the squire's daughter _being the first book in the chronicles of the clintons_ by archibald marshall new york dodd, mead and company published october, by dodd, mead and company to anstey guthrie [illustration: archibald marshall.] contents i a court ball ii in the bay of biscay iii the clintons of kencote iv clintons young and old v melbury park vi a good long talk vii the rector viii by the lake ix the question of marriage x town versus country xi a wedding xii food and raiment xiii ronald mackenzie xiv the plunge xv bloomsbury xvi the pursuit xvii the contest xviii after the storm xix the whole house upset xx mrs. clinton xxi cicely's return xxii the life chapter i a court ball "i recollect the time," said the squire, "when two women going to a ball were a big enough load for any carriage. you may say what you like about crinolines, but i've seen some very pretty women in them in my time." there were three people in the carriage passing slowly up the mall in the string, with little jerks and progressions. they were the squire himself, mrs. clinton, and cicely, and they were on their way to a court ball. the squire, big, florid, his reddish beard touched with grey falling over the red and gold of his deputy-lieutenant's uniform, sat back comfortably beside his wife, who was dressed in pale lavender silk, with diamonds in her smooth, grey-yellow hair. she was short and rather plump. her grey eyes, looking out on the violet of the night sky, the trees, and the crowd of hilarious onlookers who had not been invited to buckingham palace, had a patient and slightly wistful expression. she had not spoken since the carriage had left the quiet hotel in which they were staying for their fortnight in london. cicely sat on the back seat of the carriage. on such an occasion as this she might have been expected to be accorded the feminine privilege of sitting at the side of her mother, but it had not occurred to the squire to offer it to her. she was a pretty girl, twenty-two years of age, with a fair skin and abundant brown hair. she was dressed in costly white satin, her gown simply cut. as she had stood before her glass, while her mother's maid had held for her her light evening cloak, her beautiful neck and shoulders had seemed warmly flushed by contrast with the dead pallor of the satin. she also had hardly spoken since they had driven off from their hotel, which was so quiet and private that it was hardly like an hotel, and where some of the servants had stood in the hall to see them get into their carriage, just as they might have done at home at kencote. it was a great occasion for cicely. her brothers--dick, who was in the grenadier guards, and humphrey, who was in the foreign office--were well enough used to the scenes of splendour offered by a london season, but cicely had hardly ever been in london at all. she had been brought up four years before to be presented, and had been taken home again immediately. she had seen nothing of london gaieties, either then or since. now she was to enjoy such opportunities of social intercourse as might be open to the daughter of a rich squire who had had all he wanted of town life thirty years before, and had lived in his country house ever since. a fortnight was as long as the squire cared to be away from kencote, even in the month of june; and a fortnight was to be the extent of cicely's london season. this was to be the crowning night of it. the squire chattered on affably. he had had a good dinner and had not been hurried over it, or afterwards. that was the worst of those theatres, he would say; they didn't give you time even to drink your glass of wine; and he had not been affable with his wife and daughter the evening before, when driving to the play. but now he was rather pleased with himself. he did not care for all this sort of thing, of course; he had had quite enough of it as a subaltern, dancing about london all night, and going everywhere--all very well for a young fellow, but you got tired of it. still, there was a certain flavour about a court ball, even for a one-time subaltern in the blues, who had taken part in everything that was going on. other people scrambled for such things--they had to if they wanted them, and why they should want them if they didn't come to them naturally, the squire couldn't tell. to a man of the importance of edward clinton of kencote, they came as a matter of course, and he accepted them as his due, but was pleased, too, at having his social importance recognised in such a way, without his stirring a finger. as a matter of cold fact, a finger had been stirred to procure this particular honour, although it had not been his. but of that he was not aware. the carriage drove slowly with the rest into the big court-yard, where a military band was playing bright music. cicely suddenly felt exhilarated and expectant. they drove up before the great entrance, red-carpeted, brightly lit, and went through the hall up the stairs into the cloak-room. cicely had a flush on her cheeks now as she waited for her mother, who seemed to be taking an interminable time to settle her lace and her jewels. mrs. clinton looked her over and her eyes brightened a little. "are you nervous, darling?" she asked; and cicely said, "no, mother, not a bit." the scent of flowers was in her nostrils, the strains of the music expectantly in her ears. she was going to dance in a royal palace, and she was such a country mouse that she was excited at the prospect of seeing royalty at close quarters. she had been far too nervous to take in anything when she had been presented, and that had been four years ago. they went out and found the squire waiting for them. he did not ask them, as he generally did, why they had been so long. they seemed to go through interminable wide corridors, decorated in red and gold, with settees against the walls and beautiful pictures hanging above them, but came at last to the great ball-room. cicely drew her breath as she entered. this was better than the meadshire county ball, or the south meadshire hunt ball. the women were mostly in white, or pale colours, but their jewels were beyond anything she had ever imagined. the lights from the great lustre chandeliers seemed to be reflected in those wonderful clusters and strings and devices of sparkling gems. cold white and cold fire for the women, colour for the men. scarlet and gold pre-dominated, but there were foreign attaches in uniforms of pale blue and silver, and other unfamiliar colours, eastern robes and dresses encrusted with jewels or richly embroidered in silks. it was gorgeous, a scene from fairyland. there was a sudden ebbing of the tide of chatter. the band in the gallery began to play "god save the king." doors were thrown open at the end of the great room, and the royal party came in slowly, passed down the open space on the red carpet between the lines of bowing and curtseying guests, and took their places on the dais. cicely gazed her fill at them. they were just as she had seen them a hundred times in pictures in the illustrated papers, but more royal, and yet, more human. they danced their opening quadrille, and after that every one could dance. but of all the people there cicely knew no one who would be likely to dance with her. she sat by her mother on one of the raised settees that ran in four rows the length of the room. the squire had found friends and was talking to them elsewhere. her brother dick, who she knew was to have been there, she had not yet seen. everything depended upon him. surely, people did not come casually late to a court ball! if something had prevented his coming at all, it seemed to her that she would have to sit there all the evening. her eyes brightened. there was dick making his way towards them. he looked very smart in his guardsman's uniform, and very much at home with himself, as if the king's ball-room was no more to him than any other ball-room. he was always provokingly leisurely in his movements, and even now he stopped twice to talk to people whom he knew, and stood with them each time as if he would stay there for ever. really, dick could be almost as provoking as the squire, where their womenfolk were concerned. but at last he came, smiling very pleasantly. "hullo, mother!" he said. "hullo, siskin! now you've seen the queen in her parlour, eh? well, how do you like yourself?" he was a good-looking fellow, dick, with his well-shaped, closely cropped head, his well-trained moustache, his broad, straight shoulders and lean waist and hips. he was over thirty, but showed few signs as yet of the passing of youth. it was quite plain by the way he looked at her that he was fond of his sister. she was nearly ten years younger than he and still a child to him, to be patronised and petted, if she was taken notice of at all. he didn't take much notice of his mother, contenting himself with telling her that she "looked as smart as any of 'em." but he stood and talked to cicely, and his eyes rested on her as if he were proud of her. in the meantime the delicious strains of a valse were swinging through the great room, and the smooth floor was full of dancers, except in the space reserved for the royalties, where only a few couples were circling. cicely's feet were moving. "can't we dance, dick?" she said. "come on," said dick, "let's have a scurry," and he led her down on to the floor and floated her out into a paradise of music and movement. dick was the best partner she had ever danced with. he had often snubbed her about her own dancing, but he had danced with her all the same, more than most brothers dance with their sisters, at country balls, which were the only balls she had ever been to. he was a kind brother, according to his lights, and cicely would have liked to dance with him all the evening. that, of course, was out of the question. dick knew plenty of people to dance with to-night, if she didn't. in fact, he seemed to know half the people in the room, although he gave her the impression that he thought court balls rather mixed affairs. "can't be certain of meeting your friends here," he said, and added, "of course," as admitting handsomely that people might be quite entitled to be asked who did not happen to be his friends. "you're not the only country cousins, siskin," he said, which gave cicely somehow a higher opinion of herself, his dissociation of himself in this matter of country cousinhood from his family striking her as nothing unreasonable. indeed, it was not unreasonable with regard to the clintons, the men taking their part, as a matter of course, in everything to which their birth and wealth entitled them, so long as they cared to do so, the women living, for the most part, at home, in a wide and airy seclusion. "want to dance, eh?" said dick, in answer to her little plea. "all right, i'll bring up some young fellows." and he did. he brought up a succession of them and delivered them off-hand to his mother and sister with a slight air of authority, doing his duty very thoroughly, as a kind brother should. most of them were quite young--as young, or younger than cicely herself. some of them wore the uniform of dick's own regiment, and were presumably under his orders, professionally if not in private life. some of them were amazingly patronising and self-possessed, and these did not ask cicely to dance again. she felt, when they returned her to her mother, that she had not been a success with them. others were boyish and diffident, and with them she got on pretty well. with one, a modest child of nineteen or so with a high-sounding title, she was almost maternally friendly, and he seemed to cling to her as a refuge from a new and bewildering world. they ate ices together--he told her that he had been brought up at home in ireland under a priest, and had never eaten enough ices at a sitting until he had joined his regiment a fortnight before. he could not dance well, indeed hardly at all, although he confessed to having taken lessons, and his gratitude when cicely suggested that they should go and look at some of the rooms instead, warmed her heart to him and put their temporary friendship on the best possible footing. they stayed together during three dances, went out on to the terrace, explored wherever they were permitted to explore, paid two visits to the buffet, and enjoyed themselves much in the same way as if they had been school-children surreptitiously breaking loose from an assembly of grown-ups. the boy became volubly friendly and bubbling over with unexpected humour and high spirits. he tried to persuade cicely to stay away from the ball-room for a fourth dance. nobody would miss them, he explained. but she said she must go back, and when they joined the crowd again her partner was haled off with a frightened look to the royal circle, and she found her mother standing up before the seat on which she had sat all the evening searching anxiously for her with her eyes, and her father by her side. an old man, looking small and shrunken in his heavy uniform, but otherwise full of life and kindliness, with twinkling eyes and a short white beard, was with them, and she breathed a sigh of relief, for if she was not frightened of what her mother might say about her long absence, she rather dreaded the comments her father might be pleased to pass on it. but her kinsman, lord meadshire, lord-lieutenant of the county, a great magnate in the eyes of the world, was to her just a very kind and playful old man, whose jokes only, because of their inherent feebleness, caused her any discomfort. cousin humphrey would preserve her from the results of her fault if she had committed one. "well, my dear," he said in an affectionate, rather asthmatical voice, "you've brought us some of the meadshire roses, eh, what? hope you're enjoying yourself. if you had come a little earlier, i would have asked you to dance with me." "where have you been so long, cicely?" asked her mother, but the twinkle in lord meadshire's eyes showed that a joke was in progress, and he broke in hurriedly, "forty or fifty years earlier, i mean, my dear," and he chuckled himself into a fit of coughing. the squire was not looking quite pleased, but whatever the cause of his displeasure it was not, apparently, cicely's prolonged absence, for he also asked if she was enjoying herself, and looked at her with some pride and fondness. going home in the carriage, she learned later that lord meadshire, who would have done a great deal more to provide her with social gaiety if he had not been living, now, mostly in retirement with an invalid wife, had procured those commands which had brought them up to london, and are not generally bestowed unasked on the belongings of a country squire, however important he may be in the midst of his own possessions. lord meadshire stayed with them for some little time and pointed out to her some of the notabilities and the less familiar royalties. then dick came up and took her away to dance again. after that she sat by her mother's side until the end. she saw the boy with whom she had made friends eying her rather wistfully. he had danced a quadrille with a princess, and the experience seemed so to have shattered his nerve that he was not equal to making his way to her to ask her to bear him company again, and she could not very well beckon him, as she felt inclined to do. the ball became rather dull, although she looked a good deal at the king and queen and thought how extraordinary it was that she should be in the same room with them. before she had quite realised that it had begun, the ball was over. the band played "god save the king" again. everybody stood up and the royal procession was formed and went away to supper. with the light of royalty eclipsed, her own supper seemed an ordinary affair. at country dances she had shirked it whenever she could, taking advantage of a clearer floor to dance with some willing partner right through a valse or a two-step from beginning to end. after supper she danced once or twice, but as she drove back to the very private hotel at about half-past one, she only felt as if she had not danced nearly enough, and as she undressed she hardly knew whether she had enjoyed herself or not. chapter ii in the bay of biscay on the night on which cicely clinton was enjoying herself at the court ball, the _punjaub_ homeward bound from australia _via_ colombo and the suez canal was steaming through the bay of biscay, which, on this night of june had prepared a pleasant surprise for the _punjaub's_ numerous passengers by lying calm and still under a bright moon. two men were leaning over the side of the upper deck, watching the phosphorescent gleam of the water as it slid past beneath them, and talking as intimate friends. they were ronald mackenzie, the explorer, returning home after his adventurous two years' expedition into the wilds of tibet, and jim graham, whose home was at mountfield, three miles away from kencote, where the clintons lived. they were not intimate friends, in spite of appearances. they had joined the ship together at colombo, and found themselves occupying the same cabin. but acquaintanceship ripens so fast on board ship that the most dissimilar characters may adhere to one another for as long as a voyage lasts, although they may never meet again afterwards, nor particularly wish to. mackenzie was a tall, ruggedly fashioned man, with greying hair and a keen, bold face. jim graham was more slightly built. he had an open, honest look; he was rather deliberate in speech, and apparently in thought, for in conversation he would often pause before speaking, and he sometimes ignored a question altogether, as if he had not heard it, or had not understood it. there were those who called him stupid; but it was usually said of him that he was slow and sure. he had a rather ugly face, but it was that pleasant ugliness which, with a well-knit athletic body, clear eyes and a tanned skin, is hardly distinguishable, in a man, from good looks. they were talking about london. "i can smell it and see it," said mackenzie. "i hope it will be raining when i get home. i like the wet pavements, and the lights, and the jostling crowds. lord! it will be good to see it again. how i've pined for it, back there! but i'll be out of it again in a month. it's no place for a man like me, except to get back to every now and then." "that's how most of us take it," said jim, "unless we have to work there. i'm glad i haven't to, though i enjoy it well enough for a week or two, occasionally." "do you live in the country all the year round?" "yes." mackenzie threw him a glance which seemed to take him in from top to toe. "what do you do?" he asked. jim graham paused for a moment before replying. "i have a good deal to do," he said. "i've got my place to look after." "that doesn't take you all your time, does it?" "it takes a good deal of it. and i'm on the bench." "that means sending poor devils to prison for poaching your game, i suppose." "not quite that," said jim, without a smile. "i suppose what it all does mean is that you live in a big country house and shoot and hunt and fish to your heart's content, with just enough work to keep you contented with yourself. by jove, some men are lucky! do you know what my life has been?" "i know you have been through many adventures and done big things," said jim courteously. "well, i'm obliged to you for putting it like that. seems to me i didn't put my idea of your life quite so nicely, eh?" he stood up and stretched his tall figure, and laughed. "i'm a rough diamond," he said. "i don't mind saying so, because it's plain enough for any one to see. i sometimes envy people like you their easy manners; but i've got to be content with my own; and after all, they have served my turn well enough. look at us two. i suppose i'm about ten years older than you, but i had made my name when i was your age. you were born in a fine country house." "not so very fine," said jim. "well, pretty fine compared to the house i was born in, which was the workhouse. you were educated at eton and christchurch, and all that sort of thing----" "i don't want to spoil any comparison you are going to make," said jim, "but i was at winchester and new college." "that will do," said mackenzie. "i was dragged up at the workhouse school till i was twelve. then i ran away and sold papers in the streets, and anything else that i could pick up a few coppers by--except steal. i never did that. i always made up my mind i'd be a big man some day, and--i'm glad i didn't steal." "i didn't either, you know," said jim, "although i'm not a big man, and never shall be." "ah, that's where the likes of me scores. you've no call to ambition. you have everything you can want provided for you." "there have been one or two big men born as i was," said jim. "but please go on with your story. when did you go on your first journey?" "when i was sixteen. i looked much older. i shipped before the mast and went out to australia, and home round cape horn. by jove, i shan't forget that. the devil was in the wind. we were five months coming home, and nearly starved to death, and worked till we were as thin as hungry cats. then i shipped with the boyle-geering expedition--you know--north pole, and three years trying to get there. then i tried a change of climate and went to central africa with freke. i was his servant, got his bath, shaved him, brushed his clothes--he was always a bit of a dandy, freke, and lived like a gentleman, though i don't believe he was any better than i was when he started; but he could fight too, and there wasn't his equal with niggers. we had trouble that trip, and the men who went out with him were a rotten lot. they'd found the money, or he wouldn't have taken them. he knew a man when he saw one. when we came home i was second in command. "it was easy after that. i led that expedition through uganda when i was only twenty-five; and the rest--well, the rest i dare say you know." "yes, i know," said jim. "you've done a lot." "not so bad, eh, for a workhouse brat?" "not so bad for anybody." "i'm up top now. i used to envy lots of people. now most people envy me." jim was silent. mackenzie turned to him. "i suppose you've had a pretty easy time travelling," he said. there was a suspicion of a sneer on his long thin lips. "pretty easy," said jim. "ah! your sort of travelling is rather different from mine. if you had been roughing it in tibet for the last two years you would be pretty glad to be getting back." "i'm glad to be getting back as it is." mackenzie turned and leaned over the rail again. "well, i don't know that i don't envy you a bit after all," he said. "i've got no friends in england. i'm not a man to make friends. the big-wigs will take me up this time. i know that from what i've seen. i shall be a lion. i suppose i shall be able to go anywhere i like. but there's nowhere i want to go to particularly, when i've had enough of london. you've got your country home. lord, how i've thought of the english country, in summer time! thirsted for it. but it has to belong to you, in a way. i've a good mind to buy a little place--i shall be able to afford it when my book comes out. but i should want a wife to keep it warm for me. you're not married, i suppose?" "no." "going to be?" jim made no reply. mackenzie laughed. "mustn't ask questions, i suppose," he said. "i'm a rough diamond, graham. got no manners, you see. never had any one to teach 'em to me. i apologise." "no need to," said jim. there was silence for a space. the great round moon shone down and silvered the long ripples on the water. "i don't mind answering your question," said jim, looking out over the sea. "there are some country neighbours of mine. one of the sons is my chief pal. we were brought up together, more or less. he's going to marry my sister. and--well, i hope i'm going to marry his." his face changed a little, but mackenzie, looking straight before him did not notice it. "sounds a capital arrangement," he said drily. jim flushed, and drew himself up. "well, i think i'll be turning in," he said. mackenzie faced him quickly. "tell me all about it," he said. "how old is she? you have known her all your life. when did you first find out you wanted to marry her? when are you going to be married?" jim looked at him squarely. "you are taking liberties," he said. mackenzie laughed again--his harsh, unamused laugh. "all right," he said. "one has to be as delicate as a fine lady talking to fellows like you. it's not worth it. when you live like a savage half your life, you sort of hunger after hearing about things like that--people living in the country, falling in love and getting married, and going to church every sunday--all the simple, homely things. a man without all the nonsense about good form and all that sort of thing--a man who'd done things--he would know why you asked him, and he would know he couldn't find anybody better to tell his little happy secrets to." "oh, well," said jim, slightly mollified. "i dare say you're right, though," said mackenzie. "one doesn't blab to every stranger. even i don't, and i'm a rough diamond, as i've told you." "yes, you've told me that." "is the fellow who is going to marry your sister a country gentleman, too?" "no. his father is. he's a younger son. he's a doctor." "a doctor! isn't that a funny thing for a country gentleman's son to be?" "i don't know that it is. he's a clever fellow. he went in for science at oxford, and got keen." "that's good hearing. i like to hear of men getting keen about a real job. you might tell me about him, if i'm not taking another liberty in asking." "oh, look here, mackenzie, i'm sorry i said that. i didn't understand why you asked what you did." "i've told you. i like to hear about everything that goes on in the world. it isn't curiosity, and yet in a way it is. i'm curious about everything that goes on--everywhere. it isn't impertinent curiosity, anyway." "i see that. i'll tell you about walter clinton. he's a good chap. his father has a fine place next to mine. he's a rich man. his family has been there since the beginning of all things. walter is just my age. we've always been a lot together." "is there a large family? what do his brothers do?" "there's dick, the eldest son. he's in the guards. there's humphrey in the foreign office, and a younger son, a sailor. and--and there are three girls--two of them are children--twins." "well, now, aren't i right in saying it's odd for a son in a family like that to become a doctor?" "oh, well, i suppose in a way you are, though i can't see why he shouldn't be. the fact is that they wanted to make a parson of him--there's a rather good family living. but he wasn't taking any." "ah! i thought i knew something about your country gentry. well, i admire the doctor. was there a row?" "his father was rather annoyed. perhaps it's not to be wondered at. his half-brother is rector at kencote now, and when he dies they'll have to give the living to a stranger. of course they would rather have one of the family." "it's like a chapter in a book--one of the long, easy ones, all about country life and the squire and the parson. i love 'em. and the doctor is going to marry your sister. can i give 'em a skin for a wedding present?" "i'm sure they would be gratified. you'd better come down and make their acquaintance." "i'll do that. i'd like to come and see you, graham; and you mustn't mind my roughness peeping out occasionally. i haven't had many chances in life." there was a pause, and then jim said, "walter clinton's sister comes next to him in the family. she's six or seven years younger. of course, i've known her ever since she was a baby. when i came back from oxford one summer vac., i found her almost grown up. she seemed quite different somehow. i was always over there all the summer, or she was with my sister. we fixed it up we would get married some day. they laughed at us, and said we had better wait a few years; but of course they were pleased, really, both my people and hers, though they thought it a bit premature; she was only seventeen. when i went back to oxford and thought it over i said to myself it wasn't quite fair to tie her down at that age. i would wait and see. so we fell back to what we had been before." he stopped suddenly. "is that all?" asked mackenzie in some surprise. "it's all at present." there was a long pause. "it's disappointing, somehow," said mackenzie. "i suppose i mustn't ask questions, but there are a lot i'd like to ask." "oh, ask away. when the ice is once broken one can talk. it does one good to talk sometimes." "women talk to each other about their love affairs. men don't--not the real ones--except on occasions." "well, we'll let this be an occasion, as you have started the subject." he laughed lightly. "you've got a sort of power, mackenzie. if any one had told me yesterday that i should be talking to you to-night about a thing i haven't mentioned to a soul for five years--except once or twice to walter clinton--i should have stared at them. i'm not generally supposed to be communicative." "it's impersonal," said mackenzie, "like telling things to a priest. i'm not in the same world as you. five years, is it? well, now, what on earth have you been doing ever since? she's not too young to marry now." "no. i was at oxford a year after what i told you of. then i went for a year to learn estate management on my uncle's property. when i came home i thought i would fix it up with my father--he was alive then. he said, wait a year longer. he was beginning to get ill, and i suppose he didn't want to face the worry of making arrangements till he got better. but he never got better, and within a year he died." "and then you were your own master. that's two years ago, isn't it? and here you are coming back from a year's trip round the world. you seem to be pretty slow about things." "one doesn't become one's own master immediately one succeeds to the ownership of land. these death duties have altered all that. i shan't be free for another year. then i hope you will come to my wedding, mackenzie." "thanks. didn't the young lady object to keeping it all hanging on for so long?" jim did not reply for a moment. then he said a little stiffly, "i wrote to her from oxford when i had thought things over. i thought it wasn't fair to tie her up before i was ready to marry, and she so young." "and that means that you have never allowed yourself to make love to her since." "yes, it means that." "and yet you have been in love with her all the time?" "yes." "well, it shows a greater amount of self-control than most people possess--certainly a good deal more than i possess, i suppose you are sure of her." jim did not reply to this, but he said presently, "if it wasn't for the death duties i should have hoped to be married before this." "i'll tell you what i don't understand," said mackenzie. "i suppose you live in much the same way as your father did before you." "yes. my mother lives with me, and my sister." "well, surely you _could_ get married if you wanted to. you've got your house and everything, even if there isn't quite so much money to spend for a bit. and as for ready money--it doesn't cost nothing to travel for a year as you're doing." "oh, an uncle of mine paid for that," said jim. "i got seedy after my father's death. there was a lot of worry, and--and i was fond of the old man. the doctors told me to go off. i'm all right now. as for the rest--well, there are such things as jointures and dowries. no, i couldn't marry, giving my wife and my mother and sister everything they ought to have, before another year. even then it will be a close thing; i shall have to be careful." they fell silent. the dark mass of the ship's hull beneath them slipped on through the water, drawing ever nearer towards home. the moon climbed still higher into the sky. "well, we've had an interesting talk," said mackenzie, drawing himself up. "what you have told me is all so entirely different from anything that would ever happen in my life. if i wanted to marry a girl i should marry her, and let the money go hang. she'd have to share and share. but i dare say when i want a thing i want it for the moment a good deal more than you do; and, generally, i see that i get it. now i think i shall turn in. give me ten minutes." he went down to the cabin they both occupied. as he undressed he said to himself, "rather a triumph, drawing a story like that from a fellow like that. and lord, _what_ a story! he deserves to lose her. i should like to hear her side of it." jim graham smoked another cigarette, walking round the deck. he felt vaguely dissatisfied with himself for having made a confidant of mackenzie, and at the same time relieved at having given vent to what he had shut up for so long in the secret recesses of his mind. a day or two later the two men parted at tilbury. they had not again mentioned the subject of their long conversation in the bay of biscay. chapter iii the clintons of kencote cicely was returning home with her father and mother after her short taste of the season's gaieties. it was pleasant to lean back in a corner of the railway carriage and look at the rich meadshire country, so familiar to her, running past the window. she had not wanted to go home particularly, but she was rather glad to be going home all the same. the country in south meadshire is worth looking at. there are deep-grassed water-meadows, kept green by winding rivers; woods of beech and oak; stretches of gorse and bracken; no hills to speak of, but gentle rises, crowned sometimes by an old church, or a pleasant-looking house, neither very old nor very new, very large nor very small. the big houses, and there are a good many of them, lie for the most part in what may be called by courtesy the valleys. you catch a glimpse of them sometimes at a little distance from the line, which seems to have shown some ingenuity in avoiding them, standing in wide, well-timbered parks, or peeping from amongst thicker trees, with their court of farm and church and clustered village, in dignified seclusion. for the rest, there are picturesque hamlets; cottages with bright gardens; children, and fluttering clothes-lines; pigs and donkeys and geese on the cropped commons; a network of roads and country lanes; and everywhere a look of smiling and contented well-being, which many an english county of higher reputation for picturesque scenery might envy. the inhabitants of south meadshire will tell you that it is one of the best counties for all-round sport. game is preserved, but not over-preserved, and the mixture of pasture and arable land and frequent covert, while it does not tempt the fox-hunting londoner, breeds stout foxes for the pleasure of those who know every inch of it; and there is enough grass, enough water, and stiff enough fences to try the skill of the boldest, and to provide occasionally such a run as from its comparative rarity accords a gratification unknown to the frequenter of the shires. big fish are sometimes caught in the clear streams of south meadshire, and they are caught by the people who own them, or by their friends. for in this quiet corner of england the life of the hall and the village still goes on unchanged. at the meets--on lawn, at cross-road, or by covert-side--everybody knows everybody else, at least by sight; neighbours shoot with one another and not with strangers; and the small fry of the countryside get their share of whatever fun is going on. in the middle of this pleasant land lies the manor of kencote, and a good many fat acres around it, which have come to the clintons from time to time, either by lucky marriages or careful purchase, during the close upon six hundred years they have been settled there. for they are an old family and in their way an important one, although their actual achievements through all the centuries in which they have enjoyed wealth and local consideration fill but a small page in their family history. the squire had, in the strong room of the bathgate and medchester bank, in deed-boxes at his lawyers, and in drawers and chests and cupboards in his house, papers worthy of the attention of the antiquary. from time to time they did engage the antiquary's attention, and, scattered about in bound volumes of antiquarian and genealogical magazines, in the proceedings of learned societies, and in county histories, you may find the fruits of much careful and rewarding research through these various documents. when the squire was approached by some one who wished to write a paper or read a paper, or compile a genealogy, or carry out any project for the purposes of which it was necessary to gain access to the clinton archives, he would express his annoyance to his family. he would say that he wished these people would let him alone. the fact was that there were so few really old families left in england, that people like himself who had lived quietly on their property for eight or nine hundred years, or whatever it might be, had to bear all the brunt of these investigations, and it was really becoming an infernal nuisance. but he would always invite the antiquary to kencote, give him a bottle of fine claret and his share of a bottle of fine port, and every facility for the pursuit of his inquiries. _a history of the ancient and knightly family of clinton of kencote in the county of meadshire_, was compiled about a hundred years ago by the reverend john clinton smith, m.a., rector of kencote, and published by messrs. dow and runagate of paternoster row. it is not very accurate, but any one interested in such matters can, with due precaution taken, gain from it valuable information concerning the twenty-two generations of clintons who have lived and ruled at kencote since sir giles de clinton acquired the manor in the reign of edward i. the learned rector devoted a considerable part of his folio volume to tracing a connection between the clintons of kencote and other families of clintons who have mounted higher in the world. it is the opinion of later genealogists that he might have employed his energies to better purpose, but, in any case, the family needs no further shelter than is supplied by its own well-rooted family tree. you will find too, in his book, the result of his investigations into his own pedigree, in which the weakest links have to bear the greatest strain, as is often the case with pedigrees. it remains only to be said that the squire, edward clinton, had succeeded his grandfather, colonel thomas, of whom you may read in sporting magazines and memoirs, at the age of eighteen, and had always been a rich man, and an honest one. kencote lies about six miles to the south-west of the old town of bathgate. the whole parish, and it is an exceptionally large one, belongs to the squire, with a good deal more land besides in neighbouring parishes. kencote house is a big, rather ugly structure, and was built early in the eighteenth century after the disastrous fire which destroyed the beautiful old tudor hall and nearly all its hoarded treasures. this catastrophe is worth a brief notice, for nowadays an untitled family often enjoys some consideration from the possession of an old and beautiful house, and the clintons of kencote would be better known to the world at large if they did not live in a comparatively new one. it happened at the dead of a winter night. young william clinton had brought home his bride, lady anne, only daughter and heiress of the earl of beechmont, that afternoon, and there had been torches and bonfires and a rousing welcome. nobody knew exactly how it happened, but they awoke to find the house in flames, and most of the household too overcome by the results of their merry-making to be of any use in saving it. the house itself was burnt to a shell, but it was long enough in the burning to have enabled its more valuable contents to have been saved, if the work had been set about with some method. the young squire, in night-cap, shirt, and breeches, whether mindful of his pedigree at that time of excitement, or led by the fantastic spirit that moves men in such crises, threw as much of the contents of his muniment room out of the window as he had time for, and the antiquarians bless him to this day. then he went off to the stables, and helped to get out his horses. my lady anne, who was only sixteen, saved her jewels and one or two of her more elaborate gowns, and then sat down by the sun-dial and cried. the servants worked furiously as long as the devouring flames allowed them, but when there was nothing left of kencote hall but smouldering, unsafe walls, under a black, winter sky, and the piled-up heap of things that had been got out into the garden came to be examined, it was found to be made up chiefly of the lighter and less valuable pieces of furniture, a few pictures and hangings, many tumbled folios from the library, kitchen and house utensils, and just a few pieces of plate and other valuables to salt the whole worthless mass. so perished in a night the chief pride of the clintons of kencote, and the noble house, with its great raftered hall, its carved and panelled chambers, its spoil of tapestries and furniture, carpets, china, silver, pictures, books, all the possessions that had been gathered from many lands through many years, was only a memory that must fade more and more rapidly as time went on. the young couple went back to her ladyship's father, not many miles away, and kencote was left in its ruins for ten years or so. then my lord beechmont died, sadly impoverished by unfortunate dealings with the stock of the south sea company, the house and land that remained to him were sold, and kencote was rebuilt with the proceeds, much as it stands to-day, except that merchant jack, the father of colonel thomas, bitten with the ideas of his time, covered the mellow red brick with a coating of stucco and was responsible for the corinthian porch, and the ornamental parapet surmounted by grecian urns. merchant jack had been a younger son and had made his fortune in the city. he was modern in his ideas, and a rich man, and wanted a house as good as his neighbours. georgian brick, and tall, narrow, small-paned windows had gone out of fashion. so had the old formal gardens. those at kencote had survived the destruction of the house, but they did not survive the devastating zeal of merchant jack. they were swept away by a pupil of capability brown's, who allowed the old walls of the kitchen garden to stand because they were useful for growing fruit, but destroyed walls and terraces and old yew hedges everywhere else, brought the well-treed park into relation, as he thought, with the garden, by means of sunk fences, planted shrubberies, laid down vast lawns, and retired very well pleased with himself at having done away with one more old-fashioned, out-of-date garden, and substituted for it a few more acres of artificial ugliness. he did just one thing that turned out well; he made a large lake in a hollow of the park and ringed it with rhododendrons, which have since grown to enormous size. at the end of it he caused to be built a stucco temple overhung with weeping ashes, designed "to invite melancholy." there is no showing that merchant jack had any desire to respond to such an invitation, but it was the fashion of the time, and no doubt he was pleased with the idea. merchant jack also refurnished the house when his architect had had his way with it and the workmen had departed. a few good pieces he kept, but most of the furniture, which had been brought into the house when it was rebuilt after the fire, disappeared, to make way for heavy mahogany and rosewood. some of it went down to the dower house, a little jacobean hall in a dark corner of the park, and there is reason to fear that the rest was sold for what it would fetch. in all these lamentable activities, good, rich, up-to-date merchant jack was only improving his property according to the ideas of his time, and had no more idea of committing artistic improprieties than those people nowadays who buy a dresser from a farm-house kitchen to put in their drawing-room, and plaster the adjacent walls with soup plates. his memorial tablet in kencote church speaks well of him and his memory must be respected. but we have left edward clinton with his wife and daughter sitting for so long in the train between ganton and kencote, that we must now return to them without any further delay. having got into the railway carriage at the london terminus as a private gentleman, of no more account than any other first-class passenger, and weighed only by his potential willingness to pay handsomely for attentions received, as the successive stages of his journey were accomplished, he seemed to develop in importance. at ganton, where a change had to be made, although it was twenty miles and more from his own parcel of earth, peaked caps were touched to him, and the station-master himself, braided coat and all, opened his carriage door, expressing, as he did so, a hope that the present fair weather would continue. one might almost, until one had thought it over, have imagined him to be appealing to the squire as one who might take a hand in its continuance if he were so minded, at any rate in the neighbourhood of kencote. at kencote itself, so busy was the entire station staff in helping him and his belongings out of the train, that the signal for starting was delayed a full minute, and then given almost as an after-thought, as if it were a thing of small importance. heads were poked out of carriage windows, and an impertinent stranger, marking the delay and its cause, asked the station-master, as he was carried past him, where was the red carpet. the answer might have been that it was duly spread in the thoughts of all who conducted the squire from the train to his carriage, and was as well brushed as if it had been laid on the platform. the squire had a loud and affable word for station-master and porters alike, and another for the groom who stood at the heads of the two fine greys harnessed to his phaeton. he walked out into the road and looked them over, remarking that they were the handsomest pair he had seen since he had left home. then he took the reins and swung himself up on to his seat, actively, for a man of his age and weight. mrs. clinton climbed up more slowly to her place by his side, cicely sat behind, and with a jingle and clatter the equipage rolled down the road, while the groom touched his hat and went back to the station omnibus in which mrs. clinton's maid was establishing herself in the midst of a collection of wraps and little bags. for, unless it was unavoidable, no servant of the clintons sat on the same seat of a carriage as a member of the family. it was in the drowsiest time in the afternoon. the sun shone on the hay-fields, from which the sound of sharpened scythes and the voices of the hay-makers came most musically. great trees bordered the half-mile of road from the station to the village, and gave a grateful shade. the gardens of the cottages were bright with june flowers, and the broad village street, lined with low, irregular buildings, picturesque, but not at all from neglected age, seemed to be dozing in the still, hot air. a curtsy at the lodge gates, a turn of the squire's wrist, and they were bowling along the well kept road through the park. a minute more, and they had clattered on to the stones under the big porch. "well, here we are again, probin," said the squire to his head coachman, who himself took the reins from his hands. "and here, please god, we'll stay for the present." chapter iv clintons young and old the family tradition of the clintons, whereby the interests and occupations of the women were strictly subordinated to those of the men, had not yet availed to damp the spirits or curb the activities of joan and nancy, of whom mrs. clinton had made a simultaneous and somewhat belated present to the squire thirteen years before. frank, the sailor, the youngest son, had been seven at the time the twins were born, and dick a young man at cambridge. joan and nancy were still the pets of the household, strong and healthy pets, and unruly within the limits permitted them. released from their schoolroom, they now came rushing into the hall, and threw themselves on to their parents and their sister with loud cries of welcome. the squire kissed them in turn--they approached him first as in duty bound. it had taken him three or four years to get used to their presence, and during that time he had treated them as the sort of unaccountable plaything a woman brings into a house and a male indulgently winks his eye at, a thing beneath his own notice, like a new gown or a new poodle, or a new curate, but one in which she must be permitted, in the foolish weakness of her sex, to interest herself. then he had gradually begun to "take notice" of them, to laugh at their childish antics and speeches, to quote them--he had actually done this in the hunting-field--and finally to like to have them pottering about with him when duties of investigation took him no further than the stables or the buildings of the home farm. he had always kept them in order while they were with him; he had never lost sight of the fact that they were, after all, feminine; and he had never allowed them to interfere with his more serious pursuits. but he had fully accepted them as agreeable playthings for his own lighter hours of leisure, just as he might have taken to the poodle or the curate, and so treated them still, although their healthy figures were beginning to fill out, and if they had been born clintons of a generation or two before they would have been considered to be approaching womanhood. he now greeted them with hearty affection, and told them that if they were good girls they might come and look at the pheasants with him when he had read his letters and they had had their tea, and then took himself off to his library. mrs. clinton's greeting was less hearty, but not less affectionate. she lingered just that second longer over each of them which gives an embrace a meaning beyond mere convention, but she only said, "i must go and see miss bird. i suppose she is in the schoolroom." she gathered up her skirts and went upstairs, but when the twins had given cicely a boisterous hug, they went back to their mother, and walked on either side of her. she was still the chief personage in their little world, although their father and even their brothers were of so much more importance in the general scheme of things. and not even in the presence of their father and brothers did they "behave themselves" as they did with their mother. the schoolroom was at the end of a long corridor, down two steps and round a corner. it was a large room, looking on to the park from two windows and on to the stableyard from a third. there were shelves containing the twins' schoolbooks and storybooks, a terrestrial and a celestial globe, purchased many years ago for the instruction of their great-aunts, and besides other paraphernalia of learning, signs of more congenial occupations, such as bird-cages and a small aquarium, boxes of games, a big doll's house still in tenantable repair though seldom occupied, implements and materials for wood-carving, and in a corner of the room a toy fort and a surprising variety of lead soldiers on foot or on horseback. such things as these might undergo variation from time to time. the doll's house might disappear any day, as the rocking-horse had disappeared, for instance, a year before. but the furniture and other contents of the room were more stable. it was impossible to think of their being changed; they were so much a part of it. the squire never visited the room, but if he had done so he would have recognised it as the same room in which he had been taught his own letters, with difficulty, fifty years before, and if any unauthorised changes had been made, he would certainly have expressed surprise and displeasure, as he had done when walter had carried off to oxford the old print of colonel thomas on his black horse, satan, with a view of kencote house, on a slight eminence imagined by the artist, in the background. walter had had to send the picture back, and it was hanging in its proper place now, and not likely to be removed again. miss bird, commonly known as "the old starling," to whom mrs. clinton had come to pay an immediate visit upon entering the house, as in duty bound, was putting things away. she was accustomed to say that she spent her life in putting things away after the twins had done with them, and that they were more trouble to her than all the rest of the family had been. for miss bird had lived in the house for nearly thirty years, and had acted as educational starter to the whole race of young clintons, to dick, humphrey, walter, cicely, and frank, and had taken a new lease of life when the twins had appeared on the scene with the expectation of a prolonged period of service. she was a thin, voluble lady, as old as the squire, to whom she looked up as a god amongst mankind; her educational methods were of an older generation and included the use of the globes and the blackboard, but she was most conscientious in her duties, her religious principles were unexceptionable, and she filled a niche at kencote which would have seemed empty without her. "o mrs. clinton i am so glad to see you back," she said, almost ecstatically, "and you too cicely dear--oh my a new hat and such a pretty one! you look quite the town lady, upon my word and how did you enjoy the ball? you must tell me all about it every word now joan and nancy i will not put away your things for you once more and that i declare and you hear me say it you are the most shockingly untidy children and if i have told you that once i have told you a hundred times o mrs. clinton a new bonnet too and i declare it makes you look five years younger _at_ least." mrs. clinton took this compliment equably, and asked if the twins had been good girls. "well, good!" echoed the old starling, "they know best whether they have been good, of their lessons i say nothing and marks will show, but to get up as you might say in the dead of the night and let themselves down from a window with sheets twisted into a rope and not fit to be seen since, all creased, _most_ dangerous, besides the impropriety for great girls of thirteen if any one had been passing as i have told them and should be _obliged_ to report this behaviour to you mrs. clinton on the first opportunity." joan and nancy both glanced at their mother tentatively. "we were only playing jacobites and roundheads," said joan. "it makes it more real." "and it wasn't in the middle of the night," added nancy. "it was four o'clock, and quite light." "why, you might have killed yourselves!" exclaimed cicely. "_exactly_ what i said the very words," corroborated the old starling. "we tied the sheets very tight," said joan. "and tested them thoroughly," added nancy. "and we won't do it again, mother," said joan coaxingly. "really, we won't," said nancy impressively. "but what else will you do?" asked mrs. clinton. "you are getting too big for these pranks. if your father were to hear of it, i am sure i don't know what he would say." she knew pretty well that he would have laughed boisterously, and told her that he didn't want the children molly-coddled. time enough for that by and by when they grew up. and the twins probably knew this too, and were not unduly alarmed at the implied threat. but there was a quality in their mother's displeasure, rare as it was, which made them apprehensive when one of their periodical outbursts had come to light. they were not old enough to perceive that it was not aroused by such feats as the one under discussion, which showed no moral delinquency, but only a certain danger to life and limb, now past. but their experience did tell them that misbehaviour which caused her displeasure was not thus referred to their father, and with many embraces and promises of amendment they procured future oblivion of their escapade. "well, i have done my duty," said the old starling, "and very unpleasant it was to have to welcome you home with such a story, mrs. clinton, and now it is all over and done with i will say and am glad to say that it is the only _blot_. and that is what i said to both joan and nancy that it was _such_ a pity to have spoilt everything at the last moment, for otherwise two better behaved children it would have been impossible to find anywhere." at which joan and nancy both kissed the old starling warmly, and she strained them to her flat but tender bosom and called them her precious pets. they went with cicely into her bedroom while she "took off her things." they betrayed an immense curiosity for every detail of her recent experiences, particularly that crowning one of the court ball. she was exalted in their eyes; she had long been grown up, but now she seemed more grown up than ever, a whole cycle in advance of their active, sexless juvenility. "i don't know," said joan doubtfully, fingering the new hat which cicely had taken off, "but i almost think it must be rather fun to wear pretty things sometimes." but nancy, the younger by some minutes, rebuked that unwholesome weakness. "what rot, joan," she said indignantly. "sis, we have made up our minds to ask mother if we may wear serge knickerbockers. then we shall be able to do what we like." when this sartorial revolution had been discussed, cicely asked, "has muriel been over while i have been away?" "yes," replied joan. "walter was at mountfield on sunday, and they came over in the afternoon. they prowled about together. of course they didn't want us." "but they had us all the same," said nancy, with a grin. "we stalked them. they kissed in the temple, and again in the peach-house." "but there were lucid intervals," said joan. "they have made up their minds about something or other; we couldn't quite hear what it was. they were in the kitchen garden, and we were on the other side of the wall." "you weren't listening, darling?" hazarded cicely. "oh, rather not! we wouldn't do such a thing. but nancy and i like to pace up and down the yew walk in contemplation, and of course if they liked to pace up and down by the asparagus beds at the same time, we couldn't help hearing the murmur of their voices." "it is something very serious," said nancy. "walter is going to tackle edward about it at once. and muriel is quite at one with him in the matter. she said so." "how they do go on together, those two!" said joan. "you would think they had never met in their lives until they got engaged six months ago. when they came out of the peach-house nancy said, 'and this is love!' then she ran away." "only because walter ran after me," said nancy. "and muriel put her arm round my neck," continued joan, "and said, 'o joan, _darling_! i am so happy that i don't care _who_ sees me.' positively nauseating, i call it. you and jim don't behave like that, sis." "i should think not," said cicely primly. "well, you're engaged--or as good as," said nancy. "but i do rather wonder what walter is going to tackle edward about. it can't be to hurry on the wedding, for it's only a month off now." "we shall know pretty soon," said joan. "father doesn't keep things to himself." "no, i expect edward will make a deuce of a row," said nancy. "nancy!" said cicely sharply, "you are not to talk like that." "darling!" said nancy in a voice of grieved expostulation. "it is what walter said to muriel. i thought there _couldn't_ be any harm in it." the twins--they were called "the twankies" by their brothers--went off after tea in the schoolroom to see the young pheasants with their father. they were lively and talkative, and the squire laughed at them several times, as good-humoured men do laugh at the prattle of innocent childhood. arrived at the pens he entered into a long and earnest conversation with his head keeper, and the twins knew better than to interrupt him with artless prattle at such a time as that. but going home again through the dewy park, he unbent once more and egged nancy on to imitate the old starling, at which he roared melodiously. he was a happy man that evening. he had come back to his kingdom, to the serious business of life, which had a good deal to do with keepers and broods of pheasants, and to his simple, domestic recreations, much enhanced by the playful ways of his "pair of kittens." the mellow light of the summer evening lay over the park, upon the thick grass of which the shadows of the trees were lengthening. sheep were feeding on it, and it was flat round the house and rather uninteresting. but it was the squire's own; he had known every large tree since the earliest days of his childhood, and the others he had planted, seeing some of them grow to a respectable height and girth. he would have been quite incapable of criticising it from the point of view of beauty. the irregular roofs of the stables and other buildings, the innumerable chimneys of the big house beyond them, seen through a gap in the trees which hemmed it in for the most part on three sides, were also his own, and objects so familiar that he saw them with eyes different from any others that could have been turned upon them. the sight of them gave him a sensation of pleasure quite unrelated to their æsthetic or even their actual value. they meant home to him, and everything that he loved in the world, or out of it. the pleasure was always there subconsciously--not so much a pleasure as an attitude of mind--but this evening it warmed into something concrete. "there's plenty of little dicky-birds haven't got such a nest as my two," he said to the twins, who failed to see that this speech, which they wriggled over, but privately thought fatuous, had the elements of both poetry and religion. in the meantime cicely had made her way over the park in another direction to visit her aunts in the dower-house, for she knew they would be itching for an account of her adventures, and she had not had time to write to them from london. aunt ellen and aunt laura were the only surviving representatives of the six spinster daughters of colonel thomas clinton, the squire's grandfather. one after the other aunt mary, aunt elizabeth, aunt anna and aunt caroline had been carried out of the dark house in which they had ended their blameless days to a still darker and very narrow house within the precincts of kencote church, and the eldest sister, now an amazingly aged woman, but still in the possession of all her faculties, and the youngest, who although many years her junior, was well over seventy, were all that were left of the bevy of spinster ladies. on their father's death, now nearly forty years ago, they had removed in a body from the big house in which they had lived in a state of subdued self-repression to the small one in which, for the first time, they were to taste independence. for their father had been a terrible martinet where women were concerned, and would as readily have ordered aunt ellen to bed, at the age of fifty, if he had been displeased with her, as if she had been a child of ten. and if he had ordered her she would have gone. some of the rooms in the dower-house had been occupied by the agent to the kencote estate who at that time was a bachelor, and the rest had been shut up. the six sisters spent the happiest hours they had hitherto known in the arrangement of their future lives and of the beautiful old furniture with which the house was stocked. the lives were to be active, regular, and charitable. colonel thomas, who had allowed them each twenty pounds a year for dress allowance and pocket-money during his lifetime, had astonished everybody by leaving them six thousand pounds apiece in his will, which had been made afresh a year before his death. he had just then inherited the large fortune of his younger brother, who had succeeded to the paternal business in cheapside, lived and died a bachelor, and saved a great deal of money every year. by his previous will they would have had a hundred a year each from the estate, and the use of the dower-house. but even that would have seemed wealth to these simple ladies as long as they remained together, and all of them alive. for colonel thomas had forgotten, in that first will, to make provision for the probability of one of them outliving the rest and being reduced to a solitary existence on a hundred pounds a year. however, with fifteen hundred a year or so between them, and no rent to pay, they were exceedingly well off, kept their modest carriage, employed two men in their garden, and found such pleasures in dividing their surplus wealth amongst innumerable and deserving charities that the arrival by post of a nurseryman's catalogue excited them no more than that of an appeal to subscribe to a new mission. the beautiful old furniture, huddled in the disused rooms and in the great range of attics that ran under the high-pitched roof, gave them immense happiness in the arrangement. they were not in the least alive to its value at that time, though they had become so in some degree since, but kept rather quiet about it for fear that their nephew might wish to carry some of it off to the great house. they thought it very old-fashioned and rather absurd, and they also held this view of the beautifully carved and panelled rooms of their old house, which were certainly too dark for perfect comfort. but they disposed everything to the best advantage, and produced without knowing it an effect which no diligent collector could have equalled, and which became still more delightful and satisfying as the years went on. cicely walked across the level park and went through a deep wood, entering by an iron gate the garden of the dower-house, which seemed to have been built in a clearing, although it was older than the oldest of the trees that hemmed it round. on this hot summer afternoon it stood shaded and cool, and the very fragrance of its old-fashioned garden seeming to be confined and concentrated by the heavy foliage. there was not a leaf too many. but in the autumn it was damp and close and in the winter very dark. a narrow drive of about a hundred yards led straight from the main road to the porch and showed a blue telescopic glimpse of distant country. if all the trees had been cut down in front to the width of the house it would have stood out as a thing of beauty against its green background, air and light would have been let into the best rooms and the pleasant view of hill and vale opened up to them. but the squire, tentatively approached years before by his affectionate and submissive aunts, had decisively refused to cut down any trees at all, and four out of the six of them had taken their last look of this world out of one or other of those small-paned windows and seen only a great bank of laurels--even those they were not allowed to cut down--across a narrow space of gravel, and the branches of oaks not quite ripe for felling, above them. cicely went through a garden door opening on to a stone-floored passage which ran right through the house, and opened the door of her aunts' parlour. they were sitting on either side of the fireless grate with their tea-table not yet cleared between them. aunt ellen, ninety-three years of age, with a lace cap on her head and a white silk shawl over her shoulders, was sitting upright in her low chair, knitting. she wore no glasses, and her old hands, meagre, almost transparent, with large knuckles, and skin that looked as if it had been polished, fumbled a little with her needles and the thick wool. her eyesight was failing, though in the pride of her great age she would not acknowledge it; but her hearing was almost perfect. aunt laura, who was seventy-five, looked, except for her hair, which was not quite white, the older of the two. she was bent and frail, and she had taken to spectacles some years before, to which aunt ellen alluded every day of her life with contempt. they said the same things to each other, on that and on other subjects, time after time. every day for years aunt ellen had said that if dear edward had only been able to cut down the trees in front of the house it would give them more light and open up the view, and she had said it as if it had only just occurred to her. and aunt laura had replied that she had thought the same thing herself, and did ellen remember how dear anne, who was always one to say out what she wanted, had asked him if he thought it might be done, but he had said--quite kindly--that the trees had always been there, and there they would stay. the two old ladies welcomed cicely as if she had been a princess with whom it was their privilege to be on terms of affectionate intimacy. she was, in fact, a princess in their little world, the daughter of the reigning monarch, to whom they owed, and gave, loyal allegiance. aunt laura had been up to the house that morning and heard that they were to return by the half-past four o'clock train. they had been quite sure that cicely would come to see them at once and tell them all her news, and they had debated whether they would wait for their own tea or not. they had, in fact, waited for a quarter of an hour. they told her all this in minute detail, and only by painstaking insistence was aunt ellen herself prevented from rising to ring the bell for a fresh supply to be brought in. "well, my dear, if you are quite sure you won't," she said at last, "i will ring for rose to take the things away." cicely rang the bell, and rose, who five-and-thirty years before had come to the dower-house as an apple-cheeked girl from the village school, answered the summons. she wore a cap with coloured ribbons--the two sisters still shook their heads together over her tendency to dressiness--and dropped a child's curtsey to cicely as she came in. she had been far too well-trained to speak until she was spoken to, but aunt ellen said, "here is miss clinton returned from london, rose, where she has seen the king and queen." and rose said, "well, there, miss!" with a smile at cicely, and before she removed the tea-tray settled the white shawl more closely round aunt ellen's shoulders. "rose is a good girl," said aunt ellen, when she had left the room, "but i am afraid more fond of admiration than she should be. well, dear, now tell us all about what you have seen and done. but, first of all, how is your dear father?" "oh, quite well, thank you, aunt ellen," replied cicely, "and very pleased to get home, i think." "ah!" said aunt ellen. "we have all missed him sorely. i am sure it is wonderful how he denies himself all kinds of pleasure to remain here and do his duty. it is an example we should all do well to follow." "when he was quite a young man," said aunt laura, "there was no one who was gayer--of course in a _nice_ way--and took his part in everything that was going on in the higher circles of the metropolis. your dear aunt elizabeth used to cut out the allusions to him in the _morning post_, and there was scarcely a great occasion on which his name was not mentioned." "but after two years in his regiment he gave it all up to settle down amongst his own people," said aunt ellen. "all his life has been summed up in the word 'duty.' i wish there were more like him, but there are not." "it seems like yesterday," said aunt laura, "that he joined the horse guards blue. we all wished very much to see him in his beautiful uniform, which so became him, and your dear aunt anne, who was always the one to make requests if she saw fit, asked him to bring it down to kencote and put it on. dear edward laughed at her, and refused--quite kindly, of course--so we all took a little trip to london--it was the occasion of the opening of the international reformatory exhibition at islington by the prince of wales, as he was then--and your dear father was in the escort. how noble he looked on his black horse! i assure you we were all very proud of him." cicely sat patiently silent while these reminiscences, which she had heard a hundred times before, were entered upon. she looked at aunt ellen, fumbling with her knitting-needles, and wondered what it must be like to be so very old, and at aunt laura, who was also knitting, with quick and expert fingers, and wondered if she had ever been young. "did the king show your dear father any special mark of esteem?" asked aunt ellen. "it did occur to your aunt laura and myself that, not knowing how heavy are the duties which keep him at kencote, his majesty might have been--i will not say annoyed, because he would not be that--but perhaps disappointed at not seeing him more often about his court. for in the days gone by he was an ornament of it, and i have always understood, though not from him, that he enjoyed special consideration, which would only be his due." "the king didn't take any notice of father," said cicely, with the brusque directness of youth, and aunt ellen seemed to be somewhat bewildered at the statement, not liking to impute blame to her sovereign, but unable for the moment to find any valid excuse for him. "i thought," she said hesitatingly, "that sending specially--the invitation for all of you--but i suppose there were a great many people there." cicely took her opportunity, and described what she had seen and done, brightly and in detail. she answered all her aunts' questions, and interested them deeply. her visits, and those of her mother, or the twins with miss bird, were the daily enlivenment of the two old ladies, and were never omitted. the squire seldom went to the dower-house, but when he did look in for a minute or two, happening to pass that way, they were thrown into a flutter of pleasure and excitement which lasted them for days. when cicely took her leave an hour later, aunt ellen said: "the consideration with which dear edward's family treats us, sister, is something we may well be thankful for. i felt quite sure, and i told you, that some one would come to see us immediately upon their return. cicely is always so bright and interesting--a dear girl, and quite takes after her father." "dear anne used to say that she took after her mother," said aunt laura; to which aunt ellen replied: "i have not a word to say against nina; she has been a good wife to dear edward, though we all thought at the time of their marriage that he might have looked higher. but compared with our nephew, quiet and unassuming as she is, she has very little character, while cicely _has_ character. no, sister, cicely is a clinton--a clinton through and through." chapter v melbury park family prayers at kencote took place at nine o'clock, breakfast nominally at a quarter past, though there was no greater interval between the satisfaction of the needs of the soul and those of the body than was necessary to enable the long string of servants to file out from their seats under the wall, and the footmen to return immediately with the hot dishes. the men sat nearest to the door and frequently pushed back to the dining-room against the last of the outflowing tide; for the squire was ready for his breakfast the moment he had closed the book from which he had read the petition appointed for the day. if there was any undue delay he never failed to speak about it at once. this promptness and certainty in rebuke, when rebuke was necessary, made him a well-served man, both indoors and out. punctuality was rigidly observed by the clinton family. it had to be; especially where the women were concerned. if dick or humphrey, when they were at home, missed prayers, the omission was alluded to. if cicely, or even mrs. clinton was late, the squire spoke about it. this was more serious. in the case of the boys the rebuke hardly amounted to speaking about it. as for the twins, they were never late. for one thing their abounding physical energy made them anything but lie-abeds, and for another, they were so harried during the ten minutes before the gong sounded by miss bird that there would have been no chance of their overlooking the hour. if they had been late, miss bird would have been spoken to, and on the distressing occasions when that had happened, it had put her, as she said, all in a twitter. when it still wanted a few minutes to the hour on the morning after the return from london, cicely was standing by one of the big open windows talking to miss bird, the twins were on the broad gravel path immediately outside, and two footmen were putting the finishing touches to the appointments of the table. it was a big table, although now reduced to the smallest dimensions of which it was capable, for the use of the six people who were to occupy it. but in that great room it was like an island in the midst of a waste of turkey carpet. the sideboards, dinner-wagon, and carving-table, and the long row of chairs against the wall opposite to the three windows were as if they lined a distant shore. the wallpaper of red flock had been an expensive one, but it was ugly, and faded in places where the sun caught it. it had been good enough for the squire's grandfather forty years before, and it was good enough for him. it was hung with portraits of men and women and portraits of horses, some of the latter by animal painters of note. the furniture was all of massive mahogany, furniture that would last for ever, but had been made after the date at which furniture left off being beautiful as well as lasting. the mantelpiece was of brown marble, very heavy and very ugly. at one minute to nine mrs. clinton came in. she carried a little old-fashioned basket of keys which she put down on the dinner-wagon, exactly in the centre of the top shelf. cicely came forward to kiss her, followed by miss bird, with comma-less inquiries as to how she had spent the night after her journey, and the twins came in through the long window to wish her good morning. she replied composedly to the old starling's twittering, and cast her eye over the attire of the twins, which was sometimes known to require adjustment. then she took her seat in one of the big easy-chairs which stood on either side of the fireplace, while porter, the butler, placed a bible and a volume of devotions, both bound in brown leather, before the squire's seat at the foot of the table, and retired to sound the gong. it was exactly at this moment that the squire, who opened his letters in the library before breakfast, was accustomed to enter the room, and, with a word of greeting to his assembled family, perch his gold-rimmed glasses on his fine straight nose, and with the help of two book-markers find the places in the bible and book of prayers to which the year in its diurnal course had brought him. the gong would sound, either immediately before or immediately after he had entered the room, the maids and the men who had been assembling in the hall would file in, he would throw a glance towards them over his glasses to see that they were all settled, and then begin to read in a fast, country gentleman's voice the portion of scripture that was to hallow the day now officially beginning. the gong rolled forth its sounding reverberation, miss bird and the three girls took their seats, and then there was a pause. in a house of less rigid habits of punctuality it would have been filled by small talk, but here it was so unusual that when it had lasted for no more than ten seconds the twins looked at one another in alert curiosity and cicely's eyes met those of her mother, which showed a momentary apprehension before they fixed themselves again upon the shining steel of the fire bars. another ten seconds went by and then the library door was heard to open and the squire's tread, heavy on the paved hall. four pairs of eyes were fixed upon him as he entered the room, followed at a short but respectful interval by the servants. mrs. clinton still looked inscrutably at the grate. the squire's high colour was higher than its wont, his thick grizzled eyebrows were bent into a frown, and his face was set in lines of anger which he evidently had difficulty in controlling. he fumbled impatiently with the broad markers as he opened the books, and omitted the customary glance towards the servants as he began to read in a voice deeper and more hurried than usual. when he laid down the bible and took up the book of prayers he remained standing, as he sometimes did if he had a touch of rheumatism; but he had none now, and his abstention from a kneeling position amounted to a declaration that he was willing to go through the form of family prayers for routine's sake but must really be excused from giving a mind to it which was otherwise occupied. it was plain that he had received a letter which had upset his equanimity. this had happened before, and the disturbance created made manifest in much the same way. but it had happened seldom, because a man who is in possession of an income in excess of his needs is immune from about half the worries that come with the morning's post, and any annoyance arising from the administration of his estate was not usually made known to him by letter. the squire's letter-bag was normally as free of offence as that of any man in the country. the twins, eying one another with surreptitious and fearful pleasure, conveyed in their glances a knowledge of what had happened. the thing that walter and muriel had made up their minds about, whatever it was--that was what had caused the squire to remain behind a closed door until he had gained some slight control over his temper, and led him now to prefer the petitions appointed in the book bound in brown leather in a voice between a rumble and a bark. perhaps everything would come out when porter and the footman had brought in the tea and coffee service and the breakfast dishes, and left the room. if it did not, they would hear all about it later. their father's anger held no terrors for them, unless it was directed against themselves, and even then considerably less than might have been supposed. he was often angry, or appeared to be, but he never did anything. even in the memorable upheaval of seven years before--when walter had finally refused to become a clergyman and announced his determination of becoming a doctor--which had been so unlike anything that had ever happened within their knowledge that it had impressed itself even upon their infant minds, and of which they had long since worried all the details out of cicely, he had made a great deal of noise but had given way in the end. he would give way now, however completely he might lose his temper in the process. the twins had no fear of a catastrophe, and therefore looked forward with interest, as they knelt side by side, with their plump chins propped on their plump hands, to the coming storm. the storm broke, as anticipated, when the servants had finally left the room, and the squire had ranged over the silver dishes on the side-table for one to his liking, a search in which he was unsuccessful. "i wish you would tell barnes that if she can't think of anything for breakfast but bacon, and scrambled eggs, and whiting, and mushrooms, she had better go, and the sooner the better," he said, bending a terrifying frown on his wife. "same thing day after day!" but he piled a plate with bacon and eggs and mushrooms and carried it off to his seat, while his daughters and miss bird waited round him until he had helped himself. "i have just had a letter from walter," he began directly he had taken his seat, "which makes me so angry that, 'pon my word, i scarcely know what to do. nina, this milk is burnt. barnes shall go. she sends up food fit for the pig-tub. why can't you see that the women servants do their duty? i can't take _everything_ on my shoulders. god knows i've got enough to put up with as it is." "joan, ring the bell," said mrs. clinton. "oh--god's sake--no, no," fussed the squire. "i don't want the servants in. give me some tea. miss bird, here's my cup, please. take it, please, _take_ it, miss bird. i don't know when i've felt so annoyed. you do all you can and put yourself to an infinity of trouble and expense for the sake of your children, and then they behave like this. really, walter wants a good thrashing to bring him to his senses. if i had nipped all this folly of doctoring in the bud, as i ought to have done, i might have been able to live my life in peace. it's too bad; 'pon my word, it's too bad." the twins, sustaining their frames diligently with bacon and eggs and mushrooms--the whiting was at a discount--waited with almost too obvious expectation for the full disclosure of walter's depravity. cicely, alarmed for the sake of muriel, ate nothing and looked at her father anxiously. miss bird was in a state of painful confusion because she had not realised effectively that the squire had wanted his cup of coffee exchanged for a cup of tea, and might almost be said to have been "spoken to" about her stupidity. only with mrs. clinton did it rest to draw the fire which, if she did it unskilfully, might very well be turned upon herself. a direct question would certainly have so turned it. "i am sorry that walter has given you any further cause of complaint, edward," she said. this was not skilful enough. "cause of complaint!" echoed the squire irritably. "am i accustomed to complain about anything without good reason? you talk as if i am the last man in the world to have the right to expect my wishes to be consulted. every one knows that i gave way to walter against my better judgment. i allowed him to take up this doctoring because he had set his mind on it, and i have never said a word against it since. and how now does he reward me when he has got to the point at which he might begin to do himself and his family some credit? coolly writes to me for money--_to me_--_for money_--to enable him to buy a practice at melbury park, if you please. melbury _park_! pah!!" the squire pushed his half-emptied plate away from him in uncontrollable disgust. he was really too upset to eat his breakfast. the utterance of the two words which summed up walter's blind, infatuated stampede from respectability brought back all the poignant feelings with which he had first read his letter. for the moment he was quite beside himself with anger and disgust, and unless relief had been brought to him he would have left his breakfast unfinished and stalked out of the room. nancy brought the relief with the artless question, "where is melbury park, father?" "hold your tongue," said the squire promptly, and then drew a lurid picture of a place delivered over entirely to the hovels of nameless people of the lower middle classes, and worse, a place in which you would be as effectually cut off from your fellows as if you went to live in kamschatka. indeed, you would not be so cut off if you went to kamschatka, for you might be acknowledged to be living there, but to have it said that you lived at melbury park would _stamp_ you. it would be as easy to say you were living in halloway goal. it was a place they stopped you at when you came into london on the north central railway, to take your tickets. the squire mentioned this as if a place where they took your tickets was of necessity a dreadful kind of a place. "little have i ever thought," he said, "when i have been pulled up there, and looked at those streets and streets of mean little houses, that a son of mine would one day want to go and _live_ there. 'pon my word, i think walter's brain must be giving way." it was cicely who asked why walter wanted to live at melbury park, and what muriel said about it. "he doesn't say a word about muriel," snapped the squire. "i suppose muriel is backing him up. i shall certainly speak to jim and mrs. graham about it. it is disgraceful--positively disgraceful--to think of taking a girl like muriel to live in such a place. she wouldn't have a soul to speak to, and she would have to mix with all sorts of people. a doctor's wife can't keep to herself like other women. oh, i don't know why he wants to go there. don't ask me such questions. i was ready to start him amongst nice people, whatever it had cost, and he might have been in a first-class position while other men of his age were only thinking about it. but no, he must have his own silly way. he shan't have his way. i'll put my foot down. i won't have the name of clinton disgraced. it has been respected for hundreds of years, and i don't know that i've ever done anything to bring it down. it's a little too much that one of my own sons should go out of his way to throw mud at it. i've stood enough. i won't stand any more. melbury park! a pretty sort of _park_!" having thus relieved his feelings the squire was enabled to eat a fairly good breakfast, with a plateful of ham to follow his bacon and eggs and mushrooms, a spoonful or two of marmalade, and some strawberries to finish up with. it came out further that walter was coming down by the afternoon train to dine and sleep, and presumably to discuss the proposal of which he had given warning, and that the squire proposed to ask tom and his wife to luncheon, or rather that mrs. clinton should drop in at the rectory in the course of the morning and ask them, as he would be too busy. then cicely asked if she might have kitty, the pony, for the morning, and the squire at once said, "no, she'll be wanted to take up food for the pheasants," after which he retired to his room, but immediately returned to ask cicely what she wanted the pony for. "i want to go over to mountfield," said cicely. "very well, you can have her," said the squire, and retired again. mrs. clinton made no comment on the disclosures that had been made, but took up her basket of keys and left the room. "now, joan and nancy, do not linger but get ready for your lessons at a quarter to ten punctually," miss bird broke forth volubly. "every morning i have to hunt you from the breakfast table and my life is spent in trying to make you punctual. i am sure if your father knew the trouble i have with you he would speak to you about it and then you would see." "melbury park!" exclaimed nancy in a voice of the deepest disgust, as she rose slowly from the table. "'pon my word, joan, it's too bad. i spend my life in trying to make you punctual and then you want to go to melbury park! pah! a nice sort of a _park_!" "are you going to see muriel, cicely?" asked joan, also rising deliberately. "starling, _darling_! don't hustle me, i'm coming. i only want to ask my sister cicely a question." "yes," said cicely. "if i couldn't have had kitty i should have walked." "how unreasonable you are, cicely," said nancy. "the pony is wanted to take chickweed to the canaries at melbury park." "find out all about it, cis," said joan in process of being pushed out of the room. "oh, take it, miss bird, _please_, take it." cicely drove off through the park at half-past ten. until she had passed through the lodge gates and got between the banks of a deep country lane, kitty went her own pace, quite aware that she was being driven by one whose unreasonable inclinations for speed must subordinate themselves to the comfort of pony-flesh as long as she was in sight of house or stables. then, with a shake of her head, she suddenly quickened her trot, but did not escape the cut of a whip which was always administered to her at this point. with that rather vicious little cut cicely expressed her feelings at a state of things in which, with fourteen or fifteen horses in the stable and half a dozen at the home farm, the only animal at the disposal of herself and her sisters was always wanted for something else whenever they asked for it. the squire had four hunters--sometimes more--which nobody but himself ever used, and the price of a horse that would carry a man of his weight comfortably ran into treble figures more often than not. dick kept a couple always at kencote, even walter had one, and humphrey and frank could always be mounted whenever they wanted a day with the south meadshire. there were nine or ten horses, standing in stalls or loose boxes or at grass, kept entirely for the amusement of her father and brothers, besides half a dozen more for the carriages, the station omnibus, the luggage cart, and all the dynamic demands of a large household. the boys had all had their ponies as soon as their legs could grip a saddle. this very pony that she was driving was really frank's, having been rescued for him from a butcher's cart in bathgate fourteen years before, and nobody knew how old she was. she was used for the mowing machine and for every sort of little odd job about the garden, and seemed as if she might go on for ever. it was only when cicely or the twins drove her that the reminder was given that she was not as young as she had been, and must not be hustled. and she was all they were ever allowed to drive, and then only when she was not wanted for something else. it was a clinton tradition, deriving probably from colonel thomas and his six stay-at-home daughters, that the women of the family did not hunt. they were encouraged to drive and allowed to ride to the meets of hounds if there was anything to carry them, and in cicely's childhood there had been other ponies besides kitty, left-offs of her elder brothers, which she had used. but she had never been given a horse of her own, and the hunters were far too precious to be galled by a side-saddle. what did she want to ride for? the squire hated to see women flying about the country like men, and he wasn't going to have any more horses in the stable. the men had more than enough to do as it was. it was part of the whole unfair scheme on which life at kencote was based. everything was done for the men and boys of the family, and the women and girls must content themselves with what was left over. pondering these and other things, cicely drove along the country lanes, between banks and hedges bright with the growth of early summer, through woods in which pheasants, reared at great expense that her father and brothers and their friends might kill them, called one another hoarsely, as if in a continual state of gratulation at having for a year at least escaped their destined end; between fields in which broods of partridges ran in and out of the roots of the green corn; across a bridge near which was a deep pool terrifically guarded by a notice-board against those who might have disturbed the fat trout lying in its shadows; across a gorse-grown common, sacred home of an old dog-fox that had defied the south meadshire hounds for five seasons; and so, out of her father's property on to that of jim graham, in which blood relations of the kencote game and vermin were protected with equal care, in order that the grahams might fulfil the destiny appointed for them and the clintons and the whole race of squirearchy alike. the immediate surroundings of mountfield were prettier than those of kencote. the house stood at the foot of a wooded rise, and its long white front showed up against a dark background of trees. it was older in date than georgian kencote, and although its walls had been stuccoed out of all resemblance to those of an old house, its high-pitched roof and twisted chimney stacks had been left as they were. the effect was so incongruous that even unæsthetic alexander graham, jim's father, had thought of uncovering the red brick again. but the front had been altered to allow for bigger windows and a portico resembling that at kencote, and the architect whom he had consulted, had pressed him to spend more money on it than he felt inclined to. so he had left it alone and spent none; and jim, who was not so well off as his father by the amount of muriel's portion and the never-to-be-forgiven harcourt duties, was not likely to have a thousand pounds to spare for making his rooms darker for some years to come. the old stable buildings, untouched by the restorer, flanked the house on one side and the high red brick wall of the gardens on the other. the drive sloped gently up from the gates through an undulating park more closely planted than that of kencote. there were some very old trees at mountfield and stretches of bracken here and there beneath them. it was a pity that the house had been spoilt in appearance, but its amenities were not wholly destroyed. cicely knew it almost as well as she knew kencote, but she acknowledged its charm now as she drove up between the oak and the young fern. under the blue june sky strewn with light clouds, it stood for a peaceful, pleasant life, if rather a dull one, and she could not help wondering whether her friend would really be happier in a house of her own in melbury park, which, if painted in somewhat exaggeratedly dark colours by cicely's father, had not struck her, when she had seen it from the railway, as a place in which any one could possibly live of choice. perhaps walter had over-persuaded her. she would know very soon now, for muriel told her everything. chapter vi a good long talk mrs. graham--she was the honourable mrs. graham, a daughter of the breeder of jove ii. and other famous shorthorns--came out of the door leading to the stableyard as cicely drove up. she had been feeding young turkeys, and wore a shortish skirt of brown tweed, thick boots and a green tyrolean hat, and was followed by three dogs--a retriever, a dachshund, and one that might have been anything. she was tall and spare, with a firm-set, healthy face, and people sometimes said that she ought to have been a man. but she was quite happy as a woman, looking after her poultry and her garden out of doors, and her dogs and her household within. she had hardly moved from mountfield since her marriage thirty years before, and the only fly in the ointment of content in which she had embalmed herself was that she would have to leave it when jim married. but she greeted cicely, who was expected to supplant her, with bright cordiality, and lifted up a loud voice to summon a groom to lead off kitty to the stable. "my dear," she said; "such a nuisance as this wedding is you never knew. it's as much as i can do to keep the birds and the animals fed, and how _i_ shall look in heliotrope and an aigrette the lord only knows. but i suppose nobody will look at me, and muriel will be a picture. have you heard that walter is going to take her to live at melbury park? it seems a funny place to go to live in, doesn't it? but i suppose they won't mind as long as they are together. i never saw such a pair of love-birds." "walter wrote to father about it this morning," said cicely, "and he is coming down this afternoon. father is furious with him." "well, i'm sure i don't know why," said mrs. graham equably. "i shouldn't care to live in melbury park myself, and i don't suppose mr. clinton would. but nobody asks him to. if _they_ want to, it's their own affair. i'm all for letting people go their own way--always have been. i go mine." "why does walter choose such a place as that to take muriel to?" asked cicely, who had not remained quite unimpressed by the squire's diatribe against the unfortunate suburb. "oh, it's convenient for his hospital and gives him the sort of practice he wants for a year or two. _i_ don't know. they won't live there for ever. i don't suppose it will kill them to know a few people you wouldn't ask to dinner. it hasn't killed me. i get on with farmers' wives better than anybody--ought to have been one." "father is going to ask you to put your foot down and say muriel shan't go there," said cicely. "well then, i won't," replied mrs. graham decisively. "i'm not a snob." then she added hurriedly, "i don't say that your father is one either; but he does make a terrible fuss about all that sort of thing. i should have thought a clinton was good enough to be able to know anybody without doing himself any harm. but you had better go and talk to muriel about it, my dear. you will find her upstairs, with her clothes. oh, those clothes! i must go and look after the gardeners. they are putting liquid manure on the roses, and i'm afraid they will mix it too strong." mrs. graham went off to attend to her unsavoury but congenial task, and cicely went indoors and up to muriel's room, where she found her friend with a maid, busy over some detail of her trousseau. they greeted one another with coolness but affection, the maid was sent out of the room, and they settled down in chintz-covered easy-chairs by the window for the usual good long talk. muriel was a pretty girl, less graceful than cicely, but with her big brown eyes and masses of dark hair, a foil to her friend's fair beauty. she had her mother's sensible face, but was better-looking than her mother had ever been. "now you must tell me every word from the beginning," she said. "you said nothing in your letters. you didn't make me see the room, or any one in it." cicely had a good deal to say about her late experiences, but her friend's own affairs were of more recent interest. "but i want to hear about walter and melbury park first," she said. "there is a rare to-do about it at kencote, i can tell you, muriel." "is there?" said muriel, after a short pause, as if she were adjusting her thoughts. "that was what walter was afraid of." "don't you mind going to live in a place like that?" asked cicely. "father thinks it is a shame that walter should take you there." "o my dear," said muriel, with a trifle of impatience, "you know quite well what i think about all that sort of thing. we have talked it over hundreds of times. here we are, stuck down in the middle of all this, with nothing in the world to do but amuse ourselves, if we can, and never any chance of pushing along. we have _got_ it all; there is nothing to go for. that's what i first admired about my darling old walter. he struck out a line of his own. if he had been content just to lop over the fence into kencote rectory, i don't think i should ever have fallen in love with him. i don't know, though. he _is_ the sweetest old dear." "oh, don't begin about walter," urged cicely. "yes, i will begin about walter," replied muriel, "and i'll go on with walter. he says now that the only thing he is really keen about--except me--is his work. he always liked it, in a way, but when he made up his mind to be a doctor it was only because he knew he must have some profession, and he thought he might as well have one that interested him. but now it takes up all his thoughts, except when he comes down here for a holiday, and you know how the old pet enjoys his holidays. well, i'm going to do all i can to help him to get on. he says this practice at melbury park is just what he wants, to get his hand in; he won't be worried with a lot of people who aren't really ill at all, but have to be kept in a good humour in case they should go off to another doctor. it will be hard, sound work, and he will be in touch with the hospital all the time. he is immensely keen about it. i don't want to say anything against mr. clinton, but why _can't_ he see that walter is worth all the rest of your brothers put together, because he has set out to do something and they are just having a good time?" "oh, well, muriel, i can't allow that," said cicely. "dick is quite a good soldier. he got his d.s.o. in the war. and besides, his real work is to look after the property, and he knows as much about that as father. and humphrey _has_ to go about a lot. you must, in the foreign office. and frank--he is doing all right. he was made doggy to his admiral only the other day." "well, at any rate," replied muriel, "they start from what they are. and you can't say that their chief aim isn't to have a good time. walter has gone in against men who _have_ to work, whether they want to or not, and he has done as well as any of them. he owes nothing to being the son of a rich man. it has been against him, if anything." "father hoped he was going to set up as a consulting physician," said cicely. "yes, and why?" asked muriel. "only because he wants him to live amongst the right sort of people. he doesn't care a bit whether he would make a good consultant or not. walter says he isn't ready for it. he wants more experience. it will all come in time. he is not even quite sure what he wants to specialise on, or if he wants to specialise at all. at present he only wants to be a g.p., with plenty of work and time for the hospital." "what is a g.p.?" asked cicely. "oh, a general practitioner. it's what walter calls it." "then why can't he be a g.p. in a nicer place than melbury park? it is rather hard on you, muriel, to take you to a place where you can't know anybody." "o my dear, what _do_ i care for all that nonsense about knowing people? surely there's enough of that here! is this person to be called on, who has come to live in a house which nobody ever called at before, or that person, because nobody has ever heard of her people? i'm sick of it. even mother won't call on bathgate people, however nice they may be, and she's not nearly so stuck up as most of the county women." "yes, i know all that, and of course it's nonsense. but you must admit that it is different with people who aren't gentle-people at all." "i'm not a fool, and i don't pretend that i'm going to make bosom friends of all walter's patients, though i _am_ going to do what i can to make things pleasant all round. we shall see our friends in london, of course. jim is going to give us a jolly good motor-car, and we shall be able to dine out and go to the play and all that if we want to, and people ask us. but it is all so unimportant, cicely, that side of it. walter wants to get out of it. he'll be very busy, and the best times we shall have will be in our own little house alone, or going right away when we get a holiday." "i dare say you are quite right," said cicely. "of course it will be jolly to have your own house and do what you like with it. has walter got a house yet?" "there is quite a decent one we can have where the man who wants to sell the practice lives. it is really bigger than we want, although it's only a semi-detached villa. i should be able to have my friends to stay with me. cicely, you _must_ come directly we move in, and help to get things straight, if we go there." "oh, you'll go there all right, if walter has made up his mind about it," said cicely. "father thinks he will hold out, but he knows, really, that he won't. that's what makes him so wild." both the girls laughed. "he is a funny old thing," said muriel apologetically, "but he has been very nice to me." "only because you have got ten thousand pounds, my dear, and are the right sort of match for walter. he wouldn't be very nice to you if walter had found you at melbury park; not even if you had your ten thousand pounds. oh dear, i wish i had ten thousand pounds." "what would you do with it?" "i should travel. at any rate i should go away from kencote. muriel, i am sick to death of it." "ah, that is because it seems dull after london. you haven't told me a word about all that you have been doing, and i have been talking about myself all the time." "i didn't care a bit about london. i didn't enjoy it at all--except the opera." "don't try to be _blasée_, my dear girl. of course you enjoyed it." "i tell you i didn't. look here, muriel, really it _is_ unfair the way the boys have everything in our family and the girls have nothing." "i do think it is a shame you are not allowed to hunt." "it isn't only that. it is the same with everything. i have seen it much more plainly since i went to london." "well, my dear, you went to a court ball, and to all the best houses. the boys don't do more than that. i shouldn't do as much if i went to london in the season." "yes, i went. and i went because cousin humphrey took the trouble to get cards for us. he is an old darling. do you suppose father would have taken the smallest trouble about it--for me and mother?" "he knows all the great people. i suppose a clinton is as good as anybody." "yes, a _man_ clinton. that is just it. dick and humphrey go everywhere as a matter of course. i saw enough of it to know what society in london means. it is like a big family; you meet the same people night after night, and everybody knows everybody else--that is in the houses that cousin humphrey got us invited to. dick and humphrey know everybody like that; they were part of the family; and mother and i were just country cousins who knew nobody." "well, of course, they are there all the time and you were only up for a fortnight. didn't they introduce you to people?" "o yes. dick and humphrey are kind enough. they wanted me to have a good time. but you are not supposed to want introductions in london. you are supposed to know enough men to dance with, or you wouldn't be there. and the men don't like it. i often heard dick and humphrey apologising to their friends for asking them to dance with me. you know the sort of thing, muriel: 'you might take a turn with my little sister, old man, if you've nobody better. she's up here on the spree and she don't know anybody.'" "o cicely, they wouldn't give you away like that." "perhaps not quite as bad as that. dick and humphrey are nice enough as brothers, and i believe they're proud of me too, in a way. they always danced with me themselves, and they always noticed what i was wearing, and said i looked a topper. i know i looked all right, but directly i opened my mouth i gave myself away, just like a maid in her mistress's clothes." "o cicely!" "well, it was like that. i had nothing to talk about. i don't know london; i can't talk scandal about people i don't know. of course i had to tell them i had always lived in the country, and then they began to talk about hunting at once. then i had to say that i didn't hunt, and then they used to look at me through their eyeglasses, and wonder what the deuce i did do with myself. the fact is, that i can't do anything. even the ones with brains--there _were_ a few of them--who tried me with things besides hunting, couldn't get anything out of me, because there is nothing to get. i've never been anywhere or seen anything. i don't know anything--nothing about books or pictures or music or plays. why on earth _should_ they want to talk to me? hardly any of them did twice, unless it was those who thought i was pretty and wanted to flirt with me. i felt such a _fool_!" she was almost in tears. her pretty face under its white motor-cap was flushed; she twisted her gloves in her slender hands. "o cicely, darling!" said muriel sympathetically, "you are awfully bright and clever, really. you've many more brains than i have." "i'm not clever, but i've got as many brains as other girls. and what chance have i ever had of learning anything? dick and humphrey and walter were all sent to eton and oxford or cambridge. they have all had the most expensive education that any boys could have, and as long as they behaved themselves pretty well, nobody cared in the least whether they took advantage of it or not. what education have _i_ had? miss bird! i don't suppose she knows enough to get a place as teacher in a village school. i suppose i know just about as much as the girls who do go to a village school. i haven't even had lessons in drawing or music, or anything that i might perhaps have been good at. i'm an ignorant _fool_, and it's all father's fault, and it isn't fair." she had talked herself into actual tears now. muriel said, in a dry voice which did not accord with her expression of face, "this sudden rage for learning is a new thing, my dear." cicely dabbed her eyes impatiently and sat up in her chair. "i dare say i am talking a lot of nonsense," she said, "but i have been wondering what i _do_ get for being the daughter of a rich country gentleman; because father _is_ rich, as well as being the head of an important family, as he is always reminding us, though he pretends to think nothing of it. he has never gone without anything he wanted in the whole of his life, and the boys have everything they want too, that can be got for money." "your allowance was just twice as much as mine, when father was alive," muriel reminded her. "oh, i know i can have plenty of nice clothes and all that," said cicely, "and i have nice food too, and plenty of it, and a nice room, and a big house to live in. but i don't call it living, that's all. father and the boys can live. we can't. outside kencote, we're nobody at all--i've found that out--and mother is of no more importance than i am. we're just the women of the family. anything is good enough for us." "i don't think you are quite fair, cicely. mrs. clinton doesn't care for going about, does she? it would depend more upon her than your father and brothers." "what would depend on her?" "well, i mean you grumble at dick and humphrey knowing more people than you do." "i suppose what you do mean is that the birkets aren't as good as the clintons." there was the slightest pause. then muriel said, a little defiantly, "well, the grahams aren't as good as the conroys." "i know that mother isn't only as good as father; she is a great deal better." cicely spoke with some heat, and muriel made a little gesture with her hands. "oh, all right, my dear," she said, "if you don't want to talk straight." it was a formula they used. cicely hesitated. "if you mean," she began, but muriel interrupted her. "you know quite well what i mean, and you know what i don't mean. you know i would never say that mrs. clinton wasn't as good as anybody in the world, in the sense you pretended to take my words. we were talking of something quite different." "sorry, muriel," replied cicely. this was another formula. "we did go to a dance at aunt emmeline's, you know. if i hadn't been to all those other houses i should have enjoyed it immensely. well, i did enjoy it--better, really. aunt emmeline saw that i had heaps of partners and i got on well with them. they were mostly barristers and people like that. they took the trouble to talk, and some of them even made me talk. it is a lovely house--of course not like one of the great london houses, but with two big drawing-rooms, and iff's band, and everything done very well. if i had gone straight up from here to that ball, it would have been one of the best i had ever gone to." "well, mr. birket is a famous barrister, and i suppose is very well off too. i should think he knows as many interesting people as anybody." "interesting people, yes; but there wasn't a soul there that i had seen at the other houses, except dick and humphrey." "were they there?" "there!" cried cicely triumphantly. "you see you are quite surprised at that." "well," said muriel firmly, "they _were_ there. and how did they behave?" "oh, they behaved all right. humphrey went away early, but dick stayed quite a long time. dick can be very sweet if he likes, and he doesn't give himself airs, really--he only takes it for granted that he is a great personage. and so he is; you would say so if you saw him in london. do you know, muriel, i was next to the duchess of pevensey at dunster house, and i heard her whisper to her daughter, quite sharply, 'evelyn, keep a valse for captain clinton, in case he asks you.' of course she hadn't an idea that i was captain clinton's sister. she had looked down her nose at me just before, and wondered what i was doing there." "i suppose she didn't say so." "her nose did. you should have seen her face when dick came up the moment after and said, 'here you are, siskin; come and have a spin'; and didn't take any notice of dear evelyn, who must have been at least thirty." "well, go on about mrs. birket's." "yes, well, dick said, 'now, siskin, i don't know any of the pretty ladies here, and i'm going to dance with you.' but when aunt emmeline came up and insisted upon introducing him to a lot of girls, he went off as nicely as possible and danced with the whole lot of them. and, you know, a man like dick isn't supposed to have to do that sort of thing." muriel laughed; and cicely, who had recovered her good humour, laughed too. "of course, it wasn't anything to fuss about, really," she said, "but you see what i mean, muriel, don't you?" "no, i don't," said muriel, "unless you mean exactly what i said just now, and you bit my head off for. mr. clinton is what some people call a swell, and dick is a swell too. the grahams aren't swells, and the birkets aren't either. and if you want it quite straight, my dear, neither you nor i are swells; we're only what they call county." "you're so sensible, muriel darling!" said cicely. "and you've had your head turned, cicely darling!" retorted muriel. "you have been taken up by your great relations, and you have come back to your simple home discontented." "it's all very well, though," said cicely, becoming serious again, "but i'm a clinton just as much as the boys are, and just as much as you are a graham. you say the grahams are not swells--you do use horrible language, muriel dear--but i suppose lord conroy is, and so, according to your argument, you ought to be." "uncle blobs isn't a swell--he's only a farmer with a title." "oh! then i don't know what you mean by a swell." "well, of course the conroys _are_ swells in a way, but they don't care about swelling. if mother had liked--and father had let her--she could have been a fashionable lady, and dear muriel could have been a fashionable girl, with her picture in the illustrated papers, sitting in front of a lattice window with a sweet white frock and a bunch of lilies. 'we give this week a charming photograph of miss muriel graham, the only daughter of the honourable mrs. graham. mrs. graham is a daughter of' and so on. as it is, dear muriel is just the daughter of a country squire." "that is all dear cicely is, though you said just now that father was a swell. i don't see, really, that he is much more of a swell than mr. graham was--here." "no--he isn't--here. that's just it. that is what you are running your head against, my dear. perhaps he isn't really a swell at all, now. but he could be if he liked, and he was when he was young. it is because he likes being a country squire best that you have got to put up with being a country squire's daughter. i'm sorry for you, as you seem to feel it so much, but i'm afraid there's no help for it. i don't think, really, you have much to grumble at, but i suppose if you live for a fortnight exclusively amongst dukes and duchesses, you _are_ apt to get a little above yourself. now tell me all about the court ball." cicely told her all about the court ball; then they talked about other things, and muriel said, "you have never asked about jim. his ship is due in london next wednesday and he will be home the day after." "dear old jim," said cicely--she was at work on some embroidery for muriel. "it will be jolly to see him back again. but it doesn't seem like a year since he went away." "_you_ don't seem to have missed him much." "o yes, i have. but it was like when the boys went back to school or to cambridge--frightfully dull at first, and then you got used to it, and they were back before you knew where you were." "yes, i know. but i don't feel like that about walter now. i don't know what i should do if he were to go off for a year." "oh, that's quite different. you are deeply in love, my dear." "so were you once." "never in the world, muriel, and you know that quite well. i was a little donkey. i had only just put my hair up and i thought it a fine thing to be engaged. not that that lasted long. dear old jim soon repented, and i don't blame him." "jim is pretty close about things, but i sometimes doubt whether he has repented." "you mean that he still cherishes a tender passion for sweet cicely clinton." "i shouldn't wonder." "well, i should. anyway, it isn't returned. i love jim, but if i heard that he had come home engaged, as i dare say he will, i shouldn't mind in the very least. i should be the first to congratulate him." "no, you wouldn't. he would tell mother and me first. and you needn't give yourself airs, you know. jim would be a very good match for you. you would be mistress of mountfield. i'm not making half such a brilliant alliance." "brilliant! i'm quite sure you would rather be going to marry somebody who had his way to make, like walter, than trickle off from one big, dull country house to another. wouldn't you, now?" "well, yes, i would. but it wouldn't make any difference to me, really, if i had walter. if dick were to die, which i'm sure i hope he won't, and walter were to succeed to kencote, i should like it just as much." "well, i dare say it would be all right when one got older. at present i think it would be burying yourself alive when you ought to have the chance of doing something and seeing something. no, muriel, dear. i have been a squire's daughter all my life, and there's no money in it, as humphrey says. the last thing i want to be at present is a squire's wife. i believe jim has forgotten all that silliness as much as i have. if i thought he hadn't, i shouldn't be so glad as i am at the prospect of seeing him back." "i dare say he has. you're not good enough for him." "and he isn't good enough for me. i must be going home, or father will accuse me of over-driving kitty. i always do over-drive her, but he doesn't notice unless i am late. good-bye, muriel. it has done me good to talk to you." chapter vii the rector the rector was shown into the library where the squire was reading the _times_, for which a groom rode over to bathgate every morning at eleven o'clock, and woe betide him if he ever came back later than half-past twelve. it was a big room lined with books behind a brass lattice which nobody ever opened. though the squire used it every day, and had used it for five-and-thirty years, he had never altered its appointments, and his grandfather had not lived in it. merchant jack had furnished it handsomely for a library, and the reverend john clinton smith, the historian of kencote, had bought the books for him, and read most of them for him too. if he had returned from the tomb in which he had lain for a hundred years to this room where he had spent some of the happiest hours of his life, he would only have had to clear out a boxful or two of papers from the cupboards under the bookshelves and the drawers of the writing-tables, and remove a few photographs and personal knick-knacks, and there would have been nothing there that was not familiar, except the works of surtees and a few score other books, which he would have taken up with interest and laid down again with contempt, in some new shelves by the fireplace. the squire had no skill with a room. he hated any alteration in his house, and he had debated this question of a new bookcase to hold the few books he did read from time to time with as much care as the reverend john clinton smith, book-lover as he was, had devoted to the housing of the whole library. "ah, my dear tom," said the squire heartily, "i'm glad you came up. i should have come down to you, but i've been so busy all the morning that i thought you wouldn't mind a summons. have you brought grace?" "she is with nina," said the rector, and sat heavily down in the easy-chair opposite to that from which the squire had risen. he was a big man, with a big face, clean shaven except for a pair of abbreviated side whiskers. he had light-blue eyes and a mobile, sensitive mouth. his clothes were rather shabby, and except for a white tie under a turned-down collar, not clerical. his voice, coming from so massive a frame, seemed thin, but it was of a pleasant tenor quality, and went well with the mild and attractive expression of his face. all the parishioners of kencote liked the rector, though he was not at all diligent in visiting them. perhaps they liked him the better on that account. the rector was the squire's half-brother. colonel thomas clinton, the squire's grandfather, had followed, amongst other traditions of his family, that of marrying early, and marrying money. his wife was a city lady, daughter of alderman sir james banket, and brought him forty thousand pounds. besides his six daughters, he had one son, who was delicate and could not support the fatigue of his own arduous pursuit of sport. he was sent to eton and to trinity college, and a cornetcy was bought for him in the grenadier guards. he also married early, and married, following an alternative tradition, not money, but blood. his wife was a sister of a brother officer, the marquis of nottingham, and they were happy together for a year. he died of a low fever immediately after the birth of his son, edward, that squire of kencote with whom we have to do. colonel thomas took a great deal more pride in his sturdy grandson than ever he had been able to take in his weakly son. he taught him to ride and to shoot, and to tyrannise over his six maiden aunts, who all took a hand in bringing him up. his own placid, uncomplaining wife had died years before, and lady susan clinton, tired of living in a house where women seemed to exist on sufferance, had married again, but had not been allowed to take her child to her new home. she had the legal right to do so, of course, but was far too frightened of the weather-beaten, keen-eyed old man, who could say such cutting things with such a sweet smile upon his lips, to insist upon it. her second husband was the rector of a neighbouring parish, who grew hot to the end of his days when he thought of what he had undergone to gain possession of his bride. he did not keep her long, for she died a year later in giving him a son. that son was now the reverend thomas beach, rector of kencote, to which preferment the squire had appointed him nearly thirty years before, when he was only just of canonical age to receive it. and in the comfortable rectory of kencote, except for a year's curacy to his father, he had lived all his clerical life. the squire and the rector were not altogether unlike in appearance. they were both tall and well covered with flesh, and there was a family resemblance in their features. but the squire's bigness and ruddiness were those of a man who took much exercise in the open air, the rector's of a man physically indolent, who lived too much indoors, and lived too well. but if they were not unlike in appearance, they were as dissimilar as possible in character. the squire's well-carried, massive frame betokened a man who considered himself to have a right to hold his head high and plant his footsteps firmly; the rector's big body disguised a sensitive, timorous character, and a soul never quite at ease in its comfortable surroundings. that ponderous weight of soft flesh, insistent on warmth and good food and much rest, had a deal to answer for. spare and active, with adventures of the spirit not discouraged by the indolence of the flesh, the rector of kencote might have been anything in the way of a saint that his church encourages. he would certainly not have been rector of kencote for thirty years, with the prospect of being rector of kencote for thirty years more if he lived so long. he had a simple, lovable soul. it told him that he did nothing to speak of in return for his good income and the fine house in which he lived in such comfort, and troubled him on this score more than it would have troubled a man with less aptitude for goodness; and it omitted to tell him that he had more direct influence for righteousness than many a man who would have consciously exercised all the gifts with which he might have been endowed. he simply could not bring himself to visit his parish regularly, two or three afternoons a week, as he had made up his mind to do when he was first ordained. the afternoons always slipped away somehow, and there were so many of them. the next would always do. so it had been for the first years of his pastorate, and he had long since given way altogether to his indolence and shyness in respect of visiting his flock; but his conscience still troubled him about it. he was a great reader, but his reading had become quite desultory, and he now read only for his own entertainment. his sermons were poor; he had no delivery and no gift of expression; he could not even give utterance to the ideas that did, not infrequently, act on his brain, nor hardly to the human tenderness which was his normal attitude towards mankind. but he did go on writing fresh ones, stilted and commonplace as they were. mental activity was less of a burden to him than bodily activity, and he had kept himself up to that part of what he thought to be his clerical duty. for the rest, he was fond of his books and his garden, fond of his opulent, well-appointed house, and all that it contained, and fond of the smaller distractions of a country life, but no sportsman. he had no children, but a graceful, very feminine wife, who reacted pleasantly on his intellect and looked well after the needs of his body. he sometimes went to london for a week or two, and had been to paris; but he liked best to be at home. he watched the progress of the seasons with interest, and knew something about birds, something about flowers and trees, was a little of a weather prophet, and often thought he would study some branch of natural science, but had lacked the energy to do so. he liked the winter as well as the summer, for then his warm house called him more seductively. he liked to tramp home along muddy country roads in the gloaming, drink tea in his wife's pretty drawing-room, chat to her a little, and then go into his cosy, book-lined study and read till dinner-time. he would have been a happy man as a layman, relieved of that gnawing conviction that his placid, easy life was rather far from being apostolic. and nobody, not even his wife, had any idea that he was not quite contented, and grateful for the good things that he enjoyed. "well, tom," said the squire, "i'm infernally worried again. it's that boy walter. what do you think he wants to do now?" he spoke with none of the heat of the morning. it might have been thought that he had already accepted the inevitable and was prepared to make the best of it. "i don't know, edward," said the rector; and the squire told him. "and you have a particular objection to this place, melbury park?" inquired the rector guilelessly. "o my dear tom," said the squire impatiently, "have you ever seen the place?" "from the railway only," admitted the rector; "and chiefly its back-gardens. it left an impression of washing on my mind." "it left an impression of _not_ washing on mine," said the squire, and leant back in his chair to laugh heartily at his witticism. the rector also did justice to it, perhaps more than justice, with a kind smile. "well, edward," he said, "it may be so, but it is, otherwise, i should say, respectable. it is not like a slum. has walter any particular reason for wishing to go there?" the squire gave a grudging summary of the reasons walter had advanced for wishing to go there, and made them appear rather ridiculous reasons. he also produced again such of the arguments he had advanced at breakfast-time as seemed most weighty, and managed to work himself up into a fair return of his morning's feeling of being very badly treated. "well, edward," said the rector gently, when he had come to an end, "i think if i were you i should not make any objections to walter's going to melbury park." "you wouldn't?" asked the squire, rather weakly. "no, i don't think i would. you see, my dear edward, some of us are inclined to take life too easily. i'm sometimes afraid that i do myself." "you do your duty, tom. nobody is asked to do more than that." "well, you may be right, but i am not sure. however, what i was going to say was that one cannot help respecting--perhaps even envying--a young fellow like walter who doesn't want to take life easily." "he has stuck to his work," said the squire. "i will say that for the boy; and he's never come to me for money to pay bills with, as humphrey has, and even dick--though, as far as dick goes, he'll have the property some day, and i don't grudge him what he wants now within reason." "you see, edward, when a man has congenial work which takes up his time, he is not apt to get into mischief. i think, if i may say so, that you ought to admit now, however much you may have objected to walter's choice of a profession in the first instance, that he has justified his choice. he put his hand to the plough and he has not looked back. that is a good deal to say for a young man with walter's temptations towards an easy, perhaps idle, life." "well," said the squire, "i do admit it. i do admit it, tom. i have my natural prejudices, but i'm the last man in the world that any one has a right to call obstinate. i objected to walter becoming a doctor in the first instance. it was natural that i should. he ought to have succeeded you, as dick will succeed me. and none of our family have ever been doctors. but i gave way, and i've every wish, now, that he should succeed in his profession. and the reason i object to this move so strongly is that as far as my judgment goes it is not a step in the right direction. it might be so for the ordinary doctor--i don't know and i can't say--but i'm willing to help a son of mine over some of the drudgery, and it will be very disagreeable for me to have walter settling down to married life in a place like melbury park, when he might do so much better. you must remember, tom, that he is the first of the boys to get married. dick will marry some day soon, i hope and trust, and humphrey too, but until they do, walter's son, if he has one, will be heir to this property, eventually. he ought _not_ to be brought up in a place like melbury park." "there is a good deal in what you say, edward," replied the rector, who privately thought that there was very little; "but the contingency you mention is a very unlikely one." "i don't lay too much stress on it. if i thought that walter was right from the point of rising in his profession to go to this place i would leave all that out of the question." "well, i'll tell you what, edward," said the rector, with an engaging smile, "supposing you keep an open mind on the question until you have heard what walter has to say about it. how would that be?" the squire hummed and ha'd, and thought that on the whole it might be the best thing to do. "you see," said the rector in pursuance of his bright idea, "it is just possible that there may be reasons which walter has considered, and may wish to urge, that _might_ make it advisable for him, even with the exceptional advantages you could give him, to go through the training afforded by just such a practice as this. i should let him urge them, edward, if i were you. i should let him urge them. you can but repeat your objections, if they do not appeal to your judgment. you will be in a better position to make your own views tell, if you dispose your mind to listen to his. i should take a kindly tone, i think, if i were you. you don't want to set the boy against you." "no, i don't want that," said the squire. "and i should have done what you advise, in any case. it's the only way, of course. let us go in and have some luncheon. then you don't think, tom, that there would be any serious objection to my giving way on this point, if walter is reasonable about it?" "well, edward, do you know, i really don't think there would," replied the rector, as they crossed the hall to the dining-room. the ladies were already there. mrs. beach was by the window talking to the twins, who adored her. she was getting on for fifty, but she was still a pretty woman, and moved gracefully as she came across the room to shake hands with her brother-in-law. "it is very nice to see you back again, edward," she said, with a charming smile. "you do not look as if london had disagreed with you." "my dear grace," said the squire, holding her white, well-formed hand in his big one. "i'll tell you my private opinion of london, only don't let it go any further. it can't hold a candle to kencote." then he gave a hearty laugh, and motioned her to a seat on his right. the twins cast a look of intelligence at one another, and cicely glanced at her mother. the squire had recovered his good humour. "for these an' all his mercies," mumbled the squire, bending his head.--"oh, beg your pardon, tom," and the rector said grace. "have you heard what that silly fellow walter wants to do, grace?" asked the squire. "nothing except that he hopes to get married next month," replied mrs. beach, helping herself to an omelette, "and i hope that he will make a better husband than tom." the rector, already busy, spared her a glance of appreciation, and the twins giggled at the humour of their favourite. "yes, he is going to be married, and he proposes to take muriel to live at melbury park, of all places in the world." "then in that case," replied mrs. beach equably, "tom and i will not give them the grand piano we had fixed upon for a wedding present. they must content themselves with the railway whistles." the twins laughed outright and were ineffectively rebuked by miss bird. that they were to be seen and not heard at table was a maxim she had diligently instilled into them. but they were quite right to laugh. aunt grace was surpassing herself. she always kept the squire in a good humour, by her ready little jokes and the well-disguised deference she paid him. the deference was not offered to him alone, but to all men with whom she came in contact, even her husband, and men liked her immensely. she teased them boldly, but she deferred to their manhood. women sometimes grew tired of her sweetness of manner, which was displayed to them too, and quite naturally. she was a sweet woman, if also, in spite of her ready tongue, rather a shallow one. mrs. clinton did not like her, but did not show it, except in withholding her confidence, and mrs. beach had no idea that they were not intimate. cicely was indifferent towards her, but had loved her as a child, for the same reason that the twins thought her the most charming of womankind, because she treated them as if they were her equals in intelligence, as no doubt they were. it had never occurred to them to mimic her, which was a feather in her cap if she had known it. and another was that miss bird adored her, being made welcome in her house, and, as she said, treated like anybody else. by the time luncheon was over the squire had so overcome his bitter resentment at the idea of walter's going to live at melbury park, that he could afford to joke about it. aunt grace had suggested that they should all go and live there, and had so amused the squire with a picture of himself coming home to his villa in the evening and eating his dinner in the kitchen in his shirt sleeves, with carpet slippers on his feet, which was possibly the picture in her mind of "how the poor live," that he was in the best of humours, and drank two more glasses of port than his slightly gouty tendency usually permitted. the twins persuaded miss bird to take them to the station to meet walter in the afternoon. they were not allowed to go outside the park by themselves, and walked down the village on either side of the old starling, each of them over-topping her by half a head, like good girls, as she said herself. they wore cool white dresses, and shady hats trimmed with poppies, and looked a picture. when they reached the by-road to the station, joan said, "one, two, three, and away," and they shot like darts from the side of their instructress, arriving on the platform flushed and laughing, not at all like good girls, while miss bird panted in their rear, clucking threats and remonstrances, to the respectful but undisguised amusement of the porter, and the groom who had preceded them with the dog-cart. walter got out of a third-class carriage when the train drew up and said, "hullo, twanky-diddleses! oh, my adorable _sturna vulgaris vetus_, embrace me! come to my arms!" "now, walter, do behave," said miss bird sharply. "what will people think and joan 'n nancy i shall certainly tell mrs. clinton of your _disgraceful_ behaviour i am quite ashamed of you running off like that which you _know_ you are not allowed to do you are very _naughty_ girls and i am seriously displeased with you." "ellen bird," said walter, "don't try and put it on to the twankies. i looked out of the carriage window and saw you sprinting along the station road yourself. you have had a little race and are annoyed at being beaten. i shall put you up in the cart and send you home, and i will walk back with the twankies." and in spite of miss bird's almost frenzied remonstrances, up into the cart she was helped, and driven off at a smart pace, with cheers from the twins, now entirely beyond her control. "well, twanky dears," said walter, starting off at a smart pace with a twin on either side, "i suppose there's a deuce of a bust up, eh? look here, you can't hang on. it's too hot." "it wouldn't be too hot for muriel to hang on," said joan, her arm having been returned to her. "there was a bust up this morning at breakfast," said nancy. "edward came in purple with passion two minutes late for prayers." "eh?" said walter sharply. "look here, you mustn't speak of the governor like that." "it's only her new trick," said joan. "she'll get tired of it." "you're not to do it, nancy, do you hear?" said walter. "oh, all right," said nancy. "mr. clinton of kencote, j.p., d.l., was so put out that he wouldn't kneel down to say his prayers." "annoyed, eh?" said walter. "yes," said joan, "but he's all right now, walter. aunt grace came to lunch, and beat bogey." "what!" "it's only her new trick," said nancy. "she'll get tired of it. she means put him in a good humour." "really, you twankies do pick up some language. then there's nothing much to fear, what?" "no, we are all coming to live at melbury park, and aunt grace is going to take in our washing." "oh, that's the line taken, is it?" said walter. "well, i dare say it's all very funny, but i can't have you twankies giving yourselves airs, you know. i don't know why they talk over things before you. the governor might have kept it to himself until he had seen me." "mr. clinton doesn't keep things to himself," said nancy. "you might know that by this time; and joan and i are quite old enough to take an intelligent interest in family affairs. we do take the deepest interest in them, and we know a lot. little pitchers have long ears, you know." "so have donkeys, and they get them pinched if they're not careful," retorted walter. "how are you getting on with your lessons, twankies?" "i believe our progress is quite satisfactory, thank you, dr. clinton," replied joan. "perhaps you would like to hear us a few dates, so that our afternoon walk may not pass entirely unimproved." "you had much better look at joan's tongue," said nancy. "starling said last night that her stomach was a little out of order, and we rebuked her for her vulgarity." "you are a record pair, you two," said walter, looking at them with unwilling admiration. "i don't believe any of us led that poor old woman the dance that you do. do you want some jumbles, twankies?" "ra-_ther_," said the twins with one voice, and they turned into the village shop. the tea-table was spread on the lawn, and the squire came out of the window of the library as walter reached the garden. "well, my boy," he said, "so you're going to settle down at melbury park, are you? that's a nice sort of thing to spring on us; but good luck to you! you can always come down here when you want a holiday." chapter viii by the lake whitsuntide that year fell early in june, and the weather was glorious. cicely awoke on friday morning with a sense of happiness. she slept with her blinds up, and both her windows were wide open. she could see from her pillow a great red mass of peonies backed by dark shrubs across the lawn, and in another part of the garden laburnums and lilacs and flowering thorns, and all variations of young green from trees and grass under a sky of light blue. thrushes and blackbirds were piping sweetly. she loved these fresh mornings of early summer, and had often wakened to them with that slight palpitation of happiness. but, when she was fully awake, it had generally happened that the pleasure had rather faded, at any rate of late years, since she had grown up. in her childhood it had been enough to have the long summer day in front of her, especially in holiday time, when there would be no irksome schoolroom restraint, nothing but the pleasures and adventures of the open air. but lately she had needed more, and more, at kencote, had seldom been forthcoming. moreover she had hardly known what the "more" was that she had wanted. she had never been unhappy, but only vaguely dissatisfied, and sometimes bored. this morning her waking sense of well-being did not fade as she came to full consciousness, but started into full pleasure as she remembered that her cousins, angela and beatrice birket, with their father and mother, were in the house. and dick and humphrey had come down with them the evening before. guests were so rare at kencote that to have a party of them was a most pleasurable excitement. dick and humphrey would see that there was plenty of amusement provided, quiet enough amusement for them, no doubt, but for cicely high pleasure, with something to do all the day long, and people whom she liked to do it with. and--oh yes--jim had returned home from his travels the day before, and would be sure to come over, probably early in the morning. she jumped out of bed, put on her dressing-gown, and went to the window. the clock from the stable turret struck six, but she really could not lie in bed on such a morning as this, with so much about to happen. she would dress and go out into the garden. a still happier thought--she would go down to the lake and bathe from the temple of melancholy. it was early in the year, but the weather had been so warm for the last month that it was not too early to begin that summer habit. perhaps the twins would come with her. they were early risers. she was just about to turn away from the window when she saw the twins themselves steal round the corner of the house. their movements were mysterious. although there was nobody about, they trod on tiptoe across the broad gravel path and on to the dewy lawn. joan--she could always tell them apart, although to the outside world they were identical in form and feature--carried a basket which probably contained provisions, a plentiful supply of which was generally included in the elaborate arrangements the twins made for their various games of adventure. there was nothing odd in this, but what was rather odd was that she also held a long rope, the other end of which was tied around nancy's neck, while nancy's hands were knotted behind her. when they got on to the grass they both turned at the same moment to glance up at the windows of the house, and caught sight of cicely, who then perceived that joan's features were hidden by a mask of black velvet. she saw them draw together and take counsel, and then, without speaking, beckon her insistently to join them. she nodded her head and went back into the room, smiling to herself, while the twins pursued their mysterious course towards the shrubberies. she thought she would not bathe after all; but she dressed quickly and went down into the garden, a little curious to learn what new invention the children were busying themselves with. it proved to be nothing more original than the old game of buccaneers. nancy had awakened to find herself neatly trussed to her bed and joan in an unfinished state of attire, but wearing the black velvet mask, brandishing in her face a horse pistol, annexed from the collection of old-fashioned weapons in the hall. thus overpowered she had succumbed philosophically. it was the fortune of war, and if she had thought of it she might just as well have been kneeling on joan's chest, as joan was kneeling, somewhat oppressively, on hers. given her choice of walking the plank from the punt on the lake or being marooned on the rhododendron island, she had accepted the latter alternative, stipulating for an adequate supply of food; and a truce having been called, while pirate and victim made their toilets and raided together for the necessary rations, she had then allowed herself to be bound and led off to the shore where the pirate ship was beached. all this was explained to cicely--the search for provisions having no particular stress laid on it--when she joined them, and she was awarded the part of the unhappy victim's wife, who was to gaze across the water and tear her hair in despair at being unable to go to the rescue. "you must rend the air with your cries," joan instructed her, "not too loud, because we don't want any one to hear. the pirate king will then appear on the scene, and stalking silently up behind you--well, you'll see. i won't hurt you." nancy was already comfortably marooned. she could be seen relieved of her bonds seated amongst the rhododendrons, which were in full flower on the island and all round the lake, making her first solitary meal off cold salmon and a macedoine of fruit, and supporting her painful situation with fortitude. cicely accepted her rôle, but dispensed with the business of tearing her hair. "o my husband!" she cried, stretching her arms across the water. "shall i never see thee more? what foul ruffian has treated thee thus?" "very good," said nancy, with her mouth full--she was only twenty yards away--"keep it up, sis." "i will not rest until i have discovered the miscreant and taken his life," proceeded cicely. "shed his blood," corrected nancy. "say something about my bones bleaching on the shore." "thy bones will bleach on the shore," cicely obeyed. "and i, a disconsolate widow, will wander up and down this cruel strand--oh, don't, joan, you are hurting." for she found herself in the grip of the pirate king, who hissed in her ear, "ha, ha, fair damsel! thou art mine at last. 'twas for love of thee i committed this deed. thy lily-livered husband lies at my mercy, and once in davy jones's locker will be out of my path. then the wedding bells shall ring and we will sail together over the bounding main. gently, gently, pretty dove! do not struggle. i will not hurt thee." "unhand me, miscreant," cried cicely. "think you that i would forget my brave and gallant husband for such as thou, steeped in crime from head to foot? unhand me, i say. help! help!" "peace, pretty one!" cooed the pirate king. "thou art in my power and thy cries do not daunt me. i have only to lift my voice and my brave crew will be all around me. better come with me quietly. there is a cabin prepared for thee in my gallant barque. none shall molest thee. cease struggling and come with me." urged towards the shore by the pirate king, cicely redoubled her cries for assistance, but no one was more surprised than she to see an elderly gentleman in a grey flannel suit and a straw hat bound from behind the bushes, level a latch-key at the head of the masked bandit, and cry, "loose her, perjured villain, or thy brains shall strew the sand." nancy's clear, delighted laugh came from the island, joan giggled and said, "o uncle herbert!" "uncle me no herberts," said mr. birket. "put up your hands or i shoot. (cicely, if you will kindly swoon in my arms--thank you.) know, base buccaneer, that i represent his britannic majesty on these seas, and wherever the british flag flies there is liberty. allow me to disarm you of your weapon." "i yield to superior force," said the bold buccaneer in stately tones. "very wise of you. i should fold my arms and scowl if i were you. behold, the lady cometh to. she is, yes she is, the daughter i have mourned these many years. and you, base marauder, though you know it not, are the long-lost brother of that luckless wight starving, if i mistake not, to death on the island. well for you that your hands are not imbrued in his gore. put off at once in your stout ship--and be careful not to tumble overboard--and restore him to his hapless bride." "i will obey your bidding," said the pirate king proudly. "the claims of relationship are paramount." "well put. i have hopes of you yet. i am also hungry. bring back the victim's basket, and we will eat together and forget this unfortunate occurrence." joan punted across to the island and the marooned nancy was brought to the mainland with her somewhat depleted store of provisions. mr. birket dropped his rôle while the embarkation proceeded, and mopped his brow with a bandana handkerchief. he was a short, grey-haired man with a keen lawyer's face. "well, my dear," he said to cicely, "i think that went off very well, but it is somewhat exhausting." cicely laughed. "the twins will never forget it," she said. "did you see them come out?" "i saw them come on to the lake. i was in the temple, getting through a little work." "what ever time did you get up?" "oh, half-past five. my regular hour in the summer. i'm kept pretty busy, my dear. but i don't generally have such a charming place as this to work in. now then, pirate, hurry up with those victuals. your uncle is hungry." they picnicked on the shore--the twins' provisioning having fortunately been ample--and mr. birket proved himself an agreeable companion. joan said to nancy afterwards that the practice of the law seemed to brighten people's brains wonderfully. he smoked a cigar, told them stories, and made them laugh. at half-past eight he fetched his papers from the temple and they went indoors to get ready for breakfast. "i think," he said, as they crossed the lawn, "we had better say nothing about the startling occurrences of the morning. they might come as a shock to our elders and betters." and joan and nancy, remembering the contents of the basket and the source from which they had been derived, agreed. herbert birket was mrs. clinton's only brother. their father had been a colonel in the indian army, and had retired to end his days in a little house on the outskirts of bathgate, desiring nothing more than to read the _times_ through every morning and find something in it to disagree with, walk so many miles a day, see his son well started in the profession he had chosen, and his daughter well, but not splendidly, married. he had gained his desires in all but the last item. the young squire of kencote, in all the glory of his wide inheritance and his lieutenancy in the household cavalry, had ridden past the little house on his way to bathgate and seen a quiet, unassuming, fair-haired girl watering her flowers in the garden, had fallen in love with her, met her at a county ball, fallen still more deeply in love, and finally carried her off impetuously from the double-fronted villa in the bathgate road to rule over his great house at kencote. south meadshire had rung with the romance, and old colonel birket had not been altogether delighted with his daughter's good fortune, wishing to spend his last days in peace and not in glory. the wedding had taken place in london, with a respectable show of relations on the bride's side and all the accompaniments of semi-military parade on the bridegroom's. there was no talk of a misalliance on the part of his friends, nor was there a misalliance, for the birkets were good enough people; but the young squire's six maiden aunts had returned to the dower-house at kencote after the wedding and shaken their respective heads. no good would come of it, they said, and had, perhaps, been a little disappointed ever afterwards that no harm had come of it, at any rate to their nephew. the old colonel had long since been laid in his grave, and the little house in the bathgate road, now in the respectable occupancy of a retired druggist, would have seemed as strange a dwelling-place to the daughters of herbert birket, who had prospered exceedingly, as to the children of mrs. clinton of kencote. angela and beatrice birket were handsome girls, both of them younger than cicely, but with their assured manners and knowledge of the world, looking older. they had been brought up strictly by their mother, who had paid great attention to their education. they might have been seen during their childhood on any reasonably fine afternoon walking in kensington gardens or hyde park with a highly priced french governess, two well, but plainly dressed children with long, straight hair and composed faces. they never appeared in their mother's drawing-room when visitors were there, being employed in a room upstairs either at lessons, or consuming the plainest variety of schoolroom tea. they were taken sometimes to an afternoon concert, and on very rare occasions to a play. when they were at home in london, their days were given to their lessons, with the requisite amount of regular exercise to keep them in good health. in holiday time, in the summer, at christmas and at easter, they were allowed to run quite wild, in old clothes at some out-of-the-way seaside place, in country farmhouses, where they scrambled about on ponies and amongst ducks and chickens, or in the country houses of their friends and relations, where there were other children of their age for them to play with. so they had loved the country and hated london, and had never been so surprised in their lives as when they were duly presented and launched in society to find that london was the most amusing place in the world and that all the pains and drudgery to which they had been put there had prepared them for the enjoyment of the manifold interests and pleasures that came in their way. they had developed quickly, and those who had known them in their rather subdued childhood would hardly have known them now. of all the places in which they had spent their holidays in days gone by they had liked kencote best. it had been a paradise of fun and freedom for them; they and cicely had been happy from morning till night. the elder boys home from school or college had been kind to them, and frank, the sailor, who was about their own age, and not too proud to make a companion of his sister and cousins, had led the way in all their happy adventures. and they had loved the twins, whom they had seen grow up from babyhood. no, there had been no place like kencote in the old days, and the pleasure of a visit there still persisted, although it was no longer the most congenial house at which they visited. all the party assembled for prayers in the dining-room. that was understood to be the rule. the twins were there, very clean and well brushed and very demure. mr. birket wished them good-morning solemnly and hoped that they had slept well, at which they giggled and were rebuked by miss bird, when their uncle turned away to ask the same question of cicely. as miss bird said,--what would their uncle think of them if they could not answer a civil question without behaving in that silly fashion? at which they giggled again. angela and beatrice, tall and glossy-haired, dressed in white, made a handsome quartet with dick and humphrey, the one in smart grey flannel, the other in white. "this little rest will do you both good," said dick. "you shall lie about, and miss bird shall read to you. you will go back to the excitements of the metropolis thoroughly refreshed." "oh, we are going to be very energetic," said angela. "we want to play lawn tennis, for one thing. one never gets a chance nowadays, and we both hate croquet." "we'll get up a tournament," said humphrey, "and invite the neighbourhood. you'll see some queer specimens. i hear you're writing a book, trixie." beatrice laughed, and blushed a little. "i've left off," she said. "ah, i've heard stories about you," said dick. "soon have something else to do, eh? don't blush. i won't tell anybody. look here, we'll play golf this morning. we laid out quite a decent little course in the park last autumn. and in the afternoon we'll have a picnic." "oh, preserve us!" said humphrey. "oh, do let us have a picnic," said angela. "it will be like old times," said beatrice. "we'll go to blackborough castle," said dick, "and take the twankies. we must give them a little fun. siskin, how about a picnic?" mrs. birket was telling mrs. clinton that beatrice's engagement would be announced when they returned to london. "she is young," she said, "but both the girls are older in mind than in age." "you have educated them well," mrs. clinton said. she looked across the room at the two handsome, smiling girls, and at her own pretty daughter, who had not been very well educated and was not older in mind than in age. but just then the gong sounded, every one took their seats, the squire came in with a hearty "good-morning! good-morning!" which greeting his assembled family and guests might take and divide amongst them, and the proceedings of the day began. later in the morning angela and beatrice, dick and humphrey were actively engaged at lawn tennis. cicely was sitting under a great lime on the lawn waiting for her turn. the twins, having discovered an unusually congenial companion in their uncle, had carried him off somewhere out of sight, and cicely was alone for the moment. a voice behind her, "hullo, cicely!" made her start, and then she sprang up. "jim!" she cried. "how jolly to see you back! i thought you would come over this morning." the game had to be interrupted while the returned traveller was welcomed. "you look as fit as a fiddle, old boy," said dick. "you'll be able to stay at home and enjoy yourself now, i hope. will you play when we've finished this? i can lend you a pair of shoes." "no thanks," said jim. "i'll talk to cicely." so the others went back on to the lawn. "come and have a stroll round," jim suggested; and cicely, with a half-regretful glance at the tennis lawn, rose to go with him. they went to the rhododendron dell round the lake. it was where every one went naturally if they wanted to walk and talk at the same time. jim's honest, weathered face was very frequently turned towards cicely's fair, young one, and there was a light in his eyes which made her turn hers away a little confusedly when they met it. but jim's voice was level enough, and his speech ordinary. "i'm jolly glad to get back again," he said. "i've never liked mountfield half so well. i was up at six o'clock this morning, and out and about." "so was i," said cicely, and she told him, laughing, of the events of the morning. "i expect they've grown, those young beggars," said jim, alluding thus disrespectfully to the twins. "i've often thought of them while i've been away, and of everybody at kencote--you especially." "we've all thought of you, too," said cicely, "and talked about you. you haven't been forgotten, jim." "i hoped i shouldn't be," he said simply. "by jove, how i've looked forward to this--coming over here the first moment i could. i wish you hadn't got all these people here, though." "all these people!" echoed cicely. "why, jim, you know them as well as we do." "yes, i'm a selfish beggar. i wanted to have you all to myself." cicely was a little disturbed in her mind. jim had not talked to her like this for five years. ever since that long, happy summer when he and she had been together nearly every day, when he had made love to her in his slow, rather ponderous way, and she, her adolescence flattered, had said "yes" when he had asked her to marry him--or rather ever since he had written to her from oxford to say that he must wait for some years before he could expect to marry and that she was to consider herself quite free--he had never by word or sign shown whether he also considered himself free, or whether he intended, when the time came, to ask her again to be his wife. when he had come back to mountfield at christmas he had been in all respects as he had been up to six months before, friendly and brotherly, and no more. it made it easier for her, for her pride had been a little wounded. if he had held aloof, but shown that, although he had given her her freedom, he hoped she had not accepted it, she would have felt irked, and whatever unformed love she had for jim would quickly have disappeared. but, as it was, his equable friendship kept alive the affection which she had always felt for him; only it seemed to make the remembrance of their love passages a little absurd. she was not exactly ashamed of what had happened, but she never willingly thought of it, and after a year or so it became as much a part of her past life as the short frocks and pinafores of her childhood. she had been mildly chaffed about jim on occasions, and there was no doubt that in the minds both of her family and of jim's the expectation of an eventual marriage had never altogether subsided. nor, strangely enough, had it altogether subsided in hers, although if she had ever asked herself the question as to whether she was in love with jim in the slightest degree she would have answered it forcibly in the negative. but--there it was, as it is with every young girl--some day she would be married; and it might happen that she would be married to jim. "do you remember," jim asked her when they had walked the length of the lake and come out in front of the temple, "how you used to try to teach me to draw here?" yes, it was obviously jim's intention to open up a buried subject, and she was not by any means prepared for that. the sketching lessons had been a shameless subterfuge for obtaining privacy, for jim had about as much aptitude for the arts as a dromedary, and his libels on the lake and the rhododendrons would have made old merchant jack and his landscape gardener turn in their graves. cicely laughed. "have you brought back any sketches from your travels?" she asked. "no. i've got lots of photographs, though." jim was always literal. "angela and beatrice paint beautifully," cicely said. "we are going to make sketches at blackborough this afternoon. will you come with us, jim? we are all going." "yes, i'll come," said jim. "cicely, are you glad to see me home again?" "yes, of course, i'm glad. we have all missed you awfully, jim." "you can't think how bucked up i am to think that i need never leave mountfield again as long as i live. that's what's so jolly about having a place of your own. it's part of you. you feel that, don't you, cicely?" "well, as i haven't got a place of my own, jim, i don't know that i do." "when those beastly death duties are paid off," jim began, but cicely would not let him finish. "anyhow," she said, "i should hate to think i was going to stay in one place all my life, however much i liked it. of course, it is natural that you should feel as you do when you have been travelling for a year. if i ever have the chance of travelling for a year perhaps i shall feel like that about kencote." she laughed and looked him in the face, blushing a little. "let us go back and play tennis," she said. his face fell, and he walked by her side without speaking. cicely little knew how keen was his disappointment. this was the hour he had been looking forward to every day for the last year, and this the place, with the sun glinting through the young green of beech and ash and lighting up those masses and drifts of brilliant colour everywhere about them. it was true that he had meant to come to no conclusions with the girl he loved with all his heart. the time for that would not be for another year at least, according to the decision he had long since come to. but he had so hungered for her during his long exile, for such it had seemed to him in spite of the various enjoyments and interests he had gained from it, that the thought had grown with him that he would take just a little of the sweetness that a word from her, to show that she was his as he was hers, would give him. she had not spoken the word, and jim's heart was heavy as he walked back to the garden by her side. chapter ix the question of marriage "blackborough castle?" said the squire at luncheon. "well, if you like--but you'll take your tea in the company of dick, tom and harry, and i think you would be more comfortable at home." "i don't suppose there'll be anybody else there to-day," said dick, "and the spirit of youth cries aloud for tea on the floor." so it was settled. mrs. clinton and mrs. birket went in the carriage, angela rode with humphrey, and dick drove the rest of the party, which did not include the squire, in the brake. "you look like bean-feasters," said humphrey, as they drove past him and angela. "but you need not behave as such," said miss bird to the twins, who, one on each side of their uncle, were inclined to be a trifle uproarious. they had the old keep of the castle pretty well to themselves, spread their cloth on the green turf by the battlements, where centuries ago men-at-arms had tramped the now covered stones, and made merry in true picnic style. there was a footman to clear away, and the party broke up into little groups, and explored the ruins, and wandered in the thick woods which surrounded them. jim looked a little wistfully at cicely as she went away with her arm in that of beatrice birket, but made no attempt to join her, and presently allied himself to the storming party which joan was collecting to rescue miss bird, confined in the deepest dungeon. "now, trixie, you have got to tell me all about it," cicely said, when the two girls were out of hearing of the rest. "my dear," said beatrice, laughing, "i told you last night that he had asked me and i had said yes, and that i am very happy." "oh, i know. but that was before angela, and she said we were to have no raptures. i want raptures, please." "well, i'm afraid you won't get them. i'm too well drilled. you know, cicely, i rather envy you being brought up as you were. you're more natural, somehow, than angela and i." "well, i envy _you_; so we're quits. but never mind about that now. trixie, is angela just the least bit jealous?" "no, not a bit," said beatrice loyally. "but you see she's a year older, and ever so much cleverer, and prettier too." "she's none of those things except a year older. but she's a dear all the same, and so are you. i don't wonder at anybody falling in love with you. are you very much in love too?" "well, cicely, i don't mind telling you in strict confidence that i am. but, perhaps, it's in a way you would not sympathise with particularly." "tell me in what way, and you'll see." "of course george isn't especially good-looking; in fact he isn't good-looking at all, except for his eyes. i used to think i should never love anybody unless he was as handsome as--as, well, dick is, for instance--that sort of man--you know--smart and well set up, and"--with a laugh--"rather ignorant." "dick isn't ignorant," said cicely indignantly. "my dear, compared to george he is a monument of ignorance, a pyramid of it; so are most men. it was just that; george is so clever, and he's making such use of his brains too. he is one of the youngest men in parliament, and is in office already. it was looking up to him as a pillar of wisdom, and then finding that he looked to me of all people, to help him on." "i'm sure you will help him on. i heard some one say in london that many politicians owed a great deal of their success to their wives." "i don't mean quite in that way. i don't think george is ambitious, though i am for him. he wants to get things done. father says it is because he is so young. he tells me about everything, and it makes me grateful--you know, i think when you are very grateful, that is being in love." "you dear thing!" said cicely, squeezing her arm. "does uncle herbert like him? they are not on the same side in politics, are they?" "no. but it doesn't seem to matter. it doesn't matter in the least to me. of course, there _are_ things. george is a tremendous churchman, you know, and i have never thought much about religion--not deeply, i mean. but it is a real thing with him, and i'm learning. you see, cicely, we are rather a different engaged couple from most, although we don't appear so to the world at large. outside our two selves, george is a coming man, and i am a lucky girl to be making such a match." "i'm glad you have told me about it all," cicely said. "it must be splendid to be looking forward to helping your husband in all the good things he is going to do." "oh, it is. i am ever so happy. and george is the dearest soul--so kind and thoughtful, for all his cleverness. cicely, you must meet him." "i should love to," said cicely simply. "i never meet anybody interesting down here." her incipient sense of revolt had died down for the time; she was young enough to live in the present, if the present was agreeable enough, as it was with this mild, unwonted, holiday stir about her. she only felt, vaguely, a little sorry for herself. "it is lovely," said beatrice; "but i own i shouldn't care for it all day and every day. it is rather jolly to feel you're in the middle of things." "oh, i know it is," said cicely, laughing. "_i_ was in the middle of things in london, and i enjoyed it immensely." beatrice's engagement was the subject of another conversation that evening. when the party got back from the picnic, cicely set out for the dower-house. nobody had been near the old aunts that day; it was seven o'clock, and there was just time to pay them a short visit. mr. birket was in the hall as she passed through, and she asked him to go with her. "i should like to pay my respects to those two admirable ladies," he said. "they make me feel that i am nobody, which is occasionally good for the soul of man." "ah," said cicely, as they went across the garden together, "you are a wicked radical, you see, and you want to disestablish their beloved church." "do i?" said mr. birket. "how truly shocking of me. my dear, don't believe everything you hear. i am sure that my chief fault is that i don't possess land. cicely, how much land must you possess if you really want to hold your head up? would a hundred acres or so do the trick? i suppose not. two hundred acres, now! i might run to that if the land was cheap." "two hundred acres, i should think, uncle," said cicely, "with a manor-house, and, say, a home farm. and if you could get the advowson of a living, it would be all to the good." "would it? thank you for telling me. but then i should have to ask the parson to dinner, and we might not get on. and i should have to go to church. i like going to church when i'm not obliged to--that is if they'll preach me a good sermon. i insist upon a good sermon. but if i had to go to set an example--well, i shouldn't go; and then i should get into trouble." "yes, i think you would, uncle. you can't live your own life entirely in the country. there are responsibilities." "ah, you've thought of that, have you? you do think things over?" "yes. i do think things over. there's nothing much else to do." mr. birket cast a side glance at her. the sun striking through the trees of the park flushed translucently the smooth, fair flesh of her cheek and her ungloved hand. in her white frock, moving freely, with the springy grace of a young animal, she attracted the eye. her head, under her wide hat-brim, was pensive, but she looked up at him with a smile. "if you could bring yourself to it, you know," she began, and broke off. "i mean," she began again, "i think you must either be a man, or--or very young, or not young at all." mr. birket was a man of very quick perception. his face softened a little. "my dear," he said, "when you are very young things are happening every day, when you are a little older anything may happen, and when you are older still happenings don't matter. but you haven't got to the third stage yet." "no," cicely said, "i suppose not. happenings do matter to me; and there aren't enough of them." the two old ladies received mr. birket courteously. he was accidentally allied to the clintons, and in his own path of life had striven, not without success, to make himself worthy of the alliance. he came to see them, two old ladies who had lived all their long lives in a small country village, had hardly ever been to london, and never out of england, who had been taught to read and write and to add up pounds, shillings and pence, and had never felt the lack of a wider education. he came with his great reputation, his membership of parliament, his twenty thousand a year of income earned by the exercise of his brain, and a judgeship looming in the near future, and as far as they were concerned he came straight out of the little house on the bathgate road, now fitly occupied by a retired chemist. but far be it from them to show a brother of their nephew's wife that he was not welcome among them. they talked of the weather, of blackborough castle, of jim graham's return, and of walter's coming marriage with muriel. "well, that will be the first wedding in the new generation," said mr. birket. "but there will be another very soon. have you heard that my girl, beatrice, is going to be married?" the old ladies had not heard this piece of news and expressed their interest. privately they thought it a little odd that mr. birket should talk as if there were any connection between the two events, although, of course, it was true that walter was of the new birket generation as well as the new clinton generation. "she is rather young," pursued mr. birket, "but george senhouse is a steady fellow as well as a successful one. it is george senhouse she is going to marry--you have heard of him?" "any relation, if i may ask, to sir george senhouse of whom we read in the house of parliament?" asked aunt ellen. "yes--george senhouse--that's the man. not on my side, you know, miss clinton, but i'm sure you won't think that a drawback." indeed it was not. mr. birket was a liberal, and therefore a deadly foe to the true religion of the church of england as by compromise established, and to all the societies for raising mankind to a just appreciation of that religion which the misses clinton supported. and sir george senhouse, a capable and earnest young man, with an historic name, had early devoted his powers to the defence of those things in the outside world which they held dear. it was, indeed, a surprising piece of good fortune for mr. birket--and no wonder that he was so evidently pleased. "i hope your daughter will be strengthened to assist him in all the good work he does," said aunt ellen. "i sincerely hope she will," said mr. birket. "the engagement is not announced yet; but i tell _you_, miss clinton--and miss laura." "oh, we should not say a word before the proper time," said aunt laura. when cicely and mr. birket had gone, aunt ellen said, "you may take my word for it, sister, that it is owing to the clinton connection. we have lived a retired life, but i know very well how these things tell." as cicely dressed for dinner--it was the first time she had been alone during the day--she thought about jim, and what he had said to her, or tried to say to her, early in the morning. he had disturbed her mind and given her something that she had to think about. she had told mr. birket that she thought things over, and it was true; she had courage in that way. with but little in her education or scope of life to feed it, her brain was active and inquiring. it worked on all matters that came within her ken, and she never shirked a question. she was affectionate, loyal, and naturally light-hearted, but she was critical too, of herself no less than of others. it would have been easy for her, if she had had less character, to put away from her, as she had done for the last five years, the consideration of her relationship to jim, to have ignored his approach to her, since she had stopped him from coming closer, and to have deferred searching her own mind until he should have approached her again and in such a way that she could no longer have avoided it. but she had locked up the remembrance of the happenings of five years before in a cupboard of her brain, and locked the key on it. if she had thought of it at all, she would have had to think of herself as having made a present to jim which he had returned to her. and because she could not altogether escape from the memory of it, she had come to look upon herself as a rather foolish and very immature young person in those days, who had not in the least known what she was about when she allowed herself to be made love to. with regard to jim her thoughts had been even less definite. his attitude to her had been so entirely brotherly that she had never felt the necessity of asking herself whether he was still keeping his expressed love for her alive, although he would not show it, or whether he, too, thought of their love-making as a piece of rather childish folly, and had put it completely behind him. beyond the first slight awkwardness of meeting him when he came back from oxford after his letter to her, she had felt none in his presence, and until this very morning her attitude towards him had been frank and her feelings affectionate. he had made that possible by showing the same attitude and apparently the same feelings. but what she now had to consider was whether he had actually been so frank towards her as she to him; whether he had not been keeping something back, and, in effect, playing a part. if it were so, their relationship was not as she had thought it, and would have to be adjusted. she turned her mind to this point first. it would really be rather surprising if jim had been in love with her all this time and she had not known it. she thought she must have known if it were so, and she rejected the idea. what she could not get away from--it hardly needed stating in her mind--was that he had tentatively made love to her that morning. or rather--and here she rather congratulated herself on making the distinction, as a process of pure thought--he had seemed to show her that marriage was in his mind, perhaps as a thing already settled between them, although she, for her part, had long since given up thinking of it as a matter to be considered, however loosely, settled. of course she knew he was fond of her, as she was of him. if he was not in love with her, as once he had been, he might still want to marry her, as the nicest person he could find, and the requisite impulsion might come from his return after a long absence. she would be included in his heightened appreciation of all his home surroundings. these considerations passed through her mind, in no logical sequence of thought, but at various points of her self-questioning, and when she was also thinking further of her own part in what might follow, trying to discover what she wanted and to decide what she should do. the fact that he had opened and would probably open again the subject of their marriage was all that really mattered, and she knew that without thinking. she knew, too, without thinking, that she did not want to engage herself again to marry jim, at any rate not yet; and, in fact, she would not do so. what her honesty of mind impelled her to was the discovery of the root from which this femininely instinctive decision had flowered. what were her reasons for not wanting to marry jim now, or soon; and would they take from her, when examined, that always present but always unstated possibility of some day finding herself living at mountfield as his wife? she a little dreaded the conclusion, which may have shown that she had already made up her mind; but it was here that an answer had to be found, and she faced it bravely. she was not ready to marry jim now, or soon, because in the first place she did not love him--not in that way--and in the second place because she did not love, in any way, what he stood for. when she said to herself that she did not love jim her mind recoiled a little. he was such a good sort, so kind, so reliable. it was just as if she had said that she did not love her brothers. it was ungracious, and ungrateful. she did love him. dear old jim! and she would be sorry to cause him pain. but, if she did not want him to make love to her--and certainly she didn't--she couldn't possibly love him as a girl ought to love her prospective husband--as beatrice, for instance, loved her young parliamentarian. that seemed settled. and because she did think things over, and was no longer very young indeed, she saw that the change of circumstances in a girl's life when she was going to be married counted for something, something of the pleasure, something of the excitement. it was so with beatrice, and with muriel. they loved the men they were going to marry, but they also got a great deal of satisfaction out of the change in their surroundings, quite apart from that. what sort of change would she have as jim's wife? she would step straight out of one large house into another, and she would no more be the mistress of mountfield than she had been of kencote. so she told herself. for the mistresses of houses like kencote and mountfield were really a sort of superior housekeeper, allowed to live with the family, but placed where they were with the sole object of serving their lords and masters, with far less independence than a paid housekeeper, who could take her money and go if she were dissatisfied with her position. what a prospect! to live out the rest of her life in the subjection against which she had already begun to rebel, in exactly similar surroundings and in exactly the same atmosphere! if she married jim she would not even have the pleasure of furnishing her own house. it would be jim's house, and the furniture and all the appurtenances of it were so perfect in jim's eyes that she knew he would never hear of her altering a thing. she would not be able to rearrange her drawing-room without his permission. that was what it meant to marry a country gentleman of jim's sort, who disliked "gadding about," and would expect his wife to go through the same dull round, day after day, all her life long, while he amused himself in the way that best suited him. when she had reached this point, and the end of her toilet together, cicely suddenly determined that she would _never_ marry jim, and if he pressed her she would tell him so. she didn't want to marry anybody. if only she could get away from kencote and be a hospital nurse, or something of the sort, that was all she wanted. with this rather unsatisfactory conclusion she cleared her mind, ran downstairs, and found jim himself alone in the drawing-room. chapter x town _versus_ country "hullo!" said jim. "you're down early." "i didn't know you were here," said cicely, and was annoyed at herself, and blushed in consequence. but whatever conclusion jim may have drawn from her hurried, rather eager entrance, her denial, and her blush, he only said, "mother and muriel are upstairs." "i wonder why muriel didn't come to my room," said cicely. "i think i'll go and find her." "all right," said jim, and cicely went out of the room again. jim took up a book from a table, turned over a few leaves, and then threw it down and went to the window, where he stood looking out, with his hands in his pockets. by and by mr. birket came in, and joined him. "shame to be indoors on an evening like this," he said. "i should like to dine at nine o'clock in the summer." "what about the servants?" asked jim. "ah, yes," said mr. birket. "is it true you are a free trader, graham?" "yes, i am," said jim, with a shade of defiance. "so am i," said mr. birket. jim smiled. "well, you've got to be in your party," he said. "not at all. it isn't a question of party. it's a question of common-sense." "that's just what i think. i've looked into it with as much intelligence as i'm capable of--they say about here that isn't much--and i can't see why you shouldn't be a tory as good as any of 'em and still stick to free trade." "nor can i," said mr. birket. "but they won't let you. you had better join us, graham. anybody with any dawning of sense must be very uncomfortable where you are." "i should be a jolly sight more uncomfortable with you," said jim. "and i've got keen on the empire since i've been travelling." "oh, if you've seen it," said mr. birket, somewhat cryptically, and then the door opened, and mrs. clinton and mrs. birket came in together. mrs. birket was a tall, good-looking woman, who held herself upright, was well dressed and well informed. she had a good manner, and in mixed company never allowed a drop in the conversation. but as she talked well this was not so tiresome as it might have been. she was quoted amongst her circle, which was a wide one, as an excellent hostess, and the tribute was deserved, because, in addition to her conversational aptitude, she had the art of looking after her guests without apparent effort. she had been strict with her daughters, but they were now her companions, and devoted to her. mrs. clinton talked to her, perhaps more than to any other woman she knew, and the two were friends, although the circumstances of their lives were wide apart. the two ladies were followed by the four girls, who came in chattering, and by mrs. graham, who, even in evening clothes, with a necklace of diamonds, looked as if she liked dogs. then came humphrey, extraordinarily well dressed, his dark hair very sleek; and dick, very well dressed too, but with less of a town air; and then the squire, just upon the stroke of eight, obviously looking forward to his dinner. "nina, what on earth can have become of tom and grace?" he asked when he had greeted mrs. graham and muriel. "no sign of 'em anywhere. we can't wait, you know." mrs. clinton glanced at the ormolu clock, representing time with a scythe and hour-glass, on the mantelpiece, but said nothing. as it began to chime the door opened and the rector and mrs. beach were announced. "grace! grace!" said the squire, holding up a warning finger, but smiling affably. "i've never known you run it so fine before." "my dear edward," said mrs. beach, with her sweet smile, "tom broke a collar stud. it is one of those little accidents that nobody can foresee and nobody can guard against." "except by laying in a stock," said mrs. graham. "well, my dear grace, you were just _not_ late," said the squire, "i will forgive you." so they all went in to dinner amicably, and a very good dinner it was, although there was an entire absence of what the squire called french fal-lals. english _versus_ french cooking was a favourite dinner-table topic of his, and he expatiated on it this evening. "it stands to reason," he said, "that natural food well cooked--of course it must be well cooked, before an open range, and so on--is better than made-up stuff. now what have we got this evening?" he put on his gold-rimmed glasses and took up a menu-card. a shade of annoyance passed over his face when he discovered that it was written in french. "who wrote this rubbish?" he asked, looking over his glasses at mrs. clinton. "i did, father," said cicely, blushing. "good for you, siskin!" broke in dick. "very well done. it gives the entertainment an air." "i helped with the accents," said angela. "well," said the squire, "i don't like it. as far as i can make out it's a purely english dinner, except, perhaps, the soup, and it ought to be described in english. what's the good of calling roast lamb 'agneau rôti'?" he pronounced it "rotty," with an inflection of scorn. "there's no sense in it. but as i was saying--where are you going to find better food than salmon and roast lamb, new potatoes, asparagus, peas--of course they're forced, but they're english--and so on?" he threw down the card and took off his glasses. "everything grown on the place except the salmon, which old humphrey meadshire sent me." "you've left out the 'pêche à la melba'," said mrs. beach. "it is the crowning point of the whole dinner. but i quite agree with you, edward, you couldn't have a better one anywhere." "rather on the heavy side," commented humphrey. "not at all," said mr. birket. "the fruits of the earth in due season, or, if possible, a little before it; that's the best dinner any man can have." "every country has its own cooking," said mrs. birket. "i really think the english is the best if it is well done." "which it very seldom is," said mrs. graham. "of course this is the very best time of all the year for it," said the rector. "did you bring back any new curry recipes from india, jim?" jim replied that he had not, and the squire said, "by the bye, jim, i see that fellow mackenzie came home in the _punjaub_. the papers are full of him this evening. did you happen to meet him?" jim said that he had shared the same cabin, and that mackenzie had promised to spend a week-end at mountfield some time or other. "we are going to make a lion of him in london," said humphrey. "we haven't had an explorer for a long time. i believe he's shaggy enough to be a great success." "you must bring him over to dine, jim," said the squire. "it's interesting to hear about these fellows who trot all over the world. but heavens, what a life!" "a very good life, i think," said mr. birket. "not much chance to get moss-grown." "now, i'm sure that is a dig at us people who live in the country," said mrs. beach. "because _you_ don't get moss-grown, mr. birket." "he would if he lived in the country," said mrs. birket. "he would lie on his back all day long and do nothing at all. he has an unequalled power of doing nothing." "not at all," said mr. birket. "i'm a very hard worker. cicely caught me at it at six o'clock this morning, didn't you, my dear?" "you've no responsibilities, herbert," the squire broke in. "if you owned land you wouldn't want to lie on your back." "he is trying to make the land lie on _our_ backs," said dick. "we shan't have any left soon." "all you radicals," began the squire; but mrs. beach had something to say: "mr. birket, you despise us country folk at the bottom of your heart. i'm sure you do." "not at all," said mr. birket. "i think you live a peaceful and idyllic existence, and are much to be envied." "peaceful!" the squire snorted. "that's all you radicals know about it. i assure you we work as hard as anybody, and get less return for it. i wish you'd tell your precious leaders so, herbert." "i will," said mr. birket. "what with one thing and another," proceeded the squire, "the days are gone as soon as they are begun." "but when they are finished something has always been done," said mrs. beach. "that is the difference between a town life and a country life. in london you are immensely busy and tire yourself to death, but you've nothing to show for it." "your brains are sharpened up a bit," said humphrey. "if you have any," suggested mrs. graham. "mother, don't be rude," said muriel. "the remark had no personal bearing," said humphrey, with a grin. "i didn't say so," retorted mrs. graham. "i think it is a matter of temperament," said mrs. birket. "everybody who lives in london likes the country, and everybody who lives in the country likes london--for a change. but if you had to live in one or the other all the year round----" "i would choose the country," said mrs. beach, "and i'm sure you would, edward." "of course i would," said the squire. "i do live in the country all the year round. i've had enough of london to last me all my life." "two for the country," said dick. "now we'll go round the table. mother, where do your tastes lie?" mrs. clinton did not reply for a moment; then she said, "i don't think i should mind which it was if i had my family round me." "oh, come now, nina," said the squire, "that's no answer. surely _you_ don't want to become a town madam." "you mustn't bring pressure, edward," said mrs. beach. "we shall have quite enough on our side." "mother neutral," said dick. "jim?" "oh, the country," said jim. "three for the country. angela?" "london." "you must give a reason," said mrs. beach. angela laughed. "i like music, and plays," she said, "and hearing people talk." "well, surely you can hear people talk in the country," said the squire. "and such talk!" added mrs. graham, at which everybody laughed except the squire, who saw no humour in the remark. "three to one," said dick. "aunt grace, you've had your turn. now it's mine. i don't want to bury myself yet awhile, but when the time comes i expect i shall shy at london as the governor does. i'm country." "why?" asked angela. "oh, because there's more to do. now then, beatrice. you're london, i suppose." "yes," said beatrice. "because there's more to do." "good for you! that's four to two. mrs. graham!" "can you ask?" said that lady. "and i won't give any reasons. i like the country best because i like it best." "father is country. five to two." "and my reason," said the squire, "is that every man who doesn't like the country best, when he can get it, isn't a man at all. he's a popinjay." "well, at the risk of being called the feminine for popinjay," said mrs. birket, with a smile, "i must choose london." "oh, but i don't include the women, my dear emmeline," said the squire. "and i don't include men like herbert either, who've got their work to do. i'm thinking of the fellows who peacock about on pavements when they might be doing 'emselves good hunting, or some such pursuit. it's country sport that's good for a man, keeps him strong and healthy; and he sees things in the proper light too. england was a better country than it is now when the house of commons was chiefly made up of country gentlemen. you didn't hear anything about this preposterous socialism then. i tell you, the country gentlemen are the backbone of england, and your party will find it out when you've turned them out of the country." "oh, but we shan't do that," said mr. birket. "that would be too dreadful." "no politics," said dick. "we're five to three. tom, you're a country man, i'm sure." but the rector was not at all sure that he was. he sometimes thought that people were more interesting than nature. on the whole, he thought he would choose the town. "then i change round," said mrs. beach. "where thou goest, tom, i will go. dick, i'm town." "then that changes the game. town's one up. muriel, be careful." "certainly not country," said muriel. "i've had enough of it. i think the best place to live in is a suburb." "melbury park!" laughed the squire. "ha! ha!" "that's town," said dick. "four to six. we yokels are getting worsted." "i'll come to your rescue," said humphrey. "i don't want to be cut off with a shilling. give me a big country house and a season ticket, and i'm with you." "five to six then. now, siskin, make it all square." "no," said cicely. "i hate the country." "what!" exclaimed the squire. "it's so dreadfully dull," said cicely. "there's nothing in the world to do." "but this is a revolt!" said dick. "nothing to do!" echoed the squire, in a voice of impatient censure. "there's everything to do. don't talk nonsense, cicely. you have got to live in the country whether you like it or not, so you had better make the best of it." "very sound advice," said mr. birket. "i follow it myself. it may surprise the company, but i'm for the country. cows enrapture me, and as for the buttercups, there's no flower like 'em." "town has it," said dick. "seven to six--a very close match." * * * * * when mr. and mrs. birket were alone together that night, mr. birket said, "my dear, i think edward clinton gets more intolerable every time i see him. i hope i have succeeded in disguising that opinion." "perfectly, herbert," said his wife. "and you must please continue to do so for nina's sake." mr. birket sighed. "poor dear nina!" he said. "she was so bright as a girl. if she hadn't married that dunderhead she'd have been a happy woman. i bet she isn't now. he has crushed every bit of initiative out of her. and i'll tell you what, my dear, he'll crush it out of cicely if she doesn't get away from these deadly surroundings. heavens, what a life for a clever girl!" "do you think cicely clever?" "she doesn't know anything, because they have never let her learn anything. but she thinks for herself, and she's beginning to kick at it all. if she'd had the chances our girls have had, she'd have made use of them. can't we give her a chance, emmeline? she's a particularly nice girl. have her up to london for a month or two. the girls are fond of her--and you're fond of her too, aren't you?" "yes, i'm very fond of her," said mrs. birket. "well--then, why not?" "do you think edward would let her come?" "my private opinion of edward would probably surprise him, if he could hear it, but i don't think even he would go so far as to deny his children a pleasure so long as it didn't put him out personally." "well, i'll ask, if you like. i should be very glad to have her. but some one might fall in love with her, you know, herbert. she's very pretty, and there's always the chance." "and why on earth not? he doesn't want to keep her an old maid, does he?" "he wants her to marry jim graham." "i thought that was all over years ago." "as far as she is concerned, perhaps. i'm sure edward still looks upon it as going to happen some day." "i don't believe she'll marry graham, even if he wants her. he's just such another as edward, with a trifle more sense." "no, herbert, he is quite different. i like him. i think it would be a good thing for cicely to marry him." "she ought to have the chance of seeing other fellows. then, if she likes to embark afresh on a vegetable existence, it will be her own choice. of course, you needn't vegetate, living in the country, but the wife of jim graham probably would. give her her chance, anyway." but this particular chance was denied to cicely. the squire wouldn't hear of it. "my dear emmeline," he said, "it is very kind of you--very kind of you indeed. but she'd only get unsettled. she's got maggots in her head already. i hope some day to see her married to a country gentleman, like her mother before her. though i say it, no women could be better off. until the time comes, it's best for cicely to stay at home." "idiot!" said mr. birket, when the decision was conveyed to him. "i was mistaken in him. i think now he would be capable of any infamy. don't tell cicely, emmeline." but the squire told her, and rebuked her because the invitation had been offered. "what you have to do," he said, "is to make yourself happy at home. heaven knows there's enough to make you so. you have everything that a girl can want. for goodness' sake be contented with it, and don't always want to be gadding about." cicely felt too sore to answer him, and retired as soon as his homily was over. in the afternoon--it was on sunday--she went for a walk with her uncle. he did not express himself to her as he had done to mrs. birket, but gave her the impression that he thought her father's refusal unfortunate, but not unreasonable, smiling inwardly to himself as he did so. "i should have loved to come, you know, uncle herbert," she said. "and we should have loved to have you, my dear," he said. "but, after all, kencote is a very jolly place, and it's your own fault if you're bored in it. nobody ought to be bored anywhere. i never am." "well then, please tell me what to do with myself." "what do you do, as it is?" "i read a little, and try to paint, and----" "then read more, and try to paint better. effort, my dear,--that's the secret of life. give yourself some trouble." he gave her more advice as they walked and talked together, and she listened to him submissively, and became interested in what he said to her. "i should like to make myself useful in some way," she said. "i don't want to spend all my life amusing myself or even improving myself." "oh, improving yourself! that's not quite the way to put it. expressing yourself--that's what you want to do--what everybody ought to do. and look here, my dear, when you say you want to make yourself useful--i suppose you mean hospital nursing or something of that sort, eh?" cicely laughed. "i have thought of that," she said. "well then, don't think of it any more. it's not the way--at least not for you. you make yourself useful when you make yourself loved. that's a woman's sphere, and i don't care if all the suffragettes in the country hear me say it. a woman ought to be loved in one way or another by everybody around her; and if she is, then she's doing more in the world than ninety-nine men out of a hundred. men want opportunities. every woman has them already. somebody is dependent on her, and the more the better for her--and the world. what would your old aunts do without you, or your mother, or indeed anybody in the place? they would all miss you, every one. don't run away with the idea you're not wanted. of course you're wanted. _we_ want you, only we can't have you because they want you here." "you give me a better conceit of myself," she said gratefully. "keep it, my dear, keep it," said mr. birket. "the better conceit we have of ourselves the more we accomplish. now i think we'd better be turning back." chapter xi a wedding the london newspapers devoted small space, if any, to the wedding of walter clinton, esq., m.d., third son of edward clinton, esq., of kencote, meadshire, and muriel, only daughter of the late alexander graham, esq., and the honourable mrs. graham of mountfield, meadshire, but the _bathgate herald and south meadshire advertiser_ devoted two of its valuable columns to a description of the ceremony, a list of the distinguished guests present, and a catalogue of the wedding presents. no name that could possibly be included was left out. the confectioner who supplied the cake, the head gardeners at kencote and mountfield who--obligingly--supplied the floral decorations; the organist who presided, as organists always do, at the organ, and gave a rendering, a very inefficient one, of mendelssohn's wedding march; the schoolmaster who looked after the children who strewed flowers on the churchyard path; the coachman who drove the happy pair to the station; the station-master who arranged for them a little salvo of his own, which took the form of fog-signals, as the train came in--they were all there, and there was not an error in their initials or in the spelling of their names, although there were a good many in the list of distinguished guests, and still more in the long catalogue of presents. there was a large number of presents, more than enough to open the eyes of the readers of the _melbury park chronicle and north london intelligencer_, which, by courtesy of its contemporary, printed the account in full, except for the omission of local names, and in _minion_ instead of _bourgeois_ type. some of the presents were valuable and others were expensively useless, and the opinion expressed in melbury park was that the doctor couldn't possibly find room for them all in his house and would have to take a bigger one. melbury park opened its eyes still wider at the number of titles represented amongst the donors, for the clintons, as has been said, had frequently married blood, and many of their relations were represented, walter had been popular with his school and college friends, and on muriel's side the conroys and their numerous connections had come down handsomely in the way of georgian sugar-sifters, gold and enamelled umbrella tops, silver bowls and baskets and bridge boxes, writing-sets, and candlesticks, and other things more or less adapted to the use of a doctor's wife in a rather poor suburb of london. the wedding, if not "a scene of indescribable beauty, fashion and profusion," as the bathgate reporter, scenting promotion, described it, was a very pretty one. the two big houses produced for the occasion a sufficient number of guests, and the surrounding country of neighbours, to fill mountfield church with a congregation that was certainly well dressed, if not noticeably reverent. the bride looked beautiful, if a trifle pale, under her veil and orange blossoms, and the bridegroom as gallant as could be expected under the circumstances. there were six bridesmaids, the honourable olivia and martha conroy and miss evelyn graham, cousins of the bride, and the misses cicely, joan, and nancy clinton, sisters of the bridegroom, who were attired--but why go further into these details, which were so fully gone into in the journals already mentioned? suffice it to say that the old starling, in a new gown and the first _toque_ she had ever worn, wept tears of pride at the appearance of her pupils, and told them afterwards, most unwisely, that the misses olivia and martha conroy could not hold a candle to them in respect of good looks. the twins--there is no gainsaying it--did look angelic, with their blue eyes and fair hair, and the misses conroy, who were of the same sort of age, were not so well favoured by nature; but that was no reason why joan should have told them that they were a plain-headed pair, and nancy that they had spoilt the whole show, when some trifling dispute arose between them at the close of a long day's enthusiastic friendship. the misses conroy, though deficient in beauty, were not slow in retort, and but for the fine clothes in which all four were attired, it is to be feared that the quarrel would have been pushed to extremes. it was a regrettable incident, but fortunately took place in a retired corner of the grounds, and stopped short of actual violence. jim graham gave his sister away, and dick acted as best man to his brother, piloting him through the various pitfalls that befall a bridegroom with the same cool efficiency as he displayed in all emergencies, great or small. it was this characteristic which chiefly differentiated him from his father, who may have been efficient, but was not cool. jim graham's eyes often rested on cicely during the wedding ceremony. she was by far the prettiest of the bridesmaids, and it was little wonder if his thoughts went forward to the time when he and she would be playing the leading part in a similar ceremony. but there was some uneasiness mixed with these anticipations. cicely was not quite the same towards him as she had been before his journey, although since that morning by the lake he had made no attempt to depart from the brotherly intimacy which he had told himself was the best he had a right to until he could claim her for his own. she had never seemed quite at her ease with him, and he was beginning to follow up the idea, in his slow, tenacious way, that his wooing, when he should be ready for it, would have to be done all over again--that it might not be easy to claim her for his own. and, of course, that made him desire her all the more, and added in his eyes to her grace and girlish beauty. afterwards, in the house and on the lawn, where a band played and a tent for refreshments had been put up, he talked to her whenever he could and did his best to keep a cheerful, careless air, succeeding so well that no one observing him would have guessed that he had some difficulty in doing so. except cicely; she felt the constraint. she felt that he was in process of marking the difference in her attitude towards him, and was impatient of the slow, ruminating observation of which she would be the object. as long as he was natural with her she would do her best to keep up the same friendly and even affectionate relations which had existed between them up to a year ago, but she could not help a slight spice of irritation creeping into her manner in face of that subtle change behind his ordinary address. she was trying to clear up her thoughts on many matters, and jim was the last person in the world to help her. she wanted to be left alone. if only he would do that! it was the only possible way by which he could gain the end which, even now, she was not quite sure that she would refuse him in the long-run. "well, you needn't be snappy," jim said to her, with a good-humoured smile on his placid face when he had asked her for further details of her visit to london. she made herself smile in return. "was i?" she said. "i didn't mean to be; but i have been home nearly a month now, and i'm rather tired of talking about london." "all right," replied jim. "i agree that this is a better place. come and have a look at the nags. there has been such a bustle that i haven't been near them to-day." but cicely refused to go and look at the nags. nags were rather a sore point with her, and the constant inspection and weighing of the qualities of those at kencote was enough for her without the addition of the stables at mountfield. so they went back from the rose-garden where they were standing to join the crowd on the lawn. aunt ellen and aunt laura sat in the shade of a big cedar and held a small reception. during their long lives they had been of scarcely any account in the ebb and flow of clinton affairs, but the tide of years had shelved them on a little rock of importance, and they were paid court to because of their age. old lord meadshire was the only other member of their generation left alive. he was their first cousin. his mother had been the youngest of merchant jack's five daughters. he had never failed to pay them courteous attention whenever he had been at kencote, and he was talking to them now, as cicely joined them, of the days when they were all young together. the two old ladies had quite come to believe that they and their cousin humphrey had spent a large part of their childhood together, although he was fifteen years younger than aunt ellen, and his visits to kencote during his youth had been extremely rare. colonel thomas had been too busy with his chosen pursuits to have much time for interchange of social duties, proclaimed himself a fish out of water, and behaved like one, whenever he went to the house of his youngest sister, and had little to offer a lady of high social importance and tastes in a visit to his own. "well, my dear," lord meadshire said to cicely, as she approached, "i was reminding your aunts of the time when we used to drive over from melford to kencote in a carriage with postillions. very few railways in those days. we old people like to put our heads together and talk about the past sometimes. i recollect my grandfather--_our_ grandfather," and he bowed to the two old ladies--"merchant jack they used to call him here, because he had made his money in the city as younger sons used to do in those days, and are beginning to do again now, but they don't go into trade as they did then; and he was born in the year of the battle of culloden. that takes you back--what?" "i recollect," said aunt ellen in a slow, careful voice, "when our uncle john used to come down to kencote by the four-horse coach, and post from bathgate." "ah," said lord meadshire sympathetically, "i never saw my uncle john, to my knowledge, though he left me a hundred pounds in his will. i recollect i spent it on a tie-pin. i was an extravagant young dog in those days, my dear. you wouldn't have suspected me of spending a hundred pounds on a tie-pin, would you?" "uncle john was very kind to us," said aunt laura. "there were six of us, but he never came to the house without bringing us each a little present." "he was always dressed in black and wore a tie-wig," said aunt ellen. "our dear father and he were very dissimilar, but our father relied on his judgment. it was he who advised him to send edward to bathgate grammar school." "he would take a kind interest in our pursuits," said aunt laura, "and would always walk with us and spend part of the day with us, however occupied he might be with our father." "edward was very high-spirited as a child," said aunt ellen, "and our dear father did not sufficiently realise that if he encouraged him to break away from his lessons, which we all took it in turns to give him, it made him difficult to teach." "and when uncle john went away in the morning he gave us each one a present of five new sovereigns wrapped in tissue paper," said aunt laura, "and he would say, 'that is to buy fal-lals with.'" "so our uncle john and our uncle giles, the rector, persuaded our father to send edward to bathgate grammar school, where he remained until he went to eton, riding over there on monday morning and returning home on saturday," concluded aunt ellen. lord meadshire took his leave of the old ladies, and aunt ellen said, "i am afraid that our cousin humphrey is ageing. we do not see him as much as we used to do. he was very frequently at kencote in the old days, and we were always pleased to see him. with the exception of your dear father, there is no man for whom i have a greater regard." "he is a darling," said cicely. "he is as kind as possible to everybody. would you like me to get you anything, aunt ellen? i must go to muriel now." "no thank you, my dear," said aunt ellen. "your aunt laura and i have had sufficient. we will just rest quietly in the shade, and i have no doubt that some others of our kind friends will come and talk to us." it was getting towards the time for the bride and bridegroom to depart for their honeymoon, which they were to spend in norway. walter had had no holiday of any sort that year and had thought the desire for solitude incumbent on newly married couples might reasonably be conjoined with the desire for catching salmon; and muriel had agreed with him. the men were beginning to show a tendency to separate from the ladies. the rector of kencote and the vicar of melbury park, a new friend of walter's who happened, as the squire put it, to be a gentleman, were talking together by the buffet under the tent. the vicar, who was thin and elderly, and looked jaded, was saying that the refreshment to mind and spirit, to say nothing of body, which came from living close to nature was incalculable, and the rector was agreeing with him, mentally reserving his opinion that the real refreshment to mind and spirit, to say nothing of body, was to be found, if a man were strong enough to find it, in hard and never-ending work in a town. at the other end of the buffet dick and humphrey and jim graham were eating sandwiches and drinking champagne. they were talking of fishing, with reference to walter's approaching visit to a water which all four of them had once fished together. "it is rather sad, you know," said humphrey. "remember what a good time we had, jim? it'll never happen again. i hate a wedding. it'll be you next." jim looked at him inscrutably. "or dick," he said. dick put down his glass. "i'm not a starter," he said. "i must go and see that walter doesn't forget to change his tie." the squire and mrs. clinton and lord conroy were in a group together on the lawn. lord conroy, bluff and bucolic, was telling mrs. clinton about his own marriage, fifteen years before. "never thought i should do it," he said, "never. there was i, forty and more, but sound, mrs. clinton, mind you, sound as a bell, though no beauty--ha, ha! and there was my lady, twenty odd, as pretty as paint, and with half the young fellows in london after her. i said, 'come now, will you have me? will you or won't you? i'm not going near london,' i said, 'not once in five years, and i don't like soup. otherwise you'll have your own way and you'll find me easy to get on with.' she took me, and here we are now. i don't believe there's a happier couple in england. i believe in marrying, myself. wish i'd done it when i was a young fellow, only then i shouldn't have got my lady. i'm very glad to see my niece married to such a nice young fellow as your son--very glad indeed; and my sister tells me there's likely to be another wedding in both families before long--eh? well, i mustn't be too inquisitive; but jim's a nice young fellow too, a very nice young fellow, though as obstinate as the devil about this radical kink he's got in his brain." "oh, he'll get over that," said the squire. "it isn't sense, you know, going against the best brains in the country; i tell him we're not _all_ likely to be wrong. and he's got a stake, too. it don't do to play old harry with politics when you've got a stake." "gad, no," assented lord conroy. "we've got to stand together. i'm afraid your brother's against us, though, eh, mrs. clinton?" "oh, herbert!" said the squire. "he's a lawyer, and they can always make white black if it suits 'em." mrs. clinton flushed faintly, and lord conroy said, "he's a very rising man, though, and not so advanced as some. he told me a story just now about a judge and one of those suffragettes, as they call 'em, and i haven't heard such a good story for many a long day." and lord conroy laughed very heartily, but did not repeat the story. the carriage drove round to the door, the coachman and the horses adorned with white favours, and the guests drifted towards the house and into the big hall. walter and dick came down the staircase, and muriel and her mother and cicely followed immediately afterwards. muriel's eyes were wet, but she was merry and talkative, and mrs. graham was more brusque in her speech than usual, but very talkative too. every one crowded round them, and walter had some difficulty in leading his bride through the throng. there was laughter and hand-shaking and a general polite uproar. at last they got themselves into the carriage, which rolled away with them to their new life. it was really joan and nancy who had conceived the idea of tying a pair of goloshes on behind, but the misses conroy had provided them, one apiece, and claimed an equal share in the suggestion. it was arising out of this that their quarrel presently ensued, and they might not have quarrelled at all had not miss bird told the twins in the hearing of their friends that where they had learned such a vulgar notion passed her comprehension. it was really a dispute that did all four young ladies very great credit. chapter xii food and raiment the rector gave out his text, "is not the life more than meat and the body more than raiment?" and proceeded to read his homily in a monotonous, sweet-toned voice which had all the good effects of a sleeping-draught and none of the bad ones. kencote church was old, and untouched by modern restoration or catholic zeal. the great west door was open, and framed a bright picture of trees and grass and cloudless sky. the hot sunshine of an august morning shone through the traceried windows in the nave, and threw a square of bright colour from the little memorial window in the chancel on to the wide, uneven stone pavement. but the church was cool, with the coolness of ancient, stone-built places, which have resisted for centuries the attacks of sun and storm alike, and gained something of the tranquil insensibility of age. the congregation was penned, for the most part, in high pews. when they stood up to sing they presented a few score of heads and shoulders above the squares and oblongs of dark woodwork; when they sat or knelt the nave seemed to be suddenly emptied of worshippers, and the drone of the responses mounting up to the raftered roof had a curious effect, and seemed to be the voice of the old church itself, paying its tribute to the unseen mysteries of the long ages of faith. on the north side of the chancel, which was two steps higher than the nave, was the squire's pew. its occupants were shielded from the gaze of those in the body of the church by a faded red curtain hung on an iron rail, but the squire always drew it boldly aside during the exhortation and surveyed the congregation, the greater part of which was dependent on him for a livelihood and attended church as an undergraduate "keeps chapels," for fear of unpleasant consequences. the squire's pew occupied the whole of the space usually devoted to the organ and the vestry in modern built churches, and had a separate entrance from the churchyard. it had a wooden floor, upon which was a worn blue carpet sprinkled with yellow fleurs de lis. the big hassocks and the seat that ran along the north wall were covered with the same material. in front of the fixed bench was a row of heavy chairs; in the wall opposite to the curtain was a fireplace. mrs. clinton occupied the chair nearest to the fire, which was always lit early on sunday morning in the winter, but owing partly to the out-of-date fashion of the grate and partly to the height and extent of the church, gave no more heat than was comfortable to those immediately within its radius, and none at all to those a little way from it. the squire himself remained outside its grateful influence. his large, healthy frame, well covered with flesh, enabled him to dispense with artificial warmth during his hour and a half's occupation of the family pew, and also to do his duty by using the last of the row of chairs and hassocks, and so to command the opportunities afforded by the red curtain. on the stone walls above the wainscoting were hung great hatchments, the canvas of some fraying away from the black quadrangular frames after a lapse of years, and none of them very recently hung there. the front of the pew was open to the chancel, and commanded a full view of the reading-desk and a side glimpse of the pulpit through the bars of the carved, rather battered rood-screen. flanked by the reading-desk on one side and the harmonium on the other were the benches occupied by the school-children who formed the choir, and behind them were other benches devoted to the use of the squire's household, whose devotions were screened from the gaze of the common worshippers by no curtain, and who, therefore--maids, middle-aged women, and spruce men-servants--provided a source of interested rumination when heads were raised above the wooden partitions, and bonnets, mantles, and broadcloth could be examined, and perhaps envied, at leisure. cicely had played the rector up into the pulpit with the last verse of a hymn, had found the place from which she would presently play him down again with the tune of another, had propped the open book on the desk of the harmonium, and had then slid noiselessly into a chair on a line with the front choir bench, where she now sat with her hands in her lap, facing the members of her assembled family, sometimes looking down at the memorial brass of sir richard clinton, knight, obiit , which was let into the pavement at her feet, sometimes, through the open doors of the rood screen, to where that bright picture of sunlit green shone out of the surrounding gloom at the end of the aisle. "is not the life more than meat and the body than raiment?" the text had been given out twice and carefully indexed each time. the squire had fitted his gold-rimmed glasses on to his nose and tracked down the passage in his big bible. having satisfied himself that the words announced were identical with the words printed, he had put the bible on the narrow shelf in front of him and closed his eyes. his first nod had followed, as usual, about three minutes after the commencement of the sermon. he had then opened his eyes wide, met the fascinated gaze of a small singing-girl opposite to him, glared at her, and, having reduced her to a state of cataleptic terror, pushed aside the red curtain and transferred his glare to the body of the church. the bald head of a respectable farmer and the bonnet of his wife, which were all he could see of the congregation at the moment, assured him that all was well. he drew the curtain again and went comfortably to sleep without further ado. mrs. clinton, at the other end of the row, sat quite still, with no more evidence of mental effort on her comely, middle-aged face than was necessary for the due reception of the rector's ideas, and that was very little. joan and nancy sat one on either side of miss bird, joan next to her mother. they looked about everywhere but at the preacher, and bided with what patience they possessed the end of the discourse, aided thereto by a watchful eye and an occasional admonitory peck from the old starling. dick had come in late and settled himself upon the seat behind the row of chairs. upon the commencement of the sermon he had put his back against the partition supporting the curtain, and his long legs up on the bench in front of him, and by the look on his lean, sunburnt face was apparently resting his brain as well as his body. "is not the life more than meat and the body than raiment?" the technique of the rector's sermons involved the repetition of his text at stated intervals. cicely thought, as the words fell on her ears for the third or fourth time, that she could have supplied a meaning to them which had escaped the preacher. food and raiment! that represented all the things amongst which she had been brought up, the large, comfortable rooms in the big house, the abundant, punctual meals, the tribe of servants, the clothes and the trinkets, the gardens and stables, well-stocked and well-filled, the home farm, kept up to supply the needs of the large household, everything that came to the children of a well-to-do country gentleman as a matter of course, and made life easy--but oh, how dull! no one seeing her sitting there quietly, her slender, ungloved hands lying in her lap, prettily dressed in a cool summer frock and a shady, flower-trimmed hat, with the jewelled chains and bracelets and brooches of a rich man's daughter rousing the admiring envy of the school-children, whose weekly excitement it was to count them up--nobody would have thought that under the plaited tresses of this young girl's shapely head was a brain seething in revolt, or that the silken laces of her bodice muffled the beatings of a heart suffocated by the luxurious dulness of a life which she now told herself had become insupportable. cicely had thought a great deal since her visit to london and muriel's wedding, and had arrived at this conclusion--that she was suffocating, and that her life was insupportable. she raised her eyes and glanced at her father, wrapped in the pleasant slumber that overtakes healthy, out-of-door men when they are forced for a time into unwonted quiescence, and at her brother, calm and self-satisfied, dressed with a correct elaboration that was only unobtrusive because it was so expensively perfect. the men of the family--everything was done to bring them honour and gratification. they had everything they wanted and did what they would. it was to them that tribute and obedience were paid by every one around them, including their own womenfolk. she looked at her two young sisters. they were happy enough in their free and healthy childhood; so had she been at their age, when the spacious house and the big gardens, the stables and the farm and the open country had provided everything she needed for her amusement. but even then there had been the irksome restraint exercised by "the old starling" and the fixed rules of the house to spoil her freedom, while her brothers had been away at eton, or at oxford or cambridge, trying their wings and preparing for the unfettered delights of well-endowed manhood. she looked at her mother, placid and motionless. her mother was something of an enigma, even to her, for to those who knew her well she always seemed to be hiding something, something in her character, which yet made its mark in spite of the subjection in which she lived. cicely loved her mother, but she thought of her now with the least little shade of contempt, which she would have been shocked to recognise as such. why had she been content to bring all the hopes and ambitions that must have stirred her girlhood thus into subjection? what was the range of her life now? ruling her large house with a single eye to the convenience of her lord and master, liable to be scolded before her children or her household if anything went wrong; blamed if the faults of any one of the small army of servants reached the point at which it disturbed his ease; driving out in her fine carriage to pay dull calls on dull neighbours; looking after the comfort of ungrateful villagers; going to church; going to dinner-parties; reading; sewing; gardening under pain of the head gardener's displeasure, which was always backed up by the squire if complaint was brought to him that she had braved it; getting up in the morning and going to bed at night, at stated hours without variation; never leaving her cage of confined luxury, except when it suited his convenience that she should leave it with him. she was nothing but a slave to his whims and prejudices, and so were all the women of the family, slaves to wait upon and defer humbly and obediently to their mankind. "is not the life more than meat and the body than raiment?" it was the men who enjoyed the life, and the meat and raiment as well. while the women vegetated at home, they went out into the world. it was true that they were always pleased to come back again, and no wonder, when everything was there that could minister to their amusement. it was quite different for her, living at home all the year round. she was quite sick of it. why was not her father like other men of his wealth and lineage, who had their country houses and their country sports, but did not spend the whole year over them? daughters of men of far less established position than the squire went to london, went abroad, visited constantly at other country houses, and saw many guests in their own houses. her own brothers did all these things, except the last. they seldom brought their friends to kencote, she supposed because it was not like other big country houses, at any rate not like the houses at which they stayed. it was old-fashioned, not amusing enough; shooting parties were nearly always made up from amongst neighbours, and if any one stayed in the house to shoot, or for the few winter balls, it was nearly always a relation, or at best a party of relations. and the very few visits cicely had ever paid had been to the houses of relations, some of them amusing, others not at all so. she was now rather ashamed of her diatribe to muriel graham about her london visit. she must have given muriel the impression that what she hungered for was smart society. she remembered that she had compared the ball at the house of her aunt, mrs. birket, unfavourably with those at other houses at which she had danced, and blushed and fidgeted with her fingers when she thought of this. she liked staying with mrs. birket better than with any other of her relations, and she was still sore at her father's refusal to allow her to spend some months with her. she met clever, interesting people there, she was always made much of, and she admired and envied her cousins. they had travelled, they heard music, saw plays and pictures, read books; and they could talk upon all these subjects, as well as upon politics and upon what was going on in the big world that really mattered--not superficially, but as if they were the things that interested them most, as she knew they were. it was that kind of life she really longed for; she had only got her thoughts a little muddled in london because she had been rather humiliated in feeling herself a stranger where her brothers were so much at home. when she saw muriel again she must put herself right there. muriel would understand her. muriel had cut herself adrift from the well-fed stagnation of country life and rejoiced to be the partner of a man who was doing something in the world. life was more than food to her and the body than raiment. cicely wished that such a chance had come to her. but the rector had repeated his text for the last time, and was drawing to the end of his discourse. she must slip back to her seat at the harmonium, and defer the consideration of her own hardships until later. the congregation aroused itself and stood up upon the stroke of the word "now"; and, whilst the last hymn was being given out and played over, the squire started on a collecting tour with the wooden, baize-lined plate which he drew from beneath his chair. the coppers clinked one by one upon the silver already deposited by himself and his family, and he closely scrutinised the successive offerings. his heels rang out manfully upon the worn pavement beneath which his ancestors were sleeping, as he strode up the chancel and handed the alms to the rector. he was refreshed by his light slumber, his weekly duty was coming to an end, and he would soon be out in the open air inspecting his stables and looking forward to his luncheon. he sang the last verses of the hymn lustily, his glasses on his nose, a fine figure of a man, quite satisfied with himself and the state in life to which he had been called. the congregation filed out of church into the bright sunshine. dick, with joan on one side of him and nancy on the other, set out at a smart pace across the park, bound for the stables and the home farm. cicely walked with the old starling, who lifted her flounced skirt over her square-toed kid boots, as one who expected to find dew where she found grass, even in the hot august noonday. the squire and mrs. clinton brought up the rear, and the men and maids straggled along a footpath which diverged to another quarter of the house. cicely left the rest of the family to the time-honoured inspection of horses and live stock, always undertaken, summer and winter, after church on sunday morning, as a permissible recreation on a day otherwise devoted to sedentary pursuits. it was one of the tiresome routine habits of her life, and she was sick of routine. she dawdled in her bedroom, a room at least twenty feet square, with two big windows overlooking the garden and the park and the church tower rising from amongst its trees, until the gong sounded, when she hurried downstairs and took her seat at the luncheon table on the right of her father. the sweets and a big cake were on the table, of which the appointments were a mixture of massive silver plate and inexpensive glass and china. the servants handed round the first hot dish, placed a cold uncut sirloin of beef in front of the squire and vegetable dishes on the sideboard, and then left the room. after that it was every one help yourself. this was the invariable arrangement of luncheon on sundays, and allowing for the difference of the seasons the viands were always the same. if anybody staying in the house liked to turn up their noses at such sunday fare--one hot _entrée_, cold beef, fruit tarts and milk puddings, a ripe cheese and a good bottle of wine, why they needn't come again. but very few people did stay in the house, as has been said, and none of those who did had ever been known to object. there were no week-end parties, no traffic of mere acquaintances using the house like an hotel and amusing themselves with no reference to their host or hostess. the squire was hospitable in an old-fashioned way, liked to see his friends around him and gave them of his best. but they must be friends, and they must conform to the usages of the house. the talk over the luncheon table began with the perennial topic of the breeding of partridges and pheasants, and was carried on between the squire and dick, while the women kept submissive silence in the face of important matters with which they had no concern. then it took a more general turn, and drifted into a reminiscence of the conversation that had taken place over the dinner table the night before. mrs. graham and jim had dined at kencote and brought ronald mackenzie with them, who had arrived the evening before on his promised week-end visit. humphrey's prophecy had come true. mackenzie had been the lion of the london season, and now that london was empty might have taken his choice of country houses for a week-end visit from whatever county he pleased. his visit was something of an honour, and was even chronicled in the newspapers, which had not yet lost interest in his movements. he was a star of considerable magnitude, liable to wane, of course, but never to sink quite into obscurity, and just now a planet within everybody's ken. it was characteristic of the clinton point of view that the parentage of this man, whose sole title to fame arose from the things that he had done, should be discussed. dick knew all about him. he did not belong to any particular family of mackenzies. he was the son of a scots peasant, and was said to have tramped to london at the age of sixteen, and to have taken forcible shipment as a stowaway in the black-lyell arctic expedition; and afterwards to have climbed to the leadership of expeditions of his own with incredible rapidity. he had never made any secret of his lowly origin, and was even said to be proud of it. the squire approved heartily of this. it was also characteristic of the squire that a man who had done big things and got himself talked about should be accepted frankly as an equal, and, outside the sphere of clanship, even as a superior. a great musician would have been treated in the same way, or a great painter, or even a great scholar. for the squire belonged to the class of all others the most prejudiced and at the same time the most easily led, when its slow-moving imagination is once touched--a class which believes itself divinely appointed to rule, but will give political adherence and almost passionate personal loyalty to men whom in the type it most dislikes, its members following one another like sheep when their first instinctive mistrust has been overcome. mackenzie was one of the most talked of men in england at this moment. it was a matter of congratulation that jim had caught him for a two-days' visit, though jim's catch had involved no more skill than was needed to answer an unexpected note from mackenzie announcing his arrival on friday afternoon. the clintons had dined at mountfield on friday night, the grahams and mackenzie had dined at kencote on saturday, and it had been arranged that jim and his guest should drive over this afternoon and stay to dine again. when luncheon was over the squire retired into the library with the _spectator_, which it was known he would not read, dick went into the smoking-room, mrs. clinton and miss bird upstairs, and the twins straight into the garden, where cicely presently followed them with a book. she settled herself in a basket chair under a great lime tree on the lawn, and leaving her book lying unopened on her lap, gave herself over to further reverie. perhaps the sudden descent of this man from a strange world into the placid waters of her life had something to do with the surging up of her discontent, for she had not been so discontented since the birkets' visit two months before, having followed out to some extent her uncle's advice and found life quite supportable in consequence. she knew she had waited for mackenzie's name to be mentioned at luncheon and had blushed when she heard it, only, fortunately, nobody had seen her, not even the sharp-eyed twins. she would have resented it intensely if her interest and her blush had been noticed, and put down to personal attraction. it was not that at all. she rather disliked the man, with his keen, hawklike face, his piercing eyes, and his direct, unvarnished speech. he was the sort of man of whom a woman might have reason to be afraid if she were, by unaccountable mischance, attracted by him, and he by her. he would dominate her and she would be at least as much of a chattel as in the hands of a male clinton. it was what he stood for that interested her, and she could not help comparing his life with that of her father and her brothers, or of jim graham, much to the disadvantage of her own kind. her resentment, if it deserved that name, had fixed itself upon her father and brothers, and jim shared in it. he was just the same as they were, making the little work incumbent on him as easy as possible and spending the best part of his life in the pursuits he liked best. she had come to the conclusion that there was no place for her in such a life as that. when jim proposed to her, as she felt sure he would do when he was ready, she would refuse him. she felt now that she really could not go through with it, and her determination to refuse to marry jim rose up in her mind and fixed itself as she sat in her chair under the tree. if he had been a poor man, with a profession to work at, she would have married him and found her happiness in helping him on. she wanted the life. the food and the raiment were nothing to her, either at kencote or mountfield. chapter xiii ronald mackenzie cicely rose from her seat and strolled across the lawn, through an iron gate and a flower-garden, and on to another lawn verging on the shrubberies. joan and nancy were employed here in putting tennis balls into a hole with the handles of walking sticks. cicely rebuked them, for, according to his lights, the squire was a strict sabbatarian. "darling!" expostulated joan, in a voice of pleading, "we are not using putters and golf balls. there _can't_ be any harm in this." cicely did not think there was, and passed on through the shrubbery walk to where a raised path skirting a stone wall afforded a view of the road along which jim and ronald mackenzie would presently be driving. she hardly knew why she had come. it was certainly not to watch for jim. and if there was any idea in her mind of catching a glimpse of ronald mackenzie, herself unobserved by him, so that she might by a flash gain some insight into the character of a man who had interested her, she was probably giving herself useless trouble, for it was not yet three o'clock and the two men were not likely to arrive for another half-hour or more. but she had no sooner taken her stand by the stone wall and looked down at the road from under the shade of the great beech which overhung it, than jim's dog-cart swung round the corner, and ronald mackenzie, sitting by his side, had looked up and sent a glance from his bold dark eyes right through her. she had not had time to draw back; she had been fairly caught. she drew back now, and coloured with annoyance as she pictured to herself the figure she must have presented to him, a girl so interested in his coming and going that she must lie in wait for him, and take up her stand an hour or so before he might have been expected. at any rate, he should not find her submissively waiting for him when he drove up to the door. she would keep out of the way until tea-time, and he might find somebody else to entertain him. the shrubbery walk, which skirted the road, wound for over a mile round the park, and if she followed it she would come, by way of the kitchen gardens and stableyard, to the house again, and could regain her bedroom unseen, at the cost of a walk rather longer than she would willingly have undertaken on this hot afternoon. but it was the only thing to do. if she went back by the way she had come, she might meet jim and his friend in the garden, and of course they would think she had come on purpose to see them. if she crossed the park she ran the risk of being seen. so she kept to the shelter of the trees, and followed the windings of the path briskly, and in rather a bad temper. at a point about half-way round the circle, the dense shrubbery widened into a spinney, and cut through it transversely was a broad grass ride, which opened up a view of the park and the house. when cicely reached this point she looked to her right, and caught her breath in her throat sharply, for she saw ronald mackenzie striding down the broad green path towards her. he was about fifty yards away, but it was impossible to pretend she had not seen him, or to go on without waiting for him to catch her up. indeed, the moment he caught sight of her he waved his hand and called out, "i thought i should catch you." he then came up with a smile upon his face, and no apparent intention of apologising for his obvious pursuit of her. what was the right attitude to take up towards a man who behaved like that? cicely blushed, and felt both surprised and annoyed. but she was powerless to convey a hint of those feelings to him, and all he knew was that she had blushed. "you shouldn't have run away from me like that," he said, as he shook hands with her and looked her straight in the face. "i shan't do you any harm. we will go back this way"; and he walked on at a fairly smart rate by the way she had been going, and left her to adapt her pace to his, which she did, with the disgusted feeling that she was ambling along at an undignified trot. she was aware that if she opened her mouth she would say just the one thing that she did not want to say, so she kept it closed, but was not saved by so doing, because he immediately said it for her. "how did i know where to find you? well, i guessed you didn't expect to be spied under that tree, and that you'd keep away for a bit. i didn't want that, because i had come over on purpose to see you. so i cast my eye round the country--i've an eye for country--saw where you would be likely to go and the place to intercept you. so now you know all about it." this was a little too much. cicely found her tongue. "thank you," she said, with dignity, "i didn't want to know all about it," and then felt like a fool. "then you have something you didn't want," he replied coolly. "but we won't quarrel; there's no time. do you know what i think about you and about this place?" he looked down at her and waited for an answer; and an answer had to be given. she was not quite prepared, or it would be more accurate to say that she hardly dared, to say, "no, and i don't want to," so she compromised weakly on "no." "well, i'll tell you. it seems to me just paradise, this lovely, peaceful, luxurious english country, after the places i've been to and the life i've led. and as for you, you pretty little pink and white rose, you're the goddess that lives in the heart of it. you're the prettiest, most graceful creature on god's earth, and you're in the right setting." cicely felt like a helpless rabbit fascinated by a snake. nothing that she had ever learned, either by direct precept from the old starling, or as the result of her own observation of life, had prepared her to cope with this. outrageous as were his words and tone, she could only show that she resented them by implicitly accusing him of making love to her; and her flurried impulse was to shun that danger spot. she laughed nervously. "you use very flowery language; i suppose you learned it in tibet," she said, and felt rather pleased with herself. "one thing i learned in tibet," he answered, "if i hadn't learned it before, was that england is the most beautiful country in the world. i'm not sure that i wouldn't give up all the excitement and adventure of my life to settle down in a place like graham's--or like this." cicely congratulated herself upon having turned the conversation. she was ready to talk on this subject. "you wouldn't care for it very long," she said. "it is stagnation. i feel sometimes as if i would give anything to get out of it." he looked down at her with a smile. "and what would you like to do if you could get out of it?" he asked. "i should like to travel for one thing," she said. "if i were a man i would. i wouldn't be content to settle down in a comfortable country house to hunt foxes and shoot pheasants and partridges all my life." "like graham, eh? well, perhaps you are right. you're going to marry graham, aren't you?" "no," she said shortly. "he thinks you are," he said, with a laugh. "he's a good fellow, graham, but perhaps he takes too much for granted, eh? but i know you are not going to marry graham. i only asked you to see what you would say. you are going to marry me, my little country flower." "mr. mackenzie!" she put all the outraged surprise into her voice of which she was capable, and stopped short in the path. he stopped too, and faced her. his face was firmly set. "i have no time to go gently," he said. "i ask straight out for what i want, and i want you. come now, don't play the silly miss. you've got a man to deal with. i've done things already and i'm going to do more. you will have a husband you can be proud of." he was the type of the conquering male as he stood before her, dark, lean, strong and bold-eyed. his speech, touched with a rough northern burr, broke down defences. he would never woo gently, not if he had a year to do it in. men of his stamp do not ask their wives in marriage; they take them. cicely went red and then white, and looked round her helplessly. "you can't run away," he said, and waited for her to speak. his silence was more insolently compelling than any words could have been. her eyes were drawn to his in spite of herself, fluttered a moment, and rested there in fascinated terror. so the women in ages of violence and passion, once caught, surrendered meekly. "you are mine," he said, in a voice neither raised nor lowered. "i said you should be when i first saw you. i'll take care of you. and i'll take care of myself for your sake." suddenly she found herself trembling violently. it seemed to be her limbs that were trembling, not she, and that she could not stop them. he put his arm around her. "there, there!" he said soothingly. "poor little bird! i've frightened you. i had to, you know. but you're all right now." for answer she burst into tears, her hands to her face. he drew them away gently, mastering her with firm composure. "it was a shock, wasn't it?" he said in a low, vibrating monotone. "but it had to be done in that way. jim graham doesn't upset you in that way, i'll be bound. but jim graham is a rich, comfortable vegetable; and i'm not exactly that. you don't want to be either, do you?" "no," she said, drying her eyes. "you want a mate you can be proud of," he went on, still soothing her. "somebody who will do big things, and do them for your sake, eh? that's what i'm going to do for you, little girl. i'm famous already, so i find. but i'll be more famous yet, and make you famous too. you'll like that, won't you?" he spoke to her as if she were a little child. his boasting did not sound like boasting to her. his strength and self-confidence pushed aside all the puny weapons with which she might have opposed him. she could not tell him that she did not love him. he had not asked for her love; he had asked for herself; or rather, he had announced his intention of taking her. she was dominated, silenced, and he gave her no chance to say anything, except what he meant her to say. he took his arms from her. "we must go back now," he said, "or they will wonder what has become of us." he laughed suddenly. "they were a little surprised when i ran away after you." it occurred to her that they must have been considerably surprised. the thought added to her confusion. "oh, i can't go back to them!" she cried. "no, no," he said soothingly. "you shall slip into the house by a back way. i shall say i couldn't find you." they were walking along the path, side by side. his muscular hands were pendant; he had attempted no further possession of her, had not tried to kiss her. perhaps he knew that a kiss would have fired her to revolt, and once revolting she would be lost to him. perhaps he was not guided by policy at all, but by the instinctive touch of his power over men--and women. cicely was beginning to recover her nerve, but her thoughts were in a whirl. she was not angry; her chief desire was to go away by herself and think. in the meantime she wanted no further food for thought. but that was a matter not in her hands. "i'm going away in a fortnight, you know," he said. "back to tibet. i left some things undone there." "you only came home a month ago," she said, clutching eagerly at a topic not alarmingly personal. "i know. but i'm tired of it--the drawing-rooms and the women. i want to be doing. _you_ know." she thought she did know. the rough appeal thrown out in those two words found a way through her armour, which his insolent mastery had only dented and bruised. it gave her a better conceit of herself. this was a big man, and he recognised something of his own quality in her. at any rate, she would stand up to him. she would not be "a silly miss." "of course, you have surprised me very much," she said, with an effort at even speech, which probably came to him as hurried prattle. "i can't say what i suppose you want me to say at once. but if you will give me time--if you will speak to my father----" he broke in on her. "good heavens!" he said, with a laugh. "you don't think i've got time for all that sort of thing, do you?--orange flowers and church bells and all the rest of it. don't you say a word to your father, or any one else. do you hear?" his roughness nerved her. "then what do you want me to do?" she asked boldly. "do? why, come to london and marry me, of course. you've got the pluck. or if you haven't, you're not what i thought you, and i don't want you at all. there's no time to settle anything now, and i'm off to-morrow. if i stay longer, and come over here again with graham, they will suspect something. meet me to-night out here--this very spot, do you see? i'll get out of the house and be over here at two o'clock. then i'll tell you what to do." they had come to a little clearing, the entrance to a strip of planted ground which led to a gate in the walled kitchen garden, and so to the back regions of the house. she stood still and faced him. "do you think i am going to do that?" she asked, her blue eyes looking straight into his. he had aroused her indignant opposition. what would he do now, this amazing and masterful man? he looked down at her with an odd expression in his face. it was protecting, tender, amused. "little shy flower!" he said--he seemed to cling to that not very original metaphor--"i mustn't forget how you have been brought up, in all this shelter and luxury, must i? it is natural to you, little girl, and i'll keep you in it as far as i can. but you've got to remember what i am too. you must come out of your cotton wool sometimes. life isn't all softness and luxury." food and raiment! what had she been thinking of all the morning? her eyes fell. "you can trust me, you know," he said, still speaking softly. "but you believe in daring, don't you? you must show a little yourself." "it isn't at all that i'm afraid," she said weakly. "of course not. i know that," he answered. "it is simply that you don't do such things here." he waved his hand towards the corner of the big house, which could be seen through the trees. "but you want to get out of it, you said." did she want to get out of it? she was tired of the dull ease. she was of the clintons, of the women who were kept under; but there were men clintons behind her too, men who took the ease when it came to them, but did not put it in the first place, men of courage, men of daring. it was the love of adventure in her blood that made her answer, "perhaps i will come," and then try to dart past him. he put out his arm to stop her. "i'm not going to walk six miles here and back on the chance," he said roughly. but she was equal to him this time. "if you don't think it worth while you need not come," she said. "i won't promise." then she was gone. he walked back slowly to the garden. jim graham was lying back in a basket chair, dressed in smart blue flannel and russian leather boots, talking to joan and nancy. through the open window of the library the top of the squire's head could be seen over the back of an easy-chair. mackenzie joined the little group under the lime. "couldn't find her," he said shortly. "she'll turn up at tea-time," said jim equably. the clear eyes of the twins were fixed on mackenzie. they had run round to the front of the house on hearing the wheels of jim's cart on the gravel. they wanted to see the great man he had brought with him, and they were not troubled with considerations of shyness. but the great man had taken no notice of them at all, standing on the gravel of the drive staring at him. he had jumped down from the cart and made off, directly, round the corner of the house. "where is he going?" asked the twins. "he wants to show cicely some drawings," said jim. "he saw her in the shrubbery. want a drive round to the stables, twankies?" now the twins devoured mackenzie with all their eyes. "i am joan clinton, and this is my sister nancy," said joan. "nobody ever introduces us to anybody that comes here, so we always introduce ourselves. how do you do?" mackenzie seemed to wake up. he shook hands with both twins. "how do you do, young ladies," he said with a smile. "you seem very much alike." "not in character," said nancy. "miss bird says that joan would be a very well-behaved girl if it were not for me." "i'm sure you are both well behaved," said mackenzie. "you look as if you never gave any trouble to anybody." "what we look and what we are are two very different things," said joan. "aren't they, jim?" "good lord, i should think they were," said jim. he had been bustled off immediately after luncheon, and was lying back in his chair in an attitude inviting repose. he had rather hoped that mackenzie, whose quick energy of mind and body were rather beyond his power to cope with, would have been off his hands for half an hour when he had announced his intention of going in search of cicely. he would have liked to go in search of cicely himself, but that was one of the things that he did no longer. he had nothing to do now but wait with what patience he could until his time came. he had a sort of undefined hope that mackenzie might say something that would advance him with cicely, praise him to her, cause her to look upon him with a little refreshment of her favour. but he had not welcomed the questions with which the twins had plied him concerning his guest. "jim wants to go to sleep," said nancy. "would you like to come up into the schoolroom, mr. mackenzie? we have a globe of the world." "we can find cicely if you want to see her," added joan. mackenzie laughed his rough laugh. "we won't bother miss clinton," he said. "but i should like to see the globe of the world." so the twins led him off proudly, chattering. jim heard joan say, "we have had a bishop in our schoolroom, but we would much rather have an explorer," but by the time they had crossed the lawn he was sleeping peacefully. if he had known it, it was hardly the time for him to sleep. "if you're ill, go to bed; if not, behave as usual," was a clinton maxim which accounted for cicely's appearance at the tea-table an hour later, when she would much rather have remained in her own room. the effort, no small one, of walking across the lawn in full view of the company assembled round the tea-table, as if nothing had happened to her within the last hour, braced her nerves. she was a shade paler than ordinary, but otherwise there was nothing in her appearance to arouse comment. mackenzie sprang up from his chair as she approached and went forward to meet her. "i tried to find you directly i came, miss clinton," he said in his loud voice, which no course of civilisation would avail to subdue. "i've brought those sketches i told you about last night." cicely breathed relief. she had not been told the pretext upon which he had started off in pursuit of her immediately upon his arrival, and had had terrifying visions of a reception marked by anxious and inquiring looks. but jim greeted her with his painfully acquired air of accepted habit, and immediately, she was sitting between him and mackenzie, looking at the bundle of rough pencil drawings put into her hands, outlines of rugged peaks, desolate plains, primitive hillside villages, done with abundant determination but little skill. she listened to mackenzie's explanations without speaking, and was relieved to hand over the packet to the squire, who put on his glasses to examine them, and drew the conversation away from her. mackenzie spoke but little to her after that. he dominated the conversation, much more so than on the previous evening, when there had been some little difficulty in extracting any account of his exploits from him. now he was willing to talk of them, and he talked well, not exactly with modesty, but with no trace of boastful quality, such as would certainly have aroused the prejudices of his listeners against him. he talked like a man with whom the subject under discussion was the one subject in the world that interested him. one would have said that he had nothing else in his mind but the lust for strange places to conquer. he appeared to be obsessed by his life of travel, to be able to think of nothing else, even during this short interval in his years of adventure, and in this stay-at-home english company whose thoughts were mostly bound up in the few acres around them. cicely stole glances at him. was he acting a carefully thought out plan, or had he really forgotten her very existence for the moment, while his thoughts winged their way to cruel, dark places, whose secrets he would wrest from them, the only places in which his bold, eager spirit could find its home? he radiated power. she was drawn to him, more than half against her will. he had called to her to share his life and his enterprise. should she answer the call? it was in her mind that she might do so. he made no attempt to claim her after tea; but when the church bells began to ring from across the park, and she had to go to play for the evening service, he joined the little party of women--the clinton men went to church once on sundays, but liked their women to go twice--and sat opposite to her in the chancel pew, sometimes fixing her with a penetrating look, sometimes with his head lowered on his broad chest, thinking inscrutable thoughts, while the dusk crept from raftered roof to stone floor, and the cheap oil lamps and the glass-protected candles in the pulpit and reading-desk plucked up yellow courage to keep off the darkness. the congregation sang a tuneful, rather sentimental evening hymn in the twilight. they sang fervently, especially the maids and men in the chancel pews. their minds were stirred to soothing and vaguely aspiring thoughts. such hymns as this at the close of an evening service were the pleasantest part of the day's occupations. the villagers went home to their cottages, talking a little more effusively than usual. the next morning their work would begin again. the party from the great house hurried home across the park. the sermon had been a little longer than usual. they would barely have time to dress for dinner. jim graham's dog-cart came round at half-past ten. the squire, who had been agreeably aroused from his contented but rather monotonous existence by his unusual guest, pressed them to send it back to the stable for an hour. "the women are going to bed," he said--they were always expected to go upstairs punctually at half-past ten--"we'll go into my room." but mackenzie refused without giving jim the opportunity. "i have a lot of work to do to-night," he said. "don't suppose i shall be in bed much before four; and i must leave early to-morrow." so farewells were said in the big square hall. mrs. clinton and cicely were at a side-table upon which were rows of silver bedroom candlesticks, mrs. clinton in a black evening dress, her white, plump neck and arms bare, cicely, slim and graceful, in white. the men stood between them and the table in the middle of the hall, from which dick was dispensing whisky and soda water; the squire, big and florid, with a great expanse of white shirt front, jim and mackenzie in light overcoats with caps in their hands. servants carried bags across from behind the staircase to the open door, outside of which jim's horse was scraping the gravel, the bright lamps of the cart shining on his smooth flanks. the squire and dick stood on the stone steps as the cart drove off, and then came back into the hall. mrs. clinton and cicely, their candles lighted, were at the foot of the staircase. "well, that's an interesting fellow," said the squire as the butler shut and bolted the hall door behind him. "we'll get him down to shoot if he's in england next month." "and see what he can do," added dick. cicely went upstairs after her mother. the squire and dick went into the library, where a servant relieved them of their evening coats and handed them smoking-jackets, and the squire a pair of worked velvet slippers. chapter xiv the plunge when cicely had allowed the maid who was waiting for her to unfasten her bodice, she sent her away and locked the door after her. during the evening she had sketched in her mind a portrait of herself sitting by the open window and thinking things over calmly. it seemed to be the thing to do in the circumstances. but she could not think calmly. she could not even command herself sufficiently to go on with her undressing. the evening had been one long strain on her nerves, and now she could only throw herself on her bed and burst into tears. she had an impulse to go in to her mother and tell her everything, and perhaps only the fact that for the moment her physical strength would not allow her to move held her back. after a time she became quieter, but did not regain the mastery of her brain. she seemed to be swayed by feeling entirely. the picture of her mother, calm and self-contained, kneeling at her long nightly devotions, faded, and in its place arose the image of the man who had suddenly shouldered his way into her life and with rude hands torn away the trappings of convention that had swathed it. he attracted her strongly. he stood for a broad freedom, and her revolt against the dependence in which she lived was pointed by his contempt for the dull, easy, effortless life of the big country house. her mind swayed towards him as she thought of what he had to offer her in exchange--adventure in unknown lands; glory, perhaps not wholly reflected, for there had been women explorers before, and her strong, healthy youth made her the physical equal of any of them; comradeship in place of subjection. she weighed none of these things consciously; she simply desired them. there came to her the echo of her brother's speech as she had come up the stairs: "and let us see what he can do." he stood before her in his rugged strength, not very well dressed, his greying head held upright, his nostrils slightly dilated, his keen eyes looking out on the world without a trace of self-consciousness; and beside him stood dick in his smart clothes and his smoothed down hair, coolly ignoring all the big things the man had done, and proposing to hold over his opinion of him till he saw whether he could snap off a gun quickly enough to bring down a high pheasant or a driven partridge. if he could pass that test he would be accepted without further question as "a good fellow." his other achievements, or perhaps more accurately the kind of renown they had brought him, would be set against his lack of the ordinary gentleman's upbringing. if he could not, he would still be something of an outsider though all the world should acclaim him. dick's careless speech--she called it stupid--affected her strangely. it lifted her suitor out of the ruck, and made him bulk bigger. she got up from her bed and took her seat by the open window, according to precedent. she had seen herself, during the evening, sitting there looking out on to the moonlit garden, asking herself quietly, "what am i going to do?" weighing the pros and cons, stiffening her mind, and her courage. and she tried now to come to a decision, but could not come anywhere near to laying the foundation of one. she had not the least idea what she was going to do, nor could she even discover what she wanted to do. she got up and walked about the room, but that did not help her. she knelt down and said her prayers out of a little well-worn book of devotions, and made them long ones. but it was nothing more than repeating words and phrases whose meaning slipped away from her. she prayed in her own words for guidance, but none came. there existed only the tumult of feeling. she heard her father and brother come up to bed and held her breath in momentary terror, then breathed relief at the thought that if they should, unaccountably, break into her room, which they were not in the least likely to do, they could not know what was happening to her, or make her tell them. they went along the corridor talking loudly. she had often been disturbed from her first sleep by the noise the men made coming up to bed. she heard a sentence from her father as they passed her door. "they would have to turn out anyhow if anything happened to me." dick's answer was inaudible, but she knew quite well what they were discussing. it had been discussed before her mother and herself, and even the twins and miss bird, though not before the servants, during the last few days. lord and lady alistair macleod, she a newly wed american, had motored through kencote, lunched at the inn and fallen in love with the dower-house. lady alistair--_he_ would have nothing to do with it--had made an offer through the squire's agent for a lease of the house, at a rental about four times its market value. the squire did not want the money, but business was business. and the macleods would be "nice people to have about the place." all that stood in the way was aunt ellen and aunt laura. they could not be turned out unless they were willing to go, but the squire knew very well that they _would_ go if he told them to. there was a nice little house in the village which would be the very thing for them if he decided to accept the tempting offer. he would do it up for them. after all, the dower-house was much too large and there were only two of them left. so it had been discussed whether aunt ellen, at the age of ninety-three, and aunt laura, at the age of seventy-five, should be notified that the house in which they had spent the last forty years of their lives, and in which their four sisters had died, was wanted for strangers. that was not the only thing that had been discussed. the question of what would be done in various departments of family and estate business when the squire should have passed away--his prospective demise being always referred to by the phrase, "if anything should happen to me"--was never shirked in the least; and dick, who would reign as squire in his stead, until the far off day when something should happen to _him_, took his part in the discussion as a matter of course. these things were and would be; there was no sense in shutting one's eyes to them. and one of the things that would take place upon that happening was that mrs. clinton, and cicely, if she were not married, and the twins, would no longer have their home at kencote, unless dick should be unmarried and should invite them to go on living in his house. he would have no legal right to turn aunt ellen and aunt laura out of the dower-house, if they still remained alive, but it had been settled ever since the last death amongst the sisters that they would make way. it would only be reasonable, and was taken for granted. and now, as it seemed, her father and brother had made up their minds to exercise pressure--so little would be needed--to turn out the poor old ladies, not for the sake of those who might have a claim on their consideration, but for strangers who would pay handsomely and would be nice people to have about the place. cicely burned with anger as she thought of it. * * * * * two o'clock struck from the clock in the stable turret. cicely opened her door softly, crept along the corridor and through a baize door leading to a staircase away from the bedrooms of the house. at the foot of it was a door opening into the garden, which she was prepared to unlock and unbolt with infinite care to avoid noise. but the carelessness of a servant had destroyed the need of such caution. the door was unguarded, and with an unpleasant little shock she opened it and went out. the night was warm, and the lawns and trees and shrubs of the garden lay in bright moonlight. she hurried, wrapped in a dark cloak, to the place from which she had fled from mackenzie in the afternoon. she felt an impulse of shrinking as she saw his tall figure striding up and down on the grass, but she put it away from her and went forward to meet him. he gave a low cry as he turned and saw her. "my brave little girl!" he said, and laid his hands on her shoulders for a moment, and looked into her face. he attempted no further love-making; his tact seemed equal to his daring. "we have come here to talk," he said. "when we have made our arrangements you shall go straight back. i wouldn't have asked you to come out here like this if there had been any other way." she felt grateful. her self-respect was safe with him. he understood her. "will you come with me?" he asked, and she answered, "yes." a light sprang into his eyes. "my brave little queen of girls!" he said, but held himself back from her. "what time can you get out of the house without being missed for an hour or two?" he asked. she stood up straight and made a slight gesture as if brushing something away, and thenceforward answered him in as matter-of-fact a way as he questioned her. "in the afternoon, after lunch," she said. "very well. there is a train from bathgate at four o'clock. can you walk as far as that?" "oh yes." "you can't go from here, and you can't drive. so you must walk. is there any chance of your being recognised at bathgate?" "i am very likely to be recognised." he thought for a moment. "well, it can't be helped," he said. "if there is any one in the train you know you must say you are going up to see mrs. walter clinton. graham has told me all about her and your brother." "i shan't be able to take any luggage with me," she said. "no. that is a little awkward. we must trust to chance. luck sides with boldness. you can buy what you want in london. i have plenty of money, and nothing will please me better than to spend it on you, little girl." his tone and his eyes became tender for a moment. "i shall be on the platform in london to meet you," he said. "i shall be surprised to see you there until you tell me there is nobody to fear. i hate all this scheming, but it can't be helped. we must get a start, and in two days we shall be married. don't leave any word. you can write from london to say you are going to marry me. i'll do the rest when we are man and wife." cicely's eyes dropped as she asked, "where shall i be till--till----" "till we're married? my little girl! it won't be very long. there is a good woman i know. i'll take you there and she will look after you. i shall be near. leave it all to me and don't worry. have you got money for your journey?" "yes, i have enough." "very well. now go back, and think of me blessing the ground you walk on. you're so sweet, and you're so brave. you're the wife for me. will you give me one kiss?" she turned her head quickly. "no," he said at once. "i won't ask for it; not till you are mine altogether." but she put up her face to him in the moonlight. "i'm yours now," she said. "i have given myself to you," and he kissed her, restraining his roughness, turning away immediately without another word to stride down the grass path into the darkness of the trees. cicely looked after him for an instant and then went back to the house and crept up to her room. chapter xv bloomsbury mackenzie met her at the london terminus. she had seen no one she knew either at the station at bathgate or in the train. she was well dressed, in a tailor-made coat and skirt and a pretty hat. she got out of a first-class carriage and looked like a young woman of some social importance, travelling alone for once in a way, but not likely to be allowed to go about london alone when she reached the end of her journey. she was quite composed as she saw mackenzie's tall figure coming towards her, and shook hands with him as if he were a mere acquaintance. "i have seen nobody i know," she said, and then immediately added, "i must send a telegram to my mother. i can't leave her in anxiety for a whole night." he frowned, but not at her. "you can't do that," he said, "you don't want the post-office people to know." "i have thought of that. i will say 'have come up to see muriel. writing to-night.' it isn't true, but i will tell them afterwards why i did it." "will that satisfy them?" "i am deceiving them anyhow." "oh, i don't mean that. will they think it all right--your coming up to your sister-in-law?" "no, they will be very much surprised. but the post-office people will not gather anything." "they will wire at once to your brother. you had much better leave it till to-morrow." "no, i can't do that," she said. "i will wire just before eight o'clock. then a return wire will not go through before the morning." "yours might not get through to-night." "oh yes, it will. they would take it up to the house whatever time it came." "very well," he said. "now come along," and he hailed a hansom. "please don't think me tiresome," she said, when they were in the cab, "but there is another thing i must do. i must write to my mother so that she gets my letter the very first thing to-morrow morning." he gave an exclamation of impatience. "you can't do that," he said again. "the country mails have already gone." "i can send a letter by train to bathgate. i will send it to the hotel there with a message that it is to be taken over to kencote the first thing in the morning." "you are very resourceful. it may give them time to get on to our track, before we are married." "i have promised to marry you," she said simply. it was she who now seemed bold, and not he. "i don't see how they could get here in time," he said grudgingly. "graham only knows the address of my club, and they don't know there where i live." he brightened up again. "very well, my queen," he said, smiling down at her. "you shall do what you like. write your letter--let it be a short one--when you get in, and we will send that and the wire when we go out to dinner." they drove to a dingy-looking house in one of the smaller squares of bloomsbury. during the short journey he became almost boisterous. all the misgivings that had assailed her since they had last parted, the alternate fits of courage and of frightened shrinking, had passed him by. this was quite plain, and she was right in attributing his mood partly to his joy in having won her, partly to his love of adventure. it was an added pleasure to him to surmount obstacles in winning her. if his wooing had run the ordinary course, the reason for half his jubilation would have disappeared. she felt his strength, and, woman-like, relinquished her own doubts and swayed to his mood. "you have begun your life of adventure, little girl," he said, imprisoning her slender hand in his great muscular one, and looking down at her with pride in his eyes. she had an impulse of exhilaration, and smiled back at him. the rooms to which he took her, escorted by a middle-aged scotswoman with a grim face and a silent tongue, were on the first floor--a big sitting-room, clean, but, to her eyes, inexpressibly dingy and ill-furnished, and a bedroom behind folding doors. "mrs. fletcher will give you your breakfast here," he said, "but we will lunch and dine out. we will go out now and shop when you are ready." she went into the bedroom and stood by the window. fright had seized her again. what was she doing here? the woman who had come from her dark, downstairs dwelling-place to lead the way to these dreadful rooms, had given her one glance but spoken no word. what must she think of her? she could hear her replying in low monosyllables to mackenzie's loud instructions, through the folding doors. again the assurance and strength and determination which he exhaled came to her aid. she had taken the great step, and must not shrink from the consequences. he would look after her. she washed her hands and face--no hot water had been brought to her--and went back to the sitting-room. "i am hoping you will be comfortable here, miss," the woman said to her. "you must ask for anything you want." she did not smile, but her tone was respectful, and she looked at cicely with eyes not unfriendly. and, after all, the rooms were clean--for london. mackenzie took her to a big shop in holborn and stayed outside while she made her purchases. she had not dared to bring with her even a small hand-bag, and she had to buy paper on which to write her letter to her mother. "i lived in mrs. fletcher's rooms before i went to tibet," mackenzie said as they went back to the house. "i tried to get them when i came back--but no such luck. fortunately they fell vacant on saturday. we'll keep them on for a bit after we're married. must make ourselves comfortable, you know." she stole a glance at him. his face was beaming. she had thought he had taken her to that dingy, unknown quarter as a temporary precaution. would he really expect her to make her home in such a place? she wrote her letter to her mother at the table in the sitting-room. mrs. fletcher had brought up a penny bottle of ink and a pen with a j nib suffering from age. mackenzie walked about the room as she wrote, and it was difficult for her to collect her thoughts. she gave him the note to read, with a pretty gesture of confidence. it was very short. "my own darling mother,--i have not come to london to see muriel, but to marry ronald mackenzie. i said what i did in my telegram because of the post-office. i am very happy, and will write you a long letter directly we are married.--always your very loving daughter, "cicely." "brave girl!" he said as he returned it to her. she gave a little sob. "i wish i had not had to go away from her like that," she said. "don't cry, little girl," he said kindly. "it was the only way." she dried her eyes and sealed up the note. she had wondered more than once since he had carried her off her feet why it was the only way. they carried through the business of the letter and the telegram and drove to a little french restaurant in soho to dine. the upstairs room was full of men and a few women, some french, more english. everybody stared at her as she entered, and she blushed hotly. and some of them recognised mackenzie and whispered his name. the men were mostly journalists, of the more literary sort, one or two of them men of note, if she had known it. but to her they looked no better than the class she would have labelled vaguely as "people in shops." they were as different as possible from her brothers and her brothers' friends, sleek, well-dressed men with appropriate clothes for every occasion, and a uniform for the serious observance of dinner which she had never imagined a man without, except on an unavoidable emergency. she had never once in her life dined in the same frock as she had worn during the day and hardly ever in the company of men in morning clothes. this cheap restaurant, where the food and cooking were good but the appointments meagre, struck her as strangely as if she had been made to eat in a kitchen. that it did not strike mackenzie in that way was plain from his satisfaction at having introduced her to it. "just as good food here as at the carlton or the savoy," he said inaccurately, "at about a quarter of the price; and no fuss in dressing-up!" she enjoyed it rather, after a time. there was a sense of adventure in dining in such a place, even in dining where nobody had thought of dressing, although dressing for dinner was not one of the conventions she had wished to run away from; it was merely a habit of cleanliness and comfort. mackenzie talked to her incessantly in a low voice--they were sitting at a little table in a corner, rather apart from the rest. he talked of his travels, and fascinated her; and every now and then, when he seemed furthest away, his face would suddenly soften and he would put in a word of encouragement or gratitude to her. she felt proud of having the power to make such a man happy. they were comrades, and she wanted to share his life. at present it seemed to be enough for him to talk to her. he had not as yet made any demand on her for a return of confidence. in fact, she had scarcely spoken a word to him, except in answer to speech of his. he had won her and seemed now to take her presence for granted. he had not even told her what arrangements he had made for their marriage, or where it was to be; nor had he alluded in any way to the course of their future life or travels, except in the matter of mrs. fletcher's room in bloomsbury. "when are we going to tibet again?" she asked him the question point blank, as they were drinking their coffee, and mackenzie was smoking a big briar pipe filled with strong tobacco. he stared at her in a moment's silence. then he laughed. "tibet!" he echoed. "oh, i think now i shan't be going to tibet for some months. but i shall be taking you abroad somewhere before then. however, there will be plenty of time to talk of all that." then he changed the subject. he drove her back to her rooms and went upstairs with her. it was about half-past nine o'clock. "i have to go and meet a man at the athenæum at ten," he said. "hang it! but i will stay with you for a quarter of an hour, and i dare say you won't be sorry to turn in early." he sat himself down in a shabby armchair on one side of the fireless grate. he was still smoking his big pipe. cicely stood by the table. he looked up at her. "take off your hat," he said, "i want to see your beautiful hair. it was the first thing i noticed about you." she obeyed, with a blush. he smiled his approval. "those soft waves," he said, "and the gold in it! you are a beautiful girl, my dear. i can tell you i shall be very proud of you. i shall want to show you about everywhere." he hitched his chair towards her and took hold of her hand. "do you think you are going to love me a little bit?" he asked. she blushed again, and looked down. then she lifted her eyes to his. "i don't think you know quite what you have made me do," she said. he dropped her hand. "do you regret it?" he asked sharply. she did not answer his question, but her eyes still held his. "i have never been away from home in my life," she said, "without my father or mother. now i have left them without a word, to come to you. you seem to take that quite as a matter of course." the tears came into her eyes, although she looked at him steadily. he sprang up from his chair and put his hand on her shoulder. "my poor little girl!" he said, "you feel it. of course you feel it. you've behaved like a heroine, but you've had to screw up your courage. i don't want you to think of all that. that is why i haven't said anything about it. you mustn't break down." but she had broken down, and she wept freely, while he put his arm round her and comforted her as he might have comforted a child. presently her sobbing ceased. "you are very kind to me," she said. "but you won't keep me away from my own people, will you--after--after----" "after we are married? god bless me, no. and they won't be angry with you--at least, not for long. don't fear that. leave it all to me. we shall be married to-morrow. i've arranged everything." "you have not told me a word about that," she said forlornly. "i didn't mean to tell you a word until to-morrow came," he said. "you are not to brood." "you mean to rush me into everything," she said. "if i am to be the companion to you that i want to be, you ought to take me into your confidence." "why, there!" he said, "i believe i ought. you're brave. you're not like other girls. you can imagine that i have had a busy day. i have a special license, signed by no less a person than the archbishop of canterbury. think of that! and we are going to be married in a church. i knew you would like that; and i like it better too. you see i have been thinking of you all the time. now you mustn't worry any more." he patted her hand. "go to bed and get a good sleep. i'll come round at ten o'clock to-morrow morning, and we're to be married at eleven. then a new life begins, and by the lord i'll make it a happy one for you. come, give me a smile before i go." she had no difficulty in doing that now. he took her chin in his fingers, turned her face up to his and looked into her eyes earnestly. then he left her. she had finished her breakfast, which had been cleared away, when he came in to her the next morning. she was sitting in a chair by the empty grate with her hands in her lap, and she looked pale. mackenzie had on a frock coat, and laid a new silk hat and a new pair of gloves on the table as he greeted her with unsentimental cheerfulness. "will you sit down?" she said, regarding him with serious eyes. "i want to ask you some questions." he threw a shrewd glance at her. "ask away," he said in the same loud, cheerful tone, and took his seat opposite to her, carefully disposing of the skirts of his coat, which looked too big even for his big frame. "i have been thinking a great deal," she said. "i want to know exactly what my life is to be if i marry you." "_if_ you marry me!" he took up her words. "you _are_ going to marry me." "you said something last night," she went on, "which i didn't quite understand at the time; and i am not sure that you meant me to. are you going to take me with you to tibet, and on your other journeys, or do you want to leave me behind--here?" there was a hint of the distaste she felt for her surroundings in the slight gesture that accompanied the last word. but she looked at him out of clear, blue, uncompromising eyes. he did not return her look. "here?" he echoed, looking round him with some wonder. "what is the matter with this?" "then you do mean to leave me here." "look here, my dear," he said, looking at her now. "i am not going to take you to tibet, or on any of my big journeys. i never had the slightest intention of doing so, and never meant you to think i had. a pretty thing if i were to risk the life of the one most precious to me, as well as my own, in such journeys as i take!" "then what about me?" asked cicely. "what am i to do while you are away, risking your own life, as you say, and away perhaps for two or three years together?" "would you be very anxious for me?" he asked her, with a tender look, but she brushed the question aside impatiently. "i am to live alone, while you go away," she said, "live just as dull a life as i did before, only away from my own people, and without anything that made my life pleasant in spite of its dulness. is that what you are offering me?" "no, no," he said, trying to soothe her. "i want you to live in the sweetest little country place. we'll find one together. you needn't stay here a minute longer than you want to, though when we are in london together it will be convenient. i want to think of you amongst your roses, and to come back to you and forget all the loneliness and hardships. i want a home, and you in it, the sweetest wife ever a man had." "i don't want that," she said at once. "you are offering me nothing that i didn't have before, and i left it all to come to you--to share the hardships and--and--i would take away the loneliness." "you are making too much of my big journeys," he broke in on her eagerly. "that is the trouble. now listen to me. i shall be starting for tibet in march, and----" "did you know that when you told me you were going in a fortnight?" she interrupted him. "let me finish," he said, holding up his hand. "it is settled now that i am going to tibet in march, and i shan't be away for more than a year. until then we will travel together. i want to go to switzerland almost directly to test some instruments. you will come with me, and you can learn to climb. i don't mind that sort of hardship for you. at the end of october we will go to america. i hadn't meant to go, but i want money now--for you--and i can get it there. that's business; and for pleasure we will go anywhere you like--spain, algiers, russia--riviera, if you like, though i don't care for that sort of thing. when i go to tibet i'll leave you as mistress of a little house that you may be proud of, and you'll wait for me there. when i get back we'll go about together again, and as far as i can see i shan't have another big job to tackle for some time after that--a year, perhaps two years, perhaps more." she was silent for a moment, thinking. "come now," he said, "that's not stagnation. is it?" "no," she said unwillingly. "but it isn't what i came to you for." she raised her eyes to his. "you know it isn't what i came to you for." his face grew a little red. "you came to me," he said in a slower, deeper voice, looking her straight in the eyes, "because i wanted you. i want you now and i mean to have you. i want you as a wife. i will keep absolutely true to you. you will be the only woman in the world to me. but my work is my work. you will have no more say in that than i think good for you. you will come with me wherever i think well to take you, and i shall be glad enough to have you. otherwise you will stay behind and look after my home--and, i hope, my children." her face was a deep scarlet. she knew now what this marriage meant to him. what it had meant to her, rushing into it so blindly, seemed a foolish, far off thing. her strongest feeling was a passionate desire for her mother's presence. she was helpless, alone with this man, from whom she felt a revulsion that almost overpowered her. he sat for a full minute staring at her downcast face, his mouth firmly set, a slight frown on his brows. "come now," he said more roughly. "you don't really know what you want. but i know. trust me, and before god, i will make you happy." she hid her face in her hands. "oh, i want to go home," she cried. he shifted in his chair. the lines of his face did not relax. he must set himself to master this mood. he knew he had the power, and he must exercise it once for all. the mood must not recur again, or if it did it must not be shown to him. and there is no doubt at all that he would have mastered it. but as he opened his mouth to speak, cicely sitting there in front of him, crying, with a white face and strained eyes, there were voices on the stairs, the door opened, and dick and jim graham came into the room. chapter xvi the pursuit cicely had not been missed from home until the evening. at tea-time she was supposed to be at the dower-house, or else at the rectory. it was only when she had not returned at a quarter to eight, that the maid who waited upon her and her mother told mrs. clinton that she was not in her room. "where on earth can she be?" exclaimed mrs. clinton. punctuality at meals being so rigidly observed it was unprecedented that cicely should not have begun to dress at a quarter to eight. at ten minutes to eight mrs. clinton was convinced that some accident had befallen her. at five minutes to, she tapped at the door of the squire's dressing-room. "edward," she called, "cicely has not come home yet." "come in! come in!" called the squire. he was in his shirt sleeves, paring his nails. "i am afraid something has happened to her," said mrs. clinton anxiously. "now, nina, don't fuss," said the squire. "what can possibly have happened to her? she must be at the dower-house, though, of course, she ought to be home by this time. nobody in this house is ever punctual but myself. i am always speaking about it. you _must_ see that the children are in time for meals. if nobody is punctual the whole house goes to pieces." mrs. clinton went downstairs into the morning-room, where they were wont to assemble for dinner. dick was there already, reading a paper. "cicely has not come home yet," she said to him. "by jove, she'll catch it," said dick, and went on reading his paper. mrs. clinton went to the window and drew the curtain aside. it was not yet quite dark and she could see across the park the footpath by which cicely would come from the dower-house. but there was no one there. mrs. clinton's heart sank. she knew that something _had_ happened. cicely would never have stayed out as late as this if she could have helped it. she came back into the room and rang the bell. "i must send down," she said. dick put his paper aside and looked up at her. "it _is_ rather odd," he said. the butler came into the room, and the squire immediately behind him. "edward, i want some one to go down to the dower-house and see if cicely has been there," mrs. clinton said. "i am anxious about her." the squire looked at her for a moment. "send a man down to the dower-house to ask if miss clinton has been there this afternoon," he said, "and if she hasn't, tell him to go to the rectory." the butler left the room, but returned immediately with cicely's telegram. it was one minute to eight o'clock. he hung on his heel after handing the salver to mrs. clinton and then left the room to carry out his previous instructions. it was not his place to draw conclusions, but to do as he was told. mrs. clinton read the telegram and handed it to the squire, searching his face as he read it. "what, the devil!" exclaimed the squire, and handed it to dick. the big clock in the hall began to strike. porter threw open the door again. "dinner is served, ma'am," he said. "you needn't send down to the dower-house," dick said, raising his eyes from the paper. "miss clinton has gone up to stay with mrs. walter." then he offered his arm to his mother to lead her out of the room. "shut the door," shouted the squire, and the door was shut. "what on earth does it mean?" he asked, in angry amazement. "better have gone in to dinner," said dick. "i don't know." mrs. clinton was white, and said nothing. the squire turned to her. "what does it mean, nina?" he asked again. "did you know anything about this?" "of course mother didn't know," said dick. "there's something queer. it's too late to send a wire. i'll go up by the eleven o'clock train and find out all about it. better go in now." he laid the telegram carelessly on a table. "don't leave it about," said the squire. "better leave it there," said dick, and offered his arm to his mother again. they went into the dining-room, only a minute late. "tell higgs to pack me a bag for two nights," said dick when the squire had mumbled a grace, "and order my cart for ten o'clock. i'm going up to london. i shan't want anybody." then, as long as the servants were in the room they talked as usual. at least dick did, with frequent mention of walter and muriel and some of cicely. the squire responded to him as well as he was able, and mrs. clinton said nothing at all. but that was nothing unusual. when they were alone at last, the squire burst out, but in a low voice, "what on earth does it mean? tell me what it means, dick." "she hasn't had a row with any one, has she, mother?" asked dick, cracking a walnut. mrs. clinton moistened her lips. "with whom?" she asked. "i know it's very unlikely. i suppose she's got some maggot in her head. misunderstood, or something. you never know what girls are going to do next. she _has_ been rather mopy lately. i've noticed it." "she has not seen muriel since she was married," said mrs. clinton. "she has missed her." "pah!" spluttered the squire. "how dare she go off like that without a word? what on earth can you have been thinking of to let her, nina? and what was miles doing? miles must have packed her boxes. and who drove her to the station? when did she go? here we are, sitting calmly here and nobody thinks of asking any of these questions." "it was miles who told me she had not come back," said mrs. clinton. "she was as surprised as i was." "ring the bell, dick," said the squire. "i think you had better go up, mother, and see what she took with her," said dick. "don't say anything to anybody but miles, and tell her to keep quiet." mrs. clinton went out of the room. dick closed the door which he had opened for her, came back to the table, and lit a cigarette. "there's something queer, father," he said, "but we had better make it seem as natural as possible. i shouldn't worry if i were you. i'll find out all about it and bring her back." "worry!" snorted the squire. "it's cicely who is going to worry. if she thinks she is going to behave like that in this house she is very much mistaken." dick drove into bathgate at twenty minutes to eleven. he always liked to give himself plenty of time to catch a train, but hated waiting about on the platform. so he stopped at the george hotel and went into the hall for a whisky-and-soda. "oh, good evening, captain," said the landlord, who was behind the bar. "if you are going back to kencote you can save me sending over. this letter has just come down by train." he handed dick a square envelope which he had just opened. on it was his name and address in cicely's writing, and an underlined inscription, "please send the enclosed letter to kencote by special messenger as early as possible to-morrow morning." dick took out the inner envelope which was addressed to his mother, and looked at it. "all right," he said, "i'll take it over," and slipped it into the pocket of his light overcoat. he ordered his whisky-and-soda and drank it, talking to the landlord as he did so. only a corner of the bar faced the hall, which was otherwise empty, and as he went out he took the letter from his pocket and opened it. "the devil you will!" he said, as he read the few words cicely had written. then he went out and stood for a second beside his cart, thinking. "i'm going to mountfield," he said as he swung the horse round and the groom jumped up behind. the groom would wonder at his change of plan and when he got back he would talk. if he told him not to he would talk all the more. wisest to say nothing at present. so dick drove along the five miles of dark road at an easy pace, for he could catch no train now until seven o'clock in the morning and there was no use in hurrying, and thought and thought, as he drove. if he failed in stopping this astonishing and iniquitous proceeding it would not be for want of thinking. mountfield was an early house. jim himself unbarred and unlocked the front door to the groom's ring. the chains and bolts to be undone seemed endless. "take out my bag," said dick, as he waited, sitting in the cart. "i'm going to stay here for the night. there'll be a note to take back to mrs. clinton. see that it goes up to her to-night." he spoke so evenly that the groom wondered if, after all, there was anything going on under the surface at all. "hullo, old chap," dick called out, directly jim's astonished face appeared in the doorway. "cicely has bolted off to see muriel, and the governor has sent me to fetch her back. i was going up by the eleven o'clock train, but i thought i'd come here for to-night, and take you up with me in the morning. there's nothing to hurry for." then he got down from the cart and gave the reins to the groom. "i just want to send a note to the mater so that she won't worry," he said, as he went into the house. he went across the hall into jim's room, and jim, who had not spoken, followed him. "read that," he said, putting the letter into his hand. jim read it and looked up at him. there was no expression on his face but one of bewilderment. "you think it over," said dick, a little impatiently, and went to the writing-table and scribbled a note. "dear mother,--i thought i would come on here first on the chance of hearing something, and glad i did so. there is a letter from cicely. it is all right. jim and i are going up to-morrow morning. don't worry. "dick." then, without taking any notice of jim, still standing gazing at the letter in his hand with the same puzzled expression on his face, he went out and despatched the groom, closing the hall door after him. he went back into the room and shut that door too. "well!" he said sharply. "what the devil does it mean?" jim's expression had changed. it was now angry as well as puzzled. "it was when he went after her on sunday," he said. "_damn_ him! i thought----" "never mind what you thought," said dick. "when did he see her alone?" "i was going to tell you. when we came over yesterday afternoon he saw her over the wall, and directly we got to the house he bolted off after her. he said he had promised to show her some sketches." "but he didn't find her. he said so at tea-time--when she came out." jim was silent. "perhaps that was a blind," said dick. "how long was it before he came back and said he couldn't find her?" "about half an hour, i should think. not so much." "he _must_ have found her. but, good heavens! he can't have persuaded her to run away with him in half an hour! he had never been alone with her before." "no." "and he didn't see her alone afterwards." jim's face suddenly went dark. "he--he--went out after we went up to bed," he said. "what?" "he asked me to leave the door unlocked. he said he might not sleep, and if he didn't he should go out." the two men looked at one another. "that's a nice thing to hear of your sister," said dick bitterly. "it's a nice thing to hear of a man you've treated as a friend," said jim. "how long have you known the fellow?" "oh, i told you. i met him when i was travelling, and asked him to look me up. i haven't seen him since until he wrote and said he wanted to come for a quiet sunday." "why did he want to come? i'll tell you what it is, jim. she must have met him in london, and you were the blind. yes, that's it. she's been different since she came back. i've noticed it. we've all noticed it." "i don't believe they met before," said jim slowly. "why not?" "i don't believe they did. dick, do you think they can be married already? is there time to stop it?" "yes, there's time. i've thought it out. we'll go up by the seven o'clock train. where does the fellow live?" jim thought a moment. "i don't know. he wrote from the royal societies club." "well, we'll find him. i'm not going to talk about it any more now. i'm too angry. cicely! she ought to be whipped. if it _is_ too late, she shall never come to kencote again, if i have any say in the matter, and i don't think my say will be needed. let's go to bed. we shall have plenty of time to talk in the train." "i'll go and get hold of grove," said jim. "he must get a room ready, and see that we get to the station in the morning," and he went out of the room. dick walked up and down, and then poured himself out whisky-and-soda from a table standing ready. he lit a cigarette and threw the match violently into the fireplace. when jim returned he said, "i've managed to keep it pretty dark so far. the governor would have blurted everything out--everything that he knew. i'm glad i intercepted that letter to the mater. i haven't any sort of feeling about opening it. _i'm_ going to see to this. if we can get hold of her before it's too late, she must go to muriel for a bit; i must keep it from the governor as long as i can--until i get back and can tackle him. he'll be so furious that he'll give it away all round. he wouldn't think about the scandal." "pray god we shan't be too late," said jim. "what a fool i've been, dick! i took it all for granted. i never thought that she wasn't just as fond of me as i was of her." dick looked at him. "well, i suppose that's all over now," he said, "a girl who behaves like that!" jim turned away, and said nothing, and by and by they went up to bed. they drove over to bathgate the next morning and caught the seven o'clock train to ganton, where they picked up the london express. alone in a first-class smoking-carriage they laid their plans. "i have an idea that is worth trying before we do anything else," said jim. "when we were travelling together that fellow told me of some rooms in bloomsbury he always went to when he could get them." "do you know the address?" "yes," said jim, and gave it. "he said they were the best rooms in london, and made me write down the address. i found it last night." "why on earth didn't you say so before?" "i had forgotten. i didn't suppose i should ever want to take rooms in bloomsbury." "it's a chance. we'll go there first. if we draw blank, we will go to his club, and then to the geographical society. we'll find him somewhere." "we can't do anything to him," said jim. "i'm not thinking much of him," dick confessed. "it would be a comfort to bruise him a bit--though i dare say he'd be just as likely to bruise me. he's got an amazing cheek; but, after all, a man plays his own hand. if she had behaved herself properly he couldn't have done anything." he flicked the ash of his cigar on to the carpet and looked carelessly out of the window, but turned his head sharply at the tone in which jim said, "if i could get him alone, and it couldn't do her any harm afterwards, i'd kill him." and he cursed mackenzie with a deliberate, blasphemous oath. dick said nothing, but looked out of the window again with an expression that was not careless. jim spoke again in the same low voice of suppressed passion. "i told him about her when i was travelling. i don't know why, but i did. and after you dined on friday we spoke about her. he praised her. i didn't say much, but he knew what i felt. and he had got this in his mind then. he must have had. he was my friend, staying in my house. he's a liar and a scoundrel. for all he's done, and the name he's made, he's not fit company for decent men. dick, i'd give up everything i possess for the chance of handling him." "i'd back you up," said dick. "but the chief thing is to get her away from him." "i know that. it's the only thing. we can't do anything. i was thinking of it nearly all night long. and supposing we don't find him, or don't find him till too late." "we won't think of that," said dick coolly. "one thing at a time. and we'll shut his mouth, at any rate. i feel equal to that." they were silent for a time, and then jim said, "dick, i'd like to say one thing. she may not care about seeing me. i suppose she can't care for me much--now--or she wouldn't have let him take her away. but i'm going to fight for her--see that? i'm going to fight for her, if it's not too late." dick looked uncomfortable in face of his earnestness. "if you want her," he began hesitatingly, "after----" "want her!" echoed jim. "haven't i always wanted her? i suppose i haven't shown it. it isn't my way to show much. but i thought it was all settled and i rested on that. good god, i've wanted her every day of my life--ever since we fixed it up together--years ago. i wish i'd taken her, now, and let the beastly finance right itself. it wouldn't have made much difference, after all. but i wanted to give her everything she ought to have. if i've seemed contented to wait, i can tell you i haven't been. i didn't want to worry her. i--i--thought she understood." "she's behaved very badly," said dick, too polite to show his surprise at this revelation. jim had always been rather a queer fellow. "if you want her still, she ought to be precious thankful. the whole thing puzzles me. i can't see her doing it." "i couldn't, last night," said jim, more quietly. "i can now. she's got pluck. i never gave her any chance to show it." they were mostly silent after this. every now and then one of them said a word or two that showed that their thoughts were busy in what lay before them. the last thing jim said before the train drew up at the same platform at which cicely had alighted the day before was, "i can't do anything to him." they drove straight to the house in bloomsbury. mrs. fletcher opened the door to them. "mr. mackenzie is expecting us, i think," said dick suavely, and made as if to enter. mrs. fletcher looked at them suspiciously, more because it was her way than because, in face of dick's assumption, she had any doubts of their right of entrance. "he didn't say that he expected anybody," she said. "i can take your names up to him." "oh, thanks, we won't trouble you," said dick. "we will go straight up. first floor, as usual, i suppose?" it was a slip, and mrs. fletcher planted herself in the middle of the passage at once. "wait a moment," she said. "what do you mean by 'as usual'? neither of you have been in the house before. you won't go up to mr. mackenzie without i know he wants to see you." "now, look here," said dick, at once. "we are going up to mr. mackenzie, and i expect you know why. if you try to stop us, one of us will stay here and the other will fetch the policeman. you can make up your mind at once which it shall be, because we've no time to waste." "nobody has ever talked to me about a policeman before; you'll do it at your peril," she said angrily, still standing in the passage, but dick saw her cast an eye towards the door on her left. "i'm quite ready to take the consequences," said dick, "but whatever they are it won't do you any good with other people in your house to have the police summoned at half-past ten in the morning. now will you let us pass?" she suddenly turned and made way for them. dick went upstairs and jim followed him. the door of the drawing-room was opposite to them. "i'll do the talking," said dick, and opened the door and went in. chapter xvii the contest mackenzie sprang up and stood facing them. his face had changed in a flash. it was not at all the face of a man who had been caught and was ashamed; it was rather glad. even his ill-made london clothes could not at that moment disguise his magnificent gift of virility. so he might have looked--when there was no one to see him--face to face with sudden, unexpected danger in far different surroundings, dauntless, and eager to wrest his life out of the instant menace of death. dick had a momentary perception of the quality of the man he had to deal with, which was instantly obliterated by a wave of contemptuous dislike--the dislike of a man to whom all expression of feeling, except, perhaps, anger, was an offence. he had looked death in the face too, but not with that air. assumed at a moment like this it was a vulgar absurdity. he met mackenzie's look with a cool contempt. but the challenge, and the reply to it, had occupied but a moment. cicely had looked up and cried, "o dick!" and had tried to rise from her chair to come to him, but could not. the tone in which she uttered that appeal for mercy and protection made jim graham wince, but it did not seem to affect her brother. "go and get ready to come with us," he said. jim had never taken his eyes off cicely since he had entered the room, but she did not look at him. she sat in her chair, trembling a little, her eyes upon her brother's face, which was now turned toward her with no expression in it but a cold authority. she stood up with difficulty, and jim took half a step forward. but mackenzie broke in, with a gesture towards her. "come now, captain clinton," he said. "you have found us out; but i am going to marry your sister. you are not going to take her away, you know." he spoke in a tone of easy good humour. the air, slightly theatrical, as it had seemed, with which he had faced their intrusion, had disappeared. dick took no notice of him whatever. "i am going to take you up to muriel," he said to cicely. "there's a cab waiting. have you anything to get, or are you ready to come now?" she turned to go to her room, but mackenzie interposed again. "stay here, please," he said. "we won't take our orders from captain clinton. look here, clinton, i dare say this has been a bit of a shock to you, and i'm sorry it had to be done in such a hurry. but everything is straight and honest. i want to marry your sister, and she wants to marry me. she is of age and you can't stop her. i'm going to make her a good husband, and she's going to make me the best of wives." he still spoke good-humouredly, with the air of a man used to command who condescends to reason. he knew his power and was accustomed to exercise it, with a hand behind his back, so to speak, upon just such young men as these; men who were socially his superiors, and on that very account to be kept under, and taught that there was no such thing as social superiority where his work was to be done, but only leader and led. but still dick took no notice of him. "come along, cicely," he said, with a trifle of impatience. mackenzie shrugged his shoulders angrily. "very well," he said, "if you've made up your mind to take that fool's line, take it and welcome. only you won't take _her_. she's promised to me. my dear, tell them so." he bent his look upon cicely, the look which had made her soft in his hands. dick was looking at her too, standing on the other side of the table, with cold displeasure. and jim had never looked away from her. his face was tender and compassionate, but she did not see it. she looked at dick, searching his face for a sign of such tenderness, but none was there, or she would have gone to him. her eyes were drawn to mackenzie's, and rested there as if fascinated. they were like those of a frightened animal. "come now," said mackenzie abruptly. "it is for you to end all this. i would have spared you if i could--you know that; but if they must have it from you, let them have it. tell them that i asked you to come away and marry me, and that you came of your own accord. tell them that i have taken care of you. tell them that we are to be married this morning." she hesitated painfully, and her eyes went to her brother's face again in troubled appeal. he made no response to her look, but when the clock on the mantelpiece had ticked half a dozen audible beats and she had not spoken, he turned to mackenzie. "i see," he said. "you have----" "oh, let her speak," mackenzie interrupted roughly, with a flashing glance at him. "you have had your say." "it is quite plain, sir," proceeded dick in his level voice, "that you have gained some sort of influence over my sister." "oh, that is plain, is it?" sneered mackenzie. "excuse me if i don't express myself very cleverly," said dick. "what i mean is that somehow you have managed to _bully_ her into running away with you." they looked into one another's eyes for an instant. the swords were crossed. mackenzie turned to cicely. "did i do that?" he asked quietly. "if i might suggest," dick said, before she could reply, "that you don't try and get behind my sister, but speak up for yourself----" "did i do that?" asked mackenzie again. "o dick dear," said cicely, "i said i would come. it was my own fault." "your own fault--yes," said dick. "but i am talking to this--this gentleman, now." mackenzie faced him again. "oh, we're to have all that wash about gentlemen, are we? i'm not a gentleman. that's the trouble, is it?" "it is part of the trouble," said dick. "a good big part." "do you know what i do with the _gentlemen_ who come worrying me for jobs when i go on an expedition, captain clinton--the gentlemen who want to get seconded from your regiment and all the other smart regiments, to serve under me?" "shall we stick to the point?" asked dick. "my cab is waiting." mackenzie's face looked murderous for a moment, but he had himself in hand at once. "the point is," he said, "that i am going to marry your sister, with her consent." "the point is how you got her consent. i am here in place of my father--and hers. if she marries you she marries you, but she doesn't do it before i tell her what she is letting herself in for." "then perhaps you will tell her that." "i will." dick looked at cicely. "i should like to ask you to begin with when you first met--mr. mackenzie," he said. "dear dick!" cried cicely, "don't be so cruel. i--i--was discontented at home, and i----" "we met first at graham's house," said mackenzie, "when you were there. i first spoke to her alone on sunday afternoon, and she promised to come away and marry me on sunday night. now go on." "that was when you told graham that you couldn't sleep, i suppose, in the middle of the night." "i walked over from mountfield, and she came to me in the garden, as i had asked her to. we were together about three minutes." dick addressed cicely again, still with the same cold authority. "you were discontented at home. you can tell me why afterwards. you meet this man and hear him bragging of his great deeds, and when he takes you by surprise and asks you to marry him, you are first of all rather frightened, and then you think it would be an adventure to go off with him. is that it?" "it's near enough," said mackenzie, "except that i don't brag." "i've got my own ears," said dick, still facing cicely. "well, i dare say the sort of people you're used to don't seem much beside a man who gets himself photographed on picture postcards, but i'll tell you a few of the things we don't do. we don't go and stay in our friends' houses and then rob them. you belonged to jim. you'd promised him, and this man knew it. we don't go to other men's houses and eat their salt and make love to their daughters behind their backs. we don't tell mean lies. we don't ask young girls to sneak out of their homes to meet us in the middle of the night. we respect the women we want to marry, we don't compromise them. if this man had been a fit husband for you, he would have asked for you openly. it's just because he knows he isn't that he brings all his weight to bear upon you, and you alone. he doesn't dare to face your father or your brothers." cicely had sunk down into her chair again. her head was bent, but her eyes were dry now. mackenzie had listened to him with his face set and his lips pressed together. what he thought of the damaging indictment, whether it showed him his actions in a fresh light, or only heightened his resentment, nobody could have told. "have you finished what you have to say?" he asked. "not quite," replied dick. "listen to me, cicely." "yes, and then listen to me," said mackenzie. "what sort of treatment do you think you're going to get from a man who has behaved like that? he's ready to give you a hole-and-corner marriage. he wants you for the moment, and he'll do anything to get you. he'll get tired of you in a few weeks, and then he'll go off to the other side of the world and where will _you_ be? how much thought has he given to _your_ side of the bargain? he's ready to cut you off from your own people--_he_ doesn't care. he takes you from a house like kencote and brings you here. he's lied to jim, who treated him like a friend, and he's behaved like a cad to us who let him into our house. he's done all these things in a few days. how are you going to spend your life with a fellow like that?" cicely looked up. her face was firmer, and she spoke to mackenzie. "we had begun to talk about all these things," she said. "i asked you a question which you didn't answer. did you know when you told me you were going back to tibet in a fortnight and there wasn't time to--to ask father for me, that you weren't going until next year?" "no, i didn't," said mackenzie. "when did he tell you that?" asked dick. "on sunday." "i can find that out for you easily enough. i shouldn't take an answer from him." again, for a fraction of a second, mackenzie's face was deadly, but he said quietly to cicely, "i have answered your question. go on." "you know why i did what you asked me," she said. "i thought you were offering me a freer life and that i should share in all your travels and dangers. you told me just before my brother came in that you didn't want me for that." "i told you," said mackenzie, speaking to her as if no one else had been in the room, "that you _would_ have a freer life, but that i shouldn't risk your safety by taking you into dangerous places. i told you that i would do all that a man could do to protect and honour his chosen wife, and that's god's truth. i told you that i would make you happy. that i know i can do, and i will do. your brother judges me by the fiddling little rules he and the like of him live by. he calls himself a gentleman, and says i'm not one. i know i'm not his kind of a gentleman. i've no wish to be; i'm something bigger. i've got my own honour. _you_ know how i've treated you. your own mother couldn't have been more careful of you. and so i'll treat you to the end of the chapter when you give me the right to. you can't go back now; it's too late. you see how this precious brother of yours looks at you, after what you have done. you'll be sorry if you throw yourself into _his_ hands again. show some pluck and send him about his business. you can trust yourself to me. you won't regret it." the shadow of his spell was over her again. she hesitated once more and dick's face became hard and angry. "before you decide," he said, "let me tell you this, that if you do marry this fellow you will never come to kencote again or see any of us as long as you live." "you won't see your eldest brother," said mackenzie. "i'll take care of that. but you _will_ see those you want to see. i'll see to that too. it's time to end this. i keep you to your word. you said you were mine, and you meant it. i don't release you from your promise." cicely's calm broke down. "oh, i don't know what to do," she cried. "i did promise." "i keep you to your promise," said mackenzie inexorably. then jim, who had kept silence all this time, spoke at last. "cicely," he said, "have you forgotten that you made _me_ a promise?" "o jim," she said, without looking at him, "don't speak to me. i have behaved very badly to you." "you never wanted to marry him," said mackenzie roughly. "he's not the husband for a girl of any spirit." jim made no sign of having heard him. his face was still turned towards cicely. "it has been my fault," he said. "i've taken it all for granted. but i've never thought about anybody else, cicely." mackenzie wouldn't allow him to make his appeal as he had allowed dick. "he has had five years to take you in," he said. "he told me so. and he hasn't taken you because he might have less money to spend on himself, till he'd paid off his rates and taxes. he told me that too. he can afford to keep half a dozen horses and a house full of servants. he can't afford a wife!" he spoke with violent contempt. dick gazed at him steadily with contemptuous dislike. "this is the fellow that invited himself to your house, jim," he said. "let me speak now, dick," said jim, with decision. "he can't touch me, and i don't care if he does. he's nothing at all. i won't bother you. cicely, my dear. i've always loved you and i always shall. but----" "no, he won't bother you," interrupted mackenzie with a sneer. "he's quite comfortable." "but you will know i'm there when you are ready to be friends again. if i haven't told you before i'll tell you now. i've kept back all i've felt for you, but i've never changed and i shan't change. this won't make any difference, except that----" "except that he's lost you and i've won you," mackenzie broke in. "he's had his chance and he's missed it. you don't want to be worried with his drivel." cicely looked up at mackenzie. "let him speak," she said, with some indignation. "i have listened to all you have said." mackenzie's attitude relaxed suddenly. after a searching glance at her he shrugged his shoulders and turned aside. he took up his grey kid gloves lying on the table and played with them. "i don't blame you for this--not a bit," said jim, "and i never shall. whatever you want i'll try and give you." "o jim, i can't marry you now," said cicely, her head turned from him. "but you are very kind." she broke into tears again, more tempestuous than before. her strength was nearly at an end. "i've told you that i shan't worry you," jim said. "but you mustn't marry this man without thinking about it. you must talk to your mother--she'll be heart-broken if you go away from her like this." "oh, does she want me back?" cried cicely. "yes, she does. you must go up to muriel now. she'll want you too. and you needn't go home till you want to." "i shall never be able to go home again," she said. mackenzie threw his gloves on to the table. "do you want to go home?" he asked her. his voice had lost that insistent quality. he spoke as if he was asking her whether she would like to take a walk, in a tone almost pleasant. "i want to go away," she said doggedly. "then you may go," said mackenzie, still in the same easy voice. "i wanted you, and if we had been in a country where men behave like men, i would have had you. but i see i'm up against the whole pudding weight of british respectability, and i own it's too strong for me. we could have shifted it together, but you're not the girl to go in with a man. i'll do without you." "you had better come now, cicely," said dick. mackenzie gave a great laugh, with a movement of his whole body as if he were throwing off a weight. "shake hands before you go," he said, as she rose obediently. "you're making a mistake, you know; but i don't altogether wonder at it. if i'd had a day longer they should never have taken you away. i nearly got you, as it was." cicely put her hand into his and looked him squarely in the face. "good-bye," she said. "you thought too little of me after all. if you had really been willing for me to share your life, i think i would have stayed with you." his face changed at that. he fixed her with a look, but she took her hand out of his and turned away. "i am ready, dick," she said, and again he shrugged his broad shoulders. "i wish i had it to do over again," he said. "well, gentlemen, you have won and i have lost. i don't often lose, but when i do i don't whine about it. you can make your minds easy. not a word about this shall pass my lips." dick turned round suddenly. "will you swear that?" he asked. "oh, yes, if you like. i mean it." dick and cicely went out of the room. "well, graham, i hope you'll get her now i've lost her," said mackenzie. jim took no notice of him, but went out after the other two. chapter xviii after the storm cicely had an air at once ashamed and defiant as she stepped up into the cab. dick gave the cabman the address. "see you to-night, then," he said to jim. it had been arranged between them that when cicely had been rescued jim should fall out, as it were, for a time. "good-bye, cicely," he said. "give my love to walter and muriel," and walked off down the pavement. "you can tell me now," said dick, when the cab had started, "what went wrong with you to make you do such a thing as that." "i'm not going to tell you anything," said cicely. "i know i have made a mistake, and i know you will punish me for it--you and father and the boys. you can do what you like, but i'm not going to help you." tears of self-pity stood in her eyes, and her face was now very white and tired, but very childish too. dick was struck with some compunction. "i dare say you have had enough for the present," he said, not unkindly. "but how you could!--a low-bred swine like that!" cicely set her lips obstinately. she knew very well that this weapon would be used freely in what she had called her punishment. men like dick sifted other men with a narrow mesh. a good many of those whom a woman might accept and even admire, if left to herself, would not pass through it. certainly mackenzie wouldn't. she would have had to suffer for running away, but she would suffer far more for running away with "a bounder." and what made it harder was that, although she didn't know it yet, in the trying battle that had just been waged over her, the sieve of her own perceptions had narrowed, and mackenzie, now, would not have passed through that. she would presently be effectually punished there, if dick and the rest should leave her alone entirely. dick suddenly realised that he was ravenously desirous of a cigarette, and having lit one and inhaled a few draughts of smoke, felt the atmosphere lighter. "by jove, that was a tussle," he said. "he's a dangerous fellow, that. you'll thank me, some day, cicely, for getting you away from him." "you didn't get me away," said cicely. "you had nothing whatever to do with it." "eh?" said dick. "if you had been just a little kind i would have come with you the moment you came into the room. i was longing for some one from home. you made it the hardest thing in the world for me to come. if i had stayed with him it would have been your fault. i'll never forgive you for the way you treated me, dick. and you may do what you like to me now, and father may do what he likes. nothing can be worse than that." she poured out her words hurriedly, and only the restraint that comes with a seat in a hansom cab within full view of the populace of camden town prevented her bursting into hysterical tears. dick would rather have ridden up to the mouth of a cannon than drive through crowded streets with a woman making a scene, so he said, "oh, for god's sake keep quiet now," and kept quiet himself, with something to think about. presently he said, "no one knows at home yet that you aren't with muriel. you've got me to thank for that, at any rate." cicely blushed with her sudden great relief, but went pale again directly. "i wrote to mother," she said. "she would get the letter early this morning." "i've got the letter in my pocket," said dick. "she hasn't seen it." "you opened my letter to mother!" she exclaimed. "yes, i did, and lucky for you too. it was how we found you." she let that pass. it was of no interest to her then to learn by what chance they had found her. "then do you really mean that they don't know at home?" she asked eagerly. "they know you have gone to muriel--you'll be there in half an hour--and nothing else." "o dick, then you won't tell them," she cried, her hand on his sleeve. "you can't be so cruel as to tell them." she had the crowded streets to thank for dick's quick answer, "i'm not going to tell them. do, for heaven's sake, keep quiet." she leant back against the cushions. she had the giddy feeling of a man who has slipped on the verge of a great height, and saved himself. "you'll have plenty to answer for as it is," said dick, with a short laugh. "you've run away, though you've only run away to muriel. you won't get let down easily." she was not dismayed at that. the other peril, surmounted, was so crushingly greater. and there had been reasons for her running away, even if she had not run away to mackenzie. she stood by them later and they helped her to forget mackenzie's share in the flight. but now she could only lean back and taste the blessed relief that dick had given her. "do walter and muriel know i am coming?" she asked. "i sent them a wire from ganton this morning to say that i should probably bring you, and they weren't to answer a wire from home, if one came, till they had heard from me. you've made me stretch my brains since last night, cicely. you'd have been pretty well in the ark if it hadn't been for me." "you didn't help me for my own sake though," said cicely. both of them spoke as if they were carrying on a conversation about nothing in particular. their capacity for disturbing discussion was exhausted for the time. cicely felt a faint anticipatory pleasure in going to muriel's new house, and dick said, "this must be melbury park. funny sort of place to find your relations in!" but adelaide avenue, to which the cabman had been directed, did not quite bear out the squire's impressions, nor even the rector's, of the dreary suburb; and lying, as it did, behind the miles of shop-fronts, mean or vulgarly inviting, which they had traversed, and away from the business of the great railway which gave the name of melbury park, its sole significance to many besides the squire, it seemed quiet, and even inviting. it curved between a double row of well-grown limes. each house, or pair of houses, had a little garden in front and a bigger one behind, and most of the houses were of an earlier date than the modern red brick suburban villa. they were ugly enough, with their stucco fronts and the steps leading up to their front doors, but they were respectable and established, and there were trees behind them, and big, if dingy, shrubs inside their gates. walter's house stood at a corner where a new road had been cut through. this was lined on each side with a row of two-storied villas behind low wooden palings, of which the owner, in describing them, had taken liberties with the name of queen anne. but walter's house and the one adjoining it in the avenue, though built in the same style, or with the same lack of it, were much bigger, and had divided between them an old garden of a quarter of an acre, which, although it would have been nothing much at kencote, almost attained to the dignity of "grounds" at melbury park. there was a red lamp by the front gate, and as they drew up before it, muriel came out under a gabled porch draped with virginia creeper and hurried to welcome them to her married home. she looked blooming, as a bride should, even on this hot august day in london. she wore a frock of light holland, and it looked somehow different from the frocks of holland or of white drill which cicely had idly observed in some numbers as she had driven through the streets and roads of the suburb. she had a choking sensation as she saw muriel's eager face, and her neat dress, just as she might have worn it at home. "hullo, dick," said muriel. "walter will be in to lunch. o cicely, it _is_ jolly to see you again. but where's your luggage? you've come to stay. why, you're looking miserable, my dear! what on earth's the matter? and what did mr. clinton's telegram mean, and dick's? we haven't wired yet, but we must." they had walked up the short garden path, leaving dick to settle with the cabman, who had been nerving himself for a tussle, and was surprised to find it unnecessary. "i'm in disgrace, muriel," said cicely. "i'll tell you all about it when we are alone, if dick doesn't first." muriel threw a penetrating look at her and then turned to dick, who said, with a grin, "this is the drive, is it, muriel?" "you are not going to laugh at my house, dick," said muriel. "you'll be quite as comfortable here as anywhere. come in. this is the hall." "no, not really?" said dick. "by jove!" it was not much of a hall, the style of queen anne as adapted to the requirements of melbury park not being accustomed to effloresce in halls; but a green morris paper, a blue morris carpet, and white enamelled woodwork had brought it into some grudging semblance of welcoming a visitor. the more cultured ladies of melbury park in discussing it had called it "artistic, but slightly _bizarre_," a phrase which was intended to combine a guarded appreciation of novelty with a more solid preference for sanitary wallpaper, figured oilcloth and paint of what they called "dull art colours." "look at my callers," said muriel, indicating a china bowl on a narrow mahogany table that was full to the brim with visiting cards. "i can assure you i'm the person to know here. no sniffing at a doctor's wife in melbury park, dick." "by jove!" said dick. "you're getting into society." "my dear dick, don't i tell you, i _am_ society. oh, good gracious, i was forgetting. walter told me to send a telegram to kencote the very moment you came. mr. clinton wired at eight o'clock this morning and it's half-past twelve now." cicely turned away, and dick became serious again. "where's the wire?" he asked. "i'll answer it." "come into walter's room," said muriel, "there are forms there." "i wonder he hasn't wired again," said dick, and as he spoke a telegraph boy came up to the open door. "cannot understand why no reply to telegram. excessively annoyed. wire at once.--edward clinton," ran the squire's second message, and his first, which muriel handed to dick: "is cicely with you. most annoyed. wire immediately.--edward clinton." "i'll soothe him," said dick, and he wrote, "cicely here. wanted change. is writing. walter's reply must have miscarried.--dick." "another lie," he said composedly. "i want some clothes sent, please, dick," said cicely in a constrained voice. "better tell 'em to send miles up," said dick, considering. "no, i don't want miles," said cicely, and dick added, "please tell miles send cicely clothes for week this afternoon." "i suppose you can put her up for a week, muriel," he said. "i'll put her up for a month, if she'll stay," said muriel, putting her arm into cicely's, and the amended telegram was despatched. "now come and see my drawing-room," said muriel, "and then you can look after yourself, dick, till walter comes home, and i will take cicely to her room." the drawing-room opened on to a garden, wonderfully green and shady considering where it was. the white walls and the chintz-covered chairs and sofa had again struck the cultured ladies of melbury park as "artistic but slightly _bizarre_," but the air of richness imparted by the numberless hymeneal offerings of walter's and muriel's friends and relations had given them a pleasant subject for conversation. their opinion was that it was a mistake to have such valuable things lying about, but if "the doctor" collected them and took them up to put under his bed every night it would not so much matter. "they all tell me that dr. pringle used this room as a dining-room," said muriel. "it is the first thing they say, and it breaks the ice. we get on wonderfully well after that; but it is a pretty room, isn't it, dick?" she had her arm in cicely's, and pressed it sometimes as she talked, but she did not talk to her. "it's an uncommonly pretty room," said dick. "might be in grosvenor square. where did you and walter get your ideas of furnishing from, muriel? we don't run to this sort of thing at kencote and mountfield. content with what our forefathers have taught us, eh?" "oh, we know what's what, all right," said muriel. "we have seen a few pretty rooms, between us. now i'm going to take cicely upstairs. you can wander about if you like, dick, and there are cigarettes and things in walter's room." "i'll explore the gay parterre," said dick. then he turned to cicely and took hold of her chin between his thumb and finger. "look here, don't you worry any more, old lady," he said kindly. "you've been a little fool, and you've had a knock. tell muriel about it and i'll tell walter. nobody else need know." she clung to him, crying. "o dick," she said, "if you had only spoken to me like that at first!" "well, if i had," said dick, "i should have been in a devil of a temper now. as it is i've worked it off. there, run along. you've nothing to cry for now." he kissed her, which was an unusual attention on his part, and went through the door into the garden. muriel and cicely went upstairs together. dick soon exhausted the possibilities of the garden and went into the house again and into walter's room. it had red walls and a turkey carpet. there was a big american desk, a sofa and easy-chairs and three chippendale chairs, all confined in rather a small space. there was a low bookcase along one wall, and above it framed school and college photographs; on the other walls were prints from pictures at kencote. they were the only things in the room, except the ornaments on the mantelpiece, and a table with a heavy silver cigarette box, and other smoking apparatus, that lightened its workmanlike air. but dick was not apt to be affected by the air of a room. he sat down in the easy-chair and stretched his long legs in front of him, and thought over the occurrences of the morning. he was rather surprised to find himself in so equable a frame of mind. his anger against cicely had gradually worked up since the previous evening until, when he had seen her in the room with mackenzie, he could have taken her by the shoulders and shaken her, with clenched teeth. she had done a disgraceful thing; she, a girl, had taken the sacred name of clinton in her hands and thrown it to the mob to worry. that he had skilfully caught and saved it before it had reached them did not make her crime any the less. but he could not now regain--he tested his capacity to regain, out of curiosity--his feeling of outraged anger against her. curious that, in the train, he had felt no very great annoyance against mackenzie. he asked himself if he hadn't gone rather near to admiring the decisive stroke he had played, which few men would have attempted on such an almost complete lack of opportunity. but face to face with him his dislike and resentment had flared up. his anger now came readily enough when he thought of mackenzie, and he found himself wishing ardently for another chance of showing it effectively. it was this, no doubt, that had softened him towards his little sister, whom he loved in his patronising way. the fellow had got hold of her. she was a little fool, but it was the man who was to blame. and his own resource had averted the danger of scandal, which he dreaded like any woman. he could not but be rather pleased with himself for the way in which he had carried through his job, and cicely gained the advantage of his self-commendation. there was one thing, though--his father must never know. the fat would be in the fire then with a vengeance. turning over these things in his mind, dick dropped off into a light doze, from which he was awakened by the entrance of walter. walter wore a tall hat and a morning coat. it was august and it was very hot, and in bond street he would have worn a flannel suit and a straw hat. but if he did that here his patients would think that _he_ thought anything good enough for them. there were penalties attached to the publication of that list of wedding presents in the _melbury park chronicle and north london intelligencer_, and he had been warned of these and sundry other matters. he was not free of the tiresome side-issues of his profession even in melbury park. "hullo, dick, old chap!" he said as he came in with cheerful alacrity. "is cicely here, and what has happened?" "hullo, walter!" said dick. "yes, cicely is here and i have wired to the governor. she has led us a nice dance, that young woman. but it's all over now." "what has she done? run away with some fellow?" "that's just what she did do. if i hadn't been pretty quick off the post she'd have been married to him by this time." walter sat down in the chair at his writing-table. his face had grown rather serious. he looked as if he were prepared to receive the confidences of a patient. "who did she go off with?" he asked. dick took a cigarette from the silver box, and lit it. "mr. ronald mackenzie," he said, as he threw the match into the fireplace. "ronald mackenzie! where did she pick _him_ up?" "he picked her up. he was staying at mountfield." "i know, but he must have seen her before. he can't have persuaded her in five minutes." "just what i thought. but he did; damn him!" then he told walter everything that had happened, in his easy, leisurely way. "and the great thing now is to keep it from the governor," he ended up. "really, it's pretty strong," said walter, after a short pause. "fancy cicely! i can't see her doing a thing like that." "i could have boxed her ears with pleasure when i first heard of it," said dick. "but somehow i don't feel so annoyed with her now. poor little beggar! i suppose it's getting her away from that brute. he'd frightened her silly. he nearly got her, even when we were there fighting him." "but what about poor old jim?" asked walter. "it's too bad of her, you know, dick. she was engaged to jim." "well, it was a sort of engagement. but i don't blame her much there. if jim had gone off and married some other girl i don't know that any of us would have been very surprised." "i should." "well, you know him better than i do, of course. i must say, when he told me in the train coming up that he was as much struck on cicely as ever, it surprised me. he's a funny fellow." "he's one of the best," said walter. "but he keeps his feelings to himself. he has always talked to me about cicely, but i know he hasn't talked to anybody else, because muriel was just as surprised as you were when i told her how the land lay." "he told mackenzie--that's the odd thing," said dick. "did he?" "yes. it makes the beast's action all the worse." "well, i don't understand that. perhaps he had a suspicion and gave him a warning." "i don't think so. he let him go off after her on sunday afternoon, and didn't think anything of it. however, he's had a shaking up. he won't let her go now." "does he want to marry her still?" "o lord, yes, more than ever. that's something to be thankful for. it will keep the governor quiet if we can hurry it on a bit." "but he's not to know." "he knows she ran away here, without bringing any clothes. that's got to be explained. it's enough for the governor, isn't it?" "i should think so. enough to go on with. didn't jim want to throttle that fellow?" "he did before we got there, but he knew he couldn't do anything. it would only have come back on cicely. he behaved jolly well, jim did. he didn't take the smallest notice of mackenzie from first to last, but he talked to cicely like a father. _she_ says--_i_ don't say it, mind you--that it was jim who got her away from him; she wouldn't have come for me." dick laughed. "i dare say we both had something to do with it," he said. "i got in a few home truths. i think mr. ronald mackenzie will be rather sorry he came poaching on our land when he turns it over in his mind." "well," said walter, rising, as the luncheon bell rang, "it's a funny business altogether. you must tell me more later. like a wash, dick? is cicely going to stay here for a bit?" "oh, yes," replied dick, as they went out of the room. "muriel says she'll keep her. we've wired for clothes." he lowered his voice as they went upstairs. "you must go easy with her a bit, you and muriel," he said. "she's been touched on the raw. you'll find her in rather an excited state." "oh, i shan't worry her," said walter. "but i think she's behaved badly to jim all the same." but walter's manner towards his erring sister, when they met in the dining-room, showed no sign of his feelings, if they were resentful on behalf of his friend. she was there with muriel when he and dick came down. she was pale, and it was plain that she had been crying, but the parlour-maid was standing by the sideboard, and the two girls were talking by the window as if they had not just come from a long talk which had disturbed them both profoundly. "well, cicely," said walter. "come to see us at last! you don't look very fit, but you've come to the right man to cure you." cicely kissed him gratefully, and they sat down at the table. the dining-room was sheraton--good sheraton. on the walls were a plain blue paper and some more prints. the silver and glass on the fresh cloth and on the sideboard were as bright as possible, for muriel's parlour-maid was a treasure. she earned high wages, or she would not have demeaned herself by going into service at melbury park, where, however, she had a young man. the cook was also a treasure, and the luncheon she served up would not have disgraced kencote, where what is called "a good table" was kept. it was all great fun--to muriel, and would have been to cicely too at any other time. the little house was beautifully appointed, and "run" more in the style of a little house in mayfair than in melbury park. muriel, at any rate, was completely happy in her surroundings. they drank their coffee in the veranda outside the drawing-room window. they could hear the trains and the trams in the distance, and it seemed to be a favourite pursuit of the youths of melbury park to rattle sticks along the oak fencing of the garden, but otherwise they were shut in in a little oasis of green and could not be seen or overheard by anybody. there were certain things to be said, but no one seemed now to wish to refer to cicely's escapade, the sharp effect of which had been over-laid by the ordinary intercourse of the luncheon table. it was cicely herself who broke the ice. she asked dick nervously when he was going back to kencote. "oh, to-morrow, i think," said dick. "nothing to stay up here for." muriel said, "cicely would like mrs. clinton to come up. she doesn't want to ask her in her letter. will you ask her, dick?" dick hesitated. "do you want to tell mother--about it?" he asked of cicely. "yes," she said. "well, i think you had much better not. it'll only worry her, and she need never know." "i am going to tell her," said cicely doggedly. "i wouldn't mind your telling her, if you want to," said dick, after a pause, "but it's dangerous. if the governor suspected anything and got it out of her----" "oh, she wouldn't tell mr. clinton," said muriel. "i think cicely is quite right to tell her. don't you, walter?" "i suppose so," said walter. "but i think it's a risk. i quite agree with dick. it _must_ be kept from the governor. it's for your own sake, you know, cicely." "none of you boys know mother in the least," said cicely, in some excitement. "she's a woman, and so you think she doesn't count at all. she counts a great deal to me, and i want her." "all right, my dear," said walter kindly. "we only want to do what's best for you. don't upset yourself. and you're all right with muriel and me, you know." "you're both awfully kind," said cicely, more calmly, "and so is dick now. but i do want mother to come, and i _know_ she wouldn't tell father." "i know it too," said muriel. "i will write to her to-night and ask her; only we thought mr. clinton might make some objection, and you could get over that, dick." "oh, i'll get over that all right," said dick. "very well, she shall come. do you want me to tell her anything, cicely, or leave it all to you?" "you can tell her what i did," said cicely in a low voice. "all right. i'll break it gently. now are we all going to lord's, or are you two going to stay at home?" "cicely is going to lie down," said muriel, "and i think i will stay at home and look after her." she threw rather a longing look at walter. he didn't often allow himself a half holiday, and she liked to spend them with him. "don't stay for me, muriel," cicely besought her. "i shall be perfectly all right, and i'd really rather be alone." "no," said muriel, after another look at walter. "i'm going to stay at home." and she wouldn't be moved. walter telephoned for his new motor-car and changed his clothes. "do you know why muriel wouldn't come with us?" he asked, when he and dick were on their way. "it was because she thought you and i would rather sit in the pavilion." "so we would," said dick, with a laugh. "but she's a trump, that girl." chapter xix the whole house upset the twins arose betimes on the morning after cicely's flight, determined, as was their custom, to enjoy whatever excitement, legal, or within limits illegal, was to be wrested from a long new summer day, but quite unaware that the whole house around them was humming with excitement already. for upon dick's departure the night before the squire had thrown caution to the winds, and be-stirred himself, as he said, to get to the bottom of things. not content with mrs. clinton's report of miles's statement, which was simply that she knew nothing, he had "had miles up" and cross-examined her himself. he had then had probin up, the head coachman, who would have known if cicely had been driven to the station, which it was fairly obvious she had not been. he also had porter the butler up, more because porter was always had up if anything went wrong in the house than because he could be expected to throw any light on what had happened. and when the groom came back from mountfield with dick's note to mrs. clinton, late as it was, he had _him_ up, and sent him down again to spread his news and his suspicions busily, although he had been threatened with instant dismissal if he said a word to anybody. having thus satisfied himself of what he knew already, that cicely had walked to the station and had taken no luggage with her, and having opened up the necessary channels of information, so that outdoor and indoor servants alike now knew that cicely had run away and that her father was prepared, as the phrase went, to raise cain about it, the squire went up to bed, and breaking his usual healthy custom of going to sleep immediately he laid his head on his pillow, rated mrs. clinton soundly for not noticing what was going on under her very nose. "i can't look after everything in the house and out of it too," he ended up. "i shall be expected to see that the twins change their stockings when they get their feet wet, next. good-night, nina. god bless you." so, to return to the twins; when the schoolroom maid came to awaken them in the morning and found them, as was usual, nearly dressed, they learned, for the first time, what had been happening while they had slept, all unconscious. "why can't you call us in proper time, hannah?" said joan, as she came in. "we told you we wanted our hot water at half-past three, and it has just struck seven. you'll have to go if you can't get up in time." hannah deposited a tray containing two large cups of tea and some generous slices of bread and butter on a table and said importantly, "it's no time to joke now, miss joan. there's miss clinton missing, and most of us kep' awake half the night wondering what's come of her." hannah had not before succeeded in making an impression upon her young mistresses, but she succeeded now. joan and nancy stared at her with open eyes, and gave her time to heighten her effects as they redounded to her own importance. "but i can't stop talking now, miss," she said. "i'll just get your 'ot water and then i must go and 'elp. here i stop wasting me time, and don't know that something hadn't 'appened and i may be wanted." "you're wanted here," said joan. "what do you mean--miss clinton missing? has she gone away?" "i'll just tell you what i know, miss joan," said hannah, "and then i must go downstairs and 'elp. i was going along the passage by the room last night, jest when they was ready to take in dinner, and mr. porter came along and says to me, 'what are _you_ doing here?' well, of course, i was struck all of a 'eap, because----" "oh, don't let's waste time with her," interrupted nancy, "let's go and ask miss bird what it's all about." "wait a minute, miss nancy," cried hannah. "i was telling you----" but the twins were at the door. "lock her in," said joan. "we shall want her when we come back." and they locked her in, to the great damage of her dignity, and went along the passage to the room which had sheltered miss bird's virgin slumbers for nearly thirty years. they were at first refused admission, but upon joan's saying in a clear voice outside the door, "we want to know about cicely. if you won't tell us we must go and ask the servants," miss bird unlocked the door, and was discovered in a dressing-gown of pink flannel with her hair in curl papers. the twins were too eager for news to remark upon these phenomena, and allowed miss bird to get back into bed while they sat at the foot of it to hear her story. "well, you must know some time," said miss bird, "and to say that you will ask the servants is _not_ the way to behave as you know very well and i am the proper person to come to." "well, we have come to you," said joan, "only you wouldn't let us in. now tell us. has cicely run away?" "really, joan, that is a most foolish question," said miss bird, "to call it running away to visit walter and muriel her _own_ brother and sister too as you might say and that is all and i suppose it is that hannah who has been putting ideas into your head for i came in to see you last night and you knew nothing but were both in a _sweet_ sleep and i often think that if you could see yourselves then you would be more careful how you behave and especially nancy for it is innocence and goodness itself and a pity that it can't be so sleeping _and_ waking." "i've seen joan asleep and she looked like a stuck pig," said nancy. "but what _has_ happened, starling darling? do tell us. has cicely just gone up to stay with muriel? is that all?" "it is very inconsiderate of cicely," said miss bird, "nobody could _possibly_ have objected to her going to stay with muriel and miles would have packed her clothes and gone up to london with her to look after her and to go by herself without a _word_ and not take a _stitch_ to put on her back and mr. clinton in the greatest anxiety and very naturally annoyed for with all the horses in the stable to walk to bathgate in this heat for from kencote she did _not_ go one of the men was sent there to inquire i wonder at her doing such a thing." "keep the facts in your head as they come, joan," said nancy. "she didn't tell anybody she was going. she didn't take any clothes. she walked to bathgate, i suppose, to put them off the scent." "but whatever did she do it for?" asked joan. "something must have upset her. it is running away, you know. i wish she had told us about it." "we'd have gone with her," said nancy. "she must have done it for a lark." "oh, don't be a fool," said joan. this was one of the twins' formulæ. it meant, "there _are_ serious things in life," and was more often used by joan than by nancy. "joan how often am i to tell you not to use that expression?" said miss bird, "i may speak to the winds of heaven for all the effect it has don't you know that it says he that calleth his brother thou fool shall be in danger of hell fire?" "nancy isn't my brother, and i'll take the risk," said joan. "didn't cicely tell mother that she was going?" "no she did not and for that i blame her," said miss bird. "mrs. clinton came to me in the schoolroom as i was finishing my dinner and although her calmness is a lesson to all of us she was upset as i could see and did my _very_ best to persuade her not to worry." "it's too bad of cicely," said joan. "what are they going to do now?" "your brother dick went up to london by the late train and a telegram was to be sent the _first_ thing this morning to relieve all anxiety though with muriel no harm can come to cicely if she got there safely which i hope and trust may be the case although to go about london by herself is a thing that she knows she would not be allowed to do, but there i'm saying a great deal too much to you joan 'n nancy you must not run away with ideas in your head cicely no doubt has a _very_ good reason for what she has done and she is _years_ older than both of you and you must not ask troublesome questions when you go downstairs the only way you can help is by holding your tongues and being good girls." "oh, of course, that's the moral of it," said nancy. "if the roof were to fall in all we should have to do would be to be good girls and it would get stuck on again. joan, i'm hungry; i must go and finish my bread and butter." "thank you, starling darling, for telling us," said joan, rising from her seat on the bed. "it seems very odd, but i dare say we shall get to the bottom of it somehow. of course we shan't be able to do any lessons to-day." "oh, indeed joan the very _best_ thing we can do to show we----" began miss bird, but the twins were already out of the room. they had to wait some little time before they could satisfy their curiosity any further, because, in spite of their threat to miss bird, and the excellent relations upon which they stood with all the servants in the house, they were not in the habit of discussing family affairs with them, and this was a family affair of somewhat portentous bearings. they kept hannah busy about their persons and refused to let her open her mouth until they were quite dressed, and when they had let themselves loose on the house for the day paid a visit to cicely's room. its emptiness and the untouched bed sobered them a little. "what _did_ she do it for?" exclaimed joan, as they stood before the dressing-table upon which all the pretty silver toilette articles lying just as usual seemed to give the last unaccountable touch of reality to the sudden flight. "nancy, do you think it could have been because she didn't want to marry jim?" "or because jim didn't want to marry her," suggested nancy. but neither suggestion carried conviction. they looked about them and had nothing to say. their sister, who in some ways was so near to them, had in this receded immeasurably from their standpoint. they were face to face with one of those mysterious happenings amongst grown ups of which the springs were outside the world as they knew it. and cicely was grown up, and she and they, although there was so much that they had in common, were different, not only in the amount but in the quality of their experience of life. they always went in to their mother at eight o'clock, but were not allowed to go before. they did not want to go out of doors while so much was happening within, nor to stay in their schoolroom, which was the last place to which news would be brought; so they perambulated the hall and the downstairs rooms and got in the way of the maids who were busy with them. and at a quarter to eight were surprised by their father's entrance into the library, where they happened to be sitting for the moment. their surprise was no greater than his, nor was it so effectively expressed. he saw at once, and said so, that they were up to some mischief, and he would not have it, did they understand that? "we were only sitting talking, father," said joan. "there was nowhere else to go." "i won't have this room used as a common sitting-room," said the squire. "now go, and don't let me catch you in here again." the twins went out into the big hall. "why couldn't you cry a little at being spoke to like that?" said nancy. "he would have told us everything." "that's worn out," replied joan. "the last time i did it he only said, 'for god's sake don't begin to snivel.' besides i was rather frightened." just then the squire opened his door suddenly. the twins both jumped. but he only said, "oh, you're there. come in here, and shut the door." they went in. "now look here," said the squire, "you are old enough now to look at things in a sensible light. i suppose you have heard that your sister has taken it upon herself to take herself off without a with your leave or by your leave and has turned the whole house topsy-turvy--eh?" "yes, father," said the twins dutifully. "who told you--eh?" "miss bird, father." "i wish miss bird would mind her own business," said the squire. "what did she tell you for?" "because she wanted us to be good girls, and not worry you with questions," replied nancy. "oh! well, that's all right," said the squire, mollified. "now what i want to know is--did cicely say anything to either of you about going away like this?" "oh no, father," replied the twins, with one voice. "well, i'm determined to get to the bottom of it. no daughter of mine shall behave in that way in this house. here's everything a girl can want to make her happy--it's the ingratitude of it that i can't put up with, and so miss cicely shall find when she condescends to come home, as she shall do if i have to go to fetch her myself." neither of the twins saw her way to interpose a remark. they stood in front of their father as they stood in front of miss bird in the schoolroom when they "did repetition." "do either of you know if cicely wasn't contented or anything of that sort?" inquired the squire. "she has been rather off her oats since muriel was married," said joan. "eh! what's that!" exclaimed the squire, bending his heavy brows on her with a terrific frown. "do you think this is a time to play the fool--with me? off her oats! how dare you speak like that? we shall have you running away next." joan's face began to pucker up. "i didn't mean anything, father," she said in a tremulous voice. "i heard you say it the other day." "there, there, child, don't cry," said the squire. "what i may say and what you may say are two very different things. off her oats, eh? well, she'd better get _on_ her oats again as quick as possible. now, i won't have you children talking about this, do you understand?--or miss bird either. it's a most disagreeable thing to have happened, and if it gets out i shall be very much annoyed. i don't want the servants to know, and i trust you two not to go about wagging your tongues, do you hear?" "o father, we shouldn't think of saying anything about it to anybody," exclaimed nancy. "eh? what? there's nothing to make a mystery about, you know. cicely has gone up to london to visit walter and muriel. no reason why anybody should know more than that. there _isn't_ any more to know, except what concerns me--and i won't have it. now don't interrupt me any more. go off and behave yourselves and don't get in the way. you've got the whole house to yourselves and i don't want you here. ring the bell, joan, i want porter to send a telegram." the twins departed. they could now go up to their mother. "don't want the servants to know!" said nancy as they went upstairs. "is it the camel or the dromedary that sticks its head in the sand?" "the ostrich," said joan. "it seems to me there's a great deal of fuss about nothing. cicely wanted to see her dear muriel, so she went and _saw_ her. i call it a touching instance of friendship." "and fidelity," added nancy. their view of the matter was not contradicted by anything that mrs. clinton did or said when they went in to her. she was already dressed and moving about the room, putting things to rights. it was a very big room, so big that even with the bed not yet made nor the washstand set in order, it did not look like a room that had just been slept in. it was over the dining-room and had three windows, before one of which was a table with books and writing materials on it. there were big, old-fashioned, cane-seated and backed easy-chairs, with hard cushions covered with chintz, other tables, a chintz-covered couch, a bookcase with diamond-paned glass doors. on the broad marble mantelpiece were an empire clock and some old china, and over it a long gilt mirror with a moulded device of lions drawing chariots and cupids flying above them. on the walls, hung with a faded paper of roses, were water-colour drawings, crayon portraits, some fine line engravings of well-known pictures, a few photographs in oxford frames. the bedroom furniture proper was of heavy mahogany, a four-post bed hung with white dimity, a wardrobe as big as a closet. nothing was modern except the articles on the dressing-table, nothing was very old. never later than eight o'clock the squire would rise and go into his dressing-room, and when mrs. clinton had dressed and in her orderly fashion tidied her room she would sit at her table and read until it was time to go down to breakfast. whenever he got up earlier she got up earlier too, and had longer to spend by the window open to the summer morning, or in the winter with her books on the table lit by candles. they were for the most part devotional books. but once the squire had come in to her very early one october morning when he was going cub-hunting and found her reading _the divine comedy_ with a translation and an italian dictionary and grammar. he had talked of it downstairs as a good joke: "mother reading dante--what?" and she had put away those books. she was a little paler than usual this morning, but the twins noticed no difference in her manner. she kissed them and said, "you have heard that cicely went to london yesterday to stay with muriel. father is anxious about her, and i am rather anxious too, but there is nothing really to worry about. we must all behave as usual, and two of us at least mustn't give any cause of complaint to-day." she said this with a smile. it was nothing but a repetition of miss bird's exhortation to hold their tongues and be good girls, but they embraced her, and made fervent promises of good behaviour, which they fully intended to keep. then they read something for a few minutes with their mother and left her to her own reading and her own thoughts. the morning post brought no letter from cicely, and again the squire remained standing while he read prayers. immediately after breakfast he went down to the rectory, ostensibly to warn tom and grace not to talk, actually to have an opportunity of talking himself to a fresh relay of listeners. he expressed his surprise in the same terms as he had already used, and said repeatedly that he wouldn't have it. then, as it was plain that, whether he would or no, he already had had it, he rather weakly asked the rector what he would do if he were in his place. "well, edward," said the rector thoughtfully, "of course it is very tiresome and all that, and cicely ought not to have gone off in that way without any warning. still, we don't know what is going on in girls' minds, do we? cicely is a sensible girl enough, and i think when she comes back if you were to leave it to nina to find out what there was to make her go off suddenly like that--well, how would that be, eh?" "i can't understand it," said the squire for the twentieth time. "nina knows no more about it all than i do. i can't help blaming her for that, because----" "o edward," said mrs. beach, "whoever is to blame, it is not nina. cicely is devoted to her, and so are the dear twins, for all their general harum-scarumness." "well, i was going to say," said the squire, who had been going to say something quite different, "that nina is very much upset about this. she takes everything calmly enough, as you know, but she's a good mother to her children--i will say that for her--and it's enough to upset any woman when her daughter behaves to her in this monstrous fashion." "how do you think it would be," asked the rector, "if nina were to go up to london and have a talk with cicely there?" the squire hummed and ha'd. "i don't see the sense of making more fuss about it than has been made already," he said. "i told nina this morning, 'if you go posting off to london,' i said, 'everybody will think that something dreadful has happened. much better stop where you are.'" "if she wants to go," said mrs. beach, "i think it would be the very best thing. she would bring cicely to a right frame of mind--nobody could do it better; and you would be at home, edward, to see that nothing was done here to complicate matters. i think that would be very important, and nobody could do that but you." "so you think it would be a good idea if i let nina go up to her?" said the squire. the rector and mrs. beach both thought it would be a very good idea. "well," said the squire, "i thought perhaps it would, but i hadn't quite made up my mind about it. i thought we'd better wait, at any rate, till we got an answer to my wire to walter. and that reminds me--i'd better be getting back. well, good-bye, tom, good-bye, my dear grace. of course i needn't ask either of _you_ not to let this go any further." the non-arrival of an answer to his message had a cumulative effect upon the squire's temper during the morning. at half-past eleven o'clock he gained some temporary relief to his discomfort by despatching another one, and did not entirely recover his balance until dick's telegram arrived about luncheon time. then he calmed down suddenly, joked with the twins over the table and told miss bird that she was getting younger every day. he also gave mrs. clinton her marching orders. "i think you had better go up, nina," he said, "and see what the young monkey has been after. i'm excessively annoyed with her, and you can tell her so; but if she really _is_ with walter and muriel i don't suppose any harm has come to her. i must say it's a relief. still, i'm very angry about it, and so she'll find out when she comes home." so another telegram was despatched, and mrs. clinton went up to london by the afternoon train accompanied by the discreet and faithful miles. chapter xx mrs. clinton that night cicely and her mother sat late together in mrs. clinton's bedroom. mrs. clinton was in a low easy-chair and cicely on a stool at her feet. outside was the continuous and restless echo of london pushing up to the very feet of its encircling hills, but they were as far removed from it in spirit as if they had been at home in still and spacious kencote. mrs. clinton had arrived at muriel's house in time for dinner. walter had come home from lord's soon enough to meet her at the station and bring her out in his motor-car. he had made miles sit in front with his servant and he had told his mother what dick would have told her if she had waited to come to cicely until after he had returned to kencote. she had listened to him in silence as he unfolded his story, making no comment even when he told her of dick's opening her daughter's letter to her; but when he told her that cicely had asked that she should be sent for she had clasped her hands and said, "oh, i am so glad." muriel had met her at the door, but cicely had stayed in the drawing-room, pale and downcast. she had gone in to her alone and kissed her and said, "i am glad you wanted your mother, my darling. you shall tell me everything to-night when we go upstairs, and we won't think about it any more until then." so the evening had passed almost pleasantly. at times even cicely must have forgotten what lay behind and before her, for she had laughed and talked with a sort of feverish gaiety; only after such outbursts she had grown suddenly silent and trembled on the verge of tears. walter had watched her and sent her upstairs before ten o'clock, and her mother had gone up with her and helped her to undress as if she had been a child again. then she had put on her dressing-gown and gone to mrs. clinton's room, and resting her head on her mother's knee had told her everything with frequent tears and many exclamations at her own madness and folly. it was more difficult to tell even than she had thought. when all was said about her discontent and the suddenness with which she had been urged towards a way of escape from surroundings that now seemed inexpressibly dear to her, there remained that inexcusable fault of leaving her mother without a word, for a man whom she couldn't even plead that she loved. with her mother's hand caressing her hair it seemed to her incredible that she could have done such a thing. she begged her forgiveness again and again, but each time that she received loving words in answer she felt that it must be impossible that they could ever be to one another again what they had been. at last mrs. clinton said, "you must not think too much of that, my darling. you were carried away; you hardly knew what you were doing. it is all wiped out in my mind by your wanting me directly you came to yourself. we won't talk of it any more. but what we ought to talk of, cicely dear, and try to see our way through, is the state of mind you had got into, which made what happened to you possible, and gave this man his opportunity. i think that six months ago, although he might have tried to behave in the same way, you would only have been frightened; you would have come straight to me and told me." "oh yes, i should, mother," she cried. "then what was it that has come between us? you have told me that you were discontented at home, but couldn't you have told me that before?" cicely was silent. why hadn't she told her mother, to whom she had been used to tell everything, of her discontent? a sudden blush ran down from her cheeks to her neck. it was because she had judged her mother, as well as her father and brothers, her mother who had accepted the life that she had kicked against and had bent a meek head to the whims of her master. she couldn't tell her that. "the thing that decided me," she began hesitatingly, "when i was sitting in my room that night not knowing what i was going to do, i heard father and dick talking as they came up, and they had decided to turn aunt ellen and aunt laura out of the house they had lived in nearly all their lives and let it to those macleod people. it seemed to me so--so selfish and--and horrible." "you cannot have heard properly," said mrs. clinton. "it was what they had decided not to do. father woke me up to tell me so. but even if----i don't understand, cicely dear." "o mother, can't you see?" cried cicely. "if i was wrong about that, and i'm very glad i was, it is just what they _might_ have done. they had talked it all over again and again, and they couldn't make up their minds--and before us!" "before us?" "yes. we are nobodies. if father were to die dick would turn us out of the house as a matter of course. he would have everything; we should have nothing." mrs. clinton was clearly bewildered. "dick would not turn us out of the house unless he were married," she said, "and we should not have nothing. we should be very well off. but surely, cicely, it is impossible that you can have been thinking of money matters in that way! you cannot be giving me a right impression of what has been in your mind." "no, it isn't that," said cicely. "i don't know anything about money matters, and i haven't thought about them--not in that way. but father and the boys do talk about money; a lot seems to depend upon it, and i can't help seeing that they spend a great deal of money on whatever they want to-do, and we have to take what's left." "still i don't understand, dear," said mrs. clinton. "certainly it costs a great deal to keep up a house like kencote; but it is our home; we are all happy there together." "are you quite happy there, mother?" asked cicely. mrs. clinton put by the question. "you know, of course," she went on, "that we are well off, a good deal better off than most families who have big properties to keep up. for people in our position we live simply, and if--if i were to outlive father, and you and the children were still unmarried, we should live together--not in such a big house as kencote--but with everything we could desire, or that would be good for us." "and if we lived like that," said cicely, "wouldn't you think some things good for us that we don't have, mother? if we had horses, wouldn't you let me have one to ride? wouldn't you take me to london sometimes, not to go to smart parties, but to see something of interesting people as angela and beatrice do at aunt emmeline's, and see plays and pictures and hear music? wouldn't you take us abroad sometimes? should we have to live the whole year round in the country, doing nothing and knowing nothing?" mrs. clinton's hand stopped its gentle, caressing movement, and then went on again. during the moment of pause she faced a crisis as vital as that which cicely had gone through. she had had just those desires in her youth and she had stifled them. could they be stifled--would it be right to stifle them--in the daughter who had, perhaps, inherited them from her? "you asked me just now," she said, "whether i was happy. yes, i am happy. i have my dear ones around me, i have my religion, i have my place in the world to fill. i should be very ungrateful if i were not happy. but if you ask me whether the life i lead is exactly what it would be if it rested only with me to order it--i think you know that it isn't?" "but why shouldn't it be, mother? other women do the things they like, and father and the boys do exactly what they like. if you have wanted the same things that i want now, i say you ought to have had them." "if i had had them, cicely, i should not have found out one very great thing--that happiness does not come from these things; it does not come from doing what you like, even if what you like is good in itself. i might almost say that it comes from not doing what you like. that is the lesson that i have learned of life, and i am thankful that it has been taught me." cicely was silent for a time. she seemed to see her mother, dear as she had been to her, in a new light, with a halo of uncomplaining self-sacrifice round her. her face burned as she remembered how that morning in church, and since, she had thought of her as one who had bartered her independence for a life of dull luxury and stagnation. it came upon her with a flash of insight that her mother was a woman of strong intelligence, who had, consciously, laid her intellectual gifts on the altar of duty, and found her reward in doing so. the thought found ineffective utterance. "of course it is from you that walter gets his brains," she said. mrs. clinton did not reply to this. "you are very young to learn the lesson," she said. "i am not sure--i don't think it is a lesson that every one need learn--that every woman need learn. i should like you to make use of your brains--if that is really what you have been unhappy about, cicely. but is it so, my dear?" "oh, i don't know," said cicely. "i suppose not. if i had wanted to learn things, there are plenty of books at kencote and i had plenty of time. it was in london--it was just one of the things. first i was jealous--i suppose it was that--because dick and humphrey had always had such a good time and seemed to belong to everything, and i was so out of it all. i still think that very unfair. then when i went to aunt emmeline's and saw what a good time angela and beatrice had in a different sort of way--i wanted that too. and i think _that_ is unfair. when i talked to them--i like them very much, but i suppose they wanted to show how much better off they were than i am--the only thing they seemed to think i was lucky in was my allowance, and even then they said they didn't see how i could spend it, as i never went anywhere. i felt so _ignorant_ beside them. once angela said something to me in french--the maid was in the room--and i didn't understand her. i was ashamed. mother, i think i ought to have had the chances that angela and beatrice have had." mrs. clinton listened with a grave face. how could she not have believed most of it to be true? she knew that, in marrying her, her husband had been considered to be marrying rather beneath him. and yet, her brother's daughters were--there was no doubt of it--better fitted to take a place, even a high place, in the world than her own daughter. her husband could never have seen it, but she knew that it was true. her younger niece was already engaged to be married to a man of some mark in the world, and she would be an intellectual companion to him. if cicely had caught the fancy of such a man she would have had everything to learn. even in this deplorable danger through which she had just passed, it was her ignorance that had laid her open to it. perhaps her very ignorance had attracted the man to her, but he certainly would not have been able so to bend her to his will if she had lived more in the world. "there is one thing, darling," said mrs. clinton, "that we have not spoken of. i don't want to complicate the troubles you are passing through, but it has a bearing on what you have been saying." "you mean about jim," said cicely courageously. "yes. father and i have both been very glad of what we have always looked upon as an engagement, although it could not be a recognised one when--when it was first mooted. you must remember, dear, that we are country people. it seems to us natural that our daughters should marry country gentlemen--should marry into the circle of our friends and neighbours. and the prospect of your living near us has always given us great pleasure. you seemed to me quite happy at home, and i thought you would have the best chance of happiness in your married life in another home not unlike ours. i thought you were well fitted to fill that place. i did not think of you--i don't think it ever crossed my mind to think of you--as wanting a different life, the sort of life that your cousins lead, for instance." "jim was very good to me, this morning," cicely said, in a low voice. "i love him for it. of course i do love him, in a way, just as i love dick or walter. i was very much ashamed at having left _him_ like that, for somebody who--who isn't as good as he is. jim _is_ good, in a way a man ought to be. but, mother--i can't marry jim now, after this." "it is too soon to talk of it, or perhaps even to think of it. and you have no right to marry anybody unless you love him as a woman should love her husband, not as you love your brothers. we need not talk of marriage now at all. but, my dearest, i want you to be happy when you come home again. if you come back to think that you are badly used, that----" "oh, but, mother," cicely interrupted her, "that is all over. i have only been trying to tell you what i did feel. i never thought of the other side at all. last night i lay awake and simply longed for home. i have been very ungrateful. i love kencote, and the country and everything i do there, really. i never knew before how much i loved it. it was a sort of madness that came over me." "i am glad you feel like that. you have a very beautiful home, and you are surrounded by those who love you. you _ought_ to be able to make yourself happy at home, even if you have not got everything that you might like to have. can you do so?" "yes, mother, i can. i was happy enough before." "before you went to london." "oh, yes, i suppose it was that. i must be very foolish to let a visit to london upset me. i don't want to see london again now for a long time. o mother, i have been very wicked. you won't be different to me, will you?" she buried her face in her mother's lap. she was overwrought and desperately tired. mrs. clinton felt that except for having done something towards healing the wound made by her late experience she had accomplished little. cicely's eyes had been partially opened, and it was not in her mother's power to close them again. it was only natural that she should now turn for a time eagerly towards the quiet life she had been so eager to run away from. but when her thoughts had settled down again, when weeks and months had divided her from her painful awakening, and its memory had worn thin, would she then be content, or would these desires, which no one could say were unreasonable, gain strength again to unsettle and dispirit her? it was only too likely. and if they did, what chance was there of satisfying them? mrs. clinton thought over these things when she had tucked cicely up in her bed and sat by her side until she was asleep. cicely had begged her to do this, cicely, her mother's child again, who, the night before had lain awake hour after hour, alone, trembling at the unknown and longing for the dear familiar. there was deep thankfulness in the mother's heart as she watched over her child restored to her love and protection, but there was sadness too, and some fear of the future, which was not entirely in her hands. cicely was soon asleep. mrs. clinton gently disengaged the hand she had been holding, stood for a time looking down upon her, fondly but rather sadly, and crept out of the room. it was nearly one o'clock, so long had their confidences lasted, but as she came downstairs, for cicely's room was on the second floor, walter came out of his bedroom dressed to go out. "hullo, mother!" he said. "not in bed yet! i've been called up. child with croup. i don't suppose i shall be long, and muriel is going down to make me some soup. if you'd like a yarn with her----" muriel came out in her dressing-gown. "i said i would always make him soup when he was called out at night," she said, "and this is the first time. i'm a good doctor's wife, don't you think so, mrs. clinton? is cicely asleep?" "yes, i have just left her. i will come down with you, dear, and help you make walter's soup." so they went down together and when they had done their work, bending together over a gas stove in the kitchen, which was the home of more black beetles than was altogether desirable, although it was otherwise clean and bright and well-furnished, they sat by the dining-room table awaiting walter's return. there was sympathy between mrs. clinton and her daughter-in-law, who recognised her fine qualities and loved her for them, privately thinking that she was a woman ill-used by fate and her husband. mrs. graham thought so too, but she and mrs. clinton had little in common, and in spite of mutual esteem, could hardly be called friends. but the tie which had bound muriel to kencote all her life had depended almost as much upon mrs. clinton as upon cicely, and until the last few months more than it had upon walter. they could talk together knowing that each would understand the other, and muriel's downrightness did not offend mrs. clinton. she plunged now into the middle of things. "you know it is jim i am thinking of, mrs. clinton," she said, "now that this extraordinary business is over. i want to know where jim comes in." "i am afraid, my dear," said mrs. clinton, with a smile, "that poor jim has come in very little." "did you know," asked muriel, "that jim was head over ears in love with cicely, or did you think, like everybody else, that he was slack about it?" mrs. clinton thought for a moment. "i have never thought of him as head over ears in love with cicely," she said. "and i didn't either, till walter told me. but he is. he behaved like a brick to-day. dick told walter. and cicely told me too. it was jim who got her away from that man--the horrible creature! how can a man be such a brute, mrs. clinton?" "i don't want to talk about him, muriel," said mrs. clinton quietly. "he has come into our life and he has gone out again. i hope we shall never see him again." "if i ever see him," said muriel, "nothing shall prevent my telling him what i think of him. how cicely could! poor darling, she doesn't know how she could herself, now. she told me that she saw him as he was beside jim and dick. he isn't a gentleman, for all the great things he has done, and somehow that little fact seemed to have escaped her until then. don't you think it is rather odd that it matters so tremendously to women like us whether the men we live with are gentlemen or not, and yet we are so liable at first to make mistakes about them?" mrs. clinton was not quite equal to the discussion of a general question. "it would matter to any one brought up as cicely has been," she said, "or you. can you tell me exactly what you mean when you say that jim is head over ears in love with cicely? i don't think he has shown it to her." "nobody quite knows jim, except walter," replied muriel. "i don't, and mother doesn't; and dear father never did. i suppose there is not much doubt about his being rather slow. slow and sure is just the phrase to fit him. he is sure of himself when he makes up his mind about a thing, and i suppose he was sure of cicely. he was just content to wait. you know, i'm afraid walter thinks that cicely has behaved very badly to him." "do you think so?" asked mrs. clinton. muriel hesitated. "i think what walter does," she said, rather doggedly. "but i don't feel it so much. i love cicely, and i am very sorry for her." "why are you sorry for her?" "oh, well, one could hardly help being after what she has gone through." "only that, muriel?" muriel hesitated again. "i don't think she has had quite a fair chance," she said. "she has had the same chances that you have had." "not quite, i think," said muriel. she spoke with her head down and a face rather flushed, as if she was determined to go through with something unpleasant. "i'm not as clever as she is, but if i had been--if i had wanted the sort of things that she wants--i should have had them." "i think she could have had them, if she had really wanted them," said mrs. clinton quietly. "i think i should have seen that she did have them." "oh, dear mrs. clinton, don't think i'm taking it on myself to blame you. you know i wouldn't do that. but i must say what i think. life is desperately dull for a girl at houses like kencote or mountfield." "kencote and mountfield?" "well, don't be angry with me if i say it is much more dull at kencote than at mountfield. cicely isn't even allowed to hunt. i was, and yet i was glad enough to get away from it, although i love country life, and so does walter. we never see anybody, we never go anywhere. i am heaps and heaps happier in this little house of my own than i was at mountfield." "muriel," said mrs. clinton "what is it that cicely wants? you and she talk of the same things. first it is one thing and then it is another. first it is that she has had no chances of learning. what has she ever shown that she wants to learn? then it is that she does not go away, and does not see new faces. is that a thing of such importance that the want of it should lead to what has happened? then it is that she is not allowed to hunt! i will not add to cicely's trouble now by rebuking these desires. only the first of them could have any weight with me, and i do not think that has ever been a strong desire, or is now, for any reason that is worth taking into consideration. but the plain truth of the whole trouble is that cicely had her mind upset by her visit to london two months ago. _you_ should not encourage her in her discontent. her only chance of happiness is to see where her duty lies and to gauge the amusements that she cannot have at their true value." "i haven't encouraged her," said muriel, "i said much the same as you have when she first talked to me. i told her she had had her head turned. but, all the same, i think there is something in what she says, and at any rate, she has felt it so strongly as nearly to spoil her life in trying to get away from it all. she'll be pleased enough to get home now, if--if--well, excuse my saying it, but--if mr. clinton will let her alone--and yet, it will all come back on her when she has got used to being at home. do you know what i think, mrs. clinton? i think the only thing that will give her back to herself now is for her to marry jim as quickly as possible." "but kencote and mountfield both are desperately dull for a girl!" muriel laughed, "she wouldn't find mountfield so if she really loved jim. i don't know whether she does or not. she won't hear of him now." mrs. clinton was silent for a time. then she said slowly, "it was jim who rescued her to-day from a great danger. i think it is only jim who can rescue her from herself." chapter xxi cicely's return "when cicely comes, send her in to me at once," said the squire, with the air of a man who was going to take a matter in hand. cicely, convoyed by the reliable miles, was returning to kencote after having stayed with muriel for a fortnight. mrs. clinton had left her at melbury park after a three days' visit. "and i won't have the children meeting her, or anything of that sort," added the squire. "she is not coming home in triumph. you can go to the door, nina, and send her straight in to me. we'll get this business put right once for all." mrs. clinton said nothing, but went out of the room. she could have small hopes that her husband would succeed when she had failed in putting the business right. she told herself now that she had failed. during her many talks with cicely, although she had been able, with her love and wisdom, to soothe the raw shame that had come upon her daughter when she had looked back in cold blood to her flight with mackenzie, she had not been able to do away with the feeling of resentment with which cicely had come to view her home life. her weapons had turned back upon herself. neither of them had been able to say to each other exactly what was in their mind, and because cicely had to stay herself with some reason for her action, which with her father, at any rate, must be defended somehow, she had fallen back upon the causes of her discontent and held to them even against her mother. and there was enough truth in them to make it difficult for mrs. clinton to combat her attitude, without saying, what she could not say, that it was the duty of every wife and every daughter to do as she had done, and rigidly sink her own personality where it might clash with the smallest wish or action of her husband. she claimed to have gained her own happiness in doing so, but the doctrine of happiness through such self-sacrifice was too hard a one for a young girl to receive. she had gained cicely's admiration and a more understanding love from the self-revelation which in some sort she had made, but she had not availed to make her follow her example, and could not have done so without holding it up as the one right course. cicely must fight her own battle with her father, and whichever of them proved the victor no good could be expected to come of it. she was firm in her conviction now that in jim graham's hands lay the only immediate chance of happiness for her daughter. but jim had held quite aloof. no word had been heard from him, and no one had seen him since he had parted with dick on the evening after their journey to london, when they had dined together and jim had said he would bide his chance. if he were to sink back now into what had seemed his old apathy, he would lose cicely again and she would lose her present chance of happiness. the twins, informed by their mother that they must not go to the station to meet cicely, or even come down into the hall, but that she would come up to them when she had seen her father, of course gathered, if they had not gathered it before, that their elder sister was coming home in disgrace, and spent their leisure time in devising methods to show that they did not share in the disapprobation; in which they were alternately encouraged and thwarted by miss bird, whose tender affection for cicely warred with her fear of the squire's displeasure. mrs. clinton was in the hall when the carriage drove up. cicely came in, on her face an expression of mixed determination and timidity, and her mother drew her into the morning-room. "father wants to see you at once, darling," she said. "you must be good. if you can make him understand ever so little you know he will be kind." it was doubtful if this hurried speech would help matters at all, and there was no time for more, for the squire was at his door asking the servants where miss clinton was, for he wanted to see her at once. "i am here, father," said cicely, going out into the hall again. "i want you in here," said the squire. they went into his room and the door was shut, leaving mrs. clinton alone outside. the squire marched up to the empty fireplace and took his stand with his back to it. cicely sat down in one of the big chairs, which seemed to disconcert him for a moment. "i don't know whether you have come home expecting to be welcomed as if nothing had happened," he began. "no, i don't expect that, father," said cicely. "oh! well now, what is the meaning of it? that's what i want to know. i have been pretty patient, i think. you have had your fling for over a fortnight, the whole house has been upset and i've said nothing. now i want to get to the bottom of it. because if you think that you can behave in that way"--here followed a vivid summary of the way in which cicely had behaved--"you are very much mistaken." the squire was now fairly launched. it only rested with cicely to keep him going with a word every now and then, for she knew that until he had wrought himself into a due state of indignation and then given satisfactory vent to it, nothing she could say would have any effect at all. "i am very sorry, father," she said. "i know it was wrong of me, and i won't do it again." this was all that was wanted. "won't do it again?" echoed the squire. "no, you won't do it again. i'll take good care of that." he then went on to bring home to her the enormity of her offence, which seemed to have consisted chiefly in upsetting the whole house, which he wouldn't have, and so on. but when he had repeated all he had to say twice, and most of it three or four times, he suddenly took his seat in the chair opposite to her and said in quite a different tone, "what on earth made you do it, cicely?" and her time had come. "i was not happy at home, father," she said quietly. this set the squire off on another oration, tending to show that it was positively wicked to talk like that. there wasn't a girl in england who had more done for her. he himself spent his days and nights chiefly in thinking what he could do for the happiness of his children, and the same might be said of their mother. he enumerated the blessings cicely enjoyed, amongst which the amount of money spent upon keeping up a place like kencote bulked largely. when he had gone over the field a second time, and picked up the gleanings left over from his sheaves of oratory, he asked her, apparently as a matter of kindly curiosity, what she had to grumble about. she told him dispiritedly, leaving him time after each item of her discontent to put her in the wrong. item: she had nothing to do at home. he said amongst other things that he had in that very room a manuscript volume compiled by her great-great-grandmother full of receipts and so forth, which he intended to get published some day to show what women could do in a house if they really did what they ought. item: she hadn't been properly educated. that was wicked nonsense, and he wondered at a daughter of his talking such trash. in the course of further remarks he said that when all the girls in the board schools could play the piano and none of them could cook, he supposed the radicals would be satisfied. item: there were a great many horses in the stable and she was not allowed to ride one of them. did she think she had gone the right way to work to have horses given her, bolting out of the house without a with your leave or a by your leave, etc.? had her six great-aunts ever wanted horses to ride? hunting he would not have. he might be old-fashioned, he dared say he was, but to see a woman tearing about the country, etc.----! but if she had come to him properly, and it had been otherwise convenient, he gave her to understand that a horse might have been found for her at any time. he did not say that one would be found for her _now_. item: she never went anywhere. a treatise on gadding about, with sub-sections devoted to the state of drains in foreign cities, the game of bridge, as played in country houses, and the overcrowded state of the probate and divorce court. item: she never saw anybody interesting. a flat denial, and in the course of its expansion a sentence that brought the blood to cicely's face and left her pale and terrified. "why, only the other day," said the squire, "one of the most talked of men in england dined here. i suppose you would call ronald mackenzie an interesting man, eh? why, what's the matter? aren't you well?" "oh yes, father dear. please go on." the squire went on. fortunately he had not noticed the sudden blush, but only the paleness that had followed it. supposing he had seen, and her secret had been dragged out of her! she gave him no more material on which to exercise his gift of oratory, but sat silent and frightened while he dealt further with the subject in hand and showed her that she was fortunate in living amongst the most interesting set of people in england. her uncle tom knew as much as anybody about butterflies, her aunt grace played the piano remarkably well for an amateur, sir ralph perry, who lived at warnton court, four miles away, had written a book on fly-fishing, the rector of bathgate had published a volume of sermons, the vicar of blagden rubbed brasses, mrs. kingston of axtol was the daughter of a cambridge professor, and the squire supposed he was not entirely destitute of intelligence himself. at any rate, he had corresponded with a good many learned gentlemen in his time, and they seemed anxious enough to come to kencote, and didn't treat him exactly as if he were a fool when they did come. "the upshot of it all is, cicely," concluded the squire, "that you want a great many things that you can't have and are not going to have, and the sooner you see that and settle down sensibly to do your duty the better." "yes, father," said cicely, longing to get away. the squire bethought himself. he had nothing more to say, although as he was considering what to do next he said over again a few of the more salient things that he had said before. he hoped he had made an impression, but he would have liked to end up on a note rather less tame than this. with cicely so meek and quiet, however, and his indignation against her, already weakened by having been spread over a fortnight, having now entirely evaporated by being expressed, as his indignation generally did evaporate, he had arrived somehow at a loose end. he looked at his daughter for the first time with some affection, and noticed that she was pale, and, he thought, thinner. "come here and give me a kiss," he said, and she went to him and put her head on his big shoulder. "now you're going to be a good girl and not give us any more trouble, aren't you?" he said, patting her on the sleeve; and she promised that she would be a good girl and not give any more trouble, with mental reservations mercifully hidden from him. "there, don't cry," said the squire. "we won't say any more about it; and if you want a horse to ride, we'll see if we can't find you a horse to ride. i dare say you think your old father a terrible martinet, but it's all for your good, you know. you must say to yourself when you feel dissatisfied about some little twopenny-halfpenny disappointment that he knows best." cicely gave him a hug. he was a dear old thing really, and if one could only always bear in mind the relative qualities of his bark and his bite there would be no need at all to go in awe of him. "dear old daddy," she said. "i am sorry i ran away, and i'm very glad to get home again." then she went upstairs quite lightheartedly, and along the corridor to the schoolroom. the twins, arrayed in long blue overalls, were tidying up, after lessons, and miss bird was urging them to more conscientious endeavour, avowing that it was no more trouble to put a book on a shelf the right way than the wrong way, and that if there were fifty servants in the house it would be wrong to throw waste paper in the fireplace, since waste paper baskets existed to have waste paper thrown into them and fireplaces did not. after a minute pause of observation, the twins threw themselves upon cicely with one accord and welcomed her vociferously, and miss bird followed suit. "my own darling," she said warmly, "we have missed you dreadfully and how are muriel and walter i suppose as happy as anything now joan 'n nancy there is no occasion to pull cicely to pieces you can be glad to see her without roughness and go _at once_ and take off your overalls and wash your hands for tea i dare say cicely will go with you." "have you been to your room yet, darling?" asked joan. "not yet," said cicely. "now _straight_ to your own room first," said miss bird, clapping her hands together to add weight to her command. "you can go with cicely afterwards." "all right, starling darling, we'll be ready in time for tea," said nancy. "you finish clearing up" and one on each side of cicely, they led her to her own bedroom, and threw open the door. the room was garlanded with pink and white paper roses. they formed festoons above the bed and were carried in loops round the walls, upon which had also been hung placards printed in large letters and coloured by hand. "welcome to our sister," ran one inscription, and others were, "there is no place like home," "cicely for ever," and "no popery." the twins watched eagerly for signs of surprised rapture and were abundantly rewarded. "but that's not all," said joan, and led her up to the dressing-table, upon which was an illuminated address running as follows: "we, the undersigned, present this token of our continued esteem to cecilia mary clinton, on the occasion of her home-coming to kencote house, meadshire. do unto others as you would be done by. "_signed_, joan ellen clinton nancy caroline clinton." "i think it's rather well done," said nancy, "though our vermilions had both run out and we didn't like to borrow yours without asking. starling bought us the gold paint on condition that we put in the golden rule. it doesn't look bad, does it, cicely?" "i think it's lovely," said cicely. "i shall always keep it. thanks so much, darlings." after the subsequent embraces, nancy eyed her with some curiosity. "i say, there _was_ a dust-up," she said. "have you made it up with father, cis?" "don't be a fool," said joan. "she doesn't want you bothering her. it is quite enough that we're jolly glad to have her back." "i was rather dull," said cicely, with a nervous little laugh, "so i went away for a bit." "quite right too," said joan. "i should have done the same, and so would nancy. we thought of putting up 'don't be downtrodden,' but we were afraid mother wouldn't like it, so we put up 'no popery' instead. it comes to the same thing." "we're doing the gordon riots in history," nancy explained further. "father was awful at first, cis, but he has calmed down a lot since. i think dick poured oil on the troubled waters. dick is a brick. he gave us half a sovereign each before he went up to scotland." "we didn't ask him for it," said nancy. "no," said joan, "we only told him we were saving up for a camera, and it took a long time out of a bob a week each pocket-money." "flushed with our success," said nancy, "we tried father; but the moment was not propitious." "it was your fault," said joan. "you would hurry it. directly i said, 'when we get our camera we shall be able to take photographs of the shorthorns,' you heaved a silly great sigh and said, 'it takes _such_ a long time to save up with only a shilling a week pocket-money,' and of course what _could_ he say but that when he was our age he only had sixpence?" "i don't believe it for a moment," said nancy. "it doesn't matter. he had to say it. i was going to lead up much more slowly. how often has starling told you that if a thing's worth doing at all it's worth doing well?" here miss bird herself appeared at the door and said it was just as she had expected, and had they heard her tell them to do a thing or had they not, because if they had and had then gone and done something else she should go straight to mrs. clinton, for she was tired of having her words set at nought, and it was time to take serious measures, although nobody would be more sorry to have to do so than herself, joan and nancy being perfectly capable of behaving themselves as they should if they would only set their minds to it and do exactly as she told them. cicely heard the latter part of the address fading away down the corridor, shut the door with a smile and began to take off her hat with a sigh. the chief ordeal was over, but there was a good deal to go through still before she could live in this room again as she had lived in it before. if, indeed, she ever could. she looked round her, and its familiarity touched her strangely. it spoke not of the years she had occupied it, the five years since she had left the nursery wing, but of the one night when she had prepared to leave it for ever. it would be part of her ordeal to have that painful and confusing memory brought before her whenever she entered it. she hated now to think of that night and of the day and night that had followed it. she flushed hotly as she turned again to her glass, and called herself a fool. then she resolutely turned pictures to the wall of her mind and made herself think of something else, casting her thoughts loose to hit upon any subject they pleased. they struck against her aunts at the dower-house, and she grappled the idea and made up her mind to go and see them after tea, and get that over. she found them in their morning-room, engaged as before, except that their tea-table had been cleared away. "well, dear aunt ellen and aunt laura, i have come back," she said, kissing them in turn. "muriel's house _is_ so pretty. you would love to see it." but aunt ellen was not to be put off in this way. the squire had come down to them on the afternoon of the day after cicely had disappeared, and had gained more solid satisfaction from the attitude taken up by aunt ellen and aunt laura when he had unfolded his news than from any reception it had before or after. cicely was still in their black books. "oh, so you have returned at last," said aunt ellen, receiving her kiss, but not returning it. aunt laura was not so unforgiving. she kissed her and said, "o cicely, if you had known what unhappiness your action would cause, i am sure you would have thought twice about it." cicely sat down. "i have made it all right with father now," she said. "i would rather not talk about it if you don't mind, aunt laura. muriel sent her love to you. i said i should come and see you directly i came back." "when i was a girl," said aunt ellen--"i am speaking now of nearly eighty years ago--i upset a glass of table ale at the commencement of luncheon, and your great-grandfather was very angry. but that was nothing to this." "i have seldom seen your dear father so moved," said aunt laura. "i cannot see very well without my glasses, and i had mislaid them; they were on the sideboard in the dining-room where i had gone to get out a decanter of sherry; but i believe there were tears in his eyes. if it was so it should make you all the more sorry, cicely." "i am very sorry," said cicely, "but father has forgiven me. mayn't we talk about something else?" "your father was very high-spirited as a child," said aunt ellen, "and i and your aunts had some difficulty in managing him; not that he was a naughty child, far from it, but he was full of life. and you must always remember that he was a boy. but i feel quite sure that he would never in his wildest moments have thought of going away from home and leaving no word of his address." "i sent a telegram," pleaded cicely. "ah, but telegrams were not invented in the days i am speaking of," said aunt ellen. "pardon me, sister," said aunt laura. "the electric telegraph was invented when edward was a boy, but not when we were girls." "that may be so, sister," said aunt ellen. "it is many years since we were girls, but i say that edward would not have run away." "certainly not," said aunt laura. "you should never forget, cicely, what a good father you have. i am sure when i heard the other day from mr. hayles that your dear father had instructed him to refuse lady alistair macleod's most advantageous offer to rent this house, solely on account of your aunt ellen and myself, i felt that we were, indeed, in good hands, and fortunate to be so." "it is quite true," said aunt ellen, "that this house is larger than your aunt laura and i require, i told your father that with my own lips. but at the same time it is unlikely that at my age i have many more years to live, and i said that if it could be so arranged, i should wish to die in this house as i have lived in it for the greater part of my life." "he saw that at once," said aunt laura. "there is nobody that is quicker at seeing a thing than your dear father, cicely. he spoke very kindly about it. he said we must all die some time or other, which is perfectly true, but that if your aunt ellen did not live to be a hundred he should never forgive her. he is like your dear aunt caroline in that; he is always one to look at the bright side of things." "but didn't he tell you at once that he didn't want to let the house?" asked cicely. "did he leave it to mr. hayles to tell you afterwards?" "there was a delicacy in that," replied aunt laura. "if there is one thing that your dear father dislikes, it is being thanked. and we could not have helped thanking him. we had gone through a week of considerable anxiety." "which he might have saved you," cicely thought, but did not say. "when we lived at kencote house with our father," said aunt ellen, "it was never thought that the dower-house possessed any advantages to speak of. i do not say that we have made it what it is, for that would be boasting, but i do say that it would not be what it is if we had not made it so; and now that the danger is past, it causes both your aunt laura and myself much gratification, and would cause gratification to your other dear aunts if they could know what had happened, as no doubt they do, that it should now be sought after." the topic proved interesting enough to occupy the conversation for the rest of cicely's visit. she kept them to it diligently and got through nearly an hour's talk without further recurrence to her misdoings. then she took her leave rather hurriedly, congratulating herself that she had got safely over another fence. chapter xxii the life mrs. graham, in spite of her good points, was not overburdened with the maternal spirit. she had little love for children as children, and when her own were small she had lavished no great amount of affection on them. in the case of other people's children she frankly averred that she didn't understand them and preferred dogs. but she was equable by nature and had companionable gifts, and as jim and muriel had grown up they had found their mother pleasant to live with, never anxious to assert authority, and always interested in such of their pursuits as chimed in with her own inclinations; also quite ready with sensible advice and some sympathy when either was required of her, and showing no annoyance at all if the advice was not followed. it was not altogether surprising then that jim, when he had been back at mountfield for three or four days, should have taken her into his confidence. she had heard what, thanks to the squire, every one in that part of the county had heard, that cicely had run off to london without taking any clothes with her--this point always emerged--and that dick, and, for some as yet unexplained reason, jim, had gone up after her. but when jim returned, and told her simply that cicely was staying with muriel and that everything was all right, she had asked no further questions, although she saw that there was something that she had not been told. she had her reward when jim, sitting in her drawing-room after dinner, told her that he would like to talk over something with her. the drawing-room at mountfield was a long, rather low room, hung with an old french paper of nondescript grey, upon which were some water-colours which were supposed to be valuable. the carpet was of faded green, with ferns and roses. the curtains were of thick crimson brocade under a gilt canopy. there was a large chippendale mirror, undoubtedly valuable, over the white marble mantelpiece, upon which were three great vases of blue worcester and some dresden china figures. the furniture was upholstered in crimson to match the curtains. there was an old grand piano, there were one or two china cabinets against the walls, a white skin rug before the fire, palms in pots, a rosewood table or two, and a low glass bookcase with more china on the top of it. there was nothing modern, and the chairs and sofas were not particularly comfortable. the room had always been like that ever since jim could remember, and his mother, sitting upright in her low chair knitting stocking tops, also belonged to the room and gave it a comforting air of home. she had on a black gown and her face and neck were much redder than the skin beneath them, but, like many women to whom rough tweeds and thick boots seem to be the normal wear, she looked well in the more feminine attire of the evening. "talk away, my dear boy," she said, without raising her head. "two heads are better than one. i suppose it is something about cicely." "when cicely went away the other day she didn't go to see muriel; she went to marry mackenzie." she did raise her head then to throw an astonished look at her son, who did not meet it, but she lowered it again and made one or two stitches before she replied, "she didn't marry him, of course?" "no. dick and i found them, and got her away just in time. that is all over now, and i can't think about that fellow." "well, i won't ask you to. but i suppose you won't mind telling me why she did such an extraordinary thing." "because she is bored to death at kencote, and i don't wonder at it." "and do you still intend to bring her to be bored to death at mountfield?" "yes, i do, if she will come. and i'll see that she's not bored. at least that is what i want to talk to you about. muriel could tell me what she wants to make her happy, but i can't go to muriel as long as cicely is there, and i can't write; i've tried. you've been happy enough here, mother. you ought to be able to tell me." mrs. graham kept silence for a considerable time. then she said, "well, jim, i'm glad you have come to me. i think i can help you. in the first place, you mustn't play the martinet as mr. clinton does." "it isn't likely i should treat her as he does mrs. clinton, if that is what you mean." "i mean a good deal more than that. if mr. clinton knew how disagreeable it was to other people to hear him talk to her as he does, he probably wouldn't do it. but even if he didn't he might still make her life a burden to her, by taking away every ounce of independence she had. i don't know whether her life is a burden to her or not; i don't pretend to understand her; but i do know that you couldn't treat cicely like that, and i suppose this escapade of hers proves it." "the poor old governor was a bit of a martinet," said jim, after a pause. "he thought he was," said mrs. graham drily. jim looked at her, but did not speak. "i know what it all means," his mother went on. "i think things over more than you would give me credit for, jim, and i've seen it before. this quiet country life happens to suit me down to the ground, but i don't believe it satisfies the majority of women. and that is what men don't understand. it suits _them_, of course, and if it doesn't they can always get away from it for a bit. but to shut women up in a country house all the year round, and give them no interests in life outside it--you won't give one woman in ten what she wants in that way." "what _do_ they want then?" "it is more what cicely wants, isn't it? i don't know exactly, but i can give a pretty shrewd guess. if you want to find out something about a person, it isn't a bad thing to look at their parentage on both sides. on one side she comes of a race of yokels." "oh, come, mother. the birkets are----" "i'm not talking about the birkets, i'm talking about the clintons. poor dear mr. clinton _is_ a yokel, for all his ancestry. if he had been changed at birth and brought up a farm labourer, he wouldn't have had an idea in his head above the average of them; he would only have had a little more pluck. any birket's brains are worth six of any clinton's in the open market. mrs. clinton is a clever woman, although she doesn't show it, and her dear, stupid old husband would smother the brains of minerva if he lived with her. you've only got to look at their children to see where the birket comes in. dick is exactly like his father, except that he is not a fool; humphrey _is_ a fool to my thinking, but not the same sort of fool; walter--there's no need to speak of him; frank i don't know much about, but he isn't a yokel; cicely simply hasn't had a chance, but she'll take it fast enough when she gets it; and as for the twins, they're as sharp as monkeys, for all their blue eyes and sweet innocence." "well, what does it all lead to, mother?" "it leads to this, jim: i believe cicely will be as happy living in the country as most girls, but at kencote she doesn't even get the pleasures that a woman _can_ get out of the country; those are all kept for the men. you _must_ take her about a bit. take her to other houses and get people to come here. don't shut her up. take her to london every now and then, and try and let her see some of the sort of people that go to her uncle herbert birket's house. i believe she could hold her own with any of them, and you'll be proud of her. let her stir her mind up; she doesn't know what's in it yet. take her abroad. that always helps; even i should have liked it, only your father didn't, and i wasn't keen enough to let it make a disturbance. give her her head; that's what it comes to. she won't lose it again." jim thought for a long time while mrs. graham went on knitting. "a woman wants some brightness in her life, especially before the babies begin to come," she said, before he spoke. "thanks, mother," he said simply. "i'll think it all over." "i have thought it over," she answered, "and it's all sound sense." jim's next speech was some time coming, but when it did come it was rather a startling one. "i've given weatherley notice to leave the grange at christmas." mrs. graham's needles stopped, and then went on again rather more quickly. her voice shook a little as she said in a matter-of-fact tone, "i suppose you won't mind altering the stables for me. there is only one loose-box." "i thought it would be best to add on a couple under another roof," said jim, and they went on to discuss other alterations that would be necessary when mrs. graham should leave mountfield to go to live at the grange, but without any approach to sentiment, and no expressions of regret on either side. when they had done, and there had followed another of those pauses with which their conversations were punctuated, mrs. graham said, "you are making very certain of cicely, jim." "i'm going to claim her," said jim quietly. "i was a fool not to do it before. i've wanted her badly enough." perhaps this news was as fresh to mrs. graham as it had been to all those others who had heard it lately. perhaps it was no news at all. she was an observant woman and was accustomed to keep silence on many subjects, except when she was asked to speak, and then she spoke volubly. "i have often wondered," she said, "why you left it so long." jim did not reply to this, but made another surprising statement. "i'm going to stand for parliament," he said. mrs. graham's observation had not covered this possibility. "good gracious!" she exclaimed. "not as a liberal, i hope!" "no, as a free trade unionist." "i should think you might as well save your time and your money." "i don't expect to get in. but if i can find a seat to fight for, i'll fight." "well, i'll help you, jim. i believe the others are right, but if you will give me something to read i dare say i can persuade myself that they're wrong. i like a good fight, and that is one thing you don't get the chance of when you live with your pigs and your poultry. excuse me asking, but what about the money?" "i've settled all that, and i'm going to let this place for two years at least." mrs. graham dropped her knitting once more. "well, really, jim!" she said. "have you got anything else startling to break to me, because i wish you would bring it out all at once now. i can bear it." "that's all," said jim, with a grin. "i shall save a lot of money. i shall take a flat or a little house in london and do some work. there are lots of things besides free trade; things i'm keener about, really. i don't think cicely will mind. i think she will go in with me." mrs. graham took up her knitting again and put on another row of stitches. then she said, "i don't know why you asked my advice as to what cicely wanted. it seems to me you have thought it out pretty well for yourself." * * * * * jim rode over to kencote two days after cicely's return. it was a lovely morning, and harvesting was in full swing as he trotted along between the familiar fields. he felt rather sad at being about to leave it all; he was a countryman at heart, although he had interests that were not bucolic. but there was not much room for sadness in his mind. he was sure of himself, and had set out to grasp a great happiness. he met the squire on his stout cob about a mile from kencote, and pulled up to speak to him. "how are you, jim?" he said heartily. "birds doing all right? ours are first-class this year." "i was coming to see you," he said. "i've got something to say." "well, say it here, my boy," said the squire, "i'm not going to turn back." so they sat on their horses in the middle of the road and jim said, "i want to marry cicely as soon as possible." the squire's jaw dropped as he stared at the suitor. then he threw back his head and produced his loud, hearty laugh. "well, that's a funny thing," he said. "i was only saying to my wife this morning that cicely would die an old maid if she looked to you to come and take her." jim's red face became a little redder, but the squire did not give him time to reply. "i was only joking, you know, jim, my boy," he said kindly. "i knew _you_ were all right, and i tell you frankly there's nobody i'd sooner give my girl to. but why do you want to rush it now? what about those rascally death duties?" "it's only a question of income," said jim shortly. "and i'm going to let mountfield for a year or two." the squire's jaw fell again. "let mountfield!" he cried. "o my dear fellow, don't do that, for god's sake. wait a bit longer. cicely won't run away. ha! ha! why she did run away--what? look here, jim, you're surely not worrying yourself about that. she won't do it again, i'll promise you that. i've talked to her." "i think it is time i took her," said jim, "if she'll have me." "have you? of course she'll have you. but you mustn't let mountfield. don't think of that, my boy. we'll square it somehow, between us. my girl won't come to you empty-handed, you know, and as long as the settlements are all right you can keep her a bit short for a year or two; tell her to go easy in the house. she's a good girl, and she'll do her best. no occasion to let down the stables, and you must keep a good head of game. we'll make that all right, and it won't do you any harm to economise a bit in other ways. in fact it's a good thing for young people. you might put down your carriage for a year, and perhaps a few maids--i should keep the men except perhaps a gardener or two. oh, there are lots of ways; but don't let the place, jim." "well, i'll think about it," said jim, who had no intention of prematurely disclosing his intentions to the squire, "but you'll let me have her, mr. clinton? i thought of going over to see her now." "go by all means, my boy," said the squire heartily. "you'll find her about somewhere, only don't make her late for lunch. you'll stay, of course. you haven't seen hayles about anywhere, have you? he's not in the office." jim had not, and the squire trotted off to find his agent, with a last word of dissuasion on letting mountfield. the ubiquitous twins were in the stableyard when he rode in, raiding the corn bin for sustenance for their fantails. "hullo, jim, my boy," said joan. "you're quite a stranger." "you'll stay to lunch, of course," said nancy. "how are the birds at mountfield? i think we ought to do very well here this year." "where is cicely?" asked jim, ignoring these pleasantries. "she's out of doors somewhere," said joan. "we'll help you find her. we ought to be going in to lessons again, but starling won't mind." "i can find her myself, thanks," said jim. "is she in the garden?" "we'll show you," said nancy. "you can't shake us off. we're like the limpets of the rock." but here miss bird appeared at the schoolroom window, adjuring the twins to come in _at once_. "oh, how do you do, jim?" she cried, nodding her head in friendly welcome. "do you want to find cicely she has gone down to the lake to sketch." "bother!" exclaimed joan. "starling is so officious." "you will find our sister in the temple of melancholy," said nancy. "it will be your part to smooth the lines of trouble from her brow." "oh, coming, coming, miss bird!" called out joan. "we've only got an hour more, jim--spelling and dictation; then we will come and look you up." jim strode off across the park and entered the rhododendron dell by an iron gate. he followed a broad green path between great banks of shrubs and under the shade of trees for nearly a quarter of a mile. every now and then an open grassy space led to the water, which lay very still, ringed with dark green. he turned down one of these and peeped round the edge of a bush from whence he could see the white pillared temple at the head of the lake. cicely was sitting in front of it, drawing, and his heart gave a little leap as he saw her. then he walked more quickly, and as he neared the temple began to whistle, for he knew that, thinking herself quite alone. cicely would be disagreeably startled if he came upon her suddenly. perhaps she thought it was a gardener who was coming, for she did not move until he spoke her name, coming out from behind the building on to the stained marble platform in front of it. then she looked up with a hot blush. "o jim!" she said nervously. "i was just trying to paint a picture." "it's jolly good," said jim, looking at it with his head on one side, although she had not as yet gone further than light pencil lines. "it won't be when i've finished," she said hurriedly. "how is mrs. graham? i am coming over to see her as soon as i can, to tell her about muriel." "she's all right, thanks," said jim. "she sent her love. do you mind my watching you?" "i'd much rather you didn't," she said, with a deprecating laugh. "i shall make an awful hash of it. do you want to see father? i'll go and find him with you if you like." "no, i've seen him," said jim, going into the temple to get himself a chair. "i've come to see you, to tell you something i thought you'd be interested in. i want to stand for parliament, and i'm going to let mountfield." she looked up at him with a shade of relief in her face. "o jim," she said, "i do hope you will get in." "well, to tell you the truth, i don't expect to get in," said jim. "they won't have fellows who think as i do in the party now if they can help it. but there's a good deal to do outside that. i kept my eyes open when i was travelling, and i do know a bit about the colonies, and about land too. there are societies i can make myself useful in, even if i don't get into parliament. anyway i'm going to try." "i am so glad, jim," said cicely. "but won't you miss mountfield awfully? and where are you going to live?" "in london for a year or two. must be in the thick of things." "i suppose you won't go before the spring." "i want to. it depends on you, cicely." she had nothing to say. the flush that coloured her delicate skin so frequently, flooded it new. "i want you to come and help me," said jim. "i can't do it without you, my dear. you're much cleverer than i am. i want to get to know people, and i'm not much good at that. and i don't know that i could put up with london, living there by myself. if you were with me i shouldn't care where i lived. i would rather live all my life at melbury park with you, than at mountfield without you." "o jim," she said in a low voice, bending over her drawing board, "you are good and generous. but you can't want me now." "look here, cicely dear," he said, "let's get over that business now, and leave it alone for ever. i blame myself for it, i blame--that man, but i haven't got the smallest little piece of blame for you, and i shouldn't have even if i didn't love you. why, even dick is the same. he was angry at first, but not after he had seen you. and walter thinks as i do. i saw him one day and we had it all out; you didn't know. there's not a soul who knows who blames you, and nobody ever will." "i know," she said, "that every one has been most extraordinarily kind. i love dick and walter more than ever for it, because i know how it must have struck them when they first knew. and you too, jim. it makes me feel such a beast to think how sweet you were to me, and how i've treated you." jim took her hand. "cicely, darling," he said. "i'm a slow fellow, and, i'm afraid, rather stupid. if i hadn't been this would never have happened. but i believe i'm the only person in the world that can make you forget it. you'll let me try, won't you?" she tried to draw away her hand, but he held it. "oh, i don't know what to say," she cried. "it is all such a frightful muddle. i don't even know whether i love you or not. i do; you know that, jim. but i don't know whether i love you in the right way. i thought before that i didn't. and how can i when i did a thing like that? i'm a girl who goes to any man who calls her." she was weeping bitterly. all the shame in her heart surged up. she pulled her hand away and covered her face. "you never loved that man--not for a moment," said jim firmly. "no, i didn't," she cried. "i _hate_ him now, and i believe i hated him all the time. if i were to meet him i should die of shame. oh, why did i do it? and i feel ashamed before you, jim. i can't marry you. i can't see you any more. i am glad you are going away." "i am not going unless you come with me, cicely," he said. "i want you. i want you more than ever; i understand you better. if this hadn't happened i shouldn't have known what you wanted; i don't think i should have been able to make you happy. good heavens! do you think i believe that you wanted that man? i _know_ you didn't, or i shouldn't be here now. you wanted life, and i had never offered you that. i do offer it you now. come and help me to do what i'm going to do. i can't do any of it without you." she smiled at him forlornly. "you _are_ good," she said. "and you have comforted me a little. but you can't forget what has happened. it isn't possible." "look here, my dear," said jim simply. "will you believe me when i say that i have forgotten it already? that is to say it doesn't come into my mind. i don't have to keep it out; it doesn't come. i've got other things to think of. there's all the future, and what i'm going to do, and you are going to help me to do. really, if i thought of it, i ought to be glad you did what you did, in a way, for all i've thought of since comes from that. i saw what you were worth and what you could make of a man if he loved you as i do, and you loved him. we won't play at it, cicely. i'm in earnest. i shall be a better fellow all round if i'm trying to do something and not only sitting at home and amusing myself. we shall have to make some sacrifices. we shall only be able to afford a flat or a little house in london. i must keep things going here and put by a bit for an election, perhaps. but i know you won't mind not having much money for a time. we shall be together, and there won't be a thing in my life that you won't share." she had kept her eyes fixed upon him as he spoke. "do you really mean it, jim?" she asked quietly. "do you really want _me_, out of all the people in the world?" "i don't want anybody but you," he said, "and i don't want anything without you." "then i will come with you, dearest jim," she said. "and i will never want anything except what you want all my life." he took her in his arms, and she nestled there, laughing and crying by turns, but happier than she had ever thought she could be. they talked of a great many things, but not again of cicely's flight. jim had banished that spectre, which, if it returned to haunt her thoughts again, would not affright them. they came no nearer to it than a speech of cicely's, "i do love you, dear jim. i love you so much that i must have loved you all the time without knowing it. i feel as if there was something in you that i could rest on and know that it will never give way." "and that's exactly how i feel about you," said jim. two swans sailed out into the middle of the lake, creasing the still water into tiny ripples. the air was hot and calm, and the heavy leaves of trees and shrubs hung motionless. the singing-birds were silent. only in the green shade were the hearts of the two lovers in tumult--a tumult of gratitude and confident happiness. the peace, but not the happiness, was brought to an end when the twins, relaxed from bondage, heralded their approach by a vociferous rendering of "the campbells are coming." they came round the temple arm-in-arm. cicely was drawing, and jim looking on. "yes, that's all very well," said joan, "but it doesn't take two hours to make three pencil scratches." "girls without the nice feeling that we possess," said nancy, "would have burst upon you without warning." "without giving you time to set to partners," said joan. cicely looked up at them; her face was full of light. "shall i tell them, jim?" she said. "got to, i suppose," said jim. "my child," said joan, "you need tell us nothing." "your happy faces tell us all," said nancy. then, with a simultaneous relapse into humanity, they threw themselves upon her affectionately, and afterwards attacked jim in the same way. he bore it with equanimity. "you don't deserve her, jim," said joan, "but we trust you to be kind to her." "from this day onwards," said nancy, "you will begin a new life." _chronicles of the clintons_ by archibald marshall _to be read in the following order_ the squire's daughter the eldest son the honour of the clintons the old order changeth the clintons, and others the wife of sir isaac harman by h. g. wells new york the macmillan company all rights reserved copyright, , by h. g. wells. set up and electrotyped. published september, . contents chapter page i. introduces lady harman ii. the personality of sir isaac iii. lady harman at home iv. the beginnings of lady harman v. the world according to sir isaac vi. the adventurous afternoon vii. lady harman learns about herself viii. sir isaac as petruchio ix. mr. brumley is troubled by difficult ideas x. lady harman comes out xi. the last crisis xii. love and a serious lady the wife of sir isaac harman chapter the first introduces lady harman § the motor-car entered a little white gate, came to a porch under a thick wig of jasmine, and stopped. the chauffeur indicated by a movement of the head that this at last was it. a tall young woman with a big soft mouth, great masses of blue-black hair on either side of a broad, low forehead, and eyes of so dark a brown you might have thought them black, drooped forward and surveyed the house with a mixture of keen appreciation and that gentle apprehension which is the shadow of desire in unassuming natures.... the little house with the white-framed windows looked at her with a sleepy wakefulness from under its blinds, and made no sign. beyond the corner was a glimpse of lawn, a rank of delphiniums, and the sound of a wheel-barrow. "clarence!" the lady called again. clarence, with an air of exceeding his duties, decided to hear, descended slowly, and came to the door. "very likely--if you were to look for a bell, clarence...." clarence regarded the porch with a hostile air, made no secret that he thought it a fool of a porch, seemed on the point of disobedience, and submitted. his gestures suggested a belief that he would next be asked to boil eggs or do the boots. he found a bell and rang it with the needless violence of a man who has no special knowledge of ringing bells. how was _he_ to know? he was a chauffeur. the bell did not so much ring as explode and swamp the place. sounds of ringing came from all the windows, and even out of the chimneys. it seemed as if once set ringing that bell would never cease.... clarence went to the bonnet of his machine, and presented his stooping back in a defensive manner against anyone who might come out. he wasn't a footman, anyhow. he'd rung that bell all right, and now he must see to his engine. "he's rung so _loud!_" said the lady weakly--apparently to god. the door behind the neat white pillars opened, and a little red-nosed woman, in a cap she had evidently put on without a proper glass, appeared. she surveyed the car and its occupant with disfavour over her also very oblique spectacles. the lady waved a pink paper to her, a house-agent's order to view. "is this black strands?" she shouted. the little woman advanced slowly with her eyes fixed malevolently on the pink paper. she seemed to be stalking it. "this is black strands?" repeated the tall lady. "i should be so sorry if i disturbed you--if it isn't; ringing the bell like that--and all. you can't think----" "this is black _strand_," said the little old woman with a note of deep reproach, and suddenly ceased to look over her glasses and looked through them. she looked no kindlier through them, and her eye seemed much larger. she was now regarding the lady in the car, though with a sustained alertness towards the pink paper. "i suppose," she said, "you've come to see over the place?" "if it doesn't disturb anyone; if it is quite convenient----" "mr. brumley is _hout_," said the little old woman. "and if you got an order to view, you got an order to view." "if you think i might." the lady stood up in the car, a tall and graceful figure of doubt and desire and glossy black fur. "i'm sure it looks a very charming house." "it's _clean_," said the little old woman, "from top to toe. look as you may." "i'm sure it is," said the tall lady, and put aside her great fur coat from her lithe, slender, red-clad body. (she was permitted by a sudden civility of clarence's to descend.) "why! the windows," she said, pausing on the step, "are like crystal." "these very 'ands," said the little old woman, and glanced up at the windows the lady had praised. the little old woman's initial sternness wrinkled and softened as the skin of a windfall does after a day or so upon the ground. she half turned in the doorway and made a sudden vergerlike gesture. "we enter," she said, "by the 'all.... them's mr. brumley's 'ats and sticks. every 'at or cap 'as a stick, and every stick 'as a 'at _or_ cap, and on the 'all table is the gloves corresponding. on the right is the door leading to the kitching, on the left is the large droring-room which mr. brumley 'as took as 'is study." her voice fell to lowlier things. "the other door beyond is a small lavatory 'aving a basing for washing 'ands." "it's a perfectly delightful hall," said the lady. "so low and wide-looking. and everything so bright--and lovely. those long, italian pictures! and how charming that broad outlook upon the garden beyond!" "you'll think it charminger when you see the garding," said the little old woman. "it was mrs. brumley's especial delight. much of it--with 'er own 'ands." "we now enter the droring-room," she proceeded, and flinging open the door to the right was received with an indistinct cry suggestive of the words, "oh, _damn_ it!" the stout medium-sized gentleman in an artistic green-grey norfolk suit, from whom the cry proceeded, was kneeling on the floor close to the wide-open window, and he was engaged in lacing up a boot. he had a round, ruddy, rather handsome, amiable face with a sort of bang of brown hair coming over one temple, and a large silk bow under his chin and a little towards one ear, such as artists and artistic men of letters affect. his profile was regular and fine, his eyes expressive, his mouth, a very passable mouth. his features expressed at first only the naïve horror of a shy man unveiled. intelligent appreciation supervened. there was a crowded moment of rapid mutual inspection. the lady's attitude was that of the enthusiastic house-explorer arrested in full flight, falling swiftly towards apology and retreat. (it was a frightfully attractive room, too, full of the brightest colour, and with a big white cast of a statue--a venus!--in the window.) she backed over the threshold again. "i thought you was out by that window, sir," said the little old woman intimately, and was nearly shutting the door between them and all the beginnings of this story. but the voice of the gentleman arrested and wedged open the closing door. "i----are you looking at the house?" he said. "i say! just a moment, mrs. rabbit." he came down the length of the room with a slight flicking noise due to the scandalized excitement of his abandoned laces. the lady was reminded of her not so very distant schooldays, when it would have been considered a suitable answer to such a question as his to reply, "no, i am walking down piccadilly on my hands." but instead she waved that pink paper again. "the agents," she said. "recommended--specially. so sorry if i intrude. i ought, i know, to have written first; but i came on an impulse." by this time the gentleman in the artistic tie, who had also the artistic eye for such matters, had discovered that the lady was young, delightfully slender, either pretty or beautiful, he could scarcely tell which, and very, very well dressed. "i am glad," he said, with remarkable decision, "that i was not out. _i_ will show you the house." "'ow _can_ you, sir?" intervened the little old woman. "oh! show a house! why not?" "the kitchings--you don't understand the range, sir--it's beyond you. and upstairs. you can't show a lady upstairs." the gentleman reflected upon these difficulties. "well, i'm going to show her all i can show her anyhow. and after that, mrs. rabbit, you shall come in. you needn't wait." "i'm thinking," said mrs. rabbit, folding stiff little arms and regarding him sternly. "you won't be much good after tea, you know, if you don't get your afternoon's exercise." "rendez-vous in the kitchen, mrs. rabbit," said mr. brumley, firmly, and mrs. rabbit after a moment of mute struggle disappeared discontentedly. "i do not want to be the least bit a bother," said the lady. "i'm intruding, i know, without the least bit of notice. i _do_ hope i'm not disturbing you----" she seemed to make an effort to stop at that, and failed and added--"the least bit. do please tell me if i am." "not at all," said mr. brumley. "i hate my afternoon's walk as a prisoner hates the treadmill." "she's such a nice old creature." "she's been a mother--and several aunts--to us ever since my wife died. she was the first servant we ever had." "all this house," he explained to his visitor's questioning eyes, "was my wife's creation. it was a little featureless agent's house on the edge of these pine-woods. she saw something in the shape of the rooms--and that central hall. we've enlarged it of course. twice. this was two rooms, that is why there is a step down in the centre." "that window and window-seat----" "that was her addition," said mr. brumley. "all this room is--replete--with her personality." he hesitated, and explained further. "when we prepared this house--we expected to be better off--than we subsequently became--and she could let herself go. much is from holland and italy." "and that beautiful old writing-desk with the little single rose in a glass!" "she put it there. she even in a sense put the flower there. it is renewed of course. by mrs. rabbit. she trained mrs. rabbit." he sighed slightly, apparently at some thought of mrs. rabbit. "you--you write----" the lady stopped, and then diverted a question that she perhaps considered too blunt, "there?" "largely. i am--a sort of author. perhaps you know my books. not very important books--but people sometimes read them." the rose-pink of the lady's cheek deepened by a shade. within her pretty head, her mind rushed to and fro saying "brumley? brumley?" then she had a saving gleam. "are you _george_ brumley?" she asked,--"_the_ george brumley?" "my name _is_ george brumley," he said, with a proud modesty. "perhaps you know my little euphemia books? they are still the most read." the lady made a faint, dishonest assent-like noise; and her rose-pink deepened another shade. but her interlocutor was not watching her very closely just then. "euphemia was my wife," he said, "at least, my wife gave her to me--a kind of exhalation. _this_"--his voice fell with a genuine respect for literary associations--"was euphemia's home." "i still," he continued, "go on. i go on writing about euphemia. i have to. in this house. with my tradition.... but it is becoming painful--painful. curiously more painful now than at the beginning. and i want to go. i want at last to make a break. that is why i am letting or selling the house.... there will be no more euphemia." his voice fell to silence. the lady surveyed the long low clear room so cleverly prepared for life, with its white wall, its dutch clock, its dutch dresser, its pretty seats about the open fireplace, its cleverly placed bureau, its sun-trap at the garden end; she could feel the rich intention of living in its every arrangement and a sense of uncertainty in things struck home to her. she seemed to see a woman, a woman like herself--only very, very much cleverer--flitting about the room and making it. and then this woman had vanished--nowhither. leaving this gentleman--sadly left--in the care of mrs. rabbit. "and she is dead?" she said with a softness in her dark eyes and a fall in her voice that was quite natural and very pretty. "she died," said mr. brumley, "three years and a half ago." he reflected. "almost exactly." he paused and she filled the pause with feeling. he became suddenly very brave and brisk and businesslike. he led the way back into the hall and made explanations. "it is not so much a hall as a hall living-room. we use that end, except when we go out upon the verandah beyond, as our dining-room. the door to the right is the kitchen." the lady's attention was caught again by the bright long eventful pictures that had already pleased her. "they are copies of two of carpaccio's st. george series in venice," he said. "we bought them together there. but no doubt you've seen the originals. in a little old place with a custodian and rather dark. one of those corners--so full of that delightful out-of-the-wayishness which is so characteristic, i think, of venice. i don't know if you found that in venice?" "i've never been abroad," said the lady. "never. i should love to go. i suppose you and your wife went--ever so much." he had a transitory wonder that so fine a lady should be untravelled, but his eagerness to display his backgrounds prevented him thinking that out at the time. "two or three times," he said, "before our little boy came to us. and always returning with something for this place. look!" he went on, stepped across an exquisite little brick court to a lawn of soft emerald and turning back upon the house. "that dellia robbia placque we lugged all the way back from florence with us, and that stone bird-bath is from siena." "how bright it is!" murmured the lady after a brief still appreciation. "delightfully bright. as though it would shine even if the sun didn't." and she abandoned herself to the rapture of seeing a house and garden that were for once better even than the agent's superlatives. and within her grasp if she chose--within her grasp. she made the garden melodious with soft appreciative sounds. she had a small voice for her size but quite a charming one, a little live bird of a voice, bright and sweet. it was a clear unruffled afternoon; even the unseen wheel-barrow had very sensibly ceased to creak and seemed to be somewhere listening.... only one trivial matter marred their easy explorations;--his boots remained unlaced. no propitious moment came when he could stoop and lace them. he was not a dexterous man with eyelets, and stooping made him grunt and his head swim. he hoped these trailing imperfections went unmarked. he tried subtly to lead this charming lady about and at the same time walk a little behind her. she on her part could not determine whether he would be displeased or not if she noticed this slight embarrassment and asked him to set it right. they were quite long leather laces and they flew about with a sturdy negligence of anything but their own offensive contentment, like a gross man who whistles a vulgar tune as he goes round some ancient church; flick, flock, they went, and flip, flap, enjoying themselves, and sometimes he trod on one and halted in his steps, and sometimes for a moment she felt her foot tether him. but man is the adaptable animal and presently they both became more used to these inconveniences and more mechanical in their efforts to avoid them. they treated those laces then exactly as nice people would treat that gross man; a minimum of polite attention and all the rest pointedly directed away from him.... the garden was full of things that people dream about doing in their gardens and mostly never do. there was a rose garden all blooming in chorus, and with pillar-roses and arches that were not so much growths as overflowing cornucopias of roses, and a neat orchard with shapely trees white-painted to their exact middles, a stone wall bearing clematis and a clothes-line so gay with mr. brumley's blue and white flannel shirts that it seemed an essential part of the design. and then there was a great border of herbaceous perennials backed by delphiniums and monkshood already in flower and budding hollyhocks rising to their duty; a border that reared its blaze of colour against a hill-slope dark with pines. there was no hedge whatever to this delightful garden. it seemed to go straight into the pine-woods; only an invisible netting marked its limits and fended off the industrious curiosity of the rabbits. "this strip of wood is ours right up to the crest," he said, "and from the crest one has a view. one has two views. if you would care----?" the lady made it clear that she was there to see all she could. she radiated her appetite to see. he carried a fur stole for her over his arm and flicked the way up the hill. flip, flap, flop. she followed demurely. "this is the only view i care to show you now," he said at the crest. "there was a better one beyond there. but--it has been defiled.... those hills! i knew you would like them. the space of it! and ... yet----. this view--lacks the shining ponds. there are wonderful distant ponds. after all i must show you the other! but you see there is the high-road, and the high-road has produced an abomination. along here we go. now. don't look down please." his gesture covered the foreground. "look right over the nearer things into the distance. there!" the lady regarded the wide view with serene appreciation. "i don't see," she said, "that it's in any way ruined. it's perfect." "you don't see! ah! you look right over. you look high. i wish i could too. but that screaming board! i wish the man's crusts would choke him." and indeed quite close at hand, where the road curved about below them, the statement that staminal bread, the true staff of life, was sold only by the international bread shops, was flung out with a vigour of yellow and prussian blue that made the landscape tame. his finger directed her questioning eye. "_oh!_" said the lady suddenly, as one who is convicted of a stupidity and coloured slightly. "in the morning of course it is worse. the sun comes directly on to it. then really and truly it blots out everything." the lady stood quite silent for a little time, with her eyes on the distant ponds. then he perceived that she was blushing. she turned to her interlocutor as a puzzled pupil might turn to a teacher. "it really is very good bread," she said. "they make it----oh! most carefully. with the germ in. and one has to tell people." her point of view surprised him. he had expected nothing but a docile sympathy. "but to tell people _here_!" he said. "yes, i suppose one oughtn't to tell them here." "man does not live by bread alone." she gave the faintest assent. "this is the work of one pushful, shoving creature, a man named harman. imagine him! imagine what he must be! don't you feel his soul defiling us?--this summit of a stupendous pile of--dough, thinking of nothing but his miserable monstrous profits, seeing nothing in the delight of life, the beauty of the world but something that attracts attention, draws eyes, something that gives him his horrible opportunity of getting ahead of all his poor little competitors and inserting--_this!_ it's the quintessence of all that is wrong with the world;--squalid, shameless huckstering!" he flew off at a tangent. "four or five years ago they made this landscape disease,--a knight!" he looked at her for a sympathetic indignation, and then suddenly something snapped in his brain and he understood. there wasn't an instant between absolute innocence and absolute knowledge. "you see," she said as responsive as though he had cried out sharply at the horror in his mind, "sir isaac is my husband. naturally ... i ought to have given you my name to begin with. it was silly...." mr. brumley gave one wild glance at the board, but indeed there was not a word to be said in its mitigation. it was the crude advertisement of a crude pretentious thing crudely sold. "my dear lady!" he said in his largest style, "i am desolated! but i have said it! it isn't a pretty board." a memory of epithets pricked him. "you must forgive--a certain touch of--rhetoric." he turned about as if to dismiss the board altogether, but she remained with her brows very faintly knit, surveying the cause of his offence. "it isn't a _pretty_ board," she said. "i've wondered at times.... it isn't." "i implore you to forget that outbreak--mere petulance--because, i suppose, of a peculiar liking for that particular view. there are--associations----" "i've wondered lately," she continued, holding on to her own thoughts, "what people _did_ think of them. and it's curious--to hear----" for a moment neither spoke, she surveyed the board and he the tall ease of her pose. and he was thinking she must surely be the most beautiful woman he had ever encountered. the whole country might be covered with boards if it gave us such women as this. he felt the urgent need of some phrase, to pull the situation out of this pit into which it had fallen. he was a little unready, his faculties all as it were neglecting his needs and crowding to the windows to stare, and meanwhile she spoke again, with something of the frankness of one who thinks aloud. "you see," she said, "one _doesn't_ hear. one thinks perhaps----and there it is. when one marries very young one is apt to take so much for granted. and afterwards----" she was wonderfully expressive in her inexpressiveness, he thought, but found as yet no saving phrase. her thought continued to drop from her. "one sees them so much that at last one doesn't see them." she turned away to survey the little house again; it was visible in bright strips between the red-scarred pine stems. she looked at it chin up, with a still approval--but she was the slenderest loveliness, and with such a dignity!--and she spoke at length as though the board had never existed. "it's like a little piece of another world; so bright and so--perfect." there was the phantom of a sigh in her voice. "i think you'll be charmed by our rockery," he said. "it was one of our particular efforts. every time we two went abroad we came back with something, stonecrop or alpine or some little bulb from the wayside." "how can you leave it!" he was leaving it because it bored him to death. but so intricate is the human mind that it was with perfect sincerity he answered: "it will be a tremendous wrench.... i have to go." "and you've written most of your books here and lived here!" the note of sympathy in her voice gave him a sudden suspicion that she imagined his departure due to poverty. now to be poor as an author is to be unpopular, and he valued his popularity--with the better sort of people. he hastened to explain. "i have to go, because here, you see, here, neither for me nor my little son, is it life. it's a place of memories, a place of accomplished beauty. my son already breaks away,--a preparatory school at margate. healthier, better, for us to break altogether i feel, wrench though it may. it's full for us at least--a new tenant would be different of course--but for _us_ it's full of associations we can't alter, can't for the life of us change. nothing you see goes on. and life you know _is_ change--change and going on." he paused impressively on his generalization. "but you will want----you will want to hand it over to--to sympathetic people of course. people," she faltered, "who will understand." mr. brumley took an immense stride--conversationally. "i am certain there is no one i would more readily see in that house than yourself," he said. "but----" she protested. "and besides, you don't know me!" "one knows some things at once, and i am as sure you would--understand--as if i had known you twenty years. it may seem absurd to you, but when i looked up just now and saw you for the first time, i thought--this, this is the tenant. this is her house.... not a doubt. that is why i did not go for my walk--came round with you." "you really think you would like us to have that house?" she said. "_still?_" "no one better," said mr. brumley. "after the board?" "after a hundred boards, i let the house to you...." "my husband of course will be the tenant," reflected lady harman. she seemed to brighten again by an effort: "i have always wanted something like this, that wasn't gorgeous, that wasn't mean. i can't _make_ things. it isn't every one--can _make_ a place...." § mr. brumley found their subsequent conversation the fullest realization of his extremest hopes. behind his amiable speeches, which soon grew altogether easy and confident again, a hundred imps of vanity were patting his back for the intuition, the swift decision that had abandoned his walk so promptly. in some extraordinary way the incident of the board became impossible; it hadn't happened, he felt, or it had happened differently. anyhow there was no time to think that over now. he guided the lady to the two little greenhouses, made her note the opening glow of the great autumnal border and brought her to the rock garden. she stooped and loved and almost kissed the soft healthy cushions of pampered saxifrage: she appreciated the cleverness of the moss-bed--where there were droseras; she knelt to the gentians; she had a kindly word for that bank-holiday corner where london pride still belatedly rejoiced; she cried out at the delicate iceland poppies that thrust up between the stones of the rough pavement; and so in the most amiable accord they came to the raised seat in the heart of it all, and sat down and took in the whole effect of the place, and backing of woods, the lush borders, the neat lawn, the still neater orchard, the pergola, the nearer delicacies among the stones, and the gable, the shining white rough-cast of the walls, the casement windows, the projecting upper story, the carefully sought-out old tiles of the roof. and everything bathed in that caressing sunshine which does not scorch nor burn but gilds and warms deliciously, that summer sunshine which only northward islands know. recovering from his first astonishment and his first misadventure, mr. brumley was soon himself again, talkative, interesting, subtly and gently aggressive. for once one may use a hackneyed phrase without the slightest exaggeration; he was charmed... he was one of those very natural-minded men with active imaginations who find women the most interesting things in a full and interesting universe. he was an entirely good man and almost professionally on the side of goodness, his pen was a pillar of the home and he was hostile and even actively hostile to all those influences that would undermine and change--anything; but he did find women attractive. he watched them and thought about them, he loved to be with them, he would take great pains to please and interest them, and his mind was frequently dreaming quite actively of them, of championing them, saying wonderful and impressive things to them, having great friendships with them, adoring them and being adored by them. at times he had to ride this interest on the curb. at times the vigour of its urgencies made him inconsistent and secretive.... comparatively his own sex was a matter of indifference to him. indeed he was a very normal man. even such abstractions as goodness and justice had rich feminine figures in his mind, and when he sat down to write criticism at his desk, that pretty little slut of a delphic sibyl presided over his activities. so that it was a cultivated as well as an attentive eye that studied the movements of lady harman and an experienced ear that weighed the words and cadences of her entirely inadequate and extremely expressive share in their conversation. he had enjoyed the social advantages of a popular and presentable man of letters, and he had met a variety of ladies; but he had never yet met anyone at all like lady harman. she was pretty and quite young and fresh; he doubted if she was as much as four-and-twenty; she was as simple-mannered as though she was ever so much younger than that, and dignified as though she was ever so much older; and she had a sort of lustre of wealth about her----. one met it sometimes in young richly married jewesses, but though she was very dark she wasn't at all of that type; he was inclined to think she must be welsh. this manifest spending of great lots of money on the richest, finest and fluffiest things was the only aspect of her that sustained the parvenu idea; and it wasn't in any way carried out by her manners, which were as modest and silent and inaggressive as the very best can be. personally he liked opulence, he responded to countless-guinea furs.... soon there was a neat little history in his mind that was reasonably near the truth, of a hard-up professional family, fatherless perhaps, of a mercenary marriage at seventeen or so--and this.... and while mr. brumley's observant and speculative faculties were thus active, his voice was busily engaged. with the accumulated artistry of years he was developing his pose. he did it almost subconsciously. he flung out hint and impulsive confidence and casual statement with the careless assurance of the accustomed performer, until by nearly imperceptible degrees that finished picture of the two young lovers, happy, artistic, a little bohemian and one of them doomed to die, making their home together in an atmosphere of sunny gaiety, came into being in her mind.... "it must have been beautiful to have begun life like that," she said in a voice that was a sigh, and it flashed joyfully across mr. brumley's mind that this wonderful person could envy his euphemia. "yes," he said, "at least we had our spring." "to be together," said the lady, "and--so beautifully poor...." there is a phase in every relationship when one must generalize if one is to go further. a certain practice in this kind of talk with ladies blunted the finer sensibilities of mr. brumley. at any rate he was able to produce this sentence without a qualm. "life," he said, "is sometimes a very extraordinary thing." lady harman reflected upon this statement and then responded with an air of remembered moments: "isn't it." "one loses the most precious things," said mr. brumley, "and one loses them and it seems as though one couldn't go on. and one goes on." "and one finds oneself," said lady harman, "without all sorts of precious things----" and she stopped, transparently realizing that she was saying too much. "there is a sort of vitality about life," said mr. brumley, and stopped as if on the verge of profundities. "i suppose one hopes," said lady harman. "and one doesn't think. and things happen." "things happen," assented mr. brumley. for a little while their minds rested upon this thought, as chasing butterflies might rest together on a flower. "and so i am going to leave this," mr. brumley resumed. "i am going up there to london for a time with my boy. then perhaps we may travel-germany, italy, perhaps-in his holidays. it is beginning again, i feel with him. but then even we two must drift apart. i can't deny him a public school sooner or later. his own road...." "it will be lonely for you," sympathized the lady. "i have my work," said mr. brumley with a sort of valiant sadness. "yes, i suppose your work----" she left an eloquent gap. "there, of course, one's fortunate," said mr. brumley. "i wish," said lady harman, with a sudden frankness and a little quickening of her colour, "that i had some work. something--that was my own." "but you have----there are social duties. there must be all sorts of things." "there are--all sorts of things. i suppose i'm ungrateful. i have my children." "you have children, lady harman!" "i've _four_." he was really astonished, "your _own_?" she turned her fawn's eyes on his with a sudden wonder at his meaning. "my own!" she said with the faintest tinge of astonished laughter in her voice. "what else could they be?" "i thought----i thought you might have step-children." "oh! of course! no! i'm their mother;--all four of them. they're mine as far as that goes. anyhow." and her eye questioned him again for his intentions. but his thought ran along its own path. "you see," he said, "there is something about you--so freshly beginning life. so like--spring." "you thought i was too young! i'm nearly six-and-twenty! but all the same,--though they're mine,--_still_----why shouldn't a woman have work in the world, mr. brumley? in spite of all that." "but surely--that's the most beautiful work in the world that anyone could possibly have." lady harman reflected. she seemed to hesitate on the verge of some answer and not to say it. "you see," she said, "it may have been different with you.... when one has a lot of nurses, and not very much authority." she coloured deeply and broke back from the impending revelations. "no," she said, "i would like some work of my own." § at this point their conversation was interrupted by the lady's chauffeur in a manner that struck mr. brumley as extraordinary, but which the tall lady evidently regarded as the most natural thing in the world. mr. clarence appeared walking across the lawn towards them, surveying the charms of as obviously a charming garden as one could have, with the disdain and hostility natural to a chauffeur. he did not so much touch his cap as indicate that it was within reach, and that he could if he pleased touch it. "it's time you were going, my lady," he said. "sir isaac will be coming back by the five-twelve, and there'll be a nice to-do if you ain't at home and me at the station and everything in order again." manifestly an abnormal expedition. "must we start at once, clarence?" asked the lady consulting a bracelet watch. "you surely won't take two hours----" "i can give you fifteen minutes more, my lady," said clarence, "provided i may let her out and take my corners just exactly in my own way." "and i must give you tea," said mr. brumley, rising to his feet. "and there is the kitchen." "and upstairs! i'm afraid, clarence, for this occasion only you must--what is it?--let her out." "and no 'oh clarence!' my lady?" she ignored that. "i'll tell mrs. rabbit at once," said mr. brumley, and started to run and trod in some complicated way on one of his loose laces and was precipitated down the rockery steps. "oh!" cried the lady. "mind!" and clasped her hands. he made a sound exactly like the word "damnation" as he fell, but he didn't so much get up as bounce up, apparently in the brightest of tempers, and laughed, held out two earthy hands for sympathy with a mock rueful grimace, and went on, earthy-green at the knees and a little more carefully towards the house. clarence, having halted to drink deep satisfaction from this disaster, made his way along a nearly parallel path towards the kitchen, leaving his lady to follow as she chose to the house. "_you'll_ take a cup of tea?" called mr. brumley. "oh! _i'll_ take a cup all right," said clarence in the kindly voice of one who addresses an amusing inferior.... mrs. rabbit had already got the tea-things out upon the cane table in the pretty verandah, and took it ill that she should be supposed not to have thought of these preparations. mr. brumley disappeared for a few minutes into the house. he returned with a conscious relief on his face, clean hands, brushed knees, and his boots securely laced. he found lady harman already pouring out tea. "you see," she said, to excuse this pleasant enterprise on her part, "my husband has to be met at the station with the car.... and of course he has no idea----" she left what it was of which sir isaac had no idea to the groping speculations of mr. brumley. § that evening mr. brumley was quite unable to work. his mind was full of this beautiful dark lady who had come so unexpectedly into his world. perhaps there are such things as premonitions. at any rate he had an altogether disproportionate sense of the significance of the afternoon's adventure,--which after all was a very small adventure indeed. a mere talk. his mind refused to leave her, her black furry slenderness, her dark trustful eyes, the sweet firmness of her perfect lips, her appealing simplicity that was yet somehow compatible with the completest self-possession. he went over the incident of the board again and again, scraping his memory for any lurking crumb of detail as a starving man might scrape an insufficient plate. her dignity, her gracious frank forgiveness; no queen alive in these days could have touched her.... but it wasn't a mere elaborate admiration. there was something about her, about the quality of their meeting. most people know that sort of intimation. this person, it says, so fine, so brave, so distant still in so many splendid and impressive qualities, is yet in ways as yet undefined and unexplored, subtly and abundantly--for _you_. it was that made all her novelty and distinction and high quality and beauty so dominating among mr. brumley's thoughts. without that his interest might have been almost entirely--academic. but there was woven all through her the hints of an imaginable alliance, with _us_, with the things that are brumley, with all that makes beautiful little cottages and resents advertisements in lovely places, with us as against something over there lurking behind that board, something else, something out of which she came. he vaguely adumbrated what it was out of which she came. a closed narrow life--with horrid vast enviable quantities of money. a life, could one use the word _vulgar_?--so that carpaccio, della robbia, old furniture, a garden unostentatiously perfect, and the atmosphere of _belles-lettres_, seemed things of another more desirable world. (she had never been abroad.) a world, too, that would be so willing, so happy to enfold her, furs, funds, freshness--everything. and all this was somehow animated by the stirring warmth in the june weather, for spring raised the sap in mr. brumley as well as in his trees, had been a restless time for him all his life. this spring particularly had sensitized him, and now a light had shone. he was so unable to work that for twenty minutes he sat over a pleasant little essay on shakespear's garden that by means of a concordance and his natural aptitude he was writing for the book of the national shakespear theatre, without adding a single fancy to its elegant playfulness. then he decided he needed his afternoon's walk after all, and he took cap and stick and went out, and presently found himself surveying that yellow and blue board and seeing it from an entirely new point of view.... it seemed to him that he hadn't made the best use of his conversational opportunities, and for a time this troubled him.... toward the twilight he was walking along the path that runs through the heather along the edge of the rusty dark ironstone lake opposite the pine-woods. he spoke his thoughts aloud to the discreet bat that flitted about him. "i wonder," he said, "whether i shall ever set eyes on her again...." in the small hours when he ought to have been fast asleep he decided she would certainly take the house, and that he would see her again quite a number of times. a long tangle of unavoidable detail for discussion might be improvised by an ingenious man. and the rest of that waking interval passed in such inventions, which became more and more vague and magnificent and familiar as mr. brumley lapsed into slumber again.... next day the garden essay was still neglected, and he wrote a pretty vague little song about an earthly mourner and a fresh presence that set him thinking of the story of persephone and how she passed in the springtime up from the shadows again, blessing as she passed.... he pulled himself together about midday, cycled over to gorshott for lunch at the clubhouse and a round with horace toomer in the afternoon, re-read the poem after tea, decided it was poor, tore it up and got himself down to his little fantasy about shakespear's garden for a good two hours before supper. it was a sketch of that fortunate poet (whose definitive immortality is now being assured by an influential committee) walking round his stratford garden with his daughter, quoting himself copiously with an accuracy and inappropriateness that reflected more credit upon his heart than upon his head, and saying in addition many distinctively brumley things. when mrs. rabbit, with a solicitude acquired from the late mrs. brumley, asked him how he had got on with his work--the sight of verse on his paper had made her anxious--he could answer quite truthfully, "like a house afire." chapter the second the personality of sir isaac § it is to be remarked that two facts, usually esteemed as supremely important in the life of a woman, do not seem to have affected mr. brumley's state of mind nearly so much as quite trivial personal details about lady harman. the first of these facts was the existence of the lady's four children, and the second, sir isaac. mr. brumley did not think very much of either of these two facts; if he had they would have spoilt the portrait in his mind; and when he did think of them it was chiefly to think how remarkably little they were necessary to that picture's completeness. he spent some little time however trying to recall exactly what it was she had said about her children. he couldn't now succeed in reproducing her words, if indeed it had been by anything so explicit as words that she had conveyed to him that she didn't feel her children were altogether hers. "incidental results of the collapse of her girlhood," tried mr. brumley, "when she married harman." expensive nurses, governesses--the best that money without prestige or training could buy. and then probably a mother-in-law. and as for harman----? there mr. brumley's mind desisted for sheer lack of material. given this lady and that board and his general impression of harman's refreshment and confectionery activity--the data were insufficient. a commonplace man no doubt, a tradesman, energetic perhaps and certainly a little brassy, successful by the chances of that economic revolution which everywhere replaces the isolated shop by the syndicated enterprise, irrationally conceited about it; a man perhaps ultimately to be pitied--with this young goddess finding herself.... mr. brumley's mind sat down comfortably to the more congenial theme of a young goddess finding herself, and it was only very gradually in the course of several days that the personality of sir isaac began to assume its proper importance in the scheme of his imaginings. § in the afternoon as he went round the links with horace toomer he got some definite lights upon sir isaac. his mind was so full of lady harman that he couldn't but talk of her visit. "i've a possible tenant for my cottage," he said as he and toomer, full of the sunny contentment of english gentlemen who had played a proper game in a proper manner, strolled back towards the clubhouse. "that man harman." "not the international stores and staminal bread man." "yes. odd. considering my hatred of his board." "he ought to pay--anyhow," said toomer. "they say he has a pretty wife and keeps her shut up." "she came," said brumley, neglecting to add the trifling fact that she had come alone. "pretty?" "charming, i thought." "he's jealous of her. someone was saying that the chauffeur has orders not to take her into london--only for trips in the country. they live in a big ugly house i'm told on putney hill. did she in any way _look_--as though----?" "not in the least. if she isn't an absolutely straight young woman i've never set eyes on one." "_he_," said toomer, "is a disgusting creature." "morally?" "no, but--generally. spends his life ruining little tradesmen, for the fun of the thing. he's three parts an invalid with some obscure kidney disease. sometimes he spends whole days in bed, drinking contrexéville water and planning the bankruptcy of decent men.... so the party made a knight of him." "a party must have funds, toomer." "he didn't pay nearly enough. blapton is an idiot with the honours. when it isn't mrs. blapton. what can you expect when ---- ----" (but here toomer became libellous.) toomer was an interesting type. he had a disagreeable disposition profoundly modified by a public school and university training. two antagonistic forces made him. he was the spirit of scurrility incarnate, that was, as people say, innate; and by virtue of those moulding forces he was doing his best to be an english gentleman. that mysterious impulse which compels the young male to make objectionable imputations against seemly lives and to write rare inelegant words upon clean and decent things burnt almost intolerably within him, and equally powerful now was the gross craving he had acquired for personal association with all that is prominent, all that is successful, all that is of good report. he had found his resultant in the censorious defence of established things. he conducted the _british critic_, attacking with a merciless energy all that was new, all that was critical, all those fresh and noble tentatives that admit of unsavoury interpretations, and when the urgent yahoo in him carried him below the pretentious dignity of his accustomed organ he would squirt out his bitterness in a little sham facetious bookstall volume with a bright cover and quaint woodcuts, in which just as many prominent people as possible were mentioned by name and a sauce of general absurdity could be employed to cover and, if need be, excuse particular libels. so he managed to relieve himself and get along. harman was just on the border-line of the class he considered himself free to revile. harman was an outsider and aggressive and new, one of mrs. blapton's knights, and of no particular weight in society; so far he was fair game; but he was not so new as he had been, he was almost through with the running of the toomer gauntlet, he had a tremendous lot of money and it was with a modified vehemence that the distinguished journalist and humourist expatiated on his offensiveness to mr. brumley. he talked in a gentle, rather weary voice, that came through a moustache like a fringe of light tobacco. "personally i've little against the man. a wife too young for him and jealously guarded, but that's all to his credit. nowadays. if it wasn't for his blatancy in his business.... and the knighthood.... i suppose he can't resist taking anything he can get. bread made by wholesale and distributed like a newspaper can't, i feel, be the same thing as the loaf of your honest old-fashioned baker--each loaf made with individual attention--out of wholesome english flour--hand-ground--with a personal touch for each customer. still, everything drifts on to these hugger-mugger large enterprises; chicago spreads over the world. one thing goes after another, tobacco, tea, bacon, drugs, bookselling. decent homes destroyed right and left. not harman's affair, i suppose. the girls in his london tea-shops have of course to supplement their wages by prostitution--probably don't object to that nowadays considering the novels we have. and his effect on the landscape----until they stopped him he was trying very hard to get shakespear's cliff at dover. he did for a time have the toad rock at tunbridge. still"--something like a sigh escaped from toomer,--"his private life appears to be almost as blameless as anybody's can be.... thanks no doubt to his defective health. i made the most careful enquiries when his knighthood was first discussed. someone has to. before his marriage he seems to have lived at home with his mother. at highbury. very quietly and inexpensively." "then he's not the conventional vulgarian?" "much more of the rockefeller type. bad health, great concentration, organizing power.... applied of course to a narrower range of business.... i'm glad i'm not a small confectioner in a town he wants to take up." "he's--hard?" "merciless. hasn't the beginnings of an idea of fair play.... none at all.... no human give or take.... are you going to have tea here, or are you walking back now?" § it was fully a week before mr. brumley heard anything more of lady harman. he began to fear that this shining furry presence would glorify black strand no more. then came a telegram that filled him with the liveliest anticipations. it was worded: "coming see cottage saturday afternoon harman...." on saturday morning mr. brumley dressed with an apparent ease and unusual care.... he worked rather discursively before lunch. his mind was busy picking up the ends of their previous conversation and going on with them to all sorts of bright knots, bows and elegant cats' cradling. he planned openings that might give her tempting opportunities of confidences if she wished to confide, and artless remarks and questions that would make for self-betrayal if she didn't. and he thought of her, he thought of her imaginatively, this secluded rare thing so happily come to him, who was so young, so frank and fresh and so unhappily married (he was sure) to a husband at least happily mortal. yes, dear reader, even on that opening morning mr. brumley's imagination, trained very largely upon victorian literature and _belles-lettres_, leapt forward to the very ending of this story.... we, of course, do nothing of the sort, our lot is to follow a more pedestrian route.... he lapsed into a vague series of meditations, slower perhaps but essentially similar, after his temperate palatable lunch. he was apprised of the arrival of his visitor by the sudden indignant yaup followed by the general subdued uproar of a motor-car outside the front door, even before clarence, this time amazingly prompt, assaulted the bell. then the whole house was like that poem by edgar allan poe, one magnificent texture of clangour. at the first toot of the horn mr. brumley had moved swiftly into the bay, and screened partly by the life-size venus of milo that stood in the bay window, and partly by the artistic curtains, surveyed the glittering vehicle. he was first aware of a vast fur coat enclosing a lean grey-headed obstinate-looking man with a diabetic complexion who was fumbling with the door of the car and preventing clarence's assistance. mr. brumley was able to remark that the gentleman's nose projected to a sharpened point, and that his thin-lipped mouth was all awry and had a kind of habitual compression, the while that his eyes sought eagerly for the other occupant of the car. she was unaccountably invisible. could it be that that hood really concealed her? could it be?... the white-faced gentleman descended, relieved himself tediously of the vast fur coat, handed it to clarence and turned to the house. reverentially clarence placed the coat within the automobile and closed the door. still the protesting mind of mr. brumley refused to believe!... he heard the house-door open and mrs. rabbit in colloquy with a flat masculine voice. he heard his own name demanded and conceded. then a silence, not the faintest suggestion of a feminine rustle, and then the sound of mrs. rabbit at the door-handle. conviction stormed the last fastness of the disappointed author's mind. "oh _damn_!" he shouted with extreme fervour. he had never imagined it was possible that sir isaac could come alone. § but the house had to be let, and it had to be let to sir isaac harman. in another moment an amiable though distinguished man of letters was in the hall interviewing the great _entrepreneur_. the latter gentleman was perhaps three inches shorter than mr. brumley, his hair was grey-shot brown, his face clean-shaven, his features had a thin irregularity, and he was dressed in a neat brown suit with a necktie very exactly matching it. "sir isaac harman?" said mr. brumley with a note of gratification. "that's it," said sir isaac. he appeared to be nervous and a little out of breath. "come," he said, "just to look over it. just to see it. probably too small, but if it doesn't put you out----" he blew out the skin of his face about his mouth a little. "delighted to see you anyhow," said mr. brumley, filling the world of unspoken things with singularly lurid curses. "this. nice little hall,--very," said sir isaac. "pretty, that bit at the end. many rooms are there?" mr. brumley answered inexactly and meditated a desperate resignation of the whole job to mrs. rabbit. then he made an effort and began to explain. "that clock," said sir isaac interrupting in the dining-room, "is a fake." mr. brumley made silent interrogations. "been there myself," said sir isaac. "they sell those brass fittings in ho'bun." they went upstairs together. when mr. brumley wasn't explaining or pointing out, sir isaac made a kind of whistling between his clenched teeth. "this bathroom wants refitting anyhow," he said abruptly. "i daresay lady harman would like that room with the bay--but it's all--small. it's really quite pretty; you've done it cleverly, but--the size of it! i'd have to throw out a wing. and that you know might spoil the style. that roof,--a gardener's cottage?... i thought it might be. what's this other thing here? old barn. empty? that might expand a bit. couldn't do only just this anyhow." he walked in front of mr. brumley downstairs and still emitting that faint whistle led the way into the garden. he seemed to regard mr. brumley merely as a source of answers to his questions, and a seller in process of preparation for an offer. it was clear he meant to make an offer. "it's not the house i should buy if i was alone in this," he said, "but lady harman's taken a fancy somehow. and it might be adapted...." from first to last mr. brumley never said a single word about euphemia and the young matrimony and all the other memories this house enshrined. he felt instinctively that it would not affect sir isaac one way or the other. he tried simply to seem indifferent to whether sir isaac bought the place or not. he tried to make it appear almost as if houses like this often happened to him, and interested him only in the most incidental manner. they had their proper price, he tried to convey, which of course no gentleman would underbid. in the exquisite garden sir isaac said: "one might make a very pretty little garden of this--if one opened it out a bit." and of the sunken rock-garden: "that might be dangerous of a dark night." "i suppose," he said, indicating the hill of pines behind, "one could buy or lease some of that. if one wanted to throw it into the place and open out more. "from my point of view," he said, "it isn't a house. it's----" he sought in his mind for an expression--"a cottage ornay." this history declines to record either what mr. brumley said or what he did not say. sir isaac surveyed the house thoughtfully for some moments from the turf edging of the great herbaceous border. "how far," he asked, "is it from the nearest railway station?..." mr. brumley gave details. "four miles. and an infrequent service? nothing in any way suburban? better to motor into guildford and get the express. h'm.... and what sort of people do we get about here?" mr. brumley sketched. "mildly horsey. that's not bad. no officers about?... nothing nearer than aldershot.... that's eleven miles, is it? h'm. i suppose there aren't any _literary_ people about here, musicians or that kind of thing, no advanced people of that sort?" "not when i've gone," said mr. brumley, with the faintest flavour of humour. sir isaac stared at him for a moment with eyes vacantly thoughtful. "it mightn't be so bad," said sir isaac, and whistled a little between his teeth. mr. brumley was suddenly minded to take his visitor to see the view and the effect of his board upon it. but he spoke merely of the view and left sir isaac to discover the board or not as he thought fit. as they ascended among the trees, the visitor was manifestly seized by some strange emotion, his face became very white, he gasped and blew for breath, he felt for his face with a nervous hand. "four thousand," he said suddenly. "an outside price." "a minimum," said mr. brumley, with a slight quickening of the pulse. "you won't get three eight," gasped sir isaac. "not a business man, but my agent tells me----" panted mr. brumley. "three eight," said sir isaac. "we're just coming to the view," said mr. brumley. "just coming to the view." "practically got to rebuild the house," said sir isaac. "there!" said mr. brumley, and waved an arm widely. sir isaac regarded the prospect with a dissatisfied face. his pallor had given place to a shiny, flushed appearance, his nose, his ears, and his cheeks were pink. he blew his face out, and seemed to be studying the landscape for defects. "this might be built over at any time," he complained. mr. brumley was reassuring. for a brief interval sir isaac's eyes explored the countryside vaguely, then his expression seemed to concentrate and run together to a point. "h'm," he said. "that board," he remarked, "quite wrong there." "_well!_" said mr. brumley, too surprised for coherent speech. "quite," said sir isaac harman. "don't you see what's the matter?" mr. brumley refrained from an eloquent response. "they ought to be," sir isaac went on, "white and a sort of green. like the county council notices on hampstead heath. so as to blend.... you see, an ad. that hits too hard is worse than no ad. at all. it leaves a dislike.... advertisements ought to blend. it ought to seem as though all this view were saying it. not just that board. now suppose we had a shade of very light brown, a kind of light khaki----" he turned a speculative eye on mr. brumley as if he sought for the effect of this latter suggestion on him. "if the whole board was invisible----" said mr. brumley. sir isaac considered it. "just the letters showing," he said. "no,--that would be going too far in the other direction." he made a faint sucking noise with his lips and teeth as he surveyed the landscape and weighed this important matter.... "queer how one gets ideas," he said at last, turning away. "it was my wife told me about that board." he stopped to survey the house from the exact point of view his wife had taken nine days before. "i wouldn't give this place a second thought," said sir isaac, "if it wasn't for lady harman." he confided. "_she_ wants a week-end cottage. but _i_ don't see why it _should_ be a week-end cottage. i don't see why it shouldn't be made into a nice little country house. compact, of course. by using up that barn." he inhaled three bars of a tune. "london," he explained, "doesn't suit lady harman." "health?" asked mr. brumley, all alert. "it isn't her health exactly," sir isaac dropped out. "you see--she's a young woman. she gets ideas." "you know," he continued, "i'd like to have a look at that barn again. if we develop that--and a sort of corridor across where the shrubs are--and ran out offices...." § mr. brumley's mind was still vigorously struggling with the flaming implications of sir isaac's remark that lady harman "got ideas," and sir isaac was gently whistling his way towards an offer of three thousand nine hundred when they came down out of the pines into the path along the edge of the herbaceous border. and then mr. brumley became aware of an effect away between the white-stemmed trees towards the house as if the cambridge boat-race crew was indulging in a vigorous scrimmage. drawing nearer this resolved itself into the fluent contours of lady beach-mandarin, dressed in sky-blue and with a black summer straw hat larger than ever and trimmed effusively with marguerites. "here," said sir isaac, "can't i get off? you've got a friend." "you must have some tea," said mr. brumley, who wanted to suggest that they should agree to sir isaac's figure of three thousand eight hundred, but not as pounds but guineas. it seemed to him a suggestion that might prove insidiously attractive. "it's a charming lady, my friend lady beach-mandarin. she'll be delighted----" "i don't think i can," said sir isaac. "not in the habit--social occasions." his face expressed a panic terror of this gallant full-rigged lady ahead of them. "but you see now," said mr. brumley, with a detaining grip, "it's unavoidable." and the next moment sir isaac was mumbling his appreciations of the introduction. i must admit that lady beach-mandarin was almost as much to meet as one can meet in a single human being, a broad abundant billowing personality with a taste for brims, streamers, pennants, panniers, loose sleeves, sweeping gestures, top notes and the like that made her altogether less like a woman than an occasion of public rejoicing. even her large blue eyes projected, her chin and brows and nose all seemed racing up to the front of her as if excited by the clarion notes of her abundant voice, and the pinkness of her complexion was as exuberant as her manners. exuberance--it was her word. she had evidently been a big, bouncing, bright gaminesque girl at fifteen, and very amusing and very much admired; she had liked the rôle and she had not so much grown older as suffered enlargement--a very considerable enlargement. "ah!" she cried, "and so i've caught you at home, mr. brumley! and, poor dear, you're at my mercy." and she shook both his hands with both of hers. that was before mr. brumley introduced sir isaac, a thing he did so soon as he could get one of his hands loose and wave a surviving digit or so at that gentleman. "you see, sir isaac," she said, taking him in, in the most generous way; "i and mr. brumley are old friends. we knew each other of yore. we have our jokes." sir isaac seemed to feel the need of speech but got no further than a useful all-round noise. "and one of them is that when i want him to do the least little thing for me he hides away! always. by a sort of instinct. it's such a small thing, sir isaac." sir isaac was understood to say vaguely that they always did. but he had become very indistinct. "aren't i always at your service?" protested mr. brumley with a responsive playfulness. "and i don't even know what it is you want." lady beach-mandarin, addressing herself exclusively to sir isaac, began a tale of a shakespear bazaar she was holding in an adjacent village, and how she knew mr. brumley (naughty man) meant to refuse to give her autographed copies of his littlest book for the book stall she was organizing. mr. brumley confuted her gaily and generously. so discoursing they made their way to the verandah where lady harman had so lately "poured." sir isaac was borne along upon the lady's stream of words in a state of mulish reluctance, nodding, saying "of course" and similar phrases, and wishing he was out of it all with an extreme manifestness. he drank his tea with unmistakable discomfort, and twice inserted into the conversation an entirely irrelevant remark that he had to be going. but lady beach-mandarin had her purposes with him and crushed these quivering tentatives. lady beach-mandarin had of course like everybody else at that time her own independent movement in the great national effort to create an official british theatre upon the basis of william shakespear, and she saw in the as yet unenlisted resources of sir isaac strong possibilities of reinforcement of her own particular contribution to the great work. he was manifestly shy and sulky and disposed to bolt at the earliest possible moment, and so she set herself now with a swift and concentrated combination of fascination and urgency to commit him to participations. she flattered and cajoled and bribed. she was convinced that even to be called upon by lady beach-mandarin is no light privilege for these new commercial people, and so she made no secret of her intention of decorating the hall of his large but undistinguished house in putney, with her redeeming pasteboard. she appealed to the instances of venice and florence to show that "such men as you, sir isaac," who control commerce and industry, have always been the guardians and patrons of art. and who more worthy of patronage than william shakespear? also she said that men of such enormous wealth as his owed something to their national tradition. "you have to pay your footing, sir isaac," she said with impressive vagueness. "putting it in round figures," said sir isaac, suddenly and with a white gleam of animosity in his face, the animosity of a trapped animal at the sight of its captors, "what does coming on your committee mean, lady beach-mandarin?" "it's your name we want," said the lady, "but i'm sure you'd not be ungenerous. the tribute success owes the arts." "a hundred?" he threw out,--his ears red. "guineas," breathed lady beach-mandarin with a lofty sweetness of consent. he stood up hastily as if to escape further exaction, and the lady rose too. "and you'll let me call on lady harman," she said, honestly doing her part in the bargain. "can't keep the car waiting," was what brumley could distinguish in his reply. "i expect you have a perfectly splendid car, sir isaac," said lady beach-mandarin, drawing him out. "quite the modernest thing." sir isaac replied with the reluctance of an income tax return that it was a forty-five rolls royce, good of course but nothing amazing. "we must see it," she said, and turned his retreat into a procession. she admired the car, she admired the colour of the car, she admired the lamps of the car and the door of the car and the little fittings of the car. she admired the horn. she admired the twist of the horn. she admired clarence and the uniform of clarence and she admired and coveted the great fur coat that he held ready for his employer. (but if she had it, she said, she would wear the splendid fur outside to show every little bit of it.) and when the car at last moved forward and tooted--she admired the note--and vanished softly and swiftly through the gates, she was left in the porch with mr. brumley still by sheer inertia admiring and envying. she admired sir isaac's car number z . (such an easy one to remember!) then she stopped abruptly, as one might discover that the water in the bathroom was running to waste and turn it off. she had a cynicism as exuberant as the rest of her. "well," she said, with a contented sigh and an entire flattening of her tone, "i laid it on pretty thick that time.... i wonder if he'll send me that hundred guineas or whether i shall have to remind him of it...." her manner changed again to that of a gigantic gamin. "i mean to have that money," she said with bright determination and round eyes.... she reflected and other thoughts came to her. "plutocracy," she said, "_is_ perfectly detestable, don't you think so, mr. brumley?" ... and then, "i can't _imagine_ how a man who deals in bread and confectionery can manage to go about so completely half-baked." "he's a very remarkable type," said mr. brumley. he became urgent: "i do hope, dear lady beach-mandarin, you will contrive to call on lady harman. she is--in relation to _that_--quite the most interesting woman i have seen." § presently as they paced the croquet lawn together, the preoccupation of mr. brumley's mind drew their conversation back to lady harman. "i wish," he repeated, "you would go and see these people. she's not at all what you might infer from him." "what could one infer about a wife from a man like that? except that she'd have a lot to put up with." "you know,--she's a beautiful person, tall, slender, dark...." lady beach-mandarin turned her full blue eye upon him. "_now!_" she said archly. "i'm interested in the incongruity." lady beach-mandarin's reply was silent and singular. she compressed her lips very tightly, fixed her eye firmly on mr. brumley's, lifted her finger to the level of her left eyelash, and then shook it at him very deliberately five times. then with a little sigh and a sudden and complete restoration of manner she remarked that never in any year before had she seen peonies quite so splendid. "i've a peculiar sympathy with peonies," she said. "they're so exactly my style." chapter the third lady harman at home § exactly three weeks after that first encounter between lady beach-mandarin and sir isaac harman, mr. brumley found himself one of a luncheon party at that lady's house in temperley square and talking very freely and indiscreetly about the harmans. lady beach-mandarin always had her luncheons in a family way at a large round table so that nobody could get out of her range, and she insisted upon conversation being general, except for her mother who was impenetrably deaf and the swiss governess of her only daughter phyllis who was incomprehensible in any european tongue. the mother was incalculably old and had been a friend of victor hugo and alfred de musset; she maintained an intermittent monologue about the private lives of those great figures; nobody paid the slightest attention to her but one felt she enriched the table with an undertow of literary associations. a small dark stealthy butler and a convulsive boy with hair (apparently) taking the place of eyes waited. on this occasion lady beach-mandarin had gathered together two cousins, maiden ladies from perth, wearing valiant hats, toomer the wit and censor, and miss sharsper the novelist (whom toomer detested), a gentleman named roper whom she had invited under a misapprehension that he was the arctic roper, and mr. brumley. she had tried mr. roper with questions about penguins, seals, cold and darkness, icebergs and glaciers, captain scott, doctor cook and the shape of the earth, and all in vain, and feeling at last that something was wrong, she demanded abruptly whether mr. brumley had sold his house. "i'm selling it," said mr. brumley, "by almost imperceptible degrees." "he haggles?" "haggles and higgles. he higgles passionately. he goes white and breaks into a cold perspiration. he wants me now to include the gardener's tools--in whatever price we agree upon." "a rich man like that ought to be easy and generous," said lady beach-mandarin. "then he wouldn't be a rich man like that," said mr. toomer. "but doesn't it distress you highly, mr. brumley," one of the perth ladies asked, "to be leaving euphemia's home to strangers? the man may go altering it." "that--that weighs with me very much," said mr. brumley, recalled to his professions. "there--i put my trust in lady harman." "you've seen her again?" asked lady beach-mandarin. "yes. she came with him--a few days ago. that couple interests me more and more. so little akin." "there's eighteen years between them," said toomer. "it's one of those cases," began mr. brumley with a note of scientific detachment, "where one is really tempted to be ultra-feminist. it's clear, he uses every advantage. he's her owner, her keeper, her obstinate insensitive little tyrant.... and yet there's a sort of effect, as though nothing was decided.... as if she was only just growing up." "they've been married six or seven years," said toomer. "she was just eighteen." "they went over the house together and whenever she spoke he contradicted her with a sort of vicious playfulness. tried to poke clumsy fun at her. called her 'lady harman.' only it was quite evident that what she said stuck in his mind.... very queer--interesting people." "i wouldn't have anyone allowed to marry until they were five-and-twenty," said lady beach-mandarin. "sweet seventeen sometimes contrives to be very marriageable," said the gentleman named roper. "sweet seventeen must contrive to wait," said lady beach-mandarin. "sweet fourteen has to--and when i was fourteen--i was ardent! there's no earthly objection to a little harmless flirtation of course. it's the marrying." "you'd conduce to romance," said miss sharsper, "anyhow. eighteen won't bear restriction and everyone would begin by eloping--illegally." "i'd put them back," said lady beach-mandarin. "oh! remorselessly." mr. roper, who was more and more manifestly not the arctic one, remarked that she would "give the girls no end of an adolescence...." mr. brumley did not attend very closely to the subsequent conversation. his mind had gone back to black strand and the second visit that lady harman, this time under her natural and proper protection, had paid him. a little thread from the old lady's discourse drifted by him. she had scented marriage in the air and she was saying, "of course they ought to have let victor hugo marry over and over again. he would have made it all so beautiful. he could throw a splendour over--over almost anything." mr. brumley sank out of attention altogether. it was so difficult to express his sense of lady harman as a captive, enclosed but unsubdued. she had been as open and shining as a celandine flower in the sunshine on that first invasion, but on the second it had been like overcast weather and her starry petals had been shut and still. she hadn't been in the least subdued or effaced, but closed, inaccessible to conversational bees, that astonishing honey of trust and easy friendship had been hidden in a dignified impenetrable reserve. she had had the effect of being not so much specially shut against mr. brumley as habitually shut against her husband, as a protection against his continual clumsy mental interferences. and once when sir isaac had made a sudden allusion to price mr. brumley had glanced at her and met her eyes.... "of course," he said, coming up to the conversational surface again, "a woman like that is bound to fight her way out." "queen mary!" cried miss sharsper. "fight her way out!" "queen mary!" said mr. brumley, "no!--lady harman." "_i_ was talking of queen mary," said miss sharsper. "and mr. brumley was thinking of lady harman!" cried lady beach-mandarin. "well," said mr. brumley, "i confess i do think about her. she seems to me to be so typical in many ways of--of everything that is weak in the feminine position. as a type--yes, she's perfect." "i've never seen this lady," said miss sharsper. "is she beautiful?" "i've not seen her myself yet," said lady beach-mandarin. "she's mr. brumley's particular discovery." "you haven't called?" he asked with a faint reproach. "but i've been going to--oh! tremendously. and you revive all my curiosity. why shouldn't some of us this very afternoon----?" she caught at her own passing idea and held it. "let's go," she cried. "let's visit the wife of this ogre, the last of the women in captivity. we'll take the big car and make a party and call _en masse_." mr. toomer protested he had no morbid curiosities. "but you, susan?" miss sharsper declared she would _love_ to come. wasn't it her business to study out-of-the-way types? mr. roper produced a knowing sort of engagement--"i'm provided for already, lady beach-mandarin," he said, and the cousins from perth had to do some shopping. "then we three will be the expedition," said the hostess. "and afterwards if we survive we'll tell you our adventures. it's a house on putney hill, isn't it, where this christian maiden, so to speak, is held captive? i've had her in my mind, but i've always intended to call with agatha alimony; she's so inspiring to down-trodden women." "not exactly down-trodden," said mr. brumley, "not down-trodden. that's what's so curious about it." "and what shall we do when we get there?" cried lady beach-mandarin. "i feel we ought to do something more than call. can't we carry her off right away, mr. brumley? i want to go right in to her and say 'look here! i'm on your side. your husband's a tyrant. i'm help and rescue. i'm all that a woman ought to be--fine and large. come out from under that unworthy man's heel!'" "suppose she isn't at all the sort of person you seem to think she is," said miss sharsper. "and suppose she came!" "suppose she didn't," reflected mr. roper. "i seem to see your flight," said mr. toomer. "and the newspaper placards and head-lines. 'lady beach-mandarin elopes with the wife of an eminent confectioner. she is stopped at the landing stage by the staff of the dover branch establishment. recapture of the fugitive after a hot struggle. brumley, the eminent _littérateur_, stunned by a spent bun....'" "we're all talking great nonsense," said lady beach-mandarin. "but anyhow we'll make our call. and _i_ know!--i'll make her accept an invitation to lunch without him." "if she won't?" threw out mr. roper. "i _will_," said lady beach-mandarin with roguish determination. "and if i can't----" "not ask him too!" protested mr. brumley. "why not get her to come to your social friends meeting," said miss sharsper. § when mr. brumley found himself fairly launched upon this expedition he had the grace to feel compunction. the harmans, he perceived, had inadvertently made him the confidant of their domestic discords and to betray them to these others savoured after all of treachery. and besides much as he had craved to see lady harman again, he now realized he didn't in the least want to see her in association with the exuberant volubility of lady beach-mandarin and the hard professional observation, so remarkably like the ferrule of an umbrella being poked with a noiseless persistence into one's eye, of miss sharsper. and as he thought these afterthoughts lady beach-mandarin's chauffeur darted and dodged and threaded his way with an alacrity that was almost distressing to putney. they ran over the ghost of swinburne, at the foot of putney hill,--or perhaps it was only the rhythm of the engine changed for a moment, and in a couple of minutes more they were outside the harman residence. "here we are!" said lady beach-mandarin, more capaciously gaminesque than ever. "we've done it now." mr. brumley had an impression of a big house in the distended stately-homes-of-england style and very necessarily and abundantly covered by creepers and then he was assisting the ladies to descend and the three of them were waiting clustered in the ample victorian doorway. for some little interval there came no answer to the bell mr. brumley had rung, but all three of them had a sense of hurried, furtive and noiseless readjustments in progress behind the big and bossy oak door. then it opened and a very large egg-shaped butler with sandy whiskers appeared and looked down himself at them. there was something paternal about this man, his professional deference was touched by the sense of ultimate responsibility. he seemed to consider for a moment whether he should permit lady harman to be in, before he conceded that she was. they were ushered through a hall that resembled most of the halls in the world, it was dominated by a handsome oak staircase and scarcely gave miss sharsper a point, and then across a creation of the victorian architect, a massive kind of conservatory with classical touches--there was an impluvium in the centre and there were arches hung with manifestly costly syrian rugs, into a large apartment looking through four french windows upon a verandah and a large floriferous garden. at a sideways glance it seemed a very pleasant garden indeed. the room itself was like the rooms of so many prosperous people nowadays; it had an effect of being sedulously and yet irrelevantly over-furnished. it had none of the large vulgarity that mr. brumley would have considered proper to a wealthy caterer, but it confessed a compilation of "pieces" very carefully authenticated. some of them were rather splendid "pieces"; three big bureaus burly and brassy dominated it; there was a queen anne cabinet, some exquisite coloured engravings, an ormolu mirror and a couple of large french vases that set miss sharsper, who had a keen eye for this traffic, confusedly cataloguing. and a little incongruously in the midst of this exhibit, stood lady harman, as if she was trying to conceal the fact that she too was a visitor, in a creamy white dress and dark and defensive and yet entirely unabashed. the great butler gave his large vague impression of lady beach-mandarin's name, and stood aside and withdrew. "i've heard so much of you," said lady beach-mandarin advancing with hand upraised. "i had to call. mr. brumley----" "lady beach-mandarin met sir isaac at black strand," mr. brumley intervened to explain. miss sharsper was as it were introduced by default. "my vividest anticipations outdone," said lady beach-mandarin, squeezing lady harman's fingers with enthusiasm. "and what a charming garden you have, and what a delightful situation! such air! and on the very verge of london, high, on this delightful _literary_ hill, and ready at any moment to swoop in that enviable great car of yours. i suppose you come a great deal into london, lady harman?" "no," reflected lady harman, "not very much." she seemed to weigh the accuracy of this very carefully. "no," she added in confirmation. "but you should, you ought to; it's your duty. you've no right to hide away from us. i was telling sir isaac. we look to him, we look to you. you've no right to bury your talents away from us; you who are rich and young and brilliant and beautiful----" "but if i go on i shall begin to flatter you," said lady beach-mandarin with a delicious smile. "i've begun upon sir isaac already. i've made him promise a hundred guineas and his name to the shakespear dinners society,--nothing he didn't mention eaten (_you_ know) and all the profits to the national movement--and i want your name too. i know you'll let us have your name too. grant me that, and i'll subside into the ordinariest of callers." "but surely; isn't his name enough?" asked lady harman. "without yours, it's only half a name!" cried lady beach-mandarin. "if it were a _business_ thing----! different of course. but on my list, i'm like dear old queen victoria you know, the wives must come too." "in that case," hesitated lady harman.... "but really i think sir isaac----" she stopped. and then mr. brumley had a psychic experience. it seemed to him as he stood observing lady harman with an entirely unnecessary and unpremeditated intentness, that for the briefest interval her attention flashed over lady beach-mandarin's shoulder to the end verandah window; and following her glance, he saw--and then he did not see--the arrested figure, the white face of sir isaac, bearing an expression in which anger and horror were extraordinarily intermingled. if it was sir isaac he dodged back with amazing dexterity; if it was a phantom of the living it vanished with an air of doing that. without came the sound of a flower-pot upset and a faint expletive. mr. brumley looked very quickly at lady beach-mandarin, who was entirely unconscious of anything but her own uncoiling and enveloping eloquence, and as quickly at miss sharsper. but miss sharsper was examining a blackish bureau through her glasses as though she were looking for birthmarks and meant if she could find one to claim the piece as her own long-lost connection. with a mild but gratifying sense of exclusive complicity mr. brumley reverted to lady harman's entire self-possession. "but, dear lady harman, it's entirely unnecessary you should consult him,--entirely," lady beach-mandarin was saying. "i'm sure," said mr. brumley with a sense that somehow he had to intervene, "that sir isaac would not possibly object. i'm sure that if lady harman consults him----" the sandy-whiskered butler appeared hovering. "shall i place the tea-things in the garden, me lady?" he asked, in the tone of one who knows the answer. "oh _please_ in the garden!" cried lady beach-mandarin. "please! and how delightful to _have_ a garden, a london garden, in which one _can_ have tea. without being smothered in blacks. the south-west wind. the dear _english_ wind. all your blacks come to _us_, you know." she led the way upon the verandah. "such a wonderful garden! the space, the breadth! why! you must have acres!" she surveyed the garden--comprehensively; her eye rested for a moment on a distant patch of black that ducked suddenly into a group of lilacs. "is dear sir isaac at home?" she asked. "he's very uncertain," said lady harman, with a quiet readiness that pleased mr. brumley. "yes, snagsby, please, under the big cypress. and tell my mother and sister." lady beach-mandarin having paused a moment or so upon the verandah admiring the garden as a whole, now prepared to go into details. she gathered her ample skirts together and advanced into the midst of the large lawn, with very much of the effect of a fleet of captive balloons dragging their anchors. mr. brumley followed, as it were in attendance upon her and lady harman. miss sharsper, after one last hasty glance at the room, rather like the last hasty glance of a still unprepared schoolboy at his book, came behind with her powers of observation strainingly alert. mr. brumley was aware of a brief mute struggle between the two ladies of title. it was clear that lady harman would have had them go to the left, to where down a vista of pillar roses a single large specimen cypress sounded a faint but recognizable italian note, and he did his loyal best to support her, but lady beach-mandarin's attraction to that distant clump of lilac on the right was equally great and much more powerful. she flowed, a great and audible tide of socially influential womanhood, across the green spaces of the garden, and drew the others with her. and it seemed to mr. brumley--not that he believed his eyes--that beyond those lilacs something ran out, something black that crouched close to the ground and went very swiftly. it flashed like an arrow across a further space of flower-bed, dropped to the ground, became two agitatedly receding boot soles and was gone. had it ever been? he glanced at lady harman, but she was looking back with the naïve anxiety of a hostess to her cypress,--at lady beach-mandarin, but she was proliferating compliments and decorative scrolls and flourishes like the engraved frontispiece to a seventeenth-century book. "i know i'm inordinately curious," said lady beach-mandarin, "but gardens are my joy. i want to go into every corner of this. peep into everything. and i feel somehow"--and here she urged a smile on lady harman's attention--"that i shan't begin to know _you_, until i know all your environment." she turned the flank of the lilacs as she said these words and advanced in echelon with a stately swiftness upon the laurels beyond. lady harman said there was nothing beyond but sycamores and the fence, but lady beach-mandarin would press on through a narrow path that pierced the laurel hedge, in order, she said, that she might turn back and get the whole effect of the grounds. and so it was they discovered the mushroom shed. "a mushroom shed!" cried lady beach-mandarin. "and if we look in--shall we see hosts and regiments of mushrooms? i must--i must." "i _think_ it is locked," said lady harman. mr. brumley darted forward; tried the door and turned quickly. "it's locked," he said and barred lady beach-mandarin's advance. "and besides," said lady harman, "there's no mushrooms there. they won't come up. it's one of my husband's--annoyances." lady beach-mandarin had turned round and now surveyed the house. "what a splendid idea," she cried, "that wistaria! all mixed with the laburnum. i don't think i have ever seen such a charming combination of blossoms!" the whole movement of the party swept about and faced cypress-ward. away there the sandy-whiskered butler and a footman and basket chairs and a tea-table, with a shining white cloth, and two ladies were now grouping themselves.... but the mind of mr. brumley gave little heed to these things. his mind was full of a wonder, and the wonder was this, that the mushroom shed had behaved like a living thing. the door of the mushroom shed was not locked and in that matter he had told a lie. the door of the mushroom shed had been unlocked quite recently and the key and padlock had been dropped upon the ground. and when he had tried to open the mushroom shed it had first of all yielded to his hand and then it had closed again with great strength--exactly as a living mussel will behave if one takes it unawares. but in addition to this passionate contraction the mushroom shed had sworn in a hoarse whisper and breathed hard, which is more than your mussel can do.... § mr. brumley's interest in lady harman was to be almost too crowded by detail before that impulsive call was over. superposed upon the mystery of the mushroom shed was the vivid illumination of lady harman by her mother and sister. they had an effect of having reluctantly become her social inferiors for her own good; the mother--her name he learnt was mrs. sawbridge--had all lady harman's tall slenderness, but otherwise resembled her only in the poise of her neck and an occasional gesture; she was fair and with a kind of ignoble and premeditated refinement in her speech and manner. she was dressed with the restraint of a prolonged and attenuated widowhood, in a rich and complicatedly quiet dress of mauve and grey. she was obviously a transitory visitor and not so much taking the opulence about her and particularly the great butler for granted as pointedly and persistently ignoring it in an effort to seem to take it for granted. the sister, on the other hand, had lady harman's pale darkness but none of her fineness of line. she missed altogether that quality of fineness. her darkness was done with a quite perceptible heaviness, her dignity passed into solidity and her profile was, with an entire want of hesitation, handsome. she was evidently the elder by a space of some years and she was dressed with severity in grey. these two ladies seemed to mr. brumley to offer a certain resistance of spirit to the effusion of lady beach-mandarin, rather as two small anchored vessels might resist the onset of a great and foaming tide, but after a time it was clear they admired her greatly. his attention was, however, a little distracted from them by the fact that he was the sole representative of the more serviceable sex among five women and so in duty bound to stand by lady harman and assist with various handings and offerings. the tea equipage was silver and not only magnificent but, as certain quick movements of miss sharsper's eyes and nose at its appearance betrayed, very genuine and old. lady beach-mandarin having praised the house and garden all over again to mrs. sawbridge, and having praised the cypress and envied the tea things, resumed her efforts to secure the immediate establishment of permanent social relations with lady harman. she reverted to the question of the shakespear dinners society and now with a kind of large skilfulness involved mrs. sawbridge in her appeal. "won't _you_ come on our committee?" said lady beach-mandarin. mrs. sawbridge gave a pinched smile and said she was only staying in london for quite a little time, and when pressed admitted that there seemed no need whatever for consulting sir isaac upon so obviously foregone a conclusion as lady harman's public adhesion to the great movement. "i shall put his hundred guineas down to sir isaac and lady harman," said lady beach-mandarin with an air of conclusion, "and now i want to know, dear lady harman, whether we can't have _you_ on our committee of administration. we want--just one other woman to complete us." lady harman could only parry with doubts of her ability. "you ought to go on, ella," said miss sawbridge suddenly, speaking for the first time and in a manner richly suggestive of great principles at stake. "ella," thought the curious mind of mr. brumley. "and is that eleanor now or ellen or--is there any other name that gives one ella? simply ella?" "but what should i have to do?" fenced lady harman, resisting but obviously attracted. lady beach-mandarin invented a lengthy paraphrase for prompt acquiescences. "i shall be chairwoman," she crowned it with. "i can so easily _see you through_ as they say." "ella doesn't go out half enough," said miss sawbridge suddenly to miss sharsper, who was regarding her with furtive intensity--as if she was surreptitiously counting her features. miss sharsper caught in mid observation started and collected her mind. "one ought to go out," she said. "certainly." "and independently," said miss sawbridge, with meaning. "oh independently!" assented miss sharsper. it was evident she would now have to watch her chance and begin counting all over again from the beginning. mr. brumley had an impression that mrs. sawbridge had said something quite confidential in his ear. he turned perplexed. "such charming weather," the lady repeated in the tone of one who doesn't wish so pleasant a little secret to be too generally discussed. "never known a better summer," agreed mr. brumley. and then all these minor eddies were submerged in lady beach-mandarin's advance towards her next step, an invitation to lunch. "there," said she, "i'm not victorian. i always separate husbands and wives--by at least a week. you must come alone." it was clear to mr. brumley that lady harman wanted to come alone--and was going to accept, and equally clear that she and her mother and sister regarded this as a very daring thing to do. and when that was settled lady beach-mandarin went on to the altogether easier topic of her social friends, a society of smart and influential women; who devoted a certain fragment of time every week to befriending respectable girls employed in london, in a briskly amiable manner, having them to special teas, having them to special evenings with special light refreshments, knowing their names as far as possible and asking about their relations, and generally making them feel that society was being very frank and amiable to them and had an eye on them and meant them well, and was better for them than socialism and radicalism and revolutionary ideas. to this also lady harman it seemed was to come. it had an effect to mr. brumley's imagination as if the painted scene of that lady's life was suddenly bursting out into open doors--everywhere. "many of them are _quite_ lady-like," echoed mrs. sawbridge suddenly, picking up the whole thing instantly and speaking over her tea cup in that quasi-confidential tone of hers to mr. brumley. "of course they are mostly quite dreadfully sweated," said lady beach-mandarin. "especially in the confectionery----" she thought of her position in time. "in the inferior class of confectioners' establishments," she said and then hurried on to: "of course when you come to lunch,--agatha alimony. i'm most anxious for you and her to meet." "is that _the_ agatha alimony?" asked miss sawbridge abruptly. "the one and only," said lady beach-mandarin, flashing a smile at her. "and what a marvel she is! i do so want you to know her, lady harman. she'd be a revelation to you...." everything had gone wonderfully so far. "and now," said lady beach-mandarin, thrusting forward a face of almost exaggerated motherliness and with an unwonted tenderness suffusing her voice, "show me the chicks." there was a brief interrogative pause. "your chicks," expanded lady beach-mandarin, on the verge of crooning. "your _little_ chicks." "_oh!_" cried lady harman understanding. "the children." "lucky woman!" cried lady beach-mandarin. "yes." "one hasn't begun to be friends," she added, "until one has seen--them...." "so _true_," mrs. sawbridge confided to mr. brumley with a look that almost languished.... "certainly," said mr. brumley, "rather." he was a little distraught because he had just seen sir isaac step forward in a crouching attitude from beyond the edge of the lilacs, peer at the tea-table with a serpent-like intentness and then dart back convulsively into cover.... if lady beach-mandarin saw him mr. brumley felt that anything might happen. § lady beach-mandarin always let herself go about children. it would be unjust to the general richness of lady beach-mandarin to say that she excelled herself on this occasion. on all occasions lady beach-mandarin excelled herself. but never had mr. brumley noted quite so vividly lady beach-mandarin's habitual self-surpassingness. she helped him, he felt, to understand better those stories of great waves that sweep in from the ocean and swamp islands and devastate whole littorals. she poured into the harman nursery and filled every corner of it. she rose to unprecedented heights therein. it seemed to him at moments that they ought to make marks on the walls, like the marks one sees on the houses in the lower valley of the main to record the more memorable floods. "the dears!" she cried: "the _little_ things!" before the nursery door was fairly opened. (there should have been a line for that at once on the jamb just below the lintel.) the nursery revealed itself as a large airy white and green apartment entirely free from old furniture and done rather in the style of an æsthetically designed hospital, with a tremendously humorous decorative frieze of cocks and puppies and very bright-coloured prints on the walls. the dwarfish furniture was specially designed in green-stained wood and the floor was of cork carpet diversified by white furry rugs. the hospital quality was enhanced by the uniformed and disciplined appearance of the middle-aged and reliable head nurse and her subdued but intelligent subordinate. three sturdy little girls, with a year step between each of them, stood up to receive lady beach-mandarin's invasion; an indeterminate baby sprawled regardless of its dignity on a rug. "aah!" cried lady beach-mandarin, advancing in open order. "come and be hugged, you dears! come and be hugged!" before she knelt down and enveloped their shrinking little persons mr. brumley was able to observe that they were pretty little things, but not the beautiful children he could have imagined from lady harman. peeping through their infantile delicacy, hints all too manifest of sir isaac's characteristically pointed nose gave mr. brumley a peculiar--a eugenic, qualm. he glanced at lady harman and she was standing over the ecstasies of her tremendous visitor, polite, attentive--with an entirely unemotional speculation in her eyes. miss sawbridge, stirred by the great waves of violent philoprogenitive enthusiasm that circled out from lady beach-mandarin, had caught up the baby and was hugging it and addressing it in terms of humorous rapture, and the nurse and her assistant were keeping respectful but wary eyes upon the handling of their four charges. miss sharsper was taking in the children's characteristics with a quick expertness. mrs. sawbridge stood a little in the background and caught mr. brumley's eye and proffered a smile of sympathetic tolerance. mr. brumley was moved by a ridiculous impulse, which he just succeeded in suppressing, to say to mrs. sawbridge, "yes, i admit it looks very well. but the essential point, you know, is that it isn't so...." that it wasn't so, indeed, entirely dominated his impression of that nursery. there was lady beach-mandarin winning lady harman's heart by every rule of the game, rejoicing effusively in those crowning triumphs of a woman's being, there was miss sawbridge vociferous in support and mrs. sawbridge almost offering to join hands in rapturous benediction, and there was lady harman wearing her laurels, not indeed with indifference but with a curious detachment. one might imagine her genuinely anxious to understand why lady beach-mandarin was in such a stupendous ebullition. one might have supposed her a mere cold-hearted intellectual if it wasn't that something in her warm beauty absolutely forbade any such interpretation. there came to mr. brumley again a thought that had occurred to him first when sir isaac and lady harman had come together to black strand, which was that life had happened to this woman before she was ready for it, that her mind some years after her body was now coming to womanhood, was teeming with curiosity about all she had hitherto accepted, about sir isaac, about her children and all her circumstances.... there was a recapitulation of the invitations, a renewed offering of outlooks and vistas and agatha alimony. "you'll not forget," insisted lady beach-mandarin. "you'll not afterwards throw us over." "no," said lady harman, with that soft determination of hers. "i'll certainly come." "i'm so sorry, so very sorry, not to have seen sir isaac," lady beach-mandarin insisted. the raid had accomplished its every object and was drifting doorward. for a moment lady beach-mandarin desisted from lady harman and threw her whole being into an eddying effort to submerge the already subjugated mrs. sawbridge. miss sawbridge was behind up the oak staircase explaining sir isaac's interest in furniture-buying to miss sharsper. mr. brumley had his one moment with lady harman. "i gather," he said, and abandoned that sentence. "i hope," he said, "that you will have my little house down there. i like to think of _you_--walking in my garden." "i shall love that garden," she said. "but i shall feel unworthy." "there are a hundred little things i want to tell you--about it." then all the others seemed to come into focus again, and with a quick mutual understanding--mr. brumley was certain of its mutuality--they said no more to one another. he was entirely satisfied he had said enough. he had conveyed just everything that was needed to excuse and explain and justify his presence in that company.... upon a big table in the hall he noticed that a silk hat and an umbrella had appeared since their arrival. he glanced at miss sharsper but she was keenly occupied with the table legs. he began to breathe freely again when the partings were over and he could get back into the automobile. "toot," said the horn and he made a last grave salutation to the slender white figure on the steps. the great butler stood at the side of the entrance and a step or so below her, with the air of a man who has completed a difficult task. a small attentive valet hovered out of the shadows behind. § (a fragment of the conversation in lady beach-mandarin's returning automobile may be recorded in a parenthesis here. "but did you see sir isaac?" she cried, abruptly. "sir isaac?" defended the startled mr. brumley. "where?" "he was dodging about in the garden all the time." "dodging about the garden!... i saw a sort of gardener----" "i'm sure i saw him," said lady beach-mandarin. "positive. he hid away in the mushroom shed. the one you found locked." "but my _dear_ lady beach-mandarin!" protested mr. brumley with the air of one who listens to preposterous suggestions. "what can make you think----?" "oh i _know_ i saw him," said lady beach-mandarin. "i know. he seemed all over the place. like a boy scout. didn't you see him too, susan?" miss sharsper was roused from deep preoccupation. "what, dear?" she asked. "see sir isaac?" "sir isaac?" "dodging about the garden when we went through it." the novelist reflected. "i didn't notice," she said. "i was busy observing things.") § lady beach-mandarin's car passed through the open gates and was swallowed up in the dusty stream of traffic down putney hill; the great butler withdrew, the little manservant vanished, mrs. sawbridge and her elder daughter had hovered and now receded from the back of the hall; lady harman remained standing thoughtfully in the large bulwer-lyttonesque doorway of her house. her face expressed a vague expectation. she waited to be addressed from behind. then she became aware of the figure of her husband standing before her. he had come out of the laurels in front. his pale face was livid with anger, his hair dishevelled, there was garden mould and greenness upon his knees and upon his extended hands. she was startled out of her quiet defensiveness. "why, isaac!" she cried. "where have you been?" it enraged him further to be asked so obviously unnecessary a question. he forgot his knightly chivalry. "what the devil do you mean," he cried, "by chasing me all round the garden?" "chasing you? all round the garden?" "you heard me breaking my shins on that infernal flower-pot you put for me, and out you shot with all your pack of old women and chased me round the garden. what do you mean by it?" "i didn't think you were in the garden." "any fool could have told i was in the garden. any fool might have known i was in the garden. if i wasn't in the garden, then where the devil was i? eh? where else could i be? of course i was in the garden, and what you wanted was to hunt me down and make a fool of me. and look at me! look, i say! look at my hands!" lady harman regarded the lord of her being and hesitated before she answered. she knew what she had to say would enrage him, but she had come to a point in their relationship when a husband's good temper is no longer a supreme consideration. "you've had plenty of time to wash them," she said. "yes," he shouted. "and instead i kept 'em to show you. i stayed out here to see the last of that crew for fear i might run against 'em in the house. of all the infernal old women----" his lips were providentially deprived of speech. he conveyed his inability to express his estimate of lady beach-mandarin by a gesture of despair. "if--if anyone calls and i am at home i have to receive them," said lady harman, after a moment's deliberation. "receiving them's one thing. making a fool of yourself----" his voice was rising. "isaac," said lady harman, leaning forward and then in a low penetrating whisper, "_snagsby!_" (it was the name of the great butler.) "_damn_ snagsby!" hissed sir isaac, but dropping his voice and drawing near to her. what his voice lost in height it gained in intensity. "what i say is this, ella, you oughtn't to have brought that old woman out into the garden at all----" "she insisted on coming." "you ought to have snubbed her. you ought to have done--anything. how the devil was i to get away, once she was through the verandah? there i was! _bagged!_" "you could have come forward." "what! and meet _her_!" "_i_ had to meet her." sir isaac felt that his rage was being frittered away upon details. "if you hadn't gone fooling about looking at houses," he said, and now he stood very close to her and spoke with a confidential intensity, "you wouldn't have got that holy terror on our track, see? and now--here we are!" he walked past her into the hall, and the little manservant suddenly materialised in the middle of the space and came forward to brush him obsequiously. lady harman regarded that proceeding for some moments in a preoccupied manner and then passed slowly into the classical conservatory. she felt that in view of her engagements the discussion of lady beach-mandarin was only just beginning. § she reopened it herself in the long drawing-room into which they both drifted after sir isaac had washed the mould from his hands. she went to a french window, gathered courage, it seemed, by a brief contemplation of the garden, and turned with a little effort. "i don't agree," she said, "with you about lady beach-mandarin." sir isaac appeared surprised. he had assumed the incident was closed. "_how?_" he asked compactly. "i don't agree," said lady harman. "she seems friendly and jolly." "she's a holy terror," said sir isaac. "i've seen her twice, lady harman." "a call of that kind," his wife went on, "--when there are cards left and so on--has to be returned." "you won't," said sir isaac. lady harman took a blind-tassel in her hand,--she felt she had to hold on to something. "in any case," she said, "i should have to do that." "in any case?" she nodded. "it would be ridiculous not to. we----it is why we know so few people--because we don't return calls...." sir isaac paused before answering. "we don't _want_ to know a lot of people," he said. "and, besides----why! anybody could make us go running about all over london calling on them, by just coming and calling on us. no sense in it. she's come and she's gone, and there's an end of it." "no," said lady harman, gripping her tassel more firmly. "i shall have to return that call." "i tell you, you won't." "it isn't only a call," said lady harman. "you see, i promised to go there to lunch." "lunch!" "and to go to a meeting with her." "go to a meeting!" "--of a society called the social friends. and something else. oh! to go to the committee meetings of her shakespear dinners movement." "i've heard of that." "she said you supported it--or else of course...." sir isaac restrained himself with difficulty. "well," he said at last, "you'd better write and tell her you can't do any of these things; that's all." he thrust his hands into his trousers pockets and walked to the french window next to the one in which she stood, with an air of having settled this business completely, and being now free for the tranquil contemplation of horticulture. but lady harman had still something to say. "i am going to _all_ these things," she said. "i said i would, and i will." he didn't seem immediately to hear her. he made the little noise with his teeth that was habitual to him. then he came towards her. "this is your infernal sister," he said. lady harman reflected. "no," she decided. "it's myself." "i might have known when we asked her here," said sir isaac with an habitual disregard of her judgments that was beginning to irritate her more and more. "you can't take on all these people. they're not the sort of people we want to know." "i want to know them," said lady harman. "i don't." "i find them interesting," lady harman said. "and i've promised." "well you oughtn't to have promised without consulting me." her reply was the material of much subsequent reflection on the part of sir isaac. there was something in her manner.... "you see, isaac," she said, "you kept so out of the way...." in the pause that followed her words, mrs. sawbridge appeared from the garden smiling with a determined amiability, and bearing a great bunch of the best roses (which sir isaac hated to have picked) in her hands. chapter the fourth the beginnings of lady harman § lady harman had been married when she was just eighteen. mrs. sawbridge was the widow of a solicitor who had been killed in a railway collision while his affairs, as she put it, were unsettled; and she had brought up her two daughters in a villa at penge upon very little money, in a state of genteel protest. ellen was the younger. she had been a sturdy dark-eyed doll-dragging little thing and had then shot up very rapidly. she had gone to a boarding-school at wimbledon because mrs. sawbridge thought the penge day-school had made georgina opiniated and unladylike, besides developing her muscular system to an unrefined degree. the wimbledon school was on less progressive lines, and anyhow ellen grew taller and more feminine than her sister and by seventeen was already womanly, dignified and intensely admired by a number of schoolmates and a large circle of their cousins and brothers. she was generally very good and only now and then broke out with a venturesome enterprise that hurt nobody. she got out of a skylight, for example, and perambulated the roof in the moonshine to see how it felt and did one or two other little things of a similar kind. otherwise her conduct was admirable and her temper in those days was always contagiously good. that attractiveness which mr. brumley felt, was already very manifest, and a little hindered her in the attainment of other distinctions. most of her lessons were done for her by willing slaves, and they were happy slaves because she abounded in rewarding kindnesses; but on the other hand the study of english literature and music was almost forced upon her by the zeal of the two visiting professors of these subjects. and at seventeen, which is the age when girls most despise the boyishness of young men, she met sir isaac and filled him with an invincible covetousness.... § the school at wimbledon was a large, hushed, faded place presided over by a lady of hidden motives and great exterior calm named miss beeton clavier. she was handsome without any improper attractiveness, an associate in arts of st. andrew's university and a cousin of mr. blenker of the _old country gazette_. she was assisted by several resident mistresses and two very carefully married visiting masters for music and shakespear, and playground and shrubbery and tennis-lawn were all quite effectively hidden from the high-road. the curriculum included latin grammar--nobody ever got to the reading of books in that formidable tongue--french by an english lady who had been in france, hanoverian german by an irascible native, the more seemly aspects of english history and literature, arithmetic, algebra, political economy and drawing. there was no hockey played within the precincts, science was taught without the clumsy apparatus or objectionable diagrams that are now so common, and stress was laid upon the carriage of the young ladies and the iniquity of speaking in raised voices. miss beeton clavier deprecated the modern "craze for examinations," and released from such pressure her staff did not so much give courses of lessons as circle in a thorough-looking and patient manner about their subjects. this turn-spit quality was reflected in the school idiom; one did not learn algebra or latin or so-forth, one _did_ algebra, one was _put into_ latin.... the girls went through this system of exercises and occupations, evasively and as it were _sotto voce_, making friends, making enemies, making love to one another, following instincts that urged them to find out something about life--in spite of the most earnest discouragement.... none of them believed for a moment that the school was preparing them for life. most of them regarded it as a long inexplicable passage of blank, grey occupations through which they had to pass. beyond was the sunshine. ellen gathered what came to her. she realized a certain beauty in music in spite of the biographies of great musicians, the technical enthusiasms and the general professionalism of her teacher; the literature master directed her attention to memoirs and through these she caught gleams of understanding when the characters of history did for brief intervals cease to be rigidly dignified and institutional like miss beeton clavier and became human--like schoolfellows. and one little spectacled mistress, who wore art dresses and adorned her class-room with flowers, took a great fancy to her, talked to her with much vagueness and emotion of high aims, and lent her with an impressive furtiveness the works of emerson and shelley and a pamphlet by bernard shaw. it was a little difficult to understand what these writers were driving at, they were so dreadfully clever, but it was clear they reflected criticism upon the silences of her mother and the rigidities of miss beeton clavier. in that suppressed and evasive life beneath the outer forms and procedures of school and home, there came glimmerings of something that seemed charged with the promise of holding everything together, the key, religion. she was attracted to religion, much more attracted than she would confess even to herself, but every circumstance in her training dissuaded her from a free approach. her mother treated religion with a reverence that was almost indistinguishable from huffiness. she never named the deity and she did not like the mention of his name: she threw a spell of indelicacy over religious topics that ellen never thoroughly cast off. she put god among objectionable topics--albeit a sublime one. miss beeton clavier sustained this remarkable suggestion. when she read prayers in school she did so with the balanced impartiality of one who offers no comment. she seemed pained as she read and finished with a sigh. whatever she intended to convey, she conveyed that even if the divinity was not all he should be, if, indeed, he was a person almost primitive, having neither the restraint nor the self-obliteration of a refined gentlewoman, no word of it should ever pass her lips. and so ellen as a girl never let her mind go quite easily into this reconciling core of life, and talked of it only very rarely and shyly with a few chosen coevals. it wasn't very profitable talk. they had a guilty feeling, they laughed a little uneasily, they displayed a fatal proclivity to stab the swelling gravity of their souls with some forced and silly jest and so tumble back to ground again before they rose too high.... yet great possibilities of faith and devotion stirred already in the girl's heart. she thought little of god by day, but had a strange sense of him in the starlight; never under the moonlight--that was in no sense divine--but in the stirring darkness of the stars. and it is remarkable that after a course of astronomical enlightenment by a visiting master and descriptions of masses and distances, incredible aching distances, then even more than ever she seemed to feel god among the stars.... a fatal accident to a schoolfellow turned her mind for a time to the dark stillnesses of death. the accident happened away in wales during the summer holidays; she saw nothing of it, she only knew of its consequence. hitherto she had assumed it was the function of girls to grow up and go out from the grey intermediate state of school work into freedoms and realities beyond. death happened, she was aware, to young people, but not she had thought to the people one knew. this termination came with a shock. the girl was no great personal loss to ellen, they had belonged to different sets and classes, but the conception of her as lying very very still for ever was a haunting one. ellen felt she did not want to be still for evermore in a confined space, with life and sunshine going on all about her and above her, and it quickened her growing appetite for living to think that she might presently have to be like that. how stifled one would feel! it couldn't be like that. she began to speculate about that future life upon which religion insists so much and communicates so little. was it perhaps in other planets, under those wonderful, many-mooned, silver-banded skies? she perceived more and more a kind of absurdity in the existence all about her. was all this world a mere make-believe, and would miss beeton clavier and every one about her presently cast aside a veil? manifestly there was a veil. she had a very natural disposition to doubt whether the actual circumstances of her life were real. her mother for instance was so lacking in blood and fire, so very like the stiff paper wrapping of something else. but if these things were not real, what was real? what might she not presently do? what might she not presently be? perhaps death had something to do with that. was death perhaps no more than the flinging off of grotesque outer garments by the newly arrived guests at the feast of living? she had that feeling that there might be a feast of living. these preoccupations were a jealously guarded secret, but they gave her a quality of slight detachment that added a dreaming dignity to her dark tall charm. there were moments of fine, deep excitement that somehow linked themselves in her mind with these thoughts as being set over against the things of every day. these too were moments quite different and separate in quality from delight, from the keen appreciation of flowers or sunshine or little vividly living things. daylight seemed to blind her to them, as they blinded her to starshine. they too had a quality of reference to things large and remote, distances, unknown mysteries of light and matter, the thought of mountains, cool white wildernesses and driving snowstorms, or great periods of time. such were the luminous transfigurations that would come to her at the evening service in church. the school used to sit in the gallery over against the organist, and for a year and more ellen had the place at the corner from which she could look down the hazy candle-lit vista of the nave and see the congregation as ranks and ranks of dim faces and vaguely apprehended clothes, ranks that rose with a peculiar deep and spacious rustle to sing, and sang with a massiveness of effect she knew in no other music. certain hymns in particular seemed to bear her up and carry her into another larger, more wonderful world: "heart's abode, celestial salem" for example, a world of luminous spiritualized sensuousness. of such a quality she thought the heavenly city must surely be, away there and away. but this persuasion differed from those other mystical intimations in its detachment from any sense of the divinity. and remarkably mixed up with it and yet not belonging to it, antagonistic and kindred like a silver dagger stuck through a mystically illuminated parchment, was the angelic figure of a tall fair boy in a surplice who stood out amidst the choir below and sang, it seemed to her, alone. she herself on these occasions of exaltation would be far too deeply moved to sing. she was inundated by a swimming sense of boundaries nearly transcended, as though she was upon the threshold of a different life altogether, the real enduring life, and as though if she could only maintain herself long enough in this shimmering exaltation she would get right over; things would happen, things that would draw her into that music and magic and prevent her ever returning to everyday life again. there one would walk through music between great candles under eternal stars, hand-in-hand with a tall white figure. but nothing ever did happen to make her cross that boundary; the hymn ceased, the "amen" died away, as if a curtain fell. the congregation subsided. reluctantly she would sink back into her seat.... but all through the sermon, to which she never gave the slightest attention, her mind would feel mute and stilled, and she used to come out of church silent and preoccupied, returning unwillingly to the commonplaces of life.... § ellen met sir isaac--in the days before he was sir isaac--at the house of a school friend with whom she was staying at hythe, and afterwards her mother and sister came down and joined her for a fortnight at a folkstone boarding house. mr. harman had caught a chill while inspecting his north wales branches and had come down with his mother to recuperate. he and his mother occupied a suite of rooms in the most imposing hotel upon the leas. ellen's friend's people were partners in a big flour firm and had a pleasant new æsthetic white and green house of rough-cast and slates in the pretty country beyond the hythe golf links, and ellen's friend's father was deeply anxious to develop amiable arrangements with mr. harman. there was much tennis, much croquet, much cycling to the hythe sea-wall and bathing from little tents and sitting about in the sunshine, and mr. harman had his first automobile with him--they were still something of a novelty in those days--and was urgent to take picnic parties to large lonely places on the downs. there were only two young men in that circle, one was engaged to ellen's friend's sister, and the other was bound to a young woman remote in italy; neither was strikingly attractive and both regarded harman with that awe tempered by undignified furtive derision which wealth and business capacity so often inspire in the young male. at first he was quiet and simply looked at her, as it seemed any one might look, then she perceived he looked at her intently and continuously, and was persistently close to her and seemed always to be trying to do things to please her and attract her attention. and then from the general behaviour of the women about her, her mother and mrs. harman and her friend's mother and her friend's sister, rather than from any one specific thing they said, it grew upon her consciousness that this important and fabulously wealthy person, who was also it seemed to her so modest and quiet and touchingly benevolent, was in love with her. "your daughter," said mrs. harman repeatedly to mrs. sawbridge, "is charming, perfectly charming." "she's _such_ a child," said mrs. sawbridge repeatedly in reply. and she told ellen's friend's mother apropos of ellen's friend's engagement that she wanted all her daughters to marry for love, she didn't care what the man had so long as they loved each other, and meanwhile she took the utmost care that isaac had undisputed access to the girl, was watchfully ready to fend off anyone else, made her take everything he offered and praised him quietly and steadily to her. she pointed out how modest and unassuming he was, in spite of the fact that he was "controlling an immense business" and in his own particular trade "a perfect napoleon." "for all one sees to the contrary he might be just a private gentleman. and he feeds thousands and thousands of people...." "sooner or later," said mrs. harman, "i suppose isaac will marry. he's been such a good son to me that i shall feel it dreadfully, and yet, you know, i wish i could see him settled. then _i_ shall settle--in a little house of my own somewhere. just a little place. i don't believe in coming too much between son and daughter-in-law...." harman's natural avidity was tempered by a proper modesty. he thought ellen so lovely and so infinitely desirable--and indeed she was--that it seemed incredible to him that he could ever get her. and yet he had got most of the things in life he had really and urgently wanted. his doubts gave his love-making an eager, lavish and pathetic delicacy. he watched her minutely in an agony of appreciation. he felt ready to give or promise anything. she was greatly flattered by his devotion and she liked the surprises and presents he heaped upon her extremely. also she was sorry for him beyond measure. in the deep recesses of her heart was an oleographic ideal of a large brave young man with blue eyes, a wave in his fair hair, a wonderful tenor voice and--she could not help it, she tried to look away and not think of it--a broad chest. with him she intended to climb mountains. so clearly she could not marry mr. harman. and because of that she tried to be very kind indeed to him, and when he faltered that she could not possibly care for him, she reassured him so vaguely as to fill him with wild gusts of hope and herself with a sense of pledges. he told her one day between two sets of tennis--which he played with a certain tricky skill--that he felt that the very highest happiness he could ever attain would be to die at her feet. presently her pity and her sense of responsibility had become so large and deep that the dream hero with the blue eyes was largely overlaid and hidden by them. then, at first a little indirectly and then urgently and with a voice upon the edge of tears, harman implored her to marry him. she had never before in the whole course of her life seen a grown-up person on the very verge of tears. she felt that the release of such deep fountains as that must be averted at any cost. she felt that for a mere schoolgirl like herself, a backward schoolgirl who had never really mastered quadratics, to cause these immense and tragic distresses was abominable. she was sure her former headmistress would disapprove very highly of her. "i will make you a queen," said harman, "i will give all my life to your happiness." she believed he would. she refused him for the second time but with a weakening certainty in a little white summer-house that gave a glimpse of the sea between green and wooded hills. she sat and stared at the sea after he had left her, through a mist of tears; so pitiful did he seem. he had beaten his poor fists on the stone table and then caught up her hand, kissed it and rushed out.... she had not dreamt that love could hurt like that. and all that night--that is to say for a full hour before her wet eyelashes closed in slumber--she was sleepless with remorse for the misery she was causing him. the third time when he said with suicidal conviction that he could not live without her, she burst into tears of pity and yielded. and instantly, amazingly, with the famished swiftness of a springing panther he caught her body into his arms and kissed her on the lips.... § they were married with every circumstance of splendour, with very expensive music, and portraits in the illustrated newspapers and a great glitter of favours and carriages. the bridegroom was most thoughtful and generous about the sawbridge side of the preparations. only one thing was a little perplexing. in spite of his impassioned impatience he delayed the wedding. full of dark hints and a portentous secret, he delayed the wedding for twenty-five whole days in order that it should follow immediately upon the publication of the birthday honours list. and then they understood. "you will be lady harman," he exulted; "_lady_ harman. i would have given double.... i have had to back the _old country gazette_ and i don't care a rap. i'd have done anything. i'd have bought the rotten thing outright.... lady harman!" he remained loverlike until the very eve of their marriage. then suddenly it seemed to her that all the people she cared for in the world were pushing her away from them towards him, giving her up, handing her over. he became--possessive. his abjection changed to pride. she perceived that she was going to be left tremendously alone with him, with an effect, as if she had stepped off a terrace on to what she believed to be land and had abruptly descended into very deep water.... and while she was still feeling quite surprised by everything and extremely doubtful whether she wanted to go any further with this business, which was manifestly far more serious, out of all proportion more serious, than anything that had ever happened to her before--and _unpleasant_, abounding indeed in crumpling indignities and horrible nervous stresses, it dawned upon her that she was presently to be that strange, grown-up and preoccupied thing, a mother, and that girlhood and youth and vigorous games, mountains and swimming and running and leaping were over for her as far as she could see for ever.... both the prospective grandmothers became wonderfully kind and helpful and intimate, preparing with gusto and an agreeable sense of delegated responsibility for the child that was to give them all the pride of maternity again and none of its inconveniences. chapter the fifth the world according to sir isaac § her marriage had carried ellen out of the narrow world of home and school into another that had seemed at first vastly larger, if only on account of its freedom from the perpetual achievement of small economies. hitherto the urgent necessity of these had filled life with irksome precautions and clipped the wings of every dream. this new life into which sir isaac led her by the hand promised not only that release but more light, more colour, more movement, more people. there was to be at any rate so much in the way of rewards and compensation for her pity of him. she found the establishment at putney ready for her. sir isaac had not consulted her about it, it had been his secret, he had prepared it for her with meticulous care as a surprise. they returned from a honeymoon in skye in which the attentions of sir isaac and the comforts of a first-class hotel had obscured a marvellous background of sombre mountain and wide stretches of shining sea. sir isaac had been very fond and insistent and inseparable, and she was doing her best to conceal a strange distressful jangling of her nerves which she now feared might presently dispose her to scream. sir isaac had been goodness itself, but how she craved now for solitude! she was under the impression now that they were going to his mother's house in highbury. then she thought he would have to go away to business for part of the day at any rate, and she could creep into some corner and begin to think of all that had happened to her in these short summer months. they were met at euston by his motor-car. "_home_," said sir isaac, with a little gleam of excitement, when the more immediate luggage was aboard. as they hummed through the west-end afternoon ellen became aware that he was whistling through his teeth. it was his invariable indication of mental activity, and her attention came drifting back from her idle contemplation of the shoppers and strollers of piccadilly to link this already alarming symptom with the perplexing fact that they were manifestly travelling west. "but this," she said presently, "is knightsbridge." "goes to kensington," he replied with attempted indifference. "but your mother doesn't live this way." "_we_ do," said sir isaac, shining at every point of his face. "but," she halted. "isaac!--where are we going?" "home," he said. "you've not taken a house?" "bought it." "but,--it won't be ready!" "i've seen to that." "servants!" she cried in dismay. "that's all right." his face broke into an excited smile. his little eyes danced and shone. "everything," he said. "but the servants!" she said. "you'll see," he said. "there's a butler--and everything." "a butler!" he could now no longer restrain himself. "i was weeks," he said, "getting it ready. weeks and weeks.... it's a house.... i'd had my eye on it before ever i met you. it's a real _good_ house, elly...." the fortunate girl-wife went on through brompton to walham green with a stunned feeling. so women have felt in tumbrils. a nightmare of butlers, a galaxy of possible butlers, filled her soul. no one was quite so big and formidable as snagsby, towering up to receive her, upon the steps of the home her husband was so amazingly giving her. the reader has already been privileged to see something of this house in the company of lady beach-mandarin. at the top of the steps stood mrs. crumble, the new and highly recommended cook-housekeeper in her best black silk flounced and expanded, and behind her peeped several neat maids in caps and aprons. a little valet-like under-butler appeared and tried to balance snagsby by hovering two steps above him on the opposite side of the victorian mediæval porch. assisted officiously by snagsby and amidst the deferential unhelpful gestures of the under-butler, sir isaac handed his wife out of the car. "everything all right, snagsby?" he asked brusquely if a little breathless. "everything in order, sir isaac." "and here;--this is her ladyship." "i 'ope her ladyship 'ad a pleasent journey to 'er new 'ome. i'm sure if i may presume, sir isaac, we shall all be very glad to serve her ladyship." (like all well-trained english servants, snagsby always dropped as many h's as he could when conversing with his superiors. he did this as a mark of respect and to prevent social confusion, just as he was always careful to wear a slightly misfitting dress coat and fold his trousers so that they creased at the sides and had a wide flat effect in front.) lady harman bowed a little shyly to his good wishes and was then led up to mrs. crumble, in a stiff black silk, who curtseyed with a submissive amiability to her new mistress. "i'm sure, me lady," she said. "i'm sure----" there was a little pause. "here they are, you see, right and ready," said sir isaac, and then with an inspiration, "got any tea for us, snagsby?" snagsby addressing his mistress inquired if he should serve tea in the garden or the drawing-room, and sir isaac decided for the garden. "there's another hall beyond this," he said, and took his wife's arm, leaving mrs. crumble still bowing amiably before the hall table. and every time she bowed she rustled richly.... "it's quite a big garden," said sir isaac. § and so the woman who had been a girl three weeks ago, this tall, dark-eyed, slightly perplexed and very young-looking lady, was introduced to the home that had been made for her. she went about it with an alarmed sense of strange responsibilities, not in the least feeling that anything was being given to her. and sir isaac led her from point to point full of the pride and joy of new possession--for it was his first own house as well as hers--rejoicing over it and exacting gratitude. "it's all right, isn't it?" he asked looking up at her. "it's wonderful. i'd no idea." "see," he said, indicating a great brass bowl of perennial sunflowers on the landing, "your favourite flower!" "my favourite flower?" "you said it was--in that book. perennial sunflower." she was perplexed and then remembered. she understood now why he had said downstairs, when she had glanced at a big photographic enlargement of a portrait of doctor barnardo, "your favourite hero in real life." he had brought her at hythe one day a popular victorian device, a confession album, in which she had had to write down on a neat rose-tinted page, her favourite author, her favourite flower, her favourite colour, her favourite hero in real life, her "pet aversion," and quite a number of such particulars of her subjective existence. she had filled this page in a haphazard manner late one night, and she was disconcerted to find how thoroughly her careless replies had come home to roost. she had put down "pink" as her favourite colour because the page she was writing upon suggested it, and the paper of the room was pale pink, the curtains strong pink with a pattern of paler pink and tied with large pink bows, and the lamp shades, the bedspread, the pillow-cases, the carpet, the chairs, the very crockery--everything but the omnipresent perennial sunflowers--was pink. confronted with this realization, she understood that pink was the least agreeable of all possible hues for a bedroom. she perceived she had to live now in a chromatic range between rather underdone mutton and salmon. she had said that her favourite musical composers were bach and beethoven; she really meant it, and a bust of beethoven materialized that statement, but she had made doctor barnardo her favourite hero in real life because his name also began with a b and she had heard someone say somewhere that he was a very good man. the predominance of george eliot's pensive rather than delightful countenance in her bedroom and the array of all that lady's works in a lusciously tooled pink leather, was due to her equally reckless choice of a favourite author. she had said too that nelson was her favourite historical character, but sir isaac with a delicate jealousy had preferred to have this heroic but regrettably immoral personality represented in his home only by an engraving of the battle of copenhagen.... she stood surveying this room, and her husband watched her eagerly. she was, he felt, impressed at last!... certainly she had never seen such a bedroom in her life. by comparison even with the largest of the hotel apartments they had occupied it was vast; it had writing-tables and a dainty bookcase and a blushing sofa, and dressing-tables and a bureau and a rose-red screen and three large windows. her thoughts went back to the narrow little bedroom at penge with which she had hitherto been so entirely content. her own few little books, a photograph or so,--they'd never dare to come here, even if she dared to bring them. "here," said sir isaac, flinging open a white door, "is your dressing-room." she was chiefly aware of a huge white bath standing on a marble slab under a window of crinkled pink-stained glass, and of a wide space of tiled floor with white fur rugs. "and here," he said, opening a panel that was covered by wall paper, "is _my_ door." "yes," he said to the question in her eyes, "that's my room. you got this one--for your own. it's how people do now. people of our position.... there's no lock." he shut the door slowly again and surveyed the splendours he had made with infinite satisfaction. "all right?" he said, "isn't it?"... he turned to the pearl for which the casket was made, and slipped an arm about her waist. his arm tightened. "got a kiss for me, elly?" he whispered. at this moment, a gong almost worthy of snagsby summoned them to tea. it came booming in to them with a vast officious arrogance that brooked no denial. it made one understand the imperatives of the last trump, albeit with a greater dignity.... there was a little awkward pause. "i'm so dirty and trainy," she said, disengaging herself from his arm. "and we ought to go to tea." § the same exceptional aptitude of sir isaac for detailed administration that had relieved his wife from the need of furnishing and arranging a home, made the birth of her children and the organization of her nursery an almost detached affair for her. sir isaac went about in a preoccupied way, whistling between his teeth and planning with expert advice the equipment of an ideal nursery, and her mother and his mother became as it were voluminous clouds of uncommunicative wisdom and precaution. in addition the conversation of miss crump, the extremely skilled and costly nurse, who arrived a full advent before the child, fresh from the birth of a viscount, did much to generalize whatever had remained individual of this thing that was happening. with so much intelligence focussed, there seemed to lady harman no particular reason why she should not do her best to think as little as possible about the impending affair, which meant for her, she now understood quite clearly, more and more discomfort culminating in an agony. the summer promised to be warm, and sir isaac took a furnished house for the great event in the hills behind torquay. the maternal instinct is not a magic thing, it has to be evoked and developed, and i decline to believe it is indicative of any peculiar unwomanliness in lady harman that when at last she beheld her newly-born daughter in the hands of the experts, she moaned druggishly, "oh! please take it away. oh! take it--away. anywhere--anywhere." it was very red and wrinkled and aged-looking and, except when it opened its mouth to cry, extraordinarily like its father. this resemblance disappeared--along with a crop of darkish red hair--in the course of a day or two, but it left a lurking dislike to its proximity in her mind long after it had become an entirely infantile and engaging baby. § those early years of their marriage were the happiest period of sir isaac's life. he seemed to have everything that man could desire. he was still only just forty at his marriage; he had made for himself a position altogether dominant in the world of confectionery and popular refreshment, he had won a title, he had a home after his own heart, a beautiful young wife, and presently delightful children in his own image, and it was only after some years of contentment and serenity and with a certain incredulity that he discovered that something in his wife, something almost in the nature of discontent with her lot, was undermining and threatening all the comfort and beauty of his life. sir isaac was one of those men whom modern england delights to honour, a man of unpretentious acquisitiveness, devoted to business and distracted by no æsthetic or intellectual interests. he was the only son of his mother, the widow of a bankrupt steam-miller, and he had been a delicate child to rear. he left mr. gambard's college at ealing after passing the second-class examination of the college of preceptors at the age of sixteen, to go into a tea-office as clerk without a salary, a post he presently abandoned for a clerkship in the office of a large refreshment catering firm. he attracted the attention of his employers by suggesting various administrative economies, and he was already drawing a salary of two hundred and fifty pounds a year when he was twenty-one. many young men would have rested satisfied with so rapid an advancement, and would have devoted themselves to the amusements that are now considered so permissible to youth, but young harman was made of sterner stuff, and it only spurred him to further efforts. he contrived to save a considerable proportion of his salary for some years, and at the age of twenty-seven he started, in association with a firm of flour millers, the international bread and cake stores, which spread rapidly over the country. they were not in any sense of the word "international," but in a search for inflated and inflating adjectives this word attracted him most, and the success of the enterprise justified his choice. originally conceived as a syndicated system of baker's shops running a specially gritty and nutritious line of bread, the staminal bread, in addition to the ordinary descriptions, it rapidly developed a catering side, and in a little time there were few centres of clerkly employment in london or the midlands where an international could not be found supplying the midday scone or poached egg, washed down by a cup of tea, or coffee, or lemonade. it meant hard work for isaac harman. it drew lines on his cheeks, sharpened his always rather pointed nose to an extreme efficiency, greyed his hair, and gave an acquired firmness to his rather retreating mouth. all his time was given to the details of this development; always he was inspecting premises, selecting and dismissing managers, making codes of rules and fines for his growing army of employees, organizing and reorganizing his central offices and his central bakeries, hunting up cheaper and cheaper supplies of eggs and flour, and milk and ham, devising advertisements and agency developments. he had something of an artist's passion in these things; he went about, a little bent and peaky, calculating and planning and hissing through his teeth, and feeling not only that he was getting on, but that he was getting on in the most exemplary way. manifestly, anybody in his line of business who wanted to be leisurely, or to be generous, who possessed any broader interests than the shop, who troubled to think about the nation or the race or any of the deeper mysteries of life, was bound to go down before him. he dealt privately with every appetite--until his marriage no human being could have suspected him of any appetite but business--he disposed of every distracting impulse with unobtrusive decision; and even his political inclination towards radicalism sprang chiefly from an irritation with the legal advantages of landlordism natural to a man who is frequently leasing shops. at school sir isaac had not been a particularly prominent figure; his disposition at cricket to block and to bowl "sneaks" and "twisters" under-arm had raised his average rather than his reputation; he had evaded fights and dramatic situations, and protected himself upon occasions of unavoidable violence by punching with his white knuckles held in a peculiar and vicious manner. he had always been a little insensitive to those graces of style, in action if not in art, which appeal so strongly to the commoner sort of english mind; he played first for safety, and that assured, for the uttermost advantage. these tendencies became more marked with maturity. when he took up tennis for his health's sake he developed at once an ungracious service that had to be killed like vermin; he developed an instinct for the deadest ball available, and his returns close up to the net were like assassinations. indeed, he was inherently incapable of any vision beyond the express prohibitions and permissions of the rules of the games he played, or beyond the laws and institutions under which he lived. his idea of generosity was the undocumented and unqualified purchase of a person by payments made in the form of a gift. and this being the quality of sir isaac's mind, it followed that his interpretations of the relationship of marriage were simple and strict. a woman, he knew, had to be wooed to be won, but when she was won, she was won. he did not understand wooing after that was settled. there was the bargain and her surrender. he on his side had to keep her, dress her, be kind to her, give her the appearances of pride and authority, and in return he had his rights and his privileges and undefined powers of control. that you know, by the existing rules, is the reality of marriage where there are no settlements and no private property of the wife's. that is to say, it is the reality of marriage in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred. and it would have shocked sir isaac extremely, and as a matter of fact it did shock him, for any one to suggest the slightest revision of so entirely advantageous an arrangement. he was confident of his good intentions, and resolved to the best of his ability to make his wife the happiest of living creatures, subject only to reasonable acquiescences and general good behaviour. never before had he cared for anything so much as he did for her--not even for the international bread and cake stores. he gloated upon her. she distracted him from business. he resolved from the outset to surround her with every luxury and permit her no desire that he had not already anticipated. even her mother and georgina, whom he thought extremely unnecessary persons, were frequent visitors to his house. his solicitude for her was so great that she found it difficult even to see her doctor except in his presence. and he bought her a pearl necklace that cost six hundred pounds. he was, in fact, one of those complete husbands who grow rare in these decadent days. the social circle to which sir isaac introduced his wife was not a very extensive one. the business misadventures of his father had naturally deprived his mother of most of her friends; he had made only acquaintances at school, and his subsequent concentration upon business had permitted very few intimacies. renewed prosperity had produced a certain revival of cousins, but mrs. harman, established in a pleasant house at highbury, had received their attentions with a well-merited stiffness. his chief associates were his various business allies, and these and their wives and families formed the nucleus of the new world to which ellen was gradually and temperately introduced. there were a few local callers, but putney is now too deeply merged with london for this practice of the countryside to have any great effect upon a new-comer's visiting circle. perhaps mr. charterson might claim to be sir isaac's chief friend at the time of that gentleman's marriage. transactions in sugar had brought them together originally. he was sir isaac's best man, and the new knight entertained a feeling of something very like admiration for him. moreover, mr. charterson had very large ears, more particularly was the left one large, extraordinarily large and projecting upper teeth, which he sought vainly to hide beneath an extravagant moustache, and a harsh voice, characteristics that did much to allay the anxieties natural to a newly married man. mr. charterson was moreover adequately married to a large, attentive, enterprising, swarthy wife, and possessed a splendid house in belgravia. not quite so self-made as sir isaac, he was still sufficiently self-made to take a very keen interest in his own social advancement and in social advancement generally, and it was through him that sir isaac's attention had been first directed to those developing relations with politics that arise as a business grows to greatness. "i'm for parliament," said charterson. "sugar's in politics, and i'm after it. you'd better come too, harman. those chaps up there, they'll play jiggery-pokery with sugar if we aren't careful. and it won't be only sugar, harman!" pressed to expand this latter sentence, he pointed out to his friend that "any amount of interfering with employment" was in the air--"any amount." "and besides," said mr. charterson, "men like us have a stake in the country, harman. we're getting biggish people. we ought to do our share. i don't see the fun of leaving everything to the landlords and the lawyers. men of our sort have got to make ourselves felt. we want a business government. of course--one pays. so long as i get a voice in calling the tune i don't mind paying the piper a bit. there's going to be a lot of interference with trade. all this social legislation. and there's what you were saying the other day about these leases...." "i'm not much of a talker," said harman. "i don't see myself gassing in the house." "oh! i don't mean going into parliament," said charterson. "that's for some of us, perhaps.... but come into the party, make yourself felt." under charterson's stimulation it was that harman joined the national liberal club, and presently went on to the climax, and through him he came to know something of that inner traffic of arrangements and bargains which does so much to keep a great historical party together and maintain its vitality. for a time he was largely overshadowed by the sturdy radicalism of charterson, but presently as he understood this interesting game better, he embarked upon a line of his own. charterson wanted a seat, and presently got it; his maiden speech on the sugar bounties won a compliment from mr. evesham; and harman, who would have piloted a monoplane sooner than address the house, decided to be one of those silent influences that work outside our national assembly. he came to the help of an embarrassed liberal weekly, and then, in a fleet street crisis, undertook the larger share of backing the _old country gazette_, that important social and intellectual party organ. his knighthood followed almost automatically. such political developments introduced a second element into the intermittent social relations of the harman household. before his knighthood and marriage sir isaac had participated in various public banquets and private parties and little dinners in the vaults of the house and elsewhere, arising out of his political intentions, and with the appearance of a lady harman there came a certain urgency on the part of those who maintain in a state of hectic dullness the social activities of the great liberal party. horatio blenker, sir isaac's editor, showed a disposition to be socially very helpful, and after mrs. blenker had called in a state of worldly instructiveness, there was a little dinner at the blenkers' to introduce young lady harman to the great political world. it was the first dinner-party of her life, and she found it dazzling rather than really agreeable. she felt very slender and young and rather unclothed about the arms and neck, in spite of the six hundred pound pearl necklace that had been given to her just as she stood before the mirror in her white-and-gold dinner dress ready to start. she had to look down at that dress ever and again and at her shining arms to remind herself that she wasn't still in schoolgirl clothes, and it seemed to her there was not another woman in the room who was not fairly entitled to send her off to bed at any moment. she had been a little nervous about the details of the dinner, but there was nothing strange or difficult but caviare, and in that case she waited for some one else to begin. the chartersons were there, which was very reassuring, and the abundant flowers on the table were a sort of protection. the man on her right was very nice, gently voluble, and evidently quite deaf, so that she had merely to make kind respectful faces at him. he talked to her most of the time, and described the peasant costumes in marken and walcheren. and mr. blenker, with a fine appreciation of sir isaac's watchful temperament and his own magnetism, spoke to her three times and never looked at her once all through the entertainment. a few weeks later they went to dinner at the chartersons', and then she gave a dinner, which was arranged very skilfully by sir isaac and snagsby and the cook-housekeeper, with a little outside help, and then came a big party reception at lady barleypound's, a multitudinous miscellaneous assembly in which the obviously wealthy rubbed shoulders with the obviously virtuous and the not quite so obviously clever. it was a great orgy of standing about and seeing the various blenkers and the cramptons and the weston massinghays and the daytons and mrs. millingham with her quivering lorgnette and her last tame genius and lewis, and indeed all the tapirs and tadpoles of liberalism, being tremendously active and influential and important throughout the evening. the house struck ellen as being very splendid, the great staircase particularly so, and never before had she seen a great multitude of people in evening dress. lady barleypound in the golden parlour at the head of the stairs shook hands automatically, lest it would seem in some amiable dream, mrs. blapton and a daughter rustled across the gathering in a hasty vindictive manner and vanished, and a number of handsome, glittering, dark-eyed, splendidly dressed women kept together in groups and were tremendously but occultly amused. the various blenkers seemed everywhere, horatio in particular with his large fluent person and his luminous tenor was like a shop-walker taking customers to the departments: one felt he was weaving all these immiscibles together into one great wise liberal purpose, and that he deserved quite wonderful things from the party; he even introduced five or six people to lady harman, looking sternly over her head and restraining his charm as he did so on account of sir isaac's feelings. the people he brought up to her were not very interesting people, she thought, but then that was perhaps due to her own dreadful ignorance of politics. lady harman ceased even to dip into the vortex of london society after march, and in june she went with her mother and a skilled nurse to that beautiful furnished house sir isaac had found near torquay, in preparation for the birth of their first little daughter. § it seemed to her husband that it was both unreasonable and ungrateful of her to become a tearful young woman after their union, and for a phase of some months she certainly was a tearful young woman, but his mother made it clear to him that this was quite a correct and permissible phase for her, as she was, and so he expressed his impatience with temperance, and presently she was able to pull herself together and begin to readjust herself to a universe that had seemed for a time almost too shattered for endurance. she resumed the process of growing up that her marriage had for a time so vividly interrupted, and if her schooldays were truncated and the college phase omitted, she had at any rate a very considerable amount of fundamental experience to replace these now customary completions. three little girls she brought into the world in the first three years of her married life, then after a brief interval of indifferent health she had a fourth girl baby of a physique quite obviously inferior to its predecessors, and then, after--and perhaps as a consequence of--much whispered conversation of the two mothers-in-law, protests and tactful explanation on the part of the elderly and trustworthy family doctor and remarks of an extraordinary breadth (and made at table too, almost before the door had closed on snagsby!) from ellen's elder sister, there came a less reproductive phase.... but by that time lady harman had acquired the habit of reading and the habit of thinking over what she read, and from that it is an easy step to thinking over oneself and the circumstances of one's own life. the one thing trains for the other. now the chief circumstance in the life of lady harman was sir isaac. indeed as she grew to a clear consciousness of herself and her position, it seemed to her he was not so much a circumstance as a circumvallation. there wasn't a direction in which she could turn without immediately running up against him. he had taken possession of her extremely. and from her first resignation to this as an inevitable fact she had come, she hardly knew how, to a renewed disposition to regard this large and various universe beyond him and outside of him, with something of the same slight adventurousness she had felt before he so comprehensively happened to her. after her first phase of despair she had really done her best to honour the bargain she had rather unwittingly made and to love and to devote herself and be a loyal and happy wife to this clutching, hard-breathing little man who had got her, and it was the insatiable excesses of his demands quite as much as any outer influence that made her realize the impossibility of such a concentration. his was a supremely acquisitive and possessive character, so that he insulted her utmost subjugations by an obtrusive suspicion and jealousy, he was jealous of her childish worship of her dead father, jealous of her disposition to go to church, jealous of the poet wordsworth because she liked to read his sonnets, jealous because she loved great music, jealous when she wanted to go out; if she seemed passionless and she seemed more and more passionless he was jealous, and the slightest gleam of any warmth of temperament filled him with a vile and furious dread of dishonouring possibilities. and the utmost resolution to believe in him could not hide from her for ever the fact that his love manifested itself almost wholly as a parade of ownership and a desire, without kindliness, without any self-forgetfulness. all his devotion, his self-abjection, had been the mere qualms of a craving, the flush of eager courtship. do as she would to overcome these realizations, forces within her stronger than herself, primordial forces with the welfare of all life in their keeping, cried out upon the meanness of his face, the ugly pointed nose and the thin compressed lips, the weak neck, the clammy hands, the ungainly nervous gestures, the tuneless whistling between the clenched teeth. he would not let her forget a single detail. whenever she tried to look at any created thing, he thrust himself, like one of his own open-air advertisements, athwart the attraction. as she grew up to an achieved womanhood--and it was even a physical growing-up, for she added more than an inch of stature after her marriage--her life became more and more consciously like a fencing match in which her vision flashed over his head and under his arms and this side of him and that, while with a toiling industry he fought to intercept it. and from the complete acceptance of her matrimonial submission, she passed on by almost insensible degrees towards a conception of her life as a struggle, that seemed at first entirely lonely and unsupported, to exist--_against_ him. in every novel as in every picture there must be an immense simplification, and so i tell the story of lady harman's changing attitude without any of those tangled leapings-forward or harkings-back, those moods and counter moods and relapses which made up the necessary course of her mind. but sometimes she was here and sometimes she was there, sometimes quite back to the beginning an obedient, scrupulously loyal and up-looking young wife, sometimes a wife concealing the humiliation of an unhappy choice in a spurious satisfaction and affection. and mixed up with widening spaces of criticism and dissatisfaction and hostility there were, you must understand, moments of real liking for this outrageous little man and streaks of an absurd maternal tenderness for him. they had been too close together to avoid that. she had a woman's affection of ownership too, and disliked to see him despised or bettered or untidy; even those ridiculous muddy hands had given her a twinge of solicitude.... and all the while she was trying to see the universe also, the great background of their two little lives, and to think what it might mean for her over and above their too obliterating relationship. § it would be like counting the bacteria of an infection to trace how ideas of insubordination came drifting into sir isaac's paradise. the epidemic is in the air. there is no tempter nowadays, no definitive apple. the disturbing force has grown subtler, blows in now like a draught, creeps and gathers like the dust,--a disseminated serpent. sir isaac brought home his young, beautiful and rather crumpled and astonished eve and by all his standards he was entitled to be happy ever afterwards. he knew of one danger, but against that he was very watchful. never once for six long years did she have a private duologue with another male. but mudie and sir jesse boot sent parcels to the house unchecked, the newspaper drifted in not even censored: the nurses who guided ellen through the essential incidents of a feminine career talked of something called a "movement." and there was georgina.... the thing they wanted they called the vote, but that demand so hollow, so eyeless, had all the terrifying effect of a mask. behind that mask was a formless invincible discontent with the lot of womanhood. it wanted,--it was not clear what it wanted, but whatever it wanted, all the domestic instincts of mankind were against admitting there was anything it could want. that remarkable agitation had already worked up to the thunderous pitch, there had been demonstrations at public meetings, scenes in the ladies' gallery and something like rioting in parliament square before ever it occurred to sir isaac that this was a disturbance that touched his home. he had supposed suffragettes were ladies of all too certain an age with red noses and spectacles and a masculine style of costume, who wished to be hugged by policemen. he said as much rather knowingly and wickedly to charterson. he could not understand any woman not coveting the privileges of lady harman. and then one day while georgina and her mother were visiting them, as he was looking over the letters at the breakfast table according to his custom before giving them out, he discovered two identical newspaper packets addressed to his wife and his sister-in-law, and upon them were these words printed very plainly, "votes for women." "good lord!" he cried. "what's this? it oughtn't to be allowed." and he pitched the papers at the wastepaper basket under the sideboard. "i'll thank you," said georgina, "not to throw away our _votes for women_. we subscribe to that." "eh?" cried sir isaac. "we're subscribers. snagsby, just give us those papers." (a difficult moment for snagsby.) he picked up the papers and looked at sir isaac. "put 'em down there," said sir isaac, waving to the sideboard and then in an ensuing silence handed two letters of no importance to his mother-in-law. his face was pale and he was breathless. snagsby with an obvious tactfulness retired. sir isaac watched the door close. his remark pointedly ignored georgina. "what you been thinking about, elly," he asked, "subscribing to _that_ thing?" "i wanted to read it." "but you don't hold with all that rubbish----" "_rubbish!_" said georgina, helping herself to marmalade. "well, rot then, if you like," said sir isaac, unamiably and panting. with that as snagsby afterwards put it--for the battle raged so fiercely as to go on even when he presently returned to the room--"the fat was in the fire." the harman breakfast-table was caught up into the great controversy with heat and fury like a tree that is overtaken by a forest fire. it burnt for weeks, and smouldered still when the first white heats had abated. i will not record the arguments of either side, they were abominably bad and you have heard them all time after time; i do not think that whatever side you have taken in this matter you would find much to please you in sir isaac's goadings or georgina's repartees. sir isaac would ask if women were prepared to go as soldiers and georgina would enquire how many years of service he had done or horrify her mother by manifest allusion to the agonies and dangers of maternity,--things like that. it gave a new interest to breakfast for snagsby; and the peculiarly lady-like qualities of mrs. sawbridge, a gift for silent, pallid stiffness, a disposition, tactful but unsuccessful, to "change the subject," an air of being about to leave the room in disdain, had never shone with such baleful splendour. our interest here is rather with the effect of these remarkable disputes, which echoed in sir isaac's private talk long after georgina had gone again, upon lady harman. he could not leave this topic of feminine emancipation alone, once it had been set going, and though ellen would always preface her remarks by, "of course georgina goes too far," he worried her slowly into a series of definite insurgent positions. sir isaac's attacks on georgina certainly brought out a good deal of absurdity in her positions, and georgina at times left sir isaac without a leg to stand on, and the net result of their disputes as of most human controversies was not conviction for the hearer but release. her mind escaped between them, and went exploring for itself through the great gaps they had made in the simple obedient assumptions of her girlhood. that question originally put in paradise, "why shouldn't we?" came into her mind and stayed there. it is a question that marks a definite stage in the departure from innocence. things that had seemed opaque and immutable appeared translucent and questionable. she began to read more and more in order to learn things and get a light upon things, and less and less to pass the time. ideas came to her that seemed at first strange altogether and then grotesquely justifiable and then crept to a sort of acceptance by familiarity. and a disturbing intermittent sense of a general responsibility increased and increased in her. you will understand this sense of responsibility which was growing up in lady harman's mind if you have felt it yourself, but if you have not then you may find it a little difficult to understand. you see it comes, when it comes at all, out of a phase of disillusionment. all children, i suppose, begin by taking for granted the rightness of things in general, the soundness of accepted standards, and many people are at least so happy that they never really grow out of this assumption. they go to the grave with an unbroken confidence that somewhere behind all the immediate injustices and disorders of life, behind the antics of politics, the rigidities of institutions, the pressure of custom and the vagaries of law, there is wisdom and purpose and adequate provision, they never lose that faith in the human household they acquired amongst the directed securities of home. but for more of us and more there comes a dissolution of these assurances; there comes illumination as the day comes into a candle-lit uncurtained room. the warm lights that once rounded off our world so completely are betrayed for what they are, smoky and guttering candles. beyond what once seemed a casket of dutiful security is now a limitless and indifferent universe. ours is the wisdom or there is no wisdom; ours is the decision or there is no decision. that burthen is upon each of us in the measure of our capacity. the talent has been given us and we may not bury it. § and as we reckon up the disturbing influences that were stirring lady harman out of that life of acquiescences to which women are perhaps even more naturally disposed than men, we may pick out the conversation of susan burnet as something a little apart from the others, as something with a peculiar barbed pointedness of its own that was yet in other respects very representative of a multitude of nudges and nips and pricks and indications that life was giving lady harman's awaking mind. susan burnet was a woman who came to renovate and generally do up the putney curtains and furniture and loose covers every spring; she was mrs. crumble's discovery, she was sturdy and short and she had open blue eyes and an engaging simplicity of manner that attracted lady harman from the outset. she was stuck away in one of the spare bedrooms and there she was available for any one, so long, she explained, as they didn't fluster her when she was cutting out, with a flow of conversation that not even a mouth full of pins seemed to interrupt. and lady harman would go and watch susan burnet by the hour together and think what an enviably independent young woman she was, and listen with interest and something between horror and admiration to the various impressions of life she had gathered during a hardy and adventurous career. their early conversations were about susan burnet's business and the general condition of things in that world of upholsterers' young women in which susan had lived until she perceived the possibilities of a "connexion," and set up for herself. and the condition of things in that world, as susan described it, brought home to lady harman just how sheltered and limited her own upbringing had been. "it isn't right," said susan, "the way they send girls out with fellers into empty houses. naturally the men get persecuting them. they don't seem hardly able to help it, some of them, and i will say this for them, that a lot of the girls go more than half way with them, leading them on. still there's a sort of man won't leave you alone. one i used to be sent out with and a married man too he was, oh!--he used to give me a time. why i've bit his hands before now, bit hard, before he'd leave go of me. it's my opinion the married men are worse than the single. bolder they are. i pushed him over a scuttle once and he hit his head against a bookcase. i was fair frightened of him. 'you little devil,' he says; 'i'll be even with you yet....' oh! i've been called worse things than that.... of course a respectable girl gets through with it, but it's trying and to some it's a sort of temptation...." "i should have thought," reflected lady harman, "you could have told someone." "it's queer," said susan; "but it never seemed to me the sort of thing a girl ought to go telling. it's a kind of private thing. and besides, it isn't exactly easy to tell.... i suppose the firm didn't want to be worried by complaints and disputes about that sort of thing. and it isn't always easy to say just which of the two is to blame." "but how old are the girls they send out?" asked lady harman. "some's as young as seventeen or eighteen. it all depends on the sort of work that's wanted to be done...." "of course a lot of them have to marry...." this lurid little picture of vivid happenings in unoccupied houses and particularly of the prim, industrious, capable susan burnet, biting aggressive wrists, stuck in lady harman's imagination. she seemed to be looking into hitherto unsuspected pits of simple and violent living just beneath her feet. susan told some upholsteress love tales, real love tales, with a warmth and honesty of passion in them that seemed at once dreadful and fine to lady harman's underfed imagination. under encouragement susan expanded the picture, beyond these mere glimpses of workshop and piece-work and furtive lust. it appeared that she was practically the head of her family; there was a mother who had specialized in ill-health, a sister of defective ability who stayed at home, a brother in south africa who was very good and sent home money, and three younger sisters growing up. and father,--she evaded the subject of father at first. then presently lady harman had some glimpses of an earlier phase in susan burnet's life "before any of us were earning money." father appeared as a kindly, ineffectual, insolvent figure struggling to conduct a baker's and confectioner's business in walthamstow, mother was already specializing, there were various brothers and sisters being born and dying. "how many were there of you altogether?" asked lady harman. "thirteen there was. father always used to laugh and say he'd had a fair baker's dozen. there was luke to begin with----" susan began to count on her fingers and recite braces of scriptural names. she could only make up her tale to twelve. she became perplexed. then she remembered. "of course!" she cried: "there was nicodemus. he was still-born. i _always_ forget nicodemus, poor little chap! but he came--was it sixth or seventh?--seventh after anna." she gave some glimpses of her father and then there was a collapse of which she fought shy. lady harman was too delicate to press her to talk of that. but one day in the afternoon susan's tongue ran. she was telling how first she went to work before she was twelve. "but i thought the board schools----" said lady harman. "i had to go before the committee," said susan. "i had to go before the committee and ask to be let go to work. there they was, sitting round a table in a great big room, and they was as kind as anything, one old gentleman with a great white beard, he was as kind as could be. 'don't you be frightened, my dear,' he says. 'you tell us why you want to go out working.' 'well,' i says, '_somebody's_ got to earn something,' and that made them laugh in a sort of fatherly way, and after that there wasn't any difficulty. you see it was after father's inquest, and everybody was disposed to be kind to us. 'pity they can't all go instead of this educational tommy rot,' the old gentleman says. 'you learn to work, my dear'--and i did...." she paused. "father's inquest?" said lady harman. susan seemed to brace herself to the occasion. "father," she said, "was drowned. i know--i hadn't told you that before. he was drowned in the lea. it's always been a distress and humiliation to us there had to be an inquest. and they threw out things.... it's why we moved to haggerston. it's the worst that ever happened to us in all our lives. far worse. worse than having the things sold or the children with scarlet fever and having to burn everything.... i don't like to talk about it. i can't help it but i don't.... "i don't know why i talk to you as i do, lady harman, but i don't seem to mind talking to you. i don't suppose i've opened my mouth to anyone about it, not for years--except to one dear friend i've got--her who persuaded me to be a church member. but what i've always said and what i will always say is this, that i don't believe any evil of father, i don't believe, i won't ever believe he took his life. i won't even believe he was in drink. i don't know how he got in the river, but i'm certain it wasn't so. he was a weak man, was father, i've never denied he was a weak man. but a harder working man than he was never lived. he worried, anyone would have worried seeing the worries he had. the shop wasn't paying as it was; often we never tasted meat for weeks together, and then there came one of these internationals, giving overweight and underselling...." "one of these internationals?" "yes, i don't suppose you've ever heard of them. they're in the poorer neighbourhoods chiefly. they sell teas and things mostly now but they began as bakers' shops and what they did was to come into a place and undersell until all the old shops were ruined and shut up. that was what they tried to do and father hadn't no more chance amongst them than a mouse in a trap.... it was just like being run over. all the trade that stayed with us after a bit was bad debts. you can't blame people i suppose for going where they get more and pay less, and it wasn't till we'd all gone right away to haggerston that they altered things and put the prices up again. of course father lost heart and all that. he didn't know what to do, he'd sunk all he had in the shop; he just sat and moped about. really,--he was pitiful. he wasn't able to sleep; he used to get up at nights and go about downstairs. mother says she found him once sweeping out the bakehouse at two o'clock in the morning. he got it into his head that getting up like that would help him. but i don't believe and i won't believe he wouldn't have seen it through if he could. not to my dying day will i believe that...." lady harman reflected. "but couldn't he have got work again--as a baker?" "it's hard after you've had a shop. you see all the younger men've come on. they know the new ways. and a man who's had a shop and failed, he's lost heart. and these stores setting up make everything drivinger. they do things a different way. they make it harder for everyone." both lady harman and susan burnet reflected in silence for a few seconds upon the international stores. the sewing woman was the first to speak. "things like that," she said, "didn't ought to be. one shop didn't ought to be allowed to set out to ruin another. it isn't fair trading, it's a sort of murder. it oughtn't to be allowed. how was father to know?..." "there's got to be competition," said lady harman. "i don't call that competition," said susan burnet. "but,--i suppose they give people cheaper bread." "they do for a time. then when they've killed you they do what they like.... luke--he's one of those who'll say anything--well, he used to say it was a regular monopoly. but it's hard on people who've set out to live honest and respectable and bring up a family plain and decent to be pushed out of the way like that." "i suppose it is," said lady harman. "what was father to _do_?" said susan, and turned to sir isaac's armchair from which this discourse had distracted her. and then suddenly, in a voice thick with rage, she burst out: "and then alice must needs go and take their money. that's what sticks in _my_ throat." still on her knees she faced about to lady harman. "alice goes into one of their ho'burn branches as a waitress, do what i could to prevent her. it makes one mad to think of it. time after time i've said to her, 'alice,' i've said, 'sooner than touch their dirty money i'd starve in the street.' and she goes! she says it's all nonsense of me to bear a spite. laughs at me! 'alice,' i told her, 'it's a wonder the spirit of poor father don't rise up against you.' and she laughs. calls that bearing a spite.... of course she was little when it happened. she can't remember, not as i remember...." lady harman reflected for a time. "i suppose you don't know," she began, addressing susan's industrious back; "you don't know who--who owns these international stores?" "i suppose it's some company," said susan. "i don't see that it lets them off--being in a company." § we have done much in the last few years to destroy the severe limitations of victorian delicacy, and all of us, from princesses and prime-ministers' wives downward, talk of topics that would have been considered quite gravely improper in the nineteenth century. nevertheless, some topics have, if anything, become more indelicate than they were, and this is especially true of the discussion of income, of any discussion that tends, however remotely, to inquire, who is it at the base of everything who really pays in blood and muscle and involuntary submissions for _your_ freedom and magnificence? this, indeed, is almost the ultimate surviving indecency. so that it was with considerable private shame and discomfort that lady harman pursued even in her privacy the train of thought that susan burnet had set going. it had been conveyed into her mind long ago, and it had settled down there and grown into a sort of security, that the international bread and cake stores were a very important contribution to progress, and that sir isaac, outside the gates of his home, was a very useful and beneficial personage, and richly meriting a baronetcy. she hadn't particularly analyzed this persuasion, but she supposed him engaged in a kind of daily repetition, but upon modern scientific lines, of the miracle of the loaves and fishes, feeding a great multitude that would otherwise have gone hungry. she knew, too, from the advertisements that flowered about her path through life, that this bread in question was exceptionally clean and hygienic; whole front pages of the _daily messenger_, headed the "fauna of small bakehouses," and adorned with a bordering of _blatta orientalis_, the common cockroach, had taught her that, and she knew that sir isaac's passion for purity had also led to the _old country gazette's_ spirited and successful campaign for a non-party measure securing additional bakehouse regulation and inspection. and her impression had been that the growing and developing refreshment side of the concern was almost a public charity; sir isaac gave, he said, a larger, heavier scone, a bigger pat of butter, a more elegant teapot, ham more finely cut and less questionable pork-pies than any other system of syndicated tea-shops. she supposed that whenever he sat late at night going over schemes and papers, or when he went off for days together to cardiff or glasgow or dublin, or such-like centres, or when he became preoccupied at dinner and whistled thoughtfully through his teeth, he was planning to increase the amount or diminish the cost of tea and cocoa-drenched farinaceous food in the stomachs of that section of our national adolescence which goes out daily into the streets of our great cities to be fed. and she knew his vans and catering were indispensable to the british army upon its manoeuvres.... now the smashing up of the burnet family by the international stores was disagreeably not in the picture of these suppositions. and the remarkable thing is that this one little tragedy wouldn't for a moment allow itself to be regarded as an exceptional accident in an otherwise fair vast development. it remained obstinately a specimen--of the other side of the great syndication. it was just as if she had been doubting subconsciously all along.... in the silence of the night she lay awake and tried to make herself believe that the burnet case was just a unique overlooked disaster, that it needed only to come to sir isaac's attention to be met by the fullest reparation.... after all she did not bring it to sir isaac's attention. but one morning, while this phase of new doubts was still lively in her mind, sir isaac told her he was going down to brighton, and then along the coast road in a car to portsmouth, to pay a few surprise visits, and see how the machine was working. he would be away a night, an unusual breach in his habits. "are you thinking of any new branches, isaac?" "i may have a look at arundel." "isaac." she paused to frame her question carefully. "i suppose there are some shops at arundel now." "i've got to see to that." "if you open----i suppose the old shops get hurt. what becomes of the people if they do get hurt?" "that's _their_ look-out," said sir isaac. "isn't it bad for them?" "progress is progress, elly." "it _is_ bad for them. i suppose----wouldn't it be sometimes kinder if you took over the old shop--made a sort of partner of him, or something?" sir isaac shook his head. "i want younger men," he said. "you can't get a move on the older hands." "but, then, it's rather bad----i suppose these little men you shut up,--some of them must have families." "you're theorizing a bit this morning, elly," said sir isaac, looking up over his coffee cup. "i've been thinking--about these little people." "someone's been talking to you about my shops," said sir isaac, and stuck out an index finger. "if that's georgina----" "it isn't georgina," said lady harman, but she had it very clear in her mind that she must not say who it was. "you can't make a business without squeezing somebody," said sir isaac. "it's easy enough to make a row about any concern that grows a bit. some people would like to have every business tied down to a maximum turnover and so much a year profit. i dare say you've been hearing of these articles in the _london lion_. pretty stuff it is, too. this fuss about the little shopkeepers; that's a new racket. i've had all that row about the waitresses before, and the yarn about the normandy eggs, and all that, but i don't see that you need go reading it against me, and bringing it up at the breakfast-table. a business is a business, it isn't a charity, and i'd like to know where you and i would be if we didn't run the concern on business lines.... why, that _london lion_ fellow came to me with the first two of those articles before the thing began. i could have had the whole thing stopped if i liked, if i'd chosen to take the back page of his beastly cover. that shows the stuff the whole thing is made of. that shows you. why!--he's just a blackmailer, that's what he is. much he cares for my waitresses if he can get the dibs. little shopkeepers, indeed! i know 'em! nice martyrs they are! there isn't one wouldn't _skin_ all the others if he got half a chance...." sir isaac gave way to an extraordinary fit of nagging anger. he got up and stood upon the hearthrug to deliver his soul the better. it was an altogether unexpected and illuminating outbreak. he was flushed with guilt. the more angry and eloquent he became, the more profoundly thoughtful grew the attentive lady at the head of his table.... when at last sir isaac had gone off in the car to victoria, lady harman rang for snagsby. "isn't there a paper," she asked, "called the _london lion_?" "it isn't one i think your ladyship would like," said snagsby, gently but firmly. "i know. but i want to see it. i want copies of all the issues in which there have been articles upon the international stores." "they're thoroughly volgar, me lady," said snagsby, with a large dissuasive smile. "i want you to go out into london and get them now." snagsby hesitated and went. within five minutes he reappeared with a handful of buff-covered papers. "there 'appened to be copies in the pantry, me lady," he said. "we can't imagine 'ow they got there; someone must have brought them in, but 'ere they are quite at your service, me lady." he paused for a discreet moment. something indescribably confidential came into his manner. "i doubt if sir isaac will quite like to 'ave them left about, me lady--after you done with them." she was in a mood of discovery. she sat in the room that was all furnished in pink (her favourite colour) and read a bitter, malicious, coarsely written and yet insidiously credible account of her husband's business methods. something within herself seemed to answer, "but didn't you know this all along?" that large conviction that her wealth and position were but the culmination of a great and honourable social service, a conviction that had been her tacit comfort during much distasteful loyalty seemed to shrivel and fade. no doubt the writer was a thwarted blackmailer; even her accustomed mind could distinguish a twang of some such vicious quality in his sentences; but that did not alter the realities he exhibited and exaggerated. there was a description of how sir isaac pounced on his managers that was manifestly derived from a manager he had dismissed. it was dreadfully like him. convincingly like him. there was a statement of the wages he paid his girl assistants and long extracts from his codes of rules and schedules of fines.... when she put down the paper she was suddenly afflicted by a vivid vision of susan burnet's father, losing heart and not knowing what to do. she had an unreasonable feeling that susan burnet's father must have been a small, kindly, furry, bunnyish, little man. of course there had to be progress and the survival of the fittest. she found herself weighing what she imagined susan burnet's father to be like, against the ferrety face, stooping shoulders and scheming whistle of sir isaac. there were times now when she saw her husband with an extreme distinctness. § as this cold and bracing realization that all was not right with her position, with sir isaac's business procedure and the world generally, took possession of lady harman's thoughts there came also with it and arising out of it quite a series of new moods and dispositions. at times she was very full of the desire "to do something," something that would, as it were, satisfy and assuage this growing uneasiness of responsibility in her mind. at times her consuming wish was not to assuage but escape from this urgency. it worried her and made her feel helpless, and she wanted beyond anything else to get back to that child's world where all experiences are adventurous and everything is finally right. she felt, i think, that it was a little unfair to her that this something within her should be calling upon her to take all sorts of things gravely--hadn't she been a good wife and brought four children into the world...? i am setting down here as clearly as possible what wasn't by any means clear in lady harman's mind. i am giving you side by side phases that never came side by side in her thoughts but which followed and ousted and obliterated one another. she had moods of triviality. she had moods of magnificence. she had moods of intense secret hostility to her urgent little husband, and moods of genial tolerance for everything there was in her life. she had moods, and don't we all have moods?--of scepticism and cynicism, much profounder than the conventions and limitations of novel-writing permit us to tell here. and for hardly any of these moods had she terms and recognitions.... it isn't a natural thing to keep on worrying about the morality of one's material prosperity. these are proclivities superinduced by modern conditions of the conscience. there is a natural resistance in every healthy human being to such distressful heart-searchings. strong instincts battled in lady harman against this intermittent sense of responsibility that was beginning to worry her. an immense lot of her was for simply running away from these troublesome considerations, for covering herself up from them, for distraction. and about this time she happened upon "elizabeth and her german garden," and was very greatly delighted and stimulated by that little sister of montaigne. she was charmed by the book's fresh gaiety, by its gallant resolve to set off all the good things there are in this world, the sunshine and flowers and laughter, against the limitations and thwartings and disappointments of life. for a time it seemed to her that these brave consolations were solutions, and she was stirred by an imitative passion. how stupid had she not been to let life and sir isaac overcome her! she felt that she must make herself like elizabeth, exactly like elizabeth; she tried forthwith, and a certain difficulty she found, a certain deadness, she ascribed to the square modernity of her house and something in the putney air. the house was too large, it dominated the garden and controlled her. she felt she must get away to some place that was chiefly exterior, in the sunshine, far from towns and struggling, straining, angry and despairing humanity, from syndicated shops and all the embarrassing challenges of life. somehow there it would be possible to keep sir isaac at arm's length; and the ghost of susan burnet's father could be left behind to haunt the square rooms of the london house. and there she would live, horticultural, bookish, whimsical, witty, defiant, happily careless. and it was this particular conception of evasion that had set her careering about the countryside in her car, looking for conceivable houses of refuge from this dark novelty of social and personal care, and that had driven her into the low long room of black strand and the presence of mr. brumley. of what ensued and the appearance and influence of lady beach-mandarin and how it led among other things to a lunch invitation from that lady the reader has already been informed. chapter the sixth the adventurous afternoon § you will perhaps remember that before i fell into this extensive digression about lady harman's upbringing, we had got to the entry of mrs. sawbridge into the house bearing a plunder of sir isaac's best roses. she interrupted a conversation of some importance. those roses at this point are still unwithered and fragrant, and moreover they are arranged according to mrs. sawbridge's ideas of elegance about sir isaac's home.... and sir isaac, when that conversation could be renewed, categorically forbade lady harman to go to lady beach-mandarin's lunch and lady harman went to lady beach-mandarin's lunch. she had some peculiar difficulties in getting to that lunch. it is necessary to tell certain particulars. they are particulars that will distress the delicacy of mrs. sawbridge unspeakably if ever she chances to read this book. but a story has to be told. you see sir isaac harman had never considered it advisable to give his wife a private allowance. whatever she wished to have, he maintained, she could have. the bill would afterwards be paid by his cheque on the first day of the month following the receipt of the bill. he found a generous pleasure in writing these cheques, and lady harman was magnificently housed, fed and adorned. moreover, whenever she chose to ask for money he gave her money, usually double of what she demanded,--and often a kiss or so into the bargain. but after he had forbidden her to go to lady beach-mandarin's so grave an estrangement ensued that she could not ask him for money. a door closed between them. and the crisis had come at an unfortunate moment. she possessed the sum of five shillings and eightpence. she perceived quite early that this shortness of money would greatly embarrass the rebellion she contemplated. she was exceptionally ignorant of most worldly things, but she knew there was never yet a campaign without a war chest. she felt entitled to money.... she planned several times to make a demand for replenishment with a haughty dignity; the haughty dignity was easy enough to achieve, but the demand was not. a sensitive dread of her mother's sympathetic curiosity barred all thoughts of borrowing in that direction,--she and her mother "never discussed money matters." she did not want to get georgina into further trouble. and besides, georgina was in devonshire. even to get to lady beach-mandarin's became difficult under these circumstances. she knew that clarence, though he would take her into the country quite freely, had been instructed, on account of sir isaac's expressed dread of any accident happening to her while alone, not to plunge with her into the vortex of london traffic. only under direct orders from sir isaac would clarence take her down putney hill; though she might go up and away--to anywhere. she knew nothing of pawnshops or any associated methods of getting cash advances, and the possibility of using the telephone to hire an automobile never occurred to her. but she was fully resolved to go. she had one advantage in the fact that sir isaac didn't know the precise date of the disputed engagement. when that arrived she spent a restless morning and dressed herself at last with great care. she instructed peters, her maid, who participated in these preparations with a mild astonishment, that she was going out to lunch, asked her to inform mrs. sawbridge of the fact and, outwardly serene, made a bolt for it down the staircase and across the hall. the great butler appeared; she had never observed how like a large note of interrogation his forward contours could be. "i shall be out to lunch, snagsby," she said, and went past him into the sunshine. she left a discreetly astonished snagsby behind her. ("now where are we going out to lunch?" said snagsby presently to peters. "i've never known her so particular with her clothes," said the maid. "never before--not in the same way; it's something new and special to this affair," snagsby reflected, "i wonder now if sir isaac...." "one can't help observing things," said the maid, after a pause. "mute though we be.") lady harman had the whole five and eightpence with her. she had managed to keep it intact in her jewel case, declaring she had no change when any small demands were made on her. with an exhilaration so great that she wanted sorely to laugh aloud she walked out through her big open gates and into the general publicity of putney hill. why had she not done as much years ago? how long she had been, working up to this obvious thing! she hadn't been out in such complete possession of herself since she had been a schoolgirl. she held up a beautifully gloved hand to a private motor-car going downhill and then to an engaged taxi going up, and then with a slightly dashed feeling, picked up her skirt and walked observantly downhill. her reason dispelled a transitory impression that these two vehicles were on sir isaac's side against her. there was quite a nice taxi on the rank at the bottom of the hill. the driver, a pleasant-looking young man in a white cap, seemed to have been waiting for her in particular; he met her timid invitation halfway and came across the road to her and jumped down and opened the door. he took her instructions as though they were after his own heart, and right in front of her as she sat was a kind of tin cornucopia full of artificial flowers that seemed like a particular attention to her. his fare was two and eightpence and she gave him four shillings. he seemed quite gratified by her largesse, his manner implied he had always thought as much of her, from first to last their relations had been those of sunny contentment, and it was only as she ascended the steps of lady beach-mandarin's portico, that it occurred to her that she now had insufficient money for an automobile to take her home. but there were railways and buses and all sorts of possibilities; the day was an adventure; and she entered the drawing-room with a brow that was beautifully unruffled. she wanted to laugh still; it animated her eyes and lips with the pleasantest little stir you can imagine. "a-a-a-a-a-h!" cried lady beach-mandarin in a high note, and threw out--it had an effect of being quite a number of arms--as though she was one of those brass indian goddesses one sees. lady harman felt taken in at once to all that capacious bosom involved and contained.... § it was quite an amusing lunch. but any lunch would have been amusing to lady harman in the excitement of her first act of deliberate disobedience. she had never been out to lunch alone in all her life before; she experienced a kind of scared happiness, she felt like someone at lourdes who has just thrown away crutches. she was seated between a pink young man with an eyeglass whose place was labelled "bertie trevor" and who was otherwise unexplained, and mr. brumley. she was quite glad to see mr. brumley again, and no doubt her eyes showed it. she had hoped to see him. miss sharsper was sitting nearly opposite to her, a real live novelist pecking observations out of life as a hen pecks seeds amidst scenery, and next beyond was a large-headed inattentive fluffy person who was mr. keystone the well-known critic. and there was agatha alimony under a rustling vast hat of green-black cock's feathers next to sir markham crosby, with whom she had been having an abusive controversy in the _times_ and to whom quite elaborately she wouldn't speak, and there was lady viping with her lorgnette and adolphus blenker, horatio's younger and if possible more gentlemanly brother--horatio of the _old country gazette_ that is--sole reminder that there was such a person as sir isaac in the world. lady beach-mandarin's mother and the swiss governess and the tall but retarded daughter, phyllis, completed the party. the reception was lively and cheering; lady beach-mandarin enfolded her guests in generosities and kept them all astir like a sea-swell under a squadron, and she introduced lady harman to miss alimony by public proclamation right across the room because there were two lavish tables of bric-à-brac, a marble bust of old beach-mandarin and most of the rest of the party in the way. and at the table conversation was like throwing bread, you never knew whom you might hit or who might hit you. (but lady beach-mandarin produced an effect of throwing whole loaves.) bertie trevor was one of those dancing young men who talk to a woman as though they were giving a dog biscuits, and mostly it was mr. brumley who did such talking as reached lady harman's ear. mr. brumley was in very good form that day. he had contrived to remind her of all their black strand talk while they were still eating _petites bouchées à la reine_. "have you found that work yet?" he asked and carried her mind to the core of her situation. then they were snatched up into a general discussion of bazaars. sir markham spoke of a great bazaar that was to be held on behalf of one of the many shakespear theatre movements that were then so prevalent. was lady beach-mandarin implicated? was anyone? he told of novel features in contemplation. he generalized about bazaars and, with an air of having forgotten the presence of miss alimony, glanced at the suffrage bazaar--it was a season of bazaars. he thought poorly of the suffrage bazaar. the hostess intervened promptly with anecdotes of her own cynical daring as a bazaar-seller, miss sharsper offered fragments of a reminiscence about signing one of her own books for a bookstall, blenker told a well-known bazaar anecdote brightly and well, and the impending skirmish was averted. while the bazaar talk still whacked to and fro about the table mr. brumley got at lady harman's ear again. "rather tantalizing these meetings at table," he said. "it's like trying to talk while you swim in a rough sea...." then lady beach-mandarin intervened with demands for support for her own particular bazaar project and they were eating salad before there was a chance of another word between them. "i must confess that when i want to talk to people i like to get them alone," said mr. brumley, and gave form to thoughts that were already on the verge of crystallization in her own mind. she had been recalling that she had liked his voice before, noting something very kindly and thoughtful and brotherly about his right profile and thinking how much an hour's talk with him would help to clear up her ideas. "but it's so difficult to get one alone," said lady harman, and suddenly an idea of the utmost daring and impropriety flashed into her mind. she was on the verge of speaking it forthwith and then didn't, she met something in his eye that answered her own and then lady beach-mandarin was foaming over them like a dam-burst over an american town. "what do _you_ think, mr. brumley?" demanded lady beach-mandarin. "?" "about sir markham's newspaper symposium. they asked him what allowance he gave his wife. sent a prepaid reply telegram." "but he hasn't got a wife!" "they don't stick at a little thing like that," said sir markham grimly. "i think a husband and wife ought to have everything in common like the early christians," said lady beach-mandarin. "_we_ always did," and so got the discussion afloat again off the sandbank of mr. brumley's inattention. it was quite a good discussion and lady harman contributed an exceptionally alert and intelligent silence. sir markham distrusted lady beach-mandarin's communism and thought that anyhow it wouldn't do for a financier or business man. he favoured an allowance. "so did sir joshua," said the widow viping. this roused agatha alimony. "allowance indeed!" she cried. "is a wife to be on no better footing than a daughter? the whole question of a wife's financial autonomy needs reconsidering...." adolphus blenker became learned and lucid upon pin-money and dowry and the customs of savage tribes, and mr. brumley helped with corroboration.... mr. brumley managed to say just one other thing to lady harman before the lunch was over. it struck her for a moment as being irrelevant. "the gardens at hampton court," he said, "are delightful just now. have you seen them? autumnal fires. all the september perennials lifting their spears in their last great chorus. it's the _götterdämmerung_ of the year." she was going out of the room before she appreciated his possible intention. lady beach-mandarin delegated sir markham to preside over the men's cigars and bounced and slapped her four ladies upstairs to the drawing-room. her mother disappeared and so did phyllis and the governess. lady harman heard a large aside to lady viping: "isn't she perfectly lovely?" glanced to discover the lorgnette in appreciative action, and then found herself drifting into a secluded window-seat and a duologue with miss agatha alimony. miss alimony was one of that large and increasing number of dusky, grey-eyed ladies who go through life with an air of darkly incomprehensible significance. she led off lady harman as though she took her away to reveal unheard-of mysteries and her voice was a contralto undertone that she emphasized in some inexplicable way by the magnetic use of her eyes. her hat of cock's feathers which rustled like familiar spirits greatly augmented the profundity of her effect. as she spoke she glanced guardedly at the other ladies at the end of the room and from first to last she seemed undecided in her own mind whether she was a conspirator or a prophetess. she had heard of lady harman before, she had been longing impatiently to talk to her all through the lunch. "you are just what we want," said agatha. "what who want?" asked lady harman, struggling against the hypnotic influence of her interlocutor. "_we_," said miss agatha, "the cause. the g.s.w.s. "we want just such people as you," she repeated, and began in panting rhetorical sentences to urge the militant cause. for her it was manifestly a struggle against "the men." miss alimony had no doubts of her sex. it had nothing to learn, nothing to be forgiven, it was compact of obscured and persecuted marvels, it needed only revelation. "they know nothing," she said of the antagonist males, bringing deep notes out of the melodious caverns of her voice; "they know _nothing_ of the deeper secrets of woman's nature." her discourse of a general feminine insurrection fell in very closely with the spirit of lady harman's private revolt. "we want the vote," said agatha, "and we want the vote because the vote means autonomy. and then----" she paused voluminously. she had already used that word "autonomy" at the lunch table and it came to her hearer to supply a long-felt want. now she poured meanings into it, and lady harman with each addition realized more clearly that it was still a roomy sack for more. "a woman should be absolute mistress of herself," said miss alimony, "absolute mistress of her person. she should be free to develop----" germinating phrases these were in lady harman's ear. she wanted to know about the suffrage movement from someone less generously impatient than georgina, for georgina always lost her temper about it and to put it fairly _ranted_, this at any rate was serene and confident, and she asked tentative ill-formed questions and felt her way among miss alimony's profundities. she had her doubts, her instinctive doubts about this campaign of violence, she doubted its wisdom, she doubted its rightness, and she perceived, but she found it difficult to express her perception, that miss alimony wasn't so much answering her objections as trying to swamp her with exalted emotion. and if there was any flaw whatever in her attention to miss alimony's stirring talk, it was because she was keeping a little look-out in the tail of her eye for the reappearance of the men, and more particularly for the reappearance of mr. brumley with whom she had a peculiar feeling of uncompleted relations. and at last the men came and she caught his glance and saw that her feeling was reciprocated. she was presently torn from agatha, who gasped with pain at the parting and pursued her with a sedulous gaze as a doctor might watch an injected patient, she parted with lady beach-mandarin with a vast splash of enthusiasm and mutual invitations, and lady viping came and pressed her to come to dinner and rapped her elbow with her lorgnette to emphasize her invitation. and lady harman after a still moment for reflection athwart which the word autonomy flickered, accepted this invitation also. § mr. brumley hovered for a few moments in the hall conversing with lady beach-mandarin's butler, whom he had known for some years and helped about a small investment, and who was now being abjectly polite and grateful to him for his attention. it gave mr. brumley a nice feudal feeling to establish and maintain such relationships. the furry-eyed boy fumbled with the sticks and umbrellas in the background and wondered if he too would ever climb to these levels of respectful gilt-tipped friendliness. mr. brumley hovered the more readily because he knew lady harman was with the looking-glass in the little parlour behind the dining-room on her way to the outer world. at last she emerged. it was instantly manifest to mr. brumley that she had expected to find him there. she smiled frankly at him, with the faintest admission of complicity in her smile. "taxi, milady?" said the butler. she seemed to reflect. "no, i will walk." she hesitated over a glove button. "mr. brumley, is there a tube station near here?" "not two minutes. but can't i perhaps take you in a taxi?" "i'd rather walk." "i will show you----" he found himself most agreeably walking off with her. still more agreeable things were to follow for mr. brumley. she appeared to meditate upon a sudden idea. she disregarded some conversational opening of his that he forgot in the instant. "mr. brumley," she said, "i didn't intend to go directly home." "i'm altogether at your service," said mr. brumley. "at least," said lady harman with that careful truthfulness of hers, "it occurred to me during lunch that i wouldn't go directly home." mr. brumley reined in an imagination that threatened to bolt with him. "i want," said lady harman, "to go to kensington gardens, i think. this can't be far from kensington gardens--and i want to sit there on a green chair and--meditate--and afterwards i want to find a tube railway or something that will take me back to putney. there is really no need for me to go directly home.... it's very stupid of me but i don't know my way about london as a rational creature should do. so will you take me and put me in a green chair and--tell me how afterwards i can find the tube and get home? do you mind?" "all my time, so long as you want it, is at your service," said mr. brumley with convincing earnestness. "and it's not five minutes to the gardens. and afterwards a taxi-cab----" "no," said lady harman mindful of her one-and-eightpence, "i prefer a tube. but that we can talk about later. you're sure, mr. brumley, i'm not invading your time?" "i wish you could see into my mind," said mr. brumley. she became almost barefaced. "it is so true," she said, "that at lunch one can't really talk to anyone. and i've so wanted to talk to you. ever since we met before." mr. brumley conveyed an unfeigned delight. "since then," said lady harman, "i've read your _euphemia_ books." then after a little unskilful pause, "again." then she blushed and added, "i _had_ read one of them, you know, before." "exactly," he said with an infinite helpfulness. "and you seem so sympathetic, so understanding. i feel that all sorts of things that are muddled in my mind would come clear if i could have a really good talk. to you...." they were now through the gates approaching the albert memorial. mr. brumley was filled with an idea so desirable that it made him fear to suggest it. "of course we can talk very comfortably here," he said, "under these great trees. but i do so wish----have you seen those great borders at hampton court? the whole place is glowing, and in such sunshine as this----a taxi--will take us there under the hour. if you are free until half-past five." _why shouldn't she?_ the proposal seemed so outrageous to all the world of lady harman that in her present mood she felt it was her duty in the cause of womanhood to nerve herself and accept it.... "i mustn't be later than half-past five." "we could snatch a glimpse of it all and be back before then." "in that case----it would be very agreeable." (_why shouldn't she?_ it would no doubt make sir isaac furiously angry--if he heard of it. but it was the sort of thing other women of her class did; didn't all the novels testify? she had a perfect right---- and besides, mr. brumley was so entirely harmless.) § it had been lady harman's clear intention to have a luminous and illuminating discussion of the peculiar difficulties and perplexities of her position with mr. brumley. since their first encounter this idea had grown up in her mind. she was one of those women who turn instinctively to men and away from women for counsel. there was to her perception something wise and kindly and reassuring in him; she felt that he had lived and suffered and understood and that he was ready to help other people to live; his heart she knew from his published works was buried with his dead euphemia, and he seemed as near a thing to a brother and a friend as she was ever likely to meet. she wanted to tell him all this and then to broach her teeming and tangled difficulties, about her own permissible freedoms, about her social responsibilities, about sir isaac's business. but now as their taxi dodged through the traffic of kensington high street and went on its way past olympia and so out westwards, she found it extremely difficult to fix her mind upon the large propositions with which it had been her intention to open. do as she would to feel that this was a momentous occasion, she could not suppress, she could not ignore an obstinate and entirely undignified persuasion that she was having a tremendous lark. the passing vehicles, various motors, omnibuses, vans, carriages, the thronging pedestrians, the shops and houses, were all so distractingly interesting that at last she had to put it fairly to herself whether she hadn't better resign herself to the sensations of the present and reserve that sustained discussion for an interval she foresaw as inevitable on some comfortable seat under great trees at hampton court. you cannot talk well and penetratingly about fundamental things when you are in a not too well-hung taxi which is racing to get ahead of a vast red motor-omnibus.... with a certain discretion mr. brumley had instructed the chauffeur to cross the river not at putney but at hammersmith, and so they went by barnes station and up a still almost rural lane into richmond park, and there suddenly they were among big trees and bracken and red deer and it might have been a hundred miles from london streets. mr. brumley directed the driver to make a detour that gave them quite all the best of the park. the mind of mr. brumley was also agreeably excited and dispersed on this occasion. it was an occasion of which he had been dreaming very frequently of late, he had invented quite remarkable dialogues during those dreams, and now he too was conversationally inadequate and with a similar feeling of unexpected adventure. he was now no more ready to go to the roots of things than lady harman. he talked on the way down chiefly of the route they were following, of the changes in the london traffic due to motor traction and of the charm and amenity of richmond park. and it was only after they had arrived at hampton court and dismissed the taxi and spent some time upon the borders, that they came at last to a seat under a grove beside a long piece of water bearing water lilies, and sat down and made a beginning with the good talk. then indeed she tried to gather together the heads of her perplexity and mr. brumley did his best to do justice to confidence she reposed in him.... it wasn't at all the conversation he had dreamt of; it was halting, it was inconclusive, it was full of a vague dissatisfaction. the roots of this dissatisfaction lay perhaps more than anything else in her inattention to him--how shall i say it?--as _him_. hints have been conveyed to the reader already that for mr. brumley the universe was largely a setting, a tangle, a maze, a quest enshrining at the heart of it and adumbrating everywhere, a mystical her, and his experience of this world had pointed him very definitely to the conclusion that for that large other half of mankind which is woman, the quality of things was reciprocal and centred, for all the appearances and pretences of other interests, in--him. and he was disposed to believe that the other things in life, not merely the pomp and glories but the faiths and ambitions and devotions, were all demonstrably little more than posings and dressings of this great duality. a large part of his own interests and of the interests of the women he knew best, was the sustained and in some cases recurrent discovery and elaboration of lights and glimpses of him or her as the case might be, in various definite individuals; and it was a surprise to him, it perplexed him to find that this lovely person, so beautifully equipped for those mutual researches which constituted, he felt, the heart of life, was yet completely in her manner unaware of this primary sincerity and looking quite simply, as it were, over him and through him at such things as the ethics of the baking, confectionery and refreshment trade and the limits of individual responsibility in these matters. the conclusion that she was "unawakened" was inevitable. the dream of "awakening" this sleeping beauty associated itself in a logical sequence with his interpretations. i do not say that such thoughts were clear in mr. brumley's mind, they were not, but into this shape the forms of his thoughts fell. such things dimly felt below the clear level of consciousness were in him. and they gave his attempt to take up and answer the question that perplexed her, something of the quality of an attempt to clothe and serve hidden purposes. it could not but be evident to him that the effort of lady harman to free herself a little from her husband's circumvallation and to disentangle herself a little from the realities of his commercial life, might lead to such a liberation as would leave her like a nascent element ready to recombine. and it was entirely in the vein of this drift of thought in him that he should resolve upon an assiduous proximity against that moment of release and awakening.... i do not do mr. brumley as the human lover justice if i lead you to suppose that he plotted thus clearly and calculatingly. yet all this was in his mind. all this was in mr. brumley, but it wasn't mr. brumley. presented with it as a portrait of his mind, he would have denied it indignantly--and, knowing it was there, have grown a little flushed in his denials. quite equally in his mind was a simple desire to please her, to do what she wished, to help her because she wanted help. and a quite keen desire to be clean and honest about her and everything connected with her, for his own sake as well as for her sake--for the sake of the relationship.... so you have mr. brumley on the green seat under the great trees at hampton court, in his neat london clothes, his quite becoming silk-hat, above his neatly handsome and intelligent profile, with his gloves in his hand and one arm over the seat back, going now very earnestly and thoughtfully into the question of the social benefit of the international bread and cake stores and whether it was possible for her to "do anything" to repair any wrongs that might have arisen out of that organization, and you will understand why there is a little flush in his cheek and why his sentences are a trifle disconnected and tentative and why his eye wanders now to the soft raven tresses about lady harman's ear, now to the sweet movement of her speaking lips and now to the gracious droop of her pose as she sits forward, elbow upon crossed knee and chin on glove, and jabs her parasol at the ground in her unaccustomed efforts to explain and discuss the difficulties of her position. and you will understand too why it is that he doesn't deal with the question before him so simply and impartially as he seems to do. obscuring this extremely interesting problem of a woman growing to man-like sense of responsibility in her social consequences, is the dramatic proclivity that makes him see all this merely as something which must necessarily weaken lady harman's loyalty and qualify her submission to sir isaac, that makes him want to utilize it and develop it in that direction.... § moreover so complex is the thought of man, there was also another stream of mental activity flowing in the darker recesses of mr. brumley's mind. unobtrusively he was trying to count the money in his pockets and make certain estimates. it had been his intention to replenish his sovereign purse that afternoon at his club and he was only reminded of this abandoned plan when he paid off his taxi at the gates of hampton court. the fare was nine and tenpence and the only piece of gold he had was a half-sovereign. but there was a handful of loose silver in his trouser pocket and so the fare and tip were manageable. "will you be going back, sir?" asked the driver. and mr. brumley reflected too briefly and committed a fatal error. "no," he said with his mind upon that loose silver. "we shall go back by train." now it is the custom with taxi-cabs that take people to such outlying and remote places as hampton court, to be paid off and to wait loyally until their original passengers return. thereby the little machine is restrained from ticking out twopences which should go in the main to the absent proprietor, and a feeling of mutuality is established between the driver and his fare. but of course this cab being released presently found another passenger and went away.... i have written in vain if i have not conveyed to you that mr. brumley was a gentleman of great and cultivated delicacy, that he liked the seemly and handsome side of things and dreaded the appearance of any flaw upon his prosperity as only a man trained in an english public school can do. it was intolerable to think of any hitch in this happy excursion which was to establish he knew not what confidence between himself and lady harman. from first to last he felt it had to go with an air--and what was the first class fare from hampton court to putney--which latter station he believed was on the line from hampton court to london--and could one possibly pretend it was unnecessary to have tea? and so while lady harman talked about her husband's business--"our business" she called it--and shrank from ever saying anything more about the more intimate question she had most in mind, the limits to a wife's obedience, mr. brumley listened with these financial solicitudes showing through his expression and giving it a quality of intensity that she found remarkably reassuring. and once or twice they made him miss points in her remarks that forced him back upon that very inferior substitute for the apt answer, a judicious "um." (it would be quite impossible to go without tea, he decided. he himself wanted tea quite badly. he would think better when he had had some tea....) the crisis came at tea. they had tea at the inn upon the green that struck mr. brumley as being most likely to be cheap and which he pretended to choose for some trivial charm about the windows. and it wasn't cheap, and when at last mr. brumley was faced by the little slip of the bill and could draw his money from his pocket and look at it, he knew the worst and the worst was worse than he had expected. the bill was five shillings (should he dispute it? too ugly altogether, a dispute with a probably ironical waiter!) and the money in his hand amounted to four shillings and sixpence. he acted surprise with the waiter's eye upon him. (should he ask for credit? they might be frightfully disagreeable in such a cockney resort as this.) "tut, tut," said mr. brumley, and then--a little late for it--resorted to and discovered the emptiness of his sovereign purse. he realized that this was out of the picture at this stage, felt his ears and nose and cheeks grow hot and pink. the waiter's colleague across the room became interested in the proceedings. "i had no idea," said mr. brumley, which was a premeditated falsehood. "is anything the matter?" asked lady harman with a sisterly interest. "my dear lady harman, i find myself----ridiculous position. might i borrow half a sovereign?" he felt sure that the two waiters exchanged glances. he looked at them,--a mistake again--and got hotter. "oh!" said lady harman and regarded him with frank amusement in her eyes. the thing struck her at first in the light of a joke. "i've only got one-and-eightpence. i didn't expect----" she blushed as beautifully as ever. then she produced a small but plutocratic-looking purse and handed it to him. "most remarkable--inconvenient," said mr. brumley, opening the precious thing and extracting a shilling. "that will do," he said and dismissed the waiter with a tip of sixpence. then with the open purse still in his hand, he spent much of his remaining strength trying to look amused and unembarrassed, feeling all the time that with his flushed face and in view of all the circumstances of the case he must be really looking very silly and fluffy. "it's really most inconvenient," he remarked. "i never thought of the--of this. it was silly of me," said lady harman. "oh no! oh dear no! the silliness i can assure you is all mine. i can't tell you how entirely apologetic----ridiculous fix. and after i had persuaded you to come here." "still we were able to pay," she consoled him. "but you have to get home!" she hadn't so far thought of that. it brought sir isaac suddenly into the picture. "by half-past five," she said with just the faintest flavour of interrogation. mr. brumley looked at his watch. it was ten minutes to five. "waiter," he said, "how do the trains run from here to putney?" "i don't _think_, sir, that we have any trains from here to putney----" an a.b.c. railway guide was found and mr. brumley learnt for the first time that putney and hampton court are upon two distinct and separate and, as far as he could judge by the time-table, mutually hostile branches of the south western railway, and that at the earliest they could not get to putney before six o'clock. mr. brumley was extremely disconcerted. he perceived that he ought to have kept his taxi. it amounted almost to a debt of honour to deliver this lady secure and untarnished at her house within the next hour. but this reflection did not in the least degree assist him to carry it out and as a matter of fact mr. brumley became flurried and did not carry it out. he was not used to being without money, it unnerved him, and he gave way to a kind of hectic _savoir faire_. he demanded a taxi of the waiter. he tried to evolve a taxi by will power alone. he went out with lady harman and back towards the gates of hampton court to look for taxis. then it occurred to him that they might be losing the . up. so they hurried over the bridge of the station. he had a vague notion that he would be able to get tickets on credit at the booking office if he presented his visiting card. but the clerk in charge seemed to find something uncongenial in his proposal. he did not seem to like what he saw of mr. brumley through his little square window and mr. brumley found something slighting and unpleasant in his manner. it was one of those little temperamental jars which happen to men of delicate sensibilities and mr. brumley tried to be reassuringly overbearing in his manner and then lost his temper and was threatening and so wasted precious moments what time lady harman waited on the platform, with a certain shadow of doubt falling upon her confidence in him, and watched the five-twenty-five gather itself together and start londonward. mr. brumley came out of the ticket office resolved to travel without tickets and carry things through with a high hand just as it became impossible to do so by that train, and then i regret to say he returned for some further haughty passages with the ticket clerk upon the duty of public servants to point out such oversights as his, that led to repartee and did nothing to help lady harman on her homeward way. then he discovered a current time-table and learnt that now even were all the ticket difficulties over-ridden he could not get lady harman to putney before twenty minutes past seven, so completely is the south western railway not organized for conveying people from hampton court to putney. he explained this as well as he could to lady harman, and then led her out of the station in another last desperate search for a taxi. "we can always come back for that next train," he said. "it doesn't go for half an hour." "i cannot blame myself sufficiently," he said for the eighth or ninth time.... it was already well past a quarter to six before mr. brumley bethought himself of the london county council tramcars that run from the palace gates. along these an ample four-pennyworth was surely possible and at the end would be taxis----there _must_ be taxis. the tram took them--but oh! how slowly it seemed!--to hammersmith by a devious route through interminable roads and streets, and long before they reached that spot twilight had passed into darkness, and all the streets and shops were flowering into light and the sense of night and lateness was very strong. after they were seated in the tram a certain interval of silence came between them and then lady harman laughed and mr. brumley laughed--there was no longer any need for him to be energetic and fussy--and they began to have that feeling of adventurous amusement which comes on the further side of desperation. but beneath the temporary elation lady harman was a prey to grave anxieties and mr. brumley could not help thinking he had made a tremendous ass of himself in that ticket clerk dispute.... at hammersmith they got out, two quite penniless travellers, and after some anxious moments found a taxi. it took them to putney hill. lady harman descended at the outer gates of her home and walked up the drive in the darkness while mr. brumley went on to his club and solvency again. it was five minutes past eight when he entered the hall of his club.... § it had been lady harman's original intention to come home before four, to have tea with her mother and to inform her husband when he returned from the city of her entirely dignified and correct disobedience to his absurd prohibitions. then he would have bullied at a disadvantage, she would have announced her intention of dining with lady viping and making the various calls and expeditions for which she had arranged and all would have gone well. but you see how far accident and a spirit of enterprise may take a lady from so worthy a plan, and when at last she returned to the victorian baronial home in putney it was very nearly eight and the house blazed with crisis from pantry to nursery. even the elder three little girls, who were accustomed to be kissed goodnight by their "boofer muvver," were still awake and--catching the subtle influence of the atmosphere of dismay about them--in tears. the very under-housemaids were saying: "where _ever_ can her ladyship 'ave got to?" sir isaac had come home that day at an unusually early hour and with a peculiar pinched expression that filled even snagsby with apprehensive alertness. sir isaac had in fact returned in a state of quite unwonted venom. he had come home early because he wished to vent it upon ellen, and her absence filled him with something of that sensation one has when one puts out a foot for the floor and instead a step drops one down--it seems abysmally. "but where's she gone, snagsby?" "her ladyship _said_ to lunch, sir isaac," said snagsby. "good gracious! where?" "her ladyship didn't _say_, sir isaac." "but where? where the devil----?" "i have--'ave no means whatever of knowing, sir isaac." he had a defensive inspiration. "perhaps mrs. sawbridge, sir isaac...." mrs. sawbridge was enjoying the sunshine upon the lawn. she sat in the most comfortable garden chair, held a white sunshade overhead, had the last new novel by mrs. humphry ward upon her lap, and was engaged in trying not to wonder where her daughter might be. she beheld with a distinct blenching of the spirit sir isaac advancing towards her. she wondered more than ever where ellen might be. "here!" cried her son-in-law. "where's ellen gone?" mrs. sawbridge with an affected off-handedness was sure she hadn't the faintest idea. "then you _ought_ to have," said isaac. "she ought to be at home." mrs. sawbridge's only reply was to bridle slightly. "where's she got to? where's she gone? haven't you any idea at all?" "i was not favoured by ellen's confidence," said mrs. sawbridge. "but you _ought_ to know," cried sir isaac. "she's your daughter. don't you know anything of _either_ of your daughters. i suppose you don't care where they are, either of them, or what mischief they're up to. here's a man--comes home early to his tea--and no wife! after hearing all i've done at the club." mrs. sawbridge stood up in order to be more dignified than a seated position permitted. "it is scarcely my business, sir isaac," she said, "to know of the movements of your wife." "nor georgina's apparently either. good god! i'd have given a hundred pounds that this shouldn't have happened!" "if you must speak to me, sir isaac, will you please kindly refrain from--from the deity----" "oh! shut it!" said sir isaac, blazing up to violent rudeness. "why! don't you know, haven't you an idea? the infernal foolery! those tickets. she got those women----look here, if you go walking away with your nose in the air before i've done----look here! mrs. sawbridge, you listen to me----georgina. i'm speaking of georgina." the lady was walking now swiftly and stiffly towards the house, her face very pale and drawn, and sir isaac hurrying beside her in a white fury of expostulation. "i tell you," he cried, "georgina----" there was something maddeningly incurious about her. he couldn't understand why she didn't even pause to hear what georgina had done and what he had to say about it. a person so wrapped up in her personal and private dignity makes a man want to throw stones. perhaps she knew of georgina's misdeeds. perhaps she sympathized.... a sense of the house windows checked his pursuit of her ear. "then go," he said to her retreating back. "_go!_ i don't care if you go for good. i don't care if you go altogether. if _you_ hadn't had the upbringing of these two girls----" she was manifestly out of earshot and in full yet almost queenly flight for the house. he wanted to say things about her. _to_ someone. he was already saying things to the garden generally. what does one marry a wife for? his mind came round to ellen again. where had she got to? even if she had gone out to lunch, it was time she was back. he went to his study and rang for snagsby. "lady harman back yet?" he asked grimly. "no, sir isaac." "why isn't she back?" snagsby did his best. "perhaps, sir isaac, her ladyship has experienced--'as hexperienced a naxident." sir isaac stared at that idea for a moment. then he thought, 'someone would have telephoned,' "no," he said, "she's out. that's where she is. and i suppose i can wait here, as well as i can until she chooses to come home. degenerate foolish nonsense!..." he whistled between his teeth like an escape of steam. snagsby, after the due pause of attentiveness, bowed respectfully and withdrew.... he had barely time to give a brief outline of the interview to the pantry before a violent ringing summoned him again. sir isaac wished to speak to peters, lady harman's maid. he wanted to know where lady harman had gone; this being impossible, he wanted to know where lady harman had seemed to be going. "her ladyship _seemed_ to be going out to lunch, sir isaac," said peters, her meek face irradiated by helpful intelligence. "oh _get_ out!" said sir isaac. "_get_ out!" "yes, sir isaac," said peters and obeyed.... "he's in a rare bait about her," said peters to snagsby downstairs. "i'm inclined to think her ladyship will catch it pretty hot," said snagsby. "he can't _know_ anything," said peters. "what about?" asked snagsby. "oh, _i_ don't know," said peters. "don't ask _me_ about her...." about ten minutes later sir isaac was heard to break a little china figure of the goddess kwannon, that had stood upon his study mantel-shelf. the fragments were found afterwards in the fireplace.... the desire for self-expression may become overwhelming. after sir isaac had talked to himself about georgina and lady harman for some time in his study, he was seized with a great longing to pour some of this spirited stuff into the entirely unsympathetic ear of mrs. sawbridge. so he went about the house and garden looking for her, and being at last obliged to enquire about her, learnt from a scared defensive housemaid whom he cornered suddenly in the conservatory, that she had retired to her own room. he went and rapped at her door but after one muffled "who's that?" he could get no further response. "i want to tell you about georgina," he said. he tried the handle but the discreet lady within had turned the key upon her dignity. "i want," he shouted, "to tell you about georgina.... georgina! oh _damn_!" silence. tea awaited him downstairs. he hovered about the drawing-room, making noises between his teeth. "snagsby," said sir isaac, "just tell mrs. sawbridge i shall be obliged if she will come down to tea." "mrs. sawbridge 'as a '_ead_ache, sir isaac," said mr. snagsby with extreme blandness. "she asked me to acquaint you. she 'as ordered tea in 'er own apartment." for a moment sir isaac was baffled. then he had an inspiration. "just get me the _times_, snagsby," he said. he took the paper and unfolded it until a particular paragraph was thrown into extreme prominence. this he lined about with his fountain pen and wrote above it with a quivering hand, "these women's tickets were got by georgina under false pretences from me." he handed the paper thus prepared back to snagsby. "just take this paper to mrs. sawbridge," he said, "and ask her what she thinks of it?" but mrs. sawbridge tacitly declined this proposal for a correspondence _viâ_ snagsby. § there was no excuse for georgina. georgina had obtained tickets from sir isaac for the great party reception at barleypound house, under the shallow pretext that she wanted them for "two spinsters from the country," for whose good behaviour she would answer, and she had handed them over to that organization of disorder which swayed her mind. the historical outrage upon mr. blapton was the consequence. two desperate and misguided emissaries had gone to the great reception, dressed and behaving as much as possible like helpful liberal women; they had made their way towards the brilliant group of leading liberals of which mr. blapton was the centre, assuming an almost whig-like expression and bearing to mask the fires within, and had then suddenly accosted him. it was one of those great occasions when the rank and file of the popular party is privileged to look upon court dress. the ministers and great people had come on from buckingham palace in their lace and legs. scarlet and feathers, splendid trains and mysterious ribbons and stars, gave an agreeable intimation of all that it means to be in office to the dazzled wives and daughters of the party stalwarts and fired the ambition of innumerable earnest but earnestly competitive young men. it opened the eyes of the labour leaders to the higher possibilities of parliament. and then suddenly came a stir, a rush, a cry of "tear off his epaulettes!" and outrage was afoot. and two quite nice-looking young women! it is unhappily not necessary to describe the scene that followed. mr. blapton made a brave fight for his epaulettes, fighting chiefly with his cocked hat, which was bent double in the struggle. mrs. blapton gave all the assistance true womanliness could offer and, in fact, she boxed the ears of one of his assailants very soundly. the intruders were rescued in an extremely torn and draggled condition from the indignant statesmen who had fallen upon them by tardy but decisive police.... such scenes sprinkle the recent history of england with green and purple patches and the interest of this particular one for us is only because of georgina's share in it. that was brought home to sir isaac, very suddenly and disagreeably, while he was lunching at the climax club with sir robert charterson. a man named gobbin, an art critic or something of that sort, one of those flimsy literary people who mar the solid worth of so many great clubs, a man with a lot of hair and the sort of loose tie that so often seems to be less of a tie than a detachment from all decent restraints, told him. charterson was holding forth upon the outrage. "that won't suit sir isaac, sir robert," said gobbin presuming on his proximity. sir isaac tried to give him a sort of look one gives to an unsatisfactory clerk. "they went there with sir isaac's tickets," said gobbin. "they _never_----!" "horatio blenker was looking for you in the hall. haven't you seen him? after all the care they took. the poor man's almost in tears." "they never had tickets of mine!" cried sir isaac stoutly and indignantly. and then the thought of georgina came like a blow upon his heart.... in his flurry he went on denying.... the subsequent conversation in the smoking-room was as red-eared and disagreeable for sir isaac as any conversation could be. "but how _could_ such a thing have happened?" he asked in a voice that sounded bleached to him. "how could such a thing have come about?" their eyes were dreadful. did they guess? could they guess? conscience within him was going up and down shouting out, "georgina, your sister-in-law, georgina," so loudly that he felt the whole smoking-room must be hearing it.... § as lady harman came up through the darkness of the drive to her home, she was already regretting very deeply that she had not been content to talk to mr. brumley in kensington gardens instead of accepting his picturesque suggestion of hampton court. there was an unpleasant waif-like feeling about this return. she was reminded of pictures published in the interests of doctor barnardo's philanthropies,--dr. barnardo her favourite hero in real life,--in which wistful little outcasts creep longingly towards brightly lit but otherwise respectable homes. it wasn't at all the sort of feeling she would have chosen if she had had a choice of feelings. she was tired and dusty and as she came into the hall the bright light was blinding. snagsby took her wrap. "sir isaac, me lady, 'as been enquiring for your ladyship," he communicated. sir isaac appeared on the staircase. "good gracious, elly!" he shouted. "where you been?" lady harman decided against an immediate reply. "i shall be ready for dinner in half an hour," she told snagsby and went past him to the stairs. sir isaac awaited her. "where you been?" he repeated as she came up to him. a housemaid on the staircase and the second nursemaid on the nursery landing above shared sir isaac's eagerness to hear her answer. but they did not hear her answer, for lady harman with a movement that was all too reminiscent of her mother's in the garden, swept past him towards the door of her own room. he followed her and shut the door on the thwarted listeners. "here!" he said, with a connubial absence of restraint. "where the devil you been? what the deuce do you think you've been getting up to?" she had been calculating her answers since the moment she had realized that she was to return home at a disadvantage. (it is not my business to blame her for a certain disingenuousness; it is my business simply to record it.) "i went out to lunch at lady beach-mandarin's," she said. "i told you i meant to." "lunch!" he cried. "why, it's eight!" "i met--some people. i met agatha alimony. i have a perfect right to go out to lunch----" "you met a nice crew i'll bet. but that don't account for your being out to eight, does it? with all the confounded household doing as it pleases!" "i went on--to see the borders at hampton court." "with _her_?" "_yes_," said lady harman.... it wasn't what she had meant to happen. it was an inglorious declension from her contemplated pose of dignified assertion. she was impelled to do her utmost to get away from this lie she had uttered at once, to eliminate agatha from the argument by an emphatic generalization. "i've a perfect right," she said, suddenly nearly breathless, "to go to hampton court with anyone i please, talk about anything i like and stay there as long as i think fit." he squeezed his thin lips together for a silent moment and then retorted. "you've got nothing of the sort, nothing of the sort. you've got to do your duty like everybody else in the world, and your duty is to be in this house controlling it--and not gossiping about london just where any silly fancy takes you." "i don't think that _is_ my duty," said lady harman after a slight pause to collect her forces. "of _course_ it's your duty. you know it's your duty. you know perfectly well. it's only these rotten, silly, degenerate, decadent fools who've got ideas into you----" the sentence staggered under its load of adjectives like a camel under the last straw and collapsed. "_see?_" he said. lady harman knitted her brows. "i do my duty," she began. but sir isaac was now resolved upon eloquence. his mind was full with the accumulations of an extremely long and bitter afternoon and urgent to discharge. he began to answer her and then a passion of rage flooded him. suddenly he wanted to shout and use abusive expressions and it seemed to him there was nothing to prevent his shouting and using abusive expressions. so he did. "call this your duty," he said, "gadding about with some infernal old suffragette----" he paused to gather force. he had never quite let himself go to his wife before; he had never before quite let himself go to anyone. he had always been in every crisis just a little too timid to let himself go. but a wife is privileged. he sought strength and found it in words from which he had hitherto abstained. it was not a discourse to which print could do justice; it flickered from issue to issue. he touched upon georgina, upon the stiffness of mrs. sawbridge's manner, upon the neurotic weakness of georgina's unmarried state, upon the general decay of feminine virtue in the community, upon the laxity of modern literature, upon the dependent state of lady harman, upon the unfairness of their relations which gave her every luxury while he spent his days in arduous toil, upon the shame and annoyance in the eyes of his servants that her unexplained absence had caused him. he emphasized his speech by gestures. he thrust out one rather large ill-shaped hand at her with two vibrating fingers extended. his ears became red, his nose red, his eyes seemed red and all about these points his face was wrathful white. his hair rose up into stiff scared listening ends. he had his rights, he had some _little_ claim to consideration surely, he might be just nobody but he wasn't going to stand this much anyhow. he gave her fair warning. what was she, what did she know of the world into which she wanted to rush? he lapsed into views of lady beach-mandarin--unfavourable views. i wish lady beach-mandarin could have heard him.... ever and again lady harman sought to speak. this incessant voice confused and baffled her; she had a just attentive mind at bottom and down there was a most weakening feeling that there must indeed be some misdeed in her to evoke so impassioned a storm. she had a curious and disconcerting sense of responsibility for his dancing exasperation, she felt she was to blame for it, just as years ago she had felt she was to blame for his tears when he had urged her so desperately to marry him. some irrational instinct made her want to allay him. it is the supreme feminine weakness, that wish to allay. but she was also clinging desperately to her resolution to proclaim her other forthcoming engagements. her will hung on to that as a man hangs on to a mountain path in a thunderburst. she stood gripping her dressing-table and ever and again trying to speak. but whenever she did so sir isaac lifted a hand and cried almost threateningly: "you hear me out, elly! you hear me out!" and went on a little faster.... (limburger in his curious "_sexuelle unterschiede der seele_," points out as a probably universal distinction between the sexes that when a man scolds a woman, if only he scolds loudly enough and long enough, conviction of sin is aroused, while in the reverse case the result is merely a murderous impulse. this he further says is not understood by women, who hope by scolding to produce the similar effect upon men that they themselves would experience. the passage is illustrated by figures of ducking stools and followed by some carefully analyzed statistics of connubial crime in berlin in the years - . but in this matter let the student compare the achievement of paulina in _the winter's tale_ and reflect upon his own life. and moreover it is difficult to estimate how far the twinges of conscience that lady harman was feeling were not due to an entirely different cause, the falsification of her position by the lie she had just told sir isaac.) and presently upon this noisy scene in the great pink bedroom, with sir isaac walking about and standing and turning and gesticulating and lady harman clinging on to her dressing-table, and painfully divided between her new connections, her sense of guilty deception and the deep instinctive responsibilities of a woman's nature, came, like one of those rows of dots that are now so frequent and so helpful in the art of fiction, the surging, deep, assuaging note of snagsby's gong: booooooom. boom. boooooom.... "damn it!" cried sir isaac, smiting at the air with both fists clenched and speaking as though this was ellen's crowning misdeed, "and we aren't even dressed for dinner!" § dinner had something of the stiffness of court ceremonial. mrs. sawbridge, perhaps erring on the side of discretion, had consumed a little soup and a wing of chicken in her own room. sir isaac was down first and his wife found him grimly astride before the great dining-room fire awaiting her. she had had her dark hair dressed with extreme simplicity and had slipped on a blue velvet tea-gown, but she had been delayed by a visit to the nursery, where the children were now flushed and uneasily asleep. husband and wife took their places at the genuine sheraton dining-table--one of the very best pieces sir isaac had ever picked up--and were waited on with a hushed, scared dexterity by snagsby and the footman. lady harman and her husband exchanged no remarks during the meal; sir isaac was a little noisy with his soup as became a man who controls honest indignation, and once he complained briefly in a slightly hoarse voice to snagsby about the state of one of the rolls. between the courses he leant back in his chair and made faint sounds with his teeth. these were the only breach of the velvety quiet. lady harman was surprised to discover herself hungry, but she ate with thoughtful dignity and gave her mind to the attempted digestion of the confusing interview she had just been through. it was a very indigestible interview. on the whole her heart hardened again. with nourishment and silence her spirit recovered a little from its abasement, and her resolution to assert her freedom to go hither and thither and think as she chose renewed itself. she tried to plan some way of making her declaration so that she would not again be overwhelmed by a torrent of response. should she speak to him at the end of dinner? should she speak to him while snagsby was in the room? but he might behave badly even with snagsby in the room and she could not bear to think of him behaving badly to her in the presence of snagsby. she glanced at him over the genuine old silver bowl of roses in the middle of the table--all the roses were good _new_ sorts--and tried to estimate how he might behave under various methods of declaration. the dinner followed its appointed ritual to the dessert. came the wine and snagsby placed the cigars and a little silver lamp beside his master. she rose slowly with a speech upon her lips. sir isaac remained seated looking up at her with a mitigated fury in his little red-brown eyes. the speech receded from her lips again. "i think," she said after a strained pause, "i will go and see how mother is now." "she's only shamming," said sir isaac belatedly to her back as she went out of the room. she found her mother in a wrap before her fire and made her dutiful enquiries. "it's only quite a _slight_ headache," mrs. sawbridge confessed. "but isaac was so upset about georgina and about"--she flinched--"about--everything, that i thought it better to be out of the way." "what exactly has georgina done?" "it's in the paper, dear. on the table there." ellen studied the _times_. "georgina got them the tickets," mrs. sawbridge explained. "i wish she hadn't. it was so--so unnecessary of her." there was a little pause as lady harman read. she put down the paper and asked her mother if she could do anything for her. "i--i suppose it's all right, dear, now?" mrs. sawbridge asked. "quite," said her daughter. "you're sure i can do nothing for you, mummy?" "i'm kept so in the dark about things." "it's quite all right now, mummy." "he went on--dreadfully." "it was annoying--of georgina." "it makes my position so difficult. i do wish he wouldn't want to speak to me--about all these things.... georgina treats me like a perfect nonentity and then he comes----it's so inconsiderate. starting disputes. do you know, dear, i really think--if i were to go for a little time to bournemouth----?" her daughter seemed to find something attractive in the idea. she came to the hearthrug and regarded her mother with maternal eyes. "don't you _worry_ about things, mummy," she said. "mrs. bleckhorn told me of such a nice quiet boarding-house, almost looking on the sea.... one would be safe from insult there. you know----" her voice broke for a moment, "he was insulting, he _meant_ to be insulting. i'm--upset. i've been thinking over it ever since." § lady harman came out upon the landing. she felt absolutely without backing in the world. (if only she hadn't told a lie!) then with an effort she directed her course downstairs to the dining-room. (the lie had been necessary. it was only a detail. it mustn't blind her to the real issue.) she entered softly and found her husband standing before the fire plunged in gloomy thoughts. upon the marble mantel-shelf behind him was a little glass; he had been sipping port in spite of the express prohibition of his doctor and the wine had reddened the veins of his eyes and variegated the normal pallor of his countenance with little flushed areas. "hel-lo," he said looking up suddenly as she closed the door behind her. for a moment there was something in their two expressions like that on the faces of men about to box. "i want you to understand," she said, and then; "the way you behaved----" there was an uncontrollable break in her voice. she had a dreadful feeling that she might be going to cry. she made a great effort to be cold and clear. "i don't think you have a right--just because i am your wife--to control every moment of my time. in fact you haven't. and i have a right to make engagements.... i want you to know i am going to an afternoon meeting at lady beach-mandarin's. next week. and i have promised to go to miss alimony's to tea." "go on," he encouraged grimly. "i am going to lady viping's to dinner, too; she asked me and i accepted. later." she stopped. he seemed to deliberate. then suddenly he thrust out a face of pinched determination. "you _won't_, my lady," he said. "you bet your life you won't. _no!_ so _now_ then!" and then gripping his hands more tightly behind him, he made a step towards her. "you're losing your bearings, lady harman," he said, speaking with much intensity in a low earnest voice. "you don't seem to be remembering where you are. you come and you tell me you're going to do this and that. don't you know, lady harman, that it's your wifely duty to obey, to do as i say, to behave as i wish?" he brought out a lean index finger to emphasize his remarks. "and i am going to make you do it!" he said. "i've a perfect right," she repeated. he went on, regardless of her words. "what do you think you can do, lady harman? you're going to all these places--how? not in _my_ motor-car, not with _my_ money. you've not a thing that isn't mine, that _i_ haven't given you. and if you're going to have a lot of friends i haven't got, where're they coming to see you? not in _my_ house! i'll chuck 'em out if i find 'em. i won't have 'em. i'll turn 'em out. see?" "i'm not a slave." "you're a wife--and a wife's got to do what her husband wishes. you can't have two heads on a horse. and in _this_ horse--this house i mean, the head's--_me_!" "i'm not a slave and i won't be a slave." "you're a wife and you'll stick to the bargain you made when you married me. i'm ready in reason to give you anything you want--if you do your duty as a wife should. why!--i spoil you. but this going about on your own, this highty-flighty go-as-you-please,--no man on earth who's worth calling a man will stand it. i'm not going to begin to stand it.... you try it on. you try it, lady harman.... you'll come to your senses soon enough. see? you start trying it on now--straight away. we'll make an experiment. we'll watch how it goes. only don't expect me to give you any money, don't expect me to help your struggling family, don't expect me to alter my arrangements because of you. let's keep apart for a bit and you go your way and i'll go mine. and we'll see who's sick of it first, we'll see who wants to cry off." "i came down here," said lady harman, "to give you a reasonable notice----" "and you found _i_ could reason too," interrupted sir isaac in a kind of miniature shout, "you found i could reason too!" "you think----reason! i _won't_," said lady harman, and found herself in tears. by an enormous effort she recovered something of her dignity and withdrew. he made no effort to open the door, but stood a little hunchbacked and with a sense of rhetorical victory surveying her retreat. § after lady harman's maid had left her that night, she sat for some time in a low easy chair before her fire, trying at first to collect together into one situation all the events of the day and then lapsing into that state of mind which is not so much thinking as resting in the attitude of thought. presently, in a vaguely conceived future, she would go to bed. she was stunned by the immense dimensions of the row her simple act of defiance had evoked. and then came an incredible incident, so incredible that next day she still had great difficulty in deciding whether it was an actuality or a dream. she heard a little very familiar sound. it was the last sound she would have expected to hear and she turned sharply when she heard it. the paper-covered door in the wall of her husband's apartment opened softly, paused, opened some more and his little undignified head appeared. his hair was already tumbled from his pillow. he regarded her steadfastly for some moments with an expression between shame and curiosity and smouldering rage, and then allowed his body, clad now in purple-striped pyjamas, to follow his head into her room. he advanced guiltily. "elly," he whispered. "elly!" she caught her dressing-gown about her and stood up. "what is it, isaac?" she asked, feeling curiously abashed at this invasion. "elly," he said, still in that furtive undertone. "_make it up!_" "i want my freedom," she said, after a little pause. "don't be _silly_, elly," he whispered in a tone of remonstrance and advancing slowly towards her. "make it up. chuck all these ideas." she shook her head. "we've got to get along together. you can't go going about just anywhere. we've got--we've got to be reasonable." he halted, three paces away from her. his eyes weren't sorrowful eyes, or friendly eyes; they were just shiftily eager eyes. "look here," he said. "it's all nonsense.... elly, old girl; let's--let's make it up." she looked at him and it dawned upon her that she had always imagined herself to be afraid of him and that indeed she wasn't. she shook her head obstinately. "it isn't reasonable," he said. "here, we've been the happiest of people----anything in reason i'll let you have." he paused with an effect of making an offer. "i want my autonomy," she said. "autonomy!" he echoed. "autonomy! what's autonomy? autonomy!" this strange word seemed first to hold him in distressful suspense and then to infuriate him. "i come in here to make it up," he said, with a voice charged with griefs, "after all you've done, and you go and you talk of autonomy!" his feelings passed beyond words. an extremity of viciousness flashed into his face. he gave vent to a snarl of exasperation, "ya-ap!" he said, he raised his clenched fists and seemed on the verge of assault, and then with a gesture between fury and despair, he wheeled about and the purple-striped pyjamas danced in passionate retreat from her room. "autonomy!..." a slam, a noise of assaulted furniture, and then silence. lady harman stood for some moments regarding the paper-covered door that had closed behind him. then she bared her white forearm and pinched it--hard. it wasn't a dream! this thing had happened. § at a quarter to three in the morning, lady harman was surprised to find herself wide awake. it was exactly a quarter to three when she touched the stud of the ingenious little silver apparatus upon the table beside her bed which reflected a luminous clock-face upon the ceiling. and her mind was no longer resting in the attitude of thought but extraordinarily active. it was active, but as she presently began to realize it was not progressing. it was spinning violently round and round the frenzied figure of a little man in purple-striped pyjamas retreating from her presence, whirling away from her like something blown before a gale. that seemed to her to symbolize the completeness of the breach the day had made between her husband and herself. she felt as a statesman might feel who had inadvertently--while conducting some trivial negotiations--declared war. she was profoundly alarmed. she perceived ahead of her abundant possibilities of disagreeable things. and she wasn't by any means as convinced of the righteousness of her cause as a happy warrior should be. she had a natural disposition towards truthfulness and it worried her mind that while she was struggling to assert her right to these common social freedoms she should be tacitly admitting a kind of justice in her husband's objections by concealing the fact that her afternoon's companion was a man. she tried not to recognize the existence of a doubt, but deep down in her mind there did indeed lurk a weakening uncertainty about the right of a woman to free conversation with any man but her own. her reason disowned that uncertainty with scorn. but it wouldn't go away for all her reason. she went about in her mind doing her utmost to cut that doubt dead.... she tried to go back to the beginning and think it all out. and as she was not used to thinking things out, the effort took the form of an imaginary explanation to mr. brumley of the difficulties of her position. she framed phrases. "you see, mr. brumley," she imagined herself to be saying, "i want to do my duty as a wife, i have to do my duty as a wife. but it's so hard to say just where duty leaves off and being a mere slave begins. i cannot believe that _blind_ obedience is any woman's duty. a woman needs--autonomy." then her mind went off for a time to a wrestle with the exact meaning of autonomy, an issue that had not arisen hitherto in her mind.... and as she planned out such elucidations, there grew more and more distinct in her mind a kind of idealized mr. brumley, very grave, very attentive, wonderfully understanding, saying illuminating helpful tonic things, that made everything clear, everything almost easy. she wanted someone of that quality so badly. the night would have been unendurable if she could not have imagined mr. brumley of that quality. and imagining him of that quality her heart yearned for him. she felt that she had been terribly inexpressive that afternoon, she had shirked points, misstated points, and yet he had been marvellously understanding. ever and again his words had seemed to pierce right through what she had been saying to what she had been thinking. and she recalled with peculiar comfort a kind of abstracted calculating look that had come at times into his eyes, as though his thoughts were going ever so much deeper and ever so much further than her blundering questionings could possibly have taken them. he weighed every word, he had a guarded way of saying "um...." her thoughts came back to the dancing little figure in purple-striped pyjamas. she had a scared sense of irrevocable breaches. what would he do to-morrow? what should she do to-morrow? would he speak to her at breakfast or should she speak first to him?... she wished she had some money. if she could have foreseen all this she would have got some money before she began.... so her mind went on round and round and the dawn was breaking before she slept again. § mr. brumley, also, slept little that night. he was wakefully mournful, recalling each ungraceful incident of the afternoon's failure in turn and more particularly his dispute with the ticket clerk, and thinking over all the things he might have done--if only he hadn't done the things he had done. he had made an atrocious mess of things. he felt he had hopelessly shattered the fair fabric of impressions of him that lady harman had been building up, that image of a wise humane capable man to whom a woman would gladly turn; he had been flurried, he had been incompetent, he had been ridiculously incompetent, and it seemed to him that life was a string of desolating inadequacies and that he would never smile again. the probable reception of lady harman by her husband never came within his imaginative scope. nor did the problems of social responsibility that lady harman had been trying to put to him exercise him very greatly. the personal disillusionment was too strong for that. about half-past four a faint ray of comfort came with the consideration that after all a certain practical incapacity is part of the ensemble of a literary artist, and then he found himself wondering what flowers of wisdom montaigne might not have culled from such a day's experience; he began an imitative essay in his head and he fell asleep upon this at last at about ten minutes past five in the morning. there were better things than this in the composition of mr. brumley, we shall have to go deep into these reserves before we have done with him, but when he had so recently barked the shins of his self-esteem they had no chance at all. chapter the seventh lady harman learns about herself § so it was that the great and long incubated quarrel between lady harman and her husband broke into active hostilities. in spite of my ill-concealed bias in favour of lady harman i have to confess that she began this conflict rashly, planlessly, with no equipment and no definite end. particularly i would emphasize that she had no definite end. she had wanted merely to establish a right to go out by herself occasionally, exercise a certain choice of friends, take on in fact the privileges of a grown-up person, and in asserting that she had never anticipated that the participation of the household would be invoked, or that a general breach might open between herself and her husband. it had seemed just a definite little point at issue, but at sir isaac's angry touch a dozen other matters that had seemed safely remote, matters she had never yet quite properly thought about, had been drawn into controversy. it was not only that he drew in things from outside; he evoked things within herself. she discovered she was disposed to fight not simply to establish certain liberties for herself but also--which had certainly not been in her mind before--to keep her husband away from herself. something latent in the situation had surprised her with this effect. it had arisen out of the quarrel like a sharpshooter out of an ambuscade. her right to go out alone had now only the value of a mere pretext for far more extensive independence. the ultimate extent of these independences, she still dared not contemplate. she was more than a little scared. she wasn't prepared for so wide a revision of her life as this involved. she wasn't at all sure of the rightfulness of her position. her conception of the marriage contract at that time was liberal towards her husband. after all, didn't she owe obedience? didn't she owe him a subordinate's co-operation? didn't she in fact owe him the whole marriage service contract? when she thought of the figure of him in his purple-striped pyjamas dancing in a paroxysm of exasperation, that sense of responsibility which was one of her innate characteristics reproached her. she had a curious persuasion that she must be dreadfully to blame for provoking so ridiculous, so extravagant an outbreak.... § she heard him getting up tumultuously and when she came down,--after a brief interview with her mother who was still keeping her room,--she found him sitting at the breakfast-table eating toast and marmalade in a greedy malignant manner. the tentative propitiations of his proposal to make things up had entirely disappeared, he was evidently in a far profounder rage with her than he had been overnight. snagsby too, that seemly domestic barometer, looked extraordinarily hushed and grave. she made a greeting-like noise and sir isaac scrunched "morning" up amongst a crowded fierce mouthful of toast. she helped herself to tea and bacon and looking up presently discovered his eye fixed upon her with an expression of ferocious hatred.... he went off in the big car, she supposed to london, about ten and she helped her mother to pack and depart by a train a little after midday. she made a clumsy excuse for not giving that crisp little trifle of financial assistance she was accustomed to, and mrs. sawbridge was anxiously tactful about the disappointment. they paid a visit of inspection and farewell to the nursery before the departure. then lady harman was left until lunch to resume her meditation upon this unprecedented breach that had opened between her husband and herself. she was presently moved to write a little note to lady beach-mandarin expressing her intention of attending a meeting of the social friends and asking whether the date was the following wednesday or thursday. she found three penny stamps in the bureau at which she wrote and this served to remind her of her penniless condition. she spent some time thinking out the possible consequences of that. how after all was she going to do things, with not a penny in the world to do them with? lady harman was not only instinctively truthful but also almost morbidly honourable. in other words, she was simple-minded. the idea of a community of goods between husband and wife had never established itself in her mind, she took all sir isaac's presents in the spirit in which he gave them, presents she felt they were on trust, and so it was that with a six-hundred pound pearl necklace, a diamond tiara, bracelets, lockets, rings, chains and pendants of the most costly kind--there had been a particularly beautiful bracelet when millicent was born, a necklace on account of florence, a fan painted by charles conder for annette and a richly splendid set of old spanish jewellery--yellow sapphires set in gold--to express sir isaac's gratitude for the baby--with all sorts of purses, bags, boxes, trinkets and garments, with a bedroom and morning-room rich in admirable loot, and with endless tradespeople willing to give her credit it didn't for some time occur to her that there was any possible means of getting pocket-money except by direct demand from sir isaac. she surveyed her balance of two penny stamps and even about these she felt a certain lack of negotiable facility. she thought indeed that she might perhaps borrow money, but there again her paralyzing honesty made her recoil from the prospect of uncertain repayment. and besides, from whom could she borrow?... it was on the evening of the second day that a chance remark from peters turned her mind to the extensive possibilities of liquidation that lay close at hand. she was discussing her dinner dress with peters, she wanted something very plain and high and unattractive, and peters, who disapproved of this tendency and was all for female wiles and propitiations, fell into an admiration of the pearl necklace. she thought perhaps by so doing she might induce lady harman to wear it, and if she wore it sir isaac might be a little propitiated, and if sir isaac was a little propitiated it would be much more comfortable for snagsby and herself and everyone. she was reminded of a story of a lady who sold one and substituted imitation pearls, no one the wiser, and she told this to her mistress out of sheer garrulousness. "but if no one found out," said lady harman, "how do you know?" "not till her death, me lady," said peters, brushing, "when all things are revealed. her husband, they say, made it a present of to another lady and the other lady, me lady, had it valued...." once the idea had got into lady harman's head it stayed there very obstinately. she surveyed the things on the table before her with a slightly lifted eyebrow. at first she thought the idea of disposing of them an entirely dishonourable idea, and if she couldn't get it out of her head again at least she made it stand in a corner. and while it stood in a corner she began putting a price for the first time in her life first upon this coruscating object and then that. then somehow she found herself thinking more and more whether among all these glittering possessions there wasn't something that she might fairly regard as absolutely her own. there were for example her engagement ring and, still more debateable, certain other pre-nuptial trinkets sir isaac had given her. then there were things given her on her successive birthdays. a birthday present of all presents is surely one's very own? but selling is an extreme exercise of ownership. since those early schooldays when she had carried on an unprofitable traffic in stamps she had never sold anything--unless we are to reckon that for once and for all she had sold herself. concurrently with these insidious speculations lady harman found herself trying to imagine how one sold jewels. she tried to sound peters by taking up the story of the necklace again. but peters was uninforming. "but where," asked lady harman, "could such a thing be done?" "there are places, me lady," said peters. "but where?" "in the west end, me lady. the west end is full of places--for things of that sort. there's scarcely anything you can't do there, me lady--if only you know how." that was really all that peters could impart. "how _does_ one sell jewels?" lady harman became so interested in this side of her perplexities that she did a little lose sight of those subtler problems of integrity that had at first engaged her. do jewellers buy jewels as well as sell them? and then it came into her head that there were such things as pawnshops. by the time she had thought about pawnshops and tried to imagine one, her original complete veto upon any idea of selling had got lost to sight altogether. instead there was a growing conviction that if ever she sold anything it would be a certain sapphire and diamond ring which she didn't like and never wore that sir isaac had given her as a birthday present two years ago. but of course she would never dream of selling anything; at the utmost she need but pawn. she reflected and decided that on the whole it would be wiser not to ask peters how one pawned. it occurred to her to consult the _encyclopædia britannica_ on the subject, but though she learnt that the chinese pawnshops must not charge more than three per cent. per annum, that king edward the third pawned his jewels in and that father bernardino di feltre who set up pawnshops in assisi and padua and pavia was afterward canonized, she failed to get any very clear idea of the exact ritual of the process. and then suddenly she remembered that she knew a finished expert in pawnshop work in the person of susan burnet. susan could tell her everything. she found some curtains in the study that needed replacement, consulted mrs. crumble and, with a view to economizing her own resources, made that lady send off an urgent letter to susan bidding her come forthwith. § it has been said that fate is a plagiarist. lady harman's fate at any rate at this juncture behaved like a benevolent plagiarist who was also a little old-fashioned. this phase of speechless hostility was complicated by the fact that two of the children fell ill, or at least seemed for a couple of days to be falling ill. by all the rules of british sentiment, this ought to have brought about a headlong reconciliation at the tumbled bedside. it did nothing of the sort; it merely wove fresh perplexities into the tangled skein of her thoughts. on the day after her participation in that forbidden lunch millicent, her eldest daughter, was discovered with a temperature of a hundred and one, and then annette, the third, followed suit with a hundred. this carried lady harman post haste to the nursery, where to an unprecedented degree she took command. latterly she had begun to mistrust the physique of her children and to doubt whether the trained efficiency of mrs. harblow the nurse wasn't becoming a little blunted at the edges by continual use. and the tremendous quarrel she had afoot made her keenly resolved not to let anything go wrong in the nursery and less disposed than she usually was to leave things to her husband's servants. she interviewed the doctor herself, arranged for the isolation of the two flushed and cross little girls, saw to the toys and amusements which she discovered had become a little flattened and disused by the servants' imperatives of tidying up and putting away, and spent the greater part of the next two days between the night and day nurseries. she was a little surprised to find how readily she did this and how easily the once entirely authoritative mrs. harblow submitted. it was much the same surprise that growing young people feel when they reach some shelf that has hitherto been inaccessible. the crisis soon passed. at his first visit the doctor was a little doubtful whether the harman nursery wasn't under the sway of measles, which were then raging in a particularly virulent form in london; the next day he inclined to the view that the trouble was merely a feverish cold, and before night this second view was justified by the disappearance of the "temperatures" and a complete return to normal conditions. but as for that hushed reconciliation in the fevered presence of the almost sacrificial offspring, it didn't happen. sir isaac merely thrust aside the stiff silences behind which he masked his rage to remark: "this is what happens when wimmen go gadding about!" that much and glaring eyes and compressed lips and emphasizing fingers and then he had gone again. indeed rather than healing their widening breach this crisis did much to spread it into strange new regions. it brought lady harman to the very verge of realizing how much of instinct and how much of duty held her the servant of the children she had brought into the world, and how little there mingled with that any of those factors of pride and admiration that go to the making of heroic maternal love. she knew what is expected of a mother, the exalted and lyrical devotion, and it was with something approaching terror that she perceived that certain things in these children of hers she _hated_. it was her business she knew to love them blindly; she lay awake at night in infinite dismay realizing she did nothing of the sort. their weakness held her more than anything else, the invincible pathos of their little limbs in discomfort so that she was ready to die she felt to give them ease. but so she would have been held, she was assured, by the little children of anybody if they had fallen with sufficient helplessness into her care. just how much she didn't really like her children she presently realized when in the feeble irascibility of their sickness they fell quarrelling. they became--horrid. millicent and annette being imprisoned in their beds it seemed good to florence when she came back from the morning's walk, to annex and hide a selection of their best toys. she didn't take them and play with them, she hid them with an industrious earnestness in a box window-seat that was regarded as peculiarly hers, staggering with armfuls across the nursery floor. then millicent by some equally mysterious agency divined what was afoot and set up a clamour for a valued set of doll's furniture, which immediately provoked a similar outcry from little annette for her teddy bear. followed woe and uproar. the invalids insisted upon having every single toy they possessed brought in and put upon their beds; florence was first disingenuous and then surrendered her loot with passionate howlings. the teddy bear was rescued from baby after a violent struggle in which one furry hind leg was nearly twisted off. it jars upon the philoprogenitive sentiment of our time to tell of these things and still more to record that all four, stirred by possessive passion to the profoundest depths of their beings, betrayed to an unprecedented degree in their little sharp noses, their flushed faces, their earnest eyes, their dutiful likeness to sir isaac. he peeped from under millicent's daintily knitted brows and gestured with florence's dimpled fists. it was as if god had tried to make him into four cherubim and as if in spite of everything he was working through. lady harman toiled to pacify these disorders, gently, attentively, and with a faint dismay in her dark eyes. she bribed and entreated and marvelled at mental textures so unlike her own. baby was squared with a brand new teddy bear, a rare sort, a white one, which snagsby went and purchased in the putney high street and brought home in his arms, conferring such a lustre upon the deed that the lower orders, the very street-boys, watched him with reverence as he passed. annette went to sleep amidst a discomfort of small treasures and woke stormily when mrs. harblow tried to remove some of the spikier ones. and lady harman went back to her large pink bedroom and meditated for a long time upon these things and tried to remember whether in her own less crowded childhood with georgina, either of them had been quite so inhumanly hard and grasping as these feverish little mites in her nursery. she tried to think she had been, she tried to think that all children were such little distressed lumps of embittered individuality, and she did what she could to overcome the queer feeling that this particular clutch of offspring had been foisted upon her and weren't at all the children she could now imagine and desire,--gentle children, sweet-spirited children.... § susan burnet arrived in a gusty mood and brought new matter for lady harman's ever broadening consideration of the wifely position. susan, led by a newspaper placard, had discovered sir isaac's relations to the international bread and cake stores. "at first i thought i wouldn't come," said susan. "i really did. i couldn't hardly believe it. and then i thought, 'it isn't _her_. it can't be _her_!' but i'd never have dreamt before that i could have been brought to set foot in the house of the man who drove poor father to ruin and despair.... you've been so kind to me...." susan's simple right-down mind stopped for a moment with something very like a sob, baffled by the contradictions of the situation. "so i came," she said, with a forced bright smile. "i'm glad you came," said lady harman. "i wanted to see you. and you know, susan, i know very little--very little indeed--of sir isaac's business." "i quite believe it, my lady. i've never for one moment thought _you_----i don't know how to say it, my lady." "and indeed i'm not," said lady harman, taking it as said. "i knew you weren't," said susan, relieved to be so understood. and the two women looked perplexedly at one another over the neglected curtains susan had come to "see to," and shyness just snatched back lady harman from her impulse to give susan a sisterly kiss. nevertheless susan who was full of wise intuitions felt that kiss that was never given, and in the remote world of unacted deeds returned it with effusion. "but it's hard," said susan, "to find one's own second sister mixed up in a strike, and that's what it's come to last week. they've struck, all the international waitresses have struck, and last night in piccadilly they were standing on the kerb and picketing and her among them. with a crowd cheering.... and me ready to give my right hand to keep that girl respectable!" and with a volubility that was at once tumultuous and effective, susan sketched in the broad outlines of the crisis that threatened the dividends and popularity of the international bread and cake stores. the unsatisfied demands of that bright journalistic enterprise, _the london lion_, lay near the roots of the trouble. _the london lion_ had stirred it up. but it was only too evident that _the london lion_ had merely given a voice and form and cohesion to long smouldering discontents. susan's account of the matter had that impartiality which comes from intellectual incoherence, she hadn't so much a judgment upon the whole as a warring mosaic of judgments. it was talking upon post impressionist lines, talking in the manner of picasso. she had the firmest conviction that to strike against employment, however ill-paid or badly conditioned, was a disgraceful combination of folly, ingratitude and general wickedness, and she had an equally strong persuasion that the treatment of the employees of the international bread and cake stores was such as no reasonably spirited person ought to stand. she blamed her sister extremely and sympathized with her profoundly, and she put it all down in turn to _the london lion_, to sir isaac, and to a small round-faced person called babs wheeler, who appeared to be the strike leader and seemed always to be standing on tables in the branches, or clambering up to the lions in trafalgar square, or being cheered in the streets. but there could be no mistaking the quality of sir isaac's "international" organization as susan's dabs of speech shaped it out. it was indeed what we all of us see everywhere about us, the work of the base energetic mind, raw and untrained, in possession of the keen instruments of civilization, the peasant mind allied and blended with the ghetto mind, grasping and acquisitive, clever as a norman peasant or a jew pedlar is clever, and beyond that outrageously stupid and ugly. it was a new view and yet the old familiar view of her husband, but now she saw him not as little eager eyes, a sharp nose, gaunt gestures and a leaden complexion, but as shops and stores and rules and cash registers and harsh advertisements and a driving merciless hurry to get--to get anything and everything, money, monopoly, power, prominence, whatever any other human being seemed to admire or seemed to find desirable, a lust rather than a living soul. now that her eyes were at last opened lady harman, who had seen too little heretofore, now saw too much; she saw all that she had not seen, with an excess of vision, monstrous, caricatured. susan had already dabbed in the disaster of sir isaac's unorganized competitors going to the wall--for charity or the state to neglect or bandage as it might chance--the figure of that poor little "father," moping hopelessly before his "accident" symbolized that; and now she gave in vivid splotches of allusion, glimpses of the business machine that had replaced those shattered enterprises and carried sir isaac to the squalid glory of a liberal honours list,--the carefully balanced antagonisms and jealousies of the girls and the manageresses, those manageresses who had been obliged to invest little bunches of savings as guarantees and who had to account for every crumb and particle of food stock that came to the branch, and the hunt for cases and inefficiency by the inspectors, who had somehow to justify a salary of two hundred a year, not to mention a percentage of the fines they inflicted. "there's all that business of the margarine," said susan. "every branch gets its butter under weight,--the water squeezes out,--and every branch has over weight margarine. of course the rules say that mixing's forbidden and if they get caught they go, but they got to pay-in for that butter, and it's setting a snare for their feet. people who've never thought to cheat, when they get it like that, day after day, they cheat, my lady.... and the girls get left food for rations. there's always trouble, it's against what the rules say, but they get it. of course it's against the rules, but what can a manageress do?--if the waste doesn't fall on them, it falls on her. she's tied there with her savings.... such driving, my lady, it's against the very spirit of god. it makes scoffers point. it makes people despise law and order. there's luke, he gets bitterer and bitterer; he says that it's in the word we mustn't muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn, but these stores, he says, they'd muzzle the ox and keep it hungry and make it work a little machine, he says, whenever it put down its head in the hope of finding a scrap...." so susan, bright-eyed, flushed and voluble, pleading the cause of that vague greatness in humanity that would love, that would loiter, that would think, that would if it could give us art, delight and beauty, that turns blindly and stumblingly towards joy, towards intervals, towards the mysterious things of the spirit, against all this sordid strenuousness, this driving destructive association of hardfisted peasant soul and ghetto greed, this fool's "efficiency," that rules our world to-day. then susan lunged for a time at the waitress life her sister led. "she has 'er 'ome with us, but some--they haven't homes." "they make a fuss about all this white slave traffic," said susan, "but if ever there were white slaves it's the girls who work for a living and keep themselves respectable. and nobody wants to make an example of the men who get rich out of _them_...." and after some hearsay about the pressure in the bake-houses and the accidents to the van-men, who worked on a speeding-up system that sir isaac had adopted from an american business specialist, susan's mental discharge poured out into the particulars of the waitresses' strike and her sister's share in that. "she _would_ go into it," said susan, "she let herself be drawn in. i asked her never to take the place. better service, i said, a thousand times. i begged her, i could have begged her on my bended knees...." the immediate cause of the strike it seemed was the exceptional disagreeableness of one of the london district managers. "he takes advantage of his position," repeated susan with face aflame, and lady harman was already too wise about susan's possibilities to urge her towards particulars.... now as lady harman listened to all this confused effective picturing of the great catering business which was the other side of her husband and which she had taken on trust so long, she had in her heart a quite unreasonable feeling of shame that she should listen at all, a shyness, as though she was prying, as though this really did not concern her. she knew she had to listen and still she felt beyond her proper jurisdiction. it is against instinct, it is with an enormous reluctance that women are bringing their quick emotions, their flashing unstable intelligences, their essential romanticism, their inevitable profound generosity into the world of politics and business. if only they could continue believing that all that side of life is grave and wise and admirably managed for them they would. it is not in a day or a generation that we shall un-specialize women. it is a wrench nearly as violent as birth for them to face out into the bleak realization that the man who goes out for them into business, into affairs, and returns so comfortably loaded with housings and wrappings and trappings and toys, isn't, as a matter of fact, engaged in benign creativeness while he is getting these desirable things. § lady harman's mind was so greatly exercised by susan burnet's voluminous confidences that it was only when she returned to her own morning room that she recalled the pawning problem. she went back to sir isaac's study and found susan with all her measurements taken and on the very edge of departure. "oh susan!" she said. she found the matter a little difficult to broach. susan remained in an attitude of respectful expectation. "i wanted to ask you," said lady harman and then broke off to shut the door. susan's interest increased. "you know, susan," said lady harman with an air of talking about commonplace things, "sir isaac is very rich and--of course--very generous.... but sometimes one feels, one wants a little money of one's own." "i think i can understand that, my lady," said susan. "i knew you would," said lady harman and then with a brightness that was slightly forced, "i can't always get money of my own. it's difficult--sometimes." and then blushing vividly: "i've got lots of _things_.... susan, have you ever pawned anything?" and so she broached it. "not since i got fairly into work," said susan; "i wouldn't have it. but when i was little we were always pawning things. why! we've pawned kettles!..." she flashed three reminiscences. meanwhile lady harman produced a little glittering object and held it between finger and thumb. "if i went into a pawnshop near here," she said, "it would seem so odd.... this ring, susan, must be worth thirty or forty pounds. and it seems so silly when i have it that i should really be wanting money...." susan displayed a peculiar reluctance to handle the ring. "i've never," she said, "pawned anything valuable--not valuable like that. suppose--suppose they wanted to know how i had come by it." "it's more than alice earns in a year," she said. "it's----" she eyed the glittering treasure; "it's a queer thing for me to have." a certain embarrassment arose between them. lady harman's need of money became more apparent. "i'll do it for you," said susan, "indeed i'll do it. but----there's one thing----" her face flushed hotly. "it isn't that i want to make difficulties. but people in our position--we aren't like people in your position. it's awkward sometimes to explain things. you've got a good character, but people don't know it. you can't be too careful. it isn't sufficient--just to be honest. if i take that----if you were just to give me a little note--in your handwriting--on your paper--just asking me----i don't suppose i need show it to anyone...." "i'll write the note," said lady harman. a new set of uncomfortable ideas was dawning upon her. "but susan----you don't mean that anyone, anyone who's really honest--might get into trouble?" "you can't be too careful," said susan, manifestly resolved not to give our highly civilized state half a chance with her. § the problem of sir isaac and just what he was doing and what he thought he was doing and what he meant to do increased in importance in lady harman's mind as the days passed by. he had an air of being malignantly up to something and she could not imagine what this something could be. he spoke to her very little but he looked at her a great deal. he had more and more of the quality of a premeditated imminent explosion.... one morning she was standing quite still in the drawing-room thinking over this now almost oppressive problem of why the situation did not develop further with him, when she became aware of a thin flat unusual book upon the small side table near the great armchair at the side of the fire. he had been reading that overnight and it lay obliquely--it might almost have been left out for her. she picked it up. it was _the taming of the shrew_ in that excellent folio edition of henley's which makes each play a comfortable thin book apart. a curiosity to learn what it was had drawn her husband to english literature made her turn over the pages. _the taming of the shrew_ was a play she knew very slightly. for the harmans, though deeply implicated like most other rich and striving people in plans for honouring the immortal william, like most other people found scanty leisure to read him. as she turned over the pages a pencil mark caught her eye. thence words were underlined and further accentuated by a deeply scored line in the margin. "but for my bonny kate, she must with me. nay; look not big, nor stamp, nor stare, nor fret; i will be master of what is mine own: she is my goods, my chattels; she is my house, she is my household stuff, my field, my barn, my horse, my ox, my ass, my any thing: and here she stands, touch her whoever dare; i'll bring mine action on the proudest he, that stops my way in padua." with a slightly heightened colour, lady harman read on and presently found another page slashed with sir isaac's approval.... her face became thoughtful. did he mean to attempt--petruchio? he could never dare. there were servants, there were the people one met, the world.... he would never dare.... what a strange play it was! shakespear of course was wonderfully wise, the crown of english wisdom, the culminating english mind,--or else one might almost find something a little stupid and clumsy.... did women nowadays really feel like these elizabethan wives who talked--like girls, very forward girls indeed, but girls of sixteen?... she read the culminating speech of katherine and now she had so forgotten sir isaac she scarcely noted the pencil line that endorsed the immortal words. "thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, thy head, thy sovereign; one who cares for thee, and for thy maintenance commits his body to painful labour both by sea and land, to watch the night in storms, the day in cold, while thou liest warm at home, secure and safe; and craves no other tribute at thy hands but love, fair looks, and true obedience; too little payment for so great a debt. such duty as the subject owes the prince, even such a woman oweth to her husband; and when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour, and not obedient to his honest will, what is she but a foul contending rebel and graceless traitor to her loving lord? i am ashamed that women are so simple to offer war, where they should kneel for peace; * * * * * my mind has been as big as one of yours, my heat as great; my reason, haply, more, to bandy word for word and frown for frown. but now i see our lances are but straws; our strength is weak, our weakness past compare, seeming that most which we indeed least are...." she wasn't indignant. something in these lines took hold of her protesting imagination. she knew that so she could have spoken of a man. but that man,--she apprehended him as vaguely as an anglican bishop apprehends god. he was obscured altogether by shadows; he had only one known characteristic, that he was totally unlike sir isaac. and the play was false she felt in giving this speech to a broken woman. such things are not said by broken women. broken women do no more than cheat and lie. but so a woman might speak out of her unconquered wilfulness, as a queen might give her lover a kingdom out of the fullness of her heart. § the evening after his wife had had this glimpse into sir isaac's mental processes he telephoned that charterson and horatio blenker were coming home to dinner with him. neither lady charterson nor mrs. blenker were to be present; it was to be a business conversation and not a social occasion, and lady harman he desired should wear her black and gold with just a touch of crimson in her hair. charterson wanted a word or two with the flexible horatio on sugar at the london docks, and sir isaac had some vague ideas that a turn might be given to the public judgment upon the waitresses' strike, by a couple of horatio's thoughtful yet gentlemanly articles. and in addition charterson seemed to have something else upon his mind; he did not tell as much to sir isaac but he was weighing the possibilities of securing a controlling share in the _daily spirit_, which simply didn't know at present where it was upon the sugar business, and of installing horatio's brother, adolphus, as its editor. he wanted to form some idea from horatio of what adolphus might expect before he approached adolphus. lady harman wore the touch of crimson in her hair as her husband had desired, and the table was decorated simply with a big silver bowl of crimson roses. a slight shade of apprehension in sir isaac's face changed to approval at the sight of her obedience. after all perhaps she was beginning to see the commonsense of her position. charterson struck her as looking larger, but then whenever she saw him he struck her as looking larger. he enveloped her hand in a large amiable paw for a minute and asked after the children with gusto. the large teeth beneath his discursive moustache gave him the effect of a perennial smile to which his asymmetrical ears added a touch of waggery. he always betrayed a fatherly feeling towards her as became a man who was married to a handsome wife old enough to be her mother. even when he asked about the children he did it with something of the amused knowingness of assured seniority, as if indeed he knew all sorts of things about the children that she couldn't as yet even begin to imagine. and though he confined his serious conversation to the two other men, he would ever and again show himself mindful of her and throw her some friendly enquiry, some quizzically puzzling remark. blenker as usual treated her as if she were an only very indistinctly visible presence to whom an effusive yet inattentive politeness was due. he was clearly nervous almost to the pitch of jumpiness. he knew he was to be spoken to about the sugar business directly he saw charterson, and he hated being spoken to about the sugar business. he had his code of honour. of course one had to make concessions to one's proprietors, but he could not help feeling that if only they would consent to see his really quite obvious gentlemanliness more clearly it would be better for the paper, better for the party, better for them, far better for himself. he wasn't altogether a fool about that sugar; he knew how things lay. they ought to trust him more. his nervousness betrayed itself in many little ways. he crumbled his bread constantly until, thanks to snagsby's assiduous replacement, he had made quite a pile of crumbs, he dropped his glasses in the soup--a fine occasion for snagsby's _sang-froid_--and he forgot not to use a fish knife with the fish as lady grove directs and tried when he discovered his error to replace it furtively on the table cloth. moreover he kept on patting the glasses on his nose--after snagsby had whisked his soup plate away, rescued, wiped and returned them to him--until that feature glowed modestly at such excesses of attention, and the soup and sauces and things bothered his fine blond moustache unusually. so that mr. blenker what with the glasses, the napkin, the food and the things seemed as restless as a young sparrow. lady harman did her duties as hostess in the quiet key of her sombre dress, and until the conversation drew her out into unexpected questionings she answered rather than talked, and she did not look at her husband once throughout the meal. at first the talk was very largely charterson. he had no intention of coming to business with blenker until lady harman had given place to the port and the man's nerves were steadier. he spoke of this and that in the large discursive way men use in clubs, and it was past the fish before the conversation settled down upon the topic of business organization and sir isaac, a little warmed by champagne, came out of the uneasily apprehensive taciturnity into which he had fallen in the presence of his wife. horatio blenker was keenly interested in the idealization of commercial syndication, he had been greatly stirred by a book of mr. gerald stanley lee's called _inspired millionaires_ which set out to show just what magnificent airs rich men might give themselves, and he had done his best to catch its tone and to find _inspired millionaires_ in sir isaac and charterson and to bring it to their notice and to the notice of the readers of the _old country gazette_. he felt that if only sir isaac and charterson would see getting rich as a great creative act it would raise their tone and his tone and the tone of the _old country gazette_ tremendously. it wouldn't of course materially alter the methods or policy of the paper but it would make them all feel nobler, and blenker was of that finer clay that does honestly want to feel nobler. he hated pessimism and all that criticism and self-examination that makes weak men pessimistic, he wanted to help weak men and be helped himself, he was all for that school of optimism that would have each dunghill was a well-upholstered throne, and his nervous, starry contributions to the talk were like patches of water ranunculuses trying to flower in the overflow of a sewer. because you know it is idle to pretend that the talk of charterson and sir isaac wasn't a heavy flow of base ideas; they hadn't even the wit to sham very much about their social significance. they cared no more for the growth, the stamina, the spirit of the people whose lives they dominated than a rat cares for the stability of the house it gnaws. they _wanted_ a broken-spirited people. they were in such relations wilfully and offensively stupid, and i do not see why we people who read and write books should pay this stupidity merely because it is prevalent even the mild tribute of an ironical civility. charterson talked of the gathering trouble that might lead to a strike of the transport workers in london docks, and what he had to say, he said,--he repeated it several times--was, "_let_ them strike. we're ready. the sooner they strike the better. devonport's a man and this time we'll _beat_ 'em...." he expanded generally on strikes. "it's a question practically whether we are to manage our own businesses or whether we're to have them managed for us. _managed_ i say!..." "they know nothing of course of the details of organization," said blenker, shining with intelligence and looking quickly first to the right and then to the left. "nothing." sir isaac broke out into confirmatory matter. there was an idea in his head that this talk might open his wife's eyes to some sense of the magnitude of his commercial life, to the wonder of its scale and quality. he compared notes with charterson upon a speeding-up system for delivery vans invented by an american specialist and it made blenker flush with admiration and turn as if for sympathy to lady harman to realize how a modification in a tailboard might mean a yearly saving in wages of many thousand pounds. "the sort of thing they don't understand," he said. and then sir isaac told of some of his own little devices. he had recently taken to having the returns of percentage increase and decrease from his various districts printed on postcards and circulated monthly among the district managers, postcards endorsed with such stimulating comments in red type as "well done cardiff!" or "what ails portsmouth?"--the results had been amazingly good; "neck and neck work," he said, "everywhere"--and thence they passed to the question of confidential reports and surprise inspectors. thereby they came to the rights and wrongs of the waitress strike. and then it was that lady harman began to take a share in the conversation. she interjected a question. "yes," she said suddenly and her interruption was so unexpected that all three men turned their eyes to her. "but how much do the girls get a week?" "i thought," she said to some confused explanations by blenker and charterson, "that gratuities were forbidden." blenker further explained that most of the girls of the class sir isaac was careful to employ lived at home. their income was "supplementary." "but what happens to the others who don't live at home, mr. blenker?" she asked. "very small minority," said mr. blenker reassuring himself about his glasses. "but what do they do?" charterson couldn't imagine whether she was going on in this way out of sheer ignorance or not. "sometimes their fines make big unexpected holes in their week's pay," she said. sir isaac made some indistinct remark about "utter nonsense." "it seems to me to be driving them straight upon the streets." the phrase was susan's. its full significance wasn't at that time very clear to lady harman and it was only when she had uttered it that she realized from horatio blenker's convulsive start just what a blow she had delivered at that table. his glasses came off again. he caught them and thrust them back, he seemed to be holding his nose on, holding his face on, preserving those carefully arranged features of himself from hideous revelations; his free hand made weak movements with his dinner napkin. he seemed to be holding it in reserve against the ultimate failure of his face. charterson surveyed her through an immense pause open-mouthed; then he turned his large now frozen amiability upon his host. "these are awful questions," he gasped, "rather beyond us don't you think?" and then magnificently; "harman, things are looking pretty queer in the far east again. i'm told there are chances--of revolution--even in pekin...." lady harman became aware of snagsby's arm and his steady well-trained breathing beside her as, tenderly almost but with a regretful disapproval, he removed her plate.... § if lady harman had failed to remark at the time the deep impression her words had made upon her hearers, she would have learnt it later from the extraordinary wrath in which sir isaac, as soon as his guests had departed, visited her. he was so angry he broke the seal of silence he had set upon his lips. he came raging into the pink bedroom through the paper-covered door as if they were back upon their old intimate footing. he brought a flavour of cigars and manly refreshment with him, his shirt front was a little splashed and crumpled and his white face was variegated with flushed patches. "what ever d'you mean," he cried, "by making a fool of me in front of those fellers?... what's my business got to do with you?" lady harman was too unready for a reply. "i ask you what's my business got to do with you? it's _my_ affair, _my_ side. you got no more right to go shoving your spoke into that than--anything. see? what do _you_ know of the rights and wrongs of business? how can _you_ tell what's right and what isn't right? and the things you came out with--the things you came out with! why charterson--after you'd gone charterson said, she doesn't know, she can't know what she's talking about! a decent woman! a _lady_! talking of driving girls on the street. you ought to be ashamed of yourself! you aren't fit to show your face.... it's these damned papers and pamphlets, all this blear-eyed stuff, these decadent novels and things putting narsty thoughts, _narsty dirty_ thoughts into decent women's heads. it ought to be rammed back down their throats, it ought to be put a stop to!" sir isaac suddenly gave way to woe. "what have i _done_?" he cried, "what have i done? here's everything going so well! we might be the happiest of couples! we're rich, we got everything we want.... and then you go harbouring these ideas, fooling about with rotten people, taking up with socialism----yes, i tell you--socialism!" his moment of pathos ended. "no?" he shouted in an enormous voice. he became white and grim. he emphasized his next words with a shaken finger. "it's got to end, my lady. it's going to end sooner than you expect. that's all!..." he paused at the papered door. he had a popular craving for a vivid curtain and this he felt was just a little too mild. "it's going to end," he repeated and then with great violence, with almost alcoholic violence, with the round eyes and shouting voice and shaken fist and blaspheming violence of a sordid, thrifty peasant enraged, "it's going to end a damned sight sooner than you expect." chapter the eighth sir isaac as petruchio § twice had sir isaac come near to betraying the rapid and extensive preparations for the subjugation of his wife, that he hid behind his silences. he hoped that their estrangement might be healed by a certain display of strength and decision. he still refused to let himself believe that all this trouble that had arisen between them, this sullen insistence upon unbecoming freedoms of intercourse and movement, this questioning spirit and a gaucherie of manner that might almost be mistaken for an aversion from his person, were due to any essential evil in her nature; he clung almost passionately to the alternative that she was the victim of those gathering forces of discontent, of that interpretation which can only be described as decadent and that veracity which can only be called immodest, that darken the intellectual skies of our time, a sweet thing he held her still though touched by corruption, a prey to "idees," "idees" imparted from the poisoned mind of her sister, imbibed from the carelessly edited columns of newspapers, from all too laxly censored plays, from "blear-eyed" bookshow he thanked the archbishop of york for that clever expressive epithet!--from the careless talk of rashly admitted guests, from the very atmosphere of london. and it had grown clearer and clearer to him that his duty to himself and the world and her was to remove her to a purer, simpler air, beyond the range of these infections, to isolate her and tranquillize her and so win her back again to that acquiescence, that entirely hopeless submissiveness that had made her so sweet and dear a companion for him in the earlier years of their married life. long before lady beach-mandarin's crucial luncheon, his deliberate foreseeing mind had been planning such a retreat. black strand even at his first visit had appeared to him in the light of a great opportunity, and the crisis of their quarrel did but release that same torrential energy which had carried him to a position of napoleonic predominance in the world of baking, light catering and confectionery, into the channels of a scheme already very definitely formed in his mind. his first proceeding after the long hours of sleepless passion that had followed his wife's hampton court escapade, had been to place himself in communication with mr. brumley. he learnt at mr. brumley's club that that gentleman had slept there overnight and had started but a quarter of an hour before, back to black strand. sir isaac in hot pursuit and gathering force and assistance in mid flight reached black strand by midday. it was with a certain twinge of the conscience that mr. brumley perceived his visitor, but it speedily became clear that sir isaac had no knowledge of the guilty circumstances of the day before. he had come to buy black strand--incontinently, that was all. he was going, it became clear at once, to buy it with all its fittings and furnishings as it stood, lock, stock and barrel. mr. brumley, concealing that wild elation, that sense of a joyous rebirth, that only the liquidation of nearly all one's possessions can give, was firm but not excessive. sir isaac haggled as a wave breaks and then gave in and presently they were making a memorandum upon the pretty writing-desk beneath the traditional rose euphemia had established there when mr. brumley was young and already successful. this done, and it was done in less than fifteen minutes, sir isaac produced a rather crumpled young architect from the motor-car as a conjurer might produce a rabbit from a hat, a builder from aleham appeared astonishingly in a dog-cart--he had been summoned by telegram--and sir isaac began there and then to discuss alterations, enlargements and, more particularly, with a view to his nursery requirements, the conversion of the empty barn into a nursery wing and its connexion with the house by a corridor across the shrubbery. "it will take you three months," said the builder from aleham. "and the worst time of the year coming." "it won't take three weeks--if i have to bring down a young army from london to do it," said sir isaac. "but such a thing as plastering----" "we won't have plastering." "there's canvas and paper, of course," said the young architect. "there's canvas and paper," said sir isaac. "and those new patent building units, so far as the corridor goes. i've seen the ads." "we can whitewash 'em. they won't show much," said the young architect. "oh if you do things in _that_ way," said the builder from aleham with bitter resignation.... § the morning dawned at last when the surprise was ripe. it was four days after susan's visit, and she was due again on the morrow with the money that would enable her employer to go to lady viping's now imminent dinner. lady harman had had to cut the social friends' meeting altogether, but the day before the surprise agatha alimony had come to tea in her jobbed car, and they had gone together to the committee meeting of the shakespear dinner society. sir isaac had ignored that defiance, and it was an unusually confident and quite unsuspicious woman who descended in a warm october sunshine to the surprise. in the breakfast-room she discovered an awe-stricken snagsby standing with his plate-basket before her husband, and her husband wearing strange unusual tweeds and gaiters,--buttoned gaiters, and standing a-straddle,--unusually a-straddle, on the hearthrug. "that's enough, snagsby," said sir isaac, at her entrance. "bring it all." she met snagsby's eye, and it was portentous. latterly snagsby's eye had lost the assurance of his former days. she had noted it before, she noted it now more than ever; as though he was losing confidence, as though he was beginning to doubt, as though the world he had once seemed to rule grew insecure beneath his feet. for a moment she met his eye; it might have been a warning he conveyed, it might have been an appeal for sympathy, and then he had gone. she looked at the table. sir isaac had breakfasted acutely. in silence, among the wreckage and with a certain wonder growing, lady harman attended to her needs. sir isaac cleared his throat. she became aware that he had spoken. "what did you say, isaac?" she asked, looking up. he seemed to have widened his straddle almost dangerously, and he spoke with a certain conscious forcefulness. "we're going to move out of this house, elly," he said. "we're going down into the country right away." she sat back in her chair and regarded his pinched and determined visage. "what do you mean?" she asked. "i've bought that house of brumley's,--black strand. we're going to move down there--_now_. i've told the servants.... when you've done your breakfast, you'd better get peters to pack your things. the big car's going to be ready at half-past ten." lady harman reflected. "to-morrow evening," she said, "i was going out to dinner at lady viping's." "not my affair--seemingly," said sir isaac with irony. "well, the car's going to be ready at half-past ten." "but that dinner----!" "we'll think about it when the time comes." husband and wife regarded each other. "i've had about enough of london," said sir isaac. "so we're going to shift the scenery. see?" lady harman felt that one might adduce good arguments against this course if only one knew of them. sir isaac had a bright idea. he rang. "snagsby," he said, "just tell peters to pack up lady harman's things...." "_well!_" said lady harman, as the door closed on snagsby. her mind was full of confused protest, but she had again that entirely feminine and demoralizing conviction that if she tried to express it she would weep or stumble into some such emotional disaster. if now she went upstairs and told peters _not_ to pack----! sir isaac walked slowly to the window, and stood for a time staring out into the garden. extraordinary bumpings began overhead in sir isaac's room. no doubt somebody was packing something.... lady harman realized with a deepening humiliation that she dared not dispute before the servants, and that he could. "but the children----" she said at last. "i've told mrs. harblow," he said, over his shoulder. "told her it was a bit of a surprise." he turned, with a momentary lapse into something like humour. "you see," he said, "it _is_ a bit of a surprise." "but what are you going to do with this house?" "lock it all up for a bit.... i don't see any sense in living where we aren't happy. perhaps down there we shall manage better...." it emerged from the confusion of lady harman's mind that perhaps she had better go to the nursery, and see how things were getting on there. sir isaac watched her departure with a slightly dubious eye, made little noises with his teeth for a time, and then went towards the telephone. in the hall she found two strange young men in green aprons assisting the under-butler to remove the hats and overcoats and such-like personal material into a motor-van outside. she heard two of the housemaids scurrying upstairs. "'arf an hour," said one, "isn't what i call a proper time to pack a box in." in the nursery the children were disputing furiously what toys were to be taken into the country. lady harman was a very greatly astonished woman. the surprise had been entirely successful. § it has been said, i think, by limburger, in his already cited work, that nothing so excites and prevails with woman as rapid and extensive violence, sparing and yet centring upon herself, and certainly it has to be recorded that, so far from being merely indignant, and otherwise a helplessly pathetic spectacle, lady harman found, though perhaps she did not go quite so far as to admit to herself that she found, this vehement flight from the social, moral, and intellectual contaminations of london an experience not merely stimulating but entertaining. it lifted her delicate eyebrows. something, it may have been a sense of her own comparative immobility amid this sudden extraordinary bustle of her home, put it into her head that so it was long ago that lot must have bundled together his removable domesticities. she made one attempt at protest. "isaac," she said, "isn't all this rather ridiculous----" "don't speak to me!" he answered, waving her off. "don't speak to me! you should have spoken before, elly. _now_,--things are happening." the image of black strand as, after all, a very pleasant place indeed returned to her. she adjudicated upon the nursery difficulties, and then went in a dreamlike state of mind to preside over her own more personal packing. she found peters exercising all that indecisive helplessness which is characteristic of ladies' maids the whole world over. it was from peters she learnt that the entire household, men and maids together, was to be hurled into surrey. "aren't they all rather surprised?" asked lady harman. "yes, m'm," said peters on her knees, "but of course if the drains is wrong the sooner we all go the better." (so that was what he had told them.) a vibration and a noise of purring machinery outside drew the lady to the window, and she discovered that at least four of the large motor-vans from the international stores were to co-operate in the trek. there they were waiting, massive and uniform. and then she saw snagsby in his alpaca jacket _running_ towards the house from the gates. of course he was running only very slightly indeed, but still he was running, and the expression of distress upon his face convinced her that he was being urged to unusual and indeed unsuitable tasks under the immediate personal supervision of sir isaac.... then from round the corner appeared the under butler or at least the legs of him going very fast, under a pile of shirt boxes and things belonging to sir isaac. he dumped them into the nearest van and heaved a deep sigh and returned houseward after a remorseful glance at the windows. a violent outcry from baby, who, with more than her customary violence was making her customary morning protest against being clad, recalled lady harman from the contemplation of these exterior activities.... the journey to black strand was not accomplished without misadventure; there was a puncture near farnham, and as clarence with a leisurely assurance entertained himself with the stepney, they were passed first by the second car with the nursery contingent, which went by in a shrill chorus, crying, "_we-e-e_ shall get there first, _we-e-e_ shall get there first," and then by a large hired car all agog with housemaids and mrs. crumble and with snagsby, as round and distressed as the full moon, and the under butler, cramped and keen beside the driver. there followed the leading international stores car, and then the stepney was on and they could hasten in pursuit.... and at last they came to black strand, and when they saw black strand it seemed to lady harman that the place had blown out a huge inflamed red cheek and lost its pleasant balance altogether. "_oh!_" she cried. it was the old barn flushed by the strain of adaptation to a new use, its comfortable old wall ruptured by half a dozen brilliant new windows, a light red chimney stack at one end. from it a vividly artistic corridor ran to the house and the rest of the shrubbery was all trampled and littered with sheds, bricks, poles and material generally. black strand had left the hands of the dilettante school and was in the grip of those vigorous moulding forces that are shaping our civilization to-day. the jasmine wig over the porch had suffered a strenuous clipping; the door might have just come out of prison. in the hall the carpaccio copies still glowed, but there were dust sheets over most of the furniture and a plumber was moving his things out with that eleventh hour reluctance so characteristic of plumbers. mrs. rabbit, a little tearful, and dressed for departure very respectably in black was giving the youngest and least experienced housemaid a faithful history of mr. brumley's earlier period. "'appy we all was," said mrs. rabbit, "as birds in a nest." through the windows two of the putney gardeners were busy replacing mr. brumley's doubtful roses by recognized sorts, the _right_ sorts.... "i've been doing all i can to make it ready for you," said sir isaac at his wife's ear, bringing a curious reminiscence of the first home-coming to putney into her mind. § "and now," said sir isaac with evident premeditation and a certain deliberate amiability, "now we got down here, now we got away a bit from all those london things with nobody to cut in between us, me and you can have a bit of a talk, elly, and see what it's all about." they had lunched together in the little hall-dining room,--the children had had a noisily cheerful picnic in the kitchen with mrs. harblow, and now lady harman was standing at the window surveying the ravages of rose replacement. she turned towards him. "yes," she said. "i think--i think we can't go on like this." "_i_ can't," said sir isaac, "anyhow." he too came and stared at the rose planting. "if we were to go up there--among the pine woods"--he pointed with his head at the dark background of euphemia's herbaceous borders--"we shouldn't hear quite so much of this hammering...." husband and wife walked slowly in the afternoon sunlight across the still beautiful garden. each was gravely aware of an embarrassed incapacity for the task they had set themselves. they were going to talk things over. never in their lives had they really talked to each other clearly and honestly about anything. indeed it is scarcely too much to say that neither had ever talked about anything to anyone. she was too young, her mind was now growing up in her and feeling its way to conscious expression, and he had never before wanted to express himself. he did now want to express himself. for behind his rant and fury sir isaac had been thinking very hard indeed during the last three weeks about his life and her life and their relations; he had never thought so much about anything except his business economics. so far he had either joked at her, talked "silly" to her, made, as they say, "remarks," or vociferated. that had been the sum of their mental intercourse, as indeed it is the sum of the intercourse of most married couples. his attempt to state his case to her had so far always flared into rhetorical outbreaks. but he was discontented with these rhetorical outbreaks. his dispositions to fall into them made him rather like a nervous sepia that cannot keep its ink sac quiet while it is sitting for its portrait. in the earnestness of his attempt at self-display he vanished in his own outpourings. he wanted now to reason with her simply and persuasively. he wanted to say quietly impressive and convincing things in a low tone of voice and make her abandon every possible view except his view. he walked now slowly meditating the task before him, making a faint thoughtful noise with his teeth, his head sunken in the collar of the motor overcoat he wore because of a slight cold he had caught. and he had to be careful about colds because of his constitutional defect. she too felt she had much to say. much too she had in her mind that she couldn't say, because this strange quarrel had opened unanticipated things for her; she had found and considered repugnances in her nature she had never dared to glance at hitherto.... sir isaac began rather haltingly when they had reached a sandy, ant-infested path that ran slantingly up among the trees. he affected a certain perplexity. he said he did not understand what it was his wife was "after," what she "thought she was doing" in "making all this trouble"; he wanted to know just what it was she wanted, how she thought they ought to live, just what she considered his rights were as her husband and just what she considered were her duties as his wife--if, that is, she considered she had any duties. to these enquiries lady harman made no very definite reply; their estrangement instead of clearing her mind had on the whole perplexed it more, by making her realize the height and depth and extent of her possible separation from him. she replied therefore with an unsatisfactory vagueness; she said she wanted to feel that she possessed herself, that she was no longer a child, that she thought she had a right to read what she chose, see what people she liked, go out a little by herself, have a certain independence--she hesitated, "have a certain definite allowance of my own." "have i ever refused you money?" cried sir isaac protesting. "it isn't that," said lady harman; "it's the feeling----" "the feeling of being able to--defy--anything i say," said sir isaac with a note of bitterness. "as if i didn't understand!" it was beyond lady harman's powers to express just how that wasn't the precise statement of the case. sir isaac, reverting to his tone of almost elaborate reasonableness, expanded his view that it was impossible for husband and wife to have two different sets of friends;--let alone every other consideration, he explained, it wasn't convenient for them not to be about together, and as for reading or thinking what she chose he had never made any objection to anything unless it was "decadent rot" that any decent man would object to his womanfolk seeing, rot she couldn't understand the drift of--fortunately. blear-eyed humbug.... he checked himself on the verge of an almost archiepiscopal outbreak in order to be patiently reasonable again. he was prepared to concede that it would be very nice if lady harman could be a good wife and also an entirely independent person, very nice, but the point was--his tone verged on the ironical--that she couldn't be two entirely different people at the same time. "but you have your friends," she said, "you go away alone----" "that's different," said sir isaac with a momentary note of annoyance. "it's business. it isn't that i want to." lady harman had a feeling that they were neither of them gaining any ground. she blamed herself for her lack of lucidity. she began again, taking up the matter at a fresh point. she said that her life at present wasn't full, that it was only half a life, that it was just home and marriage and nothing else; he had his business, he went out into the world, he had politics and--"all sorts of things"; she hadn't these interests; she had nothing in the place of them---- sir isaac closed this opening rather abruptly by telling her that she should count herself lucky she hadn't, and again the conversation was suspended for a time. "but i want to know about these things," she said. sir isaac took that musingly. "there's things go on," she said; "outside home. there's social work, there's interests----am i never to take any part--in that?" sir isaac still reflected. "there's one thing," he said at last, "i want to know. we'd better have it out--_now_." but he hesitated for a time. "elly!" he blundered, "you aren't--you aren't getting somehow--not fond of me?" she made no immediate reply. "look here!" he said in an altered voice. "elly! there isn't something below all this? there isn't something been going on that i don't know?" her eyes with a certain terror in their depths questioned him. "something," he said, and his face was deadly white--"_some other man, elly?_" she was suddenly crimson, a flaming indignation. "isaac!" she said, "what do you _mean_? how can you _ask_ me such a thing?" "if it's that!" said sir isaac, his face suddenly full of malignant force, "i'll----but i'd _kill_ you...." "if it isn't that," he went on searching his mind; "why should a woman get restless? why should she want to go away from her husband, go meeting other people, go gadding about? if a woman's satisfied, she's satisfied. she doesn't harbour fancies.... all this grumbling and unrest. natural for your sister, but why should you? you've got everything a woman needs, husband, children, a perfectly splendid home, clothes, good jewels and plenty of them, respect! why should you want to go out after things? it's mere spoilt-childishness. of course you want to wander out--and if there isn't a man----" he caught her wrist suddenly. "there isn't a man?" he demanded. "isaac!" she protested in horror. "then there'll be one. you think i'm a fool, you think i don't know anything all these literary and society people know. i _do_ know. i know that a man and a woman have got to stick together, and if you go straying--you may think you're straying after the moon or social work or anything--but there's a strange man waiting round the corner for every woman and a strange woman for every man. think _i_'ve had no temptations?... oh! i _know_, i _know_. what's life or anything but that? and it's just because we've not gone on having more children, just because we listened to all those fools who said you were overdoing it, that all this fretting and grumbling began. we've got on to the wrong track, elly, and we've got to get back to plain wholesome ways of living. see? that's what i've come down here for and what i mean to do. we've got to save ourselves. i've been too--too modern and all that. i'm going to be a husband as a husband should. i'm going to protect you from these idees--protect you from your own self.... and that's about where we stand, elly, as i make it out." he paused with the effect of having delivered himself of long premeditated things. lady harman essayed to speak. but she found that directly she set herself to speak she sobbed and began weeping. she choked for a moment. then she determined she would go on, and if she must cry, she must cry. she couldn't let a disposition to tears seal her in silence for ever. "it isn't," she said, "what i expected--of life. it isn't----" "it's what life is," sir isaac cut in. "when i think," she sobbed, "of what i've lost----" "_lost!_" cried sir isaac. "lost! oh come now, elly, i like that. what!--_lost_. hang it! you got to look facts in the face. you can't deny----marrying like this,--you made a jolly good thing of it." "but the beautiful things, the noble things!" "_what's_ beautiful?" cried sir isaac in protesting scorn. "_what's_ noble? rot! doing your duty if you like and being sensible, that's noble and beautiful, but not fretting about and running yourself into danger. you've got to have a sense of humour, elly, in this life----" he created a quotation. "as you make your bed--so shall you lie." for an interval neither of them spoke. they crested the hill, and came into view of that advertisement board she had first seen in mr. brumley's company. she halted, and he went a step further and halted too. he recalled his ideas about the board. he had meant to have them all altered but other things had driven it from his mind.... "then you mean to imprison me here," said lady harman to his back. he turned about. "it isn't much like a prison. i'm asking you to stay here--and be what a wife _should_ be." "i'm to have no money." "that's--that depends entirely on yourself. you know that well enough." she looked at him gravely. "i won't stand it," she said at last with a gentle deliberation. she spoke so softly that he doubted his hearing. "_what?_" he asked sharply. "i won't stand it," she repeated. "no." "but--what can you do?" "i don't know," she said, after a moment of grave consideration. for some moments his mind hunted among possibilities. "it's me that's standing it," he said. he came closely up to her. he seemed on the verge of rhetoric. he pressed his thin white lips together. "standing it! when we might be so happy," he snapped, and shrugged his shoulders and turned with an expression of mournful resolution towards the house again. she followed slowly. he felt that he had done all that a patient and reasonable husband could do. _now_--things must take their course. § the imprisonment of lady harman at black strand lasted just one day short of a fortnight. for all that time except for such interludes as the urgent needs of the strike demanded, sir isaac devoted himself to the siege. he did all he could to make her realize how restrainedly he used the powers the law vests in a husband, how little he forced upon her the facts of marital authority and wifely duty. at times he sulked, at times he affected a cold dignity, and at times a virile anger swayed him at her unsubmissive silences. he gave her little peace in that struggle, a struggle that came to the edge of physical conflict. there were moments when it seemed to her that nothing remained but that good old-fashioned connubial institution, the tussle for the upper hand, when with a feminine horror she felt violence shouldering her shoulder or contracting ready to grip her wrist. against violence she doubted her strength, was filled with a desolating sense of yielding nerve and domitable muscle. but just short of violence sir isaac's spirit failed him. he would glower and bluster, half threaten, and retreat. it might come to that at last but at present it had not come to that. she could not understand why she had neither message nor sign from susan burnet, but she hid that anxiety and disappointment under her general dignity. she spent as much time with the children as she could, and until sir isaac locked up the piano she played, and was surprised to find far more in chopin than she had ever suspected in the days when she had acquired a passable dexterity of execution. she found, indeed, the most curious things in chopin, emotional phrases, that stirred and perplexed and yet pleased her.... the weather was very fine and open that year. a golden sunshine from october passed on into november and lady harman spent many of these days amidst the pretty things the builder from aleham had been too hurried to desecrate, dump, burn upon, and flatten into indistinguishable mire, after the established custom of builders in gardens since the world began. she would sit in the rockery where she had sat with mr. brumley and recall that momentous conversation, and she would wander up the pine-wood slopes behind, and she would spend long musing intervals among euphemia's perennials, thinking sometimes, and sometimes not so much thinking as feeling the warm tendernesses of nature and the perplexing difficulties of human life. with an amused amazement lady harman reflected as she walked about the pretty borders and the little patches of lawn and orchard that in this very place she was to have realized an imitation of the immortal "elizabeth" and have been wise, witty, gay, defiant, gallant and entirely successful with her "man of wrath." evidently there was some temperamental difference, or something in her situation, that altered the values of the affair. it was clearly a different sort of man for one thing. she didn't feel a bit gay, and her profound and deepening indignation with the alternative to this stagnation was tainted by a sense of weakness and incapacity. she came very near surrender several times. there were afternoons of belated ripened warmth, a kind of summer that had been long in the bottle, with a certain lassitude in the air and a blue haze among the trees, that made her feel the folly of all resistances to fate. why, after all, shouldn't she take life as she found it, that is to say, as sir isaac was prepared to give it to her? he wasn't really so bad, she told herself. the children--their noses were certainly a little sharp, but there might be worse children. the next might take after herself more. who was she to turn upon her appointed life and declare it wasn't good enough? whatever happened the world was still full of generous and beautiful things, trees, flowers, sunset and sunrise, music and mist and morning dew.... and as for this matter of the sweated workers, the harshness of the business, the ungracious competition, suppose if instead of fighting her husband with her weak powers, she persuaded him. she tried to imagine just exactly how he might be persuaded.... she looked up and discovered with an extraordinary amazement mr. brumley with eager gestures and a flushed and excited visage hurrying towards her across the croquet lawn. § lady viping's dinner-party had been kept waiting exactly thirty-five minutes for lady harman. sir isaac, with a certain excess of zeal, had intercepted the hasty note his wife had written to account for her probable absence. the party was to have centred entirely upon lady harman, it consisted either of people who knew her already, or of people who were to have been specially privileged to know her, and lady viping telephoned twice to putney before she abandoned hope. "it's disconnected," she said, returning in despair from her second struggle with the great public service. "they can't get a reply." "it's that little wretch," said lady beach-mandarin. "he hasn't let her come. _i_ know him." "it's like losing a front tooth," said lady viping, surveying her table as she entered the dining-room. "but surely--she would have written," said mr. brumley, troubled and disappointed, regarding an aching gap to the left of his chair, a gap upon which a pathetic little card bearing lady harman's name still lay obliquely. naturally the talk tended to centre upon the harmans. and naturally lady beach-mandarin was very bold and outspoken and called sir isaac quite a number of vivid things. she also aired her views of the marriage of the future, which involved a very stringent treatment of husbands indeed. "half his property and half his income," said lady beach-mandarin, "paid into her separate banking account." "but," protested mr. brumley, "would men marry under those conditions?" "men will marry anyhow," said lady beach-mandarin, "under _any_ conditions." "exactly sir joshua's opinion," said lady viping. all the ladies at the table concurred and only one cheerful bachelor barrister dissented. the other men became gloomy and betrayed a distaste for this general question. even mr. brumley felt a curious faint terror and had for a moment a glimpse of the possibilities that might lie behind the vote. lady beach-mandarin went bouncing back to the particular instance. at present, she said, witness lady harman, women were slaves, pampered slaves if you will, but slaves. as things were now there was nothing to keep a man from locking up his wife, opening all her letters, dressing her in sack-cloth, separating her from her children. most men, of course, didn't do such things, they were amenable to public opinion, but sir isaac was a jealous little ogre. he was a gnome who had carried off a princess.... she threw out projects for assailing the ogre. she would descend to-morrow morning upon the putney house, a living flamboyant writ of habeas corpus. mr. brumley, who had been putting two and two together, was abruptly moved to tell of the sale of black strand. "they may be there," he said. "he's carried her off," cried lady beach-mandarin on a top note. "it might be the eighteenth century for all he cares. but if it's black strand,--i'll go to black strand...." but she had to talk about it for a week before she actually made her raid, and then, with an instinctive need for an audience, she took with her a certain miss garradice, one of those mute, emotional nervous spinsters who drift detachedly, with quick sudden movements, glittering eyeglasses, and a pent-up imminent look, about our social system. there is something about this type of womanhood--it is hard to say--almost as though they were the bottled souls of departed buccaneers grown somehow virginal. she came with lady beach-mandarin quietly, almost humorously, and yet it was as if the pirate glittered dimly visible through the polished glass of her erect exterior. "here we are!" said lady beach-mandarin, staring astonished at the once familiar porch. "now for it!" she descended and assailed the bell herself and miss garradice stood beside her with the light of combat in her eyes and glasses and cheeks. "shall i offer to take her for a drive!" "_let's_," said miss garradice in an enthusiastic whisper. "_right away! for ever._" "_i will_," said lady beach-mandarin, and nodded desperately. she was on the point of ringing again when snagsby appeared. he stood with a large obstructiveness in the doorway. "lady 'arman, my lady" he said with a well-trained deliberation, "is not a tome." "not at home!" queried lady beach-mandarin. "not a tome, my lady," repeated snagsby invincibly. "but--when will she be at home?" "i can't say, my lady." "is sir isaac----?" "sir isaac, my lady, is not a tome. nobody is a tome, my lady." "but we've come from london!" said lady beach-mandarin. "i'm very sorry, my lady." "you see, i want my friend to see this house and garden." snagsby was visibly disconcerted. "i 'ave no instructions, my lady," he tried. "oh, but lady harman would never object----" snagsby's confusion increased. he seemed to be wanting to keep his face to the visitors and at the same time glance over his shoulder. "i will," he considered, "i will enquire, my lady." he backed a little, and seemed inclined to close the door upon them. lady beach-mandarin was too quick for him. she got herself well into the open doorway. "and of whom are you going to enquire?" a large distress betrayed itself in snagsby's eye. "the 'ousekeeper," he attempted. "it falls to the 'ousekeeper, my lady." lady beach-mandarin turned her face to miss garradice, shining in support. "stuff and nonsense," she said, "of course we shall come in." and with a wonderful movement that was at once powerful and perfectly lady-like this intrepid woman--"butted" is not the word--collided herself with snagsby and hurled him backward into the hall. miss garradice followed closely behind and at once extended herself in open order on lady beach-mandarin's right. "go and enquire," said lady beach-mandarin with a sweeping gesture of her arm. "go and enquire." for a moment snagsby surveyed the invasion with horror and then fled precipitately into the recesses of the house. "of _course_ they're at home!" said lady beach-mandarin. "fancy that--that--that _navigable_--trying to shut the door on us!" for a moment the two brightly excited ladies surveyed each other and then lady beach-mandarin, with a quickness of movement wonderful in one so abundant, began to open first one and then another of the various doors that opened into the long hall-living room. at a peculiar little cry from miss garradice she turned from a contemplation of the long low study in which so much of the euphemia books had been written, to discover sir isaac behind her, closely followed by an agonized snagsby. "a-a-a-a-h!" she cried, with both hands extended, "and so you've come in, sir isaac! that's perfectly delightful. this is my friend miss garradice, who's _dying_ to see anything you've left of poor euphemia's garden. and _how_ is dear lady harman?" for some crucial moments sir isaac was unable to speak and regarded his visitors with an expression that was unpretendingly criminal. then he found speech. "you can't," he said. "it--can't be managed." he shook his head; his lips were whitely compressed. "but all the way from london, sir isaac!" "lady harman's ill," lied sir isaac. "she mustn't be disturbed. everything has to be kept quiet. see? not even shouting. not even ordinarily raised voices. a voice like yours--might kill her. that's why snagsby here said we were not at home. we aren't at home--not to anyone." lady beach-mandarin was baffled. "snagsby," said sir isaac, "open that door." "but can't i see her--just for a moment?" sir isaac's malignity had softened a little at the prospect of victory. "absolutely impossible," he said. "everything disturbs her, every tiny thing. you----you'd be certain to." lady beach-mandarin looked at her companion and it was manifest that she was at the end of her resources. miss garradice after the fashion of highly strung spinsters suddenly felt disappointed in her leader. it wasn't, her silence intimated, for her to offer suggestions. the ladies were defeated. when at last that stiff interval ended their dresses rustled doorward, and sir isaac broke out into the civilities of a victor.... it was only when they were a mile away from black strand that fluent speech returned to lady beach-mandarin. "the little--crippen," she said. "he's got her locked up in some cellar.... horrid little face he has! he looked like a rat at bay." "i think perhaps if we'd done _differently_," said miss garradice in a tone of critical irresponsibility. "i'll write to her. that's what i'll do," said lady beach-mandarin contemplating her next step. "i'm really--concerned. and didn't you feel--something sinister. that butler-man's expression--a kind of round horror." that very evening she told it all--it was almost the trial trip of the story--to mr. brumley.... sir isaac watched their departure furtively from the study window and then ran out to the garden. he went right through into the pine woods beyond and presently, far away up the slopes, he saw his wife loitering down towards him, a gracious white tallness touched by a ray of sunlight--and without a suspicion of how nearly rescue had come to her. § so you see under what excitement mr. brumley came down to black strand. luck was with him at first and he forced the defence with ridiculous ease. "lady harman, sir, is not a tome," said snagsby. "ah!" said mr. brumley, with all the assurance of a former proprietor, "then i'll just have a look round the garden," and was through the green door in the wall and round the barn end before snagsby's mind could function. that unfortunate man went as far as the green door in pursuit and then with a gesture of despair retreated to the pantry and began cleaning all his silver to calm his agonized spirit. he could pretend perhaps that mr. brumley had never rung at the front door at all. if not---- moreover mr. brumley had the good fortune to find lady harman quite unattended and pensive upon the little seat that euphemia had placed for the better seeing of her herbaceous borders. "lady harman!" he said rather breathlessly, taking both her hands with an unwonted assurance and then sitting down beside her, "i am so glad to see you. i came down to see you--to see if i couldn't be of any service to you." "it's so kind of you to come," she said, and her dark eyes said as much or more. she glanced round and he too glanced round for sir isaac. "you see," he said. "i don't know.... i don't want to be impertinent.... but i feel--if i can be of any service to you.... i feel perhaps you want help here. i don't want to seem to be taking advantage of a situation. or making unwarrantable assumptions. but i want to assure you--i would willingly die--if only i could do anything.... ever since i first saw you." he said all this in a distracted way, with his eyes going about the garden for the possible apparition of sir isaac, and all the time his sense of possible observers made him assume an attitude as though he was engaged in the smallest of small talk. her colour quickened at the import of his words, and emotion, very rich and abundant emotion, its various factors not altogether untouched perhaps by the spirit of laughter, lit her eyes. she doubted a little what he was saying and yet she had anticipated that somehow, some day, in quite other circumstances, mr. brumley might break into some such strain. "you see," he went on with a quality of appeal in his eyes, "there's so little time to say things--without possible interruption. i feel you are in difficulties and i want to make you understand----we----every beautiful woman, i suppose, has a sort of right to a certain sort of man. i want to tell you--i'm not really presuming to make love to you--but i want to tell you i am altogether yours, altogether at your service. i've had sleepless nights. all this time i've been thinking about you. i'm quite clear, i haven't a doubt, i'll do anything for you, without reward, without return, i'll be your devoted brother, anything, if only you'll make use of me...." her colour quickened. she looked around and still no one appeared. "it's so kind of you to come like this," she said. "you say things--but i _have_ felt that you wanted to be brotherly...." "whatever i _can_ be," assured mr. brumley. "my situation here," she said, her dark frankness of gaze meeting his troubled eyes. "it's so strange and difficult. i don't know what to do. i don't know--what i _want_ to do...." "in london," said mr. brumley, "they think--they say--you have been taken off--brought down here--to a sort of captivity." "i _have_," admitted lady harman with a note of recalled astonishment in her voice. "if i can help you to escape----!" "but where can i escape?" and one must admit that it is a little difficult to indicate a correct refuge for a lady who finds her home intolerable. of course there was mrs. sawbridge, but lady harman felt that her mother's disposition to lock herself into her bedroom at the slightest provocation made her a weak support for a defensive fight, and in addition that boarding-house at bournemouth did not attract her. yet what other wall in all the world was there for lady harman to set her back against? during the last few days mr. brumley's mind had been busy with the details of impassioned elopements conducted in the most exalted spirit, but now in the actual presence of the lady these projects did in the most remarkable manner vanish. "couldn't you," he said at last, "go somewhere?" and then with an air of being meticulously explicit, "i mean, isn't there somewhere, where you might safely go?" (and in his dreams he had been crossing high passes with her; he had halted suddenly and stayed her mule. in his dream because he was a man of letters and a poet it was always a mule, never a _train de luxe_. "look," he had said, "below there,--_italy!_--the country you have never seen before.") "there's nowhere," she answered. "now _where_?" asked mr. brumley, "and how?" with the tone and something of the gesture of one who racks his mind. "if you only trust yourself to me----oh! lady harman, if i dared ask it----" he became aware of sir isaac walking across the lawn towards them.... the two men greeted each other with a reasonable cordiality. "i wanted to see how you were getting on down here," said mr. brumley, "and whether there was anything i could do for you." "we're getting on all right," said sir isaac with no manifest glow of gratitude. "you've altered the old barn--tremendously." "come and see it," said sir isaac. "it's a wing." mr. brumley remained seated. "it was the first thing that struck me, lady harman. this evidence of sir isaac's energy." "come and look over it," sir isaac persisted. mr. brumley and lady harman rose together. "one's enough to show him that," said sir isaac. "i was telling lady harman how much we missed her at lady viping's, sir isaac." "it was on account of the drains," sir isaac explained. "you can't--it's foolhardy to stay a day when the drains are wrong, dinners or no dinners." "you know _i_ was extremely sorry not to come to lady viping's. i hope you'll tell her. i wrote." but mr. brumley didn't remember clearly enough to make any use of that. "everybody naturally _is_ sorry on an occasion of that sort," said sir isaac. "but you come and see what we've done in that barn. in three weeks. they couldn't have got it together in three months ten years ago. it's--system." mr. brumley still tried to cling to lady harman. "have you been interested in this building?" he asked. "i still don't understand the system of the corridor," she said, rising a little belatedly to the occasion. "i _will_ come." sir isaac regarded her for a moment with a dubious expression and then began to explain the new method of building with large prepared units and shaped pieces of reinforced concrete instead of separate bricks that messrs. prothero & cuthbertson had organized and which had enabled him to create this artistic corridor so simply. it was a rather uncomfortable three-cornered conversation. sir isaac addressed his exposition exclusively to mr. brumley and mr. brumley made repeated ineffectual attempts to bring lady harman, and lady harman made repeated ineffectual attempts to bring herself, into a position in the conversation. their eyes met, the glow of mr. brumley's declarations remained with them, but neither dared risk any phrase that might arouse sir isaac's suspicions or escape his acuteness. and when they had gone through the new additions pretty thoroughly--the plumbers were still busy with the barn bathroom--sir isaac asked mr. brumley if there was anything more he would like to see. in the slight pause that ensued lady harman suggested tea. but tea gave them no opportunity of resuming their interrupted conversation, and as sir isaac's invincible determination to shadow his visitor until he was well off the premises became more and more unmistakable,--he made it quite ungraciously unmistakable,--mr. brumley's inventiveness failed. one thing came to him suddenly, but it led to nothing of any service to him. "but i heard you were dangerously ill, lady harman!" he cried. "lady beach-mandarin called here----" "but when?" asked lady harman, astonished over the tea-things. "but you _know_ she called!" said mr. brumley and looked in affected reproach at sir isaac. "i've not been ill at all!" "sir isaac told her." "told her i was ill!" "dangerously ill. that you couldn't bear to be disturbed." "but _when_, mr. brumley?" "three days ago." they both looked at sir isaac who was sitting on the music stool and eating a piece of tea-cake with a preoccupied air. he swallowed and then spoke thoughtfully--in a tone of detached observation. nothing but a slight reddening of the eyes betrayed any unusual feeling in him. "it's my opinion," he said, "that that old lady--lady beach-mandarin i mean--doesn't know what she's saying half the time. she says--oh! remarkable things. saying _that_ for example!" "but did she call on me?" "she called. i'm surprised you didn't hear. and she was all in a flurry for going on.... did you come down, mr. brumley, to see if lady harman was ill?" "that weighed with me." "well,--you see she isn't," said sir isaac and brushed a stray crumb from his coat.... mr. brumley was at last impelled gateward and sir isaac saw him as far as the high-road. "good-bye!" cried mr. brumley with excessive amiability. sir isaac with soundless lips made a good-bye like gesture. "and now," said sir isaac to himself with extreme bitterness, "now to see about getting a dog." "bull mastiff?" said sir isaac developing his idea as he went back to lady harman. "or perhaps a thoroughly vicious collie?" "how did that chap get in?" he demanded. "what had he got to say to you?" "he came in--to look at the garden," said lady harman. "and of course he wanted to know if i had been well--because of lady viping's party. and i suppose because of what you told lady beach-mandarin." sir isaac grunted doubtfully. he thought of snagsby and of all the instructions he had given snagsby. he turned about and went off swiftly and earnestly to find snagsby.... snagsby lied. but sir isaac was able to tell from the agitated way in which he was cleaning his perfectly clean silver at that unseasonable hour that the wretched man was lying. § quite a number of words came to the lips of mr. brumley as he went unwillingly along the pleasant country road that led from black strand to the railway station. but the word he ultimately said showed how strongly the habits of the gentlemanly _littérateur_ prevailed in him. it was the one inevitable word for his mood,--"baffled!" close upon its utterance came the weak irritation of the impotent man. "what the _devil_?" cried mr. brumley. some critical spirit within him asked him urgently why he was going to the station, what he thought he was doing, what he thought he had done, and what he thought he was going to do. to all of which questions mr. brumley perceived he had no adequate reply. earlier in the day he had been inspired by a vague yet splendid dream of large masterful liberations achieved. he had intended to be very disinterested, very noble, very firm, and so far as sir isaac was concerned, a trifle overbearing. you know now what he said and did. "of course if we could have talked for a little longer," he said. from the stormy dissatisfaction of his retreat this one small idea crystallized, that he had not talked enough without disturbance to lady harman. the thing he had to do was to talk to her some more. to go on with what he had been saying. that thought arrested his steps. on that hypothesis there was no reason whatever why he should go on to the station and london. instead----he stopped short, saw a convenient gate ahead, went to it, seated himself upon its topmost rail and attempted a calm survey of the situation. he had somehow to continue that conversation with lady harman. was it impossible to do that by going back to the front door of black strand? his instinct was against that course. he knew that if he went back now openly he would see nobody but sir isaac or his butler. he must therefore not go back openly. he must go round now and into the pine-woods at the back of black strand; thence he must watch the garden and find his opportunity of speaking to the imprisoned lady. there was something at once attractively romantic and repellently youthful about this course of action. mr. brumley looked at his watch, then he surveyed the blue clear sky overhead, with just one warm tinted wisp of cloud. it would be dark in an hour and it was probable that lady harman had already gone indoors for the day. might it be possible after dark to approach the house? no one surely knew the garden so well as he. of course this sort of thing is always going on in romances; in the stories of that last great survivor of the stevensonian tradition, h.b. marriot watson, the heroes are always creeping through woods, tapping at windows, and scaling house-walls, but mr. brumley as he sat on his gate became very sensible of his own extreme inexperience in such adventures. and yet anything seemed in his present mood better than going back to london. suppose he tried his luck! he knew of course the lie of the land about black strand very well indeed and his harmless literary social standing gave him a certain freedom of trespass. he dropped from his gate on the inner side and taking a bridle path through a pine-wood was presently out upon the moorland behind his former home. he struck the high-road that led past the staminal bread board and was just about to clamber over the barbed wire on his left and make his way through the trees to the crest that commanded the black strand garden when he perceived a man in a velveteen coat and gaiters strolling towards him. he decided not to leave the road until he was free from observation. the man was a stranger, an almost conventional gamekeeper, and he endorsed mr. brumley's remark upon the charmingness of the day with guarded want of enthusiasm. mr. brumley went on for some few minutes, then halted, assured himself that the stranger was well out of sight and returned at once towards the point where high-roads were to be left and adventure begun. but he was still some yards away when he became aware of that velveteen-coated figure approaching again. "damn!" said mr. brumley and slacked his eager paces. this time he expressed a view that the weather was extremely mild. "very," said the man in velveteen with a certain lack of respect in his manner. it was no good turning back again. mr. brumley went on slowly, affected to botanize, watched the man out of sight and immediately made a dash for the pine-woods, taking the barbed wire in a manner extremely detrimental to his left trouser leg. he made his way obliquely up through the trees to the crest from which he had so often surveyed the shining ponds of aleham. there he paused to peer back for that gamekeeper--whom he supposed in spite of reason to be stalking him--to recover his breath and to consider his further plans. the sunset was very fine that night, a great red sun was sinking towards acutely outlined hill-crests, the lower nearer distances were veiled in lavender mists and three of the ponds shone like the fragments of a shattered pink topaz. but mr. brumley had no eye for landscape.... about two hours after nightfall mr. brumley reached the railway station. his trousers and the elbow of his coat bore witness to a second transit of the barbed-wire fence in the darkness, he had manifestly walked into a boggy place and had some difficulty in recovering firm ground and he had also been sliding in a recumbent position down a bank of moist ferruginous sand. moreover he had cut the palm of his left hand. there was a new strange stationmaster who regarded him without that respect to which he had grown accustomed. he received the information that the winter train service had been altered and that he would have to wait forty-five minutes for the next train to london with the resignation of a man already chastened by misfortune and fatigue. he went into the waiting-room and after a vain search for the poker--the new stationmaster evidently kept it in a different place--sat down in front of an irritatingly dull fire banked up with slack, and nursed his damaged hand and meditated on his future plans. his plans were still exactly in the state in which they had been when sir isaac parted from him at the gate of black strand. they remained in the same state for two whole days. throughout all that distressing period his general intention of some magnificent intervention on behalf of lady harman remained unchanged, it produced a number of moving visions of flights at incredible speeds in (recklessly hired) motor-cars of colossal power,--most of the purchase money for black strand was still uninvested at his bank--of impassioned interviews with various people, of a divorce court with a hardened judge congratulating the manifestly quite formal co-respondent on the moral beauty of his behaviour, but it evolved no sort of concrete practicable detail upon which any kind of action might be taken. and during this period of indecision mr. brumley was hunted through london by a feverish unrest. when he was in his little flat in pont street he was urged to go to his club, when he got to his club he was urged to go anywhere else, he called on the most improbable people and as soon as possible fled forth again, he even went to the british museum and ordered out a lot of books on matrimonial law. long before that great machine had disgorged them for him he absconded and this neglected, this widowed pile of volumes still standing to his account only came back to his mind in the middle of the night suddenly and disturbingly while he was trying to remember the exact words he had used in his brief conversation with lady harman.... § two days after mr. brumley's visit susan burnet reached black strand. she too had been baffled for a while. for some week or more she couldn't discover the whereabouts of lady harman and lived in the profoundest perplexity. she had brought back her curtains to the putney house in a large but luggable bundle, they were all made and ready to put up, and she found the place closed and locked, in the charge of a caretaker whose primary duty it was to answer no questions. it needed several days of thought and amazement, and a vast amount of "i wonder," and "i just would like to know," before it occurred to susan that if she wrote to lady harman at the putney address the letter might be forwarded. and even then she almost wrecked the entire enterprise by mentioning the money, and it was by a quite exceptional inspiration that she thought after all it was wiser not to say that but to state that she had finished the curtains and done everything (underlined) that lady harman had desired. sir isaac read it and tossed it over to his wife. "make her send her bill," he remarked. whereupon lady harman set mrs. crumble in motion to bring susan down to black strand. this wasn't quite easy because as mrs. crumble pointed out they hadn't the slightest use for susan's curtains there, and lady harman had to find the morning light quite intolerable in her bedroom--she always slept with window wide open and curtains drawn back--to create a suitable demand for susan's services. but at last susan came, too humbly invisible for sir isaac's attention, and directly she found lady harman alone in the room with her, she produced a pawn ticket and twenty pounds. "i 'ad to give all sorts of particulars," she said. "it was a job. but i did it...." the day was big with opportunity, for sir isaac had been unable to conceal the fact that he had to spend the morning in london. he had gone up in the big car and his wife was alone, and so, with susan upstairs still deftly measuring for totally unnecessary hangings, lady harman was able to add a fur stole and a muff and some gloves to her tweed gardening costume, walk unchallenged into the garden and from the garden into the wood and up the hillside and over the crest and down to the high-road and past that great advertisement of staminal bread and so for four palpitating miles, to the railway station and the outer world. she had the good fortune to find a train imminent,--the twelve-seventeen. she took a first-class ticket for london and got into a compartment with another woman because she felt it would be safer. § lady harman reached miss alimony's flat at half-past three in the afternoon. she had lunched rather belatedly and uncomfortably in the waterloo refreshment room and she had found out that miss alimony was at home through the telephone. "i want to see you urgently," she said, and miss alimony received her in that spirit. she was hatless but she had a great cloud of dark fuzzy hair above the grey profundity of her eyes and she wore an artistic tea-gown that in spite of a certain looseness at neck and sleeve emphasized the fine lines of her admirable figure. her flat was furnished chiefly with books and rich oriental hangings and vast cushions and great bowls of scented flowers. on the mantel-shelf was the crystal that amused her lighter moments and above it hung a circular allegory by florence swinstead, very rich in colour, the awakening of woman, in a heavy gold frame. miss alimony conducted her guest to an armchair, knelt flexibly on the hearthrug before her, took up a small and elegant poker with a brass handle and a spear-shaped service end of iron and poked the fire. the service end came out from the handle and fell into the grate. "it always does that," said miss alimony charmingly. "but never mind." she warmed both hands at the blaze. "tell me all about it," she said, softly. lady harman felt she would rather have been told all about it. but perhaps that would follow. "you see," she said, "i find----my married life----" she halted. it _was_ very difficult to tell. "everyone," said agatha, giving a fine firelit profile, and remaining gravely thoughtful through a little pause. "do you mind," she asked abruptly, "if i smoke?" when she had completed her effect with a delicately flavoured cigarette, she encouraged lady harman to proceed. this lady harman did in a manner do. she said her husband left her no freedom of mind or movement, gave her no possession of herself, wanted to control her reading and thinking. "he insists----" she said. "yes," said miss agatha sternly blowing aside her cigarette smoke. "they all insist." "he insists," said lady harman, "on seeing all my letters, choosing all my friends. i have no control over my house or my servants, no money except what he gives me." "in fact you are property." "i'm simply property." "a harem of one. and all _that_ is within the provisions of the law!" "how any woman can marry!" said miss agatha, after a little interval. "i sometimes think that is where the true strike of the sex ought to begin. if none of us married! if we said all of us, 'no,--definitely--we refuse this bargain! it is a man-made contract. we have had no voice in it. we decline.' perhaps it will come to that. and i knew that you, you with that quiet beautiful penetration in your eyes would come to see it like that. the first task, after the vote is won, will be the revision of that contract. the very first task of our women statesmen...." she ceased and revived her smouldering cigarette and mused blinking through the smoke. she seemed for a time almost lost to the presence of her guest in a great daydream of womanstatecraft. "and so," she said, "you've come, as they all come,--to join us." "_well_," said lady harman in a tone that made agatha turn eyes of surprise upon her. "of course," continued lady harman, "i suppose--i shall join you; but as a matter of fact you see, what i've done to-day has been to come right away.... you see i am still in my garden tweeds.... there it was down there, a sort of stale mate...." agatha sat up on her heels. "but my dear!" she said, "you don't mean you've run away?" "yes,--i've run away." "but--run away!" "i sold a ring and got some money and here i am!" "but--what are you going to do?" "i don't know. i thought you perhaps--might advise." "but--a man like your husband! he'll pursue you!" "if he knows where i am, he will," said lady harman. "he'll make a scandal. my dear! are you wise? tell me, tell me exactly, _why_ have you run away? i didn't understand at all--that you had run away." "because," began lady harman and flushed hotly. "it was impossible," she said. miss alimony regarded her deeply. "i wonder," she said. "i feel," said lady harman, "if i stayed, if i gave in----i mean after--after i had once--rebelled. then i should just be--a wife--ruled, ordered----" "it wasn't your place to give in," said miss alimony and added one of those parliament touches that creep more and more into feminine phraseology; "i agree to that--_nemine contradicente_. but--i _wonder_...." she began a second cigarette and thought in profile again. "i think, perhaps, i haven't explained, clearly, how things are," said lady harman, and commenced a rather more explicit statement of her case. she felt she had not conveyed and she wanted to convey to miss alimony that her rebellion was not simply a desire for personal freedom and autonomy, that she desired these things because she was becoming more and more aware of large affairs outside her home life in which she ought to be not simply interested but concerned, that she had been not merely watching the workings of the business that made her wealthy, but reading books about socialism, about social welfare that had stirred her profoundly.... "but he won't even allow me to know of such things," she said.... miss alimony listened a little abstractedly. suddenly she interrupted. "tell me," she said, "one thing.... i confess," she explained, "i've no business to ask. but if i'm to advise----if my advice is to be worth anything...." "yes?" asked lady harman. "is there----is there someone else?" "someone else?" lady harman was crimson. "on _your_ side!" "someone else on my side?" "i mean--someone. a man perhaps? some man that you care for? more than you do for your husband?..." "_i can't imagine_," whispered lady harman, "_anything_----" and left her sentence unfinished. her breath had gone. her indignation was profound. "then i can't understand why you should find it so important to come away." lady harman could offer no elucidation. "you see," said miss alimony, with an air of expert knowledge, "our case against our opponents is just exactly their great case against us. they say to us when we ask for the vote, 'the woman's place is the home.' 'precisely,' we answer, 'the woman's place _is_ the home. _give_ us our homes!' now _your_ place is your home--with your children. that's where you have to fight your battle. running away--for you it's simply running away." "but----if i stay i shall be beaten." lady harman surveyed her hostess with a certain dismay. "do you understand, agatha? i _can't_ go back." "but my dear! what else can you do? what had you thought?" "you see," said lady harman, after a little struggle with that childish quality in her nerves that might, if it wasn't controlled, make her eyes brim. "you see, i didn't expect you quite to take this view. i thought perhaps you might be disposed----if i could have stayed with you here, only for a little time, i could have got some work or something----" "it's so dreadful," said miss alimony, sitting far back with the relaxation of infinite regrets. "it's dreadful." "of course if you don't see it as i do----" "i can't," said miss alimony. "i can't." she turned suddenly upon her visitor and grasped her knees with her shapely hands. "oh let me implore you! don't run away. please for my sake, for all our sakes, for the sake of womanhood, don't run away! stay at your post. you mustn't run away. you must _not_. if you do, you admit everything. everything. you must fight in your home. it's _your_ home. that is the great principle you must grasp,--it's not his. it's there your duty lies. and there are your children--_your_ children, your little ones! think if you go--there may be a fearful fuss--proceedings. lawyers--a search. very probably he will take all sorts of proceedings. it will be a matrimonial case. how can i be associated with that? we mustn't mix up women's freedom with matrimonial cases. impossible! we _dare_ not! a woman leaving her husband! think of the weapon it gives our enemies. if once other things complicate the vote,--the vote is lost. after all our self-denial, after all our sacrifices.... you see! don't you _see_?... "_fight!_" she summarized after an eloquent interval. "you mean," said lady harman,--"you think i ought to go back." miss alimony paused to get her full effect. "_yes_," she said in a profound whisper and endorsed it, "oh so much so!--yes." "now?" "instantly." for an interval neither lady spoke. it was the visitor at last who broke the tension. "do you think," she asked in a small voice and with the hesitation of one whom no refusal can surprise; "you could give me a cup of tea?" miss alimony rose with a sigh and a slow unfolding rustle. "i forgot," she said. "my little maid is out." lady harman left alone sat for a time staring at the fire with her eyes rather wide and her eyebrows raised as though she mutely confided to it her infinite astonishment. this was the last thing she had expected. she would have to go to some hotel. can a woman stay alone at an hotel? her heart sank. inflexible forces seemed to be pointing her back to home--and sir isaac. he would be a very triumphant sir isaac, and she'd not have much heart left in her.... "i _won't_ go back," she whispered to herself. "whatever happens i _won't_ go back...." then she became aware of the evening newspaper miss alimony had been reading. the headline, "suffrage raid on regent street," caught her eye. a queer little idea came into her head. it grew with tremendous rapidity. she put out a hand and took up the paper and read. she had plenty of time to read because her hostess not only got the tea herself but went during that process to her bedroom and put on one of those hats that have contributed so much to remove the stigma of dowdiness from the suffrage cause, as an outward and visible sign that she was presently ceasing to be at home.... lady harman found an odd fact in the report before her. "one of the most difficult things to buy at the present time in the west end of london," it ran, "is a hammer...." then a little further: "the magistrate said it was impossible to make discriminations in this affair. all the defendants must have a month's imprisonment...." when miss alimony returned lady harman put down the paper almost guiltily. afterwards miss alimony recalled that guilty start, and the still more guilty start that had happened, when presently she went out of the room again and returned with a lamp, for the winter twilight was upon them. afterwards, too, she was to learn what had become of the service end of her small poker, the little iron club, which she missed almost as soon as lady harman had gone.... lady harman had taken that grubby but convenient little instrument and hidden it in her muff, and she had gone straight out of miss alimony's flat to the post office at the corner of jago street, and there, with one simple effective impact, had smashed a ground-glass window, the property of his majesty king george the fifth. and having done so, she had called the attention of a youthful policeman, fresh from yorkshire, to her offence, and after a slight struggle with his incredulity and a visit to the window in question, had escorted him to the south hampsmith police-station, and had there made him charge her. and on the way she explained to him with a newfound lucidity why it was that women should have votes. and all this she did from the moment of percussion onward, in a mood of exaltation entirely strange to her, but, as she was astonished to find, by no means disagreeable. she found afterwards that she only remembered very indistinctly her selection of the window and her preparations for the fatal blow, but that the effect of the actual breakage remained extraordinarily vivid upon her memory. she saw with extreme distinctness both as it was before and after the breakage, first as a rather irregular grey surface, shining in the oblique light of a street lamp, and giving pale phantom reflections of things in the street, and then as it was after her blow. it was all visual impression in her memory; she could not recollect afterwards if there had been any noise at all. where there had been nothing but a milky dinginess a thin-armed, irregular star had flashed into being, and a large triangular piece at its centre, after what seemed an interminable indecision, had slid, first covertly downward, and then fallen forward at her feet and shivered into a hundred fragments.... lady harman realized that a tremendous thing had been done--irrevocably. she stared at her achievement open-mouthed. the creative lump of iron dropped from her hand. she had a momentary doubt whether she had really wanted to break that window at all; and then she understood that this business had to be seen through, and seen through with neatness and dignity; and that wisp of regret vanished absolutely in her concentration upon these immediate needs. § some day, when the arts of the writer and illustrator are more closely blended than they are to-day, it will be possible to tell of all that followed this blow, with an approach to its actual effect. here there should stand a page showing simply and plainly the lower half of the window of the jago street post office, a dark, rather grimy pane, reflecting the light of a street lamp--and _broken_. below the pane would come a band of evilly painted woodwork, a corner of letter-box, a foot or so of brickwork, and then the pavement with a dropped lump of iron. that would be the sole content of this page, and the next page would be the same, but very slightly fainter, and across it would be printed a dim sentence or so of explanation. the page following that would show the same picture again, but now several lines of type would be visible, and then, as one turned over, the smashed window would fade a little, and the printed narrative, still darkened and dominated by it, would nevertheless resume. one would read on how lady harman returned to convince the incredulous young yorkshireman of her feat, how a man with a barrow-load of bananas volunteered comments, and how she went in custody, but with the extremest dignity, to the police-station. then, with some difficulty, because that imposed picture would still prevail over the letterpress, and because it would be in small type, one would learn how she was bailed out by lady beach-mandarin, who was clearly the woman she ought to have gone to in the first place, and who gave up a dinner with a duchess to entertain her, and how sir isaac, being too torn by his feelings to come near her spent the evening in a frantic attempt to keep the whole business out of the papers. he could not manage it. the magistrate was friendly next morning, but inelegant in his friendly expedients; he remanded lady harman until her mental condition could be inquired into, but among her fellow-defendants--there had been quite an epidemic of window-smashing that evening--lady harman shone pre-eminently sane. she said she had broken this window because she was assured that nothing would convince people of the great dissatisfaction of women with their conditions except such desperate acts, and when she was reminded of her four daughters she said it was precisely the thought of how they too would grow up to womanhood that had made her strike her blow. the statements were rather the outcome of her evening with lady beach-mandarin than her own unaided discoveries, but she had honestly assimilated them, and she expressed them with a certain simple dignity. sir isaac made a pathetic appearance before the court, and lady harman was shocked to see how worn he was with distress at her scandalous behaviour. he looked a broken man. that curious sense of personal responsibility, which had slumbered throughout the black strand struggle, came back to her in a flood, and she had to grip the edge of the dock tightly to maintain her self-control. unaccustomed as he was to public speaking, sir isaac said in a low, sorrow-laden voice, he had provided himself with a written statement dissociating himself from the views his wife's rash action might seem to imply, and expressing his own opinions upon woman's suffrage and the relations of the sexes generally, with especial reference to contemporary literature. he had been writing it most of the night. he was not, however, permitted to read this, and he then made an unstudied appeal for the consideration and mercy of the court. he said lady harman had always been a good mother and a faithful wife; she had been influenced by misleading people and bad books and publications, the true significance of which she did not understand, and if only the court would regard this first offence leniently he was ready to take his wife away and give any guarantee that might be specified that it should not recur. the magistrate was sympathetic and kindly, but he pointed out that this window-breaking had to be stamped out, and that it could only be stamped out by refusing any such exception as sir isaac desired. and so sir isaac left the court widowed for a month, a married man without a wife, and terribly distressed. all this and more one might tell in detail, and how she went to her cell, and the long tedium of her imprisonment, and how deeply snagsby felt the disgrace, and how miss alimony claimed her as a convert to the magic of her persuasions, and many such matters--there is no real restraint upon a novelist fully resolved to be english and gothic and unclassical except obscure and inexplicable instincts. but these obscure and inexplicable instincts are at times imperative, and on this occasion they insist that here must come a break, a pause, in the presence of this radiating gap in the postmaster-general's glass, and the phenomenon of this gentle and beautiful lady, the mother of four children, grasping in her gloved hand, and with a certain amateurishness, a lumpish poker-end of iron. we make the pause by ending the chapter here and by resuming the story at a fresh point--with an account of various curious phases in the mental development of mr. brumley. chapter the ninth mr. brumley is troubled by difficult ideas § then as that picture of a post office pane, smashed and with a large hole knocked clean through it, fades at last upon the reader's consciousness, let another and a kindred spectacle replace it. it is the carefully cleaned and cherished window of mr. brumley's mind, square and tidy and as it were "frosted" against an excess of light, and in that also we have now to record the most jagged all and devastating fractures. little did mr. brumley reckon when first he looked up from his laces at black strand, how completely that pretty young woman in the dark furs was destined to shatter all the assumptions that had served his life. but you have already had occasion to remark a change in mr. brumley's bearing and attitude that carries him far from the kindly and humorous conservatism of his earlier work. you have shared lady harman's astonishment at the ardour of his few stolen words in the garden, an astonishment that not only grew but flowered in the silences of her captivity, and you know something of the romantic impulses, more at least than she did, that gave his appearance at the little local railway station so belated and so disreputable a flavour. in the chilly ill-flavoured solitude of her prison cell and with a mind quickened by meagre and distasteful fare, lady harman had ample leisure to reflect upon many things, she had already fully acquainted herself with the greater proportion of mr. brumley's published works, and she found the utmost difficulty in reconciling the flushed impassioned quality of his few words of appeal, with the moral assumptions of his published opinions. on the whole she was inclined to think that her memory had a little distorted what he had said. in this however she was mistaken; mr. brumley had really been proposing an elopement and he was now entirely preoccupied with the idea of rescuing, obtaining and possessing lady harman for himself as soon as the law released her. one may doubt whether this extensive change from a humorous conservatism to a primitive and dangerous romanticism is to be ascribed entirely to the personal charm, great as it no doubt was, of lady harman; rather did her tall soft dark presence come to release a long accumulating store of discontent and unrest beneath the polished surfaces of mr. brumley's mind. things had been stirring in him for some time; the latter euphemia books had lacked much of the freshness of their precursors and he had found it increasingly hard, he knew not why, to keep up the lightness, the geniality, the friendly badinage of successful and accepted things, the sunny disregard of the grim and unamiable aspects of existence, that were the essential merits of that optimistic period of our literature in which mr. brumley had begun his career. with every justification in the world mr. brumley had set out to be an optimist, even in the _granta_ his work had been distinguished by its gay yet steadfast superficiality, and his early success, his rapid popularity, had done much to turn this early disposition into a professional attitude. he had determined that for all his life he would write for comfortable untroubled people in the character of a light-spirited, comfortable, untroubled person, and that each year should have its book of connubial humour, its travel in picturesque places, its fun and its sunshine, like roses budding in succession on a stem. he did his utmost to conceal from himself the melancholy realization that the third and the fourth roses were far less wonderful than the first and the second, and that by continuing the descending series a rose might be attained at last that was almost unattractive, but he was already beginning to suspect that he was getting less animated and a little irritable when euphemia very gently and gracefully but very firmly and rather enigmatically died, and after an interval of tender and tenderly expressed regrets he found himself, in spite of the most strenuous efforts to keep bright and kindly and optimistic in the best style, dull and getting duller--he could disguise the thing no longer. and he weighed more. six--eight--eleven pounds more. he took a flat in london, dined and lunched out lightly but frequently, sought the sympathetic friendship of several charming ladies, and involved himself deeply in the affairs of the academic committee. indeed he made a quite valiant struggle to feel that optimism was just where it always had been and everything all right and very bright with him and with the world about him. he did not go under without a struggle. but as max beerbohm's caricature--the one i mean--brought out all too plainly, there was in his very animation, something of the alert liveliness of the hunted man. do what he would he had a terrible irrational feeling that things, as yet scarce imagined things, were after him and would have him. even as he makes his point, even as he gesticulates airily, with his rather distinctively north european nose beerbohmically enlarged and his sensitive nostril in the air, he seems to be looking at something he does not want to look at, something conceivably pursuing, out of the corner of his eye. the thing that was assailing mr. brumley and making his old established humour and tenderness seem dull and opaque and giving this new uneasy quality to his expression was of course precisely the thing that sir isaac meant when he talked about "idees" and their disturbing influence upon all the once assured tranquillities and predominances of putney life. it was criticism breaking bounds. as a basis and substance for the tissue of whimsically expressed happiness and confident appreciation of the good things of life, which mr. brumley had set before himself as his agreeable--and it was to be hoped popular and profitable--life-task, certain assumptions had been necessary. they were assumptions he had been very willing to make and which were being made in the most exemplary way by the writers who were succeeding all about him at the commencement of his career. and these assumptions had had such an air then of being quite trustworthy, as being certain to wash and wear! already nowadays it is difficult to get them stated; they have become incredible while still too near to justify the incredibility that attaches to history. it was assumed, for example, that in the institutions, customs and culture of the middle victorian period, humanity had, so far as the broad lines of things are concerned, achieved its goal. there were of course still bad men and women--individually--and classes one had to recognize as "lower," but all the main things were right, general ideas were right; the law was right, institutions were right, consols and british railway debentures were right and were going to keep right for ever. the abolition of slavery in america had been the last great act which had inaugurated this millennium. except for individual instances the tragic intensities of life were over now and done with; there was no more need for heroes and martyrs; for the generality of humanity the phase of genial comedy had begun. there might be improvements and refinements ahead, but social, political and economic arrangement were now in their main outlines settled for good and all; nothing better was possible and it was the agreeable task of the artist and the man of letters to assist and celebrate this establishment. there was to be much editing of shakespear and charles lamb, much delightful humour and costume romance, and an academy of refined fine writers would presently establish belles-lettres on the reputable official basis, write _finis_ to creative force and undertake the task of stereotyping the language. literature was to have its once terrible ferments reduced to the quality of a helpful pepsin. ideas were dead--or domesticated. the last wild idea, in an impoverished and pitiful condition, had been hunted down and killed in the mobbing of, "the woman who did." for a little time the world did actually watch a phase of english writing that dared nothing, penetrated nothing, suppressed everything and aspired at most to charm, creep like a transitory patch of sunlight across a storm-rent universe. and vanish.... at no time was it a perfectly easy task to pretend that the crazy makeshifts of our legal and political systems, the staggering accidents of economic relationship, the festering disorder of contemporary philosophy and religious teaching, the cruel and stupid bed of king og that is our last word in sexual adjustment, really constituted a noble and enduring sanity, and it became less and less so with the acute disillusionments that arose out of the boer war. the first decade of the twentieth century was for the english a decade of badly sprained optimism. our empire was nearly beaten by a handful of farmers amidst the jeering contempt of the whole world--and we felt it acutely for several years. we began to question ourselves. mr. brumley found his gay but entirely respectable irresponsibility harder and harder to keep up as that decade wore on. and close upon the south african trouble came that extraordinary new discontent of women with a woman's lot which we have been observing as it reached and troubled the life of lady harman. women who had hitherto so passively made the bulk of that reading public which sustained mr. brumley and his kind--they wanted something else! and behind and beneath these immediately disconcerting things still more sinister hintings and questioning were beginning to pluck at contentment. in nobody would have dreamt of asking and in even mr. brumley was asking, "are things going on much longer?" a hundred little incidents conspired to suggest that a christianity that had, to put it mildly, shirked the darwinian challenge, had no longer the palliating influence demanded of a national religion, and that down there in the deep levels of labour where they built railways to carry mr. brumley's food and earn him dividends, where they made engines and instruments and textiles and drains for his little needs, there was a new, less bounded discontent, a grimmer spirit, something that one tried in vain to believe was only the work of "agitators," something that was to be pacified no longer by the thin pretences of liberalism, something that might lead ultimately--optimism scarcely dared to ask whither.... mr. brumley did his best to resist the influence of these darkening ideas. he tried to keep it up that everything was going well and that most of these shadows and complaints were the mischief of a few incurably restless personalities. he tried to keep it up that to belong to the working class was a thoroughly jolly thing--for those who were used to it. he declared that all who wanted to alter our laws or our ideas about property or our methods of production were envious and base and all who wanted any change between the sexes, foolish or vicious. he tried to go on disposing of socialists, agitators, feminists, women's suffragists, educationists and every sort of reformer with a good-humoured contempt. and he found an increasing difficulty in keeping his contempt sufficiently good-humoured. instead of laughing down at folly and failure, he had moments when he felt that he was rather laughing up--a little wryly--at monstrous things impending. and since ideas are things of atmosphere and the spirit, insidious wolves of the soul, they crept up to him and gnawed the insides out of him even as he posed as their manful antagonist. insensibly mr. brumley moved with his times. it is the necessary first phase in the break-up of any system of unsound assumptions that a number of its votaries should presently set about padding its cutting corners and relieving the harsh pressure of its injustices by exuberances of humour and sentimentality. mr. brumley became charitable and romantic,--orthodox still but charitable and romantic. he was all for smashing with the generalization, but now in the particular instance he was more and more for forgiveness. one finds creeping into the later euphemia books a bret-harte-like doctrine that a great number of bad women are really good and a persuasion in the 'raffles' key that a large proportion of criminals are really very picturesque and admirable fellows. one wonders how far mr. brumley's less ostensible life was softening in harmony with this exterior change, this tender twilight of principle. he wouldn't as yet face the sterner fact that most people who are condemned by society, whether they are condemned justly or not, are by the very gregariousness of man's nature debased, and that a law or custom that stamps you as bad makes you bad. a great state should have high and humane and considerate laws nobly planned, nobly administered and needing none of these shabby little qualifications _sotto voce_. to find goodness in the sinner and justification in the outcast is to condemn the law, but as yet mr. brumley's heart failed where his intelligence pointed towards that conclusion. he hadn't the courage to revise his assumptions about right and wrong to that extent; he just allowed them to get soft and sloppy. he waded, where there should be firm ground. he waded toward wallowing. this is a perilous way of living and the sad little end of euphemia, flushed and coughing, left him no doubt in many ways still more exposed to the temptations of the sentimental byway and the emotional gloss. happily this is a book about lady harman and not an exhaustive monograph upon mr. brumley. we will at least leave him the refuge of a few shadows. occasionally he would write an important signed review for the _twentieth century_ or the _hebdomadal review_, and on one such occasion he took in hand several studies of contemporary conditions by various 'new witnesses,' 'young liberals,' _new age_ rebels and associated insurgent authors. he intended to be rather kindly with them, rather disillusioned, quite sympathetic but essentially conventional and conservative and sane. he sat at a little desk near the drooping venus, under the benediction of euphemia's posthumous rose, and turned over the pages of one of the least familiar of the group. the stuff was written with a crude force that at times became almost distinguished, but with a bitterness that he felt he must reprove. and suddenly he came upon a passionate tirade against the present period. it made him nibble softly with his lips at the top of his fountain pen as he read. "we live," said the writer, "in a second byzantine age, in one of those multitudinous accumulations of secondary interests, of secondary activities and conventions and colossal intricate insignificances, that lie like dust heaps in the path of the historian. the true history of such periods is written in bank books and cheque counterfoils and burnt to save individual reputations; it sneaks along under a thousand pretences, it finds its molelike food and safety in the dirt; its outer forms remain for posterity, a huge débris of unfathomable riddles." "hm!" said mr. brumley. "he slings it out. and what's this?" "a civilization arrested and decayed, waiting through long inglorious ages of unscheduled crime, unchallenged social injustice, senseless luxury, mercenary politics and universal vulgarity and weakness, for the long overdue scavenging of the turk." "i wonder where the children pick up such language," whispered mr. brumley with a smile. but presently he had pushed the book away and was thinking over this novel and unpleasant idea that perhaps after all his age didn't matter as some ages have mattered and as he had hitherto always supposed it did matter. byzantine, with the gold of life stolen and the swans changed to geese? of course always there had been a certain qualification upon heroes, even cæsar had needed a wreath, but at any rate the age of cæsar had mattered. kings no doubt might be more kingly and the issues of life plainer and nobler, but this had been true of every age. he tried to weigh values against values, our past against our present, temperately and sanely. our art might perhaps be keener for beauty than it seemed to be, but still--it flourished. and our science at least was wonderful--wonderful. there certainly this young detractor of existing things went astray. what was there in byzantium to parallel with the electric light, the electric tram, wireless telegraphy, aseptic surgery? of course this about "unchallenged social injustice" was nonsense. rant. why! we were challenging social injustice at every general election--plainly and openly. and crime! what could the man mean about unscheduled crime? mere words! there was of course a good deal of luxury, but not _wicked_ luxury, and to compare our high-minded and constructive politics with the mere conflict of unscrupulous adventurers about that semi-oriental throne! it was nonsense! "this young man must be spanked," said mr. brumley and, throwing aside an open illustrated paper in which a full-length portrait of sir edward carson faced a picture of the king and queen in their robes sitting side by side under a canopy at the coronation durbar, he prepared himself to write in an extremely salutary manner about the follies of the younger generation, and incidentally to justify his period and his professional contentment. § one is reminded of those houses into which the white ants have eaten their way; outwardly still fair and solid, they crumble at the touch of a hand. and now you will begin to understand those changes of bearing that so perplexed lady harman, that sudden insurgence of flushed half-furtive passion in the garden, through the thin pretences of a liberal friendship. his hollow honour had been gripped and had given way. he had begun so well. at first lady harman had occupied his mind in the properest way. she was another man's wife and sacred--according to all honourable standards, and what he wanted was merely to see more of her, talk to her, interest her in himself, share whatever was available outside her connubial obligations,--and think as little of sir isaac as possible. how quickly the imaginative temperament of mr. brumley enlarged that to include a critical hostility to sir isaac, we have already recorded. lady harman was no longer simply a charming, suppressed young wife, crying out for attentive development; she became an ill-treated beautiful woman--misunderstood. still scrupulously respecting his own standards, mr. brumley embarked upon the dangerous business of inventing just how sir isaac might be outraging them, and once his imagination had started to hunt in that field, it speedily brought in enough matter for a fine state of moral indignation, a white heat of not altogether justifiable chivalry. assisted by lady beach-mandarin mr. brumley had soon converted the little millionaire into a matrimonial ogre to keep an anxious lover very painfully awake at nights. because by that time and quite insensibly he had become an anxious lover--with all the gaps in the thread of realities that would have made him that, quite generously filled up from the world of reverie. moral indignation is jealousy with a halo. it is the peculiar snare of the perplexed orthodox, and soon mr. brumley was in a state of nearly unendurable moral indignation with sir isaac for a hundred exaggerations of what he was and of what conceivably he might have done to his silent yet manifestly unsuitably mated wife. and now that romantic streak which is as i have said the first certain symptom of decay in a system of moral assumptions began to show itself in mr. brumley's thoughts and conversation. "a marriage like that," said mr. brumley to lady beach-mandarin, "isn't a marriage. it flouts the true ideal of marriage. it's slavery--following a kidnapping...." but this is a wide step from the happy optimism of the cambridge days. what becomes of the sanctity of marriage and the institution of the family when respectable gentlemen talk of something called "true marriage," as non-existent in relation to a lady who is already the mother of four children? i record this lapsing of mr. brumley into romanticism without either sympathy or mitigation. the children, it presently became apparent, were not "true" children. "forced upon her," said mr. brumley. "it makes one ill to think of it!" it certainly very nearly made him ill. and as if these exercises in distinction had inflamed his conscience mr. brumley wrote two articles in the _hebdomadal_ denouncing impure literature, decadence, immorality, various recent scandalous instances, and the suffragettes, declaring that woman's place was the home and that "in a pure and exalted monogamy lies the sole unitary basis for a civilized state." the most remarkable thing about this article is an omission. that sir isaac's monogamy with any other instances that might be akin to it was not pure and exalted, and that it needed--shall we call it readjustment? is a view that in this article mr. brumley conspicuously doesn't display. it's as if for a moment, pen in hand, he had eddied back to his old absolute positions.... in a very little while mr. brumley and lady beach-mandarin had almost persuaded each other that sir isaac was applying physical torture to his proudly silent wife, and mr. brumley was no longer dreaming and glancing at but steadily facing the possibility of a pure-minded and handsomely done elopement to "free" lady harman, that would be followed in due course by a marriage, a "true marriage" on a level of understanding far above any ordinary respectable wedding, amidst universal sympathy and admiration and the presence of all the very best people. in these anticipations he did rather remarkably overlook the absence of any sign of participation on the part of lady harman in his own impassioned personal feelings, and he overlooked still more remarkably as possible objections to his line of conduct, millicent, florence, annette and baby. these omissions no doubt simplified but also greatly falsified his outlook. this proposal that all the best people shall applaud the higher rightness that was to be revealed in his projected elopement, is in the very essence of the romantic attitude. all other people are still to remain under the law. there is to be nothing revolutionary. but with exceptional persons under exceptional conditions---- mr. brumley stated his case over and over again to his utmost satisfaction, and always at great moral altitudes and with a kind of transcendent orthodoxy. the more difficult any aspect of the affair appeared from the orthodox standpoint the more valiantly mr. brumley soared; if it came to his living with lady harman for a time before they could be properly married amidst picturesque foreign scenery in a little _casa_ by the side of a stream, then the water in that stream was to be quite the purest water conceivable and the scenery and associations as morally faultless as a view that had passed the exacting requirements of mr. john ruskin. and mr. brumley was very clear in his mind that what he proposed to do was entirely different in quality even if it was similar in form from anything that anyone else had ever done who had ever before made a scandal or appeared in the divorce court. this is always the way in such cases--always. the scandal was to be a noble scandal, a proud scandal, one of those instances of heroical love that turn aside misdemeanours--admittedly misdemeanours--into edifying marvels. this was the state of mind to which mr. brumley had attained when he made his ineffectual raid upon black strand, and you will remark about it, if you are interested in the changes in people's ideas that are going on to-day, that although he was prepared to make the most extensive glosses in this particular instance upon the commonly accepted rules of what is right and proper, he was not for a moment prepared to accord the terrible gift of an independent responsibility to lady harman. in that direction lay regions that mr. brumley had still to explore. lady harman he considered was married wrongly and disastrously and this he held to be essentially the fault of sir isaac--with perhaps some slight blame attaching to lady harman's mother. the only path of escape he could conceive as yet for lady harman lay through the chivalry of some other man. that a woman could possibly rebel against one man without the sympathy and moral maintenance of another was still outside the range of mr. brumley's understanding. it is still outside the range of most men's understandings--and of a great many women's. if he generalized at all from these persuasions it was in the direction that in the interest of "true marriage" there should be greater facilities for divorce and also a kind of respectable-ization of divorce. then these "false marriages" might be rectified without suffering. the reasons for divorce he felt should be extended to include things not generally reprehensible, and chivalrous people coming into court should be protected from the indelicate publicity of free reporting.... § mr. brumley was still contemplating rather inconclusively the possibility of a long and intimate talk leading up to and preparing for an elopement with lady harman, when he read of her jago street escapade and of her impending appearance at the south hampsmith police court. he was astonished. the more he contemplated the thing the greater became his astonishment. even at the first impact he realized that the line she had taken wasn't quite in the picture with the line he had proposed for her. he felt--left out. he felt as though a door had slammed between himself and affairs to which he had supposed himself essential. he could not understand why she had done this thing instead of coming straight to his flat and making use of all that chivalrous service she surely knew was at her disposal. this self-reliance, this direct dealing with the world, seemed to him, even in the height of his concern, unwomanly, a deeper injury to his own abandoned assumptions than any he had contemplated. he felt it needed explanation, and he hurried to secure an elbowed unsavoury corner in the back of the court in order to hear her defence. he had to wait through long stuffy spaces of time before she appeared. there were half a dozen other window smashers,--plain or at least untidy-looking young women. the magistrate told them they were silly and the soul of mr. brumley acquiesced. one tried to make a speech, and it was such a poor speech--squeaky.... when at last lady harman entered the box--the strangest place it seemed for her--he tried to emerge from the jostling crowd about him into visibility, to catch her eye, to give her the support of his devoted presence. twice at least she glanced in his direction but gave no sign of seeing him. he was surprised that she could look without fear or detestation, indeed once with a gesture of solicitude, at sir isaac. she was astonishingly serene. there seemed to be just the faintest shadow of a smile about her lips as the stipendiary explained the impossibility of giving her anything less than a month. an uneasy object like the smashed remains of a colossal box of bonbons that was riding out a gale, down in the middle of the court, turned round at last completely and revealed itself as the hat of lady beach-mandarin, but though mr. brumley waved his hand he could not even make that lady aware of his presence. a powerful rude criminal-looking man who stood in front of him and smelt grossly of stables, would not give him a fair chance of showing himself, and developed a strong personal hostility to him on account of his alleged "shoving about." it would not he felt be of the slightest help to lady harman for him to involve himself in a personal struggle with a powerful and powerfully flavoured criminal. it was all very dreadful. after the proceedings were over and lady harman had been led away into captivity, he went out and took a taxi in an agitated distraught manner to lady beach-mandarin's house. "she meant," said lady beach-mandarin, "to have a month's holiday from him and think things out. and she's got it." perhaps that was it. mr. brumley could not tell, and he spent some days in that state of perplexity which, like the weariness that heralds a cold, marks so often the onset of a new series of ideas.... why hadn't she come to him? had he after all rather overloaded his memory of her real self with imaginative accessories? had she really understood what he had been saying to her in the garden? afterwards when he had met her eyes as he and she went over the new wing with sir isaac she had so manifestly--and, when one came to think of it, so tranquilly--seemed to understand.... it was such an extraordinary thing to go smashing a window like that--when there he was at hand ready to help her. she knew his address? did she? for a moment mr. brumley cherished that wild surmise. was that perhaps it? but surely she could have looked in the telephone directory or who's who.... but if that was the truth of the matter she would have looked and behaved differently in court--quite differently. she would have been looking for him. she would have seen him.... it was queer too to recall what she had said in court about her daughters.... could it be, he had a frightful qualm, that after all--he wasn't the man? how little he knew of her really.... "this wretched agitation," said mr. brumley, trying to flounder away anyhow from these disconcerting riddles; "it seems to unbalance them all." but he found it impossible to believe that lady harman was seriously unbalanced. § and if mr. brumley's system of romantically distorted moral assumptions was shattered by lady harman's impersonal blow at a post office window when all the rules seemed to require her to fly from the oppression of one man to the chivalry of another, what words can convey the devastating effect upon him of her conduct after her release? to that crisis he had been looking forward continually; to record the variety of his expectations would fill a large volume, but throughout them all prevailed one general idea, that when she came out of prison her struggle with her husband would be resumed, and that this would give mr. brumley such extraordinary opportunities of displaying his devotion that her response, which he was now beginning to suspect might be more reluctant than his earlier dreams had assumed, was ultimately inevitable. in all these dreams and meditations that response figured as the crown. he had to win and possess lady harman. the idea had taken hold of his busy yet rather pointless life, had become his directing object. he was full of schemes for presently arresting and captivating her imagination. he was already convinced that she cared for him; he had to inflame interest and fan liking into the fire of passion. and with a mind so occupied, mr. brumley wrote this and that and went about his affairs. he spent two days and a night at margate visiting his son at his preparatory school, and he found much material for musing in the question of just how the high romantic affairs ahead of him would affect this delicately intelligent boy. for a time perhaps he might misjudge his father.... he spent a week-end with lady viping and stayed on until wednesday and then he came back to london. his plans were still unformed when the day came for lady harman's release, and indeed beyond an idea that he would have her met at the prison gates by an enormous bunch of snowy-white and crimson chrysanthemums he had nothing really concrete at all in his mind. she had, however, been released stealthily a day before her time, and this is what she had done. she had asked that--of all improbable people!--sir isaac's mother should meet her, the biggest car had come to the prison gates, and she had gone straight down with mrs. harman to her husband--who had taken a chill and was in bed drinking contrexéville water--at black strand. as these facts shaped themselves in answer to the blanched inquiries of mr. brumley his amazement grew. he began to realize that there must have been a correspondence during her incarceration, that all sorts of things had been happening while he had been dreaming, and when he went round to lady beach-mandarin, who was just packing up to be the life and soul of a winter-sports party at a nice non-lunnite hotel at lenzerheide, he learnt particulars that chilled him to the marrow. "they've made it up," said lady beach-mandarin. "but how?" gasped mr. brumley, with his soul in infinite distress. "but how?" "the ogre, it seems, has come to see that bullying won't do. he's given in tremendously. he's let her have her way with the waitress strike and she's going to have an allowance of her own and all kinds of things. it's settled. it's his mother and that man charterson talked him over. you know--his mother came to me--as her friend. for advice. wanted to find out what sort of things we might have been putting in her head. she said so. a curious old thing--vulgar but--_wise_. i liked her. he's her darling--and she just knows what he is.... he doesn't like it but he's taken his dose. the thought of her going to prison again----! he's let her do anything rather than that...." "and she's gone to him!" "naturally," said lady beach-mandarin with what he felt to be deliberate brutality. surely she must have understood---- "but the waitress strike--what has it got to do with the waitress strike?" "she cared--tremendously." "_did_ she?" "tremendously. and they all go back and the system of inspection is being altered, and he's even forgiven babs wheeler. it made him ill to do it but he did." "and she's gone back to him." "like godiva," said lady beach-mandarin with that sweeping allusiveness that was part of her complicated charm. § for three days mr. brumley was so staggered by these things that it did not occur to him that it was quite possible for him to see lady harman for himself and find out just how things stood. he remained in london with an imagination dazed. and as it was the christmas season and as george edmund in a rather expectant holiday state had now come up from margate, mr. brumley went in succession to the hippodrome, to peter pan and to an exhibition at olympia, assisted at an afternoon display of the kinemacolor at la scala theatre, visited hamley's and lunched george edmund once at the criterion and twice at the climax club, while thinking of nothing in all the world but the incalculable strangeness of women. george edmund thought him a very passive leadable parent indeed, less querulous about money matters and altogether much improved. the glitter and colour of these various entertainments reflected themselves upon the surface of that deep flood of meditation, hook-armed wooden-legged pirates, intelligent elephants, ingenious but extremely expensive toys, flickering processions, comic turns, snatches of popular music and george edmund's way of eating an orange, pictured themselves on his mind confusedly without in any way deflecting its course. then on the fourth day he roused himself, gave george edmund ten shillings to get himself a cutlet at the café royal and do the cinematographs round and about the west end, and so released reached aleham in time for a temperate lunch. he chartered the aleham car to take him to black strand and arrived there about a quarter past three, in a great effort to feel himself a matter-of-course visitor. it ought to be possible to record that mr. brumley's mind was full of the intensest sense of lady harman during that journey and of nothing else, but as a matter of fact his mind was now curiously detached and reflective, the tensions and expectation of the past month and the astonishment of the last few days had worked themselves out and left him as it were the passive instrument of the purpose of his more impassioned moods. this distressed lover approached black strand in a condition of philosophical lassitude. the road from aleham to black strand is a picturesque old english road, needlessly winding and badly graded, wriggling across a healthy wilderness with occasional pine-woods. something in that familiar landscape--for his life had run through it since first he and euphemia on a tandem bicycle and altogether very young had sought their ideal home in the south of england--set his mind swinging and generalizing. how freshly youthful he and euphemia had been when first he came along that road, how crude, how full of happy expectations of success; it had been as bright and it was now as completely gone as the sunsets they had seen together. how great a thing life is! how much greater than any single romance, or any individual affection! since those days he had grown, he had succeeded, he had suffered in a reasonable way of course, still he could recall with a kind of satisfaction tears and deep week-long moods of hopeless melancholy--and he had changed. and now dominating this landscape, filling him with new emotions and desires and perplexing intimations of ignorance and limitations he had never suspected in his youth, was this second figure of a woman. she was different from euphemia. with euphemia everything had been so simple and easy; until that slight fading, that fatigue of entire success and satisfaction, of the concluding years. he and euphemia had always kept it up that they had no thought in the world except for one another.... yet if that had been true, why hadn't he died when she did. he hadn't died--with remarkable elasticity. clearly in his case there had been these unexplored, unsuspected hinterlands of possibility towards which lady harman seemed now to be directing him. it came to him that afternoon as an entirely fresh thought that there might also have been something in euphemia beyond their simple, so charmingly treated relationship. he began to recall moments when euphemia had said perplexing little things, had looked at him with an expression that was unexpected, had been--difficult.... i write of mr. brumley to tell you things about him and not to explain him. it may be that the appetite for thorough good talks with people grows upon one, but at any rate it did occur to mr. brumley on his way to talk to lady harman, it occurred to him as a thing distressingly irrevocable that he could now never have a thorough good talk with euphemia about certain neglected things between them. it would have helped him so much.... his eyes rested as he thought of these things upon the familiar purple hill crests, patched that afternoon with the lingering traces of a recent snowstorm, the heather slopes, the dark mysterious woods, the patches of vivid green where a damp and marshy meadow or so broke the moorland surface. to-day in spite of the sun there was a bright blue-white line of frost to the northward of every hedge and bank, the trees were dripping down the white edgings of the morning into the pine-needle mud at their feet; he had seen it so like this before; years hence he might see it all like this again; all this great breezy countryside had taken upon itself a quality of endurance, as though it would still be real and essential in his mind when lady harman had altogether passed again. it would be real when he himself had passed away, and in other costumes and other vehicles fresh euphemias and new crude george brumleys would come along, feeling in the ultimate bright new wisdom of youth that it was all for them--a subservient scenery, when really it was entirely indifferent in its careless permanence to all their hopes and fancies.... § mr. brumley's thoughts on the permanence of landscape and the mutability of human affairs were more than a little dashed when he came within sight of black strand and perceived that once cosily beautiful little home clipped and extended, its shrubbery wrecked and the old barn now pierced with windows and adorned--for its new chimneys were not working very well--by several efficient novelties in chimney cowls. up the slopes behind sir isaac had extended his boundaries, and had been felling trees and levelling a couple of tennis courts for next summer. something was being done to the porch, and the jasmine had been cleared away altogether. mr. brumley could not quite understand what was in progress; sir isaac he learnt afterwards had found a wonderful bargain in a real genuine georgian portal of great dignity and simplicity in aleham, and he was going to improve black strand by transferring it thither--with the utmost precaution and every piece numbered--from its original situation. mr. brumley stood among the preparatory débris of this and rang a quietly resolute electric bell, which was answered no longer by mrs. rabbit but by the ample presence of snagsby. snagsby in that doorway had something of the preposterous effect of a very large face beneath a very small hat. he had to mr. brumley's eyes a restored look, as though his self-confidence had been thoroughly done up since their last encounter. bygones were bygones. mr. brumley was admitted as one is admitted to any normal home. he was shown into the little study-drawing-room with the stepped floor, which had been so largely the scene of his life with euphemia, and he was left there for the better part of a quarter of an hour before his hostess appeared. the room had been changed very little. euphemia's solitary rose had gone, and instead there were several bowls of beaten silver scattered about, each filled with great chrysanthemums from london. sir isaac's jackdaw acquisitiveness had also overcrowded the corner beyond the fireplace with a very fine and genuine queen anne cabinet; there were a novel by elizabeth robins and two or three feminist and socialist works lying on the table which would certainly not have been visible, though they might have been in the house, during the brumley régime. otherwise things were very much as they always had been. a room like this, thought mr. brumley among much other mental driftage, is like a heart,--so long as it exists it must be furnished and tenanted. no matter what has been, however bright and sweet and tender, the spaces still cry aloud to be filled again. the very essence of life is its insatiability. how complete all this had seemed in the moment when first he and euphemia had arranged it. and indeed how complete life had seemed altogether at seven-and-twenty. every year since then he had been learning--or at any rate unlearning. until at last he was beginning to realize he had still everything to learn.... the door opened and the tall dark figure of lady harman stood for a moment in the doorway before she stepped down into the room. she had always the same effect upon him, the effect of being suddenly remembered. when he was away from her he was always sure that she was a beautiful woman, and when he saw her again he was always astonished to see how little he had borne her beauty in mind. for a moment they regarded one another silently. then she closed the door behind her and came towards him. all mr. brumley's philosophizing had vanished at the sight of her. his spirit was reborn within him. he thought of her and of his effect upon her, vividly, and of nothing else in the world. she was paler he thought beneath her dusky hair, a little thinner and graver.... there was something in her manner as she advanced towards him that told him he mattered to her, that his coming there was something that moved her imagination as well as his own. with an almost impulsive movement she held out both her hands to him, and with an inspiration as sudden he took them and kissed them. when he had done so he was ashamed of his temerity; he looked up to meet in her dark eyes the scared shyness of a fallow deer. she suddenly remembered to withdraw her hands, and it became manifest to both of them that the incident must never have happened. she went to the window, stood almost awkwardly for a moment looking out of it, then turned. she put her hands on the back of the chair and stood holding it. "i knew you would come to see me," she said. "i've been very anxious about you," he said, and on that their minds rested through a little silence. "you see," he explained, "i didn't know what was happening to you. or what you were doing." "after asking your advice," she said. "exactly." "i don't know why i broke that window. except i think that i wanted to get away." "but why didn't you come to me?" "i didn't know where you were. and besides--i didn't somehow want to come to you." "but wasn't it wretched in prison? wasn't it miserably cold? i used to think of you of nights in some wretched ill-aired cell.... you...." "it _was_ cold," she admitted. "but it was very good for me. it was quiet. the first few days seemed endless; then they began to go by quickly. quite quickly at last. and i came to think. in the day there was a little stool where one sat. i used to sit on that and brood and try to think things out--all sorts of things i've never had the chance to think about before." "yes," said mr. brumley. "all this," she said. "and it has brought you back here!" he said, with something of the tone of one who has a right to enquire, with some flavour too of reproach. "you see," she said after a little pause, "during that time it was possible to come to understandings. neither i nor my husband had understood the other. in that interval it was possible--to explain. "yes. you see, mr. brumley, we--we both misunderstood. it was just because of that and because i had no one who seemed able to advise me that i turned to you. a novelist always seems so wise in these things. he seems to know so many lives. one can talk to you as one can scarcely talk to anyone; you are a sort of doctor--in these matters. and it was necessary--that my husband should realize that i had grown up and that i should have time to think just how one's duty and one's--freedom have to be fitted together.... and my husband is ill. he has been ill, rather short of breath--the doctor thinks it is asthma--for some time, and all the agitation of this business has upset him and made him worse. he is upstairs now--asleep. of course if i had thought i should make him ill i could never have done any of this. but it's done now and here i am, mr. brumley, back in my place. with all sorts of things changed. put right...." "i see," said mr. brumley stupidly. her speech was like the falling of an opaque curtain upon some romantic spectacle. she stood there, almost defensively behind her chair as she made it. there was a quality of premeditation in her words, yet something in her voice and bearing made him feel that she knew just how it covered up and extinguished his dreams and impulses. he heard her out and then suddenly his spirit rebelled against her decision. "no!" he cried. she waited for him to go on. "you see," he said, "i thought that it was just that you wanted to get away----that this life was intolerable----that you were----forgive me if i seem to be going beyond--going beyond what i ought to be thinking about you. only, why should i pretend? i care, i care for you tremendously. and it seemed to me that you didn't love your husband, that you were enslaved and miserable. i would have done anything to help you--anything in the world, lady harman. i know--it may sound ridiculous--there have been times when i would have faced death to feel you were happy and free. i thought all that, i felt all that,--and then--then you come back here. you seem not to have minded. as though i had misunderstood...." he paused and his face was alive with an unwonted sincerity. his self-consciousness had for a moment fallen from him. "i know," she said, "it _was_ like that. i knew you cared. that is why i have so wanted to talk to you. it looked like that...." she pressed her lips together in that old familiar hunt for words and phrases. "i didn't understand, mr. brumley, all there was in my husband or all there was in myself. i just saw his hardness and his--his hardness in business. it's become so different now. you see, i forgot he has bad health. he's ill; i suppose he was getting ill then. instead of explaining himself--he was--excited and--unwise. and now----" "now i suppose he has--explained," said mr. brumley slowly and with infinite distaste. "lady harman, _what_ has he explained?" "it isn't so much that he has explained, mr. brumley," said lady harman, "as that things have explained themselves." "but how, lady harman? how?" "i mean about my being a mere girl, almost a child when i married him. naturally he wanted to take charge of everything and leave nothing to me. and quite as naturally he didn't notice that now i am a woman, grown up altogether. and it's been necessary to do things. and naturally, mr. brumley, they shocked and upset him. but he sees now so clearly, he wrote to me, such a fair letter--an unusual letter--quite different from when he talks--it surprised me, telling me he wanted me to feel free, that he meant to make me--to arrange things that is, so that i should feel free and more able to go about as i pleased. it was a _generous_ letter, mr. brumley. generous about all sorts of affairs that there had been between us. he said things, quite kind things, not like the things he has ever said before----" she stopped short and then began again. "you know, mr. brumley, it's so hard to tell things without telling other things that somehow are difficult to tell. yet if i don't tell you them, you won't know them and then you won't be able to understand in the least how things are with us." her eyes appealed to him. "tell me," he said, "whatever you think fit." "when one has been afraid of anyone and felt they were ever so much stronger and cruel and hard than one is and one suddenly finds they aren't. it alters everything." he nodded, watching her. her voice fell nearly to a whisper. "mr. brumley," she said, "when i came back to him--you know he was in bed here--instead of scolding me--he _cried_. he cried like a vexed child. he put his face into the pillow--just misery.... i'd never seen him cry--at least only once--long ago...." mr. brumley looked at her flushed and tender face and it seemed to him that indeed he could die for her quite easily. "i saw how hard i had been," she said. "in prison i'd thought of that, i'd thought women mustn't be hard, whatever happens to them. and when i saw him like that i knew at once how true that was.... he begged me to be a good wife to him. no!--he just said, 'be a wife to me,' not even a good wife--and then he cried...." for a moment or so mr. brumley didn't respond. "i see," he said at last. "yes." "and there were the children--such helpless little things. in the prison i worried about them. i thought of things for them. i've come to feel--they are left too much to nurses and strangers.... and then you see he has agreed to nearly everything i had wanted. it wasn't only the personal things--i was anxious about those silly girls--the strikers. i didn't want them to be badly treated. it distressed me to think of them. i don't think you know how it distressed me. and he--he gave way upon all that. he says i may talk to him about the business, about the way we do our business--the kindness of it i mean. and this is why i am back here. where else _could_ i be?" "no," said mr. brumley still with the utmost reluctance. "i see. only----" he paused downcast and she waited for him to speak. "only it isn't what i expected, lady harman. i didn't think that matters could be settled by such arrangements. it's sane, i know, it's comfortable and kindly. but i thought--oh! i thought of different things, quite different things from all this. i thought of you who are so beautiful caught in a loveless passionless world. i thought of the things there might be for you, the beautiful and wonderful things of which you are deprived.... never mind what i thought! never mind! you've made your choice. but i thought that you didn't love, that you couldn't love--this man. it seemed to me that you felt too--that to live as you are doing--with him--was a profanity. something--i'd give everything i have, everything i am, to save you from. because--because i care.... i misunderstood you. i suppose you can--do what you are doing." he jumped to his feet as he spoke and walked three paces away and turned to utter his last sentences. she too stood up. "mr. brumley," she said weakly, "i don't understand. what do you mean? i have to do what i am doing. he--he is my husband." he made a gesture of impatience. "do you understand nothing of _love_?" he cried. she pressed her lips together and remained still and silent, dark against the casement window. there came a sound of tapping from the room above. three taps and again three taps. lady harman made a little gesture as though she would put this sound aside. "love," she said at last. "it comes to some people. it happens. it happens to young people.... but when one is married----" her voice fell almost to a whisper. "one must not think of it," she said. "one must think of one's husband and one's duty. life cannot begin again, mr. brumley." the taps were repeated, a little more urgently. "that is my husband," she said. she hesitated through a little pause. "mr. brumley," she said, "i want friendship so badly, i want some one to be my friend. i don't want to think of things--disturbing things--things i have lost--things that are spoilt. _that_--that which you spoke of; what has it to do with me?" she interrupted him as he was about to speak. "be my friend. don't talk to me of impossible things. love! mr. brumley, what has a married woman to do with love? i never think of it. i never read of it. i want to do my duty. i want to do my duty by him and by my children and by all the people i am bound to. i want to help people, weak people, people who suffer. i want to help him to help them. i want to stop being an idle, useless, spending woman...." she made a little gesture of appeal with her hands. "oh!" he sighed, and then, "you know if i can help you----rather than distress you----" her manner changed. it became confidential and urgent. "mr. brumley," she said, "i must go up to my husband. he will be impatient. and when i tell him you are here he will want to see you.... you will come up and see him?" mr. brumley sought to convey the struggle within him by his pose. "i will do what you wish, lady harman," he said, with an almost theatrical sigh. he closed the door after her and was alone in his former study once more. he walked slowly to his old writing-desk and sat down in his familiar seat. presently he heard her footfalls across the room above. mr. brumley's mind under the stress of the unfamiliar and the unexpected was now lapsing rapidly towards the theatrical. "my _god_!" said mr. brumley. he addressed that friendly memorable room in tones that mingled amazement and wrong. "he is her husband!" he said, and then: "the power of words!" ... § it seemed to mr. brumley's now entirely disordered mind that sir isaac, propped up with cushions upon a sofa in the upstairs sitting-room, white-faced, wary and very short of breath, was like proprietorship enthroned. everything about him referred deferentially to him. even his wife dropped at once into the position of a beautiful satellite. his illness, he assured his visitor with a thin-lipped emphasis, was "quite temporary, quite the sort of thing that might happen to anyone." he had had a queer little benumbing of one leg, "just a trifle of nerve fag did it," and the slight asthma that came and went in his life had taken advantage of his condition to come again with a little beyond its usual aggressiveness. "elly is going to take me off to marienbad next week or the week after," he said. "i shall have a cure and she'll have a treat, and we shall come back as fit as fiddles." the incidents of the past month were to be put on a facetious footing it appeared. "it's a mercy they didn't crop her hair," he said, apropos of nothing and with an air of dry humour. no further allusion was made to lady harman's incarceration. he was dressed in a lama wool bedroom suit and his resting leg was covered by a very splendid and beautiful fur rug. all euphemia's best and gayest cushions sustained his back. the furniture had been completely rearranged for his comfort and convenience. close to his hand was a little table with carefully selected remedies and aids and helps and stimulants, and the latest and best of the light fiction of the day was tossed about between the table, the couch and the floor. at the foot of the couch euphemia's bedroom writing-table had been placed, and over this there were scattered traces of the stenographer who had assisted him to wipe off the day's correspondence. three black cylinders and other appliances in the corner witnessed that his slight difficulty in breathing could be relieved by oxygen, and his eyes were regaled by a great abundance of london flowers at every available point in the room. of course there were grapes, fabulous looking grapes. everything conspired to give sir isaac and his ownership the centre of the picture. mr. brumley had been brought upstairs to him, and the tea table, with scarcely a reference to anyone else, was arranged by snagsby conveniently to his hand. and sir isaac himself had a confidence--the assurance of a man who has been shaken and has recovered. whatever tears he had ever shed had served their purpose and were forgotten. "elly" was his and the house was his and everything about him was his--he laid his hand upon her once when she came near him, his possessiveness was so gross--and the strained suspicion of his last meeting with mr. brumley was replaced now by a sage and wizened triumph over anticipated and arrested dangers. their party was joined by sir isaac's mother, and the sight of her sturdy, swarthy, and rather dignified presence flashed the thought into mr. brumley's mind that sir isaac's father must have been a very blond and very nosey person indeed. she was homely and practical and contributed very usefully to a conversation that remained a trifle fragmentary and faintly uncomfortable to the end. mr. brumley avoided as much as he could looking at lady harman, because he knew sir isaac was alert for that, but he was acutely aware of her presence dispensing the tea and moving about the room, being a good wife. it was his first impression of lady harman as a good wife and he disliked the spectacle extremely. the conversation hovered chiefly about marienbad, drifted away and came back again. mrs. harman made several confidences that provoked the betrayal of a strain of irritability in sir isaac's condition. "we're all looking forward to this marienbad expedition," she said. "i do hope it will turn out well. neither of them have ever been abroad before--and there's the difficulty of the languages." "ow," snarled sir isaac, with a glance at his mother that was almost vicious and a lapse into cockney intonations and phrases that witnessed how her presence recalled his youth, "it'll _go_ all right, mother. _you_ needn't fret." "of course they'll have a courier to see to their things, and go train de luxe and all that," mrs. harman explained with a certain gusto. "but still it's an adventure, with him not well, and both as i say more like children than grown-up people." sir isaac intervened with a crushing clumsiness to divert this strain of explanation, with questions about the quality of the soil in the wood where the ground was to be cleared and levelled for his tennis lawns. mr. brumley did his best to behave as a man of the world should. he made intelligent replies about the sand, he threw out obvious but serviceable advice upon travel upon the continent of europe, and he tried not to think that this was the way of living into which the sweetest, tenderest, most beautiful woman in the world had been trapped. he avoided looking at her until he felt it was becoming conspicuous, a negative stare. why had she come back again? fragmentary phrases she had used downstairs came drifting through his mind. "i never think of it. i never read of it." and she so made for beautiful love and a beautiful life! he recalled lady beach-mandarin's absurdly apt, absurdly inept, "like godiva," and was suddenly impelled to raise the question of those strikers. "your trouble with your waitresses is over, sir isaac?" sir isaac finished a cup of tea audibly and glanced at his wife. "i never meant to be hard on them," he said, putting down his cup. "never. the trouble blew up suddenly. one can't be all over a big business everywhere all at once, more particularly if one is worried about other things. as soon as i had time to look into it i put things right. there was misunderstandings on both sides." he glanced up again at lady harman. (she was standing behind mr. brumley so that he could not see her but--did their eyes meet?) "as soon as we are back from marienbad," sir isaac volunteered, "lady harman and i are going into all that business thoroughly." mr. brumley concealed his intense aversion for this association under a tone of intelligent interest. "into--i don't quite understand--what business?" "women employees in london--hostels--all that kind of thing. bit more sensible than suffragetting, eh, elly?" "very interesting," said mr. brumley with a hollow cordiality, "very." "done on business lines, mind you," said sir isaac, looking suddenly very sharp and keen, "done on proper business lines, there's no end of a change possible. and it's a perfectly legitimate outgrowth from such popular catering as ours. it interests me." he made a little whistling noise with his teeth at the end of this speech. "i didn't know lady harman was disposed to take up such things," he said. "or i'd have gone into them before." "he's going into them now," said mrs. harman, "heart and soul. why! we have to take his temperature over it, to see he doesn't work himself up into a fever." her manner became reasonable and confidential. she spoke to mr. brumley as if her son was slightly deaf. "it's better than his fretting," she said.... § mr. brumley returned to london in a state of extreme mental and emotional unrest. the sight of lady harman had restored all his passion for her, the all too manifest fact that she was receding beyond his reach stirred him with unavailing impulses towards some impossible extremity of effort. she had filled his mind so much that he could not endure the thought of living without hope of her. but what hope was there of her? and he was jealous, detestably jealous, so jealous that in that direction he did not dare to let his mind go. he sawed at the bit and brought it back, or he would have had to writhe about the carriage. his thoughts ran furiously all over the place to avoid that pit. and now he found himself flashing at moments into wild and hopeless rebellion against the institution of marriage, of which he had hitherto sought always to be the dignified and smiling champion against the innovator, the over-critical and the young. he had never rebelled before. he was so astonished at the violence of his own objection that he lapsed from defiance to an incredulous examination of his own novel attitude. "it's not _true_ marriage i object to," he told himself. "it's this marriage like a rat trap, alluring and scarcely unavoidable, so that in we all go, and then with no escape--unless you tear yourself to rags. no escape...." it came to him that there was at least one way out for lady harman: _sir isaac might die!_ ... he pulled himself up presently, astonished and dismayed at the activities of his own imagination. among other things he had wondered if by any chance lady harman had ever allowed her mind to travel in this same post-mortem direction. at times surely the thing must have shone upon her as a possibility, a hope. from that he had branched off to a more general speculation. how many people were there in the world, nice people, kind people, moral and delicate-minded people, to whom the death of another person means release from that inflexible barrier--possibilities of secretly desired happiness, the realization of crushed and forbidden dreams? he had a vision of human society, like the vision of a night landscape seen suddenly in a lightning flash, as of people caught by couples in traps and quietly hoping for one another's deaths. "good heavens!" said mr. brumley, "what are we coming to," and got up in his railway compartment--he had it to himself--and walked up and down its narrow limits until a jolt over a point made him suddenly sit down again. "most marriages are happy," said mr. brumley, like a man who has fallen into a river and scrambles back to safety. "one mustn't judge by the exceptional cases.... "though of course there are--a good many--exceptional cases." ... he folded his arms, crossed his legs, frowned and reasoned with himself,--resolved to dismiss post-mortem speculations--absolutely. he was not going to quarrel with the institution of marriage. that was going too far. he had never been able to see the beginnings of reason in sexual anarchy, never. it is against the very order of things. man is a marrying animal just as much as he was a fire-making animal; he goes in pairs like mantel ornaments; it is as natural for him to marry and to exact and keep good faith--if need be with a savage jealousy, as it is for him to have lobes to his ears and hair under his armpits. these things jar with the dream perhaps; the gods on painted ceilings have no such ties, acting beautifully by their very nature; and here on the floor of the world one had them and one had to make the best of them.... are we making the best of them? mr. brumley was off again. that last thought opened the way to speculative wildernesses, and into these mr. brumley went wandering with a novel desperate enterprise to find a kind of marriage that would suit him. he began to reform the marriage laws. he did his utmost not to think especially of lady harman and himself while he was doing so. he would just take up the whole question and deal with it in a temperate reasonable way. it was so necessary to be reasonable and temperate in these questions--and not to think of death as a solution. marriages to begin with were too easy to make and too difficult to break; countless girls--lady harman was only a type--were married long before they could know the beginnings of their own minds. we wanted to delay marriage--until the middle twenties, say. why not? or if by the infirmities of humanity one must have marriage before then, there ought to be some especial opportunity of rescinding it later. (lady harman ought to have been able to rescind her marriage.) what ought to be the marriageable age in a civilized community? when the mind was settled into its general system of opinions mr. brumley thought, and then lapsed into a speculation whether the mind didn't keep changing and developing all through life; lady harman's was certainly still doing so.... this pointed to logical consequences of an undesirable sort.... (some little mind-slide occurred just at this point and he found himself thinking that perhaps sir isaac might last for years and years, might even outlive a wife exhausted by nursing. and anyhow to wait for death! to leave the thing one loved in the embrace of the moribund!) he wrenched his thoughts back as quickly as possible to a disinterested reform of the marriage laws. what had he decided so far? only for more deliberation and a riper age in marrying. surely that should appeal even to the most orthodox. but that alone would not eliminate mistakes and deceptions altogether. (sir isaac's skin had a peculiar, unhealthy look.) there ought in addition to be the widest facilities for divorce possible. mr. brumley tried to draw up a schedule in his head of the grounds for divorce that a really civilized community would entertain. but there are practical difficulties. marriage is not simply a sexual union, it is an economic one of a peculiarly inseparable sort,--and there are the children. and jealousy! of course so far as economics went, a kind of marriage settlement might meet most of the difficulties, and as for the children, mr. brumley was no longer in that mood of enthusiastic devotion to children that had made the birth of george edmund so tremendous an event. children, alone, afforded no reason for indissoluble lifelong union. face the thing frankly. how long was it absolutely necessary for people to keep a home together for their children? the prosperous classes, the best classes in the community, packed the little creatures off to school at the age of nine or ten. one might overdo--we were overdoing in our writing nowadays this--philoprogenitive enthusiasm.... he found himself thinking of george meredith's idea of ten year marriages.... his mind recoiled to sir isaac's pillowed-up possession. what flimsy stuff all this talk of altered marriage was! these things did not even touch the essentials of the matter. he thought of sir isaac's thin lips and wary knowing eyes. what possible divorce law could the wit of man devise that would release a desired woman from that--grip? marriage was covetousness made law. as well ask such a man to sell all his goods and give to the poor as expect the sir isaacs of this world to relax the matrimonial subjugation of the wife. our social order is built on jealousy, sustained by jealousy, and those brave schemes we evolve in our studies for the release of women from ownership,--and for that matter for the release of men too,--they will not stand the dusty heat of the market-place for a moment, they wilt under the first fierce breath of reality. marriage and property are the twin children of man's individualistic nature; only on these terms can he be drawn into societies.... mr. brumley found his little scheme for novelties in marriage and divorce lying dead and for the most part still-born in his mind; himself in despair. to set to work to alter marriage in any essential point was, he realized, as if an ant should start to climb a thousand feet of cliff. this great institution rose upon his imagination like some insurmountable sierra, blue and sombre, between himself and the life of lady harman and all that he desired. there might be a certain amount of tinkering with matrimonial law in the next few years, of petty tinkering that would abolish a few pretences and give ease to a few amiable people, but if he were to come back to life a thousand years hence he felt he would still find the ancient gigantic barrier, crossed perhaps by a dangerous road, pierced perhaps by a narrow tunnel or so, but in all its great essentials the same, between himself and lady harman. it wasn't that it was rational, it wasn't that it was justifiable, but it was one with the blood in one's veins and the rain-cloud in the sky, a necessity in the nature of present things. before mankind emerged from the valley of these restraints--if ever they did emerge--thousands of generations must follow one another, there must be tens of thousands of years of struggle and thought and trial, in the teeth of prevalent habit and opinion--and primordial instincts. a new humanity.... his heart sank to hopelessness. meanwhile? meanwhile we had to live our lives. he began to see a certain justification for the hidden cults that run beneath the fair appearances of life, those social secrecies by which people--how could one put it?--people who do not agree with established institutions, people, at any rate not merely egoistic and jealous as the crowd is egoistic and jealous, hide and help one another to mitigate the inflexible austerities of the great unreason. yes, mr. brumley had got to a phrase of that quality for the undiscriminating imperatives of the fundamental social institution. you see how a particular situation may undermine the assumptions of a mind originally devoted to uncritical acceptances. he still insisted it was a necessary great unreason, absolutely necessary--for the mass of people, a part of them, a natural expression of them, but he could imagine the possibility--of 'understandings.' ... mr. brumley was very vague about those understandings, those mysteries of the exalted that were to filch happiness from the destroying grasp of the crude and jealous. he had to be vague. for secret and noble are ideas like oil and water; you may fling them together with all the force of your will but in a little while they will separate again. for a time this dream of an impossible secrecy was uppermost in mr. brumley's meditations. it came into his head with the effect of a discovery that always among the unclimbable barriers of this supreme institution there had been,--caves. he had been reading anatole france recently and the lady of _le lys rouge_ came into his thoughts. there was something in common between lady harman and the countess martin, they were tall and dark and dignified, and lady harman was one of those rare women who could have carried the magnificent name of thérèse. and there in the setting of paris and florence was a whole microcosm of love, real but illicit, carried out as it were secretly and tactfully, beneath the great shadow of the cliff. but he found it difficult to imagine lady harman in that. or sir isaac playing count martin's part.... how different were those frenchwomen, with their afternoons vacant except for love, their detachment, their lovers, those secret, convenient, romantically furnished flats, that compact explicit business of _l'amour_! he had indeed some moments of regret that lady harman wouldn't go into that picture. she was different--if only in her simplicity. there was something about these others that put them whole worlds apart from her, who was held so tethered from all furtive adventure by her filmy tentacles of responsibility, her ties and strands of relationship, her essential delicacy. that momentary vision of ellen as the countess martin broke up into absurdities directly he looked at it fully and steadfastly. from thinking of the two women as similar types he passed into thinking of them as opposites; thérèse, hard, clear, sensuous, secretive, trained by a brilliant tradition in the technique of connubial betrayal, was the very antithesis of ellen's vague but invincible veracity and openness. not for nothing had anatole france made his heroine the daughter of a grasping financial adventurer.... of course the cave is a part of the mountain.... his mind drifted away to still more general speculations, and always he was trying not to see the figure of sir isaac, grimly and yet meanly resolute--in possession. always too like some open-mouthed yokel at a fair who knows nothing of the insult chalked upon his back, he disregarded how he himself coveted and desired and would if he could have gripped. he forgot his own watchful attention to euphemia in the past, nor did he think what he might have been if lady harman had been his wife. it needed the chill veracities of the small hours to bring him to that. he thought now of crude egotism as having sir isaac's hands and sir isaac's eyes and sir isaac's position. he forgot any egotism he himself was betraying. all the paths of enlightenment he thought of, led to lady harman. § that evening george edmund, who had come home with his mind aglitter with cinematograph impressions, found his father a patient but inattentive listener. for indeed mr. brumley was not listening at all; he was thinking and thinking. he made noises like "ah!" and "um," at george edmund and patted the boy's shoulder kindly and repeated words unintelligently, such as, "red indians, eh!" or "came out of the water backwards! my eye!" sometimes he made what george edmund regarded as quite footling comments. still george edmund had to tell someone and there was no one else to tell. so george edmund went on talking and mr. brumley went on thinking. § mr brumley could not sleep at all until it was nearly five. his intelligence seemed to be making up at last for years of speculative restraint. in a world for the most part given up to slumber mr. brumley may be imagined as clambering hand over fist in the silences, feverishly and wonderfully overtaking his age. in the morning he got up pallid and he shaved badly, but he was a generation ahead of his own euphemia series, and the school of charm and quiet humour and of letting things slide with a kind of elegant donnishness, had lost him for ever.... and among all sorts of things that had come to him in that vast gulf of nocturnal thinking was some vivid self-examination. at last he got to that. he had been dragged down to very elemental things indeed by the manifest completeness of lady harman's return to her husband. he had had at last to look at himself starkly for the male he was, to go beneath the gentlemanly airs, the refined and elegant virilities of his habitual poses. either this thing was unendurable--there were certainly moments when it came near to being unendurable--or it was not. on the whole and excepting mere momentary paroxysms it was not, and so he had to recognize and he did recognize with the greatest amazement that there could be something else besides sexual attraction and manoeuvring and possession between a beautiful woman and a man like himself. he loved lady harman, he loved her, he now began to realize just how much, and she could defeat him and reject him as a conceivable lover, turn that aside as a thing impossible, shame him as the romantic school would count shame and still command him with her confident eyes and her friendly extended hands. he admitted he suffered, let us rather say he claimed to suffer the heated torments of a passionate nature, but he perceived like fresh air and sunrise coming by blind updrawn and opened window into a foetid chamber, that also he loved her with a clean and bodiless love, was anxious to help her, was anxious now--it was a new thing--to understand her, to reassure her, to give unrequited what once he had sought rather to seem to give in view of an imagined exchange. he perceived too in these still hours how little he had understood her hitherto. he had been blinded,--obsessed. he had been seeing her and himself and the whole world far too much as a display of the eternal dualism of sex, the incessant pursuit. now with his sexual imaginings newly humbled and hopeless, with a realization of her own tremendous minimization of that fundamental of romance, he began to see all that there was in her personality and their possible relations outside that. he saw how gravely and deeply serious was her fine philanthropy, how honest and simple and impersonal her desire for knowledge and understandings. there is the brain of her at least, he thought, far out of sir isaac's reach. she wasn't abased by her surrenders, their simplicity exalted her, showed her innocent and himself a flushed and congested soul. he perceived now with the astonishment of a man newly awakened just how the great obsession of sex had dominated him--for how many years? since his early undergraduate days. had he anything to put beside her own fine detachment? had he ever since his manhood touched philosophy, touched a social question, thought of anything human, thought of art, or literature or belief, without a glancing reference of the whole question to the uses of this eternal hunt? during that time had he ever talked to a girl or woman with an unembarrassed sincerity? he stripped his pretences bare; the answer was no. his very refinements had been no more than indicative fig-leaves. his conservatism and morality had been a mere dalliance with interests that too brutal a simplicity might have exhausted prematurely. and indeed hadn't the whole period of literature that had produced him been, in its straining purity and refinement, as it were one glowing, one illuminated fig-leaf, a vast conspiracy to keep certain matters always in mind by conspicuously covering them away? but this wonderful woman--it seemed--she hadn't them in mind! she shamed him if only by her trustful unsuspiciousness of the ancient selfish game of him and her that he had been so ardently playing.... he idealized and worshipped this clean blindness. he abased himself before it. "no," cried mr. brumley suddenly in the silence of the night, "i will rise again. i will rise again by love out of these morasses.... she shall be my goddess and by virtue of her i will end this incessant irrational craving for women.... i will be her friend and her faithful friend." he lay still for a time and then he said in a whisper very humbly: "_god help me_." he set himself in those still hours which are so endless and so profitable to men in their middle years, to think how he might make himself the perfect lover instead of a mere plotter for desire, and how he might purge himself from covetousness and possessiveness and learn to serve. and if very speedily his initial sincerity was tinged again with egotism and if he drowsed at last into a portrait of himself as beautifully and admirably self-sacrificial, you must not sneer too readily at him, for so god has made the soul of mr. brumley and otherwise it could not do. chapter the tenth lady harman comes out § the treaty between lady harman and her husband which was to be her great charter, the constitutional basis of her freedoms throughout the rest of her married life, had many practical defects. the chief of these was that it was largely undocumented; it had been made piecemeal, in various ways, at different times and for the most part indirectly through diverse intermediaries. charterson had introduced large vaguenesses by simply displaying more of his teeth at crucial moments, mrs. harman had conveyed things by hugging and weeping that were afterwards discovered to be indistinct; sir isaac writing from a bed of sickness had frequently been totally illegible. one cannot therefore detail the clauses of this agreement or give its provisions with any great precision; one can simply intimate the kind of understanding that had had an air of being arrived at. the working interpretations were still to come. before anything else it was manifestly conceded by lady harman that she would not run away again, and still more manifest that she undertook to break no more windows or do anything that might lead to a second police court scandal. and she was to be a true and faithful wife and comfort, as a wife should be, to sir isaac. in return for that consideration and to ensure its continuance sir isaac came great distances from his former assumption of a matrimonial absolutism. she was to be granted all sorts of small autonomies,--the word autonomy was carefully avoided throughout but its spirit was omnipresent. she was in particular to have a banking account for her dress and personal expenditure into which sir isaac would cause to be paid a hundred pounds monthly and it was to be private to herself alone until he chose to go through the cashed cheques and counterfoils. she was to be free to come and go as she saw fit, subject to a punctual appearance at meals, the comfort and dignity of sir isaac and such specific engagements as she might make with him. she might have her own friends, but there the contract became a little misty; a time was to come when sir isaac was to betray a conviction that the only proper friends that a woman can have are women. there were also non-corroborated assurances as to the privacy of her correspondence. the second rolls-royce car was to be entirely at her service, and clarence was to be immediately supplemented by a new and more deferential man, and as soon as possible assisted to another situation and replaced. she was to have a voice in the further furnishing of black strand and in the arrangement of its garden. she was to read what she chose and think what she liked within her head without too minute or suspicious an examination by sir isaac, and short of flat contradiction at his own table she was to be free to express her own opinions in any manner becoming a lady. but more particularly if she found her ideas infringing upon the management or influence of the international bread and cake stores, she was to convey her objections and ideas in the first instance privately and confidentially to sir isaac. upon this point he displayed a remarkable and creditable sensitiveness. his pride in that organization was if possible greater than his original pride in his wife, and probably nothing in all the jarring of their relationship had hurt him more than her accessibility to hostile criticism and the dinner-table conversation with charterson and blenker that had betrayed this fact. he began to talk about it directly she returned to him. his protestations and explanations were copious and heart-felt. it was perhaps the chief discovery made by lady harman at this period of reconstruction that her husband's business side was not to be explained completely as a highly energetic and elaborate avarice. he was no doubt acquisitive and retentive and mean-spirited, but these were merely the ugly aspects of a disposition that involved many other factors. he was also incurably a schemer. he liked to fit things together, to dove-tail arrangements, to devise economies, to spread ingeniously into new fields, he had a love of organization and contrivance as disinterested as an artist's love for the possibilities of his medium. he would rather have made a profit of ten per cent. out of a subtly planned shop than thirty by an unforeseen accident. he wouldn't have cheated to get money for the world. he knew he was better at figuring out expenditures and receipts than most people and he was as touchy about his reputation for this kind of cleverness as any poet or painter for his fame. now that he had awakened to the idea that his wife was capable of looking into and possibly even understanding his business, he was passionately anxious to show her just how wonderfully he had done it all, and when he perceived she was in her large, unskilled, helpless way, intensely concerned for all the vast multitude of incompetent or partially competent young women who floundered about in badly paid employment in our great cities, he grasped at once at the opportunity of recovering her lost interest and respect by doing some brilliant feats of contrivance in that direction. why shouldn't he? he had long observed with a certain envy the admirable advertisement such firms as lever and cadbury and burroughs & wellcome gained from their ostentatiously able and generous treatment of their workpeople, and it seemed to him conceivable that in the end it might not be at all detrimental to his prosperity to put his hand to this long neglected piece of social work. the babs wheeler business had been a real injury in every way to the international bread and cake stores and even if he didn't ultimately go to all the lengths his wife seemed to contemplate, he was resolved at any rate that an affair of that kind should not occur again. the expedition to marienbad took with it a secretary who was also a stenographer. a particularly smart young inspector and graper, the staff manager, had brisk four-day holidays once or twice for consultation purposes; sir isaac's rabbit-like architect was in attendance for a week and the harmans returned to putney with the first vivid greens of late march,--for the putney hill house was to be reopened and black strand reserved now for week-end and summer use--with plans already drawn out for four residential hostels in london primarily for the girl waitresses of the international stores who might have no homes or homes at an inconvenient distance, and, secondarily, if any vacant accommodation remained over, for any other employed young women of the same class.... § lady harman came back to england from the pine-woods and bright order and regimen and foreign novelty of their bohemian kur-ort, in a state of renewed perplexity. already that undocumented magna charta was manifestly not working upon the lines she had anticipated. the glosses sir isaac put upon it were extensive and remarkable and invariably in the direction of restricting her liberties and resuming controls she had supposed abandoned. marienbad had done wonders for him; his slight limp had disappeared, his nervous energy was all restored; except for a certain increase in his natural irritability and occasional panting fits, he seemed as well as he had ever been. at the end of their time at the kur he was even going for walks. once he went halfway up the podhorn on foot. and with every increment in his strength his aggressiveness increased, his recognition of her new freedoms was less cordial and her sense of contrition and responsibility diminished. moreover, as the scheme of those hostels, which had played so large a part in her conception of their reconciliation, grew more and more definite, she perceived more and more that it was not certainly that fine and humanizing thing she had presumed it would be. she began to feel more and more that it might be merely an extension of harman methods to cheap boarding-houses for young people. but faced with a mass of detailed concrete projects and invited to suggest modifications she was able to realize for the first time how vague, how ignorant and incompetent her wishes had been, how much she had to understand and how much she had to discover before she could meet sir isaac with his "i'm doing it all for you, elly. if you don't like it, you tell me what you don't like and i'll alter it. but just vague doubting! one can't do anything with vague doubting." she felt that once back in england out of this picturesque toylike german world she would be able to grasp realities again and deal with these things. she wanted advice, she wanted to hear what people said of her ideas. she would also, she imagined, begin to avail herself of those conceded liberties which their isolation together abroad and her husband's constant need of her presence had so far prevented her from tasting. she had an idea that susan burnet might prove suggestive about the hostels. and moreover, if now and then she could have a good talk with someone understanding and intelligent, someone she could trust, someone who cared enough for her to think with her and for her.... § we have traced thus far the emergence of lady harman from that state of dutiful subjection and social irresponsibility which was the lot of woman in the past to that limited, ill-defined and quite unsecured freedom which is her present condition. and now we have to give an outline of the ideas of herself and her uses and what she had to do, which were forming themselves in her mind. she had made a determination of herself, which carried her along the lines of her natural predisposition, to duty, to service. there she displayed that acceptance of responsibility which is so much more often a feminine than a masculine habit of thinking. but she brought to the achievement of this determination a discriminating integrity of mind that is more frequently masculine than feminine. she wanted to know clearly what she was undertaking and how far its consequences would reach and how it was related to other things. her confused reading during the last few years and her own observation and such leakages of fact into her life as the talk of susan burnet, had all contributed to her realization that the world was full of needless discomfort and hardships and failure, due to great imperfectly apprehended injustices and maladjustments in the social system, and recently it had been borne in upon her, upon the barbed point of the _london lion_ and the quick tongue of susan, that if any particular class of people was more answerable than any other for these evils, it was the people of leisure and freedom like herself, who had time to think, and the directing organizing people like her husband, who had power to change. she was called upon to do something, at times the call became urgent, and she could not feel any assurance which it was of the many vague and conflicting suggestions that came drifting to her that she had to do. her idea of hostels for the international waitresses had been wrung out of her prematurely during her earlier discussions with her husband. she did not feel that it was anything more than a partial remedy for a special evil. she wanted something more general than that, something comprehensive enough to answer completely so wide a question as "what ought i to be doing with all my life?" in the honest simplicity of her nature she wanted to find an answer to that. out of the confusion of voices about us she hoped to be able to disentangle directions for her life. already she had been reading voraciously: while she was still at marienbad she had written to mr. brumley and he had sent her books and papers, advanced and radical in many cases, that she might know, "what are people thinking?" many phrases from her earlier discussions with sir isaac stuck in her mind in a curiously stimulating way and came back to her as she read. she recalled him, for instance, with his face white and his eyes red and his flat hand sawing at her, saying: "i dessay i'm all wrong, i dessay i don't know anything about anything and all those chaps you read, bernud shaw, and gosworthy, and all the rest of them are wonderfully clever; but you tell me, elly, what they say we've got to do! you tell me that. you go and ask some of those chaps just what they want a man like me to do.... they'll ask me to endow a theatre or run a club for novelists or advertise the lot of them in the windows of my international stores or something. and that's about all it comes to. you go and see if i'm not right. they grumble and they grumble; i don't say there's not a lot to grumble at, but give me something they'll back themselves for all they're worth as good to get done.... that's where i don't agree with all these idees. they're wind, elly, weak wind at that." it is distressing to record how difficult it was for lady harman to form even the beginnings of a disproof of that. her life through all this second phase of mitigated autonomy was an intermittent pilgrimage in search of that disproof. she could not believe that things as they were, this mass of hardships, cruelties, insufficiencies and heartburnings were the ultimate wisdom and possibility of human life, yet when she went from them to the projects that would replace or change them she seemed to pass from things of overwhelming solidity to matters more thin and flimsy than the twittering of sparrows on the gutter. so soon as she returned to london she started upon her search for a solution; she supplemented mr. brumley's hunt for books with her own efforts, she went to meetings--sometimes sir isaac took her, once or twice she was escorted by mr. brumley, and presently her grave interest and her personal charm had gathered about her a circle of companionable friends. she tried to talk to people and made great efforts to hear people who seemed authoritative and wise and leaderlike, talking. there were many interruptions to this research, but she persevered. quite early she had an illness that ended in a miscarriage, an accident for which she was by no means inconsolable, and before she had completely recovered from that sir isaac fell ill again, the first of a series of relapses that necessitated further foreign travel--always in elaborately comfortable trains with maid, courier, valet, and secretary, to some warm and indolent southward place. and few people knew how uncertain her liberties were. sir isaac was the victim of an increasing irritability, at times he had irrational outbursts of distrust that would culminate in passionate outbreaks and scenes that were truncated by an almost suffocating breathlessness. on several occasions he was on the verge of quarrelling violently with her visitors, and he would suddenly oblige her to break engagements, pour abuse upon her and bring matters back to the very verge of her first revolt. and then he would break her down by pitiful appeals. the cylinders of oxygen would be resorted to, and he would emerge from the crisis, rather rueful, tamed and quiet for the time. he was her chief disturbance. her children were healthy children and fell in with the routines of governess and tutor that their wealth provided. she saw them often, she noted their increasing resemblance to their father, she did her best to soften the natural secretiveness and aggressiveness of their manners, she watched their teachers and intervened whenever the influences about them seemed to her to need intervention, she dressed them and gave them presents and tried to believe she loved them, and as sir isaac's illness increased she took a larger and larger share in the direction of the household.... through all these occupations and interruptions and immediacies she went trying to comprehend and at times almost believing she comprehended life, and then the whole spectacle of this modern world of which she was a part would seem to break up again into a multitude of warring and discordant fragments having no conceivable common aim or solution. those moments of unifying faith and confidence, that glowed so bravely and never endured, were at once tantalizing and sustaining. she could never believe but that ultimately she would not grasp and hold--something.... many people met her and liked her and sought to know more of her; lady beach-mandarin and lady viping were happy to be her social sponsors, the blenkers and the chartersons met her out and woke up cautiously to this new possibility; her emergence was rapid in spite of the various delays and interruptions i have mentioned and she was soon in a position to realize just how little one meets when one meets a number of people and how little one hears when one has much conversation. her mind was presently crowded with confused impressions of pleasant men evading her agreeably and making out of her gravities an opportunity for bright sayings, and of women being vaguely solemn and quite indefinite. she went into the circle of movements, was tried over by mrs. hubert plessington, she questioned this and that promoter of constructive schemes, and instead of mental meat she was asked to come upon committees and sounded for subscriptions. on several occasions, escorted by mr. brumley--some instinct made her conceal or minimize his share in these expeditions to her husband--she went as inconspicuously as possible to the backs of public meetings in which she understood great questions were being discussed or great changes inaugurated. some public figures she even followed up for a time, distrusting her first impressions. she became familiar with the manners and bearing of our platform class, with the solemn dummy-like chairman or chairwoman, saying a few words, the alert secretary or organizer, the prominent figures sitting with an air of grave responsibility, generously acting an intelligent attention to others until the moment came for them themselves to deliver. then with an ill-concealed relief some would come to the footlights, some leap up in their places with a tenoring eagerness, some would be facetious and some speak with neuralgic effort, some were impertinent, some propitiatory, some dull, but all were--disappointing, disappointing. god was not in any of them. a platform is no setting for the shy processes of an honest human mind,--we are all strained to artificiality in the excessive glare of attention that beats upon us there. one does not exhibit opinions at a meeting, one acts them, the very truth must rouge its cheeks and blacken its eyebrows to tell, and to lady harman it was the acting chiefly and the make-up that was visible. they didn't grip her, they didn't lift her, they failed to convince her even of their own belief in what they supported. § but occasionally among the multitude of conversations that gave her nothing, there would come some talk that illuminated and for the time almost reconciled her to the effort and the loss of time and distraction her social expeditions involved. one evening at one of lady tarvrille's carelessly compiled parties she encountered edgar wilkins the novelist and got the most suggestive glimpses of his attitude towards himself and towards the world of intellectual ferment to which he belonged. she had been taken down by an amiable but entirely uninteresting permanent official who when the time came turned his stereotyped talk over to the other side of him with a quiet mechanical indifference, and she was left for a little while in silence until wilkins had disengaged himself. he was a flushed man with untidy hair, and he opened at once with an appeal to her sympathies. "oh! bother!" he said. "i say,--i've eaten that mutton. i didn't notice. one eats too much at these affairs. one doesn't notice at the time and then afterwards one finds out." she was a little surprised at his gambit and could think of nothing but a kindly murmur. "detestable thing," he said; "my body." "but surely not," she tried and felt as she said it that was a trifle bold. "you're all right," he said making her aware he saw her. "but i've this thing that wheezes and fattens at the slightest excuse and--it encumbers me--bothers me to take exercise.... but i can hardly expect you to be interested in my troubles, can i?" he made an all too manifest attempt to read her name on the slip of card that lay before her among the flowers and as manifestly succeeded. "we people who write and paint and all that sort of thing are a breed of insatiable egotists, lady harman. with the least excuse. don't you think so?" "not--not exceptionally," she said. "exceptionally," he insisted. "it isn't my impression," she said. "you're--franker." "but someone was telling me--you've been taking impressions of us lately. i mean all of us people who go flapping ideas about in the air. somebody--was it lady beach-mandarin?--was saying you'd come out looking for intellectual heroes--and found bernard shaw.... but what could you have expected?" "i've been trying to find out and understand what people are thinking. i want ideas." "it's disheartening, isn't it?" "it's--perplexing sometimes." "you go to meetings, and try to get to the bottom of movements, and you want to meet and know the people who write the wonderful things? get at the wonderful core of it?" "one feels there are things going on." "great illuminating things." "well--yes." "and when you see those great thinkers and teachers and guides and brave spirits and high brows generally----" he laughed and stopped just in time on the very verge of taking pheasant. "oh, take it away," he cried sharply. "we've all been through that illusion, lady harman," he went on. "but i don't like to think----aren't great men after all--great?" "in their ways, in their places--yes. but not if you go up to them and look at them. not at the dinner table, not in their beds.... what a time of disillusionment you must have had! "you see, lady harman," he said, leaning back from his empty plate, inclining himself confidentially to her ear and speaking in a privy tone; "it's in the very nature of things that we--if i may put myself into the list--we ideologists, should be rather exceptionally loose and untrustworthy and disappointing men. rotters--to speak plain contemporary english. if you come to think of it, it has to be so." "but----" she protested. he met her eye firmly. "it has to be." "why?" "the very qualities that make literature entertaining, vigorous, inspiring, revealing, wonderful, beautiful and--all that sort of thing, make its producers--if you will forgive the word again--rotters." she smiled and lifted her eyebrows protestingly. "sensitive nervous tissue," he said with a finger up to emphasize his words. "quick responsiveness to stimulus, a vivid, almost uncontrollable, expressiveness; that's what you want in your literary man." "yes," said lady harman following cautiously. "yes, i suppose it is." "can you suppose for a moment that these things conduce to self-control, to reserve, to consistency, to any of the qualities of a trustworthy man?... of course you can't. and so we _aren't_ trustworthy, we _aren't_ consistent. our virtues are our vices.... _my_ life," said mr. wilkins still more confidentially, "won't bear examination. but that's by the way. it need not concern us now." "but mr. brumley?" she asked on the spur of the moment. "i'm not talking of him," said wilkins with careless cruelty. "he's restrained. i mean the really imaginative people, the people with vision, the people who let themselves go. you see now why they are rotten, why they must be rotten. (no! no! take it away. i'm talking.) i feel so strongly about this, about the natural and necessary disreputableness of everybody who produces reputable writing--and for the matter of that, art generally--that i set my face steadily against all these attempts that keep on cropping up to make figures of us. we aren't figures, lady harman; it isn't our line. of all the detestable aspects of the victorian period surely that disposition to make figures of its artists and literary men was the most detestable. respectable figures--examples to the young. the suppressions, the coverings up that had to go on, the white-washing of dickens,--who was more than a bit of a rip, you know, the concealment of thackeray's mistresses. did you know he had mistresses? oh rather! and so on. it's like that bust of jove--or bacchus was it?--they pass off as plato, who probably looked like any other literary grub. that's why i won't have anything to do with these academic developments that my friend brumley--do you know him by the way?--goes in for. he's the third man down----you _do_ know him. and he's giving up the academic committee, is he? i'm glad he's seen it at last. what _is_ the good of trying to have an academy and all that, and put us in uniform and make out we are somebodies, and respectable enough to be shaken hands with by george and mary, when as a matter of fact we are, by our very nature, a collection of miscellaneous scandals----we _must_ be. bacon, shakespear, byron, shelley--all the stars.... no, johnson wasn't a star, he was a character by boswell.... oh! great things come out of us, no doubt, our arts are the vehicles of wonder and hope, the world is dead without these things we produce, but that's no reason why--why the mushroom-bed should follow the mushrooms into the soup, is it? perfectly fair image. (no, take it away.)" he paused and then jumped in again as she was on the point of speaking. "and you see even if our temperaments didn't lead inevitably to our--dipping rather, we should still have to--_dip_. asking a writer or a poet to be seemly and academic and so on, is like asking an eminent surgeon to be stringently decent. it's--you see, it's incompatible. now a king or a butler or a family solicitor--if you like." he paused again. lady harman had been following him with an attentive reluctance. "but what are we to do," she asked, "we people who are puzzled by life, who want guidance and ideas and--help, if--if all the people we look to for ideas are----" "bad characters." "well,--it's your theory, you know--bad characters?" wilkins answered with the air of one who carefully disentangles a complex but quite solvable problem. "it doesn't follow," he said, "that because a man is a bad character he's not to be trusted in matters where character--as we commonly use the word--doesn't come in. these sensitives, these--would you mind if i were to call myself an Æolian harp?--these Æolian harps; they can't help responding to the winds of heaven. well,--listen to them. don't follow them, don't worship them, don't even honour them, but listen to them. don't let anyone stop them from saying and painting and writing and singing what they want to. freedom, canvas and attention, those are the proper honours for the artist, the poet and the philosopher. listen to the noise they make, watch the stuff they produce, and presently you will find certain things among the multitude of things that are said and shown and put out and published, something--light in _your_ darkness--a writer for you, something for you. nobody can have a greater contempt for artists and writers and poets and philosophers than i, oh! a squalid crew they are, mean, jealous, pugnacious, disgraceful in love, _disgraceful_--but out of it all comes the greatest serenest thing, the mind of the world, literature. nasty little midges, yes,--but fireflies--carrying light for the darkness." his face was suddenly lit by enthusiasm and she wondered that she could have thought it rather heavy and commonplace. he stopped abruptly and glanced beyond her at her other neighbour who seemed on the verge of turning to them again. "if i go on," he said with a voice suddenly dropped, "i shall talk loud." "you know," said lady harman, in a halty undertone, "you--you are too hard upon--upon clever people, but it is true. i mean it is true in a way...." "go on, i understand exactly what you are saying." "i mean, there _are_ ideas. it's just that, that is so--so----i mean they seem never to be just there and always to be present." "like god. never in the flesh--now. a spirit everywhere. you think exactly as i do, lady harman. it is just that. this is a great time, so great that there is no chance for great men. every chance for great work. and we're doing it. there is a wind--blowing out of heaven. and when beautiful people like yourself come into things----" "i try to understand," she said. "i want to understand. i want--i want not to miss life." he was on the verge of saying something further and then his eyes wandered down the table and he stopped short. he ended his talk as he had begun it with "bother! lady tarvrille, lady harman, is trying to catch your eye." lady harman turned her face to her hostess and answered her smile. wilkins caught at his chair and stood up. "it would have been jolly to have talked some more," he said. "i hope we shall." "well!" said wilkins, with a sudden hardness in his eyes and she was swept away from him. she found no chance of talking to him upstairs, sir isaac came for her early; but she went in hope of another meeting. it did not come. for a time that expectation gave dinners and luncheon parties a quite appreciable attraction. then she told agatha alimony. "i've never met him but that once," she said. "one doesn't meet him now," said agatha, deeply. "but why?" deep significance came into miss alimony's eyes. "my dear," she whispered, and glanced about them. "don't you _know_?" lady harman was a radiant innocence. and then miss alimony began in impressive undertones, with awful omissions like pits of darkness and with such richly embroidered details as serious spinsters enjoy, adding, indeed, two quite new things that came to her mind as the tale unfolded, and, naming no names and giving no chances of verification or reply, handed on the fearful and at that time extremely popular story of the awful wickedness of wilkins the author. upon reflection lady harman perceived that this explained all sorts of things in their conversation and particularly the flash of hardness at the end. even then, things must have been hanging over him.... § and while lady harman was making these meritorious and industrious attempts to grasp the significance of life and to get some clear idea of her social duty, the developments of those hostels she had started--she now felt so prematurely--was going on. there were times when she tried not to think of them, turned her back on them, fled from them, and times when they and what she ought to do about them and what they ought to be and what they ought not to be, filled her mind to the exclusion of every other topic. rigorously and persistently sir isaac insisted they were hers, asked her counsel, demanded her appreciation, presented as it were his recurring bill for them. five of them were being built, not four but five. there was to be one, the largest, in a conspicuous position in bloomsbury near the british museum, one in a conspicuous position looking out upon parliament hill, one conspicuously placed upon the waterloo road near st. george's circus, one at sydenham, and one in the kensington road which was designed to catch the eye of people going to and fro to the various exhibitions at olympia. in sir isaac's study at putney there was a huge and rather splendid-looking morocco portfolio on a stand, and this portfolio bore in excellent gold lettering the words, international bread and cake hostels. it was her husband's peculiar pleasure after dinner to take her to turn over this with him; he would sit pencil in hand, while she, poised at his request upon the arm of his chair, would endorse a multitude of admirable modifications and suggestions. these hostels were to be done--indeed they were being done--by sir isaac's tame architect, and the interlacing yellow and mauve tiles, and the doulton ware mouldings that were already familiar to the public as the uniform of the stores, were to be used upon the façades of the new institutions. they were to be boldly labelled international hostels right across the front. the plans revealed in every case a site depth as great as the frontage, and the utmost ingenuity had been used to utilize as much space as possible. "every room we get in," said sir isaac, "adds one to the denominator in the cost;" and carried his wife back to her schooldays. at last she had found sense in fractions. there was to be a series of convenient and spacious rooms on the ground floor, a refectory, which might be cleared and used for meetings--"dances," said lady harman. "hardly the sort of thing we want 'em to get up to," said sir isaac--various offices, the matron's apartments--"we ought to begin thinking about matrons," said sir isaac;--a bureau, a reading-room and a library--"we can pick good, serious stuff for them," said sir isaac, "instead of their filling their heads with trash"--one or two workrooms with tables for cutting out and sewing; this last was an idea of susan burnet's. upstairs there was to be a beehive of bedrooms, floor above floor, and each floor as low as the building regulations permitted. there were to be long dormitories with cubicles at three-and-sixpence a week--make your own beds--and separate rooms at prices ranging from four-and-sixpence to seven-and-sixpence. every three cubicles and every bedroom had lavatory basins with hot and cold water; there were pull-out drawers under the beds and a built-in chest of drawers, a hanging cupboard, a looking-glass and a radiator in each cubicle, and each floor had a box-room. it was ship-shape. "a girl can get this cubicle for three-and-six a week," said sir isaac, tapping the drawing before him with his pencil. "she can get her breakfast with a bit of bacon or a sausage for two shillings a week, and she can get her high tea, with cold meat, good potted salmon, shrimp paste, jam and cetera, for three-and-six a week. say her bus fares and lunch out mean another four shillings. that means she can get along on about twelve-and-six a week, comfortable, read the papers, have a book out of the library.... there's nothing like it to be got now for twice the money. the sort of thing they have now is one room, dingy, badly fitted, extra for coals. "that's the answer to your problem, elly," he said. "there we are. every girl who doesn't live at home can live here--with a matron to keep her eye on her.... and properly run, elly, properly run the thing's going to pay two or three per cent,--let alone the advertisement for the stores. "we can easily make these hostels obligatory on all our girls who don't live at their own homes," he said. "that ought to keep them off the streets, if anything can. i don't see how even miss babs wheeler can have the face to strike against that. "and then we can arrange with some of the big firms, drapers' shops and all that sort of thing near each hostel, to take over most of our other cubicle space. a lot of them--overflow. "of course we'll have to make sure the girls get in at night." he reached out for a ground floor plan of the bloomsbury establishment which was to be the first built. "if," he said, "we were to have a sort of porter's lodge with a book--and make 'em ring a bell after eleven say--just here...." he took out a silver pencil case and got to work. lady harman's expression as she leant over him became thoughtful. there were points about this project that gave her the greatest misgivings; that matron, keeping her eye on the girls, that carefully selected library, the porter's bell, these casual allusions to "discipline" that set her thinking of scraps of the babs wheeler controversy. there was a regularity, an austerity about this project that chilled her, she hardly knew why. her own vague intentions had been an amiable, hospitable, agreeably cheap establishment to which the homeless feminine employees in london could resort freely and cheerfully, and it was only very slowly that she perceived that her husband was by no means convinced of the spontaneity of their coming. he seemed always glancing at methods for compelling them to come in and oppressions when that compulsion had succeeded. there had already hovered over several of these anticipatory evenings, his very manifest intention to have very carefully planned "rules." she felt there lay ahead of them much possibility for divergence of opinion about these "rules." she foresaw a certain narrowness and hardness. she herself had made her fight against the characteristics of sir isaac and--perhaps she was lacking in that aristocratic feeling which comes so naturally to most successful middle-class people in england--she could not believe that what she had found bad and suffocating for herself could be agreeable and helpful for her poorer sisters. it occurred to her to try the effect of the scheme upon susan burnet. susan had such a knack of seeing things from unexpected angles. she contrived certain operations upon the study blinds, and then broached the business to susan casually in the course of an enquiry into the welfare of the burnet family. susan was evidently prejudiced against the idea. "yes," said susan after various explanations and exhibitions, "but where's the home in it?" "the whole thing is a home." "barracks _i_ call it," said susan. "nobody ever felt at home in a room coloured up like that--and no curtains, nor vallances, nor toilet covers, nor anywhere where a girl can hang a photograph or anything. what girl's going to feel at home in a strange place like that?" "they ought to be able to hang up photographs," said lady harman, making a mental note of it. "and of course there'll be all sorts of rules." "_some_ rules." "homes, real homes don't have rules. and i daresay--fines." "no, there shan't be any fines," said lady harman quickly. "i'll see to that." "you got to back up rules somehow--once you got 'em," said susan. "and when you get a crowd, and no father and mother, and no proper family feeling, i suppose there's got to be rules." lady harman pointed out various advantages of the project. "i'm not saying it isn't cheap and healthy and social," said susan, "and if it isn't too strict i expect you'll get plenty of girls to come to it, but at the best it's an institution, lady harman. it's going to be an institution. that's what it's going to be." she held the front elevation of the bloomsbury hostel in her hand and reflected. "of course for my part, i'd rather lodge with nice struggling believing christian people anywhere than go into a place like that. it's the feeling of freedom, of being yourself and on your own. even if the water wasn't laid on and i had to fetch it myself.... if girls were paid properly there wouldn't be any need of such places, none at all. it's the poverty makes 'em what they are.... and after all, somebody's got to lose the lodgers if this place gets them. suppose this sort of thing grows up all over the place, it'll just be the story of the little bakers and little grocers and all those people over again. why in london there are thousands of people just keep a home together by letting two or three rooms or boarding someone--and it stands to reason, they'll have to take less or lose the lodgers if this kind of thing's going to be done. nobody isn't going to build a hostel for them." "no," said lady harman, "i never thought of them." "lots of 'em haven't anything in the world but their bits of furniture and their lease and there they are stuck and tied. there's aunt hannah, father's sister, she's like that. sleeps in the basement and works and slaves, and often i've had to lend her ten shillings to pay the rent with, through her not being full. this sort of place isn't going to do much good to her." lady harman surveyed the plan rather blankly. "i suppose it isn't." "and then if you manage this sort of place easy and attractive, it's going to draw girls away from their homes. there's girls like alice who'd do anything to get a bit of extra money to put on their backs and seem to think of nothing but chattering and laughing and going about. such a place like this would be fine fun for alice; in when she liked and out when she liked, and none of us to ask her questions. she'd be just the sort to go, and mother, who's had the upbringing of her, how's she to make up for alice's ten shillings what she pays in every week? there's lots like alice. she's not bad isn't alice, she's a good girl and a good-hearted girl; i will say that for her, but she's shallow, say what you like she's shallow, she's got no thought and she's wild for pleasure, and sometimes it seems to me that that's as bad as being bad for all the good it does to anyone else in the world, and so i tell her. but of course she hasn't seen things as i've seen them and doesn't feel as i do about all these things...." thus susan. her discourse so puzzled lady harman that she bethought herself of mr. brumley and called in his only too readily accorded advice. she asked him to tea on a day when she knew unofficially that sir isaac would be away, she showed him the plans and sketched their probable development. then with that charming confidence of hers in his knowledge and ability she put her doubts and fears before him. what did he really think of these places? what did he think of susan burnet's idea of ruined lodging-house keepers? "i used to think our stores were good things," she said. "is this likely to be a good thing at all?" mr. brumley said "um" a great number of times and realized that he was a humbug. he fenced with her and affected sagacity for a time and suddenly he threw down his defences and confessed he knew as little of the business as she did. "but i see it is a complex question and--it's an interesting one too. may i enquire into it for you? i think i might be able to hunt up a few particulars...." he went away in a glow of resolution. georgina was about the only intimate who regarded the new development without misgiving. "you think you're going to do all sorts of things with these hostels, ella," she said, "but as a matter of fact they're bound to become just exactly what we've always wanted." "and what may that be?" asked mrs. sawbridge over her macramé work. "strongholds for a garrison of suffragettes," said georgina with the light of the great insane movement in her eyes and a ringing note in her voice. "fort chabrols for women." § for some months in a negative and occasionally almost negligent fashion mr. brumley had been living up to his impassioned resolve to be an unselfish lover of lady harman. he had been rather at loose ends intellectually, deprived of his old assumptions and habitual attitudes and rather chaotic in the matter of his new convictions. he had given most of his productive hours to the writing of a novel which was to be an entire departure from the euphemia tradition. the more he got on with this, the more clearly he realized that it was essentially insignificant. when he re-read what he had written he was surprised by crudities where he had intended sincerities and rhetoric where the scheme had demanded passion. what was the matter with him? he was stirred that lady harman should send for him, and his inability to deal with her perplexities deepened his realization of the ignorance and superficiality he had so long masked even from himself beneath the tricks and pretensions of a gay scepticism. he went away fully resolved to grapple with the entire hostel question, and he put the patched and tortured manuscript of the new novel aside with a certain satisfaction to do this. the more he reflected upon the nature of this study he proposed for himself the more it attracted him. it was some such reality as this he had been wanting. he could presently doubt whether he would ever go back to his novel-writing again, or at least to the sort of novel-writing he had been doing hitherto. to invent stories to save middle-aged prosperous middle-class people from the distresses of thinking, is surely no work for a self-respecting man. stevenson in the very deeps of that dishonourable traffic had realized as much and likened himself to a _fille de joie_, and haggard, of the same school and period, had abandoned blood and thunder at the climax of his success for the honest study of agricultural conditions. the newer successes were turning out work, less and less conventional and agreeable and more and more stiffened with facts and sincerities.... he would show lady harman that a certain debonair quality he had always affected, wasn't incompatible with a powerful grasp of general conditions.... and she wanted this done. suppose he did it in a way that made him necessary to her. suppose he did it very well. he set to work, and understanding as you do a certain quality of the chameleon in mr. brumley's moral nature, you will understand that he worked through a considerable variety of moods. sometimes he worked with disinterested passion and sometimes he was greatly sustained by this thought that here was something that would weave him in with the gravities of her life and give him perhaps a new inlet to intimacy. and presently a third thing came to his help, and that was the discovery that the questions arising out of this attempt to realize the importance of those hostels, were in themselves very fascinating questions for an intelligent person. because before you have done with the business of the modern employé, you must, if you are an intelligent person, have taken a view of the whole vast process of social reorganization that began with the development of factory labour and big towns, and which is even now scarcely advanced enough for us to see its general trend. for a time mr. brumley did not realize the magnitude of the thing he was looking at; when he did, theories sprouted in his mind like mushrooms and he babbled with mental excitement. he came in a state of the utmost lucidity to explain his theories to lady harman, and they struck that lady at the time as being the most illuminating suggestions she had ever encountered. they threw an appearance of order, of process, over a world of trade and employment and competition that had hitherto seemed too complex and mysterious for any understanding. "you see," said mr. brumley--they had met that day in kensington gardens and they were sitting side by side upon green chairs near the frozen writings of physical energy--"you see, if i may lecture a little, putting the thing as simply as possible, the world has been filling up new spaces ever since the discovery of america; all the period from then to about , let us say, was a period of rapid increase of population in response to new opportunities of living and new fulnesses of life in every direction. during that time, four hundred years of it roughly, there was a huge development of family life; to marry and rear a quite considerable family became the chief business of everybody, celibacy grew rare, monasteries and nunneries which had abounded vanished like things dissolving in a flood and even the priests became protestant against celibacy and took unto themselves wives and had huge families. the natural checks upon increase, famine and pestilence, were lifted by more systematized communication and by scientific discovery; and altogether and as a consequence the world now has probably three or four times the human population it ever carried before. everywhere in that period the family prevailed again, the prospering multiplying household; it was a return to the family, to the reproductive social grouping of early barbaric life, and naturally all the thought of the modern world which has emerged since the fifteenth century falls into this form. so i see it, lady harman. the generation of our grandfathers in the opening nineteenth century had two shaping ideas, two forms of thought, the family and progress, not realizing that that very progress which had suddenly reopened the doors of opportunity for the family that had revived the ancient injunction to increase and multiply and replenish the earth, might presently close that door again and declare the world was filled. but that is what is happening now. the doors close. that immense swarming and multiplying of little people is over, and the forces of social organization have been coming into play now, more and more for a century and a half, to produce new wholesale ways of doing things, new great organizations, organizations that invade the autonomous family more and more, and are perhaps destined ultimately to destroy it altogether and supersede it. at least it is so i make my reading of history in these matters." "yes," said lady harman, with knitted brows, "yes," and wondered privately whether it would be possible to get from that opening to the matter of her hostels before it was time for her to return for sir isaac's tea. mr. brumley continued to talk with his eyes fixed as it were upon his thoughts. "these things, lady harman, go on at different paces in different regions. i will not trouble you with a discussion of that, or of emigration, of any of the details of the vast proliferation that preceded the present phase. suffice it, that now all the tendency is back towards restraints upon increase, to an increasing celibacy, to a fall in the birth-rate and in the average size of families, to--to a release of women from an entire devotion to a numerous offspring, and so at last to the supersession of those little family units that for four centuries have made up the substance of social life and determined nearly all our moral and sentimental attitudes. the autonomy of the family is being steadily destroyed, and it is being replaced by the autonomy of the individual in relation to some syndicated economic effort." "i think," said lady harman slowly, arresting him by a gesture, "if you could make that about autonomy a little clearer...." mr. brumley did. he went on to point out with the lucidity of a university extension lecturer what he meant by these singular phrases. she listened intelligently but with effort. he was much too intent upon getting the thing expressed to his own satisfaction to notice any absurdity in his preoccupation with these theories about the population of the world in the face of her immediate practical difficulties. he declared that the onset of this new phase in human life, the modern phase, wherein there was apparently to be no more "proliferating," but instead a settling down of population towards a stable equilibrium, became apparent first with the expropriation of the english peasantry and the birth of the factory system and machine production. "since that time one can trace a steady substitution of wholesale and collective methods for household and family methods. it has gone far with us now. instead of the woman drawing water from a well, the pipes and taps of the water company. instead of the home-made rushlight, the electric lamp. instead of home-spun, ready-made clothes. instead of home-brewed, the brewer's cask. instead of home-baked, first the little baker and then, clean and punctual, the international bread and cake stores. instead of the child learning at its mother's knee, the compulsory elementary school. flats take the place of separate houses. instead of the little holding, the big farm, and instead of the children working at home, the factory. everywhere synthesis. everywhere the little independent proprietor gives place to the company and the company to the trust. you follow all this, lady harman?" "go on," she said, encouraged by that transitory glimpse of the stores in his discourse. "now london--and england generally--had its period of expansion and got on to the beginnings at least of this period of synthesis that is following it, sooner than any other country in the world; and because it was the first to reach the new stage it developed the characteristics of the new stage with a stronger flavour of the old than did such later growths of civilization as new york or bombay or berlin. that is why london and our british big cities generally are congestions of little houses, little homes, while the newer great cities run to apartments and flats. we hadn't grasped the logical consequences of what we were in for so completely as the people abroad did who caught it later, and that is why, as we began to develop our new floating population of mainly celibate employees and childless people, they had mostly to go into lodgings, they went into the homes that were intended for families as accessories to the family, and they were able to go in because the families were no longer so numerous as they used to be. london is still largely a city of landladies and lodgings, and in no other part of the world is there so big a population of lodgers. and this business of your hostels is nothing more nor less than the beginning of the end of that. just as the great refreshment caterers have mopped up the ancient multitude of coffee-houses and squalid little special feeding arrangements of the days of tittlebat titmouse and dick swiveller, so now your hostels are going to mop up the lodging-house system of london. of course there are other and kindred movements. naturally. the y.w.c.a., the y.m.c.a., the london girls club union and so forth are all doing kindred work." "but what, mr. brumley, what is to become of the landladies?" asked lady harman. mr. brumley was checked in mid theory. "i hadn't thought of the landladies," he said, after a short pause. "they worry me," said lady harman. "um," said mr. brumley, thrown out. "do you know the other day i went into chelsea, where there are whole streets of lodgings, and--i suppose it was wrong of me, but i went and pretended to be looking for rooms for a girl clerk i knew, and i saw--oh! no end of rooms. and such poor old women, such dingy, worked-out, broken old women, with a kind of fearful sharpness, so eager, so dreadfully eager to get that girl clerk who didn't exist...." she looked at him with an expression of pained enquiry. "that," said mr. brumley, "that i think is a question, so to speak, for the social ambulance. if perhaps i might go on----that particular difficulty we might consider later. i think i was talking of the general synthesis." "yes," said lady harman. "and what is it exactly that is to take the place of these isolated little homes and these dreary little lodgings? here are we, my husband and i, rushing in with this new thing, just as he rushed in with his stores thirty years ago and overset little bakers and confectioners and refreshment dealers by the hundred. some of them--poor dears--they----i don't like to think. and it wasn't a good thing he made after all,--only a hard sort of thing. he made all those shops of his--with the girls who strike and say they are sweated and driven.... and now here we are making a kind of barrack place for people to live in!" she expressed the rest of her ideas with a gesture of the hands. "i admit the process has its dangers," said mr. brumley. "it's like the supersession of the small holdings by the _latifundia_ in italy. but that's just where our great opportunity comes in. these synthetic phases have occurred before in the world's history and their history is a history of lost opportunities.... but need ours be?" she had a feeling as though something had slipped through her fingers. "i feel," she said, "that it is more important to me than anything else in life, that these hostels, anyhow, which are springing so rapidly from a chance suggestion of mine, shouldn't be lost opportunities." "exactly," said mr. brumley, with the gesture of one who recovers a thread. "that is just what i am driving at." the fingers of his extended hand felt in the warm afternoon air for a moment, and then he said "ah!" in a tone of recovery while she waited respectfully for the resumed thread. "you see," he said, "i regard this process of synthesis, this substitution of wholesale and collective methods for homely and individual ones as, under existing conditions, inevitable--inevitable. it's the phase we live in, it's to this we have to adapt ourselves. it is as little under your control or mine as the movement of the sun through the zodiac. practically, that is. and what we have to do is not, i think, to sigh for lost homes and the age of gold and spade husbandry, and pigs and hens in the home, and so on, but to make this new synthetic life tolerable for the mass of men and women, hopeful for the mass of men and women, a thing developing and ascending. that's where your hostels come in, lady harman; that's where they're so important. they're a pioneer movement. if they succeed--and things in sir isaac's hands have a way of succeeding at any rate to the paying point--then there'll be a headlong rush of imitations, imitating your good features, imitating your bad features, deepening a groove.... you see my point?" "yes," she said. "it makes me--more afraid than ever." "but hopeful," said mr. brumley, presuming to lay his hand for an instant on her arm. "it's big enough to be inspiring." "but i'm afraid," she said. "it's laying down the lines of a new social life--no less. and what makes it so strange, so typical, too, of the way social forces work nowadays, is that your husband, who has all the instinctive insistence upon every right and restriction of the family relation in his private life, who is narrowly, passionately _for_ the home in his own case, who hates all books and discussion that seem to touch it, should in his business activities be striking this tremendous new blow at the ancient organization. for that, you see, is what it amounts to." "yes," said lady harman slowly. "yes. of course, he doesn't know...." mr. brumley was silent for a little while. "you see," he resumed, "at the worst this new social life may become a sort of slavery in barracks; at the best--it might become something very wonderful. my mind's been busy now for days thinking just how wonderful the new life might be. instead of the old bickering, crowded family home, a new home of comrades...." he made another pause, and his thoughts ran off upon a fresh track. "in looking up all these things i came upon a queer little literature of pamphlets and so forth, dealing with the case of the shop assistants. they have a great grievance in what they call the living-in system. the employers herd them in dormitories over the shops, and usually feed them by gaslight in the basements; they fine them and keep an almost intolerable grip upon them; make them go to bed at half-past ten, make them go to church on sundays,--all sorts of petty tyrannies. the assistants are passionately against this, but they've got no power to strike. where could they go if they struck? into the street. only people who live out and have homes of their own to sulk in _can_ strike. naturally, therefore, as a preliminary to any other improvement in the shop assistant's life, these young people want to live out. practically that's an impossible demand at present, because they couldn't get lodgings and live out with any decency at all on what it costs their employers to lodge and feed them _in_. well, here you see a curious possibility for your hostels. you open the prospect of a living-out system for shop assistants. but just in the degree in which you choose to interfere with them, regulate them, bully and deal with them wholesale through their employers, do you make the new living-out method approximate to the living-in. _that's_ a curious side development, isn't it?" lady harman appreciated that. "that's only the beginning of the business. there's something more these hostels might touch...." mr. brumley gathered himself together for the new aspect. "there's marriage," he said. "one of the most interesting and unsatisfactory aspects of the life of the employee to-day--and you know the employee is now in the majority in the adult population--is this. you see, we hold them celibate. we hold them celibate for a longer and longer period; the average age at marriage rises steadily; and so long as they remain celibate we are prepared with some sort of ideas about the future development of their social life, clubs, hostels, living-in, and so forth. but at present we haven't any ideas at all about the adaptation of the natural pairing instinct to the new state of affairs. ultimately the employee marries; they hold out as long as they possibly can, but ultimately they have to. they have to, even in the face of an economic system that holds out no prospects of anything but insecurity and an increasing chance of trouble and disaster to the employee's family group. what happens is that they drop back into a distressful, crippled, insecure imitation of the old family life as one had it in what i might call the multiplying periods of history. they start a home,--they dream of a cottage, but they drift to a lodging, and usually it isn't the best sort of lodging, for landladies hate wives and the other lodgers detest babies. often the young couple doesn't have babies. you see, they are more intelligent than peasants, and intelligence and fecundity vary reciprocally," said mr. brumley. "you mean?" interrupted lady harman softly. "there is a world-wide fall in the birth-rate. people don't have the families they did." "yes," said lady harman. "i understand now." "and the more prosperous or the more sanguine take these suburban little houses, these hutches that make such places as hendon nightmares of monotony, or go into ridiculous jerry-built sham cottages in some garden suburb, where each young wife does her own housework and pretends to like it. they have a sort of happiness for a time, i suppose; the woman stops all outside work, the man, very much handicapped, goes on competing against single men. then--nothing more happens. except difficulties. the world goes dull and grey for them. they look about for a lodger, perhaps. have you read gissing's _paying guest_?..." "i suppose," said lady harman, "i suppose it is like that. one tries not to think it is so." "one needn't let oneself believe that dullness is unhappiness," said mr. brumley. "i don't want to paint things sadder than they are. but it's not a fine life, it's not a full life, that life in a neo-malthusian suburban hutch." "neo----?" asked lady harman. "a mere phrase," said mr. brumley hastily. "the extraordinary thing is that, until you set me looking into these things with your questions, i've always taken this sort of thing for granted, as though it couldn't be otherwise. now i seem to see with a kind of freshness. i'm astounded at the muddle of it, the waste and aimlessness of it. and here again it is, lady harman, that i think your opportunity comes in. with these hostels as they might be projected now, you seem to have the possibility of a modernized, more collective and civilized family life than the old close congestion of the single home, and i see no reason at all why you shouldn't carry that collective life on to the married stage. as things are now these little communities don't go beyond the pairing--and out they drift to find the homestead they will never possess. what has been borne in upon me more and more forcibly as i have gone through your--your nest of problems, is the idea that the new social--association, that has so extensively replaced the old family group, might be carried on right through life, that it might work in with all sorts of other discontents and bad adjustments.... the life of the women in these little childless or one-or-two-child homes is more unsatisfactory even than the man's." mr. brumley's face flushed with enthusiasm and he wagged a finger to emphasize his words. "why not make hostels, lady harman, for married couples? why not try that experiment so many people have talked about of the conjoint kitchen and refectory, the conjoint nursery, the collective social life, so that the children who are single children or at best children in small families of two or three, may have the advantages of playfellows, and the young mothers still, if they choose, continue to have a social existence and go on with their professional or business, work? that's the next step your hostels might take ... incidentally you see this opens a way to a life of relative freedom for the woman who is married.... i don't know if you have read mrs. stetson. yes, charlotte perkins gilman stetson.... yes, _woman and economics_, that's the book. "i know," mr. brumley went on, "i seem to be opening out your project like a concertina, but i want you to see just how my thoughts have been going about all this. i want you to realize i haven't been idle during these last few weeks. i know it's a far cry from what the hostels are to all these ideas of what they might begin to be, i know the difficulties in your way--all sorts of difficulties. but when i think just how you stand at the very centre of the moulding forces in these changes...." he dropped into an eloquent silence. lady harman looked thoughtfully at the sunlight under the trees. "you think," she said, "that it comes to as much as all this." "more," said mr. brumley. "i was frightened before. _now_----you make me feel as though someone had put the wheel of a motor car in my hand, started it and told me to steer...." § lady harman went home from that talk in a taxi, and on the way she passed the building operations in kensington road. a few weeks ago it had been a mere dusty field of operation for the house-wreckers; now its walls were already rising to the second storey. she realized how swiftly nowadays the search for wisdom can be outstripped by reinforced concrete. § it was only by slow degrees and rather in the absence of a more commanding interest than through any invincible quality in their appeal to her mind that these hostels became in the next three years the grave occupation of lady harman's thoughts and energies. she yielded to them reluctantly. for a long time she wanted to look over them and past them and discover something--she did not know what--something high and domineering to which it would be easy to give herself. it was difficult to give herself to the hostels. in that mr. brumley, actuated by a mixture of more or less admirable motives, did his best to assist her. these hostels alone he thought could give them something upon which they could meet, give them a common interest and him a method of service and companionship. it threw the qualities of duty and justification over their more or less furtive meetings, their little expeditions together, their quiet frequent association. together they made studies of the girls' clubs which are scattered about london, supplementary homes that have in such places as walworth and soho worked small miracles of civilization. these institutions appealed to a lower social level than the one their hostels were to touch, but they had been organized by capable and understanding minds and lady harman found in one or two of their evening dances and in the lunch she shared one morning with a row of cheerful young factory girls from soho just that quality of concrete realization for which her mind hungered. then mr. brumley took her once or twice for evening walks, just when the stream of workers is going home; he battled his way with her along the footpath of charing cross railway bridge from the waterloo side, they swam in the mild evening sunshine of september against a trampling torrent of bobbing heads, and afterwards they had tea together in one of the international stores near the strand, where mr. brumley made an unsuccessful attempt to draw out the waitress on the subject of babs wheeler and the recent strike. the young woman might have talked freely to a man alone or freely to lady harman alone but the combination of the two made her shy. the bridge experience led to several other expeditions, to see home-going on the tube, at the big railway termini, on the train--and once they followed up the process to streatham and saw how the people pour out of the train at last and scatter--until at last they are just isolated individuals running up steps, diving into basements. and then it occurred to mr. brumley that he knew someone who would take them over "gerrard," that huge telephone exchange, and there lady harman saw how the national telephone company, as it was in those days, had a care for its staff, the pleasant club rooms, the rest room, and stood in that queer rendez-vous of messages, where the "hello" girl sits all day, wearing a strange metallic apparatus over ear and mouth, watching small lights that wink significantly at her and perpetually pulling out and slipping in and releasing little flexible strings that seem to have a resilient volition of their own. they hunted out mrs. barnet and heard her ideas about conjoint homes for spinsters in the garden suburb. and then they went over a training college for elementary teachers and visited the post office and then came back to more unobtrusive contemplation, from the customer's little table, of the ministering personalities of the international stores. there were times when all these things seen, seemed to fall into an entirely explicable system under mr. brumley's exposition, when they seemed to be giving and most generously giving the clearest indications of what kind of thing the hostels had to be, and times when this all vanished again and her mind became confused and perplexed. she tried to express just what it was she missed to mr. brumley. "one doesn't," she said, "see all of them and what one sees isn't what we have to do with. i mean we see them dressed up and respectable and busy and then they go home and the door shuts. it's the home that we are going to alter and replace--and what is it like?" mr. brumley took her for walks in highbury and the newer parts of hendon and over to clapham. "i want to go inside those doors," she said. "that's just what they won't let you do," said mr. brumley. "nobody visits but relations--and prospective relations, and the only other social intercourse is over the garden wall. perhaps i can find books----" he got her novels by edwin pugh and pett ridge and frank swinnerton and george gissing. they didn't seem to be attractive homes. and it seemed remarkable to her that no woman had ever given the woman's view of the small london home from the inside.... she overcame her own finer scruples and invaded the burnet household. apart from fresh aspects of susan's character in the capacity of a hostess she gained little light from that. she had never felt so completely outside a home in her life as she did when she was in the burnets' parlour. the very tablecloth on which the tea was spread had an air of being new and protective of familiar things; the tea was manifestly quite unlike their customary tea, it was no more intimate than the confectioner's shop window from which it mostly came; the whole room was full of the muffled cries of things hastily covered up and specially put away. vivid oblongs on the faded wallpaper betrayed even a rearrangement of the pictures. susan's mother was a little dingy woman, wearing a very smart new cap to the best of her ability; she had an air of having been severely shaken up and admonished, and her general bearing confessed only too plainly how shattered those preparations had left her. she watched her capable daughter for cues. susan's sisters displayed a disposition to keep their backs against something and at the earliest opportunity to get into the passage and leave susan and her tremendous visitor alone but within earshot. they started convulsively when they were addressed and insisted on "your ladyship." susan had told them not to but they would. when they supposed themselves to be unobserved they gave themselves up to the impassioned inspection of lady harman's costume. luke had fled into the street, and in spite of various messages conveyed to him by the youngest sister he refused to enter until lady harman had gone again and was well out of the way. and susan was no longer garrulous and at her ease; she had no pins in her mouth and that perhaps hampered her speech; she presided flushed and bright-eyed in a state of infectious nervous tension. her politeness was awful. never in all her life had lady harman felt her own lack of real conversational power so acutely. she couldn't think of a thing that mightn't be construed as an impertinence and that didn't remind her of district visiting. yet perhaps she succeeded better than she supposed. "what a family you have had!" she said to mrs. burnet. "i have four little girls, and i find them as much as we can manage." "you're young yet, my ladyship," said mrs. burnet, "and they aren't always the blessings they seem to be. it's the rearing's the difficulty." "they're all such healthy-looking--people." "i wish we could get hold of luke, my ladyship, and show you _'im_. he's that sturdy. and yet when 'e was a little feller----" she was launched for a time on those details that were always so dear to the mothers of the past order of things. her little spate of reminiscences was the only interlude of naturalness in an afternoon of painfully constrained behaviour.... lady harman returned a trifle shamefacedly from this abortive dip into realities to mr. brumley's speculative assurance. § while lady harman was slowly accustoming her mind to this idea that the development of those hostels was her appointed career in life, so far as a wife may have a career outside her connubial duties, and while she was getting insensibly to believe in mr. brumley's theory of their exemplary social importance, the hostels themselves with a haste that she felt constantly was premature, were achieving a concrete existence. they were developing upon lines that here and there disregarded mr. brumley's ideas very widely; they gained in practicality what perhaps they lost in social value, through the entirely indirect relations between mr. brumley on the one hand and sir isaac on the other. for sir isaac manifestly did not consider and would have been altogether indisposed to consider mr. brumley as entitled to plan or suggest anything of the slightest importance in this affair, and whatever of mr. brumley reached that gentleman reached him in a very carefully transmitted form as lady harman's own unaided idea. sir isaac had sound victorian ideas about the place of literature in life. if anyone had suggested to him that literature could supply ideas to practical men he would have had a choking fit, and he regarded mr. brumley's sedulous attentions to these hostel schemes with feelings, the kindlier elements of whose admixture was a belief that ultimately he would write some elegant and respectful approval of the established undertaking. the entire admixture of sir isaac's feelings towards mr. brumley was by no means kindly. he disliked any man to come near lady harman, any man at all; he had a faint uneasiness even about waiters and hotel porters and the clergy. of course he had agreed she should have friends of her own and he couldn't very well rescind that without something definite to go upon. but still this persistent follower kept him uneasy. he kept this uneasiness within bounds by reassuring himself upon the point of lady harman's virtuous obedience, and so reassured he was able to temper his distrust with a certain contempt. the man was in love with his wife; that was manifest enough, and dangled after her.... let him dangle. what after all did he get for it?... but occasionally he broke through this complacency, betrayed a fitful ingenious jealousy, interfered so that she missed appointments and had to break engagements. he was now more and more a being of pathological moods. the subtle changes of secretion that were hardening his arteries, tightening his breath and poisoning his blood, reflected themselves upon his spirit in an uncertainty of temper and exasperating fatigues and led to startling outbreaks. then for a time he would readjust himself, become in his manner reasonable again, become accessible. he was the medium through which this vision that was growing up in her mind of a reorganized social life, had to translate itself, as much as it could ever translate itself, into reality. he called these hostels her hostels, made her the approver of all he did, but he kept every particle of control in his own hands. all her ideas and desires had to be realized by him. and his attitudes varied with his moods; sometimes he was keenly interested in the work of organization and then he terrified her by his bias towards acute economies, sometimes he was resentful at the burthen of the whole thing, sometimes he seemed to scent brumley or at least some moral influence behind her mind and met her suggestions with a bitter resentment as though any suggestion must needs be a disloyalty to him. there was a remarkable outbreak upon her first tentative proposal that the hostel system might ultimately be extended to married couples. he heard her with his lips pressing tighter and tighter together until they were yellow white and creased with a hundred wicked little horizontal creases. then he interrupted her with silent gesticulations. then words came. "i never did, elly," he said. "i never did. reely--there are times when you ain't rational. married couples who're assistants in shops and places!" for a little while he sought some adequate expression of his point of view. "nice thing to go keeping a place for these chaps to have their cheap bits of skirt in," he said at last. then further: "if a man wants a girl let him work himself up until he can keep her. married couples indeed!" he began to expand the possibilities of the case with a quite unusual vividness. "double beds in each cubicle, i suppose," he said, and played for a time about this fancy.... "well, to hear such an idea from you of all people, elly. i never did." he couldn't leave it alone. he had to go on to the bitter end with the vision she had evoked in his mind. he was jealous, passionately jealous, it was only too manifest, of the possible happinesses of these young people. he was possessed by that instinctive hatred for the realized love of others which lies at the base of so much of our moral legislation. the bare thought--whole corridors of bridal chambers!--made his face white and his hand quiver. _his_ young men and young women! the fires of a hundred vigilance committees blazed suddenly in his reddened eyes. he might have been a concentrated society for preventing the rapid multiplication of the unfit. the idea of facilitating early marriages was manifestly shameful to him, a disgraceful service to render, a job for pandarus. what was she thinking of? elly of all people! elly who had been as innocent as driven snow before georgina came interfering! it ended in a fit of abuse and a panting seizure, and for a day or so he was too ill to resume the discussion, to do more than indicate a disgusted aloofness.... and then it may be the obscure chemicals at work within him changed their phase of reaction. at any rate he mended, became gentler, was more loving to his wife than he had been for some time and astonished her by saying that if she wanted hostels for married couples, it wasn't perhaps so entirely unreasonable. selected cases, he stipulated, it would have to be and above a certain age limit, sober people. "it might even be a check on immorality," he said, "properly managed...." but that was as far as his acquiescence went and lady harman was destined to be a widow before she saw the foundation of any hostel for young married couples in london. § the reinforced concrete rose steadily amidst lady harman's questionings and mr. brumley's speculations. the harmans returned from a recuperative visit to kissingen, to which sir isaac had gone because of a suspicion that his marienbad specialist had failed to cure him completely in order to get him back again, to find the first of the five hostels nearly ripe for its opening. there had to be a manageress and a staff organized and neither lady harman nor mr. brumley were prepared for that sort of business. a number of abler people however had become aware of the opportunities of the new development and mrs. hubert plessington, that busy publicist, got the harmans to a helpful little dinner, before lady harman had the slightest suspicion of the needs that were now so urgent. there shone a neat compact widow, a mrs. pembrose, who had buried her husband some eighteen months ago after studying social questions with him with great éclat for ten happy years, and she had done settlement work and girls' club work and had perhaps more power of organization--given a suitable director to provide for her lack of creativeness, mrs. plessington told sir isaac, than any other woman in london. afterwards sir isaac had an opportunity of talking to her; he discussed the suffrage movement with her and was pleased to find her views remarkably sympathetic with his own. she was, he declared, a sensible woman, anxious to hear a man out and capable, it was evident, of a detachment from feminist particularism rare in her sex at the present time. lady harman had seen less of the lady that evening, she was chiefly struck by her pallor, by a kind of animated silence about her, and by the deep impression her capabilities had made on mr. plessington, who had hitherto seemed to her to be altogether too overworked in admiring his wife to perceive the points of any other human being. afterwards lady harman was surprised to hear from one or two quite separate people that mrs. pembrose was the only possible person to act as general director of the new hostels. lady beach-mandarin was so enthusiastic in the matter that she made a special call. "you've known her a long time?" said lady harman. "long enough to see what a chance she is!" said lady beach-mandarin. lady harman perceived equivocation. "now how long is that really?" she said. "count not in years, nor yet in moments on a dial," said lady beach-mandarin with a fine air of quotation. "i'm thinking of her quiet strength of character. mrs. plessington brought her round to see me the other afternoon." "did she talk to you?" "i saw, my dear, i saw." a vague aversion from mrs. pembrose was in some mysterious way strengthened in lady harman by this extraordinary convergence of testimony. when sir isaac mentioned the lady with a kind of forced casualness at breakfast as the only conceivable person for the work of initiation and organization that lay before them, lady harman determined to see more of her. with a quickened subtlety she asked her to tea. "i have heard so much of your knowledge of social questions and i want you to advise me about my work," she wrote, and then scribbled a note to mr. brumley to call and help her judgments. mrs. pembrose appeared dressed in dove colour with a near bonnetesque straw hat to match. she had a pale slightly freckled complexion, little hard blue-grey eyes with that sort of nose which redeems a squarish shape by a certain delicacy of structure; her chin was long and protruding and her voice had a wooden resonance and a ghost of a lisp. her talk had a false consecutiveness due to the frequent use of the word "yes." her bearing was erect and her manner guardedly alert. from the first she betrayed a conviction that mr. brumley was incidental and unnecessary and that her real interest lay with sir isaac. she might almost have been in possession of special information upon that point. "yes," she said, "i'm rather specially _up_ in this sort of question. i worked side by side with my poor frederick all his life, we were collaborators, and this question of the urban distributive employee was one of his special studies. yes, he would have been tremendously interested in sir isaac's project." "you know what we are doing?" "every one is interested in sir isaac's enterprise. naturally. yes, i think i have a fairly good idea of what you mean to do. it's a great experiment." "you think it is likely to answer?" said mr. brumley. "in sir isaac's hands it is _very_ likely to answer," said mrs. pembrose with her eye steadily on lady harman. there was a little pause. "yes, now you wrote of difficulties and drawing upon my experience. of course just now i'm quite at sir isaac's disposal." lady harman found herself thrust perforce into the rôle of her husband's spokeswoman. she asked mrs. pembrose if she knew the exact nature of the experiment they contemplated. mrs. pembrose hadn't a doubt she knew. of course for a long time and more especially in the metropolis where the distances were so great and increasing so rapidly, there had been a gathering feeling not only in the catering trade, but in very many factory industries, against the daily journey to employment and home again. it was irksome and wasteful to everyone concerned, there was a great loss in control, later hours of beginning, uncertain service. "yes, my husband calculated the hours lost in london every week, hours that are neither work nor play, mere tiresome stuffy journeying. it made an enormous sum. it worked out at hundreds of working lives per week." sir isaac's project was to abolish all that, to bring his staff into line with the drapers and grocers who kept their assistants on the living-in system.... "i thought people objected to the living-in system," said mr. brumley. "there's an agitation against it on the part of a small trade union of shop assistants," said mrs. pembrose. "but they have no real alternative to propose." "and this isn't living in," said mr. brumley. "yes, i think you'll find it is," said mrs. pembrose with a nice little expert smile. "living-in isn't _quite_ what we want," said lady harman slowly and with knitted brows, seeking a method of saying just what the difference was to be. "yes, not perhaps in the strictest sense," said mrs. pembrose giving her no chance, and went on to make fine distinctions. strictly speaking, living-in meant sleeping over the shop and eating underneath it, and this hostel idea was an affair of a separate house and of occupants who would be assistants from a number of shops. "yes, collectivism, if you like," said mrs. pembrose. but the word collectivism, she assured them, wouldn't frighten her, she was a collectivist, a socialist, as her husband had always been. the day was past when socialist could be used as a term of reproach. "yes, instead of the individual employer of labour, we already begin to have the collective employer of labour, with a labour bureau--and so on. we share them. we no longer compete for them. it's the keynote of the time." mr. brumley followed this with a lifted eyebrow. he was still new to these modern developments of collectivist ideas, this socialism of the employer. the whole thing mrs. pembrose declared was a step forward in civilization, it was a step in the organization and discipline of labour. of course the unruly and the insubordinate would cry out. but the benefits were plain enough, space, light, baths, association, reasonable recreations, opportunities for improvement---- "but freedom?" said mr. brumley. mrs. pembrose inclined her head a little on one side, looked at him this time and smiled the expert smile again. "if you knew as much as i do of the difficulties of social work," she said, "you wouldn't be very much in love with freedom." "but--it's the very substance of the soul!" "you must permit me to differ," said mrs. pembrose, and for weeks afterwards mr. brumley was still seeking a proper polite retort to that difficult counterstroke. it was such a featureless reply. it was like having your nose punched suddenly by a man without a face. they descended to a more particular treatment of the problems ahead. mrs. pembrose quoted certain precedents from the girls' club union. "the people lady harman contemplates--entertaining," said mr. brumley, "are of a slightly more self-respecting type than those young women." "it's largely veneer," said mrs. pembrose.... "detestable little wretch," said mr. brumley when at last she had departed. he was very uncomfortable. "she's just the quintessence of all one fears and dreads about these new developments, she's perfect--in that way--self-confident, arrogant, instinctively aggressive, with a tremendous class contempt. there's a multitude of such people about who hate the employed classes, who _want_ to see them broken in and subjugated. i suppose that kind of thing is in humanity. every boy's school has louts of that kind, who love to torment fags for their own good, who spring upon a chance smut on the face of a little boy to scrub him painfully, who have a kind of lust to dominate under the pretence of improving. i remember----but never mind that now. keep that woman out of things or your hostels work for the devil." "yes," said lady harman. "certainly she shall not----. no." but there she reckoned without her husband. "i've settled it," he said to her at dinner two nights later. "what?" "mrs. pembrose." "you've not made her----?" "yes, i have. and i think we're very lucky to get her." "but--isaac! i don't want her!" "you should have told me that before, elly. i've made an agreement." she suddenly wanted to cry. "but----you said i should manage these hostels myself." "so you shall, elly. but we must have somebody. when we go abroad and all that and for all the sort of business stuff and looking after things that you can't do. we've _got_ to have her. she's the only thing going of her sort." "but--i don't like her." "well," cried sir isaac, "why in goodness couldn't you tell me that before, elly? i've been and engaged her." she sat pale-faced staring at him with wide open eyes in which tears of acute disappointment were shining. she did not dare another word because of her trick of weeping. "it's all right, elly," said sir isaac. "how touchy you are! anything you want about these hostels of yours, you've only got to tell me and it's done." § lady harman was still in a state of amazement at the altered prospects of her hostels when the day arrived for the formal opening of the first of these in bloomsbury. they made a little public ceremony of it in spite of her reluctance, and mr. brumley had to witness things from out of the general crowd and realize just how completely he wasn't in it, in spite of all his efforts. mrs. pembrose was modestly conspicuous, like the unexpected in all human schemes. there were several reporters present, and horatio blenker who was going to make a loyal leader about it, to be followed by one or two special articles for the _old country gazette_. horatio had procured mrs. blapton for the opening after some ineffectual angling for the princess adeline, and the thing was done at half-past three in the afternoon. in the bright early july sunshine outside the new building there was a crimson carpet down on the pavement and an awning above it, there was a great display of dog-daisies at the windows and on the steps leading up to the locked portals, an increasing number of invited people lurked shyly in the ground-floor rooms ready to come out by the back way and cluster expectantly when mrs. blapton arrived, graper the staff manager and two assistants in dazzling silk hats seemed everywhere, the rabbit-like architect had tried to look doggish in a huge black silk tie and only looked more like a rabbit than ever, and there was a steady driftage of small boys and girls, nurses with perambulators, cab touts, airing grandfathers and similar unemployed people towards the promise of the awning, the carpet and the flowers. the square building in all its bravery of doulton ware and yellow and mauve tiles and its great gilt inscription international hostels above the windows of the second storey seemed typical of all those modern forces that are now invading and dispelling the ancient residential peace of bloomsbury. mrs. blapton appeared only five minutes late, escorted by bertie trevor and her husband's spare secretary. graper became so active at the sight of her that he seemed more like some beast out of the apocalypse with seven hands and ten hats than a normal human being; he marshalled the significant figures into their places, the door was unlocked without serious difficulty, and lady harman found herself in the main corridor beside mr. trevor and a little behind mrs. blapton, engaged in being shown over the new creation. sir isaac (driven by graper at his elbow) was in immediate attendance on the great political lady, and mrs. pembrose, already with an air of proprietorship, explained glibly on her other hand. close behind lady harman came lady beach-mandarin, expanding like an appreciative gas in a fine endeavour to nestle happily into the whole big place, and with her were mrs. hubert plessington and mr. pope, one of those odd people who are called publicists because one must call them something, and who take chairs and political sides and are vice-presidents of everything and organize philanthropies, write letters to the papers and cannot let the occasion pass without saying a few words and generally prevent the institutions of this country from falling out of human attention. he was a little abstracted in his manner, every now and then his lips moved as he imagined a fresh turn to some classic platitude; anyone who knew him might have foretold the speech into which he presently broke. he did this in the refectory where there was a convenient step up at the end. beginning with the customary confession of incontinence, "could not let the occasion pass," he declared that he would not detain them long, but he felt that everyone there would agree with him that they shared that day in no slight occasion, no mean enterprise, that here was one of the most promising, one of the most momentous, nay! he would go further and add with due deference to them all, one of the most pregnant of social experiments in modern social work. in the past he had himself--if he might for a moment allow a personal note to creep into his observations, he himself had not been unconnected with industrial development.--(querulous voice, "who the devil is that?" and whispered explanations on the part of horatio blenker; "pope--very good man--east purblow experiment--payment in kind instead of wages--yes.").... lady harman ceased to listen to mr. pope's strained but not unhappy tenor. she had heard him before, and she had heard his like endlessly. he was the larger moiety of every public meeting she had ever attended. she had ceased even to marvel at the dull self-satisfaction that possessed him. to-day her capacity for marvelling was entirely taken up by the details of this extraordinary reality which had sprung from her dream of simple, kindly, beautiful homes for distressed and overworked young women; nothing in the whole of life had been so amazing since that lurid occasion when she had been the agonized vehicle for the entry of miss millicent harman upon this terrestrial scene. it was all so entirely what she could never have thought possible. a few words from other speakers followed, mrs. blapton, with the young secretary at hand to prompt, said something, and sir isaac was poked forwards to say, "thank you very much. it's all my wife's doing, really.... oh dash it! thank you very much." it had the effect of being the last vestige of some more elaborate piece of eloquence that had suddenly disintegrated in his mind. "and now, elly," he said, as their landaulette took them home, "you're beginning to have your hostels." "then they _are_ my hostels?" she asked abruptly. "didn't i say they were?" the satisfaction of his face was qualified by that fatigued irritability that nowadays always followed any exertion or excitement. "if i want things done? if i want things altered?" "of course you may, of course you may. what's the matter with you, elly? what's been putting ideers into your head? you got to have a directress to the thing; you must have a woman of education who knows a bit about things to look after the matrons and so on. very likely she isn't everything you want. she's the only one we could get, and i don't see----. here i go and work hard for a year and more getting these things together to please you, and then suddenly you don't like 'em. there's a lot of the spoilt child in you, elly--first and last. there they are...." they were silent for the rest of the journey to putney, both being filled with incommunicable things. § and now lady harman began to share the trouble of all those who let their minds pass out of the circle of their immediate affections with any other desire save interest and pleasure. assisted in this unhappy development by the sedulous suggestions of mr. brumley she had begun to offend against the most sacred law in our sensible british code, she was beginning to take herself and her hostels seriously, and think that it mattered how she worked for them and what they became. she tried to give all the attention her children's upbringing, her husband's ailments and the general demands of her household left free, to this complex, elusive, puzzling and worrying matter. instead of thinking that these hostels were just old hostels and that you start them and put in a mrs. pembrose and feel very benevolent and happy and go away, she had come to realize partly by dint of her own conscientious thinking and partly through mr. brumley's strenuous resolve that she should not take sir isaac's gift horse without the most exhaustive examination of its quality, that this new work, like most new things in human life, was capable not only of admirable but of altogether detestable consequences, and that it rested with her far more than with any other human being to realize the former and avoid the latter. and directly one has got to this critical pose towards things, just as one ceases to be content with things anyhow and to want them precisely somehow, one begins to realize just how intractable, confused and disingenuous are human affairs. mr. brumley had made himself see and had made her see how inevitable these big wholesale ways of doing things, these organizations and close social co-operations, have become unless there is to be a social disintegration and set back, and he had also brought himself and her to realize how easily they may develop into a new servitude, how high and difficult is the way towards methods of association that will ensure freedom and permit people to live fine individual lives. every step towards organization raises a crop of vices peculiar to itself, fresh developments of the egotism and greed and vanity of those into whose hands there falls control, fresh instances of that hostile pedantry which seems so natural to officials and managers, insurgencies and obstinacies and suspicions on the part of everyone. the poor lady had supposed that when one's intentions were obviously benevolent everyone helped. she only faced the realities of this task that she had not so much set for herself as had happened to her, after dreadful phases of disillusionment and dismay. "these hostels," said mr. brumley in his most prophetic mood, "can be made free, fine things--or no--just as all the world of men we are living in, could be made a free, fine world. and it's our place to see they are that. it's just by being generous and giving ourselves, helping without enslaving, and giving without exacting gratitude, planning and protecting with infinite care, that we bring that world nearer.... since i've known you i've come to know such things are possible...." the bloomsbury hostel started upon its career with an embarrassing difficulty. the young women of the international stores refreshment departments for whom these institutions were primarily intended displayed what looked extremely like a concerted indisposition to come in. they had been circularized and informed that henceforth, to ensure the "good social tone" of the staff, all girls not living at home with their parents or close relations would be expected to reside in the new hostels. there followed an attractive account of the advantages of the new establishment. in drawing up this circular with the advice of mrs. pembrose, sir isaac had overlooked the fact that his management was very imperfectly informed just where the girls did live, and that after its issue it was very improbable that it would be possible to find out this very necessary fact. but the girls seemed to be unaware of this ignorance at headquarters, miss babs wheeler was beginning to feel a little bored by good behaviour and crave for those dramatic cessations at the lunch hour, those speeches, with cheers, from a table top, those interviews with reporters, those flushed and eager councils of war and all the rest of that good old crisis feeling that had previously ended so happily. mr. graper came to his proprietor headlong, mrs. pembrose was summoned and together they contemplated the lamentable possibility of this great social benefit they had done the world being discredited at the outset by a strike of the proposed beneficiaries. sir isaac fell into a state of vindictiveness and was with difficulty restrained by mr. graper from immediately concluding the negotiations that were pending with three great oxford street firms that would have given over the hostels to their employees and closed them against the international girls for ever. even mrs. pembrose couldn't follow sir isaac in that, and remarked: "as i understand it, the whole intention was to provide proper housing for our own people first and foremost." "and haven't we provided it, _damn_ them?" said sir isaac in white desperation.... it was lady harman who steered the newly launched institutions through these first entanglements. it was her first important advantage in the struggle that had hitherto been going relentlessly against her. she now displayed her peculiar gift, a gift that indeed is unhappily all too rare among philanthropists, the gift of not being able to classify the people with whom she was dealing, but of continuing to regard them as a multitude of individualized souls as distinct and considerable as herself. that makes no doubt for slowness and "inefficiency" and complexity in organization, but it does make for understandings. and now, through a little talk with susan burnet about her sister's attitude upon the dispute, she was able to take the whole situation in the flank. like many people who are not easily clear, lady harman when she was clear acted with very considerable decision, which was perhaps none the less effective because of the large softnesses of her manner. she surprised sir isaac by coming of her own accord into his study, where with an altogether novel disfavour he sat contemplating the detailed plans for the sydenham hostel. "i think i've found out what the trouble is," she said. "what trouble?" "about my hostel." "how do you know?" "i've been finding out what the girls are saying." "they'd say anything." "i don't think they're clever enough for that," said lady harman after consideration. she recovered her thread. "you see, isaac, they've been frightened by the rules. i didn't know you had printed a set of rules." "one must _have_ rules, elly." "in the background," she decided. "but you see these rules--were made conspicuous. they were printed in two colours on wall cards just exactly like that list of rules and scale of fines you had to withdraw----" "i know," said sir isaac, shortly. "it reminded the girls. and that circular that seems to threaten them if they don't give up their lodgings and come in. and the way the front is got up to look just exactly like one of the refreshment-room branches--it makes them feel it will be un-homelike, and that there will be a kind of repetition in the evening of all the discipline and regulations they have to put up with during the day." "have to put up with!" murmured sir isaac. "i wish that had been thought of sooner. if we had made the places look a little more ordinary and called them osborne house or something a little old-fashioned like that, something with a touch of the old queen about it and all that kind of thing." "we can't go to the expense of taking down all those big gilt letters just to please the fancies of miss babs wheeler." "it's too late now to do that, perhaps. but we could do something, i think, to remove the suspicions ... i want, isaac----i think----" she pulled herself together to announce her determination. "i think if i were to go to the girls and meet a delegation of them, and just talk to them plainly about what we mean by this hostel." "_you_ can't go making speeches." "it would just be talking to them." "it's such a come down," said sir isaac, after a momentary contemplation of the possibility. for some time they talked without getting very far from these positions they had assumed. at last sir isaac shifted back upon his expert. "can't we talk about it to mrs. pembrose? she knows more about this sort of business than we do." "i'm not going to talk to mrs. pembrose," said lady harman, after a little interval. some unusual quality in her quiet voice made sir isaac lift his eyes to her face for a moment. so one saturday afternoon, lady harman had a meeting with a roomful of recalcitrant girls at the regent street refreshment branch, which looked very odd to her with grey cotton wrappers over everything and its blinds down, and for the first time she came face to face with the people for whom almost in spite of herself she was working. it was a meeting summoned by the international branch of the national union of waitresses and miss babs wheeler and mr. graper were so to speak the north and south poles of the little group upon the improvised platform from which lady harman was to talk to the gathering. she would have liked the support of mr. brumley, but she couldn't contrive any unostentatious way of bringing him into the business without putting it upon a footing that would have involved the appearance of sir isaac and mrs. pembrose and--everybody. and essentially it wasn't to be everybody. it was to be a little talk. lady harman rather liked the appearance of miss babs wheeler, and met more than an answering approval in that insubordinate young woman's eye. miss wheeler was a minute swaggering person, much akimbo, with a little round blue-eyed innocent face that shone with delight at the lark of living. her three companions who were in the lobby with her to receive and usher in lady harman seemed just as young, but they were relatively unilluminated except by their manifest devotion to their leader. they displayed rather than concealed their opinion of her as a "dear" and a "fair wonder." and the meeting generally it seemed to her was a gathering of very human young women, rather restless, then agog to see her and her clothes, and then somehow allayed by her appearance and quite amiably attentive to what she had to say. a majority were young girls dressed with the cheap smartness of the suburbs, the rest were for the most part older and dingier, and here and there were dotted young ladies of a remarkable and questionable smartness. in the front row, full of shy recognitions and a little disguised by an unfamiliar hat was susan's sister alice. as lady harman had made up her mind that she was not going to deliver a speech she felt no diffidence in speaking. she was far too intent on her message to be embarrassed by any thought of the effect she was producing. she talked as she might have talked in one of her easier moods to mr. brumley. and as she talked it happened that miss babs wheeler and quite a number of the other girls present watched her face and fell in love with her. she began with her habitual prelude. "you see," she said, and stopped and began again. she wanted to tell them and with a clumsy simplicity she told them how these hostels had arisen out of her desire that they should have something better than the uncomfortable lodgings in which they lived. they weren't a business enterprise, but they weren't any sort of charity. "and i wanted them to be the sort of place in which you would feel quite free. i hadn't any sort of intention of having you interfered with. i hate being interfered with myself, and i understand just as well as anyone can that you don't like it either. i wanted these hostels to be the sort of place that you might perhaps after a time almost manage and run for yourselves. you might have a committee or something.... only you know it isn't always easy to do as one wants. things don't always go in this world as one wants them to go--particularly if one isn't clever." she lost herself for a moment at that point, and then went on to say she didn't like the new rules. they had been drawn up in a hurry and she had only read them after they were printed. all sorts of things in them---- she seemed to be losing her theme again, and mr. graper handed her the offending card, a big varnished wall placard, with eyelets and tape complete. she glanced at it. for example, she said, it wasn't her idea to have fines. (great and long continued applause.) there was something she had always disliked about fines. (renewed applause.) but these rules could easily be torn up. and as she said this and as the meeting broke into acquiescence again it occurred to her that there was the card of rules in her hands, and nothing could be simpler than to tear it up there and then. it resisted her for a moment, she compressed her lips and then she had it in halves. this tearing was so satisfactory to her that she tore it again and then again. as she tore it, she had a pleasant irrational feeling that she was tearing mrs. pembrose. mr. graper's face betrayed his shocked feelings, and the meeting which had become charged with a strong desire to show how entirely it approved of her, made a crowning attempt at applause. they hammered umbrellas on the floor, they clapped hands, they rattled chairs and gave a shrill cheer. a chair was broken. "i wish," said lady harman when that storm had abated, "you'd come and look at the hostel. couldn't you come next saturday afternoon? we could have a stand-up tea and you could see the place and then afterwards your committee and i--and my husband--could make out a real set of rules...." she went on for some little time longer, she appealed to them with all the strength of her honest purpose to help her to make this possible good thing a real good thing, not to suspect, not to be hard on her--"and my husband"--not to make a difficult thing impossible, it was so easy to do that, and when she finished she was in the happiest possession of her meeting. they came thronging round her with flushed faces and bright eyes, they wanted to come near her, wanted to touch her, wanted to assure her that for her they were quite prepared to live in any kind of place. for her. "you come and talk to us, lady harman," said one; "_we'll_ show you." "nobody hasn't told us, lady harman, how these hostels were _yours_." "you come and talk to us again, lady harman." ... they didn't wait for the following saturday. on monday morning mrs. pembrose received thirty-seven applications to take up rooms. § for the next few years it was to be a matter of recurrent heart-searching for lady harman whether she had been profoundly wise or extremely foolish in tearing up that card of projected rules. at the time it seemed the most natural and obvious little action imaginable; it was long before she realized just how symbolical and determining a few movements of the hand and wrist can be. it fixed her line not so much for herself as for others. it put her definitely, much more definitely than her convictions warranted, on the side of freedom against discipline. for indeed her convictions like most of our convictions kept along a tortuous watershed between these two. it is only a few rare extravagant spirits who are wholly for the warp or wholly for the woof of human affairs. the girls applauded and loved her. at one stroke she had acquired the terrible liability of partisans. they made her their champion and sanction; she was responsible for an endless succession of difficulties that flowered out of their interpretations of her act. these hostels that had seemed passing out of her control, suddenly turned back upon her and took possession of her. and they were never simple difficulties. right and wrong refused to unravel for her; each side of every issue seemed to be so often in suicidal competition with its antagonist for the inferior case. if the forces of order and discipline showed themselves perennially harsh and narrow, it did not blind her perplexed eyes to the fact that the girls were frequently extremely naughty. she wished very often, she did so wish--they wouldn't be. they set out with a kind of eagerness for conflict. their very loyalty to her expressed itself not so much in any sustained attempt to make the hostels successful as in cheering inconveniently, in embarrassing declarations of a preference, in an ingenious and systematic rudeness to anyone suspected of imperfect devotion to her. the first comers into the hostels were much more like the swelling inrush of a tide than, as mrs. pembrose would have preferred, like something laid on through a pipe, and when this lady wanted to go on with the old rules until sir isaac had approved of the new, the new arrivals went into the cutting-out room and manifested. lady harman had to be telephoned for to allay the manifestation. and then arose questions of deportment, trivial in themselves, but of the gravest moment for the welfare of the hostels. there was a phrase about "noisy or improper conduct" in the revised rules. few people would suspect a corridor, ten feet wide and two hundred feet long, as a temptation to impropriety, but mrs. pembrose found it was so. the effect of the corridors upon undisciplined girls quite unaccustomed to corridors was for a time most undesirable. for example they were moved to _run_ along them violently. they ran races along them, when they overtook they jostled, when they were overtaken they squealed. the average velocity in the corridors of the lady occupants of the bloomsbury hostel during the first fortnight of its existence was seven miles an hour. was that violence? was that impropriety? the building was all steel construction, but one _heard_ even in the head matron's room. and then there was the effect of the rows and rows of windows opening out upon the square. the square had some pleasant old trees and it was attractive to look down into their upper branches, where the sparrows mobbed and chattered perpetually, and over them at the chimneys and turrets and sky signs of the london world. the girls looked. so far they were certainly within their rights. but they did not look modestly, they did not look discreetly. they looked out of wide-open windows, they even sat perilously and protrudingly on the window sills conversing across the façade from window to window, attracting attention, and once to mrs. pembrose's certain knowledge a man in the street joined in. it was on a sunday morning, too, a bloomsbury sunday morning! but graver things were to rouse the preventive prohibitionist in the soul of mrs. pembrose. there was the visiting of one another's rooms and cubicles. most of these young people had never possessed or dreamt of possessing a pretty and presentable apartment to themselves, and the first effect of this was to produce a decorative outbreak, a vigorous framing of photographs and hammering of nails ("dust-gathering litter."--_mrs. pembrose_) and then--visiting. they visited at all hours and in all costumes; they sat in groups of three or four, one on the chair and the rest on the bed conversing into late hours,--entirely uncensored conversations too often accompanied by laughter. when mrs. pembrose took this to lady harman she found her extraordinarily blind to the conceivable evils of this free intercourse. "but lady harman!" said mrs. pembrose, with a note of horror, "some of them--kiss each other!" "but if they're fond of each other," said lady harman. "i'm sure i don't see----" and when the floor matrons were instructed to make little surprise visits up and down the corridors the girls who occupied rooms took to locking their doors--and lady harman seemed inclined to sustain their right to do that. the floor matrons did what they could to exercise authority, one or two were former department manageresses, two were ex-elementary teachers, crowded out by younger and more certificated rivals, one, and the most trustworthy one, mrs. pembrose found, was an ex-wardress from holloway. the natural result of these secret talkings and conferrings in the rooms became apparent presently in some mild ragging and in the concoction of petty campaigns of annoyance designed to soften the manners of the more authoritative floor matrons. here again were perplexing difficulties. if a particular floor matron has a clear commanding note in her voice, is it or is it not "violent and improper" to say "haw!" in clear commanding tones whenever you suppose her to be within earshot? as for the door-locking mrs. pembrose settled that by carrying off all the keys. complaints and incidents drifted towards definite scenes and "situations." both sides in this continuing conflict of dispositions were so definite, so intolerant, to the mind of the lady with the perplexed dark eyes who mediated. her reason was so much with the matrons; her sympathies so much with the girls. she did not like the assured brevity of mrs. pembrose's judgments and decisions; she had an instinctive perception of the truth that all compact judgments upon human beings are unjust judgments. the human spirit is but poorly adapted either to rule or to be ruled, and the honesty of all the efforts of mrs. pembrose and her staffs--for soon the hostels at sydenham and west kensington were open--were marred not merely by arrogance but by an irritability, a real hostility to complexities and difficulties and resisters and troublesome characters. and it did not help the staff to a triumphant achievement of its duties that the girls had an exaggerated perception that lady harman's heart was on their side. and presently the phrase "weeding out" crept into the talk of mrs. pembrose. some of the girls were being marked as ringleaders, foci of mischief, characters it was desirable to "get rid of." confronted with it lady harman perceived she was absolutely opposed to this idea of getting rid of anyone--unless it was mrs. pembrose. she liked her various people; she had no desire for a whittled success with a picked remnant of subdued and deferential employees. she put that to mr. brumley and mr. brumley was indignant and eloquent in his concurrence. a certain mary trunk, a dark young woman with a belief that it became her to have a sweet disorder in her hair, and a large blond girl named lucy baxandall seemed to be the chief among the bad influences of the bloomsbury hostel, and they took it upon themselves to appeal to lady harman against mrs. pembrose. they couldn't, they complained, "do a thing right for her...." so the tangle grew. presently lady harman had to go to the riviera with sir isaac and when she came back mary trunk and lucy baxandall had vanished from both the international hostel and the international stores. she tried to find out why, and she was confronted by inadequate replies and enigmatical silences. "they decided to go," said mrs. pembrose, and dropped "fortunately" after that statement. she disavowed any exact knowledge of their motives. but she feared the worst. susan burnet was uninforming. whatever had happened had failed to reach alice burnet's ears. lady harman could not very well hold a commission of enquiry into the matter, but she had an uneasy sense of a hidden campaign of dislodgement. and about the corridors and cubicles and club rooms there was she thought a difference, a discretion, a flavour of subjugation.... chapter the eleventh the last crisis § it would be quite easy for anyone with the knack of reserve to go on from this point with a history of lady harman that would present her as practically a pure philanthropist. for from these beginnings she was destined to proceed to more and more knowledge and understanding and clear purpose and capable work in this interesting process of collective regrouping, this process which may even at last justify mr. brumley's courageous interpretations and prove to be an early experiment in the beginning of a new social order. perhaps some day there will be an official biography, another addition to the inscrutable records of british public lives, in which all these things will be set out with tact and dignity. horatio blenker or adolphus blenker may survive to be entrusted with this congenial task. she will be represented as a tall inanimate person pursuing one clear benevolent purpose in life from her very beginning, and sir isaac and her relations with sir isaac will be rescued from reality. the book will be illustrated by a number of carefully posed photographer's photographs of her, studies of the putney house and perhaps an unappetizing woodcut of her early home at penge. the aim of all british biography is to conceal. a great deal of what we have already told will certainly not figure in any such biography, and still more certainly will the things we have yet to tell be missing. lady harman was indeed only by the force of circumstances and intermittently a pure philanthropist, and it is with the intercalary passages of less exalted humanity that we are here chiefly concerned. at times no doubt she did really come near to filling and fitting and becoming identical with that figure of the pure philanthropist which was her world-ward face, but for the most part that earnest and dignified figure concealed more or less extensive spaces of nothingness, while the errant soul of the woman within strayed into less exalted ways of thinking. there were times when she was almost sure of herself--mrs. hubert plessington could scarcely have been surer of herself, and times when the whole magnificent project of constructing a new urban social life out of those difficult hostels, a collective urban life that should be liberal and free, broke into grimacing pieces and was the most foolish of experiments. her struggles with mrs. pembrose thereupon assumed a quality of mere bickering and she could even doubt whether mrs. pembrose wasn't justified in her attitude and wiser by her very want of generosity. she felt then something childish in the whole undertaking that otherwise escaped her, she was convicted of an absurd self-importance, she discovered herself an ignorant woman availing herself of her husband's power and wealth to attempt presumptuous experiments. in these moods of disillusionment, her mind went adrift and was driven to and fro from discontent to discontent; she would find herself taking soundings and seeking an anchorage upon the strangest, most unfamiliar shoals. and in her relations and conflicts with her husband there was a smouldering shame for her submissions to him that needed only a phase of fatigue to become acute. so long as she believed in her hostels and her mission that might be endured, but forced back upon her more personal life its hideousness stood unclothed. mr. brumley could sometimes reassure her by a rhetorical effort upon the score of her hostels, but most of her more intimate and inner life was not, for very plain reasons, to be shown to him. he was full of the intention of generous self-denials, but she had long since come to measure the limits of his self-denial.... mr. brumley was a friend in whom smouldered a love, capable she knew quite clearly of tormented and tormenting jealousies. it would be difficult to tell, and she certainly could never have told how far she knew of this by instinct, how far it came out of rapid intuitions from things seen and heard. but she understood that she dared not let a single breath of encouragement, a hint of physical confidence, reach that banked-up glow. a sentinel discretion in her brain was always on the watch for that danger, and that restraint, that added deliberate inexpressiveness, kept them most apart, when most her spirit cried out for companionship. the common quality of all these moods of lassitude was a desolating loneliness. she had at times a need that almost overwhelmed her to be intimate, to be comforted and taken up out of the bleak harsh disappointments and stresses of her customary life. at times after sir isaac had either been too unloving or too loving, or when the girls or the matrons had achieved some new tangle of mutual unreasonableness, or when her faith failed, she would lie in the darkness of her own room with her soul crying out for--how can one put it?--the touch of other soul-stuff. and perhaps it was the constant drift of mr. brumley's talk, the little suggestions that fell drop by drop into her mind from his, that disposed her to believe that this aching sense of solitude in the void was to be assuaged by love, by some marvel of close exaltation that one might reach through a lover. she had told mr. brumley long ago that she would never let herself think of love, she still maintained to him that attitude of resolute aloofness, but almost without noting what she did, she was tampering now in her solitude with the seals of that locked chamber. she became secretly curious about love. perhaps there was something in it of which she knew nothing. she found herself drawn towards poetry, found a new attraction in romance; more and more did she dally with the idea that there was some unknown beauty in the world, something to which her eyes might presently open, something deeper and sweeter than any thing she had ever known, close at hand, something to put all the world into proportion for her. in a little while she no longer merely tampered with these seals, for quite silently the door had opened and she was craning in. this love it seemed to her might after all be so strange a thing that it goes unsuspected and yet fills the whole world of a human soul. an odd grotesque passage in a novel by wilkins gave her that idea. he compared love to electricity, of all things in the world; that throbbing life amidst the atoms that we now draw upon for light, warmth, connexion, the satisfaction of a thousand wants and the cure of a thousand ills. there it is and always has been in the life of man, and yet until a century ago it worked unsuspected, was known only for a disregarded oddity of amber, a crackling in frost-dry hair and thunder.... and then she remembered how mr. brumley had once broken into a panegyric of love. "it makes life a different thing. it is like the home-coming of something lost. all this dispersed perplexing world _centres_. think what true love means; to live always in the mind of another and to have that other living always in your mind.... only there can be no restraints, no reserves, no admission of prior rights. one must feel _safe_ of one's welcome and freedoms...." wasn't it worth the risk of almost any breach of boundaries to get to such a light as that?... she hid these musings from every human being, she was so shy with them, she hid them almost from herself. rarely did they have their way with her and when they did, presently she would accuse herself of slackness and dismiss them and urge herself to fresh practicalities in her work. but her work was not always at hand, sir isaac's frequent relapses took her abroad to places where she found herself in the midst of beautiful scenery with little to do and little to distract her from these questionings. then such thoughts would inundate her. this feeling of the unsatisfactoriness of life, of incompleteness and solitariness, was not of that fixed sort that definitely indicates its demand. under its oppression she tried the idea of love, but she also tried certain other ideas. very often this vague appeal had the quality of a person, sometimes a person shrouded in night, a soundless whisper, the unseen lover who came to psyche in the darkness. and sometimes that person became more distinct, less mystic and more companionable. perhaps because imaginations have a way of following the line of least resistance, it took upon itself something of the form, something of the voice and bearing of mr. brumley. she recoiled from her own thoughts when she discovered herself wondering what manner of lover mr. brumley might make--if suddenly she lowered her defences, freed his suffocating pleading, took him to herself. in my anxiety to draw mr. brumley as he was, i have perhaps a little neglected to show him as lady harman saw him. we have employed the inconsiderate verisimilitude of a novelist repudiating romance in his portrayal; towards her he kept a better face. he was at least a very honest lover and there was little disingenuousness in the flow of fine mental attitudes that met her; the thought and presence of her made him fine; as soon could he have turned his shady side towards the sun. and she was very ready and eager to credit him with generous qualities. we of his club and circle, a little assisted perhaps by max beerbohm's diabolical index finger, may have found and been not unwilling to find his face chiefly expressive of a kind of empty alertness; but when it was turned to her its quite pleasantly modelled features glowed and it was transfigured. so far as she was concerned, with sir isaac as foil, he was real enough and good enough for her. and by the virtue of that unlovely contrast even a certain ineffectiveness--became infinite delicacy.... the thought of mr. brumley in that relation and to that extent of clearness came but rarely into her consciousness, and when it did it was almost immediately dismissed again. it was the most fugitive of proffered consolations. and it is to be remarked that it made its most successful apparitions when mr. brumley was far away, and by some weeks or months of separation a little blurred and forgotten.... and sometimes this unrest of her spirit, this unhappiness turned her in quite another direction as it seemed and she had thoughts of religion. with a deepened shame she would go seeking into that other, that greater indelicacy, from which her upbringing had divorced her mind. she would even secretly pray. greatly daring she fled on several occasions from her visitation of the hostels or slipped out of her home, and evading mr. brumley, went once to the brompton oratory, once or twice to the westminster cathedral and then having discovered saint paul's, to saint paul's in search of this nameless need. it was a need that no plain and ugly little place of worship would satisfy. it was a need that demanded choir and organ. she went to saint paul's haphazard when her mood and opportunity chanced together and there in the afternoons she found a wonder of great music and chanting voices, and she would kneel looking up into those divine shadows and perfect archings and feel for a time assuaged, wonderfully assuaged. sometimes, there, she seemed to be upon the very verge of grasping that hidden reality which makes all things plain. sometimes it seemed to her that this very indulgence was the hidden reality. she could never be sure in her mind whether these secret worshippings helped or hampered her in her daily living. they helped her to a certain disregard of annoyances and indignities and so far they were good, but they also helped towards a more general indifference. she might have told these last experiences to mr. brumley if she had not felt them to be indescribable. they could not be half told. they had to be told completely or they were altogether untellable. so she had them hid, and at once accepted and distrusted the consolation they brought her, and went on with the duties and philanthropies that she had chosen as her task in the world. § one day in lent--it was nearly three years after the opening of the first hostel--she went to saint paul's. she was in a mood of great discouragement; the struggle between mrs. pembrose and the bloomsbury girls had suddenly reopened in an acute form and sir isaac, who was sickening again after a period of better health, had become strangely restless and irritable and hostile to her. he had thwarted her unusually and taken the side of the matrons in a conflict in which susan burnet's sister alice was now distinguished as the chief of the malcontents. the new trouble seemed to lady harman to be traceable in one direction to that ardent unionist, miss babs wheeler, under the spell of whose round-faced, blue-eyed, distraught personality alice had altogether fallen. miss babs wheeler was fighting for the union; she herself lived at highbury with her mother, and alice was her chosen instrument in the hostels. the union had always been a little against the lady-like instincts of many of the waitresses; they felt strikes were vulgar and impaired their social standing, and this feeling had been greatly strengthened by irruptions of large contingents of shop assistants from various department stores. the bloomsbury hostel in particular now accommodated a hundred refined and elegant hands--they ought rather to be called figures--from the great oxford street costume house of eustace and mills, young people with a tall sweeping movement and an elevation of chin that had become nearly instinctive, and a silent yet evident intention to find the international girls "low" at the slightest provocation. it is only too easy for poor humanity under the irritation of that tacit superiority to respond with just the provocation anticipated. what one must regretfully speak of as the vulgar section of the international girls had already put itself in the wrong by a number of aggressive acts before the case came to lady harman's attention. mrs. pembrose seized the occasion for weeding on a courageous scale, and miss alice burnet and three of her dearest friends were invited to vacate their rooms "pending redecoration". with only too much plausibility the threatened young women interpreted this as an expulsion, and declined to remove their boxes and personal belongings. miss babs wheeler thereupon entered the bloomsbury hostel, and in the teeth of three express prohibitions from mrs. pembrose, went a little up the staircase and addressed a confused meeting in the central hall. there was loud and continuous cheering for lady harman at intervals during this incident. thereupon mrs. pembrose demanded sweeping dismissals, not only from the hostels but the shops as an alternative to her resignation, and lady harman found herself more perplexed than ever.... georgina sawbridge had contrived to mingle herself in an entirely characteristic way in these troubles by listening for a brief period to an abstract of her sister's perplexities, then demanding to be made director-general of the whole affair, refusing to believe this simple step impossible and retiring in great dudgeon to begin a series of letters of even more than sisterly bitterness. and mr. brumley when consulted had become dangerously sentimental. under these circumstances lady harman's visit to saint paul's had much of the quality of a flight. it was with an unwonted sense of refuge that she came from the sombre stress and roar of london without into the large hushed spaces of the cathedral. the door closed behind her--and all things changed. here was meaning, coherence, unity. here instead of a pelting confusion of movements and motives was a quiet concentration upon the little focus of light about the choir, the gentle complete dominance of a voice intoning. she slipped along the aisle and into the nave and made her way to a seat. how good this was! outside she had felt large, awkwardly responsible, accessible to missiles, a distressed conspicuous thing; within this living peace she suddenly became no more than one of a tranquil hushed community of small black-clad lenten people; she found a chair and knelt and felt she vanished even from her own consciousness.... how beautiful was this place! she looked up presently at the great shadowy arcs far above her, so easy, so gracious that it seemed they had not so much been built by men as shaped by circling flights of angels. the service, a little clustering advance of voices unsustained by any organ, mingled in her mind with the many-pointed glow of candles. and then into this great dome of worship and beauty, like a bed of voices breaking into flower, like a springtime breeze of sound, came allegri's miserere.... her spirit clung to this mood of refuge. it seemed as though the disorderly, pugnacious, misunderstanding universe had opened and shown her luminous mysteries. she had a sense of penetration. all that conflict, that jar of purposes and motives, was merely superficial; she had left it behind her. for a time she had no sense of effort in keeping hold of this, only of attainment, she drifted happily upon the sweet sustaining sounds, and then--then the music ceased. she came back into herself. close to her a seated man stirred and sighed. she tried to get back her hold upon that revelation but it had gone. inexorably, opaque, impenetrable doors closed softly on her moment of vision.... all about her was the stir of departure. she walked out slowly into the cold march daylight, to the leaden greys, the hurrying black shapes, the chaotic afternoon traffic of london. she paused on the steps, still but half reawakened. a passing omnibus obtruded the familiar inscription, "international stores for staminal bread." she turned like one who remembers, to where her chauffeur stood waiting. § as her motor car, with a swift smoothness, carried her along the embankment towards the lattice bar of charing cross bridge and the remoter towers of the houses of parliament, grey now and unsubstantial against the bright western sky, her mind came back slowly to her particular issues in life. but they were no longer the big exasperatingly important things that had seemed to hold her life by a hundred painful hooks before she went into the cathedral. they were small still under this dome of evening, small even by the measure of the grey buildings to the right of her and the warm lit river to her left, by the measure of the clustering dark barges, the teeming trams, the streaming crowds of people, the note of the human process that sounds so loud there. she felt small even to herself, for the touch of beauty saves us from our own personalities, makes gods of us to our own littleness. she passed under the railway bridge at charing cross, watched the square cluster of westminster's pinnacles rise above her until they were out of sight overhead, ran up the little incline and round into parliament square, and was presently out on the riverside embankment again with the great chimneys of chelsea smoking athwart the evening gold. and thence with a sudden effect of skies shut and curtains drawn she came by devious ways to the fulham road and the crowding traffic of putney bridge and putney high street and so home. snagsby, assisted by a new under-butler, a lean white-faced young man with red hair, received her ceremoniously and hovered serviceably about her. on the hall table lay three or four visiting cards of no importance, some circulars and two letters. she threw the circulars into the basket placed for them and opened her first letter. it was from georgina; it was on several sheets and it began, "i still cannot believe that you refuse to give me the opportunity the director-generalship of your hostels means to me. it is not as if you yourself had either the time or the abilities necessary for them yourself; you haven't, and there is something almost dog-in-the-manger-ish to my mind in the way in which you will not give me my chance, the chance i have always been longing for----" at this point lady harman put down this letter for subsequent perusal and took its companion, which was addressed in an unfamiliar hand. it was from alice burnet and it was written in that sprawling hand and diffused style natural to a not very well educated person with a complicated story to tell in a state of unusual emotion. but the gist was in the first few sentences which announced that alice had been evicted from the hostel. "i found my things on the pavement," wrote alice. lady harman became aware of snagsby still hovering at hand. "mrs. pembrose, my lady, came here this afternoon," he said, when he had secured her attention. "came here." "she asked for you, my lady, and when i told her you were not at 'ome, she asked if she might see sir isaac." "and did she?" "sir isaac saw her, my lady. they 'ad tea in the study." "i wish i had been at home to see her," said lady harman, after a brief interval of reflection. she took her two letters and turned to the staircase. they were still in her hand when presently she came into her husband's study. "i don't want a light," he said, as she put out her hand to the electric switch. his voice had a note of discontent, but he was sitting in the armchair against the window so that she could not see his features. "how are you feeling this afternoon?" she asked. "i'm feeling all right," he answered testily. he seemed to dislike inquiries after his health almost as much as he disliked neglect. she came and stood by him and looked out from the dusk of the room into the garden darkening under a red-barred sky. "there is fresh trouble between mrs. pembrose and the girls," she said. "she's been telling me about it." "she's been here?" "pretty nearly an hour," said sir isaac. lady harman tried to imagine that hour's interview on the spur of the moment and failed. she came to her immediate business. "i think," she said, "that she has been--high-handed...." "you would," said sir isaac after an interval. his tone was hostile, so hostile that it startled her. "don't you?" he shook his head. "my idees and your idees--or anyhow the idees you've got hold of--somewhere--somehow----i don't know where you _get_ your idees. we haven't got the same idees, anyhow. you got to keep order in these places--anyhow...." she perceived that she was in face of a prepared position. "i don't think," she threw out, "that she does keep order. she represses--and irritates. she gets an idea that certain girls are against her...." "and you get an idea she's against certain girls...." "practically she expels them. she has in fact just turned one out into the street." "you got to expel 'em. you got to. you can't run these places on sugar and water. there's a sort of girl, a sort of man, who makes trouble. there's a sort makes strikes, makes mischief, gets up grievances. you got to get rid of 'em somehow. you got to be practical somewhere. you can't go running these places on a lot of littry idees and all that. it's no good." the phrase "littry idees" held lady harman's attention for a moment. but she could not follow it up to its implications, because she wanted to get on with the issue she had in hand. "i want to be consulted about these expulsions. girl after girl has been sent away----" sir isaac's silhouette was obstinate. "she knows her business," he said. he seemed to feel the need of a justification. "they shouldn't make trouble." on that they rested for a little while in silence. she began to realize with a gathering emotion that this matter was far more crucial than she had supposed. she had been thinking only of the reinstatement of alice burnet, she hadn't yet estimated just what that overriding of mrs. pembrose might involve. "i don't want to have any girl go until i have looked into her case. it's----it's vital." "she says she can't run the show unless she has some power." neither spoke for some seconds. she had the feeling of hopeless vexation that might come to a child that has wandered into a trap. "i thought," she began. "these hostels----" she stopped short. sir isaac's hand tightened on the arm of his chair. "i started 'em to please you," he said. "i didn't start 'em to please your friends." she turned her eyes quickly to his grey up-looking face. "i didn't start them for you and that chap brumley to play about with," he amplified. "and now you know about it, elly." the thing had found her unprepared. "as if----" she said at last. "as if!" he mocked. she stood quite still staring blankly at this unmanageable situation. he was the first to break silence. he lifted one hand and dropped it again with a dead impact on the arm of his chair. "i got the things," he said, "and there they are. anyhow,--they got to be run in a proper way." she made no immediate answer. she was seeking desperately for phrases that escaped her. "do you think," she began at last. "do you really think----?" he stared out of the window. he answered in tones of excessive reasonableness: "i didn't start these hostels to be run by you and your--friend." he gave the sentence the quality of an ultimatum, an irreducible minimum. "he's my friend," she explained, "only--because he does work--for the hostels." sir isaac seemed for a moment to attempt to consider that. then he relapsed upon his predetermined attitude. "god!" he exclaimed, "but i have been a fool!" she decided that that must be ignored. "i care more for those hostels than i care for anything--anything else in the world," she told him. "i want them to work--i want them to succeed.... and then----" he listened in sceptical silence. "mr. brumley is nothing to me but a helper. he----how can you imagine, isaac----? _i!_ how can you dare? to suggest----!" "very well," said sir isaac and reflected and made his old familiar sound with his teeth. "run the hostels without him, elly," he propounded. "then i'll believe." she perceived that suddenly she was faced by a test or a bargain. in the background of her mind the figure of mr. brumley, as she had seen him last, in brown and with a tie rather to one side, protested vainly. she did what she could for him on the spur of the moment. "but," she said, "he's so helpful. he's so--harmless." "that's as may be," said sir isaac and breathed heavily. "how can one suddenly turn on a friend?" "i don't see that you ever wanted a friend," said sir isaac. "he's been so good. it isn't reasonable, isaac. when anyone has--_slaved_." "i don't say he isn't a good sort of chap," said sir isaac, with that same note of almost superhuman rationality, "only--he isn't going to run my hostels." "but what do you mean, isaac?" "i mean you got to choose." he waited as if he expected her to speak and then went on. "what it comes to is this, elly, i'm about sick of that chap. i'm sick of him." he paused for a moment because his breath was short. "if you go on with the hostels he's--phew--got to mizzle. _then_--i don't mind--if you want that girl burnet brought back in triumph.... it'll make mrs. pembrose chuck the whole blessed show, you know, but i say--i don't mind.... only in that case, i don't want to see or hear--or hear about--phew--or hear about your mr. brumley again. and i don't want you to, either.... i'm being pretty reasonable and pretty patient over this, with people--people--talking right and left. still,--there's a limit.... you've been going on--if i didn't know you were an innocent--in a way ... i don't want to talk about that. there you are, elly." it seemed to her that she had always expected this to happen. but however much she had expected it to happen she was still quite unprepared with any course of action. she wanted with an equal want of limitation to keep both mr. brumley and her hostels. "but isaac," she said. "what do you suspect? what do you think? this friendship has been going on----how can i end it suddenly?" "don't you be too innocent, elly. you know and i know perfectly well what there is between men and women. i don't make out i know--anything i don't know. i don't pretend you are anything but straight. only----" he suddenly gave way to his irritation. his self-control vanished. "damn it!" he cried, and his panting breath quickened; "the thing's got to end. as if i didn't understand! as if i didn't understand!" she would have protested again but his voice held her. "it's got to end. it's got to end. of course you haven't done anything, of course you don't know anything or think of anything.... only here i am ill.... _you_ wouldn't be sorry if i got worse.... _you_ can wait; you can.... all right! all right! and there you stand, irritating me--arguing. you know--it chokes me.... got to end, i tell you.... got to end...." he beat at the arms of his chair and then put a hand to his throat. "go away," he cried to her. "go to hell!" § i cannot tell whether the reader is a person of swift decisions or one of the newer race of doubters; if he be the latter he will the better understand how lady harman did in the next two days make up her mind definitely and conclusively to two entirely opposed lines of action. she decided that her relations with mr. brumley, innocent as they were, must cease in the interests of the hostels and her struggle with mrs. pembrose, and she decided with quite equal certainty that her husband's sudden veto upon these relations was an intolerable tyranny that must be resisted with passionate indignation. also she was surprised to find how difficult it was now to think of parting from mr. brumley. she made her way to these precarious conclusions and on from whichever it was to the other through a jungle of conflicting considerations and feelings. when she thought of mrs. pembrose and more particularly of the probable share of mrs. pembrose in her husband's objection to mr. brumley her indignation kindled. she perceived mrs. pembrose as a purely evil personality, as a spirit of espionage, distrust, calculated treachery and malignant intervention, as all that is evil in rule and officialism, and a vast wave of responsibility for all those difficult and feeble and likeable young women who elbowed and giggled and misunderstood and blundered and tried to live happily under the commanding stresses of mrs. pembrose's austerity carried her away. she had her duty to do to them and it overrode every other duty. if a certain separation from mr. brumley's assiduous aid was demanded, was it too great a sacrifice? and no sooner was that settled than the whole question reopened with her indignant demand why anyone at any price had the right to prohibit a friendship that she had so conscientiously kept innocent. if she gave way to this outrageous restriction to-day, what fresh limitations might not sir isaac impose to-morrow? and now, she was so embarrassed in her struggle by his health. she could not go to him and have things out with him, she could not directly defy him, because that might mean a suffocating seizure for him.... it was entirely illogical, no doubt, but extremely natural for lady harman to decide that she must communicate her decision, whichever one it was, to mr. brumley in a personal interview. she wrote to him and arranged to meet and talk to him in kew gardens, and with a feeling of discretion went thither not in the automobile but in a taxi-cab. and so delicately now were her two irrevocable decisions balanced in her mind that twice on her way to kew she swayed over from one to the other. arrived at the gardens she found herself quite disinclined to begin the announcement of either decision. she was quite exceptionally glad to see mr. brumley; he was dressed in a new suit of lighter brown that became him very well indeed, the day was warm and bright, a day of scyllas and daffodils and snow-upon-the-mountains and green-powdered trees and frank sunshine,--and the warmth of her feelings for her friend merged indistinguishably with the springtime stir and glow. they walked across the bright turf together in a state of unjustifiable happiness, purring little admirations at the ingenious elegance of creation at its best as gardeners set it out for our edification, and the whole tenor of lady harman's mind was to make this occasion an escape from the particular business that had brought her thither. "we'll look for daffodils away there towards the river under the trees," said mr. brumley, and it seemed preposterous not to enjoy those daffodils at least before she broached the great issue between an irresistible force and an immoveable post, that occupied her mental background. mr. brumley was quite at his best that afternoon. he was happy, gay and deferential; he made her realize by his every tone and movement that if he had his choice of the whole world that afternoon and all its inhabitants and everything, there was no other place in which he would be, no other companion, no other occupation than this he had. he talked of spring and flowers, quoted poets and added the treasures of a well-stored mind to the amenities of the day. "it's good to take a holiday at times," he said, and after that it was more difficult than ever to talk about the trouble of the hostels. she was able to do this at last while they were having tea in the little pavilion near the pagoda. it was the old pavilion, the one that miss alimony's suffragettes were afterwards to burn down in order to demonstrate the relentless logic of women. they did it in the same eventful week when miss alimony was, she declared, so nearly carried off by white slave traders (disguised as nurses but, fortunately for her, smelling of brandy) from the brixton temperance bazaar. but in those simpler days the pavilion still existed; it was tended by agreeable waiters whose evening dress was mitigated by cheerful little straw hats, and an enormous multitude of valiant and smutty cockney sparrows chirped and squeaked and begged and fluttered and fought, venturing to the very tables and feet of the visitors. and here, a little sobered from their first elation by much walking about and the presence of jam and watercress, mr. brumley and lady harman could think again of the work they were doing for the reconstitution of society upon collective lines. she began to tell him of the conflict between mrs. pembrose and alice burnet that threatened the latter with extinction. she found it more convenient to talk at first as though the strands of decision were still all in her hands; afterwards she could go on to the peculiar complication of the situation through the unexpected weakening of her position in relation to mrs. pembrose. she described the particular of the new trouble, the perplexing issue between the "lady-like," for which as a feminine ideal there was so much to be said on the one hand and the "genial," which was also an admirable quality, on the other. "you see," she said, "it's very rude to cough at people and make noises, but then it's so difficult to explain to the others that it's equally rude to go past people and pretend not to see or hear them. girls of that sort always seem so much more underbred when they are trying to be superior than when they are not; they get so stiff and--exasperating. and this keeping out of the union because it isn't genteel, it's the very essence of the trouble with all these employees. we've discussed that so often. those drapers' girls seem full of such cold, selfish, base, pretentious notions; much more full even than our refreshment girls. and then as if it wasn't all difficult enough comes mrs. pembrose and her wardresses doing all sorts of hard, clumsy things, and one can't tell them just how little they are qualified to judge good behaviour. their one idea of discipline is to speak to people as if they were servants and to be distant and crushing. and long before one can do anything come trouble and tart replies and reports of "gross impertinence" and expulsion. we keep on expelling girls. this is the fourth time girls have had to go. what is to become of them? i know this burnet girl quite well as you know. she's just a human, kindly little woman.... she'll feel disgraced.... how can i let a thing like that occur?" she spread her hands apart over the tea things. mr. brumley held his chin in his hand and said "um" and looked judicial, and admired lady harman very much, and tried to grasp the whole trouble and wring out a solution. he made some admirable generalizations about the development of a new social feeling in response to changed conditions, but apart from a remark that mrs. pembrose was all organization and no psychology, and quite the wrong person for her position, he said nothing in the slightest degree contributory to the particular drama under consideration. from that utterance, however, lady harman would no doubt have gone on to the slow, tentative but finally conclusive statement of the new difficulty that had arisen out of her husband's jealousy and to the discussion of the more fundamental decisions it forced upon her, if a peculiar blight had not fallen upon their conversation and robbed it at last of even an appearance of ease. this blight crept upon their minds.... it began first with mr. brumley. mr. brumley was rarely free from self-consciousness. whenever he was in a restaurant or any such place of assembly, then whatever he did or whatever he said he had a kind of surplus attention, a quickening of the ears, a wandering of the eyes, to the groups and individuals round about him. and while he had seemed entirely occupied with lady harman, he had nevertheless been aware from the outset that a dingy and inappropriate-looking man in a bowler hat and a ready-made suit of grey, was listening to their conversation from an adjacent table. this man had entered the pavilion oddly. he had seemed to dodge in and hesitate. then he had chosen his table rather deliberately--and he kept looking, and trying not to seem to look. that was not all. mr. brumley's expression was overcast by the effort to recall something. he sat elbows on table and leant forward towards lady harman and at the blossom-laden trees outside the pavilion and trifled with two fingers on his lips and spoke between them in a voice that was speculative and confidential and muffled and mysterious. "where have i seen our friend to the left before?" she had been aware of his distraction for some time. she glanced at the man and found nothing remarkable in him. she tried to go on with her explanations. mr. brumley appeared attentive and then he said again: "but where have i seen him?" and from that point their talk was blighted; the heart seemed to go out of her. mr. brumley she felt was no longer taking in what she was saying. at the time she couldn't in any way share his preoccupation. but what had been difficult before became hopeless and she could no longer feel that even presently she would be able to make him understand the peculiar alternatives before her. they drifted back by the great conservatory and the ornamental water, aripple with ducks and swans, to the gates where his taxi waited. even then it occurred to her that she ought to tell him something of the new situation. but now their time was running out, she would have to be concise, and what wife could ever say abruptly and offhand that frequent fact, "oh, by the by, my husband is jealous of you"? then she had an impulse to tell him simply, without any explanation at all, that for a time he must not meet her. and while she gathered herself together for that, his preoccupations intervened again. he stood up in the open taxi-cab and looked back. "that chap," he said, "is following us." § the effect of this futile interview upon lady harman was remarkable. she took to herself an absurd conviction that this inconclusiveness had been an achievement. confronted by a dilemma, she had chosen neither horn and assumed an attitude of inoffensive defiance. springs in england vary greatly in their character; some are easterly and quarrelsome, some are north-westerly and wetly disastrous, a bleak invasion from the ocean; some are but the broken beginnings of what are not so much years as stretches of meteorological indecision. this particular spring was essentially a south-westerly spring, good and friendly, showery but in the lightest way and so softly reassuring as to be gently hilarious. it was a spring to get into the blood of anyone; it gave lady harman the feeling that mrs. pembrose would certainly be dealt with properly and without unreasonable delay by heaven, and that meanwhile it was well to take the good things of existence as cheerfully as possible. the good things she took were very innocent things. feeling unusually well and enjoying great draughts of spring air and sunshine were the chief. and she took them only for three brief days. she carried the children down to black strand to see her daffodils, and her daffodils surpassed expectation. there was a delirium of blackthorn in the new wild garden she had annexed from the woods and a close carpet of encouraged wild primroses. even the putney garden was full of happy surprises. the afternoon following her visit to black strand was so warm that she had tea with her family in great gaiety on the lawn under the cedar. her offspring were unusually sweet that day, they had new blue cotton sunbonnets, and baby and annette at least succeeded in being pretty. and millicent, under the new swiss governess, had acquired, it seemed quite suddenly, a glib colloquial french that somehow reconciled one to the extreme thinness and shapelessness of her legs. then an amazing new fact broke into this gleam of irrational contentment, a shattering new fact. she found she was being watched. she discovered that dingy man in the grey suit following her. the thing came upon her one afternoon. she was starting out for a talk with georgina. she felt so well, so confident of the world that it was intolerable to think of georgina harbouring resentment; she resolved she would go and have things out with her and make it clear just how impossible it was to impose a director-general upon her husband. she became aware of the man in grey as she walked down putney hill. she recognized him at once. he was at the corner of redfern road and still unaware of her existence. he was leaning against the wall with the habituated pose of one who is frequently obliged to lean against walls for long periods of time, and he was conversing in an elucidatory manner with the elderly crossing-sweeper who still braves the motor-cars at that point. he became aware of her emergence with a start, he ceased to lean and became observant. he was one of those men whose face suggests the word "muzzle," with an erect combative nose and a forward slant of the body from the rather inturned feet. he wore an observant bowler hat a little too small for him, and there is something about the tail of his jacket--as though he had been docked. she passed at a stride to the acceptance of mr. brumley's hitherto incredible suspicion. her pulses quickened. it came into her head to see how far this man would go in following her. she went on demurely down the hill leaving him quite unaware that she had seen him. she was amazed, and after her first belief incredulous again. could isaac be going mad? at the corner she satisfied herself of the grey man's proximity and hailed a taxi-cab. the man in grey came nosing across to listen to her directions and hear where she was going. "please drive up the hill until i tell you," she said, "slowly"--and had the satisfaction, if one may call it a satisfaction, of seeing the grey man dive towards the taxi-cab rank. then she gave herself up to hasty scheming. she turned her taxi-cab abruptly when she was certain of being followed, went back into london, turned again and made for westridge's great stores in oxford street. the grey man ticked up two pences in pursuit. all along the brompton road he pursued her with his nose like the jib of a ship. she was excited and interested, and not nearly so shocked as she ought to have been. it didn't somehow jar as it ought to have jarred with her idea of sir isaac. watched by a detective! this then was the completion of the conditional freedom she had won by smashing that window. she might have known.... she was astonished and indignant but not nearly so entirely indignant as a noble heroine should have been. she was certainly not nearly so queenly as mrs. sawbridge would have shown herself under such circumstances. it may have been due to some plebeian strain in her father's blood that over and above her proper indignation she was extremely interested. she wanted to know what manner of man it was whose nose was just appearing above the window edge of the taxi-cab behind. in her inexperienced inattention she had never yet thought it was possible that men could be hired to follow women. she sat a little forward, thinking. how far would he follow her and was it possible to shake him off? or are such followers so expert that once upon a scent, they are like the indian hunting dog, inevitable. she must see. she paid off her taxi at westridge's and, with the skill of her sex, observed him by the window reflection, counting the many doors of the establishment. would he try to watch them all? there were also some round the corner. no, he was going to follow her in. she had a sudden desire, an unreasonable desire, perhaps an instinctive desire to see that man among baby-linen. it was in her power for a time to wreathe him with incongruous objects. this was the sort of fancy a woman must control.... he stalked her with an unreal sang-froid. he ambushed behind a display of infants' socks. driven to buy by a saleswoman he appeared to be demanding improbable varieties of infant's socks. are these watchers and trackers sometimes driven to buying things in shops? if so, strange items must figure in accounts of expenses. if he bought those socks, would they appear in sir isaac's bill? she felt a sudden craving for the sight of sir isaac's private detective account. and as for the articles themselves, what became of them? she knew her husband well enough to feel sure that if he paid for anything he would insist upon having it. but where--where did he keep them?... but now the man's back was turned; he was no doubt improvising paternity and an extreme fastidiousness in baby's footwear----now for it!--through departments of deepening indelicacy to the lift! but he had considered that possibility of embarrassment; he got round by some other way, he was just in time to hear the lift gate clash upon a calmly preoccupied lady, who still seemed as unaware of his existence as the sky. he was running upstairs, when she descended again, without getting out; he stopped at the sight of her shooting past him, their eyes met and there was something appealing in his. he was very moist and his bowler was flagging. he had evidently started out in the morning with misconceptions about the weather. and it was clear he felt he had blundered in coming into westridge's. before she could get a taxi he was on the pavement behind her, hot but pursuing. she sought in her mind for corner shops, with doors on this street and that. she exercised him upon peter robinson's and debenham and freebody's and then started for the monument. but on her way to the monument she thought of the moving staircase at harrod's. if she went up and down on this, she wanted to know what he would do, would he run up and down the fixed flight? he did. several times. and then she bethought herself of the piccadilly tube; she got in at brompton road and got out at down street and then got in again and went to south kensington and he darted in and out of adjacent carriages and got into lifts by curious retrograde movements, being apparently under the erroneous impression that his back was less characteristic than his face. by this time he was evidently no longer unaware of her intelligent interest in his movements. it was clear too that he had received a false impression that she wanted to shake him off and that all the sleuth in him was aroused. he was dishevelled and breathing hard and getting a little close and coarse in his pursuit, but he was sticking to it with a puckered intensified resolution. he came up into the south kensington air open-mouthed and sniffing curiously, but invincible. she discovered suddenly that she did not like him at all and that she wanted to go home. she took a taxi, and then away in the wilds of the fulham road she had her crowning idea. she stopped the cab at a dingy little furniture shop, paid the driver exorbitantly and instructed him to go right back to south kensington station, buy her an evening paper and return for her. the pursuer drew up thirty yards away, fell into her trap, paid off his cab and feigned to be interested by a small window full of penny toys, cheap chocolate and cocoanut ice. she bought herself a brass door weight, paid for it hastily and posted herself just within the furniture-shop door. then you see her cab returned suddenly and she got in at once and left him stranded. he made a desperate effort to get a motor omnibus. she saw him rushing across the traffic gesticulating. then he collided with a boy with a basket on a bicycle--not so far as she could see injuriously, they seemed to leap at once into a crowd and an argument, and then he was hidden from her by a bend in the road. § for a little while her mind was full of fragments of speculation about this man. was he a married man? was he very much away from home? what did he earn? were there ever disputes about his expenses?... she must ask isaac. for she was determined to go home and challenge her husband. she felt buoyed up by indignation and the consciousness of innocence.... and then she felt an odd little doubt whether her innocence was quite so manifest as she supposed? that doubt grew to uncomfortable proportions. for two years she had been meeting mr. brumley as confidently as though they had been invisible beings, and now she had to rack her brains for just what might be mistaken, what might be misconstrued. there was nothing, she told herself, nothing, it was all as open as the day, and still her mind groped about for some forgotten circumstance, something gone almost out of memory that would bear misinterpretation.... how should she begin? "isaac," she would say, "i am being followed about london." suppose he denied his complicity! how could he deny his complicity? the cab ran in through the gates of her home and stopped at the door. snagsby came hurrying down the steps with a face of consternation. "sir isaac, my lady, has come home in a very sad state indeed." beyond snagsby in the hall she came upon a lost-looking round-eyed florence. "daddy's ill again," said florence. "you run to the nursery," said lady harman. "i thought i might help," said florence. "i don't want to play with the others." "no, run away to the nursery." "i want to see the ossygen let out," said florence petulantly to her mother's unsympathetic back. "i _never_ see the ossygen let out. mum--my!..." lady harman found her husband on the couch in his bedroom. he was propped up in a sitting position with every available cushion and pillow. his coat and waistcoat and collar had been taken off, and his shirt and vest torn open. the nearest doctor, almsworth, was in attendance, but oxygen had not arrived, and sir isaac with an expression of bitter malignity upon his face was fighting desperately for breath. if anything his malignity deepened at the sight of his wife. "damned climate," he gasped. "wouldn't have come back--except for _your_ foolery." it seemed to help him to say that. he took a deep inhalation, pressed his lips tightly together, and nodded at her to confirm his words. "if he's fanciful," said almsworth. "if in any way your presence irritates him----" "let her stay," said sir isaac. "it--pleases her...." almsworth's colleague entered with the long-desired oxygen cylinder. § and now every other interest in life was dominated, and every other issue postponed by the immense urgencies of sir isaac's illness. it had entered upon a new phase. it was manifest that he could no longer live in england, that he must go to some warm and kindly climate. there and with due precautions and observances almsworth assured lady harman he might survive for many years--"an invalid, of course, but a capable one." for some time the business of the international stores had been preparing itself for this withdrawal. sir isaac had been entrusting his managers with increased responsibility and making things ready for the flotation of a company that would take the whole network of enterprises off his hands. charterson was associated with him in this, and everything was sufficiently definite to be managed from any continental resort to which his doctors chose to send him. they chose to send him to santa margherita on the ligurian coast near rapallo and porto fino. it was old bergener of marienbad who chose this place. sir isaac had wanted to go to marienbad, his first resort abroad; he had a lively and indeed an exaggerated memory of his kur there; his growing disposition to distrust had turned him against his london specialist, and he had caused lady harman to send gigantic telegrams of inquiry to old bergener before he would be content. but bergener would not have him at marienbad; it wasn't the place, it was the wrong time of year, there was the very thing for them at the regency hotel at santa margherita, an entire dépendance in a beautiful garden right on the sea, admirably furnished and adapted in every way to sir isaac's peculiar needs. there, declared doctor bergener, with a proper attendant, due precaution, occasional oxygen and no excitement he would live indefinitely, that is to say eight or ten years. and attracted by the eight or ten years, which was three more than the london specialist offered, sir isaac finally gave in and consented to be taken to santa margherita. he was to go as soon as possible, and he went in a special train and with an immense elaboration of attendance and comforts. they took with them a young doctor their specialist at marienbad had recommended, a bright young bavarian with a perfectly square blond head, an incurable frock coat, the manners of the less kindly type of hotel-porter and luggage which apparently consisted entirely of apparatus, an arsenal of strange-shaped shining black cases. he joined them in london and went right through with them. from genoa at his request they obtained the services of a trained nurse, an amiable fluent-shaped woman who knew only italian and german. for reasons that he declined to give, but which apparently had something to do with the suffrage agitation, he would have nothing to do with an english trained nurse. they had also a stenographer and typist for sir isaac's correspondence, and lady harman had a secretary, a young lady with glasses named summersly satchell who obviously reserved opinions of a harshly intellectual kind and had previously been in the service of the late lady mary justin. she established unfriendly relations with the young doctor at an early date by attempting, he said, to learn german from him. then there was a maid for lady harman, an assistant maid, and a valet-attendant for sir isaac. the rest of the service in the dépendance was supplied by the hotel management. it took some weeks to assemble this expedition and transport it to its place of exile. arrangements had to be made for closing the putney house and establishing the children with mrs. harman at black strand. there was an exceptional amount of packing up to do, for this time lady harman felt she was not coming back--it might be for years. they were going out to warmth and sunlight for the rest of sir isaac's life. he was entering upon the last phase in the slow disorganization of his secretions and the progressive hardening of his arterial tissues that had become his essential history. his appearance had altered much in the last few months; he had become visibly smaller, his face in particular had become sharp and little-featured. it was more and more necessary for him to sit up in order to breathe with comfort, he slept sitting up; and his senses were affected, he complained of strange tastes in his food, quarrelled with the cook and had fits of sickness. sometimes, latterly, he had complained of strange sounds, like air whistling in water-pipes, he said, that had no existence outside his ears. moreover, he was steadily more irritable and more suspicious and less able to control himself when angry. a long-hidden vein of vile and abusive language, hidden, perhaps, since the days of mr. gambard's college at ealing, came to the surface.... for some days after his seizure lady harman was glad to find in the stress of his necessities an excuse for disregarding altogether the crisis in the hostels and the perplexing problem of her relations to mr. brumley. she wrote two brief notes to the latter gentleman breaking appointments and pleading pressure of business. then, at first during intervals of sleeplessness at night, and presently during the day, the danger and ugliness of her outlook began to trouble her. she was still, she perceived, being watched, but whether that was because her husband had failed to change whatever orders he had given, or because he was still keeping himself minutely informed of her movements, she could not tell. she was now constantly with him, and except for small spiteful outbreaks and occasional intervals of still and silent malignity, he tolerated and utilized her attentions. it was clear his jealousy of her rankled, a jealousy that made him even resentful at her health and ready to complain of any brightness of eye or vigour of movement. they had drifted far apart from the possibility of any real discussion of the hostels since that talk in the twilit study. to re-open that now or to complain of the shadowing pursuer who dogged her steps abroad would have been to precipitate mr. brumley's dismissal. even at the cost of letting things drift at the hostels for a time she wished to avoid that question. she would not see him, but she would not shut the door upon him. so far as the detective was concerned she could avoid discussion by pretending to be unaware of his existence, and as for the hostels--the hostels each day were left until the morrow. she had learnt many things since the days of her first rebellion, and she knew now that this matter of the man friend and nothing else in the world is the central issue in the emancipation of women. the difficulty of him is latent in every other restriction of which women complain. the complete emancipation of women will come with complete emancipation of humanity from jealousy--and no sooner. all other emancipations are shams until a woman may go about as freely with this man as with that, and nothing remains for emancipation when she can. in the innocence of her first revolt this question of friendship had seemed to lady harman the simplest, most reasonable of minor concessions, but that was simply because mr. brumley hadn't in those days been talking of love to her, nor she been peeping through that once locked door. now she perceived how entirely sir isaac was by his standards justified. and after all that was recognized she remained indisposed to give up mr. brumley. yet her sense of evil things happening in the hostels was a deepening distress. it troubled her so much that she took the disagreeable step of asking mrs. pembrose to meet her at the bloomsbury hostel and talk out the expulsions. she found that lady alertly defensive, entrenched behind expert knowledge and pretension generally. her little blue eyes seemed harder than ever, the metallic resonance in her voice more marked, the lisp stronger. "of course, lady harman, if you were to have some practical experience of control----" and "three times i have given these girls every opportunity--_every_ opportunity." "it seems so hard to drive these girls out," repeated lady harman. "they're such human creatures." "you have to think of the ones who remain. you must--think of the institution as a whole." "i wonder," said lady harman, peering down into profundities for a moment. below the great truth glimmered and vanished that institutions were made for man and not man for institutions. "you see," she went on, rather to herself than to mrs. pembrose, "we shall be away now for a long time." mrs. pembrose betrayed no excesses of grief. "it's no good for me to interfere and then leave everything...." "that way spells utter disorganization," said mrs. pembrose. "but i wish something could be done to lessen the harshness--to save the pride--of such a girl as alice burnet. practically you tell her she isn't fit to associate with--the other girls." "she's had her choice and warning after warning." "i daresay she's--stiff. oh!--she's difficult. but--being expelled is bitter." "i've not _expelled_ her--technically." "she thinks she's expelled...." "you'd rather perhaps, lady harman, that _i_ was expelled." the dark lady lifted her eyes to the little bridling figure in front of her for a moment and dropped them again. she had had an unspeakable thought, that mrs. pembrose wasn't a gentlewoman, and that this sort of thing was a business for the gentle and for nobody else in the world. "i'm only anxious not to hurt anyone if i can help it," said lady harman. she went on with her attempt to find some way of compromise with mrs. pembrose that should save the spirit of the new malcontents. she was much too concerned on account of the things that lay ahead of them to care for her own pride with mrs. pembrose. but that good lady had all the meagre inflexibilities of her class and at last lady harman ceased. she came out into the great hall of the handsome staircase, ushered by mrs. pembrose as a guest is ushered by a host. she looked at the spacious proportion of the architecture and thought of the hopes and imaginations she had allowed to centre upon this place. it was to have been a glowing home of happy people, and over it all brooded the chill stillness of rules and regulations and methodical suppressions and tactful discouragement. it was an institution, it had the empty orderliness of an institution, mrs. pembrose had just called it an institution, and so susan burnet had prophesied it would become five years or more ago. it was a dream subjugated to reality. so it seemed to lady harman must all dreams be subjugated to reality, and the tossing spring greenery of the square, the sunshine, the tumult of sparrows and the confused sound of distant traffic, framed as it was in the hard dark outline of the entrance door, was as near as the promise of joy could ever come to her. "caught and spoilt," that seemed to be the very essential of her life; just as it was of these hostels, all the hopes, the imaginings, the sweet large anticipations, the generosities, and stirring warm desires.... perhaps lady harman had been a little overworking with her preparations for exile. because as these unhappy thoughts passed through her mind she realized that she was likely to weep. it was extremely undesirable that mrs. pembrose should see her weeping. but mrs. pembrose did see her weeping, saw her dark eyes swimming with uncontrollable tears, watched her walk past her and out, without a word or a gesture of farewell. a kind of perplexity came upon the soul of mrs. pembrose. she watched the tall figure descend to her car and enter it and dispose itself gracefully and depart.... "hysterical," whispered mrs. pembrose at last and was greatly comforted. "childish," said mrs. pembrose sipping further consolation for an unwonted spiritual discomfort. "besides," said mrs. pembrose, "what else can one do?" § sir isaac was greatly fatigued by his long journey to santa margherita in spite of every expensive precaution to relieve him; but as soon as the effect of that wore off, his recovery under the system bergener had prescribed was for a time remarkable. in a little while he was out of bed again and in an armchair. then the young doctor began to talk of drives. they had no car with them, so he went into genoa and spent an energetic day securing the sweetest-running automobile he could find and having it refitted for sir isaac's peculiar needs. in this they made a number of excursions through the hot beauty of the italian afternoons, eastward to genoa, westward to sestri and northward towards montallegro. then they went up to the summit of the monte de porto fino and sir isaac descended and walked about and looked at the view and praised bergener. after that he was encouraged to visit the gracious old monastery that overhangs the road to porto fino. at first lady harman did her duty of control and association with an apathetic resignation. this had to go on--for eight or ten years. then her imagination began to stir again. there came a friendly letter from mr. brumley and she answered with a description of the colour of the sea and the charm and wonder of its tideless shore. the three elder children wrote queer little letters and she answered them. she went into rapallo and got herself a carriageful of tauchnitz books.... that visit to the monastery on the porto fino road was like a pleasant little glimpse into the brighter realities of the middle ages. the place, which is used as a home of rest for convalescent carthusians, chanced to be quite empty and deserted; the bavarian rang a jangling bell again and again and at last gained the attention of an old gardener working in the vineyard above, an unkempt, unshaven, ungainly creature dressed in scarce decent rags of brown, who was yet courteous-minded and, albeit crack-voiced, with his yellow-fanged mouth full of gracious polysyllables. he hobbled off to get a key and returned through the still heat of the cobbled yard outside the monastery gates, and took them into cool airy rooms and showed them clean and simple cells in shady corridors, and a delightful orangery, and led them to a beautiful terrace that looked out upon the glowing quivering sea. and he became very anxious to tell them something about "francesco"; they could not understand him until the doctor caught "battaglia" and "pavia" and had an inspiration. francis the first, he explained in clumsy but understandable english, slept here, when he was a prisoner of the emperor and all was lost but honour. they looked at the slender pillars and graceful archings about them. "chust as it was now," the young doctor said, his imagination touched for a moment by mere unscientific things.... they returned to their dépendance in a state of mutual contentment, sir isaac scarcely tired, and lady harman ran upstairs to change her dusty dress for a fresher muslin, while he went upon the doctor's arm to the balcony where tea was to be served to them. she came down to find her world revolutionized. on the table in the balcony the letters had been lying convenient to his chair and he--it may be without troubling to read the address, had seized the uppermost and torn it open. he was holding that letter now a little crumpled in his hand. she had walked close up to the table before she realized the change. the little eyes that met hers were afire with hatred, his lips were white and pressed together tightly, his nostrils were dilated in his struggle for breath. "i knew it," he gasped. she clung to her dignity though she felt suddenly weak within. "that letter," she said, "was addressed to me." there was a gleam of derision in his eyes. "look at it!" he said, and flung it towards her. "my private letter!" "look at it!" he repeated. "what right have you to open my letter?" "friendship!" he said. "harmless friendship! look what your--friend says!" "whatever there was in my letter----" "oh!" cried sir isaac. "don't come _that_ over me! don't you try it! oooh! phew--" he struggled for breath for a time. "he's so harmless. he's so helpful. he----read it, you----" he hesitated and then hurled a strange word at her. she glanced at the letter on the table but made no movement to touch it. then she saw that her husband's face was reddening and that his arm waved helplessly. his eyes, deprived abruptly of all the fury of conflict, implored assistance. she darted to the french window that opened into the dining-room from the balcony. "doctor greve!" she cried. "doctor greve!" behind her the patient was making distressful sounds. "doctor greve," she screamed, and from above she heard the bavarian shouting and then the noise of his coming down the stairs. he shouted some direction in german as he ran past her. by an inspiration she guessed he wanted the nurse. miss summersley satchell appeared in the doorway and became helpful. then everyone in the house seemed to be converging upon the balcony. it was an hour before sir isaac was in bed and sufficiently allayed for her to go to her own room. then she thought of mr. brumley's letter, and recovered it from the table on the balcony where it had been left in the tumult of her husband's seizure. it was twilight and the lights were on. she stood under one of them and read with two moths circling about her.... mr. brumley had had a mood of impassioned declaration. he had alluded to his "last moments of happiness at kew." he said he would rather kiss the hem of her garment than be the "lord of any other woman's life." it was all so understandable--looked at in the proper light. it was all so impossible to explain. and why had she let it happen? why had she let it happen? § the young doctor was a little puzzled and rather offended by sir isaac's relapse. he seemed to consider it incorrect and was on the whole disposed to blame lady harman. he might have had such a seizure, the young doctor said, later, but not now. he would be thrown back for some weeks, then he would begin to mend again and then whatever he said, whatever he did, lady harman must do nothing to contradict him. for a whole day sir isaac lay inert, in a cold sweat. he consented once to attempt eating, but sickness overcame him. he seemed so ill that all the young doctor's reassurances could not convince lady harman that he would recover. then suddenly towards evening his arrested vitality was flowing again, the young doctor ceased to be anxious for his own assertions, the patient could sit up against a pile of pillows and breathe and attend to affairs. there was only one affair he really seemed anxious to attend to. his first thought when he realized his returning strength was of his wife. but the young doctor would not let him talk that night. next morning he seemed still stronger. he was restless and at last demanded lady harman again. this time the young doctor transmitted the message. she came to him forthwith and found him, white-faced and unfamiliar-looking, his hands gripping the quilt and his eyes burning with hatred. "you thought i'd forgotten," was his greeting. "don't argue," signalled the doctor from the end of sir isaac's bed. "i've been thinking it out," said sir isaac. "when you were thinking i was too ill to think.... i know better now." he sucked in his lips and then went on. "you've got to send for old crappen," he said. "i'm going to alter things. i had a plan. but that would have been letting you off too easy. see? so--you send for old crappen." "what do you mean to do?" "never you mind, my lady, never you mind. you send for old crappen." she waited for a moment. "is that all you want me to do?" "i'm going to make it all right about those hostels. don't you fear. you and your hostels! you shan't _touch_ those hostels ever again. ever. mrs. pembrose go! why! you ain't worthy to touch the heel of her shoe! mrs. pembrose!" he gathered together all his forces and suddenly expelled with rousing force the word he had already applied to her on the day of the intercepted letter. he found it seemed great satisfaction in the sound and taste of it. he repeated it thrice. "zut," cried the doctor, "sssh!" then sir isaac intimated his sense that calm was imperative. "you send for crappen," he said with a quiet earnestness. she had become now so used to terms of infamy during the last year or so, so accustomed to forgive them as part of his suffering, that she seemed not to hear the insult. "do you want him at once?" she asked. "shall i telegraph?" "want him at once!" he dropped his voice to a whisper. "yes, you fool--yes. telegraph. (phew.) telegraph.... i mustn't get angry, you know. you--telegraph." he became suddenly still. but his eyes were active with hate. she glanced at the doctor, then moved to the door. "i will send a telegram," she said, and left him still malignant. she closed the door softly and walked down the long cool passage towards her own room.... § she had to be patient. she had to be patient. this sort of thing had to go on from crisis to crisis. it might go on for years. she could see no remedy and no escape. what else was there to do but be patient? it was all amazing unjust, but to be a married woman she was beginning to understand is to be outside justice. it is autocracy. she had once imagined otherwise, and most of her life had been the slow unlearning of that initial error. she had imagined that the hostels were hers simply because he had put it in that way. they had never been anything but his, and now it was manifest he would do what he liked with his own. the law takes no cognizance of the unwritten terms of a domestic reconciliation. she sat down at the writing-table the hotel management had improvised for her. she rested her chin on her hand and tried to think out her position. but what was there to think out, seeing that nature and law and custom have conspired together to put women altogether under the power of jealous and acquisitive men? she drew the telegram form towards her. she was going to write a telegram that she knew would bring crappen headlong--to disinherit her absolutely. and--it suddenly struck her--her husband had trusted her to write it. she was going to do what he had trusted her to do.... but it was absurd. she sat making patterns of little dots with her pencil point upon the telegram form, and there was a faint smile of amusement upon her lips. it was absurd--and everything was absurd. what more was to be said or thought about it? this was the lot of woman. she had made her struggle, rebelled her little bit of rebellion. most other women no doubt had done as much. it made no difference in the long run. but it was hard to give up the hostels. she had been foolish of course, but she had not let them make her feel _real_. and she wasn't real. she was a wife--just _this_.... she sighed and bestirred herself and began to write. then abruptly she stopped writing. for three years her excuse for standing--everything, had been these hostels. if now the hostels were to be wrenched out of her hands, if at her husband's death she was to be stripped of every possession and left a helpless dependant on her own children, if for all her good behaviour she was to be insulted by his frantic suspicions so long as he lived and then disgraced by his posthumous mistrust; was there any reason why she should go on standing anything any more? away there in england was mr. brumley, _her_ man, ready with service and devotion.... it was a profoundly comforting thing to think of him there as hers. he was hers. he'd given so much and on the whole so well. if at last she were to go to him.... yet when she came to imagine the reality of the step that was in her mind, it took upon itself a chill and forbidding strangeness. it was like stepping out of a familiar house into empty space. what could it be like? to take some odd trunks with her, meet him somewhere, travel, travel through the evening, travel past nightfall? the bleak strangeness of that going out never to return! her imagination could give her no figure of mr. brumley as intimate, as habitual. she could as easily imagine his skeleton. he remained in all this queer speculation something friendly, something incidental, more than a trifle disembodied, entirely devoted of course in that hovering way--but hovering.... and she wanted to be free. it wasn't mr. brumley she wanted; he was but a means--if indeed he was a means--to an end. the person she wanted, the person she had always wanted--was _herself_. could mr. brumley give her that? would mr. brumley give her that? was it conceivable he would carry sacrifice to such a pitch as that?... and what nonsense was this dream! here was her husband needing her. and the children, whose inherent ungainliness, whose ungracious spirits demanded a perpetual palliation of culture and instilled deportment. what honest over-nurse was there for him or helper and guide and friend for them, if she withdrew? there was something undignified in a flight for mere happiness. there was something vindictive in flight from mere insult. to go, because she was disinherited, because her hostels were shattered,--no! and in short--she couldn't do it.... if sir isaac wanted to disinherit her he must disinherit her. if he wanted to go on seizing and reading her letters, then he could. there was nothing in the whole scheme of things to stop him if he did not want to stop himself, nothing at all. she was caught. this was the lot of women. she was a _wife_. what else in honour was there but to be a wife up to the hilt?... she finished writing her telegram. § suddenly came a running in the passage outside, a rap at the door and the nurse entered, scared, voluble in italian, but with gestures that translated her. lady harman rose, realized the gravity and urgency of the moment and hurried with her along the passage. "est-il mauvais?" the poor lady attempted, "est-il----" oh! what words are there for "taken worse"? the woman attempted english and failed. she resorted to her native italian and exclaimed about the "povero signore." she conveyed a sense of pitiful extremities. could it be he was in pain again? what was it? what was it? ten minutes ago he had been so grimly angry. at the door of the sick room the nurse laid a warning hand on the arm of lady harman and made an apprehensive gesture. they entered almost noiselessly. the bavarian doctor turned his face from the bed at their entrance. he was bending over sir isaac. he held up one hand as if to arrest them; his other was engaged with his patient. "no," he said. his attention went back to the sick man, and he remained very still in that position, leaving lady harman to note for the first time how broad and flat he was both between his shoulders and between his ears. then his face came round slowly, he relinquished something heavy, stood up, held up a hand. "zu spät," he whispered, as though he too was surprised. he sought in his mind for english and then found his phrase: "he has gone!" "gone?" "in one instant." "dead?" "so. in one instant." on the bed lay sir isaac. his hand was thrust out as though he grasped at some invisible thing. his open eyes stared hard at his wife, and as she met his eyes he snored noisily in his nose and throat. she looked from the doctor to the nurse. it seemed to her that both these people must be mad. never had she seen anything less like death. "but he's not dead!" she protested, still standing in the middle of the room. "it iss chust the air in his throat," the doctor said. "he went--_so!_ in one instant as i was helping him." he waited to see some symptom of feminine weakness. there was a quality in his bearing--as though this event did him credit. "but--isaac!" it was astounding. the noise in his throat ceased. but he still stared at her. and then the nurse made a kind of assault upon lady harman, caught her--even if she didn't fall. it was no doubt the proper formula to collapse. or to fling oneself upon the deceased. lady harman resisted this assistance, disentangled herself and remained amazed; the nurse a little disconcerted but still ready behind her. "but," said lady harman slowly, not advancing and pointing incredulously at the unwinking stare that met her own, "is he dead? is he really dead? like that?" the doctor's gesture to the nurse betrayed his sense of the fine quick scene this want of confidence had ruined. under no circumstances in life did english people really seem to know how to behave or what was expected of them. he answered with something bordering upon irony. "madam," he said, with a slight bow, "he is _really_ det." "but--like _that_!" cried lady harman. "like that," repeated the doctor. she went three steps nearer and stopped, open-eyed, wonder-struck, her lips compressed. § for a time astonishment overwhelmed her mind. she did not think of sir isaac, she did not think of herself, her whole being was filled by this marvel of death and cessation. like _that_! death! never before had she seen it. she had expected an extreme dignity, an almost ceremonial sinking back, a slow ebbing, but this was like a shot from a bow. it stunned her. and for some time she remained stunned, while the doctor and her secretary and the hotel people did all that they deemed seemly on this great occasion. she let them send her into another room; she watched with detached indifference a post-mortem consultation in whispers with a doctor from rapallo. then came a great closing of shutters. the nurse and her maid hovered about her, ready to assist her when the sorrowing began. but she had no sorrow. the long moments lengthened out, and he was still dead and she was still only amazement. it seemed part of the extraordinary, the perennial surprisingness of sir isaac that he should end in this way. dead! she didn't feel for some hours that he had in any way ended. he had died with such emphasis that she felt now that he was capable of anything. what mightn't he do next? when she heard movements in the chamber of death it seemed to her that of all the people there, most probably it was he who made them. she would not have been amazed if he had suddenly appeared in the doorway of her room, anger-white and his hand quiveringly extended, spluttering some complaint. he might have cried: "here i am dead! and it's _you_, damn you--it's _you_!" it was after distinct efforts, after repeated visits to the room in which he lay, that she began to realize that death was death, that death goes on, that there was no more any sir isaac, but only a still body he had left behind, that was being moulded now into a stiff image of peace. then for a time she roused herself to some control of their proceedings. the doctor came to lady harman to ask her about the meals for the day, the hotel manager was in entanglements of tactful consideration, and then the nurse came for instructions upon some trivial matter. they had done what usage prescribes and now, in the absence of other direction, they appealed to her wishes. she remarked that everyone was going on tiptoe and speaking in undertones.... she realized duties. what does one have to do when one's husband is dead? people would have to be told. she would begin by sending off telegrams to various people, to his mother, to her own, to his lawyer. she remembered she had already written a telegram--that very morning to crappen. should she still let the lawyer come out? he was her lawyer now. perhaps he had better come, but instead of that telegram, which still lay upon the desk, she would wire the news of the death to him.... does one send to the papers? how does one send to the papers? she took miss summersly satchell who was hovering outside in the sunshine on the balcony, into her room, and sat pale and businesslike and very careful about details, while miss summersly satchell offered practical advice and took notes and wrote telegrams and letters.... there came a hush over everything as the day crept towards noon, and the widowed woman sat in her own room with an inactive mind, watching thin bars of sunlight burn their slow way across the floor. he was dead. it was going on now more steadfastly than ever. he was keeping dead. he was dead at last for good and her married life was over, that life that had always seemed the only possible life, and this stunning incident, this thing that was like the blinding of eyes or the bursting of eardrums, was to be the beginning of strange new experiences. she was afraid at first at their possible strangeness. and then, you know, in spite of a weak protesting compunction she began to feel glad.... she would not admit to herself that she was glad, that she was anything but a woman stunned, she maintained her still despondent attitude as long as she could, but gladness broke upon her soul as the day breaks, and a sense of release swam up to the horizons of her mind and rose upon her, flooding every ripple of her being, as the sun rises over water in a clear sky. presently she could sit there no longer, she had to stand up. she walked to the closed venetians to look out upon the world and checked herself upon the very verge of flinging them open. he was dead and it was all over for ever. of course!--it was all over! her marriage was finished and done. miss satchell came to summon her to lunch. throughout that meal lady harman maintained a sombre bearing, and listened with attention to the young doctor's comments on the manner of sir isaac's going. and then,--it was impossible to go back to her room. "my head aches," she said, "i must go down and sit by the sea," and her maid, a little shocked, brought her not only her sunshade, but needless wraps--as though a new-made widow must necessarily be very sensitive to the air. she would not let her maid come with her, she went down to the beach alone. she sat on some rocks near the very edge of the transparent water and fought her gladness for a time and presently yielded to it. he was dead. one thought filled her mind, for a while so filled her mind, that no other thought it seemed could follow it, it had an effect of being final; it so filled her mind that it filled the whole world; the broad sapphire distances of the sea, the lapping waves amidst the rocks at her feet, the blazing sun, the dark headland of porto fino and a small sailing boat that hung beyond came all within it like things enclosed within a golden globe. she forgot all the days of nursing and discomfort and pity behind her, all the duties and ceremonies before her, forgot all the details and circumstances of life in this one luminous realization. she was free at last. she was a free woman. never more would he make a sound or lift a finger against her life, never more would he contradict her or flout her; never more would he come peeping through that papered panel between his room and hers, never more could hateful and humiliating demands be made upon her as his right; no more strange distresses of the body nor raw discomfort of the nerves could trouble her--for ever. and no more detectives, no more suspicions, no more accusations. that last blow he had meant to aim was frozen before it could strike her. and she would have the hostels in her hands, secure and undisputed, she could deal as she liked with mrs. pembrose, take such advisers as she pleased.... she was free. she found herself planning the regeneration of those difficult and disputed hostels, plans that were all coloured by the sun and sky of italy. the manacles had gone; her hands were free. she would make this her supreme occupation. she had learnt her lesson now she felt, she knew something of the mingling of control and affectionate regard that was needed to weld the warring uneasy units of her new community. and she could do it, now as she was and unencumbered, she knew this power was in her. when everything seemed lost to her, suddenly it was all back in her hands.... she discovered the golden serenity of her mind with a sudden astonishment and horror. she was amazed and shocked that she should be glad. she struggled against it and sought to subdue her spirit to a becoming grief. one should be sorrowful at death in any case, one should be grieved. she tried to think of sir isaac with affection, to recall touching generosities, to remember kind things and tender and sweet things and she could not do so. nothing would come back but the white intensities of his face, nothing but his hatred, his suspicion and his pitiless mean mastery. from which she was freed. she could not feel sorry. she did her utmost to feel sorry; presently when she went back into the dépendance, she had to check her feet to a regretful pace; she dreaded the eyes of the hotel visitors she passed in the garden lest they should detect the liberation of her soul. but the hotel visitors being english were for the most part too preoccupied with manifestations of a sympathy that should be at once heart-felt and quite unobtrusive and altogether in the best possible taste, to have any attention free for the soul of lady harman. the sense of her freedom came and went like the sunlight of a day in spring, though she attempted her utmost to remain overcast. after dinner that night she was invaded by a vision of the great open years before her, at first hopeful but growing at last to fear and a wild restlessness, so that in defiance of possible hotel opinion, she wandered out into the moonlight and remained for a long time standing by the boat landing, dreaming, recovering, drinking in the white serenities of sea and sky. there was no hurry now. she might stay there as long as she chose. she need account for herself to no one; she was free. she might go where she pleased, do what she pleased, there was no urgency any more.... there was mr. brumley. mr. brumley made a very little figure at first in the great prospect before her.... then he grew larger in her thoughts. she recalled his devotions, his services, his self-control. it was good to have one understanding friend in this great limitless world.... she would have to keep that friendship.... but the glorious thing was freedom, to live untrammelled.... through the stillness a little breeze came stirring, and she awoke out of her dream and turned and faced the shuttered dépendance. a solitary dim light was showing on the verandah. all the rest of the building was a shapeless mass of grey. the long pale front of the hotel seen through a grove of orange trees was lit now at every other window with people going to bed. beyond, a black hillside clambered up to the edge of the sky. far away out of the darknesses a man with a clear strong voice was singing to a tinkling accompaniment. in the black orange trees swam and drifted a score of fireflies, and there was a distant clamour of nightingales when presently the unseen voice had done. § when she was in her room again she began to think of sir isaac and more particularly of that last fixed stare of his.... she was impelled to go and see him, to see for herself that he was peaceful and no longer a figure of astonishment. she went slowly along the corridor and very softly into his room--it remained, she felt, his room. they had put candles about him, and the outline of his face, showing dimly through the linen that veiled it, was like the face of one who sleeps very peacefully. very gently she uncovered it. he was not simply still, he was immensely still. he was more still and white than the moonlight outside, remoter than moon or stars.... she stood surveying him. he looked small and pinched and as though he had been very tired. life was over for him, altogether over. never had she seen anything that seemed so finished. once, when she was a girl she had thought that death might be but the opening of a door upon a more generous feast of living than this cramped world could give, but now she knew, she saw, that death can be death. life was over. she felt she had never before realized the meaning of death. that beautiful night outside, and all the beautiful nights and days that were still to come and all the sweet and wonderful things of god's world could be nothing to him now for ever. there was no dream in him that could ever live again, there was no desire, no hope in him. and had he ever had his desire or his hope, or felt the intensities of life? there was this beauty she had been discovering in the last few years, this mystery of love,--all that had been hidden from him. she began to realize something sorrowful and pitiful in his quality, in his hardness, his narrowness, his bickering suspicions, his malignant refusals of all things generous and beautiful. he made her feel, as sometimes the children made her feel, the infinite pity of perversity and resistance to the bounties and kindliness of life. the shadow of sorrow for him came to her at last. yet how obstinate he looked, the little frozen white thing that had been sir isaac harman! and satisfied, wilfully satisfied; his lips were compressed and his mouth a little drawn in at the corners as if he would not betray any other feeling than content with the bargain he had made with life. she did not touch him; not for the world would she ever touch that cold waxen thing that had so lately clasped her life, but she stood for a long time by the side of his quiet, immersed in the wonder of death.... he had been such a hard little man, such a pursuing little man, so unreasonable and difficult a master, and now--he was such a poor shrunken little man for all his obstinacy! she had never realized before that he was pitiful.... had she perhaps feared him too much, disliked him too much to deal fairly with him? could she have helped him? was there anything she could have done that she had not done? might she not at least have saved him his suspicion? behind his rages, perhaps he had been wretched. could anyone else have helped him? if perhaps someone had loved him more than she had ever pretended to do---- how strange that she should be so intimately in this room--and still so alien. so alien that she could feel nothing but detached wonder at his infinite loss.... _alien_,--that was what she had always been, a captured alien in this man's household,--a girl he had taken. had he ever suspected how alien? the true mourner, poor woman! was even now, in charge of cook's couriers and interpreters, coming by express from london, to see with her own eyes this last still phase of the son she had borne into the world and watched and sought to serve. she was his nearest; she indeed was the only near thing there had ever been in his life. once at least he must have loved her? and even she had not been very near. no one had ever been very near his calculating suspicious heart. had he ever said or thought any really sweet or tender thing--even about her? he had been generous to her in money matters, of course,--but out of a vast abundance.... how good it was to have a friend! how good it was to have even one single friend!... at the thought of his mother lady harman's mind began to drift slowly from this stiff culmination of life before her. presently she replaced the white cloth upon his face and turned slowly away. her imagination had taken up the question of how that poor old lady was to be met, how she was to be consoled, what was to be said to her.... she began to plan arrangements. the room ought to be filled with flowers; mrs. harman would expect flowers, large heavy white flowers in great abundance. that would have to be seen to soon. one might get them in rapallo. and afterwards,--they would have to take him to england, and have a fine great funeral, with every black circumstance his wealth and his position demanded. mrs. harman would need that, and so it must be done. cabinet ministers must follow him, members of parliament, all blenkerdom feeling self-consciously and, as far as possible, deeply, the chartersons by way of friends, unfamiliar blood relations, a vast retinue of employees.... how could one take him? would he have to be embalmed? embalming!--what a strange complement of death. she averted herself a little more from the quiet figure on the bed, and could not turn to it again. they might come here and do all sorts of things to it, mysterious, evil-seeming things with knives and drugs.... she must not think of that. she must learn exactly what mrs. harman thought and desired. her own apathy with regard to her husband had given way completely now to a desire to anticipate and meet mrs. harman's every conceivable wish. chapter the twelfth love and a serious lady § the news of sir isaac's death came quite unexpectedly to mr. brumley. he was at the climax club, and rather bored; he had had some tea and dry toast in the magazine room, and had been through the weeklies, and it was a particularly uninteresting week. then he came down into the hall, looked idly at the latest bulletins upon the board, and read that "sir isaac harman died suddenly this morning at sta. margherita, in ligure, whither he had gone for rest and change." he went on mechanically reading down the bulletin, leaving something of himself behind him that did not read on. then he returned to that remarkable item and re-read it, and picked up that lost element of his being again. he had awaited this event for so long, thought of it so often in such a great variety of relationships, dreamt of it, hoped for it, prayed for it, and tried not to think of it, that now it came to him in reality it seemed to have no substance or significance whatever. he had exhausted the fact before it happened. since first he had thought of it there had passed four long years, and in that time he had seen it from every aspect, exhausted every possibility. it had become a theoretical possibility, the basis of continually less confident, continually more unsubstantial day dreams. constantly he had tried not to think of it, tried to assure himself of sir isaac's invalid immortality. and here it was! the line above it concerned an overdue ship, the line below resumed a speech by mr. lloyd george. "he would challenge the honourable member to repeat his accusations----" mr. brumley stood quite still before the mauve-coloured print letters for some time, then went slowly across the hall into the breakfast-room, sat down in a chair by the fireplace, and fell into a kind of featureless thinking. sir isaac was dead, his wife was free, and the long waiting that had become a habit was at an end. he had anticipated a wild elation, and for a while he was only sensible of change, a profound change.... he began to feel glad that he had waited, that she had insisted upon patience, that there had been no disaster, no scandal between them. now everything was clear for them. he had served his apprenticeship. they would be able to marry, and have no quarrel with the world. he sat with his mind forming images of the prospect before him, images that were at first feeble and vague, and then, though still in a silly way, more concrete and definite. at first they were quite petty anticipations, of how he would have to tell people of his approaching marriage, of how he would break it to george edmund that a new mother impended. he mused for some time upon the details of that. should he take her down to george edmund's school, and let the boy fall in love with her--he would certainly fall in love with her--before anything definite was said, or should he first go down alone and break the news? each method had its own attractive possibilities of drama. then mr. brumley began to think of the letter he must write lady harman--a difficult letter. one does not rejoice at death. already mr. brumley was beginning to feel a generous pity for the man he had done his utmost not to detest for so long. poor sir isaac had lived like a blind thing in the sunlight, gathering and gathering, when the pride and pleasure of life is to administer and spend.... mr. brumley fell wondering just how she could be feeling now about her dead husband. she might be in a phase of quite real sorrow. probably the last illness had tired and strained her. so that his letter would have to be very fine and tender and soothing, free from all harshness, free from any gladness--yet it would be hard not to let a little of his vast relief peep out. always hitherto, except for one or two such passionate lapses as that which had precipitated the situation at santa margherita, his epistolary manner had been formal, his matter intellectual and philanthropic, for he had always known that no letter was absolutely safe from sir isaac's insatiable research. should he still be formal, still write to "dear lady harman," or suddenly break into a new warmth? half an hour later he was sitting in the writing-room with some few flakes of torn paper on the carpet between his feet and the partially filled wastepaper basket, still meditating upon this difficult issue of the address. the letter he achieved at last began, "my dear lady," and went on to, "i do not know how to begin this letter--perhaps you will find it almost as difficult to receive...." in the small hours he woke to one of his habitual revulsions. was that, he asked himself, the sort of letter a lover should write to the beloved on her release, on the sudden long prayed-for opening of a way to her, on the end of her shameful servitude and his humiliations? he began to recall the cold and stilted sentences of that difficult composition. the gentility of it! all his life he had been a prey to gentility, had cast himself free from it, only to relapse again in such fashion as this. would he never be human and passionate and sincere? of course he was glad, and she ought to be glad, that sir isaac, their enemy and their prison, was dead; it was for them to rejoice together. he turned out of bed at last, when he could lie still under these self-accusations no longer, and wrapped himself in his warm dressing-gown and began to write. he wrote in pencil. his fountain-pen was as usual on his night table, but pencil seemed the better medium, and he wrote a warm and glowing love-letter that was brought to an end at last by an almost passionate fit of sneezing. he could find no envelopes in his bedroom davenport, and so he left that honest scrawl under a paper-weight, and went back to bed greatly comforted. he re-read it in the morning with emotion, and some slight misgivings that grew after he had despatched it. he went to lunch at his club contemplating a third letter that should be sane and fine and sweet, and that should rectify the confusing effect of those two previous efforts. he wrote this letter later in the afternoon. the days seemed very long before the answer to his first letter came to him, and in that interval two more--aspects went to her. her reply was very brief, and written in the large, firm, still girlishly clear hand that distinguished her. "_i was so glad of your letter. my life is so strange here, a kind of hushed life. the nights are extraordinarily beautiful, the moon very large and the little leaves on the trees still and black. we are coming back to england and the funeral will be from our putney house._" that was all, but it gave mr. brumley an impression of her that was exceedingly vivid and close. he thought of her, shadowy and dusky in the moonlight until his soul swam with love for her; he had to get up and walk about; he whispered her name very softly to himself several times; he groaned gently, and at last he went to his little desk and wrote to her his sixth letter--quite a beautiful letter. he told her that he loved her, that he had always loved her since their first moment of meeting, and he tried to express just the wave of tenderness that inundated him at the thought of her away there in italy. once, he said, he had dreamt that he would be the first to take her to italy. perhaps some day they would yet be in italy together. § it was only by insensible degrees that doubt crept into mr. brumley's assurances. he did not observe at once that none of the brief letters she wrote him responded to his second, the impassioned outbreak in pencil. and it seemed only in keeping with the modest reserves of womanhood that she should be restrained--she always had been restrained. she asked him not to see her at once when she returned to england; she wanted, she said, "to see how things are," and that fell in very well with a certain delicacy in himself. the unburied body of sir isaac--it was now provisionally embalmed--was, through some inexplicable subtlety in his mind, a far greater barrier than the living man had ever been, and he wanted it out of the way. and everything settled. then, indeed, they might meet. meanwhile he had a curious little private conflict of his own. he was trying not to think, day and night he was trying not to think, that lady harman was now a very rich woman. yet some portions of his brain, and he had never suspected himself of such lawless regions, persisted in the most vulgar and outrageous suggestions, suggestions that made his soul blush; schemes, for example, of splendid foreign travel, of hotel staffs bowing, of a yacht in the mediterranean, of motor cars, of a palatial flat in london, of a box at the opera, of artists patronized, of--most horrible!--a baronetcy.... the more authentic parts of mr. brumley cowered from and sought to escape these squalid dreams of magnificences. it shocked and terrified him to find such things could come out in him. he was like some pest-stricken patient, amazedly contemplating his first symptom. his better part denied, repudiated. of course he would never touch, never even propose--or hint.... it was an aspect he had never once contemplated before sir isaac died. he could on his honour, and after searching his heart, say that. yet in pall mall one afternoon, suddenly, he caught himself with a thought in his head so gross, so smug, that he uttered a faint cry and quickened his steps.... benevolent stepfather! these distresses begot a hope. perhaps, after all, probably, there would be some settlement.... she might not be rich, not so very rich.... she might be tied up.... he perceived in that lay his hope of salvation. otherwise--oh, pitiful soul!--things were possible in him; he saw only too clearly what dreadful things were possible. if only she were disinherited, if only he might take her, stripped of all these possessions that even in such glancing anticipations begot----this horrid indigestion of the imagination! but then,----the hostels?... there he stumbled against an invincible riddle! there was something dreadful about the way in which these considerations blotted out the essential fact of separations abolished, barriers lowered, the way to an honourable love made plain and open.... the day of the funeral came at last, and mr. brumley tried not to think of it, paternally, at margate. he fled from sir isaac's ultimate withdrawal. blenker's obituary notice in the _old country gazette_ was a masterpiece of tactful eulogy, ostentatiously loyal, yet extremely not unmindful of the widowed proprietor, and of all the possible changes of ownership looming ahead. mr. brumley, reading it in the londonward train, was greatly reminded of the hostels. that was a riddle he didn't begin to solve. of course, it was imperative the hostels should continue--imperative. now they might run them together, openly, side by side. but then, with such temptations to hitherto inconceivable vulgarities. and again, insidiously, those visions returned of two figures, manifestly opulent, grouped about a big motor car or standing together under a large subservient archway.... there was a long letter from her at his flat, a long and amazing letter. it was so folded that his eye first caught the writing on the third page: "_never marry again. it is so clear that our work needs all my time and all my means._" his eyebrows rose, his expression became consternation; his hands trembled a little as he turned the letter over to read it through. it was a deliberate letter. it began-- "_dear mr. brumley, i could never have imagined how much there is to do after we are dead, and before we can be buried._" "yes," said mr. brumley; "but what does this _mean_?" "_there are so many surprises_----" "it isn't clear." "_in ourselves and the things about us._" "of course, he would have made some complicated settlement. i might have known." "_it is the strangest thing in the world to be a widow, much stranger than anyone could ever have supposed, to have no one to control one, no one to think of as coming before one, no one to answer to, to be free to plan one's life for oneself_----" * * * * * he stood with the letter in his hand after he had read it through, perplexed. "i can't stand this," he said. "i want to know." he went to his desk and wrote:-- "_my dear, i want you to marry me._" what more was to be said? he hesitated with this brief challenge in his hand, was minded to telegraph it and thought of james's novel, _in the cage_. telegraph operators are only human after all. he determined upon a special messenger and rang up his quarter valet--he shared service in his flat--to despatch it. the messenger boy got back from putney that evening about half-past eight. he brought a reply in pencil. "_my dear friend_," she wrote. "_you have been so good to me, so helpful. but i do not think that is possible. forgive me. i want so badly to think and here i cannot think. i have never been able to think here. i am going down to black strand, and in a day or so i will write and we will talk. be patient with me._" she signed her name "_ellen_"; always before she had been "e.h." "yes," cried mr. brumley, "but i want to know!" he fretted for an hour and went to the telephone. something was wrong with the telephone, it buzzed and went faint, and it would seem that at her end she was embarrassed. "i want to come to you now," he said. "impossible," was the clearest word in her reply. should he go in a state of virile resolution, force her hesitation as a man should? she might be involved there with mrs. harman, with all sorts of relatives and strange people.... in the end he did not go. § he sat at his lunch alone next day at one of the little tables men choose when they shun company. but to the right of him was the table of the politicians, adolphus blenker and pope of the east purblow experiment, and sir piper nicolls, and munk, the editor of the _daily rectification_, sage men all and deep in those mysterious manipulations and wire-pullings by which the liberal party organization was even then preparing for itself unusual distrust and dislike, and horatio blenker was tenoring away after his manner about a case of right and conscience, "blenking like winking" was how a silent member had put it once to brumley in a gust of hostile criticism. "practically if she marries again, she is a pauper," struck on brumley's ears. "of course," said mr. brumley, and stopped eating. "i don't know if you remember the particulars of the astor case," began munk.... never had mr. brumley come so frankly to eavesdropping. but he heard no more of lady harman. munk had to quote the rights and wrongs of various american wills, and then mr. pope seized his opportunity. "at east purblow," he went on, "in quite a number of instances we had to envisage this problem of the widow----" mr. brumley pushed back his plate and strolled towards the desk. it was exactly what he might have expected, what indeed had been at the back of his mind all along, and on the whole he was glad. naturally she hesitated; naturally she wanted time to think, and as naturally it was impossible for her to tell him what it was she was thinking about. they would marry. they must marry. love has claims supreme over all other claims and he felt no doubt that for her his comparative poverty of two thousand a year would mean infinitely more happiness than she had ever known or could know with sir isaac's wealth. she was reluctant, of course, to become dependent upon him until he made it clear to her what infinite pleasure it would be for him to supply her needs. should he write to her forthwith? he outlined a letter in his mind, a very fine and generous letter, good phrases came, and then he reflected that it would be difficult to explain to her just how he had learnt of her peculiar situation. it would be far more seemly to wait either for a public announcement or for some intimation from her. and then he began to realize that this meant the end of all their work at the hostels. in his first satisfaction at escaping that possible great motor-car and all the superfluities of sir isaac's accumulation, he had forgotten that side of the business.... when one came to think it over, the hostels did complicate the problem. it was ingenious of sir isaac.... it was infernally ingenious of sir isaac.... he could not remain in the club for fear that somebody might presently come talking to him and interrupt his train of thought. he went out into the streets. these hostels upset everything. what he had supposed to be a way of escape was really the mouth of a net. whichever way they turned sir isaac crippled them.... § mr. brumley grew so angry that presently even the strangers in the street annoyed him. he turned his face homeward. he hated dilemmas; he wanted always to deny them, to thrust them aside, to take impossible third courses. "for three years," shouted mr. brumley, free at last in his study to give way to his rage, "for three years i've been making her care for these things. and then--and then--they turn against me!" a violent, incredibly undignified wrath against the dead man seized him. he threw books about the room. he cried out vile insults and mingled words of an unfortunate commonness with others of extreme rarity. he wanted to go off to kensal green and hammer at the grave there and tell the departed knight exactly what he thought of him. then presently he became calmer, he lit a pipe, picked up the books from the floor, and meditated revenges upon sir isaac's memory. i deplore my task of recording these ungracious moments in mr. brumley's love history. i deplore the ease with which men pass from loving and serving women to an almost canine fight for them. it is the ugliest essential of romance. there is indeed much in the human heart that i deplore. but mr. brumley was exasperated by disappointment. he was sore, he was raw. driven by an intolerable desire to explore every possibility of the situation, full indeed of an unholy vindictiveness, he went off next morning with strange questions to maxwell hartington. he put the case as a general case. "lady harman?" said maxwell hartington. "no, not particularly lady harman. a general principle. what are people--what are women tied up in such a way to do?" precedents were quoted and possibilities weighed. mr. brumley was flushed, vague but persistent. "suppose," he said, "that they love each other passionately--and their work, whatever it may be, almost as passionately. is there no way----?" "he'll have a _dum casta_ clause right enough," said maxwell hartington. "_dum----? dum casta!_ but, oh! anyhow that's out of the question--absolutely," said mr. brumley. "of course," said maxwell hartington, leaning back in his chair and rubbing the ball of his thumb into one eye. "of course--nobody ever enforces these _dum casta_ clauses. there isn't anyone to enforce them. ever."--he paused and then went on, speaking apparently to the array of black tin boxes in the dingy fixtures before him. "who's going to watch you? that's what i always ask in these cases. unless the lady goes and does things right under the noses of these trustees they aren't going to bother. even sir isaac i suppose hasn't provided funds for a private detective. eh? you said something?" "nothing," said mr. brumley. "well, why should they start a perfectly rotten action like that," continued maxwell hartington, now addressing himself very earnestly to his client, "when they've only got to keep quiet and do their job and be comfortable. in these matters, brumley, as in most matters affecting the relations of men and women, people can do absolutely what they like nowadays, absolutely, unless there's someone about ready to make a row. then they can't do anything. it hardly matters if they don't do anything. a row's a row and damned disgraceful. if there isn't a row, nothing's disgraceful. of course all these laws and regulations and institutions and arrangements are just ways of putting people at the mercy of blackmailers and jealous and violent persons. one's only got to be a lawyer for a bit to realize that. still that's not _our_ business. that's psychology. if there aren't any jealous and violent persons about, well, then no ordinary decent person is going to worry what you do. no decent person ever does. so far as i can gather the only barbarian in this case is the testator--now in kensal green. with additional precautions i suppose in the way of an artistic but thoroughly massive monument presently to be added----" "he'd--turn in his grave." "let him. no trustees are obliged to take action on _that_. i don't suppose they'd know if he did. i've never known a trustee bother yet about post-mortem movements of any sort. if they did, we'd all be having prayers for the dead. fancy having to consider the subsequent reflections of the testator!" "well anyhow," said mr. brumley, after a little pause, "such a breach, such a proceeding is out of the question--absolutely out of the question. it's unthinkable." "then why did you come here to ask me about it?" demanded maxwell hartington, beginning to rub the other eye in an audible and unpleasant manner. § when at last mr. brumley was face to face with lady harman again, a vast mephitic disorderly creation of anticipations, intentions, resolves, suspicions, provisional hypotheses, urgencies, vindications, and wild and whirling stuff generally vanished out of his mind. there beside the raised seat in the midst of the little rock garden where they had talked together five years before, she stood waiting for him, this tall simple woman he had always adored since their first encounter, a little strange and shy now in her dead black uniform of widowhood, but with her honest eyes greeting him, her friendly hands held out to him. he would have kissed them but for the restraining presence of snagsby who had brought him to her; as it was it seemed to him that the phantom of a kiss passed like a breath between them. he held her hands for a moment and relinquished them. "it is so good to see you," he said, and they sat down side by side. "i am very glad to see you again." then for a little while they sat in silence. mr. brumley had imagined and rehearsed this meeting in many different moods. now, he found none of his premeditated phrases served him, and it was the lady who undertook the difficult opening. "i could not see you before," she began. "i did not want to see anyone." she sought to explain. "i was strange. even to myself. suddenly----" she came to the point. "to find oneself free.... mr. brumley,--_it was wonderful!_" he did not interrupt her and presently she went on again. "you see," she said, "i have become a human being----owning myself. i had never thought what this change would be to me.... it has been----. it has been--like being born, when one hadn't realized before that one wasn't born.... now--now i can act. i can do this and that. i used to feel as though i was on strings--with somebody able to pull.... there is no one now able to pull at me, no one able to thwart me...." her dark eyes looked among the trees and mr. brumley watched her profile. "it has been like falling out of a prison from which one never hoped to escape. i feel like a moth that has just come out of its case,--you know how they come out, wet and weak but--released. for a time i feel i can do nothing but sit in the sun." "it's queer," she repeated, "how one tries to feel differently from what one really feels, how one tries to feel as one supposes people expect one to feel. at first i hardly dared look at myself.... i thought i ought to be sorrowful and helpless.... i am not in the least sorrowful or helpless.... "but," said mr. brumley, "are you so free?" "yes." "altogether?" "as free now--as a man." "but----people are saying in london----. something about a will----." her lips closed. her brows and eyes became troubled. she seemed to gather herself together for an effort and spoke at length, without looking at him. "mr. brumley," she said, "before i knew anything of the will----. on the very evening when isaac died----. i knew----i would never marry again. never." mr. brumley did not stir. he remained regarding her with a mournful expression. "i was sure of it then," she said, "i knew nothing about the will. i want you to understand that--clearly." she said no more. the still pause lengthened. she forced herself to meet his eyes. "i thought," he said after a silent scrutiny, and left her to imagine what he had thought.... "but," he urged to her protracted silence, "you _care_?" she turned her face away. she looked at the hand lying idle upon her crape-covered knee. "you are my dearest friend," she said very softly. "you are almost my only friend. but----. i can never go into marriage any more...." "my dear," he said, "the marriage you have known----." "no," she said. "no sort of marriage." mr. brumley heaved a profound sigh. "before i had been a widow twenty-four hours, i began to realize that i was an escaped woman. it wasn't the particular marriage.... it was any marriage.... all we women are tied. most of us are willing to be tied perhaps, but only as people are willing to be tied to life-belts in a wreck--from fear from drowning. and now, i am just one of the free women, like the women who can earn large incomes, or the women who happen to own property. i've paid my penalties and my service is over.... i knew, of course, that you would ask me this. it isn't that i don't care for you, that i don't love your company and your help--and the love and the kindness...." "only," he said, "although it is the one thing i desire, although it is the one return you can make me----. but whatever i have done--i have done willingly...." "my dear!" cried mr. brumley, breaking out abruptly at a fresh point, "i want you to marry me. i want you to be mine, to be my dear close companion, the care of my life, the beauty in my life.... i can't frame sentences, my dear. you know, you know.... since first i saw you, talked to you in this very garden...." "i don't forget a thing," she answered. "it has been my life as well as yours. only----" the grip of her hand tightened on the back of their seat. she seemed to be examining her thumb intently. her voice sank to a whisper. "i won't marry you," she said. § mr. brumley leant back, then he bent forward in a desperate attitude with his hands and arms thrust between his knees, then suddenly he recovered, stood up and then knelt with one knee upon the seat. "what are you going to do with me then?" he asked. "i want you to go on being my friend." "i can't." "you can't?" "no,--i've _hoped_." and then with something almost querulous in his voice, he repeated, "my dear, i want you to marry me and i want now nothing else in the world." she was silent for a moment. "mr. brumley," she said, looking up at him, "have you no thought for our hostels?" mr. brumley as i have said hated dilemmas. he started to his feet, a man stung. he stood in front of her and quivered extended hands at her. "what do such things matter," he cried, "when a man is in love?" she shrank a little from him. "but," she asked, "haven't they always mattered?" "yes," he expostulated; "but these hostels, these hostels.... we've started them--isn't that good enough? we've set them going...." "do you know," she asked, "what would happen to the hostels if i were to marry?" "they would go on," he said. "they would go to a committee. named. it would include mrs. pembrose.... don't you see what would happen? he understood the case so well...." mr. brumley seemed suddenly shrunken. "he understood too well," he said. he looked down at her soft eyes, at her drooping gracious form, and it seemed to him that indeed she was made for love and that it was unendurable that she should be content to think of friendship and freedom as the ultimate purposes of her life.... § presently these two were walking in the pine-woods beyond the garden and mr. brumley was discoursing lamentably of love, this great glory that was denied them. the shade of perplexity deepened in her dark eyes as she listened. ever and again she seemed about to speak and then checked herself and let him talk on. he spoke of the closeness of love and the deep excitement of love and how it filled the soul with pride and the world with wonder, and of the universal right of men and women to love. he told of his dreams and his patience, and of the stormy hopes that would not be suppressed when he heard that sir isaac was dead. and as he pictured to himself the lost delights at which he hinted, as he called back those covert expectations, he forgot that she had declared herself resolved upon freedom at any cost, and his rage against sir isaac, who had possessed and wasted all that he would have cherished so tenderly, grew to nearly uncontrollable proportions. "here was your life," he said, "your beautiful life opening and full--full of such dear seeds of delight and wonder, calling for love, ready for love, and there came this _clutch_, this clutch that embodied all the narrow meanness of existence, and gripped and crumpled you and spoilt you.... for i tell you my dear you don't know; you don't begin to know...." he disregarded her shy eyes, giving way to his gathered wrath. "and he conquers! this little monster of meanness, he conquers to the end--his dead hand, his dead desires, out of the grave they hold you! always, always, it is clutch that conquers; the master of life! i was a fool to dream, a fool to hope. i forgot. i thought only of you and i--that perhaps you and i----" he did not heed her little sound of protest. he went on to a bitter denunciation of the rule of jealousy in the world, forgetting that the sufferer under that rule in this case was his own consuming jealousy. that was life. life was jealousy. it was all made up of fierce graspings, fierce suspicions, fierce resentments; men preyed upon one another even as the beasts they came from; reason made its crushed way through their conflict, crippled and wounded by their blows at one another. the best men, the wisest, the best of mankind, the stars of human wisdom, were but half ineffectual angels carried on the shoulders and guided by the steps of beasts. one might dream of a better world of men, of civilizations and wisdom latent in our passion-strained minds, of calms and courage and great heroical conquests that might come, but they lay tens of thousands of years away and we had to live, we had to die, no more than a herd of beasts tormented by gleams of knowledge we could never possess, of happiness for which we had no soul. he grew more and more eloquent as these thoughts sprang and grew in his mind. "of course i am absurd," he cried. "all men are absurd. man is the absurd animal. we have parted from primordial motives--lust and hate and hunger and fear, and from all the tragic greatness of uncontrollable fate and we, we've got nothing to replace them. we are comic--comic! ours is the stage of comedy in life's history, half lit and blinded,--and we fumble. as absurd as a kitten with its poor little head in a bag. there's your soul of man! mewing. we're all at it, the poets, the teachers. how can anyone hope to escape? why should i escape? what am i that i should expect to be anything but a thwarted lover, a man mocked by his own attempts at service? why should i expect to discover beauty and think that it won't be snatched away from me? all my life is comic--the story of this--this last absurdity could it make anything but a comic history? and yet within me my heart is weeping tears. the further one has gone, the deeper one wallows in the comic marsh. i am one of the newer kind of men, one of those men who cannot sit and hug their credit and their honour and their possessions and be content. i have seen the light of better things than that, and because of my vision, because of my vision and for no other reason i am the most ridiculous of men. always i have tried to go out from myself to the world and give. those early books of mine, those meretricious books in which i pretended all was so well with the world,--i did them because i wanted to give happiness and contentment and to be happy in the giving. and all the watchers and the grippers, the strong silent men and the calculating possessors of things, the masters of the world, they grinned at me. how i lied to please! but i tell you for all their grinning, in my very prostitution there was a better spirit than theirs in their successes. if i had to live over again----" he left that hypothesis uncompleted. "and now," he said, with a curious contrast between his voice and the exaltation of his sentiments, "now that i am to be your tormented, your emasculated lover to the very end of things, emasculated by laws i hate and customs i hate and vile foresights that i despise----" he paused, his thread lost for a moment. "because," he said, "i'm going to do it. i'm going to do what i can. i'm going to be as you wish me to be, to help you, to serve you.... if you can't come to meet me, i'll meet you. i can't help but love you, i can't do without you. never in my life have i subscribed willingly to the idea of renunciation. i've hated renunciation. but if there is no other course but renunciation, renunciation let it be. i'm bitter about this, bitter to the bottom of my soul, but at least i'll have you know i love you. anyhow...." his voice broke. there were tears in his eyes. and on the very crest of these magnificent capitulations his soul rebelled. he turned about so swiftly that for a sentence or so she did not realize the nature of his change. her mind remained glowing with her distressed acceptance of his magnificent nobility. "i can't," he said. he flung off his surrenders as a savage might fling off a garment. "when i think of his children," he said. "when i think of the world filled by his children, the children you have borne him--and i--forbidden almost to touch your hand!" and flying into a passion mr. brumley shouted "no!" "not even to touch your hand!" "i won't do it," he assured her. "i won't do it. if i cannot be your lover--i will go away. i will never see you again. i will do anything--anything, rather than suffer this degradation. i will go abroad. i will go to strange places. i will aviate. i will kill myself--or anything, but i won't endure this. i won't. you see, you ask too much, you demand more than flesh and blood can stand. i've done my best to bring myself to it and i can't. i won't have that--that----" he waved his trembling fingers in the air. he was absolutely unable to find an epithet pointed enough and bitter enough to stab into the memory of the departed knight. he thought of him as marble, enthroned at kensal green, with a false dignity, a false serenity, and intolerable triumph. he wanted something, some monosyllable to expound and strip all that, some lung-filling sky-splitting monosyllable that one could shout. his failure increased his exasperation. "i won't have him grinning, at me," he said at last. "and so, it's one thing or the other. there's no other choice. but i know your choice. i see your choice. it's good-bye--and why--why shouldn't i go now?" he waved his arms about. he was pitifully ridiculous. his face puckered as an ill-treated little boy's might do. this time it wasn't just the pathetic twinge that had broken his voice before; he found himself to his own amazement on the verge of loud, undignified, childish weeping. he was weeping passionately and noisily; he was over the edge of it, and it was too late to snatch himself back. the shame which could not constrain him, overcame him. a preposterous upward gesture of the hands expressed his despair. and abruptly this unhappy man of letters turned from her and fled, the most grief-routed of creatures, whooping and sobbing along a narrow pathway through the trees. § he left behind him an exceedingly distressed and astonished lady. she had stood with her eyes opening wider and wider at this culminating exhibition. "but mr. brumley!" she had cried at last. "mr. brumley!" he did not seem to hear her. and now he was running and stumbling along very fast through the trees, so that in a few minutes he would be out of sight. dismay came with the thought that he might presently go out of sight altogether. for a moment she seemed to hesitate. then with a swift decision and a firm large grasp of the hand, she gathered up her black skirts and set off after him along the narrow path. she ran. she ran lightly, with a soft rhythmic fluttering of white and black. the long crêpe bands she wore in sir isaac's honour streamed out behind her. "but mr. brumley," she panted unheard. "mister brumley!" he went from her fast, faster than she could follow, amidst the sun-dappled pine stems, and as he went he made noises between bellowing and soliloquy, heedless of any pursuit. all she could hear was a heart-wringing but inexpressive "wa, wa, wooh, wa, woo," that burst from him ever and again. through a more open space among the trees she fancied she was gaining upon him, and then as the pines came together again and were mingled with young spruces, she perceived that he drew away from her more and more. and he went round a curve and was hidden, and then visible again much further off, and then hidden----. she attempted one last cry to him, but her breath failed her, and she dropped her pace to a panting walk. surely he would not go thus into the high road! it was unendurable to think of him rushing out into the high road--blind with sorrow--it might be into the very bonnet of a passing automobile. she passed beyond the pines and scanned the path ahead as far as the stile. then she saw him, lying where he had flung himself, face downward among the bluebells. "oh!" she whispered to herself, and put one hand to her heart and drew nearer. she was flooded now with that passion of responsibility, with that wild irrational charity which pours out of the secret depths of a woman's stirred being. she came up to him so lightly as to be noiseless. he did not move, and for a moment she remained looking at him. then she said once more, and very gently-- "mr. brumley." he started, listened for a second, turned over, sat up and stared at her. his face was flushed and his hair extremely ruffled. and a slight moisture recalled his weeping. "mr. brumley," she repeated, and suddenly there were tears of honest vexation in her voice and eyes. "you _know_ i cannot do without you." he rose to his knees, and never, it seemed to him, had she looked so beautiful. she was a little out of breath, her dusky hair was disordered, and there was an unwonted expression in her eyes, a strange mingling of indignation and tenderness. for a moment they stared unaffectedly at each other, each making discoveries. "oh!" he sighed at last; "whatever you please, my dear. whatever you please. i'm going to do as you wish, if you wish it, and be your friend and forget all this"--he waved an arm--"loving." there were signs of a recrudescence of grief, and, inarticulate as ever, she sank to her knees close beside him. "let us sit quietly among these hyacinths," said mr. brumley. "and then afterwards we will go back to the house and talk ... talk about our hostels." he sat back and she remained kneeling. "of course," he said, "i'm yours--to do just as you will with. and we'll work----. i've been a bit of a stupid brute. we'll work. for all those people. it will be--oh! a big work, quite a big work. big enough for us to thank god for. only----." the sight of her panting lips had filled him with a wild desire, that set every nerve aquivering, and yet for all that had a kind of moderation, a reasonableness. it was a sisterly thing he had in mind. he felt that if this one desire could be satisfied, then honour would be satisfied, that he would cease grudging sir isaac--anything.... but for some moments he could not force himself to speak of this desire, so great was his fear of a refusal. "there's one thing," he said, and all his being seemed aquiver. he looked hard at the trampled bluebells about their feet. "never once," he went on, "never once in all these years--have we two even--once--kissed.... it is such a little thing.... so much." he stopped, breathless. he could say no more because of the beating of his heart. and he dared not look at her face.... there was a swift, soft rustling as she moved.... she crouched down upon him and, taking his shoulder in her hand, upset him neatly backwards, and, doing nothing by halves, had kissed the astonished mr. brumley full upon his mouth. the end the following pages contain advertisements of macmillan books by the same author, and new fiction. by the same author the war in the air _illustrated. mo. $ . net._ "it is not every man who can write a story of the improbable and make it appear probable, and yet that is what mr. wells has done in _the war in the air_."--_the outlook._ "a more entertaining and original story of the future has probably never been written."--_town and country._ " ... displays that remarkable ingenuity for which mr. wells 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touches upon the same problems--problems involving love, freedom of expression, the right to live one's life in one's own way--he is revealed to be no less a master of the prose form than of the poetical. while the book is one for mature minds, the skill with which delicate situations are handled and the reserve everywhere exhibited remove it from possible criticism even by the most exacting. the title, it should be explained, refers to a spirited race horse with the fortunes of which the lives of two of the leading characters are bound up. faces in the dawn a story by hermann hagedorn _with frontispiece in colors. cloth, mo. $ . net._ a great many people already know mr. hagedorn through his verse. _faces in the dawn_ will, however, be their introduction to him as a novelist. the same qualities that have served to raise his poetry above the common level help to distinguish this story of a german village. the theme of the book is the transformation that was wrought in the lives of an irritable, domineering german pastor and his wife through the influence of a young german girl and her american lover. sentiment, humor and a human feeling, all present in just the right measure, warm the heart and contribute to the enjoyment which the reader derives in following the experiences of the well drawn characters. published by the macmillan company - fifth avenue new york new macmillan fiction metzel changes his mind by rachel capen schauffler, author of "the goodly fellowship." _with frontispiece. decorated cloth, mo. $ . net._ the many readers who enjoyed _the goodly fellowship_ have been eagerly awaiting something more from the pen of the same author. this is at last announced. in _metzel changes his mind_, miss schauffler strengthens the impression made by her first book that she is a writer of marked originality. here again she has provided an unusual setting for her tale. the scene is largely laid in a pathological laboratory, surely a new background for a romance. it is a background, moreover, which is used most effectively by miss schauffler in the furtherance of her plot. her characters, too, are as interesting as their surroundings--a woman doctor, attractive as well as sensible, a gruff old german doctor, suspicious of womankind, and a young american. around these the action centers, though half a dozen others, vividly sketched, have a hand in the proceedings. of course _metzel changes his mind_ is a love story, but not of the ordinary type. landmarks by e.v. lucas, author of "over bemerton's," "london lavender," etc. _cloth, mo. $ . net._ mr. lucas's new story combines a number of the most significant episodes in the life of the central figure; in other words, those events of his career from early childhood to the close of the book which have been most instrumental in building up his character and experience. the episodes are of every kind, serious, humorous, tender, awakening, disillusioning, and they are narrated without any padding whatever, each one beginning as abruptly as in life; although in none of his previous work has the author been so minute in his social observation and narration. a descriptive title precedes each episode, as in the moving-picture; and it was in fact while watching a moving-picture that mr. lucas had the idea of adapting its swift selective methods to fiction. published by the macmillan company - fifth avenue new york heartbreak house a fantasia in the russian manner on english themes by bernard shaw - heartbreak house and horseback hall where heartbreak house stands heartbreak house is not merely the name of the play which follows this preface. it is cultured, leisured europe before the war. when the play was begun not a shot had been fired; and only the professional diplomatists and the very few amateurs whose hobby is foreign policy even knew that the guns were loaded. a russian playwright, tchekov, had produced four fascinating dramatic studies of heartbreak house, of which three, the cherry orchard, uncle vanya, and the seagull, had been performed in england. tolstoy, in his fruits of enlightenment, had shown us through it in his most ferociously contemptuous manner. tolstoy did not waste any sympathy on it: it was to him the house in which europe was stifling its soul; and he knew that our utter enervation and futilization in that overheated drawingroom atmosphere was delivering the world over to the control of ignorant and soulless cunning and energy, with the frightful consequences which have now overtaken it. tolstoy was no pessimist: he was not disposed to leave the house standing if he could bring it down about the ears of its pretty and amiable voluptuaries; and he wielded the pickaxe with a will. he treated the case of the inmates as one of opium poisoning, to be dealt with by seizing the patients roughly and exercising them violently until they were broad awake. tchekov, more of a fatalist, had no faith in these charming people extricating themselves. they would, he thought, be sold up and sent adrift by the bailiffs; and he therefore had no scruple in exploiting and even flattering their charm. the inhabitants tchekov's plays, being less lucrative than swings and roundabouts, got no further in england, where theatres are only ordinary commercial affairs, than a couple of performances by the stage society. we stared and said, "how russian!" they did not strike me in that way. just as ibsen's intensely norwegian plays exactly fitted every middle and professional class suburb in europe, these intensely russian plays fitted all the country houses in europe in which the pleasures of music, art, literature, and the theatre had supplanted hunting, shooting, fishing, flirting, eating, and drinking. the same nice people, the same utter futility. the nice people could read; some of them could write; and they were the sole repositories of culture who had social opportunities of contact with our politicians, administrators, and newspaper proprietors, or any chance of sharing or influencing their activities. but they shrank from that contact. they hated politics. they did not wish to realize utopia for the common people: they wished to realize their favorite fictions and poems in their own lives; and, when they could, they lived without scruple on incomes which they did nothing to earn. the women in their girlhood made themselves look like variety theatre stars, and settled down later into the types of beauty imagined by the previous generation of painters. they took the only part of our society in which there was leisure for high culture, and made it an economic, political and; as far as practicable, a moral vacuum; and as nature, abhorring the vacuum, immediately filled it up with sex and with all sorts of refined pleasures, it was a very delightful place at its best for moments of relaxation. in other moments it was disastrous. for prime ministers and their like, it was a veritable capua. horseback hall but where were our front benchers to nest if not here? the alternative to heartbreak house was horseback hall, consisting of a prison for horses with an annex for the ladies and gentlemen who rode them, hunted them, talked about them, bought them and sold them, and gave nine-tenths of their lives to them, dividing the other tenth between charity, churchgoing (as a substitute for religion), and conservative electioneering (as a substitute for politics). it is true that the two establishments got mixed at the edges. exiles from the library, the music room, and the picture gallery would be found languishing among the stables, miserably discontented; and hardy horsewomen who slept at the first chord of schumann were born, horribly misplaced, into the garden of klingsor; but sometimes one came upon horsebreakers and heartbreakers who could make the best of both worlds. as a rule, however, the two were apart and knew little of one another; so the prime minister folk had to choose between barbarism and capua. and of the two atmospheres it is hard to say which was the more fatal to statesmanship. revolution on the shelf heartbreak house was quite familiar with revolutionary ideas on paper. it aimed at being advanced and freethinking, and hardly ever went to church or kept the sabbath except by a little extra fun at weekends. when you spent a friday to tuesday in it you found on the shelf in your bedroom not only the books of poets and novelists, but of revolutionary biologists and even economists. without at least a few plays by myself and mr granville barker, and a few stories by mr h. g. wells, mr arnold bennett, and mr john galsworthy, the house would have been out of the movement. you would find blake among the poets, and beside him bergson, butler, scott haldane, the poems of meredith and thomas hardy, and, generally speaking, all the literary implements for forming the mind of the perfect modern socialist and creative evolutionist. it was a curious experience to spend sunday in dipping into these books, and the monday morning to read in the daily paper that the country had just been brought to the verge of anarchy because a new home secretary or chief of police without an idea in his head that his great-grandmother might not have had to apologize for, had refused to "recognize" some powerful trade union, just as a gondola might refuse to recognize a , -ton liner. in short, power and culture were in separate compartments. the barbarians were not only literally in the saddle, but on the front bench in the house of commons, with nobody to correct their incredible ignorance of modern thought and political science but upstarts from the counting-house, who had spent their lives furnishing their pockets instead of their minds. both, however, were practised in dealing with money and with men, as far as acquiring the one and exploiting the other went; and although this is as undesirable an expertness as that of the medieval robber baron, it qualifies men to keep an estate or a business going in its old routine without necessarily understanding it, just as bond street tradesmen and domestic servants keep fashionable society going without any instruction in sociology. the cherry orchard the heartbreak people neither could nor would do anything of the sort. with their heads as full of the anticipations of mr h. g. wells as the heads of our actual rulers were empty even of the anticipations of erasmus or sir thomas more, they refused the drudgery of politics, and would have made a very poor job of it if they had changed their minds. not that they would have been allowed to meddle anyhow, as only through the accident of being a hereditary peer can anyone in these days of votes for everybody get into parliament if handicapped by a serious modern cultural equipment; but if they had, their habit of living in a vacuum would have left them helpless end ineffective in public affairs. even in private life they were often helpless wasters of their inheritance, like the people in tchekov's cherry orchard. even those who lived within their incomes were really kept going by their solicitors and agents, being unable to manage an estate or run a business without continual prompting from those who have to learn how to do such things or starve. from what is called democracy no corrective to this state of things could be hoped. it is said that every people has the government it deserves. it is more to the point that every government has the electorate it deserves; for the orators of the front bench can edify or debauch an ignorant electorate at will. thus our democracy moves in a vicious circle of reciprocal worthiness and unworthiness. nature's long credits nature's way of dealing with unhealthy conditions is unfortunately not one that compels us to conduct a solvent hygiene on a cash basis. she demoralizes us with long credits and reckless overdrafts, and then pulls us up cruelly with catastrophic bankruptcies. take, for example, common domestic sanitation. a whole city generation may neglect it utterly and scandalously, if not with absolute impunity, yet without any evil consequences that anyone thinks of tracing to it. in a hospital two generations of medical students way tolerate dirt and carelessness, and then go out into general practice to spread the doctrine that fresh air is a fad, and sanitation an imposture set up to make profits for plumbers. then suddenly nature takes her revenge. she strikes at the city with a pestilence and at the hospital with an epidemic of hospital gangrene, slaughtering right and left until the innocent young have paid for the guilty old, and the account is balanced. and then she goes to sleep again and gives another period of credit, with the same result. this is what has just happened in our political hygiene. political science has been as recklessly neglected by governments and electorates during my lifetime as sanitary science was in the days of charles the second. in international relations diplomacy has been a boyishly lawless affair of family intrigues, commercial and territorial brigandage, torpors of pseudo-goodnature produced by laziness and spasms of ferocious activity produced by terror. but in these islands we muddled through. nature gave us a longer credit than she gave to france or germany or russia. to british centenarians who died in their beds in , any dread of having to hide underground in london from the shells of an enemy seemed more remote and fantastic than a dread of the appearance of a colony of cobras and rattlesnakes in kensington gardens. in the prophetic works of charles dickens we were warned against many evils which have since come to pass; but of the evil of being slaughtered by a foreign foe on our own doorsteps there was no shadow. nature gave us a very long credit; and we abused it to the utmost. but when she struck at last she struck with a vengeance. for four years she smote our firstborn and heaped on us plagues of which egypt never dreamed. they were all as preventable as the great plague of london, and came solely because they had not been prevented. they were not undone by winning the war. the earth is still bursting with the dead bodies of the victors. the wicked half century it is difficult to say whether indifference and neglect are worse than false doctrine; but heartbreak house and horseback hall unfortunately suffered from both. for half a century before the war civilization had been going to the devil very precipitately under the influence of a pseudo-science as disastrous as the blackest calvinism. calvinism taught that as we are predestinately saved or damned, nothing that we can do can alter our destiny. still, as calvinism gave the individual no clue as to whether he had drawn a lucky number or an unlucky one, it left him a fairly strong interest in encouraging his hopes of salvation and allaying his fear of damnation by behaving as one of the elect might be expected to behave rather than as one of the reprobate. but in the middle of the nineteenth century naturalists and physicists assured the world, in the name of science, that salvation and damnation are all nonsense, and that predestination is the central truth of religion, inasmuch as human beings are produced by their environment, their sins and good deeds being only a series of chemical and mechanical reactions over which they have no control. such figments as mind, choice, purpose, conscience, will, and so forth, are, they taught, mere illusions, produced because they are useful in the continual struggle of the human machine to maintain its environment in a favorable condition, a process incidentally involving the ruthless destruction or subjection of its competitors for the supply (assumed to be limited) of subsistence available. we taught prussia this religion; and prussia bettered our instruction so effectively that we presently found ourselves confronted with the necessity of destroying prussia to prevent prussia destroying us. and that has just ended in each destroying the other to an extent doubtfully reparable in our time. it may be asked how so imbecile and dangerous a creed ever came to be accepted by intelligent beings. i will answer that question more fully in my next volume of plays, which will be entirely devoted to the subject. for the present i will only say that there were better reasons than the obvious one that such sham science as this opened a scientific career to very stupid men, and all the other careers to shameless rascals, provided they were industrious enough. it is true that this motive operated very powerfully; but when the new departure in scientific doctrine which is associated with the name of the great naturalist charles darwin began, it was not only a reaction against a barbarous pseudo-evangelical teleology intolerably obstructive to all scientific progress, but was accompanied, as it happened, by discoveries of extraordinary interest in physics, chemistry, and that lifeless method of evolution which its investigators called natural selection. howbeit, there was only one result possible in the ethical sphere, and that was the banishment of conscience from human affairs, or, as samuel butler vehemently put it, "of mind from the universe." hypochondria now heartbreak house, with butler and bergson and scott haldane alongside blake and the other major poets on its shelves (to say nothing of wagner and the tone poets), was not so completely blinded by the doltish materialism of the laboratories as the uncultured world outside. but being an idle house it was a hypochondriacal house, always running after cures. it would stop eating meat, not on valid shelleyan grounds, but in order to get rid of a bogey called uric acid; and it would actually let you pull all its teeth out to exorcise another demon named pyorrhea. it was superstitious, and addicted to table-rapping, materialization seances, clairvoyance, palmistry, crystal-gazing and the like to such an extent that it may be doubted whether ever before in the history of the world did soothsayers, astrologers, and unregistered therapeutic specialists of all sorts flourish as they did during this half century of the drift to the abyss. the registered doctors and surgeons were hard put to it to compete with the unregistered. they were not clever enough to appeal to the imagination and sociability of the heartbreakers by the arts of the actor, the orator, the poet, the winning conversationalist. they had to fall back coarsely on the terror of infection and death. they prescribed inoculations and operations. whatever part of a human being could be cut out without necessarily killing him they cut out; and he often died (unnecessarily of course) in consequence. from such trifles as uvulas and tonsils they went on to ovaries and appendices until at last no one's inside was safe. they explained that the human intestine was too long, and that nothing could make a child of adam healthy except short circuiting the pylorus by cutting a length out of the lower intestine and fastening it directly to the stomach. as their mechanist theory taught them that medicine was the business of the chemist's laboratory, and surgery of the carpenter's shop, and also that science (by which they meant their practices) was so important that no consideration for the interests of any individual creature, whether frog or philosopher, much less the vulgar commonplaces of sentimental ethics, could weigh for a moment against the remotest off-chance of an addition to the body of scientific knowledge, they operated and vivisected and inoculated and lied on a stupendous scale, clamoring for and actually acquiring such legal powers over the bodies of their fellow-citizens as neither king, pope, nor parliament dare ever have claimed. the inquisition itself was a liberal institution compared to the general medical council. those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying heartbreak house was far too lazy and shallow to extricate itself from this palace of evil enchantment. it rhapsodized about love; but it believed in cruelty. it was afraid of the cruel people; and it saw that cruelty was at least effective. cruelty did things that made money, whereas love did nothing but prove the soundness of larochefoucauld's saying that very few people would fall in love if they had never read about it. heartbreak house, in short, did not know how to live, at which point all that was left to it was the boast that at least it knew how to die: a melancholy accomplishment which the outbreak of war presently gave it practically unlimited opportunities of displaying. thus were the firstborn of heartbreak house smitten; and the young, the innocent, the hopeful, expiated the folly and worthlessness of their elders. war delirium only those who have lived through a first-rate war, not in the field, but at home, and kept their heads, can possibly understand the bitterness of shakespeare and swift, who both went through this experience. the horror of peer gynt in the madhouse, when the lunatics, exalted by illusions of splendid talent and visions of a dawning millennium, crowned him as their emperor, was tame in comparison. i do not know whether anyone really kept his head completely except those who had to keep it because they had to conduct the war at first hand. i should not have kept my own (as far as i did keep it) if i had not at once understood that as a scribe and speaker i too was under the most serious public obligation to keep my grip on realities; but this did not save me from a considerable degree of hyperaesthesia. there were of course some happy people to whom the war meant nothing: all political and general matters lying outside their little circle of interest. but the ordinary war-conscious civilian went mad, the main symptom being a conviction that the whole order of nature had been reversed. all foods, he felt, must now be adulterated. all schools must be closed. no advertisements must be sent to the newspapers, of which new editions must appear and be bought up every ten minutes. travelling must be stopped, or, that being impossible, greatly hindered. all pretences about fine art and culture and the like must be flung off as an intolerable affectation; and the picture galleries and museums and schools at once occupied by war workers. the british museum itself was saved only by a hair's breadth. the sincerity of all this, and of much more which would not be believed if i chronicled it, may be established by one conclusive instance of the general craziness. men were seized with the illusion that they could win the war by giving away money. and they not only subscribed millions to funds of all sorts with no discoverable object, and to ridiculous voluntary organizations for doing what was plainly the business of the civil and military authorities, but actually handed out money to any thief in the street who had the presence of mind to pretend that he (or she) was "collecting" it for the annihilation of the enemy. swindlers were emboldened to take offices; label themselves anti-enemy leagues; and simply pocket the money that was heaped on them. attractively dressed young women found that they had nothing to do but parade the streets, collecting-box in hand, and live gloriously on the profits. many months elapsed before, as a first sign of returning sanity, the police swept an anti-enemy secretary into prison pour encourages les autres, and the passionate penny collecting of the flag days was brought under some sort of regulation. madness in court the demoralization did not spare the law courts. soldiers were acquitted, even on fully proved indictments for wilful murder, until at last the judges and magistrates had to announce that what was called the unwritten law, which meant simply that a soldier could do what he liked with impunity in civil life, was not the law of the land, and that a victoria cross did not carry with it a perpetual plenary indulgence. unfortunately the insanity of the juries and magistrates did not always manifest itself in indulgence. no person unlucky enough to be charged with any sort of conduct, however reasonable and salutary, that did not smack of war delirium, had the slightest chance of acquittal. there were in the country, too, a certain number of people who had conscientious objections to war as criminal or unchristian. the act of parliament introducing compulsory military service thoughtlessly exempted these persons, merely requiring them to prove the genuineness of their convictions. those who did so were very ill-advised from the point of view of their own personal interest; for they were persecuted with savage logicality in spite of the law; whilst those who made no pretence of having any objection to war at all, and had not only had military training in officers' training corps, but had proclaimed on public occasions that they were perfectly ready to engage in civil war on behalf of their political opinions, were allowed the benefit of the act on the ground that they did not approve of this particular war. for the christians there was no mercy. in cases where the evidence as to their being killed by ill treatment was so unequivocal that the verdict would certainly have been one of wilful murder had the prejudice of the coroner's jury been on the other side, their tormentors were gratuitously declared to be blameless. there was only one virtue, pugnacity: only one vice, pacifism. that is an essential condition of war; but the government had not the courage to legislate accordingly; and its law was set aside for lynch law. the climax of legal lawlessness was reached in france. the greatest socialist statesman in europe, jaures, was shot and killed by a gentleman who resented his efforts to avert the war. m. clemenceau was shot by another gentleman of less popular opinions, and happily came off no worse than having to spend a precautionary couple of days in bed. the slayer of jaures was recklessly acquitted: the would-be slayer of m. clemenceau was carefully found guilty. there is no reason to doubt that the same thing would have happened in england if the war had begun with a successful attempt to assassinate keir hardie, and ended with an unsuccessful one to assassinate mr lloyd george. the long arm of war the pestilence which is the usual accompaniment of war was called influenza. whether it was really a war pestilence or not was made doubtful by the fact that it did its worst in places remote from the battlefields, notably on the west coast of north america and in india. but the moral pestilence, which was unquestionably a war pestilence, reproduced this phenomenon. one would have supposed that the war fever would have raged most furiously in the countries actually under fire, and that the others would be more reasonable. belgium and flanders, where over large districts literally not one stone was left upon another as the opposed armies drove each other back and forward over it after terrific preliminary bombardments, might have been pardoned for relieving their feelings more emphatically than by shrugging their shoulders and saying, "c'est la guerre." england, inviolate for so many centuries that the swoop of war on her homesteads had long ceased to be more credible than a return of the flood, could hardly be expected to keep her temper sweet when she knew at last what it was to hide in cellars and underground railway stations, or lie quaking in bed, whilst bombs crashed, houses crumbled, and aircraft guns distributed shrapnel on friend and foe alike until certain shop windows in london, formerly full of fashionable hats, were filled with steel helmets. slain and mutilated women and children, and burnt and wrecked dwellings, excuse a good deal of violent language, and produce a wrath on which many suns go down before it is appeased. yet it was in the united states of america where nobody slept the worse for the war, that the war fever went beyond all sense and reason. in european courts there was vindictive illegality: in american courts there was raving lunacy. it is not for me to chronicle the extravagances of an ally: let some candid american do that. i can only say that to us sitting in our gardens in england, with the guns in france making themselves felt by a throb in the air as unmistakeable as an audible sound, or with tightening hearts studying the phases of the moon in london in their bearing on the chances whether our houses would be standing or ourselves alive next morning, the newspaper accounts of the sentences american courts were passing on young girls and old men alike for the expression of opinions which were being uttered amid thundering applause before huge audiences in england, and the more private records of the methods by which the american war loans were raised, were so amazing that they put the guns and the possibilities of a raid clean out of our heads for the moment. the rabid watchdogs of liberty not content with these rancorous abuses of the existing law, the war maniacs made a frantic rush to abolish all constitutional guarantees of liberty and well-being. the ordinary law was superseded by acts under which newspapers were seized and their printing machinery destroyed by simple police raids a la russe, and persons arrested and shot without any pretence of trial by jury or publicity of procedure or evidence. though it was urgently necessary that production should be increased by the most scientific organization and economy of labor, and though no fact was better established than that excessive duration and intensity of toil reduces production heavily instead of increasing it, the factory laws were suspended, and men and women recklessly over-worked until the loss of their efficiency became too glaring to be ignored. remonstrances and warnings were met either with an accusation of pro-germanism or the formula, "remember that we are at war now." i have said that men assumed that war had reversed the order of nature, and that all was lost unless we did the exact opposite of everything we had found necessary and beneficial in peace. but the truth was worse than that. the war did not change men's minds in any such impossible way. what really happened was that the impact of physical death and destruction, the one reality that every fool can understand, tore off the masks of education, art, science and religion from our ignorance and barbarism, and left us glorying grotesquely in the licence suddenly accorded to our vilest passions and most abject terrors. ever since thucydides wrote his history, it has been on record that when the angel of death sounds his trumpet the pretences of civilization are blown from men's heads into the mud like hats in a gust of wind. but when this scripture was fulfilled among us, the shock was not the less appalling because a few students of greek history were not surprised by it. indeed these students threw themselves into the orgy as shamelessly as the illiterate. the christian priest, joining in the war dance without even throwing off his cassock first, and the respectable school governor expelling the german professor with insult and bodily violence, and declaring that no english child should ever again be taught the language of luther and goethe, were kept in countenance by the most impudent repudiations of every decency of civilization and every lesson of political experience on the part of the very persons who, as university professors, historians, philosophers, and men of science, were the accredited custodians of culture. it was crudely natural, and perhaps necessary for recruiting purposes, that german militarism and german dynastic ambition should be painted by journalists and recruiters in black and red as european dangers (as in fact they are), leaving it to be inferred that our own militarism and our own political constitution are millennially democratic (which they certainly are not); but when it came to frantic denunciations of german chemistry, german biology, german poetry, german music, german literature, german philosophy, and even german engineering, as malignant abominations standing towards british and french chemistry and so forth in the relation of heaven to hell, it was clear that the utterers of such barbarous ravings had never really understood or cared for the arts and sciences they professed and were profaning, and were only the appallingly degenerate descendants of the men of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who, recognizing no national frontiers in the great realm of the human mind, kept the european comity of that realm loftily and even ostentatiously above the rancors of the battle-field. tearing the garter from the kaiser's leg, striking the german dukes from the roll of our peerage, changing the king's illustrious and historically appropriate surname (for the war was the old war of guelph against ghibelline, with the kaiser as arch-ghibelline) to that of a traditionless locality. one felt that the figure of st. george and the dragon on our coinage should be replaced by that of the soldier driving his spear through archimedes. but by that time there was no coinage: only paper money in which ten shillings called itself a pound as confidently as the people who were disgracing their country called themselves patriots. the sufferings of the sane the mental distress of living amid the obscene din of all these carmagnoles and corobberies was not the only burden that lay on sane people during the war. there was also the emotional strain, complicated by the offended economic sense, produced by the casualty lists. the stupid, the selfish, the narrow-minded, the callous and unimaginative were spared a great deal. "blood and destruction shall be so in use that mothers shall but smile when they behold their infantes quartered by the hands of war," was a shakespearean prophecy that very nearly came true; for when nearly every house had a slaughtered son to mourn, we should all have gone quite out of our senses if we had taken our own and our friend's bereavements at their peace value. it became necessary to give them a false value; to proclaim the young life worthily and gloriously sacrificed to redeem the liberty of mankind, instead of to expiate the heedlessness and folly of their fathers, and expiate it in vain. we had even to assume that the parents and not the children had made the sacrifice, until at last the comic papers were driven to satirize fat old men, sitting comfortably in club chairs, and boasting of the sons they had "given" to their country. no one grudged these anodynes to acute personal grief; but they only embittered those who knew that the young men were having their teeth set on edge because their parents had eaten sour political grapes. then think of the young men themselves! many of them had no illusions about the policy that led to the war: they went clear-sighted to a horribly repugnant duty. men essentially gentle and essentially wise, with really valuable work in hand, laid it down voluntarily and spent months forming fours in the barrack yard, and stabbing sacks of straw in the public eye, so that they might go out to kill and maim men as gentle as themselves. these men, who were perhaps, as a class, our most efficient soldiers (frederick keeling, for example), were not duped for a moment by the hypocritical melodrama that consoled and stimulated the others. they left their creative work to drudge at destruction, exactly as they would have left it to take their turn at the pumps in a sinking ship. they did not, like some of the conscientious objectors, hold back because the ship had been neglected by its officers and scuttled by its wreckers. the ship had to be saved, even if newton had to leave his fluxions and michael angelo his marbles to save it; so they threw away the tools of their beneficent and ennobling trades, and took up the blood-stained bayonet and the murderous bomb, forcing themselves to pervert their divine instinct for perfect artistic execution to the effective handling of these diabolical things, and their economic faculty for organization to the contriving of ruin and slaughter. for it gave an ironic edge to their tragedy that the very talents they were forced to prostitute made the prostitution not only effective, but even interesting; so that some of them were rapidly promoted, and found themselves actually becoming artists in wax, with a growing relish for it, like napoleon and all the other scourges of mankind, in spite of themselves. for many of them there was not even this consolation. they "stuck it," and hated it, to the end. evil in the throne of good this distress of the gentle was so acute that those who shared it in civil life, without having to shed blood with their own hands, or witness destruction with their own eyes, hardly care to obtrude their own woes. nevertheless, even when sitting at home in safety, it was not easy for those who had to write and speak about the war to throw away their highest conscience, and deliberately work to a standard of inevitable evil instead of to the ideal of life more abundant. i can answer for at least one person who found the change from the wisdom of jesus and st. francis to the morals of richard iii and the madness of don quixote extremely irksome. but that change had to be made; and we are all the worse for it, except those for whom it was not really a change at all, but only a relief from hypocrisy. think, too, of those who, though they had neither to write nor to fight, and had no children of their own to lose, yet knew the inestimable loss to the world of four years of the life of a generation wasted on destruction. hardly one of the epoch-making works of the human mind might not have been aborted or destroyed by taking their authors away from their natural work for four critical years. not only were shakespeares and platos being killed outright; but many of the best harvests of the survivors had to be sown in the barren soil of the trenches. and this was no mere british consideration. to the truly civilized man, to the good european, the slaughter of the german youth was as disastrous as the slaughter of the english. fools exulted in "german losses." they were our losses as well. imagine exulting in the death of beethoven because bill sykes dealt him his death blow! straining at the gnat and swallowing the camel but most people could not comprehend these sorrows. there was a frivolous exultation in death for its own sake, which was at bottom an inability to realize that the deaths were real deaths and not stage ones. again and again, when an air raider dropped a bomb which tore a child and its mother limb from limb, the people who saw it, though they had been reading with great cheerfulness of thousands of such happenings day after day in their newspapers, suddenly burst into furious imprecations on "the huns" as murderers, and shrieked for savage and satisfying vengeance. at such moments it became clear that the deaths they had not seen meant no more to them than the mimic death of the cinema screen. sometimes it was not necessary that death should be actually witnessed: it had only to take place under circumstances of sufficient novelty and proximity to bring it home almost as sensationally and effectively as if it had been actually visible. for example, in the spring of there was an appalling slaughter of our young soldiers at neuve chapelle and at the gallipoli landing. i will not go so far as to say that our civilians were delighted to have such exciting news to read at breakfast. but i cannot pretend that i noticed either in the papers, or in general intercourse, any feeling beyond the usual one that the cinema show at the front was going splendidly, and that our boys were the bravest of the brave. suddenly there came the news that an atlantic liner, the lusitania, had been torpedoed, and that several well-known first-class passengers, including a famous theatrical manager and the author of a popular farce, had been drowned, among others. the others included sir hugh lane; but as he had only laid the country under great obligations in the sphere of the fine arts, no great stress was laid on that loss. immediately an amazing frenzy swept through the country. men who up to that time had kept their heads now lost them utterly. "killing saloon passengers! what next?" was the essence of the whole agitation; but it is far too trivial a phrase to convey the faintest notion of the rage which possessed us. to me, with my mind full of the hideous cost of neuve chapelle, ypres, and the gallipoli landing, the fuss about the lusitania seemed almost a heartless impertinence, though i was well acquainted personally with the three best-known victims, and understood, better perhaps than most people, the misfortune of the death of lane. i even found a grim satisfaction, very intelligible to all soldiers, in the fact that the civilians who found the war such splendid british sport should get a sharp taste of what it was to the actual combatants. i expressed my impatience very freely, and found that my very straightforward and natural feeling in the matter was received as a monstrous and heartless paradox. when i asked those who gaped at me whether they had anything to say about the holocaust of festubert, they gaped wider than before, having totally forgotten it, or rather, having never realized it. they were not heartless anymore than i was; but the big catastrophe was too big for them to grasp, and the little one had been just the right size for them. i was not surprised. have i not seen a public body for just the same reason pass a vote for £ , without a word, and then spend three special meetings, prolonged into the night, over an item of seven shillings for refreshments? little minds and big battles nobody will be able to understand the vagaries of public feeling during the war unless they bear constantly in mind that the war in its entire magnitude did not exist for the average civilian. he could not conceive even a battle, much less a campaign. to the suburbs the war was nothing but a suburban squabble. to the miner and navvy it was only a series of bayonet fights between german champions and english ones. the enormity of it was quite beyond most of us. its episodes had to be reduced to the dimensions of a railway accident or a shipwreck before it could produce any effect on our minds at all. to us the ridiculous bombardments of scarborough and ramsgate were colossal tragedies, and the battle of jutland a mere ballad. the words "after thorough artillery preparation" in the news from the front meant nothing to us; but when our seaside trippers learned that an elderly gentleman at breakfast in a week-end marine hotel had been interrupted by a bomb dropping into his egg-cup, their wrath and horror knew no bounds. they declared that this would put a new spirit into the army; and had no suspicion that the soldiers in the trenches roared with laughter over it for days, and told each other that it would do the blighters at home good to have a taste of what the army was up against. sometimes the smallness of view was pathetic. a man would work at home regardless of the call "to make the world safe for democracy." his brother would be killed at the front. immediately he would throw up his work and take up the war as a family blood feud against the germans. sometimes it was comic. a wounded man, entitled to his discharge, would return to the trenches with a grim determination to find the hun who had wounded him and pay him out for it. it is impossible to estimate what proportion of us, in khaki or out of it, grasped the war and its political antecedents as a whole in the light of any philosophy of history or knowledge of what war is. i doubt whether it was as high as our proportion of higher mathematicians. but there can be no doubt that it was prodigiously outnumbered by the comparatively ignorant and childish. remember that these people had to be stimulated to make the sacrifices demanded by the war, and that this could not be done by appeals to a knowledge which they did not possess, and a comprehension of which they were incapable. when the armistice at last set me free to tell the truth about the war at the following general election, a soldier said to a candidate whom i was supporting, "if i had known all that in , they would never have got me into khaki." and that, of course, was precisely why it had been necessary to stuff him with a romance that any diplomatist would have laughed at. thus the natural confusion of ignorance was increased by a deliberately propagated confusion of nursery bogey stories and melodramatic nonsense, which at last overreached itself and made it impossible to stop the war before we had not only achieved the triumph of vanquishing the german army and thereby overthrowing its militarist monarchy, but made the very serious mistake of ruining the centre of europe, a thing that no sane european state could afford to do. the dumb capables and the noisy incapables confronted with this picture of insensate delusion and folly, the critical reader will immediately counterplead that england all this time was conducting a war which involved the organization of several millions of fighting men and of the workers who were supplying them with provisions, munitions, and transport, and that this could not have been done by a mob of hysterical ranters. this is fortunately true. to pass from the newspaper offices and political platforms and club fenders and suburban drawing-rooms to the army and the munition factories was to pass from bedlam to the busiest and sanest of workaday worlds. it was to rediscover england, and find solid ground for the faith of those who still believed in her. but a necessary condition of this efficiency was that those who were efficient should give all their time to their business and leave the rabble raving to its heart's content. indeed the raving was useful to the efficient, because, as it was always wide of the mark, it often distracted attention very conveniently from operations that would have been defeated or hindered by publicity. a precept which i endeavored vainly to popularize early in the war, "if you have anything to do go and do it: if not, for heaven's sake get out of the way," was only half carried out. certainly the capable people went and did it; but the incapables would by no means get out of the way: they fussed and bawled and were only prevented from getting very seriously into the way by the blessed fact that they never knew where the way was. thus whilst all the efficiency of england was silent and invisible, all its imbecility was deafening the heavens with its clamor and blotting out the sun with its dust. it was also unfortunately intimidating the government by its blusterings into using the irresistible powers of the state to intimidate the sensible people, thus enabling a despicable minority of would-be lynchers to set up a reign of terror which could at any time have been broken by a single stern word from a responsible minister. but our ministers had not that sort of courage: neither heartbreak house nor horseback hall had bred it, much less the suburbs. when matters at last came to the looting of shops by criminals under patriotic pretexts, it was the police force and not the government that put its foot down. there was even one deplorable moment, during the submarine scare, in which the government yielded to a childish cry for the maltreatment of naval prisoners of war, and, to our great disgrace, was forced by the enemy to behave itself. and yet behind all this public blundering and misconduct and futile mischief, the effective england was carrying on with the most formidable capacity and activity. the ostensible england was making the empire sick with its incontinences, its ignorances, its ferocities, its panics, and its endless and intolerable blarings of allied national anthems in season and out. the esoteric england was proceeding irresistibly to the conquest of europe. the practical business men from the beginning the useless people set up a shriek for "practical business men." by this they meant men who had become rich by placing their personal interests before those of the country, and measuring the success of every activity by the pecuniary profit it brought to them and to those on whom they depended for their supplies of capital. the pitiable failure of some conspicuous samples from the first batch we tried of these poor devils helped to give the whole public side of the war an air of monstrous and hopeless farce. they proved not only that they were useless for public work, but that in a well-ordered nation they would never have been allowed to control private enterprise. how the fools shouted the wise men down thus, like a fertile country flooded with mud, england showed no sign of her greatness in the days when she was putting forth all her strength to save herself from the worst consequences of her littleness. most of the men of action, occupied to the last hour of their time with urgent practical work, had to leave to idler people, or to professional rhetoricians, the presentation of the war to the reason and imagination of the country and the world in speeches, poems, manifestoes, picture posters, and newspaper articles. i have had the privilege of hearing some of our ablest commanders talking about their work; and i have shared the common lot of reading the accounts of that work given to the world by the newspapers. no two experiences could be more different. but in the end the talkers obtained a dangerous ascendancy over the rank and file of the men of action; for though the great men of action are always inveterate talkers and often very clever writers, and therefore cannot have their minds formed for them by others, the average man of action, like the average fighter with the bayonet, can give no account of himself in words even to himself, and is apt to pick up and accept what he reads about himself and other people in the papers, except when the writer is rash enough to commit himself on technical points. it was not uncommon during the war to hear a soldier, or a civilian engaged on war work, describing events within his own experience that reduced to utter absurdity the ravings and maunderings of his daily paper, and yet echo the opinions of that paper like a parrot. thus, to escape from the prevailing confusion and folly, it was not enough to seek the company of the ordinary man of action: one had to get into contact with the master spirits. this was a privilege which only a handful of people could enjoy. for the unprivileged citizen there was no escape. to him the whole country seemed mad, futile, silly, incompetent, with no hope of victory except the hope that the enemy might be just as mad. only by very resolute reflection and reasoning could he reassure himself that if there was nothing more solid beneath their appalling appearances the war could not possibly have gone on for a single day without a total breakdown of its organization. the mad election happy were the fools and the thoughtless men of action in those days. the worst of it was that the fools were very strongly represented in parliament, as fools not only elect fools, but can persuade men of action to elect them too. the election that immediately followed the armistice was perhaps the maddest that has ever taken place. soldiers who had done voluntary and heroic service in the field were defeated by persons who had apparently never run a risk or spent a farthing that they could avoid, and who even had in the course of the election to apologize publicly for bawling pacifist or pro-german at their opponent. party leaders seek such followers, who can always be depended on to walk tamely into the lobby at the party whip's orders, provided the leader will make their seats safe for them by the process which was called, in derisive reference to the war rationing system, "giving them the coupon." other incidents were so grotesque that i cannot mention them without enabling the reader to identify the parties, which would not be fair, as they were no more to blame than thousands of others who must necessarily be nameless. the general result was patently absurd; and the electorate, disgusted at its own work, instantly recoiled to the opposite extreme, and cast out all the coupon candidates at the earliest bye-elections by equally silly majorities. but the mischief of the general election could not be undone; and the government had not only to pretend to abuse its european victory as it had promised, but actually to do it by starving the enemies who had thrown down their arms. it had, in short, won the election by pledging itself to be thriftlessly wicked, cruel, and vindictive; and it did not find it as easy to escape from this pledge as it had from nobler ones. the end, as i write, is not yet; but it is clear that this thoughtless savagery will recoil on the heads of the allies so severely that we shall be forced by the sternest necessity to take up our share of healing the europe we have wounded almost to death instead of attempting to complete her destruction. the yahoo and the angry ape contemplating this picture of a state of mankind so recent that no denial of its truth is possible, one understands shakespeare comparing man to an angry ape, swift describing him as a yahoo rebuked by the superior virtue of the horse, and wellington declaring that the british can behave themselves neither in victory nor defeat. yet none of the three had seen war as we have seen it. shakespeare blamed great men, saying that "could great men thunder as jove himself does, jove would ne'er be quiet; for every pelting petty officer would use his heaven for thunder: nothing but thunder." what would shakespeare have said if he had seen something far more destructive than thunder in the hand of every village laborer, and found on the messines ridge the craters of the nineteen volcanoes that were let loose there at the touch of a finger that might have been a child's finger without the result being a whit less ruinous? shakespeare may have seen a stratford cottage struck by one of jove's thunderbolts, and have helped to extinguish the lighted thatch and clear away the bits of the broken chimney. what would he have said if he had seen ypres as it is now, or returned to stratford, as french peasants are returning to their homes to-day, to find the old familiar signpost inscribed "to stratford, mile," and at the end of the mile nothing but some holes in the ground and a fragment of a broken churn here and there? would not the spectacle of the angry ape endowed with powers of destruction that jove never pretended to, have beggared even his command of words? and yet, what is there to say except that war puts a strain on human nature that breaks down the better half of it, and makes the worse half a diabolical virtue? better, for us if it broke it down altogether, for then the warlike way out of our difficulties would be barred to us, and we should take greater care not to get into them. in truth, it is, as byron said, "not difficult to die," and enormously difficult to live: that explains why, at bottom, peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous. did any hero of the war face the glorious risk of death more bravely than the traitor bolo faced the ignominious certainty of it? bolo taught us all how to die: can we say that he taught us all how to live? hardly a week passes now without some soldier who braved death in the field so recklessly that he was decorated or specially commended for it, being haled before our magistrates for having failed to resist the paltriest temptations of peace, with no better excuse than the old one that "a man must live." strange that one who, sooner than do honest work, will sell his honor for a bottle of wine, a visit to the theatre, and an hour with a strange woman, all obtained by passing a worthless cheque, could yet stake his life on the most desperate chances of the battle-field! does it not seem as if, after all, the glory of death were cheaper than the glory of life? if it is not easier to attain, why do so many more men attain it? at all events it is clear that the kingdom of the prince of peace has not yet become the kingdom of this world. his attempts at invasion have been resisted far more fiercely than the kaiser's. successful as that resistance has been, it has piled up a sort of national debt that is not the less oppressive because we have no figures for it and do not intend to pay it. a blockade that cuts off "the grace of our lord" is in the long run less bearable than the blockades which merely cut off raw materials; and against that blockade our armada is impotent. in the blockader's house, he has assured us, there are many mansions; but i am afraid they do not include either heartbreak house or horseback hall. plague on both your houses! meanwhile the bolshevist picks and petards are at work on the foundations of both buildings; and though the bolshevists may be buried in the ruins, their deaths will not save the edifices. unfortunately they can be built again. like doubting castle, they have been demolished many times by successive greathearts, and rebuilt by simple, sloth, and presumption, by feeble mind and much afraid, and by all the jurymen of vanity fair. another generation of "secondary education" at our ancient public schools and the cheaper institutions that ape them will be quite sufficient to keep the two going until the next war. for the instruction of that generation i leave these pages as a record of what civilian life was during the war: a matter on which history is usually silent. fortunately it was a very short war. it is true that the people who thought it could not last more than six months were very signally refuted by the event. as sir douglas haig has pointed out, its waterloos lasted months instead of hours. but there would have been nothing surprising in its lasting thirty years. if it had not been for the fact that the blockade achieved the amazing feat of starving out europe, which it could not possibly have done had europe been properly organized for war, or even for peace, the war would have lasted until the belligerents were so tired of it that they could no longer be compelled to compel themselves to go on with it. considering its magnitude, the war of - will certainly be classed as the shortest in history. the end came so suddenly that the combatant literally stumbled over it; and yet it came a full year later than it should have come if the belligerents had not been far too afraid of one another to face the situation sensibly. germany, having failed to provide for the war she began, failed again to surrender before she was dangerously exhausted. her opponents, equally improvident, went as much too close to bankruptcy as germany to starvation. it was a bluff at which both were bluffed. and, with the usual irony of war, it remains doubtful whether germany and russia, the defeated, will not be the gainers; for the victors are already busy fastening on themselves the chains they have struck from the limbs of the vanquished. how the theatre fared let us now contract our view rather violently from the european theatre of war to the theatre in which the fights are sham fights, and the slain, rising the moment the curtain has fallen, go comfortably home to supper after washing off their rose-pink wounds. it is nearly twenty years since i was last obliged to introduce a play in the form of a book for lack of an opportunity of presenting it in its proper mode by a performance in a theatre. the war has thrown me back on this expedient. heartbreak house has not yet reached the stage. i have withheld it because the war has completely upset the economic conditions which formerly enabled serious drama to pay its way in london. the change is not in the theatres nor in the management of them, nor in the authors and actors, but in the audiences. for four years the london theatres were crowded every night with thousands of soldiers on leave from the front. these soldiers were not seasoned london playgoers. a childish experience of my own gave me a clue to their condition. when i was a small boy i was taken to the opera. i did not then know what an opera was, though i could whistle a good deal of opera music. i had seen in my mother's album photographs of all the great opera singers, mostly in evening dress. in the theatre i found myself before a gilded balcony filled with persons in evening dress whom i took to be the opera singers. i picked out one massive dark lady as alboni, and wondered how soon she would stand up and sing. i was puzzled by the fact that i was made to sit with my back to the singers instead of facing them. when the curtain went up, my astonishment and delight were unbounded. the soldier at the theatre front in , i saw in the theatres men in khaki in just the same predicament. to everyone who had my clue to their state of mind it was evident that they had never been in a theatre before and did not know what it was. at one of our great variety theatres i sat beside a young officer, not at all a rough specimen, who, even when the curtain rose and enlightened him as to the place where he had to look for his entertainment, found the dramatic part of it utterly incomprehensible. he did not know how to play his part of the game. he could understand the people on the stage singing and dancing and performing gymnastic feats. he not only understood but intensely enjoyed an artist who imitated cocks crowing and pigs squeaking. but the people who pretended that they were somebody else, and that the painted picture behind them was real, bewildered him. in his presence i realized how very sophisticated the natural man has to become before the conventions of the theatre can be easily acceptable, or the purpose of the drama obvious to him. well, from the moment when the routine of leave for our soldiers was established, such novices, accompanied by damsels (called flappers) often as innocent as themselves, crowded the theatres to the doors. it was hardly possible at first to find stuff crude enough to nurse them on. the best music-hall comedians ransacked their memories for the oldest quips and the most childish antics to avoid carrying the military spectators out of their depth. i believe that this was a mistake as far as the novices were concerned. shakespeare, or the dramatized histories of george barnwell, maria martin, or the demon barber of fleet street, would probably have been quite popular with them. but the novices were only a minority after all. the cultivated soldier, who in time of peace would look at nothing theatrical except the most advanced postibsen plays in the most artistic settings, found himself, to his own astonishment, thirsting for silly jokes, dances, and brainlessly sensuous exhibitions of pretty girls. the author of some of the most grimly serious plays of our time told me that after enduring the trenches for months without a glimpse of the female of his species, it gave him an entirely innocent but delightful pleasure merely to see a flapper. the reaction from the battle-field produced a condition of hyperaesthesia in which all the theatrical values were altered. trivial things gained intensity and stale things novelty. the actor, instead of having to coax his audiences out of the boredom which had driven them to the theatre in an ill humor to seek some sort of distraction, had only to exploit the bliss of smiling men who were no longer under fire and under military discipline, but actually clean and comfortable and in a mood to be pleased with anything and everything that a bevy of pretty girls and a funny man, or even a bevy of girls pretending to be pretty and a man pretending to be funny, could do for them. then could be seen every night in the theatres oldfashioned farcical comedies, in which a bedroom, with four doors on each side and a practicable window in the middle, was understood to resemble exactly the bedroom in the flats beneath and above, all three inhabited by couples consumed with jealousy. when these people came home drunk at night; mistook their neighbor's flats for their own; and in due course got into the wrong beds, it was not only the novices who found the resulting complications and scandals exquisitely ingenious and amusing, nor their equally verdant flappers who could not help squealing in a manner that astonished the oldest performers when the gentleman who had just come in drunk through the window pretended to undress, and allowed glimpses of his naked person to be descried from time to time. heartbreak house men who had just read the news that charles wyndham was dying, and were thereby sadly reminded of pink dominos and the torrent of farcical comedies that followed it in his heyday until every trick of that trade had become so stale that the laughter they provoked turned to loathing: these veterans also, when they returned from the field, were as much pleased by what they knew to be stale and foolish as the novices by what they thought fresh and clever. commerce in the theatre wellington said that an army moves on its belly. so does a london theatre. before a man acts he must eat. before he performs plays he must pay rent. in london we have no theatres for the welfare of the people: they are all for the sole purpose of producing the utmost obtainable rent for the proprietor. if the twin flats and twin beds produce a guinea more than shakespeare, out goes shakespeare and in come the twin flats and the twin beds. if the brainless bevy of pretty girls and the funny man outbid mozart, out goes mozart. unser shakespeare before the war an effort was made to remedy this by establishing a national theatre in celebration of the tercentenary of the death of shakespeare. a committee was formed; and all sorts of illustrious and influential persons lent their names to a grand appeal to our national culture. my play, the dark lady of the sonnets, was one of the incidents of that appeal. after some years of effort the result was a single handsome subscription from a german gentleman. like the celebrated swearer in the anecdote when the cart containing all his household goods lost its tailboard at the top of the hill and let its contents roll in ruin to the bottom, i can only say, "i cannot do justice to this situation," and let it pass without another word. the higher drama put out of action the effect of the war on the london theatres may now be imagined. the beds and the bevies drove every higher form of art out of it. rents went up to an unprecedented figure. at the same time prices doubled everywhere except at the theatre pay-boxes, and raised the expenses of management to such a degree that unless the houses were quite full every night, profit was impossible. even bare solvency could not be attained without a very wide popularity. now what had made serious drama possible to a limited extent before the war was that a play could pay its way even if the theatre were only half full until saturday and three-quarters full then. a manager who was an enthusiast and a desperately hard worker, with an occasional grant-in-aid from an artistically disposed millionaire, and a due proportion of those rare and happy accidents by which plays of the higher sort turn out to be potboilers as well, could hold out for some years, by which time a relay might arrive in the person of another enthusiast. thus and not otherwise occurred that remarkable revival of the british drama at the beginning of the century which made my own career as a playwright possible in england. in america i had already established myself, not as part of the ordinary theatre system, but in association with the exceptional genius of richard mansfield. in germany and austria i had no difficulty: the system of publicly aided theatres there, court and municipal, kept drama of the kind i dealt in alive; so that i was indebted to the emperor of austria for magnificent productions of my works at a time when the sole official attention paid me by the british courts was the announcement to the english-speaking world that certain plays of mine were unfit for public performance, a substantial set-off against this being that the british court, in the course of its private playgoing, paid no regard to the bad character given me by the chief officer of its household. howbeit, the fact that my plays effected a lodgment on the london stage, and were presently followed by the plays of granville barker, gilbert murray, john masefield, st. john hankin, lawrence housman, arnold bennett, john galsworthy, john drinkwater, and others which would in the nineteenth century have stood rather less chance of production at a london theatre than the dialogues of plato, not to mention revivals of the ancient athenian drama and a restoration to the stage of shakespeare's plays as he wrote them, was made economically possible solely by a supply of theatres which could hold nearly twice as much money as it cost to rent and maintain them. in such theatres work appealing to a relatively small class of cultivated persons, and therefore attracting only from half to three-quarters as many spectators as the more popular pastimes, could nevertheless keep going in the hands of young adventurers who were doing it for its own sake, and had not yet been forced by advancing age and responsibilities to consider the commercial value of their time and energy too closely. the war struck this foundation away in the manner i have just described. the expenses of running the cheapest west-end theatres rose to a sum which exceeded by twenty-five per cent the utmost that the higher drama can, as an ascertained matter of fact, be depended on to draw. thus the higher drama, which has never really been a commercially sound speculation, now became an impossible one. accordingly, attempts are being made to provide a refuge for it in suburban theatres in london and repertory theatres in the provinces. but at the moment when the army has at last disgorged the survivors of the gallant band of dramatic pioneers whom it swallowed, they find that the economic conditions which formerly made their work no worse than precarious now put it out of the question altogether, as far as the west end of london is concerned. church and theatre i do not suppose many people care particularly. we are not brought up to care; and a sense of the national importance of the theatre is not born in mankind: the natural man, like so many of the soldiers at the beginning of the war, does not know what a theatre is. but please note that all these soldiers who did not know what a theatre was, knew what a church was. and they had been taught to respect churches. nobody had ever warned them against a church as a place where frivolous women paraded in their best clothes; where stories of improper females like potiphar's wife, and erotic poetry like the song of songs, were read aloud; where the sensuous and sentimental music of schubert, mendelssohn, gounod, and brahms was more popular than severe music by greater composers; where the prettiest sort of pretty pictures of pretty saints assailed the imagination and senses through stained-glass windows; and where sculpture and architecture came to the help of painting. nobody ever reminded them that these things had sometimes produced such developments of erotic idolatry that men who were not only enthusiastic amateurs of literature, painting, and music, but famous practitioners of them, had actually exulted when mobs and even regular troops under express command had mutilated church statues, smashed church windows, wrecked church organs, and torn up the sheets from which the church music was read and sung. when they saw broken statues in churches, they were told that this was the work of wicked, godless rioters, instead of, as it was, the work partly of zealots bent on driving the world, the flesh, and the devil out of the temple, and partly of insurgent men who had become intolerably poor because the temple had become a den of thieves. but all the sins and perversions that were so carefully hidden from them in the history of the church were laid on the shoulders of the theatre: that stuffy, uncomfortable place of penance in which we suffer so much inconvenience on the slenderest chance of gaining a scrap of food for our starving souls. when the germans bombed the cathedral of rheims the world rang with the horror of the sacrilege. when they bombed the little theatre in the adelphi, and narrowly missed bombing two writers of plays who lived within a few yards of it, the fact was not even mentioned in the papers. in point of appeal to the senses no theatre ever built could touch the fane at rheims: no actress could rival its virgin in beauty, nor any operatic tenor look otherwise than a fool beside its david. its picture glass was glorious even to those who had seen the glass of chartres. it was wonderful in its very grotesques: who would look at the blondin donkey after seeing its leviathans? in spite of the adam-adelphian decoration on which miss kingston had lavished so much taste and care, the little theatre was in comparison with rheims the gloomiest of little conventicles: indeed the cathedral must, from the puritan point of view, have debauched a million voluptuaries for every one whom the little theatre had sent home thoughtful to a chaste bed after mr chesterton's magic or brieux's les avaries. perhaps that is the real reason why the church is lauded and the theatre reviled. whether or no, the fact remains that the lady to whose public spirit and sense of the national value of the theatre i owed the first regular public performance of a play of mine had to conceal her action as if it had been a crime, whereas if she had given the money to the church she would have worn a halo for it. and i admit, as i have always done, that this state of things may have been a very sensible one. i have asked londoners again and again why they pay half a guinea to go to a theatre when they can go to st. paul's or westminster abbey for nothing. their only possible reply is that they want to see something new and possibly something wicked; but the theatres mostly disappoint both hopes. if ever a revolution makes me dictator, i shall establish a heavy charge for admission to our churches. but everyone who pays at the church door shall receive a ticket entitling him or her to free admission to one performance at any theatre he or she prefers. thus shall the sensuous charms of the church service be made to subsidize the sterner virtue of the drama. the next phase the present situation will not last. although the newspaper i read at breakfast this morning before writing these words contains a calculation that no less than twenty-three wars are at present being waged to confirm the peace, england is no longer in khaki; and a violent reaction is setting in against the crude theatrical fare of the four terrible years. soon the rents of theatres will once more be fixed on the assumption that they cannot always be full, nor even on the average half full week in and week out. prices will change. the higher drama will be at no greater disadvantage than it was before the war; and it may benefit, first, by the fact that many of us have been torn from the fools' paradise in which the theatre formerly traded, and thrust upon the sternest realities and necessities until we have lost both faith in and patience with the theatrical pretences that had no root either in reality or necessity; second, by the startling change made by the war in the distribution of income. it seems only the other day that a millionaire was a man with £ , a year. to-day, when he has paid his income tax and super tax, and insured his life for the amount of his death duties, he is lucky if his net income is , pounds though his nominal property remains the same. and this is the result of a budget which is called "a respite for the rich." at the other end of the scale millions of persons have had regular incomes for the first time in their lives; and their men have been regularly clothed, fed, lodged, and taught to make up their minds that certain things have to be done, also for the first time in their lives. hundreds of thousands of women have been taken out of their domestic cages and tasted both discipline and independence. the thoughtless and snobbish middle classes have been pulled up short by the very unpleasant experience of being ruined to an unprecedented extent. we have all had a tremendous jolt; and although the widespread notion that the shock of the war would automatically make a new heaven and a new earth, and that the dog would never go back to his vomit nor the sow to her wallowing in the mire, is already seen to be a delusion, yet we are far more conscious of our condition than we were, and far less disposed to submit to it. revolution, lately only a sensational chapter in history or a demagogic claptrap, is now a possibility so imminent that hardly by trying to suppress it in other countries by arms and defamation, and calling the process anti-bolshevism, can our government stave it off at home. perhaps the most tragic figure of the day is the american president who was once a historian. in those days it became his task to tell us how, after that great war in america which was more clearly than any other war of our time a war for an idea, the conquerors, confronted with a heroic task of reconstruction, turned recreant, and spent fifteen years in abusing their victory under cover of pretending to accomplish the task they were doing what they could to make impossible. alas! hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that men never learn anything from history. with what anguish of mind the president sees that we, the new conquerors, forgetting everything we professed to fight for, are sitting down with watering mouths to a good square meal of ten years revenge upon and humiliation of our prostrate foe, can only be guessed by those who know, as he does, how hopeless is remonstrance, and how happy lincoln was in perishing from the earth before his inspired messages became scraps of paper. he knows well that from the peace conference will come, in spite of his utmost, no edict on which he will be able, like lincoln, to invoke "the considerate judgment of mankind: and the gracious favor of almighty god." he led his people to destroy the militarism of zabern; and the army they rescued is busy in cologne imprisoning every german who does not salute a british officer; whilst the government at home, asked whether it approves, replies that it does not propose even to discontinue this zabernism when the peace is concluded, but in effect looks forward to making germans salute british officers until the end of the world. that is what war makes of men and women. it will wear off; and the worst it threatens is already proving impracticable; but before the humble and contrite heart ceases to be despised, the president and i, being of the same age, will be dotards. in the meantime there is, for him, another history to write; for me, another comedy to stage. perhaps, after all, that is what wars are for, and what historians and playwrights are for. if men will not learn until their lessons are written in blood, why, blood they must have, their own for preference. the ephemeral thrones and the eternal theatre to the theatre it will not matter. whatever bastilles fall, the theatre will stand. apostolic hapsburg has collapsed; all highest hohenzollern languishes in holland, threatened with trial on a capital charge of fighting for his country against england; imperial romanoff, said to have perished miserably by a more summary method of murder, is perhaps alive or perhaps dead: nobody cares more than if he had been a peasant; the lord of hellas is level with his lackeys in republican switzerland; prime ministers and commanders-in-chief have passed from a brief glory as solons and caesars into failure and obscurity as closely on one another's heels as the descendants of banquo; but euripides and aristophanes, shakespeare and moliere, goethe and ibsen remain fixed in their everlasting seats. how war muzzles the dramatic poet as for myself, why, it may be asked, did i not write two plays about the war instead of two pamphlets on it? the answer is significant. you cannot make war on war and on your neighbor at the same time. war cannot bear the terrible castigation of comedy, the ruthless light of laughter that glares on the stage. when men are heroically dying for their country, it is not the time to show their lovers and wives and fathers and mothers how they are being sacrificed to the blunders of boobies, the cupidity of capitalists, the ambition of conquerors, the electioneering of demagogues, the pharisaism of patriots, the lusts and lies and rancors and bloodthirsts that love war because it opens their prison doors, and sets them in the thrones of power and popularity. for unless these things are mercilessly exposed they will hide under the mantle of the ideals on the stage just as they do in real life. and though there may be better things to reveal, it may not, and indeed cannot, be militarily expedient to reveal them whilst the issue is still in the balance. truth telling is not compatible with the defence of the realm. we are just now reading the revelations of our generals and admirals, unmuzzled at last by the armistice. during the war, general a, in his moving despatches from the field, told how general b had covered himself with deathless glory in such and such a battle. he now tells us that general b came within an ace of losing us the war by disobeying his orders on that occasion, and fighting instead of running away as he ought to have done. an excellent subject for comedy now that the war is over, no doubt; but if general a had let this out at the time, what would have been the effect on general b's soldiers? and had the stage made known what the prime minister and the secretary of state for war who overruled general a thought of him, and what he thought of them, as now revealed in raging controversy, what would have been the effect on the nation? that is why comedy, though sorely tempted, had to be loyally silent; for the art of the dramatic poet knows no patriotism; recognizes no obligation but truth to natural history; cares not whether germany or england perish; is ready to cry with brynhild, "lass'uns verderben, lachend zu grunde geh'n" sooner than deceive or be deceived; and thus becomes in time of war a greater military danger than poison, steel, or trinitrotoluene. that is why i had to withhold heartbreak house from the footlights during the war; for the germans might on any night have turned the last act from play into earnest, and even then might not have waited for their cues. june, . heartbreak house act i the hilly country in the middle of the north edge of sussex, looking very pleasant on a fine evening at the end of september, is seen through the windows of a room which has been built so as to resemble the after part of an old-fashioned high-pooped ship, with a stern gallery; for the windows are ship built with heavy timbering, and run right across the room as continuously as the stability of the wall allows. a row of lockers under the windows provides an unupholstered windowseat interrupted by twin glass doors, respectively halfway between the stern post and the sides. another door strains the illusion a little by being apparently in the ship's port side, and yet leading, not to the open sea, but to the entrance hall of the house. between this door and the stern gallery are bookshelves. there are electric light switches beside the door leading to the hall and the glass doors in the stern gallery. against the starboard wall is a carpenter's bench. the vice has a board in its jaws; and the floor is littered with shavings, overflowing from a waste-paper basket. a couple of planes and a centrebit are on the bench. in the same wall, between the bench and the windows, is a narrow doorway with a half door, above which a glimpse of the room beyond shows that it is a shelved pantry with bottles and kitchen crockery. on the starboard side, but close to the middle, is a plain oak drawing-table with drawing-board, t-square, straightedges, set squares, mathematical instruments, saucers of water color, a tumbler of discolored water, indian ink, pencils, and brushes on it. the drawing-board is set so that the draughtsman's chair has the window on its left hand. on the floor at the end of the table, on its right, is a ship's fire bucket. on the port side of the room, near the bookshelves, is a sofa with its back to the windows. it is a sturdy mahogany article, oddly upholstered in sailcloth, including the bolster, with a couple of blankets hanging over the back. between the sofa and the drawing-table is a big wicker chair, with broad arms and a low sloping back, with its back to the light. a small but stout table of teak, with a round top and gate legs, stands against the port wall between the door and the bookcase. it is the only article in the room that suggests (not at all convincingly) a woman's hand in the furnishing. the uncarpeted floor of narrow boards is caulked and holystoned like a deck. the garden to which the glass doors lead dips to the south before the landscape rises again to the hills. emerging from the hollow is the cupola of an observatory. between the observatory and the house is a flagstaff on a little esplanade, with a hammock on the east side and a long garden seat on the west. a young lady, gloved and hatted, with a dust coat on, is sitting in the window-seat with her body twisted to enable her to look out at the view. one hand props her chin: the other hangs down with a volume of the temple shakespeare in it, and her finger stuck in the page she has been reading. a clock strikes six. the young lady turns and looks at her watch. she rises with an air of one who waits, and is almost at the end of her patience. she is a pretty girl, slender, fair, and intelligent looking, nicely but not expensively dressed, evidently not a smart idler. with a sigh of weary resignation she comes to the draughtsman's chair; sits down; and begins to read shakespeare. presently the book sinks to her lap; her eyes close; and she dozes into a slumber. an elderly womanservant comes in from the hall with three unopened bottles of rum on a tray. she passes through and disappears in the pantry without noticing the young lady. she places the bottles on the shelf and fills her tray with empty bottles. as she returns with these, the young lady lets her book drop, awakening herself, and startling the womanservant so that she all but lets the tray fall. the womanservant. god bless us! [the young lady picks up the book and places it on the table]. sorry to wake you, miss, i'm sure; but you are a stranger to me. what might you be waiting here for now? the young lady. waiting for somebody to show some signs of knowing that i have been invited here. the womanservant. oh, you're invited, are you? and has nobody come? dear! dear! the young lady. a wild-looking old gentleman came and looked in at the window; and i heard him calling out, "nurse, there is a young and attractive female waiting in the poop. go and see what she wants." are you the nurse? the womanservant. yes, miss: i'm nurse guinness. that was old captain shotover, mrs hushabye's father. i heard him roaring; but i thought it was for something else. i suppose it was mrs hushabye that invited you, ducky? the young lady. i understood her to do so. but really i think i'd better go. nurse guinness. oh, don't think of such a thing, miss. if mrs hushabye has forgotten all about it, it will be a pleasant surprise for her to see you, won't it? the young lady. it has been a very unpleasant surprise to me to find that nobody expects me. nurse guinness. you'll get used to it, miss: this house is full of surprises for them that don't know our ways. captain shotover [looking in from the hall suddenly: an ancient but still hardy man with an immense white beard, in a reefer jacket with a whistle hanging from his neck]. nurse, there is a hold-all and a handbag on the front steps for everybody to fall over. also a tennis racquet. who the devil left them there? the young lady. they are mine, i'm afraid. the captain [advancing to the drawing-table]. nurse, who is this misguided and unfortunate young lady? nurse guinness. she says miss hessy invited her, sir. the captain. and had she no friend, no parents, to warn her against my daughter's invitations? this is a pretty sort of house, by heavens! a young and attractive lady is invited here. her luggage is left on the steps for hours; and she herself is deposited in the poop and abandoned, tired and starving. this is our hospitality. these are our manners. no room ready. no hot water. no welcoming hostess. our visitor is to sleep in the toolshed, and to wash in the duckpond. nurse guinness. now it's all right, captain: i'll get the lady some tea; and her room shall be ready before she has finished it. [to the young lady]. take off your hat, ducky; and make yourself at home [she goes to the door leading to the hall]. the captain [as she passes him]. ducky! do you suppose, woman, that because this young lady has been insulted and neglected, you have the right to address her as you address my wretched children, whom you have brought up in ignorance of the commonest decencies of social intercourse? nurse guinness. never mind him, doty. [quite unconcerned, she goes out into the hall on her way to the kitchen]. the captain. madam, will you favor me with your name? [he sits down in the big wicker chair]. the young lady. my name is ellie dunn. the captain. dunn! i had a boatswain whose name was dunn. he was originally a pirate in china. he set up as a ship's chandler with stores which i have every reason to believe he stole from me. no doubt he became rich. are you his daughter? ellie [indignant]. no, certainly not. i am proud to be able to say that though my father has not been a successful man, nobody has ever had one word to say against him. i think my father is the best man i have ever known. the captain. he must be greatly changed. has he attained the seventh degree of concentration? ellie. i don't understand. the captain. but how could he, with a daughter? i, madam, have two daughters. one of them is hesione hushabye, who invited you here. i keep this house: she upsets it. i desire to attain the seventh degree of concentration: she invites visitors and leaves me to entertain them. [nurse guinness returns with the tea-tray, which she places on the teak table]. i have a second daughter who is, thank god, in a remote part of the empire with her numskull of a husband. as a child she thought the figure-head of my ship, the dauntless, the most beautiful thing on earth. he resembled it. he had the same expression: wooden yet enterprising. she married him, and will never set foot in this house again. nurse guinness [carrying the table, with the tea-things on it, to ellie's side]. indeed you never were more mistaken. she is in england this very moment. you have been told three times this week that she is coming home for a year for her health. and very glad you should be to see your own daughter again after all these years. the captain. i am not glad. the natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years. my daughter ariadne was born when i was forty-six. i am now eighty-eight. if she comes, i am not at home. if she wants anything, let her take it. if she asks for me, let her be informed that i am extremely old, and have totally forgotten her. nurse guinness. that's no talk to offer to a young lady. here, ducky, have some tea; and don't listen to him [she pours out a cup of tea]. the captain [rising wrathfully]. now before high heaven they have given this innocent child indian tea: the stuff they tan their own leather insides with. [he seizes the cup and the tea-pot and empties both into the leathern bucket]. ellie [almost in tears]. oh, please! i am so tired. i should have been glad of anything. nurse guinness. oh, what a thing to do! the poor lamb is ready to drop. the captain. you shall have some of my tea. do not touch that fly-blown cake: nobody eats it here except the dogs. [he disappears into the pantry]. nurse guinness. there's a man for you! they say he sold himself to the devil in zanzibar before he was a captain; and the older he grows the more i believe them. a woman's voice [in the hall]. is anyone at home? hesione! nurse! papa! do come, somebody; and take in my luggage. thumping heard, as of an umbrella, on the wainscot. nurse guinness. my gracious! it's miss addy, lady utterword, mrs hushabye's sister: the one i told the captain about. [calling]. coming, miss, coming. she carries the table back to its place by the door and is harrying out when she is intercepted by lady utterword, who bursts in much flustered. lady utterword, a blonde, is very handsome, very well dressed, and so precipitate in speech and action that the first impression (erroneous) is one of comic silliness. lady utterword. oh, is that you, nurse? how are you? you don't look a day older. is nobody at home? where is hesione? doesn't she expect me? where are the servants? whose luggage is that on the steps? where's papa? is everybody asleep? [seeing ellie]. oh! i beg your pardon. i suppose you are one of my nieces. [approaching her with outstretched arms]. come and kiss your aunt, darling. ellie. i'm only a visitor. it is my luggage on the steps. nurse guinness. i'll go get you some fresh tea, ducky. [she takes up the tray]. ellie. but the old gentleman said he would make some himself. nurse guinness. bless you! he's forgotten what he went for already. his mind wanders from one thing to another. lady utterword. papa, i suppose? nurse guinness. yes, miss. lady utterword [vehemently]. don't be silly, nurse. don't call me miss. nurse guinness [placidly]. no, lovey [she goes out with the tea-tray]. lady utterword [sitting down with a flounce on the sofa]. i know what you must feel. oh, this house, this house! i come back to it after twenty-three years; and it is just the same: the luggage lying on the steps, the servants spoilt and impossible, nobody at home to receive anybody, no regular meals, nobody ever hungry because they are always gnawing bread and butter or munching apples, and, what is worse, the same disorder in ideas, in talk, in feeling. when i was a child i was used to it: i had never known anything better, though i was unhappy, and longed all the time--oh, how i longed!--to be respectable, to be a lady, to live as others did, not to have to think of everything for myself. i married at nineteen to escape from it. my husband is sir hastings utterword, who has been governor of all the crown colonies in succession. i have always been the mistress of government house. i have been so happy: i had forgotten that people could live like this. i wanted to see my father, my sister, my nephews and nieces (one ought to, you know), and i was looking forward to it. and now the state of the house! the way i'm received! the casual impudence of that woman guinness, our old nurse! really hesione might at least have been here: some preparation might have been made for me. you must excuse my going on in this way; but i am really very much hurt and annoyed and disillusioned: and if i had realized it was to be like this, i wouldn't have come. i have a great mind to go away without another word [she is on the point of weeping]. ellie [also very miserable]. nobody has been here to receive me either. i thought i ought to go away too. but how can i, lady utterword? my luggage is on the steps; and the station fly has gone. the captain emerges from the pantry with a tray of chinese lacquer and a very fine tea-set on it. he rests it provisionally on the end of the table; snatches away the drawing-board, which he stands on the floor against table legs; and puts the tray in the space thus cleared. ellie pours out a cup greedily. the captain. your tea, young lady. what! another lady! i must fetch another cup [he makes for the pantry]. lady utterword [rising from the sofa, suffused with emotion]. papa! don't you know me? i'm your daughter. the captain. nonsense! my daughter's upstairs asleep. [he vanishes through the half door]. lady utterword retires to the window to conceal her tears. ellie [going to her with the cup]. don't be so distressed. have this cup of tea. he is very old and very strange: he has been just like that to me. i know how dreadful it must be: my own father is all the world to me. oh, i'm sure he didn't mean it. the captain returns with another cup. the captain. now we are complete. [he places it on the tray]. lady utterword [hysterically]. papa, you can't have forgotten me. i am ariadne. i'm little paddy patkins. won't you kiss me? [she goes to him and throws her arms round his neck]. the captain [woodenly enduring her embrace]. how can you be ariadne? you are a middle-aged woman: well preserved, madam, but no longer young. lady utterword. but think of all the years and years i have been away, papa. i have had to grow old, like other people. the captain [disengaging himself]. you should grow out of kissing strange men: they may be striving to attain the seventh degree of concentration. lady utterword. but i'm your daughter. you haven't seen me for years. the captain. so much the worse! when our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them. but when they are away, we console ourselves for their absence by dwelling on their vices. that is how i have come to think my absent daughter ariadne a perfect fiend; so do not try to ingratiate yourself here by impersonating her [he walks firmly away to the other side of the room]. lady utterword. ingratiating myself indeed! [with dignity]. very well, papa. [she sits down at the drawing-table and pours out tea for herself]. the captain. i am neglecting my social duties. you remember dunn? billy dunn? lady utterword. do you mean that villainous sailor who robbed you? the captain [introducing ellie]. his daughter. [he sits down on the sofa]. ellie [protesting]. no-- nurse guinness returns with fresh tea. the captain. take that hogwash away. do you hear? nurse. you've actually remembered about the tea! [to ellie]. oh, miss, he didn't forget you after all! you have made an impression. the captain [gloomily]. youth! beauty! novelty! they are badly wanted in this house. i am excessively old. hesione is only moderately young. her children are not youthful. lady utterword. how can children be expected to be youthful in this house? almost before we could speak we were filled with notions that might have been all very well for pagan philosophers of fifty, but were certainly quite unfit for respectable people of any age. nurse. you were always for respectability, miss addy. lady utterword. nurse, will you please remember that i am lady utterword, and not miss addy, nor lovey, nor darling, nor doty? do you hear? nurse. yes, ducky: all right. i'll tell them all they must call you my lady. [she takes her tray out with undisturbed placidity]. lady utterword. what comfort? what sense is there in having servants with no manners? ellie [rising and coming to the table to put down her empty cup]. lady utterword, do you think mrs hushabye really expects me? lady utterword. oh, don't ask me. you can see for yourself that i've just arrived; her only sister, after twenty-three years' absence! and it seems that i am not expected. the captain. what does it matter whether the young lady is expected or not? she is welcome. there are beds: there is food. i'll find a room for her myself [he makes for the door]. ellie [following him to stop him]. oh, please--[he goes out]. lady utterword, i don't know what to do. your father persists in believing that my father is some sailor who robbed him. lady utterword. you had better pretend not to notice it. my father is a very clever man; but he always forgot things; and now that he is old, of course he is worse. and i must warn you that it is sometimes very hard to feel quite sure that he really forgets. mrs hushabye bursts into the room tempestuously and embraces ellie. she is a couple of years older than lady utterword, and even better looking. she has magnificent black hair, eyes like the fishpools of heshbon, and a nobly modelled neck, short at the back and low between her shoulders in front. unlike her sister she is uncorseted and dressed anyhow in a rich robe of black pile that shows off her white skin and statuesque contour. mrs hushabye. ellie, my darling, my pettikins [kissing her], how long have you been here? i've been at home all the time: i was putting flowers and things in your room; and when i just sat down for a moment to try how comfortable the armchair was i went off to sleep. papa woke me and told me you were here. fancy your finding no one, and being neglected and abandoned. [kissing her again]. my poor love! [she deposits ellie on the sofa. meanwhile ariadne has left the table and come over to claim her share of attention]. oh! you've brought someone with you. introduce me. lady utterword. hesione, is it possible that you don't know me? mrs hushabye [conventionally]. of course i remember your face quite well. where have we met? lady utterword. didn't papa tell you i was here? oh! this is really too much. [she throws herself sulkily into the big chair]. mrs hushabye. papa! lady utterword. yes, papa. our papa, you unfeeling wretch! [rising angrily]. i'll go straight to a hotel. mrs hushabye [seizing her by the shoulders]. my goodness gracious goodness, you don't mean to say that you're addy! lady utterword. i certainly am addy; and i don't think i can be so changed that you would not have recognized me if you had any real affection for me. and papa didn't think me even worth mentioning! mrs hushabye. what a lark! sit down [she pushes her back into the chair instead of kissing her, and posts herself behind it]. you do look a swell. you're much handsomer than you used to be. you've made the acquaintance of ellie, of course. she is going to marry a perfect hog of a millionaire for the sake of her father, who is as poor as a church mouse; and you must help me to stop her. ellie. oh, please, hesione! mrs hushabye. my pettikins, the man's coming here today with your father to begin persecuting you; and everybody will see the state of the case in ten minutes; so what's the use of making a secret of it? ellie. he is not a hog, hesione. you don't know how wonderfully good he was to my father, and how deeply grateful i am to him. mrs hushabye [to lady utterword]. her father is a very remarkable man, addy. his name is mazzini dunn. mazzini was a celebrity of some kind who knew ellie's grandparents. they were both poets, like the brownings; and when her father came into the world mazzini said, "another soldier born for freedom!" so they christened him mazzini; and he has been fighting for freedom in his quiet way ever since. that's why he is so poor. ellie. i am proud of his poverty. mrs hushabye. of course you are, pettikins. why not leave him in it, and marry someone you love? lady utterword [rising suddenly and explosively]. hesione, are you going to kiss me or are you not? mrs hushabye. what do you want to be kissed for? lady utterword. i don't want to be kissed; but i do want you to behave properly and decently. we are sisters. we have been separated for twenty-three years. you ought to kiss me. mrs hushabye. to-morrow morning, dear, before you make up. i hate the smell of powder. lady utterword. oh! you unfeeling--[she is interrupted by the return of the captain]. the captain [to ellie]. your room is ready. [ellie rises]. the sheets were damp; but i have changed them [he makes for the garden door on the port side]. lady utterword. oh! what about my sheets? the captain [halting at the door]. take my advice: air them: or take them off and sleep in blankets. you shall sleep in ariadne's old room. lady utterword. indeed i shall do nothing of the sort. that little hole! i am entitled to the best spare room. the captain [continuing unmoved]. she married a numskull. she told me she would marry anyone to get away from home. ladt utterword. you are pretending not to know me on purpose. i will leave the house. mazzini dunn enters from the hall. he is a little elderly man with bulging credulous eyes and earnest manners. he is dressed in a blue serge jacket suit with an unbuttoned mackintosh over it, and carries a soft black hat of clerical cut. ellie. at last! captain shotover, here is my father. the captain. this! nonsense! not a bit like him [he goes away through the garden, shutting the door sharply behind him]. lady utterword. i will not be ignored and pretended to be somebody else. i will have it out with papa now, this instant. [to mazzini]. excuse me. [she follows the captain out, making a hasty bow to mazzini, who returns it]. mrs hushabye [hospitably shaking hands]. how good of you to come, mr dunn! you don't mind papa, do you? he is as mad as a hatter, you know, but quite harmless and extremely clever. you will have some delightful talks with him. mazzini. i hope so. [to ellie]. so here you are, ellie, dear. [he draws her arm affectionately through his]. i must thank you, mrs hushabye, for your kindness to my daughter. i'm afraid she would have had no holiday if you had not invited her. mrs hushabye. not at all. very nice of her to come and attract young people to the house for us. mazzini [smiling]. i'm afraid ellie is not interested in young men, mrs hushabye. her taste is on the graver, solider side. mrs hushabye [with a sudden rather hard brightness in her manner]. won't you take off your overcoat, mr dunn? you will find a cupboard for coats and hats and things in the corner of the hall. mazzini [hastily releasing ellie]. yes--thank you--i had better-- [he goes out]. mrs hushabye [emphatically]. the old brute! ellie. who? mrs hushabye. who! him. he. it [pointing after mazzini]. "graver, solider tastes," indeed! ellie [aghast]. you don't mean that you were speaking like that of my father! mrs hushabye. i was. you know i was. ellie [with dignity]. i will leave your house at once. [she turns to the door]. mrs hushabye. if you attempt it, i'll tell your father why. ellie [turning again]. oh! how can you treat a visitor like this, mrs hushabye? mrs hushabye. i thought you were going to call me hesione. ellie. certainly not now? mrs hushabye. very well: i'll tell your father. ellie [distressed]. oh! mrs hushabye. if you turn a hair--if you take his part against me and against your own heart for a moment, i'll give that born soldier of freedom a piece of my mind that will stand him on his selfish old head for a week. ellie. hesione! my father selfish! how little you know-- she is interrupted by mazzini, who returns, excited and perspiring. mazzini. ellie, mangan has come: i thought you'd like to know. excuse me, mrs hushabye, the strange old gentleman-- mrs hushabye. papa. quite so. mazzini. oh, i beg your pardon, of course: i was a little confused by his manner. he is making mangan help him with something in the garden; and he wants me too-- a powerful whistle is heard. the captain's voice. bosun ahoy! [the whistle is repeated]. mazzini [flustered]. oh dear! i believe he is whistling for me. [he hurries out]. mrs hushabye. now my father is a wonderful man if you like. ellie. hesione, listen to me. you don't understand. my father and mr mangan were boys together. mr ma-- mrs hushabye. i don't care what they were: we must sit down if you are going to begin as far back as that. [she snatches at ellie's waist, and makes her sit down on the sofa beside her]. now, pettikins, tell me all about mr mangan. they call him boss mangan, don't they? he is a napoleon of industry and disgustingly rich, isn't he? why isn't your father rich? ellie. my poor father should never have been in business. his parents were poets; and they gave him the noblest ideas; but they could not afford to give him a profession. mrs hushabye. fancy your grandparents, with their eyes in fine frenzy rolling! and so your poor father had to go into business. hasn't he succeeded in it? ellie. he always used to say he could succeed if he only had some capital. he fought his way along, to keep a roof over our heads and bring us up well; but it was always a struggle: always the same difficulty of not having capital enough. i don't know how to describe it to you. mrs hushabye. poor ellie! i know. pulling the devil by the tail. ellie [hurt]. oh, no. not like that. it was at least dignified. mrs hushabye. that made it all the harder, didn't it? i shouldn't have pulled the devil by the tail with dignity. i should have pulled hard--[between her teeth] hard. well? go on. ellie. at last it seemed that all our troubles were at an end. mr mangan did an extraordinarily noble thing out of pure friendship for my father and respect for his character. he asked him how much capital he wanted, and gave it to him. i don't mean that he lent it to him, or that he invested it in his business. he just simply made him a present of it. wasn't that splendid of him? mrs hushabye. on condition that you married him? ellie. oh, no, no, no! this was when i was a child. he had never even seen me: he never came to our house. it was absolutely disinterested. pure generosity. mrs hushabye. oh! i beg the gentleman's pardon. well, what became of the money? ellie. we all got new clothes and moved into another house. and i went to another school for two years. mrs hushabye. only two years? ellie. that was all: for at the end of two years my father was utterly ruined. mrs hushabye. how? ellie. i don't know. i never could understand. but it was dreadful. when we were poor my father had never been in debt. but when he launched out into business on a large scale, he had to incur liabilities. when the business went into liquidation he owed more money than mr mangan had given him. mrs hushabye. bit off more than he could chew, i suppose. ellie. i think you are a little unfeeling about it. mrs hushabye. my pettikins, you mustn't mind my way of talking. i was quite as sensitive and particular as you once; but i have picked up so much slang from the children that i am really hardly presentable. i suppose your father had no head for business, and made a mess of it. ellie. oh, that just shows how entirely you are mistaken about him. the business turned out a great success. it now pays forty-four per cent after deducting the excess profits tax. mrs hushabye. then why aren't you rolling in money? ellie. i don't know. it seems very unfair to me. you see, my father was made bankrupt. it nearly broke his heart, because he had persuaded several of his friends to put money into the business. he was sure it would succeed; and events proved that he was quite right. but they all lost their money. it was dreadful. i don't know what we should have done but for mr mangan. mrs hushabye. what! did the boss come to the rescue again, after all his money being thrown away? ellie. he did indeed, and never uttered a reproach to my father. he bought what was left of the business--the buildings and the machinery and things--from the official trustee for enough money to enable my father to pay six-and-eight-pence in the pound and get his discharge. everyone pitied papa so much, and saw so plainly that he was an honorable man, that they let him off at six-and-eight-pence instead of ten shillings. then mr. mangan started a company to take up the business, and made my father a manager in it to save us from starvation; for i wasn't earning anything then. mrs. hushabye. quite a romance. and when did the boss develop the tender passion? ellie. oh, that was years after, quite lately. he took the chair one night at a sort of people's concert. i was singing there. as an amateur, you know: half a guinea for expenses and three songs with three encores. he was so pleased with my singing that he asked might he walk home with me. i never saw anyone so taken aback as he was when i took him home and introduced him to my father, his own manager. it was then that my father told me how nobly he had behaved. of course it was considered a great chance for me, as he is so rich. and--and--we drifted into a sort of understanding--i suppose i should call it an engagement--[she is distressed and cannot go on]. mrs hushabye [rising and marching about]. you may have drifted into it; but you will bounce out of it, my pettikins, if i am to have anything to do with it. ellie [hopelessly]. no: it's no use. i am bound in honor and gratitude. i will go through with it. mrs hushabye [behind the sofa, scolding down at her]. you know, of course, that it's not honorable or grateful to marry a man you don't love. do you love this mangan man? ellie. yes. at least-- mrs hushabye. i don't want to know about "at least": i want to know the worst. girls of your age fall in love with all sorts of impossible people, especially old people. ellie. i like mr mangan very much; and i shall always be-- mrs hushabye [impatiently completing the sentence and prancing away intolerantly to starboard]. --grateful to him for his kindness to dear father. i know. anybody else? ellie. what do you mean? mrs hushabye. anybody else? are you in love with anybody else? ellie. of course not. mrs hushabye. humph! [the book on the drawing-table catches her eye. she picks it up, and evidently finds the title very unexpected. she looks at ellie, and asks, quaintly] quite sure you're not in love with an actor? ellie. no, no. why? what put such a thing into your head? mrs hushabye. this is yours, isn't it? why else should you be reading othello? ellie. my father taught me to love shakespeare. mrs hushaye [flinging the book down on the table]. really! your father does seem to be about the limit. ellie [naively]. do you never read shakespeare, hesione? that seems to me so extraordinary. i like othello. mrs hushabye. do you, indeed? he was jealous, wasn't he? ellie. oh, not that. i think all the part about jealousy is horrible. but don't you think it must have been a wonderful experience for desdemona, brought up so quietly at home, to meet a man who had been out in the world doing all sorts of brave things and having terrible adventures, and yet finding something in her that made him love to sit and talk with her and tell her about them? mrs hushabye. that's your idea of romance, is it? ellie. not romance, exactly. it might really happen. ellie's eyes show that she is not arguing, but in a daydream. mrs hushabye, watching her inquisitively, goes deliberately back to the sofa and resumes her seat beside her. mrs hushabye. ellie darling, have you noticed that some of those stories that othello told desdemona couldn't have happened--? ellie. oh, no. shakespeare thought they could have happened. mrs hushabye. hm! desdemona thought they could have happened. but they didn't. ellie. why do you look so enigmatic about it? you are such a sphinx: i never know what you mean. mrs hushabye. desdemona would have found him out if she had lived, you know. i wonder was that why he strangled her! ellie. othello was not telling lies. mrs hushabye. how do you know? ellie. shakespeare would have said if he was. hesione, there are men who have done wonderful things: men like othello, only, of course, white, and very handsome, and-- mrs hushabye. ah! now we're coming to it. tell me all about him. i knew there must be somebody, or you'd never have been so miserable about mangan: you'd have thought it quite a lark to marry him. ellie [blushing vividly]. hesione, you are dreadful. but i don't want to make a secret of it, though of course i don't tell everybody. besides, i don't know him. mrs hushabye. don't know him! what does that mean? ellie. well, of course i know him to speak to. mrs hushabye. but you want to know him ever so much more intimately, eh? ellie. no, no: i know him quite--almost intimately. mrs hushabye. you don't know him; and you know him almost intimately. how lucid! ellie. i mean that he does not call on us. i--i got into conversation with him by chance at a concert. mrs hushabye. you seem to have rather a gay time at your concerts, ellie. ellie. not at all: we talk to everyone in the greenroom waiting for our turns. i thought he was one of the artists: he looked so splendid. but he was only one of the committee. i happened to tell him that i was copying a picture at the national gallery. i make a little money that way. i can't paint much; but as it's always the same picture i can do it pretty quickly and get two or three pounds for it. it happened that he came to the national gallery one day. mrs hushabye. one students' day. paid sixpence to stumble about through a crowd of easels, when he might have come in next day for nothing and found the floor clear! quite by accident? ellie [triumphantly]. no. on purpose. he liked talking to me. he knows lots of the most splendid people. fashionable women who are all in love with him. but he ran away from them to see me at the national gallery and persuade me to come with him for a drive round richmond park in a taxi. mrs hushabye. my pettikins, you have been going it. it's wonderful what you good girls can do without anyone saying a word. ellie. i am not in society, hesione. if i didn't make acquaintances in that way i shouldn't have any at all. mrs hushabye. well, no harm if you know how to take care of yourself. may i ask his name? ellie [slowly and musically]. marcus darnley. mrs hushabye [echoing the music]. marcus darnley! what a splendid name! ellie. oh, i'm so glad you think so. i think so too; but i was afraid it was only a silly fancy of my own. mrs hushabye. hm! is he one of the aberdeen darnleys? ellie. nobody knows. just fancy! he was found in an antique chest-- mrs hushabye. a what? ellie. an antique chest, one summer morning in a rose garden, after a night of the most terrible thunderstorm. mrs hushabye. what on earth was he doing in the chest? did he get into it because he was afraid of the lightning? ellie. oh, no, no: he was a baby. the name marcus darnley was embroidered on his baby clothes. and five hundred pounds in gold. mrs hushabye [looking hard at her]. ellie! ellie. the garden of the viscount-- mrs hushabye. --de rougemont? ellie [innocently]. no: de larochejaquelin. a french family. a vicomte. his life has been one long romance. a tiger-- mrs hushabye. slain by his own hand? ellie. oh, no: nothing vulgar like that. he saved the life of the tiger from a hunting party: one of king edward's hunting parties in india. the king was furious: that was why he never had his military services properly recognized. but he doesn't care. he is a socialist and despises rank, and has been in three revolutions fighting on the barricades. mrs hushabye. how can you sit there telling me such lies? you, ellie, of all people! and i thought you were a perfectly simple, straightforward, good girl. ellie [rising, dignified but very angry]. do you mean you don't believe me? mrs hushabye. of course i don't believe you. you're inventing every word of it. do you take me for a fool? ellie stares at her. her candor is so obvious that mrs hushabye is puzzled. ellie. goodbye, hesione. i'm very sorry. i see now that it sounds very improbable as i tell it. but i can't stay if you think that way about me. mrs hushabye [catching her dress]. you shan't go. i couldn't be so mistaken: i know too well what liars are like. somebody has really told you all this. ellie [flushing]. hesione, don't say that you don't believe him. i couldn't bear that. mrs hushabye [soothing her]. of course i believe him, dearest. but you should have broken it to me by degrees. [drawing her back to her seat]. now tell me all about him. are you in love with him? ellie. oh, no. i'm not so foolish. i don't fall in love with people. i'm not so silly as you think. mrs hushabye. i see. only something to think about--to give some interest and pleasure to life. ellie. just so. that's all, really. mrs hushabye. it makes the hours go fast, doesn't it? no tedious waiting to go to sleep at nights and wondering whether you will have a bad night. how delightful it makes waking up in the morning! how much better than the happiest dream! all life transfigured! no more wishing one had an interesting book to read, because life is so much happier than any book! no desire but to be alone and not to have to talk to anyone: to be alone and just think about it. ellie [embracing her]. hesione, you are a witch. how do you know? oh, you are the most sympathetic woman in the world! mrs hushabye [caressing her]. pettikins, my pettikins, how i envy you! and how i pity you! ellie. pity me! oh, why? a very handsome man of fifty, with mousquetaire moustaches, wearing a rather dandified curly brimmed hat, and carrying an elaborate walking-stick, comes into the room from the hall, and stops short at sight of the women on the sofa. ellie [seeing him and rising in glad surprise]. oh! hesione: this is mr marcus darnley. mrs hushabye [rising]. what a lark! he is my husband. ellie. but now--[she stops suddenly: then turns pale and sways]. mrs hushabye [catching her and sitting down with her on the sofa]. steady, my pettikins. the man [with a mixture of confusion and effrontery, depositing his hat and stick on the teak table]. my real name, miss dunn, is hector hushabye. i leave you to judge whether that is a name any sensitive man would care to confess to. i never use it when i can possibly help it. i have been away for nearly a month; and i had no idea you knew my wife, or that you were coming here. i am none the less delighted to find you in our little house. ellie [in great distress]. i don't know what to do. please, may i speak to papa? do leave me. i can't bear it. mrs hushabye. be off, hector. hector. i-- mrs hushabye. quick, quick. get out. hector. if you think it better--[he goes out, taking his hat with him but leaving the stick on the table]. mrs hushabye [laying ellie down at the end of the sofa]. now, pettikins, he is gone. there's nobody but me. you can let yourself go. don't try to control yourself. have a good cry. ellie [raising her head]. damn! mrs hushabye. splendid! oh, what a relief! i thought you were going to be broken-hearted. never mind me. damn him again. ellie. i am not damning him. i am damning myself for being such a fool. [rising]. how could i let myself be taken in so? [she begins prowling to and fro, her bloom gone, looking curiously older and harder]. mrs hushabye [cheerfully]. why not, pettikins? very few young women can resist hector. i couldn't when i was your age. he is really rather splendid, you know. ellie [turning on her]. splendid! yes, splendid looking, of course. but how can you love a liar? mrs hushabye. i don't know. but you can, fortunately. otherwise there wouldn't be much love in the world. ellie. but to lie like that! to be a boaster! a coward! mrs hushabye [rising in alarm]. pettikins, none of that, if you please. if you hint the slightest doubt of hector's courage, he will go straight off and do the most horribly dangerous things to convince himself that he isn't a coward. he has a dreadful trick of getting out of one third-floor window and coming in at another, just to test his nerve. he has a whole drawerful of albert medals for saving people's lives. ellie. he never told me that. mrs hushabye. he never boasts of anything he really did: he can't bear it; and it makes him shy if anyone else does. all his stories are made-up stories. ellie [coming to her]. do you mean that he is really brave, and really has adventures, and yet tells lies about things that he never did and that never happened? mrs hushabye. yes, pettikins, i do. people don't have their virtues and vices in sets: they have them anyhow: all mixed. ellie [staring at her thoughtfully]. there's something odd about this house, hesione, and even about you. i don't know why i'm talking to you so calmly. i have a horrible fear that my heart is broken, but that heartbreak is not like what i thought it must be. mrs hushabye [fondling her]. it's only life educating you, pettikins. how do you feel about boss mangan now? ellie [disengaging herself with an expression of distaste]. oh, how can you remind me of him, hesione? mrs hushabye. sorry, dear. i think i hear hector coming back. you don't mind now, do you, dear? ellie. not in the least. i am quite cured. mazzini dunn and hector come in from the hall. hector [as he opens the door and allows mazzini to pass in]. one second more, and she would have been a dead woman! mazzini. dear! dear! what an escape! ellie, my love, mr hushabye has just been telling me the most extraordinary-- ellie. yes, i've heard it [she crosses to the other side of the room]. hector [following her]. not this one: i'll tell it to you after dinner. i think you'll like it. the truth is i made it up for you, and was looking forward to the pleasure of telling it to you. but in a moment of impatience at being turned out of the room, i threw it away on your father. ellie [turning at bay with her back to the carpenter's bench, scornfully self-possessed]. it was not thrown away. he believes it. i should not have believed it. mazzini [benevolently]. ellie is very naughty, mr hushabye. of course she does not really think that. [he goes to the bookshelves, and inspects the titles of the volumes]. boss mangan comes in from the hall, followed by the captain. mangan, carefully frock-coated as for church or for a dihectors' meeting, is about fifty-five, with a careworn, mistrustful expression, standing a little on an entirely imaginary dignity, with a dull complexion, straight, lustreless hair, and features so entirely commonplace that it is impossible to describe them. captain shotover [to mrs hushabye, introducing the newcomer]. says his name is mangan. not able-bodied. mrs hushabye [graciously]. how do you do, mr mangan? mangan [shaking hands]. very pleased. captain shotover. dunn's lost his muscle, but recovered his nerve. men seldom do after three attacks of delirium tremens [he goes into the pantry]. mrs hushabye. i congratulate you, mr dunn. mazzini [dazed]. i am a lifelong teetotaler. mrs hushabye. you will find it far less trouble to let papa have his own way than try to explain. mazzini. but three attacks of delirium tremens, really! mrs hushabye [to mangan]. do you know my husband, mr mangan [she indicates hector]. mangan [going to hector, who meets him with outstretched hand]. very pleased. [turning to ellie]. i hope, miss ellie, you have not found the journey down too fatiguing. [they shake hands]. mrs hushabye. hector, show mr dunn his room. hector. certainly. come along, mr dunn. [he takes mazzini out]. ellie. you haven't shown me my room yet, hesione. mrs hushabye. how stupid of me! come along. make yourself quite at home, mr mangan. papa will entertain you. [she calls to the captain in the pantry]. papa, come and explain the house to mr mangan. she goes out with ellie. the captain comes from the pantry. captain shotover. you're going to marry dunn's daughter. don't. you're too old. mangan [staggered]. well! that's fairly blunt, captain. captain shotover. it's true. mangan. she doesn't think so. captain shotover. she does. mangan. older men than i have-- captain shotover [finishing the sentence for him].--made fools of themselves. that, also, is true. mangan [asserting himself]. i don't see that this is any business of yours. captain shotover. it is everybody's business. the stars in their courses are shaken when such things happen. mangan. i'm going to marry her all the same. captain shotover. how do you know? mangan [playing the strong man]. i intend to. i mean to. see? i never made up my mind to do a thing yet that i didn't bring it off. that's the sort of man i am; and there will be a better understanding between us when you make up your mind to that, captain. captain shotover. you frequent picture palaces. mangan. perhaps i do. who told you? captain shotover. talk like a man, not like a movie. you mean that you make a hundred thousand a year. mangan. i don't boast. but when i meet a man that makes a hundred thousand a year, i take off my hat to that man, and stretch out my hand to him and call him brother. captain shotover. then you also make a hundred thousand a year, hey? mangan. no. i can't say that. fifty thousand, perhaps. captain shotover. his half brother only [he turns away from mangan with his usual abruptness, and collects the empty tea-cups on the chinese tray]. mangan [irritated]. see here, captain shotover. i don't quite understand my position here. i came here on your daughter's invitation. am i in her house or in yours? captain shotover. you are beneath the dome of heaven, in the house of god. what is true within these walls is true outside them. go out on the seas; climb the mountains; wander through the valleys. she is still too young. mangan [weakening]. but i'm very little over fifty. captain shotover. you are still less under sixty. boss mangan, you will not marry the pirate's child [he carries the tray away into the pantry]. mangan [following him to the half door]. what pirate's child? what are you talking about? captain shotover [in the pantry]. ellie dunn. you will not marry her. mangan. who will stop me? captain shotover [emerging]. my daughter [he makes for the door leading to the hall]. mangan [following him]. mrs hushabye! do you mean to say she brought me down here to break it off? captain shotover [stopping and turning on him]. i know nothing more than i have seen in her eye. she will break it off. take my advice: marry a west indian negress: they make excellent wives. i was married to one myself for two years. mangan. well, i am damned! captain shotover. i thought so. i was, too, for many years. the negress redeemed me. mangan [feebly]. this is queer. i ought to walk out of this house. captain shotover. why? mangan. well, many men would be offended by your style of talking. captain shotover. nonsense! it's the other sort of talking that makes quarrels. nobody ever quarrels with me. a gentleman, whose first-rate tailoring and frictionless manners proclaim the wellbred west ender, comes in from the hall. he has an engaging air of being young and unmarried, but on close inspection is found to be at least over forty. the gentleman. excuse my intruding in this fashion, but there is no knocker on the door and the bell does not seem to ring. captain shotover. why should there be a knocker? why should the bell ring? the door is open. the gentleman. precisely. so i ventured to come in. captain shotover. quite right. i will see about a room for you [he makes for the door]. the gentleman [stopping him]. but i'm afraid you don't know who i am. captain shotover. do you suppose that at my age i make distinctions between one fellow creature and another? [he goes out. mangan and the newcomer stare at one another]. mangan. strange character, captain shotover, sir. the gentleman. very. captain shotover [shouting outside]. hesione, another person has arrived and wants a room. man about town, well dressed, fifty. the gentleman. fancy hesione's feelings! may i ask are you a member of the family? mangan. no. the gentleman. i am. at least a connection. mrs hushabye comes back. mrs hushabye. how do you do? how good of you to come! the gentleman. i am very glad indeed to make your acquaintance, hesione. [instead of taking her hand he kisses her. at the same moment the captain appears in the doorway]. you will excuse my kissing your daughter, captain, when i tell you that-- captain shotover. stuff! everyone kisses my daughter. kiss her as much as you like [he makes for the pantry]. the gentleman. thank you. one moment, captain. [the captain halts and turns. the gentleman goes to him affably]. do you happen to remember but probably you don't, as it occurred many years ago-- that your younger daughter married a numskull? captain shotover. yes. she said she'd marry anybody to get away from this house. i should not have recognized you: your head is no longer like a walnut. your aspect is softened. you have been boiled in bread and milk for years and years, like other married men. poor devil! [he disappears into the pantry]. mrs hushabye [going past mangan to the gentleman and scrutinizing him]. i don't believe you are hastings utterword. the gentleman. i am not. mrs hushabye. then what business had you to kiss me? the gentleman. i thought i would like to. the fact is, i am randall utterword, the unworthy younger brother of hastings. i was abroad diplomatizing when he was married. lady utterword [dashing in]. hesione, where is the key of the wardrobe in my room? my diamonds are in my dressing-bag: i must lock it up--[recognizing the stranger with a shock] randall, how dare you? [she marches at him past mrs hushabye, who retreats and joins mangan near the sofa]. randall. how dare i what? i am not doing anything. lady utterword. who told you i was here? randall. hastings. you had just left when i called on you at claridge's; so i followed you down here. you are looking extremely well. lady utterword. don't presume to tell me so. mrs hushabye. what is wrong with mr randall, addy? lady utterword [recollecting herself]. oh, nothing. but he has no right to come bothering you and papa without being invited [she goes to the window-seat and sits down, turning away from them ill-humoredly and looking into the garden, where hector and ellie are now seen strolling together]. mrs hushabye. i think you have not met mr mangan, addy. lady utterword [turning her head and nodding coldly to mangan]. i beg your pardon. randall, you have flustered me so: i make a perfect fool of myself. mrs hushabye. lady utterword. my sister. my younger sister. mangan [bowing]. pleased to meet you, lady utterword. lady utterword [with marked interest]. who is that gentleman walking in the garden with miss dunn? mrs hushabye. i don't know. she quarrelled mortally with my husband only ten minutes ago; and i didn't know anyone else had come. it must be a visitor. [she goes to the window to look]. oh, it is hector. they've made it up. lady utterword. your husband! that handsome man? mrs hushabye. well, why shouldn't my husband be a handsome man? randall [joining them at the window]. one's husband never is, ariadne [he sits by lady utterword, on her right]. mrs hushabye. one's sister's husband always is, mr randall. lady utterword. don't be vulgar, randall. and you, hesione, are just as bad. ellie and hector come in from the garden by the starboard door. randall rises. ellie retires into the corner near the pantry. hector comes forward; and lady utterword rises looking her very best. mrs. hushabye. hector, this is addy. hector [apparently surprised]. not this lady. lady utterword [smiling]. why not? hector [looking at her with a piercing glance of deep but respectful admiration, his moustache bristling]. i thought-- [pulling himself together]. i beg your pardon, lady utterword. i am extremely glad to welcome you at last under our roof [he offers his hand with grave courtesy]. mrs hushabye. she wants to be kissed, hector. lady utterword. hesione! [but she still smiles]. mrs hushabye. call her addy; and kiss her like a good brother-in-law; and have done with it. [she leaves them to themselves]. hector. behave yourself, hesione. lady utterword is entitled not only to hospitality but to civilization. lady utterword [gratefully]. thank you, hector. [they shake hands cordially]. mazzini dunn is seen crossing the garden from starboard to port. captain shotover [coming from the pantry and addressing ellie]. your father has washed himself. ellie [quite self-possessed]. he often does, captain shotover. captain shotover. a strange conversion! i saw him through the pantry window. mazzini dunn enters through the port window door, newly washed and brushed, and stops, smiling benevolently, between mangan and mrs hushabye. mrs hushabye [introducing]. mr mazzini dunn, lady ut--oh, i forgot: you've met. [indicating ellie] miss dunn. mazzini [walking across the room to take ellie's hand, and beaming at his own naughty irony]. i have met miss dunn also. she is my daughter. [he draws her arm through his caressingly]. mrs hushabye. of course: how stupid! mr utterword, my sister's--er-- randall [shaking hands agreeably]. her brother-in-law, mr dunn. how do you do? mrs hushabye. this is my husband. hector. we have met, dear. don't introduce us any more. [he moves away to the big chair, and adds] won't you sit down, lady utterword? [she does so very graciously]. mrs hushabye. sorry. i hate it: it's like making people show their tickets. mazzini [sententiously]. how little it tells us, after all! the great question is, not who we are, but what we are. captain shotover. ha! what are you? mazzini [taken aback]. what am i? captain shotover. a thief, a pirate, and a murderer. mazzini. i assure you you are mistaken. captain shotover. an adventurous life; but what does it end in? respectability. a ladylike daughter. the language and appearance of a city missionary. let it be a warning to all of you [he goes out through the garden]. dunn. i hope nobody here believes that i am a thief, a pirate, or a murderer. mrs hushabye, will you excuse me a moment? i must really go and explain. [he follows the captain]. mrs hushabye [as he goes]. it's no use. you'd really better-- [but dunn has vanished]. we had better all go out and look for some tea. we never have regular tea; but you can always get some when you want: the servants keep it stewing all day. the kitchen veranda is the best place to ask. may i show you? [she goes to the starboard door]. randall [going with her]. thank you, i don't think i'll take any tea this afternoon. but if you will show me the garden-- mrs hushabye. there's nothing to see in the garden except papa's observatory, and a gravel pit with a cave where he keeps dynamite and things of that sort. however, it's pleasanter out of doors; so come along. randall. dynamite! isn't that rather risky? mrs hushabye. well, we don't sit in the gravel pit when there's a thunderstorm. lady utterorrd. that's something new. what is the dynamite for? hector. to blow up the human race if it goes too far. he is trying to discover a psychic ray that will explode all the explosive at the well of a mahatma. ellie. the captain's tea is delicious, mr utterword. mrs hushabye [stopping in the doorway]. do you mean to say that you've had some of my father's tea? that you got round him before you were ten minutes in the house? ellie. i did. mrs hushabye. you little devil! [she goes out with randall]. mangan. won't you come, miss ellie? ellie. i'm too tired. i'll take a book up to my room and rest a little. [she goes to the bookshelf]. mangan. right. you can't do better. but i'm disappointed. [he follows randall and mrs hushabye]. ellie, hector, and lady utterword are left. hector is close to lady utterword. they look at ellie, waiting for her to go. ellie [looking at the title of a book]. do you like stories of adventure, lady utterword? lady utterword [patronizingly]. of course, dear. ellie. then i'll leave you to mr hushabye. [she goes out through the hall]. hector. that girl is mad about tales of adventure. the lies i have to tell her! lady utterword [not interested in ellie]. when you saw me what did you mean by saying that you thought, and then stopping short? what did you think? hector [folding his arms and looking down at her magnetically]. may i tell you? lady utterword. of course. hector. it will not sound very civil. i was on the point of saying, "i thought you were a plain woman." lady utterword. oh, for shame, hector! what right had you to notice whether i am plain or not? hector. listen to me, ariadne. until today i have seen only photographs of you; and no photograph can give the strange fascination of the daughters of that supernatural old man. there is some damnable quality in them that destroys men's moral sense, and carries them beyond honor and dishonor. you know that, don't you? lady utterword. perhaps i do, hector. but let me warn you once for all that i am a rigidly conventional woman. you may think because i'm a shotover that i'm a bohemian, because we are all so horribly bohemian. but i'm not. i hate and loathe bohemianism. no child brought up in a strict puritan household ever suffered from puritanism as i suffered from our bohemianism. hector. our children are like that. they spend their holidays in the houses of their respectable schoolfellows. lady utterword. i shall invite them for christmas. hector. their absence leaves us both without our natural chaperones. lady utterword. children are certainly very inconvenient sometimes. but intelligent people can always manage, unless they are bohemians. hector. you are no bohemian; but you are no puritan either: your attraction is alive and powerful. what sort of woman do you count yourself? lady utterword. i am a woman of the world, hector; and i can assure you that if you will only take the trouble always to do the perfectly correct thing, and to say the perfectly correct thing, you can do just what you like. an ill-conducted, careless woman gets simply no chance. an ill-conducted, careless man is never allowed within arm's length of any woman worth knowing. hector. i see. you are neither a bohemian woman nor a puritan woman. you are a dangerous woman. lady utterword. on the contrary, i am a safe woman. hector. you are a most accursedly attractive woman. mind, i am not making love to you. i do not like being attracted. but you had better know how i feel if you are going to stay here. lady utterword. you are an exceedingly clever lady-killer, hector. and terribly handsome. i am quite a good player, myself, at that game. is it quite understood that we are only playing? hector. quite. i am deliberately playing the fool, out of sheer worthlessness. lady utterword [rising brightly]. well, you are my brother-in-law, hesione asked you to kiss me. [he seizes her in his arms and kisses her strenuously]. oh! that was a little more than play, brother-in-law. [she pushes him suddenly away]. you shall not do that again. hector. in effect, you got your claws deeper into me than i intended. mrs hubhabye [coming in from the garden]. don't let me disturb you; i only want a cap to put on daddiest. the sun is setting; and he'll catch cold [she makes for the door leading to the hall]. lady utterword. your husband is quite charming, darling. he has actually condescended to kiss me at last. i shall go into the garden: it's cooler now [she goes out by the port door]. mrs hushabye. take care, dear child. i don't believe any man can kiss addy without falling in love with her. [she goes into the hall]. hector [striking himself on the chest]. fool! goat! mrs hushabye comes back with the captain's cap. hector. your sister is an extremely enterprising old girl. where's miss dunn! mrs hushabye. mangan says she has gone up to her room for a nap. addy won't let you talk to ellie: she has marked you for her own. hector. she has the diabolical family fascination. i began making love to her automatically. what am i to do? i can't fall in love; and i can't hurt a woman's feelings by telling her so when she falls in love with me. and as women are always falling in love with my moustache i get landed in all sorts of tedious and terrifying flirtations in which i'm not a bit in earnest. mrs hushabye. oh, neither is addy. she has never been in love in her life, though she has always been trying to fall in head over ears. she is worse than you, because you had one real go at least, with me. hector. that was a confounded madness. i can't believe that such an amazing experience is common. it has left its mark on me. i believe that is why i have never been able to repeat it. mrs hushabye [laughing and caressing his arm]. we were frightfully in love with one another, hector. it was such an enchanting dream that i have never been able to grudge it to you or anyone else since. i have invited all sorts of pretty women to the house on the chance of giving you another turn. but it has never come off. hector. i don't know that i want it to come off. it was damned dangerous. you fascinated me; but i loved you; so it was heaven. this sister of yours fascinates me; but i hate her; so it is hell. i shall kill her if she persists. mrs. hushabye. nothing will kill addy; she is as strong as a horse. [releasing him]. now i am going off to fascinate somebody. hector. the foreign office toff? randall? mrs hushabye. goodness gracious, no! why should i fascinate him? hector. i presume you don't mean the bloated capitalist, mangan? mrs hushabye. hm! i think he had better be fascinated by me than by ellie. [she is going into the garden when the captain comes in from it with some sticks in his hand]. what have you got there, daddiest? captain shotover. dynamite. mrs hushabye. you've been to the gravel pit. don't drop it about the house, there's a dear. [she goes into the garden, where the evening light is now very red]. hector. listen, o sage. how long dare you concentrate on a feeling without risking having it fixed in your consciousness all the rest of your life? captain shotover. ninety minutes. an hour and a half. [he goes into the pantry]. hector, left alone, contracts his brows, and falls into a day-dream. he does not move for some time. then he folds his arms. then, throwing his hands behind him, and gripping one with the other, he strides tragically once to and fro. suddenly he snatches his walking stick from the teak table, and draws it; for it is a swordstick. he fights a desperate duel with an imaginary antagonist, and after many vicissitudes runs him through the body up to the hilt. he sheathes his sword and throws it on the sofa, falling into another reverie as he does so. he looks straight into the eyes of an imaginary woman; seizes her by the arms; and says in a deep and thrilling tone, "do you love me!" the captain comes out of the pantry at this moment; and hector, caught with his arms stretched out and his fists clenched, has to account for his attitude by going through a series of gymnastic exercises. captain shotover. that sort of strength is no good. you will never be as strong as a gorilla. hector. what is the dynamite for? captain shotover. to kill fellows like mangan. hector. no use. they will always be able to buy more dynamite than you. captain shotover. i will make a dynamite that he cannot explode. hector. and that you can, eh? captain shotover. yes: when i have attained the seventh degree of concentration. hector. what's the use of that? you never do attain it. captain shotover. what then is to be done? are we to be kept forever in the mud by these hogs to whom the universe is nothing but a machine for greasing their bristles and filling their snouts? hector. are mangan's bristles worse than randall's lovelocks? captain shotover,. we must win powers of life and death over them both. i refuse to die until i have invented the means. hector. who are we that we should judge them? captain shotover. what are they that they should judge us? yet they do, unhesitatingly. there is enmity between our seed and their seed. they know it and act on it, strangling our souls. they believe in themselves. when we believe in ourselves, we shall kill them. hector. it is the same seed. you forget that your pirate has a very nice daughter. mangan's son may be a plato: randall's a shelley. what was my father? captain shotover. the damnedst scoundrel i ever met. [he replaces the drawing-board; sits down at the table; and begins to mix a wash of color]. hector. precisely. well, dare you kill his innocent grandchildren? captain shotover. they are mine also. hector. just so--we are members one of another. [he throws himself carelessly on the sofa]. i tell you i have often thought of this killing of human vermin. many men have thought of it. decent men are like daniel in the lion's den: their survival is a miracle; and they do not always survive. we live among the mangans and randalls and billie dunns as they, poor devils, live among the disease germs and the doctors and the lawyers and the parsons and the restaurant chefs and the tradesmen and the servants and all the rest of the parasites and blackmailers. what are our terrors to theirs? give me the power to kill them; and i'll spare them in sheer-- captain shotover [cutting in sharply]. fellow feeling? hector. no. i should kill myself if i believed that. i must believe that my spark, small as it is, is divine, and that the red light over their door is hell fire. i should spare them in simple magnanimous pity. captain shotover. you can't spare them until you have the power to kill them. at present they have the power to kill you. there are millions of blacks over the water for them to train and let loose on us. they're going to do it. they're doing it already. hector. they are too stupid to use their power. captain shotover [throwing down his brush and coming to the end of the sofa]. do not deceive yourself: they do use it. we kill the better half of ourselves every day to propitiate them. the knowledge that these people are there to render all our aspirations barren prevents us having the aspirations. and when we are tempted to seek their destruction they bring forth demons to delude us, disguised as pretty daughters, and singers and poets and the like, for whose sake we spare them. hector [sitting up and leaning towards him]. may not hesione be such a demon, brought forth by you lest i should slay you? captain shotover. that is possible. she has used you up, and left you nothing but dreams, as some women do. hector. vampire women, demon women. captain shotover. men think the world well lost for them, and lose it accordingly. who are the men that do things? the husbands of the shrew and of the drunkard, the men with the thorn in the flesh. [walking distractedly away towards the pantry]. i must think these things out. [turning suddenly]. but i go on with the dynamite none the less. i will discover a ray mightier than any x-ray: a mind ray that will explode the ammunition in the belt of my adversary before he can point his gun at me. and i must hurry. i am old: i have no time to waste in talk [he is about to go into the pantry, and hector is making for the hall, when hesione comes back]. mrs hushabye. daddiest, you and hector must come and help me to entertain all these people. what on earth were you shouting about? hector [stopping in the act of turning the door handle]. he is madder than usual. mrs hushabye. we all are. hector. i must change [he resumes his door opening]. mrs hushabye. stop, stop. come back, both of you. come back. [they return, reluctantly]. money is running short. hector. money! where are my april dividends? mrs hushabye. where is the snow that fell last year? captain shotover. where is all the money you had for that patent lifeboat i invented? mrs hushabye. five hundred pounds; and i have made it last since easter! captain shotover. since easter! barely four months! monstrous extravagance! i could live for seven years on pounds. mrs hushabye. not keeping open house as we do here, daddiest. captain shotover. only pounds for that lifeboat! i got twelve thousand for the invention before that. mrs hushabye. yes, dear; but that was for the ship with the magnetic keel that sucked up submarines. living at the rate we do, you cannot afford life-saving inventions. can't you think of something that will murder half europe at one bang? captain shotover. no. i am ageing fast. my mind does not dwell on slaughter as it did when i was a boy. why doesn't your husband invent something? he does nothing but tell lies to women. hector. well, that is a form of invention, is it not? however, you are right: i ought to support my wife. mrs hushabye. indeed you shall do nothing of the sort: i should never see you from breakfast to dinner. i want my husband. hector [bitterly]. i might as well be your lapdog. mrs hushabye. do you want to be my breadwinner, like the other poor husbands? hector. no, by thunder! what a damned creature a husband is anyhow! mrs hushabye [to the captain]. what about that harpoon cannon? captain shotover. no use. it kills whales, not men. mrs hushabye. why not? you fire the harpoon out of a cannon. it sticks in the enemy's general; you wind him in; and there you are. hector. you are your father's daughter, hesione. captain shotover. there is something in it. not to wind in generals: they are not dangerous. but one could fire a grapnel and wind in a machine gun or even a tank. i will think it out. mrs hushabye [squeezing the captain's arm affectionately]. saved! you are a darling, daddiest. now we must go back to these dreadful people and entertain them. captain shotover. they have had no dinner. don't forget that. hector. neither have i. and it is dark: it must be all hours. mrs hushabye. oh, guinness will produce some sort of dinner for them. the servants always take jolly good care that there is food in the house. captain shotover [raising a strange wail in the darkness]. what a house! what a daughter! mrs hushabye [raving]. what a father! hector [following suit]. what a husband! captain shotover. is there no thunder in heaven? hector. is there no beauty, no bravery, on earth? mrs hushabye. what do men want? they have their food, their firesides, their clothes mended, and our love at the end of the day. why are they not satisfied? why do they envy us the pain with which we bring them into the world, and make strange dangers and torments for themselves to be even with us? captain shotover [weirdly chanting]. i builded a house for my daughters, and opened the doors thereof, that men might come for their choosing, and their betters spring from their love; but one of them married a numskull; hector [taking up the rhythm]. the other a liar wed; mrs hushabye [completing the stanza]. and now must she lie beside him, even as she made her bed. lady utterword [calling from the garden]. hesione! hesione! where are you? hector. the cat is on the tiles. mrs hushabye. coming, darling, coming [she goes quickly into the garden]. the captain goes back to his place at the table. hector [going out into the hall]. shall i turn up the lights for you? captain shotover. no. give me deeper darkness. money is not made in the light. act ii the same room, with the lights turned up and the curtains drawn. ellie comes in, followed by mangan. both are dressed for dinner. she strolls to the drawing-table. he comes between the table and the wicker chair. mangan. what a dinner! i don't call it a dinner: i call it a meal. ellie. i am accustomed to meals, mr mangan, and very lucky to get them. besides, the captain cooked some maccaroni for me. mangan [shuddering liverishly]. too rich: i can't eat such things. i suppose it's because i have to work so much with my brain. that's the worst of being a man of business: you are always thinking, thinking, thinking. by the way, now that we are alone, may i take the opportunity to come to a little understanding with you? ellie [settling into the draughtsman's seat]. certainly. i should like to. mangan [taken aback]. should you? that surprises me; for i thought i noticed this afternoon that you avoided me all you could. not for the first time either. ellie. i was very tired and upset. i wasn't used to the ways of this extraordinary house. please forgive me. mangan. oh, that's all right: i don't mind. but captain shotover has been talking to me about you. you and me, you know. ellie [interested]. the captain! what did he say? mangan. well, he noticed the difference between our ages. ellie. he notices everything. mangan. you don't mind, then? ellie. of course i know quite well that our engagement-- mangan. oh! you call it an engagement. ellie. well, isn't it? mangan. oh, yes, yes: no doubt it is if you hold to it. this is the first time you've used the word; and i didn't quite know where we stood: that's all. [he sits down in the wicker chair; and resigns himself to allow her to lead the conversation]. you were saying--? ellie. was i? i forget. tell me. do you like this part of the country? i heard you ask mr hushabye at dinner whether there are any nice houses to let down here. mangan. i like the place. the air suits me. i shouldn't be surprised if i settled down here. ellie. nothing would please me better. the air suits me too. and i want to be near hesione. mangan [with growing uneasiness]. the air may suit us; but the question is, should we suit one another? have you thought about that? ellie. mr mangan, we must be sensible, mustn't we? it's no use pretending that we are romeo and juliet. but we can get on very well together if we choose to make the best of it. your kindness of heart will make it easy for me. mangan [leaning forward, with the beginning of something like deliberate unpleasantness in his voice]. kindness of heart, eh? i ruined your father, didn't i? ellie. oh, not intentionally. mangan. yes i did. ruined him on purpose. ellie. on purpose! mangan. not out of ill-nature, you know. and you'll admit that i kept a job for him when i had finished with him. but business is business; and i ruined him as a matter of business. ellie. i don't understand how that can be. are you trying to make me feel that i need not be grateful to you, so that i may choose freely? mangan [rising aggressively]. no. i mean what i say. ellie. but how could it possibly do you any good to ruin my father? the money he lost was yours. mangan [with a sour laugh]. was mine! it is mine, miss ellie, and all the money the other fellows lost too. [he shoves his hands into his pockets and shows his teeth]. i just smoked them out like a hive of bees. what do you say to that? a bit of shock, eh? ellie. it would have been, this morning. now! you can't think how little it matters. but it's quite interesting. only, you must explain it to me. i don't understand it. [propping her elbows on the drawingboard and her chin on her hands, she composes herself to listen with a combination of conscious curiosity with unconscious contempt which provokes him to more and more unpleasantness, and an attempt at patronage of her ignorance]. mangan. of course you don't understand: what do you know about business? you just listen and learn. your father's business was a new business; and i don't start new businesses: i let other fellows start them. they put all their money and their friends' money into starting them. they wear out their souls and bodies trying to make a success of them. they're what you call enthusiasts. but the first dead lift of the thing is too much for them; and they haven't enough financial experience. in a year or so they have either to let the whole show go bust, or sell out to a new lot of fellows for a few deferred ordinary shares: that is, if they're lucky enough to get anything at all. as likely as not the very same thing happens to the new lot. they put in more money and a couple of years' more work; and then perhaps they have to sell out to a third lot. if it's really a big thing the third lot will have to sell out too, and leave their work and their money behind them. and that's where the real business man comes in: where i come in. but i'm cleverer than some: i don't mind dropping a little money to start the process. i took your father's measure. i saw that he had a sound idea, and that he would work himself silly for it if he got the chance. i saw that he was a child in business, and was dead certain to outrun his expenses and be in too great a hurry to wait for his market. i knew that the surest way to ruin a man who doesn't know how to handle money is to give him some. i explained my idea to some friends in the city, and they found the money; for i take no risks in ideas, even when they're my own. your father and the friends that ventured their money with him were no more to me than a heap of squeezed lemons. you've been wasting your gratitude: my kind heart is all rot. i'm sick of it. when i see your father beaming at me with his moist, grateful eyes, regularly wallowing in gratitude, i sometimes feel i must tell him the truth or burst. what stops me is that i know he wouldn't believe me. he'd think it was my modesty, as you did just now. he'd think anything rather than the truth, which is that he's a blamed fool, and i am a man that knows how to take care of himself. [he throws himself back into the big chair with large self approval]. now what do you think of me, miss ellie? ellie [dropping her hands]. how strange! that my mother, who knew nothing at all about business, should have been quite right about you! she always said not before papa, of course, but to us children--that you were just that sort of man. mangan [sitting up, much hurt]. oh! did she? and yet she'd have let you marry me. ellie. well, you see, mr mangan, my mother married a very good man--for whatever you may think of my father as a man of business, he is the soul of goodness--and she is not at all keen on my doing the same. mangan. anyhow, you don't want to marry me now, do you? ellie. [very calmly]. oh, i think so. why not? mangan. [rising aghast]. why not! ellie. i don't see why we shouldn't get on very well together. mangan. well, but look here, you know--[he stops, quite at a loss]. ellie. [patiently]. well? mangan. well, i thought you were rather particular about people's characters. ellie. if we women were particular about men's characters, we should never get married at all, mr mangan. mangan. a child like you talking of "we women"! what next! you're not in earnest? ellie. yes, i am. aren't you? mangan. you mean to hold me to it? ellie. do you wish to back out of it? mangan. oh, no. not exactly back out of it. ellie. well? he has nothing to say. with a long whispered whistle, he drops into the wicker chair and stares before him like a beggared gambler. but a cunning look soon comes into his face. he leans over towards her on his right elbow, and speaks in a low steady voice. mangan. suppose i told you i was in love with another woman! ellie [echoing him]. suppose i told you i was in love with another man! mangan [bouncing angrily out of his chair]. i'm not joking. ellie. who told you i was? mangan. i tell you i'm serious. you're too young to be serious; but you'll have to believe me. i want to be near your friend mrs hushabye. i'm in love with her. now the murder's out. ellie. i want to be near your friend mr hushabye. i'm in love with him. [she rises and adds with a frank air] now we are in one another's confidence, we shall be real friends. thank you for telling me. mangan [almost beside himself]. do you think i'll be made a convenience of like this? ellie. come, mr mangan! you made a business convenience of my father. well, a woman's business is marriage. why shouldn't i make a domestic convenience of you? mangan. because i don't choose, see? because i'm not a silly gull like your father. that's why. ellie [with serene contempt]. you are not good enough to clean my father's boots, mr mangan; and i am paying you a great compliment in condescending to make a convenience of you, as you call it. of course you are free to throw over our engagement if you like; but, if you do, you'll never enter hesione's house again: i will take care of that. mangan [gasping]. you little devil, you've done me. [on the point of collapsing into the big chair again he recovers himself]. wait a bit, though: you're not so cute as you think. you can't beat boss mangan as easy as that. suppose i go straight to mrs hushabye and tell her that you're in love with her husband. ellie. she knows it. mangan. you told her!!! ellie. she told me. mangan [clutching at his bursting temples]. oh, this is a crazy house. or else i'm going clean off my chump. is she making a swop with you--she to have your husband and you to have hers? ellie. well, you don't want us both, do you? mangan [throwing himself into the chair distractedly]. my brain won't stand it. my head's going to split. help! help me to hold it. quick: hold it: squeeze it. save me. [ellie comes behind his chair; clasps his head hard for a moment; then begins to draw her hands from his forehead back to his ears]. thank you. [drowsily]. that's very refreshing. [waking a little]. don't you hypnotize me, though. i've seen men made fools of by hypnotism. ellie [steadily]. be quiet. i've seen men made fools of without hypnotism. mangan [humbly]. you don't dislike touching me, i hope. you never touched me before, i noticed. ellie. not since you fell in love naturally with a grown-up nice woman, who will never expect you to make love to her. and i will never expect him to make love to me. mangan. he may, though. ellie [making her passes rhythmically]. hush. go to sleep. do you hear? you are to go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep; be quiet, deeply deeply quiet; sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep. he falls asleep. ellie steals away; turns the light out; and goes into the garden. nurse guinness opens the door and is seen in the light which comes in from the hall. guinness [speaking to someone outside]. mr mangan's not here, duckie: there's no one here. it's all dark. mrs hushabye [without]. try the garden. mr dunn and i will be in my boudoir. show him the way. guinness. yes, ducky. [she makes for the garden door in the dark; stumbles over the sleeping mangan and screams]. ahoo! o lord, sir! i beg your pardon, i'm sure: i didn't see you in the dark. who is it? [she goes back to the door and turns on the light]. oh, mr mangan, sir, i hope i haven't hurt you plumping into your lap like that. [coming to him]. i was looking for you, sir. mrs hushabye says will you please [noticing that he remains quite insensible]. oh, my good lord, i hope i haven't killed him. sir! mr mangan! sir! [she shakes him; and he is rolling inertly off the chair on the floor when she holds him up and props him against the cushion]. miss hessy! miss hessy! quick, doty darling. miss hessy! [mrs hushabye comes in from the hall, followed by mazzini dunn]. oh, miss hessy, i've been and killed him. mazzini runs round the back of the chair to mangan's right hand, and sees that the nurse's words are apparently only too true. mazzini. what tempted you to commit such a crime, woman? mrs hushabye [trying not to laugh]. do you mean, you did it on purpose? guinness. now is it likely i'd kill any man on purpose? i fell over him in the dark; and i'm a pretty tidy weight. he never spoke nor moved until i shook him; and then he would have dropped dead on the floor. isn't it tiresome? mrs hushabye [going past the nurse to mangan's side, and inspecting him less credulously than mazzini]. nonsense! he is not dead: he is only asleep. i can see him breathing. guinness. but why won't he wake? mazzini [speaking very politely into mangan's ear]. mangan! my dear mangan! [he blows into mangan's ear]. mrs hushabye. that's no good [she shakes him vigorously]. mr mangan, wake up. do you hear? [he begins to roll over]. oh! nurse, nurse: he's falling: help me. nurse guinness rushes to the rescue. with mazzini's assistance, mangan is propped safely up again. guinness [behind the chair; bending over to test the case with her nose]. would he be drunk, do you think, pet? mrs hushabye. had he any of papa's rum? mazzini. it can't be that: he is most abstemious. i am afraid he drank too much formerly, and has to drink too little now. you know, mrs hushabye, i really think he has been hypnotized. guinness. hip no what, sir? mazzini. one evening at home, after we had seen a hypnotizing performance, the children began playing at it; and ellie stroked my head. i assure you i went off dead asleep; and they had to send for a professional to wake me up after i had slept eighteen hours. they had to carry me upstairs; and as the poor children were not very strong, they let me slip; and i rolled right down the whole flight and never woke up. [mrs hushabye splutters]. oh, you may laugh, mrs hushabye; but i might have been killed. mrs hushabye. i couldn't have helped laughing even if you had been, mr dunn. so ellie has hypnotized him. what fun! mazzini. oh no, no, no. it was such a terrible lesson to her: nothing would induce her to try such a thing again. mrs hushabye. then who did it? i didn't. mazzini. i thought perhaps the captain might have done it unintentionally. he is so fearfully magnetic: i feel vibrations whenever he comes close to me. guinness. the captain will get him out of it anyhow, sir: i'll back him for that. i'll go fetch him [she makes for the pantry]. mrs hushabye. wait a bit. [to mazzini]. you say he is all right for eighteen hours? mazzini. well, i was asleep for eighteen hours. mrs hushabye. were you any the worse for it? mazzini. i don't quite remember. they had poured brandy down my throat, you see; and-- mrs hushabye. quite. anyhow, you survived. nurse, darling: go and ask miss dunn to come to us here. say i want to speak to her particularly. you will find her with mr hushabye probably. guinness. i think not, ducky: miss addy is with him. but i'll find her and send her to you. [she goes out into the garden]. mrs hushabye [calling mazzini's attention to the figure on the chair]. now, mr dunn, look. just look. look hard. do you still intend to sacrifice your daughter to that thing? mazzini [troubled]. you have completely upset me, mrs hushabye, by all you have said to me. that anyone could imagine that i--i, a consecrated soldier of freedom, if i may say so--could sacrifice ellie to anybody or anyone, or that i should ever have dreamed of forcing her inclinations in any way, is a most painful blow to my--well, i suppose you would say to my good opinion of myself. mrs hushabye [rather stolidly]. sorry. mazzini [looking forlornly at the body]. what is your objection to poor mangan, mrs hushabye? he looks all right to me. but then i am so accustomed to him. mrs hushabye. have you no heart? have you no sense? look at the brute! think of poor weak innocent ellie in the clutches of this slavedriver, who spends his life making thousands of rough violent workmen bend to his will and sweat for him: a man accustomed to have great masses of iron beaten into shape for him by steam-hammers! to fight with women and girls over a halfpenny an hour ruthlessly! a captain of industry, i think you call him, don't you? are you going to fling your delicate, sweet, helpless child into such a beast's claws just because he will keep her in an expensive house and make her wear diamonds to show how rich he is? mazzini [staring at her in wide-eyed amazement]. bless you, dear mrs hushabye, what romantic ideas of business you have! poor dear mangan isn't a bit like that. mrs hushabye [scornfully]. poor dear mangan indeed! mazzini. but he doesn't know anything about machinery. he never goes near the men: he couldn't manage them: he is afraid of them. i never can get him to take the least interest in the works: he hardly knows more about them than you do. people are cruelly unjust to mangan: they think he is all rugged strength just because his manners are bad. mrs hushabye. do you mean to tell me he isn't strong enough to crush poor little ellie? mazzini. of course it's very hard to say how any marriage will turn out; but speaking for myself, i should say that he won't have a dog's chance against ellie. you know, ellie has remarkable strength of character. i think it is because i taught her to like shakespeare when she was very young. mrs hushabye [contemptuously]. shakespeare! the next thing you will tell me is that you could have made a great deal more money than mangan. [she retires to the sofa, and sits down at the port end of it in the worst of humors]. mazzini [following her and taking the other end]. no: i'm no good at making money. i don't care enough for it, somehow. i'm not ambitious! that must be it. mangan is wonderful about money: he thinks of nothing else. he is so dreadfully afraid of being poor. i am always thinking of other things: even at the works i think of the things we are doing and not of what they cost. and the worst of it is, poor mangan doesn't know what to do with his money when he gets it. he is such a baby that he doesn't know even what to eat and drink: he has ruined his liver eating and drinking the wrong things; and now he can hardly eat at all. ellie will diet him splendidly. you will be surprised when you come to know him better: he is really the most helpless of mortals. you get quite a protective feeling towards him. mrs hushabye. then who manages his business, pray? mazzini. i do. and of course other people like me. mrs hushabye. footling people, you mean. mazzini. i suppose you'd think us so. mrs hushabye. and pray why don't you do without him if you're all so much cleverer? mazzini. oh, we couldn't: we should ruin the business in a year. i've tried; and i know. we should spend too much on everything. we should improve the quality of the goods and make them too dear. we should be sentimental about the hard cases among the work people. but mangan keeps us in order. he is down on us about every extra halfpenny. we could never do without him. you see, he will sit up all night thinking of how to save sixpence. won't ellie make him jump, though, when she takes his house in hand! mrs hushabye. then the creature is a fraud even as a captain of industry! mazzini. i am afraid all the captains of industry are what you call frauds, mrs hushabye. of course there are some manufacturers who really do understand their own works; but they don't make as high a rate of profit as mangan does. i assure you mangan is quite a good fellow in his way. he means well. mrs hushabye. he doesn't look well. he is not in his first youth, is he? mazzini. after all, no husband is in his first youth for very long, mrs hushabye. and men can't afford to marry in their first youth nowadays. mrs hushabye. now if i said that, it would sound witty. why can't you say it wittily? what on earth is the matter with you? why don't you inspire everybody with confidence? with respect? mazzini [humbly]. i think that what is the matter with me is that i am poor. you don't know what that means at home. mind: i don't say they have ever complained. they've all been wonderful: they've been proud of my poverty. they've even joked about it quite often. but my wife has had a very poor time of it. she has been quite resigned-- mrs hushabye [shuddering involuntarily!] mazzini. there! you see, mrs hushabye. i don't want ellie to live on resignation. mrs hushabye. do you want her to have to resign herself to living with a man she doesn't love? mazzini [wistfully]. are you sure that would be worse than living with a man she did love, if he was a footling person? mrs hushabye [relaxing her contemptuous attitude, quite interested in mazzini now]. you know, i really think you must love ellie very much; for you become quite clever when you talk about her. mazzini. i didn't know i was so very stupid on other subjects. mrs hushabye. you are, sometimes. mazzini [turning his head away; for his eyes are wet]. i have learnt a good deal about myself from you, mrs hushabye; and i'm afraid i shall not be the happier for your plain speaking. but if you thought i needed it to make me think of ellie's happiness you were very much mistaken. mrs hushabye [leaning towards him kindly]. have i been a beast? mazzini [pulling himself together]. it doesn't matter about me, mrs hushabye. i think you like ellie; and that is enough for me. mrs hushabye. i'm beginning to like you a little. i perfectly loathed you at first. i thought you the most odious, self-satisfied, boresome elderly prig i ever met. mazzini [resigned, and now quite cheerful]. i daresay i am all that. i never have been a favorite with gorgeous women like you. they always frighten me. mrs hushabye [pleased]. am i a gorgeous woman, mazzini? i shall fall in love with you presently. mazzini [with placid gallantry]. no, you won't, hesione. but you would be quite safe. would you believe it that quite a lot of women have flirted with me because i am quite safe? but they get tired of me for the same reason. mrs hushabye [mischievously]. take care. you may not be so safe as you think. mazzini. oh yes, quite safe. you see, i have been in love really: the sort of love that only happens once. [softly]. that's why ellie is such a lovely girl. mrs hushabye. well, really, you are coming out. are you quite sure you won't let me tempt you into a second grand passion? mazzini. quite. it wouldn't be natural. the fact is, you don't strike on my box, mrs hushabye; and i certainly don't strike on yours. mrs hushabye. i see. your marriage was a safety match. mazzini. what a very witty application of the expression i used! i should never have thought of it. ellie comes in from the garden, looking anything but happy. mrs hushabye [rising]. oh! here is ellie at last. [she goes behind the sofa]. ellie [on the threshold of the starboard door]. guinness said you wanted me: you and papa. mrs hushabye. you have kept us waiting so long that it almost came to--well, never mind. your father is a very wonderful man [she ruffles his hair affectionately]: the only one i ever met who could resist me when i made myself really agreeable. [she comes to the big chair, on mangan's left]. come here. i have something to show you. [ellie strolls listlessly to the other side of the chair]. look. ellie [contemplating mangan without interest]. i know. he is only asleep. we had a talk after dinner; and he fell asleep in the middle of it. mrs hushabye. you did it, ellie. you put him asleep. mazzini [rising quickly and coming to the back of the chair]. oh, i hope not. did you, ellie? ellie [wearily]. he asked me to. mazzini. but it's dangerous. you know what happened to me. ellie [utterly indifferent]. oh, i daresay i can wake him. if not, somebody else can. mrs hushabye. it doesn't matter, anyhow, because i have at last persuaded your father that you don't want to marry him. ellie [suddenly coming out of her listlessness, much vexed]. but why did you do that, hesione? i do want to marry him. i fully intend to marry him. mazzini. are you quite sure, ellie? mrs hushabye has made me feel that i may have been thoughtless and selfish about it. ellie [very clearly and steadily]. papa. when mrs. hushabye takes it on herself to explain to you what i think or don't think, shut your ears tight; and shut your eyes too. hesione knows nothing about me: she hasn't the least notion of the sort of person i am, and never will. i promise you i won't do anything i don't want to do and mean to do for my own sake. mazzini. you are quite, quite sure? ellie. quite, quite sure. now you must go away and leave me to talk to mrs hushabye. mazzini. but i should like to hear. shall i be in the way? ellie [inexorable]. i had rather talk to her alone. mazzini [affectionately]. oh, well, i know what a nuisance parents are, dear. i will be good and go. [he goes to the garden door]. by the way, do you remember the address of that professional who woke me up? don't you think i had better telegraph to him? mrs hushabye [moving towards the sofa]. it's too late to telegraph tonight. mazzini. i suppose so. i do hope he'll wake up in the course of the night. [he goes out into the garden]. ellie [turning vigorously on hesione the moment her father is out of the room]. hesione, what the devil do you mean by making mischief with my father about mangan? mrs hushabye [promptly losing her temper]. don't you dare speak to me like that, you little minx. remember that you are in my house. ellie. stuff! why don't you mind your own business? what is it to you whether i choose to marry mangan or not? mrs hushabye. do you suppose you can bully me, you miserable little matrimonial adventurer? ellie. every woman who hasn't any money is a matrimonial adventurer. it's easy for you to talk: you have never known what it is to want money; and you can pick up men as if they were daisies. i am poor and respectable-- mrs hushabye [interrupting]. ho! respectable! how did you pick up mangan? how did you pick up my husband? you have the audacity to tell me that i am a--a--a-- ellie. a siren. so you are. you were born to lead men by the nose: if you weren't, marcus would have waited for me, perhaps. mrs hushabye [suddenly melting and half laughing]. oh, my poor ellie, my pettikins, my unhappy darling! i am so sorry about hector. but what can i do? it's not my fault: i'd give him to you if i could. ellie. i don't blame you for that. mrs hushabye. what a brute i was to quarrel with you and call you names! do kiss me and say you're not angry with me. ellie [fiercely]. oh, don't slop and gush and be sentimental. don't you see that unless i can be hard--as hard as nails--i shall go mad? i don't care a damn about your calling me names: do you think a woman in my situation can feel a few hard words? mrs hushabye. poor little woman! poor little situation! ellie. i suppose you think you're being sympathetic. you are just foolish and stupid and selfish. you see me getting a smasher right in the face that kills a whole part of my life: the best part that can never come again; and you think you can help me over it by a little coaxing and kissing. when i want all the strength i can get to lean on: something iron, something stony, i don't care how cruel it is, you go all mushy and want to slobber over me. i'm not angry; i'm not unfriendly; but for god's sake do pull yourself together; and don't think that because you're on velvet and always have been, women who are in hell can take it as easily as you. mrs hushabye [shrugging her shoulders]. very well. [she sits down on the sofa in her old place.] but i warn you that when i am neither coaxing and kissing nor laughing, i am just wondering how much longer i can stand living in this cruel, damnable world. you object to the siren: well, i drop the siren. you want to rest your wounded bosom against a grindstone. well [folding her arms] here is the grindstone. ellie [sitting down beside her, appeased]. that's better: you really have the trick of falling in with everyone's mood; but you don't understand, because you are not the sort of woman for whom there is only one man and only one chance. mrs hushabye. i certainly don't understand how your marrying that object [indicating mangan] will console you for not being able to marry hector. ellie. perhaps you don't understand why i was quite a nice girl this morning, and am now neither a girl nor particularly nice. mrs hushabye. oh, yes, i do. it's because you have made up your mind to do something despicable and wicked. ellie. i don't think so, hesione. i must make the best of my ruined house. mrs hushabye. pooh! you'll get over it. your house isn't ruined. ellie. of course i shall get over it. you don't suppose i'm going to sit down and die of a broken heart, i hope, or be an old maid living on a pittance from the sick and indigent roomkeepers' association. but my heart is broken, all the same. what i mean by that is that i know that what has happened to me with marcus will not happen to me ever again. in the world for me there is marcus and a lot of other men of whom one is just the same as another. well, if i can't have love, that's no reason why i should have poverty. if mangan has nothing else, he has money. mrs hushabye. and are there no young men with money? ellie. not within my reach. besides, a young man would have the right to expect love from me, and would perhaps leave me when he found i could not give it to him. rich young men can get rid of their wives, you know, pretty cheaply. but this object, as you call him, can expect nothing more from me than i am prepared to give him. mrs hushabye. he will be your owner, remember. if he buys you, he will make the bargain pay him and not you. ask your father. ellie [rising and strolling to the chair to contemplate their subject]. you need not trouble on that score, hesione. i have more to give boss mangan than he has to give me: it is i who am buying him, and at a pretty good price too, i think. women are better at that sort of bargain than men. i have taken the boss's measure; and ten boss mangans shall not prevent me doing far more as i please as his wife than i have ever been able to do as a poor girl. [stooping to the recumbent figure]. shall they, boss? i think not. [she passes on to the drawing-table, and leans against the end of it, facing the windows]. i shall not have to spend most of my time wondering how long my gloves will last, anyhow. mrs hushabye [rising superbly]. ellie, you are a wicked, sordid little beast. and to think that i actually condescended to fascinate that creature there to save you from him! well, let me tell you this: if you make this disgusting match, you will never see hector again if i can help it. ellie [unmoved]. i nailed mangan by telling him that if he did not marry me he should never see you again [she lifts herself on her wrists and seats herself on the end of the table]. mrs hushabye [recoiling]. oh! ellie. so you see i am not unprepared for your playing that trump against me. well, you just try it: that's all. i should have made a man of marcus, not a household pet. mrs hushabye [flaming]. you dare! ellie [looking almost dangerous]. set him thinking about me if you dare. mrs hushabye. well, of all the impudent little fiends i ever met! hector says there is a certain point at which the only answer you can give to a man who breaks all the rules is to knock him down. what would you say if i were to box your ears? ellie [calmly]. i should pull your hair. mrs hushabye [mischievously]. that wouldn't hurt me. perhaps it comes off at night. ellie [so taken aback that she drops off the table and runs to her]. oh, you don't mean to say, hesione, that your beautiful black hair is false? mrs hushabye [patting it]. don't tell hector. he believes in it. ellie [groaning]. oh! even the hair that ensnared him false! everything false! mrs hushabye. pull it and try. other women can snare men in their hair; but i can swing a baby on mine. aha! you can't do that, goldylocks. ellie [heartbroken]. no. you have stolen my babies. mrs hushabye. pettikins, don't make me cry. you know what you said about my making a household pet of him is a little true. perhaps he ought to have waited for you. would any other woman on earth forgive you? ellie. oh, what right had you to take him all for yourself! [pulling herself together]. there! you couldn't help it: neither of us could help it. he couldn't help it. no, don't say anything more: i can't bear it. let us wake the object. [she begins stroking mangan's head, reversing the movement with which she put him to sleep]. wake up, do you hear? you are to wake up at once. wake up, wake up, wake-- mangan [bouncing out of the chair in a fury and turning on them]. wake up! so you think i've been asleep, do you? [he kicks the chair violently back out of his way, and gets between them]. you throw me into a trance so that i can't move hand or foot--i might have been buried alive! it's a mercy i wasn't--and then you think i was only asleep. if you'd let me drop the two times you rolled me about, my nose would have been flattened for life against the floor. but i've found you all out, anyhow. i know the sort of people i'm among now. i've heard every word you've said, you and your precious father, and [to mrs hushabye] you too. so i'm an object, am i? i'm a thing, am i? i'm a fool that hasn't sense enough to feed myself properly, am i? i'm afraid of the men that would starve if it weren't for the wages i give them, am i? i'm nothing but a disgusting old skinflint to be made a convenience of by designing women and fool managers of my works, am i? i'm-- mrs hushabye [with the most elegant aplomb]. sh-sh-sh-sh-sh! mr mangan, you are bound in honor to obliterate from your mind all you heard while you were pretending to be asleep. it was not meant for you to hear. mangan. pretending to be asleep! do you think if i was only pretending that i'd have sprawled there helpless, and listened to such unfairness, such lies, such injustice and plotting and backbiting and slandering of me, if i could have up and told you what i thought of you! i wonder i didn't burst. mrs hushabye [sweetly]. you dreamt it all, mr mangan. we were only saying how beautifully peaceful you looked in your sleep. that was all, wasn't it, ellie? believe me, mr mangan, all those unpleasant things came into your mind in the last half second before you woke. ellie rubbed your hair the wrong way; and the disagreeable sensation suggested a disagreeable dream. mangan [doggedly]. i believe in dreams. mrs hushabye. so do i. but they go by contraries, don't they? mangan [depths of emotion suddenly welling up in him]. i shan't forget, to my dying day, that when you gave me the glad eye that time in the garden, you were making a fool of me. that was a dirty low mean thing to do. you had no right to let me come near you if i disgusted you. it isn't my fault if i'm old and haven't a moustache like a bronze candlestick as your husband has. there are things no decent woman would do to a man--like a man hitting a woman in the breast. hesione, utterly shamed, sits down on the sofa and covers her face with her hands. mangan sits down also on his chair and begins to cry like a child. ellie stares at them. mrs hushabye, at the distressing sound he makes, takes down her hands and looks at him. she rises and runs to him. mrs hushabye. don't cry: i can't bear it. have i broken your heart? i didn't know you had one. how could i? mangan. i'm a man, ain't i? mrs hushabye [half coaxing, half rallying, altogether tenderly]. oh no: not what i call a man. only a boss: just that and nothing else. what business has a boss with a heart? mangan. then you're not a bit sorry for what you did, nor ashamed? mrs hushabye. i was ashamed for the first time in my life when you said that about hitting a woman in the breast, and i found out what i'd done. my very bones blushed red. you've had your revenge, boss. aren't you satisfied? mangan. serve you right! do you hear? serve you right! you're just cruel. cruel. mrs hushabye. yes: cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn't really hurt. by the way [sitting down beside him on the arm of the chair], what's your name? it's not really boss, is it? mangan [shortly]. if you want to know, my name's alfred. mrs hushabye [springs up]. alfred!! ellie, he was christened after tennyson!!! mangan [rising]. i was christened after my uncle, and never had a penny from him, damn him! what of it? mrs hushabye. it comes to me suddenly that you are a real person: that you had a mother, like anyone else. [putting her hands on his shoulders and surveying him]. little alf! mangan. well, you have a nerve. mrs hushabye. and you have a heart, alfy, a whimpering little heart, but a real one. [releasing him suddenly]. now run and make it up with ellie. she has had time to think what to say to you, which is more than i had [she goes out quickly into the garden by the port door]. mangan. that woman has a pair of hands that go right through you. ellie. still in love with her, in spite of all we said about you? mangan. are all women like you two? do they never think of anything about a man except what they can get out of him? you weren't even thinking that about me. you were only thinking whether your gloves would last. ellie. i shall not have to think about that when we are married. mangan. and you think i am going to marry you after what i heard there! ellie. you heard nothing from me that i did not tell you before. mangan. perhaps you think i can't do without you. ellie. i think you would feel lonely without us all, now, after coming to know us so well. mangan [with something like a yell of despair]. am i never to have the last word? captain shotover [appearing at the starboard garden door]. there is a soul in torment here. what is the matter? mangan. this girl doesn't want to spend her life wondering how long her gloves will last. captain shotover [passing through]. don't wear any. i never do [he goes into the pantry]. lady utterword [appearing at the port garden door, in a handsome dinner dress]. is anything the matter? ellie. this gentleman wants to know is he never to have the last word? lady utterword [coming forward to the sofa]. i should let him have it, my dear. the important thing is not to have the last word, but to have your own way. mangan. she wants both. lady utterword. she won't get them, mr mangan. providence always has the last word. mangan [desperately]. now you are going to come religion over me. in this house a man's mind might as well be a football. i'm going. [he makes for the hall, but is stopped by a hail from the captain, who has just emerged from his pantry]. captain shotover. whither away, boss mangan? mangan. to hell out of this house: let that be enough for you and all here. captain shotover. you were welcome to come: you are free to go. the wide earth, the high seas, the spacious skies are waiting for you outside. lady utterword. but your things, mr mangan. your bag, your comb and brushes, your pyjamas-- hector [who has just appeared in the port doorway in a handsome arab costume]. why should the escaping slave take his chains with him? mangan. that's right, hushabye. keep the pyjamas, my lady, and much good may they do you. hector [advancing to lady utterword's left hand]. let us all go out into the night and leave everything behind us. mangan. you stay where you are, the lot of you. i want no company, especially female company. ellie. let him go. he is unhappy here. he is angry with us. captain shotover. go, boss mangan; and when you have found the land where there is happiness and where there are no women, send me its latitude and longitude; and i will join you there. lady utterword. you will certainly not be comfortable without your luggage, mr mangan. ellie [impatient]. go, go: why don't you go? it is a heavenly night: you can sleep on the heath. take my waterproof to lie on: it is hanging up in the hall. hector. breakfast at nine, unless you prefer to breakfast with the captain at six. ellie. good night, alfred. hector. alfred! [he runs back to the door and calls into the garden]. randall, mangan's christian name is alfred. randall [appearing in the starboard doorway in evening dress]. then hesione wins her bet. mrs hushabye appears in the port doorway. she throws her left arm round hector's neck: draws him with her to the back of the sofa: and throws her right arm round lady utterword's neck. mrs hushabye. they wouldn't believe me, alf. they contemplate him. mangan. is there any more of you coming in to look at me, as if i was the latest thing in a menagerie? mrs hushabye. you are the latest thing in this menagerie. before mangan can retort, a fall of furniture is heard from upstairs: then a pistol shot, and a yell of pain. the staring group breaks up in consternation. mazzini's voice [from above]. help! a burglar! help! hector [his eyes blazing]. a burglar!!! mrs hushabye. no, hector: you'll be shot [but it is too late; he has dashed out past mangan, who hastily moves towards the bookshelves out of his way]. captain shotover [blowing his whistle]. all hands aloft! [he strides out after hector]. lady utterword. my diamonds! [she follows the captain]. randall [rushing after her]. no. ariadne. let me. ellie. oh, is papa shot? [she runs out]. mrs hushabye. are you frightened, alf? mangan. no. it ain't my house, thank god. mrs hushabye. if they catch a burglar, shall we have to go into court as witnesses, and be asked all sorts of questions about our private lives? mangan. you won't be believed if you tell the truth. mazzini, terribly upset, with a duelling pistol in his hand, comes from the hall, and makes his way to the drawing-table. mazzini. oh, my dear mrs hushabye, i might have killed him. [he throws the pistol on the table and staggers round to the chair]. i hope you won't believe i really intended to. hector comes in, marching an old and villainous looking man before him by the collar. he plants him in the middle of the room and releases him. ellie follows, and immediately runs across to the back of her father's chair and pats his shoulders. randall [entering with a poker]. keep your eye on this door, mangan. i'll look after the other [he goes to the starboard door and stands on guard there]. lady utterword comes in after randall, and goes between mrs hushabye and mangan. nurse guinness brings up the rear, and waits near the door, on mangan's left. mrs hushabye. what has happened? mazzini. your housekeeper told me there was somebody upstairs, and gave me a pistol that mr hushabye had been practising with. i thought it would frighten him; but it went off at a touch. the burglar. yes, and took the skin off my ear. precious near took the top off my head. why don't you have a proper revolver instead of a thing like that, that goes off if you as much as blow on it? hector. one of my duelling pistols. sorry. mazzini. he put his hands up and said it was a fair cop. the burglar. so it was. send for the police. hector. no, by thunder! it was not a fair cop. we were four to one. mrs hushabye. what will they do to him? the burglar. ten years. beginning with solitary. ten years off my life. i shan't serve it all: i'm too old. it will see me out. lady utterword. you should have thought of that before you stole my diamonds. the burglar. well, you've got them back, lady, haven't you? can you give me back the years of my life you are going to take from me? mrs hushabye. oh, we can't bury a man alive for ten years for a few diamonds. the burglar. ten little shining diamonds! ten long black years! lady utterword. think of what it is for us to be dragged through the horrors of a criminal court, and have all our family affairs in the papers! if you were a native, and hastings could order you a good beating and send you away, i shouldn't mind; but here in england there is no real protection for any respectable person. the burglar. i'm too old to be giv a hiding, lady. send for the police and have done with it. it's only just and right you should. randall [who has relaxed his vigilance on seeing the burglar so pacifically disposed, and comes forward swinging the poker between his fingers like a well folded umbrella]. it is neither just nor right that we should be put to a lot of inconvenience to gratify your moral enthusiasm, my friend. you had better get out, while you have the chance. the burglar [inexorably]. no. i must work my sin off my conscience. this has come as a sort of call to me. let me spend the rest of my life repenting in a cell. i shall have my reward above. mangan [exasperated]. the very burglars can't behave naturally in this house. hector. my good sir, you must work out your salvation at somebody else's expense. nobody here is going to charge you. the burglar. oh, you won't charge me, won't you? hector. no. i'm sorry to be inhospitable; but will you kindly leave the house? the burglar. right. i'll go to the police station and give myself up. [he turns resolutely to the door: but hector stops him]. hector. { oh, no. you mustn't do that. randall. [speaking together] { no no. clear out man, can't you; and don't be a fool. mrs. hushabye { don't be so silly. can't you repent at home? lady utterword. you will have to do as you are told. the burglar. it's compounding a felony, you know. mrs hushabye. this is utterly ridiculous. are we to be forced to prosecute this man when we don't want to? the burglar. am i to be robbed of my salvation to save you the trouble of spending a day at the sessions? is that justice? is it right? is it fair to me? mazzini [rising and leaning across the table persuasively as if it were a pulpit desk or a shop counter]. come, come! let me show you how you can turn your very crimes to account. why not set up as a locksmith? you must know more about locks than most honest men? the burglar. that's true, sir. but i couldn't set up as a locksmith under twenty pounds. randall. well, you can easily steal twenty pounds. you will find it in the nearest bank. the burglar [horrified]. oh, what a thing for a gentleman to put into the head of a poor criminal scrambling out of the bottomless pit as it were! oh, shame on you, sir! oh, god forgive you! [he throws himself into the big chair and covers his face as if in prayer]. lady utterword. really, randall! hector. it seems to me that we shall have to take up a collection for this inopportunely contrite sinner. lady utterword. but twenty pounds is ridiculous. the burglar [looking up quickly]. i shall have to buy a lot of tools, lady. lady utterword. nonsense: you have your burgling kit. the burglar. what's a jimmy and a centrebit and an acetylene welding plant and a bunch of skeleton keys? i shall want a forge, and a smithy, and a shop, and fittings. i can't hardly do it for twenty. hector. my worthy friend, we haven't got twenty pounds. the burglar [now master of the situation]. you can raise it among you, can't you? mrs hushabye. give him a sovereign, hector, and get rid of him. hector [giving him a pound]. there! off with you. the burglar [rising and taking the money very ungratefully]. i won't promise nothing. you have more on you than a quid: all the lot of you, i mean. lady utterword [vigorously]. oh, let us prosecute him and have done with it. i have a conscience too, i hope; and i do not feel at all sure that we have any right to let him go, especially if he is going to be greedy and impertinent. the burglar [quickly]. all right, lady, all right. i've no wish to be anything but agreeable. good evening, ladies and gentlemen; and thank you kindly. he is hurrying out when he is confronted in the doorway by captain shotover. captain shotover [fixing the burglar with a piercing regard]. what's this? are there two of you? the burglar [falling on his knees before the captain in abject terror]. oh, my good lord, what have i done? don't tell me it's your house i've broken into, captain shotover. the captain seizes him by the collar: drags him to his feet: and leads him to the middle of the group, hector falling back beside his wife to make way for them. captain shotover [turning him towards ellie]. is that your daughter? [he releases him]. the burglar. well, how do i know, captain? you know the sort of life you and me has led. any young lady of that age might be my daughter anywhere in the wide world, as you might say. captain shotover [to mazzini]. you are not billy dunn. this is billy dunn. why have you imposed on me? the burglar [indignantly to mazzini]. have you been giving yourself out to be me? you, that nigh blew my head off! shooting yourself, in a manner of speaking! mazzini. my dear captain shotover, ever since i came into this house i have done hardly anything else but assure you that i am not mr william dunn, but mazzini dunn, a very different person. the burglar. he don't belong to my branch, captain. there's two sets in the family: the thinking dunns and the drinking dunns, each going their own ways. i'm a drinking dunn: he's a thinking dunn. but that didn't give him any right to shoot me. captain shotover. so you've turned burglar, have you? the burglar. no, captain: i wouldn't disgrace our old sea calling by such a thing. i am no burglar. lady utterword. what were you doing with my diamonds? guinness. what did you break into the house for if you're no burglar? randall. mistook the house for your own and came in by the wrong window, eh? the burglar. well, it's no use my telling you a lie: i can take in most captains, but not captain shotover, because he sold himself to the devil in zanzibar, and can divine water, spot gold, explode a cartridge in your pocket with a glance of his eye, and see the truth hidden in the heart of man. but i'm no burglar. captain shotover. are you an honest man? the burglar. i don't set up to be better than my fellow-creatures, and never did, as you well know, captain. but what i do is innocent and pious. i enquire about for houses where the right sort of people live. i work it on them same as i worked it here. i break into the house; put a few spoons or diamonds in my pocket; make a noise; get caught; and take up a collection. and you wouldn't believe how hard it is to get caught when you're actually trying to. i have knocked over all the chairs in a room without a soul paying any attention to me. in the end i have had to walk out and leave the job. randall. when that happens, do you put back the spoons and diamonds? the burglar. well, i don't fly in the face of providence, if that's what you want to know. captain shotover. guinness, you remember this man? guinness. i should think i do, seeing i was married to him, the blackguard! hesione } [exclaiming { married to him! lady utterword } together] { guinness!! the burglar. it wasn't legal. i've been married to no end of women. no use coming that over me. captain shotover. take him to the forecastle [he flings him to the door with a strength beyond his years]. guinness. i suppose you mean the kitchen. they won't have him there. do you expect servants to keep company with thieves and all sorts? captain shotover. land-thieves and water-thieves are the same flesh and blood. i'll have no boatswain on my quarter-deck. off with you both. the burglar. yes, captain. [he goes out humbly]. mazzini. will it be safe to have him in the house like that? guinness. why didn't you shoot him, sir? if i'd known who he was, i'd have shot him myself. [she goes out]. mrs hushabye. do sit down, everybody. [she sits down on the sofa]. they all move except ellie. mazzini resumes his seat. randall sits down in the window-seat near the starboard door, again making a pendulum of his poker, and studying it as galileo might have done. hector sits on his left, in the middle. mangan, forgotten, sits in the port corner. lady utterword takes the big chair. captain shotover goes into the pantry in deep abstraction. they all look after him: and lady utterword coughs consciously. mrs hushabye. so billy dunn was poor nurse's little romance. i knew there had been somebody. randall. they will fight their battles over again and enjoy themselves immensely. lady utterword [irritably]. you are not married; and you know nothing about it, randall. hold your tongue. randall. tyrant! mrs hushabye. well, we have had a very exciting evening. everything will be an anticlimax after it. we'd better all go to bed. randall. another burglar may turn up. mazzini. oh, impossible! i hope not. randall. why not? there is more than one burglar in england. mrs hushabye. what do you say, alf? mangan [huffily]. oh, i don't matter. i'm forgotten. the burglar has put my nose out of joint. shove me into a corner and have done with me. mrs hushabye [jumping up mischievously, and going to him]. would you like a walk on the heath, alfred? with me? ellie. go, mr mangan. it will do you good. hesione will soothe you. mrs hushabye [slipping her arm under his and pulling him upright]. come, alfred. there is a moon: it's like the night in tristan and isolde. [she caresses his arm and draws him to the port garden door]. mangan [writhing but yielding]. how you can have the face-the heart-[he breaks down and is heard sobbing as she takes him out]. lady utterword. what an extraordinary way to behave! what is the matter with the man? ellie [in a strangely calm voice, staring into an imaginary distance]. his heart is breaking: that is all. [the captain appears at the pantry door, listening]. it is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. when your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. it is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace. lady utterword [suddenly rising in a rage, to the astonishment of the rest]. how dare you? hector. good heavens! what's the matter? randall [in a warning whisper]. tch--tch-tch! steady. ellie [surprised and haughty]. i was not addressing you particularly, lady utterword. and i am not accustomed to being asked how dare i. lady utterword. of course not. anyone can see how badly you have been brought up. mazzini. oh, i hope not, lady utterword. really! lady utterword. i know very well what you meant. the impudence! ellie. what on earth do you mean? captain shotover [advancing to the table]. she means that her heart will not break. she has been longing all her life for someone to break it. at last she has become afraid she has none to break. lady utterword [flinging herself on her knees and throwing her arms round him]. papa, don't say you think i've no heart. captain shotover [raising her with grim tenderness]. if you had no heart how could you want to have it broken, child? hector [rising with a bound]. lady utterword, you are not to be trusted. you have made a scene [he runs out into the garden through the starboard door]. lady utterword. oh! hector, hector! [she runs out after him]. randall. only nerves, i assure you. [he rises and follows her, waving the poker in his agitation]. ariadne! ariadne! for god's sake, be careful. you will--[he is gone]. mazzini [rising]. how distressing! can i do anything, i wonder? captain shotover [promptly taking his chair and setting to work at the drawing-board]. no. go to bed. good-night. mazzini [bewildered]. oh! perhaps you are right. ellie. good-night, dearest. [she kisses him]. mazzini. good-night, love. [he makes for the door, but turns aside to the bookshelves]. i'll just take a book [he takes one]. good-night. [he goes out, leaving ellie alone with the captain]. the captain is intent on his drawing. ellie, standing sentry over his chair, contemplates him for a moment. ellie. does nothing ever disturb you, captain shotover? captain shotover. i've stood on the bridge for eighteen hours in a typhoon. life here is stormier; but i can stand it. ellie. do you think i ought to marry mr mangan? captain shotover [never looking up]. one rock is as good as another to be wrecked on. ellie. i am not in love with him. captain shotover. who said you were? ellie. you are not surprised? captain shotover. surprised! at my age! ellie. it seems to me quite fair. he wants me for one thing: i want him for another. captain shotover. money? ellie. yes. captain shotover. well, one turns the cheek: the other kisses it. one provides the cash: the other spends it. ellie. who will have the best of the bargain, i wonder? captain shotover. you. these fellows live in an office all day. you will have to put up with him from dinner to breakfast; but you will both be asleep most of that time. all day you will be quit of him; and you will be shopping with his money. if that is too much for you, marry a seafaring man: you will be bothered with him only three weeks in the year, perhaps. ellie. that would be best of all, i suppose. captain shotover. it's a dangerous thing to be married right up to the hilt, like my daughter's husband. the man is at home all day, like a damned soul in hell. ellie. i never thought of that before. captain shotover. if you're marrying for business, you can't be too businesslike. ellie. why do women always want other women's husbands? captain shotover. why do horse-thieves prefer a horse that is broken-in to one that is wild? ellie [with a short laugh]. i suppose so. what a vile world it is! captain shotover. it doesn't concern me. i'm nearly out of it. ellie. and i'm only just beginning. captain shotover. yes; so look ahead. ellie. well, i think i am being very prudent. captain shotover. i didn't say prudent. i said look ahead. ellie. what's the difference? captain shotover. it's prudent to gain the whole world and lose your own soul. but don't forget that your soul sticks to you if you stick to it; but the world has a way of slipping through your fingers. ellie [wearily, leaving him and beginning to wander restlessly about the room]. i'm sorry, captain shotover; but it's no use talking like that to me. old-fashioned people are no use to me. old-fashioned people think you can have a soul without money. they think the less money you have, the more soul you have. young people nowadays know better. a soul is a very expensive thing to keep: much more so than a motor car. captain shotover. is it? how much does your soul eat? ellie. oh, a lot. it eats music and pictures and books and mountains and lakes and beautiful things to wear and nice people to be with. in this country you can't have them without lots of money: that is why our souls are so horribly starved. captain shotover. mangan's soul lives on pig's food. ellie. yes: money is thrown away on him. i suppose his soul was starved when he was young. but it will not be thrown away on me. it is just because i want to save my soul that i am marrying for money. all the women who are not fools do. captain shotover. there are other ways of getting money. why don't you steal it? ellie. because i don't want to go to prison. captain shotover. is that the only reason? are you quite sure honesty has nothing to do with it? ellie. oh, you are very very old-fashioned, captain. does any modern girl believe that the legal and illegal ways of getting money are the honest and dishonest ways? mangan robbed my father and my father's friends. i should rob all the money back from mangan if the police would let me. as they won't, i must get it back by marrying him. captain shotover. i can't argue: i'm too old: my mind is made up and finished. all i can tell you is that, old-fashioned or new-fashioned, if you sell yourself, you deal your soul a blow that all the books and pictures and concerts and scenery in the world won't heal [he gets up suddenly and makes for the pantry]. ellie [running after him and seizing him by the sleeve]. then why did you sell yourself to the devil in zanzibar? captain shotover [stopping, startled]. what? ellie. you shall not run away before you answer. i have found out that trick of yours. if you sold yourself, why shouldn't i? captain shotover. i had to deal with men so degraded that they wouldn't obey me unless i swore at them and kicked them and beat them with my fists. foolish people took young thieves off the streets; flung them into a training ship where they were taught to fear the cane instead of fearing god; and thought they'd made men and sailors of them by private subscription. i tricked these thieves into believing i'd sold myself to the devil. it saved my soul from the kicking and swearing that was damning me by inches. ellie [releasing him]. i shall pretend to sell myself to boss mangan to save my soul from the poverty that is damning me by inches. captain shotover. riches will damn you ten times deeper. riches won't save even your body. ellie. old-fashioned again. we know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. they tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies. i am afraid you are no use to me, captain. captain shotover. what did you expect? a savior, eh? are you old-fashioned enough to believe in that? ellie. no. but i thought you were very wise, and might help me. now i have found you out. you pretend to be busy, and think of fine things to say, and run in and out to surprise people by saying them, and get away before they can answer you. captain shotover. it confuses me to be answered. it discourages me. i cannot bear men and women. i have to run away. i must run away now [he tries to]. ellie [again seizing his arm]. you shall not run away from me. i can hypnotize you. you are the only person in the house i can say what i like to. i know you are fond of me. sit down. [she draws him to the sofa]. captain shotover [yielding]. take care: i am in my dotage. old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world. they sit side by side on the sofa. she leans affectionately against him with her head on his shoulder and her eyes half closed. ellie [dreamily]. i should have thought nothing else mattered to old men. they can't be very interested in what is going to happen to themselves. captain shotover. a man's interest in the world is only the overflow from his interest in himself. when you are a child your vessel is not yet full; so you care for nothing but your own affairs. when you grow up, your vessel overflows; and you are a politician, a philosopher, or an explorer and adventurer. in old age the vessel dries up: there is no overflow: you are a child again. i can give you the memories of my ancient wisdom: mere scraps and leavings; but i no longer really care for anything but my own little wants and hobbies. i sit here working out my old ideas as a means of destroying my fellow-creatures. i see my daughters and their men living foolish lives of romance and sentiment and snobbery. i see you, the younger generation, turning from their romance and sentiment and snobbery to money and comfort and hard common sense. i was ten times happier on the bridge in the typhoon, or frozen into arctic ice for months in darkness, than you or they have ever been. you are looking for a rich husband. at your age i looked for hardship, danger, horror, and death, that i might feel the life in me more intensely. i did not let the fear of death govern my life; and my reward was, i had my life. you are going to let the fear of poverty govern your life; and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live. ellie [sitting up impatiently]. but what can i do? i am not a sea captain: i can't stand on bridges in typhoons, or go slaughtering seals and whales in greenland's icy mountains. they won't let women be captains. do you want me to be a stewardess? captain shotover. there are worse lives. the stewardesses could come ashore if they liked; but they sail and sail and sail. ellie. what could they do ashore but marry for money? i don't want to be a stewardess: i am too bad a sailor. think of something else for me. captain shotover. i can't think so long and continuously. i am too old. i must go in and out. [he tries to rise]. ellie [pulling him back]. you shall not. you are happy here, aren't you? captain shotover. i tell you it's dangerous to keep me. i can't keep awake and alert. ellie. what do you run away for? to sleep? captain shotover. no. to get a glass of rum. ellie [frightfully disillusioned]. is that it? how disgusting! do you like being drunk? captain shotover. no: i dread being drunk more than anything in the world. to be drunk means to have dreams; to go soft; to be easily pleased and deceived; to fall into the clutches of women. drink does that for you when you are young. but when you are old: very very old, like me, the dreams come by themselves. you don't know how terrible that is: you are young: you sleep at night only, and sleep soundly. but later on you will sleep in the afternoon. later still you will sleep even in the morning; and you will awake tired, tired of life. you will never be free from dozing and dreams; the dreams will steal upon your work every ten minutes unless you can awaken yourself with rum. i drink now to keep sober; but the dreams are conquering: rum is not what it was: i have had ten glasses since you came; and it might be so much water. go get me another: guinness knows where it is. you had better see for yourself the horror of an old man drinking. ellie. you shall not drink. dream. i like you to dream. you must never be in the real world when we talk together. captain shotover. i am too weary to resist, or too weak. i am in my second childhood. i do not see you as you really are. i can't remember what i really am. i feel nothing but the accursed happiness i have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten. ellie. you dread it almost as much as i used to dread losing my dreams and having to fight and do things. but that is all over for me: my dreams are dashed to pieces. i should like to marry a very old, very rich man. i should like to marry you. i had much rather marry you than marry mangan. are you very rich? captain shotover. no. living from hand to mouth. and i have a wife somewhere in jamaica: a black one. my first wife. unless she's dead. ellie. what a pity! i feel so happy with you. [she takes his hand, almost unconsciously, and pats it]. i thought i should never feel happy again. captain shotover. why? ellie. don't you know? captain shotover. no. ellie. heartbreak. i fell in love with hector, and didn't know he was married. captain shotover. heartbreak? are you one of those who are so sufficient to themselves that they are only happy when they are stripped of everything, even of hope? ellie [gripping the hand]. it seems so; for i feel now as if there was nothing i could not do, because i want nothing. captain shotover. that's the only real strength. that's genius. that's better than rum. ellie [throwing away his hand]. rum! why did you spoil it? hector and randall come in from the garden through the starboard door. hector. i beg your pardon. we did not know there was anyone here. ellie [rising]. that means that you want to tell mr randall the story about the tiger. come, captain: i want to talk to my father; and you had better come with me. captain shotover [rising]. nonsense! the man is in bed. ellie. aha! i've caught you. my real father has gone to bed; but the father you gave me is in the kitchen. you knew quite well all along. come. [she draws him out into the garden with her through the port door]. hector. that's an extraordinary girl. she has the ancient mariner on a string like a pekinese dog. randall. now that they have gone, shall we have a friendly chat? hector. you are in what is supposed to be my house. i am at your disposal. hector sits down in the draughtsman's chair, turning it to face randall, who remains standing, leaning at his ease against the carpenter's bench. randall. i take it that we may be quite frank. i mean about lady utterword. hector. you may. i have nothing to be frank about. i never met her until this afternoon. randall [straightening up]. what! but you are her sister's husband. hector. well, if you come to that, you are her husband's brother. randall. but you seem to be on intimate terms with her. hector. so do you. randall. yes: but i am on intimate terms with her. i have known her for years. hector. it took her years to get to the same point with you that she got to with me in five minutes, it seems. randall [vexed]. really, ariadne is the limit [he moves away huffishly towards the windows]. hector [coolly]. she is, as i remarked to hesione, a very enterprising woman. randall [returning, much troubled]. you see, hushabye, you are what women consider a good-looking man. hector. i cultivated that appearance in the days of my vanity; and hesione insists on my keeping it up. she makes me wear these ridiculous things [indicating his arab costume] because she thinks me absurd in evening dress. randall. still, you do keep it up, old chap. now, i assure you i have not an atom of jealousy in my disposition. hector. the question would seem to be rather whether your brother has any touch of that sort. randall. what! hastings! oh, don't trouble about hastings. he has the gift of being able to work sixteen hours a day at the dullest detail, and actually likes it. that gets him to the top wherever he goes. as long as ariadne takes care that he is fed regularly, he is only too thankful to anyone who will keep her in good humor for him. hector. and as she has all the shotover fascination, there is plenty of competition for the job, eh? randall [angrily]. she encourages them. her conduct is perfectly scandalous. i assure you, my dear fellow, i haven't an atom of jealousy in my composition; but she makes herself the talk of every place she goes to by her thoughtlessness. it's nothing more: she doesn't really care for the men she keeps hanging about her; but how is the world to know that? it's not fair to hastings. it's not fair to me. hector. her theory is that her conduct is so correct randall. correct! she does nothing but make scenes from morning till night. you be careful, old chap. she will get you into trouble: that is, she would if she really cared for you. hector. doesn't she? randall. not a scrap. she may want your scalp to add to her collection; but her true affection has been engaged years ago. you had really better be careful. hector. do you suffer much from this jealousy? randall. jealousy! i jealous! my dear fellow, haven't i told you that there is not an atom of-- hector. yes. and lady utterword told me she never made scenes. well, don't waste your jealousy on my moustache. never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary hero that supplants us all in the long run. besides, jealousy does not belong to your easy man-of-the-world pose, which you carry so well in other respects. randall. really, hushabye, i think a man may be allowed to be a gentleman without being accused of posing. hector. it is a pose like any other. in this house we know all the poses: our game is to find out the man under the pose. the man under your pose is apparently ellie's favorite, othello. randall. some of your games in this house are damned annoying, let me tell you. hector. yes: i have been their victim for many years. i used to writhe under them at first; but i became accustomed to them. at last i learned to play them. randall. if it's all the same to you i had rather you didn't play them on me. you evidently don't quite understand my character, or my notions of good form. hector. is it your notion of good form to give away lady utterword? randall [a childishly plaintive note breaking into his huff]. i have not said a word against lady utterword. this is just the conspiracy over again. hector. what conspiracy? randall. you know very well, sir. a conspiracy to make me out to be pettish and jealous and childish and everything i am not. everyone knows i am just the opposite. hector [rising]. something in the air of the house has upset you. it often does have that effect. [he goes to the garden door and calls lady utterword with commanding emphasis]. ariadne! lady utterword [at some distance]. yes. randall. what are you calling her for? i want to speak-- lady utterword [arriving breathless]. yes. you really are a terribly commanding person. what's the matter? hector. i do not know how to manage your friend randall. no doubt you do. lady utterword. randall: have you been making yourself ridiculous, as usual? i can see it in your face. really, you are the most pettish creature. randall. you know quite well, ariadne, that i have not an ounce of pettishness in my disposition. i have made myself perfectly pleasant here. i have remained absolutely cool and imperturbable in the face of a burglar. imperturbability is almost too strong a point of mine. but [putting his foot down with a stamp, and walking angrily up and down the room] i insist on being treated with a certain consideration. i will not allow hushabye to take liberties with me. i will not stand your encouraging people as you do. hector. the man has a rooted delusion that he is your husband. lady utterword. i know. he is jealous. as if he had any right to be! he compromises me everywhere. he makes scenes all over the place. randall: i will not allow it. i simply will not allow it. you had no right to discuss me with hector. i will not be discussed by men. hector. be reasonable, ariadne. your fatal gift of beauty forces men to discuss you. lady utterword. oh indeed! what about your fatal gift of beauty? hector. how can i help it? lady utterword. you could cut off your moustache: i can't cut off my nose. i get my whole life messed up with people falling in love with me. and then randall says i run after men. randall. i-- lady utterword. yes you do: you said it just now. why can't you think of something else than women? napoleon was quite right when he said that women are the occupation of the idle man. well, if ever there was an idle man on earth, his name is randall utterword. randall. ariad-- lady utterword [overwhelming him with a torrent of words]. oh yes you are: it's no use denying it. what have you ever done? what good are you? you are as much trouble in the house as a child of three. you couldn't live without your valet. randall. this is-- lady utterword. laziness! you are laziness incarnate. you are selfishness itself. you are the most uninteresting man on earth. you can't even gossip about anything but yourself and your grievances and your ailments and the people who have offended you. [turning to hector]. do you know what they call him, hector? hector } [speaking { please don't tell me. randall } together] { i'll not stand it-- lady utterword. randall the rotter: that is his name in good society. randall [shouting]. i'll not bear it, i tell you. will you listen to me, you infernal--[he chokes]. lady utterword. well: go on. what were you going to call me? an infernal what? which unpleasant animal is it to be this time? randall [foaming]. there is no animal in the world so hateful as a woman can be. you are a maddening devil. hushabye, you will not believe me when i tell you that i have loved this demon all my life; but god knows i have paid for it [he sits down in the draughtsman's chair, weeping]. lady utterword [standing over him with triumphant contempt]. cry-baby! hector [gravely, coming to him]. my friend, the shotover sisters have two strange powers over men. they can make them love; and they can make them cry. thank your stars that you are not married to one of them. lady utterword [haughtily]. and pray, hector-- hector [suddenly catching her round the shoulders: swinging her right round him and away from randall: and gripping her throat with the other hand]. ariadne, if you attempt to start on me, i'll choke you: do you hear? the cat-and-mouse game with the other sex is a good game; but i can play your head off at it. [he throws her, not at all gently, into the big chair, and proceeds, less fiercely but firmly]. it is true that napoleon said that woman is the occupation of the idle man. but he added that she is the relaxation of the warrior. well, i am the warrior. so take care. lady utterword [not in the least put out, and rather pleased by his violence]. my dear hector, i have only done what you asked me to do. hector. how do you make that out, pray? lady utterword. you called me in to manage randall, didn't you? you said you couldn't manage him yourself. hector. well, what if i did? i did not ask you to drive the man mad. lady utterword. he isn't mad. that's the way to manage him. if you were a mother, you'd understand. hector. mother! what are you up to now? lady utterword. it's quite simple. when the children got nerves and were naughty, i smacked them just enough to give them a good cry and a healthy nervous shock. they went to sleep and were quite good afterwards. well, i can't smack randall: he is too big; so when he gets nerves and is naughty, i just rag him till he cries. he will be all right now. look: he is half asleep already [which is quite true]. randall [waking up indignantly]. i'm not. you are most cruel, ariadne. [sentimentally]. but i suppose i must forgive you, as usual [he checks himself in the act of yawning]. lady utterword [to hector]. is the explanation satisfactory, dread warrior? hector. some day i shall kill you, if you go too far. i thought you were a fool. lady utterword [laughing]. everybody does, at first. but i am not such a fool as i look. [she rises complacently]. now, randall, go to bed. you will be a good boy in the morning. randall [only very faintly rebellious]. i'll go to bed when i like. it isn't ten yet. lady utterword. it is long past ten. see that he goes to bed at once, hector. [she goes into the garden]. hector. is there any slavery on earth viler than this slavery of men to women? randall [rising resolutely]. i'll not speak to her tomorrow. i'll not speak to her for another week. i'll give her such a lesson. i'll go straight to bed without bidding her good-night. [he makes for the door leading to the hall]. hector. you are under a spell, man. old shotover sold himself to the devil in zanzibar. the devil gave him a black witch for a wife; and these two demon daughters are their mystical progeny. i am tied to hesione's apron-string; but i'm her husband; and if i did go stark staring mad about her, at least we became man and wife. but why should you let yourself be dragged about and beaten by ariadne as a toy donkey is dragged about and beaten by a child? what do you get by it? are you her lover? randall. you must not misunderstand me. in a higher sense--in a platonic sense-- hector. psha! platonic sense! she makes you her servant; and when pay-day comes round, she bilks you: that is what you mean. randall [feebly]. well, if i don't mind, i don't see what business it is of yours. besides, i tell you i am going to punish her. you shall see: i know how to deal with women. i'm really very sleepy. say good-night to mrs hushabye for me, will you, like a good chap. good-night. [he hurries out]. hector. poor wretch! oh women! women! women! [he lifts his fists in invocation to heaven]. fall. fall and crush. [he goes out into the garden]. act iii in the garden, hector, as he comes out through the glass door of the poop, finds lady utterword lying voluptuously in the hammock on the east side of the flagstaff, in the circle of light cast by the electric arc, which is like a moon in its opal globe. beneath the head of the hammock, a campstool. on the other side of the flagstaff, on the long garden seat, captain shotover is asleep, with ellie beside him, leaning affectionately against him on his right hand. on his left is a deck chair. behind them in the gloom, hesione is strolling about with mangan. it is a fine still night, moonless. lady utterword. what a lovely night! it seems made for us. hector. the night takes no interest in us. what are we to the night? [he sits down moodily in the deck chair]. ellie [dreamily, nestling against the captain]. its beauty soaks into my nerves. in the night there is peace for the old and hope for the young. hector. is that remark your own? ellie. no. only the last thing the captain said before he went to sleep. captain shotover. i'm not asleep. hector. randall is. also mr mazzini dunn. mangan, too, probably. mangan. no. hector. oh, you are there. i thought hesione would have sent you to bed by this time. mrs hushabye [coming to the back of the garden seat, into the light, with mangan]. i think i shall. he keeps telling me he has a presentiment that he is going to die. i never met a man so greedy for sympathy. mangan [plaintively]. but i have a presentiment. i really have. and you wouldn't listen. mrs hushabye. i was listening for something else. there was a sort of splendid drumming in the sky. did none of you hear it? it came from a distance and then died away. mangan. i tell you it was a train. mrs hushabye. and i tell you, alf, there is no train at this hour. the last is nine forty-five. mangan. but a goods train. mrs hushabye. not on our little line. they tack a truck on to the passenger train. what can it have been, hector? hector. heaven's threatening growl of disgust at us useless futile creatures. [fiercely]. i tell you, one of two things must happen. either out of that darkness some new creation will come to supplant us as we have supplanted the animals, or the heavens will fall in thunder and destroy us. lady utterword [in a cool instructive manner, wallowing comfortably in her hammock]. we have not supplanted the animals, hector. why do you ask heaven to destroy this house, which could be made quite comfortable if hesione had any notion of how to live? don't you know what is wrong with it? hector. we are wrong with it. there is no sense in us. we are useless, dangerous, and ought to be abolished. lady utterword. nonsense! hastings told me the very first day he came here, nearly twenty-four years ago, what is wrong with the house. captain shotover. what! the numskull said there was something wrong with my house! lady utterword. i said hastings said it; and he is not in the least a numskull. captain shotover. what's wrong with my house? lady utterword. just what is wrong with a ship, papa. wasn't it clever of hastings to see that? captain shotover. the man's a fool. there's nothing wrong with a ship. lady utterword. yes, there is. mrs hushabye. but what is it? don't be aggravating, addy. lady utterword. guess. hector. demons. daughters of the witch of zanzibar. demons. lady utterword. not a bit. i assure you, all this house needs to make it a sensible, healthy, pleasant house, with good appetites and sound sleep in it, is horses. mrs hushabye. horses! what rubbish! lady utterword. yes: horses. why have we never been able to let this house? because there are no proper stables. go anywhere in england where there are natural, wholesome, contented, and really nice english people; and what do you always find? that the stables are the real centre of the household; and that if any visitor wants to play the piano the whole room has to be upset before it can be opened, there are so many things piled on it. i never lived until i learned to ride; and i shall never ride really well because i didn't begin as a child. there are only two classes in good society in england: the equestrian classes and the neurotic classes. it isn't mere convention: everybody can see that the people who hunt are the right people and the people who don't are the wrong ones. captain shotover. there is some truth in this. my ship made a man of me; and a ship is the horse of the sea. lady utterword. exactly how hastings explained your being a gentleman. captain shotover. not bad for a numskull. bring the man here with you next time: i must talk to him. lady utterword. why is randall such an obvious rotter? he is well bred; he has been at a public school and a university; he has been in the foreign office; he knows the best people and has lived all his life among them. why is he so unsatisfactory, so contemptible? why can't he get a valet to stay with him longer than a few months? just because he is too lazy and pleasure-loving to hunt and shoot. he strums the piano, and sketches, and runs after married women, and reads literary books and poems. he actually plays the flute; but i never let him bring it into my house. if he would only--[she is interrupted by the melancholy strains of a flute coming from an open window above. she raises herself indignantly in the hammock]. randall, you have not gone to bed. have you been listening? [the flute replies pertly]. how vulgar! go to bed instantly, randall: how dare you? [the window is slammed down. she subsides]. how can anyone care for such a creature! mrs hushabye. addy: do you think ellie ought to marry poor alfred merely for his money? mangan [much alarmed]. what's that? mrs hushabye, are my affairs to be discussed like this before everybody? lady utterword. i don't think randall is listening now. mangan. everybody is listening. it isn't right. mrs hushabye. but in the dark, what does it matter? ellie doesn't mind. do you, ellie? ellie. not in the least. what is your opinion, lady utterword? you have so much good sense. mangan. but it isn't right. it--[mrs hushabye puts her hand on his mouth]. oh, very well. lady utterword. how much money have you, mr. mangan? mangan. really--no: i can't stand this. lady utterword. nonsense, mr mangan! it all turns on your income, doesn't it? mangan. well, if you come to that, how much money has she? ellie. none. lady utterword. you are answered, mr mangan. and now, as you have made miss dunn throw her cards on the table, you cannot refuse to show your own. mrs hushabye. come, alf! out with it! how much? mangan [baited out of all prudence]. well, if you want to know, i have no money and never had any. mrs hushabye. alfred, you mustn't tell naughty stories. mangan. i'm not telling you stories. i'm telling you the raw truth. lady utterword. then what do you live on, mr mangan? mangan. travelling expenses. and a trifle of commission. captain shotover. what more have any of us but travelling expenses for our life's journey? mrs hushabye. but you have factories and capital and things? mangan. people think i have. people think i'm an industrial napoleon. that's why miss ellie wants to marry me. but i tell you i have nothing. ellie. do you mean that the factories are like marcus's tigers? that they don't exist? mangan. they exist all right enough. but they're not mine. they belong to syndicates and shareholders and all sorts of lazy good-for-nothing capitalists. i get money from such people to start the factories. i find people like miss dunn's father to work them, and keep a tight hand so as to make them pay. of course i make them keep me going pretty well; but it's a dog's life; and i don't own anything. mrs hushabye. alfred, alfred, you are making a poor mouth of it to get out of marrying ellie. mangan. i'm telling the truth about my money for the first time in my life; and it's the first time my word has ever been doubted. lady utterword. how sad! why don't you go in for politics, mr mangan? mangan. go in for politics! where have you been living? i am in politics. lady utterword. i'm sure i beg your pardon. i never heard of you. mangan. let me tell you, lady utterword, that the prime minister of this country asked me to join the government without even going through the nonsense of an election, as the dictator of a great public department. lady utterword. as a conservative or a liberal? mangan. no such nonsense. as a practical business man. [they all burst out laughing]. what are you all laughing at? mrs husharye. oh, alfred, alfred! ellie. you! who have to get my father to do everything for you! mrs hushabye. you! who are afraid of your own workmen! hector. you! with whom three women have been playing cat and mouse all the evening! lady utterword. you must have given an immense sum to the party funds, mr mangan. mangan. not a penny out of my own pocket. the syndicate found the money: they knew how useful i should be to them in the government. lady utterword. this is most interesting and unexpected, mr mangan. and what have your administrative achievements been, so far? mangan. achievements? well, i don't know what you call achievements; but i've jolly well put a stop to the games of the other fellows in the other departments. every man of them thought he was going to save the country all by himself, and do me out of the credit and out of my chance of a title. i took good care that if they wouldn't let me do it they shouldn't do it themselves either. i may not know anything about my own machinery; but i know how to stick a ramrod into the other fellow's. and now they all look the biggest fools going. hector. and in heaven's name, what do you look like? mangan. i look like the fellow that was too clever for all the others, don't i? if that isn't a triumph of practical business, what is? hector. is this england, or is it a madhouse? lady utterword. do you expect to save the country, mr mangan? mangan. well, who else will? will your mr randall save it? lady utterword. randall the rotter! certainly not. mangan. will your brother-in-law save it with his moustache and his fine talk? hector. yes, if they will let me. mangan [sneering]. ah! will they let you? hector. no. they prefer you. mangan. very well then, as you're in a world where i'm appreciated and you're not, you'd best be civil to me, hadn't you? who else is there but me? lady utterword. there is hastings. get rid of your ridiculous sham democracy; and give hastings the necessary powers, and a good supply of bamboo to bring the british native to his senses: he will save the country with the greatest ease. captain shotover. it had better be lost. any fool can govern with a stick in his hand. i could govern that way. it is not god's way. the man is a numskull. lady utterword. the man is worth all of you rolled into one. what do you say, miss dunn? ellie. i think my father would do very well if people did not put upon him and cheat him and despise him because he is so good. mangan [contemptuously]. i think i see mazzini dunn getting into parliament or pushing his way into the government. we've not come to that yet, thank god! what do you say, mrs hushabye? mrs hushabye. oh, i say it matters very little which of you governs the country so long as we govern you. hector. we? who is we, pray? mrs hushabye. the devil's granddaughters, dear. the lovely women. hector [raising his hands as before]. fall, i say, and deliver us from the lures of satan! ellie. there seems to be nothing real in the world except my father and shakespeare. marcus's tigers are false; mr mangan's millions are false; there is nothing really strong and true about hesione but her beautiful black hair; and lady utterword's is too pretty to be real. the one thing that was left to me was the captain's seventh degree of concentration; and that turns out to be-- captain shotover. rum. lady utterword [placidly]. a good deal of my hair is quite genuine. the duchess of dithering offered me fifty guineas for this [touching her forehead] under the impression that it was a transformation; but it is all natural except the color. mangan [wildly]. look here: i'm going to take off all my clothes [he begins tearing off his coat]. lady utterword. [in consternation] { mr. mangan! captain shotover { what's that? hector. { ha! ha! do. do. ellie { please don't. mrs hushabye [catching his arm and stopping him]. alfred, for shame! are you mad? mangan. shame! what shame is there in this house? let's all strip stark naked. we may as well do the thing thoroughly when we're about it. we've stripped ourselves morally naked: well, let us strip ourselves physically naked as well, and see how we like it. i tell you i can't bear this. i was brought up to be respectable. i don't mind the women dyeing their hair and the men drinking: it's human nature. but it's not human nature to tell everybody about it. every time one of you opens your mouth i go like this [he cowers as if to avoid a missile], afraid of what will come next. how are we to have any self-respect if we don't keep it up that we're better than we really are? lady utterword. i quite sympathize with you, mr mangan. i have been through it all; and i know by experience that men and women are delicate plants and must be cultivated under glass. our family habit of throwing stones in all directions and letting the air in is not only unbearably rude, but positively dangerous. still, there is no use catching physical colds as well as moral ones; so please keep your clothes on. mangan. i'll do as i like: not what you tell me. am i a child or a grown man? i won't stand this mothering tyranny. i'll go back to the city, where i'm respected and made much of. mrs hushabye. goodbye, alf. think of us sometimes in the city. think of ellie's youth! ellie. think of hesione's eyes and hair! captain shotover. think of this garden in which you are not a dog barking to keep the truth out! hector. think of lady utterword's beauty! her good sense! her style! lady utterword. flatterer. think, mr. mangan, whether you can really do any better for yourself elsewhere: that is the essential point, isn't it? mangan [surrendering]. all right: all right. i'm done. have it your own way. only let me alone. i don't know whether i'm on my head or my heels when you all start on me like this. i'll stay. i'll marry her. i'll do anything for a quiet life. are you satisfied now? ellie. no. i never really intended to make you marry me, mr mangan. never in the depths of my soul. i only wanted to feel my strength: to know that you could not escape if i chose to take you. mangan [indignantly]. what! do you mean to say you are going to throw me over after my acting so handsome? lady utterword. i should not be too hasty, miss dunn. you can throw mr mangan over at any time up to the last moment. very few men in his position go bankrupt. you can live very comfortably on his reputation for immense wealth. ellie. i cannot commit bigamy, lady utterword. mrs hushabye. { bigamy! whatever on earth are you talking about, ellie? lady utterword [exclaiming altogether { bigamy! what do you mean, miss dunn? mangan { bigamy! do you mean to say you're married already? hector { bigamy! this is some enigma. ellie. only half an hour ago i became captain shotover's white wife. mrs hushabye. ellie! what nonsense! where? ellie. in heaven, where all true marriages are made. lady utterword. really, miss dunn! really, papa! mangan. he told me i was too old! and him a mummy! hector [quoting shelley]. "their altar the grassy earth outspreads and their priest the muttering wind." ellie. yes: i, ellie dunn, give my broken heart and my strong sound soul to its natural captain, my spiritual husband and second father. she draws the captain's arm through hers, and pats his hand. the captain remains fast asleep. mrs hushabye. oh, that's very clever of you, pettikins. very clever. alfred, you could never have lived up to ellie. you must be content with a little share of me. mangan [snifflng and wiping his eyes]. it isn't kind--[his emotion chokes him]. lady utterword. you are well out of it, mr mangan. miss dunn is the most conceited young woman i have met since i came back to england. mrs hushabye. oh, ellie isn't conceited. are you, pettikins? ellie. i know my strength now, hesione. mangan. brazen, i call you. brazen. mrs hushabye. tut, tut, alfred: don't be rude. don't you feel how lovely this marriage night is, made in heaven? aren't you happy, you and hector? open your eyes: addy and ellie look beautiful enough to please the most fastidious man: we live and love and have not a care in the world. we women have managed all that for you. why in the name of common sense do you go on as if you were two miserable wretches? captain shotover. i tell you happiness is no good. you can be happy when you are only half alive. i am happier now i am half dead than ever i was in my prime. but there is no blessing on my happiness. ellie [her face lighting up]. life with a blessing! that is what i want. now i know the real reason why i couldn't marry mr mangan: there would be no blessing on our marriage. there is a blessing on my broken heart. there is a blessing on your beauty, hesione. there is a blessing on your father's spirit. even on the lies of marcus there is a blessing; but on mr mangan's money there is none. mangan. i don't understand a word of that. ellie. neither do i. but i know it means something. mangan. don't say there was any difficulty about the blessing. i was ready to get a bishop to marry us. mrs hushabye. isn't he a fool, pettikins? hector [fiercely]. do not scorn the man. we are all fools. mazzini, in pyjamas and a richly colored silk dressing gown, comes from the house, on lady utterword's side. mrs hushabye. oh! here comes the only man who ever resisted me. what's the matter, mr dunn? is the house on fire? mazzini. oh, no: nothing's the matter: but really it's impossible to go to sleep with such an interesting conversation going on under one's window, and on such a beautiful night too. i just had to come down and join you all. what has it all been about? mrs hushabye. oh, wonderful things, soldier of freedom. hector. for example, mangan, as a practical business man, has tried to undress himself and has failed ignominiously; whilst you, as an idealist, have succeeded brilliantly. mazzini. i hope you don't mind my being like this, mrs hushabye. [he sits down on the campstool]. mrs hushabye. on the contrary, i could wish you always like that. lady utterword. your daughter's match is off, mr dunn. it seems that mr mangan, whom we all supposed to be a man of property, owns absolutely nothing. mazzini. well, of course i knew that, lady utterword. but if people believe in him and are always giving him money, whereas they don't believe in me and never give me any, how can i ask poor ellie to depend on what i can do for her? mangan. don't you run away with this idea that i have nothing. i-- hector. oh, don't explain. we understand. you have a couple of thousand pounds in exchequer bills, , shares worth tenpence a dozen, and half a dozen tabloids of cyanide of potassium to poison yourself with when you are found out. that's the reality of your millions. mazzini. oh no, no, no. he is quite honest: the businesses are genuine and perfectly legal. hector [disgusted]. yah! not even a great swindler! mangan. so you think. but i've been too many for some honest men, for all that. lady utterword. there is no pleasing you, mr mangan. you are determined to be neither rich nor poor, honest nor dishonest. mangan. there you go again. ever since i came into this silly house i have been made to look like a fool, though i'm as good a man in this house as in the city. ellie [musically]. yes: this silly house, this strangely happy house, this agonizing house, this house without foundations. i shall call it heartbreak house. mrs hushabye. stop, ellie; or i shall howl like an animal. mangan [breaks into a low snivelling]!!! mrs husahbye. there! you have set alfred off. ellie. i like him best when he is howling. captain shotover. silence! [mangan subsides into silence]. i say, let the heart break in silence. hector. do you accept that name for your house? captain shotover. it is not my house: it is only my kennel. hector. we have been too long here. we do not live in this house: we haunt it. lady utterword [heart torn]. it is dreadful to think how you have been here all these years while i have gone round the world. i escaped young; but it has drawn me back. it wants to break my heart too. but it shan't. i have left you and it behind. it was silly of me to come back. i felt sentimental about papa and hesione and the old place. i felt them calling to me. mazzini. but what a very natural and kindly and charming human feeling, lady utterword! lady utterword. so i thought, mr dunn. but i know now that it was only the last of my influenza. i found that i was not remembered and not wanted. captain shotover. you left because you did not want us. was there no heartbreak in that for your father? you tore yourself up by the roots; and the ground healed up and brought forth fresh plants and forgot you. what right had you to come back and probe old wounds? mrs hushabye. you were a complete stranger to me at first, addy; but now i feel as if you had never been away. lady utterword. thank you, hesione; but the influenza is quite cured. the place may be heartbreak house to you, miss dunn, and to this gentleman from the city who seems to have so little self-control; but to me it is only a very ill-regulated and rather untidy villa without any stables. hector. inhabited by--? ellie. a crazy old sea captain and a young singer who adores him. mrs hushabye. a sluttish female, trying to stave off a double chin and an elderly spread, vainly wooing a born soldier of freedom. mazzini. oh, really, mrs hushabye-- mangan. a member of his majesty's government that everybody sets down as a nincompoop: don't forget him, lady utterword. lady utterword. and a very fascinating gentleman whose chief occupation is to be married to my sister. hector. all heartbroken imbeciles. mazzini. oh no. surely, if i may say so, rather a favorable specimen of what is best in our english culture. you are very charming people, most advanced, unprejudiced, frank, humane, unconventional, democratic, free-thinking, and everything that is delightful to thoughtful people. mrs hushabye. you do us proud, mazzini. mazzini. i am not flattering, really. where else could i feel perfectly at ease in my pyjamas? i sometimes dream that i am in very distinguished society, and suddenly i have nothing on but my pyjamas! sometimes i haven't even pyjamas. and i always feel overwhelmed with confusion. but here, i don't mind in the least: it seems quite natural. lady utterword. an infallible sign that you are now not in really distinguished society, mr dunn. if you were in my house, you would feel embarrassed. mazzini. i shall take particular care to keep out of your house, lady utterword. lady utterword. you will be quite wrong, mr dunn. i should make you very comfortable; and you would not have the trouble and anxiety of wondering whether you should wear your purple and gold or your green and crimson dressing-gown at dinner. you complicate life instead of simplifying it by doing these ridiculous things. ellie. your house is not heartbreak house: is it, lady utterword? hector. yet she breaks hearts, easy as her house is. that poor devil upstairs with his flute howls when she twists his heart, just as mangan howls when my wife twists his. lady utterword. that is because randall has nothing to do but have his heart broken. it is a change from having his head shampooed. catch anyone breaking hastings' heart! captain shotover. the numskull wins, after all. lady utterword. i shall go back to my numskull with the greatest satisfaction when i am tired of you all, clever as you are. mangan [huffily]. i never set up to be clever. lady utterword. i forgot you, mr mangan. mangan. well, i don't see that quite, either. lady utterword. you may not be clever, mr mangan; but you are successful. mangan. but i don't want to be regarded merely as a successful man. i have an imagination like anyone else. i have a presentiment. mrs hushabye. oh, you are impossible, alfred. here i am devoting myself to you; and you think of nothing but your ridiculous presentiment. you bore me. come and talk poetry to me under the stars. [she drags him away into the darkness]. mangan [tearfully, as he disappears]. yes: it's all very well to make fun of me; but if you only knew-- hector [impatiently]. how is all this going to end? mazzini. it won't end, mr hushabye. life doesn't end: it goes on. ellie. oh, it can't go on forever. i'm always expecting something. i don't know what it is; but life must come to a point sometime. lady utterword. the point for a young woman of your age is a baby. hector. yes, but, damn it, i have the same feeling; and i can't have a baby. lady utterword. by deputy, hector. hector. but i have children. all that is over and done with for me: and yet i too feel that this can't last. we sit here talking, and leave everything to mangan and to chance and to the devil. think of the powers of destruction that mangan and his mutual admiration gang wield! it's madness: it's like giving a torpedo to a badly brought up child to play at earthquakes with. mazzini. i know. i used often to think about that when i was young. hector. think! what's the good of thinking about it? why didn't you do something? mazzini. but i did. i joined societies and made speeches and wrote pamphlets. that was all i could do. but, you know, though the people in the societies thought they knew more than mangan, most of them wouldn't have joined if they had known as much. you see they had never had any money to handle or any men to manage. every year i expected a revolution, or some frightful smash-up: it seemed impossible that we could blunder and muddle on any longer. but nothing happened, except, of course, the usual poverty and crime and drink that we are used to. nothing ever does happen. it's amazing how well we get along, all things considered. lady utterword. perhaps somebody cleverer than you and mr mangan was at work all the time. mazzini. perhaps so. though i was brought up not to believe in anything, i often feel that there is a great deal to be said for the theory of an over-ruling providence, after all. lady utterword. providence! i meant hastings. mazzini. oh, i beg your pardon, lady utterword. captain shotover. every drunken skipper trusts to providence. but one of the ways of providence with drunken skippers is to run them on the rocks. mazzini. very true, no doubt, at sea. but in politics, i assure you, they only run into jellyfish. nothing happens. captain shotover. at sea nothing happens to the sea. nothing happens to the sky. the sun comes up from the east and goes down to the west. the moon grows from a sickle to an arc lamp, and comes later and later until she is lost in the light as other things are lost in the darkness. after the typhoon, the flying-fish glitter in the sunshine like birds. it's amazing how they get along, all things considered. nothing happens, except something not worth mentioning. ellie. what is that, o captain, o my captain? captain shotover [savagely]. nothing but the smash of the drunken skipper's ship on the rocks, the splintering of her rotten timbers, the tearing of her rusty plates, the drowning of the crew like rats in a trap. ellie. moral: don't take rum. captain shotover [vehemently]. that is a lie, child. let a man drink ten barrels of rum a day, he is not a drunken skipper until he is a drifting skipper. whilst he can lay his course and stand on his bridge and steer it, he is no drunkard. it is the man who lies drinking in his bunk and trusts to providence that i call the drunken skipper, though he drank nothing but the waters of the river jordan. ellie. splendid! and you haven't had a drop for an hour. you see you don't need it: your own spirit is not dead. captain shotover. echoes: nothing but echoes. the last shot was fired years ago. hector. and this ship that we are all in? this soul's prison we call england? captain shotover. the captain is in his bunk, drinking bottled ditch-water; and the crew is gambling in the forecastle. she will strike and sink and split. do you think the laws of god will be suspended in favor of england because you were born in it? hector. well, i don't mean to be drowned like a rat in a trap. i still have the will to live. what am i to do? captain shotover. do? nothing simpler. learn your business as an englishman. hector. and what may my business as an englishman be, pray? captain shotover. navigation. learn it and live; or leave it and be damned. ellie. quiet, quiet: you'll tire yourself. mazzini. i thought all that once, captain; but i assure you nothing will happen. a dull distant explosion is heard. hector [starting up]. what was that? captain shotover. something happening [he blows his whistle]. breakers ahead! the light goes out. hector [furiously]. who put that light out? who dared put that light out? nurse guinness [running in from the house to the middle of the esplanade]. i did, sir. the police have telephoned to say we'll be summoned if we don't put that light out: it can be seen for miles. hector. it shall be seen for a hundred miles [he dashes into the house]. nurse guinness. the rectory is nothing but a heap of bricks, they say. unless we can give the rector a bed he has nowhere to lay his head this night. captain shotover. the church is on the rocks, breaking up. i told him it would unless it headed for god's open sea. nurse guinness. and you are all to go down to the cellars. captain shotover. go there yourself, you and all the crew. batten down the hatches. nurse guinness. and hide beside the coward i married! i'll go on the roof first. [the lamp lights up again]. there! mr hushabye's turned it on again. the burglar [hurrying in and appealing to nurse guinness]. here: where's the way to that gravel pit? the boot-boy says there's a cave in the gravel pit. them cellars is no use. where's the gravel pit, captain? nurse guinness. go straight on past the flagstaff until you fall into it and break your dirty neck. [she pushes him contemptuously towards the flagstaff, and herself goes to the foot of the hammock and waits there, as it were by ariadne's cradle]. another and louder explosion is heard. the burglar stops and stands trembling. ellie [rising]. that was nearer. captain shotover. the next one will get us. [he rises]. stand by, all hands, for judgment. the burglar. oh my lordy god! [he rushes away frantically past the flagstaff into the gloom]. mrs hushabye [emerging panting from the darkness]. who was that running away? [she comes to ellie]. did you hear the explosions? and the sound in the sky: it's splendid: it's like an orchestra: it's like beethoven. ellie. by thunder, hesione: it is beethoven. she and hesione throw themselves into one another's arms in wild excitement. the light increases. mazzini [anxiously]. the light is getting brighter. nurse guinness [looking up at the house]. it's mr hushabye turning on all the lights in the house and tearing down the curtains. randall [rushing in in his pyjamas, distractedly waving a flute]. ariadne, my soul, my precious, go down to the cellars: i beg and implore you, go down to the cellars! lady utterword [quite composed in her hammock]. the governor's wife in the cellars with the servants! really, randall! randall. but what shall i do if you are killed? lady utterword. you will probably be killed, too, randall. now play your flute to show that you are not afraid; and be good. play us "keep the home fires burning." nurse guinness [grimly]. they'll keep the home fires burning for us: them up there. randall [having tried to play]. my lips are trembling. i can't get a sound. mazzini. i hope poor mangan is safe. mrs hushabye. he is hiding in the cave in the gravel pit. captain shotover. my dynamite drew him there. it is the hand of god. hector [returning from the house and striding across to his former place]. there is not half light enough. we should be blazing to the skies. ellie [tense with excitement]. set fire to the house, marcus. mrs hushabye. my house! no. hector. i thought of that; but it would not be ready in time. captain shotover. the judgment has come. courage will not save you; but it will show that your souls are still live. mrs hushabye. sh-sh! listen: do you hear it now? it's magnificent. they all turn away from the house and look up, listening. hector [gravely]. miss dunn, you can do no good here. we of this house are only moths flying into the candle. you had better go down to the cellar. ellie [scornfully]. i don't think. mazzini. ellie, dear, there is no disgrace in going to the cellar. an officer would order his soldiers to take cover. mr hushabye is behaving like an amateur. mangan and the burglar are acting very sensibly; and it is they who will survive. ellie. let them. i shall behave like an amateur. but why should you run any risk? mazzini. think of the risk those poor fellows up there are running! nurse guinness. think of them, indeed, the murdering blackguards! what next? a terrific explosion shakes the earth. they reel back into their seats, or clutch the nearest support. they hear the falling of the shattered glass from the windows. mazzini. is anyone hurt? hector. where did it fall? nurse guinness [in hideous triumph]. right in the gravel pit: i seen it. serve un right! i seen it [she runs away towards the gravel pit, laughing harshly]. hector. one husband gone. captain shotover. thirty pounds of good dynamite wasted. mazzini. oh, poor mangan! hector. are you immortal that you need pity him? our turn next. they wait in silence and intense expectation. hesione and ellie hold each other's hand tight. a distant explosion is heard. mrs hushabye [relaxing her grip]. oh! they have passed us. lady utterword. the danger is over, randall. go to bed. captain shotover. turn in, all hands. the ship is safe. [he sits down and goes asleep]. ellie [disappointedly]. safe! hector [disgustedly]. yes, safe. and how damnably dull the world has become again suddenly! [he sits down]. mazzini [sitting down]. i was quite wrong, after all. it is we who have survived; and mangan and the burglar-- hector. --the two burglars-- lady utterword. --the two practical men of business-- mazzini. --both gone. and the poor clergyman will have to get a new house. mrs hushabye. but what a glorious experience! i hope they'll come again tomorrow night. ellie [radiant at the prospect]. oh, i hope so. randall at last succeeds in keeping the home fires burning on his flute. the production and performance of this play is granted to the public domain. the included music has separate licensing, described within. heartbreak house by george bernard shaw original production the garrick theatre, nyc sound recording at the ensemble studio theatre, nyc cast ellie dunn - georgia southern captain shotover - richard kent green hesione hushabye (hessy) - temi rose hector hushabye (marcus darnley) - paul singleton lady utterwood (addie) - lucy mcmichael boss mangan (alfred) - don brennan randall utterword - ross hewitt mazzini dunn - jerry rodgers billy dunn - matthew l. imparato guinness - charlotte hampden narrators - jason daniel siegel and elena sapora music credits temi rose production of heartbreak house by george bernard shaw act one heartbreak house act part felix mendelssohn, four songs without words. benjamin moser, solo keyboard. http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/ / /e/ e ba f da /mendelssohn_foursongs.mp ?c_id= &expiration= &hwt=baccc dc d cf a df e www.gardnermuseum.org/music/listen/music_library attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives . international - cc by-nc-nd . https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / and wolfgang amadeus mozart, piano sonata in f major, k. /k. . jonathan biss , solo keyboard. http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/ /a/e/ ae db e /mozart_k k .mp ?c_id= &expiration= &hwt= a ec aa c bba b www.gardnermuseum.org/music/listen/music_library attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives . international - cc by-nc-nd . https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / act part - wolfgang amadeus mozart, piano sonata in f major, k. /k. . jonathan biss , solo keyboard. http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/ /a/e/ ae db e /mozart_k k .mp ?c_id= &expiration= &hwt= a ec aa c bba b www.gardnermuseum.org/music/listen/music_library attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives . international - cc by-nc-nd . https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / act part - wolfgang amadeus mozart, clarinet quintet in a major k. . a far cry, musicians from marlboro, anthony mcgill, chamber orchestra. http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/ /f/d/ fd dc a /mozart_k .mp ?c_id= &expiration= &hwt=b a e c d f c fa e ce www.gardnermuseum.org/music/listen/music_library attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives . international - cc by-nc-nd . https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / act part felix mendelssohn, four songs without words. benjamin moser, solo keyboard. http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/ / /e/ e ba f da /mendelssohn_foursongs.mp ?c_id= &expiration= &hwt=baccc dc d cf a df e www.gardnermuseum.org/music/listen/music_library attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives . international - cc by-nc-nd . https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / and wolfgang amadeus mozart, clarinet quintet in a major k. . a far cry, musicians from marlboro, anthony mcgill, chamber orchestra. http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/ /f/d/ fd dc a /mozart_k .mp ?c_id= &expiration= &hwt=b a e c d f c fa e ce www.gardnermuseum.org/music/listen/music_library attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives . international - cc by-nc-nd . https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / act two heartbreak house act part christoph willibald gluck, orfeo ed euridice (excerpt). paula robison, mariko anraku, flute and harp. http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/c/ /f/c f f a cc d /gluck_orfeo.mp ?c_id= &expiration= &hwt= afcd ad f aab f c www.gardnermuseum.org/music/listen/music_library attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives . international - cc by-nc-nd . https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / act part carl reineke, flute sonata in e major op. ('undine'. dora seres, emese mali, flute and keyboard. http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/ / /b/ b bcfa b /reinecke_op .mp ?c_id= &expiration= &hwt=aff f ed fcd a b ad www.gardnermuseum.org/music/listen/music_library attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives . international - cc by-nc-nd . https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / act part antonio vivaldi, concerto for flute and orchestra in f major ('con sordino'. gardner chamber orchestra. http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/ / / / e daf b/vivaldi_bassonconcertoaminor.mp ?c_id= &expiration= &hwt=cf ba f f e f dc www.gardnermuseum.org/music/listen/music_library attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives . international - cc by-nc-nd . https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / act part gaetano donizetti, italian love songs. anton belov, lydia brown, voice and keyboard. http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/ /d/ / d cfec b e/italiansongs.mp ?c_id= &expiration= &hwt= eaa e db f c c d www.gardnermuseum.org/music/listen/music_library attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives . international - cc by-nc-nd . https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / and pyotr ilyich tchaikovsky, meditation. nick kendall, robert koenig, string and keyboard. http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/ / /e/ ea aca b a /tchaikovsky_meditation.mp ?c_id= &expiration= &hwt= a cd b b b e b eb d www.gardnermuseum.org/music/listen/music_library attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives . international - cc by-nc-nd . https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / act part johannes brahms, sonata for cello and piano, no. e minor, op. . wendy warner, eileen buck, cello and keyboard. http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/ /d/ / d a e a /brahms_op .mp ?c_id= &expiration= &hwt=c d b b bb ba d e ad www.gardnermuseum.org/music/listen/music_library attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives . international - cc by-nc-nd . https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / and frederic chopin. nocturne for piano no. in c minor, op. no. . cecile licard, solo keyboard. http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/ / /e/ ea bf f /chopin_op no .mp ?c_id= &expiration= &hwt= d b a e ee c e d a www.gardnermuseum.org/music/listen/music_library attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives . international - cc by-nc-nd . https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / act part johannes brahms, sonata for cello and piano, no. e minor, op. . wendy warner, eileen buck, cello and keyboard. http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/ /d/ / d a e a /brahms_op .mp ?c_id= &expiration= &hwt=c d b b bb ba d e ad www.gardnermuseum.org/music/listen/music_library attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives . international - cc by-nc-nd . https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / act three - heartbreak house act part alban berg, four pieces for clarinet and piano, op. . carol mcgonnell, steven beck, clarinet and keyboard. http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/ / / / b ff ee b f/berg_op _mcgonnell_beck.mp ?c_id= &expiration= &hwt= ae f e c d ee www.gardnermuseum.org/music/listen/music_library attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives . international - cc by-nc-nd . https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / act part carl reineke, flute sonata in e major op. ('undine'). dora seres, emese mali, flute and keyboard. http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/ / /b/ b bcfa b /reinecke_op .mp ?c_id= &expiration= &hwt=aff f ed fcd a b ad www.gardnermuseum.org/music/listen/music_library attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives . international - cc by-nc-nd . https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / and ludwig van beethoven, coriolan overture, op. . walter bruno, conductor. columbia symphony orchestra https://www.liberliber.it/mediateca/musica/b/beethoven/op _coriolan_overture/wb/mp /beethoven_op _wb_ _alleg_etc.mp www.liberliber.it/online/opere/musica/ attribution-noncommercial-sharealike . international - cc by-nc-sa . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/ . /deed.it flaming youth warner fabian [illustration: logo] boni and liveright publishers new york copyright - , by boni & liveright, inc. _printed in the united states of america_ first printing, january, second printing, february, third printing, february, fourth printing, march, fifth printing, march, a word from the writer to the reader: "those who know will not tell; those who tell do not know." the old saying applies to woman in to-day's literature. women writers when they write of women, evade and conceal and palliate. ancestral reticences, sex loyalties, dissuade the pen. men writers when they write of women, do so without comprehension. men understand women only as women choose to have them, with one exception, the family physician. he knows. he sees through the body to the soul. but he may not tell what he sees. professional honour binds him. only through the unaccustomed medium of fiction and out of the vatic incense-cloud of pseudonymity may he speak the truth. being a physician, i must conceal my identity, and, not less securely, the identity of those whom i picture. there is no such suburb as dorrisdale ... and there are a score of dorrisdales. there is no such family as the fentrisses ... and there are a thousand fentriss families. for the delineation which i have striven to present, honestly and unreservedly, of the twentieth century woman of the luxury-class i beg only the indulgence permissible to a neophyte's pen. i have no other apologia to offer. to the woman of the period thus set forth, restless, seductive, greedy, discontented, craving sensation, unrestrained, a little morbid, more than a little selfish, intelligent, uneducated, sybaritic, following blind instincts and perverse fancies, slack of mind as she is trim of body, neurotic and vigorous, a worshipper of tinsel gods at perfumed altars, fit mate for the hurried, reckless and cynical man of the age, predestined mother of--what manner of being?: to her i dedicate this study of herself. w. f. flaming youth part i chapter i the room was vital with air and fresh with the scent of many flowers. it was a happy room, a loved room, even a petted room. there was about it a sense of stir, of life, of habitual holiday. some rooms retain these echoes. people say of them that they have character or express individuality. but this one's character was composite, possessing attributes of the many who had come and gone and laughed and played and perhaps loved there, at the behest of its mistress. a captious critic might have complained that it was over-crowded. the same critic might have said the same of mona fentriss's life. though a chiefly contributory part of the room's atmosphere, mona fentriss's personality was not fully reflected in her immediate environment. the room was not a married room. it suggested none of the staidness, the habitude, the even acceptances of conjugal life. the bed stood outside, on the sleeping porch. it was a single bed. unfriendly commentators upon the fentriss ménage had been known to express the conviction that marriage was not a specially important element in mrs. fentriss's joyous existence. nevertheless there were the three children, all girls. there was also fentriss. the mistress of the room lolled on a cushioned chaise longue near the side window. she was a golden-brown, strong, delicately rounded woman, glowing with an effect of triumphant and imperishable youth. not one of her features but was faulty by strict artistic tenets; even the lustrous eyes were set at slightly different levels. yet the total effect was that of loveliness; yes, more, of compelling charm. one would have guessed her to be still short of thirty. "this is final, is it?" she asked evenly of a man who was standing near the door. "it's final enough," he answered. he shambled across the room to her side, moving like a bear. like a bear's his exterior was rough, shaggy, and seemed not to fit him well. his face was irregularly square, homely, thoughtful, and humorous. "want to cry?" he asked. "no. i want to swear." "go ahead." downstairs a door opened and closed. there followed the rhythmic crepitation of ice against metal. "there's ralph home," interpreted the wife. "call down and tell him to shake up one for me." "better not." "oh, you be damned!" she retorted, twinkling at him. "you've finished your day's job as a physician. i need one." as he obediently went out she mused, with the instinct of the competent housekeeper: "gin's gone to twenty-five dollars a gallon. that'll rasp poor old ralph. i wonder how much this will jar him." by "this" she meant the news which she had just forced from the reluctant lips of dr. robert osterhout. she pursued her line of thought. "who'll take over the house? the girls know nothing about running it. perhaps he'll marry again. he's very young for fifty." the two men entered, fentriss carrying the shaker. he set it down, crossed the room and kissed his wife. there was an effect of habitual and well-bred gallantry in the act. he was a slender, alert, companionable looking man with a quizzical expression. dr. osterhout poured out a cocktail which he offered to mrs. fentriss. she regarded it contemptuously. "bob, you devil! that's only half a drink." "it's more than you ought to have." "pour me a real one. at once! ralph; _you_ do it. come on." with a shrug and a deprecatory smile at the physician, ralph fentriss filled the glass to the brim. the fentriss cocktails were famous far beyond the suburban limits of dorrisdale for length as well as flavour. "here's to prohibition," said their concoctor in his suave voice, before drinking; "and to your better health, my dear." "a toi," she responded carelessly. "leave the shaker, will you, ralph? bob and i are talking." fentriss nodded and went. a moment later the concert grand in the big living room below stairs responded to a touch at once delicate, strong and distinctive. "how i used to love his music!" said mona fentriss half to herself; "and still do," she added. "bob." she turned upon her physician with laughing reproach in her eyes. "don't you know better, after all these years, than to try to keep me from doing anything i want to do? i always get what i want." "if you don't, it's not for lack of trying." "i don't even have to try very hard. life has been a generous godfather to me. but i've always wanted more. like oliver twist, wasn't it? or jephthah's daughter?" dr. osterhout grinned. "it was the horse leech's daughters that were always crying 'give! give!'" "why cry for it? reach out and help yourself," she said gaily. "them's my principles. and now the fairy godfather is going to cut me off with a shilling. or a year. or less." "unless you obey orders it'll be considerably less." "let it! i'd rather do as i please while it lasts. "'i've taken my fun where i found it, i've rogued and i've ranged in my time,'" sang ralph fentriss at the piano below to music of his own composing. "so have i," murmured his wife. her eyes grew brilliant, craving, excited as they wandered to the flower-decked mantel upon which stood half a dozen photographs. all were of men. though they varied in age and indications of character, they presented a typical similarity in being well-groomed and attractive. they might all have belonged to the same club. "bob, do many women confess to their doctors?" "lots." "to you?" "no. i don't let 'em." "why not? i should think it would be interesting." "it's only a trick to gratify the senses through recollection," said the blunt physician. "reflected lechery." "you know too much, bob. then you won't be my father confessor?" "i doubt if you could tell me much," he said slowly. a smile, unabashed and mischievous, played upon her lips. "that's an ambiguous sort of answer. sometimes i suspect that very little gets past you." "i'm trained to observation," he remarked. "and to silence. so you're safe. i think it would do me good to confess to you." she grew still and pensive. "bob, if i'd been a roman catholic do you suppose i'd have been--different?" "doubted. would you want to be?" "i don't really know that i would. anyway i'm what i had to be. we all are." "fatalism is a convenient excuse." "no; but i am," she insisted. "it's temperament. temperament is fate. for a woman, anyway," she added with a flash of insight. "you don't blame me, do you? i couldn't help it, could i?" he smiled down at her, tolerant but uncompromising. "oh, don't stand there looking like god," she fretted. "do you know what i'd resolved to do? will you laugh at me if i tell you?" "probably. therefore tell me." "i was going to be a pattern of all the proprieties after i turned forty." "too early," he pronounced judicially. "why? what do you mean?" "make it fifty." she knit her smooth forehead. "because i wouldn't be pretty then?" "oh, you'd charm and attract men at seventy. but you wouldn't have such a--well, such an urgent temperament. that passes, usually." "bob! you beast!" but she laughed. "you're very much the medical man, aren't you?" "it's my business in life." "well, the whole discussion is what you call an academic question, anyhow. if you and your hateful medical science are right, i'll never see thirty-eight, let alone forty. i don't feel thirty-seven. there's so much life in me. too much, i suppose." "no. not too much." "no more flutters for pretty mona," she mused. "at least she's had her share. do you think ralph cares?" "you're the one to know that." "if he does, he's never given any sign. but then, it's years since he's been true to me." her companion made a slight, uninterpretable gesture. "shall i tell him? your verdict, i mean." "great judas, no! why stir him up? it's going to be hard enough on him anyway." "is it?" she said wistfully. "he'll miss me in a way, won't he? i _am_ fond of him, too, you know." "yes. i understand that." "but you don't understand why i've gone trouble-hunting, out of bounds." "yes. i understand that, too." "perhaps you do. you understand lots more than one would think from your dear, old, stupid face." she paused. "tell me something, honestly, bob. has there been much talk about me?" "oh, there's always talk and always will be about anyone as brilliant and vivid as you." "don't evade. some of the older crowd look at me as if they thought i was the scarlet woman come back to life. i'm _not_ the scarlet woman, bob. only a dash of pink." he smiled indulgently. "it's strange," she mused, "how the tradition of behaviour clings in the blood, in that set. your set, bob. ah, well! discretion is the better part of virtue, as someone said. and i haven't been discreet, even if i have been virtuous. you believe i've been, don't you, bob?" "what, discreet?" again she laughed, showing little, even, animal-like teeth. "no; the other thing." "i believe whatever you want me to." "meaning that you reserve your own opinion. but you're a staunch friend, anyway.... the trouble with me is that i was born too soon. i really belong with this wild young age that's coming on the stage just as i'm going off; with the girls. listen!" below stairs fentriss, still at the piano, had swung into the rhythms of the second rhapsody, wild and broken as white water seething through a rock-beset gorge. "that's the measure they dance to, the new generation. doesn't it get into your torpid blood, bob? don't you wish you were young again? to be a desperado of twenty! they're all desperadoes, these kids, all of them with any life in their veins; the girls as well as the boys; maybe more than the boys. even connie with her eyes of a vestal. ah!" a new note had merged with the music, a hoarse, childish croon, following the mad measure with an interwoven recitative. "that's patricia. she's dancing to it." "how can you tell?" asked the physician. "by the way she's singing. little devil! i wonder what it'll be like by the time she's grown up," mused the mother. "which won't be so long, now." "so it won't. i keep forgetting that. she seems such a baby. what a queer little creature it is, bob!" "she's a terror. but there's something lovable about her, too. a touch of you in her, mona." "of me? she's no more like me than i'm like my namesake of the well-known lisa family. nor like the older girls, either. well, why shouldn't she be different from them? coming five years after i'd supposed all that sort of thing was over. she was pure accident. how i tried to get out of having her! perhaps that's why she's such a strange little elf. but ralph's crazy about her--as much as he can be crazy about anything. i thought for a time she'd bring us together again." "but you found variety more amusing than pure domesticity," suggested the physician. "i? it wasn't i that began it; it was ralph. you know i never went in for even the mildest flirtation until long after pat was born; until i began to get bored with the sameness of life." "boredom leads more women astray than passion," pronounced the other oracularly; "in our set, anyway." "oh, astray," she fretted. "don't use mid-victorian pulpit language." "i was only philosophising about our lot in general." "we're a pretty rotten lot, aren't we! though i suppose the people you don't know, the people that nobody knows, are just as rotten. ah, well, so long as one preserves appearances! and ralph has no kick coming. he'd gone on the loose before i ever looked sidewise at any other man. they say he's got a floozie now, tucked away in a cozy corner somewhere." "do they?" "has he?" "ask him." "too good a sport," she retorted. "i shouldn't be asking you if i thought you'd tell me. very likely you don't know. _he_ hasn't been boring you with confessions, i'll bet! men don't, do they?" "only of their symptoms." "but they confess to women." "the more fools they!" "can't i wring a confession out of you?" she teased. "why haven't you ever made love to me, bob?" "too much afraid of losing what little i've got of you," he returned sombrely. "how do you know you wouldn't have got more? how do you know that i wouldn't have given you--everything?" "everything you could give wouldn't be enough." "pig! you don't want much, do you!" "have you ever really cared for any of your partners in flirtation?" "you speak as if i'd had dozens," she pouted. "it isn't a question of the quantity but of the quality of your attachments. if i'd ever asked anything of you it would have been--well, romance." he laughed quietly at himself. "something you haven't got to give. you see, i'm a romantic and you're not. you've sought excitement, admiration, change. but not 'the light that never was on land or sea.' you're adventurous and passionate, but not romantic. it's quite a different order of thing." "and you're brutal. besides, you're wrong; quite wrong." "am i?" his glance ranged the faces on the mantel. "which one?" she gave him a swift smile. "he isn't there. you never saw him. his name was cary scott." "was? is he dead?" "he's out of my life; or almost. he's married. he was hardly more than a boy when i knew him. nine years ago in paris. he was studying at the polytechnique, doing his post-graduate work and doing it brilliantly, i believe. he went mad over me. my fault; i meant him to; it amused me. i was attracted, too. there was a vividness of youth about him. i didn't realise how much i was going to miss him out of my life, though, until we came back. i did miss him. like hell!" "he was the one to whom you really gave?" "hardly so much as a kiss. i wanted to keep it that way, and he was slave to me. he was an innocent sort of soul, i think. every year he sends me a card on my birthday--that was the date of our first meeting--to remind me that sometime we are to take up our friendship again. i never answer but i never quite forget." "ah, that's the sort of thing that i'd have asked but never expected of you." "no; you never could have had it. that's the sort of thing that one gives but once." suddenly she shot out her white, strong hand and gripped his wrist. "if you'd ever been really in love with me," she said fiercely, "you wouldn't let me die. you'd find some way to save me." his rugged face softened with pain. "my dear," he said, "don't you know that if there were any way in the world, any sacrifice----" "yes; i know; i know! i'm sorry. that was a rotten thing to say." "you've taken it all like such a good sport." "i'm trying. let's not talk of it any more. let's talk of the girls. bob, how much is there to heredity?" "oh, lord! ask me to square the circle. or make the fifth hole in one. or something easy." "i was just thinking. who's going to look after them? ralph won't be of much use. he's too detached." "well, the family physician can be of service in some ways," he said slowly. "particularly if he chances to be a family friend, too." "would you?" she cried eagerly. "they'll be a handful. any modern girl is. but i'd rest easier, knowing you were on the job. speaking of resting, i had rather a rotten night last night." "what were you doing in the evening?" "we had a little poker party here in the room." he shrugged his heavy shoulders. "if you won't pay any heed to your doctor's orders----" "you know i won't." "then you've got to pay the piper." "haven't you got anything that will make me sleep?" "were the pains bad?" "pretty stiff. will they get worse?" "i'm afraid so, my dear." "more dope, then, please." "dangerous." "well?" she smiled up into his face, pleadingly, temptingly. "well, bob?" her voice dropped. "what's the difference? since it's a hopeless case. don't be an inquisitor and sentence me to torture in the name of your god, science," she whispered. he yielded. "all right. but you'll stand it as long as you can?" "good old bob!" she murmured. she reached for his hand, twined her fingers around it, nestled it into her firm and rounded neck. then she laughed. "well?" he queried. "association of ideas," she answered. "i was thinking of cary scott." he winced and drew his hand away. "what of cary scott?" "if he doesn't come back pretty soon, what a joke it will be on him!" chapter ii the fentriss house stood high on a knoll overlooking the country club which constituted dorrisdale's chief attraction as a suburb. mona fentriss had built it with a legacy of $ , left to her just before patricia's birth, and ralph had put in the $ , necessary to complete the work after the architect's original estimate had been exhausted, leaving the place still unfinished by one wing, all the decorations, and most of the plumbing. the extra cost was due largely to the constantly altering schemes of mona. she wished her house "just so," and just so she finally had it from the little conservatory off the side hallway to the comfortable servants' suite on the third floor. if the result was, architecturally, a plate of hash, as ralph called it, nevertheless the house was particularly easy to live in. to mona fentriss belonged the credit for this. what she had of conscience was enlisted in her domestic economy. as ralph fentriss's wife she might be casually unfaithful. as mistress of his household she was impeccable. the effortless seductiveness of her personality established its special atmosphere throughout the place. it made the servants her devoted and unwearying aids, and broadly speaking, a household is much what the servants make it. people gravitate naturally to a well-run place. life seems so suave and easy there. guests of all ages came and went at holiday knoll, mostly men. mona cared little for women, and her own strong magnetism for men had been inherited by her two grown daughters. there was no special selectiveness about the company. all that was required of them was that they should be superficially presentable and contribute something of amusement or entertainment to the composite life of the ménage. at least nine-tenths of them were making love to constance or mary delia or mona herself, openly or surreptitiously as the case might be. it made a pleasantly restless and stimulating atmosphere. in the city itself there would have been criticism of the easy standards; indeed there was more or less which drifted out to the knoll. but judgments in the suburbs are kindlier. and dorrisdale is quite fashionable enough to establish its own standards. any week-end would find half a dozen or more cars bunched on the driveway, having brought their quota of pleasure-seeking youth out from new york or from philadelphia or baltimore or princeton. the girls had carte blanche, within reasonable limits, for invitations, which they were careful not to abuse. a few errors in judgment had reacted unpleasantly not only upon themselves but upon their undesirable guests. mona fentriss could act with decision and dignity within her own walls. her social discrimination was keen if not rigid, and she possessed a blighting gift of sarcasm, mainly imitative, the most deadly kind used against the young. neither of the girls was likely ever to forget her imitation of connie's friend from minneapolis whose method of handling a fork, according to mrs. fentriss's theory, had been derived from bayonet practice in camp; nor her presentation of a steamship acquaintance of dee's who had too pathetically bewailed his losses at bridge. partly from theory, partly as a trouble-saving device, the mother seldom attempted any exercise of direct authority upon the children. a system of self-government was established, or, rather, encouraged to grow into being. it was ordained that each of the girls should have her own room to hold like a castle, into which not even the parents might intrude unbidden, and for which the occupant was held responsible. constance's room was luxurious, lazy, filled with photographs mainly of groups in which her charming face was always central. the special mark of mary delia's was its white and airy kemptness. patricia's was a mess of clothing and odds and ends, tossed hither and thither and left to lie as they fell until a temporary access of orderliness inspired the child to clean up. it suggested a room in which no window was opened at night. fentriss called it the hurrah's nest. through this feminine environment he moved like a tolerant but semi-detached presiding genius. his profession as consulting engineer took him early to the city and that, or something else, often kept him late. being a considerate though rather selfish person, he invariably telephoned when detained over dinner time, which made the less difference in that there were always two or three men dropping in after golf, hopeful of an invitation to stay: harry mercer or the grant twins, or sam gracie, or one of the selfridges, father or son. envious mothers whispered that mrs. fentriss was trying to catch emslie selfridge for constance, and that it might not be as good a match as she supposed; things weren't going any too well at the selfridge factory since the strike. they also wondered acidly that ralph fentriss was so easy as to let his pretty wife go about so much with steve selfridge, who was almost old enough to be her father, it was true, but whose reputation was that of a decidedly unwithered age. it would no more have occurred to fentriss to raise objections over mona's going where she pleased, with whom she pleased than it would have occurred to her to ask his permission. all that was past long ago. the outside member of the family was robert osterhout. he lived near by in a small studio-bungalow where he conducted delicate and obscure experiments in the therapy of the ductless glands. thrice a week he lectured at the university, for he had already won a reputation in his own specialty. having inherited a sufficient fortune, he was letting his private practice dwindle to a point where presently the fentriss family would be about all there was left of it. into and out of the house on the knoll he wandered, casual, unobtrusive, never in the way, always welcome, contributing a quiet, solid background to the kaleidoscopic pattern of its existence. in the most innocent of senses he was _l'ami du maison_. if he was and had for years been in love with mona, the fact never made a ripple in the affectionate friendliness of their relations nor in the outward placidity of his life. it was accepted as part of the natural scheme of things. fentriss recognized it, quite without resentment. mona wondered at times whether constance and mary delia were not aware of it--not that it would have made any difference. she herself made little account of it, yet she would sorely have missed the stable, enduring, inexpressive devotion had it lapsed. bob was the intellectual outlet for her restless, fervent, exigent nature, too complex to be satisfied with physical and emotional gratifications alone. one could talk to bob; god knows, there were few enough others in her set with any understanding beyond the current chatter of the day! after her sentence was pronounced she talked to him even more frankly than theretofore. "if ralph had died, bob, i'd probably have married you." "would you?" "what do you mean by that? that you wouldn't have married me?" "i'd probably have done as you wished. i always do." "so you do, old dear! that's the reason i'd have married you. that, and to keep you in the family, where you belong." "i'll keep myself in the family, mona, if you want me there." "but ralph didn't die," she pursued. "i'm going to, instead. you can't marry ralph." "not very well." "but you might marry the girls." "all of 'em?" "connie, i think. she's most like me." "she isn't nearly as pretty as you." mona blew him a kiss. "she's much, much prettier. don't be so prejudiced. and she's very intelligent, for twenty-two." "about half my age." "oh, she'd catch up fast enough. she's quite mature." "much too attractive for an old husband, thank you. that way trouble lies--as you know!" "thanks, yourself!" she thrust out her tongue at him in an impudent, childish grimace. "perhaps you'd prefer mary delia." "i understand dee better than i do connie." "do you? it's more than i do. she's devilish frank about other people but she never gives herself away." "that's what i like about her." "you really are quite chummy with her, aren't you?" said the mother, looking at him curiously. "but that's because you're so much older. she doesn't care much about men really." "she's unawakened. there's hot blood under that cool skin." "i wonder what makes you think that?" "oh, a medically trained man notices little things." "so does a woman. but i haven't seen---- has dee begun to awake?" "oh, no! she's quite unaware of herself in that way. very likely she won't until after she's married." "after? won't that be a little late?" "it's the first awakening a lot of women have. and a harsh one for some." "what a lot of unpleasant things doctors know about life!" "life's got its unpleasant phases." "particularly for women.... yet i'm glad i've been a woman." a little, sensuous quiver passed over her tenderly modelled lips. she smiled, sighed, and reverted to her other thought. "but you're going to have your hands full with the fentrisses. really, you'd do better if you married one." "perhaps i shouldn't do as well. i might be too taken up with the one." she darted a glance at him, full of shrewd questioning with a touch of suspicion. "you _could_ care for dee," she interpreted. "i'd be more flattered if it were connie." she pressed an electric button. to the trim maid who appeared she said, "send miss dee here, please, mollie." "what are you going to do, mona?" demanded osterhout in some alarm, for he knew the devastating frankness with which she was wont to deal with those nearest her. "wait and see." there was a rhythmic, swift footfall on the stairs, the door was thrown open, and mary delia fentriss swung in upon them. "hello, mother!" she said. "hail, lord roberts! what's the summons?" her bearing attested poise, careless self-confidence, and a brusque and ready good humour. she was tall, rounded, supple, browned, redolent of physical expression. at first sight one knew that here was a girl whose body would exhale freshness, whose lips would be cool, whose breath would be sweet, whose voice would be even, whose senses and nerves would be controlled. a student of humankind might have appreciated in her the unafraid honesty and directness which so often go with the consciousness of physical strength, in women as well as men. her nickname in the family was candida. she was not beautiful; not even pretty, by strict standards. but there was about her a sort of careless splendour. "been playing golf?" asked her mother. "yes. cantered in with a forty-seven." "nice going! how would you like to marry bob?" neither the expression nor the attitude of the girl altered, but her cool and thoughtful eyes turned upon osterhout. "has his lordship been making proposals for me?" "no; i haven't!" barked the gentleman in the case. "watson, the strait-jacket! he's growing violent." "it was wholly my idea," proffered mona. "i thought bobs was your special property. why mark him down? it isn't bargain day." "he's a fairly good bargain, though," pointed out her mother. "don't mind me if you want to discuss my good points," said osterhout, lighting a cigarette and seating himself upon the window sill. "i don't," said mary delia. "let's consider him as a market proposition. his age is against him. you're forty, aren't you, bobs?... he doesn't squirm, mother. that's a bad sign; shows he's reached the age where he doesn't care. or is it a good sign, showing his self-control?" "dee, i'd beat you if i married you." her eyes lightened. "would you? i believe you'd try." with a bound she was upon him. one arm crooked under his shoulder, the heel of the other fist was thrust under his chin. "improved jit," she panted. "you'd have your work cut out." there was a quick shift, a blending of the two figures, and the slighter was bent backward almost to the floor. "give up?" demanded osterhout, his face close above the laughing lips. "yes. lord, you're quick! thought i had you. take your penalty and let me up." ignoring the invitation he set her in a chair and restored his deranged necktie. "i'll apologise for the forty," said dee. "you're not so old and feeble! to resume, as we say when serious; you're homely as a scalded pup----" "thank you!" "--but it's a nice homely. you've got a lamb of a disposition. _and_ money enough. haven't you?" "enough for me." "how passionately he pleads his cause! you play a nasty round of golf, too; i mustn't forget that. but--no. i don't think i would. not even if you asked me." "what's the obstacle, dee?" "well, for one thing, there's jimmy james." "what!" "quite so," said the girl sedately. "you're engaged to james?" "we haven't got that far yet. but i've got him on the run." "dee!" expostulated her mother, laughing. "does he know of your honourable intentions?" queried osterhout. "he hasn't expressed his own yet. but he will." "when?" "next time i kiss him." "next time, eh? how many times will that make?" "haven't counted, grandpa," mocked the girl. "we haven't pulled many petting parties, though." "well, i'm good-and-be-damned," muttered osterhout. "modern stuff, bob," remarked mona. "being an ancient fossil, i'd say dangerous stuff with a fellow like jameson james." "not with a girl like me," returned dee with superb assurance. "bee-lieve muh, i've got a hand on the emergency brake every minute." osterhout, who had returned to his window seat, gave a sharp exclamation. "what's the matter now?" he rubbed his cheek, growling. a hoarse, childish voice from below, which had in it some echo of mona fentriss's lyric and alluring tones, served to answer the question: "where did i hit you, old bobs?" "it's the scrub," said dee. "don't you call me 'bobs,' you young devil." "oh, _all_ right! _doctor_ bobs. come down. i've got a fer-rightful gash in my knee." "well, don't show it to the world. i'll be there immediately." "if you want to be the family benefactor," said mary delia as he was leaving, "marry pat. nobody else ever will." "you're a liar!" came the hoarse voice from outside. there was a pause as for consideration. "a stinkin' liar," it concluded with conviction. "pat!" called her mother. "oh, very well! but i bet i'm married before i'm dee's age. and to a better man than jimmy james. he's a chaser." "we've got to send that child away to school," said mona fentriss in amused dismay as the door closed behind osterhout. "she's growing up any old way, and she seems to know everything that's going on.... dee, are you really going to marry jimmy james?" "i think so. any objections?" "well, ada clare, you know." "he's through with her." "she's the kind that men don't get through with so readily. it's gone pretty far." "it's gone the limit probably. well, i never thought jimmy was president of the purity league, mother." "do you really care for him, dee?" "of course i do. i don't mean that he gives me an awful thrill. nobody does." "perhaps the right man would." "then i haven't seen him yet. mother," she turned her cool regard upon mona, "tell me about it." "about what?" "the thrill. the real thrill. you know." mona's colour deepened. "you're a queer child, dee. there are some things a woman has to find out for herself." "or get some man to teach her," supplied the girl thoughtfully. "the whole thing's mostly bluff, _i_ think. men are queer things. i could laugh my head off at jimmy sometimes." "that's a good safeguard." "yes; but i don't need it.... mother, aren't we going to pull a big party this spring?" "of course. and we ought to do it pretty soon, too." "what makes you say that so queerly?" "nothing," answered mona hastily. "i was just thinking." for though she was up and about again, she knew that she was weakening under the heart attacks which she endured with silent fortitude, due partly to natural pride, partly to her belief that a complaining woman lost all charm for those about her, winning only the poor substitute of pity instead of admiration. upon dr. osterhout she had imposed silence; she was determined that her household should know nothing so long as concealment was possible. in her way she was an unselfish woman. she was quite aware that this would be the last of her parties in the house on the knoll. pat's voice floated upward in tones of lamentation. "oh, damn it, bobs! go easy, can't you? that stuff's like fire." "patricia's fifteen," reflected the mother. "i'll enter her at the sisterhood school next fall." chapter iii the party was a bingo. before midnight that had been settled to the satisfaction of everyone. the music, good at the outset, soon become irresistible. (a drink all around every seven numbers was the fentriss prescription for the musicians; expensive but worth it.) the punch was very special. several of its masculine devotees had already faded, and one girl had been quietly spirited to an upper room, there to be disrobed and de-spirited. there was much drifting in and out of the french windows to the darkness of the lawn, and plaintive inquiries for missing partners were prevalent. lovely, flushed, youthful, regnant in her own special queendom, mona fentriss sat in the midst of a circle of the older men, bandying stories with them in voices which were discreetly lowered when any of the youngsters drew near. it was the top of the time. upstairs in her remote bed patricia sat with her pillows banked behind her, her knees propping her chin, her angry eyes staring into the dark. the strong rhythms of the music, barbaric, excitant, harshly sensuous, throbbed upward, stirring her to dim and uninterpretable hungers. "damn! damn! damn!" she whispered in shivering wrath. she had been banished from even the earliest part of the festivities. it was mean. it was rotten. it was stinkin' rotten. why should she be treated so? she wasn't a baby. she wouldn't stand it! leaping from bed she ran to her tumbled clothes, began feverishly to put them on. in undergarments and stockings she crept across to dee's room, listened and entered. this was gross violation of the law of the household. but pat was desperate. selecting a pink dinner dress rather high-cut for dee, she held it against her half-developed body, decided that it would do, ran back with her booty to her own den. putting it on before the glass she became unpleasantly conscious of several pimples on her face. she was always having pimples! the others never had them. she wondered why, resentfully. should she pick the one at the side of her nose? or would that only make it the more unsightly? she decided for the heroic method, performed a clumsy operation with a pin, and perceived at once that she must have some powder. this time it was connie's room that she invaded, and while she was about it she found and added a touch of colour. it was by no means the height of artistry, but pat approved it as eminently satisfactory. she did not wholly approve dee's dress. there was too much of it in important spots. she meditated padding, but did not know how it was done. or--dared she go back and get a scantier frock? contemplating her boyish contours she realised that it would not do. "flat like a board," she muttered disparagingly. "i'm bunched all in the wrong places." that the gown which fitted dee's slender strength to perfection should oppress pat across her round little stomach, struck her as an unjust infliction of fate, instead of the proper penalty of gluttony, which it was. the maltreated pimple--another sign and symbol of her unrestrained appetite--still bled a little and was obviously angry. she staunched it impatiently. the others, she decided, would do as they were. not unskillfully she touched the area around them with little dabs of mme. lablanche's rose-skin. "i'm going to have one dance," she decided, "if they send me to jail." the back stairs and a side window gave her unobserved exit to the odorous shelter of a syringa. "i'll wait until i can catch bobs," she ruminated. "he'll dance with me--old bear! but first i'll do a little scouting." she peeked into the big living room where most of the dancing was in progress. as was invariably the rule at holiday knoll, men held the superiority of numbers, and therefore, girls that of position. every girl had a partner. to the ungrown waif outside of fairyland the dancers seemed ethereal beings, moving in a radiant and unattainable world. how beautifully the girls were dressed! how attractive the men looked! "i wish i was pretty," mourned pat. she thought forlornly of her blotchy skin. "i never will be, though." then she recalled the deep, eager lustre of her eyes as seen in the glass, and how one of the boys at school had once made awkward and admiring phrases about them. she had not liked that particular boy, but she was grateful for the phrases. maybe if she paid more attention to herself she might come to be attractive like her lovely mother. no; that was too much to hope; never like her mother, nor like constance, who was just then whirled by in the arms of one of the new york guests, all aglow with languorous triumph, easily the beauty of the party. perhaps like dee. lots of men were crazy about dee. would any man ever be crazy about her, wondered pat.... wouldn't she look a smear if she did venture on the floor among all those human flowers? she left her window to prowl further. the glass door of the breakfast room gave her a view of the proceedings within. sprawled upon the tiles five of the youthful local element were intent upon the dice which one of them had just rolled toward a central heap of silver and bills. "seven! i lose again," said the thrower cheerily. "who'll stand for hiking the limit to a dollar?" opposite pat's vantage point sprawled selden thorpe, son of the local rector. pat knew they had not much means and, marking the pale, strained face of the boy, wished with misgivings that he wouldn't. the misgivings vanished when she heard him say: "i'm an easy hundred ahead so i can't kick. let 'er go." she stepped back into the darkness to round the conservatory wing and brushed the mudguard of a lightless limousine. a girl's voice strained, tremulous, and laughing lent caution to her retreating steps; but she stopped within listening distance. "don't, freddie! i'll have to go in if you----" "oh, come, ada! be a sport." "do behave yourself. get me another drink." "all right." as the man stepped out, pat shrank behind the car. she had recognized the girl's voice as that of ada clare, who had the reputation of being an indiscriminate "necker." pat passed on. but that whisper from within the limousine, with its defensive, nervous, eager, stimulated effect, troubled the eavesdropper with strange, disturbing surmises. she wanted, yet feared to return and wait until fred browning, a man of thirty, well-liked in the neighbourhood, not the less perhaps because of his reputation as a "goer," came back with the desired drink. what would be the next step in the unseen drama? a little stir of fear drove pat onward. she stopped abruptly at the end of the conservatory as she heard her mother's voice within. "oh, sid, dear! i almost wish i hadn't told you." sid! that was sidney rathbone, a baltimorean, much given to running over for week-ends. to pat's mind he was stricken in years, being nearly forty, but the _most_ distinguished looking (thus her mentally italicised characterisation) person she had ever seen and distantly adored. furthermore there was a quietly knightly devotion in his attitude toward the beautiful mrs. fentriss which enlisted the submerged romanticism of the child's mind. now she hardly recognised the usually smooth and gentle tones characteristic of him as he replied: "my god, mona! i can't believe it. i won't believe it." "poor boy! it's true, though." "what does osterhout know about it! he's no diagnostician. you must come to baltimore and see finney or earle----" "it's no use." what rathbone next said the listener could not make out, but mona answered very gently: "no, sid, dear. not again. that's all over. i couldn't now. you understand." and then the man's broken voice: "yes; i understand, dearest. but----" "oh, sid! please don't cry. i can't bear it." pat blundered on into the darkness, rather appalled. what in the name of bewilderment did _that_ mean? mr. rathbone crying! and her mother's voice was so sad. though she did not care much for her mother beyond a lively admiration of her charm and beauty, pat experienced a distinct chill. it was followed by a surge of exultation; she was certainly seeing life to-night! and then came the climax. a blithe voice at her elbow said: "hello! who are you?" "sh--sh-sh-sh!" she warned in startled sibilance. "shush goes if you say so. not dancing?" "no. they wouldn't let me," said pat mournfully. "who wouldn't?" "the family." "snoutrage," declared the stranger economically. "you're one of the family, are you?" "yes. i'm the kid. i hate it." "cinderella; yes? the lovely but wicked sisters--they're peaches, too." he spoke clearly but a little disjointedly. "but you're not rigged for the part. you've got your regal rags on." "they're not mine. they're my sister's. i sneaked 'em." "snappy child!" he laughed. "let's have a look." he moved closer to her. a wale of light fell across his face. he was short and fair with a winsome, laughing mouth, and candid eyes. drooping her chin pat studied him covertly and decided that he was a winner. she herself was in the shadow; he could see little but contour. but the rich hoarseness of the voice pleased him. "i'm glad i found you," he murmured. thrilling to his tone, all that she could find to say was: "don't speak so loud." naturally he took this as an invitation, and, moving still closer, felt for her hand in the darkness. her fingers twined willingly within his. instead of alarming her, his touch gave her confidence. "what are you doing out here?" she asked. "cooling off. the family brew's got quite a kick in it." "has it? get me some." "you're too young." "don't be hateful." "what'll you give me for it?" he teased. it was the first spur that her instinct of conscious seductiveness had ever known. she replied instantly: "anything." "you're on. wait for me right there." while he was gone, a long time as it seemed to her, she stood surging with an exultant inner turmoil. a man and a girl passed close to her, unseeing in the bar of light. the girl's eyes wore a strange, sleepy expression as if the lids were almost too heavy to hold open. the man's shoulder was pressed close upon her. they disappeared. strange scents of the night crept into pat's brain; made her remember things she had never known. the music, softened through intervening walls, was pleading sensuously, urging upon her something mysterious and desirable. she felt her nerves like strung wires already tingling with electric forces but awaiting the supreme shock. "drink, pretty creature!" the gay, insinuating, mirthful voice was close to her. "you've only half filled it," she complained, taking the glass. "must have spilled some. in such a hurry to get back to you," he explained. "there's plenty more where it came from if you like it." "i don't," she gasped. the liquid, of which she had taken a generous swallow, stung in her throat. she poured the rest out upon the ground. "here," she said holding out the glass to him. his fingers met hers again. the glass fell and crunched beneath his foot as he stepped to her. she was hardly cognisant of his arm drawing her. rather what she felt was some irresistible power compelling her to itself. the face of the youth, still gay with laughter, drew down upon hers, closer, closer, changed, seemed to become dimly luminous. her arms, without volition, crept upward to his shoulders. she was incongruously and painfully conscious of something pressing into her bosom, one of his pearl shirt-studs, and drew away from it slightly. he bent his head after her. and then, as their lips met and merged--the shock! she went limp under it. after a long, long minute in which were blended the pulsations of the music, the undermining odours of the night, the look of the passing girl's eyes (how heavy were her own now!), the memory of that broken whisper overheard in the limousine, and the surge of the blood in her veins, she heard him say: "let's go." "where?" "i've got my car here." she was silent, deeply, passively acquiescent to his will. misconstruing her speechlessness, he urged: "come on, sweetie! we'll take a fifty-mile-an-hour dip into the landscape. the little boat can go some." "i'll have to get a wrap." "take my coat." his arm tightened, guiding her. she lifted a hungry face. he bent again when a door opened shedding a broad ray of light upon them. against the glaring background moved constance, a vision of witchery in her filmy gown, followed by emslie selfridge. "pat!" she exclaimed. "what are you doing here?" before the confused girl could reply, her escort came briskly to her rescue. "i caught it peeking behind a bush," he explained, "and it wasn't a bur-gu-lar after all. so i'm taking it in to see what it is and whether it can dance." "it's my kid sister," said constance. "mother _will_ be pleased!" "are you going to tell her?" demanded pat. "i certainly am." "then i may as well have my dance before you find her," declared the culprit calmly. "the fourteenth, a foxy little trot; with mr. warren graves," put in her escort cheerily. he drew her arm through his own where it nestled gratefully. armoured though he was in the careless self-confidence of youth, young mr. graves winced as his partner stood revealed under the full glare of the lights. she looked so awfully and awkwardly young! her hair was so awry, her gown so ill-fitted, her skin so splotchy. but there was magic in the long, slanted, shy, trustful eyes looking into his own, and the tingling excitation of her kiss was still in his blood. moreover he had had a steady succession of drinks. "how old are you?" he asked in her ear as her cheek pressed close to his. "seventeen," she lied glibly. "sub-deb stuff," he laughed. "i love 'em young. you can dance, too. can i have the next?" "there won't be any next," said pat tragically. "here's mother." "oh, lord!" said warren graves. "let me do the talking." but no talking was called for. mona fentriss swept down upon her truant daughter, caught her in a laughing embrace, slapped one hot cheek, kissed the other, and delivered her verdict! "back to bed with you! quick! how did you ever get out?" "can't i have just one more turn," pleaded pat. "not a step. where did this roost-robber"--she indicated graves--"find you?" "i was looking on and wanting in," replied the dismal and thwarted pat. "wait three years, until you're seventeen. away!" "let me escort you to your--er--baby-carriage," said the youth with an elaborate bow. the feeble witticism, meant only to cover his own sense of being at a loss, stabbed pat. she averted her angry and tearful eyes as they crossed the floor together. "i hate you," she muttered. "i'm crazy about you," he retorted close to her ear. instantly she was radiant again. "good-night," she said softly and ran up the stairs. the turn of the landing hid her from view. but, after a moment's struggle with herself against doubt, she stopped and leaned out over the rail. there he stood with the blithe expectancy of his face upturned. queer looking, unkempt, ill-dressed she might be, and hardly more than a child at that, but the glamour of her youth and her passion held him. "don't forget me," he pleaded under his breath. she nodded. forget him! with the fervent assurance of the neophyte she was sure that she never would, never could forget him and the moment which he had deified for her. and herein her inexperience was a true mentor. for, whatever else may pass from her crowded memories, a girl does not forget her first kiss. pat had been mulcted of that dance which she had rebelliously promised herself. but there was compensation in overflowing measure. she had had her taste of life. chapter iv vagrant airs from the window of the small library playfully stirred the bright tendrils on constance fentriss's neck. the girl was a picture of unconscious grace and delight as she sat, with her great, heavy-lashed eyes fixed in speculation, her curving lips a little drawn down, her gracious, girlish figure relaxed in the deep chair. across the room mary delia was skimming hopefully the pages of _town topics_ for scandals about people she knew. she lifted her head and asked carelessly: "what doing, con?" "figuring out a letter." "who to?" (mary delia's higher education, inclusive of "correct" english, had cost something more than ten thousand dollars.) "a certain party." this was formula, current in their set and deemed to possess a mildly satiric flavour. "oh, verra well!" (meaning "don't tell if you don't want to.") "it's to warren graves, if you want to know." "your princeton paragon? have you got something going there?" "i'm going to give him hell." "what for? i thought he was one of your best bets." "for acting like a mick saturday night." "what did he pull? a pickle?" "a petting party with pat." "no! did he?" dee cast aside the professional organ of scandal in favour of a more immediate interest. "how do you know?" "trapped 'em. he put up a good front. acted like he expected to get away with it." (constance's school, also highly expensive, had specialised in "finish of speech and manner.") dee laughed. "that bratling! he must have been lit." "emslie said so. he was with me when we walked into 'em." "as per usual. what was _his_ view?" "he said the scrub ought to be spanked and sent to bed." "some job!" opined her sister. "she's starting in early. when did you have your first real flutter, con?" "not at that age," returned the elder. "and not with that kind of a face." dee reflected shrewdly that connie was a little sore over the young man's defection. "it must have been dark for graves to take her on," she agreed. "it was, till we opened the door on 'em. they were clinched all right. dam' little fool!" "better go easy with the letter," advised dee carelessly. "he'll think it's green-eyed stuff." "not from what i'm going to give him. he tried the half-nelson on me earlier in the evening and got turned down." "well, i had to tell him the strangle hold was barred, myself," remarked dee. "he must have had a busy evening." "thinks he's a boa-constrictor, does he?" commented the beauty viciously. "he'll think he's an apple-worm when he reads my few well-chosen words." "cordially invited not to come back?" "something of that sort." "that was a pretty husky punch, though," mused dee. "con, you don't suppose he fed the scrub any of it?" "yes, he did." "dirty work!" lighting a cigarette dee took a few puffs, but without inhaling. "going to tell mona?" the two older girls habitually spoke of their mother and sometimes to her by her given name. "i don't know. what do you think?" "i think she'd laugh." "dad wouldn't." "dad's old. mona's one of our kind. she's as modern as jazz." "dad may be old but it hasn't slowed him up so much, yet. he was the life of the party." "oh, dad's all right. i'm for him, myself. but he's all for pat. there might be fireworks if he knew she was starting in this early." "there were never any about mona." "meaning?" "well, sid rathbone. and tom merrill. and a few others." "she doesn't interfere with his little amusements, either, if you come to that. have you noticed anything about her lately?" "yes. she looks like a ghost in the mornings." "bobs has been trying to get her to put on the brakes." "funny old bobs! he's pippy on you, isn't he, dee?" "me! i should say not. it's mona." "can you blame him? with her war paint on she's got us both faded." "sometimes when i catch him looking at her with that poodle dog expression of his, i wonder whether there's something really wrong with her." "probably it's just the pace. what'll we be like at her age, if we last that long?" constance's soft mouth hardened as she seated herself at the desk and scratched off the letter which she had been meditating. "there!" she observed at the close. "that will tell mr. warren graves where he gets off." "what about pat? someone ought to tell her where she gets off." "i don't know why they keep her around anyway," said constance discontentedly. "she ought to have been sent away to school last year." "god help the school! she'll give it an education." "going to the club to-night?" asked the elder after a pause. "no." "i thought you had a date with jimmy james for all the saturday dances." "so did he," replied dee calmly. "he was getting too proprietary. so i turned him down." "war is hell," observed her sister with apparent irrelevance. "besides, de severin is coming over from washington for an early round of golf." "so that's it. paul de severin could give me quite a thrill if he went at it right." "not me. i've never seen the man that could, either. something must have been left out of my make-up when i was built." "sometimes i wish it had been left out of mine," said the beauty. "and other times," she added gaily, "i don't. by the way, i'm likely to be in pretty late. so don't let dad lock me out, will you?" "i thought they still pulled the midnight rule for the saturday night dances." "so they do. but the grants are having a small-and-early afterward. somebody slipped will grant a case of bacardi." she sealed her letter with a thump and tossed it into a silver-wicker basket. "keep your rum," said dee with an effect of disdainful connoisseurship. "it gets me nothing but perspiration and a bum eye next day! not even the right kind of kick.... so your princeton laddie fed pat some of the party fluid. did it make her sick?" "no; it didn't make her sick," answered a resentful voice, all on one level tone. pat entered by the rear door. "been listening in?" inquired constance amiably. "i have not. wouldn't waste my time," declared the infant of the family. she cast an eye upon the journal which her sister had laid aside. "what's in t.t. this week? anything rich?" "rapidly growing to womanhood," observed constance to dee in a tone of mock admiration. "talk-party, i suppose," said the intruder. "don't let me interrupt." she strolled purposelessly over to the desk, glanced in the letter box and picked up the letter. "what are you writing to warren graves about?" she demanded. "put that letter back," said constance. "i'm going to look," declared pat uncertainly. her statement was followed by a yell of pain. the letter fell, inviolate, to the floor as dee, who had leapt upon her with the swiftness and precision of a young panther, tortured her arms backward. "if you try to kick i'll break you in two," muttered the athlete. "let go! i won't," wailed pat, who knew and dreaded the other's strength. released, she massaged her aching elbows. "dirty you, though!" she said, scowling at constance. "sneaking a letter off to him that way." "i suppose you'd like to censor it," taunted the writer. "well, if you want to know what's in it, i told him just how old you are and what kind of a silly little ass. i don't think he'll come back for any more baby-kisses." at this pat grinned inwardly. whatever else it may have been, that was no baby-kiss that had passed between them. with her equanimity quite restored she remarked: "you lie." "tasty manners!" commented dee. "i don't know what you've got to say about it," said pat venomously. "i noticed a sedan with all the curtains pulled down just after you disappeared from the house with jimmy james." this was a random shot. it went wide of the target. "cut it, scrubby! cut it!" admonished her sister calmly. "i don't put on any snuggling sketches where everybody can see me." "don't call me scrubby!" choked the girl. "look at yourself," suggested constance, "and see what else you can expect to be called. did you brush your teeth this morning?" "oh, _mind_ your business." "then go and brush them now," said mona's voice from the stairway in its clear and singing cadence. whatever mona said took on the sound and form of music. pat's hoarse and unformed speech had an echo of the same seductive sweetness. the mother entered, adjusting her hat. "i'm lunching in town, kiddies. what's the row?" pat cast a sullenly appealing glance at constance. in vain. "the scrub's been doing a hug with warren graves," announced the elder sister. "i have _not_." mona regarded the flaming face with amused pity. she did not take the news seriously. "did you like him, bambina?" she asked with careless sympathy. a quick, half-suppressed sob answered and surprised her. "he fed her up on the punch," began constance. "and then----" "a very enterprising young man," broke in mrs. fentriss. "i don't think we'll urge him to repeat his visit, connie." "exactly what i'm writing to tell him." "because i pinched him from you," declared pat in a vicious undertone. constance laughed, but not without annoyance. "it's likely, isn't it!" "i made him give me the punch," continued the accused one. "i hated it. i only took one swallow. it wasn't his fault. he told me to go easy on it." the defence of her possession by the girl moved mona; it was so naïvely, primitively feminine. at the same time the look in the childish eyes, dreamy, remembering, unconsciously sensuous, stirred misgivings in the mother's mind. conscious womanhood was perhaps going to burst upon the child explosively; was already in process of realisation, very likely. mona recalled certain developments of her own roused and startled emotions twenty years before. could it be as long ago as that? how vivid to her memory it still was! "never mind," she said in her equable tones. "i dare say the punch was too strong. and the graves boy had more than one swallow. _he_ didn't hate it." "i wrote to him," said pat suddenly. "_you_ did?" the three incredulous voices blended. "yes, i did. he wrote to me. he asked me to answer. he was terribly sorry." "sorry for what?" asked dee. "for--for acting that way. he seemed to think he'd hurt my feelings or something. i told him it was just as much my fault as his." "did you, little pat?" her mother leaned forward to look into the queer, defiant, chivalrous little face. "perhaps you're older than i thought. but i shouldn't write any more, if i were you." "i won't." mona went out, followed by her youngest. in the hallway, pat gave her mother a light, familiar, shy pat on the shoulder. "thanks for standing by me," she said awkwardly. "did i stand by you?" returned mona. "i wonder if i stand by you enough." inside the room, dee mused with a thoughtful, frowning face. "think of the scrub!" she muttered. "what of her?" asked constance. "feeling that way. already." there was a hint of unconscious envy in her manner. "about a man!" she sighed and shook her head incredulously. "it gets me," she confessed. "don't you like to have a man you like kiss you?" inquired constance curiously. dee meditated. "i don't mind it," she answered. "but i'd rather run down a long putt, any day." to dr. robert osterhout, whom she sought out after her return from luncheon (with stevens selfridge) mona detailed the conversation with and about pat. "yes; i know," said he. "how could you know?" "pat told me about young graves." "what! the whole thing?" "so far as i could judge, she didn't leave out much." "why did she tell you? confession? remorse?" "not in the least. she enjoyed the telling. she's very feminine, that child. and very curious about herself." "i hope to god she isn't developing my temperament," reflected the downright mona after a pause. "it would be a dismal joke if the ugly duckling of the flock had that wished on her. poor, pimply little gnome." "ugly? i wouldn't be too sure. the fairy prince from princeton seems to have been quite captivated with her." "and she with him." "that, of course. it was a very awakening kiss for her." "does she realise----" "she said, 'bobs, it made me go weak all over. is chloroform like that?'" "diverting notion! what did you tell her?" "i told her that it wasn't, precisely. then she said, 'what does it mean?' and i said that it might mean danger." "she wouldn't understand that. i've never talked to her." mona, like many women of broad and easy attitude toward sex relations in so far as went her own life, had a reticence in discussing them with other women. "yes; she would. pat's over twelve, you know." "yes; _i_ know. but does she?" "perfectly." "why? she didn't say anything----" "no; she didn't go into the physico-psycho-analysis of her emotions, if that's what you mean, mona. i shouldn't have let her. there's a touch of the morbid in her, anyway. that's the irish strain from her father. but there's a lot of your saving grace, too--your most saving grace." "and what may that be?" "the habit of facing facts squarely; even facts about oneself." "is that a gift or a detriment, bob?" "it's a saving grace, i tell you. little pat is going to look right clean through the petty illusions of life, clear-eyed." "but illusions are the bloom and happiness of life," said mona wistfully. "to play with; not to trust in. oh, she'll have her illusions about others; she's begun already. she's a romantic, as you are not. but her dreams about herself will all be subject to her own detached scrutiny. if ever she comes to dream about a man----" "well? you're being very subtle and analytical, doctor." "--she'll make heaven or hell for him." "bob! men aren't going to waste time over her with pretty dee and lovely connie around." "aren't they! ask young graves. she'll make 'em dream. wait and see." "just what i can't do," said mona quietly. "ah, i didn't mean to say that, bob," she added quickly, catching the contraction of pain that altered his face. "well," she mused, brushing her hair back from her broad brow, "i can't quite see it in pat myself. but perhaps you're right. you ought to know. you're a man." chapter v dawn was tinting the high clouds when mary delia awoke. she had the gift of coming forth from sleep in full and instant possession of her faculties. now she felt that something was amiss; something insistent and troublesome going on below her window. she jumped from bed, crossed the room, and looked out upon the shrubbery-encircled driveway. voices came up to her, restrained and cautious, a man's and a woman's. she recognised the latter. "hush, you two!" she called, low but imperiously. the man stepped into view. to her surprise it was not emslie selfridge but fred browning. he was in evening dress, a little wilted, and his eyes looked hot and anxious; but he retained evident command of himself. "that you, dee?" he whispered loudly, peering up. "yes. what's the matter? anything wrong?" "no. connie can't get in." dee smothered an exclamation. with dismay she recalled her sister's request that she leave the door unlocked. but she had not dreamed that the party at the grants' would last as late as this. "i'll be right down," she promised. turning the dim corner from the stairway she stumbled upon a smoking-stand and overturned it with a din which made her heart stand still. expectant and fearful she halted, poised and listening. no sound or stir came from above. cautiously she felt her way forward and unlocked the door. constance was standing at the corner of the porch. her hair was dishevelled and luminous, her eyes softly heavy. there was a stain across the bodice of her evening dress. as the door opened she was releasing her lips from the man's kiss. "take care of her, dee," said browning, and was gone. "and what do you think of _that_?" challenged constance as she paused by the threshold. dee's answer might have seemed inconsecutive. "you _are_ a beautiful thing, con." "am i? perhaps it's just as well that i am." there was a grimness in the sweet voice. "why that?" "i'd be out of luck if i weren't." "the grants' party must have been a hurrah." "not so much. it got too slow for me before two o'clock." "did it? where have you been all night?" "motoring." "you don't look very dusty," observed the shrewd dee. "perhaps you think i'm not telling you the truth." "it's no affair of mine," returned dee easily. "well, i'm not," continued the elder sister. "come into the conservatory." she led the way across the living room, dragging her feet a little as she walked. "now, if you want to know," she continued defiantly, "i'll tell you. i've been in fred browning's rooms." "that's nice!" observed dee. "what's the idea?" "i had to go somewhere. i couldn't come home." "drunk?" dee shot out the monosyllable with a sharpness which made the other wince. but she answered promptly: "i was that. and i wasn't the only one. that bacardi rum is hell." "who was with you?" "nobody." "you and fred? alone?" "yes." "_con!_" "i know. but i was so sick." "at the party?" "no. i wasn't any worse than the rest. everyone was going strong. emslie had a wonder!" "what will he think?" "he's done his thinking," returned the beauty obstinately. "he pulled a rotten grouch because i danced too much with freddie at the club, and after we got to the grants' he wouldn't pay any attention to anything but the punch. not that i cared. i was enjoying life with freddie. so we decided to pull out at two o'clock." "yes; but if you were all right then----" "i was until we got into his car. then the punch hit me. it was the change into the air, i suppose. i went all to pieces, just as we were passing his apartment. so he took me in there. it wasn't his fault. i was terribly sick and then awfully sleepy, and when i woke up----" "woke up?" "yes. fred was bathing my face and telling me that i had to pull myself together and go home.... what are you looking at me that way for, dee?" she concluded plaintively. "con, did anything happen?" "anything happen?" repeated the other in a dreamy voice. "i--i--don't know." "you don't _know_! you must know." "yes; i would, wouldn't i? though i was completely sunk. anything might have happened," said she, slowly nodding her lovely hair-beclouded head. "con! think!" urged dee with impatient anxiety. "i wouldn't care," declared the beauty recklessly. "i'm crazy about freddie.... but it didn't; no, i'm sure of that now. freddie's an awfully decent sort, dee." "he hasn't too pious a reputation. and when did you take on this sudden hunch for him? i thought it was emslie." "so did i. until--dee, did you ever have a man that you've always known suddenly look different to you?" "no. not enough different, anyway, to make any difference." "it's hard to explain. something in the way he affects you changes and all the world changes with it. that's how it was with fred, and, i suppose the same way about me with him. though he claims he's been mad about me for months." "that's a blessing, considering," remarked dee grimly. "suppose you were seen going into his place?" "we weren't." "so far as you know." "if we should have been, it's a sweet little scandal for the cats, isn't it!" "in that case it's up to freddie. it's up to freddie anyway." "freddie's all right," declared connie with conviction. "if he hadn't been--dee, when i came to, i told him i didn't want to go home." "you wanted to stay?" said the sister slowly. constance nodded. "i wasn't quite sobered up. but anyway i did want to stay. you can't understand that, can you?" "no; i can't." "because you're a cold-blooded little fish. i'm still feeling that dam' bacardi or i wouldn't be talking to you this way." "was fred feeling it, too?" "if he was, he had a grip on himself all right. he's a lot squarer man than people give him credit for, dee." "lucky for you he is." "oh, i don't know. what's the difference!" retorted connie perversely. "i guess those sort of things happen a lot more often than any of us know about." "what sort of things?" interpolated a voice new to the parley. the two sisters whirled about. just outside the door stood patricia in her tousled nightgown, hot-eyed with curiosity. "what sort of things?" she repeated. "how long have you been there?" demanded mary delia. "long enough to hear a lot," answered the unperturbed patricia. "since before you asked con did anything happen, and she said first she didn't know and afterward that it didn't. what did you mean? _what_ didn't happen?" with a sudden pounce the lithe dee was upon her and held her, half-choked against the wall. "if you breathe a word of this, scrubs, i'll half kill you." "leh--heh-heh--me alone!" whimpered pat. "i'm not going to tell anybody." "see that you don't, then." "you told on me about warren graves." "that was different." "how, different?" "you're only a child. you've no business playing silly tricks like that." "wasn't it a silly trick of con to----" "go back to bed," ordered dee with a powerful shake which seemed to the unfortunate victim to loosen her eyes in their sockets. she crept away but paused at the door to say wistfully and sullenly: "just the same, i think you might tell me what didn't happen." late the next afternoon fred browning came to the house, having called up constance at noon. dee came down to him. "is everything all right, dee?" he asked anxiously. the girl nodded. "yes. the family didn't wake up. i'll send con down right away." but before constance arrived, little pat entered the side room where he was nervously waiting. she looked at him solemnly, entreatingly, hesitatingly, then burst out: "mr. browning, will you tell me something?" her earnestness amused him. "why, of course," he said, quite unsuspecting. "i always like to help the young to knowledge. but don't make it too hard." "what was it that might have happened to con last night, that the girls wouldn't tell me about?" he stared at her, completely aghast. "you young devil!" he breathed. constance's quick footsteps sounded on the stairs, and the inquirer was fain to flee, unsated of her curiosity. but she peered back, and her breath came quicker as she saw her pretty sister walk straight, eager, and unashamed into the man's waiting arms. pat deemed it the part of prudence to keep herself aloof the rest of the day. later fred browning had a cocktail with mr. fentriss and a brief talk on the subject of constance. and so they were married. chapter vi moth-like, patricia hovered around the mystic radiance of constance's wedding festivities. they had let her come home from school for the occasion. reckoned too young for a bridesmaid and too old for a flower-girl she occupied an anomalous and unofficial position in the party. dee, who, as maid of honour, had opportunity to exercise her executive faculties in managing the details, found her irritatingly in the way. "under your feet all the time," said she to the bride. "the kid is crazy with curiosity. i never heard so many questions." "yes," assented constance fretfully. "she keeps asking me how i feel and staring at me as if i were going to die or have an operation or something." dee laughed. "she got hold of fred yesterday and put him through a catechism while he was waiting for you to come down. he actually looked rattled." "she's a pest, that child! school doesn't seem to have toned her down a bit." "at least it's taken the slump out of her shoulders. she's got a kind of boyish swagger that isn't bad. for her kind of style, i mean." "oh, style!" repeated the elder sister contemptuously. "she'll never have any more style than a kitten. i wish you'd keep her out of my way." to accomplish this, however, would have entailed an almost continuous vigilance. the elaborate ceremonial of marriage and giving in marriage with its trappings and appurtenances, its vestigial suggestions of sexual-sacrificial import, its underlying and provocative symbolism had stirred in the youngest member of the family an imagination as inflammable as it was unself-comprehending. constance's matter-of-fact mind could not interpret the eager and searching scrutiny of her sister, though it made her restless and uneasy and vaguely shamed her. the afternoon before the wedding, pat tiptoed in upon her as she was resting on mona's sleeping-porch. "connie," she half whispered. "well?" returned the bride crossly. "where are you going?" "going? i'm trying to rest." "where are you going after you're married? to a hotel?" "what do you want to know for?" demanded the elder sister, raising herself on her elbow to look at the younger. "nothing. i just wanted to know." "well, you won't. not from me." "oh, verra-well! you needn't get all fussed up about it." "oh, _don't_ be hateful, pat. i want to rest." "i'll go in just a minute. but---- con?" the bride sighed, a martyrized sigh. "what is it?" "when you get back--when i get back from school, will you tell me?" "what is the child getting at! tell you what?" "everything." "i don't know what you mean," fended constance. "yes, you do. you know." the older girl flushed a slow pink, then laughed. "you're a funny little monkey! why should you want to know?" "well, i've got to go through it sometime, myself, haven't i?" reasoned the girl. "oh, have you! well, you can find out then." "i think you're mean. you'd tell dee if she asked you." "i wouldn't tell _anyone_. it's disgusting to be so--so prying. where do you get such ideas?" pat reflected before answering. "don't all girls have 'em?" "if they do, they don't talk about them." "oh, that's all bunk," declared the cheerful pat. "if you've got the idea inside you, you might as well spit it out.... i'll bet men tell." the bride looked at the clever, eager, childish face with sudden panic. "if i thought they did," she began, but immediately broke off, taking a plaintive, invalidish tone. "do go away, scrubs! you're making my head ache. and for heaven's sake, don't stare at me to-morrow like you have to-day. it gives me the creeps." "it gives me the thrills," returned the alarmingly outspoken ingénue, as she danced out. throughout the ceremony of the following day, pat's interest was divided between the bride and an equally absorbing prepossession. she had, so she told herself, fallen desperately in love with one of the ushers, a boston man named vincent. to her infatuated eyes he was _adorably_ handsome, and _so_ romantic looking, though quite old. probably thirty! on the previous evening he had chatted casually with her for five minutes, finding the odd, eager child with the sombre eyes and the effortful affectation of grown-up-ness mildly amusing. going up the aisle he had made her heart leap by giving her a little friendly nod. during the ceremony she brooded on him, building up the airiest of vague and roseate sentimentalities for the far future, and for the near, nursing the belief that he would surely seek her out as soon as possible at the reception. when she saw him, later, quite forgetful of her in his interest in virginia platt, a slight, flashing brunette of the wedding party, she was both chilled and infuriated. he did not even ask her to dance, though once he crossed the floor toward her, only to turn aside at the last, hopeful moment. it was terrible to be young and queer looking, though she had done her careful best for her elfish little face and immature figure. others came for dances, however; selden thorpe, the rector's son, the most often. him she deemed "interesting looking," with his pale face, bristly hair, and hard, grey eyes, typical of the unconscious egotist. though he danced well, here pat could overmatch him, for she had the passion of rhythmic movement in her blood. "you've got the fairy foot all right, little one," said he, investing the epithet with his conscious sophomoric superiority. pat felt offended. she wanted so much to be grown-up that evening. but she feared to alienate her escort's budding interest if she showed any resentment. "anyone can dance with as good a dancer as you are," she replied sweetly. he gave her an appreciative glance. "can they? i guess we could enter for a prize all right." "we could make some of 'em hustle to beat us," she declared gaily. "could you make a getaway some evening, and we'd slip over and try it out at one of the big places?" "would you take me?" she cried, delighted. but her face fell. "there won't be time. i'm going back to school." the talk languished after this disappointment. the number was over and they were seated in a remote corner of the little conservatory. thorpe wondered what he could find to talk to this kid about. "engine completely stalled," he thought ruefully. on her part, patricia experienced a sense of dismal vacancy. what was there in her mental repertoire to interest this worldly collegian? the memory of the party at which she had seen him gambling came to mind as a hopeful bridge over the widening conversational chasm. "been winning much lately?" she asked brightly. "winning?" he looked puzzled. "at what?" "craps. i heard you stung the crowd for a hundred dollars at our party." he was flattered and lofty. "oh, i did pretty well. where'd you hear about it? you weren't at the party." "not for long," confessed pat. "but i was among those present for a little while." connection of ideas recalled to her warren graves and his light-hearted allure. she wished he were beside her on the settee instead of selden. she could almost hear his voice, bantering and tender, "sweetie," and feel the warm pressure of his arm. with him there would have been no anxious necessity of searching for topics of conversation, whereas with selden---- why not experiment a little, she thought, daringly. she let her hand slip carelessly from her lap to her side. it came into touch with his. the contact gave her a shock as unexpected as it was painful. she had failed to notice that he held a lighted cigarette. "ouch!" said pat, and licked the wounded knuckle with a sharp, pink tongue like a young animal's. "let's see," said the youth. he took her hand, glanced at it, and set his lips to the reddened skin cavalierly enough. "that better?" he asked. pat nodded. she stared intently at the solaced spot wondering what the progress of the game would be. in thorpe's inured mind there was no room for surmise. to him this was all formula, the parliamentary procedure of casual love-making. he drew the yielding fingers into his left hand and slipped his right arm across the slim, girlish shoulders. she leaned back a little from his embrace. "well?" he questioned, an easy laugh on his lips. "well, what?" she whispered. he bent and kissed her. it was a quick kiss, adventurous and playful. not so had warren graves's eager and searching lips closed down upon hers. pat was both disappointed of her expected thrill, and unaccountably relieved and reassured. a queer, inward fluttering which had unbalanced her thoughts for the moment when the appropriative arm encircled her, was stilled. suddenly she felt quite mistress of herself and the situation. she proceeded now according to a formula which she was improvising, and which millions of girls had improvised before her. "what did you do that for?" she murmured. "didn't you want me to?" pat abandoned her formula before it was fairly under way. "i suppose i did," she admitted. expectant of the usual "no," he was startled, amused, and a little roused. "did you?" he said. he drew her closer, bent his mouth to hers again, felt a swift stir at the sweet, soft pressure, followed by a sensible chilling as she turned away to say thoughtfully: "i wonder why i did." "you're a queer kid," he observed genuinely. "but there's something mighty sweet about you." "is there?" she cried, charmed with the direct flattery. "i suppose you wanted me to because you like me," he pursued. "wasn't that it?" "i don't know. i like being petted." "oh! _do_ you? by any-old-body?" "i don't know," she repeated. "i've never been but once before." "did you like that better than this?" "it was different." "different?" his interest and curiosity were piqued; his vanity, too. "well, i can make it different, too." "no," choked pat in sudden panic as she felt his lean, sinewy arms encircle her crushingly. "don't, sel!" she twitched her face away from his. immediately her alarm gave place to a stimulus of sheer delight. she had distinctly felt him tremble. an epochal discovery! for she was, herself, quite cool. she possessed then the mysterious power to arouse men out of themselves, while remaining self-possessed, to affect them in this strange manner more than she herself was moved. "pat, dear!" whispered the youth, avid and insistent. he had ceased to seem formidably old to her now; she was his superior. she kissed him again, but lightly and pushed him back. "bad bunny!" she mocked. "we ought not to, sel." "oh, what's the harm?" "someone might come in." "come outside, then." "oh, let's go back and dance. i'm afraid of you." she gave him a sidelong glance with this gratuitous lie. "come, i love this trot." they danced it out, he holding her closer than before, she letting her cheek press his from time to time. she yearned to the feeling of his young strength, yet was quite content for the time, with the experience of the evening as far as it had gone. when they returned to the conservatory again, she made him sit in a chair opposite to her. his sophomoric assurance was quite tempered down; the unformed child whom he had danced with condescendingly and as a kindness earlier in the evening, was become imperatively desirable now. he chafed at her aloof attitude. "i'm coming to see you," he said with an attempt at masterfulness in his tone. "i'll come to-morrow. keep the evening open." she shook her head. "i'm going back to school." "are you?" he looked dispirited. "will you write to me, pat?" "can't." "well--you'll be home for vacation, won't you?" "of course." "so'll i. i was going to a house party on staten island. but if you'll be here i'm coming back." "will you?" her tone was almost indifferent, though she was aflame with triumph, inwardly. "that's nice of you." "i will if you'll be glad to see me." "of course i will." "awfully glad?" he pressed. "oh, i don't know about all that," replied pat, the coquette. "you're going to kiss me good-bye?" he pleaded. "perhaps. just a little one." when she had slipped from his embrace, her gaze was far away. "what are you thinking of now?" he asked jealously. "of connie." "what of her?" "i wonder where they are now. i was thinking," she continued as if speaking to herself, "that i'd like to see her to-morrow morning." "why to-morrow morning?" asked thorpe. he was a youth of slow imagination, but he was not stupid. suddenly he laughed. "oh!" he cried. "so _that's_ the idea! you little devil!" "no; it isn't," denied pat, her cheeks flaming, and ran back to the ballroom. at the entrance she collided with scott vincent, who was looking for a vanished partner. "pardon!" he said, cleverly saving her from a recoil against the door! "oh; it's the infanta!" he looked into her vivid face with appreciative amusement. "don't you want to give me this dance?" he asked. her hot cheeks cooled. she considered him appraisingly though her heart beat quicker. he was so very good to look at! "no; i don't," she replied. "no?" he laughed. "you're frank, at least. perhaps you'll be franker and tell me why." "because you didn't ask me earlier." "indeed! but i hadn't seen you," he protested, surprised at himself at being put upon the defensive by this child. "i don't like not being seen," retorted pat, with a calmness worthy of an experienced flirt. "well, i'm damned!" said vincent softly, under his breath. he began to be interested in this quaint specimen. "oh! come! give me a chance to make amends. how about a little supper?" "no," answered pat with perverse satisfaction. "i'm going to bed. good-night, mr. too-late." she darted away from him, triumphantly satisfied of having left a barb behind her. he wouldn't forget her soon, _she'd_ bet! at the turn of the stairs she peeped down expectantly. sure enough! there he stood staring after her, his comely face clouded with perplexity and disappointment. it gave pat a sudden heating of the blood; but this was the thrill of satisfaction, of something achieved, quite different from the unsated yet delicious longing experienced when she had looked down before from that same vantage point upon warren graves. even more than before she was aware of a power within herself, perhaps greater than herself, to allure men. and subtly, profoundly, she felt that the touchstone of that power was denial. scott vincent would remember her, selden thorpe would think of her with longing, because she had denied them both. pat slept happily that night, the sleep of a little venus victrix. chapter vii it was to her second daughter that mona fentriss made, after due thought, disclosure of her condition. dee was shocked and incredulous. she had no profound affection for her mother. none of the girls had. but mona had always been _bonne camarade_ with them in her casual and light-hearted way. and she had made, as few women make, the atmosphere of her home. without her the house was almost unthinkable; it would not be the same place; not only sadder and duller, but essentially different. in this way chiefly would she be missed. "you'll have to be the one to carry on the housekeeping job, dee." "i?" said mary delia. "mother, i don't know the first thing about it." "you'll learn. you're clever." "besides, i can't believe that you're going to--that you're right about yourself." "ask dr. bob." "he's been hinting at something. but he seemed afraid to come out with it when i tried to follow up. is that the reason why you wanted me to marry bobs?" "partly." "i can't seem to think of him in that way. but then, i can't seem to think of any man in that way." "not even jimmy james?" "not even jimmy, much as i like him." "when we talked about this before you said----" "yes; i know. probably i'll marry him one of these days. but when he tries to make love to me, i curl up a little. am i abnormal, mona?" "i don't know," answered mona reflectively. "we women are queer machines, dee. perhaps it's just that jimmy isn't the right man." "then i haven't met the right man yet. it would be pretty weird if he came along afterward, wouldn't it? so perhaps i'd better wait." "no; i think perhaps you'd better not, if you really like jimmy. there might not be any right man for you, in that sense. some of us are made that way." "yes; i suppose so. but why choose me to run the house? con would do it better, wouldn't she?" "possibly. but if she's to do it, i'd have to tell her what i've just told you. and i don't want to break in on her happiness." "oh, happiness," murmured dee in a curious tone. "you don't think she's happy?" queried the mother. "or perhaps you don't believe in that kind of happiness. cynicism at your age is a pose." "it isn't that. but i don't believe con and freddie are going too well together." "why not?" "freddie's hitting the booze quite a bit. besides, he hasn't as much money as con thought. not nearly. and she's a high-speed little spender, you know." "yes; she's certainly that," agreed mona, bethinking herself of the monthly bills which came in after the eldest sister's allowance had been expended in a variety of manners for which the spender was cheerfully unable to account. "doing fifty thousand dollar things on a fifteen thousand dollar income won't speed 'em up the road to happiness," opined the shrewd dee. "she'll make a hash of it, if she doesn't pull up." "doesn't she care for fred, do you think?" "in one way she's crazy about him." dee's curled lip suggested the way; also that she neither comprehended nor sympathised with it. but mona laughed, relieved. "well; that's rather essential, you know, in marriage. i'll talk to connie about extravagance when i come back." "as a preacher on that text," began dee wickedly; then bent over to give her mother's hand an awkward and remorseful pat. "i'll do the best i can, of course. and don't think i'm not--not feeling pretty rotten over this," she continued, huskily and a little shamefully, like a boy caught in a display of emotion.... "you say, when you come back. going away?" "oh, just a run over to philadelphia to spend a couple of days with the barhams," replied mona carelessly. "you and i will have to do a little figuring about the housekeeping, too, on my return. and you can pass it on to pat when you get married." "pat! she'll be a grand little housekeeper when her turn comes. i pity poor dad." "she and your father understand each other, though, in a way," mused mona. having meditated over this conversation with dubious feelings, dee, who had a sane instinct for facts, went to call on dr. osterhout at the little laboratory attached to his bungalow. this was on a tuesday. her mother had left the previous noon. osterhout emerged from rapt contemplation of a test tube to find the girl standing over him. "hullo," he said. "what are you invading a bachelor's quarters at this hour for?" "afraid of being compromised, bobs?" she retorted. "hadn't thought of it. why put such alarming ideas into my head? but my reputation will stand it if yours will. besides, a physician is immune. one of the perquisites of the profession." "it's as a physician that i want to talk to you." his face changed; became grave and solicitous. "what's wrong?" "i want to know about mona." "has she told you anything?" "yes." "i've wanted her to for some time." "then it's true." "yes; it's true." "how long, bobs?" "uncertain. it isn't progressing as fast as i feared. but--not very long, dee." he spoke with effort. "a year?" "perhaps. if she's careful." "but she isn't careful. you know mona." "no. she isn't. it isn't in her to be." "ought she to be running off on trips?" "of course not. but i can't stop her." a note of weariness, of defeat had come into his brusque voice. "poor old bobs!" the girl went to him and set a hand on his shoulder, brushing his cheek with her fingers as she did so. there was nothing repellent to her sensitiveness in contact with him, nothing of the revulsion which she experienced under the eager touch of men, tentatively love-making. bobs wasn't like a man to her so much as like a faithful and noble-spirited dog. "it's hard on you, isn't it?" she murmured. his eyes thanked her for her understanding and sympathy. "it isn't easy," he confessed. "i won't hurt you any more. but just one question; is it quite hopeless?" "i can't see any chance of cure." "poor old bobs!" she said again, this time in a whisper. "if i were a man i'm sure i should be wild about mona. i can see that even if she is my mother. she's so lovely; and she's so young; and she's"--dee smiled--"she's such a bad child." "no; she's not," he defended doggedly. "she's just a little spoiled because life has always petted her. and now the petting is almost over." "yes. that's hard to believe, isn't it? of mona! she's always had her own way with everyone and everything. but she's got courage. she won't flinch. bobs, do you remember a talk we three had, months ago?" "yes." "i'd like to do something for her before--something that she wanted. and for you, too. it wouldn't do any good, would it," she asked wistfully, "if i were to marry you?" "not a bit." she smiled, awry, but withal, relieved. "what a bear you are! isn't that your phone ringing?" "let it ring. this isn't office hours." "a hint for me? having proposed and been rejected, i'm off." she brushed his cheek again. "old boy," she said, "it _is_ going to be tough going for you. worse than for any of us. good-bye." concentration upon his work being dissipated by this disturbing visit, osterhout threw himself on the settee and dropped out of the world into a chasm of dark musings. if mona had ever really cared for him, he mused--if he had been her lover--might he have been her lover, as she had hinted?--had she lovers? or were the other men merely playthings of her wayward moods, of her craving for excitement, for adulation, for the sunlit warmth of being loved? at least he had not been a plaything; her regard for and trust in him were true and sincere. better these, perhaps, than the turmoil and uncertainty of---- yet, that temptation that she had held out to him; was it just an instance of her wickeder bent of coquetry?... or could he have made her care?... damn that telephone! he roused himself with a wrench and went into the next room where the intrusive mechanism was thrilling. long-distance had been trying to get him.... wait a moment.... a man's voice, low, eager and strained came to his ear over the wire. "dr. osterhout?" "yes." "can you come to trenton immediately? by the next train?" "who is speaking?" "it's very important," went on the nervous and insistent voice. "it's a--a very important case. critical." "who are you?" "is that necessary?" queried the voice, after a pause. "certainly. do you suppose that i am going out on any wild-goose, anonymous call?" "then i was to say," said the voice, "that mona needs you." "mona! is she ill?" "yes." "where?" "here, in trenton." "where in trenton?" "at the marcus groot hotel. you'll be met at the train. for god's sake say you'll come." "i can get the one o'clock," said osterhout. "good-bye." going over on the train he had time for scalding meditations. mona in trenton! at the marcus groot hotel. when she was supposedly visiting the barhams at their philadelphia apartment. and all this atmosphere of secrecy thrown about it by the unknown man. but was he unknown? the voice had seemed dimly familiar to osterhout. surely, he had heard it before. feverishly he mustered in his mind mona's admirers, canvassed them over, vacillated between this and that one, and shook with a jealous and amazed rage which horrified while it tore at him, as sidney rathbone hurried up the platform to meet him. but in a moment he had mastered himself. "thank god, you're here!" "how is she?" "a good deal easier. she's been terribly ill." "heart?" "yes. she wouldn't let me call any local physician." "when was she taken?" inquired osterhout as he stepped into the waiting taxi. "this morning. about eight o'clock." in his anxiety rathbone was beyond any considerations of concealment; the revelation was absolute when, at the hotel, he took osterhout directly to the suite of rooms, as one having the right. mona greeted the newcomer with a smile, grateful, pleading, pitiful. mutely it said: "don't be too harsh in your judgment of me." hardening himself to his professional state of mind, osterhout made his swift, assured, detailed examination. "what's the verdict?" whispered mona. he nodded encouragingly. "you'll be all right," he said reassuringly. from his case he produced some pellets. "not an opiate?" she asked rebelliously. "i want to talk to you." "no. it's a stimulant. but i think you'd better not try to talk for a while." "i must ... sid, dear, go into the other room, won't you?" rathbone nodded, speechless for the moment. his hollowed eyes were full of the slow tears of relief. he bent over the sick woman's face for a moment and was gone, obediently. "i want to tell you," said mona, as soon as the door had closed, "about this." "there isn't any need," returned osterhout. "no. there isn't," agreed mona. "the situation explains itself, doesn't it?" she smiled at him, equably but without hardihood. "it does." "are you being my wise doctor or my reproachful friend? are you thinking to yourself: 'mona, i wouldn't have thought it of you!' because, if you are----" "i'm not." "you mean that you would have thought it of me. how dare you, bobs!" she demanded elfishly. he did not respond to her raillery, which he recognised for the expression of tortured nerves. "i wish you wouldn't talk," he said. "i will," she retorted mutinously. "it won't hurt me. at worst, it won't hurt me nearly as much as to hold in what i want to say. bobs, was this attack brought on by--by my foolishness?" "very possibly. it certainly didn't help any," he replied grimly. "suppose i'd died here," she mused. "i very nearly did." "so i should judge." "what a scandal there'd have been! and what a text for the pious! 'the wages of sin is death.' d'you believe that, bobs?" "it's a useful bogey to scare people who are more timid than they are wicked." "i'm not timid," she proclaimed. "and i don't feel particularly wicked. only anxious over how this is going to turn out." "what did you do it for, mona?" he burst out painfully. she gave him a sidelong glance. "oh, i don't know. boredom. and he begged me so. poor sid! he does love me." "the dirty scoundrel! if he loved you, would he----" "of course he would!" she broke in, with impatient contempt. "don't indulge in cheap melodrama. it's because people are in love that they take risks like this." "then you love him," said osterhout dolorously. "i don't know. he sways me. but--i don't think i'm in love with him, as you mean it." "yet you----" "yet i came here with him. does that seem so terrible to you?" she spoke in a tone of half-tender mockery. "i can't understand it, except on the ground that you love him." "because you don't understand me. and there are twenty-one different definitions of love." "do you understand yourself?" "yes; i do," she asserted thoughtfully and boldly. "and i'm not afraid to accept myself as i am. i don't shut my eyes to the picture just because it's my own. i'm not a sneak." "no. you're not that." "and if i take the chances i'm ready to face the consequences," she said without defiance, but as one who enunciates a principle of life. "the consequences? of this?" "if necessary. it isn't the first time." he winced and shrank. "ah, i'm sorry if that hurt you!" she cried contritely. "never mind. there are others than me to be thought of." "you do the thinking, bobs. i'm not up to it." "i will." "that's like you," she murmured gratefully. "where are you supposed to be staying?" "at the barhams', on walnut street. only sue is at home." "can you arrange it with her?" "to back up my lies? yes; sue will stand by." it was characteristic of mona fentriss that she should use the short, ugly, and veracious word. "then i shall take you to a philadelphia hospital." "am i as bad as that?" "it's the simplest way to cover the trail. you were taken ill at the barhams'; you wired for me to avoid alarming the family, and i had you transferred to the hospital. but there's a risk." "of being trapped?" "not that so much. of bringing on another attack." "you'll be with me, won't you?" "yes. we'll get a car and take you over." "then i'm not afraid," she said trustfully. "but--'we'; do you mean that sid is going along?" "i supposed you'd want him." "i don't." wise though he was in human nature, mona was always surprising osterhout. he made no comment, but went into the front room. rathbone, his finely cut face mottled and livid, lurched heavily out of his chair. "is she going to die?" he asked, looking pitifully unlike the traditional villain of such a drama. "perhaps," returned the physician shortly. "because of--was it this that brought on the attack?" osterhout eyed him with grim distaste. "it didn't help any," he answered, as he had answered mona. "good god! if she dies through my fault----" "you should have thought of that before." "i love her so!" groaned the man. his face changed. "i'll know what to do," he muttered in quiet, self-centred determination. "and what's that?" demanded the physician. "nothing," replied the other, startled and sullen. osterhout reached him in three steps. "suicide, perhaps," he said. "that's my business." "it is. if you're a low, dirty coward." rathbone straightened. "i won't take that from any man." "lower your voice, you fool! and listen to me. if she dies and you kill yourself, do you realize what that would mean? it would be advertising this situation to the world. scandal and shame for the family. oh, it's an easy way out for you. but can't you be man enough to think of others a little?" "isn't it scandal and shame anyway?" "no. it isn't," returned the doctor energetically. "i'm going to get her out of it. all you have to do is to obey orders." "i'll do that," said rathbone eagerly and brokenly. "i'll do anything you say. and if ever i can repay you----" "if you try to thank me i'll kill you!" retorted osterhout, snarling and livid, suddenly losing control of himself in his jealous anguish of soul. the other stared in his face, amazed but unalarmed by the outbreak. "ah!" he breathed. "so that's the way it is with you. well--god help you! i'm sorry. but i know now you'll do your best for her. that's all i care about." he turned toward the door of the room. for the moment osterhout started forward to intercept him, then drew back with a face in which shone the bitterness of yielding to a superior right. when rathbone returned, both men had recovered their self-command. "get your things together; send for a maid to pack hers; settle your bill, and get the easiest riding car you can find to go to philadelphia," were the physician's brief directions. "where are you going to take her?" "to a hospital." "when can i see her?" "that is for her to say." "then you don't think she's going to--that there is any immediate danger?" said the lover hopefully. "i think she'll pull through this time, though there is still danger." "i'm glad you're with her," said rathbone simply, and went. quite as much time was devoted by dr. osterhout in the days immediately following to covering the devious trail of his patient as to treating her medically. after a consultation with mrs. barham, in which each solemnly pretended that the other entertained no suspicion of mona's slip, he wrote a heedfully worded letter of misinformation and assurance to ralph fentriss, explaining that his wife had been taken to the hospital after a mild attack, more for rest than anything else; that no member of the family was to come over, and that she would be in condition to return home in a few days. this latter was true, for mona's recuperative powers were great. none of the family came. but to osterhout's surprise, he ran upon patricia while walking down broad street on sunday. she was with a pretty and smartly dressed girl a little older than herself. "what are you doing here, pat?" he demanded. "week-ending with cissie parmenter." with an aplomb amusing in one so young she indicated her companion. "she's my b.f. at school. cissie, this is dr. bobs. you know about him." "yes, indeed. how d'you do, dr. osterhout." "and what manner of creature is a b.f.?" asked he quizzically, taking the extended hand which was ornamented with a valuable ruby. "best friend, of course, stupid bobs," returned pat. "what kind of a bat are you on down here?" "your mother's been ill. she's in hospital here," he answered and immediately wondered whether he had not spoken unwisely. "hospital?" pat opened wide eyes. "is it dangerous?" "no. she's coming along very well." "take me to see her." she turned to cissie. "i'm plunged, ciss, but the luncheon's off for me. tell the boys. you may have my c.t. see you this afternoon." "i don't know that you ought--" began osterhout, but was cut short by a quick: "then she's worse than you pretend." "no; but i don't want her excited. however, you may see her," he decided. he took her to the hospital and left her there with her mother. on his return for his evening's visit he asked: "how long did the bambina stay?" "we had a long talk. bob, did you notice any change in pat?" "no; i don't think i did. i wasn't thinking about her." mona's beautiful eyes grew pensive. "but you were right about her; what you said before." "as to what?" "she is going to be attractive to men in her own queer style. there's something about her, a femininity--no, a sheer femaleness that's going to make trouble." "for her or for others?" "for her possibly, because of its effect on others. she understands it a little herself, already, for she's very precocious. and she's proud of it. but she's afraid of it, too. such a talk as we've had! she's a frank little beast. your respectable hairs would have stood on end. i've been frank with her, too. i had to be; there may not be much time. _morituri te_--what's the silly latin, bob?... oh, don't look like that, my dear! i didn't mean to hurt you. and i've hurt you so much, haven't i?" "it doesn't matter." "because you're so good to me. so it does matter. why are you so good to me, bob?" "you know, mona." "but i want to hear you say it.... no; i don't! that's my badness coming out again. and i'm going to be good now in the time remaining to me. can't you see me, with a saintly expression of face and piously folded hands, waiting submissively like--like somebody on a sampler? somebody very woolly?" in spite of his pain he smiled. "that's better," she cried gaily. "cheer up. i want you in good mood because i've something to ask you. there's something i want you awfully to do, and you won't want to do it." "is it very foolish?" he asked indulgently. "imbecile to the verge of asininity.... do you believe in spiritualism?" "no." "what a flat and flattening negative. but i'm not to be flattened. if you don't believe in it, there couldn't be any harm in carrying out my silly little scheme." "which is?" "i'm going to want to know about pat. if i don't, i'll worry." "about pat?" he queried, not comprehending. "but, as she's away at school i'll be no more in touch with her than you." "i'm talking about afterwards." "afterwards?" "yes. after i'm dead. what makes you so slow, bob? i want you to write me." "what? spirit letters? through some cheap fraud of a medium?" "oh, no! direct." "do you believe they'd reach you, my letters?" he asked sadly. "not the letters themselves, certainly. i don't know that i actually _believe_ anything about it. but what is in the letters might sift through to me in some way we don't understand. it _might_, bob," she pleaded. "i've heard of strange cases. and, anyway, i should think you'd like to write, in case you miss me." "miss you!" he repeated hoarsely. "yes; i'll miss you." "then wouldn't you give up just a little, tiny time to writing me?" she cajoled. "just a promise to please silly me. after i'm dead you needn't keep it, you know, if you don't believe that i'll know." "any promise i made you i'd keep, living or dead. what would i do with the letters if i did write?" "you know the built-in desk-safe in my room? you could put them there. you'll have the combination, for you're to be executor of my will. there's a large drawer at the bottom.... of course it's all foolishness. but--won't you?" "you know i'll do anything you ask." "yes; i know. poor old bob! write me about all the girls; but principally pat, just as if she were yours, too; all that you'd hope for her and fear for her; her problems and growth and dangers. she'll have 'em. perhaps i'll come back, a haunt, and read your letters--you must make 'em very wise, bob--and whisper your wisdom in the ear of pat's queer little soul, and warn her if need be.... bob, do you know what i really want for the girls?" "i might guess." "not goodness; that's for plain girls. nor virtue, particularly; that's more or less of a scarecrow. i want happiness for them." "only a little, easy thing like that?" he taunted gently. "well, i've had it; a lot of it. 'i've taken my fun where i found it.' bob, i'm a pagan thing! and perhaps after i've gone where the good pagans go, i'll send word back to you and invite you to follow--if it's a proper place for a dear old fogy like you. it may not be an orthodox heaven, old boy. but there'll be something doing if mona goes there!" but it was not until six months later and from her own house that lovely, pagan mona fentriss went to her own place. went with an expectant soul and a smile on her lips, unafraid in the face of the great, dim guess as she had been in every threat that life had held over her. part ii chapter viii the front door-button was out of commission. since constance had come to live at holiday knoll, bringing her husband with her and taking over the management of the place, the bell had developed a habit of being out of order. so had many other fixtures, schedules, and household appurtenances. constance always meant to put them aright, and sometimes did. but they never seemed to stay put. as a housekeeper, ralph fentriss used to remark with humorous resignation, connie was a grand little society beauty. of the beauty there could be no question. as she sat now, on this winter's night, the glow of the reading lamp showing warm and soft upon her loose, rose-coloured lounging robe and her dreamy face, she was a picture which, unfortunately, lacked any observer. fred browning was out. fred was often out in the evenings now, though they had been married less than two years. not that it mattered greatly to the young wife. fred had ceased to stimulate her senses; he had never stimulated her imagination. she got along well enough with him, and equally well without him. substitutes were not wanting. but just at the moment she rather wished he were there, because she thought she heard someone at the front door, though it might be only the beating of the blizzard, and it was so much trouble to rouse herself from the easy chair and the flimsy novel. that so many things were so much trouble was the bane of constance's life. her soul had begun to take on fat. presently her lissome body would follow suit. yes; there certainly was someone at the door. she could discern now an impatient stamping. probably bobs, although he had said that he could not come before nine to see the baby, who was constantly fretting. another superfluous trouble in a world of annoyances! we-ell; on the whole it was less bother to go to the door than to look up a maid. tossing her book aside she walked into the hall. as she passed, she pressed an electric light button. only one globe out of the cluster responded, and that weakly. "damn!" said constance. "i forgot to phone the company." she threw open the front door. in the storm centre stood a man. he wore a long coat lined with seal, a coat which the luxurious constance at once appraised and approved, and an astrakhan cap which he lifted, showing fair, close waves of hair. he peered into the dim entry. "is this----" he began, and then, in an eager exclamation, "mona!" constance drew a quick breath of shock and amazement. "_what!_" "a thousand pardons," said the stranger. "a stupid error." he spoke with the accent of a cultivated american, but there was about him the vague, indefinable atmosphere of an older, riper, calmer civilisation. "am i mistaken in supposing this to be mrs. fentriss's home?" he asked courteously. "no. yes. it is," answered constance, still shaken. "i would have telephoned before presenting myself, but the wires are down. what a furious storm! my taxi," he added cheerily, "is stalled in your very largest and finest local snowdrift. is mrs. fentriss in?" "my mother?" faltered constance. he gazed on her keenly, incredulously. "your mother? that's hardly possible. yet--yes. you are wonderfully like her." there was a caressing intonation in his voice as he said the words. "permit me; i am cary scott." "oh!" gasped constance in dismay. cary scott, the old romance about which she had heard her father joke her mother more than once, concerning which all the children had felt a lively curiosity because it was supposed to be "different" from mona's other little adventures; cary scott here in the flesh and in tragic ignorance of her mother's death! commanding herself, she drew aside with a slight, gracious gesture which bade him enter. bowing, he passed into the hallway and shook the snow from his coat. not until he had reached the door of the library did she gather her forces to tell him. "hadn't you heard about mother, mr. scott?" she asked very gently. her tone stopped him. his eyes were steady as he raised them to the lovely, pitying face before him. but hollows seemed suddenly to have fallen in beneath them. "not--?" he whispered. she inclined her head. "nearly a year ago." "why haven't i heard? why was i not told?" he demanded. "father wrote you, i think. you must sit down." she pushed a chair around for him and, laying light hands upon his shoulders, slipped his coat back. "take it off," she said. he obeyed. he was like a man tranced. seated under the lamplight he stared fixedly into a dark corner of the room, as if to evoke a vision for his appeasement. sharply intrigued, constance took the opportunity of observing him at her leisure. he was, she decided, a delightful personality, all the more engaging for that touch of the exotic, that hint of potential romance which the men of her acquaintance did not have. no woman would have called him handsome. his features were too irregular, and the finely modelled forehead was scarred vertically with a savagely deep v which mercifully lost itself in the clustering hair, a testimony to active war service. there was confident distinction in his bearing, and an atmosphere of quiet and somewhat ironic worldliness in voice and manner. he looked to be a man who had experimented much with life in its larger meanings and found it amusing but perhaps not fulfilling. reckoning him contemporaneously with the implication of that betraying "mona!" of his first utterance, constance thought: "he must be nearly forty to have been one of mother's suitors. but he looks hardly over thirty." she heard him sigh as he drew his spirit back from far distances, and was sensitive to the power of control implied in the composed countenance which he turned to her. "you should be constance fentriss." "constance browning," she corrected. "i'm an old married woman of two years' standing." "grand dieu!" he muttered. "i think of you always as hardly more than a child. as i used to hear about you. one loses touch." "you had not seen my mother for a long time, had you?" "very long. many years. but one does not forget her kind." constance, who had not seated herself during this passage of speech, crossed to the mantel, and lifted from it a heavily framed photograph which she placed in the visitor's hands. "that was taken a few months before she died." "unchanged!" he breathed. something imperative in constance's burgeoning interest in the man drove her to ask: "did you--were you very much in love with her?" there was daring in her tone; but there was compassion also. because of his sense of the latter he answered her frankly: "no. not, perhaps, as most people understand it. love asks much. i asked--nothing. it was not," he smiled faintly, "as one falls in love and falls out." "ah?" she returned, questioningly, tauntingly. but he held to the graver tone. "she was all that dreams could be, and as unattainable as dreams. if she was like an angel to me, i suppose i was like a boy to her. she used to tell me about you and your sisters." again he smiled. "once she said, 'wait and come back and marry one of them.'" "but you did not wait," accused constance. "nor did you," he retorted with that swift, ironic eye-flash which she was to know so well later. she welcomed the change to a lighter, and more familiar vein. "how should i know?" she mocked. "you sent no word of your claim. is mrs. scott with you?" "no," he answered shortly. then, in suaver tone: "it is more than a year now that i have been out of the world. the east; wild parts of hindustan and northern china; and then the south seas. i have a boy's passion for travel." "but not for your native land. you _are_ an american, aren't you?" "i have been. and i want to be again. but i shall need help." "we fentrisses are terribly american. don't you want us to reclaim you?" "would you? then i may come back?" "you must. father will want to see you." "and i him. he is well?" "very. where can he find you?" "at the st. regis for a few days." "do you think a few days enough to re-americanize you?" "say a few years, then." he rose and turned to give a long look at the portrait of mona fentriss which he had set on the table. "you have been more than kind to me," he said gravely. "i cannot thank you enough." "i'm afraid i was clumsy and abrupt." he shook his head. "it must have been a shock to you." "yes. but--dreams do not die. and i still keep the dream. and perhaps"--he lifted an appealing gaze to her--"perhaps, as a legacy, some little part of the friendship. i may hold that as a hope?" "yes," said constance. her fingers stirred in his as he bent and touched light lips to her hand. out into the tumultuous night cary scott carried two pictures, mother and daughter, strangely alike, strangely different, which interchanged and blended and separated again, like the evanescence of sunset-hued clouds. but it was the visual memory of the living woman which eventually held his inner eye, the pure, smooth contour of her face, the sumptuous curves of the figure beneath the suave folds of the clinging robe, the chaste line of the lips contradicted by the half-veiled sensuality of the wide, humid, deer-soft eyes. a delicate, but unsatisfied sensuality which might yet, as he read it, break down under provocation into reckless self-indulgence. sensitive by nature to beauty in all its implications, inner and outer, he felt the enveloping atmosphere of her youth and sweetness, and sought, to match it, the swift intelligence, the eager responsiveness which had been mona's. had the daughter inherited these qualities of the mother? if she had, she would be irresistible. mona fentriss, whatever relations she had maintained, in her wayward, laughing course of life, with other men (wholly unknown and unsuspected by cary scott) had been to him all that was demanded by the ideal which he himself had formed of her; had given him a friendship infinitely wise and sweet and clear in spirit. of constance he had asked the chance to win a like friendship. yet in his heart, at once hopeful by instinct, and cynical by experience, he knew from the evidence of those hungering eyes, that if she gave at all it would be more than friendship. and, if she chose to give, would he choose to take? from mona's daughter, at once so subtly like and unlike mona? was he already a little in love with her? the question was still unsolved when he went to sleep. after he left, constance returned to her book. presently it dropped from her hand. dreams seeped into the craving eyes. her husband found her so when he came in at midnight. "what are you mooning over, con?" he said testily. he was prone to the impatient mood when he had had too much to drink. "i?" answered his wife. "oh! ghosts." "rats!" said fred browning. "come to bed." chapter ix "who's the princely party holding con's hand in the library?" patricia, home from school for the easter vacation, slouched against mary delia's door as she put her question. the child had begun to take on the florescence of the woman. her meagre face had filled out; the lines of her slim figure had become firmer, more gracious; the knowing eyes deeper of hue, more veiled of intent. she was still sallow, but the reproach of "pimply little gnome" was no longer applicable. her trusted dr. bobs had promised her the complexion of a peach if she would hold to his stern regimen of diet for a year, and as she had been fairly faithful, though with an occasional lapse into her besetting sin of gluttony, the clarification of her blood already showed in a soft lustre underlying the duller tint of the skin. her teeth had whitened in perceptible degree, and her tongue reddened from its former furry grey of replete mornings. she glowed with a conscious and eager vitality. startled by the form of the question put to her so abruptly, mary delia looked up from the golf glove which she was mending. "is he holding her hand?" she said unguardedly. "figure of speech," returned the airy pat, perceiving, however, that there was something in this. "they look pretty chummy, though. who is he, dee?" "cary scott." "meaning little or nothing to muh. where's he from?" "all over. he was a friend of mona's." "old like that! he doesn't look it. visiting our flourishing village?" "he's come back to live, i believe." "here? and connie's annexed him, has she? married?" "no; not here. he comes down week-ends. yes; he's married, i believe, but not very much." "business?" "he's invented some new mechanical thing that the mills have to have, and he makes a lot of money out of it." "crazy about con?" "he's here a good deal." "how does freddie take it?" "between cocktails," returned dee laconically. pat thought for a moment. "is con getting tired of him?" "wouldn't you be?" "i? oh, i'd be sick to death of any man in a month! but i thought con would turn into the domestic breeder kind." "i don't blame con so much. freddie's quit his business for drink. they're miles in debt. con's more extravagant than ever. that's the reason they're living here on father. pretty boring for him. he's getting sore, too." "no wonder. the house is like a pig pen." "con doesn't pay any attention to it. she hasn't any interest in anything except clothes, and men--principally scott." "then she is nuts about him." "i don't know. you never can tell with con. but i know this; bobs is worried." "poor old bobs! he has his troubles with us. but i don't see that this scott party is any francis x. bushman, the male beauty-spot of the movie screen. how does he work his little game?" dee tossed the repaired glove into the basket and regarded her sister. "why all the eager questions, sweetie?" "don't be nawsty, pettah," retorted pat, who well knew what "sweetie" in that tone meant. "i'm awsking you." "not thinking of organising a rescue party, are you?" "i might at that." "a fat chance you'd have against con. why, he'd chuck you under the chin and tell you to run away to your crib." "then i'd put up my innocent, childish lips and ask him to say nighty-nighty nicey-nicey." "yes; you're pretty good at that innocent, childish lips stuff," remarked dee placidly. "about time you were outgrowing it, i'd say." pat glowered. "oh, you go to hell," she snapped. "no man would ever want to kiss you. you--you dead fish." dee laughed. "wouldn't they? i wish they didn't. it's a rotten nuisance." pat's ill humour vanished in interest. "you are a queer one," she said. "how does jimmieson james like your views?" dee shrugged her slim, clean-muscled shoulders. "he dangles along." "better haul him in before he wriggles off the hook," advised the worldly pat. "come on down and show me the new suitor." "do your own butting-in," yawned dee. "i won't." "oh, verra-well! here's trying." finesse did not mark pat's irruption upon the _solitude à deux_ in the library. "'lo, con," was her opening. "seen t. t. around here?" constance's companion arose and viewed the new arrival with surprise, amusement and expectation. the latter was not immediately fulfilled. "no," said constance with significant brevity. "it's in the conservatory." which was a guess. "i've looked," said pat. which was a lie. she directed a guileless gaze at cary scott. "i think you must have been sitting on it," she said; "my copy of _town topics_." "no; i assure you," he returned. there was a moment's pause which he relieved by turning to constance. "this is miss patricia?" he asked. "yes; that's the infant," returned constance so disparagingly that pat at once decided to see it through. "only half an introduction," she said, greatly fancying herself for her aplomb. "what's the other half?" "cary scott, at your service, mademoiselle." he made her an elaborate bow, twinkling. she held out a hand, large, firm, and nervously modelled. "oh, yes. dee's been telling me about you. such a lot." "a charming historian. i hope the history borrowed some of the quality." "it wasn't so dull. con, are you driving down for dad to-day?" "no. you are." "oh, _very_ well. i can take the car, then. good-bye, mr. scott. it was really an awfully interesting history. i'd like to hear more of it some day." "that's a precocious child, stancia," said cary scott, giving to the special name which he had devised for constance a caressing quality. "she's a terrible brat," replied the other. "she is your sister and therefore has for me a shadow of your delight about her." "how foreign you sound when you say those things! i love it in you." "do you? but you use the word 'love' so lightly." "i don't think of it lightly. no," she whispered, reading the swift fire in his eyes and holding him back with a light hand upon his shoulder. "not again. not now. that other time--it frightened me." "don't be afraid of me," he murmured. "i can wait." "ah, but i'm more afraid of you when you wait than when you seek," she smiled, and he reflected, with warm recognisance, that for once she had shown a gleam of subtlety, that subtlety which had so enthralled him in the mother, for which he was ever eagerly looking in the daughter. "you'll be at the club dance saturday?" she added. "since you are to be there. _cela va sans dire._" scott, delayed from reaching the club house early, found the dance in full swing when he got there. it was one of the largest and gayest of the season. the eleventh commandment as promulgated by mr. volstead, "thou shalt not drink except by stealth," had made every man a walking bar-room. having neglected to provide himself with a flask, scott was quite discomfited when constance, sitting out one of the three dances which were all that she had allowed him, railed at him with a charming air of proprietorship for his negligence. "i might pass out on your hands and you'd have nothing to revive me with." "possibly i could borrow some from this youth," said he as a young fellow with his shirt gaping open where a stud had deserted its post, wavered toward them. "that's billy grant, pat's latest flame," said constance. "he's got a wonder, hasn't he!" the youngster steadied himself to approach them. "miss-zz brow-owning," he said politely, "could you tell me whe-ere patiz?" "no, billy. i haven't seen her," replied constance promptly. "i've los' her. and thissiz my dance wither. seccon-extra." onward he lurched on his quest. "do be a dear, cary, and get pat out of billy's way," begged constance. "of course. where can i find her?" "she's coming through the further door now. go and stop her. tell her this is your dance and why." pat greeted the applicant with her quick, wide smile. "yes, i know," she said. "billy is rather sunk. come on. i'm all for this music." she slipped into his arms, her body already swaying to the impulses of a half-barbaric, half-languorous waltz.... "i would never have thought you'd dance so beautifully," she presently hummed, setting the words to the consonance of the music. "why?" he asked, amused. "men of your age don't care much about it. bridge for them." "do i seem so stricken in years?" "grandfather stuff!" she laughed up at him impudently. "you do and you don't." ever alive to physical impressions she added: "you're terribly strong, aren't you?" "rather. it was the fad to be in my set in paris." "your muscles are like steel; i like the feel of them. no; they're not like steel at all. that's just one of the things people say because other people say them. they're like rubber, hard, live rubber." "i see that you're of an independent turn of expression," he commented mockingly. "you seek the just word." "but they are, aren't they? how do you keep that way?" "a little riding. a little fencing. a little boxing. a little swimming. at my advanced age, you see, one must preserve oneself." "now you're laughing at me. i like it.... why don't you applaud?" she demanded indignantly as the music fell silent. "don't you _want_ any more of this dance with me?" "certainly i do!" he clapped violently, she joining him. "will that serve?" contentedly as a purry kitten she nestled to him as the drums signalised the resumption of the tune. "let's not talk this time," said she. they merged silently into the current of physical rhythm about them. responsive to the music by instinct, guiding with the intuition of the perfect dancer, scott looked about him on the crowded scene. the measure had swollen to a fuller harmony, taken on a throbbing, suggestive quality, and he sensed the reaction in the close-joined couples around him. the girls danced by him with their eyes drooping, their cheeks inflamed, a little line of passion across their foreheads. they seemed to cling to their partners with tightening grasp, each couple a separate entity, alone with the surge of the music and what it covertly implied, the allegro furioso of tumultuous, untamable blood. he glanced down at the young girl in his arms. her lashes, long and fringed, all but touched the swell of her cheek; her lips were lightly parted for the rapid breathing; a little pulse beat in her neck. "good god!" he thought. "this child! does she know what it is that she is feeling?" he felt an access of sheer pity; thought that he must speak to stancia of this. the music panted itself to silence. pat lifted smiling, unfathomable eyes to his and let them drop. "oh!" she breathed ecstatically. "what shall i do with you now, miss pat?" he asked. "oh, stick me anywhere. this is the supper number. billy's my provider. i think he's on the veranda." misgivings beset scott that the errant billy would prove a doubtful source of supply, but he took the girl out into the dimness. propped against a corner pillar, young mr. grant gazed upon the moon with an expression of foreboding, which was almost immediately justified by the event. he leaned upon the railing, and it became evident that he would not be supping that evening. quite the contrary. "down _and_ out," commented pat, equally without surprise or resentment. "let's go. take me back to con. someone will come and get me; i've turned down a couple of the boys for supper." "perhaps," said scott formally, "you would honour me by accepting me as substitute for the recreant billy." pat gave a little, hoarse crow of delight. "how _divine_ of you!" she was at that stage of articulate development where only the highest-pressure adjective would serve her facile emotions. "come on. i know the best corner in the place if somebody hasn't snitched it already." the corner proved to be unsnitched. established there, pat gave her cavalier a large and varied order, only to countermand half of it. "i almost forgot bobs's darn diet," she grumbled. "you know bobs?" "dr. osterhout? yes. we have become quite friends." "i'm glad of that," she said gravely. "are you? why? you like him?" "i _adore_ him. i would have thought that you two would be friends," she added thoughtfully. "now i wonder why you should think that?" he smiled, but instead of awaiting her reply he set out for the food. pat wondered, too. by the time he had returned, however, her restless mind had taken another turn. "how long have you known us?" she asked. "us?" "the fentriss girls. we're us." "ah? some two months or more." "and you're almost one of the family." "how do you arrive at that flattering conclusion?" "from dee, and dad. and you say bobs has taken you in. _and_ con. especially con. why aren't you having supper with her?" "because i happen to be here." quietly though the words were spoken a palpable hardening of his manner warned her against further impertinences along this line. for the moment she shied off, and, removing a macaroon which she had filched from his plate after once denying it to herself, from between her teeth, inquired casually: "got anything on your hip?" not yet fully initiate in the argot of his native land, scott looked his inquiry. "a drink. a flask." "do you want a drink?" "why the amazement, grandfather dear?" "is that a recognised part of your dear dr. bobs's diet?" "bobs would have a fit. he doesn't know little pat is out. but wouldn't a touch of hooch put a bit of a dash into the proceedings about now?" "i assure you, i am finding no lack of interest in the proceedings," he returned drily. "meaning, 'don't get fresh, little child.' well, i'm no rum-hound. by the way, do you take that patronising tone with connie?" "suppose you satisfy your curiosity on that subject by asking her." "now you're trying to flatten me out like a worm." she contemplated him with mischievous daring in her eyes. "i don't see it," she stated deliberately. "i don't see it at all." "what don't you see? i should have thought that very little escaped your singularly sharp faculties of observation." "you and connie. i don't get it." his stare met her glance and turned it aside. but she persisted, half laughing: "if you weren't old enough to be her father---- yet you're not clever enough to be onto her. she's got you going. do you know what's the matter with con?" "while your views are doubtless valuable, i am not aware that i have invited them." "blighted! but i'm going to tell you just the same. nothing above the ears." "above the ears?" scott stared in puzzlement at the two blobs of sub-lustrous, dark hair which effectually concealed his youthful partner's organs of hearing. "oh, no brains!" she cried impatiently. "must i talk baby talk to you?" "you might talk comprehensible english," he said sternly. "and you might also find a more suitable topic than criticism of your sister." she was daring enough to try to meet the cold fire of his gaze, but not steadfast enough to endure it. "now you're angry with me," she accused, her breath catching a little. truly cary scott was angry with her. but anger was secondary to a sudden, startling realisation. he felt as if a clear, blinding, chilling light had pierced to a cherished place of illusions, betraying its voidness. no brains! it was sickeningly true. all through these weeks of his yielding to stancia's physical charm he had unconfessedly harboured the knowledge, met and denied its disappointments, its deadening negations in a score of phases, by refusing to think them out. now this bratling of the devil had thrown the ray of her withering and brutal candour upon his false spiritualisation of a gross attachment. stancia was gentle, she was sweet, she was provocative, she was adorably lovely to look upon; but--no brains! for a man of cary scott's fastidious type of mind, it was a disenchantment beyond all hope of restoration. _nulla redintegratio amoris_; the ancient philosopher was right; there was no such thing as a return upon the road of love. and, now he knew that it never had been love. however potently the attraction of stancia's beauty might draw him, he would always know it for what it was; not the true fire, but a baser flame. enlightenment! and in time, thank god! but he was in a still rage with the little prophetess who had revealed the omen. out of the long silence came her half whisper: "i _am_ a little rotter, aren't i! but i just couldn't help it!" inadequate though the plea was, he felt inexplicably appeased of his wrath. when he was still meditating what he should say to this amazing child, footsteps, heavy and not all of them steady, sounded on the veranda immediately outside the window at which they were seated. voices, unmuffled by any considerations of caution, came clearly to them. "_quelque_ chick, what!" "i'll telephone mars that she is! and coming every minute." "too easy, say i. you can hug her to a peak." "something to hug, too, that little treechie. she's got a teasin' little way with her." "guess she teases herself as much as she teases the other feller." "that teasing game is likely to be double-barrelled," put in a deeper voice. "what was it the old woman in that play said about the flapper? 'precarious virginity.' pretty wise, that." "it might also be wise," cut in cary scott's chiselling voice, "for you gentlemen to air your opinions in some less public spot." "oh, gawd!" said one of the voices. "who the devil's that?" another. "le's beat it," a third. the footsteps thudded away. "chivalrous young america!" commented scott to pat. "a companion piece to sisterly loyalty." he had meant to sting her, but he was amazed at the spasmodic constriction of the face which she turned to him. he had not expected that she would be so much affected by anything he could say; in fact, he had reckoned her rather a thick-skinned and insensitive little person. but now her eyes were set, and her cheeks sallow with ebbing blood. "the girl they were discussing," he pursued, with a view to giving her time for recovery from his too successful stab, "is presumably some man's sister; perhaps the sister of one of their friends. if he had been sitting here----" "she isn't any man's sister," said pat chokingly. then he understood. "but they called her 'treechie,'" he said stupidly. "that's one of my nicknames." "my dear!" said scott pityingly, at a loss for the moment in the face of her shamed and helpless fury. he laid his hand on hers. "do you believe it? what they said?" she whispered. "no; no. of course not," he answered soothingly. "you _do_. anyway, it's true." "can you tell me who those fellows are?" he asked grimly. "i'll find a way to stop their foul chatter." "you can't mix in it. what good would it do if you did half kill them?" for she had read the formidable wrath in his face. "besides," she concluded sullenly, "i tell you it's true." "why is it true, pat?" he asked gently. "because i'm a cheap little idiot. i never realised--i never knew men talked--that way--about girls." "men don't. those were callow boys." "not all of them. the one that--that spoke about the play----" she stopped with her hand to her throat. for a moment he studied her working face. "it's hardly worth while, is it?" he said gravely. "you've come to the end of that phase, haven't you? how old are you, pat?" "eighteen. almost. and i've been a terrible necker ever since--since i began to be grown up. most girls are." "are they? why?" "i don't know. the boys sort of expect it," she answered childishly. "and it's--it's fun, in a way." she wriggled like a very schoolgirl. "i got billy away from celia bly that way. and now look at the damn thing!" she laughed and the tension was temporarily relieved. "anyway," she declared resolutely, "here and now is where i quit. there's nothing in it. unless," she added with an astounding naïveté, "it's somebody that i'm quite crazy about." anger and pain had left a faint fire still in the eyes which she turned to his. "i'm glad it was you that were with me when it happened, mr. scott." "i was afraid that it only made it the harder for you." "no. because you understand." he was by no means sure that he understood at all, but he made no denial. "have you got any daughters?" "no." "i wish i'd had someone like you that i could talk to," she said wistfully. "dad's all right. i adore dad. but i couldn't talk to him like this. i can to you. isn't it funny! do you like me a little, mr. scott?" her face, upturned to his, was one anxious, honest, hopeful plea. "yes. i like you very much," he returned soberly. "you might adopt me," she pursued. "on account of mother. you were fond of her, weren't you?" he regarded her with a slight frown which vanished as he realised that this was no adventurous impertinence such as her references to constance. "i don't see how you could help but be; she was so beautiful.... but no; i couldn't be anyone's daughter but dad's, even adopted." "granddaughter," suggested scott mockingly. "i take it all back!" she cried, her spirits quite restored. "you aren't nearly as old as i thought you were; and twice as nice. we'll just be friends, won't we? and i'll be awfully good and never say anything catty about con again. come on; there's the music. let's dance. this is somebody else's but i don't care." at the door she stretched her arms above her head in a long sweep, a hovering, expectant gesture as if she were going to give herself into a profound and enduring embrace, then leaned to him as the swirl of the rhythms caught them. he felt her fresh young cheek pressed to his, close and warm, and drew away a little. "what's the matter?" she asked naïvely. "don't you like it?" perplexed for the moment and a little startled by the sweetness of the contact, he did not answer at once. "i thought we were to be friends," she murmured mournfully. with a sudden understanding he realised that she had nestled to him as unconsciously as a kitten; that her natural expression of the merest comradeship was physical. in a manner, innocently so. after that dance he did not see her again until, just before her departure, she dashed up to him to say, "i've been _terribly_ good all evening. it isn't so hard." then, peering at him anxiously: "you don't despise me, do you, mr. scott?" the innate pathos of it made it hard for him to control his voice, though he answered easily but sincerely: "how could i? we're friends, you know." "yes," she assented with deep content. "we're friends." at home dee asked her: "did you try your rescue party, kid?" "what rescue party?" returned pat dreamily. "oh, _that_! i trow some not! _he_ won't be the one that needs help when the water gets deep." "i suppose not," acquiesced dee. she thought that pat meant constance. chapter x wandering into the drawing-room on one of her infrequent and languid tours of inspection, constance was astonished to find mary delia contemplating herself in the full-length mirror. she was clad in a new and modish bathing suit. "what do you think of it?" she asked her elder sister, turning slowly about. "there's certainly plenty of it," was the disparaging reply. "where are you going in it; to church?" "to the dangerfields' round-robin tennis." "going to play that way?" "yeppy. we're going to fool the hot spell. after the tennis we christen the new swimming pool. it's the biggest private tank in captivity." "i thought wally dangerfield was that. i don't see why you want to mix up with that set, dee." "what set? they're the same set as the rest of us. what's the matter with wally and sally?" "nothing much except their pace and the way they get talked about. you know there have been half a dozen near-scandals at their place already." "not near me," returned dee cheerfully. "i can take care of myself." "i grant you that. but won't jimmy be awfully sore? he doesn't like the dangerfields." "jimmy is sore," was the indifferent response. indeed, mr. jameson james, an insistent formalist in his ideas for women though not at all in his ideas of men, had most unwisely essayed a veto upon dee's attendance, only to be reminded by that untamed virgin that they were not yet engaged, and that, even if they were, it was by no means certain that she would meekly take orders from him. she spoke with unruffled good humour. mr. james had departed in great ill humour. "i like jimmy when he's furious," remarked dee. "he's so much more human." "you'll lose him yet," warned constance. "who's your partner for the tennis?" "paul de severin was to have been but he's held up in washington. i thought i'd borrow cary scott if you don't mind." "why should i mind?" returned the other moodily. "he isn't my property." "had a scrap?" "no." constance brooded for a moment, then made one of those disclosures characteristic of the peculiarly frank relations existing between all three of the sisters. "dee, freddie's been borrowing money from cary." dee whirled and stared. "the devil!" she ejaculated. "he'll never pay it back." "i don't suppose cary expects it back." "what does he expect, then?" "i don't know," answered constance slowly. "humph! i do. are you going to pay, connie?" "if i did pay--that way--would i be half as rotten as freddie?" demanded the wife savagely. "that depends. are you in love with cary?" "i don't know," muttered the beauty. "i thought i was. then i found out about freddie and it sickened me so that i don't know where i stand." dee ruminated. "perhaps that's why freddie did it. he's no fool." "he's a drunkard. that's worse." "poor old con! i wonder what cary thinks of it all." "that's what i'm afraid to think about." "then you _are_ in love with him. see here, con; have you been borrowing from him, too?" constance's exquisite, self-indulgent face was set and hard as she stared past her sister. "he's paid a bill or two. i didn't dare take them to father." a soft whistle on a single, low note issued from dee's lips. "that's not in the book of rules." "i know it. but he was so wonderful about it. you'd think that i was the one conferring the favour by taking his"--constance gulped--"his money." "yes. cary's a thoroughbred. whatever happens i can't see that freddie has any kick coming. _maquereau!_" "what's that?" "tasty french slang. the english is shorter and uglier. con, how much are you in for?" "too much.... you marry money, dee," counselled constance fiercely. "it lasts. the other thing doesn't." "with me it doesn't even begin. then i can take cary?" "of course. i almost wish you'd never bring him back." "it might be safer," agreed the other. "i'll go and wire him." dorrisdale knew the elaborate establishment of the dangerfields, built out of war profits at the back of the golf course, as "the private athletic club." everything about it was based upon sports, and the clique which frequented it was linked in a common bond of physical fitness, a willingness to bet any amount on anything, and capacity for hard drinking. it boasted expensive stables, an indoor and two outdoor tennis courts, a squash and racquets building, and, in the middle, the sixty-foot swimming tank just completed. sally dangerfield, a big-eyed, softly rounded brunette whose air of rather amorous languor concealed a feline vitality and strength, had a penchant for small parties, many in a season. this opening tennis party of the season included but eight couples. walter dangerfield, robust, hairy, loud-voiced and generous of hospitality, announced to the arriving guests that there would be first and second prizes worth striving for, also that, while it was a long time between sets, it would be a shorter period between drinks, in proof of which he indicated tubs of ice housing bottles of the famous dangerfield punch. the intense, unseasonable heat bred an immediate thirst, appeasement of which enhanced the joyousness of the occasion if not the quality of the tennis. thanks to a quality of comparative abstemiousness on the part of both, dee and her partner won against a pair who were normally their betters. the prize was a magnum of champagne apiece, and that they should celebrate by opening it immediately was, of course, _de rigueur_ in the private athletic club. the swim which followed was signalised by the appearance, upon a specially constructed raft, of a "submarine cocktail" invented by the host for the occasion. by dinner time the party had accumulated what was universally regarded as a highly satisfactory start. over the luxurious repast the heat settled like a steamy blanket. it was too hot to talk, it was too hot to sing (though several ambitious souls tried to pretend that it wasn't), it was too hot to dance between courses, it was too hot to do anything but drink. there was a gasp of relief when the hostess announced that coffee would be served outside, and a groan of disappointment when a splash of lukewarm rain heralded a thunderstorm which came booming and belching up from the west. pent within the stagnant house the guests established themselves in the big living-room and offered various suggestions for amusement, each of which was promptly rejected as calling for too much effort. wally dangerfield was just saying, "the time has now arrived, children, for a new and spine-tickling drink which--" when the crash came. it seemed to precede rather than follow the blinding stab of radiance which ripped through the outer darkness, dimming the electric lights to futile sparks for the thousandth of a second before they went out. the great, stone structure rocked with the concussion. one thin, high shriek sounded. then silence. wally dangerfield's voice boomed through the blackness: "anyone hurt?" "i'm alive." "present." "battered but in the ring." "missed _me_." "whose hair is that singeing?" "kamerad! call off the big bertha." the replies came, shaky, flippant, with forced laughter, with bravado. it beseemed good sports to show a front under fire, and they did it. matches were struck. servants came with two feeble candles. the entire electrical establishment of the house was out of commission. the host promptly dispatched a car to the local plant with instructions to bring back an expert if it was necessary to kidnap him. with that one terrific discharge the storm had spent its greatest fury. it retired, leaving the steaming world immersed in humid heat, and the air full of rotted electricity. the guests tingled to it; it thrilled in their senses as well as their nerves. after the sobering sense of peril escaped, there followed a relaxing reaction of solvent ties and conventions, of sudden and reckless audacities. a warm puff of wind doused one of the feeble candles; the other was only sufficient to produce a provocative twilight. a silence significant and languorous, broken only by murmurs and snatches of soft, protesting laughter settled upon the dim room. even dee's nerves of iron responded. leaning back on her divan to catch a wandering breath of air she felt a man's hand pressing upon her shoulder, a man's breath soft upon her neck. with her ready young strength, she pushed back the wooer. "not for me," she said quietly. "oh, don't be a prude," implored a straining whisper. "everything goes to-night." she thought it was harry mercer's voice. evading him she got to her feet, made her way toward the door, and stumbled upon a chaise longue occupied by two close-clasped figures. "beg your pardon," she said nonchalantly; but she was vaguely stirred by all this suggestion, not to disgust, which would have been her normal retroaction, but to a wistful wonderment. _what_ did they see in it? what was it that she was missing out of life? was she abnormal? or just fastidious? across the room she could discern the sumptuous outlines of sally dangerfield's figure, dark against the background of a flannelled figure. "why not start something, sally?" she suggested. the hostess laughed. "it's starting itself, isn't it? haven't you got your self-starter working? but i guess you're right. help me find some more lights." "why lights?" murmured a sleepy-toned protestant. "it's more comfortable as it is." "who said 'comfortable'?" growled another. "it's hotter than ever." "wish i were back in the pool," said a woman. "grand little idea!" boomed dangerfield. "let's all go in!" "what! in our wet things?" objected young mrs. redfern. "i wouldn't put my clammy stockings on again for a million swims." "why wear stockings?" "why wear any thing?" cried someone in a tone of inspiration. "_that's_ an idea" shouted dangerfield. "a swimming party, _à la_ adam-and-eve in the warranted respectable darkness. who's on?" "come off it, wally!" said a woman's voice. "you've got only one pool." "we'll splice two tennis nets together and run them down the middle for a barrier." "why not?" cried the high-pitched, excited voice of mrs. carson. "we're all married here." "not that i know of," remarked dee. "not that anybody knows of for me," added emslie selfridge in a voice of mincing propriety. "wanted, a chaperon." "you two can stand on the bank and be policemen," suggested the hostess. "one on each side." "not on your life," objected one of the men. "one go, all go!" the popping of a champagne cork expressed the explosive quality of the neurotic atmosphere. "come on, dee," whispered sally dangerfield. "if you quit now it will gum a good game." "oh, well, you can't bluff me," returned dee aloud. "i hate bathing suits anyway." there was a shout of acclaim. the party organised and moved forward across the dripping courtyard under the guidance of a pair of lights. the men rigged the nets while the women retired to the squash court, designated as their dressing room. there they disrobed with feverish laughter and jerky bits of talk. this adventure had given a fillip to even their sated appetite for sensation. "who'll go first?" asked one in the gloom. "match for it," came the answering suggestion. "oh, piffle and likewise pish!" cut in viccy carson's shrill giggle. "i'll be the goat. put a dimmer on that light, someone." a moment later dee heard her call at the end of the passage: "anybody present in case i fall in?" several male voices answered: "stout sport!" "who's the pioneer?" "sally." "no; it's little viccy." "shinny-on-your-own-side!" called mrs. carson. "listen for the splash. come on, you girls!" "we're coming." two splashes almost simultaneous echoed sharply against the bare walls, followed by others mingled with shrieks, laughter, chokings and gurglings. dee, reluctant, found herself alone in the passage way. like many women of unaroused temperament she preserved a sort of remote and proud consciousness of her body, a physical reticence. the gross implications of contact, the prurient stimulus to the imagination in what was going on in the pool, held her back. yet she was conscious of some participation in the excitement, too; the lewd mob-psychology of that mixed group spurred her while it revolted her finer instincts. but it was her sportsmanship that finally urged her forward. after all, she had agreed to join. backing out now would be pretty yellow. her hand was fumbling along the open door when another burst of merriment checked her. "i've caught me a mermaid over the net." "reel her in, bill." "so've i. mine's got a bathing cap on." "no fair, bathing caps. this is the garden of eden." "no; it's the fountain of eternal youth. steady on the net, there!" "students! students!" cried sally dangerfield in a voice of chiding laughter. "care beful!" "who's who in this part of america? call the roll." the roll! dee's hesitations were resolved. she must go forward now. she stretched out a groping hand and held it, stiffened in mid-air. footsteps were close behind her; heavy, shod footsteps. "who's there?" she challenged sharply. no answer. she turned, angry and uncertain. the footsteps had stopped. she had gathered her forces to call when the appalling thing happened. over her burst a great flood of light. every globe in the passageway and the court back of it was sending out its pitiless rays upon her nakedness. a bisected bar of radiance shot forth into the tank-room, illuminating it from end to end. pandemonium broke out; shrieks, flounderings, catcalls, and above it all the thundering profanity of wally dangerfield calling down vengeance upon the fool who had played the trick. with the trained athlete's readiness of action in a crisis, dee turned, leapt backward, tore the heavy door loose from the clamp which held it open, and slammed it. "saved!" yelled a gleeful voice outside. dee heard a short, deep, dismayed exclamation behind her. she bent forward against the closed door, her proud little head bowed against her wrists. with a click the darkness shut down again. the footsteps came toward her, but she was no longer afraid, for she had seen; she was only bitterly ashamed. folds, cool and light, enveloped her shoulders; she smelt the odor of wet rubber and gratefully drew the long raincoat about her. "turn on the light, please," she directed quietly. it flashed, intolerable to her eyes. when her vision could bear the strain she looked up and saw the man standing a few paces away with his kitbag of implements beside him, dressed in working garb. his face was pallid, amazed, and beautiful. "i never thought to see you again," he said breathlessly. "you've seen all there is of me to see," giggled dee with the inanity of sheer nerve-shock, and could have killed herself for hatred and fury at her untoward response. he made no comment upon this; only looked at her with incredulous pain. "what are you doing here?" she asked. "repairing the electric plant. i'm a workman. as i told you." "i thought it was a joke." "no." he listened to the confused sounds from beyond the door. "i seem to have been inopportune," he remarked with quiet grimness. "a swimming party, isn't it?" "yes." "more or less informal, i judge." dee felt a hot wave submerging her. "you could see for yourself." "quite so. you were on your way to join it?" "yes, i was," she retorted defiantly but with an incredible inclination to weep. "pray don't let me detain you." "please," whispered dee. his face changed. he took a step toward her, and stopped. a shriek, too authentic in its terror to be misinterpreted, penetrated the heavy door, followed by a babel. "turn on that light!" "open the door." "no! no!" "she's drowned, i tell you." "damn it, where's that switch?" the electrician threw the door open, made a quick movement along the wall, and every detail of the scene leapt forth into bold significance. the women were huddled along the side of the pool, all except plump mrs. grant who was absurdly striving to draw an end of the net about her, and sally dangerfield who was bending above the slim, motionless nudity of viccy carson, stretched along the stairs. "i stepped on her," wailed sally. "she was lying on the bottom." half of the men had scattered for their clothes. the others stood, shamed and uncertain, except cary scott. in the face of reality in this calamitous form he had remembered an early emergency regimen, thrown himself down beside the woman, and with lips pressed to her inanimate mouth was striving to stimulate her flaccid lungs to induce breathing. desisting for a moment he called: "she's alive, i think. get a doctor." "phone for osterhout, somebody," shouted dangerfield. "wire's down," groaned grant. "then get a car and go like hell!" "my car is outside," said the electrician. "where am i to go?" "i'll show you," said dee. "quick!" together they darted into the night. crossing the pebbled courtyard, dee involuntarily cried out. "what is it?" he demanded. "my foot. i forgot i had no shoes. it doesn't matter. go on." he swung her strongly into his arms and did not set her down until he had reached the car, when he lifted her to the seat. it was as well that he had. such was the yielding of her body in every nerve and muscle as he took her that she could not have stood upright. a light in dr. osterhout's laboratory showed him at work over some test tubes. "bobs!" called dee. "come out. there's been an accident. we've got a car." in less than a minute they were retracing their course at wild speed, the electrician driving with consummate control while dee acquainted osterhout with the main facts. as they came to a stop in the yard dee turned to the volunteer chauffeur. "will you wait for me?" she asked in a tone that made osterhout turn to look at her. "yes." within they found the victim violently ill in the midst of a half-dressed and vastly relieved group. "none the worse for it," osterhout reported to dee after attending the victim. "a little too much water for comfort. and something besides water, wasn't there?" "yes." "a good deal of it?" "plenty for all hands." "a rough party?" "about the usual, at this house." "don't you think you're out of place in that gallery, dee?" "oh, don't lecture me, bobs," said the girl wearily. "i'm through." but it was another, not bobs, who was the inspiration of that resolve. to the other, patient in the sighing darkness, she returned. "she's all right," she informed him. "but it was a close call." "scott saved her, i expect," he replied absently. "he knew the method." "do you know cary scott?" she asked, startled. he hesitated. "i did once. i should hardly have expected to find him at this kind of an orgy." "it isn't as bad as it looks," she defended weakly. "you told me, didn't you, that you were going into the pool with the others?" "yes. but you don't understand. will you wait until i go in and get my clothes on?" "i--don't--think--so," he said with palpable effort. she gathered all her resolution. "aren't you going to take me home?" through the darkness came the sound of a deep-drawn breath. "no," said his voice, both hard and sad. only the sadness remained as he continued. "you see, i had idealised you." "you needn't have," she retorted bitterly. "i'm just like other girls." "so i see. i wish to god i'd never seen you!" "there's no reason why you should ever see me again," she answered with rising spirit. "not the slightest," he agreed dolorously. "good-bye." she turned and went into the building. as dr. osterhout had no car, scott and dee drove him back to his place. "who was your friend in the service car, dee?" asked the physician. "his name is wollaston." cary scott gave a start. "wollaston! you know, i thought i caught a glimpse---- then i supposed that my eyes had gone wrong in the sudden light. he was in working clothes, wasn't he?" "yes. he was the electrician from the plant." "stanley wollaston? electrician? it can't be the same." "it is. he recognised you and said that he used to know you." "know me! good god! i should say so! we were in hospital together for weeks in the war. afterwards i visited him at their place in hertfordshire. he was a poet and a dreamer then. i remember now. i heard that his branch of the family went broke." "where did you know him, dee?" asked osterhout. "oh, it's a long story, bobs," said the girl lightly. herein she said what was not true. it was a short story; short and vivid and bewildering. in the darkness she ran over the whole scope of it, every detail as clear as if it had not occurred nearly a year before: the breakdown of her motor car in the open country near rahway; the stranger on the bank of a stream who had put down his rod and come to her aid, a roughly dressed stranger with questing eyes and a quaint turn of speech; the long and patient tinkering, with the mechanism, ending in a second collapse; the luncheon offered and shared, the talk that followed, a long, long talk such as dee had never before known, running through luminous hours, touching all the realms of fancy until the incredulous sun turned his face from them and went down; the drive back to the village where she left him; his final words, "i am resisting an intolerable temptation when i say no more than good-bye and thank you," and then nothing until now. scott's voice broke in upon her meditations. "i must find out where he is." "i don't believe i would, cary," she advised after osterhout had bidden them good-night. "what? not look up old stanley? why not?" "i think he's cut himself off from all the old life. he--he's a queer person." until the car drew in at holiday knoll scott thought that over in silence. then he laid a friendly hand over dee's. "old girl," he said gently, "you seem to know a lot about him." "so i do. you can learn a lot in an afternoon." "there's a lot to learn. he's a wonderful person. pretty tough to find him like this.... are you really interested in him, dee?" "who? me? i should _say_ not!" returned dee hardily. "i'm going to marry jimmie james." chapter xi ripples from the swimming party spread to wash far shores. although the participants had been sworn to secrecy, the details had of course been whispered confidentially, adorning themselves with rich imaginings as they travelled. for this, the inopportune electrician was blamed, the indictment against him being strengthened by the astounding fact that wally dangerfield, seeking to bribe him into a promise of silence, had been effectually snubbed. to the indirect procurement of the outsider was attributed a specially lively brace of paragraphs in _town topics_, even less veiled than was typical of that journal's transparent allusions. penetrating within the virginal confines of the sisterhood school where it was naturally upon the index expurgatorius, the publication entranced pat and also contributed in no small degree to her prestige. having a sister who was involved in a t.t. scandal was feather for any girl's cap! pat cherished the glittering ambition of one day appearing in those glorifying pages herself. she wrote to dee begging to be told all about it. in return came a letter informing her of her sister's engagement to jameson james. connie also wrote saying that it had come off at last, it was a very good thing, and everybody was satisfied. but the genuine opinion of the betrothal went forth from the pen of robert osterhout to, or perhaps only toward, the dead mona. "i do not pretend to understand it, my dearest," he wrote, "and what i do not understand i do not like. the scientific spirit of resentment. dee is still unawakened. james has no appeal for her; of that i am satisfied. it will not be he who interprets for her her womanhood. perhaps it will not be anyone. nevertheless, our proud dee has grown inexplicably docile, almost meek. and jimmy inspires me with a daily desire to kick him, by adopting a condescending attitude toward her, as if he were doing quite a noble thing in marrying her. such is the position in which she has been put by that infernal 'dangerfield dip' episode, as it is generally called. in some way, though i don't know how, the engagement was the result of that party. from what i can learn, the swim _au naturel_ was playful rather than vicious; but the scandal has been lively. there was a strange passage between dee and a workman who seems to be a gentleman under cover, which puzzled me. disturbs me, too, a bit.... how you may be laughing at all this, my darling, with your wider, deeper vision! "holiday knoll will be duller when dee leaves. to me it has been an empty shell since your bright spirit went out of it. yet i derive my sad satisfactions in looking after the girls as best i may and in trying to make myself hold to the belief of some intangible contact with you through these letters. ralph is at home very little. when pat comes back the place will liven up again. perhaps my tired old ears will recapture from her some of the music of life with which you filled the place.... i wish that dee were less still and self-contained. she doesn't talk to me any more; not as she used to." to all the fentriss household dee was a puzzle in the days following her engagement, not less to herself, osterhout suspected, than to the others. home early from school, because of an outbreak of scarlet fever there, pat complained to him, sitting perched on an arm of his chair with a hand on his shoulder. "bobs, dee is moony." "is she? and what is 'moony'?" "you know she is," returned pat, scorning to waste time on obvious definitions. "isn't her engagement going all right?" "so far as i can judge. she hasn't confided in me." "bad sign. in some girls it would be a good sign. not in dee," pronounced the oracular pat with her head on one side like a considering and sagacious bird. "has she talked to you?" "no; she hasn't. bet you she will, though. dee's a lot more chummish with me than she used to be." "because connie is married. that throws dee back on you." "it ought to throw her back on jimmiejams. i'm not wild about t. jameson james, bobs. he's rather a sob." "what have you got against your future brother-in-law?" "oh, he's so stiff and bumpy. so darn impressed with his own correctness. and it's mostly bluff. he tried to kiss me last night." osterhout's face darkened for the moment, but he said: "why not? you're only a child to him, and one of the family." "brotherly stuff; i know. only it wasn't too brotherly. well," she laughed knowingly, "i don't suppose he gets much of that sort of thing from dee." "dee's a strange little person," said the doctor absently. "she'd be my idea of nothing to be engaged to if i were a man." which opinion she later expressed, in slightly modified terms, to the subject of it. "oh, well, jimmy understands," responded dee negligently. "i don't believe any man understands. i don't believe you understand anything about it yourself." "don't i!" muttered dee. pat stared with all her big eyes. "well, _do_ you?" "pat," said the other, fidgetting with an unlighted cigarette--she had taken to smoking, although it was bad for her golf, since her engagement--"you've kissed men." "what if i have?" retorted pat, instantly on the sullen defensive. "everyone does. you have." "men have kissed me. it's different." "i'll cable the emperor of japan it's different," chuckled the slangy pat. "what do you get out of it?" "you've got a nerve to ask me that; you, an engaged girl!" "i'm asking because i don't know." "tell you one thing, then," said pat earnestly. "i wouldn't marry any man that couldn't make me know." dee murmured something that sounded like "might just as well." thus interpreting it the younger sister returned: "yes; you might. you're different." "i'm not different. i always thought i was, until----" "until!" cried pat in great excitement. "until what? who's the man? and when did it happen?" "it never happened." "then you're a dam' fool," replied the other with conviction. "if i was crazy about a man i bet i'd kiss him if it was only for--for experiment." "i've always thought that sort of thing was imbecile. sort of sickening." "do i know him?" demanded the practical pat. "no." "evens and odds i do. tell pattie," she wheedled. with face gloomily averted, dee pursued her main preoccupation. "do you feel when you kiss a man as if all your nerves were strung wires and an electric shock went flaming along them and then died out and left you _plah_?" "oh!" jeered pat softly. "and you claim that you've never been really kissed." "i haven't. but he--he lifted me in his arms once. and i felt his heart beating.... and then afterwards, do you hate and despise yourself for letting it affect you that way?" queried the neophyte of passion, interpreting dimly the sharp revulsion of her undefeated maidenhood against its own first weakening toward surrender. "no. of course i don't. why should i?" pat reflected. "i have been ashamed, though--a little. but that was because of what someone said to me about it. a friend. he made it seem cheap." "cheap? oh, no; it wasn't cheap. but that's what i felt; that ashamedness afterward. as strongly as i felt the other. stronger." instinctive psychologist enough to know that the rebound is never as powerful as the impact, pat disbelieved this. "just the same i think you're taking a big chance marrying jimmy. why don't you marry the--the thriller?" "don't!" snapped dee. "you're making it cheap now." "but why don't you?" persisted the junior. "i couldn't." "is he married already? that _would_ be binding!" "no. i don't know," dee amended with a startled realisation of how little she did know in comparison with what she felt. "he might just as well be. i'll never see him again." "i would," asserted pat. "if it was that way with me. if he was the only one." "of course he's the only one. could you feel that with any man? i can't understand that," marvelled dee. "oh, no! not with just anyone. i'd have to like him. quite a good deal. it isn't so hard to like 'em when they make love to you. but i'm off'n that stuff," sighed pat, turning demure. "there's nothing in it." again she thought of mr. scott and that evening of disastrous revelation at the club. his influence had persisted. she quite prided herself that it had. she had thought much about him as one might think of a benign guardian and had written once to bespeak the continuance of their friendship. "how's con's affair coming on?" she asked, as a logical mental sequitur. "with cary scott? he's away. back in paris for a couple of months' stay." "do you like him, dee?" "yes. a lot." "he isn't the man, is he?" demanded pat sharply. dee's laughter was refutation enough. "catch me poaching connie's game. it couldn't be done." "oh, i don't know," replied the other airily. "mr. scott's got too much brains for old con. do you think she's crazy over him?" "i think she misses him." "when's he coming back?" "in time for the wedding, anyway." "the wedding! when is it, dee?" "second week in july," said dee without enthusiasm. "so soon! am i going to be a bridesmaid?" "no." "oh-h-h-h-h!" wailed pat. "pig!" "you're to be maid of honour." pat gave her little, hoarse crow of ecstasy. "how darling of you! that's _too_ divine! are you going to give me my frock?" dee nodded. they talked clothes, absorbedly. when she got up to go pat leaned over and kissed her sister, the first time since they were children that she had done this except as a formality of family life. "i almost wish you weren't going to do it, though, dee," she murmured. "i don't," said dee resolutely. chapter xii "if i could find it in my heart, dearest one, to blame you for anything, it would be for sending little pat to the sisterhood school." (so wrote robert osterhout to mona fentriss.) "with the best of intentions they wreck a mind as thoroughly as house-wreckers gut a building. it was your choice and i dare not change it. even if i could persuade ralph to take her out of that environment and send her to bryn mawr or vassar or smith, which is where she ought to be, she would rebel. she has a contempt for 'those rah-rah girls,' a prejudice bred of the shallow and self-sufficient snobbery which is the basic lesson of her scholastic experience. to be sure, they have finished her in the outward attributes of good form, but most of that is a natural heritage which any daughter of yours would have. she can be, when on exhibition, the most impeccable little creature, sparkling, and easy and natural and charmingly deferential toward the older people with whom she comes in contact--when she chooses. for the most part she elects to be calmly careless, slovenly of speech and manner, or lightly impudent. to have good breeding at call but not to waste it on most people--that is the cachet of her set. "but these are surface matters. it is the inner woman--yes, beloved--our little pat is coming to conscious and dynamic womanhood--which concerns me now and would concern you could you be here. appalls me, too. but perhaps that is because my standards are the clumsy man-standards. what is she going to get out of life for herself? what does all this meaningless preparation, aside from the polishing process, look to? if hers were just a stupid, satisfied mind, a pattern intellect like constance's, it would not so much matter. or if she had the self-discipline and control which dee's athletics have given her, i should be less troubled. but pat's is a strange little brain; hungry, keen and uncontrolled. it really craves food, and it is having its appetite blunted by sweets and drugs. is there nothing that i can do? i hear you ask it. yes; now that she is at home i can train her a little, but not rigorously, for her mind is too soft and pampered to set itself seriously to any real task. in the days of her childish gluttony i used to drive her into a fury by mocking her for her pimples, and finally, by excoriating her vanity, got her to adopt a reasonable diet. the outer pimples are gone. but if one could see her mind, it would be found pustulous with acne. and there can i do little against the damnable influence of the school which has taught her that a hard-trained, clean-blooded mind is not necessary. the other girls do not go in for it. why be a highbrow? she is so easily a leader in the school, and, as she boasts, puts it over the teachers in any way she pleases. in the days before she became aware of herself it used to be hard to get her to brush her teeth. to-day i presume that her worthy preceptresses would expel her if she did not use the latest dentifrice twice a day. but they are quite willing to let her mind become overlaid with foul scum for want of systematic brushing up. "dynamite for that institution and all like it! nothing else would serve. with all your luxuriousness, mona, your love of excitement, your _carpe diem_ philosophy of life (pat, who has 'taken' latin, does not know what _carpe diem_ signifies), your eagerness for the immediate satisfactions of the moment, you never let your brain become softened and untrained and fat. the higher interests were just as much a part of the embellishment of life to you as were flowers or games, music or friends. what inner friends will little pat have? not literature. shakespeare she knows because she must; the school course requires it. but he is a task, not a delight. thackeray is slow and dickens a bore. poetry is a mechanical exercise; i doubt whether a single really beautiful line of shelley or keats or coleridge remains in her memory, though she can chant r. w. service and walt mason. swinburne she has read on the sly, absorbing none of the luminousness of his flame; only the heat. similarly, balzac means to her the 'contes drolatiques,' also furtively perused. conrad and wells are vague names; something to save until she is older. but o. henry she dutifully deems a classic and is quite familiar with his tight-rope performances; proud of it, too, as evincing an up-to-date erudition. as for 'the latest books of the day,' she is keen on them, particularly if they happen to be some such lewd and false achievement as the intolerable 'arab.' any book spoken of under the breath has for her the stimulus of a race; she must absorb it first and look knowing and demure when it is mentioned. the age of sex, mona.... her standards of casual reading are of like degree; she considers _town topics_ an important chronicle and _vanity fair_ a symposium of pure intellect. "yet she has been taking a course in literature at the school! "science has no thrill for pat; therefore she ignores it. futile little courses in 'how to know' things like flowers and birds and mushrooms have gone no deeper than the skin. no love of nature has been inculcated by them. she hardly knows the names of the great scientists. einstein she recognises through having seen his travels chronicled and heard vaudeville jokes about him. but mention pasteur or metchnikoff and you would leave her groping; and she doubtless would identify lister as one who achieved fame by inventing a mouth wash. however, she could at once tell you the name of the fashionable physician to go to for nervous breakdown. "her economics are as vague as her science. politics are a blank. but to be found ignorant of the most recent trend of the movies or the names of their heroes, or not to know the latest gag of some unspeakable vulgarian of the revues--that would overwhelm her with shame. her speech and thought are largely a reflection of the contemporary stage. not the stage of shaw and o'neill, but of bedroom farce and trite musical comedy. thus far she compares unfavourably in education with the average shop girl. "in music and art the reckoning is better. but this again is largely inherited. if the sap-headed sisterhood have not fostered, they at least have not tainted her sound instincts in these directions. she has followed her own bent. "as it is a professedly denominational school she has, of course, specialised or been specialised upon as a churchwoman. a very sound and correct churchwoman, but not much of a godwoman. no philosophy and very little ethics are to be found in her religion. worship is for her a bargain of which the other consideration is prayer. she gives to god certain praises and observances and asks in return special favours. 'i'll do this for you, god, and you do as much for me some day.' her expectancy of assured returns she regards as a praiseworthy and pious quality known as faith. blasphemy, of course. not the poor child's. the sin, which is a sin of ignorance and loose thinking, is upon the sanctified sisterhood. they have classified the deity for pat: god as a social arbiter. "the sisterhood are purists. naturally. but purists only by negation. all the essential facts they dodge. true, there is a course in hygiene. it is conducted by a desiccated virgin who minces about the simple and noble facts of sex life as if she were afraid of getting her feet wet, and whose soul would shrivel within her could she overhear the casual conversation of the girls whom she purports to instruct. all that side of knowledge and conjecture they absorb from outside contacts. a worse medium would be hard to conceive. from what pat indicates of the tittle-tattle of ingénues' luncheons, it would enlighten rabelais and shock pepys! and the current jokes between the girls and their boy associates of college age are chiefly innuendo and _double entente_ based on sex. pat cannot say 'bed' or 'leg' or 'skin' without an expectant self-consciousness. some reechy sort of bedroom story has been lately going the rounds, the point of which is involved in the words 'nudge' and 'phone.' every time either word is used in pat's set, there are knowing looks and sniggers, and some nimble wit makes a quick turn of the context and gets his reward in more or less furtive laughter. it is not so much the moral side, it is the nauseous bad taste that sickens one. the mind decays in that atmosphere. once pat said to me: 'bobs, you and mr. scott are the only clean-minded men i know.' think of what that means, mona! the viciousness of such an environment. yet the youngsters themselves are not essentially vicious; not many of them. they are curious with the itchy curiosity of their explorative time of life, and they have no proper guidance. the girls are worse off than the boys who do gain some standards in college. but our finishing schools, churchly or otherwise! hell is paved with their good intentions. pat's is not worse than the others, i suppose. but the pity of it; the waste of it for her. hers is such a vivid mind; such a brave, straightforward little mind; at war with that hungry, passionate temperament of hers, yet instinctively clean if it could be protected from befoulment. i have been talking biology with her and she absorbs it with such swift, sure appreciation. the day of trial for her will come when the lighter amusements pall and her brain demands something to feed on--unless before that time it becomes totally encysted. "cary scott's influence on her is good. she likes and respects him and is a little afraid of him, too. he has a quality of quiet contempt for cheap and shoddy things to which she responds, though not always without bursts of her fiery little temper. if he were less of the natural aristocrat in all the outer attributes he would not impress her so. meantime i am glad to see him take some interest even though it be but a playfully intellectual one, in anyone who will divert his mind from constance. sometimes i have thought disaster imminent in that quarter. disaster! how readily one falls into the moralist's speech, and how your dear lips would quirk at that tone from me, dearest. yet a liaison between those two would be potentially disastrous. for connie has nothing to give to a man like cary scott except her beauty. if he is the man i think him, he will never take her for that alone; or, if he does, be long satisfied with it. yet her charm is terribly strong.... i wonder whether you really loved cary scott, mona, as i have loved and still love you...." coming downstairs after writing this letter, from the dead woman's room where a desk had been set aside for him as executor of her estate, osterhout found cary scott, dressed in evening clothes, waiting in the library. on his return from his trip abroad scott had unobtrusively resumed his established place at holiday knoll. he had seen as much of constance as before, perhaps more, because dee, between whom and scott a very frank and easy friendship had grown up, was occupied with jameson james to the partial exclusion of other associations, and therefore scott was less with her than formerly. he did not like james. scott and the doctor greeted each other cordially. "you have a festive air to-night," remarked osterhout. "yes. it's the special symphony concert this evening. i'm taking constance." "no, you're not," contradicted a hoarse and gay voice. pat smiled upon them from the entrance. the two men turned to look at her. she stood, one hand above the tousled shimmer of her short, dark hair, lightly holding by the lintel. in her eyes were laughter, anticipation, and a plea. her strong, young figure preserving still much of the adorable awkwardness of undeveloped youth, had fallen into a posture of stilled expectancy. she wore a sweater of some exotic, metallic blue, a short, barred skirt, and woollen stockings, displaying the firm, rounded legs. "you're taking _me_. aren't you?" she added in the husky, breaking sweetness of her voice. into the minds of the two men darted diverse responses to the appeal of the interrupter. cary scott thought, "what a child it is!" wiser and more cognisant, through experience of the years, robert osterhout said within himself, "good lord! it's a woman." "why the charming substitution?" inquired scott in the manner which, to her unfailing delight, he used toward pat as toward any of his older associates. "con's got a headache." cary scott understood perfectly. this was subterfuge on constance's part. she was unready to face the issue. there had been a preamble between them on the previous evening; tacitly it was understood that this evening was to determine their future relations. and now she was shirking the crisis. or was she merely playing the part of the "teaser," drawing back the more to inflame his ardour--and perhaps her own? of the two hypotheses scott inclined to the former. it was more in consonance with her natural inertia of character. if she were in love with him it was not the kind of love which justified itself by daring, by taking the risks, by boldly facing sacrifice. inexplicably he felt a quality of relief mingling with his natural pique. he was well satisfied to postpone, to let the decision go, to find relaxation in taking pat to the concert. in the companionship of this eager, acute, vivid child he would breathe a clearer atmosphere, with something of a mental stimulus, a tingle in it, that which he most missed in his association with the married sister. all of this rapid cogitation was quite without reflected effect upon his imperturbable manner as he said: "tell constance that i'm so sorry, won't you? and that i appreciate her sending so delightful a substitute." "oh, she didn't send me," answered pat composedly. "it's all my own idea." "a very good one," grunted osterhout. "pat's a connoisseur of music. but don't keep my infant out too late, scott." "all right, pop," returned scott with mocking deference, as the older man left. "how long can you wait?" demanded pat of her escort. "i can't wait at all. my car is champing at the leash now." pat's illumined face fell. "but i can't go this way." "why not? i like you that way." "but you're always so awfully correct. i look like a mess." "you look like"--he searched for and found the picture--"like a mediæval page." she made a grimace. "yes. a boy." in frank unconsciousness she set her hands with spread fingers against her breasts. "flat, like a board," she said disconsolately. "i like it," he reassured her. "it's part of the charm." she gave her characteristic soft crow of pleasure. "_that's_ the nicest thing you could possibly say to me. d'you mean it? really?" "of course i mean it. why not?" "i thought men liked girls to be just the other way. all rounded." she peered at him doubtfully. "perhaps it's because you're old," she surmised. taken aback for the moment he interpreted the innocent speech too literally. "i'm not as old as that. though i don't suppose--i rather wonder what you meant by that." "oh, nothing! just that the point of view must be different. isn't it? less personal." "it's very personal in this case," he retorted with a real warmth of friendliness for this strange and appealing child, "and quite simple. you're a very delightful little pat. i like your type. _petite gamine._" "what's that?" "isn't french taught in your school?" "it's taught; but it isn't necessarily learned," she answered, summing up in that flash of criticism the essential falsity of the whole finishing school system. "i see. you know what a gamin is?" "gamin?" she gave it the english pronunciation. "oh, yes." "_gamine_ is the feminine. but there's a suggestion in it of something more delicate and fetching; of verve, of--of diablerie. as there is in you. it's hard to say in english. i could describe you better in french." "could you? then i'll learn french. and i think it's divine of you," said she, employing her favourite adjective, "to like my funny, flat figure. you know," she added, sparkling at him mischievously, "you're taking a chance on this concert thing." "any special chance other than that of being late?" "oh, i shan't be a minute, now that i needn't dress. yes; you're taking a big chance. i'm an awful nut over music. it does all kinds of things to me. i'm quite capable of falling on your neck and bursting into sobs if they play anything i awfully like." beneath the lightness he sensed a real emotion. "are you really so fond of it? then i'm doubly glad that you're going." "i _adore_ it. really good music, i mean. oh, i do wish i could play or sing or do something worth while." "have you ever tried?" she shrugged her shoulders. "too lazy. if it wasn't for the boring practice i might do something." she raised her voice and sang the opening bars of the hindu sleep-song. "the devil!" exclaimed cary scott. all the huskiness had passed from the voice, which issued from the full throat, pure, fresh-toned, deep and effortless. "you ought to be ashamed of yourself," he declared so vehemently that she pouted. "now you're scolding me." "because you're letting a voice like that go untrained." "lots of people like it as it is," she said resentfully. "then they don't recognise what a really lovely thing it might be, properly handled. why haven't you taken lessons?" again the shrug. "i did. but i stopped. too much trouble. will you teach me?" "i? heavens, no! you want a professional." "what! and practice an hour every day?" cried the horrified pat. "two hours. three probably. it would be worth it." "i'd be bored to a frazz." "you're bored with anything that means work, discipline, self-restraint. aren't you, pat?" "are you going to lecture me again? i love it," she observed unexpectedly and with a brilliant smile. in spite of himself he laughed. "no. i'm going to take you to the concert. get your hat." settling herself in the car like a contented kitten, pat presently said: "there's something i want to tell you, mr. scott. only it isn't too easy to begin." "why not? we're friends, aren't we?" "right! that makes it easier. you remember at the club; what we talked about?" "yes." "i've been awfully good--about that. i haven't, at all. at least, nothing serious." "i am flattered to have been so good an influence," he remarked with his faintly ironic inflection. constance would not have caught it. but little pat's ear was truer. "don't josh me about it," she protested. "nobody's ever tried to be a good influence for me really. except bobs. and he doesn't know." "why doesn't he know?" "too old. but," she added in afterthought, "you're old, too, aren't you!" "terribly." "i'd almost forgotten that," she said thoughtfully. chapter xiii coming out of the concert hall after the last, culminating burst of harmony, cary scott drew a deep breath of the night air. lover and connoisseur of music though he had always been, never in his recollection had it so penetrated his being as now. better programmes he had listened to, more perfectly rendered. but the companionship of the intensely responsive young girl, her superb and poignant vitality concentrated upon the great waves of sensation which had swept over their spirits, interpreted the numbers for him in a new measure. timidly, tentatively at first, then more boldly as the ardent influences took hold upon her, pat had yearned to him in the semi-darkness which surrounded them. the sweet, firm curve of her shoulder first, then the close pressure of her knee; soon her fingers, creeping to his hand, clasping and being enfolded, the fragrance of her light, quick breath, rhythmic upon his cheek. it seemed as if she had become subtly the medium and instrument of all the splendour of sound, as if the music were flowing in the currents of her woman's body out upon him and around him in a submerging flood. now they were in the open air. she walked beside him, her face dreamy and demure, the faintest of smiles implicit in the up-slanted corners of her mouth. "wasn't it--magic!" she breathed. "yes, magic," he assented. they located and entered his car. for a time the intricacies of the traffic engrossed his attention. as they passed into the light-shot spaciousness of the park he turned to her. "well?" "don't let's talk. i want to just remember." he nodded and she leaned to him momentarily again, kitten-like, caressing, grateful for his understanding. he, too, was glad of the respite, for, man of the world though he was, he had been strangely, unexpectedly shaken. it was pat who, long minutes later, sighed and broke the silence with the hoarse, enticing sweetness of her tones. "what did you do it for, mr. scott?" "i? do what?" he was surprised by the directness of the attack. "oh, well! i, then. you know. what did you let me do it for?" he made no reply. in his stillness was a sense of expectancy to which she responded. "i warned you what music did to me. but you--you needn't have let me----" she paused. "do you like me a little?" she murmured. "yes. a little." "only a little?" she teased, half child demanding the comfort of affection, half conscious coquette. "not more than that?" "perhaps a little more," he smiled. "but not half as much as you do con," she said deliberately. he was silent, his attention apparently engrossed in a heavy truck which gave them bare passing room. "do you?" she insisted, daring greatly. "do i what?" "like me as much as you do con? half as much, i mean." "if i did do you think i should tell you?" "why shouldn't you? but i thought you were crazy over con. she thinks so." scott hummed one of the passages from the final number of the concert. "oh, _very_ well. i'm only making conversation. i don't really want to talk at all. i'd rather think. all the rest of the way home." arrived at holiday knoll, he stepped from the car and held out a hand to her. "good-night, pat." "aren't you coming in?" "i think not." "ah, do," she wheedled. "just for a minute." he turned to look at the broad, rambling house. a dim light burned in the library; a brighter one in dee's room overhead. constance's room was dark. he was vaguely glad of that. "i haven't even thanked you yet," she observed. "you needn't." "then you ought to thank me," she asserted daringly, "for taking connie's place. do come in. perhaps i can find you a drink." "i don't want a drink, thank you," he returned; but he followed her through the door. "it's us, dee," called the girl, projecting her voice up the stairway as she led the way to the library. "mr. scott and me." "all right," dee responded. "i'm in my nightie or i'd come down. have a good time?" "gee-lorious!" said pat. she took off her hat, fluffed up her short, heavy hair with a double-handed scuffle characteristic of her, and moved forward to the table. in the diffused soft radiance of the one light, scott stared at her. her pose was languid, her eyes sombre with the still passion of lovely sounds remembered. slowly the lids drooped over them. she tilted her chin and in her effortless, liquid voice of song gave out the exquisite rhythm of a melody from the tschaikowsky fifth which they had just heard. "don't, pat," muttered scott. "don't you like it?" "i love it. so--don't." she moved toward him, her throat still quivering with the beauty of sound, and lifted her hand to the bright, curt waves of hair at his temple, brushing them lightly back. a dusky colour glowed in her cheeks. as the dim echo of the music died, she leaned to him. her lips, light, fervent, cool, softly firm, met his, lingered upon them for the smallest, sweetest moment as a moth hovers in its flight from a flower. then she, too, was in flight. "good-night," she whispered back to him from the doorway. pat's challenge to stancia's supremacy gave scott plenty to speculate about. his first sentiment was amusement that this daring child should have deliberately elected to enter the lists against her older and more beautiful sister. but what was pat's interest in him? flirtation? evidently. he guessed that it was the dash of diablerie in her that had inspired the experiment. nevertheless, he was conscious of a rather excited interest in and curiosity about her, not as a precocious child, but as a reckonable woman with distinct provocations of person and mind. in comparison with her, scott reflected (and was shocked at his own disloyalty in so reflecting) stancia was becoming insipid. he discovered, in thinking it over, that there had grown up an impalpable embarrassment between stancia and himself, and that it seemed to have been growing for some time; an inexplicable thing between those two who had approached so near to embarkation upon the love-adventure perilous. had she noticed it? he wondered. had he been so bold as to put the query to her, she would have hardly known how to reply. she was conscious that at times she failed to hold his interest; that his mind seemed to wander away from her; but, in the self-sufficiency of her beauty, she set that down to a quality of vagueness in his character. he was unfailingly gentle, considerate, and helpful wherever, in her luxurious and hard-pressed life, she allowed him to help. and he asked nothing in return. this piqued, even while it relieved her. for she was no longer adventurous. the layers of fat were insulating that soft and comfort-enslaved soul. scott, striving to maintain the appearances of a loyalty which he did not really owe (how he thanked his gods for that now!) found her loveliness growing monotonous, her inertia of mind, irritant. "nothing above the ears," pat had said; wicked little pat, whose vividness so far outshone the mere beauty of the elder. the harsh truth of the slang had stuck. his next encounter with the girl was several days later when he was keeping an appointment with stancia in the library at the knoll; the merest fleeting glimpse of the boyish girl-figure as it passed through the hallway, followed by the heart-troubling, deep thrill of her voice raised in the tschaikowsky melody.... "i've asked you twice," he was conscious of stancia saying plaintively, "and you don't pay any attention." "i really beg your pardon," apologised scott. "awfully stupid of me. of course, i shall be delighted to stay to luncheon." as he was leaving early in the afternoon, pat hurried after him to intercept the car. "take me down to the village with you, mr. scott?" "indeed i will." she jumped in. "i don't want to go to the village," said she in quite a different tone, as the car took the curve. "i want to talk." "it's a worthy ambition. so do i. where shall we go?" "anywhere." he whirled the car around an abrupt corner and headed for the open country. "i cried that night after the concert," pat informed him. she was staring straight in front of her. "my dear!" he murmured. "i'm _not_ your dear." "no. you're not. i must remember that." "not a bit--to-day. i've had time to think." "so have i." she whirled on him. "have you changed, too?" she demanded with animation and dismay, quaintly negligent of the implied inconsistency. "no. i haven't changed." "i'm glad," said she naïvely. then, stealing a glance at him, "do you still like me--a little?" a little? how much did he "like" this bewitching child? was "like" a sufficient word at all for the feeling which had taken such puzzling growth within him? he could not have answered the query to himself satisfactorily, and had no intention of defining his attitude for her benefit. "tell me," she whispered. "i think you might." "i have many things to tell you, little pat," he replied with his foreign precision of speech; "but that is not one of them." "it's the one i want to hear," said willful pat. "first, do you tell me: why did you cry that night?" "conscience. no," she contradicted herself thoughtfully; "that's a bluff. i don't know. sort of nervousness, i expect." "that is what i feared for you; that you would brood over it and make yourself unhappy----" "it wasn't that at all," interrupted pat simply and promptly. "but i did want to see you again and know that you didn't think--that i wasn't too awfully--that i didn't seem just a fresh kid to you." "no. you didn't." "was that being '_petite gamine_'?" she threw a sidelong glance at him. "was it? you should know." "after all, it was only a white kiss." "a _what_?" "white kiss. there are white kisses and red kisses," she explained unconcernedly. "you have no right to that kind of knowledge," said he sternly. "where did you come by it?" "i told you," she muttered gloomily, "that i used to be a terrible necker." "yes. but--that sort of thing! don't you know that's dangerous?" "would it be with you?" she asked with direct and naïve curiosity. "there is no question of it with me," he answered rigidly. "but, so far as that goes, no. i am old enough to know how to control myself." "then you're different from most men," she returned bitterly. "good god, child! have you learned that already? at your age?" "since we're telling each other our real names," said pat in her levelest tones, "the first time i was kissed i was hardly fifteen." "you seem to have been unfortunately precocious." she flashed a smile at him. "are you jealous?" the amazing realisation came to him that he was. but he answered steadily: "what right should i have to be jealous of what you might do?" "suppose i _want_ you to be?" this he chose to disregard. "i don't believe that you understand yourself, your temperament." he was trying to hold himself to a tone of cool diagnosis. "i wish i were your dr. bobs for fifteen minutes." "well, i don't," she retorted. "bobs's middle names are sterling worth; but i'd rather have you lecture me. _you_ understand." "i understand that you are of a very high-strung, neurotic, excitable temperament." gloom overshadowed her face again. "you're not telling me any news about myself." "then you must see how perilous it is for a girl like you to be what you call a necker." "oh, as far as that goes," she answered coolly, "i've always got my foot on the brake. every minute. if things get too hectic i can always see the ridiculous side of it and get up a laugh. it's a grand little safeguard, being able to laugh at yourself." "i suppose it is. as long as you _are_ able." "anyway, i've been terribly proper ever since you talked to me that night at the party. wise virgin stuff! do you know you've got a lot of influence over me, mr. scott?" "have i? i'm glad of that." "so am i. but i don't quite know why you should have." she pondered. "unless it's because there's something about you that makes the other men seem clumsy and--and _local_." he laughed. "i'm very flattered." "don't make fun of me," pouted pat. "i'm serious. particularly about your having influence over me. since our talk i've passed up all sorts of chances to have a flutter. i don't believe i've kissed three boys, in all." despite himself scott queried acidly: "and were they red or white kisses?" "well, one of them might have had a dash of pink in it. no; i just said that to tease you," she added impulsively. "i really have been boringly good. it isn't too easy, either." "pat, why don't you talk to dr. bobs about yourself?" "i will if you want me to," said she submissively. "it would be a good thing, assuming that you would talk frankly." "where shall i begin? by telling him about us?" she inquired demurely. upon this scott's inner commentary was, "you little devil!" aloud he said composedly: "if you think it significant. but what i said was about yourself." "oh, i'm well enough," said she carelessly. "are you happy enough?" she gave him a startled glance. "why should you think i'm not happy?" "i didn't say i thought so. i simply asked you." "well, i am." but there was a hint of defiance in her tone. "and you _do_ think i'm not." "i think you're restless and discontented." "what makes you think that?" she asked, curiously, leaning over to him so that the warm curve of her arm pressed his. he glanced not at her but at her encroaching shoulder. "because of just that sort of thing." she snatched her arm away. "i hate you!" "better hate me than yourself. as you did that night at the club." tears welled up in her eyes. her chin trembled and there was a soft, heart-thrilling catch in the huskiness of her voice, barely controlled enough to enunciate: "i don't see why you're so mean to me." "why, it's a child!" he exclaimed in mock self-reproach. "and i keep forgetting and treating it like a grown-up." "that's why i love to be with you. i want to be treated that way." "oh, no! you merely think you do. in reality you want to be petted and flattered and coddled and approved in all your cunning and silly little ways. that would be very easy. only--it isn't part of our compact." with one of her mercurial changes she flashed a smile at him. "i'd nearly forgotten. you were to be my wise and guiding friend, weren't you? is that why you're telling me that i'm restless and discontented?" "well, aren't you?" "not more than the other girls." "is that an answer?" "no. yes, it is, too! why should i be different?" "because you're you." "'be-_cause_ you're _you_,'" she sang gaily to the measure of an elderly but still popular song. "i like to have you say that. how do you think i'm different?" "ah, that i can't say. you see, i don't know the girls of your age much." "no; you're always playing around with the married women," she remarked calmly. "well, you don't miss much. they're a lot of dimwits, the girls of my age here. no snap. if they can get a couple of rounds of bridge in the afternoon and a cocktail before dinner and a speed-limit whizz around the country in somebody's car, or a few hours of jazz, or a snuggling party with some good-looking boy on the porch, that'll keep them from suicide for quite a spell." "i see. they seek the same distractions from the prevailing restlessness----" "you needn't finish," she broke in. "yes; we're all alike. there isn't a girl that doesn't go in for spooning if she likes the boy--and a lot of 'em aren't even too particular about that--except maybe the standish girls, and they've been brought up as if their house was a convent. at that, ailsa standish told me the conundrum about why girls wear their hair covering their ears. d'you know it?" she enquired with a palpable effect of brazen hardihood. but she turned her head away from the quiet disgust of his look as he answered: "yes, i know it. but you've no business to. it strikes me that you're in a pretty rotten set." "it's the only set in dorrisdale," defended pat sullenly. "and we're slow compared to some of the other towns." "well, if you think it's worth it," he began slowly when she cut in, with a sort of cry, throwing out her hands, those large, supple, shapely, capable hands, in a gesture of despair and appeal. "but what's a girl to do?" "doesn't your school give you anything?" "not a dam' thing that i don't want to get and get easy. all they try to do is make it easy for you to get through. they won't even issue diplomas for fear some of the girls couldn't pass the exams and their people would get sore on the school. i study when i feel like it, and that isn't too often." "will you do something for me, pat?" "yes; i'd love to," was the eager reply. "make something of your voice. you can do it with a little work." at the last word she assumed an expression of distrust. "how much work?" "two hours a day, perhaps." "two hours a day! for how long?" "a year of it would give you a start." "two whole hours out of every day for a year? what do you take me for; a machine?" scott's nerves quivered with the strident rasp of the voice, like the squawk of a dismayed and indignant hen. "why, i wouldn't have any time for anything else." "some days have as much as twenty-four hours in them," he pointed out. "however, you might make a start with an hour." "i might," she admitted dubiously, "while i'm in school. but when i get out i want to have some fun. and i'm going to." "so, it seems this influence which i am supposed to have over you doesn't go very far." "now you're disgusted with me again. but i can't help it. i'm not going to be a _slave_ just to be able to sing a little." "it might be more than a little. and it seems to be the one quality you have which might be susceptible of development." "now you're talking like a school teacher. and you're not too flattering, are you? don't you think i've got any brains?" "yes. but i don't think you're going to find them of much use." "i suppose you'd like me to go to college," said pat contemptuously, "and learn the college cheer and how to play basketball." "you might even learn more than that. however, if you're satisfied with your present status, that settles _that_. suppose we talk of something else." this did not suit pat at all. she promptly said so. "i want to talk about me. you almost always do talk to me about myself. i wonder if that's why i like to be with you more than anyone else," she concluded with one of her accesses of insight. "it's an extremely interesting subject." "now you're laughing at me again. and a moment ago you were angry. but you're still disappointed, aren't you?" "a little." "i think that's rotten of you!" she murmured. "i suppose we ought to be going back." she sighed. "i don't want to a bit. can you turn here?" it was a narrow and tricky road. as the car came to a stop after backing she laid her hand on his. "kiss little pattie and tell her to be a good child and she'll be awfully good," she murmured elfishly. scott completed the turn before he answered: "no, little pat. no more of that between you and me." on the return journey she was silent and thoughtful. at the post office in the village she asked to be set down, and, getting out, looked up at him, her eyes limpid with sincerity. "please, mr. scott, keep on liking me," she said. "it's awfully good for me." chapter xiv semicircles of weariness hollowed robert osterhout's eyes as he opened the door and entered mona's room. it had been a hard night for him. memory had been delicately dissecting his nerves. striving in vain to lose himself in his experiments he had turned, early in the morning, to his communion with the dead woman. the letter, that pitiful solace for the unremitting pain of loss and loneliness, was in his hand now as he closed the door behind him. " ... as for pat," he had written, "she is one of those born to trouble the hearts of men and to take fire from their trouble. of the tribe of helen! if i could see her safely married---- safely! as if there were any safety in marriage! not under our present system. look at connie. though, for that matter, my misgivings about her and cary scott seem to have been misplaced. that flame has flickered out. she will perhaps settle down from sheer inertia. but hers is hardly what one would call a safe or successful marriage. dee's may be better. not that she is specially in love with james. but her training at sports will stand her in good stead. she will go through with it. dee is first and last a good sport. nevertheless, i sometimes wish she had waited for the really right man, if there be any such for her. "mona, there are times when i could believe in trial marriage, with suitable safeguards, of course, against children. if i were a philosopher instead of a medical man i should certainly favour the system. but my technical training prejudices my judgment. of course, we do have trial marriages, and commonly; or trial alliances, which is the same thing without the same name. if the truth were known i suppose that most men who marry the second time, marry their mistresses. how many other experiments may previously have gone into the discard as having proved unsuitable, is another question. selection of the fittest. the notion that men never marry the women who give themselves is fictional cant, one of those many falsities which society propagates under the silly delusion that they are safeguards of virtue. "what an experiment it would be to bring up a young girl in an atmosphere clear of all the common lies and illusions! you had begun to do it with pat, i think. i wish that i could carry on. but it is too blind a venture for a worn and uncertain bachelor like myself. nevertheless, when pat does put questions to me i give her the truth. and she has a flair for truth. an enquiring and pioneering sort of mind, too, which would be a fine equipment if only it were trained and disciplined. as it is, it is a danger. she will explore, and exploration, with her temperament--pat ought to marry some man much older than herself; a man of thirty at least, clever enough to understand her, patient enough to bear with her caprices, and strong enough to compel her respect. he could make something real of her, for there is essential character in pat. or is it only the charm of her personality that makes one think so? i could wish that cary scott were not married. though, of course, he is too old for her. he takes a great deal of interest in her and has much influence over her mind; but his interest is not that kind of interest, naturally. he has been talking to me about her; very shrewdly, too. he thinks her of the dangerously inflammable type. i fancy that she has been making a confidant of him. he thinks that i should talk to her plainly. i feel rather alarmed at the prospect; the modern flapper knows so formidably much!" opening the safe to add this letter to the accumulating pile in the centre compartment, osterhout was conscious of a subtle and troubling impression. he felt that some alien hand had intruded there, some alien eye had seen those words, so sacredly confidential, sealed in the inviolable silences of death. yet that, he knew, was impossible. no one in the world except himself had the combination of the safe. could mona herself, mona's spirit, returning to the room she had so loved and so permeated with her personality, have entered there to absorb the essence of the confidences which she had demanded of him? but if that were so, why should he feel that sense of invasion, since the letters belonged more to mona than to him? nevertheless, the thought was a blessed appeasement to the thirst of his heart. he clasped it to him. but presently his underlying materialistic hard sense reasserted its ascendancy. he set it all down to imagination; smiled tolerantly at himself for a sentimental self-deluder. for a long time pat did not come to pay him the expected visit. but the day before her return to school she appeared in his laboratory. "bobs," she announced pathetically, "i've got a sore throat." "let's have a look at it," he directed, leading her to the window. she tilted back her face, while he explored the recesses of the accused organ. "sore throat, eh?" he remarked. "at least your mouth is clean, which is more than could have been said of it a year ago. you've got a breath like a cow." "'snice," purred pat. "i'm a good little dieter. but what about my throat?" "well," answered the physician judicially, "it might be diphtheria or it might be scarlet fever, but _i_ think it's that guilty feeling that comes of telling lies about itself. your throat is no more sore than my pipe." "i know it isn't," admitted the unabashed pat. "but i'm kind of wrong inside. way-way inside, i mean." "the patient must be more specific if the physician is to be of use." "bobs, am i a fool?" "i suppose so. most people are." "am i a dam' fool?" "as to degree we come to a consideration of definition which----" "mr. scott thinks i am." "hello! who's making this diagnosis? cary scott, or you, or i?" "do you think i ought to go to college?" "too late. you couldn't get in now, thanks to that infernal, mind-coddling, brain-softening school of yours." "it isn't! i love the school. they let you do whatever you like." "which is, of course, the best possible course for a finished product like you." "oh, _well_! who cares? i don't." "then why come to me?" "i don't think i'm getting everything out of--of things that i might," said pat plaintively. "that's the beginning of wisdom. why this divine discontent? have the movies begun to pall?" "oh, _have_ you seen doug fairbanks in his last? he's _too_ flawless." "evidently they haven't begun to pall. if i could be assured of its being his last i would gladly go to see the too-flawless doug. but my dull artistic appreciations do not rise above charley chaplin. but we wander. we were discussing your way-way inside, weren't we? why its sudden discomposure?" "i thought you could tell me. you know so much, bobs. i'm getting bored with the things i used to like. i think it's talking with mr. scott. he's so different, and he makes the rest seem dull." "yes; scott is a bit of a prig," said osterhout with intention. "he isn't!" flashed pat indignantly. "he's the best dressed man at the club. jimmie james says so." as the physician smiled at this naïve refutation she added: "well, a man can't be a prig and look the way mr. scott always does, can he?" "obviously not." "it's only because he's been about the world so much and knows such a lot about music and art and books and--and things." "well, you've had the advantages of a liberal and ladylike education yourself. kindred spirits. don't fall in love with cary scott, infant. remember he's a married man," smiled osterhout. "fall in _love_ with him? why, i'd as soon think of falling in love with you! he's old enough to be my grandfather! but i think he's awfully good for me," she added naïvely. "don't you love to talk with mr. scott, bobs?" "oh, i just _adore_ it!" simpered the doctor, clasping fervent hands. "now you're laughing at me," she pouted. "he's always laughing at me. that doesn't help much." "sometimes it does, bambina. it might even teach you to laugh at yourself." "i do that, too. and sometimes i cry at myself. all night." "do you?" he scrutinised her. "at your age? what do you cry about?" "just about myself. because nothing seems worth while except--except queer things." "that's morbid. or else it's a pose." "it isn't a pose. i even don't like school as much as i did. bobs, i want to leave after this term. d'you think if you went to dad you could talk him into letting me?" "much more likely that you could. what's your plan? launch yourself socially on a waiting world?" "don't be spit-catty; it doesn't suit you. no; i want to come back home and run the house for dad and have some fun. i've been taking domestic science, and i know i could do it better than con. she'd be glad to be rid of the bother, anyway. i thought i'd work at music, too. do you think i could do anything with my voice, bobs?" "don't ask me. any crow knows more music than i do. i think it would be good for you to tackle anything steady and regular. it would keep you from being too introspective." "nice bobs, to give me all the big words for nothing! that means that i think too much about myself, doesn't it? i know i do. and i talk too much about myself, too. i came over here just to talk about myself and to get you to talk about me," she confessed simply. with an air of considered maturity, she added: "it isn't much fun for me to talk to boys of my own age. they're always wanting to tell you about themselves, or else to make love to you. generally it's love-stuff." "indeed! do you go in much for that particular indoor sport, pat?" "oh, it isn't all indoors. there's porch swings, and limousines; all that helps. are you shocked, bobs?" "i'm interested. the habits of the young of the species are bound to be interesting to a scientist." "you said something when you said 'habits.' everybody does it. didn't you when you were young?" "it's so long ago that i've forgotten. but i don't think my sisters did. not promiscuously." "if they did you'd be the last one that knew about it," the sapient pat informed him. "and i hate the word 'promiscuously.' besides, it isn't true. i don't. not any more." "great grief, infant! you talk as if you'd been at this sort of thing for uncounted years!" "i've been over twelve for some time, you know," she observed lightly. "perhaps it's as well that you reminded me. you seem so permanently young to me. however, speaking medically, i should say cut it out, infant. cut it out for good. it's no good for you. it's no good for any young girl; but particularly not for you." she knitted her pretty brows at him, thinking it through. "i get you, stephen," she said presently. "though i'm not so different from other girls, only a little more so than some, maybe. but you're right. sometimes i've felt like a nervous wreck. i wish that i didn't know so much about myself. or else that i knew a little more." "you know quite enough. at any rate you spend quite enough time thinking about yourself. where do you suppose all this leads to, pat?" "i don't know. lots of time to think about that, isn't there? i suppose i'll get married and have a lot of kids some day. i like kids." "it would probably be the best thing for you." "do you think so? but i'd be a rotten wife, bobs," she added, a cloud settling down upon her expressive face. "what kind of a training have i had to marry and have children to bring up?" "about the same as most of your set, haven't you?" "yes; and look at them! there isn't one of them that's true to her husband." "great lord, pat----" "now, i _have_ shocked you." "yes, you have. not the fact--though it isn't a fact so sweepingly--but that you at your age should know it or think it." "oh, i don't mean necessarily that they go the limit. but they're all out for a flutter with any attractive suitor that comes along. bobs, tell me something; if a married woman goes necking around isn't she more likely to--to go farther than a girl is?" "depends on the individual. it isn't the safest of pastimes for anyone, as i've suggested to you." "but it's such fun to make 'em crazy," returned the irrepressible pat. "only," she added pensively, "it isn't such fun when you feel kind of crazy yourself. yet it is, too. when i get married i'm going to everlastingly settle down and never look sideways at any other man. bobs, what makes you think i ought to marry a man thirty years old?" "it's about the right age for you. it will take a man of some wisdom and self-control to manage you, little pat." "more grandfather stuff!" she muttered fretfully. "i don't want to marry a settled old thing. i want someone with some fun left in him." "two or three years from now thirty won't look so senile." "probably not. dee's marrying a man over thirty. bobs, do you like dee's engagement?" "no; i don't," he answered, and straightway wished that he had not been betrayed into that frankness. "neither do i. jimmie james thinks he's first cousin to the almighty. dee won't stand for that." "she seems devoted to him." "oh, she'll see it through. dee's a good old girl. but i wish she wouldn't. have you told her what you think about it?" "certainly not!" "well, don't bite me. would you have if she'd asked you?" "perhaps. i doubt it." "i'd have thought she'd have come to you. dee's awfully impressed with you, bobs. lots more than i am. would you tell _me_ if i came to you?" "of course." "why the difference, i wonder? never mind, old dear. i'll make you a promise right here that i won't marry anyone without your consent. only, you'll have to give your consent if i want it very much, you know. won't you, bobs?" "probably," he said. she waved him a kiss and was gone. he returned to his interrupted task. in the midst of a test which should have absorbed all his attention a sudden query jarred itself into his brain. how had pat known that he thought it desirable for her to marry a man of thirty? certainly he had never told her so. he had never told anyone so. except mona. chapter xv consciousness of virtue warmed pat's heart as she jumped from the train at dorrisdale and sniffed the shrewd october air with nostrils that quivered like a kitten's. she had been working hard at school, ever so much harder than there was any real need for, on her music and domestic science, and now she was to enjoy some deserved recreation. for this was the week of dee's wedding and she had five days of unmitigated gaiety in prospect. she peopled her plans with the figures of those who were to be participants of and ministers to her pleasurings, nearly all of them, it is significant to note, of the masculine gender. there were the local youth of her own "crowd," with half a dozen of whom she had "had a flutter" more or less ardent, in the last year; the out-of-town contingent whom she had long known from the viewpoint of childhood and upon whom she aspired confidently to try her burgeoning charms; and two or three unknowns who were to be of the wedding party. cary scott had a place in the mosaic, too; but not an overshadowing one. the easy effacements of time, so potent upon a youthful mind, had dimmed, though they had not erased, his image. she was expectant of livelier excitements than association with him afforded. nevertheless there was an abiding feeling of assurance in having him for a secure background: she looked forward happily to being approved by him for having worked so hard, much as a playful puppy looks for a tidbit as reward of a trick cleverly performed. furthermore she had a surprise in store for him. "what's doing to-night?" was her first question of dee, after their greetings. "dinner-dance at the vaughns'." "everybody going to be there?" "all that are on hand. some of the party aren't here yet." "who's back of my crowd?" "selden thorpe, billy grant, monty standish; he was asking to-day about you." "that stiff!" commented pat, doing a pirouette. "no more pep than a jumping-jack." "neither would you have if you'd been brought up in a bandbox. but he's begun to lift the lid and look around. and he's a winner to look at." "maybe i'll have a shot at him. dee, i'm out for trouble this trip. i've been being good so long it hurts." "you look it; the trouble-hunting, i mean," commented the elder, appraising her maid-of-honour. "they ought to put a danger signal over you, pat. where do you get the stuff that you work on the men? your features are nothing to hire out to an artist, you know. and yet----" pat laughed delightedly. "aren't they? well, you and con have got enough cold and haughty beauty for the family. being a bride is becoming to you, dee. you look stunning." indeed, dee's clean-cut, attractive athleticism seemed to have taken on a new quality. her eyes had grown more brilliant; there was a higher glow of colour in the clear skin; but a more analytical observer than pat might have discerned in the little, straightening lines at the corners of the firm, sweet mouth, a conscious effort at nervous control. "oh, i'm all right," said she, carelessly. "when's cissie coming?" cissie parmenter was the philadelphia schoolmate whom pat had adopted as "b.f." "to-morrow night. you're a peach to let me have her. what'll we do with her wednesday, dee? only the actual wedding party are asked to the dangerfields', aren't they?" "that's all. i'll get cary scott to run her in town for luncheon." "isn't mr. scott one of the ushers?" "no. he and jimmy aren't very strong for each other. i'm using him as my general utility man for the show. dad's no good for that, and bobs is too busy." "cissie'll be all fired up about mr. scott. i've told her about him." "did you tell her he was married?" "of course. you don't think that would cramp cissie's style, do you? she'll show him some thrill if he gives her half a chance. not that he's too brisk a pacer, himself. how's his little flutter with con going?" "all off," answered dee, laconically. "does con miss it much?" "no. she's having a mild whirl with emslie selfridge. he's safer." "safer than mr. scott? couldn't be. i think scottie invented safety first." "do you?" returned dee drily. "well, you've still got _something_ to learn about men, infant." "i've got something to teach 'em, too," laughed pat impishly. "will he be there to-night?" "who? cary? no; he's in washington. gets back to-morrow noon." this suited pat well enough for her projected surprise. it went with her temperament that she should have a taste for dramatic effect. assuming that mr. scott would report himself at the house shortly after his arrival, she planned to keep the early afternoon free. watchful at her window, on pretence of taking a nap, she saw his car come up the drive and hurried down to the music room where she seated herself at the piano and began to strum casually, taking up the accompaniment of a song as he entered the front door. it was sketchy and sloppy, that accompaniment, the performance of a jerry-trained hand, but it served as background to the fresh, deep, unforgotten voice, which met his ears and checked his footsteps. "if love were what the rose is and you were like the leaf." she completed the stanza, conscious, through her woman's sense, of every slow step that brought him nearer to her. all the falsity of method, the cheap trickery of intonation which had been coached into her for the song, could not wholly devitalise the velvety passion of the voice. as the final word died away she whirled about. "mr. scott! i didn't know _you_ were there." "didn't you?" he smiled down into her eyes with that quietly ironic look of his which seemed to mock at himself as much as at that to which it was directed, taking her outstretched hand. "i'm glad to see you, pat. but--didn't you?" "you know i did," she confessed. "i was singing at you. did you like it?" "yes." unsated of her lust for praise, she persisted: "don't you think my lessons have done me good?" "have you been taking lessons?" "certainly i have. you told me you wanted me to. i've been working _terribly_ hard." "how hard?" "a whole hour, some days. or pretty nearly." "that _is_ toil! under whom?" "one of the teachers at school. she's _very_ good." "a professional?" "she used to sing in a choir. she says," pat dropped her voice impressively, "there are lots of voices on the stage not as good as mine." "doubtless." "i wish i knew what you mean when you say that, that funny way," she said pathetically. "i think you're awfully queer to-day, anyway." her manner changed from petulance to pleading. "do you think i've got a terrible lot to learn before i could try?" "try? what?" "going on the stage." "i think you've got everything to unlearn," he said calmly. silently she gazed at him. the tender upper curve of her lip quivered. she turned back to the piano, jangled a discord which was intended to be a sad and melting harmony, and told her little, feminine lie in a muffled voice: "and i did it all on your account, too." "were you going on the stage on my account?" around she whisked again, jumped from the seat and went to him, her face alight. "that's what i _adore_ about you. you never let me put over any bunk. what makes you so awfully clever about girls, mr. scott?" "not clever at all," he disclaimed. "i'm simply being honest with you. and," he supplemented, "hoping that you're one of those rare human beings with whom one can be honest successfully." "oh, i am," she averred fervently. "but you simply _smeared_ my feelings. i thought you were going to be perfectly thrilled and i get no come-back at all! don't you like my voice even a little bit any more, mr. scott? you did, before." "there's a quality in it that--that---- but what's the use! you won't do any honest work with it." "you don't think i'm any good at all, do you?" she said peevishly. "we were talking about your music, weren't we?" "ah, but i've done a lot besides music since i saw you. and i've been fearfully good and proper. aren't you proud?" "of you? very," he smiled. "of your influence." she took a fold of his sleeve between finger and thumb and idly pleated at it, keeping her intent gaze fixed there. "nobody's ever had half so much over me. i've always done exactly what i liked and never done anything i didn't like." "it's a delightful world, isn't it, pat? but sometimes those things have to be paid for." at this she raised her eyes, thoughtful and honest eyes, now a little shadowed. "i've always known that. and i'll always be ready to pay. whatever else i may be, i'm not yellow, mr. scott. i'll take what i can get, and if there's a--a come-back, i'll take that, too." "yes. you've got courage. _Ça se voit._ that sees itself." he had dropped unconsciously into the emphatic french idiom. "does it? how can you tell? you don't know me so well." "no; i don't." "yes, you do," she contradicted him and herself. "i think you know me better than anyone ever has." again she let her glance fall. "i know that you will face whatever comes, unafraid. that is in your face. no; it's in the way you bear yourself. in any event, there it is." "but you did hurt my feelings. terribly! i thought you'd like my music--and maybe pat me on the head--and say 'nice little girl'--and give me a kiss and a stick of candy." she slipped her fingers down to his wrist, let them creep to the palm of his hand where they clung. "say you're glad to see me again, mr. scott," she murmured. "very glad." "but"--she tilted her face toward his, turned it away, whispered--"i don't think you act so--very." his free hand clamped strongly, friendlily down upon hers for a moment, then released it with a tap. "are you trying to flirt with your grandfather, pat?" he mocked. not for the first time in their intercourse pat said savagely, "i hate you!" but this time she said it to herself, with the wrath of disappointment and shamed uncertainty. she turned to take her music from the piano. it fluttered from her grasp to the floor whence he retrieved it. pat's heart gave a bound of exultation. she had seen his hand shake as it held the sheet out to her. "wouldn't grandpa like a dance with granddaughter this evening?" she challenged gaily. "as many as granddaughter can spare from her little playmates." "come early then and avoid the rush," she advised. "i'll keep what i can out of the wreckage. now i must send dee down to you. she's got a million things for you to do." the million things proved exacting enough to keep scott in town so long that the dance was well under way when he reached it. pat passed him on the floor, floating beatifically in the arms of this or that partner, never for more than a few turns with anyone, for the rush was on for her favours. after dancing contentedly enough with such partners as he could pick up, for several numbers, scott looked about to see whether there was any hope of his cutting in on pat, but failed to find her on the floor; so, as the rooms were rather close, he wandered outside to smoke a cigarette. the soft carpet of the lawn tempted his tired feet. he strolled around the house, intending to re-enter by the far end of the vine-shrouded piazza, when, turning the corner, he came abruptly upon a couple deep in shadow which did not prevent his making out that they were close-clasped. noiselessly though he stepped back he saw the girl's face strain back in attentiveness. pat's startled eyes peered after him in the dark, unrecognising. cary scott swore. then he laughed. the laughter was more bitter than the curse. chapter xvi miss cissie parmenter strolled down the broad stairs at holiday knoll, looking neither to the left nor the right. she was freshly painted with considerable taste, and arrayed with such precision and perfection that she would have suggested a handsome and expensive species of toy but for the sleepy and dangerous eyes which were as profoundly human and natural as the rest of her was delicately artificial. in their depths one could surmise volcanic possibilities. she was small, daintily made, and languid of movement, not without a hint of feline strength. though her regard was apparently fixed upon far-away things, she had at once observed the man in the library. "you're mr. scott, aren't you?" she said in a cool and lazy voice, advancing with hand outstretched. "yes." he took the hand. "and you're miss parmenter?" "yes; i'm cissie. you know, mr. scott, i'm a social outcast for the afternoon." "it wouldn't strike one as having weighed on your spirits." "buoyed up by the prospect of meeting you. aren't you appalled at having a total stranger on your hands all afternoon?" "on the contrary, i'm thrilled," he returned with the conventional answer. she let her slow gaze sweep over him estimatingly. "you're not a bit like i figured out," she murmured, having decided upon the direct-personality gambit, as promising the best and promptest returns. "no? well, youth survives these disappointments." "fishing," she retorted. "no; i shan't tell you how much nicer you are than the prospectus. what are you going to do with me?" "whatever you permit." "oh, have a care of yourself! that might take you far. but i can decide better after eating. where do we go for that?" "how would the ritz do?" "music to my ears. can you get a cocktail there?" "i think it might be managed, confidentially." "that'll do nicely for a starter." "a starter? i see. and for continuance?" "i'm feeling a little down to-day. what would you prescribe?" "i've heard that that medicine with bubbles in it possesses a self-raising quality." "from now on you're my family physician. but i'm sinking rapidly." he contemplated her curiously. "believe me, miss parmenter, i don't want to spoil sport before it begins, but--how old are you?" "twenty-one. beyond the age of consent--for drinks. it's all right; i know how to say 'when' to a bottle. and i'm not so old but that you might call me cissie if you like. i think it would help pass the time." "and as i'm still short of forty, i suppose, on the same principle, you'd better call me cary." "how nicely you play back! and pat told me you were slow; nice, but slow." at the mention of pat's name a little surge of anger and contempt went through scott's veins. but he answered lightly: "i'm a plodding old party, it's true. but i do my best. now, as to practical details i'm afraid that the ritz would draw the line at champagne." "that's a blow." "but i bethink me that there's a locker at a country club up toward the frozen north that i have entry to, if that isn't too far." "if you'd said albany it wouldn't be too far for me." "what would be too far for you, cissie?" she gave him her eyes, alight with gleams of mirth and appreciation. "don't let me stop you," she laughed. "there are days when my brakes need re-lining. let's go!" throughout the drive, cissie alternated between urging her companion to put more speed on the car, and light, slangy, clever, suggestive chatter about theatres, athletics, movies, and the sort of thing that fills the society columns of the daily newspapers. at the luncheon she drank two cocktails, half of the pint of champagne which was all that she would permit to be provided, and then declared herself fit for life again. "what'll we do now?" was her way of putting it. "what time do they expect you back?" "five sharp. so, of course, i shan't be there. i never am. play golf, mr. scott?" "just an average game, miss parmenter." "all right, cary; i'll take you on for twenty on our handicaps." "you bet fairly high, don't you?" "yes; and what's more, i pay up when i lose. if the bet isn't good enough, just to make it more interesting, i'll throw in the odds of a kiss if you win. do you know anyone here who'd loan me a pair of shoes?" that matter being arranged, cissie, playing with cool precision, proceeded to beat him by three and one. "now i'll have a highball, please, and we'll trail for home," she directed. "we won't be more than an hour late if you hit it up with that hearse you drive. are you going to claim the loser's end of the purse?" "the loser's? oh, i see. but i thought that was the winner's." "don't fall all over yourself with unbridled enthusiasm," she jeered. "you've got to give three more rousing cheers than that to wake me up." "just at present i'm busy with the car. but to-night is coming. what dances will you give me?" "the lucky numbers. seven and eleven. aren't you flattered?" "almost as much flattered as i am delighted." she twisted in her seat to confront him. "cary scott, you're a good bluffer, but it doesn't go with me. you haven't fallen for me one little bit!" "i? like an avalanche," he protested. "i find you as charming as you are--startling." "ah, that startling stuff; you know what that is, don't you?" "i'm not sure that i do." "i'm showing you my line; that's all." "and now i find you bewildering. be kind to the stupidity of one who has not yet become fully acclimated to his own amazing country." "yes; anyone could tell that you don't fully belong with us. you see, every girl has her special line to show, nowadays." "like a commercial traveller?" "you've said it! it's whatever is supposed to fit her personality best. you go to a character reader--there's a wiz in carnegie hall, who lays you out a complete map for twenty-five dollars--and she sizes you up and lays out your line for you." "is this line, perhaps, equipped with a hook?" "eh? oh, sure!" cissie laughed. "hook and bait. yes; it's a fish-line, all right." "and what is your specialty?" "haven't i shown it plain enough? it's the lively and risky with just enough restraint to lead 'em on. i'm supposed to have passionate eyes, you know." scott laughed aloud. "i like you, cissie." "it's about time!" she exclaimed. "you haven't, up to now. and i've been working pretty hard on you." "that's very shrewd of you. i mean it, this time. it's realler than the thing we've been playing at." "good man! it's mutual. you can have the kiss if you want it, just for liking." "but you'd rather i wouldn't." "and _that's_ very shrewd of _you_. you're right; i like you that much ... cary, i don't wonder pat's batty over you." "pat? you're quite wrong." "and i'm wrong in thinking you're crazy about her, i suppose." "equally." "pat's line," remarked the astute miss parmenter thoughtfully, "is the minnesota shift up to date; all tomboy, you're-another, take-it-or-leave-it one minute, and the next you know she's a clinging vine and you're it. she can do it with those wonderful eyes and that throaty, croaky, heart-breaky voice of hers. it knocks the boys cold. and i'd think it would be just the line to catch an old--a man of the world like----" "an old man like you, you started to say," prompted scott. "no occasion for embarrassment on my account." "don't fool yourself by thinking that age makes such a difference to girls, these days. they think it does at pat's age, but a couple of years more makes a big diff. most of the boys i used to be crazy about look like sapheads to me now. they're too easy. there's more pep in experience; and," remarked the youthful philosopher, "the bigger they are, the harder they fall. pat's a pretty wise kid, at that. she isn't all '_petite gamine_.'" "evidently she has no secrets from you," said scott, vexed. "we're b.f.'s, you know. i suppose you think dirty me for trying to cut in on her with you." "i don't know that i'd thought of it at all." "now we're very old and stately," said the girl with mischievous alarm. "it makes us coldly dignified to be teased.... heavens! are we home already? good-bye, and thank you for a corking afternoon. see you to-night." she waved him a farewell, but reappeared as his car came back around the curve at the side of the house. "don't forget the lucky numbers, cary," she called, in her high, sweet drawl. "no danger," he answered, wondering just why she had come back to say that. he understood when, in the hallway back of cissie, he caught sight of pat's surprised and frowning face. "the little devil!" he chuckled. but, he thought the moment after, was cissie playing her own game, or pat's? within doors pat rushed the tardy guest upstairs and followed into her room. "do hustle," she said crossly. "you're gumming the game." "hustle is my ancestral name," stated cissie. "i'm right in high to-day." "i'll bet a bet you are," was the reply with a tinge of bitterness in it. miss parmenter's pleasantly decorated face took on an expression of innocent frankness. "what ever made you tell me that your scottie man was slow? i think he's a winner. i've fallen for him like--like an avalanche." "you can have him. but where do you get that cary stuff you were working?" "start a bath for me, will you, mike? oh, _that_. he asked me to. we're awful pals. just like that." she crooked her two perfectly manicured little fingers together pat grunted. "you know you told me to go as far as i liked, _dee_-rie." "well, you did, didn't you?" "oh, not half," cooed the b.f. "he's going to drive me back home after the wedding." "that won't break up my summer!" shouted pat, from the bathroom, above the seethe of the foaming faucets. she felt a definite sense of injury, not against cissie so much as against mr. scott, who represented, to her annoyed mind, a defection on the part of her own presumptive property. had cissie really lured his interest away? or had he lost interest in her, pat, anyway? upon this point her misgivings were allayed by calling to mind the tremulous hand with which he had recovered that sheet of music. yet he had resisted the lure of her touch, the mute offer of her lips. accustomed to the potency of physical appeal upon men, she felt at a loss. true, what had drawn her to scott had been his enjoyment of that in her which underlay the surface, his capacity for appreciating in her qualities and potentialities which she herself felt only dimly and doubtfully when the influence of his presence was remote. yet that he should find her attractive on this side, while holding himself under restraint against her more direct advances, puzzled and discouraged her. especially if he were, in fact, embarking upon a whirl with cissie parmenter. pat knew cissie's methods--or thought she did. in truth she decidedly underestimated the b.f.'s acumen as well as her adaptability to various kinds of camaraderie. pat determined to make herself extra-specially attractive to mr. scott that evening at the dance. unfortunately to be extra-specially or even ordinarily attractive to a person, you must first draw that person within the radius of attraction. to pat's discomfiture mr. scott evinced no interest whatsoever in her; barely any cognisance of her existence and presence at the dance. with the other girls in the wedding party he had early dances, to their obvious satisfaction, for in some occult way, though not of the party proper, he had come to be a central figure of interest. he was deemed "unusual," fascinating, "relieving"--a word which had recently come much into vogue in that set. cissie parmenter had been exploiting him. the party was notable for its pretty girls; but pat, though on the score of actual beauty she was far behind in the running, glowed among them with her dark, exotic radiance, like a flame among flowers. she was beset with admirers competing for such fractions of dances as they could get. every man in the room had been a suppliant except mr. scott. in that atmosphere of adulation pat seemed to become more quiveringly, femininely, alluringly alive. she exhaled delight, like a perfume of her ardent soul. yet in all the excitement of her pleasures, she was waiting and hoping and manoeuvring.... twice cary scott had danced with dee; three times with connie, who was her old, lovely, wistful self for the occasion; pat didn't feel any too comfortable about that. once he had danced with cissie, and once sat out with her on the piazza; and pat didn't feel at all comfortable about that. here it was the twelfth dance and he hadn't come near her. between two numbers she caught sight of him just outside a door, and then and there deserted a lamenting partner. "_mister_ scott!" he turned, and, in spite of himself, felt his breath quicken. she was so superb in the sure luxuriance of her youth; so appealing in the poise of her body, the turn of her head. "having a good time?" he asked courteously. "gorgeous!" she said mechanically, "who you taking in to supper?" "your very charming little friend, miss parmenter." "oh!" said pat. "that's terribly nice of you. if it weren't for you," she added viciously, "i'm afraid cissie'd be having a dull time." "i haven't noticed that she's had many dull moments," he answered, smiling slightly. pat stamped her foot. "then you've been watching her all the time. i think you might have----" she choked a little. "night air too much for you, pat?" he inquired solicitously. "no; it isn't.... _aren't_ you going to ask me for a dance, mr. scott? you didn't last night, either." "surely your programme is already full to overflowing." "it is. but i might do some shifty work with it." "thoughtful of you. but you would doubtless find it more amusing to sit out, or perhaps i should say stand out, the later dances in some remote nook with some attractive youth." he was speaking quite slowly and softly. "i might even say ... any attractive youth." she moved closer to him, with puzzled eagerness in her eyes. "won't you please tell me what you mean?" "consult your memory," he suggested. "surely it will go back for twenty-four hours." illumination came to her. "was it you who came around the corner last night?" "it was." pat's eyes fell. but there was a light in them which he would have found hard to interpret, harder than he thought her next plaintive, exculpatory words: "it's been so long since anyone has petted me." "and you require a certain amount of petting to keep you up to form," he remarked with cold contempt. "you've got the _meanest_ way of speaking," she muttered, before making direct response. "well, if nobody ever pets you, you get to feeling like a social leper; as if nobody cared about you. that's a ghastly feeling." "i'm sure you're quite competent to guard yourself against it." "well, you wouldn't pet me," she said very low, "when you'd hurt my feelings. in the music room." "how very remiss of me!" her attitude changed. her boyish shoulders straightened. her firm little chin went up. "how much did you see last night?" "sufficient to suggest that i was in the way." "were monty and i clinched?" "quite so." "and you went on right away?" "naturally." "if you had stayed," she said calmly, "you might have been of some use. monty was pickled. he was just going to crash when i grabbed him." "is that true, pat?" she met his searching look with unwavering eyes, her nostrils wide with pride. "do you think i'm so afraid of you--or of anyone--that i'd lie about it?" to look at her and disbelieve was impossible. "besides," she added, her voice breaking a little in self-pity, "i told you i was through with that necking game." "how do you want me to apologise, little pat?" her unerring instinct for the charming, the compelling move inspired her. "i don't want you to apologise. i want you to dance with me." "any and all that you'll give me--and with all gratitude and contrition." "i'll filch out two; the fifteenth and the fifth extra. you must be watching. and--about supper--couldn't you?" "no. not possibly. how could i?" she smiled, ruefully yet with a shining quality in her disappointment. "of course you couldn't. it wouldn't be you if you did. i don't care--now." until the fifteenth number scott did not return to the ballroom but wandered outside in dreamy and restless expectation. what he expected, he could not have told. he was conscious chiefly of an enormous relief in the discovery that pat had not gone back on her good resolutions. but this was only part of what he felt. the callowest sophomore could hardly have found himself more eager or less certain of his ground, than did cary scott, man of ripened wisdom and wide experience of women though he was, as he entered to claim his appointment. "but i tell you, monty," pat was saying to a tall and particularly handsome youth who stood before her, programme in hand and a look of almost ludicrous disappointment on his face, "you've made a mistake. you've mixed your dates with cocktails." "i told you last night i'd stay off it," muttered the youth, "and i've done it. and now you're throwing me down." "oh, come around later," said pat carelessly. she slipped into scott's arms, whispering: "don't let _anyone_ cut in." after a few turns she continued: "do you know it's ever and ever so long since we've had a dance together." "it might be a thousand years in its effect on you. you were almost a little girl then and i--what was it you called me?--your wise and guiding friend." "aren't you that now? you must always be," she returned quickly. "and for me only. do you like cissie, mr. scott?" "immensely. she's charming." "better than me?" challenged pat. in the measure of the dance he caught her close to him for a moment and felt the little, excited access of laughter which ran through her body like a tearless sob. "what do you think?" he queried. her cheek fluttered against his. "then that's all right," she breathed. "you dear!" whispered scott. he felt himself losing his head; told himself that this was inexcusable foolishness, unfair, unworthy, sterile trifling with evil chance. yet he lacked the force to draw back. "would you mind very much," asked pat deprecatingly after a pause, "if i renigged on the fifth extra?" "indeed i should! unless"--he tried for a light tone--"there's some special reason for it, such as that you don't want to give it to me." "oh, i want to _terribly_. but i'm in such a mix-up and that dance would straighten me out ... i thought perhaps you'd wait and take me home. i'm going quite early; about three. will you?" "yes." "we'll walk through the lawns; it's only three minutes. watch out for my signal." she was giving him orders as one with a proprietary claim. scott thrilled to it. he would not let himself think to what it was leading. his mind was absorbed in the delight of her, that dark radiance of personality, the sweet compulsion of her charm. he would have waited all night, though a little time before he had thought himself beginning to be bored. it did not seem long when he saw her coming toward him, her wrap over her arm. "quick!" she directed. "or there'll be a howl about my leaving. i'm not even going to say good-night." then they were in the autumn-spiced darkness together, her arm linked in his. it seemed quite natural that her fingers should slip into and twine themselves about his palm. "isn't it a grand little world!" she chuckled softly. "i've had such fun to-night." "you're a wonderful little pat," he replied unsteadily. "d'you really think i'm wonderful? sometimes i think so myself. other times"--she hunched her shoulders in a gesture peculiar to her--"i think i'm just like everyone else." "like no one else in the world." "because no two people are alike, of course. i'd hate to be exactly somebody's twin.... you're that way, too. you don't remind me of anyone i've ever seen. most men do." they had come to a gate which resisted pat's attempt, being locked. "oh, very well!" she said, addressing it, "i'll just climb _you_." she attained the top, agile as a cat. but in getting down she tore her frock. "oh, hell!" she cried lamentably. "are you shocked, mr. scott? you don't like me to swear, do you?" "i like you to be your very self, pat." "it's easy to be that with you. you're an easy person to be with," she meditated. she stopped under the shelter of a small arbour spanning one of the sideyard paths of holiday knoll. clematis in full glory covered it. the faint, rich odour of its late blossoming, dewy and fresh and virginal as if the aging year, after all its fecund maternity of summer, had again put forth its claim to imperishable maidenhood in the blooms, enveloped them. she turned upon him the slant challenge of her eyes from beneath the clouding mass of hair. "do you truly like me," she wheedled, "better than cissie?" as if the words were torn from the depths of him and forced through his constricted throat, he answered: "i'm mad about you." "oh-h-h-h-h," she crooned, and there was both dismay and delight in the sound. "i didn't _want_ you to say that." "i didn't want to say it," he muttered. "i didn't mean to say it." he stared intently before him; his brain felt numb. there was an appalled sense of inner catastrophe, wholly unforeseen, inherent in the impossible situation. "oh, why did you have to go and say it?" she wailed in childish resentment. "it spoils everything." he made no reply. her intonation changed, became daring and seductive. "it's just a--a--sort of fatherly interest, isn't it?" "no." "now you're angry. but it ought to be." "do you want it to be?" "no, i want it to be--as it is. yet i don't." he gathered himself together. "i'm sorry, little pat. suppose we agree to forget it." "i won't," she mutinied. "i don't want to forget it." "i do," he said moodily. "then i won't let you." slowly she lifted her hands and held them out to him. the finger tips were icy cold to his clasp. he could hear her quick, unsteady breathing. "pat! little pat!" he whispered. a smile blossomed upon her curved mouth, tender, tremulous, persuasive. she swayed forward, lifting her face, half closing her eyes. with the gasp of a man whose last strength of restraint is shattered, he enfolded her, crushing his lips down upon hers. only the one long, slow kiss in the breathless silence, and all the world forgotten in its ecstasy. then pat pressed herself gently back from him, looked eagerly, curiously, triumphantly into his face, and stood clear. "my god, pat!" he groaned. "i didn't mean to do that." "i did," she said. from the roses drooping below her breast she detached a bud, crushed to a perfumed splotch of colour in the fierce pressure of their embrace, and held it out to him. "keepsake," she breathed. "it's red, red, red. it's the colour of life. my colour. pat's colour. good-night, mr. scott." "mister" scott! after that fusion of lips and longings. chapter xvii insistent jangling of the telephone woke scott next morning at the club. he was prepared for the rough sweetness of pat's voice in his ear. "is that you, mr. scott? aren't you up yet? lazy!" "good-morning, little pat. what time is it?" "i did wake you up, then. it's terribly early--for me. only nine. aren't you surprised to hear me?" "not a bit." "oh! you expected me to call up. boasting, aren't you? i didn't intend to call you." "but i intended to call you. what changed your mind?" "oh, i don't know," she said evasively. "i woke up early myself, and i suppose i felt lonely. when are you coming out?" "just as soon as i can get there." her soft, elfin chuckle was the reception which this announcement got. "quick, then! i want awfully to see you now. and i might change my mind later." throughout the hurried processes of dressing while he breakfasted, scott strove to quiet and command his thoughts, to find some clue to this tangle of passion wherein he had become ensnared. incredible that he should so have lost himself, after the warning of the earlier experience. she, too, had been carried beyond her depth by a feeling presumably uninterpretable to her inexperience; so he believed. true, she had been through sentimental encounters before, by her own admission, but he too fatuously assumed that these were of minor and transient import, that it had remained to him to awaken her. "boasting," pat would have said. she was awaiting him in the music room. "i thought you were _never_ coming," she sighed. "but the others aren't up yet." she half lifted her arms, expectant, enticing. "wait," said he. she gave him a quick glance, puzzled, apprehensive, a little angry. "you're going to scold me. it was all your fault." "absolutely. if there is anyone to be scolded it's i." "it _wasn't_," she declared with one of her vehement and point-blank reversals. "i did it." her face took on its most impish expression. "bad bunny! i don't care." "i care," he said evenly. "more than i could have believed it possible to care. i love you, pat." "oh, no!" she protested. "i didn't want you to say that." "what did you expect?" he demanded, taken aback. "did you want this to be just a cheap and easy little flirtation--a flutter, as you call it?" "no-o. i didn't want it to be that. i wanted you to--to like me. but why did you have to say _that_?" "as a justification. no, not quite that; nothing can justify me. but as an excuse, not for myself, but for you." "for me? i don't understand." "think, pat." his voice was very gentle. her dark, delicate brows drew down in concentration. "yes; i think i do see. you mean you would not have kissed me that way without--without thinking a lot of me." "i mean that i should not be here now if i were not deeply and wholly in love with you." "and you're telling me to keep me from feeling ashamed of myself." "yes. there is nothing shameful in my feeling for you, inexcusable as it is." "i think," she pronounced slowly, "you're _the_ most divine man i've ever met." "oh, no," he refuted bitterly. "just a weakling. but i give you my word, dear love, if i could have foreseen this i would have gone to the farthest corner of the earth rather than have it come about." she lifted startled and wondering eyes to his. "why?" "you know how things are with me, pat. you know i'm not free." a lively interest animated her expression. "oh, yes. though i've never thought of it much. tell me about your wife." he winced. "what is there to tell?" "tell me what she is like? is she dark or fair? are you very much in love with her?" "pat!" "well, you must have loved her or you wouldn't have married her, would you? doesn't she care for you?" "i will tell you this much," he said after a pause. "we are completely estranged. but as she is still my wife in name and likely to remain so, i cannot discuss her. not even with you." "oh, very well!" pat's familiar imp had taken possession of her face again. "it's none of my business, of course." "that is not quite fair of you, is it?" "of course it isn't." she caught his hand, pressed her cheek down into it, and was violently crushed into his arms, her mouth quivering beneath his kiss. "my god, how i love you!" he groaned. this time she accepted it. "do you?" she crooned. releasing herself she drew him over to the divan, where she snuggled close to him. "i believe you do. it seems so funny. but i don't see that it makes much difference, your being married." "this difference; that it's all wrong, and unfair to you, and only means suffering later on." "that isn't what i meant." with lowered face she plucked nervously at his coat sleeve. "i mean--suppose you were free; you wouldn't want to marry me, would you?" "good god, pat! i want it more than anything else in the world." "little me?" she crowed in delight. "that seems awfully funny. you're so--so different, and you know so much, and i don't know anything." she pondered the matter. "if i was ten years older, or you were ten years younger i think it would be _thrilling_! but of course there's nothing in that," she added briskly. "you're married and that's settled. am i acting like a rotter?" "i am," he answered hoarsely. "i'm sorry, little pat. i've been a beast. but i think i've got your point of view, now. it's rather a shock--but there won't be any more of that kind of love-making from me." like a little, lithe tigress she pounced upon him. "there will!" she panted rebelliously. "i want it to be so. i love to have you pet me." "and i haven't even the strength to resist that," he muttered. "i love you so." "then you must be very nice to me all the rest of the party, and i'll save out as many dances as i can for you, and you can take me home again to-night. couldn't you come back a little while this afternoon, late?" "i'd go anywhere in the world and give up anything in the world for a moment with you, pat." "then be here at five o'clock. all the others will be dressing or bathing or gabbling. we'll have the place to ourselves again. aren't i nice to you, mr. scott?" "how can you call me mister, after this?" "i don't know," she said pensively. "it seems more natural. but i suppose i _could_ call you cary. cissie did. i was furious at her." "no need. there's no room for anyone else in my heart or thought but you." "but you're going to run her over to philadelphia in your car." "am i? i hadn't heard about it." "aren't you? what a liar cissie is! then you're going to run me over when i go back to school. will you?" "of course. but what will the family think of all this?" "nothing. i'm only the infant to them. if they did think anything about it it wouldn't make any special difference. they'd think it was a lovely joke." "you mean even if they knew that i am in love with you?" she gave him a glowing glance. "they'd say, 'little pat's gone and snared herself a real live man.' you don't know this family." suddenly she drew away from him, jumped to her feet, and darted to the door, where she stood smiling and poised. "what's it all coming to, anyway?" she laughed. what, indeed? scott put the question to himself, but in no spirit of laughter. toward womankind cary scott had much of the continental attitude. since the separation from his wife and the freedom of action which it implied, he had played the game of passion, real or counterfeit, in sundry places and with sundry partners, always married women hitherto, and always within the code as he interpreted it. but there remained in him enough of the american to inhibit him from the thought of a purposeful siege upon a young, unmarried girl of a household wherein he was a professed friend. besides, he loved pat too well, he told himself, to harm her. it was incredible; it was shameful; it was damnable; but this child, this _petite gamine_, this reckless, careless, ignorant, swift-witted, unprincipled, selfish, vain, lovable, impetuous, bewildering, seductive, half-formed girl had taken his heart in her two strong, shapely woman-hands, and claimed it away from him--for what? a toy? a keepsake? a treasure? what future was there for this abrupt and blind encounter of his manhood and her womanhood? he could find no answer. but of one fact he was appallingly certain: that all the radiance, the glamour wherewith he had surrounded the figure of mona, all the desire which the soft loveliness, the reluctant half-yielding of constance had inspired in him, were merged and submerged in the passion that had swept him into pat's eager and clinging arms. to what bitter and perhaps absurd end? for he was bound, and she hardly more than a playful child. he recalled her strange look as she had left him. what might one read in it? a glow of possessiveness? a gleam of bright mockery? or the undecipherable sphinxhood of the woman triumphant who knows herself loved? chapter xviii with unwearying strategy pat made opportunities for being with scott thereafter. each time they were together alone she came to his arms as sweetly and naturally as if she claimed him of right; each time until the evening before the wedding when, as he drew her to him, she twitched away with a boyish, petulant jerk of the shoulders. "what is it, pat?" he queried. "nothing. i don't want you to pet me. that's all." he had the acumen to suspect that this might be a first crisis in their newly established relations, though he did not fathom her purpose. "very well," he assented quietly. "you are quite right, of course." this did not suit pat at all. from her youthful suitors she was accustomed to woeful protests. "am i?" she retorted perversely. "i'm _not_. there's nothing right about it." "no. but there is this. i shall never make any claim upon you except as you wish it." "well, i don't wish it. not now." a dart of lightning flashed through her clouded look. "i might to-morrow." his brows lifted, enquiringly. mockingly, too? pat wondered. you never could tell with mr. scott. what would he say? he said nothing. "d'you know what i mean?" demanded pat, who didn't clearly know herself. "perfectly." "what?" "coquetry. that's a form of dishonesty between us. and between us there is no reason nor place for anything but honesty." she came to him then, encircled him closely, drew her lips from his, after a time, to murmur: "you understand me so. when you say things like that i'm crazy about you." against his better judgment he said: "i wonder how much you really care for me, pat?" "oh, an awful lot! or i wouldn't be acting like this. but," she added with pensive frankness, "i've been just as crazy about other people before." "i see. it's the normal thing for you to feel this way toward someone." "oh, well; you expect to have somebody in love with you," she explained. "think how _lost_ you'd feel without it. and it's natural to play back, isn't it? now i've hurt you." she spoke the words with a kind of remorseful interest as an experimentalist might feel pity for the animal under his knife. "that doesn't matter. one gets used to being hurt." all woman, at this she tightened her embrace. "i don't _want_ you to be hurt. i _do_ love you. only with me it doesn't last. but there's never been anyone who _interested_ me as much as you do. i don't see what you find in me, though." "'said the rose to the bee.'" he forced himself to laugh as he gave the quotation. but within, the cold disillusionment of whatever blind hopes he may have felt, which had underlain his passion from the first, asserted itself. what constancy could he expect from this will-of-the-wisp girl? and what could a lasting attraction mean for her except such unhappiness as he knew himself fated to suffer? he took his resolution. whatever might come to him he must so command himself and his actions as to safeguard pat in every possible way. already, he knew, his intellectual influence over that unsated, groping, casual mind was strong enough to outlast any change in the more purely physical attraction which she felt for him. if he could find the strength to crush down his own passion, he might still mould her to make something of herself, direct her ardent temperament into channels through which she would eventually come to safe harbour. there lies in every man of strong mentality a trace of the pedagogue. scott had it. if he could not be pat's lover, he might find some self-sacrificing satisfaction in being her guide and mentor. that he was prepared for self-sacrifice was the best evidence in his own mind of the quality of his love for the girl. in his lesser affairs he had sought only self-satisfaction. "my dearest," he said, "i think we have come to a turning-point. we've got to stop this sort of thing." she cuddled closer to him in the remote darkness of the swing where they sat out two successive dances which she had contrived to save for him. "i don't want to!" she rebelled. "do you think i want to! but i'm thinking of the risk." "you said there wasn't any danger with you," she teased. "boasting, were you, when you claimed you had self-control enough for both of us." "i'm not thinking of that kind of danger." "what then? oh, of our being trapped! but there's only one more day after this," she pleaded, "and then i go back." "but you'll be coming home again before long." "by that time i may be crazy about someone else," was the calm reply. "which is pleasant for me to contemplate," he replied grimly. "it's a mess, isn't it? what d'you expect me to do? what do you _want_ me to do?" "if it's a question of the best thing for you," he said, speaking slowly and with effort, "that would be for you to fall in love genuinely with some man who would understand you and safeguard you----" "you _want_ me to marry? do you, cary?" "it will almost kill me," he said between his teeth. "but--it's the way, for you." "probably it is. i'll make a rotten wife," she said, as she had said to dr. osterhout. "you could make heaven or hell for a man. but marriage alone isn't going to be enough. there are other things." "you mean--children?" "that, too. but what i meant was some background for yourself. your music, or reading, or some interest to fall back on." "why?" "because you've got an eager and active mind, pat. a half-starved mind, if you only knew it. it's going to demand things when the novelty begins to wear off." "when i get tired of my husband?" "i hope you're going to marry a man of whom you won't tire," he said gravely. "but there's a certain monotony about marriage. many women tire of that. then is the danger time." "then i'll send for you." a devil sparkled in her eyes. "i wouldn't come." "not come! not when i needed you?" "from the ends of the earth if you needed me. but not for any caprice. i'd put you on honour there. happiness doesn't lie in that direction, little pat. what i want for you is happiness." she brooded upon this darkly. "i believe you do," she whispered after a time. "more than for yourself." "more than for myself," he repeated. "why not?" "don't make me cry," she said. "it tears me to pieces to cry. and then, i'm such a sight!" "nonsense!" he returned brusquely. "you're not going to. what is there to cry about? 'men have died,' you know, 'and worms have eaten them, but not for love.'" "what's that from?" she asked, seeking relief in the turn. "ibsen?" "not exactly," he smiled. "it was said as a reminder by a charming and rebellious pat of her time named rosalind." "oh, i know! 'as you like it.' aren't i clever! the rosalind reminds me of something. aunt linda's here. have you seen her?" "no. who is she?" "my very pettest aunt. she's an old peach. i'll take you to her if she's broken away from the bridge game. but first----" she lifted pleading and hungry eyes to him. "well, pat?" "our being so--so _dam'_ good and proper doesn't have to begin until i go, does it?" he swept her into his arms, held her close and long. "oh, pat! little wonderful pat," he breathed. "what am i ever to do without you?" "i don't want you to do without me," she murmured. "i want you to be always somewhere--somewhere where i can find you if---- be careful! here comes some butt-in." they returned to the dancing floor, where pat after a survey drew scott by the hand across the room to a group in a corner. "here she is," she announced. "that's aunt linda." before she could go further with this informal presentation a circle of importunate claimants had swept about her. "how do you do, mr. cary scott?" said the lady before whom he found himself standing. "mrs. parker!" he ejaculated. pat's description of "old peach" was decidedly overdrawn as to the adjective, though not as to the noun. aunt linda was a slim, twinkling, rose-complexioned woman of thirty-five, gowned in a work of art and characterised by a quality of worldliness which, like scott's own, was a degree above mere smartness. she carried with her a breath of the greater outer world. moreover she was, if not beautiful, extremely attractive to look at by virtue of a sort of eternal fitness. "you've forgotten me," she accused lightly. "or at least, my name. i'm miss fentriss." not a muscle of scott's face testified to his surprise at this unexpected denial of a perfectly remembered name. "so stupid of me," he confessed. "won't you try a round of this dance?" "no; i'm not dancing. but you may take me to some cooler spot, if you know of any." no sooner were they beyond earshot of the crowd than she said: "so you have not forgotten taormina." "i have forgotten whatever you wish me to forget." "always the perfection of tact," she mocked. "it would be more flattering that you should remember. though not too much." "a cliff of beaten gold overlooking a sea of shimmering silver, a waft of perfume on the air, the charm of beauty and mystery, both of which still endure after these seven years." "shall i dispel the mystery? i was mrs. parker then only because an independent-minded vagrant such as i am finds travel in europe more convenient under a married name than as a miss. so one does not take, but invents a husband. here and now i am ralph fentriss's half-sister and patricia fentriss's aunt." "something of an occupation in itself," he reflected aloud. "it is. what, if one may ask, are you doing in that gallery? pat curled herself on the foot of my bed this morning and discussed the universe for an hour. chiefly you." "vastly flattered! _et après?_" "afterward? that is for you to answer, isn't it? why are you laying siege to the child's mind?" "because i dislike waste. it is too keen a mind to be frittered away on nothings." "has pat been making love to you?" the question was put without the slightest alteration of the easy tone. "really, that's a question which----" "don't pretend to be shocked. women always do make love to you, don't they?" "you didn't," smilingly he reminded her, "at taormina. hence my blighted life." "no. i preferred to have you make love to me. you did it so expertly." "and wholly unsuccessfully." "what did you expect? a correct young married woman going on to meet her husband by the boat! would you have been so vehement if you had known me to be an unmarried girl?" "i haven't made it a practice to make love to unmarried girls." "why select pat, then?" she paused, giving him time to speculate upon what pat might or might not have unintentionally revealed to this shrewd observer. "i was twenty-eight then," she pursued, "and i found you a dangerous wooer, even though i knew it was not _pour le bon motif_. pat isn't nineteen yet." "mademoiselle has taken the ordering of this matter into her own hands?" he queried mildly. "_dieu m'en garde!_" she laughed. "it is as an old friend of yours that i speak." "then i am prepared for the worst," he sighed. "strike!" "still of a pretty wit." she spoke sharply, but her eyes were not without kindness for him. "danger, mr. cary scott! danger!" he did not pretend to misunderstand. "let me assure you that i am not wholly without principle, miss fentriss." "you? granted. but what of pat? has my scapegrace little witch of a niece any principles whatever? i doubt it." so, after all, he had misunderstood. "are you, then, warning me of danger to myself? _c'est à rire, n'est-ce pas?_" "it is not to laugh at all. i am serious. i have been watching you this evening when you were with pat and when you were only following her with your eyes. your expression is not always guarded, if one has learned to read the human face." he flushed. then there came upon him the reckless desire to ease his soul of the secret which filled it. she had invited it, and he instinctively knew that to this serene, poised, self-sufficing, sage woman of the world he could speak in the assurance of sympathy and without fear of incomprehension or betrayal. "it's true," he said beneath his breath. "i love her. i love her as i never dreamed it possible to love." "and you've told her so." he made no reply. "i know you have because i know pat. she's as greedy as she is shrewd; she'd know and she'd never be happy until she'd had it out of you. and then she'd be sorry and blame you for speaking." "yes. i've told her," he muttered. "inevitable that you should have. not that it makes any particular difference, but you're still married, aren't you?" "yes." "any prospects of change?" "prospects? no!" "ah, well; i haven't an idea that pat would marry you anyway. she appears to regard you as rather an elderly person, quite delightful to play with, but belonging to another world. her infatuation will probably die out." "give me credit for being decent enough to hope and know that it will." "yet there is no certainty about it. your appeal to her senses may be temporary, doubtless is. but you have taken hold upon her mind to a degree which she herself does not appreciate, and that is a more profound and lasting influence. i wonder if you did it deliberately." "no. yes. i don't know whether i did or not. it may have been at the back of my brain all the time." "that sounds more like pat's honesty than your own diplomatic way of looking at things. it would be quite incredible that she has exerted a counter-influence upon you." "why incredible, since i love her?" was the quiet reply. she gave him a swift, estimating glance before she went on: "i'm very fond of pat, mr. scott. most of my money will go to her eventually, unless i marry." "which is inevitable," he put in. "which is the most improbable thing in the world. and i want to see her happy. she has great possibilities of happiness, and great possibilities of tragedy. it is a tragic face, rather; have you noticed that?" "it is a face impossible to analyse." "true enough. it has the mysterious quality that quite outdoes beauty. men go mad over that type of face, though one doesn't find it in poetry or painting. i wonder why? is it because genius doesn't dare that far, because it is untransferable even for genius? perhaps it is genius in itself. didn't some poet say that beauty of a kind is genius?... what are you going to do with pat, mr. scott?" "nothing. what is there to do?" "_laissez faire?_ there's danger in letting things take their course too. there is danger everywhere in this sort of affair. let me interpret a little of pat's mind for you. she is a combination of instinctive shrewdness, ignorance, false standards and beliefs, and straight thinking. there's an innocence about her that is appalling, an innocence as regards life as it really is. one might say that her ideas of the more intimate phases of life are formed mainly from the trashy, sexy-sentimental plays and the more trashy motion pictures that she loves. she believes that sin is always punished in the direct and logical way. if she should surrender to a man she would expect first, to have a baby at once; second, that the man would naturally despise and abandon her; that's what the modern drama teaches, on the ground, one supposes, that it's an influence for safety. and perhaps," continued the analyst thoughtfully, "it is. though i'm rather for the truth myself. but there are other things taught in the same school that aren't so safe. did you happen to read a fool book called _the salamander_ some years ago?" "yes; but i didn't think it so bad." "because you're a man and don't understand what the effect of it has been. a salamander school of fiction and drama has grown out of it. the central idea is that if a girl is 'pure' she can get herself into any kind of situation, take any kind of chance with any kind of man, play the game of passion to the limit and yet come out unscathed; virtue its own safeguard, and that sort of thing. why i saw a play this winter which was written to prove that a girl of to-day could spend a night alone in a house with a man with whom she was in love without any thought of harm. yet the censors suppress honest portrayals of life as it really is. it's a great little world, cary scott, if your mind doesn't weaken. but i think mine _has_!" pat, passing by on the arm of a worshipping partner, stopped to give them a smile. "what are you talking about, you two?" "you've guessed it; about you," returned the young aunt. for a hidden moment pat's eyes met scott's and shot forth their ardent message before the sweeping lashes curled down. "leave me a few shreds," she called back gaily. "pat considers herself a miracle of astuteness and knowledge," pursued the aunt. "having been taught the gospel of lies and trash, she is sure of her own natural inviolability. if anything in the world ought to be banned from the access of pat and her kind, it is the salamander-story of the girl who always comes out right. it isn't true; it never will be true; it never has been true. women aren't that way." she let her pensive, grey gaze wander to the doorway wherein pat had vanished, then return to meet scott's. "i know," she said coolly. "i've tried." chapter xix slow and stately, the measure of the lohengrin wedding march pulsated through the church; much slower and statelier than herr wagner ever intended that it should be delivered, unforeseeing that his minute directions would be universally disregarded off the stage in order that the bride might make her progress up the aisle less like a human being with a happy goal in sight than like a rusty mechanism directed by a hidden and uncertain hand. even to that halting rhythm, however, mary delia fentriss, owner of her own name and her own maiden self for the last time, managed to walk like a proud and graceful young goddess to the accompaniment of something more than the usual hum of admiration and excitement. t. jameson james stood awaiting her, looking handsome, well-groomed, perfectly self-possessed, and even more self-satisfied. as dee turned she raised her head slightly and let one slow look range over the gathered congregation, a gesture inscrutable to many, though the more romantic among the women deemed it conventionally suitable, as a farewell glance proper to the drama of marrying and giving in marriage. but two men in that assemblage, both observers of humankind, both genuinely caring for dee in diverse ways, read that look and were secretly disturbed. the rector caught his cue and swung into his part with all the empressement due to a highly fashionable occasion, the ceremony proceeded, its gross symbolism of sex worship, broad paganism, and underlying acceptance of women's slavery as a divine system, thinly cloaked in the severe beauty of the words; and dee fentriss was mrs. t. jameson james. returned to her father's house for the post-ceremonial festivities, dee admitted pat to her room where the last packing was going on, and was caught in a swift, hard hug. "oh, dee! you looked lovely." "did i?" said the bride indifferently. "you surely did. where are you going on your trip?" "secret. washington first, if you want to know." pat lowered her voice though there was no one else in the room. "dee, aren't you scared?" "of course not. don't be an idiot!" "i'd be. no; i don't know as i would either, if i was crazy about the man." pat, thinking aloud, did not see her sister wince. "i'd be too curious about--about what came next. you'll tell me, won't you, dee? _everything?_" the bride laughed not over-mirthfully. "wait till you're older, infant. though i believe that's what they always say and i don't know why they should. had a good time?" "_the_ most priceless time!" "that's right. i wish i could always be at the top of the heap, as you are." "sometimes i'm at the bottom. i'll have a poisonous grouch after this." "will you? you're a queer kid. by the way, do you know that mark denby is quite nuts over you?" denby was best man, an attractive but not highly intelligent baltimorean. pat shrugged her shoulders affectedly to hide her satisfaction. "he's all right in his way." "be nice to him to-night, will you? you haven't shown him much." "low speed," remarked pat. "i wouldn't think cary scott was specially high speed, though he's a dear. you've been playing round with him quite a bit." "well, that can't hurt me, can it?" said pat, a little impatiently, as one suspicious of criticism. no such notion was in the mind of dee, who answered promptly: "no. best thing in the world for you, i'd say. but do give mark a run for his money this evening." "oh, very well! i don't have to marry the bird, do i?" dee laughed. "you might do worse. he's got lots of money and you could manage him like a lamb." "i don't want a lamb. i don't want anything yet but to have a good time." "shoot along and have it, then." thus it was that cary scott was mulcted of several expected dances with no other explanation than a whispered "i'll tell you why later," which, however, left him not ill-content. just before the bridal couple left he got his first private word with the busy maid-of-honour. they stood together on the tile of the loggia, now a bower of greenery and a narrow thoroughfare for the guests going outside to smoke. pat's first words were: "oh, cary; did you _see_ dee's face?" "yes." he did not need to ask her when. "what did it mean?" "i don't know. nothing probably." "you know it did!" her confidence in his understanding, her appeal to him in this, the most intimate of family matters, thrilled him with a new sense of their rapprochement, was stronger testimony to his claim upon her inner self than a thousand kisses. "you're fond of dee, aren't you?" she pursued. "i'd be fond of her anyway, aside from her being your sister and the person closest to you in the world. she is, isn't she?" "but she doesn't know as much about me as you do," murmured pat. "in some ways she does, though. after all, you're only a man.... but dee's a wonder, isn't she?" "she is a fine and high personality." the jealous coquette in pat asserted itself. "finer than i am?" "much." his answer was grave and sincere. pat made a little face at him. "i don't think it's nice of you to think anyone is nicer than i am." "i love you, pat." she quivered a little with delight of the words. "it would make no difference if another woman were as far above you in character as the stars are above the earth; it would still be you and no one else in the world for me. is it enough? or do you want rather to be flattered?" "no," she breathed softly. "i want you to--love me." there was the faint hesitancy over the committing word which she always evinced. "just your own way. but dee---- oh, bobs!" she exclaimed as the doctor entered the place. "come here." "hello, bambina. ah, cary." osterhout's face was moody. "what's on _your_ mind?" demanded pat. "you look grouchy as a bear." "nothing," he disclaimed. "did you notice dee, in church?" osterhout's heavy gaze lifted to study pat's face, then passed to that of scott. "did you see it, too?" he muttered. "bobs, _what_ was she looking for?" "what could she have been looking for?" he fenced. "it was so helpless, so hopeless," went on the girl; "and yet as if she had one hope left and weren't going to give up without--without looking." osterhout had his own private interpretation of that last, long quest of the bride's eyes before she turned them to her bridegroom, but he was not going to betray it. "all of us are a little high-strung," he opined. "imagining a vain thing. dee's all right." he passed on his way. as if by thought transference there flashed into scott's mind the strange passage between dee and the electrical repair man, his old acquaintance, stanley wollaston, at the famous dangerfield "swim _au naturel_," and the memory of her possessed, dream-haunted face. could t. jameson james ever evoke that yearning? scott knew that he could not, and a great pity for dee filled him. pat left him, not to return until the party was dispersed, all but a few heavy-drinking remnants who had stood by to help ralph fentriss finish up the punch. later pat and cary passed them on their way to the clematis arbour. the girl's face was sombre and thoughtful. "i wish she hadn't married him," she burst out. scott sought to reassure her. "it's all right, dearest. as osterhout said, we're all emotionally stirred up----" "i wish she hadn't," persisted the girl. "it must be terrible to go away--like that--with a man--when you don't love him!" "oh, nonsense!" he strove for a light tone. "she does love him. otherwise why on earth should she have married him?" pat's brows were knit, her gaze far away, fixed upon visions. "i wish it was us," she murmured. "you and i. going away. to-night. together." "my god! pat!" "i _do_. i wish there weren't any laws. i hate laws." the terrible, fiery desire seized him to claim her then and there, to bid her leave everything for love and go with him to the ends of the earth, to overwhelm her with the force of his desire; to make her believe that with him she would know a happiness greater, fuller, more real than anything in her petty and tinselled prospect of life; seized and scorched and convulsed him, until she felt, through the hand which she had let fall upon his arm, the tremors shake his strong frame; felt them and exulted, through her woman's dim alarms. "no!" he said hoarsely, in a voice which told how spent he was by the struggle against himself. "not that, pat. not for you. i'd give the soul out of my body to take you away with me. you know that, don't you?" "yes," she assented. she was daunted by the depths of passion which she had evoked. but only for the moment. the reaction brought back to her her hoydenish flippancy. "you don't for a minute think i'd go, do you? i was only wishing!" "for god's sake, don't wish!" "i _do_ wish there weren't any laws. there ought to be a world where we could go when we're tired of this one, where laws and rules and things don't count, and we could come back when--when things got too hectic there." "fools think there is, and go there. but they don't come back." "let's pretend that there is such a world," she besought childishly, "and that we can go there whenever we want to. there you could kiss me as much as you liked whether people were around or not.... there's nobody around right now in _this_ world, cary.... "i've got to go in," she sighed at last. "and i don't want to at all. tell me good-night." his last kiss was very tender, very gentle, long and almost passionless. "that's good-bye, my darling," he said. "i don't want it to be good-bye." she stretched out her arms to him. "oh, i do wish it was us!" he took her hands, pressed them to his hot eyes and released them. "good-night, pat. go in. please!" "i will," she acquiesced, obedient for once before the pain in his voice. "but you're driving me over to-morrow, aren't you?" "to-morrow is another day," he said. almost was pat convinced on the morning following that she had made a mistake in commandeering scott and his car for the trip. the train would have been far quicker and possibly more amusing. for scott was unaccountably silent all the early part of the drive. having arrayed herself with much selective thought for the occasion, and being conscious of her charm as set forth by a gown that clung to her budding form, and a tight little, bright little hat prisoning her dusky, mutinous hair, pat resented the lack of attention she was receiving and thought proper to "jolly" her companion into a more fitting frame of mind. she elicited little response in kind. "you're about as gay as a hearse this morning," she observed with annoyance as the car swung aside from the main highway to a more sparsely travelled back road. "this isn't anybody's funeral that i know. where are we going, anyway?" "by a route i like to take when i've plenty of time. we'll reach the maple swamp in time for luncheon, i've packed a hamper. i'm sorry if i'm dull, dear." "you're quiet. i don't know that you're dull, exactly. i don't quite see you ever being dull. but i don't want to be quiet to-day. it gives me too much time to think. and thinking's the very thing i want the least of right now. i just want to be happy--because i'm with you. there's nothing to be solemn about, is there?" "nothing!" he agreed. but though he talked with his usual charm thereafter, she was resentfully conscious of the effort it cost him. arrived at the luncheon place he ran the car up beside a stone wall enclosing a coppice which was all ablaze with the last, defiant splendour of the year. autumn was going down with all colours flying. pat snuffed the keen scented air with nostrils that quivered. "oof!" she cried. "i'm ravenous. what a spiffy luncheon! coffee? hold out your cup. when and where shall we lunch together next time, i wonder? isn't there an old song or something, 'when shall we two eat again?' oh, no; it's 'when shall we three meet again?' i'm glad there aren't three of us here; aren't you?" she chattered on. "you don't look glad about anything. what are you thinking about so hard?" "only that we aren't likely to see each other for some time." "some time?" her face showed alarm and suspicion. "you're not going to see me any more at all," she accused. "is that it?" he smiled wanly. "hardly as bad as that." "when, then?" "how can i tell? business----" "business!" she echoed scornfully. "you're going away--from me." "for a while." "why?" she demanded, "when i need you so much?" "no. you don't really need me." "when i want you, then?" she said imperiously. "isn't that just a little selfish of you?" "of course it is. have i ever pretended to be anything else? i always get what i want if i can, and i never give up anything i want without trying for it. why should i?" "an unanswerable proposition," he made reply, with his subtly ironic smile. "but the tide never runs all one way; i'm afraid that you've got some harsh disillusionments in prospect." "i don't care. if i have to pay, i'll pay." "it may hurt." "let it! i'm not afraid." "because you've never been hurt. if i were a praying man i'd pray that you never may be. but that's foolish of course. life will hurt you. it hurts all of us." "has it hurt you, cary?" "it is hurting me now--a little. not more than i deserve." "why do you deserve? you couldn't help liking"--he smiled--"being in love with me, could you?" "i could have helped making love to you." she had a superb gesture. "could you, though! when i wanted you to? what harm has it done?" "so long as it hasn't harmed you----" "it's helped me. that's why i can't bear to think of your going. i'm going to miss you so terribly!" there followed the little, slighting, boyish, devil-may-care hunch of the shoulders. "not for long, though. i never do. i go crazy over someone and think he's the whole thing and i can't see anything in the world without him, and then, pouf! it's all over." "so may it be with you now." "you _want_ it to be?" "i don't want you to have the pain of missing me as i shall miss you. but i'm afraid you're going to feel it more than you think." "boasting!" she retorted, but there was no conviction in the word. "no; i'm not boasting. but i've given you something, pat, that you haven't had from your minor flirtations. much that you won't readily forget. nor do i want you to forget it all. but--i want it to drop into the background for you." "background? i don't understand." "when the real man for you comes along into the foreground of your life----" "you want me to compare him with you?" she broke in quickly. "perhaps that wouldn't be quite fair to him. i've had more opportunities, more experience of the world than your younger lovers are likely to have had; you can't expect quite so much of youth in some ways. but before you commit yourself finally, suppose you ask yourself whether you care for the man more than you have at any time for me; if, in case you married him, you would miss out of your life together certain phases that we have known." "but of course i shall!" she cried. "what boy do i know that could understand me as you do?" upon the naïve egotism of this he made no comment. "i haven't made myself quite clear. before you decide, go back to our association, go back to all the associations you have had hitherto, and ask if the new one will take the place of all of them. if not--don't." "you're trying to keep me from marrying someone else because you can't have me, yourself," she accused. "do you think that of me, pat?" "oh, no; no! i don't. you know i don't. what makes me so hateful?" she threw herself upon him, pressed her face close to his, turned so that their lips met; then drew back with a questioning look in her eyes. "that was a _very_ white kiss," she murmured discontentedly. "you're so strange to-day." "there's more, pat. it isn't so easy to say." her intuition leapt to meet his thought. "it's about this." she touched her cheek to his again. "with other men. i won't, if you don't want me to." "i can't claim any promises from you. you wouldn't keep them anyway." "i _would_," was the instant and indignant response. "no; probably i wouldn't," she amended, her voice trailing off, "after you'd been away from me for a while. but what's the harm, cary?" "i've told you; it's dangerous." "and i've told you; it's not, for me. suppose i'm in love with the man. must i act like an icicle?" "ah, that is a different matter. if you're really in love." "but how am i to tell whether i am or not without letting him make love to me?" the naïve logic of it left scott without adequate answer. after all, these direct contacts were the very essence and experiment of mating, the empiric method which inexorable nature prescribes. had the modern flapper, with her daring contempt of what older generations considered the proprieties if not the normal decencies of social intercourse, only reverted to a simpler, more natural method? of course, carrying the scheme a little further, there were obvious arguments against it, arguments which he did not care to advance to pat. "only be certain," he said after a pause, "that it isn't merely a casual fascination." "you know i'm past being an easy necker," she replied with a touch of self-righteous reproach. "i know that you are of a sensuous temperament----" "oh, i hate that word!" "i didn't say 'sensual,' my dear. i said 'sensuous.' you are one of those fortunate people who are vividly alive to all impressions of the senses. but with you, the sensuous beauty of life is linked up with imagination. that is why physical attraction alone won't suffice for you in the long run; sooner or later your mind is going to awaken and demand the things of the mind." the morbid look of introspection darkened down over her face. "you talk as if i had a mind. i'm an awful fool. you make me forget it when i'm with you----" "because it isn't true. you're a woefully uneducated, untrained, undisciplined child. but you have the hunger of the mind, the discontent. just now your senses are hungry" (she winced and flushed) "and so you don't feel the deeper hunger. you will in time. it is for that time that i am anxious. the time of the second dreaming." "tell me," she begged. "the first dreaming for you," he prophesied, "will be passionate and romantic. you may be carried away by mere physical beauty or superficial charm. i have known women of your type marry their chauffeurs or elope with gypsy fiddlers." pat gave a tiny snort of disdain. "probably you are fastidious enough to escape that extreme. but unless the man you choose can satisfy what is deepest in you, you will awake from that first dreaming to an empty world. and afterward, unless you have found something to satisfy your craving mind, will come the danger and the seductiveness of the second dreaming." "will you come back then?" she challenged. "i shall be a middle-aged man then; though i suppose you regard me as that now." he forced a wry smile. "no; i shall never come back, in the way that you mean." "i'll make you," she laughed. "unless you've stopped caring." "i shall never stop caring." "if i get engaged shall i bring him to you? and if you say not, i won't marry him." scott's face contracted. "no; my dear. i don't think i could quite endure being put in that position." "i don't suppose i'll _ever_ understand about you," she sighed. "we ought to be going on, oughtn't we?" she looked at him expectantly, but he only set about packing the things into the hamper. it was her turn to be thoughtful and silent when they re-embarked in the car. as they neared the city, she said suddenly, "come to the parmenters' this evening." "i think not, pat." "your voice sounds hard as iron. why not?" "i don't think it's wise." she affected not to understand him. "they'll all be out. cissie told me so." "we said our good-byes last night. i don't think i could stand it again." a long silence followed. "i wish i'd never teased you," said the girl. "i wish there was nothing between us that i had to be sorry for--things that i've done to hurt you, i mean." "they are nothing, compared to the sweetness and magic of it," he said. "don't let yourself think of what doesn't matter." "yes; that's like you." she went on with down-drawn brows and face darkened in thought: "whatever happens don't ever think that this hasn't been the best thing i've ever known in my life. when i've been crazy over men before i've never had a thought for anyone but myself.... i wish there was something, anything that i could do for you, dear," she concluded with passionate wistfulness. "there is. be yourself; the real self that you are now." "i'll try. oh, i will try! but it's so hard with you gone." at the door of the parmenter house she did not raise her eyes to his, but her strong young hand clung within his fingers in a fluttering clasp. "good-bye, cary, _dear_." "god keep you, my darling." she had to grope her way in past the astonished maid who opened the door. chapter xx "wisdom may be where you are, dear and lost one." so wrote robert osterhout, seated in mona fentriss's sun-impregnated room, which seemed still to be fragrant of her personality. "certainly it is not here. all of us had the sorriest misgivings over dee's marriage, and behold, it has turned out better than most matrimonial arrangements of this ill-assorted world. they have been married for nearly six months and all goes as smooth as machinery. one could not say that dee is rapturous; but she is not a rapturous person. she seems to run evenly in double harness with james and makes an admirable mistress for his establishment. i wish i could really like james. if he makes dee happy i shall have to like him. but he is so infernally self-content. and equally content with dee, evidently considering her a part and portion of himself. absorptive--that is what jameson james is. "i should have been equally skeptical of pat's management of holiday knoll. another instance of the fallibility of human judgments, for she runs the place excellently, as even ralph, who prophesied a hurrah's nest from which he would have to take refuge at the club, now admits. i dare say the bills are something to shudder at. "connie also has a new occupation: another baby coming. at first she was querulous; now she is quite taken up with the idea. and the extraordinary pat has seized upon this to bring connie and fred together again. fred is cutting down on the bottle and showing interest in business. connie has quit her nonsense with emslie selfridge; it was only a make-shift, stop-gap sort of flirtation, anyway; the marriage may yet be a success. if it is, credit to pat. but imagine the bambina becoming the managing director of the family, the schemer for happiness, the adjuster of difficulties. she bosses ralph within an inch of his life. all of this does not seem to interfere with her raids upon the male portion of the community, who clutter up the place largely. "cary scott has quit us. why, i do not know. can it be that he was seriously interested in dee? there is no doubt of her strong liking for him, but i would have sworn that it was quite unsentimental. possibly his feeling was deeper; the abrupt cure of his infatuation for connie has never been clear to me. in any case, i miss him. he has brains and charm and, i think, character. atmosphere, too, which the men of our lot lack. i've had a letter or two from him from california. through a friend who lives in paris i have heard about his marriage, too. his wife is of the leech type, a handsome, heartless, useless, shrewd beast who hates him because he revolted against her taking everything and giving nothing, and who will never, out of sheer spite, give him his divorce. they say he has amused himself widely; yet he retains a reputation for decency even in the more rigid circles of the foreign community there. "that queer little mystery of pat's mind-reading of which i wrote you, remains unsolved. i have tried to catch her napping on it; made careless mention of having talked with her before about marrying a man of thirty. but she is not to be trapped; maintains an obstinate reserve. it is too much for me. she is developing fast, but into what i cannot say. conscious, conquering womanhood, i should say; yet she is still so much the simple, willful child with it all. what i fear for her is the difficulty of adjustment to life when she meets with the severer problems. she is so uneven. too much background and no foreground; the background of tradition, habit, breeding, _les convenances_ (which she recklessly overrides yet always with a sense of what they imply), the divine right of being what she is, a fentriss, and the lack of what should fill in, training, achievement, discipline, purpose, any real underlying interest in life. cary scott was, i believe, giving her something along that line; the more reason for regretting his defection.... pat declares that she will keep a vacant place for him at the family dinner party which she is projecting for next week." the dinner party was designed by pat, to convince the fentrisses, one and all, of her competence to run the house. "mid-victorian stuff," fred browning called it, but he announced himself as for it, as did also dee james, while her husband was graciously acquiescent. ralph fentriss was humorously obedient to any whim of his youngest daughter's, while connie was delighted with the idea. osterhout was of course included, as was linda fentriss, bird of passage between winter sports in the adirondacks and a yachting trip in florida waters. the gastronomic part of the dinner was a marked success, aided by a contribution of three bottles of champagne from the private and dwindling cellar of the head of the family. he summed up the verdict after his second glass in a toast proposed and responded to by himself: "we fentrisses! we're a damned sight better company for ourselves than most of the people we associate with." to which satisfying sentiment there was emphatic response, participated in by robert osterhout. it struck him, however, that if there were any exception on this occasion, it was the second daughter, who alternated between long silences and fits of febrile gaiety quite unlike her usual insouciant good humour. he thought that he caught a look of relief on her face when the men retired to the loggia with their cigars, since the new household tyrant had ruled against anything but cigarettes in the other parts of the house. the women took possession of the library and pat established herself beside dee, who sat on the lounge near the half-open door leading into the loggia. "who's the angel-faced athlete i saw you skating with last saturday, mary delia fentriss james?" was pat's opening remark. "saturday? where were you?" "on the bank in my runabout. you were some conspicuous pair! he's as good as you are, almost." "were we so good?" said dee, coolly. "meaning that you don't choose to tell." "wrong guess. his name is wollaston." "not in my social register." "a few people manage to exist without being." "don't be catty, pettah!" "don't be an imbecile, baba!" "all right. i'm off'n him as a subject for airy persiflage. but i will say that he's a wonderful looking bird--for a skating instructor." dee laughed. "you didn't expect to get a rise out of me that way, did you?" but there was a harsh quality in her mirth which made pat thoughtful. "when are you going south?" she asked. "i don't want to go till the first. t. jameson wants to go next week. we'll probably go next week." "like that!" commented pat. "but why be bitter about a jaunt to the sunny? i wish it was me.... give ear: what's old bobs growling about?" the heavy voice of dr. osterhout penetrated to them. "all very well for the club. but i wouldn't have the swine in my house." to which ralph fentriss's musical and tolerant tones replied: "oh, you can't judge a man solely on the basis of his business, can you, now?" "if his business is that of a panderer, i can." "rough talk," murmured pat to dee. "who's the accused?" "because peter waddington's newspaper," put in browning, "has violated some technical rule of the medical profession----" "technical nothing! it isn't technicality. it's ordinary law and order and decency. look at that column. abortionists, every one of 'em." "oh, myo-my!" whispered pat, vastly enjoying this. "they're waxing wroth." "a very useful contribution to the social system," said jameson james in his precise enunciation, with a lift obviously intended to be humorous. "i always understood that those fellows didn't deliver the goods," remarked fred browning carelessly. "whether they do or not," retorted osterhout, "has nothing to do with the question. that thing"--he snapped his finger against the offending print--"is an invitation to commit murder. but aside from that feature, if you men think that sort of stuff is decent to have lying around a house where there is a young girl----" "oh, pat would never think of looking at it," said her father easily. "if she did she wouldn't know what it meant. it's veiled." "i wouldn't be too sure of that," remarked browning. "pat's a wise kid. not much gets past her, nor any of the girls of her age for that matter." "you make me sick, all of you," vociferated osterhout. "you wouldn't talk about these things before young girls, yet you'd admit the stuff in this form. i'll see that this specimen doesn't befoul anyone's eyes." there was the rustle of a newspaper being violently crumpled. "where's the damned waste-basket?" "chuck it in the wood-box and forget it. have a drink," advised browning. her quick and prurient curiosity stimulated, pat made instant resolution to retrieve that newspaper and see for herself later how they did these things. presently the men came in and joined the group in the library. pat sang for them to her father's accompaniment, also to his delighted surprise, for, with his natural taste he appreciated the genuine quality of the voice. then there was poker, family limit, meaning fifty cents. at midnight dee called for a round of roodles, declaring that she was tired out. she had previously announced her intention of spending the night at the knoll, as james was taking an early morning train to attend a sale at which he expected to pick up some polo ponies. pat, going upstairs last, as befitted the châtelaine, heard dee moving about in the bathroom, and went to her own room to wait. when all was quiet she slipped on a dressing gown and tiptoed downstairs to rifle the wood-box of its denounced print. there was a single light on in the loggia. astonished, pat crept to a viewpoint and peeped in. dee, with an intent and haunted face, was smoothing out the newspaper upon her knee. chapter xxi before she was fully awake next morning pat had come to a daring resolution. to prepare her way she got up, went to the loggia, and looked in the wood-box. no newspaper was there. the maids had not yet made their rounds; therefore dee must have taken it up with her. dee did not appear at breakfast, but at ten o'clock she came down. her face was weary and apathetic; her lithe body seemed to have lost something of its poise. sorely compassionate and thrilling to the sense of secret and adventurous matters pat seized upon the first chance of speaking to her alone. "dee, did you take a newspaper from the wood-box?" dee's expression was inscrutable. "yes." "the one bobs was grouching about? i wanted to see it." "you!" the exclamation was pregnant with astonishment and dismay. it crystallised pat's suspicion as to dee's motive in taking the paper. the older woman rose slowly, walked across the room and stared down into the thoughtful face of the younger. "what do you want that for?" "just cussed curiosity." "bobs is a nut," said dee listlessly. "there's nothing in that paper. i tore it up." "dee, are you _that_ way?" "none of your business." "con told me when she was." "con's a cow." "she's tickled pink. i should think you'd be." "oh, would you!" dee's self-control broke. her face worked spasmodically. "i'd kill myself first." the badinage faded from pat's lips. "that doesn't sound like you, dee. i'd think you'd be a sport about it anyway." "pat, i can't have a baby." "rats! you're as strong as an ox." "it isn't that. i'm not afraid that way." "what else is there to be afraid of?" "it isn't fear. it's--it's disgust." "disgust?" pat stared. "i don't get you." "pat, listen to me," burst out the sister, her hands twitching, one over the other in a nervous spasm. "whatever you do, when the time comes however much it may seem the thing to do at the time, don't, don't, _don't_ marry a man you aren't in love with. it's a thing to make you sick of yourself every day of your life." "dee!" "it is. i'll never talk to you like this again. but i tell you now; do anything, take any chance but that." pat's voice was hushed as she asked: "do you hate jimmie-james so much?" "not as much as i hate myself. but i've got cause against him. he hasn't kept to his bargain. he hasn't been on the level." pat's eyes widened. "you'll never make me believe that the correct and careful t. jameson has been straying off the reservation." "i wish to god he would! it isn't that. it's worse--for me. i oughtn't to be spilling this to you, pat." "oh, go ahead! get it off your chest." "i married jim under a private agreement. we were to live together for a month, and after that if either of us wanted to quit we were to just say so and stop being husband and wife without any legal separation or any fuss of that sort. the house is big enough for two separate lives." "no house is," denied the sapient pat. "i don't know much about marriage, but i know that much. it's a fool arrangement." "i thought it would be a clever sort of trial marriage. trial marriage"--dee gave a short and bitter laugh--"doesn't work out so well after the ceremony. if a girl is going to experiment, she might better make her experiments before---- oh, damn it, pat! i don't mean it. i think i've gone crazy mooning over this thing." "what was wrong? wouldn't jimmie keep to his part of the agreement?" "no." "bum sport," pronounced pat. "and he knew you wanted to quit?" "yes." "why?" dee's body writhed under its loose covering. "i can't explain." "has it got something to do with--with the other man?" "what other man?" it was not like direct dee to fence, pat reflected. she persisted: "the one you told me about." "i never told you about any man." "oh, _well_! you talked about that thrill stuff----" "don't!" gasped dee. "i'm sorry," said pat in swift contrition. "is it as bad as that? then i suppose it is the angel-face on skates." the hard lines melted out of dee's face. "yes," she whispered. she seemed to find relief in the admission. pat took her courage in her hands. "dee, is it his baby?" "if it were, i'd want to have it," was the low, vehement response. "i'd be proud to have it." for the moment pat was awed. passion she understood well enough; but not in this degree. she gathered her forces again. "is it jimmie's, then?" "yes; it's jim's." "you say that," marvelled pat, "as if you were ashamed of it." "i am. god knows i am!" she bowed her proudly set head in her hands and rocked it to and fro. "pat, there's nothing so rotten and shameful in the world as marrying a man you don't love." "you didn't have to," said pat, gaping. "what did you do it for?" "the usual thing: convenience. and because i was afraid of making a fool of myself by--with someone else. it couldn't come to anything, the other thing. so i got reckless and took jim. it wasn't a fool that i made of myself; it was something worse. shall i tell you?" "no. don't think it. you did the right thing." "of course! as we figure it out. and i've paid for it. but i won't pay for it this way. i won't! i won't!" "i would," said pat slowly. "if i went into it i'd go through with it. you've got to be fair to jimmie. does he know?" the smile called forth by the query disfigured dee's mouth. "no. and he never will know, what's more." "you're going to get out of it? you're going to one of those people in the newspaper?" "yes." "isn't it terribly dangerous?" "what do i care if it is?" "dee, why don't you go to bobs?" "bobs?" she hesitated. "i couldn't go to bobs. he wouldn't help me out anyway. doctors aren't allowed to." "he'd do anything in the world for you, dee." "if he would, that's all the more reason why i couldn't go to him with this," muttered dee obscurely. pat had an inspiration. "i could. i'll tell him. i'll tell him the whole thing. except about angel-face, of course. i'll tell him he's just _got_ to get you out of it. let me, dee." "oh, go ahead! i don't care. i don't care about anything. i wish i were dead." "don't be an ass. we'll fix it." pat was exuberant with the sense of great and delicate affairs in her hands. "i'll go right now and tackle him. if he sends for you will you come?" "yes," agreed dee listlessly. "you're a good little sport, pat," she added. the response was curt and unexpected: "are you?" "for not going through with it, you mean?" "yes. on jimmie's account. it's as much his as yours." "_is_ it!" bitter laughter followed. "he's no right to it. he's no right to _me_." "why didn't you quit him, then? i would have. in a minute." "i couldn't. you don't know." "you could have come home. of course there'd have been a stink-up, but----" "i wouldn't have cared. i'd have done anything to get away from him. but he found out--about stanley." "stanley? oh, angel-face! dee, _had_ you?" "no; _no_! there was never any question of that between us," she said moodily. "i did meet him, though. it was accidental at first, for i never meant to see him again after i married jim. after that we met once in a while, for walks and in places like the skating rink. that was all there was to it, but jim found it out and used it to blackmail me and hold me to the marriage. white slave stuff, on the respectable side! but bobs won't do anything," she added dully. "you'll see." pat caught her in a sudden, reassuring hug. "leave it to me," was her commonplace but confident rejoinder to this baring of a woman's self-wrought and therefore doubly grim tragedy. having carefully rehearsed her form of attack upon the family physician pat went to his bungalow. "why the face so solemn, infant?" he greeted her. "i've got something serious to say to you, bobs." "what devilment have you been up to now?" "it isn't me," returned pat, with her usual superiority to the laws of grammar. "it's dee." "hello!" his expression changed. "anything wrong?" "yes. she's going to have a baby." "dee," he murmured, "a mother." he lost himself in musing, seeming to forget pat's presence. "but she doesn't _want_ to be a mother." "eh?" osterhout quite jumped, startled by the emphasis which pat gave to the assertion. "oh! that's unimportant. they often don't in the early stages." "dee never will. never! _never!_" the physician smiled tolerantly. "and you've got to help her out of it." "i?" the scandalised amazement in his expression tempted pat to mirth, but she restrained herself. "help her out! in what way, may i ask?" "you needn't may-i-ask in that hateful tone. you know perfectly well. doctors do those things, don't they?" "oh, certainly! by all means. it's the backbone and mainstay of the profession." "now you're being sarcastic. and it's terribly serious." "you go back to dee and tell her not to be a damned fool. she ought to be ashamed of herself for sending you on such an errand. i don't understand it in dee." "liar yourself, bobs. she didn't send me. i came. and"--a little breathlessly--"if you don't do it for her somebody else will." "somebody else? who?" "i don't know yet. one of these people in here." she produced the newspaper page which she had extracted from dee. osterhout swore vividly and voluminously. "just what i said! leaving such filth about where girls can pick it up." he rose, shuffled over to pat, took her chin between finger and thumb and peered down into her limpid, troubled eyes. "what's behind all this foolishness?" came the stern question. "oh, bobs! be good and help us. she can't have the baby. truly she can't. i mustn't tell you why, but you'd say so, too, if you knew." his face darkened. "what's this? isn't it james's child?" pat was virtuously indignant, notwithstanding that she had put a like query herself a few moments earlier. "of course it is!" "then it's probably the very best thing that could happen to her." "won't you believe me, bobs," pat implored, "when i tell you----" "i'm going to put you out of this house in a minute if you don't stop talking such trash." "you won't help her?" "not by so much as stirring a finger." then pat, offering up a silent prayer to the genius of histrionics, played her trump card. "will you help--me, then?" her eyes were cast down; that was in the rôle she had assumed; but she heard his pipe clatter to the floor, felt the insistence of his stare fixed upon her. "_bambina!_" it was long since he had called her by the old pet-name of her childhood. the realisation of what the reversion implied almost broke down her resolution. but he instantly recovered his self-command; was wholly the physician. "tell me about it," he said gently. "what is there to tell more?" she threw out her arms in what she deemed the proper gesture. "are you sure?" "yes. or i'd never have come to you." "who is the man?" pat shook her head. she had not invented the man even in her own mind. "tell me, pat." her lips set firm indicating (as she had seen determination "registered" on the screen) that rather would she die than betray her lover. "the damned scoundrel has got to marry you." "he can't." "why? is he married?" her head inclined slowly. she was quite pale with emotion now, living into her part thoroughly. "then i'll drive the dirty whelp out of town. pat, you're not going to leave this room until you tell me." "real old mellerdrammer stuff," thought pat. sadly she said: "what's the use, bobs? i'll never tell. he'd marry me if he could. oh, you needn't go guessing," she added hastily. "you've never seen or heard of him. word of honour." he went over to the window and stood, staring out into the soft, grey drizzle of an early thaw. when he turned to her his face was set in a still resolution. "pat, you're absolutely certain that he can't marry you?" "absolutely," returned pat, with the conviction of truth. "then, will you marry me?" "bobs!" she started to her feet, astounded, incredulous. "you're joking." "i'm in dead earnest." the irrepressible coquette within her seized upon and dominated her. "do you mean to say that you're in _love_ with _me_? with little pat?" she crowed. "no." "oh!" the coquette retired, discomfited. "i'm offering you a marriage of safety; a marriage of form, only. i should never make any claim on you." "i couldn't," she gasped, still in the grip of utter amazement. "do you see any other way out?" he asked with grim patience. "but why should you do it?" "why shouldn't i? i'd do it for your mother's sake if for no other reason. it isn't as if i had anything else to do with my life. you needn't be afraid of my ever bothering you; and when the time comes, we can get a quiet divorce." pat fell back into her chair, her brain still whirling. "no. no. no. no. no! never in this world! i couldn't even think of it." "if the idea of me as a pretended husband is so repulsive----" "it isn't. i think you're _divine_. i _adore_ you. not that way, though. and i couldn't mess things up that way for both of us. i'd kill myself, first." she was winning back, though badly jarred, into the drama of it again. "bobs, you will help me through. the--the other way." "what! a criminal operation? why, i couldn't if i were willing. i'm no obstetrician!" pat had the grace to turn red. "no. not you, of course. but if you'd just send me somewhere--to one of the men in the paper----" "that would be just as bad." "then you'd rather stand by and see me ruined and disgraced," she cried hotly. with a swift change to beseeching softness she murmured, "mona would tell you to help me if she were here." again osterhout turned to look out into the colorless tumult of the storm: "you're wrong, pat. she wouldn't. she'd know me better." "then what am i going to do?" he prowled up and down the room like an anxious bear. "i don't know. we'll have to get you away somewhere. oh, bambina! how could you be such an infernal little fool? why didn't i look after you better?" "poor old bobs!" said she softly. "how could you know anything about it?" "one thing you absolutely must not do," he pursued vigorously, "is to go to any of those scoundrelly quacks in the paper." "it's easy enough to tell me what _not_ to do." "you've got to go through with it. i'll make the arrangements when the time comes. just try not to worry any more than you can help." pat nodded her assent and farewell. but inwardly her mood was anything but acquiescent. if bobs, her trusted stand-by of so many years, wouldn't help, well--outside in the drizzle she drew out the newspaper and scanned the second legend in the discreet looking column. it gave an obscure address in newark and was signed "dr. jelleco." chapter xxii what work osterhout was able to do in the two days following pat's revelation was mainly mechanical. neither his mind nor his real interest were enlisted. pat's supposed situation absorbed both. there were so many phases to that problem! if only mona were alive. that thought came to him with more poignancy than for a long time past. he would have taken pat's secret to her at once, without hesitancy. could he take it to any other member of the family? certainly not ralph fentriss. nor the helpless constance. dee? he shrank from that idea with an invincible reluctance. life, he more than suspected, was not treating dee over-tenderly. he took his perplexities out into the bluster and whirl of a wild afternoon, and came back weary and a little quieted to find the subject of them stretched out on his divan, fast asleep. her face, he observed pitifully, showed not only exhaustion but a deeper strain. he touched her limp hand and spoke her name softly. at once she sprang half erect, like a startled animal. "oh, bobs! it's you. i'm so glad you've come. i'm afraid, bobs." "no, dear; you mustn't let yourself be," he soothed her. "there's nothing----" "you don't understand. and i've got to tell you. that's what i'm scared about." "haven't you told me the whole thing, bambina?" "no. i'll--i'll tell you on the way over to dee's." "to dee's?" "yes. dee's ill. you must come at once." he caught up his hat and gloves; his overcoat he had not taken off. "what is it?" "bobs, it's--it's _that_." "that? what? can't you speak out?" out in the air she took a deep breath. "it wasn't me at all that was in trouble," she announced desperately. "not you?" stupefaction was in his voice. gathering wrath superseded it as he demanded, "is this some kind of an infernal joke?" "no. it was dee all the time. as i told you at first." "then why in the name----" "you wouldn't help her because she's married. so i thought you might help me, if you thought it was me, because i wasn't." "an admirable little game. but i'm still not sure that i quite get the point of it." his voice was so ugly that pat's shook as she said: "the point was to get you to tell me, if you wouldn't help me yourself, about one of those men in the newspaper----" "dee went to one of them?" he broke in. she looked up at him piteously, pleadingly. "bobs, it was _terrible_. he was so--so ghastly business-like." "what did you expect?" he returned grimly. "and now she's ill?" "yes." "fever?" "i--i think so." with a barked-out oath he increased his pace. pat, striding fast to keep up said: "bobs, dear; dee doesn't know about it." "about what?" "about my pretending that i was the one. it was my own notion." "then you will tell her," he ordained with chill command, "as soon as she is well enough to hear it. if she gets well enough," he added. "if? bobs! you don't think there's any real danger----" "of course there is danger. what do you think fever means in such a case? you take things into your own hands, perpetrate a piece of criminal folly----" "bobs! i couldn't have stopped her." "you could have told me the truth and let me handle the situation. she would never have dared if she knew that i knew. now, if dee dies----" "don't, bobs!" "it will be your lie that killed her." for once the reckless soul of pat shrunk back upon itself in awed remorse. "you've never spoken to me that way in your life," she whimpered. "i've never felt toward you before as i feel now." "i'm sorry, bobs. but i had to do it. i'd do it again to save dee." "save her? aid her in a cowardly shirking of her first duty as a woman and a wife. it is bad enough to find you lying to me. but to find her a coward and a slacker----" "you're more angry at her than you are at me, aren't you?" said pat, in wonder and some resentment. she did not like to have anyone else put before her even for indignation. he made no reply, but turned in at the gateway to the james ground. as they passed under the portico she stole a glance at his face. it had, by the magic of his will, become calm, cheerful, self-possessed, exorcised of all wrath and dismay, the face of the confident, confidence-inspiring physician going on his duty of aid. pat marvelled and admired. for her it was a long and thought-haunted half hour before he emerged from dee's room. "is it bad?" she whispered, striving to read his expression. "no. a slight nervous shock. nothing more." "oh, bobs! i could cry with thankfulness." "save your tears," he advised, "for those on whom they might make an impression." "you don't like me much, do you?" she sighed. "did you tell dee about my trick?" "haven't i made it clear that you are to make that explanation?" "what if i don't choose to?" "i think you will. whether you like it or not." pat said with slow malice: "shall i tell her that you asked me to marry you?" "why not?" "oh, _very_ well!" she could think of nothing more effective to say. he took his coat and hat from the chair upon which he had tossed them. "bobs." he turned at the door, eyeing her with an uncompromising regard. "don't look at me in that poisonous way. say you're sorry, or i'm sorry, or something." he did not move but seemed to be considering. when he spoke his voice shook her with its gravity: "it is not going to be easy to forgive you, pat." "how about dee?" she shot at him. "that is between dee and myself. she at least did not lie to me." pat flamed with a sense of unmerited injuries. "oh, you go to hell!" she muttered. but her eyes were wondering and frightened after he left her. dee's voice calling gave her something else to think about. she ran upstairs. "what were you and bobs quarrelling about?" demanded the patient. "nothing." "you were. was it about me? is he very bitter against me?" "i'll tell you to-morrow. you must go to sleep now." "there's something back of this." dee jumped from her bed and set her back to the door. "you won't leave this room till you tell me." "get back into bed," implored the alarmed pat. "i'll tell you. truly i will." "tell, then." pat related the tale of the stratagem with increasing relish in the unfolding of the drama. "pretty clever of little pat, what?" "i'm sorry you had to lie to bobs, though." "i've kept the best of it. when i told him, bobs asked me to marry him." "asked _you_?" "yes. isn't that a scream!" between nervousness and exaltation of her diplomatic powers pat burst into laughter. "and you laugh?" the mirth died on her lips. "don't you think it's fun----" "you--dirty--little--beast." "what did i do?" faltered the younger sister. "why pick on me? i did it all for you anyway, and i think it's pretty rotten, if you ask me, to----" "you didn't laugh at bobs for me." "i didn't laugh at him at all. i was too paralysed." "if you had i hope he'd have killed you. i would." a monstrous conjecture rose in pat's excited brain. "he isn't the man, is he? it isn't bobs that you're crazy about, and the other man just a bluff? it _couldn't_ be." "why couldn't it?" "dee! it _isn't_." "no; it isn't. but there's no reason why it couldn't be with any woman who had heart and sense enough to know him for what he is. he's the best and finest person i've ever known. and when he does the biggest and noblest thing a man could do and offers his name and honour to shield a little heartless fool, he gets laughed at." "but it wasn't any of it true," cried pat feebly. "don't you see what a difference that makes?" "no. he thought it was true." "oh, very _well_! i guess i'm pretty rotten. but i'm just as fond of bobs as you are, dee fentriss. only, the idea of marrying him--well, it's a scream. that's all; a simple scream." "oh, do get out of here," said dee wearily. she slumped down into her bed and drew the covers up. "good-_night_," said pat, and made her exit. before the hall mirror she paused to contemplate herself. "there you are, pattie-pat," she remarked, with the little triple jerk of the head that set her shaggy locks rippling over her ears and neck. "you still look pretty good to me. but if this family was running a popularity contest with peanuts for ballots, you wouldn't get one shuck. lord-ee! i wish cary scott was here for just one minute! i need moral support." chapter xxiii spring was turbulent in the sap of young trees and the blood of young humans when mary delia james rolled along fifth avenue in the quietly elegant limousine provided for her special use by a correctly generous husband. nothing about her suggested participation in the turbulence of the season. rather, life with that most unvernal young man, t. jameson james, would have served to allay any tendencies toward ebullience which she might otherwise have exhibited. she gave the impression of a cool impassivity. the car had just turned into a side street when her languid expression livened. she signalled to her chauffeur, leaned out of the window and called: "cary! cary scott!" the object of the summons turned in mid-crossing and came back, his eyes shining with pleasure. "dee! it is good to see you again. how's james?" "all right, thank you. what do you mean by turning up and not letting us know?" "unexpected," he explained. "i hardly had time to find it out before i was here." "the telegraph, that useful invention, is still operating. get in; we're blocking traffic. you're dining and spending the night with us, of course." "if i stay over," he answered dubiously. "i don't know yet. tell me about the family." "as usual. we're all flourishing in true fentriss style." "pat? and mr. fentriss? and the brownings?" "separated. no; i don't mean fred and con," she amended, laughing at the dismay in his face. "dad and the brownings. fred's sticking to business _and_ to con; they've got a cottage over beyond the club; addition in june, not to the cottage, to the family. pat's running holiday knoll like a veteran, though just now she's in boston. she'll be sunk in desolation when she finds you've been here and she's missed you." "perhaps i'll be back again when she returns," he said carelessly, but his words belied his inward resolution so to arrange his schedule that he would run no risk of the peace-destroying encounter. as a minor determination, he decided to accept dee's invitation for the night, since it involved no danger of seeing pat. "yes; pat's quite doing her job," continued dee. "it's good for her to have the responsibility. but she's still a queer, restless, morbid kid. you saw a lot of her at one time, cary. i always thought you had a steadying influence on her. what's the matter with pat, do you think?" "the fever of the age, perhaps." "oh, we've all got that. but pat's temperature is particularly high. she rushes from one whirl to another, playing billy-old-hell with mark denby one week, and emslie selfridge another, and selden thorpe, a third, and what does she get out of it? not even excitement, or else she's a little liar. she's beaten it now because she says she's bored to suicide with this place." "and you yourself, dee? how is it with you?" "oh, i've everything i want," she said restlessly. "everything should include happiness; i'm glad." "what's that? don't know--yeh." her voice was hard. "please stop looking at me like a solemn owl, as if you were probing for symptoms. bobs does all that i need in that line." "osterhout? how is he?" "go and see him. he needs stirring up. you _are_ coming to us to-night, aren't you?" "only too charmed. what's this place?" he asked, as the car drew to the curb. "my tailor's. will you wait for me?" "heavens, no!" he laughed. "i'm nearly forty now. can't spare the time." "then account for yourself before you go. what brings you here so suddenly and without any announcement?" "a peculiar mission." "private, for a guess. not hooked, are you, cary?" "nothing of that nature. it's private, but not secret, from you. in fact, you may be able to help me." "i? in what possible way?" "i want to find stanley wollaston." at the name a slow colour rose in dee's cheeks until it tinged even the broadly and beautifully modelled forehead. "he's gone away. to richmond. i can give you his address." "good! i've some important news for him. there's no reason why you shouldn't know it. his aunt in england has died and left him the estate. stan's lean days are over." the rich hue ebbed out of dee's face. "he'll go back, then," she mused. at once she recovered herself. "i _am_ glad," she said. "i knew you would be," he answered. but he thought with pity: "she still loves him"; and, with uneasiness, "and still sees him." he continued: "he'll be going back within a month at the latest. i'll go on to-morrow to find him." he got out, bared his head, and helped her to alight. "at seven o'clock then," she said. "shall i get some people in? who do you want to see?" "no one else in the world," he answered with such conviction that she smiled up at him. "you _are_ a dear, cary. i can't tell you how much we've missed you. pat almost went into mourning." she did not see his expression change, ever so slightly, as he turned away. business of his own kept scott busy most of the afternoon. when he reached the club he found jameson james waiting to motor him out. james was amiable in his stiff and carefully measured way. scott went to his room immediately upon their arrival, bathed, dressed, drank the preliminary cocktail which dee had mixed with her own hands and sent up to him, and had started to go downstairs when he stopped, his breath piling up, as it were, in his throat from an emotion half dismay, half rapture. the unforgettable, luscious huskiness of a voice floated up from below. "dee; where are you? _do_ come and hook this last hook for me. i can't get the dam' thing to stay." he took a step forward. pat looked up. "oh, _mist_-er scott!" she crowed. "it's too flawless to see you again. i thought you were _never_ coming back." chapter xxiv he walked back with her to holiday knoll after dinner. pat's face was thoughtful, moody. as they paced in silence he studied it intently, with passionate longings, with passionate misgivings. out of a reverie she spoke. "i've never missed anyone in my life as i've missed you. you were right." "about what, pat?" "that day you took me to philadelphia. you said i'd miss you more than i thought. d'you remember, i told you then what i thought about it. 'oh, well, i'll miss him for a few days and then--pouf!'" there followed the impatient, boyish wriggle and hunch of the lithe shoulders. "'it'll be all over.' it wasn't all over." "for me it has never been over. not for a single minute." "have you wanted me so much?" beneath the conscious coquetry there was a more wistful note. "oh, god, pat!" his voice sounded thick and rough. "there has been no colour or savour, no music or fragrance in life without you." "why did you go away?" she demanded accusingly. "you know, i had to go." "why did you come back?" "not to see you. i didn't want to see you. dee told me that you were away." "she told me you were here. i'd phoned over about some clothes. so i just thought i'd like to see you again. don't scowl at me. you look as if you think i ought not to have come." "no; you oughtn't." "are you sorry i did?" he looked away from her into the wind-swept night. "are you angry because i did?" "i love you," he burst out. "god, how i love you!" she laughed softly. her hand slid down his arm, clasped for a moment the wrist in which his pulses leapt madly to her touch, wreathed itself, cool and strong and smooth, around his palm. "and i love you," she half-whispered gaily. "i'm terribly in love with you"--a pause of deliberate intent--"to-night. because you've been away from me so long." "ah, yes, to-night!" he made no effort to keep the bitterness out of his voice. "but, to-morrow----" "to-night's to-night," she broke in happily. "we've got lots of it to ourselves. it's only nine o'clock. i broke away early on purpose." arrested by the look on his face, she added with exasperation and protest: "cary! you're not going to play propriety to-night? when we haven't seen each other for so long?" she shook the gleamy mist of her hair about her face, gave a gnomish bend and twist to body and neck and peered sidelong at him from out the tangle. suddenly her face darted upward. her mouth met his in a grotesque parody of a passion-laden kiss. "oh, bad bunny!" she admonished herself in mock reproach. he stopped, gazing at her from beneath bent brows. "you hated that, didn't you?" she said. "yes." "because it wasn't real?" "because it was mockery." "_petite gamine_ stuff. but i'm not _petite gamine_ to-night; i'm something else. i don't know what i am. do you?" "no." "don't be cross with me. whatever it is that i am, it's sorry that it kissed you that way. i didn't mean to make a josh of it." he smiled. "one might as well try to be cross with a moonbeam." they had come around by the side street, and now he held the garden gate back for her. the house was dim. pat kissed her hand to the clematis arbour. "d'you remember?" she murmured. "is there one moment ever spent with you that i've forgotten?" "would you like to forget?" "there are times when i would give anything in the world to forget." "but i don't _want_ you to forget." "you want me to have to bear this always?" "no. i don't want you to be unhappy about it. i want--i don't know what i do want. except now. now i want to have this evening just to ourselves." she opened a side door, spoke to a servant, moving about in the kitchen. "it's all right, katie." then to scott: "aren't you coming in?" he hesitated, but when she added impatiently, "oh, don't be such a crab!" he followed her. "go into the small conservatory," she bade him. "that's _my_ work. i've fussed it up into a sort of den." she bounded upstairs and ran into her room, shook out her hair, gathered it, studied herself in the glass. her eyes were brilliant, heavy-lidded, dreamy. she shook herself impatiently; her strong, supervitalised young body felt cramped and pent in the close-fitting tailor-made which she had on. she plucked at the buttons with hurried fingers, wriggled out of the garment which she kicked from her feet and left lying on the floor, tossed her corsets after it, and exhaled a long, luxurious "ooo-oo-oofff!" of satisfaction and voluptuous relief. opening the door of her clothes-press, she rummaged for a moment and pulled out a long, sweeping robe, which she drew about her, moulding it to the boyish set of her shoulders and the woman's depth and contour of her bosom. she caught up a cigarette, lighted a match, then, lapsing into thought, let it droop from her fingers until the scorching brought an angry "damn!" of pain. she threw the cigarette after the expiring match. no; she wouldn't smoke, much as her tense nerves demanded it. she would keep her mouth fresh and sweet for cary's first kiss. she ran down to him, putting on the far light in the hallway, so that only a dim glow invaded the conservatory-den. scott stood at the window in an attitude of attention. "what are you doing?" she asked. "listening." "music! a violin. oh, i know. it's a visitor at the eastmans', next door. he's good. and how _flawless_ of him to be playing just now. open the window. let's hear it all." he obeyed. she drew in to him. her ready fingers sought his palm. "want me to mix you a drink?" "no, dear." "that's better," she approved. "though," she added, with her old air of _gaminerie_, "it might go further and not get a call-down. what is it he's playing?" "'the Élégie.'" the violin was sobbing, panting, pleading like a woman in sweet distress. the wind swept the notes to them until the whole room was surcharged with the passion and grief of it. pat lifted scott's hand, cuddled it to her cheek, flipped it away carelessly, turned from him, drifted out of the den into the hallway, back again, and to the divan in the far corner, where she threw herself, snuggling amidst the pillows. her eyes grew heavy, languorous; in their depths played a shadowed gleam like the far reflection of flame in the heart of sombre waters. the long, thrilling, haunted, wind-borne prayer of the violin penetrated to the innermost fibre of her, mingling there with the passionate sense of his nearness, swaying her to undefined and flashing languors, to unthinkable urgencies. "oh, cary!" she breathed, in the breaking seduction of her voice, a voice that blended and was one with the resistless pleading of the music. and again: "oh, cary!" her arms yearned out to him, drawing him through the dimness. with a cry he leapt to her, clasped her, felt her young strength and lissome grace yield to his enfoldment. through her sundered lips he drew the wine of her breath deep, deep into his veins, until all his self was merged and lost in her passion. outside the great wind possessed the world, full of the turbulence, the fever, the unassuaged desire of spring, the _allegro furioso_ of the elements, and through it pierced the unbearable sweetness of the stringed melody. the strain died. was it after a minute, or an hour, or a night that was an age in their intertwined lives? he was back at the window, leaning against the casement, drawing the rushing wind into his lungs, his heart bursting, his soul a whirl of fire. behind him, in the gloom, sounded the shaken softness of her breathing. he bent his head upon his arms. "oh, god!" he said. "pat. little pat!" she came to him then, spread her gracious arms wide, flung the gleaming fog of her hair to the wind, enclasped him, claimed his soul with her lips. "i'm _not_ sorry," she panted. "i'm not! i'm not! i'm _glad_!" chapter xxv nothing irked pat more than being awakened too early. consequently katie's knock upon her door, at the third discreet repetition, elicited a plaintive growl of protest. "oh, _go_ away!" "special delivery letter for you, miss pat." "shove it under the door and don't bother me." she flumped over in bed, burrowing her face among the pillows like an annoyed baby. very much did pat wish to sleep. until long after midnight she had lain awake, thinking excitedly. to be roused out of the profound oblivion which she had finally achieved, thus untimely, was a little too much. but that letter got between her and her rest. from cary scott, of course. she visualised the oblong blue stamp, insistent, intrusive, "immediate." oh, _well_! up she jumped, caught the envelope from the floor, and dived back into bed to read it. it was mainly repetition of what he had said last night when they parted: nothing but the absolute necessity of going would have taken him away from her at such a time; he would be back in a few days at the latest; she must wait until then; must not let herself worry, must not make herself unhappy, must trust in him. it ended, "i love you, pat." through the quiet directness of the wording pat felt the stress of an overwhelming emotion. it was not so much worry or unhappiness that filled pat's thoughts as a confused and colourful bewilderment, a sense of unreality. there intervened a reflection from her mis-education through the media of flash fiction and the conventional false moralizings of the screen. in a variety of presentations they all taught the same lesson, that when girls "went wrong" they invariably "got into trouble." she passed her hands down along her slender, boyish body and experienced a sharp qualm of fear and disgust and anger, a visualisation of gross and sodden changes in those slim contours. it couldn't happen to _her_. in spite of the movies, other girls "took a chance" and "got away with it." ada clare, for instance, according to common gossip; nothing had happened to her. cissie parmenter had lightly hinted at "experiences." pat thought it would be exciting to tell cissie. but would it be safe? she would like to have cissie's reassurance that everything would be all right. but why should she need reassurance? she steadied herself with the thought, entertained wholly without idea of blasphemy or irreverence, that god wouldn't let anything like that come about, the god to whom she had paid such assiduous homage by going regularly to church and asking every night for what she specially wanted on the morrow or in the further future. it was her naïve idea of an unwritten pact with the deity that the performance of her little ritual, be it never so self-seeking, entitled her, of right, to definite rewards and exemptions, claimable as required. this was one of them. surely he would keep to his part of the bargain. otherwise, what good would religion be to anyone? it occurred to her uncomfortably that he had somewhere said, "the wages of sin is death," which she secretly deemed bad grammar even if it was in the bible. but pat did not really feel that this was sin; rather it was accident. technically it might be sin; she admitted so much. but if it were really sin she would, as a sound christian, feel remorse. and she did not feel remorse. therefore it could not in any serious sense be sin. irrefutable logic! what did she feel? she asked herself. a sense of the fullness of life, of adventure boldly dared. she had met one of the great crises of a woman's life, _the_ crisis, indeed. it must be so, since all the stories and movies and plays agreed on the point. the singular aspect of it was that she was conscious of no inner change. she was the same pat fentriss, only a day older than yesterday. being a "woman," if this was it, was not so different from being a "girl." and mr. scott. according to the conventions, as she had absorbed them through the sensationalised and distorted lens to which her intellectual vision had become habituated, the lover should lose all "respect" for the unfortunate girl, this being the first symptom of the waning of his love. well, it wasn't working that way with _her_ lover. the few, broken words of parting last night, the still passion of his letter, told a different story. possibly, reflected pat, the people who set forth what purported to be life, on screen, stage, and the printed page, didn't know so much about it after all. or possibly she and cary scott were different from other people. she felt convinced that she was. from this she fell to speculating upon scott's probable attitude toward the ingenious and comforting theory of conduct and responsibility which she just had formulated specially to fit the present crisis. somehow it did not seem quite satisfactory in the illumination of his imagined view. she had thought of him always and rather mournfully as a non-religious if not actually irreligious man; but it was disturbingly cast up from the depths of her mind that if cary scott had a god, he would never try either to make cheap excuses to nor shift responsibility upon him. and suddenly in that light her exculpatory arguments seemed shallow and paltering. this uncomfortable consideration she thrust determinedly into the background, and concentrated her thought upon her next meeting with scott. all things considered, she was not, on the whole, sorry that he had gone away, assuming, of course, that he came back very soon. it gave her time to think, to figure things out free from the immediate glamour of his presence and the disturbing gladness of his return after the long disseverance. did she really love him? she supposed she must; otherwise---- yet there was still strong within her the impulse toward the companionship of youth which had inspired her petulant remonstrance to dr. bobs over his opinion as to the desirable age for her husband: "i don't want to marry my _grandfather_!" would she marry cary scott if he were free? even now she doubted it. not at once, anyway. she wanted her own freedom for a time yet, freedom to enjoy life, to range, to pick and choose. but she had made her choice. tradition would hold that she had taken an irrevocable step, committed herself. tradition be damned! she didn't believe it. would cary take that view? if, on his return, he should assume the proprietary attitude, evince a sense of possessiveness--pat clenched her fists but at once softened with the recollection of his sure comprehension, his unerring tact, his instinctive sense of her deeper emotions and reactions. so far as the immediate future went, he was not free to marry her, nor likely to be. that problem need not be faced now. suppose later she fell in love and wanted to marry someone else; what would be her course then? oh, _well_! let that take care of itself when it came. meantime she had something more immediate to look forward to in cary's return. she anticipated it with a mingling of trepidation, eagerness, warmth, and excited curiosity, the latter element being predominant. on the following morning she had another letter, and still a third on the day after. she quite gloried in his devotion. but she did not answer the letters. she rather wanted to but found a difficulty in beginning. she preferred to plan out what she should say to him when they met again, and was in the act of building up a quite thrilling and eloquent statement of her feelings when the phone summoned her. "pat?" it was dee's voice, queer and strained. "can you come over at once?" "yes. what's happened?" "jim has been hurt." "jim? how?" "hit by a car." "oh, dee! is it bad?" "yes. i think so. they're bringing him here." "i'll be right over." pat made a dash for her runabout. when she reached the james house there were two cars in the driveway, dr. osterhout's and a large touring car strange to her. there was blood on the steps which pat mounted. "is he killed?" she asked, chokingly, of a maid who was hurrying through the hall. "no'm," said the girl. "i don't think so." then added in awe-stricken tones: "he was swearin' somethin' awful when they brung him in. the poo-er man!" pat followed her to the front room. dr. osterhout's head was thrust out, at her knock. "what can i do, bobs?" she asked. he nodded, approving the steadiness of her voice and control. "locate a trained nurse and bring her here." "i'll have one in half an hour. how is he?" "bad." within the time prescribed pat was back with the nurse. she found dee in the library waiting. the young wife's face was sallow, her eyes wide and shining and fixed. "oh, dee! don't!" begged pat. "you look so afraid." "i am afraid," was the monotoned reply. "is he going to die?" "i don't know. that's what i'm afraid of. i'm afraid he isn't." "_dee!_" "i know, i know how it sounds. i don't care. when the word first came they said he was killed. i was glad." pat stared at her aghast. "why should i lie and pretend?" whispered the wife fiercely. "why shouldn't i want to be free of him? you know how it is between us. i'm a marriage-slave to a man who has no thought of anything but himself." she gulped and writhed in an access of strong physical nausea. pat's strong hands fell upon her wrists. "stop, dee! you mustn't let yourself go that way. tell me how it happened." "i don't know anything about it. the marburys' car struck him, down near the station." "poor jimmie!" "poor jimmie? poor me! shall i tell you what happened last week?" "no. not now, dee. you're----" "i'm all right, i tell you. and i'm going to tell you. we fought it out to a finish. he wants to have children. _children_, after the agreement he broke! well, i couldn't tell him the whole reason why i wouldn't; but i told him this, and it's true, too, as far as it goes. i said to him: 'jim, if you'd ever had one single thought for anybody in your life but yourself i might feel different. but if there's anything in heredity i'd as soon hand down idiocy to a child as your strain. now, if you want a separation, get it.' what do you think he said? 'oh, no, my dear. that's heroics. i'm just about the same as other men. you don't get off so easily. as for selfishness, you didn't marry me in any spirit of altruism.'" "he had you there, dee." "yes; he had me there. then he said, 'i'm going to hold you until you make good or break away yourself.'" "'then i'll break,' i said. 'i'll leave you.' he only smiled. 'you won't find it too easy,' he said. i could have killed him." "are you really going to leave him?" asked pat, wide-eyed. "i was. now"--she jerked her hand upward--"how can i? what kind of a brute would i look?" "perhaps he will die. poor jimmie!" "if you say 'poor jimmie' once again i'll scream at the top of my voice." a man in chauffeur's livery came down the stairs. he looked beseechingly at dee. "i couldn't help it, mrs. james," he gulped. "i never seen him until he grabbed the kid an' then i couldn't turn." "what kid?" asked pat. "didn't you hear how it happened?" "no. tell us." "i was comin' down the road by the turn above the bridge when a little girl run out from the curb. mr. james must have been right behind her. i honked and the kid stopped dead. i give the wheel a twist and the kid jumped right under the fender. i knew there wasn't no chance, but i jerked her again and felt her hit somethin' hard, and the kid yelled once, and there was mr. james under the wheels. he'd seen the little girl and he made a dive for her and shoved her out from under just as i--i got him. it was the nerviest thing"--the man's rough voice broke. "he must-a knowed he didn't have a chance. a--a--man's thinkin' little of himself to do that for a dago kid he never seen before." dee was leaning forward with fixed stare and twitching lips which barely formed the words: "did jim do that?" "yes'm. he sure did. he'd oughta get the carnegie medal for it." "and the little girl?" said pat, thrilled. "he saved her?" the man shook a doleful head. "he shoved her out from under my wheels and she rolled right into a truck passin' the other way." "killed?" he nodded, speechlessly. dee burst into laughter. she laughed and laughed and laughed. chapter xxvi never in all her career of coquetry had pat devoted more careful planning than to her meeting with cary scott when he should return. at first sight of him all her elaborate campaign was dissipated in consternation. "_mist_-er scott!" she cried. he had come out from the city direct to holiday knoll and was standing in the library, as she came downstairs to meet him, the morning light brilliant on his haggard face. at her exclamation a wry smile twisted his lips. "still that, to you?" he asked. she moved toward him slowly, a little shyly, with fluttering hands outstretched, lips upturned, rather from the wish to comfort his manifest suffering than from any impulse of passion within herself. he drew her into his arms, bent over her, kissed her gently. she felt him tremble in her clasp. "what is it, cary?" she whispered. "you look _too_ appalling." "i haven't slept very well." she drew back to survey him. "i don't believe you've slept at all," she pronounced. "have you?" "it doesn't matter." "it does! you mustn't take it that way." his expression told her that her coolness amazed him. and, then, suddenly, by reflex from him, it amazed herself. it was so exactly the reverse of the programmed course of events as presented in the familiar media of her reading. she, the woman, the "betrayed," was striving to comfort and reassure him, the man, the "betrayer." "did you expect that i should take it lightly, pat?" "no, but----" "i love you," he said. no more than that, hardly above his breath. but it was as if he had pronounced the final word of passion, of yearning, of devotion; his full confession of the bond which is at once primal and eternal between man and woman. she dropped her head. the thick clusters of her hair rippled forward, almost concealing the eyes which she lifted, aslant, alight, mischievous, yet craving, to his. "do you?" she whispered. "do you truly?" she nestled again, close in his embrace. "and you, pat?" he asked. "i don't know," she answered, troubled. "i've hardly been able to think--since. i suppose i must; but----" "we have a great deal to say to each other," he began gravely, when she broke in: "i've had so much else to think about. have you heard about poor dee?" "dee? no. what is it?" "it isn't exactly dee. it's jimmie. he was run over by a car three days ago." "not killed!" "almost. it's his back. bobs says they can save him but it would be kinder to let him die. he'll never be anything but a helpless log." "good heavens! poor dee! i must go over there." "we'll go over together. i'll tell you as we go." she ran to get her hat, returned at once, setting it in place on her mutinous hair, stood studying him for a moment through half-closed eyes, then leapt to him, flung her arms about his body, pressed her cheek to his, murmuring, "it's _too_ flawless to have you back, cary!" outside, she said, "dee was going to leave him." "no! for what earthly reason?" "i can't tell you. yes, i can. i can tell you anything--now." she flushed, but looked at him unflinchingly. "it's strange, isn't it?" "it's unutterably sweet," he said. "it's the companionship that is deeper and more lasting than any other association." "but there's always been that between us," she mused. "only, it's different now. i don't quite understand; there's so much i don't understand, cary, dear. but i know that i want to tell you. i don't believe dee would mind." she repeated dee's bitter protest over james's breach of faith, her refusal to accept maternity, her recent resolution to quit her husband at whatever cost of scandal. "and now she can't," she concluded. "you mean that she won't." "yes. dee's a good sport. she'll stick to a man when he's down. the worst of it is, she told him why she wouldn't have a baby of his; because he was just a bunch of pure selfishness. and then he goes and pulls a real hero stunt and deliberately throws his life away for a dago brat--and doesn't save the darn thing, anyway," concluded pat, her lips quivering. "where does that leave dee?" "was it what dee said that drove him to do it?" "no. it was too quick for that. he did it instinctively. it must have been in him all the while to do the big, self-sacrificing thing when it was put up to him. like the men on the _titanic_ that everybody thought were wasters. that's what makes it so rotten for dee. she thinks she's misjudged him all the time. i believe she'd give her life now to have a child for him." "well?" queried scott. pat shook a mournful head. "no, never. not a chance. haven't i told you? he'll live in a plaster cast the rest of his life if he does live. i wouldn't!... i've had a hell of a time with dee, cary." "poor darling! do you think dee will want to see me?" "yes. i'm sure she will. perhaps not to-day." "has this really turned her to james again, pat?" "has it made her really love him, you mean? how could she? women aren't that way. but all she can think of now is her remorse." he paced along beside her in deep thought for a time before he said: "was there any other reason for her leaving him?" "the other man?" she gave him a quick look. "i suppose that had something to do with it. cary, was it a rotten trick for dee to marry jimmie?" "i'm afraid it was, rather. poor child! she's paying for it." "do women always pay for it?" "no. sometimes the men do." "you know dee's man, don't you?" "yes." "do you know where he is now?" "not at this moment. but i know he is intending to come back here in a few days." "to see dee?" "i'm afraid so." "he mustn't." "no; he mustn't." "can't you stop him?" "if i can reach him." "cary, you _must_ stop him." "is she still in love with him?" "terribly." "i'll do my best." at the james house they found dr. osterhout. pat went up to dee after bidding cary come to the knoll directly after dinner. going out with the physician he asked how serious james's case really was. "as serious as it could possibly be," was the grim reply. "he'll live." "then pat was right. he'll never be any better?" "not much. a paralytic. with a good deal of suffering." "can't you help him die?" muttered scott. the medical man turned an uncompromising look upon the other. "when i acquire the wisdom of deity, then i'll assume the prerogatives of deity. not before." "it's a merciless attitude. in a case like this----" "in a case like this," the physician cut him short, "the man's life may be valuable to others if not to himself. and suppose after i'd killed him, as you so casually suggest"--the other's gesture of protest did not serve to stop him--"and some new operation was discovered that would restore this kind of case; where should i stand with myself?" "is that likely?" "it's most unlikely. but it's possible. in any case, we doctors do not kill." "you don't give a thought to dee." a ripple of pain twisted the harsh features. "i'm trying not to. my business is with my patient." "does he know?" "yes. he wormed the truth out of me. he wants dee to get a separation." "a separation? i don't understand. what is his idea?" "to relieve her from being tied to a corpse, as he says. he's taken to thinking of others besides himself at this late date, has t. jameson james. a close look at death sometimes works these miracles." "trying to make his peace with heaven?" "no. he's honest in this, just as he has always been in his selfishness. he's thinking only of dee." "does he really care for her, osterhout?" "i think he'd die without her." "isn't there a good chance of his dying anyway?" "nothing to bank on." "what does dee say to the separation idea?" "won't listen. just turns away and stops her ears." more than ever convinced that wollaston must be kept away from dorrisdale at all costs, scott put in the hours between his talk with osterhout and his appointment with pat, striving to locate the englishman on the long-distance telephone, but without success. upon his arrival at the knoll, scott found only ralph fentriss in possession. "pat is just starting back from dee's," said the ostensible head of the fentriss household, after a hearty greeting. "she telephoned. pretty rough on dee, this, isn't it?" "she's standing up under it like the sport she is," said scott. they chatted of local matters, fentriss being patently restless. at the sound of pat's step on the threshold he said with relief: "you'll excuse me, cary. i've got a business engagement downtown." the visitor repressed a smile. so ralph fentriss's evening "business engagements" remained a constant quantity. a casual sort of father. had he been less casual, had pat been less unprotected--a throb of remorse and self-contempt sickened scott to the core of his heart. how could he have let himself be so swept away!... pat stood before him in the doorway, and at once his bitter self-accusation sank into nothingness before the delight of her victorious charm. how could he have helped being carried away, loving her as he did! she tossed her hat on the table, her gloves at him and herself into the arm chair. "now we can talk," said she. "_you_ begin." at their morning meeting it had seemed to him that the indeterminate and hovering tragedy of the james household had aged and sobered pat, given more of the womanly to her elfin fascination. now she seemed again all _gamine_, provocative, elusive, challenging. he stood looking down at her gravely. "owl-face!" she mocked, protruding the tip of a red tongue. "pat, will you marry me?" the smile died from her eyes and lips. "how could we? you're married." "i'll get free." "how can you?" "i'd rather not tell you." "you've got to tell me," she retorted imperiously. "yes," he admitted. "i've got to, if you insist. you've the right to know." she softened. "have i? tell me, then." "i have--evidence." he spoke with an effort. "against your wife?" "yes." "why haven't you used it before?" "i haven't wanted to. and--i considered that it would not be entirely honourable." "if it wasn't honourable before, how is it now?" demanded the keen pat. "i don't know that it is," he muttered. "but there's another question of honour now, a paramount question, between you and me." "tell me why it wouldn't be honourable to use your evidence," persisted pat, ignoring the other issue. "you're making it very hard. it's true that she--my wife--has been unfaithful. but that was after we had been long separated in everything but the formalities, and morally i was in no position to blame her." "you'd been untrue to her?" "yes." "with another woman. were you _very_ much in love with her, cary, the other woman?" she asked wistfully. for a moment he hesitated, too long a moment, for a flash of hateful intuition shot through pat's quick brain. "there was _more_ than one. there may have been a dozen. oh, i think you're _revolting_!" "i'm not going to lie to you, pat. i regarded myself as free of all responsibility to her----" "you're free of all responsibility to me," she choked. "don't think that i want----" "no. i am bound to you by the strongest tie i have ever known. i love you." "you've loved a hundred other women," charged pat, savagely revelling in her exaggeration. "i've loved no one as i love you." despite the banality of the words there was in his speech a quiet force that calmed and convinced her. "not so that i ever wished to be free and marry." "of course," she said loftily, "there's no reason why i should be jealous of your past." "it is your future that i have been jealous of always," he replied. "that is a thousand times harder to bear. and now i am asking you to give it to me." "you'd do a dishonourable thing, a thing you consider dishonourable, to be free?" she asked. "to marry you," he said doggedly. "yes. there's nothing i'd stop at." she gave her little, delighted crow. "i believe you wouldn't. but i'm not going to let you." "you can't prevent me." "i wouldn't marry you if you did." his brows took on their ironic lift. "that is heroics, pat; motion picture heroics. 'to save the other woman.'" pat pouted. "it's misplaced nobility, my dear. she isn't entitled to it. she doesn't care for me. you do." "not enough to marry you, though. not enough to be _sure_. it's all so puzzling, cary." her deep, soft voice shook. "i--i don't understand myself. but i'm just not sure. is that terrible of me, dear, not to want to marry you?" "don't you love me, pat?" he asked, incredulous of the doubt itself. "i suppose i do, now. if it would only last, like this." "but it can't go on like this," he cried hoarsely. "why can't it?" she murmured protestingly. the eternal feminine within her, eternally static, eternally conservative, eternally fatalistic where its own interests are concerned, was asserting itself. better the thing as it is, however precarious, than a step in the dark. change, to a woman's apprehension, is a challenge to the unknown. "surely you must know. surely you must realize the constant risk, the constant danger----" "of being found out? i'm not afraid for myself. you know, cary, dear, i never can quite believe in danger until it comes. i suppose i ought to. i suppose i ought to feel different in lots of ways. yet i don't feel different. not really. tell me why, cary." he bent and kissed the sweet, troubled eyes, the soft, questioning lips. "my darling!" he said brokenly. "my little pat! i wish to god, i'd never come back----" "no; don't wish that. i think i'm glad you came, anyway. it's been very dull without you, cary," she added with childish plaintiveness. "then why----" "don't ask me any more whys to-night. please! my head's so tired with thinking. throw open the windows. wide! i want to breathe the spring." he obeyed. the soft, odour-drenched, earthy wind flowed in, surrounded them, englamoured them, swept them into each other's arms. "i'm so tired, cary, dear," murmured pat. "so tired! just hold me. hold me close." chapter xxvii the night was warm, moist, astir with vernal growth. the trees whispered tender secrets to each other. flowers were being born in the grasses. clouds formed a light coverlet above an earth too fecund of dreams to sleep soundly. dee emerged from the side door of the james house and moved down the cedar path, soft as a wraith. the still mansion oppressed her. for two weeks she had hardly stirred beyond earshot of her husband's petulant, pathetic need of her. her young blood craved air, the expanses, the sense of space and quiet. definite verdict had been pronounced that afternoon upon t. jameson james by dr. osterhout, after a careful résumé of the case with the consulting surgeon. "he'll last indefinitely. as long, one might say, as he has the will to live. five years.... ten. twenty, if he can stand it. much depends on you, dee." "will he get better?" osterhout moved uneasily. "better? stronger, a little. not really better. a wheel-chair existence at best." "i can't conceive of it for jim." "he'll adjust himself to it after a fashion. people do. but he'll be difficult, dam' difficult. have you thought any more of his offer to release you?" "no. and i won't think of it." "i wouldn't have supposed you would, being you. you're a good sort, dee. and a good sport." he rubbed his forehead with a stubby forefinger. "as for your own status--you want me to be frank, don't you?" "yes, bobs." "it's a life of--well, practical widowhood for you. you understand." yes; she had understood, and with an influx of relief. her loyalty would keep her beside her husband, helpless, whereas she would have left him had he been his normal self-centred, self-sufficient self. more; she would now gladly have forgiven him the breach of their private marriage agreement, have accepted the full regimen and responsibility of wifehood could she have borne him the child he wished, the child which might have brought an enduring and saving interest into his ruined life. but from that hateful duty she was absolved; the more reason for standing by him through his ordeal. at worst, she was now free to be faithful in thought and spirit to the man to whom, had he been husband or lover to her, she could have given her all in glorious surrender. he stepped from the shadow of a cedar and stood before her. "dee!" "stanley!" her hands flew to her breast. "how long have you been here?" "hours. since dark." "why didn't you send word?" "would it have been safe to write?" "quite. now." "how, now?" "don't you _know_? haven't you seen cary scott?" "not since i left baltimore. i came the first moment that i could after making arrangements. our arrangements." they had stood apart. but now he reached forward, took her hands, crushed them to his cheek. at his touch she flamed and trembled. "when can you come with me, dee?" "with you? where?" "to england. the divorce can be arranged, and our marriage follow. you can trust me." "oh, yes; i can trust you," she answered dully. "then, when?" "i can't go with you, stanley." "can't?" he repeated incredulously. "when i can feel your pulse leap when i touch your hand, when----" "i love you with every breath i take," she cried low and passionately. she snatched her hands from his grip, wreathed them back of his head, drew his lips down upon hers. "i've never dreamed what it could be to love as i love you." "come with me," he said. the wife looked about her like a trapped creature. "i've got to make him understand," she muttered to herself in travail of spirit. "i've got to make him see and--and help me. stanley," she pleaded, "be kind to me and don't stop me till i've finished telling what i've got to tell." she related the accident and its sequel in few and simple words. for a time of pulse-beats wollaston was silent, then: "poor devil!" he murmured. "poor, poor devil!" "so, you see, dear love----" "i see nothing but that we belong to each other. you can't deny that kiss and what it means. you can't let me go back alone, dee.... shall i stay?" "oh, no! no! i couldn't bear it." "then you must come with me. now. to-night." "for god's sake, stanley, don't! don't kiss me." she was fighting for strength, for breath. "don't make me----" "dee! _dee!_ where are you?" the petulant, flattened voice of helplessness came like a stab of pain through the night. a light, tenuous and sharp, flashed out from the wrecked man's window. its ray touched the cedar overshadowing them. dee answered at once. "i'm coming, jim. just a moment. good-bye, stanley." he gathered her into a slow, overmastering pressure of body to body, face to face. "dee, i love you. i want you." "i know. god, how i know!" "as you love and want me. what does anything else matter!" "oh, love; don't make it so bitter hard for me! i can't leave him. he needs me so. i can't! i can't!" "dee! the pain has come back. where are you?" "coming, jim, dear!" she turned away from wollaston without another look; heard him thrashing through the bushy growth like a man blinded; felt her knees sag and give way. she toppled slowly forward and lay, face down upon the earth that gives life, that gives courage, that gives endurance to bear the deadliest hurt, her fingers tearing in agony at the young grasses. presently she heaved herself up and went into the house. her mouth was firm, her eyes tearless. a good sort. a good sport. chapter xxviii for two weeks pat and scott lived in a paradise of constant dangers and passionate adventure. fate played into their hands; james, as he recovered a little strength, developed a strong inclination for scott's society, and insisted that he remain at their house as guest. the two men played chess and bezique. to dee, in her time of ordeal and sacrifice, it was a relief without which she must have broken to have the invalid taken off her hands for a good part of every day. twice daily pat came over from the knoll, often staying to luncheon on her morning visit and returning directly after dinner to make a fourth hand at bridge whenever james was in fit condition to play. as a matter of course, scott took her home and ostensibly left her while he went for a long walk alone, before returning to the james place. in reality those hours were spent with pat in her conservatory. "when are you going to get tired of me?" she asked pertly, one gold-studded night of stars and soft winds as they sat together at the open window of the secluded room. she was perched on the arm of his chair, her hand overhanging the back to touch the short curls at his temple. he drew her palm downward and spoke with his lips lightly pressed upon it. "when that planet yonder tumbles down out of the sky into your lap." "but you ought to, you know. they always do." "still obsessed by the movies," he interpreted playfully. "this is the real world we're living in." "sometimes i wonder if it is. it doesn't seem too real." "you're a phantasm yourself," said he jealously. "i never quite grasp and hold you." "yet i belong to you, don't i? or is that just a--a silly form of words that hasn't any real meaning?" "it's a phrase. you belong to yourself. you always will. there's that quality of the eternally unattainable, the eternally virginal, about you." "is there? i love to have you say that! do you _truly_ think it, cary?" "in the depths of my heart--where you live." "but it wouldn't be so if we were married." "it would always be so, my darling." ever keenly interested in her own character and its reflex upon others, she took this under thoughtful consideration. "i've never felt that i could really belong to anybody. not even to you. if i could think it, then perhaps i'd want to marry you. does that mean that i don't love you, cary? or what?" "not as i love you," he replied with gloomy patience. "it means that i've got to wait." "here?" she flashed at him with her bewildering smile. "but you've been threatening to go away again." "i ought to," he groaned. "i just haven't the will power. it would be like giving up hope to leave you now." "poor darling!" but there was a touch of mockery in her pity. "if it weren't so terribly dangerous for you." her proud little head went up. "i told you long ago that i always did what i wanted. if i take a chance, i'm willing to pay for it. i'm not afraid." "because you've never suffered. you've never had to take punishment." "have you?" "i'm taking it now, in the thought of our separation. pat, for god's sake let me get free, if it is only to be ready, in case----" "no; no; no!" she denied vehemently. "i won't be--captured, compelled. you can go if you want to, as soon as you want to." "pat!" "yes; i know." her lips brushed his cheek in sweet contrition. "that was mean of me. but i just--don't--want--to--marry you." she spaced the words with rhythmic deliberation. "i don't want to marry anybody.... and have a lot of kids.... and look like con does now. she _waddles_.... cary, were you her lover?" she demanded abruptly. "no!" "i couldn't _bear_ it if you had been. but you'd say that anyway, wouldn't you? even to me?" "it's quite true. i never was." "if anyone asked you that about me you'd swear by all your gods you weren't. wouldn't you?" "yes." "you'd lie about it? i _hate_ to think of your lying. i wonder whether i would if it was put up to me or whether i'd admit that we are lovers." she brooded darkly for a moment over the word. "i didn't mean to be, you know," she added naïvely. "whatever fault there was is mine," he claimed hoarsely. "if there is any just god----" she slipped her fingers over his lips, cutting him short. "don't, cary. don't say 'if.' of course there is." "then he will hold me responsible; not you." she rose, giving her shoulders the quaint, sliding wriggle with which she was wont to slough off, symbolically, problems too troublesome for solution. "oh, if those things are going to happen, they happen," she muttered. "that's the fate part of it. but i do suppose we can't go on forever. we'll crash, some way." "does anyone suspect? dee?" "i don't think so. she's got troubles enough of her own these days. if it's anyone, it's con. she's been asking some snoopy kind of questions." "what questions?" "oh, i don't know. i told her to go to the devil; that i was over twelve, and she told me i'd better remember particularly that i was." "i don't like that," said he. "oh, well; i don't like it much, myself. but what can she do?" "talk." "not outside the family. con isn't that kind. she might tell fred." "that would be a pleasant complication," he observed grimly. "there will be more and more complications all the time," she fretted. "if you only weren't married!" "but i thought----" he began eagerly. "then there wouldn't be any kick. we could be supposed to be engaged. i suppose we _would_ be engaged!" she added brightly, as if a new thought had struck her. "being engaged implies being married eventually," he pointed out. "not these days," she retorted. "it doesn't hold you up for anything and we could snap out of it when we got good and ready. only--this isn't the kind of thing you can snap out of, is it?" a cloud darkened the vivacity of her face. "we're terrible boobs, cary.... let's stop it." "that's wholly in your hands, dear love." "yes," she said discontentedly; "you've always put everything up to me; let me go my own way--that's why i've gone so far. i wonder if you knew that was the way to get me. you're so dam' clever.... like what's-his-name--mephistoph--no, macchiavelli, wasn't it?" she dropped to the floor in front of him, clasped her hands over his knee, turned upward a shadowy and bewitching face, speaking in a lowered voice. "listen, dear. next week i'm going back to philadelphia, to finish out my visit with cissie. but--i won't go to cissie's, not till the next day. we'll have that time together; that'll be our good-bye. and then you must go away." "if you wish it so," he assented steadily. "i _don't_ wish it so. but it's got to come some time. you say so yourself." "yes; it's got to come some time. unless----" "i know the unless. i don't say i'll never send for you to come back. i might." "i'll never come back except with my freedom. and if you send for me it must be for good and all." "i wish i could, cary. i wish i were sure," she said wistfully. she jumped to her feet. "tell me good-night," she commanded, holding out her arms. "and you're to come early to-morrow and take me for a long walk." overnight, luck, which had so befriended the lovers, turned against them. they returned from their morning's tramp, weary but elate with the vigour of strong sunshine and woodland air. pat, her glorious eyes welling light, paused by the open library window. "is there anything in the world that we haven't talked to a finish to-day, cary?" she demanded, laughing. "nothing, dearest." "yet to-morrow we'll have just as much to talk about as if we'd never spoken a word to each other. it's rather wonderful, isn't it? what makes us that way?" "companionship. the rarest thing in life or love." she swung herself in by the window. "come on, companion," she invited. as he followed, she detached a few sprays from the huge cluster of wild purple violets at her belt, and set them in his coat. "decoration of companionship," she said. "and"--she stretched up and kissed his lips--"reward for a happy morning." there was a stifled exclamation. constance rose from the depths of the big arm chair facing away from them and confronted the pair. pat burst into harsh laughter. "trapped!" she exclaimed. constance's face with its strained, expectant, apprehensive expression of imminent motherhood, was white. "pat, i think you'd better leave me with mr. scott," she said. "i don't," snapped pat. "if you've got anything to say, say it." her eyes burned sombrely, angrily. she was furious with her sister for having surprised her. a puzzled, helpless look came over constance's face. "i wouldn't have believed----" she began lamentably. "how long has this been going on?" "none of your business," returned pat coolly. "it will be father's business. i shall phone him now." "wait, connie," put in scott with quiet authoritativeness. "wouldn't it be as well to consider consequences before making more trouble than can perhaps be undone?" "you're afraid, are you? well, you can run." "i shall stay here, if you phone, until mr. fentriss comes." constance swayed, irresolute, uncertain on her feet. "how far has this gone?" she muttered. scott rallied his defences. "you're not to think that this is just a casual, cheap flirtation," he said. "if i could make you understand how deeply and honestly i love pat----" "honestly!" echoed constance with scorn. "i won't split words with you. and for myself i've no excuses to make. i ought to have held myself better in hand. but as for this sort of thing--my kissing pat--it's the first time and it will be----" "oh, piffle!" pat's reckless voice broke in. "tell her the truth, cary." constance looked from one to the other. her lips quivered, curled down at the corners like a grieved baby's. she began to sob in short, quick, strangled catches of the breath. suddenly a dreadful look convulsed her face. she pressed her hands down upon her abdomen. "oh!" she cried. "ah-h-h-h. the pain! pat! i'm----" scott jumped to catch her, barely in time to break the fall. he eased her into the chair. pat was beside him instantly. "phone for bobs. quick! tell him to get dr. courcey. no. you go for courcey, it'll save time. second house around the corner. tell him to bring everything. all his instruments and a nurse. don't come back. i'll write you." as he hurried to the door he heard a shriek, then pat's strong, soothing voice: "all right, con, old girl. the doctor'll be here in five minutes." such was their parting, one of life's sardonic emendations to the plots and plans of lovers. chapter xxix "some kind of internal explosion has taken place in our little family, dear one (wrote robert osterhout to his dead love); and is still taking place, which is rather a deliberate method for an explosion. they are keeping me out of it; even pat will not confide in me. therefore i infer that it is not so much her trouble as the others'. con's baby is now six months old; she had a bad time of it but the son is a lusty creature. about the time of his birth there was a quarrel between con and pat not wholly made up yet. but while con was so ill, pat stood by, a tower of strength. from the way in which she gave up everything to look after con and her household, i was almost ready to suspect a touch of remorse. but what about? there was the contemporaneous phenomenon of cary scott going away so abruptly, quite without explanation. i ask myself whether it is possible that the old fire flamed up between con and him and pat was in some way involved. a tangled skein! "dee troubles me, too. she has grown so subdued and inert. her devotion to james would explain it, to a casual observer. it isn't enough for me. there is something else. she withdraws from me, too; but she has always given me less of her confidence than the others. it is a sort of shyness, and at times it hurts. i so long to help her. but you can't help another person who lives in a fourth dimension by herself. "pat is back in the rush and whirl of things, going faster than ever, but she does not seem to be getting as much fun out of it as of old. she is as little comprehensible as ever." to pat herself, her mental processes were difficult of comprehension. it was now six months since she and cary scott had so strangely and inconsequentially parted and he had gone back to europe. on the whole, she did very well without him; but that there was a gap she could not deny to herself. being uncompromisingly what she was, she filled it with other masculine interests. rather to her surprise she did not find herself specially tempted to venture upon forbidden ground with any other man. the barriers once down, she had supposed that self-control would be more difficult. but curiosity is an important component part of sex-attraction to the untried, and her curiosity was appeased. perhaps, too, scott had been right in imputing to her an instinctive quality of virginity, constantly at war against but not incompatible with her passionate temperament. certainly the substitute interests seemed dull and insufficient as compared with her association with scott. at times she missed intolerably that unique understanding and companionship which he had given her, and these times became more instead of less frequent as the weeks lengthened out, which was both unexpected and perturbing. she was seriously annoyed with him, too, because he had respected religiously her injunction against writing, and when, three months after his departure, she herself had written lifting the embargo, he had returned, after a long silence, a single sentence: "when you send for me i will come; but you must be ready to accept all and give all." choosing to interpret this as an attempt to bully her she was properly wrathful. by way of logical reprisal (though how it was to affect him she would have found it difficult to say) she "stepped on the gas," as she would have put it, and speeded up an already sufficient pace. local eruptions followed. "all the old cats are squalling their heads off at me," she complained to osterhout. "what would you expect?" said the philosophical doctor. "of course _you'd_ take that side," retorted the aggrieved pat. "why should they?" "for one item, the broken vandegrift-mercer engagement." "i didn't do it!" disclaimed pat. but she dimpled a little. "you're popularly credited with having had a hand in it, not to say a face." "don't be coarse, bobs. what right had bess vandegrift to be sticking _her_ blotchy face between the curtains----" "what right had you to be kissing bess's best young feller?" "liar yourself, bobs! i didn't kiss him. he kissed me." "it's a fine distinction. maybe a shade too fine for bess." "i haven't kissed a man," declared pat virtuously, "that is to say really kissed, since--well, never mind that," with hasty but belated discretion. "i didn't want harry to kiss me. troo-woo-wooly, bobs. though i did suspect that he might get interesting and try.... she's a sob, anyway." "then, there's stanley johnston----" "all off. tackles too hard!" said pat. "and mark denby. you keep him rushing back and forth between here and baltimore like a demented drummer." "oh, mark's like the pig that forgot he was educated. he doesn't count." "who does count at the present moment?" "nobody. that's the big trouble," said pat fretfully. "they none of 'em give _me_ any thrill. i'm bored, bobs." "pose of youth," opined bobs. herein he was wrong. pat really was bored, though she would not admit to herself the reason, deep and effective in the background of her willful soul. life was flat, stale, tasteless. men were either unenterprising guinea-pigs or bellowing rhinoceroses. women were cats. she loathed the tame and monotonous world. it was boredom, combined with a provocative accidental discovery, that led her to the reckless adventure of the washington heights flat and edna carroll. in an earlier age the fentriss family would have referred to edna carroll with hushed voices, if at all, as "that woman." in this enlightened and tolerant time she was humorously characterised by the three girls as "ralph's flossie." little was known of her. she lived somewhere outside the social pale and fentriss's liaison with her had endured for many years. constance was sure that she was of the flamboyant, roystering, chorus-girl type. dee inclined to the soft and babyish siren. pat speculated rangingly, and had more than once endeavoured to pump osterhout, with notable lack of success. from some unlocatable purlieu of gossip had issued the rumour that ralph fentriss was going to marry her, perhaps had already done so secretly. constance was outraged. dee was cynically amused, but skeptical. pat was hotly excited. entering the city by one of the upper ferries one day in search of a dressmaker's assistant, recreant in the matter of a dinner gown, the youngest daughter was startled to see her father's car drawn up opposite a pleasant looking apartment house on a quiet side street. at three-thirty in the afternoon! the truth leapt to her mind. profusely blooming flowers made beautiful the third floor window ledge; there, pat decided, was the nest of the bird. fearing that her father might emerge and find her, she hastened away. on the following morning, full of delightful tremors and keen anticipations--for this would be something, indeed, to tell the girls--she returned and pressed the third button in the entry. the light click of the release almost sent her scuttling out, but she gathered her resolution, composed a demure face for herself, and mounted the stairs. in the top hallway stood a slim, tailor-made woman with glasses pushed up on her forehead. pat at once made up her mind that she was attractive in an alert, bird-like way. "whom are you looking for?"' asked the woman pleasantly. pat liked her voice. "does mrs. fentriss live here?" "_who?_" said the woman in a tone which made pat regret that she had chosen that particular form of opening. pat faltered out the enquiry again, not knowing what else to do. the other's brown and dancing eyes grew formidably cold. "why do you ask for mrs. fentriss?" "i thought this was where she lived." "there is no mrs. fentriss here." "perhaps i've got the wrong apartment." "no. i think you have the right one. who are you?" entire frankness appeared to the intruder the method of sense and safety. "i'm pat. patricia fentriss." "i thought so. by what right do you come here?" two tiny spots of reddish flame shone in the wine-dark eyes. pat decided that she was _very_ attractive. "please don't be angry with me." "you're hardly here as an emissary of the family, i suppose." "no. i--i just came." "in that case hadn't you better just go again?" "if you tell me to," said pat, downcast and humble. the other hesitated. "i can't conceive what you mean by this visit," she said with severity, into which, however, had crept a mitigating quality. "was it just vulgar curiosity?" pat nodded so vigorously that her hair flicked forward about her face like wind-whipped silk ribbons. "you're frank, at any rate. i like that." abruptly she stepped back. "as you're here, come in." pat obeyed. "you're awfully good to let me." "am i? that remains to be seen." she led the way to an airy, daintily furnished front room, a conspicuous feature of which was a big arm chair with a drawing board across the arms. "what's that?" asked pat with lively curiosity. "my work." "oh! are you an artist?" "of a sort. i make fashion drawings." "how diverting!" pat was recovering herself. "can't you go on working while we talk?" "are we going to talk?" the corners of the firm mouth crinkled up, a dimple affirmed its existence, the brown eyes twinkled, and pat incontinently and most improperly fell in love with her hostess. "i think you're _too_ delightful!" "i can be quite otherwise, on occasion--to impertinent people." "don't scare me again," begged pat. "i won't be impertinent. though i want to be, terribly." "as that is what you came for, perhaps you'd better be. why did you ask for mrs. fentriss?" "isn't that what--what you're called?" "certainly not." an inspiration struck pat. "we heard that you'd married dad." the hostess replaced her glasses, seated herself, and began to ink in a sketch. "did you?" "is it true?" "no. we are not married." no good, that line. a chilling thought followed. "he isn't likely to be coming here, is he?" "why? are you afraid of being caught?" "i can't think of anything more poisonous." "don't be alarmed. he couldn't get in if he did come." pat searched her mind for movie evidence. "hasn't he got a key?" "no. why not be honest and ask directly what's in your mind?" "i--i don't know how," confessed the visitor. "for a singularly forward young person you don't get on very fast. how old are you?" "nineteen. but i know everything about--about everything." "if you don't it isn't for lack of enterprise," was the grim reply. "and what you don't know, you suspect. in this case your suspicions are quite correct. but it doesn't follow that ralph--that your father comes and goes at will here, in _my_ place." there was the slightest emphasis on the possessive. "oh! i thought they--they always had--had a key, and--and----" "and paid the rent, and filled the place with luxury and orchids, cigarettes and champagne. you've been reading cheap novels. the rotten-minded little fiction writers don't know everything. they don't know anything about women." pat leaned forward. "are you going to marry dad?" the artist's face hardened. "you were sent here to find that out. well, then, i am." "i'm glad," said pat simply and sincerely. the older woman took off her glasses, rose, walked across to the lounge where pat was seated and set her delicate hands on the girl's shoulders, staring into her face with an inscrutable expression. "why do you say that?" "because it's true. i'm crazy about you--already." the other sat down limply. "what kind of a person _are_ you?" "an honest one." "then i'll be, too. i'm not going to marry ralph. i can't. i've got a husband. he's no good. i haven't lived with him for years. i had a devil of a life. i was going to kill myself when i met ralph." "were you so poor?" asked pat sympathetically. "poor? do you think it was a question of money with me that took me to ralph?" retorted the other with slow anger. "no. i don't know why i said that. but you're so young." "so is he," was the defiant reply. "he's eternally young. that's what i love in him. i loved him the first time i ever saw him and i've never stopped. but if you've come here looking for a common kept-woman----" "i haven't. oh, i haven't!" broke in pat, squirming. "anyway, you know all about me now. all except my name, edna carroll. what are you going to tell your family?" "not a word." "aren't you? you're a strange little witch." "do you like me a little?" asked pat, slant-eyed and demure. "yes; i do. you're very like ralph in some ways." "then may i come again?" "no." "why not?" "i should have thought you might understand without my drawing you a diagram." "conventional stuff!" scoffed the girl. "how do you get that way? i'm coming anyway--edna." edna carroll laughed uncertainly. "i'm insane to let you. but i'd love to have you. what would your father think?" "he's not going to think at all. we won't give him the chance. will you ask me to your parties?" "how do you know i give parties?" "you're the kind that always draws people around them. besides," added the shrewd pat, "there's a violin and a clarinet on the piano. i don't suppose you play them _all_. and i'm mad about music." "inheritance," murmured edna softly. she let her darkling glance rest on the piano bench where ralph fentriss had so often sat to make his music. "very well. i'll ask you sometime." she was as good as her word. it was there that pat met leo stenak. chapter xxx the episode between leo stenak and patricia fentriss was headlong as a torrent. she heard him before she saw him; heard, rather, his violin, expression and interpretation of his innermost self. the raucous sweetness of his tone, which he overemphasises and sentimentalises, and which is the cardinal defect of his striking and uneven style, floated out to her as she stood, astonished, in the exterior hallway of edna carroll's flat. when it died into silence, she supposed that the number was over and entered just as he was resuming. her first impression was of a plump, sallow, carelessly dressed youth with hair almost as shaggy as her own, and the most wildly luminous eyes she had ever looked into, who turned upon her an infuriated regard and at once pointedly dropped his bow. his savage regard followed her while she crossed the room to speak to her hostess. this was no way to treat high-spirited pat. quite deliberately she took off gloves and wrap, handed them to the nearest young man and remarked to the violinist: "it's very nice of you to wait. i'm quite fixed now, thank you." a vicious snort was the only response. the accompanist who had trailed along a bar or two before appreciating the interruption, took up his part, and the melody again filled the air. in spite of her exacerbated feelings, pat recognised the power and distinction of the performance. nevertheless, she refrained from joining in the applause which followed the final note. at once the musician crossed to her, which was exactly what she had intended. "you don't like music," he accused, glowering. "i love it," retorted pat. "then you don't like my music." "better than your manners." "i care nothing for manners. i am not a society puppet." "if you were, perhaps you would have waited to be presented." "i am leo stenak," said he impressively. if not unduly impressed, pat was at least interested. she remembered the name from having heard cary scott speak of a youthful violinist named stenak who had appeared at a red cross concert the year before and for whom he had predicted a real career, "if he can get over his cubbish egotism and self-satisfaction." "i've heard of you," she remarked. "the whole world will hear of me presently," he replied positively. "where did you hear?" "from a friend of mine, cary scott." stenak searched his memory. "i never heard of him. an amateur?" "yes." "amateurs don't count," was his superb pronouncement. "any friend of mine counts," said pat coldly, and turned her back upon him. he flounced away exactly like a disgruntled schoolgirl. "don't mind leo, pat," said her hostess, coming over to her with a smile of amusement. "he's a spoiled child; almost as much spoiled as you are." "i don't mind him," returned the girl equably, but inside she was tingling with the sense of combat and of the man's intense and salient personality. she was sure that he would come back to her. late in the evening he did, with a manifest effect of its being against his judgment and intention, which delighted her mischievous soul. most of the others had left. "they tell me you sing, miss fentriss," he began abruptly. "a little," replied pat, who had been devoting what she regarded as hard and grinding work to her music for a six-month. "rag-time, i suppose." contemptuously. "_and_ others!" "know the _chanson de florian_?" "of course." "well, it's light sort of trash, but it has a melody. i've written my own obbligato to it. if you like i'll play it with you." "i don't like, at all, thank you." "you owe me something for spoiling my andante when you came in. i played wretchedly after that. you did something to me; i was too conscious of you to get back into the music. won't you sing for me?" his manner was quite amenable now; his splendid eyes held and made appeal to her. "but i'm an amateur," she answered, still obdurate. "and amateurs don't count." "it isn't every amateur i'd ask. come on!" he caught up his violin. "ready, carlos?" he said to the accompanist. pat gave her little, reckless laugh. "oh, _very_ well!" she sang. it seemed to her that she was in exceptionally good voice, inspired and upheld by the golden stream of counter-melody which surged from the violin. at the close he looked at her intently and in silence. "well?" queried pat, thrilling with expectancy of merited praise. "you sing rottenly," he replied with entire seriousness. "thank you!" pat's sombre eyes smarted with tears of mortification. "but you have a voice. some of the notes--pure music. your method--horrible. you should practice." "i've been practicing. a terrible lot." "pffooh! fiddle-faddling. you amateurs don't know what work is!" "do you think my voice is worth working with?" "perhaps. it has beauty. you are beautiful, yourself. where do you live?" pat laughed. "what's the big idea, mr. stenak?" "i will take you home when you go. i wish to talk to you." "i'm not going home. i'm staying with friends downtown." "then i will take you there. may i?" "yes; if you'll play once more for me first." though it was quite a distance to her destination, stenak did not offer to get a taxi. he observed that as the night was pleasant, it would be nice to walk part way, to which pat, somewhat surprised, assented. immediately, and with no more self-consciousness than an animal, he became intimately autobiographical. he told her that he was a russian, a philosophic anarchist, with no belief in or use for society's instituted formulas: marriage, laws, government--nothing but the eternal right of the individual to express himself to the utmost in his chosen medium of life. all his assertiveness had left him; he talked honestly and interestingly. pat caught glimpses of a personality as simple and, in some ways, as innocent as a child's; credulous, eager, resolute, confident, trusting, and illumined with a lambent inner fire. "i was rude to you at first," he confessed. "i am sorry. but i could not help it. i am like that." "you shouldn't be," she chided. "tell me what i should be and i will be it," he declared. "you could make me anything. when you came into the room, even though i was angry, there was a flash of understanding between us. you felt it, too?" "i felt something," admitted she. "but i was angry, myself. how silly of you to give yourself the airs of genius!" "i have genius," he averred quietly. such profound conviction was in his tone that pat was ready to believe him. as they turned to the elevated stairs he asked: "will you come to my studio soon for music?" "who else will be there?" "nobody. just you and i." "no. i couldn't do that. ask mrs. carroll and i'll come." "why should you not come alone? are you afraid of me? that would be strange." "of course i'm not afraid of you. but----" "i will not make love to you. i will only make music to you." pat reflected that it might well prove to be much the same thing. when she left him it was with a half promise. before the week was out she had gone to his studio. within the fortnight she had been there half a dozen times. she was drawn back to him by the lure of his marvellous music--"i play for no one as i play for you," he said--and by the fascination of his strange and single-minded personality. not only did he play for her, but he made her sing, experimenting with her voice, pointing out her errors, instructing her, laughing to shame her impatiences and little mutinies, himself patient with the endurance and insight of the true artist. ever responsive to genuine quality of whatever kind, pat let herself become more and more involved in imagination and vagrant possibilities. in the matter of love-making he was faithful to his word. while she was his guest he never so much as offered to kiss her, rather to her resentful disappointment, to tell the truth. but when, one november afternoon, he was walking with her to where her car was waiting, he said without preface: "colleen, i love you." he had taken to calling her colleen after hearing her sing an irish ballad of that title. pat liked it. she gave her veiled and sombre glance. "do you _really_ love me?" "you know it. and you?" "i don't know." "i think you do." "i think it would be very stupid of me to fall in love with you." "why?" "we're not the same kind at all. some day i shall marry and settle down and be good and happy and correct, ever after. you don't believe in marriage." "i believe in love. and in faith to be kept between two who love. don't you?" "when you play to me i do. you could make me believe anything then." "then come back, colleen, and let me play to you." "no," said pat, in self-protective panic. she could not make herself look at him. "when are you coming again?" "i don't know," she answered, and popped into her car as if it were sanctuary. wayward thoughts of his flame-deep eyes, his persuasive speech, the subtle passion of his music made restless many nights for her thereafter. edna carroll, suspecting the progress of the affair, questioned her. "what are you up to with leo?" "just playing around." "with fire?" "he's got it all right, the fire. i wonder if it's the divine fire?" "how seriously are you thinking of him, pat?" edna's piquant face was anxious. "you wouldn't marry him?" "are you afraid for me?" "no. for him." "you're too flattering!" "i'm in earnest. you'd ruin him. you're too selfish and too capricious to be the mate of a genius. and he's going to be a great genius, pat, if he keeps himself straight and undivided. you'd divide him. he's quite mad over you; told me so himself." "how do you know i'm not mad over him?" "god forbid! it would never last with you. because he isn't your kind, you'd grow away from him and he'd be wretched and that would react on his music." "and you think more of his music than of me," pouted pat. the artist in edna carroll, humble and slight in degree though it were, spoke out the true creed of all artistry which is one. "not of him. of his genius. where you find genius you have to think of it and cherish it above everything." "above love?" said pat. she understood enough of this pure passion to be a little daunted. "above everything," reaffirmed the other. "you needn't be afraid. he doesn't want to marry me." "whether he does or not, it's a dangerous fascination for both of you." vacillating days followed for pat. there was a week in which she did not trust herself to see leo. he telephoned and wrote frantically. she did not answer his letters. but one day she met him fortuitously on the street, and went to the studio with him. there he broke all bounds, poured out the fire of his heart upon her: he loved her, wanted her, needed her; she was part of his genius, without her he could never reach his full artistic stature. she loved him, too; he felt it; he knew it; he defied her to deny it, and she found that, under the compulsion of his presence, she could not. he was going to boston on the following day, for a week. would she come and join him, if only for a day? she could make up some tale for her family; pretend to be staying with a friend. and he would take her to a great singing-master, the greatest, a friend of his whom he wanted to hear and try her voice. wouldn't she trust herself to him and come? pat denied him vehemently. but she was stirred and troubled to her own passionate depths by his stormy yet controlled passion. he had not so much as touched her hand. in the hallway, as they went out, she turned to him and yielded herself into his arms. "oh, _well_!" she murmured, her voice fluttering in her throat. "i don't care. i'll come. only--don't rush me. give me time." they parted with the one kiss of that embrace. instantly she had agreed, the spirit of adventure rose within her. she was recklessly jubilant. three days of alternating morbid self-examination and flushed excitement followed. she looked forward to the meeting not so much with conscious physical anticipation as with the sense of something vivid and bold and new coming, as relief, into the too monotonous pattern of life. the rendezvous was arranged by letter. she was to take a late afternoon train, and he was to be at the back bay to meet her. looking from the window as the train pulled in she saw him restlessly pacing the platform on the wrong side. he had on a new overcoat which did not fit him and was incongruously glossy as compared with his untidy hair and rumpled soft hat. as his coat slumped open, she was conscious of an unpressed suit underneath. probably greasy! at the moment he dropped one of the brand new gloves in his hand--she could not recall ever having seen him wear gloves--and bent awkwardly to recover it. his head protruded; his collar, truant from its retaining rear button, hunched mussily up, and she looked down with a dismal revulsion of the flesh, upon an expanse of sallow, shaven neck. unbidden, vividly intrusive, there rose to the eyes of her quickening imagination the image of cary scott, always impeccable of dress and carriage, hard-knit of frame, exhaling the atmosphere of smooth skin and hard muscle. in fancy she breathed the very aroma of him, clean, tingling, masculine, and felt again the imperative claim of his arms. from the groping figure below her, glamour fell like a decaying garment. she forgot the genius, the inner fire; beheld only the outer shell, uncouth, pulpy, nauseous to her senses. with cheeks afire and chin high, she walked up the aisle, turned into the ladies' room and found safe refuge there, until the train moved on. at the south station she took the next train back to new york. the image of cary scott bore her unsolicited company. she went straight to edna carroll with the story. edna was alarmed, relieved, puzzled. "but, after going so far, why--why--why?" she demanded. in response pat delivered one of those final and damning sentences upon man which women express only to women: "when i saw him that way i knew that his socks would be dirty." chapter xxxi "i'm off of men," confidently wrote pat in her diary. "there's nothing to it for me. from now on i'm going to be so nice and careful and mind-your-steppy that the place won't know me. all the old cats in dorrisdale will purr when i come around. i think i shall take up slumming. anyway, no more flutters for little pat. i've reformed." in proof of which she comported herself with great circumspection for a space of several months, to the surprise of all and the discomfiture of sundry amatory youths of her circle. the word went about that pat fentriss was slowing up. while as much fun as ever in a crowd, she was less approachable in a corner. pat, her peculiar radiance deepening and ripening, was content with the crowd. her quickening intelligence was impatient of the callowness and shallowness of her contemporaries among the youth of the suburb. to fill her time a new and purely unselfish interest had come into her life; not so showy as the slumming which she had considered, but of far more practical beneficence. at the time of t. jameson james's accident she had devoted herself with centred enthusiasm to the sufferer and his household. later as the tragedy became a commonplace to her mind, she drifted wide of it. it was natural to the shallow fervours and shifting interests of her youth that she should unconsciously drop out of mind that silent and shadowed personality in the big house across the town. when she did think of it, temporary self-reproach would send her there two or three times in a week. but there seemed to be "nothing that she could do"; and she would drop away again. it was an episode of one of these visits that changed her attitude. on her arrival dee had told her that jim was probably asleep; she could creep up softly and see; the attendant who pushed the wheeled-chair was out. tiptoeing to the open door pat peered in at the crack. t. jameson james lay very stiff and still on the window divan, apparently sleeping. pat was just about to turn away with a sense of relief when she noticed the hand nearest her. it was so tightly clenched that the flesh around the nails was white. his head turned quite gradually, bringing the contour of the face into view. she saw that the eyes were closed, but in the corners two drops of water gathered and grew, slowly, slowly, as if wrung from the very core of a soul's repressed agony. the drops broke, darted, trickled down like rain along a windowpane. a slight shudder lifted his breast. then he was immobile again. pat crept away until she reached the refuge of the lower floor. she ran into the garden, kept on running to the far extent of the grounds, flung herself down and so lay. she did not collapse; she did not cry. but presently--unpoetic and anti-climactic though it be to record plain facts--the stress of sudden emotion on top of a hearty luncheon had its logical effect. pat was violently sick. as soon as she recovered breath and poise, she returned to the house with a plan in mind, stamped noisily upstairs and entered the sick room. "hello, jimmie-jams!" "hello, pat." his face lighted up a little; she was miserably conscious that he had always welcomed her with a smile. "how are you feeling?" "all right." this was his invariable formula. "don't lie to me!" she closed the door, lowered the window, and turned upon him. "jimmie!" "well?" "swear!" "all right. i swear. what's the secret?" "not that kind of swear. cuss. rip it out. blast the ceiling off the roof. let yourself go." he peered into her face. it was solemn, intent. "i don't know what----" he began. then he broke off and let himself go. such virulent, vitriolic, blazing, throbbing profanity pat had never dreamt of. it comprehended the known universe and covered the history of the cosmos, past, present, and future. when he had finished and lay back exhausted, she enquired: "feel better, don't you?" "yes. how did you know?" "i saw you a few minutes ago when your eyes were holding in. but you couldn't help--there was----" she touched her own eyelids. "you're a ---- liar, pat!" exploded the correct and punctilious t. jameson james. "that's right. go to it if you haven't got it all out," approved pat. "no; i'm through. lord, that did me good!" "cussing to yourself is no good. you've got to have somebody to listen. ever let anyone hear you really loosen up before?" "no. i've always been too--too"--he grinned--"hellish dignified." "well, you send for me when you need an audience." from that time a bond of special sympathy and fellowship was established between the life so disastrously wrecked and the life so triumphantly burgeoning. every morning after breakfast pat called him on the phone and every noon she came over for an hour's chat, until dee, grateful beyond her self-contained power to express, threatened to sue her sister for alienation of her husband's affections. nothing, of however much appeal to pat, was permitted to interfere with this regimen. through this it was that she had her quarrel with monty standish. after three years of hard-working athletic obscurity, standish had suddenly blossomed out into flaming football prominence. his picture appeared in the sporting pages of the metropolitan dailies; his condition was the subject of commentary in the papers, as serious as that accorded to an ailing king. he was of a gallant and alluring type, a bonny lad, handsome, spirited, good-humoured, well-mannered, sluggish of mind as he was alert of body, but with a magnetism almost as imperative as pat's own. he had quite withheld his homage from her, ostentatiously refusing to compete in the circle of her adorers, so she was the more surprised and gratified when he asked her to join his sister's party for the big game. it cost her a real pang to decline, but when he hotly resented her refusal and demanded an explanation--he was rather spoiled by all the local adulation and newspaper notoriety which were the guerdon of his prowess--pat declined to be catechised. there was a scene, angry on his part, scornful on hers, and he departed, darkly indicating that if princeton lost the game on his side of the line the true responsibility for the catastrophe would rest upon her contemptuous shoulders. how t. jameson james got wind of the controversy she never knew, but on the day of the game he called her to account. "why didn't you go down to princeton?" "didn't want to," she said airily. "monty standish asked you, didn't he?" "he said something about it." "they say he's the greatest end we've had for ten years." james was a princeton alumnus. "he's a good-looking youngster, pat." the girl flushed and her eyes shone. "he's a winner to look at," she agreed. "they tell me you've added him to your collection." "that's all guff," replied the inelegant pat. "is it? the point is that you wouldn't go because you felt you had to come here. isn't that so?" "i didn't want to go, anyway," lied pat gallantly. "i'm worn with football twice a week." "well, you've got to stop spoiling me by coming here every day. it's bad for me; the doctor says so. i won't have it." "are you going to close the house to me?" retorted pat saucily. "you'll have to hire a guard. go on, swear, jimmie." "oh, you go to the devil!" said the invalid, laughing. "if princeton loses to-day----" but princeton won and pat was saved from the undying remorse which should (but probably would not) have consumed her spirit had standish "fallen down" and involved his team in defeat. he came back the following week-end, a hero of the first calibre, and undertook to ignore pat at the saturday dance at which he was unofficial guest of honour. it would have been a more successful attempt if his eyes had not constantly strayed from whatever partner he was with, to follow pat's pliant and swaying form in the arms of some happier man. on the morrow his stern resolution, already weakened, was totally melted by a talk which he had with t. jameson james, who had sent for him ostensibly to ask about the game. for a front-page newspaper hero he was amazingly humble when he called up pat to ask if he might come and see her. pat, her heart swelling with pride and not without a flutter of other emotions, said that he might if he would apologise properly. mr. standish did apologise properly and handsomely, and, by the time the apology was concluded, pat was mildly astonished at finding herself in his arms being fervently kissed and returning the kisses with no less fervour. she was further surprised to find, when he bade her good-night, that she was engaged to him. but the really astounding feature of the whole matter came when she awoke the next morning to a sense of the prevailing luminosity of the world and the conviction that she was thrillingly in love. she had thought that she was through with all that. for a long time, anyway. chapter xxxii they had been engaged for four months. on the whole pat found the status highly satisfactory. everyone heartily approved the match. because of monty's college duties, which pressed sorely upon him as he was having constant difficulty in keeping up, they saw little of each other, a fortunate circumstance, as the glamour of her lover's physical beauty and personal charm persisted in her mind when they were separated, creating a romantic figure, to which no special mental attributes were essential. had they been thrown more constantly together she might have been disillusioned by the torpid and unimaginative quality of his mind. but in their brief association over week-ends they were surrounded by others, and when they were alone his ardent love-making eked out the scantness of his conversational resources. if, sometimes, cary scott's words, "companionship, the rarest thing in life or love," recurred to her, arousing unwelcome questions, she put them away. scott's image had dimmed again, in the hot radiance of this new attraction; she determinedly kept it far in the background. but there was one unrelenting memory which refused to be permanently immured in the past. when the time for the wedding was set, mid-june immediately after monty's graduation (if he succeeded in graduating), she realised that she must face that memory and dispose of it, for her own peace of mind. her uneasy thoughts turned to dr. bobs. perhaps he could lay the ghost. "bobs, what do you really think of monty?" she had gone to his office, nerved up to the interview. osterhout considered. "he means well," was his judicial pronunciamento. "what a rotten thing to say about a girl's best young man! what's the matter with him?" "stupid." "then you didn't really mean your congratulations." "certainly. it's an excellent engagement." "am i stupid, bobs?" she pouted. "no. but i think you'll be perfectly satisfied with a stupid husband." "i don't know what makes you so _revolting_ to-day!" complained pat. "i'd be bored to death with a boob around the house, and you know it. he's not stupid." "if you're satisfied, i am," said the amiable bobs. "i don't have to live with him. he's a prize beauty all right. _and_ rich!" "there you go again. i don't care. (defiantly) i love monty, and that's enough. anyway i didn't come here to talk about him exactly. it's something else. bobs, do many girls confess to their doctors?" osterhout looked up sharply and frowned. almost word for word mona had put that same query to him years before. but pat's face was more child-like, graver, than that of the lovely, laughing, reckless mona had been. "probably more than to their priests," he made reply. "that's what a doctor is for." "yes!" she cried eagerly. "please be just the fentriss family physician for a few minutes. make it easy for me, bobs dear." indefinably his manner changed with his next words, became quietly attentive, soothing, almost impersonal as he said: "take your time, pat. and when you're ready, tell me as much or as little as you wish." "it isn't too easy--even to you. can't you guess?" "ah," said he, after a pause of scrutiny. "so that's it." "don't look at me." she put her hands up as if to shield her face from flame. "just tell me what to do." "are you in trouble?" "of course," said she impatiently. "do you think i'd come bothering you---- oh, no! not _that_ way. though it might have happened. now you _do_ know." "go on, pat." "aren't you shocked?" her eyes darted up at him, at once supplicating and defiant, from out the tangle of her vagrant hair. "not a bit. we doctors don't judge. we help." "oh, bobs! you _are_ divine. i want to know--it's awfully hard to put it--to know whether--if _he'll_ know--when we're married." "he?" osterhout groped in a murk of bewilderment. "who?" "monty, of course. don't be _dumb_." "_monty?_ isn't monty the man?" "oh, no!" for the moment osterhout was startled clean out of his professional attitude. "who is?" he said sternly. instantly pat was mutinous. "i won't tell you." "i'm sorry i asked it. it's none of your doctor's affair who he is. you want me to tell you whether your husband, when you marry, will know that you have had experience before." "yes," answered pat under her breath. "i'll answer you as i always answer that question." "always! have you had it asked you before?" a slight, melancholy, tolerant smile lifted the corners of the strong mouth. "my dear, every doctor who has had among his patients specimens of the modern, high-strung girl has had that problem put up to him. the answer is simple; no, he won't know--unless you tell him." she drew a soft breath of relief, but almost at once her face darkened, as the import of his last words made its way to her quick sensitiveness. "do you want me to tell him?" "that is not a question for a physician to answer." pat stamped her foot. "stop being one, then. be bobs again. shall i tell him, bobs?" "has he ever told you anything of that nature?" "no. perhaps there isn't anything to tell. though i don't suppose he's exactly one of them dam' virgins. what do you know about him?" osterhout gave himself full time to debate the answer within himself before responding. "there was a raid last year on a notorious roadhouse near here. several of our best youth--if you reckon them by family--were caught. montgomery standish was one of them." "ugh!" shuddered pat. "a vile joint like that! why didn't you tell me before, bobs?" he shrugged his shoulders. "you'd have to go pretty wide of your own set to find a boy with a clean record. monty is no worse than the rest." "what _beasts_ men are!" "he might say, if he knew anything: 'what crooks girls are!'" "you don't mean that it's the same thing," said pat beneath her breath. "he goes to a rotten place, probably drunk----" "undoubtedly." "and--and---- oh, it makes me sick to think of it! it isn't the same. i may have been a silly little fool, but--oh, bobs! can't you understand?" "who was the man, bambina?" at the old term of affection her face softened. "can't you guess, bobs, dear?" she whispered. a blinding, burning illumination lighted up his memory of a hundred small, vitally significant facts, against which the sudden certainty stood forth, black and stark. "cary scott, by god!" pat's face was set. her eyes, sombre but fearless, answered him. "the damned scoundrel!" "he _isn't_." "isn't? a man of his age to come into a house as a friend and seduce an innocent child!" "he didn't seduce me any more than i seduced him." "don't talk infernal nonsense." "it's true; it's _true_, and you've got to believe it. it was as much my fault as his." "was it your fault that he left you, like a coward?" "he didn't. i sent him away. he wanted to get free and marry me, and he would have done it if i'd let him. he was terribly in love with me, bobs. monty doesn't love me that way. nobody ever will again." "well, why wouldn't you marry him?" queried the amazed physician. "oh, _i_ don't know." she gave her shoulders the childish petulant wriggle of old, again the _petite gamine_ of scott's patient love. "he's so old." "then why in the name----" "you're full of whys, bobs. it happened; that's all. nobody ever knows why nor how in these things, do they? i--i just lost my footing and drew him with me, if you want the truth of it." "i'm beginning to believe you. but i still think he's----" she flattened a hand gently across his lips. "no, you don't. he's the best man i've ever known. except, perhaps, you, bobs. if you were in monty's place and i came to you and told the whole thing you'd marry me anyway, wouldn't you?" "yes, of course." "but you don't think monty would?" "i didn't say so. he's very young and--and unformed." pat fell into a reverie. "it was really my mind that cary seduced. he drew my mind into his and--and sort of absorbed it, so that i couldn't get any satisfaction out of other associations. you wouldn't call him a damned scoundrel for that----" "i'm not so sure i wouldn't." "--but it's the thing he's most to blame for. it's worse than the other. it goes deeper." "you're getting profound, pat, as well as clever." in spite of his perturbation, the doctor smiled. "though you're talking casuistry." "i don't know what that is. i'm talking sense. i've almost forgotten that cary and i were lovers. but there's something way down deep in my mind that he'll never lose his hold on." "you're in love with him yet, then!" "i'm not!" she denied vehemently. "i'm in love with monty. violently." "i wish he were ten years older. or a thousand or so wiser. then i'd say, 'tell him the whole thing.' as it is, no. he's marrying your future, not your past. if you're going to play straight with him----" "absolutely!" she averred. "i won't look at another man after we're married." "what about that restlessness of the mind, though?" "all done with. what's the good? you have more fun if you're stupid.... you were always wanting me to marry somebody old enough to be my grandfather, bobs, but----" "ah, yes," he cut in grimly. "now you're going to answer me some questions. how came you to know that, about my wanting you to marry a man over thirty?" "if i tell you, you'll be paralysed." "go ahead. paralyse me." "i read it in your letters." "what letters?" he asked, stupefied. "the ones to mother. oh, bobs, i think they were too flawless. no one but a darling like you could have written them." "wait a moment." he put his hand to his head. his science-circumscribed world of materialism was toppling about him. "how did you know about them? that i was writing them? where to find them?" "mother told me." "mona? pat, i want the truth." "i'm giving it to you. before she died, when i saw her there in new york, she told me how she had made you promise to write and put the letters in the safe; and the real reason was, not that she thought she would ever come back to read them, but she thought you were the wisest and best man in the world, and she knew how fond you were of all of us, and she wanted me to know what you thought and be guided by what you said. i suppose she figured that you'd say more about me that way than you ever would to me. so you did." osterhout gave a great laugh, partly of relief, partly of tenderness. "that's so like mona! her passion for intrigue, just for the sake of the game itself; her eternal loving cleverness. there are mighty few people, pat, in whom affection is a thing of the mind as well as the heart. your mother was one of them." "so'm i," asserted pat promptly. "what's the matter now, bobs?" for his face had altered again, his brow drawing heavily down, his eyes become still and brooding. "it won't do, pat. you're not telling me the truth. not the whole truth. after your mother died, i changed the combination of the safe." the girl's laugh had a queer, strained quality. "i know you did. what of it?" "how could you get the letters to read?" "i couldn't, at first." "but you claim that you did. how?" "well--it was a dream. at least, it must have been a dream. or else--i don't know. mother came back one night and took me by the hand and led me into her room to the safe, and when i woke up the door was open and the numbers of the combination were in my brain as clearly as if someone had just spoken them in my ear." "were you frightened, pat?" "not a bit. isn't it strange? after that i could open it myself, any time." "pat, do you really think," he began hoarsely, and stopped. "do i think it was her spirit? i don't know. it was _something_." "it was something," he repeated. "something from the other side. a lifting of the curtain. for you; not for me. well," he sighed, "no more letters." "why not?" "why should there be? whatever i've got to say to you i can say direct, now that the secret is out. it was really to you that i was writing all the time, so it appears." "it wasn't. it was to her. how do you know she doesn't know; doesn't read them--and love them? you must keep them up, bobs." he shook his head. but his veiled glance roved to the mahogany desk in the corner. instantly pat interpreted it: "there's one there. an unfinished one. let me read it." "as you like. it's only just begun. about your engagement. it doesn't matter anyway now. a lost illusion." from a locked secret drawer he took the letter, only a single sheet. an inspiration came to pat. "i'm going to add a p. s. may i?" "yes." seating herself she ran through the few brief words, then wrote busily. having finished she leaned back in her chair to consider her companion. "bobs," she announced with deliberation: "i think i'll let you read what i've written. shall i?" he held out his hand. she put the missive into it. he read: "dearest: bobs thinks he is still in love with you. he means to be faithful, poor old boy. but he really loves dee. she knows it, way inside her; the way women know. and she is coming to care for him, too. that is why she is so shy and stand-offish with him; not a bit like con and me. but he hasn't the sense to see it. it's time he knew it; that both of them knew it. poor, brave old jimmie-jams is going to pass out one of these days, and be rid of all his pains. he knows it; he told me last week--we're the greatest pals ever--that he wouldn't last a year. there was someone else that dee was crazy about; but she's given that up. it's over. so when jimmie-jams passes along it's up to bobs, if he's a man and not an old fossil, to step forward. dee's been a widow long enough. that is what you would want for them both, isn't it, dear? i know it is." osterhout walked over to the window. his face was white, his bulky frame trembling. the betraying sheet of paper fluttered away from his fingers. suddenly warm arms were about his neck; soft lips were pressed to his cheek; a breath that wavered against his ear like a fragrant breeze of spring formed the words, gaily spoken: "oh, bobs! who cares a darn for a lost illusion when the reality is so much sweeter!" chapter xxxiii from the time when dr. osterhout assured her of her secret's safety, pat knew that she must tell her fiancé, before the wedding. some quirk of feminine psychology would have justified her in concealment, so long as there was risk. the chances of the game! but to go forward upon the path of marriage in perfect safety and with an unsuspecting mate--that was, in her mind, _mean_. curiosity, too, that restless, morbid craving to know what exciting thing would result, pressed her. the daring experimentalist was rampant within her. how would monty take it? what would he do? ... how should she tell him?... opportunity paved the way. a group of her set were at holiday knoll on a saturday evening, discussing the local sensation of the day. generously measured highballs had been distributed, and in the dim conservatory, lighted only by the glow of cigarettes, they discussed the event. a betrothed girl of another suburb had committed suicide after the breaking of her engagement and gossip ascribed the tragedy to the inopportune discovery of an old love affair. with the freedom of the modern flapper, margaret thorne, half lying in the arms of nick torrance on the settee, declared the position: "it was the teddy barnaby business. two years ago we all thought they were engaged." "weren't they?" asked someone. "more or less," asseverated the sprightly miss thorne. "chiefly more, from all accounts. then johnny dupuy came here to live, and she shifted her young affections to him and caught him." "do you think he found out about teddy?" "sure--like--a--bible." "how?" "why pick on me for a hard one like that?" "perhaps she told him," suggested one of the other girls. "she wouldn't be such a boob; no girl would," offered a languid girlish voice. "it'd be the square thing to do." this was a masculine opinion, and jejune, even for that crowd. "don't know--yah!" declared miss thorne, meaning to express her contempt for this view. "it was up to dupuy to look in the mare's mouth before he bought." the discussion played about the subject with daring sallies and prurient relish, the final conclusion of the majority being that the fiancé had "got wise" and the girl had killed herself because he broke the engagement, "as any fellow would" (monty standish's contribution, this last). "what if she did go to him and own up?" suggested selden thorpe. "it'd be just the same," opined standish. "he'd have to quit." "oh, i don't know. it doesn't follow." "wouldn't you?" "i don't know that i would. it depends." "you'd be a pretty poor sort of fish if you wouldn't." "maybe, if i thought as you do. but we don't all think the same." "some of us don't think at all," put in pat acidly. "we just talk." "meaning which, treechy?" inquired torrance. "oh, nothing!" "i know john dupuy," proceeded thorpe. "he isn't just exactly the one to draw lines too strictly." "i grant you that johnnie would never win the diamond-set chastity belt of the world's championship," said the daring miss thorne, and elicited a chorus of appreciative mirth. pat did not join in it. she was thinking fast and hard. after the rest had gone monty stayed on, as of right. something in pat's expression struck even his torpid perceptions, as he put his arm around her and drew her to him for the customary "petting party." "what's all the gloom about, sweetie?" she released herself not over-gently. "monty, would you have done what dupuy did?" "how do you mean?" "broken off your engagement--on _that_ account?" "why, yes. any fellow would." a convincing reason, for him. "selden thorpe wouldn't." "i'll bet he would. he's a bluff. he makes me sick." "well--then--you'd better break ours." "i don't get you, pat." "it's been the same with me as with elsie dowden. i've been meaning to tell you." "i don't believe it," he said violently. "it's a try-on. a trick." "it's true. you've got to believe it." "who's the man?" bayed monty like a huge dog. "i'll never tell you." he gathered his powerful frame together as if to spring upon her. if he did, if he beat her to the ground, choked her into helplessness, pat thought, she would hate him and love him for it. but his rage ebbed, impotent of its culmination, a little pitiful, a little ridiculous. "wh-wh-what did you do it for?" it was almost a whimper. "i don't know. i didn't mean to--at the beginning." "did you love him?" "yes. i thought i did." "you love him now," he charged, his fury mounting again. "i don't! i love you." "this is a hell of a thing to tell a man you say you love," he faltered plaintively. "you'd rather i hadn't told you. i'm not built that way! i had to tell." instantly he was suspicious. "had to? why did you _have_ to?" "not for any reason that you'd understand." the slight emphasis on the "you" was the first touch of bitterness she had allowed herself. "wouldn't he marry you?" "i wouldn't marry him." monty perceptibly brightened. pat's womanly intuitions, supersensitised by the strain of the contest, told her why. if, to his male standards, she was a maiden despoiled, she was at least not a woman scorned; her rating had gone up sensibly. "where is he now?" "i don't know. i haven't seen him for a long time. i'll never see him again." "pat," with an air of resolute magnanimity--"if you'll tell me who it was i'll marry you anyway." at that her pale cheeks flamed. "i'm not begging you to marry me, monty. i'm not that cheap in the market." "you _want_ our engagement broken?" "that's up to you. absolutely. if you think, now i've told you, that you're so much better and purer than i am because i've done what i did----" "what d'you mean, better and purer?" "i suppose you've never had any affair with any girl----" "are you trying to pretend to believe that's the same thing?" his voice was incredulous, contemptuous. "why isn't it the same thing?" young mr. standish suffered a paralysis of scandalised amazement. "because it isn't! for god's sake! you talk like one of those radical freaks that spout on soapboxes." "i'm not so sure they aren't right about this man-and-woman thing," declared pat recklessly. in so speaking she felt that she had broken with conventionalities far more than in anything, however bold, previously enunciated in their talk. monty's square jaw became ugly. "i'm giving you your chance. you won't tell me the man's name?" pat preserved the silence of obstinacy. it was more convincing than any negative. also more exasperating. "good-_night_!" bellowed her lover, and strode from the room. almost immediately he was back, endued with a sad and noble expression. "nobody shall ever know about this from me, pat. you're safe." for three nights pat washed her troubled soul with tears. her family knew that there had been a lovers' quarrel; that was all. pat waited for monty to break the engagement formally or send her word that he wished her to break it. through all her grief of bereavement which, she repeatedly told herself, was the most sorrowful depth that her life had yet touched, that any life could touch, she impatiently awaited the definite solution. relief from the strain of uncertainty; that was what she craved. on the fourth evening monty reappeared. all his nobleness was gone. he was haggard, nerve-racked, forlorn. he threw himself upon her compassion. he implored her. he would forgive everything; he would forget everything; he would make no conditions, if only she would take him back. life without her---- "all right, monty-boy," said pat, really affected by his suffering. "i haven't changed. i love you, monty. but if ever you let what i've told you make any difference, if ever you speak of it or let me know that you even think of it, i'm _through_. that minute and forever." humbly, abjectly, the upholder of man's superior privilege accepted the absurd condition. the stronger nature had completely dominated the weaker. back in his arms again, pat savoured the delicious warmth of a passion the more ardent for the threat of frustration; the triumph of a crisis valorously met and successfully passed. but an encroaching thought tainted the rapture of the moment. what was it that he himself had so confidently said to selden thorpe? was her splendid and beautiful young lover, holding the views which he had proclaimed and surrendering them so readily, indeed "a poor sort of fish"? chapter xxxiv again pat was happy in her engagement. she frequently and insistently assured herself that she was. certainly she had no just complaint of monty. he was all that a lover should be when they were together; he kept to his pact and never in any manner referred to pat's confession. but when he was away she sometimes wished that he wouldn't write so often, or, at least, expect her to answer so regularly. his letters added nothing to his charm. they innocently bristled with i's; but it was the monotony rather than the egotism of his style that annoyed her. her answers, at first ardent, vivid and flashing like herself, soon became mere chronicles of petty events, interspersed with protestations of love. they were temporarily genuine enough, these latter, since each time he was with her she was re-warmed in the glow of their mutual passion. but she could not stifle all misgivings. incompetent though she was to analyse comprehensively her changeful emotions, she nevertheless had disturbing gleams of self-knowledge which added nothing to her confidence in a future whereof monty standish was to be a large part. pat dimly recognised herself for that difficult and composite type of girlhood which, though imperatively sexed, will never fulfill itself through physical attraction and physical satisfactions alone. for such as she there must be the double response; if the mating be not both mentally and physically sufficient, ultimate disaster is inevitable. brooding upon these self-suspicions she would fall into moods of silence and withdrawal puzzling to the matter-of-fact lover who would sometimes grow quite petulant over her perfunctory responses to his good-humoured ineffectualities of companionship. once when he rallied her upon this she burst into angry tears and snapped out: "i'm so dam' worn with piffle and prattle," and darted upstairs. but at their next meeting she was so prettily contrite and yielding that his vanity was quite soothed. as the wedding day drew near, pat dismissed whatever doubts she may have had, in the excitement of fitting-out. it was on one of these shopping expeditions, when she had gone into town by train, her runabout having suffered an attack of nervous breakdown, that, crossing the station plaza she came face to face with an old but unforgotten acquaintance. she saw his keen pleasant face light up, could read in his half-dismayed expression the struggle to remember exactly who she was, and went to him, holding out her hand: "you've forgotten me, mr. warren graves." he took the hand. "indeed, i haven't! it's pat. little pat." she nodded. "better than i gave you credit for." "i'm awfully sorry, but i have forgotten the rest of it." "pat'll do," she laughed. "no; but let me think back." "want any help?" "it was a party, somewhere about here. a corking party. i'd had one drink that i remember and some more that i don't. a funny, delightful kiddie was floating around outside like cinderella. she wouldn't go in and dance with me, but--let me think----" "i wouldn't think too far," urged pat, her face tinged with pink. "ah, but i've got the name now!" he cried, triumphant and tactful at once. "fentriss. miss patricia fentriss, alias pat, alias the infant, alias the demon----" "what a relieving memory you've got!" "--who stood at the bend of the stairs and said good-night so sweetly that i never quite got over it. but, i say; you _have_ grown up." he looked at her piquant, provocative, welcoming face and continued, with a gleam of mischief in his eyes: "now that i'm recovering from the shock i seem to recall an older sister protruding from a door most inopportunely." "aren't you afraid you'll miss your train, mr. graves?" "i'm not going to the train." "you're carrying that satchel for exercise?" "i'm wishing it onto the parcels stand while i take a delightful young lady to luncheon." "surely you must be keeping her waiting." "i'm daring to hope she'll come with me while i pry myself from this baggage. will you, pat?" "oh; you're asking me to lunch with you?" "such is my dark and deadly purpose." "i ought not to. but i want to." he laughed delightedly. "you haven't changed a bit inside and most marvellously outside. then you'll come?" "you'd make a fortune as a mind-reader. there's a condition though." "name it; it's agreed to." "that you'll forget all about that foolishness of ours at the party. i was only fourteen." it was his turn to flush. "you make me ashamed of myself," he said with such charming sincerity that pat let fall a friendly and forgiving hand upon his arm for a second. "but let me tell you this. when i left your house that night i was more than a little in love with you. oh, calf-love, doubtless. but--it makes it a little better, doesn't it?" "yes," answered pat gravely. "it makes it a lot better--for both of us." "then we'll forget all of it that you'd wish forgotten," said he. in her italicised moments pat would have described the luncheon that followed as "_too_ enticing." but pat did not feel stressful in the company of warren graves; she felt quiet and attentive, and wonderfully receptive to the breath of the greater world which he brought to her. he had been in the diplomatic service since the war, in several european capitals, had read and thought and mingled with men who were making or marring not the politics alone, but the very geography of the malleable earth. after a little light talk, in which pat was conscious that he was trying her out, the _rapprochement_ of their minds was established and he settled down to talk with her as if she had been a woman of the international world in which he moved. her swift, apprehensive intelligence kept him up to his best form. as the coffee was finished he said reproachfully: "you've made me chatter my head off. and i'm supposed to have rather a gift for silence. how do you work your spells?" "by being sunk in admiring interest," she answered, smiling up at him as she put on her gloves. "you've given me the most delightful hour i've had for years." "but it needn't end here, need it?" he protested anxiously. "don't you want to go to a matinée, or something?" "there aren't any. it's friday." "so it is. but there are always the movies." pat knew that she ought not to go; there were a dozen important errands to be done. but: "oh, very well," she said. duties could wait. pleasure was something you had to grab before it got away from you. the philosophy of the flapper. at the "motion picture palace" they got box seats, the chairs suggestively close together. she wondered whether he would try to hold her hand; also whether she would let him if he did. probably she would; there was no harm in that, and it gave a pleasant sense of companionship. most of the boys with whom she went to the theatre or movies expected it. apparently warren graves didn't. he made no move in that direction. piqued a little, nevertheless pat liked him the better for it. monty might perhaps have objected if he knew. and, with a start, she discovered that only just then had she thought of monty standish. he had been, for the time, quite forgotten in the interest of a more enlivening and demanding association. what the "serial" of the play was, pat could hardly have told; "some hurrah about the west," she informed t. jameson james afterward. at the conclusion of it there came a "news feature," showing scenes about the building where the league of nations session was being held. various noted personages appeared, walked with the knee-slung, unnatural stalk of the screen across the space, and vanished. then it was as if a blinding flash had been projected from the square. an unforgettable figure stood out amidst the crowd, the face turned toward her, the eyes, with the faint ironic lift of the brows, looking down into her soul, arousing a tumult and a throbbing which left her hardly breath enough to gasp out: "cary scott!" "do you know scott?" asked her escort interestedly. "yes. he used to visit in dorrisdale. do you?" "quite well. everyone on the inside in europe knows him; he's one of the men who are doing big things under the surface at the conference." "tell me," urged pat as they left the place. he sketched scott's career as confidential adviser to several of the most important of the protagonists in that titans' struggle. "he's a sort of liaison officer, knowing france and this country as he does. he's had a rather rough time of it, lately, poor chap." "is he ill?" pat had a struggle to control her voice. "no. a domestic smash. his wife--that was--is a demonish sort of female. however, he's got well rid of her now. to be accurate, he let her get rid of him. over-decent of him, all things considered." "perhaps she had cause, too." pat hated herself as she said it. but she craved to know. "nothing of that kind," was the positive reply. "scott has been living like an anchorite. they say he was hard hit here in america. as to that, i don't know. certainly he has been devoting himself to his work with no room for any other devotion. which is more than can be said of his ex-wife." "i never met her," pat heard her voice saying, and quite admired it for its tone of casual interest. "she didn't come to dorrisdale." "speaking of dorrisdale, i'm at washington for a while. mayn't i run up to see you?" "no. i'm afraid not." "that's a little--disappointing." "you see, i'm going to be terribly busy until my wedding." "wedding? oh! all my felicitations. i didn't know." "yes. i'm to be married to monty standish next month." even as her lips spoke the words her soul denied them. in the dominant depths of her, she knew that she could never marry monty standish now. her thoughts, so lightly detached from her fiancé by the easy charm of warren graves, had been claimed, coerced, irrevocably absorbed by the swift-passing phantom presentment of her former lover. the bond created when she had given herself to him was as nothing compared to this imperative summons across the spaces. after a night of passionate struggle, succeeded by resolute thinking, she wired monty to come on. when he came, she broke the engagement. it was ruthless, cruel, unfair. pat had no excuses, no extenuations to offer. she simply stood firm. monty returned to college, failed of his graduation, and let it be known among his indignant friends and relatives that pat had ruined his career. hot and righteous though his wrath was, he never so much as hinted at pat's secret. stupid, unstable, self-satisfied, spoiled; the plaster idol of an athlete-worshipping age; but nevertheless a gentleman within whom one flame of honour burned clear and constant behind its dull encasement. pat's family variously raged, begged, and protested. pat let them. they prophesied social ostracism for her. she shrugged away the suggestion as improbable in the first place and not worth worrying about anyway. but she would have gone away had it not been for her self-assumed responsibility to her broken brother-in-law. and it was from him that her main support came. from the first he stood by her unquestioning. "you're awfully good to me, jimmie-jams," she said one day as she was wheeling him in the garden, having dismissed the attendant. "what did you really think when i told you i wasn't going to marry monty?" a smile of justified cleverness lighted up his pain-worn face. "i'd never thought that you would." "cute little jimmie! why not?" "too much brains. he'd never keep you interested and you found it out in time." "not too soon," observed the girl with a grimace. "the family are still raising merry hades about it." "naturally. you don't think you're entitled to any sunday-school award for good behaviour on the thing, do you?" "no. i don't," admitted pat. but she pouted. a silence fell between them. it lasted for a full turn around the garden. tired of pouting, pat broke it. "want to play bezique, jimmie?" "no." "want me to read to you?" "no, dear." "what the devil do you want? oh, i'm sorry, jimmie! i believe i've got nerves. never knew there were such things before." "pat, stop the chair." "what's the idea, jimmie?" "come around here where i can see you." "as per order." "i know the man." "what man?" "the other man." "i've been acquainted with several of 'em in my life." "so i've been given to understand. i'm talking about the man on whose account you broke your engagement." "you're seeing things, jimmie. monty himself is the nigger in that woodpile." "what about cary scott?" the look with which she faced him did not waver. "well, what about him?" "he's coming back." "coming back? here?" still her eyes were steady, but there was the faintest catch in her breathing. "well, no; he isn't. i just said that as an experiment. though, of course, he might come if you wanted him. you do want him, don't you, pat dear?" "sometimes. other times i don't. how did you know?" "when you've nothing to do but think," he explained, "you get tired of thinking about yourself by and by and begin to think about other people. i've been thinking a lot about you since we got to be pals." "you're a dear, jimmie-jams." "i'm an old crab. but i'm fond of you. and scott was good to me, too, when i was first laid up. when you think hard enough about people you're fond of you begin to see things about them, even things they may not see, themselves." "even things that maybe aren't there at all," she mocked. "this is there," he asseverated. "there's no use your pretending. when we talk i'm always catching echoes of scott's influence in what you say. you're a different pat from what you were before you knew him. i don't think you get on so well with yourself." "you _are_ clever, jimmie. i don't. and it makes me furious." "at him?" "yes. i don't know. at myself, too." "i had a letter from him last week. we've carried on a desultory correspondence since he left." pat's eyes livened. "what does he say about me?" "how do you know he says anything about you?" "don't tease. tell pattie." "you ought to know scott well enough to realise that he isn't the sort to display his feelings in a show window. but there are lines that one could read between. have you written to him, pat?" "no." "aren't you going to send for him?" her face darkened with troubled memories. "i couldn't. you don't understand. i couldn't, jimmie." "i could write." "you shan't. you mustn't; if you do i'll hate you. promise." "all right. i promise. but don't you really want to see him ever again?" "sometimes i think i'll die if i don't," she said simply. "other times--i don't know." "why not find out? won't you let me write?" "no; no. you've promised." "very well. i'll keep to it. take me inside, slave." he did not write. he cabled. chapter xxxv faint spice of budding clematis was fragrant in the air at holiday knoll. on her way to the street pat passed through the arbour with a little, warm shiver of recollection. how long ago that other october seemed, that night when, amidst the scents and seductions of the year's late warmth she had opened her arms and her lips to cary scott in that first, unforgettable red kiss of their passion; how far away; how deep buried under other, varied experiences! would he ever come back? it was many weeks since james had talked of him, suggesting the possibility, and the subject had not again been brought up. would she really want him back if she could have him? and what would she do with him if he came? or he with her? or fate with them both? pat had become a good deal of a fatalist. it was a convenient theory and dovetailed neatly with her religion, enabling her to compound with her conscience at the smallest expense of self-blame. fate, she felt, had saved her from marrying monty standish, which was a large count to its credit. chiefly because of monty she was now going down to the village. for he was due back after a long absence for repairs to his damaged heart, and the local old cats had prophesied that pat would leave town, for a time anyway, "if she possesses a grain of decent feeling." pat purposed to do nothing of the sort. neither monty standish nor any other living specimen of the male sex could run her off the public streets! for excuse she had some marketing to do, and she set forth with her most nonchalant air and independent shoulder swing. she'd show 'em whether she was ashamed or afraid to meet monty! after pervading the town for a while she would run over for her daily chatter with jimmie-jams. jimmie was growing very frail and weary and had a look of eager, anxious expectancy, these days. pat thought that she knew what he was waiting for. there would be a big void in her life when jimmie got his release. emerging from the fruit shop where she hoped to find an avocado pear for him, she saw a man standing on the curb. his back was turned, but there was that in the set of his shoulders, the slender grace of the figure, the poise of the head which startled her heart to one great throb of excited delight. here, indeed, was relief from dull days, food for that greed of excitement, of "thrill," which life had not yet begun to sate for her. "_mist_-er scott!" he whirled about. his face lighted up. taking the hand which she held out, he said, with the old, mocking half-lift of the brows: "still that, pat?" "what are you doing in dorrisdale?" "i've just been telephoning miss patricia fentriss." "she's out." "so i was informed. i begin to suspect it's true." both laughed. pat, quite charmed with herself for the light and easy manner in which she was carrying off this potentially difficult situation, committed the error of looking up into his eyes. there she read a hunger and a want that made her avert her gaze. she sought hurriedly for something to say. "i didn't even know that you were in this country." "i wasn't until last night." he had fallen into step beside her. "i was going to the jameses'," she remarked a little lamely. "i go there every morning." "yes; i know. james has written me. you make life bearable for him. it's rather wonderful of you, pat." "i like to go there," she said in disclaimer of his praise. "will you come with me?" "yes; if i may." for two squares that was his only remark. pat grew restless. "you're not too conversational," she complained. "i was thinking," he said quietly; "how very lovely you've grown." "have i, cary?" the soft echo of the old, throaty crow was in her voice. "i ought to be a ruin. i've had troubles enough." "troubles? you? haven't you been well?" "d'you think that's the only kind of trouble a girl can have? there are others! i came near having the worst of 'em four months ago." "why then?" "date of my wedding," said pat briefly, with intent to create a sensation. she failed. "yes; i heard you were to have been married," he remarked calmly. "and the rest of it?" "that you broke off your engagement? yes." "who told you?" "i found a letter when the ship docked. from james." pat's eyes snapped with suspicion. "did jimmie write you to come back here? from europe, i mean." "he cabled." "jimmie's a---- never mind what he is. i'll tell him to his face, when we get there." but when they got there t. jameson james, it seemed, was not feeling very brisk. well enough to have them come up to his room; oh, yes, that; and warmly glad to see scott again. after a few moments' talk, however, he displayed symptoms of weariness. he even hinted that he would be better off for the time without visitors. pat, with the perverseness of her excitement and anticipations, insisted on staying to read to her brother-in-law as usual. this he vetoed outright. "no. i don't want you. i'm sleepy. take scott over to the knoll for luncheon. he's probably famished. and dee had to go to town, so there's nothing to be had here. run along." her hand being thus forced, pat issued the invitation, and she and scott left the sick-room. but they had not reached the front door when she turned and darted upstairs again. throwing herself down by the cripple's couch she caught his head to her bosom and cherished it there. "oh, jimmie! you promise-breaker. you old liar! i adore you." she pressed a swift kiss on his cheek and was gone. mr. t. jameson james made a face at the devil and chuckled himself to sleep. rejoining scott outside pat commanded: "tell me everything you've been doing in the big, big world." he was unprotestingly obedient, cheerfully impersonal throughout the walk to the knoll. but never had she been more conscious of the quiet compulsion of his charm. her arms ached for him. they entered the house by the side door. instinctively pat turned toward the conservatory, but some inexplicable revulsion of feeling checked her. "no; not there," she said. "let's go to the library." no sooner had the door closed behind them, than she turned to his embrace not so much yielding to as claiming him back. after the long kiss she stood away from him, but with her hands still clinging upon his shoulders. "that makes it seem all real again," she breathed. "have you grown so far away from me as that, my darling?" "well, i was going to marry monty standish, you know," she reminded him. "yes. why didn't you?" "i couldn't. you were in the way." "pat! that's what i've feared and dreaded more than----" "wait. it isn't what you think. and it isn't all. before i was engaged to monty i ran away with a boy to boston. and you spoiled that." "i don't understand," he said dully. "i left him before--well, before anything. because"--she whirled away from him, flung herself upon the lounge, and blew him an airy kiss--"because i happened to think of you at the wrong time. or perhaps it was the right time. anyway, his collar gaped. like a sick fish. and yours always set so beautifully. so i beat it." she was all _petite gamine_ now. "you're always getting in my way, cary. aren't you 'shamed?" he smiled at her his little twisted, tolerant smile. "you don't change much, do you, little pat?" "oh, i'm fer-rightfully changed. much more serious. years older. lost my girlish illusions. all that sorta thing. you won't like me nearly as much, you're so serious yourself." her eyes blazed with enjoyment of the situation and the excitement of his proximity. "most of the time i haven't believed it, though. have you?" "believed what, pat?" "about us. all of it, i mean. that we were--lovers. it got to seem like a dream to me; something way, far off. in another life. or like something that had happened to some other girl. it didn't seem real to me, not even when i told monty." "ah, you told him?" "had to. what'd you think i'd do?" "knowing your courage and honour, that's what i'd think you'd do." the hard, excited glitter softened out of her eyes. "i knew you'd want me to, cary. of course i never told him who the man was." "and is that what----" "what broke the engagement? it did for a while. then he came back. but i couldn't stand it. nothing above the ears, cary. it wasn't even the first dreaming for me. you remember what you said that day you drove me over to cissie's about my marrying, and about keeping you in the background of my mind?" "yes." "but you don't stay there," she complained childishly. "you're always popping out and spoiling things." she gave him a challenging look. "i was sort of keeping you for my second dreaming." scott laughed. "pat, dearest, are you flirting with me after i've come four thousand miles----" "what did you come for?" "for you." her loosely clasped hands stirred and parted. "well--here i am." "that's not enough." "you don't want much, do you?" she murmured. "everything or nothing now. you know i'm free." she nodded. "i can see what's coming," she said with a pretence of demureness. "if you've hopped across those four thousand miles from a sense of duty to the weeping girl that you left behind----" "_pat!_" "don't bark at me. it frazzles my nerves. i haven't done any weeping over you, cary. too busy with the thrills of life. would you have come back, i wonder, if you could have known everything that's been going on. suppose i'd stayed in boston that time?" "well?" "wouldn't that make a difference?" "in my wanting to marry you? no." "suppose," she said more slowly, "i'd had an affair, a real affair with monty. like ours." a spasm of pain passed over his face. "i shouldn't blame you. how could i?" "wouldn't it make any difference in your loving me?" "not an iota." "wouldn't you even _care_?" she flashed in resentful wrath. "care? good god, pat, if you saw a man in torture----" "oh, don't, cary, dear," she cried, startled and remorseful. "it isn't true. it's just my sneaking, rotten curiosity to know how you'd feel about it." she pursed her lips, musing darkly. "i wonder," she began. "have you been true to me? not that i've got any right to ask or that it makes a bit of difference in my young life whether you have or not, but just----" she broke off, leaning forward, studying his face as he looked at her in silence. "_cary!_ why don't you say something? i _would_ care. i'd care like hell." "i came back," he said slowly, "because you are the one and only woman in the world for me and always have been since i saw you. is that enough answer?" "from any other man in the world it wouldn't be an answer at all. from you it's enough." "will you marry me, pat?" she jumped to her feet, walked over to the window, and looked out to where the clematis blooms trembled in the wind. "oh, i suppose so," she said fretfully. "if you want to take the chance." "what chance, dear love?" "the chance every man takes that marries a girl of the kind you men all seem to want to marry. how many of the married set here d'you suppose are true to their husbands?" "i don't like you cynical, pat. you've been letting something poison your mind." "not me. i see things as they are; that's all. ask con. ask dee. ask bobs. ask any of 'em. you know you could have had con if you'd really wanted her. and then i butted in." her chuckle was full of diablerie. it still persisted in her tone as she continued: "cary, what would you do to me if i went straying off the reservation after we were married?" "nothing." "oh, don't be so calm and superior and noble about it," she fretted. "you'd tempt an angel to try a flutter just to see whether she would get by with it." "what do you want me to say, pat?" "i want you to tell me honestly how you think you're going to hold me if i do marry you." "come over here." she walked across to him, defiant, daring, provocative. "well?" "you love me, don't you, pat?" "you make me when you're with me." "and when i'm not?" "that's just the trouble. you're there all the time, parked just around the corner and you won't let me love anybody else enough to--to do any good." "and if i asked you now," he said, low and insistent, "you'd come back to me and be to me what you were before. wouldn't you?" there was a quickening in her shadowed eyes, in her soft breathing. "you know i would," she whispered. "how could i help myself?" "then you couldn't very well marry anyone else, could you?" "i've tried. it was a fliv, as you know. what's the answer?" "isn't it plain enough? why not try me--on your own terms?" "where do you get that 'own term' stuff, cary?" she demanded suspiciously. "do you know about dee and jimmie; their arrangement?" "no." "it's a secret. but you belong to us," she added sweetly; "to the fentrisses. so i'll tell you. they were to stay married for a month and after that if either of them wanted to quit, they were just to live like unmarried people without any fuss. only jimmie wouldn't keep to it. that's what made the row." "would you like to try that plan?" he asked in an inscrutable tone. "would you do it?" she looked at him doubtfully. "would you really let me go after a month if i wanted to?" "after a day. do you think i'd try to hold you against your wish?" "then i don't think you can love me much," she objected with perverse jealousy. "it strikes me as a perfectly fair bargain to both. i certainly ought to be willing to take the chance," he said reasonably, "if you are." "if _i_ am! cary! you mean that you--might--want--to leave _me_?" a startled incredulity made the words jerky. "one can never be quite certain how these things are going to turn out, can one?" he observed with a fine air of judicial detachment. "shall i have my lawyer draw the agreement?" "cary; you're laughing at me," she accused. "far be it from me, in a matter of such serious import----" "you are! you're hateful! it isn't fair. you know that's the way to hold me and you know you don't mean to let me get loose for a single minute. i don't like your knowing so dam' much about women," she continued plaintively. "it makes it so uneven." "i'm trying to be fair," he pointed out. he drew a chair up to the writing desk. "suppose i just sketch out the scheme. 'this agreement,' he dictated to himself, speaking the words slowly, 'between patricia fentriss----'" "scott," she interposed. "--scott--thank you, dearest--and--cary--scott--for--the--space--of--one--month--after----" she bent across his shoulder, put a soft hand over his mouth, then slipped it aside to make place for the yearning of her own lips. when she finally leaned back from him it was to say judicially: "i offer an amendment. let's make it twenty years instead of a month. but, oh, cary, darling!" her eyes darkened, brooded, dreamed, grew sombre, subtle, prophetic as she gave voice to her warning. "as a husband you'll have to be a terribly on-the-job lover. there are so many men in the world!" finis the age of innocence by edith wharton jtable jtable book i i. on a january evening of the early seventies, christine nilsson was singing in faust at the academy of music in new york. though there was already talk of the erection, in remote metropolitan distances "above the forties," of a new opera house which should compete in costliness and splendour with those of the great european capitals, the world of fashion was still content to reassemble every winter in the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable old academy. conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the "new people" whom new york was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to; and the sentimental clung to it for its historic associations, and the musical for its excellent acoustics, always so problematic a quality in halls built for the hearing of music. it was madame nilsson's first appearance that winter, and what the daily press had already learned to describe as "an exceptionally brilliant audience" had gathered to hear her, transported through the slippery, snowy streets in private broughams, in the spacious family landau, or in the humbler but more convenient "brown coupe." to come to the opera in a brown coupe was almost as honourable a way of arriving as in one's own carriage; and departure by the same means had the immense advantage of enabling one (with a playful allusion to democratic principles) to scramble into the first brown conveyance in the line, instead of waiting till the cold-and-gin congested nose of one's own coachman gleamed under the portico of the academy. it was one of the great livery-stableman's most masterly intuitions to have discovered that americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it. when newland archer opened the door at the back of the club box the curtain had just gone up on the garden scene. there was no reason why the young man should not have come earlier, for he had dined at seven, alone with his mother and sister, and had lingered afterward over a cigar in the gothic library with glazed black-walnut bookcases and finial-topped chairs which was the only room in the house where mrs. archer allowed smoking. but, in the first place, new york was a metropolis, and perfectly aware that in metropolises it was "not the thing" to arrive early at the opera; and what was or was not "the thing" played a part as important in newland archer's new york as the inscrutable totem terrors that had ruled the destinies of his forefathers thousands of years ago. the second reason for his delay was a personal one. he had dawdled over his cigar because he was at heart a dilettante, and thinking over a pleasure to come often gave him a subtler satisfaction than its realisation. this was especially the case when the pleasure was a delicate one, as his pleasures mostly were; and on this occasion the moment he looked forward to was so rare and exquisite in quality that--well, if he had timed his arrival in accord with the prima donna's stage-manager he could not have entered the academy at a more significant moment than just as she was singing: "he loves me--he loves me not--he loves me!--" and sprinkling the falling daisy petals with notes as clear as dew. she sang, of course, "m'ama!" and not "he loves me," since an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the german text of french operas sung by swedish artists should be translated into italian for the clearer understanding of english-speaking audiences. this seemed as natural to newland archer as all the other conventions on which his life was moulded: such as the duty of using two silver-backed brushes with his monogram in blue enamel to part his hair, and of never appearing in society without a flower (preferably a gardenia) in his buttonhole. "m'ama ... non m'ama ..." the prima donna sang, and "m'ama!", with a final burst of love triumphant, as she pressed the dishevelled daisy to her lips and lifted her large eyes to the sophisticated countenance of the little brown faust-capoul, who was vainly trying, in a tight purple velvet doublet and plumed cap, to look as pure and true as his artless victim. newland archer, leaning against the wall at the back of the club box, turned his eyes from the stage and scanned the opposite side of the house. directly facing him was the box of old mrs. manson mingott, whose monstrous obesity had long since made it impossible for her to attend the opera, but who was always represented on fashionable nights by some of the younger members of the family. on this occasion, the front of the box was filled by her daughter-in-law, mrs. lovell mingott, and her daughter, mrs. welland; and slightly withdrawn behind these brocaded matrons sat a young girl in white with eyes ecstatically fixed on the stagelovers. as madame nilsson's "m'ama!" thrilled out above the silent house (the boxes always stopped talking during the daisy song) a warm pink mounted to the girl's cheek, mantled her brow to the roots of her fair braids, and suffused the young slope of her breast to the line where it met a modest tulle tucker fastened with a single gardenia. she dropped her eyes to the immense bouquet of lilies-of-the-valley on her knee, and newland archer saw her white-gloved finger-tips touch the flowers softly. he drew a breath of satisfied vanity and his eyes returned to the stage. no expense had been spared on the setting, which was acknowledged to be very beautiful even by people who shared his acquaintance with the opera houses of paris and vienna. the foreground, to the footlights, was covered with emerald green cloth. in the middle distance symmetrical mounds of woolly green moss bounded by croquet hoops formed the base of shrubs shaped like orange-trees but studded with large pink and red roses. gigantic pansies, considerably larger than the roses, and closely resembling the floral pen-wipers made by female parishioners for fashionable clergymen, sprang from the moss beneath the rose-trees; and here and there a daisy grafted on a rose-branch flowered with a luxuriance prophetic of mr. luther burbank's far-off prodigies. in the centre of this enchanted garden madame nilsson, in white cashmere slashed with pale blue satin, a reticule dangling from a blue girdle, and large yellow braids carefully disposed on each side of her muslin chemisette, listened with downcast eyes to m. capoul's impassioned wooing, and affected a guileless incomprehension of his designs whenever, by word or glance, he persuasively indicated the ground floor window of the neat brick villa projecting obliquely from the right wing. "the darling!" thought newland archer, his glance flitting back to the young girl with the lilies-of-the-valley. "she doesn't even guess what it's all about." and he contemplated her absorbed young face with a thrill of possessorship in which pride in his own masculine initiation was mingled with a tender reverence for her abysmal purity. "we'll read faust together ... by the italian lakes ..." he thought, somewhat hazily confusing the scene of his projected honey-moon with the masterpieces of literature which it would be his manly privilege to reveal to his bride. it was only that afternoon that may welland had let him guess that she "cared" (new york's consecrated phrase of maiden avowal), and already his imagination, leaping ahead of the engagement ring, the betrothal kiss and the march from lohengrin, pictured her at his side in some scene of old european witchery. he did not in the least wish the future mrs. newland archer to be a simpleton. he meant her (thanks to his enlightening companionship) to develop a social tact and readiness of wit enabling her to hold her own with the most popular married women of the "younger set," in which it was the recognised custom to attract masculine homage while playfully discouraging it. if he had probed to the bottom of his vanity (as he sometimes nearly did) he would have found there the wish that his wife should be as worldly-wise and as eager to please as the married lady whose charms had held his fancy through two mildly agitated years; without, of course, any hint of the frailty which had so nearly marred that unhappy being's life, and had disarranged his own plans for a whole winter. how this miracle of fire and ice was to be created, and to sustain itself in a harsh world, he had never taken the time to think out; but he was content to hold his view without analysing it, since he knew it was that of all the carefully-brushed, white-waistcoated, button-hole-flowered gentlemen who succeeded each other in the club box, exchanged friendly greetings with him, and turned their opera-glasses critically on the circle of ladies who were the product of the system. in matters intellectual and artistic newland archer felt himself distinctly the superior of these chosen specimens of old new york gentility; he had probably read more, thought more, and even seen a good deal more of the world, than any other man of the number. singly they betrayed their inferiority; but grouped together they represented "new york," and the habit of masculine solidarity made him accept their doctrine on all the issues called moral. he instinctively felt that in this respect it would be troublesome--and also rather bad form--to strike out for himself. "well--upon my soul!" exclaimed lawrence lefferts, turning his opera-glass abruptly away from the stage. lawrence lefferts was, on the whole, the foremost authority on "form" in new york. he had probably devoted more time than any one else to the study of this intricate and fascinating question; but study alone could not account for his complete and easy competence. one had only to look at him, from the slant of his bald forehead and the curve of his beautiful fair moustache to the long patent-leather feet at the other end of his lean and elegant person, to feel that the knowledge of "form" must be congenital in any one who knew how to wear such good clothes so carelessly and carry such height with so much lounging grace. as a young admirer had once said of him: "if anybody can tell a fellow just when to wear a black tie with evening clothes and when not to, it's larry lefferts." and on the question of pumps versus patent-leather "oxfords" his authority had never been disputed. "my god!" he said; and silently handed his glass to old sillerton jackson. newland archer, following lefferts's glance, saw with surprise that his exclamation had been occasioned by the entry of a new figure into old mrs. mingott's box. it was that of a slim young woman, a little less tall than may welland, with brown hair growing in close curls about her temples and held in place by a narrow band of diamonds. the suggestion of this headdress, which gave her what was then called a "josephine look," was carried out in the cut of the dark blue velvet gown rather theatrically caught up under her bosom by a girdle with a large old-fashioned clasp. the wearer of this unusual dress, who seemed quite unconscious of the attention it was attracting, stood a moment in the centre of the box, discussing with mrs. welland the propriety of taking the latter's place in the front right-hand corner; then she yielded with a slight smile, and seated herself in line with mrs. welland's sister-in-law, mrs. lovell mingott, who was installed in the opposite corner. mr. sillerton jackson had returned the opera-glass to lawrence lefferts. the whole of the club turned instinctively, waiting to hear what the old man had to say; for old mr. jackson was as great an authority on "family" as lawrence lefferts was on "form." he knew all the ramifications of new york's cousinships; and could not only elucidate such complicated questions as that of the connection between the mingotts (through the thorleys) with the dallases of south carolina, and that of the relationship of the elder branch of philadelphia thorleys to the albany chiverses (on no account to be confused with the manson chiverses of university place), but could also enumerate the leading characteristics of each family: as, for instance, the fabulous stinginess of the younger lines of leffertses (the long island ones); or the fatal tendency of the rushworths to make foolish matches; or the insanity recurring in every second generation of the albany chiverses, with whom their new york cousins had always refused to intermarry--with the disastrous exception of poor medora manson, who, as everybody knew ... but then her mother was a rushworth. in addition to this forest of family trees, mr. sillerton jackson carried between his narrow hollow temples, and under his soft thatch of silver hair, a register of most of the scandals and mysteries that had smouldered under the unruffled surface of new york society within the last fifty years. so far indeed did his information extend, and so acutely retentive was his memory, that he was supposed to be the only man who could have told you who julius beaufort, the banker, really was, and what had become of handsome bob spicer, old mrs. manson mingott's father, who had disappeared so mysteriously (with a large sum of trust money) less than a year after his marriage, on the very day that a beautiful spanish dancer who had been delighting thronged audiences in the old opera-house on the battery had taken ship for cuba. but these mysteries, and many others, were closely locked in mr. jackson's breast; for not only did his keen sense of honour forbid his repeating anything privately imparted, but he was fully aware that his reputation for discretion increased his opportunities of finding out what he wanted to know. the club box, therefore, waited in visible suspense while mr. sillerton jackson handed back lawrence lefferts's opera-glass. for a moment he silently scrutinised the attentive group out of his filmy blue eyes overhung by old veined lids; then he gave his moustache a thoughtful twist, and said simply: "i didn't think the mingotts would have tried it on." ii. newland archer, during this brief episode, had been thrown into a strange state of embarrassment. it was annoying that the box which was thus attracting the undivided attention of masculine new york should be that in which his betrothed was seated between her mother and aunt; and for a moment he could not identify the lady in the empire dress, nor imagine why her presence created such excitement among the initiated. then light dawned on him, and with it came a momentary rush of indignation. no, indeed; no one would have thought the mingotts would have tried it on! but they had; they undoubtedly had; for the low-toned comments behind him left no doubt in archer's mind that the young woman was may welland's cousin, the cousin always referred to in the family as "poor ellen olenska." archer knew that she had suddenly arrived from europe a day or two previously; he had even heard from miss welland (not disapprovingly) that she had been to see poor ellen, who was staying with old mrs. mingott. archer entirely approved of family solidarity, and one of the qualities he most admired in the mingotts was their resolute championship of the few black sheep that their blameless stock had produced. there was nothing mean or ungenerous in the young man's heart, and he was glad that his future wife should not be restrained by false prudery from being kind (in private) to her unhappy cousin; but to receive countess olenska in the family circle was a different thing from producing her in public, at the opera of all places, and in the very box with the young girl whose engagement to him, newland archer, was to be announced within a few weeks. no, he felt as old sillerton jackson felt; he did not think the mingotts would have tried it on! he knew, of course, that whatever man dared (within fifth avenue's limits) that old mrs. manson mingott, the matriarch of the line, would dare. he had always admired the high and mighty old lady, who, in spite of having been only catherine spicer of staten island, with a father mysteriously discredited, and neither money nor position enough to make people forget it, had allied herself with the head of the wealthy mingott line, married two of her daughters to "foreigners" (an italian marquis and an english banker), and put the crowning touch to her audacities by building a large house of pale cream-coloured stone (when brown sandstone seemed as much the only wear as a frock-coat in the afternoon) in an inaccessible wilderness near the central park. old mrs. mingott's foreign daughters had become a legend. they never came back to see their mother, and the latter being, like many persons of active mind and dominating will, sedentary and corpulent in her habit, had philosophically remained at home. but the cream-coloured house (supposed to be modelled on the private hotels of the parisian aristocracy) was there as a visible proof of her moral courage; and she throned in it, among pre-revolutionary furniture and souvenirs of the tuileries of louis napoleon (where she had shone in her middle age), as placidly as if there were nothing peculiar in living above thirty-fourth street, or in having french windows that opened like doors instead of sashes that pushed up. every one (including mr. sillerton jackson) was agreed that old catherine had never had beauty--a gift which, in the eyes of new york, justified every success, and excused a certain number of failings. unkind people said that, like her imperial namesake, she had won her way to success by strength of will and hardness of heart, and a kind of haughty effrontery that was somehow justified by the extreme decency and dignity of her private life. mr. manson mingott had died when she was only twenty-eight, and had "tied up" the money with an additional caution born of the general distrust of the spicers; but his bold young widow went her way fearlessly, mingled freely in foreign society, married her daughters in heaven knew what corrupt and fashionable circles, hobnobbed with dukes and ambassadors, associated familiarly with papists, entertained opera singers, and was the intimate friend of mme. taglioni; and all the while (as sillerton jackson was the first to proclaim) there had never been a breath on her reputation; the only respect, he always added, in which she differed from the earlier catherine. mrs. manson mingott had long since succeeded in untying her husband's fortune, and had lived in affluence for half a century; but memories of her early straits had made her excessively thrifty, and though, when she bought a dress or a piece of furniture, she took care that it should be of the best, she could not bring herself to spend much on the transient pleasures of the table. therefore, for totally different reasons, her food was as poor as mrs. archer's, and her wines did nothing to redeem it. her relatives considered that the penury of her table discredited the mingott name, which had always been associated with good living; but people continued to come to her in spite of the "made dishes" and flat champagne, and in reply to the remonstrances of her son lovell (who tried to retrieve the family credit by having the best chef in new york) she used to say laughingly: "what's the use of two good cooks in one family, now that i've married the girls and can't eat sauces?" newland archer, as he mused on these things, had once more turned his eyes toward the mingott box. he saw that mrs. welland and her sister-in-law were facing their semicircle of critics with the mingottian aplomb which old catherine had inculcated in all her tribe, and that only may welland betrayed, by a heightened colour (perhaps due to the knowledge that he was watching her) a sense of the gravity of the situation. as for the cause of the commotion, she sat gracefully in her corner of the box, her eyes fixed on the stage, and revealing, as she leaned forward, a little more shoulder and bosom than new york was accustomed to seeing, at least in ladies who had reasons for wishing to pass unnoticed. few things seemed to newland archer more awful than an offence against "taste," that far-off divinity of whom "form" was the mere visible representative and vicegerent. madame olenska's pale and serious face appealed to his fancy as suited to the occasion and to her unhappy situation; but the way her dress (which had no tucker) sloped away from her thin shoulders shocked and troubled him. he hated to think of may welland's being exposed to the influence of a young woman so careless of the dictates of taste. "after all," he heard one of the younger men begin behind him (everybody talked through the mephistopheles-and-martha scenes), "after all, just what happened?" "well--she left him; nobody attempts to deny that." "he's an awful brute, isn't he?" continued the young enquirer, a candid thorley, who was evidently preparing to enter the lists as the lady's champion. "the very worst; i knew him at nice," said lawrence lefferts with authority. "a half-paralysed white sneering fellow--rather handsome head, but eyes with a lot of lashes. well, i'll tell you the sort: when he wasn't with women he was collecting china. paying any price for both, i understand." there was a general laugh, and the young champion said: "well, then----?" "well, then; she bolted with his secretary." "oh, i see." the champion's face fell. "it didn't last long, though: i heard of her a few months later living alone in venice. i believe lovell mingott went out to get her. he said she was desperately unhappy. that's all right--but this parading her at the opera's another thing." "perhaps," young thorley hazarded, "she's too unhappy to be left at home." this was greeted with an irreverent laugh, and the youth blushed deeply, and tried to look as if he had meant to insinuate what knowing people called a "double entendre." "well--it's queer to have brought miss welland, anyhow," some one said in a low tone, with a side-glance at archer. "oh, that's part of the campaign: granny's orders, no doubt," lefferts laughed. "when the old lady does a thing she does it thoroughly." the act was ending, and there was a general stir in the box. suddenly newland archer felt himself impelled to decisive action. the desire to be the first man to enter mrs. mingott's box, to proclaim to the waiting world his engagement to may welland, and to see her through whatever difficulties her cousin's anomalous situation might involve her in; this impulse had abruptly overruled all scruples and hesitations, and sent him hurrying through the red corridors to the farther side of the house. as he entered the box his eyes met miss welland's, and he saw that she had instantly understood his motive, though the family dignity which both considered so high a virtue would not permit her to tell him so. the persons of their world lived in an atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies, and the fact that he and she understood each other without a word seemed to the young man to bring them nearer than any explanation would have done. her eyes said: "you see why mamma brought me," and his answered: "i would not for the world have had you stay away." "you know my niece countess olenska?" mrs. welland enquired as she shook hands with her future son-in-law. archer bowed without extending his hand, as was the custom on being introduced to a lady; and ellen olenska bent her head slightly, keeping her own pale-gloved hands clasped on her huge fan of eagle feathers. having greeted mrs. lovell mingott, a large blonde lady in creaking satin, he sat down beside his betrothed, and said in a low tone: "i hope you've told madame olenska that we're engaged? i want everybody to know--i want you to let me announce it this evening at the ball." miss welland's face grew rosy as the dawn, and she looked at him with radiant eyes. "if you can persuade mamma," she said; "but why should we change what is already settled?" he made no answer but that which his eyes returned, and she added, still more confidently smiling: "tell my cousin yourself: i give you leave. she says she used to play with you when you were children." she made way for him by pushing back her chair, and promptly, and a little ostentatiously, with the desire that the whole house should see what he was doing, archer seated himself at the countess olenska's side. "we did use to play together, didn't we?" she asked, turning her grave eyes to his. "you were a horrid boy, and kissed me once behind a door; but it was your cousin vandie newland, who never looked at me, that i was in love with." her glance swept the horse-shoe curve of boxes. "ah, how this brings it all back to me--i see everybody here in knickerbockers and pantalettes," she said, with her trailing slightly foreign accent, her eyes returning to his face. agreeable as their expression was, the young man was shocked that they should reflect so unseemly a picture of the august tribunal before which, at that very moment, her case was being tried. nothing could be in worse taste than misplaced flippancy; and he answered somewhat stiffly: "yes, you have been away a very long time." "oh, centuries and centuries; so long," she said, "that i'm sure i'm dead and buried, and this dear old place is heaven;" which, for reasons he could not define, struck newland archer as an even more disrespectful way of describing new york society. iii. it invariably happened in the same way. mrs. julius beaufort, on the night of her annual ball, never failed to appear at the opera; indeed, she always gave her ball on an opera night in order to emphasise her complete superiority to household cares, and her possession of a staff of servants competent to organise every detail of the entertainment in her absence. the beauforts' house was one of the few in new york that possessed a ball-room (it antedated even mrs. manson mingott's and the headly chiverses'); and at a time when it was beginning to be thought "provincial" to put a "crash" over the drawing-room floor and move the furniture upstairs, the possession of a ball-room that was used for no other purpose, and left for three-hundred-and-sixty-four days of the year to shuttered darkness, with its gilt chairs stacked in a corner and its chandelier in a bag; this undoubted superiority was felt to compensate for whatever was regrettable in the beaufort past. mrs. archer, who was fond of coining her social philosophy into axioms, had once said: "we all have our pet common people--" and though the phrase was a daring one, its truth was secretly admitted in many an exclusive bosom. but the beauforts were not exactly common; some people said they were even worse. mrs. beaufort belonged indeed to one of america's most honoured families; she had been the lovely regina dallas (of the south carolina branch), a penniless beauty introduced to new york society by her cousin, the imprudent medora manson, who was always doing the wrong thing from the right motive. when one was related to the mansons and the rushworths one had a "droit de cite" (as mr. sillerton jackson, who had frequented the tuileries, called it) in new york society; but did one not forfeit it in marrying julius beaufort? the question was: who was beaufort? he passed for an englishman, was agreeable, handsome, ill-tempered, hospitable and witty. he had come to america with letters of recommendation from old mrs. manson mingott's english son-in-law, the banker, and had speedily made himself an important position in the world of affairs; but his habits were dissipated, his tongue was bitter, his antecedents were mysterious; and when medora manson announced her cousin's engagement to him it was felt to be one more act of folly in poor medora's long record of imprudences. but folly is as often justified of her children as wisdom, and two years after young mrs. beaufort's marriage it was admitted that she had the most distinguished house in new york. no one knew exactly how the miracle was accomplished. she was indolent, passive, the caustic even called her dull; but dressed like an idol, hung with pearls, growing younger and blonder and more beautiful each year, she throned in mr. beaufort's heavy brown-stone palace, and drew all the world there without lifting her jewelled little finger. the knowing people said it was beaufort himself who trained the servants, taught the chef new dishes, told the gardeners what hot-house flowers to grow for the dinner-table and the drawing-rooms, selected the guests, brewed the after-dinner punch and dictated the little notes his wife wrote to her friends. if he did, these domestic activities were privately performed, and he presented to the world the appearance of a careless and hospitable millionaire strolling into his own drawing-room with the detachment of an invited guest, and saying: "my wife's gloxinias are a marvel, aren't they? i believe she gets them out from kew." mr. beaufort's secret, people were agreed, was the way he carried things off. it was all very well to whisper that he had been "helped" to leave england by the international banking-house in which he had been employed; he carried off that rumour as easily as the rest--though new york's business conscience was no less sensitive than its moral standard--he carried everything before him, and all new york into his drawing-rooms, and for over twenty years now people had said they were "going to the beauforts'" with the same tone of security as if they had said they were going to mrs. manson mingott's, and with the added satisfaction of knowing they would get hot canvas-back ducks and vintage wines, instead of tepid veuve clicquot without a year and warmed-up croquettes from philadelphia. mrs. beaufort, then, had as usual appeared in her box just before the jewel song; and when, again as usual, she rose at the end of the third act, drew her opera cloak about her lovely shoulders, and disappeared, new york knew that meant that half an hour later the ball would begin. the beaufort house was one that new yorkers were proud to show to foreigners, especially on the night of the annual ball. the beauforts had been among the first people in new york to own their own red velvet carpet and have it rolled down the steps by their own footmen, under their own awning, instead of hiring it with the supper and the ball-room chairs. they had also inaugurated the custom of letting the ladies take their cloaks off in the hall, instead of shuffling up to the hostess's bedroom and recurling their hair with the aid of the gas-burner; beaufort was understood to have said that he supposed all his wife's friends had maids who saw to it that they were properly coiffees when they left home. then the house had been boldly planned with a ball-room, so that, instead of squeezing through a narrow passage to get to it (as at the chiverses') one marched solemnly down a vista of enfiladed drawing-rooms (the sea-green, the crimson and the bouton d'or), seeing from afar the many-candled lustres reflected in the polished parquetry, and beyond that the depths of a conservatory where camellias and tree-ferns arched their costly foliage over seats of black and gold bamboo. newland archer, as became a young man of his position, strolled in somewhat late. he had left his overcoat with the silk-stockinged footmen (the stockings were one of beaufort's few fatuities), had dawdled a while in the library hung with spanish leather and furnished with buhl and malachite, where a few men were chatting and putting on their dancing-gloves, and had finally joined the line of guests whom mrs. beaufort was receiving on the threshold of the crimson drawing-room. archer was distinctly nervous. he had not gone back to his club after the opera (as the young bloods usually did), but, the night being fine, had walked for some distance up fifth avenue before turning back in the direction of the beauforts' house. he was definitely afraid that the mingotts might be going too far; that, in fact, they might have granny mingott's orders to bring the countess olenska to the ball. from the tone of the club box he had perceived how grave a mistake that would be; and, though he was more than ever determined to "see the thing through," he felt less chivalrously eager to champion his betrothed's cousin than before their brief talk at the opera. wandering on to the bouton d'or drawing-room (where beaufort had had the audacity to hang "love victorious," the much-discussed nude of bouguereau) archer found mrs. welland and her daughter standing near the ball-room door. couples were already gliding over the floor beyond: the light of the wax candles fell on revolving tulle skirts, on girlish heads wreathed with modest blossoms, on the dashing aigrettes and ornaments of the young married women's coiffures, and on the glitter of highly glazed shirt-fronts and fresh glace gloves. miss welland, evidently about to join the dancers, hung on the threshold, her lilies-of-the-valley in her hand (she carried no other bouquet), her face a little pale, her eyes burning with a candid excitement. a group of young men and girls were gathered about her, and there was much hand-clasping, laughing and pleasantry on which mrs. welland, standing slightly apart, shed the beam of a qualified approval. it was evident that miss welland was in the act of announcing her engagement, while her mother affected the air of parental reluctance considered suitable to the occasion. archer paused a moment. it was at his express wish that the announcement had been made, and yet it was not thus that he would have wished to have his happiness known. to proclaim it in the heat and noise of a crowded ball-room was to rob it of the fine bloom of privacy which should belong to things nearest the heart. his joy was so deep that this blurring of the surface left its essence untouched; but he would have liked to keep the surface pure too. it was something of a satisfaction to find that may welland shared this feeling. her eyes fled to his beseechingly, and their look said: "remember, we're doing this because it's right." no appeal could have found a more immediate response in archer's breast; but he wished that the necessity of their action had been represented by some ideal reason, and not simply by poor ellen olenska. the group about miss welland made way for him with significant smiles, and after taking his share of the felicitations he drew his betrothed into the middle of the ball-room floor and put his arm about her waist. "now we shan't have to talk," he said, smiling into her candid eyes, as they floated away on the soft waves of the blue danube. she made no answer. her lips trembled into a smile, but the eyes remained distant and serious, as if bent on some ineffable vision. "dear," archer whispered, pressing her to him: it was borne in on him that the first hours of being engaged, even if spent in a ball-room, had in them something grave and sacramental. what a new life it was going to be, with this whiteness, radiance, goodness at one's side! the dance over, the two, as became an affianced couple, wandered into the conservatory; and sitting behind a tall screen of tree-ferns and camellias newland pressed her gloved hand to his lips. "you see i did as you asked me to," she said. "yes: i couldn't wait," he answered smiling. after a moment he added: "only i wish it hadn't had to be at a ball." "yes, i know." she met his glance comprehendingly. "but after all--even here we're alone together, aren't we?" "oh, dearest--always!" archer cried. evidently she was always going to understand; she was always going to say the right thing. the discovery made the cup of his bliss overflow, and he went on gaily: "the worst of it is that i want to kiss you and i can't." as he spoke he took a swift glance about the conservatory, assured himself of their momentary privacy, and catching her to him laid a fugitive pressure on her lips. to counteract the audacity of this proceeding he led her to a bamboo sofa in a less secluded part of the conservatory, and sitting down beside her broke a lily-of-the-valley from her bouquet. she sat silent, and the world lay like a sunlit valley at their feet. "did you tell my cousin ellen?" she asked presently, as if she spoke through a dream. he roused himself, and remembered that he had not done so. some invincible repugnance to speak of such things to the strange foreign woman had checked the words on his lips. "no--i hadn't the chance after all," he said, fibbing hastily. "ah." she looked disappointed, but gently resolved on gaining her point. "you must, then, for i didn't either; and i shouldn't like her to think--" "of course not. but aren't you, after all, the person to do it?" she pondered on this. "if i'd done it at the right time, yes: but now that there's been a delay i think you must explain that i'd asked you to tell her at the opera, before our speaking about it to everybody here. otherwise she might think i had forgotten her. you see, she's one of the family, and she's been away so long that she's rather--sensitive." archer looked at her glowingly. "dear and great angel! of course i'll tell her." he glanced a trifle apprehensively toward the crowded ball-room. "but i haven't seen her yet. has she come?" "no; at the last minute she decided not to." "at the last minute?" he echoed, betraying his surprise that she should ever have considered the alternative possible. "yes. she's awfully fond of dancing," the young girl answered simply. "but suddenly she made up her mind that her dress wasn't smart enough for a ball, though we thought it so lovely; and so my aunt had to take her home." "oh, well--" said archer with happy indifference. nothing about his betrothed pleased him more than her resolute determination to carry to its utmost limit that ritual of ignoring the "unpleasant" in which they had both been brought up. "she knows as well as i do," he reflected, "the real reason of her cousin's staying away; but i shall never let her see by the least sign that i am conscious of there being a shadow of a shade on poor ellen olenska's reputation." iv. in the course of the next day the first of the usual betrothal visits were exchanged. the new york ritual was precise and inflexible in such matters; and in conformity with it newland archer first went with his mother and sister to call on mrs. welland, after which he and mrs. welland and may drove out to old mrs. manson mingott's to receive that venerable ancestress's blessing. a visit to mrs. manson mingott was always an amusing episode to the young man. the house in itself was already an historic document, though not, of course, as venerable as certain other old family houses in university place and lower fifth avenue. those were of the purest , with a grim harmony of cabbage-rose-garlanded carpets, rosewood consoles, round-arched fire-places with black marble mantels, and immense glazed book-cases of mahogany; whereas old mrs. mingott, who had built her house later, had bodily cast out the massive furniture of her prime, and mingled with the mingott heirlooms the frivolous upholstery of the second empire. it was her habit to sit in a window of her sitting-room on the ground floor, as if watching calmly for life and fashion to flow northward to her solitary doors. she seemed in no hurry to have them come, for her patience was equalled by her confidence. she was sure that presently the hoardings, the quarries, the one-story saloons, the wooden green-houses in ragged gardens, and the rocks from which goats surveyed the scene, would vanish before the advance of residences as stately as her own--perhaps (for she was an impartial woman) even statelier; and that the cobble-stones over which the old clattering omnibuses bumped would be replaced by smooth asphalt, such as people reported having seen in paris. meanwhile, as every one she cared to see came to her (and she could fill her rooms as easily as the beauforts, and without adding a single item to the menu of her suppers), she did not suffer from her geographic isolation. the immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. she had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation. a flight of smooth double chins led down to the dizzy depths of a still-snowy bosom veiled in snowy muslins that were held in place by a miniature portrait of the late mr. mingott; and around and below, wave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious armchair, with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the surface of the billows. the burden of mrs. manson mingott's flesh had long since made it impossible for her to go up and down stairs, and with characteristic independence she had made her reception rooms upstairs and established herself (in flagrant violation of all the new york proprieties) on the ground floor of her house; so that, as you sat in her sitting-room window with her, you caught (through a door that was always open, and a looped-back yellow damask portiere) the unexpected vista of a bedroom with a huge low bed upholstered like a sofa, and a toilet-table with frivolous lace flounces and a gilt-framed mirror. her visitors were startled and fascinated by the foreignness of this arrangement, which recalled scenes in french fiction, and architectural incentives to immorality such as the simple american had never dreamed of. that was how women with lovers lived in the wicked old societies, in apartments with all the rooms on one floor, and all the indecent propinquities that their novels described. it amused newland archer (who had secretly situated the love-scenes of "monsieur de camors" in mrs. mingott's bedroom) to picture her blameless life led in the stage-setting of adultery; but he said to himself, with considerable admiration, that if a lover had been what she wanted, the intrepid woman would have had him too. to the general relief the countess olenska was not present in her grandmother's drawing-room during the visit of the betrothed couple. mrs. mingott said she had gone out; which, on a day of such glaring sunlight, and at the "shopping hour," seemed in itself an indelicate thing for a compromised woman to do. but at any rate it spared them the embarrassment of her presence, and the faint shadow that her unhappy past might seem to shed on their radiant future. the visit went off successfully, as was to have been expected. old mrs. mingott was delighted with the engagement, which, being long foreseen by watchful relatives, had been carefully passed upon in family council; and the engagement ring, a large thick sapphire set in invisible claws, met with her unqualified admiration. "it's the new setting: of course it shows the stone beautifully, but it looks a little bare to old-fashioned eyes," mrs. welland had explained, with a conciliatory side-glance at her future son-in-law. "old-fashioned eyes? i hope you don't mean mine, my dear? i like all the novelties," said the ancestress, lifting the stone to her small bright orbs, which no glasses had ever disfigured. "very handsome," she added, returning the jewel; "very liberal. in my time a cameo set in pearls was thought sufficient. but it's the hand that sets off the ring, isn't it, my dear mr. archer?" and she waved one of her tiny hands, with small pointed nails and rolls of aged fat encircling the wrist like ivory bracelets. "mine was modelled in rome by the great ferrigiani. you should have may's done: no doubt he'll have it done, my child. her hand is large--it's these modern sports that spread the joints--but the skin is white.--and when's the wedding to be?" she broke off, fixing her eyes on archer's face. "oh--" mrs. welland murmured, while the young man, smiling at his betrothed, replied: "as soon as ever it can, if only you'll back me up, mrs. mingott." "we must give them time to get to know each other a little better, mamma," mrs. welland interposed, with the proper affectation of reluctance; to which the ancestress rejoined: "know each other? fiddlesticks! everybody in new york has always known everybody. let the young man have his way, my dear; don't wait till the bubble's off the wine. marry them before lent; i may catch pneumonia any winter now, and i want to give the wedding-breakfast." these successive statements were received with the proper expressions of amusement, incredulity and gratitude; and the visit was breaking up in a vein of mild pleasantry when the door opened to admit the countess olenska, who entered in bonnet and mantle followed by the unexpected figure of julius beaufort. there was a cousinly murmur of pleasure between the ladies, and mrs. mingott held out ferrigiani's model to the banker. "ha! beaufort, this is a rare favour!" (she had an odd foreign way of addressing men by their surnames.) "thanks. i wish it might happen oftener," said the visitor in his easy arrogant way. "i'm generally so tied down; but i met the countess ellen in madison square, and she was good enough to let me walk home with her." "ah--i hope the house will be gayer, now that ellen's here!" cried mrs. mingott with a glorious effrontery. "sit down--sit down, beaufort: push up the yellow armchair; now i've got you i want a good gossip. i hear your ball was magnificent; and i understand you invited mrs. lemuel struthers? well--i've a curiosity to see the woman myself." she had forgotten her relatives, who were drifting out into the hall under ellen olenska's guidance. old mrs. mingott had always professed a great admiration for julius beaufort, and there was a kind of kinship in their cool domineering way and their short-cuts through the conventions. now she was eagerly curious to know what had decided the beauforts to invite (for the first time) mrs. lemuel struthers, the widow of struthers's shoe-polish, who had returned the previous year from a long initiatory sojourn in europe to lay siege to the tight little citadel of new york. "of course if you and regina invite her the thing is settled. well, we need new blood and new money--and i hear she's still very good-looking," the carnivorous old lady declared. in the hall, while mrs. welland and may drew on their furs, archer saw that the countess olenska was looking at him with a faintly questioning smile. "of course you know already--about may and me," he said, answering her look with a shy laugh. "she scolded me for not giving you the news last night at the opera: i had her orders to tell you that we were engaged--but i couldn't, in that crowd." the smile passed from countess olenska's eyes to her lips: she looked younger, more like the bold brown ellen mingott of his boyhood. "of course i know; yes. and i'm so glad. but one doesn't tell such things first in a crowd." the ladies were on the threshold and she held out her hand. "good-bye; come and see me some day," she said, still looking at archer. in the carriage, on the way down fifth avenue, they talked pointedly of mrs. mingott, of her age, her spirit, and all her wonderful attributes. no one alluded to ellen olenska; but archer knew that mrs. welland was thinking: "it's a mistake for ellen to be seen, the very day after her arrival, parading up fifth avenue at the crowded hour with julius beaufort--" and the young man himself mentally added: "and she ought to know that a man who's just engaged doesn't spend his time calling on married women. but i daresay in the set she's lived in they do--they never do anything else." and, in spite of the cosmopolitan views on which he prided himself, he thanked heaven that he was a new yorker, and about to ally himself with one of his own kind. v. the next evening old mr. sillerton jackson came to dine with the archers. mrs. archer was a shy woman and shrank from society; but she liked to be well-informed as to its doings. her old friend mr. sillerton jackson applied to the investigation of his friends' affairs the patience of a collector and the science of a naturalist; and his sister, miss sophy jackson, who lived with him, and was entertained by all the people who could not secure her much-sought-after brother, brought home bits of minor gossip that filled out usefully the gaps in his picture. therefore, whenever anything happened that mrs. archer wanted to know about, she asked mr. jackson to dine; and as she honoured few people with her invitations, and as she and her daughter janey were an excellent audience, mr. jackson usually came himself instead of sending his sister. if he could have dictated all the conditions, he would have chosen the evenings when newland was out; not because the young man was uncongenial to him (the two got on capitally at their club) but because the old anecdotist sometimes felt, on newland's part, a tendency to weigh his evidence that the ladies of the family never showed. mr. jackson, if perfection had been attainable on earth, would also have asked that mrs. archer's food should be a little better. but then new york, as far back as the mind of man could travel, had been divided into the two great fundamental groups of the mingotts and mansons and all their clan, who cared about eating and clothes and money, and the archer-newland-van-der-luyden tribe, who were devoted to travel, horticulture and the best fiction, and looked down on the grosser forms of pleasure. you couldn't have everything, after all. if you dined with the lovell mingotts you got canvas-back and terrapin and vintage wines; at adeline archer's you could talk about alpine scenery and "the marble faun"; and luckily the archer madeira had gone round the cape. therefore when a friendly summons came from mrs. archer, mr. jackson, who was a true eclectic, would usually say to his sister: "i've been a little gouty since my last dinner at the lovell mingotts'--it will do me good to diet at adeline's." mrs. archer, who had long been a widow, lived with her son and daughter in west twenty-eighth street. an upper floor was dedicated to newland, and the two women squeezed themselves into narrower quarters below. in an unclouded harmony of tastes and interests they cultivated ferns in wardian cases, made macrame lace and wool embroidery on linen, collected american revolutionary glazed ware, subscribed to "good words," and read ouida's novels for the sake of the italian atmosphere. (they preferred those about peasant life, because of the descriptions of scenery and the pleasanter sentiments, though in general they liked novels about people in society, whose motives and habits were more comprehensible, spoke severely of dickens, who "had never drawn a gentleman," and considered thackeray less at home in the great world than bulwer--who, however, was beginning to be thought old-fashioned.) mrs. and miss archer were both great lovers of scenery. it was what they principally sought and admired on their occasional travels abroad; considering architecture and painting as subjects for men, and chiefly for learned persons who read ruskin. mrs. archer had been born a newland, and mother and daughter, who were as like as sisters, were both, as people said, "true newlands"; tall, pale, and slightly round-shouldered, with long noses, sweet smiles and a kind of drooping distinction like that in certain faded reynolds portraits. their physical resemblance would have been complete if an elderly embonpoint had not stretched mrs. archer's black brocade, while miss archer's brown and purple poplins hung, as the years went on, more and more slackly on her virgin frame. mentally, the likeness between them, as newland was aware, was less complete than their identical mannerisms often made it appear. the long habit of living together in mutually dependent intimacy had given them the same vocabulary, and the same habit of beginning their phrases "mother thinks" or "janey thinks," according as one or the other wished to advance an opinion of her own; but in reality, while mrs. archer's serene unimaginativeness rested easily in the accepted and familiar, janey was subject to starts and aberrations of fancy welling up from springs of suppressed romance. mother and daughter adored each other and revered their son and brother; and archer loved them with a tenderness made compunctious and uncritical by the sense of their exaggerated admiration, and by his secret satisfaction in it. after all, he thought it a good thing for a man to have his authority respected in his own house, even if his sense of humour sometimes made him question the force of his mandate. on this occasion the young man was very sure that mr. jackson would rather have had him dine out; but he had his own reasons for not doing so. of course old jackson wanted to talk about ellen olenska, and of course mrs. archer and janey wanted to hear what he had to tell. all three would be slightly embarrassed by newland's presence, now that his prospective relation to the mingott clan had been made known; and the young man waited with an amused curiosity to see how they would turn the difficulty. they began, obliquely, by talking about mrs. lemuel struthers. "it's a pity the beauforts asked her," mrs. archer said gently. "but then regina always does what he tells her; and beaufort--" "certain nuances escape beaufort," said mr. jackson, cautiously inspecting the broiled shad, and wondering for the thousandth time why mrs. archer's cook always burnt the roe to a cinder. (newland, who had long shared his wonder, could always detect it in the older man's expression of melancholy disapproval.) "oh, necessarily; beaufort is a vulgar man," said mrs. archer. "my grandfather newland always used to say to my mother: 'whatever you do, don't let that fellow beaufort be introduced to the girls.' but at least he's had the advantage of associating with gentlemen; in england too, they say. it's all very mysterious--" she glanced at janey and paused. she and janey knew every fold of the beaufort mystery, but in public mrs. archer continued to assume that the subject was not one for the unmarried. "but this mrs. struthers," mrs. archer continued; "what did you say she was, sillerton?" "out of a mine: or rather out of the saloon at the head of the pit. then with living wax-works, touring new england. after the police broke that up, they say she lived--" mr. jackson in his turn glanced at janey, whose eyes began to bulge from under her prominent lids. there were still hiatuses for her in mrs. struthers's past. "then," mr. jackson continued (and archer saw he was wondering why no one had told the butler never to slice cucumbers with a steel knife), "then lemuel struthers came along. they say his advertiser used the girl's head for the shoe-polish posters; her hair's intensely black, you know--the egyptian style. anyhow, he--eventually--married her." there were volumes of innuendo in the way the "eventually" was spaced, and each syllable given its due stress. "oh, well--at the pass we've come to nowadays, it doesn't matter," said mrs. archer indifferently. the ladies were not really interested in mrs. struthers just then; the subject of ellen olenska was too fresh and too absorbing to them. indeed, mrs. struthers's name had been introduced by mrs. archer only that she might presently be able to say: "and newland's new cousin--countess olenska? was she at the ball too?" there was a faint touch of sarcasm in the reference to her son, and archer knew it and had expected it. even mrs. archer, who was seldom unduly pleased with human events, had been altogether glad of her son's engagement. ("especially after that silly business with mrs. rushworth," as she had remarked to janey, alluding to what had once seemed to newland a tragedy of which his soul would always bear the scar.) there was no better match in new york than may welland, look at the question from whatever point you chose. of course such a marriage was only what newland was entitled to; but young men are so foolish and incalculable--and some women so ensnaring and unscrupulous--that it was nothing short of a miracle to see one's only son safe past the siren isle and in the haven of a blameless domesticity. all this mrs. archer felt, and her son knew she felt; but he knew also that she had been perturbed by the premature announcement of his engagement, or rather by its cause; and it was for that reason--because on the whole he was a tender and indulgent master--that he had stayed at home that evening. "it's not that i don't approve of the mingotts' esprit de corps; but why newland's engagement should be mixed up with that olenska woman's comings and goings i don't see," mrs. archer grumbled to janey, the only witness of her slight lapses from perfect sweetness. she had behaved beautifully--and in beautiful behaviour she was unsurpassed--during the call on mrs. welland; but newland knew (and his betrothed doubtless guessed) that all through the visit she and janey were nervously on the watch for madame olenska's possible intrusion; and when they left the house together she had permitted herself to say to her son: "i'm thankful that augusta welland received us alone." these indications of inward disturbance moved archer the more that he too felt that the mingotts had gone a little too far. but, as it was against all the rules of their code that the mother and son should ever allude to what was uppermost in their thoughts, he simply replied: "oh, well, there's always a phase of family parties to be gone through when one gets engaged, and the sooner it's over the better." at which his mother merely pursed her lips under the lace veil that hung down from her grey velvet bonnet trimmed with frosted grapes. her revenge, he felt--her lawful revenge--would be to "draw" mr. jackson that evening on the countess olenska; and, having publicly done his duty as a future member of the mingott clan, the young man had no objection to hearing the lady discussed in private--except that the subject was already beginning to bore him. mr. jackson had helped himself to a slice of the tepid filet which the mournful butler had handed him with a look as sceptical as his own, and had rejected the mushroom sauce after a scarcely perceptible sniff. he looked baffled and hungry, and archer reflected that he would probably finish his meal on ellen olenska. mr. jackson leaned back in his chair, and glanced up at the candlelit archers, newlands and van der luydens hanging in dark frames on the dark walls. "ah, how your grandfather archer loved a good dinner, my dear newland!" he said, his eyes on the portrait of a plump full-chested young man in a stock and a blue coat, with a view of a white-columned country-house behind him. "well--well--well ... i wonder what he would have said to all these foreign marriages!" mrs. archer ignored the allusion to the ancestral cuisine and mr. jackson continued with deliberation: "no, she was not at the ball." "ah--" mrs. archer murmured, in a tone that implied: "she had that decency." "perhaps the beauforts don't know her," janey suggested, with her artless malice. mr. jackson gave a faint sip, as if he had been tasting invisible madeira. "mrs. beaufort may not--but beaufort certainly does, for she was seen walking up fifth avenue this afternoon with him by the whole of new york." "mercy--" moaned mrs. archer, evidently perceiving the uselessness of trying to ascribe the actions of foreigners to a sense of delicacy. "i wonder if she wears a round hat or a bonnet in the afternoon," janey speculated. "at the opera i know she had on dark blue velvet, perfectly plain and flat--like a night-gown." "janey!" said her mother; and miss archer blushed and tried to look audacious. "it was, at any rate, in better taste not to go to the ball," mrs. archer continued. a spirit of perversity moved her son to rejoin: "i don't think it was a question of taste with her. may said she meant to go, and then decided that the dress in question wasn't smart enough." mrs. archer smiled at this confirmation of her inference. "poor ellen," she simply remarked; adding compassionately: "we must always bear in mind what an eccentric bringing-up medora manson gave her. what can you expect of a girl who was allowed to wear black satin at her coming-out ball?" "ah--don't i remember her in it!" said mr. jackson; adding: "poor girl!" in the tone of one who, while enjoying the memory, had fully understood at the time what the sight portended. "it's odd," janey remarked, "that she should have kept such an ugly name as ellen. i should have changed it to elaine." she glanced about the table to see the effect of this. her brother laughed. "why elaine?" "i don't know; it sounds more--more polish," said janey, blushing. "it sounds more conspicuous; and that can hardly be what she wishes," said mrs. archer distantly. "why not?" broke in her son, growing suddenly argumentative. "why shouldn't she be conspicuous if she chooses? why should she slink about as if it were she who had disgraced herself? she's 'poor ellen' certainly, because she had the bad luck to make a wretched marriage; but i don't see that that's a reason for hiding her head as if she were the culprit." "that, i suppose," said mr. jackson, speculatively, "is the line the mingotts mean to take." the young man reddened. "i didn't have to wait for their cue, if that's what you mean, sir. madame olenska has had an unhappy life: that doesn't make her an outcast." "there are rumours," began mr. jackson, glancing at janey. "oh, i know: the secretary," the young man took him up. "nonsense, mother; janey's grown-up. they say, don't they," he went on, "that the secretary helped her to get away from her brute of a husband, who kept her practically a prisoner? well, what if he did? i hope there isn't a man among us who wouldn't have done the same in such a case." mr. jackson glanced over his shoulder to say to the sad butler: "perhaps ... that sauce ... just a little, after all--"; then, having helped himself, he remarked: "i'm told she's looking for a house. she means to live here." "i hear she means to get a divorce," said janey boldly. "i hope she will!" archer exclaimed. the word had fallen like a bombshell in the pure and tranquil atmosphere of the archer dining-room. mrs. archer raised her delicate eye-brows in the particular curve that signified: "the butler--" and the young man, himself mindful of the bad taste of discussing such intimate matters in public, hastily branched off into an account of his visit to old mrs. mingott. after dinner, according to immemorial custom, mrs. archer and janey trailed their long silk draperies up to the drawing-room, where, while the gentlemen smoked below stairs, they sat beside a carcel lamp with an engraved globe, facing each other across a rosewood work-table with a green silk bag under it, and stitched at the two ends of a tapestry band of field-flowers destined to adorn an "occasional" chair in the drawing-room of young mrs. newland archer. while this rite was in progress in the drawing-room, archer settled mr. jackson in an armchair near the fire in the gothic library and handed him a cigar. mr. jackson sank into the armchair with satisfaction, lit his cigar with perfect confidence (it was newland who bought them), and stretching his thin old ankles to the coals, said: "you say the secretary merely helped her to get away, my dear fellow? well, he was still helping her a year later, then; for somebody met 'em living at lausanne together." newland reddened. "living together? well, why not? who had the right to make her life over if she hadn't? i'm sick of the hypocrisy that would bury alive a woman of her age if her husband prefers to live with harlots." he stopped and turned away angrily to light his cigar. "women ought to be free--as free as we are," he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences. mr. sillerton jackson stretched his ankles nearer the coals and emitted a sardonic whistle. "well," he said after a pause, "apparently count olenski takes your view; for i never heard of his having lifted a finger to get his wife back." vi. that evening, after mr. jackson had taken himself away, and the ladies had retired to their chintz-curtained bedroom, newland archer mounted thoughtfully to his own study. a vigilant hand had, as usual, kept the fire alive and the lamp trimmed; and the room, with its rows and rows of books, its bronze and steel statuettes of "the fencers" on the mantelpiece and its many photographs of famous pictures, looked singularly home-like and welcoming. as he dropped into his armchair near the fire his eyes rested on a large photograph of may welland, which the young girl had given him in the first days of their romance, and which had now displaced all the other portraits on the table. with a new sense of awe he looked at the frank forehead, serious eyes and gay innocent mouth of the young creature whose soul's custodian he was to be. that terrifying product of the social system he belonged to and believed in, the young girl who knew nothing and expected everything, looked back at him like a stranger through may welland's familiar features; and once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas. the case of the countess olenska had stirred up old settled convictions and set them drifting dangerously through his mind. his own exclamation: "women should be free--as free as we are," struck to the root of a problem that it was agreed in his world to regard as non-existent. "nice" women, however wronged, would never claim the kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself were therefore--in the heat of argument--the more chivalrously ready to concede it to them. such verbal generosities were in fact only a humbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that tied things together and bound people down to the old pattern. but here he was pledged to defend, on the part of his betrothed's cousin, conduct that, on his own wife's part, would justify him in calling down on her all the thunders of church and state. of course the dilemma was purely hypothetical; since he wasn't a blackguard polish nobleman, it was absurd to speculate what his wife's rights would be if he were. but newland archer was too imaginative not to feel that, in his case and may's, the tie might gall for reasons far less gross and palpable. what could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty, as a "decent" fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal? what if, for some one of the subtler reasons that would tell with both of them, they should tire of each other, misunderstand or irritate each other? he reviewed his friends' marriages--the supposedly happy ones--and saw none that answered, even remotely, to the passionate and tender comradeship which he pictured as his permanent relation with may welland. he perceived that such a picture presupposed, on her part, the experience, the versatility, the freedom of judgment, which she had been carefully trained not to possess; and with a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other. lawrence lefferts occurred to him as the husband who had most completely realised this enviable ideal. as became the high-priest of form, he had formed a wife so completely to his own convenience that, in the most conspicuous moments of his frequent love-affairs with other men's wives, she went about in smiling unconsciousness, saying that "lawrence was so frightfully strict"; and had been known to blush indignantly, and avert her gaze, when some one alluded in her presence to the fact that julius beaufort (as became a "foreigner" of doubtful origin) had what was known in new york as "another establishment." archer tried to console himself with the thought that he was not quite such an ass as larry lefferts, nor may such a simpleton as poor gertrude; but the difference was after all one of intelligence and not of standards. in reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs; as when mrs. welland, who knew exactly why archer had pressed her to announce her daughter's engagement at the beaufort ball (and had indeed expected him to do no less), yet felt obliged to simulate reluctance, and the air of having had her hand forced, quite as, in the books on primitive man that people of advanced culture were beginning to read, the savage bride is dragged with shrieks from her parents' tent. the result, of course, was that the young girl who was the centre of this elaborate system of mystification remained the more inscrutable for her very frankness and assurance. she was frank, poor darling, because she had nothing to conceal, assured because she knew of nothing to be on her guard against; and with no better preparation than this, she was to be plunged overnight into what people evasively called "the facts of life." the young man was sincerely but placidly in love. he delighted in the radiant good looks of his betrothed, in her health, her horsemanship, her grace and quickness at games, and the shy interest in books and ideas that she was beginning to develop under his guidance. (she had advanced far enough to join him in ridiculing the idyls of the king, but not to feel the beauty of ulysses and the lotus eaters.) she was straightforward, loyal and brave; she had a sense of humour (chiefly proved by her laughing at his jokes); and he suspected, in the depths of her innocently-gazing soul, a glow of feeling that it would be a joy to waken. but when he had gone the brief round of her he returned discouraged by the thought that all this frankness and innocence were only an artificial product. untrained human nature was not frank and innocent; it was full of the twists and defences of an instinctive guile. and he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow. there was a certain triteness in these reflections: they were those habitual to young men on the approach of their wedding day. but they were generally accompanied by a sense of compunction and self-abasement of which newland archer felt no trace. he could not deplore (as thackeray's heroes so often exasperated him by doing) that he had not a blank page to offer his bride in exchange for the unblemished one she was to give to him. he could not get away from the fact that if he had been brought up as she had they would have been no more fit to find their way about than the babes in the wood; nor could he, for all his anxious cogitations, see any honest reason (any, that is, unconnected with his own momentary pleasure, and the passion of masculine vanity) why his bride should not have been allowed the same freedom of experience as himself. such questions, at such an hour, were bound to drift through his mind; but he was conscious that their uncomfortable persistence and precision were due to the inopportune arrival of the countess olenska. here he was, at the very moment of his betrothal--a moment for pure thoughts and cloudless hopes--pitchforked into a coil of scandal which raised all the special problems he would have preferred to let lie. "hang ellen olenska!" he grumbled, as he covered his fire and began to undress. he could not really see why her fate should have the least bearing on his; yet he dimly felt that he had only just begun to measure the risks of the championship which his engagement had forced upon him. a few days later the bolt fell. the lovell mingotts had sent out cards for what was known as "a formal dinner" (that is, three extra footmen, two dishes for each course, and a roman punch in the middle), and had headed their invitations with the words "to meet the countess olenska," in accordance with the hospitable american fashion, which treats strangers as if they were royalties, or at least as their ambassadors. the guests had been selected with a boldness and discrimination in which the initiated recognised the firm hand of catherine the great. associated with such immemorial standbys as the selfridge merrys, who were asked everywhere because they always had been, the beauforts, on whom there was a claim of relationship, and mr. sillerton jackson and his sister sophy (who went wherever her brother told her to), were some of the most fashionable and yet most irreproachable of the dominant "young married" set; the lawrence leffertses, mrs. lefferts rushworth (the lovely widow), the harry thorleys, the reggie chiverses and young morris dagonet and his wife (who was a van der luyden). the company indeed was perfectly assorted, since all the members belonged to the little inner group of people who, during the long new york season, disported themselves together daily and nightly with apparently undiminished zest. forty-eight hours later the unbelievable had happened; every one had refused the mingotts' invitation except the beauforts and old mr. jackson and his sister. the intended slight was emphasised by the fact that even the reggie chiverses, who were of the mingott clan, were among those inflicting it; and by the uniform wording of the notes, in all of which the writers "regretted that they were unable to accept," without the mitigating plea of a "previous engagement" that ordinary courtesy prescribed. new york society was, in those days, far too small, and too scant in its resources, for every one in it (including livery-stable-keepers, butlers and cooks) not to know exactly on which evenings people were free; and it was thus possible for the recipients of mrs. lovell mingott's invitations to make cruelly clear their determination not to meet the countess olenska. the blow was unexpected; but the mingotts, as their way was, met it gallantly. mrs. lovell mingott confided the case to mrs. welland, who confided it to newland archer; who, aflame at the outrage, appealed passionately and authoritatively to his mother; who, after a painful period of inward resistance and outward temporising, succumbed to his instances (as she always did), and immediately embracing his cause with an energy redoubled by her previous hesitations, put on her grey velvet bonnet and said: "i'll go and see louisa van der luyden." the new york of newland archer's day was a small and slippery pyramid, in which, as yet, hardly a fissure had been made or a foothold gained. at its base was a firm foundation of what mrs. archer called "plain people"; an honourable but obscure majority of respectable families who (as in the case of the spicers or the leffertses or the jacksons) had been raised above their level by marriage with one of the ruling clans. people, mrs. archer always said, were not as particular as they used to be; and with old catherine spicer ruling one end of fifth avenue, and julius beaufort the other, you couldn't expect the old traditions to last much longer. firmly narrowing upward from this wealthy but inconspicuous substratum was the compact and dominant group which the mingotts, newlands, chiverses and mansons so actively represented. most people imagined them to be the very apex of the pyramid; but they themselves (at least those of mrs. archer's generation) were aware that, in the eyes of the professional genealogist, only a still smaller number of families could lay claim to that eminence. "don't tell me," mrs. archer would say to her children, "all this modern newspaper rubbish about a new york aristocracy. if there is one, neither the mingotts nor the mansons belong to it; no, nor the newlands or the chiverses either. our grandfathers and great-grandfathers were just respectable english or dutch merchants, who came to the colonies to make their fortune, and stayed here because they did so well. one of your great-grandfathers signed the declaration, and another was a general on washington's staff, and received general burgoyne's sword after the battle of saratoga. these are things to be proud of, but they have nothing to do with rank or class. new york has always been a commercial community, and there are not more than three families in it who can claim an aristocratic origin in the real sense of the word." mrs. archer and her son and daughter, like every one else in new york, knew who these privileged beings were: the dagonets of washington square, who came of an old english county family allied with the pitts and foxes; the lannings, who had intermarried with the descendants of count de grasse, and the van der luydens, direct descendants of the first dutch governor of manhattan, and related by pre-revolutionary marriages to several members of the french and british aristocracy. the lannings survived only in the person of two very old but lively miss lannings, who lived cheerfully and reminiscently among family portraits and chippendale; the dagonets were a considerable clan, allied to the best names in baltimore and philadelphia; but the van der luydens, who stood above all of them, had faded into a kind of super-terrestrial twilight, from which only two figures impressively emerged; those of mr. and mrs. henry van der luyden. mrs. henry van der luyden had been louisa dagonet, and her mother had been the granddaughter of colonel du lac, of an old channel island family, who had fought under cornwallis and had settled in maryland, after the war, with his bride, lady angelica trevenna, fifth daughter of the earl of st. austrey. the tie between the dagonets, the du lacs of maryland, and their aristocratic cornish kinsfolk, the trevennas, had always remained close and cordial. mr. and mrs. van der luyden had more than once paid long visits to the present head of the house of trevenna, the duke of st. austrey, at his country-seat in cornwall and at st. austrey in gloucestershire; and his grace had frequently announced his intention of some day returning their visit (without the duchess, who feared the atlantic). mr. and mrs. van der luyden divided their time between trevenna, their place in maryland, and skuytercliff, the great estate on the hudson which had been one of the colonial grants of the dutch government to the famous first governor, and of which mr. van der luyden was still "patroon." their large solemn house in madison avenue was seldom opened, and when they came to town they received in it only their most intimate friends. "i wish you would go with me, newland," his mother said, suddenly pausing at the door of the brown coupe. "louisa is fond of you; and of course it's on account of dear may that i'm taking this step--and also because, if we don't all stand together, there'll be no such thing as society left." vii. mrs. henry van der luyden listened in silence to her cousin mrs. archer's narrative. it was all very well to tell yourself in advance that mrs. van der luyden was always silent, and that, though non-committal by nature and training, she was very kind to the people she really liked. even personal experience of these facts was not always a protection from the chill that descended on one in the high-ceilinged white-walled madison avenue drawing-room, with the pale brocaded armchairs so obviously uncovered for the occasion, and the gauze still veiling the ormolu mantel ornaments and the beautiful old carved frame of gainsborough's "lady angelica du lac." mrs. van der luyden's portrait by huntington (in black velvet and venetian point) faced that of her lovely ancestress. it was generally considered "as fine as a cabanel," and, though twenty years had elapsed since its execution, was still "a perfect likeness." indeed the mrs. van der luyden who sat beneath it listening to mrs. archer might have been the twin-sister of the fair and still youngish woman drooping against a gilt armchair before a green rep curtain. mrs. van der luyden still wore black velvet and venetian point when she went into society--or rather (since she never dined out) when she threw open her own doors to receive it. her fair hair, which had faded without turning grey, was still parted in flat overlapping points on her forehead, and the straight nose that divided her pale blue eyes was only a little more pinched about the nostrils than when the portrait had been painted. she always, indeed, struck newland archer as having been rather gruesomely preserved in the airless atmosphere of a perfectly irreproachable existence, as bodies caught in glaciers keep for years a rosy life-in-death. like all his family, he esteemed and admired mrs. van der luyden; but he found her gentle bending sweetness less approachable than the grimness of some of his mother's old aunts, fierce spinsters who said "no" on principle before they knew what they were going to be asked. mrs. van der luyden's attitude said neither yes nor no, but always appeared to incline to clemency till her thin lips, wavering into the shadow of a smile, made the almost invariable reply: "i shall first have to talk this over with my husband." she and mr. van der luyden were so exactly alike that archer often wondered how, after forty years of the closest conjugality, two such merged identities ever separated themselves enough for anything as controversial as a talking-over. but as neither had ever reached a decision without prefacing it by this mysterious conclave, mrs. archer and her son, having set forth their case, waited resignedly for the familiar phrase. mrs. van der luyden, however, who had seldom surprised any one, now surprised them by reaching her long hand toward the bell-rope. "i think," she said, "i should like henry to hear what you have told me." a footman appeared, to whom she gravely added: "if mr. van der luyden has finished reading the newspaper, please ask him to be kind enough to come." she said "reading the newspaper" in the tone in which a minister's wife might have said: "presiding at a cabinet meeting"--not from any arrogance of mind, but because the habit of a life-time, and the attitude of her friends and relations, had led her to consider mr. van der luyden's least gesture as having an almost sacerdotal importance. her promptness of action showed that she considered the case as pressing as mrs. archer; but, lest she should be thought to have committed herself in advance, she added, with the sweetest look: "henry always enjoys seeing you, dear adeline; and he will wish to congratulate newland." the double doors had solemnly reopened and between them appeared mr. henry van der luyden, tall, spare and frock-coated, with faded fair hair, a straight nose like his wife's and the same look of frozen gentleness in eyes that were merely pale grey instead of pale blue. mr. van der luyden greeted mrs. archer with cousinly affability, proffered to newland low-voiced congratulations couched in the same language as his wife's, and seated himself in one of the brocade armchairs with the simplicity of a reigning sovereign. "i had just finished reading the times," he said, laying his long finger-tips together. "in town my mornings are so much occupied that i find it more convenient to read the newspapers after luncheon." "ah, there's a great deal to be said for that plan--indeed i think my uncle egmont used to say he found it less agitating not to read the morning papers till after dinner," said mrs. archer responsively. "yes: my good father abhorred hurry. but now we live in a constant rush," said mr. van der luyden in measured tones, looking with pleasant deliberation about the large shrouded room which to archer was so complete an image of its owners. "but i hope you had finished your reading, henry?" his wife interposed. "quite--quite," he reassured her. "then i should like adeline to tell you--" "oh, it's really newland's story," said his mother smiling; and proceeded to rehearse once more the monstrous tale of the affront inflicted on mrs. lovell mingott. "of course," she ended, "augusta welland and mary mingott both felt that, especially in view of newland's engagement, you and henry ought to know." "ah--" said mr. van der luyden, drawing a deep breath. there was a silence during which the tick of the monumental ormolu clock on the white marble mantelpiece grew as loud as the boom of a minute-gun. archer contemplated with awe the two slender faded figures, seated side by side in a kind of viceregal rigidity, mouthpieces of some remote ancestral authority which fate compelled them to wield, when they would so much rather have lived in simplicity and seclusion, digging invisible weeds out of the perfect lawns of skuytercliff, and playing patience together in the evenings. mr. van der luyden was the first to speak. "you really think this is due to some--some intentional interference of lawrence lefferts's?" he enquired, turning to archer. "i'm certain of it, sir. larry has been going it rather harder than usual lately--if cousin louisa won't mind my mentioning it--having rather a stiff affair with the postmaster's wife in their village, or some one of that sort; and whenever poor gertrude lefferts begins to suspect anything, and he's afraid of trouble, he gets up a fuss of this kind, to show how awfully moral he is, and talks at the top of his voice about the impertinence of inviting his wife to meet people he doesn't wish her to know. he's simply using madame olenska as a lightning-rod; i've seen him try the same thing often before." "the leffertses!--" said mrs. van der luyden. "the leffertses!--" echoed mrs. archer. "what would uncle egmont have said of lawrence lefferts's pronouncing on anybody's social position? it shows what society has come to." "we'll hope it has not quite come to that," said mr. van der luyden firmly. "ah, if only you and louisa went out more!" sighed mrs. archer. but instantly she became aware of her mistake. the van der luydens were morbidly sensitive to any criticism of their secluded existence. they were the arbiters of fashion, the court of last appeal, and they knew it, and bowed to their fate. but being shy and retiring persons, with no natural inclination for their part, they lived as much as possible in the sylvan solitude of skuytercliff, and when they came to town, declined all invitations on the plea of mrs. van der luyden's health. newland archer came to his mother's rescue. "everybody in new york knows what you and cousin louisa represent. that's why mrs. mingott felt she ought not to allow this slight on countess olenska to pass without consulting you." mrs. van der luyden glanced at her husband, who glanced back at her. "it is the principle that i dislike," said mr. van der luyden. "as long as a member of a well-known family is backed up by that family it should be considered--final." "it seems so to me," said his wife, as if she were producing a new thought. "i had no idea," mr. van der luyden continued, "that things had come to such a pass." he paused, and looked at his wife again. "it occurs to me, my dear, that the countess olenska is already a sort of relation--through medora manson's first husband. at any rate, she will be when newland marries." he turned toward the young man. "have you read this morning's times, newland?" "why, yes, sir," said archer, who usually tossed off half a dozen papers with his morning coffee. husband and wife looked at each other again. their pale eyes clung together in prolonged and serious consultation; then a faint smile fluttered over mrs. van der luyden's face. she had evidently guessed and approved. mr. van der luyden turned to mrs. archer. "if louisa's health allowed her to dine out--i wish you would say to mrs. lovell mingott--she and i would have been happy to--er--fill the places of the lawrence leffertses at her dinner." he paused to let the irony of this sink in. "as you know, this is impossible." mrs. archer sounded a sympathetic assent. "but newland tells me he has read this morning's times; therefore he has probably seen that louisa's relative, the duke of st. austrey, arrives next week on the russia. he is coming to enter his new sloop, the guinevere, in next summer's international cup race; and also to have a little canvasback shooting at trevenna." mr. van der luyden paused again, and continued with increasing benevolence: "before taking him down to maryland we are inviting a few friends to meet him here--only a little dinner--with a reception afterward. i am sure louisa will be as glad as i am if countess olenska will let us include her among our guests." he got up, bent his long body with a stiff friendliness toward his cousin, and added: "i think i have louisa's authority for saying that she will herself leave the invitation to dine when she drives out presently: with our cards--of course with our cards." mrs. archer, who knew this to be a hint that the seventeen-hand chestnuts which were never kept waiting were at the door, rose with a hurried murmur of thanks. mrs. van der luyden beamed on her with the smile of esther interceding with ahasuerus; but her husband raised a protesting hand. "there is nothing to thank me for, dear adeline; nothing whatever. this kind of thing must not happen in new york; it shall not, as long as i can help it," he pronounced with sovereign gentleness as he steered his cousins to the door. two hours later, every one knew that the great c-spring barouche in which mrs. van der luyden took the air at all seasons had been seen at old mrs. mingott's door, where a large square envelope was handed in; and that evening at the opera mr. sillerton jackson was able to state that the envelope contained a card inviting the countess olenska to the dinner which the van der luydens were giving the following week for their cousin, the duke of st. austrey. some of the younger men in the club box exchanged a smile at this announcement, and glanced sideways at lawrence lefferts, who sat carelessly in the front of the box, pulling his long fair moustache, and who remarked with authority, as the soprano paused: "no one but patti ought to attempt the sonnambula." viii. it was generally agreed in new york that the countess olenska had "lost her looks." she had appeared there first, in newland archer's boyhood, as a brilliantly pretty little girl of nine or ten, of whom people said that she "ought to be painted." her parents had been continental wanderers, and after a roaming babyhood she had lost them both, and been taken in charge by her aunt, medora manson, also a wanderer, who was herself returning to new york to "settle down." poor medora, repeatedly widowed, was always coming home to settle down (each time in a less expensive house), and bringing with her a new husband or an adopted child; but after a few months she invariably parted from her husband or quarrelled with her ward, and, having got rid of her house at a loss, set out again on her wanderings. as her mother had been a rushworth, and her last unhappy marriage had linked her to one of the crazy chiverses, new york looked indulgently on her eccentricities; but when she returned with her little orphaned niece, whose parents had been popular in spite of their regrettable taste for travel, people thought it a pity that the pretty child should be in such hands. every one was disposed to be kind to little ellen mingott, though her dusky red cheeks and tight curls gave her an air of gaiety that seemed unsuitable in a child who should still have been in black for her parents. it was one of the misguided medora's many peculiarities to flout the unalterable rules that regulated american mourning, and when she stepped from the steamer her family were scandalised to see that the crape veil she wore for her own brother was seven inches shorter than those of her sisters-in-law, while little ellen was in crimson merino and amber beads, like a gipsy foundling. but new york had so long resigned itself to medora that only a few old ladies shook their heads over ellen's gaudy clothes, while her other relations fell under the charm of her high colour and high spirits. she was a fearless and familiar little thing, who asked disconcerting questions, made precocious comments, and possessed outlandish arts, such as dancing a spanish shawl dance and singing neapolitan love-songs to a guitar. under the direction of her aunt (whose real name was mrs. thorley chivers, but who, having received a papal title, had resumed her first husband's patronymic, and called herself the marchioness manson, because in italy she could turn it into manzoni) the little girl received an expensive but incoherent education, which included "drawing from the model," a thing never dreamed of before, and playing the piano in quintets with professional musicians. of course no good could come of this; and when, a few years later, poor chivers finally died in a madhouse, his widow (draped in strange weeds) again pulled up stakes and departed with ellen, who had grown into a tall bony girl with conspicuous eyes. for some time no more was heard of them; then news came of ellen's marriage to an immensely rich polish nobleman of legendary fame, whom she had met at a ball at the tuileries, and who was said to have princely establishments in paris, nice and florence, a yacht at cowes, and many square miles of shooting in transylvania. she disappeared in a kind of sulphurous apotheosis, and when a few years later medora again came back to new york, subdued, impoverished, mourning a third husband, and in quest of a still smaller house, people wondered that her rich niece had not been able to do something for her. then came the news that ellen's own marriage had ended in disaster, and that she was herself returning home to seek rest and oblivion among her kinsfolk. these things passed through newland archer's mind a week later as he watched the countess olenska enter the van der luyden drawing-room on the evening of the momentous dinner. the occasion was a solemn one, and he wondered a little nervously how she would carry it off. she came rather late, one hand still ungloved, and fastening a bracelet about her wrist; yet she entered without any appearance of haste or embarrassment the drawing-room in which new york's most chosen company was somewhat awfully assembled. in the middle of the room she paused, looking about her with a grave mouth and smiling eyes; and in that instant newland archer rejected the general verdict on her looks. it was true that her early radiance was gone. the red cheeks had paled; she was thin, worn, a little older-looking than her age, which must have been nearly thirty. but there was about her the mysterious authority of beauty, a sureness in the carriage of the head, the movement of the eyes, which, without being in the least theatrical, struck his as highly trained and full of a conscious power. at the same time she was simpler in manner than most of the ladies present, and many people (as he heard afterward from janey) were disappointed that her appearance was not more "stylish"--for stylishness was what new york most valued. it was, perhaps, archer reflected, because her early vivacity had disappeared; because she was so quiet--quiet in her movements, her voice, and the tones of her low-pitched voice. new york had expected something a good deal more reasonant in a young woman with such a history. the dinner was a somewhat formidable business. dining with the van der luydens was at best no light matter, and dining there with a duke who was their cousin was almost a religious solemnity. it pleased archer to think that only an old new yorker could perceive the shade of difference (to new york) between being merely a duke and being the van der luydens' duke. new york took stray noblemen calmly, and even (except in the struthers set) with a certain distrustful hauteur; but when they presented such credentials as these they were received with an old-fashioned cordiality that they would have been greatly mistaken in ascribing solely to their standing in debrett. it was for just such distinctions that the young man cherished his old new york even while he smiled at it. the van der luydens had done their best to emphasise the importance of the occasion. the du lac sevres and the trevenna george ii plate were out; so was the van der luyden "lowestoft" (east india company) and the dagonet crown derby. mrs. van der luyden looked more than ever like a cabanel, and mrs. archer, in her grandmother's seed-pearls and emeralds, reminded her son of an isabey miniature. all the ladies had on their handsomest jewels, but it was characteristic of the house and the occasion that these were mostly in rather heavy old-fashioned settings; and old miss lanning, who had been persuaded to come, actually wore her mother's cameos and a spanish blonde shawl. the countess olenska was the only young woman at the dinner; yet, as archer scanned the smooth plump elderly faces between their diamond necklaces and towering ostrich feathers, they struck him as curiously immature compared with hers. it frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes. the duke of st. austrey, who sat at his hostess's right, was naturally the chief figure of the evening. but if the countess olenska was less conspicuous than had been hoped, the duke was almost invisible. being a well-bred man he had not (like another recent ducal visitor) come to the dinner in a shooting-jacket; but his evening clothes were so shabby and baggy, and he wore them with such an air of their being homespun, that (with his stooping way of sitting, and the vast beard spreading over his shirt-front) he hardly gave the appearance of being in dinner attire. he was short, round-shouldered, sunburnt, with a thick nose, small eyes and a sociable smile; but he seldom spoke, and when he did it was in such low tones that, despite the frequent silences of expectation about the table, his remarks were lost to all but his neighbours. when the men joined the ladies after dinner the duke went straight up to the countess olenska, and they sat down in a corner and plunged into animated talk. neither seemed aware that the duke should first have paid his respects to mrs. lovell mingott and mrs. headly chivers, and the countess have conversed with that amiable hypochondriac, mr. urban dagonet of washington square, who, in order to have the pleasure of meeting her, had broken through his fixed rule of not dining out between january and april. the two chatted together for nearly twenty minutes; then the countess rose and, walking alone across the wide drawing-room, sat down at newland archer's side. it was not the custom in new york drawing-rooms for a lady to get up and walk away from one gentleman in order to seek the company of another. etiquette required that she should wait, immovable as an idol, while the men who wished to converse with her succeeded each other at her side. but the countess was apparently unaware of having broken any rule; she sat at perfect ease in a corner of the sofa beside archer, and looked at him with the kindest eyes. "i want you to talk to me about may," she said. instead of answering her he asked: "you knew the duke before?" "oh, yes--we used to see him every winter at nice. he's very fond of gambling--he used to come to the house a great deal." she said it in the simplest manner, as if she had said: "he's fond of wild-flowers"; and after a moment she added candidly: "i think he's the dullest man i ever met." this pleased her companion so much that he forgot the slight shock her previous remark had caused him. it was undeniably exciting to meet a lady who found the van der luydens' duke dull, and dared to utter the opinion. he longed to question her, to hear more about the life of which her careless words had given him so illuminating a glimpse; but he feared to touch on distressing memories, and before he could think of anything to say she had strayed back to her original subject. "may is a darling; i've seen no young girl in new york so handsome and so intelligent. are you very much in love with her?" newland archer reddened and laughed. "as much as a man can be." she continued to consider him thoughtfully, as if not to miss any shade of meaning in what he said, "do you think, then, there is a limit?" "to being in love? if there is, i haven't found it!" she glowed with sympathy. "ah--it's really and truly a romance?" "the most romantic of romances!" "how delightful! and you found it all out for yourselves--it was not in the least arranged for you?" archer looked at her incredulously. "have you forgotten," he asked with a smile, "that in our country we don't allow our marriages to be arranged for us?" a dusky blush rose to her cheek, and he instantly regretted his words. "yes," she answered, "i'd forgotten. you must forgive me if i sometimes make these mistakes. i don't always remember that everything here is good that was--that was bad where i've come from." she looked down at her viennese fan of eagle feathers, and he saw that her lips trembled. "i'm so sorry," he said impulsively; "but you are among friends here, you know." "yes--i know. wherever i go i have that feeling. that's why i came home. i want to forget everything else, to become a complete american again, like the mingotts and wellands, and you and your delightful mother, and all the other good people here tonight. ah, here's may arriving, and you will want to hurry away to her," she added, but without moving; and her eyes turned back from the door to rest on the young man's face. the drawing-rooms were beginning to fill up with after-dinner guests, and following madame olenska's glance archer saw may welland entering with her mother. in her dress of white and silver, with a wreath of silver blossoms in her hair, the tall girl looked like a diana just alight from the chase. "oh," said archer, "i have so many rivals; you see she's already surrounded. there's the duke being introduced." "then stay with me a little longer," madame olenska said in a low tone, just touching his knee with her plumed fan. it was the lightest touch, but it thrilled him like a caress. "yes, let me stay," he answered in the same tone, hardly knowing what he said; but just then mr. van der luyden came up, followed by old mr. urban dagonet. the countess greeted them with her grave smile, and archer, feeling his host's admonitory glance on him, rose and surrendered his seat. madame olenska held out her hand as if to bid him goodbye. "tomorrow, then, after five--i shall expect you," she said; and then turned back to make room for mr. dagonet. "tomorrow--" archer heard himself repeating, though there had been no engagement, and during their talk she had given him no hint that she wished to see him again. as he moved away he saw lawrence lefferts, tall and resplendent, leading his wife up to be introduced; and heard gertrude lefferts say, as she beamed on the countess with her large unperceiving smile: "but i think we used to go to dancing-school together when we were children--." behind her, waiting their turn to name themselves to the countess, archer noticed a number of the recalcitrant couples who had declined to meet her at mrs. lovell mingott's. as mrs. archer remarked: when the van der luydens chose, they knew how to give a lesson. the wonder was that they chose so seldom. the young man felt a touch on his arm and saw mrs. van der luyden looking down on him from the pure eminence of black velvet and the family diamonds. "it was good of you, dear newland, to devote yourself so unselfishly to madame olenska. i told your cousin henry he must really come to the rescue." he was aware of smiling at her vaguely, and she added, as if condescending to his natural shyness: "i've never seen may looking lovelier. the duke thinks her the handsomest girl in the room." ix. the countess olenska had said "after five"; and at half after the hour newland archer rang the bell of the peeling stucco house with a giant wisteria throttling its feeble cast-iron balcony, which she had hired, far down west twenty-third street, from the vagabond medora. it was certainly a strange quarter to have settled in. small dress-makers, bird-stuffers and "people who wrote" were her nearest neighbours; and further down the dishevelled street archer recognised a dilapidated wooden house, at the end of a paved path, in which a writer and journalist called winsett, whom he used to come across now and then, had mentioned that he lived. winsett did not invite people to his house; but he had once pointed it out to archer in the course of a nocturnal stroll, and the latter had asked himself, with a little shiver, if the humanities were so meanly housed in other capitals. madame olenska's own dwelling was redeemed from the same appearance only by a little more paint about the window-frames; and as archer mustered its modest front he said to himself that the polish count must have robbed her of her fortune as well as of her illusions. the young man had spent an unsatisfactory day. he had lunched with the wellands, hoping afterward to carry off may for a walk in the park. he wanted to have her to himself, to tell her how enchanting she had looked the night before, and how proud he was of her, and to press her to hasten their marriage. but mrs. welland had firmly reminded him that the round of family visits was not half over, and, when he hinted at advancing the date of the wedding, had raised reproachful eye-brows and sighed out: "twelve dozen of everything--hand-embroidered--" packed in the family landau they rolled from one tribal doorstep to another, and archer, when the afternoon's round was over, parted from his betrothed with the feeling that he had been shown off like a wild animal cunningly trapped. he supposed that his readings in anthropology caused him to take such a coarse view of what was after all a simple and natural demonstration of family feeling; but when he remembered that the wellands did not expect the wedding to take place till the following autumn, and pictured what his life would be till then, a dampness fell upon his spirit. "tomorrow," mrs. welland called after him, "we'll do the chiverses and the dallases"; and he perceived that she was going through their two families alphabetically, and that they were only in the first quarter of the alphabet. he had meant to tell may of the countess olenska's request--her command, rather--that he should call on her that afternoon; but in the brief moments when they were alone he had had more pressing things to say. besides, it struck him as a little absurd to allude to the matter. he knew that may most particularly wanted him to be kind to her cousin; was it not that wish which had hastened the announcement of their engagement? it gave him an odd sensation to reflect that, but for the countess's arrival, he might have been, if not still a free man, at least a man less irrevocably pledged. but may had willed it so, and he felt himself somehow relieved of further responsibility--and therefore at liberty, if he chose, to call on her cousin without telling her. as he stood on madame olenska's threshold curiosity was his uppermost feeling. he was puzzled by the tone in which she had summoned him; he concluded that she was less simple than she seemed. the door was opened by a swarthy foreign-looking maid, with a prominent bosom under a gay neckerchief, whom he vaguely fancied to be sicilian. she welcomed him with all her white teeth, and answering his enquiries by a head-shake of incomprehension led him through the narrow hall into a low firelit drawing-room. the room was empty, and she left him, for an appreciable time, to wonder whether she had gone to find her mistress, or whether she had not understood what he was there for, and thought it might be to wind the clock--of which he perceived that the only visible specimen had stopped. he knew that the southern races communicated with each other in the language of pantomime, and was mortified to find her shrugs and smiles so unintelligible. at length she returned with a lamp; and archer, having meanwhile put together a phrase out of dante and petrarch, evoked the answer: "la signora e fuori; ma verra subito"; which he took to mean: "she's out--but you'll soon see." what he saw, meanwhile, with the help of the lamp, was the faded shadowy charm of a room unlike any room he had known. he knew that the countess olenska had brought some of her possessions with her--bits of wreckage, she called them--and these, he supposed, were represented by some small slender tables of dark wood, a delicate little greek bronze on the chimney-piece, and a stretch of red damask nailed on the discoloured wallpaper behind a couple of italian-looking pictures in old frames. newland archer prided himself on his knowledge of italian art. his boyhood had been saturated with ruskin, and he had read all the latest books: john addington symonds, vernon lee's "euphorion," the essays of p. g. hamerton, and a wonderful new volume called "the renaissance" by walter pater. he talked easily of botticelli, and spoke of fra angelico with a faint condescension. but these pictures bewildered him, for they were like nothing that he was accustomed to look at (and therefore able to see) when he travelled in italy; and perhaps, also, his powers of observation were impaired by the oddness of finding himself in this strange empty house, where apparently no one expected him. he was sorry that he had not told may welland of countess olenska's request, and a little disturbed by the thought that his betrothed might come in to see her cousin. what would she think if she found him sitting there with the air of intimacy implied by waiting alone in the dusk at a lady's fireside? but since he had come he meant to wait; and he sank into a chair and stretched his feet to the logs. it was odd to have summoned him in that way, and then forgotten him; but archer felt more curious than mortified. the atmosphere of the room was so different from any he had ever breathed that self-consciousness vanished in the sense of adventure. he had been before in drawing-rooms hung with red damask, with pictures "of the italian school"; what struck him was the way in which medora manson's shabby hired house, with its blighted background of pampas grass and rogers statuettes, had, by a turn of the hand, and the skilful use of a few properties, been transformed into something intimate, "foreign," subtly suggestive of old romantic scenes and sentiments. he tried to analyse the trick, to find a clue to it in the way the chairs and tables were grouped, in the fact that only two jacqueminot roses (of which nobody ever bought less than a dozen) had been placed in the slender vase at his elbow, and in the vague pervading perfume that was not what one put on handkerchiefs, but rather like the scent of some far-off bazaar, a smell made up of turkish coffee and ambergris and dried roses. his mind wandered away to the question of what may's drawing-room would look like. he knew that mr. welland, who was behaving "very handsomely," already had his eye on a newly built house in east thirty-ninth street. the neighbourhood was thought remote, and the house was built in a ghastly greenish-yellow stone that the younger architects were beginning to employ as a protest against the brownstone of which the uniform hue coated new york like a cold chocolate sauce; but the plumbing was perfect. archer would have liked to travel, to put off the housing question; but, though the wellands approved of an extended european honeymoon (perhaps even a winter in egypt), they were firm as to the need of a house for the returning couple. the young man felt that his fate was sealed: for the rest of his life he would go up every evening between the cast-iron railings of that greenish-yellow doorstep, and pass through a pompeian vestibule into a hall with a wainscoting of varnished yellow wood. but beyond that his imagination could not travel. he knew the drawing-room above had a bay window, but he could not fancy how may would deal with it. she submitted cheerfully to the purple satin and yellow tuftings of the welland drawing-room, to its sham buhl tables and gilt vitrines full of modern saxe. he saw no reason to suppose that she would want anything different in her own house; and his only comfort was to reflect that she would probably let him arrange his library as he pleased--which would be, of course, with "sincere" eastlake furniture, and the plain new bookcases without glass doors. the round-bosomed maid came in, drew the curtains, pushed back a log, and said consolingly: "verra--verra." when she had gone archer stood up and began to wander about. should he wait any longer? his position was becoming rather foolish. perhaps he had misunderstood madame olenska--perhaps she had not invited him after all. down the cobblestones of the quiet street came the ring of a stepper's hoofs; they stopped before the house, and he caught the opening of a carriage door. parting the curtains he looked out into the early dusk. a street-lamp faced him, and in its light he saw julius beaufort's compact english brougham, drawn by a big roan, and the banker descending from it, and helping out madame olenska. beaufort stood, hat in hand, saying something which his companion seemed to negative; then they shook hands, and he jumped into his carriage while she mounted the steps. when she entered the room she showed no surprise at seeing archer there; surprise seemed the emotion that she was least addicted to. "how do you like my funny house?" she asked. "to me it's like heaven." as she spoke she untied her little velvet bonnet and tossing it away with her long cloak stood looking at him with meditative eyes. "you've arranged it delightfully," he rejoined, alive to the flatness of the words, but imprisoned in the conventional by his consuming desire to be simple and striking. "oh, it's a poor little place. my relations despise it. but at any rate it's less gloomy than the van der luydens'." the words gave him an electric shock, for few were the rebellious spirits who would have dared to call the stately home of the van der luydens gloomy. those privileged to enter it shivered there, and spoke of it as "handsome." but suddenly he was glad that she had given voice to the general shiver. "it's delicious--what you've done here," he repeated. "i like the little house," she admitted; "but i suppose what i like is the blessedness of its being here, in my own country and my own town; and then, of being alone in it." she spoke so low that he hardly heard the last phrase; but in his awkwardness he took it up. "you like so much to be alone?" "yes; as long as my friends keep me from feeling lonely." she sat down near the fire, said: "nastasia will bring the tea presently," and signed to him to return to his armchair, adding: "i see you've already chosen your corner." leaning back, she folded her arms behind her head, and looked at the fire under drooping lids. "this is the hour i like best--don't you?" a proper sense of his dignity caused him to answer: "i was afraid you'd forgotten the hour. beaufort must have been very engrossing." she looked amused. "why--have you waited long? mr. beaufort took me to see a number of houses--since it seems i'm not to be allowed to stay in this one." she appeared to dismiss both beaufort and himself from her mind, and went on: "i've never been in a city where there seems to be such a feeling against living in des quartiers excentriques. what does it matter where one lives? i'm told this street is respectable." "it's not fashionable." "fashionable! do you all think so much of that? why not make one's own fashions? but i suppose i've lived too independently; at any rate, i want to do what you all do--i want to feel cared for and safe." he was touched, as he had been the evening before when she spoke of her need of guidance. "that's what your friends want you to feel. new york's an awfully safe place," he added with a flash of sarcasm. "yes, isn't it? one feels that," she cried, missing the mockery. "being here is like--like--being taken on a holiday when one has been a good little girl and done all one's lessons." the analogy was well meant, but did not altogether please him. he did not mind being flippant about new york, but disliked to hear any one else take the same tone. he wondered if she did not begin to see what a powerful engine it was, and how nearly it had crushed her. the lovell mingotts' dinner, patched up in extremis out of all sorts of social odds and ends, ought to have taught her the narrowness of her escape; but either she had been all along unaware of having skirted disaster, or else she had lost sight of it in the triumph of the van der luyden evening. archer inclined to the former theory; he fancied that her new york was still completely undifferentiated, and the conjecture nettled him. "last night," he said, "new york laid itself out for you. the van der luydens do nothing by halves." "no: how kind they are! it was such a nice party. every one seems to have such an esteem for them." the terms were hardly adequate; she might have spoken in that way of a tea-party at the dear old miss lannings'. "the van der luydens," said archer, feeling himself pompous as he spoke, "are the most powerful influence in new york society. unfortunately--owing to her health--they receive very seldom." she unclasped her hands from behind her head, and looked at him meditatively. "isn't that perhaps the reason?" "the reason--?" "for their great influence; that they make themselves so rare." he coloured a little, stared at her--and suddenly felt the penetration of the remark. at a stroke she had pricked the van der luydens and they collapsed. he laughed, and sacrificed them. nastasia brought the tea, with handleless japanese cups and little covered dishes, placing the tray on a low table. "but you'll explain these things to me--you'll tell me all i ought to know," madame olenska continued, leaning forward to hand him his cup. "it's you who are telling me; opening my eyes to things i'd looked at so long that i'd ceased to see them." she detached a small gold cigarette-case from one of her bracelets, held it out to him, and took a cigarette herself. on the chimney were long spills for lighting them. "ah, then we can both help each other. but i want help so much more. you must tell me just what to do." it was on the tip of his tongue to reply: "don't be seen driving about the streets with beaufort--" but he was being too deeply drawn into the atmosphere of the room, which was her atmosphere, and to give advice of that sort would have been like telling some one who was bargaining for attar-of-roses in samarkand that one should always be provided with arctics for a new york winter. new york seemed much farther off than samarkand, and if they were indeed to help each other she was rendering what might prove the first of their mutual services by making him look at his native city objectively. viewed thus, as through the wrong end of a telescope, it looked disconcertingly small and distant; but then from samarkand it would. a flame darted from the logs and she bent over the fire, stretching her thin hands so close to it that a faint halo shone about the oval nails. the light touched to russet the rings of dark hair escaping from her braids, and made her pale face paler. "there are plenty of people to tell you what to do," archer rejoined, obscurely envious of them. "oh--all my aunts? and my dear old granny?" she considered the idea impartially. "they're all a little vexed with me for setting up for myself--poor granny especially. she wanted to keep me with her; but i had to be free--" he was impressed by this light way of speaking of the formidable catherine, and moved by the thought of what must have given madame olenska this thirst for even the loneliest kind of freedom. but the idea of beaufort gnawed him. "i think i understand how you feel," he said. "still, your family can advise you; explain differences; show you the way." she lifted her thin black eyebrows. "is new york such a labyrinth? i thought it so straight up and down--like fifth avenue. and with all the cross streets numbered!" she seemed to guess his faint disapproval of this, and added, with the rare smile that enchanted her whole face: "if you knew how i like it for just that--the straight-up-and-downness, and the big honest labels on everything!" he saw his chance. "everything may be labelled--but everybody is not." "perhaps. i may simplify too much--but you'll warn me if i do." she turned from the fire to look at him. "there are only two people here who make me feel as if they understood what i mean and could explain things to me: you and mr. beaufort." archer winced at the joining of the names, and then, with a quick readjustment, understood, sympathised and pitied. so close to the powers of evil she must have lived that she still breathed more freely in their air. but since she felt that he understood her also, his business would be to make her see beaufort as he really was, with all he represented--and abhor it. he answered gently: "i understand. but just at first don't let go of your old friends' hands: i mean the older women, your granny mingott, mrs. welland, mrs. van der luyden. they like and admire you--they want to help you." she shook her head and sighed. "oh, i know--i know! but on condition that they don't hear anything unpleasant. aunt welland put it in those very words when i tried.... does no one want to know the truth here, mr. archer? the real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!" she lifted her hands to her face, and he saw her thin shoulders shaken by a sob. "madame olenska!--oh, don't, ellen," he cried, starting up and bending over her. he drew down one of her hands, clasping and chafing it like a child's while he murmured reassuring words; but in a moment she freed herself, and looked up at him with wet lashes. "does no one cry here, either? i suppose there's no need to, in heaven," she said, straightening her loosened braids with a laugh, and bending over the tea-kettle. it was burnt into his consciousness that he had called her "ellen"--called her so twice; and that she had not noticed it. far down the inverted telescope he saw the faint white figure of may welland--in new york. suddenly nastasia put her head in to say something in her rich italian. madame olenska, again with a hand at her hair, uttered an exclamation of assent--a flashing "gia--gia"--and the duke of st. austrey entered, piloting a tremendous blackwigged and red-plumed lady in overflowing furs. "my dear countess, i've brought an old friend of mine to see you--mrs. struthers. she wasn't asked to the party last night, and she wants to know you." the duke beamed on the group, and madame olenska advanced with a murmur of welcome toward the queer couple. she seemed to have no idea how oddly matched they were, nor what a liberty the duke had taken in bringing his companion--and to do him justice, as archer perceived, the duke seemed as unaware of it himself. "of course i want to know you, my dear," cried mrs. struthers in a round rolling voice that matched her bold feathers and her brazen wig. "i want to know everybody who's young and interesting and charming. and the duke tells me you like music--didn't you, duke? you're a pianist yourself, i believe? well, do you want to hear sarasate play tomorrow evening at my house? you know i've something going on every sunday evening--it's the day when new york doesn't know what to do with itself, and so i say to it: 'come and be amused.' and the duke thought you'd be tempted by sarasate. you'll find a number of your friends." madame olenska's face grew brilliant with pleasure. "how kind! how good of the duke to think of me!" she pushed a chair up to the tea-table and mrs. struthers sank into it delectably. "of course i shall be too happy to come." "that's all right, my dear. and bring your young gentleman with you." mrs. struthers extended a hail-fellow hand to archer. "i can't put a name to you--but i'm sure i've met you--i've met everybody, here, or in paris or london. aren't you in diplomacy? all the diplomatists come to me. you like music too? duke, you must be sure to bring him." the duke said "rather" from the depths of his beard, and archer withdrew with a stiffly circular bow that made him feel as full of spine as a self-conscious school-boy among careless and unnoticing elders. he was not sorry for the denouement of his visit: he only wished it had come sooner, and spared him a certain waste of emotion. as he went out into the wintry night, new york again became vast and imminent, and may welland the loveliest woman in it. he turned into his florist's to send her the daily box of lilies-of-the-valley which, to his confusion, he found he had forgotten that morning. as he wrote a word on his card and waited for an envelope he glanced about the embowered shop, and his eye lit on a cluster of yellow roses. he had never seen any as sun-golden before, and his first impulse was to send them to may instead of the lilies. but they did not look like her--there was something too rich, too strong, in their fiery beauty. in a sudden revulsion of mood, and almost without knowing what he did, he signed to the florist to lay the roses in another long box, and slipped his card into a second envelope, on which he wrote the name of the countess olenska; then, just as he was turning away, he drew the card out again, and left the empty envelope on the box. "they'll go at once?" he enquired, pointing to the roses. the florist assured him that they would. x. the next day he persuaded may to escape for a walk in the park after luncheon. as was the custom in old-fashioned episcopalian new york, she usually accompanied her parents to church on sunday afternoons; but mrs. welland condoned her truancy, having that very morning won her over to the necessity of a long engagement, with time to prepare a hand-embroidered trousseau containing the proper number of dozens. the day was delectable. the bare vaulting of trees along the mall was ceiled with lapis lazuli, and arched above snow that shone like splintered crystals. it was the weather to call out may's radiance, and she burned like a young maple in the frost. archer was proud of the glances turned on her, and the simple joy of possessorship cleared away his underlying perplexities. "it's so delicious--waking every morning to smell lilies-of-the-valley in one's room!" she said. "yesterday they came late. i hadn't time in the morning--" "but your remembering each day to send them makes me love them so much more than if you'd given a standing order, and they came every morning on the minute, like one's music-teacher--as i know gertrude lefferts's did, for instance, when she and lawrence were engaged." "ah--they would!" laughed archer, amused at her keenness. he looked sideways at her fruit-like cheek and felt rich and secure enough to add: "when i sent your lilies yesterday afternoon i saw some rather gorgeous yellow roses and packed them off to madame olenska. was that right?" "how dear of you! anything of that kind delights her. it's odd she didn't mention it: she lunched with us today, and spoke of mr. beaufort's having sent her wonderful orchids, and cousin henry van der luyden a whole hamper of carnations from skuytercliff. she seems so surprised to receive flowers. don't people send them in europe? she thinks it such a pretty custom." "oh, well, no wonder mine were overshadowed by beaufort's," said archer irritably. then he remembered that he had not put a card with the roses, and was vexed at having spoken of them. he wanted to say: "i called on your cousin yesterday," but hesitated. if madame olenska had not spoken of his visit it might seem awkward that he should. yet not to do so gave the affair an air of mystery that he disliked. to shake off the question he began to talk of their own plans, their future, and mrs. welland's insistence on a long engagement. "if you call it long! isabel chivers and reggie were engaged for two years: grace and thorley for nearly a year and a half. why aren't we very well off as we are?" it was the traditional maidenly interrogation, and he felt ashamed of himself for finding it singularly childish. no doubt she simply echoed what was said for her; but she was nearing her twenty-second birthday, and he wondered at what age "nice" women began to speak for themselves. "never, if we won't let them, i suppose," he mused, and recalled his mad outburst to mr. sillerton jackson: "women ought to be as free as we are--" it would presently be his task to take the bandage from this young woman's eyes, and bid her look forth on the world. but how many generations of the women who had gone to her making had descended bandaged to the family vault? he shivered a little, remembering some of the new ideas in his scientific books, and the much-cited instance of the kentucky cave-fish, which had ceased to develop eyes because they had no use for them. what if, when he had bidden may welland to open hers, they could only look out blankly at blankness? "we might be much better off. we might be altogether together--we might travel." her face lit up. "that would be lovely," she owned: she would love to travel. but her mother would not understand their wanting to do things so differently. "as if the mere 'differently' didn't account for it!" the wooer insisted. "newland! you're so original!" she exulted. his heart sank, for he saw that he was saying all the things that young men in the same situation were expected to say, and that she was making the answers that instinct and tradition taught her to make--even to the point of calling him original. "original! we're all as like each other as those dolls cut out of the same folded paper. we're like patterns stencilled on a wall. can't you and i strike out for ourselves, may?" he had stopped and faced her in the excitement of their discussion, and her eyes rested on him with a bright unclouded admiration. "mercy--shall we elope?" she laughed. "if you would--" "you do love me, newland! i'm so happy." "but then--why not be happier?" "we can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?" "why not--why not--why not?" she looked a little bored by his insistence. she knew very well that they couldn't, but it was troublesome to have to produce a reason. "i'm not clever enough to argue with you. but that kind of thing is rather--vulgar, isn't it?" she suggested, relieved to have hit on a word that would assuredly extinguish the whole subject. "are you so much afraid, then, of being vulgar?" she was evidently staggered by this. "of course i should hate it--so would you," she rejoined, a trifle irritably. he stood silent, beating his stick nervously against his boot-top; and feeling that she had indeed found the right way of closing the discussion, she went on light-heartedly: "oh, did i tell you that i showed ellen my ring? she thinks it the most beautiful setting she ever saw. there's nothing like it in the rue de la paix, she said. i do love you, newland, for being so artistic!" the next afternoon, as archer, before dinner, sat smoking sullenly in his study, janey wandered in on him. he had failed to stop at his club on the way up from the office where he exercised the profession of the law in the leisurely manner common to well-to-do new yorkers of his class. he was out of spirits and slightly out of temper, and a haunting horror of doing the same thing every day at the same hour besieged his brain. "sameness--sameness!" he muttered, the word running through his head like a persecuting tune as he saw the familiar tall-hatted figures lounging behind the plate-glass; and because he usually dropped in at the club at that hour he had gone home instead. he knew not only what they were likely to be talking about, but the part each one would take in the discussion. the duke of course would be their principal theme; though the appearance in fifth avenue of a golden-haired lady in a small canary-coloured brougham with a pair of black cobs (for which beaufort was generally thought responsible) would also doubtless be thoroughly gone into. such "women" (as they were called) were few in new york, those driving their own carriages still fewer, and the appearance of miss fanny ring in fifth avenue at the fashionable hour had profoundly agitated society. only the day before, her carriage had passed mrs. lovell mingott's, and the latter had instantly rung the little bell at her elbow and ordered the coachman to drive her home. "what if it had happened to mrs. van der luyden?" people asked each other with a shudder. archer could hear lawrence lefferts, at that very hour, holding forth on the disintegration of society. he raised his head irritably when his sister janey entered, and then quickly bent over his book (swinburne's "chastelard"--just out) as if he had not seen her. she glanced at the writing-table heaped with books, opened a volume of the "contes drolatiques," made a wry face over the archaic french, and sighed: "what learned things you read!" "well--?" he asked, as she hovered cassandra-like before him. "mother's very angry." "angry? with whom? about what?" "miss sophy jackson has just been here. she brought word that her brother would come in after dinner: she couldn't say very much, because he forbade her to: he wishes to give all the details himself. he's with cousin louisa van der luyden now." "for heaven's sake, my dear girl, try a fresh start. it would take an omniscient deity to know what you're talking about." "it's not a time to be profane, newland.... mother feels badly enough about your not going to church ..." with a groan he plunged back into his book. "newland! do listen. your friend madame olenska was at mrs. lemuel struthers's party last night: she went there with the duke and mr. beaufort." at the last clause of this announcement a senseless anger swelled the young man's breast. to smother it he laughed. "well, what of it? i knew she meant to." janey paled and her eyes began to project. "you knew she meant to--and you didn't try to stop her? to warn her?" "stop her? warn her?" he laughed again. "i'm not engaged to be married to the countess olenska!" the words had a fantastic sound in his own ears. "you're marrying into her family." "oh, family--family!" he jeered. "newland--don't you care about family?" "not a brass farthing." "nor about what cousin louisa van der luyden will think?" "not the half of one--if she thinks such old maid's rubbish." "mother is not an old maid," said his virgin sister with pinched lips. he felt like shouting back: "yes, she is, and so are the van der luydens, and so we all are, when it comes to being so much as brushed by the wing-tip of reality." but he saw her long gentle face puckering into tears, and felt ashamed of the useless pain he was inflicting. "hang countess olenska! don't be a goose, janey--i'm not her keeper." "no; but you did ask the wellands to announce your engagement sooner so that we might all back her up; and if it hadn't been for that cousin louisa would never have invited her to the dinner for the duke." "well--what harm was there in inviting her? she was the best-looking woman in the room; she made the dinner a little less funereal than the usual van der luyden banquet." "you know cousin henry asked her to please you: he persuaded cousin louisa. and now they're so upset that they're going back to skuytercliff tomorrow. i think, newland, you'd better come down. you don't seem to understand how mother feels." in the drawing-room newland found his mother. she raised a troubled brow from her needlework to ask: "has janey told you?" "yes." he tried to keep his tone as measured as her own. "but i can't take it very seriously." "not the fact of having offended cousin louisa and cousin henry?" "the fact that they can be offended by such a trifle as countess olenska's going to the house of a woman they consider common." "consider--!" "well, who is; but who has good music, and amuses people on sunday evenings, when the whole of new york is dying of inanition." "good music? all i know is, there was a woman who got up on a table and sang the things they sing at the places you go to in paris. there was smoking and champagne." "well--that kind of thing happens in other places, and the world still goes on." "i don't suppose, dear, you're really defending the french sunday?" "i've heard you often enough, mother, grumble at the english sunday when we've been in london." "new york is neither paris nor london." "oh, no, it's not!" her son groaned. "you mean, i suppose, that society here is not as brilliant? you're right, i daresay; but we belong here, and people should respect our ways when they come among us. ellen olenska especially: she came back to get away from the kind of life people lead in brilliant societies." newland made no answer, and after a moment his mother ventured: "i was going to put on my bonnet and ask you to take me to see cousin louisa for a moment before dinner." he frowned, and she continued: "i thought you might explain to her what you've just said: that society abroad is different ... that people are not as particular, and that madame olenska may not have realised how we feel about such things. it would be, you know, dear," she added with an innocent adroitness, "in madame olenska's interest if you did." "dearest mother, i really don't see how we're concerned in the matter. the duke took madame olenska to mrs. struthers's--in fact he brought mrs. struthers to call on her. i was there when they came. if the van der luydens want to quarrel with anybody, the real culprit is under their own roof." "quarrel? newland, did you ever know of cousin henry's quarrelling? besides, the duke's his guest; and a stranger too. strangers don't discriminate: how should they? countess olenska is a new yorker, and should have respected the feelings of new york." "well, then, if they must have a victim, you have my leave to throw madame olenska to them," cried her son, exasperated. "i don't see myself--or you either--offering ourselves up to expiate her crimes." "oh, of course you see only the mingott side," his mother answered, in the sensitive tone that was her nearest approach to anger. the sad butler drew back the drawing-room portieres and announced: "mr. henry van der luyden." mrs. archer dropped her needle and pushed her chair back with an agitated hand. "another lamp," she cried to the retreating servant, while janey bent over to straighten her mother's cap. mr. van der luyden's figure loomed on the threshold, and newland archer went forward to greet his cousin. "we were just talking about you, sir," he said. mr. van der luyden seemed overwhelmed by the announcement. he drew off his glove to shake hands with the ladies, and smoothed his tall hat shyly, while janey pushed an arm-chair forward, and archer continued: "and the countess olenska." mrs. archer paled. "ah--a charming woman. i have just been to see her," said mr. van der luyden, complacency restored to his brow. he sank into the chair, laid his hat and gloves on the floor beside him in the old-fashioned way, and went on: "she has a real gift for arranging flowers. i had sent her a few carnations from skuytercliff, and i was astonished. instead of massing them in big bunches as our head-gardener does, she had scattered them about loosely, here and there ... i can't say how. the duke had told me: he said: 'go and see how cleverly she's arranged her drawing-room.' and she has. i should really like to take louisa to see her, if the neighbourhood were not so--unpleasant." a dead silence greeted this unusual flow of words from mr. van der luyden. mrs. archer drew her embroidery out of the basket into which she had nervously tumbled it, and newland, leaning against the chimney-place and twisting a humming-bird-feather screen in his hand, saw janey's gaping countenance lit up by the coming of the second lamp. "the fact is," mr. van der luyden continued, stroking his long grey leg with a bloodless hand weighed down by the patroon's great signet-ring, "the fact is, i dropped in to thank her for the very pretty note she wrote me about my flowers; and also--but this is between ourselves, of course--to give her a friendly warning about allowing the duke to carry her off to parties with him. i don't know if you've heard--" mrs. archer produced an indulgent smile. "has the duke been carrying her off to parties?" "you know what these english grandees are. they're all alike. louisa and i are very fond of our cousin--but it's hopeless to expect people who are accustomed to the european courts to trouble themselves about our little republican distinctions. the duke goes where he's amused." mr. van der luyden paused, but no one spoke. "yes--it seems he took her with him last night to mrs. lemuel struthers's. sillerton jackson has just been to us with the foolish story, and louisa was rather troubled. so i thought the shortest way was to go straight to countess olenska and explain--by the merest hint, you know--how we feel in new york about certain things. i felt i might, without indelicacy, because the evening she dined with us she rather suggested ... rather let me see that she would be grateful for guidance. and she was." mr. van der luyden looked about the room with what would have been self-satisfaction on features less purged of the vulgar passions. on his face it became a mild benevolence which mrs. archer's countenance dutifully reflected. "how kind you both are, dear henry--always! newland will particularly appreciate what you have done because of dear may and his new relations." she shot an admonitory glance at her son, who said: "immensely, sir. but i was sure you'd like madame olenska." mr. van der luyden looked at him with extreme gentleness. "i never ask to my house, my dear newland," he said, "any one whom i do not like. and so i have just told sillerton jackson." with a glance at the clock he rose and added: "but louisa will be waiting. we are dining early, to take the duke to the opera." after the portieres had solemnly closed behind their visitor a silence fell upon the archer family. "gracious--how romantic!" at last broke explosively from janey. no one knew exactly what inspired her elliptic comments, and her relations had long since given up trying to interpret them. mrs. archer shook her head with a sigh. "provided it all turns out for the best," she said, in the tone of one who knows how surely it will not. "newland, you must stay and see sillerton jackson when he comes this evening: i really shan't know what to say to him." "poor mother! but he won't come--" her son laughed, stooping to kiss away her frown. xi. some two weeks later, newland archer, sitting in abstracted idleness in his private compartment of the office of letterblair, lamson and low, attorneys at law, was summoned by the head of the firm. old mr. letterblair, the accredited legal adviser of three generations of new york gentility, throned behind his mahogany desk in evident perplexity. as he stroked his closeclipped white whiskers and ran his hand through the rumpled grey locks above his jutting brows, his disrespectful junior partner thought how much he looked like the family physician annoyed with a patient whose symptoms refuse to be classified. "my dear sir--" he always addressed archer as "sir"--"i have sent for you to go into a little matter; a matter which, for the moment, i prefer not to mention either to mr. skipworth or mr. redwood." the gentlemen he spoke of were the other senior partners of the firm; for, as was always the case with legal associations of old standing in new york, all the partners named on the office letter-head were long since dead; and mr. letterblair, for example, was, professionally speaking, his own grandson. he leaned back in his chair with a furrowed brow. "for family reasons--" he continued. archer looked up. "the mingott family," said mr. letterblair with an explanatory smile and bow. "mrs. manson mingott sent for me yesterday. her grand-daughter the countess olenska wishes to sue her husband for divorce. certain papers have been placed in my hands." he paused and drummed on his desk. "in view of your prospective alliance with the family i should like to consult you--to consider the case with you--before taking any farther steps." archer felt the blood in his temples. he had seen the countess olenska only once since his visit to her, and then at the opera, in the mingott box. during this interval she had become a less vivid and importunate image, receding from his foreground as may welland resumed her rightful place in it. he had not heard her divorce spoken of since janey's first random allusion to it, and had dismissed the tale as unfounded gossip. theoretically, the idea of divorce was almost as distasteful to him as to his mother; and he was annoyed that mr. letterblair (no doubt prompted by old catherine mingott) should be so evidently planning to draw him into the affair. after all, there were plenty of mingott men for such jobs, and as yet he was not even a mingott by marriage. he waited for the senior partner to continue. mr. letterblair unlocked a drawer and drew out a packet. "if you will run your eye over these papers--" archer frowned. "i beg your pardon, sir; but just because of the prospective relationship, i should prefer your consulting mr. skipworth or mr. redwood." mr. letterblair looked surprised and slightly offended. it was unusual for a junior to reject such an opening. he bowed. "i respect your scruple, sir; but in this case i believe true delicacy requires you to do as i ask. indeed, the suggestion is not mine but mrs. manson mingott's and her son's. i have seen lovell mingott; and also mr. welland. they all named you." archer felt his temper rising. he had been somewhat languidly drifting with events for the last fortnight, and letting may's fair looks and radiant nature obliterate the rather importunate pressure of the mingott claims. but this behest of old mrs. mingott's roused him to a sense of what the clan thought they had the right to exact from a prospective son-in-law; and he chafed at the role. "her uncles ought to deal with this," he said. "they have. the matter has been gone into by the family. they are opposed to the countess's idea; but she is firm, and insists on a legal opinion." the young man was silent: he had not opened the packet in his hand. "does she want to marry again?" "i believe it is suggested; but she denies it." "then--" "will you oblige me, mr. archer, by first looking through these papers? afterward, when we have talked the case over, i will give you my opinion." archer withdrew reluctantly with the unwelcome documents. since their last meeting he had half-unconsciously collaborated with events in ridding himself of the burden of madame olenska. his hour alone with her by the firelight had drawn them into a momentary intimacy on which the duke of st. austrey's intrusion with mrs. lemuel struthers, and the countess's joyous greeting of them, had rather providentially broken. two days later archer had assisted at the comedy of her reinstatement in the van der luydens' favour, and had said to himself, with a touch of tartness, that a lady who knew how to thank all-powerful elderly gentlemen to such good purpose for a bunch of flowers did not need either the private consolations or the public championship of a young man of his small compass. to look at the matter in this light simplified his own case and surprisingly furbished up all the dim domestic virtues. he could not picture may welland, in whatever conceivable emergency, hawking about her private difficulties and lavishing her confidences on strange men; and she had never seemed to him finer or fairer than in the week that followed. he had even yielded to her wish for a long engagement, since she had found the one disarming answer to his plea for haste. "you know, when it comes to the point, your parents have always let you have your way ever since you were a little girl," he argued; and she had answered, with her clearest look: "yes; and that's what makes it so hard to refuse the very last thing they'll ever ask of me as a little girl." that was the old new york note; that was the kind of answer he would like always to be sure of his wife's making. if one had habitually breathed the new york air there were times when anything less crystalline seemed stifling. the papers he had retired to read did not tell him much in fact; but they plunged him into an atmosphere in which he choked and spluttered. they consisted mainly of an exchange of letters between count olenski's solicitors and a french legal firm to whom the countess had applied for the settlement of her financial situation. there was also a short letter from the count to his wife: after reading it, newland archer rose, jammed the papers back into their envelope, and reentered mr. letterblair's office. "here are the letters, sir. if you wish, i'll see madame olenska," he said in a constrained voice. "thank you--thank you, mr. archer. come and dine with me tonight if you're free, and we'll go into the matter afterward: in case you wish to call on our client tomorrow." newland archer walked straight home again that afternoon. it was a winter evening of transparent clearness, with an innocent young moon above the house-tops; and he wanted to fill his soul's lungs with the pure radiance, and not exchange a word with any one till he and mr. letterblair were closeted together after dinner. it was impossible to decide otherwise than he had done: he must see madame olenska himself rather than let her secrets be bared to other eyes. a great wave of compassion had swept away his indifference and impatience: she stood before him as an exposed and pitiful figure, to be saved at all costs from farther wounding herself in her mad plunges against fate. he remembered what she had told him of mrs. welland's request to be spared whatever was "unpleasant" in her history, and winced at the thought that it was perhaps this attitude of mind which kept the new york air so pure. "are we only pharisees after all?" he wondered, puzzled by the effort to reconcile his instinctive disgust at human vileness with his equally instinctive pity for human frailty. for the first time he perceived how elementary his own principles had always been. he passed for a young man who had not been afraid of risks, and he knew that his secret love-affair with poor silly mrs. thorley rushworth had not been too secret to invest him with a becoming air of adventure. but mrs. rushworth was "that kind of woman"; foolish, vain, clandestine by nature, and far more attracted by the secrecy and peril of the affair than by such charms and qualities as he possessed. when the fact dawned on him it nearly broke his heart, but now it seemed the redeeming feature of the case. the affair, in short, had been of the kind that most of the young men of his age had been through, and emerged from with calm consciences and an undisturbed belief in the abysmal distinction between the women one loved and respected and those one enjoyed--and pitied. in this view they were sedulously abetted by their mothers, aunts and other elderly female relatives, who all shared mrs. archer's belief that when "such things happened" it was undoubtedly foolish of the man, but somehow always criminal of the woman. all the elderly ladies whom archer knew regarded any woman who loved imprudently as necessarily unscrupulous and designing, and mere simple-minded man as powerless in her clutches. the only thing to do was to persuade him, as early as possible, to marry a nice girl, and then trust to her to look after him. in the complicated old european communities, archer began to guess, love-problems might be less simple and less easily classified. rich and idle and ornamental societies must produce many more such situations; and there might even be one in which a woman naturally sensitive and aloof would yet, from the force of circumstances, from sheer defencelessness and loneliness, be drawn into a tie inexcusable by conventional standards. on reaching home he wrote a line to the countess olenska, asking at what hour of the next day she could receive him, and despatched it by a messenger-boy, who returned presently with a word to the effect that she was going to skuytercliff the next morning to stay over sunday with the van der luydens, but that he would find her alone that evening after dinner. the note was written on a rather untidy half-sheet, without date or address, but her hand was firm and free. he was amused at the idea of her week-ending in the stately solitude of skuytercliff, but immediately afterward felt that there, of all places, she would most feel the chill of minds rigorously averted from the "unpleasant." he was at mr. letterblair's punctually at seven, glad of the pretext for excusing himself soon after dinner. he had formed his own opinion from the papers entrusted to him, and did not especially want to go into the matter with his senior partner. mr. letterblair was a widower, and they dined alone, copiously and slowly, in a dark shabby room hung with yellowing prints of "the death of chatham" and "the coronation of napoleon." on the sideboard, between fluted sheraton knife-cases, stood a decanter of haut brion, and another of the old lanning port (the gift of a client), which the wastrel tom lanning had sold off a year or two before his mysterious and discreditable death in san francisco--an incident less publicly humiliating to the family than the sale of the cellar. after a velvety oyster soup came shad and cucumbers, then a young broiled turkey with corn fritters, followed by a canvas-back with currant jelly and a celery mayonnaise. mr. letterblair, who lunched on a sandwich and tea, dined deliberately and deeply, and insisted on his guest's doing the same. finally, when the closing rites had been accomplished, the cloth was removed, cigars were lit, and mr. letterblair, leaning back in his chair and pushing the port westward, said, spreading his back agreeably to the coal fire behind him: "the whole family are against a divorce. and i think rightly." archer instantly felt himself on the other side of the argument. "but why, sir? if there ever was a case--" "well--what's the use? she's here--he's there; the atlantic's between them. she'll never get back a dollar more of her money than what he's voluntarily returned to her: their damned heathen marriage settlements take precious good care of that. as things go over there, olenski's acted generously: he might have turned her out without a penny." the young man knew this and was silent. "i understand, though," mr. letterblair continued, "that she attaches no importance to the money. therefore, as the family say, why not let well enough alone?" archer had gone to the house an hour earlier in full agreement with mr. letterblair's view; but put into words by this selfish, well-fed and supremely indifferent old man it suddenly became the pharisaic voice of a society wholly absorbed in barricading itself against the unpleasant. "i think that's for her to decide." "h'm--have you considered the consequences if she decides for divorce?" "you mean the threat in her husband's letter? what weight would that carry? it's no more than the vague charge of an angry blackguard." "yes; but it might make some unpleasant talk if he really defends the suit." "unpleasant--!" said archer explosively. mr. letterblair looked at him from under enquiring eyebrows, and the young man, aware of the uselessness of trying to explain what was in his mind, bowed acquiescently while his senior continued: "divorce is always unpleasant." "you agree with me?" mr. letterblair resumed, after a waiting silence. "naturally," said archer. "well, then, i may count on you; the mingotts may count on you; to use your influence against the idea?" archer hesitated. "i can't pledge myself till i've seen the countess olenska," he said at length. "mr. archer, i don't understand you. do you want to marry into a family with a scandalous divorce-suit hanging over it?" "i don't think that has anything to do with the case." mr. letterblair put down his glass of port and fixed on his young partner a cautious and apprehensive gaze. archer understood that he ran the risk of having his mandate withdrawn, and for some obscure reason he disliked the prospect. now that the job had been thrust on him he did not propose to relinquish it; and, to guard against the possibility, he saw that he must reassure the unimaginative old man who was the legal conscience of the mingotts. "you may be sure, sir, that i shan't commit myself till i've reported to you; what i meant was that i'd rather not give an opinion till i've heard what madame olenska has to say." mr. letterblair nodded approvingly at an excess of caution worthy of the best new york tradition, and the young man, glancing at his watch, pleaded an engagement and took leave. xii. old-fashioned new york dined at seven, and the habit of after-dinner calls, though derided in archer's set, still generally prevailed. as the young man strolled up fifth avenue from waverley place, the long thoroughfare was deserted but for a group of carriages standing before the reggie chiverses' (where there was a dinner for the duke), and the occasional figure of an elderly gentleman in heavy overcoat and muffler ascending a brownstone doorstep and disappearing into a gas-lit hall. thus, as archer crossed washington square, he remarked that old mr. du lac was calling on his cousins the dagonets, and turning down the corner of west tenth street he saw mr. skipworth, of his own firm, obviously bound on a visit to the miss lannings. a little farther up fifth avenue, beaufort appeared on his doorstep, darkly projected against a blaze of light, descended to his private brougham, and rolled away to a mysterious and probably unmentionable destination. it was not an opera night, and no one was giving a party, so that beaufort's outing was undoubtedly of a clandestine nature. archer connected it in his mind with a little house beyond lexington avenue in which beribboned window curtains and flower-boxes had recently appeared, and before whose newly painted door the canary-coloured brougham of miss fanny ring was frequently seen to wait. beyond the small and slippery pyramid which composed mrs. archer's world lay the almost unmapped quarter inhabited by artists, musicians and "people who wrote." these scattered fragments of humanity had never shown any desire to be amalgamated with the social structure. in spite of odd ways they were said to be, for the most part, quite respectable; but they preferred to keep to themselves. medora manson, in her prosperous days, had inaugurated a "literary salon"; but it had soon died out owing to the reluctance of the literary to frequent it. others had made the same attempt, and there was a household of blenkers--an intense and voluble mother, and three blowsy daughters who imitated her--where one met edwin booth and patti and william winter, and the new shakespearian actor george rignold, and some of the magazine editors and musical and literary critics. mrs. archer and her group felt a certain timidity concerning these persons. they were odd, they were uncertain, they had things one didn't know about in the background of their lives and minds. literature and art were deeply respected in the archer set, and mrs. archer was always at pains to tell her children how much more agreeable and cultivated society had been when it included such figures as washington irving, fitz-greene halleck and the poet of "the culprit fay." the most celebrated authors of that generation had been "gentlemen"; perhaps the unknown persons who succeeded them had gentlemanly sentiments, but their origin, their appearance, their hair, their intimacy with the stage and the opera, made any old new york criterion inapplicable to them. "when i was a girl," mrs. archer used to say, "we knew everybody between the battery and canal street; and only the people one knew had carriages. it was perfectly easy to place any one then; now one can't tell, and i prefer not to try." only old catherine mingott, with her absence of moral prejudices and almost parvenu indifference to the subtler distinctions, might have bridged the abyss; but she had never opened a book or looked at a picture, and cared for music only because it reminded her of gala nights at the italiens, in the days of her triumph at the tuileries. possibly beaufort, who was her match in daring, would have succeeded in bringing about a fusion; but his grand house and silk-stockinged footmen were an obstacle to informal sociability. moreover, he was as illiterate as old mrs. mingott, and considered "fellows who wrote" as the mere paid purveyors of rich men's pleasures; and no one rich enough to influence his opinion had ever questioned it. newland archer had been aware of these things ever since he could remember, and had accepted them as part of the structure of his universe. he knew that there were societies where painters and poets and novelists and men of science, and even great actors, were as sought after as dukes; he had often pictured to himself what it would have been to live in the intimacy of drawing-rooms dominated by the talk of merimee (whose "lettres a une inconnue" was one of his inseparables), of thackeray, browning or william morris. but such things were inconceivable in new york, and unsettling to think of. archer knew most of the "fellows who wrote," the musicians and the painters: he met them at the century, or at the little musical and theatrical clubs that were beginning to come into existence. he enjoyed them there, and was bored with them at the blenkers', where they were mingled with fervid and dowdy women who passed them about like captured curiosities; and even after his most exciting talks with ned winsett he always came away with the feeling that if his world was small, so was theirs, and that the only way to enlarge either was to reach a stage of manners where they would naturally merge. he was reminded of this by trying to picture the society in which the countess olenska had lived and suffered, and also--perhaps--tasted mysterious joys. he remembered with what amusement she had told him that her grandmother mingott and the wellands objected to her living in a "bohemian" quarter given over to "people who wrote." it was not the peril but the poverty that her family disliked; but that shade escaped her, and she supposed they considered literature compromising. she herself had no fears of it, and the books scattered about her drawing-room (a part of the house in which books were usually supposed to be "out of place"), though chiefly works of fiction, had whetted archer's interest with such new names as those of paul bourget, huysmans, and the goncourt brothers. ruminating on these things as he approached her door, he was once more conscious of the curious way in which she reversed his values, and of the need of thinking himself into conditions incredibly different from any that he knew if he were to be of use in her present difficulty. nastasia opened the door, smiling mysteriously. on the bench in the hall lay a sable-lined overcoat, a folded opera hat of dull silk with a gold j. b. on the lining, and a white silk muffler: there was no mistaking the fact that these costly articles were the property of julius beaufort. archer was angry: so angry that he came near scribbling a word on his card and going away; then he remembered that in writing to madame olenska he had been kept by excess of discretion from saying that he wished to see her privately. he had therefore no one but himself to blame if she had opened her doors to other visitors; and he entered the drawing-room with the dogged determination to make beaufort feel himself in the way, and to outstay him. the banker stood leaning against the mantelshelf, which was draped with an old embroidery held in place by brass candelabra containing church candles of yellowish wax. he had thrust his chest out, supporting his shoulders against the mantel and resting his weight on one large patent-leather foot. as archer entered he was smiling and looking down on his hostess, who sat on a sofa placed at right angles to the chimney. a table banked with flowers formed a screen behind it, and against the orchids and azaleas which the young man recognised as tributes from the beaufort hot-houses, madame olenska sat half-reclined, her head propped on a hand and her wide sleeve leaving the arm bare to the elbow. it was usual for ladies who received in the evenings to wear what were called "simple dinner dresses": a close-fitting armour of whale-boned silk, slightly open in the neck, with lace ruffles filling in the crack, and tight sleeves with a flounce uncovering just enough wrist to show an etruscan gold bracelet or a velvet band. but madame olenska, heedless of tradition, was attired in a long robe of red velvet bordered about the chin and down the front with glossy black fur. archer remembered, on his last visit to paris, seeing a portrait by the new painter, carolus duran, whose pictures were the sensation of the salon, in which the lady wore one of these bold sheath-like robes with her chin nestling in fur. there was something perverse and provocative in the notion of fur worn in the evening in a heated drawing-room, and in the combination of a muffled throat and bare arms; but the effect was undeniably pleasing. "lord love us--three whole days at skuytercliff!" beaufort was saying in his loud sneering voice as archer entered. "you'd better take all your furs, and a hot-water-bottle." "why? is the house so cold?" she asked, holding out her left hand to archer in a way mysteriously suggesting that she expected him to kiss it. "no; but the missus is," said beaufort, nodding carelessly to the young man. "but i thought her so kind. she came herself to invite me. granny says i must certainly go." "granny would, of course. and i say it's a shame you're going to miss the little oyster supper i'd planned for you at delmonico's next sunday, with campanini and scalchi and a lot of jolly people." she looked doubtfully from the banker to archer. "ah--that does tempt me! except the other evening at mrs. struthers's i've not met a single artist since i've been here." "what kind of artists? i know one or two painters, very good fellows, that i could bring to see you if you'd allow me," said archer boldly. "painters? are there painters in new york?" asked beaufort, in a tone implying that there could be none since he did not buy their pictures; and madame olenska said to archer, with her grave smile: "that would be charming. but i was really thinking of dramatic artists, singers, actors, musicians. my husband's house was always full of them." she said the words "my husband" as if no sinister associations were connected with them, and in a tone that seemed almost to sigh over the lost delights of her married life. archer looked at her perplexedly, wondering if it were lightness or dissimulation that enabled her to touch so easily on the past at the very moment when she was risking her reputation in order to break with it. "i do think," she went on, addressing both men, "that the imprevu adds to one's enjoyment. it's perhaps a mistake to see the same people every day." "it's confoundedly dull, anyhow; new york is dying of dullness," beaufort grumbled. "and when i try to liven it up for you, you go back on me. come--think better of it! sunday is your last chance, for campanini leaves next week for baltimore and philadelphia; and i've a private room, and a steinway, and they'll sing all night for me." "how delicious! may i think it over, and write to you tomorrow morning?" she spoke amiably, yet with the least hint of dismissal in her voice. beaufort evidently felt it, and being unused to dismissals, stood staring at her with an obstinate line between his eyes. "why not now?" "it's too serious a question to decide at this late hour." "do you call it late?" she returned his glance coolly. "yes; because i have still to talk business with mr. archer for a little while." "ah," beaufort snapped. there was no appeal from her tone, and with a slight shrug he recovered his composure, took her hand, which he kissed with a practised air, and calling out from the threshold: "i say, newland, if you can persuade the countess to stop in town of course you're included in the supper," left the room with his heavy important step. for a moment archer fancied that mr. letterblair must have told her of his coming; but the irrelevance of her next remark made him change his mind. "you know painters, then? you live in their milieu?" she asked, her eyes full of interest. "oh, not exactly. i don't know that the arts have a milieu here, any of them; they're more like a very thinly settled outskirt." "but you care for such things?" "immensely. when i'm in paris or london i never miss an exhibition. i try to keep up." she looked down at the tip of the little satin boot that peeped from her long draperies. "i used to care immensely too: my life was full of such things. but now i want to try not to." "you want to try not to?" "yes: i want to cast off all my old life, to become just like everybody else here." archer reddened. "you'll never be like everybody else," he said. she raised her straight eyebrows a little. "ah, don't say that. if you knew how i hate to be different!" her face had grown as sombre as a tragic mask. she leaned forward, clasping her knee in her thin hands, and looking away from him into remote dark distances. "i want to get away from it all," she insisted. he waited a moment and cleared his throat. "i know. mr. letterblair has told me." "ah?" "that's the reason i've come. he asked me to--you see i'm in the firm." she looked slightly surprised, and then her eyes brightened. "you mean you can manage it for me? i can talk to you instead of mr. letterblair? oh, that will be so much easier!" her tone touched him, and his confidence grew with his self-satisfaction. he perceived that she had spoken of business to beaufort simply to get rid of him; and to have routed beaufort was something of a triumph. "i am here to talk about it," he repeated. she sat silent, her head still propped by the arm that rested on the back of the sofa. her face looked pale and extinguished, as if dimmed by the rich red of her dress. she struck archer, of a sudden, as a pathetic and even pitiful figure. "now we're coming to hard facts," he thought, conscious in himself of the same instinctive recoil that he had so often criticised in his mother and her contemporaries. how little practice he had had in dealing with unusual situations! their very vocabulary was unfamiliar to him, and seemed to belong to fiction and the stage. in face of what was coming he felt as awkward and embarrassed as a boy. after a pause madame olenska broke out with unexpected vehemence: "i want to be free; i want to wipe out all the past." "i understand that." her face warmed. "then you'll help me?" "first--" he hesitated--"perhaps i ought to know a little more." she seemed surprised. "you know about my husband--my life with him?" he made a sign of assent. "well--then--what more is there? in this country are such things tolerated? i'm a protestant--our church does not forbid divorce in such cases." "certainly not." they were both silent again, and archer felt the spectre of count olenski's letter grimacing hideously between them. the letter filled only half a page, and was just what he had described it to be in speaking of it to mr. letterblair: the vague charge of an angry blackguard. but how much truth was behind it? only count olenski's wife could tell. "i've looked through the papers you gave to mr. letterblair," he said at length. "well--can there be anything more abominable?" "no." she changed her position slightly, screening her eyes with her lifted hand. "of course you know," archer continued, "that if your husband chooses to fight the case--as he threatens to--" "yes--?" "he can say things--things that might be unpl--might be disagreeable to you: say them publicly, so that they would get about, and harm you even if--" "if--?" "i mean: no matter how unfounded they were." she paused for a long interval; so long that, not wishing to keep his eyes on her shaded face, he had time to imprint on his mind the exact shape of her other hand, the one on her knee, and every detail of the three rings on her fourth and fifth fingers; among which, he noticed, a wedding ring did not appear. "what harm could such accusations, even if he made them publicly, do me here?" it was on his lips to exclaim: "my poor child--far more harm than anywhere else!" instead, he answered, in a voice that sounded in his ears like mr. letterblair's: "new york society is a very small world compared with the one you've lived in. and it's ruled, in spite of appearances, by a few people with--well, rather old-fashioned ideas." she said nothing, and he continued: "our ideas about marriage and divorce are particularly old-fashioned. our legislation favours divorce--our social customs don't." "never?" "well--not if the woman, however injured, however irreproachable, has appearances in the least degree against her, has exposed herself by any unconventional action to--to offensive insinuations--" she drooped her head a little lower, and he waited again, intensely hoping for a flash of indignation, or at least a brief cry of denial. none came. a little travelling clock ticked purringly at her elbow, and a log broke in two and sent up a shower of sparks. the whole hushed and brooding room seemed to be waiting silently with archer. "yes," she murmured at length, "that's what my family tell me." he winced a little. "it's not unnatural--" "our family," she corrected herself; and archer coloured. "for you'll be my cousin soon," she continued gently. "i hope so." "and you take their view?" he stood up at this, wandered across the room, stared with void eyes at one of the pictures against the old red damask, and came back irresolutely to her side. how could he say: "yes, if what your husband hints is true, or if you've no way of disproving it?" "sincerely--" she interjected, as he was about to speak. he looked down into the fire. "sincerely, then--what should you gain that would compensate for the possibility--the certainty--of a lot of beastly talk?" "but my freedom--is that nothing?" it flashed across him at that instant that the charge in the letter was true, and that she hoped to marry the partner of her guilt. how was he to tell her that, if she really cherished such a plan, the laws of the state were inexorably opposed to it? the mere suspicion that the thought was in her mind made him feel harshly and impatiently toward her. "but aren't you as free as air as it is?" he returned. "who can touch you? mr. letterblair tells me the financial question has been settled--" "oh, yes," she said indifferently. "well, then: is it worth while to risk what may be infinitely disagreeable and painful? think of the newspapers--their vileness! it's all stupid and narrow and unjust--but one can't make over society." "no," she acquiesced; and her tone was so faint and desolate that he felt a sudden remorse for his own hard thoughts. "the individual, in such cases, is nearly always sacrificed to what is supposed to be the collective interest: people cling to any convention that keeps the family together--protects the children, if there are any," he rambled on, pouring out all the stock phrases that rose to his lips in his intense desire to cover over the ugly reality which her silence seemed to have laid bare. since she would not or could not say the one word that would have cleared the air, his wish was not to let her feel that he was trying to probe into her secret. better keep on the surface, in the prudent old new york way, than risk uncovering a wound he could not heal. "it's my business, you know," he went on, "to help you to see these things as the people who are fondest of you see them. the mingotts, the wellands, the van der luydens, all your friends and relations: if i didn't show you honestly how they judge such questions, it wouldn't be fair of me, would it?" he spoke insistently, almost pleading with her in his eagerness to cover up that yawning silence. she said slowly: "no; it wouldn't be fair." the fire had crumbled down to greyness, and one of the lamps made a gurgling appeal for attention. madame olenska rose, wound it up and returned to the fire, but without resuming her seat. her remaining on her feet seemed to signify that there was nothing more for either of them to say, and archer stood up also. "very well; i will do what you wish," she said abruptly. the blood rushed to his forehead; and, taken aback by the suddenness of her surrender, he caught her two hands awkwardly in his. "i--i do want to help you," he said. "you do help me. good night, my cousin." he bent and laid his lips on her hands, which were cold and lifeless. she drew them away, and he turned to the door, found his coat and hat under the faint gas-light of the hall, and plunged out into the winter night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate. xiii. it was a crowded night at wallack's theatre. the play was "the shaughraun," with dion boucicault in the title role and harry montague and ada dyas as the lovers. the popularity of the admirable english company was at its height, and the shaughraun always packed the house. in the galleries the enthusiasm was unreserved; in the stalls and boxes, people smiled a little at the hackneyed sentiments and clap-trap situations, and enjoyed the play as much as the galleries did. there was one episode, in particular, that held the house from floor to ceiling. it was that in which harry montague, after a sad, almost monosyllabic scene of parting with miss dyas, bade her good-bye, and turned to go. the actress, who was standing near the mantelpiece and looking down into the fire, wore a gray cashmere dress without fashionable loopings or trimmings, moulded to her tall figure and flowing in long lines about her feet. around her neck was a narrow black velvet ribbon with the ends falling down her back. when her wooer turned from her she rested her arms against the mantel-shelf and bowed her face in her hands. on the threshold he paused to look at her; then he stole back, lifted one of the ends of velvet ribbon, kissed it, and left the room without her hearing him or changing her attitude. and on this silent parting the curtain fell. it was always for the sake of that particular scene that newland archer went to see "the shaughraun." he thought the adieux of montague and ada dyas as fine as anything he had ever seen croisette and bressant do in paris, or madge robertson and kendal in london; in its reticence, its dumb sorrow, it moved him more than the most famous histrionic outpourings. on the evening in question the little scene acquired an added poignancy by reminding him--he could not have said why--of his leave-taking from madame olenska after their confidential talk a week or ten days earlier. it would have been as difficult to discover any resemblance between the two situations as between the appearance of the persons concerned. newland archer could not pretend to anything approaching the young english actor's romantic good looks, and miss dyas was a tall red-haired woman of monumental build whose pale and pleasantly ugly face was utterly unlike ellen olenska's vivid countenance. nor were archer and madame olenska two lovers parting in heart-broken silence; they were client and lawyer separating after a talk which had given the lawyer the worst possible impression of the client's case. wherein, then, lay the resemblance that made the young man's heart beat with a kind of retrospective excitement? it seemed to be in madame olenska's mysterious faculty of suggesting tragic and moving possibilities outside the daily run of experience. she had hardly ever said a word to him to produce this impression, but it was a part of her, either a projection of her mysterious and outlandish background or of something inherently dramatic, passionate and unusual in herself. archer had always been inclined to think that chance and circumstance played a small part in shaping people's lots compared with their innate tendency to have things happen to them. this tendency he had felt from the first in madame olenska. the quiet, almost passive young woman struck him as exactly the kind of person to whom things were bound to happen, no matter how much she shrank from them and went out of her way to avoid them. the exciting fact was her having lived in an atmosphere so thick with drama that her own tendency to provoke it had apparently passed unperceived. it was precisely the odd absence of surprise in her that gave him the sense of her having been plucked out of a very maelstrom: the things she took for granted gave the measure of those she had rebelled against. archer had left her with the conviction that count olenski's accusation was not unfounded. the mysterious person who figured in his wife's past as "the secretary" had probably not been unrewarded for his share in her escape. the conditions from which she had fled were intolerable, past speaking of, past believing: she was young, she was frightened, she was desperate--what more natural than that she should be grateful to her rescuer? the pity was that her gratitude put her, in the law's eyes and the world's, on a par with her abominable husband. archer had made her understand this, as he was bound to do; he had also made her understand that simplehearted kindly new york, on whose larger charity she had apparently counted, was precisely the place where she could least hope for indulgence. to have to make this fact plain to her--and to witness her resigned acceptance of it--had been intolerably painful to him. he felt himself drawn to her by obscure feelings of jealousy and pity, as if her dumbly-confessed error had put her at his mercy, humbling yet endearing her. he was glad it was to him she had revealed her secret, rather than to the cold scrutiny of mr. letterblair, or the embarrassed gaze of her family. he immediately took it upon himself to assure them both that she had given up her idea of seeking a divorce, basing her decision on the fact that she had understood the uselessness of the proceeding; and with infinite relief they had all turned their eyes from the "unpleasantness" she had spared them. "i was sure newland would manage it," mrs. welland had said proudly of her future son-in-law; and old mrs. mingott, who had summoned him for a confidential interview, had congratulated him on his cleverness, and added impatiently: "silly goose! i told her myself what nonsense it was. wanting to pass herself off as ellen mingott and an old maid, when she has the luck to be a married woman and a countess!" these incidents had made the memory of his last talk with madame olenska so vivid to the young man that as the curtain fell on the parting of the two actors his eyes filled with tears, and he stood up to leave the theatre. in doing so, he turned to the side of the house behind him, and saw the lady of whom he was thinking seated in a box with the beauforts, lawrence lefferts and one or two other men. he had not spoken with her alone since their evening together, and had tried to avoid being with her in company; but now their eyes met, and as mrs. beaufort recognised him at the same time, and made her languid little gesture of invitation, it was impossible not to go into the box. beaufort and lefferts made way for him, and after a few words with mrs. beaufort, who always preferred to look beautiful and not have to talk, archer seated himself behind madame olenska. there was no one else in the box but mr. sillerton jackson, who was telling mrs. beaufort in a confidential undertone about mrs. lemuel struthers's last sunday reception (where some people reported that there had been dancing). under cover of this circumstantial narrative, to which mrs. beaufort listened with her perfect smile, and her head at just the right angle to be seen in profile from the stalls, madame olenska turned and spoke in a low voice. "do you think," she asked, glancing toward the stage, "he will send her a bunch of yellow roses tomorrow morning?" archer reddened, and his heart gave a leap of surprise. he had called only twice on madame olenska, and each time he had sent her a box of yellow roses, and each time without a card. she had never before made any allusion to the flowers, and he supposed she had never thought of him as the sender. now her sudden recognition of the gift, and her associating it with the tender leave-taking on the stage, filled him with an agitated pleasure. "i was thinking of that too--i was going to leave the theatre in order to take the picture away with me," he said. to his surprise her colour rose, reluctantly and duskily. she looked down at the mother-of-pearl opera-glass in her smoothly gloved hands, and said, after a pause: "what do you do while may is away?" "i stick to my work," he answered, faintly annoyed by the question. in obedience to a long-established habit, the wellands had left the previous week for st. augustine, where, out of regard for the supposed susceptibility of mr. welland's bronchial tubes, they always spent the latter part of the winter. mr. welland was a mild and silent man, with no opinions but with many habits. with these habits none might interfere; and one of them demanded that his wife and daughter should always go with him on his annual journey to the south. to preserve an unbroken domesticity was essential to his peace of mind; he would not have known where his hair-brushes were, or how to provide stamps for his letters, if mrs. welland had not been there to tell him. as all the members of the family adored each other, and as mr. welland was the central object of their idolatry, it never occurred to his wife and may to let him go to st. augustine alone; and his sons, who were both in the law, and could not leave new york during the winter, always joined him for easter and travelled back with him. it was impossible for archer to discuss the necessity of may's accompanying her father. the reputation of the mingotts' family physician was largely based on the attack of pneumonia which mr. welland had never had; and his insistence on st. augustine was therefore inflexible. originally, it had been intended that may's engagement should not be announced till her return from florida, and the fact that it had been made known sooner could not be expected to alter mr. welland's plans. archer would have liked to join the travellers and have a few weeks of sunshine and boating with his betrothed; but he too was bound by custom and conventions. little arduous as his professional duties were, he would have been convicted of frivolity by the whole mingott clan if he had suggested asking for a holiday in mid-winter; and he accepted may's departure with the resignation which he perceived would have to be one of the principal constituents of married life. he was conscious that madame olenska was looking at him under lowered lids. "i have done what you wished--what you advised," she said abruptly. "ah--i'm glad," he returned, embarrassed by her broaching the subject at such a moment. "i understand--that you were right," she went on a little breathlessly; "but sometimes life is difficult ... perplexing..." "i know." "and i wanted to tell you that i do feel you were right; and that i'm grateful to you," she ended, lifting her opera-glass quickly to her eyes as the door of the box opened and beaufort's resonant voice broke in on them. archer stood up, and left the box and the theatre. only the day before he had received a letter from may welland in which, with characteristic candour, she had asked him to "be kind to ellen" in their absence. "she likes you and admires you so much--and you know, though she doesn't show it, she's still very lonely and unhappy. i don't think granny understands her, or uncle lovell mingott either; they really think she's much worldlier and fonder of society than she is. and i can quite see that new york must seem dull to her, though the family won't admit it. i think she's been used to lots of things we haven't got; wonderful music, and picture shows, and celebrities--artists and authors and all the clever people you admire. granny can't understand her wanting anything but lots of dinners and clothes--but i can see that you're almost the only person in new york who can talk to her about what she really cares for." his wise may--how he had loved her for that letter! but he had not meant to act on it; he was too busy, to begin with, and he did not care, as an engaged man, to play too conspicuously the part of madame olenska's champion. he had an idea that she knew how to take care of herself a good deal better than the ingenuous may imagined. she had beaufort at her feet, mr. van der luyden hovering above her like a protecting deity, and any number of candidates (lawrence lefferts among them) waiting their opportunity in the middle distance. yet he never saw her, or exchanged a word with her, without feeling that, after all, may's ingenuousness almost amounted to a gift of divination. ellen olenska was lonely and she was unhappy. xiv. as he came out into the lobby archer ran across his friend ned winsett, the only one among what janey called his "clever people" with whom he cared to probe into things a little deeper than the average level of club and chop-house banter. he had caught sight, across the house, of winsett's shabby round-shouldered back, and had once noticed his eyes turned toward the beaufort box. the two men shook hands, and winsett proposed a bock at a little german restaurant around the corner. archer, who was not in the mood for the kind of talk they were likely to get there, declined on the plea that he had work to do at home; and winsett said: "oh, well so have i for that matter, and i'll be the industrious apprentice too." they strolled along together, and presently winsett said: "look here, what i'm really after is the name of the dark lady in that swell box of yours--with the beauforts, wasn't she? the one your friend lefferts seems so smitten by." archer, he could not have said why, was slightly annoyed. what the devil did ned winsett want with ellen olenska's name? and above all, why did he couple it with lefferts's? it was unlike winsett to manifest such curiosity; but after all, archer remembered, he was a journalist. "it's not for an interview, i hope?" he laughed. "well--not for the press; just for myself," winsett rejoined. "the fact is she's a neighbour of mine--queer quarter for such a beauty to settle in--and she's been awfully kind to my little boy, who fell down her area chasing his kitten, and gave himself a nasty cut. she rushed in bareheaded, carrying him in her arms, with his knee all beautifully bandaged, and was so sympathetic and beautiful that my wife was too dazzled to ask her name." a pleasant glow dilated archer's heart. there was nothing extraordinary in the tale: any woman would have done as much for a neighbour's child. but it was just like ellen, he felt, to have rushed in bareheaded, carrying the boy in her arms, and to have dazzled poor mrs. winsett into forgetting to ask who she was. "that is the countess olenska--a granddaughter of old mrs. mingott's." "whew--a countess!" whistled ned winsett. "well, i didn't know countesses were so neighbourly. mingotts ain't." "they would be, if you'd let them." "ah, well--" it was their old interminable argument as to the obstinate unwillingness of the "clever people" to frequent the fashionable, and both men knew that there was no use in prolonging it. "i wonder," winsett broke off, "how a countess happens to live in our slum?" "because she doesn't care a hang about where she lives--or about any of our little social sign-posts," said archer, with a secret pride in his own picture of her. "h'm--been in bigger places, i suppose," the other commented. "well, here's my corner." he slouched off across broadway, and archer stood looking after him and musing on his last words. ned winsett had those flashes of penetration; they were the most interesting thing about him, and always made archer wonder why they had allowed him to accept failure so stolidly at an age when most men are still struggling. archer had known that winsett had a wife and child, but he had never seen them. the two men always met at the century, or at some haunt of journalists and theatrical people, such as the restaurant where winsett had proposed to go for a bock. he had given archer to understand that his wife was an invalid; which might be true of the poor lady, or might merely mean that she was lacking in social gifts or in evening clothes, or in both. winsett himself had a savage abhorrence of social observances: archer, who dressed in the evening because he thought it cleaner and more comfortable to do so, and who had never stopped to consider that cleanliness and comfort are two of the costliest items in a modest budget, regarded winsett's attitude as part of the boring "bohemian" pose that always made fashionable people, who changed their clothes without talking about it, and were not forever harping on the number of servants one kept, seem so much simpler and less self-conscious than the others. nevertheless, he was always stimulated by winsett, and whenever he caught sight of the journalist's lean bearded face and melancholy eyes he would rout him out of his corner and carry him off for a long talk. winsett was not a journalist by choice. he was a pure man of letters, untimely born in a world that had no need of letters; but after publishing one volume of brief and exquisite literary appreciations, of which one hundred and twenty copies were sold, thirty given away, and the balance eventually destroyed by the publishers (as per contract) to make room for more marketable material, he had abandoned his real calling, and taken a sub-editorial job on a women's weekly, where fashion-plates and paper patterns alternated with new england love-stories and advertisements of temperance drinks. on the subject of "hearth-fires" (as the paper was called) he was inexhaustibly entertaining; but beneath his fun lurked the sterile bitterness of the still young man who has tried and given up. his conversation always made archer take the measure of his own life, and feel how little it contained; but winsett's, after all, contained still less, and though their common fund of intellectual interests and curiosities made their talks exhilarating, their exchange of views usually remained within the limits of a pensive dilettantism. "the fact is, life isn't much a fit for either of us," winsett had once said. "i'm down and out; nothing to be done about it. i've got only one ware to produce, and there's no market for it here, and won't be in my time. but you're free and you're well-off. why don't you get into touch? there's only one way to do it: to go into politics." archer threw his head back and laughed. there one saw at a flash the unbridgeable difference between men like winsett and the others--archer's kind. every one in polite circles knew that, in america, "a gentleman couldn't go into politics." but, since he could hardly put it in that way to winsett, he answered evasively: "look at the career of the honest man in american politics! they don't want us." "who's 'they'? why don't you all get together and be 'they' yourselves?" archer's laugh lingered on his lips in a slightly condescending smile. it was useless to prolong the discussion: everybody knew the melancholy fate of the few gentlemen who had risked their clean linen in municipal or state politics in new york. the day was past when that sort of thing was possible: the country was in possession of the bosses and the emigrant, and decent people had to fall back on sport or culture. "culture! yes--if we had it! but there are just a few little local patches, dying out here and there for lack of--well, hoeing and cross-fertilising: the last remnants of the old european tradition that your forebears brought with them. but you're in a pitiful little minority: you've got no centre, no competition, no audience. you're like the pictures on the walls of a deserted house: 'the portrait of a gentleman.' you'll never amount to anything, any of you, till you roll up your sleeves and get right down into the muck. that, or emigrate ... god! if i could emigrate ..." archer mentally shrugged his shoulders and turned the conversation back to books, where winsett, if uncertain, was always interesting. emigrate! as if a gentleman could abandon his own country! one could no more do that than one could roll up one's sleeves and go down into the muck. a gentleman simply stayed at home and abstained. but you couldn't make a man like winsett see that; and that was why the new york of literary clubs and exotic restaurants, though a first shake made it seem more of a kaleidoscope, turned out, in the end, to be a smaller box, with a more monotonous pattern, than the assembled atoms of fifth avenue. the next morning archer scoured the town in vain for more yellow roses. in consequence of this search he arrived late at the office, perceived that his doing so made no difference whatever to any one, and was filled with sudden exasperation at the elaborate futility of his life. why should he not be, at that moment, on the sands of st. augustine with may welland? no one was deceived by his pretense of professional activity. in old-fashioned legal firms like that of which mr. letterblair was the head, and which were mainly engaged in the management of large estates and "conservative" investments, there were always two or three young men, fairly well-off, and without professional ambition, who, for a certain number of hours of each day, sat at their desks accomplishing trivial tasks, or simply reading the newspapers. though it was supposed to be proper for them to have an occupation, the crude fact of money-making was still regarded as derogatory, and the law, being a profession, was accounted a more gentlemanly pursuit than business. but none of these young men had much hope of really advancing in his profession, or any earnest desire to do so; and over many of them the green mould of the perfunctory was already perceptibly spreading. it made archer shiver to think that it might be spreading over him too. he had, to be sure, other tastes and interests; he spent his vacations in european travel, cultivated the "clever people" may spoke of, and generally tried to "keep up," as he had somewhat wistfully put it to madame olenska. but once he was married, what would become of this narrow margin of life in which his real experiences were lived? he had seen enough of other young men who had dreamed his dream, though perhaps less ardently, and who had gradually sunk into the placid and luxurious routine of their elders. from the office he sent a note by messenger to madame olenska, asking if he might call that afternoon, and begging her to let him find a reply at his club; but at the club he found nothing, nor did he receive any letter the following day. this unexpected silence mortified him beyond reason, and though the next morning he saw a glorious cluster of yellow roses behind a florist's window-pane, he left it there. it was only on the third morning that he received a line by post from the countess olenska. to his surprise it was dated from skuytercliff, whither the van der luydens had promptly retreated after putting the duke on board his steamer. "i ran away," the writer began abruptly (without the usual preliminaries), "the day after i saw you at the play, and these kind friends have taken me in. i wanted to be quiet, and think things over. you were right in telling me how kind they were; i feel myself so safe here. i wish that you were with us." she ended with a conventional "yours sincerely," and without any allusion to the date of her return. the tone of the note surprised the young man. what was madame olenska running away from, and why did she feel the need to be safe? his first thought was of some dark menace from abroad; then he reflected that he did not know her epistolary style, and that it might run to picturesque exaggeration. women always exaggerated; and moreover she was not wholly at her ease in english, which she often spoke as if she were translating from the french. "je me suis evadee--" put in that way, the opening sentence immediately suggested that she might merely have wanted to escape from a boring round of engagements; which was very likely true, for he judged her to be capricious, and easily wearied of the pleasure of the moment. it amused him to think of the van der luydens' having carried her off to skuytercliff on a second visit, and this time for an indefinite period. the doors of skuytercliff were rarely and grudgingly opened to visitors, and a chilly week-end was the most ever offered to the few thus privileged. but archer had seen, on his last visit to paris, the delicious play of labiche, "le voyage de m. perrichon," and he remembered m. perrichon's dogged and undiscouraged attachment to the young man whom he had pulled out of the glacier. the van der luydens had rescued madame olenska from a doom almost as icy; and though there were many other reasons for being attracted to her, archer knew that beneath them all lay the gentle and obstinate determination to go on rescuing her. he felt a distinct disappointment on learning that she was away; and almost immediately remembered that, only the day before, he had refused an invitation to spend the following sunday with the reggie chiverses at their house on the hudson, a few miles below skuytercliff. he had had his fill long ago of the noisy friendly parties at highbank, with coasting, ice-boating, sleighing, long tramps in the snow, and a general flavour of mild flirting and milder practical jokes. he had just received a box of new books from his london book-seller, and had preferred the prospect of a quiet sunday at home with his spoils. but he now went into the club writing-room, wrote a hurried telegram, and told the servant to send it immediately. he knew that mrs. reggie didn't object to her visitors' suddenly changing their minds, and that there was always a room to spare in her elastic house. xv. newland archer arrived at the chiverses' on friday evening, and on saturday went conscientiously through all the rites appertaining to a week-end at highbank. in the morning he had a spin in the ice-boat with his hostess and a few of the hardier guests; in the afternoon he "went over the farm" with reggie, and listened, in the elaborately appointed stables, to long and impressive disquisitions on the horse; after tea he talked in a corner of the firelit hall with a young lady who had professed herself broken-hearted when his engagement was announced, but was now eager to tell him of her own matrimonial hopes; and finally, about midnight, he assisted in putting a gold-fish in one visitor's bed, dressed up a burglar in the bath-room of a nervous aunt, and saw in the small hours by joining in a pillow-fight that ranged from the nurseries to the basement. but on sunday after luncheon he borrowed a cutter, and drove over to skuytercliff. people had always been told that the house at skuytercliff was an italian villa. those who had never been to italy believed it; so did some who had. the house had been built by mr. van der luyden in his youth, on his return from the "grand tour," and in anticipation of his approaching marriage with miss louisa dagonet. it was a large square wooden structure, with tongued and grooved walls painted pale green and white, a corinthian portico, and fluted pilasters between the windows. from the high ground on which it stood a series of terraces bordered by balustrades and urns descended in the steel-engraving style to a small irregular lake with an asphalt edge overhung by rare weeping conifers. to the right and left, the famous weedless lawns studded with "specimen" trees (each of a different variety) rolled away to long ranges of grass crested with elaborate cast-iron ornaments; and below, in a hollow, lay the four-roomed stone house which the first patroon had built on the land granted him in . against the uniform sheet of snow and the greyish winter sky the italian villa loomed up rather grimly; even in summer it kept its distance, and the boldest coleus bed had never ventured nearer than thirty feet from its awful front. now, as archer rang the bell, the long tinkle seemed to echo through a mausoleum; and the surprise of the butler who at length responded to the call was as great as though he had been summoned from his final sleep. happily archer was of the family, and therefore, irregular though his arrival was, entitled to be informed that the countess olenska was out, having driven to afternoon service with mrs. van der luyden exactly three quarters of an hour earlier. "mr. van der luyden," the butler continued, "is in, sir; but my impression is that he is either finishing his nap or else reading yesterday's evening post. i heard him say, sir, on his return from church this morning, that he intended to look through the evening post after luncheon; if you like, sir, i might go to the library door and listen--" but archer, thanking him, said that he would go and meet the ladies; and the butler, obviously relieved, closed the door on him majestically. a groom took the cutter to the stables, and archer struck through the park to the high-road. the village of skuytercliff was only a mile and a half away, but he knew that mrs. van der luyden never walked, and that he must keep to the road to meet the carriage. presently, however, coming down a foot-path that crossed the highway, he caught sight of a slight figure in a red cloak, with a big dog running ahead. he hurried forward, and madame olenska stopped short with a smile of welcome. "ah, you've come!" she said, and drew her hand from her muff. the red cloak made her look gay and vivid, like the ellen mingott of old days; and he laughed as he took her hand, and answered: "i came to see what you were running away from." her face clouded over, but she answered: "ah, well--you will see, presently." the answer puzzled him. "why--do you mean that you've been overtaken?" she shrugged her shoulders, with a little movement like nastasia's, and rejoined in a lighter tone: "shall we walk on? i'm so cold after the sermon. and what does it matter, now you're here to protect me?" the blood rose to his temples and he caught a fold of her cloak. "ellen--what is it? you must tell me." "oh, presently--let's run a race first: my feet are freezing to the ground," she cried; and gathering up the cloak she fled away across the snow, the dog leaping about her with challenging barks. for a moment archer stood watching, his gaze delighted by the flash of the red meteor against the snow; then he started after her, and they met, panting and laughing, at a wicket that led into the park. she looked up at him and smiled. "i knew you'd come!" "that shows you wanted me to," he returned, with a disproportionate joy in their nonsense. the white glitter of the trees filled the air with its own mysterious brightness, and as they walked on over the snow the ground seemed to sing under their feet. "where did you come from?" madame olenska asked. he told her, and added: "it was because i got your note." after a pause she said, with a just perceptible chill in her voice: "may asked you to take care of me." "i didn't need any asking." "you mean--i'm so evidently helpless and defenceless? what a poor thing you must all think me! but women here seem not--seem never to feel the need: any more than the blessed in heaven." he lowered his voice to ask: "what sort of a need?" "ah, don't ask me! i don't speak your language," she retorted petulantly. the answer smote him like a blow, and he stood still in the path, looking down at her. "what did i come for, if i don't speak yours?" "oh, my friend--!" she laid her hand lightly on his arm, and he pleaded earnestly: "ellen--why won't you tell me what's happened?" she shrugged again. "does anything ever happen in heaven?" he was silent, and they walked on a few yards without exchanging a word. finally she said: "i will tell you--but where, where, where? one can't be alone for a minute in that great seminary of a house, with all the doors wide open, and always a servant bringing tea, or a log for the fire, or the newspaper! is there nowhere in an american house where one may be by one's self? you're so shy, and yet you're so public. i always feel as if i were in the convent again--or on the stage, before a dreadfully polite audience that never applauds." "ah, you don't like us!" archer exclaimed. they were walking past the house of the old patroon, with its squat walls and small square windows compactly grouped about a central chimney. the shutters stood wide, and through one of the newly-washed windows archer caught the light of a fire. "why--the house is open!" he said. she stood still. "no; only for today, at least. i wanted to see it, and mr. van der luyden had the fire lit and the windows opened, so that we might stop there on the way back from church this morning." she ran up the steps and tried the door. "it's still unlocked--what luck! come in and we can have a quiet talk. mrs. van der luyden has driven over to see her old aunts at rhinebeck and we shan't be missed at the house for another hour." he followed her into the narrow passage. his spirits, which had dropped at her last words, rose with an irrational leap. the homely little house stood there, its panels and brasses shining in the firelight, as if magically created to receive them. a big bed of embers still gleamed in the kitchen chimney, under an iron pot hung from an ancient crane. rush-bottomed arm-chairs faced each other across the tiled hearth, and rows of delft plates stood on shelves against the walls. archer stooped over and threw a log upon the embers. madame olenska, dropping her cloak, sat down in one of the chairs. archer leaned against the chimney and looked at her. "you're laughing now; but when you wrote me you were unhappy," he said. "yes." she paused. "but i can't feel unhappy when you're here." "i sha'n't be here long," he rejoined, his lips stiffening with the effort to say just so much and no more. "no; i know. but i'm improvident: i live in the moment when i'm happy." the words stole through him like a temptation, and to close his senses to it he moved away from the hearth and stood gazing out at the black tree-boles against the snow. but it was as if she too had shifted her place, and he still saw her, between himself and the trees, drooping over the fire with her indolent smile. archer's heart was beating insubordinately. what if it were from him that she had been running away, and if she had waited to tell him so till they were here alone together in this secret room? "ellen, if i'm really a help to you--if you really wanted me to come--tell me what's wrong, tell me what it is you're running away from," he insisted. he spoke without shifting his position, without even turning to look at her: if the thing was to happen, it was to happen in this way, with the whole width of the room between them, and his eyes still fixed on the outer snow. for a long moment she was silent; and in that moment archer imagined her, almost heard her, stealing up behind him to throw her light arms about his neck. while he waited, soul and body throbbing with the miracle to come, his eyes mechanically received the image of a heavily-coated man with his fur collar turned up who was advancing along the path to the house. the man was julius beaufort. "ah--!" archer cried, bursting into a laugh. madame olenska had sprung up and moved to his side, slipping her hand into his; but after a glance through the window her face paled and she shrank back. "so that was it?" archer said derisively. "i didn't know he was here," madame olenska murmured. her hand still clung to archer's; but he drew away from her, and walking out into the passage threw open the door of the house. "hallo, beaufort--this way! madame olenska was expecting you," he said. during his journey back to new york the next morning, archer relived with a fatiguing vividness his last moments at skuytercliff. beaufort, though clearly annoyed at finding him with madame olenska, had, as usual, carried off the situation high-handedly. his way of ignoring people whose presence inconvenienced him actually gave them, if they were sensitive to it, a feeling of invisibility, of nonexistence. archer, as the three strolled back through the park, was aware of this odd sense of disembodiment; and humbling as it was to his vanity it gave him the ghostly advantage of observing unobserved. beaufort had entered the little house with his usual easy assurance; but he could not smile away the vertical line between his eyes. it was fairly clear that madame olenska had not known that he was coming, though her words to archer had hinted at the possibility; at any rate, she had evidently not told him where she was going when she left new york, and her unexplained departure had exasperated him. the ostensible reason of his appearance was the discovery, the very night before, of a "perfect little house," not in the market, which was really just the thing for her, but would be snapped up instantly if she didn't take it; and he was loud in mock-reproaches for the dance she had led him in running away just as he had found it. "if only this new dodge for talking along a wire had been a little bit nearer perfection i might have told you all this from town, and been toasting my toes before the club fire at this minute, instead of tramping after you through the snow," he grumbled, disguising a real irritation under the pretence of it; and at this opening madame olenska twisted the talk away to the fantastic possibility that they might one day actually converse with each other from street to street, or even--incredible dream!--from one town to another. this struck from all three allusions to edgar poe and jules verne, and such platitudes as naturally rise to the lips of the most intelligent when they are talking against time, and dealing with a new invention in which it would seem ingenuous to believe too soon; and the question of the telephone carried them safely back to the big house. mrs. van der luyden had not yet returned; and archer took his leave and walked off to fetch the cutter, while beaufort followed the countess olenska indoors. it was probable that, little as the van der luydens encouraged unannounced visits, he could count on being asked to dine, and sent back to the station to catch the nine o'clock train; but more than that he would certainly not get, for it would be inconceivable to his hosts that a gentleman travelling without luggage should wish to spend the night, and distasteful to them to propose it to a person with whom they were on terms of such limited cordiality as beaufort. beaufort knew all this, and must have foreseen it; and his taking the long journey for so small a reward gave the measure of his impatience. he was undeniably in pursuit of the countess olenska; and beaufort had only one object in view in his pursuit of pretty women. his dull and childless home had long since palled on him; and in addition to more permanent consolations he was always in quest of amorous adventures in his own set. this was the man from whom madame olenska was avowedly flying: the question was whether she had fled because his importunities displeased her, or because she did not wholly trust herself to resist them; unless, indeed, all her talk of flight had been a blind, and her departure no more than a manoeuvre. archer did not really believe this. little as he had actually seen of madame olenska, he was beginning to think that he could read her face, and if not her face, her voice; and both had betrayed annoyance, and even dismay, at beaufort's sudden appearance. but, after all, if this were the case, was it not worse than if she had left new york for the express purpose of meeting him? if she had done that, she ceased to be an object of interest, she threw in her lot with the vulgarest of dissemblers: a woman engaged in a love affair with beaufort "classed" herself irretrievably. no, it was worse a thousand times if, judging beaufort, and probably despising him, she was yet drawn to him by all that gave him an advantage over the other men about her: his habit of two continents and two societies, his familiar association with artists and actors and people generally in the world's eye, and his careless contempt for local prejudices. beaufort was vulgar, he was uneducated, he was purse-proud; but the circumstances of his life, and a certain native shrewdness, made him better worth talking to than many men, morally and socially his betters, whose horizon was bounded by the battery and the central park. how should any one coming from a wider world not feel the difference and be attracted by it? madame olenska, in a burst of irritation, had said to archer that he and she did not talk the same language; and the young man knew that in some respects this was true. but beaufort understood every turn of her dialect, and spoke it fluently: his view of life, his tone, his attitude, were merely a coarser reflection of those revealed in count olenski's letter. this might seem to be to his disadvantage with count olenski's wife; but archer was too intelligent to think that a young woman like ellen olenska would necessarily recoil from everything that reminded her of her past. she might believe herself wholly in revolt against it; but what had charmed her in it would still charm her, even though it were against her will. thus, with a painful impartiality, did the young man make out the case for beaufort, and for beaufort's victim. a longing to enlighten her was strong in him; and there were moments when he imagined that all she asked was to be enlightened. that evening he unpacked his books from london. the box was full of things he had been waiting for impatiently; a new volume of herbert spencer, another collection of the prolific alphonse daudet's brilliant tales, and a novel called "middlemarch," as to which there had lately been interesting things said in the reviews. he had declined three dinner invitations in favour of this feast; but though he turned the pages with the sensuous joy of the book-lover, he did not know what he was reading, and one book after another dropped from his hand. suddenly, among them, he lit on a small volume of verse which he had ordered because the name had attracted him: "the house of life." he took it up, and found himself plunged in an atmosphere unlike any he had ever breathed in books; so warm, so rich, and yet so ineffably tender, that it gave a new and haunting beauty to the most elementary of human passions. all through the night he pursued through those enchanted pages the vision of a woman who had the face of ellen olenska; but when he woke the next morning, and looked out at the brownstone houses across the street, and thought of his desk in mr. letterblair's office, and the family pew in grace church, his hour in the park of skuytercliff became as far outside the pale of probability as the visions of the night. "mercy, how pale you look, newland!" janey commented over the coffee-cups at breakfast; and his mother added: "newland, dear, i've noticed lately that you've been coughing; i do hope you're not letting yourself be overworked?" for it was the conviction of both ladies that, under the iron despotism of his senior partners, the young man's life was spent in the most exhausting professional labours--and he had never thought it necessary to undeceive them. the next two or three days dragged by heavily. the taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future. he heard nothing of the countess olenska, or of the perfect little house, and though he met beaufort at the club they merely nodded at each other across the whist-tables. it was not till the fourth evening that he found a note awaiting him on his return home. "come late tomorrow: i must explain to you. ellen." these were the only words it contained. the young man, who was dining out, thrust the note into his pocket, smiling a little at the frenchness of the "to you." after dinner he went to a play; and it was not until his return home, after midnight, that he drew madame olenska's missive out again and re-read it slowly a number of times. there were several ways of answering it, and he gave considerable thought to each one during the watches of an agitated night. that on which, when morning came, he finally decided was to pitch some clothes into a portmanteau and jump on board a boat that was leaving that very afternoon for st. augustine. xvi. when archer walked down the sandy main street of st. augustine to the house which had been pointed out to him as mr. welland's, and saw may welland standing under a magnolia with the sun in her hair, he wondered why he had waited so long to come. here was the truth, here was reality, here was the life that belonged to him; and he, who fancied himself so scornful of arbitrary restraints, had been afraid to break away from his desk because of what people might think of his stealing a holiday! her first exclamation was: "newland--has anything happened?" and it occurred to him that it would have been more "feminine" if she had instantly read in his eyes why he had come. but when he answered: "yes--i found i had to see you," her happy blushes took the chill from her surprise, and he saw how easily he would be forgiven, and how soon even mr. letterblair's mild disapproval would be smiled away by a tolerant family. early as it was, the main street was no place for any but formal greetings, and archer longed to be alone with may, and to pour out all his tenderness and his impatience. it still lacked an hour to the late welland breakfast-time, and instead of asking him to come in she proposed that they should walk out to an old orange-garden beyond the town. she had just been for a row on the river, and the sun that netted the little waves with gold seemed to have caught her in its meshes. across the warm brown of her cheek her blown hair glittered like silver wire; and her eyes too looked lighter, almost pale in their youthful limpidity. as she walked beside archer with her long swinging gait her face wore the vacant serenity of a young marble athlete. to archer's strained nerves the vision was as soothing as the sight of the blue sky and the lazy river. they sat down on a bench under the orange-trees and he put his arm about her and kissed her. it was like drinking at a cold spring with the sun on it; but his pressure may have been more vehement than he had intended, for the blood rose to her face and she drew back as if he had startled her. "what is it?" he asked, smiling; and she looked at him with surprise, and answered: "nothing." a slight embarrassment fell on them, and her hand slipped out of his. it was the only time that he had kissed her on the lips except for their fugitive embrace in the beaufort conservatory, and he saw that she was disturbed, and shaken out of her cool boyish composure. "tell me what you do all day," he said, crossing his arms under his tilted-back head, and pushing his hat forward to screen the sun-dazzle. to let her talk about familiar and simple things was the easiest way of carrying on his own independent train of thought; and he sat listening to her simple chronicle of swimming, sailing and riding, varied by an occasional dance at the primitive inn when a man-of-war came in. a few pleasant people from philadelphia and baltimore were picknicking at the inn, and the selfridge merrys had come down for three weeks because kate merry had had bronchitis. they were planning to lay out a lawn tennis court on the sands; but no one but kate and may had racquets, and most of the people had not even heard of the game. all this kept her very busy, and she had not had time to do more than look at the little vellum book that archer had sent her the week before (the "sonnets from the portuguese"); but she was learning by heart "how they brought the good news from ghent to aix," because it was one of the first things he had ever read to her; and it amused her to be able to tell him that kate merry had never even heard of a poet called robert browning. presently she started up, exclaiming that they would be late for breakfast; and they hurried back to the tumble-down house with its pointless porch and unpruned hedge of plumbago and pink geraniums where the wellands were installed for the winter. mr. welland's sensitive domesticity shrank from the discomforts of the slovenly southern hotel, and at immense expense, and in face of almost insuperable difficulties, mrs. welland was obliged, year after year, to improvise an establishment partly made up of discontented new york servants and partly drawn from the local african supply. "the doctors want my husband to feel that he is in his own home; otherwise he would be so wretched that the climate would not do him any good," she explained, winter after winter, to the sympathising philadelphians and baltimoreans; and mr. welland, beaming across a breakfast table miraculously supplied with the most varied delicacies, was presently saying to archer: "you see, my dear fellow, we camp--we literally camp. i tell my wife and may that i want to teach them how to rough it." mr. and mrs. welland had been as much surprised as their daughter by the young man's sudden arrival; but it had occurred to him to explain that he had felt himself on the verge of a nasty cold, and this seemed to mr. welland an all-sufficient reason for abandoning any duty. "you can't be too careful, especially toward spring," he said, heaping his plate with straw-coloured griddle-cakes and drowning them in golden syrup. "if i'd only been as prudent at your age may would have been dancing at the assemblies now, instead of spending her winters in a wilderness with an old invalid." "oh, but i love it here, papa; you know i do. if only newland could stay i should like it a thousand times better than new york." "newland must stay till he has quite thrown off his cold," said mrs. welland indulgently; and the young man laughed, and said he supposed there was such a thing as one's profession. he managed, however, after an exchange of telegrams with the firm, to make his cold last a week; and it shed an ironic light on the situation to know that mr. letterblair's indulgence was partly due to the satisfactory way in which his brilliant young junior partner had settled the troublesome matter of the olenski divorce. mr. letterblair had let mrs. welland know that mr. archer had "rendered an invaluable service" to the whole family, and that old mrs. manson mingott had been particularly pleased; and one day when may had gone for a drive with her father in the only vehicle the place produced mrs. welland took occasion to touch on a topic which she always avoided in her daughter's presence. "i'm afraid ellen's ideas are not at all like ours. she was barely eighteen when medora manson took her back to europe--you remember the excitement when she appeared in black at her coming-out ball? another of medora's fads--really this time it was almost prophetic! that must have been at least twelve years ago; and since then ellen has never been to america. no wonder she is completely europeanised." "but european society is not given to divorce: countess olenska thought she would be conforming to american ideas in asking for her freedom." it was the first time that the young man had pronounced her name since he had left skuytercliff, and he felt the colour rise to his cheek. mrs. welland smiled compassionately. "that is just like the extraordinary things that foreigners invent about us. they think we dine at two o'clock and countenance divorce! that is why it seems to me so foolish to entertain them when they come to new york. they accept our hospitality, and then they go home and repeat the same stupid stories." archer made no comment on this, and mrs. welland continued: "but we do most thoroughly appreciate your persuading ellen to give up the idea. her grandmother and her uncle lovell could do nothing with her; both of them have written that her changing her mind was entirely due to your influence--in fact she said so to her grandmother. she has an unbounded admiration for you. poor ellen--she was always a wayward child. i wonder what her fate will be?" "what we've all contrived to make it," he felt like answering. "if you'd all of you rather she should be beaufort's mistress than some decent fellow's wife you've certainly gone the right way about it." he wondered what mrs. welland would have said if he had uttered the words instead of merely thinking them. he could picture the sudden decomposure of her firm placid features, to which a lifelong mastery over trifles had given an air of factitious authority. traces still lingered on them of a fresh beauty like her daughter's; and he asked himself if may's face was doomed to thicken into the same middle-aged image of invincible innocence. ah, no, he did not want may to have that kind of innocence, the innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience! "i verily believe," mrs. welland continued, "that if the horrible business had come out in the newspapers it would have been my husband's death-blow. i don't know any of the details; i only ask not to, as i told poor ellen when she tried to talk to me about it. having an invalid to care for, i have to keep my mind bright and happy. but mr. welland was terribly upset; he had a slight temperature every morning while we were waiting to hear what had been decided. it was the horror of his girl's learning that such things were possible--but of course, dear newland, you felt that too. we all knew that you were thinking of may." "i'm always thinking of may," the young man rejoined, rising to cut short the conversation. he had meant to seize the opportunity of his private talk with mrs. welland to urge her to advance the date of his marriage. but he could think of no arguments that would move her, and with a sense of relief he saw mr. welland and may driving up to the door. his only hope was to plead again with may, and on the day before his departure he walked with her to the ruinous garden of the spanish mission. the background lent itself to allusions to european scenes; and may, who was looking her loveliest under a wide-brimmed hat that cast a shadow of mystery over her too-clear eyes, kindled into eagerness as he spoke of granada and the alhambra. "we might be seeing it all this spring--even the easter ceremonies at seville," he urged, exaggerating his demands in the hope of a larger concession. "easter in seville? and it will be lent next week!" she laughed. "why shouldn't we be married in lent?" he rejoined; but she looked so shocked that he saw his mistake. "of course i didn't mean that, dearest; but soon after easter--so that we could sail at the end of april. i know i could arrange it at the office." she smiled dreamily upon the possibility; but he perceived that to dream of it sufficed her. it was like hearing him read aloud out of his poetry books the beautiful things that could not possibly happen in real life. "oh, do go on, newland; i do love your descriptions." "but why should they be only descriptions? why shouldn't we make them real?" "we shall, dearest, of course; next year." her voice lingered over it. "don't you want them to be real sooner? can't i persuade you to break away now?" she bowed her head, vanishing from him under her conniving hat-brim. "why should we dream away another year? look at me, dear! don't you understand how i want you for my wife?" for a moment she remained motionless; then she raised on him eyes of such despairing dearness that he half-released her waist from his hold. but suddenly her look changed and deepened inscrutably. "i'm not sure if i do understand," she said. "is it--is it because you're not certain of continuing to care for me?" archer sprang up from his seat. "my god--perhaps--i don't know," he broke out angrily. may welland rose also; as they faced each other she seemed to grow in womanly stature and dignity. both were silent for a moment, as if dismayed by the unforeseen trend of their words: then she said in a low voice: "if that is it--is there some one else?" "some one else--between you and me?" he echoed her words slowly, as though they were only half-intelligible and he wanted time to repeat the question to himself. she seemed to catch the uncertainty of his voice, for she went on in a deepening tone: "let us talk frankly, newland. sometimes i've felt a difference in you; especially since our engagement has been announced." "dear--what madness!" he recovered himself to exclaim. she met his protest with a faint smile. "if it is, it won't hurt us to talk about it." she paused, and added, lifting her head with one of her noble movements: "or even if it's true: why shouldn't we speak of it? you might so easily have made a mistake." he lowered his head, staring at the black leaf-pattern on the sunny path at their feet. "mistakes are always easy to make; but if i had made one of the kind you suggest, is it likely that i should be imploring you to hasten our marriage?" she looked downward too, disturbing the pattern with the point of her sunshade while she struggled for expression. "yes," she said at length. "you might want--once for all--to settle the question: it's one way." her quiet lucidity startled him, but did not mislead him into thinking her insensible. under her hat-brim he saw the pallor of her profile, and a slight tremor of the nostril above her resolutely steadied lips. "well--?" he questioned, sitting down on the bench, and looking up at her with a frown that he tried to make playful. she dropped back into her seat and went on: "you mustn't think that a girl knows as little as her parents imagine. one hears and one notices--one has one's feelings and ideas. and of course, long before you told me that you cared for me, i'd known that there was some one else you were interested in; every one was talking about it two years ago at newport. and once i saw you sitting together on the verandah at a dance--and when she came back into the house her face was sad, and i felt sorry for her; i remembered it afterward, when we were engaged." her voice had sunk almost to a whisper, and she sat clasping and unclasping her hands about the handle of her sunshade. the young man laid his upon them with a gentle pressure; his heart dilated with an inexpressible relief. "my dear child--was that it? if you only knew the truth!" she raised her head quickly. "then there is a truth i don't know?" he kept his hand over hers. "i meant, the truth about the old story you speak of." "but that's what i want to know, newland--what i ought to know. i couldn't have my happiness made out of a wrong--an unfairness--to somebody else. and i want to believe that it would be the same with you. what sort of a life could we build on such foundations?" her face had taken on a look of such tragic courage that he felt like bowing himself down at her feet. "i've wanted to say this for a long time," she went on. "i've wanted to tell you that, when two people really love each other, i understand that there may be situations which make it right that they should--should go against public opinion. and if you feel yourself in any way pledged ... pledged to the person we've spoken of ... and if there is any way ... any way in which you can fulfill your pledge ... even by her getting a divorce ... newland, don't give her up because of me!" his surprise at discovering that her fears had fastened upon an episode so remote and so completely of the past as his love-affair with mrs. thorley rushworth gave way to wonder at the generosity of her view. there was something superhuman in an attitude so recklessly unorthodox, and if other problems had not pressed on him he would have been lost in wonder at the prodigy of the wellands' daughter urging him to marry his former mistress. but he was still dizzy with the glimpse of the precipice they had skirted, and full of a new awe at the mystery of young-girlhood. for a moment he could not speak; then he said: "there is no pledge--no obligation whatever--of the kind you think. such cases don't always--present themselves quite as simply as ... but that's no matter ... i love your generosity, because i feel as you do about those things ... i feel that each case must be judged individually, on its own merits ... irrespective of stupid conventionalities ... i mean, each woman's right to her liberty--" he pulled himself up, startled by the turn his thoughts had taken, and went on, looking at her with a smile: "since you understand so many things, dearest, can't you go a little farther, and understand the uselessness of our submitting to another form of the same foolish conventionalities? if there's no one and nothing between us, isn't that an argument for marrying quickly, rather than for more delay?" she flushed with joy and lifted her face to his; as he bent to it he saw that her eyes were full of happy tears. but in another moment she seemed to have descended from her womanly eminence to helpless and timorous girlhood; and he understood that her courage and initiative were all for others, and that she had none for herself. it was evident that the effort of speaking had been much greater than her studied composure betrayed, and that at his first word of reassurance she had dropped back into the usual, as a too-adventurous child takes refuge in its mother's arms. archer had no heart to go on pleading with her; he was too much disappointed at the vanishing of the new being who had cast that one deep look at him from her transparent eyes. may seemed to be aware of his disappointment, but without knowing how to alleviate it; and they stood up and walked silently home. xvii. "your cousin the countess called on mother while you were away," janey archer announced to her brother on the evening of his return. the young man, who was dining alone with his mother and sister, glanced up in surprise and saw mrs. archer's gaze demurely bent on her plate. mrs. archer did not regard her seclusion from the world as a reason for being forgotten by it; and newland guessed that she was slightly annoyed that he should be surprised by madame olenska's visit. "she had on a black velvet polonaise with jet buttons, and a tiny green monkey muff; i never saw her so stylishly dressed," janey continued. "she came alone, early on sunday afternoon; luckily the fire was lit in the drawing-room. she had one of those new card-cases. she said she wanted to know us because you'd been so good to her." newland laughed. "madame olenska always takes that tone about her friends. she's very happy at being among her own people again." "yes, so she told us," said mrs. archer. "i must say she seems thankful to be here." "i hope you liked her, mother." mrs. archer drew her lips together. "she certainly lays herself out to please, even when she is calling on an old lady." "mother doesn't think her simple," janey interjected, her eyes screwed upon her brother's face. "it's just my old-fashioned feeling; dear may is my ideal," said mrs. archer. "ah," said her son, "they're not alike." archer had left st. augustine charged with many messages for old mrs. mingott; and a day or two after his return to town he called on her. the old lady received him with unusual warmth; she was grateful to him for persuading the countess olenska to give up the idea of a divorce; and when he told her that he had deserted the office without leave, and rushed down to st. augustine simply because he wanted to see may, she gave an adipose chuckle and patted his knee with her puff-ball hand. "ah, ah--so you kicked over the traces, did you? and i suppose augusta and welland pulled long faces, and behaved as if the end of the world had come? but little may--she knew better, i'll be bound?" "i hoped she did; but after all she wouldn't agree to what i'd gone down to ask for." "wouldn't she indeed? and what was that?" "i wanted to get her to promise that we should be married in april. what's the use of our wasting another year?" mrs. manson mingott screwed up her little mouth into a grimace of mimic prudery and twinkled at him through malicious lids. "'ask mamma,' i suppose--the usual story. ah, these mingotts--all alike! born in a rut, and you can't root 'em out of it. when i built this house you'd have thought i was moving to california! nobody ever had built above fortieth street--no, says i, nor above the battery either, before christopher columbus discovered america. no, no; not one of them wants to be different; they're as scared of it as the small-pox. ah, my dear mr. archer, i thank my stars i'm nothing but a vulgar spicer; but there's not one of my own children that takes after me but my little ellen." she broke off, still twinkling at him, and asked, with the casual irrelevance of old age: "now, why in the world didn't you marry my little ellen?" archer laughed. "for one thing, she wasn't there to be married." "no--to be sure; more's the pity. and now it's too late; her life is finished." she spoke with the cold-blooded complacency of the aged throwing earth into the grave of young hopes. the young man's heart grew chill, and he said hurriedly: "can't i persuade you to use your influence with the wellands, mrs. mingott? i wasn't made for long engagements." old catherine beamed on him approvingly. "no; i can see that. you've got a quick eye. when you were a little boy i've no doubt you liked to be helped first." she threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves. "ah, here's my ellen now!" she exclaimed, as the portieres parted behind her. madame olenska came forward with a smile. her face looked vivid and happy, and she held out her hand gaily to archer while she stooped to her grandmother's kiss. "i was just saying to him, my dear: 'now, why didn't you marry my little ellen?'" madame olenska looked at archer, still smiling. "and what did he answer?" "oh, my darling, i leave you to find that out! he's been down to florida to see his sweetheart." "yes, i know." she still looked at him. "i went to see your mother, to ask where you'd gone. i sent a note that you never answered, and i was afraid you were ill." he muttered something about leaving unexpectedly, in a great hurry, and having intended to write to her from st. augustine. "and of course once you were there you never thought of me again!" she continued to beam on him with a gaiety that might have been a studied assumption of indifference. "if she still needs me, she's determined not to let me see it," he thought, stung by her manner. he wanted to thank her for having been to see his mother, but under the ancestress's malicious eye he felt himself tongue-tied and constrained. "look at him--in such hot haste to get married that he took french leave and rushed down to implore the silly girl on his knees! that's something like a lover--that's the way handsome bob spicer carried off my poor mother; and then got tired of her before i was weaned--though they only had to wait eight months for me! but there--you're not a spicer, young man; luckily for you and for may. it's only my poor ellen that has kept any of their wicked blood; the rest of them are all model mingotts," cried the old lady scornfully. archer was aware that madame olenska, who had seated herself at her grandmother's side, was still thoughtfully scrutinising him. the gaiety had faded from her eyes, and she said with great gentleness: "surely, granny, we can persuade them between us to do as he wishes." archer rose to go, and as his hand met madame olenska's he felt that she was waiting for him to make some allusion to her unanswered letter. "when can i see you?" he asked, as she walked with him to the door of the room. "whenever you like; but it must be soon if you want to see the little house again. i am moving next week." a pang shot through him at the memory of his lamplit hours in the low-studded drawing-room. few as they had been, they were thick with memories. "tomorrow evening?" she nodded. "tomorrow; yes; but early. i'm going out." the next day was a sunday, and if she were "going out" on a sunday evening it could, of course, be only to mrs. lemuel struthers's. he felt a slight movement of annoyance, not so much at her going there (for he rather liked her going where she pleased in spite of the van der luydens), but because it was the kind of house at which she was sure to meet beaufort, where she must have known beforehand that she would meet him--and where she was probably going for that purpose. "very well; tomorrow evening," he repeated, inwardly resolved that he would not go early, and that by reaching her door late he would either prevent her from going to mrs. struthers's, or else arrive after she had started--which, all things considered, would no doubt be the simplest solution. it was only half-past eight, after all, when he rang the bell under the wisteria; not as late as he had intended by half an hour--but a singular restlessness had driven him to her door. he reflected, however, that mrs. struthers's sunday evenings were not like a ball, and that her guests, as if to minimise their delinquency, usually went early. the one thing he had not counted on, in entering madame olenska's hall, was to find hats and overcoats there. why had she bidden him to come early if she was having people to dine? on a closer inspection of the garments besides which nastasia was laying his own, his resentment gave way to curiosity. the overcoats were in fact the very strangest he had ever seen under a polite roof; and it took but a glance to assure himself that neither of them belonged to julius beaufort. one was a shaggy yellow ulster of "reach-me-down" cut, the other a very old and rusty cloak with a cape--something like what the french called a "macfarlane." this garment, which appeared to be made for a person of prodigious size, had evidently seen long and hard wear, and its greenish-black folds gave out a moist sawdusty smell suggestive of prolonged sessions against bar-room walls. on it lay a ragged grey scarf and an odd felt hat of semiclerical shape. archer raised his eyebrows enquiringly at nastasia, who raised hers in return with a fatalistic "gia!" as she threw open the drawing-room door. the young man saw at once that his hostess was not in the room; then, with surprise, he discovered another lady standing by the fire. this lady, who was long, lean and loosely put together, was clad in raiment intricately looped and fringed, with plaids and stripes and bands of plain colour disposed in a design to which the clue seemed missing. her hair, which had tried to turn white and only succeeded in fading, was surmounted by a spanish comb and black lace scarf, and silk mittens, visibly darned, covered her rheumatic hands. beside her, in a cloud of cigar-smoke, stood the owners of the two overcoats, both in morning clothes that they had evidently not taken off since morning. in one of the two, archer, to his surprise, recognised ned winsett; the other and older, who was unknown to him, and whose gigantic frame declared him to be the wearer of the "macfarlane," had a feebly leonine head with crumpled grey hair, and moved his arms with large pawing gestures, as though he were distributing lay blessings to a kneeling multitude. these three persons stood together on the hearth-rug, their eyes fixed on an extraordinarily large bouquet of crimson roses, with a knot of purple pansies at their base, that lay on the sofa where madame olenska usually sat. "what they must have cost at this season--though of course it's the sentiment one cares about!" the lady was saying in a sighing staccato as archer came in. the three turned with surprise at his appearance, and the lady, advancing, held out her hand. "dear mr. archer--almost my cousin newland!" she said. "i am the marchioness manson." archer bowed, and she continued: "my ellen has taken me in for a few days. i came from cuba, where i have been spending the winter with spanish friends--such delightful distinguished people: the highest nobility of old castile--how i wish you could know them! but i was called away by our dear great friend here, dr. carver. you don't know dr. agathon carver, founder of the valley of love community?" dr. carver inclined his leonine head, and the marchioness continued: "ah, new york--new york--how little the life of the spirit has reached it! but i see you do know mr. winsett." "oh, yes--i reached him some time ago; but not by that route," winsett said with his dry smile. the marchioness shook her head reprovingly. "how do you know, mr. winsett? the spirit bloweth where it listeth." "list--oh, list!" interjected dr. carver in a stentorian murmur. "but do sit down, mr. archer. we four have been having a delightful little dinner together, and my child has gone up to dress. she expects you; she will be down in a moment. we were just admiring these marvellous flowers, which will surprise her when she reappears." winsett remained on his feet. "i'm afraid i must be off. please tell madame olenska that we shall all feel lost when she abandons our street. this house has been an oasis." "ah, but she won't abandon you. poetry and art are the breath of life to her. it is poetry you write, mr. winsett?" "well, no; but i sometimes read it," said winsett, including the group in a general nod and slipping out of the room. "a caustic spirit--un peu sauvage. but so witty; dr. carver, you do think him witty?" "i never think of wit," said dr. carver severely. "ah--ah--you never think of wit! how merciless he is to us weak mortals, mr. archer! but he lives only in the life of the spirit; and tonight he is mentally preparing the lecture he is to deliver presently at mrs. blenker's. dr. carver, would there be time, before you start for the blenkers' to explain to mr. archer your illuminating discovery of the direct contact? but no; i see it is nearly nine o'clock, and we have no right to detain you while so many are waiting for your message." dr. carver looked slightly disappointed at this conclusion, but, having compared his ponderous gold time-piece with madame olenska's little travelling-clock, he reluctantly gathered up his mighty limbs for departure. "i shall see you later, dear friend?" he suggested to the marchioness, who replied with a smile: "as soon as ellen's carriage comes i will join you; i do hope the lecture won't have begun." dr. carver looked thoughtfully at archer. "perhaps, if this young gentleman is interested in my experiences, mrs. blenker might allow you to bring him with you?" "oh, dear friend, if it were possible--i am sure she would be too happy. but i fear my ellen counts on mr. archer herself." "that," said dr. carver, "is unfortunate--but here is my card." he handed it to archer, who read on it, in gothic characters: +---------------------------+ | agathon carver | | the valley of love | | kittasquattamy, n. y. | +---------------------------+ dr. carver bowed himself out, and mrs. manson, with a sigh that might have been either of regret or relief, again waved archer to a seat. "ellen will be down in a moment; and before she comes, i am so glad of this quiet moment with you." archer murmured his pleasure at their meeting, and the marchioness continued, in her low sighing accents: "i know everything, dear mr. archer--my child has told me all you have done for her. your wise advice: your courageous firmness--thank heaven it was not too late!" the young man listened with considerable embarrassment. was there any one, he wondered, to whom madame olenska had not proclaimed his intervention in her private affairs? "madame olenska exaggerates; i simply gave her a legal opinion, as she asked me to." "ah, but in doing it--in doing it you were the unconscious instrument of--of--what word have we moderns for providence, mr. archer?" cried the lady, tilting her head on one side and drooping her lids mysteriously. "little did you know that at that very moment i was being appealed to: being approached, in fact--from the other side of the atlantic!" she glanced over her shoulder, as though fearful of being overheard, and then, drawing her chair nearer, and raising a tiny ivory fan to her lips, breathed behind it: "by the count himself--my poor, mad, foolish olenski; who asks only to take her back on her own terms." "good god!" archer exclaimed, springing up. "you are horrified? yes, of course; i understand. i don't defend poor stanislas, though he has always called me his best friend. he does not defend himself--he casts himself at her feet: in my person." she tapped her emaciated bosom. "i have his letter here." "a letter?--has madame olenska seen it?" archer stammered, his brain whirling with the shock of the announcement. the marchioness manson shook her head softly. "time--time; i must have time. i know my ellen--haughty, intractable; shall i say, just a shade unforgiving?" "but, good heavens, to forgive is one thing; to go back into that hell--" "ah, yes," the marchioness acquiesced. "so she describes it--my sensitive child! but on the material side, mr. archer, if one may stoop to consider such things; do you know what she is giving up? those roses there on the sofa--acres like them, under glass and in the open, in his matchless terraced gardens at nice! jewels--historic pearls: the sobieski emeralds--sables,--but she cares nothing for all these! art and beauty, those she does care for, she lives for, as i always have; and those also surrounded her. pictures, priceless furniture, music, brilliant conversation--ah, that, my dear young man, if you'll excuse me, is what you've no conception of here! and she had it all; and the homage of the greatest. she tells me she is not thought handsome in new york--good heavens! her portrait has been painted nine times; the greatest artists in europe have begged for the privilege. are these things nothing? and the remorse of an adoring husband?" as the marchioness manson rose to her climax her face assumed an expression of ecstatic retrospection which would have moved archer's mirth had he not been numb with amazement. he would have laughed if any one had foretold to him that his first sight of poor medora manson would have been in the guise of a messenger of satan; but he was in no mood for laughing now, and she seemed to him to come straight out of the hell from which ellen olenska had just escaped. "she knows nothing yet--of all this?" he asked abruptly. mrs. manson laid a purple finger on her lips. "nothing directly--but does she suspect? who can tell? the truth is, mr. archer, i have been waiting to see you. from the moment i heard of the firm stand you had taken, and of your influence over her, i hoped it might be possible to count on your support--to convince you ..." "that she ought to go back? i would rather see her dead!" cried the young man violently. "ah," the marchioness murmured, without visible resentment. for a while she sat in her arm-chair, opening and shutting the absurd ivory fan between her mittened fingers; but suddenly she lifted her head and listened. "here she comes," she said in a rapid whisper; and then, pointing to the bouquet on the sofa: "am i to understand that you prefer that, mr. archer? after all, marriage is marriage ... and my niece is still a wife..." xviii. "what are you two plotting together, aunt medora?" madame olenska cried as she came into the room. she was dressed as if for a ball. everything about her shimmered and glimmered softly, as if her dress had been woven out of candle-beams; and she carried her head high, like a pretty woman challenging a roomful of rivals. "we were saying, my dear, that here was something beautiful to surprise you with," mrs. manson rejoined, rising to her feet and pointing archly to the flowers. madame olenska stopped short and looked at the bouquet. her colour did not change, but a sort of white radiance of anger ran over her like summer lightning. "ah," she exclaimed, in a shrill voice that the young man had never heard, "who is ridiculous enough to send me a bouquet? why a bouquet? and why tonight of all nights? i am not going to a ball; i am not a girl engaged to be married. but some people are always ridiculous." she turned back to the door, opened it, and called out: "nastasia!" the ubiquitous handmaiden promptly appeared, and archer heard madame olenska say, in an italian that she seemed to pronounce with intentional deliberateness in order that he might follow it: "here--throw this into the dustbin!" and then, as nastasia stared protestingly: "but no--it's not the fault of the poor flowers. tell the boy to carry them to the house three doors away, the house of mr. winsett, the dark gentleman who dined here. his wife is ill--they may give her pleasure ... the boy is out, you say? then, my dear one, run yourself; here, put my cloak over you and fly. i want the thing out of the house immediately! and, as you live, don't say they come from me!" she flung her velvet opera cloak over the maid's shoulders and turned back into the drawing-room, shutting the door sharply. her bosom was rising high under its lace, and for a moment archer thought she was about to cry; but she burst into a laugh instead, and looking from the marchioness to archer, asked abruptly: "and you two--have you made friends!" "it's for mr. archer to say, darling; he has waited patiently while you were dressing." "yes--i gave you time enough: my hair wouldn't go," madame olenska said, raising her hand to the heaped-up curls of her chignon. "but that reminds me: i see dr. carver is gone, and you'll be late at the blenkers'. mr. archer, will you put my aunt in the carriage?" she followed the marchioness into the hall, saw her fitted into a miscellaneous heap of overshoes, shawls and tippets, and called from the doorstep: "mind, the carriage is to be back for me at ten!" then she returned to the drawing-room, where archer, on re-entering it, found her standing by the mantelpiece, examining herself in the mirror. it was not usual, in new york society, for a lady to address her parlour-maid as "my dear one," and send her out on an errand wrapped in her own opera-cloak; and archer, through all his deeper feelings, tasted the pleasurable excitement of being in a world where action followed on emotion with such olympian speed. madame olenska did not move when he came up behind her, and for a second their eyes met in the mirror; then she turned, threw herself into her sofa-corner, and sighed out: "there's time for a cigarette." he handed her the box and lit a spill for her; and as the flame flashed up into her face she glanced at him with laughing eyes and said: "what do you think of me in a temper?" archer paused a moment; then he answered with sudden resolution: "it makes me understand what your aunt has been saying about you." "i knew she'd been talking about me. well?" "she said you were used to all kinds of things--splendours and amusements and excitements--that we could never hope to give you here." madame olenska smiled faintly into the circle of smoke about her lips. "medora is incorrigibly romantic. it has made up to her for so many things!" archer hesitated again, and again took his risk. "is your aunt's romanticism always consistent with accuracy?" "you mean: does she speak the truth?" her niece considered. "well, i'll tell you: in almost everything she says, there's something true and something untrue. but why do you ask? what has she been telling you?" he looked away into the fire, and then back at her shining presence. his heart tightened with the thought that this was their last evening by that fireside, and that in a moment the carriage would come to carry her away. "she says--she pretends that count olenski has asked her to persuade you to go back to him." madame olenska made no answer. she sat motionless, holding her cigarette in her half-lifted hand. the expression of her face had not changed; and archer remembered that he had before noticed her apparent incapacity for surprise. "you knew, then?" he broke out. she was silent for so long that the ash dropped from her cigarette. she brushed it to the floor. "she has hinted about a letter: poor darling! medora's hints--" "is it at your husband's request that she has arrived here suddenly?" madame olenska seemed to consider this question also. "there again: one can't tell. she told me she had had a 'spiritual summons,' whatever that is, from dr. carver. i'm afraid she's going to marry dr. carver ... poor medora, there's always some one she wants to marry. but perhaps the people in cuba just got tired of her! i think she was with them as a sort of paid companion. really, i don't know why she came." "but you do believe she has a letter from your husband?" again madame olenska brooded silently; then she said: "after all, it was to be expected." the young man rose and went to lean against the fireplace. a sudden restlessness possessed him, and he was tongue-tied by the sense that their minutes were numbered, and that at any moment he might hear the wheels of the returning carriage. "you know that your aunt believes you will go back?" madame olenska raised her head quickly. a deep blush rose to her face and spread over her neck and shoulders. she blushed seldom and painfully, as if it hurt her like a burn. "many cruel things have been believed of me," she said. "oh, ellen--forgive me; i'm a fool and a brute!" she smiled a little. "you are horribly nervous; you have your own troubles. i know you think the wellands are unreasonable about your marriage, and of course i agree with you. in europe people don't understand our long american engagements; i suppose they are not as calm as we are." she pronounced the "we" with a faint emphasis that gave it an ironic sound. archer felt the irony but did not dare to take it up. after all, she had perhaps purposely deflected the conversation from her own affairs, and after the pain his last words had evidently caused her he felt that all he could do was to follow her lead. but the sense of the waning hour made him desperate: he could not bear the thought that a barrier of words should drop between them again. "yes," he said abruptly; "i went south to ask may to marry me after easter. there's no reason why we shouldn't be married then." "and may adores you--and yet you couldn't convince her? i thought her too intelligent to be the slave of such absurd superstitions." "she is too intelligent--she's not their slave." madame olenska looked at him. "well, then--i don't understand." archer reddened, and hurried on with a rush. "we had a frank talk--almost the first. she thinks my impatience a bad sign." "merciful heavens--a bad sign?" "she thinks it means that i can't trust myself to go on caring for her. she thinks, in short, i want to marry her at once to get away from some one that i--care for more." madame olenska examined this curiously. "but if she thinks that--why isn't she in a hurry too?" "because she's not like that: she's so much nobler. she insists all the more on the long engagement, to give me time--" "time to give her up for the other woman?" "if i want to." madame olenska leaned toward the fire and gazed into it with fixed eyes. down the quiet street archer heard the approaching trot of her horses. "that is noble," she said, with a slight break in her voice. "yes. but it's ridiculous." "ridiculous? because you don't care for any one else?" "because i don't mean to marry any one else." "ah." there was another long interval. at length she looked up at him and asked: "this other woman--does she love you?" "oh, there's no other woman; i mean, the person that may was thinking of is--was never--" "then, why, after all, are you in such haste?" "there's your carriage," said archer. she half-rose and looked about her with absent eyes. her fan and gloves lay on the sofa beside her and she picked them up mechanically. "yes; i suppose i must be going." "you're going to mrs. struthers's?" "yes." she smiled and added: "i must go where i am invited, or i should be too lonely. why not come with me?" archer felt that at any cost he must keep her beside him, must make her give him the rest of her evening. ignoring her question, he continued to lean against the chimney-piece, his eyes fixed on the hand in which she held her gloves and fan, as if watching to see if he had the power to make her drop them. "may guessed the truth," he said. "there is another woman--but not the one she thinks." ellen olenska made no answer, and did not move. after a moment he sat down beside her, and, taking her hand, softly unclasped it, so that the gloves and fan fell on the sofa between them. she started up, and freeing herself from him moved away to the other side of the hearth. "ah, don't make love to me! too many people have done that," she said, frowning. archer, changing colour, stood up also: it was the bitterest rebuke she could have given him. "i have never made love to you," he said, "and i never shall. but you are the woman i would have married if it had been possible for either of us." "possible for either of us?" she looked at him with unfeigned astonishment. "and you say that--when it's you who've made it impossible?" he stared at her, groping in a blackness through which a single arrow of light tore its blinding way. "i've made it impossible--?" "you, you, you!" she cried, her lip trembling like a child's on the verge of tears. "isn't it you who made me give up divorcing--give it up because you showed me how selfish and wicked it was, how one must sacrifice one's self to preserve the dignity of marriage ... and to spare one's family the publicity, the scandal? and because my family was going to be your family--for may's sake and for yours--i did what you told me, what you proved to me that i ought to do. ah," she broke out with a sudden laugh, "i've made no secret of having done it for you!" she sank down on the sofa again, crouching among the festive ripples of her dress like a stricken masquerader; and the young man stood by the fireplace and continued to gaze at her without moving. "good god," he groaned. "when i thought--" "you thought?" "ah, don't ask me what i thought!" still looking at her, he saw the same burning flush creep up her neck to her face. she sat upright, facing him with a rigid dignity. "i do ask you." "well, then: there were things in that letter you asked me to read--" "my husband's letter?" "yes." "i had nothing to fear from that letter: absolutely nothing! all i feared was to bring notoriety, scandal, on the family--on you and may." "good god," he groaned again, bowing his face in his hands. the silence that followed lay on them with the weight of things final and irrevocable. it seemed to archer to be crushing him down like his own grave-stone; in all the wide future he saw nothing that would ever lift that load from his heart. he did not move from his place, or raise his head from his hands; his hidden eyeballs went on staring into utter darkness. "at least i loved you--" he brought out. on the other side of the hearth, from the sofa-corner where he supposed that she still crouched, he heard a faint stifled crying like a child's. he started up and came to her side. "ellen! what madness! why are you crying? nothing's done that can't be undone. i'm still free, and you're going to be." he had her in his arms, her face like a wet flower at his lips, and all their vain terrors shrivelling up like ghosts at sunrise. the one thing that astonished him now was that he should have stood for five minutes arguing with her across the width of the room, when just touching her made everything so simple. she gave him back all his kiss, but after a moment he felt her stiffening in his arms, and she put him aside and stood up. "ah, my poor newland--i suppose this had to be. but it doesn't in the least alter things," she said, looking down at him in her turn from the hearth. "it alters the whole of life for me." "no, no--it mustn't, it can't. you're engaged to may welland; and i'm married." he stood up too, flushed and resolute. "nonsense! it's too late for that sort of thing. we've no right to lie to other people or to ourselves. we won't talk of your marriage; but do you see me marrying may after this?" she stood silent, resting her thin elbows on the mantelpiece, her profile reflected in the glass behind her. one of the locks of her chignon had become loosened and hung on her neck; she looked haggard and almost old. "i don't see you," she said at length, "putting that question to may. do you?" he gave a reckless shrug. "it's too late to do anything else." "you say that because it's the easiest thing to say at this moment--not because it's true. in reality it's too late to do anything but what we'd both decided on." "ah, i don't understand you!" she forced a pitiful smile that pinched her face instead of smoothing it. "you don't understand because you haven't yet guessed how you've changed things for me: oh, from the first--long before i knew all you'd done." "all i'd done?" "yes. i was perfectly unconscious at first that people here were shy of me--that they thought i was a dreadful sort of person. it seems they had even refused to meet me at dinner. i found that out afterward; and how you'd made your mother go with you to the van der luydens'; and how you'd insisted on announcing your engagement at the beaufort ball, so that i might have two families to stand by me instead of one--" at that he broke into a laugh. "just imagine," she said, "how stupid and unobservant i was! i knew nothing of all this till granny blurted it out one day. new york simply meant peace and freedom to me: it was coming home. and i was so happy at being among my own people that every one i met seemed kind and good, and glad to see me. but from the very beginning," she continued, "i felt there was no one as kind as you; no one who gave me reasons that i understood for doing what at first seemed so hard and--unnecessary. the very good people didn't convince me; i felt they'd never been tempted. but you knew; you understood; you had felt the world outside tugging at one with all its golden hands--and yet you hated the things it asks of one; you hated happiness bought by disloyalty and cruelty and indifference. that was what i'd never known before--and it's better than anything i've known." she spoke in a low even voice, without tears or visible agitation; and each word, as it dropped from her, fell into his breast like burning lead. he sat bowed over, his head between his hands, staring at the hearthrug, and at the tip of the satin shoe that showed under her dress. suddenly he knelt down and kissed the shoe. she bent over him, laying her hands on his shoulders, and looking at him with eyes so deep that he remained motionless under her gaze. "ah, don't let us undo what you've done!" she cried. "i can't go back now to that other way of thinking. i can't love you unless i give you up." his arms were yearning up to her; but she drew away, and they remained facing each other, divided by the distance that her words had created. then, abruptly, his anger overflowed. "and beaufort? is he to replace me?" as the words sprang out he was prepared for an answering flare of anger; and he would have welcomed it as fuel for his own. but madame olenska only grew a shade paler, and stood with her arms hanging down before her, and her head slightly bent, as her way was when she pondered a question. "he's waiting for you now at mrs. struthers's; why don't you go to him?" archer sneered. she turned to ring the bell. "i shall not go out this evening; tell the carriage to go and fetch the signora marchesa," she said when the maid came. after the door had closed again archer continued to look at her with bitter eyes. "why this sacrifice? since you tell me that you're lonely i've no right to keep you from your friends." she smiled a little under her wet lashes. "i shan't be lonely now. i was lonely; i was afraid. but the emptiness and the darkness are gone; when i turn back into myself now i'm like a child going at night into a room where there's always a light." her tone and her look still enveloped her in a soft inaccessibility, and archer groaned out again: "i don't understand you!" "yet you understand may!" he reddened under the retort, but kept his eyes on her. "may is ready to give me up." "what! three days after you've entreated her on your knees to hasten your marriage?" "she's refused; that gives me the right--" "ah, you've taught me what an ugly word that is," she said. he turned away with a sense of utter weariness. he felt as though he had been struggling for hours up the face of a steep precipice, and now, just as he had fought his way to the top, his hold had given way and he was pitching down headlong into darkness. if he could have got her in his arms again he might have swept away her arguments; but she still held him at a distance by something inscrutably aloof in her look and attitude, and by his own awed sense of her sincerity. at length he began to plead again. "if we do this now it will be worse afterward--worse for every one--" "no--no--no!" she almost screamed, as if he frightened her. at that moment the bell sent a long tinkle through the house. they had heard no carriage stopping at the door, and they stood motionless, looking at each other with startled eyes. outside, nastasia's step crossed the hall, the outer door opened, and a moment later she came in carrying a telegram which she handed to the countess olenska. "the lady was very happy at the flowers," nastasia said, smoothing her apron. "she thought it was her signor marito who had sent them, and she cried a little and said it was a folly." her mistress smiled and took the yellow envelope. she tore it open and carried it to the lamp; then, when the door had closed again, she handed the telegram to archer. it was dated from st. augustine, and addressed to the countess olenska. in it he read: "granny's telegram successful. papa and mamma agree marriage after easter. am telegraphing newland. am too happy for words and love you dearly. your grateful may." half an hour later, when archer unlocked his own front-door, he found a similar envelope on the hall-table on top of his pile of notes and letters. the message inside the envelope was also from may welland, and ran as follows: "parents consent wedding tuesday after easter at twelve grace church eight bridesmaids please see rector so happy love may." archer crumpled up the yellow sheet as if the gesture could annihilate the news it contained. then he pulled out a small pocket-diary and turned over the pages with trembling fingers; but he did not find what he wanted, and cramming the telegram into his pocket he mounted the stairs. a light was shining through the door of the little hall-room which served janey as a dressing-room and boudoir, and her brother rapped impatiently on the panel. the door opened, and his sister stood before him in her immemorial purple flannel dressing-gown, with her hair "on pins." her face looked pale and apprehensive. "newland! i hope there's no bad news in that telegram? i waited on purpose, in case--" (no item of his correspondence was safe from janey.) he took no notice of her question. "look here--what day is easter this year?" she looked shocked at such unchristian ignorance. "easter? newland! why, of course, the first week in april. why?" "the first week?" he turned again to the pages of his diary, calculating rapidly under his breath. "the first week, did you say?" he threw back his head with a long laugh. "for mercy's sake what's the matter?" "nothing's the matter, except that i'm going to be married in a month." janey fell upon his neck and pressed him to her purple flannel breast. "oh newland, how wonderful! i'm so glad! but, dearest, why do you keep on laughing? do hush, or you'll wake mamma." book ii xix. the day was fresh, with a lively spring wind full of dust. all the old ladies in both families had got out their faded sables and yellowing ermines, and the smell of camphor from the front pews almost smothered the faint spring scent of the lilies banking the altar. newland archer, at a signal from the sexton, had come out of the vestry and placed himself with his best man on the chancel step of grace church. the signal meant that the brougham bearing the bride and her father was in sight; but there was sure to be a considerable interval of adjustment and consultation in the lobby, where the bridesmaids were already hovering like a cluster of easter blossoms. during this unavoidable lapse of time the bridegroom, in proof of his eagerness, was expected to expose himself alone to the gaze of the assembled company; and archer had gone through this formality as resignedly as through all the others which made of a nineteenth century new york wedding a rite that seemed to belong to the dawn of history. everything was equally easy--or equally painful, as one chose to put it--in the path he was committed to tread, and he had obeyed the flurried injunctions of his best man as piously as other bridegrooms had obeyed his own, in the days when he had guided them through the same labyrinth. so far he was reasonably sure of having fulfilled all his obligations. the bridesmaids' eight bouquets of white lilac and lilies-of-the-valley had been sent in due time, as well as the gold and sapphire sleeve-links of the eight ushers and the best man's cat's-eye scarf-pin; archer had sat up half the night trying to vary the wording of his thanks for the last batch of presents from men friends and ex-lady-loves; the fees for the bishop and the rector were safely in the pocket of his best man; his own luggage was already at mrs. manson mingott's, where the wedding-breakfast was to take place, and so were the travelling clothes into which he was to change; and a private compartment had been engaged in the train that was to carry the young couple to their unknown destination--concealment of the spot in which the bridal night was to be spent being one of the most sacred taboos of the prehistoric ritual. "got the ring all right?" whispered young van der luyden newland, who was inexperienced in the duties of a best man, and awed by the weight of his responsibility. archer made the gesture which he had seen so many bridegrooms make: with his ungloved right hand he felt in the pocket of his dark grey waistcoat, and assured himself that the little gold circlet (engraved inside: newland to may, april ---, -) was in its place; then, resuming his former attitude, his tall hat and pearl-grey gloves with black stitchings grasped in his left hand, he stood looking at the door of the church. overhead, handel's march swelled pompously through the imitation stone vaulting, carrying on its waves the faded drift of the many weddings at which, with cheerful indifference, he had stood on the same chancel step watching other brides float up the nave toward other bridegrooms. "how like a first night at the opera!" he thought, recognising all the same faces in the same boxes (no, pews), and wondering if, when the last trump sounded, mrs. selfridge merry would be there with the same towering ostrich feathers in her bonnet, and mrs. beaufort with the same diamond earrings and the same smile--and whether suitable proscenium seats were already prepared for them in another world. after that there was still time to review, one by one, the familiar countenances in the first rows; the women's sharp with curiosity and excitement, the men's sulky with the obligation of having to put on their frock-coats before luncheon, and fight for food at the wedding-breakfast. "too bad the breakfast is at old catherine's," the bridegroom could fancy reggie chivers saying. "but i'm told that lovell mingott insisted on its being cooked by his own chef, so it ought to be good if one can only get at it." and he could imagine sillerton jackson adding with authority: "my dear fellow, haven't you heard? it's to be served at small tables, in the new english fashion." archer's eyes lingered a moment on the left-hand pew, where his mother, who had entered the church on mr. henry van der luyden's arm, sat weeping softly under her chantilly veil, her hands in her grandmother's ermine muff. "poor janey!" he thought, looking at his sister, "even by screwing her head around she can see only the people in the few front pews; and they're mostly dowdy newlands and dagonets." on the hither side of the white ribbon dividing off the seats reserved for the families he saw beaufort, tall and redfaced, scrutinising the women with his arrogant stare. beside him sat his wife, all silvery chinchilla and violets; and on the far side of the ribbon, lawrence lefferts's sleekly brushed head seemed to mount guard over the invisible deity of "good form" who presided at the ceremony. archer wondered how many flaws lefferts's keen eyes would discover in the ritual of his divinity; then he suddenly recalled that he too had once thought such questions important. the things that had filled his days seemed now like a nursery parody of life, or like the wrangles of mediaeval schoolmen over metaphysical terms that nobody had ever understood. a stormy discussion as to whether the wedding presents should be "shown" had darkened the last hours before the wedding; and it seemed inconceivable to archer that grown-up people should work themselves into a state of agitation over such trifles, and that the matter should have been decided (in the negative) by mrs. welland's saying, with indignant tears: "i should as soon turn the reporters loose in my house." yet there was a time when archer had had definite and rather aggressive opinions on all such problems, and when everything concerning the manners and customs of his little tribe had seemed to him fraught with world-wide significance. "and all the while, i suppose," he thought, "real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them ..." "there they come!" breathed the best man excitedly; but the bridegroom knew better. the cautious opening of the door of the church meant only that mr. brown the livery-stable keeper (gowned in black in his intermittent character of sexton) was taking a preliminary survey of the scene before marshalling his forces. the door was softly shut again; then after another interval it swung majestically open, and a murmur ran through the church: "the family!" mrs. welland came first, on the arm of her eldest son. her large pink face was appropriately solemn, and her plum-coloured satin with pale blue side-panels, and blue ostrich plumes in a small satin bonnet, met with general approval; but before she had settled herself with a stately rustle in the pew opposite mrs. archer's the spectators were craning their necks to see who was coming after her. wild rumours had been abroad the day before to the effect that mrs. manson mingott, in spite of her physical disabilities, had resolved on being present at the ceremony; and the idea was so much in keeping with her sporting character that bets ran high at the clubs as to her being able to walk up the nave and squeeze into a seat. it was known that she had insisted on sending her own carpenter to look into the possibility of taking down the end panel of the front pew, and to measure the space between the seat and the front; but the result had been discouraging, and for one anxious day her family had watched her dallying with the plan of being wheeled up the nave in her enormous bath chair and sitting enthroned in it at the foot of the chancel. the idea of this monstrous exposure of her person was so painful to her relations that they could have covered with gold the ingenious person who suddenly discovered that the chair was too wide to pass between the iron uprights of the awning which extended from the church door to the curbstone. the idea of doing away with this awning, and revealing the bride to the mob of dressmakers and newspaper reporters who stood outside fighting to get near the joints of the canvas, exceeded even old catherine's courage, though for a moment she had weighed the possibility. "why, they might take a photograph of my child and put it in the papers!" mrs. welland exclaimed when her mother's last plan was hinted to her; and from this unthinkable indecency the clan recoiled with a collective shudder. the ancestress had had to give in; but her concession was bought only by the promise that the wedding-breakfast should take place under her roof, though (as the washington square connection said) with the wellands' house in easy reach it was hard to have to make a special price with brown to drive one to the other end of nowhere. though all these transactions had been widely reported by the jacksons a sporting minority still clung to the belief that old catherine would appear in church, and there was a distinct lowering of the temperature when she was found to have been replaced by her daughter-in-law. mrs. lovell mingott had the high colour and glassy stare induced in ladies of her age and habit by the effort of getting into a new dress; but once the disappointment occasioned by her mother-in-law's non-appearance had subsided, it was agreed that her black chantilly over lilac satin, with a bonnet of parma violets, formed the happiest contrast to mrs. welland's blue and plum-colour. far different was the impression produced by the gaunt and mincing lady who followed on mr. mingott's arm, in a wild dishevelment of stripes and fringes and floating scarves; and as this last apparition glided into view archer's heart contracted and stopped beating. he had taken it for granted that the marchioness manson was still in washington, where she had gone some four weeks previously with her niece, madame olenska. it was generally understood that their abrupt departure was due to madame olenska's desire to remove her aunt from the baleful eloquence of dr. agathon carver, who had nearly succeeded in enlisting her as a recruit for the valley of love; and in the circumstances no one had expected either of the ladies to return for the wedding. for a moment archer stood with his eyes fixed on medora's fantastic figure, straining to see who came behind her; but the little procession was at an end, for all the lesser members of the family had taken their seats, and the eight tall ushers, gathering themselves together like birds or insects preparing for some migratory manoeuvre, were already slipping through the side doors into the lobby. "newland--i say: she's here!" the best man whispered. archer roused himself with a start. a long time had apparently passed since his heart had stopped beating, for the white and rosy procession was in fact half way up the nave, the bishop, the rector and two white-winged assistants were hovering about the flower-banked altar, and the first chords of the spohr symphony were strewing their flower-like notes before the bride. archer opened his eyes (but could they really have been shut, as he imagined?), and felt his heart beginning to resume its usual task. the music, the scent of the lilies on the altar, the vision of the cloud of tulle and orange-blossoms floating nearer and nearer, the sight of mrs. archer's face suddenly convulsed with happy sobs, the low benedictory murmur of the rector's voice, the ordered evolutions of the eight pink bridesmaids and the eight black ushers: all these sights, sounds and sensations, so familiar in themselves, so unutterably strange and meaningless in his new relation to them, were confusedly mingled in his brain. "my god," he thought, "have i got the ring?"--and once more he went through the bridegroom's convulsive gesture. then, in a moment, may was beside him, such radiance streaming from her that it sent a faint warmth through his numbness, and he straightened himself and smiled into her eyes. "dearly beloved, we are gathered together here," the rector began ... the ring was on her hand, the bishop's benediction had been given, the bridesmaids were a-poise to resume their place in the procession, and the organ was showing preliminary symptoms of breaking out into the mendelssohn march, without which no newly-wedded couple had ever emerged upon new york. "your arm--i say, give her your arm!" young newland nervously hissed; and once more archer became aware of having been adrift far off in the unknown. what was it that had sent him there, he wondered? perhaps the glimpse, among the anonymous spectators in the transept, of a dark coil of hair under a hat which, a moment later, revealed itself as belonging to an unknown lady with a long nose, so laughably unlike the person whose image she had evoked that he asked himself if he were becoming subject to hallucinations. and now he and his wife were pacing slowly down the nave, carried forward on the light mendelssohn ripples, the spring day beckoning to them through widely opened doors, and mrs. welland's chestnuts, with big white favours on their frontlets, curvetting and showing off at the far end of the canvas tunnel. the footman, who had a still bigger white favour on his lapel, wrapped may's white cloak about her, and archer jumped into the brougham at her side. she turned to him with a triumphant smile and their hands clasped under her veil. "darling!" archer said--and suddenly the same black abyss yawned before him and he felt himself sinking into it, deeper and deeper, while his voice rambled on smoothly and cheerfully: "yes, of course i thought i'd lost the ring; no wedding would be complete if the poor devil of a bridegroom didn't go through that. but you did keep me waiting, you know! i had time to think of every horror that might possibly happen." she surprised him by turning, in full fifth avenue, and flinging her arms about his neck. "but none ever can happen now, can it, newland, as long as we two are together?" every detail of the day had been so carefully thought out that the young couple, after the wedding-breakfast, had ample time to put on their travelling-clothes, descend the wide mingott stairs between laughing bridesmaids and weeping parents, and get into the brougham under the traditional shower of rice and satin slippers; and there was still half an hour left in which to drive to the station, buy the last weeklies at the bookstall with the air of seasoned travellers, and settle themselves in the reserved compartment in which may's maid had already placed her dove-coloured travelling cloak and glaringly new dressing-bag from london. the old du lac aunts at rhinebeck had put their house at the disposal of the bridal couple, with a readiness inspired by the prospect of spending a week in new york with mrs. archer; and archer, glad to escape the usual "bridal suite" in a philadelphia or baltimore hotel, had accepted with an equal alacrity. may was enchanted at the idea of going to the country, and childishly amused at the vain efforts of the eight bridesmaids to discover where their mysterious retreat was situated. it was thought "very english" to have a country-house lent to one, and the fact gave a last touch of distinction to what was generally conceded to be the most brilliant wedding of the year; but where the house was no one was permitted to know, except the parents of bride and groom, who, when taxed with the knowledge, pursed their lips and said mysteriously: "ah, they didn't tell us--" which was manifestly true, since there was no need to. once they were settled in their compartment, and the train, shaking off the endless wooden suburbs, had pushed out into the pale landscape of spring, talk became easier than archer had expected. may was still, in look and tone, the simple girl of yesterday, eager to compare notes with him as to the incidents of the wedding, and discussing them as impartially as a bridesmaid talking it all over with an usher. at first archer had fancied that this detachment was the disguise of an inward tremor; but her clear eyes revealed only the most tranquil unawareness. she was alone for the first time with her husband; but her husband was only the charming comrade of yesterday. there was no one whom she liked as much, no one whom she trusted as completely, and the culminating "lark" of the whole delightful adventure of engagement and marriage was to be off with him alone on a journey, like a grownup person, like a "married woman," in fact. it was wonderful that--as he had learned in the mission garden at st. augustine--such depths of feeling could coexist with such absence of imagination. but he remembered how, even then, she had surprised him by dropping back to inexpressive girlishness as soon as her conscience had been eased of its burden; and he saw that she would probably go through life dealing to the best of her ability with each experience as it came, but never anticipating any by so much as a stolen glance. perhaps that faculty of unawareness was what gave her eyes their transparency, and her face the look of representing a type rather than a person; as if she might have been chosen to pose for a civic virtue or a greek goddess. the blood that ran so close to her fair skin might have been a preserving fluid rather than a ravaging element; yet her look of indestructible youthfulness made her seem neither hard nor dull, but only primitive and pure. in the thick of this meditation archer suddenly felt himself looking at her with the startled gaze of a stranger, and plunged into a reminiscence of the wedding-breakfast and of granny mingott's immense and triumphant pervasion of it. may settled down to frank enjoyment of the subject. "i was surprised, though--weren't you?--that aunt medora came after all. ellen wrote that they were neither of them well enough to take the journey; i do wish it had been she who had recovered! did you see the exquisite old lace she sent me?" he had known that the moment must come sooner or later, but he had somewhat imagined that by force of willing he might hold it at bay. "yes--i--no: yes, it was beautiful," he said, looking at her blindly, and wondering if, whenever he heard those two syllables, all his carefully built-up world would tumble about him like a house of cards. "aren't you tired? it will be good to have some tea when we arrive--i'm sure the aunts have got everything beautifully ready," he rattled on, taking her hand in his; and her mind rushed away instantly to the magnificent tea and coffee service of baltimore silver which the beauforts had sent, and which "went" so perfectly with uncle lovell mingott's trays and side-dishes. in the spring twilight the train stopped at the rhinebeck station, and they walked along the platform to the waiting carriage. "ah, how awfully kind of the van der luydens--they've sent their man over from skuytercliff to meet us," archer exclaimed, as a sedate person out of livery approached them and relieved the maid of her bags. "i'm extremely sorry, sir," said this emissary, "that a little accident has occurred at the miss du lacs': a leak in the water-tank. it happened yesterday, and mr. van der luyden, who heard of it this morning, sent a housemaid up by the early train to get the patroon's house ready. it will be quite comfortable, i think you'll find, sir; and the miss du lacs have sent their cook over, so that it will be exactly the same as if you'd been at rhinebeck." archer stared at the speaker so blankly that he repeated in still more apologetic accents: "it'll be exactly the same, sir, i do assure you--" and may's eager voice broke out, covering the embarrassed silence: "the same as rhinebeck? the patroon's house? but it will be a hundred thousand times better--won't it, newland? it's too dear and kind of mr. van der luyden to have thought of it." and as they drove off, with the maid beside the coachman, and their shining bridal bags on the seat before them, she went on excitedly: "only fancy, i've never been inside it--have you? the van der luydens show it to so few people. but they opened it for ellen, it seems, and she told me what a darling little place it was: she says it's the only house she's seen in america that she could imagine being perfectly happy in." "well--that's what we're going to be, isn't it?" cried her husband gaily; and she answered with her boyish smile: "ah, it's just our luck beginning--the wonderful luck we're always going to have together!" xx. "of course we must dine with mrs. carfry, dearest," archer said; and his wife looked at him with an anxious frown across the monumental britannia ware of their lodging house breakfast-table. in all the rainy desert of autumnal london there were only two people whom the newland archers knew; and these two they had sedulously avoided, in conformity with the old new york tradition that it was not "dignified" to force one's self on the notice of one's acquaintances in foreign countries. mrs. archer and janey, in the course of their visits to europe, had so unflinchingly lived up to this principle, and met the friendly advances of their fellow-travellers with an air of such impenetrable reserve, that they had almost achieved the record of never having exchanged a word with a "foreigner" other than those employed in hotels and railway-stations. their own compatriots--save those previously known or properly accredited--they treated with an even more pronounced disdain; so that, unless they ran across a chivers, a dagonet or a mingott, their months abroad were spent in an unbroken tete-a-tete. but the utmost precautions are sometimes unavailing; and one night at botzen one of the two english ladies in the room across the passage (whose names, dress and social situation were already intimately known to janey) had knocked on the door and asked if mrs. archer had a bottle of liniment. the other lady--the intruder's sister, mrs. carfry--had been seized with a sudden attack of bronchitis; and mrs. archer, who never travelled without a complete family pharmacy, was fortunately able to produce the required remedy. mrs. carfry was very ill, and as she and her sister miss harle were travelling alone they were profoundly grateful to the archer ladies, who supplied them with ingenious comforts and whose efficient maid helped to nurse the invalid back to health. when the archers left botzen they had no idea of ever seeing mrs. carfry and miss harle again. nothing, to mrs. archer's mind, would have been more "undignified" than to force one's self on the notice of a "foreigner" to whom one had happened to render an accidental service. but mrs. carfry and her sister, to whom this point of view was unknown, and who would have found it utterly incomprehensible, felt themselves linked by an eternal gratitude to the "delightful americans" who had been so kind at botzen. with touching fidelity they seized every chance of meeting mrs. archer and janey in the course of their continental travels, and displayed a supernatural acuteness in finding out when they were to pass through london on their way to or from the states. the intimacy became indissoluble, and mrs. archer and janey, whenever they alighted at brown's hotel, found themselves awaited by two affectionate friends who, like themselves, cultivated ferns in wardian cases, made macrame lace, read the memoirs of the baroness bunsen and had views about the occupants of the leading london pulpits. as mrs. archer said, it made "another thing of london" to know mrs. carfry and miss harle; and by the time that newland became engaged the tie between the families was so firmly established that it was thought "only right" to send a wedding invitation to the two english ladies, who sent, in return, a pretty bouquet of pressed alpine flowers under glass. and on the dock, when newland and his wife sailed for england, mrs. archer's last word had been: "you must take may to see mrs. carfry." newland and his wife had had no idea of obeying this injunction; but mrs. carfry, with her usual acuteness, had run them down and sent them an invitation to dine; and it was over this invitation that may archer was wrinkling her brows across the tea and muffins. "it's all very well for you, newland; you know them. but i shall feel so shy among a lot of people i've never met. and what shall i wear?" newland leaned back in his chair and smiled at her. she looked handsomer and more diana-like than ever. the moist english air seemed to have deepened the bloom of her cheeks and softened the slight hardness of her virginal features; or else it was simply the inner glow of happiness, shining through like a light under ice. "wear, dearest? i thought a trunkful of things had come from paris last week." "yes, of course. i meant to say that i shan't know which to wear." she pouted a little. "i've never dined out in london; and i don't want to be ridiculous." he tried to enter into her perplexity. "but don't englishwomen dress just like everybody else in the evening?" "newland! how can you ask such funny questions? when they go to the theatre in old ball-dresses and bare heads." "well, perhaps they wear new ball-dresses at home; but at any rate mrs. carfry and miss harle won't. they'll wear caps like my mother's--and shawls; very soft shawls." "yes; but how will the other women be dressed?" "not as well as you, dear," he rejoined, wondering what had suddenly developed in her janey's morbid interest in clothes. she pushed back her chair with a sigh. "that's dear of you, newland; but it doesn't help me much." he had an inspiration. "why not wear your wedding-dress? that can't be wrong, can it?" "oh, dearest! if i only had it here! but it's gone to paris to be made over for next winter, and worth hasn't sent it back." "oh, well--" said archer, getting up. "look here--the fog's lifting. if we made a dash for the national gallery we might manage to catch a glimpse of the pictures." the newland archers were on their way home, after a three months' wedding-tour which may, in writing to her girl friends, vaguely summarised as "blissful." they had not gone to the italian lakes: on reflection, archer had not been able to picture his wife in that particular setting. her own inclination (after a month with the paris dressmakers) was for mountaineering in july and swimming in august. this plan they punctually fulfilled, spending july at interlaken and grindelwald, and august at a little place called etretat, on the normandy coast, which some one had recommended as quaint and quiet. once or twice, in the mountains, archer had pointed southward and said: "there's italy"; and may, her feet in a gentian-bed, had smiled cheerfully, and replied: "it would be lovely to go there next winter, if only you didn't have to be in new york." but in reality travelling interested her even less than he had expected. she regarded it (once her clothes were ordered) as merely an enlarged opportunity for walking, riding, swimming, and trying her hand at the fascinating new game of lawn tennis; and when they finally got back to london (where they were to spend a fortnight while he ordered his clothes) she no longer concealed the eagerness with which she looked forward to sailing. in london nothing interested her but the theatres and the shops; and she found the theatres less exciting than the paris cafes chantants where, under the blossoming horse-chestnuts of the champs elysees, she had had the novel experience of looking down from the restaurant terrace on an audience of "cocottes," and having her husband interpret to her as much of the songs as he thought suitable for bridal ears. archer had reverted to all his old inherited ideas about marriage. it was less trouble to conform with the tradition and treat may exactly as all his friends treated their wives than to try to put into practice the theories with which his untrammelled bachelorhood had dallied. there was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free; and he had long since discovered that may's only use of the liberty she supposed herself to possess would be to lay it on the altar of her wifely adoration. her innate dignity would always keep her from making the gift abjectly; and a day might even come (as it once had) when she would find strength to take it altogether back if she thought she were doing it for his own good. but with a conception of marriage so uncomplicated and incurious as hers such a crisis could be brought about only by something visibly outrageous in his own conduct; and the fineness of her feeling for him made that unthinkable. whatever happened, he knew, she would always be loyal, gallant and unresentful; and that pledged him to the practice of the same virtues. all this tended to draw him back into his old habits of mind. if her simplicity had been the simplicity of pettiness he would have chafed and rebelled; but since the lines of her character, though so few, were on the same fine mould as her face, she became the tutelary divinity of all his old traditions and reverences. such qualities were scarcely of the kind to enliven foreign travel, though they made her so easy and pleasant a companion; but he saw at once how they would fall into place in their proper setting. he had no fear of being oppressed by them, for his artistic and intellectual life would go on, as it always had, outside the domestic circle; and within it there would be nothing small and stifling--coming back to his wife would never be like entering a stuffy room after a tramp in the open. and when they had children the vacant corners in both their lives would be filled. all these things went through his mind during their long slow drive from mayfair to south kensington, where mrs. carfry and her sister lived. archer too would have preferred to escape their friends' hospitality: in conformity with the family tradition he had always travelled as a sight-seer and looker-on, affecting a haughty unconsciousness of the presence of his fellow-beings. once only, just after harvard, he had spent a few gay weeks at florence with a band of queer europeanised americans, dancing all night with titled ladies in palaces, and gambling half the day with the rakes and dandies of the fashionable club; but it had all seemed to him, though the greatest fun in the world, as unreal as a carnival. these queer cosmopolitan women, deep in complicated love-affairs which they appeared to feel the need of retailing to every one they met, and the magnificent young officers and elderly dyed wits who were the subjects or the recipients of their confidences, were too different from the people archer had grown up among, too much like expensive and rather malodorous hot-house exotics, to detain his imagination long. to introduce his wife into such a society was out of the question; and in the course of his travels no other had shown any marked eagerness for his company. not long after their arrival in london he had run across the duke of st. austrey, and the duke, instantly and cordially recognising him, had said: "look me up, won't you?"--but no proper-spirited american would have considered that a suggestion to be acted on, and the meeting was without a sequel. they had even managed to avoid may's english aunt, the banker's wife, who was still in yorkshire; in fact, they had purposely postponed going to london till the autumn in order that their arrival during the season might not appear pushing and snobbish to these unknown relatives. "probably there'll be nobody at mrs. carfry's--london's a desert at this season, and you've made yourself much too beautiful," archer said to may, who sat at his side in the hansom so spotlessly splendid in her sky-blue cloak edged with swansdown that it seemed wicked to expose her to the london grime. "i don't want them to think that we dress like savages," she replied, with a scorn that pocahontas might have resented; and he was struck again by the religious reverence of even the most unworldly american women for the social advantages of dress. "it's their armour," he thought, "their defence against the unknown, and their defiance of it." and he understood for the first time the earnestness with which may, who was incapable of tying a ribbon in her hair to charm him, had gone through the solemn rite of selecting and ordering her extensive wardrobe. he had been right in expecting the party at mrs. carfry's to be a small one. besides their hostess and her sister, they found, in the long chilly drawing-room, only another shawled lady, a genial vicar who was her husband, a silent lad whom mrs. carfry named as her nephew, and a small dark gentleman with lively eyes whom she introduced as his tutor, pronouncing a french name as she did so. into this dimly-lit and dim-featured group may archer floated like a swan with the sunset on her: she seemed larger, fairer, more voluminously rustling than her husband had ever seen her; and he perceived that the rosiness and rustlingness were the tokens of an extreme and infantile shyness. "what on earth will they expect me to talk about?" her helpless eyes implored him, at the very moment that her dazzling apparition was calling forth the same anxiety in their own bosoms. but beauty, even when distrustful of itself, awakens confidence in the manly heart; and the vicar and the french-named tutor were soon manifesting to may their desire to put her at her ease. in spite of their best efforts, however, the dinner was a languishing affair. archer noticed that his wife's way of showing herself at her ease with foreigners was to become more uncompromisingly local in her references, so that, though her loveliness was an encouragement to admiration, her conversation was a chill to repartee. the vicar soon abandoned the struggle; but the tutor, who spoke the most fluent and accomplished english, gallantly continued to pour it out to her until the ladies, to the manifest relief of all concerned, went up to the drawing-room. the vicar, after a glass of port, was obliged to hurry away to a meeting, and the shy nephew, who appeared to be an invalid, was packed off to bed. but archer and the tutor continued to sit over their wine, and suddenly archer found himself talking as he had not done since his last symposium with ned winsett. the carfry nephew, it turned out, had been threatened with consumption, and had had to leave harrow for switzerland, where he had spent two years in the milder air of lake leman. being a bookish youth, he had been entrusted to m. riviere, who had brought him back to england, and was to remain with him till he went up to oxford the following spring; and m. riviere added with simplicity that he should then have to look out for another job. it seemed impossible, archer thought, that he should be long without one, so varied were his interests and so many his gifts. he was a man of about thirty, with a thin ugly face (may would certainly have called him common-looking) to which the play of his ideas gave an intense expressiveness; but there was nothing frivolous or cheap in his animation. his father, who had died young, had filled a small diplomatic post, and it had been intended that the son should follow the same career; but an insatiable taste for letters had thrown the young man into journalism, then into authorship (apparently unsuccessful), and at length--after other experiments and vicissitudes which he spared his listener--into tutoring english youths in switzerland. before that, however, he had lived much in paris, frequented the goncourt grenier, been advised by maupassant not to attempt to write (even that seemed to archer a dazzling honour!), and had often talked with merimee in his mother's house. he had obviously always been desperately poor and anxious (having a mother and an unmarried sister to provide for), and it was apparent that his literary ambitions had failed. his situation, in fact, seemed, materially speaking, no more brilliant than ned winsett's; but he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who loved ideas need hunger mentally. as it was precisely of that love that poor winsett was starving to death, archer looked with a sort of vicarious envy at this eager impecunious young man who had fared so richly in his poverty. "you see, monsieur, it's worth everything, isn't it, to keep one's intellectual liberty, not to enslave one's powers of appreciation, one's critical independence? it was because of that that i abandoned journalism, and took to so much duller work: tutoring and private secretaryship. there is a good deal of drudgery, of course; but one preserves one's moral freedom, what we call in french one's quant a soi. and when one hears good talk one can join in it without compromising any opinions but one's own; or one can listen, and answer it inwardly. ah, good conversation--there's nothing like it, is there? the air of ideas is the only air worth breathing. and so i have never regretted giving up either diplomacy or journalism--two different forms of the same self-abdication." he fixed his vivid eyes on archer as he lit another cigarette. "voyez-vous, monsieur, to be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it? but, after all, one must earn enough to pay for the garret; and i confess that to grow old as a private tutor--or a 'private' anything--is almost as chilling to the imagination as a second secretaryship at bucharest. sometimes i feel i must make a plunge: an immense plunge. do you suppose, for instance, there would be any opening for me in america--in new york?" archer looked at him with startled eyes. new york, for a young man who had frequented the goncourts and flaubert, and who thought the life of ideas the only one worth living! he continued to stare at m. riviere perplexedly, wondering how to tell him that his very superiorities and advantages would be the surest hindrance to success. "new york--new york--but must it be especially new york?" he stammered, utterly unable to imagine what lucrative opening his native city could offer to a young man to whom good conversation appeared to be the only necessity. a sudden flush rose under m. riviere's sallow skin. "i--i thought it your metropolis: is not the intellectual life more active there?" he rejoined; then, as if fearing to give his hearer the impression of having asked a favour, he went on hastily: "one throws out random suggestions--more to one's self than to others. in reality, i see no immediate prospect--" and rising from his seat he added, without a trace of constraint: "but mrs. carfry will think that i ought to be taking you upstairs." during the homeward drive archer pondered deeply on this episode. his hour with m. riviere had put new air into his lungs, and his first impulse had been to invite him to dine the next day; but he was beginning to understand why married men did not always immediately yield to their first impulses. "that young tutor is an interesting fellow: we had some awfully good talk after dinner about books and things," he threw out tentatively in the hansom. may roused herself from one of the dreamy silences into which he had read so many meanings before six months of marriage had given him the key to them. "the little frenchman? wasn't he dreadfully common?" she questioned coldly; and he guessed that she nursed a secret disappointment at having been invited out in london to meet a clergyman and a french tutor. the disappointment was not occasioned by the sentiment ordinarily defined as snobbishness, but by old new york's sense of what was due to it when it risked its dignity in foreign lands. if may's parents had entertained the carfrys in fifth avenue they would have offered them something more substantial than a parson and a schoolmaster. but archer was on edge, and took her up. "common--common where?" he queried; and she returned with unusual readiness: "why, i should say anywhere but in his school-room. those people are always awkward in society. but then," she added disarmingly, "i suppose i shouldn't have known if he was clever." archer disliked her use of the word "clever" almost as much as her use of the word "common"; but he was beginning to fear his tendency to dwell on the things he disliked in her. after all, her point of view had always been the same. it was that of all the people he had grown up among, and he had always regarded it as necessary but negligible. until a few months ago he had never known a "nice" woman who looked at life differently; and if a man married it must necessarily be among the nice. "ah--then i won't ask him to dine!" he concluded with a laugh; and may echoed, bewildered: "goodness--ask the carfrys' tutor?" "well, not on the same day with the carfrys, if you prefer i shouldn't. but i did rather want another talk with him. he's looking for a job in new york." her surprise increased with her indifference: he almost fancied that she suspected him of being tainted with "foreignness." "a job in new york? what sort of a job? people don't have french tutors: what does he want to do?" "chiefly to enjoy good conversation, i understand," her husband retorted perversely; and she broke into an appreciative laugh. "oh, newland, how funny! isn't that french?" on the whole, he was glad to have the matter settled for him by her refusing to take seriously his wish to invite m. riviere. another after-dinner talk would have made it difficult to avoid the question of new york; and the more archer considered it the less he was able to fit m. riviere into any conceivable picture of new york as he knew it. he perceived with a flash of chilling insight that in future many problems would be thus negatively solved for him; but as he paid the hansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage. "after that i suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other's angles," he reflected; but the worst of it was that may's pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep. xxi. the small bright lawn stretched away smoothly to the big bright sea. the turf was hemmed with an edge of scarlet geranium and coleus, and cast-iron vases painted in chocolate colour, standing at intervals along the winding path that led to the sea, looped their garlands of petunia and ivy geranium above the neatly raked gravel. half way between the edge of the cliff and the square wooden house (which was also chocolate-coloured, but with the tin roof of the verandah striped in yellow and brown to represent an awning) two large targets had been placed against a background of shrubbery. on the other side of the lawn, facing the targets, was pitched a real tent, with benches and garden-seats about it. a number of ladies in summer dresses and gentlemen in grey frock-coats and tall hats stood on the lawn or sat upon the benches; and every now and then a slender girl in starched muslin would step from the tent, bow in hand, and speed her shaft at one of the targets, while the spectators interrupted their talk to watch the result. newland archer, standing on the verandah of the house, looked curiously down upon this scene. on each side of the shiny painted steps was a large blue china flower-pot on a bright yellow china stand. a spiky green plant filled each pot, and below the verandah ran a wide border of blue hydrangeas edged with more red geraniums. behind him, the french windows of the drawing-rooms through which he had passed gave glimpses, between swaying lace curtains, of glassy parquet floors islanded with chintz poufs, dwarf armchairs, and velvet tables covered with trifles in silver. the newport archery club always held its august meeting at the beauforts'. the sport, which had hitherto known no rival but croquet, was beginning to be discarded in favour of lawn-tennis; but the latter game was still considered too rough and inelegant for social occasions, and as an opportunity to show off pretty dresses and graceful attitudes the bow and arrow held their own. archer looked down with wonder at the familiar spectacle. it surprised him that life should be going on in the old way when his own reactions to it had so completely changed. it was newport that had first brought home to him the extent of the change. in new york, during the previous winter, after he and may had settled down in the new greenish-yellow house with the bow-window and the pompeian vestibule, he had dropped back with relief into the old routine of the office, and the renewal of this daily activity had served as a link with his former self. then there had been the pleasurable excitement of choosing a showy grey stepper for may's brougham (the wellands had given the carriage), and the abiding occupation and interest of arranging his new library, which, in spite of family doubts and disapprovals, had been carried out as he had dreamed, with a dark embossed paper, eastlake book-cases and "sincere" arm-chairs and tables. at the century he had found winsett again, and at the knickerbocker the fashionable young men of his own set; and what with the hours dedicated to the law and those given to dining out or entertaining friends at home, with an occasional evening at the opera or the play, the life he was living had still seemed a fairly real and inevitable sort of business. but newport represented the escape from duty into an atmosphere of unmitigated holiday-making. archer had tried to persuade may to spend the summer on a remote island off the coast of maine (called, appropriately enough, mount desert), where a few hardy bostonians and philadelphians were camping in "native" cottages, and whence came reports of enchanting scenery and a wild, almost trapper-like existence amid woods and waters. but the wellands always went to newport, where they owned one of the square boxes on the cliffs, and their son-in-law could adduce no good reason why he and may should not join them there. as mrs. welland rather tartly pointed out, it was hardly worth while for may to have worn herself out trying on summer clothes in paris if she was not to be allowed to wear them; and this argument was of a kind to which archer had as yet found no answer. may herself could not understand his obscure reluctance to fall in with so reasonable and pleasant a way of spending the summer. she reminded him that he had always liked newport in his bachelor days, and as this was indisputable he could only profess that he was sure he was going to like it better than ever now that they were to be there together. but as he stood on the beaufort verandah and looked out on the brightly peopled lawn it came home to him with a shiver that he was not going to like it at all. it was not may's fault, poor dear. if, now and then, during their travels, they had fallen slightly out of step, harmony had been restored by their return to the conditions she was used to. he had always foreseen that she would not disappoint him; and he had been right. he had married (as most young men did) because he had met a perfectly charming girl at the moment when a series of rather aimless sentimental adventures were ending in premature disgust; and she had represented peace, stability, comradeship, and the steadying sense of an unescapable duty. he could not say that he had been mistaken in his choice, for she had fulfilled all that he had expected. it was undoubtedly gratifying to be the husband of one of the handsomest and most popular young married women in new york, especially when she was also one of the sweetest-tempered and most reasonable of wives; and archer had never been insensible to such advantages. as for the momentary madness which had fallen upon him on the eve of his marriage, he had trained himself to regard it as the last of his discarded experiments. the idea that he could ever, in his senses, have dreamed of marrying the countess olenska had become almost unthinkable, and she remained in his memory simply as the most plaintive and poignant of a line of ghosts. but all these abstractions and eliminations made of his mind a rather empty and echoing place, and he supposed that was one of the reasons why the busy animated people on the beaufort lawn shocked him as if they had been children playing in a grave-yard. he heard a murmur of skirts beside him, and the marchioness manson fluttered out of the drawing-room window. as usual, she was extraordinarily festooned and bedizened, with a limp leghorn hat anchored to her head by many windings of faded gauze, and a little black velvet parasol on a carved ivory handle absurdly balanced over her much larger hatbrim. "my dear newland, i had no idea that you and may had arrived! you yourself came only yesterday, you say? ah, business--business--professional duties ... i understand. many husbands, i know, find it impossible to join their wives here except for the week-end." she cocked her head on one side and languished at him through screwed-up eyes. "but marriage is one long sacrifice, as i used often to remind my ellen--" archer's heart stopped with the queer jerk which it had given once before, and which seemed suddenly to slam a door between himself and the outer world; but this break of continuity must have been of the briefest, for he presently heard medora answering a question he had apparently found voice to put. "no, i am not staying here, but with the blenkers, in their delicious solitude at portsmouth. beaufort was kind enough to send his famous trotters for me this morning, so that i might have at least a glimpse of one of regina's garden-parties; but this evening i go back to rural life. the blenkers, dear original beings, have hired a primitive old farm-house at portsmouth where they gather about them representative people ..." she drooped slightly beneath her protecting brim, and added with a faint blush: "this week dr. agathon carver is holding a series of inner thought meetings there. a contrast indeed to this gay scene of worldly pleasure--but then i have always lived on contrasts! to me the only death is monotony. i always say to ellen: beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins. but my poor child is going through a phase of exaltation, of abhorrence of the world. you know, i suppose, that she has declined all invitations to stay at newport, even with her grandmother mingott? i could hardly persuade her to come with me to the blenkers', if you will believe it! the life she leads is morbid, unnatural. ah, if she had only listened to me when it was still possible ... when the door was still open ... but shall we go down and watch this absorbing match? i hear your may is one of the competitors." strolling toward them from the tent beaufort advanced over the lawn, tall, heavy, too tightly buttoned into a london frock-coat, with one of his own orchids in its buttonhole. archer, who had not seen him for two or three months, was struck by the change in his appearance. in the hot summer light his floridness seemed heavy and bloated, and but for his erect square-shouldered walk he would have looked like an over-fed and over-dressed old man. there were all sorts of rumours afloat about beaufort. in the spring he had gone off on a long cruise to the west indies in his new steam-yacht, and it was reported that, at various points where he had touched, a lady resembling miss fanny ring had been seen in his company. the steam-yacht, built in the clyde, and fitted with tiled bath-rooms and other unheard-of luxuries, was said to have cost him half a million; and the pearl necklace which he had presented to his wife on his return was as magnificent as such expiatory offerings are apt to be. beaufort's fortune was substantial enough to stand the strain; and yet the disquieting rumours persisted, not only in fifth avenue but in wall street. some people said he had speculated unfortunately in railways, others that he was being bled by one of the most insatiable members of her profession; and to every report of threatened insolvency beaufort replied by a fresh extravagance: the building of a new row of orchid-houses, the purchase of a new string of race-horses, or the addition of a new meissonnier or cabanel to his picture-gallery. he advanced toward the marchioness and newland with his usual half-sneering smile. "hullo, medora! did the trotters do their business? forty minutes, eh? ... well, that's not so bad, considering your nerves had to be spared." he shook hands with archer, and then, turning back with them, placed himself on mrs. manson's other side, and said, in a low voice, a few words which their companion did not catch. the marchioness replied by one of her queer foreign jerks, and a "que voulez-vous?" which deepened beaufort's frown; but he produced a good semblance of a congratulatory smile as he glanced at archer to say: "you know may's going to carry off the first prize." "ah, then it remains in the family," medora rippled; and at that moment they reached the tent and mrs. beaufort met them in a girlish cloud of mauve muslin and floating veils. may welland was just coming out of the tent. in her white dress, with a pale green ribbon about the waist and a wreath of ivy on her hat, she had the same diana-like aloofness as when she had entered the beaufort ball-room on the night of her engagement. in the interval not a thought seemed to have passed behind her eyes or a feeling through her heart; and though her husband knew that she had the capacity for both he marvelled afresh at the way in which experience dropped away from her. she had her bow and arrow in her hand, and placing herself on the chalk-mark traced on the turf she lifted the bow to her shoulder and took aim. the attitude was so full of a classic grace that a murmur of appreciation followed her appearance, and archer felt the glow of proprietorship that so often cheated him into momentary well-being. her rivals--mrs. reggie chivers, the merry girls, and divers rosy thorleys, dagonets and mingotts, stood behind her in a lovely anxious group, brown heads and golden bent above the scores, and pale muslins and flower-wreathed hats mingled in a tender rainbow. all were young and pretty, and bathed in summer bloom; but not one had the nymph-like ease of his wife, when, with tense muscles and happy frown, she bent her soul upon some feat of strength. "gad," archer heard lawrence lefferts say, "not one of the lot holds the bow as she does"; and beaufort retorted: "yes; but that's the only kind of target she'll ever hit." archer felt irrationally angry. his host's contemptuous tribute to may's "niceness" was just what a husband should have wished to hear said of his wife. the fact that a coarseminded man found her lacking in attraction was simply another proof of her quality; yet the words sent a faint shiver through his heart. what if "niceness" carried to that supreme degree were only a negation, the curtain dropped before an emptiness? as he looked at may, returning flushed and calm from her final bull's-eye, he had the feeling that he had never yet lifted that curtain. she took the congratulations of her rivals and of the rest of the company with the simplicity that was her crowning grace. no one could ever be jealous of her triumphs because she managed to give the feeling that she would have been just as serene if she had missed them. but when her eyes met her husband's her face glowed with the pleasure she saw in his. mrs. welland's basket-work pony-carriage was waiting for them, and they drove off among the dispersing carriages, may handling the reins and archer sitting at her side. the afternoon sunlight still lingered upon the bright lawns and shrubberies, and up and down bellevue avenue rolled a double line of victorias, dog-carts, landaus and "vis-a-vis," carrying well-dressed ladies and gentlemen away from the beaufort garden-party, or homeward from their daily afternoon turn along the ocean drive. "shall we go to see granny?" may suddenly proposed. "i should like to tell her myself that i've won the prize. there's lots of time before dinner." archer acquiesced, and she turned the ponies down narragansett avenue, crossed spring street and drove out toward the rocky moorland beyond. in this unfashionable region catherine the great, always indifferent to precedent and thrifty of purse, had built herself in her youth a many-peaked and cross-beamed cottage-orne on a bit of cheap land overlooking the bay. here, in a thicket of stunted oaks, her verandahs spread themselves above the island-dotted waters. a winding drive led up between iron stags and blue glass balls embedded in mounds of geraniums to a front door of highly-varnished walnut under a striped verandah-roof; and behind it ran a narrow hall with a black and yellow star-patterned parquet floor, upon which opened four small square rooms with heavy flock-papers under ceilings on which an italian house-painter had lavished all the divinities of olympus. one of these rooms had been turned into a bedroom by mrs. mingott when the burden of flesh descended on her, and in the adjoining one she spent her days, enthroned in a large armchair between the open door and window, and perpetually waving a palm-leaf fan which the prodigious projection of her bosom kept so far from the rest of her person that the air it set in motion stirred only the fringe of the anti-macassars on the chair-arms. since she had been the means of hastening his marriage old catherine had shown to archer the cordiality which a service rendered excites toward the person served. she was persuaded that irrepressible passion was the cause of his impatience; and being an ardent admirer of impulsiveness (when it did not lead to the spending of money) she always received him with a genial twinkle of complicity and a play of allusion to which may seemed fortunately impervious. she examined and appraised with much interest the diamond-tipped arrow which had been pinned on may's bosom at the conclusion of the match, remarking that in her day a filigree brooch would have been thought enough, but that there was no denying that beaufort did things handsomely. "quite an heirloom, in fact, my dear," the old lady chuckled. "you must leave it in fee to your eldest girl." she pinched may's white arm and watched the colour flood her face. "well, well, what have i said to make you shake out the red flag? ain't there going to be any daughters--only boys, eh? good gracious, look at her blushing again all over her blushes! what--can't i say that either? mercy me--when my children beg me to have all those gods and goddesses painted out overhead i always say i'm too thankful to have somebody about me that nothing can shock!" archer burst into a laugh, and may echoed it, crimson to the eyes. "well, now tell me all about the party, please, my dears, for i shall never get a straight word about it out of that silly medora," the ancestress continued; and, as may exclaimed: "cousin medora? but i thought she was going back to portsmouth?" she answered placidly: "so she is--but she's got to come here first to pick up ellen. ah--you didn't know ellen had come to spend the day with me? such fol-de-rol, her not coming for the summer; but i gave up arguing with young people about fifty years ago. ellen--ellen!" she cried in her shrill old voice, trying to bend forward far enough to catch a glimpse of the lawn beyond the verandah. there was no answer, and mrs. mingott rapped impatiently with her stick on the shiny floor. a mulatto maid-servant in a bright turban, replying to the summons, informed her mistress that she had seen "miss ellen" going down the path to the shore; and mrs. mingott turned to archer. "run down and fetch her, like a good grandson; this pretty lady will describe the party to me," she said; and archer stood up as if in a dream. he had heard the countess olenska's name pronounced often enough during the year and a half since they had last met, and was even familiar with the main incidents of her life in the interval. he knew that she had spent the previous summer at newport, where she appeared to have gone a great deal into society, but that in the autumn she had suddenly sub-let the "perfect house" which beaufort had been at such pains to find for her, and decided to establish herself in washington. there, during the winter, he had heard of her (as one always heard of pretty women in washington) as shining in the "brilliant diplomatic society" that was supposed to make up for the social short-comings of the administration. he had listened to these accounts, and to various contradictory reports on her appearance, her conversation, her point of view and her choice of friends, with the detachment with which one listens to reminiscences of some one long since dead; not till medora suddenly spoke her name at the archery match had ellen olenska become a living presence to him again. the marchioness's foolish lisp had called up a vision of the little fire-lit drawing-room and the sound of the carriage-wheels returning down the deserted street. he thought of a story he had read, of some peasant children in tuscany lighting a bunch of straw in a wayside cavern, and revealing old silent images in their painted tomb ... the way to the shore descended from the bank on which the house was perched to a walk above the water planted with weeping willows. through their veil archer caught the glint of the lime rock, with its white-washed turret and the tiny house in which the heroic light-house keeper, ida lewis, was living her last venerable years. beyond it lay the flat reaches and ugly government chimneys of goat island, the bay spreading northward in a shimmer of gold to prudence island with its low growth of oaks, and the shores of conanicut faint in the sunset haze. from the willow walk projected a slight wooden pier ending in a sort of pagoda-like summer-house; and in the pagoda a lady stood, leaning against the rail, her back to the shore. archer stopped at the sight as if he had waked from sleep. that vision of the past was a dream, and the reality was what awaited him in the house on the bank overhead: was mrs. welland's pony-carriage circling around and around the oval at the door, was may sitting under the shameless olympians and glowing with secret hopes, was the welland villa at the far end of bellevue avenue, and mr. welland, already dressed for dinner, and pacing the drawing-room floor, watch in hand, with dyspeptic impatience--for it was one of the houses in which one always knew exactly what is happening at a given hour. "what am i? a son-in-law--" archer thought. the figure at the end of the pier had not moved. for a long moment the young man stood half way down the bank, gazing at the bay furrowed with the coming and going of sailboats, yacht-launches, fishing-craft and the trailing black coal-barges hauled by noisy tugs. the lady in the summer-house seemed to be held by the same sight. beyond the grey bastions of fort adams a long-drawn sunset was splintering up into a thousand fires, and the radiance caught the sail of a catboat as it beat out through the channel between the lime rock and the shore. archer, as he watched, remembered the scene in the shaughraun, and montague lifting ada dyas's ribbon to his lips without her knowing that he was in the room. "she doesn't know--she hasn't guessed. shouldn't i know if she came up behind me, i wonder?" he mused; and suddenly he said to himself: "if she doesn't turn before that sail crosses the lime rock light i'll go back." the boat was gliding out on the receding tide. it slid before the lime rock, blotted out ida lewis's little house, and passed across the turret in which the light was hung. archer waited till a wide space of water sparkled between the last reef of the island and the stern of the boat; but still the figure in the summer-house did not move. he turned and walked up the hill. "i'm sorry you didn't find ellen--i should have liked to see her again," may said as they drove home through the dusk. "but perhaps she wouldn't have cared--she seems so changed." "changed?" echoed her husband in a colourless voice, his eyes fixed on the ponies' twitching ears. "so indifferent to her friends, i mean; giving up new york and her house, and spending her time with such queer people. fancy how hideously uncomfortable she must be at the blenkers'! she says she does it to keep cousin medora out of mischief: to prevent her marrying dreadful people. but i sometimes think we've always bored her." archer made no answer, and she continued, with a tinge of hardness that he had never before noticed in her frank fresh voice: "after all, i wonder if she wouldn't be happier with her husband." he burst into a laugh. "sancta simplicitas!" he exclaimed; and as she turned a puzzled frown on him he added: "i don't think i ever heard you say a cruel thing before." "cruel?" "well--watching the contortions of the damned is supposed to be a favourite sport of the angels; but i believe even they don't think people happier in hell." "it's a pity she ever married abroad then," said may, in the placid tone with which her mother met mr. welland's vagaries; and archer felt himself gently relegated to the category of unreasonable husbands. they drove down bellevue avenue and turned in between the chamfered wooden gate-posts surmounted by cast-iron lamps which marked the approach to the welland villa. lights were already shining through its windows, and archer, as the carriage stopped, caught a glimpse of his father-in-law, exactly as he had pictured him, pacing the drawing-room, watch in hand and wearing the pained expression that he had long since found to be much more efficacious than anger. the young man, as he followed his wife into the hall, was conscious of a curious reversal of mood. there was something about the luxury of the welland house and the density of the welland atmosphere, so charged with minute observances and exactions, that always stole into his system like a narcotic. the heavy carpets, the watchful servants, the perpetually reminding tick of disciplined clocks, the perpetually renewed stack of cards and invitations on the hall table, the whole chain of tyrannical trifles binding one hour to the next, and each member of the household to all the others, made any less systematised and affluent existence seem unreal and precarious. but now it was the welland house, and the life he was expected to lead in it, that had become unreal and irrelevant, and the brief scene on the shore, when he had stood irresolute, halfway down the bank, was as close to him as the blood in his veins. all night he lay awake in the big chintz bedroom at may's side, watching the moonlight slant along the carpet, and thinking of ellen olenska driving home across the gleaming beaches behind beaufort's trotters. xxii. "a party for the blenkers--the blenkers?" mr. welland laid down his knife and fork and looked anxiously and incredulously across the luncheon-table at his wife, who, adjusting her gold eye-glasses, read aloud, in the tone of high comedy: "professor and mrs. emerson sillerton request the pleasure of mr. and mrs. welland's company at the meeting of the wednesday afternoon club on august th at o'clock punctually. to meet mrs. and the misses blenker. "red gables, catherine street. r. s. v. p." "good gracious--" mr. welland gasped, as if a second reading had been necessary to bring the monstrous absurdity of the thing home to him. "poor amy sillerton--you never can tell what her husband will do next," mrs. welland sighed. "i suppose he's just discovered the blenkers." professor emerson sillerton was a thorn in the side of newport society; and a thorn that could not be plucked out, for it grew on a venerable and venerated family tree. he was, as people said, a man who had had "every advantage." his father was sillerton jackson's uncle, his mother a pennilow of boston; on each side there was wealth and position, and mutual suitability. nothing--as mrs. welland had often remarked--nothing on earth obliged emerson sillerton to be an archaeologist, or indeed a professor of any sort, or to live in newport in winter, or do any of the other revolutionary things that he did. but at least, if he was going to break with tradition and flout society in the face, he need not have married poor amy dagonet, who had a right to expect "something different," and money enough to keep her own carriage. no one in the mingott set could understand why amy sillerton had submitted so tamely to the eccentricities of a husband who filled the house with long-haired men and short-haired women, and, when he travelled, took her to explore tombs in yucatan instead of going to paris or italy. but there they were, set in their ways, and apparently unaware that they were different from other people; and when they gave one of their dreary annual garden-parties every family on the cliffs, because of the sillerton-pennilow-dagonet connection, had to draw lots and send an unwilling representative. "it's a wonder," mrs. welland remarked, "that they didn't choose the cup race day! do you remember, two years ago, their giving a party for a black man on the day of julia mingott's the dansant? luckily this time there's nothing else going on that i know of--for of course some of us will have to go." mr. welland sighed nervously. "'some of us,' my dear--more than one? three o'clock is such a very awkward hour. i have to be here at half-past three to take my drops: it's really no use trying to follow bencomb's new treatment if i don't do it systematically; and if i join you later, of course i shall miss my drive." at the thought he laid down his knife and fork again, and a flush of anxiety rose to his finely-wrinkled cheek. "there's no reason why you should go at all, my dear," his wife answered with a cheerfulness that had become automatic. "i have some cards to leave at the other end of bellevue avenue, and i'll drop in at about half-past three and stay long enough to make poor amy feel that she hasn't been slighted." she glanced hesitatingly at her daughter. "and if newland's afternoon is provided for perhaps may can drive you out with the ponies, and try their new russet harness." it was a principle in the welland family that people's days and hours should be what mrs. welland called "provided for." the melancholy possibility of having to "kill time" (especially for those who did not care for whist or solitaire) was a vision that haunted her as the spectre of the unemployed haunts the philanthropist. another of her principles was that parents should never (at least visibly) interfere with the plans of their married children; and the difficulty of adjusting this respect for may's independence with the exigency of mr. welland's claims could be overcome only by the exercise of an ingenuity which left not a second of mrs. welland's own time unprovided for. "of course i'll drive with papa--i'm sure newland will find something to do," may said, in a tone that gently reminded her husband of his lack of response. it was a cause of constant distress to mrs. welland that her son-in-law showed so little foresight in planning his days. often already, during the fortnight that he had passed under her roof, when she enquired how he meant to spend his afternoon, he had answered paradoxically: "oh, i think for a change i'll just save it instead of spending it--" and once, when she and may had had to go on a long-postponed round of afternoon calls, he had confessed to having lain all the afternoon under a rock on the beach below the house. "newland never seems to look ahead," mrs. welland once ventured to complain to her daughter; and may answered serenely: "no; but you see it doesn't matter, because when there's nothing particular to do he reads a book." "ah, yes--like his father!" mrs. welland agreed, as if allowing for an inherited oddity; and after that the question of newland's unemployment was tacitly dropped. nevertheless, as the day for the sillerton reception approached, may began to show a natural solicitude for his welfare, and to suggest a tennis match at the chiverses', or a sail on julius beaufort's cutter, as a means of atoning for her temporary desertion. "i shall be back by six, you know, dear: papa never drives later than that--" and she was not reassured till archer said that he thought of hiring a run-about and driving up the island to a stud-farm to look at a second horse for her brougham. they had been looking for this horse for some time, and the suggestion was so acceptable that may glanced at her mother as if to say: "you see he knows how to plan out his time as well as any of us." the idea of the stud-farm and the brougham horse had germinated in archer's mind on the very day when the emerson sillerton invitation had first been mentioned; but he had kept it to himself as if there were something clandestine in the plan, and discovery might prevent its execution. he had, however, taken the precaution to engage in advance a runabout with a pair of old livery-stable trotters that could still do their eighteen miles on level roads; and at two o'clock, hastily deserting the luncheon-table, he sprang into the light carriage and drove off. the day was perfect. a breeze from the north drove little puffs of white cloud across an ultramarine sky, with a bright sea running under it. bellevue avenue was empty at that hour, and after dropping the stable-lad at the corner of mill street archer turned down the old beach road and drove across eastman's beach. he had the feeling of unexplained excitement with which, on half-holidays at school, he used to start off into the unknown. taking his pair at an easy gait, he counted on reaching the stud-farm, which was not far beyond paradise rocks, before three o'clock; so that, after looking over the horse (and trying him if he seemed promising) he would still have four golden hours to dispose of. as soon as he heard of the sillerton's party he had said to himself that the marchioness manson would certainly come to newport with the blenkers, and that madame olenska might again take the opportunity of spending the day with her grandmother. at any rate, the blenker habitation would probably be deserted, and he would be able, without indiscretion, to satisfy a vague curiosity concerning it. he was not sure that he wanted to see the countess olenska again; but ever since he had looked at her from the path above the bay he had wanted, irrationally and indescribably, to see the place she was living in, and to follow the movements of her imagined figure as he had watched the real one in the summer-house. the longing was with him day and night, an incessant undefinable craving, like the sudden whim of a sick man for food or drink once tasted and long since forgotten. he could not see beyond the craving, or picture what it might lead to, for he was not conscious of any wish to speak to madame olenska or to hear her voice. he simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty. when he reached the stud-farm a glance showed him that the horse was not what he wanted; nevertheless he took a turn behind it in order to prove to himself that he was not in a hurry. but at three o'clock he shook out the reins over the trotters and turned into the by-roads leading to portsmouth. the wind had dropped and a faint haze on the horizon showed that a fog was waiting to steal up the saconnet on the turn of the tide; but all about him fields and woods were steeped in golden light. he drove past grey-shingled farm-houses in orchards, past hay-fields and groves of oak, past villages with white steeples rising sharply into the fading sky; and at last, after stopping to ask the way of some men at work in a field, he turned down a lane between high banks of goldenrod and brambles. at the end of the lane was the blue glimmer of the river; to the left, standing in front of a clump of oaks and maples, he saw a long tumble-down house with white paint peeling from its clapboards. on the road-side facing the gateway stood one of the open sheds in which the new englander shelters his farming implements and visitors "hitch" their "teams." archer, jumping down, led his pair into the shed, and after tying them to a post turned toward the house. the patch of lawn before it had relapsed into a hay-field; but to the left an overgrown box-garden full of dahlias and rusty rose-bushes encircled a ghostly summer-house of trellis-work that had once been white, surmounted by a wooden cupid who had lost his bow and arrow but continued to take ineffectual aim. archer leaned for a while against the gate. no one was in sight, and not a sound came from the open windows of the house: a grizzled newfoundland dozing before the door seemed as ineffectual a guardian as the arrowless cupid. it was strange to think that this place of silence and decay was the home of the turbulent blenkers; yet archer was sure that he was not mistaken. for a long time he stood there, content to take in the scene, and gradually falling under its drowsy spell; but at length he roused himself to the sense of the passing time. should he look his fill and then drive away? he stood irresolute, wishing suddenly to see the inside of the house, so that he might picture the room that madame olenska sat in. there was nothing to prevent his walking up to the door and ringing the bell; if, as he supposed, she was away with the rest of the party, he could easily give his name, and ask permission to go into the sitting-room to write a message. but instead, he crossed the lawn and turned toward the box-garden. as he entered it he caught sight of something bright-coloured in the summer-house, and presently made it out to be a pink parasol. the parasol drew him like a magnet: he was sure it was hers. he went into the summer-house, and sitting down on the rickety seat picked up the silken thing and looked at its carved handle, which was made of some rare wood that gave out an aromatic scent. archer lifted the handle to his lips. he heard a rustle of skirts against the box, and sat motionless, leaning on the parasol handle with clasped hands, and letting the rustle come nearer without lifting his eyes. he had always known that this must happen ... "oh, mr. archer!" exclaimed a loud young voice; and looking up he saw before him the youngest and largest of the blenker girls, blonde and blowsy, in bedraggled muslin. a red blotch on one of her cheeks seemed to show that it had recently been pressed against a pillow, and her half-awakened eyes stared at him hospitably but confusedly. "gracious--where did you drop from? i must have been sound asleep in the hammock. everybody else has gone to newport. did you ring?" she incoherently enquired. archer's confusion was greater than hers. "i--no--that is, i was just going to. i had to come up the island to see about a horse, and i drove over on a chance of finding mrs. blenker and your visitors. but the house seemed empty--so i sat down to wait." miss blenker, shaking off the fumes of sleep, looked at him with increasing interest. "the house is empty. mother's not here, or the marchioness--or anybody but me." her glance became faintly reproachful. "didn't you know that professor and mrs. sillerton are giving a garden-party for mother and all of us this afternoon? it was too unlucky that i couldn't go; but i've had a sore throat, and mother was afraid of the drive home this evening. did you ever know anything so disappointing? of course," she added gaily, "i shouldn't have minded half as much if i'd known you were coming." symptoms of a lumbering coquetry became visible in her, and archer found the strength to break in: "but madame olenska--has she gone to newport too?" miss blenker looked at him with surprise. "madame olenska--didn't you know she'd been called away?" "called away?--" "oh, my best parasol! i lent it to that goose of a katie, because it matched her ribbons, and the careless thing must have dropped it here. we blenkers are all like that ... real bohemians!" recovering the sunshade with a powerful hand she unfurled it and suspended its rosy dome above her head. "yes, ellen was called away yesterday: she lets us call her ellen, you know. a telegram came from boston: she said she might be gone for two days. i do love the way she does her hair, don't you?" miss blenker rambled on. archer continued to stare through her as though she had been transparent. all he saw was the trumpery parasol that arched its pinkness above her giggling head. after a moment he ventured: "you don't happen to know why madame olenska went to boston? i hope it was not on account of bad news?" miss blenker took this with a cheerful incredulity. "oh, i don't believe so. she didn't tell us what was in the telegram. i think she didn't want the marchioness to know. she's so romantic-looking, isn't she? doesn't she remind you of mrs. scott-siddons when she reads 'lady geraldine's courtship'? did you never hear her?" archer was dealing hurriedly with crowding thoughts. his whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen. he glanced about him at the unpruned garden, the tumble-down house, and the oak-grove under which the dusk was gathering. it had seemed so exactly the place in which he ought to have found madame olenska; and she was far away, and even the pink sunshade was not hers ... he frowned and hesitated. "you don't know, i suppose--i shall be in boston tomorrow. if i could manage to see her--" he felt that miss blenker was losing interest in him, though her smile persisted. "oh, of course; how lovely of you! she's staying at the parker house; it must be horrible there in this weather." after that archer was but intermittently aware of the remarks they exchanged. he could only remember stoutly resisting her entreaty that he should await the returning family and have high tea with them before he drove home. at length, with his hostess still at his side, he passed out of range of the wooden cupid, unfastened his horses and drove off. at the turn of the lane he saw miss blenker standing at the gate and waving the pink parasol. xxiii. the next morning, when archer got out of the fall river train, he emerged upon a steaming midsummer boston. the streets near the station were full of the smell of beer and coffee and decaying fruit and a shirt-sleeved populace moved through them with the intimate abandon of boarders going down the passage to the bathroom. archer found a cab and drove to the somerset club for breakfast. even the fashionable quarters had the air of untidy domesticity to which no excess of heat ever degrades the european cities. care-takers in calico lounged on the door-steps of the wealthy, and the common looked like a pleasure-ground on the morrow of a masonic picnic. if archer had tried to imagine ellen olenska in improbable scenes he could not have called up any into which it was more difficult to fit her than this heat-prostrated and deserted boston. he breakfasted with appetite and method, beginning with a slice of melon, and studying a morning paper while he waited for his toast and scrambled eggs. a new sense of energy and activity had possessed him ever since he had announced to may the night before that he had business in boston, and should take the fall river boat that night and go on to new york the following evening. it had always been understood that he would return to town early in the week, and when he got back from his expedition to portsmouth a letter from the office, which fate had conspicuously placed on a corner of the hall table, sufficed to justify his sudden change of plan. he was even ashamed of the ease with which the whole thing had been done: it reminded him, for an uncomfortable moment, of lawrence lefferts's masterly contrivances for securing his freedom. but this did not long trouble him, for he was not in an analytic mood. after breakfast he smoked a cigarette and glanced over the commercial advertiser. while he was thus engaged two or three men he knew came in, and the usual greetings were exchanged: it was the same world after all, though he had such a queer sense of having slipped through the meshes of time and space. he looked at his watch, and finding that it was half-past nine got up and went into the writing-room. there he wrote a few lines, and ordered a messenger to take a cab to the parker house and wait for the answer. he then sat down behind another newspaper and tried to calculate how long it would take a cab to get to the parker house. "the lady was out, sir," he suddenly heard a waiter's voice at his elbow; and he stammered: "out?--" as if it were a word in a strange language. he got up and went into the hall. it must be a mistake: she could not be out at that hour. he flushed with anger at his own stupidity: why had he not sent the note as soon as he arrived? he found his hat and stick and went forth into the street. the city had suddenly become as strange and vast and empty as if he were a traveller from distant lands. for a moment he stood on the door-step hesitating; then he decided to go to the parker house. what if the messenger had been misinformed, and she were still there? he started to walk across the common; and on the first bench, under a tree, he saw her sitting. she had a grey silk sunshade over her head--how could he ever have imagined her with a pink one? as he approached he was struck by her listless attitude: she sat there as if she had nothing else to do. he saw her drooping profile, and the knot of hair fastened low in the neck under her dark hat, and the long wrinkled glove on the hand that held the sunshade. he came a step or two nearer, and she turned and looked at him. "oh"--she said; and for the first time he noticed a startled look on her face; but in another moment it gave way to a slow smile of wonder and contentment. "oh"--she murmured again, on a different note, as he stood looking down at her; and without rising she made a place for him on the bench. "i'm here on business--just got here," archer explained; and, without knowing why, he suddenly began to feign astonishment at seeing her. "but what on earth are you doing in this wilderness?" he had really no idea what he was saying: he felt as if he were shouting at her across endless distances, and she might vanish again before he could overtake her. "i? oh, i'm here on business too," she answered, turning her head toward him so that they were face to face. the words hardly reached him: he was aware only of her voice, and of the startling fact that not an echo of it had remained in his memory. he had not even remembered that it was low-pitched, with a faint roughness on the consonants. "you do your hair differently," he said, his heart beating as if he had uttered something irrevocable. "differently? no--it's only that i do it as best i can when i'm without nastasia." "nastasia; but isn't she with you?" "no; i'm alone. for two days it was not worth while to bring her." "you're alone--at the parker house?" she looked at him with a flash of her old malice. "does it strike you as dangerous?" "no; not dangerous--" "but unconventional? i see; i suppose it is." she considered a moment. "i hadn't thought of it, because i've just done something so much more unconventional." the faint tinge of irony lingered in her eyes. "i've just refused to take back a sum of money--that belonged to me." archer sprang up and moved a step or two away. she had furled her parasol and sat absently drawing patterns on the gravel. presently he came back and stood before her. "some one--has come here to meet you?" "yes." "with this offer?" she nodded. "and you refused--because of the conditions?" "i refused," she said after a moment. he sat down by her again. "what were the conditions?" "oh, they were not onerous: just to sit at the head of his table now and then." there was another interval of silence. archer's heart had slammed itself shut in the queer way it had, and he sat vainly groping for a word. "he wants you back--at any price?" "well--a considerable price. at least the sum is considerable for me." he paused again, beating about the question he felt he must put. "it was to meet him here that you came?" she stared, and then burst into a laugh. "meet him--my husband? here? at this season he's always at cowes or baden." "he sent some one?" "yes." "with a letter?" she shook her head. "no; just a message. he never writes. i don't think i've had more than one letter from him." the allusion brought the colour to her cheek, and it reflected itself in archer's vivid blush. "why does he never write?" "why should he? what does one have secretaries for?" the young man's blush deepened. she had pronounced the word as if it had no more significance than any other in her vocabulary. for a moment it was on the tip of his tongue to ask: "did he send his secretary, then?" but the remembrance of count olenski's only letter to his wife was too present to him. he paused again, and then took another plunge. "and the person?"-- "the emissary? the emissary," madame olenska rejoined, still smiling, "might, for all i care, have left already; but he has insisted on waiting till this evening ... in case ... on the chance ..." "and you came out here to think the chance over?" "i came out to get a breath of air. the hotel's too stifling. i'm taking the afternoon train back to portsmouth." they sat silent, not looking at each other, but straight ahead at the people passing along the path. finally she turned her eyes again to his face and said: "you're not changed." he felt like answering: "i was, till i saw you again;" but instead he stood up abruptly and glanced about him at the untidy sweltering park. "this is horrible. why shouldn't we go out a little on the bay? there's a breeze, and it will be cooler. we might take the steamboat down to point arley." she glanced up at him hesitatingly and he went on: "on a monday morning there won't be anybody on the boat. my train doesn't leave till evening: i'm going back to new york. why shouldn't we?" he insisted, looking down at her; and suddenly he broke out: "haven't we done all we could?" "oh"--she murmured again. she stood up and reopened her sunshade, glancing about her as if to take counsel of the scene, and assure herself of the impossibility of remaining in it. then her eyes returned to his face. "you mustn't say things like that to me," she said. "i'll say anything you like; or nothing. i won't open my mouth unless you tell me to. what harm can it do to anybody? all i want is to listen to you," he stammered. she drew out a little gold-faced watch on an enamelled chain. "oh, don't calculate," he broke out; "give me the day! i want to get you away from that man. at what time was he coming?" her colour rose again. "at eleven." "then you must come at once." "you needn't be afraid--if i don't come." "nor you either--if you do. i swear i only want to hear about you, to know what you've been doing. it's a hundred years since we've met--it may be another hundred before we meet again." she still wavered, her anxious eyes on his face. "why didn't you come down to the beach to fetch me, the day i was at granny's?" she asked. "because you didn't look round--because you didn't know i was there. i swore i wouldn't unless you looked round." he laughed as the childishness of the confession struck him. "but i didn't look round on purpose." "on purpose?" "i knew you were there; when you drove in i recognised the ponies. so i went down to the beach." "to get away from me as far as you could?" she repeated in a low voice: "to get away from you as far as i could." he laughed out again, this time in boyish satisfaction. "well, you see it's no use. i may as well tell you," he added, "that the business i came here for was just to find you. but, look here, we must start or we shall miss our boat." "our boat?" she frowned perplexedly, and then smiled. "oh, but i must go back to the hotel first: i must leave a note--" "as many notes as you please. you can write here." he drew out a note-case and one of the new stylographic pens. "i've even got an envelope--you see how everything's predestined! there--steady the thing on your knee, and i'll get the pen going in a second. they have to be humoured; wait--" he banged the hand that held the pen against the back of the bench. "it's like jerking down the mercury in a thermometer: just a trick. now try--" she laughed, and bending over the sheet of paper which he had laid on his note-case, began to write. archer walked away a few steps, staring with radiant unseeing eyes at the passersby, who, in their turn, paused to stare at the unwonted sight of a fashionably-dressed lady writing a note on her knee on a bench in the common. madame olenska slipped the sheet into the envelope, wrote a name on it, and put it into her pocket. then she too stood up. they walked back toward beacon street, and near the club archer caught sight of the plush-lined "herdic" which had carried his note to the parker house, and whose driver was reposing from this effort by bathing his brow at the corner hydrant. "i told you everything was predestined! here's a cab for us. you see!" they laughed, astonished at the miracle of picking up a public conveyance at that hour, and in that unlikely spot, in a city where cab-stands were still a "foreign" novelty. archer, looking at his watch, saw that there was time to drive to the parker house before going to the steamboat landing. they rattled through the hot streets and drew up at the door of the hotel. archer held out his hand for the letter. "shall i take it in?" he asked; but madame olenska, shaking her head, sprang out and disappeared through the glazed doors. it was barely half-past ten; but what if the emissary, impatient for her reply, and not knowing how else to employ his time, were already seated among the travellers with cooling drinks at their elbows of whom archer had caught a glimpse as she went in? he waited, pacing up and down before the herdic. a sicilian youth with eyes like nastasia's offered to shine his boots, and an irish matron to sell him peaches; and every few moments the doors opened to let out hot men with straw hats tilted far back, who glanced at him as they went by. he marvelled that the door should open so often, and that all the people it let out should look so like each other, and so like all the other hot men who, at that hour, through the length and breadth of the land, were passing continuously in and out of the swinging doors of hotels. and then, suddenly, came a face that he could not relate to the other faces. he caught but a flash of it, for his pacings had carried him to the farthest point of his beat, and it was in turning back to the hotel that he saw, in a group of typical countenances--the lank and weary, the round and surprised, the lantern-jawed and mild--this other face that was so many more things at once, and things so different. it was that of a young man, pale too, and half-extinguished by the heat, or worry, or both, but somehow, quicker, vivider, more conscious; or perhaps seeming so because he was so different. archer hung a moment on a thin thread of memory, but it snapped and floated off with the disappearing face--apparently that of some foreign business man, looking doubly foreign in such a setting. he vanished in the stream of passersby, and archer resumed his patrol. he did not care to be seen watch in hand within view of the hotel, and his unaided reckoning of the lapse of time led him to conclude that, if madame olenska was so long in reappearing, it could only be because she had met the emissary and been waylaid by him. at the thought archer's apprehension rose to anguish. "if she doesn't come soon i'll go in and find her," he said. the doors swung open again and she was at his side. they got into the herdic, and as it drove off he took out his watch and saw that she had been absent just three minutes. in the clatter of loose windows that made talk impossible they bumped over the disjointed cobblestones to the wharf. seated side by side on a bench of the half-empty boat they found that they had hardly anything to say to each other, or rather that what they had to say communicated itself best in the blessed silence of their release and their isolation. as the paddle-wheels began to turn, and wharves and shipping to recede through the veil of heat, it seemed to archer that everything in the old familiar world of habit was receding also. he longed to ask madame olenska if she did not have the same feeling: the feeling that they were starting on some long voyage from which they might never return. but he was afraid to say it, or anything else that might disturb the delicate balance of her trust in him. in reality he had no wish to betray that trust. there had been days and nights when the memory of their kiss had burned and burned on his lips; the day before even, on the drive to portsmouth, the thought of her had run through him like fire; but now that she was beside him, and they were drifting forth into this unknown world, they seemed to have reached the kind of deeper nearness that a touch may sunder. as the boat left the harbour and turned seaward a breeze stirred about them and the bay broke up into long oily undulations, then into ripples tipped with spray. the fog of sultriness still hung over the city, but ahead lay a fresh world of ruffled waters, and distant promontories with light-houses in the sun. madame olenska, leaning back against the boat-rail, drank in the coolness between parted lips. she had wound a long veil about her hat, but it left her face uncovered, and archer was struck by the tranquil gaiety of her expression. she seemed to take their adventure as a matter of course, and to be neither in fear of unexpected encounters, nor (what was worse) unduly elated by their possibility. in the bare dining-room of the inn, which he had hoped they would have to themselves, they found a strident party of innocent-looking young men and women--school-teachers on a holiday, the landlord told them--and archer's heart sank at the idea of having to talk through their noise. "this is hopeless--i'll ask for a private room," he said; and madame olenska, without offering any objection, waited while he went in search of it. the room opened on a long wooden verandah, with the sea coming in at the windows. it was bare and cool, with a table covered with a coarse checkered cloth and adorned by a bottle of pickles and a blueberry pie under a cage. no more guileless-looking cabinet particulier ever offered its shelter to a clandestine couple: archer fancied he saw the sense of its reassurance in the faintly amused smile with which madame olenska sat down opposite to him. a woman who had run away from her husband--and reputedly with another man--was likely to have mastered the art of taking things for granted; but something in the quality of her composure took the edge from his irony. by being so quiet, so unsurprised and so simple she had managed to brush away the conventions and make him feel that to seek to be alone was the natural thing for two old friends who had so much to say to each other.... xxiv. they lunched slowly and meditatively, with mute intervals between rushes of talk; for, the spell once broken, they had much to say, and yet moments when saying became the mere accompaniment to long duologues of silence. archer kept the talk from his own affairs, not with conscious intention but because he did not want to miss a word of her history; and leaning on the table, her chin resting on her clasped hands, she talked to him of the year and a half since they had met. she had grown tired of what people called "society"; new york was kind, it was almost oppressively hospitable; she should never forget the way in which it had welcomed her back; but after the first flush of novelty she had found herself, as she phrased it, too "different" to care for the things it cared about--and so she had decided to try washington, where one was supposed to meet more varieties of people and of opinion. and on the whole she should probably settle down in washington, and make a home there for poor medora, who had worn out the patience of all her other relations just at the time when she most needed looking after and protecting from matrimonial perils. "but dr. carver--aren't you afraid of dr. carver? i hear he's been staying with you at the blenkers'." she smiled. "oh, the carver danger is over. dr. carver is a very clever man. he wants a rich wife to finance his plans, and medora is simply a good advertisement as a convert." "a convert to what?" "to all sorts of new and crazy social schemes. but, do you know, they interest me more than the blind conformity to tradition--somebody else's tradition--that i see among our own friends. it seems stupid to have discovered america only to make it into a copy of another country." she smiled across the table. "do you suppose christopher columbus would have taken all that trouble just to go to the opera with the selfridge merrys?" archer changed colour. "and beaufort--do you say these things to beaufort?" he asked abruptly. "i haven't seen him for a long time. but i used to; and he understands." "ah, it's what i've always told you; you don't like us. and you like beaufort because he's so unlike us." he looked about the bare room and out at the bare beach and the row of stark white village houses strung along the shore. "we're damnably dull. we've no character, no colour, no variety.--i wonder," he broke out, "why you don't go back?" her eyes darkened, and he expected an indignant rejoinder. but she sat silent, as if thinking over what he had said, and he grew frightened lest she should answer that she wondered too. at length she said: "i believe it's because of you." it was impossible to make the confession more dispassionately, or in a tone less encouraging to the vanity of the person addressed. archer reddened to the temples, but dared not move or speak: it was as if her words had been some rare butterfly that the least motion might drive off on startled wings, but that might gather a flock about it if it were left undisturbed. "at least," she continued, "it was you who made me understand that under the dullness there are things so fine and sensitive and delicate that even those i most cared for in my other life look cheap in comparison. i don't know how to explain myself"--she drew together her troubled brows--"but it seems as if i'd never before understood with how much that is hard and shabby and base the most exquisite pleasures may be paid." "exquisite pleasures--it's something to have had them!" he felt like retorting; but the appeal in her eyes kept him silent. "i want," she went on, "to be perfectly honest with you--and with myself. for a long time i've hoped this chance would come: that i might tell you how you've helped me, what you've made of me--" archer sat staring beneath frowning brows. he interrupted her with a laugh. "and what do you make out that you've made of me?" she paled a little. "of you?" "yes: for i'm of your making much more than you ever were of mine. i'm the man who married one woman because another one told him to." her paleness turned to a fugitive flush. "i thought--you promised--you were not to say such things today." "ah--how like a woman! none of you will ever see a bad business through!" she lowered her voice. "is it a bad business--for may?" he stood in the window, drumming against the raised sash, and feeling in every fibre the wistful tenderness with which she had spoken her cousin's name. "for that's the thing we've always got to think of--haven't we--by your own showing?" she insisted. "my own showing?" he echoed, his blank eyes still on the sea. "or if not," she continued, pursuing her own thought with a painful application, "if it's not worth while to have given up, to have missed things, so that others may be saved from disillusionment and misery--then everything i came home for, everything that made my other life seem by contrast so bare and so poor because no one there took account of them--all these things are a sham or a dream--" he turned around without moving from his place. "and in that case there's no reason on earth why you shouldn't go back?" he concluded for her. her eyes were clinging to him desperately. "oh, is there no reason?" "not if you staked your all on the success of my marriage. my marriage," he said savagely, "isn't going to be a sight to keep you here." she made no answer, and he went on: "what's the use? you gave me my first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment you asked me to go on with a sham one. it's beyond human enduring--that's all." "oh, don't say that; when i'm enduring it!" she burst out, her eyes filling. her arms had dropped along the table, and she sat with her face abandoned to his gaze as if in the recklessness of a desperate peril. the face exposed her as much as if it had been her whole person, with the soul behind it: archer stood dumb, overwhelmed by what it suddenly told him. "you too--oh, all this time, you too?" for answer, she let the tears on her lids overflow and run slowly downward. half the width of the room was still between them, and neither made any show of moving. archer was conscious of a curious indifference to her bodily presence: he would hardly have been aware of it if one of the hands she had flung out on the table had not drawn his gaze as on the occasion when, in the little twenty-third street house, he had kept his eye on it in order not to look at her face. now his imagination spun about the hand as about the edge of a vortex; but still he made no effort to draw nearer. he had known the love that is fed on caresses and feeds them; but this passion that was closer than his bones was not to be superficially satisfied. his one terror was to do anything which might efface the sound and impression of her words; his one thought, that he should never again feel quite alone. but after a moment the sense of waste and ruin overcame him. there they were, close together and safe and shut in; yet so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well have been half the world apart. "what's the use--when you will go back?" he broke out, a great hopeless how on earth can i keep you? crying out to her beneath his words. she sat motionless, with lowered lids. "oh--i shan't go yet!" "not yet? some time, then? some time that you already foresee?" at that she raised her clearest eyes. "i promise you: not as long as you hold out. not as long as we can look straight at each other like this." he dropped into his chair. what her answer really said was: "if you lift a finger you'll drive me back: back to all the abominations you know of, and all the temptations you half guess." he understood it as clearly as if she had uttered the words, and the thought kept him anchored to his side of the table in a kind of moved and sacred submission. "what a life for you!--" he groaned. "oh--as long as it's a part of yours." "and mine a part of yours?" she nodded. "and that's to be all--for either of us?" "well; it is all, isn't it?" at that he sprang up, forgetting everything but the sweetness of her face. she rose too, not as if to meet him or to flee from him, but quietly, as though the worst of the task were done and she had only to wait; so quietly that, as he came close, her outstretched hands acted not as a check but as a guide to him. they fell into his, while her arms, extended but not rigid, kept him far enough off to let her surrendered face say the rest. they may have stood in that way for a long time, or only for a few moments; but it was long enough for her silence to communicate all she had to say, and for him to feel that only one thing mattered. he must do nothing to make this meeting their last; he must leave their future in her care, asking only that she should keep fast hold of it. "don't--don't be unhappy," she said, with a break in her voice, as she drew her hands away; and he answered: "you won't go back--you won't go back?" as if it were the one possibility he could not bear. "i won't go back," she said; and turning away she opened the door and led the way into the public dining-room. the strident school-teachers were gathering up their possessions preparatory to a straggling flight to the wharf; across the beach lay the white steam-boat at the pier; and over the sunlit waters boston loomed in a line of haze. xxv. once more on the boat, and in the presence of others, archer felt a tranquillity of spirit that surprised as much as it sustained him. the day, according to any current valuation, had been a rather ridiculous failure; he had not so much as touched madame olenska's hand with his lips, or extracted one word from her that gave promise of farther opportunities. nevertheless, for a man sick with unsatisfied love, and parting for an indefinite period from the object of his passion, he felt himself almost humiliatingly calm and comforted. it was the perfect balance she had held between their loyalty to others and their honesty to themselves that had so stirred and yet tranquillized him; a balance not artfully calculated, as her tears and her falterings showed, but resulting naturally from her unabashed sincerity. it filled him with a tender awe, now the danger was over, and made him thank the fates that no personal vanity, no sense of playing a part before sophisticated witnesses, had tempted him to tempt her. even after they had clasped hands for good-bye at the fall river station, and he had turned away alone, the conviction remained with him of having saved out of their meeting much more than he had sacrificed. he wandered back to the club, and went and sat alone in the deserted library, turning and turning over in his thoughts every separate second of their hours together. it was clear to him, and it grew more clear under closer scrutiny, that if she should finally decide on returning to europe--returning to her husband--it would not be because her old life tempted her, even on the new terms offered. no: she would go only if she felt herself becoming a temptation to archer, a temptation to fall away from the standard they had both set up. her choice would be to stay near him as long as he did not ask her to come nearer; and it depended on himself to keep her just there, safe but secluded. in the train these thoughts were still with him. they enclosed him in a kind of golden haze, through which the faces about him looked remote and indistinct: he had a feeling that if he spoke to his fellow-travellers they would not understand what he was saying. in this state of abstraction he found himself, the following morning, waking to the reality of a stifling september day in new york. the heat-withered faces in the long train streamed past him, and he continued to stare at them through the same golden blur; but suddenly, as he left the station, one of the faces detached itself, came closer and forced itself upon his consciousness. it was, as he instantly recalled, the face of the young man he had seen, the day before, passing out of the parker house, and had noted as not conforming to type, as not having an american hotel face. the same thing struck him now; and again he became aware of a dim stir of former associations. the young man stood looking about him with the dazed air of the foreigner flung upon the harsh mercies of american travel; then he advanced toward archer, lifted his hat, and said in english: "surely, monsieur, we met in london?" "ah, to be sure: in london!" archer grasped his hand with curiosity and sympathy. "so you did get here, after all?" he exclaimed, casting a wondering eye on the astute and haggard little countenance of young carfry's french tutor. "oh, i got here--yes," m. riviere smiled with drawn lips. "but not for long; i return the day after tomorrow." he stood grasping his light valise in one neatly gloved hand, and gazing anxiously, perplexedly, almost appealingly, into archer's face. "i wonder, monsieur, since i've had the good luck to run across you, if i might--" "i was just going to suggest it: come to luncheon, won't you? down town, i mean: if you'll look me up in my office i'll take you to a very decent restaurant in that quarter." m. riviere was visibly touched and surprised. "you're too kind. but i was only going to ask if you would tell me how to reach some sort of conveyance. there are no porters, and no one here seems to listen--" "i know: our american stations must surprise you. when you ask for a porter they give you chewing-gum. but if you'll come along i'll extricate you; and you must really lunch with me, you know." the young man, after a just perceptible hesitation, replied, with profuse thanks, and in a tone that did not carry complete conviction, that he was already engaged; but when they had reached the comparative reassurance of the street he asked if he might call that afternoon. archer, at ease in the midsummer leisure of the office, fixed an hour and scribbled his address, which the frenchman pocketed with reiterated thanks and a wide flourish of his hat. a horse-car received him, and archer walked away. punctually at the hour m. riviere appeared, shaved, smoothed-out, but still unmistakably drawn and serious. archer was alone in his office, and the young man, before accepting the seat he proffered, began abruptly: "i believe i saw you, sir, yesterday in boston." the statement was insignificant enough, and archer was about to frame an assent when his words were checked by something mysterious yet illuminating in his visitor's insistent gaze. "it is extraordinary, very extraordinary," m. riviere continued, "that we should have met in the circumstances in which i find myself." "what circumstances?" archer asked, wondering a little crudely if he needed money. m. riviere continued to study him with tentative eyes. "i have come, not to look for employment, as i spoke of doing when we last met, but on a special mission--" "ah--!" archer exclaimed. in a flash the two meetings had connected themselves in his mind. he paused to take in the situation thus suddenly lighted up for him, and m. riviere also remained silent, as if aware that what he had said was enough. "a special mission," archer at length repeated. the young frenchman, opening his palms, raised them slightly, and the two men continued to look at each other across the office-desk till archer roused himself to say: "do sit down"; whereupon m. riviere bowed, took a distant chair, and again waited. "it was about this mission that you wanted to consult me?" archer finally asked. m. riviere bent his head. "not in my own behalf: on that score i--i have fully dealt with myself. i should like--if i may--to speak to you about the countess olenska." archer had known for the last few minutes that the words were coming; but when they came they sent the blood rushing to his temples as if he had been caught by a bent-back branch in a thicket. "and on whose behalf," he said, "do you wish to do this?" m. riviere met the question sturdily. "well--i might say hers, if it did not sound like a liberty. shall i say instead: on behalf of abstract justice?" archer considered him ironically. "in other words: you are count olenski's messenger?" he saw his blush more darkly reflected in m. riviere's sallow countenance. "not to you, monsieur. if i come to you, it is on quite other grounds." "what right have you, in the circumstances, to be on any other ground?" archer retorted. "if you're an emissary you're an emissary." the young man considered. "my mission is over: as far as the countess olenska goes, it has failed." "i can't help that," archer rejoined on the same note of irony. "no: but you can help--" m. riviere paused, turned his hat about in his still carefully gloved hands, looked into its lining and then back at archer's face. "you can help, monsieur, i am convinced, to make it equally a failure with her family." archer pushed back his chair and stood up. "well--and by god i will!" he exclaimed. he stood with his hands in his pockets, staring down wrathfully at the little frenchman, whose face, though he too had risen, was still an inch or two below the line of archer's eyes. m. riviere paled to his normal hue: paler than that his complexion could hardly turn. "why the devil," archer explosively continued, "should you have thought--since i suppose you're appealing to me on the ground of my relationship to madame olenska--that i should take a view contrary to the rest of her family?" the change of expression in m. riviere's face was for a time his only answer. his look passed from timidity to absolute distress: for a young man of his usually resourceful mien it would have been difficult to appear more disarmed and defenceless. "oh, monsieur--" "i can't imagine," archer continued, "why you should have come to me when there are others so much nearer to the countess; still less why you thought i should be more accessible to the arguments i suppose you were sent over with." m. riviere took this onslaught with a disconcerting humility. "the arguments i want to present to you, monsieur, are my own and not those i was sent over with." "then i see still less reason for listening to them." m. riviere again looked into his hat, as if considering whether these last words were not a sufficiently broad hint to put it on and be gone. then he spoke with sudden decision. "monsieur--will you tell me one thing? is it my right to be here that you question? or do you perhaps believe the whole matter to be already closed?" his quiet insistence made archer feel the clumsiness of his own bluster. m. riviere had succeeded in imposing himself: archer, reddening slightly, dropped into his chair again, and signed to the young man to be seated. "i beg your pardon: but why isn't the matter closed?" m. riviere gazed back at him with anguish. "you do, then, agree with the rest of the family that, in face of the new proposals i have brought, it is hardly possible for madame olenska not to return to her husband?" "good god!" archer exclaimed; and his visitor gave out a low murmur of confirmation. "before seeing her, i saw--at count olenski's request--mr. lovell mingott, with whom i had several talks before going to boston. i understand that he represents his mother's view; and that mrs. manson mingott's influence is great throughout her family." archer sat silent, with the sense of clinging to the edge of a sliding precipice. the discovery that he had been excluded from a share in these negotiations, and even from the knowledge that they were on foot, caused him a surprise hardly dulled by the acuter wonder of what he was learning. he saw in a flash that if the family had ceased to consult him it was because some deep tribal instinct warned them that he was no longer on their side; and he recalled, with a start of comprehension, a remark of may's during their drive home from mrs. manson mingott's on the day of the archery meeting: "perhaps, after all, ellen would be happier with her husband." even in the tumult of new discoveries archer remembered his indignant exclamation, and the fact that since then his wife had never named madame olenska to him. her careless allusion had no doubt been the straw held up to see which way the wind blew; the result had been reported to the family, and thereafter archer had been tacitly omitted from their counsels. he admired the tribal discipline which made may bow to this decision. she would not have done so, he knew, had her conscience protested; but she probably shared the family view that madame olenska would be better off as an unhappy wife than as a separated one, and that there was no use in discussing the case with newland, who had an awkward way of suddenly not seeming to take the most fundamental things for granted. archer looked up and met his visitor's anxious gaze. "don't you know, monsieur--is it possible you don't know--that the family begin to doubt if they have the right to advise the countess to refuse her husband's last proposals?" "the proposals you brought?" "the proposals i brought." it was on archer's lips to exclaim that whatever he knew or did not know was no concern of m. riviere's; but something in the humble and yet courageous tenacity of m. riviere's gaze made him reject this conclusion, and he met the young man's question with another. "what is your object in speaking to me of this?" he had not to wait a moment for the answer. "to beg you, monsieur--to beg you with all the force i'm capable of--not to let her go back.--oh, don't let her!" m. riviere exclaimed. archer looked at him with increasing astonishment. there was no mistaking the sincerity of his distress or the strength of his determination: he had evidently resolved to let everything go by the board but the supreme need of thus putting himself on record. archer considered. "may i ask," he said at length, "if this is the line you took with the countess olenska?" m. riviere reddened, but his eyes did not falter. "no, monsieur: i accepted my mission in good faith. i really believed--for reasons i need not trouble you with--that it would be better for madame olenska to recover her situation, her fortune, the social consideration that her husband's standing gives her." "so i supposed: you could hardly have accepted such a mission otherwise." "i should not have accepted it." "well, then--?" archer paused again, and their eyes met in another protracted scrutiny. "ah, monsieur, after i had seen her, after i had listened to her, i knew she was better off here." "you knew--?" "monsieur, i discharged my mission faithfully: i put the count's arguments, i stated his offers, without adding any comment of my own. the countess was good enough to listen patiently; she carried her goodness so far as to see me twice; she considered impartially all i had come to say. and it was in the course of these two talks that i changed my mind, that i came to see things differently." "may i ask what led to this change?" "simply seeing the change in her," m. riviere replied. "the change in her? then you knew her before?" the young man's colour again rose. "i used to see her in her husband's house. i have known count olenski for many years. you can imagine that he would not have sent a stranger on such a mission." archer's gaze, wandering away to the blank walls of the office, rested on a hanging calendar surmounted by the rugged features of the president of the united states. that such a conversation should be going on anywhere within the millions of square miles subject to his rule seemed as strange as anything that the imagination could invent. "the change--what sort of a change?" "ah, monsieur, if i could tell you!" m. riviere paused. "tenez--the discovery, i suppose, of what i'd never thought of before: that she's an american. and that if you're an american of her kind--of your kind--things that are accepted in certain other societies, or at least put up with as part of a general convenient give-and-take--become unthinkable, simply unthinkable. if madame olenska's relations understood what these things were, their opposition to her returning would no doubt be as unconditional as her own; but they seem to regard her husband's wish to have her back as proof of an irresistible longing for domestic life." m. riviere paused, and then added: "whereas it's far from being as simple as that." archer looked back to the president of the united states, and then down at his desk and at the papers scattered on it. for a second or two he could not trust himself to speak. during this interval he heard m. riviere's chair pushed back, and was aware that the young man had risen. when he glanced up again he saw that his visitor was as moved as himself. "thank you," archer said simply. "there's nothing to thank me for, monsieur: it is i, rather--" m. riviere broke off, as if speech for him too were difficult. "i should like, though," he continued in a firmer voice, "to add one thing. you asked me if i was in count olenski's employ. i am at this moment: i returned to him, a few months ago, for reasons of private necessity such as may happen to any one who has persons, ill and older persons, dependent on him. but from the moment that i have taken the step of coming here to say these things to you i consider myself discharged, and i shall tell him so on my return, and give him the reasons. that's all, monsieur." m. riviere bowed and drew back a step. "thank you," archer said again, as their hands met. xxvi. every year on the fifteenth of october fifth avenue opened its shutters, unrolled its carpets and hung up its triple layer of window-curtains. by the first of november this household ritual was over, and society had begun to look about and take stock of itself. by the fifteenth the season was in full blast, opera and theatres were putting forth their new attractions, dinner-engagements were accumulating, and dates for dances being fixed. and punctually at about this time mrs. archer always said that new york was very much changed. observing it from the lofty stand-point of a non-participant, she was able, with the help of mr. sillerton jackson and miss sophy, to trace each new crack in its surface, and all the strange weeds pushing up between the ordered rows of social vegetables. it had been one of the amusements of archer's youth to wait for this annual pronouncement of his mother's, and to hear her enumerate the minute signs of disintegration that his careless gaze had overlooked. for new york, to mrs. archer's mind, never changed without changing for the worse; and in this view miss sophy jackson heartily concurred. mr. sillerton jackson, as became a man of the world, suspended his judgment and listened with an amused impartiality to the lamentations of the ladies. but even he never denied that new york had changed; and newland archer, in the winter of the second year of his marriage, was himself obliged to admit that if it had not actually changed it was certainly changing. these points had been raised, as usual, at mrs. archer's thanksgiving dinner. at the date when she was officially enjoined to give thanks for the blessings of the year it was her habit to take a mournful though not embittered stock of her world, and wonder what there was to be thankful for. at any rate, not the state of society; society, if it could be said to exist, was rather a spectacle on which to call down biblical imprecations--and in fact, every one knew what the reverend dr. ashmore meant when he chose a text from jeremiah (chap. ii., verse ) for his thanksgiving sermon. dr. ashmore, the new rector of st. matthew's, had been chosen because he was very "advanced": his sermons were considered bold in thought and novel in language. when he fulminated against fashionable society he always spoke of its "trend"; and to mrs. archer it was terrifying and yet fascinating to feel herself part of a community that was trending. "there's no doubt that dr. ashmore is right: there is a marked trend," she said, as if it were something visible and measurable, like a crack in a house. "it was odd, though, to preach about it on thanksgiving," miss jackson opined; and her hostess drily rejoined: "oh, he means us to give thanks for what's left." archer had been wont to smile at these annual vaticinations of his mother's; but this year even he was obliged to acknowledge, as he listened to an enumeration of the changes, that the "trend" was visible. "the extravagance in dress--" miss jackson began. "sillerton took me to the first night of the opera, and i can only tell you that jane merry's dress was the only one i recognised from last year; and even that had had the front panel changed. yet i know she got it out from worth only two years ago, because my seamstress always goes in to make over her paris dresses before she wears them." "ah, jane merry is one of us," said mrs. archer sighing, as if it were not such an enviable thing to be in an age when ladies were beginning to flaunt abroad their paris dresses as soon as they were out of the custom house, instead of letting them mellow under lock and key, in the manner of mrs. archer's contemporaries. "yes; she's one of the few. in my youth," miss jackson rejoined, "it was considered vulgar to dress in the newest fashions; and amy sillerton has always told me that in boston the rule was to put away one's paris dresses for two years. old mrs. baxter pennilow, who did everything handsomely, used to import twelve a year, two velvet, two satin, two silk, and the other six of poplin and the finest cashmere. it was a standing order, and as she was ill for two years before she died they found forty-eight worth dresses that had never been taken out of tissue paper; and when the girls left off their mourning they were able to wear the first lot at the symphony concerts without looking in advance of the fashion." "ah, well, boston is more conservative than new york; but i always think it's a safe rule for a lady to lay aside her french dresses for one season," mrs. archer conceded. "it was beaufort who started the new fashion by making his wife clap her new clothes on her back as soon as they arrived: i must say at times it takes all regina's distinction not to look like ... like ..." miss jackson glanced around the table, caught janey's bulging gaze, and took refuge in an unintelligible murmur. "like her rivals," said mr. sillerton jackson, with the air of producing an epigram. "oh,--" the ladies murmured; and mrs. archer added, partly to distract her daughter's attention from forbidden topics: "poor regina! her thanksgiving hasn't been a very cheerful one, i'm afraid. have you heard the rumours about beaufort's speculations, sillerton?" mr. jackson nodded carelessly. every one had heard the rumours in question, and he scorned to confirm a tale that was already common property. a gloomy silence fell upon the party. no one really liked beaufort, and it was not wholly unpleasant to think the worst of his private life; but the idea of his having brought financial dishonour on his wife's family was too shocking to be enjoyed even by his enemies. archer's new york tolerated hypocrisy in private relations; but in business matters it exacted a limpid and impeccable honesty. it was a long time since any well-known banker had failed discreditably; but every one remembered the social extinction visited on the heads of the firm when the last event of the kind had happened. it would be the same with the beauforts, in spite of his power and her popularity; not all the leagued strength of the dallas connection would save poor regina if there were any truth in the reports of her husband's unlawful speculations. the talk took refuge in less ominous topics; but everything they touched on seemed to confirm mrs. archer's sense of an accelerated trend. "of course, newland, i know you let dear may go to mrs. struthers's sunday evenings--" she began; and may interposed gaily: "oh, you know, everybody goes to mrs. struthers's now; and she was invited to granny's last reception." it was thus, archer reflected, that new york managed its transitions: conspiring to ignore them till they were well over, and then, in all good faith, imagining that they had taken place in a preceding age. there was always a traitor in the citadel; and after he (or generally she) had surrendered the keys, what was the use of pretending that it was impregnable? once people had tasted of mrs. struthers's easy sunday hospitality they were not likely to sit at home remembering that her champagne was transmuted shoe-polish. "i know, dear, i know," mrs. archer sighed. "such things have to be, i suppose, as long as amusement is what people go out for; but i've never quite forgiven your cousin madame olenska for being the first person to countenance mrs. struthers." a sudden blush rose to young mrs. archer's face; it surprised her husband as much as the other guests about the table. "oh, ellen--" she murmured, much in the same accusing and yet deprecating tone in which her parents might have said: "oh, the blenkers--." it was the note which the family had taken to sounding on the mention of the countess olenska's name, since she had surprised and inconvenienced them by remaining obdurate to her husband's advances; but on may's lips it gave food for thought, and archer looked at her with the sense of strangeness that sometimes came over him when she was most in the tone of her environment. his mother, with less than her usual sensitiveness to atmosphere, still insisted: "i've always thought that people like the countess olenska, who have lived in aristocratic societies, ought to help us to keep up our social distinctions, instead of ignoring them." may's blush remained permanently vivid: it seemed to have a significance beyond that implied by the recognition of madame olenska's social bad faith. "i've no doubt we all seem alike to foreigners," said miss jackson tartly. "i don't think ellen cares for society; but nobody knows exactly what she does care for," may continued, as if she had been groping for something noncommittal. "ah, well--" mrs. archer sighed again. everybody knew that the countess olenska was no longer in the good graces of her family. even her devoted champion, old mrs. manson mingott, had been unable to defend her refusal to return to her husband. the mingotts had not proclaimed their disapproval aloud: their sense of solidarity was too strong. they had simply, as mrs. welland said, "let poor ellen find her own level"--and that, mortifyingly and incomprehensibly, was in the dim depths where the blenkers prevailed, and "people who wrote" celebrated their untidy rites. it was incredible, but it was a fact, that ellen, in spite of all her opportunities and her privileges, had become simply "bohemian." the fact enforced the contention that she had made a fatal mistake in not returning to count olenski. after all, a young woman's place was under her husband's roof, especially when she had left it in circumstances that ... well ... if one had cared to look into them ... "madame olenska is a great favourite with the gentlemen," said miss sophy, with her air of wishing to put forth something conciliatory when she knew that she was planting a dart. "ah, that's the danger that a young woman like madame olenska is always exposed to," mrs. archer mournfully agreed; and the ladies, on this conclusion, gathered up their trains to seek the carcel globes of the drawing-room, while archer and mr. sillerton jackson withdrew to the gothic library. once established before the grate, and consoling himself for the inadequacy of the dinner by the perfection of his cigar, mr. jackson became portentous and communicable. "if the beaufort smash comes," he announced, "there are going to be disclosures." archer raised his head quickly: he could never hear the name without the sharp vision of beaufort's heavy figure, opulently furred and shod, advancing through the snow at skuytercliff. "there's bound to be," mr. jackson continued, "the nastiest kind of a cleaning up. he hasn't spent all his money on regina." "oh, well--that's discounted, isn't it? my belief is he'll pull out yet," said the young man, wanting to change the subject. "perhaps--perhaps. i know he was to see some of the influential people today. of course," mr. jackson reluctantly conceded, "it's to be hoped they can tide him over--this time anyhow. i shouldn't like to think of poor regina's spending the rest of her life in some shabby foreign watering-place for bankrupts." archer said nothing. it seemed to him so natural--however tragic--that money ill-gotten should be cruelly expiated, that his mind, hardly lingering over mrs. beaufort's doom, wandered back to closer questions. what was the meaning of may's blush when the countess olenska had been mentioned? four months had passed since the midsummer day that he and madame olenska had spent together; and since then he had not seen her. he knew that she had returned to washington, to the little house which she and medora manson had taken there: he had written to her once--a few words, asking when they were to meet again--and she had even more briefly replied: "not yet." since then there had been no farther communication between them, and he had built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret thoughts and longings. little by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities; thither he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him, his judgments and his visions. outside it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency, blundering against familiar prejudices and traditional points of view as an absent-minded man goes on bumping into the furniture of his own room. absent--that was what he was: so absent from everything most densely real and near to those about him that it sometimes startled him to find they still imagined he was there. he became aware that mr. jackson was clearing his throat preparatory to farther revelations. "i don't know, of course, how far your wife's family are aware of what people say about--well, about madame olenska's refusal to accept her husband's latest offer." archer was silent, and mr. jackson obliquely continued: "it's a pity--it's certainly a pity--that she refused it." "a pity? in god's name, why?" mr. jackson looked down his leg to the unwrinkled sock that joined it to a glossy pump. "well--to put it on the lowest ground--what's she going to live on now?" "now--?" "if beaufort--" archer sprang up, his fist banging down on the black walnut-edge of the writing-table. the wells of the brass double-inkstand danced in their sockets. "what the devil do you mean, sir?" mr. jackson, shifting himself slightly in his chair, turned a tranquil gaze on the young man's burning face. "well--i have it on pretty good authority--in fact, on old catherine's herself--that the family reduced countess olenska's allowance considerably when she definitely refused to go back to her husband; and as, by this refusal, she also forfeits the money settled on her when she married--which olenski was ready to make over to her if she returned--why, what the devil do you mean, my dear boy, by asking me what i mean?" mr. jackson good-humouredly retorted. archer moved toward the mantelpiece and bent over to knock his ashes into the grate. "i don't know anything of madame olenska's private affairs; but i don't need to, to be certain that what you insinuate--" "oh, i don't: it's lefferts, for one," mr. jackson interposed. "lefferts--who made love to her and got snubbed for it!" archer broke out contemptuously. "ah--did he?" snapped the other, as if this were exactly the fact he had been laying a trap for. he still sat sideways from the fire, so that his hard old gaze held archer's face as if in a spring of steel. "well, well: it's a pity she didn't go back before beaufort's cropper," he repeated. "if she goes now, and if he fails, it will only confirm the general impression: which isn't by any means peculiar to lefferts, by the way." "oh, she won't go back now: less than ever!" archer had no sooner said it than he had once more the feeling that it was exactly what mr. jackson had been waiting for. the old gentleman considered him attentively. "that's your opinion, eh? well, no doubt you know. but everybody will tell you that the few pennies medora manson has left are all in beaufort's hands; and how the two women are to keep their heads above water unless he does, i can't imagine. of course, madame olenska may still soften old catherine, who's been the most inexorably opposed to her staying; and old catherine could make her any allowance she chooses. but we all know that she hates parting with good money; and the rest of the family have no particular interest in keeping madame olenska here." archer was burning with unavailing wrath: he was exactly in the state when a man is sure to do something stupid, knowing all the while that he is doing it. he saw that mr. jackson had been instantly struck by the fact that madame olenska's differences with her grandmother and her other relations were not known to him, and that the old gentleman had drawn his own conclusions as to the reasons for archer's exclusion from the family councils. this fact warned archer to go warily; but the insinuations about beaufort made him reckless. he was mindful, however, if not of his own danger, at least of the fact that mr. jackson was under his mother's roof, and consequently his guest. old new york scrupulously observed the etiquette of hospitality, and no discussion with a guest was ever allowed to degenerate into a disagreement. "shall we go up and join my mother?" he suggested curtly, as mr. jackson's last cone of ashes dropped into the brass ashtray at his elbow. on the drive homeward may remained oddly silent; through the darkness, he still felt her enveloped in her menacing blush. what its menace meant he could not guess: but he was sufficiently warned by the fact that madame olenska's name had evoked it. they went upstairs, and he turned into the library. she usually followed him; but he heard her passing down the passage to her bedroom. "may!" he called out impatiently; and she came back, with a slight glance of surprise at his tone. "this lamp is smoking again; i should think the servants might see that it's kept properly trimmed," he grumbled nervously. "i'm so sorry: it shan't happen again," she answered, in the firm bright tone she had learned from her mother; and it exasperated archer to feel that she was already beginning to humour him like a younger mr. welland. she bent over to lower the wick, and as the light struck up on her white shoulders and the clear curves of her face he thought: "how young she is! for what endless years this life will have to go on!" he felt, with a kind of horror, his own strong youth and the bounding blood in his veins. "look here," he said suddenly, "i may have to go to washington for a few days--soon; next week perhaps." her hand remained on the key of the lamp as she turned to him slowly. the heat from its flame had brought back a glow to her face, but it paled as she looked up. "on business?" she asked, in a tone which implied that there could be no other conceivable reason, and that she had put the question automatically, as if merely to finish his own sentence. "on business, naturally. there's a patent case coming up before the supreme court--" he gave the name of the inventor, and went on furnishing details with all lawrence lefferts's practised glibness, while she listened attentively, saying at intervals: "yes, i see." "the change will do you good," she said simply, when he had finished; "and you must be sure to go and see ellen," she added, looking him straight in the eyes with her cloudless smile, and speaking in the tone she might have employed in urging him not to neglect some irksome family duty. it was the only word that passed between them on the subject; but in the code in which they had both been trained it meant: "of course you understand that i know all that people have been saying about ellen, and heartily sympathise with my family in their effort to get her to return to her husband. i also know that, for some reason you have not chosen to tell me, you have advised her against this course, which all the older men of the family, as well as our grandmother, agree in approving; and that it is owing to your encouragement that ellen defies us all, and exposes herself to the kind of criticism of which mr. sillerton jackson probably gave you, this evening, the hint that has made you so irritable.... hints have indeed not been wanting; but since you appear unwilling to take them from others, i offer you this one myself, in the only form in which well-bred people of our kind can communicate unpleasant things to each other: by letting you understand that i know you mean to see ellen when you are in washington, and are perhaps going there expressly for that purpose; and that, since you are sure to see her, i wish you to do so with my full and explicit approval--and to take the opportunity of letting her know what the course of conduct you have encouraged her in is likely to lead to." her hand was still on the key of the lamp when the last word of this mute message reached him. she turned the wick down, lifted off the globe, and breathed on the sulky flame. "they smell less if one blows them out," she explained, with her bright housekeeping air. on the threshold she turned and paused for his kiss. xxvii. wall street, the next day, had more reassuring reports of beaufort's situation. they were not definite, but they were hopeful. it was generally understood that he could call on powerful influences in case of emergency, and that he had done so with success; and that evening, when mrs. beaufort appeared at the opera wearing her old smile and a new emerald necklace, society drew a breath of relief. new york was inexorable in its condemnation of business irregularities. so far there had been no exception to its tacit rule that those who broke the law of probity must pay; and every one was aware that even beaufort and beaufort's wife would be offered up unflinchingly to this principle. but to be obliged to offer them up would be not only painful but inconvenient. the disappearance of the beauforts would leave a considerable void in their compact little circle; and those who were too ignorant or too careless to shudder at the moral catastrophe bewailed in advance the loss of the best ball-room in new york. archer had definitely made up his mind to go to washington. he was waiting only for the opening of the law-suit of which he had spoken to may, so that its date might coincide with that of his visit; but on the following tuesday he learned from mr. letterblair that the case might be postponed for several weeks. nevertheless, he went home that afternoon determined in any event to leave the next evening. the chances were that may, who knew nothing of his professional life, and had never shown any interest in it, would not learn of the postponement, should it take place, nor remember the names of the litigants if they were mentioned before her; and at any rate he could no longer put off seeing madame olenska. there were too many things that he must say to her. on the wednesday morning, when he reached his office, mr. letterblair met him with a troubled face. beaufort, after all, had not managed to "tide over"; but by setting afloat the rumour that he had done so he had reassured his depositors, and heavy payments had poured into the bank till the previous evening, when disturbing reports again began to predominate. in consequence, a run on the bank had begun, and its doors were likely to close before the day was over. the ugliest things were being said of beaufort's dastardly manoeuvre, and his failure promised to be one of the most discreditable in the history of wall street. the extent of the calamity left mr. letterblair white and incapacitated. "i've seen bad things in my time; but nothing as bad as this. everybody we know will be hit, one way or another. and what will be done about mrs. beaufort? what can be done about her? i pity mrs. manson mingott as much as anybody: coming at her age, there's no knowing what effect this affair may have on her. she always believed in beaufort--she made a friend of him! and there's the whole dallas connection: poor mrs. beaufort is related to every one of you. her only chance would be to leave her husband--yet how can any one tell her so? her duty is at his side; and luckily she seems always to have been blind to his private weaknesses." there was a knock, and mr. letterblair turned his head sharply. "what is it? i can't be disturbed." a clerk brought in a letter for archer and withdrew. recognising his wife's hand, the young man opened the envelope and read: "won't you please come up town as early as you can? granny had a slight stroke last night. in some mysterious way she found out before any one else this awful news about the bank. uncle lovell is away shooting, and the idea of the disgrace has made poor papa so nervous that he has a temperature and can't leave his room. mamma needs you dreadfully, and i do hope you can get away at once and go straight to granny's." archer handed the note to his senior partner, and a few minutes later was crawling northward in a crowded horse-car, which he exchanged at fourteenth street for one of the high staggering omnibuses of the fifth avenue line. it was after twelve o'clock when this laborious vehicle dropped him at old catherine's. the sitting-room window on the ground floor, where she usually throned, was tenanted by the inadequate figure of her daughter, mrs. welland, who signed a haggard welcome as she caught sight of archer; and at the door he was met by may. the hall wore the unnatural appearance peculiar to well-kept houses suddenly invaded by illness: wraps and furs lay in heaps on the chairs, a doctor's bag and overcoat were on the table, and beside them letters and cards had already piled up unheeded. may looked pale but smiling: dr. bencomb, who had just come for the second time, took a more hopeful view, and mrs. mingott's dauntless determination to live and get well was already having an effect on her family. may led archer into the old lady's sitting-room, where the sliding doors opening into the bedroom had been drawn shut, and the heavy yellow damask portieres dropped over them; and here mrs. welland communicated to him in horrified undertones the details of the catastrophe. it appeared that the evening before something dreadful and mysterious had happened. at about eight o'clock, just after mrs. mingott had finished the game of solitaire that she always played after dinner, the door-bell had rung, and a lady so thickly veiled that the servants did not immediately recognise her had asked to be received. the butler, hearing a familiar voice, had thrown open the sitting-room door, announcing: "mrs. julius beaufort"--and had then closed it again on the two ladies. they must have been together, he thought, about an hour. when mrs. mingott's bell rang mrs. beaufort had already slipped away unseen, and the old lady, white and vast and terrible, sat alone in her great chair, and signed to the butler to help her into her room. she seemed, at that time, though obviously distressed, in complete control of her body and brain. the mulatto maid put her to bed, brought her a cup of tea as usual, laid everything straight in the room, and went away; but at three in the morning the bell rang again, and the two servants, hastening in at this unwonted summons (for old catherine usually slept like a baby), had found their mistress sitting up against her pillows with a crooked smile on her face and one little hand hanging limp from its huge arm. the stroke had clearly been a slight one, for she was able to articulate and to make her wishes known; and soon after the doctor's first visit she had begun to regain control of her facial muscles. but the alarm had been great; and proportionately great was the indignation when it was gathered from mrs. mingott's fragmentary phrases that regina beaufort had come to ask her--incredible effrontery!--to back up her husband, see them through--not to "desert" them, as she called it--in fact to induce the whole family to cover and condone their monstrous dishonour. "i said to her: 'honour's always been honour, and honesty honesty, in manson mingott's house, and will be till i'm carried out of it feet first,'" the old woman had stammered into her daughter's ear, in the thick voice of the partly paralysed. "and when she said: 'but my name, auntie--my name's regina dallas,' i said: 'it was beaufort when he covered you with jewels, and it's got to stay beaufort now that he's covered you with shame.'" so much, with tears and gasps of horror, mrs. welland imparted, blanched and demolished by the unwonted obligation of having at last to fix her eyes on the unpleasant and the discreditable. "if only i could keep it from your father-in-law: he always says: 'augusta, for pity's sake, don't destroy my last illusions'--and how am i to prevent his knowing these horrors?" the poor lady wailed. "after all, mamma, he won't have seen them," her daughter suggested; and mrs. welland sighed: "ah, no; thank heaven he's safe in bed. and dr. bencomb has promised to keep him there till poor mamma is better, and regina has been got away somewhere." archer had seated himself near the window and was gazing out blankly at the deserted thoroughfare. it was evident that he had been summoned rather for the moral support of the stricken ladies than because of any specific aid that he could render. mr. lovell mingott had been telegraphed for, and messages were being despatched by hand to the members of the family living in new york; and meanwhile there was nothing to do but to discuss in hushed tones the consequences of beaufort's dishonour and of his wife's unjustifiable action. mrs. lovell mingott, who had been in another room writing notes, presently reappeared, and added her voice to the discussion. in their day, the elder ladies agreed, the wife of a man who had done anything disgraceful in business had only one idea: to efface herself, to disappear with him. "there was the case of poor grandmamma spicer; your great-grandmother, may. of course," mrs. welland hastened to add, "your great-grandfather's money difficulties were private--losses at cards, or signing a note for somebody--i never quite knew, because mamma would never speak of it. but she was brought up in the country because her mother had to leave new york after the disgrace, whatever it was: they lived up the hudson alone, winter and summer, till mamma was sixteen. it would never have occurred to grandmamma spicer to ask the family to 'countenance' her, as i understand regina calls it; though a private disgrace is nothing compared to the scandal of ruining hundreds of innocent people." "yes, it would be more becoming in regina to hide her own countenance than to talk about other people's," mrs. lovell mingott agreed. "i understand that the emerald necklace she wore at the opera last friday had been sent on approval from ball and black's in the afternoon. i wonder if they'll ever get it back?" archer listened unmoved to the relentless chorus. the idea of absolute financial probity as the first law of a gentleman's code was too deeply ingrained in him for sentimental considerations to weaken it. an adventurer like lemuel struthers might build up the millions of his shoe polish on any number of shady dealings; but unblemished honesty was the noblesse oblige of old financial new york. nor did mrs. beaufort's fate greatly move archer. he felt, no doubt, more sorry for her than her indignant relatives; but it seemed to him that the tie between husband and wife, even if breakable in prosperity, should be indissoluble in misfortune. as mr. letterblair had said, a wife's place was at her husband's side when he was in trouble; but society's place was not at his side, and mrs. beaufort's cool assumption that it was seemed almost to make her his accomplice. the mere idea of a woman's appealing to her family to screen her husband's business dishonour was inadmissible, since it was the one thing that the family, as an institution, could not do. the mulatto maid called mrs. lovell mingott into the hall, and the latter came back in a moment with a frowning brow. "she wants me to telegraph for ellen olenska. i had written to ellen, of course, and to medora; but now it seems that's not enough. i'm to telegraph to her immediately, and to tell her that she's to come alone." the announcement was received in silence. mrs. welland sighed resignedly, and may rose from her seat and went to gather up some newspapers that had been scattered on the floor. "i suppose it must be done," mrs. lovell mingott continued, as if hoping to be contradicted; and may turned back toward the middle of the room. "of course it must be done," she said. "granny knows what she wants, and we must carry out all her wishes. shall i write the telegram for you, auntie? if it goes at once ellen can probably catch tomorrow morning's train." she pronounced the syllables of the name with a peculiar clearness, as if she had tapped on two silver bells. "well, it can't go at once. jasper and the pantry-boy are both out with notes and telegrams." may turned to her husband with a smile. "but here's newland, ready to do anything. will you take the telegram, newland? there'll be just time before luncheon." archer rose with a murmur of readiness, and she seated herself at old catherine's rosewood "bonheur du jour," and wrote out the message in her large immature hand. when it was written she blotted it neatly and handed it to archer. "what a pity," she said, "that you and ellen will cross each other on the way!--newland," she added, turning to her mother and aunt, "is obliged to go to washington about a patent law-suit that is coming up before the supreme court. i suppose uncle lovell will be back by tomorrow night, and with granny improving so much it doesn't seem right to ask newland to give up an important engagement for the firm--does it?" she paused, as if for an answer, and mrs. welland hastily declared: "oh, of course not, darling. your granny would be the last person to wish it." as archer left the room with the telegram, he heard his mother-in-law add, presumably to mrs. lovell mingott: "but why on earth she should make you telegraph for ellen olenska--" and may's clear voice rejoin: "perhaps it's to urge on her again that after all her duty is with her husband." the outer door closed on archer and he walked hastily away toward the telegraph office. xxviii. "ol-ol--howjer spell it, anyhow?" asked the tart young lady to whom archer had pushed his wife's telegram across the brass ledge of the western union office. "olenska--o-len-ska," he repeated, drawing back the message in order to print out the foreign syllables above may's rambling script. "it's an unlikely name for a new york telegraph office; at least in this quarter," an unexpected voice observed; and turning around archer saw lawrence lefferts at his elbow, pulling an imperturbable moustache and affecting not to glance at the message. "hallo, newland: thought i'd catch you here. i've just heard of old mrs. mingott's stroke; and as i was on my way to the house i saw you turning down this street and nipped after you. i suppose you've come from there?" archer nodded, and pushed his telegram under the lattice. "very bad, eh?" lefferts continued. "wiring to the family, i suppose. i gather it is bad, if you're including countess olenska." archer's lips stiffened; he felt a savage impulse to dash his fist into the long vain handsome face at his side. "why?" he questioned. lefferts, who was known to shrink from discussion, raised his eye-brows with an ironic grimace that warned the other of the watching damsel behind the lattice. nothing could be worse "form" the look reminded archer, than any display of temper in a public place. archer had never been more indifferent to the requirements of form; but his impulse to do lawrence lefferts a physical injury was only momentary. the idea of bandying ellen olenska's name with him at such a time, and on whatsoever provocation, was unthinkable. he paid for his telegram, and the two young men went out together into the street. there archer, having regained his self-control, went on: "mrs. mingott is much better: the doctor feels no anxiety whatever"; and lefferts, with profuse expressions of relief, asked him if he had heard that there were beastly bad rumours again about beaufort.... that afternoon the announcement of the beaufort failure was in all the papers. it overshadowed the report of mrs. manson mingott's stroke, and only the few who had heard of the mysterious connection between the two events thought of ascribing old catherine's illness to anything but the accumulation of flesh and years. the whole of new york was darkened by the tale of beaufort's dishonour. there had never, as mr. letterblair said, been a worse case in his memory, nor, for that matter, in the memory of the far-off letterblair who had given his name to the firm. the bank had continued to take in money for a whole day after its failure was inevitable; and as many of its clients belonged to one or another of the ruling clans, beaufort's duplicity seemed doubly cynical. if mrs. beaufort had not taken the tone that such misfortunes (the word was her own) were "the test of friendship," compassion for her might have tempered the general indignation against her husband. as it was--and especially after the object of her nocturnal visit to mrs. manson mingott had become known--her cynicism was held to exceed his; and she had not the excuse--nor her detractors the satisfaction--of pleading that she was "a foreigner." it was some comfort (to those whose securities were not in jeopardy) to be able to remind themselves that beaufort was; but, after all, if a dallas of south carolina took his view of the case, and glibly talked of his soon being "on his feet again," the argument lost its edge, and there was nothing to do but to accept this awful evidence of the indissolubility of marriage. society must manage to get on without the beauforts, and there was an end of it--except indeed for such hapless victims of the disaster as medora manson, the poor old miss lannings, and certain other misguided ladies of good family who, if only they had listened to mr. henry van der luyden ... "the best thing the beauforts can do," said mrs. archer, summing it up as if she were pronouncing a diagnosis and prescribing a course of treatment, "is to go and live at regina's little place in north carolina. beaufort has always kept a racing stable, and he had better breed trotting horses. i should say he had all the qualities of a successful horsedealer." every one agreed with her, but no one condescended to enquire what the beauforts really meant to do. the next day mrs. manson mingott was much better: she recovered her voice sufficiently to give orders that no one should mention the beauforts to her again, and asked--when dr. bencomb appeared--what in the world her family meant by making such a fuss about her health. "if people of my age will eat chicken-salad in the evening what are they to expect?" she enquired; and, the doctor having opportunely modified her dietary, the stroke was transformed into an attack of indigestion. but in spite of her firm tone old catherine did not wholly recover her former attitude toward life. the growing remoteness of old age, though it had not diminished her curiosity about her neighbours, had blunted her never very lively compassion for their troubles; and she seemed to have no difficulty in putting the beaufort disaster out of her mind. but for the first time she became absorbed in her own symptoms, and began to take a sentimental interest in certain members of her family to whom she had hitherto been contemptuously indifferent. mr. welland, in particular, had the privilege of attracting her notice. of her sons-in-law he was the one she had most consistently ignored; and all his wife's efforts to represent him as a man of forceful character and marked intellectual ability (if he had only "chosen") had been met with a derisive chuckle. but his eminence as a valetudinarian now made him an object of engrossing interest, and mrs. mingott issued an imperial summons to him to come and compare diets as soon as his temperature permitted; for old catherine was now the first to recognise that one could not be too careful about temperatures. twenty-four hours after madame olenska's summons a telegram announced that she would arrive from washington on the evening of the following day. at the wellands', where the newland archers chanced to be lunching, the question as to who should meet her at jersey city was immediately raised; and the material difficulties amid which the welland household struggled as if it had been a frontier outpost, lent animation to the debate. it was agreed that mrs. welland could not possibly go to jersey city because she was to accompany her husband to old catherine's that afternoon, and the brougham could not be spared, since, if mr. welland were "upset" by seeing his mother-in-law for the first time after her attack, he might have to be taken home at a moment's notice. the welland sons would of course be "down town," mr. lovell mingott would be just hurrying back from his shooting, and the mingott carriage engaged in meeting him; and one could not ask may, at the close of a winter afternoon, to go alone across the ferry to jersey city, even in her own carriage. nevertheless, it might appear inhospitable--and contrary to old catherine's express wishes--if madame olenska were allowed to arrive without any of the family being at the station to receive her. it was just like ellen, mrs. welland's tired voice implied, to place the family in such a dilemma. "it's always one thing after another," the poor lady grieved, in one of her rare revolts against fate; "the only thing that makes me think mamma must be less well than dr. bencomb will admit is this morbid desire to have ellen come at once, however inconvenient it is to meet her." the words had been thoughtless, as the utterances of impatience often are; and mr. welland was upon them with a pounce. "augusta," he said, turning pale and laying down his fork, "have you any other reason for thinking that bencomb is less to be relied on than he was? have you noticed that he has been less conscientious than usual in following up my case or your mother's?" it was mrs. welland's turn to grow pale as the endless consequences of her blunder unrolled themselves before her; but she managed to laugh, and take a second helping of scalloped oysters, before she said, struggling back into her old armour of cheerfulness: "my dear, how could you imagine such a thing? i only meant that, after the decided stand mamma took about its being ellen's duty to go back to her husband, it seems strange that she should be seized with this sudden whim to see her, when there are half a dozen other grandchildren that she might have asked for. but we must never forget that mamma, in spite of her wonderful vitality, is a very old woman." mr. welland's brow remained clouded, and it was evident that his perturbed imagination had fastened at once on this last remark. "yes: your mother's a very old woman; and for all we know bencomb may not be as successful with very old people. as you say, my dear, it's always one thing after another; and in another ten or fifteen years i suppose i shall have the pleasing duty of looking about for a new doctor. it's always better to make such a change before it's absolutely necessary." and having arrived at this spartan decision mr. welland firmly took up his fork. "but all the while," mrs. welland began again, as she rose from the luncheon-table, and led the way into the wilderness of purple satin and malachite known as the back drawing-room, "i don't see how ellen's to be got here tomorrow evening; and i do like to have things settled for at least twenty-four hours ahead." archer turned from the fascinated contemplation of a small painting representing two cardinals carousing, in an octagonal ebony frame set with medallions of onyx. "shall i fetch her?" he proposed. "i can easily get away from the office in time to meet the brougham at the ferry, if may will send it there." his heart was beating excitedly as he spoke. mrs. welland heaved a sigh of gratitude, and may, who had moved away to the window, turned to shed on him a beam of approval. "so you see, mamma, everything will be settled twenty-four hours in advance," she said, stooping over to kiss her mother's troubled forehead. may's brougham awaited her at the door, and she was to drive archer to union square, where he could pick up a broadway car to carry him to the office. as she settled herself in her corner she said: "i didn't want to worry mamma by raising fresh obstacles; but how can you meet ellen tomorrow, and bring her back to new york, when you're going to washington?" "oh, i'm not going," archer answered. "not going? why, what's happened?" her voice was as clear as a bell, and full of wifely solicitude. "the case is off--postponed." "postponed? how odd! i saw a note this morning from mr. letterblair to mamma saying that he was going to washington tomorrow for the big patent case that he was to argue before the supreme court. you said it was a patent case, didn't you?" "well--that's it: the whole office can't go. letterblair decided to go this morning." "then it's not postponed?" she continued, with an insistence so unlike her that he felt the blood rising to his face, as if he were blushing for her unwonted lapse from all the traditional delicacies. "no: but my going is," he answered, cursing the unnecessary explanations that he had given when he had announced his intention of going to washington, and wondering where he had read that clever liars give details, but that the cleverest do not. it did not hurt him half as much to tell may an untruth as to see her trying to pretend that she had not detected him. "i'm not going till later on: luckily for the convenience of your family," he continued, taking base refuge in sarcasm. as he spoke he felt that she was looking at him, and he turned his eyes to hers in order not to appear to be avoiding them. their glances met for a second, and perhaps let them into each other's meanings more deeply than either cared to go. "yes; it is awfully convenient," may brightly agreed, "that you should be able to meet ellen after all; you saw how much mamma appreciated your offering to do it." "oh, i'm delighted to do it." the carriage stopped, and as he jumped out she leaned to him and laid her hand on his. "good-bye, dearest," she said, her eyes so blue that he wondered afterward if they had shone on him through tears. he turned away and hurried across union square, repeating to himself, in a sort of inward chant: "it's all of two hours from jersey city to old catherine's. it's all of two hours--and it may be more." xxix. his wife's dark blue brougham (with the wedding varnish still on it) met archer at the ferry, and conveyed him luxuriously to the pennsylvania terminus in jersey city. it was a sombre snowy afternoon, and the gas-lamps were lit in the big reverberating station. as he paced the platform, waiting for the washington express, he remembered that there were people who thought there would one day be a tunnel under the hudson through which the trains of the pennsylvania railway would run straight into new york. they were of the brotherhood of visionaries who likewise predicted the building of ships that would cross the atlantic in five days, the invention of a flying machine, lighting by electricity, telephonic communication without wires, and other arabian night marvels. "i don't care which of their visions comes true," archer mused, "as long as the tunnel isn't built yet." in his senseless school-boy happiness he pictured madame olenska's descent from the train, his discovery of her a long way off, among the throngs of meaningless faces, her clinging to his arm as he guided her to the carriage, their slow approach to the wharf among slipping horses, laden carts, vociferating teamsters, and then the startling quiet of the ferry-boat, where they would sit side by side under the snow, in the motionless carriage, while the earth seemed to glide away under them, rolling to the other side of the sun. it was incredible, the number of things he had to say to her, and in what eloquent order they were forming themselves on his lips ... the clanging and groaning of the train came nearer, and it staggered slowly into the station like a prey-laden monster into its lair. archer pushed forward, elbowing through the crowd, and staring blindly into window after window of the high-hung carriages. and then, suddenly, he saw madame olenska's pale and surprised face close at hand, and had again the mortified sensation of having forgotten what she looked like. they reached each other, their hands met, and he drew her arm through his. "this way--i have the carriage," he said. after that it all happened as he had dreamed. he helped her into the brougham with her bags, and had afterward the vague recollection of having properly reassured her about her grandmother and given her a summary of the beaufort situation (he was struck by the softness of her: "poor regina!"). meanwhile the carriage had worked its way out of the coil about the station, and they were crawling down the slippery incline to the wharf, menaced by swaying coal-carts, bewildered horses, dishevelled express-wagons, and an empty hearse--ah, that hearse! she shut her eyes as it passed, and clutched at archer's hand. "if only it doesn't mean--poor granny!" "oh, no, no--she's much better--she's all right, really. there--we've passed it!" he exclaimed, as if that made all the difference. her hand remained in his, and as the carriage lurched across the gang-plank onto the ferry he bent over, unbuttoned her tight brown glove, and kissed her palm as if he had kissed a relic. she disengaged herself with a faint smile, and he said: "you didn't expect me today?" "oh, no." "i meant to go to washington to see you. i'd made all my arrangements--i very nearly crossed you in the train." "oh--" she exclaimed, as if terrified by the narrowness of their escape. "do you know--i hardly remembered you?" "hardly remembered me?" "i mean: how shall i explain? i--it's always so. each time you happen to me all over again." "oh, yes: i know! i know!" "does it--do i too: to you?" he insisted. she nodded, looking out of the window. "ellen--ellen--ellen!" she made no answer, and he sat in silence, watching her profile grow indistinct against the snow-streaked dusk beyond the window. what had she been doing in all those four long months, he wondered? how little they knew of each other, after all! the precious moments were slipping away, but he had forgotten everything that he had meant to say to her and could only helplessly brood on the mystery of their remoteness and their proximity, which seemed to be symbolised by the fact of their sitting so close to each other, and yet being unable to see each other's faces. "what a pretty carriage! is it may's?" she asked, suddenly turning her face from the window. "yes." "it was may who sent you to fetch me, then? how kind of her!" he made no answer for a moment; then he said explosively: "your husband's secretary came to see me the day after we met in boston." in his brief letter to her he had made no allusion to m. riviere's visit, and his intention had been to bury the incident in his bosom. but her reminder that they were in his wife's carriage provoked him to an impulse of retaliation. he would see if she liked his reference to riviere any better than he liked hers to may! as on certain other occasions when he had expected to shake her out of her usual composure, she betrayed no sign of surprise: and at once he concluded: "he writes to her, then." "m. riviere went to see you?" "yes: didn't you know?" "no," she answered simply. "and you're not surprised?" she hesitated. "why should i be? he told me in boston that he knew you; that he'd met you in england i think." "ellen--i must ask you one thing." "yes." "i wanted to ask it after i saw him, but i couldn't put it in a letter. it was riviere who helped you to get away--when you left your husband?" his heart was beating suffocatingly. would she meet this question with the same composure? "yes: i owe him a great debt," she answered, without the least tremor in her quiet voice. her tone was so natural, so almost indifferent, that archer's turmoil subsided. once more she had managed, by her sheer simplicity, to make him feel stupidly conventional just when he thought he was flinging convention to the winds. "i think you're the most honest woman i ever met!" he exclaimed. "oh, no--but probably one of the least fussy," she answered, a smile in her voice. "call it what you like: you look at things as they are." "ah--i've had to. i've had to look at the gorgon." "well--it hasn't blinded you! you've seen that she's just an old bogey like all the others." "she doesn't blind one; but she dries up one's tears." the answer checked the pleading on archer's lips: it seemed to come from depths of experience beyond his reach. the slow advance of the ferry-boat had ceased, and her bows bumped against the piles of the slip with a violence that made the brougham stagger, and flung archer and madame olenska against each other. the young man, trembling, felt the pressure of her shoulder, and passed his arm about her. "if you're not blind, then, you must see that this can't last." "what can't?" "our being together--and not together." "no. you ought not to have come today," she said in an altered voice; and suddenly she turned, flung her arms about him and pressed her lips to his. at the same moment the carriage began to move, and a gas-lamp at the head of the slip flashed its light into the window. she drew away, and they sat silent and motionless while the brougham struggled through the congestion of carriages about the ferry-landing. as they gained the street archer began to speak hurriedly. "don't be afraid of me: you needn't squeeze yourself back into your corner like that. a stolen kiss isn't what i want. look: i'm not even trying to touch the sleeve of your jacket. don't suppose that i don't understand your reasons for not wanting to let this feeling between us dwindle into an ordinary hole-and-corner love-affair. i couldn't have spoken like this yesterday, because when we've been apart, and i'm looking forward to seeing you, every thought is burnt up in a great flame. but then you come; and you're so much more than i remembered, and what i want of you is so much more than an hour or two every now and then, with wastes of thirsty waiting between, that i can sit perfectly still beside you, like this, with that other vision in my mind, just quietly trusting to it to come true." for a moment she made no reply; then she asked, hardly above a whisper: "what do you mean by trusting to it to come true?" "why--you know it will, don't you?" "your vision of you and me together?" she burst into a sudden hard laugh. "you choose your place well to put it to me!" "do you mean because we're in my wife's brougham? shall we get out and walk, then? i don't suppose you mind a little snow?" she laughed again, more gently. "no; i shan't get out and walk, because my business is to get to granny's as quickly as i can. and you'll sit beside me, and we'll look, not at visions, but at realities." "i don't know what you mean by realities. the only reality to me is this." she met the words with a long silence, during which the carriage rolled down an obscure side-street and then turned into the searching illumination of fifth avenue. "is it your idea, then, that i should live with you as your mistress--since i can't be your wife?" she asked. the crudeness of the question startled him: the word was one that women of his class fought shy of, even when their talk flitted closest about the topic. he noticed that madame olenska pronounced it as if it had a recognised place in her vocabulary, and he wondered if it had been used familiarly in her presence in the horrible life she had fled from. her question pulled him up with a jerk, and he floundered. "i want--i want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like that--categories like that--won't exist. where we shall be simply two human beings who love each other, who are the whole of life to each other; and nothing else on earth will matter." she drew a deep sigh that ended in another laugh. "oh, my dear--where is that country? have you ever been there?" she asked; and as he remained sullenly dumb she went on: "i know so many who've tried to find it; and, believe me, they all got out by mistake at wayside stations: at places like boulogne, or pisa, or monte carlo--and it wasn't at all different from the old world they'd left, but only rather smaller and dingier and more promiscuous." he had never heard her speak in such a tone, and he remembered the phrase she had used a little while before. "yes, the gorgon has dried your tears," he said. "well, she opened my eyes too; it's a delusion to say that she blinds people. what she does is just the contrary--she fastens their eyelids open, so that they're never again in the blessed darkness. isn't there a chinese torture like that? there ought to be. ah, believe me, it's a miserable little country!" the carriage had crossed forty-second street: may's sturdy brougham-horse was carrying them northward as if he had been a kentucky trotter. archer choked with the sense of wasted minutes and vain words. "then what, exactly, is your plan for us?" he asked. "for us? but there's no us in that sense! we're near each other only if we stay far from each other. then we can be ourselves. otherwise we're only newland archer, the husband of ellen olenska's cousin, and ellen olenska, the cousin of newland archer's wife, trying to be happy behind the backs of the people who trust them." "ah, i'm beyond that," he groaned. "no, you're not! you've never been beyond. and i have," she said, in a strange voice, "and i know what it looks like there." he sat silent, dazed with inarticulate pain. then he groped in the darkness of the carriage for the little bell that signalled orders to the coachman. he remembered that may rang twice when she wished to stop. he pressed the bell, and the carriage drew up beside the curbstone. "why are we stopping? this is not granny's," madame olenska exclaimed. "no: i shall get out here," he stammered, opening the door and jumping to the pavement. by the light of a street-lamp he saw her startled face, and the instinctive motion she made to detain him. he closed the door, and leaned for a moment in the window. "you're right: i ought not to have come today," he said, lowering his voice so that the coachman should not hear. she bent forward, and seemed about to speak; but he had already called out the order to drive on, and the carriage rolled away while he stood on the corner. the snow was over, and a tingling wind had sprung up, that lashed his face as he stood gazing. suddenly he felt something stiff and cold on his lashes, and perceived that he had been crying, and that the wind had frozen his tears. he thrust his hands in his pockets, and walked at a sharp pace down fifth avenue to his own house. xxx. that evening when archer came down before dinner he found the drawing-room empty. he and may were dining alone, all the family engagements having been postponed since mrs. manson mingott's illness; and as may was the more punctual of the two he was surprised that she had not preceded him. he knew that she was at home, for while he dressed he had heard her moving about in her room; and he wondered what had delayed her. he had fallen into the way of dwelling on such conjectures as a means of tying his thoughts fast to reality. sometimes he felt as if he had found the clue to his father-in-law's absorption in trifles; perhaps even mr. welland, long ago, had had escapes and visions, and had conjured up all the hosts of domesticity to defend himself against them. when may appeared he thought she looked tired. she had put on the low-necked and tightly-laced dinner-dress which the mingott ceremonial exacted on the most informal occasions, and had built her fair hair into its usual accumulated coils; and her face, in contrast, was wan and almost faded. but she shone on him with her usual tenderness, and her eyes had kept the blue dazzle of the day before. "what became of you, dear?" she asked. "i was waiting at granny's, and ellen came alone, and said she had dropped you on the way because you had to rush off on business. there's nothing wrong?" "only some letters i'd forgotten, and wanted to get off before dinner." "ah--" she said; and a moment afterward: "i'm sorry you didn't come to granny's--unless the letters were urgent." "they were," he rejoined, surprised at her insistence. "besides, i don't see why i should have gone to your grandmother's. i didn't know you were there." she turned and moved to the looking-glass above the mantel-piece. as she stood there, lifting her long arm to fasten a puff that had slipped from its place in her intricate hair, archer was struck by something languid and inelastic in her attitude, and wondered if the deadly monotony of their lives had laid its weight on her also. then he remembered that, as he had left the house that morning, she had called over the stairs that she would meet him at her grandmother's so that they might drive home together. he had called back a cheery "yes!" and then, absorbed in other visions, had forgotten his promise. now he was smitten with compunction, yet irritated that so trifling an omission should be stored up against him after nearly two years of marriage. he was weary of living in a perpetual tepid honeymoon, without the temperature of passion yet with all its exactions. if may had spoken out her grievances (he suspected her of many) he might have laughed them away; but she was trained to conceal imaginary wounds under a spartan smile. to disguise his own annoyance he asked how her grandmother was, and she answered that mrs. mingott was still improving, but had been rather disturbed by the last news about the beauforts. "what news?" "it seems they're going to stay in new york. i believe he's going into an insurance business, or something. they're looking about for a small house." the preposterousness of the case was beyond discussion, and they went in to dinner. during dinner their talk moved in its usual limited circle; but archer noticed that his wife made no allusion to madame olenska, nor to old catherine's reception of her. he was thankful for the fact, yet felt it to be vaguely ominous. they went up to the library for coffee, and archer lit a cigar and took down a volume of michelet. he had taken to history in the evenings since may had shown a tendency to ask him to read aloud whenever she saw him with a volume of poetry: not that he disliked the sound of his own voice, but because he could always foresee her comments on what he read. in the days of their engagement she had simply (as he now perceived) echoed what he told her; but since he had ceased to provide her with opinions she had begun to hazard her own, with results destructive to his enjoyment of the works commented on. seeing that he had chosen history she fetched her workbasket, drew up an arm-chair to the green-shaded student lamp, and uncovered a cushion she was embroidering for his sofa. she was not a clever needle-woman; her large capable hands were made for riding, rowing and open-air activities; but since other wives embroidered cushions for their husbands she did not wish to omit this last link in her devotion. she was so placed that archer, by merely raising his eyes, could see her bent above her work-frame, her ruffled elbow-sleeves slipping back from her firm round arms, the betrothal sapphire shining on her left hand above her broad gold wedding-ring, and the right hand slowly and laboriously stabbing the canvas. as she sat thus, the lamplight full on her clear brow, he said to himself with a secret dismay that he would always know the thoughts behind it, that never, in all the years to come, would she surprise him by an unexpected mood, by a new idea, a weakness, a cruelty or an emotion. she had spent her poetry and romance on their short courting: the function was exhausted because the need was past. now she was simply ripening into a copy of her mother, and mysteriously, by the very process, trying to turn him into a mr. welland. he laid down his book and stood up impatiently; and at once she raised her head. "what's the matter?" "the room is stifling: i want a little air." he had insisted that the library curtains should draw backward and forward on a rod, so that they might be closed in the evening, instead of remaining nailed to a gilt cornice, and immovably looped up over layers of lace, as in the drawing-room; and he pulled them back and pushed up the sash, leaning out into the icy night. the mere fact of not looking at may, seated beside his table, under his lamp, the fact of seeing other houses, roofs, chimneys, of getting the sense of other lives outside his own, other cities beyond new york, and a whole world beyond his world, cleared his brain and made it easier to breathe. after he had leaned out into the darkness for a few minutes he heard her say: "newland! do shut the window. you'll catch your death." he pulled the sash down and turned back. "catch my death!" he echoed; and he felt like adding: "but i've caught it already. i am dead--i've been dead for months and months." and suddenly the play of the word flashed up a wild suggestion. what if it were she who was dead! if she were going to die--to die soon--and leave him free! the sensation of standing there, in that warm familiar room, and looking at her, and wishing her dead, was so strange, so fascinating and overmastering, that its enormity did not immediately strike him. he simply felt that chance had given him a new possibility to which his sick soul might cling. yes, may might die--people did: young people, healthy people like herself: she might die, and set him suddenly free. she glanced up, and he saw by her widening eyes that there must be something strange in his own. "newland! are you ill?" he shook his head and turned toward his arm-chair. she bent over her work-frame, and as he passed he laid his hand on her hair. "poor may!" he said. "poor? why poor?" she echoed with a strained laugh. "because i shall never be able to open a window without worrying you," he rejoined, laughing also. for a moment she was silent; then she said very low, her head bowed over her work: "i shall never worry if you're happy." "ah, my dear; and i shall never be happy unless i can open the windows!" "in this weather?" she remonstrated; and with a sigh he buried his head in his book. six or seven days passed. archer heard nothing from madame olenska, and became aware that her name would not be mentioned in his presence by any member of the family. he did not try to see her; to do so while she was at old catherine's guarded bedside would have been almost impossible. in the uncertainty of the situation he let himself drift, conscious, somewhere below the surface of his thoughts, of a resolve which had come to him when he had leaned out from his library window into the icy night. the strength of that resolve made it easy to wait and make no sign. then one day may told him that mrs. manson mingott had asked to see him. there was nothing surprising in the request, for the old lady was steadily recovering, and she had always openly declared that she preferred archer to any of her other grandsons-in-law. may gave the message with evident pleasure: she was proud of old catherine's appreciation of her husband. there was a moment's pause, and then archer felt it incumbent on him to say: "all right. shall we go together this afternoon?" his wife's face brightened, but she instantly answered: "oh, you'd much better go alone. it bores granny to see the same people too often." archer's heart was beating violently when he rang old mrs. mingott's bell. he had wanted above all things to go alone, for he felt sure the visit would give him the chance of saying a word in private to the countess olenska. he had determined to wait till the chance presented itself naturally; and here it was, and here he was on the doorstep. behind the door, behind the curtains of the yellow damask room next to the hall, she was surely awaiting him; in another moment he should see her, and be able to speak to her before she led him to the sick-room. he wanted only to put one question: after that his course would be clear. what he wished to ask was simply the date of her return to washington; and that question she could hardly refuse to answer. but in the yellow sitting-room it was the mulatto maid who waited. her white teeth shining like a keyboard, she pushed back the sliding doors and ushered him into old catherine's presence. the old woman sat in a vast throne-like arm-chair near her bed. beside her was a mahogany stand bearing a cast bronze lamp with an engraved globe, over which a green paper shade had been balanced. there was not a book or a newspaper in reach, nor any evidence of feminine employment: conversation had always been mrs. mingott's sole pursuit, and she would have scorned to feign an interest in fancywork. archer saw no trace of the slight distortion left by her stroke. she merely looked paler, with darker shadows in the folds and recesses of her obesity; and, in the fluted mob-cap tied by a starched bow between her first two chins, and the muslin kerchief crossed over her billowing purple dressing-gown, she seemed like some shrewd and kindly ancestress of her own who might have yielded too freely to the pleasures of the table. she held out one of the little hands that nestled in a hollow of her huge lap like pet animals, and called to the maid: "don't let in any one else. if my daughters call, say i'm asleep." the maid disappeared, and the old lady turned to her grandson. "my dear, am i perfectly hideous?" she asked gaily, launching out one hand in search of the folds of muslin on her inaccessible bosom. "my daughters tell me it doesn't matter at my age--as if hideousness didn't matter all the more the harder it gets to conceal!" "my dear, you're handsomer than ever!" archer rejoined in the same tone; and she threw back her head and laughed. "ah, but not as handsome as ellen!" she jerked out, twinkling at him maliciously; and before he could answer she added: "was she so awfully handsome the day you drove her up from the ferry?" he laughed, and she continued: "was it because you told her so that she had to put you out on the way? in my youth young men didn't desert pretty women unless they were made to!" she gave another chuckle, and interrupted it to say almost querulously: "it's a pity she didn't marry you; i always told her so. it would have spared me all this worry. but who ever thought of sparing their grandmother worry?" archer wondered if her illness had blurred her faculties; but suddenly she broke out: "well, it's settled, anyhow: she's going to stay with me, whatever the rest of the family say! she hadn't been here five minutes before i'd have gone down on my knees to keep her--if only, for the last twenty years, i'd been able to see where the floor was!" archer listened in silence, and she went on: "they'd talked me over, as no doubt you know: persuaded me, lovell, and letterblair, and augusta welland, and all the rest of them, that i must hold out and cut off her allowance, till she was made to see that it was her duty to go back to olenski. they thought they'd convinced me when the secretary, or whatever he was, came out with the last proposals: handsome proposals i confess they were. after all, marriage is marriage, and money's money--both useful things in their way ... and i didn't know what to answer--" she broke off and drew a long breath, as if speaking had become an effort. "but the minute i laid eyes on her, i said: 'you sweet bird, you! shut you up in that cage again? never!' and now it's settled that she's to stay here and nurse her granny as long as there's a granny to nurse. it's not a gay prospect, but she doesn't mind; and of course i've told letterblair that she's to be given her proper allowance." the young man heard her with veins aglow; but in his confusion of mind he hardly knew whether her news brought joy or pain. he had so definitely decided on the course he meant to pursue that for the moment he could not readjust his thoughts. but gradually there stole over him the delicious sense of difficulties deferred and opportunities miraculously provided. if ellen had consented to come and live with her grandmother it must surely be because she had recognised the impossibility of giving him up. this was her answer to his final appeal of the other day: if she would not take the extreme step he had urged, she had at last yielded to half-measures. he sank back into the thought with the involuntary relief of a man who has been ready to risk everything, and suddenly tastes the dangerous sweetness of security. "she couldn't have gone back--it was impossible!" he exclaimed. "ah, my dear, i always knew you were on her side; and that's why i sent for you today, and why i said to your pretty wife, when she proposed to come with you: 'no, my dear, i'm pining to see newland, and i don't want anybody to share our transports.' for you see, my dear--" she drew her head back as far as its tethering chins permitted, and looked him full in the eyes--"you see, we shall have a fight yet. the family don't want her here, and they'll say it's because i've been ill, because i'm a weak old woman, that she's persuaded me. i'm not well enough yet to fight them one by one, and you've got to do it for me." "i?" he stammered. "you. why not?" she jerked back at him, her round eyes suddenly as sharp as pen-knives. her hand fluttered from its chair-arm and lit on his with a clutch of little pale nails like bird-claws. "why not?" she searchingly repeated. archer, under the exposure of her gaze, had recovered his self-possession. "oh, i don't count--i'm too insignificant." "well, you're letterblair's partner, ain't you? you've got to get at them through letterblair. unless you've got a reason," she insisted. "oh, my dear, i back you to hold your own against them all without my help; but you shall have it if you need it," he reassured her. "then we're safe!" she sighed; and smiling on him with all her ancient cunning she added, as she settled her head among the cushions: "i always knew you'd back us up, because they never quote you when they talk about its being her duty to go home." he winced a little at her terrifying perspicacity, and longed to ask: "and may--do they quote her?" but he judged it safer to turn the question. "and madame olenska? when am i to see her?" he said. the old lady chuckled, crumpled her lids, and went through the pantomime of archness. "not today. one at a time, please. madame olenska's gone out." he flushed with disappointment, and she went on: "she's gone out, my child: gone in my carriage to see regina beaufort." she paused for this announcement to produce its effect. "that's what she's reduced me to already. the day after she got here she put on her best bonnet, and told me, as cool as a cucumber, that she was going to call on regina beaufort. 'i don't know her; who is she?' says i. 'she's your grand-niece, and a most unhappy woman,' she says. 'she's the wife of a scoundrel,' i answered. 'well,' she says, 'and so am i, and yet all my family want me to go back to him.' well, that floored me, and i let her go; and finally one day she said it was raining too hard to go out on foot, and she wanted me to lend her my carriage. 'what for?' i asked her; and she said: 'to go and see cousin regina'--cousin! now, my dear, i looked out of the window, and saw it wasn't raining a drop; but i understood her, and i let her have the carriage.... after all, regina's a brave woman, and so is she; and i've always liked courage above everything." archer bent down and pressed his lips on the little hand that still lay on his. "eh--eh--eh! whose hand did you think you were kissing, young man--your wife's, i hope?" the old lady snapped out with her mocking cackle; and as he rose to go she called out after him: "give her her granny's love; but you'd better not say anything about our talk." xxxi. archer had been stunned by old catherine's news. it was only natural that madame olenska should have hastened from washington in response to her grandmother's summons; but that she should have decided to remain under her roof--especially now that mrs. mingott had almost regained her health--was less easy to explain. archer was sure that madame olenska's decision had not been influenced by the change in her financial situation. he knew the exact figure of the small income which her husband had allowed her at their separation. without the addition of her grandmother's allowance it was hardly enough to live on, in any sense known to the mingott vocabulary; and now that medora manson, who shared her life, had been ruined, such a pittance would barely keep the two women clothed and fed. yet archer was convinced that madame olenska had not accepted her grandmother's offer from interested motives. she had the heedless generosity and the spasmodic extravagance of persons used to large fortunes, and indifferent to money; but she could go without many things which her relations considered indispensable, and mrs. lovell mingott and mrs. welland had often been heard to deplore that any one who had enjoyed the cosmopolitan luxuries of count olenski's establishments should care so little about "how things were done." moreover, as archer knew, several months had passed since her allowance had been cut off; yet in the interval she had made no effort to regain her grandmother's favour. therefore if she had changed her course it must be for a different reason. he did not have far to seek for that reason. on the way from the ferry she had told him that he and she must remain apart; but she had said it with her head on his breast. he knew that there was no calculated coquetry in her words; she was fighting her fate as he had fought his, and clinging desperately to her resolve that they should not break faith with the people who trusted them. but during the ten days which had elapsed since her return to new york she had perhaps guessed from his silence, and from the fact of his making no attempt to see her, that he was meditating a decisive step, a step from which there was no turning back. at the thought, a sudden fear of her own weakness might have seized her, and she might have felt that, after all, it was better to accept the compromise usual in such cases, and follow the line of least resistance. an hour earlier, when he had rung mrs. mingott's bell, archer had fancied that his path was clear before him. he had meant to have a word alone with madame olenska, and failing that, to learn from her grandmother on what day, and by which train, she was returning to washington. in that train he intended to join her, and travel with her to washington, or as much farther as she was willing to go. his own fancy inclined to japan. at any rate she would understand at once that, wherever she went, he was going. he meant to leave a note for may that should cut off any other alternative. he had fancied himself not only nerved for this plunge but eager to take it; yet his first feeling on hearing that the course of events was changed had been one of relief. now, however, as he walked home from mrs. mingott's, he was conscious of a growing distaste for what lay before him. there was nothing unknown or unfamiliar in the path he was presumably to tread; but when he had trodden it before it was as a free man, who was accountable to no one for his actions, and could lend himself with an amused detachment to the game of precautions and prevarications, concealments and compliances, that the part required. this procedure was called "protecting a woman's honour"; and the best fiction, combined with the after-dinner talk of his elders, had long since initiated him into every detail of its code. now he saw the matter in a new light, and his part in it seemed singularly diminished. it was, in fact, that which, with a secret fatuity, he had watched mrs. thorley rushworth play toward a fond and unperceiving husband: a smiling, bantering, humouring, watchful and incessant lie. a lie by day, a lie by night, a lie in every touch and every look; a lie in every caress and every quarrel; a lie in every word and in every silence. it was easier, and less dastardly on the whole, for a wife to play such a part toward her husband. a woman's standard of truthfulness was tacitly held to be lower: she was the subject creature, and versed in the arts of the enslaved. then she could always plead moods and nerves, and the right not to be held too strictly to account; and even in the most strait-laced societies the laugh was always against the husband. but in archer's little world no one laughed at a wife deceived, and a certain measure of contempt was attached to men who continued their philandering after marriage. in the rotation of crops there was a recognised season for wild oats; but they were not to be sown more than once. archer had always shared this view: in his heart he thought lefferts despicable. but to love ellen olenska was not to become a man like lefferts: for the first time archer found himself face to face with the dread argument of the individual case. ellen olenska was like no other woman, he was like no other man: their situation, therefore, resembled no one else's, and they were answerable to no tribunal but that of their own judgment. yes, but in ten minutes more he would be mounting his own doorstep; and there were may, and habit, and honour, and all the old decencies that he and his people had always believed in ... at his corner he hesitated, and then walked on down fifth avenue. ahead of him, in the winter night, loomed a big unlit house. as he drew near he thought how often he had seen it blazing with lights, its steps awninged and carpeted, and carriages waiting in double line to draw up at the curbstone. it was in the conservatory that stretched its dead-black bulk down the side street that he had taken his first kiss from may; it was under the myriad candles of the ball-room that he had seen her appear, tall and silver-shining as a young diana. now the house was as dark as the grave, except for a faint flare of gas in the basement, and a light in one upstairs room where the blind had not been lowered. as archer reached the corner he saw that the carriage standing at the door was mrs. manson mingott's. what an opportunity for sillerton jackson, if he should chance to pass! archer had been greatly moved by old catherine's account of madame olenska's attitude toward mrs. beaufort; it made the righteous reprobation of new york seem like a passing by on the other side. but he knew well enough what construction the clubs and drawing-rooms would put on ellen olenska's visits to her cousin. he paused and looked up at the lighted window. no doubt the two women were sitting together in that room: beaufort had probably sought consolation elsewhere. there were even rumours that he had left new york with fanny ring; but mrs. beaufort's attitude made the report seem improbable. archer had the nocturnal perspective of fifth avenue almost to himself. at that hour most people were indoors, dressing for dinner; and he was secretly glad that ellen's exit was likely to be unobserved. as the thought passed through his mind the door opened, and she came out. behind her was a faint light, such as might have been carried down the stairs to show her the way. she turned to say a word to some one; then the door closed, and she came down the steps. "ellen," he said in a low voice, as she reached the pavement. she stopped with a slight start, and just then he saw two young men of fashionable cut approaching. there was a familiar air about their overcoats and the way their smart silk mufflers were folded over their white ties; and he wondered how youths of their quality happened to be dining out so early. then he remembered that the reggie chiverses, whose house was a few doors above, were taking a large party that evening to see adelaide neilson in romeo and juliet, and guessed that the two were of the number. they passed under a lamp, and he recognised lawrence lefferts and a young chivers. a mean desire not to have madame olenska seen at the beauforts' door vanished as he felt the penetrating warmth of her hand. "i shall see you now--we shall be together," he broke out, hardly knowing what he said. "ah," she answered, "granny has told you?" while he watched her he was aware that lefferts and chivers, on reaching the farther side of the street corner, had discreetly struck away across fifth avenue. it was the kind of masculine solidarity that he himself often practised; now he sickened at their connivance. did she really imagine that he and she could live like this? and if not, what else did she imagine? "tomorrow i must see you--somewhere where we can be alone," he said, in a voice that sounded almost angry to his own ears. she wavered, and moved toward the carriage. "but i shall be at granny's--for the present that is," she added, as if conscious that her change of plans required some explanation. "somewhere where we can be alone," he insisted. she gave a faint laugh that grated on him. "in new york? but there are no churches ... no monuments." "there's the art museum--in the park," he explained, as she looked puzzled. "at half-past two. i shall be at the door ..." she turned away without answering and got quickly into the carriage. as it drove off she leaned forward, and he thought she waved her hand in the obscurity. he stared after her in a turmoil of contradictory feelings. it seemed to him that he had been speaking not to the woman he loved but to another, a woman he was indebted to for pleasures already wearied of: it was hateful to find himself the prisoner of this hackneyed vocabulary. "she'll come!" he said to himself, almost contemptuously. avoiding the popular "wolfe collection," whose anecdotic canvases filled one of the main galleries of the queer wilderness of cast-iron and encaustic tiles known as the metropolitan museum, they had wandered down a passage to the room where the "cesnola antiquities" mouldered in unvisited loneliness. they had this melancholy retreat to themselves, and seated on the divan enclosing the central steam-radiator, they were staring silently at the glass cabinets mounted in ebonised wood which contained the recovered fragments of ilium. "it's odd," madame olenska said, "i never came here before." "ah, well--. some day, i suppose, it will be a great museum." "yes," she assented absently. she stood up and wandered across the room. archer, remaining seated, watched the light movements of her figure, so girlish even under its heavy furs, the cleverly planted heron wing in her fur cap, and the way a dark curl lay like a flattened vine spiral on each cheek above the ear. his mind, as always when they first met, was wholly absorbed in the delicious details that made her herself and no other. presently he rose and approached the case before which she stood. its glass shelves were crowded with small broken objects--hardly recognisable domestic utensils, ornaments and personal trifles--made of glass, of clay, of discoloured bronze and other time-blurred substances. "it seems cruel," she said, "that after a while nothing matters ... any more than these little things, that used to be necessary and important to forgotten people, and now have to be guessed at under a magnifying glass and labelled: 'use unknown.'" "yes; but meanwhile--" "ah, meanwhile--" as she stood there, in her long sealskin coat, her hands thrust in a small round muff, her veil drawn down like a transparent mask to the tip of her nose, and the bunch of violets he had brought her stirring with her quickly-taken breath, it seemed incredible that this pure harmony of line and colour should ever suffer the stupid law of change. "meanwhile everything matters--that concerns you," he said. she looked at him thoughtfully, and turned back to the divan. he sat down beside her and waited; but suddenly he heard a step echoing far off down the empty rooms, and felt the pressure of the minutes. "what is it you wanted to tell me?" she asked, as if she had received the same warning. "what i wanted to tell you?" he rejoined. "why, that i believe you came to new york because you were afraid." "afraid?" "of my coming to washington." she looked down at her muff, and he saw her hands stir in it uneasily. "well--?" "well--yes," she said. "you were afraid? you knew--?" "yes: i knew ..." "well, then?" he insisted. "well, then: this is better, isn't it?" she returned with a long questioning sigh. "better--?" "we shall hurt others less. isn't it, after all, what you always wanted?" "to have you here, you mean--in reach and yet out of reach? to meet you in this way, on the sly? it's the very reverse of what i want. i told you the other day what i wanted." she hesitated. "and you still think this--worse?" "a thousand times!" he paused. "it would be easy to lie to you; but the truth is i think it detestable." "oh, so do i!" she cried with a deep breath of relief. he sprang up impatiently. "well, then--it's my turn to ask: what is it, in god's name, that you think better?" she hung her head and continued to clasp and unclasp her hands in her muff. the step drew nearer, and a guardian in a braided cap walked listlessly through the room like a ghost stalking through a necropolis. they fixed their eyes simultaneously on the case opposite them, and when the official figure had vanished down a vista of mummies and sarcophagi archer spoke again. "what do you think better?" instead of answering she murmured: "i promised granny to stay with her because it seemed to me that here i should be safer." "from me?" she bent her head slightly, without looking at him. "safer from loving me?" her profile did not stir, but he saw a tear overflow on her lashes and hang in a mesh of her veil. "safer from doing irreparable harm. don't let us be like all the others!" she protested. "what others? i don't profess to be different from my kind. i'm consumed by the same wants and the same longings." she glanced at him with a kind of terror, and he saw a faint colour steal into her cheeks. "shall i--once come to you; and then go home?" she suddenly hazarded in a low clear voice. the blood rushed to the young man's forehead. "dearest!" he said, without moving. it seemed as if he held his heart in his hands, like a full cup that the least motion might overbrim. then her last phrase struck his ear and his face clouded. "go home? what do you mean by going home?" "home to my husband." "and you expect me to say yes to that?" she raised her troubled eyes to his. "what else is there? i can't stay here and lie to the people who've been good to me." "but that's the very reason why i ask you to come away!" "and destroy their lives, when they've helped me to remake mine?" archer sprang to his feet and stood looking down on her in inarticulate despair. it would have been easy to say: "yes, come; come once." he knew the power she would put in his hands if she consented; there would be no difficulty then in persuading her not to go back to her husband. but something silenced the word on his lips. a sort of passionate honesty in her made it inconceivable that he should try to draw her into that familiar trap. "if i were to let her come," he said to himself, "i should have to let her go again." and that was not to be imagined. but he saw the shadow of the lashes on her wet cheek, and wavered. "after all," he began again, "we have lives of our own.... there's no use attempting the impossible. you're so unprejudiced about some things, so used, as you say, to looking at the gorgon, that i don't know why you're afraid to face our case, and see it as it really is--unless you think the sacrifice is not worth making." she stood up also, her lips tightening under a rapid frown. "call it that, then--i must go," she said, drawing her little watch from her bosom. she turned away, and he followed and caught her by the wrist. "well, then: come to me once," he said, his head turning suddenly at the thought of losing her; and for a second or two they looked at each other almost like enemies. "when?" he insisted. "tomorrow?" she hesitated. "the day after." "dearest--!" he said again. she had disengaged her wrist; but for a moment they continued to hold each other's eyes, and he saw that her face, which had grown very pale, was flooded with a deep inner radiance. his heart beat with awe: he felt that he had never before beheld love visible. "oh, i shall be late--good-bye. no, don't come any farther than this," she cried, walking hurriedly away down the long room, as if the reflected radiance in his eyes had frightened her. when she reached the door she turned for a moment to wave a quick farewell. archer walked home alone. darkness was falling when he let himself into his house, and he looked about at the familiar objects in the hall as if he viewed them from the other side of the grave. the parlour-maid, hearing his step, ran up the stairs to light the gas on the upper landing. "is mrs. archer in?" "no, sir; mrs. archer went out in the carriage after luncheon, and hasn't come back." with a sense of relief he entered the library and flung himself down in his armchair. the parlour-maid followed, bringing the student lamp and shaking some coals onto the dying fire. when she left he continued to sit motionless, his elbows on his knees, his chin on his clasped hands, his eyes fixed on the red grate. he sat there without conscious thoughts, without sense of the lapse of time, in a deep and grave amazement that seemed to suspend life rather than quicken it. "this was what had to be, then ... this was what had to be," he kept repeating to himself, as if he hung in the clutch of doom. what he had dreamed of had been so different that there was a mortal chill in his rapture. the door opened and may came in. "i'm dreadfully late--you weren't worried, were you?" she asked, laying her hand on his shoulder with one of her rare caresses. he looked up astonished. "is it late?" "after seven. i believe you've been asleep!" she laughed, and drawing out her hat pins tossed her velvet hat on the sofa. she looked paler than usual, but sparkling with an unwonted animation. "i went to see granny, and just as i was going away ellen came in from a walk; so i stayed and had a long talk with her. it was ages since we'd had a real talk...." she had dropped into her usual armchair, facing his, and was running her fingers through her rumpled hair. he fancied she expected him to speak. "a really good talk," she went on, smiling with what seemed to archer an unnatural vividness. "she was so dear--just like the old ellen. i'm afraid i haven't been fair to her lately. i've sometimes thought--" archer stood up and leaned against the mantelpiece, out of the radius of the lamp. "yes, you've thought--?" he echoed as she paused. "well, perhaps i haven't judged her fairly. she's so different--at least on the surface. she takes up such odd people--she seems to like to make herself conspicuous. i suppose it's the life she's led in that fast european society; no doubt we seem dreadfully dull to her. but i don't want to judge her unfairly." she paused again, a little breathless with the unwonted length of her speech, and sat with her lips slightly parted and a deep blush on her cheeks. archer, as he looked at her, was reminded of the glow which had suffused her face in the mission garden at st. augustine. he became aware of the same obscure effort in her, the same reaching out toward something beyond the usual range of her vision. "she hates ellen," he thought, "and she's trying to overcome the feeling, and to get me to help her to overcome it." the thought moved him, and for a moment he was on the point of breaking the silence between them, and throwing himself on her mercy. "you understand, don't you," she went on, "why the family have sometimes been annoyed? we all did what we could for her at first; but she never seemed to understand. and now this idea of going to see mrs. beaufort, of going there in granny's carriage! i'm afraid she's quite alienated the van der luydens ..." "ah," said archer with an impatient laugh. the open door had closed between them again. "it's time to dress; we're dining out, aren't we?" he asked, moving from the fire. she rose also, but lingered near the hearth. as he walked past her she moved forward impulsively, as though to detain him: their eyes met, and he saw that hers were of the same swimming blue as when he had left her to drive to jersey city. she flung her arms about his neck and pressed her cheek to his. "you haven't kissed me today," she said in a whisper; and he felt her tremble in his arms. xxxii. "at the court of the tuileries," said mr. sillerton jackson with his reminiscent smile, "such things were pretty openly tolerated." the scene was the van der luydens' black walnut dining-room in madison avenue, and the time the evening after newland archer's visit to the museum of art. mr. and mrs. van der luyden had come to town for a few days from skuytercliff, whither they had precipitately fled at the announcement of beaufort's failure. it had been represented to them that the disarray into which society had been thrown by this deplorable affair made their presence in town more necessary than ever. it was one of the occasions when, as mrs. archer put it, they "owed it to society" to show themselves at the opera, and even to open their own doors. "it will never do, my dear louisa, to let people like mrs. lemuel struthers think they can step into regina's shoes. it is just at such times that new people push in and get a footing. it was owing to the epidemic of chicken-pox in new york the winter mrs. struthers first appeared that the married men slipped away to her house while their wives were in the nursery. you and dear henry, louisa, must stand in the breach as you always have." mr. and mrs. van der luyden could not remain deaf to such a call, and reluctantly but heroically they had come to town, unmuffled the house, and sent out invitations for two dinners and an evening reception. on this particular evening they had invited sillerton jackson, mrs. archer and newland and his wife to go with them to the opera, where faust was being sung for the first time that winter. nothing was done without ceremony under the van der luyden roof, and though there were but four guests the repast had begun at seven punctually, so that the proper sequence of courses might be served without haste before the gentlemen settled down to their cigars. archer had not seen his wife since the evening before. he had left early for the office, where he had plunged into an accumulation of unimportant business. in the afternoon one of the senior partners had made an unexpected call on his time; and he had reached home so late that may had preceded him to the van der luydens', and sent back the carriage. now, across the skuytercliff carnations and the massive plate, she struck him as pale and languid; but her eyes shone, and she talked with exaggerated animation. the subject which had called forth mr. sillerton jackson's favourite allusion had been brought up (archer fancied not without intention) by their hostess. the beaufort failure, or rather the beaufort attitude since the failure, was still a fruitful theme for the drawing-room moralist; and after it had been thoroughly examined and condemned mrs. van der luyden had turned her scrupulous eyes on may archer. "is it possible, dear, that what i hear is true? i was told your grandmother mingott's carriage was seen standing at mrs. beaufort's door." it was noticeable that she no longer called the offending lady by her christian name. may's colour rose, and mrs. archer put in hastily: "if it was, i'm convinced it was there without mrs. mingott's knowledge." "ah, you think--?" mrs. van der luyden paused, sighed, and glanced at her husband. "i'm afraid," mr. van der luyden said, "that madame olenska's kind heart may have led her into the imprudence of calling on mrs. beaufort." "or her taste for peculiar people," put in mrs. archer in a dry tone, while her eyes dwelt innocently on her son's. "i'm sorry to think it of madame olenska," said mrs. van der luyden; and mrs. archer murmured: "ah, my dear--and after you'd had her twice at skuytercliff!" it was at this point that mr. jackson seized the chance to place his favourite allusion. "at the tuileries," he repeated, seeing the eyes of the company expectantly turned on him, "the standard was excessively lax in some respects; and if you'd asked where morny's money came from--! or who paid the debts of some of the court beauties ..." "i hope, dear sillerton," said mrs. archer, "you are not suggesting that we should adopt such standards?" "i never suggest," returned mr. jackson imperturbably. "but madame olenska's foreign bringing-up may make her less particular--" "ah," the two elder ladies sighed. "still, to have kept her grandmother's carriage at a defaulter's door!" mr. van der luyden protested; and archer guessed that he was remembering, and resenting, the hampers of carnations he had sent to the little house in twenty-third street. "of course i've always said that she looks at things quite differently," mrs. archer summed up. a flush rose to may's forehead. she looked across the table at her husband, and said precipitately: "i'm sure ellen meant it kindly." "imprudent people are often kind," said mrs. archer, as if the fact were scarcely an extenuation; and mrs. van der luyden murmured: "if only she had consulted some one--" "ah, that she never did!" mrs. archer rejoined. at this point mr. van der luyden glanced at his wife, who bent her head slightly in the direction of mrs. archer; and the glimmering trains of the three ladies swept out of the door while the gentlemen settled down to their cigars. mr. van der luyden supplied short ones on opera nights; but they were so good that they made his guests deplore his inexorable punctuality. archer, after the first act, had detached himself from the party and made his way to the back of the club box. from there he watched, over various chivers, mingott and rushworth shoulders, the same scene that he had looked at, two years previously, on the night of his first meeting with ellen olenska. he had half-expected her to appear again in old mrs. mingott's box, but it remained empty; and he sat motionless, his eyes fastened on it, till suddenly madame nilsson's pure soprano broke out into "m'ama, non m'ama ..." archer turned to the stage, where, in the familiar setting of giant roses and pen-wiper pansies, the same large blonde victim was succumbing to the same small brown seducer. from the stage his eyes wandered to the point of the horseshoe where may sat between two older ladies, just as, on that former evening, she had sat between mrs. lovell mingott and her newly-arrived "foreign" cousin. as on that evening, she was all in white; and archer, who had not noticed what she wore, recognised the blue-white satin and old lace of her wedding dress. it was the custom, in old new york, for brides to appear in this costly garment during the first year or two of marriage: his mother, he knew, kept hers in tissue paper in the hope that janey might some day wear it, though poor janey was reaching the age when pearl grey poplin and no bridesmaids would be thought more "appropriate." it struck archer that may, since their return from europe, had seldom worn her bridal satin, and the surprise of seeing her in it made him compare her appearance with that of the young girl he had watched with such blissful anticipations two years earlier. though may's outline was slightly heavier, as her goddesslike build had foretold, her athletic erectness of carriage, and the girlish transparency of her expression, remained unchanged: but for the slight languor that archer had lately noticed in her she would have been the exact image of the girl playing with the bouquet of lilies-of-the-valley on her betrothal evening. the fact seemed an additional appeal to his pity: such innocence was as moving as the trustful clasp of a child. then he remembered the passionate generosity latent under that incurious calm. he recalled her glance of understanding when he had urged that their engagement should be announced at the beaufort ball; he heard the voice in which she had said, in the mission garden: "i couldn't have my happiness made out of a wrong--a wrong to some one else;" and an uncontrollable longing seized him to tell her the truth, to throw himself on her generosity, and ask for the freedom he had once refused. newland archer was a quiet and self-controlled young man. conformity to the discipline of a small society had become almost his second nature. it was deeply distasteful to him to do anything melodramatic and conspicuous, anything mr. van der luyden would have deprecated and the club box condemned as bad form. but he had become suddenly unconscious of the club box, of mr. van der luyden, of all that had so long enclosed him in the warm shelter of habit. he walked along the semi-circular passage at the back of the house, and opened the door of mrs. van der luyden's box as if it had been a gate into the unknown. "m'ama!" thrilled out the triumphant marguerite; and the occupants of the box looked up in surprise at archer's entrance. he had already broken one of the rules of his world, which forbade the entering of a box during a solo. slipping between mr. van der luyden and sillerton jackson, he leaned over his wife. "i've got a beastly headache; don't tell any one, but come home, won't you?" he whispered. may gave him a glance of comprehension, and he saw her whisper to his mother, who nodded sympathetically; then she murmured an excuse to mrs. van der luyden, and rose from her seat just as marguerite fell into faust's arms. archer, while he helped her on with her opera cloak, noticed the exchange of a significant smile between the older ladies. as they drove away may laid her hand shyly on his. "i'm so sorry you don't feel well. i'm afraid they've been overworking you again at the office." "no--it's not that: do you mind if i open the window?" he returned confusedly, letting down the pane on his side. he sat staring out into the street, feeling his wife beside him as a silent watchful interrogation, and keeping his eyes steadily fixed on the passing houses. at their door she caught her skirt in the step of the carriage, and fell against him. "did you hurt yourself?" he asked, steadying her with his arm. "no; but my poor dress--see how i've torn it!" she exclaimed. she bent to gather up a mud-stained breadth, and followed him up the steps into the hall. the servants had not expected them so early, and there was only a glimmer of gas on the upper landing. archer mounted the stairs, turned up the light, and put a match to the brackets on each side of the library mantelpiece. the curtains were drawn, and the warm friendly aspect of the room smote him like that of a familiar face met during an unavowable errand. he noticed that his wife was very pale, and asked if he should get her some brandy. "oh, no," she exclaimed with a momentary flush, as she took off her cloak. "but hadn't you better go to bed at once?" she added, as he opened a silver box on the table and took out a cigarette. archer threw down the cigarette and walked to his usual place by the fire. "no; my head is not as bad as that." he paused. "and there's something i want to say; something important--that i must tell you at once." she had dropped into an armchair, and raised her head as he spoke. "yes, dear?" she rejoined, so gently that he wondered at the lack of wonder with which she received this preamble. "may--" he began, standing a few feet from her chair, and looking over at her as if the slight distance between them were an unbridgeable abyss. the sound of his voice echoed uncannily through the homelike hush, and he repeated: "there is something i've got to tell you ... about myself ..." she sat silent, without a movement or a tremor of her lashes. she was still extremely pale, but her face had a curious tranquillity of expression that seemed drawn from some secret inner source. archer checked the conventional phrases of self-accusal that were crowding to his lips. he was determined to put the case baldly, without vain recrimination or excuse. "madame olenska--" he said; but at the name his wife raised her hand as if to silence him. as she did so the gaslight struck on the gold of her wedding-ring. "oh, why should we talk about ellen tonight?" she asked, with a slight pout of impatience. "because i ought to have spoken before." her face remained calm. "is it really worth while, dear? i know i've been unfair to her at times--perhaps we all have. you've understood her, no doubt, better than we did: you've always been kind to her. but what does it matter, now it's all over?" archer looked at her blankly. could it be possible that the sense of unreality in which he felt himself imprisoned had communicated itself to his wife? "all over--what do you mean?" he asked in an indistinct stammer. may still looked at him with transparent eyes. "why--since she's going back to europe so soon; since granny approves and understands, and has arranged to make her independent of her husband--" she broke off, and archer, grasping the corner of the mantelpiece in one convulsed hand, and steadying himself against it, made a vain effort to extend the same control to his reeling thoughts. "i supposed," he heard his wife's even voice go on, "that you had been kept at the office this evening about the business arrangements. it was settled this morning, i believe." she lowered her eyes under his unseeing stare, and another fugitive flush passed over her face. he understood that his own eyes must be unbearable, and turning away, rested his elbows on the mantel-shelf and covered his face. something drummed and clanged furiously in his ears; he could not tell if it were the blood in his veins, or the tick of the clock on the mantel. may sat without moving or speaking while the clock slowly measured out five minutes. a lump of coal fell forward in the grate, and hearing her rise to push it back, archer at length turned and faced her. "it's impossible," he exclaimed. "impossible--?" "how do you know--what you've just told me?" "i saw ellen yesterday--i told you i'd seen her at granny's." "it wasn't then that she told you?" "no; i had a note from her this afternoon.--do you want to see it?" he could not find his voice, and she went out of the room, and came back almost immediately. "i thought you knew," she said simply. she laid a sheet of paper on the table, and archer put out his hand and took it up. the letter contained only a few lines. "may dear, i have at last made granny understand that my visit to her could be no more than a visit; and she has been as kind and generous as ever. she sees now that if i return to europe i must live by myself, or rather with poor aunt medora, who is coming with me. i am hurrying back to washington to pack up, and we sail next week. you must be very good to granny when i'm gone--as good as you've always been to me. ellen. "if any of my friends wish to urge me to change my mind, please tell them it would be utterly useless." archer read the letter over two or three times; then he flung it down and burst out laughing. the sound of his laugh startled him. it recalled janey's midnight fright when she had caught him rocking with incomprehensible mirth over may's telegram announcing that the date of their marriage had been advanced. "why did she write this?" he asked, checking his laugh with a supreme effort. may met the question with her unshaken candour. "i suppose because we talked things over yesterday--" "what things?" "i told her i was afraid i hadn't been fair to her--hadn't always understood how hard it must have been for her here, alone among so many people who were relations and yet strangers; who felt the right to criticise, and yet didn't always know the circumstances." she paused. "i knew you'd been the one friend she could always count on; and i wanted her to know that you and i were the same--in all our feelings." she hesitated, as if waiting for him to speak, and then added slowly: "she understood my wishing to tell her this. i think she understands everything." she went up to archer, and taking one of his cold hands pressed it quickly against her cheek. "my head aches too; good-night, dear," she said, and turned to the door, her torn and muddy wedding-dress dragging after her across the room. xxxiii. it was, as mrs. archer smilingly said to mrs. welland, a great event for a young couple to give their first big dinner. the newland archers, since they had set up their household, had received a good deal of company in an informal way. archer was fond of having three or four friends to dine, and may welcomed them with the beaming readiness of which her mother had set her the example in conjugal affairs. her husband questioned whether, if left to herself, she would ever have asked any one to the house; but he had long given up trying to disengage her real self from the shape into which tradition and training had moulded her. it was expected that well-off young couples in new york should do a good deal of informal entertaining, and a welland married to an archer was doubly pledged to the tradition. but a big dinner, with a hired chef and two borrowed footmen, with roman punch, roses from henderson's, and menus on gilt-edged cards, was a different affair, and not to be lightly undertaken. as mrs. archer remarked, the roman punch made all the difference; not in itself but by its manifold implications--since it signified either canvas-backs or terrapin, two soups, a hot and a cold sweet, full decolletage with short sleeves, and guests of a proportionate importance. it was always an interesting occasion when a young pair launched their first invitations in the third person, and their summons was seldom refused even by the seasoned and sought-after. still, it was admittedly a triumph that the van der luydens, at may's request, should have stayed over in order to be present at her farewell dinner for the countess olenska. the two mothers-in-law sat in may's drawing-room on the afternoon of the great day, mrs. archer writing out the menus on tiffany's thickest gilt-edged bristol, while mrs. welland superintended the placing of the palms and standard lamps. archer, arriving late from his office, found them still there. mrs. archer had turned her attention to the name-cards for the table, and mrs. welland was considering the effect of bringing forward the large gilt sofa, so that another "corner" might be created between the piano and the window. may, they told him, was in the dining-room inspecting the mound of jacqueminot roses and maidenhair in the centre of the long table, and the placing of the maillard bonbons in openwork silver baskets between the candelabra. on the piano stood a large basket of orchids which mr. van der luyden had had sent from skuytercliff. everything was, in short, as it should be on the approach of so considerable an event. mrs. archer ran thoughtfully over the list, checking off each name with her sharp gold pen. "henry van der luyden--louisa--the lovell mingotts--the reggie chiverses--lawrence lefferts and gertrude--(yes, i suppose may was right to have them)--the selfridge merrys, sillerton jackson, van newland and his wife. (how time passes! it seems only yesterday that he was your best man, newland)--and countess olenska--yes, i think that's all...." mrs. welland surveyed her son-in-law affectionately. "no one can say, newland, that you and may are not giving ellen a handsome send-off." "ah, well," said mrs. archer, "i understand may's wanting her cousin to tell people abroad that we're not quite barbarians." "i'm sure ellen will appreciate it. she was to arrive this morning, i believe. it will make a most charming last impression. the evening before sailing is usually so dreary," mrs. welland cheerfully continued. archer turned toward the door, and his mother-in-law called to him: "do go in and have a peep at the table. and don't let may tire herself too much." but he affected not to hear, and sprang up the stairs to his library. the room looked at him like an alien countenance composed into a polite grimace; and he perceived that it had been ruthlessly "tidied," and prepared, by a judicious distribution of ash-trays and cedar-wood boxes, for the gentlemen to smoke in. "ah, well," he thought, "it's not for long--" and he went on to his dressing-room. ten days had passed since madame olenska's departure from new york. during those ten days archer had had no sign from her but that conveyed by the return of a key wrapped in tissue paper, and sent to his office in a sealed envelope addressed in her hand. this retort to his last appeal might have been interpreted as a classic move in a familiar game; but the young man chose to give it a different meaning. she was still fighting against her fate; but she was going to europe, and she was not returning to her husband. nothing, therefore, was to prevent his following her; and once he had taken the irrevocable step, and had proved to her that it was irrevocable, he believed she would not send him away. this confidence in the future had steadied him to play his part in the present. it had kept him from writing to her, or betraying, by any sign or act, his misery and mortification. it seemed to him that in the deadly silent game between them the trumps were still in his hands; and he waited. there had been, nevertheless, moments sufficiently difficult to pass; as when mr. letterblair, the day after madame olenska's departure, had sent for him to go over the details of the trust which mrs. manson mingott wished to create for her granddaughter. for a couple of hours archer had examined the terms of the deed with his senior, all the while obscurely feeling that if he had been consulted it was for some reason other than the obvious one of his cousinship; and that the close of the conference would reveal it. "well, the lady can't deny that it's a handsome arrangement," mr. letterblair had summed up, after mumbling over a summary of the settlement. "in fact i'm bound to say she's been treated pretty handsomely all round." "all round?" archer echoed with a touch of derision. "do you refer to her husband's proposal to give her back her own money?" mr. letterblair's bushy eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch. "my dear sir, the law's the law; and your wife's cousin was married under the french law. it's to be presumed she knew what that meant." "even if she did, what happened subsequently--." but archer paused. mr. letterblair had laid his pen-handle against his big corrugated nose, and was looking down it with the expression assumed by virtuous elderly gentlemen when they wish their youngers to understand that virtue is not synonymous with ignorance. "my dear sir, i've no wish to extenuate the count's transgressions; but--but on the other side ... i wouldn't put my hand in the fire ... well, that there hadn't been tit for tat ... with the young champion...." mr. letterblair unlocked a drawer and pushed a folded paper toward archer. "this report, the result of discreet enquiries ..." and then, as archer made no effort to glance at the paper or to repudiate the suggestion, the lawyer somewhat flatly continued: "i don't say it's conclusive, you observe; far from it. but straws show ... and on the whole it's eminently satisfactory for all parties that this dignified solution has been reached." "oh, eminently," archer assented, pushing back the paper. a day or two later, on responding to a summons from mrs. manson mingott, his soul had been more deeply tried. he had found the old lady depressed and querulous. "you know she's deserted me?" she began at once; and without waiting for his reply: "oh, don't ask me why! she gave so many reasons that i've forgotten them all. my private belief is that she couldn't face the boredom. at any rate that's what augusta and my daughters-in-law think. and i don't know that i altogether blame her. olenski's a finished scoundrel; but life with him must have been a good deal gayer than it is in fifth avenue. not that the family would admit that: they think fifth avenue is heaven with the rue de la paix thrown in. and poor ellen, of course, has no idea of going back to her husband. she held out as firmly as ever against that. so she's to settle down in paris with that fool medora.... well, paris is paris; and you can keep a carriage there on next to nothing. but she was as gay as a bird, and i shall miss her." two tears, the parched tears of the old, rolled down her puffy cheeks and vanished in the abysses of her bosom. "all i ask is," she concluded, "that they shouldn't bother me any more. i must really be allowed to digest my gruel...." and she twinkled a little wistfully at archer. it was that evening, on his return home, that may announced her intention of giving a farewell dinner to her cousin. madame olenska's name had not been pronounced between them since the night of her flight to washington; and archer looked at his wife with surprise. "a dinner--why?" he interrogated. her colour rose. "but you like ellen--i thought you'd be pleased." "it's awfully nice--your putting it in that way. but i really don't see--" "i mean to do it, newland," she said, quietly rising and going to her desk. "here are the invitations all written. mother helped me--she agrees that we ought to." she paused, embarrassed and yet smiling, and archer suddenly saw before him the embodied image of the family. "oh, all right," he said, staring with unseeing eyes at the list of guests that she had put in his hand. when he entered the drawing-room before dinner may was stooping over the fire and trying to coax the logs to burn in their unaccustomed setting of immaculate tiles. the tall lamps were all lit, and mr. van der luyden's orchids had been conspicuously disposed in various receptacles of modern porcelain and knobby silver. mrs. newland archer's drawing-room was generally thought a great success. a gilt bamboo jardiniere, in which the primulas and cinerarias were punctually renewed, blocked the access to the bay window (where the old-fashioned would have preferred a bronze reduction of the venus of milo); the sofas and arm-chairs of pale brocade were cleverly grouped about little plush tables densely covered with silver toys, porcelain animals and efflorescent photograph frames; and tall rosy-shaded lamps shot up like tropical flowers among the palms. "i don't think ellen has ever seen this room lighted up," said may, rising flushed from her struggle, and sending about her a glance of pardonable pride. the brass tongs which she had propped against the side of the chimney fell with a crash that drowned her husband's answer; and before he could restore them mr. and mrs. van der luyden were announced. the other guests quickly followed, for it was known that the van der luydens liked to dine punctually. the room was nearly full, and archer was engaged in showing to mrs. selfridge merry a small highly-varnished verbeckhoven "study of sheep," which mr. welland had given may for christmas, when he found madame olenska at his side. she was excessively pale, and her pallor made her dark hair seem denser and heavier than ever. perhaps that, or the fact that she had wound several rows of amber beads about her neck, reminded him suddenly of the little ellen mingott he had danced with at children's parties, when medora manson had first brought her to new york. the amber beads were trying to her complexion, or her dress was perhaps unbecoming: her face looked lustreless and almost ugly, and he had never loved it as he did at that minute. their hands met, and he thought he heard her say: "yes, we're sailing tomorrow in the russia--"; then there was an unmeaning noise of opening doors, and after an interval may's voice: "newland! dinner's been announced. won't you please take ellen in?" madame olenska put her hand on his arm, and he noticed that the hand was ungloved, and remembered how he had kept his eyes fixed on it the evening that he had sat with her in the little twenty-third street drawing-room. all the beauty that had forsaken her face seemed to have taken refuge in the long pale fingers and faintly dimpled knuckles on his sleeve, and he said to himself: "if it were only to see her hand again i should have to follow her--." it was only at an entertainment ostensibly offered to a "foreign visitor" that mrs. van der luyden could suffer the diminution of being placed on her host's left. the fact of madame olenska's "foreignness" could hardly have been more adroitly emphasised than by this farewell tribute; and mrs. van der luyden accepted her displacement with an affability which left no doubt as to her approval. there were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old new york code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe. there was nothing on earth that the wellands and mingotts would not have done to proclaim their unalterable affection for the countess olenska now that her passage for europe was engaged; and archer, at the head of his table, sat marvelling at the silent untiring activity with which her popularity had been retrieved, grievances against her silenced, her past countenanced, and her present irradiated by the family approval. mrs. van der luyden shone on her with the dim benevolence which was her nearest approach to cordiality, and mr. van der luyden, from his seat at may's right, cast down the table glances plainly intended to justify all the carnations he had sent from skuytercliff. archer, who seemed to be assisting at the scene in a state of odd imponderability, as if he floated somewhere between chandelier and ceiling, wondered at nothing so much as his own share in the proceedings. as his glance travelled from one placid well-fed face to another he saw all the harmless-looking people engaged upon may's canvas-backs as a band of dumb conspirators, and himself and the pale woman on his right as the centre of their conspiracy. and then it came over him, in a vast flash made up of many broken gleams, that to all of them he and madame olenska were lovers, lovers in the extreme sense peculiar to "foreign" vocabularies. he guessed himself to have been, for months, the centre of countless silently observing eyes and patiently listening ears; he understood that, by means as yet unknown to him, the separation between himself and the partner of his guilt had been achieved, and that now the whole tribe had rallied about his wife on the tacit assumption that nobody knew anything, or had ever imagined anything, and that the occasion of the entertainment was simply may archer's natural desire to take an affectionate leave of her friend and cousin. it was the old new york way of taking life "without effusion of blood": the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes," except the behaviour of those who gave rise to them. as these thoughts succeeded each other in his mind archer felt like a prisoner in the centre of an armed camp. he looked about the table, and guessed at the inexorableness of his captors from the tone in which, over the asparagus from florida, they were dealing with beaufort and his wife. "it's to show me," he thought, "what would happen to me--" and a deathly sense of the superiority of implication and analogy over direct action, and of silence over rash words, closed in on him like the doors of the family vault. he laughed, and met mrs. van der luyden's startled eyes. "you think it laughable?" she said with a pinched smile. "of course poor regina's idea of remaining in new york has its ridiculous side, i suppose;" and archer muttered: "of course." at this point, he became conscious that madame olenska's other neighbour had been engaged for some time with the lady on his right. at the same moment he saw that may, serenely enthroned between mr. van der luyden and mr. selfridge merry, had cast a quick glance down the table. it was evident that the host and the lady on his right could not sit through the whole meal in silence. he turned to madame olenska, and her pale smile met him. "oh, do let's see it through," it seemed to say. "did you find the journey tiring?" he asked in a voice that surprised him by its naturalness; and she answered that, on the contrary, she had seldom travelled with fewer discomforts. "except, you know, the dreadful heat in the train," she added; and he remarked that she would not suffer from that particular hardship in the country she was going to. "i never," he declared with intensity, "was more nearly frozen than once, in april, in the train between calais and paris." she said she did not wonder, but remarked that, after all, one could always carry an extra rug, and that every form of travel had its hardships; to which he abruptly returned that he thought them all of no account compared with the blessedness of getting away. she changed colour, and he added, his voice suddenly rising in pitch: "i mean to do a lot of travelling myself before long." a tremor crossed her face, and leaning over to reggie chivers, he cried out: "i say, reggie, what do you say to a trip round the world: now, next month, i mean? i'm game if you are--" at which mrs. reggie piped up that she could not think of letting reggie go till after the martha washington ball she was getting up for the blind asylum in easter week; and her husband placidly observed that by that time he would have to be practising for the international polo match. but mr. selfridge merry had caught the phrase "round the world," and having once circled the globe in his steam-yacht, he seized the opportunity to send down the table several striking items concerning the shallowness of the mediterranean ports. though, after all, he added, it didn't matter; for when you'd seen athens and smyrna and constantinople, what else was there? and mrs. merry said she could never be too grateful to dr. bencomb for having made them promise not to go to naples on account of the fever. "but you must have three weeks to do india properly," her husband conceded, anxious to have it understood that he was no frivolous globe-trotter. and at this point the ladies went up to the drawing-room. in the library, in spite of weightier presences, lawrence lefferts predominated. the talk, as usual, had veered around to the beauforts, and even mr. van der luyden and mr. selfridge merry, installed in the honorary arm-chairs tacitly reserved for them, paused to listen to the younger man's philippic. never had lefferts so abounded in the sentiments that adorn christian manhood and exalt the sanctity of the home. indignation lent him a scathing eloquence, and it was clear that if others had followed his example, and acted as he talked, society would never have been weak enough to receive a foreign upstart like beaufort--no, sir, not even if he'd married a van der luyden or a lanning instead of a dallas. and what chance would there have been, lefferts wrathfully questioned, of his marrying into such a family as the dallases, if he had not already wormed his way into certain houses, as people like mrs. lemuel struthers had managed to worm theirs in his wake? if society chose to open its doors to vulgar women the harm was not great, though the gain was doubtful; but once it got in the way of tolerating men of obscure origin and tainted wealth the end was total disintegration--and at no distant date. "if things go on at this pace," lefferts thundered, looking like a young prophet dressed by poole, and who had not yet been stoned, "we shall see our children fighting for invitations to swindlers' houses, and marrying beaufort's bastards." "oh, i say--draw it mild!" reggie chivers and young newland protested, while mr. selfridge merry looked genuinely alarmed, and an expression of pain and disgust settled on mr. van der luyden's sensitive face. "has he got any?" cried mr. sillerton jackson, pricking up his ears; and while lefferts tried to turn the question with a laugh, the old gentleman twittered into archer's ear: "queer, those fellows who are always wanting to set things right. the people who have the worst cooks are always telling you they're poisoned when they dine out. but i hear there are pressing reasons for our friend lawrence's diatribe:--typewriter this time, i understand...." the talk swept past archer like some senseless river running and running because it did not know enough to stop. he saw, on the faces about him, expressions of interest, amusement and even mirth. he listened to the younger men's laughter, and to the praise of the archer madeira, which mr. van der luyden and mr. merry were thoughtfully celebrating. through it all he was dimly aware of a general attitude of friendliness toward himself, as if the guard of the prisoner he felt himself to be were trying to soften his captivity; and the perception increased his passionate determination to be free. in the drawing-room, where they presently joined the ladies, he met may's triumphant eyes, and read in them the conviction that everything had "gone off" beautifully. she rose from madame olenska's side, and immediately mrs. van der luyden beckoned the latter to a seat on the gilt sofa where she throned. mrs. selfridge merry bore across the room to join them, and it became clear to archer that here also a conspiracy of rehabilitation and obliteration was going on. the silent organisation which held his little world together was determined to put itself on record as never for a moment having questioned the propriety of madame olenska's conduct, or the completeness of archer's domestic felicity. all these amiable and inexorable persons were resolutely engaged in pretending to each other that they had never heard of, suspected, or even conceived possible, the least hint to the contrary; and from this tissue of elaborate mutual dissimulation archer once more disengaged the fact that new york believed him to be madame olenska's lover. he caught the glitter of victory in his wife's eyes, and for the first time understood that she shared the belief. the discovery roused a laughter of inner devils that reverberated through all his efforts to discuss the martha washington ball with mrs. reggie chivers and little mrs. newland; and so the evening swept on, running and running like a senseless river that did not know how to stop. at length he saw that madame olenska had risen and was saying good-bye. he understood that in a moment she would be gone, and tried to remember what he had said to her at dinner; but he could not recall a single word they had exchanged. she went up to may, the rest of the company making a circle about her as she advanced. the two young women clasped hands; then may bent forward and kissed her cousin. "certainly our hostess is much the handsomer of the two," archer heard reggie chivers say in an undertone to young mrs. newland; and he remembered beaufort's coarse sneer at may's ineffectual beauty. a moment later he was in the hall, putting madame olenska's cloak about her shoulders. through all his confusion of mind he had held fast to the resolve to say nothing that might startle or disturb her. convinced that no power could now turn him from his purpose he had found strength to let events shape themselves as they would. but as he followed madame olenska into the hall he thought with a sudden hunger of being for a moment alone with her at the door of her carriage. "is your carriage here?" he asked; and at that moment mrs. van der luyden, who was being majestically inserted into her sables, said gently: "we are driving dear ellen home." archer's heart gave a jerk, and madame olenska, clasping her cloak and fan with one hand, held out the other to him. "good-bye," she said. "good-bye--but i shall see you soon in paris," he answered aloud--it seemed to him that he had shouted it. "oh," she murmured, "if you and may could come--!" mr. van der luyden advanced to give her his arm, and archer turned to mrs. van der luyden. for a moment, in the billowy darkness inside the big landau, he caught the dim oval of a face, eyes shining steadily--and she was gone. as he went up the steps he crossed lawrence lefferts coming down with his wife. lefferts caught his host by the sleeve, drawing back to let gertrude pass. "i say, old chap: do you mind just letting it be understood that i'm dining with you at the club tomorrow night? thanks so much, you old brick! good-night." "it did go off beautifully, didn't it?" may questioned from the threshold of the library. archer roused himself with a start. as soon as the last carriage had driven away, he had come up to the library and shut himself in, with the hope that his wife, who still lingered below, would go straight to her room. but there she stood, pale and drawn, yet radiating the factitious energy of one who has passed beyond fatigue. "may i come and talk it over?" she asked. "of course, if you like. but you must be awfully sleepy--" "no, i'm not sleepy. i should like to sit with you a little." "very well," he said, pushing her chair near the fire. she sat down and he resumed his seat; but neither spoke for a long time. at length archer began abruptly: "since you're not tired, and want to talk, there's something i must tell you. i tried to the other night--." she looked at him quickly. "yes, dear. something about yourself?" "about myself. you say you're not tired: well, i am. horribly tired ..." in an instant she was all tender anxiety. "oh, i've seen it coming on, newland! you've been so wickedly overworked--" "perhaps it's that. anyhow, i want to make a break--" "a break? to give up the law?" "to go away, at any rate--at once. on a long trip, ever so far off--away from everything--" he paused, conscious that he had failed in his attempt to speak with the indifference of a man who longs for a change, and is yet too weary to welcome it. do what he would, the chord of eagerness vibrated. "away from everything--" he repeated. "ever so far? where, for instance?" she asked. "oh, i don't know. india--or japan." she stood up, and as he sat with bent head, his chin propped on his hands, he felt her warmly and fragrantly hovering over him. "as far as that? but i'm afraid you can't, dear ..." she said in an unsteady voice. "not unless you'll take me with you." and then, as he was silent, she went on, in tones so clear and evenly-pitched that each separate syllable tapped like a little hammer on his brain: "that is, if the doctors will let me go ... but i'm afraid they won't. for you see, newland, i've been sure since this morning of something i've been so longing and hoping for--" he looked up at her with a sick stare, and she sank down, all dew and roses, and hid her face against his knee. "oh, my dear," he said, holding her to him while his cold hand stroked her hair. there was a long pause, which the inner devils filled with strident laughter; then may freed herself from his arms and stood up. "you didn't guess--?" "yes--i; no. that is, of course i hoped--" they looked at each other for an instant and again fell silent; then, turning his eyes from hers, he asked abruptly: "have you told any one else?" "only mamma and your mother." she paused, and then added hurriedly, the blood flushing up to her forehead: "that is--and ellen. you know i told you we'd had a long talk one afternoon--and how dear she was to me." "ah--" said archer, his heart stopping. he felt that his wife was watching him intently. "did you mind my telling her first, newland?" "mind? why should i?" he made a last effort to collect himself. "but that was a fortnight ago, wasn't it? i thought you said you weren't sure till today." her colour burned deeper, but she held his gaze. "no; i wasn't sure then--but i told her i was. and you see i was right!" she exclaimed, her blue eyes wet with victory. xxxiv. newland archer sat at the writing-table in his library in east thirty-ninth street. he had just got back from a big official reception for the inauguration of the new galleries at the metropolitan museum, and the spectacle of those great spaces crowded with the spoils of the ages, where the throng of fashion circulated through a series of scientifically catalogued treasures, had suddenly pressed on a rusted spring of memory. "why, this used to be one of the old cesnola rooms," he heard some one say; and instantly everything about him vanished, and he was sitting alone on a hard leather divan against a radiator, while a slight figure in a long sealskin cloak moved away down the meagrely-fitted vista of the old museum. the vision had roused a host of other associations, and he sat looking with new eyes at the library which, for over thirty years, had been the scene of his solitary musings and of all the family confabulations. it was the room in which most of the real things of his life had happened. there his wife, nearly twenty-six years ago, had broken to him, with a blushing circumlocution that would have caused the young women of the new generation to smile, the news that she was to have a child; and there their eldest boy, dallas, too delicate to be taken to church in midwinter, had been christened by their old friend the bishop of new york, the ample magnificent irreplaceable bishop, so long the pride and ornament of his diocese. there dallas had first staggered across the floor shouting "dad," while may and the nurse laughed behind the door; there their second child, mary (who was so like her mother), had announced her engagement to the dullest and most reliable of reggie chivers's many sons; and there archer had kissed her through her wedding veil before they went down to the motor which was to carry them to grace church--for in a world where all else had reeled on its foundations the "grace church wedding" remained an unchanged institution. it was in the library that he and may had always discussed the future of the children: the studies of dallas and his young brother bill, mary's incurable indifference to "accomplishments," and passion for sport and philanthropy, and the vague leanings toward "art" which had finally landed the restless and curious dallas in the office of a rising new york architect. the young men nowadays were emancipating themselves from the law and business and taking up all sorts of new things. if they were not absorbed in state politics or municipal reform, the chances were that they were going in for central american archaeology, for architecture or landscape-engineering; taking a keen and learned interest in the prerevolutionary buildings of their own country, studying and adapting georgian types, and protesting at the meaningless use of the word "colonial." nobody nowadays had "colonial" houses except the millionaire grocers of the suburbs. but above all--sometimes archer put it above all--it was in that library that the governor of new york, coming down from albany one evening to dine and spend the night, had turned to his host, and said, banging his clenched fist on the table and gnashing his eye-glasses: "hang the professional politician! you're the kind of man the country wants, archer. if the stable's ever to be cleaned out, men like you have got to lend a hand in the cleaning." "men like you--" how archer had glowed at the phrase! how eagerly he had risen up at the call! it was an echo of ned winsett's old appeal to roll his sleeves up and get down into the muck; but spoken by a man who set the example of the gesture, and whose summons to follow him was irresistible. archer, as he looked back, was not sure that men like himself were what his country needed, at least in the active service to which theodore roosevelt had pointed; in fact, there was reason to think it did not, for after a year in the state assembly he had not been re-elected, and had dropped back thankfully into obscure if useful municipal work, and from that again to the writing of occasional articles in one of the reforming weeklies that were trying to shake the country out of its apathy. it was little enough to look back on; but when he remembered to what the young men of his generation and his set had looked forward--the narrow groove of money-making, sport and society to which their vision had been limited--even his small contribution to the new state of things seemed to count, as each brick counts in a well-built wall. he had done little in public life; he would always be by nature a contemplative and a dilettante; but he had had high things to contemplate, great things to delight in; and one great man's friendship to be his strength and pride. he had been, in short, what people were beginning to call "a good citizen." in new york, for many years past, every new movement, philanthropic, municipal or artistic, had taken account of his opinion and wanted his name. people said: "ask archer" when there was a question of starting the first school for crippled children, reorganising the museum of art, founding the grolier club, inaugurating the new library, or getting up a new society of chamber music. his days were full, and they were filled decently. he supposed it was all a man ought to ask. something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. but he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery. there were a hundred million tickets in his lottery, and there was only one prize; the chances had been too decidedly against him. when he thought of ellen olenska it was abstractly, serenely, as one might think of some imaginary beloved in a book or a picture: she had become the composite vision of all that he had missed. that vision, faint and tenuous as it was, had kept him from thinking of other women. he had been what was called a faithful husband; and when may had suddenly died--carried off by the infectious pneumonia through which she had nursed their youngest child--he had honestly mourned her. their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of a duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites. looking about him, he honoured his own past, and mourned for it. after all, there was good in the old ways. his eyes, making the round of the room--done over by dallas with english mezzotints, chippendale cabinets, bits of chosen blue-and-white and pleasantly shaded electric lamps--came back to the old eastlake writing-table that he had never been willing to banish, and to his first photograph of may, which still kept its place beside his inkstand. there she was, tall, round-bosomed and willowy, in her starched muslin and flapping leghorn, as he had seen her under the orange-trees in the mission garden. and as he had seen her that day, so she had remained; never quite at the same height, yet never far below it: generous, faithful, unwearied; but so lacking in imagination, so incapable of growth, that the world of her youth had fallen into pieces and rebuilt itself without her ever being conscious of the change. this hard bright blindness had kept her immediate horizon apparently unaltered. her incapacity to recognise change made her children conceal their views from her as archer concealed his; there had been, from the first, a joint pretence of sameness, a kind of innocent family hypocrisy, in which father and children had unconsciously collaborated. and she had died thinking the world a good place, full of loving and harmonious households like her own, and resigned to leave it because she was convinced that, whatever happened, newland would continue to inculcate in dallas the same principles and prejudices which had shaped his parents' lives, and that dallas in turn (when newland followed her) would transmit the sacred trust to little bill. and of mary she was sure as of her own self. so, having snatched little bill from the grave, and given her life in the effort, she went contentedly to her place in the archer vault in st. mark's, where mrs. archer already lay safe from the terrifying "trend" which her daughter-in-law had never even become aware of. opposite may's portrait stood one of her daughter. mary chivers was as tall and fair as her mother, but large-waisted, flat-chested and slightly slouching, as the altered fashion required. mary chivers's mighty feats of athleticism could not have been performed with the twenty-inch waist that may archer's azure sash so easily spanned. and the difference seemed symbolic; the mother's life had been as closely girt as her figure. mary, who was no less conventional, and no more intelligent, yet led a larger life and held more tolerant views. there was good in the new order too. the telephone clicked, and archer, turning from the photographs, unhooked the transmitter at his elbow. how far they were from the days when the legs of the brass-buttoned messenger boy had been new york's only means of quick communication! "chicago wants you." ah--it must be a long-distance from dallas, who had been sent to chicago by his firm to talk over the plan of the lakeside palace they were to build for a young millionaire with ideas. the firm always sent dallas on such errands. "hallo, dad--yes: dallas. i say--how do you feel about sailing on wednesday? mauretania: yes, next wednesday as ever is. our client wants me to look at some italian gardens before we settle anything, and has asked me to nip over on the next boat. i've got to be back on the first of june--" the voice broke into a joyful conscious laugh--"so we must look alive. i say, dad, i want your help: do come." dallas seemed to be speaking in the room: the voice was as near by and natural as if he had been lounging in his favourite arm-chair by the fire. the fact would not ordinarily have surprised archer, for long-distance telephoning had become as much a matter of course as electric lighting and five-day atlantic voyages. but the laugh did startle him; it still seemed wonderful that across all those miles and miles of country--forest, river, mountain, prairie, roaring cities and busy indifferent millions--dallas's laugh should be able to say: "of course, whatever happens, i must get back on the first, because fanny beaufort and i are to be married on the fifth." the voice began again: "think it over? no, sir: not a minute. you've got to say yes now. why not, i'd like to know? if you can allege a single reason--no; i knew it. then it's a go, eh? because i count on you to ring up the cunard office first thing tomorrow; and you'd better book a return on a boat from marseilles. i say, dad; it'll be our last time together, in this kind of way--. oh, good! i knew you would." chicago rang off, and archer rose and began to pace up and down the room. it would be their last time together in this kind of way: the boy was right. they would have lots of other "times" after dallas's marriage, his father was sure; for the two were born comrades, and fanny beaufort, whatever one might think of her, did not seem likely to interfere with their intimacy. on the contrary, from what he had seen of her, he thought she would be naturally included in it. still, change was change, and differences were differences, and much as he felt himself drawn toward his future daughter-in-law, it was tempting to seize this last chance of being alone with his boy. there was no reason why he should not seize it, except the profound one that he had lost the habit of travel. may had disliked to move except for valid reasons, such as taking the children to the sea or in the mountains: she could imagine no other motive for leaving the house in thirty-ninth street or their comfortable quarters at the wellands' in newport. after dallas had taken his degree she had thought it her duty to travel for six months; and the whole family had made the old-fashioned tour through england, switzerland and italy. their time being limited (no one knew why) they had omitted france. archer remembered dallas's wrath at being asked to contemplate mont blanc instead of rheims and chartres. but mary and bill wanted mountain-climbing, and had already yawned their way in dallas's wake through the english cathedrals; and may, always fair to her children, had insisted on holding the balance evenly between their athletic and artistic proclivities. she had indeed proposed that her husband should go to paris for a fortnight, and join them on the italian lakes after they had "done" switzerland; but archer had declined. "we'll stick together," he said; and may's face had brightened at his setting such a good example to dallas. since her death, nearly two years before, there had been no reason for his continuing in the same routine. his children had urged him to travel: mary chivers had felt sure it would do him good to go abroad and "see the galleries." the very mysteriousness of such a cure made her the more confident of its efficacy. but archer had found himself held fast by habit, by memories, by a sudden startled shrinking from new things. now, as he reviewed his past, he saw into what a deep rut he had sunk. the worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else. at least that was the view that the men of his generation had taken. the trenchant divisions between right and wrong, honest and dishonest, respectable and the reverse, had left so little scope for the unforeseen. there are moments when a man's imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level, and surveys the long windings of destiny. archer hung there and wondered.... what was left of the little world he had grown up in, and whose standards had bent and bound him? he remembered a sneering prophecy of poor lawrence lefferts's, uttered years ago in that very room: "if things go on at this rate, our children will be marrying beaufort's bastards." it was just what archer's eldest son, the pride of his life, was doing; and nobody wondered or reproved. even the boy's aunt janey, who still looked so exactly as she used to in her elderly youth, had taken her mother's emeralds and seed-pearls out of their pink cotton-wool, and carried them with her own twitching hands to the future bride; and fanny beaufort, instead of looking disappointed at not receiving a "set" from a paris jeweller, had exclaimed at their old-fashioned beauty, and declared that when she wore them she should feel like an isabey miniature. fanny beaufort, who had appeared in new york at eighteen, after the death of her parents, had won its heart much as madame olenska had won it thirty years earlier; only instead of being distrustful and afraid of her, society took her joyfully for granted. she was pretty, amusing and accomplished: what more did any one want? nobody was narrow-minded enough to rake up against her the half-forgotten facts of her father's past and her own origin. only the older people remembered so obscure an incident in the business life of new york as beaufort's failure, or the fact that after his wife's death he had been quietly married to the notorious fanny ring, and had left the country with his new wife, and a little girl who inherited her beauty. he was subsequently heard of in constantinople, then in russia; and a dozen years later american travellers were handsomely entertained by him in buenos ayres, where he represented a large insurance agency. he and his wife died there in the odour of prosperity; and one day their orphaned daughter had appeared in new york in charge of may archer's sister-in-law, mrs. jack welland, whose husband had been appointed the girl's guardian. the fact threw her into almost cousinly relationship with newland archer's children, and nobody was surprised when dallas's engagement was announced. nothing could more dearly give the measure of the distance that the world had travelled. people nowadays were too busy--busy with reforms and "movements," with fads and fetishes and frivolities--to bother much about their neighbours. and of what account was anybody's past, in the huge kaleidoscope where all the social atoms spun around on the same plane? newland archer, looking out of his hotel window at the stately gaiety of the paris streets, felt his heart beating with the confusion and eagerness of youth. it was long since it had thus plunged and reared under his widening waistcoat, leaving him, the next minute, with an empty breast and hot temples. he wondered if it was thus that his son's conducted itself in the presence of miss fanny beaufort--and decided that it was not. "it functions as actively, no doubt, but the rhythm is different," he reflected, recalling the cool composure with which the young man had announced his engagement, and taken for granted that his family would approve. "the difference is that these young people take it for granted that they're going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn't. only, i wonder--the thing one's so certain of in advance: can it ever make one's heart beat as wildly?" it was the day after their arrival in paris, and the spring sunshine held archer in his open window, above the wide silvery prospect of the place vendome. one of the things he had stipulated--almost the only one--when he had agreed to come abroad with dallas, was that, in paris, he shouldn't be made to go to one of the newfangled "palaces." "oh, all right--of course," dallas good-naturedly agreed. "i'll take you to some jolly old-fashioned place--the bristol say--" leaving his father speechless at hearing that the century-long home of kings and emperors was now spoken of as an old-fashioned inn, where one went for its quaint inconveniences and lingering local colour. archer had pictured often enough, in the first impatient years, the scene of his return to paris; then the personal vision had faded, and he had simply tried to see the city as the setting of madame olenska's life. sitting alone at night in his library, after the household had gone to bed, he had evoked the radiant outbreak of spring down the avenues of horse-chestnuts, the flowers and statues in the public gardens, the whiff of lilacs from the flower-carts, the majestic roll of the river under the great bridges, and the life of art and study and pleasure that filled each mighty artery to bursting. now the spectacle was before him in its glory, and as he looked out on it he felt shy, old-fashioned, inadequate: a mere grey speck of a man compared with the ruthless magnificent fellow he had dreamed of being.... dallas's hand came down cheerily on his shoulder. "hullo, father: this is something like, isn't it?" they stood for a while looking out in silence, and then the young man continued: "by the way, i've got a message for you: the countess olenska expects us both at half-past five." he said it lightly, carelessly, as he might have imparted any casual item of information, such as the hour at which their train was to leave for florence the next evening. archer looked at him, and thought he saw in his gay young eyes a gleam of his great-grandmother mingott's malice. "oh, didn't i tell you?" dallas pursued. "fanny made me swear to do three things while i was in paris: get her the score of the last debussy songs, go to the grand-guignol and see madame olenska. you know she was awfully good to fanny when mr. beaufort sent her over from buenos ayres to the assomption. fanny hadn't any friends in paris, and madame olenska used to be kind to her and trot her about on holidays. i believe she was a great friend of the first mrs. beaufort's. and she's our cousin, of course. so i rang her up this morning, before i went out, and told her you and i were here for two days and wanted to see her." archer continued to stare at him. "you told her i was here?" "of course--why not?" dallas's eye brows went up whimsically. then, getting no answer, he slipped his arm through his father's with a confidential pressure. "i say, father: what was she like?" archer felt his colour rise under his son's unabashed gaze. "come, own up: you and she were great pals, weren't you? wasn't she most awfully lovely?" "lovely? i don't know. she was different." "ah--there you have it! that's what it always comes to, doesn't it? when she comes, she's different--and one doesn't know why. it's exactly what i feel about fanny." his father drew back a step, releasing his arm. "about fanny? but, my dear fellow--i should hope so! only i don't see--" "dash it, dad, don't be prehistoric! wasn't she--once--your fanny?" dallas belonged body and soul to the new generation. he was the first-born of newland and may archer, yet it had never been possible to inculcate in him even the rudiments of reserve. "what's the use of making mysteries? it only makes people want to nose 'em out," he always objected when enjoined to discretion. but archer, meeting his eyes, saw the filial light under their banter. "my fanny?" "well, the woman you'd have chucked everything for: only you didn't," continued his surprising son. "i didn't," echoed archer with a kind of solemnity. "no: you date, you see, dear old boy. but mother said--" "your mother?" "yes: the day before she died. it was when she sent for me alone--you remember? she said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you most wanted." archer received this strange communication in silence. his eyes remained unseeingly fixed on the thronged sunlit square below the window. at length he said in a low voice: "she never asked me." "no. i forgot. you never did ask each other anything, did you? and you never told each other anything. you just sat and watched each other, and guessed at what was going on underneath. a deaf-and-dumb asylum, in fact! well, i back your generation for knowing more about each other's private thoughts than we ever have time to find out about our own.--i say, dad," dallas broke off, "you're not angry with me? if you are, let's make it up and go and lunch at henri's. i've got to rush out to versailles afterward." archer did not accompany his son to versailles. he preferred to spend the afternoon in solitary roamings through paris. he had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime. after a little while he did not regret dallas's indiscretion. it seemed to take an iron band from his heart to know that, after all, some one had guessed and pitied.... and that it should have been his wife moved him indescribably. dallas, for all his affectionate insight, would not have understood that. to the boy, no doubt, the episode was only a pathetic instance of vain frustration, of wasted forces. but was it really no more? for a long time archer sat on a bench in the champs elysees and wondered, while the stream of life rolled by.... a few streets away, a few hours away, ellen olenska waited. she had never gone back to her husband, and when he had died, some years before, she had made no change in her way of living. there was nothing now to keep her and archer apart--and that afternoon he was to see her. he got up and walked across the place de la concorde and the tuileries gardens to the louvre. she had once told him that she often went there, and he had a fancy to spend the intervening time in a place where he could think of her as perhaps having lately been. for an hour or more he wandered from gallery to gallery through the dazzle of afternoon light, and one by one the pictures burst on him in their half-forgotten splendour, filling his soul with the long echoes of beauty. after all, his life had been too starved.... suddenly, before an effulgent titian, he found himself saying: "but i'm only fifty-seven--" and then he turned away. for such summer dreams it was too late; but surely not for a quiet harvest of friendship, of comradeship, in the blessed hush of her nearness. he went back to the hotel, where he and dallas were to meet; and together they walked again across the place de la concorde and over the bridge that leads to the chamber of deputies. dallas, unconscious of what was going on in his father's mind, was talking excitedly and abundantly of versailles. he had had but one previous glimpse of it, during a holiday trip in which he had tried to pack all the sights he had been deprived of when he had had to go with the family to switzerland; and tumultuous enthusiasm and cock-sure criticism tripped each other up on his lips. as archer listened, his sense of inadequacy and inexpressiveness increased. the boy was not insensitive, he knew; but he had the facility and self-confidence that came of looking at fate not as a master but as an equal. "that's it: they feel equal to things--they know their way about," he mused, thinking of his son as the spokesman of the new generation which had swept away all the old landmarks, and with them the sign-posts and the danger-signal. suddenly dallas stopped short, grasping his father's arm. "oh, by jove," he exclaimed. they had come out into the great tree-planted space before the invalides. the dome of mansart floated ethereally above the budding trees and the long grey front of the building: drawing up into itself all the rays of afternoon light, it hung there like the visible symbol of the race's glory. archer knew that madame olenska lived in a square near one of the avenues radiating from the invalides; and he had pictured the quarter as quiet and almost obscure, forgetting the central splendour that lit it up. now, by some queer process of association, that golden light became for him the pervading illumination in which she lived. for nearly thirty years, her life--of which he knew so strangely little--had been spent in this rich atmosphere that he already felt to be too dense and yet too stimulating for his lungs. he thought of the theatres she must have been to, the pictures she must have looked at, the sober and splendid old houses she must have frequented, the people she must have talked with, the incessant stir of ideas, curiosities, images and associations thrown out by an intensely social race in a setting of immemorial manners; and suddenly he remembered the young frenchman who had once said to him: "ah, good conversation--there is nothing like it, is there?" archer had not seen m. riviere, or heard of him, for nearly thirty years; and that fact gave the measure of his ignorance of madame olenska's existence. more than half a lifetime divided them, and she had spent the long interval among people he did not know, in a society he but faintly guessed at, in conditions he would never wholly understand. during that time he had been living with his youthful memory of her; but she had doubtless had other and more tangible companionship. perhaps she too had kept her memory of him as something apart; but if she had, it must have been like a relic in a small dim chapel, where there was not time to pray every day.... they had crossed the place des invalides, and were walking down one of the thoroughfares flanking the building. it was a quiet quarter, after all, in spite of its splendour and its history; and the fact gave one an idea of the riches paris had to draw on, since such scenes as this were left to the few and the indifferent. the day was fading into a soft sun-shot haze, pricked here and there by a yellow electric light, and passers were rare in the little square into which they had turned. dallas stopped again, and looked up. "it must be here," he said, slipping his arm through his father's with a movement from which archer's shyness did not shrink; and they stood together looking up at the house. it was a modern building, without distinctive character, but many-windowed, and pleasantly balconied up its wide cream-coloured front. on one of the upper balconies, which hung well above the rounded tops of the horse-chestnuts in the square, the awnings were still lowered, as though the sun had just left it. "i wonder which floor--?" dallas conjectured; and moving toward the porte-cochere he put his head into the porter's lodge, and came back to say: "the fifth. it must be the one with the awnings." archer remained motionless, gazing at the upper windows as if the end of their pilgrimage had been attained. "i say, you know, it's nearly six," his son at length reminded him. the father glanced away at an empty bench under the trees. "i believe i'll sit there a moment," he said. "why--aren't you well?" his son exclaimed. "oh, perfectly. but i should like you, please, to go up without me." dallas paused before him, visibly bewildered. "but, i say, dad: do you mean you won't come up at all?" "i don't know," said archer slowly. "if you don't she won't understand." "go, my boy; perhaps i shall follow you." dallas gave him a long look through the twilight. "but what on earth shall i say?" "my dear fellow, don't you always know what to say?" his father rejoined with a smile. "very well. i shall say you're old-fashioned, and prefer walking up the five flights because you don't like lifts." his father smiled again. "say i'm old-fashioned: that's enough." dallas looked at him again, and then, with an incredulous gesture, passed out of sight under the vaulted doorway. archer sat down on the bench and continued to gaze at the awninged balcony. he calculated the time it would take his son to be carried up in the lift to the fifth floor, to ring the bell, and be admitted to the hall, and then ushered into the drawing-room. he pictured dallas entering that room with his quick assured step and his delightful smile, and wondered if the people were right who said that his boy "took after him." then he tried to see the persons already in the room--for probably at that sociable hour there would be more than one--and among them a dark lady, pale and dark, who would look up quickly, half rise, and hold out a long thin hand with three rings on it.... he thought she would be sitting in a sofa-corner near the fire, with azaleas banked behind her on a table. "it's more real to me here than if i went up," he suddenly heard himself say; and the fear lest that last shadow of reality should lose its edge kept him rooted to his seat as the minutes succeeded each other. he sat for a long time on the bench in the thickening dusk, his eyes never turning from the balcony. at length a light shone through the windows, and a moment later a man-servant came out on the balcony, drew up the awnings, and closed the shutters. at that, as if it had been the signal he waited for, newland archer got up slowly and walked back alone to his hotel. a note on the text the age of innocence first appeared in four large installments in the pictorial review, from july to october . it was published that same year in book form by d. appleton and company in new york and in london. wharton made extensive stylistic, punctuation, and spelling changes and revisions between the serial and book publication, and more than thirty subsequent changes were made after the second impression of the book edition had been run off. this authoritative text is reprinted from the library of america edition of novels by edith wharton, and is based on the sixth impression of the first edition, which incorporates the last set of extensive revisions that are obviously authorial. proofreading team. revised edition and html version produced by victoria woosley. thelma by marie corelli thelma. book i. the land of the midnight sun. chapter i. "dream by dream shot through her eyes, and each outshone the last that lighted." swinburne. midnight,--without darkness, without stars! midnight--and the unwearied sun stood, yet visible in the heavens, like a victorious king throned on a dais of royal purple bordered with gold. the sky above him,--his canopy,--gleamed with a cold yet lustrous blue, while across it slowly flitted a few wandering clouds of palest amber, deepening, as they sailed along, to a tawny orange. a broad stream of light falling, as it were, from the centre of the magnificent orb, shot lengthwise across the altenfjord, turning its waters to a mass of quivering and shifting color that alternated from bronze to copper,--from copper to silver and azure. the surrounding hills glowed with a warm, deep violet tint, flecked here and there with touches of bright red, as though fairies were lighting tiny bonfires on their summits. away in the distance a huge mass of rock stood out to view, its rugged lines transfigured into ethereal loveliness by a misty veil of tender rose pink,--a hue curiously suggestive of some other and smaller sun that might have just set. absolute silence prevailed. not even the cry of a sea-mew or kittiwake broke the almost deathlike stillness,--no breath of wind stirred a ripple on the glassy water. the whole scene might well have been the fantastic dream of some imaginative painter, whose ambition soared beyond the limits of human skill. yet it was only one of those million wonderful effects of sky and sea which are common in norway, especially on the altenfjord, where, though beyond the arctic circle, the climate in summer is that of another italy, and the landscape a living poem fairer than the visions of endymion. there was one solitary watcher of the splendid spectacle. this was a man of refined features and aristocratic appearance, who, reclining on a large rug of skins which he had thrown down on the shore for that purpose, was gazing at the pageant of the midnight sun and all its stately surroundings, with an earnest and rapt expression in his clear hazel eyes. "glorious! beyond all expectation, glorious!" he murmured half aloud, as he consulted his watch and saw that the hands marked exactly twelve on the dial. "i believe i'm having the best of it, after all. even if those fellows get the _eulalie_ into good position they will see nothing finer than this." as he spoke he raised his field-glass and swept the horizon in search of a vessel, his own pleasure yacht,--which had taken three of his friends, at their special desire, to the opposite island of seiland,--seiland, rising in weird majesty three thousand feet above the sea, and boasting as its chief glory the great peak of jedkè, the most northern glacier in all the wild norwegian land. there was no sign of a returning sail, and he resumed his study of the sumptuous sky, the colors of which were now deepening and burning with increasing lustre, while an array of clouds of the deepest purple hue, swept gorgeously together beneath the sun as though to form his footstool. "one might imagine that the trump of the resurrection had sounded, and that all this aerial pomp,--this strange silence,--was just the pause, the supreme moment before the angels descended," he mused, with a half-smile at his own fancy, for though something of a poet at heart, he was much more of a cynic. he was too deeply imbued with modern fashionable atheism to think seriously about angels or resurrection trumps, but there was a certain love of mysticism and romance in his nature, which not even his oxford experiences and the chilly dullness of english materialism had been able to eradicate. and there was something impressive in the sight of the majestic orb holding such imperial revel at midnight,--something almost unearthly in the light and life of the heavens, as compared with the referential and seemingly worshipping silence of the earth,--that, for a few moments, awed him into a sense of the spiritual and unseen. mythical passages from the poets he loved came into his memory, and stray fragments of old songs and ballads he had known in his childhood returned to him with haunting persistence. it was, for him, one of those sudden halts in life which we all experience,--an instant,--when time and the world seem to stand still, as though to permit us easy breathing; a brief space,--in which we are allowed to stop and wonder awhile at the strange unaccountable force within us, that enables us to stand with such calm, smiling audacity, on our small pin's point of the present, between the wide dark gaps of past and future; a small hush,--in which the gigantic engines of the universe appear to revolve no more, and the immortal soul of man itself is subjected and over-ruled by supreme and eternal thought. drifting away on those delicate imperceptible lines that lie between reality and dreamland, the watcher of the midnight sun gave himself up to the half painful, half delicious sense of being drawn in, absorbed, and lost in infinite imaginings, when the intense stillness around him was broken by the sound of a voice singing, a full, rich contralto, that rang through the air with the clearness of a golden bell. the sweet liquid notes were those of an old norwegian mountain melody, one of those wildly pathetic _folk-songs_ that seem to hold all the sorrow, wonder, wistfulness, and indescribable yearning of a heart too full for other speech than music. he started to his feet and looked around him for the singer. there was no one visible. the amber streaks in the sky were leaping into crimson flame; the fjord glowed like the burning lake of dante's vision; one solitary sea-gull winged its graceful, noiseless flight far above, its white pinions shimmering like jewels as it crossed the radiance of the heavens. other sign of animal life there was none. still the hidden voice rippled on in a stream of melody, and the listener stood amazed and enchanted at the roundness and distinctness of every note that fell from the lips of the unseen vocalist. "a woman's voice," he thought; "but where is the woman?" puzzled, he looked to the right and left, then out to the shining fjord, half expecting to see some fisher-maiden rowing along, and singing as she rowed, but there was no sign of any living creature. while he waited, the voice suddenly ceased, and the song was replaced by the sharp grating of a keel on the beach. turning in the direction of this sound, he perceived a boat being pushed out by invisible hands towards the water's edge from a rocky cave, that jutted upon the fjord, and, full of curiosity, he stepped towards the arched entrance, when,--all suddenly and unexpectedly,--a girl sprang out from the dark interior, and standing erect in her boat, faced the intruder. a girl of about nineteen, she seemed, taller than most women,--with a magnificent uncovered mass of hair, the color of the midnight sunshine, tumbled over her shoulders, and flashing against her flushed cheeks and dazzlingly fair skin. her deep blue eyes had an astonished and certainly indignant expression in them, while he, utterly unprepared for such a vision of loveliness at such a time and in such a place, was for a moment taken aback and at a loss for words. recovering his habitual self-possession quickly, however, he raised his hat, and, pointing to the boat, which was more than half way out of the cavern, said simply-- "may i assist you?" she was silent, eyeing him with a keen glance which had something in it of disfavor and suspicion. "i suppose she doesn't understand english," he thought, "and i can't speak a word of norwegian. i must talk by signs." and forthwith he went through a labored pantomime of gesture, sufficiently ludicrous in itself, yet at the same time expressive of his meaning. the girl broke into a laugh--a laugh of sweet amusement which brought a thousand new sparkles of light into her lovely eyes. "that is very well done," she observed graciously, speaking english with something of a foreign accent. "even the lapps would understand you, and they are very stupid, poor things!" half vexed by her laughter, and feeling that he was somehow an object of ridicule to this tall, bright-haired maiden, he ceased his pantomimic gestures abruptly and stood looking at her with a slight flush of embarrassment on his features. "i know your language," she resumed quietly, after a brief pause, in which she had apparently considered the stranger's appearance and general bearing. "it was rude of me not to have answered you at once. you can help me if you will. the keel has caught among the pebbles, but we can easily move it between us." and, jumping lightly out of her boat, she grasped its edge firmly with her strong white hands, exclaiming gaily, as she did so, "push!" thus adjured, he lost no time in complying with her request, and, using his great strength and muscular force to good purpose, the light little craft was soon well in the water, swaying to and fro as though with impatience to be gone. the girl sprang to her seat, discarding his eagerly proffered assistance, and, taking both oars, laid them in their respective rowlocks, and seemed about to start, when she paused and asked abruptly-- "are you a sailor?" he smiled. "not i! do i remind you of one?" "you are strong, and you manage a boat as though you were accustomed to the work. also you look as if you had been at sea." "rightly guessed!" he replied, still smiling; "i certainly _have_ been at sea; i have been coasting all about your lovely land. my yacht went across to seiland this afternoon." she regarded him more intently, and observed, with the critical eye of a woman, the refined taste displayed in his dress, from the very cut of his loose travelling coat, to the luxurious rug of fine fox-shins, that lay so carelessly cast on the shore at a little distance from him. then she gave a gesture of hauteur and half-contempt. "you have a yacht? oh! then you are a gentleman. you do nothing for your living?" "nothing, indeed!" and he shrugged his shoulders with a mingled air of weariness and self-pity, "except one thing--i live!" "is that hard work?" she inquired wonderingly. "very." they were silent then, and the girl's face grew serious as she rested on her oars, and still surveyed him with a straight, candid gaze, that, though earnest and penetrating, had nothing of boldness in it. it was the look of one in whose past there were no secrets--the look of a child who is satisfied with the present and takes no thought for the future. few women look so after they have entered their teens. social artifice, affectation, and the insatiate vanity that modern life encourages in the feminine nature--all these things soon do away with the pellucid clearness and steadfastness of the eye--the beautiful, true, untamed expression, which, though so rare, is, when seen infinitely more bewitching than all the bright arrows of coquetry and sparkling invitation that flash from the glances of well-bred society dames, who have taken care to educate their eyes if not their hearts. this girl was evidently not trained properly; had she been so, she would have dropped a curtain over those wide, bright windows of her soul; she would have remembered that she was alone with a strange man at midnight--at midnight, though the sun shone; she would have simpered and feigned embarrassment, even if she could not feel it. as it happened, she did nothing of the kind, only her expression softened and became more wistful and earnest, and when she spoke again her voice was mellow with a suave gentleness, that had something in it of compassion. "if you do not love life itself," she said, "you love the beautiful things of life, do you not? see yonder! there is what we call the meeting of night and morning. one is glad to be alive at such a moment. look quickly! the light soon fades." she pointed towards the east. her companion gazed in that direction, and uttered an exclamation,--almost a shout,--of wonder and admiration. within the space of the past few minutes the aspect of the heavens had completely changed. the burning scarlet and violet hues had all melted into a transparent yet brilliant shade of pale mauve,--as delicate as the inner tint of a lilac blossom,--and across this stretched two wing-shaped gossamer clouds of watery green, fringed with soft primrose. between these cloud-wings, as opaline in lustre as those of a dragon-fly, the face of the sun shone like a shield of polished gold, while his rays, piercing spear-like through the varied tints of emerald, brought an unearthly radiance over the landscape--a lustre as though the moon were, in some strange way, battling with the sun for mastery over the visible universe though, looking southward, she could dimly be perceived, the ghost of herself--a poor, fainting, pallid goddess,--a perishing diana. bringing his glance down from the skies, the young man turned it to the face of the maiden near him, and was startled at her marvellous beauty--beauty now heightened by the effect of the changeful colors that played around her. the very boat in which she sat glittered with a bronze-like, metallic brightness as it heaved gently to and fro on the silvery green water; the midnight sunshine bathed the falling glory of her long hair, till each thick tress, each clustering curl, appeared to emit an amber spark of light. the strange, weird effect of the sky seemed to have stolen into her eyes, making them shine with witch-like brilliancy,--the varied radiance flashing about her brought into strong relief the pureness of her profile, drawing as with a fine pencil the outlines of her noble forehead, sweet mouth, and rounded chin. it touched the scarlet of her bodice, and brightened the quaint old silver clasps she wore at her waist and throat, till she seemed no longer an earthly being, but more like some fair wondering sprite from the legendary norse kingdom of _alfheim_, the "abode of the luminous genii." she was gazing upwards,--heavenwards,--and her expression was one of rapt and almost devotional intensity. thus she remained for some moments, motionless as the picture of an expectant angel painted by raffaele or correggio; then reluctantly and with a deep sigh she turned her eyes towards earth again. in so doing she met the fixed and too visibly admiring gaze of her companion. she started, and a wave of vivid color flushed her cheeks. quickly recovering her serenity, however, she saluted him slightly, and, moving her oars in unison, was on the point of departure. stirred by an impulse he could not resist, he laid one hand detainingly on the rim of her boat. "are you going now?" he asked. she raised her eyebrows in some little surprise and smiled. "going?" she repeated. "why, yes. i shall be late in getting home as it is." "stop a moment," he said eagerly, feeling that he could not let this beautiful creature leave him as utterly as a midsummer night's dream without some clue as to her origin and destination. "will you not tell me your name?" she drew herself erect with a look of indignation. "sir, i do not know you. the maidens of norway do not give their names to strangers." "pardon me," he replied, somewhat abashed. "i mean no offense. we have watched the midnight sun together, and--and--i thought--" he paused, feeling very foolish, and unable to conclude his sentence. she looked at him demurely from under her long, curling lashes. "you will often find a peasant girl on the shores of the altenfjord watching the midnight sun at the same time as yourself," she said, and there was a suspicion of laughter in her voice. "it is not unusual. it is not even necessary that you should remember so little a thing." "necessary or not, i shall never forget it," he said with sudden impetuosity. "you are no peasant! come; if i give you my name will you still deny me yours?" her delicate brows drew together in a frown of haughty and decided refusal. "no names please my ears save those that are familiar," she said, with intense coldness. "we shall not meet again. farewell!" and without further word or look, she leaned gracefully to the oars, and pulling with a long, steady, resolute stroke, the little boat darted away as lightly and swiftly as a skimming swallow out on the shimmering water, he stood gazing after it till it became a distant speck sparkling like a diamond in the light of sky and wave, and when he could no more watch it with unassisted eyes, he took up his field glass and followed its course attentively. he saw it cutting along as straightly as an arrow, then suddenly it dipped round to the westward, apparently making straight for some shelving rocks, that projected far into the fjord. it reached them; it grew less and less--it disappeared. at the same time the lustre of the heavens gave way to a pale pearl-like uniform grey tint, that stretched far and wide, folding up as in a mantle all the regal luxury of the sun-king's palace. the subtle odor and delicate chill of the coming dawn stole freshly across the water. a light haze rose and obscured the opposite islands. something of the tender melancholy of autumn, though it was late june, toned down the aspect of the before brilliant landscape. a lark rose swiftly from its nest in an adjacent meadow, and, soaring higher and higher, poured from its tiny throat a cascade of delicious melody. the midnight sun no longer shone at midnight; his face smiled with a sobered serenity through the faint early mists of approaching morning. chapter ii. "viens donc--je te chanterai des chansons que les esprits des cimetieres m'ont apprises!" maturin. "baffled!" he exclaimed, with a slight vexed laugh, as the boat vanished from his sight. "by a woman, too! who would have thought it?" who would have thought it, indeed! sir philip bruce-errington, baronet, the wealthy and desirable parti for whom many match-making mothers had stood knee-deep in the chilly though sparkling waters of society, ardently plying rod and line with patient persistence, vainly hoping to secure him as a husband for one of their highly proper and passionless daughters,--he, the admired, long-sought-after "eligible," was suddenly rebuffed, flouted--by whom? a stray princess, or a peasant. he vaguely wondered, as he lit a cigar and strolled up and down on the shore, meditating, with a puzzled, almost annoyed expression on his handsome features. he was not accustomed to slights of any kind, however trifling; his position being commanding and enviable enough to attract flattery and friendship from most people. he was the only son of a baronet as renowned for eccentricity as for wealth. he had been the spoilt darling of his mother; and now, both his parents being dead, he was alone in the world, heir to his father's revenues, and entire master of his own actions. and as part of the penalty he had to pay for being rich and good-looking to boot, he was so much run after by women that he found it hard to understand the haughty indifference with which he had just been treated by one of the most fair, if not the fairest of her sex. he was piqued, and his _amour propre_ was wounded. "i'm sure my question was harmless enough," he mused, half crossly, "she might have answered it." he glanced out impatiently over the fjord. there was no sign of his returning yacht as yet. "what a time those fellows are!" he said to himself. "if the pilot were not on board, i should begin to think they had run the _eulalie_ aground." he finished his cigar and threw the end of it into the water; then he stood moodily watching the ripples as they rolled softly up and caressed the shining brown shore at his feet, thinking all the while of that strange girl, so wonderfully lovely in face and form, so graceful and proud of bearing, with her great blue eyes and masses of dusky gold hair. his meeting with her was a sort of adventure in its way--the first of the kind he had had for some time. he was subject to fits of weariness or caprice, and it was in one of these that he had suddenly left london in the height of the season, and had started for norway on a yachting cruise with three chosen companions, one of whom, george lorimer, once an oxford fellow-student, was now his "chum"--the pythias to his damon, the _fidus achates_ of his closest confidence. through the unexpected wakening up of energy in the latter young gentleman, who was usually of a most sleepy and indolent disposition, he happened to be quite alone on this particular occasion, though, as a general rule, he was accompanied in his rambles by one if not all three of his friends. utter solitude was with him a rare occurrence, and his present experience of it had chanced in this wise. lorimer the languid, lorimer the lazy, lorimer who had remained blandly unmoved and drowsy through all the magnificent panorama of the norwegian coast, including the sogne fjord and the toppling peaks of the justedal glaciers; lorimer who had slept peacefully in a hammock on deck, even while the yacht was passing under the looming splendors of melsnipa; lorimer, now that he had arrived at the alton fjord, then at its loveliest in the full glory of the continuous sunshine, developed a new turn of mind, and began to show sudden and abnormal interest in the scenery. in this humor he expressed his desire to "take a sight" of the midnight sun from the island of seiland, and also declared his resolve to try the nearly impossible ascent of the great jedkè glacier. errington laughed at the idea. "don't tell me," he said, "that you are going in for climbing. and do you suppose i believe that you are interested--_you_ of all people--in the heavenly bodies?" "why not?" asked lorimer, with a candid smile. "i'm not in the least interested in earthly bodies, except my own. the sun's a jolly fellow. i sympathize with him in his present condition. he's in his cups--that's what's the matter--and he can't be persuaded to go to bed. i know his feelings perfectly; and i want to survey his gloriously inebriated face from another point of view. don't laugh, phil; i'm in earnest! and i really have quite a curiosity to try my skill in amateur mountaineering. jedkè's the very place for a first effort. it offers difficulties, and"--this with a slight yawn--"i like to surmount difficulties; it's rather amusing." his mind was so evidently set upon the excursion, that sir philip made no attempt to dissuade him from it, but excused himself from accompanying the party on the plea that he wanted to finish a sketch he had recently begun. so that when the _eulalie_ got up her steam, weighed anchor, and swept gracefully away towards the coast of the adjacent islands, her owner was left, at his desire, to the seclusion of a quiet nook on the shore of the altenfjord, where he succeeded in making a bold and vivid picture of the scene before him. the colors of the sky had, however, defied his palette, and after one or two futile attempts to transfer to his canvas a few of the gorgeous tints that illumed the landscape, he gave up the task in despair, and resigned himself to the _dolce far niente_ of absolute enjoyment. from his half pleasing, half melancholy reverie the voice of the unknown maiden had startled him, and now,--now she had left him to resume it if he chose,--left him, in chill displeasure, with a cold yet brilliant flash of something like scorn in her wonderful eyes. since her departure the scenery, in some unaccountable way, seemed less attractive to him, the songs of the birds, who were all awake, fell on inattentive ears; he was haunted by her face and voice, and he was, moreover, a little out of humor with himself for having been such a blunderer as to give her offense and thus leave an unfavorable impression on her mind. "i suppose i _was_ rude," he considered after a while. "she seemed to think so, at any rate. by jove! what a crushing look she gave me! a peasant? not she! if she had said she was an empress i shouldn't have been much surprised. but a mere common peasant, with that regal figure and those white hands! i don't believe it. perhaps our pilot, valdemar, knows who she is; i must ask him." all at once he bethought himself of the cave whence she had emerged. it was close at hand--a natural grotto, arched and apparently lofty. he resolved to explore it. glancing at his watch he saw it was not yet one o'clock in the morning, yet the voice of the cuckoo called shrilly from the neighboring hills, and a circling group of swallows flitted around him, their lovely wings glistening like jewels in the warm light of the ever-wakeful sun. going to the entrance of the cave, he looked in. it was formed of rough rock, hewn out by the silent work of the water, and its floor was strewn thick with loose pebbles and polished stones. entering it, he was able to walk upright for some few paces, then suddenly it seemed to shrink in size and to become darker. the light from the opening gradually narrowed into a slender stream too small for him to see clearly where he was going, thereupon he struck a fusee. at first he could observe no sign of human habitation, not even a rope, or chain, or hook, to intimate that it was a customary shelter for a boat. the fusee went out quickly, and he lit another. looking more carefully and closely about him, he perceived on a projecting shelf of rock, a small antique lamp, etruscan in shape, made of iron and wrought with curious letters. there was oil in it, and a half-burnt wick; it had evidently been recently used. he availed himself at once of this useful adjunct to his explorations, and lighting it, was able by the clear and steady flame it emitted, to see everything very distinctly. right before him was an uneven flight of steps leading down to a closed door. he paused and listened attentively. there was no sound but the slow lapping of the water near the entrance; within, the thickness of the cavern walls shut out the gay carolling of the birds, and all the cheerful noises of awakening nature. silence, chillness, and partial obscurity are depressing influences, and the warm blood flowing through his veins, ran a trifle more slowly and coldly as he felt the sort of uncomfortable eerie sensation which is experienced by the jolliest and most careless traveller, when he first goes down to the catacombs in rome. a sort of damp, earthy shudder creeps through the system, and a dreary feeling of general hopelessness benumbs the faculties; a morbid state of body and mind which is only to be remedied by a speedy return to the warm sunlight, and a draught of generous wine. sir philip, however, held the antique lamp aloft, and descended the clumsy steps cautiously, counting twenty steps in all, at the bottom of which he found himself face to face with the closed door. it was made of hard wood, so hard as to be almost like iron. it was black with age, and covered with quaint carvings and inscriptions; but in the middle, standing out in bold relief among the numberless runic figures and devices, was written in large well-cut letters the word-- thelma "by jove!" he exclaimed, "i have it! the girl's name, of course! this is some private retreat of hers, i suppose,--a kind of boudoir like my lady winsleigh's, only with rather a difference." and he laughed aloud, thinking of the dainty gold-satin hangings of a certain room in a certain great mansion in park lane, where an aristocratic and handsome lady-leader of fashion had as nearly made love to him as it was possible for her to do without losing her social dignity. his laugh was echoed back with a weird and hollow sound, as though a hidden demon of the cave were mocking him, a demon whose merriment was intense but also horrible. he heard the unpleasant jeering repetition with a kind of careless admiration. "that echo would make a fortune in _faust_, if it could be persuaded to back up mephistopheles with that truly fiendish, '_ha ha_!'" he said, resuming his examination of the name on the door. then an odd fancy seized him, and he called loudly-- "thelma!" "thelma!" shouted the echo. "is that her name?" "her name!" replied the echo. "i thought so!" and philip laughed again, while the echo laughed wildly in answer. "just the sort of name to suit a norwegian nymph or goddess. _thelma_ is quaint and appropriate, and as far as i can remember there's no rhyme to it in the english language. _thelma_!" and he lingered on the pronunciation of the strange word with a curious sensation of pleasure. "there is something mysteriously suggestive about the sound of it; like a chord of music played softly in the distance. now, can i get through this door, i wonder?" he pushed it gently. it yielded very slightly, and he tried again and yet again. finally, he put down the lamp and set his shoulder against the wooden barrier with all his force. a dull creaking sound rewarded his efforts, and inch by inch the huge door opened into what at first appeared immeasurable darkness. holding up the light he looked in, and uttered a smothered exclamation. a sudden gust of wind rushed from the sea through the passage and extinguished the lamp, leaving him in profound gloom. nothing daunted he sought his fusee case; there was just one left in it. this he hastily struck, and shielding the glow carefully with one hand, relit his lamp, and stepped boldly into the mysterious grotto. the murmur of the wind and waves, like spirit-voices in unison, followed him as he entered. he found himself in a spacious winding corridor, that had evidently been hollowed out in the rocks and fashioned by human hands. its construction was after the ancient gothic method; but the wonder of the place consisted in the walls, which were entirely covered with shells,--shells of every shape and hue,--some delicate as rose-leaves, some rough and prickly, others polished as ivory, some gleaming with a thousand irridescent colors, others pure white as the foam on high billows. many of them were turned artistically in such a position as to show their inner sides glistening with soft tints like the shades of fine silk or satin,--others glittered with the opaline sheen of mother-o'-pearl. all were arranged in exquisite patterns, evidently copied from fixed mathematical designs,--there were stars, crescents, roses, sunflowers, hearts, crossed daggers, ships and implements of war, all faithfully depicted with extraordinary neatness and care, as though each particular emblem had served some special purpose. sir philip walked along very slowly, delighted with his discovery, and,--pausing to examine each panel as he passed,--amused himself with speculations as to the meaning of this beautiful cavern, so fancifully yet skillfully decorated. "some old place of worship, i suppose," he thought. "there must be many such hidden in different parts of norway. it has nothing to do with the christian faith, for among all these devices i don't perceive a single cross." he was right. there were no crosses; but there were many designs of the sun--the sun rising, the sun setting, the sun in full glory, with all his rays embroidered round him in tiny shells, some of them no bigger than a pin's head. "what a waste of time and labor," he mused. "who would undertake such a thing nowadays? fancy the patience and delicacy of finger required to fit all these shells in their places! and they are embedded in strong mortar too, as if the work were meant to be indestructible." full of pleased interest, he pursued his way, winding in and out through different arches, all more or less richly ornamented, till he came to a tall, round column, which seemingly supported the whole gallery, for all the arches converged towards it. it was garlanded from top to bottom with their roses and their leaves, all worked in pink and lilac shells, interspersed with small pieces of shining amber and polished malachite. the flicker of the lamp he carried, made it glisten like a mass of jewel-work, and, absorbed in his close examination of this unique specimen of ancient art, sir philip did not at once perceive that another light beside his own glimmered from out the furthest archway a little beyond him,--an opening that led into some recess he had not as yet explored. a peculiar lustre sparkling on one side of the shell-work however, at last attracted his attention, and, glancing up quickly, he saw, to his surprise, the reflection of a strange radiance, rosily tinted and brilliant. turning in its direction, he paused, irresolute. could there be some one living in that furthest chamber to which the long passage he had followed evidently led? some one who would perhaps resent his intrusion as an impertinence? some eccentric artist or hermit who had made the cave his home? or was it perhaps a refuge for smugglers? he listened anxiously. there was no sound. he waited a minute or two, then boldly advanced, determined to solve the mystery. this last archway was lower than any of those he had passed through, and he was forced to take off his hat and stoop as he went under it. when he raised his head he remained uncovered, for he saw at a glance that the place was sacred. he was in the presence, not of life, but death. the chamber in which he stood was square in form, and more richly ornamented with shell-designs than any other portion of the grotto he had seen, and facing the east was an altar hewn out of the solid rock and studded thickly with amber, malachite and mother-o'-pearl. it was covered with the incomprehensible emblems of a bygone creed worked in most exquisite shell-patterns, but on it,--as though in solemn protest against the past,--stood a crucifix of ebony and carved ivory, before which burned steadily a red lamp. the meaning of the mysterious light was thus explained, but what chiefly interested errington was the central object of the place,--a coffin,--of rather a plain granite sarcophagus which was placed on the floor lying from north to south. upon it,--in strange contrast to the sombre coldness of the stone,--reposed a large wreath of poppies freshly gathered. the vivid scarlet of the flowers, the gleam of the shining shells on the walls, the mournful figure of the ivory christ stretched on the cross among all those pagan emblems,--the intense silence broken only by the slow drip, drip of water trickling somewhere behind the cavern,--and more than these outward things,--his own impressive conviction that he was with the imperial dead--imperial because past the sway of empire--all made a powerful impression on his mind. overcoming by degrees his first sensations of awe, he approached the sarcophagus and examined it. it was solidly closed and mortared all round, so that it might have been one compact coffin-shaped block of stone so far as its outward appearance testified. stooping more closely, however, to look at the brilliant poppy-wreath, he started back with a slight exclamation. cut deeply in the hard granite he read for the second time that odd name-- thelma it belonged to some one dead, then--not to the lovely living woman who had so lately confronted him in the burning glow of the midnight sun? he felt dismayed at his unthinking precipitation,--he had, in his fancy, actually associated _her_, so full of radiant health and beauty, with what was probably a mouldering corpse in that hermetically sealed tenement of stone! this idea was unpleasant, and jarred upon his feelings. surely she, that golden-haired nymph of the fjord, had nothing to do with death! he had evidently found his way into some ancient tomb. "thelma" might be the name or title of some long-departed queen or princess of norway, yet, if so, how came the crucifix there,--the red lamp, the flowers? he lingered, looking curiously about him, as if he fancied the shell-embroidered walls might whisper some answer to his thoughts. the silence offered no suggestions. the plaintive figure of the tortured christ suspended on the cross maintained an immovable watch over all things, and there was a subtle, faint odor floating about as of crushed spices or herbs. while he still stood there absorbed in perplexed conjectures, he became oppressed by want of air. the red hue of the poppy-wreath mingled with the softer glow of the lamp on the altar,--the moist glitter of the shells and polished pebbles, seemed to dazzle and confuse his eyes. he felt dizzy and faint--and hastily made his way out of that close death-chamber into the passage, where he leaned for a few minutes against the great central column to recover himself. a brisk breath of wind from the fjord came careering through the gallery, and blew coldly upon his forehead. refreshed by it, he rapidly overcame the sensation of giddiness, and began to retrace his steps through the winding arches, thinking with some satisfaction as he went, what a romantic incident he would have to relate to lorimer and his other friends, when a sudden glare of light illumined the passage, and he was brought to an abrupt standstill by the sound of a wild "halloo!" the light vanished; it reappeared. it vanished again, and again appeared, flinging a strong flare upon the shell-worked walls as it approached. again the fierce "halloo!" resounded through the hollow cavities of the subterranean temple, and he remained motionless, waiting for an explanation of this unlooked-for turn to the events of the morning. he had plenty of physical courage, and the idea of any addition to his adventure rather pleased him than otherwise. still, with all his bravery, he recoiled a little when he first caught sight of the extraordinary being that emerged from the darkness--a wild, distorted figure that ran towards him with its head downwards, bearing aloft in one skinny hand a smoking pine-torch, from which the sparks flew like so many fireflies. this uncanny personage, wearing the semblance of man, came within two paces of errington before perceiving him; then, stopping short in his headlong career, the creature flourished his torch and uttered a defiant yell. philip surveyed him coolly and without alarm, though so weird an object might well have aroused a pardonable distrust, and even timidity. he saw a misshapen dwarf, not quite four feet high, with large, ungainly limbs out of all proportion to his head, which was small and compact. his features were of almost feminine fineness, and from under his shaggy brows gleamed a restless pair of large, full, wild blue eyes. his thick, rough flaxen hair was long and curly, and hung in disordered profusion over his deformed shoulders. his dress was of reindeer skin, very fancifully cut, and ornamented with beads of different colors,--and twisted about him as though in an effort to be artistic, was a long strip of bright scarlet woollen material, which showed up the extreme pallor and ill-health of the meagre countenance, and the brilliancy of the eyes that now sparkled with rage as they met those of errington. he, from his superior height, glanced down with pity on the unfortunate creature, whom he at once took to be the actual owner of the cave he had explored. uncertain what to do, whether to speak or remain silent, he moved slightly as though to pass on; but the shock-headed dwarf leaped lightly in his way, and, planting himself firmly before him, shrieked some unintelligible threat, of which errington could only make out the last words, "nifleheim" and "nastrond." "i believe he is commending me to the old norwegian inferno," thought the young baronet with a smile, amused at the little man's evident excitement. "very polite of him, i'm sure! but, after all, i had no business here. i'd better apologize." and forthwith he began to speak in the simplest english words he could choose, taking care to pronounce them very slowly and distinctly. "i cannot understand you, my good sir; but i see you are angry. i came here by accident. i am going away now at once." his explanation had a strange effect. the dwarf drew nearer, twirled himself rapidly round three times as though waltzing; then, holding his torch a little to one side, turned up his thin, pale countenance, and, fixing his gaze on sir philip, studied every feature of his face with absorbing interest. then he burst into a violent fit of laughter. "at last--at last?" he cried in fluent english. "going now? going, you say? never! never! you will never go away any more. no, not without something stolen! the dead have summoned you here! their white bony fingers have dragged you across the deep! did you not hear their voices, cold and hollow as the winter wind, calling, calling you, and saying, 'come, come, proud robber, from over the far seas; come and gather the beautiful rose of the northern forest'? yes, yes! you have obeyed the dead--the dead who feign sleep, but are ever wakeful;--you have come as a thief in the golden midnight, and the thing you seek is the life of sigurd! yes--yes! it is true. the spirit cannot lie. you must kill, you must steal! see how the blood drips, drop by drop, from the heart of sigurd! and the jewel you steal--ah, what a jewel!--you shall not find such another in norway!" his excited voice sank by degrees to a plaintive and forlorn whisper, and dropping his torch with a gesture of despair on the ground, he looked at it burning, with an air of mournful and utter desolation. profoundly touched, as he immediately understood the condition of his companion's wandering wits, errington spoke to him soothingly. "you mistake me," he said in gentle accents; "i would not steal anything from you, nor have i come to kill you. see," and he held out his hand, "i wouldn't harm you for the world. i didn't know this cave belonged to you. forgive me for having entered it. i am going to rejoin my friends. good-bye!" the strange, half-crazy creature touched his outstretched hand timidly, and with a sort of appeal. "good-bye, good-bye!" he muttered. "that is what they all say,--even the dead,--good-bye; but they never go--never, never! you cannot be different to the rest. and you do not wish to hurt poor sigurd?" "certainly not, if _you_ are sigurd," said philip, half laughing; "i should be very sorry to hurt you." "you are _sure_?" he persisted, with a sort of obstinate eagerness. "you have eyes which tell truths; but there are other things which are truer than eyes--things in the air, in the grass, in the waves, and they talk very strangely of you. i know you, of course! i knew you ages ago--long before i saw you dead on the field of battle, and the black-haired valkyrie galloped with you to valhalla! yes; i knew you long before that, and you knew me; for i was your king, and you were my vassal, wild and rebellious--not the proud, rich englishman you are to-day." errington startled. how could this sigurd, as he called himself, be aware of either his wealth or nationality? the dwarf observed his movement of surprise with a cunning smile. "sigurd is wise,--sigurd is brave! who shall deceive him? he knows you well; he will always know you. the old gods teach sigurd all his wisdom--the gods of the sea and the wind--the sleepy gods that lie in the hearts of the flowers--the small spirits that sit in shells and sing all day and all night." he paused, and his eyes filled with a wistful look of attention. he drew closer. "come," he said earnestly, "come, you must listen to my music; perhaps you can tell me what it means." he picked up his smouldering torch and held it aloft again; then, beckoning errington to follow him, he led the way to a small grotto, cut deeply into the wall of the cavern. here there were no shell patterns. little green ferns grew thickly out of the stone crevices, and a minute runlet of water trickled slowly down from above, freshening the delicate frondage as it fell. with quick, agile fingers he removed a loose stone from this aperture, and as he did so, a low shuddering wail resounded through the arches--a melancholy moan that rose and sank, and rose again in weird, sorrowful minor echoes. "hear her," murmured sigurd plaintively. "she is always complaining; it is a pity she cannot rest! she is a spirit, you know. i have often asked her what troubles her, but she will not tell me; she only weeps!" his companion looked at him compassionately. the sound that so affected his disordered imagination was nothing but the wind blowing through the narrow hole formed by the removal of the stone; but it was useless to explain this simple fact to one in his condition. "tell me," and sir philip spoke very gently, "is this your home?" the dwarf surveyed him almost scornfully. "_my_ home!" he echoed. "my home is everywhere--on the mountains, in the forests, on the black rocks and barren shores! my soul lives between the sun and the sea; my heart is with thelma!" thelma! here was perhaps a clue to the mystery. "who is thelma?" asked errington somewhat hurriedly. sigurd broke into violent and derisive laughter. "do you think i will tell _you_?" he cried loudly. "_you_,--one of that strong, cruel race who must conquer all they see; who covet everything fair under heaven, and will buy it, even at the cost of blood and tears! do you think i will unlock the door of my treasure to _you_? no, no; besides," and his voice sank lower, "what should you do with thelma? she is dead!" and, as if possessed by a sudden access of frenzy, he brandished his pine-torch wildly above his head till it showered a rain of bright sparks above him, and exclaimed furiously--"away, away, and trouble me not! the days are not yet fulfilled,--the time is not yet ripe. why seek to hasten my end? away, away, i tell you! leave me in peace! i will die when thelma bids me; but not till then!" and he rushed down the long gallery and disappeared in the furthest chamber, where he gave vent to a sort of long, sobbing cry, which rang dolefully through the cavern and then subsided into utter silence. feeling as if he were in a chaotic dream, errington pursued his interrupted course through the winding passages with a bewildered and wondering mind. what strange place had he inadvertently lighted on? and who were the still stranger beings in connection with it? first the beautiful girl herself; next the mysterious coffin, hidden in its fanciful shell temple; and now this deformed madman, with the pale face and fine eyes; whose utterances, though incoherent, savored somewhat of poesy and prophecy. and what spell was attached to that name of thelma? the more he thought of his morning's adventure, the more puzzled he became. as a rule, he believed more in the commonplace than in the romantic--most people do. but truth to tell, romance is far more common than the commonplace. there are few who have not, at one time or other of their lives, had some strange or tragic episode woven into the tissue of their every-day existence; and it would be difficult to find one person even among humdrum individuals, who, from birth to death, has experienced nothing out of the common. errington generally dismissed all tales of adventure as mere exaggerations of heated fancy; and, had he read in some book, of a respectable nineteenth-century yachtsman having such an interview with a madman in a sea-cavern, he would have laughed at the affair as an utter improbability, though he could not have explained why he considered it improbable. but now it had occurred to himself, he was both surprised and amused at the whole circumstance; moreover, he was sufficiently interested and curious to be desirous of sifting the matter to its foundation. it was, however, somewhat of a relief to him when he again reached the outer cavern. he replaced the lamp on the shelf where he had found it, and stepped once more into the brilliant light of the very early dawn, which then had all the splendor of full morning. there was a deliciously balmy wind, the blue sky was musical with a chorus of larks, and every breath of air that waved aside the long grass sent forth a thousand odors from hidden beds of wild thyme and bog-myrtle. he perceived the _eulalie_ at anchor in her old place on the fjord; she had returned while he was absent on his explorations. gathering together his rug and painting materials, he blew a whistle sharply three times; he was answered from the yacht, and presently a boat, manned by a couple of sailors, came skimming over the water towards him. it soon reached the shore, and, entering it, he was speedily rowed away from the scene of his morning's experience back to his floating palace, where, as yet, none of his friends were stirring. "how about jedkè?" he inquired of one of his men. "did they climb it?" a slow grin overspread the sailor's brown face. "lord bless you, no, sir! mr. lorimer, he just looked at it and sat down in the shade; the other gentleman played pitch-and-toss with pebbles. they was main hungry too, and ate a mighty sight of 'am and pickles. then they came on board and all turned in at once." errington laughed. he was amused at the utter failure of lorimer's recent sudden energy, but not surprised. his thoughts were, however, busied with something else, and he next asked--"where's our pilot?" "valdemar svensen, sir? he went down to his bunk as soon as we anchored, for a snooze, he said." "all right. if he comes on deck before i do, just tell him not to go ashore for anything till i see him. i want to speak to him after breakfast." "ay, ay, sir." whereupon sir philip descended to his private cabin. he drew the blind at the port-hole to shut out the dazzling sunlight, for it was nearly three o'clock in the morning, and quickly undressing, he flung himself into his berth with a slight, not altogether unpleasant, feeling of exhaustion. to the last, as his eyes closed drowsily, he seemed to hear the slow drip, drip of the water behind the rocky cavern, and the desolate cry of the incomprehensible sigurd, while through these sounds that mingled with the gurgle of little waves lapping against the sides of the _eulalie_, the name of "thelma" murmured itself in his ears till slumber drowned his senses in oblivion. chapter iii. "hast any mortal name, fit appellation for this dazzling frame, or friends or kinsfolk on the citied earth?" keats. "this is positively absurd," murmured lorimer, in mildly injured tones, seven hours later, as he sat on the edge of his berth, surveying errington, who, fully dressed, and in the highest spirits, had burst in to upbraid him for his laziness while he was yet but scantily attired. "i tell you, my good fellow, there are some things which the utmost stretch of friendship will _not_ stand. here am i in shirt and trousers with only one sock on, and you dare to say you have had an adventure! why, if you had cut a piece out of the sun, you ought to wait till a man is shaved before mentioning it." "don't be snappish, old boy!" laughed errington gaily. "put on that other sock and listen. i don't want to tell those other fellows just yet, they might go making inquiries about her--" "oh, there is a 'her' in the case, is there?" said lorimer, opening his eyes rather widely. "well, phil! i thought you had had enough, and something too much, of women." "this is not a woman!" declared philip with heat and eagerness, "at least not the sort of woman _i_ have ever known! this is a forest-empress, sea-goddess, or sun-angel! i don't know _what_ she is, upon my life!" lorimer regarded him with an air of reproachful offense. "don't go on--please don't!" he implored. "i can't stand it--i really can't! incipient verse-mania is too much for me. forest-empress, sea-goddess, sun-angel--by jove! what next? you are evidently in a very bad way. if i remember rightly, you had a flask of that old green chartreuse with you. ah! that accounts for it! nice stuff, but a little too strong." errington laughed, and, unabashed by his friend's raillery, proceeded to relate with much vivacity and graphic fervor the occurrences of the morning. lorimer listened patiently with a forbearing smile on his open, ruddy countenance. when he had heard everything he looked up and inquired calmly-- "this is not a yarn, is it?" "a yarn!" exclaimed philip. "do you think i would invent such a thing?" "can't say," returned lorimer imperturbably. "you are quite capable of it. it's a very creditable crammer, due to chartreuse. might have been designed by victor hugo; it's in his style. scene, norway--midnight. mysterious maiden steals out of a cave and glides away in a boat over the water; man, the hero, goes into cave, finds a stone coffin, says--'qu'est-ce que c'est? dieu! c'est la mort!' spectacle affreux! staggers back perspiring; meets mad dwarf with torch; mad dwarf talks a good deal--mad people always do,--then yells and runs away. man comes out of cave and--and--goes home to astonish his friends; one of them won't be astonished,--that's me!" "i don't care," said errington. "it's a true story for all that. only, i say, don't talk of it before the others; let's keep our own counsel--" "no poachers allowed on the sun-angel manor!" interrupted lorimer gravely. philip went on without heeding him. "i'll question valdemar svensen after breakfast. he knows everybody about here. come and have a smoke on deck when i give you the sign, and we'll cross-examine him." lorimer still looked incredulous. "what's the good of it?" he inquired languidly. "even if it's all true you had much better leave this goddess, or whatever you call her, alone, especially if she has any mad connections. what do _you_ want with her?" "nothing!" declared errington, though hiss color heightened. "nothing, i assure you! it's just a matter of curiosity with me. i should like to know who she is--that's all! the affair won't go any further." "how do you know?" and lorimer began to brush his stiff curly hair with a sort of vicious vigor. "how can you tell? i'm not a spiritualist, nor any sort of a humbug at all, i hope, but i sometimes indulge in presentiments. before we started on this cruise, i was haunted by that dismal old ballad of sir patrick spens--" 'the king's daughter of norroway 'tis thou maun bring her hame!' "and here you have found her, or so it appears. what's to come of it, i wonder?" "nothing's to come of it; nothing _will_ come of it!" laughed philip. "as i told you, she said she was a peasant. there's the breakfast-bell! make haste, old boy, i'm as hungry as a hunter!" and he left his friend to finish dressing, and entered the saloon, where he greeted his two other companions, alec, or, as he was oftener called, sandy macfarlane, and pierre duprèz; the former an oxford student,--the latter a young fellow whose acquaintance he had made in paris, and with whom he had kept up a constant and friendly intercourse. a greater contrast than these two presented could scarcely be imagined. macfarlane was tall and ungainly, with large loose joints that seemed to protrude angularly out of him in every direction,--duprèz was short, slight and wiry, with a dapper and by no means ungraceful figure. the one had formal _gauche_ manners, a never-to-be-eradicated glasgow accent, and a slow, infinitely tedious method of expressing himself,--the other was full of restless movement and pantomimic gesture, and being proud of his english, plunged into that language recklessly, making it curiously light and flippant, though picturesque, as he went. macfarlane was destined to become a shining light of the established church of scotland, and therefore took life very seriously,--duprèz was the spoilt only child of an eminent french banker, and had very little to do but enjoy himself, and that he did most thoroughly, without any calculation or care for the future. on all points of taste and opinion they differed widely; but there was no doubt about their both being good-hearted fellows, without any affectation of abnormal vice or virtue. "so you did not climb jedkè after all!" remarked errington laughingly, as they seated themselves at the breakfast table. "my friend, what would you!" cried duprèz. "i have not said that i will climb it; no! i never say that i will do anything, because i'm not sure of myself. how can i be? it is that _cher enfant_, lorimer, that said such brave words! see! . . . we arrive; we behold the shore--all black, great, vast! . . . rocks like needles, and, higher than all, this most fierce jedkè--bah! what a name!--straight as the spire of a cathedral. one must be a fly to crawl up it, and we, we are not flies--_ma foi_! no! lorimer, he laugh, he yawn--so! he say, 'not for me to-day; i very much thank you!' and then, we watch the sun. ah! that was grand, glorious, beautiful!" and duprèz kissed the tips of his fingers in ecstacy. "what did _you_ think about it, sandy?" asked sir philip. "i didna think much," responded macfarlane, shortly. "it's no sae grand a sight as a sunset in skye. and it's an uncanny business to see the sun losin' a' his poonctooality, and remainin' stock still, as it were, when it's his plain duty to set below the horizon. mysel', i think it's been fair over-rated. it's unnatural an' oot o' the common, say what ye like." "of course it is," agreed lorimer, who just then sauntered in from his cabin. "nature _is_ most unnatural. i always thought so. tea for me, phil, please; coffee wakes me up too suddenly. i say, what's the programme to-day?" "fishing in the alten," answered errington promptly. "that suits me perfectly," said lorimer, as he leisurely sipped his tea. "i'm an excellent fisher. i hold the line and generally forget to bait it. then,--while it trails harmlessly in the water, i doze; thus both the fish and i are happy." "and this evening," went on errington, "we must return the minister's call. he's been to the yacht twice. we're bound to go out of common politeness." "spare us, good lord!" groaned lorimer. "what a delightfully fat man is that good religious!" cried duprèz. "a living proof of the healthiness of norway!" "he's not a native," put in macfarlane; "he's frae yorkshire. he's only been a matter of three months here, filling the place o' the settled meenister who's awa' for a change of air." "he's a precious specimen of a humbug, anyhow," sighed lorimer drearily. "however, i'll be civil to him as long as he doesn't ask me to hear him preach. at that suggestion i'll fight him. he's soft enough to bruise easily." "ye're just too lazy to fight onybody," declared macfarlane. lorimer smiled sweetly. "thanks, awfully! i dare say you're right. i've never found it worth while as yet to exert myself in any particular direction. no one has asked me to exert myself; no one wants me to exert myself; therefore, why should i?" "don't ye want to get on in the world?" asked macfarlane, almost brusquely. "dear me, no! what an exhausting idea! get on in the world--what for? i have five hundred a year, and when my mother goes over to the majority (long distant be that day, for i'm very fond of the dear old lady), i shall have five thousand--more than enough to satisfy any sane man who doesn't want to speculate on the stock exchange. _your_ case, my good mac, is different. you will be a celebrated scotch divine. you will preach to a crowd of pious numskulls about predestination, and so forth. you will be stump-orator for the securing of seats in paradise. now, now, keep calm!--don't mind me. it's only a figure of speech! and the numskulls will call you a 'rare powerful rousin' preacher'--isn't that the way they go on? and when you die--for die you must, most unfortunately--they will give you a three-cornered block of granite (if they can make up their minds to part with the necessary bawbees) with your name prettily engraved thereon. that's all very nice; it suits some people. it wouldn't suit me." "what _would_ suit you?" queried errington. "you find everything more or less of a bore." "ah, my good little boy!" broke in duprèz. "paris is the place for you. you should live in paris. of that you would never fatigue yourself." "too much absinthe, secret murder and suicidal mania," returned lorimer, meditatively. "that was a neat idea about the coffins though. i never hoped to dine off a coffin." "ah! you mean the taverne de l'enfer?" exclaimed duprèz. "yes; the divine waitresses wore winding sheets, and the wine was served in imitation skulls. excellent! i remember; the tables were shaped like coffins." "gude lord almighty!" piously murmured macfarlane. "what a fearsome sicht!" as he pronounced these words with an unusually marked accent, duprèz looked inquiring. "what does our macfarlane say?" "he says it must have been a 'fearsome sicht,'" repeated lorimer, with even a stronger accent than sanby's own, "which, _mon cher_ pierre, means all the horrors in your language; _affreux_, _epouvantable_, _navrant_--anything you like, that is sufficiently terrible." "_mais, point du tout_!" cried duprèz energetically. "it was charming! it made us laugh at death--so much better than to cry! and there was a delicious child in a winding-sheet; brown curls, laughing eyes and little mouth; ha ha! but she was well worth kissing!" "i'd rather follow ma own funeral, than kiss a lass in a winding-sheet," said sandy, in solemn and horrified tones. "it's just awfu' to think on." "but, see, my friend," persisted duprèz, "you would not be permitted to follow your own funeral, not possible,--_voilà_! you _are_ permitted to kiss the pretty one in the winding-sheet. it _is_ possible. behold the difference!" "never mind the taverne de l'enfer just now," said errington, who had finished his breakfast hurriedly. "it's time for you fellows to get your fishing toggery on. i'm off to speak to the pilot." and away he went, followed more slowly by lorimer, who, though he pretended indifference, was rather curious to know more, if possible, concerning his friend's adventure of the morning. they found the pilot, valdemar svensen, leaning at his ease against the idle wheel, with his face turned towards the eastern sky. he was a stalwart specimen of norse manhood, tall and strongly built, with thoughtful, dignified features, and keen, clear hazel eyes. his chestnut hair, plentifully sprinkled with gray, clustered thickly over a broad brow, that was deeply furrowed with many a line of anxious and speculative thought, and the forcible brown hand that rested lightly on the spokes of the wheel, told its own tale of hard and honest labor. neither wife nor child, nor living relative had valdemar; the one passion of his heart was the sea. sir philip errington had engaged him at christiansund, hearing of him there as a man to whom the intricacies of the fjords, and the dangers of rock-bound coasts, were more familiar than a straight road on dry lake, and since then the management of the _eulalie_ had been entirely entrusted to him. though an eminently practical sailor, he was half a mystic, and believed in the wildest legends of his land with more implicit faith than many so-called christians believe in their sacred doctrines. he doffed his red cap respectfully now as errington and lorimer approached, smilingly wishing them "a fair day." sir philip offered him a cigar, and, coming to the point at once, asked abruptly-- "i say, svensen, are there any pretty girls in bosekop?" the pilot drew the newly lit cigar from his mouth, and passed his rough hand across his forehead in a sort of grave perplexity. "it is a matter in which i am foolish," he said at last, "for my ways have always gone far from the ways of women. girls there are plenty, i suppose, but--" he mused with pondering patience for awhile. then a broad smile broke like sunshine over his embrowned countenance, as he continued, "now, gentlemen, i do remember well; it is said that at bosekop yonder, are to be found some of the homeliest wenches in all norway." errington's face fell at this reply. lorimer turned away to hide the mischievous smile that came on his lips at his friend's discomfiture. "i _know_ it was that chartreuse," he thought to himself. "that and the midnight sun-effects. nothing else!" "what!" went on philip. "no good-looking girls at all about here, eh?" svensen shook his head, still smilingly. "not at bosekop, sir, that i ever heard of." "i say!" broke in lorimer, "are there any old tombs or sea-caves, or places of that sort close by, worth exploring?" valdemar svensen answered this question readily, almost eagerly. "no, sir! there are no antiquities of any sort; and as for caves, there are plenty, but only the natural formations of the sea, and none of these are curious or beautiful on this side of the fjord." lorimer poked his friend secretly in the ribs. "you've been dreaming, old fellow!" he whispered slyly. "i knew it was a crammer!" errington shook him off good-humoredly. "can you tell me," he said, addressing valdemar again in distinct accents, "whether there is any place, person, or thing near here called _thelma_?" the pilot started; a look of astonishment and fear came into his eyes; his hand went instinctively to his red cap, as though in deference to the name. "the fröken thelma!" he exclaimed, in low tones. "is it possible that you have seen her?" "ah, george, what do you say now?" cried errington delightedly. "yes, yes, valdemar; the fröken thelma, as you call her. who is she? . . . what is she?--and how can there be no pretty girls in bosekop if such a beautiful creature as she lives there?" valdemar looked troubled and vexed. "truly, i thought not of the maiden," he said gravely. "'tis not for me to speak of the daughter of olaf," here his voice sank a little, and his face grew more and more sombre. "pardon me, sir, but how did you meet her?" "by accident," replied errington promptly, not caring to relate his morning's adventure for the pilot's benefit. "is she some great personage here?" svensen sighed, and smiled somewhat dubiously. "great? oh, no; not what you would call great. her father, olaf güldmar, is a _bonde_,--that is, a farmer in his own right. he has a goodly house, and a few fair acres well planted and tilled,--also he pays his men freely,--but those that work for him are all he sees,--neither he nor his daughter ever visit the town. they dwell apart, and have nothing in common with their neighbors." "and where do they live?" asked lorimer, becoming as interested as he had formerly been incredulous. the pilot leaned lightly over the rail of the deck and pointed towards the west. "you see that great rock shaped like a giant's helmet, and behind it a high green knoll, clustered thick with birch and pine?" they nodded assent. "at the side of the knoll is the _bonde's_ house, a good eight-mile walk from the outskirts of bosekop. should you ever seek to rest there, gentlemen," and svensen spoke with quiet resolution, "i doubt whether you will receive a pleasant welcome." and he looked at them both with an inquisitive air, as though seeking to discover their intentions. "is that so?" drawled lorimer lazily, giving his friend an expressive nudge. "ah! _we_ shan't trouble them! thanks for your information, valdemar! we don't intend to hunt up the--what d'ye call him?--the _bonde_, if he's at all surly. hospitality that gives you greeting and a dinner for nothing,--that's what suits _me_." "our people are not without hospitality," said the pilot, with a touch of wistful and appealing dignity. "all along your journey, gentlemen, you have been welcomed gladly, as you know. but olaf güldmar is not like the rest of us; he has the pride and fierceness of olden days; his manners and customs are different; and few like him. he is much feared." "you know him then?" inquired errington carelessly. "i know him," returned valdemar quietly. "and his daughter is fair as the sun and the sea. but it is not my place to speak of them--." he broke off, and after a slightly embarrassed pause, asked, "will the herren wish to sail to-day?" "no valdemar," answered errington indifferently. "not till to-morrow, when we'll visit the kaa fjord if the weather keeps fair." "very good, sir," and the pilot, tacitly avoiding any further converse with his employer respecting the mysterious thelma and her equally mysterious father, turned to examine the wheel and compass as though something there needed his earnest attention. errington and lorimer strolled up and down the polished white deck arm-in-arm, talking in low tones. "you didn't ask him about the coffin and the dwarf," said lorimer. "no; because i believe he knows nothing of either, and it would be news to him which i'm not bound to give. if i can manage to see the girl again the mystery of the cave may explain itself." "well, what are you going to do?" errington looked meditative. "nothing at present. we'll go fishing with the others. but, i tell you what, if you're up to it, we'll leave duprèz and macfarlane at the minister's house this evening and tell them to wait for us there,--once they all begin to chatter they never know how time goes. meanwhile you and i will take the boat and row over in search of this farmer's abode. i believe there's a short cut to it by water; at any rate i know the way _she_ went." "'i know the way she went home with her maiden posy!'" quoted lorimer, with a laugh. "you are hit phil, 'a very palpable hit'! who would have thought it! clara winsleigh needn't poison her husband after all in-order to marry you, for nothing but a sun-empress will suit you now." "don't be a fool, george," said errington, half vexedly, as the hot color mounted to his face in spite of himself. "it is all idle curiosity, nothing else. after what svensen told us, i'm quite as anxious to see this gruff old _bonde_ as his daughter." lorimer held up a reproachful finger. "now, phil, don't stoop to duplicity--not with me, at any rate. why disguise your feelings? why, as the tragedians say, endeavor to crush the noblest and best emotions that ever warm the _boo-zum_ of man? chivalrous sentiment and admiration for beauty,--chivalrous desire to pursue it and catch it and call it your own,--i understand it all, my dear boy! but my prophetic soul tells me you will have to strangle the excellent olaf güldmar--heavens! what a name!--before you will be allowed to make love to his fair _chee-ild_. then don't forget the madman with the torch,--he may turn up in the most unexpected fashion and give you no end of trouble. but, by jove, it _is_ a romantic affair, positively quite stagey! something will come of it, serious or comic. i wonder which?" errington laughed, but said nothing in reply, as their two companions ascended from the cabin at that moment, in full attire for the fishing expedition, followed by the steward bearing a large basket of provisions for luncheon,--and all private conversation came to an end. hastening the rest of their preparations, within twenty minutes they were skimming across the fjord in a long boat manned by four sailors, who rowed with a will and sent the light craft scudding through the water with the swiftness of an arrow. landing, they climbed the dewy hills spangled thick with forget-me-nots and late violets, till they reached a shady and secluded part of the river, where, surrounded by the songs of hundreds of sweet-throated birds, they commenced their sport, which kept them, well employed till a late hour in the afternoon. chapter iv. "thou art violently carried away from grace; there is a devil haunts thee in the likeness of a fat old man,--a tun of man is thy companion." shakespeare. the reverend charles dyceworthy sat alone in the small dining-room of his house at bosekop, finishing a late tea, and disposing of round after round of hot buttered toast with that suave alacrity he always displayed in the consumption of succulent eatables. he was a largely made man, very much on the wrong side of fifty, with accumulations of unwholesome fat on every available portion of his body. his round face was cleanly shaven and shiny, as though its flabby surface were frequently polished with some sort of luminous grease instead of the customary soap. his mouth was absurdly small and pursy for so broad a countenance,--his nose seemed endeavoring to retreat behind his puffy cheeks as though painfully aware of its own insignificance,--and he had little, sharp, ferret-like eyes of a dull mahogany brown, which were utterly destitute of even the faintest attempt at any actual expression. they were more like glass beads than eyes, and glittered under their scanty fringe of pale-colored lashes with a sort of shallow cunning which might mean malice or good-humor,--no one looking at them could precisely determine which. his hair was of an indefinite shade, neither light nor dark, somewhat of the tinge of a dusty potato before it is washed clean. it was neatly brushed and parted in the middle with mathematical precision, while from the back of his head it was brought forward in two projections, one on each side, like budding wings behind his ears. it was impossible for the most fastidious critic to find fault with the reverend mr. dyceworthy's hands. he had beautiful hands, white, soft, plump and well-shaped,--his delicate filbert nails were trimmed with punctilious care, and shone with a pink lustre that was positively charming. he was evidently an amiable man, for he smiled to himself over his tea,--he had a trick of smiling,--ill-natured people said he did it on purpose, in order to widen his mouth and make it more in pro-portion to the size of his face. such remarks, however, emanated only from the spiteful and envious who could not succeed in winning the social popularity that everywhere attended mr. dyceworthy's movements. for he was undoubtedly popular,--no one could deny that. in the small yorkshire town where he usually had his abode, he came little short of being adored by the women of his own particular sect, who crowded to listen to his fervent discourses, and came away from them on the verge of hysteria, so profoundly moved were their sensitive souls by his damnatory doctrines. the men were more reluctant in their admiration, yet even they were always ready to admit "that he was an excellent fellow, with his heart in the right place." he had a convenient way of getting ill at the proper seasons, and of requiring immediate change of air, whereupon his grateful flock were ready and willing to subscribe the money necessary for their beloved preacher to take repose and relaxation in any part of the world he chose. this year, however, they had not been asked to furnish the usual funds for travelling expenses, for the resident minister of bosekop, a frail, gentle old man, had been seriously prostrated during the past winter with an affection of the lungs, which necessitated his going to a different climate for change and rest. knowing dyceworthy as a zealous member of the lutheran persuasion, and, moreover, as one who had in his youth lived for some years in christiania,--thereby gaining a knowledge of the norwegian tongue,--he invited him to take his place for his enforced time of absence, offering him his house, his servants, his pony-carriage and an agreeable pecuniary _douceur_ in exchange for his services,--proposals which the reverend charles eagerly accepted. though norway was not exactly new to him, the region of the alten fjord was, and he at once felt, though he knew not why, that the air there would be the very thing to benefit his delicate constitution. besides, it looked well for at least _one_ occasion, to go away for the summer without asking his congregation to pay for his trip. it was generous on his part, almost noble. the ladies of his flock wept at his departure and made him socks, comforters, slippers, and other consoling gear of the like description to recall their sweet memories to his saintly mind during his absence from their society. but, truth to tell, mr. dyceworthy gave little thought to these fond and regretful fair ones; he was much too comfortable at bosekop to look back with any emotional yearning to the ugly, precise little provincial town he had left behind him. the minister's quaint, pretty house suited him perfectly; the minister's servants were most punctual in their services: the minister's phaeton conveniently held his cumbrous person, and the minister's pony was a quiet beast, that trotted good-temperedly wherever it was guided, and shied at nothing. yes, he was thoroughly comfortable,--as comfortable as a truly pious fat man deserves to be, and all the work he had to do was to preach twice on sundays, to a quiet, primitive, decently ordered congregation, who listened to his words respectfully though without displaying any emotional rapture. their stolidity, however, did not affect him,--he preached to please himself,--loving above all things to hear the sound of his own voice, and never so happy as when thundering fierce denunciations against the church of rome. his thoughts seemed tending in that direction now, as he poured himself out his third cup of tea and smilingly shook his head over it, while he stirred the cream and sugar in,--for he took from his waistcoat pocket a small glittering object and laid it before him on the table, still shaking his head and smiling with a patient, yet reproachful air of superior wisdom. it was a crucifix of mother-o'-pearl and silver, the symbol of the christian faith. but it seemed to carry no sacred suggestions to the soul of mr. dyceworthy. on the contrary, he looked at it with an expression of meek ridicule,--ridicule that bordered on contempt. "a roman," he murmured placidly to himself, between two large bites of toast. "the girl is a roman, and thereby hopelessly damned." and he smiled again,--more sweetly than before, as though the idea of hopeless damnation suggested some peculiarly agreeable reflections. unfolding his fine cologne-scented cambric handkerchief, he carefully wiped his fat white fingers free from the greasy marks of the toast, and, taking up the objectionable cross gingerly, as though it were red-hot, he examined it closely on all sides. there were some words engraved on the back of it, and after some trouble mr. dyceworthy spelt them out. they were "_passio christi, conforta me. thelma._" he shook his head with a sort of resigned cheerfulness. "hopelessly damned," he murmured again gently, "unless--" what alternative suggested itself to his mind was not precisely apparent, for his thoughts suddenly turned in a more frivolous direction. rising from the now exhausted tea-table, he drew out a small pocket-mirror and surveyed himself therein with a mild approval. with the extreme end of his handkerchief he tenderly removed two sacrilegious crumbs that presumed to linger in the corners of his piously pursed mouth. in the same way he detached a morsel of congealed butter that clung pertinaciously to the end of his bashfully retreating nose. this done, he again looked at himself with increased satisfaction, and, putting by his pocket-mirror, rang the bell. it was answered at once by a tall, strongly built woman, with a colorless, stolid countenance,--that might have been carved out of wood for any expression it had in it. "ulrika," said mr. dyceworthy blandly, "you can clear the table." ulrika, without answering, began to pack the tea-things together in a methodical way, without clattering so much as a plate or spoon, and, piling them compactly on a tray, was about to leave the room, when mr. dyceworthy called to her, "ulrika!" "sir?" "did you ever see a thing like this before?" and he held up the crucifix to her gaze. the woman shuddered, and her dull eyes lit up with a sudden terror. "it is the witch's charm!" she muttered thickly, while her pale face grew yet paler. "burn it, sir!--burn it, and the power will leave her." mr. dyceworthy laughed indulgently. "my good woman, you mistake," he said suavely. "your zeal for the true gospel leads you into error. there are thousands of misguided persons who worship such a thing as this. it is often all of our dear lord they know. sad, very sad! but still, though they, alas! are not of the elect, and are plainly doomed to perdition,--they are not precisely what are termed witches, ulrika." "_she_ is," replied the woman with a sort of ferocity; "and, if i had my way, i would tell her so to her face, and see what would happen to her then!" "tut, tut!" remarked mr. dyceworthy amiably. "the days of witchcraft are past. you show some little ignorance, ulrika. you are not acquainted with the great advancement of recent learning." "maybe, maybe," and ulrika turned to go; but she muttered sullenly as she went, "there be them that know and could tell, and them that will have her yet." she shut the door behind her with a sharp clang, and, left to himself, mr. dyceworthy again smiled--such a benignant, fatherly smile! he then walked to the window and looked out. it was past seven o'clock, an hour that elsewhere would have been considered evening, but in bosekop at that season it still seemed afternoon. the sun was shining brilliantly, and in the minister's front garden the roses were all wide awake. a soft moisture glittered on every tiny leaf and blade of grass. the penetrating and delicious odor of sweet violets scented each puff of wind, and now and then the call of the cuckoo pierced the air with a subdued, far-off shrillness. from his position mr. dyceworthy could catch a glimpse through the trees of the principal thoroughfare of bosekop--a small, primitive street enough, of little low houses, which, though unpretending from without, were roomy and comfortable within. the distant, cool sparkle of the waters of the fjord, the refreshing breeze, the perfume of the flowers, and the satisfied impression left on his mind by recent tea and toast--all these things combined had a soothing effect on mr. dyceworthy, and with a sigh of absolute comfort he settled his large person in a deep easy chair and composed himself for pious meditation. he meditated long,--with fast-closed eyes and open mouth, while the earnestness of his inward thoughts was clearly demonstrated now and then by an irrepressible,--almost triumphant,--cornet-blast from that trifling elevation of his countenance called by courtesy a nose, when his blissful reverie was suddenly broken in upon by the sound of several footsteps crunching slowly along the garden path, and, starting up from his chair, he perceived four individuals clad in white flannel costumes and wearing light straw hats trimmed with fluttering blue ribbons, who were leisurely sauntering up to his door, and stopping occasionally to admire the flowers on their way. mr. dyceworthy's face reddened visibly with excitement. "the gentlemen from the yacht," he murmured to himself, hastily settling his collar and cravat, and pushing up his cherubic wings of hair more prominently behind his ears. "i never thought they would come. dear me! sir philip errington himself, too! i must have refreshments instantly." and he hurried from the room, calling his orders to ulrika as he went, and before the visitors had time to ring, he had thrown open the door to them himself, and stood smiling urbanely on the threshold, welcoming them with enthusiasm,--and assuring sir philip especially how much honored he felt, by his thus visiting, familiarly and unannounced, his humble dwelling. errington waved his many compliments good-humoredly aside, and allowed himself and his friends to be marshalled into the best parlor, the drawing-room of the house, a pretty little apartment whose window looked out upon a tangled yet graceful wilderness of flowers. "nice, cosy place this," remarked lorimer, as he seated himself negligently on the arm of the sofa. "you must be pretty comfortable here?" their perspiring and affable host rubbed his soft white hands together gently. "i thank heaven it suits my simple needs," he answered meekly. "luxuries do not become a poor servant of god." "ah, then you are different to many others who profess to serve the same master," said duprèz with a _sourire fin_ that had the devil's own mockery in it. "_monsieur le bon dieu_ is very impartial! some serve him by constant over-feeding, others by constant over-starving; it is all one to him apparently! how do you know which among his servants he likes best, the fat or the lean?" sandy macfarlane, though slightly a bigot for his own form of doctrine, broke into a low chuckle of irrepressible laughter at duprèz's levity, but mr. dyceworthy's flabby face betokened the utmost horror. "sir," he said gravely, "there are subjects concerning which it is not seemly to speak without due reverence. he knoweth his own elect. he hath chosen them out from the beginning. he summoned forth from the million, the glorious apostle of reform, martin luther--" "_le bon gaillard!_" laughed duprèz. "tempted by a pretty nun! what man could resist! myself, i would try to upset all the creeds of this world if i saw a pretty nun worth my trouble. yes, truly! a pity though, that the poor luther died of over-eating; his exit from life so undignified!" "shut up, duprèz," said errington severely. "you displease mr. dyceworthy by your fooling." "oh, pray do not mention it, sir philip," murmured the reverend gentleman with a mild patience. "we must accustom ourselves to hear with forbearance the opinions of all men, howsoever contradictory, otherwise our vocation is of no avail. yet is it sorely grievous to me to consider that there should be any person or persons existent who lack the necessary faith requisite for the performance of god's promises." "ye must understand, mr. dyceworthy," said macfarlane in his slow, deliberate manner, "that ye have before ye a young frenchman who doesna believe in onything except himsel'--and even as to whether he himsel' is a mon or a myth, he has his doots--vera grave doots." duprèz nodded delightedly. "that is so!" he exclaimed. "our dear sandy puts it so charmingly! to be a myth seems original,--to be a mere man, quite ordinary. i believe it is possible to find some good scientific professor who would prove me to be a myth--the moving shadow of a dream--imagine!--how perfectly poetical!" "you talk too much to be a dream, my boy," laughed errington, and turning to mr. dyceworthy, he added, "i'm afraid you must think us a shocking set. we are really none of us very religious, i fear, though," and he tried to look serious; "if it had not been for mr. lorimer, we should have come to church last sunday. mr. lorimer was, unfortunately, rather indisposed." "ya-as!" drawled that gentleman, turning from the little window where he had been gathering a rose for his button-hole. "i was knocked up; had fits, and all that sort of thing; took these three fellows all their time on sunday to hold me down!" "dear me!" and mr. dyceworthy was about to make further inquiries concerning mr. lorimer's present state of health, when the door opened, and ulrika entered, bearing a large tray laden with wine and other refreshments. as she set it down, she gave a keen, covert glance round the room, as though rapidly taking note of the appearance and faces of all the young men, then, with a sort of stiff curtsey, she departed as noiselessly as she had come,--not, however, without leaving a disagreeable impression on errington's mind. "rather a stern phyllis, that waiting-maid of yours," he remarked, watching his host, who was carefully drawing the cork from one of the bottles of wine. mr. dyceworthy smiled. "oh, no, no! not stern at all," he answered sweetly. "on the contrary, most affable and kind-hearted. her only fault is that she is a little zealous,--over-zealous for the purity of the faith; and she has suffered much; but she is an excellent woman, really excellent! sir philip, will you try this lacrima christi?" "lacrima christi!" exclaimed duprèz. "you do not surely get that in norway?" "it seems strange, certainly," replied mr. dyceworthy, "but it is a fact that the italian or papist wines are often used here. the minister whose place i humbly endeavor to fill has his cellar stocked with them. the matter is easy of comprehension when once explained. the benighted inhabitants of italy, a land, lost in the darkness of error, still persist in their fasts, notwithstanding the evident folly of their ways--and the norwegian sailors provide them with large quantities of fish for their idolatrous customs, bringing back their wines in exchange." "a very good idea," said lorimer, sipping the lacrima with evident approval--"phil, i doubt if your brands on board the _eulalie_ are better than this." "hardly so good," replied errington with some surprise, as he tasted the wine and noted its delicious flavor. "the minister must be a fine _connoisseur_. are there many other families about here, mr. dyceworthy, who know how to choose their wines so well?" mr. dyceworthy smiled with a dubious air. "there is one other household that in the matter of choice liquids is almost profanely particular," he said. "but they are people who are ejected with good reason from respectable society, and,--it behooves me not to speak of their names." "oh, indeed!" said errington, while a sudden and inexplicable thrill of indignation fired his blood and sent it in a wave of color up to his forehead--"may i ask--" but he was interrupted by lorimer, who, nudging him slyly on one side, muttered, "keep cool, old fellow! you can't tell whether he's talking about the güldmar folk! be quiet--you don't want every one to know your little game." thus adjured, philip swallowed a large gulp of wine, to keep down his feelings, and strove to appear interested in the habits and caprices of bees, a subject into which mr. dyceworthy had just inveigled duprèz and macfarlane. "come and see my bees," said the reverend charles almost pathetically. "they are emblems of ever-working and patient industry,--storing up honey for others to partake thereof." "they wudna store it up at a', perhaps, if they knew that," observed sandy significantly. mr. dyceworthy positively shone all over with beneficence. "they _would_ store it up, sir; yes, they would, even if they knew! it is god's will that they should store it up; it is god's will that they should show an example of unselfishness, that they should flit from flower to flower sucking therefrom the sweetness to impart into strange palates unlike their own. it is a beautiful lesson; it teaches us who are the ministers of the lord to likewise suck the sweetness from the flowers of the living gospel, and impart it gladly to the unbelievers who shall find it sweeter than the sweetest honey!" and he shook his head piously several times, while the pores of his fat visage exuded holy oil. duprèz sniggered secretly. macfarlane looked preternaturally solemn. "come," repeated the reverend gentleman, with an inviting smile. "come and see my bees,--also my strawberries! i shall be delighted to send a basket of the fruit to the yacht, if sir philip will permit me?" errington expressed his thanks with due courtesy, and hastened to seize the opportunity that presented itself for breaking away from the party. "if you will excuse us for twenty minutes or so, mr. dyceworthy," he said, "lorimer and i want to consult a fellow here in bosekop about some new fishing tackle. we shan't be gone long. mac, you and duprèz wait for us here. don't commit too many depredations on mr. dyceworthy's strawberries." the reason for their departure was so simply and naturally given, that it was accepted without any opposing remarks. duprèz was delighted to have the chance of amusing himself by harassing the reverend charles with open professions of utter atheism, and macfarlane, who loved an argument more than he loved whiskey, looked forward to a sharp discussion presently concerning the superiority of john knox, morally and physically, over martin luther. so that when the others went their way, their departure excited no suspicion in the minds of their friends, and most unsuspecting of all was the placid mr. dyceworthy, who, had he imagined for an instant the direction which they were going, would certainly not have discoursed on the pleasures of bee-keeping with the calmness and placid conviction, that always distinguished him when holding forth on any subject that was attractive to his mind. leading the way through his dewy, rose-grown garden, and conversing amicably as he went, he escorted macfarlane and duprèz to what he called with a gentle humor his "bee-metropolis," while errington and lorimer returned to the shore of the fjord, where they had left their boat moored to a small, clumsily constructed pier,--and entering it, they set themselves to the oars and pulled away together with the long, steady, sweeping stroke rendered famous by the exploits of the oxford and cambridge men. after some twenty minutes' rowing, lorimer looked up and spoke as he drew his blade swiftly through the bright green water. "i feel as though i were aiding and abetting you in some crime, phil. you know, my first impression of this business remains the same. you had much better leave it alone." "why?" asked errington coolly. "well, 'pon my life i don't know why. except that, from long experience, i have proved that it's always dangerous and troublesome to run after a woman. leave her to run after you--she'll do it fast enough." "wait till you see her. besides, i'm not running after any woman," averred philip with some heat. "oh, i beg your pardon--i forgot. she's not a woman; she's a sun-angel. you are rowing, not running, after a sun-angel. is that correct? i say, don't drive through the water like that; you'll pull the boat round." errington slackened his speed and laughed. "it's only curiosity," he said, lifting his hat, and pushing back the clustering dark-brown curls from his brow. "i bet you that sleek dyceworthy fellow meant the old _bonde_ and his daughter, when he spoke of persons who were 'ejected' from the social circles of bosekop. fancy bosekop society presuming to be particular--what an absurd idea!" "my good fellow, don't pretend to be so deplorably ignorant! surely you know that a trumpery village or a two-penny town is much more choice and exclusive in its 'sets' than a great city? i wouldn't live in a small place for the world. every inhabitant would know the cut of my clothes by heart, and the number of buttons on my waistcoat. the grocer would copy the pattern of my trousers,--the butcher would carry a cane like mine. it would be simply insufferable. to change the subject, may i ask you if you know which way you are going, for it seems to me we're bound straight for a smash on that uncomfortable-looking rock, where there is certainly no landing-place." errington stopped pulling, and, standing up in the boat, began to examine the surroundings with keen interest. they were close to the great crag "shaped like a giant's helmet," as valdemar svensen had said. it rose sheer out of the water, and its sides were almost perpendicular. some beautiful star-shaped sea anemones clung to it in a vari-colored cluster on one projection, and the running ripple of the small waves broke on its jagged corners with a musical splash, and sparkle of white foam. below them, in the emerald mirror of the fjord, it was so clear that they could see the fine white sand lying at the bottom, sprinkled thick with shells and lithe moving creatures of all shapes, while every now and then, there streamed past them, brilliantly tinted specimens of the medusae, with their long feelers or tendrils, looking like torn skins of crimson and azure floss silk. the place was very silent; only the sea-gulls circled round and round the summit of the great rock, some of them occasionally swooping down on the unwary fishes, their keen eyes perceived in the waters beneath, then up again they soared, swaying their graceful wings and uttering at intervals that peculiar wild cry that in solitary haunts sounds so intensely mournful. errington gazed about him in doubt for some minutes, then suddenly his face brightened. he sat down again in the boat and resumed his oar. "row quietly, george," he said in a subdued tone "quietly--round to the left." the oars dipped noiselessly, and the boat shot forward,--then swerved sharply round in the direction,--and there before them lay a small sandy creek, white and shining as though sprinkled with powdered silver. from this, a small but strongly-built wooden pier ran out into the sea. it was carved all over with fantastic figures, and in it at equal distances, were fastened iron rings, such as are used for the safe mooring of boats. one boat was there already, and errington recognized it with delight. it was that in which he had seen the mysterious maiden disappear. high and dry on the sand, out of reach of the tides, was a neat sailing-vessel; its name was painted round the stern--_the valkyrie_. as the two friends ran their boat on shore, and fastened it to the furthest ring of the convenient pier, they caught the distant sound of the plaintiff "coo-cooing" of turtle doves. "you've done it this time, old boy," said lorimer, speaking in a whisper, though he knew not why. "this is the old _bonde's_ own private landing-place evidently, and here's a footpath leading somewhere. shall we follow it?" philip emphatically assented, and, treading softly, like the trespassers they felt themselves to be, they climbed the ascending narrow way that guided them up from the seashore, round through a close thicket of pines, where their footsteps fell noiselessly on a thick carpet of velvety green moss, dotted prettily here and there with the red gleam of ripening wild strawberries. everything was intensely still, and as yet there seemed no sign of human habitation. suddenly a low whirring sound broke upon their ears, and errington, who was a little in advance of his companion, paused abruptly with a smothered exclamation, and drew back on tip-toe, catching lorimer by the arm. "by jove!" he whispered excitedly, "we've come right up to the very windows of the house. look!" lorimer obeyed, and for once, the light jest died upon his tips. surprise and admiration held him absolutely silent. chapter v. "elle filait et souriait--et je crois qu'elle enveloppa mon coeur avec son fil."--heine. before them, close enough for their outstretched hands to have touched it, was what appeared to be a framed picture, exquisitely painted,--a picture perfect in outline matchless in color, faultless in detail,--but which was in reality nothing but a large latticed window thrown wide open to admit the air. they could now see distinctly through the shadows cast by the stately pines, a long, low, rambling house, built roughly, but strongly, of wooden rafters, all overgrown with green and blossoming creepers; but they scarcely glanced at the actual building, so strongly was their attention riveted on the one window before them. it was surrounded by an unusually broad framework, curiously and elaborately carved, and black as polished ebony. flowers grew all about it,--sweet peas, mignonette, and large purple pansies--while red and white climbing roses rioted in untrained profusion over its wide sill. above it was a quaintly built dovecote, where some of the strutting fan-tailed inhabitants were perched, swelling out their snowy breasts, and discoursing of their domestic trials in notes of dulcet melancholy; while lower down, three or four ring-doves nestled on the roof in a patch of sunlight, spreading up their pinions like miniature sails, to catch the warmth and lustre. within the deep, shadowy embrasure, like a jewel placed on dark velvet, was seated a girl spinning,--no other than the mysterious maiden of the shell cavern. she was attired in a plain, straight gown, of some soft white woolen stuff, cut squarely at her throat; her round, graceful arms were partially bare, and as the wheel turned swiftly, and her slender hands busied themselves with the flax, she smiled, as though some pleasing thought had touched her mind. her smile had the effect of sudden sunshine in the dark room where she sat and span,--it was radiant and mirthful as the smile of a happy child. yet her dark blue eyes remained pensive and earnest, and the smile soon faded, leaving her fair face absorbed and almost dreamy. the whirr-whirring of the wheel grew less and less rapid,--it slackened,--it stopped altogether,--and, as though startled by some unexpected sound, the girl paused and listened, pushing away the clustering masses of her rich hair from her brow. then rising slowly from her seat, she advanced to the window, put aside the roses with one hand, and looked out,--thus forming another picture as beautiful, if not more beautiful, than the first. lorimer drew his breath hard. "i say, old fellow," he whispered; but errington pressed his arm with vice-like firmness, as a warning to him to be silent, while they both stepped farther back into the dusky gloom of the pine boughs. the girl, meanwhile, stood motionless, in a half-expectant attitude, and, seeing her there, some of the doves on the roof flew down and strutted on the ground before her, coo-cooing proudly, as though desirous of attracting her attention. one of them boldly perched on the window-sill; she glanced at the bird musingly, and softly stroked its opaline wings and shining head without terrifying it. it seemed delighted to be noticed, and almost lay down under her hand in order to be more conveniently caressed. still gently smoothing its feathers, she leaned further out among the clambering wealth of blossoms, and called in a low, penetrating tone, "father! father! is that you?" there was no answer; and, after waited a minute or two, she moved and resumed her former seat, the stray doves flew back to their customary promenade on the roof, and the drowsy whirr-whirr of the spinning-wheel murmured again its monotonous hum upon the air. "come on, phil," whispered lorimer, determined not to be checked this time; "i feel perfectly wretched! it's mean of us to be skulking about here, as if we were a couple of low thieves waiting to trap some of those birds for a pigeon-pie. come away,--you've seen her; that's enough." errington did not move. holding back a branch of pine, he watched the movements of the girl at her wheel with absorbed fascination. suddenly her sweet lips parted, and she sang a weird, wild melody, that seemed, like a running torrent, to have fallen from the crests of the mountains, bringing with it echoes from the furthest summits, mingled with soft wailings of a mournful wind. her voice was pure as the ring of fine crystal--deep, liquid, and tender, with a restrained passion in it that stirred errington's heart and filled it with a strange unrest and feverish yearning,--emotions which were new to him, and which, while he realized their existence, moved him to a sort of ashamed impatience. he would have willingly left his post of observation now, if only for the sake of shaking off his unwonted sensations; and he took a step or two backwards for that purpose, when lorimer, in his turn, laid a detaining hand on his shoulder. "for heaven's sake, let us hear the song through!" he said in subdued tones. "what a voice! a positive golden flute!" his rapt face betokened his enjoyment, and errington, nothing loth, still lingered, his eyes fixed on the white-robed slim figure framed in the dark old rose-wreathed window--the figure that swayed softly with the motion of the wheel and the rhythm of the song,--while flickering sunbeams sparkled now and then on the maiden's dusky gold hair, or touched up a warmer tint on her tenderly flushed cheeks, and fair neck, more snowy than the gown she wore. music poured from her lips as from the throat of a nightingale. the words she sang were norwegian, and her listeners understood nothing of them; but the melody,--the pathetic appealing melody,--soul-moving as all true melody must be, touched the very core of their hearts, and entangled them in a web of delicious reveries. "talk of ary scheffer's gretchen!" murmured lorimer with a sigh. "what a miserable, pasty, milk-and-watery young person she is beside that magnificent, unconscious beauty! i give in, phil! i admit your taste. i'm willing to swear that she's a sun-angel if you like. her voice has convinced me of that." at that instant the song ceased. errington turned and regarded him steadfastly. "are _you_ hit, george?" he said softly, with a forced smile. lorimer's face flushed, but he met his friend's eyes frankly. "i am no poacher, old fellow," he answered in the same quiet accents; "i think you know that. if that girl's mind is as lovely as her face, i say, go in and win!" sir philip smiled. his brow cleared and an expression of relief settled there. the look of gladness was unconscious; but lorimer saw it at once and noted it. "nonsense!" he said in a mirthful undertone. "how can i go in and win, as you say? what am i to do? i can't go up to that window and speak to her,--she might take me for a thief." "you look like a thief," replied lorimer, surveying his friend's athletic figure, clad in its loose but well-cut yachting suit of white flannel, ornamented with silver anchor buttons, and taking a comprehensive glance from the easy pose of the fine head and handsome face, down to the trim foot with the high and well-arched instep, "very much like a thief? i wonder i haven't noticed it before. any london policeman would arrest you on the mere fact of your suspicious appearance." errington laughed. "well, my boy, whatever my looks may testify, i am at this moment an undoubted trespasser on private property,--and so are you for that matter. what shall we do?" "find the front door and ring the bell," suggested george promptly. "say we are benighted travellers and have lost our way. the _bonde_ can but flay us. the operation, i believe, is painful, but it cannot last long." "george, you are incorrigible! suppose we go back and try the other side of this pine-wood? that might lead us to the front of the house." "i don't see why we shouldn't walk coolly past that window," said lorimer. "if any observation is made by the fair 'marguerite' yonder, we can boldly say we have come to see the _bonde_." unconsciously they had both raised their voices a little during the latter part of their hasty dialogue, and at the instant when lorimer uttered the last words, a heavy hand was laid on each of their shoulders,--a hand that turned them round forcibly away from the window they had been gazing at, and a deep, resonant voice addressed them. "the _bonde_? truly, young men, you need seek no further,--i am olaf güldmar!" had he said, "i am an emperor!" he could not have spoken with more pride. errington and his friend were for a moment speechless,--partly from displeasure at the summary manner in which they had been seized and twisted round like young uprooted saplings, and partly from surprise and involuntary admiration for the personage who had treated them with such scant courtesy. they saw before them a man somewhat above the middle height, who might have served an aspiring sculptor as a perfect model for a chieftain of old gaul, or a dauntless viking. his frame was firmly and powerfully built, and seemed to be exceptionally strong and muscular; yet an air of almost courtly grace pervaded his movements, making each attitude he assumed more or less picturesque. he was broad-shouldered and deep-chested; his face was full and healthily colored, while his head was truly magnificent. well-poised and shapely, it indicated power, will, and wisdom; and was furthermore adorned by a rough, thick mass of snow-white hair that shone in the sunlight like spun silver. his beard was short and curly, trimmed after the fashion of the warriors of old rome; and, from under his fierce, fuzzy, grey eyebrows, a pair of sentinel eyes, that were keen, clear, and bold as an eagle's, looked out with a watchful steadiness--steadiness that like the sharp edge of a diamond, seemed warranted to cut through the brittle glass of a lie. judging by his outward appearance, his age might have been guessed at as between fifty-eight and sixty, but he was, in truth, seventy-two, and more strong, active, and daring than many another man whose years are not counted past the thirties. he was curiously attired, after something of the fashion of the highlander, and something yet more of the ancient greek, in a tunic, vest, and loose jacket all made of reindeer skin, thickly embroidered with curious designs worked in coarse thread and colored beads; while thrown carelessly over his shoulders and knotted at his waist, was a broad scarf of white woollen stuff, or _wadmel_, very soft-looking and warm. in his belt he carried a formidable hunting-knife, and as he faced the two intruders on his ground, he rested one hand lightly yet suggestively on a weighty staff of pine, which was notched all over with quaint letters and figures, and terminated in a curved handle at the top. he waited for the young men to speak, and finding they remained silent, he glanced at them half angrily and again repeated his words-- "i am the _bonde_,--olaf güldmar. speak your business and take your departure; my time is brief!" lorimer looked up with his usual nonchalance,--a faint smile playing about his lips. he saw at once that the old farmer was not a man to be trifled with, and he raised his cap with a ready grace as he spoke. "fact is," he said frankly, "we've no business here at all--not the least in the world. we are perfectly aware of it! we are trespassers, and we know it. pray don't be hard on us, mr.--mr. güldmar!" the _bonde_ glanced him over with a quick lightening of the eyes, and the suspicion of a smile in the depths of his curly beard. he turned to errington. "is this true? you came here on purpose, knowing the ground was private property?" errington, in his turn, lifted his cap from his clustering brown curls with that serene and stately court manner which was to him second nature. "we did," he confessed, quietly following lorimer's cue, and seeing also that it was best to be straightforward. "we heard you spoken of in bosekop, and we came to see if you would permit us the honor of your acquaintance." the old man struck his pine-staff violently into the ground, and his face flushed wrathfully. "bosekop!" he exclaimed. "talk to me of a wasp's nest! bosekop! you shall hear of me there enough to satisfy your appetite for news. bosekop! in the days when my race ruled the land, such people as they that dwell there would have been put to sharpen my sword on the grindstone, or to wait, hungry and humble, for the refuse of the food left from my table!" he spoke with extraordinary heat and passion,--it was evidently necessary to soothe him. lorimer took a covert glance backward over his shoulder towards the lattice window, and saw that the white figure at the spinning-wheel had disappeared. "my dear mr. güldmar," he then said with polite fervor, "i assure you i think the bosekop folk by no means deserve to sharpen your sword on the grindstone, or to enjoy the remains of your dinner! myself, i despise them! my friend here, sir philip errington, despises them--don't you, phil?" errington nodded demurely. "what my friend said just now is perfectly true," continued lorimer. "we desire the honor of your acquaintance,--it will charm and delight us above all things!" and his face beamed with a candid, winning, boyish smile, which was very captivating in its own way, and which certainly had its effect on the old _bonde_, for his tone softened, though he said gravely-- "my acquaintance, young men, is never sought by any. those who are wise, keep away from me. i love not strangers, it is best you should know it. i freely pardon your trespass; take your leave, and go in peace." the two friends exchanged disconsolate looks. there really seemed nothing for it, but to obey this unpleasing command. errington made one more venture. "may i hope, mr. güldmar," he said with persuasive courtesy, "that you will break through your apparent rule of seclusion for once and visit me on board my yacht? you have no doubt seen her--the _eulalie_--she lies at anchor in the fjord." the _bonde_ looked him straight in the eyes. "i have seen her. a fair toy vessel to amuse an idle young man's leisure! you are he that in that fool's hole of a bosekop, is known as the 'rich englishman,'--an idle trifler with time,--an aimless wanderer from those dull shores where they eat gold till they die of surfeit! i have heard of you,--a mushroom knight, a fungus of nobility,--an ephemeral growth on a grand decaying old tree, whose roots lie buried in the annals of a far forgotten past." the rich, deep voice of the old man quivered as he spoke, and a shadow of melancholy flitted across his brow. errington listened with unruffled patience. he heard himself, his pleasures, his wealth, his rank, thus made light of, without the least offense. he met the steady gaze of the _bonde_ quietly, and slightly bent his head as though in deference to his remarks. "you are quite right," he said simply. "we modern men are but pigmies compared with the giants of old time. royal blood itself is tainted nowadays. but, for myself, i attach no importance to the mere appurtenances of life,--the baggage that accompanies one on that brief journey. life itself is quite enough for me." "and for me too," averred lorimer, delighted that his friend had taken the old farmer's scornful observations so good-naturedly. "but, do you know, mr. güldmar, you are making life unpleasant for us just now, by turning us out? the conversation is becoming interesting! why not prolong it? we have no friends in bosekop, and we are to anchor here for some days. surely you will allow us to come and see you again?" olaf güldmar was silent. he advanced a step nearer, and studied them both with such earnest and searching scrutiny, that as they remembered the real attraction that had drawn them thither, the conscious blood mounted to their faces, flushing errington's forehead to the very roots of his curly brown hair. still the old man gazed as though he sought to read their very souls. he muttered something to himself in norwegian, and, finally, to their utter astonishment, he drew his hunting-knife from its sheath, and with a rapid, wild gesture, threw it on the ground and placed his foot upon it. "be it so!" he said briefly. "i cover the blade! you are men; like men you speak truth. as such, i receive you! had you told me a lie concerning your coming here,--had you made pretense of having lost your way, or other such shifty evasion, your path would never have again crossed mine. as it is,--welcome!" and he held out his hand with a sort of royal dignity, still resting one foot on the fallen weapon. the young men, struck by his action and gratified by his change of manner and the genial expression that now softened his rugged features, were quick to respond to his friendly greeting, and the _bonde_, picking up and re-sheathing his hunting-knife as if he had done nothing at all out of the common, motioned them towards the very window on which their eyes had been so long and so ardently fixed. "come!" he said. "you must drain a cup of wine with me before you leave. your unguided footsteps led you by the wrong path,--i saw your boat moored to my pier, and wondered who had been venturesome enough to trample through my woodland. i might have guessed that only a couple of idle boys like yourselves, knowing no better, would have pushed their way to a spot that all worthy dwellers in bosekop, and all true followers of the lutheran devilry, avoid as though the plague were settled in it." and the old man laughed, a splendid, mellow laugh, with the ring of true jollity in it,--a laugh that was infectious, for errington and lorimer joined in it heartily without precisely knowing why. lorimer, however, thought it seemly to protest against the appellation "idle boys." "what do you take us for, sir?" he said with lazy good-nature. "i carry upon my shoulders the sorrowful burden of twenty-six years,--philip, there, is painfully conscious of being thirty,--may we not therefore dispute the word 'boys' as being derogatory to our dignity? you called us 'men' a while ago,--remember that!" olaf güldmar laughed again. his suspicious gravity had entirely disappeared, leaving his face a beaming mirror of beneficence and good-humor. "so you _are_ men," he said cheerily, "men in the bud, like leaves on a tree. but you seem boys to a tough old stump of humanity such as i am. that is my way,--my child thelma, though they tell me she is a woman grown, is always a babe to me. 'tis one of the many privileges of the old, to see the world about them always young and full of children." and he led the way past the wide-open lattice, where they could dimly perceive the spinning-wheel standing alone, as though thinking deeply of the fair hands that had lately left it idle, and so round to the actual front of the house, which was exceedingly picturesque, and literally overgrown with roses from ground to roof. the entrance door stood open;--it was surrounded by a wide, deep porch richly carved and grotesquely ornamented, having two comfortable seats within it, one on each side. through this they went, involuntarily brushing down as they passed, a shower of pink and white rose-leaves, and stepped into a wide passage, where upon walls of dark, polished pine, hung a large collection of curiously shaped weapons, all of primitive manufacture, such as stone darts and rough axes, together with bows and arrows and two-handled swords, huge as the fabled weapon of william wallace. opening a door to the right the _bonde_ stood courteously aside and bade them enter, and they found themselves in the very apartment where they had seen the maiden spinning. "sit down, sit down!" said their host hospitably. "we will have wine directly, and thelma shall come hither. thelma! thelma! where is the child? she wanders hither and thither like a mountain sprite. wait here, my lads, i shall return directly." and he strode away, leaving errington and lorimer delighted at the success of their plans, yet somewhat abashed too. there was a peace and gentle simplicity about the little room in which they were, that touched the chivalrous sentiment in their natures and kept them silent. on one side of it, half a dozen broad shelves supported a goodly row of well-bound volumes, among which the time-honored golden names of shakespeare and scott glittered invitingly, together with such works as chapman's homer, byron's "childe harold," the poems of john keats, gibbon's rome, and plutarch; while mingled with these were the devotional works in french of alphonse de liguori, the "imitation," also in french,--and a number of books with titles in norwegian,--altogether an heterogenous collection of literature, yet not without interest as displaying taste and culture on the part of those to whom it belonged. errington, himself learned in books, was surprised to see so many standard works in the library of one who professed to be nothing but a norwegian farmer, and his respect for the sturdy old _bonde_ increased. there were no pictures in the room,--the wide lattice window on one hand, looking out on the roses and pine-wood, and the other smaller one, close to the entrance door, from which the fjord was distinctly visible, were sufficient pictures in themselves, to need no others. the furniture was roughly made of pine, and seemed to have been carved by hand,--some of the chairs were very quaint and pretty and would have sold in a bric-a-brac shop for more than a sovereign apiece. on the wide mantle-shelf was a quantity of curious old china that seemed to have been picked up from all parts of the world,--most of it was undoubtedly valuable. in one dark corner stood an ancient harp; then there was the spinning-wheel,--itself a curiosity fit for a museum,--testifying dumbly of the mistress of all these surroundings, and on the floor there was something else,--something that both the young men were strongly inclined to take possession of. it was only a bunch of tiny meadow daisies, fastened together with a bit of blue silk. it had fallen,--they guessed by whom it had been worn,--but neither made any remark, and both, by some strange instinct, avoided looking at it, as though the innocent little blossoms carried within them some terrible temptation. they were conscious of a certain embarrassment, and making an effort to break through it, lorimer remarked softly-- "by jove, phil, if this old güldmar really knew what you are up to, i believe he would bundle you out of this place like a tramp! didn't you feel a sneak when he said we had told the truth like men?" philip smiled dreamily. he was seated in one of the quaintly carved chairs, half absorbed in what was evidently a pleasing reverie. "no; not exactly," he replied. "because we _did_ tell him the truth; we did want to know him, and he's worth knowing too! he is a magnificent-looking fellow; don't you think so?" "rather!" assented lorimer, with emphasis. "i wish there were any hope of my becoming such a fine old buffer in my _decadence_,--it would be worth living for if only to look at myself in the glass now and then. he rather startled me when he threw down that knife, though. i suppose it is some old norwegian custom?" "i suppose so," errington answered, and then was silent, for at that moment the door opened and the old farmer returned, followed by a girl bearing a tray glittering with flasks of italian wine, and long graceful glasses shaped like round goblets, set on particularly slender stems. the sight of the girl disappointed the eager visitors, for though she was undeniably pretty, she was not thelma. she was short and plump, with rebellious nut-brown locks, that rippled about her face and from under her close white cap with persistent untidiness. her cheeks were as round and red as lore-apples, and she had dancing blue eyes that appeared for ever engaged in good-natured efforts to outsparkle each other. she wore a spotless apron, lavishly trimmed with coquettish little starched frills,--her hands were, unfortunately, rather large and coarse,--but her smile, as she set down the tray and curtsied respectfully to the young men, was charming, disclosing as it did, tiny teeth as even and white as a double row of small pearls. "that is well, britta," said güldmar, speaking in english, and assisting her to place the glasses. "now, quick! . . . run after thy mistress to the shore,--her boat cannot yet have left the creek,--bid her return and come to me,--tell her there are friends here who will be glad of her presence." britta hurried away at once, but errington's heart sank. thelma had gone!--gone, most probably, for one of those erratic journeys across the fjord to the cave where he had first seen her. she would not come back, he felt certain; not even at her father's request would that beautiful, proud maiden consent to alter her plans. what an unlucky destiny was his! absorbed in disappointed reflections, he scarcely heard the enthusiastic praises lorimer was diplomatically bestowing on the _bonde's_ wine. he hardly felt its mellow flavor on his own palate, though it was in truth delicious, and fit for the table of a monarch. güldmar noticed the young baronet's abstraction, and addressed him with genial kindness. "are you thinking, sir philip, of my rough speeches to you yonder? no offense was meant, no offense! . . ." the old fellow paused, and laughed over his wine-glass. "yet i may as well be honest about it! offense _was_ meant; but when i found that none was taken, my humor changed." a slight, half-weary smile played on errington's lips. "i assure you, sir," he said, "i agreed with you then and agree with you now in every word you uttered. you took my measure very correctly, and allow me to add that no one can be more conscious of my own insignificance that i am myself. the days we live in are insignificant; the chronicle of our paltry doings will be skipped by future readers of the country's history. among a society of particularly useless men, i feel myself to be one of the most useless. if you could show me any way to make my life valuable--" he paused abruptly, and his heart beat with inexplicable rapidity. a light step and the rustle of a dress was heard coming through the porch; another perfumed shower of rose-leaves fell softly on the garden path; the door of the room opened, and a tall, fair, white-robed figure shone forth from the dark background of the outer passage; a figure that hesitated on the threshold, and then advanced noiselessly and with a reluctant shyness. the old _bonde_ turned round in his chair with a smile. "ah, here she is!" he said fondly. "where hast thou been, my thelma?" chapter vi. "and sigurd the bishop said, 'the old gods are not dead, for the great thor still reigns, and among the jarls and thanes the old witchcraft is spread.'" longfellow's _saga of king olaf_. the girl stood silent, and a faint blush crimsoned her cheeks. the young men had risen at her entrance, and in one fleeting glance she recognized errington, though she gave no sign to that effect. "see, my darling," continued her father, "here are english visitors to norway. this is sir philip errington, who travels through our wild waters in the great steam yacht now at anchor in the fjord; and this is his friend, mr.--mr.--lorimer,--have i caught your name rightly, my lad?" he continued, turning to george lorimer with a kindly smile. "you have, sir," answered that gentleman promptly, and then he was mute, feeling curiously abashed in the presence of this royal-looking young lady, who, encircled by her father's arm, raised her deep, dazzling blue eyes, and serenely bent her stately head to him as his name was mentioned. the old farmer went on, "welcome them, thelma mine!--friends are scarce in these days, and we must not be ungrateful for good company. what! what! i know honest lads when i see them! smile on them, my thelma!--and then we will warm their hearts with another cup of wine." as he spoke, the maiden advanced with a graceful, even noble air, and extending both her hands to each of the visitors in turn, she said-- "i am your servant, friends; in entering this house you do possess it. peace and heart's greeting!" the words were a literal translation of a salutation perfectly common in many parts of norway--a mere ordinary expression of politeness; but, uttered in the tender, penetrating tones, of the most musical voice they had ever heard, and accompanied by the warm, frank, double handclasp of those soft, small, daintily shaped hands, the effect on the minds of the generally self-possessed, fashionably bred young men of the world, was to confuse and bewilder them to the last degree. what could they answer to this poetical, quaint formula of welcome? the usual latitudes, such as "delighted, i'm sure;" or, "most happy--am charmed to meet you?" no; these remarks, deemed intelligent by the lady rulers of london drawing-rooms, would, they felt, never do here. as well put a gentleman in modern evening dress _en face_ with a half-nude scornfully beautiful statue of apollo, as trot out threadbare, insincere commonplaces in the hearing of this clear-eyed child of nature, whose pure, perfect face seemed to silently repel the very passing shadow of a falsehood. philip's brain whirled round and about in search of some suitable reply, but could find none; and lorimer felt himself blushing like a schoolboy, as he stammered out something incoherent and eminently foolish, though he had sense enough left to appreciate the pressure of those lovely hands as long as it lasted. thelma, however, appeared not to notice their deep embarrassment--she had not yet done with them. taking the largest goblet on the table, she filled it to the brim with wine, and touched it with her lips,--then with a smile in which a thousand radiating sunbeams seemed to quiver and sparkle, she lifted it towards errington. the grace of her attitude and action wakened him out of his state of dreamy bewilderment--in his soul he devoutly blessed these ancient family customs, and arose to the occasion like a man. clasping with a tender reverence the hands that upheld the goblet, he bent his handsome head and drank a deep draught, while his dark curls almost touched her fair ones,--and then an insane jealousy possessed him for a moment, as he watched her go through the same ceremony with lorimer. she next carried the now more than half-emptied cup to the _bonde_, and said as she held it, laughing softly-- "drink it all, father!--if you leave a drop, you know these gentlemen will quarrel with us, or you with them." "that is true!" said olaf güldmar with great gravity; "but it will not be my fault, child, nor the fault of wasted wine." and he drained the glass to its dregs and set it upside down on the table with a deep sigh of satisfaction and refreshment. the ceremony concluded, it was evident the ice of reserve was considered broken, for thelma seated herself like a young queen, and motioned her visitors to do the same with a gesture of gracious condescension. "how did you find your way here?" she asked with sweet, yet direct abruptness, giving sir philip a quick glance, in which there was a sparkle of mirth, though her long lashes veiled it almost instantly. her entire lack of stiffness and reserve set the young men at their ease, and they fell into conversation freely, though errington allowed lorimer to tell the story of their trespass in his own fashion without interference. he instinctively felt that the young lady who listened with so demure a smile to that plausible narrative, knew well enough the real motive that had brought them thither though she apparently had her own reasons for keeping silence on the point, as whatever she may have thought, she said nothing. lorimer skillfully avoided betraying the fact that they had watched her through the window, and had listened to her singing. and thelma heard all the explanations patiently till bosekop was mentioned, and then her fair face grew cold and stern. "from whom did you hear of us there?" she inquired. "we do not mix with the people,--why should they speak of us?" "the truth is," interposed errington, resting his eyes with a sense of deep delight on the beautiful rounded figure and lovely features that were turned towards him, "i heard of you first through my pilot--one valdemar svensen." "ha, ha!" cried old güldmar with some excitement, "there is a fellow who cannot hold his tongue! what have i said to thee, child? a bachelor is no better than a gossiping old woman. he that is always alone must talk, if it be only to woods and waves. it is the married men who know best how excellent it is to keep silence!" they all laughed, though thelma's eyes had a way of looking pensive even when she smiled. "you would not blame poor svensen because he is alone, father?" she said. "is he not to be pitied? surely it is a cruel fate to have none to love in all the wide world. nothing can be more cruel!" güldmar surveyed her humorously. "hear her!" he said. "she talks as if she knew all about such things; and if ever a child was ignorant of sorrow, surely it is my thelma! every flower and bird in the place loves her. yes; i have thought sometimes the very sea loves her. it must; she is so much upon it. and as for her old father"--he laughed a little, though a suspicious moisture softened his keen eyes--"why, he doesn't love her at all. ask her! she knows it." thelma rose quickly and kissed him. how deliciously those sweet lips pouted, thought errington, and what an unreasonable and extraordinary grudge he seemed to bear towards the venerable _bonde_ for accepting that kiss with so little apparent emotion! "hush, father!" she said. "these friends can see too plainly how much you spoil me. tell me,"--and she turned with a sudden pretty imperiousness to lorimer, who started at her voice as a racehorse starts at its rider's touch,--"what person in bosekop spoke of us?" lorimer was rather at a loss, inasmuch as no one in the small town had actually spoken of them, and mr. dyceworthy's remarks concerning those who were "ejected with good reason from respectable society," might not, after all, have applied to the güldmar family. indeed, it now seemed an absurd and improbable supposition. therefore he replied cautiously-- "the reverend mr. dyceworthy, i think, has some knowledge of you. is he not a friend of yours?" these simple words had a most unexpected effect. olaf güldmar sprang up from his seat flaming with wrath. it was in vain that his daughter laid a restraining hand upon his arm. the name of the lutheran divine had sufficed to put him in a towering passion, and he turned furiously upon the astonished errington. "had i known you came from the devil, sir, you should have returned to him speedily, with hot words to hasten your departure! i would have split that glass to atoms before i would have drained it after you! the friends of a false heart are no friends for me,--the followers of a pretended sanctity find no welcome under my roof! why not have told me at once that you came as spies, hounded on by the liar dyceworthy? why not have confessed it openly? .. . . and not have played the thief's trick on an old fool, who, for once, misled by your manly and upright bearing, consented to lay aside the rightful suspicions he at first entertained of your purpose? shame on you, young men! shame!" the words coursed impetuously from his lips; his face burned with indignation. he had broken away from his daughter's hold, while she, pale and very still, stood leaning one hand upon the table. his white hair was tossed back from his brow; his eyes flashed; his attitude though vengeful and threatening, was at the same time so bold and commanding that lorimer caught himself lazily admiring the contour of his figure, and wondering how he would look in marble as an infuriated viking. one excellent thing in the dispositions of both errington and lorimer was that they never lost temper. either they were too lazy or too well-bred. undoubtedly they both considered it "bad form." this indifference stood them in good stead now. they showed no sign whatever of offense, though the old farmer's outbreak of wrath was so sudden and unlooked for, that they remained for a moment silent out of sheer surprise. then rising with unruffled serenity, they took up their caps preparatory to departure. errington's gentle, refined voice broke the silence. "you are in error, mr. güldmar," he said in chilly but perfectly polite tones. "i regret you should be so hasty in your judgment of us. if you accepted us as 'men' when you first met us, i cannot imagine why you should now take us for spies. the two terms are by no means synonymous. i know nothing of mr. dyceworthy beyond that he called upon me, and that i, as in duty bound, returned his call. i am ignorant of his character and disposition. i may add that i have no desire to be enlightened respecting them. i do not often take a dislike to anybody, but it so happens that i have done so in the case of mr. dyceworthy. i know lorimer doesn't care for him, and i don't think my other two friends are particularly attached to him. i have nothing more to say, except that i fear we have outstayed our welcome. permit us now to wish you good evening. and you,"--he hesitated, and turned with a low bow to thelma, who had listened to his words with a gradually dawning brightness on her face--"you will, i trust, exonerate us from any intentional offense towards your father or yourself? our visit has proved unlucky, but--" thelma interrupted him by laying her fair little hand on his arm with a wistful, detaining gesture, which, though seemingly familiar, was yet perfectly sweet and natural. the light touch thrilled his blood, and sent it coursing through his veins at more than customary speed. "ah, then, you also will be foolish!" she said, with a naïve protecting air of superior dignity. "do you not see my father is sorry? have we all kissed the cup for nothing, or was the wine wasted? not a drop was spilt; how then, if we are friends should we part in coldness? father, it is you to be ashamed,--not these gentleman, who are strangers to the altenfjord, and know nothing of mr. dyceworthy, or an other person dwelling here. and when their vessel sails away again over the wide seas to their own shores, how will you have them think of you? as one whose heart was all kindness, and who helped to make their days pass pleasantly? or as one who, in unreasonable anger, forgot the duties of sworn hospitality?" the _bonde_ listened to her full, sweet, reproachful voice as a tough old lion might listen to the voice of its tamer, uncertain whether to yield or spring. he wiped his heated brow and stared around him shamefacedly. finally, as though swallowing his pride with a gulp, he drew a long breath, took a couple of determined strides forward, and held out his hands, one to errington and the other to lorimer, by whom they were warmly grasped. "there, my lads," he said rapidly. "i'm sorry i spoke! forgive and forget! that is the worst of me--my blood is up in a minute, and old though i am, i'm not old enough yet to be patient. and when i hear the name of that sneak dyceworthy--by the gates of valhalla, i feel as if my own house would not hold me! no, no; don't go yet! nearly ten? well, no matter, the night is like the day here, you see--it doesn't matter when one goes to bed. come and sit in the porch awhile; i shall get cool out there. ah, thelma, child! i see thee laughing at thy old father's temper! never mind, never mind; is it not for thy sake after all?" and, holding errington by the arm, he led the way into the fine old porch, lorimer following with rather a flushed face, for he, as he passed out of the room, had managed to pick up and secrete the neglected little bunch of daisies, before noticed as having fallen on the floor. he put them quickly in his breast pocket with a curious sense of satisfaction, though he had no intention of keeping them, and leaned idly against the clambering roses, watching thelma, as she drew a low stool to her father's feet and sat there. a balmy wind blew in from the fjord, and rustled mysteriously among the pines; the sky was flecked here and there with fleecy clouds, and a number of birds were singing in full chorus. old güldmar heaved a sigh of relief, as though his recent outburst of passion had done him good. "i will tell you, sir philip," he said, ruffling his daughter's curls as he spoke,--"i will tell you why i detest the villain dyceworthy. it is but fair you should know it. now, thelma!--why that push to my knee? you fear i may offend our friends again? nay, i will take good care. and so, first of all, i ask you, what is your religion? though i know you cannot be lutherans." errington was somewhat taken aback by the question. he smiled. "my dear sir," he replied at last; "to be frank with you, i really do not think i have any religion. if i had, i suppose i should call myself a christian, though, judging from the behavior of christians in general, i cannot be one of them after all,--for i belong to no sect, i go to no church, and i have never read a tract in my life. i have a profound reverence and admiration for the character and doctrine of christ, and i believe if i had had the privilege of knowing and conversing with him, i should not have deserted him in extremity as his timorous disciples did. i believe in an all-wise creator; so you see i am not an atheist. my mother was an austrian and a catholic, and i have a notion that, as a small child, i was brought up in that creed; but i'm afraid i don't know much about it now." the _bonde_ nodded gravely. "thelma, here," he said, "is a catholic, as her mother was--" he stopped abruptly, and a deep shadow of pain darkened his features. thelma looked up,--her large blue eyes filled with sudden tears, and she pressed her father's hand between her own, as though in sympathy with some undeclared grief; then she looked at errington with a sort of wistful appeal. philip's heart leaped as he met that soft beseeching glance, which seemed to entreat his patience with the old man for her sake--he felt himself drawn into a bond of union with her thoughts, and in his innermost soul he swore as knightly a vow of chivalry and reverence for the fair maiden, who thus took him into her silent confidence, as though he were some gallant crusader of old time, pledged to defend his lady's honor unto death. olaf güldmar, after a long and apparently sorrowful pause, resumed his conversation. "yes," he said, "thelma is a catholic, though here she has scarcely any opportunity for performing the duties of her religion. it is a pretty and a graceful creed,--well fitted for women. as for me, i am made of sterner stuff, and the maxims of that gentle creature, christ, find no echo in my soul. but you, young sir," he added, turning suddenly on lorimer, who was engaged in meditatively smoothing out on his palm one of the fallen rose-petals--"you have not spoken. what faith do you profess? it is no curiosity that prompts me to ask,--i only seek not to offend." lorimer laughed languidly. "upon my life, mr. güldmar, you really ask too much of me. i haven't any faith at all; not a shred! it's been all knocked out of me. i tried to hold on to a last remaining bit of christian rope in the universal ship-wreck, but that was torn out of my hands by a scientific professor, who ought to know what he is about, and--and--now i drift along anyhow!" güldmar smiled dubiously; but thelma looked at the speaker with astonished, regretful eyes. "i am sorry," she said simply. "you must be often unhappy." lorimer was not disconcerted, though her evident pity caused an unwanted flush on his face. "oh no," he said in answer to her, "i am not a miserable sort of fellow by any means. for instance, i'm not afraid of death,--lots of very religious people are horribly afraid of it, though they all the time declare it's the only path to heaven. they're not consistent at all. you see i believe in nothing,--i came from nothing,--i am nothing,--i shall be nothing. that being plain, i am all right." güldmar laughed. "you are an odd lad," he said good-humoredly. "you are in the morning of life; there are always mists in the morning as there are in the evening. in the light of your full manhood you will see these things differently. your creed of nothing provides no moral law,--no hold on the conscience, no restraint on the passions,--don't you see that?" lorimer smiled with a very winning and boyish candor. "you are exceedingly good, sir, to credit me with a conscience! i don't think i have one,--i'm sure i have no passions. i have always been too lazy to encourage them, and as for moral law,--i adhere to morality with the greatest strictness, because if a fellow is immoral, he ceases to be a gentleman. now, as there are very few gentlemen nowadays, i fancy i'd like to be one as long as i can." errington here interposed. "you mustn't take him seriously. mr. güldmar," he said; "he's never serious himself, i'll give you his character in a few words. he belongs to no religious party, it's true,--but he's a first-rate fellow,--the best fellow i know!" lorimer glanced at him quietly with a gratified expression on his face. but he said nothing, for thelma was regarding him with a most bewitching smile. "ah!" she said, shaking a reproachful finger at him, "you do love all nonsense, that i can see! you would make every person laugh, if you could,--is it not so?" "well, yes," admitted george, "i think i would! but it's a herculean task sometimes. if you had ever been to london, miss güldmar, you would understand how difficult it is to make people even smile,--and when they do, the smile is not a very natural one." "why?" she exclaimed. "are they all so miserable?" "they pretend to be, if they're not," said lorimer; "it is the fashion there to find fault with everything and everybody." "that is so," said güldmar thoughtfully. "i visited london once and thought i was in hell. nothing but rows of hard, hideously built houses, long streets, and dirty alleys, and the people had weary faces all, as though nature had refused to bless them. a pitiful city,--doubly pitiful to the eyes of a man like myself, whose life has been passed among fjords and mountains such as these. well, now, as neither of you are lutherans,--in fact, as neither of you seem to know what you are," and he laughed, "i can be frank, and speak out as to my own belief. i am proud to say i have never deserted the faith of my fathers, the faith that makes a man's soul strong and fearless, and defiant of evil,--the faith that is supposed to be crushed out among us, but that is still alive and rooted in the hearts of many who can trace back their lineage to the ancient vikings as i can,--yes!--rooted firm and fast,--and however much some of the more timorous feign to conceal it, in the tacit acceptance of another creed, there are those who can never shake it off, and who never desire to forsake it. i am one of these few. shame must fall on the man who willfully deserts the faith of his warrior-ancestry! sacred to me for ever be the names of odin and thor!" he raised his hand aloft with a proud gesture, and his eyes flashed. errington was interested, but not surprised: the old _bonde's_ declaration of his creed seemed eminently fitted to his character. lorimer's face brightened,--here was a novelty--a man, who in all the conflicting storms of modern opinion, sturdily clung to the traditions of his forefathers. "by jove!" he exclaimed eagerly, "i think the worship of odin would suit me perfectly! it's a rousing, fighting sort of religion,--i'm positive it would make a man of me. will you initiate me into the mysteries, mr. güldmar? there's a fellow in london who writes poetry on indian subjects, and who, it is said, thinks buddhism might satisfy his pious yearnings,--but i think odin would be a personage to command more respect than buddha,--at any rate, i should like to try him. will you give me a chance?" olaf güldmar smiled gravely, and rising from his seat, pointed to the western sky. "see yonder threads of filmy white," he said, "that stretch across the wide expanse of blue! they are the lingering, fading marks of light clouds,--and even while we watch them, they shall pass and be no more. such is the emblem of your life, young man--you that would, for an idle jest or pastime, presume to search into the mysteries of odin! for you they are not,--your spirit is not of the stern mould that waits for death as gladly as the bridegroom waits for the bride! the christian heaven is an abode for girls and babes,--valhalla is the place for men! i tell you, my creed is as divine in its origin as any that ever existed on the earth! the rainbow bridge is a fairer pathway from death to life than the doleful cross,--and better far the dark summoning eyes of a beauteous valkyrie, than the grinning skull and cross-bones, the christian emblem of mortality. thelma thinks,--and her mother before her thought also,--that different as my way of belief is to the accepted new creeds of to-day, it will be all right with me in the next world--that i shall have as good a place in heaven as any christian. it may be so,--i care not! but see you,--the key-note of all the civilization of to-day is discontent, while i,--thanks to the gods of my fathers, am happy, and desire nothing that i have not." he paused and seemed absorbed. the young men watched his fine inspired features with lively interest. thelma's head was turned away from them so that her face was hidden. by-and-by he resumed in quieter tones-- "now, my lads, you know what we are--both of us accursed in the opinion of the lutheran community. my child belongs to the so-called idolatrous church of rome. i am one of the very last of the 'heathen barbarians,'"--and the old fellow smiled sarcastically, "though, truth to tell, for a barbarian, i am not such a fool as some folks would have you think. if the snuffling dyceworthy and i competed at a spelling examination, i'm pretty sure 'tis i would have the prize! but, as i said,--you know us,--and if our ways are likely to offend you, then let us part good friends before the swords are fairly drawn." "no sword will be drawn on my side, i assure you, sir," said errington, advancing and laying one hand on the _bonde's_ shoulder. "i hope you will believe me when i say i shall esteem it an honor and a privilege to know more of you." "and though you won't accept me as a servant of odin," added lorimer, "you really cannot prevent me from trying to make myself agreeable to you. i warn you, mr. güldmar, i shall visit you pretty frequently! such men as you are not often met with." olaf güldmar looked surprised. "you really mean it?" he said. "nothing that i have told you affects you? you still seek our friendship?" they both earnestly assured him that they did, and as they spoke thelma rose from her low seat and faced them with a bright smile. "do you know," she said, "that you are the first people who, on visiting us once, have ever cared to come again? ah, you look surprised, but it is so, is it not, father?" güldmar nodded a grave assent. "yes," she continued demurely, counting on her little white fingers, "we are three things--first, we are accursed; secondly, we have the evil eye; thirdly, we are not respectable!" and she broke into a peal of laughter, ringing and sweet as a chime of bells. the young men joined her in it; and, still with an amused expression on her lovely face, leaning her head back against a cluster of pale roses, she went on-- "my father dislikes mr. dyceworthy so much, because he wants to--to--oh, what is it they do to savages, father? yes, i know,--to convert us,--to make us lutherans. and when he finds it all no use, he is angry; and, though he is so religious, if he hears any one telling some untruth about us in bosekop, he will add another thing equally untrue, and so it grows and grows, and--why! what is the matter with you?" she exclaimed in surprise as errington scowled and clenched his fist in a peculiarly threatening manner. "i should like to knock him down!" he said briefly under his breath. old güldmar laughed and looked at the young baronet approvingly. "who knows, who knows!" he said cheerfully. "you may do it some day! it will be a good deed! i will do it myself if he troubles me much more. and now let us make some arrangement with you. when will you come and see, us again?" "you must visit me first," said sir philip quickly. "if you and your daughter will honor me with your company to-morrow, i shall be proud and pleased. consider the yacht at your service." thelma, resting among the roses, looked across at him with serious, questioning eyes--eyes that seemed to be asking his intentions towards both her and her father. güldmar accepted the invitation at once, and, the hour for their visit next day being fixed and agreed upon, the young men began to take their leave. as errington clasped thelma's hand in farewell, he made a bold venture. he touched a rose that hung just above her head almost dropping on her hair. "may i have it?" he asked in a low tone. their eyes met. the girl flushed deeply, and then grew pale. she broke off the flower and gave it to him,--then turned to lorimer to say good-bye. they left her then, standing under the porch, shading her brow with one hand from the glittering sunlight, as she watched them descending the winding path to the shore, accompanied by her lather, who hospitably insisted on seeing them into their boat. they looked back once or twice, always to see the slender, tall white figure standing there like an angel resting in a bower of roses, with the sunshine flashing on a golden crown of hair. at the last in the pathway philip raised his hat and waved it, but whether she condescended to wave her hand in answer he could not see. left alone, she sighed, and went slowly into the house to resume her spinning. hearing the whirr of the wheel, the servant britta entered. "you are not going in the boat, fröken?" she asked in a tone of mingled deference and affection. thelma looked up, smiled faintly, and shook her head in the negative. "it is late, britta, and i am tired." and the deep blue eyes had an intense dreamy light within them as they wandered from the wheel to the wide-open window, and rested on the majestic darkness of the overshadowing, solemn pines. chapter vii. "in mezzo del mio core c' e una spina; non c' e barbier che la possa levare,-- solo il mio amore colla sua manina" _rime popolari._ errington and lorimer pulled away across the fjord in a silence that lasted for many minutes. old güldmar stood on the edge of his little pier to watch them out of sight. so, till their boat turned the sharp corner of the protecting rock, that hid the landing-place from view, they saw his picturesque figure and gleaming silvery hair outlined clearly against the background of the sky--a sky now tenderly flushed with pink like the inside of a delicate shell. when they could no longer perceive him they still rowed on speaking no word,--the measured, musical plash of the oars through the smooth, dark olive-green water alone breaking the stillness around them. there was a curious sort of hushed breathlessness in the air; fantastic, dream-like lights and shadows played on the little wrinkling waves; sudden flushes of crimson came and went in the western horizon, and over the high summits of the surrounding mountains mysterious shapes, formed of purple and grey mist, rose up and crept softly downwards, winding in and out deep valleys and dark ravines, like wandering spirits sent on some secret and sorrowful errand. after a while errington said almost vexedly-- "are you struck dumb, george? haven't you a word to say to a fellow?" "just what i was about to ask _you_," replied lorimer carelessly; "and i was also going to remark that we hadn't seen your mad friend up at the güldmar residence." "no. yet i can't help thinking he has something to do with them, all the same," returned errington meditatively. "i tell you, he swore at me by some old norwegian infernal place or other. i dare say he's an odin worshipper, too. but never mind him. what do you think of _her_?" lorimer turned lazily round in the boat, so that he faced his companion. "well, old fellow, if you ask me frankly, i think she is the most beautiful woman i ever saw, or, for that matter, ever heard of. and i am an impartial critic--perfectly impartial." and, resting on his oar, he dipped the blade musingly in and out of the water, watching the bright drops fall with an oil-like smoothness as they trickled from the polished wood and glittered in the late sunshine like vari-colored jewels. then he glanced curiously at philip, who sat silent, but whose face was very grave and earnest,--even noble, with that shade of profound thought upon it. he looked like one who had suddenly accepted a high trust, in which there was not only pride, but tenderness. lorimer shook himself together, as he himself would have expressed it, and touched his friend's arm half-playfully. "you've met the king's daughter of norroway after all, phil;" and his light accents had a touch of sadness in them; "and you'll have to bring her home, as the old song says. i believe the 'eligible' is caught at last. the 'woman' of the piece has turned up, and your chum must play second fiddle--eh, old boy?" errington flushed hotly, but caught lorimer's hand and pressed it with tremendous fervor. "by jove, i'll wring it off your wrist if you talk in that fashion, george!" he said, with a laugh. "you'll always be the same to me, and you know it. i tell you," and he pulled his moustache doubtfully, "i don't know quite what's the matter with me. that girl fascinates me! i feel a fool in her presence. is that a sign of being in love i wonder?" "certainly not!" returned george promptly; "for _i_ feel a fool in her presence, and i'm not in love." "how do you know that?" and errington glanced at him keenly and inquiringly. "how do i know? come, i like that! have i studied myself all these years for nothing? look here,"--and he carefully drew out the little withering bunch of daisies he had purloined--"these are for you. i knew you wanted them, though you hadn't the impudence to pick them up, and i had. i thought you might like to put them under your pillow, and all that sort of thing, because if one is resolved to become love-lunatic, one may as well do the thing properly out and out,--i hate all half-measures. now, if the remotest thrill of sentiment were in me, you can understand, i hope, that wild horses would not have torn this adorable posy from my possession! i should have kept it, and you would never have known of it," and he laughed softly. "take it, old fellow! you're rich now, with the rose she gave you besides. what is all your wealth compared with the sacred preciousness of such blossoms! there, don't look so awfully estactic, or i shall be called upon to ridicule you in the interests of common sense. so you're in love with the girl at once, and have done with it. don't beat about the bush!" "i'm not sure about it," said philip, taking the daisies gratefully, however, and pressing them in his pocket-book. "i don't believe in love at first sight!" "i do," returned lorimer decidedly. "love is electricity. two telegrams are enough to settle the business,--one from the eyes of the man, the other from those of the woman. you and miss güldmar must have exchanged a dozen such messages at least." "and you?" inquired errington persistently. "you had the same chance as myself." george shrugged his shoulders. "my dear boy, there are no wires of communication between the sun-angel and myself; nothing but a blank, innocent landscape, over which perhaps some day, the mild lustre of friendship may beam. the girl is beautiful--extraordinarily so; but i'm not a 'man o' wax,' as juliet's gabbling old nurse says--not in the least impressionable." and forthwith he resumed his oar, saying briskly as he did so-- "phil, do you know those other fellows must be swearing at us pretty forcibly for leaving them so long with dyceworthy. we've been away two hours!" "not possible!" cried errington, amazed, and wielding his oar vigorously. "they'll think me horribly rude. by jove, they must be bored to death!" and, stimulated by the thought of the penance their friends were enduring, they sent the boat spinning swiftly through the water, and rowed as though they were trying for a race, when they were suddenly pulled up by a loud "halloo!" and the sight of another boat coming slowly out from bosekop, wherein two individuals were standing up, gesticulating violently. "there they are!" exclaimed lorimer. "i say, phil, they've hired a special tub, and are coming out to us." so it proved. duprèz and macfarlane had grown tired of waiting for their truant companions, and had taken the first clumsy wherry that presented itself, rowed by an even clumsier norwegian boatman, whom they had been compelled to engage also, as he would not let his ugly punt out of his sight, for fear some harm might chance to befall it. thus attended, they were on their way back to the yacht. with a few long, elegant strokes, errington and lorimer soon brought their boat alongside, and their friends gladly jumped into it, delighted to be free of the company of the wooden-faced mariner they had so reluctantly hired, and who now, on receiving his fee, paddled awkwardly away in his ill-constructed craft, without either a word of thanks or salutation. errington began to apologize at once for his long absence, giving as a reason for it, the necessity he found himself under of making a call on some persons of importance in the neighborhood, whom he had, till now, forgotten. "my good phil-eep!" cried duprèz, in his cheery sing song accent, "why apologize? we have amused ourselves! our dear sandy has a vein of humor that is astonishing! we have not wasted our time. no! we have made mr. dyceworthy our slave; we have conquered him; we have abased him! he is what we please,--he is for all gods or for no god,--just as we pull the string! in plain words, _mon cher_, that amiable religious is drunk!" "drunk!" cried errington and lorimer together. "jove! you don't mean it?" macfarlane looked up with a twinkle of satirical humor in his deep-set grey eyes. "ye see," he said seriously, "the lacrima, or papist wine as he calls it, was strong--we got him to take a good dose o't--a vera feir dose indeed. then, doun he sat, an' fell to convairsing vera pheelosophically o' mony things,--it wad hae done ye gude to hear him,--he was fair lost in the mazes o' his metapheesics, for twa flies took a bit saunter through the pleasant dewy lanes o' his forehead, an' he never raised a finger to send them awa' aboot their beeziness. then i thoet i wad try him wi' the whusky--i had ma pocket flask wi' me--an' o mon! he was sairly glad and gratefu' for the first snack o't! he said it was deevilish fine stuff, an' so he took ane drappikie, an' anither drappikie, and yet anither drappikie,"--sandy's accent got more and more pronounced as he went on--"an' after a bit, his heed dropt doun, an' he took a wee snoozle of a minute or twa,--then he woke up in a' his strength an' just grappit the flask in his twa hands an' took the hale o't off at a grand, rousin' gulp! ma certes! after it ye shuld ha' seen him laughin' like a feckless fule, an' rubbin' an' rubbin' his heed, till his hair was like the straw kicked roond by a mad coo!" lorimer lay back in the stern of the boat and laughed uproariously at this extraordinary picture, as did the others. "but that is not all," said duprèz, with delighted mischief sparkling in his wicked little dark eyes; "the dear religious opened his heart to us. he spoke thickly, but we could understand him. he was very impressive! he is quite of my opinion. he says all religion is nonsense, fable, imposture,--man is the only god, woman his creature and subject. again,--man and woman conjoined, make up divinity, necessity, law. he was quite clear on that point. why did he preach what he did not believe, we asked? he almost wept! he replied that the children of this world liked fairy-stories and he was paid to tell them. it was his bread and butter,--would we wish him to have no bread and butter? we assured him so cruel a thought had no place in our hearts! then he is amorous--yes! the good fat man is amorous! he would have become a priest, but on close examination of the confessionals he saw there was no possibility of seeing, much less kissing a lady penitent through the grating. so he gave up that idea! in his form of faith he _can_ kiss, he says,--he _does_ kiss!--always a holy kiss, of course! he is so ingenuous,--so delightfully frank, it is quite charming!" they laughed again. sir philip looked somewhat disgusted. "what an old brute he must be!" he said. "somebody ought to kick him--a holy kick, of course, and therefore more intense and forcible than other kicks." "you begin, phil," laughed lorimer, "and we'll all follow suit. he'll be like that indian in 'vathek' who rolled himself into a ball; no one could resist kicking as long as the ball bounded before them,--we, similarly, shall not be able to resist, if dyceworthy's fat person is once left at our mercy." "that was a grand bit he told us, errington," resumed macfarlane. "ye should ha' heard him talk aboot his love-affair! . . . the saft jelly of a man that he is, to be making up to ony woman." at that moment they ran alongside of the _eulalie_ and threw up their oars. "stop a bit," said errington. "tell us the rest on board." the ladder was lowered; they mounted it, and their boat was hauled up to its place. "go on!" said lorimer, throwing himself lazily into a deck arm-chair and lighting a cigar, while the others leaned against the yacht rails and followed his example. "go on, sandy--this is fun! dyceworthy's amours must be amusing. i suppose he's after that ugly wooden block of a woman we saw at his house who is so zealous for the 'true gospel'?" "not a bit of it," replied sandy, with immense gravity. "the auld silenus has better taste. he says there's a young lass running after him, fit to break her heart aboot him,--puir thing, she must have vera little choice o' men! he hasna quite made up his mind, though he admeets she's as fine a lass as ony man need require. he's sorely afraid she has set herself to catch him, as he says she's an eye like a warlock for a really strong good-looking fellow like himself," and macfarlane chuckled audibly. "maybe he'll take pity on her, maybe he wont; the misguided lassie will be sairly teazed by him from a' he tauld us in his cups. he gave us her name,--the oddest in a' the warld for sure,--i canna just remember it." "i can," said duprèz glibly. "it struck me as quaint and pretty--thelma güldmar." errington started so violently, and flushed so deeply, that lorimer was afraid of some rash outbreak of wrath on his part. but he restrained himself by a strong effort. he merely took his cigar from his mouth and puffed a light cloud of smoke into the air before replying, then he said coldly-- "i should say mr. dyceworthy, besides being a drunkard, is a most consummate liar. it so happens that the güldmars are the very people i have just visited,--highly superior in every way to anybody we have yet met in norway. in fact, mr. and miss güldmar will come on board to-morrow. i have invited them to dine with us; you will then be able to judge for yourselves whether the young lady is at all of the description mr. dyceworthy gives of her." duprèz and macfarlane exchanged astonished looks. "are ye quite sure," the latter ventured to remark cautiously, "that ye're prudent in what ye have done? remember ye have asked no pairson at a' to dine with ye as yet,--it's a vera sudden an' exceptional freak o' hospitality." errington smoked on peacefully and made no answer. duprèz hummed a verse of a french _chansonnette_ under his breath and smiled. lorimer glanced at him with a lazy amusement. "unburden yourself, pierre, for heaven's sake!" he said. "your mind is as uncomfortable as a loaded camel. let it lie down, while you take off its packages, one by one, and reveal their contents. in short, what's up?" duprèz made a rapid, expressive gesture with his hands. "_mon cher_, i fear to displease phil-eep! he has invited these people; they are coming,--_bien_! there is no more to say." "i disagree with ye," interposed macfarlane "i think errington should hear what _we_ ha' heard; it's fair an' just to a mon that he should understand what sort o' folk are gaun to pairtake wi' him at his table. ye see, errington, ye should ha' thought a wee, before inviting pairsons o' unsettled an' dootful chairacter--" "who says they are?" demanded errington half-angrily. "the drunken dyceworthy?" "he was no sae drunk at the time he tauld us." persisted macfarlane in his most obstinate, most dictatorial manner. "ye see, it's just this way--" "ah, _pardon_!" interrupted duprèz briskly. "our dear sandy is an excellent talker, but he is a little slow. thus it is, _mon cher_ errington. this gentleman named güldmar had a most lovely wife--a mysterious lady, with an evident secret. the beautiful one was never seen in the church or in any town or village; she was met sometimes on hills, by rivers, in valleys, carrying her child in her arms. the people grew afraid of her; but, now, see what happens! suddenly, she appears no more; some one ventures to ask this monsieur güldmar, 'what has become of madame?' his answer is brief. 'she is dead!' satisfactory so far, yet not quite; for, madame being dead, then what has become of the corpse of madame? it was never seen,--no coffin was ever ordered,--and apparently it was never buried! _bien!_ what follows? the good people of bosekop draw the only conclusion possible--monsieur güldmar, who is said to have a terrific temper, killed madame and made away with her body. _voilà_!" and duprèz waved his hand with an air of entire satisfaction. errington's brow grew sombre. "this is the story, is it?" he asked at last. "it is enough, is it not?" laughed duprèz. "but, after all, what matter? it will be novel to dine with a mur--" "stop!" said philip fiercely, with so much authority that the sparkling pierre was startled. "call no man by such a name till you know he deserves it. if güldmar was suspected, as you say, why didn't somebody arrest him on the charge?" "because, ye see," replied macfarlane, "there was not sufficient proof to warrant such a proceeding. moreover, the actual meenister of the parish declared it was a' richt, an' said this güldmar was a mon o' vera queer notions, an' maybe, had buried his wife wi' certain ceremonies peculiar to himself--what's wrong wi' ye now?" for a light had flashed on errington's mind, and with the quick comprehension it gave him, his countenance cleared. he laughed. "that's very likely," he said; "mr. güldmar is a character. he follows the faith of odin, and not even dyceworthy can convert him to christianity." macfarlane stared with a sort of stupefied solemnity. "mon!" he exclaimed, "ye never mean to say there's an actual puir human creature that in this blessed, enlightened nineteenth century of ours, is so far misguidit as to worship the fearfu' gods o' the scandinavian meethology?" "ah!" yawned lorimer, "you may wonder away, sandy, but it's true enough! old güldmar is an odinite. in this blessed, enlightened nineteenth century of ours, when christians amuse themselves by despising and condemning each other, and thus upsetting all the precepts of the master they profess to follow, there is actually a man who sticks to the traditions of his ancestors. odd, isn't it? in this delightful, intellectual age, when more than half of us are discontented with life and yet don't want to die, there is a fine old gentleman, living beyond the arctic circle, who is perfectly satisfied with his existence--not only that, he thinks death the greatest glory that can befall him. comfortable state of things altogether! i'm half inclined to be an odinite too." sandy still remained lost in astonishment. "then ye don't believe that he made awa' wi' his wife?" he inquired slowly. "not in the least!" returned lorimer decidedly; "neither will you, to-morrow, when you see him. he's a great deal better up in literature than you are, my boy, i'd swear, judging from the books he has. and when he mentioned his wife, as he did once, you could see in his face he had never done _her_ any harm. besides, his daughter--" "ah! but i forgot," interposed duprèz again. "the daughter, thelma, was the child the mysteriously vanished lady carried in her arms, wandering with it all about the woods and hills. after her disappearance, another thing extraordinary happens. the child also disappears, and monsieur güldmar lives alone, avoided carefully by every respectable person. suddenly the child returns, grown to be nearly a woman--and they say, lovely to an almost impossible extreme. she lives with her father. she, like her strange mother, never enters a church, town, or village--nowhere, in fact, where persons are in any numbers. three years ago, it appears, she vanished again, but came back at the end of ten months, lovelier than ever. since then she has remained quiet--composed--but always apart,--she may disappear at any moment. droll, is it not, errington? and the reputation she has is natural!" "pray state it," said philip, with freezing coldness. "the reputation of a woman is nothing nowadays. fair game--go on!" but his face was pale, and his eyes blazed dangerously. almost unconsciously his hand toyed with the rose thelma had given him, that still ornamented his button-hole. "mon dieu!" cried duprèz in amazement. "but look not at me like that! it seems to displease you, to put you _en fureur_, what i say! it is not my story,--it is not i,--i know not mademoiselle güldmar. but as her beauty is considered superhuman, they say it is the devil who is her _parfumeur_, her _coiffeur_, and who sees after her complexion; in brief, she is thought to be a witch in full practice, dangerous to life and limb." errington laughed loudly, he was so much relieved. "is that all?" he said with light contempt. "by jove! what a pack of fools there must be about here,--ugly fools too, if they think beauty is a sign of witchcraft. i wonder dyceworthy isn't scared out of his skin if he positively thinks the so-called witch is setting her cap at him." "ah, but he means to convairt her," said macfarlane seriously. "to draw the evil oot o' her, as it were. he said he wad do't by fair means or foul." something in these latter words struck lorimer, for, raising himself in his seat, he asked, "surely mr. dyceworthy, with all his stupidity, doesn't carry it so far as to believe in witchcraft?" "oh, indeed he does," exclaimed duprèz; "he believes in it _à la lettre_! he has bible authority for his belief. he is very firm--firmest when drunk!" and he laughed gaily. errington muttered something not very flattering to mr. dyceworthy's intelligence, which escaped the hearing of his friends; then he said-- "come along, all of you, down into the saloon. we want something to eat. let the güldmars alone; i'm not a bit sorry i've asked them to come to-morrow. i believe you'll all like them immensely." they all descended the stair-way leading to the lower part of the yacht, and macfarlane asked as he followed his host-- "is the lass vera bonnie did ye say?" "bonnie's not the word for it this time," said lorimer, coolly answering instead of errington. "miss güldmar is a magnificent woman. you never saw such a one, sandy, my boy; she'll make you sing small with one look; she'll wither you up into a kippered herring! and as for you, duprèz," and he regarded the little frenchman critically, "let me see,--you _may_ possibly reach up to her shoulder,--certainly not beyond it." "_pas possible!_" cried duprèz. "mademoiselle is a giantess." "she needn't be a giantess to overtop you, _mon ami_," laughed lorimer with a lazy shrug. "by jove, i _am_ sleepy, errington, old boy; are we never going to bed? it's no good waiting till it's dark here, you know." "have something first," said sir philip, seating himself at the saloon table, where his steward had laid out a tasty cold collation. "we've had a good deal of climbing about and rowing; it's taken it out of us a little." thus hospitably adjured, they took their places, and managed to dispose of an excellent supper. the meal concluded, duprèz helped himself to a tiny liqueur glass of chartreuse, as a wind-up to the exertions of the day, a mild luxury in which the others joined him, with the exception of macfarlane, who was wont to declare that a "mon without his whusky was nae mon at a'," and who, therefore, persisted in burning up his interior mechanism with alcohol in spite of the doctrines of hygiene, and was now absorbed in the work of mixing his lemon, sugar, hot water, and poison--his usual preparation for a night's rest. lorimer, usually conversational, watched him in abstracted silence. rallied on this morose humor, he rose, shook himself like a retriever, yawned, and sauntered to the piano that occupied a dim corner of the saloon, and began to play with that delicate, subtle touch, which, though it does not always mark the brilliant pianist, distinguishes the true lover of music, to whose ears a rough thump on the instrument, or a false note would be most exquisite agony. lorimer had no pretense to musical talent; asked, he confessed he could "strum a little," and he seemed to see the evident wonder and admiration he awakened in the minds of many to whom such "strumming" as his was infinitely more delightful than more practiced, finished playing. just now he seemed undecided,--he commenced a dainty little prelude of chopin's, then broke suddenly off, and wandered into another strain, wild, pleading, pitiful, and passionate,--a melody so weird and dreamy that even the stolid macfarlane paused in his toddy-sipping, and duprèz looked round in some wonderment. "_comme c'est beau, ça!_" he murmured. errington said nothing; he recognized the tune as that which thelma had sung at her spinning-wheel, and his bold bright eyes grew pensive and soft, as the picture of the fair face and form rose up again before his mind. absorbed in a reverie, he almost started when lorimer ceased playing, and said lightly-- "by-bye, boys! i'm off to bed! phil, don't wake me so abominably early as you did this morning. if you do, friendship can hold out no longer--we must part!" "all right!" laughed errington good-humoredly, watching his friend as he sauntered out of the saloon; then seeing duprèz and macfarlane rise from the table, he added courteously, "don't hurry away on lorimer's account, you two. i'm not in the least sleepy,--i'll sit up with you to any hour." "it is droll to go to bed in broad daylight," said duprèz. "but it must be done. _cher philippe_, your eyes are heavy. 'to bed, to bed,' as the excellent madame macbeth says. ah! _quelle femme!_ what an exciting wife she was for a man? come, let us follow our dear lorimer,--his music was delicious. good night or good morning? . . . i know not which it is in this strange land where the sun shines always! it is confusing!" they shook hands and separated. errington, however, unable to compose his mind to rest, went into his cabin merely to come out of it again and betake himself to the deck, where he decided to walk up and down till he felt sleepy. he wished to be alone with his own thoughts for awhile--to try and resolve the meaning of this strange new emotion that possessed him,--a feeling that was half pleasing, half painful, and that certainly moved him to a sort of shame. a man, if he be strong and healthy, is always more or less ashamed when love, with a single effort, proves him to be weaker than a blade of grass swaying in the wind. what! all his dignity, all his resoluteness, all his authority swept down by the light touch of a mere willow wand? for the very sake of his own manhood and self-respect, he cannot help but be ashamed! it is as though a little nude, laughing child mocked at a lion's strength, and made him a helpless prisoner with a fragile daisy chain. so the god eros begins his battles, which end in perpetual victory,--first fear and shame,--then desire and passion,--then conquest and possession. and afterwards? ah! . . . afterwards the pagan deity is powerless,--a higher god, a grander force, a nobler creed must carry love to its supreme and best fulfillment. chapter viii. "le vent qui vient à travers la montagne m'a rendu fou!" victor hugo. it was half an hour past midnight. sir philip was left in absolute solitude to enjoy his meditative stroll on deck, for the full radiance of light that streamed over the sea and land was too clear and brilliant to necessitate the attendance of any of the sailors for the purpose of guarding the _eulalie_. she was safely anchored and distinctly visible to all boats or fishing craft crossing the fjord, so that unless a sudden gale should blow, which did not seem probable in the present state of the weather, there was nothing for the men to do that need deprive them of their lawful repose. errington paced up and down slowly, his yachting shoes making no noise, even as they left no scratch on the spotless white deck, that shone in the night sunshine like polished silver. the fjord was very calm,--on one side it gleamed like a pool of golden oil in which the outline of the _eulalie_ was precisely traced, her delicate masts and spars and drooping flag being drawn in black lines on the yellow water as though with a finely pointed pencil. there was a curious light in the western sky; a thick bank of clouds, dusky brown in color, were swept together and piled one above the other in mountainous ridges, that rose up perpendicularly from the very edge of the sea-line, while over their dark summits a glimpse of the sun, like a giant's eye, looked forth, darting dazzling descending rays through the sullen smoke-like masses, tinging them with metallic green and copper hues as brilliant and shifting as the bristling points of lifted spears. away to the south, a solitary wreath of purple vapor floated slowly as though lost from some great mountain height; and through its faint, half disguising veil the pale moon peered sorrowfully, like a dying prisoner lamenting joy long past, but unforgotten. a solemn silence reigned; and errington, watching sea and sky, grew more and more absorbed and serious. the scornful words of the proud old olaf güldmar rankled in his mind and stung him. "an idle trifler with time--an aimless wanderer!" bitter, but, after all, true! he looked back on his life with a feeling kin to contempt. what had he done that was at all worth doing? he had seen to the proper management of his estates,--well! any one with a grain of self-respect and love of independence would do the same. he had travelled and amused himself,--he had studied languages and literature,--he had made many friends; but after all said and done, the _bonde's_ cutting observations had described him correctly enough. the do-nothing, care-nothing tendency, common to the very wealthy in this age, had crept upon him unconsciously; the easy, cool, indifferent nonchalance common to men of his class and breeding was habitual with him, and he had never thought it worth while to exert his dormant abilities. why then, should he now begin to think it was time to reform all this,--to rouse himself to an effort,--to gain for himself some honor, some distinction, some renown that should mark him out as different to other men? why was he suddenly seized with an insatiate desire to be something more than a mere "mushroom knight, a fungus of nobility"--why? if not to make himself worthy of--ah! there he had struck a suggestive key-note! worthy of what? of whom? there was no one in all the world, excepting perhaps lorimer, who cared what became of sir philip errington, baronet, in the future, so long as he would, for the present, entertain and feast his numerous acquaintances and give them all the advantages, social and political, his wealth could so easily obtain. then why, in the name of well-bred indolence, should he muse with such persistent gloom, on his general unworthiness at this particular moment? was it because this norwegian maiden's grand blue eyes had met his with such beautiful trust and candor? he had known many women, queens of society, titled beauties, brilliant actresses, sirens of the world with all their witcheries in full play, and he had never lost his self-possession or his heart; with the loveliest of them he had always felt himself master of the situation, knowing that, in their opinion he was always "a catch," "an eligible," and, therefore, well worth winning. now, for the first time, he became aware of his utter insignificance,--this tall, fair goddess knew none of the social slang--and her fair, pure face, the mirror of a fair, pure soul, showed that the "eligibility" of a man from a pecuniary point of view was a consideration that would never present itself to her mind. what she would look at would be the man himself,--not his pocket. and, studied from such an exceptional height,--a height seldom climbed by modern marrying women,--philip felt himself unworthy. it was a good sign; there are great hopes of any man who is honestly dissatisfied with himself. folding his arms, he leaned idly on the deck-rails, and looked gravely and musingly down into the motionless water where the varied lines of the sky were clearly mirrored,--when a slight creaking, cracking sound was heard, as of some obstacle grazing against or bumping the side of the yacht. he looked, and saw, to his surprise, a small rowing boat close under the gunwale, so close indeed that the slow motion of the tide heaved it every now and then into a jerky collision with the lower framework of the _eulalie_--a circumstance which explained the sound which had attracted his attention. the boat was not unoccupied--there was some one in it lying straight across the seats, with face turned upwards to the sky--and, walking noiselessly to a better post of observation, errington's heart beat with some excitement as he recognized the long, fair, unkempt locks, and eccentric attire of the strange personage who had confronted him in the cave--the crazy little man who had called himself "sigurd." there he was, beyond a doubt, lying flat on his back with his eyes closed. asleep or dead? he might have been the latter,--his thin face was so pale and drawn,--his lips were so set and colorless. errington, astonished to see him there, called softly-- "sigurd! sigurd!" there was no answer; sigurd's form seemed inanimate--his eyes remained fast shut. "is he in a trance?" thought sir philip wonderingly; "or has he fainted from some physical exhaustion?" he called again, but again received no reply. he now observed in the stem of the boat a large bunch of pansies, dark as velvet, and evidently freshly gathered,--proving that sigurd had been wandering in the deep valleys and on the sloping sides of the hills, where these flowers may be frequently found in norway during the summer. he began to feel rather uncomfortable, as he watched that straight stiff figure in the boat, and was just about to swing down the companion-ladder for the purpose of closer inspection, when a glorious burst of light streamed radiantly over the fjord,--the sun conquered the masses of dark cloud that had striven to conceal his beauty, and now,--like a warrior clad in golden armor, surmounted and trod down his enemies, shining forth in all his splendor. with that rush of brilliant effulgence, the apparently lifeless sigurd stirred,--he opened his eyes, and as they were turned upwards, he naturally, from his close vicinity to the side of the _eulalie_, met errington's gaze fixed inquiringly and somewhat anxiously upon him. he sprang up with such sudden and fierce haste that his frail boat rocked dangerously and philip involuntarily cried out-- "take care!" sigurd stood upright in his swaying skiff and laughed scornfully. "take care!" he echoed derisively. "it is you who should take care! you,--poor miserable moth on the edge of a mad storm! it is you to fear--not i! see how the light rains over the broad sky. all for me! yes, all the light, all the glory for me; all the darkness, all the shame for you!" errington listened to these ravings with an air of patience and pitying gentleness, then he said with perfect coolness-- "you are quite right, sigurd! you are always right, i am sure. come up here and see me; i won't hurt you! come along!" the friendly tone and gentle manner appeared to soothe the unhappy dwarf, for he stared doubtfully, then smiled,--and finally, as though acting under a spell, he took up an oar and propelled himself skillfully enough to the gangway, where errington let down the ladder and with his own hand assisted his visitor to mount, not forgetting to fasten the boat safely to the steps as he did so. once on deck, sigurd gazed about him perplexedly. he had brought his bunch of pansies with him, and he fingered their soft leaves thoughtfully. suddenly his eyes flashed. "you are alone here?" he asked abruptly. fearing to scare his strange guest by the mention of his companions, errington answered simply--"yes, quite alone just now, sigurd." sigurd took a step closer towards him. "are you not afraid?" he said in an awe-struck, solemn voice. sir philip smiled. "i never was afraid of anything in my life!" he answered. the dwarf eyed him keenly. "you are not afraid," he went on, "that i shall kill you?" "not in the least," returned errington calmly. "you would not do anything so foolish, my friend." sigurd laughed. "ha ha! you call me 'friend.' you think that word a safeguard! i tell you, no! there are no friends now; the world is a great field of battle,--each man fights the other. there is no peace,--none anywhere! the wind fights with the forests; you can hear them slashing and slaying all night long--when it _is_ night--the long, long night! the sun fights with the sky, the light with the dark, and life with death. it is all a bitter quarrel; none are satisfied, none shall know friendship any more; it is too late! we cannot be friends!" "well, have it your own way," said philip good-naturedly, wishing that lorimer were awake to interview this strange specimen of human wit gone astray; "we'll fight if you like. anything to please you!" "we _are_ fighting," said sigurd with intense passion in his voice. "you may not know it; but i know it! i have felt the thrust of your sword; it has crossed mine. stay!" and his eyes grew vague and dreamy. "why was i sent to seek you out--let me think--let me think!" and he seated himself forlornly on one of the deck chairs and seemed painfully endeavoring to put his scattered ideas in order. errington studied him with a gentle forbearance; inwardly he was very curious to know whether this sigurd had any connection with the güldmars, but he refrained from asking too many questions. he simply said in a cheery tone-- "yes, sigurd,--why did you come to see me? i'm glad you did; it's very kind of you, but i don't think you even know my name." to his surprise, sigurd looked up with a more settled and resolved expression of face, and answered almost as connectedly as any sane man could have done. "i know your name very well," he said in a low composed manner. "you are sir philip errington, a rich english nobleman. fate led you to _her_ grave--a grave that no strange feet have ever passed, save yours--and so i know you are the man for whom her spirit has waited,--she has brought you hither. how foolish to think she sleeps under the stone, when she is always awake and busy,--always at work opposing me! yes, though i pray her to lie still, she will not!" his voice grew wild again, and philip asked quietly-- "of whom are you speaking, sigurd?" his steady tone seemed to have some compelling influence on the confused mind of the half-witted creature, who answered readily and at once-- "of whom should i speak but thelma? thelma, the beautiful rose of the northern forest--thelma--" he broke off abruptly with a long shuddering sigh, and rocking himself drearily to and fro, gazed wistfully out to the sea. errington hazarded a guess as to the purpose of that coffin hidden in the shell cavern. "do you mean thelma living? . . . or thelma dead?" "both," answered sigurd promptly. "they are one and the same,--you cannot part them. mother and child,--rose and rosebud! one walks the earth with the step of a queen, the other floats in the air like a silvery cloud; but i see them join and embrace and melt into each other's arms till they unite in one form, fairer than the beauty of angels! and you--you know this as well as i do--you have seen thelma, you have kissed the cup of friendship with her; but remember!--not with me--not with me!" he started from his seat, and, running close up to errington, laid one meagre hand on his chest. "how strong you are, how broad and brave," he exclaimed with a sort of childish admiration. "and can you not be generous too?" errington looked down upon him compassionately. he had learned enough from his incoherent talk to clear up what had seemed a mystery. the scandalous reports concerning olaf güldmar were incorrect,--he had evidently laid the remains of his wife in the shell-cavern, for some reason connected with his religious belief, and thelma's visits to the sacred spot were now easy of comprehension. no doubt it was she who placed fresh flowers there every day, and kept the little lamp burning before the crucifix as a sign of the faith her departed mother had professed, and which she herself followed. but who was sigurd, and what was he to the güldmars? thinking this, he replied to the dwarf's question by a counter-inquiry. "how shall i be generous, sigurd? tell me! what can i do to please you?" sigurd's wild blue eyes sparkled with pleasure. "do!" he cried. "you can go away, swiftly, swiftly, over the seas, and the altenfjord need know you no more! spread your white sails!" and he pointed excitedly up to the tall tapering masts of the _eulalie_. "you are king here. command and you are obeyed! go from us, go! what is there here to delay you? our mountains are dark and gloomy,--the fields are wild and desolate,--there are rocks, glaciers and shrieking torrents that hiss like serpents gliding into the sea! oh, there must be fairer lands than this one,--lands where oceans and sky are like twin jewels set in one ring,--where there are sweet flowers and fruits and bright eyes to smile on you all day--yes! for you are as a god in your strength and beauty--no woman will be cruel to _you_! ah! say you will go away!" and sigurd's face was transfigured into a sort of pained beauty as he made his appeal. "that is what i came to seek you for,--to ask you to set sail quickly and go, for why should you wish to destroy me? i have done you no harm as yet. go!--and odin himself shall follow your path with blessings!" he paused, almost breathless with his own earnest pleading. errington was silent. he considered the request a mere proof of the poor creature's disorder. the very idea that sigurd seemed to entertain of his doing him any harm, showed a reasonless terror and foreboding that was simply to be set down as caused by his unfortunate mental condition. to such an appeal there could be no satisfactory reply. to sail away from the altenfjord and its now most fascinating attractions, because a madman asked him to do so, was a proposition impossible of acceptance, so sir philip said nothing. sigurd, however, watching his face intently, saw, or thought he saw, a look of resolution in the englishman's clear, deep grey eyes,--and with the startling quickness common to many whose brains, like musical instruments, are jarred, yet not quite unstrung, he grasped the meaning of that expression instantly. "ah! cruel and traitorous!" he exclaimed fiercely. "you will not go; you are resolved to tear my heart out for your sport! i have pleaded with you as one pleads with a king and all in vain--all in vain! you will not go? listen, see what you will do," and he held up the bunch of purple pansies, while his voice sank to an almost feeble faintness. "look!" and he fingered the flowers, "look! . . . they are dark and soft as a purple sky,--cool and dewy and fresh;--they are the thoughts of thelma; such thoughts! so wise and earnest, so pure and full of tender shadows!--no hand has grasped them rudely, no rough touch has spoiled their smoothness! they open full-faced to the sky, they never droop or languish; they have no secrets, save the marvel of their beauty. now you have come, you will have no pity,--one by one you will gather and play with her thoughts as though they were these blossoms,--your burning hand will mar their color,--they will wither and furl up and die, all of them,--and you,--what will you care? nothing! no man ever cares for a flower that is withered,--not even though his own hand slew it." the intense melancholy that vibrated through sigurd's voice touched his listener profoundly. dimly he guessed that the stricken soul before him had formed the erroneous idea that he, errington, had come to do some great wrong to thelma or her belongings, and he pitied the poor creature for his foolish self-torture. "listen to me, sigurd," he said, with a certain imperativeness; "i cannot promise you to go away, but i can promise that i will do no harm to you or to--to--thelma. will that content you?" sigurd smiled vacantly and shook his head. he looked at the pansies wistfully and laid them down very gently on one of the deck benches. "i must go," he said in a faint voice:--"she is calling me." "who is calling you?" demanded errington astonished. "she is," persisted sigurd, walking steadily to the gangway. "i can hear her! there are the roses to water, and the doves to feed, and many other things." he looked steadily at sir philip, who, seeing he was bent on departure, assisted him to descend the companion ladder into his little boat. "you are sure you will not sail away?" errington balanced himself lightly on the ladder and smiled. "i am sure, sigurd! i have no wish to sail away. are you all right there?" he spoke cheerily, feeling in his own mind that it was scarcely safe for a madman to be quite alone in a cockle-shell of a boat on a deep fjord, the shores of which were indented with dangerous rocks as sharp as the bristling teeth of fabled sea-monsters, but sigurd answered him almost contemptuously. "all right!" he echoed. "that is what the english say always. all right! as if it were ever wrong with me, and the sea! we know each other,--we do each other no harm. _you_ may die on the sea, but _i_ shall not! no, there is another way to valhalla!" "oh, i dare say there are no end of ways," said errington good-temperedly, still poising himself on the ladder, and holding on to the side of his yacht, as he watched his late visitor take the oars and move off. "good-bye, sigurd! take care of yourself! hope i shall see you again soon." but sigurd replied not. bending to the oars, he rowed swiftly and strongly, and sir philip, pulling up the ladder and closing the gangway, saw the little skiff flying over the water like a bird in the direction of the güldmar's landing-place. he wondered again and again what relationship, if any, this half-crazed being bore to the _bonde_ and his daughter. that he knew all about them was pretty evident; but how? catching sight of the pansies left on the deck bench, errington took them, and, descending to the saloon, set them on the table in a tumbler of water. "thelma's thoughts, the poor little fellow called them," he mused, with a smile. "a pretty fancy of his, and linked with the crazy imaginings of ophelia too. 'there's pansies, that's for thoughts,' _she_ said, but sigurd's idea is different; he believes they are thelma's own thoughts in flower. 'no rough touch has spoiled their smoothness,' he declared; he's right there, i'm sure. and shall i ruffle the sweet leaves; shall i crush the tender petals? or shall i simply transform them, from pansies into roses,--from the dream of love,--into love itself?" his eyes softened as he glanced at the drooping rose he wore, which thelma herself had given him, and as he went to his sleeping cabin, he carefully detached it from his button-hole, and taking down a book,--one which he greatly prized, because it had belonged to his mother,--he prepared to press the flower within its leaves. it was the "imitation of christ," bound quaintly and fastened with silver clasps, and as he was about to lay his fragrant trophy on the first page that opened naturally of itself, he glanced at the words that there presented themselves to his eyes. "nothing is sweeter than love, nothing stronger, nothing higher, nothing wider, nothing more pleasant, nothing fuller or better in heaven or in earth!" and with a smile and a warmer flush of color than usual on his handsome face, he touched the rose lightly yet tenderly with his lips and shut it reverently within its sacred resting-place. chapter ix. "our manners are infinitely corrupted, and wonderfully incline to the worse; of our customs there are many barbarous and monstrous." montaigne. the next day was very warm and bright, and that pious lutheran divine, the reverend charles dyceworthy, was seriously encumbered by his own surplus flesh material as he wearily rowed himself across the fjord towards olaf güldmar's private pier. as the perspiration bedewed his brow, he felt that heaven had dealt with him somewhat too liberally in the way of fat--he was provided too amply with it ever to excel as an oarsman. the sun was burning hot, the water was smooth as oil, and very weighty--it seemed to resist every stroke of his clumsily wielded blades. altogether it was hard, uncongenial work,--and, being rendered somewhat flabby and nerveless by his previous evening's carouse with macfarlane's whisky, mr. dyceworthy was in a plaintive and injured frame of mind, he was bound on a mission--a holy and edifying errand, which would have elevated any minister of his particular sect. he had found a crucifix with the name of thelma engraved thereon,--he was now about to return it to the evident rightful owner, and in returning it, he purposed denouncing it as an emblem of the "scarlet woman, that sitteth on the seven hills," and threatening all those who dared to hold it sacred, as doomed to eternal torture, "where the worm dieth not." he had thought over all he meant to say; he had planned several eloquent and rounded sentences, some of which he murmured placidly to himself as he propelled his slow boat along. "yea!" he observed in a mild sotto-voce--"ye shall be cut off root and branch! ye shall be scorched even as stubble,--and utterly destroyed." here he paused and mopped his streaming forehead with his clean perfumed handkerchief. "yea!" he resumed peacefully, "the worshippers of idolatrous images are accursèd; they shall have ashes for food and gall for drink! let them turn and repent themselves, lest the wrath of god consume them as straw whirled on the wind. repent! . . . or ye shall be cast into everlasting fire. beauty shall avail not, learning shall avail not, meekness shall avail not; for the fire of hell is a searching, endless, destroying--" here mr. dyceworthy, by plunging one oar with too much determination into the watery depths, caught a crab, as the saying is, and fell violently backward in a somewhat undignified posture. recovering himself slowly, he looked about him in a bewildered way, and for the first time noticed the vacant, solitary appearance of the fjord. some object was missing; he realized what it was immediately--the english yacht _eulalie_ was gone from her point of anchorage. "dear me!" said mr. dyceworthy, half aloud, "what a very sudden departure! i wonder, now, if those young men have gone for good, or whether they are coming back again? pleasant fellows, very pleasant! flippant, perhaps, but pleasant." and he smiled benevolently. he had no remembrance of what had occurred, after he had emptied young macfarlane's flask of glenlivet; he had no idea that he had been almost carried from his garden into his parlor, and there flung on the sofa and left to sleep off the effects of his strong tipple; least of all did he dream that he had betrayed any of his intentions towards thelma güldmar, or given his religious opinions with such free and undisguised candor. blissfully ignorant on these points, he resumed his refractory oars, and after nearly an hour of laborious effort, succeeded at last in reaching his destination. arrived at the little pier, he fastened up his boat, and with the lofty air of a thoroughly moral man, he walked deliberately up to the door of the _bonde's_ house. contrary to custom, it was closed, and the place seemed strangely silent and deserted. the afternoon heat was so great that the song-birds were hushed, and in hiding under the cool green leaves,--the clambering roses round the porch hung down their bright heads for sheer faintness,--and the only sounds to be heard were the subdued coo-cooing of the doves on the roof and the soft trickling rush of a little mountain stream that flowed through the grounds. some what surprised, though not abashed, at the evident "not-at-home" look of the farm-house, mr. dyceworthy rapped loudly at the rough oaken door with his knuckles, there being no such modern convenience as a bell or a knocker. he waited sometime before he was answered, repeating his summons violently at frequent intervals, and swearing irreligiously under his breath as he did so. but at last the door was flung sharply open, and the tangle-haired, rosy-cheeked britta confronted him with an aspect which was by no means encouraging or polite. her round blue eyes sparkled saucily, and she placed her bare, plump, red arms, wet with recent soapsuds, akimbo on her sturdy little hips, with an air that was decidedly impertinent. "well, what do you want?" she demanded with rude abruptness. mr. dyceworthy regarded her in speechless dignity. vouchsafing no reply, he attempted to pass her and enter the house. but britta settled her arms more defiantly than ever, and her voice had a sharper ring as she said-- "it's no use your coming in! there's no one here but me. the master has gone out for the day." "young woman," returned mr. dyceworthy with polite severity, "i regret to see that your manners stand in sore need of improvement. your master's absence is of no importance to me. it is with the fröken thelma i desire to speak." britta laughed and tossed her rough brown curls back from her forehead. mischievous dimples came and went at the corners of her mouth--indications of suppressed fun. "the fröken is out too," she said demurely. "it's time she had a little amusement; and the gentlemen treat her as if she were a queen!" mr. dyceworthy started, and his red visage became a trifle paler. "gentlemen? what gentlemen?" he demanded with some impatience. britta's inward delight evidently increased. "the gentlemen from the yacht, of course," she said. "what other _gentlemen_ are there?" this with a contemptuous up-and-down sort of look at the lutheran minister's portly form. "sir philip errington was here with his friend yesterday evening and stayed a long time--and today a fine boat with four oars came to fetch the master and fröken thelma, and they are all gone for a sail to the kaa fjord or some other place near here--i cannot remember the name. and i am so glad!" went on britta, clasping her plump hands in ecstasy. "they are the grandest, handsomest _herren_ i have ever seen, and one can tell they think wonders of the fröken--nothing is too good for her!" mr. dyceworthy's face was the picture of dismay. this was a new turn to the course of events, and one, more over, that he had never once contemplated. britta watched him amusedly. "will you leave any message for them when they return?" she asked. "no," said the minister dubiously. "yet, stay; yes! i will! tell the fröken that i have found something which belongs to her, and that when she wishes to have it, i will myself bring it." britta looked cross. "if it is hers you have no business to keep it," she said brusquely. "why not leave it,--whatever it is,--with me?" mr. dyceworthy regarded her with a bland and lofty air. "i trust no concerns of mine or hers to the keeping of a paid domestic," he said. "a domestic, moreover, who deserts the ways of her own people,--who hath dealings with the dwellers in darkness,--who even bringeth herself to forget much of her own native tongue, and who devoteth herself to--" what he would have said was uncertain, as at that moment he was nearly thrown down by a something that slipped agilely between his legs, pinching each fat calf as it passed--a something that looked like a ball, but proved to be a human creature--no other than the crazy sigurd, who, after accomplishing his uncouth gambol successfully, stood up, shaking back his streaming fair locks and laughing wildly. "ha, ha!" he exclaimed. "that was good; that was clever! if i had upset you now, you would have said your prayers backward! what are you here for? this is no place for you! they are all gone out of it. _she_ has gone--all the world is empty! there is nothing any where but air, air, air!--no birds, no flowers, no trees, no sunshine! all gone with her on the sparkling, singing water!" and he swung his arms round violently, and snapped his fingers in the minister's face. "what an ugly man your are!" he exclaimed with refreshing candor. "i think you are uglier than i am! you are straight,--but you are like a load of peat--heavy and barren and fit to burn. now, i--i am the crooked bough of a tree, but i have bright leaves where a bird hides and sings all day! you--you have no song, no foliage; only ugly and barren and fit to burn!" he laughed heartily, and, catching sight of britta, where she stood in the doorway entirely unconcerned at his eccentric behavior, he went up to her and took hold of the corner of her apron. "take me in, britta dear--pretty britta!" he said coaxingly. "sigurd is hungry! britta, sweet little britta,--come and talk to me and sing! good-bye, fat man!" he added suddenly, turning round once more on dyceworthy. "you will never overtake the big ship that has gone away with thelma over the water. thelma will come back,--yes! . . . but one day she will go never to come back." he dropped his voice to a mysterious whisper. "last night i saw a little spirit come out of a rose,--he carried a tiny golden hammer and nail, and a ball of cord like a rolled-up sunbeam. he flew away so quickly i could not follow him; but i know where he went! he fastened the nail in the heart of thelma, deeply, so that the little drops of blood flowed,--but she felt no pain; and then he tied the golden cord to the nail and left her, carrying the other end of the string with him--to whom? some other heart must be pierced! whose heart?" sigurd looked infinitely cunning as well as melancholy, and sighed deeply. the reverend mr. dyceworthy was impatient and disgusted. "it is a pity," he said with an air of solemn patience, "that this hapless creature, accursèd of god and man, is not placed in some proper abode suitable to the treatment of his affliction. you, britta, as the favored servant of a--a--well, let us say, of a peculiar mistress, should persuade her to send this--this--person away, lest his vagaries become harmful." britta glanced very kindly at sigurd, who still held her apron with the air of a trustful child. "he's no more harmful than you are," she said promptly, in answer to the minister's remark. "he's a good fellow and if he talks strangely he can make himself useful,--which is more than can be said of certain people. he can saw and chop the wood, make hay, feed the cattle, pull a strong oar, and sweep and keep the garden,--can't you, sigurd?" she laid her hand on sigurd's shoulder, and he nodded his head emphatically, as she enumerated his different talents. "and as for climbing,--he can guide you anywhere over the hills, or up the streams to the big waterfalls--no one better. and if you mean by peculiar,--that my mistress is different to other people, why, i know she is, and am glad of it,--at any rate, she's a great deal too kind-hearted to shut this poor boy up in a house for madmen! he'd die if he couldn't have the fresh air." she paused, out of breath with her rapid utterance, and mr. dyceworthy held up his hands in dignified astonishment. "you talk too glibly, young woman," he said. "it is necessary that i should instruct you without loss of time, as to how you should be sparing of your words in the presence of your superiors and betters--" bang! the door was closed with a decision that sent a sharp echo through the silent, heated air, and mr. dyceworthy was left to contemplate it at his leisure. full of wrath, he was about to knock peremptorily and insist that it should be re-opened; but on second thoughts he decided that it was beneath his dignity to argue with a servant, much less with a declared lunatic like sigurd,--so he made the best of his way back to his boat, thinking gloomily of the hard labor awaiting him in the long pull back to bosekop. other thoughts, too, tortured and harrassed his brain, and as he again took the oars and plied them wearily through the water, he was in an exceedingly unchristian humor. though a specious hypocrite, he was no fool. he knew the ways of men and women, and he thoroughly realized the present position of affairs. he was quite aware of thelma güldmar's exceptional beauty,--and he felt pretty certain that no man could look upon her without admiration. but up to this time, she had been, as it were, secluded from all eyes,--a few haymakers and fishermen were the only persons of the male sex who had ever been within the precincts of olaf güldmar's dwelling, with the exception of himself, dyceworthy,--who, being armed with a letter of introduction from the actual minister of bosekop, whose place, he, for the present, filled, had intruded his company frequently and persistently on the _bonde_ and his daughter, though he knew himself to be entirely unwelcome. he had gathered together as much as he could, all the scraps of information concerning them; how olaf güldmar was credited with having made away with his wife by foul means; how nobody even knew where his wife had come from; how thelma had been mysteriously educated, and had learned strange things concerning foreign lands, which no one else in the place understood anything about; how she was reputed to be a witch, and was believed to have cast her spells on the unhappy sigurd, to the destruction of his reason,--and how nobody could tell where sigurd himself had come from. all this mr. dyceworthy had heard with much interest, and as the sensual part of his nature was always more or less predominant, he had resolved in his own mind that here was a field of action suitable to his abilities. to tame and break the evil spirit in the reputed witch; to convert her to the holy and edifying lutheran faith; to save her soul for the lord, and take her beautiful body for himself; these were mr. dyceworthy's laudable ambitions. there was no rival to oppose him, and he had plenty of time to mature his plans. so he had thought. he had not bargained for the appearance of sir philip bruce errington on the scene,--a man, young, handsome, and well-bred, with vast wealth to back up his pretensions, should he make any. "how did he find her out?" thought the reverend charles, as he dolefully pulled his craft along. "and that brutal pagan güldmar, too, who pretends he cannot endure strangers!" and as he meditated, a flush of righteous indignation crimsoned his flabby features. "let her take care," he half muttered, with a smile that was not pleasant; "let her take care! there are more ways than one to bring down her pride! sir philip errington must be too rich and popular in his own country to think of wishing to marry a girl who is only a farmer's daughter after all. he may trifle with her; yes! . . . and he will help me by so doing. the more mud on her name, the better for me; the more disgrace, the more need of rescue, and the more grateful she will have to be. just a word to ulrika,--and the scandal will spread. patience, patience!" and somewhat cheered by his own reflections, though still wearing an air of offended dignity, he rowed on, glancing up every now and then to see if the _eulalie_ had returned, but her place was still empty. meanwhile, as he thought and planned, other thoughts and plans were being discussed at a meeting which was held in a little ruined stone hut, situated behind some trees on a dreary hill just outside bosekop. it was a miserable place, barren of foliage,--the ground was dry and yellow, and the hut itself looked as if it had been struck by lightning. the friends, whose taste had led them to select this dilapidated dwelling as a place of conference, were two in number, both women,--one of them no other than the minister's servant, the drear-faced ulrika. she was crouched on the earth-floor in an attitude of utter abasement, at the feet of her companion,--an aged dame of tall and imposing appearance, who, standing erect, looked down upon her with an air of mingled contempt and malevolence. the hut was rather dark, for the roof was not sufficiently destroyed to have the advantage of being open to the sky. the sunlight fell through holes of different shapes and sizes,--one specially bright patch of radiance illumining the stately form, and strongly marked, though withered features of the elder woman, whose eyes, deeply sunken in her head, glittered with a hawk-like and evil lustre, as they rested on the prostrate figure before her. when she spoke, her accents were harsh and commanding. "how long?" she said, "how long must i wait? how long must i watch the work of satan in the land? the fields are barren and will not bring forth; the curse of bitter poverty is upon us all: and only he, the pagan güldmar, prospers and gathers in harvest, while all around him starve! do i not know the devil's work when i see it,--i, the chosen servant of the lord?" and she struck a tall staff she held violently into the ground to emphasize her words. "am i not left deserted in my age? the child britta,--sole daughter of my sole daughter,--is she not stolen, and kept from me? has not her heart been utterly turned away from mine? all through that vile witch,--accursèd of god and man! she it is who casts the blight on our land; she it is who makes the hands and hearts of our men heavy and careless, so that even luck has left the fishing; and yet you hesitate,--you delay, you will not fulfill your promise! i tell you, there are those in bosekop who, at my bidding, would cast her naked into the fjord, leave her there, to sink or swim according to her nature!" "i know," murmured ulrika humbly, raising herself slightly from her kneeling posture; "i know it well! . . . . but, good lovisa, be patient! i work for the best! mr. dyceworthy will do more for us than we can do for ourselves; he is wise and cautious--" lovisa interrupted her with a fierce gesture. "fool!" she cried. "what need of caution? a witch is a witch, burn her, drown her! there is no other remedy! but two days since, the child of my neighbor engla passed her on the fjord; and now the boy has sickened of some strange disease, and 'tis said he will die. again, the drove of cattle owned by hildmar bjorn were herded home when she passed by. now they are seized by the murrain plague! tell your good saint dyceworthy these things; if he can find no cure, _i_ can,--and _will_!" ulrika shuddered slightly as she rose from the ground and stood erect, drawing her shawl closely about her. "you hate her so much, lovisa?" she asked, almost timidly. lovisa's face darkened, and her yellow, claw-like hand closed round her strong staff in a cruel and threatening manner. "hate her!" she muttered, "i have hated her ever since she was born! i hated her mother before her! a nest of devils, every one of them; and the curse will always be upon us while they dwell here." she paused and looked at ulrika steadily. "remember!" she said, with an evil leer on her lips, "i hold a secret of yours that is worth the keeping! i give you two weeks more; within that time you must act! destroy the witch,--bring back to me my grandchild britta, or else--it will be _my_ turn!" and she laughed silently. ulrika's face grew paler, and the hand that grasped the folds of her shawl trembled violently. she made an effort, however, to appear composed, as she answered--"i have sworn to obey you, lovisa,--and i will. but tell me one thing--how do you know that thelma güldmar is indeed a witch?" "how do i know?" almost yelled lovisa. "have i lived all these years for nothing? look at her! am _i_ like her? are _you_ like her? are any of the honest women of the neighborhood like her? meet her on the hills with knives and pins,--prick her, and see if the blood will flow! i swear it will not--not one drop! her skin is too white; there is no blood in those veins--only fire! look at the pink in her cheeks,--the transparency of her flesh,--the glittering light in her eyes, the gold of her hair, it is all devil's work, it is not human, it is not natural! i have watched her,--i used to watch her mother, and curse her every time i saw her--ay! curse her till i was breathless with cursing--" she stopped abruptly. ulrika gazed at her with as much wonder as her plain, heavy face was capable of expressing. lovisa saw the look and smiled darkly. "one would think _you_ had never known what love is!" she said, with a sort of grim satire in her tone. "yet even your dull soul was on fire once! but i--when i was young, i had beauty such as you never had, and i loved--olaf güldmar." ulrika uttered an exclamation of astonishment. "you! and yet you hate him now?" lovisa raised her hand with an imperious gesture. "i have grown hate like a flower in my breast," she said, with a sort of stern impressiveness. "i have fostered it year after year, and now,--it has grown too strong for me! when olaf güldmar was young he told me i was fair; once he kissed my cheek at parting! for those words,--for that kiss,--i loved him then--for the same things i hate him now! when i know he had married, i cursed him; on the day of my own marriage with a man i despised, i cursed him! i have followed him and all his surroundings with more curses than there are hours in the day! i have had some little revenge--yes!"--and she laughed grimly--"but i want more! for britta has been caught by his daughter's evil spell. britta is mine, and i must have her back. understand me well!--do what you have to do without delay! surely it is an easy thing to ruin a woman!" ulrika stood as though absorbed in meditation, and said nothing for some moments. at last she murmured as though to herself-- "mr. dyceworthy could do much--if--" "ask him, then," said lovisa imperatively. "tell him the village is in fear of her. tell him that if he will do nothing _we_ will. and if all fails, come to me again; and remember! . . . i shall not only act,--i shall _speak_!" and emphasizing the last word as a sort of threat, she turned and strode out of the hut. ulrika followed more slowly, taking a different direction to that in which her late companion was seen rapidly disappearing. on returning to the minister's dwelling, she found that mr. dyceworthy had not yet come back from his boating excursion. she gave no explanation of her absence to her two fellow-servants, but went straight up to her own room--a bare attic in the roof--where she deliberately took off her dress and bared her shoulders and breast. then she knelt down on the rough boards, and clasping her hands, began to writhe and wrestle as though she were seized with a sudden convulsion. she groaned and tortured the tears from her eyes; she pinched her own flesh till it was black and blue, and scratched it with her nails till it bled,--and she prayed inaudibly, but with evident desperation. sometimes her gestures were frantic, sometimes appealing; but she made no noise that was loud enough to attract attention from any of the dwellers in the house. her stolid features were contorted with anguish,--and had she been an erring nun of the creed she held in such bitter abhorrence, who, for some untold crime, endured a self-imposed penance, she could not have punished her own flesh much more severely. she remained some quarter of an hour or twenty minutes thus; then rising from her knees, she wiped the tears from her eyes and re-clothed herself,--and with her usual calm, immovable aspect--though smarting from the injuries she had inflicted on herself--she descended to the kitchen, there to prepare mr. dyceworthy's tea with all the punctilious care and nicety befitting the meal of so good a man and so perfect a saint. chapter x. "she believed that by dealing nobly with all, all would show themselves noble; so that whatsoever she did became her." hafiz. as the afternoon lengthened, and the sun lowered his glittering shield towards that part of the horizon where he rested a brief while without setting, the _eulalie_,--her white sails spread to the cool, refreshing breeze,--swept gracefully and swiftly back to her old place on the fjord, and her anchor dropped with musical clank and splash, just as mr. dyceworthy entered his house, fatigued, perspiring, and ill-tempered at the non-success of his day. all on board the yacht were at dinner--a dinner of the most tasteful and elegant description, such as sir philip errington well knew how to order and superintend, and thelma, leaning against the violet velvet cushions that were piled behind her for her greater ease, looked,--as she indeed was,--the veritable queen of the feast. macfarlane and duprèz had been rendered astonished and bashful by her excessive beauty. from the moment she came on board with her father, clad in her simple white gown, with a deep crimson hood drawn over her fair hair, and tied under her rounded chin, she had taken them all captive--they were her abject slaves in heart, though they put on very creditable airs of manly independence and nonchalance. each man in his different way strove to amuse or interest her, except, strange to say, errington himself, who, though deeply courteous to her, kept somewhat in the background and appeared more anxious to render himself agreeable to old olaf güldmar, than to win the good graces of his lovely daughter. the girl was delighted with everything on board the yacht,--she admired its elegance and luxury with child-like enthusiasm; she gloried in the speed with which its glittering prow cleaved the waters; she clapped her hands at the hiss of the white foam as it split into a creaming pathway for the rushing vessel; and she was so unaffected and graceful in all her actions and attitudes, that the slow blood of the cautious macfarlane began to warm up by degrees to a most unwonted heat of admiration. when she had first arrived, errington, in receiving her, had seriously apologized for not having some lady to meet her, but she seemed not to understand his meaning. her naïve smile and frankly uplifted eyes put all his suddenly conceived notions of social stiffness to flight. "why should a lady come?" she asked sweetly. "it is not necessary? . . ." "of course it isn't!" said lorimer promptly and delightedly. "i am sure we shall be able to amuse you, miss güldmar." "oh,--for that!" she replied, with a little shrug that had something french about it, "i amuse myself always! i am amused now,--you must not trouble yourselves!" as she was introduced to duprèz and macfarlane, she gave them each a quaint, sweeping curtsy, which had the effect of making them feel the most ungainly lumbersome fellows on the face of the earth. macfarlane grew secretly enraged at the length of his legs,--while pierre duprèz, though his bow was entirely parisian, decided in his own mind that it was jerky, and not good style. she was perfectly unembarrassed with all the young men; she laughed at their jokes, and turned her glorious eyes full on them with the unabashed sweetness of innocence; she listened to the accounts they gave her of their fishing and climbing excursions with the most eager interest,--and in her turn, she told them of fresh nooks and streams and waterfalls, of which they had never even heard the names. not only were they enchanted with her, but they were thoroughly delighted with her father, olaf güldmar. the sturdy old pagan was in the best of humors,--and seemed determined to be pleased with everything,--he told good stories,--and laughed that rollicking, jovial laugh of his with such unforced heartiness that it was impossible to be dull in his company,--and not one of errington's companions gave a thought to the reports concerning him and his daughter, which had been so gratuitously related by mr. dyceworthy. they had had a glorious day's sail, piloted by valdemar svensen, whose astonishment at seeing the güldmars on board the _eulalie_ was depicted in his face, but who prudently forebore from making any remarks thereon. the _bonde_ hailed him good-humoredly as an old acquaintance,--much in the tone of a master addressing a servant,--and thelma smiled kindly at him,--but the boundary line between superior and inferior was in this case very strongly marked, and neither side showed any intention of overstepping it. in the course of the day, duprèz had accidentally lapsed into french, whereupon to his surprise thelma had answered him in the same tongue,--though with a different and much softer pronunciation. her "_bien zoli_!" had the mellifluous sweetness of the provencal dialect, and on his eagerly questioning her, he learned that she had received her education in a large convent at arles, where she had learned french from the nuns. her father overheard her talking of her school-days, and he added-- "yes, i sent my girl away for her education, though i know the teaching is good in christiania. yet it did not seem good enough for her. besides, your modern 'higher education' is not the thing for a woman,--it is too heavy and commonplace. thelma knows nothing about mathematics or algebra. she can sing and read and write,--and, what is more, she can spin and sew; but even these things were not the first consideration with me. i wanted her disposition trained, and her bodily health attended to. i said to those good women at arles--'look here,--here's a child for you! i don't care how much or how little she knows about accomplishments. i want her to be sound and sweet from head to heel--a clean mind in a wholesome body. teach her self-respect, and make her prefer death to a lie. show her the curse of a shrewish temper, and the blessing of cheerfulness. that will satisfy me!' i dare say, now i come to think of it, those nuns thought me an odd customer; but, at any rate, they seemed to understand me. thelma was very happy with them, and considering all things"--the old man's eyes twinkled fondly--"she hasn't turned out so badly!" they laughed,--and thelma blushed as errington's dreamy eyes rested on her with a look, which, though he was unconscious of it, spoke passionate admiration. the day passed too quickly with them all,--and now, as they sat at dinner in the richly ornamented saloon, there was not one among them who could contemplate without reluctance the approaching break-up of so pleasant a party. dessert was served, and as thelma toyed with the fruit on her plate and sipped her glass of champagne, her face grew serious and absorbed,--even sad,--and she scarcely seemed to hear the merry chatter of tongues around her, till errington's voice asking a question of her father roused her into swift attention. "do you know any one of the name of sigurd?" he was saying, "a poor fellow whose wits are in heaven let us hope,--for they certainly are not on earth." olaf güldmar's fine face softened with pity, and he replied-- "sigurd? have you met him then? ah, poor boy, his is a sad fate! he has wit enough, but it works wrongly; the brain is there, but 'tis twisted. yes, we know sigurd well enough--his home is with us in default of a better. ay, ay! we snatched him from death--perhaps unwisely,--yet he has a good heart, and finds pleasure in his life." "he is a kind of poet in his own way," went on errington, watching thelma as she listened intently to their conversation. "do you know he actually visited me on board here last night and begged me to go away from the altenfjord altogether? he seemed afraid of me, as if he thought i meant to do him some harm." "how strange!" murmured thelma. "sigurd never speaks to visitors,--he is too shy. i cannot understand his motive!" "ah, my dear!" sighed her father. "has he any motive at all? . . . and does he ever understand himself? his fancies change with every shifting breeze! i will tell you," he continued, addressing himself to errington, "how he came to be, as it were, a bit of our home. just before thelma was born, i was walking with my wife one day on the shore, when we both caught sight of something bumping against our little pier, like a large box or basket. i managed to get hold of it with a boat-hook and drag it in; it was a sort of creel such as is used to pack fish in, and in it was the naked body of a half-drowned child. it was an ugly little creature--a newly born infant deformity--and on its chest there was a horrible scar in the shape of a cross, as though it had been gashed deeply with a pen-knife. i thought it was dead, and was for throwing it back into the fjord, but my wife,--a tender-hearted angel--took the poor wretched little wet body in her arms, and found that it breathed. she warmed it, dried it, and wrapped it in her shawl,--and after awhile the tiny monster opened its eyes and stared at her. well! . . . somehow, neither of us could forget the look it gave us,--such a solemn, warning, pitiful, appealing sort of expression! there was no resisting it,--so we took the foundling and did the best we could for him. we gave him the name of sigurd,--and when thelma was born, the two babies used to play together all day, and we never noticed anything wrong with the boy, except his natural deformity, till he was about ten or twelve years old. then we saw to our sorrow that the gods had chosen to play havoc with his wits. however, we humored him tenderly, and he was always manageable. poor sigurd! he adored my wife; i have known him listen for hours to catch the sound of her footstep; he would actually deck the threshold with flowers in the morning that she might tread on them as she passed by." the old bonds sighed and rubbed his hand across his eyes with a gesture half of pain, half of impatience--"and now he is thelma's slave,--a regular servant to her. she can manage him best of us all,--he is as docile as a lamb, and will do anything she tells him." "i am not surprised at that," said the gallant duprèz; "there is reason in such obedience!" thelma looked at him inquiringly, ignoring the implied compliment. "you think so?" she said simply "i am glad! i always hope that he will one day be well in mind,--and every little sign of reason in him is pleasant to me." duprèz was silent. it was evidently no use making even an attempt at flattering this strange girl; surely she must be dense not to understand compliments that most other women compel from the lips of men as their right? he was confused--his paris breeding was no use to him--in fact he had been at a loss all day, and his conversation had, even to himself, seemed particularly shallow and frothy. this mademoiselle güldmar, as he called her, was by no means stupid--she was not a mere moving statue of lovely flesh and perfect color whose outward beauty was her only recommendation,--she was, on the contrary, of a most superior intelligence,--she had read much and thought more,--and the dignified elegance of her manner, and bearing would have done honor to a queen. after all, thought duprèz musingly, the social creeds of paris _might_ be wrong--it was just possible! there might be women who were womanly,--there might be beautiful girls who were neither vain nor frivolous,--there might even be creatures of the feminine sex, besides whom a trained parisian coquette would seem nothing more than a painted fiend of the neuter gender. these were new and startling considerations to the feather-light mind of the frenchman,--and unconsciously his fancy began to busy itself with the old romantic histories of the ancient french chivalry, when faith, and love, and loyalty, kept white the lilies of france, and the stately courtesy and unflinching pride of the _ancien régime_ made its name honored throughout the world. an odd direction indeed for pierre duprèz's reflection to wander in--he, who never reflected on either past or future, but was content to fritter away the present as pleasantly as might be--and the only reason to which his unusually serious reverie could be attributed was the presence of thelma. she certainly had a strange influence on them all, though she herself was not aware of it,--and not only errington, but each one of his companions had been deeply considering during the day, that notwithstanding the unheroic tendency of modern living, life itself might be turned to good and even noble account, if only an effort were made in the right direction. such was the compelling effect of thelma's stainless mind reflected in her pure face, on the different dispositions of all the young men; and she, perfectly unconscious of it, smiled at them, and conversed gaily,--little knowing as she talked, in her own sweet and unaffected way, that the most profound resolutions were being formed, and the most noble and unselfish deeds, were being planned in the souls of her listeners,--all forsooth! because one fair, innocent woman had, in the clear, grave glances of her wondrous sea-blue eyes, suddenly made them aware of their own utter unworthiness. macfarlane, meditatively watching the girl from under his pale eyelashes, thought of mr. dyceworthy's matrimonial pretensions, with a humorous smile hovering on his thin lips. "ma certes! the fellow has an unco' gude opeenion o' himself," he mused. "he might as well offer his hand in marriage to the queen while he's aboot it,--he wad hae just as muckle chance o' acceptance." meanwhile, errington, having learned all he wished to know concerning sigurd, was skillfully drawing out old olaf güldmar, and getting him to give his ideas on things in general, a task in which lorimer joined. "so you don't think we're making any progress nowadays?" inquired the latter with an appearance of interest, and a lazy amusement in his blue eyes as he put the question. "progress!" exclaimed güldmar. "not a bit of it! it is all a going backward; it may not seem apparent, but it is so. england, for instance, is losing the great place she once held in the world's history,--and these things always happen to all nations when money becomes more precious to the souls of the people than honesty and honor. i take the universal wide-spread greed of gain to be one of the worst signs of the times,--the forewarning of some great upheaval and disaster, the effects of which no human mind can calculate. i am told that america is destined to be the dominating power of the future,--but i doubt it! its politics are too corrupt,--its people live too fast, and burn their candle at both ends, which is unnatural and most unwholesome; moreover, it is almost destitute of art in its highest forms,--and is not its confessed watchward 'the almighty dollar?' and such a country as that expects to arrogate to itself the absolute sway of the world? i tell you, _no_--ten thousand times _no_! it is destitute of nearly everything that has made nations great and all-powerful in historic annals,--and my belief is that what, has been, will be again,--and that what has never been, will never be." "you mean by that, i suppose, that there is no possibility of doing anything new,--no way of branching out in some, better and untried direction?" asked errington. olaf güldmar shook his head emphatically. "you can't do it," he said decisively. "everything in every way has been begun and completed and then forgotten over and over in this world,--to be begun and completed and forgotten again, and so on to the end of the chapter. no one nation is better than another in this respect,--there is,--there can be nothing new. norway, for example, has had its day; whether it will ever have another i know not,--at any rate, i shall not live to see it. and yet, what a past!--" he broke off and his eyes grew meditative. lorimer looked at him. "you would have been a viking, mr. güldmar, had you lived in the old days," he said with a smile. "i should, indeed!" returned the old man, with an unconsciously haughty gesture of his head; "and no better fate could have befallen me! to sail the seas in hot pursuit of one's enemies, or in search of further conquest,--to feel the very wind and sun beating up the blood in one's veins,--to live the life of a _man_--a true man! . . . in all the pride and worth of strength, and invincible vigor!--how much better than the puling, feeble, sickly existence, led by the majority of men to-day! i dwell apart from them as much as i can,--i steep my mind and body in the joys of nature, and the free fresh air,--but often i feel that the old days of the heroes must have been best,--when gorm the bold and the fierce siegfried seized paris, and stabled their horses in the chapel where charlemagne lay buried!" pierre duprèz looked up with a faint smile. "ah, _pardon_! but that was surely a very long time ago!" "true!" said güldmar quietly. "and no doubt you will not believe the story at this distance of years. but the day is coming when people will look back on the little chronicle of your empire,--your commune,--your republic, all your little affairs, and will say, 'surely these things are myths; they occurred--if they occurred at all,--a very long time ago!" "monsieur is a philosopher!" said duprèz, with a good-humored gesture; "i would not presume to contradict him." "you see, my lad," went on güldmar more gently, "there is much in our ancient norwegian history that is forgotten or ignored by students of to-day. the travellers that come hither come to see the glories of our glaciers and fjords,--but they think little or nothing of the vanished tribe of heroes who once possessed the land. if you know your greek history, you must have heard of pythias, who lived three hundred and fifty-six years before christ, and who was taken captive by a band of norseman and carried away to see 'the place where the sun slept in winter.' most probably he came to this very spot, the altenfjord,--at any rate the ancient greeks had good words to say for the 'outside northwinders,' as they called us norwegians, for they reported us to be 'persons living in peace with their gods and themselves.' again, one of the oldest tribes in the world came among us in times past,--the phoenicians,--there are traces among us still of their customs and manners. yes! we have a great deal to look back upon with pride as well as sorrow,--and much as i hear of the wonders of the new world, the marvels and the go-ahead speed of american manners and civilization,--i would rather be a norseman than a yankee." and he laughed. "there's more dignity in the name, at any rate," said lorimer. "but i say, mr. güldmar, you are 'up' in history much better than i am. the annals of my country were grounded into my tender soul early in life, but i have a very hazy recollection of them. i know henry viii. got rid of his wives expeditiously and conveniently,--and i distinctly remember that queen elizabeth wore the first pair of silk stockings, and danced a kind of jig in them with the earl of leicester; these things interested me at the time,--and they now seen firmly impressed on my memory to the exclusion of everything else that might possibly be more important." old güldmar smiled, but thelma laughed outright and her eyes danced mirthfully. "ah, i do know you now!" she said, nodding her fair head at him wisely. "you are not anything that is to be believed! so i shall well understand you,--that is, you are a very great scholar,--but that it pleases you to pretend you are a dunce!" lorimer's face brightened into a very gentle and winning softness as he looked at her. "i assure you, miss güldmar, i am not pretending in the least. i'm no scholar. errington is, if you like! if it hadn't been for him, i should never have learned anything at oxford at all. he used to leap over a difficulty while i was looking at it. phil, don't interrupt me,--you know you did! i tell you he's up to everything: greek, latin, and all the rest of it,--and, what's more, he writes well,--i believe,--though he'll never forgive me for mentioning it,--that he has even published some poems." "be quiet, george!" exclaimed errington, with a vexed laugh. "you are boring miss güldmar to death!" "what is _boring_?" asked thelma gently, and then turning her eyes full on the young baronet, she added, "i like to hear that you will pass your days sometimes without shooting the birds and killing the fish; it can hurt nobody for you to write." and she smiled that dreamy pensive smile, of hers that was so infinitely bewitching. "you must show me all your sweet poems!" errington colored hotly. "they are all nonsense, miss güldmar," he said quickly. "there's nothing 'sweet' about them, i tell you frankly! all rubbish, every line of them!" "then you should not write them," said thelma quietly. "it is only a pity and a disappointment." "i wish every one were of your opinion," laughed lorimer, "it would spare us a lot of indifferent verse." "ah! you have the chief skald of all the world in your land!" cried güldmar, bringing his fist down with a jovial thump on the table. "he can teach you all that you need to know." "_skald_?" queried lorimer dubiously. "oh, you mean bard. i suppose you allude to shakespeare?" "i do," said the old _bonde_ enthusiastically, "he is the only glory of your country i envy! i would give anything to prove him a norwegian. by valhalla! had he but been one of the bards of odin, the world might have followed the grand old creed still! if anything could ever persuade me to be a christian, it would be the fact that shakespeare was one. if england's name is rendered imperishable, it will be through the fame of shakespeare alone,--just as we have a kind of tenderness for degraded modern greece, because of homer. ay, ay! countries and nations are worthless enough; it is only the great names of heroes that endure, to teach the lesson that is never learned sufficiently,--namely, that man and man alone is fitted to grasp the prize of immortality." "ye believe in immortality?" inquired macfarlane seriously. güldmar's keen eyes lighted on him with fiery impetuousness. "believe in it? i possess it! how can it be taken from me? as well make a bird without wings, a tree without sap, an ocean without depths, as expect to find a man without an immortal soul! what a question to ask? do _you_ not possess heaven's gift? and why should not i?" "no offense," said macfarlane, secretly astonished at the old _bonde's_ fervor,--for had not he, though himself intending to become a devout minister of the word,--had not he now and then felt a creeping doubt as to whether, after all, there was any truth in the doctrine of another life than this one. "i only thocht ye might have perhaps questioned the probabeelity o't, in your own mind?" "i never question divine authority," replied olaf güldmar, "i pity those that do!" "and this divine authority?" said duprèz suddenly with a delicate sarcastic smile, "how and where do you perceive it?" "in the very law that compels me to exist, young sir," said güldmar,--"in the mysteries of the universe about me,--the glory of the heavens,--the wonders of the sea! you have perhaps lived in cities all your life, and your mind is cramped a bit. no wonder, . . . you can hardly see the stars above the roofs of a wilderness of houses. cities are men's work,--the gods have never had a finger in the building of them. dwelling in them, i suppose you cannot help forgetting divine authority altogether; but here,--here among the mountains, you would soon remember it! you should live here,--it would make a man of you!" "and you do not consider me a man?" inquired duprèz with imperturbable good-humor. güldmar laughed. "well, not quite!" he admitted candidly, "there's not enough muscle about you. i confess i like to see strong fellows--fellows fit to rule the planet on which they are placed. that's my whim!--but you're a neat little chap enough, and i dare say you can hold your own!" and his eyes twinkled good-temperedly as he filled himself another glass of his host's fine burgundy, and drank it off, while duprèz, with a half-plaintive, half-comical shrug of resignation to güldmar's verdict on his personal appearance, asked thelma if she would favor them with a song. she rose from her seat instantly, without any affected hesitation, and went to the piano. she had a delicate touch, and accompanied herself with great taste,--but her voice, full, penetrating, rich and true,--was one of the purest and most sympathetic ever possessed by woman, and its freshness was unspoilt by any of the varied "systems" of torture invented by singing-masters for the ingenious destruction of the delicate vocal organ. she sang a norwegian love-song in the original tongue, which might be roughly translated as follows:-- "lovest thou me for my beauty's sake? love me not then! love the victorious, glittering sun, the fadeless, deathless, marvellous one!" "lovest thou me for my youth's sake? love me not then! love the triumphant, unperishing spring, who every year new charms doth bring!" "lovest thou me for treasure's sake? oh, love me not then! love the deep, the wonderful sea, its jewels are worthier love than me!" "lovest thou me for love's own sake? ah sweet, then love me! more than the sun and the spring and the sea, is the faithful heart i will yield to thee!" a silence greeted the close of her song. though the young men were ignorant of the meaning of the words still old güldmar translated them for their benefit, they could feel the intensity of the passion vibrating through her ringing tones,--and errington sighed involuntarily. she heard the sigh, and turned round on the music-stool laughing. "are you so tired, or sad, or what is it?" she asked merrily. "it is too melancholy a tune? and i was foolish to sing it,--because you cannot understand the meaning of it. it is all about love,--and of course love is always sorrowful." "always?" asked lorimer, with a half-smile. "i do not know," she said frankly, with a pretty deprecatory gesture of her hands,--"but all books say so! it must be a great pain, and also a great happiness. let me think what i can sing to you now,--but perhaps you will yourself sing?" "not one of us have a voice, miss güldmar," said errington. "i used to think i had, but lorimer discouraged my efforts." "men shouldn't sing," observed lorimer; "if they only knew how awfully ridiculous they look, standing up in dress-coats and white ties, pouring forth inane love-ditties that nobody wants to hear, they wouldn't do it. only a woman looks pretty while singing." "ah, that is very nice!" said thelma, with a demure smile. "then i am agreeable to you when i sing?" agreeable? this was far too tame a word--they all rose from the table and came towards her, with many assurances of their delight and admiration; but she put all their compliments aside with a little gesture that was both incredulous and peremptory. "you must not say so many things in praise of me," she said, with a swift upward glance at errington, where he leaned on the piano regarding her. "it is nothing to be able to sing. it is only like the birds, but we cannot understand the words they say, just as you cannot understand norwegian. listen,--here is a little ballad you will all know," and she played a soft prelude, while her voice, subdued to a plaintive murmur, rippled out in the dainty verses of sainte-beuve-- "sur ma lyre, l'autre fois dans un bois, ma main préludait à peine; une colombe descend en passant, blanche sur le luth d'ébène" "mais au lieu d'accords touchants, de doux chants, la colombe gemissante me demande par pitié sa moitié sa moitié loin d'elle absente!" she sang this seriously and sweetly till she came to the last three lines, when, catching errington's earnest gaze, her voice quivered and her cheeks flushed. she rose from the piano as soon as she had finished, and said to the _bonde_, who had been watching her with proud and gratified looks-- "it is growing late, father. we must say good-bye to our friends and return home." "not yet!" eagerly implored sir philip. "come up on deck,--we will have coffee there, and afterwards you shall leave us when you will." güldmar acquiesced in this arrangement, before his daughter had time to raise any objection, and they all went on deck, where a comfortable lounging chair was placed for thelma, facing the most gorgeous portion of the glowing sky, which on this evening was like a moving mass of molten gold, split asunder here and there by angry ragged-looking rifts of crimson. the young men grouped themselves together at the prow of the vessel in order to smoke their cigars without annoyance to thelma. old güldmar did not smoke, but he talked,--and errington after seeing them all fairly absorbed in an argument on the best methods of spearing salmon, moved quietly away to where the girl was sitting, her great pensive eyes fixed on the burning splendors of the heavens. "are you warm enough there?" he asked, and there was an unconscious tenderness in his voice as he asked the question, "or shall i fetch you a wrap?" she smiled. "i have my hood," she said. "it is the warmest thing i ever wear, except, of course, in winter." philip looked at the hood as she drew it more closely over her head, and thought that surely no more becoming article of apparel ever was designed for woman's wear. he had never seen anything like it either in color or texture,--it was of a peculiarly warm, rich crimson, like the heart of a red damask rose, and it suited the bright hair and tender, thoughtful eyes of its owner to perfection. "tell me," he said, drawing a little nearer and speaking in a lower tone, "have you forgiven me for my rudeness the first time i saw you?" she looked a little troubled. "perhaps also i was rude," she said gently. "i did not know you. i thought--" "you were quite right," he eagerly interrupted her. "it was very impertinent of me to ask you for your name. i should have found it out for myself, as i _have_ done." and he smiled at her as he said the last words with marked emphasis. she raised her eyes wistfully. "and you are glad?" she asked softly and with a sort of wonder in her accents. "glad to know your name? glad to know _you_! of course! can you ask such a question?" "but why?" persisted thelma. "it is not as if you were lonely,--you have friends already. we are nothing to you. soon you will go away, and you will think of the altenfjord as a dream,--and our names will be forgotten. that is natural!" what a foolish rush of passion filled his heart as she spoke in those mellow, almost plaintive accents,--what wild words leaped to his lips and what an effort it cost him to keep them hack. the heat and impetuosity of romeo,--whom up to the present he had been inclined to consider a particularly stupid youth,--was now quite comprehensible to his mind, and he, the cool, self-possessed englishman, was ready at that moment to outrival juliet's lover, in his utmost excesses of amorous folly. in spite of his self-restraint, his voice quivered a little as he answered her-- "i shall never forget the altenfjord or you, miss güldmar. don't you know there are some things that cannot be forgotten? such as a sudden glimpse of fine scenery,--a beautiful song, or a pathetic poem?" she bent her head in assent. "and here there is so much to remember--the light of the midnight sun,--the glorious mountains, the loveliness of the whole land!" "is it better than other countries you have seen?" asked the girl with some interest. "much better!" returned sir philip fervently. "in fact, there is no place like it in my opinion." he paused at the sound of her pretty laughter. "you are--what is it?--ecstatic!" she said mirthfully. "tell me, have you been to the south of france and the pyrenees?" "of course i have," he replied. "i have been all over the continent,--travelled about it till i'm tired of it. do you like the south of france better than norway?" "no,--not so very much better," she said dubiously. "and yet a little. it is so warm and bright there, and the people are gay. here they are stern and sullen. my father loves to sail the seas, and when i first went to school at arles, he took me a long and beautiful voyage. we went from christiansund to holland, and saw all those pretty dutch cities with their canals and quaint bridges. then we went through the english channel to brest,--then by the bay of biscay to bayonne. bayonne seemed to me very lovely, but we left it soon, and travelled a long way by land, seeing all sorts of wonderful things, till we came to arles. and though it is such a long route, and not one for many persons to take, i have travelled to arles and back twice that way, so all there is familiar to me,--and in some things i do think it better than norway." "what induced your father to send you so far away from him?" asked philip rather curiously. the girl's eyes softened tenderly. "ah, that is easy to understand!" she said. "my mother came from arles." "she was french, then?" he exclaimed with some surprise. "no," she answered gravely. "she was norwegian, because her father and mother both were of this land. she was what they call 'born sadly.' you must not ask me any more about her, please!" errington apologized at once with some embarrassment, and a deeper color than usual on his face. she looked up at him quite frankly. "it is possible i will tell you her history some day," she said, "when we shall know each other better. i do like to talk to you very much! i suppose there are many englishmen like you?" philip laughed. "i don't think i am at all exceptional! why do you ask?" she shrugged her shoulders. "i have seen some of them," she said slowly, "and they are stupid. they shoot, shoot,--fish, fish, all day, and eat a great deal. . . ." "my dear miss güldmar, i also do all these things!" declared errington amusedly. "these are only our surface faults. englishmen are the best fellows to be found anywhere. you mustn't judge them by their athletic sports, or their vulgar appetites. you must appeal to their hearts when you want to know them." "or to their pockets, and you will know them still better!" said thelma almost mischievously, as she raised herself in her chair to take a cup of coffee from the tray that was then being handed to her by the respectful steward. "ah, how good this is! it reminds me of our coffee luncheon at arles!" errington watched her with a half-smile, but said no more, as the others now came up to claim their share of her company. "i say!" said lorimer, lazily throwing himself full length on the deck and looking up at her, "come and see us spear a salmon to-morrow, miss güldmar. your father is going to show us how to do it in the proper norse style." "that is for men," said thelma loftily. "women must know nothing about such things." "by jove!" and lorimer looked profoundly astonished. "why, miss güldmar, women are going in for everything nowadays! hunting, shooting, bull-fighting, duelling, horse-whipping, lecturing,--heaven knows what! they stop at nothing--salmon-spearing is a mere trifle in the list of modern feminine accomplishments." thelma smiled down upon him benignly. "you will always be the same," she said with a sort of indulgent air. "it is your delight to say things upside down? but you shall not make me believe that women do all these dreadful things. because, how is it possible? the men would not allow them!" errington laughed, and lorimer appeared stupefied with surprise. "the men--would--not--allow them?" he repeated slowly. "oh, miss güldmar, little do you realize the state of things at the present day! the glamor of viking memories clings about you still! don't you know the power of man has passed away, and that ladies do exactly as they like? it is easier to control the thunderbolt than to prevent a woman having her own way." "all that is nonsense!" said thelma decidedly. "where there is a man to rule, he _must_ rule, that is certain." "is that positively your opinion?" and lorimer looked more astonished than ever. "it is everybody's opinion, of course!" averred thelma. "how foolish it would be if women did not obey men! the world would be all confusion! ah, you see you cannot make me think your funny thoughts; it is no use!" and she laughed and rose from her chair, adding with a gentle persuasive air, "father dear, is it not time to say good-bye?" "truly i think it is!" returned güldmar, giving himself a shake like an old lion, as he broke off a rather tedious conversation he had been having with macfarlane. "we shall have sigurd coming to look for us, and poor britta will think we have left her too long alone. thank you, my lad!" this to sir philip, who instantly gave orders for the boat to be lowered. "you have given us a day of thorough, wholesome enjoyment. i hope i shall be able to return it in some way. you must let me see as much of you as possible." they shook hands cordially, and errington proposed to escort them back as far as their own pier, but this offer güldmar refused. "nonsense!" he exclaimed cheerily. "with four oarsmen to row us along, why should we take you away from your friends? i won't hear of such a thing! and now, regarding the great fall of njedegorze; mr. macfarlane here says you have not visited it yet. well the best guide you can have there is sigurd. we'll make up a party and go when it is agreeable to you; it is a grand sight,--well worth seeing. to-morrow we shall meet again for the salmon-spearing,--i warrant i shall be able to make the time pass quickly for you! how long do you think of staying here?" "as long as possible!" answered errington absently, his eyes wandering to thelma, who was just then shaking hands with his friends and bidding them farewell. güldmar laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. "that means till you are tired of the place," he said good-humoredly. "well you shall not be dull if i can prevent it! good-bye, and thanks for your hospitality." "ah, yes!" added thelma gently, coming up at that moment and laying her soft hand in his. "i have been so happy all day, and it is all your kindness! i am very grateful!" "it is i who have cause to be grateful," said errington hurriedly, clasping her hand warmly, "for your company and that of your father. i trust we shall have many more pleasant days together." "i hope so too!" she answered simply, and then, the boat being ready, they departed. errington and lorimer leaned on the deck-rails, waving their hats and watching them disappear over the gleaming water, till the very last glimpse of thelma's crimson hood had vanished, and then they turned to rejoin their companions, who were strolling up and down smoking. "_belle comme un ange!_" said duprèz briefly. "in short, i doubt if the angels are so good-looking!" "the auld pagan's a fine scholar," added macfarlane meditatively. "he corrected me in a bit o' latin." "did he, indeed?" and lorimer laughed indolently. "i suppose you think better of him now, sandy?" sandy made no reply, and as errington persisted in turning the conversation away from the merits or demerits of their recent guests, they soon entered on other topics. but that night, before retiring to rest, lorimer laid a hand on his friend's shoulder, and said quietly, with a keen look-- "well, old man, have you made up your mind? have i seen the future lady bruce-errington?" sir philip smiled,--then, after a brief pause, answered steadily-- "yes, george, you have! that is,--if i can win her!" lorimer laughed a little and sighed. "there's no doubt about that, phil." and eyeing errington's fine figure and noble features musingly, he repeated again thoughtfully--"no doubt about that, my boy!" then after a pause he said, somewhat abruptly, "time to turn in--good night!" "good night, old fellow!" and errington wrung his hand warmly, and left him to repose. but lorimer had rather a bad night,--he tossed and tumbled a good deal, and had dreams,--unusual visitors with him,--and once or twice he muttered in his sleep,--"no doubt about it--not the least in the world--and if there were--" but the conclusion of this sentence was inaudible. chapter xi. "tu vas faire un beau rève, et t'enivrer d'un plaisir dangereux. sur ton chemin l'étoile qui se leve longtemps encore éblouira les yeux!" de musset. a fortnight passed. the first excursion in the _eulalie_ had been followed by others of a similar kind, and errington's acquaintance with the güldmars was fast ripening into a pleasant intimacy. it had grown customary for the young men to spend that part of the day which, in spite of persistent sunshine, they still called evening, in the comfortable, quaint parlor of the old farmhouse,--looking at the view through the rose-wreathed windows,--listening to the fantastic legends of norway as told by olaf güldmar,--or watching thelma's picturesque figure, as she sat pensively apart in her shadowed corner spinning. they had fraternized with sigurd too--that is, as far as he would permit them--for the unhappy dwarf was uncertain of temper, and if at one hour he were docile and yielding as a child, the next he would be found excited and furious at some imaginary slight that he fancied had been inflicted upon him. sometimes, if good-humored, he would talk almost rationally,--only allowing his fancy to play with poetical ideas concerning the sea, the flowers, or the sunlight,--but he was far more often sullen and silent. he would draw a low chair to thelma's side, and sit there with half-closed eyes and compressed lips, and none could tell whether he listened to the conversation around him, or was utterly indifferent to it. he had taken a notable fancy to lorimer, but he avoided errington in the most marked and persistent manner. the latter did his best to overcome this unreasonable dislike, but his efforts were useless,--and deciding in his own mind that it was best to humor sigurd's vagaries, he soon let him alone, and devoted his attention more entirely to thelma. one evening, after supper at the farmhouse, lorimer, who for some time had been watching philip and thelma conversing together in low tones near the open window, rose from his seat quietly, without disturbing the hilarity of the _bonde_, who was in the middle of a rollicking sea-story, told for macfarlane's entertainment,--and slipped out into the garden, where he strolled along rather absently till he found himself in the little close thicket of pines,--the very same spot where he and philip had stood on the first day of their visit thither. he threw himself down on the soft emerald moss and lit a cigar, sighing rather drearily as he did so. "upon my life," he mused, with a half-smile, "i am very nearly being a hero,--a regular stage-martyr,--the noble creature of the piece! by jove, i wish i were a soldier! i'm certain i could stand the enemy's fire better than this! self-denial? well, no wonder the preachers make such a fuss about it, it's a tough, uncomfortable duty. but am i self-denying? not a bit of it! look here, george lorimer"--here he tapped himself very vigorously on his broad chest--"don't you imagine yourself to be either virtuous or magnanimous! if you were anything of a man at all you would never let your feelings get the better of you,--you would be sublimely indifferent, stoically calm,--and, as it is,--you know what a sneaking, hang-dog state of envy you were in just now when you came out of that room! aren't you ashamed of yourself,--rascal?" the inner self he thus addressed was most probably abashed by this adjuration, for his countenance cleared a little, as though he had received an apology from his own conscience. he puffed lazily at his cigar, and felt somewhat soothed. light steps below him attracted his attention, and, looking down from the little knoll on which he lay, he saw thelma and philip pass. they were walking slowly along a little winding path that led to the orchard, which was situated at some little distance from the house. the girl's head was bent, and philip was talking to her with evident eagerness. lorimer looked after them earnestly, and his honest eyes were full of trouble. "god bless them both!" he murmured half aloud. "there's no harm in saying that, any how! dear old phil! i wonder whether--" what he would have said was uncertain, for at that moment he was considerably startled by the sight of a meagre, pale face peering through the parted pine boughs,--a face in which two wild eyes shone with a blue-green glitter, like that of newly sharpened steel. "hello, sigurd!" said lorimer good-naturedly, as he recognized his visitor. "what are you up to? going to climb a tree?" sigurd pushed aside the branches cautiously and approached. he sat down by lorimer, and, taking his hand, kissed it deferentially. "i followed you. i saw you go away to grieve alone. i came to grieve also!" he said with a patient gentleness. lorimer laughed languidly. "by jove, sigurd, you're too clever for your age! think i came away to grieve, eh? not so, my boy--came away to smoke! there's a come-down for you! i never grieve--don't know how to do it. what _is_ grief?" "to love!" answered sigurd promptly. "to see a beautiful elf with golden wings come fluttering, fluttering gently down from the sky,--you open your arms to catch her--so! . . . and just as you think you have her, she leans only a little bit on one side, and falls, not into your heart--no!--into the heart of some one else! that is grief, because, when she has gone, no more elves come down from the sky,--for you, at any rate,--good things may come for others,--but for _you_ the heavens are empty!" lorimer was silent, looking at the speaker curiously. "how do you get all this nonsense into your head, eh?" he inquired kindly. "i do not know," replied sigurd with a sigh. "it comes! but, tell me,"--and he smiled wistfully--"it is true, dear friend--good friend--it is all true, is it not? for you the heavens are empty? you know it!" lorimer flushed hotly, and then grew strangely pale. after a pause, he said in his usual indolent way-- "look here, sigurd; you're romantic! i'm not. i know nothing about elves or empty heavens. i'm all right! don't you bother yourself about me." the dwarf studied his face attentively, and a smile of almost fiendish cunning suddenly illumined his thin features. he laid his weak-looking white hand on the young man's arm and said in a lower tone-- "i will tell you what to do. kill him!" the last two words were uttered with such intensity of meaning that lorimer positively recoiled from the accents, and the terrible look which accompanied them. "i say, sigurd, this won't do," he remonstrated gravely. "you mustn't talk about killing, you know! it's not good for you. people don't kill each other nowadays so easily as you seem to think. it can't be done, sigurd! nobody wants to do it." "it _can_ be done!" reiterated the dwarf imperatively. "it _must_ be done, and either you or i will do it! he shall not rob us,--he shall not steal the treasure of the golden midnight. he shall not gather the rose of all roses--" "stop!" said lorimer suddenly. "who are you talking about?" "who!" cried sigurd excitedly. "surely you know. of him--that tall, proud, grey-eyed englishman,--your foe, your rival; the rich, cruel errington. . . ." lorimer's hand fell heavily on his shoulder, and his voice was very stern. "what nonsense, sigurd! you don't know what you are talking about to-day. errington my foe! good heavens! why, he's my best friend! do you hear?" sigurd stared up at him in vacant surprise, but nodded feebly. "well, mind you remember it! the spirits tell lies, my boy, if they say that he is my enemy. i would give my life to save his!" he spoke quietly, and rose from his seat on the moss as he finished his words, and his face had an expression that was both noble and resolute. sigurd still gazed upon him. "and you,--you do not love thelma?" he murmured. lorimer started, but controlled himself instantly. his frank english eyes met the feverishly brilliant ones fixed so appealingly upon him. "certainly not!" he said calmly, with a serene smile. "what makes you think of such a thing? quite wrong, sigurd,--the spirits have made a mistake again! come along,--let us join the others." but sigurd would not accompany him. he sprang away like a frightened animal, in haste, and abruptly plunging into the depths of a wood that bordered on olaf güldmar's grounds, was soon lost to sight. lorimer looked after him in a little perplexity. "i wonder if he ever gets dangerous?" he thought. "a fellow with such queer notions might do some serious harm without meaning it. i'll keep an eye on him!" and once or twice during that same evening, he felt inclined to speak to errington on the subject, but no suitable opportunity presented itself--and after a while, with his habitual indolence, he partly forgot the circumstance. on the following sunday afternoon thelma sat alone under the wide blossom-covered porch, reading. her father and sigurd,--accompanied by errington and his friends,--had all gone for a mountain ramble, promising to return for supper, a substantial meal which britta was already busy preparing. the afternoon was very warm,--one of those long, lazy stretches of heat and brilliancy in which nature seems to have lain down to rest like a child tired of play, sleeping in the sunshine with drooping flowers in her hands. the very ripple of the stream seemed hushed, and thelma, though her eyes were bent seriously on the book she held, sighed once or twice heavily as though she were tired. there was a change in the girl,--an undefinable something seemed to have passed over her and toned down the redundant brightness of her beauty. she was paler,--and there were darker shadows than usual under the splendor of her eyes. her very attitude, as she leaned her head against the dark, fantastic carving of the porch, had a touch of listlessness and indifference in it; her sweetly arched lips drooped with a plaintive little line at the corners, and her whole air was indicative of fatigue, mingled with sadness. she looked up now and then from the printed page, and her gaze wandered over the stretch of the scented, flower-filled garden, to the little silvery glimmer of the fjord from whence arose, like delicate black streaks against the sky, the slender masts of the _eulalie_,--and then she would resume her reading with a slight movement of impatience. the volume she held was victor hugo's "orientales," and though her sensitive imagination delighted in poetry as much as in sunshine, she found it for once hard to rivet her attention as closely as she wished to do, on the exquisite wealth of language, and glow of color, that distinguishes the writings of the shakespeare of france. within the house britta was singing cheerily at her work, and the sound of her song alone disturbed the silence. two or three pale-blue butterflies danced drowsily in and out a cluster of honeysuckle that trailed downwards, nearly touching thelma's shoulder, and a diminutive black kitten, with a pink ribbon round its neck, sat gravely on the garden path, washing its face with its tiny velvety paws, in that deliberate and precise fashion, common to the spoiled and petted members of its class. everything was still and peaceful as became a sunday afternoon,--so that when the sound of a heavy advancing footstep disturbed the intense calm, the girl was almost nervously startled, and rose from her seat with so much precipitation, that the butterflies, who had possibly been considering whether her hair might not be some new sort of sunflower, took fright and flew far upwards, and the demure kitten scared out of its absurd self-consciousness, scrambled hastily up the nearest little tree. the intruder on the quietude of güldmar's domain was the rev. mr. dyceworthy,--and as thelma, standing erect in the porch, beheld him coming, her face grew stern and resolute, and her eyes flashed disdainfully. ignoring the repellant, almost defiant dignity of the girl's attitude, mr. dyceworthy advanced, rather out of breath and somewhat heated,--and smiling benevolently, nodded his head by way of greeting, without removing his hat. "ah, fröken thelma!" he observed condescendingly. "and how are you to-day? you look remarkably well--remarkably so, indeed!" and he eyed her with mild approval. "i am well, i thank you," she returned quietly. "my father is not in, mr. dyceworthy." the reverend charles wiped his hot face, and his smile grew wider. "what matter?" he inquired blandly. "we shall, no doubt, entertain ourselves excellently without him! it is with you alone, fröken, that i am desirous to hold converse." and, without waiting for her permission, he entered the porch, and settled himself comfortably on the bench opposite to her, heaving a sigh of relief as he did so. thelma remained standing--and the lutheran minister's covetous eye glanced greedily over the sweeping curves of her queenly figure, the dazzling whiteness of her slim arched throat, and the glitter of her rich hair. she was silent--and there was something in her manner as she confronted him that made it difficult for mr. dyceworthy to speak. he hummed and hawed several times, and settled his stiff collar once or twice as though it hurt him; finally he said with an evident effort-- "i have found a--a--trinket of yours--a trifling toy--which, perhaps, you would be glad to have again." and he drew carefully out of his waistcoat pocket, a small parcel wrapped up in tissue paper, which he undid with his fat fingers, thus displaying the little crucifix he had kept so long in his possession. "concerning this," he went on, holding it up before her, "i am grievously troubled,--and would fain say a few necessary words--" she interrupted him, reaching out her hand for the cross as she spoke. "that was my mother's crucifix," she said in solemn, infinitely tender accents, with a mist as of unshed tears in her sweet blue eyes. "it was round her neck when she died. i knew i had lost it, and was very unhappy about it. i do thank you with all my heart for bringing it back to me!" and the hauteur of her face relaxed, and her smile--that sudden sweet smile of hers,--shone forth like a gleam of sunshine athwart a cloud. mr. dyceworthy's breath came and went with curious rapidity. his visage grew pale, and a clammy dew broke out upon his forehead. he took the hand she held out,--a fair, soft hand with a pink palm like an upcurled shell,--and laid the little cross within it, and still retaining his hold of her, he stammeringly observed-- "then we are friends, fröken thelma! . . . good friends, i hope?" she withdrew her fingers quickly from his hot, moist clasp, and her bright smile vanished. "i do not see that at all!" she replied frigidly. "friendship is very rare. to be friends, one must have similar tastes and sympathies,--many things which we have not,--and which we shall never have. i am slow to call any person my friend." mr. dyceworthy's small pursy mouth drew itself into a tight thin line. "except," he said, with a suave sneer, "except when 'any person' happens to be a rich englishman with a handsome face and easy manners! . . . then you are not slow to make friends, fröken,--on the contrary, you are remarkably quick!" the cold haughty stare with which the girl favored him might have frozen a less conceited man to a pillar of ice. "what do you mean?" she asks abruptly, and with an air of surprise. the minister's little ferret-like eyes, drooped under their puny lids, and he fidgeted on the seat with uncomfortable embarrassment. he answered her in the mildest of mild voices. "you are unlike yourself, my dear fröken!" he said, with a soothing gesture of one of his well-trimmed white hands. "you are generally frank and open, but to-day i find you just a little,--well!--what shall i say--secretive! yes, we will call it secretive! oh, fie!" and mr. dyceworthy laughed a gentle little laugh; "you must not pretend ignorance of what i mean! all the neighborhood is talking of you and the gentleman you are so often seen with. notably concerning sir philip errington,--the vile tongue of rumor is busy,--for, according to his first plans when his yacht arrived here, he was bound for the north cape,--and should have gone there days ago. truly, i think,--and there are others who think also in the same spirit of interest for you,--that the sooner this young man leaves our peaceful fjord the better,--and the less he has to do with the maidens of the district, the safer we shall be from the risk of scandal." and he heaved a pious sigh. thelma turned her eyes upon him in wonderment. "i do not understand you," she said coldly. "why do you speak of _others_? no others are interested in what i do? why should they be? why should _you_ be? there is no need!" mr. dyceworthy grew slightly excited. he felt like a runner nearing the winning-post. "oh, you wrong yourself, my dear fröken," he murmured softly, with a sickly attempt at tenderness in his tone. "you really wrong yourself! it is impossible,--for me at least, not to be interested in you,--even for our dear lord's sake. it troubles me to the inmost depths of my soul to behold in you one of the foolish virgins whose light hath been extinguished for lack of the saving oil,--to see you wandering as a lost sheep in the paths of darkness and error, without a hand to rescue your steps from the near and dreadful precipice! ay, truly! . . . my spirit yearneth for you as a mother for an own babe--fain would i save you from the devices of the evil one,--fain would i--" here the minister drew out his handkerchief and pressed it lightly to his eyes,--then, as if with an effort overcoming his emotion, he added, with the gravity of a butcher presenting an extortionate bill, "but first,--before my own humble desires for your salvation--first, ere i go further in converse, it behoveth me to enter on the lord's business!" thelma bent her head slightly, with an air as though she said: "indeed; pray do not be long about it!" and, leaning back against the porch, she waited somewhat impatiently. "the image i have just restored to you," went on mr. dyceworthy in his most pompous and ponderous manner, "you say belonged to your unhappy--" "she was not unhappy," interposed the girl, calmly. "ay, ay!" and the minister nodded with a superior air of wisdom. "so you imagine, so you think,--you must have been too young to judge of these things. she died--" "i saw her die," again she interrupted, with a musing tenderness in her voice. "she smiled and kissed me,--then she laid her thin, white hand on this crucifix, and, closing her eyes, she went to sleep. they told me it was death, since then i have known that death is beautiful!" mr. dyceworthy coughed,--a little cough of quiet incredulity. he was not fond of sentiment in any form, and the girl's dreamily pensive manner annoyed him. death "beautiful?" faugh! it was the one thing of all others that he dreaded; it was an unpleasant necessity, concerning which he thought as little as possible. though he preached frequently on the peace of the grave and the joys of heaven,--he was far from believing in either,--he was nervously terrified of illness, and fled like a frightened hare from the very rumor of any infectious disorder, and he had never been known to attend a death-bed. and now, in answer to thelma, he nodded piously and rubbed his hands, and said-- "yes, yes; no doubt, no doubt! all very proper on your part, i am sure! but concerning this same image of which i came to speak,--it is most imperative that you should be brought to recognize it as a purely carnal object, unfitting a maiden's eyes to rest upon. the true followers of the gospel are those who strive to forget the sufferings of our dear lord as much as possible,--or to think of them only in spirit. the minds of sinners, alas! are easily influenced,--and it is both unseemly and dangerous to gaze freely upon the carven semblance of the lord's limbs! yea, truly, it hath oft been considered as damnatory to the soul,--more especially in the cases of women immured as nuns, who encourage themselves in an undue familiarity with our lord, by gazing long and earnestly upon his body nailed to the accursèd tree." here mr. dyceworthy paused for breath. thelma was silent, but a faint smile gleamed on her face. "wherefore," he went on, "i do adjure you, as you desire grace and redemption, to utterly cast from you the vile trinket, i have,--heaven knows how reluctantly! . . . returned to your keeping,--to trample upon it, and renounce it as a device of satan. . ." he stopped, surprised and indignant, as she raised the much-abused emblem to her lips and kissed it reverently. "it is the sign of peace and salvation," she said steadily, "to me, at least. you waste your words, mr. dyceworthy; i am a catholic." "oh, say not so!" exclaimed the minister, now thoroughly roused to a pitch of unctuous enthusiasm. "say not so. poor child! who knowest not the meaning of the word used. catholic signifies universal. god forbid a universal papacy! you are not a catholic--no! you are a roman--by which name we understand all that is most loathsome and unpleasing unto god! but i will wrestle for your soul,--yea, night and day will i bend my spiritual sinews to the task,--i will obtain the victory,--i will exorcise the fiend! alas, alas! you are on the brink of hell--think of it!" and mr. dyceworthy stretched out his hand with his favorite pulpit gesture. "think of the roasting and burning,--the scorching and withering of souls! imagine, if you can, the hopeless, bitter, eternal damnation," and here he smacked his lips as though he were tasting something excellent,--"from which there is no escape! . . . for which there shall be no remedy!" "it is a gloomy picture," said thelma, with a quiet sparkle in her eye. "i am sorry,--for _you_. but i am happier,--my faith teaches of purgatory--there is always a little hope!" "there is none! there is none!" exclaimed the minister rising in excitement from his seat, and swaying ponderously to and fro as he gesticulated with hands and head. "you are doomed,--doomed! there is no middle course between hell and heaven. it must be one thing or the other; god deals not in half-measures! pause, oh pause, ere you decide to fall! even at the latest hour the lord desires to save your soul,--the lord yearns for your redemption, and maketh me to yearn also. fröken thelma!" and mr. dyceworthy's voice deepened in solemnity, "there is a way which the lord hath whispered in mine ears,--a way that pointeth to the white robe and the crown of glory,--a way by which you shall possess the inner peace of the heart with bliss on earth as the forerunner of bliss in heaven!" she looked at him steadfastly. "and that way is--what?" she inquired. mr. dyceworthy hesitated, and wished with all his heart that this girl was not so thoroughly self-possessed. any sign of timidity in her would have given him an increase of hardihood. but her eyes were coldly brilliant, and glanced him over without the smallest embarrassment. he took refuge in his never-failing remedy, his benevolent smile--a smile that covered a multitude of hypocrisies. "you ask a plain question, fröken," he said sweetly, "and i should be loth not to give you a plain answer. that way--that glorious way of salvation for you is--through _me_!" and his countenance shone with smug self-satisfaction as he spoke, and he repeated softly, "yes, yes; that way is through me!" she moved with a slight gesture of impatience. "it is a pity to talk any more," she said rather wearily. "it is all no use! why do you wish to change me in my religion? i do not wish to change _you_. i do not see why we should speak of such things at all." "of course!" replied mr. dyceworthy blandly. "of course you do not see. and why? because you are blind." here he drew a little nearer to her, and looked covetously at the curve of her full, firm waist. "oh, why!" he resumed in a sort of rapture--"why should we say it is a pity to talk any more? why should we say it is all no use? it _is_ of use,--it is noble, it is edifying to converse of the lord's good pleasure! and what is his good pleasure at this moment? to unite two souls in his service! yea, he hath turned my desire towards you, fröken thelma,--even as jacob's desire was towards rachel! let me see this hand." he made a furtive grab at the white taper fingers that played listlessly with the jessamine leaves on the porch, but the girl dexterously withdrew them from his clutch and moved a little further back, her face flushing proudly. "oh, will it not come to me? cruel hand!" and he rolled his little eyes with an absurdly sentimental air of reproach. "it is shy--it will not clasp the hand of its protector! do not be afraid, fröken! . . . i, charles dyceworthy, am not the man to trifle with your young affections! let them rest where they have flown! i accept them! yea! . . . in spite of wrath and error and moral destitution,--my spirit inclineth towards you,--in the language of carnal men, i love you! more than this, i am willing to take you as my lawful wife--" he broke off abruptly, somewhat startled at the bitter scorn of the flashing eyes that, like two quivering stars, were blazing upon him. her voice, clear as a bell ringing in frosty air, cut through the silence like a sweep of a sword-blade. "how dare you!" she said, with a wrathful thrill in her low, intense tones. "how dare you come here to insult me!" insult her! he,--the reverend charles dyceworthy,--considered guilty of insult in offering honorable marriage to a mere farmer's daughter! he could not believe his own ears,--and in his astonishment he looked up at her. looking, he recoiled and shrank into himself, like a convicted knave before some queenly accuser. the whole form of the girl seemed to dilate with indignation. from her proud mouth, arched like a bow, sprang barbed arrows of scorn that flew straightly and struck home. "always i have guessed what you wanted," she went on in that deep, vibrating tone which had such a rich quiver of anger within it; "but i never thought you would--" she paused, and a little disdainful laugh broke from her lips. "you would make _me_ your wife--_me_? you think _me_ likely to accept such an offer?" and she drew herself up with a superb gesture, and regarded him fixedly. "oh, pride, pride!" murmured the unabashed dyceworthy, recovering from the momentary abasement into which he had been thrown by her look and manner. "how it overcometh our natures and mastereth our spirits! my dear, my dearest fröken,--i fear you do not understand me! yet it is natural that you should not; you were not prepared for the offer of my--my affections,"--and he beamed all over with benevolence,--"and i can appreciate a maidenly and becoming coyness, even though it assume the form of a repellant and unreasonable anger. but take courage, my--my dear girl!--our lord forbid that i should wantonly play with the delicate emotions of your heart! poor little heart! does it flutter?" and mr. dyceworthy leered sweetly. "i will give it time to recover itself! yes, yes! a little time! and then you will put that pretty hand in mine"--here he drew nearer to her, "and with one kiss we will seal the compact!" and he attempted to steal his arm round her waist, but the girl sprang back indignantly, and pulling down a thick branch of the clambering prickly roses from the porch, held it in front of her by way of protection. mr. dyceworthy laughed indulgently. "very pretty--very pretty indeed!" he mildly observed, eyeing her as she stood at bay barricaded by the roses. "quite a picture! there, there! do not be frightened,--such shyness is very natural! we will embrace in the lord another day! in the meantime one little word--_the_ word--will suffice me,--yea, even one little smile,--to show me that you understand my words,--that you love me"--here he clasped his plump hands together in flabby ecstasy--"even as you are loved!" his absurd attitude,--the weak, knock-kneed manner in which his clumsy legs seemed, from the force of sheer sentiment, to bend under his weighty body, and the inanely amatory expression of his puffy countenance, would have excited most women to laughter,--and thelma was perfectly conscious of his utterly ridiculous appearance, but she was too thoroughly indignant to take the matter in a humorous light. "love you!" she exclaimed, with a movement of irrepressible loathing. "you must be mad! i would rather die than marry you!" mr. dyceworthy's face grew livid and his little eyes sparkled vindictively,--but he restrained his inward rage, and merely smiled, rubbing his hands softly one against the other. "let us be calm!" he said soothingly. "whatever we do, let us be calm! let us not provoke one another to wrath! above all things, let us, in a spirit of charity and patience, reason out this matter without undue excitement. my ears have most painfully heard your last words, which, taken literally, might mean that you reject my honorable offer. the question is, _do_ they mean this? i cannot,--i will not believe that you would foolishly stand in the way of your own salvation,"--and he shook his head with doleful gentleness. "moreover, fröken thelma, though it sorely distresses me to speak of it,--it is my duty, as a minister of the lord, to remind you that an honest marriage,--a marriage of virtue and respectability such as i propose, is the only way to restore your reputation,--which, alas! is sorely damaged, and--" mr. dyceworthy stopped abruptly, a little alarmed, as she suddenly cast aside the barrier of roses and advanced toward him, her blue eyes blazing. "my reputation!" she said haughtily. "who speaks of it?" "oh dear, dear me!" moaned the minister pathetically. "sad! . . . very sad to see so ungovernable a temper, so wild and untrained a disposition! alas, alas! how frail we are without the lord's support,--without the strong staff of the lord's mercy to lean upon! not i, my poor child, not i, but the whole village speaks of you; to you the ignorant people attribute all the sundry evils that of late have fallen sorely upon them,--bad harvests, ill-luck with the fishing, poverty, sickness,"--here mr. dyceworthy pressed the tips of his fingers delicately together, and looked at her with a benevolent compassion,--"and they call it witchcraft,--yes! strange, very strange! but so it is,--ignorant as they are, such ignorance is not easily enlightened,--and though i," he sighed, "have done my poor best to disabuse their minds of the suspicions against you, i find it is a matter in which i, though a humble mouthpiece of the gospel, am powerless--quite powerless!" she relaxed her defiant attitude, and moved away from him; the shadow of a smile was on her lips. "it is not my fault if the people are foolish," she said coldly; "i have never done harm to any one that i know of." and turning abruptly, she seemed about to enter the house, but the minister dexterously placed himself in her way, and barred her passage. "stay, oh, stay!" he exclaimed with unctuous fervor. "pause, unfortunate girl, ere you reject the strong shield and buckler that the lord has, in his great mercy, offered you, in my person! for i must warn you,--fröken thelma, i must warn you seriously of the danger you run! i will not pain you by referring to the grave charges brought against your father, who is, alas! in spite of my spiritual wrestling with the lord for his sake, still no better than a heathen savage; no! i will say nothing of this. but what,--what shall i say,"--here he lowered his voice to a tone of mysterious and weighty reproach,--"what shall i say of your most unseemly and indiscreet companionship with these worldly young men who are visiting the fjord for their idle pastime? ah dear, dear! this is indeed a heavy scandal and a sore burden to my soul,--for up to this time i have, in spite of many faults in your disposition, considered you were at least of a most maidenly and decorous deportment,--but now--now! to think that you should, of your own free will and choice, consent to be the plaything of this idle stroller from the wicked haunts of fashion,--the hour's toy of this sir philip errington! fröken thelma, i would never have believed it of you!" and he drew himself up with ponderous and sorrowful dignity. a burning blush had covered thelma's face at the mention of errington's name, but it soon faded, leaving her very pale. she changed her position so that she confronted mr. dyceworthy,--her clear blue eyes regarded him steadfastly. "is this what is said of me?" she asked calmly. "it is,--it is, most unfortunately!" returned the minister, shaking his bullet-like head a great many times; then, with a sort of elephantine cheerfulness, he added, "but what matter? there is time to remedy these things. i am willing to set myself as a strong barrier against the evil noises of rumor! am i selfish or ungenerous? the lord forbid it! no matter how _i_ am compromised, no matter how _i_ am misjudged,--i am still willing to take you as my lawful wife fröken thelma,--but," and here he shook his forefinger at her with a pretended playfulness, "i will permit no more converse with sir philip errington; no, no! i cannot allow it! . . . i cannot, indeed!" she still looked straight at him,--her bosom rose and fell rapidly with her passionate breath, and there was such an eloquent breath of scorn in her face that he winced under it as though struck by a sharp scourge. "you are not worth my anger!" she said slowly, this time without a tremor in her rich voice. "one must have something to be angry with, and you--you are nothing! neither man nor beast,--for men are brave, and beasts tell no lies! your wife! i!" and she laughed aloud,--then with a gesture of command, "go!" she exclaimed, "and never let me see your face again!" the clear scornful laughter,--the air of absolute authority with which she spoke,--would have stung the most self-opinionated of men, even though his conscience were enveloped in a moral leather casing of hypocrisy and arrogance. and, notwithstanding his invariable air of mildness, mr. dyceworthy had a temper. that temper rose to a white heat just now,--every drop of blood receded from his countenance,--and his soft hands clenched themselves in a particularly ugly and threatening manner. yet he managed to preserve his suave composure. "alas, alas!" he murmured. "how sorely my soul is afflicted to see you thus, fröken! i am amazed--i am distressed! such language from your lips! oh fie, fie! and has it come to this! and must i resign the hope i had of saving your poor soul? and must i withdraw my spiritual protection from you?" this he asked with a suggestive sneer of his prim mouth,--and then continued, "i must--alas, i must! my conscience will not permit me to do more than pray for you! and as is my duty, i shall, in a spirit of forbearance and charity, speak warningly to sir philip concerning--" but thelma did not permit him to finish his sentence. she sprang forward like a young leopardess, and with a magnificent outward sweep of her arm motioned him down the garden path. "out of my sight,--_coward_!" she cried, and then stood waiting for him to obey her, her whole frame vibrating with indignation like a harp struck too roughly. she looked so terribly beautiful, and there was such a suggestive power in that extended bare white arm of hers, that the minister, though quaking from head to heel with disappointment and resentment, judged it prudent to leave her. "certainly, i will take my departure, fröken!" he said meekly, while his teeth glimmered wolfishly through his pale lips, in a snarl more than a smile. "it is best you should be alone to recover yourself--from this--this undue excitement! i shall not repeat my--my--offer; but i am sure your good sense will--in time--show you how very unjust and hasty you have been in this matter--and--and you will be sorry! yes, indeed! i am quite sure you will be sorry! i wish you good day, fröken thelma!" she made him no reply, and he turned from the house and left her, strolling down the flower-bordered path as though he were in the best of all possible moods with himself and the universe. but, in truth, he muttered a heavy oath under his breath--an oath that was by no means in keeping with his godly and peaceful disposition. once, as he walked, he looked back,--and saw the woman he coveted now more than ever, standing erect in the porch, tall, fair and loyal in her attitude, looking like some proud empress who had just dismissed an unworthy vassal. a farmer's daughter! and she had refused mr. dyceworthy with disdain! he had much ado to prevent himself shaking his fist at her! "the lofty shall be laid low, and the stiff-necked shall be humbled," he thought, as with a vicious switch of his stick he struck off a fragrant head of purple clover. "conceited fool of a girl! hopes to be 'my lady' does she? she had better take care!" here he stopped abruptly in his walk as if a thought had struck him,--a malignant joy sparkled in his eyes, and he flourished his stick triumphantly in the air. "i'll have her yet!" he exclaimed half-aloud. "i'll set lovisa on her!" and his countenance cleared; he quickened his pace like a man having some pressing business to fulfill, and was soon in his boat, rowing towards bosekop with unaccustomed speed and energy. meanwhile thelma stood motionless where he had left her,--she watched the retreating form of her portly suitor till he had altogether disappeared,--then she pressed one hand on her bosom, sighed, and laughed a little. glancing at the crucifix so lately restored to her, she touched it with her lips and fastened it to a small silver chain she wore, and then a shadow swept over her fair face that made it strangely sad and weary. her lips quivered pathetically; she shaded her eyes with her curved fingers as though the sunlight hurt her,--then with faltering steps she turned away from the warm stretch of garden, brilliant with blossom, and entered the house. there was a sense of outrage and insult upon her, and though in her soul she treated mr. dyceworthy's observations with the contempt they deserved, his coarse allusion to sir philip errington had wounded her more than she cared to admit to herself. once in the quiet sitting-room, she threw herself on her knees by her father's arm-chair, and laying her proud little golden head down on her folded arms, she broke into a passion of silent tears. who shall unravel the mystery of a woman's weeping? who shall declare whether it is a pain or a relief to the overcharged heart? the dignity of a crowned queen is capable of utterly dissolving and disappearing in a shower of tears, when love's burning finger touches the pulse and marks its slow or rapid beatings. and thelma wept as many of her sex weep, without knowing why, save that all suddenly she felt herself most lonely and forlorn like sainte beuve's-- "colombe gemissante, qui demande par pitié sa moitié, sa moitié loin d'elle absente!" chapter xii. "a wicked will, a woman's will; a cankered grandame's will!" _king john_. "by jove!" and lorimer, after uttering this unmeaning exclamation, was silent out of sheer dismay. he stood hesitating and looking in at the door of the güldmar's sitting-room, and the alarming spectacle he saw was the queenly thelma down on the floor in an attitude of grief,--thelma giving way to little smothered sobs of distress,--thelma actually crying! he drew a long breath and stared, utterly bewildered. it was a sight for which he was unprepared,--he was not accustomed to women's tears. what should he do? should he cough gently to attract her attention, or should he retire on tip-toe and leave her to indulge her grief as long as she would, without making any attempt to console her? the latter course seemed almost brutal, yet he was nearly deciding upon it, when a slight creak of the door against which he leaned, caused her to look up suddenly. seeing him, she rose quickly from her desponding position and faced him, her cheeks somewhat deeply flushed and her eyes glittering feverishly. "mr. lorimer!" she exclaimed, forcing a faint smile to her quivering lips. "you here? why, where are the others?" "they are coming on after me," replied lorimer, advancing into the room, and diplomatically ignoring the girl's efforts to hide the tears that still threatened to have their way. "but i was sent in advance to tell you not to be frightened. there has been a slight accident--" she grew very pale. "is it my father?" she asked tremblingly. "sir philip--" "no, no!" answered lorimer reassuringly. "it is nothing serious, really, upon my honor! your father's all right,--so is phil,--our lively friend pierre is the victim. the fact is, we've had some trouble with sigurd. i can't think what has come to the boy! he was as amiable as possible when we started, but after we had climbed about half-way up the mountain, he took it into his head to throw stones about rather recklessly. it was only fun, he said. your father tried to make him leave off, but he was obstinate. at last, in a particularly bright access of playfulness, he got hold of a large flint, and nearly put phil's eye out with it,--phil dodged it, and it flew straight at duprèz, splitting open his cheek in rather an unbecoming fashion--don't look so horrified, miss güldmar,--it is really nothing!" "oh, but indeed it is something!" she said, with true womanly anxiety in her voice. "poor fellow! i am so sorry! is he much hurt? does he suffer?" "pierre? oh, no, not a bit of it! he's as jolly as possible! we bandaged him up in a very artistic fashion; he looks quite interesting, i assure you. his beauty's spoilt for a time, that's all. phil thought you might be alarmed when you saw us bringing home the wounded,--that is why i came on to tell you all about it." "but what can be the matter with sigurd?" asked the girl, raising her hand furtively to dash off a few tear-drops that still hung on her long lashes. "and where is he?" "ah, that i can't tell you!" answered lorimer. "he is perfectly incomprehensible to-day. as soon as he saw the blood flowing from duprèz's cheek, he tittered a howl as if some one had shot him, and away he rushed into the woods as fast as he could go. we called him, and shouted his name till we were hoarse,--all no use! he wouldn't come back. i suppose he'll find his way home by himself?" "oh, yes," said thelma gravely. "but when he comes i will scold him very much! it is not like him to be so wild and cruel. he will understand me when i tell him how wrong he has been." "oh, don't break his heart, poor little chap!" said lorimer easily. "your father has given him a terrible scolding already. he hasn't got his wits about him you know,--he can't help being queer sometimes. but what have _you_ been doing with yourself during our absence?" and he regarded her with friendly scrutiny. "you were crying when i came in. now, weren't you?" she met his gaze quite frankly. "yes!" she replied, with a plaintive thrill in her voice. "i could not help it! my heart ached and the tears came. somehow i felt that everything was wrong,--and that it was all my fault--" "your fault!" murmured lorimer, astonished. "my dear miss güldmar, what do you mean? what _is_ your fault?" "everything!" she answered sadly, with a deep sigh. "i am very foolish; and i am sure i often do wrong without meaning it. mr. dyceworthy has been here and--" she stopped abruptly, and a wave of color flushed her face. lorimer laughed lightly. "dyceworthy!" he exclaimed. "the mystery is explained! you have been bored by 'the good religious,' as pierre calls him. you know what _boring_ means now, miss güldmar, don't you?" she smiled slightly, and nodded. "the first time you visited the _eulalie_, you didn't understand the word, i remember,--ah!" and he shook his head--"if you were in london society, you'd find that expression very convenient,--it would come to your lips pretty frequently, i can tell you!" "i shall never see london," she said, with a sort of resigned air. "you will all go away very soon, and i--i shall be lonely--" she bit her lips in quick vexation, as her blue eyes filled again with tears in spite of herself. lorimer turned away and pulled a chair to the open window. "come and sit down here," he said invitingly. "we shall be able to see the others coming down the hill. nothing like fresh air for blowing away the blues." then, as she obeyed him, he added, "what has dyceworthy been saying to you?" "he told me i was wicked," she murmured; "and that all the people here think very badly of me. but that was not the worst"--and a little shudder passed over her--"there was something else--something that made me very angry--so angry!"--and here she raised her eyes with a gravely penitent air--"mr. lorimer, i do not think i have ever had so bad and fierce a temper before!" "good gracious!" exclaimed lorimer, with a broad smile. "you alarm me, miss güldmar! i had no idea you were a 'bad, fierce' person,--i shall get afraid of you--i shall, really!" "ah, you laugh!" and she spoke half-reproachfully. "you will not be serious for one little moment!" "yes i will! now look at me," and he assumed a solemn expression, and drew himself up with an air of dignity. "i am all attention! consider me your father-confessor. miss güldmar, and explain the reason of this 'bad, fierce' temper of yours." she peeped at him shyly from under her silken lashes. "it is more dreadful than you think," she answered in a low tone. "mr. dyceworthy asked me to marry him." lorimer's keen eyes flashed with indignation. this was beyond a jest,--and he clenched his fist as he exclaimed-- "impudent donkey! what a jolly good thrashing he deserves! . . . and i shouldn't be surprised if he got it one of these days! and so, miss güldmar,"--and he studied her face with some solicitude--"you were very angry with him?" "oh yes!" she replied, "but when i told him he was a coward, and that he must go away, he said some very cruel things--" she stopped, and blushed deeply; then, as if seized by some sudden impulse, she laid her small hand on lorimer's and said in the tone of an appealing child, "you are very good and kind to me, and you are clever,--you know so much more than i do! you must help me,--you will tell me, will you not? . . . if it is wrong of me to like you all,--it is as if we had known each other a long time and i have been very happy with you and your friends. but you must teach me to behave like the girls you have seen in london,--for i could not bear that sir philip should think me wicked!" "wicked!" and lorimer drew a long breath. "good heavens! if you knew what phil's ideas about you are, miss güldmar--" "i do not wish to know," interrupted thelma steadily. "you must quite understand me,--i am not clever to hide my thoughts, and--and--, _you_ are glad when you talk sometimes to sir philip, are you not?" he nodded, gravely studying every light and shadow on the fair, upturned, innocent face. "yes!" she continued with some eagerness, "i see you are! well, it is the same with me,--i do love to hear him speak! you know how his voice is like music, and how his kind ways warm the heart,--it is pleasant to be in his company--i am sure you also find it so! but for me,--it seems it is wrong,--it is not wise for me to show when i am happy. i do not care what other people say,--but i would not have _him_ think ill of me for all the world!" lorimer took her hand and held it in his with a most tender loyalty and respect. her naïve, simple words had, all unconsciously to herself, laid bare the secret of her soul to his eyes,--and though his heart beat with a strange sickening sense of unrest that flavored of despair, a gentle reverence filled him, such as a man might feel if some little snow-white shrine, sacred to purity and peace, should be suddenly unveiled before him. "my dear miss güldmar," he said earnestly, "i assure you, you have no cause to be uneasy! you must not believe a word dyceworthy says--every one with a grain of common sense can see what a liar and hypocrite he is! and as for you, you never do anything wrong,--don't imagine such nonsense! i wish there were more women like you!" "ah, that is very kind of you!" half laughed the girl, still allowing her hand to rest in his. "but i do not think everybody would have such a good opinion." they both started, and their hands fell asunder as a shadow darkened the room, and sir philip stood before them. "excuse me!" he said stiffly, lifting his hat with ceremonious politeness. "i ought to have knocked at the door--i--" "why?" asked thelma, raising her eyebrows in surprise. "yes--why indeed?" echoed lorimer, with a frank look at his friend. "i am afraid,"--and for once the generally good-humored errington looked positively petulant--"i am afraid i interrupted a pleasant conversation!" and he gave a little forced laugh of feigned amusement, but evident vexation. "and if it was pleasant, shall you not make it still more so?" asked thelma, with timid and bewitching sweetness, though her heart beat very fast,--she was anxious. why was sir philip so cold and distant? he looked at her, and his pent-up passion leaped to his eyes and filled them with a glowing and fiery tenderness,--her head drooped suddenly, and she turned quickly, to avoid that searching, longing gaze. lorimer glanced from one to the other with, a slight feeling of amusement. "well phil," he inquired lazily, "how did you get here so soon? you must have glided into the garden like a ghost, for i never heard you coming." "so i imagine!" retorted errington, with, an effort to be sarcastic, in which he utterly failed as he met his friend's eyes,--then after a slight and somewhat embarrassed pause he added more mildly! "duprèz cannot get on very fast,--his wound still bleeds, and he feels rather faint now and then. i don't think we bandaged him up properly, and i came on to see if britta could prepare something for him." "but you will not need to ask britta," said thelma quietly, with a pretty air of authority, "for i shall myself do all for mr. duprèz. i understand well how to cure his wound, and i do think he will like me as well as britta." and, hearing footsteps approaching, she looked out at the window. "here they come!" she exclaimed. "ah, poor monsieur pierre! he does look very pale! i will go and meet them." and she hurried from the room, leaving the two young men together. errington threw himself into olaf güldmar's great arm-chair, with a slight sigh. "well?" said lorimer inquiringly. "well!" he returned somewhat gruffly. lorimer laughed, and crossing the room, approached him and clapped a hand on his shoulder. "look here, old man!" he said earnestly, "don't be a fool! i know that 'love maketh men mad,' but i never supposed the lunacy would lead you to the undesirable point of distrusting your friend,--your true friend, phil,--by all the gods of the past and present!" and he laughed again,--a little huskily this time, for there was a sudden unaccountable and unwished-for lump in his throat, and a moisture in his eyes which he had not bargained for. philip looked up,--and silently held out his hand, which lorimer as silently clasped. there was a moment's hesitation, and then the young baronet spoke out manfully. "i'm ashamed of myself, george! i really am! but i tell you, when i came in and saw you two standing there,--you've no idea what a picture you made! . . . by jove! . . . i was furious!" and he smiled. "i suppose i was jealous!" "i suppose you were!" returned lorimer amusedly. "novel sensation, isn't it? a sort of hot, prickly, 'have-at-thee-villain' sort of thing; must be frightfully exhausting! but why you should indulge this emotion at _my_ expense is what i cannot, for the life of me, understand!" "well," murmured errington, rather abashed, "you see, her hands were in yours--" "as they will be again, and yet again, i trust!" said lorimer with cheery fervor. "surely you'll allow me to shake hands with your wife?" "i say, george, be quiet!" exclaimed philip warningly, as at that moment thelma passed the window with pierre duprèz leaning on her arm, and her father and macfarlane following. she entered the room with the stately step of a young queen,--her tall, beautiful figure forming a strong contrast to that of the narrow-shouldered little frenchman, upon whom she smiled down with an air of almost maternal protection. "you will sit here, monsieur duprèz," she said, leading him to the _bonde's_ arm-chair which errington instantly vacated, "and father will bring you a good glass of wine. and the pain will be nothing when i have attended to that cruel wound. but i am so sorry,--so very sorry, to see you suffer!" pierre did indeed present rather a dismal spectacle. there was a severe cut on his forehead as well as his cheek; his face was pale and streaked with blood, while the hastily-improvised bandages which were tied under his chin, by no means improved his personal appearance. his head ached with the pain, and his eyes smarted with the strong sunlight to which he had been exposed all the day, but his natural gaiety was undiminished, and he laughed as he answered-- "_chère mademoiselle_, you are too good to me! it is a piece of good fortune that sigurd threw that stone--yes! since it brings me your pity! but do not trouble; a little cold water and a fresh handkerchief is all i need." but thelma was already practicing her own simple surgery for his benefit. with deft, soft fingers she laid bare the throbbing wound,--washed and dressed it carefully and skillfully,--and used with all such exceeding gentleness, that duprèz closed his eyes in a sort of rapture during the operation, and wished it could last longer. then taking the glass of wine her father brought in obedience to her order, she said in a tone of mild authority-- "now, you will drink this monsieur pierre, and you will rest quite still till it is time to go back to the yacht; and to-morrow you will not feel any pain, i am sure. and i do think it will not be an ugly scar for long." "if it is," answered pierre, "i shall say i received it in a duel! then i shall be great--glorious! and all the pretty ladies will love me!" she laughed,--but looked grave a moment afterwards. "you must never say what is not true," she said. "it is wrong to deceive any one,--even in a small matter." duprèz gazed up at her wonderingly, feeling very much like a chidden child. "never say what is not true!" he thought. "mon dieu! what would become of my life?" it was a new suggestion, and he reflected upon it with astonishment. it opened such a wide vista of impossibilities to his mind. meanwhile old güldmar was engaged in pouring out wine for the other young men, talking all the time. "i tell thee, thelma mine," he said seriously, "something must be very wrong with our sigurd. the poor lad has always been gentle and tractable, but to-day he was like some wild animal for mischief and hardihood. i grieve to see it! i fear the time may come when he may no longer be a safe servant for thee, child!" "oh, father!"--and the girl's voice was full of tender anxiety--"surely not! he is too fond of us to do us any harm--he is so docile and affectionate!" "maybe, maybe!" and the old farmer shook his head doubtfully. "but when the wits are away the brain is like a ship without ballast--there is no safe sailing possible. he would not mean any harm, perhaps,--and yet in his wild moods he might do it, and be sorry for it directly afterwards. 'tis little use to cry when the mischief is done,--and i confess i do not like his present humor." "by-the-by," observed lorimer, "that reminds me! sigurd has taken an uncommonly strong aversion to phil. it's curious but it's a fact. perhaps it is that which upsets his nerves?" "i have noticed it myself," said errington, "and i'm sorry for it, for i've done him no harm that i can remember. he certainly asked me to go away from the altenfjord, and i refused,--i'd no idea he had any serious meaning in his request. but it's evident he can't endure my company." "ah, then!" said thelma simply and sorrowfully, "he must be very ill,--because it is natural for every one to like you." she spoke in perfect good faith and innocence of heart; but errington's eyes flashed and he smiled--one of those rare, tender smiles of his which brightened his whole visage. "you are very kind to say so, miss güldmar!" "it is not kindness; it is the truth!" she replied frankly. at that moment a very rosy face and two sparkling eyes peered in at the door. "yes, britta!" thelma smiled; "we are quite ready!" whereupon the face disappeared, and olaf güldmar led the way into the kitchen, which was at the same time the dining-room, and where a substantial supper was spread on the polished pine table. the farmer's great arm-chair was brought in for duprèz, who, though he declared he was being spoilt by too much attention, seemed to enjoy it immensely,--and they were all, including britta, soon clustered round the hospitable board whereon antique silver and quaint glasses of foreign make sparkled bravely, their effect enhanced by the snowy whiteness of the homespun table-linen. a few minutes set them all talking gaily. macfarlane vied with the ever-gallant duprèz in making a few compliments to britta, who was pretty and engaging enough to merit attention, and who, after all, was something more than a mere servant, possessing, as she did, a great deal of her young mistress's affection and confidence, and being always treated by güldmar himself as one of the family. there was no reserve or coldness in the party, and the hum of their merry voices echoed up to the cross-rafters of the stout wooden ceiling and through the open door and window, from whence a patch of the gorgeous afternoon sky could be seen, glimmering redly, like a distant lake of fire. they were in the full enjoyment of their repast, and the old farmer's rollicking "ha, ha, ha!" in response to a joke of lorimer's, had just echoed jovially through the room, when a strong, harsh voice called aloud--"olaf güldmar!" there was a sudden silence. each one looked at the other in surprise. again the voice called--"olaf güldmar!" "well!" roared the _bonde_ testily, turning sharply round in his chair, "who calls me?" "i do!" and the tall, emaciated figure of a woman advanced and stood on the threshold, without actually entering the room. she dropped the black shawl that enveloped her, and, in so doing, disordered her hair, which fell in white, straggling locks about her withered features, and her dark eyes gleamed maliciously as she fixed them on the assembled party. britta, on perceiving her, uttered a faint shriek, and without considering the propriety of her action, buried her nut-brown curls and sparkling eyes in duprèz's coat-sleeve, which, to do the frenchman justice, was exceedingly prompt to receive and shelter its fair burden. the _bonde_ rose from his chair, and his face grew stern. "what do you here, lovisa elsland? have you walked thus far from talvig to pay a visit that must needs be unwelcome?" "unwelcome i know i am," replied lovisa, disdainfully noting the terror of britta and the astonished glances if errington and his friends--"unwelcome at all times,--but most unwelcome at the hour of feasting and folly,--for who can endure to receive a message from the lord when the mouth is full of savory morsels, and the brain reels with the wicked wine? yet i have come in spite of your iniquities. olaf güldmar,--strong in the strength of the lord, i dare to set foot upon your accursèd threshold, and once more make my just demand. give me back the child of my dead daughter! . . . restore to me the erring creature who should be the prop of my defenceless age, had not your pagan spells alienated her from me,--release her,--and bid her return with me to my desolate hearth and home. this done,--i will stay the tempest that threatens your habitation--i will hold back the dark cloud of destruction--i will avert the wrath of the lord,--yes! for the sake of the past--for the sake of the past!" these last words she muttered in a low tone, more to herself than to güldmar; and, having spoken, she averted her eyes from the company, drew her shawl closely about her, and waited for an answer. "by all the gods of my fathers!" shouted the _bonde_ in a towering passion. "this passes my utmost endurance! have i not told thee again and again, thou silly soul! . . . that thy grandchild is no slave? she is free--free to return to thee an' she will; free also to stay with us, where she has found a happier home than thy miserable hut at talvig, britta!" and he thumped his fist on the table. "look up, child! speak for thyself! thou hast a spirit of thine own. here is thy one earthly relation. wilt go with her? neither thy mistress nor i will stand in the way of thy pleasure." thus adjured britta looked up so suddenly that duprèz,--who had rather enjoyed the feel of her little nestling head hidden upon his arm,--was quite startled, and he was still more so at the utter defiance that flashed into the small maiden's round, rosy face. "go with _you_!" she cried shrilly, addressing the old woman, who remained standing in the same attitude, with an air of perfect composure. "do you think i have forgotten how you treated my mother, or how you used to beat me and starve me? you wicked old woman! how dare you come here? i'm ashamed of you! you frightened my mother to death--you know you did! . . . and now you want to do the same to me! but you won't--i can tell you! i'm old enough to do as i like, and i'd rather die than live with you!" then, overcome by excitement and temper, she burst out crying, heedless of pierre duprèz's smiling nods of approval, and the admiring remarks he was making under his breath, such as--"_brava, ma petite! c'est bien fait! c'est joliment bien dit! mais je crois bien!_" lovisa seemed unmoved; she raised her head and looked, at güldmar. "is this your answer?" she demanded. "by the sword of odin!" cried the _bonde_, "the woman must be mad! _my_ answer? the girl has spoken for herself,--and plainly enough too! art thou deaf, lovisa elsland? or are thy wits astray?" "my hearing is very good," replied lovisa calmly, "and my mind, olaf güldmar, is as clear as yours. and, thanks to your teaching in mine early days,"--she paused and looked keenly at him, but he appeared to see no meaning in her allusion,--"i know the english tongue, of which we hear far too much,--too often! there is nothing britta has said that i do not understand. but i know well it is not the girl herself that speaks--it is a demon in her,--and that demon shall be cast forth before i die! yea, with the help of the lord i shall--" she stopped abruptly and fixed her eyes, glowing with fierce wrath, on thelma. the girl met her evil glance with a gentle surprise. lovisa smiled malignantly. "you know me, i think!" said lovisa. "you have seen me before?" "often," answered thelma mildly. "i have always been sorry for you." "sorry for me!" almost yelled the old woman. "why--why are you sorry for me?" "do not answer her, child!" interrupted güldmar angrily. "she is mad as the winds of a wild winter, and will but vex thee." but thelma laid her hand soothingly on her father's, and smiled peacefully as she turned her fair face again towards lovisa. "why?" she said. "because you seem so very lonely and sad--and that must make you cross with every one who is happy! and it is a pity, i think, that you do not let britta alone--you only quarrel with each other when you meet. and would you not like her to think kindly of you when you are dead?" lovisa seemed choking with anger,--her face worked into such hideous grimaces, that all present, save thelma, were dismayed at her repulsive aspect. "when i am dead!" she muttered hoarsely. "so you count upon that already, do you? ah! . . . but do you know which of us shall die first!" then raising her voice with an effort she exclaimed-- "stand forth, thelma güldmar! let me see you closely--face to face!" errington said something in a low tone, and the _bonde_ would have again interfered, but thelma shook her head, smiled and rose from her seat at table. "anything to soothe her, poor soul!" she whispered, as she left errington's side and advanced towards lovisa till she was within reach of the old woman's hand. she looked like some grand white angel, who had stepped down from a cathedral altar, as she stood erect and stately with a gravely pitying expression in her lovely eyes, confronting the sable-draped, withered, leering hag, who fixed upon her a steady look of the most cruel and pitiless hatred. "daughter of satan!" said lovisa then, in intense piercing tones that somehow carried with them a sense of awe and horror. "creature, in whose veins the fire of hell burns without ceasing,--my _curse_ upon you! my curse upon the beauty of your body--may it grow loathsome in the sight of all men! may those who embrace you, embrace misfortune and ruin!--may love betray you and forsake you! may your heart be broken even as mine has been!--may your bridal bed be left deserted!--may your children wither and pine from their hour of birth! sorrow track you to the grave!--may your death be lingering and horrible! god be my witness and fulfill my words!" and, raising her arms with wild gesture, she turned and left the house. the spell of stupefied silence was broken with her disappearance. old güldmar prepared to rush after her and force her to retract her evil speech,--errington was furious, and britta cried bitterly. the lazy lorimer was excited and annoyed. "fetch her back," he said, "and i'll dance upon her!" but thelma stood where the old woman had left her--she smiled faintly, but she was very pale. errington approached her,--she turned to him and stretched out her hands with a little appealing gesture. "my friend," she said softly, "do you think i deserve so many curses? is there something about me that is evil?" what errington would have answered is doubtful,--his heart beat wildly--he longed to draw those little hands in his own, and cover them with passionate kisses,--but he was intercepted by old güldmar, who caught his daughter in his arms and hugged her closely, his silvery beard mingling with the gold of her rippling hair. "never fear a wicked tongue, my bird!" said the old man fondly. "there is naught of harm that would touch thee either on earth or in heaven,--and a foul-mouthed curse must roll off thy soul like water from a dove's wing! cheer thee, my darling--cheer thee! what! thine own creed teaches thee that the gentle mother of christ, with her little white angels round her, watches over all innocent maids,--and thinkest thou she will let an old woman's malice and envy blight thy young days? no, no! _thou_ accursed?" and the _bonde_ laughed loudly to hide the tears that moistened his keen eyes. "thou art the sweetest blessing of my heart, even as thy mother was before thee! come, come! raise thy pretty head--here are these merry lads growing long-faced,--and britta is weeping enough salt water to fill a bucket! one of thy smiles will set us all right again,--ay, there now!"--as she looked up and, meeting philip's eloquent eyes, blushed, and withdrew herself gently from her father's arms,--"let us finish our supper and think no more of yonder villainous old hag--she is crazy, i believe, and knows not what she says half her time. now, britta, cease thy grunting and sighing--'twill spoil thy face and will not mend the hole in thy grandmother's brain!" "wicked, spiteful, ugly old thing!" sobbed britta; "i'll never, never, never forgive her!" then, running to thelma, she caught her hand and kissed it affectionately. "oh, my dear, my dear! to think she should have cursed you, what dreadful, dreadful wickedness! oh!" and britta looked volumes of wrath. "i could have beaten her black and blue!" her vicious eagerness was almost comic--every one laughed, including thelma, though she pressed the hand of her little servant very warmly. "oh fie!" said lorimer seriously. "little girls mustn't whip their grandmothers; it's specially forbidden in the prayer-book, isn't it, phil?" "i'm sure i don't know!" replied errington merrily. "i believe there is something to the effect that a man may not marry his grandmother--perhaps that is what you mean?" "ah, no doubt!" murmured lorimer languidly, as, with the others, he resumed his seat at the supper-table. "i knew there was a special mandate respecting one's particularly venerable relations, with a view to self-guidance in case they should prove troublesome, like britta's good grand-mamma. what a frightfully picturesque mouthing old lady she is!" "she is _la petroleuse_ of norway!" exclaimed duprèz. "she would make an admirable dancer in the carmagnole!" macfarlane, who had preserved a discreet silence throughout the whole scene, here looked up. "she's just a screech-owl o' mistaken piety," he said. "she minds me o' a glowerin' auld warlock of an aunt o' mine in glasgie, wha sits in her chair a' day wi' ae finger on the bible. she says she's gaun straight to heaven by special invitation o' the lord, leavin' a' her blood relations howlin' vainly after her from their roastin' fires down below. ma certes! she'll give ye a good rousin' curse if ye like! she's cursed me ever since i can remember her,--cursed me in and out from sunrise to sunset,--but i'm no the worse for't as yet,--an' it's dootful whether she's any the better." "and yet lovisa elsland used to be as merry and lissom a lass as ever stepped," said güldmar musingly. "i remember her well when both she and i were young. i was always on the sea at that time,--never happy unless the waves tossed me and my vessel from one shore to another. i suppose the restless spirit of my fathers was in me. i was never contented unless i saw some new coast every six months or so. well! . . . lovisa was always foremost among the girls of the village who watched me leave the fjord,--and however long or short a time i might be absent, she was certain to be on the shore when my ship came sailing home again. many a joke i have cracked with her and her companions--and she was a bonnie enough creature to look at then, i tell you,--though now she is like a battered figure-head on a wreck. her marriage, spoiled her temper,--her husband was as dark and sour a man as could be met with in all norway, and when he and his fishing-boat sank in a squall off the lofoden islands, i doubt if she shed many tears for his loss. her only daughter's husband went down in the same storm,--and he but three months wedded,--and the girl,--britta's mother,--pined and pined, and even when her child was born took no sort of comfort in it. she died four years after britta's birth--her death was hastened, so i have heard, through old lovisa's harsh treatment,--anyhow the little lass she left behind her had no very easy time of it all alone with her grandmother,--eh britta?" britta looked up and shook her head emphatically. "then," went on güldmar, "when my girl came back the last time from france, britta chanced to see her, and, strangely enough,"--here he winked shrewdly--"took a fancy to her face,--odd, wasn't it? however, nothing would suit her but that she must be thelma's handmaiden, and here she is. now you know her history,--she would be happy enough if her grandmother would let her alone; but the silly old woman thinks the girl is under a spell, and that thelma is the witch that works it;"--and the old farmer laughed. "there's a grain of truth in the notion too, but not in the way she has of looking at it." "all women are witches!" said duprèz. "britta is a little witch herself!" britta's rosy cheeks grew rosier at this, and she tossed her chestnut curls with an air of saucy defiance that delighted the frenchman. he forgot his wounded cheek and his disfiguring bandages in the contemplation of the little plump figure, cased in its close-fitting scarlet bodice, and the tempting rosy lips that were in such close proximity to his touch. "if it were not for those red hands!" he thought. "dieu! what a charming child she would be! one would instantly kill the grandmother and kiss the granddaughter!" and he watched her with admiration as she busied herself about the supper-table, attending to every one with diligence and care, but reserving her special services for thelma, whom she waited on with a mingled tenderness, and reverence, that were both touching and pretty to see. the conversation now became general, and nothing further occurred to disturb the harmony and hilarity of the party--only errington seemed somewhat abstracted, and answered many questions that were put to him at haphazard, without knowing, or possibly caring, whether his replies were intelligible or incoherent. his thoughts were dreamlike and brilliant with fairy sunshine. he understood at last what poets meant by their melodious musings, woven into golden threads of song--he seemed to have grasped some hitherto unguessed secret of his being--a secret that filled him with as much strange pain as pleasure. he felt as though he were endowed with a thousand senses,--each one keenly alive and sensitive to the smallest touch,--and there was a pulsation in his blood that was new and beyond his control,--a something that beat wildly in his heart at the sound of thelma's voice, or the passing flutter of her white garments near him. of what use to disguise it from himself any longer? he loved her! the terrible, beautiful tempest of love had broken over his life at last; there was no escape from its thunderous passion and dazzling lightning glory. he drew a sharp quick breath--the hum of the gay voices around him was more meaningless to his ears than the sound of the sea breaking on the beach below. he glanced at the girl--the fair and innocent creature who had, in his imagination, risen to a throne of imperial height, from whence she could bestow on him death or salvation. how calm she seemed! she was listening with courteous patience to a long story of macfarlane's whose scotch accent rendered it difficult for her to understand. she was pale, philip thought, and her eyes were heavy; but she smiled now and then,--such a smile! even so sweetly might the "kiss-worthy" lips of the greek aphrodite part, could that eloquent and matchless marble for once breathe into life. he looked at her with a sort of fear. her hands held his fate. what if she could not love him? what if he must lose her utterly? this idea overpowered him; his brain whirled, and he suddenly pushed away his untasted glass of wine, and rose abruptly from the table, heedless of the surprise his action excited. "hullo, phil, where are you off to?" cried lorimer. "wait for me!" "tired of our company, my lad?" said güldmar kindly, "you've had a long day of it,--and what with the climbing and the strong air, no doubt you'll be glad to turn in." "upon my life, sir," answered errington, with some confusion, "i don't know why i got up just now! i was thinking,--i'm rather a dreamy sort of fellow sometimes, and--" "he was asleep, and doesn't want to own it!" interrupted lorimer sententiously. "you will excuse him; he means well! he looks rather seedy. i think, mr. güldmar, we'll be off to the yacht. by the way, you're coming with us to-morrow, aren't you?" "oh yes," said thelma. "we will sail with you round by soroe,--it is weird and dark and grand; but i think it is beautiful. and there are many stories of the elves and berg-folk, who are said to dwell there among the deep ravines. have you heard about the berg-folk?" she continued, addressing herself to errington, unaware of the effort he was making to appear cool and composed in her presence. "no? then i must tell you to-morrow." they all walked out of the house into the porch, and while her father was interchanging farewells with the others, she looked at sir philip's grave face with some solicitude. "i am afraid you are very tired, my friend?" she asked softly, "or your head aches,--and you suffer?" he caught her hands swiftly and raised them to his lips. "would you care much,--would you care at all, if i suffered?" he murmured in a low tone. then before she could speak or move, he let go her hands again, and turned with his usual easy courtesy to güldmar. "then we may expect you without fail to-morrow, sir! good night!" "good night, my lad!" and with many hearty salutations the young men took their departure, raising their hats to thelma as they turned down the winding path to the shore. she remained standing near her father,--and, when the sound of their footsteps had died away, she drew closer still and laid her head against his breast. "cold, my bird?" queried the old man. "why, thou art shivering, child!--and yet the sunshine is as warm as wine. what ails thee?" "nothing, father!" and she raised her eyes, glowing and brilliant as stars. "tell me,--do you think often of my mother now!" "often!" and güldmar's fine resolute face grew sad and tender. "she is never absent from my mind! i see her night and day, ay! i can feel her soft arms clinging round my neck,--why dost thou ask so strange a question, little one? is it possible to forget what has been once loved?" thelma was silent for many minutes. then she kissed her father and said "good night." he held her by the hand and looked at her with a sort of vague anxiety. "art thou well, my child?" he asked. "this little hand burns like fire,--and thine eyes are too bright, surely, for sleep to visit them? art sure that nothing ails thee?" "sure, quite sure," answered the girl with a strange, dreamy smile. "i am quite well,--and happy!" and she turned to enter the house. "stay!" called the father. "promise me thou wilt think no more of lovisa!" "i had nearly forgotten her," she responded. "poor thing! she cursed me because she is so miserable, i suppose--all alone and unloved; it must be hard! curses sometimes turn to blessings, father! good night!" and she ascended the one flight of wooden stairs in the house to her own bedroom--a little three-cornered place as clean and white as the interior of a shell. never once glancing at the small mirror that seemed to invite her charms to reflect themselves therein, she went to the quaint latticed window and knelt down by it, folding her arms on the sill while she looked far out to the fjord. she could see the english flag fluttering from the masts of the _eulalie_; she could almost hear the steady plash of the oars wielded by errington and his friends as they rowed themselves back to the yacht. bright tears filled her eyes, and brimmed over, falling warmly on her folded hands. "would i care if you suffered?" she whispered. "oh, my love! . . . my love!" then, as if afraid lest the very winds should have heard her half-breathed exclamation, she shut her window in haste, and a hot blush crimsoned her cheeks. undressing quickly, she slipped into her little white bed and, closing her eyes, fancied she slept, though her sleep was but a waking dream of love in which all bright hopes reached their utmost fulfillment, and yet were in some strange way crossed with shadows which she had no power to disperse. and later on, when old güldmar slumbered soundly, and the golden mid-night sunshine lit up every nook and gable of the farmhouse with its lustrous glory, making thelma's closed lattice sparkle like a carven jewel,--a desolate figure lay prone on the grass beneath her window, with meagre pale face, and wide-open wild blue eyes upturned to the fiery brilliancy of the heavens. sigurd had come home;--sigurd was repentant, sorrowful, ashamed,--and broken-hearted. chapter xiii. "o love! o love! o gateway of delight! thou porch of peace, thou pageant of the prime of all god's creatures! i am here to climb thine upward steps, and daily and by night to gaze beyond them and to search aright the far-off splendor of thy track sublime." eric mackay's _love-letters of a violinist_. on the following morning the heat was intense,--no breath of wind stirred a ripple on the fjord, and there was a heaviness in the atmosphere which made the very brightness of the sky oppressive. such hot weather was unusual for that part of norway, and according to valdemar svensen, betokened some change. on board the _eulalie_ everything was ready for the trip to soroe,--steam was getting up prior to departure,--and a group of red-capped sailors stood prepared to weigh the anchor as soon as the signal was given. breakfast was over,--macfarlane was in the saloon writing his journal, which he kept with great exactitude, and duprèz, who, on account of his wound, was considered something of an invalid, was seated in a lounge chair on deck, delightedly turning over a bundle of inflammatory french political journals received that morning. errington and lorimer were pacing the deck arm in arm, keeping a sharp look-out for the first glimpse of the returning boat which had been sent off to fetch thelma and her father. errington looked vexed and excited,--lorimer bland and convincing. "i can't help it, phil!" he said. "it's no use fretting and fuming at me. it was like dyceworthy's impudence, of course,--but there's no doubt he proposed to her,--and it's equally certain that she rejected him. i thought i'd tell you you had a rival,--not in me, as you seemed to think yesterday,--but in our holy fat friend." "rival! pshaw!" returned errington, with an angry laugh. "he is not worth kicking!" "possibly not! still i have a presentiment that he's the sort of fellow that won't take 'no' for an answer. he'll dodge that poor girl and make her life miserable if he can, unless--" "unless what?" asked philip quickly. lorimer stopped in his walk, and, leaning against the deck-railings, looked his friend straight in the eyes. "unless you settle the matter," he said with a slight effort. "you love her,--tell her so!" errington laid one hand earnestly on his shoulder. "ah, george, you don't understand!" he said in a low tone, while his face was grave and full of trouble. "i used to think i was fairly brave, but i find i am a positive coward. i dare not tell her! she--thelma--is not like other women. you may think me a fool,--i dare say you do,--but i swear to you i am afraid to speak, because--because, old boy,--if she were to refuse me,--if i knew there was no hope--well, i don't want to be sentimental,--but my life would be utterly empty and worthless,--so useless, that i doubt if i should care to live it out to the bitter end!" lorimer heard him in silence,--a silence maintained partly out of sympathy, and partly that he might keep his own feelings well under control. "but why persist in looking at the gloomy side of the picture?" he said at last. "suppose she loves you?" "suppose an angel flew down from heaven!" replied philip, with rather a sad smile. "my dear fellow, who am i that i should flatter myself so far? if she were one of those ordinary women to whom marriage is the be-all and end-all of existence, it would be different--but she is not. her thoughts are like those of a child or a poet,--why should i trouble them by the selfishness of my passion? for all passion _is_ selfish, even at its best. why should i venture to break the calm friendship she may have for me, by telling her of a love which might prove unwelcome!" lorimer looked at him with gentle amusement depicted in his face. "phil, you are less conceited than i thought you were," he said, with a light laugh, "or else you are blind--blind as a bat, old man! take my advice,--don't lose any more time about it. make the 'king's daughter of norroway' happy, . . ." and a brief sigh escaped him. "you are the man to do it. i am surprised at your density; sigurd, the lunatic, has more perception. he sees which way the wind blows,--and that's why he's so desperately unhappy. he thinks--and thinks rightly too--that he will lose his 'beautiful rose of the northern forest,' as he calls her,--and that you are to be the robber. hence his dislike to you. dear me!" and lorimer lit a cigarette and puffed at it complacently. "it seems to me that my wits are becoming sharper as i grow older, and that yours, my dear boy,--pardon me! . . . are getting somewhat blunted, otherwise you would certainly have perceived--" he broke off abruptly. "well, go on!" exclaimed philip eagerly, with flashing eyes. "perceived what?" lorimer laughed. "that the boat containing your sun-empress is coming along very rapidly, old fellow, and that you'd better make haste to receive her!" this was the fact, and duprèz had risen from his chair and was waving his french newspaper energetically to the approaching visitors. errington hastened to the gangway with a brighter flush than usual on his handsome face, and his heart beating with a new sense of exhilaration and excitement. if lorimer's hints had any foundation of truth--if thelma loved him ever so little--how wild a dream it seemed! . . . why not risk his fate? he resolved to speak to her that very day if opportunity favored him,--and, having thus decided, felt quite masterful and heroic about it. this feeling of proud and tender elation increased when thelma stepped on deck that morning and laid her hands in his. for, as he greeted her and her father, he saw at a glance that she was slightly changed. some restless dream must have haunted her--or his hurried words beneath the porch, when he parted from her the previous evening, had startled her and troubled her mind. her blue eyes were no longer raised to his in absolute candor,--her voice was timid, and she had lost something of her usual buoyant and graceful self-possession. but she looked lovelier than ever with that air of shy hesitation and appealing sweetness. love had thrown his network of light about her soul and body till, like keats's "madeleine," "she seemed a splendid angel newly drest save wings, for heaven!" as soon as the güldmars were on board, the anchor was weighed with many a cheery and musical cry from the sailors; the wheel revolved rapidly under valdemar svensen's firm hand,--and with a grand outward sweeping curtsy to the majestic fjord she left behind her, the _eulalie_ steamed away, cutting a glittering line of white foam through the smooth water as she went, and threading her way swiftly among the clustering picturesque islands,--while the inhabitants of every little farm and hamlet on the shores, stopped for a while in their occupations to stare at the superb vessel, and to dreamily envy the wealth of the english _herren_ who could afford to pass the summer months in such luxury and idleness. thelma seated herself at once by duprèz, and seemed glad to divert attention from herself to him. "you are better, monsieur duprèz, are you not?" she asked gently. "we saw sigurd this morning; he came home last night. he is very, very sorry to have hurt you!" "he need not apologize," said duprèz cheerfully. "i am delighted he gave me this scar, otherwise i am confident he would have put out the eye of phil-eep. and that would have been a misfortune! for what would the ladies in london say if _le beau_ errington returned to them with one eye! _mon dieu!_ they would all be en desespoir!" thelma looked up. philip was standing at some little distance with olaf güldmar and lorimer, talking and laughing gaily. his cap was slightly pushed off his forehead, and the sun shone on his thick dark-chestnut curls; his features, warmly colored by the wind and sea, were lit up with mirth, and his even white teeth sparkled in an irresistible smile of fascinating good-humor. he was the beau-ideal of the best type of englishman, in the full tide of youth, health and good spirits. "i suppose he is a great favorite with all those beautiful ladies?" she asked very quietly. something of gentle resignation in her tone struck the frenchman's sense of chivalry; had she been like any ordinary woman, bent on conquest, he would have taken a mischievous delight in inventing a long list of fair ones supposed to be deeply enamored of errington's good looks,--but this girl's innocent inquiring face inspired him with quite a different sentiment. "_mais certainement!_" he said frankly and emphatically. "phil-eep is a favorite everywhere! yet not more so with women than with men. i love him extremely--he is a charming boy! then you see, _chère mademoiselle_, he is rich,--very rich,--and there are so many pretty girls who are very poor,--naturally they are enchanted with our errington--_voyez-vous_?" "i do not understand," she said, with a puzzled brow. "it is not possible that they should like him better because he is rich. he would be the same man without money as with it--it makes no difference!" "perhaps not to you," returned duprèz, with a smile; "but to many it would make an immense difference! _chère mademoiselle_, it is a grand thing to have plenty of money,--believe me!" thelma shrugged her shoulders. "perhaps," she answered indifferently. "but one cannot spend much on one's self, after all. the nuns at arles used to tell me that poverty was a virtue, and that to be very rich was to be very miserable. they were poor,--all those good women,--and they were always cheerful." "the nuns! _ah, mon dieu!_" cried duprèz. "the darlings know not the taste of joy--they speak of what they cannot understand! how should they know what it is to be happy or unhappy, when they bar their great convent doors against the very name of love!" she looked at him, and her color rose. "you always talk of _love_," she said, half reproachfully, "as if it were so common a thing! you know it is sacred--why will you speak as if it were all a jest?" a strange emotion of admiring tenderness stirred pierre's heart--he was very impulsive and impressionable. "forgive me!" he murmured penitently. then he added suddenly, "you should have lived ages ago, _ma belle_,--the world of to-day will not suit you! you will be made very sorrowful in it, i assure you,--it is not a place for good women!" she laughed. "you are morose," she said. "that is not like you! no one is good,--we all live to try and make ourselves better." "what highly moral converse is going on here?" inquired lorimer, strolling leisurely up to them. "are you giving duprèz a lecture, miss güldmar? he needs it,--so do i. please give me a scolding!" and he folded his hands with an air of demure appeal. a sunny smile danced in the girl's blue eyes. "always you will be foolish!" she said. "one can never know you because i am sure you never show your real self to anybody. no,--i will not scold you, but i should like to find you out!" "to find me out!" echoed lorimer. "why, what do you mean?" she nodded her bright head with much sagacity. "ah, i do observe you often! there is something you hide; it is like when my father has tears in his eyes; he pretends to laugh, but the tears are there all the time. now i see in you--" she paused, and her questioning eyes rested on his, seriously. "this is interesting!" said lorimer, lazily drawing a camp-stool opposite to her, and seating himself thereon. "i had no idea i was a human riddle. can you read me, miss güldmar?" "yes," she answered slowly and meditatively. "just a little. but i will not say anything; no--except this--that you are not altogether what you seem." "here, phil!" called lorimer, as he saw errington approaching, arm in arm with olaf güldmar, "come and admire this young lady's power of perception. she declares i am not such a fool as i look!" "now," said thelma, shaking her forefinger at him, "you know very well that i did not put it in that way. but is it not true, sir philip--" and she looked up for a moment, though her eyes drooped again swiftly under his ardent gaze, "is it not true that many people do hide their feelings, and pretend to be quite different to what they are?" "i should say it was a very common fault," replied errington. "it is a means of self-defense against the impertinent curiosity of outsiders. but lorimer is free from it,--he has nothing to hide. at any rate, he has no secrets from me,--i'm sure of that!" and he clapped his hand heartily on his friend's shoulder. lorimer flushed slightly, but made no remark, and at that moment macfarlane emerged from the saloon, where the writing of his journal had till now detained him. in the general handshaking and salutations which followed, the conversation took a different turn, for which lorimer was devoutly thankful. his face was a tell-tale one,--and he was rather afraid of philip's keen eyes. "i hope to heaven he'll speak to her to-day," he thought, vexedly. "i hate being in suspense! my mind will be easier when i once know that he has gained his point,--and that there's not the ghost of a chance for any other fellow!" meanwhile the yacht skimmed along by the barren and rocky coast of seiland; the sun was dazzling; yet there was a mist in the air as though the heavens were full of unshed tears. a bank of nearly motionless clouds hung behind the dark, sharp peaks of the altenguard mountains, which now lay to the southward, as the vessel pursued her course. there was no wind; the flag on the mast flapped idly now and then with the motion of the yacht; and thelma found herself too warm with her pretty crimson hood,--she therefore unfastened it and let the sunshine play on the uncovered gold of her hair. they had a superb view of the jagged glacier of jedkè,--black in some parts, and in others white with unmelted snow,--and seeming, as it rose straight up against the sky, to be the majestic monument of some giant viking. presently, at her earnest request, errington brought his portfolio of norwegian sketches for thelma to look at; most of them were excellently well done, and elicited much admiration from the _bonde_. "it is what i have wondered at all my life," said he, "that skill of the brush dipped in color. pictures surprise me as much as poems. ah, men are marvellous creatures, when they are once brought to understand that they _are_ men,--not beasts! one will take a few words and harmonize them into a song or a verse that clings to the world for ever; another will mix a few paints and dab a brush in them, and give you a picture that generation after generation shall flock to see. it is what is called genius,--and genius is a sort of miracle. yet i think it is fostered by climate a good deal,--the further north, the less inspiration. warmth, color, and the lightness of heart that a generally bright sky brings, enlarges the brain and makes it capable of creative power." "my dear sir," said lorimer, "england does not possess these climatic advantages, and yet shakespeare was an englishman." "he must have travelled," returned güldmar positively. "no one will make me believe that the man never visited italy. his italian scenes prove it,--they are full of the place and the people. the whole of his works, full of such wonderful learning, and containing so many types of different nations, show,--to _my_ mind, at least,--that countries were his books of study. why i, who am only a farmer and proprietor of a bit of norwegian land,--i have learned many a thing from simply taking a glance at a new shore each year. that's the way i used to amuse myself when i was young,--now i am old, the sea tempts me less, and i am fonder of my arm-chair; yet i've seen a good deal in my time--enough to provide me with memories for my declining days. and it's a droll thing, too," he added, with a laugh, "the further south you go, the more immoral and merry are the people; the further north, the more virtuous and miserable. there's a wrong balance somewhere,--but where, 'tis not easy to find out." "weel," said macfarlane, "i can give ye a direct contradeection to your theory. scotland lies to the north, and ye'll not find a grander harvest o' sinfu' souls anywhere between this an' the day o' judgment. i'm a scotchman, an' i'm just proud o' my country--i'd back its men against a' the human race,--but i wadna say much for the stabeelity o' its women. i wad just tak to my heels and run if i saw a real, thumpin', red-cheeked, big-boned scotch lassie makin' up to me. there's nae bashfulness in they sort, and nae safety." "i will go to scotland!" said duprèz enthusiastically. "i feel that those--what do you call them, _lassies_?--will charm me!" "scotland i never saw," said güldmar. "from all i have heard, it seems to me 'twould be too much like norway. after one's eyes have rested long on these dark mountains and glaciers, one likes now and then to see a fertile sunshiny stretch of country such as france, or the plains of lombardy. of course there may be exceptions, but i tell you climatic influences have a great deal to do with the state of mind and morals. now, take the example of that miserable old lovisa elsland. she is the victim of religious mania--and religious mania, together with superstition of the most foolish kind, is common in norway. it happens often during the long winters; the people have not sufficient to occupy their minds; no clergyman--not even dyceworthy--can satisfy the height of their fanaticism. they preach and pray and shriek and groan in their huts; some swear that they have the spirit of prophecy,--others that they are possessed of devils,--others imagine witchcraft, like lovisa--and altogether there is such a howling on the name of christ, that i am glad to be out of it,--for 'tis a sight to awaken the laughter and contempt of a pagan such as i am!" thelma listened with a slight shadow of pain on her features. "father is not a pagan," she declared, turning to lorimer. "how can one be pagan if one believes that there is good in everything,--and that nothing happens except for the best?" "it sounds to me more christian than pagan," averred lorimer, with a smile. "but it's no use appealing to _me_ on such matters, miss güldmar. i am an advocate of the law of nothing. i remember a worthy philosopher who,--when he was in his cups,--earnestly assured me it was all right--'everything was nothing, and nothing was everything.' 'you are sure that is so?' i would say to him. 'my dear young friend--_hic_--i am positive! i have--_hic_--worked out the problem with--_hic_--care!' and he would shake me by the hand warmly, with a mild and moist smile, and would retire to bed walking sideways in the most amiable manner. i'm certain his ideas were correct as well as luminous." they laughed, and then looking up saw that they were passing a portion of the coast of seiland which was more than usually picturesque. facing them was a great cavernous cleft in the rocks, tinted with a curious violet hue intermingled with bronze,--and in the strong sunlight these colors flashed with the brilliancy of jewels, reflecting themselves in the pale slate-colored sea. by errington's orders the yacht slackened speed, and glided along with an almost noiseless motion,--and they were silent, listening to the dash and drip of water that fell invisibly from the toppling crags that frowned above, while the breathless heat and stillness of the air added to the weird solemnity of the scene. they all rose from their chairs and leaned on the deck-rails, looking, but uttering no word. "in one of these islands," said thelma at last, very softly--"it was either seiland or soroe--they once found the tomb of a great chief. there was an inscription outside that warned all men to respect it, but they laughed at the warning and opened the tomb. and they saw, seated in a stone chair, a skeleton with a gold crown on its head and a great carved seal in its hand, and at its feet there was a stone casket. the casket was broken open, and it was full of gold and jewels. well, they took all the gold and jewels, and buried the skeleton--and now,--do you know what happens? at midnight a number of strange persons are seen searching on the shore and among the rocks for the lost treasure, and it is said they often utter cries of anger and despair. and those who robbed the tomb all died suddenly." "served them right!" said lorimer. "and now they are dead, i suppose the wronged ghosts don't appear any more?" "oh yes, they do," said güldmar very seriously. "if any sailor passes at midnight, and sees them or hears their cries, he is doomed." "but _does_ he see or hear them?" asked errington, with a smile. "well, i don't know," returned güldmar, with a grave shake of his head. "i'm not superstitious myself, but i should be sorry to say anything against the berg-folk. you see they _may_ exist, and it's no use offending them." "and what do ye mean by the berg-folk?" inquired macfarlane. "they are supposed to be the souls of persons who died impenitent," said thelma, "and they are doomed to wander, on the hills till the day of judgment. it is a sort of purgatory." duprèz shook his fingers emphatically in the air. "ah, bah!" he said; "what droll things remain still in the world! yes, in spite of liberty, equality, fraternity! you do not believe in foolish legends, mademoiselle? for example,--do you think you will suffer purgatory?" "indeed yes!" she replied. "no one can be good enough to go straight to heaven. there must be some little stop on the way in which to be sorry for all the bad things one has done." "'tis the same idea as ours," said güldmar. "we have two places of punishment in the norse faith; one, _nifleheim_, which is a temporary thing like the catholic purgatory; the other _nastrond_, which is the counterpart of the christian hell. know you not the description of _nifleheim_ in the _edda_?--'tis terrible enough to satisfy all tastes. 'hela, or death rules over the nine worlds of nifleheim. her hall is called grief. famine is her table, and her only servant is delay. her gate is a precipice, her porch faintness, her bed leanness,--cursing and howling are her tent. her glance is dreadful and terrifying,--and her lips are blue with the venom of hatred.' these words," he added, "sound finer in norwegian, but i have given the meaning fairly." "ma certes!" said macfarlane chuckling. "i'll tell my aunt in glasgie aboot it. this nifleheim wad suit her pairfectly,--she wad send a' her relations there wi' tourist tickets, not available for the return journey!" "it seems to me," observed errington, "that the nine worlds of nifleheim have a resemblance to the different circles of dante's purgatory." "exactly so," said lorimer. "all religions seem to me to be more or less the same,--the question i can never settle is,--which is the right one?" "would you follow it if you knew?" asked thelma, with a slight smile. lorimer laughed. "well, upon my life, i don't know!" he answered frankly, "i never was a praying sort of fellow,--i don't seem to grasp the idea of it somehow. but there's one thing i'm certain of,--i can't endure a bird without song,--a flower without scent, or a _woman_ without religion--she seems to me no woman at all." "but _are_ there any such women?" inquired the girl surprised. "yes, there are undoubtedly! free-thinking, stump-orator, have-your-rights sort of creatures. _you_ don't know anything about them, miss güldmar--be thankful! now, phil, how long is this vessel of yours going to linger here?" thus reminded, errington called to the pilot, and in a few minutes the _eulalie_ resumed her usual speed, and bore swiftly on towards soroe. this island, dreary and dark in the distance, grew somewhat more inviting in aspect on a nearer approach. now and then a shaft of sunlight fell on some glittering point of felspar or green patch of verdure.--and valdemar svensen stated that he knew of a sandy creek where, if the party chose, they could land and see a small cave of exquisite beauty, literally hung all over with stalactites. "i never heard of this cave," said güldmar, fixing a keen eye on the pilot. "art thou a traveller's guide to all such places in norway?" somewhat to errington's surprise, svensen changed color and appeared confused; moreover, he removed his red cap altogether when he answered the _bonde_, to whom he spoke deferentially in rapid norwegian. the old man laughed as he listened, and seemed satisfied; then, turning away, he linked his arm through philip's, and said, "you must pardon him, my lad, that he spoke in your presence a tongue unfamiliar to you. no offense was meant. he is of my creed, but fears to make it known, lest he should lose all employment--which is likely enough, seeing that so many of the people are fanatics. moreover, he is bound to me by an oath,--which in olden days would have made him my serf,--but which leaves him free enough just now,--with one exception." "and that exception?" asked errington with some interest. "is, that should i ever demand a certain service at his hands, he dare not refuse it. odd, isn't it? or so it seems to you," and güldmar pressed the young man's arm lightly and kindly; "but our norse oaths, are taken with great solemnity, and are as binding as the obligation of death itself. however, i have not commanded valdemar's obedience yet, nor do i think i am likely to do so for some time. he is a fine, faithful fellow,--though too much given to dreams." a gay chorus of laughter here broke from the little group seated on deck, of which thelma was the centre,--and güldmar stopped in his walk, with an attentive smile on his open, ruddy countenance. "'tis good for the heart to hear the merriment of young folks," he said. "think you not my girl's laugh is like the ripple of a lark's song? just so clear and joyous?" "her voice is music itself!" declared philip quickly and warmly. "there is nothing she says, or does, or looks,--that is not absolutely beautiful!" then, suddenly aware of his precipitation, he stopped abruptly. his face flushed as güldmar regarded him fixedly, with a musing and doubtful air. but whatever the old man thought, he said nothing. he merely held the young baronet's arm a little closer, and together they joined the others,--though it was noticeable that during the rest of the day the _bonde_ was rather abstracted and serious,--and that every now and then his eyes rested on his daughter's face with an expression of tender yearning and melancholy. it was about two hours after luncheon that the _eulalie_ approached the creek spoken of by the pilot, and they were all fascinated by the loveliness as well as by the fierce grandeur of the scene. the rocks on that portion of soroe appeared to have split violently asunder to admit some great in-rushing passage of the sea, and were piled up in toppling terraces to the height of more than two thousand feet above the level of the water. beneath these wild and craggy fortresses of nature a shining stretch of beach had formed itself, on which the fine white sand, mixed with crushed felspar, sparkled like powdered silver. on the left-hand side of this beach could be distinctly seen the round opening of the cavern to which valdemar svensen directed their attention. they decided to visit it--the yacht was brought to a standstill, and the long-boat lowered. they took no sailors with them, errington and his companions rowing four oars, while thelma and her father occupied the stern. a landing was easily effected, and they walked toward the cavern, treading on thousands of beautiful little shells which strewed the sand beneath their feet. there was a deep stillness everywhere--the island was so desolate that it seemed as though the very seabirds refused to make their homes in the black clefts of such steep and barren rocks. at the entrance of the little cave güldmar looked back to the sea. "there's a storm coming!" he announced. "those clouds we saw this morning have sailed thither almost as quickly as ourselves!" the sky had indeed grown darker, and little wrinkling waves disturbed the surface of the water. but the sun as yet retained his sovereignty, and there was no wind. by the pilot's advice, errington and his friends had provided themselves each with a pine torch, in order to light up the cavern as soon as they found themselves within it. the smoky crimson flare illuminated what seemed at a first glance to be a miniature fairy palace studded thickly with clusters of diamonds. long pointed stalactites hung from the roof at almost mathematically even distances from one another,--the walls glistened with varying shades of pink and green and violet,--and in the very midst of the cave was a still pool of water in which all the fantastic forms and hues of the place mirrored themselves in miniature. in one corner the stalactites had clustered into the shape of a large chair overhung by a canopy, and duprèz perceiving it, exclaimed--he listened, and seemed satisfied; then, turning away, he linked his arm through philip's, and said, "_voilà!_ a queen's throne! come mademoiselle güldmar, you must sit in it!" "but i am not a queen," laughed thelma. "a throne is for a king--will not sir phillip sit there?" "there's a compliment for you, phil!" cried lorrimer, waving his torch enthusiastically. "let us awaken the echoes with the shout of 'long live the king!'" but errington approached thelma, and taking her hand in his, said gently-- "come! let us see you throned in state, queen thelma! to please me,--come!" she looked up--the flame of the bright torch he carried illumined his face, on which love had written what she could not fail to read,--but she trembled as with cold, and there was a kind of appalling wonder in her troubled eyes. he whispered, "come, queen thelma!" as in a dream, she allowed him to lead her to the stalactite chair, and when she was seated therein, she endeavored to control the rapid beating of her heart, and to smile unconcernedly on the little group that surrounded her with shouts of mingled mirth and admiration. "ye look just fine!" said macfarlane with undisguised delight. "ye'd mak' a grand picture, wouldn't she, errington?" phillip gazed at her, but said nothing--his head was too full. sitting there among the glittering, intertwisted, and suspended rocks,--with the blaze from the torches flashing on her winsome face and luxuriant hair,--with that half-troubled, half-happy look in her eyes, and an uncertain shadowy smile quivering on her sweet lips, the girl looked almost dangerously lovely,--helen of troy could scarce have fired more passionate emotion among the old-world heroes than she unconsciously excited at that moment in the minds of all who beheld her. duprèz for once understood what it was to reverence a woman's beauty, and decided that the flippant language of compliment was out of place--he therefore said nothing, and lorrimer, too, was silent battling bravely against the wild desires that were now, in his opinion, nothing but disloyalty to his friend. old güldmar's hearty voice roused and startled them all. "now thelma, child! if thou art a queen, give orders to these lads to be moving! 'tis a damp place to hold a court in, and thy throne must needs be a cold one. let us out to the blessed sunshine again--maybe we can climb one of yon wild rocks and get a view worth seeing." "all right, sir!" said lorimer, chivalrously resolving that now errington should have a chance. "come on, mac! _allons, marchons_,--pierre! mr. güldmar exacts our obedience! phil, you take care of the queen!" and skillfully pushing on duprèz and macfarlane before him, he followed güldmar, who preceded them all,--thus leaving his friend in a momentary comparative solitude with thelma. the girl was a little startled as she saw them thus taking their departure, and sprang up from her stalactite throne in haste. sir philip had laid aside his torch in order to assist her with both hands to descend the sloping rocks; but her embarrassment at being left almost alone with him made her nervous and uncertain of foot,--she was hurried and agitated and anxious to overtake the others, and in trying to walk quickly she slipped and nearly fell. in one second she was caught in his arms and clasped passionately to his heart. "thelma! thelma!" he whispered, "i love you, my darling--i love you!" she trembled in his strong embrace, and strove to release herself, but he pressed her more closely to him, scarcely knowing that he did so, but feeling that he held the world, life, time, happiness, and salvation in this one fair creature. his brain was in a wild whirl--the glitter of the stalactite cave turned to a gyrating wheel of jewel-work, there was nothing any more--no universe, no existence--nothing but love, love, love, beating strong hammer-strokes through every fibre of his frame. he glanced up, and saw that the slowly retreating forms of his friends had nearly reached the outer opening of the cavern. once there, they would look back and-- "quick, thelma!" and his warm breath touched her cheek. "my darling! my love! if you are not angry,--kiss me! i shall understand." she hesitated. to philip that instant of hesitation seemed a cycle of slow revolving years. timidly she lifted her head. she was very pale, and her breath came and went quickly. he gazed at her in speechless suspense,--and saw as in a vision the pure radiance of her face and star-like eyes shining more and more closely upon him. then came a touch,--soft and sweet as a roseleaf pressed against his lips,--and for one mad moment he remembered nothing,--he was caught up like homer's paris in a cloud of gold, and knew not which was earth or heaven. "you love me, thelma?" he murmured in a sort of wondering rapture. "i cannot believe it, sweet! tell me--you love me?" she looked up. a new, unspeakable glory flushed her face, and her eyes glowed with the mute eloquence of awakening passion. "love you?" she said in a voice so low and sweet that it might have been the whisper of a passing fairy. "ah, yes! more than my life!" chapter xiv. "sweet hands, sweet hair, sweet cheeks, sweet eyes, sweet mouth; each singly wooed and won!" dante rosetti. "hallo, ho!" shouted güldmar vociferously, peering back into the shadows of the cavern from whence the figures of his daughter and errington were seen presently emerging. "why, what kept you so long, my lad? we thought you were close behind us. where's your torch?" "it went out," replied philip promptly, as he assisted thelma with grave and ceremonious politeness to cross over some rough stones at the entrance, "and we had some trouble to find our way." "ye might hae called to us i' the way o' friendship," observed macfarlane somewhat suspiciously, "and we wad hae lighted ye through." "oh, it was no matter!" said thelma, with a charming smile. "sir philip seemed well to know the way, and it was not so very dark!" lorimer glanced at her and read plainly all that was written in her happy face. his heart sank a little; but, noticing that the old _bonde_ was studying his daughter with a slight air of vexation and surprise, he loyally determined to divert the general attention from her bright blushes and too brilliantly sparkling eyes. "well! . . . here you both are, at any rate," he said lightly, "and i should strongly advise that we attempt no more exploration of the island of soroe to-day. look at the sky; and just now there was a clap of thunder." "thunder?" exclaimed errington. "i never heard it!" "i dare say not!" said lorimer, with a quiet smile. "still _we_ heard it pretty distinctly, and i think we'd better make for the yacht." "all right!" and sir philip sprang gaily into the long-boat to arrange the cushions in the stern for thelma. never had he looked handsomer or more high-spirited, and his elation was noticed by all his companions. "something joyous has happened to our phil-eep," said duprèz in a half-whisper. "he is in the air!" "and something in the ither way has happened vera suddenly to mr. güldmar," returned macfarlane. "th' auld man is in the dumps." the _bonde's_ face in truth looked sad and somewhat stern. he scarcely spoke at all as he took his place in the boat beside his daughter,--once he raised her little hand, looked at it, and kissed it fondly. they were all soon on their way back to the _eulalie_ over a sea that had grown rough and white-crested during their visit to the stalactite cave. clouds had gathered thickly over the sky, and though a few shafts of sunlight still forced a passage through them, the threatening darkness spread with steady persistency, especially to the northern side of the horizon, where storm hovered in the shape of a black wing edged with coppery crimson. as they reached the yacht a silver glare of lightning sprang forth from beneath this sable pinion, and a few large drops of rain began to fall. errington hurried thelma on deck and down into the saloon. his friends, with güldmar, followed,--and the vessel was soon plunging through waves of no small height on her way back to the altenfjord. a loud peal of thunder like a salvo of artillery accompanied their departure from soroe, and thelma shivered a little as she heard it. "you are nervous, mademoiselle güldmar?" asked duprèz, noticing her tremor. "oh no," she answered brightly. "nervous? that is to be afraid,--i am not afraid of a storm, but i do not like it. it is a cruel, fierce thing; and i should have wished to-day to be all sunshine--all gladness!" she paused, and her eyes grew soft and humid. "then you have been happy to-day?" said lorimer in a low and very gentle voice. she smiled up at him from the depths of the velvet lounge in which errington had placed her. "happy? i do not think i have ever been so happy before!" she paused, and a bright blush crimsoned her cheeks; then, seeing the piano open, she said suddenly "shall i sing to you? or perhaps you are all tired, and would rather rest?" "music _is_ rest," said lorimer rather dreamily, watching her as she rose from her seat,--a tall, supple, lithe figure,--and moved towards the instrument. "and _your_ voice. miss güldmar, would soothe the most weary soul that ever dwelt in clay." she glanced round at him, surprised at his sad tone. "ah, you are very, very tired, mr. lorimer, i am sure! i will sing you a norse cradle-song to make you go to sleep. you will not understand the words though--will that matter?" "not in the least!" answered lorimer, with a smile. "the london girls sing in german, italian, spanish, and english. nobody knows what they are saying: they scarcely know themselves--but it's all right, and quite fashionable." thelma laughed gaily. "how funny!" she exclaimed. "it is to amuse people, i suppose! well,--now listen." and, playing a soft prelude, her rich contralto rippled forth in a tender, passionate, melancholy melody,--so sweet and heart-penetrating that the practical macfarlane sat as one in a dream,--duprèz forgot to finish making the cigarette he was daintily manipulating between his fingers, and lorimer had much ado to keep tears from his eyes. from one song she glided to another and yet another; her soul seemed possessed by the very spirit of music. meanwhile errington, in obedience to an imperative sign from old güldmar, left the saloon, with him,--once outside the doors the _bonde_ said in a somewhat agitated voice-- "i desire to speak to you, sir philip, alone and undisturbed, if such a thing be possible." "by all means!" answered philip. "come to my 'den' on deck. we shall be quite solitary there." he led the way, and olaf güldmar followed him in silence. it was raining fiercely, and the waves, green towers of strength, broke every now and then over the sides of the yacht with a hissing shower of salt white spray. the thunder rolled along the sky in angry reverberating echoes,--frequent flashes of lightning leaped out like swords drawn from dark scabbards,--yet towards the south the sky was clearing, and arrowy beams of pale gold fell from the hidden sun, with a soothing and soft lustre on the breast of the troubled water. güldmar looked about him, and heaved a deep sigh of refreshment. his eyes rested lovingly on the tumbling billows,--he bared his white head to the wind and rain. "this is the life, the blood, the heart of a man!" he said, while a sort of fierce delight shone in his keen eyes. "to battle with the tempest,--to laugh at the wrath of waters,--to set one's face against the wild wind,--to sport with the elements as though they were children or serfs,--this is the joy of manhood! a joy," he added slowly, "that few so-called men of to-day can ever feel." errington smiled gravely. "perhaps you are right, sir," he said; "but perhaps, at the same time, you forget that life has grown very bitter to all of us during the last hundred years or so. maybe the world is getting old and used up, maybe the fault is in ourselves,--but it is certain that none of us nowadays are particularly happy, except at rare intervals when--" at that moment, in a lull of the storm, thelma's voice pealed upwards from the saloon. she was singing a french song, and the refrain rang out clearly-- "ah! le doux son d'un baiser tendre!" errington paused abruptly in his speech, and turning towards a little closed and covered place on deck which was half cabin, half smoking-room, and which he kept as his own private sanctum, he unlocked it, saying-- "will you come in here, sir? it's not very spacious, but i think it's just the place for a chat,--especially a private one." güldmar entered, but did not sit down,--errington shut the door against the rain and beating spray and also remained standing. after a pause, during which the _bonde_ seemed struggling with some inward emotion, he said resolutely-- "sir philip, you are a young man, and i am an old one. i would not willingly offend you--for i like you--yes!" and the old man looked up frankly: "i like you enough to respect you--which is more than i can say to many men i have known! but i have a weight on my heart that must be lifted. you and my child have been much together for many days,--and i was an old fool not to have foreseen the influence your companionship might have upon her. i may be mistaken in the idea that has taken hold of me--some wild words let fall by the poor boy sigurd this morning, when he entreated my pardon for his misconduct of yesterday, have perhaps misled my judgment,--but--by the gods! i cannot put it into suitable words! i--" "you think i love your daughter?" said sir philip quietly. "you are not mistaken, sir! i love her with my whole heart and soul! i want you to give her to me as my wife." a change passed over the old farmer's face. he grew deathly pale, and put out one hand feebly as though to seek some support. errington caught it in his own and pressed it hard. "surely you are not surprised, sir?" he added with eagerness. "how can i help loving her! she is the best and loveliest girl i have ever seen! believe me,--i would make her happy!" "and have you thought, young man," returned güldmar slowly, "that you would make me desolate?--or, thinking it, have you cared?" there was an infinite pathos in his voice, and errington was touched and silent. he found no answer to this reproach. güldmar sat down, leaning his head on his hand. "let me think a little," he said. "my mind is confused a bit. i was not prepared for--" he paused and seemed lost in sorrowful meditation. by-and-by he looked up, and meeting errington's anxious gaze, he broke into a short laugh. "don't mind me, my lad!" he said sturdily. "'tis a blow, you see! i had not thought so far as this. i'll tell you the plain truth, and you must forgive me for wronging you. i know what young blood is, all the world over. a fair face fires it--and impulse makes it gallop beyond control. 'twas so with me when i was your age,--though no woman, i hope, was ever the worse for my harmless lovemaking. but thelma is different from most women,--she has a strange nature,--moreover, she has a heart and a memory,--if she once learns the meaning of love, she will never unlearn the lesson. now, i thought, that like most young men of your type, you might, without meaning any actual evil, trifle with her--play with her feelings--" "i understand, sir," said philip coolly, without displaying any offense. "to put it plainly, in spite of your liking for me, you thought me a snob." this time the old man laughed heartily and unforcedly. "dear, dear!" he exclaimed. "you are what is termed in your own land, a peppery customer! never mind--i like it. why, my lad, the men of to-day think it fair sport to trifle with a pretty woman now and then--" "pardon!" interrupted philip curtly. "i must defend my sex. we _may_ occasionally trifle with those women who show us that they wish to be trifled with--but never with those who, like your daughter, win every man's respect and reverence." güldmar rose and grasped his hand fervently. "by all the gods, i believe you are a true gentleman!" he said. "i ask your pardon if i have offended you by so much as a thought. but now"--and his face grew very serious--"we must talk this matter over. i will not speak of the suddenness of your love for my child, because i know, from my own past experience, that love is a rapid impulse--a flame ignited in a moment. yes, i know that well!" he paused, and his voice trembled a little, but he soon steadied it and went on--"i think, however, my lad, that you have been a little hasty,--for instance, have you thought what your english friends and relatives will say to your marrying a farmer's daughter who,--though she has the blood of kings in her veins,--is, nevertheless, as this present world would judge, beneath you in social standing? i say, have you thought of this?" philip smiled proudly. "certainly, sir, i have _not_ thought of any such trifle as the opinion of society,--if that is what you mean. i have no relatives to please or displease--no friends in the truest sense of the world except lorimer. i have a long list of acquaintances undoubtedly,--infinite bores, most of them,--and whether they approve or disapprove of my actions is to me a matter of profound indifference." "see you!" said the _bonde_ firmly and earnestly. "it would be an ill day for me if i gave my little one to a husband who might--mind! i only say _might_,--in the course of years, regret having married her." "regret!" cried philip excitedly, then quieting down, he said gently. "my good friend, i do not think you understand me. you talk as if thelma were beneath _me_. good god! it is _i_ who am infinitely beneath _her_! i am utterly unworthy of her in every way, i assure you--and i tell you so frankly. i have led a useless life, and a more or less selfish one. i have principally sought to amuse and interest myself all through it. i've had my vices too, and have them still. beside thelma's innocent white soul, mine looks villainous! but i can honestly say i never knew what love was till i saw her,--and now--well! i would give my life away gladly to save her from even a small sorrow." "i believe you--i thoroughly believe you!" said güldmar. "i see you love the child. the gods forbid that i should stand in the way of her happiness! i am getting old, and 'twas often a sore point with me to know what would become of my darling when i was gone,--for she is fair to look upon, and there are many human wolves ready to devour such lambs. still, my lad, you must learn all. do you know what is said of me in bosekop?" errington smiled and nodded in the affirmative. "you do?" exclaimed the old man, somewhat surprised. "you know they say i killed my wife--my wife! the creature before whom my soul knelt in worship night and day--whose bright head was the sunlight of life! let me tell you of her, sir philip--'tis a simple story. she was the child of my dearest friend, and many years younger than myself. this friend of mine, erik erlandsen, was the captain of a stout norwegian barque, running constantly between these wild waters and the coast of france. he fell in love with, and married a blue-eyed beauty from the sogne fjord, he carried her secretly away from her parents, who would not consent to the marriage. she was a timid creature, in spite of her queenly ways, and, for fear of her parents, she would never land again on the shores of norway. she grew to love france,--and erik often left her there in some safe shelter when he was bound on some extra long and stormy passage. she took to the catholic creed, too, in france, and learned to speak the french tongue, so erik said, as though it were her own. at the time of the expected birth of her child, her husband had taken her far inland to arles, and there business compelled him to leave her for some days. when he returned she was dead!--laid out for burial, with flowers and tapers round her. he fell prone on her body insensible,--and not for many hours did the people of the place dare to tell him that he was the father of a living child--a girl, with the great blue eyes and white skin of her mother. he would scarce look at it--but at last, when roused a bit, he carried the little thing in his arms to the great convent at arles, and, giving the nuns money, he bade them take it and bring it up as they would, only giving it the name of thelma. then poor erlandsen came home--he sought me out:--he said, 'olaf, i feel that i am going on my last voyage. promise you will see to my child--guard her, if you can, from an evil fate! for me there is no future!' i promised, and strove to cheer him--but he spoke truly--his ship went down in a storm on the bay of biscay, and all on board were lost. then it was that i commenced my journeyings to and fro, to see the little maiden that was growing up in the convent at arles. i watched her for sixteen years--and when she reached her seventeenth birthday, i married her and brought her to norway." "and she was thelma's mother?" said errington with interest. "she was thelma's mother," returned the _bonde_, "and she was more beautiful than even thelma is now. her education had been almost entirely french, but, as a child, she had learnt that i generally spoke english, and as there happened to be an english nun in the convent, she studied that language and mastered it for the love of me--yes!" he repeated with musing tenderness, "all for the love of me,--for she loved me, sir philip--ay! as passionately as i loved her, and that is saying a great deal! we lived a solitary happy life,--but we did not mix with our neighbors--our creeds were different,--our ways apart from theirs. we had some time of perfect happiness together. three years passed before our child was born, and then"--the _bonde_ paused awhile, and again continued,--"then my wife's health grew frail and uncertain. she liked to be in the fresh air, and was fond of wandering about the hills with her little one in her arms. one day--shall i ever forget it! when thelma was about two and a half years old, i missed them both, and went out to search for them, fearing my wife had lost her way, and knowing that our child could not toddle far without fatigue. i found them"--the _bonde_ shuddered-"but how? my wife had slipped and fallen through a chasm in the rocks,--high enough, indeed, to have killed her,--she was alive, but injured for life. she lay there white and motionless--little thelma meanwhile sat smilingly on the edge of the rock, assuring me that her mother had gone to sleep '_down there_.' well!" and güldmar brushed the back of his hand across his eyes, "to make a long story short, i carried my darling home in my arms a wreck--she lingered for ten years of patient suffering, ten long years! she could only move about on crutches,--the beauty of her figure was gone--but the beauty of her face grew more perfect every day! never again was she seen on the hills,--and so to the silly folks of bosekop she seemed to have disappeared. indeed, i kept her very existence a secret,--i could not endure that others should hear of the destruction of all that marvellous grace and queenly loveliness! she lived long enough to see her daughter blossom into girlhood,--then,--she died. i could not bear to have her laid in the damp, wormy earth--you know in our creed earth-burial is not practiced,--so i laid her tenderly away in a king's tomb of antiquity,--a tomb known only to myself and one who assisted me to lay her in her last resting-place. there she sleeps right royally,--and now is your mind relieved, my lad? for the reports of the bosekop folk must certainly have awakened some suspicions in your mind?" "your story has interested me deeply, sir," said errington; "but i assure you i never had any suspicions of you at all. i always disregard gossip--it is generally scandalous, and seldom true. besides, i took your face on trust, as you took mine." "then," declared güldmar, with a smile, "i have nothing more to say,--except"--and he stretched out both hands--"may the great gods prosper your wooing! you offer a fairer fate to thelma than i had dreamed of for her--but i know not what the child herself may say--" philip interrupted him. his eyes flashed, and he smiled. "she loves me!" he said simply. güldmar looked at him, laughed a little, and sighed. "she loves thee?" he said, relapsing into the _thee_ and _thou_ he was wont to use with his daughter. "thou hast lost no time, my lad? when didst thou find that out?" "to-day!" returned philip, with that same triumphant smile playing about his lips. "she told me so--yet even now i cannot believe it!" "ah, well, thou mayest believe it truly," said güldmar, "for thelma says nothing that she does not mean! the child has never stooped to even the smallest falsehood." errington seemed lost in a happy dream. suddenly he roused himself and took güldmar by the arm. "come," he said, "let us go to her! she will wonder why we are so long absent. see! the storm has cleared--the sun is shining. it is understood? you will give her to me?" "foolish lad!" said güldmar gently. "what have i to do with it? she has given herself to thee! love has overwhelmed both of your hearts, and before the strong sweep of such an ocean what can an old man's life avail? nothing--less than nothing! besides, i _should_ be happy--if i have regrets,--if i feel the tooth of sorrow biting at my heart--'tis naught but selfishness. 'tis my own dread of parting with her"--his voice trembled, and his fine face quivered with suppressed emotion. errington pressed his arm. "our house shall be yours, sir!" he said eagerly. "why not leave this place and come with us?" güldmar shook his head. "leave norway!" he said--"leave the land of my fathers--turn my back on these mountains and fjords and glaziers? never! no, no, my lad, you're kind-hearted and generous as becomes you, and i thank you from my heart. but 'twould be impossible! i should be like a caged eagle, breaking my wings against the bars of english conventionalities. besides, young birds must make their nest without interference from the old ones." he stepped out on deck as errington opened the little cabin door, and his features kindled with enthusiasm as he looked on the stretch of dark mountain scenery around him, illumined by the brilliant beams of the sun that shone out now in full splendor, as though in glorious defiance of the retreating storm, which had gradually rolled away in clouds that were tumbling one over the other at the extreme edge of the northern horizon, like vanquished armies taking to hasty flight. "could i stand the orderly tameness of your green england, think you, after this?" he exclaimed, with a comprehensive gesture of his hand. "no, no! when death comes--and 'twill not be long coming--let it find me with my face turned to the mountains, and nothing but their kingly crests between me and the blessed sky! come, my lad!" and he relapsed into his ordinary tone. "if thou art like me when i was thy age, every minute passed away from thy love seems an eternity! let us go to her--we had best wait till the decks are dry before we assemble up here again." they descended at once into the saloon, where they found thelma being initiated into the mysteries of chess by duprèz, while macfarlane and lorimer looked idly on. she glanced up from the board as her father and errington entered, and smiled at them both with a slightly heightened color. "this is such a wonderful game, father!" she said. "and i am so stupid, i cannot understand it! so monsieur pierre is trying to make me remember the moves." "nothing is easier!" declared duprèz. "i was showing you how the bishop goes, so--cross-ways," and he illustrated his lesson. "he is a dignitary of the church, you perceive. _bien!_ it follows that he cannot go in a straight line,--if you observe them well, you will see that all the religious gentlemen play at cross purposes. you are very quick, mademoiselle güldmar,--you have perfectly comprehended the move of the castle, and the pretty plunge of the knight. now, as i told you, the queen can do anything--all the pieces shiver in their shoes before her!" "why?" she asked, feeling a little embarrassed, as sir philip came and sat beside her, looking at her with an undoubtedly composed air of absolute proprietorship. "why? _enfin_, the reason is simple!" answered pierre. "the queen is a woman,--everything must give way to her wish!" "and the king?" she inquired. "ah! _le pauvre roi!_ he can do very little--almost nothing! he can only move one step at a time, and that with much labor and hesitation--he is the wooden image of louis xvi!" "then," said the girl quickly, "the object of the game is to protect a king who is not worth protecting!" duprèz laughed. "exactly! and thus, in this charming game, you have the history of many nations! mademoiselle güldmar has put the matter excellently! chess is for those who intend to form republics. all the worry and calculation--all the moves of pawns, bishops, knights, castles, and queens,--all to shelter the throne which is not worth protecting! excellent! mademoiselle, you are not in favor of monarchies!" "i do not know," said thelma; "i have never thought of such things. but kings should be great men,--wise and powerful, better and braver than all their subjects, should they not?" "undoubtedly!" remarked lorimer; "but, it's a curious thing, they seldom are. now, our queen, god bless her--" "hear, hear!" interrupted errington, laughing good-humoredly. "i won't have a word said against the dear old lady, lorimer! granted that she hates london, and sees no fun in being stared at by vulgar crowds, i think she's quite right,--and i sympathize heartily with her liking for a cup of tea in peace and quiet with some old scotch body who doesn't care whether she's a queen or a washerwoman." "i think," said macfarlane slowly, "that royalty has its duties, ye see, an' though i canna say i object to her majesty's homely way o' behavin', still there are a few matters that wad be the better for her pairsonal attention." "oh bother!" said errington gaily. "look at that victim of the nation, the prince of wales! the poor fellow hasn't a moment's peace of his life,--what with laying foundation stones, opening museums, inspecting this and visiting that, he is like a costermonger's donkey, that must gee-up or gee-wo as his master, the people bid. if he smiles at a woman, it is instantly reported that he's in love with her,--if he frankly says he considers her pretty, there's no end to the scandal. poor royal wretch! i pity him from my heart! the unwashed, beer-drinking, gin-swilling classes, who clamor for shortened hours of labor, and want work to be expressly invented for their benefit, don't suffer a bit more than albert edward, who is supposed to be rolling idly in the very lap of luxury, and who can hardly call his soul his own. why, the man can't eat a mutton-chop without there being a paragraph in the papers headed, 'diet of the prince of wales.' his life is made an infinite bore to him, i'm positive!" güldmar looked thoughtful. "i know little about kings or princes," he said, "but it seems to me, from what i _do_ know, that they have but small power. they are mere puppets. in olden times they possessed supremacy, but now--" "i will tell you," interrupted duprèz excitedly, "who it is that rules the people in these times,--it is the _pen_--_madame la plume_. a little black, sharp, scratching devil she is,--empress of all nations! no crown but a point,--no royal robe save ink! it is certain that as long as _madame la plume_ gambols freely over her realms of paper, so long must kings and autocrats shake in their shoes and be uncertain of their thrones. mon dieu! if i had but the gift of writing, i would conquer the world!" "there are an immense number of people writing just now, pierre," remarked lorimer, with a smile, "yet they don't do much in the conquering line." "because they are afraid!" said duprèz. "because they have not the courage of their opinions! because they dare not tell the truth!" "upon my life, i believe you are right!" said errington. "if there were a man bold enough to declare truths and denounce lies, i should imagine it quite possible that he might conquer the world,--or, at any rate, make it afraid of him." "but is the world so full of lies?" asked thelma timidly. lorimer looked at her gravely. "i fear so, miss güldmar! i think it has a tolerable harvest of them every year,--a harvest, too, that never fails! but i say, phil! look at the sun shining! let us go up on deck,--we shall soon be getting back to the altenfjord." they all rose, threw on their caps, and left the saloon with the exception of errington, who lingered behind, watching his opportunity, and as thelma followed her father he called her back softly-- "thelma!" she hesitated, and then turned towards him,--her father saw her movement, smiled at her, and nodded kindly, as he passed through the saloon doors and disappeared. with a beating heart, she sprang quickly to her lover's side, and as he caught her in his arms, she whispered-- "you have told him?" "your father? yes, my darling!" murmured philip, as he kissed her sweet, upturned lips. "be quite happy--he knows everything. come, thelma! tell me again you love me--i have not heard you say it properly yet!" she smiled dreamily as she leaned against his breast and looked up into his eyes. "i cannot say it properly!" she said. "there is no language for my heart! if i could tell you all i feel, you would think it foolish, i am sure, because it is all so wild and strange,"--she stopped, and her face grew pale,--"oh!" she murmured with a slight tremor; "it is terrible!" "what is terrible, my sweet one?" asked errington drawing her more closely, and folding her more tightly in his arms. she sighed deeply. "to have no more life of my own!" she answered, while her low voice quivered with intense feeling. "it has all gone--to you! and yours has come to me!--is it not strange and almost sad? how your heart beats, poor boy!--i can hear it throb, throb--so fast!--here, where i am resting my head." she looked up, and her little white hand caressed his cheek. "philip," she said very softly, "what are you thinking about? your eyes shine so brightly--do you know you have beautiful eyes?" "have i?" he murmured abstractedly, looking down on that exquisite, innocent, glowing face, and trembling with the force of the restrained passion that kindled through him. "i don't know about that!--yours seem to me like two stars fallen from heaven! oh, thelma, my darling!--god make me worthy of you." he spoke with intense fervor,--kissing her with a tenderness, in which there was something of reverence as well as fear. the whole soul of the man was startled and roused to inexpressible devotion, by the absolute simplicity and purity of her nature--the direct frankness with which she had said her life was his--his!--and in what way was he fitted to be the guardian and possessor of this white lily from the garden of god? she was so utterly different to all women as he had known them--as different as a bird of paradise to a common house-sparrow. meanwhile, as these thoughts flitted through his brain, she moved gently from his embrace and smiled proudly, yet sweetly. "worthy of me?" she said softly and wonderingly. "it is i that will pray to be made worthy of _you_! you must not put it wrongly, philip!" he made no answer, but looked at her as she stood before him, majestic as a young empress in her straight, unadorned white gown. "thelma!" he said suddenly, "do you know how lovely you are?" "yes!" she answered simply; "i know it, because i am like my mother. but it is not anything to be beautiful,--unless one is loved,--and then it is different! i feel much more beautiful now, since you think me pleasant to look at!" philip laughed and caught her hand. "what a child you are!" he said. "now let me see this little finger." and he loosened from his watch-chain a half-hoop ring of brilliants. "this belonged to _my_ mother, thelma," he continued gently, "and since her death i have always carried it about with me. i resolved never to part with it, except to--" he paused and slipped it on the third finger of her left hand, where it sparkled bravely. she gazed at it in surprise. "you part with it now?" she asked, with wonder in her accents. "i do not understand!" he kissed her. "no? i will explain again, thelma!--and you shall not laugh at me as you did the very first time i saw you! i resolved never to part with this ring, i say, except to--my promised wife. _now_ do you understand?" she blushed deeply, and her eyes dropped before his ardent gaze. "i do thank you very much, philip,"--she faltered timidly,--she was about to say something further when suddenly lorimer entered the saloon. he glanced from errington to thelma, and from thelma back again to errington,--and smiled. so have certain brave soldiers been known to smile in face of a death-shot. he advanced with his usual languid step and nonchalant air, and removing his cap, bowed gravely and courteously. "let me be the first to offer my congratulations to the future lady errington! phil, old man! . . . i wish you joy!" chapter xv. "why, sir, in the universal game of double-dealing, shall not the cleverest tricksters play each other false by haphazard, and so betray their closest secrets, to their own and their friends' infinite amazement?"--congreve. when olaf güldmar and his daughter left the yacht that evening, errington accompanied them, in order to have the satisfaction of escorting his beautiful betrothed as far as her own door. they were all three very silent--the _bonde_ was pensive, thelma shy, and errington himself was too happy for speech. arriving at the farmhouse, they saw sigurd curled up under the porch, playing idly with the trailing rose-branches, but, on hearing their footsteps, he looked up, uttered a wild exclamation, and fled. güldmar tapped his own forehead significantly. "he grows worse and worse, the poor lad!" he said somewhat sorrowfully. "and yet there is a strange mingling of foresight and wit with his wild fancies. wouldst thou believe it, thelma, child," and here he turned to his daughter and encircled her waist with his arm--"he seemed to know how matters were with thee and philip, when i was yet in the dark concerning them!" this was the first allusion her father had made to her engagement, and her head drooped with a sort of sweet shame. "nay, now, why hide thy face?" went on the old man cheerily. "didst thou think i would grudge my bird her summer-time? not i! and little did i hope for thee, my darling, that thou wouldst find a shelter worthy of thee in this wild world!" he paused a moment, looking tenderly down upon her, as she nestled in mute affection against his breast,--then addressing himself to errington, he went on-- "we have a story in our norse religion, my lad, of two lovers who declared their passion to each other, on one stormy night in the depth of winter. they were together in a desolate hut on the mountains, and around them lay unbroken tracts of frozen snow. they were descended from the gods, and therefore the gods protected them--and it happened that after they had sworn their troth, the doors of the snow-bound hut flew suddenly open, and lo! the landscape had changed--the hills were gay with grass and flowers,--the sky was blue and brilliant, the birds sang, and everywhere was heard the ripple of waters let loose from their icy fetters, and gamboling down the rocks in the joyous sun. this was the work of the goddess friga,--the first kiss exchanged by the lovers she watched over, banished winter from the land, and spring came instead. 'tis a pretty story, and true all the world over--true for all men and women of all creeds! it must be an ice-bound heart indeed that will not warm to the touch of love--and mine, though aged, grows young again in the joy of my children." he put his daughter gently from him to-wards philip, saying with more gravity, "go to him, child!--go--with thy old father's blessing! and take with thee the three best virtues of a wife,--truth, humility, and obedience. good night, my son!" and he wrung errington's hand with fervor. "you'll take longer to say good night to thelma," and he laughed, "so i'll go in and leave you to it!" and with a good-natured nod, he entered the house whistling a tune as he went, that they might not think he imagined himself lonely or neglected,--and the two lovers paced slowly up and down the garden-path together, exchanging those first confidences which to outsiders seem so eminently foolish, but which to those immediately concerned are most wonderful, delightful, strange, and enchanting beyond all description. where, from a practical point of view, is the sense of such questions as these--"when did you love me first?" "what did you feel when i said so-and-so?" "have you dreamt of me often?" "will you love me always, always, always?" and so on _ad infinitum_. "ridiculous rubbish!" exclaims the would-be strong-minded, but secretly savage old maid,--and the selfishly matter-of-fact, but privately fidgety and lonely old bachelor. ah! but there are those who could tell you that at one time or another of their lives this "ridiculous rubbish" seemed far more important than the decline and fall of empires,--more necessary to existence than light and air,--more fraught with hope, fear, suspense, comfort, despair, and anxiety than anything that could be invented or imagined! philip and thelma,--man and woman in the full flush of youth, health, beauty, and happiness,--had just entered their paradise,--their fairy-garden,--and every little flower and leaf on the way had special, sweet interest for them. love's indefinable glories,--love's proud possibilities,--love's long ecstasies,--these, like so many spirit-figures, seemed to smile and beckon them on, on, on, through golden seas of sunlight,--through flower-filled fields of drowsy entrancement,--through winding ways of rose-strewn and lily-scented leafage,--on, on, with eyes and hearts absorbed in one another,--unseeing any end to the dreamlike wonders that, like some heavenly picture-scroll, unrolled slowly and radiantly before them. and so they murmured those unwise, tender things which no wisdom in the world has ever surpassed, and when philip at last said "good night!" with more reluctance than romeo, and pressed his parting kiss on his love's sweet, fresh mouth,--the riddle with which he had puzzled himself so often was resolved at last,--life _was_ worth living, worth cherishing, worth ennobling. the reason of all things seemed clear to him,--love, and love only, supported, controlled, and grandly completed the universe! he accepted this answer to all perplexities,--his heart expanded with a sense of large content--his soul was satisfied. meanwhile, during his friend's absence from the yacht, lorimer took it upon himself to break the news to duprèz and macfarlane. these latter young gentlemen had had their suspicions already, but they were not quite prepared to hear them so soon confirmed. lorimer told the matter in his own way. "i say, you fellows!" he remarked carelessly, as he sat smoking in their company on deck, "you'd better look out! if you stare at miss güldmar too much, you'll have phil down upon you!" "ha, ha!" exclaimed duprèz slyly, "the dear phil-eep is in love?" "something more than that," said lorimer, looking absently at the cigarette he held between his fingers,--"he's an engaged man." "engaged!" cried macfarlane excitedly. "ma certes! he has the deevil's own luck! he's just secured for himself the grandest woman in the warld!" "_je le crois bien!_" said duprèz gravely, nodding his head several times. "phil-eep is a wise boy! he is the fortunate one! i am not for marriage at all--no! not for myself,--it is to tie one's hands, to become a prisoner,--and that would not suit me; but if i were inclined to captivity, i should like mademoiselle güldmar for my beautiful gaoler. and beautiful she is, _mon dieu!_ . . . beyond all comparison!" lorimer was silent, so was macfarlane. after a pause duprèz spoke again. "and do you know, _cher_ lorimer, when our phil-eep will marry?" "i haven't the slightest idea," returned lorimer. "i know he's engaged, that's all." suddenly macfarlane broke into a chuckling laugh. "i say, lorimer," he said, with his deep-set, small grey eyes sparkling with mischief. "'twould be grand fun to see auld dyceworthy's face when he hears o't. by the lord! he'll fall to cursin' an' swearin' like ma pious aunt in glasgie, or that auld witch that cursed miss thelma yestreen!" "an eminently unpleasant old woman _she_ was!" said lorimer musingly. "i wonder what she meant by it!" "she meant, _mon cher_," said duprèz airily, "that she knew herself to be ugly and venerable, while mademoiselle was youthful and ravishing,--it is a sufficient reason to excite profanity in the mind of a lady!" "here comes errington!" said macfarlane, pointing to the approaching boat that was coming swiftly back from the güldmars' pier. "lorimer, are we to congratulate him?" "if you like!" returned lorimer. "i dare say he won't object." so that as soon as sir philip set foot on the yacht, his hands were cordially grasped, and his friends out-vied each other in good wishes for his happiness. he thanked them simply and with a manly straightforwardness, entirely free from the usual affected embarrassment that some modern young men think it seemly to adopt under similar circumstances. "the fact is," he said frankly, "i congratulate myself,--i'm more lucky than i deserve, i know!" "what a sensation she will make in london, phil!" said lorimer suddenly. "i've just thought of it! good heavens! lady winsleigh will cry for sheer spite and vexation!" philip laughed. "i hope not," he said. "i should think it would need immense force to draw a tear from her ladyship's cold bright eyes." "she used to like you awfully, phil!" said lorimer. "you were a great favorite of hers." "all men are her favorites with the exception of one--her husband!" observed errington gaily. "come along, let's have some champagne to celebrate the day! we'll propose toasts and drink healths--we've got a fair excuse for jollity this evening." they all descended into the saloon, and had a merry time of it, singing songs and telling good stories, lorimer being the gayest of the party, and it was long past midnight when they retired to their cabins, without even looking at the wonders of, perhaps, the most gorgeous sky that had yet shone on their travels--a sky of complete rose-color, varying from the deepest shade up to the palest, in which the sun glowed with a subdued radiance like an enormous burning ruby. thelma saw it, standing under her house-porch, where her father had joined her,--sigurd saw it,--he had come out from some thicket where he had been hiding, and he now sat, in a humble, crouching posture at thelma's feet. all three were silent, reverently watching the spreading splendor of the heavens. once güldmar addressed his daughter in a soft tone. "thou are happy, my bird?" she smiled--the expression of her face was almost divine in its rapture. "perfectly happy, my father!" at the sound of her dulcet voice, sigurd looked up. his large blue eyes were full of tears, he took her hand and held it in his meagre and wasted one. "mistress!" he said suddenly, "do you think i shall soon die?" she turned her pitying eyes down upon him, startled by the vibrating melancholy of his tone. "thou wilt die, sigurd," answered güldmar gently, "when the gods please,--not one second sooner or later. art thou eager to see valhalla?" sigurd nodded dreamily. "they will understand me there!" he murmured. "and i shall grow straight and strong and brave! mistress, if you meet me in valhalla, you will love me!" she stroked his wild fair locks. "i love you now, sigurd," she said tenderly. "but perhaps we shall all love each other better in heaven." "yes, yes!" exclaimed sigurd, patting her hand caressingly. "when we are all dead, dead! when our bodies crumble away and turn to flowers and birds and butterflies,--and our souls come out like white and red flames,--yes! . . . then we shall love each other and talk of such strange, strange things!" he paused and laughed wildly. then his voice sank again into melancholy monotony--and he added: "mistress, you are killing poor sigurd!" thelma's face grow very earnest and anxious. "are you vexed with me, dear?" she asked soothingly. "tell me what it is that troubles you?" sigurd met her eyes with a look of speechless despair and shook his head. "i cannot tell you!" he muttered. "all my thoughts have gone to drown themselves one by one in the cold sea! my heart was buried yesterday, and i saw it sealed down into its coffin. there is something of me left,--something that dances before me like a flame,--but it will not rest, it does not obey me. i call it, but it will not come! and i am getting tired, mistress--very, very tired!" his voice broke, and a low sob escaped him,--he hid his face in the folds of her dress. güldmar looked at the poor fellow compassionately. "the wits wander further and further away!" he said to his daughter in a low tone. "'tis a mind like a broken rainbow, split through by storm--'twill soon vanish. be patient with him, child,--it cannot be for long!" "no, not for long!" cried sigurd, raising his head brightly. "that is true--not for long! mistress, will you come to-morrow with me and gather flowers? you used to love to wander with your poor boy in the fields,--but you have forgotten,--and i cannot find any blossoms without you! they will not show themselves unless you come! will you? dear, beautiful mistress! will you come?" she smiled, pleased to see him a little more cheerful. "yes, sigurd," she said; "i will come. we will go together early to-morrow morning and gather all the flowers we can find. will that make you happy?" "yes!" he said, softly kissing the hem of her dress. "it will make me happy--for the last time." then he rose in an attitude of attention, as though he had been called by some one at a distance,--and with a grave, preoccupied air he moved away, walking on tip-toe as though he feared to interrupt the sound of some soft invisible music. güldmar sighed as he watched him disappear. "may the gods make us thankful for a clear brain when we have it!" he said devoutly; and then turning to his daughter, he bade her good night, and laid his hands on her golden head in silent but fervent blessing. "child," he said tremulously, "in the new joys that await thee, never forget how thy old father loves thee!" then, not trusting himself to say more, he strode into the house and betook himself to slumber. thelma followed his example, and the old farmhouse was soon wrapped in the peace and stillness of the strange night--a night of glittering sunshine. sigurd alone was wakeful,--he lay at the foot of one of the tallest pine-trees, and stared persistently at the radiant sky through the network of dark branches. now and then he smiled as though he saw some beatific vision--sometimes he plucked fitfully at the soft long moss on which he had made his couch, and sometimes he broke into a low, crooning song. god alone knew the broken ideas, the dim fancies, the half born desires, that glimmered like pale ghosts in the desert of his brain,--god alone, in the great hereafter, could solve the problem of his sorrows and throw light on his soul's darkness. it was past six in the morning when he arose, and smoothing back his tangled locks, went to thelma's window and sat down beneath it, in mute expectancy. he had not long to wait,--at the expiration of ten or fifteen minutes, the little lattice was thrown wide open, and the girl's face, fresh as a rose, framed in a shower of amber locks, smiled down upon him. "i am coming, sigurd!" she cried softly and joyously. "how lovely the morning is! stay for me there! i shall not be long." and she disappeared, leaving her window open. sigurd heard her singing little scraps of song to herself, as she moved about in the interior of her room. he listened, as though his soul were drawn out of him by her voice,--but presently the rich notes ceased, and there was a sudden silence. sigurd knew or guessed the reason of that hush,--thelma was at her prayers. instinctively the poor forlorn lad folded his wasted hands--most piteously and most imploringly he raised his bewildered eyes to the blue and golden glory of the sky. his conception of god was indefinable; his dreams of heaven, chaotic minglings of fairy-land with valhalla,--but he somehow felt that wherever thelma's holy aspirations turned, there the angels must be listening. presently she came out of the house, looking radiant as the morning itself,--her luxuriant hair was thrown back over her shoulders, and fell loosely about her in thick curls, simply confined by a knot of blue ribbon. she carried a large osier basket, capacious, and gracefully shaped. "now, sigurd," she called sweetly, "i am ready! where shall we go?" sigurd hastened to her side, happy and smiling. "across there," he said, pointing toward the direction of bosekop. "there is a stream under the trees that laughs to itself all day--you know it, mistress? and the poppies are in the field as you go--and by the banks there are the heart's-ease flowers--we cannot have too many of _them_! shall we go?" "wherever you like, dear," answered thelma tenderly, looking down from her stately height on the poor stunted creature at her side, who held her dress as though he were a child clinging to her as his sole means of guidance. "all the land is pleasant to-day." they left the farm and its boundaries. a few men were at work on one of güldmar's fields, and these looked up,--half in awe, half in fear,--as thelma and her fantastic servitor passed along. "'tis a fine wench!" said one man, resting on his spade, and following with his eyes the erect, graceful figure of his employer's daughter. "maybe, maybe!" said another gruffly; "but a fine wench is a snare of the devil! do ye mind what lovisa elsland told us?" "ay, ay," answered the first speaker, "lovisa knows,--lovisa is the wisest woman we have in these parts--that's true! the girl's a witch, for sure!" and they resumed their work in gloomy silence. not one of them would have willingly labored on olaf güldmar's land, had not the wages he offered been above the usual rate of hire,--and times were bad in norway. but otherwise, the superstitious fear of him was so great that his fields might have gone untilled and his crops ungathered,--however, as matters stood, none of them could deny that he was a good paymaster, and just in his dealings with those whom he employed. thelma and sigurd took their way in silence across a perfumed stretch of meadow-land,--the one naturally fertile spot in that somewhat barren district. plenty of flowers blossomed at their feet, but they did not pause to gather these, for sigurd was anxious to get to the stream where the purple pansies grew. they soon reached it--it was a silvery clear ribbon of water that unrolled itself in bright folds, through green, transparent tunnels of fern and waving grass--leaping now and then with a swift dash over a smooth block of stone or jagged rock--but for the most part gliding softly, with a happy, self-satisfied murmur, as though it were some drowsy spirit dreaming joyous dreams. here nodded the grave, purple-leaved pansies,--legendary consolers of the heart,--their little, quaint, expressive physiognomies turned in every direction; up to the sky, as though absorbing the sunlight,--down to the ground, with an almost severe air of meditation, or curled sideways on their stems in a sort of sly reflectiveness. sigurd was among them at once--they were his friends,--his playmates, his favorites,--and he gathered them quickly, yet tenderly, murmuring as he did so, "yes, you must all die; but death does not hurt; no! life hurts, but not death! see! as i pluck you, you all grow wings and fly away--away to other meadows, and bloom again." he paused, and a puzzled look came into his eyes. he turned toward thelma, who had seated herself on a little knoll just above the stream, "tell me, mistress," he said, "do the flowers go to heaven?" she smiled. "i think so, dear sigurd," she said; "i hope so! i am almost sure they do." sigurd nodded with an air of satisfaction. "that is right," he observed. "it would never do to leave them behind, you know! they would be missed, and we should have to come down again and fetch them--" a crackling among the branches of some trees startled him,--he looked round, and uttered a peculiar cry like the cry of a wild animal, and exclaimed, "spies, spies! ha! ha! secret, wicked faces that are afraid to show themselves! come out! mistress, mistress! make them come out!" thelma rose, surprised as his gesticulations, and came towards him; to her utter astonishment she found herself confronted by old lovisa elsland, and the reverend mr. dyceworthy's servant, ulrika. on both women's faces there was a curious expression of mingled fear, triumph, and malevolence. lovisa was the first to break silence. "at last!" she croaked, in a sort of slow, monotonous tone "at last, thelma güldmar, the lord has delivered you into my hands!" thelma drew sigurd close to her, and slipped one arm around him. "poor soul!" she said softly, with sweet pitying eyes fixed fearlessly on the old hag's withered, evil visage. "you must be tired, wandering about on the hills as you do! if you are her friend," she added, addressing ulrika, "why do you not make her rest at home and keep warm? she is so old and feeble!" "feeble!" shrieked lovisa; "feeble!" and she seemed choking with passion. "if i had my fingers at your throat, you should then see if i am feeble! i--" ulrika pulled her by the arm, and whispered something which had the effect of calming her a little. "well," she said, "you speak then! i can wait!" ulrika cleared her husky voice, and fixed her dull eyes on the girl's radiant countenance. "you must go away," she said coldly and briefly; "you and your father, and this creature," and she pointed contemptuously to the staring sigurd. "do you understand? you must leave the alten fjord. the people are tired of you--tired of bad harvests, ill-luck, sickness, and continued poverty. you are the cause of all our miseries,--and we have resolved you shall not stay among us. go quickly,--take the blight and pestilence of your presence elsewhere! go! or if you will not--" "we shall burn, burn, burn, and utterly destroy!" interrupted lovisa, with a sort of eldritch shriek. "the strong pine rafters of olaf güldmar's dwelling shall be kindled into flame to light the hills with crimson, far and near! not a plank shall be spared!--not a vestige of his pride be left--" "stop!" said thelma quietly. "what do you mean? you must both be very mad or very wicked! you want us to go away--you threaten to set fire to our home--why? we have done you no harm. tell me, poor soul!" and she turned with queenly forbearance to lovisa, "is it for britta's sake that you would burn the house she lives in? that is not wise! you cursed me the other day,--and why? what have i done that you should hate me?" the old woman regarded her with steadfast, cruel eyes. "you are your mother's child!" she said. "i hated her--i hate you! you are a witch!--the village knows it--mr. dyceworthy knows it! mr. dyceworthy says we shall be justified in the lord's sight for wreaking evil upon you! evil, evil be on those of evil deeds!" "then shall the evil fall on mr. dyceworthy," said the girl calmly. "he is wicked in himself,--and doubly wicked to encourage _you_ in wickedness. he is ignorant and false--why do you believe in such a man?" "he is a saint--a saint!" cried lovisa wildly. "and shall the daughter of satan withstand his power?" and she clapped her hands in a sort of fierce ecstasy. thelma glanced at her pityingly and smiled. "a saint! poor thing, how little you know him!" she said. "and it is a pity you should hate me, for i have done you no wrong. i would do good to all if i knew how,--tell me can i comfort you, or make your life more cheerful? it must be hard to be so old and all alone!" "your death would comfort me!" returned lovisa grimly. "why do you keep britta from me?" "i do not keep her," thelma answered. "she stays with me because she is happy. why do you grudge her, her happiness? and as for burning my father's house, surely you would not do so wicked and foolish a thing!--but still, you must do as you choose, for it is not possible that we shall leave the altenfjord to please you." here ulrika started forward angrily. "you defy us!" she cried. "you will not go?" and in her excitement she seized thelma's arm roughly. this action was too much for sigurd; he considered it an attack on the person of his beloved mistress and he resented it at once in his own fashion. throwing himself on ulrika with sudden ferocity, he pushed and beat her back as though he were a wolf-hound struggling with refractory prey; and though the ancient lovisa rushed to the rescue, and thelma imploringly called upon her zealous champion to desist,--all remonstrances were unavailing, till sigurd had reduced his enemy to the most abject and whimpering terror. "a demon--a demon!" she sobbed and moaned, as the valiant dwarf at last released her from his clutches; and, tossing his long, fair locks over his misshapen shoulders, laughed loudly and triumphantly with delight at his victory. "lovisa! lovisa elsland! this is your doing; you brought this upon me! i may die now, and you will not care! o lord, lord, have mercy--" suddenly she stopped; her eyes dilated,--her face grew grey with the sickening pallor of fear. slowly she raised her hand and pointed to sigurd--his fantastic dress had become disordered in the affray, and his jacket was torn open,--and on his bare chest a long red scar in the shape of a cross was distinctly visible. "that scar!" she muttered. "how did he get that scar?" lovisa stared at her in impatient derision. thelma was too surprised to answer immediately, and sigurd took it upon himself to furnish what he considered a crushing reply. "odin's mark!" he said, patting the scar with much elation. "no wonder you are afraid of it! everybody knows it--birds, flowers, trees, and stars! even you--you are afraid!" and he laughed again, and snapped his fingers in her face. the woman shuddered violently. step by step she drew near to the wondering thelma, and spoke in low and trembling accents, without a trace of her former anger. "they say you are wicked," she said slowly, "and that the devil has your soul ready, before you are dead! but i am not afraid of you. no; i will forgive you, and pray for you, if you will tell me, . . ." she paused, and then continued, as with a strong effort. "yes--tell me _who_ is this sigurd?" "sigurd is a foundling," answered thelma simply. "he was floating about in the fjord in a basket, and my father saved him. he was quite a baby. he had this scar on his chest then. he has lived with us ever since." ulrika looked at her searchingly,--then bent her head,--whether in gratitude or despair it was difficult to say. "lovisa elsland," she said monotonously, "i am going home. i cannot help you any longer! i am tired--ill." here she suddenly broke down, and, throwing up her arms with a wild gesture, she cried, "o god, god! o god!" and burst into a stormy passion of sobs and tears. thelma, touched by her utter misery, would have offered consolation, but lovisa repelled her with a fierce gesture. "go!" said the old woman harshly. "you have cast your spells upon her--i am witness of your work! and shall you escape just punishment? no; not while there is a god in heaven, and i, lovisa elsland, live to perform his bidding! go,--white devil that you are!--go and carry misfortune upon misfortune to your fine gentleman-lover! ah!" and she chuckled maliciously as the girl recoiled from her, her proud face growing suddenly paler, "have i touched you there? lie in his breast, and it shall be as though a serpent stung him,--kiss his lips, and your touch shall be poison,--live in doubt, and die in misery! go! and may all evil follow you!" she raised her staff and waved it majestically, as though she drew a circle in the air,--thelma smiled pityingly, but deigned no answer to her wild ravings. "come, sigurd!" she said simply, "let us return home. it is growing late--father will wonder where we are." "yes, yes," agreed sigurd, seizing the basket full of the pansies he had plucked. "the sunshine is slipping away, and we cannot live with shadows! these are not real women, mistress; they are dreams--black dreams,--i have often fought with dreams, and i know how to make them afraid! see how the one weeps because she knows me,--and the other is just going to fall into a grave. i can hear the clods thrown on her head--thump--thump! it does not take long to bury a dream! come, mistress, let us follow the sunshine!" and, taking the hand she extended towards him, he turned away, looking back once, however, to call out loudly-- "good-bye, bad dreams!" as they disappeared behind the trees, lovisa turned angrily to the still-sobbing ulrika. "what is this folly?" she exclaimed, striking her staff fiercely into the ground. "art mad or bewitched?" ulrika looked up,--her plain face swollen and stained with weeping. "o lord, have mercy upon me! o lord, forgive me!" she moaned. "i did not know it--how _could_ i know?" lovisa grew so impatient that she seized her by the shoulder and shook her violently. "know what?" she cried; "know what?" "sigurd is my son!" said ulrika, with a sort of solemn resignation,--then, with a sudden gesture, she threw her hands above her head, crying, "my son, my son! the child i thought i had killed! the lord be praised i did not murder him!" lovisa elsland seemed stupefied with surprise. "is this the truth?" she asked at last, slowly and incredulously. "the truth, the truth!" cried ulrika passionately. "it is always the truth that comes to light! he is my child, i tell you! . . . i gave him that scar!" she paused, shuddering, and continued in a lower tone, "i tried to kill him with a knife, but when the blood flowed, it sickened me, and i could not! he was an infant abortion--the evil fruit of an evil deed--and i threw him out to the waves,--as i told you, long ago. you have had good use of my confession, lovisa elsland; you have held me in your power by means of my secret, but now--" the old woman interrupted her with a low laugh of contempt and malice. "as the parents are, so are the children!" she said scornfully. "your lover must have been a fine man, ulrika, if the son is like his father!" ulrika glared at her vengefully, then drew herself up with an air of defiance. "i care nothing for your taunts, lovisa elsland!" she said. "you can do me no harm! all is over between us! i will help in no mischief against the güldmars. whatever their faults, they saved--my child!" "is that so great a blessing?" asked lovisa ironically. "it makes your threats useless," answered ulrika. "you cannot call me _murderess_ again!" "coward and fool!" shrieked lovisa. "was it _your_ intent that the child should live? were you not glad to think it dead? and cannot i spread the story of your infamy through all the villages where you are known? is not the wretched boy himself a living witness of the attempt you made to kill him? does not that scar speak against you? would not olaf güldmar relate the story of the child's rescue to any one that asked him? would you like all bosekop to know of your intrigue with an escaped criminal, who was afterwards caught and hung! the virtuous ulrika--the zealous servant of the gospel--the pious, praying ulrika!" and the old woman trembled with rage and excitement. "out of my power? never, never! as long as there is breath in my body i will hold you down! _not_ a murderess, you say--?" "no," said ulrika very calmly, with a keen look, "i am _not_--but you _are_!" chapter xvi. "il n'y a personne qui ait eu autant à souffrir à votre sujet que moi depuis ma naissance! aussi je vous supplie à deux genoux et au nom de dien, d'avoir pitié de moi!"--_old breton ballad_. in a few more days thelma's engagement to sir philip bruce-errington was the talk of the neighborhood. the news spread gradually, having been, in the first place, started by britta, whose triumph in her mistress's happiness was charming to witness. it reached the astonished and reluctant ears of the reverend mr. dyceworthy, whose rage was so great that it destroyed his appetite for twenty-four hours. but the general impression in the neighborhood, where superstition maintained so strong a hold on the primitive and prejudiced minds of the people, was that the reckless young englishman would rue the day on which he wedded "the white witch of the altenfjord." güldmar was regarded with more suspicion than ever, as having used some secret and diabolical influence to promote the match; and the whole party were, as it seemed, tabooed, and looked upon as given up to the most unholy practices. needless to say, the opinions of the villagers had no effect whatever on the good spirits of those who were thus unfavorably criticised, and it would have been difficult to find a merrier group than that assembled one fine morning in front of güldmar's house, all equipped from top to toe for some evidently unusually lengthy and arduous mountain excursion. each man carried a long, stout stick, portable flask, knapsack, and rug--the latter two articles strapped together and slung across the shoulder--and they all presented an eminently picturesque appearance, particularly sigurd, who stood at a little distance from the others, leaning on his tall staff and gazing at thelma with an air of peculiar pensiveness and abstraction. she was at that moment busied in adjusting errington's knapsack more comfortably, her fair, laughing face turned up to his, and her bright eyes alight with love and tender solicitude. "i've a good mind not to go at all," he whispered in her ear. "i'll come back and stay with you all day." "you foolish boy!" she answered merrily. "you would miss seeing the grand fall--all for what? to sit with me and watch me spinning, and you would grow so very sleepy! now, if i were a man, i would go with you." "i'm very glad you're not a man!" said errington, pressing the little hand that had just buckled his shoulder-strap. "though i wish you _were_ going with us. but i say, thelma, darling, won't you be lonely?" she laughed gaily. "lonely? i? why, britta is with me--besides, i am never lonely _now_." she uttered the last word softly, with a shy, upward glance. "i have so much to think about--" she paused and drew her hand away from her lover's close clasp. "ah," she resumed, with a mischievous smile, "you are a conceited boy! you want to be missed! you wish me to say that i shall feel most miserable all the time you are away! if i do, i shall not tell you!" "thelma, child?" called olaf güldmar, at this juncture "keep the gates bolted and doors barred while we are absent. remember, thou and britta must pass the night alone here,--we cannot be at home till late in the evening of to-morrow. let no one inside the garden, and deny thyself to all comers. dost thou hear?" "yes, father," she responded meekly. "and let britta keep good guard that her crazy hag of a grandam come not hither to disturb or fright thee with her croaking,--for thou hast not even sigurd to protect thee." "not even sigurd!" said that personage, with a meditative smile. "no, mistress; not even poor sigurd!" "one of us might remain behind," suggested lorimer, with a side-look at his friend. "oh no, no!" exclaimed thelma anxiously. "it would vex me so much! britta and i have often been alone before. we are quite safe, are we not, father?" "safe enough!" said the old man, with a laugh. "i know of no one save lovisa elsland who has the courage to face thee, child! still, pretty witch as thou art, 'twill not harm thee to put the iron bar across the house door, and to lock fast the outer gate when we have gone. this done, i have no fear of thy safety. now," and he kissed his daughter heartily, "now lads, 'tis time we were on the march! sigurd, my boy, lead on!" "wait!" cried sigurd, springing to thelma's side. "i must say good-bye!" and he caught the girl's hand and kissed it,--then plucking a rose, he left it between her fingers. "that will remind you of sigurd, mistress! think of him once to-day!--once again when the midnight glory shines. good-bye, mistress! that is what the dead say, . . . good-bye!" and with a passionate gesture of farewell, he ran and placed himself at the head of the little group that waited for him, saying exultingly-- "now follow me! sigurd knows the way! sigurd is the friend of all the wild waterfall! up the hills,--across the leaping stream,--through the sparkling foam!" and he began chanting to himself a sort of wild mountain song. macfarlane looked at him dubiously. "are ye sure?" he said to güldmar. "are ye sure that wee chap kens whaur he's gaun? he'll no lead us into a ditch an' leave us there, mistakin' it for the fall?" güldmar laughed heartily. "never fear! sigurd's the best guide you can have, in spite of his fancies. he knows all the safest and surest paths; and njedegorze is no easy place to reach, i can tell you!" "_pardon!_ how is it called?" asked duprèz eagerly. "njedegorze." the frenchman shrugged his shoulders. "i give it up!" he said smilingly. "mademoiselle güldmar, if anything happens to me at this cascade with the name unpronounceable, you will again be my doctor, will you not?" thelma laughed as she shook hands with him. "nothing will happen," she rejoined; "unless, indeed, you catch cold by sleeping in a hut all night. father, you must see that they do not catch cold!" the _bonde_ nodded, and motioned the party forward, sigurd leading the way,--errington, however, lingered behind on pretense of having forgotten something, and, drawing his betrothed in his arms, kissed her fondly. "take care of yourself, darling!" he murmured,--and then hurrying away he rejoined his friends, who had discreetly refrained from looking back, and therefore had not seen the lovers embrace. sigurd, however, had seen it, and the sight apparently gave fresh impetus to his movements, for he sprang up the adjacent hill with so much velocity that those who followed had some difficulty to keep up with him,--and it was not till they were out of sight of the farmhouse that he resumed anything like a reasonable pace. as soon as they had disappeared, thelma turned into the house and seated herself at her spinning-wheel. britta soon entered the room, carrying the same graceful implement of industry, and the two maidens sat together for some time in a silence unbroken, save by the low melodious whirring of the two wheels, and the mellow complaints of the strutting doves on the window-sill. "fröken thelma!" said britta at last, timidly. "yes, britta?" and her mistress looked up inquiringly. "of what use is it for you to spin now?" queried the little handmaid. "you will be a great lady, and great ladies do not work at all!" thelma's wheel revolved more and more slowly, till at last it stopped altogether. "do they not?" she said half inquiringly and musingly. "i think you must be wrong, britta. it is impossible that there should be people who are always idle. i do not know what great ladies are like." "i do!" and britta nodded her curly head sagaciously. "there was a girl from hammerfest who went to christiania to seek service--she was handy at her needle, and a fine spinner, and a great lady took her right away from norway to london. and the lady bought her spinning-wheel for a curiosity she said,--and put it in the corner of a large parlor, and used to show it to her friends, and they would all laugh and say, 'how pretty!' and jansena,--that was the girl--never span again--she wore linen that she got from the shops,--and it was always falling into holes, and jansena was always mending, mending, and it was no good!" thelma laughed. "then it is better to spin, after all, britta--is it not?" britta looked dubious. "i do not know," she answered; "but i am sure great ladies do not spin. because, as i said to you, fröken, this jansena's mistress was a great lady, and she never did anything,--no! nothing at all,--but she put on wonderful dresses, and sat in her room, or was driven about in a carriage. and that is what you will do also, fröken!" "oh no, britta," said thelma decisively. "i could not be so idle. is it not fortunate i have so much linen ready? i have quite enough for marriage." the little maid looked wistful. "yes, dear fröken," she murmured hesitatingly; "but i was thinking if it is right for you to wear what you have spun. because, you see, jansena's mistress had wonderful things all trimmed with lace,--and they would all come back from the washing torn and hanging in threads, and jansena had to mend those as well as her own clothes. you see, they do not last at all--and they cost a large sum of money; but it is proper for great ladies to wear them." "i am not sure of that, britta," said thelma, still musingly. "but still, it may be--my bridal things may not please philip. if you know anything about it, you must tell me what is right." britta was in a little perplexity. she had gathered some idea from her friend jansena concerning life in london,--she had even a misty notion of what was meant by a "trousseau" with all its dainty, expensive, and often useless fripperies; but she did not know how to explain herself to her young mistress, whose simple, almost severe tastes would, she instinctively felt, recoil from anything like ostentation in dress, so she was discreetly silent. "you know, britta," continued thelma gently, "i shall be philip's wife, and i must not vex him in any little thing. but i do not quite understand. i have always dressed in the same way,--and he has never said that he thought me wrongly clothed." and she looked down with quite a touching pathos at her straight, white woolen gown, and smoothed its folds doubtfully. the impulsive britta sprang to her side and kissed her with girlish and unaffected enthusiasm. "my dear, my dear! you are more lovely and sweet than anybody in the world!" she cried. "and i am sure sir philip thinks so too!" a beautiful roseate flush suffused thelma's cheeks, and she smiled. "yes, i know he does!" she replied softly. "and, after all, it does not matter what one wears." britta was meditating,--she looked lovingly at her mistress's rippling wealth of hair. "diamonds!" she murmured to herself in a sort of satisfied soliloquy. "diamonds, like those you have on your finger, fröken,--diamonds all scattered among your curls like dew-drops! and white satin, all shining, shining!--people would take you for an angel!" thelma laughed merrily. "britta, britta! you are talking such nonsense! nobody dresses so grandly except queens in fairy-tales." "do they not?" and the wise britta looked more profound than ever. "well, we shall see, dear fröken--we shall see!" "_we?_" queried thelma with surprised emphasis. her little maid blushed vividly, and looked down demurely, twisting and untwisting the string of her apron. "yes, fröken," she said in a low tone. "i have asked sir philip to let me go with you when you leave norway." "britta!" thelma's astonishment was too great for more than this exclamation. "oh, my dear! don't be angry with me!" implored britta, with sparkling eyes, rosy cheeks, and excited tongue all pleading eloquently together, "i should die here without you! i told the _bonde_ so; i did, indeed! and then i went to sir philip--he is such a grand gentleman,--so proud and yet so kind,--and i asked him to let me still be your servant. i said i knew all great ladies had a maid, and if i was not clever enough i could learn, and--and--" here britta began to sob, "i said i did not want any wages--only to live in a little corner of the same house where you were,--to sew for you, and see you, and hear your voice sometimes--" here the poor little maiden broke down altogether and hid her face in her apron crying bitterly. the tears were in thelma's eyes too, and she hastened to put her arm round britta's waist, and tried to soothe her by every loving word she could think of. "hush, britta dear! you must not cry," she said tenderly. "what did philip say?" "he said," jerked out britta convulsively, "that i was a g-good little g-girl, and that he was g-glad i wanted to g-go!" here her two sparkling wet eyes peeped out of the apron inquiringly, and seeing nothing but the sweetest affection on thelma's attentive face, she went on more steadily. "he p-pinched my cheek, and he laughed--and he said he would rather have me for your maid than anybody--there!" and this last exclamation was uttered with so much defiance that she dashed away the apron altogether, and stood erect in self-congratulatory glory, with a particularly red little nose and very trembling lips. thelma smiled, and caressed the tumbled brown curls. "i am very glad, britta!" she said earnestly. "nothing could have pleased me more! i must thank philip. but it is of father i am thinking--what will father and sigurd do?" "oh, that is all settled, fröken," said britta, recovering herself rapidly from her outburst. "the _bonde_ means to go for one of his long voyages in the _valkyrie_--it is time she was used again, i'm sure,--and sigurd will go with him. it will do them both good--and the tongues of bosekop can waggle as much as they please, none of us will be here to mind them!" "and you will escape your grandmother!" said thelma amusedly, as she once more set her spinning-wheel in motion. britta laughed delightedly. "yes! she will not find her way to england without some trouble!" she exclaimed. "oh, how happy i shall be! and you"--she looked pleadingly at her mistress--"you do not dislike me for your servant?" "dislike!" and thelma gave her a glance of mingled reproach and tenderness. "you know how fond i am of you, britta! it will be like having a little bit of my old home always with me." silently britta kissed her hand, and then resumed her work. the monotonous murmur of the two wheels recommenced,--this time pleasantly accompanied by the rippling chatter of the two girls, who, after the fashion of girls all the world over, indulged in many speculations as to the new and strange life that lay before them. their ideas were of the most primitive character,--britta had never been out of norway, and thelma's experiences, apart from her home life, extended merely to the narrow and restricted bounds of simple and severe convent discipline, where she had been taught that the pomps and vanities of the world were foolish and transient shows, and that nothing could please god more than purity and rectitude of soul. her character was formed, and set upon a firm basis--firmer than she herself was conscious of. the nuns who had been entrusted with her education had fulfilled their task with more than their customary zeal--they were interested in the beautiful norwegian child for the sake of her mother, who had also been their charge. one venerable nun in particular had bestowed a deep and lasting benefit on her, for, seeing her extraordinary beauty, and forestalling the dangers and temptations into which the possession of such exceptional charms might lead her, she adopted a wise preventive course, that cased her as it were in armor, proof against all the assailments of flattery. she told the girl quite plainly that she was beautiful,--but at the same time made her aware that beauty was common,--that she shared it alike with birds, flowers, trees, and all the wonderful objects of nature--moreover, that it was nothing to boast of, being so perishable. "suppose a rose foolish enough to boast of its pretty leaves," said the gentle _religieuse_ on one occasion. "they all fall to the ground in a short time, and become decayed and yellow--it is only the fragrance, or the _soul_ of the rose that lasts." such precepts, that might have been wasted on a less sensitive and thoughtful nature, sank deeply into thelma's mind--she accepted them not only in theory but in practice, and the result was that she accepted her beauty as she accepted her health,--as a mere natural occurrence--no more. she was taught that the three principal virtues of a woman were chastity, humility, and obedience,--these were the laws of god, fixed and immutable, which no one dared break without committing grievous and unpardonable sin. so she thought, and according to her thoughts she lived. what a strange world, then, lay before her in the contemplated change that was about to take place in the even tenor of her existence! a world of intrigue and folly--a world of infidelity and falsehood!--how would she meet it? it was a question she never asked herself--she thought london a sort of magnified christiania, or at best, the provencal town of arles on a larger scale. she had heard her father speak of it, but only in a vague way, and she had been able to form no just idea even to herself of the enormous metropolis crowded to excess with its glad and sorrowful, busy and idle, rich and poor millions. england itself floated before her fancy as a green, fertile, embowered island where shakespeare had lived--and it delighted her to know that her future home, errington manor, was situated in warwickshire, shakespeare's county. of the society that awaited her she had no notion,--she was prepared to "keep house" for her husband in a very simple way--to spin his household linen, to spare him all trouble and expense, and to devote herself body and soul to his service. as may be well imagined, the pictures she drew of her future married life, as she sat and span with britta on that peaceful afternoon, were widely different to the destined reality that every day approached her more nearly. meantime, while the two girls were at home and undisturbed in the quiet farm house, the mountaineering party, headed by sigurd, were well on their way towards the great fall of njedegorze. they had made a toilsome ascent of the hills by the side of the alten river--they had climbed over craggy boulders and slippery rocks, sometimes wading knee-deep in the stream, or pausing to rest and watch the salmon leap and turn glittering somersaults in the air close above the diamond-clear water,--and they had beguiled their fatigue with songs and laughter, and the telling of fantastic legends and stories in which sigurd had shone at his best--indeed, this unhappy being was in a singularly clear and rational frame of mind, disposed, too, to be agreeable even towards errington. lorimer, who for reasons of his own, had kept a close watch on sigurd ever since his friend's engagement to thelma, was surprised and gratified at this change in his former behavior, and encouraged him in it, while errington himself responded to the dwarf's proffered friendship, and walked beside him, chatting cheerfully, during the most part of the excursion to the fall. it was a long and exceedingly difficult journey--and in some parts dangerous--but sigurd proved himself worthy of the commendations bestowed on him by the _bonde_, and guided them by the easiest and most secure paths, till at last, about seven o'clock in the evening, they heard the rush and roar of the rapids below the fall, and with half an hour's more exertion, came in sight of them, though not as yet of the fall itself. yet the rapids were grand enough to merit attention--and the whole party stopped to gaze on the whirling wonders of water that, hissing furiously, circled round and round giddily in wheels of white foam, and then, as though enraged, leaped high over obstructing stones and branches, and rushed onward and downward to the smoother length of the river. the noise was deafening,--they could not hear each other speak unless by shouting at the top of their voices, and even then the sounds were rendered almost indistinct by the riotous uproar. sigurd, however, who knew all the ins and outs of the place, sprang lightly on a jutting crag, and, putting both hands to his mouth, uttered a peculiar, shrill, and far-reaching cry. clear above the turmoil of the restless waters, that cry was echoed back eight distinct times from the surrounding rocks and hills. sigurd laughed triumphantly. "you see!" he exclaimed, as he resumed his leadership of the party, "they all know me! they are obliged to answer me when i call--they dare not disobey!" and his blue eyes flashed with that sudden wild fire that generally foretold some access of his particular mania. errington saw this and said soothingly, "of course not, sigurd! no one would dream of disobeying you! see how we follow you to-day--we all do exactly what you tell us." "we are sheep, sigurd," added lorimer lazily; "and you are the shepherd!" sigurd looked from one to the other half doubtingly, half cunningly. he smiled. "yes!" he said. "you will follow me, will you not? up to the very top of the fall?" "by all means!" answered sir philip gaily. "anywhere you choose to go!" sigurd seemed satisfied, and lapsing into the calm, composed manner which had distinguished him all day, he led the way as before, and they resumed their march, this time in silence, for conversation was well-nigh impossible. the nearer they came to the yet invisible fall, the more thunderous grew the din--it was as though they approached some vast battle-field, where opposing armies were in full action, with all the tumult of cannonade and musketry. the ascent grew steeper and more difficult--at times the high barriers of rocks seemed almost impassable,--often they were compelled to climb over confused heaps of huge stones, through which the eddying water pushed its way with speed and fury,--but sigurd's precision was never at fault,--he leaped crag after crag swiftly and skillfully, always lighting on a sure foothold, and guiding the others to do the same. at last, at a sharp turn of one of these rocky eminences, they perceived an enormous cloud of white vapor rising up like smoke from the earth, and twisting itself as it rose, in swaying, serpentine folds, as though some giant spirit-hand were shaking it to and fro like a long flowing veil in the air. sigurd paused and pointed forward. "njedegorze!" he cried. they all pressed on with some excitement. the ground vibrated beneath their feet with the shock of the falling torrent, and the clash and uproar of the disputing waters rolled in their ears like the grand, sustained bass of some huge cathedral organ. almost blinded by the spray that dashed its disdainful drops in their faces, deafened by the majestic, loud, and ceaseless eloquence that poured its persuasive force into the splitting hearts of the rocks around them,--breathless with climbing, and well-nigh tread out, they struggled on, and broke into one unanimous shout of delight and triumph when they at last reached the small hut that had been erected for the convenience of travellers who might choose that way to journey to the altenfjord,--and stood face to face with the magnificent cascade, one of the grandest in norway. what a sublime spectacle it was!--that tempest of water sweeping sheer down the towering rocks in one straight, broad, unbroken sheet of foam! a myriad rainbows flashed in the torrent and vanished, to reappear again instantly with redoubled lustre,--while the glory of the evening sunlight glittering on one side of the fall made it gleam like a sparkling shower of molten gold. "njedegorze!" cried sigurd again, giving a singularly musical pronunciation to the apparently uncouth name. "come! still a little further,--to the top of the fall!" olaf güldmar, however, paid no attention to this invitation. he was already beginning to busy himself with preparations for passing the night comfortably in the hut before mentioned. stout old norseman as he was, there were limits to his endurance, and the arduous exertions of the long day had brought fatigue to him as well as to the rest of the party. macfarlane was particularly exhausted. his frequent pulls at the whiskey flask had been of little or no avail as a support to his aching limbs, and, now he had reached his destination, he threw himself full length on the turf in front of the hut and groaned most dismally. lorimer surveyed him amusedly, and stood beside him, the very picture of a cool young briton whom nothing could possibly discompose. "done up--eh, sandy?" he inquired. "done up!" growled macfarlane. "d'ye think i'm a norseman or a jumping frenchy?" this with a look of positive indignation at the lively duprèz, who, if tired, was probably too vain to admit it, for he was strutting about, giving vent to his genuine admiration of the scene before him with the utmost freshness and enthusiasm. "i'm just a plain scotchman, an' no such a fule at climbin' either! why, man, i've been up goatfell in arran, an' ben lomond an' ben nevis--there's a mountain for ye, if ye like! but a brae like this, wi' a' the stanes lyin' helter-skelter, an' crags that ye can barely hold on to--and a mad chap guidin' ye on at the speed o' a leapin' goat--i tell ye, i havena been used to't." here he drew out his flask and took another extensive pull at it. then he added suddenly, "just look at errington! he'll be in a fair way to break his neck if he follows yon wee crazy loon any further." at these words lorimer turned sharply round, and perceived his friend following sigurd step by step up a narrow footing in the steep ascent of some rough, irregular crags that ran out and formed a narrow ledge, ending in a sharp point, jutting directly over the full fury of the waterfall. he watched the two climbing figures for an instant without any anxiety,--then he suddenly remembered that philip had promised to go with sigurd "to the top of the fall." acting on a rapid impulse which he did not stop to explain to himself, lorimer at once started off after them,--but the ascent was difficult; they were some distance ahead, and though he shouted vociferously, the roar of the cascade rendered his voice inaudible. gaining on them, however, by slow degrees, he was startled when all at once they disappeared at the summit--and, breathless with his rapid climb, he paused, bewildered. by-and-by he saw sigurd creeping cautiously out along the rocky shelf that overhung the tumbling torrent--his gaze grew riveted with a sort of deadly fascination on the spot. "good god!" he muttered under his breath. "surely phil will not follow him _there_!" he watched with strained eyes,--and a smothered cry escaped him as errington's tall figure, erect and bold, appeared on that narrow and dangerous platform! he never knew how he clambered up the rest of the slippery ascent. a double energy seemed given to his active limbs. he never paused again for one second till he also stood on the platform, without being heard or perceived by either sigurd or philip. their backs were turned to him, and he feared to move or speak, lest a sudden surprised movement on their parts should have the fatal result of precipitating one or both into the fall. he remained, therefore, behind them, silent and motionless,--looking, as they looked, at the terrific scene below. from that point, njedegorze was as a huge boiling caldron, from which arose twisted wreaths and coiling lengths of white vapor, faintly colored with gold and silvery blue. dispersing in air, these mists took all manner of fantastic forms,--ghostly arms seemed to wave and beckon, ghostly hands to unite in prayer,--and fluttering creatures in gossamer draperies of green and crimson, appeared to rise and float, and retire and shrink, to nothingness again in the rainbow drift and sweep of whirling foam. errington gazed unconcernedly down on the seething abyss. he pushed back his cap from his brow, and let the fresh wind play among his dark, clustering curls. his nerves were steady, and he surveyed the giddily twisting wheels of shining water, without any corresponding giddiness in his own brain. he had that sincere delight in a sublime natural spectacle, which is the heritage of all who possess a poetic and artistic temperament; and though he stood on a frail ledge of rock, from which one false or unwary step might send him to certain destruction, he had not the slightest sense of possible danger in his position. withdrawing his eyes from the fall, he looked kindly down at sigurd, who in turn was staring up at him with a wild fixity of regard. "well, old boy," he said cheerfully, "this is a fine sight! have you had enough of it? shall we go back?" sigurd drew imperceptibly nearer. lorimer, from his point of vantage behind a huge bowlder, drew nearer also. "go back?" echoed sigurd. "why should we go back?" "why, indeed!" laughed errington, lightly balancing himself on the trembling rocks beneath him. "except that i should scarcely think this is the best place on which to pass the night! not enough room, and too much noise! what say you?" "oh, brave, brave, fool!" cried the dwarf in sudden excitement. "are you not _afraid_?" the young baronet's keen eyes glanced him over with amused wonder. "what of?" he demanded coolly. still nearer came sigurd--nearer also came the watchful, though almost invisible lorimer. "look down there!" continued sigurd in shrill tones, pointing to the foaming gulf. "look at the _elf-danz_--see the beautiful spirits with the long pale green hair and glittering wings! see how they beckon, beckon, beckon! they want some one to join them--look how their white arms wave,--they throw back their golden veils and smile at us! they call to _you_--you with the strong figure and the proud eyes--why do you not go to them? they will kiss and caress you--they have sweet lips and snow-white bosoms,--they will love you and take care of you--they are as fair as thelma!" "are they? i doubt it!" and errington smiled dreamily as he turned his head again towards the fleecy whirl of white water, and saw at once with an artist's quick eye what his sick-brained companion meant by the _elf-danz_, in the fantastic twisting, gliding shapes tossed up in the vaporous mist of the fall. "but i'll take your word, sigurd, without making the elves' personal acquaintance! come along--this place is bad for you--we'll dance with the green-haired nymphs another time." and with a light laugh he was about to turn away, when he was surprised by a sudden, strange convulsion of sigurd's countenance--his blue eyes flashed with an almost phosphorescent lustre,--his pale skin flushed deeply red, and the veins in his forehead started into swelled and knotted prominence. "another time!" he screamed loudly; "no, no! now--now! die, robber of thelma's love! die--die--_die_!" repeating these words like quick gasps of fury, he twisted his meager arms tightly round errington, and thrust him fiercely with all his might towards the edge of the fall. for one second philip strove against him--the next, he closed his eyes--thelma's face smiled on his mind in that darkness as though in white farewell--the surging blood roared in his ears with more thunder than the terrific tumble of the torrent--"god!" he muttered, and _then_--then he stood safe on the upper part of the rocky platform with lorimer's strong hand holding him in a vice-like grasp, and lorimer's face, pale, but looking cheerfully into his. for a moment he was too bewildered to speak. his friend loosened him and laughed rather forcedly--a slight tremble of his lips was observable under his fair moustache. "by jove, phil," he remarked in his usual nonchalant manner, "that was rather a narrow shave! fortunate i happened to be there!" errington gazed about him confusedly. "where's sigurd?" he asked. "gone! ran off like a 'leapin' goat,' as sandy elegantly describes him. i thought at first he meant to jump over the fall, in which case i should have been compelled to let him have his own way, as my hands were full. but he's taken a safe landward direction." "didn't he try to push me over?" "exactly! he was quite convinced that the mermaids wanted you. but i considered that miss thelma's wishes had a prior claim on my regard." "look here, old man," said errington suddenly, "don't jest about it! you saved my life!" "well!" and lorimer laughed. "quite by accident, i assure you." "_not_ by accident!" and philip flushed up, looking very handsome and earnest. "i believe you followed us up here thinking something might happen. now didn't you?" "suppose i did," began lorimer, but he was interrupted by his friend, who seized his hand, and pressed it with a warm, close, affectionate fervor. their eyes met--and lorimer blushed as though he had performed some action meriting blame rather than gratitude. "that'll do, old fellow," he said almost nervously. "as we say in polite society when some one crushes our favorite corn under his heel--don't mention it! you see sigurd _is_ cracked,--there's not the slightest doubt about that,--and he's hardly accountable for his vagaries. then i know something about him that perhaps you don't. he loves your thelma!" they were making the descent of the rocks together, and errington stopped short in surprise. "loves thelma! you mean as a brother--" "oh no, i don't! i mean that he loves her as brothers often love other people's sisters--his affection is by no means fraternal--if it were only _that_--" "i see!" and philip's eyes filled with a look of grave compassion. "poor fellow! i understand his hatred of me now. good heavens! how he must suffer! i forgive him with all my heart. but--i say, thelma has no idea of this!" "of course not. and you'd better not tell her. what's the good of making her unhappy?" "but how did _you_ learn it?" inquired philip, with a look of some curiosity at his friend. "oh, i!" and lorimer laughed carelessly; "i was always an observing sort of fellow--fond of putting two and two together and making four of them, when i wasn't too exhausted and the weather wasn't too hot for the process. sigurd's rather attached to me--indulges me with some specially private ravings now and then--i soon found out his secret, though i believe the poor little chap doesn't understand his own feelings himself." "well," said errington thoughtfully, "under the circumstances you'd better not mention this affair of the fall to güldmar. it will only vex him. sigurd won't try such a prank again." "i'm not so sure of that," replied lorimer; "but you know enough now to be on your guard with him." he paused and looked up with a misty softness in his frank blue eyes--then went on in a subdued tone--"when i saw you on the edge of that frightful chasm, phil--" he broke off as if the recollection were too painful, and exclaimed suddenly--"good god! if i had lost you!" errington clapped one hand on his shoulder. "well! what if you had?" he asked almost mirthfully, though there was a suspicious tremble in his ringing voice. "i should have said with horatio, 'i am more an antique roman than a dane,'--and gone after you," laughed lorimer. "and who knows what a jolly banquet we might not have been enjoying in the next world by this time? if i believe in anything at all, i believe in a really agreeable heaven--nectar and ambrosia, and all that sort of thing, and hebes to wait upon you." as he spoke they reached the sheltering hut, where güldmar, duprèz, and macfarlane were waiting rather impatiently for them. "where's sigurd?" cried the _bonde_. "gone for a ramble on his own account," answered errington readily. "you know his fancies!" "i wish his fancies would leave him," grumbled güldmar. "he promised to light a fire and spread the meal--and now, who knows whither he has wandered?" "never mind, sir," said lorimer. "engage me as a kitchen-boy. i can light a fire, and can also sit beside it when it is properly kindled. more i cannot promise. as the housemaids say when they object to assist the cook,--it would be _beneath_ me." "cook!" cried duprèz, catching at this word. "i can cook! give me anything to broil. i will broil it! you have coffee--i will make it!" and in the twinkling of an eye he had divested himself of his coat, turned up his cuffs, and manufactured the cap of a _chef_ out of a newspaper which he stuck jauntily on his head. "behold me, _messieurs_, _à votre service_!" his liveliness was infectious; they all set to work with a will, and in a few moments a crackling wood-fire blazed cheerily on the ground, and the gipsy preparations for the _al fresco_ supper went on apace amid peals of laughter. soon the fragrance of steaming coffee arose and mingled itself with the resinous odors of the surrounding pine-trees,--while macfarlane distinguished himself by catching a fine salmon trout in a quiet nook of the rushing river, and this duprèz cooked in a style that would have done honor to a _cordon bleu_. they made an excellent meal, and sang songs in turn and told stories,--olaf güldmar, in particular, related eerie legends of the _dovre-fjelde_, and many a striking history of ancient origin, full of terror and superstition,--concerning witches, devils, and spirits both good and evil, who are still believed to have their abode on the norwegian hills,--for, as the _bonde_ remarked with a smile, "when civilization has driven these unearthly beings from every other refuge in the world, they will always be sure of a welcome in norway." it was eleven o'clock when they at last retired within the hut to rest for the night, and the errant sigurd had not returned. the sun shone brilliantly, but there was no window to the small shed, and light and air came only through the door, which was left wide open. the tired travellers lay down on their spread-out rugs and blankets, and wishing each other a cheerful "good night," were soon fast asleep. errington was rather restless, and lay awake for some little time, listening to the stormy discourse of the fall; but at last his eyelids yielded to the heaviness that oppressed them, and he sank into a light slumber. meanwhile the imperial sun rode majestically downwards to the edge of the horizon,--and the sky blushed into the pale tint of a wild rose, that deepened softly and steadily with an ever-increasing fiery brilliance as the minutes glided noiselessly on to the enchanted midnight hour. a wind began to rustle mysteriously among the pines--then gradually growing wrathful, strove to whistle a loud defiance to the roar of the tumbling waters. through the little nooks and crannies of the roughly constructed cabin, where the travellers slept, it uttered small wild shrieks of warning or dismay--and, suddenly, as though touched by an invisible hand, sir philip awoke. a crimson glare streaming through the open door dazzled his drowsy eyes--was it a forest on fire? he started up in dreamy alarm,--then remembered where he was. realizing that there must be an exceptionally fine sky to cast so ruddy a reflection on the ground, he threw on his cloak and went outside. what a wondrous, almost unearthly scene greeted him! his first impulse was to shout aloud in sheer ecstasy--his next to stand silent in reverential awe. the great fall was no longer a sweeping flow of white foam--it had changed to a sparkling shower of rubies, as though some great genie, tired of his treasures, were flinging them away by giant handfuls, in the most reckless haste and lavish abundance. from the bottom of the cascade a crimson vapor arose, like smoke from flame, and the whirling rapids, deeply red for the most part, darkened here and there into an olive-green flecked with gold, while the spray, tossed high over interrupting rocks and boulders, glittered as it fell like, small fragments of broken opal. the sky was of one dense uniform rose-color from west to east,--soft and shimmering as a broad satin pavilion freshly unrolled,--the sun was invisible, hidden behind the adjacent mountains, but his rays touched some peaks in the distance, on which white wreaths of snow lay, bringing them into near and sparkling prominence. the whole landscape was transformed--the tall trees, rustling and swaying in the now boisterous wind, took all flickering tints of color on their trunks and leaves,--the grey stones and pebbles turned to lumps of gold and heaps of diamonds, and on the other side of the rapids, a large tuft of heather in a cleft of the rocks glowed with extraordinary vividness and warmth, like a suddenly kindled fire. a troop of witches dancing wildly on the sward,--a ring of fairies,--kelpies tripping from crag to crag,--a sudden chorus of sweet-voiced water-nymphs--nothing unreal or fantastical would have surprised errington at that moment. indeed, he almost expected something of the kind--the scene was so eminently fitted for it. "positively, i must wake lorimer," he thought to himself. "he oughtn't to miss such a gorgeous spectacle as this." he moved a little more in position to view the fall. what was that small dark object running swiftly yet steadily along on the highest summit of those jutting crags? he rubbed his eyes amazedly--was it--could it be _sigurd_? he watched it for a moment,--then uttered a loud cry as he saw it pause on the very ledge of rock from which but a short while since, he himself had been so nearly precipitated. the figure was now distinctly visible, outlined in black against the flaming crimson of the sky,--it stood upright and waved its arms with a frantic gesture. there was no mistaking it--it _was_ sigurd! without another second's hesitation errington rushed back to the hut and awoke, with clamorous alarm, the rest of the party. his brief explanation sufficed--they all hurried forth in startled excitement. sigurd still occupied his hazardous position, and as they looked at him he seemed to dance wildly nearer the extreme edge of the rocky platform. old güldmar turned pale. "the gods preserve him!" he muttered in his beard--then turning he began resolutely to make the ascent of the rocks with long, rapid strides--the young men followed him eager and almost breathless, each and all bent upon saving sigurd from the danger in which he stood, and trying by different ways to get more quickly near the unfortunate lad and call, or draw him back by force from his point of imminent deadly peril. they were more than half-way up, when a piercing cry rang clearly above the thunderous din of the fall--a cry that made them pause for a moment. sigurd had caught sight of the figures advancing to his rescue, and was waving them back with eloquent gesture of anger and defiance. his small misshapen body was alive with wrath,--it seemed as though he were some dwarf king ruling over the glittering crimson torrent, and grimly forbidding strangers to enter on the boundaries of his magic territory. they, however, pressed on with renewed haste,--and they had nearly reached the summit when another shrill cry echoed over the sunset-colored foam. once more they paused--they were in full view of the distraught sigurd, and he turned his head towards them, shaking back his long fair hair with his old favorite gesture and laughing in apparent glee. then he suddenly raised his arms, and, clasping his hands together, poised himself as though he were some winged thing about to fly. "sigurd! sigurd!" shouted güldmar, his strong voice tremulous with anguish. "come back! come back to thelma!" at the sound of that beloved name, the unhappy creature seemed to hesitate, and, profiting by that instant of irresolution, errington and lorimer rushed forward--too late! sigurd saw them coming, and glided with stealthy caution to the very brink of the torrent, where there was scarcely any foothold--there he looked back at his would-be rescuers with an air of mystery and cunning, and broke into a loud derisive laugh. then--still with clasped hands and smiling face--unheeding the shout of horror that broke from those who beheld him--he leaped, and fell! down, down into the roaring abyss! for one half-second--one lightning flash--his twisted figure, like a slight black speck was seen against the wide roseate glory of the tumbling cascade--then it disappeared, engulfed and lost for ever! gone,--with all his wild poet fancies and wandering dreams--gone, with his unspoken love and unguessed sorrows--gone where dark things shall be made light,--and where the broken or tangled chain of the soul's intelligence shall be mended and made perfect by the tender hands of the all-wise and the all-loving one, whose ways are too gloriously vast for our finite comprehension. "gone, mistress!" as he would have said to the innocent cause of his heart's anguish. "gone where i shall grow straight and strong and brave! mistress, if you meet me in valhalla, you will love me!" chapter xvii. "do not, i pray you, think evilly of so holy a man! he has a sore combat against the flesh and the devil!"--_the maid of honor_. the horror-stricken spectators of the catastrophe stood for a minute inert and speechless,--stupefied by its suddenness and awful rapidity. then with one accord they hurried down to the level shore of the torrent, moved by the unanimous idea that they might possibly succeed in rescuing sigurd's frail corpse from the sharp teeth of the jagged rocks, that, piercing upwards through the foam of the roaring rapids, were certain to bruise, tear, and disfigure it beyond all recognition. but even this small satisfaction was denied them. there was no sign of a floating or struggling body anywhere visible. and while they kept an eager look-out, the light in the heavens slowly changed. from burning crimson it softened to a tender amethyst hue, as smooth and delicate as the glossy pale tint of the purple clematis,--and with it the rosy foam of the fall graduated to varying tints of pink, from pink to tender green, and lastly, it became as a shower of amber wine. güldmar spoke first in a voice broken by deep emotion. "'tis all over with him, poor lad!" he said, and tears glittered thickly in his keen old eyes. "and--though the gods, of a surety, know best--this is an end i looked not for! a mournful home-returning shall we have--for how to break the news to thelma is more than i can tell!" and he shook his head sorrowfully while returning the warm and sympathizing pressure of errington's hand. "you see," he went on, with a wistful look at the grave and compassionate face of his accepted son-in-law--"the boy was no boy of mine, 'tis true--and the winds had more than their share of his wits--yet--we knew him from a baby--and my wife loved him for his sad estate, which he was not to blame for. thelma, too--he was her first playmate--" the _bonde_ could trust himself to say no more, but turned abruptly away, brushing one hand across his eyes, and was silent for many minutes. the young men, too, were silent,--sigurd's determined suicide had chilled and sickened them. slowly they returned to the hut to pass the remaining hours of the night--though sleep was, of course, after what they had witnessed, impossible. they remained awake, therefore, talking in low tones of the fatal event, and listening to the solemn _sough_ of the wind through the pines, that sounded to errington's ears like a monotonous forest dirge. he thought of the first time he had ever seen the unhappy creature whose wandering days had just ended,--of that scene in the mysterious shell cavern,--of the wild words he had then uttered--how strangely they came back to philip's memory now! "you have come as a thief in the golden midnight, and the thing you seek is the life of sigurd! yes--yes! it is true--the spirit cannot lie! you must kill, you must steal--see how the blood drips, drop by drop, from the heart of sigurd! and the jewel you steal,--ah! what a jewel! you shall not find such another in norway!" was not the hidden meaning of these incoherent phrases rendered somewhat clear now? though how the poor lad's disordered imagination had been able thus promptly to conjure up with such correctness, an idea of errington's future relations with thelma, was a riddle impossible of explanation. he thought, too, with a sort of generous remorse, of that occasion when sigurd had visited him on board the yacht to implore him to leave the altenfjord. he realized everything,--the inchoate desires of the desolate being, who, though intensely capable of loving, felt himself in a dim, sad way, unworthy of love,--the struggling passions in him that clamored for utterance--the instinctive dread and jealousy of a rival, while knowing that he was both physically and mentally unfitted to compete with one,--all these things passed through philip's mind, and filled him with a most profound pity for the hidden sufferings, the tortures and inexplicable emotions which had racked sigurd's darkened soul. and, still busy with these reflections, he turned on his arm as he lay, and whispered softly to his friend who was close by him--"i say, lorimer,--i feel as if i had been to blame somehow in this affair! if i had never come on the scene, sigurd would still have been happy in his own way." lorimer was silent. after a pause, errington went on still in the same low tone. "poor little fellow! do you know, i can't imagine anything more utterly distracting than having to see such a woman as thelma day after day,--loving her all the time, and knowing such love to be absolutely hopeless! why, it was enough to make him crazier than ever!" lorimer moved restlessly. "yes, it must have been hard on him!" he answered at last, in a gentle, somewhat sad tone. "perhaps it's as well he's out of it all. life is infinitely perplexing to many of us. by this time he's no doubt wiser than you or i, phil,--he could tell us the reason why love is such a blessing to some men, and such a curse to others!" errington made no answer, and they relapsed into silence--silence which was almost unbroken save by an occasional deep sigh from olaf güldmar and a smothered exclamation such as, "poor lad, poor lad! who would have thought it?" with the early dawn they were all up and ready for the homeward journey,--though with very different feelings to those with which they had started on their expedition. the morning was dazzlingly bright and clear,--and the cataract of njedegorze rolled down in glittering folds of creamy white and green, uttering its ceaseless psalm of praise to the creator in a jubilant roar of musical thunder. they paused and looked at it for the last time before leaving,--it had assumed for them a new and solemn aspect--it was sigurd's grave. the _bonde_ raised his cap from his rough white hair,--instinctively the others followed his example. "may the gods grant him good rest!" said the old man reverently. "in the wildest waters they say there is a calm underflow,--maybe the lad has found it and is glad to sleep." he paused and stretched his hands forth with an eloquent and touching gesture. "peace be with him!" then, without more words, and as though disdaining his own emotion, he turned abruptly away, and began to descend the stony and precipitous hill, up which sigurd had so skillfully guided them the day before. macfarlane and duprèz followed him close,--macfarlane casting more than once a keen look over the rapids. "'tis a pity we couldna find his body," he said in a low tone. duprèz shrugged his shoulders. sigurd's death had shocked him considerably by its suddenness, but he was too much of a volatile frenchman to be morbidly anxious about securing the corpse. "i think not so at all," he said. "of what use would it be? to grieve _mademoiselle_? to make her cry? that would be cruel,--i would not assist in it! a dead body is not a sight for ladies,--believe me, things are best as they are." they went on, while errington and lorimer lingered yet a moment longer. "a magnificent sepulchre!" said lorimer, dreamily eyeing for the last time the sweeping flow of the glittering torrent. "better than all the monuments ever erected! upon my life, i would not mind having such a grave myself! say what you like, phil, there was something grand in sigurd's choice of a death. we all of us have to get out of life somehow one day--that's certain--but few of us have the chance of making such a triumphant exit!" errington looked at him with a grave smile. "how you talk, george!" he said half-reproachfully. "one would think you envied the end of that unfortunate, half-witted fellow! you've no reason to be tired of your life, i'm sure,--all your bright days are before you." "are they?" and lorimer's blue eyes looked slightly melancholy. "well, i dare say they are! let's hope so at all events. there need be something before me,--there isn't much behind except wasted opportunities. come on, phil!" they resumed their walk, and soon rejoined the others. the journey back to the altenfjord was continued all day with but one or two interruptions for rest and refreshment. it was decided that on reaching home, old güldmar should proceed a little in advance, in order to see his daughter alone first, and break to her the news of the tragic event that had occurred,--so that when, after a long and toilsome journey, they caught sight, at about eight in the evening, of the familiar farmhouse through the branches of the trees that surrounded and sheltered it, they all came to a halt. the young men seated themselves on a pleasant knoll under some tall pines, there to wait a quarter of an hour or so, while the _bonde_ went forward to prepare thelma. on second thoughts, the old man asked errington to accompany him,--a request to which he very readily acceded, and these two, leaving the others to follow at their leisure, went on their way rapidly. they arrived at, and entered the garden,--their footsteps made a crunching noise on the pebbly path,--but no welcoming face looked forth from any of the windows of the house. the entrance door stood wide open,--there was not a living soul to be seen but the kitten asleep in a corner of the porch, and the doves drowsing on the roof in the sunshine. the deserted air of the place was unmistakable, and güldmar and errington exchanged looks of wonder not unmixed with alarm. "thelma! thelma!" called the _bonde_ anxiously. there was no response. he entered the house and threw open the kitchen door. there was no fire,--and not the slightest sign of any of the usual preparations for supper. "britta!" shouted güldmar. still no answer. "by the gods!" he exclaimed, turning to the astonished philip, "this is a strange thing! where can the girls be? i have never known both of them to be absent from the house at the same time. go down to the shore, my lad, and see if thelma's boat is missing, while i search the garden." errington obeyed--hurrying off on his errand with a heart beating fast from sudden fear and anxiety. for he knew thelma was not likely to have gone out of her own accord, at the very time she would have naturally expected her father and his friends back, and the absence of britta too, was, to say the least of it, extraordinary. he reached the pier very speedily, and saw at a glance that the boat was gone. he hastened back to report this to güldmar, who was making the whole place resound with his shouts of "thelma!" and "britta!" though he shouted altogether in vain. "maybe," he said dubiously, on hearing of the missing boat--"maybe the child has gone on the fjord--'tis often her custom,--but, then, where is britta? besides, they must have expected us--they would have prepared supper--they would have been watching for our return. no, no! there is something wrong about this--'tis altogether unusual." and he looked about him in a bewildered way, while sir philip, noting his uneasiness, grew more and more uneasy himself. "let me go and search for them, sir," he said, eagerly. "they may be in the woods, or up towards the orchard." güldmar shook his head and drew his fuzzy white brows together in puzzled meditation--suddenly he started and struck his staff forcibly on the ground. "i have it!" he exclaimed. "that old hag lovisa is at the bottom of this!" "by jove!" cried errington. "i believe you're right! what shall we do?" at that moment, lorimer, duprèz, and macfarlane came on the scene, thinking they had kept aloft long enough,--and the strange disappearance of the two girls was rapidly explained to them. they listened astonished and almost incredulous, but agreed with the _bonde_ as to lovisa's probable share in the matter. "look here!" said lorimer excitedly. "i'm not in the least tired,--show me the way to talvig, where that old screech-owl lives, and i'll go there straight as a gun! shouldn't wonder if she has not forced away her grandchild, in which case miss thelma may have gone after her." "i'll come with you!" said errington. "let's lose no time about it." but güldmar shook his head. "'tis a long way, my lads,--and you do not know the road. no--'twill be better we should take the boat and pull over to bosekop; there we can get a carriole to take two of us at least to talvig--" he stopped, interrupted by macfarlane, who looked particularly shrewd. "i should certainly advise ye to try bosekop first," he remarked cautiously. "mr. dyceworthy might be able to provide ye with valuable information." "dyceworthy!" roared the _bonde_, becoming inflammable at once. "he knows little of me or mine, thank the gods! and i would not by choice step within a mile of his dwelling. what makes you think of him, sir?" lorimer laid a hand soothingly on his arm. "now, my dear mr. güldmar, don't get excited! mac is right. i dare say dyceworthy knows as much in his way as the ancient lovisa. at any rate, it isn't his fault if he does not. because you see--" lorimer hesitated and turned to errington. "you tell him, phil! you know all about it." "the fact is," said errington, while güldmar gazed from one to the other in speechless amazement, "thelma hasn't told you because she knew how angry you'd be--but dyceworthy asked her to marry him. of course she refused him, and i doubt if he's taken his rejection very resignedly." the face of the old farmer as he heard these words was a study. wonder, contempt, pride, and indignation struggled for the mastery on his rugged features. "asked--her--to--marry--him!" he repeated slowly. "by the sword of odin! had i known it i would have throttled him!" his eyes blazed and he clenched his hand. "throttled him, lads! i would! give me the chance and i'll do it now! i tell you, the mere look of such a man as that is a desecration to my child,--liar and hypocrite as he is! may the gods confound him!" he paused--then suddenly bracing himself up, added. "i'll away to bosekop at once--they've been afraid of me there for no reason--i'll teach them to be afraid of me in earnest! who'll come with me?" all eagerly expressed their desire to accompany him with the exception of one,--pierre duprèz,--he had disappeared. "why, where has he gone?" demanded lorimer in some surprise. "i canna tell," replied macfarlane. "he just slipped awa' while ye were haverin' about dyceworthy--he'll maybe join us at the shore." to the shore they at once betook themselves, and were soon busied in unmooring güldmar's own rowing-boat, which, as it had not been used for some time, was rather a tedious business,--moreover they noted with concern that the tide was dead against them. duprèz did not appear,--the truth is, that he had taken into his head to start off for talvig on foot without waiting for the others. he was fond of an adventure and here was one that suited him precisely--to rescue distressed damsels from the grasp of persecutors. he was tired, but he managed to find the road,--and he trudged on determinedly, humming a song of beranger's as he walked to keep him cheerful. but he had not gone much more than a mile when he discerned in the distance a carriole approaching him,--and approaching so swiftly that it appeared to swing from side to side of the road at imminent risk of upsetting altogether. there seemed to be one person in it--an excited person too, who lashed the stout little pony and urged it on to fresh exertions with gesticulations and cries. that plump buxom figure--that tumbled brown hair streaming wildly on, the breeze,--that round rosy face--why! it was britta! britta, driving all alone, with the reckless daring of a norwegian peasant girl accustomed to the swaying, jolting movement of the carriole as well as the rough roads and sharp turnings. nearer she came and nearer--and duprèz hailed her with a shout of welcome. she saw him, answered his call, and drove still faster,--soon she came up beside him, and without answering his amazed questions, she cried breathlessly-- "jump in--jump in! we must go on as quickly as possible to bosekop! quick--quick! oh my poor fröken! the old villain! wait till i get at him!" "but, my _leet-le_ child!" expostulated pierre, climbing up into the queer vehicle--"what is all this? i am in astonishment--i understand not at all! how comes it that you are run away from home, and mademoiselle also?" britta only waited till he was safely seated, and then lashed the pony with redoubled force. away they clattered at a break-neck pace, the frenchman having much ado to prevent himself from being jolted out again on the road. "it is a wicked plot!" she then exclaimed, panting with excitement--"a wicked, wicked plot! this afternoon mr. dyceworthy's servant came and brought sir philip's card. it said that he had met with an accident and had been brought back to bosekop, and that he wished the fröken to come to him at once. of course, the darling believed it all--and she grew so pale, so pale! and she went straight away in her boat all by herself! oh my dear--my dear!" britta gasped for breath, and duprèz soothingly placed an arm round her waist, an action which the little maiden seemed not to be aware of. she resumed her story--"then the fröken had not been gone so very long, and i was watching for her in the garden, when a woman passed by--a friend of my grandmother's. she called out--'hey, britta! do you know they have got your mistress down at talvig, and they'll burn her for a witch before they sleep!' 'she has gone to bosekop,' i answered, 'so i know you tell a lie.' 'it is no lie,' said the old woman, 'old lovisa has her this time for sure.' and she laughed and went away. well, i did not stop to think twice about it--i started off for talvig at once--i ran nearly all the way. i found my grandmother alone--i asked her if she had seen the fröken? she screamed and clapped her hands like a mad woman! she said that the fröken was with mr. dyceworthy--mr. dyceworthy would know what to do with her!" "_sapristi!_" ejaculated duprèz. "this is serious!" britta glanced anxiously at him, and went on. "then she tried to shut the doors upon me and beat me--but i escaped. outside i saw a man i knew with his carriole, and i borrowed it of him and came back as fast as i could--but oh! i am so afraid--my grandmother said such dreadful things!" "the others have taken a boat to bosekop," said duprèz, to reassure her. "they may be there by now." britta shook her head. "the tide is against them--no! we shall be there first. but," and she looked wistfully at pierre, "my grandmother said mr. dyceworthy had sworn to ruin the fröken. what did she mean, do you think?" duprèz did not answer,--he made a strange grimace and shrugged his shoulders. then he seized the whip and lashed the pony. "faster, faster, _mon chère_!" he cried to that much-astonished, well-intentioned animal. "it is not a time to sleep, _ma foi_!" then to britta--"my little one, you shall see! we shall disturb the good clergyman at his peaceful supper--yes indeed! be not afraid!" and with such reassuring remarks he beguiled the rest of the way, which to both of them seemed unusually long, though it was not much past nine when they rattled into the little village called by courtesy a town, and came to a halt within a few paces of the minister's residence. everything was very quiet--the inhabitants of the place retired to rest early--and the one principal street was absolutely deserted. duprèz alighted. "stay you here, britta," he said, lightly kissing the hand that held the pony's reins. "i will make an examination of the windows of the house. yes--before knocking at the door! you wait with patience. i will let you know everything!" and with a sense of pleasurable excitement in his mind, he stole softly along on tip-toe--entered the minister's garden, fragrant with roses and mignonette, and then, attracted by the sound of voices, went straight up to the parlor window. the blind was down and he could see nothing, but he heard mr. dyceworthy's bland persuasive tones, echoing out with a soft sonorousness, as though he were preaching to some refractory parishioner. he listened attentively. "oh strange, strange!" said mr. dyceworthy. "strange that you will not see how graciously the lord hath delivered you into my hands! yea,--and no escape is possible! for lo, you yourself, fröken thelma," dyceworthy started, "you yourself came hither unto my dwelling, a woman all unprotected, to a man equally unprotected,--and who, though a humble minister of saving grace, is not proof against the offered surrender of your charms! make the best of it, my sweet girl!--make the best of it! you can never undo what you have done to-night." "coward! . . . coward!" and thelma's rich low voice caused pierre to almost leap forward from the place where he stood concealed. "you,--_you_ made me come here--_you_ sent me that card--_you_ dared to use the name of my betrothed husband, to gain your vile purpose! _you_ have kept me locked in this room all these hours--and do you think you will not be punished? i will let the whole village know of your treachery and falsehood!" mr. dyceworthy laughed gently. "dear me, dear me!" he remarked sweetly. "how pretty we look in a passion, to be sure! and we talk of our 'betrothed husband' do we? tut-tut! put that dream out of your mind, my dear girl--sir philip bruce-errington will have nothing to do with you after your little escapade of to-night! your honor is touched!--yes, yes! and honor is everything to such a man as he. as for the 'card' you talk about, i never sent a card--not i!" mr. dyceworthy made this assertion in a tone of injured honesty. "why should i! no--no! you came here of your own accord,--that is certain and--" here he spoke more slowly and with a certain malicious glee, "i shall have no difficulty in proving it to be so, should the young man errington ask me for an explanation! now you had better give me a kiss and make the peace! there's not a soul in the place who will believe anything you say against me; _you_, a reputed witch, and i, a minister of the gospel. for your father i care nothing, a poor sinful pagan can never injure a servant of the lord. come now, let me have that kiss! i have been very patient--i am sure i deserve it!" there was a sudden rushing movement in the room, and a slight cry. "if you touch me!" cried thelma, "i will kill you! i will! god will help me!" again mr. dyceworthy laughed sneeringly. "god will help you!" he exclaimed as though in wonder. "as if god ever helped a _roman_! fröken thelma, be sensible. by your strange visit to me to-night you have ruined your already damaged character--i say you have ruined it,--and if anything remains to be said against you, i can say it--moreover, i _will_!" a crash of breaking window-glass followed these words, and before mr. dyceworthy could realize what had happened, he was pinioned against his own wall by an active, wiry, excited individual, whose black eyes sparkled with gratified rage, whose clenched fist was dealing him severe thumps all over his fat body. "ha, ha! you will, will you!" cried duprèz, literally dancing up against him and squeezing him as though he were a jelly. "you will tell lies in the service of _le bon dieu_? no--not quite, not yet!" and still pinioning him with one hand, he dragged at his collar with the other till he succeeded, in spite of the minister's unwieldly efforts to defend himself, in rolling him down upon the floor, where he knelt upon him in triumph. "_voilà! je sais faire la boxe, moi!_" then turning to thelma, who stood an amazed spectator of the scene, her flushed cheeks and tear-swollen eyes testifying to the misery of the hours she had passed, he said, "run, mademoiselle, run! the little britta is outside, she has a pony-car--she will drive you home. i will stay here till phil-eep comes. i shall enjoy myself! i will begin--phil-eep with finish! then we will return to you." thelma needed no more words, she rushed to the door, threw it open, and vanished like a bird in air. britta's joy at seeing her was too great for more than an exclamation of welcome,--and the carriole, with the two girls safely in it, was soon on its rapid way back to the farm. meanwhile, olaf güldmar, with errington and the others, had just landed at bosekop after a heavy pull across the fjord, and they made straight for mr. dyceworthy's house, the _bonde_ working himself up as he walked into a positive volcano of wrath. finding the street-door open as it had just been left by the escaped thelma, they entered, and on the threshold of the parlor, stopped abruptly, in amazement at the sight that presented itself. two figures were rolling about on the floor, apparently in a close embrace,--one large and cumbrous, the other small and slight. sometimes they shook each other,--sometimes they lay still,--sometimes they recommenced rolling. both were perfectly silent, save that the larger personage seemed to breathe somewhat heavily. lorimer stepped into the room to secure a better view--then he broke into an irrepressible laugh. "it's duprèz," he cried, for the benefit of the others that stood at the door. "by jove! how did he get here, i wonder?" hearing his name, duprèz looked up from that portion of mr. dyceworthy's form in which he had been burrowing, and smiled radiantly. "ah, _cher_ lorimer! put your knee here, will you? so! that is well--i will rest myself!" and he rose, smoothing his roughened hair with both hands, while lorimer in obedience to his request, kept one knee artistically pressed on the recumbent figure of the minister. "ah! and there is our phil-eep, and sandy, and monsieur güldmar! but i do not think," here he beamed all over, "there is much more to be done! he is one bruise, i assure you! he will not preach for many sundays;--it is bad to be so fat--he will be so exceedingly suffering!" errington could not forbear smiling at pierre's equanimity. "but what has happened?" he asked. "is thelma here?" "she _was_ here," answered duprèz. "the religious had decoyed her here by means of some false writing,--supposed to be from you. he kept her locked up here the whole afternoon. when i came he was making love and frightening her,--i am pleased i was in time. but"--and he smiled again--"he is well beaten!" sir philip strode up to the fallen dyceworthy, his face darkening with wrath. "let him go, lorimer," he said sternly. then, as the reverend gentleman slowly struggled to his feet, moaning with pain, he demanded, "what have you to say for yourself, sir? be thankful if i do not give you the horse-whipping you deserve, you scoundrel!" "let me get at him!" vociferated güldmar at this juncture, struggling to free himself from the close grasp of the prudent macfarlane. "i have longed for such a chance! let me get at him!" but lorimer assisted to restrain him from springing forward,--and the old man chafed and swore by his gods in vain. mr. dyceworthy meanwhile meekly raised his eyes, and folded his hands with a sort of pious resignation. "i have been set upon and cruelly abused," he said mournfully, "and there is no part of me without ache and soreness!" he sighed deeply. "but i am punished rightly for yielding unto carnal temptation, put before me in the form of the maiden who came hither unto me with delusive entrancements--" he stopped, shrinking back in alarm from the suddenly raised fist of the young baronet. "you'd better be careful!" remarked philip coolly, with dangerously flashing eyes; "there are four of us here, remember!" mr. dyceworthy coughed, and resumed an air of outraged dignity. "truly, i am aware of it!" he said; "and it surpriseth me not at all that the number of the ungodly outweigheth that of the righteous! alas! 'why do the heathen rage so furiously together?' why, indeed! except that 'in their hearts they imagine a vain thing!' i pardon you, sir philip, i freely pardon you! and you also, sir," turning gravely to duprèz, who received his forgiveness with a cheerful and delighted bow. "you can indeed injure--and you _have_ injured this poor body of mine--but you cannot touch the _soul_! no, nor can you hinder that freedom of speech"--here his malignant smile was truly diabolical--"which is my glory, and which shall forever be uplifted against all manner of evil-doers, whether they be fair women and witches, or misguided pagans--" again he paused, rather astonished at errington's scornful laugh. "you low fellow!" said the baronet. "from yorkshire, are you? well, i happen to know a good many people in that part of the world--and i have some influence there, too. now, understand me--i'll have you hounded out of the place! you shall find it too hot to hold you--that i swear! remember! i'm a man of my word! and if you dare to mention the name of miss güldmar disrespectfully, i'll thrash you within an inch of your life!" mr. dyceworthy blinked feebly, and drew out his handkerchief. "i trust, sir philip," he said mildly, "you will reconsider your words! it would ill beseem you to strive to do me harm in the parish were my ministrations are welcome, as appealing to that portion of the people who follow the godly luther. oh yes,"--and he smiled cheerfully--"you will reconsider your words. in the meantime--i--i"--he stammered slightly--"i apologize! i meant naught but good to the maiden--but i have been misunderstood, as is ever the case with the servants of the lord. let us say no more about it! i forgive!--let us all forgive! i will even extend my pardon to the pagan yonder--" but the "pagan" at that moment broke loose from the friendly grasp in which he had been hitherto held, and strode up to the minister, who recoiled like a beaten cur from the look of that fine old face flushed with just indignation, and those clear blue eyes fiery as the flash of steel. "pagan, you call me!" he cried. "i thank the gods for it--i am proud of the title! i would rather be the veriest savage that ever knelt in untutored worship to the great forces of nature, than such a _thing_ as you--a slinking, unclean animal, crawling coward-like between earth and sky, and daring to call itself a _christian_! faugh! were i the christ, i should sicken at sight of you!" dyceworthy made no reply, but his little eyes glittered evilly. errington, not desiring any further prolongation of the scene, managed to draw the irate _bonde_ away, saying in a low tone-- "we've had enough of this, sir! let us get home to thelma." "i was about to suggest a move," added lorimer. "we are only wasting time here." "ah!" exclaimed duprèz radiantly--"and monsieur dyceworthy will be glad to be in bed! he will be very stiff to-morrow, i am sure! here is a lady who will attend him." this with a courteous salute to the wooden-faced ulrika, who suddenly confronted them in the little passage. she seemed surprised to see them, and spoke in a monotonous dreamy tone, as though she walked in her sleep. "the girl has gone?" she added slowly. duprèz nodded briskly. "she has gone! and let me tell you, madame, that if it had not been for you, she would not have come here at all. you took that card to her?" ulrika frowned. "i was compelled," she said. "_she_ made me take it. i promised." she turned her dull eyes slowly on güldmar. "it was lovisa's fault. ask lovisa about it." she paused, and moistened her dry lips with her tongue. "where is your crazy lad?" she asked, almost anxiously. "did he come with you?" "he is dead!" answered güldmar, with grave coldness. "dead!" and to their utter amazement, she threw up her arms and burst into a fit of wild laughter. "dead! thank god! thank god! dead! and through no fault of mine! the lord be praised! he was only fit for death--never mind how he died--it is enough that he is dead--dead! i shall see him no more--he cannot curse me again!--the lord be thankful for all his mercies!" and her laughter ceased--she threw her apron over her head and broke into a passion of weeping. "the woman must be crazy!" exclaimed the _bonde_, thoroughly mystified,--then placing his arm through errington's, he said impatiently, "you're right, my lad! we've had enough of this. let us shake the dust of this accursed place off our feet and get home. i'm tired out!" they left the minister's dwelling and made straight for the shore, and were soon well on their journey back to the farm across the fjord. this time the tide was with them--the evening was magnificent, and the coolness of the breeze, the fresh lapping of the water against the boat, and the brilliant tranquility of the landscape, soon calmed their over-excited feelings. thelma was waiting for them under the porch as usual, looking a trifle paler than her wont, after all the worry and fright and suspense she had undergone,--but the caresses of her father and lover soon brought back the rosy warmth on her fair face, and restored the lustre to her eyes. nothing was said about sigurd's fate just then,--when she asked for her faithful servitor, she was told he had "gone wandering as usual," and it was not till errington and his friends returned to their yacht that old güldmar, left alone with his daughter, broke the sad news to her very gently. but the shock, so unexpected and terrible, was almost too much for her already overwrought nerves,--and such tears were shed for sigurd as sigurd himself might have noted with gratitude. sigurd--the loving, devoted sigurd--gone for ever! sigurd,--her playmate,--her servant,--her worshiper,--dead! ah, how tenderly she mourned him!--how regretfully she thought of his wild words! "mistress, you are killing poor sigurd!" wistfully she wondered if, in her absorbing love for philip, she had neglected the poor crazed lad,--his face, in all its pale, piteous appeal, haunted her, and her grief for his loss was the greatest she had ever known since the day on which she had seen her mother sink into the last long sleep. britta, too, wept and would not be comforted--she had been fond of sigurd in her own impetuous little way,--and it was some time before either she or her mistress, could calm themselves sufficiently to retire to rest. and long after thelma was sleeping, with tears still wet on her cheeks, her father sat alone under his porch, lost in melancholy meditation. now and then he ruffled his white hair impatiently with his hand,--his daughter's adventure in mr. dyceworthy's house had vexed his proud spirit. he knew well enough that the minister's apology meant nothing--that the whole village would be set talking against thelma more, even than before,--that there was no possibility of preventing scandal so long as dyceworthy was there to start it. he thought and thought and puzzled himself with probabilities--till at last, when he finally rose to enter his dwelling for the night, he muttered half-aloud. "if it must be, it must! and the sooner the better now, i think, for the child's sake." the next morning sir philip arrived unusually early,--and remained shut up with the _bonde_, in private conversation for more than an hour. at the expiration of that time, thelma was called, and taken into their confidence. the result of their mysterious discussion was not immediately evident,--though for the next few days, the farm-house lost its former tranquility and became a scene of bustle and excitement. moreover, to the astonishment of the bosekop folk, the sailing-brig known as the _valkyrie_, belonging to olaf güldmar, which had been hauled up high and dry on the shore for many months, was suddenly seen afloat on the fjord, and valdemar svensen, errington's pilot, appeared to be busily engaged upon her decks, putting everything in ship-shape order. it was no use asking _him_ any questions--he was not the man to gratify impertinent curiosity. by-and-by a rumor got about in the village--lovisa had gained her point in one particular,--the güldmars were going away--going to leave the altenfjord! at first, the report was received with incredulity--but gained ground, as people began to notice that several packages were being taken in boats from the farm-house to both the _eulalie_ and the _valkyrie_. these preparations excited a great deal of interest and inquisitiveness,--but no one dared ask for information as to what was about to happen. the reverend mr. dyceworthy was confined to his bed "from a severe cold"--as he said, and therefore was unable to perform his favorite mission of spy;--so that when, one brilliant morning, bosekop was startled by the steam-whistle of the _eulalie_ blowing furiously, and echoing far and wide across the surrounding rocky islands, several of the lounging inhabitants paused on the shore, or sauntered down to the rickety pier, to see what was the cause of the clamor. even the long-suffering minister crawled out of bed and applied his fat, meek visage to his window, from whence he could command an almost uninterrupted view of the glittering water. great was his amazement, and discomfiture to see the magnificent yacht moving majestically out of the fjord, with güldmar's brig in tow behind her, and the english flag fluttering gaily from her middle-mast, as she curtsied her farewell to the dark mountains, and glided swiftly over the little hissing waves. had mr. dyceworthy been possessed of a field-glass, he might have been able to discern on her deck, the figure of a tall, fair girl, who, drawing her crimson hood over her rich hair, stood gazing with wistful, dreamy blue eyes, at the last receding shores of the altenfjord--eyes that smiled and yet were tearful. "are you sorry, thelma?" asked errington gently, as he passed one arm tenderly round her. "sorry to trust your life to me?" she laid her little hand in playful reproach against his lips. "sorry! you foolish boy! i am glad and grateful! but it is saying good-bye to one's old life, is it not? the dear old home!--and poor sigurd!" her voice trembled, and bright tears fell. "sigurd is happy,"--said errington gravely, taking the hand that caressed him, and reverently kissing it. "believe me, love,--if he had lived some cruel misery might have befallen him--it is better as it is!" thelma did not answer for a minute or two--then she said suddenly--"philip,--do you remember where i saw you first?" "perfectly!" he answered, looking fondly into the sweet upturned face. "outside a wonderful cavern, which i afterwards explored." she started and seemed surprised. "you went inside?--you saw--?" "everything!"--and philip related his adventure of that morning, and his first interview with sigurd. she listened attentively--then she whispered softly-- "my mother sleeps there, you know,--yesterday i went to take her some flowers for the last time. father came with me--we asked her blessing. and i think she will give it, philip--she must know how good you are and how happy i am." he stroked her silky hair tenderly and was silent. the _eulalie_ had reached the outward bend of the altenfjord, and the station of bosekop was rapidly disappearing. olaf güldmar and the others came on deck to take their last look of it. "i shall see the old place again, i doubt not, long before you do, thelma, child," said the stout old _bonde_, viewing, with a keen, fond glance, the stretch of the vanishing scenery. "though when once you are safe married at christiania, valdemar svensen and i will have a fine toss on the seas in the _valkyrie_,--and i shall grow young again in the storm and drift of the foam and the dark wild waves! yes--a wandering life suits me--and i am not sorry to have a taste of it once more. there's nothing like it--nothing like a broad ocean and a sweeping wind!" and he lifted his cap and drew himself erect, inhaling the air like an old warrior scenting battle. the others listened, amused at his enthusiasm,--and, meanwhile, the altenfjord altogether disappeared, and the _eulalie_ was soon plunging in a rougher sea. they were bound for christiania, where it was decided thelma's marriage should at once take place--after which sir philip would leave his yacht at the disposal of his friends, for them to return in it to england. he himself intended to start directly for germany with his bride, a trip in which britta was to accompany them as thelma's maid. olaf güldmar, as he had just stated, purposed making a voyage in the _valkyrie_, as soon as he should get her properly manned and fitted, which he meant to do at christiania. such were their plans,--and, meanwhile, they were all together on the _eulalie_,--a happy and sociable party,--errington having resigned his cabin to the use of his fair betrothed, and her little maid, whose delight at the novel change in her life, and her escape from the persecution of her grandmother, was extreme. onward they sailed,--past the grand lofoden islands and all the magnificent scenery extending thence to christiansund, while the inhabitants of bosekop looked in vain for their return to the altenfjord. the short summer there was beginning to draw to a close,--some of the birds took their departure from the coast,--the dull routine of the place went on as usual, rendered even duller by the absence of the "witch" element of discord,--a circumstance that had kept the superstitious villagers, more or less on a lively tension of religious and resentful excitement--and by-and-by, the rightful minister of bosekop came back to his duties and released the reverend charles dyceworthy, who straightway returned to his loving flock in yorkshire. it was difficult to ascertain whether the aged lovisa was satisfied or wrathful, at the departure of the güldmars with her granddaughter britta in their company--she kept herself almost buried in her hut at talvig, and saw no one but ulrika, who seemed to grow more respectably staid than ever, and who, as a prominent member of the lutheran congregation, distinguished herself greatly by her godly bearing and uncompromising gloom. little by little, the gossips ceased to talk about the disappearance of the "white witch" and her father--little by little they ceased to speculate as to whether the rich englishman, sir philip errington, really meant to marry her--a consummation of things which none of them seemed to think likely--the absence of their hated neighbors, was felt by them as a relief, while the rumored fate of the crazy sigurd was of course looked upon as evidence of fresh crime on the part of the "pagan," who was accused of having, in some way or other, caused the unfortunate lad's death. and the old farm-house on the pine-covered knoll was shut up and silent,--its doors and windows safely barred against wind and rain,--and only the doves, left to forage for themselves, crooned upon its roof, all day, or strutting on the deserted paths, ruffled their plumage in melancholy meditation, as though wondering at the absence of the fair ruling spirit of the place, whose smile had been brighter than the sunshine. the villagers avoided it as though it were haunted--the roses drooped and died untended,--and by degrees the old homestead grew to look like a quaint little picture of forgotten joys, with its deserted porch and fading flowers. meanwhile, a thrill of amazement, incredulity, disappointment, indignation, and horror, rushed like a violent electric shock through the upper circles of london society, arousing the deepest disgust in the breasts of match-making matrons, and seriously ruffling the pretty feathers of certain bird-like beauties who had just began to try their wings, and who "had expectations." the cause of the sensation was very simple. it was an announcement in the _times_--under the head of "marriages"--and ran as follows: "at the english consulate, christiania, sir philip bruce-errington, bart., to thelma, only daughter of olaf güldmar, _bonde_, of the altenfjord, norway. no cards." book ii. the land of mockery chapter xviii. "there's nothing serious in mortality: all is but toys." macbeth. "i think," said mrs. rush-marvelle deliberately, laying down the _morning post_ beside her breakfast-cup, "i think his conduct is perfectly disgraceful!" mr. rush-marvelle, a lean gentleman with a sallow, clean-shaven face and an apologetic, almost frightened manner, looked up hastily. "of whom are you speaking, my dear?" he inquired. "why, of that wretched young man bruce-errington! he ought to be ashamed of himself!" and mrs. marvelle fixed her glasses more firmly on her small nose, and regarded her husband almost reproachfully. "don't tell me, montague, that you've forgotten that scandal about him! he went off last year, in the middle of the season, to norway, in his yacht, with three of the very fastest fellows he could pick out from his acquaintance--regular reprobates, so i'm told--and after leading the most awful life out there, making love to all the peasant girls in the place, he married one of them,--a common farmer's daughter. don't you remember? we saw the announcement of his marriage in the _times_." "ah yes, yes!" and mr. rush-marvelle smiled a propitiatory smile, intended to soothe the evidently irritated feelings of his better-half, of whom he stood always in awe. "of course, of course! a very sad _mésalliance_. yes, yes! poor fellow! and is there fresh news of him?" "read _that_,"--and the lady handed the _morning post_ across the table, indicating by a dent of her polished finger-nail, the paragraph that had offended her sense of social dignity. mr. marvelle read it with almost laborious care--though it was remarkably short and easy of comprehension. "sir philip and lady bruce-errington have arrived at their house in prince's gate from errington manor." "well, my dear?" he inquired, with a furtive and anxious glance at his wife. "i suppose--er--it--er--it was to be expected?" "no, it was _not_ to be expected," said mrs. rush-marvelle, rearing her head, and heaving her ample bosom to and fro in rather a tumultuous manner. "of course it was to be expected that bruce-errington would behave like a fool--his father was a fool before him. but i say it was not to be expected that he would outrage society by bringing that common wife of his to london, and expecting _us_ to receive her! the thing is perfectly scandalous! he has had the decency to keep away from town ever since his marriage--part of the time he has staid abroad, and since january he has been at his place in warwickshire,--and this time--observe this!" and mrs. marvelle looked most impressive--"not a soul has been invited to the manor--not a living soul! the house used to be full of people during the winter season--of course, now, he dare not ask anybody lest they should be shocked at his wife's ignorance. that's as clear as daylight! and now he has the impudence to actually bring her here,--into _society_! good heavens! he must be mad! he will be laughed at wherever he goes!" mr. rush-marvelle scratched his bony chin perplexedly. "it makes it a little awkward for--for you," he remarked feelingly. "awkward! it is abominable!" and mrs. marvelle rose from her chair, and shook out the voluminous train of her silken breakfast-gown, an elaborate combination of crimson with grey chinchilla fur. "i shall have to call on the creature--just imagine it! it is most unfortunate for me that i happen to be one of bruce-errington's oldest friends--otherwise i might have passed him over in some way--as it is i can't. but fancy having to meet a great coarse peasant woman, who, i'm certain, will only be able to talk about fish and whale-oil! it is really _quite_ dreadful!" mr. rush-marvelle permitted himself to smile faintly. "let us hope she will not turn out so badly," he said soothingly,--"but, you know, if she proves to be--er--a common person of,--er--a very uneducated type--you can always let her drop gently--quite gently!" and he waved his skinny hand with an explanatory flourish. but mrs. marvelle did not accept his suggestion in good part. "you know nothing about it," she said somewhat testily. "keep to your own business, montague, such as it is. the law suits your particular form of brain--society does not. you would never be in society at all if it were not for me--now you know you wouldn't!" "my love," said mr. marvelle, with a look of meek admiration at his wife's majestic proportions. "i am aware of it! i always do you justice. you are a remarkable woman!" mrs. marvelle smiled, somewhat mollified. "you see," she then condescended to explain--"the whole thing is so extremely disappointing to me. i wanted marcia van clupp to go in for the errington stakes,--it would have been such an excellent match,--money on both sides. and marcia would have been just the girl to look after that place down in warwickshire--the house is going to rack and ruin, in _my_ opinion." "ah, yes!" agreed her husband mildly. "van clupp is a fine girl--a _very_ fine girl! no end of 'go' in her. and so errington manor needs a good deal of repairing, perhaps?" this query was put by mr. marvelle, with his head very much on one side, and his bilious eyes blinking drowsily. "i don't know about repairs," replied mrs. marvelle. "it is a magnificent place, and certainly the grounds are ravishing. but one of the best rooms in the house, is the former lady errington's boudoir--it is full of old-fashioned dirty furniture, and bruce-errington won't have it touched,--he will insist on keeping it as his mother left it. now that is ridiculous--perfectly morbid! it's just the same thing with his father's library--he won't have that touched either--and the ceiling wants fresh paint, and the windows want new curtains--and all sorts of things ought to be done. marcia would have managed all that splendidly--she'd have had everything new throughout--americans are so quick, and there's no nonsensical antiquated sentiment about marcia." "she might even have had new pictures and done away with the old ones," observed mr. marvelle, with a feeble attempt at satire. his wife darted a keen look at him, but smiled a little too. she was not without a sense of humor. "nonsense, montague! she knows the value of works of art better than many a so-called connoisseur. i won't have you make fun of her. poor girl! she _did_ speculate on bruce-errington,--you know he was very attentive to her, at that ball i gave just before he went off to norway." "he certainly seemed rather amused by her," said mr. marvelle. "did she take it to heart when she heard he was married?" "i should think not," replied mrs. marvelle loftily. "she has too much sense. she merely said, 'all right! i must stick to masherville!'" mr. marvelle nodded blandly. "admirable,--admirable!" he murmured, with a soft little laugh, "a _very_ clever girl--a very bright creature! and really there are worse fellows than masherville! the title is old." "yes, the title is all very well," retorted his wife--"but there's no money--or at least very little." "marcia has sufficient to cover any deficit?" suggested mr. marvelle, in a tone of meek inquiry. "an american woman _never_ has sufficient," declared mrs. marvelle. "you know that as well as i do. and poor dear mrs. van clupp has so set her heart on a really brilliant match for her girl--and i had positively promised she should have bruce-errington. it is really too bad!" and mrs. marvelle paced the room with a stately, sweeping movement, pausing every now and then to glance at herself approvingly in the mirror above the chimney-piece, while her husband resumed his perusal of the _times_. by-and-by she said abruptly-- "montague!" mr. marvelle dropped his paper with an alarmed air. "my dear!" "i shall go to clara winsleigh this morning--and see what she means to do in the matter. poor clara! she must be disgusted at the whole affair!" "she had rather a liking for errington, hadn't she?" inquired mr. marvelle, folding up the _times_ in a neat parcel, preparatory to taking it with him in order to read it in peace on his way to the law courts. "liking? well!" and mrs. marvelle, looking at herself once more in the glass, carefully arranged the ruffle of honiton lace about her massive throat,--"it was a little more than liking--though, of course, her feelings were perfectly proper, and all that sort of thing,--at least, i suppose they were! she had a great friendship for him,--one of those emotional, perfectly spiritual and innocent attachments, i believe, which are so rare in this wicked world." mrs. marvelle sighed, then suddenly becoming practical again, she continued. "yes, i shall go there and stop to luncheon, and talk this thing over. then i'll drive on to the van clupps, and bring marcia home to dinner. i suppose you don't object?" "object!" mr. marvelle made a deprecatory gesture, and raised his eyes in wonder. as if he dared object to anything whatsoever that his wife desired! she smiled graciously as he approached, and respectfully kissed her smooth cool cheek, before taking his departure for his daily work as a lawyer in the city, and when he was gone, she betook herself to her own small boudoir, where she busied herself for more than an hour in writing letters, and answering invitations. she was, in her own line, a person of importance. she made it her business to know everything and everybody--she was fond of meddling with other people's domestic concerns, and she had a finger in every family pie. she was, moreover, a regular match-maker,--fond of taking young ladies under her maternal wing, and "introducing" them to the proper quarters, and when, as was often the case, a distinguished american of many dollars but no influence offered her three or four hundred guineas for chaperoning his daughter into english society and marrying her well, mrs. rush-marvelle pocketed the _douceur_ quite gracefully, and did her best for the girl. she was a good-looking woman, tall, portly, and with an air of distinction about her, though her features were by no means striking, and the smallness of her nose was out of all proportion to the majesty of her form--but she had a very charming smile, and a pleasant, taking manner, and she was universally admired in that particular "set" wherein she moved. girls adored her, and wrote her gushing letters, full of the most dulcet flatteries--married ladies on the verge of a scandal came to her to help them out of their difficulties--old dowagers, troubled with rheumatism or refractory daughters, poured their troubles into her sympathizing ears--in short, her hands were full of other people's business to such an extent that she had scarcely any leisure to attend to her own. mr. rush-marvelle,--but why describe this gentleman at all? he was a mere nonentity--known simply as the husband of mrs. rush-marvelle. he knew he was nobody--and, unlike many men placed in a similar position, he was satisfied with his lot. he admired his wife intensely, and never failed to flatter her vanity to the utmost excess, so that, on the whole, they were excellent friends, and agreed much better than most married people. it was about twelve o'clock in the day, when mrs. rush-marvelle's neat little brougham and pair stopped at lord winsleigh's great house in park lane. a gorgeous flunkey threw open the door with a virtuously severe expression on his breakfast-flushed countenance,--an expression which relaxed into a smile of condescension on seeing who the visitor was. "i suppose lady winsleigh is at home, briggs?" inquired mrs. marvelle, with the air of one familiar with the ways of the household. "yes'm," replied briggs slowly, taking in the "style" of mrs. rush-marvelle's bonnet, and mentally calculating its cost. "her ladyship is in the boo-dwar." "i'll go there," said mrs. marvelle, stepping into the hall, and beginning to walk across it, in her own important and self-assertive manner. "you needn't announce me." briggs closed the street-door, settled his powdered wig, and looked after her meditatively. then he shut up one eye in a sufficiently laborious manner and grinned. after this he retired slowly to a small ante-room, where he found the _world_ with its leaves uncut. taking up his master's ivory paper-knife, he proceeded to remedy this slight inconvenience,--and, yawning heavily, he seated himself in a velvet arm-chair, and was soon absorbed in perusing the pages of the journal in question. meanwhile mrs. marvelle, in her way across the great hall to the "boo-dwar," had been interrupted and nearly knocked down by the playful embrace of a handsome boy, who sprang out upon her suddenly with a shout of laughter,--a boy of about twelve years old, with frank, bright blue eyes and clustering dark curls. "hullo, mimsey!" cried this young gentleman--"here you are again! do you want to see papa? papa's in there!"--pointing to the door from which he had emerged--"he's correcting my latin exercise. five good marks to-day, and i'm going to the circus this afternoon! isn't it jolly?" "dear me, ernest!" exclaimed mrs. marvelle half crossly, yet with an indulgent smile,--"i wish you would not be so boisterous! you've nearly knocked my bonnet off." "no, i haven't," laughed ernest; "it's as straight as--wait a bit!" and waving a lead pencil in the air, he drew an imaginary stroke with it. "the middle feather is bobbing up and down just on a line with your nose--it couldn't be better!" "there, go along, you silly boy!" said mrs. marvelle, amused in spite of herself. "get back to your lessons. there'll be no circus for you if you don't behave properly! i'm going to see your mother." "mamma's reading," announced ernest. "mudie's cart has just been and brought a lot of new novels. mamma wants to finish them all before night. i say, are you going to stop to lunch?" "ernest, why are you making such a noise in the passage?" said a gentle, grave voice at this juncture. "i am waiting for you, you know. you haven't finished your work yet. ah, mrs. marvelle! how do you do?" and lord winsleigh came forward and shook hands. "you will find her ladyship in, i believe. she will be delighted to see you. this young scapegrace," here he caressed his son's clustering curls tenderly--"has not yet done with his lessons--the idea of the circus to-day seems to have turned his head." "papa, you promised you'd let me off virgil this morning!" cried ernest, slipping his arm coaxingly through his father's. lord winsleigh smiled. mrs. rush-marvelle shook her head with a sort of mild reproachfulness. "he really ought to go to school," she said, feigning severity. "you will find him too much for you, winsleigh, in a little while." "i think not," replied lord winsleigh, though an anxious look troubled for an instant the calm of his deep-set grey eyes. "we get on very well together, don't we, ernest?" the boy glanced up fondly at his father's face and nodded emphatically. "at a public-school, you see, the boys are educated on hard and fast lines--all ground down to one pattern,--there's no chance of any originality possible. but don't let me detain you, mrs. marvelle--you have no doubt much to say to lady winsleigh. come, ernest! if i let you off virgil, you must do the rest of your work thoroughly." and with a courteous salute, the grave, kindly-faced nobleman re-entered his library, his young son clinging to his arm and pouring forth boyish confidences, which seemingly received instant attention and sympathy,--while mrs. rush-marvelle looked after their retreating figures with something of doubt and wonder on her placid features. but whatever her thoughts, they were not made manifest just then. arriving at a door draped richly with old-gold plush and satin, she knocked. "come in!" cried a voice that, though sweet in tone, was also somewhat petulant. mrs. marvelle at once entered, and the occupant of the room sprang up in haste from her luxurious reading-chair, where she was having her long tresses brushed out by a prim-looking maid, and uttered an exclamation of delight. "my dearest mimsey!" she cried, "this is quite too sweet of you! you're just the very person i wanted to see!" and she drew an easy fauteuil to the sparkling fire,--for the weather was cold, with that particularly cruel coldness common to an english may,--and dismissed her attendant. "now sit down, you dear old darling," she continued, "and let me have all the news!" throwing herself back on her lounge, she laughed, and tossed her waving hair loose over her shoulders, as the maid had left it,--then she arranged, with a coquettish touch here and there, the folds of her pale pink dressing-gown, showered with delicate valenciennes. she was undeniably a lovely woman. tall and elegantly formed, with an almost regal grace of manner, clara, lady winsleigh, deserved to be considered, as she was, one of the reigning beauties of the day. her full dark eyes were of a bewitching and dangerous softness,--her complexion was pale, but of such a creamy, transparent pallor as to be almost brilliant,--her mouth was small and exquisitely shaped. true,--her long eyelashes were not altogether innocent of "kohl,"--true, there was a faint odor about her as of rare perfumes and cosmetics,--true, there was something not altogether sincere or natural even in her ravishing smile and fascinating ways--but few, save cynics, could reasonably dispute her physical perfections, or question the right she had to tempt and arouse the passions of men, or to trample underfoot? with an air of insolent superiority, the feelings of women less fair and fortunate. most of her sex envied her,--but mrs. rush-marvelle, who was past the prime of life, and, who, moreover, gained her social successes through intelligence and tact alone, was far too sensible to grudge any woman her beauty. on the contrary, she was a frank admirer of handsome persons, and she surveyed lady winsleigh now through her glasses with a smile of bland approval. "you are looking very well, clara," she said. "let me see--you went to kissingen in the summer, didn't you?" "of course i did," laughed her ladyship. "it was delicious! i suppose you know lennie came after me there! wasn't it ridiculous!" mrs. marvelle coughed dubiously. "didn't winsleigh put in an appearance at all?" she asked. lady clara's brow clouded. "oh yes! for a couple of weeks or so. ernest came with him, of course, and they rambled about together all the time. the boy enjoyed it." "i remember now," said mrs. marvelle. "but i've not seen anything of you since you came back, clara, except once in the park and once at the theatre. you've been all the time at winsleigh court--by-the-by, was sir francis lennox there too?" "why, naturally!" replied the beauty, with a cool smile. "he follows me everywhere like a dog! poor lennie!" again the elder lady coughed significantly. clara winsleigh broke into a ringing peal of laughter, and rising from her lounge, knelt beside her visitor in a very pretty coaxing attitude. "come, mimsey!" she said, "you are not going to be proper at this time of day! that would be a joke! darling, indulgent, good old mimsey!--you don't mean to turn into a prim, prosy, cross mrs. grundy! i won't believe it! and you mustn't be severe on poor lennie--he's such a docile, good boy, and really not bad-looking!" mrs. marvelle fidgeted a little on her chair. "i don't want to talk about _lennie_, as you call him," she said, rather testily--"only i think you'd better be careful how far you go with him. i came to consult you on something quite different. what are you going to do about the bruce-errington business? you know it was in the post to-day that they've arrived in town. the idea of sir philip bringing his common wife into society!--it's too ridiculous!" lady winsleigh sprang to her feet, and her eyes flashed disdainfully. "what am i going to do?" she repeated, in accents of bitter contempt. "why, receive them, of course! it will be the greatest punishment bruce-errington can have! i'll get all the best people here that i know--and he shall bring his peasant woman among them, and blush for her! it will be the greatest fun out! fancy a norwegian farmer's girl lumbering along with her great feet and red hands! . . . and, perhaps, not knowing whether to eat an ice with a spoon or with her fingers! i tell you bruce-errington will be ready to die for shame--and serve him right too!" mrs. marvelle was rather startled at the harsh, derisive laughter with which her ladyship concluded her excited observations, but she merely observed mildly-- "well, then, you will leave cards?" "certainly?" "very good--so shall i," and mrs. marvelle sighed resignedly. "what must be, must be! but it's really dreadful to think of it all--i would never have believed philip errington could have so disgraced himself!" "he is no gentleman!" said lady winsleigh freezingly. "he has low tastes and low desires. he and his friend lorimer are two _cads_, in my opinion!" "clara!" exclaimed mrs. marvelle warningly. "you were fond of him once!--now, don't deny it!" "why should i deny it?" and her ladyship's dark eyes blazed with concentrated fury. "i loved him! there! i would have done anything for him! he might have trodden me down under his feet! he knew it well enough--cold, cruel, heartless cynic as he was and is! yes, i loved him!--but i _hate_ him now!" and she stamped her foot to give emphasis to her wild words. mrs. marvelle raised her hands and eyes in utter amazement. "clara, clara! pray, pray be careful! suppose any one else heard you going on in this manner! your reputation would suffer, i assure you! really, you're horribly reckless! just think of your husband--" "my husband!" and a cold gleam of satire played round lady winsleigh's proud mouth. she paused and laughed a little. then she resumed in her old careless way--"you must be getting very goody-goody, mimsey, to talk to me about my husband! why don't you read me a lecture on the duties of wives and the education of children? i am sure you know how profoundly it would interest me!" she paced up and down the room slowly while mrs. marvelle remained discreetly silent. presently there came a tap at the door, and the gorgeous briggs entered. he held himself like an automaton, and spoke as though repeating a lesson. "his lordship's compliments, and will her la'ship lunch in the dining-room to-day?" "no," said lady winsleigh curtly. "luncheon for myself and mrs. marvelle can be sent up here." briggs still remained immovable. "his lordship wished to know if master hernest was to come to your la'ship before goin' out?" "certainly not!" and lady winsleigh's brows drew together in a frown. "the boy is a perfect nuisance!" briggs bowed and vanished. mrs. rush-marvelle grew more and more restless. she was a good-hearted woman, and there was something in the nature of clara winsleigh that, in spite of her easy-going conscience, she could not altogether approve of. "do you never lunch with your husband, clara?" she asked at last. lady winsleigh looked surprised. "very seldom. only when there is company, and i am compelled to be present. a domestic meal would be too _ennuyant_! i wonder you can think of such a thing! and we generally dine out." mrs. marvelle was silent again, and, when she did speak, it was on a less delicate matter. "when is your great 'crush,' clara?" she inquired, "you sent me a card, but i forget the date." "on the twenty-fifth," replied lady winsleigh. "this is the fifteenth. i shall call on lady bruce-errington"--here she smiled scornfully--"this afternoon--and to-morrow i shall send them their invitations. my only fear is whether they mayn't refuse to come. i would not miss the chance for the world! i want my house to be the first in which her peasant-ladyship distinguishes herself by her blunders!" "i'm afraid it'll be quite a scandal!" sighed mrs. rush-marvelle. "quite! such a pity! bruce-errington was such a promising, handsome young man!" at that moment briggs appeared again with an elegantly set luncheon-tray, which he placed on the table with a flourish. "order the carriage at half-past three," commanded lady winsleigh. "and tell mrs. marvelle's coachman that he needn't wait,--i'll drive her home myself." "but, my dear clara," remonstrated mrs. marvelle, "i must call at the van clupps'--" "i'll call there with you. i owe them a visit. has marcia caught young masherville yet?" "well," hesitated mrs. marvelle, "he is rather slippery, you know--so undecided and wavering!" lady winsleigh laughed. "never mind that! marcia's a match for him! rather a taking girl--only _what_ an accent! my nerves are on edge whenever i hear her speak." "it's a pity she can't conquer that defect," agreed mrs. marvelle. "i know she has tried. but, after all, they're not the best sort of americans--" "the _best_ sort! i should think not! but they're of the _richest_ sort, and that's something, mimsey! besides, though everybody knows what van clupp's father was, they make a good pretense at being well-born,--they don't cram their low connections down your throat, as bruce-errington wants to do with his common wife. they ignore all their vulgar belongings delightfully! they've been cruelly 'cut' by mrs. rippington--she's american--but, then, she's perfect style. do you remember that big 'at home' at the van clupp's when they had a band to play in the back-yard, and everybody was deafened by the noise? wasn't it quite too ridiculous!" lady winsleigh laughed over this reminiscence, and then betook herself to the consideration of lunch,--a tasty meal which both she and mrs. marvelle evidently enjoyed, flavored as it was with the high spice of scandal concerning their most immediate and mutual friends, who were, after much interesting discussion, one by one condemned as of "questionable" repute, and uncertain position. then lady winsleigh summoned her maid, and was arrayed _cap-à-pie_ in "carriage-toilette," while mrs. marvelle amused herself by searching the columns of _truth_ for some new tit-bit of immorality connected with the royalty or nobility of england. and at half-past three precisely, the two ladies drove off together in an elegant victoria drawn by a dashing pair of greys, with a respectably apoplectic coachman on the box, supported by the stately briggs, in all the glory of the olive-green and gold liveries which distinguished the winsleigh equipage. by her ladyship's desire, they were driven straight to prince's gate. "we may as well leave our cards together," said clara, with a malicious little smile, "though i hope to goodness the creature won't be at home." bruce-errington's town-house was a very noble-looking mansion--refined and simple in outer adornment, with a broad entrance, deep portico, and lofty windows--windows which fortunately were not spoilt by gaudy hangings of silk or satin in "æsthetic" colors. the blinds were white--and, what could be seen of the curtains from the outside, suggested the richness of falling velvets, and gold-woven tapestries. the drawing-room balconies were full of brilliant flowers, shaded by quaint awnings of oriental pattern, thus giving the place an air of pleasant occupation and tasteful elegance. lady winsleigh's carriage drew up at the door, and briggs descended. "inquire if lady bruce-errington is at home," said his mistress. "and if not, leave these cards." briggs received the scented glossy bits of pasteboard in his yellow-gloved hand with due gravity, and rang the bell marked "visitors" in his usual ponderous manner, with a force that sent it clanging loudly through the corridors of the stately mansion. the door was instantly opened by a respectable man with grey hair and a gentle, kindly face, who was dressed plainly in black, and who eyed the gorgeous briggs with the faintest suspicion of a smile. he was errington's butler, and had served the family for twenty-five years. "her ladyship is driving in the park," he said in response to the condescending inquiries of briggs. "she left the house about half an hour ago." briggs thereupon handed in the cards, and forthwith reported the result of his interview to lady winsleigh, who said with some excitement-- "turn into the park and drive up and down till i give further orders." briggs mutely touched his hat, mounted the box, and the carriage rapidly bowled in the required direction, while lady winsleigh remarked laughingly to mrs. marvelle-- "philip is sure to be with his treasure! if we can catch a glimpse of her, sitting, staring open-mouthed at everything, it will be amusing! we shall then know what to expect." mrs. marvelle said nothing, though she too was more or less curious to see the "peasant" addition to the circle of fashionable society,--and when they entered the park, both she and lady winsleigh kept a sharp look-out for the first glimpse of the quiet grey and silver of the bruce-errington liveries. they watched, however, in vain--it was not yet the hour for the crowding of the row--and there was not a sign of the particular equipage they were so desirous to meet. presently lady winsleigh's face flushed--she laughed, and bade her coachman come to a halt. "it is only lennie," she said in answer to mrs. marvelle's look of inquiry. "i _must_ speak to him a moment!" and she beckoned coquettishly to a slight, slim young man with a dark moustache and rather handsome features, who was idling along on the footpath, apparently absorbed in a reverie, though it was not of so deep a character that he failed to be aware of her ladyship's presence--in fact he had seen her as soon as she appeared in the park. he saw everything apparently without looking--he had lazily drooping eyes, but a swift under-glance which missed no detail of whatever was going on. he approached now with an excessively languid air, raising his hat slowly, as though the action bored him. "how do, mrs. marvelle!" he drawled lazily, addressing himself first to the elder lady, who responded somewhat curtly,--then leaning his arms on the carriage door, he fixed lady winsleigh with a sleepy stare of admiration. "and how is our clara? looking charming, as usual! by jove! why weren't you here ten minutes ago? you never saw such a sight in your life! thought the whole row was going crazy, 'pon my soul!" "why, what happened?" asked lady winsleigh, smiling graciously upon him. "anything extraordinary?" "well, i don't know what you'd call extraordinary;" and sir francis lennox yawned and examined the handle of his cane attentively. "i suppose if helen of troy came driving full pelt down the row all of a sudden, there'd be some slight sensation!" "dear me!" said clara winsleigh pettishly. "you talk in enigmas to-day. what on earth do you mean?" sir francis condescended to smile. "don't be waxy, clara!" he urged--"i mean what i say--a new helen appeared here to-day, and instead of 'tall troy' being on fire, as dante rossetti puts it, the row was in a burning condition of excitement--fellows on horseback galloped the whole length of the park to take a last glimpse of her--her carriage dashed off to richmond after taking only four turns. she is simply magnificent!" "who is she?" and in spite of herself, lady winsleigh's smile vanished and her lips quivered. "lady bruce-errington," answered sir francis readily. "the loveliest woman in the world, i should say! phil was beside her--he looks in splendid condition--and that meek old secretary fellow sat opposite--neville--isn't that his name? anyhow they seemed as jolly as pipers,--as for that woman, she'll drive everybody out of their wits about her before half the season's over." "but she's a mere peasant!" said mrs. marvelle loftily. "entirely uneducated--a low, common creature!" "ah, indeed!" and sir francis again yawned extensively. "well, i don't know anything about that! she was exquisitely dressed, and she held herself like a queen. as for her hair--i never saw such wonderful hair,--there's every shade of gold in it." "dyed!" said lady winsleigh, with a sarcastic little laugh. "she's been in paris,--i dare say a good _coiffeur_ has done it for her there artistically!" this time sir francis's smile was a thoroughly amused one. "commend me to a woman for spite!" he said carelessly. "but i'll not presume to contradict you, clara! you know best, i dare say! ta-ta! i'll come for you to-night,--you know we're bound for the theatre together. by-bye, mrs. marvelle! you look younger than ever!" and sir francis lennox sauntered easily away, leaving the ladies to resume their journey through the park. lady winsleigh looked vexed--mrs. marvelle bewildered. "do you think," inquired this latter, "she can really be so wonderfully lovely?" "no, i don't!" answered clara snappishly. "i dare say she's a plump creature with a high color--men like fat women with brick-tinted complexions--they think it's healthy. helen of troy indeed! pooh! lennie must be crazy." the rest of their drive was very silent,--they were both absorbed in their own reflections. on arriving at the van clupps', they found no one at home--not even marcia--so lady winsleigh drove her "dearest mimsey" back to her own house in kensington, and there left her with many expressions of tender endearment--then, returning home, proceeded to make an elaborate and brilliant toilette for the enchantment and edification of sir francis lennox that evening. she dined alone, and was ready for her admirer when he called for her in his private hansom, and drove away with him to the theatre, where she was the cynosure of many eyes; meanwhile her husband, lord winsleigh, was pressing a good-night kiss on the heated forehead of an excited boy, who, plunging about in his little bed and laughing heartily, was evidently desirous of emulating the gambols of the clown who had delighted him that afternoon at hengler's. "papa! could you stand on your head and shake hands with your foot?" demanded this young rogue, confronting his father with towzled curls and flushed cheeks. lord winsleigh laughed. "really, ernest, i don't think i could!" he answered good-naturedly. "haven't you talked enough about the circus by this time? i thought you were ready for sleep, otherwise i should not have come up to say good-night." ernest studied the patient, kind features of his father for a moment, and then slipped penitently under the bedclothes, settling his restless young head determinedly on the pillow. "i'm all right now!" he murmured, with a demure, dimpling smile. then, with a tender upward twinkle of his merry blue eyes, he added, "good-night, papa dear! god bless you!" a sort of wistful pathos softened the grave lines of lord winsleigh's countenance as he bent once more over the little bed, and pressed his bearded lips lightly on the boy's fresh cheek, as cool and soft as a rose-leaf. "god bless you, little man!" he answered softly, and there was a slight quiver in his calm voice. then he put out the light and left the room, closing the door after him with careful noiselessness. descending the broad stairs slowly, his face changed from its late look of tenderness to one of stern and patient coldness, which was evidently its habitual expression. he addressed himself to briggs, who was lounging aimlessly in the hall. "her ladyship is out?" "yes, my lord! gone to the theayter with sir francis lennox." lord winsleigh turned upon him sharply. "i did not ask you, briggs, _where_ she had gone, or _who_ accompanied her. have the goodness to answer my questions simply, without adding useless and unnecessary details." briggs's mouth opened a little in amazement at his master's peremptory tone, but he answered promptly-- "very good, my lord!" lord winsleigh paused a moment, and seemed to consider. then he said-- "see that her ladyship's supper is prepared in the dining-room. she will most probably return rather late. should she inquire for me, say i am at the carlton." again briggs responded, "very good, my lord!" and, like an exemplary servant as he was, he lingered about the passage while lord winsleigh entered his library, and, after remaining there some ten minutes or so, came out again in hat and great coat. the officious briggs handed him his cane, and inquired-- "'ansom, my lord?" "thanks, no. i will walk." it was a fine moonlight night, and briggs stood for some minutes on the steps, airing his shapely calves and watching the tall, dignified figure of his master walking, with the upright, stately bearing which always distinguished him, in the direction of pall mall. park lane was full of crowding carriages with twinkling lights, all bound to the different sources of so-called "pleasure" by which the opening of the season is distinguished. briggs surveyed the scene with lofty indifference, sniffed the cool breeze, and, finding it somewhat chilly, re-entered the house and descended to the servant's hall. here all the domestics of the winsleigh household were seated at a large table loaded with hot and savory viands,--a table presided over by a robust and perspiring lady, with a very red face and sturdy arms bare to the elbow. "lor', mr. briggs!" cried this personage, rising respectfully as he approached, "'ow late you are! wot 'ave you been a-doin' on? 'ere i've been a-keepin' your lamb-chops and truffles 'ot all this time, and if they's dried up 'taint my fault, nor that of the hoven, which is as good a hoven as you can wish to bake in. . . ." she paused breathless, and briggs smiled blandly. "now, flopsie!" he said in a tone of gentle severity. "excited again--as usual! it's bad for your 'elth--very bad! _hif_ the chops is dried, your course is plain--cook some more! not that i am enny ways particular--but chippy meat is bad for a delicate digestion. and you would not make me hill, my flopsie, would you?" whereupon he seated himself, and looked condescendingly round the table. he was too great a personage to be familiar with such inferior creatures as housemaids, scullery-girls, and menials of that class,--he was only on intimate terms with the cook, mrs. flopper, or, as he called her, "flopsie,"--the coachman, and lady winsleigh's own maid, louise rénaud, a prim, sallow-faced frenchwoman, who, by reason of her nationality, was called by all the inhabitants of the kitchen, "mamzelle," as being a name both short, appropriate, and convenient. on careful examination, the lamb-chops turned out satisfactorily--"chippiness" was an epithet that could not justly be applied to them,--and mr. briggs began to eat them leisurely, flavoring them with a glass or two of fine port out of a decanter which he had taken the precaution to bring down from the dining-room sideboard. "i _ham_, late," he then graciously explained--"not that i was detained in enny way by the people upstairs. the gay clara went out early, but i was absorbed in the evenin' papers--winsleigh forgot to ask me for them. but he'll see them at his club. he's gone there now on foot--poor fellah!" "i suppose _she's_ with the same party?" grinned the fat flopsie, as she held a large piece of bacon dipped in vinegar on her fork, preparatory to swallowing it with a gulp. briggs nodded gravely, "the same! not a fine man at all, you know--no leg to speak of, and therefore no form. legs--_good_ legs--are beauty. now, winsleigh's not bad in that particular,--and i dare say clara can hold her own,--but i wouldn't bet on little francis." flopsie shrieked with laughter till she had a "stitch in her side," and was compelled to restrain her mirth. "lor', mr. briggs!" she gasped, wiping the moisture from her eyes, "you are a regular one, aren't you! mussy on us, you ought to put all wot you say in the papers--you'd make your fortin!" "maybe, maybe, flopsie," returned briggs with due dignity. "i will not deny that there may be wot is called 'sparkle' in my natur. and 'sparkle' is wot is rekwired in polite literatoor. look at 'hedmund' and ''enery!' sparkle again,--read their magnificent productions, the _world_ and _truth_,--all sparkle, every line! it is the secret of success, flopsie--be a sparkler and you've got everything before you." louise rénaud looked across at him half-defiantly. her prim, cruel mouth hardened into a tight line. "to spark-el?" she said--"that is what we call _étinceler_--_éclater_. yes, i comprehend! miladi is one spark-el! but one must be a very good jewel to spark-el always--yes--yes--not a sham!" and she nodded a great many times, and ate her salad very fast. briggs surveyed her with much complacency. "you are a talented woman, mamzelle," he said, "very talented! i admire your ways--i really do!" mamzelle smiled with a gratified air, and briggs settled his wig, eyeing her anew with fresh interest. "_wot_ a witness you would be in a divorce case!" he continued enthusiastically. "you'd be in your helement!" "i should--i should indeed!" exclaimed mamzelle, with sudden excitement,--then as suddenly growing calm, she made a rapid gesture with her hands--"but there will be no divorce. milord winsleigh is a fool!" briggs appeared doubtful about this, and meditated for a long time over his third glass of port with the profound gravity of a philosopher. "no, mamzelle," he said at last, when he rose from the table to return to his duties upstairs--"no! there i must differ from you. i am a close observer. wotever winsleigh's faults,--and i do not deny that they are many,--he is a gentleman--that i _must_ admit--and with _hevery_ respect for you, mamzelle--i can assure you he's no fool!" and with these words briggs betook himself to the library to arrange the reading-lamp and put the room in order for his master's return, and as he did so, he paused to look at a fine photograph of lady winsleigh that stood on the oak escritoire, opposite her husband's arm-chair. "no," he muttered to himself. "wotever he thinks of some goings-on, he ain't blind nor deaf--that's certain. and i'd stake my character and purfessional reputation on it--wotever he is, he's no fool!" for once in his life, briggs was right. he was generally wrong in his estimate of both persons and things--but it so happened on this particular occasion that he had formed a perfectly correct judgment. chapter xix. "could you not drink her gaze like wine? yet in its splendor swoon into the silence languidly, as a tune into a tune?" dante rossetti. on the morning of the twenty-fifth of may, thelma, lady bruce-errington, sat at breakfast with her husband in their sun-shiny morning-room, fragrant with flowers and melodious with the low piping of a tame thrush in a wild gilded cage, who had the sweet habit of warbling his strophes to himself very softly now and then, before venturing to give them full-voiced utterance. a bright-eyed, feathered poet he was, and an exceeding favorite with his fair mistress, who occasionally leaned back in her low chair to look at him and murmur an encouraging "sweet, sweet!" which caused the speckled plumage on his plump breast to ruffle up with suppressed emotion and gratitude. philip was pretending to read the _times_, but the huge, self-important printed sheet had not the faintest interest for him,--his eyes wandered over the top of its columns to the golden gleam of his wife's hair, brightened just then by the sunlight streaming through the window,--and finally he threw it down beside him with a laugh. "there's no news," he declared. "there never _is_ any news!" thelma smiled, and her deep-blue eyes sparkled. "no?" she half inquired--then taking her husband's cup from his hand to re-fill it with coffee, she added, "but i think you do not give yourself time to find the news, philip. you will never read the papers more than five minutes." "my dear girl," said philip gaily, "i am more conscientious than you are, at any rate, for you never read them at all!" "ah, but you must remember," she returned gravely, "that is because i do not understand them! i am not clever. they seem to me to be all about such dull things--unless there is some horrible murder or cruelty or accident--and i would rather not hear of these. i do prefer books always--because the books last, and news is never certain--it may not even be true." her husband looked at her fondly; his thoughts were evidently very far away from newspapers and their contents. as she met his gaze, the rich color flushed her soft cheeks and her eyes drooped shyly under their long lashes. love, with her, had not yet proved an illusion,--a bright toy to be snatched hastily and played with for a brief while, and then thrown aside as broken and worthless. it seemed to her a most marvellous and splendid gift of god, increasing each day in worth and beauty,--widening upon her soul and dazzling her life in ever new and expanding circles of glory. she felt as if she could never sufficiently understand it,--the passionate adoration philip lavished upon her, filled her with a sort of innocent wonder and gratitude, while her own overpowering love and worship of him, sometimes startled her by its force into a sweet shame and hesitating fear. to her mind he was all that was great, strong, noble, and beautiful--he was her master, her king,--and she loved to pay him homage by her exquisite humility, clinging tenderness, and complete, contented submission. she was neither weak nor timid,--her character, moulded on grand and simple lines of duty, saw the laws of nature in their true light, and accepted them without question. it seemed to her quite clear that man was the superior,--woman the inferior, creature--and she could not understand the possibility of any wife not rendering instant and implicit obedience to her husband, even in trifles. since her wedding-day no dark cloud had crossed her heaven of happiness, though she had been a little confused and bewildered at first by the wealth and dainty luxury with which sir philip had delighted to surround her. she had been married quietly at christiania, arrayed in one of her own simple white gowns, with no ornament save a cluster of pale blush-roses, the gift of lorimer. the ceremony was witnessed by her father and errington's friends,--and when it was concluded they had all gone on their several ways,--old güldmar for a "toss" on the bay of biscay,--the yacht _eulalie_, with lorimer, macfarlane, and duprèz on board, back to england, where these gentlemen had separated to their respective homes,--while errington, with his beautiful bride, and britta in demure and delighted attendance on her, went straight to copenhagen. from there they travelled to hamburg, and through germany to the schwarzwald, where they spent their honeymoon at a quiet little hotel in the very heart of the deep-green forest. days of delicious dreaming were these,--days of roaming on the emerald green turf under the stately and odorous pines, listening to the dash of the waterfalls, or watching the crimson sunset burning redly through the darkness of the branches,--and in the moonlit evenings sitting under the trees to hear the entrancing music of a hungarian string-band, which played divine and voluptuous melodies of the land,--"lieder" and "walzer" that swung the heart away on a golden thread of sound to a paradise too sweet to name! days of high ecstacy, and painfully passionate joy!--when "love, love!" palpitated in the air, and struggled for utterance in the jubilant throats of birds, and whispered wild suggestions in the rustling of the leaves! there were times when thelma,--lost and amazed and overcome by the strength and sweetness of the nectar held to her innocent lips by a smiling and flame-winged eros,--would wonder vaguely whether she lived indeed, or whether she were not dreaming some gorgeous dream, too brilliant to last? and even when her husband's arms most surely embraced her, and her husband's kiss met hers in all the rapture of victorious tenderness, she would often question herself as to whether she were worthy of such perfect happiness, and she would pray in the depths of her pure heart to be made more deserving of this great and wonderful gift of love--this supreme joy, almost too vast for her comprehension. on the other hand, errington's passion for his wife was equally absorbing--she had become the very moving-spring of his existence. his eyes delighted in her beauty,--but more than this, he revelled in and reverenced the crystal-clear parity and exquisite refinement of her soul. life assumed for him a new form,--studied by the light of thelma's straightforward simplicity and intelligence, it was no longer, as he had once been inclined to think, a mere empty routine,--it was a treasure of inestimable value fraught with divine meanings. gradually, the touch of modern cynicism that had at one time threatened to spoil his nature, dropped away from him like the husk from an ear of corn,--the world arrayed itself in bright and varying colors--there was good--nay, there was glory--in everything. with these ideas, and the healthy satisfaction they engendered, his heart grew light and joyous,--his eyes more lustrous,--his step gay and elastic,--and his whole appearance was that of man at his best,--man, as god most surely meant him to be--not a rebellious, feebly-repining, sneering wretch, ready to scoff at the very sunlight,--but a being both brave and intelligent, strong and equally balanced in temperament, and not only contented, but absolutely glad to be alive,--glad to feel the blood flowing through the veins,--glad and grateful for the gifts of breathing and sight. as each day passed, the more close and perfect grew the sympathies of husband and wife,--they were like two notes of a perfect chord, sounding together in sweetest harmony. naturally, much of this easy and mutual blending of character and disposition arose from thelma's own gracious and graceful submissiveness,--submissiveness which, far from humiliating her, actually placed her (though she knew it not) on a throne of almost royal power, before which sir philip was content to kneel--an ardent worshipper of her womanly sweetness. always without question or demur, she obeyed his wishes implicitly,--though, as has been before mentioned, she was at first a little overpowered and startled by the evidences of his wealth, and did not quite know what to do with all the luxuries and gifts he heaped upon her. britta's worldly prognostications had come true,--the simple gowns her mistress had worn at the altenfjord were soon discarded for more costly apparel,--though sir philip had an affection for his wife's norwegian costumes, and in his heart thought they were as pretty, if not prettier, than the most perfect triumphs of a parisian _modiste_. but in the social world, fashion, the capricious deity, must be followed, if not wholly, yet in part; and so thelma's straight, plain garments were laid carefully by as souvenirs of the old days, and were replaced by toilettes of the most exquisite description,--some simple,--some costly,--and it was difficult to say in which of them the lovely wearer looked her best. she herself was indifferent in the matter--she dressed to please philip,--if he was satisfied, she was happy--she sought nothing further. it was britta whose merry eyes sparkled with pride and admiration when she saw her "fröken" arrayed in gleaming silk or sweeping velvets, with the shine of rare jewels in her rippling hair,--it was britta who took care of all the dainty trifles that gradually accumulated on thelma's dressing table,--in fact, britta had become a very important personage in her own opinion. dressed neatly in black, with a coquettish muslin apron and cap becomingly frilled, she was a very taking little maid, with her demure rosy face and rebellious curls, though very different to the usual trained spy whose officious ministrations are deemed so necessary by ladies of position, whose lofty station in life precludes them from the luxury of brushing their own hair. britta's duties were slight--she invented most of them--yet she was always busy sewing, dusting, packing, or polishing. she was a very wide-awake little person, too,--no hint was lost upon her,--and she held her own wherever she went with her bright eyes and sharp tongue. though secretly in an unbounded state of astonishment at everything new she saw, she was too wise to allow this to be noticed, and feigned the utmost coolness and indifference, even when they went from germany to paris, where the brilliancy and luxury of the shops almost took away her breath for sheer wonderment. in paris, thelma's wardrobe was completed--a certain madame rosine, famous for "artistic arrangements," was called into requisition, and viewing with a professional eye the superb figure and majestic carriage of her new customer, rose to the occasion in all her glory, and resolved that miladi bruce-errington's dresses should be the wonder and envy of all who beheld them. "for," said madame, with a grand air, "it is to do me justice. that form so magnificent is worth draping,--it will support my work to the best advantage. and persons without figures will hasten to me and entreat me for costumes, and will think that if i dress them i can make them look as well as miladi. and they will pay!"--madame shook her head with much shrewdness--"_mon dieu!_ they will pay!--and that they still look frightful will not be my fault." and undoubtedly madame surpassed her usual skill in all she did for thelma,--she took such pains, and was so successful in all her designs, that "miladi," who did not as a rule show more than a very ordinary interest in her toilette, found it impossible not to admire the artistic taste, harmonious coloring, and exquisite fit of the few choice gowns supplied to her from the "maison rosine"--and only on one occasion had she any discussion with the celebrated modiste. this was when madame herself, with much pride, brought home an evening dress of the very palest and tenderest sea-green silk, showered with pearls and embroidered in silver, a perfect _chef-d'oeuvre_ of the dressmaker's art. the skirt, with its billowy train and peeping folds of delicate lace, pleased thelma,--but she could not understand the bodice, and she held that very small portion of the costume in her hand with an air of doubt and wonderment. at last she turned her grave blue eyes inquiringly on madame. "it is not finished?" she asked. "where is the upper part of it and the sleeves?" madame rosine gesticulated with her hands and smiled. "miladi, there is no more!" she declared. "miladi will perceive it is for the evening wear--it is _décolletée_--it is to show to everybody miladi's most beautiful white neck and arms. the effect will be ravishing!" thelma's face grew suddenly grave--almost stern. "you must be very wicked!" she said severely, to the infinite amazement of the vivacious rosine. "you think i would show myself to people half clothed? how is it possible! i would not so disgrace myself! it would bring shame to my husband!" madame was almost speechless with surprise. what strange lady was this who was so dazzlingly beautiful and graceful, and yet so ignorant of the world's ways? she stared,--but was soon on the defensive. "miladi is in a little error!" she said rapidly and with soft persuasiveness. "it is _la mode_. miladi has perhaps lived in a country where the fashions are different. but if she will ask the most amiable sieur bruce-errington, she will find that her dress is quite in keeping with _les convenances_." a pained blush crimsoned thelma's fair cheek. "i do not like to ask my husband such a thing," she said slowly, "but i must. for i could not wear this dress without shame. i cannot think he would wish me to appear in it as you have made it--but--" she paused, and taking up the objectionable bodice, she added gently--"you will kindly wait here, madame, and i will see what sir philip says." and she retired, leaving the _modiste_ in a state of much astonishment, approaching resentment. the idea was outrageous,--a woman with such divinely fair skin,--a woman with the bosom of a venus, and arms of a shape to make sculptors rave,--and yet she actually wished to hide these beauties from the public gaze! it was ridiculous--utterly ridiculous,--and madame sat fuming impatiently, and sniffing the air in wonder and scorn. meanwhile thelma, with flushing cheeks and lowered eyes, confided her difficulty to philip, who surveyed the shocking little bodice she brought for his inspection with a gravely amused, but very tender smile. "there certainly doesn't seem much of it, does there, darling?" he said. "and so you don't like it?" "no," she confessed frankly--"i think i should feel quite undressed in it. i often wear just a little opening at the throat--but this--! still, philip, i must not displease you--and i will always wear what you wish, even if it is uncomfortable to myself." "look here, my pet," and he encircled her waist fondly with his arm, "rosine is quite right. the thing's perfectly fashionable,--and there isn't a woman in society who wouldn't be perfectly charmed with it. but your ideas are better than rosine's and all society's put together. obey your own womanly instinct, thelma!" "but what do _you_ wish?" she asked earnestly. "you must tell me. it is to please you that i live." he kissed her. "you want me to issue a command about the affair?" he said half laughingly. she smiled up into his eyes. "yes!--and i will obey!" "very well! now listen!" and he held her by both hands, and looked with sudden gravity into her sweet face--"thelma, my wife, thus sayeth your lord and master,--despise the vulgar indecencies of fashion, and you will gratify me more than words can say;--keep your pure and beautiful self sacred from the profaning gaze of the multitude,--sacred to me and my love for you, and i shall be the proudest man living! finally,"--and he smiled again--"give rosine back this effort at a bodice, and tell her to make something more in keeping with the laws of health and modesty. and thelma--one more kiss! you are a darling!" she laughed softly and left him, returning at once to the irate dressmaker who waited for her. "i am sorry," she said very sweetly, "to have called you wicked! you see, i did not understand! but though this style of dress is fashionable, i do not wish to wear it--so you will please make me another bodice, with a small open square at the throat, and elbow-sleeves,--and you will lose nothing at all--for i shall pay you for this one just the same. and you must quite pardon me for my mistake and hasty words!" maladi's manner was so gracious and winning, that madame rosine found it impossible not to smile in a soothed and mollified way,--and though she deeply regretted that so beautiful a neck and arms were not to be exposed to public criticism, she resigned herself to the inevitable, and took away the offending bodice, replacing it in a couple of days by one much prettier and more becoming by reason of its perfect modesty. on leaving paris, sir philip had taken his wife straight home to his fine old manor in warwickshire. thelma's delight in her new abode was unbounded--the stately oaks that surrounded it,--the rose-gardens, the conservatories,--the grand rooms, with their fine tapestries, oak furniture, and rare pictures,--the splendid library, the long, lofty drawing-rooms, furnished and decorated after the style of louis quinze,--all filled her with a tender pride and wistful admiration. this was philip's home! and she was here to make it bright and glad for him!--she could imagine no fairer fate. the old servants of the place welcomed their new mistress with marked respect and evident astonishment at her beauty, though, when they knew her better, they marvelled still more at her exceeding gentleness and courtesy. the housekeeper, a stately white-haired dame, who had served the former lady errington, declared she was "an angel"--while the butler swore profoundly that "he knew what a queen was like at last!" the whole household was pervaded with an affectionate eagerness to please her, though, perhaps, the one most dazzled by her entrancing smile and sweet consideration for his comfort was edward neville, sir philip's private secretary and librarian,--a meek, mild-featured man of some five and forty years old, whose stooping shoulders, grizzled hair, and weak eyes gave him an appearance of much greater age. thelma was particularly kind to neville, having heard his history from her husband. it was brief and sad. he had married a pretty young girl whom he had found earning a bare subsistence as a singer in provincial music-halls,--loving her, he had pitied her unprotected state, and had rescued her from the life she led--but after six months of comparative happiness, she had suddenly deserted him, leaving no clue as to where or why she had gone. his grief for her loss, weighed heavily upon his mind--he brooded incessantly upon it--and though his profession was that of a music master and organist, he grew so abstracted and inattentive to the claims of the few pupils he had, that they fell away from him one by one--and, after a bit, he lost his post as organist to the village church as well. this smote him deeply, for he was passionately fond of music, and was, moreover, a fine player,--and it was at this stage of his misfortunes that he met by chance bruce-errington. philip, just then, was almost broken-hearted--his father and mother had died suddenly within a week of one another,--and he, finding the blank desolation of his home unbearable, was anxious to travel abroad for a time, so soon as he could find some responsible person in whose hands to leave the charge of the manor, with its invaluable books and pictures, during his absence. hearing neville's history through a mutual friend, he decided, with his usual characteristic impulse, that here was the very man for him--a gentleman by birth, rumored to be an excellent scholar,--and he at once offered him the post he had in view,--that of private secretary at a salary of pounds per annum. the astonished neville could not at first believe in his good fortune, and began to stammer forth his gratitude with trembling lips and moistening eyes,--but errington cut him short by declaring the whole thing settled, and desiring him to enter on his duties at once. he was forthwith installed in his position,--a highly enviable one for a man of his dreamy and meditative turn of mind. to him, literature and music were precious as air and light, he handled the rare volumes on the errington book-shelves with lingering tenderness, and often pored over some difficult manuscript, or dusty folio till long past midnight, almost forgetful of his griefs in the enchantment thus engendered. nor did he lack his supreme comforter, music,--there was a fine organ at the lower end of the long library, and seated at his beloved instrument, he wiled away many an hour,--steeping his soul in the divine and solemn melodies of palestrina and pergolesi, till the cruel sorrow that had darkened his life seemed nothing but a bad dream, and the face of his wife as he had first known it, fair, trustful, and plaintive, floated before his eyes unchanged, and arousing in him the old foolish throbbing emotions of rapture and passion that had gladdened the bygone days. he never lost the hope of meeting her again, and from time to time he renewed his search for her, though all uselessly--he studied the daily papers with an almost morbid anxiety lest he should see the notice of her death--and he would even await each post with a heart beating more rapidly than usual, in case there should be some letter from her, imploring forgiveness, explaining everything, and summoning him once more to her side. he found a true and keenly sympathizing friend in sir philip, to whom he became profoundly attached,--to satisfy his wishes, to forward his interests, to attend to his affairs with punctilious exactitude--all this gave neville the supremest happiness. he felt some slight doubt and anxiety, when he first received the sudden announcement of his patron's marriage,--but all forebodings as to the character and disposition of the new lady bruce-errington fled like mist before sunshine, when he saw thelma's fair face and felt her friendly hand-clasp. every morning on her way to the breakfast-room, she would look in at the door of his little study, which adjoined the library, and he learned to watch for the first glimmer of her dress, and to listen for her bright "good morning, mr. neville!" with a sensation of the keenest pleasure. it was a sort of benediction on the whole day. a proud man was he when she asked him to give her lessons on the organ,--and never did he forget the first time he heard her sing. he was playing an exquisite "ave maria," by stradella, and she, standing by her husband's side was listening, when she suddenly exclaimed-- "why, we used to sing that at arles!"--and her rich, round voice pealed forth clear, solemn, and sweet, following with pure steadiness the sustained notes of the organ. neville's heart thrilled,--he heard her with a sort of breathless wonder and rapture, and when she ceased, it seemed as though heaven had closed upon him. "one cannot praise such a voice as that!" he said. "it would be a kind of sacrilege. it is divine!" after this, many were the pleasant musical evenings they all passed together in the grand old library, and,--as mrs. rush-marvelle had so indignantly told her husband,--no visitors were invited to the manor during that winter. errington was perfectly happy--he wanted no one but his wife, and the idea of entertaining a party of guests who would most certainly interfere with his domestic enjoyment, seemed almost abhorrent to him. the county-people called,--but missed seeing thelma, for during the daytime she was always out with her husband taking long walks and rambling excursions to the different places hallowed by shakespeare's presence,--and when she, instructed by sir philip, called on the county-people, they also seemed to be never at home. and so, as yet, she had made no acquaintances, and now that she had been married eight months and had come to london, the same old story repeated itself. people called on her in the afternoon just at the time when she went out driving,--when she returned their visits, she, in her turn, found them absent. she did not as yet understand the mystery of having "a day" on which to receive visitors in shoals--a day on which to drink unlimited tea, talk platitudes, and utterly bored and exhausted at the end thereof--in fact, she did not see the necessity of knowing many people,--her husband was all-sufficient for her,--to be in his society was all she cared for. she left her card at different houses because he told her to do so, but this social duty amused her immensely. "it is like a game!" she declared, laughing, "some one comes and leaves these little cards which explain who _they_ are, on _me_,--then i go and leave _my_ little cards and yours, explaining who _we_ are on that some one--and we keep on doing this, yet we never see each other by any chance! it is so droll!" errington did not feel called upon to explain what was really the fact,--namely, that none of the ladies who had left cards on his wife had given her the option of their "at home" day on which to call,--he did not think it necessary to tell her what he knew very well, that his "set," both in county and town, had resolved to "snub" her in every petty fashion they could devise,--that he had already received several invitations which, as they did not include her, he had left unanswered,--and that the only house to which she had as yet been really asked in proper form was that of lady winsleigh. he was more amused than vexed at the resolute stand made by the so-called "leaders" of society against her, knowing as he did, most thoroughly, how she must conquer them all in the end. she had been seen nowhere as yet but in the park, and philip had good reason to be contented with the excitement her presence had created there,--but he was a little astonished at lady winsleigh's being the first to extend a formal welcome to his unknown bride. her behavior seemed to him a little suspicious,--for he certainly could not disguise from himself that she had at one time been most violently and recklessly in love with him. he recollected one or two most painful scenes he had had with her, in which he had endeavored to recall her to a sense of the duty she owed to her husband,--and his face often flushed with vexation when he thought of her wild and wicked abandonment of despair, her tears, her passion, and distracted, dishonoring words. yet she was the very woman who now came forward in the very front of society to receive his wife!--he could not quite understand it. after all, he was a man,--and the sundry artful tricks and wiles of fashionable ladies were, naturally, beyond him. thelma had never met lady winsleigh--not even for a passing glance in the park,--and when she received the invitation for the grand reception at winsleigh house, she accepted it, because her husband wished her so to do, not that she herself anticipated any particular pleasure from it. when the day came round at last she scarcely thought of it, till at the close of their pleasant breakfast _tête-à-tête_ described at the commencement of this chapter, philip suddenly said,--"by-the-by, thelma, i have sent to the bank for the errington diamonds. they'll be here presently. i want you to wear them to-night." thelma looked puzzled and inquiring. "to-night? what is it that we do? i forget! oh! now i know--it is to go to lady winsleigh. what will it be like, philip?" "well, there'll be heaps of people all cramming and crowding up the stairs and down them again,--you'll see all those women who have called on you, and you'll be introduced to them,--i dare say there'll be some bad music and an indigestible supper--and--and--that's all!" she laughed and shook her head reproachfully. "i cannot believe you, my naughty boy!" she said, rising from her seat, and kneeling beside him with arms round his neck, and soft eyes gazing lovingly into his. "you are nearly as bad as that very bad mr. lorimer, who will always see strange vexations in everything! i am quite sure lady winsleigh will not have crowds up and down her stairs,--that would be bad taste. and if she has music, it will be good--and she would not give her friends a supper to make them ill." philip did not answer. he was studying every delicate tint in his wife's dazzling complexion and seemed absorbed. "wear that one gown you got from worth," he said abruptly. "i like it--it suits you." "of course i will wear it if you wish," she answered, laughing still. "but why? what does it matter? you want me to be something very splendid in dress to-night?" philip drew a deep breath. "i want you to eclipse every woman in the room!" he said with remarkable emphasis. she grew rather pensive. "i do not think that would be pleasant," she said gravely. "besides, it is impossible. and it would be wrong to wish me to make every one else dissatisfied with themselves. that is not like you, my philip!" he touched with tender fingers the great glistening coil of hair that was twisted up at the top of her graceful head. "ah, darling! you don't know what a world it is, and what very queer people there are in it! never mind! . . . don't bother yourself about it. you'll have a good bird's-eye view of society tonight, and you shall tell me afterwards how you like it. i shall be curious to know what you think of lady winsleigh." "she is beautiful, is she not?" "well, she is considered so by most of her acquaintances, and by herself," he returned with a smile. "i do like to see very pretty faces," said thelma warmly; "it is as if one looked at pictures. since i have been in london i have seen so many of them--it is quite pleasant. yet none of these lovely ladies seem to me as if they were really happy or strong in health." "half of them have got nervous diseases and all sorts of things wrong with them from over-much tea and tight lacing," replied errington, "and the few who _are_ tolerably healthy are too bouncing by half, going in for hunting and such-like amusements till they grow blowsy and fat, and coarse as tom-boys or grooms. they can never hit the _juste milieu_. well!" and he rose from the breakfast-table. "i'll go and see neville and attend to business. we'll drive out this afternoon for some fresh air, and afterwards you must rest, my pet--for you'll find an 'at home' more tiring than climbing a mountain in norway." he kissed, and left her to her usual occupations, of which she had many, for she had taken great pains to learn all the details of the work in the errington establishment,--in fact, she went every morning to the little room where mistress parton, the housekeeper, received her with much respect and affection, and duly instructed her on every point of the domestic management and daily expenditure, so that she was thoroughly acquainted with everything that went on. she had very orderly quiet ways of her own, and though thoughtful for the comfort and well-being of the lowest servant in her household she very firmly checked all extravagance and waste, yet in such a gentle, unobtrusive manner that her control was scarcely felt--though her husband at once recognized it in the gradually decreasing weekly expenses, while to all appearance, things were the same as ever. she had plenty of clear, good common sense,--she saw no reason why she should waste her husband's wealth simply because it was abundant,--so that under her mild sway, sir philip found himself getting richer without any trouble on his own part. his house assumed an air of lighter and more tasteful elegance,--flowers, always arranged by thelma herself, adorned the rooms,--birds filled the great conservatory with their delicious warblings, and gradually that strange fairy sweet fabric known as "home" rose smilingly around him. formerly he had much disliked his stately town mansion--he had thought it dull and cold--almost gloomy,--but now he considered it charming, and wondered he had missed so many of its good points before. and when the evening for lady winsleigh's "crush" came,--he looked regretfully round the lovely luxurious drawing-room with its bright fire, deep easy chairs, books, and grand piano, and wished he and his wife could remain at home in peace. he glanced at his watch--it was ten o'clock. there was no hurry--he had not the least intention of arriving at winsleigh house too early. he knew what the effect of thelma's entrance would be--and he smiled as he thought of it. he was waiting for her now,--he himself was ready in full evening dress--and remarkably handsome he looked. he walked up and down restlessly for a minute or so,--then taking up a volume of keats, he threw himself into an easy chair and soon became absorbed. his eyes were still on the printed page, when a light touch on his shoulder startled him,--a soft, half-laughing voice inquired--"philip! do i please you?" he sprang up and faced her,--but for a moment could not speak. the perfection of her beauty had never ceased to arouse his wonder and passionate admiration,--but on this night, as she stood before him, arrayed in a simple, trailing robe of ivory-tinted velvet, with his family diamonds flashing in a tiara of light on her hair, glistening against the whiteness of her throat and rounded arms, she looked angelically lovely--so radiant, so royal, and withal so innocently happy, that, wistfully gazing at her, and thinking of the social clique into which she was about to make her entry, he wondered vaguely whether he was not wrong to take so pure and fair a creature among the false glitter and reckless hypocrisy of modern fashion and folly. and so he stood silent, till thelma grew anxious. "ah, you are not satisfied!" she said plaintively. "i am not as you wish! there is something wrong." he drew her closely into his arms, kissing her with an almost pathetic tenderness. "thelma, my love, my sweet one!" and his strong voice trembled. "you do not know--how should you? what i think of you! satisfied? pleased? good heavens--what little words those are to express my feelings! i can tell you how you look, for nothing can ever make _you_ vain. you are beautiful! . . . you are the most beautiful woman i have ever seen, and you look your very best tonight. but you are more than beautiful--you are good and pure and true, while society is--but why should i destroy your illusions? only, my wife,--we have been all in all to each other,--and now i have a foolish feeling as if things were going to be different--as if we should not be so much together--and i wish--i wish to god i could keep you all to myself without anybody's interference!" she looked at him in wonder, though she smiled. "but you have changed, my boy, since the morning," she said. "then you did wish me to be particular in dress,--and to wear your jewels, for this lady winsleigh. now your eyes are sad, and you seem as if you would rather not go at all. well, is it not easy to remain at home? i will take off these fine things, and we will sit together and read. shall it be so?" he laughed. "i believe you would do it if i asked you!" he said. "but, of course! i am quite happy alone with you. i care nothing for this party,--what is it to me if you do not wish to go?" he kissed her again. "thelma, don't spoil me too much! if you let me have my own way to such an extent, who knows what an awful domestic tyrant i may become! no, dear--we must go tonight--there's no help for it. you see we've accepted the invitation, and it's no use being churlish. besides, after all"--he gazed at her admiringly--"i want them to see my norwegian rose! come along! the carriage is waiting." they passed out into the hall, where britta was in attendance with a long cloak of pale-blue plush lined with white fur, in which she tenderly enveloped her beloved "fröken," her rosy face beaming with affectionate adoration as she glanced from the fair diamond-crowned head down to the point of a small pearl-embroidered shoe that peeped beneath the edge of the rich, sheeny white robe, and saw that nothing was lacking to the most perfect toilette that ever woman wore. "good-night, britta!" said thelma kindly. "you must not sit up for me. you will be tired." britta smiled--it was evident she meant to outwatch the stars, if necessary, rather than allow her mistress to be unattended on her return. but she said nothing--she waited at the door while philip assisted his wife into the carriage--and still stood musingly under the wide portico, after they had driven away. "hadn't you better come in, miss britta?" said the butler respectfully,--he had a great regard for her ladyship's little maid. britta, recalled to herself, started, turned, and re-entered the hall. "there will be many fine folks there to-night, i suppose?" she asked. the butler rubbed his nose perplexedly. "fine folks at winsleigh house? well, as far as clothes go, i dare say there will. but there'll be no one like her ladyship--no one!" and he shook his grey head emphatically. "of course not!" said britta, with a sort of triumphant defiance. "we know that very well, morris! there's no one like her ladyship anywhere in the wide world! but i tell you what--i think a great many people will be jealous of her." morris smiled. "you may take your oath of that, miss britta," he said with placid conviction. "jealous! jealous isn't the word for it! why," and he surveyed britta's youthful countenance with fatherly interest, "you're only a child as it were, and you don't know the world much. now, i've been five and twenty years in this family, and i knew sir philip's mother, the lady _eulalie_--he named his yacht after her. ah! she was a sweet creature--she came from austria, and she was as dark as her present ladyship is fair. wherever she went, i tell you, the women were ready to cry for spite and envy of her good looks--and they would say anything against her they could invent. that's the way they go on sometimes in society, you know." "as bad as in bosekop," murmured britta, more to herself than to him, "only london is a larger place." then raising her voice again, she said, "perhaps there will be some people wicked enough to hate her ladyship, morris?" "i shouldn't wonder," said morris philosophically. "i shouldn't wonder at all! there's a deal of hate about one way or another,--and if a lady is as beautiful as an angel, and cuts out everybody wherever she goes, why you can't expect the other ladies to be very fond of her. 'tisn't in human nature--at least not in feminine human nature. men don't care much about their looks, one way or the other, unless they're young chaps--then one has a little patience with them and they come all right." but britta had become meditative again. she went slowly up into her mistress's room and began arranging the few trifles that had been left in disorder. "just fancy!"--she said to herself--"some one may hate the fröken even in london just as they hated her in bosekop, because she is so unlike everybody else. _i_ shall keep my eyes open,--and _i_ shall soon find out any wickedness against her! my beautiful, dear darling! i believe the world is a cruel place after all,--but _she_ shan't be made unhappy in it, if i can help it!" and with this emphatic declaration, she kissed a little shoe of thelma's that she was just putting by--and, smoothing her curls, went down to her supper. chapter xx. "such people there are living and flourishing in the world,--faithless, hopeless, charityless,--let us have at them, dear friends, with might and main!"--thackeray. who can adequately describe the thrilling excitement attending an aristocratic "crush,"--an extensive, sweeping-off-of-old-cores "at home,"--that scene of bewildering confusion which might be appropriately set forth to the minds of the vulgar in the once-popular ditty, "such a getting-up-stairs i never did see!" who can paint in sufficiently brilliant colors the mere _outside_ of a house thus distinguished by this strange festivity, in which there is no actual pleasure,--this crowding of carriages--this shouting of small boys and policemen?--who can, in words, delineate the various phases of lofty indignation and offense on the countenances of pompous coachmen, forced into contention with vulgar but good-natured "cabbys"--for right of way? . . . who can sufficiently set forth the splendors of a striped awning avenue, lined on both sides with a collection of tropical verdure, hired for the occasion at so much per dozen pots, and illuminated with chinese lanterns! talk of orange groves in italy and the languid light of a southern moon! what are they compared to the marvels of striped awning? mere trees--mere moonlight--(poor products of nature!) do not excite either wonder or envy--but, strange to say, an awning avenue invariably does! as soon as it is erected in all its bland suggestiveness, no matter at what house, a small crowd of street-arabs and nursemaids collect to stare at it,--and when tired of staring, pass and repass under it with peculiar satisfaction; the beggar, starving for a crust, lingers doubtfully near it, and ventures to inquire of the influenza-smitten crossing-sweeper whether it is a wedding or a party? and if awning avenue means matrimony, the beggar waits to see the guests come out; if, on the contrary, it stands for some evening festivity, he goes, resolving to return at the appointed hour, and try if he cannot persuade one "swell" at least to throw him a penny for his night's supper. yes--a great many people endure sharp twinges of discontent at the sight of awning avenue,--people who can't afford to give parties, and who wish they could,--pretty, sweet girls who never go to a dance in their lives, and long with all their innocent hearts for a glimpse,--just _one_ glimpse!--of what seems to them inexhaustible, fairy-like delight,--lonely folks, who imagine in their simplicity that all who are privileged to pass between the lines of hired tropical foliage aforementioned, must perforce be the best and most united of friends--hungry men and women who picture, with watering mouths, the supper-table that lies _beyond_ the awning, laden with good things, of the very names of which they are hopelessly ignorant,--while now and then a stern, dark-browed thinker or two may stalk by and metaphorically shake his fist at all the waste, extravagance, useless luxury, humbug, and hypocrisy awning avenue usually symbolizes, and may mutter in his beard, like an old-fashioned tragedian, "a time _will_ come!" yes, sir thinker!--it will most undoubtedly--it _must_--but not through you--not through any mere human agency. modern society contains within itself the seed of its own destruction,--the most utter nihilist that ever swore deadly oath need but contain his soul in patience and allow the seed to ripen. for god's justice is as a circle that slowly surrounds an evil and as slowly closes on it with crushing and resistless force,--and feverish, fretting humanity, however nobly inspired, can do nothing either to hasten or retard the round, perfect, absolute and divine law. so let the babes of the world play on, and let us not frighten them with stories of earthquakes; they are miserable enough as it is, believe it!--their toys are so brittle, and snap in their feeble hands so easily, that one is inclined to pity them! and awning avenue, with its borrowed verdure and artificial light, is frequently erected for the use of some of the most wretched among the children of the earth,--children who have trifled with and lost everything,--love, honor, hope, and faith, and who are travelling rapidly to the grave with no consolation save a few handfuls, of base coin, which they must, perforce, leave behind them at the last. so it may be that the crippled crossing-sweeper outside winsleigh house is a very great deal happier than the master of that stately mansion. he has a new broom,--and master ernest winsleigh has given him two oranges, and a rather bulky stick of sugar candy. he is a _protégé_ of ernest's--that bright handsome boy considers it a "jolly shame"--to have only one leg,--and has said so with much emphasis,--and though the little sweeper himself has never regarded his affliction quite in that light, he is exceedingly grateful for the young gentleman's patronage and sympathy thus frankly expressed. and on this particular night of the grand reception he stands, leaning on his broom and munching his candy, a delighted spectator of the scene in park lane,--the splendid equipages, the prancing horses, the glittering liveries, the excited cabmen, the magnificent toilettes of the ladies, the solemn and resigned deportment of the gentlemen,--and he envies none of them--not he! why should he? his oranges are in his pocket--untouched as yet--and it is doubtful whether the crowding guests at the winsleigh supper-table shall find anything there to yield them such entire enjoyment as he will presently take in his humble yet refreshing desert. and he is pleased as a child at a pantomime--the winsleigh "at home" is a show that amuses him,--and he makes sundry remarks on "'im" and "'er" in a meditative _sotto voce_. he peeps up awning avenue heedless of the severe eye of the policeman on guard,--he sweeps the edge of the crimson felt foot-cloth tenderly with his broom,--and if he has a desire ungratified, it is that he might take a peep just for a minute inside the front door, and see how "they're all a'goin' it!" and how _are_ they a'goin' it! well, not very hilariously, if one may judge by the aspect of the gentlemen in the hall and on the stairs,--gentlemen of serious demeanor, who are leaning, as though exhausted, against the banisters, with a universal air of profound weariness and dissatisfaction. some of these are young fledglings of manhood,--callow birds who, though by no means innocent,--are more or less inexperienced,--and who have fluttered hither to the snare of lady winsleigh's "at home," half expecting to be allowed to make love to their hostess, and so have something to boast of afterwards,--others are of the middle-aged complacent type, who, though infinitely bored, have condescended to "look in" for ten minutes or so, to see if there are any pretty women worth the honor of their criticism--others again (and these are the most unfortunate) are the "nobodies"--or husbands, fathers, and brothers of "beauties," whom they have dutifully escorted to the scene of triumph, in which they, unlucky wights! are certainly not expected to share. a little desultory conversation goes on among these stair-loungers,--conversation mingled with much dreary yawning,--a trained opera-singer is shaking forth chromatic roulades and trills in the great drawing-room above,--there is an incessant stream of people coming and going,--there is the rustle of silk and satin,--perfume, shaken out of lace kerchiefs, and bouquets oppresses the warm air,--the heat is excessive,--and there is a never-ending monotonous hum of voices, only broken at rare intervals by the "society laugh"--that unmeaning giggle on the part of the women,--that strained "ha, ha, ha!" on the part of the men, which is but the faint ghostly echo of the farewell voice of true mirth. presently, out of the ladies' cloak-room come two fascinating figures--the one plump and matronly, with grey hair and a capacious neck glittering with diamonds,--the other a slim girl in pale pink, with dark eyes and a ravishing complexion, for whom the lazy gentlemen on the stairs make immediate and respectful room. "how d'ye do, mrs. van clupp?" says one of the loungers. "glad to see you, miss marcia!" says another, a sandy-haired young man, with a large gardenia in his button-hole, and a glass in his eye. at the sound of his voice miss marcia stops and regards him with a surprised smile. she is very pretty, is marcia,--bewitchingly pretty,--and she has an air of demure grace and modesty about her that is perfectly charming. why? oh, why does she not remain in that sylph-like, attitude of questioning silence? but she speaks--and the charm is broken. "waal now! dew tell!" she exclaims. "i thought yew were in pa-ar--is! ma, would yew have concluded to find lord algy here? this is _too_ lovely! if i'd known _yew_ were coming i'd have stopped at home--yes, i would--that's so!" and she nods her little head, crowned with its glossy braids of chestnut hair, in a very coquettish manner, while her mother, persistently beaming a stereotyped company smile on all around her, begins to ascend the stairs, beckoning her daughter to follow. marcia does so, and lord algernon masherville escorts her. "you--you didn't mean that!" he stammers rather feebly--"you--you don't mind my being here, do you? i'm--i'm _awfully_ glad to see you again, you know--and--er--all that sort of thing!" marcia darts a keen glance at him,--the glance of an observant, clear-headed magpie. "oh yes! i dare say!" she remarks with airy scorn. "s'pect _me_ to believe _yew_! waal! did yew have a good time in pa-ar--is?" "fairly so," answers lord masherville indifferently. "i only came back two days ago. lady winsleigh met me by chance at the theatre, and asked me to look in to-night for 'some fun' she said. have you any idea what she meant?" "of course!" says the fair new yorker, with a little nasal laugh,--"don't _yew_ know? we're all here to see the fisherwoman from the wilds of norway,--the creature sir philip errington married last year. i conclude she'll give us fits all round, don't yew?" lord masherville, at this, appears to hesitate. his eye-glass troubles him, and he fidgets with its black string. he is not intellectual--he is the most vacillating, most meek and timid of mortals--but he is a gentleman in his own poor fashion, and has a sort of fluttering chivalry about him, which, though feeble, is better than none. "i really cannot tell you, miss marcia," he replies almost nervously. "i hear--at the club,--that--that lady bruce-errington is a great beauty." "dew tell!" shrieks marcia, with a burst of laughter. "is she really though! but i guess her looks won't mend her grammar any way!" he makes no reply, as by this time they have reached the crowded drawing-room, where lady winsleigh, radiant in ruby velvet and rose-brilliants, stands receiving her guests, with a cool smile and nod for mere acquaintances,--and a meaning flash of her dark eyes for her intimates, and a general air of haughty insolence and perfect self-satisfaction pervading her from head to foot. close to her is her husband, grave, courtly, and kind to all comers, and fulfilling his duty as host to perfection,--still closer is sir francis lennox, who in the pauses of the incoming tide of guests finds occasion to whisper trifling nothings in her tiny white ear, and even once ventures to arrange more tastefully a falling cluster of pale roses that rests lightly on the brief shoulder-strap (called by courtesy a sleeve) which, keeps her ladyship's bodice in place. mrs. rush-marvelle is here too, in all her glory,--her good-humored countenance and small nose together beam with satisfaction,--her voluminous train of black satin showered with jet gets in everybody's way,--her ample bosom heaves like the billowy sea, somewhat above the boundary line of transparent lace that would fain restrain it--but in this particular she is prudence itself compared with her hostess, whose charms are exhibited with the unblushing frankness of a ballet-girl,--and whose example is followed, it must be confessed, by most of the women in the room. is mr. rush-marvelle here? oh yes--after some little trouble we discover him,--squeezed against the wall and barricaded by the grand piano,--in company with a large album, over which he pores, feigning an almost morbid interest in the portraits of persons he has never seen, and never will see. beside him is a melancholy short man with long hair and pimples, who surveys the increasing crowd in the room with an aspect that is almost tragic. once or twice he eyes mr. marvelle dubiously as though he would speak--and, finally, he _does_ speak, tapping that album-entranced gentleman on the arm with an energy that is somewhat startling. "it is to blay i am here!" he announces. "to blay ze biano! i am great artist!" he rolls his eyes wildly and with a sort of forced calmness proceeds to enumerate on his fingers--"baris, vienna, rome, berlin, st. betersburg--all know me! all resbect me! see!" and he holds out his button-hole in which there is a miniature red ribbon. "from ze emberor! kaiser wilhelm!" he exhibits a ring on his little finger. "from ze tsar!" another rapid movement and a pompous gold watch is thrust before the bewildered gaze of his listener. "from my bubils in baris! i am bianist--i am here to blay!" and raking his fingers through his long locks, he stares defiantly around him. mr. rush-marvelle is a little frightened. this is an eccentric personage--he must be soothed. evidently he must be soothed! "yes, yes, i quite understand!" he says, nodding persuasively at the excited genius. "you are here to play. exactly! yes, yes! we shall all have the pleasure of hearing you presently. delightful, i'm sure! you are the celebrated herr--?" "machtenklinken," adds the pianist haughtily. "ze celebrated machtenklinken!" "yes--oh--er,--yes!" and mr. marvelle grapples desperately with this terrible name. "oh--er--yes! i--er know you by reputation herr--er--machten--. oh, er--yes! pray excuse me for a moment!" and thankfully catching the commanding eye of his wife, he scrambles hastily away from the piano and joins her. she is talking to the van clupps, and she wants him to take away mr. van clupp, a white-headed, cunning-looking old man, for a little conversation, in order that she may be free to talk over certain naughty bits of scandal with mrs. van clupp and marcia. to-night there is no place to sit down in all the grand extent of the winsleigh drawing-rooms,--puffy old dowagers occupy the sofas, ottomans, and chairs, and the largest and most brilliant portion of the assemblage are standing, grinning into each other's faces with praiseworthy and polite pertinacity, and talking as rapidly as though their lives depended on how many words they could utter within the space of two minutes. mrs. rush-marvelle, mrs. van clupp and marcia make their way slowly through the gabbling, pushing, smirking crowd till they form a part of the little _coterie_ immediately round lady winsleigh, to whom, at the first opportunity, mrs. marvelle whispers-- "have they come?" "the modern paris and the new helen?" laughs lady clara, with a shrug of her snowy shoulders. "no, not yet. perhaps they won't turn up at all! marcia dear, you look _quite_ charming! where is lord algy?" "i guess he's not a thousand miles away!" returns marcia, with a knowing twinkle of her dark eyes. "he'll hang round here presently! why,--there's mr. lorimer worrying in at the doorway!" "worrying in" is scarcely the term to apply to the polite but determined manner in which george lorimer coolly elbows a passage among the heaving bare shoulders, backs, fat arms, and long trains that seriously obstruct his passage, but after some trouble he succeeds in his efforts to reach his fair hostess, who receives him with rather a supercilious uplifting of her delicate eyebrows. "dear me, mr. lorimer, you are quite a stranger!" she observes somewhat satirically. "we thought you had made up your mind to settle in norway!" "did you really, though!" and lorimer smiles languidly. "i wonder at that,--for you knew i came back from that region in the august of last year." "and since then i suppose you have played the hermit?" inquires her ladyship indifferently, unfurling her fan of ostrich feathers and waving it slowly to and fro. "by no means! i went off to scotland with a friend, alec macfarlane, and had some excellent shooting. then, as i never permit my venerable mamma to pass the winter in london, i took her to nice, from which delightful spot we returned three weeks ago." lady winsleigh laughs. "i did not ask you for a categorical explanation of your movements, mr. lorimer," she says lightly--"i'm sure i hope you enjoyed yourself?" he bows gravely. "thanks! yes,--strange to say, i _did_ manage to extract a little pleasure here and there out of the universal dryness of things." "have you seen your friend, sir philip, since he came to town?" asks mrs. rush-marvelle in her stately way. "several times. i have dined with him and lady errington frequently. i understand they are to be here to-night?" lady winsleigh fans herself a little more rapidly, and her full crimson lips tighten into a thin, malicious line. "well, i asked them, of course,--as a matter of form," she says carelessly,--"but i shall, on the whole, be rather relieved if they don't come." a curious, amused look comes over lorimer's face. "indeed! may i ask why?" "i should think the reason ought to be perfectly apparent to you"--and her ladyship's eyes flash angrily. "sir philip is all very well--he is by birth a gentleman,--but the person he has married is not a lady, and it is an exceedingly unpleasant duty for me to have to receive her." a feint tinge of color flushes lorimer's brow. "i think," he says slowly, "i think you will find yourself mistaken, lady winsleigh. i believe--" here he pauses, and mrs. rush-marvelle fixes him with a stony stare. "are we to understand that she is educated?" she inquires freezingly. "positively well-educated?" lorimer laughs. "not according to the standard of modern fashionable requirements!" he replies. mrs. marvelle sniffs the air portentously,--lady clara curls her lip. at that moment everybody makes respectful way for one of the most important guests of the evening--a broad-shouldered man of careless attire, rough hair, fine features, and keen, mischievous eyes--a man of whom many stand in wholesome awe,--beaufort lovelace, or as he is commonly called. "beau" lovelace, a brilliant novelist, critic, and pitiless satirist. for him society is a game,--a gay humming-top which he spins on the palm of his hand for his own private amusement. once a scribbler in an attic, subsisting bravely on bread and cheese and hope, he now lords it more than half the year in a palace of fairy-like beauty on the lago di como,--and he is precisely the same person who was formerly disdained and flouted by fair ladies because his clothes were poor and shabby, yet for whom they now practise all the arts known to their sex, in fruitless endeavors to charm and conciliate him. for he laughs at them and their pretty ways,--and his laughter is merciless. his arrowy glance discovers the "poudre de riz" on their blooming cheeks,--the carmine on their lips, and the "kohl" on their eyelashes. he knows purchased hair from the natural growth--and he has a cruel eye for discerning the artificial contour of a "made-up" figure. and like a merry satyr dancing in a legendary forest, he capers and gambols in the vast fields of humbug--all forms of it are attacked and ridiculed by his powerful and pungent pen,--he is a sort of english heine, gathering in rich and daily harvests from the never-perishing incessantly-growing crop of fools. and as he,--in all the wickedness of daring and superior intellect,--approaches, lady winsleigh draws herself up with the conscious air of a beauty who knows she is nearly perfect,--mrs. rush-marvelle makes a faint endeavor to settle the lace more modestly over her rebellious bosom,--marcia smiles coquettishly, and mrs. van clupp brings her diamond pendant (value, a thousand guineas) more prominently forward,--for as she thinks, poor ignorant soul! "wealth always impresses these literary men more than anything!" in one swift glance beau lovelace observes all these different movements,--and the inner fountain of his mirth begins to bubble. "what fun those van clupps are!" he thinks. "the old woman's got a diamond plaster on her neck! horrible taste! she's anxious to show how much she's worth, i suppose! mrs. marvelle wants a shawl, and lady clara a bodice. by jove! what sights the women do make of themselves!" but his face betrays none of these reflections,--its expression is one of polite gravity, though a sudden sweetness smooths it as he shakes hands with lord winsleigh and lorimer,--a sweetness that shows how remarkably handsome beau can look if he chooses. he rests one hand on lorimer's shoulder. "why, george, old boy, i thought you were playing the dutiful son at nice? don't tell me you've deserted the dear old lady! where is she? you know i've got to finish that argument with her about her beloved byron." lorimer laughs. "go and finish it when you like, beau," he answers. "my mother's all right. she's at home. you know she's always charmed to see you. she's delighted with that new book of yours." "is she? she finds pleasure in trifles then--" "oh no, mr. lovelace!" interrupts lady clara, with a winning glance. "you must not run yourself down! the book is exquisite! i got it at once from the library, and read every line of it!" "i am exceedingly flattered!" says lovelace, with a grave bow, though there is a little twinkling mockery in his glance. "when a lady so bewitching condescends to read what i have written, how can i express my emotion!" "the press is unanimous in its praise of you," remarks lord winsleigh cordially. "you are quite the lion of the day!" "oh quite!" agrees beau laughing. "and do i not roar 'as sweet as any nightingale'? but i say, where's the new beauty?" "i really do not know to whom you allude, mr. lovelace," replies lady winsleigh coldly. lorimer smiles and is silent. beau looks from one to the other amusedly. "perhaps i've made a mistake," he says, "but the duke of roxwell is responsible. he told me that if i came here to-night i should see one of the loveliest women living,--lady bruce-errington. he saw her in the park. i think _this_ gentleman"--indicating sir francis lennox, who bites his moustache vexedly--"said quite openly at the club last night that she _was_ the new beauty,--and that she would be here this evening." lady winsleigh darts a side glance at her "lennie" that is far from pleasant. "really it's perfectly absurd!" she says, with a scornful toss of her head. "we shall have housemaids and bar-girls accepted as 'quite the rage' next. i do not know sir philip's wife in the least,--i hear she was a common farmer's daughter. i certainly invited her to-night out of charity and kindness in order that she might get a little accustomed to society--for, of course, poor creature! entirely ignorant and uneducated as she is, everything will seem strange to her. but she has not come--" "sir philip and lady bruce-errington!" announces briggs at this juncture. there is a sudden hush--a movement of excitement,--and the groups near the door fall apart staring, and struck momentarily dumb with surprise, as a tall, radiant figure in dazzling white, with diamonds flashing on a glittering coil of gold hair, and wondrous sea-blue earnest eyes, passes through their midst with that royal free step and composed grace of bearing that might distinguish an empress of many nations. "good heavens! what a magnificent woman!" mutters beau lovelace--"venus realized!" lady winsleigh turns very pale,--she trembles and can scarcely regain her usual composure as sir philip, with a proud tenderness lighting up the depths of his hazel eyes, leads this vision of youth and perfect loveliness up to her, saying simply-- "lady winsleigh, allow me to introduce to you--my wife! thelma, this is lady winsleigh." there is a strange sensation in lady winsleigh's throat as though a very tight string were suddenly drawn round it to almost strangling point--and it is certain that she feels as though she must scream, hit somebody with her fan, and rush from the room in an undignified rage. but she chokes back these purely feminine emotions--she smiles and extends her jewelled hand. "so good of you to come to-night!" she says sweetly. "i have been longing to see you, lady errington! i dare say you know your husband is quite an old acquaintance of mine!" and a langourous glance, like fire seen through smoke, leaps from beneath her silky eyelashes at sir philip--but he sees it not--he is chatting and laughing gaily with lorimer and beau lovelace. "indeed, yes!" answers thelma, in that soft low voice of hers, which had such a thrilling richness within it--"and it is for that reason i am very glad to meet you. it is always pleasant for me to know my husband's friends." here she raises those marvellous, innocent eyes of hers and smiles;--why does lady winsleigh shrink from that frank and childlike openness of regard? why does she, for one brief moment, hate herself?--why does she so suddenly feel herself to be vile and beneath contempt? god only knows!--but the first genuine blush that has tinged her ladyship's cheek for many a long day, suddenly spreads a hot and embarrassing tide of crimson over the polished pallor of her satiny skin, and she says hurriedly-- "i must find you some people to talk to. this is my dear friend, mrs. rush-marvelle--i am sure you will like each other. let me introduce mrs. van clupp to you--mrs. van clupp, and miss van clupp!" the ladies bow stiffly while thelma responds to their prim salutation with easy grace. "sir francis lennox"--continues lady winsleigh, and there is something like a sneer in her smile, as that gentleman makes a deep and courtly reverence, with an unmistakable look of admiration in his sleepy tiger-brown eyes,--then she turns to lord winsleigh and adds in a casual way, "my husband!" lord winsleigh advances rather eagerly--there is a charm in the exquisite nobility of thelma's face that touches his heart and appeals to the chivalrous and poetical part of his nature. "sir philip and i have known each other for some years," he says, pressing her little fair hand cordially. "it is a great pleasure for me to see you to-night, lady errington--i realize how very much my friend deserves to be congratulated on his marriage!" thelma smiles. this little speech pleases her, but she does not accept the compliment implied to herself. "you are very kind, lord winsleigh"--she answers; "i am glad indeed that you like philip. i do think with you that he deserves every one's good wishes. it is my great desire to make him always happy." a brief shadow crosses lord winsleigh's thoughtful brow, and he studies her sweet eyes attentively. is she sincere? does she mean what she says? or is she, like others of her sex, merely playing a graceful part? a slight sigh escapes him,--absolute truth, innocent love, and stainless purity are written in such fair, clear lines on that perfect countenance that the mere idea of questioning her sincerity seems a sacrilege. "your desire is gratified, i am sure," he returns, and his voice is somewhat sad. "i never saw him looking so well. he seems in excellent spirits." "oh, for that!" and she laughs. "he is a very light-hearted boy! but once he would tell me very dreadful things about the world--how it was not at all worth living in--but i do think he must have been lonely. for he is very pleased with everything now, and finds no fault at all!" "i can quite understand that!" and lord winsleigh smiles, though that shadow of pain still rests on his brow. mrs. rush-marvelle and the van clupps are listening to the conversation with straining ears. what strange person is this? she does not talk bad grammar, though her manner of expressing herself is somewhat quaint and foreign. but she is babyish--perfectly babyish! the idea of any well-bred woman condescending to sing the praises of her own husband in public! absurd! "deserves every-one's good wishes!"--pooh! her "great desire is to make him always happy!"--what utter rubbish!--and he is a "light-hearted boy!" good gracious!--what next? marcia van clupp is strongly inclined to giggle, and mrs. van clupp is indignantly conscious that the errington diamonds far surpass her own, both for size and lustre. at that moment sir philip approaches his wife, with george lorimer and beau lovelace. thelma's smile at lorimer is the greeting of an old friend--a sun-bright glance that makes his heart beat a little quicker than usual. he watches her as she turns to be introduced to lovelace,--while miss van clupp, thinking of the relentless gift of satire with which that brilliant writer is endowed, looks out for "some fun"--for, as she confides in a low tone to mrs. marvelle--"she'll never know how to talk to that man!" "thelma," says sir philip, "this is the celebrated author, beaufort lovelace,--you have often heard me speak of him." she extends both her hands, and her eyes deepen and flash. "ah! you are one of those great men whom we all love and admire!" she says, with direct frankness,--and the cynical beau, who has never yet received so sincere a compliment, feels himself coloring like a school-girl. "i am so very proud to meet you! i have read your wonderful book, 'azaziel,' and it made me glad and sorry together. for why do you draw a noble example and yet say at the same time that it is impossible to follow it? because in one breath you inspire us to be good, and yet you tell us we shall never become so! that is not right,--is it?" beau meets her questioning glance with a grave smile. "it is most likely entirely wrong from _your_ point of view, lady errington," he said. "some day we will talk over the matter. you shall show me the error of my ways. perhaps you will put life, and the troublesome business of living, in quite a new light for me! you see, we novelists have an unfortunate trick of looking at the worst or most ludicrous side of everything--we can't help it! so many apparently lofty and pathetic tragedies turn out, on close examination, to be the meanest and most miserable of farces,--it's no good making them out to be grand greek poems when they are only base doggerel rhymes. besides, it's the fashion nowadays to be _chiffonniers_ in literature--to pick up the rags of life and sort them in all their uncomeliness before the morbid eyes of the public. what's the use of spending thought and care on the manufacture of a jewelled diadem, and offering it to the people on a velvet cushion, when they prefer an _olla-podrida_ of cast-off clothing, dried bones and candle-ends? in brief, what would it avail to write as grandly as shakespeare or scott, when society clamors for zola and others of his school?" there was a little group round them by this time,--men generally collected wherever beau lovelace aired his opinions,--and a double attraction drew them together now in the person of the lovely woman to whom he was holding forth. marcia van clupp stared mightily--surely the norwegian peasant would not understand beau's similes,--for they were certainly incomprehensible to marcia. as for his last remark--why! she had read all zola's novels in the secrecy of her own room, and had gloated over them;--no words could describe her intense admiration of books that were so indelicately realistic! "he is jealous of other writers, i suppose," she thought; "these literary people hate each other like poison." meanwhile thelma's blue eyes looked puzzled. "i do not know that name," she said. "zola!--what is he? he cannot be great. shakespeare i know,--he is the glory of the world, of course; i think him as noble as homer. then for walter scott--i love all his beautiful stories--i have read them many, many times, nearly as often as i have read homer and the norse sagas. and the world must surely love such writings--or how should they last so long?" she laughed and shook her bright head archly. "_chiffonnier! point du tout! monsieur, les divines pensées que vous avez donné au monde ne sont pas des chiffons._" beau smiled again, and offered her his arm. "let me find you a chair!" he said. "it will be rather a difficult matter,--still i can but try. you will be fatigued if you stand too long." and he moved through the swaying crowd, with her little gloved hand resting lightly on his coat-sleeve,--while marcia van clupp and her mother exchanged looks of wonder and dismay. the "fisherwoman" could speak french,--moreover, she could speak it with a wonderfully soft and perfect accent,--the "person" had studied homer and shakespeare, and was conversant with the best literature,--and, bitterest sting of all, the "peasant" could give every woman in the room a lesson in deportment, grace, and perfect taste in dress. every costume looked tawdry beside her richly flowing velvet draperies--every low bodice became indecent compared with the modesty of that small square opening at thelma's white throat--an opening just sufficient to display her collar of diamonds--and every figure seemed either dumpy and awkward, too big or too fat, or too lean and too lanky--when brought into contrast with her statuesque outlines. the die was cast,--the authority of beau lovelace was nearly supreme in fashionable and artistic circles, and from the moment he was seen devoting his attention to the "new beauty," excited whispers began to flit from mouth to mouth,--"she will be the rage this season!"--"we must ask her to come to us!"--"_do_ ask lady winsleigh to introduce us!"--"she _must_ come to _our_ house!" and so on. and lady winsleigh was neither blind nor deaf--she saw and heard plainly enough that her reign was over, and in her secret soul she was furious. the "common farmer's daughter" was neither vulgar nor uneducated--and she was surpassingly lovely--even lady winsleigh could not deny so plain and absolute a fact. but her ladyship was a woman of the world, and she perceived at once that thelma was not. philip had married a creature with the bodily loveliness of a goddess and the innocent soul of a child--and it was just that child-like, pure soul looking serenely out of thelma's eyes that had brought the long-forgotten blush of shame to clara winsleigh's cheek. but that feeling of self-contempt soon passed--she was no better and no worse than other women of her set, she thought--after all, what had she to be ashamed of? nothing, except--except--perhaps, her "little affair" with "lennie." a new emotion now stirred her blood--one of malice and hatred, mingled with a sense of outraged love and ungratified passion--for she still admired philip to a foolish excess. her dark eyes flashed scornfully as she noted the attitude of sir francis lennox,--he was leaning against the marble mantel-piece, stroking his moustache with one hand, absorbed in watching thelma, who, seated in an easy chair which beau lovelace had found for her, was talking and laughing gaily with those immediately around her, a group which increased in size every moment, and in which the men were most predominant. "fool!" muttered lady winsleigh to herself, apostrophizing "lennie" in this uncomplimentary manner. "fool! i wonder if he thinks i care! he may play hired lacquey to all the women in london if he likes! he looks a prig compared to philip!" and her gaze wandered,--philip was standing by his wife, engaged in an animated conversation with lord winsleigh. they were all near the grand piano--and lady clara, smoothing her vexed brow, swept her ruby velvets gracefully up to that quarter of the room. before she could speak, the celebrated herr machtenklinken confronted her with some sternness. "your ladyshib vill do me ze kindness to remember," he said, loftily, "zat i am here to blay! zere has been no obbortunity--ze biano could not make itself to be heard in zis fery moch noise. it is bossible your ladyshib shall require not ze music zis efening? in zat case i shall take my fery goot leave." lady winsleigh raised her eyes with much superciliousness. "as you please," she said coolly. "if _you_ are so indifferent to your advantages--then all i can say is, so am i! you are, perhaps, known on the continent, herr machtenklinken,--but not here--and i think you ought to be more grateful for my influence." so saying, she passed on, leaving the luckless pianist in a state of the greatest indignation. "_gott in himmel!_" he gasped, in a sort of infuriated sotto voce. "ze emberor himself would not have speak to me so! i come here as a favor--her ladyshib do not offer me one _pfenning_,--ach! ze music is not for such beoble! i shall brefer to blay to bigs! zere is no art in zis country!--" and he began to make his way out of the room, when he was overtaken by beau lovelace, who had followed him in haste. "where are you off to, hermann?" he asked good-naturedly. "we want you to play. there is a lady here who heard you in paris quite recently--she admires you immensely. won't you come and be introduced to her?" herr machtenklinken paused, and a smile softened his hitherto angry countenance. "you are fery goot, mr. lofelace," he remarked--"and i would do moch for _you_--but her ladyshib understands me not--she has offend me--it is better i should take my leave." "oh, bother her ladyship!" said beau lightly. "come along, and give us something in your best style." so saying, he led the half-reluctant artist back to the piano, where he was introduced to thelma, who gave him so sweet a smile that he was fairly dazzled. "it is you who play schumann so beautifully," she said. "my husband and i heard you at one of lamoureux's concerts in paris. i fear," and she looked wistfully at him, "that you would think it very rude and selfish of me if i asked you to play just one little piece? because, of course, you are here to enjoy yourself, and talk to your friends, and it seems unkind to take you away from them!" a strange moisture dimmed the poor german's eyes. this was the first time in england that the "celebrate" had been treated as a friend and a gentleman. up to this moment, at all the "at homes" and "assemblies," he had not been considered as a guest at all,--he was an "artist," "a good pianist,"--"a man who had played before the emperor of germany"--and he was expected to perform for nothing, and be grateful for the "influence" exercised on his behalf--influence which as yet had not put one single extra guinea in his pocket. now, here was a great lady almost apologizing for asking him to play, lest it should take him away from his "friends"! his heart swelled with emotion and gratitude--the poor fellow had no "friends" in london, except beau lovelace, who was kind to him, but who had no power in the musical world,--and, as thelma's gentle voice addressed him, he could have knelt and kissed her little shoe for her sweet courtesy and kindness. "miladi," he said, with a profound reverence, "i will blay for you with bleasure,--it will be a joy for ze music to make itself beautiful for you!" and with this fantastic attempt at a compliment, he seated himself at the instrument and struck a crashing chord to command silence. the hum of conversation grew louder than ever--and to thelma's surprise lady winsleigh seated herself by her and began to converse. herr machtenklinken struck another chord,--in vain! the deafening clamor of tongues continued, and lady winsleigh asked thelma with much seeming interest if the scenery was very romantic in norway? the girl colored deeply, and after a little hesitation, said-- "excuse me,--i would rather not speak till the music is over. it is impossible for a great musician to think his thoughts out properly unless there is silence. would it not be better to ask every one to leave off talking while this gentleman plays?" clara winsleigh looked amused. "my dear, you don't know them," she said carelessly. "they would think me mad to propose such a thing! there are always a few who listen." once more the pianist poised his hands over the keys of the instrument,--thelma looked a little troubled and grieved. beau lovelace saw it, and acting on a sudden impulse, turned towards the chattering crowds, and, holding up his hand, called, "silence, please!" there was an astonished hush. beau laughed. "we want to hear some music," he said, with the utmost coolness. "conversation can be continued afterwards." he then nodded cheerfully towards herr machtenklinken, who, inspired by this open encouragement, started off like a race-horse into one of the exquisite rambling preludes of chopin. gradually, as he played, his plain face took upon itself a noble, thoughtful, rapt expression,--his wild eyes softened,--his furrowed, frowning brow smoothed,--and, meeting the grave, rare blue eyes of thelma, he smiled. his touch grew more and more delicate and tender--from the prelude he wandered into a nocturne of plaintive and exceeding melancholy, which he played with thrilling and exquisite pathos--anon, he glided into one of those dreamily joyous yet sorrowful mazurkas, that remind one of bright flowers growing in wild luxuriance over lonely and forsaken graves. the "celebrate" had reason to boast of himself--he was a perfect master of the instrument,--and as his fingers closed on the final chord, a hearty burst of applause rewarded his efforts, led by lovelace and lorimer. he responded by the usual bow,--but his real gratitude was all for thelma. for her he had played his best--and he had seen tears in her lovely eyes. he felt as proud of her appreciation as of the ring he had received from the tsar,--and bent low over the fair hand she extended to him. "you must be very happy," she said, "to feel all those lovely sounds in your heart! i hope i shall see and hear you again some day,--i thank you so very much for the pleasure you have given me!" lady winsleigh said nothing--and she listened to thelma's words with a sort of contempt. "is the girl half-witted?" she thought. "she must be, or she would not be so absurdly enthusiastic! the man plays well,--but it is his profession to play well--it's no good praising these sort of people,--they are never grateful, and they always impose upon you." aloud she asked sir philip-- "does lady errington play?" "a little," he answered. "she sings." at once there was a chorus of inanely polite voices round the piano, "oh, _do_ sing, lady errington! please, give us one song!" and sir francis lennox, sauntering up, fixed his languorous gaze on thelma's face, murmuring, "you will not be so cruel as to refuse us such delight?" "but, of course not!" answered the girl, greatly surprised at all these unnecessary entreaties. "i am always pleased to sing." and she drew off her long loose gloves and seated herself at the piano without the least affectation of reluctance. then, glancing at her husband with a bright smile, she asked, "what song do you think will be best, philip?" "one of those old norse mountain-songs," he answered. she played a soft minor prelude--there was not a sound in the room now--everybody pressed towards the piano, staring with a curious fascination at her beautiful face and diamond-crowned hair. one moment--and her voice, in all its passionate, glorious fullness, rang out with a fresh vibrating tone that thrilled to the very heart--and the foolish crowd that gaped and listened was speechless, motionless, astonished, and bewildered. a norse mountain-song was it? how strange, and grand, and wild! george lorimer stood apart--his eyes ached with restrained tears. he knew the melody well--and up before him rose the dear solemnity of the altenguard hills, the glittering expanse of the fjord, the dear old farmhouse behind its cluster of pines. again he saw thelma as he had seen her first--clad in her plain white gown, spinning in the dark embrasure of the rose-wreathed window--again the words of the self-destroyed sigurd came back to his recollection, "good things may come for others--but for you the heavens are empty!" he looked at her now,--philip's wife--in all the splendor of her rich attire;--she was lovelier than ever, and her sweet nature was as yet unspoilt by all the wealth and luxury around her. "good god! what an _inferno_ she has come into!" he thought vaguely. "how will she stand these people when she gets to know them? the van clupps, the rush-marvelles, and others like them,--and as for clara winsleigh--" he turned to study her ladyship attentively. she was sitting quite close to the piano--her eyes were cast down, but the rubies on her bosom heaved quickly and restlessly, and she furled and unfurled her fan impatiently. "i shouldn't wonder," he went on meditating gravely, "if she doesn't try and make some mischief somehow. she looks it." at that moment thelma ceased singing, and the room rang with applause. herr machtenklinken was overcome with admiration. "it is a voice of heaven!" he said in a rapture. the fair singer was surrounded with people. "i hope," said mrs. van clupp, with her usual ill-bred eagerness to ingratiate herself with the titled and wealthy, "i hope you will come and see me, lady errington? i am at home every friday evening to my friends." "oh yes," said thelma, simply. "but i am not your friend yet! when we do know each other better i will come. we shall meet each other many times first,--and then you will see if you like me to be your friend. is it not so?" a scarcely concealed smile reflected itself on the faces of all who heard this naïve, but indefinite acceptance of mrs. van clupp's invitation, while mrs. van clupp herself was somewhat mortified, and knew not what to answer. this norwegian girl was evidently quite ignorant of the usages of polite society, or she would at once have recognized the fact that an "at home" had nothing whatsoever to do with the obligations of friendship--besides, as far as friendship was concerned, had not mrs. van clupp tabooed several of her own blood-relations and former intimate acquaintances? . . . for the very sensible reason that while she had grown richer, they had grown poorer. but now mrs. rush-marvelle sailed up in all her glory, with her good-natured smile and matronly air. she was a privileged person, and she put her arm round thelma's waist. "you must come to me, my dear," she said with real kindness--her motherly heart had warmed to the girl's beauty and innocence,--"i knew philip when he was quite a boy. he will tell you what a dreadfully old woman i am! you must try to like me for his sake." thelma smiled radiantly. "i always wish to like philip's friends," she said frankly. "i do hope i shall please you!" a pang of remorse smote mrs. rush-marvelle's heart as she remembered how loth she had been to meet philip's "peasant" wife,--she hesitated,--then, yielding to her warm impulse, drew the girl closer and kissed her fair rose-tinted cheek. "you please everybody, my child," she said honestly. "philip is a lucky man! now i'll say good night, for it is getting late,--i'll write to you to-morrow and fix a day for you to come and lunch with me." "but you must also come and see philip," returned thelma, pressing her hand. "so i will--so i will!" and mrs. rush-marvelle nodded beamingly, and made her way up to lady winsleigh, saying, "bye-bye, clara! thanks for a most charming evening!" clara pouted. "going already, mimsey?" she queried,--then, in a lower tone, she said, "well! what do you think of her?" "a beautiful child--no more!" answered mrs. marvelle,--then, studying with some gravity the brilliant brunette face before her, she added in a whisper, "leave her alone, clara,--don't make her miserable! you know what i mean! it wouldn't take much to break her heart." clara laughed harshly and played with her fan. "dear me, mimsey! . . . you are perfectly outrageous! do you think i'm an ogress ready to eat her up? on the contrary, i mean to be a friend to her." mrs. marvelle still looked grave. "i'm glad to hear it," she said; "only some friends are worse than declared enemies." lady winsleigh shrugged her shoulders. "go along, mimsey,--go home to bed!" she exclaimed impatiently. "you are _insensé_! i hate sentimental philosophy and copy-book platitudes!" she laughed again and folded her hands with an air of mock penitence, "there! i didn't mean to be rude! good-night, dear old darling!" "good-night, clara!" and mrs. marvelle, summoning her timid husband from some far corner, where he had remained in hiding, took her departure with much stateliness. a great many people were going down to supper by this time, but sir philip was tired of the heat and glare and noise, and whispered as much to thelma, who at once advanced to bid her hostess farewell. "won't you have some supper?" inquired her ladyship. "don't go yet!" but thelma was determined not to detain her husband a moment longer than he wished--so lady winsleigh, seeing remonstrances were of no avail, bade them both an effusive good-night. "we must see a great deal of each other!" she said, pressing thelma's hands warmly in her own: "i hope we shall be quite dear friends!" "thank you!" said thelma, "i do hope so too, if you wish it so much. good-night, lord winsleigh!" "let me escort you to your carriage," said her noble host, at once offering her his arm. "and allow me to follow," added beau lovelace, slipping his arm through errington's, to whom he whispered, "how dare you, sir! how dare you be such a provokingly happy man in this miserable old world?" errington laughed--and the little group had just reached the door of the drawing-room when thelma suddenly turned with a look of inquiry in her eyes. "where is mr. lorimer?" she said. "i have forgotten to say good-night to him, philip." "here i am, lady errington," and lorimer sauntered forward with rather a forced smile,--a smile which altogether vanished, leaving his face strangely pale, as she stretched out her hand to him, and said laughingly-- "you bad mr. lorimer! where were you? you know it would make me quite unhappy not to wish you good-night. ah, you are a very naughty brother!" "come home with us, george," said sir philip eagerly. "do, there's a good fellow!" "i can't, phil!" answered lorimer, almost pathetically. "i can't to-night--indeed, i can't! don't ask me!" and he wrung his friend's hand hard,--and then bravely met thelma's bright glance. "forgive me!" he said to her. "i know i ought to have presented myself before--i'm a dreadfully lazy fellow, you know! good-night!" thelma regarded him steadfastly. "you look,--what is it you call yourself sometimes--_seedy_?" she observed. "not well at all. mind you come to us to-morrow!" he promised--and then accompanied them down to their carriage--he and beau lovelace assisting to cover thelma with her fur cloak, and being the last to shake hands with sir philip as he sprang in beside his wife, and called to the coachman "home!" the magic word seemed to effect the horses, for they started at a brisk trot, and within a couple of minutes the carriage was out of sight. it was a warm star-lit evening,--and as lorimer and lovelace re-entered winsleigh house, beau stole a side-glance at his silent companion. "a plucky fellow!" he mused; "i should say he'd die game. tortures won't wring his secret out of him." aloud he said, "i say, haven't we had enough of this? don't let us sup here--nothing but unsubstantial pastry and claretcup--the latter abominable mixture would kill me. come on to the club, will you?" lorimer gladly assented--they got their over-coats from the officious briggs, tipped him handsomely, and departed arm in arm. the last glimpse they caught of the winsleigh festivities was marcia van clupp sitting on the stairs, polishing off with much gusto the wing and half-breast of a capon,--while the mild lord masherville stood on the step just above her, consoling his appetite with a spoonful of tepid yellow jelly. he had not been able to secure any capon for himself--he had been frightened away by the warning cry of "ladies first!" shouted forth by a fat gentleman, who was on guard at the head of the supper-table, and who had already secreted five plates of different edibles for his own consumption, in a neat corner behind the window-curtains. meanwhile, sir philip bruce-errington, proud, happy, and triumphant, drew his wife into a close embrace as they drove home together, and said, "you were the queen of the evening, my thelma! have you enjoyed yourself?" "oh, i do not call that enjoyment!" she declared. "how is it possible to enjoy anything among so many strangers?" "well, what is it?" he asked laughingly. she laughed also. "i do not know indeed what it is!" she said. "i have never been to anything like it before. it did seem to me as if all the people were on show for some reason or other. and the gentlemen did look very tired--there was nothing for them to do. even you, my boy! you made several very big yawns! did you know that?" philip laughed more than ever. "i didn't know it, my pet!" he answered; "but i'm not surprised. big yawns are the invariable result of an 'at home.' do you like beau lovelace?" "very much," she answered readily. "but, philip, i should not like to have so many friends as lady winsleigh. i thought friends were rare?" "so they are! she doesn't care for these people a bit. they are mere acquaintances." "whom does she care for then?" asked thelma suddenly. "of course i mean after her husband. naturally she loves him best." "naturally," and philip paused, adding, "she has her son--ernest--he's a fine bright boy--he was not there to-night. you must see him some day. then i think her favorite friend is mrs. rush-marvelle." "i do like that lady too," said thelma. "she spoke very kindly to me and kissed me." "did she really!" and philip smiled. "i think she was more to be congratulated on taking the kiss than you in receiving it! but she's not a bad old soul,--only a little too fond of money. but, thelma, whom do _you_ care for most? you did tell me once, but i forget!" she turned her lovely face and star-like eyes upon him, and, meeting his laughing look, she smiled. "how often must i tell you!" she murmured softly. "i do think you will never tire of hearing! you know that it is you for whom i care most, and that all the world would be empty to me without you! oh, my husband--my darling! do not make me try to tell you how much i love you! i cannot--my heart is too full!" the rest of their drive homeward was very quiet--there are times when silence is more eloquent than speech. chapter xxi. "a small cloud, so slight as to be a mere speck on the fair blue sky, was all the warning we received."--pliny. after that evening great changes came into thelma's before peaceful life. she had conquered her enemies, or so it seemed,--society threw down all its barricades and rushed to meet her with open arms. invitations crowded upon her,--often she grew tired and bewildered in the multiplicity of them all. london life wearied her,--she preferred the embowered seclusion of errington manor, the dear old house in green-wooded warwickshire. but the "season" claimed her,--its frothy gaieties were deemed incomplete without her--no "at home" was considered quite "the" thing unless she was present. she became the centre of a large and ever-widening social circle,--painters, poets, novelists, wits savants, and celebrities of high distinction crowded her rooms, striving to entertain her as well as themselves with that inane small talk and gossip too often practiced by the wisest among us,--and thus surrounded, she began to learn many puzzling and painful things of which in her old norwegian life, she had been happily ignorant. for instance, she had once imagined that all the men and women of culture who followed the higher professions must perforce be a sort of "joyous fraternity," superior to other mortals not so gifted,--and, under this erroneous impression, she was at first eager to know some of the so-called "great" people who had distinguished themselves in literature or the fine arts. she had fancied that they must of necessity be all refined, sympathetic, large-hearted, and noble-minded--alas! how grievously was she disappointed! she found, to her sorrow, that the tree of modern art bore but few wholesome roses and many cankered buds--that the "joyous fraternity" were not joyous at all--but, on the contrary, inclined to dyspepsia and discontentment. she found that even poets, whom she had fondly deemed were the angel-guides among the children of this earth,--were most of them painfully conceited, selfish in aim and limited in thought,--moreover, that they were often so empty of all true inspiration, that they were actually able to hate and envy one another with a sort of womanish spite and temper,--that novelists, professing to be in sympathy with the heart of humanity, were no sooner brought into contact one with another, than they plainly showed by look, voice, and manner, the contempt they entertained for each other's work,--that men of science were never so happy as when trying to upset each other's theories;--that men of religious combativeness were always on the alert to destroy each other's creeds,--and that, in short, there was a very general tendency to mean jealousies, miserable heart-burnings and utter weariness all round. on one occasion, she, in the sweetest simplicity, invited two lady authoresses of note to meet at one of her "at homes,". . . she welcomed both the masculine-looking ladies with a radiant smile, and introduced them, saying gently,--"you will be so pleased to know each other!" but the stony stare, stiff nod, portentous sniff, and scornful smile with which these two eminent females exchanged cold greetings, were enough to daunt the most sympathetic hostess that ever lived--and when they at once retired to different corners of the room and sat apart with their backs turned to one another for the remainder of the evening, their attitude was so uncompromising that it was no wonder the gentle thelma felt quite dismayed and wretched at the utter failure of the _rencontre_. "they would _not_ be sociable!" she afterwards complained to lady winsleigh. "they _tried_ to be as rude to each other as they could!" lady winsleigh laughed. "of course!" she said. "what else _did_ you expect! but if you want some fun, ask a young, pretty, and brilliant authoress (there are a few such) to meet an old, ugly and dowdy one (and there are many such), and watch the dowdy one's face! it will be a delicious study of expression, i assure you!" but thelma would not try this delicate experiment,--in fact, she began rather to avoid literary people, with the exception of beau lovelace. his was a genial, sympathetic nature, and, moreover, he had a winning charm of manner which few could resist. he was not a bookworm,--he was not, strictly speaking, a literary man,--and he was entirely indifferent to public praise or blame. he was, as he himself expressed it, "a servant and worshipper of literature," and there is a wide gulf of difference between one who serves literature for its own sake and one who uses it basely as a tool to serve himself. but in all her new and varied experiences, perhaps thelma was most completely bewildered by the women she met. her simple norse beliefs in the purity and gentleness of womanhood were startled and outraged,--she could not understand london ladies at all. some of them seemed to have no idea beyond dress and show,--others looked upon their husbands, the lawful protectors of their name and fame, with easy indifference, as though they were mere bits of household furniture,--others, having nothing better to do, "went in" for spiritualism,--the low spiritualism that manifests itself in the turning of tables and moving of side-boards--not the higher spiritualism of an improved, perfected, and saint-like way of life--and these argued wildly on the theory of matter passing through matter, to the extent of declaring themselves able to send a letter or box through the wall without making a hole in it,--and this with such obstinate gravity as made thelma fear for their reason. then there were the women-atheists,--creatures who had voluntarily crushed all the sweetness of the sex within them--foolish human flowers without fragrance, that persistently turned away their faces from the sunlight and denied its existence, preferring to wither, profitless, on the dry stalk of their own theory;--there were the "platform-women," unnatural products of an unnatural age,--there were the great ladies of the aristocracy who turned with scorn from a case of real necessity, and yet spent hundreds of pounds on private theatricals wherein they might have the chance of displaying themselves in extravagant costumes,--and there were the "professional" beauties, who, if suddenly deprived of elegant attire and face-cosmetics, turned out to be no beauties at all, but very ordinary, unintelligent persons. "what is the exact meaning of the term, 'professional beauty'?" thelma had asked beau lovelace on one occasion. "i suppose it is some very poor beautiful woman, who takes money for showing herself to the public, and having her portraits sold in the shops? and who is it that pays her?" lovelace broke into a laugh. "upon my word, lady errington,--you have put the matter in a most original but indubitably correct light! who pays the 'professional beauty,' you ask? well, in the case of mrs. smith-gresham, whom you met the other day, it is a certain duke who pays her to the tune of several thousands a year. when he gets tired of her, or she of him, she'll find somebody else--or perhaps she'll go on the stage and swell the list of bad amateurs. she'll get on somehow, as long as she can find a fool ready to settle her dressmaker's bill." "i do not understand!" said thelma,--and her fair brows drew together in that pained grave look that was becoming rather frequent with her now. and she began to ask fewer questions concerning the various strange phases of social life that puzzled her,--why, for instance, religious theorists made so little practical use of their theories,--why there were cloudy-eyed eccentrics who admired the faulty drawing of watts, and the common-place sentence-writing of walt whitman,--why members of parliament talked so much and did so little,--why new poets, however nobly inspired, were never accepted unless they had influential friends on the press,--why painters always married their models or their cooks, and got heartily ashamed of them afterwards,--and why people all round said so many things they did not mean. and confused by the general insincerity, she clung,--poor child!--to lady winsleigh, who had the tact to seem what she was not,--and the cleverness to probe into thelma's nature and find out how translucently clear and pure it was--a perfect well of sweet water, into which one drop of poison, or better still, several drops, gradually and insidiously instilled, might in time taint its flavor and darken its brightness. for if a woman have an innocent, unsuspecting soul as delicate as the curled cup of a nile lily, the more easily will it droop and wither in the heated grasp of a careless, cruel hand. and to this flower-crushing task lady winsleigh set herself,--partly for malice pretense against errington, whose coldness to herself in past days had wounded her vanity, and partly for private jealousy of thelma's beauty and attractiveness. within a short time she had completely won the girl's confidence and affection,--sir philip, forgetting his former suspicions of her, was touched and disarmed by the attachment and admiration she openly displayed towards his young wife,--she and thelma were constantly seen together, and mrs. rush-marvelle, far-sighted as she generally was, often sighed doubtfully and rubbed her nose in perplexity as she confessed she "couldn't quite understand clara." but mrs. rush-marvelle had her hands full of other matters,--she was aiding and abetting marcia van clupp to set traps for that mild mouse lord masherville,--and she was too much absorbed in this difficult and delicate business to attend to anything else just then. otherwise, it is possible she might have scented danger for thelma's peace of mind, and being good-natured, might have warded it off before it approached too closely,--but, like policeman who are never within call when wanted, so friends are seldom at hand when their influence might be of real benefit. the van clupps were people thelma could not get on with at all--she tried to do so because mrs. rush-marvelle had assured her they were "charming"--and she liked mrs. marvelle sufficiently well to be willing to please her. but, in truth, these rich and vulgar yankees seemed to her mind less to be esteemed than the peasants of the altenfjord, who in many instances possessed finer tact and breeding than old van clupp, the man of many dollars, whose father had been nothing but a low navvy, but of whom he spoke now with smirking pride as a real descendant of the pilgrim fathers. an odd thing it is, by the way, how fond some americans are of tracing back their ancestry to these virtuous old gentlemen! the van clupps were of course not the best types of their country--they were of that class who, because they have money, measure everything by the money-standard, and hold even a noble poverty in utter contempt. poor van clupp! it was sometimes pitiable to see him trying to be a gentleman--"going in" for "style"--to an excess that was ludicrous,--cramming his house with expensive furniture like an upholsterer's show-room,--drinking his tea out of pure sevres, with a lofty ignorance of its beauty and value,--dressing his wife and daughter like shilling fashion-plates, and having his portrait taken in precisely the same attitude as that assumed by the duke of wrigglesbury when his grace sat to the same photographer! it was delicious to hear him bragging of his pilgrim ancestor,--while in the same breath he would blandly sneer at certain "poor gentry" who could trace back their lineage to coeur de lion! but because the erringtons were rich as well as titled persons, van clupp and his belongings bent the servile knee before them, flattering thelma with that ill-judged eagerness and zealous persistency which distinguish inborn vulgarity, and which, far from pleasing her, annoyed and embarrassed her because she could not respond sincerely to such attentions. there were many others too, not dollar-crusted americans, whose excessive adulation and ceaseless compliment vexed the sincere, frank spirit of the girl,--a spirit fresh and pure as the wind blowing over her own norse mountains. one of these was sir francis lennox, that fashionable young man of leisure,--and she had for him an instinctive, though quite unreasonable aversion. he was courtesy itself--he spared no pains to please her. yet she felt as if his basilisk brown eyes were always upon her,--he seemed to be ever at hand, ready to watch over her in trifles, such as the passing of a cup of tea, the offering of her wrap,--the finding of a chair,--the holding of a fan,--he was always on the alert, like a remarkably well-trained upper servant. she could not, without rudeness, reject such unobtrusive, humble services,--and yet--they rendered her uncomfortable, though she did not quite know why. she ventured to mention her feeling concerning him to her friend lady winsleigh, who heard her timid remarks with a look on her face that was not quite pleasant. "poor sir francis!" her ladyship said with a slight, mocking laugh. "he's never happy unless he plays puppy-dog! don't mind him, thelma! he won't bite, i assure you,--he means no harm. it's only his little way of making himself agreeable!" george lorimer, during this particular "london season," fled the field of action, and went to paris to stay with pierre duprèz. he felt that it was dangerous to confront the fair enemy too often, for he knew in his own honest heart that his passion for thelma increased each time he saw her--so, he avoided her. she missed him very much from her circle of intimates, and often went to see his mother, mrs. lorimer, one of the sweetest old ladies in the world,--who had at once guessed her son's secret, but, like a prudent dame, kept it to herself. there were few young women as pretty and charming as old mrs. lorimer, with her snow-white parted hair and mild blue eyes, and voice as cheery as the note of a thrush in spring-time. after lady winsleigh, thelma liked her best of all her new friends, and was fond of visiting her quiet little house in kensington,--for it was very quiet, and seemed like a sheltered haven of rest from the great rush of frivolity and folly in which the fashionable world delighted. and thelma was often now in need of rest. as the season drew towards its close, she found herself strangely tired and dispirited. the life she was compelled to lead was all unsuited to her nature--it was artificial and constrained,--and she was often unhappy. why? why, indeed! she did her best,--but she made enemies everywhere. again, why? because she had a most pernicious,--most unpleasant habit of telling the truth. like socrates, she seemed to say--"if any man should appear to me not to possess virtue, but to pretend that he does, i shall reproach him." this she expressed silently in face, voice, and manner,--and, like socrates, she might have added that she went about "perceiving, indeed, and grieving and alarmed that she was making herself odious." for she discovered, by degrees, that many people looked strangely upon her--that others seemed afraid of her--and she continually heard that she was considered "eccentric." so she became more reserved--even cold,--she was content to let others argue about trifles, and air their whims and follies without offering an opinion on any side. and by-and-by the first shadow began to sweep over the fairness of her married life. it happened at a time when she and her husband were not quite so much together,--society and its various claims had naturally separated them a little, but now a question of political ambition separated them still more. some well-intentioned friends had persuaded sir philip to stand for parliament--and this idea no sooner entered his head, than he decided with impulsive ardor that he had been too long without a "career,"--and a "career" he must have in order to win distinction for his wife's sake. therefore, summoning his secretary, neville to his aid, he plunged headlong into the seething, turgid waters of english politics, and shut himself up in his library day after day, studying blue-books, writing and answering letters, and drawing up addresses,--and with the general proneness of the masculine mind to attend to one thing only at a time, he grew so absorbed in his work that his love for thelma, though all unchanged and deep as ever, fell slightly into the background of his thoughts. not that he neglected her,--he simply concerned himself more with other things. so it happened that a certain indefinable sense of loss weighed upon her,--a vague, uncomprehended solitude began to encompass her,--a solitude even more keenly felt when she was surrounded by friends than when she was quite alone,--and as the sweet english june drew to its end, she grew languid and listless, and her blue eyes often filled with sudden tears. her little watch-dog, britta, began to notice this, and to wonder concerning the reason of her mistress's altered looks. "it is this dreadful london," thought britta. "so hot and stifling--there's no fresh air for her. and all this going about to balls and parties and shows--no wonder she is tired out!" but it was something more than mere fatigue that made thelma's eyes look sometimes so anxious, so gravely meditative and earnest. one day she seemed so much abstracted and lost in painful musings that britta's loving heart ached, and she watched her for some moments without venturing to say a word. at last she spoke out bravely-- "fröken!"--she paused,--thelma seemed not to hear her. "fröken!--has anything vexed or grieved you today?" thelma started nervously. "vexed me--grieved me?" she repeated. "no, britta--why do you ask?" "you look very tired, dear fröken," continued britta gently. "you are not as bright as you were when we first came to london." thelma's lips quivered. "i--i am not well, britta," she murmured, and suddenly her self-control gave way, and she broke into tears. in an instant britta was kneeling by her, coaxing and caressing her, and calling her by every endearing name she could think of, while she wisely forbore from asking any more questions. presently her sobs grew calmer,--she rested her fair head against britta's shoulder and smiled faintly. at that moment a light tap was heard outside, and a voice called-- "thelma! are you there?" britta opened the door, and sir philip entered hurriedly and smiling--but stopped short to survey his wife in dismay. "why, my darling!" he exclaimed distressfully. "have you been crying?" here the discreet britta retired. thelma sprang to her husband and nestled in his arms. "philip, do not mind it," she murmured. "i felt a little sad--it is nothing! but tell me--you _do_ love me? you will never tire of me? you have always loved me, i am sure?" he raised her face gently with one hand, and looked at her in surprise. "thelma--what strange questions from _you_! love you? is not every beat of my heart for you? are you not my life, my joy--my everything in this world?" and he pressed her passionately in his arms and kissed her. "you have never loved any one else so much?" she whispered, half abashed. "never!" he answered readily. "what makes you ask such a thing?" she was silent. he looked down at her flushing cheeks and tear-wet lashes attentively. "you are fanciful to-day, my pet," he said at last. "you've been tiring yourself too much. you must rest. you'd better not go to the brilliant theatre to-night--it's only a burlesque, and is sure to be vulgar and noisy. we'll stop at home and spend a quiet evening together--shall we?" she raised her eyes half wistfully and smiled. "i should like that very, very much, philip!" she murmured; "but you know we did promise clara to go with her to-night. and as we are so soon to leave london and return to warwickshire, i should not like to disappoint her." "you are very fond of clara?" he asked suddenly. "very!" she paused and sighed slightly. "she is so kind and clever--much more clever than i can ever be--and she knows many things about the world which i do not. and she admires you so much, philip!" "does she indeed?" philip laughed and colored a little. "very good of her, i'm sure! and so you'd really like to go to the brilliant to-night?" "i think so," she said hesitatingly. "clara says it will be very amusing. and you must remember how much i enjoyed 'faust' and 'hamlet.'" errington smiled. "you'll find the brilliant performance very different to either," he said amusedly. "you don't know what a burlesque is like!" "then i must be instructed," replied thelma, smiling also, "i need to learn many things. i am very ignorant!" "ignorant!" and he swept aside with a caressing touch the clustering hair from her broad, noble brow. "my darling, you possess the greatest wisdom--the wisdom of innocence. i would not change it for all the learning of the sagest philosophers!" "you really mean that?" she asked half timidly. "i really mean that!" he answered fondly. "little sceptic! as if i would ever say anything to you that i did _not_ mean! i shall be glad when we're out of london and back at the manor--then i shall have you all to myself again--for a time, at least." she raised her eyes full of sudden joy,--all traces of her former depression had disappeared. "and _i_ shall have _you_!" she said gladly. "and we shall not disappoint lady winsleigh to-night, philip--i am not tired--and i shall be pleased to go to the theatre." "all right!" responded philip cheerfully. "so let it be! only i don't believe you'll like the piece,--though it certainly won't make you cry. yet i doubt if it will make you laugh, either. however, it will be a new experience for you." and a new experience it decidedly was,--an experience, too, which brought some strange and perplexing results to thelma of which she never dreamed. she went to the brilliant, accompanied by lady winsleigh and her husband,--neville, the secretary, making the fourth in their box; and during the first and second scene of the performance the stage effects were so pretty and the dancing so graceful that she nearly forgot the bewildered astonishment she had at first felt at the extreme scantiness of apparel worn by the ladies of the ballet. they represented birds, bees, butterflies, and the other winged denizens of the forest-world,--and the _tout-ensemble_ was so fairy-like and brilliant with swift movement, light, and color that the eye was too dazzled and confused to note objectionable details. but in the third scene, when a plump, athletic young woman leaped on the stage in the guise of a humming-bird, with a feather tunic so short that it was a mere waist-belt of extra width,--a flesh-colored bodice about three inches high, and a pair of blue wings attached to her fat shoulders, thelma started and half rose from her seat in dismay, while a hot tide of color crimsoned her cheeks. she looked nervously at her husband. "i do not think this is pleasant to see," she said in a low tone. "would it not be best to go away? i--i think i would rather be at home." lady winsleigh heard and smiled,--a little mocking smile. "don't be silly, child!" she said. "if you leave the theatre just now you'll have every one staring at you. that woman's an immense favorite--she is the success of the piece. she's got more diamonds than either you or i." thelma regarded her friend with a sort of grave wonder,--but said nothing in reply. if lady winsleigh liked the performance and wished to remain, why--then politeness demanded that thelma should not interfere with her pleasure by taking an abrupt leave. so she resumed her seat, but withdrew herself far behind the curtain of the box, in a corner where the stage was almost invisible to her eyes. her husband bent over her and whispered-- "i'll take you home if you wish it, dear! only say the word." she shook her head. "clara enjoys it!" she answered somewhat plaintively. "we must stay." philip was about to address lady winsleigh on the subject, when suddenly neville touched him on the arm. "can i speak to you alone for a moment, sir philip?" he said in a strange, hoarse whisper. "outside the box--away from the ladies--a matter of importance!" he looked as if he were about to faint. he gasped rather than spoke these words; his face was white as death, and his eyes had a confused and bewildered stare. "certainly!" answered philip promptly, though not without an accent of surprise,--and, excusing their absence briefly to his wife and lady winsleigh, they left the box together. meanwhile the well-fed "humming-bird" was capering extravagantly before the footlights, pointing her toe in the delighted face of the stalls and singing in a in a loud, coarse voice the following refined ditty-- "oh my ducky, oh my darling, oh my duck, duck, duck! if you love me you must have a little pluck, pluck, pluck! come and put your arms around me, kiss me once, twice, thrice, for kissing may be naughty, but, by jingo! it is nice! once, twice, thrice! nice, nice, nice! bliss, bliss, bliss! kiss, kiss, kiss! kissing may be naughty, but it's nice!" there were several verses in this graceful poem, and each one was hailed with enthusiastic applause. the "humming-bird" was triumphant, and when her song was concluded she executed a startling _pas-seul_ full of quaint and astonishing surprises, reaching her superbest climax, when she backed off the stage on one portly leg,--kicking the other in regular time to the orchestra. lady winsleigh laughed, and leaning towards thelma, who still sat in her retired corner, said with a show of kindness-- "you dear little goose! you must get accustomed to this kind of thing--it takes with the men immensely. why, even your wonderful philip has gone down behind the scenes with neville--you may be sure of that!" the startled, pitiful astonishment in the girl's face might have touched a less callous heart than lady winsleigh's,--but her ladyship was prepared for it and only smiled. "gone behind the scenes! to see that dreadful woman!" exclaimed thelma in a low pained tone. "oh no, clara! he would not do such a thing. impossible!" "well, my dear, then where is he? he has been gone quite ten minutes. look at the stalls--all the men are out of them! i tell you violet vere draws everybody--of the male sex after her! at the end of all her 'scenes' she has a regular reception--for men only--of course! ladies not admitted!" and clara winsleigh laughed. "don't look so shocked for heaven's sake, thelma,--you don't want your husband to be a regular nincompoop! he must have his amusements as well as other people. i believe you want him to be like a baby, tied to your apron-string! you'll find that an awful mistake,--he'll get tired to death of you, sweet little griselda though you are!" thelma's face grew very pale, and her hand closed more tightly on the fan she held. "you have said that so very, very often lately, clara!" she murmured. "you seem so sure that he will get tired--that all men get tired. i do not think you know philip--he is not like any other person i have ever met. and why should he go behind the scenes to such a person as violet vere--" at that moment the box-door opened with a sharp click, and errington entered alone. he looked disturbed and anxious. "neville is not well," he said abruptly, addressing his wife. "i've sent him home. he wouldn't have been able to sit this thing out." and he glanced half angrily towards the stage--the curtain had just gone up again and displayed the wondrous violet vere still in her "humming-bird" character, swinging on the branch of a tree and (after the example of all humming-birds) smoking a cigar with brazen-faced tranquillity. "i am sorry he is ill," said thelma gently. "that is why you were so long away?" "was i long?" returned philip somewhat absently. "i didn't know it. i went to ask a question behind the scenes." lady winsleigh coughed and glanced at thelma, whose eyes dropped instantly. "i suppose you saw violet vere?" asked clara. "yes, i saw her," he replied briefly. he seemed irritable and vexed--moreover, decidedly impatient. presently he said-- "lady winsleigh, would you mind very much if we left this place and went home? i'm rather anxious about neville--he's had a shock. thelma doesn't care a bit about this piece, i know, and if you are not very much absorbed--" lady winsleigh rose instantly, with her usual ready grace. "my dear sir philip!" she said sweetly. "as if i would not, do anything to oblige you! let us go by all means! these burlesques _are_ extremely fatiguing!" he seemed relieved by her acquiescence--and smiled that rare sweet smile of his, which had once played such havoc with her ladyship's sensitive feelings. they left the theatre, and were soon on their way home, though thelma was rather silent during the drive. they dropped lady winsleigh at her own door, and after they had bidden her a cordial good night, and were going on again towards home, philip, turning towards his wife, and catching sight of her face by the light of a street-lamp, was struck by her extreme paleness and weary look. "you are very tired, my darling, i fear?" he inquired, tenderly encircling her with one arm. "lean your head on my shoulder--so!" she obeyed, and her hand trembled a little as he took and held it in his own warm, strong clasp. "we shall soon be home!" he added cheerily. "and i think we must have no more theatre-going this season. the heat and noise and glare are too much for you." "philip," said thelma suddenly. "did you really go behind the scenes to-night?" "yes, i did," he answered readily. "i was obliged to go on a matter of business--a very disagreeable and unpleasant matter too." "and what was it?" she asked timidly, yet hopefully. "my pet, i can't tell you! i wish i could! it's a secret i'm bound not to betray--a secret which involves the name of another person who'd be wretched if i were to mention it to you. there,--don't let us talk about it any more!" "very well, philip," said thelma resignedly,--but though she smiled, a sudden presentiment of evil depressed her. the figure of the vulgar, half-clothed, painted creature known as violet vere rose up mockingly before her eyes,--and the half-scornful, half-jesting words of lady winsleigh rang persistently in her ears. on reaching home, philip went straight to neville's little study and remained with him in earnest conversation for a long time--while thelma went to bed, and lay restless among her pillows, puzzling her brain with strange forebodings and new and perplexing ideas, till fatigue overpowered her, and she fell asleep with a few tear-drops wet on her lashes. and that night philip wondered why his sweet wife talked so plaintively in her sleep,--though he smiled as he listened to the drift of those dove-like murmurings. "no one knows how my boy loves me," sighed the dreaming voice. "no one in all the world! how should he tire? love can never tire!" meanwhile, lady winsleigh, in the seclusion of her own boudoir, penned a brief note to sir francis lennox as follows-- "dear old lennie," "i saw you in the stalls at the theatre this evening, though you pretended not to see me. what a fickle creature you are! not that i mind in the very least. the virtuous bruce-errington left his saintly wife and me to talk little platitudes together, while he, decorously accompanied by his secretary, went down to pay court to violet vere. how stout she is getting! why don't you men advise her to diet herself? i know you also went behind the scenes--of course, you _are_ an _ami intime_--promising boy you are, to be sure! come and lunch with me to-morrow, if you're not too lazy." "yours ever, clara." she gave this missive to her maid, louise rénaud, to post,--that faithful attendant took it first to her own apartment where she ungummed the envelope neatly by the aid of hot water, and read every word of it. this was not an exceptional action of hers,--all the letters received and sent by her mistress were subjected to the same process,--even those that were sealed with wax she had a means of opening in such a manner that it was impossible to detect that they had been tampered with. she was a very clever french maid was louise,--one of the cleverest of her class. fond of mischief, ever suspicious, always on the alert for evil, utterly unscrupulous and malicious, she was an altogether admirable attendant for a lady of rank and fashion, her skill as a _coiffeur_ and needle-woman always obtaining for her the wages she so justly deserved. when will wealthy women reared in idleness and luxury learn the folly of keeping a trained spy attached to their persons?--a spy whose pretended calling is merely to arrange dresses and fripperies (half of which she invariably steals), but whose real delight is to take note of all her mistress's incomings and outgoings, tempers and tears--to watch her looks, her smiles and frowns,--and to start scandalous gossip concerning her in the servants' hall, from whence it gradually spreads to the society newspapers--for do you think these estimable and popular journals are never indebted for their "reliable" information to the "honest" statements of discharged footman or valet? briggs, for instance, had tried his hand at a paragraph or two concerning the "upper ten," and with the aid of a dictionary, had succeeded in expressing himself quite smartly, though in ordinary conversation his h's were often lacking or superfluous, and his grammar doubtful. whether he persuaded any editor to accept his literary efforts is quite another matter--a question to which the answer must remain for ever enveloped in mystery,--but if he _did_ appear in print (it is only an if!) he must have been immensely gratified to consider that his statements were received with gusto by at least half aristocratic london, and implicitly believed as having emanated from the "best authorities." and louise rénaud having posted her mistress's letter at last, went down to visit briggs in his private pantry, and to ask him a question. "tell me," she said rapidly, with her tight, prim smile. "you read the papers--you will know. what lady is that of the theatres--violet vere?" briggs laid down the paper he was perusing and surveyed her with a superior air. "what, vi?" he exclaimed with a lazy wink. "vi, of the hopperer-buff? you've 'erd of 'er surely, mamzelle? no? there's not a man (as is worth calling a man) about town, as don't know _'er_! dukes, lords, an' royal 'ighnesses--she's the style for 'em! mag-ni-ficent creetur! all legs and arms! i won't deny but wot i 'ave an admiration for 'er myself--i bought a 'arf-crown portrait of 'er quite recently." and briggs rose slowly and searched in a mysterious drawer which he invariably kept locked. "'ere she is, as large as life, mamzelle," he continued, exhibiting a "promenade" photograph of the actress in question. "there's a neck for you! there's form! vi, my dear, i saloot you!" and he pressed a sounding kiss on the picture--"you're one in a million! smokes and drinks like a trooper, mamzelle!" he added admiringly, as louise rénaud studied the portrait attentively. "but with all 'er advantages, you would not call 'er a lady. no--that term would be out of the question. she is wot we men would call an enchantin' female!" and briggs kissed the tips of his fingers and waved them in the air as he had seen certain foreign gentlemen do when enthusiastic. "i comprehend," said the french maid, nodding emphatically. "then, if she is so, what makes that proud seigneur bruce-errington visit her?" here she shook her finger at briggs. "and leave his beautiful lady wife, to go and see her?" another shake. "and that _miserable_ sieur lennox to go also? tell me that!" she folded her arms, like napoleon at st. helena, and smiled again that smile which was nothing but a sneer. briggs rubbed his nose contemplatively. "little francis can go ennywheres," he said at last. "he's laid out a good deal of tin on vi and others of 'er purfession. you cannot make enny-think of that young feller but a cad. i would not accept 'im for my pussonal attendant. no! but sir philip bruce-errington--" he paused, then continued, "air you sure of your facts, mamzelle?" mamzelle was so sure, that the bow on her cap threatened to come off with the determined wagging of her head. "well," resumed briggs, "sir philip may, like hothers, consider it 'the thing' you know, to 'ang on as it were to vi. but i _'ad_ thought 'im superior to it. ah! poor 'uman natur, as 'uxley says!" and briggs sighed. "lady errington is a sweet creetur, mamzelle--a _very_ sweet creetur! _has_ a rule i find the merest nod of my 'ed a sufficient saloot to a woman of the aristocracy--but for _'er_, mamzelle, i never fail to show 'er up with a court bow!" and involuntarily briggs bowed then and there in his most elegant manner. mamzelle tightened her thin lips a little and waved her hand expressively. "she is an angel of beauty!" she said, "and miladi winsleigh is jealous--ah, _dieu!_ jealous to death of her! she is innocent too--like a baby--and she worships her husband. that is an error! to worship a man is a great mistake--she will find it so. men are not to be too much loved--no, no!" briggs smiled in superb self-consciousness. "well, well! i will not deny, mamzelle, that it spoils us," he said complacently. "it certainly spoils us! 'when lovely woman stoops to folly,'--the hold, hold story!" "you will r-r-r-emember," said mamzelle, suddenly stepping up very close to him and speaking with a strong accent, "what i have said to-night! monsieur briggs, you will r-remember! there will be mees-cheef! yes--there will be mees-cheef to sieur bruce-errington, and when there is,--i--i, louise rénaud--i know who ees at the bottom of eet!" so saying, with a whirl of her black silk dress and a flash of her white muslin apron, she disappeared. briggs, left alone, sauntered to a looking-glass hanging on the wall and studied with some solicitude a pimple that had recently appeared on his clean-shaven face. "mischief!" he soliloquized. "i des-say! whenever a lot of women gets together, there's sure to be mischief. dear creeturs! they love it like the best clicquot. sprightly young pusson is mamzelle. knows who's at the bottom of 'eet,' does she! well--she's not the only one as knows the same thing. as long as doors 'as cracks and key'oles, it ain't in the least difficult to find out wot goes on inside boo-dwars and drorin'-rooms. and 'ighly interestin' things one 'ears now and then--'ighly interestin'!" and briggs leered suavely at his own reflection, and then resumed the perusal of his paper. he was absorbed in the piquant, highly flavored details of a particularly disgraceful divorce case, and he was by no means likely to disturb himself from his refined enjoyment for any less important reason than the summons of lord winsleigh's bell, which rang so seldom that, when it did, he made it a point of honor to answer it immediately, for, as he said-- "his lordship knows wot is due to me, and i knows wot is due to 'im--therefore it 'appens we are able to ekally respect each other!" chapter xxii. "if thou wert honorable, thou would'st have told this tale for virtue, not for such an end thou seek'st; as base, as strange. thou wrong'st a gentleman who is as far from thy report, as thou from honor." _cymbeline._ summer in shakespeare land! summer in the heart of england--summer in wooded warwickshire,--a summer brilliant, warm, radiant with flowers, melodious with the songs of the heaven--aspiring larks, and the sweet, low trill of the forest-hidden nightingales. wonderful and divine it is to hear the wild chorus of nightingales that sing beside como in the hot languorous nights of an italian july--wonderful to hear them maddening themselves with love and music, and almost splitting their slender throats with the bursting bubbles of burning song,--but there is something, perhaps, more dreamily enchanting still,--to hear them warbling less passionately but more plaintively, beneath the drooping leafage of those grand old trees, some of which may have stretched their branches in shadowy benediction over the sacred head of the grandest poet in the world. why travel to athens,--why wander among the ionian isles for love of the classic ground? surely, though the clear-brained old greeks were the founders of all noble literature, they have reached their fulminating point in the english shakespeare,--and the warwickshire lanes, decked simply with hawthorn and sweet-briar roses, through which mary arden walked leading her boy-angel by the hand, are sacred as any portion of that earth once trodden by the feet of homer and plato. so, at least, thelma thought, when, released from the bondage of london social life, she found herself once more at errington manor, then looking its loveliest, surrounded with a green girdle of oak and beech, and set off by the beauty of velvety lawns and terraces, and rose-gardens in full bloom. the depression from which she had suffered fell away from her completely--she grew light-hearted as a child, and flitted from room to room, singing to herself for pure gladness. philip was with her all day now, save for a couple of hours in the forenoon which he devoted to letter-writing in connection with his parliamentary aspirations,--and philip was tender, adoring and passionate as lovers may be, but as husbands seldom are. they took long walks together through the woods,--they often rambled across the fragrant fields to anne hathaway's cottage, which was not very far away, and sitting down in some sequestered nook, philip would pull from his pocket a volume of the immortal plays, and read passages aloud in his fine mellow voice, while thelma, making posies of the meadow flowers, listened entranced. sometimes, when he was in a more business-like humor, he would bring out cicero's orations, and after pondering over them for a while would talk very grandly about the way in which he meant to speak in parliament. "they want dash and fire there," he said, "and these qualities must be united with good common sense. in addressing the house, you see, thelma, one must rouse and interest the men--not bore them. you can't expect fellows to pass a bill if you've made them long for their beds all the time you've been talking about it." thelma smiled and glanced over his shoulder at "cicero's orations." "and do you wish to speak to them like cicero, my boy?" she said gently. "but i do not think you will find that possible. because when cicero spoke it was in a different age and to very different people--people who were glad to learn how to be wise and brave. but if you were cicero himself, do you think you would be able to impress the english parliament?" "why not, dear?" asked errington with some fervor. "i believe that men, taken as men, _pur et simple_, are the same in all ages, and are open to the same impressions. why should not modern englishmen be capable of receiving the same lofty ideas as the antique romans, and acting upon them?" "ah, do not ask _me_ why," said thelma, with a plaintive little shake of her head--"for _i_ cannot tell you! but remember how many members of parliament we did meet in london--and where were their lofty ideas? philip, had they any ideas at all, do you think? there was that very fat gentleman who is a brewer,--well, to hear him talk, would you not think all england was for the making of beer? and he does not care for the country unless it continues to consume his beer! it was to that very man i said something about _hamlet_, and he told me he had no interest for such nonsense as shakespeare and play-going--his time was taken up at the '_'ouse_.' you see, he is a member of parliament--yet it is evident he neither knows the language nor the literature of his country! and there must be many like him, otherwise so ignorant a person would not hold such a position--and for such men, what would be the use of a cicero?" philip leaned back against the trunk of the tree under which they were sitting, and laughed. "you may be right, thelma,--i dare say you are. there's certainly too much beer represented in the house--i admit that. but, after all, trade is the great moving-spring of national prosperity,--and it would hardly be fair to refuse seats to the very men who help to keep the country going." "i do not see that," said thelma gravely,--"if those men are ignorant, why should they have a share in so important a thing as government? they may know all about beer, and wool, and iron,--but perhaps they can only judge what is good for themselves, not what is best for the whole country, with all its rich and poor. i do think that only the wisest scholars and most intelligent persons should be allowed to help in the ruling of a great nation." "but the people choose their own rulers," remarked errington reflectively. "ah, the poor people!" sighed thelma. "they know so very little,--and they are taught so badly! i think they never do quite understand what they do want,--they are the same in all histories,--like little children, they get bewildered and frightened in any trouble, and the wisest heads are needed to think for them. it is, indeed, most cruel to make them puzzle out all difficulty for themselves!" "what a little sage you are, my pet!" laughed philip, taking her hand on which the marriage-ring and its accompanying diamond circlet, glistened brilliantly in the warm sunlight. "do you mean to go in for politics?" she shook her head. "no, indeed! that is not woman's work at all. the only way in which i think about such things, is that i feel the people cannot all be wise,--and that it seems a pity the wisest and greatest in the land should not be chosen to lead them rightly." "and so under the circumstances, you think it's no use my trying to _pose_ as a cicero?" asked her husband amusedly. she laughed--with a very tender cadence in her laughter. "it would not be worth your while, my boy," she said "you know i have often told you that i do not see any great distinction in being a member of parliament at all. what will you do? you will talk to the fat brewer perhaps, and he will contradict you--then other people will get up and talk and contradict each other,--and so it will go on for days and days--meanwhile the country remains exactly as it was, neither better nor worse,--and all the talking does no good! it is better to be out of it,--here together, as we are to-day." and she raised her dreamy blue eyes to the sheltering canopy of green leaves that overhung them--leaves thick-clustered and dewy, through which the dazzling sky peeped in radiant patches. philip looked at her,--the rapt expression of her upward gaze,--the calm, untroubled sweetness of her fair face,--were such as might well have suited one of raffaelle's divinest angels. his heart beat quickly--he drew closer to her, and put his arm round her. "your eyes are looking at the sky, thelma," he whispered. "do you know what that is? heaven looking into heaven! and do you know which of the two heavens i prefer?" she smiled, and turning, met his ardent gaze with one of equal passion and tenderness. "ah, you _do_ know!" he went on, softly kissing the side of her slim white throat. "i thought you couldn't possibly make a mistake!" he rested his head against her shoulder, and after a minute or two of lazy comfort, he resumed. "you are not ambitious, my thelma! you don't seem to care whether your husband distinguishes himself in the 'ouse,' as our friend the brewer calls it, or not. in fact, i don't believe you care for anything save--love! am i not right, my wife?" a wave of rosy color flushed her transparent skin, and her eyes filled with an earnest, almost pathetic languor. "surely of all things in the world," she said in a low tone,--"love is best?" to this he made prompt answer, though not in words--his lips conversed with hers, in that strange, sweet language which, though unwritten, is everywhere comprehensible,--and then they left their shady resting-place and sauntered homeward hand in hand through the warm fields fragrant with wild thyme and clover. many happy days passed thus with these lovers--for lovers they still were. marriage had for once fulfilled its real and sacred meaning--it had set love free from restraint, and had opened all the gateways of the only earthly paradise human hearts shall ever know,--the paradise of perfect union and absolute sympathy with the one thing beloved on this side eternity. the golden hours fled by all too rapidly,--and towards the close of august there came an interruption to their felicity. courtesy had compelled bruce-errington and his wife to invite a few friends down to visit them at the manor before the glory of the summer-time was past,--and first among the guests came lord and lady winsleigh and their bright boy, ernest. her ladyship's maid, louise rénaud, of course, accompanied her ladyship,--and briggs was also to the fore in the capacity of lord winsleigh's personal attendant. after these, george lorimer arrived--he had avoided the erringtons all the season,--but he could not very well refuse the pressing invitation now given him without seeming churlish,--then came beau lovelace, for a few days only, as with the commencement of september he would be off as usual to his villa on the lago di como. sir francis lennox, too, made his appearance frequently in a casual sort of way--he "ran down," to use his own expression, now and then, and made himself very agreeable, especially to men, by whom he was well liked for his invariable good-humor and extraordinary proficiency in all sports and games of skill. another welcome visitor was pierre duprèz, lively and sparkling as ever,--he came from paris to pass a fortnight with his "cher phil-eep," and make merriment for the whole party. his old admiration for britta had by no means decreased,--he was fond of waylaying that demure little maiden on her various household errands, and giving her small posies of jessamine and other sweet-scented blossoms to wear just above the left-hand corner of her apron-bib, close to the place where the heart is supposed to be. olaf güldmar had been invited to the manor at this period,--errington wrote many urgent letters, and so did thelma, entreating him to come,--for nothing would have pleased sir philip more than to have introduced the fine old odin worshipper among his fashionable friends, and to have heard him bluntly and forcibly holding his own among them, putting their feint and languid ways of life to shame by his manly, honest, and vigorous utterance. but güldmar had only just returned to the altenfjord after nearly a year's absence, and his hands were too full of work for him to accept his son-in-law's invitation. "the farm lands have a waste and dreary look," he wrote, "though i let them to a man who should verily have known how to till the soil trodden by his fathers--and as for the farmhouse, 'twas like a hollow shell that has lain long on the shore and become brown and brittle--for thou knowest no human creature has entered there since we departed. however, valdemar svensen and i, for sake of company, have resolved to dwell together in it, and truly we have nearly settled down to the peaceful contemplation of our past days,--so philip, and thou, my child thelma, trouble not concerning me. i am hale and hearty, the gods be thanked,--and may live on in hope to see you both next spring or summer-tide. your happiness keeps this old man young--so grudge me not the news of your delights wherein i am myself delighted." one familiar figure was missing from the manor household,--that of edward neville. since the night at the brilliant, when he had left the theatre so suddenly, and gone home on the plea of illness, he had never been quite the same man. he looked years older--he was strangely nervous and timid--and he shrank away from thelma as though he were some guilty or tainted creature. surprised at this, she spoke to her husband about it,--but he, hurriedly, and with some embarrassment, advised her to "let him alone"--his "nerves were shaken"--his "health was feeble"--and that it would be kind on her part to refrain from noticing him or asking him questions. so she refrained--but neville's behavior puzzled her all the same. when they left town, he implored, almost piteously, to be allowed to remain behind,--he could attend to sir philip's business so much better in london, he declared, and he had his way. errington, usually fond of neville's society, made no attempt whatever to persuade him against his will,--so he stayed in the half-shut-up house in prince's gate through all the summer heat, poring over parliamentary documents and pamphlets,--and philip came up from the country once a fortnight to visit him, and transact any business that might require his personal attention. on one of the last and hottest days in august, a grand garden-party was given at the manor. all the county people were invited, and they came eagerly, though, before thelma's social successes in london, they had been reluctant to meet her. now, they put on their best clothes, and precipitated themselves into the manor grounds like a flock of sheep seeking land on which to graze,--all wearing their sweetest propitiatory smirk--all gushing forth their admiration of "that _darling_ lady errington"--all behaving themselves in the exceptionally funny manner that county people affect,--people who are considered somebodies in the small villages their big houses dominate,--but who, when brought to reside in london, become less than the minnows in a vast ocean. these good folks were not only anxious to _see_ lady errington--they wanted to _say_ they had seen her,--and that she had spoken to _them_, so that they might, in talking to their neighbors, mention it in quite an easy, casual way, such as--"oh, i was at errington manor the other day, and lady errington said to me--." or--"sir philip is _such_ a charming man! i was talking to his lovely wife, and he asked me--" etc., etc. or--"you've no idea what large strawberries they grow at the manor! lady errington showed me some that were just ripening--magnificent!" and so on. for in truth this _is_ "a mad world, my masters,"--and there is no accounting for the inexpressibly small follies and mean toadyisms of the people in it. moreover, all the london guests who were visiting thelma came in for a share of the county magnates' servile admiration. they found the winsleighs "so distingué"--master ernest instantly became "that _dear_ boy!"--beau lovelace was "so dreadfully clever, you know!"--and pierre duprèz "quite _too_ delightful!" the grounds looked very brilliant--pink-and-white marquees were dotted here and there on the smooth velvet lawns--bright flags waved from different quarters of the gardens, signals of tennis, archery, and dancing,--and the voluptuous waltz-music of a fine hungarian band rose up and swayed in the air with the downward floating songs of the birds and the dash of fountains in full play. girls in pretty light summer costumes made picturesque groups under the stately oaks and beeches,--gay laughter echoed from the leafy shrubberies, and stray couples were seen sauntering meditatively through the rose-gardens, treading on the fallen scented petals, and apparently too much absorbed in each other to notice anything that was going on around them. most of these were lovers, of course--intending lovers, if not declared ones,--in fact, eros was very busy that day among the roses, and shot forth a great many arrows, aptly aimed, out of his exhaustless quiver. two persons there were, however,--man and woman,--who, walking in that same rose-avenue, did not seem, from their manner, to have much to do with the fair greek god,--they were lady winsleigh and sir francis lennox. her ladyship looked exceedingly beautiful in her clinging dress of madras lace, with a bunch of scarlet poppies at her breast, and a wreath of the same vivid flowers in her picturesque leghorn hat. she held a scarlet-lined parasol over her head, and from under the protecting shadow of this silken pavilion, her dark, lustrous eyes flashed disdainfully as she regarded her companion. he was biting an end of his brown moustache, and looked annoyed, yet lazily amused too. "upon my life, clara," he observed, "you are really awfully down on a fellow, you know! one would think you never cared two-pence about me!" "too high a figure!" retorted lady winsleigh, with a hard little laugh. "i never cared a brass farthing!" he stopped short in his walk and stared at her. "by jove! you _are_ cool!" he ejaculated. "then what did you mean all the time?" "what did _you_ mean?" she asked defiantly. he was silent. after a slight, uncomfortable pause, he shrugged his shoulders and smiled. "don't let us have a scene!" he observed in a bantering tone. "anything but that!" "scene!" she exclaimed indignantly. "pray when have you had to complain of me on that score?" "well, don't let me have to complain now," he said coolly. she surveyed him in silent scorn for a moment, and her full, crimson lips curled contemptuously. "what a brute you are!" she muttered suddenly between her set pearly teeth. "thanks, awfully!" he answered, taking out a cigarette and lighting it leisurely. "you are really charmingly candid, clara! almost as frank as lady errington, only less polite!" "i shall not learn politeness from _you_, at any rate," she said,--then altering her tone to one of studied indifference, she continued coldly, "what do you want of me? we've done with each other, as you know. i believe you wish to become gentleman-lacquey to bruce-errington's wife, and that you find it difficult to obtain the situation. shall i give you a character?" he flushed darkly, and his eyes glittered with an evil lustre. "gently, clara! draw it mild!" he said languidly. "don't irritate me, or i _may_ turn crusty! you know, if i chose, i could open bruce-errington's eyes rather more widely than you'd like with respect to the _devoted affection_ you entertain for his beautiful wife." she winced a little at this observation--he saw it and laughed,--then resumed: "at present i'm really in the best of humors. the reason i wanted to speak to you alone for a minute or two was, that i'd something to say which might possibly please you. but perhaps you'd rather not hear it?" she was silent. so was he. he watched her closely for a little--noting with complacency the indignant heaving of her breast and the flush on her cheeks,--signs of the strong repression she was putting upon her rising temper. "come, clara, you may as well be amiable," he said. "i'm sure you'll be glad to know that the virtuous philip is not immaculate after all. won't it comfort you to think that he's nothing but a mortal man like the rest of us? . . . and that with a little patience your charms will most probably prevail with him as easily as they once did with me? isn't that worth hearing?" "i don't understand you," she replied curtly. "then you are very dense, my dear girl," he remarked smilingly. "pardon me for saying so! but i'll put it plainly and in as few words as possible. the moral bruce-errington, like a great many other 'moral' men i know, has gone in for violet vere,--and i dare say you understand what _that_ means. in the simplest language, it means that he's tired of his domestic bliss and wants a change." lady winsleigh stopped in her slow pacing along the gravel-walk, and raised her eyes steadily to her companion's face. "are you sure of this?" she asked. "positive!" replied sir francis, flicking the light ash off his cigarette delicately with his little finger. "when you wrote me that note about the vere, i confess i had my suspicions. since then they've been confirmed. i know for a fact that errington has had several private interviews with vi, and has also written her a good many letters. some of the fellows in the green-room tease her about her new conquest, and she grins and admits it. oh, the whole thing's plain enough! only last week, when he went up to town to see his man neville on business he called on vi at her own apartments in arundel street, strand. she told me so herself--we're rather intimate, you know,--though of course she refused to mention the object of his visit. honor among thieves!" and he smiled half mockingly. lady winsleigh seemed absorbed, and walked on like one in a dream. just then, a bend in the avenue brought them in full view of the broad terrace in front of the manor, where thelma's graceful figure, in a close-fitting robe of white silk crepe, was outlined clearly against the dazzling blue of the sky. several people were grouped near her,--she seemed to be in animated conversation with some of them, and her face was radiant with smiles. lady winsleigh looked at her,--then said suddenly in a low voice-- "it will break her heart!" sir francis assumed an air of polite surprise. "pardon! whose heart?" she pointed slightly to the white figure on the terrace. "hers! surely you must know that?" he smiled. "well--isn't that precisely what you desire clara? though, for my part, i don't believe in the brittleness of hearts--they seem to me to be made of exceptionally tough material. however, if the fair thelma's heart cracks ever so widely, i think i can undertake to mend it!" clara shrugged her shoulders. "you!" she exclaimed contemptuously. he stroked his moustache with feline care and nicety. "yes--i! if not, i've studied women all my life for nothing!" she broke into a low peal of mocking laughter--turned, and was about to leave him, when he detained her by a slight touch on her arm. "stop a bit!" he said in an impressive _sotto-voce_. "a bargain's a bargain all the world over. if i undertake to keep you cognizant of bruce-errington's little goings-on in london,--information which, i dare say, you can turn to good account,--you must do something for me. i ask very little. speak of me to lady errington--make her think well of me,--flatter me as much as you used to do when we fancied ourselves terrifically in love with each other--(a good joke, wasn't it!)--and, above all, make her _trust_ me! do you understand?" "as red riding-hood trusted the wolf and was eaten up for her innocence," observed lady winsleigh. "very well! i'll do my best. as i said before, you want a character. i'm sure i hope you'll obtain the situation you so much desire! i can state that you made yourself fairly useful in your last place, and that you left because your wages were not high enough!" and with another sarcastic laugh, she moved forward towards the terrace where thelma stood. sir francis followed at some little distance with no very pleasant expression on his features. a stealthy step approaching him front behind made him start nervously--it was louise rénaud, who, carrying a silver tray on which soda-water bottles and glasses made an agreeable clinking, tripped demurely past him without raising her eyes. she came directly out of the rose-garden,--and, as she overtook her mistress on the lawn, that lady seemed surprised, and asked-- "where have you been, louise?" "miladi was willing that i should assist in the attendance to-day," replied louise discreetly. "i have waited upon milord winsleigh, and other gentlemen in the summer-house at the end of the rose-garden." and with one furtive glance of her black, bead-like eyes at lady winsleigh's face, she made a respectful sort of half-curtsy and went her way. later on in the afternoon, when it was nearing sunset, and all other amusements had given way to the delight of dancing on the springy green turf to the swinging music of the band,--briggs, released for a time from the duties of assisting the waiters at the splendid refreshment-table (duties which were pleasantly lightened by the drinking of a bottle of champagne which he was careful to reserve for his own consumption), sauntered leisurely through the winding alleys and fragrant shrubberies which led to the most unromantic portion of the manor grounds,--namely, the vegetable-garden. here none of the butterflies of fashion found their way,--the suggestions offered by growing cabbages, turnips, beans, and plump, yellow-skinned marrows were too prosaic for society bantams who require refined surroundings in which to crow their assertive platitudes. yet it was a peaceful nook--and there were household odors of mint and thyme and sweet marjoram, which were pleasant to the soul of briggs, and reminded him of roast goose on christmas day, with all its attendant succulent delicacies. he paced the path slowly,--the light of the sinking sun blazing gloriously on his plush breeches, silver cordons and tassels,--for he was in full-dress livery in honor of the fête, and looked exceedingly imposing. now and then he glanced down at his calves with mild approval,--his silk stockings fitted them well, and they had a very neat and shapely appearance. "i've developed," he murmured to himself. "there ain't a doubt about it! one week of country air, and i'm a different man;--the effecks of overwork 'ave disappeared. flopsie won't know these legs of mine when i get back,--they've improved surprisingly." he stopped to survey a bed of carrots. "plenty of cressy there," he mused. "cressy's a noble soup, and flopsie makes it well,--a man might do wuss than marry flopsie. she's a widder, and a _leetle_ old--just a leetle old for me--but--" here he sniffed delicately at a sprig of thyme he had gathered, and smiled consciously. presently he perceived a small, plump, pretty figure approaching him, no other than britta, looking particularly charming in a very smart cap, adorned with pink-ribbon bows, and a very elaborately frilled muslin apron. briggs at once assumed his most elegant and conquering air, straightened himself to his full height and kissed his hand to her with much condescension. she laughed as she came up to him, and the dimples in her round cheeks appeared in full force. "well, mr. briggs," she said, "are you enjoying yourself?" briggs smiled down upon her benevolently. "i am!" he responded graciously. "i find the hair refreshing. and you, miss britta?" "oh, i'm very comfortable, thank you!" responded britta demurely, edging a little away from his arm, which showed an unmistakable tendency to encircle her waist,--then glancing at a basket she held full of grapes, just cut from the hot house, she continued, "these are for the supper-table. i must be quick, and take them to mrs. parton." "must you?" and briggs asked this question with quite an unnecessary amount of tenderness, then resuming his dignity, he observed, "mrs. parton is a very worthy woman--an excellent 'ousekeeper. but she'll no doubt excuse you for lingering a little, miss britta--especially in _my_ company." britta laughed again, showing her pretty little white teeth to the best advantage. "do you think she will?" she said merrily. "then i'll stop a minute, and if she scolds me i'll put the blame on you!" briggs played with his silver tassels and, leaning gracefully against a plum-tree, surveyed her with a critical eye. "i was not able," he observed, "to see much of you in town. our people were always a' visitin' each other, and yet our meetings were, as the poet says, 'few and far between.'" britta nodded indifferently, and perceiving a particularly ripe gooseberry on one of the bushes close to her, gathered it quickly and popped it between her rosy lips. seeing another equally ripe, she offered it to briggs, who accepted it and ate it slowly, though he had a misgiving that by so doing he was seriously compromising his dignity. he resumed his conversation. "since i've been down 'ere, i've 'ad more opportunity to observe you. i 'ope you will allow me to say i think very highly of you." he waved his hand with the elegance of a sir charles grandison. "very 'ighly indeed! your youth is most becoming to you! if you only 'ad a little more _chick_, there'd be nothing left to desire!" "a little more--_what_?" asked britta, opening her blue eyes very wide in puzzled amusement. "_chick_!" replied briggs, with persistent persuasiveness. "_chick_, miss britta, is a french word much used by the aristocracy. coming from norway, an 'avin' perhaps a very limited experience, you mayn't 'ave 'erd it--but eddicated people 'ere find it very convenient and expressive. _chick_ means style,--_the_ thing, _the_ go, _the_ fashion. for example, everything your lady wears is _chick_!" "really!" said britta, with a wandering and innocent air. "how funny! it doesn't sound like french, at all, mr. briggs,--it's more like english." "perhaps the paris accent isn't familiar to you yet," remarked briggs majestically. "your stay in the gay metropolis was probably short. now, i 'ave been there many times--ah, paris, paris!" he paused in a sort of ecstacy, then, with a side leer, continued--"you'd 'ardly believe 'ow wicked i am in paris, miss britta! i am, indeed! it is something in the hair of the bollyvards, i suppose! and the caffy life excites my nerves." "then you shouldn't go there," said britta gravely, though her eyes twinkled with repressed fun. "it can't be good for you. and, oh! i'm so sorry, mr. briggs, to think that _you_ are ever wicked!" and she laughed. "it's not for long," explained briggs, with a comically satisfied, yet penitent, look. "it is only a sort of breaking out,--a fit of 'igh spirits. hall men are so at times! it's _chick_ to run a little wild in paris. but miss britta, if _you_ were with me i should never run wild!" here his arm made another attempt to get round her waist--and again she skillfully, and with some show of anger, avoided it. "ah, you're very 'ard upon me," he then observed, "very, very, 'ard! but i won't complain, my--my dear gal--one day you'll know me better!" he stopped and looked at her very intently. "miss britta," he said abruptly, "you've a great affection for your lady, 'aven't you?" instantly britta's face flushed, and she was all attention. "yes, indeed!" she answered quickly. "why do you ask, mr. briggs?" briggs rubbed his nose perplexedly. "it is not easy to explain," he said. "to run down my own employers wouldn't be in my line. but i've an idea that clara--by which name i allude to my lord winsleigh's lady,--is up to mischief. she 'ates _your_ lady, miss britta--'ates 'er like poison!" "hates her!" cried britta in astonishment. "oh, you must be mistaken, mr. briggs! she is as fond of her as she can be--almost like a sister to her!" "clara's a fine actress," murmured briggs, more to himself than to his companion. "she'd beat violet vere on 'er own ground." raising his voice a little, he turned gallantly to britta and relieved her of the basket she held. "hallow me!" he said. "we'll walk to the 'ouse together. on the way i'll explain--and you'll judge for yourself. the words of the immortal bard, whose county we are in, occur to me as _aprerpo_,--'there are more things in 'evin and 'erth, 'oratio,--than even the most devoted domestic can sometimes be aweer of.'" and gently sauntering by britta's side, briggs began to converse in low and confidential tones,--she listened with strained and eager attention,--and she was soon receiving information that startled her and set her on the alert. talk of private detectives and secret service! do private detectives ever discover so much as the servants of a man's own household?--servants who are aware of the smallest trifles,--who know the name and position of every visitor that comes and goes,--who easily learn to recognize the handwriting on every letter that arrives--who laugh and talk in their kitchens over things that their credulous masters and mistresses imagine are unknown to all the world save themselves,--who will judge the morals of a duke, and tear the reputation of a duchess to shreds, for the least, the most trifling error of conduct! if you can stand well with your servants, you can stand well with the whole world--if not--carry yourself as haughtily as you may--your pride will not last long, depend upon it! meanwhile, as briggs and britta strolled in the side paths of the shrubbery, the gay guests of the manor were dancing on the lawn. thelma did not dance,--she reclined in a low basket-chair, fanning herself. george lorimer lay stretched in lazy length at her feet, and near her stood her husband, together with beau lovelace and lord winsleigh. at a little distance, under the shadow of a noble beech, sat mrs. rush-marvelle and mrs. van clupp in earnest conversation. it was to mrs. marvelle that the van clupps owed their invitation for this one day down to errington manor,--for thelma herself was not partial to them. but she did not like to refuse mrs. marvelle's earnest entreaty that they should be asked,--and that good-natured, scheming lady having gained her point, straightway said to marcia van clupp somewhat severely-- "now, marcia, this is your last chance. if you don't hook masherville at the carringten fête, you'll lose him! you mark my words!" marcia had dutifully promised to do her best, and she was not having what she herself called "a good hard time of it." lord algy was in one of his most provokingly vacillating moods--moreover, he had a headache, and felt bilious. therefore he would not dance--he would not play tennis--he did not understand archery--he was disinclined to sit in romantic shrubberies or summer-houses, as he had a nervous dread of spiders--so he rambled aimlessly about the grounds with his hands in his pockets, and perforce marcia was compelled to ramble too. once she tried what effect an opposite flirtation would have on his mind, so she coquetted desperately with a young country squire, whose breed of pigs was considered the finest in england--but masherville did not seem to mind it in the least. nay, he looked rather relieved than otherwise, and marcia, seeing this, grew more resolute than ever. "i guess i'll pay him out for this!" she thought as she watched him feebly drinking soda-water for his headache. "he's a man that wants ruling, and ruled he shall be!" and mrs. rush-marvelle and mrs. van clupp observed her manoeuvres with maternal interest, while the cunning-faced, white-headed van clupp conversed condescendingly with mr. rush-marvelle, as being a nonentity of a man whom he could safely patronize. as the glory of the sunset paled, and the delicate, warm hues of the summer twilight softened the landscape, the merriment of the brilliant assembly seemed to increase. as soon as it was dark, the grounds were to be illuminated by electricity, and dancing was to be continued indoors--the fine old picture-gallery being the place chosen for the purpose. nothing that could add to the utmost entertainment of the guests had been forgotten, and thelma, the fair mistress of these pleasant revels, noting with quiet eyes the evident enjoyment of all present, felt very happy and tranquil. she had exerted herself a good deal, and was now a little tired. her eyes had a dreamy, far-off look, and she found her thoughts wandering, now and then, away to the altenfjord--she almost fancied she could hear the sigh of the pines and the dash of the waves mingling in unison as they used to do when she sat at the old farm-house window and span, little dreaming then how her life would change--how all those familiar things would be swept away as though they had never been. she roused herself from this momentary reverie, and glancing down at the recumbent gentleman at her feet, touched his shoulder lightly with the edge of her fan. "why do you not dance, you very lazy mr. lorimer?" she asked, with a smile. he turned up his fair, half-boyish face to hers and laughed. "dance! i! good gracious! such an exertion would kill me, lady errington--don't you know that? i am of a sultan-like disposition--i shouldn't mind having slaves to dance for me if they did it well--but i should look on from the throne whereon i sat cross-legged,--and smoke my pipe in peace." "always the same!" she said lightly. "are you never serious?" his eyes darkened suddenly. "sometimes. awfully so! and in that condition i become a burden to myself and my friends." "never be serious!" interposed beau lovelace, "it really isn't worth while! cultivate the humor of a socrates, and reduce everything by means of close argument to its smallest standpoint, and the world, life, and time are no more than a pinch of snuff for some great titantic god to please his giant nose withal!" "your fame isn't worth much then, beau, if we're to go by that line of argument," remarked errington, with a laugh. "fame! by jove! you don't suppose i'm such an arrant donkey as to set any store by fame!" cried lovelace, a broad smile lighting up his face and eyes. "why, because a few people read my books and are amused thereby,--and because the press pats me graciously on the back, and says metaphorically, 'well done, little 'un!' or words to that effect, am i to go crowing about the world as if i were the only literary chanticleer? my dear friend, have you read 'esdras'? you will find there that a certain king of persia wrote to one 'rathumus, a story-writer.' no doubt he was famous in his day, but,--to travesty _hamlet_, 'where be his stories now?' learn, from the deep oblivion into which poor rathumus's literary efforts have fallen, the utter mockery and uselessness of so-called _fame_!" "but there must be a certain pleasure in it while you're alive to enjoy it," said lord winsleigh. "surely you derive some little satisfaction from your celebrity, mr. lovelace?" beau broke into a laugh, mellow, musical, and hearty. "a satisfaction shared with murderers, thieves, divorced women, dynamiters, and other notorious people in general," he said. "they're all talked about--so am i. they all get written about--so do i. my biography is always being carefully compiled by newspaper authorities, to the delight of the reading public. only the other day i learned for the first time that my father was a greengrocer, who went in for selling coals by the half-hundred and thereby made his fortune--my mother was an unsuccessful oyster-woman who failed ignominiously at margate--moreover, i've a great many brothers and sisters of tender age whom i absolutely refuse to assist. i've got a wife somewhere, whom my literary success causes me to despise--and i have deserted children. i'm charmed with the accuracy of the newspapers--and i wouldn't contradict them for the world,--i find my biographies so original! they are the result of that celebrity which winsleigh thinks enjoyable." "but assertions of that kind are libels," said errington, "you could prosecute." "too much trouble!" declared beau. "besides, five journals have disclosed the name of the town where i was born, and as they all contradict each other, and none of them are right, any contradiction on _my_ part would be superfluous!" they laughed,--and at that moment lady winsleigh joined them. "are you not catching cold, thelma?" she inquired sweetly. "sir philip, you ought to make her put on something warm,--i find the air growing chilly." at that moment the ever-ready sir francis lennox approached with a light woolen wrap he had found in the hall. "permit me!" he said gently, at the same time adroitly throwing it over thelma's shoulders. she colored a little,--she did not care for his attention, but she could not very well ignore it without seeming to be discourteous. so she murmured, "thank you!" and, rising from her chair, addressed lady winsleigh. "if you feel cold, clara, you will like some tea," she said. "shall we go indoors, where it is ready?" lady winsleigh assented with some eagerness,--and the two, beautiful women--the one dark, the other fair--walked side by side across the lawn into the house, their arms round each other's waists as they went. "two queens--and yet not rivals?" half queried lovelace, as he watched them disappearing. "their thrones are secure!" returned sir philip gaily. the others were silent. lord winsleigh's thoughts, whatever they were, deepened the lines of gravity on his face; and george lorimer, as he got up from his couch on the grass, caught a fleeting expression in the brown eyes of sir francis lennox that struck him with a sense of unpleasantness. but he quickly dismissed the impression from his mind, and went to have a quiet smoke in the shrubbery. chapter xxiii. "la rose du jardin, comme tu sais, dure peu, et la saison des roses est bien vite écoulée!"--saadi. thelma took her friend lady winsleigh to her own boudoir, a room which had been the particular pride of sir philip's mother. the walls were decorated with panels of blue silk in which were woven flowers of gold and silver thread,--and the furniture, bought from an old palace in milan, was of elaborately carved wood inlaid with ivory and silver. here a _tête-à-tête_ tea was served for the two ladies, both of whom were somewhat fatigued by the pleasures of the day. lady winsleigh declared she must have some rest, or she would be quite unequal to the gaieties of the approaching evening, and thelma herself was not sorry to escape for a little from her duties as hostess,--so the two remained together for some time in earnest conversations and lady winsleigh then and there confided to thelma what she had heard reported concerning sir philip's intimate acquaintance with the burlesque actress, violet vere. and they were both so long absent that, after a while, errington began to miss his wife, and, growing impatient, went in search of her. he entered the boudoir, and, to his surprise, found lady winsleigh there quite alone. "where is thelma?" he demanded. "she seems not very well--a slight headache or something of that sort--and has gone to lie down," replied lady winsleigh, with a faint trace of embarrassment in her manner. "i think the heat has been too much for her." "i'll go and see after her,"--and he turned promptly to leave the room. "sir philip!" called lady winsleigh. he paused and looked back. "stay one moment," continued her ladyship softly. "i have been for a long time so very anxious to say something to you in private. please let me speak now. you--you know"--here she cast down her lustrous eyes--"before you went to norway i--i was very foolish--" "pray do not recall it," he said with kindly gravity "_i_ have forgotten it." "that is so good of you!" and a flush of color warmed her delicate cheeks. "for if you have forgotten, you have also forgiven?" "entirely!" answered errington,--and touched by her plaintive, self-reproachful manner and trembling voice, he went up to her and took her hands in his own. "don't think of the past, clara! perhaps i also was to blame a little--i'm quite willing to think i was. flirtation's a dangerous amusement at best." he paused as he saw two bright tears on her long, silky lashes, and in his heart felt a sort of remorse that he had ever permitted himself to think badly of her. "we are the best of friends now, clara," he continued cheerfully, "and i hope we may always remain so. you can't imagine how glad i am that you love my thelma!" "who would not love her!" sighed lady winsleigh gently, as sir philip released her hands from his warm clasp,--then raising her tearful eyes to his she added wistfully, "you must take great care of her, philip--she is so sensitive,--i always fancy an unkind word would kill her." "she'll never hear one from me!" he returned, with so tender and earnest a look on his face, that lady winsleigh's heart ached for jealousy. "i must really go and see how she is. she's been exerting herself too much to-day. excuse me!" and with a courteous smile and bow he left the room with a hurried and eager step. alone, lady winsleigh smiled bitterly. "men are all alike!" she said half aloud. "who would think he was such a hypocrite? fancy his dividing his affection between two such contrasts as thelma and violet vere! however, there's no accounting for tastes. as for man's fidelity, i wouldn't give a straw for it--and for his morality--!" she finished the sentence with a scornful laugh, and left the boudoir to return to the rest of the company. errington, meanwhile, knocked softly at the door of his wife's bedroom--and receiving no answer, turned the handle noiselessly and went in. thelma lay on the bed, dressed as she was, her cheek resting on her hand, and her face partially hidden. her husband approached on tiptoe, and lightly kissed her forehead. she did not stir,--she appeared to sleep profoundly. "poor girl!" he thought, "she's tired out, and no wonder, with all the bustle and racket of these people! a good thing if she can rest a little before the evening closes in." and he stole quietly out of the room, and meeting britta on the stairs told her on no account to let her mistress be disturbed till it was time for the illumination of the grounds. britta promised,--britta's eyes were red--one would almost have fancied she had been crying. but thelma was not asleep--she had felt her husband's kiss,--her heart had beat as quickly as the wing of a caged wild bird at his warm touch,--and now he had gone she turned and pressed her lips passionately on the pillow where his hand had leaned. then she rose languidly from the bed, and, walking slowly to the door, locked it against all comers. presently she began to pace the room up and down,--up and down,--her face was very white and weary, and every now and then a shuddering sigh broke from her lips. "can i believe it? oh no!--i cannot--i will not!" she murmured. "there must be some mistake--clara has heard wrongly." she sighed again. "yet--if it is so,--he is not to blame--it is i--i who have failed to please him. where--how have i failed?" a pained, puzzled look filled her grave blue eyes, and she stopped in her walk to and fro. "it cannot be true!" she said half aloud,--"it is altogether unlike him. though clara says--and she has known him so long!--clara says he loved _her_ once--long before he saw me--my poor philip!--he must have suffered by that love!--perhaps that is why he thought life so wearisome when he first came to the altenfjord--ah! the altenfjord!" a choking sob rose in her throat--but she repressed it. "i must try not to weary him," she continued softly--"i must have done so in some way, or he would not be tired. but as for what i have heard,--it is not for me to ask him questions. i would not have him think that i mistrust him. no--there is some fault in me--something he does not like, or he would never go to--" she broke off and stretched out her hands with a sort of wild appeal. "oh, philip! my darling!" she exclaimed in a sobbing whisper. "i always knew i was not worthy of you--but i thought,--i hoped my love would make amends for all my shortcomings!" tears rushed into her eyes, and she turned to a little arched recess, shaded by velvet curtains--her oratory--where stood an exquisite white marble statuette of the virgin and child. there she knelt for some minutes, her face hidden in her hands, and when she rose she was quite calm, though very pale. she freshened her face with cold water, rearranged her disordered hair,--and then went downstairs, thereby running into the arms of her husband who was coming up again to look, as he said, at his "sleeping beauty." "and here she is!" he exclaimed joyously. "have you rested enough, my pet?" "indeed, yes!" she answered gently. "i am ashamed so be so lazy. have you wanted me, philip?" "i always want you," he declared. "i am never happy without you." she smiled and sighed. "you say that to please me," she said half wistfully. "i say it because it is true!" he asserted proudly, putting his arm round her waist and escorting her in this manner down the great staircase. "and you know it, you sweet witch! you're just in time to see the lighting up of the grounds. there'll be a good view from the picture-gallery--lots of the people have gone in there--you'd better come too, for it's chilly outside." she followed him obediently, and her reappearance among her guests was hailed with enthusiasm,--lady winsleigh being particular effusive, almost too much so. "your headache has quite gone, dearest, hasn't it?" she inquired sweetly. thelma eyed her gravely. "i did not suffer from the headache, clara," she said. "i was a little tired, but i am quite rested now." lady winsleigh bit her lips rather vexedly, but said no more, and at that moment exclamations of delight broke from all assembled at the brilliant scene that suddenly flashed upon their eyes. electricity, that radiant sprite whose magic wand has lately been bent to the service of man, had in less than a minute played such dazzling pranks in the gardens that they resembled the fabled treasure-houses discovered by aladdin. every tree glittered with sparkling clusters of red, blue, and green light--every flower-bed was bordered with lines and circles of harmless flame, and the fountains tossed up tall columns of amber rose, and amethyst spray against the soft blue darkness of the sky, in which a lustrous golden moon had just risen. the brilliancy of the illuminations showed up several dark figures strolling in couples about the grounds--romantic persons evidently, who were not to be persuaded to come indoors, even for the music of the band, which just then burst forth invitingly through the open windows of the picture-gallery. two of these pensive wanderers were marcia van clupp and lord algernon masherville,--and lord algy was in a curiously sentimental frame of mind, and weak withal, "_comme une petite queue d'agneau affligé_" he had taken a good deal of soda and brandy for his bilious headache, and, physically, he was much better,--but mentally he was not quite his ordinary self. by this it must not be understood that he was at all unsteadied by the potency of his medicinal tipple--he was simply in a bland humor--that peculiar sort of humor which finds strange and mystic beauty in everything, and contemplates the meanest trifles with emotions of large benevolence. he was conversational too, and inclined to quote poetry--this sort of susceptibleness often affects gentlemen after they have had an excellent dinner flavored with the finest burgundy. lord algy was as mild, as tame, and as flabby as a sleeping jelly-fish,--and in this inoffensive, almost tender mood of his, marcia pounced upon him. she looked ravishingly pretty in the moonlight, with a white wrap thrown carelessly round her head and shoulders, and her bold, bird-like eyes sparkling with excitement (for who that knows the pleasure of sports, is not excited when the fox is nearly run to earth?), and she stood with him beside one of the smaller illuminated fountains, raising her small white hand every now and then to catch some of the rainbow drops, and then with a laugh she would shake them off her little pearly nails into the air again. poor masherville could not help gazing at her with a lack-lustre admiration in his pale eyes,--and marcia, calculating every move in her own shrewd mind, saw it. she turned her head away with a petulant yet coquettish movement. "my patience!" she exclaimed; "yew _kin_ stare! yew'll know me again when yew see me,--say?" "i should know you anywhere," declared masherville, nervously fumbling with the string of his eye-glass. "it's impossible to forget _your_ face, miss marcia!" she was silent,--and kept that face turned from him so long that the gentle little lord was surprised. he approached her more closely and took her hand--the hand that had played with the drops in the fountain. it was such an astonishingly small hand.--so very fragile-looking and tiny, that he was almost for putting up his eye-glass to survey it, as if it were a separate object in a museum. but the faintest pressure of the delicate fingers he held startled him, and sent the most curious thrill through his body--and when he spoke he was in such a flutter that he scarcely knew what he was saying. "miss--miss marcia!" he stammered, "have--have i said--anything to--to offend you?" very slowly, and with seeming reluctance, she turned her head towards him, and--oh, thou mischievous puck, that sometimes takest upon thee the semblance of eros, what skill is thine! . . . there were tears in her eyes--real tears--bright, large tears that welled up and fell through her long lashes in the most beautiful, touching, and becoming manner! "and," thought marcia to herself, "if i don't fetch him now, i never will!" lord algy was quite frightened--his poor brain grew more and more bewildered. "why--miss marcia! i say! look here!" he mumbled in his extremity, squeezing her little hand tighter and tighter. "what--what _have_ i done! good gracious! you--you really mustn't cry, you know--i say--look here! marcia! i wouldn't vex you for the world!" "yew bet yew wouldn't!" said marcia, with slow and nasal plaintiveness. "i like that! that's the way yew english talk. but yew kin hang round a girl a whole season and make all her folks think badly of her--and--and--break her heart--yes--that's so!" here she dried her eyes with a filmy lace handkerchief. "but don't _yew_ mind me! i kin bear it. i kin worry through!" and she drew herself up with dignified resignation--while lord algy stared wildly at her, his feeble mind in a whirl. presently she smiled most seductively, and looked up with her dark, tear-wet eyes to the moon. "i guess it's a good night for lovers!" she said, sinking her ordinary tone to an almost sweet cadence. "but we're not of that sort, are we?" the die was cast! she looked so charming--so irresistible, that masherville lost all hold over his wits. scarcely knowing what he did, he put his arm round her waist. oh, what a warm, yielding waist! he drew her close to his breast, at the risk of breaking his most valuable eyeglass,--and felt his poor weak soul in a quiver of excitement at this novel and delicious sensation. "we are--we are of that sort!" he declared courageously. "why should you doubt it, marcia?" "i believe _yew_ if _yew_ say so," responded marcia. "but i guess yew're only fooling me!" "fooling you!" lord algy was so surprised that he released her quite suddenly from his embrace--so suddenly that she was a little frightened. was she to lose him, after all? "marcia," he continued mildly, yet with a certain manliness that did not ill become him. "i--i hope i am too much of--of a gentleman to--to '_fool_' any woman, least of all you, after i have, as you say, compromised you in society by my--my attentions. i--i have very little to offer you--but such as it is, is yours. in--in short, marcia, i--i will try to make you happy if you can--can care for me enough to--to--marry me!" eureka! the game was won! a vision of masherville park, yorkshire, that "well-timbered and highly desirable residence," as the auctioneers would describe it, flitted before marcia's eyes,--and, filled with triumph, she went straight into her lordly wooer's arms, and kissed him with thorough transatlantic frankness. she was really grateful to him. ever since she had come to england, she had plotted and schemed to become "my lady" with all the vigor of a purely republican soul,--and now at last, after hard fighting, she had won the prize for which her soul had yearned. she would in future belong to the english aristocracy--that aristocracy which her relatives in new york pretended to despise, yet openly flattered,--and with her arms round the trapped masherville's neck, she foresaw the delight she would have in being toadied by them as far as toadyism could be made to go. she is by no means presented to the reader as a favorable type of her nation--for, of course, every one knows there are plenty of sweet, unselfish, guileless american girls, who are absolutely incapable of such unblushing marriage-scheming as hers,--but what else could be expected from marcia? her grandfather, the navvy, had but recently become endowed with pilgrim-father ancestry,--and her maternal uncle was a boastful pork-dealer in cincinnati. it was her bounden duty to ennoble the family somehow,--surely, if any one had a right to be ambitious, she was that one! and wild proud dreams of her future passed through her brain, little lord algy quivered meekly under her kiss, and returned it with all the enthusiasm of which he was capable. one or two faint misgivings troubled him as to whether he had not been just a little too hasty in making a serious _bona fide_ offer of marriage to the young lady by whose pilgrim progenitors he was not deceived. he knew well enough what her antecedents were, and a faint shudder crossed him as he thought of the pork-dealing uncle, who would, by marriage, become _his_ uncle also. he had long been proud of the fact that the house of masherville had never, through the course of centuries, been associated, even in the remotest manner with trade--and now!-- "yet, after all," he mused, "the marquis of londonderry openly advertises himself as a coal-merchant, and the brothers-in-law of the princess louise are in the wine trade and stock-broking business,--and all the old knightly blood of england is mingling itself by choice with that of the lowest commoners--what's the use of my remaining aloof, and refusing to go with the spirit of the age? besides, marcia loves me, and it's pleasant to be loved!" poor lord algy. he certainly thought there could be no question about marcia's affection for him. he little dreamed that it was to his title and position she had become so deeply attached,--he could not guess that after he had married her there would be no more lord masherville worth mentioning--that that individual, once independent, would be entirely swallowed up and lost in the dashing personality of lady masherville, who would rule her husband as with a rod of iron. he was happily ignorant of his future, and he walked in the gardens for some time with his arm round marcia's waist, in a very placid and romantic frame of mind. by-and-by he escorted her into the house, where the dancing was in full swing--and she, with a sweet smile, bidding him wait for her in the refreshment-room, sought for and found her mother, who as usual, was seated in a quiet corner with mrs. rush-marvelle, talking scandal. "well?" exclaimed these two ladies, simultaneously and breathlessly. marcia's eyes twinkled. "guess he came in as gently as a lamb!" she said. they understood her. mrs. rush-marvelle rose from her chair in her usual stately and expensive manner. "i congratulate you, my dear!" kissing marcia affectionately on both cheeks. "bruce errington would have been a better match,--but, under the circumstances, masherville is really about the best thing you could do. you'll find him quite easy to manage!" this with an air as though she were recommending a quiet pony. "that's so!" said marcia carelessly, "i guess we'll pull together somehow. mar-ma," to her mother--"yew kin turn on the news to all the folks yew meet--the more talk the better! i'm not partial to secrets!" and with a laugh, she turned away. then mrs. van clupp laid her plump, diamond-ringed hand on that of her dear friend, mrs. marvelle. "you have managed the whole thing beautifully," she said, with a grateful heave of her ample bosom. "such a clever creature as you are!" she dropped her voice to a mysterious whisper. "you shall have that cheque to-morrow, my love!" mrs. rush-marvelle pressed her fingers cordially. "don't hurry yourself about it!"--she returned in the same confidential tone. "i dare say you'll want me to arrange the wedding and the 'crush' afterwards. i can wait till then." "no, no! that's a separate affair," declared mrs. van clupp. "i must insist on your taking the promised two hundred. you've been really so _very_ energetic!" "well, i _have_ worked rather hard," said mrs. marvelle, with modest self-consciousness. "you see nowadays it's so difficult to secure suitable husbands for the girls who ought to have them. men _are_ such slippery creatures!" she sighed--and mrs. van clupp echoed the sigh,--and then these two ladies,--the nature of whose intimacy may now be understood by the discriminating reader,--went together to search out those of their friends and acquaintances who were among the guests that night, and to announce to them (in the strictest confidence, of course!) the delightful news of "dear marcia's engagement." thelma heard of it, and went at once to proffer her congratulations to marcia in person. "i hope you will be very, very happy!" she said simply, yet with such grave earnestness in her look and voice that the "yankee gel" was touched to a certain softness and seriousness not at all usual with her, and became so winning and gentle to lord algy that he felt in the seventh heaven of delight with his new position as affianced lover to so charming a creature. meanwhile george lorimer and pierre duprèz were chatting together in the library. it was very quiet there,--the goodly rows of books, the busts of poets and philosophers,--the large, placid features of the pallas athene crowning an antique pedestal,--the golden pipes of the organ gleaming through the shadows,--all these gave a solemn, almost sacred aspect to the room. the noise of the dancing and festivity in the distant picture-gallery did not penetrate here, and lorimer sat at the organ, drawing out a few plaintive strains from its keys as he talked. "it's your fancy, pierre," he said slowly. "thelma may be a little tired to-day, perhaps--but i know she's perfectly happy." "i think not so," returned duprèz. "she has not the brightness--the angel look--_les yeux d'enfant_,--that we beheld in her at that far norwegian fjord. britta is anxious for her." lorimer looked up, and smiled a little. "britta? it's always britta with you, _mon cher_! one would think--" he paused and laughed. "think what you please!" exclaimed duprèz, with a defiant snap of his fingers. "i would not give that little person for all the _grandes dames_ here to-day! she is charming--and she is _true_!--_ma foi!_ to be true to any one is a virtue in this age! i tell you, my good boy, there is something sorrowful--heavy--on _la belle_ thelma's mind--and britta, who sees her always, feels it--but she cannot speak. one thing i will tell you--it is a pity she is so fond of miladi winsleigh." "why?" asked lorimer, with some eagerness. "because--" he stopped abruptly as a white figure suddenly appeared at the doorway, and a musical voice addressed them-- "why, what are you both doing here, away from everybody?" and thelma smiled as she approached. "you are hermits, or you are lazy! people are going in to supper. will you not come also?" "_ma foi!_" exclaimed duprèz; "i had forgotten! i have promised your most charming mother, _cher_ lorimer, to take her in to this same supper. i must fly upon the wings of chivalry!" and with a laugh, he hurried off, leaving thelma and lorimer alone together. she sank rather wearily into a chair near the organ, and looked at him. "play me something!" she said softly. a strange thrill quivered through him as he met her eyes--the sweet, deep, earnest eyes of the woman he loved. for it was no use attempting to disguise it from himself--he loved her passionately, wildly, hopelessly; as he had loved her from the first. obedient to her wish, his fingers wandered over the organ-keys in a strain of solemn, weird, yet tender melancholy--the grand, rich notes pealed forth sobbingly--and she listened, her hands clasped idly in her lap. presently he changed the theme to one of more heart-appealing passion--and a strange wild minor air, like the rushing of the wind across the mountains, began to make itself heard through the subdued rippling murmur of his improvised accompaniment. to his surprise and fear, she started up, pressing her hands against her ears. "not that--not that song, my friend!" she cried, almost imploringly. "oh, it will break my heart! oh, the altenfjord!" and she gave way to a passion of weeping. "thelma! thelma!" and poor lorimer, rising from the organ, stood gazing at her in piteous dismay,--every nerve in his body wrung to anguish by the sound of her sobbing. a mad longing seized him to catch her in his arms,--to gather her and her sorrows, whatever they were, to his heart!--and he had much ado to restrain himself. "thelma," he presently said, in a gentle voice that trembled just a little, "thelma, what is troubling you? you call me your brother--give me a brother's right to your confidence." he bent over her and took her hand. "i--i can't bear to see you cry like this! tell me--what's the matter? let me fetch philip." she looked up with wild wet eyes and quivering lips. "oh no--no!" she murmured, in a tone of entreaty and alarm. "do not,--philip must not know--i do wish him always to see me bright and cheerful--and--it is nothing! it is that i heard something which grieved me--" "what was it?" asked lorimer, remembering duprèz's recent remarks. "oh, i would not tell you!" she said eagerly, drying her eyes and endeavoring to smile, "because i am sure it was a mistake, and all wrong--and i was foolish to fancy that such a thing could be, even for a moment. but when one does not know the world, it seems cruel--" "thelma, what do you mean?" and george surveyed her in some perplexity. "if any one's been bothering or vexing you, just you tell phil all about it. don't have any secrets from him,--he'll soon put everything straight, whatever it is." she shook her head slightly. "ah, you do not understand!" she said pathetically, "how should you? because you have not given your life away to any one, and it is all different with you. but when you do love--if you are at all like me,--you will be so anxious to always seem worthy of love--and you will hide all your griefs away from your beloved,--so that your constant presence shall not seem tiresome. and i would not for all the world trouble philip with my silly fancies--because then he might grow more weary still--" "_weary_!" interrupted lorimer, in an accent of emphatic surprise. "why, you don't suppose phil's tired of you, thelma? that _is_ nonsense indeed! he worships you! who's been putting such notions into your head?" she rose from her chair quite calm and very pale, and laid her two trembling hands in his. "ah, you also will mistake me," she said, with touching sweetness, "like so many others who think me strange in my speech and manner. i am sorry i am not like other women,--but i cannot help it. what i do wish you to understand is that i never suppose anything against my philip--he is the noblest and best of men! and you must promise not to tell him that i was so foolish as to cry just now because you played that old song i sang to you both so often in norway--it was because i felt a little sad--but it was only a fancy,--and i would not have him troubled with such things. will you promise?" "but what has made you sad?" persisted lorimer, still puzzled. "nothing--nothing indeed," she answered, with almost feverish earnestness. "you yourself are sometimes sad, and can you tell why?" lorimer certainly could have told why,--but he remained silent, and gently kissed the little hands he held. "then i mustn't tell philip of your sadness?" he asked softly, at last. "but will you tell him yourself, thelma? depend upon it, it's much better to have no secrets from him. the least grief of yours would affect him more than the downfall of a kingdom. you know how dearly he loves you!" "yes--i know!" she answered, and her eyes brightened slowly. "and that is why i wish him always to see me happy!" she paused, and then added in a lower tone, "i would rather die, my friend, than vex him for one hour!" george still held her hands and looked wistfully in her face. he was about to speak again, when a cold, courteous voice interrupted them. "lady errington, may i have the honor of taking you in to supper?" it was sir francis lennox. he had entered quite noiselessly--his footsteps making no sound on the thick velvet-pile carpet, and he stood quite close to lorimer, who dropped thelma's hands hastily and darted a suspicious glance at the intruder. but sir francis was the very picture of unconcerned and bland politeness, and offered thelma his arm with the graceful ease of an accomplished courtier. she was, perforce, compelled to accept it--and she was slightly confused, though she could not have told why. "sir philip has been looking everywhere for you," continued sir francis amicably. "and for you also," he added, turning slightly to lorimer. "i trust i've not abruptly broken off a pleasant _tête-à-tête_?" lorimer colored hotly. "not at all," he said rather brusquely. "i've been strumming on the organ, and lady errington has been good enough to listen to me." "you do not _strum_" said thelma, with gentle reproach. "you play very beautifully." "ah! a charming accomplishment!" observed sir francis, with his under-glance and covert smile, as they all three wended their way out of the library. "i regret i have never had time to devote myself to acquiring some knowledge of the arts. in music i am a positive ignoramus! i can hold my own best in the field." "yes, you're a great adept at hunting, lennox," remarked lorimer suddenly, with something sarcastic in his tone. "i suppose the quarry never escapes you?" "seldom!" returned sir francis coolly. "indeed, i think i may say, never!" and with that, he passed into the supper-room, elbowing a way for thelma, till he succeeded in placing her near the head of the table, where she was soon busily occupied in entertaining her guests and listening to their chatter; and lorimer, looking at her once or twice, saw, to his great relief, that all traces of her former agitation had disappeared, leaving her face fair and radiant as a spring morning. chapter xxiv. "a generous fierceness dwells with innocence, and conscious virtue is allowed some pride." dryden. the melancholy days of autumn came on apace, and by-and-by the manor was deserted. the bruce-errington establishment removed again to town, where business, connected with his intending membership for parliament, occupied sir philip from morning till night. the old insidious feeling of depression returned and hovered over thelma's mind like a black bird of ill omen, and though she did her best to shake it off she could not succeed. people began to notice her deepening seriousness and the wistful melancholy of her blue eyes, and made their remarks thereon when they saw her at marcia van clupp's wedding, an event which came off brilliantly at the commencement of november, and which was almost entirely presided over by mrs. rush-marvelle. that far-seeing matron had indeed urged on the wedding by every delicate expedient possible. "long engagements are a great mistake," she told marcia,--then, in a warning undertone she added, "men are capricious nowadays,--they're all so much in demand,--better take masherville while he's in the humor." marcia accepted this hint and took him,--and mrs. rush-marvelle heaved a sigh of relief when she saw the twain safely married, and off to the continent on their honeymoon-trip,--marcia all sparkling and triumphant,--lord algy tremulous and feebly ecstatic. "thank heaven _that's_ over!" she said to her polite and servile husband. "i never had such a troublesome business in my life! that girl's been nearly two seasons on my hands, and i think five hundred guineas not a bit too much for all i've done." "not a bit--not a bit!" agreed mr. marvelle warmly. "have they--have they--" here he put on a most benevolent side-look--"quite settled with you, my dear?" "every penny," replied mrs. marvelle calmly. "old van clupp paid me the last hundred this morning. and poor mrs. van clupp is so _very_ grateful!" she sighed placidly, and appeared to meditate. then she smiled sweetly and, approaching mr. marvelle, patted his shoulder caressingly. "i think we'll do the italian lakes, dear--what do you say?" "charming--charming!" declared, not her lord and master, but her slave and vassal. "nothing could be more delightful!" and to the italian lakes accordingly they went. a great many people were out of town,--all who had leisure and money enough to liberate themselves from the approaching evils of an english winter, had departed or were departing,--beau lovelace had gone to como,--george lorimer had returned with duprèz to paris, and thelma had very few visitors except lady winsleigh, who was more often with her now than ever. in fact, her ladyship was more like one of the errington household than anything else,--she came so frequently and stayed so long. she seemed sincerely attached to thelma,--and thelma herself, too single-hearted and simple to imagine that such affection could be feigned, gave her in return, what lady winsleigh had never succeeded in winning from any woman,--a pure, trusting, and utterly unsuspecting love, such as she would have lavished on a twin-born sister. but there was one person who was not deceived by lady winsleigh's charm of manner, and grace of speech. this was britta. her keen eyes flashed a sort of unuttered defiance into her ladyship's beautiful, dark languishing ones--she distrusted her, and viewed the intimacy between her and the "fröken" with entire disfavor. once she ventured to express something of her feeling on the matter to thelma--but thelma had looked so gently wondering and reproachful that britta had not courage to go on. "i am so sorry, britta," said her mistress, "that you do not like lady winsleigh--because i am very fond of her. you must try to like her for my sake." but britta pursed her lips and shook her head obstinately. however, she said no more at the time, and decided within herself to wait and watch the course of events. and in the meantime she became very intimate with lady winsleigh's maid, louise rénaud, and briggs, and learned from these two domestic authorities many things which greatly tormented and puzzled her little brain,--things over which she pondered deeply without arriving at any satisfactory conclusion. on her return to town, thelma had been inexpressibly shocked at the changed appearance of her husband's secretary, edward neville. at first she scarcely knew him, he had altered so greatly. always inclined to stoop, his shoulders were now bent as by the added weight of twenty years--his hair, once only grizzled, was now quite grey--his face was deeply sunken and pale, and his eyes by contrast looked large and wild, as though some haunting thought were driving him to madness. he shrank so nervously from her gaze, that she began to fancy he must have taken some dislike to her,--and though she delicately refrained from pressing questions upon him personally, she spoke to her husband about him, with real solicitude. "is mr. neville working too hard?" she asked one day. "he looks very ill." her remark seemed to embarrass philip,--he colored and seemed confused. "does he? oh, i suppose he sleeps badly. yes, i remember, he told me so. you see, the loss of his wife has always preyed on his mind--he never loses hope of--of--that is--he is always trying to--you know!--to get her back again." "but do you think he will ever find her?" asked thelma. "i thought you said it was a hopeless case?" "well--i think so, certainly--but, you see, it's no good dashing his hopes--one never knows--she might turn up any day--it's a sort of chance!" "i wish i could help him to search for her," she said compassionately. "his eyes do look so full of sorrow," she paused and added musingly, "almost like sigurd's eyes sometimes." "oh, he's not losing his wits," said philip hastily, "he's quite patient, and--and all that sort of thing. don't bother about him, thelma, he's all right!" and he fumbled hastily with some papers, and began to talk of something else. his embarrassed manner caused her to wonder a little at the time as to the reason of it,--but she had many other things to think about, and she soon forgot a conversation that might have proved a small guiding-link in the chain of events that were soon about to follow quickly one upon another, shaking her life to its very foundation. lady winsleigh found it almost impossible to get her on the subject of the burlesque actress, violet vere, and sir philip's supposed admiration for that notorious stage-siren. "i do not believe it," she said firmly, "and you--you must not believe it either, clara. for wherever you heard it, it is wrong. we should dishonor philip by such a thought--you are his friend, and i am his wife--we are not the ones to believe anything against him, even if it could be proved--and there are no proofs." "my dear," responded her ladyship easily. "you can get proofs for yourself if you like. for instance, ask sir philip how often he has seen miss vere lately,--and hear what he says." thelma colored deeply. "i would not question my husband on such a subject," she said proudly. "oh well! if you are so fastidious!" and lady winsleigh shrugged her shoulders. "i am not fastidious," returned thelma, "only i do wish to be worthy of his love,--and i should not be so if i doubted him. no, clara, i will trust him to the end." clara winsleigh drew nearer to her, and took her hand. "even if he were unfaithful to you?" she asked in a low, impressive tone. "unfaithful!" thelma uttered the word with a little cry. "clara, dear clara, you must not say such a word! unfaithful! that means that my husband would love some one more than me!--ah! that is impossible!" "suppose it were possible?" persisted lady winsleigh, with a cruel light in her dark eyes. "such things have been!" thelma stood motionless, a deeply mournful expression on her fair, pale face. she seemed to think for a moment, then she spoke. "i would never believe it!" she said solemnly. "never, unless i heard it from his own lips, or saw it in his own writing, that he was weary of me, and wanted me no more." "and then?" "then"--she drew a quick breath--"i should know what to do. but, clara, you must understand me well, even if this were so, i should never blame him--no--not once!" "not blame him?" cried lady winsleigh impatiently. "not blame him for infidelity?" a deep blush swept over her face at the hated word "infidelity," but she answered steadily-- "no. because, you see, it would be my fault, not his. when you hold a flower in your hand for a long time, till all its fragrance has gone, and you drop it because it no longer smells sweetly--you are not to blame--it is natural you should wish to have something fresh and fragrant,--it is the flower's fault because it could not keep its scent long enough to please you. now, if philip were to love me no longer, i should be like that flower, and how would he be to blame? he would be good as ever, but i--i should have ceased to seem pleasant to him--that is all!" she put this strange view of the case quite calmly, as if it were the only solution to the question. lady winsleigh heard her, half in contemptuous amusement, half in dismay. "what can i do with such a woman as this," she thought. "and fancy lennie imagining for a moment that he could have any power over her!" aloud, she said-- "thelma, you're the oddest creature going--a regular heathen child from norway! you've set up your husband as an idol, and you're always on your knees before him. it's awfully sweet of you, but it's quite absurd, all the same. angelic wives always get the worst of it, and so you'll see! haven't you heard that?" "yes, i have heard it," she answered, smiling a little. "but only since i came to london. in norway, it is taught to women that to be patient and obedient is best for every one. it is not so here. but i am not an angelic wife, clara, and so the 'worst of it' will not apply to me. indeed, i do not know of any 'worst' that i would not bear for philip's sake." lady winsleigh studied the lovely face, eloquent with love and truth, for some moments in silence;--a kind of compunction pricked her conscience. why destroy all that beautiful faith? why wound that grandly trusting nature? the feeling was but momentary. "philip _does_ run after the vere," she said to herself--"it's true, there's no mistake about it, and she ought to know of it. but she won't believe without proofs--what proofs can i get, i wonder?" and her scheming brain set to work to solve this problem. in justice to her, it must be admitted, she had a good deal of seeming truth on her side. sir philip's name _had_ somehow got connected with that of the leading actress at the brilliant, and more people than lady winsleigh began to make jocose whispering comments on his stage "amour"--comments behind his back, which he was totally unaware of. nobody knew quite how the rumor had first been started. sir francis lennox seemed to know a good deal about it, and he was an "intimate" of the "vere" magic circle of attraction. and though they talked, no one ventured to say anything to sir philip himself;--the only two among his friends who would have spoken out honestly were beau lovelace and lorimer, and these were absent. one evening, contrary to his usual custom, sir philip went out after the late dinner. before leaving, he kissed his wife tenderly, and told her on no account to sit up for him--he and neville were going to attend to a little matter of business which might detain them longer than they could calculate. after they had gone, thelma resigned herself to a lonely evening, and, stirring the fire in the drawing-room to a cheerful blaze, she sat down beside it. first, she amused herself by reading over some letters recently received from her father,--and then, yielding to a sudden fancy, she drew her spinning-wheel from the corner where it always stood, and set it in motion. she had little time for spinning now, but she never quite gave it up, and as the low, familiar whirring sound hummed pleasantly on her ears, she smiled, thinking how quaint and almost incongruous her simple implement of industry looked among all the luxurious furniture, and costly nick-nacks by which she was surrounded. "i ought to have one of my old gowns on," she half murmured, glancing down at the pale-blue silk robe she wore, "i am too fine to spin!" and she almost laughed as the wheel flew round swiftly under her graceful manipulations. listening to its whirr, whirr, whirr, she scarcely heard a sudden knock at the street-door, and was quite startled when the servant, morris, announced--"sir francis lennox!" surprised, she rose from her seat at the spinning-wheel with a slight air of hauteur. sir francis, who had never in his life seen a lady of title and fashion in london engaged in the primitive occupation of spinning, was entirely delighted with the picture before him,--the tall, lovely woman with her gold hair and shimmering blue draperies, standing with such stateliness beside the simple wooden wheel, the antique emblem of household industry. instinctively he thought of marguerite;--but marguerite as a crowned queen, superior to all temptations of either man or fiend. "sir philip is out," she said, as she suffered him to take her hand. "so i was aware!" returned lennox easily. "i saw him a little while ago at the door of the brilliant theatre." she turned very pale,--then controlling the rapid beating of her heart by a strong effort, she forced a careless smile, and said bravely-- "did you? i am very glad--for he will have some amusement there, perhaps, and that will do him good. he has been working so hard!" she paused. he said nothing, and she went on more cheerfully still-- "is it not a very dismal, wet evening! yes!--and you must be cold. will you have some tea?" "tha-anks!" drawled sir francis, staring at her admiringly. "if it's not too much trouble--" "oh no!" said thelma. "why should it be?" and she rang the bell and gave the order. sir francis sank lazily back in an easy chair, and stroked his moustache slowly. he knew that his random hit about the theatre had struck home,--but she allowed the arrow to pierce and possibly wound her heart without showing any outward sign of discomposure. "a plucky woman!" he considered, and wondered how he should make his next move. she, meanwhile, smiled at him frankly, and gave a light twirl to her spinning-wheel. "you see!" she said, "i was amusing myself this evening by imagining that i was once more at home in norway." "pray don't let me interrupt the amusement," he responded, with a sleepy look of satisfaction shooting from beneath his eyelids. "go on spinning, lady errington! . . . i've never seen any one spin before." at that moment morris appeared with the tea, and handed it to sir francis,--thelma took none, and as the servant retired, she quietly resumed her occupation. there was a short silence, only broken by the hum of the wheel. sir francis sipped his tea with a meditative air, and studied the fair woman before him as critically as he would have studied a picture. "i hope i'm not in your way?" he asked suddenly. she looked up surprised. "oh no--only i am sorry philip is not here to talk to you. it would be so much pleasanter." "would it?" he murmured rather dubiously and smiling. "well--i shall be quite contented if you will talk to me, lady errington!" "ah, but i am not at all clever in conversation," responded thelma quite seriously. "i am sure you, as well as many others, must have noticed that. i never do seem to say exactly the right thing to please everybody. is it not very unfortunate?" he laughed a little. "i have yet to learn in what way you do not please everybody," he said, dropping his voice to a low, caressing cadence. "who, that sees you, does not admire--and--and love you?" she met his languorous gaze without embarrassment,--while the childlike openness of her regard confused and slightly shamed him. "admire me? oh yes!" she said somewhat plaintively. "it is that of which i am so weary! because god has made one pleasant in form and face,--to be stared at and whispered about, and have all one's dresses copied!--all that is so small and common and mean, and does vex me so much!" "it is the penalty you pay for being beautiful," said sir francis slowly, wondering within himself at the extraordinary incongruity of a feminine creature who was actually tired of admiration. she made no reply--the wheel went round faster than before. presently lennox set aside his emptied cup, and drawing his chair a little closer to hers, asked-- "when does errington return?" "i cannot tell you," she answered. "he said that he might be late. mr. neville is with him." there was another silence. "lady errington," said sir francis abruptly--"pray excuse me--i speak as a friend, and in your interests,--how long is this to last?" the wheel stopped. she raised her eyes,--they were grave and steady. "i do not understand you," she returned quietly. "what is it that you mean?" he hesitated--then went on, with lowered eyelids and a half-smile. "i mean--what all our set's talking about--errington's queer fancy for that actress at the brilliant." thelma still gazed at him fixedly. "it is a mistake," she said resolutely, "altogether a mistake. and as you are his friend, sir francis, you will please contradict this report--which is wrong, and may do philip harm. it has no truth in it at all--" "no truth!" exclaimed lennox. "it's true as gospel! lady errington, i'm sorry for it--but your husband is deceiving you most shamefully!" "how dare you say such a thing!" she cried, springing upright and facing him,--then she stopped and grew very pale--but she kept her eyes upon him. how bright they were! what a chilling pride glittered in their sea-blue depths! "you are in error," she said coldly. "if it is wrong to visit this theatre you speak of, why are you so often seen there--and why is not some harm said of _you_? it is not your place to speak against my husband. it is shameful and treacherous! you do forget yourself most wickedly!" and she moved to leave the room. but sir francis interposed. "lady errington," he said very gently, "don't be hard upon me--pray forgive me! of course i've no business to speak--but how can i help it? when i hear every one at the clubs discussing you, and pitying you, it's impossible to listen quite unmoved! i'm the least among your friends, i know,--but i can't bear this sort of thing to go on,--the whole affair will be dished up in the society papers next!" and he paced the room half impatiently,--a very well-feigned expression of friendly concern and sympathy on his features. thelma stood motionless, a little bewildered--her head throbbed achingly, and there was a sick sensation of numbness creeping about her. "i tell you it is all wrong!" she repeated with an effort. "i do not understand why these people at the clubs should talk of me, or pity me. i do not need any pity! my husband is all goodness and truth,"--she stopped and gathered courage as she went on. "yes! he is better, braver, nobler than all other men in the world, it seems to me! he gives me all the joy of my life--each day and night i thank god for the blessing of his love!" she paused again. sir francis turned and looked at her steadily. a sudden thought seemed to strike her, for she advanced eagerly, a sweet color flushing the pallor of her skin. "you can do so much for me if you will!" she said, laying her hand on his arm. "you can tell all these people who talk so foolishly that they are wrong,--tell them how happy i am! and that my philip has never deceived me in any matter, great or small!" "never?" he asked with a slight sneer. "you are sure?" "sure!" she answered bravely. "he would keep nothing from me that it was necessary or good for me to know. and i--oh! i might pass all my life in striving to please him, and yet i should never, never be worthy of all his tenderness and goodness! and that he goes many times to a theatre without me--what is it? a mere nothing--a trifle to laugh at! it is not needful to tell me of such a small circumstance!" as she spoke she smiled--her form seemed to dilate with a sort of inner confidence and rapture. sir francis stared at her half shamed,--half savage. the beautiful, appealing face, bright with simple trust, roused him to no sort of manly respect or forbearance,--the very touch of the blossom-white hand she had laid so innocently on his arm, stung his passion as with a lash--as he had said, he was fond of hunting--he had chased the unconscious deer all through the summer, and now that it had turned to bay with such pitiful mildness and sweet pleading, why not draw the knife across its slim throat without mercy? "really, lady errington!" he said at last sarcastically, "your wifely enthusiasm and confidence are indeed charming! but, unfortunately, the proofs are all against you. truth is truth, however much you may wish to blind your eyes to its manifestations. i sincerely wish sir philip were present to hear your eloquent praises of him, instead of being where he most undoubtedly is,--in the arms of violet vere!" as he said these words she started away from him and put her hands to her ears as though to shut out some discordant sound--her eyes glowed feverishly. a cold shiver shook her from head to foot. "that is false--false!" she muttered in a low, choked voice. "how can you--how dare you?" she ceased, and with a swaying, bewildered movement, as though she were blind, she fell senseless at his feet. in one second he was kneeling beside her. he raised her head on his arm,--he gazed eagerly on her fair, still features. a dark contraction of his brows showed that his thoughts were not altogether righteous ones. suddenly he laid her down again gently, and, springing to the door, locked it. returning, he once more lifted her in a half-reclining position, and encircling her with his arms, drew her close to his breast and kissed her. he was in no hurry for her to recover--she looked very beautiful--she was helpless--she was in his power. the silvery ting-ling of the clock on the mantel-piece striking eleven startled him a little--he listened painfully--he thought he heard some one trying the handle of the door he had locked. again--again he kissed those pale, unconscious lips! presently, a slight shiver ran through her frame--she sighed, and a little moan escaped her. gradually, as warmth and sensation returned to her, she felt the pressure of his embrace, and murmured-- "philip! darling,--you have come back earlier,--i thought--" here she opened her eyes and met those of sir francis, who was eagerly bending over her. she uttered an exclamation of alarm, and strove to rise. he held her still more closely. "thelma--dear, dearest thelma! let me comfort you,--let me tell you how much i love you!" and before she could divine his intent, he pressed his lips passionately on her pale cheek. with a cry she tore herself violently from his arms and sprang to her feet, trembling in every limb. "what--what is this?" she exclaimed wrathfully. "are you mad?" and still weak and confused from her recent attack of faintness, she pushed back her hair from her brows and regarded him with a sort of puzzled horror. he flushed deeply, and set his lips hard. "i dare say i am," he answered, with a bitter laugh; "in fact, i know i am! you see, i've betrayed my miserable secret. will you forgive me, lady errington--thelma?" he drew nearer to her, and his eyes darkened with restrained passion. "matchless beauty!--adorable woman, as you are!--will you not pardon my crime, if crime it be--the crime of loving you? for i do love you!--heaven only knows how utterly and desperately!" she stood mute, white, almost rigid, with that strange look of horror frozen, as it were, upon her features. emboldened by her silence, he approached and caught her hand,--she wrenched it from his grasp and motioned him from her with a gesture of such royal contempt that he quailed before her. all suddenly the flood-gates of her speech were loosened,--the rising tide of burning indignation that in its very force had held her dumb and motionless, now broke forth unrestrainedly. "o god!" she cried impetuously, a magnificent glory of disdain flashing in her jewel-like eyes, "what _thing_ is this that calls itself a man?--this thief of honor,--this pretended friend? what have i done, sir, that you should put such deep disgrace as your so-called _love_ upon me?--what have i _seemed_, that you thus dare to outrage me by the pollution of your touch? i,--the wife of the noblest gentleman in the land! ah!" and she drew a long breath--"and it is you who speak against my husband--_you_!" she smiled scornfully,--then with more calmness continued--"you will leave my house, sir, at once! . . . and never presume to enter it again!" and she stepped towards the bell. he looked at her with an evil leer. "stop a moment!" he said coolly. "just one moment before you ring. pray consider! the servant cannot possibly enter, as the door is locked." "you _dared_ to lock the door!" she exclaimed, a sudden fear chilling her heart as she remembered similar manoeuvres on the part of the reverend mr. dyceworthy--then another thought crossed her mind, and she began to retreat towards a large painted panel of "venus" disporting among cupids and dolphins in the sea. sir francis sprang to her side, and caught her arm in an iron grip--his face was aflame with baffled spite and vindictiveness. "yes, i _dared_!" he muttered with triumphant malice. "and i dared do more than that! you lay unconscious in my arms,--you beautiful, bewitching thelma, and i kissed you--ay! fifty times! you can never undo those kisses! you can never forget that _my_ lips, as well as your husband's, have rested on yours--i have had that much joy that shall never be taken away from me! and if i choose, even now,"--and he gripped her more closely--"yes, even now i will kiss you, in spite of you!--who is to prevent me? i will force you to love me, thelma--" driven to bay, she struck him with all her force in the face, across the eyes. "traitor!--liar!--coward!" she gasped breathlessly. "let me go!" smarting with the pain of the blow, he unconsciously loosened his grasp--she rushed to the "venus" panel, and to his utter discomfiture and amazement he saw it open and close behind her. she disappeared suddenly and noiselessly as if by magic. with a fierce exclamation, he threw his whole weight against that secret sliding door--it resisted all his efforts. he searched for the spring by which it must have opened,--the whole panel was perfectly smooth and apparently solid, and the painted "venus" reclining on her dolphin's back seemed as though she smiled mockingly at his rage and disappointment. while he was examining it, he heard the sudden, sharp, and continuous ringing of an electric bell somewhere in the house, and with a guilty flush on his face he sprang to the drawing-room door and unlocked it. he was just in time, for scarcely had he turned the key, when morris made his appearance. that venerable servitor looked round the room in evident surprise. "did her ladyship ring?" he inquired, his eyes roving everywhere in search of his mistress. sir francis collected his wits, and forced himself to seem composed. "no," he said coolly. "_i_ rang." he adopted this falsehood as a means of exit. "call a hansom, will you?" and he sauntered easily into the hall, and got on his hat and great-coat. morris was rather bewildered,--but, obedient to the command, blew the summoning cab-whistle, which was promptly answered. sir francis tossed him half a crown, and entered the vehicle, which clattered away with him in the direction of cromwell road. stopping at a particular house in a side street leading from thence, he bade the cabman wait,--and, ascending the steps, busied himself for some moments in scribbling something rapidly in pencil on a leaf of his note-book by the light of the hanging-lamp in the doorway. he then gave a loud knock, and inquired of the servant who answered it-- "is mr. snawley-grubbs in?" "yes, sir,"--the reply came rather hesitatingly--"but he's having a party to-night." and, in fact, the scraping of violins and the shuffle of dancing feet were distinctly audible overhead. "oh, well, just mention my name--sir francis lennox. say i will not detain him more than five minutes." he entered, and was ushered into a small ante-room while the maid went to deliver her message. he caught sight of his own reflection in a round mirror over the mantel-piece, and his face darkened as he saw a dull red ridge across his forehead--the mark of thelma's well-directed blow,--the sign-manual of her scorn. a few minutes passed, and then there came in to him a large man in an expensive dress-suit,--a man with a puffy, red, silenus-like countenance--no other than mr. snawley-grubbs, who hailed him with effusive cordiality. "my dear, sir francis!" he said in a rich, thick, uncomfortable voice. "this is an unexpected pleasure! won't you come upstairs? my girls are having a little informal dance--just among themselves and their own young friends--quite simple,--in fact an unpretentious little affair!" and he rubbed his fat hands, on which twinkled two or three large diamond rings. "but we shall be charmed if you will join us!" "thanks, not this evening," returned sir francis. "it's rather too late. i should not have intruded upon you at this hour--but i thought you might possibly like this paragraph for the _snake_." and he held out with a careless air the paper on which he had scribbled but a few minutes previously. mr. snawley-grubbs smiled,--and fixed a pair of elegant gold-rimmed eye-glasses on his inflamed crimson nose. "i must tell you, though," he observed, before reading, "that it is too late for this week, at any rate. we've gone to press already." "never mind!" returned sir francis indifferently. "next week will do as well." and he furtively watched mr. snawley-grubbs while he perused the pencilled scrawl. that gentleman, however, as editor and proprietor of the _snake_--a new, but highly successful weekly "society" journal, was far too dignified and self-important to allow his countenance to betray his feelings. he merely remarked, as he folded up the little slip very carefully. "very smart! very smart, indeed! authentic, of course?" sir francis drew himself up haughtily. "you doubt my word?" "oh dear, no!" declared mr. snawley-grubbs hastily, venturing to lay a soothing hand on sir francis's shoulder. "your position, and all that sort of thing--naturally you _must_ be able to secure correct information. you can't help it! i assure you the _snake_ is infinitely obliged to you for a great many well-written and socially exciting paragraphs. only, you see, i myself should never have thought that so extreme a follower of the exploded old doctrine of noblesse oblige, as sir philip bruce-errington, would have started on such a new line of action at all. but, of course, we are all mortal!" and he shook his round thick head with leering sagacity. "well!" he continued after a pause. "this shall go in without fail next week, i promise you." "you can send me a hundred copies of the issue," said sir francis, taking up his hat to go. "i suppose you're not afraid of an action for libel?" mr. snawley-grubbs laughed--nay, he roared,--the idea seemed so exquisitely suited to his sense of humor. "afraid? my dear fellow, there's nothing i should like better! it would establish the _snake_, and make my fortune! i would even go to prison with pleasure. prison, for a first-class misdemeanant, as i should most probably be termed, is perfectly endurable." he laughed again, and escorted sir francis to the street-door, where he shook hands heartily. "you are sure you won't come upstairs and join us? no? ah, i see you have a cab waiting. good-night, good-night!" and the snawley-grubbs door being closed upon him, sir francis re-entered his cab, and was driven straight to his bachelor lodgings in piccadilly. he was in a better humor with himself now,--though he was still angrily conscious of a smart throbbing across the eyes, where thelma's ringed hand had struck him. he found a brief note from lady winsleigh awaiting him. it ran as follows:-- "you're playing a losing game this time,--she will believe nothing without proofs--and even then it will be difficult. you had better drop the pursuit, i fancy. for once a woman's reputation will escape you!" he smiled bitterly as he read these last words. "not while a society paper exists!" he said to himself. "as long as there are editors willing to accept the word of a responsible man of position, for any report, the chastest diana that ever lived shall not escape calumny! she wants proofs, does she? she shall have them--by jove! she shall!" and instead of going to bed, he went off to a bijou villa in st. john's wood,--an elegantly appointed little place, which he rented and maintained,--and where the popular personage known as violet vere, basked in the very lap of luxury. meanwhile, thelma paced up and down her own boudoir, into which she had escaped through the sliding panel which had baffled her admirer. her whole frame trembled as she thought of the indignity to which she had been subjected during her brief unconsciousness,--her face burned with bitter shame,--she felt as if she were somehow poisonously infected by those hateful kisses of lennox,--all her womanly and wifely instincts were outraged. her first impulse was to tell her husband everything the instant he returned. it was she who had rung the bell which had startled sir francis, and she was surprised that her summons was not answered. she rang again, and britta appeared. "i wanted morris," said thelma quickly. "he thought it was the drawing-room bell," responded britta meekly, for her "fröken" looked very angry. "i saw him in the hall just now, letting out sir francis lennox." "has he gone?" demanded thelma eagerly. britta's wonder increased. "yes, fröken!" thelma caught her arm. "tell morris never, never to let him inside the house again--_never_!" and her blue eyes flashed wrathfully. "he is a wicked man, britta! you do not know how wicked he is!" "oh yes, i do!" and britta regarded her mistress very steadfastly. "i know quite well! but, then, i must not speak! if i dared, i could tell you some strange things, dear fröken--but you will not hear me. you know you do not wish me to talk about your grand new friends, fröken, but--" she paused timidly. "oh, britta, dear!" said thelma affectionately taking her hand. "you know they are not so much my friends as the friends of sir philip,--and for this reason i must never listen to anything against them. do you not see? of course their ways seem strange to us--but, then, life in london is so different to life in norway,--and we cannot all at once understand--" she broke off, sighing a little. then she resumed--"now you will give morris my message, britta--and then come to me in my bedroom--i am tired, and philip said i was not to wait up for him." britta departed, and thelma went rather slowly up-stairs. it was now nearly midnight, and she felt languid and weary. her reflections began to take a new turn. suppose she told her husband all that had occurred, he would most certainly go to sir francis and punish him in some way--there might then be a quarrel in which philip might suffer--and all sorts of evil consequences would perhaps result from her want of reticence. if, on the other hand, she said nothing, and simply refused to receive lennox, would not her husband think such conduct on her part strange? she puzzled over these questions till her head ached--and finally resolved to keep her own counsel for the present,--after what had happened. sir francis would most probably not intrude himself again into her presence. "i will ask mrs. lorimer what is best to do," she thought. "she is old and wise, and she will know." that night, as she laid her head on her pillow, and britta threw the warm _eidredon_ over her, she shivered a little and asked-- "is it not very cold, britta?" "very!" responded her little maid. "and it is beginning to snow." thelma looked wistful. "it is all snow and darkness now at the altenfjord," she said. britta smiled. "yes, indeed, fröken! we are better off here than there." "perhaps!" replied thelma a little musingly, and then she settled herself as though to sleep. britta kissed her hand, and retired noiselessly. when she had gone, thelma opened her eyes and lay broad awake looking at the flicker of rosy light flung on the ceiling from the little suspended lamp in her oratory. all snow and darkness at the altenfjord! how strange the picture seemed! she thought of her mother's sepulchre,--how cold and dreary it must be,--she could see in fancy the long pendent icicles fringing the entrance to the sea-king's tomb,--the spot where she and philip had first met,--she could almost hear the slow, sullen plash of the black fjord against the shore. her maiden life in norway--her school days at arles,--these were now like dreams,--dreams that had passed away long, long ago. the whole tenor of her existence had changed,--she was a wife,--she was soon to be a mother,--and with this near future of new and sacred joy before her, why did she to-night so persistently look backward to the past? as she lay quiet, watching the glimmering light upon the wall, it seemed as though her room were suddenly filled with shadowy forms,--she saw her mother's sweet, sad, suffering face,--then her father's sturdy figure and fine, frank features,--then came the flitting shape of the hapless sigurd, whose plaintive voice she almost imagined she could hear,--and feeling that she was growing foolishly nervous, she closed her eyes, and tried to sleep. in vain,--her mind began to work on a far more unpleasing train of thought. why did not philip return? where was he? as though some mocking devil had answered her, the words, "in the arms of violet vere!" as uttered by sir francis lennox, recurred to her. overcome by her restlessness, she started up,--she determined to get out of bed, and put on her dressing-gown and read,--when her quick ears caught the sound of steps coming up the stair-case. she recognized her husband's firm tread, and understood that he was followed by neville, whose sleeping-apartment was on the floor above. she listened attentively--they were talking together in low tones on the landing outside her door. "i think it would be much better to make a clean breast of it," said sir philip. "she will have to know some day." "your wife? for god's sake, don't tell her!" neville's voice replied. "such a disgraceful--" here his words sank to a whisper, and thelma could not distinguish them. another minute, and her husband entered with soft precaution, fearing to awake her--she stretched out her arms to welcome him, and he hastened to her with an exclamation of tenderness and pleasure. "my darling! not asleep yet?" she smiled,--but there was something very piteous in her smile, had the dim light enabled him to perceive it. "no, not yet, philip! and yet i think i have been dreaming of--the altenfjord." "ah! it must be cold there now," he answered lightly. "it's cold enough here, in all conscience. to-night there is a bitter east wind, and snow is falling." she heard this account of the weather with almost morbid interest. her thoughts instantly betook themselves again to norway, and dwelt there. to the last,--before her aching eyes closed in the slumber she so sorely needed,--she seemed to be carried away in fancy to a weird stretch of gloom-enveloped landscape where she stood entirely alone, vaguely wondering at the dreary scene. "how strange it seems!" she murmured almost aloud. "all snow and darkness at the altenfjord!" chapter xxv. "le temps où nous nous sommes aimés n'a guère duré, jeune fille; il a passé comme un coup de vent!" _old breton ballad._ the next morning dawned, cold and dismal. a dense yellow fog hung over the metropolis like a pall--the street lamps were lighted, but their flare scarcely illumined the thoroughfares, and the chill of the snow-burdened air penetrated into the warmest rooms, and made itself felt even by the side of the brightest fires. sir philip woke with an uncomfortable sense of headache and depression, and grumbled,--as surely every englishman has a right to grumble, at the uncompromising wretchedness of his country's winter climate. his humor was not improved when a telegram arrived before breakfast, summoning him in haste to a dull town in one of the midland counties, on pressing business connected with his candidature for parliament. "what a bore!" he exclaimed, showing the missive to his wife. "i _must_ go,--and i shan't be able to get back tonight. you'll be all alone, thelma. i wish you'd go to the winsleighs!" "why?" said thelma quietly. "i shall much prefer to be here. i do not mind, philip. i am accustomed to be alone." something in her tone struck him as particularly sad, and he looked at her intently. "now, my darling," he said suddenly, "if this parliamentary bother is making you feel worried or vexed in any way, i'll throw it all up--by jove, i will!" and he drew her into his warm embrace. "after all" he added, with a laugh, "what does it matter! the country can get on without me!" thelma smiled a little. "you must not talk so foolishly, philip," she said tenderly. "it is wrong to begin a thing of importance, and not go through with it. and i am not worried or vexed at all. what would people say of me if i, your wife, were, for my own selfish comfort and pleasure of having you always with me, to prevent you from taking a good place among the men of your nation? indeed, i should deserve much blame! and so, though it is a gloomy day for you, poor boy,--you must go to this place where you are wanted, and i shall think of you all the time you are gone, and shall be so happy to welcome you home to-morrow!" and she kissed and clung to him for a moment in silence. all that day philip was haunted by the remembrance of the lingering tenderness of her farewell embrace. by ten o'clock he was gone, taking neville with him; and after her household duties were over, thelma prepared herself to go and lunch with old mrs. lorimer, and see what she would advise concerning the affair of sir francis lennox. but, at the same time, she resolved that nothing should make her speak of the reports that were afloat about her husband and violet vere. "i know it is all false," she said to herself over and over again. "and the people here are as silly as the peasants in bosekop, ready to believe any untruth so long as it gives them something to talk about. but they may chatter as they please--i shall not say one word, not even to philip--for it would seem as if i mistrusted him." thus she put away all the morbid fancies that threatened to oppress her, and became almost cheerful. and while she made her simple plans for pleasantly passing the long, dull day of her husband's enforced absence, her friend, lady winsleigh, was making arrangements of a very different nature. her ladyship had received a telegram from sir francis lennox that morning. the pink missive had apparently put her in an excellent humor, though, after reading it, she crumpled it up and threw it in the waste-paper basket, from which receptacle, louise rénaud, her astute attendant, half an hour later extracted it, secreting it in her own pocket for private perusal at leisure. she ordered her brougham, saying she was going out on business,--and before departing, she took from her dressing-case certain bank-notes and crammed them hastily into her purse--a purse which, in all good faith, she handed to her maid to put in her sealskin muff-bag. of course, louise managed to make herself aware of its contents,--but when her ladyship at last entered her carriage her unexpected order, "to the brilliant theatre, strand," was sufficient to startle briggs, and cause him to exchange surprise signals with "mamzelle," who merely smiled a prim, incomprehensible smile. "_where_ did your la'ship say?" asked briggs dubiously. "are you getting deaf, briggs?" responded his mistress pleasantly. "to the brilliant theatre!" she raised her voice, and spoke with distinct emphasis. there was no mistaking her. briggs touched his hat,--in the same instant he winked at louise, and then the carriage rolled away. at night, the brilliant theatre is a pretty little place,--comfortable, cosy, bright, and deserving of its name;--in broad day, it is none of these things. a squalid dreariness seems to have settled upon it--it has a peculiar atmosphere of its own--an atmosphere dark, heavy, and strangely flavored with odors of escaping gas and crushed orange-peel. behind the scenes, these odors mingle with a chronic, all-pervading smell of beer--beer, which the stranger's sensitive nose detects directly, in spite of the choking clouds of dust which arise from the boards at the smallest movement of any part of the painted scenery. the brilliant had gone through much ill-fortune--its proprietors never realized any financial profit till they secured violet vere. with her came prosperity. her utter absence of all reserve--the frankness with which she threw modesty to the winds,--the vigor with which she danced a regular "break-down,"--roaring a comic song of the lowest type, by way of accompaniment,--the energetic manner in which, metaphorically speaking, she kicked at the public with her shapely legs,--all this overflow of genius on her part drew crowds to the brilliant nightly, and the grateful and happy managers paid her a handsome salary, humored all her caprices, and stinted and snubbed for her sake, all the rest of the company. she was immensely popular--the "golden youth" of london raved about her dyed hair, painted eyes, and carmined lips--even her voice, as coarse as that of a dustman, was applauded to the echo, and her dancing excited the wildest enthusiasm. dukes sent her presents of diamond ornaments--gifts of value which they would have possibly refused to their own wives and daughters,--royal highnesses thought it no shame to be seen lounging near her stage dressing-room door,--in short, she was in the zenith of her career, and, being thoroughly unprincipled, audaciously insolent, and wholly without a conscience,--she enjoyed herself immensely. at the very time when lady winsleigh's carriage was nearing the strand, the grand morning rehearsal of a new burlesque was "on" at the brilliant--and violet's harsh tones, raised to a sort of rough masculine roar, were heard all over the theatre, as she issued commands or made complaints according to her changeful humors. she sat in an elevated position above the stage on a jutting beam of wood painted to resemble the gnarled branch of a tree,--swinging her legs to and fro and clinking the heels of her shoes together in time to the mild scraping of a violin, the player whereof was "trying over" the first few bars of the new "jig" in which she was ere long to distinguish herself. she was a handsome woman, with a fine, fair skin, and large, full, dark eyes--she had a wide mouth, which, nearly always on the grin, displayed to the full her strong white teeth,--her figure was inclined to excessive _embonpoint_, but this rather endeared her to her admirers than otherwise,--many of these gentlemen being prone to describe her fleshly charms by the epithet "prime!" as though she were a fatting pig or other animal getting ready for killing. "tommy! tommy!" she screeched presently. "are you going to sleep? do you expect me to dance to a dirge, you lazy devil!" tommy, the player of the violin, paused in his efforts, and looked up drearily. he was an old man, with a lean, long body and pinched features--his lips had a curious way, too, of trembling when he spoke, as if he were ready to cry. "i can't help it," he said slowly. "i don't know it yet. i must practice it a bit at home. my sight's not so good as it used to be--" "such a pair of optics, love, you've never, never seen-- one my mother blacked last night, the other it is green!" sang violet, to the infinite delight of all the unwashed-looking supernumeraries and ballet-girls, who were scattered about the stage, talking and laughing. "shut up, tommy!" she continued. "you're always talking about your eyesight. i warn you, if you say too much about it you'll lose your place. we don't want blind fiddlers in the brilliant. put down you catgut screamer, and fetch me a pint. ask for the vere's own tipple--they'll twig!" tommy obeyed, and shuffled off on his errand. as he departed,--a little man with a very red face, wearing a stove-pipe hat very much on one side, bounced on the stage as if some one had thrown him there like a ball. "now, ladies, ladies!" he shouted warningly. "attention! once again, please! the last figure once again!" the straggling groups scrambled hastily into something like order, and the little man continued--"one, two, three! advance--retreat--left, right! very well, indeed! arms up a little more, miss jenkins--so! toes well pointed--curtsy--retire! one, two, three! swift slide to the left wing--forward! round--take hands--all smile, please!" this general smile was apparently not quite satisfactory, for he repeated persuasively--"all smile, please! so! round again--more quickly--now break the circle in a centre--enter miss vere--" he paused, growing still redder in the face, and demanded, "where is miss vere?" he was standing just beneath the painted bough of the sham tree, and in one second his hat was dexterously kicked off, and two heels met with a click round his neck. "here i am, pickaninny!" retorted miss vere holding him fast in this novel embrace, amid the laughter of the supers. "you're getting as blind as tommy! steady, steady now, donkey!--steady--woa!" and in a thrice she stood upright, one foot planted firmly on each of his shoulders. "no weight, am i, darling?" she went on jeeringly, and with an inimitably derisive air she put up an eye-glass and surveyed the top of his head. "you want a wig, my dear--you do, indeed! come with me to-morrow, and i'll buy you one to suit your complexion. your wife won't know you!" and with a vigorous jump she sprang down from her position, managing to give him a smart hit on the nose as she did so--and leaping to the centre of the stage, she posed herself to commence her dance--when tommy came creeping back in his slow and dismal fashion, bearing something in a pewter pot. "that's the ticket!" she cried as she perceived him. "i'm as dry as a whole desert! give it here!" and she snatched the mug from the feeble hand of her messenger and began drinking eagerly. the little red-faced man interposed. "now, miss vi," he said, "is that brandy?" "rather so!" returned the vere, with a knowing wink, "and a good many things besides. it's a mixture. the 'vere's own!' ha, ha! might be the name of a regiment!" and she buried her mouth and nose again in the tankard. "look here," said the little man again. "why not wait till after the dance? it's bad for you before." "oh, is it, indeed!" screamed violet, raising her face, which became suddenly and violently flushed. "o good lord! are you a temperance preacher? teach your granny! bad for me? say another word, and i'll box your ears for you! you braying jackass!--you snivelling idiot! who makes the brilliant draw? you or i? tell me that, you staring old--" here tommy, who had for some minutes been vainly endeavoring to attract her attention, raised his weak voice to a feeble shout. "i say, miss vere! i've been trying to tell you, but you won't listen! there's a lady waiting to see you!" "a what?" she asked. "a lady!" continued tommy, in loud tones. "a lady of title! wants to see you in private! won't detain you long!" violet vere raised her pewter mug once more, and drained off its contents. "lord, ain't i honored!" she said, smacking her lips with a grin. "a lady of title to see me! let her wait! now then!" and snapping her fingers, she began her dance, and went through it to the end, with her usual vigor and frankness. when she had finished, she turned to the red-faced man who had watched her evolutions with much delight in spite of the abuse she had heaped upon him, and said with an affected, smirking drawl-- "show the lady of title into my dressing-room! i shall be ready for her in ten minutes. be sure to mention that i am very shy,--and unaccustomed to company!" and, giggling gently like an awkward school-girl, she held down her head with feigned bashfulness, and stepped mincingly across the stage with such a ludicrous air of prim propriety, that all her associates burst out laughing, and applauded her vociferously. she turned and curtsied to them demurely--then suddenly raising one leg in a horizontal position, she twirled it rapidly in their faces,--then she gave a little shocked cough behind her hand, grinned, and vanished. when, in the stipulated ten minutes, she was ready to receive her unknown visitor, she was quite transformed. she had arrayed herself in a trailing gown of rich black velvet, fastened at the side with jet clasps--a cluster of natural, innocent, white violets nestled in the fall of spanish lace at her throat--her face was pale with pearl-powder,--and she had eaten a couple of scented bon-bons to drown the smell of her recent brandy-tipple. she reclined gracefully in an easy chair, pretending to read, and she rose with an admirably acted air of startled surprise, as one of the errand boys belonging to the brilliant tapped at her door, and in answer to her "come in!" announced, "lady winsleigh!" a faint, sweet, questioning smile played on the vere's wide mouth. "i am not aware that i have the honor of--" she began, modulating her voice to the requirements of fashionable society, and wondering within herself "what the d----l" this woman in the silk and sable-fur costume wanted. lady winsleigh in the meantime stared at her with cold, critical eyes. "she is positively rather handsome," she thought. "i can quite imagine a certain class of men losing their heads about her." aloud she said-- "i must apologize for this intrusion, miss vere! i dare say you have never heard my name--i am not fortunate enough to be famous,--as _you_ are." this with a killing satire in her smile. "may i sit down? thanks! i have called upon you in the hope that you may perhaps be able to give me a little information in a private matter--a matter concerning the happiness of a very dear friend of mine." she paused--violet vere sat silent. after a minute or two, her ladyship continued in a somewhat embarrassed manner-- "i believe you know a gentleman with whom i am also acquainted--sir philip bruce-errington." miss vere raised her eyes with charming languor and a slow smile. "oh yes!" "he visits you, doesn't he?" "frequently!" "i'm afraid you'll think me rude and inquisitive," continued lady winsleigh, with a coaxing air, "but--but may i ask--" "anything in the world," interrupted violet coolly. "ask away! but i'm not bound to answer." lady winsleigh reddened with indignation. "what an insulting creature!" she thought. but, after all, she had put herself in her present position, and she could not very well complain if she met with a rebuff. she made another effort. "sir francis lennox told me--" she began. the vere interrupted her with a cheerful laugh. "oh, you come from him, do you? now, why didn't you tell me that at first? it's all right! you're a great friend of lennie's, aren't you?" lady winsleigh sat erect and haughty, a deadly chill of disgust and fear at her heart. this creature called her quondam lover, "lennie"--even as she herself had done,--and she, the proud, vain woman of society and fashion shuddered at the idea that there should be even this similarity between herself and the "thing" called violet vere. she replied stiffly-- "i have known him a long time." "he's a nice fellow," went on miss vere easily--"a _leetle_ stingy sometimes, but never mind that! you want to know about sir philip errington, and i'll tell you. he's chosen to mix himself up with some affairs of mine--" "what affairs?" asked lady winsleigh rather eagerly. "they don't concern you," returned miss vere calmly, "and we needn't talk about them! but they concern sir philip,--or he thinks they do, and insists on seeing me about them, and holding long conversations, which bore me excessively!" she yawned slightly, smothering her yawn in a dainty lace handkerchief, and then went on-- "he's a moral young man, don't you know--and i never could endure moral men! i can't get on with them at all!" "then you don't like him?" questioned lady winsleigh in rather a disappointed tone. "no, i don't!" said the vere candidly. "he's not my sort. but, lord bless you! i know how he's getting talked about because he comes here--and serve him right too! he shouldn't meddle with my business." she paused suddenly and drew a letter from her pocket,--laughed and tossed it across the table. "you can read that, if you like," she said indifferently. "he wrote it, and sent it round to me last night." lady winsleigh's eyes glistened eagerly,--she recognized errington's bold, clear hand at once,--and as she read, an expression of triumph played on her features. she looked up presently and said-- "have you any further use for this letter, miss vere? or--will you allow me to keep it?" the vere seemed slightly suspicious of this proposal, but looked amused too. "why, what do you want it for?" she inquired bluntly. "to tease him about me?" lady winsleigh forced a smile. "well--perhaps!" she admitted, then with an air of gentleness and simplicity she continued, "i think, miss vere, with you, that it is very wrong of sir philip,--very absurd of him, in fact--to interfere with your affairs, whatever they may be,--and as it is very likely annoying to you--" "it _is_," interrupted violet decidedly. "then, with the help of this letter--which, really--really--excuse me for saying it!--quite compromises him," and her ladyship looked amiably concerned about it, "i might perhaps persuade him not to--to--intrude upon you--you understand? but if you object to part with the letter, never mind! if i did not fear to offend you, i should ask you to exchange it for--for something more--well! let us say, something more substantial--" "don't beat about the bush!" said violet, with a sudden oblivion of her company manners. "you mean money?" lady winsleigh smiled. "as you put it so frankly, miss vere--" she began. "of course! i'm always frank," returned the vere, with a loud laugh. "besides, what's the good of pretending? money's the only thing worth having--it pays your butcher, baker, and dressmaker--and how are you to get along if you _can't_ pay them, i'd like to know! lord! if all the letters i've got from fools were paying stock instead of waste-paper, i'd shut up shop, and leave the brilliant to look out for itself!" lady winsleigh felt she had gained her object, and she could now afford to be gracious. "that would be a great loss to the world," she remarked sweetly. "an immense loss! london could scarcely get on without violet vere!" here she opened her purse and took out some bank-notes, which she folded and slipped inside an envelope. "then i may have the letter?" she continued. "you may and welcome!" returned violet. lady winsleigh instantly held out the envelope, which she as instantly clutched. "especially if you'll tell sir philip errington to mind his own business!" she paused, and a dark flush mounted to her brow--one of those sudden flushes that purpled rather than crimsoned her face. "yes," she repeated, "as he's a friend of yours, just tell him i said he was to mind his own business! lord! what does he want to come here and preach at me for! i don't want his sermons! moral!" here she laughed rather hoarsely, "i'm as moral as any one on the stage! who says i'm not! take 'em all round--there's not a soul behind the footlights more open and above-board than i am!" and her eyes flashed defiantly. "she's been drinking?" thought lady winsleigh disgustedly. in fact, the "vere's own" tipple had begun to take its usual effect, which was to make the vere herself both blatant and boisterous. "i'm sure," said her ladyship with frigid politeness, "that you are everything that is quite charming, miss vere! i have a great respect for the--the ornaments of the english stage. society has quite thrown down its former barriers, you know!--the members of your profession are received in the very best circles--" "i ain't!" said violet, with ungrammatical candor. "your irvings and your terrys, your mary andersons and your langtrys,--they're good enough for your fine drawing-rooms, and get more invitations out than they can accept. and none of them have got half my talent, i tell you! lord bless my soul! if they're respectable enough for you,--so am i!" and she struck her hand emphatically on the table, lady winsleigh looked at her with a slight smile. "i must really say good-bye!" she said, rising and gathering her furs about her. "i could talk with you all the morning, miss vere, but i have so many engagements! besides i mustn't detain _you_! i'm so much obliged to you for your kind reception of me!" "don't mention, it!" and violet glanced her over with a kind of sullen sarcasm. "i'm bound to please lennie when i can, you know!" again lady winsleigh shivered a little, but forced herself to shake hands with the notorious stage-jezebel. "i shall come and see you in the new piece," she said graciously. "i always take a box on first nights? and your dancing is so exquisite! the very poetry of motion! so pleased to have met you! good-bye!" and with a few more vague compliments and remarks about the weather, lady winsleigh took her departure. left alone, the actress threw herself back in her chair and laughed. "that woman's up to some mischief," she exclaimed sotto voce, "and so is lennie! i wonder what's their little game? _i_ don't care, as long as they'll keep the high-and-mighty errington in his place. i'm tired of him! why does he meddle with _my_ affairs?" her brows knitted into a frown. "as if he or anybody else could persuade me to go back to--," she paused, and bit her lips angrily. then she opened the envelope lady winsleigh had left with her, and pulled out the bank-notes inside. "let me see--five, ten, fifteen, twenty! not bad pay, on the whole! it'll just cover the bill for my plush mantle. hullo! who's there?" some one knocked at her door. "come in!" she cried. the feeble tommy presented himself. his weak mouth trembled more than ever, and he was apparently conscious of this, for he passed his hand nervously across it two or three times. "well, what's up?" inquired the "star" of the brilliant, fingering her bank-notes as she spoke. "miss vere," stammered tommy, "i venture to ask you a favor,--could you kindly, very kindly lend me ten shillings till to-morrow night? i am so pressed just now--and my wife is ill in bed--and--" he stopped, and his eyes sought her face hopefully, yet timidly. "you shouldn't have a wife, tommy!" averred violet with blunt frankness. "wives are expensive articles. besides, i never lend. i never give--except to public charities where one's name gets mentioned in the papers. i'm obliged to do that, you know, by way of advertisement. ten shillings! why, i can't afford ten pence! my bills would frighten you, tommy! there go along, and don't cry, for goodness sake! let your fiddle cry for you!" "oh, miss vere," once more pleaded tommy, "if you knew how my wife suffers--" the actress rose and stamped her foot impatiently. "bother your wife!" she cried angrily, "and you too! look out! or i tell the manager we've got a beggar at the brilliant. don't stare at me like that! go to the d----l with you!" tommy slunk off abashed and trembling, and the vere began to sing, or rather croak, a low comic song, while she threw over her shoulders a rich mantle glittering with embroidered trimmings, and poised a coquettish paris model hat on her thick untwisted coils of hair. thus attired, she passed out of her dressing-room, locking the door behind her, and after a brief conversation with the jocose acting manager, whom she met on her way out, she left the theatre, and took a cab to the criterion, where the young duke of moorlands, her latest conquest, had invited her to a sumptuous luncheon with himself and friends, all men of fashion, who were running through what money they had as fast as they could go. lady winsleigh, on her way home, was tormented by sundry uncomfortable thoughts and sharp pricks of conscience. her interview with violet vere had instinctively convinced her that sir philip was innocent of the intrigue imputed to him, and yet,--the letter she had now in her possession seemed to prove him guilty. and though she felt herself to be playing a vile part, she could not resist the temptation of trying what the effect would be of this compromising document on thelma's trusting mind. it was undoubtedly a very incriminating epistle--any lawyer would have said as much, while blandly pocketing his fee for saying it. it was written off in evident haste, and ran as follows:-- "let me see you once more on the subject you know of. why will you not accept the honorable position offered to you? there shall be no stint of money--all the promises i have made i am quite ready to fulfill--you shall lose nothing by being gentle. surely you cannot continue to seem so destitute of all womanly feeling and pity? i will not believe that you would so deliberately condemn to death a man who has loved, and who loves you still so faithfully, and who, without you, is utterly weary of life and broken-hearted! think once more--and let my words carry more weight with you!" "bruce-errington." this was all, but more than enough! "i wonder what he means," thought lady winsleigh. "it looks as if he were in love with the vere and she refused to reciprocate. it _must_ be that. and yet that doesn't accord with what the creature herself said about his 'preaching at her.' he wouldn't do that if he were in love." she studied every word of the letter again and again, and finally folded it up carefully and placed it in her pocket-book. "innocent or guilty, thelma must see it," she decided. "i wonder how she'll take it! if she wants a proof--it's one she'll scarcely deny. some women would fret themselves to death over it--but i shouldn't wonder if she sat down under it quite calmly without a word of complaint." she frowned a little. "why must _she_ always be superior to others of her sex! how i detest that still solemn smile of hers and those big baby-blue eyes! i think if philip had married any other woman than she--a woman more like the rest of us who'd have gone with her time,--i could have forgiven him more easily. but to pick up a norwegian peasant and set her up as a sort of moral finger-post to society--and then to go and compromise himself with violet vere--that's a kind of thing i _can't_ stand! i'd rather be anything in the world than a humbug!" many people desire to be something they are not, and her ladyship quite unconsciously echoed this rather general sentiment. she was, without knowing it, such an adept in society humbug, that she even humbugged herself. she betrayed herself as she betrayed others, and told little soothing lies to her own conscience as she told them to her friends. there are plenty of women like her,--women of pleasant courtesy and fashion, to whom truth is mere coarseness,--and with whom polite lying passes for perfect breeding. she was not aware, as she was driven along park lane to her own residence, that she carried with her on the box of her brougham a private detective in the person of briggs. perched stiffly on his seat, with arms tightly folded, this respectable retainer was quite absorbed in meditation, so much so that he exchanged not a word with his friend, the coachman, beside him. he had his own notions of propriety,--he considered that his mistress had no business whatever to call on an actress of violet vere's repute,--and he resolved that whether he were reproved for over-officiousness or not, nothing should prevent him from casually mentioning to lord winsleigh the object of her ladyship's drive that morning. "for," mused briggs gravely, "a lady 'as responsibilities, and 'owever she forgets 'erself, appearances 'as to be kep' up." with the afternoon, the fog which had hung over the city all day, deepened and darkened. thelma had lunched with mrs. lorimer, and had enjoyed much pleasant chat with that kindly, cheerful old lady. she had confided to her, part of the story of sir francis lennox's conduct, carefully avoiding every mention of the circumstance which had given rise to it,--namely, the discussion about violet vere. she merely explained that she had suddenly fainted, in which condition sir francis had taken advantage of her helplessness to insult her. mrs. lorimer was highly indignant. "tell your husband all about it, my dear!" she advised. "he's big enough, and strong enough, to give that little snob a good trouncing! my patience! i wish george were in london--he'd lend a hand and welcome!" and the old lady nodded her head violently over the sock she was knitting,--the making of socks for her beloved son was her principal occupation and amusement. "but i hear," said thelma, "that it is against the law to strike any one, no matter how you have been insulted. if so,--then philip would be punished for attacking sir francis, and that would not be fair." "you didn't think of that, child, when you struck lennox yourself," returned mrs. lorimer, laughing. "and i guarantee you gave him a good hard blow,--and serve him right! never mind what comes of it, my dearie--just tell your husband as soon as ever he comes home, and let him take the matter into his own hands. he's a fine man--he'll know how to defend the pretty wife he loves so well!" and she smiled, while her shining knitting-needles clicked faster than ever. thelma's face saddened a little. "i think i am not worthy of his love," she said sorrowfully. mrs. lorimer looked at her with some inquisitiveness. "what makes you say that, my dear?" "because i feel it so much," she replied. "dear mrs. lorimer, you cannot, perhaps, understand--but when he married me, it seemed as if the old story of the king and the beggar-maid were being repeated over again. i sought nothing but his love--his love was, and is my life! these riches--these jewels and beautiful things he surrounds me with--i do not care for them at all, except for the reason that he wishes me to have them. i scarcely understand their value, for i have been poor all my life, and yet i have wanted nothing. i do not think wealth is needful to make one happy. but love--ah! i could not live without it--and now--now--" she paused, and her eyes filled with sudden tears. "now what?" asked mrs. lorimer gently. "now," continued the girl in a low voice, "my heart is always afraid! yes! i am afraid of losing my husband's love. ah, do not laugh at me, dear mrs. lorimer! you know people who are much together sometimes get tired,--tired of seeing the same face always,--the same form--" "are _you_ tired, dearie?" asked the old lady meaningly. "i? tired of philip? i am only happy when he is with me!" and her eyes deepened with passionate tenderness. "i would wish to live and die beside him, and i should not care if i never saw another human face than his!" "well, and don't you think he has the same feelings for you?" "men are different, i think," returned thelma musingly. "now, love is everything to me--but it may not be everything to philip. i do believe that love is only part of a man's life, while it is _all_ a woman's. clara told me once that most husbands wearied of their wives, though they would not always confess it--" "clara winsleigh's modern social doctrines are false, my dear!" interrupted mrs. lorimer quickly. "she isn't satisfied with her own marriage, and she thinks everybody must be as discontented as herself. now, my husband and i lived always together for five and twenty years,--and we were lovers to the last day, when my darling died with his hand in mine--and--and--if it hadn't been for my boy,--i should have died too!" and two bright tears fell glittering on the old lady's knitting. thelma took her hand and kissed it fondly. "i can understand that," she said softly; "but still,--still i do believe it is difficult to keep love when you have won it! it is, perhaps, easy to win--but i am sure it is hard to keep!" mrs. lorimer looked at her earnestly. "my dear child, don't let that frivolous winsleigh woman put nonsense into your pretty head. you are too sensible to take such a morbid view of things,--and you mustn't allow your wholesome fresh nature to be contaminated by the petulant, wrong-headed notions that cloud the brains of idle, fashionable, useless women. believe me, good men don't tire of their wives--and sir philip is a good man. good wives never weary their husbands--and you are a good wife--and you will be a good, sweet mother. think of that new delight so soon coming for you,--and leave all the modern, crazy, one-sided notions of human life to the french and russian novelists. tut-tut!" continued the old lady tenderly. "a nice little ladyship you are,--worrying yourself about nothing! send philip to me when he comes home--i'll scold him for leaving his bird to mope in her london cage!" "i do not mope," declared thelma. "and you must not scold him, please! poor boy! he is working so very hard, and has so much to attend to. he wants to distinguish himself for--for my sake!" "that looks very much as if he were tired of you!" laughed mrs. lorimer. "though i dare say you'd like him to stay at home and make love to you all day! silly girl! you want the world to be a sort of arcadia, with you as phyllis, and sir philip as corydon! my dear, we're living in the nineteenth century, and the days of fond shepherds and languishing shepherdesses are past!" thelma laughed too, and felt soon ashamed of her depression. the figure of violet vere now and then danced before her like a mocking will-o'-the-wisp--but her pride forbade her to mention this,--the actual source of all her vague troubles. she left mrs. lorimer's house, which was near holland park, about four o'clock, and as she was passing church street, kensington, she bade her coachman drive up to the carmelite church there, familiarly known as the "carms." she entered the sacred edifice, where the service of benediction was in progress; and, kneeling down, she listened to the exquisite strains of the solemn music that pealed through those dim and shadowy aisles, and a sense of the most perfect peace settled soothingly on her soul. clasping her gentle hands, she prayed with innocent and heart-felt earnestness--not for herself,--never for herself,--but always, always for that dear, most dear one, for whom every beat of her true heart was a fresh vow of undying and devoted affection. "dear god!" she whispered, "if i love him too much, forgive me! thou who art all love, wilt pardon me this excess of love! bless my darling always, and teach me how to be more worthy of thy goodness and his tenderness!" and when she left the church, she was happier and more light-hearted than she had been for many a long day. she drove home, heedless of the fog and cold, dismal aspect of the weather, and resolved to go and visit lady winsleigh in the evening, so that when philip came back on the morrow, she might be able to tell him that she had amused herself, and had not been lonely. but when she arrived at her own door, morris, who opened it, informed her that lady winsleigh was waiting in the drawing-room to see her, and had been waiting some time. thelma hastened thither immediately, and held out her hands joyously to her friend. "i am so sorry you have had to wait, clara!" she began. "why did you not send word and say you were coming? philip is away and will not be back to-night, and i have been lunching with mrs. lorimer, and--why, what makes you look so grave?" lady winsleigh regarded her fixedly. how radiantly lovely the young wife looked!--her cheeks had never been more delicately rosy, or her eyes more brilliant. the dark fur cloak she wore with its rich sable trimmings, and the little black velvet _toque_ that rested on her fair curls, set off the beauty of her clear skin to perfection, and her rival, who stood gazing at her with such close scrutiny, envied her more than ever as she was once again reluctantly forced to admit to herself the matchless loveliness of the innocent creature whose happiness she now sought to destroy. "do i look grave, thelma?" she said with a slight smile. "well, perhaps i've a reason for my gravity. and so your husband is away?" "yes. he went quite early this morning,--a telegram summoned him and he was obliged to go." here she drew up a chair to the fire, and began to loosen her wraps. "sit down, clara! i will ring for tea." "no, don't ring," said lady winsleigh. "not yet! i want to talk to you privately." she sank languidly on a velvet lounge and looked thelma straight in the eyes. "dear thelma," she continued in a sweetly tremulous, compassionate voice. "can you bear to hear something very painful and shocking, something that i'm afraid will grieve you very much?" the color fled from the girl's fair face--her eyes grew startled. "what do you mean, clara? is it anything about--about philip?" lady winsleigh bent her head in assent, but remained silent. "if," continued thelma, with a little return of the rosy hue to her cheeks. "if it is something else about that--that person at the theatre, clara, i would rather not hear it! i think i have been wrong in listening to any such stories--it is so seldom that gossip of any kind is true. it is not a wife's duty to receive scandals about her husband. and suppose he does see miss vere, how do i know that it may not be on business for some friend of his?--because i do know that on that night when he went behind the scenes at the brilliant, he said it was on business. mr. lovelace used often to go and see miss mary anderson, all to persuade her to take a play written by a friend of his--and philip, who is always kind-hearted, may perhaps be doing something of the same sort. i feel i have been wicked to have even a small doubt of my husband's love,--so, clara, do not let us talk any more on a subject which only displeases me." "you must choose your own way of life, of course," said lady winsleigh coldly. "but you draw rather foolish comparisons, thelma. there is a wide difference between mary anderson and violet vere. besides, mr. lovelace is a bachelor,--he can do as he likes and go where he likes without exciting comment. however, whether you are angry with me or not, i feel i should not be your true friend if i did not show you--_this_. you know your husband's writing!" and she drew out the fatal letter, and continued, watching her victim as she spoke, "this was sent by sir philip to violet vere last night,--she gave it to me herself this morning." thelma's hand trembled as she took the paper. "why should i read it?" she faltered mechanically. lady winsleigh raised her eyebrows and frowned impatiently. "why--why? because it is your duty to do so! have you no pride? will you allow your husband to write such a letter as that to another woman,--and _such_ a woman too! without one word of remonstrance? you owe it to yourself--to your own sense of honor--to resent and resist such treatment on his part! surely the deepest love cannot pardon deliberate injury and insult." "my love can pardon anything," answered the girl in a low voice, and then slowly, very slowly, she opened the folded sheet--slowly she read every word it contained,--words that stamped themselves one by one on her bewildered brain and sent it reeling into darkness and vacancy. she felt sick and cold--she stared fixedly at her husband's familiar handwriting. "a man who has loved and who loves you still, and who without you is utterly weary and broken-hearted!" thus he wrote of himself to--to violet vere! it seemed incredible--yet it was true! she heard a rushing sound in her ears--the room swung round dizzily before her eyes--yet she sat, still, calm and cold, holding the letter and speaking no word. lady winsleigh watched her, irritated at her passionless demeanor. "well!" she exclaimed at last. "have you nothing to say?" thelma looked up, her eyes burning with an intense feverish light. "nothing!" she replied. "_nothing_?" repeated her ladyship with emphatic astonishment. "nothing against philip," continued the girl steadily. "for the blame is not his, but mine! that he is weary and broken-hearted must be my fault--though i cannot yet understand what i have done. but it must be something, because if i were all that he wished he would not have grown so tired." she paused and her pale lips quivered. "i am sorry," she went on with dreamy pathos, "sorrier for him than for myself, because now i see i am in the way of his happiness." a quiver of agony passed over her face,--she fixed her large bright eyes on lady winsleigh, who instinctively shrank from the solemn speechless despair of that penetrating gaze. "who gave you this letter, clara?" she asked calmly. "i told you before,--miss vere herself." "why did she give it to you?" continued thelma in a dull, sad voice. lady winsleigh hesitated and stammered a little. "well, because--because i asked her if the stories about sir philip were true. and she begged me to ask him not to visit her so often." then, with an additional thought of malice, she said softly. "she doesn't wish to wrong you, thelma,--of course, she's not a very good woman, but i think she feels sorry for you!" the girl uttered a smothered cry of anguish, as though she had been stabbed to the heart. she!--to be actually _pitied_ by violet vere, because she had been unable to keep her husband's love! this idea tortured her very soul,--but she was silent. "i thought you were my friend, clara?" she said suddenly, with a strange wistfulness. "so i am, thelma," murmured lady winsleigh, a guilty flush coloring her cheeks. "you have made me very miserable," went on thelma gravely, and with pathetic simplicity, "and i am sorry indeed that we ever met. i was so happy till i knew you!--and yet i was very fond of you! i am sure you mean everything for the best, but i cannot think it is so. and it is all so dark and desolate now--why have you taken such pains to make me sad? why have you so often tried to make me doubt my husband's love?--why have you come to-day so quickly to tell me i have lost it? but for you, i might never have known this sorrow,--i might have died soon, in happy ignorance, believing in my darling's truth as i believe in god!" her voice broke, and a hard sob choked her utterance. for once lady winsleigh's conscience smote her--for once she felt ashamed, and dared not offer consolation to the innocent soul she had so wantonly stricken. for a minute or two there was silence--broken only by the monotonous ticking of the clock and the crackling of the fire. presently thelma spoke again. "i will ask you to go away now and leave me, clara," she said simply. "when the heart is sorrowful, it is best to be alone. good-bye!" and she gently held out her hand. "poor thelma!" said lady winsleigh, taking it with an affectation of tenderness. "what will you do?" thelma did not answer; she sat mute and rigid. "you are thinking unkindly of me just now," continued clara softly; "but i felt it was my duty to tell you the worst at once. it's no good living in a delusion! i'm very, very sorry for you, thelma!" thelma remained perfectly silent. lady winsleigh moved towards the door, and as she opened it looked back at her. the girl might have been a lifeless figure for any movement that could be perceived about her. her face was white as marble--her eyes were fixed on the sparkling fire--her very hands looked stiff and pallid as wax, as they lay clasped in her lap--the letter--the cruel letter,--had fallen at her feet. she seemed as one in a trance of misery--and so lady winsleigh left her. chapter xxvi. "o my lord, o love, i have laid my life at thy feet; have thy will thereof for what shall please thee is sweet!" swinburne. she roused herself at last. unclasping her hands, she pushed back her hair from her brows and sighed heavily. shivering as with intense cold, she rose from the chair she had so long occupied, and stood upright, mechanically gathering around her the long fur mantle that she had not as yet taken off. catching sight of the letter where it lay, a gleaming speck of white on the rich dark hues of the carpet, she picked it up and read it through again calmly and comprehensively,--then folded it up carefully as though it were something of inestimable value. her thoughts were a little confused,--she could only realize clearly two distinct things,--first, that philip was unhappy,--secondly, that she was in the way of his happiness. she did not pause to consider how this change in him had been effected,--moreover, she never imagined that the letter he had written could refer to any one but himself. hers was a nature that accepted facts as they appeared--she never sought for ulterior motives or disguised meanings. true, she could not understand her husband's admiration for violet vere, "but then"--she thought--"many other men admire her too. and so it is certain there must be something about her that wins love,--something i cannot see!" and presently she put aside all other considerations, and only pondered on one thing,--how should she remove herself from the path of her husband's pleasure? for she had no doubt but that she was an obstacle to his enjoyment. he had made promises to violet vere which he was "ready to fulfill,"--he offered her "an honorable position,"--he desired her "not to condemn him to death,"--he besought her to let his words "carry more weight with her." "it is because i am here," thought thelma wearily. "she would listen to him if i were gone!" she had the strangest notions of wifely duty--odd minglings of the stern norse customs with the gentler teachings of christianity,--yet in both cases the lines of woman's life were clearly defined in one word--obedience. most women, receiving an apparent proof of a husband's infidelity, would have made what is termed a "scene,"--would have confronted him with rage and tears, and personal abuse,--but thelma was too gentle for this,--too gentle to resist what seemed to be philip's wish and will, and far too proud to stay where it appeared evident she was not wanted. moreover she could not bear the idea of speaking to him on, such a subject as his connection with violet vere,--the hot color flushed her cheeks with a sort of shame as she thought of it. of course, she was weak--of course, she was foolish,--we will grant that she was anything the reader chooses to call her. it is much better for a woman nowadays to be defiant rather than yielding,--aggressive, not submissive,--violent, not meek. we all know that! to abuse a husband well all round, is the modern method of managing him! but poor, foolish, loving, sensitive thelma had nothing of the magnificent strength of mind possessed by most wives of to-day,--she could only realize that philip--her philip--was "utterly weary and broken-hearted"--for the sake of another woman--and that other woman actually pitied _her_! she pitied herself too, a little vaguely--her brows ached and throbbed violently--there was a choking sensation in her throat, but she could not weep. tears would have relieved her tired brain, but no tears fell. she strove to decide on some immediate plan of action,--philip would be home to-morrow,--she recoiled at the thought of meeting him, knowing what she knew. glancing dreamily at her own figure, reflected by the lamplight in the long mirror opposite, she recognized that she was fully attired in outdoor costume--all save her hat, which she had taken off after her first greeting of lady winsleigh, and which was still on the table at her side. she looked at the clock,--it was five minutes to seven. eight o'clock was her dinner-hour, and thinking of this, she suddenly rang the bell. morris immediately answered it. "i shall not dine at home," she said in her usual gentle voice; "i am going to see some friend this evening. i may not be back till--till late." "very well, my lady," and morris retired without seeing anything remarkable in his mistress's announcement. thelma drew a long breath of relief as he disappeared, and, steadying her nerves by a strong effort, passed into her own boudoir,--the little sanctum specially endeared to her by philip's frequent presence there. how cosy and comfortable a home-nest it looked!--a small fire glowed warmly in the grate, and britta, whose duty it was to keep this particular room in order, had lit the lamp,--a rosy globe supported by a laughing cupid,--and had drawn the velvet curtains close at the window to keep out the fog and chilly air--there were fragrant flowers on the table,--thelma's own favorite lounge was drawn up to the fender in readiness for her,--opposite to it stood the deep, old-fashioned easy chair in which philip always sat. she looked round upon all these familiar things with a dreary sense of strangeness and desolation, and the curves of her sweet mouth trembled a little and drooped piteously. but her resolve was taken, and she did not hesitate or weep. she sat down to her desk and wrote a few brief lines to her father--this letter she addressed and stamped ready for posting. then for a while she remained apparently lost in painful musings, playing with the pen she held, and uncertain what to do. presently she drew a sheet of note-paper toward her, and began, "my darling boy." as these words appeared under her hand on the white page, her forced calm nearly gave way,--a low cry of intense agony escaped from her lips, and, dropping the pen, she rose and paced the room restlessly, one hand pressed against her heart as though that action could still its rapid beatings. once more she essayed the hard task she had set herself to fulfill--the task of bidding farewell to the husband in whom her life was centred. piteous, passionate words came quickly from her overcharged and almost breaking heart--words, tender, touching,--full of love, and absolutely free from all reproach. little did she guess as she wrote that parting letter, what desperate misery it would cause to the receiver!-- when she had finished it, she felt quieted--even more composed than before. she folded and sealed it--then put it out of sight and rang for britta. that little maiden soon appeared, and seemed surprised to see her mistress still in walking costume. "have you only just come in, fröken?" she ventured to inquire. "no, i came home some time ago," returned thelma gently. "but i was talking to lady winsleigh in the drawing-room,--and as i am going out again this evening i shall not require to change my dress. i want you to post this letter for me, britta." and she held out the one addressed to her father, olaf güldmar. britta took it, but her mind still revolved the question of her mistress's attire. "if you are going to spend the evening with friends," she suggested, "would it not be better to change?" "i have on a velvet gown," said thelma, with a rather wearied patience. "it is quite dressy enough for where i am going." she paused abruptly, and britta looked at her inquiringly. "are you tired, fröken thelma?" she asked. "you are so pale!" "i have a slight headache," thelma answered. "it is nothing,--it will soon pass. i wish you to post that letter at once, britta." "very well, fröken." britta still hesitated. "will you be out all the evening?" was her next query. "yes." "then perhaps you will not mind if i go and see louise, and take supper with her? she has asked me, and mr. briggs"--here britta laughed--"is coming to see if i can go. he will escort me, he says!" and she laughed again. thelma forced herself to smile. "you can go, by all means, britta! but i thought you did not like lady winsleigh's french maid?" "i don't like her much," britta admitted--"still, she means to be kind and agreeable, i think. and"--here she eyed thelma with a mysterious and important air--"i want to ask her a question about something very particular." "then, go and stay as long as you like, dear," said thelma, a sudden impulse of affection causing her to caress softly her little maid's ruffled brown curls, "i shall not be back till--till quite late. and when you return from the post, i shall be gone--so--good-bye!" "good-bye!" exclaimed britta wonderingly. "why, where are you going? one would think you were starting on a long journey. you speak so strangely, fröken!" "do i?" and thelma smiled kindly. "it is because my head aches, i suppose. but it is not strange to say good-bye, britta!" britta caught her hand. "where are you going?" she persisted. "to see some friends," responded thelma quietly. "now do not ask any more questions, britta, but go and post my letter. i want father to get it as soon as possible, and you will lose the post if you are not very quick." thus reminded, britta hastened off, determining to run all the way, in order to get back before her mistress left the house. thelma, however, was too quick for her. as soon as britta had gone, she took the letter she had written to philip, and slipped it within the pages of a small volume of poems he had lately been reading. it was a new book entitled "gladys the singer," and its leading _motif_ was the old, never-exhausted subject of a woman's too faithful love, betrayal, and despair. as she opened it, her eyes fell by chance on a few lines of hopeless yet musical melancholy, which, like a sad song heard suddenly, made her throat swell with rising yet restrained tears. they ran thus:-- "oh! i can drown, or, like a broken lyre, be thrown to earth, or cast upon a fire,-- i can be made to feel the pangs of death, and yet be constant to the quest of breath,-- our poor pale trick of living through the lies we name existence when that 'something' dies which we call honor. many and many a way can i be struck or fretted night or day in some new fashion,--or condemn'd the while to take for food the semblance of a smile,-- the left-off rapture of a slain caress,--" ah!--she caught her breath sobbingly, "the left-off rapture of a slain caress!" yes,--that would be her portion now if--if she stayed to receive it. but she would not stay! she turned over the volume abstractedly, scarcely conscious of the action,--and suddenly, as if the poet-writer of it had been present to probe her soul and make her inmost thoughts public, she read:-- "because i am unlov'd of thee to-day, and undesired as sea-weeds in the sea!" yes!--that was the "because" of everything that swayed her sorrowful spirit,--"because" she was "unlov'd and undesired." she hesitated no longer, but shut the book with her farewell letter inside it, and put it back in its former place on the little table beside philip's arm-chair. then she considered how she should distinguish it by some mark that should attract her husband's attention toward it,--and loosening from her neck a thin gold chain on which was suspended a small diamond cross with the names "philip" and "thelma" engraved at the back, she twisted it round the little book, and left it so that the sparkle of the jewels should be seen distinctly on the cover. now was there anything more to be done? she divested herself of all her valuable ornaments, keeping only her wedding-ring and its companion circlet of brilliants,--she emptied her purse of all money save that which was absolutely necessary for her journey--then she put on her hat, and began to fasten her long cloak slowly, for her fingers were icy cold and trembled very strangely. stay,--there was her husband's portrait,--she might take that, she thought, with a sort of touching timidity. it was a miniature on ivory--and had been painted expressly for her,--she placed it inside her dress, against her bosom. "he has been too good to me," she murmured; "and i have been too happy,--happier than i deserved to be. excess of happiness must always end in sorrow." she looked dreamily at philip's empty chair--in fancy she could see his familiar figure seated there, and she sighed as she thought of the face she loved so well,--the passion of his eyes,--the tenderness of his smile. softly she kissed the place where his head had rested,--then turned resolutely away. she was giving up everything, she thought, to another woman,--but then--that other woman, however incredible it seemed, was the one philip loved best,--his own written words were a proof of this. there was no choice therefore,--his pleasure was her first consideration,--everything must yield to that, so she imagined,--her own life was nothing, in her estimation, compared to his desire. such devotion as hers was of course absurd--it amounted to weak self-immolation, and would certainly be accounted as supremely foolish by most women who have husbands, and who, when they swear to "obey," mean to break the vow at every convenient opportunity--but thelma could not alter her strange nature, and, with her, obedience meant the extreme letter of the law of utter submission. leaving the room she had so lately called her own, she passed into the entrance-hall. morris was not there, and she did not summon him,--she opened the street-door for herself, and shutting it quietly behind her, she stood alone in the cold street, where the fog had now grown so dense that the lamp-posts were scarcely visible. she walked on for a few paces rather bewildered and chilled by the piercing bitterness of the air,--then, rallying her forces, she hailed a passing cab, and told the man to take her to charing cross station. she was not familiar with london--and charing cross was the only great railway terminus she could just then think of. arrived there, the glare of the electric light, the jostling passengers rushing to and from the trains, the shouts and wrangling of porters and cabmen, confused her not a little,--and the bold looks of admiration bestowed on her freely by the male loungers sauntering near the doors of the restaurant and hotel, made her shrink and tremble for shame. she had never travelled entirely alone before--and she began to be frightened at the pandemonium of sights and noises that surged around her. yet she never once thought of returning,--she never dreamed of going to any of her london friends, lest on hearing of her trouble they might reproach philip--and this thelma would not have endured. for the same reason, she had said nothing to britta. in her then condition, it seemed to her that only one course lay open for her to follow,--and that was to go quietly home,--home to the altenfjord. no one would be to blame for her departure but herself, she thought,--and philip would be free. thus she reasoned,--if, indeed, she reasoned at all. but there was such a frozen stillness in her soul--her senses were so numbed with pain, that as yet she scarcely realized either what had happened or what she herself was doing. she was as one walking in sleep--the awakening, bitter as death, was still to come. presently a great rush of people began to stream towards her from one of the platforms, and trucks of luggage, heralded by shouts of, "out of the way, there!" and "by'r leave!" came trundling rapidly along--the tidal train from the continent had just arrived. dismayed at the increasing confusion and uproar, thelma addressed herself to an official with a gold band round his hat. "can you tell me," she asked timidly, "where i shall take a ticket for hull?" the man glanced at the fair, anxious face, and smiled good-humoredly. "you've come to the wrong station, miss," he said. "you want the midland line." "the midland?" thelma felt more bewildered than ever. "yes,--the _midland_," he repeated rather testily. "it's a good way from here--you'd better take a cab." she moved away,--but started and drew herself back into a shadowed corner, coloring deeply as the sound of a rich, mellifluous voice, which she instantly recognized, smote suddenly on her ears. "and as i before remarked, my good fellow," the voice was saying, "i am not a disciple of the semi-obscure. if a man has a thought which is worth declaring, let him declare it with a free and noble utterance--don't let him wrap it up in multifarious parcels of dreary verbosity! there's too much of that kind of thing going on nowadays--in england, at least. there's a kind of imitation of art which isn't art at all,--a morbid, bilious, bad imitation. you only get close to the real goddess in italy. i wish i could persuade you to come and pass the winter with me there?" it was beau lovelace who spoke, and he was talking to george lorimer. the two had met in paris,--lovelace was on his way to london, where a matter of business summoned him for a few days, and lorimer, somewhat tired of the french capital, decided to return with him. and here they were,--just arrived at charing cross,--and they walked across the station arm in arm, little imagining who watched them from behind the shelter of one of the waiting-room doors, with a yearning sorrow in her grave blue eyes. they stopped almost opposite to her to light their cigars,--she saw lorimer's face quite distinctly, and heard his answer to lovelace. "well, i'll see what i can do about it, beau! you know my mother always likes to get away from london in winter--but whether we ought to inflict ourselves upon you,--you being a literary man too--" "nonsense, you won't interfere in the least with the flow of inky inspiration," laughed beau. "and as for your mother, i'm in love with her, as you are aware! i admire her almost as much as i do lady bruce-errington--and that's saying a great deal! by-the-by, if phil can get through his share of this country's business, he might do worse than bring his beautiful thelma to the lake of como for a while. i'll ask him!" and having lit their havannas successfully, they walked on and soon disappeared. for one instant thelma felt strongly inclined to run after them, like a little forlorn child that had lost its way,--and, unburdening herself of all her miseries to the sympathetic george, entreat, with tears, to be taken back to that husband who did not want her any more. but she soon overcame this emotion,--and calling to mind the instructions of the official personage whose advice she had sought, she hurried out of the huge, brilliantly lit station, and taking a hansom, was driven, as she requested, to the midland. here the rather gloomy aspect of the place oppressed her as much as the garish bustle of charing cross had bewildered her,--but she was somewhat relieved when she learned that a train for hull would start in ten minutes. hurrying to the ticket-office she found there before her a kindly faced woman with a baby in her arms, who was just taking a third-class ticket to hull, and as she felt lonely and timid, thelma at once decided to travel third-class also, and if possible in the same compartment with this cheerful matron, who, as soon as she had secured her ticket, walked away to the train, hushing her infant in her arms as she went. thelma followed her at a little distance--and as soon as she saw her enter a third-class carriage, she hastened her steps and entered also, quite thankful to have secured some companionship for the long cold journey. the woman glanced at her a little curiously--it was strange to see so lovely and young a creature travelling all alone at night,--and she asked kindly-- "be you goin' fur, miss?" thelma smiled--it was pleasant to be spoken to, she thought. "yes," she answered. "all the way to hull." "'tis a cold night for a journey," continued her companion. "yes, indeed," answered thelma. "it must be cold for your little baby." and unconsciously her voice softened and her eyes grew sad as she looked across at the sleeping infant. "oh, he's as warm as toast!" laughed the mother cheerily. "he gets the best of everything, he do. it's yourself that's looking cold, my dear in spite of your warm cloak. will ye have this shawl?" and she offered thelma a homely gray woollen wrap with much kindly earnestness of manner. "i am quite warm, thank you," said thelma gently, accepting the shawl, however, to please her fellow-traveller. "it is a headache i have which makes me look pale. and, i am very, very tired!" her voice trembled a little,--she sighed and closed her eyes. she felt strangely weak and giddy,--she seemed to be slipping away from herself and from all the comprehension of life,--she wondered vaguely who and what she was. had her marriage with philip been all a dream?--perhaps she had never left the altenfjord after all! perhaps she would wake up presently and see the old farm-house quite unchanged, with the doves flying about the roof, and sigurd wandering under the pines as was his custom. ah, dear sigurd! poor sigurd! he had loved her, she thought--nay, he loved her still,--he could not be dead! oh, yes,--she must have been dreaming,--she felt certain she was lying on her own little white bed at home, asleep;--she would by-and-by open her eyes and get up and look through her little latticed window, and see the sun sparkling on the water, and the _eulalie_ at the anchor in the fjord--and her father would ask sir philip and his friends to spend the afternoon at the farm-house--and philip would come and stroll with her through the garden and down to the shore, and would talk to her in that low, caressing voice of his,--and though she loved him dearly, she must never, never let him know of it, because she was not worthy! . . . she woke from these musings with a violent start and a sick shiver running through all her frame,--and looking wildly about her, saw that she was reclining on some one's shoulder,--some one was dabbing a wet handkerchief on her forehead--her hat was off and her cloak was loosened. "there, my dear, you're better now!" said a kindly voice in her ear. "lor! i thought you was dead--that i did! 'twas a bad faint indeed. and with the train jolting along like this too! it was lucky i had a flask of cold water with me. raise your head a little--that's it! poor thing,--you're as white as a sheet! you're not fit to travel, my dear--you're not indeed." thelma raised herself slowly, and with a sudden impulse kissed the good woman's honest, rosy face, to her intense astonishment and pleasure. "you are very kind to me!" she said tremulously. "i am so sorry to have troubled you. i do feel ill--but it will soon pass." and she smoothed her ruffled hair, and sitting up erect, endeavored to smile. her companion eyed her pale face compassionately, and taking up her sleeping baby from the shawl on which she had laid it while ministering to thelma's needs, began to rock it slowly to and fro. thelma, meanwhile, became sensible of the rapid movement of the train. "we have left london?" she asked with an air of surprise. "nearly half an hour ago, my dear." then, after a pause, during which she had watched thelma very closely, she said-- "i think you're married, aren't you, dearie?" "yes." thelma answered, a slight tinge of color warming her fair pale cheeks. "your husband, maybe, will meet you at hull?" "no,--he is in london," said thelma simply. "i am going to see my father." this answer satisfied her humble friend, who, noticing her extreme fatigue and the effort it cost her to speak, forbore to ask any more questions, but good-naturedly recommended her to try and sleep. she slept soundly herself for the greater part of the journey; but thelma was now feverishly wide awake, and her eyeballs ached and burned as though there were fire behind them. gradually her nerves began to be wound up to an extreme tension of excitement--she forgot all her troubles in listening with painful intentness to the rush and roar of the train through the darkness. the lights of passing stations and signal-posts gleamed like scattered and flying stars--there was the frequent shriek of the engine-whistle,--the serpent-hiss of escaping steam. she peered through the window--all was blackness; there seemed to be no earth, no sky,--only a sable chaos, through which the train flew like a flame-mouthed demon. always that rush and roar! she began to feel as if she could stand it no longer. she must escape from that continuous, confusing sound--it maddened her brain. nothing was easier; she would open the carriage-door and get out! surely she could manage to jump off the step, even though the train was in motion! danger! she smiled at that idea,--there was no danger; and, if there was, it did not much matter. nothing mattered now,--now that she had lost her husband's love. she glanced at the woman opposite, who slept profoundly--the baby had slipped a little from its mother's arms, and lay with its tiny face turned towards thelma. it was a pretty creature, with soft cheeks and a sweet little mouth,--she looked at it with a vague, wild smile. again, again that rush and roar surged like a storm in her ears and distracted her mind! she rose suddenly and seized the handle of the carriage door. another instant, and she would have sprang to certain death,--when suddenly the sleeping baby woke, and, opening its mild blue eyes, gazed at her. she met its glance as one fascinated,--almost unconsciously her fingers dropped from the door-handle,--the little baby still looked at her in dreamlike, meditative fashion,--its mother slept profoundly. she bent lower and lower over the child. with a beating heart she ventured to touch the small, pink hand that lay outside its wrappings like a softly curved rose-leaf. with a sort of elf-like confidence and contentment the feeble, wee fingers closed and curled round hers,--and held her fast! weak as a silken thread, yet stronger in its persuasive force than a grasp of iron, that soft, light pressure controlled and restrained her, . . . very gradually the mists of her mind cleared,--the rattling, thunderous dash of the train grew less dreadful, less monotonous, less painful to her sense of hearing,--her bosom heaved convulsively, and all suddenly her eyes filled with tears--merciful tears, which at first welled up slowly, and were hot as fire, but which soon began to fall faster and faster in large, bright drops down her pale cheeks. seeing that its mother still slept, she took the baby gently into her own fair arms,--and rocked it to and fro with many a sobbing murmur of tenderness;--the little thing smiled drowsily and soon fell asleep again, all unconscious that its timely look and innocent touch had saved poor thelma's life and reason. she, meanwhile, wept on softly, till her tired brain and heart were somewhat relieved of their heavy burden,--the entanglement of her thoughts became unravelled,--and, though keenly aware of the blank desolation of her life, she was able to raise herself in spirit to the giver of all love and consolation, and to pray humbly for that patience and resignation which now alone could serve her needs. and she communed with herself and god in silence, as the train rushed on northwards. her fellow-traveller woke up as they were nearing their destination, and, seeing her holding the baby, was profuse in her thanks for this kindness. and when they at last reached hull, about half an hour after midnight, the good woman was exceedingly anxious to know if she could be of any service,--but thelma gently, yet firmly, refused all her offers of assistance. they parted in the most friendly manner,--thelma kissing the child, through whose unconscious means, as she now owned to herself, she had escaped a terrible death,--and then she went directly to a quiet hotel she knew of, which was kept by a native of christiania, a man who had formerly been acquainted with her father. at first, when this worthy individual saw a lady arrive, alone, young, richly dressed, and without luggage, he was inclined to be suspicious,--but as soon as she addressed him in norwegian, and told him who she was, he greeted her with the utmost deference and humility. "the daughter of jarl güldmar," he said, continuing to speak in his own tongue, "honors my house by entering it!" thelma smiled a little. "the days of the great jarls are past, friedhof," she replied somewhat sadly, "and my father is content to be what he is,--a simple _bonde_." friedhof shook his head quite obstinately. "a jarl is always a jarl," he declared. "nothing can alter a man's birth and nature. and the last time i saw valdemar svensen,--he who lives with your father now,--he was careful always to speak of the _jarl_, and seldom or never did he mention him in any other fashion. and now, noble fröken, in what manner can i serve you?" thelma told him briefly that she was going to see her father on business, and that she was desirous of starting for norway the next day as early as possible. friedhof held up his hands in amazement. "ah! most surely you forget," he exclaimed, using the picturesque expressions of his native speech, "that this is the sleeping time of the sun! even at the hardanger fjord it is dark and silent,--the falling streams freeze with cold on their way; and if it is so at the hardanger, what will it be at the alten? and there is no passenger ship going to christiania or bergen for a fortnight!" thelma clasped her hands in dismay. "but i _must_ go!" she cried impatiently; "i must, indeed, good friedhof! i cannot stay here! surely, surely there is some vessel that would take me,--some fishing boat,--what does it matter how i travel, so long as i get away?" the landlord looked at her rather wonderingly. "nay, if it is indeed so urgent, noble fröken," he replied, "do not trouble, for there is a means of making the journey. but for _you_, and in such bitter weather, it seems a cruelty to speak of it. a steam cargo-boat leaves here for hammerfest and the north cape to-morrow--it will pass the altenfjord. no doubt you could go with that, if you so choose,--but there will be no warmth or comfort, and there are heavy storms on the north sea. i know the captain; and 'tis true he takes his wife with him, so there would be a woman on board,--yet--" thelma interrupted him. she pressed two sovereigns into his hand. "say no more, friedhof," she said eagerly. "you will take me to see this captain--you will tell him i must go with him. my father will thank you for this kindness to me, even better than i can." "it does not seem to me a kindness at all," returned friedhof with frank bluntness. "i would be loth to sail the seas myself in such weather. and i thought you were so grandly married, fröken güldmar,--though i forget your wedded name,--how comes it that your husband is not with you?" "he is very busy in london," answered thelma. "he knows where i am going. do not be at all anxious, friedhof,--i shall make the journey very well and i am not afraid of storm or wild seas." friedhof still looked dubious, but finally yielded to her entreaties and agreed to arrange her passage for her in the morning. she stayed at his hotel that night, and with the very early dawn accompanied him on board the ship he had mentioned. it was a small, awkwardly built craft, with an ugly crooked black funnel out of which the steam was hissing and spitting with quite an unnecessary degree of violence--the decks were wet and dirty, and the whole vessel was pervaded with a sickening smell of whale-oil. the captain, a gruff red-faced fellow, looked rather surlily at his unexpected passenger--but was soon mollified by her gentle manner, and the readiness with which she paid the money he demanded for taking her. "you won't be very warm," he said, eyeing her from head to foot--"but i can lend you a rug to sleep in." thelma smiled and thanked him. he called to his wife, a thin, overworked-looking creature, who put up her head from a window in the cabin, at his summons. "here's a lady going with us," he announced. "look after her, will you?" the woman nodded. then, once more addressing himself to thelma, he said, "we shall have nasty weather and a wicked sea!" "i do not mind!" she answered quietly, and turning to friedhof who had come to see her off, she shook hands with him warmly and thanked him for the trouble he had taken in her behalf. the good landlord bade her farewell somewhat reluctantly,--he had a presentiment that there was something wrong with the beautiful, golden-haired daughter of the _jarl_--and that perhaps he ought to have prevented her making this uncomfortable and possibly perilous voyage. but it was too late now,--and at a little before seven o'clock, the vessel,--which rejoiced in the name of the _black polly_,--left the harbor, and steamed fussily down the humber in the teeth of a sudden storm of sleet and snow. her departure had no interest for any one save friedhof, who stood watching her till she was no more than a speck on the turbid water. he kept his post, regardless of the piercing cold of the gusty, early morning air, till she had entirely disappeared, and then returned to his own house and his daily business in a rather depressed frame of mind. he was haunted by the pale face and serious eyes of thelma--she looked very ill, he thought. he began to reproach himself,--why had he been such a fool as to let her go?--why had he not detained her?--or at any rate, persuaded her to rest a few days in hull? he looked at the threatening sky and the falling flakes of snow with a shiver. "what weather!" he muttered, "and there must be a darkness as of death at the altenfjord!" meanwhile the _black polly_--unhandsome as she was in appearance, struggled gallantly with and overcame an army of furious waves that rose to greet her as she rounded spurn head, and long ere thelma closed her weary eyes in an effort to sleep, was plunging, shivering, and fighting her slow way through shattering mountainous billows and a tempest of sleet, snow, and tossing foam across the wild north sea. chapter xxvii. "what of her glass without her? the blank grey there, where the pool is blind of the moon's face-- her dress without her? the tossed empty space of cloud-rack whence the moon has passed away!" dante g. rossetti. "good god!" cried errington impatiently "what's the matter? speak out!" he had just arrived home. he had barely set foot within his own door, and full of lover-like ardor and eagerness was about to hasten to his wife's room,--when his old servant morris stood in his way trembling and pale-faced,--looking helplessly from him to neville,--who was as much astonished as sir philip, at the man's woe-begone appearance. "something has happened," he stammered faintly at last. "her ladyship--" philip started--his heart beat quickly and then seemed to grow still with a horrible sensation of fear. "what of her?" he demanded in low hoarse tones. "is she ill?" morris threw up his hands with a gesture of despair. "sir philip, my dear master!" cried the poor old man. "i do not know whether she is ill or well--i cannot guess! my lady went out last night at a little before eight o'clock,--and--and she has never come home at all! we cannot tell what has become of her! she has gone!" and tears of distress and anxiety filled his eyes. philip stood mute. he could not understand it. all color fled from his face--he seemed as though he had received a sudden blow on the head which had stunned him. "gone!" he said mechanically. "thelma--my wife gone! why should she go?" and he stared fixedly at neville, who laid one hand soothingly on his arm. "perhaps she is with friends," he suggested. "she may be at lady winsleigh's or mrs. lorimer's." "no, no!" interrupted morris. "britta, who stayed up all night for her, has since been to every house that my lady visits and no one has seen or heard of her!" "where is britta?" demanded philip suddenly. "she has gone again to lady winsleigh's," answered morris, "she says it is there that mischief has been done,--i don't know what she means!" philip shook off his secretary's sympathetic touch, and strode through the rooms to thelma's boudoir. he put aside the velvet curtains of the portiere with a noiseless hand--somehow he felt as if, in spite of all he had just heard, she _must_ be there as usual to welcome him with that serene sweet smile which was the sunshine of his life. the empty desolate air of the room smote him with a sense of bitter pain,--only the plaintive warble of her pet thrush, who was singing to himself most mournfully in his gilded cage, broke the heavy silence. he looked about him vacantly. all sorts of dark forebodings crowded on his mind,--she must have met with some accident, he thought with a shudder,--for that she would depart from him in this sudden way of her own accord for no reason whatsoever seemed to him incredible--impossible. "what have i done that she should leave me?" he asked half aloud and wonderingly. everything that had seemed to him of worth a few hours ago became valueless in this moment of time. what cared he now for the business of parliament--for distinction or honors among men? nothing--less than nothing! without her, the world was empty--its ambitions, its pride, its good, its evil, seemed but the dreariest and most foolish trifles! "not even a message?" he thought. "no hint of where she meant to go--no word of explanation for me? surely i must be dreaming--my thelma would never have deserted me!" a sort of sob rose in his throat, and he pressed his hand strongly over his eyes to keep down the womanish drops that threatened to overflow them. after a minute or two, he went to her desk and opened it, thinking that there perhaps she might have left a note of farewell. there was nothing--nothing save a little heap of money and jewels. these thelma had herself placed, before her sorrowful, silent departure, in the corner where he now found them. more puzzled than ever, he glanced searchingly round the room--and his eyes were at once attracted by the sparkle of the diamond cross that lay uppermost on the cover of "gladys the singer," the book of poems which was in its usual place on his own reading table. in another second he seized it--he unwound the slight gold chain--he opened the little volume tremblingly. yes!--there was a letter within its pages addressed to himself,--now, now he should know all! he tore it open with feverish haste--two folded sheets of paper fell out,--one was his own epistle to violet vere, and this, to his consternation, he perceived first. full of a sudden misgiving he laid it aside, and began to read thelma's parting words. "my darling boy," she wrote-- "a friend of yours and mine brought me the enclosed letter and though, perhaps, it was wrong of me to read it, i hope you will forgive me for having done so. i do not quite understand it, and i cannot bear to think about it--but it seems that you are tired of your poor thelma! i do not blame you, dearest, for i am sure that in some way or other the fault is mine, and it does grieve me so much to think you are unhappy! i know that i am very ignorant of many things, and that i am not suited to this london life--and i fear i shall never understand its ways. but one thing i can do, and that is to let you be free, my philip--quite free! and so i am going back to the altenfjord, where i will stay till you want me again, if you ever do. my heart is yours and i shall always love you till i die,-- and though it seems to me just now better that we should part, to give you greater ease and pleasure, still you must always remember that i have no reproaches to make to you. i am only sorry to think my love has wearied you,--for you have been all goodness and tenderness to me. and so that people shall not talk about me or you, you will simply say to them that i have gone to see my father, and they will think nothing strange in that. be kind to britta,--i have told her nothing, as it would only make her miserable. do not be angry that i go away--i cannot bear to stay here, knowing all. and so, good-bye, my love, my dearest one!--if you were to love many women more than me, i still should love you best--i still would gladly die to serve you. remember this always,--that, however long we may be parted, and though all the world should come between us, i am, and ever shall be your faithful wife," "thelma." the ejaculation that broke from errington's lips as he finished reading this letter was more powerful than reverent. stinging tears darted to his eyes--he pressed his lips passionately on the fair writing. "my darling--my darling!" he murmured. "what a miserable misunderstanding!" then without another moment's delay he rushed into neville's study and cried abruptly-- "look here! it's all your fault." "_my_ fault!" gasped the amazed secretary. "yes--your fault!" shouted errington almost beside himself with grief and rage. "your fault, and that of your accursed _wife_, violet vere!" and he dashed the letter, the cause of all the mischief, furiously down on the table. neville shrank and shivered,--his grey head drooped, he stretched out his hands appealingly. "for god's sake, sir philip, tell me what i've done?" he exclaimed piteously. errington strode up and down the room in a perfect fever of impatience. "by heaven, it's enough to drive me mad!" he burst forth. "your wife!--your wife!--confound her! when you first discovered her in that shameless actress, didn't i want to tell thelma all about it--that very night?--and didn't you beg me not to do so? your silly scruples stood in the way of everything! i was a fool to listen to you--a fool to meddle in your affairs--and--and i wish to god i'd never seen or heard of you!" neville turned very white, but remained speechless. "read that letter!" went on philip impetuously. "you've seen it before! it's the last one i wrote to your wife imploring her to see you and speak with you. here it comes, the devil knows how, into thelma's hands. she's quite in the dark about _your secret_, and fancies i wrote it on my own behalf! it looks like it too--looks exactly as if i were pleading for myself and breaking my heart over that detestible stage-fiend--by jove! it's too horrible!" and he gave a gesture of loathing and contempt. neville heard him in utter bewilderment. "not possible!" he muttered. "not possible--it can't be!" "can't be? it _is_!" shouted philip. "and if you'd let me tell thelma everything from the first, all this wouldn't have happened. and you ask me what you've done! _done!_ you've parted me from the sweetest, dearest girl in the world!" and throwing himself into a chair, he covered his face with his hand and a great uncontrollable sob broke from his lips. neville was in despair. of course, it was his fault--he saw it all clearly. he painfully recalled all that had happened since that night at the brilliant theatre when with a sickening horror he had discovered violet vere to be no other than violet neville,--his own little violet! . . . as he had once called her--his wife that he had lost and mourned as though she were some pure dead woman lying sweetly at rest in a quiet grave. he remembered thelma's shuddering repugnance at the sight of her,--a repugnance which he himself had shared--and which made him shrink with fastidious aversion, from the idea of confiding to any one but sir philip, the miserable secret of his connection with her. sir philip had humored him in this fancy, little imagining that any mischief would come of it--and the reward of his kindly sympathy was this,--his name was compromised, his home desolate, and his wife estranged from him! in the first pangs of the remorse and sorrow that filled his heart, neville could gladly have gone out and drowned himself. presently he began to think,--was there not some one else beside himself who might possibly be to blame for all this misery? for instance, who could have brought or sent that letter to lady errington? in her high station, she, so lofty, so pure, so far above the rest of her sex, would have been the last person to make any inquiries about such a woman as violet vere. how had it all happened? he looked imploringly for some minutes at the dejected figure in the chair without daring to offer a word of consolation. presently he ventured a remark-- "sir philip!" he stammered. "it will soon be all right,--her ladyship will come back immediately. i myself will explain--it's--it's only a misunderstanding . . ." errington moved in his chair impatiently, but said nothing. only a misunderstanding! how many there are who can trace back broken friendships and severed loves to that one thing--"only a misunderstanding!" the tenderest relations are often the most delicate and subtle, and "trifles light as air" may scatter and utterly destroy the sensitive gossamer threads extending between one heart and another, as easily as a child's passing foot destroys the spider's web woven on the dewy grass in the early mornings of spring. presently sir philip started up--his lashes were wet and his face was flushed. "it's no good sitting here," he said, rapidly buttoning on his overcoat. "i must go after her. let all the business go to the devil! write and say i won't stand for middleborough--i resign in favor of the liberal candidate. i'm off to norway to-night." "to norway!" cried neville. "has she gone _there_? at this season--" he broke off, for at that moment britta entered, looking the picture of misery. her face was pale and drawn--her eyelids red and swollen, and when she saw sir philip, she gave him a glance of the most despairing reproach and indignation. he sprang up to her. "any news?" he demanded. britta shook her head mournfully, the tears beginning to roll again down her cheeks. "oh, if i'd only thought!" she sobbed, "if i'd only known what the dear fröken meant to do when she said good-bye to me last night, i could have prevented her going--i could--i would have told her all i know--and she would have stayed to see you! oh, sir philip, if you had only been here, that wicked, wicked lady winsleigh _couldn't_ have driven her away!" at this name such a fury filled philip's heart that he could barely control himself. he breathed quickly and heavily. "what of her?" he demanded in a low, suffocated voice. "what has lady winsleigh to do with it, britta?" "everything!" cried britta, though, as she glanced at his set, stern face and paling lips, she began to feel a little frightened. "she has always hated the fröken, and been jealous of her--always! her own maid, louise, will tell you so--lord winsleigh's man, briggs, will tell you so! they've listened at the doors, and they know all about it!" britta made this statement with the most childlike candor. "and they've heard all sorts of wicked things--lady winsleigh was always talking to sir francis lennox about the fröken,--and now they've made her believe you do not care for her any more--they've been trying to make her believe everything bad of you for ever so many months--" she paused, terrified at sir philip's increasing pallor. "go on, britta," he said quietly, though his voice sounded strange to himself. britta gathered up all her remaining stock of courage. "oh dear, oh dear!" she continued desperately, "i _don't_ understand london people at all, and i never shall understand them. everybody seems to want to be wicked! briggs says that lady winsleigh was fond of _you_, sir philip,--then, that she was fond of sir francis lennox,--and yet she has a husband of her own all the time! it is so very strange!" and the little maiden's perplexity appeared to border on distraction. "they would think such a woman quite mad in norway! but what is worse than anything is that you--you, sir philip,--oh! i _won't_ believe it," and she stamped her foot passionately, "i _can't_ believe it! . . . and yet everybody says that you go to see a dreadful, painted dancing woman at the theatre, and that you like her better than the fröken,--it _isn't_ true, is it?" here she peered anxiously at her master--but he was absolutely silent. neville made as though he would speak, but a gesture from sir philip's hand restrained him. britta went on rather dispiritedly, "anyhow, briggs has just told me that only yesterday lady winsleigh went all by herself to see this actress, and that she got some letter there which she brought to the fröken--" she recoiled suddenly with a little scream. "oh, sir philip!--where are you going?" errington's hand came down on her shoulder, as he twisted her lightly out of his path and strode to the door. "sir philip--sir philip!" cried neville anxiously, hastening after him. "think for a moment; don't do anything rash!" philip wrung his hand convulsively. "rash! my good fellow, it's a _woman_ who has slandered me--what _can_ i do? her sex protects her!" he gave a short, furious laugh. "but--by god!--were she a man i'd shoot her dead!" and with these words, and his eyes blazing with wrath, he left the room. neville and britta confronted each other in vague alarm. "where will he go?" half whispered britta. "to winsleigh house, i suppose," answered neville in the same low tone. just then the hall door shut with a loud bang, that echoed through the silent house. "he's gone!" and as neville said this he sighed and looked dubiously at his companion. "how do you know all this about lady winsleigh, britta? it may not be true--it's only servants' gossip." "only servants' gossip!" exclaimed britta. "and is that nothing? why, in these grand houses like lord winsleigh's, the servants know everything! briggs makes it his business to listen at the doors--he says it's a part of his duty. and louise opens all her mistress's letters--she says she owes it to her own respectability to know what sort of a lady it is she serves. and she's going to leave, because she says her ladyship _isn't_ respectable! there! what do you think of that! and sir philip will find out a great deal more than even _i_ have told him--but oh! i _can't_ understand about that actress!" and she shook her head despairingly. "britta," said neville suddenly, "that actress is my wife!" britta started,--and her round eyes opened wide. "your wife, mr. neville?" she exclaimed. neville took off his spectacles and polished them nervously. "yes, britta--my wife!" she looked at him in amazed silence. neville went on rubbing his glasses, and continued in rather dreamy, tremulous accents-- "yes--i lost her years ago--i thought she was dead. but i found her--on the stage of the brilliant theatre. i--i never expected--_that_! i would rather she had died!" he paused and went on softly, "when i married her, britta, she was such a dear little girl,--so bright and pretty!--and i--i fancied she was fond of me! yes, i did,--of course, i was foolish--i've always been foolish, i think. and when--when i saw her on that stage i felt as if some one had struck me a hard blow--it seems as if i'd been stunned ever since. and though she knows i'm in london, she won't see me, britta,--she won't let me speak to her even for a moment! it's very hard! sir philip has tried his best to persuade her to see me--he has talked to her and written to her about me; and that's not all,--he has even tried to make her come back to me--but it's all no use--and--and that's how all the mischief has arisen--do you see?" britta gazed at him still, with sympathy written on every line of her face,--but a great load had been lifted from her mind by his words--she began to understand everything. "i'm so sorry for you, mr. neville!" she said. "but why didn't you tell all this to the fröken?" "i _couldn't_!" murmured neville desperately. "she was there that night at the brilliant,--and if you had seen how she looked when she saw--my wife--appeared on the stage! so pained, so sorry, so ashamed! and she wanted to leave the theatre at once. of course, i ought to have told her,--i wish i had--but--somehow, i never could." he paused again. "it's all my stupidity, of course, sir philip is quite blameless--he has been the kindest, the best of friends to me--" his voice trembled more and more, and he could not go on. there was a silence of some minutes, during which britta appeared absorbed in meditation, and neville furtively wiped his eyes. presently he spoke again more cheerfully. "it'll soon be all right again, britta!" and he nodded encouragingly. "sir philip says her ladyship has gone home to norway, and he means to follow her to-night." britta nodded gravely, but heaved a deep sigh. "and i posted her letter to her father!" she half murmured. "oh, if i had only thought or guessed why it was written!" "isn't it rather a bad time of the year for norway?" pursued neville. "why, there must be snow and darkness--" "snow and darkness at the altenfjord!" suddenly cried britta, catching at his words. "that's exactly what she said to me the other evening! oh dear! i never thought of it--i never remembered it was the dark season!" she clasped her hands in dismay. "there is no sun at the altenfjord now--it is like night--and the cold is bitter. and she is not strong--not strong enough to travel--and there's the north sea to cross--oh, mr. neville," and she broke out sobbing afresh. "the journey will kill her,--i know it will! my poor, poor darling! i must go after her--i'll go with sir philip--i _won't_ be left behind!" "hush, hush, britta!" said neville kindly, patting her shoulder. "don't cry--don't cry!" but he was very near crying himself, poor man, so shaken was he by the events of the morning. and he could not help admitting to himself the possibility that so long and trying a journey for thelma in her present condition of health meant little else than serious illness--perhaps death. the only comfort he could suggest to the disconsolate britta was, that at that time of year it was very probable there would be no steamer running to christiansund or bergen, and in that case thelma would be unable to leave england, and would, therefore, be overtaken by sir philip at hull. meanwhile, sir philip himself, in a white heat of restrained anger, arrived at winsleigh house, and asked to see lord winsleigh immediately. briggs, who opened the door to him, was a little startled at his haggard face and blazing eyes, even though he knew, through britta, all about the sorrow that had befallen him. briggs was not surprised at lady errington's departure,--that portion of his "duty" which consisted in listening at doors, had greatly enlightened him on many points,--all, save one--the reported connection between sir philip and violet vere. this seemed to be really true according to all appearances. "which it puzzles me," soliloquized the owner of the shapely calves. "it do, indeed. yet i feels very much for sir philip,--i said to flopsie this morning--'flopsie, i feels for 'im!' yes,--i used them very words. only, of course, he shouldn't 'ave gone with vi. she's a fine woman certainly--but skittish--d--d skittish! i've allus made it a rule myself to avoid 'er on principle. lor! if i'd kep' company with 'er and the likes of 'er i shouldn't be the man i am!" and he smiled complacently. lord winsleigh, who was in his library as usual, occupied with his duties as tutor to his son ernest, rose to receive sir philip with an air of more than his usual gravity. "i was about to write to you, errington," he began, and then stopped short, touched by the utter misery expressed in philip's face. he addressed ernest with a sort of nervous haste. "run away, my boy, to your own room. i'll send for you again presently." ernest obeyed. "now," said lord winsleigh, as soon as the lad disappeared, "tell me everything, errington. is it true that your wife has left you?" "left me!" and philip's eyes flashed with passionate anger. "no winsleigh!--she's been driven away from me by the vilest and most heartless cruelty. she's been made to believe a scandalous and abominable lie against me--and she's gone! i--i--by jove! i hardly like to say it to your face--but--" "i understand!" a curious flicker of a smile shadowed rather than brightened lord winsleigh's stern features. "pray speak quite plainly! lady winsleigh is to blame? i am not at all surprised!" errington gave him a rapid glance of wonder. he had always fancied winsleigh to be a studious, rather dull sort of man, absorbed in books and the education of his son,--a man, more than half blind to everything that went on around him--and, moreover, one who deliberately shut his eyes to the frivolous coquetry of his wife,--and though he liked him fairly well, there had been a sort of vague contempt mingled with his liking. now a new light was suddenly thrown on his character--there was something in his look, his manner, his very tone of voice,--which proved to errington that there was a deep and forcible side to his nature of which his closest friends had never dreamed--and he was somewhat taken aback by the discovery. seeing that he still hesitated, winsleigh laid a hand encouragingly on his shoulder and said-- "i repeat--i'm not at all surprised! nothing that lady winsleigh might do would cause me the slightest astonishment. she has long ceased to be my wife, except in name,--that she still bears that name and holds the position she has in the world is simply--for my son's sake! i do not wish,"--his voice quivered slightly--"i do not wish the boy to despise his mother. it's always a bad beginning for a young man's life. i want to avoid it for ernest, if possible,--regardless of any personal sacrifice." he paused a moment--then resumed. "now, speak out, errington, and plainly,--for if mischief has been done and i can repair it in any way, you may be sure i will." thus persuaded, sir philip briefly related the whole story of the misunderstanding that had arisen concerning neville's wife, violet vere--and concluded by saying-- "it is, of course, only through britta that i've just heard about lady winsleigh's having anything to do with it. her information may not be correct--i hope it isn't,--but--" lord winsleigh interrupted him. "come with me," he said composedly. "we'll resolve this difficulty at once." he led the way out of the library across the hall. errington followed him in silence. he knocked at the door of his wife's room,--in response to her "come in!" they both entered. she was alone, reclining on a sofa, reading,--she started up with a pettish exclamation at sight of her husband, but observing who it was that came with him, she stood mute, the color rushing to her cheeks with surprise and something of fear. yet she endeavored to smile, and returned with her usual grace their somewhat formal salutations. "clara," then said lord winsleigh gravely, "i have to ask you a question on behalf of sir philip errington here,--a question to which it is necessary for you to give the plain answer. did you or did you not procure this letter from violet vere, of the brilliant theatre--and did you or did you not, give it yourself yesterday into the hands of lady bruce-errington?" and he laid the letter in question, which philip had handed to him, down upon the table before her. she looked at it--then at him--then from him to sir philip, who uttered no word--and lightly shrugged her shoulders. "i don't know what you are talking about," she said, carelessly. sir philip turned upon her indignantly. "lady winsleigh, you _do_ know--" she interrupted him with a stately gesture. "excuse me, sir philip! i am not accustomed to be spoken to in this extraordinary manner. you forget yourself--my husband, i think, also forgets himself! i know nothing whatever about violet vere--i am not fond of the society of actresses. of course, i've heard about your admiration for her--that is common town-talk,--though my informant on this point was sir francis lennox." "sir francis lennox!" cried philip furiously. "thank god! there's a man to deal with! by heaven, i'll choke him with his own lie!" lady winsleigh raised her eyebrows in well-bred surprise. "dear me! it is a lie, then? now, i should have thought from all accounts that it was so very likely to be true!" philip turned white with passion. her sarcastic smile,--her mocking glance,--irritated him almost beyond endurance. "permit me to ask you, clara," continued lord winsleigh calmly, "if you,--as you say, know nothing about violet vere, why did you go to the brilliant theatre yesterday morning?" she flashed an angry glance at him. "why? to secure a box for the new performance. is there anything wonderful in that?" her husband remained unmoved. "may i see the voucher for this box?" he inquired. "i've sent it to some friends," replied her ladyship haughtily. "since when have you decided to become an inquisitor, my lord?" "lady winsleigh," said philip suddenly and eagerly, "will you swear to me that you have said or done nothing to make my thelma leave me?" "oh, she _has_ left you, has she?" and lady clara smiled maliciously. "i thought she would! why don't you ask your dear friend, george lorimer, about her? he is madly in love with her, as everybody knows,--she is probably the same with him!" "clara, clara!" exclaimed lord winsleigh in accents of deep reproach. "shame on you! shame!" her ladyship laughed amusedly. "please don't be tragic!" she said; "it's too ridiculous! sir philip has only himself to blame. of course, thelma knows about his frequent visits to the brilliant theatre. i told her all that sir francis said. why should she be kept in the dark? i dare say she doesn't mind--she's very fond of mr. lorimer!" errington felt as though he must choke with fury. he forgot the presence of lord winsleigh--he forgot everything but his just indignation. "my god!" he cried passionately. "you _dare_ to speak so!--_you_!" "yes i!" she returned coolly, measuring him with a glance. "i dare! what have you to say against _me_?" she drew herself up imperiously. then turning to her husband, she said, "have the goodness to take your excited friend away, my lord! i am going out--i have a great many engagements this morning--and i really cannot stop to discuss this absurd affair any longer! it isn't my fault that sir philip's excessive admiration for miss vere has become the subject of gossip--_i_ don't blame him for it! he seems extremely ill-tempered about it; after all, _'ce n'est que la vérité qui blesse!'_" and she smiled maliciously. chapter xxviii. "for my mother's sake, for thine and hers, o love! i pity take on all poor women. jesu's will be done, honor for all, and infamy for none, this side the borders of the burning lake." eric mackay's _love-letters of a violinist_. lord winsleigh did not move. sir philip fixed his eyes upon her in silence. some occult fascination forced her to meet his glance, and the utter scorn of it stung her proud heart to its centre. not that she felt much compunction--her whole soul was up in arms against him, and had been so from the very day she was first told of his unexpected marriage. his evident contempt now irritated her--she was angrier with him than ever, and yet--she had a sort of strange triumph in the petty vengeance she had designed--she had destroyed his happiness for a time, at least. if she could but shake his belief in his wife! she thought, vindictively. to that end she had thrown out her evil hint respecting thelma's affection for george lorimer, but the shaft had been aimed uselessly. errington knew too well the stainless purity of thelma to wrong her by the smallest doubt, and he would have staked his life on the loyalty of his friend. presently he controlled his anger sufficiently to be able to speak, and still eyeing her with that straight, keen look of immeasurable disdain, he said in cold, deliberate accents-- "your ladyship is in error,--the actress in question is the wife of my secretary, mr. neville. for years they have been estranged--my visits to her were entirely on neville's behalf--my letters to her were all on the same subject. sir francis lennox must have known the truth all along,--violet vere has been his mistress for the past five years!" he uttered the concluding words with intense bitterness. a strange, bewildered horror passed over lady winsleigh's face. "i don't believe it," she said rather faintly. "believe it or not, it is true!" he replied curtly. "ask the manager of the brilliant, if you doubt me. winsleigh, it's no use my stopping here any longer. as her ladyship refuses to give any explanation--" "wait a moment, errington," interposed lord winsleigh in his coldest and most methodical manner. "her ladyship refuses--but _i_ do not refuse! her ladyship will not speak--she allows her husband to speak for her. therefore," and he smiled at his astonished wife somewhat sardonically, "i may tell you at once, that her ladyship admits to having purchased from violet vere for the sum of pounds, the letter which she afterwards took with her own hands to your wife." lady winsleigh uttered an angry exclamation. "don't interrupt me, clara, if you please," he said, with an icy smile. "we have so many sympathies in common that i'm sure i shall be able to explain your unspoken meanings quite clearly." he went on, addressing himself to errington, who stood utterly amazed. "her ladyship desires me to assure you that her only excuse for her action in this matter is, that she fully believed the reports her friend, sir francis lennox, gave her concerning your supposed intimacy with the actress in question,--and that, believing it, she made use of it as much as possible for the purpose of destroying your wife's peace of mind and confidence in you. her object was most purely feminine--love of mischief, and the gratification of private spite! there's nothing like frankness!" and lord winsleigh's face was a positive study as he spoke. "you see,"--he made a slight gesture towards his wife, who stood speechless, and so pale that her very lips were colorless--"her ladyship is not in a position to deny what i have said. excuse her silence!" and again he smiled--that smile as glitteringly chilled as a gleam of light on the edge of a sword. lady winsleigh raised her head, and her eyes met his with a dark expression of the uttermost anger. "spy!" she hissed between her teeth,--then without further word or gesture, she swept haughtily away into her dressing-room, which adjoined the boudoir, and closed the door of communication, thus leaving the two men alone together. errington felt himself to be in a most painful and awkward position. if there was anything he more than disliked, it was a _scene_--particularly of a domestic nature. and he had just had a glimpse into lord and lady winsleigh's married life, which, to him, was decidedly unpleasant. he could not understand how lord winsleigh had become cognizant of all he had so frankly stated--and then, why had he not told him everything at first, without waiting to declare it in his wife's presence? unless, indeed, he wished to shame her? there was evidently something in the man's disposition and character that he, philip, could not as yet comprehend,--something that certainly puzzled him, and filled him with vague uneasiness. "winsleigh, i'm awfully sorry this has happened," he began hurriedly, holding out his hand. lord winsleigh grasped it cordially. "my dear fellow, so am i! heartily sorry! i have to be sorry for a good many things rather often. but i'm specially grieved to think that your beautiful and innocent young wife is the victim in this case. unfortunately i was told nothing till this morning, otherwise i might possibly have prevented all your unhappiness. but i trust it won't be of long duration. here's this letter," he returned it as he spoke, "which in more than one way has cost so large a price. possibly her ladyship may now regret her ill-gotten purchase." "pardon me," said errington curiously, "but how did you know--" "the information was pressed upon me very much," replied lord winsleigh evasively, "and from such a source that up to the last moment i almost refused to believe it." he paused, and then went on with a forced smile, "suppose we don't talk any more about it, errington? the subject's rather painful to me. only allow me to ask your pardon for my wife's share in the mischief!" something in his manner of speaking affected sir philip. "upon my soul, winsleigh," he exclaimed with sudden fervor, "i fancy you're a man greatly wronged!" lord winsleigh smiled slightly. "you only _fancy_?" he said quietly. "well,--my good friend, we all have our troubles--i dare say mine are no greater than those of many better men." he stopped short, then asked abruptly, "i suppose you'll see lennox?" errington set his teeth hard. "i shall,--at once!" he replied. "and i shall probably thrash him within an inch of his life!" "that's right! i shan't be sorry!" and lord winsleigh's hand clenched almost unconsciously. "i hope you understand, errington, that if it hadn't been for my son, i should have shot that fellow long ago. i dare say you wonder,--and some others too,--why i haven't done it. but ernest--poor little chap! . . . he would have heard of it,--and the reason of it,--his young life is involved in mine--why should i bequeath him a dishonored mother's name? there--for heaven's sake, don't let me make a fool of myself!" and he fiercely dashed his hand across his eyes. "a duel or a divorce--or a horsewhipping--they all come to pretty much the same thing--all involve public scandal for the name of the woman who may be unhappily concerned--and scandal clings, like the stain on lady macbeth's hand. in your case you can act--_your_ wife is above a shadow of suspicion--but i--oh, my god! how much women have to answer for in the miseries of this world!" errington said nothing. pity and respect for the man before him held him silent. here was one of the martyrs of modern social life--a man who evidently knew himself to be dishonored by his wife,--and who yet, for the sake of his son, submitted to be daily broken on the wheel of private torture rather than let the boy grow up to despise and slight his mother. whether he were judged as wise or weak in his behavior there was surely something noble about him--something unselfish and heroic that deserved recognition. presently lord winsleigh continued in calmer tones-- "i've been talking too much about myself, errington, i fear--forgive it! sometimes i've thought you misunderstood me--" "i never shall again!" declared philip earnestly. lord winsleigh met his look of sympathy with one of gratitude. "thanks!" he said briefly,--and with this they shook hands again heartily, and parted. lord winsleigh saw his visitor to the door--and then at once returned to his wife's apartments. she was still absent from the boudoir--he therefore entered her dressing-room without ceremony. there he found her,--alone, kneeling on the floor, her head buried in an arm-chair,--and her whole frame shaken with convulsive sobs. he looked down upon her with a strange wistful pain in his eyes,--pain mingled with compassion. "clara!" he said gently. she started and sprang up--confronting him with flushed cheeks and wet eyes. "_you_ here?" she exclaimed angrily. "i wonder you dare to--" she broke off, confused by his keen, direct glance. "it _is_ a matter for wonder," he said quietly. "it's the strangest thing in the world that i--your husband--should venture to intrude myself into your presence! nothing could be more out of the common. but i have something to say to you--something which must be said sooner or later--and i may as well speak now." he paused,--she was silent, looking at him in a sort of sudden fear. "sit down," he continued in the same even tones. "you must have a little patience with me--i'll endeavor to be as brief as possible." mechanically she obeyed him and sank into a low fauteuil. she began playing with the trinkets on her silver chatelaine, and endeavored to feign the most absolute unconcern, but her heart beat quickly--she could not imagine what was coming next--her husband's manner and tone were quite new to her. "you accused me just now," he went on, "of being a spy. i have never condescended to act such a part toward you, clara. when i first married you i trusted you with my life, my honor, and my name, and though you have betrayed all three"--she moved restlessly as his calm gaze remained fixed on her--"i repeat,--though you have betrayed all three,--i have deliberately shut my eyes to the ruin of my hopes, in a loyal endeavor to shield you from the world's calumny. regarding the unhappiness you have caused the erringtons,--your own maid louise rénaud (who has given you notice of her intention to leave you) told me all she knew of your share in what i may call positive cruelty, towards a happy and innocent woman who has never injured you, and whose friend you declared yourself to be--" "you believe the lies of a servant?" suddenly cried lady winsleigh wrathfully. "have not _you_ believed the lies of sir francis lennox, who is less honest than a servant?" asked her husband, his grave voice deepening with a thrill of passion. "and haven't you reported them everywhere as truths? but as regards your maid--i doubted her story altogether. she assured me she knew what money you took out with you yesterday, and what you returned with--and as the only place you visited in the morning was the brilliant theatre,--after having received a telegram from lennox, which she saw,--it was easy for her to put two and two together, especially as she noticed you reading the letter you had purchased--moreover"--he paused--"she has heard certain conversations between you and sir francis, notably one that took place at the garden-party in the summer at errington manor. spy? you say? your detective has been paid by you,--fed and kept about your own person,--to minister to your vanity and to flatter your pride--that she has turned informer against you is not surprising. be thankful that her information has fallen into no more malignant hands than mine!" again he paused--she was still silent--but her lips trembled nervously. "and yet i was loth to believe everything"--he resumed half sadly--"till errington came and showed me that letter and told me the whole story of his misery. even then i thought i would give you one more chance--that's why i brought him to you and asked you the question before him. one look at your face told me you were guilty, though you denied it. i should have been better pleased had you confessed it! but why talk about it any longer?--the mischief is done--i trust it is not irreparable. i certainly consider that before troubling that poor girl's happiness,--you should have taken the precaution to inquire a little further into the truth of the reports you heard from sir francis lennox,--he is not a reliable authority on any question whatsoever. you may have thought him so--" he stopped short and regarded her with sorrowful sternness--"i say, clara, you may have thought him so, once--but _now_? are you proud to have shared his affections with--violet vere?" she uttered a sharp cry and covered her face with her hands,--an action which appeared to smite her husband to the heart,--for his voice trembled with deep feeling when he next spoke. "ah, best hide it, clara!" he said passionately. "hide that fair face i loved so well--hide those eyes in which i dreamed of finding my life's sunshine! clara, clara! what can i say to you, fallen rose of womanhood? how can i--" he suddenly bent over her as though to caress her, then drew back with a quick agonized sigh. "you thought me blind, clara! . . ." he went on in low tones, "blind to my own dishonor--blind to your faithlessness,--i tell you if you had taken my heart between your hands and wrung the blood out of it drop by drop, i could not have suffered more than i have done! why have i been silent so long?--no matter why,--but _now_, now clara,--this life of ours must end!" she shuddered away from him. "end it then!" she muttered in a choked voice. "you can do as you like,--you can divorce me." "yes," said lord winsleigh musingly. "i can divorce you! there will be no defense possible,--as you know. if witnesses are needed, they are to be had in the persons of our own domestics. the co-respondent in the case will not refute the charge against him,--and i, the plaintiff, _must_ win my just cause. do you realize it all, clara? you, the well-known leader of a large social circle--you, the proud beauty and envied lady of rank and fashion,--you will be made a subject for the coarse jests of lawyers,--the very judge on the bench will probably play off his stale witticism at your expense,--your dearest friends will tear your name to shreds,--the newspapers will reek of your doings,--and honest housemaids reading of your fall from your high estate, will thank god that their souls and bodies are more chaste than yours! and last,--not least,--think when old age creeps on, and your beauty withers,--think of your son grown to manhood,--the sole heir to my name,--think of him as having but one thing to blush for--the memory of his dishonored mother!" "cruel--cruel!" she cried, endeavoring to check her sobs, and withdrawing her hands from her face. "why do you say such things to me? why did you marry me?" he caught her hands and held them in a fast grip. "why? because i loved you, clara--loved you with all the tenderness of a strong man's heart! when i first saw you, you seemed to me the very incarnation of maiden purity and loveliness! the days of our courtship--the first few months of our marriage--what they were to you, i know not,--to me they were supreme happiness. when our boy was born, my adoration, my reverence for you increased--you were so sacred in my eyes, that i could have knelt and asked a benediction from these little hands"--here he gently loosened them from his clasp. "then came the change--_what_ changed you, i cannot imagine--it has always seemed to me unnatural, monstrous, incredible! there was no falling away in _my_ affection, that i can swear! my curse upon the man who turned your heart from mine! so rightful and deep a curse is it that i feel it must some day strike home." he paused and seemed to reflect. "who is there more vile, more traitorous than he?" he went on. "has he not tried to influence errington's wife against her husband? for what base purpose? but clara,--he is powerless against _her_ purity and innocence;--what, in the name of god, gave him power over _you_?" she drooped her head, and the hot blood rushed to her face. "you've said enough!" she murmured sullenly. "if you have decided on a divorce, pray carry out your intention with the least possible delay. i cannot talk any more! i--i am tired!" "clara," said her husband solemnly, with a strange light in his eyes, "i would rather kill you than divorce you!" there was something so terribly earnest in his tone that her heart beat fast with fear. "kill me?--kill me?" she gasped, with white lips. "yes!" he repeated, "kill you,--as a frenchman or an italian would,--and take the consequences. yes--though an englishman, i would rather do this than drag your frail poor womanhood through the mire of public scandal! i have, perhaps, a strange nature, but such as i am, i am. there are too many of our high-born families already, flaunting their immorality and low licentiousness in the face of the mocking, grinning populace,--i for one could never make up my mind to fling the honor of my son's mother to them, as though it were a bone for dogs to fight over. no--i have another proposition to make to you--" he stopped short. she stared at him wonderingly. he resumed in methodical, unmoved, business-like tones. "i propose, clara, simply,--to leave you! i'll take the boy and absent myself from this country, so as to give you perfect freedom and save you all trouble. there'll be no possibility of scandal, for i will keep you cognizant of my movements,--and should you require my presence at any time for the sake of appearances,--or--to shield you from calumny,--you may rely on my returning to you at once,--without delay. ernest will gain many advantages by travel,--his education is quite a sufficient motive for my departure, my interest in his young life being well known to all our circle. moreover, with me--under my surveillance--he need never know anything against--against you. i have always taught him to honor and obey you in his heart." lord winsleigh paused a moment--then went on, somewhat musingly;--"when he was quite little, he used to wonder why you didn't love him,--it was hard for me to hear him say that, sometimes. but i always told him that you did love him--but that you had so many visits to makes and so many friends to entertain, that you had no time to play with him. i don't think he quite understood,--but still--i did my best!" he was silent. she had hidden her face again in her hands, and he heard a sound of smothered sobbing. "i think," he continued calmly, "that he has a great reverence for you in his young heart--a feeling which partakes, perhaps, more of fear than love--still it is better than--disdain--or--or disrespect. i shall always teach him to esteem you highly,--but i think, as matters stand--if i relieve you of all your responsibilities to husband and son--you--clara!--pray don't distress yourself--there's no occasion for this--clara--" for on a sudden impulse she had flung herself at his feet in an irrepressible storm of passionate weeping. "kill me, harry!" she sobbed wildly, clinging to him. "kill me! don't speak to me like this!--don't leave me! oh, my god! don't, don't despise me so utterly! hate me--curse me--strike me--do anything, but don't leave me as if i were some low thing, unfit for your touch,--i know i am, but oh, harry! . . ." she clung to him more closely. "if you leave me i will not live,--i cannot! have you no pity? why would you throw me back alone--all, all alone, to die of your contempt and my shame!" and she bowed her head in an agony of tears. he looked down upon her a moment in silence. "your shame!" he murmured. "my wife--" then he raised her in his arms and drew her with a strange hesitation of touch, to his breast, as though she were some sick or wounded child, and watched her as she lay there weeping, her face hidden, her whole frame trembling in his embrace. "poor soul!" he whispered, more to himself than to her. "poor frail woman! hush, hush, clara! the past is past! i'll make you no more reproaches. i--i _can't_ hurt you, because i once so loved you--but now--now,--what _is_ there left for me to do, but to leave you? you'll be happier so--you'll have perfect liberty--you needn't even think of me--unless, perhaps, as one dead and buried long ago--" she raised herself in his arms and looked at him piteously. "won't you give me a chance?" she sobbed. "not one? if i had but known you better--if i had understood oh, i've been vile, wicked, deceitful--but i'm not happy, harry--i've never been happy since i wronged you! won't you give me one little hope that i may win your love again,--no, not your love, but your pity? oh, harry, have i lost all--all--" her voice broke--she could say no more. he stroked her hair gently. "you speak on impulse just now, clara," he said gravely yet tenderly. "you can't know your own strength or weakness. god forbid that _i_ should judge you harshly! as you wish it, i will not leave you yet. i'll wait. whether we part or remain together, shall be decided by your own actions, your own looks, your own words. you understand, clara? you know my feelings. i'm content for the present to place my fate in your hands." he smiled rather sadly. "but for love, clara--i fear nothing can be done to warm to life this poor perished love of ours. we can, perhaps, take hands and watch its corpse patiently together and say how sorry we are it is dead--such penitence comes always too late!" he sighed, and put her gently away from him. she turned up her flushed, tear-stained face to his. "will you kiss me, harry?" she asked tremblingly. he met her eyes, and an exclamation that was almost a groan broke from his lips. a shudder passed through his frame. "i can't, clara! i can't--god forgive me!--not yet!" and with that he bowed his head and left her. she listened to the echo of his firm footsteps dying away, and creeping guiltily to a side-door she opened it, and watched yearningly his retreating figure till it had disappeared. "why did i never love him till now?" she murmured sobbingly. "now, when he despises me--when he will not even kiss me?--" she leaned against the half-open door in an attitude of utter dejection, not caring to move, listening intently with a vague hope of hearing her husband's returning tread. a lighter step than his, however, came suddenly along from the other side of the passage and startled her a little--it was ernest, looking the picture of boyish health and beauty. he was just going out for his usual ride--he lifted his cap with a pretty courtesy as he saw her, and said-- "good-morning, mother!" she looked at him with new interest,--how handsome the lad was!--how fresh his face!--how joyously clear those bright blue eyes of his! he, on his part, was moved by a novel sensation too--his mother,--his proud, beautiful, careless mother had been crying--he saw that at a glance, and his young heart beat faster when she laid her white hand, sparkling all over with rings, on his arm and drew him closer to her. "are you going to the park?" she asked gently. "yes." then recollecting his training in politeness and obedience he added instantly--"unless you want me." she smiled faintly. "i never do want you--do i, ernest?" she asked half sadly. "i never want my boy at all." her voice quivered,--and ernest grew more and more astonished. "if you do, i'll stay," he said stoutly, filled with a chivalrous desire to console his so suddenly tender mother of his, whatever her griefs might be. her eyes filled again, but she tried to laugh. "no dear--not now,--run along and enjoy yourself. come to me when you return. i shall be at home all day. and,--stop ernest--won't you kiss me?" the boy opened his eyes wide in respectful wonderment, and his cheeks flushed with surprise and pleasure. "why, mother--of course!" and his fresh, sweet lips closed on hers with frank and unaffected heartiness. she held him fast for a moment and looked at him earnestly. "tell your father you kissed me--will you?" she said. "don't forget!" and with that she waved her hand to him, and retreated again into her own apartment. the boy went on his way somewhat puzzled and bewildered--did his mother love him, after all? if so, he thought--how glad he was!--how very glad! and what a pity he had not known it before! chapter xxix. "i heed not custom, creed, nor law; i care for nothing that ever i saw-- i terribly laugh with an oath and sneer, when i think that the hour of death draws near!" w. winter. errington's first idea, on leaving winsleigh house, was to seek an interview with sir francis lennox, and demand an explanation. he could not understand the man's motive for such detestable treachery and falsehood. his anger rose to a white heat as he thought of it, and he determined to "have it out" with him whatever the consequences might be. "no apology will serve his turn," he muttered. "the scoundrel! he has lied deliberately--and, by jove, he shall pay for it!" and he started off rapidly in the direction of piccadilly, but on the way he suddenly remembered that he had no weapon with him, not even a cane wherewith to carry out his intention of thrashing sir francis, and calling to mind a certain heavy horsewhip, that hung over the mantel-piece in his own room, he hailed a hansom, and was driven back to his house in order to provide himself with that implement of castigation before proceeding further. on arriving at the door, to his surprise he found lorimer who was just about to ring the bell. "why, i thought you were in paris?" he exclaimed. "i came back last night," george began, when morris opened the door, and errington, taking his friend by the arm hurried him into the house. in five minutes he had unburdened himself of all his troubles--and had explained the misunderstanding about violet vere and thelma's consequent flight. lorimer listened with a look of genuine pain and distress on his honest face. "phil, you _have_ been a fool!" he said candidly. "a positive fool, if you'll pardon me for saying so. you ought to have told thelma everything at first,--she's the very last woman in the world who ought to be kept in the dark about anything. neville's feelings? bother neville's feelings! depend upon it the poor girl has heard all manner of stories. she's been miserable for some time--duprèz noticed it." and he related in a few words the little scene that had taken place at errington manor on the night of the garden-party, when his playing on the organ had moved her to such unwonted emotion. philip heard him in moody silence,--how had it happened, he wondered, that others,--comparative strangers,--had observed that thelma looked unhappy, while he, her husband, had been blind to it? he could not make this out,--and yet it is a thing that very commonly happens. our nearest and dearest are often those who are most in the dark respecting our private and personal sufferings,--we do not wish to trouble them,--and they prefer to think that everything is right with us, even though the rest of the world can plainly perceive that everything is wrong. to the last moment they will refuse to see death in our faces, though the veriest stranger meeting us casually, clearly beholds the shadow of the dark angel's hand. "_apropos_ of lennox," went on lorimer, sympathetically watching his friend, "i came on purpose to speak to you about him. i've got some news for you. he's a regular sneak and scoundrel. you can thrash him to your heart's content for he has grossly insulted your wife." "_insulted_ her?" cried errington furiously. "how,--what--" "give me time to speak!" and george laid a restraining hand on his arm. "thelma visited my mother yesterday and told her that on the night before, when you had gone out, lennox took advantage of your absence to come here and make love to her,--and she actually had to struggle with him, and even to strike him, in order to release herself from his advances. my mother advised her to tell you about it--and she evidently then had no intention of flight, for she said she would inform you of everything as soon as you returned from the country. and if lady winsleigh hadn't interfered, it's very probable that--i say, where are you going?" this as philip made a bound for the door. "to get my horsewhip!" he answered. "all right--i approve!" cried lorimer. "but wait one instant, and see how clear the plot becomes. thelma's beauty had maddened lennox,--to gain her good opinion, as he thinks, he throws his mistress, violet vere, on _your_ shoulders--(your ingenuous visits to the brilliant theatre gave him a capital pretext for this) and as for lady winsleigh's share in the mischief, it's nothing but mere feminine spite against you for marrying at all, and hatred of the woman whose life is such a contrast to her own, and who absorbs all your affection. lennox has used her as his tool and the vere also, i've no doubt. the thing's as clear as crystal. it's a sort of general misunderstanding all round--one of those eminently unpleasant trifles that very frequently upset the peace and comfort of the most quiet and inoffensive persons. but the fault lies with _you_, dear old boy!" "with _me_!" exclaimed philip. "certainly! thelma's soul is as open as daylight--you shouldn't have had any secret from her, however trifling. she's not a woman 'on guard,'--she can't take life as the most of us do, in military fashion, with ears pricked for the approach of a spy, and prepared to expect betrayal from her most familiar friends. she accepts things as they appear, without any suspicion of mean ulterior designs. it's a pity, of course!--it's a pity she can't be worldly-wise, and scheme and plot and plan and lie like the rest of us! however, _your_ course is plain--first interview lennox and then follow thelma. she can't have left hull yet,--there are scarcely any boats running to norway at this season. you'll overtake her i'm certain." "by jove, lorimer!" said errington suddenly. "clara winsleigh sticks at nothing--do you know she actually had the impudence to suggest that _you_,--you, of all people,--were in love with thelma!" lorimer flushed up, but laughed lightly. "how awfully sweet of her! much obliged to her, i'm sure! and how did you take it phil?" "take it? i didn't take it at all," responded philip warmly. "of course, i knew it was only her spite--she'd say anything in one of her tempers." lorimer looked at him with a sudden tenderness in his blue eyes. then he laughed again, a little forcedly, and said-- "be off, old man, and get that whip of yours! we'll run lennox to earth. hullo! here's britta!" the little maid entered hurriedly at that moment,--she came to ask with quivering lips, whether she might accompany sir philip in his intended journey to norway. "for if you do not find the fröken at hull, you will want to reach the altenfjord," said britta, folding hands resolutely in front of her apron, "and you will not get on without me. you do not know what the country is like in the depth of winter when the sun is asleep. you must have the reindeer to help you--and no englishman knows how to drive reindeer. and--and--" here britta's eyes filled--"you have not thought, perhaps, that the journey may make the fröken very ill--and that when we find her--she may be dying--" and britta's strength gave way in a big sob that broke from the depths of her honest, affectionate heart. "don't--_don't_ talk like that, britta!" cried philip passionately. "i can't bear it! of course, you shall go with me! i wouldn't leave you behind for the world! get everything ready--" and in a fever of heat and impatience he began rummaging among some books on a side-shelf, till he found the time-tables he sought. "yes,--here we are,--there's a train leaving for hull at five--we'll take that. tell morris to pack my portmanteau, and you bring it along with you to the midland railway-station this afternoon. do you understand?" britta nodded emphatically, and hurried off at once to busy herself with these preparations, while philip, all excitement, dashed off to give a few parting injunctions to neville, and to get his horsewhip. lorimer, left alone for a few minutes, seated himself in an easy chair and began absently turning over the newspapers on the table. but his thoughts were far away, and presently he covered his eyes with one hand as though the light hurt them. when he removed it, his lashes were wet. "what a fool i am!" he muttered impatiently. "oh thelma, thelma! my darling!--how i wish i could follow and find you and console you!--you poor, tender, resigned soul, going away like this because you thought you were not wanted--not wanted!--my god!--if you only knew how one man at least has wanted and yearned for you ever since he saw your sweet face!--why can't i tear you out of my heart--why can't i love some one else? ah phil!--good, generous, kind old phil!--he little guesses," he rose and paced the room up and down restlessly. "the fact is i oughtn't to be here at all--i ought to leave england altogether for a long time--till--till i get over it. the question is, _shall_ i ever get over it? sigurd was a wise boy--he found a short way out of all his troubles,--suppose i imitate his example? no,--for a man in his senses that would be rather cowardly--though it might be pleasant!" he stopped in his walk with a pondering expression on his face. "at any rate, i won't stop here to see her come back--i couldn't trust myself,--i should say something foolish--i know i should! i'll take my mother to italy--she wants to go; and we'll stay with lovelace. it'll be a change--and i'll have a good stand-up fight with myself, and see if i can't come off the conqueror somehow! it's all very well to kill an opponent in battle but the question is, can a man kill his inner, grumbling, discontented, selfish self? if he can't, what's the good of him?" as he was about to consider this point reflectively, errington entered, equipped for travelling, and whip in hand. his imagination had been at work during the past few minutes, exaggerating all the horrors and difficulties of thelma's journey to the altenfjord, till he was in a perfect fever of irritable excitement. "come on lorimer!" he cried. "there's no time to lose! britta knows what to do--she'll meet me at the station. i can't breathe in this wretched house a moment longer--let's be off!" plunging out into the hall, he bade morris summon a hansom,--and with a few last instructions to that faithful servitor, and an encouraging kind word and shake of the hand to neville, who with a face of remorseful misery, stood at the door to watch his departure,--he was gone. the hansom containing him and lorimer rattled rapidly towards the abode of sir francis lennox, but on entering piccadilly, the vehicle was compelled to go so slowly on account of the traffic, that errington, who every moment grew more and more impatient, could not stand it. "by jove! this is like a walking funeral!" he muttered. "i say lorimer, let's get out! we can do the rest on foot." they stopped the cabman and paid him his fare--then hurried along rapidly, errington every now and then giving a fiercer clench to the formidable horsewhip which was twisted together with his ordinary walking-stick in such a manner as not to attract special attention. "coward and liar!" he muttered, as he thought of the man he was about to punish. "he shall pay for his dastardly falsehood--by jove he shall! it'll be a precious long time before he shows himself in society any more!" then he addressed lorimer. "you may depend upon it he'll shout 'police! police!' and make for the door," he observed. "you keep your back against it, lorimer! i don't care how many fines i've got to pay as long as i can thrash him soundly!" "all right!" lorimer answered, and they quickened their pace. as they neared the chambers which sir francis lennox rented over a fashionable jeweller's shop, they became aware of a small procession coming straight towards them from the opposite direction. _something_ was being carried between four men who appeared to move with extreme care and gentleness,--this something was surrounded by a crowd of boys and men whose faces were full of morbid and frightened interest--the whole _cortége_ was headed by a couple of solemn policemen. "you spoke of a walking funeral just now," said lorimer suddenly. "this looks uncommonly like one." errington made no reply--he had only one idea in his mind,--the determination to chastise and thoroughly disgrace sir francis. "i'll hound him out of the clubs!" he thought indignantly. "his own set shall know what a liar he is--and if i can help it he shall never hold up his head again!" entirely occupied as he was with these reflections, he paid no heed to anything that was going on in the street, and he scarcely heard lorimer's last observation. so that he was utterly surprised and taken aback, when he, with lorimer, was compelled to come to a halt before the very door of the jeweller, lennox's landlord, while the two policemen cleared a passage through the crowd, saying in low tones, "stand aside, gentlemen, please!--stand aside," thus making gradual way for four bearers, who, as was now plainly to be seen, carried a common wooden stretcher covered with a cloth, under which lay what seemed, from its outline, to be a human figure. "what's the matter here?" asked lorimer, with a curious cold thrill running through him as he put the simple question. one of the policemen answered readily enough. "an accident, sir. gentleman badly hurt. down at charing cross station--tried to jump into a train when it had started,--foot caught,--was thrown under the wheels and dragged along some distance--doctor says he can't live, sir." "who is he,--what's his name?" "lennox, sir--leastways, that's the name on his card--and this is the address. sir francis lennox, i believe it is." errington uttered a sharp exclamation of horror,--at that moment the jeweller came out of the recesses of his shop with uplifted hands and bewildered countenance. "an accident? good heavens!--sir francis! up-stairs!--take him up-stairs!" here he addressed the bearers. "you should have gone round to the private entrance--he mustn't be seen in the shop--frightening away all my customers--here, pass through!--pass through, as quick as you can!" and they did pass through,--carrying their crushed burden tenderly along by the shining glass cases and polished counters, where glimmered and flashed jewels of every size and lustre for the adorning of the children of this world,--slowly and carefully, step by step, they reached the upper floor,--and there, in a luxurious apartment furnished with almost feminine elegance, they lifted the inanimate form from the stretcher and laid it down, still shrouded, on a velvet sofa, removing the last number of _truth_, and two of zola's novels, to make room for the heavy, unconscious head. errington and lorimer stood at the doorway, completely overcome by the suddenness of the event--they had followed the bearers up-stairs almost mechanically,--exchanging no word or glance by the way,--and now they watched in almost breathless suspense while a surgeon who was present, gently turned back the cover that hid the injured man's features and exposed them to full view. was _that_ sir francis? that blood-smeared, mangled creature?--_that_ the lascivious dandy,--the disciple of no-creed and self-worship? errington shuddered and averted his gaze from that hideous face,--so horribly contorted,--yet otherwise deathlike in its rigid stillness. there was a grave hush. the surgeon still bent over him--touching here, probing there, with tenderness and skill,--but finally he drew back with a hopeless shake of his head. "nothing can be done," he whispered. "absolutely nothing!" at that moment sir francis stirred,--he groaned and opened his eyes;--what terrible eyes they were, filled with that look of intense anguish, and something worse than anguish,--fear--frantic fear--coward fear--fear that was almost more overpowering than his bodily suffering. he stared wildly at the little group assembled--strange faces, so far as he could make them out, that regarded him with evident compassion,--what --what was all this--what did it mean? death? no, no! he thought madly, while his brain reeled with the idea--death? what _was_ death?--darkness, annihilation, blackness--all that was horrible--unimaginable! god! he would _not_ die! god!--who _was_ god? no matter--he would live;--he would struggle against this heaviness,--this coldness--this pillar of ice in which he was being slowly frozen--frozen--frozen!--inch by--inch! he made a furious effort to move, and uttered a scream of agony, stabbed through and through by torturing pain. "keep still!" said the surgeon pityingly. sir francis heard him not. he wrestled with his bodily anguish till the perspiration stood in large drops on his forehead. he raised himself, gasping for breath, and glared about him like a trapped beast of prey. "give me brandy!" he muttered chokingly. "quick--quick! are you going to let me die like a dog?--damn you all!" the effort to move,--to speak,--exhausted his sinking strength--his throat rattled,--he clenched his fists and made as though he would spring off his couch--when a fearful contortion convulsed his whole body,--his eyes rolled up and became fixed--he fell heavily back,--_dead_! quietly the surgeon covered again what was now nothing,--nothing but a mutilated corpse. "it's all over!" he announce briefly. errington heard these words in sickened silence. all over! was it possible? so soon? all over!--and he had come too late to punish the would-be ravisher of his wife's honor,--too late! he still held the whip in his hand with which he had meant to chastise that--that distorted, mangled lump of clay yonder, . . . pah! he could not bear to think of it, and he turned away, faint and dizzy. he felt,--rather than saw the staircase,--down which he dreamily went, followed by lorimer. the two policemen were in the hall scribbling the cut-and-dry particulars of the accident in their note-books, which having done, they marched off, attended by a wandering, bilious-looking penny-a-liner who was anxious to write a successful account of the "shocking fatality," as it was called in the next day's newspapers. then the bearers departed cheerfully, carrying with them the empty stretcher. then the jeweller, who seemed quite unmoved respecting the sudden death of his lodger, chatted amicably with the surgeon about the reputation and various demerits of the deceased,--and errington and lorimer, as they passed through the shop, heard him speaking of a person hitherto unheard of, namely, lady francis lennox, who had been deserted by her husband for the past six years, and who was living uncomplainingly the life of an art-student in germany with her married sister, maintaining, by the work of her own hands, her one little child, a boy of five. "he never allowed her a farthing," said the conversational jeweller. "and she never asked him for one. mr. wiggins, his lawyer--firm of wiggins & whizzer, furnival's inn,--told me all about his affairs. oh yes--he was a regular "masher"--tip-top! not worth much, i should say. he must have spent over a thousand a year in keeping up that little place at st. john's wood for violet vere. he owes me five hundred. however, mr. wiggins will see everything fair, i've no doubt. i've just wired to him, announcing the death. i don't suppose any one will regret him--except, perhaps, the woman at st. john's wood. but i believe she's playing for a bigger stake just now." and, stimulated by this thought, he drew out from a handsome morocco case a superb pendant of emeralds and diamonds--a work of art, that glittered as he displayed it, like a star on a frosty night. "pretty thing, isn't it?" he said proudly. "eight hundred pounds, and cheap, too! it was ordered for miss vere, two months ago, by the duke of moorlands. i see he sold his collection of pictures the other day. luckily they fetched a tidy sum, so i'm pretty sure of the money for this. he'll sell everything he's got to please her. queer? oh, not at all! she's the rage just now,--i can't see anything in her myself,--but i'm not a duke, you see--i'm obliged to be respectable!" he laughed as he returned the pendant to its nest of padded amber satin, and errington,--sick at heart to hear such frivolous converse going on while that crushed and lifeless form lay in the very room above,--unwatched, uncared-for,--put his arm through lorimer's and left the shop. once in the open street, with the keen, cold air blowing against their faces, they looked at each other blankly. piccadilly was crowded; the hurrying people passed and re-passed,--there were the shouts of omnibus conductors and newsboys--the laughter of young men coming out of the st. james's hall restaurant; all was as usual,--as, indeed, why should it not? what matters the death of one man in a million? unless, indeed, it be a man whose life, like a torch, uplifted in darkness, has enlightened and cheered the world,--but the death of a mere fashionable "swell" whose chief talent has been a trick of lying gracefully--who cares for such a one? society is instinctively relieved to hear that his place is empty, and shall know him more. but errington could not immediately forget the scene he had witnessed. he was overcome by sensations of horror,--even of pity,--and he walked by his friend's side for some time in silence. "i wish i could get rid of this thing!" he said suddenly, looking down at the horsewhip in his hand. lorimer made no answer. he understood his feeling, and realized the situation as sufficiently grim. to be armed with a weapon meant for the chastisement of a man whom death had so suddenly claimed was, to say the least of it, unpleasant. yet the horsewhip could scarcely be thrown away in piccadilly--such an action might attract notice and comment. presently philip spoke again. "he was actually married all the time!" "so it seems;" and lorimer's face expressed something very like contempt. "by jove, phil! he must have been an awful scoundrel!" "don't let's say any more about him--he's dead!" and philip quickened his steps. "and what a horrible death!" "horrible enough, indeed!" again they were both silent. mechanically they turned down towards pall mall. "george," said errington, with a strange awe in his tones, "it seems to me to-day as if there were death in the air. i don't believe in presentiments, but yet--yet i cannot help thinking--what if i should find my thelma--_dead_?" lorimer turned very pale--a cold shiver ran through him, but he endeavored to smile. "for god's sake, old fellow, don't think of anything so terrible! look here, you're hipped--no wonder! and you've got a long journey before you. come and have lunch. it's just two o'clock. afterwards we'll go to the garrick and have a chat with beau lovelace--he's a first-rate fellow for looking on the bright side of everything. then i'll see you off this afternoon at the midland--what do you say?" errington assented to this arrangement, and tried to shake off the depression that had settled upon him, though dark forebodings passed one after the other like clouds across his mind. he seemed to see the altenguard hills stretching drearily, white with frozen snow, around the black fjord; he pictured thelma, broken-hearted, fancying herself deserted, returning through the cold and darkness to the lonely farm-house behind the now withered pines. then he began to think of the shell-cave where that other thelma lay hidden in her last deep sleep,--the wailing words of sigurd came freshly back to his ears, when the poor crazed lad had likened thelma's thoughts to his favorite flowers, the pansies--"one by one you will gather and play with her thoughts as though they were these blossoms; your burning hand will mar their color--they will wither and furl up and die,--and you--what will you care? nothing! no man ever cares for a flower that is withered,--not even though his own hand slew it!" had he been to blame? he mused, with a sorrowful weight at his heart. unintentionally, had he,--yes, he would put it plainly,--had he neglected her, just a little? had he not, with all his true and passionate love for her, taken her beauty, her devotion, her obedience too much for granted--too much as his right? and in these latter months, when her health had made her weaker and more in need of his tenderness, had he not, in a sudden desire for political fame and worldly honor, left her too much alone, a prey to solitude and the often morbid musings which solitude engenders? he began to blame himself heartily for the misunderstanding that had arisen out of his share in neville's unhappy secret. neville had been weak and timid,--he had shrunk nervously from avowing that the notorious violet vere was actually the woman he had so faithfully loved and mourned,--but he, philip, ought not to have humored him in these fastidious scruples--he ought to have confided everything to thelma. he remembered now that he had once or twice been uneasy lest rumors of his frequent visits to miss vere might possibly reach his wife's ears,--but, then, as his purpose was absolutely disinterested and harmless, he did not dwell on this idea, but dismissed it, and held his peace for neville's sake, contenting himself with the thought that, "if thelma _did_ hear anything, she would never believe a word against me." he could not quite see where his fault had been,--though a fault there was somewhere, as he uneasily felt--and he would no doubt have started indignantly had a small elf whispered in his ear the word "_conceit._" yet that was the name of his failing--that and no other. how many men, otherwise noble-hearted, are seriously, though often unconsciously, burdened with this large parcel of blown-out nothing! sir philip did not appear to be conceited--he would have repelled the accusation with astonishment,--not knowing that in his very denial of the fault, the fault existed. he had never been truly humbled but twice in his life,--once as he knelt to receive his mother's dying benediction,--and again when he first loved thelma, and was uncertain whether his love could be returned by so fair and pure a creature. with these two exceptions, all his experience had tended to give him an excellent opinion of himself,--and that he should possess one of the best and loveliest wives in the world, seemed to him quite in keeping with the usual course of things. the feeling that it was a sheer impossibility for her to ever believe a word against him, rose out of this inward self-satisfaction--this one flaw in his otherwise bright, honest, and lovable character--a flaw of which he himself was not aware. now, when for the third time his fairy castle of perfect peace and pleasure seemed shaken to its foundations,--when he again realized the uncertainty of life or death, he felt bewildered and wretched. his chiefest pride was centred in thelma, and she--was gone! again he reverted to the miserable idea that, like a melancholy refrain, haunted him--"what if i should find her _dead_!" absorbed in painful reflections, he was a very silent companion for lorimer during the luncheon which they took at a quiet little restaurant well known to the _habitués_ of pall mall and regent street. lorimer himself had his own reasons for being equally depressed and anxious,--for did he not love thelma as much as even her husband could?--nay, perhaps more, knowing his love was hopeless. not always does possession of the adored object strengthen the adoration,--the rapturous dreams of an ideal passion have often been known to surpass reality a thousandfold. so the two friends exchanged but few words,--though they tried to converse cheerfully on indifferent subjects, and failed in the attempt. they had nearly finished their light repast, when a familiar voice saluted them. "it _is_ errington,--i thocht i couldna be mistaken! how are ye both?" sandy macfarlane stood before them, unaltered, save that his scanty beard had grown somewhat longer. they had seen nothing of him since their trip to norway, and they greeted him now with unaffected heartiness, glad of the distraction his appearance afforded them. "where do you hail from, mac?" asked lorimer, as he made the new-comer sit down at their table. "we haven't heard of you for an age." "it _is_ a goodish bit of time," assented macfarlane, "but better late than never. i came up to london a week ago from glasgie,--and my heed has been in a whirl ever since. eh, mon! but it's an awful place!--maybe i'll get used to't after a wee whilie." "are you going to settle here, then?" inquired errington, "i thought you intended to be a minister somewhere in scotland?" macfarlane smiled, and his eyes twinkled. "i hae altered ma opee-nions a bit," he said. "ye see, ma aunt in glasgie's deed--" "i understand," laughed lorimer. "you've come in for the old lady's money?" "puir body!" and sandy shook his head gravely. "a few hours before she died she tore up her will in a screamin' fury o' christian charity and forethought,--meanin' to mak anither in favor o' leavin' a' her warld's trash to the fund for distributin' bible knowledge among the heathen--but she never had time to fulfill her intention. she went off like a lamb,--and there being no will, her money fell to me, as the nearest survivin' relative--eh! the puir thing!--if her dees-imbodied spirit is anywhere aboot, she must be in a sair plight to think i've got it, after a' her curses!" "how much?" asked lorimer amused. "oh, just a fair seventy thousand or so," answered macfarlane carelessly. "well done, mac!" said errington, with a smile, endeavoring to appear interested. "you're quite rich, then? i congratulate you!" "riches are a snare," observed macfarlane, sententiously, "a snare and a decoy to both soul and body!" he laughed and rubbed his hands,--then added with some eagerness, "i say, how is lady errington?" "she's very well," answered sir philip hurriedly, exchanging a quick look with lorimer, which the latter at once understood. "she's away on a visit just now. i'm going to join her this afternoon." "i'm sorry she's away," said sandy, and he looked very disappointed; "but i'll see her when she comes back. will she be long absent?" "no, not long--a few days only"--and as errington said this an involuntary sigh escaped him. a few days only!--god grant it! but what--what if he should find her _dead_? macfarlane noticed the sadness of his expression, but prudently forbore to make any remark upon it. he contented himself with saying-- "weel, ye've got a wife worth having--as i dare say ye know. i shall be glad to pay my respects to her as soon as she returns. i've got your address, errington--will ye take mine?" and he handed him a small card on which was written in pencil the number of a house in one of the lowest streets in the east-end of london. philip glanced at it with some surprise. "is _this_ where you live?" he asked with emphatic amazement. "yes. it's just the cleanest tenement i could find in that neighborhood. and the woman that keeps it is fairly respectable." "but with your money," remonstrated lorimer, who also looked at the card, "i rather wonder at your choice of abode. why, my dear fellow, do you _know_ what sort of a place it is?" a steadfast, earnest, _thinking_ look came into macfarlane's deep-set, grey eyes. "yes, i do know, pairfectly," he said in answer to the question. "it's a place where there's misery, starvation, and crime of all sorts,--and there i am in the very midst of it--just where i want to be. ye see, i was meant to be a meenister--one of those douce, cannie, comfortable bodies that drone in the pulpit about predestination and original sin, and so forth a--sort, of palaver that does no good to ony resonable creature--an' if i had followed out this profession, i make nae doot that, with my aunt's seventy thousand, i should be a vera comfortable, respectable, selfish type of a man, who was decently embarked in an apparently important but really useless career--" "useless?" interrupted lorimer archly. "i say, mac, take care! a minister of the lord, _useless_!" "i'm thinkin' there are unco few meen-isters o' the lord in this warld," said macfarlane musingly. "maist o' them meen-ister to themselves, an' care na a wheen mair for christ than buddha. i tell ye, i was an altered man after we'd been to norway--the auld pagan set me thinkin' mony an' mony a time--for, ma certes! he's better worthy respect than mony a so-called christian. and as for his daughter--the twa great blue eyes o' that lassie made me fair ashamed o' mysel'. why? because i felt that as a meen-ister o' the established kirk, i was bound to be a sort o' heep-ocrite,--ony thinkin', reasonable man wi' a conscience canna be otherwise wi' they folk,--and ye ken, errington, there's something in your wife's look that maks a body hesitate before tellin' a lee. weel--what wi' her face an' the auld _bonde's_ talk, i reflectit that i couldna be a meen-ister as meen-isters go,--an' that i must e'en follow oot the testament's teachings according to ma own way of thinkin'. first, i fancied i'd rough it abroad as a meesionary--then i remembered the savages at hame, an' decided to attend to them before onything else. then my aunt's siller came in handy--in short, i'm just gaun to live on as wee a handfu' o' the filthy lucre as i can, an' lay oot the rest on the heathens o' london. an' it's as well to do't while i'm alive to see to't mysel'--for i've often observed that if ye leave your warld's gear to the poor when ye're deed, just for the gude reason that ye canna tak it to the grave wi' ye,--it'll melt in a wonderfu' way through the hands o' the 'secretaries' an' 'distributors' o' the fund, till there's naething left for those ye meant to benefit. ye maunna think i'm gaun to do ony preachin' business down at east-end,--there's too much o' that an' tract-givin' already. the puir soul whose wee hoosie i've rented hadna tasted bit nor sup for three days--till i came an' startled her into a greetin' fit by takin' her rooms an' payin' her in advance--eh! mon, ye'd have thought i was a saint frae heaven if ye'd heard her blessin' me,--an' a gude curate had called on her just before and had given her a tract to dine on. ye see, i maun mak mysel' a _friend_ to the folk first, before i can do them gude--i maun get to the heart o' their troubles--an' troubles are plentiful in that quarter,--i maun live among them, an' be ane o' them. i wad mind ye that christ himsel' gave sympathy to begin with,--he did the preachin' afterwards." "what a good fellow you are, mac!" said errington, suddenly seeing his raw scotch friend with the perverse accent, in quite a new and heroic light. macfarlane actually blushed. "nonsense, not a bit o't!" he declared quite nervously. "it's just pure selfishness, after a'--for i'm simply enjoyin' mysel' the hale day long. last nicht, i found a wee cripple o' a laddie sittin' by himsel' in the gutter, munchin' a potato skin. i just took him,--he starin' an' blinkin' like an owl at me,--and carried him into my room. there i gave him a plate o' barley broth, an' finished him up wi' a hunk o' gingerbread. ma certes! ye should ha' seen the rascal laugh. 'twas better than lookin' at a play from a ten-guinea box on the grand tier!" "by jove, sandy, you're a brick!" cried lorimer, laughing to hide a very different emotion--"i had no idea you were that sort of chap." "nor had i," said macfarlane quite simply--"i never fashed mysel' wi' thinkin' o' ither folks troubles at a'--i never even took into conseederation the meanin' o' the testament teachings till--i saw your leddy wife, errington." he paused a moment, then added gravely--"yes--and i've aften fancied she maun be a real live angel,--an' i've sought always to turn my hand to something useful and worth the doin',--ever since i met her." "i'll tell her so," said poor philip, his heart aching for his lost love as he spoke, though he smiled. "it will give her pleasure to hear it." macfarlane blushed again like any awkward schoolboy. "oh, i dinna ken aboot that!" he said hurriedly. "she's just a grand woman anyway." then, bethinking himself of another subject, he asked, "have you heard o' the reverend mr. dyceworthy lately?" errington and lorimer replied in the negative. macfarlane laughed--his eyes twinkled. "it's evident ye never read police reports," he said--"talk o' misters,--he's a pretty specimen! he's been hunted out o' his place in yorkshire for carryin' on love-affairs wi' the women o' his congregation. one day he locked himsel' in the vestry wi' the new-married wife o' one o' his preencipal supporters--an' he had a grand time of it--till the husband came an' dragged him oot an' thrashed him soundly. then he left the neighborhood--an' just th' ither day--he turned up in glasgie." macfarlane paused and laughed again. "well?" said lorimer, with some interest--"did you meet him there?" "that did i--but no to speak to him--he was for too weel lookit after to need my services," and macfarlane rubbed his great hands together with an irrepressible chuckle. "there was a crowd o' hootin' laddies round him, an' he was callin' on the heavens to bear witness to his purity. his hat was off--an' he had a black eye--an' a' his coat was covered wi' mud, an' a policeman was embracin' him vera affectionately by th' arm. he was in charge for drunken, disorderly, an' indecent conduct--an' the magistrate cam' down pretty hard on him. the case proved to be exceptionally outrageous--so he's sentenced to a month's imprisonment an' hard labor. hard labor! eh, mon! but that's fine! fancy him at work--at real work for the first time in a' his days! gude lord! i can see him at it!" "so he's come to that!" and errington shrugged his shoulders with weary contempt. "i thought he would. his career as a minister is ended, that's one comfort!" "don't be too sure o' that!" said sandy cautiously. "there's always america, ye ken. he can mak' a holy martyr o' himsel' there! he may gain as muckle a reputation as henry ward beecher--ye canna ever tell what may happen--'tis a queer warld!" "queer, indeed!" assented lorimer as they all rose and left the restaurant together. "if our present existence is the result of a fortuitous conglomeration of atoms,--i think the atoms ought to have been more careful what they were about, that's all i can say!" they reached the open street, where macfarlane shook hands and went his way, promising to call on errington as soon as thelma should be again at home. "he's turned out quite a fine fellow," said lorimer, when he had gone. "i should never have thought he had so much in him. he has become a philanthropist." "i fancy he's better than an ordinary philanthropist," replied philip. "philanthropists often talk a great deal and do nothing." "like members of parliament," suggested lorimer, with a smile. "exactly so. by-the-by--i've resigned my candidateship." "resigned? why?" "oh, i'm sick of the thing! one has to be such a humbug to secure one's votes. i had a wretched time yesterday,--speechifying and trying to rouse up clodhoppers to the interests of their country,--and all the time my darling at home was alone, and breaking her heart about me! by jove! if i'd only known! when i came back this morning to all this misery--i told neville to send in my resignation. i repeated the same thing to him the last thing before i left the house." "but you might have waited a day or two," said lorimer wonderingly. "you're such a fellow of impulse, phil--" "well, i can't help it. i'm tired of politics. i began with a will, fancying that every member of the house had his country's interests at heart,--not a bit of it! they're all for themselves--most of them, at any rate--they're not even sincere in their efforts to do good to the population. and it's all very well to stick up for the aristocracy; but why, in heaven's name, can't some of the wealthiest among them do as much as our old mac is doing, for the outcast and miserable poor? i see some real usefulness and good in _his_ work, and i'll help him in it with a will--when--when thelma comes back." thus talking, the two friends reached the garrick club, where they found beau lovelace in the reading-room, turning over some new books with the curious smiling air of one who believes there can be nothing original under the sun, and that all literature is mere repetition. he greeted them cheerfully. "come out of here," he said. "come into a place where we can talk. there's an old fellow over there who's ready to murder any member who even whispers. we won't excite his angry passions. you know we're all literature-mongers here,--we've each got our own little particular stall where we sort our goods--our mouldy oranges, sour apples, and indigestible nuts,--and we polish them up to look tempting to the public. it's a great business, and we can't bear to be looked at while we're turning our apples with the best side outwards, and boiling our oranges to make them swell and seem big! we like to do our humbug in silence and alone." he led the way into the smoking-room--and there heard with much surprise and a great deal of concern the story of thelma's flight. "ingenuous boy!" he said kindly, clapping philip on the shoulder. "how could you be such a fool as to think that repeated visits to violet vere, no matter on what business, would not bring the dogs of scandal yelping about your heels! i wonder you didn't see how you were compromising yourself!" "he never told _me_ a word about it," interposed lorimer, "or else i should have given him a bit of my mind on the subject." "of course!" agreed lovelace. "and--excuse me--why the devil didn't you let your secretary manage his domestic squabbles by himself?" "he's very much broken down," said errington. "a hopeless, frail, disappointed man. i thought i could serve him--" "i see!" and beau's eyes were bent on him with a very friendly look. "you're a first-rate fellow, errington,--but you shouldn't fly off so readily on the rapid wings of impulse. now i suppose you want to shoot lennox--that can't be done--not in england at any rate." "it can't be done at all, anywhere," said lorimer gravely. "he's dead." beau lovelace started back in amazement. "dead! you don't say so! why, he was dining last night at the criterion--i saw him there." briefly they related the sudden accident that had occurred, and described its fatal result. "he died horribly!" said philip in a low voice. "i haven't got over it yet. that evil, tortured face of his haunts me." lovelace was only slightly shocked. he had known lennox's life too well, and had despised it too thoroughly, to feel much regret now it was thus abruptly ended. "rather an unpleasant exit for such a fellow," he remarked. "not aesthetic at all. and so you were going to castigate him?" "look!" and philip showed him the horsewhip; "i've been carrying this thing about all day,--i wish i could drop it in the streets; but if i did, some one would be sure to pick it up and return it to me." "if it were a purse containing bank-notes you could drop it with the positive certainty of never seeing it again," laughed beau. "here, hand it over!" and he possessed himself of it. "i'll keep it till you come back. you leave for norway to-night, then?" "yes. if i can. but it's the winter season--and there'll be all manner of difficulties. i'm afraid it's no easy matter to reach the altenfjord at this time of year." "why not use your yacht, and be independent of obstacles?" suggested lovelace. "she's under repairs, worse luck!" sighed philip despondingly. "she won't be in sailing condition for another month. no--i must take my chance--that's all. it's possible i may overtake thelma at hull--that's my great hope." "well, don't be down in the mouth about it, my boy!" said beau sympathetically. "it'll all come right, depend upon it! your wife's a sweet, gentle, noble creature,--and when once she knows all about the miserable mistake that has arisen, i don't know which will be greatest, her happiness or her penitence, for having misunderstood the position. now let's have some coffee." he ordered this refreshment from a passing waiter, and as he did so, a gentleman, with hands clasped behind his back, and a suave smile on his countenance, bowed to him with marked and peculiar courtesy as he sauntered on his way through the room. beau returned the salute with equal politeness. "that's whipper," he explained with a smile, when the gentleman was out of earshot. "the best and most generous of men! he's a critic--all critics are large-minded and generous, we know,--but he happens to be remarkably so. he did me the kindest turn i ever had in my life. when my first book came out, he fell upon it tooth and claw, mangled it, tore it to ribbons, metaphorically speaking,--and waved the fragments mockingly in the eyes of the public. from that day my name was made--my writings sold off with delightful rapidity, and words can never tell how i blessed, and how i still bless, whipper! he always pitches into me--that's what's so good of him! we're awfully polite to each other, as you observe--and what is so perfectly charming is that he's quite unconscious how much he's helped me along! he's really a first-rate fellow. but i haven't yet attained the summit of my ambition,"--and here lovelace broke off with a sparkle of fun in his clear steel-grey eyes. "why, what else do you want?" asked lorimer laughing. "i want," returned beau solemnly, "i want to be jeered at by _punch_! i want _punch_ to make mouths at me, and give me the benefit of his inimitable squeak and gibber. no author's fame is quite secure till dear old _punch_ has abused him. abuse is the thing nowadays, you know. heaven forbid that i should be praised by _punch_. that would be frightfully unfortunate!" here the coffee arrived, and lovelace dispensed it to his friends, talking gaily the while in an effort to distract errington from his gloomy thoughts. "i've just been informed on respectable authority, that walt whitman is the new socrates," he said laughingly. "i felt rather stunned at the moment but i've got over it now. oh, this deliciously mad london! what a gigantic colney hatch it is for the crazed folk of the world to air their follies in! that any reasonable englishmen with such names as shakespeare, byron, keats, and shelley, to keep the glory of their country warm, should for one moment consider walt whitman a _poet_! ye gods! where are your thunderbolts!" "he's an american, isn't he?" asked errington. "he is, my dear boy! an american whom the sensible portion of america rejects. we, therefore,--out of opposition,--take him up. his chief recommendation is that he writes blatantly concerning commonplaces,--regardless of music or rhythm. here's a bit of him concerning the taming of oxen. he says the tamer lives in a "'placid pastoral region. there they bring him the three-year-olds and the four-year-olds to break them,-- some are such beautiful animals, so lofty looking,--some are buff-colored, some mottled, one has a white line running along his back, some are brindled, some have wide flaring horns (a good sign!) look you! the bright hides see the two with stars on their foreheads--see the round bodies and broad backs how straight and square they stand on their legs--'" "stop, stop!" cried lorimer, putting his hands to his ears. "this is a practical joke, beau! no one would call that jargon poetry!" "oh! wouldn't they though!" exclaimed lovelace. "let some critic of reputation once start the idea, and you'll have the good london folk who won't bother to read him for themselves, declaring him as fine as shakespeare. the dear english muttons! fine southdowns! fleecy baa-lambs! once let the press-bell tinkle loudly enough across the fields of literature, and they'll follow, bleating sweetly in any direction! the sharpest heads in our big metropolis are those who know this, and who act accordingly." "then why don't _you_ act accordingly?" asked errington, with a faint smile. "oh, i? i can't! i never asked a favor from the press in my life--but its little bell has tinkled for me all the same, and a few of the muttons follow, but not all. are you off?" this, as they rose to take their leave. "well, errington, old fellow," and he shook hands warmly, "a pleasant journey to you, and a happy return home! my best regards to your wife. lorimer, have you settled whether you'll go with me to italy? i start the day after to-morrow." lorimer hesitated--then said, "all right! my mother's delighted at the idea,--yes, beau! we'll come. only i hope we shan't bore you." "bore me! you know me better than that," and he accompanied them out of the smoking-room into the hall, while errington, a little surprised at this sudden arrangement, observed-- "why, george--i thought you'd be here when we came back from norway--to--to welcome thelma, you know!" george laughed. "my dear boy, i shan't be wanted! just let me know how everything goes on. you--you see, i'm in duty bound to take my mother out of london in winter." "just so!" agreed lovelace, who had watched him narrowly while he spoke. "don't grudge the old lady her southern sunshine. errington! lorimer wants brushing up a bit too--he looks seedy. then i shall consider it settled--the day after to-morrow, we meet at charing cross--morning tidal express, of course,--never go by night service across the channel if you can help it." again they shook hands and parted. "best thing that young fellow can do!" thought lovelace as he returned to the club reading-room. "the sooner he gets out of this, into new scenes the better,--he's breaking his heart over the beautiful thelma. by jove! the boy's eyes looked like those of a shot animal whenever her name was mentioned. he's rather badly hit!" he sat down and began to meditate. "what can i do for him, i wonder?" he thought. "nothing, i suppose. a love of that sort can't be remedied. it's a pity--a great pity! and i don't know any woman likely to make a counter-impression on him. he'd never put up with an italian beauty"--he paused in his reflections, and the color flushed his broad, handsome brow, as the dazzling vision of a sweet, piquant face with liquid dark eyes and rippling masses of rich brown hair came flitting before him--"unless he saw angela," he murmured to himself softly,--"and he will not see her,--besides, angela loves _me_!" and after this, his meditations seemed to be particularly pleasant, to judge from the expression of his features. beau was by no means ignorant of the tender passion--he had his own little romance, as beautiful and bright as a summer day--but he had resolved that london, with its love of gossip, its scandal, and society papers,--london, that on account of his popularity as a writer, watched his movements and chronicled his doings in the most authoritative and incorrect manner,--london should have no chance of penetrating into the secret of his private life. and so far he had succeeded--and was likely still to succeed. meanwhile, as he still sat in blissful reverie, pretending to read a newspaper, though his thoughts were far away from it, errington and lorimer arrived at the midland station. britta was already there with the luggage,--she was excited and pleased--her spirits had risen at the prospect of seeing her mistress soon again,--possibly, she thought gladly, they might find her at hull,--they might not have to go to norway at all. the train came up to the platform--the tickets were taken,--and sir philip, with britta, entered--a first-class compartment, while lorimer stood outside leaning with folded arms on the carriage-window, talking cheerfully. "you'll find her all right, phil, i'm positive!" he said. "i think it's very probable she has been compelled to remain at hull,--and even at the worst, britta can guide you all over norway, if necessary. nothing will daunt _her_!" and he nodded kindly to the little maid who had regained her rosy color and the sparkle of her eyes in the eagerness she felt to rejoin her beloved "fröken." the engine-whistle gave a warning shriek--philip leaned out and pressed his friend's hand warmly. "good-bye, old fellow! i'll write to you in italy." "all right--mind you do! and i say--give my love to thelma!" philip smiled and promised. the train began to move,--slowly at first, then more quickly, till with clattering uproar and puffing clouds of white steam, it rushed forth from the station, winding through the arches like a black snake, till it had twisted itself rapidly out of sight. lorimer, left alone, looked after it wistfully, with a heavy weight of unuttered love and sorrow at his heart, and as he at last turned away, those haunting words that he had heard under the pines at the altenfjord recurred again and again to his memory--the words uttered by the distraught sigurd--and how true they were, he thought! how desperately, cruelly true! "good things may come for others--but for _you_, the heavens are empty!" chapter xxx. "honor is an old-world thing, but it smells sweet to those in whose hand it is strong."--ouida. disappointment upon disappointment awaited errington at hull. unfortunately, neither he nor britta knew of the existence of the good norwegian innkeeper, friedhof, who had assisted thelma in her flight--and all their persistent and anxious inquiries elicited no news of her. moreover, there was no boat of any kind leaving immediately for norway--not even a whaler or fishing-smack. in a week's time,--possibly later,--there would be a steamer starting for christiansund, and for this, errington, though almost mad with impatience, was forced to wait. and in the meantime, he roamed about the streets of hull, looking eagerly at every fair-haired woman who passed him, and always hoping that thelma herself would suddenly meet him face to face, and put her hands in his. he wrote to neville and told him to send on any letters that might arrive for him, and by every post he waited anxiously for one from thelma but none came. to relieve his mind a little, he scribbled a long letter to her, explaining everything, telling her how ardently he loved and worshipped her--how he was on his way to join her at the altenfjord,--and ending by the most passionate vows of unchanging love and fidelity. he was somewhat soothed when he had done this--though he did not realize the fact that in all probability he himself might arrive before the letter. the slow, miserable days went on--the week was completed--the steamer for christiansund started at last,--and, after a terribly stormy passage, he and the faithful britta were landed there. on arrival, he learned that a vessel bound for the north cape had left on the previous day--there would not be another for a fortnight. cursing his ill-luck, he resolved to reach the altenfjord by land, and began to make arrangements accordingly. those who knew the country well endeavored to dissuade him from this desperate project--the further north, the greater danger, they told him,--moreover, the weather was, even for norway, exceptionally trying. snow lay heavily over all the country he would have to traverse--the only means of conveyance was by carriole or _pulkha_--the latter a sort of sledge used by the laplanders, made in the form of a boat, and generally drawn by reindeer. the capabilities of the carriole would be exhausted as soon as the snow-covered regions were reached--and to manage a _pulkha_ successfully, required special skill of no ordinary kind. but the courageous little britta made short work of all these difficulties--she could drive a _pulkha_,--she knew how to manage reindeer,--she entertained not the slightest doubt of being able to overcome all the obstacles on the way. at the same time, she frankly told sir philip that the journey would be a long one, perhaps occupying several days--that they would have to rest at different farms or stations on the road, and put up with hard fare--that the cold would be intense,--that often they would find it difficult to get relays of the required reindeer,--and that it might perhaps be wiser to wait for the next boat going to the north cape. but errington would hear of no more delays--each hour that passed filled him with fresh anxieties--and once in norway he could not rest. the idea that thelma might be ill--dying--or dead--gained on him with redoubled force,--and his fears easily communicating themselves to britta, who was to the full as impatient as he, the two made up their minds, and providing every necessary for the journey they could think of, they started for the far sunless north, through a white, frozen land, which grew whiter and more silent the further they went,--even as the brooding sky above them grew darker and darker. the aurora borealis flashed its brilliant shafts of color against the sable breast of heaven,--the tall pines, stripped bare, every branch thick with snow and dropping icicles, stood,--pale ghosts of the forest,--shedding frozen tears--the moon, more like steel than silver, shone frostily cold, her light seeming to deepen rather than soften the dreariness of the land--and on--on--on--they went, britta enveloped to the chin in furs, steadily driving the strange elfin-looking steeds with their horned heads casting long distorted shadows on the white ground,--and philip beside her, urging her on with feverish impatience, while he listened to the smooth trot of the reindeer,--the tinkle of the bells on their harness, and the hiss of the sledge across the sparkling snow. meanwhile, as he thus pursued his long and difficult journey, rumor was very busy with his name in london. everybody--that is, everybody worth consideration in the circle of the "upper ten"--was talking about him,--shrugging their shoulders, lifting their eyebrows and smiling knowingly, whenever he was mentioned. he became more known in one day than if he had served his country's interests in parliament for years. on the very morning after he had left the metropolis en route for norway, that admirably conducted society journal, the _snake_, appeared,--and of course, had its usual amount of eager purchasers, anxious to see the latest bit of aristocratic scandal. often these good folks were severely disappointed--the _snake_ was sometimes so frightfully dull, that it had actually nothing to say against anybody--then, naturally, it was not worth buying. but this time it was really interesting--it knocked down--or tried to knock down--at one blow, a formerly spotless reputation--and "really--really!" said the upper ten, "it was dreadful, but of course it was to be expected! those quiet, seemingly virtuous persons are always the worst when you come to know them, yet who would have thought it!" and society read the assailing paragraph, and rolled it in its rank mouth, like a bon-bon, enjoying its flavor. it ran as follows:-- "we hear on excellent authority that the norwegian 'beauty,' lady bruce-errington, wife of sir philip bruce-errington, is about to sue for a divorce on the ground of infidelity. the offending dama in the question is an admired actress, well-known to the frequenters of the brilliant theatre. but there are always two sides to these affairs, and it is rumored that the fair norwegian (who before her marriage, we understand, was a great adept in the art of milking reindeer on the shores of her native fjord) has private reasons of her own for desiring the divorce, not altogether in keeping with her stated reasons or her apparent reserve. we are, however, always on the side of the fair sex, and, as the faithless husband has made no secret of his new liaison, we do not hesitate to at once pronounce in the lady's favor. the case is likely to prove interesting to believers in wedded happiness, combined with the strictest moral and religious sentiments." quite by accident this piece of would-be "smartness" was seen by beau lovelace. he had a wholesome contempt for the _snake_--and all its class,--he would never have looked at it, or known of the paragraph, had not a friend of his at the garrick pointed it out to him with half a smile and half a sneer. "it's a damned lie!" said beau briefly. "that remains to be proved!" answered his friend, and went away laughing. beau read it over and over again, his blood firing with honest indignation. thelma! thelma--that pure white lily of womanhood,--was she to have her stainless life blurred by the trail of such a thing as the _snake_?--and was errington's honor to be attainted in his absence, and he condemned without a word uttered in his defence? "detestable blackguard!" muttered lovelace, reverting in his mind to the editor of the journal in question. "what's his name i wonder?" he searched and found it at the top of a column--"sole editor and proprietor, c. snawley-grubbs, to whom all checks and post-office orders should be made payable. the editor cannot be responsible for the return of rejected mss." beau noted the name, and wrote the address of the office in his pocket-book, smiling curiously to himself the while. "i'm almost glad errington's out of the way," he said half aloud. "he shan't see this thing if i can help it, though i dare say some particularly affectionate friend will send it to him, carefully marked. at any rate, he needn't know it just yet--and as for lorimer--shall i tell him! no, i won't. i'll have the game all to myself--and--by jove! how i _shall_ enjoy it!" an hour later he stood in the office of the _snake_, courteously inquiring for mr. snawley-grubbs. apparently he had come on horseback, for he held a riding-whip in his hand,--the very whip errington had left with him the previous day. the inky, dirty, towzle-headed boy who presided in solitary grandeur over the _snake's_ dingy premises, stared at him inquiringly,--visitors of his distinguished appearance and manner being rather uncommon. those who usually had business with the great grubbs were of a different type altogether,--some of them discarded valets or footmen, who came to gain half a crown or five shillings by offering information as to the doings of their late masters and mistresses,--shabby "supers" from the theatres, who had secured the last bit of scandal concerning some celebrated stage or professional "beauty"--sporting men and turf gamblers of the lowest class,-- unsuccessful dramatists and small verse writers--these, with now and then a few "ladies"--ladies of the bar-room, ballet, and demi-monde, were the sort, of persons who daily sought private converse with grubbs--and beau lovelace, with his massive head, fine muscular figure, keen eyes, and self-assertive mien, was quite a novel specimen of manhood for the wondering observation of the office-boy, who scrambled off his high chair with haste and something of respect as he said-- "what name, sir, please?" "beaufort lovelace," said the gentleman, with a bland smile. "here is my card. ask mr. grubbs whether he can see me for a few minutes. if he is engaged--editors generally are engaged--tell him i'll wait." the boy went off in a greater hurry than ever. the name of lovelace was quite familiar to him--he knew him, not as a distinguished novelist, but as "'im who makes such a precious lot of money." and he was breathless with excitement; when he reached the small editorial chamber at the top of a dark, narrow flight of stairs, wherein sat the autocratic snawley, smiling suavely over a heap of letters and disordered mss. he glanced at the card which his ink-smeared attendant presented him. "ah, indeed!" he said condescendingly. "lovelace--lovelace? oh yes--i suppose it must be the novelist of that name--yes!--show him up." shown up he was accordingly. he entered the room with a firm tread, and closed the door behind him! "how do you do, my dear sir!" exclaimed grubbs warmly. "you are well known to me by reputation! i am charmed--delighted to make the personal acquaintance of one who is--yes--let me say, who is a brother in literature! sit down, i beg of you!" and he waved his hand towards a chair, thereby displaying the great rings that glittered on his podgy fingers. beau, however, did not seat himself--he only smiled very coldly and contemptuously. "we can discuss the fraternal nature of our relationship afterwards," he said satirically, "business first. pray, sir,"--here he drew from his pocket the last number of the _snake_--"are you the writer of this paragraph?" he pointed to it, as he flattened the journal and laid it in front of the editor on the desk. mr. snawley-grubbs glanced at it and smiled unconcernedly. "no i am not. but i happen to know it is perfectly correct. i received the information on the highest--the very highest and most credible authority." "indeed!" and beau's lip curled haughtily, while his hand clenched the riding-whip more firmly. "then allow me to tell you, sir, that it is utterly false in every particular--moreover--that it is a gross libel,--published with deliberate intent to injure those whom it presumes to mention,--and that, whoever wrote it,--you, sir, you alone are responsible for a most mischievous, scandalous, and damnable lie!" mr. grubbs was in no wise disconcerted. honest indignation honestly expressed, always amused him--he was amused now. "you're unduly excited, mr. lovelace," he said with a little laugh. "permit me to remark that your language is rather extraordinary--quite too strong under the circumstances! however, you're a privileged person--genius is always a little mad, or shall we say,--eccentric?--i suppose you are a friend of sir philip errington, and you naturally feel hurt--yes--yes, i quite understand! but the scourge of the press--the wholesome, purifying scourge, cannot be withheld out of consideration for private or personal feelings. no--no! there's a higher duty--the duty we owe to the public!" "i tell you again," repeated lovelace firmly--"the whole thing is a lie. will you apologize?" mr. grubbs threw himself back in his chair and laughed aloud. "apologize? my dear sir, you must be dreaming! apologize? certainly not! i cannot retract the statements i have made--and i firmly believe them to be true. and though there is a saying, 'the greater the truth the greater the libel,' i'm ready, sir, and, always have been ready, to sacrifice myself to the cause of truth. truth, truth for ever! tell the truth and shame the devil! you are at liberty to inform sir philip errington from me, that as it is my object--a laudable and praiseworthy one, too, i think--to show up the awful immorality now reigning in our upper classes, i do not regret in the least the insertion of the paragraph in question. if it only makes him ashamed of his vices, i shall have done a good deed, and served the interests of society at large. at the same time, if he wishes to bring an action for libel--" "you dog!" exclaimed lovelace fiercely, approaching him with such a sudden rapid stride that the astonished editor sprang up and barricaded himself behind his own chair. "you hope for that, do you? an action for libel! nothing would please you better! to bring your scandalous printed trash into notoriety,--to hear your name shouted by dirty hawkers and newsboys--to be sentenced as a first-class misdemenent; ah, no such luck for you! i know the tricks of your vile trade! there are other ways of dealing with a vulgar bully and coward!" and before the startled grubbs could realize his position, lovelace closed with him, beat him under, and struck the horsewhip smartly cross his back and shoulders. he uttered a yell of pain and fury, and strove vigorously to defend himself, but, owing to his obesity, his muscles were weak and flabby, and he was powerless against the activity and strength of his opponent. lash after lash descended regularly and mercilessly--his cries, which gradually became like the roarings of a bull of basban, were unheard, as the office-boy below, profiting by a few idle moments, had run across the street to buy some chestnuts at a stall he particularly patronized. beau thrashed on with increasing enjoyment--grubbs resisted him less and less, till finally he slipped feebly down on the floor and grovelled there, gasping and groaning. beau gave him one or two more artistic cuts, and stood above him, with the serene, triumphant smile of a successful athlete. suddenly a loud peal of laughter echoed from the doorway,--a woman stood there, richly dressed in silk and fur, with diamonds sparkling in her ears and diamonds clasping the long boa at her throat. it was violet vere. "why, snawley!" she cried with cheerful familiarity. "how are you? all broken, and no one to pick up the pieces! serve you right! got it at last, eh? don't get up! you look so comfortable!" "bodily assault," gasped grubbs. "i'll summons--call the police--call," his voice died away in inarticulate gurglings, and raising himself, he sat up on the floor in a sufficiently abject and ludicrous posture, wiping the tears of pain from his eyes. beau looked at the female intruder and recognized her at once. he saluted her with cold courtesy, and turned again to grubbs. "_will_ you apologize?" "no--i--i _won't_!" beau made another threatening movement--miss vere interposed. "stop a bit," she said, regarding him with her insolent eyes, in which lurked, however, an approving smile. "i don't know who you are, but you seem a fighting man! don't go at him again till i've had a word. i say, grubbs! you've been hitting at me in your trashy paper." grubbs still sat on the floor groaning. "you must eat those words," went on the vere calmly. "eat 'em up with sauce for dinner. the 'admired actress well known at the brilliant,' has nothing to do with the bruce-errington man,--not she! he's a duffer, a regular stiff one--no go about him anyhow. and what the deuce do you mean by calling me an offending dama. keep your oaths to yourself, will you?" beau lovelace was amused. grubbs turned his watering eye from one to the other in wretched perplexity. he made an effort to stand up and succeeded. "i'll have you arrested, sir!" he exclaimed shaking his fists at beau, and quivering with passion, "on a charge of bodily assault--shameful bodily assault, sir!" "all right!" returned beau coolly. "if i were fined a hundred pounds for it, i should think it cheap for the luxury of thrashing such a hound!" grubbs quaked at the determined attitude and threatening eye of his assailant, and turned for relief to miss vere whose smile, however, was not sympathetic. "you'd better cave in!" she remarked airily. "you've got the worst of it, you know!" she had long been on confidential terms with the _snake_ proprietor, and she spoke to him now with the candor of an old friend. "dear me, what do you expect of me!" he almost whimpered. "i'm not to blame! the paragraph was inserted without my knowledge by my sub-editor--he's away just now, and--there! why?" he cried with sudden defiance, "why don't you ask sir francis lennox about it? he wrote the whole thing." "well, he's dead," said miss vere with the utmost coolness. "so it wouldn't be much use asking _him_. he can't answer,--you'll have to answer for him." "i don't believe it!" exclaimed mr. grubbs. "he can't be dead!" "oh, yes, he can, and he _is_," retorted violet. "and a good job too! he was knocked over by a train at charing cross. you'll see it in to-day's paper, if you take the trouble to look. and mind you contradict all that stuff about me in your next number--do you hear? i'm going to america with a duke next month, and i can't afford to have my reputation injured. and i won't be called a 'dama' for any penny-a-liner living." she paused, and again broke out laughing, "poor old snawley! you do look so sore! ta-ta!" and she moved towards the door. lovelace, always courteous, opened it for her. she raised her hard, bright eyes, and smiled. "thanks! hope i shall see you again some day!" "you are very good!" responded beau gravely. either his tone, which was one chill indifference, or some thing in his look, irritated her suddenly--for a rash of hot color crimsoned her face, and she bit her lips vexedly as she descended the office-stairs. "he's one of your high-and-mighty sort," she thought disdainfully, as she entered her cosy brougham and was driven away. "quite too awfully moral!" she pulled a large, elaborately cut glass scent-bottle out of the pocket of her cloak, and, unscrewing the gold top, applied it, not to her nose but her mouth. it contained neat cognac--and she drank a goodly gulp of it with evident relish, swallowing a scented bon-bon immediately afterwards to take away the suspicious odor. "yes--quite too awfully moral!" she repeated with a grin. "not in my line at all! lord! it's lucky there are not many such fellows about, or what would become of _me_? a precious poor business i should make of it!" meanwhile, lovelace, left alone again with mr. grubbs, reiterated his demand for an apology. grubbs made a rush for the door, as soon as miss vere had gone, with the full intention of summoning the police, but beau coolly placed his back against it with resolute firmness, and flourished his whip defiantly. "come, sir, none of this nonsense!" he said sternly. "i don't mean to leave this spot till i have satisfaction. if sir francis lennox wrote that scandalous paragraph the greater rascal he,--and the more shame to you for inserting it.--you, who make it your business to know all the dirty alleys and dark corners of life, must have known _his_ character pretty thoroughly. there's not the slightest excuse for you. will you apologize?--and retract every word of that paragraph, in your next issue?" grubbs, breathless with rage and fear, glared at him, but made no answer. "if you refuse to comply," went on beau deliberately, balancing the horsewhip lightly on his hand, "i'll just tell you what the consequences will be. i've thrashed you once--and i'll thrash you again. i have only to give the cue to several worthy fellows of my acquaintance, who don't care how much they pay for their fun, and each of them in turn will thrash you. as for an action for libel, don't expect it--but i swear there shan't be a safe corner in london for you. if, however, you publish next week a full retraction of your printed lie--why, then i--shall be only too happy to forget that such an individual as yourself burdens this planet. there are the two alternatives--choose!" grubbs hesitated, but coward fear made him quail the prospect of unlimited thrashings. "very well," he said sullenly. "write what you want put in--i'll attend to it--i don't mind obliging miss vere. but all the same, i'll have _you_ arrested!" beau laughed. "do so by all means!" he said gaily. "i'll leave my address with you!" he wrote rapidly a few lines on a piece of paper to the following effect-- "we have to entirely contradict a statement we made last week respecting a supposed forthcoming divorce case in which sir philip bruce-errington was seriously implicated. there was no truth whatever in the statement, and we herewith apologize most humbly and heartily for having inadvertently given credence to a rumor which is now proved to be utterly false and without the slightest shadow of a foundation." he handed this to grubbs. "insert that word for word, at the head of your paragraphs," he said, "and you'll hear no more of me, unless you give me fresh provocation. and i advise you to think twice before you have me arrested--for i'll defend my own case, and--ruin you! i'm rather a dangerous customer to have much to do with! however, you've got my card--you know where to find me if you want me. only you'd better send after me to-night if you do--to-morrow i may be absent." he smiled, and drew on his gloves leisurely, eyeing meanwhile the discomfited editor, who was furtively rubbing his shoulder where the lash had stung it somewhat severely. "i'm exceedingly glad i've hurt you, mr. grubbs," he said blandly. "and the next time you want to call me your brother in literature, pray reflect on the manner in which my fraternal affection displayed itself! _good_ morning!" and he took his departure with a quiet step and serene manner, leaving snawley-grubbs to his own meditations, which were far from agreeable. he was not ignorant of the influence beau lovelace possessed, both on the press and in society--he was a general favorite,--a man whose opinions were quoted, and whose authority was accepted everywhere. if he appeared to answer a charge of assault against grubbs, and defended his own case, he certainly would have the best of it. he might--he would have to pay a fine, but what did he care for that? he would hold up the _snake_ and its proprietor to the utmost ridicule and opprobrium--his brilliant satire and humor would carry all before it--and he, snawley-grubbs, would be still more utterly routed and humiliated. weighing all these considerations carefully in his mind, the shrinking editor decided to sit down under his horsewhipping in silence and resignation. it was not a very lofty mode of action--still, it was the safest. of course violet vere would spread the story all through _her_ particular "set"--it made him furious to think of this yet there was no help for it. he would play the martyr, he thought--the martyr to the cause of truth,--the injured innocent entrapped by false information--he might possibly gain new supporters and sympathizers in this way if he played his cards carefully. he turned to the daily paper, and saw there chronicled the death of sir francis lennox. it was true, then. well! he was not at all affected by it--he merely committed the dead man in the briefest and strongest language to the very lowest of those low and sulphurous regions over which satan is supposed to have full sway. not a soul regretted sir francis--not even the vere, whom he had kept and surrounded with every luxury for five years. only one person, a fair, weary faced woman away in germany shed a few tears over the lawyer's black-bordered letter that announced his death to her--and this was the deserted wife,--who had once loved him. lady winsleigh had heard the news,--she shuddered and turned very pale when her husband gently and almost pityingly told her of the sudden and unprepared end that had overtaken her quondam admirer--but she said nothing. she was presiding at the breakfast-table for the first time in many years--she looked somewhat sad and listless, yet lovelier so than in all the usual pride and assertive arrogance of her beauty. lord winsleigh read aloud the brief account of the accident in the paper--she listened dreamily, still mute. he watched her with yearning eyes. "an awful death for such a man, clara!" he said at last in a low tone. she dared not look up--she was trembling nervously. how dreadful it was, she thought, to be thankful that a man was dead!--to feel a relief at his being no longer in this world! presently her husband spoke again more reservedly. "no doubt you are greatly shocked and grieved," he said. "i should not have told you so suddenly--pardon me!" "i am not grieved," she murmured unsteadily. "it sounds horrible to say so--but i--i am afraid i am _glad_!" "clara!" she rose and came tremblingly towards him. she knelt at his feet, though he strove to prevent her,--she raised her large, dark eyes, full of dull agony, to his. "i've been a wicked woman, harry," she said, with a strange, imploring thrill of passion in her voice, "i am down--down in the dust before you! look at me--don't forgive me--i won't ask that--you _can't_ forgive me,--but _pity_ me!" he took her hands and laid them round his neck,--he drew her gently, soothingly,--closer, closer, till he pressed her to his heart. "down in the dust are you?" he whispered brokenly. "my poor wife! god forbid that i should keep you there!" book iii. the land of the long shadow chapter xxxi. "they have the night, who had, like us, the day-- we, whom day binds, shall have the night as they-- we, from the fetters of the light unbound, healed of our wound of living, shall sleep sound!" swinburne. night on the altenfjord,--the long, long, changeless night of winter. the sharp snow-covered crests of the mountains rose in white appeal against the darkness of the sky,--the wild north wind tore through the leafless branches of the pine-forests, bringing with it driving pellets of stinging hail. joyless and songless, the whole landscape lay as though frozen into sculptured stone. the sun slept,--and the fjord, black with brooding shadows, seemed silently to ask--where? where was the great king of light?--the glorious god of the golden hair and ruddy countenance?--the glittering warrior with the flaming shield and spear invincible? where had he found his rest? by what strange enchantment had he fallen into so deep and long a drowsiness. the wind that had rioted across the mountains, rooting up great trees in its shrieking career northwards, grew hushed as it approached the altenfjord--there a weird stillness reigned, broken only by the sullen and monotonous plash of the invisible waves upon the scarcely visible shore. a few tiny, twinkling lights showed the irregular outline of bosekop, and now and then one or two fishing-boats with sable sails and small colored lamps at mast and prow would flit across the inky water like dark messengers from another world bound on some mournful errand. human figures, more shadowy than real, were to be seen occasionally moving on the pier, and to the left of the little town, as the eye grew accustomed to the moveless gloom, a group of persons, like ghosts in a dream, could be dimly perceived, working busily at the mending of nets. suddenly a strange, unearthly glow flashed over the sombre scene,--a rosy radiance deepening to brilliant streaks of fire. the dark heavens were torn asunder, and through them streamed flaring pennons of light,--waving, trembling, dancing, luminous ribbons of red, blue, green, and a delicious amber, like the flowing of golden wine,--wider, higher, more dazzlingly lustrous, the wondrous glory shone aloft, rising upward from the horizon--thrusting long spears of lambent flame among the murky retreating clouds, till in one magnificent coruscation of resplendent beams a blazing arch of gold leaped from east to west, spanning the visible breath of the fjord, and casting towards the white peaks above, vivid sparkles and reflections of jewel-like brightness and color. here was surely the rainbow bridge of odin--the glittering pathway leading to valhalla! long filmy threads of emerald and azure trailed downwards from it, like ropes of fairy flowers, binding it to the earth--above it hung a fleece-like nebulous whiteness,--a canopy through which palpitated sudden flashes of amethyst. then, as though the arch were a bent bow for the hand of some heavenly hunter, crimson beams darted across it in swift succession, like arrows shot at the dark target of the world. round and round swept the varying circles of color--now advancing--now retreating--now turning the sullen waters beneath into a quivering mass of steely green--now beating against the snow-covered hills till they seemed pinnacles of heaped-up pearls and diamonds. the whole landscape was transformed,--and the shadowy cluster of men and women on the shore paused in their toil, and turned their pale faces towards the rippling splendor,--the heavy fishing-nets drooping from their hands like dark webs woven by giant spiders. "'tis the first time we have seen the arch of death this year," said one in awed accents. "ay, ay!" returned another, with a sigh. "and some one is bound to cross it, whether he will or no. 'tis a sure sign!" "sure!" they all agreed, in hushed voices as faint and far-off as the breaking of the tide against the rocks on the opposite coast. as they spoke, the fairy-like bridge in the sky parted asunder and vanished! the brilliant aurora borealis faded by swift degrees--a few moments, and the land was again enveloped in gloom. it might have been midnight--yet by the clock it was but four in the afternoon. dreary indeed was the altenfjord,--yet the neighboring village of talvag was even drearier. there, desolation reigned supreme--it was a frozen region of bitter, shelterless cold, where the poverty-stricken inhabitants, smitten by the physical torpor and mental stupefaction engendered by the long, dark season, scarcely stirred out of their miserable homes, save to gather extra fuel. this is a time in norway, when beyond the arctic circle, the old gods yet have sway--when in spite of their persistent, sometimes fanatical, adherence to the strictest forms of christianity, the people almost unconsciously revert to the superstitions of their ancestors. gathering round the blazing pine-logs, they recount to one another in low voices the ancient legends of dead and gone heroes,--and listening to the yell of the storm-wind round their huts, they still fancy they hear the wild war-cries of the valkyries rushing past air full gallop on their coal-black steeds, with their long hair floating behind them. on this particular afternoon the appearance of the "death-arch," as they called that special form of the aurora, had impressed the talvig folk greatly. some of them were at the doors, and, regardless of the piercing cold, occupied themselves in staring languidly at a reindeer sledge which stood outside one of the more distant huts, evidently waiting for some person within. the hoofs of the animals made no impression on the hardened snow--now and again they gently shook the tinkling bells on their harness, but otherwise were very patient. the sledge was in charge of a youthful laplander--a hideous, stunted specimen of humanity, who appeared to be literally sewed up from head to foot in skins. this cortege was evidently an object of curiosity,--the on-lookers eyed it askance, and with a sort of fear. for did it not belong to the terrible _bonde_, olaf güldmar?--and would not the laplander,--a useful boy, well known in talvig,--come to some fatal harm by watching, even for a few minutes, the property of an acknowledged pagan? who could tell? the very reindeer might be possessed by evil spirits,--they were certainly much sleeker and finer than the ordinary run of such animals. there was something uncanny in the very look of them! thus the stupefied, unreasoning talvig folk muttered, one to another, leaning drowsily out of their half-open doors. "'tis a strange thing," said one man, "that woman as strong in the fear of the lord as lovisa elsland should call for one of the wicked to visit her on her death-bed." "strange enough!" answered his neighbor, blinking over his pipe, and knocking down some of the icicles pendent from his roof. "but maybe it is to curse him with the undying curse of the godly." "she's done that all her life," said the first speaker. "that's true! she's been a faithful servant of the gospel. all's right with her in the next world--she'll die easily." "was it for her the death-arch shone?" asked an old woman, suddenly thrusting her head, wrapped in a red woollen hood, out of a low doorway, through which the light of a fire sparkled from the background, sending vivid flashes across the snow. the man who had spoken last shook his head solemnly. "the death-arch never shone for a christian yet," he said gravely. "no! there's something else in the wind. we can't see it--but it will come--it must come! that sign never fails." and presently, tired of watching the waiting sledge and the passive laplander, he retreated within his house, shutting his door against the darkness and the bitter wind. his neighbors followed his example,--and, save for two or three red glimmers of light here and there, the little village looked as though it had been deserted long ago--a picture of frost-bound silence and solitude. meanwhile, in lovisa elsland's close and comfortless dwelling, stood olaf güldmar. his strong, stately figure, wrapped in furs, seemed almost to fill the little place--he had thrown aside the thick scarf of wadmel in which he had been wrapped to the eyes while driving in the teeth of the wind,--and he now lifted his fur cap, thus displaying his silvery hair, ruddy features, and open, massive brow. at that moment a woman who was busying herself in putting fresh pine-logs on the smouldering fire, turned and regarded him intently. "lord, lord!" she muttered--"'tis a man of men,--he rejoiceth in his strength, even as the lion,--and of what avail shall the curse of the wicked avail against the soul that is firmly established!" güldmar heard her not--he was looking towards a low pallet bed, on which lay, extended at full length, an apparently insensible form. "has she been long thus?" he asked, in a low voice. "since last night," replied the woman--no other than mr. dyceworthy's former servant, ulrika. "she wakened suddenly, and bade me send for you. to-day she has not spoken." the _bonde_ sighed somewhat impatiently. he approached the now blazing pine-logs, and as he drew off his thick fur driving-gloves, and warmed his hands at the cheerful blaze, ulrika again fixed her dull eyes upon him with something of wonder and reluctant admiration. presently she trimmed an oil-lamp, and set it, burning dimly, on the table. then she went to the bed and bent over it,--after a pause of several minutes, she turned and made a beckoning sign with her finger. güldmar advanced a little,--when a sudden eldritch shriek startled him back, almost curdling the blood in his veins. out of the deep obscurity, like some gaunt spectre rising from the tomb, started a face, wrinkled, cadaverous, and distorted by suffering,--a face in which the fierce, fevered eyes glittered with a strange and dreadful brilliancy--the face of lovisa elsland, stern, forbidding, and already dark with the shadows of approaching death. she stared vacantly at güldmar, whose picturesque head was illumined by the ruddy glow of the fire--and feebly shaded her eyes as though she saw something that hurt them. ulrika raised her on her tumbled pillow, and saying, in cold, unmoved tones--"speak now, for the time is short," she once more beckoned the _bonde_ imperatively. he approached slowly. "lovisa elsland," he began in distinct tones, addressing himself to that ghastly countenance still partly shaded by one hand. "i am here--olaf güldmar. dost thou know me?" at the sound of his voice, a strange spasm contorted the withered features of the dying woman. she bent her head as though to listen to some far-off echo, and held up her skinny finger as though enjoining silence. "know thee!" she babbled whisperingly. "how should i not know the brown-haired olaf! olaf of the merry eye--olaf, the pride of the norse maiden?" she lifted herself in a more erect attitude, and stretching out her lean arms, went on as though chanting a monotonous recitative. "olaf, the wanderer over wild seas,--he comes and goes in his ship that sails like a white bird on the sparkling waters--long and silent are the days of his absence--mournful are the fjelds and fjords without the smile of olaf--olaf the king!" she paused, and güldmar regarded her in pitying wonder. her face changed to a new expression--one of wrath and fear. "stay, stay!" she cried in penetrating accents. "who comes from the south with olaf? the clouds drive fast before the wind--clouds rest on the edge of the dark fjord--sails red as blood flash against the sky--who comes with olaf? fair hair ripples against his breast like streaming sunbeams; eyes blue as the glitter of the northern lights, are looking upon him--lips crimson and heavy with kisses for olaf--ah!" she broke off with a cry, and beat the air with her hands as though to keep some threatening thing away from her. "back, back! dead bride of olaf, torment me no more--back, i say! see,"--and she pointed into the darkness before her--"the pale, pale face--the long glittering hair twisted like a snake of gold,--she glides along the path across the mountains,--the child follows!--the child! why not kill the child as well--why not?" she stopped suddenly with a wild laugh. the _bonde_ had listened to her ravings with something of horror, his ruddy cheeks growing paler. "by the gods, this is strange!" he muttered. "she seems to speak of my wife,--yet what can she know of her?" for some moments there was silence. lovisa seemed to have exhausted her strength. presently, however, she put aside her straggling white hairs from her forehead, and demanded fiercely-- "where is my grandchild? where is britta?" neither güldmar nor ulrika made any reply. but britta's name recalled the old woman to herself, and when she spoke again it was quite collectedly, and in her usual harsh voice. she seemed to forget all that she had just uttered, for she turned her eyes upon the _bonde_, as though she had but then perceived him. "so you are come, olaf güldmar!" she said. "it is well--for the hand of death is upon me." "it is well, indeed, if i can be of service, lovisa elsland," responded güldmar, "though i am but a sorry consoler, holding as i do, that death is the chief blessing, and in no way to be regretted at any time. moreover, when the body grows too weak to support the soul, 'tis as well to escape from it with what speed we may." "escape--escape? where?" asked lovisa. "from the worm that dieth not? from the devouring fame that is never quenched? from the torturing thirst and heat and darkness of hell, who shall escape?" "nay, if that is all the comfort thy creed can give thee," said the _bonde_, with a half-smile, "'tis but a poor staff to lean on!" lovisa looked at him mockingly. "and is thine so strong a prop to thy pride?" she asked disdainfully. "has odin so endowed thee that thou shouldst boast of him? listen to me, olaf güldmar--i have but little strength remaining, and i must speak briefly. thy wife--" "what of her?" said the _bonde_ hastily. "thou knewst her not." "i knew her," said lovisa steadily, "as the lightning knows the tree it withers--as the sea knows the frail boat it wrecks for sport on a windy day. thou haughty olaf! i knew her well even as the broken heart knows its destroyer!" güldmar looked perplexedly at ulrika. "surely she raves again?" he said. ulrika was silent. "rave? tell him i do not rave!" cried lovisa rising in her bed to utter her words with more strength and emphasis. "may be i have raved, but that is past! the lord, who will judge and condemn my soul, bear witness that i speak the truth! olaf güldmar, rememberest thou the days when we were young?" "'tis long ago, lovisa!" replied the _bonde_ with brief gentleness. "long ago? it seems but yesterday! but yesterday i saw the world all radiant with hope and joy and love--love that to you was a mere pastime--but with _me_--" she shuddered and seemed to lose herself in a maze of dreary recollections. "love!" she presently muttered--"'love is strong as death,--jealousy is cruel as the grave--the coals thereof are coals of fire which hath a most vehement flame!' even so! you, olaf güldmar, have forgotten what i remember,--that once in that yesterday of youth, you called me fair,--once your lips branded mine! could i forget that kiss? think you a norse woman, bred in a shadow of the constant mountains, forgets the first thrill of passion waked in her soul? light women of those lands where the sun ever shines on fresh follies, may count their loves by the score,--but with us of the north, _one_ love suffices to fill a lifetime. and was not my life filled? filled to overflowing with bitterness and misery! for i loved you, proud olaf!--i loved you--" the _bonde_ uttered an exclamation of incredulous astonishment. lovisa fixed her eyes on him with a dark scorn. "yes, i loved you,--scoffer and unbeliever as you were and are!--accursed of god and man! i loved you in spite of all that was said against you--nay, i would have forsaken my creed for yours, and condemned my soul to the everlasting burning for your sake! i loved you as _she_--that pale, fair, witch-like thing you wedded, could never love--" her voice died away in a sort of despairing wail, and she paused. "by my soul!" said the _bonde_, astounded, and stroking his white beard in some embarrassment. "i never knew of this! it is true that in the hot days of youth, mischief is often done unwittingly. but why trouble yourself with these memories, lovisa? if it be any comfort,--believe me, i am sorry harm ever came to you through my thoughtless jesting--" "it matters not!" and lovisa regarded him with a strange and awful smile. "i have had my revenge!" she stopped abruptly,--then went on--"'twas a fair bride you chose, olaf güldmar--child of an alien from these shores,--thelma, with the treacherous laughter and light of the south in her eyes and smile! and i, who had known love, made friends with hate--" she checked herself, and looked full at the _bonde_ with a fiendish joy sparkling in her eyes. "she whom you wedded--she whom you loved so well,--how soon she died!" there was something so suggestive and dreadful in the expression of her face as she said this, that the stout heart of the old _bonde_, pulsated more quickly with a sudden vague distrust and dread. she gave him no time to speak, but laying one yellow, claw-like hand on his arm, and raising her voice to a sort of yell, exclaimed triumphantly-- "yes, yes! how soon she died! bravely, bravely done! and no one ever guessed the truth--no one ever knew i _killed_ her!" güldmar uttered a sharp cry, and shook himself free from her touch. in the same instant his hand flew to the hilt of the hunting-knife in his girdle. "_killed_ her! by the gods--" ulrika sprang before him. "shame!" she cried sternly. "she is dying!" "too slowly for me!" exclaimed the _bonde_ furiously. "peace--peace!" implored ulrika. "let her speak!" "strike, olaf güldmar!" said lovisa, in a deep voice, harsh, but all untremulous--"strike, pagan, with whom the law of blood is supreme--strike to the very center of my heart--i do not fear you! i killed her, i say--and therein i, the servant of the lord, was justified! think you that the most high hath not commanded his elect to utterly destroy and trample underfoot their enemies?--and is not vengeance mine as well as thine, accursed slave of odin?" a spasm of pain here interrupted her--she struggled violently for breath--and ulrika supported her. güldmar stood motionless, white with restrained fury, his eyes blazing. recovering by slow degrees, lovisa once more spoke--her voice was weaker, and sounded a long way off. "yea, the lord hath been on my side!" she said, and the hideous blasphemy rattled in her throat as it was uttered. "listen--and hear how he delivered mine enemy into my hands. i watched her always--i followed her many and many a time, though she never saw me. i knew her favorite path across the mountains,--it led past a rocky chasm. on the edge of that chasm there was a broad, flat stone, and there she would sit often, reading, or watching the fishing-boats on the fjord, and listening to the prattle of her child. i used to dream of that stone, and wonder if i could loosen it! it was strongly imbedded in the earth--but each day i went to it--each day i moved it! little by little i worked--till a mere touch would have set it hurling downwards,--yet it looked as firm as ever." güldmar uttered a fierce ejaculation of anguish--he put one hand to his throat as though he were stifling. lovisa, watching him, smiled vindictively, and continued-- "when i had done all i could do, i lay in wait for her, hoping and praying--my hour came at last! it was a bright sunny morning--a little bird had been twittering above the very place--as it flew away, _she_ approached--a book was in her hand,--her child followed her at some little distance off. fortune favored me--a cluster of pansies had opened their blossoms a few inches below the stone,--she saw them,--and, light as a bird, sprang on it and reached forward to gather them--ah!"--and the wretched woman clapped her hands and broke into malignant laughter--"i can hear her quick shriek now--the crash of the stones and the crackle of branches as she fell down,--down to her death! presently the child came running,--it was too young to understand--it sat down patiently waiting for its mother. how i longed to kill it! but it sang to itself like the bird that had flown away, and i could not! but _she_ was gone--_she_ was silent for ever--the lord be praised for all his mercies! was she smiling, olaf güldmar, when you found her--_dead_?" a strange solemnity shadowed the _bonde's_ features. he turned his eyes upon her steadily. "blessing and honor be to the gods of my fathers!" he said--"i found her--_living_!" the change that came over lovisa's face at these words was inexpressibly awful--she grew livid and her lips twitched convulsively. "living--living!" she gasped. "living!" repeated güldmar sternly. "vile hag! your purpose was frustrated! your crime destroyed her beauty and shortened her days--but she lived--lived for ten sweet, bitter years, hidden away from all eyes save mine,--mine that never grew tired of looking in her patient, heavenly face! ten years i held her as one holds a jewel--and, when she died, her death was but falling asleep in these fond arms--" lovisa raised herself with a sharp cry, and wrung her hands together-- "ten years--ten years!" she moaned. "i thought her dead--and she lived on,--beloved and loving all the while. oh god, god, why hast thou made a mockery of thy servant!" she rocked herself to and fro--then looked up with an evil smile. "nay, but she _suffered_! that was best. it is worse to suffer than to die. thank god, she _suffered_!" "ay, she suffered!" said güldmar fiercely, scarce able to restrain himself from seizing upon the miserable old woman and shaking the sinking life out of her--"and had i but guessed who caused her sufferings, by the sword of odin, i would have--" ulrika laid her hand on his suddenly upraised arm. "listen!" she whispered. a low wailing, like the cry of a distressed child, swept round and round the house, followed by a gust of wind and a clattering shower of hailstones. a strange blue light leaped up from the sparkling log fire, and cast an unearthly glow through the room. a deep stillness ensued. then--steady and clear and resonant--a single sound echoed through the air, like a long note played on an exceedingly sweet silver trumpet. it began softly--swelled to a crescendo--then died delicately away. güldmar raised his head--his face was full of rapt and expectant gravity,--his action, too, was somewhat singular, for he drew the knife from his girdle and kissed the hilt solemnly, returning it immediately to its sheath. at the same moment lovisa uttered a loud cry, and flinging the coverings from her, strove to rise from her bed. ulrika held her firmly,--she struggled feebly yet determinedly, gazing the while with straining, eager, glassy eyes into the gloom of the opposite corner. "darkness--darkness!" she muttered hoarsely,--"and the white faces of dead things! there--there they lie!--all still, at the foot of the black chasm--their mouths move without sound--what--what are they saying? i cannot hear--ask them to speak louder--louder! ah!" and she uttered a terrified scream that made the rafters ring. "they move!--they stretch out their hands--cold, cold hands!--they are drawing me down to them--down--down--to that darkness! hold me--hold me! don't let me go to them--lord, lord be merciful to me--let me live--live--" suddenly she drew back in deadly horror, gesticulating with her tremulous lean hands as though it shut away the sight of some loathsome thing unveiled to her view. "who is it"--she asked in an awful, shuddering whisper--"who is it that says there is no hell? _i see it_!" still retreating backwards, backwards--the clammy dew of death darkening her affrighted countenance,--she turned her glazing eyes for the last time on güldmar. her lips twitched into a smile of dreadful mockery. "may--thy gods--reward thee--olaf güldmar--even--as mine--are--rewarding--_me_!" and with these words, her head dropped heavily on her breast. ulrika laid her back on her pillow, a corpse. the stern, cruel smile froze slowly on her dead features--gradually she became, as it were, a sort of ancient cenotaph, carved to resemble old age combined with unrepenting evil--the straggling white hair that rested on her wrinkled forehead looking merely like snow fallen on sculptured stone. "good lord, have mercy on her soul!" murmured ulrika piously, as she closed the upward staring eyes, and crossed the withered hands. "good devil, claim thine own!" said güldmar, with proudly lifted arm and quivering, disdainful lips. "thou foolish woman! thinkest thou thy lord makes place for murderers in his heaven? if so, 'tis well i am not bound there! only the just can tread the pathway to valhalla,--'tis a better creed!" ulrika looked at his superb, erect figure and lofty head, and a strangely anxious expression flitted across her dull countenance. "nay, _bonde_, we do not believe that the lord accepteth murderers, without they repent themselves of their backslidings,--but if with penitence they turn to him even at the eleventh hour, haply they may be numbered among the elect." güldmar's eyes flashed. "i know not thy creed, woman, nor care to learn it! but, all the same, thou art deceived in thy vain imaginings. the eternal justice cannot err--call that justice christ or odin as thou wilt. i tell you, the soul of the innocent bird that perishes in the drifting snow is near and dear to its creator--but the tainted soul that had yonder vile body for its tenement, was but a flame of the evil one, and accursed from the beginning,--it must return to him from whom it came. a heaven for such as she? nay--rather the lowest circle of the furthest and fiercest everlasting fires--and thither do i commend her! farewell!" rapidly muffling himself up in his wraps, he strode out of the house. he sprang into his sledge, throwing a generous gratuity to the small laplander who had taken charge of it, and who now ventured to inquire-- "has the good lovisa left us?" güldmar burst into a hard laugh. "_good_! by my soul! the folks of talvig take up murderers for saints and criminals for guides! 'tis a wild world! yes--she has gone--where all such blessed ones go--to--heaven!" he shook his clenched fist in the air--then hastily gathering up the reins, prepared to start. the lapp, after the manner of his race, was easily frightened, and cowered back, terrified at the _bonde's_ menacing gesture and fierce tone,--but quickly bethinking himself of the liberal fee he clutched in his palm, he volunteered a warning to this kingly old man with the streaming white hair and beard, and his keen eyes that were already fixed on the dark sweep of the rough, uneven road winding towards the altenfjord. "there is a storm coming, jarl güldmar!" he stammered. güldmar turned his head. "why call me jarl?" he demanded half angrily. "'tis a name i wear not." he touched the reindeer lightly with his long whip--the sensitive beast started and sprang forward. once more the lapp exclaimed, with increased excitement and uncouth gestures-- "storm is coming!--wide--dark, deep! see how the sky stoops with the hidden snow!" he pointed to the north, and there, low on the horizon, was a lurid red gleam like a smouldering fire, while just above it a greenish blackness of cloud hung heavy and motionless. towards the central part of the heaven two or three stars shone with frosty brightness, and through a few fleecy ribbons of greyish mist limmered the uncertain promise of a faint moon. güldmar smiled slightly. "storm coming?" he answered almost gaily. "that is well! storm and i are old friends, my lad! good night!" once more he touched his horned steeds, and with a jingle-jangle of musical bells and a scudding, slippery hissing across the hard snow, the sledge sped off with fairy-like rapidity, and in a few moments its one little guiding lantern disappeared in the darkness like a suddenly extinguished candle. the lapp stood pondering and gazing after it, with the _bonde's_ money in his palm, till the cold began to penetrate even his thick skin-clothing and his fat little body, well anointed with whale-oil though it was,--and becoming speedily conscious of this, he scampered with extraordinary agility, considering the dimensions of his snow-shoes, into the hut where he had his dwelling, relating to all who choose to hear, the news of old lovisa elsland's death, and the account of his brief interview with the dreaded but generous pagan. ulrika, watching by the corpse of her aged friend, was soon joined by others bent on sharing her vigil, and the house was presently filled with woman's religious wailings and prayers for the departed. to all the curious inquiries that were made concerning the cause of lovisa's desire to see the _bonde_ before she died, ulrika vouchsafed no reply,--and the villagers, who stood somewhat in awe of her as a woman of singular godliness and discreet reputation, soon refrained from asking any more questions. an ambitious young lutheran preacher came, and, addressing himself to all assembled, loudly extolled the superhuman virtues of the dead "mother of the village," as lovisa had been called,--amid the hysterical weeping and moaning of the mourners, he begged them to look upon her "venerated face" and observe "the smile of god's own peace engraven there,"--and amid all his eloquence, and the shrieking excitement of his fanatical hearers, ulrika alone was silent. she sat stern and absorbed, with set lips and lowered eyelids at the head of the bed whereon the corpse was now laid out, grimly rigid,--with bound-up jaws, and clasped fingers like stiff, dried bones. her thoughts dwelt gloomily and intently on güldmar's words--"the eternal justice cannot err." eternal justice! what sentence would eternal justice pass upon the crime of murder?--or attempt to murder? "i am guilty," the unhappy woman reflected, with a strong shudder chilling her veins, "guilty even as lovisa! i tried to kill my child--i thought, i hoped it was dead! it was not my meaning that it should live. and this eternal justice, may be, will judge the intention more than the crime. o lord, lord! save my soul! teach me how to escape from the condemning fires of thine anger!" thus she prayed and wrestled with her accusing self in secret--despair and fear raging in her heart, though not a flicker of her inward agitation betrayed itself outwardly on her stolid, expressionless features. meanwhile the wind rose to a tearing, thunderous gale, and the night, already so dark, darkened yet more visibly. olaf güldmar, driving swiftly homewards, caught the first furious gust of the storm that came rushing onward from the north cape, and as it swooped sideways against his light sledge, he was nearly hurled from his seat by the sudden violence of the shock. he settled himself more firmly, encouraging with a cheery word the startled reindeer, who stopped short,--stretching out their necks and sniffing the air, their hairy sides heaving with the strain of trotting against the blast, and the smoke of their breath steaming upwards in the frosty air like white vapor. the way lay now through a narrow defile bordered with tall pines,--and as the terrified animals, recovering, shook the tinkling bells on their harness, and once more resumed their journey, the road was comparatively sheltered, and the wind seemed to sink as suddenly as it rose. there was a hush--an almost ominous silence. the sledge glided more slowly between the even lines of upright giant trees, crowned with icicles and draped in snow,--the _bonde_ involuntarily loosened the reins of his elfin steeds, and again returned to those painful and solemn musings, from which the stinging blow of the tempest had for a moment roused him. the proud heart of the old man ached bitterly. what! all these years had passed, and he, the descendant of a hundred vikings, had been cheated of justice! he had seen his wife,--the treasured darling of his days, suffering,--dying, inch by inch, year by year, with all her radiant beauty withered,--and he had never known her destroyer! her fall from the edge of the chasm had been deemed by them both an accident, and yet--this wretched lovisa elsland--mad with misplaced, disappointed passion, jealousy, and revenge,--had lived on to the extreme of life, triumphant and unsuspected. "i swear the gods have played me false in this!" he muttered, lifting his eyes in a sort of fierce appeal to the motionless pinetops stiff with frost. the mystery of the old hag's hatred of his daughter was now made clear--she resembled her mother too closely to escape lovisa's malice. he remembered the curse she had called down upon the innocent girl,--how it was she who had untiringly spread abroad the report among the superstitious people of the place, that thelma was a witch whose presence was a blight upon the land,--how she had decoyed her into the power of mr. dyceworthy--all was plain--and, notwithstanding her deliberate wickedness, she had lived her life without punishment! this was what made güldmar's blood burn, and pulses thrill. he could not understand why the higher powers had permitted this error of justice, and, like many of his daring ancestors, he was ready to fling defiance in the very face of odin, and demand--"why,--o thou drowsy god, nodding over thy wine-cups,--why didst thou do this thing?" utter fearlessness,--bodily and spiritual,--fearlessness of past, present, or future, life or death,--was güldmar's creed. the true norse warrior spirit was in him--had he been told, on heavenly authority, that the lowest range of the "nastrond" or scandinavian hell, awaited him, he would have accepted his fate with unflinching firmness. the indestructibility of the soul, and the certainty that it must outlive even centuries of torture, and triumph gloriously in the end, was the core of the faith he professed. as he glanced upwards, the frozen tree-tops, till then rigidly erect, swayed slightly from side to side with a crackling sound--but he paid no heed to this slight warning of a fresh attack from the combative storm that was gathering together and renewing its scattered forces. he began to think of his daughter, and the grave lines on his face relaxed and softened. "'tis all fair sailing for the child," he mused. "for that i should be grateful! the world has been made a soft nest for my bird,--i should not complain,--my own time is short." his former anger calmed a little--the brooding irritation of his mind became gradually soothed. "rose of my heart!" he whispered, tenderly apostrophizing the memory of his wife,--that lost jewel of love, whose fair body lay enshrined in the king's tomb by the fjord. "wrongfully done to death as thou wert, and brief time as we had for loving;--in spite of thy differing creed, i feel that i shall meet thee soon! yes--in the world beyond the stars, they will bring thee to me in valhalla,--wheresoever thou art, thou wilt not refuse to come! the gods themselves cannot unfasten the ties of love between us!" as he half thought, half uttered, these words, the reindeer again stopped abruptly, rearing their antlered heads and panting heavily. hark! what was that? a clear, far-reaching note of music seemingly wakened from the waters of the fjord and rising upwards, upwards, with bell-like distinctness! güldmar leaned from his motionless sledge and listened in awe--it was the same sound he had before heard as he stood by lovisa elsland's death-bed--and was in truth nothing but a strong current of wind blowing through the arched and honeycombed rocks by the sea, towards the higher land,--creating the same effect as though one should breathe forcibly through a pipe-like instrument of dried and hollow reeds,--and being rendered more resonant by the intense cold, it bore a striking similarity to the full blast of a war-trumpet. for the worshipper of odin, it had a significant and supernatural meaning,--and he repeated his former action--that of drawing the knife from his girdle and kissing the hilt. "if death is near me," he said in a loud voice, "i bid it welcome! the gods know that i am ready!" he waited as though expecting some answer--but there was a brief, absolute silence. then, with a wild shriek and riotous uproar, the circling tempest,--before uncertain and vacillating in its wrath,--pounced, eagle-like, downward and grasped the mountains in its talons,--the strong pines rocked backwards and forwards as though bent by herculean hands, crashing their frosted branches madly together:--the massive clouds in the sky opened and let fall their burden of snow. down came the large fleecy flakes, twisting dizzily round and round in a white waltz to the whirl of the wind--faster--faster--heavier and thicker, till there seemed no clear space in the air. güldmar urged on the reindeer, more anxious for their safety than his own--the poor beasts were fatigued, and the blinding snow confused them, but they struggled on patiently, encouraged by their master's voice and the consciousness that they were nearing home. the storm increased in fury--and a fierce gust of frozen sleet struck the sledge like a strong hammer-stroke as it advanced through the rapidly deepening snow-drifts--its guiding lantern was extinguished. güldmar did not stop to relight it--he knew he was approaching his farm, and he trusted to the instinct and sagacity of his steeds. there was indeed but a short distance to go,--the narrow wooded defile opened out on two roads, one leading direct to bosekop--the other, steep and tortuous, winding down to the shore of the fjord--this latter passed the _bonde's_ gate. once out of the shadow of the pines, the way would be more distinctly seen,--the very reindeer seemed to be conscious of this, for they trotted more steadily, shaking their bells in even and rhythmical measure. as they neared the end of the long dark vista, a sudden bright blue glare quivered and sprang wave-like across the snow--a fantastic storm-aurora that flashed and played among the feathery falling flakes of white till they looked like knots and closters of sparkling jewels. the extreme point of the close defile was reached at last, and here the landscape opened up wide, rocky and desolate--a weird picture,--with the heavy clouds above repeatedly stabbed through and through by the needle-pointed beams of the aurora borealis,--and the blank whiteness of the ground below. just as the heads of the reindeer were turned into the homeward road, half of the aurora suddenly faded, leaving the other half still beating out its azure brilliance against the horizon. at the same instant, with abrupt swiftness, a dark shadow,--so dark as to seem almost palpable,--descended and fell directly in front of the advancing sledge--a sort of mist that appeared to block the way. güldmar leaned forward and gazed with eager, straining eyes into that drooping gloom--a shadow?--a mere vapor, with the northern lights glimmering through its murky folds? ah no--no! for him it was something very different,--a heavenly phantasm, beautiful and grand, with solemn meaning! he saw a maiden, majestically tall, of earnest visage and imperial mien,--her long black hair streamed loose upon the wind--in one hand she held a shining shield--in the other a lifted spear! on her white brow rested a glittering helmet,--her bosom heaved beneath a corslet of pale gold--she fixed her divine, dark eyes full upon his face and smiled! with a cry of wonder and ecstacy the old man fell back in his sledge,--the reins dropped from his hands,--"the _valkyrie_! the _valkyrie_!" he exclaimed. a mere breathing space, and the shadow vanished,--the aurora came out again in unbroken splendor--and the reindeer, feeling no restraint upon them, and terrified by something in the air, or the ceaseless glitter, of the lights in the sky, started off precipitately at full gallop. the long reins trailed loosely over their backs, lashing their sides as they ran--güldmar, recovering from his momentary awe and bewilderment, strove to seize them, but in vain. he called, he shouted,--the frightened animals were utterly beyond control, and dashed madly down the steep road, swinging the sledge from side to side, and entangling themselves more and more with the loose reins, till, irritated beyond endurance, confused and blinded by the flash of the aurora and the dizzy whirl of the swiftly falling snow, they made straight for a steep bank,--and before the _bonde_ had time to realize the situation and jump from the sledge--crash! down they went with a discordant jangle of bells, their hoofs splitting a thin, sharp shelf of ice as they leaped forward,--dragging the light vehicle after them, and twisting it over and over till it was a mere wreck,--and throwing out its occupant head foremost against a jagged stone. then more scared than ever, they strove to clamber out of the gully into which they had recklessly sprung, but, foiled in these attempts, they kicked, plunged, and reared,--trampling heedlessly over the human form lying helpless among the shattered fragments of the sledge,--till tired out at last, they stood motionless, panting with terror. their antlered heads cast fantastic patterns on the snow in the varying rose and azure radiance that rippled from the waving ribbons of the aurora,--and close to them, his slowly trickling life-blood staining the white ground,--his hair and beard glittering in the light like frosted silver,--his eyes fast closed as though he slept,--lay olaf güldmar unconscious--dying. the spear of the valkyrie had fallen! chapter xxxii. "bury me not when i am dead-- lay me not down in a dusty bed; i could not bear the life down there, with the wet worms crawling about my hair!" eric mackay. long hours passed, and the next day dawned, if the dim twilight that glimmered faintly across the altenfjord could be called a dawn. the snow-fall had ceased,--the wind had sunk--there was a frost-bound, monotonous calm. the picturesque dwelling of the _bonde_ was white in every part, and fringed with long icicles,--icicles drooped from its sheltering porch and gabled windows--the deserted dove-cote on the roof was a miniature ice-palace, curiously festooned with thin threads and crested pinnacles of frozen snow. within the house there was silence,--the silence of approaching desolation. in the room where thelma used to sit and spin, a blazing fire of pine sparkled on the walls, casting ruddy outward flashes through the frost-covered lattice-windows,--and here, towards the obscure noon, olaf güldmar awoke from his long trance of insensibility. he found himself at home, stretched on his own bed, and looked about him vacantly. in the earnest and watchful countenance that bent above his pillow, he slowly recognized his friend, companion, and servant, valdemar svensen, and though returning consciousness brought with it throbs of agonizing pain, he strove to smile, and feebly stretched out his hand. valdemar grasped it--kissed it--and in spite of his efforts to restrain his emotion, a sigh, that was almost a groan, escaped him. the _bonde_ smiled again,--then lay quiet for a few moments as though endeavoring to collect his thought. presently he spoke--his voice was faint yet distinct. "what has happened, valdemar?" he asked. "how is it that the strength has departed from me?" svensen dropped on his knees by the bedside. "an accident, my lord olaf," he began falteringly. güldmar's eyes suddenly lightened. "ah, i remember!" he said. "the rush down the valley--i remember all!" he paused, then added gently, "and so the end has come, valdemar!" svensen uttered a passionate exclamation of distress. "let not my lord say so!" he murmured appealingly, with the air of a subject entreating favor from a king. "or, if it must be, let me also travel with thee wherever thou goest!" olaf güldmar's gaze rested on him with a musing tenderness. "'tis a far journey," he said simply. "and thou art not summoned." he raised his arm to test its force--for one second it was uplifted,--then it fell powerless at his side. "i am conquered!" he went on with a cheerful air. "the fight is over, valdemar! surely i have had a long battle, and the time for rest and reward is welcome." he was silent for a little, then continued, "tell me--how--where didst thou find me? it seems i had a dream, strange, and glorious--then came a rushing sound of wheels and clanging bells,--and after that, a long deep silence." speaking in low tones, valdemar briefly related the events of the past night. how he had heard the reindeer's gallop down the road, and the quick jangling of the bells on their harness, and had concluded that the _bonde_ was returning home at extraordinary speed--how these sounds had suddenly and unaccountably ceased,--how, after waiting for some time, and hearing nothing more, he had become greatly alarmed, and, taking a pine-torch, had gone out to see what had occurred,--how he had found the reindeer standing by the broken sledge in the gully, and how, after some search, he had finally discovered his master, lying half-covered by the snow, and grievously injured. how he had lifted him and carried him into the house, . . . "by my soul!" interrupted the _bonde_ cheerfully, "thou must have found me no light weight, valdemar! see what a good thing it is to be a man--with iron muscles, and strong limbs, and hardy nerve! by the hammer of thor! the glorious gift of strong manhood is never half appreciated! as for me--i am a man no longer!" he sighed a little, and, passing his sinewy hand across his brow, lay back exhausted. he was racked by bodily torture, but,--unflinching old hero as he was,--gave no sign of the agonizing pain he suffered. valdemar svensen had risen from his knees, and now stood gazing at him with yearning, miserable eyes, his brown, weather-beaten visage heavily marked with lines of grief and despair. he knew that he was utterly powerless--that nothing could save the noble life that was ebbing slowly away before him. his long and varied experience as a sailor, pilot, and traveller in many countries had given him some useful knowledge of medicine and surgery, and if anything was possible to be done, he could do it. but in this case no medical skill would have been availing--the old man's ribs were crushed in and his spine injured,--his death was a question of but a few hours at the utmost, if so long. "olaf the king!" muttered the _bonde_ presently, "true! they make no mistakes yonder,--they know each warrior by name and rank--'tis only in this world we are subject to error. this world! by the gods! . . . 'tis but a puff of thistle-down--or a light mist floating from the sunset to the sea!" he made a vigorous attempt to raise himself from his pillow--though the excruciating anguish caused by his movement, made him wince a little and grow paler. "wine, valdemar! fill the horn cup to the brim and bring it to me--i must have strength to speak--before i depart--on the last great journey." obediently and in haste, svensen filled the cup he asked for with old lacrima christi, of which there was always a supply in this far northern abode, and gave it to him, watching him with a sort of superstitious reverence as he drained off its contents and returned it empty. "ah! that warms this freezing blood of mine," he said, the lustre flashing back into his eyes. "'twill find fresh force to flow a brief while longer. valdemar--i have little time to spend with thee--i feel death _here_"--and he slightly touched his chest--"cold--cold and heavy. 'tis nothing--a passing, chilly touch that sweeps away the world! but the warmth of a new, strong life awaits me--a life of never-ending triumph! the doors of valhalla stand wide open--i heard the trumpet-call last night--i saw the dark-haired valkyrie! all is well--and my soul is full of rejoicing. valdemar--there is but one thing now thou hast to do for me,--the one great service thou hast sworn to render. _fulfill thine oath!_" valdemar's brown cheek blanched,--his lips quivered,--he flung up his hands in wild appeal. the picturesque flow of his native speech gained new fervor and eloquence as he spoke. "not yet--not yet, my lord!" he cried passionately. "wait but a little--there is time. think for one moment--think! would it not be well for my lord to sleep the last sleep by the side of his beloved thelma--the star of the dark mountains--the moonbeam of the night of his life? would not peace enwrap him there as with a soft garment, and would not his rest be lulled by the placid murmur of the sea? for the days of old time and storm and victory are past--and the dead slumber as stones in the silent pathways--why would my lord depart in haste as though he were wrathful, from the land he has loved?--from the vassal who implores his pardon for pleading against a deed he dares not do!" "dares not--dares not!" cried the _bonde_, springing up half-erect from his couch, in spite of pain, and looking like some enraged old lion with his tossed, streaming hair and glittering eyes. "serf as thou art and coward! thinkest thou an oath such as thine is but a thread of hair, to be snapped at thy pleasure? wilt thou brave the wrath of the gods and the teeth of the wolf of nastrond? as surely as the seven stars shine on the white brow of thor, evil shall be upon thee if thou refusest to perform the vow thou hast sworn! and shall a slave have strength to resist the dying curse of a king?" the pride, the supreme authority,--the magnified strength of command that flushed the old man's features, were extraordinary and almost terrible in their impressive grandeur. if he indeed believed himself by blood a king and a descendant of kings,--he could not have shown a more forcible display of personal sovereignty. the effect of his manner on valdemar was instantaneous,--the superstitious fears of that bronzed sea-wanderer were easily aroused. his head drooped--he stretched out his hands imploringly. "let not my lord curse his servant," he faltered. "it was but a tremor of the heart that caused my tongue to speak foolishly. i am ready--i have sworn--the oath shall be kept to its utmost end!" olaf güldmar's threatening countenance relaxed, and he fell back on his pillows. "it is well!" he said feebly and somewhat indistinctly. "thy want of will maddened me--i spoke and lived in times that are no more--days of battle--and--glory--that are gone--from men--for ever. more wine, valdemar!--i must keep a grip on this slippery life--and yet--i wander--wander into the--night--" his voice ceased, and he sank into a swoon--a swoon that was like death. his breathing was scarcely perceptible, and svensen, alarmed at his appearance, forced some drops of wine between his set lips, and chafed his cold hands with anxious solicitude. slowly and very gradually he recovered consciousness and intelligence, and presently asked for a pencil and paper to write a few farewell words to his daughter. in the grief and bewilderment of the time, valdemar entirely forgot to tell him that a letter from thelma had arrived for him on the previous afternoon while he was away at talvig,--and was even now on the shelf above the chimney, awaiting perusal. güldmar, ignorant of this, began to write slowly and with firmness, disregarding his rapidly sinking strength. scarcely had he begun the letter, however, than he looked up meaningly at svensen, who stood waiting beside him. "the time grows very short," he said imperatively. "prepare everything quickly--go! fear not--i shall live to see thee return--and to bless thee for thy faithful service." as he uttered these words he smiled;--and with one wistful, yearning look at him, valdemar obediently and instantly departed. he left the house, carrying with him a huge pile of dry brushwood, and with the air of a man strung up to prompt action, rapidly descended the sloping path, thick with hardened snow, that led downwards to the fjord. on reaching the shore, he looked anxiously about him. there was nothing in sight but the distant, twinkling lights of bosekop--the fjord itself was like a black pool,--so still that even the faintest murmur of its rippling against the _bonde's_ own private pier could be heard,--the tide was full up. out of the reach of the encroaching waters, high and dry on the beach, was güldmar's brig, the _valkyrie_, transformed by the fingers of the frost into a white ship, fantastically draped with threads of frozen snow and pendent icicles. she was placed on a descending plank, to which she was attached by a chain and rope pulley,--so that at any time of the weather or tide she could be moved glidingly downwards into deep water--and this was what valdemar occupied himself in doing. it was a hard task. the chains were stiff with the frost,--but, after some patient and arduous striving, they yielded to his efforts, and, with slow clank and much creaking complaint, the vessel slid reluctantly down and plunged forward, afloat at last. holding her ropes, valdemar sprang to the extreme edge of the pier and fastened her there, and then getting on board, he untied and began to hoist the sails. this was a matter of the greatest difficulty, but it was gradually and successfully accomplished; and a strange sight the _valkyrie_ then presented, resting nearly motionless on the black fjord,--her stretched and frosted canvas looking like sheeted pearl fringed with silver,--her masts white with encrusted snow, and topped with pointed icicles. leaving her for a moment, valdemar quickly returned, carrying the pile of dry brushwood he had brought,--he descended with this into the hold of the ship, and returned without it. glancing once more nervously about him, he jumped from the deck to the pier--thence to the shore--and as he did so a long dark wave rolled up and broke at his feet. the capricious wind had suddenly arisen,--and a moaning whisper coming from the adjacent hills gave warning of another storm. valdemar hurriedly retraced his steps back to the house,--his work with the _valkyrie_ had occupied him more than an hour--the _bonde_, his friend and master, might have died during his absence! there was a cold sickness at his heart--his feet seemed heavy as lead, and scarcely able to carry him along quickly enough--to his credulous and visionary mind, the hovering shadow of death seemed everywhere,--in every crackling twig he brushed against,--in every sough of the wakening gale that rustled among the bare pines. to his intense relief he found güldmar lying calmly back among his pillows,--his eyes well open and clear, and an expression of perfect peace upon his features. he smiled as he saw his servant enter. "all is in readiness?" he asked. valdemar bent his head in silent assent. the _bonde's_ face lightened with extraordinary rapture. "i thank thee, old friend!" he said in low but glad accents. "thou knowest i could not be at peace in any other grave. i have suffered in thine absence,--the sufferings of the body that, being yet strong in spite of age, is reluctant to take leave of life. but it is past! i am as one numbed with everlasting frost,--and now i feel no pain. and my mind is like a bird that poises for a while over past and present, ere soaring into the far future. there are things i must yet say to thee, valdemar,--give me thy close hearing, for my voice is weak." svensen drew closer, and stood in the humble attitude of one who waits a command from some supreme chief. "this letter," went on the old man, giving him a folded paper, "is to the child of my heart, my thelma. send it to her--when--i am gone. it will not grieve her, i hope--for, as far as i could find words, i have expressed therein nothing but joy--the joy of a prisoner set free. tell her, that with all the strength of my perishing body and escaping soul, i blessed her! . . . her and the husband in whose arms she rests in safety." he raised his trembling hands solemnly--"the gods of my fathers and their attendant spirits have her young life in their glorious keeping!--the joy of love and purity and peace be on her innocent head for ever!" he paused,--the wind wailed mournfully round the house and shook the lattice with a sort of stealthy clatter, like a forlorn wanderer striving to creep in to warmth and shelter. "here, valdemar," continued the _bonde_ presently, in fainter accents, at the same time handing him another paper. "here are some scrawled lines--they are plainly set forth and signed--which make thee master of this poor place and all that it contains." a low, choked sob broke from valdemar's broad breast--he covered his face with his hands. "of what avail?" he murmured brokenly. "when my lord departs, i am alone and friendless!" the _bonde_ regarded him with kindly pity. "tears from the stout heart?" he inquired with a sort of grave wonder. "weep for life, valdemar--not for death! alone and friendless? not while the gods are in heaven! cheer thee--thou art strong and in vigorous pride of manhood--why should not bright days come for thee--" he broke off with a gasp--a sudden access of pain convulsed him and rendered his breathing difficult. by sheer force of will he mastered the cruel agony, though great drops of sweat stood on his brow when he at last found voice to continue-- "i thought all suffering was past," he said with a heroic smile. "this foolish flesh and blood of mine dies hard! but, as i was saying to thee, valdemar--the farm is thine, and all it holds--save some few trifles i have set down to be given to my child. there is little worth in what i leave thee--the soil--is hard and ungrateful--the harvest uncertain, and the cattle few. even the reindeer--didst thou say they were injured by their fall last night?--i--i forget, . . ." "no harm has come to them," said svensen hastily, seeing that the very effort of thinking was becoming too much for the old man. "they are safe and unhurt. trouble not about these things!" a strange, unearthly radiance transfigured güldmar's visage. "trouble is departing swiftly from me," he murmured. "trouble and i shall know each other no more!" his voice died away inarticulately, and he was silent a little space. suddenly, and with a rush of vigor--that seemed superhuman, he raised himself nearly erect, and pointed outwards with a commanding gesture. "bear me hence!" he cried in ringing tones. "hence to the mountains and the sea!" with a sort of mechanical, swift obedience, valdemar threw open the door--the wind rushed coldly into the house, bringing with it large feathery flakes of snow. a hand sledge stood outside the porch,--it was always there during the winter, being much used for visiting the outlying grounds of the farm,--and to this, valdemar prepared to carry the _bonde_ in his herculean arms. but, on being lifted from his couch, the old man, filled with strange, almost delirious force, declared himself able to stand,--and, though suffering deadly anguish at every step, did in truth manage to reach and enter the sledge, strongly supported by valdemar. there, however, he fainted--and his faithful servant, covering his insensible form with, furs, thought he was dead. but there was now no time for hesitation,--dead or living, olaf güldmar's will was law to his vassal,--an oath had been made and must be kept. to propel the sledge down to the fjord was an easy matter--how the rest of his duty was accomplished he never knew. he was conscious of staggering blindly onward, weighted with a heavy, helpless burden,--he felt the slippery pier beneath his feet--the driving snow and the icy wind on his face,--but he was as one in a dream, realizing nothing plainly, till with a wild start, he seemed to awake--and lo! he stood on the glassy deck of the _valkyrie_ with the body of his "king" stretched senseless before him! had he brought him there? he could not remember what he had done during the past few mad minutes,--the earth and sky whirled dizzily around him,--he could grasp nothing tangible in thought or memory. but there, most certainly, olaf güldmar lay,--his pallid face upturned, his hair and beard as white as the snow that clung to the masts of his vessel--his hand clenched on the fur garment that enwrapped him as with a robe of royalty. dropping on his knees beside him, valdemar felt his heart--it still throbbed fitfully and feebly. watching the intense calm of the grand, rugged face, this stern, weather-worn sailor--this man of superstitious and heathen imaginations--gave way to womanish tears--tears that were the outcome of sincere and passionate grief. his love was of an exceptional type,--something like that of a faithful dog that refuses to leave the grave of its master,--he could contemplate death for himself with absolute indifference,--but not for the _bonde_, whose sturdy strength and splendid physique had seemed to defy all danger. as he knelt and wept unrestrainedly, a soft change, a delicate transparency, swept over the dark bosom of the sky. pale pink streaks glittered on the dusky horizon--darts of light began to climb upward into the clouds, and to plunge downward into the water,--the radiance spread, and gradually formed into a broad band of deep crimson, which burned with a fixed and intense glow--topaz-like rays flickered and streamed about it, as though uncertain what fantastic shape they should take to best display their brilliancy. this tremulous hesitation of varying color did not last long; the whole jewel-like mass swept together, expanding and contracting with extraordinary swiftness for a few seconds--then, suddenly and clearly defined in the sky, a kingly crown blazed forth--a crown of perfect shape, its five points distinctly and separately outlined and flashing as with a million rubies and diamonds. the red lustre warmly tinged the pale features of the dying man, and startled valdemar, who sprang to his feet and gazed at that mystic aureola with a cry of wonder. at the same moment olaf güldmar stirred, and began to speak drowsily without opening his eyes. "dawn on the sea!" he murmured--"the white waves gleam and sparkle beneath the prow, and the ship makes swift way through the water! it is dawn in my heart--the dawn of love for thee and me, my thelma--fear not! the rose of passion is a hardy flower that can bloom in the north as well as in the south, believe me! thelma--thelma!" he suddenly opened his eyes, and realizing his surroundings, raised himself half-erect. "set sail!" he cried, pointing with a majestic motion of his arm to the diadem glittering in the sky. "why do we linger? the wind favors us, and the tide sweeps forward--forward! see how the lights beckon from the harbor!" he bent his brows and looked almost angrily at svensen. "do what thou hast to do!" and his tones were sharp and imperious. "i must press on!" an expression of terror, pain, and pity passed over the sailor's countenance--for one instant he hesitated--the next, he descended into the hold of the vessel. he was absent for a very little space,--but when he returned his eyes were wild as though he had been engaged in some dark and criminal deed. olaf güldmar was still gazing at the brilliancy in the heavens, which seemed to increase in size and lustre as the wind rose higher. svensen took his hand--it was icy cold, and damp with the dew of death. "let me go with thee!" he implored, in broken accent. "i fear nothing! why should i not venture also on the last voyage?" güldmar made a faint but decided sign of rejection. "the viking sails alone to the grave of his fathers!" he with a serene and proud smile. "alone--alone! neither wife, nor child, nor vassal may have place with him in his ship--even so have the gods willed it. farewell, valdemar! loosen the ropes and let me go!--thou servest me ill--hasten--hasten--i am weary of waiting--" his head fell back,--that mysterious shadow which darkens the face of the dying a moment before dissolution, was on him now. just then a strange, suffocating odor began to permeate the air--little wreaths of pale smoke made their slow way through the boards of the deck--and a fierce gust of wind, blowing seawards from the mountains, swayed the _valkyrie_ uneasily to and fro. slowly, and with evident reluctance, svensen commenced the work of detaching her from the pier--feeling instinctively all the while that his master's dying eyes were fixed upon him. when but one slender rope remained to be cast off, he knelt by the old man's side said whispered tremblingly that all was done. at the same moment a small, stealthy tongue of red flame curled up through the deck from the hold,--and güldmar, observing this, smiled. "i see thou hast redeemed thine oath," he said, gratefully pressing svensen's hand. "'tis the last act of thine allegiance,--may the gods reward thy faithfulness! peace be with thee!--we shall meet hereafter. already the light shines from the rainbow bridge,--there,--there are the golden peaks of the hills and the stretch of the wide sea! go, valdemar!--delay no longer, for my soul is impatient--it burns, it struggles to be free! go!--and--farewell!" stricken to the heart, and full of anguish,--yet serf-like in his submission and resignation to the inevitable,--svensen kissed his master's hand for the last time. then, with a sort of fierce sobbing groan, wrung from the very depths of his despairing grief, he turned resolutely away, and sprang off the vessel. standing at the extreme edge of the pier, he let slip the last rope that bound her,--her sails filled and bulged outward,--her cordage creaked, she shuddered on the water--lurched a little--then paused. in that brief moment a loud triumphant cry rang through the air. olaf güldmar leaped upright on the deck as though lifted by some invisible hand, and confronted his terrified servants, who gazed at him in fascinated amazement and awe. his white hair gleamed like spun silver--his face was transfigured, and wore a strange, rapt look of pale yet splendid majesty--the dark furs that clung about him trailed in regal folds to his feet. "hark!" he cried, and his voice vibrated with deep and mellow clearness. "hark to the thunder of the galloping hoofs!--see--see the glitter of the shield and spear! she comes-ah! thelma! thelma!" he raised his arms as though in ecstacy. "glory!--joy!--victory!" and, like a noble tree struck down by lightning, he fell--dead! even as he fell, the _valkyrie_ plunged forward, driven forcibly by a swooping gust of wind, and scudded out to the fjord like a wild bird flying before a tempest,--and, while she thus fled, a sheet of flame burst through her sides and blazed upwards, mingling a lurid, smoky glow with the clear crimson radiance of the still brilliant and crown-like aurora. following the current, she made swift way across the dark water in the direction of the island of seiland, and presently became a wondrous ship of fire! fire flashed from her masts--fire folded up her spars and sails in a devouring embrace,--fire, that leaped and played and sent forth a million showering sparks hissingly into the waves beneath. with beating heart and straining eyes, valdemar svensen crouched on the pier-head, watching, in mute agony, the burning vessel. he had fulfilled his oath!--that strange vow that had so sternly bound him,--a vow that was the outcome of his peculiar traditions and pagan creed. long ago, in the days of his youth,--full of enthusiasm for the worship of odin and the past splendors of the race of the great norse warriors,--he had chosen to recognize in olaf güldmar a true descendant of kings, who was by blood and birth, though not in power, himself a king,--and tracing his legendary history back to old and half-forgotten sources, he had proved, satisfactorily, to his own mind, that he, svensen, must lawfully, and according to old feudal system, be this king's serf or vassal. and, growing more and more convinced of this in his dreamy and imaginative mind,--he had sworn a sort of mystic friendship and allegiance, which güldmar had accepted, imposing on him, however, only one absolute command. this was that he should be given the "crimson shroud" and sea-tomb of his war-like ancestors,--for the idea that his body might be touched by strange hands, shut in a close coffin, and laid in the earth to moulder away to wormy corruption,--had been the one fantastic dread of the sturdy old pagan's life. and he had taken advantage of svensen's devotion and obedience to impress on him the paramount importance of his solitary behest. "let no hypocritical prayers be chanted over my dumb corpse," he had said. "my blood would ooze from me at every pore were i touched by the fingers of a lutheran! save this goodly body that has served me so well from the inferior dust,--let the bright fire wither it, and the glad sea drown it,--and my soul, beholding its end afar off, shall rejoice and be satisfied. swear by the wrath and thunder of the gods!--swear by the unflinching hammer of thor,--swear by the gates of valhalla, and in the name of odin!--and having sworn, the curse of all these be upon thee if thou fail to keep thy vow!" and valdemar had sworn. now that the oath was kept--now that his promised obedience had been carried out to the extremest letter, he was as one stupefied. shivering, yet regardless of the snow that began to fall thickly, he kept his post, staring, staring in drear fascination across the fjord, where the _valkyrie_ drifted, now a mass of flame blown fiercely by the wind, and gleaming red through the flaky snow-storm. the aurora borealis faded by gradual degrees, and the flaming ship was more than ever distinctly visible. she was seen from the shore of bosekop, by a group of the inhabitants, who, rubbing their dull eyes, could not decide whether what they beheld was fire, or a new phase of the capricious, ever-changing northern lights,--the rapidly descending snow rendering their vision bewildered and uncertain. any way, they thought very little about it,--they had had excitement of another kind in the arrival of ulrika from talvig, bringing accounts of the godly lovisa elsland's death. moreover, an english steam cargo-boat, bound for the north cape, had, just an hour previously, touched at their harbor, to land a passenger,--a mysterious woman closely veiled, who immediately on arrival had hired a sledge, and had bidden the driver to take her to the house of olaf güldmar, an eight miles journey through the drifted snow. all this was intensely interesting to the good, stupid, gossiping fisher-folks of bosekop,--so much so, indeed, that they scarcely paid any heed to the spectacle of the fiery ship swaying suggestively on the heaving water, and drifting rapidly away--away towards the frosted peaks of seiland. further and further she receded,--the flames around her waving like banners in a battle--further and further still--till valdemar svensen, from his station on the pier, began to lose sight of her blazing timbers,--and, starting from his reverie, he ran rapidly from the shore, up through the garden paths to the farm-house, in order to gain the summit, and from that point of vantage, watch the last glimmering spark of the viking's burial. as he reached the house, he stopped short and uttered a wild exclamation. there,--under the porch hung with sparkling icicles,--stood thelma! . . . thelma,--her face pale and weary, yet smiling faintly,--thelma with the glint of her wondrous gold hair escaping from under her hat, and glittering on the folds of her dark fur mantle. "i have come home, valdemar!" said the sweet, rich, penetrating voice. "where is my father?" as a man distraught, or in some dreadful dream, valdemar approached her--the strangeness of his look and manner filled her with sudden fear,--he caught her hand and pointed to the dark fjord--to the spot where gleamed a lurid waving wreath of flames. "fröken thelma--he is _there_!" he gasped in choked, hoarse tones. "_there_--where the gods have called him!" with a faint shriek of terror, thelma's blue eyes turned toward the shadowy water,--as she looked, a long up-twisting snake of fire appeared to leap from the perishing _valkyrie_,--a snake that twined its glittering coils rapidly round and round on the wind, and as rapidly sank--down--down--to one glimmering spark which glowed redly like a floating lamp for a brief space,--and was then quenched for ever! the ship had vanished! thelma needed no explanation,--she knew her father's creed--she understood all. breaking loose from valdemar's grasp, she rushed a few steps forward with arms outstretched on the bitter, snowy air. "father! father!" she cried aloud and sobbingly. "wait for me!--it is i thelma!--i am coming--father!" the white world around her grew black--and, shuddering like a shot bird, she fell senseless. instantly valdemar raised her from the ground, and holding her tenderly and reverently in his strong arms, carried her, as though she were a child, into the house . . . clouds darkened--the snow-storm thickened--the mountain-peaks, stern giants, frowned through their sleety veils at the arctic desolation of the land below them,--and over the charred and sunken corpse of the departed servant of odin, sounded the solemn de profundis of the sea. chapter xxxiii. "the body is the storm; the soul the star beyond it, in the deep of nature's calm. and, yonder, on the steep, the sun of faith, quiescent, round, and warm!" late on that same night, the pious ulrika was engaged in prayer. prayer with her was a sort of fanatical wrestling of the body as well as of the soul,--she was never contented unless by means of groans and contortions she could manage to work up by degrees into a condition of hysteria resembling a mild epileptic attack, in which state alone she considered herself worthy to approach the deity. on this occasion she had some difficulty to attain the desired result--her soul, as she herself expressed it, was "dry"--and her thoughts wandered,--though she pinched her neck and arms with the hard resoluteness of a sworn flagellant, and groaned, "lord, have mercy on me a sinner!" with indefatigable earnestness. she was considerably startled in the midst of these energetic devotions by a sudden jangling of sledge--bells, and aloud knocking--a knocking which threatened to break down the door of the small and humble house she inhabited. hastily donning the coarse gown and bodice she had recently taken off in order to administer chastisement to her own flesh more thoroughly, she unfastened her bolts and bars, and, lifting the latch, was confronted by valdemar svensen, who, nearly breathless with swift driving through the snow-storm, cried out in quick gasps-- "come with me--come! she is dying!" "god help the man!" exclaimed ulrika startled. "who is dying?" "she--the fröken thelma--lady errington--she is all alone up there," and he pointed distractedly in the direction from whence he had come. "i can get no one in bosekop,--the women are cowards all,--all afraid to go near her," and he wrung his hands in passionate distress. ulrika pulled a thick shawl from the nail where it hung and wrapped it round her. "i am ready," she said, and without more delay, stepped into the waiting sledge, while valdemar, with an exclamation of gratitude and relief, took his place beside her. "but how is it?" she asked, as the reindeer started off at full speed, "how is it that the _bonde's_ daughter is again at the altenfjord?" "i know not!" answered svensen despairingly. "i would have given my life not to have told her of her father's death." "death!" cried ulrika. "olaf güldmar _dead_! impossible! only last night i saw him in the pride of his strength,--and thought i never had beheld so goodly a man. lord, lord! that he should be _dead_!" in a few words svensen related all that had happened, with the exception of the fire-burial in the fjord. but ulrika immediately asked, "is his body still in the house?" svensen looked at her darkly. "hast thou never heard ulrika," he said solemnly, "that the bodies of men who follow olaf güldmar's creed, disappear as soon as the life departs from them? it is a mystery--strange and terrible! but this is true--my master's sailing-ship has gone, and his body with it--and i know not where!" ulrika surveyed him steadily with a slow, incredulous smile. after a pause, she said-- "fidelity in a servant is good, valdemar svensen! i know you well--i also know that a pagan shrinks from christian burial. enough said--i will ask no more--but if olaf güldmar's ship's has gone, and he with it,--i warn you, the village will wonder." "i cannot help it," said svensen with cold brevity. "i have spoken truth--he has gone! i saw him die--and then vanish. believe it or not as you will, i care not!" and he drove on in silence. ulrika was silent too. she had known valdemar svensen for many years--he was a man universally liked and respected at all the harbors and different fishing-stations of norway, and his life was an open book to everybody, with the exception of one page, which was turned down and sealed,--this was the question of his religious belief. no one knew what form of faith he followed,--it was only when he went to live with the _bonde_, after thelma's marriage,--that the nature of his creed was dimly suspected. but ulrika had no dislike for him on this account,--her opinions had changed very much during the past few months. as devout a lutheran as ever, she began to entertain a little more of the true spirit of christianity--that spirit of gentle and patient tolerance which, full of forbearance towards all humanity, is willing to admit the possibility of a little good in everything, even in the blind tenets of a heathen creed. part of this alteration in her was due to the gratitude she secretly felt towards the güldmar family, for having saved from destruction,--albeit unconscious of his parentage,--sigurd, the child she had attempted to murder. the hideous malevolence of lovisa elsland's nature had shown her that there _may_ be bad lutherans,--the invariable tenderness displayed by the güldmars for her unrecognized, helpless and distraught son,--had proved to her that there _may_ be good heathens. hearing thus suddenly of the _bonde's_ death, she was strangely affected--she could almost have wept. she felt perfectly convinced that svensen had made away with his master's body by some mysterious rite connected with pagan belief,--she knew that güldmar himself, according to rumor, had buried his own wife in some unknown spot, with strange and weird ceremonials, but she was inclined to be tolerant,--and glancing at svensen's grave, pained face from time to time as she sat beside him in the sledge, she resolved to ask him no more questions on the subject, but to accept and support, if necessary, the theory he had so emphatically set forth,--namely, the mystical evanishment of the corpse by some supernatural agency. as they neared their destination, she began to think of thelma, the beautiful, proud girl whom she remembered best as standing on a little green-tufted hillock with a cluster of pansies in her hand, and sigurd--sigurd clinging fondly to her white skirts, with a wealth of passionate devotion in his upturned, melancholy, blue eyes. ulrika had seen her but once since then,--and that was on the occasion when, at the threat of lovisa elsland, and the command of the reverend mr. dyceworthy, she had given her sir philip errington's card, with the false message written on it that had decoyed her for a time into the wily minister's power. she felt a thrill of shame as she remembered the part she had played in that cruel trick,--and reverting once more to the memory of sigurd, whose tragic end at the fall of njedegorze she had learned through valdemar, she resolved to make amends now that she had the chance, and to do her best for thelma in her suffering and trouble. "for who knows," mused ulrika, "whether it is not the lord's hand that is extended towards me,--and that in the ministering to the wants of her whom i wronged, and whom my son so greatly loved, i may not thereby cancel the past sin, and work out my own redemption!" and her dull eyes brightened with hope, and her heart warmed,--she began to feel almost humane and sympathetic,--and was so eager to commence her office of nurse and consoler to thelma that she jumped out of the sledge almost before it had stopped at the farm gate. disregarding valdemar's assistance, she clambered sturdily over the drifted heaps of slippery snow that blocked the deserted pathways, and made for the house,--valdemar following her as soon as he had safely fastened up the sledge, which was not his own, he having in emergency borrowed it from a neighbor. as they approached, a sound came floating to meet them--a sound which made them pause and look at each other in surprise and anxiety. some one was singing,--a voice full and clear, though with a strange, uncertain quiver in it, rippled out in wild strains of minor melody on the snow-laden air. for one moment ulrika listened doubtedly, and then without more delay ran hastily forward and entered the house. thelma was there,--sitting at the lattice window which she had thrown wide open to the icy blast,--she had taken off her cloak and hat, and her hair, unbound, fell about her in a great, glittering tangle of gold,--her hands were busy manipulating an imaginary spinning-wheel--her eyes were brilliant as jewels, but full of pain, terror, and pathos. she smiled a piteous smile as she became hazily conscious that there were others in the room--but she went on with her song--a mournful, norwegian ditty,--till a sudden break in her voice caused her to put her hand to her throat and look up perplexedly. "that song pleases you?" she asked softly, "i am very glad! has sigurd come home? he wanders so much, poor boy! father, dear, you must tell him how wrong it is not to love philip. every one loves philip--and i--i love him too, but he must never know that." she paused and sighed. "that is my secret,--the only one i have!" and she drooped her fair head forlornly. moved by intense pity, such as she had never felt in all her life before, ulrika went up and tried to draw her gently from the window. "poor thing, poor thing!" she said kindly. "come away with me, and lie down! you mustn't sit here,--let me shut the lattice,--it's quite late at night, and too cold for you, my dear." "too cold?" and thelma eyed her wonderingly. "why, it is summer-time, and the sun never sets! the roses are all about the walls--i gave one to philip yesterday--a little pale rose with a crimson heart. he wore it, and seemed glad!" she passed her hand across her forehead with a troubled air, and watched ulrika, who quietly closed the window against the darkness and desolation of the night. "are you a friend?" she asked presently in anxious tones. "i know so many that say they are my friends--but i am afraid of them all--and i have left them. do you know why?" and she laid her hand on ulrika's rough arm. "because they tell me my philip does not love me any more. they are very cruel to say so, and i think it cannot be true. i want to tell my father what they say--because he will know--and if it is true, then i wish to die,--i could not live! will you take me to my father?" the plaintive, pleading gentleness of her voice and look brought more tears into ulrika's eyes than had ever been forced there by her devotional exercises,--and the miserable valdemar, already broken-hearted by his master's death, turned away and sobbingly cursed his gods for this new and undeserved affliction. as the italian peasantry fall to abusing their saints in time of trouble, even so will the few remaining believers in norse legendary lore, upbraid their fierce divinities with the most reckless hardihood when things go wrong. there were times when valdemar svensen secretly quailed at the mere thought of the wrath of odin,--there were others when he was ready to pluck the great god by the beard and beat him with the flat of his own drawn sword. this was his humor at the present moment, as he averted his gaze from the pitiful sight of his "king's" fair daughter all desolate and woe-begone, her lovely face pale with anguish,--her sweet wits wandering, and her whole demeanor that of one who is lost in some dark forest, and is weary unto death. she studied ulrika's rough visage attentively, and presently noticed the tears on her cheeks. "you are crying!" she said in a tone of grave surprise. "why? it is foolish to cry even when the heart aches. i have found that,--no one in the world ever pities you! but perhaps you do not know the world,--ah! it is very hard and cold;--all the people hide their feelings, and pretend to be what they are not. it is difficult to live so,--and i am tired!" she rose from her chair, and stood up unsteadily, stretching out her little cold white hands to ulrika, who folded them in her own strong coarse palms. "yes--i am very tired!" she went on dreamily. "there seems to be nothing that is true--all is false and unreal--i cannot understand! but you seem kind,"--here her swaying figure tottered, and ulrika drew her more closely to herself--"i think i know you--you came with me in the train, did you not? yes--and the little baby smiled and slept in my arms nearly all the way." a violent shuddering seized her, and a quiver of agony passed over her face. "forgive me," she murmured, "i feel ill--very ill--and cold--but do not mind--i think--i am--dying!" she could scarcely articulate these last words--she sank forward, fainting, on ulrika's breast, and that devout disciple of luther, forgetting all her former dread of the "white witch of the altenfjord"--only remembered that she held in her arms a helpless woman with all the sorrows and pangs of womanhood thick upon her,--and in this act of warm heart-expansion and timely tenderness, it may be that she cleansed her soiled soul in the sight of the god she worshipped, and won a look of pardon from the ever-watchful eyes of christ. as far as mundane matters were concerned, she showed herself a woman of prompt energy and decision. laying thelma gently down upon the very couch her dead father had so lately occupied, she sent the distracted valdemar out to gather fresh pine-logs for the fire, and then busied herself in bringing down thelma's own little bed from the upper floor, airing it with methodical care, and making it as warm and cosy as a bird's-nest. while she was engaged in these preparations, thelma regained her consciousness, and began to toss and tumble and talk deliriously; but with it all she retained the innate gentleness and patience, and submitted to be undressed, though she began to sob pleadingly when ulrika would have removed her husband's miniature from where it lay pressed against her bosom,--and taking it in her own hand she kissed and held it fast. one by one, the dainty articles of delicate apparel she wore were loosened and laid aside, ulrika wondering at the embroidered linen and costly lace, the like of which was never seen in that part of norway,--but wondering still more at the dazzling skin she thus unveiled, a skin as exquisitely soft and pure as the satiny cup of a nile lily. poor thelma sat resignedly watching her own attire taken from her, and allowing herself to be wrapped in a comfortable loose garment of white wadmel, as warm as eider-down, which ulrika had found in a cupboard upstairs, and which, indeed, had once belonged to thelma, she and britta having made it together. she examined its texture now with some faint interest--then she asked plaintively-- "are you going to bury me? you must put me to sleep with my mother--her name was thelma, too. i think it is an unlucky name." "why, my dear?" asked ulrika kindly, as she swept the rich tumbled hair from the girl's eyes, and began to braid it in one long loose plait, in order to give her greater ease. thelma sighed. "there is an old song that says--" she broke off. "shall i sing it to you?" she asked with a wild look. "no, no," said ulrika. "not now. by-and-by!" and she nodded her head encouragingly. "by-and-by! there'll be plenty of time for singing presently," and she laid her in bed, tucking her up warmly as though she were a very little child, and feeling strongly inclined to kiss her. "ah, but i should like to tell you, even if i must not sing--" and thelma gazed up anxiously from her pillow--"only my head is so heavy, and full of strange noises--i do not know whether i can remember it." "don't try to remember it," and ulrika stroked the soft cheek, with a curious yearning sensation of love tugging at her tough heartstrings. "try to sleep--that will be better for you!" and she took from the fire a warm, nourishing drink she had prepared, and gave it to her. she was surprised at the eagerness with which the poor girl seized it. "lord help us, i believe she is light-headed for want of food!" she thought. such indeed was the fact,--thelma had been several days on her journey from hull, and during that time had eaten so little that her strength had entirely given way. the provisions on board the black polly were extremely limited, and consisted of nothing but dried fish, hard bread, and weak tea, without milk or sugar,--and in her condition of health, her system had rebelled against this daily untempting bill of fare. ulrika's simple but sustaining beverage seemed more than delicious to her palate,--she drained it to the last drop, and, as she returned the cup, a feint color came back to her cheeks and lips. "thank you," she said feebly. "you are very good to me! and now i do quite know what i wished to say. it was long ago--there was a queen, named thelma, and some one--a great warrior, loved her and found her fair. but presently he grew tired of her face--and raised an army against her, and took her throne by force, and crowned himself king of all her land. and the song says that queen thelma wandered on the mountains all alone till she died--it was a sad song--but i forget--the end." and her voice trailed off into broken murmurs, her eyes closed, and she slept. ulrika watched her musingly and tenderly--wondering what secret trouble weighed on the girl's mind. when valdemar svensen presently looked in, she made him a warning sign--and, hushing his footsteps, he went away again. she followed him out into the kitchen, where he had deposited his load of pine-wood, and began to talk to him in low tones. he listened,--the expression of grief and fear deepened on his countenance as he heard. "will she die?" he asked anxiously. "let us hope not," returned ulrika, "but there is no doubt she is very ill, and will be worse. what has brought her here, i wonder? do you know?" valdemar shook his head. "where is her husband?" went on ulrika. "he ought to be here. how could he have let her make such a journey at such a time! why did he not come with her? there must be something wrong!" svensen looked, as he felt, completely perplexed and despairing. he could think of no reason for thelma's unexpected appearance at the altenfjord--he had forgotten all about the letter that had come from her to her father,--the letter which was still in the house, unopened. "well, well! it is very strange!" ulrika sighed resignedly. "but it is the lord's will--and we must do our best for her, that's all." and she began to enumerate a list of things she wanted from bosekop for her patient's sustenance and comfort. "you must fetch all these," she said, "as soon as the day is fairly advanced." she glanced at the clock--it was just four in the morning. "and at the same time, you had better call at the doctor's house." "he's away," interrupted valdemar. "gone to christiania." "very well," said ulrika composedly. "then we must do without him. doctors are never much use, any way,--maybe the lord will help me instead." and she returned to thelma, who still slept, though her face was now feverishly flushed and her breathing hurried and irregular. the hours of the new day,--day, though seeming night, passed on and it was verging towards ten o'clock when she woke, raving deliriously. her father, sigurd, philip, the events of her life in, london, the fatigues of her journey, were all jumbled fantastically together in her brain--she talked and sang incessantly, and, like some wild bird suddenly caged, refused to be quieted. ulrika was all alone with her,--valdemar having gone to execute his commissions in bosekop,--and she had enough to do to make her remain in bed. for she became suddenly possessed by a strong desire to go sailing on the fjord--and occasionally it took all ulrika's strength to hold and keep her from springing to the window, whose white frosted panes seemed to have some fatal attraction for her wandering eyes. she spoke of things strange and new to her attendant's ears--frequently she pronounced the names of violet vere and lady winsleigh with an accent of horror,--then she would talk of george lorimer and pierre duprèz,--and she would call for britta often, sometimes endearingly--sometimes impatiently. the picture of her home in warwickshire seemed to haunt her,--she spoke of its great green trees, its roses, its smooth sloping lawns--then she would begin to smile and sing again in such a weak, pitiful fashion that ulrika,--her stern nature utterly melted at the sight of such innocent helpless distraction and sorrow,--could do nothing but fold the suffering creature in her arms, and rock her to and fro soothingly on her breast, the tears running down her cheeks the while. and after long hours of bewilderment and anguish, errington's child, a boy, was born--dead. with a regretful heart, ulrika laid out the tiny corpse,--the withered blossom of a promised new delight, a miniature form so fair and perfect that it seemed sheer cruelty on the part of nature to deny it breath and motion. thelma's mind still wandered--she was hardly conscious of anything--and ulrika was almost glad that this was so. her anxiety was very great--she could not disguise from herself that thelma's life was in danger,--and both she and valdemar wrote to sir philip errington, preparing him for the worst, and urging him to come at once,--little aware that the very night the lifeless child was born, was the same on which he had started from hull for christiansund, after his enforced waiting for the required steamer. there was nothing more to be done now, thought ulrika piously, but to trust in the lord and hope for the best. and valdemar svensen made with his own hands a tiny coffin for the body of the little dead boy who was to have brought such pride and satisfaction to his parents, and one day rowed it across the fjord to that secret cave where thelma's mother lay enshrined in stone. there he left it, feeling sure he had done well. ulrika asked him no questions--she was entirely absorbed in the duties that devolved upon her, and with an ungrudging devotion strange to see in her, watched and tended thelma incessantly, scarcely allowing herself a minute's space for rest or food. the idea that her present ministration was to save her soul in the sight of the lord, had grown upon her, and was now rooted firmly in her mind--she never gave way to fatigue or inattention,--every moan, every restless movement of the suffering girl, obtained her instant and tender solicitude, and when she prayed now, it was not for herself but for thelma. "spare her, good lord!" she would implore in the hyperbolical language she had drawn from her study of the scriptures--"as the lily among thorns, so is she among the daughters! cut her not off root and branch from the land of the living, for her countenance is comely, and as a bunch of myrrh which hath a powerful sweetness, even so must she surely be to the heart of her husband! stretch forth thy right hand, o lord, and scatter healing, for the gates of death shall not prevail against thy power!" day after day she poured out petitions such as these, and with the dogged persistency of a soldier serving cromwell, believed that they would be granted,--though day after day thelma seemed to grow weaker and weaker. she was still light-headed--her face grew thin and shadowy,--her hands were almost transparent in their whiteness and delicacy, and her voice was so faint as to be nearly in-audible. sometimes ulrika got frightened at her appearance, and heartily wished for medical assistance but this was not to be had. therefore she was compelled to rely on the efficacy of one simple remedy,--a herbal drink to allay fever,--the virtues of which she had been taught in her youth,--this, and the healing mercies of mother nature together with the reserved strength of her own constitution, were the threads on which thelma's life hung. time passed on--and yet there was no news from sir philip. one night, sitting beside her exhausted patient, ulrika fancied she saw a change on the wan face--a softer, more, peaceful look than had been there for many days. half in fear, half in hope, she watched,--thelma seemed to sleep,--but presently her large blue eyes opened with a calm yet wondering expression in their clear depths. she turned slightly on her pillows, and smiled faintly. "have i been ill?" she asked. "yes, my dear," returned ulrika softly, overjoyed, yet afraid at the girl's returning intelligence. "very ill. but you feel better now, don't you?" thelma sighed, and raising her little wasted hand, examined it curiously. her wedding and betrothal rings were so loose on her finger that they would have fallen off had they been held downwards. she seemed surprised at this, but made no remark. for some time she remained quiet, steadfastly gazing at ulrika, and evidently trying to make out who she was. presently she spoke again. "i remember everything now," she said, slowly. "i am at home, at the altenfjord--and i know how i came--and also _why_ i came." here her lips quivered. "and i shall see my father no more, for he has gone--and i am all--all alone in the world!" she paused--then added, "do you think i am dying? if so, i am very glad!" "hush my dear!" said ulrika. "you mustn't talk in that way. your husband is coming presently--" she broke off suddenly, startled at the look of utter despair in thelma's eyes. "you are wrong," she replied wearily. "he will not come--he cannot! he does not want me any more!" and two large tears rolled slowly down her pale cheeks. ulrika wondered, but forebore to pursue the subject further, fearing to excite or distress her,--and contented herself for the present with attending to her patient's bodily needs. she went to the fire, and began to pour out some nourishing soup, which she always had there in readiness,--and while she was thus engaged, thelma's brain cleared more and more,--till with touching directness, and a new hope flushing her face, she asked softly and beseechingly for her child. "i forgot!" she said simply and sweetly. "of course i am not alone any more. do give me my baby--i am much better--nearly well--and i should like to kiss it." ulrika stood mute, taken aback by this demand. she dared not tell her the truth--she feared its effect on the sensitive mind that had so lately regained its balance. but while she hesitated, thelma instinctively guessed all she strove to hide. "it is dead!" she cried. "dead!--and i never knew!" and, burying her golden head in her pillows, she broke into a passion of convulsive sobbing. ulrika grew positively desperate at the sound,--what _was_ she to do? everything seemed to go against her--she was inclined to cry herself. she embraced the broken-hearted girl, and tried to soothe her, but in vain. the long delirium and subsequent weakness,--combined with the secret trouble on her mind,--had deprived poor thelma of all resisting power, and she wept on and on in ulrika's arms till nature was exhausted, and she could weep no longer. then she lay motionless, with closed eyes, utterly drained in body and spirit, scarcely breathing, and, save for a shivering moan that now and then escaped her, she seemed almost insensible. ulrika watched her with darkening, meditative brows,--she listened to the rush of the storm-wind without,--it was past eleven o'clock at night. she began to count on her fingers--it was the sixteenth day since the birth of the child,--sixteen days exactly since she had written to sir philip errington, informing him of his wife's danger--and the danger was not yet past. thinking over all that had happened, and the apparent hopelessness of the case, she suddenly took a strange idea into her head. retiring to a distant corner, she dropped on her knees. "o lord, god almighty!" she said in a fierce whisper, "behold, i have been thy servant until now! i have wrestled with thee in prayer till i am past all patience! if thou wilt not hear my petition, why callest thou thyself good? is it good to crush the already fallen? is it good to have no mercy on the sorrowful? wilt thou condemn the innocent without reason? if so, thou art not the holy one i imagined! send forth thy power now--now, while there is time! rescue her that is lying under the shadow of death--for how has she offended thee that she should die? delay no longer, or how shall i put my trust in thee? send help speedily from thine everlasting habitations--or, behold! i do forsake thee--and my soul shall seek elsewhere for eternal justice!" as she finished this extraordinary, half-threatening, and entirely blasphemous petition, the boisterous gale roared wildly round the house joining in chorus with the stormy dash of waves upon the coast--a chorus that seemed to ulrika's ears like the sound of fiendish and derisive laughter. she stood listening,--a trifle scared--yet with a sort of fanatical defiance written on her face, and she waited in sullen patience evidently expecting an immediate answer to her outrageous prayer. she felt somewhat like a demagogue of the people, who boldly menaces an all-powerful sovereign, even while in dread of instant execution. there was a sharp patter of sleet on the window,--she glanced nervously at thelma, who, perfectly still on her couch, looked more like a white, recumbent statue than a living woman. the wind shook the doors, and whistled shrilly through the crevices,--then, as though tired of its own wrath, surged away in hoarse murmurs over the tops of the creaking pines towards the fjord, and there was a short, impressive silence. ulrika still waited--almost holding her breath in expectation of some divine manifestation. the brief stillness grew unbearable.. . . hush! what was that! jingle--jangle--jingle--jangle!--bells! sledge bells tinkling musically and merrily--and approaching swiftly, nearer--nearer! now the sharp trotting roofs on the hard snow--then a sudden slackening of speed--the little metallic chimes rang slower and yet more slowly, till with a decisive and melodious clash they stopped! ulrika's heart beat thickly--her face flushed--she advanced to thelma's bedside, hoping, fearing,--she knew not what. there was a tread of firm, yet hurried, footsteps without--a murmur of subdued voices--a half-suppressed exclamation of surprise and relief from valdemar,--and then the door of the room was hastily thrown open, and a man's tall figure, draped in what seemed to be a garment of frozen snowflakes, stood on the threshold. the noise startled thelma--she opened her beautiful, tired, blue eyes. ah! what a divine rapture,--what a dazzling wonder and joy flashed into them, giving them back their old lustre of sunlight sparkling on azure sea! she sprang up in her bed and stretched out her arms. "philip!" she cried sobbingly. "philip! oh my darling! try--try to love me again! . . . just a little!--before i die!" as she spoke she was clasped to his breast,--folded to his heart in that strong, jealous, passionate embrace with which we who love, would fain shield our nearest and dearest from even the shadow of evil--his lips closed on hers,--and in the sacred stillness that followed, ulrika slipped from the room, leaving husband and wife alone together. chapter xxxiv. "i have led her home, my love, my only friend; there is none like her, none! and never yet so warmly ran my blood, and sweetly on and on, calming itself to the long-wished-for end, full to the banks, close on the promised good." tennyson. britta was in the kitchen, dragging off her snow-wet cloak and fur mufflers, and crying heartily all the while. the stalwart svensen stood looking at her in perplexity, now and then uttering a word of vague sympathy and consolation, to which she paid not the slightest heed. the poor girl was tired out, and half-numb with the piercing cold,--the excitement which had kept her up for days and days, had yielded to the nervous exhaustion, which was its natural result,--and she kept on weeping without exactly knowing why she wept. throughout the long and fatiguing journey she had maintained unflinching energy and perseverance,--undaunted by storm, sleet, and darkness, she had driven steadily over long miles of trackless snow--her instinct had guided her by the shortest and quickest routes--she seemed to know every station and village on the way,--she always managed to obtain relays of reindeer just when they were needed,--in short, errington would hardly have been able to reach the altenfjord without her. he had never realized to its full extent her strong, indomitable, devoted character, till he saw her hour after hour seated beside him in the _pulkha_, her hands tightly gripping the reins of the horned animals, whose ways she understood and perfectly controlled,--her bright, bird-like eyes fixed with watchful eagerness on the bewildering white landscape that opened out incessantly before her. her common sense was never at fault--she forgot nothing--and with gentle but respectful firmness she would insist on sir philip's taking proper intervals of rest and refreshment at the different farms they passed on their road, though he, eager to press on, chafed and fretted at every little delay. they were welcomed all along their route with true norse hospitality, though the good country-folk who entertained them could not refrain from astonishment at the idea of their having undertaken such a journey at such a season, and appeared to doubt the possibility of their reaching their destination at all. and now that they had reached it in safety, britta's strength gave way. valdemar svensen had hastily blurted out the news of the _bonde's_ death even while she and sir philip were alighting from their sledge--and in the same breath had told them of thelma's dangerous illness. what wonder, then, that britta sobbed hysterically, and refused to be comforted,--what wonder that she turned upon ulrika as that personage approached, in a burst of unreasonable anger. "oh dear, oh dear!" she cried, "to think that the fröken should be so ill--almost dying! and have nobody but _you_ to attend to her!" this, with a vindictive toss of the brown curls. ulrika winced at her words--she was hurt, but she answered gently-- "i have done my best," she said with a sort of grave pathos, "i have been with her night and day--had she been a daughter of my own blood, i know not how i could have served her with more tenderness. and, surely, it has been a sore and anxious time with me also--for i, too, have learned to love her!" her set mouth quivered,--and britta, seeing her emotion, was ashamed of her first hasty speech. she made an act of contrition at once by putting her arms round ulrika's neck and kissing her--a proceeding which so much astonished that devout servant of luther, that her dull eyes filled with tears. "forgive me!" said the impetuous little maiden. "i was very rude and very unkind! but if you love the fröken, you will understand how i feel--how i wish i could have helped to take care of her. and oh! the _bonde_!"--here she gave way to a fresh burst of tears--"the dear, good, kind, brave _bonde_! that he should be dead!--oh! it is too cruel--too dreadful--i can hardly believe it!" ulrika patted her consolingly on the shoulder, but said nothing--and valdemar sighed. britta sought for her handkerchief, and dried her eyes--but, after a minute, began to cry again as recklessly as ever. "and now"--she gasped--"if the fröken--dies--i will die too. i will--you see if i don't! i _w-w-won't_ live--without her!" and such a big sob broke from her heaving bosom that it threatened to burst her trimly laced little bodice. "she will not die," said ulrika decisively. "i have had my fears--but the crisis is passed. do not fret, britta--there is no longer any danger. her husband's love will lift the trouble from her heart--and strength will return more speedily than it left her." and turning a little aside on the pretence of throwing more wood on the fire, she muttered inaudibly, "o lord, verily thou hast done well to grant my just demand! even for this will i remain thy servant for ever!" after this parenthesis, she resumed the conversation,--valdemar svensen sitting silently apart,--and related all that had happened since thelma's arrival at the altenfjord. she also gave an account of lovisa elsland's death,--though britta was not much affected by the loss of her grandmother. "dreadful old thing!" she said with a shudder. "i'm glad i wasn't with her! i remember how she cursed the fröken,--perhaps her curse has brought all the trouble--if so, it's a good thing she's dead, for now everything will come right again. i used to fancy she had some crime to confess,--did she say anything wicked when she was dying?" ulrika avoided a direct reply to this question. what was the good of horrifying the girl by telling her that her deceased relative was to all intents and purposes a murderess? she resolved to let the secret of old lovisa's life remain buried with her. therefore she simply answered-- "her mind wandered greatly,--it was difficult to hear her last words. but it should satisfy you, britta, to know that she passed away in the fear of the lord." britta gave a little half-dubious, half-scornful smile. she had not the slightest belief in the sincerity of her late grandmother's religious principles. "i don't understand people who are so much _afraid_ of the lord," she said. "they must have done something wrong. if you always do your best, and try to be good, you needn't fear anything. at least, that's my opinion." "there is the everlasting burning," began ulrika solemnly. "oh, nonsense!" exclaimed britta quite impatiently. "i don't believe it!" ulrika started back in wonder and dismay. "you don't believe it!" she said in awed accents. "are you also a heathen?" "i don't know what you mean by a heathen," replied britta almost gaily. "but i can't believe that god, who is so good, is going to everlastingly burn anybody. he couldn't, you know! it would hurt him so much to see poor creatures writhing about in flames for ever--we would not be able to bear it, and i'm quite sure it would make him miserable even in heaven. because he is all love--he says so,--he couldn't be cruel!" this frank statement of britta's views presented such a new form of doctrine to ulrika's heavy mind that she was almost appalled by it. god _couldn't_ burn anybody for ever--he was too good! what a daring idea! and yet so consoling--so wonderful in the infinite prospect of hope it offered, that she smiled,--even while she trembled to contemplate it. poor soul! she talked of heathens--being herself the worst type of heathen--namely, a christian heathen. this sounds incongruous--yet it may be taken for granted that those who profess to follow christianity, and yet make of god, a being malicious, revengeful, and of more evil attributes than they possess themselves,--are as barbarous, as unenlightened, as hopelessly sunken in slavish ignorance as the lowest savage who adores his idols of mud and stone. britta was quite unconscious of having said anything out of the common--she was addressing herself to svensen. "where is the _bonde_ buried, valdemar?" she asked in a low tone. he looked at her with a strange, mysterious smile. "buried? do you suppose his body could mix itself with common earth? no!--he sailed away, britta--away--yonder!" and he pointed out through the window to the fjord now, invisible in the deep darkness. britta stared at him with roundly opened, frightened eyes--her face paled. "sailed away? you must be dreaming! sailed away! how could he--if he was dead?" valdemar grew suddenly excited. "i tell you, he sailed away!" he repeated in a low, hoarse whisper. "where is his ship, the _valkyrie_? try if you can find it anywhere--on sea or land! it has gone, and he has gone with it--like a king and warrior--to glory, joy, and victory! glory--joy--victory!--those were his last words!" britta retreated, and caught ulrika by the arm. "is he mad?" she asked fearfully. valdemar heard her, and rose from his chair, a pained smile on his face. "i am not mad, britta," he said gently. "do not be afraid! if grief for my master could have turned my brain, i had been mad ere this,--but i have all my wits about me, and i have told you the truth." he paused--then added, in a more ordinary tone, "you will need fresh logs of pine--i will go and bring them in." and he went out. britta gazed after him in speechless wonder. "what does he mean?" she asked. "what he says," returned ulrika composedly. "you, like others, must have known that olaf güldmar's creed was a strange one--his burial has been strange--that is all!" and she skillfully turned the conversation, and began to talk of thelma, her sorrows and sufferings. britta was most impatient to see her beloved "fröken," and quite grudged sir philip the long time he remained alone with his wife. "he _might_ call me, if only for a moment," britta thought plaintively. "i do so want to look at her dear face again! but men are all alike--as long as they've got what _they_ want, they never think of anybody else. dear me! i wonder how long i shall have to wait!" so she fumed and fretted, and sat by the kitchen-fire, drinking hot tea and talking to ulrika--all the while straining her ears for the least sound or movement from the adjoining room. but none came--there was the most perfect silence. at last she could endure it no longer--and, regardless of ulrika's remonstrances, she stole on tip-toe to the closed door that barred her from the sight of her heart's idol, and turning the handle softly, opened it and looked in. sir philip saw her, and made a little warning sign, though he smiled. he was sitting by the bedside, and in his arms, nestled against his shoulder, thelma rested. she was fast asleep. the lines of pain had disappeared from her sweet face--a smile was on her lips--her breath came and went with peaceful regularity,--and the delicate hue of a pale rose flushed her cheeks. britta stood gazing on this fair sight till her affectionate little heart overflowed, and the ready tears dropped like diamonds from her curly lashes. "oh, my dear--my dear!" she whispered in a sort of rapture when there was a gentle movement,--and two star-like eyes opened like blue flowers outspreading to the sun. "is that you, britta?" asked a tender, wondering voice--and with a smothered cry of ecstacy, britta sprang to seize the outstretched hand of her beloved fröken, and cover it with kisses. and while thelma laughed with pleasure to see her, and stroked her hair. sir philip described their long drive through the snow, and so warmly praised britta's patience, endurance, and constant cheerfulness, that his voice trembled with its own earnestness, while britta grew rosily red in her deep shyness and embarrassment, vehemently protesting that she had done nothing,--nothing at all to deserve so much commendation. then, after much glad converse, ulrika was called, and sir philip seizing her hand, shook it with such force and fervor that she was quite overcome. "i don't know how to thank you!" he said, his eyes sparkling with gratitude. "it's impossible to repay such goodness as yours! my wife tells me how tender and patient and devoted you have been--that even when she knew nothing else, she was aware of your kindness. god bless you for it! you have saved her life--" "ah, yes, indeed!" interrupted thelma gently. "and life has grown so glad for me again! i do owe you so much." "you owe me nothing," said ulrika in those harsh, monotonous tones which she had of late learned to modulate. "nothing. the debt is all on my side." she stopped abruptly--a dull red color flushed her face--her eyes dwelt on thelma with a musing tenderness. sir philip looked at her in some surprise. "yes," she went on. "the debt is all on my side. hear me out, sir philip--and you too,--you 'rose of the northern forest', as sigurd used to call you! you have not forgotten sigurd?" "forgotten him?" said thelma softly. "never! . . . i loved him too well!" ulrika's head dropped. "he was my son!" she said. there was a silence of complete astonishment. ulrika paused--then, as no one uttered a word, she looked up boldly, and spoke with a sort of desperate determination. "you see you have nothing to thank me for," she went on, addressing herself to sir philip, while thelma, leaning back on her pillows, and holding britta's hand, regarded her with a new and amazed interest. "perhaps, if you had known what sort of a woman i am, you might not have liked me to come near--_her_." and she motioned towards thelma. "when i was young--long ago--i loved--" she laughed bitterly. "it seems a strange thing to say, does it not? let it pass--the story of my love, my sin and shame, need not be told here! but sigurd was my child--born in an evil hour--and i--i strove to kill him at his birth." thelma uttered a faint cry of horror. ulrika turned an imploring gaze upon her. "don't hate me!" she said, her voice trembling. "don't, for god's sake, hate me! you don't know what i have suffered! i was mad, i think, at the time--i flung the child in the fjord to drown;--your father, olaf güldmar, rescued him. i never knew that till long after;--for years the crime i had committed weighed upon my soul,--i prayed and strove with the lord for pardon, but always, always felt that for me there, was no forgiveness. lovisa elsland used to call me "murderess;" she was right--i was one, or so i thought--till--till that day i met you, fröken thelma, on the hills with sigurd,--and the lad fought with me." she shuddered,--and her eyes looked wild. "i recognized him--no matter how! . . . he bore my mark upon him--he was my son,--_mine_!--the deformed, crazy creature who yet had wit enough to love _you_--you, whom then i hated--but now--" she stopped and advanced a little closer to thelma's bedside. "now, there is nothing i would not do for you, my dear!" she said very gently. "but you will not need me any more. you understand what you have done for me,--you and your father? you have saved me by saving sigurd,--saved _me_ from being weighed down to hell with the crime of murder! and you made the boy happy while he lived. all the rest of my days spent in your service could not pay back the worth of that good deed. and most heartily do i thank the lord that he has mercifully permitted me to tend and comfort you in the hour of trouble--and, moreover, that he has given me strength to speak and confess my sin and unworthiness before you ere i depart. for now the trouble is past, i must remove my shadow from your joy. god bless you!--and--try to think as kindly as you can of me for--for sigurd's sake!" stooping, she kissed thelma's hand,--and, before any one had time to speak a word, she left the room abruptly. when, in a few minutes, britta went to look after her, she was gone. she had departed to her own house in bosekop, where she obstinately remained. nothing would induce her to present herself again before sir philip or thelma, and it was not till many days after they had left the altenfjord that she was once more seen about the village. and then she was a changed being. no longer harsh or forbidding in manner, she became humble and gentle,--she ministered to the sick, and consoled the afflicted--but she was especially famous for her love of children. all the little ones of the place knew her, and were attracted by her,--and the time came when ulrika, white-haired, and of peaceful countenance, could be seen knitting at her door in the long summer afternoons surrounded by a whole army of laughing, chattering, dimpled youngsters, who would play at hide-and-seek behind her chair, and clamber up to kiss her wrinkled cheeks, putting their chubby arms round her neck with that guileless confidence children show only to those whom they feel can appreciate such flattering attentions. some of her acquaintance were wont to say that she was no longer the "godly" ulrika--but however this might be, it is certain she had drifted a little nearer to the author of all godliness, which--after all,--is the most we dare to strive for in all our differing creeds. it was not long before thelma began to recover. the day after her husband arrived, and ulrika departed, she rose from her bed with britta's assistance, and sat by the blazing fire, wrapped in her white gown and looking very fragile, though very lovely, philip had been talking to her for some time, and now he sat at her feet, holding her hand in his, and, watching her face, on which there was an expression of the most plaintive and serious penitence. "i have been very wicked!" she said, with such a quaint horror of herself that her husband laughed. "now i look back upon it all, i think i have behaved so very badly! because i ought never to have doubted you, my boy--no--not for all the lady winsleighs in the world. and poor mr. neville! he must be so unhappy! but it was that letter--that letter in your own writing, philip!" "of course!" he answered soothingly. "no wonder you thought me a dreadful fellow! but you won't do so again, will you, thelma? you will believe that you are the crown and centre of my life--the joy of all the world to me?" "yes, i will!" she said softly and proudly. "though it is always the same, i never do think myself worthy! but i must try to grow very conceited, and assure myself that i am very valuable! so that then i shall understand everything better, and be wiser." philip laughed. "talking of letters," he said suddenly, "here's one i wrote to you from hull--it only got here today. where it has been delayed is a mystery. you needn't read it--you know everything in it already. then there's a letter on the shelf up there addressed in your writing--it seems never to have been opened." he reached it down, and gave it to her. as she took it, her face grew very sad. "it is the one i wrote to my father before i left london," she said. and her eyes filled with tears. "it came too late!" "thelma," said sir philip then, very gently and gravely, "would you like--can you bear--to read your father's last words to you? he wrote to you on his death-bed, and gave the letter to valdemar--" "oh, let me see it!" she murmured half-sobbingly. "father,--dear father! i knew he would not leave me without a word!" sir philip reverently opened the folded paper which svensen had committed to his care that morning, and together they read the _bonde's_ farewell. it ran as follows:-- "thelma, my beloved," "the summons i have waited for has come at last, and the doors of valhalla are set open to receive my soul. wonder not that i depart with joy! old as i am, i long for youth--the everlasting youth of which the strength and savor fails not. i have lived long enough to know the sameness of this world--though there is much therein to please the heart and eye of a man--but with that roving restlessness that was born within me, i desire to sail new seas and gaze on new lands, where a perpetual light shines that knows no fading. grieve not for me--thou wilt remember that, unlike a christian, i see in death the chiefest glory of life--and thou must not regret that i am eager to drain this cup of world-oblivion offered by the gods. i leave thee,--not sorrowfully,--for thou art in shelter and safety--the strong protection of thy husband's love defends thee and the safeguard of thine own innocence. my blessing upon him and thee! serve him, thelma mine, with full devotion and obedience--even as i have taught thee,--thus drawing from thy womanlife its best measure of sweetness,--keep the bright shield of thy truth untarnished--and live so that at the hour of thine own death-ecstasy thou mayest depart as easily as a song-bird soaring to the sun! i pass hence in happiness--if thou dost shed a tear thou wrongest my memory,--there is naught to weep for. valdemar will give me the crimson shroud and ocean grave of my ancestors--but question him not concerning this fiery pomp of my last voyage--he is but a serf, and his soul is shaken to its very depths by sorrow. let him be--he will have his reward hereafter. and now farewell, child of my heart--darling of mine age--clear mirror in which my later life has brightened to content! all partings are brief--we shall meet again--thou and i and philip--and all who have loved or who love each other,--the journey heavenwards may be made by different roads, but the end--the glory--the immortality is the same! peace be upon thee and on thy children and on thy children's children!" "thy father, olaf gÜldmar." in spite of the brave old pagan's declaration that tears would wrong his memory, they dropped bright and fast from his daughter's eyes as she kissed again and again the words his dying hand had pencilled,--while errington knew not which feeling gained the greater mastery over him,--grief for a good man's loss, or admiration for the strong, heroic spirit in which that good man had welcomed death with rejoicing. he could not help comparing the _bonde's_ departure from this life with that of sir francis lennox, the man of false fashion, who had let slip his withered soul with an oath into the land of nowhere. presently thelma grew calmer, and began to speak in hushed, soft tones-- "poor valdemar!" she said meditatively. "his heart must ache very much, philip!" philip looked up inquiringly. "you see, my father speaks of the 'crimson shroud,'" she went on. "that means that he was buried like many of the ancient norwegian sea kings;--he was taken from his bed while dying and placed on board his own ship to breathe his last; then the ship was set on fire and sent out to sea. i always knew he wished it so. valdemar must have done it all--for i,--i saw the last glimpse of the flames on the fjord the night i came home! oh, philip!" and her beautiful eyes rested tenderly upon him, "it was all so dreadful--so desolate! i wanted--i prayed to die also! the world was so empty--it seemed as if there was nothing left!" philip, still sitting at her feet, encircled her with both arms, and drew her down to him. "my thelma!" he whispered, "there _is_ nothing left--nothing at all worth living for,--save love!" "ah! but that," she answered softly, "is everything!" * * * * * * is it so, indeed? is love alone worth living for--worth dying for? is it the only satisfying good we can grasp at among the shifting shadows of our brief existence? in its various phases and different workings, is it, after all, the brightest radiance known in the struggling darkness of our lives? sigurd had thought so,--he had died to prove it. philip thought so,--when once more at home in england with his recovered "treasure of the golden midnight" he saw her, like a rose refreshed by rain, raise her bright head in renewed strength and beauty, with the old joyous lustre dancing in her eyes, and the smile of a perfect happiness like summer sunshine on her fair face. lord winsleigh thought so;--he was spending the winter in rome with his wife and son,--and there among the shadows of the caesars, his long, social martyrdom ended, and he regained what he had once believed lost for ever--his wife's affection. clara gentle, wistful, with the softening shadow of a great sorrow and a great repentance in her once too-brilliant eyes, was a very different clara to the dashing "beauty" who had figured so conspicuously in london society. she clung to her husband with an almost timid eagerness as though she dreaded losing him--and when he was not with her, she seemed to rely entirely on her son, whom she watched with a fond, almost melancholy pride, and who responded to her tenderness though proffered so late, with the full-hearted frankness of his impulsive, ardent nature. she wrote to thelma asking her pardon, and in return received such a sweet, forgiving, generous letter as caused her to weep for an hour or more. but she felt she could never again meet the clear regard of those beautiful, earnest, truthful eyes--never again could she stand in thelma's presence, or call her friend--that was all over. still love remained,--a love, chastened and sad, with drooping wings and a somewhat doubting smile,--yet it was love-- "love, that keeps all the choir of lives in chime-- love, that is blood--within the veins of time." and love, no matter how abused and maltreated, is a very patient god, and even while suffering from undeserved wounds, still works on, doing magical things. so that poor edward neville, the forsaken husband of violet vere, when he heard that that popular actress had died suddenly in america from a fit of delirium tremens brought on by excessive drinking, was able, by some gentle method known only to love and himself, to forget all her frailties--to obliterate from his memory the fact that he ever saw her on the boards of the brilliant theatre,--and to think of her henceforth only as the wife he had once adored, and who, he decided in vague, dreamy fashion, must have died young. love also laid a firm hand on the vivacious pierre duprèz--he who had long scoffed at the _jeu d'amour_, played it at last in grave earnest,--and one bright season he introduced his bride into parisian society,--a charming little woman, with very sparkling eyes and white teeth, who spoke french perfectly, though not with the ''haccent' recommended by briggs. it was difficult to recognize britta in the _petite élégante_ who laughed and danced and chattered her way through some of the best _salons_ in paris, captivating everybody as she went,--but there she was, all the same, holding her own as usual. her husband was extremely proud of her--he was fond of pointing her out to people as something excessively precious and unique--and saying--"see her! that is my wife! from norway! yes--from the very utmost north of norway! i love my country--certainly!--but i will tell you this much--if i had been obliged to choose a wife among french women--_ma foi!_ i should never have married!" and what of george lorimer?--the idle, somewhat careless man of "modern" type, in whose heart, notwithstanding the supposed deterioration of the age, all the best and bravest codes of old-world chivalry were written? had love no fair thing to offer _him_? was he destined to live out his life in the silent heroism of faithful, unuttered, unrequited, unselfish devotion? were the heavens, as sigurd had said, always to be empty? apparently not,--for when he was verging towards middle age, a young lady besieged him with her affections, and boldly offered to be his wife any day he chose to name. she was a small person, not quite five years old, with great blue eyes and a glittering tangle of golden curls. she made her proposal one summer afternoon on the lawn at errington manor, in the presence of beau lovelace, on whose knee sat her little brother olaf, a fine boy a year younger than herself. she had placed her dimpled arms round lorimer's neck,--and when she so confidingly suggested marriage to her "zordie," as she called him, she was rubbing her rosy, velvety cheek against his moustache with much sweet consideration and tenderness. lovelace, hearing her, laughed aloud, whereat the little lady was extremely offended. "i don't tare!" she said, with pretty defiance. "i do love oo, zordie, and i will marry oo!" george held her fondly to his breast as though she were some precious fragile flower of which not a petal must be injured. "all right!" he answered gaily, though his voice trembled somewhat, "i accept! you shall be my little wife, thelma. consider it settled!" apparently she did so consider it, for from that day, whenever she was asked her name, she announced herself proudly as "zordie's 'ittle wife, thelma"--to the great amusement of her father, sir philip, and that other thelma, on whom the glory of motherhood had fallen like a new charm, investing both face and form with superior beauty and an almost divine serenity. but "zordie's wife" took her _sobriquet_ very seriously,--so much so, indeed, that by-and-by "zordie" began to take it rather seriously himself--and to wonder whether, after all, marriages, unequal in point of age, might not occasionally turn out well. he condemned himself severely for the romanticism of thinking such thoughts, even while he indulged in them, and called himself "an old fool," though he was in the actual prime of manhood, and an exceedingly handsome fellow withal. but when the younger thelma came back at the age of sixteen from her convent school at arles,--the same school where her mother had been before her,--she looked so like her mother, so very like, that his heart began to ache with the old, wistful, passionate longing he fancied he had stilled for ever. he struggled against this feeling for a while, till at last it became too strong for him,--and then, though he told himself it was absurd,--that a man past forty had no right to expect to win a girl's first love, he grew so reckless that he determined to risk his fate with her. one day, therefore, he spoke out, scarcely knowing what he said, and only conscious that his pulses were beating with abnormal rapidity. she listened to his tremulous, rather hesitating proposal with exceeding gravity, and appeared more surprised than displeased. raising her glorious blue eyes--eyes in which her mother's noble, fearless look was faithfully reflected, she said simply, just in her mother's own quaint way-- "i do not know why you talk about this at all. i thought it was all settled long ago!" "settled!" faltered lorimer astonished,--he was generally self-possessed, but this fair young lady's perfect equanimity far surpassed his at that moment--"settled! my darling! my child--i am so much older than you are--" "i don't like _boys_!" she declared, with stately disdain. "i was your wife when i was little--and i thought it was to be the same thing now i am big! i told mother so, and she was quite pleased. but of course, if you don't want me--" she was not allowed to finish her sentence, for lorimer, with a sudden rush of joy that almost overpowered him, caught her in his arms and pressed the first lover's kiss on her pure, innocently smiling lips. "want you!" he murmured passionately, with a strange sweet mingling of the past and present in his words. "i have always wanted--thelma!" scanned images of public domain material from the google print archive. mammon and co. by e. f. benson. * * * * * mammon and co. mo. cloth, $ . . this latest novel by a popular author deals with personages living in the same society that was characterized by "dodo" and "the rubicon." mr. benson is thoroughly acquainted with the society in which he places the scenes of his novels of london life. in "mammon and co." the good genius of the tale is an american girl. the book will be found to be one of exceeding interest throughout. dodo. _a detail of the day._ mo. paper, cents; cloth, $ . . "'dodo' is a delightfully witty sketch of the 'smart' people of society.... the writer is a true artist."--_london spectator._ the rubicon. mo. paper, cents; cloth, $ . . "the anticipations which must have been formed by all readers of 'dodo' will in no wise be disappointed by 'the rubicon.' the new work is well written, stimulating, unconventional, and, in a word, characteristic. intellectual force is never absent, and the keen observation and knowledge of character, of which there is abundant evidence, are aided by real literary power."--_birmingham post._ * * * * * d. appleton and company, new york. mammon and co. by e. f. benson author of dodo, the rubicon [illustration] new york d. appleton and company copyright, , by d. appleton and company. contents _book i_ chapter page i.--the city dinner ii.--sunday morning iii.--after the gee-gee party iv.--kit's little plan v.--toby vi.--toby's partner vii.--the solitary financier viii.--the simply nobody ix.--the plot miscarries x.--mrs. murchison's diplomacy xi.--mr. alington opens check xii.--the cottage by the sea xiii.--toby to the rescue xiv.--the chairman and the director xv.--the week by the sea _book ii_ i.--kit's meditations ii.--the first deal iii.--lily draws a cheque iv.--the darkened house v.--toby acts without speaking vi.--lily's desire vii.--the second deal viii.--mr. alington leaves london ix.--the slump x.--toby draws the moral _book i_ chapter i the city dinner "egotism is certainly the first," said lady conybeare with admirable firmness; "and your inclination towards your neighbour is the second." now, this was the sort of thing which alice haslemere liked; and she stopped abruptly in the middle of her rather languishing conversation with nobody in particular to ask for explanations. it sounded promising. "the first what, and the second what, kit?" she inquired. "the first and the second lessons," said lady conybeare promptly. "the first and the second social virtues, if you are particular. i am going to set up a school for the propagation of social virtues, where i shall teach the upper classes to be charming. there shall be a special class for royalty." lady haslemere was not generally known as being particularly particular, but she took her stand on kit's conditional, and defended it. "there is nothing like particularity--nothing," she said earnestly, with a sort of missionary zeal to disagree with somebody; "though some people try to get on without it." being a great friend of kit's, she knew that it was sufficient for her to state a generality of any kind to get it contradicted. she was not wrong in this instance. kit sighed with the air of a woman who meant to do her unpleasant duty like a sister and a christian. "dear alice," she said, "there is nothing so thoroughly irritating as particularity. i am not sure what you mean by it, but i suppose you allude either to people who are prudes or to people who are always letting fly precise information at one. they always want it back too. don't you know how the people who insist on telling one the exact time are just those who ask one for the exact time. i never know the exact time, and i never want to be told it. and i hate a prudish woman," she concluded with emphasis, "as much as i abhor a well-informed man." "put it the other way round," said lady haslemere, "and i agree with you. i loathe a prudish man, and i detest a well-informed woman." "there aren't any of either," said lady conybeare. she sat up very straight in her chair as she made this surprising assertion, and arranged the lace round her throat. her attitude gave one the impression somehow of a rakish frigate clearing for action, and on the moment came the first shot. "i am a prude," said a low, bass voice at her elbow. kit scarcely glanced round. "i know you are," she said, replying with a heavy broadside; "but then you are not a man." "that depends on what you mean by a man," said the voice again. the speaker was so hidden by the arms of the low chair in which he sat, that a knee, shin and foot, in a horizontal line on the invisible support of another knee, was all that could be seen of him. "i mean a human being who likes killing things," said kit without hesitation. "i killed a wasp yesterday," said the voice; "at least, i think it died afterwards. certainly i disabled it. oh, i am sure i killed it." "yes, and you remembered it to-day," said lady conybeare briskly. "you did not really kill it; it lives in your memory, and--and poisons your life. in time it will kill you. do you suppose jack remembers the grouse he killed yesterday?" "oh, but jack is like the oldest inhabitant," said lady haslemere. "he never remembers anything, just as the oldest inhabitant never remembers a flood or a thunderstorm or a famine at all like the one in question. that means they don't remember anything at all, for one famine is just like another; so are thunderstorms." kit paused a moment, with her head on one side, regarding the speaker. "no; forgetfulness is not characteristic of jack," she said, "any more than memory is. he remembers what he wants to remember, and forgets what he wants to forget. now, it's just the opposite with me. i forget what i want to remember--horrid stories about my friends, for instance--and i remember the sort of thing i want to forget--like--like sunday morning. isn't it so, jack?" a slightly amused laugh came from a man seated in the window, who was no other than the jack in question, and, incidentally, kit's husband. "it is true i make a point of forgetting unpleasant things," he said; "that is the only real use of having a memory decently under control. i forget kit's milliner's bills----" "so do i, darling," said kit with sudden affection. "no, you don't; you only remind me to forget them. i forget the names and faces of uninteresting people. i forget--no, i don't forget that----" "what don't you forget, jack?" demanded kit with some sharpness. "i don't believe it." "i don't forget that we've got to dine in the city at half-past seven. why ever there was such an hour as half-past seven to put into a christian clock i can't conjecture," he said in a tone of regretful wonder. "well, if you forget unpleasant things, and you don't forget that, perhaps it will be pleasant." "i am quite certain it will be infernal," said jack. "go and dress, kit." lady conybeare frowned impatiently. "oh, jack! when will you learn that i cannot do what you ask if you talk to me in that way?" she cried. "i was just going to dress. now i can't, and we shall both be late, which will be very tiresome. you will curse and swear at me like st. peter for keeping you waiting. how stupid you are, and how little you know me!" lord conybeare looked at his watch. "it is exactly three minutes to six," he said. "you needn't go for half an hour yet. there is loads of time--loads!" kit got up at once. "that's a dear boy," she said. "gracious! it's past the half-hour! i must fly! good-bye, alice; conybeare and i will look in on you after our dinner. i think you said you were going to have a nice round game with counters. good-bye, tom, and learn not to be a prude." "i'm sure you would teach me, if anybody could," said tom rather viciously. kit adjusted the lace round her throat again. "thanks for the compliment," she said; "but prudes are born, not made. you don't shoot, you don't hunt, you remember every wasp you have possibly killed. oh, tom, i am afraid you are hopeless. don't laugh. i mean what i say; at least, i think i mean the greater part of it." "i reserve the less, then," said tom. "i must go too. so alice and haslemere and i will see you to-night?" "yes; we'll escape as soon as we can from the dinner. mind you take some money with you, jack, for the round game. i must fly," she said again, and took her graceful presence very slowly out of the room. there was a short silence, broken by lord conybeare. "it is odd how you can tell a man by the hour at which he dines," he said. "seven is an impossible hour, and the people who dine at seven are as impossible as the hour. people who dine at half-past are those who are trying to dine at eight and cannot manage it. they are also trying not to be impossible, and cannot." lady haslemere got up. "i once knew a man who dined at ten minutes to eight," she said, "which struck me as extremely curious. he was an archdeacon. i believe all archdeacons dine at ten minutes to eight. and they call it a quarter to, which is even odder." "i don't know any archdeacons," said tom, with a touch of wistfulness in his voice. "introduce me to one to-night, alice." "archdeacons don't come to berkeley street," said she. "why not? how exclusive! do they expect berkeley street to come to them?" "probably. they are trained to believe nothing which is not incredible. it is exactly that which makes them impossible." "extremes meet," said lord conybeare. "the sceptic forces himself to believe everything that is perfectly credible. and he succeeds so well. sceptics believe that they once ate nuts--we've all eaten nuts once--and are descended from apes. and how obvious is their genealogy from their faces! if i was going to be anything, it should not be a sceptic." lady haslemere wandered once round the room, condemning the china silently. "i must positively go," she said. "do, alice!" said jack; "because i want to dress. but you are rather like kit. when she says she must fly, it means she has little intention of walking, just yet." lady haslemere laughed. "come, tom," she said. "we are not wanted. how deeply pathetic that is! they will want us some day, as the hangman said. well, jack, we shall see you later. i _am_ going." lord conybeare went upstairs to his dressing-room, revolving with some intentness the affair of this city dinner. the taking off his coat led him to wind up his watch, and he was so lost in thought that for a moment he looked surprisedly at his dress-clothes, which were laid out for him, as if pyjamas would have been a more likely find. but his linked and studded shirt was an irresistible reminder that it was dinner-time, not bedtime, and he proceeded to dress with a certain neat haste that was clearly characteristic of him. in stature he was somewhat below the average size, both in height and breadth; but one felt that an auctioneer of men might most truthfully have said, when he came to him at a sale: "here is a rather smaller specimen, gentlemen, but much more highly finished, and very strong!" the quick deftness of even unimportant movements certainly gave the impression of great driving power; everything he did was done unerringly; he had no fumblings with his studs, and his tie seemed to fashion a faultless, careless bow under a mere suggestion from his thin, taper-nailed fingers. he looked extremely well bred, and a certain mephistophelian sharpness about his face, though it might have warned those whom kit would have called prudes--for this was rather a sweeping word with her--that he might not be desirable as a friend, would certainly have warned the prudent that he would assuredly be much more undesirable as an enemy. on the whole, a prudent prude would have tried to keep on good terms with him. he appeared, in fact, even on so hasty and informal a glance as that which we are giving him as he arranges his tie, to be one of those lucky people to whom it is well to be pleasant, for it was difficult to imagine that he was afraid of anything or cared for anybody. certain happily-constituted folk have never had any doubt about the purpose of the world, so clearly was it designed to feed and amuse them. lord conybeare was one of these; and in justice to the world we must say that it performed its altruistic part very decently indeed. jack conybeare was still on the sunny side of thirty-five. he and kit had been married some seven years, and had no children, a privation for which they were touchingly thankful. they had, both of them, quite sufficient responsibilities, or, to speak more precisely, liabilities; and to be in any way responsible for any liabilities beyond their own would have seemed to them a vicarious burden of the most intolerable sort. their own, it is only fair to add, sat but lightly on them; kit, in particular, wore hers most gracefully, like a becoming mantle. chronic conditions, for the most part, tend to cease being acutely felt, and both she and jack would far sooner have had a couple of thousand pounds in hand, and fifty thousand pounds in debt, than not to have owed or owned a penny. kit had once even thought of advertising in the morning papers that a marchioness of pleasing disposition was willing to do anything in the world for a thousand pounds, and jack had agreed that there was something in the idea, though the flaw in it was cheapness: you should not give yourself away. he himself had mortgaged every possible acre of his property, and sold all that was available to sell, and the close of every day exhibited to a wondering world how it was possible to live in the very height of fashion and luxury without any means of living at all. had he and kit sat down for a moment by the side of a road, or loitered in park lane, they would probably have been haled, by the fatherly care of english law, to the nearest magistrate, for that they had no apparent means of sustenance. luckily they never thought of doing anything of the kind, finding it both safer and pleasanter to entertain princes and give the best balls in london. a want of money is an amiable failing, common to the saint and the sinner alike, and does not stand in the way of the _accusé_ acquiring great popularity. jack, it is true, had no friends, for the very simple reason that he did not in the least want them; kit, on the other hand, had enough for two. her rules of life were very uncomplicated, and they daily became more so. "you can't be too charming," was the chief of them. she took infinite pains to make herself almost universally agreeable, and was amply repaid, for she was almost universally considered to be so. this embracing desire had its drawbacks, but kit's remedies for them quite met the case. for instance, when any woman whom she did not happen to remember by sight greeted her, as often happened, effusively at some evening party, kit always kissed her with a corresponding effusion; if a man in the same circumstances did the same, she always said reproachfully, "you _never_ come to see us now." in this way her total ignorance of who they were became a trivial thing; both were charmed, and when people are charmed, their names become of notable insignificance. the finest inventions of all are the simplest, and the simplicity of jack's _modus vivendi_ rivalled its own subtlety and the subtlety of kit's. he loudly professed staunch conservative principles, always voted with the bishops in the house of lords on any question, and had made a special study of guano and church ritual. a method exposed always sounds a little crude, but the crudity often belongs not to the method but to its exposure. certainly jack's method answered, and no method can do more. the mammon of unrighteousness, not being deceived, but not being shocked at such duplicity, thought him very clever, and the unmammon of righteousness, being deceived, was not shocked at other things which were occasionally in the air about him. with perfect justice they labelled the world scandal-loving and uncharitable when they were told these other things, and asked jack to dinner, to show that they did not believe them. a further proof of his wisdom may be seen in the fact that he accepted such invitations, and if he and kit left early, it was not because they were going on elsewhere to play round games, but because the laying of foundation-stones and the opening of bazaars had been so fatiguing. but though both he and kit were fond of appearing other than they were to sets other than their own, they were on the whole singularly unsecretive to each other. in the first place, they both knew that the other was reasonably sharp, and while each respected the other for this sharpness, they realized that any attempt to deceive would probably be detected. in the second place, a far better reason, even on the lowest grounds, on which they took it, they knew that mutual lying is a rotten basis for married life. each allowed the other a wide latitude, and in consequence they were excellent friends, and always lent each other a helping hand if there was any scheme of mutual aggrandizement to be put through. there were just a few questions that kit never put to jack, nor he to her; each had a cupboard, a very little one, to which there was only one key, and they were wise enough never to ask each other for it. such, hitherto, had been their married life--a great deal of frankness and confidence, and an absolute respect for the privacy of the other's innermost sanctum. to-night there was a beautiful scheme in the egg ready to be hatched, or neither of them would have dreamed of dining in the city at half-past seven. attention was just beginning to be directed to west australian gold-mining, and the public had awoke to the fact that there were large fortunes to be made, or lost, in that direction. thus jack, having no fortune to lose, went into it with a light heart; he was clearly marked out as one of those who were destined to win. in pursuance of the laudable idea of avoiding a really serious financial crisis, they were dining at the drapers' company, where they would meet a mr. frank alington, who had a whole fleet of little paper companies, it was understood, ready to be floated. jack had met him once, and had taken this opportunity of meeting him again, hoping to find bread upon the waters. it was to be kit's business to make herself inimitably agreeable, ask him to park lane, and leave the rest to jack. she, of course, would have a finger in the profits. kit was delighted to take the part assigned to her. jack had looked into her bedroom as she was dressing, and through the half-open door had said, "very gorgeous, please, kit," and she had understood that this was a really important operation, and that a dazzling wife was part of the apparatus necessary. she had not meant to dress very particularly; plush and cairngorms, she had once said to jack, was the sort of thing the city really appreciated, but she was always ready, within reason, to do as jack wished, and she told her maid to get out a dress that had arrived from paris only that morning. but jack's remark to her as she was dressing was the sort of hint that kit always took. it cost so little to be pleasant in these ways, and how wise it was to obey one's husband in such matters! she had intended to keep this dress for a royal dinner a week hence, but she put it on without a murmur, and, indeed, her wifely devotion had its immediate reward. for the dress! that surpassing man jean worth had said once, not to herself, but to some other customer, and no friend of hers, that it was a real pleasure to dress lady conybeare; and lady conybeare, on her side, kindly considered it a real pleasure to be dressed by worth. thus the gratification was mutual, and it must have been a consolation to the dressmaker, if he had to whistle long and loud for his cheque, to have his artistic pleasure to fall back on. now kit--a rare accomplishment--could stand orange, and to stand orange means to be admirably suited to orange. she loved it herself, jean genuinely agreed with her, and in this dress four tints of orange chiffon, _dantè_, _faisan doré_, _vésuve_, and _pomme d'or_, blazed together. even worth, the greatly daring, had inwardly felt a qualm of audacity, but how admirably, when kit was inside the gown, had his audacity succeeded! "_réussi!_" he would have sighed had he seen it. over all was a fine net of pale mandarin yellow, to which was tacked a cusped acanthus pattern of sequins; and kit, looking at herself long and critically in her wardrobe glass, said "lor'!" her glorious red-gold hair, full of dusky flames, of a tint after which nature blindly gropes where paris leads the way, was the point to which worth had worked, and his success was beyond all approval or praise. next came the question of jewels, and hortense, her maid, with the artist's eye, thought that pearls and pearls only, _pas un diamant_, would be consummately chic. kit saw what she meant, and from an artistic point of view devoutly agreed, but she turned up her nose at the suggestion. "we don't want to be chic, my good woman," she said. "we want to hit 'em in the eye. the rubies, hortense!" now, the rubies were really fine, glorious molten lakes of colour, almost barbarically splendid, and being entailed, they had been forced to remain in the conybeare coffers. but if ever a woman and her dress were designed and built for rubies, kit and this creation were. hortense, moved beyond her wont, ejaculated "_mon dieu!_" as the gorgeous baubles were clasped on kit's dazzling neck; and her mistress, being as candid with herself as she was with her husband, smiled serenely at her own reflection. "a touch of rouge," she said to hortense, and when that was unerringly applied, "there," she murmured, "that will double up the city. and jack," she added to herself, "will then proceed to pick its pockets." she rustled across the floor, and tapped at the door of her husband's dressing-room. "are you ready, jack?" she asked. "yes, just. come in, kit." kit took from her table the orange-red fan which worth had sent with the dress, threw the door open and held her head very high. "the gold-miner's wife," she remarked. her husband looked at her a moment in blank admiration. seven years' husband as he was, kit still occasionally "knocked him over" as he expressed it, and she knocked him over now. then he laughed outright. "that ought to fetch 'em," he said frankly. "so i think," said kit; "but really, jack, it was a sacrifice putting this on. remember that, please. i was keeping it for the royalties next week, but you said 'very gorgeous,' and i obeyed." "oh, blow the royalties!" said jack. "dress in tartan plaid for them, or a kilt even. besides, it is bad form for a hostess to be better dressed than her guests. that dress wouldn't do at all, kit, in your own house. they would think you were an advanced radical." the india-rubber-tired brougham, with its little electric lamp in the roof (kit's only real extravagance for more than ten days, as she triumphantly told jack) was ready when they got downstairs, and they rolled off into the gaslit roar of the streets. this way and that flashed the gleaming lights of hansoms and carriages; it was like passing through an august shower of shooting-stars. long queues of waiting folk stretched like snakes from the pit-doors of theatres; newsboys roared their "'orrible and revoltin'" details; jewellers' shops with windows a blaze of gems signalled and winked across the streets; feathered women peacocked along, making eyes at the passers; loungers lounged; busy little men with black bags made scurrying bee-lines across the crowded roadway; buses, a plaster of advertisements, swung nodding on their way; and bicycles glided by them so spare and silent that they might have been incorporeal things. high up on house-roofs glowed the changing colours of prima-donna soaps, putting to shame the lesser lights of heaven; now an invisible gigantic penman would write _kodak_ with large flowing hand in red ink, then, dissatisfied, delete it, and try it again in yellow. here the crystal signs of music-halls flashed diamonds, or the open door of a restaurant cast a brilliant square of light on to the street. then for a moment a strident, diabolically-precise scale from a street-organ would overscore all other noises; but the hoofs and wheels which bore the hungry world to the houses of its friends to be fed reasserted itself with a crash and trample like some valkürie-ritt; the whole town was abroad, and humming like a swarming beehive. kit was never tired of the spectacle of life, provided it was gay, and varied, and full. the incessant movement, the infinite separate businesses, which went to make up the great major chord of london streets, the admirable pace at which the world moved, the marvel of its contrasts, the gas, the glitter, the sordidness and the splendour rubbing shoulders, all appealed to her tremendous _joie de vivre_, the best and the most unvarying factor in her very living character. she had once expressed a wish to be buried, like a suicide at cross-roads, in the very centre of piccadilly circus. "no country churchyards or knells of parting day for me, thank you," she had said. all down piccadilly she was silent, looking devouringly from the window of the brougham at the kaleidoscope outside, but when they turned out of trafalgar square down northumberland avenue, to avoid the strand, which at that hour spouts and bubbles with traffic like a weir in spring, she turned to her husband with a sigh of regret at leaving the fuller streets. "the outline of the plot, jack?" she said. "don't know it myself yet," said jack. "but the _vieux premier_ is alington--a heavy, solemn man, like a butler, rather tiresome, i'm afraid. very likely you will sit next him; he is a guest of the drapers' like ourselves. if not, get hold of him somehow. he might dine to-morrow." "but we give a dance to-morrow," said kit, "and we feed only the very brightest and best." "all the more reason for alington coming, perhaps," said jack. "i have heard it said that there are still a few people who care for a duke as such. it sounds odd, but let us hope he is one." "yes, those people are so easy to deal with," said kit thoughtfully. "but it will upset the table, jack." "of course, if you put your table as more important than possible thousands," said jack. "it is really a big thing then?" asked kit. "it is possibly a very big thing. i know no more than you yet. it may even run to a saturday till monday or more." "very good. i'll upset the whole apple-cart for it, as mr. rhodes says. here we are. let's get away early, jack. i said we'd go to berkeley street afterwards." "we'll go as early as we can," he replied. "but you mustn't risk not landing your fish because you don't play him long enough." "oh, jack, i am not a fool," she said. "order the carriage for ten. i'd undertake in this gown to land the whole house of laymen by ten without a gaff. dear jean worth! what a lot of money i owe him, and what a lot of pleasure he gives me! i should be puzzled to say which was the greater." chapter ii sunday morning mr. frank alington turned out to be a star of greater magnitude, in fact a saturday till monday star, almost a comet. lord conybeare found that the whirl and bustle of london did not allow of his seeing enough of him, so he phrased it, and thus it happened that, some ten days after the dinner at the drapers' company (kit's playing and landing of the fish having been masterly, for she had him dead-beat long before ten), mr. alington arrived on a saturday afternoon in june at what kit called their "cottage" in buckinghamshire. strictly speaking--though she did not often speak strictly--it was not a cottage at all; and it was certainly not in buckinghamshire, but in berkshire. but there was a rustic, almost bohemian, sound to kit's mind in buckinghamshire, whereas berkshire only reminded one of bacon, and a few miles either way made a very little difference. "and if i choose to call berkshire the malay archipelago," said kit, "who is to stop me?" however, to adopt kit's nomenclature, the cottage in question was a large red-brick elizabethan house on the banks of the thames, with a few acres of conservatories, and a charming flower-garden, leading down by green degrees and cut yew hedges to the river. but the cottage idea was not wholly absent, for they always dined in the room which had once certainly been the kitchen. the range had been removed, leaving an immense open fireplace, where it was sacrilege to burn anything but logs, and the most charming dark oak dressers, bearing under the new _régime_ quantities of old blue nankin ware, ran round the walls. following the same idea, they always sat in the big hall which opened straight on to the front-door, instead of in the drawing-room. "quite like hobnailed day-labourers," said kit. the analogy is obvious, and kit's admirable taste had made the likeness almost glaring. there was a grandfather's clock there, a couple of large oak settles on each side of the fireplace, which had bronze dogs for the fire-irons, and homely chippendale and basket chairs. a few persian rugs, it is true, which it would have tasked a connoisseur to price, happened to be lying on the floor, but otherwise it was quite uncarpeted, and you trod on real naked wooden boards of polished oak. in all the windows but one there were tiny diamond panes of old wavy glass, which made the features of the landscape outside go up and down like a switchback as you walked across the room; and in the other window, which gave light to the serving-up-room (a highly inconvenient arrangement, in which kit, in the _rôle_ of labourer, delighted), were real bottom-of-glasses panes, which looked charming. the roof was gabled and not even whitewashed (being also of oak), and altogether an unexacting labourer might have spent very fairly comfortable evenings in this simple room. the cottage idea was carried out in the garden also. the beds were all of old-fashioned flowers, hollyhocks, london-pride, poppies, wallflowers, dahlias, mignonette, quite rustic and herbaceous, with no pincushion italian beds, which kit said were very expensive and out of keeping with the prevalent simplicity. they also reminded her of badly-mixed salads. stern frugality further showed itself in the clothing of the red-brick walls which bounded the garden. here were no flaunting, flaming creepers, bright and profitless, but homely pear-trees and apricots, which bore quite excellent fruit. a common wooden punt lay moored at the end of the garden, useful and homely, fit for the carrying of the produce of the labourer's garden to market. a pile of embroidered cushions happened at that moment to be lying in it, and kit had also left her jewelled russian cigarette-case there, but that was all. even the cigarette-case was made of simple plaited straw, and the monogram and coronet set in very blue turquoises at one corner seemed to have got there by accident, as if they had been chips which had fallen out of the sky, and might be shortly expected to float back there again. it was sunday morning, obviously sunday morning, and nature was proceeding as usual on her simple but pleasant way. a brilliant sun, a gentle wind, the smooth, unruffled river, all testified to the tenderness and benignity of the powers of the air. spring, the watery, impetuous spring of the north, had now a month ago definitely given place to summer, leaving another year in which poets, with their extraordinary want of correct observation, might forget what it had really been like, and rhyme it a hundred undeserved and unfounded courtesies. but summer had come in earnest in the latter days of may, with a marked desire to make itself pleasant, and give to the sturdy british yeoman, who had till then complained (with statistics of rainfall) of the wetness of the spring, another excellent opportunity of vilifying the dryness of the summer. over such providence watches with a special care, and, knowing that the one thing worse than having a grievance is to have none, gives them a kindly interchange of wet springs, dry summers, wet summers, dry springs, secure of never pleasing anybody. a soft blue haze of heat and moisture hung over the river and the low-lying water-meadows on the far side, but as the hills beyond climbed upwards from the valley, they rose into an atmosphere extraordinarily clear. though the day was hot, there was a precision of outline about the woods that cut the sky almost suggestive of a frosty morning, and even here below the heat was of a brisk quality. everything was steeped in sunday content, and from the gray church-tower standing guardian among the huddled hamlet-roofs came the melodious jangle of bells ringing for the eleven o'clock service. the labourers' garden was in full luxuriance of midsummer flower (for a bright and cheerful garden should be within reach of the humblest), and a rainbow of colour bounded the close-shaven lawn. nothing, as is right, was ever done on this lawn, mossy to the foot, restful to the eye; no whitewash lines cut it up into horrible squares and oblongs, no frenzied tennis-balls ever did decapitation among the flower-beds that framed it, and you could wander about it at dusk immune from anxiety as to whether your next step would be tripped in a croquet-hoop or entangled in the snares of a drooped tennis-net. during the weeks of spring it had been a star-sown space of crocuses, like the meadow in fra angelico's annunciation, but these were over, and it had again become a green, living velvet. kit had developed that morning at breakfast a strange unreasoning desire to go to church, and until jack saw her eat he was almost afraid she was going to be ill. to church accordingly she had gone, dragging with her alice haslemere, who was staying with them. they had been put across the river in the punt, kit armed with a huge church service, and it was evident, so thought conybeare as he strolled down to the water's edge after the return of the punt, that kit had smoked a cigarette as she went across. this, by the standard of perfection, he considered a mistake. if you are going to do a thing at all, do it thoroughly, he argued to himself, and that a woman should smoke just before going to church was a lapse from the proper level. but he took the cigarette-case with its turquoise monogram from where it lay on the cushion, and put it into his pocket. as like as not kit would step on it when she got into the punt again. jack had enjoyed a long conversation with mr. alington after dinner the evening before, and he was now strolling about the garden expecting him to come out and continue it. alington was, as he had told kit, a heavy-looking man, but conversationally he had not found him in the least heavy. he had the air of a solid, intelligent englishman, whose mind had been considerably widened by extensive travel abroad, and took a large uninsular view of things. had he been disposed to apply for a situation as a butler, no householder could have reasonably hoped to find a more trustworthy or respectable-looking man. sobriety shone from his large mild eye, and the lines of his firm, somewhat full-lipped, mouth expressed steadiness in every curve. if as a butler he had been told that the whole of the royal family were coming to high tea in ten minutes, you would have felt yourself safe to bet that the intelligence would not flurry him, and that a sufficient high tea would somehow immediately appear. for so ample and well-furnished a man he had a curiously small voice, rather suggesting that it came from a distance, and he spoke his sentences in a precise manner, never correcting a word, as if he had thought them out before he opened his mouth. colour was given to this supposition by the fact that he always paused a moment before speaking. such a habit of speech, when worn by the majority, would predispose towards heaviness; but the result when it arrived was not, in the case of mr. alington, heavy. on the contrary, it was weighty--a far different thing. in the interval of reminding one of an admirable butler he irresistibly suggested a member of a conservative cabinet, safe of a peerage. it was only when considered as a floater of gold mines that his appearance was against him, and even then it was against him only on the score of probability, for it was impossible that even an imaginative public could invent a man in whom more _primâ-facie_ confidence should be reposed as a trustee of the moneys of widows and fatherless. jack strolled in the garden for nearly half an hour before he appeared, chucking pebbles into the thames and cigarette-ends into the flower-beds. at breakfast mr. alington had been dressed in a black frock-coat, but now when he made his unhurried exit from the low drawing-room french window he wore a straw hat and a suit of decorous tweed, the result, no doubt, of his observation that no one else wore sunday clothes. he carried a malacca cane in one hand; in the other a large tune hymn-book with edges red in one light, gold in another. "lady conybeare has started?" he inquired of jack. "yes; she has gone to church. she went nearly half an hour ago." mr. alington paused a moment. "i had meant to go with her," he said. "i had no idea it was so late." "there is the punt here," said jack. "you can go now if you like. i had no idea you meant to." "i thought everyone went to church on sunday morning in england when they were in the country," he said. "but i would sooner not go at all than arrive in the middle of the prayer of st. chrysostom." "and i would sooner arrive in the middle of the prayer of st. chrysostom than at the beginning of it," remarked jack. a slight look of pain crossed mr. alington's face, as if he had a twinge of neuralgia; but he made no further comment on jack's levity. he leaned his tune hymn-book carefully against the bottom of his basket-chair, after feeling that the lawn was dry, and lit a cigarette. "an exquisite morning," he said, after a moment's reflection. "the hills look as if they had been painted with cream for a medium, an effect so rare out of england." lord conybeare did not reply immediately, for he had not waited all this time in the garden for alington to hear him talk about cream. then he went straight to the point: "all you said last night interested me very much," he began, "and your kind offer to invest some money for me in your new group of mines----" mr. alington held up a large white, deprecating hand. on the little finger was a plain gold signet-ring, bearing the motto, _fortiter fideliter feliciter_. "it is nothing," he replied; "pray don't mention it. indeed, lord conybeare, if i may say so, i only made that offer as a sort of feeler. your reply to me then, your further reference to the subject now, show me that you are kind enough to be interested in my new undertakings." "profoundly," said lord conybeare; then, with disarming frankness: "money is the most interesting thing in the world and the most desirable. i often wish," he added, "that i saw more of it." alington flicked a morsel of ash off the end of his cigarette. "that confirms me in what i was thinking of saying to you," he replied. "now will you allow me to speak with your own frankness? ah, observe that beautiful line traced by that skein of starlings!" jack looked up. "lovely!" he said. "pray speak." "it is this then. my honest belief is that there are immense fortunes to be made in west australian mining. i believe also, again with absolute honesty, that these claims which i own are--some of them, at least, extremely rich. now, i wish very much that i was wealthy enough to work them by myself. i regret to say that i am not. i must therefore form a company. to form a company i must have directors." "surely your name----" began conybeare politely, but with only the faintest conjecture of what might be coming. "my name, as you so kindly suggest, will no doubt be a little assistance," said alington, "for i am not wholly unknown in such matters. but it is not enough. this company must be english; it must be formed here; the shareholders should be largely english. why? for a variety of reasons. in the first place, you can raise ten thousand pounds here more easily than you can raise one thousand in australia. again, the british public is getting ready to go mad about west australian mining, while in australia they regard australian mining without, well, without any premonitory symptoms of insanity. perhaps they underrate its future; i think they do. perhaps the british public overrates it; that also is possible. but i bring my wares to the best market. now i ask you, lord conybeare, will you be on my board? will you be my chairman?" he turned briskly round with the first quick movement that conybeare had yet seen him make. "i," he asked, "on a board of mining directors? i know about mines exactly what you told me, last night--that is to say, unless i have forgotten some of it." the ghost of a smile flickered across mr. alington's broad face, and he laid his large white hand on jack's knee. the latter seemed to regard it just as he might have regarded a harmless moth that had settled there. the poor thing did not hurt. "you saw that i smiled," he said. "i saw that you saw it. i smiled because you spoke so far from the point. that is frank enough, is it not, to show you that i am telling you the truth. there are further proofs also." both in his action with his hand and in his speech the plebeian showed plain, but jack did not resent it. he had not asked alington down to the cottage to enjoy his refined conversation and his well-bred presence, but to talk business. that he was doing. jack was quite pleased with him. "i do not follow you," he said. mr. alington lit another cigarette from the stump of his old one before replying, and rose to deposit the other out of sight in a garden-bed. "cigarette-ends are so terribly dissonant with this charming garden," he said. "now, i am speaking to you from a purely business point of view. i supposed--it was natural, was it not?--that you were so kind as to ask me to your delightful house in order to discuss these mines. you see how frank i am." conybeare let his eye travel slowly down a reach of the thames. "yes, that was the reason why i asked you," he said. "and i came for exactly the same reason. the pleasure of visiting you at your 'cottage,' as lady conybeare so playfully calls it, is great--very great; but plain business-men like me have little time for such pleasures. frankly, then, i should not have come unless i guessed your reason. i, too, wished to talk about these mines, lord conybeare, and i ask you again to be a director on my board." he took off his straw hat--for they were sitting in the shade--and propped it carefully up against his chair by the side of the large tune hymn-book. its removal showed a high white forehead and a circular baldness in the centre of flossy, light-brown hair, like a tonsure. "i am a plain business man," he went on, "and when i am engaged in business i do not offer an advantageous thing to others unless i get an advantage myself; for to introduce sentiment into business is to make a pleasure of it and a failure. you must remember, my dear lord conybeare, that england is essentially aristocratic in her ideas. at least, so far as your nobility is conservative, she is aristocratic. think if lord salisbury joined a board how the public would clamour for allotments! dear me, yes, the master of hatfield might be a very rich man--a very rich man indeed." jack conybeare was completely himself; he was not dazzled or unduly delighted at the offer. he merely wished to know what he got by it, taking for granted, and justly, that the man was sincere. "marquises still count, then," he said. "i give you my word i had no idea of it. i am glad i am a marquis. but what," he added, "do i get by it?" "a salary," said mr. alington, and his usual pause gave the remark considerable weight. "but we will pass over that," he went on. "directors, however, have the privilege of taking a great many shares before the concern is made public. in fact, in order to qualify for being a director, you must hold a considerable number." "i am very poor," said jack. "that, fortunately, can be remedied," said mr. alington. jack was immensely practical, and very quick, and it was obvious at once that this was capable of two interpretations. he took the right one. "you mean it is a certainty for me?" he said. again mr. alington let a perceptible pause intervene before he answered. "i mean this," he said, "if you want plain speaking, and i think you do; it also suits me better. you shall be allotted a certain number of shares, say ten thousand, in my new group of mines. you will probably only have to pay the first call. you will be a director of these mines--and, by the way, there is another name i have in my mind, the owner of which i should also like to have on my board. i had the pleasure of seeing him at your house in london. very well, i issue my prospectus, and my name, as you so kindly observed, counts for something. i, of course, as vendor, shall join the board after allotment. yours and another i hope will be there too. now, i feel certain in my own mind that such a board (with certain other names, which shall be my affair) will be advantageous to me. it will pay. i am certain also--i say this soberly--that between my prospectus and my board the shares will at once go up, so that if you choose you can sell out before the second call. thus you will not be without your advantage also. we do no favour to each other; we enter into partnership each for his own advantage." "and my duties?" asked jack. "attendance, regular attendance at the meetings of the company. on those occasions i shall want you to take the chair, read the report of the manager, if there is one to hand, make the statement of the affairs of the company, and congratulate the shareholders." "or condole?" asked jack. "i hope not. i should also ask you to immediately approach lord abbotsworthy, and ask him to be on the board. his is the other name i mentioned." "whatever do you want tom abbotsworthy for?" asked conybeare surprisedly. "for much the same reason as i want you. he is already an earl--he will be a duke. dear me, if i was not a man of business i should choose to be a duke." jack pondered a moment. "it is your own concern," he said. "i will ask him with pleasure, and i think very probably he will consent. oddly enough, he and i were talking about this sudden interest in west australia only yesterday morning." "i think that many other people will be talking of it before long," said alington. "i consent," said jack. mr. alington showed neither elation, relief, nor surprise. but he paused. "i think you will find it worth your while," he said. "and now, lord conybeare, there is another point. in the working of a big scheme like this--for, i assure you, this is no cottage-garden affair--there is, as you may imagine, an enormous deal of business. somebody has to be responsible for, or, at any rate, to sanction, all that is done. whether we put up fresh stamps, or whether we decide to use the cyanide process for tailings, or sink a deep level, or abandon a vein, or use the sulphide reduction, to take only a few obvious instances, somebody has to be able to answer all questions, difficult ones sometimes, possibly even awkward ones. now, are you willing to go into all this, or not? if you wish to have a voice in such matters you must go into it. on that i insist. i hear you are a first-rate authority on chemical manures--a most absorbing subject, i am sure. are you willing to learn as much about mines? on the other hand, it is open to you and lord abbotsworthy to leave the whole working of such affairs to me and certain business men whom i may appoint. but, having left it, you leave it altogether. you will have no right of being consulted at all about technical points unless you will make them your study. if you decide to leave these things to those whose life has been passed in them, good. you put implicit confidence in them, and if required, you will say so, honestly, at the meetings. if, on the other hand, you wish to have a voice in technical affairs, your voice must be justified. you must make mines, technically, your study. you must go out and see mines. you must acquire, not a superficial, but a thorough knowledge of them. you must be able to form some estimate of what relation one ounce of gold to the ton bears to the cost of working, and the capital on which such a yield will pay. now which? choose!" and mr. alington faced round squarely, a little exhausted on so hot a morning by a volubility which was rare with him, and looked jack in the face. "which do you advise?" asked the other. "i cannot undertake to advise you. i have merely given you the data of your choice, and i can do no more." "then spare me details," said jack. mr. alington nodded his head gravely. "i think you are wise," he said, "though i could not take the responsibility of influencing your own opinion. i pay you for your name. your name, to tell you the truth, is what i want. you delegate business to business men. i hope you will put the matter in the same light to lord abbotsworthy. with regard to your salary as chairman, i cannot make you a precise offer yet; tentatively, i should suggest five thousand a year." lord conybeare had to perfection that very useful point of good breeding, namely, the ability to preserve a perfectly wooden face when hearing the most surprising news. mr. alington, for all the effect this information apparently had on it, might have been speaking to the leg of a table. "that seems to me very handsome," he replied negligently. "it seems to me about fair," said mr. alington. lord conybeare was puzzled, and he wondered whether kit would understand it all. how his name on a "front page," as mr. alington called it, with attendance at a few meetings, at which he would read a report, could be worth five thousand a year, he did not see, though he felt quite certain that mr. alington thought it was. whether it would turn out to be so or not, he hardly cared at all; clearly that matter did not concern him. if anyone was willing to pay five thousand a year for his name they were perfectly welcome to have it; indeed, he would have taken a much smaller figure. he had no idea that marquises were at such a premium. his distinguished ancestry had suddenly become an industrial company, paying heavily. "the new esau," he thought to himself, "and a great improvement on the old. i only lend my birthright, and the pottage i receive is really considerable." some time before they had reached this point in their conversation the punt had been taken across the river again to fetch kit and alice haslemere back from church, and as mr. alington said his last words it had returned again with the jaded church-goers. he put on his straw hat, picked up the big tune hymn-book, and with conybeare strolled down to the bottom of the lawn to meet them. "devotion is so very fatiguing," said kit, in a harassed voice, as she stepped on to the grass. "alice and i feel as if we had been having the influenza--don't we, dear? and i've lost my cigarette-case. it is too tiresome, because i meant to pawn it. i am sure i left it in the punt." jack took it out of his pocket and returned it to her. "thank your dear husband you didn't step on it," he remarked. kit took it petulantly, and lit a cigarette. "oh, jack, i wish you wouldn't be so thoughtful," she said. "thoughtful people are such a nuisance. they always remind one of what one is doing one's best to forget, and put one's cherished things in safe places. oh, i'm so glad i'm not a clergyman. i should have to go to church again this evening. what's that book, mr. alington? oh, i see. have you and jack been singing hymns on the lawn? how dear of you! i didn't know you thought of going to church, or i would have waited for you. i understood you were going to talk business with jack. there is business in the air. just a trifle stuffy." mr. alington paused. "we have been having a long and interesting talk," he replied. "one can say more on sunday morning than in the whole of the rest of the week put together." "yes, that's so true," said kit, walking on ahead with him, and smoking violently. "the man who preached knew it too. it was like a night journey, i slept so badly. and was your talk satisfactory?" "to me, very," said mr. alington. "i am convinced it will also prove satisfactory to lord conybeare. he has kindly consented to become my chairman and a director of my new group of mines, the carmel mines, as they will be called." "what a nice name!" said kit. "and shall we all make our fortunes?" mr. alington nodded his massive head. "i shall be very much surprised if we do not get a modest competence out of the carmel mines," said he. chapter iii after the gee-gee party lady haslemere was entertaining what she called the "gee-gees" or "great grundys" one night at her house in berkeley street. the "gee-gee" party was an idea borrowed from jack, and all who were weightiest in society came to it, a large number of them to dine, and the rest to the evening party. just now her brother, tom abbotsworthy, was living with them, for his own house was being done up, and alice had easily persuaded him to stay with them, instead of living with the duke. indeed to live with the duke was nearly an impossibility; three women already had attempted to support the burden of being his duchess, but they had all collapsed before long, leaving him in each case eminently consolable. he could hurry a person into the grave, so it was said, sooner than any man or woman in the kingdom. the last time tom had seen him was about a week ago, at dinner somewhere, and the whole of his conversation had been to say loudly to him across the dinner-table at intervals of about two minutes, "why don't you marry?" tom's presence in the house was a great boon during the season; he relieved his brother-in-law of his duties as host in an easy, unostentatious manner, thereby earning his heartfelt gratitude, and discharging these duties, instead of leaving them undischarged. lord haslemere himself had a habit of being unreckoned with. he was an adept at doing wire puzzles, and played a remarkably good game at billiards, but otherwise there was nothing of him. he wore whiskers, spent the greater part of his day at the club, and was known as whisky-and-soda, not because he had intemperate leanings in that direction, but because there was really nothing else to call him. when his wife entertained, he shrank into what there was of himself, and the majority of his guests at an evening party did not generally know him by sight. his face was one stamped with the quality of obliviality; to see him once was to insure forgetting him at least twice. but at the "gee-gee" parties he was made tidy, which he usually was not, and put in prominent places. he had been very prominent this evening, and correspondingly unhappy. he had taken a parrot-hued duchess into dinner, and spilt a glass of wine over her new dress, and as her grace's temper was as high as the bridge of her nose, the evening had been unusually bitter. the "grundy" dinner-party was succeeded by a vast "grundy" at home, to which flocked all the solid people in london, including those who "bridle" when a very smart set is mentioned, and flock thirstily to their houses, like camels to a desert well, whenever they are asked. it was the usual thing. there had been a little first-rate music--during which everyone talked their loudest--and a great many pink and china-blue hydrangeas on the stairs, a positive coruscation of stars and orders and garters--for two royal princes had been included among the "gee-gees"--and about midnight lady haslemere was yawning dismally behind her fan, and wondering when people would begin to go away. in the intervals of her yawns, which she concealed most admirably, she spoke excellent and vivacious french to the hungarian ambassador, an old bald-headed little man, who only wanted a stick to make him into a monkey on one, and laughed riotously at his stuffy little monkey-house jokes, all of which she had frequently heard before. in consequence, he considered her an extremely agreeable woman, as indeed she was. kit and her husband were not at the dinner, both having refused point-blank to go, on the ground that they had done their duty to "grundy" already; but they turned up, having dined quietly at home, at about half-past eleven, with mr. alington in tow. he was not known to many people present, but lady haslemere instantly left her ambassador, having received instructions from kit, and led him about like a dancing bear. she introduced him to royalty, which asked him graciously whether he enjoyed england, or preferred australia, and other questions of a highly original and penetrating kind; she presented him to stars and orders and garters, and to all the finest "gee-gees" present, as if he had been the guest of the evening. kit's eye was on her all the time, though she was talking to two thousand people, and saw that she did her duty. the rooms were as pretty as decorated boxes can be, and hotter than one would have thought any boxes could possibly get. people stood packed together like sardines in a tin, cheek to jowl, and appeared to enjoy it. anæmic men dropped inaudible questions to robust females, and ethereal-looking _débutantes_ screamed replies to elderly conservatives. nobody sat down--indeed, there was not room to sit down--and the happiest of all the crowd, excepting those who had dined there, were the enviable mortals who had come on from one house, and were able to announce that they were going on to another. three small drawing-rooms opened out the one from the other, and the doorways were inflamed and congested. whoever took up most room seemed to stand there, and whoever took up most room seemed to be dressed in red. altogether, one could not imagine a more successful evening. politicians considered it a political party, those who were not quite so smart as lady haslemere's set considered it the smartest party of the year, and everybody who was nobody considered that everybody was there, and looked forward to buying the next issue of smart society, in order to see what "belle" or "amy" thought of it all. the noise of two or three hundred people all talking at once in small rooms causes a roar extraordinarily strident, and, as in the case of rooms full of tobacco-smoke, intolerable unless one contributes to it oneself. mr. alington had to raise his small, precise voice till it sounded as if he was intoning, and the effort was considerable. this particular way of passing a pleasant evening in the heat of the summer was hitherto unknown to him, and he looked about him in mild wonder. he felt himself reminded of those crates of ducks and fowls which are to be seen on the decks of ocean-going steamers, the occupants of which are so cruelly overcrowded, and of whom the most fortunate only can thrust their beaks through the wicker of their prison-house, and quack desolately to the breeze of the sea. lady haslemere's rooms seemed to him to resemble these bird-crates, the only difference being that people sought this suffocating imprisonment of their own free will, because they liked it, the birds because the passengers had to be fed. one or two very tall men had their heads free, a few others stood by windows, and could breathe; but the majority could neither breathe nor hear, nor see further than their immediate neighbours. they could only quack. and they quacked. by degrees the party thinned; an unwilling lane was cut through the crowd for the exit of the princes, and the great full-blown flowers in the hedges, so to speak, bobbed down in turn as they passed, like a field of poppies blown on by a passing wind. after them those lucky folk who were going on to another house, where they would stand shoulder to shoulder again with a slightly different crowd, and express extreme wonder that their neighbours had not been at lady haslemere's ("i thought everyone was there!"), made haste to follow. outside all down the street from berkeley square at one end to piccadilly at the other stretched the lines of carriage-lamps, looking like some gigantic double necklace. the congestion in the drawing-room developed into a really alarming inflammation in the cloak-room and the hall, and everyone wanted her carriage and was waiting for it, except the one unfortunate lady whose carriage stopped the whole of the way, as a stentorian policeman studiously informed her, but who could only find attached to her ticket a small opera hat instead of the cloak which should have covered her. people trod on each other's toes and heels, and entangled themselves in other folks' jewels and lace. rain had begun to fall heavily, the red carpet from the door to the curbstone was moist and muddy, contemptuous footmen escorted elderly ladies under carriage umbrellas to their broughams, and large drops of rain fell chill on the elderly ladies' backs. loungers of the streets criticised the outgoers with point and cockney laughter, but still the well-dressed crowd jostled and quacked and talked, and said how remarkably pleasant it had been, and how doubly delightful it was to have come here from somewhere else, and to go on somewhere else from here. half an hour after the departure of the princes, lady haslemere, who was fast ceasing to yawn, manoeuvred the two or three dozen people who still could not manage to tear themselves away, into the outermost of the three drawing-rooms, and nodded to a footman who lingered in the doorway, and had obvious orders to catch her eye. upon this he and another impassive giant glided into the innermost room, and took two green-baize-covered tables from where they had been folded against the wall, setting them in the middle of the room, and placed a dozen chairs round them; then, making use of a back staircase, so that they should not be seen by the remaining "grundys," they brought up and laid out a cold supper, consisting chiefly of jelly and frills and froth and glass and bottles and quails and cigarettes, put cards, counters, and candles on the green-baize tables, and withdrew. ten minutes later the last of the "grundys" withdrew also, and the rest, some dozen people who had stood about in attitudes of the deepest dejection for the last half-hour, while a bishop played the man of the world to kit, heaved a heartfelt sigh of relief, and brightened up considerably. automatically, or as if by the action of a current of air or a tide, they drifted into the inner room, and chalk lines were neatly drawn on the green-baize cloth. baccarat is a game admirably suited to people who have had a long day, and is believed to be a specific antidote to the gloom induced by huge "grundy" parties. it is an effort and a strain on the mind to talk to very solid people who are interested in great questions and delight in discussion; but at baccarat the mind, so to speak, lights a cigarette, throws itself into an armchair, and puts on its slippers. baccarat requires no judgment, no calculation, no previous knowledge of anything, and though it is full of pleasing excitement, it makes no demands whatever on the strongest or feeblest intellect. the players have only to put themselves blindly, as ladies dressing for dinner surrender themselves to a skilful maid, into the hands of luck, and the austere elemental forces which manage the winds and waves, and decree in what order nines and other cards are dealt from packs, do the rest. you buy your counters, and when they are all gone you buy some more. if, on the other hand, they behave as counters should, and increase and multiply like rabbits, you have the pleasure of presenting them to your host at the end of the evening or the beginning of the morning, as the case may be, and he very kindly gives you shining sterling gold and rich crackling bank-notes in exchange. tom abbotsworthy, since he had been staying with his sister, always took the place of host when this soothing game was being played at berkeley street; for lord haslemere, if he were not in bed, was by this time busily practising nursery cannons on the billiard-table. occasionally he looked in, with his fidgety manner, and trifled with the froth and frills, and if there was anyone present whose greatness demanded his attendance, he took a hesitating hand. but to-night he was spared; there was only a small, intimate party, who would have found him a bore. he was slow at cards, displayed an inordinate greed for his stake, and had been known at baccarat to consider whether he should have another. this, as already stated, is unnecessary. with certain numbers you must; with all the others you must not, and consideration delays the game. the hours passed much more pleasantly and briskly than during the period of the "grundy" party. it was a warm, still night, the windows were flung wide, and the candles burned unwaveringly. round the table were a dozen eager, attentive faces. luck, like some pied piper, was fluting to the nobility and gentry, and the nobility and gentry followed her like the children of hamelin. now and then one of them would rise and consult the side-table to the diminishment of frills and froth, or the crisp-smelling smoke of a cigarette would hold the room for a few minutes. most of those present had been idle all day, now they were employed and serious. outside the rain had ceased, and for a couple of hours the never-ending symphony of wheels sank to a pianissimo. occasionally, with a sharp-cut noise of hoofs and the jingle of a bell, a hansom would trot briskly past, and at intervals an iron-shod van made thunder in the street. but the siesta of noise was short, for time to the most is precious; barely had the world got home from its parties of the night, when those whose business it is to rise when their masters are going to bed, in order that the breakfast-table may not lack its flowers and fruits, began to get to the morning's work, and the loaded, fragrant vans went eastward. the candles had once burned down, and had been replaced by one of the impassive giants, when the hint of dawn, the same dawn that in the country illuminated with tremulous light the dewy hollows of untrodden ways, was whispered in the world. here it but changed the blank, dark faces of the houses opposite into a more visible gray; it sucked the fire from the candles, was strangely unbecoming to lady haslemere, who was calculated for artificial light, and out of the darkness was born day. there was no longer any need for the carriage-lamps to be lit when kit and her husband got into their brougham. a very pale-blue sky, smokeless and clear, was over the city, and the breath of the morning was deliciously chill. kit, whether from superior art or mere nature, did not look in the least out of keeping with the morning. she was a little flushed, but her flush was that of a child just awakened from a long night's rest more than that of a woman of twenty-five, excited by baccarat and sufficient--in no degree more than sufficient--champagne. her constant harmony with her surroundings was her most extraordinary characteristic; it seemed to be an instinct, acting automatically, just as the chameleon takes its colour from its surroundings. set her in a well-dressed mob of the world, she was the best dressed and most worldly woman there; among rosy-faced children she would look at the most a pupil teacher. just now in lady haslemere's drawing-room you would have called her gambler to her finger-tips; but as she stood for a moment on the pavement outside waiting for her carriage-door to be opened, she was a child of morning. she drew her cloak, lined with the plucked breast feathers that grow on the mother only in breeding-time, more closely about her, and drew the window half up. "you were in luck as well as i, were you not, jack?" she said. "i suppose i am mercenary, but i must confess i like winning other people's money. i feel as if i was earning something." "yes, we were both on the win to-night," said jack. then he stopped, but as if he had something more to say, and to kit as well as to him the silence was awkward. "you noticed something?" she asked. "yes; alington." "so did i. so did alice, i think. what a bore it is! what is to be done?" jack fidgeted on his seat, lit a cigarette, took two whiffs at it, and threw it away. "perhaps we are wrong," he said. "perhaps he didn't cheat." kit did not find it worth while to reply to so half-hearted a suggestion. "it's damned awkward," he continued, abandoning this himself. "i don't know what to do. you see, kit, what an awful position i am in. in any case, do let us have no scandal; that sort of thing has been tried once, and i don't know that it did any good to anybody." "of course we will have no scandal," said kit quickly. "if there was a scandal, you would have to break with him, and pop go the gold mines as far as we are concerned." jack started. his thoughts had been so absolutely identical with what his wife said, that it was as if he had heard a sudden echo. and though the thoughts had been his own, and kit had merely stated them, yet when she did so, so unreasonable is man, he felt inclined to repudiate what she said. the thing sounded crude when put like that. kit saw him start, divined the cause with intuitive accuracy, and felt a sudden impatient anger at him. she hated hypocritical cowardice of this kind, for, having plenty of immoral courage herself, she had no sympathy with those who were defective in it. jack, she knew very well, had no intention of breaking with alington, because the latter had cheated at baccarat. then, in heaven's name, even if you are too squeamish to be frank yourself, try to make an effort not to wince when somebody else is. "that is what a man calls his honour," she thought to herself with amused annoyance. "it is unlike jack, though." meantime her quick brain was spinning threads like a spider. "look here, jack," she said in a moment. "leave the thing entirely to me. it was stupid of me to mention it. you saw nothing: i saw nothing. you know nothing about it. there was no baccarat, no cheating, no nothing. come." "what are you going to do?" asked jack doubtfully. he had great confidence in kit, but this matter required consideration. "oh, jack, i am not a fool," said kit. "i only want you, officially, so to speak, to know nothing about this, just in case of accidents; but there will be no accidents if you let me manage it. if you want to know what i shall do, it is this: i shall go to alice to-morrow--to-day, rather--and tell her what i saw. i am sure she saw it herself, or i should say nothing to her. i shall also add how lucky it was that only she and i noticed it. then the whole thing shall be hushed up, though i dare say we shall watch alington play once more to be certain about it, and if we see him cheat again, make him promise to play no more. trust us for not letting it come out. i am in your galley about the mines, you see." "she is to understand that i saw nothing?" asked jack. "of course, of course," said kit. "that is the whole point of it. what is your scruple? i am really unable to understand. i know it is not nice to deal with a person who cheats at cards. you have always to be on the watch. you'll have to keep your eyes open in this business of the mines, but that is your own affair. clearly it is much better that alice should imagine you know nothing about the cheating. she might think you ought to break with the man; people are so queer and unexpected." "what about tom?" asked he. they had arrived at park lane, and kit stepped out. "jack, will you or will you not leave the whole matter in my hands--the whole matter, you understand--without interference?" he paused for a moment, still irresolute. "yes," he said at last; "but be careful." kit hardly heard this injunction; as soon as he had said "yes" she turned quickly from him, and went into the house. it was already after four, and the tops of the trees in the park had caught the first level rays of the eastern sun. the splendid, sordid town still lay asleep, and the road was glistening from the rain which had fallen earlier in the night, and empty of passengers. but the birds, those fit companions of the dawn, were awake, and the twittered morning hymn of sparrows pricked the air. kit went straight to her bedroom, where the rose-coloured blinds, drawn down over the wide-open windows, filled the room with soft, subdued light, and rang the bell which communicated with her maid's room. when she was likely to be out very late she always let her maid go to bed, and rang for her when she was wanted. often she even made an effort to get to bed without her help, but this morning she was preoccupied, and rang before she could determine whether she needed her. kit herself was one of those happily-constituted people who can do with very little sleep, though they can manage a great deal, and in these london months four or five hours during the night and a possible half-hour before dinner was sufficient to make her not only just awake, but excessively so at other times. in the country, it is true, she made up for unnatural hours by really bucolic behaviour. she took vigorous exercise every day in any weather, ate largely of wholesome things, hardly drank any wine, and slept her eight hours like a child. in this she was wiser than the majority of her world, who, in order to correct their errors in london, spend a month of digestive retirement at carlsbad. "live wholesomely six months of the year," said kit once, "and you will repair your damages. why should i listen to german bands and drink salt water?" instead, she fished all august and september, cut down her cigarettes, and lived, as she said, like a milkmaid. it would have been rather a queer sort of milkmaid, but people knew what she meant. before her maid came (kit's arrangement that she might go to bed was partly the result of kindness, partly of her disinclination to be waited on by a very sleepy attendant) she had taken off her jewels, and put them into her safe. there also she placed the very considerable sum of money which she had just won at baccarat, to join the rainy-day fund. jack did not know about the rainy-day fund--it was of kit's very private possessions; but it is only fair to her to say that if he had been in a financial _impasse_ it would have been at his disposal. no number of outstanding bills, however, constituted an _impasse_ till you were absolutely sued for debt; the simplest way of discharging them, a way naturally popular, was to continue ordering things at the same shops. kit and her husband did not meet at breakfast, but took that plebeian meal in their own rooms. and she, having told hortense to open the windows still wider, and bring her breakfast at half-past ten, put the key of her jewel-safe under her pillow, and lay down to sleep for five hours. she would want her victoria at twelve, and she scribbled a note to lady haslemere saying that she would be with her at a quarter past. outside the day grew ever brighter, and rivulets of traffic began to flow down park lane. the hour of the starting of the omnibuses brought a great accession of sound, but kit fell asleep as soon as she got into bed, and, the sleep of the just and the healthy being sound, she heard them not. she dreamed in a vague way that she had won a million pounds, but that as she was winning the last of them, which would mean eternal happiness, she cheated some undefined shadow of a penny, which, in the misty, unexplained fashion of dreams, took away the whole of her winnings. then the smell of tea and bacon and a sudden influx of light scattered these vain and inauspicious imaginings, and she woke to another day of her worthless, selfish, aimless life. chapter iv kit's little plan to many people the events of the day before, and the anticipations of the day to come, give with the most pedantic exactness an automatic colour to the waking moments. the first pulse of conscious consciousness, without apparent cause, is happy, unhappy, or indifferent. then comes a backward train of thought, the brain gropes for the reason of its pleasure or chagrin, something has happened, something is going to happen, and the instinct of the first moment is justified. the thing lay in the brain; it gave the colour of itself to the moment when reasoned thought was yet dormant. bacon and tea were the first savours of an outer world to kit when she awoke, for she had slept soundly, but simultaneously, and not referring to these excellent things, her brain said to her, "not nice!" now, this was odd: she shared with her husband his opinion of the paramount importance of money, and the night before she had locked up in her safe enough to pay for six gowns at least, and a year's dentist bills, for her teeth were very good. indeed, it was generally supposed that they were false, and though kit always laughed with an open mouth, she had been more than once asked who her dentist was. herein she showed less than her ordinary wisdom when she replied that she had not got one, for the malignity of the world, how incomparable she should have known, felt itself justified. yet in spite of that delightful round sum in her jewel-safe, the smell of bacon woke her to no sense of bliss beyond bacon. for a moment she challenged her instinct, and told herself that she was going to have tea with the carburys, and that coquelin was coming; that she was dining with the arbuthnots, where they were going to play a little french farce so screaming and curious that the censor would certainly have had a fit if he had known that such a piece had been performed within the bounds of his paternal care. all this was as it should be, yet as the river of thought began to flow more fully, she was even less pleased with the colour of the day. something unpleasant had happened; something unpleasant was still in the air--ah! that was it, and she sat up in bed and wondered exactly how she should put it to lady haslemere. anyhow she had _carte blanche_ from jack, and if between half-past ten and a quarter past twelve she could not think of something simple and sufficient, she was a fool, and that she knew she certainly was not. with her breakfast came the post. there were half a dozen cards of invitation to concerts and dinners and garden-parties; an autograph note from a very great personage about her guests at the banquet next week; a number of bills making a surprising but uninteresting total; another note, which she read with interest twice, and then tore into very small pieces; and a few lines from jack, scribbled on a half-sheet of paper. "do the best you can, kit," he said; "i am off to the city to see a. i shall behave as if i knew nothing." kit tore up this also, but not into small pieces, with a little sigh of relief. "sense cometh in the morning," she said to herself, and ate her breakfast with a very good appetite. whatever she had been doing, however unwisely she had supped, kit always "wanted" her breakfast, and as she took it the affair of the night before seemed to her to assume a somewhat different complexion. in her heart of hearts she began to be not very sorry for the lapse in social morality of which mr. alington had been guilty on the previous night. it seemed to her on post-prandial consideration that it might not be altogether a bad thing that she should have some little check upon him. it might even be called a blessing, with hardly any disguise at all, and she put the position to herself thus. when you went careering about in unexplored goldfields with the owner, a comparative stranger, harnessed to your cart, it was just as well to have some sort of a break ready to your hand. very likely it would be unnecessary to use it; indeed, she did not want to have to use it at all, but it was certainly preferable to know that it was there, and that if the comparative stranger took it into his head to bolt, he would find it suddenly clapped on. the only drawback was that alice knew about it too; at least, kit was morally certain that she had noticed mr. alington's surreptitious pushing forward of his stake after the declaration of his card, which was very clumsily done, and she would have preferred, had it been possible, that only jack and she should have known, for a secret has only one value, and the more it is shared the less valuable does each share become, on the simple arithmetical postulate that if you divide a unit into pieces, each piece is less than the original unit. indeed, the more she thought of it, the more convenient did it appear that mr. alington should have made this little mistake, and that she should have noticed it. and, after all, perhaps it would save trouble that alice should have noticed it too, for in all probability it would be necessary to make alington play again and watch him. for this she must have some accomplice, and as jack was not to come into the affair at all, there really was no better accomplice to have than alice. to lay this trap for the bland financier did not seem to kit to be in any way a discreditable proceeding. she put it to herself that, if a man cheated, he ought not to be allowed to play cards and win his friends' money, and that it was in justice to him that it was necessary to verify the suspicion. but that it was a low and loathsome thing to ask a man as a friend to play cards in order to see whether he cheated or not did not present itself to her. her mind--after all, it is a question of taste--was not constructed in such a way as to be able to understand this point of view, and she was not hide-bound or pedantic in her idea of the obligation entailed by hospitality. to cheat at cards was an impossible habit, it would not do in the least; for a rich man to cheat at cards was inexplicable. indeed, it would not be too much to say that kit was really shocked at the latter. in the course of an hour came an answer from lady haslemere. she was unavoidably out till two, but if kit would come to lunch then she would be at home. haslemere and tom were both out, and they could be alone. kit always found alice haslemere excellent company, and during lunch they blackened the reputations of their more intimate friends with all the mastery of custom, and a firm though gentle touch. like some deductive detective of unreadable fiction, kit could most plausibly argue guilt from cigarette ashes, muddy boots, cups of tea--anything, in fact, wholly innocent in itself. but luckier than he, she had not got to wrest verdicts from reluctant juries, but only to convince lady haslemere, which was a far lighter task, as she could without the slightest effort believe anything bad of anybody. kit, moreover, was a perfect genius at innuendo; it was one of the greatest charms of her conversation. after lunch they sat in the card-room and smoked gold-tipped, opium-tainted cigarettes, and when the servants had brought coffee and left them, kit went straight to the point, and asked alice whether she had seen anything irregular as they played baccarat the night before. lady haslemere took a sip of coffee and lit another cigarette; she intended to enjoy herself very much. "you mean the australian," she said. "well, i had suspicions; that is to say, last night i felt certain. it is so easy to feel certain about that sort of thing when one is losing." kit laughed a sympathetic laugh. "it _is_ a bore, losing," she said. "if there is one thing i dislike more than winning other people's money, it is losing my own. and the certainty of last night is still a suspicion to-day?" "ye-es. but you know a man may mean to stake, and yet not put the counters quite clear of that dear little chalk line. i am sure, in any case, that tom saw nothing, because i threw a hint at him this morning, which he would have understood if he had seen anything." "oh, tom never sees anything," said kit; "he is like jack." lady haslemere's natural conclusion was that jack had not seen anything either, and for the moment kit was saved from a more direct misstatement. not that she had any prudish horror of misstatements, but it was idle to make one unless it was necessary; it is silly to earn a reputation for habitual prevarication. lies are like drugs or stimulants, the more frequent use you make of them, the less effect they have, both on yourself and on other people. "well, then, kit," continued lady haslemere, "we have not yet got much to go on. you, tom, jack, and i are the only four people who could really have seen: jack and i because we were sitting directly opposite mr. alington, you and tom because you were sitting one on each side of him. and of us four, you alone really think that this--this unfortunate moral collapse, i think you called it, happened. and jack is so sharp. i don't at all agree that he never sees anything; there is nothing, rather, that he does not see. i attach as much weight to his seeing nothing as to anybody else seeing anything. you and i see things very quick, you know, dear," she added with unusual candour. "perhaps jack was lighting a cigarette or something," said kit. "indeed, now i come to think of it, i believe he was." "jack can see through cigarette smoke as well as most people," remarked alice. "but on the whole i agree with you, kit; we cannot leave it as it is. i believe the recognised thing to do is to get him to play again and watch him." "i believe so," said kit, with studied unconcern. here she made a mistake; the unconcern was a little overdone, and it caused lady haslemere to look up quickly. at that moment it occurred to her for the first time that kit was not being quite ingenuous. "but i don't like doing that sort of thing," she went on, throwing out a feeler. "but what else are we to do?" asked kit, who since breakfast had evolved from her inner consciousness several admirable platitudes. "it is really not fair to alington himself to leave it like this; to have lurking in one's mind--one can't help it--a suspicion against the man which may be quite erroneous. on the other hand, supposing it is not erroneous, supposing he did cheat, it is not fair on other people that he should be allowed to go on playing. he either did cheat or else he did not." there was no gainsaying the common-sense of this, and lady haslemere was silent a moment. "tell jack," she suggested at length, after racking her brains for something rather awkward to say. as a rule she and kit were excellent friends, and treated each other with immense frankness; but lady haslemere this morning had a very distinct impression that kit was keeping something back, which annoyed her. doubtless it was something quite trivial and unimportant, but she herself did not relish being kept in the dark about anything by anybody. but kit replied immediately. "i don't see why we should tell anybody, alice," she said; "and poor dear jack would pull his moustache off in his perplexity, if he were to know," she added, with a fine touch of local colour. "in any case, the last thing we want is a scandal, for it never looks well to see in the papers that the 'marchioness of conybeare, while entertaining a large baccarat party last night, detected one of her guests cheating. her ladyship now lies in a precarious state.' you know the sort of thing. then follow the names of the guests. i hate the public press!" she observed with dignity. "yes; it is like x rays," observed lady haslemere; "and enables the curious public to see one's bones. and however charming one may be, one's bones are not fit for public inspection. also the papers would put the name of one of the guests with dashes for vowels, and the excited reader would draw his conclusions. really, the upper class is terribly ill-used. it is the whipping-boy of the nation. supposing smith and jones had a baccarat-party, and smith cheated, no one would care, not even robinson." kit laughed. "that is just why i don't want to tell anybody," she said. "if three people are in a secret, the chances of it getting out are enormously greater than if only two are. not that anyone tells it exactly; but the atmosphere gets impregnated with it. you know what happened before. one has to keep the windows open, so to speak, and let in plenty of fresh air, politics, and so on. other people breathe the secret." "we can't tackle the man alone," said alice. "why not? a man always hates a scene, because a man is never any good at a scene; and, personally, i rather like them. i am at my best in a scene, dear; i really am ripping." again lady haslemere had a quite distinct sensation that kit was keeping something back. she seemed to wish to prove her case against alington, yet she did not want anybody else to know. it was puzzling why she desired a private handle against the man. perhaps--lady haslemere thought she had an inkling of the truth, and decided to take a shot at it. "of course it would be awkward for jack," she observed negligently, "to be connected in business with this man, if it became known that he knew that alington had cheated at baccarat." kit was off her guard. "that is just what he feels--what i feel," she said. she made this barefaced correction with the most silken coolness; she neither hurried nor hesitated, but lady haslemere burst out laughing. "my dear kit!" she said. kit sat silent a moment, and then perfectly naturally she laughed too. "oh, alice," she said, "how sharp you are! really, dear, if i had been a man and had married you, we should have been king and queen of england before you could say 'knife.' indeed, it was very quick of you, because i didn't correct myself at all badly. i was thinking i had carried my point, and so i got careless. now i'll apologize, dear, and i promise never to try to take you in again, partly because it's no use, and partly because you owe me one. jack does know, and he, at my request, left me to deal with it as if he didn't. it would be very awkward for him if he knew, so to speak, officially. at present, you see, he has only his suspicions. he could not be certain any more than you or i. as you so sensibly said, dear, we have only suspicions. but now, alice, let us leave jack out of it. don't let him know that you know that he knows. dear me, how complicated! you see, he would have to break with alington if he knew." lady haslemere laughed. "i suppose middle-class people would think us wicked?" she observed. "probably; and it would be so middle-class of them," said kit. "that is the convenient thing about the middle class; they are never anything else. now, there is no counting on the upper and lower class; at one time we both belong to the criminal class, at another we are both honest labourers. but the middle class preserves a perpetual monopoly of being shocked and thinking us wicked. and then it puts us in pillories and throws dirt. such fun it must be, too, because it thinks we mind. so don't let us have a scandal." lady haslemere pursed her pretty mouth up, and blew an excellent smoke-ring. she was a good-humoured woman, and her detection of kit took the sting out of the other's attempted deception. she was quite pleased with herself. "very well, i won't tell him," she said. "that's a dear!" said kit cordially; "and you must see that it would do no good to tell anybody else. jack would have to break with him if it got about, and when a reduced marquis is really wanting to earn his livelihood it is cruel to discourage him. so let's get alington to play again, and watch him, you and i, like two cats. then if we see him cheat again, we'll ask him to lunch and tell him so, and make him sign a paper, and stamp it and seal it and swear it, to say he'll never play again, amen." lady haslemere rose. "the two conspirators swear silence, then," she said. "but how awkward it will be, kit, if anyone else notices it on this second occasion!" "bluff it out!" said kit. "you and i will deny seeing anything at all, and say the thing is absurd. then we'll tell this alington that we know all about it, but that unless he misbehaves or plays again the incident will be clo-o-o-sed!" "i should be sorry to trust my money to that man," said alice. "oh, there you make a mistake," said kit. "you are cautious in the wrong place, and i shouldn't wonder if you joined us carmelites before long. for some reason he thinks that conybeare's name is worth having on his 'front page,' as he calls it, and i am convinced he will give him his money's worth. he may even give him more, especially as jack hasn't got any. he thinks jack is very sharp, and he is quite right. you are very sharp, too, alice, and so am i. how pleasant for us all, and how right we are to be friends! dear me! if you, jack, and i were enemies, we should soon make london too hot to hold any of us. as it is, the temperature is perfectly charming." "and is this bounder going to make you and jack very rich?" asked lady haslemere. "the bounder is going to do his best," laughed kit; "at least, jack thinks so. but it would need a very persevering sort of bounder to make us rich for long together. money is so restless; it is always flying about, and it so seldom flies in my direction." "it has caught the habit from the world, perhaps," said alice. "i dare say. certainly we are always flying about, and it is so tiresome having to pay ready money at booking-offices. jack quite forgot the other day when we were going to sandown, and he told the booking-office man to put it down to him, which he barbarously refused to do." "how unreasonable, dear!" "wasn't it? i'd give a lot to be able to run up a bill with railway companies. dear me, it's after three! i must fly. there's a bazaar for the prevention of something or the propagation of something at knightsbridge, and i am going to support princess frederick, who is going to open it, and eat a large tea. how they eat, those people! we are always propagating or preventing, and one can't cancel them against each other, because one wants to propagate exactly those things one wants not to prevent." "what are you going to propagate to-day?" "i forget. i believe it is the anti-propagation of prevention in general. do you go to the hungarian ball to-night? yes? we shall meet then. _au revoir!_" "you are so full of good works, kit," said lady haslemere, with no touch of regret in her tone. kit laughed loudly. "yes, isn't it sweet of me?" she said. "really, bazaars are an excellent policy, as good as honesty. and they tell so much more. if you have been to a bazaar it is put in the papers, whereas they don't put it in the papers if you have been honest. i often have. bazaars are soon over, too, and you feel afterwards as if you'd earned your ball, just as you feel you've earned your dinner after bicycling." kit rustled pleasantly downstairs, leaving alice in the card-room where they had talked. that lady had as keen a scent for money as kit herself, and evidently if kit denied herself the pleasure of causing a scandal over this cheating at baccarat (a piquant subject), she must have a strong reason for doing so. she wanted, so lady haslemere reasoned, to have alington under her very private thumb, not, so she concluded, to get anything definite out of him, for blackmail was not in kit's line, but as a precautionary measure. she followed her train of thought with admirable lucidity, and came to the very sensible conclusion that the interest that the conybeares had in alington was large. indeed, taking into consideration the utter want of cash in the conybeare establishment, it must be immense; for neither of them would have considered anything less than a fair settled income or a very large sum of money worth trying for. this being the case, she wished to have a hand in it, too. tom, she knew, had been approached by mr. alington and jack on the subject of his becoming a director, and she determined to persuade him to do so. at present he had not decided. anyhow, to win money out of mines was fully as respectable as to lose it at cards, and much more profitable. besides, the daily papers might become interesting if it was a personal matter whether bonanzas were up or rands down. tom had a large interest as it was in robinsons--whatever they were, and they sounded vulgar but rich--and she had occasionally read the reports of the money market from his financial paper, as an idle person may spell out words in some unknown language. the "ursine operators," "bulls," "flatness," "tightness," "realizations"--how interesting all these terms would become if they applied to one's own money! she had often noticed that the political outlook affected the money market, and during the fashoda time tom had been like a bear with a sore head. to know something about politics, to have, as she had, a conservative leader ready to whisper to her things that were not officially supposed to be whispered, would evidently be an advantage if you had an interest in prices. and the demon of speculation made his introductory bow to her. it is difficult for those who dwell on the level lands of sanity to understand the peaks and valleys of mania. to fully estimate the intolerable depression which ensues on the conviction that you have a glass leg, or the secret majesty which accompanies the belief that one is charles i., is impossible to anyone who does not know the heights and depths to which such creeds conduct the holder. but the mania for speculation--as surely a madness as either of these--is easier of comprehension. only common-sense of the crudest kind is required; if it is supposed that your country is on the verge of war, and you happen to know for certain that reassuring events will be made public to-morrow, it is a corollary to invest all you can lay hands on in the sunken consols in the certainty of a rise to-morrow. this is as simple as a b c, and your gains are only limited by the amount that you can invest. a step further and you have before you the enchanting plan of not paying for what you buy at all. buy merely. consols (of this you must be sure) will rise before next settling-day, and before next settling-day sell. and thus the secret of not taking up shares is yours. but consols are a slow gamble. they may conceivably rise two points in a day. instead of your hundred pounds you will have a hundred and two (minus brokerage), an inglorious spoil for so many shining sovereigns to lead home. but for the sake of those who desire to experience this fascinating form of excitement in less staid a manner there are other means supplied, and the chiefest and choicest is mines. a single mining share which, judiciously bought, cost a sterling sovereign may under advantageous circumstances be worth three or four in a week or two. how much more stirring an adventure! when we estimate this in hundreds and thousands, the prospect will be found to dazzle comparatively sober eyes. now, of the people concerned at present in this story, no less than five, as kit drove to her bazaar, were pondering these simple things. alington was always pondering them and acting on them; jack had been pondering them for a full week, kit for the same period, and tom abbotsworthy was on the point of consenting to become a director. and lady haslemere, thinking over her interview with kit, said to herself, with her admirable common-sense, that if there was a cake going, she might as well have a slice. she had immense confidence in the power of both kit and jack to take care of themselves, and knew well that neither would have stirred a finger for mr. alington, if they had not quite clearly considered it to be worth their while. and kit was stirring all her fingers; she was taking alington about as constantly as she took her pocket-handkerchief; she took him not merely to big parties and large grundy dinners, but to the intimate gatherings of the brightest and best. for she was a good wife to jack, and she at any rate believed that there was a cake going. chapter v toby lord evelyn ronald anstruther d'eyncourt massingbird was not usually known as all or any of this, but as toby. it would have been a difficult matter, requiring a faith of the most preposterous sort, to have stood in front of him and seriously said, "i believe you to be lord evelyn ronald anstruther d'eyncourt massingbird," and the results of so doing might have been quite disconcerting. but having been told he was toby, it would have been impossible to forget or to doubt it. the most vivid imagination could not conceive a more obvious toby; the identity might almost have been guessed by a total stranger or an intelligent foreigner. he was about twenty-four years old (the usual age of tobys), and he had a pleasantly ugly face, with a snub nose, slightly freckled. blue eyes, in no way beautiful, but very white as to the white and blue as to the blue, looked honestly out from under a typically unintellectual forehead, above which was a shock head of sandy hair, which stood up like a terrier's coat or a doormat, and on which no brush yet invented had been known to exert a flattening tendency. he was about five foot ten in height, and broad for that. his hat had a tendency to tilt towards the back of his head, and he had big, firm hands, callous on their insides with the constant use of weapons made for the violent propulsion of balls. he always looked comfortable in his clothes, and whether he was adorning the streets of london, immaculately dressed and hot and large, or trudging through heather in homespun, he was never anything but toby. a further incredible fact about him, in addition to his impossible baptismal name, was that he was jack conybeare's younger brother, and kit's brother-in-law. nature, that exquisite humorist who turns so many dissimilar little figures out of the same moulds, had never shown herself a more imaginative artist than when she ordained that jack and toby should have the same father and mother. the more you considered their relationship, the stranger that relationship appeared. jack, slim, aquiline, dark, with his fine, taper-fingered hands and the unmistakable marks of breeding in face and form, was sufficiently remote to all appearance from toby--fair, snub-nosed, squat, with his big gloves and his big boots, and his chair-filling build; but in character they were, considered as brothers, perfectly irreconcilable. the elder had what we may call a spider-mind. it wove a thread invisible almost to the eye, but strong enough to bear the weight of what it was meant to bear. obvious issues, the natural consequences of things, jack passed by in the manner of an express rushing through a wayside station, and before toby, to continue the metaphor, had drawn up, flushed and panting, at the platform, and read the name on the station board, jack would be a gray streamer of smoke on the horizon. but toby's grasp of the obvious was as sure as jack's keen appreciation of subtleties, and though he made no dragon-fly dartings through the air, nor vanished unaware on horizon points, he went very steadily along, right in the middle of the road, and was never in any danger of falling into obvious ditches, or colliding with anyone who did not unquestionably get in his way, or where he might be expected to go. toby was a person who got continually slapped on the back--a lovable habit, but one which no amount of diplomacy or thread-spinning will produce. to slap jack on the back, for instance, must always, from his earliest years, have been an impossibility. this was lucky, for he would have resented it. that nobody ever quarrelled with either of them appears at first sight a point in common; in reality it illustrates their dissimilarity. it was dangerous to quarrel with jack; it was blankly impossible to quarrel with toby. you dare not try it with the one; it was useless to try it with the other. at the present moment his sister-in-law was trying her utmost to do so, and failing pitiably. kit was not accustomed to fail or to be pitiable, and it irritated her. "you have no sense, toby," she was saying. "you cannot see, or you will not, where your interest lies--yes, and your duty, too." now, when kit talked about duty toby always smiled. when he smiled his eyes wrinkled up till they closed, and he showed a row of strong, clean, useful teeth. strength, cleanliness, and utility, in fact, were his most salient features. kit leaned back in her chair, waiting for his answer, for toby got confused unless you gave him time. they were sitting in the tented balcony of the hungarian embassy, and from within came the rhythm of dance music and a delicious murmur of voices. it was the evening of the day of the bazaar, and kit felt that she had earned her ball. the night was hot, and as she attempted the hopeless task of quarrelling with toby she fanned herself, partly, no doubt, for the sake of the current of air, but to a psychologist, judging by her face, not without the intention of fanning the embers of her wrath. she had sat out this dance with him on purpose, and she was beginning to think that she was wasting her time. toby's smile broadened. "when did you last do your duty, kit?" he asked. "my duty?" said kit sharply. "we are talking about yours." "and my duty is----" "not to go to that vulgar, stupid music-hall to-morrow night with that loutish friend of yours from oxford, but to dine with us, and meet miss murchison. you seem to forget that jack is your elder brother." "my duty towards jack----" began toby irreverently. "don't be profane. you are jack's only brother, and i tell you plainly that it is no fun being lord conybeare unless you have something to be lord conybeare with. putting money into the estate," said kit rather unwisely, "is like throwing it down a well." toby became thoughtful, and his eyes opened again. his mind worked slowly, but it soon occurred to him that he had never heard that his brother was famed for putting money into the estate. "and taking money out of the estate is like taking it out of a well," he remarked at length, with an air of a person who is sure of his facts, but does not mean to draw inferences of any kind whatever. kit stared at him a moment. it had happened once or twice before that she had suspected toby of dark sayings, and this sounded remarkably like another of them. he was so sensible that sometimes he was not at all stupid. she made a mental note of how admirable a thing is a perfectly impenetrable manner if you wish to make an innuendo; there was nothing so telling. "well?" she said at length. toby's face expressed nothing whatever. he took off a large eight and lit a cigarette. "that's all," he said--"nothing more." kit decided to pass on. "it's all very well for you now," she said, "for you have six or seven hundred a year, and you happen to like nothing so much as hitting round balls with pieces of wood and iron. it is an inexpensive taste, and you are lucky to find it amusing. in your position at present you have no calls upon you and no barrack of a house to keep up. but when you are lord conybeare you will find how different it is. besides, you must marry some time, and when you marry you must marry money. old bachelors are more absurd, if possible, than old spinsters. and goodness knows how ridiculous they are!" "my sister-in-law is a mercenary woman," remarked toby. "and aren't we getting on rather quick?" "quick!" screamed kit. "i am painfully trying to drag you a few steps forward, and you say we are getting on quick! now, toby, you are twenty-five----" "four," said toby. "oh, toby, you are enough to madden job! what difference does that make? i choose that you should be twenty-five! all your people marry early; they always did; and it is a most proper thing for a young man to do. really, young men are getting quite impossible. they won't dance--you aren't dancing; they won't marry--you aren't married; they spend all their lazy, selfish lives in amusing themselves and--and ruining other people." "it's better to amuse yourself than not to amuse yourself," said toby. this, as he knew, was a safe draw. if kit was at home, out she came. "that is your view. thank goodness there are other views," said kit, with extraordinary energy. "why, for instance, do you suppose that i went down to the wilds of kensington and opened a bazaar, as i did this afternoon?" "i can't think," said toby. "wasn't it awfully slow?" he began to grin again. "slow? yes, of course it was slow; but it is one's duty not to mind what is slow," continued kit rapidly, pumping up moral sentiments with surprising fluency. "why do you suppose jack goes to the house whenever there is a church bill on? why do i come and argue with you and quarrel with you like this?" toby opened his blue eyes as wide as kit's bazaar. "are you quarrelling with me?" he asked. "i didn't know. try not, kit." kit laughed. "dear toby, don't be so odious and tiresome," she said. "do be nice. you can behave so nicely if you like, and the princess was saying at the bazaar this afternoon what a dear boy you were." "so the bazaar wasn't so slow," thought toby, who knew that kit had a decided weakness, quite unaccountable, for princesses. but he was wise enough to say nothing. "and i've taken all the trouble to ask miss murchison to dinner just because of you," continued kit quickly, seeing her partner out of the corner of her eye careering wildly about in search of her. "she's perfectly charming, toby, and very pretty, and you always like talking to pretty girls, and quite right, too; and the millions--oh, the millions! you have no one to look after you but jack and me, and jack is a city man now; and what will happen to the conybeares if you don't marry money i don't know. you want money; she wants a marquis. there it is!" "did you ask her?" said toby parenthetically. "no, darling, i did not," said kit, with pardonable asperity. "i left that to you." toby sighed. "you go so quick, kit," he said. "you marry me to a person i've never yet seen." kit drew on her gloves; the partner was imminent. "come and see her, toby--come and see her. that is all i ask. oh, here you are, ted; i've been waiting for you for ages. i thought you had thrown me over. good-bye, toby; to-morrow at half-past eight, and i'll promise to order iced asparagus, which i know you like." the two went off, leaving toby alone. conversation of this kind with kit always reduced him to a state of breathless mental collapse. she caught him up, so to speak, and whirled him along through endless seas of prospective alliances, to drop him at the end, a mere lifeless lump, in unknown localities, with the prospect of iced asparagus as a restorative. this question of his marriage was not a new one between them. many times before kit had snatched him up like this, and plumped him down in front of some extraordinarily eligible maiden. but either he or the extraordinarily eligible maiden, or both, had walked away as soon as kit's eye was turned, and made themselves disconcerting to her schemes. but to-night kit had shown an unusual vigour and directness. selfish and unscrupulous as she was, she had, like everybody else, a soft spot for toby, and she could honestly think of nothing more conducive to his highest advantage than to procure him a wealthy wife. wealth was the _sine quâ non_--no other need apply; but in miss murchison she thought she had found very much more. the girl was a beauty--a real beauty; and though she was not of the type that appealed personally to kit, she might easily appeal immensely to toby. she had only come out that season, and kit had met her but once or twice before; but a very much duller eye than kit's could have seen that in all probability she would not be on view in the eligible department very long. she was american by origin, but had been brought up entirely in england; and her countrymen observed with pain, and the men of her adopted country with that patronizing approval over which our continental neighbours find it so hard to keep calm, that no one would have guessed her nationality. of her father little was known, but that little was good, for he was understood to be wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, having made a colossal pile in some porky or oily manner, and to have had the good taste not to beget any other children. she and her mother had been at the bazaar that afternoon, where they had run across the pervasive kit, who suddenly saw in her impulsive way that here at last was the very girl for toby, wondered at her blindness in not seeing it before, and engaged them to dine next evening. now, mrs. murchison had long sighed and pined for an invitation from kit, whom she considered to be the topmost flower of the smartest plant in the pleasant garden of society. at last her wish was fulfilled. princes had drunk her champagne, and danced or sat out to her fiddles, and made themselves agreeable under her palms; but a small and particular set in society in which kit most intimately moved had hitherto had nothing to say to her, and she accepted the invitation with effusion, though it meant an excuse or a subterfuge to a countess. but mrs. murchison had picked up the line of london life with astonishing swiftness and great perspicuity. her object was to get herself and her daughter, not into the cleverest or the most amusing, or, as she styled it, the "ducalest set," in london, but into what she and others, for want of a better name, called "the smart set," and she had observed, at first with surprise and pain, but unerringly, that rank counted for nothing there. she could not have told you, nor perhaps could they, what did count there, but she knew very well it was not rank. "why, we might play kiss-in-the-ring with the queen and royal family," she had observed once to her daughter, "but we should be no nearer for that." a year ago she would have hoarded a countess as being a step in the ladder she proposed to get to the top of, but now she knew that no countess, _quâ_ countess, mattered a straw in the attainment of the goal for which she aimed; and this particular one, whom she had already thrown over for kit, might as well have been a milkmaid in connecticut for all the assistance she could give her in her quest. the smart set was the smart set, here was her creed; americans had got there before, and americans, she fully determined, should get there again. what she expected to find there she did not know; whether it would be at all worth the pains she did not care, and she would not be at all disappointed if it was exactly like everything else, or perhaps duller. it would be sufficient for her to be there. in many ways mrs. murchison was a remarkable woman, and she had a kind and excellent heart. she had been the very pretty daughter of a man who had made a fair fortune in commerce, and had let his children grow up and get educated as god pleased; but from very early years this daughter of his had made up her mind that she was not going to revolve for the remainder of her life in commercial circles, and she had divided her money fairly evenly between adornments for the body and improvements for the mind. thus she had acquired a great fluency in french, and an accent as remarkable as it was incorrect. in the same way she had read a great deal of history, and the classical literature of both english tongues; and though she seldom managed to get her names quite right, both she and those who heard her were easily able to guess to whom she referred. thus, when she alluded to richard dent de lion, though the name sounded like a yellow flower with a milky stem, there could be no reasonable doubt that she was speaking of the crusader; or when she told you that her husband was as rich as croesum, those who had ever heard of croesus could not fail to see that they were hearing of him now. she was fond of allusions, and her conversation was as full of plums as a cake; but as she held the sensible and irrefutable view that conversation is but a means of making oneself understood, she was quite satisfied to do so. mrs. murchison was now a big handsome woman of about forty, fresh, of high colour, and beautifully dressed. in spite of her manifest absurdities and the surprising nature of her conversation, she was eminently likeable, and to her friends lovable. there was no mistaking the honesty and kindliness of her nature; she was a good woman, and in ways a wise one. lily, her daughter, who found herself on the verge of hysterics twenty times a day at her inimitable remarks, had the intensest affection for her mother, blindly reciprocated; and the daughter, to whom the wild chase after the smart set seemed perfectly incomprehensible, was willing that all the world should think her heart was in it sooner than that her mother should suspect it was not. mrs. murchison herself had begun to forget her french and history a little, for she was a mere slave to this new accomplishment, social success, and found it demanded all her time and attention. she worked at it from morning till night, and from night to morning she dreamed about it. only the night before she had thought with extraordinary vividness in her sleep that her maid had come to her bedside with a note containing a royal command to sing duets with the queen quite quietly at . that morning, and she had awoke with a pang of rapturous anxiety to find the vision unsubstantial, and that she need not get up to practise her scales. she made no secret of her ambitions, but rather paraded them, and told her dream to the princess frederick at the bazaar with huge _naïveté_. and to see lily married into the smart set would have caused her to say her nunc dimittis with a sober and grateful heart. but the smart set was a terribly baffling will-o'-the-wisp kind of affair, or so it had hitherto been to her. a married daughter, an unmarried daughter even, so she observed, might be steeped in the smart set, while the mother was, figuratively speaking, in bloomsbury. you might robe yourself from head to foot in balas rubies, you might be a double duchess, you might dance a cancan down piccadilly, you might be the most amiable of god's creatures, the wittiest, the most corrupt, or the most correct of the daughters of eve, and yet never get near it; but here was mrs. lancelot gordon, who never did anything, was not even an honourable, dressed rather worse than mrs. murchison's own maid, and yet was a pivot and centre of that charmed circle. mrs. murchison racked her brain over the problem, and came to the conclusion that no accomplishment could get you into it, no vice or virtue keep you out. that was a comfort, for she had no vices. but to-day kit had asked her to dinner; the mystic doors perhaps were beginning to turn on their hinges, and her discarded countess might continue to revolve on her unillumined orbit in decent and dull obscurity with her belted earl. chapter vi toby's partner toby finished his cigarette when kit left him, and threw the end over the balcony into the street. it went flirting through the air like a small firework, and he saw it pitch on the shoulder of an immense policeman below, who looked angrily round. and so it was that the discreet toby withdrew softly into the ballroom. it was only a little after one, and the dancing was at its height. everyone who intended to come had done so, and no one yet had thought of going away. from the band in the gallery came the enchanting lilt of the dance music, with its graceful stress and abatement, making it impossible not to dance. the light-hearted intoxication of rhythmic movement entering into the souls of many women whom one would naturally have supposed to have left their dancing days behind them, for reasons over which they had no control, had produced the same sort of effect in them as a warm november day does in the bluebottles who have outlived the summer, and they were deluding themselves into thinking that "june was not over, though past her full." the ballroom was ideally occupied; it was peopled enough, but not overcrowded, and like a whisper underneath the shouting band you could hear the sibilant rustle of skirts, and the "sip-sip" of shoes over the well-polished floor. kit and her partner were as well matched and graceful a pair as could be found in london--too well matched, the world said; but the world is never happy unless it is saying something of the sort, and the wiser there, among whom even her bitterest friends put kit, are accustomed to discount all that is said. to repeat fresh gossip without actually believing or disbelieving it, and to hear it in the same light-hearted spirit makes the world as fresh as a daily paper to someone just arrived from long sea, and kit's interest in what was said about her was of the most breezily superficial sort. she never intended that it should be ever so distantly possible that she should compromise herself, for she recognised with humble thankfulness how hard she was to compromise. she had done many risky things in her life, and there was safety in their very numbers. people would only say that her conduct with so-and-so had been much riskier, and yet it had come to nothing. probably, then, this intimacy with lord comber was equally innocent. other people had merely looked over hedges and been accused of stealing horses, while kit, so to speak, had been found before now with the stolen halter in her hand; and yet her excellent grace in giving it up at the proper moment to the proper owner had got her out of what might have been a scrape to a less accomplished adventurer. and to-night nobody talked more disagreeably than they had talked scores of times before. up to a certain point repetition is the soul of wit; at least, the point of a joke grows by dwelling on it, but the repetition in excess is wearisome, and to-night people scarcely said more than what a beautiful couple they were. about this there could scarcely be two opinions. kit was very tall and slenderly made, and there was a boyish spring and grace about her dancing which gave a peculiar spontaneousness to this pretty performance. ted comber, a fresh-faced, handsome youth, had no extra weight on his hands; the two moved with an exquisite unanimity of motion. amiable indiscretions and a course of life not indicated in the educational curriculum had led the authorities both at eton and christ church to make their parting with him take place sooner than he had himself intended, but, as kit said in her best manner, "he was only a boy then." he was in years not much more than a boy now; in appearance, especially by artificial light, he was a boy still, and the two numbered scarcely more than fifty years between them. but balls are not given in order to furnish a hunting-ground for the novelist and reformer, and to-night there were few such present. indeed, anyone must have had a soul of putty not to have laid criticism aside; not to have forgotten all that had been said before, and all that might be said afterwards, in the enchanting moment. this dance had been on the board some ten minutes when toby entered; people with winds and what is known, by an elegant periphrasis, as a superfluity of adipose tissue had paused; and for a few minutes there were not more than half a dozen couples on the floor. kit, secure in the knowledge that no one present except herself and jack had been to that city dinner a fortnight before, had put on again the same orange chiffon creation as she had worn that night, and she blazed out against the man's dark clothes; she was a flame in his encircling arm. the room was nearly square, and they danced not in straight lines up, across and down, but in one big circle, coming close to the walls only at four points in the middle of the sides of the room; like some beautiful twin star they moved round a centre, revolving also on a private axis of their own. indeed, the sight of them whirling fast and smoothly in perfect time to the delicious rhythm was so pretty that no one thought of alluding to their private axis at all. even the hungarian ambassador, as sprightly a young man of eighty or thereabouts as you could wish to see, and still accustomed to lead the cotillion, recognised the superiority of the performance. "decidedly all the rest of us cut a poor figure when those two are dancing," he said with unwonted modesty to lady haslemere. but in a few minutes the room grew crowded again. recovered couples sprang up like mushrooms on the floor, and the pace slowed. lord comber steered as no one else could steer, but checks infinitesimal but infinite could not but occur. it would have been good enough had it not just now been better. "we'll wait a moment, ted," said kit; "perhaps at the end it will be emptier again." she stopped opposite one of the doors. "shall we go on to the balcony?" he asked. "there will be no one there." "yes. oh, there is mrs. murchison! take me to her. i'll follow you in a moment." ted swore gently under his breath. "oh, leave the croesum alone," he said. "do come now, kit. this is my last dance with you this evening." but kit dropped his arm. "fetch toby," she said under her voice to lord comber; "fetch, you understand, and at once. he is over there." then, without a pause, "so we meet again," she said to mrs. murchison. "you were right and i was wrong, for i said, do you remember, that the one way not to meet a person was to go to the same dance. and did you get all those great purchases of yours home safely? you were quite too charitable! what will you do with a hundred and forty fire-screens?--or was it a hundred and forty-one? miss murchison, what magnificent pearls you have! they are too beautiful! now, if i wore pearls like yours, people would say they were not real, and they would be perfectly right." miss murchison was what kit would have called at first sight an uncomfortable sort of a girl, very pretty, beautiful indeed, but uncomfortable. what she should have said to kit's praise of her pearls kit could not have told you, but having made yourself agreeable to anyone, it is that person's business to reply in the same strain. else, what happens to social and festive meetings? but miss murchison looked neither gratified nor embarrassed. either would have shown a proper spirit. "they are good," she said shortly. kit kept a weather eye open for toby. she could see him near, and yet far, for the room was full, being reluctantly "fetched" by lord comber, who appeared to be expostulating with him. there were still some seconds to elapse before he could get to them, but kit had determined to introduce him then and there to miss murchison. perhaps her beauty would be more effective than her own arguments. "it is only quite a little dinner to-morrow," she said to mrs. murchison, in order to fill up the time naturally. "you will have to take a sort of pot-luck with us. a kind of 'no fish-knife' dinner." better and better. this was a promising beginning to the intimacy mrs. murchison craved. it was nothing, she said to herself, to be asked to a big dinner; the pot-luck dinner was far more to her taste. "well, i think that's perfectly charming of you, lady conybeare," she said. "if there's one thing i am _folle_ about, it's those quiet little dinners, and one gets so little of them. be it ever so humble, there's nothing like dining quietly with your friends." kit's face dimpled with merriment. "that's so sweet of you," she said. "oh, here's toby. toby, let me introduce you to mrs. murchison. oh, what's your name?--i always forget. it begins with evelyn. anyhow, he is conybeare's brother, you know, mrs. murchison." mrs. murchison did not know, but she was very happy to do so. also the informality was charming. but her happiness had a momentary eclipse. she knew that a man was introduced to a woman, and not the other way about, but might not some other rule hold when the case was between a plain miss and the brother of a marquis? english precedence seemed to her a fearful and wonderful thing. but kit relieved her of her difficulty. "and miss murchison, toby," she said. "charmed to have seen you again. till . to-morrow;" and she smiled and retreated with ted. blushing honours were raining thick on the enchanted lady. "one thing leads to another," she said to herself, and here was the brother of lord conybeare endorsing the happy meeting of this afternoon. then aloud: "very pleased to make your acquaintance," she said, for the phrase was ineradicable. she had searched in vain for a cisatlantic equivalent, but could not get hold of one. like the snake in spring, she had cast off the slough of many of her transatlanticisms, but "very pleased" was deeply engrained, and appeared involuntarily and inevitably. but toby's inflammable eye had caught the _filia pulchrior_. "my sister-in-law tells me you are dining with her to-morrow," he said genially. "that is delightful." he paused a moment, and racked his brain for another suitable remark; but, finding none, he turned abruptly to miss murchison. "may i have the pleasure?" he asked. "we shall just have time for a turn before this is over." "of course you may, lord evelyn," said her mother precipitately. miss murchison paused for a moment without replying, and toby, though naturally modest, told himself that her mother's ready acceptance for her justified the pause. "delighted," she said. toby might be described as a good, useful dancer, but no more. people who persist in describing one thing in terms suitable to another speak of the poetry and the melody of motion, and the dancing toby had no more poetry or melody in his motion than a motor car or a street piano. the tide of couples, as inexplicable in its ebb and flow as deep sea-currents, had gone down again, and they had a fairly free floor. but before they had made the circuit of the room twice kit and lord comber reappeared, and kit heaved a thankful sister-in-law's sigh. "toby is dancing with the murchison girl," she said; "and she hardly ever dances. now----" and they glided off on to the floor. "a design of yours?" asked ted. "yes, all my own. _ego fecit_, as mrs. murchison says. she has millions. if jack were dead and i was a man, i should try to marry her myself. simply millions, ted. don't you wish you had?" "certainly; but i am very content dancing with you. i prefer it." "that is silly," said kit. "no sane man really prefers dancing with--with anyone, to having millions." "why try the cynical _rôle_? do you really believe that, kit?" "yes, and i hate compliments. compliments should always be insincere, and i'm sure you mean what you say. if they are sincere they are unnecessary. oh, it's stopping. what a bore! six bars more. quicker--quicker!" the coda gathered up the dreamy threads of the valse into a vivid ever-quickening pattern of sound, and came to an end with a great blare. the industrious and heated toby wiped his forehead. "that was delicious," he said. "won't you have an ice or something, miss murchison? i say, it is sw--stewing hot, isn't it?" lily took his arm. "yes, do give me an ice," she said. "who is that dancing with lady conybeare?" toby looked round. "i don't see them," he said. "but i expect it's ted comber. kit usually dances with him. they are supposed to be the best dancers in london. oh yes, i see them. it is comber." "do you know him?" "yes, in the sort of way one knows fifty thousand people. we always say 'hulloa' to each other, and then we've finished, don't you know." "you don't like him, apparently." "i particularly dislike him," said toby, in a voice that was cheerful and had the real ring of sincerity. "why?" "don't know. he doesn't do any of the things he ought. he doesn't shoot, or ride, or play games. he stays at country houses, you see, and sits with the women in the drawing-room, or walks with them, and bicycles with them in the afternoon. not my sort." lily glanced at his ugly, pleasant face. "i quite agree with you," she said. "i hate men to sit on chairs and look beautiful. he was introduced to me just now, though i did not catch his name, and i felt he knew what my dress was made of, and how it was made, and what it cost." "oh, he knows all that sort of thing," said toby. "you should hear him and kit talking chiffon together. and you dislike that sort of inspection?" "intensely. but most women apparently don't." "no: isn't it funny! so many women don't seem to know a man when they see him. certainly comber is very popular with them. but a man ought to be liked by men." miss murchison smiled. toby had got two ices and was sitting opposite her, devouring his in large mouthfuls, as if it had been porridge. she had been brought up in the country and the open air, among horses and dogs, and other nice wholesome things, and this mode of life in london, as she saw it, under her mother's marchings and manoeuvres to storm the smart set, seemed to her at times to be little short of insane. if you were not putting on a dress, you were taking it off, and all this simply to sit on a chair in the park, to say half a dozen words to half a dozen people, to lunch at one house, to dine at another, and dance at a third. all that was only incidental in life seemed to her to be turned into its business; everything was topsy-turvy. she understood well enough that if you lived in the midst of your best friends, it would be delightful to see them there three times a day, in these pretty well-dressed settings, but to go to a house simply in order to have been there was inexplicable. mrs. murchison had given a ball only a few weeks before at her house in grosvenor square, about which even after the lapse of days people had scarcely ceased talking. royalty had been there, and mrs. murchison, in the true republican spirit, had entertained them royally. her cotillion presents had been really marvellous; there had been so many flowers that it was scarcely possible to breathe, and so many people that it was quite impossible to dance. but as success to mrs. murchison's and many other minds was measured by your crowd and your extravagance, she had been ecstatically satisfied, and had sent across to her husband several elegantly written accounts of the festivity clipped from society papers. the evening had been to her, as it were, a sort of signed certificate of her social standing. but to lily the ball had been more nearly a nightmare than a certificate: neither she nor her mother knew by sight half the people who came, and certainly half the people who came did not know them by sight. the whole thing seemed to her vulgar, wickedly wasteful, and totally unenjoyable. there are those, and her mother was one, who would cheerfully be asphyxiated in a sufficiently exalted crowd. to be found dead among a heap of duchesses would be to her what to a soldier is death in the forefront of the battle. a mob of fashionable people had eaten and drunk at her expense, listened to her band and marvelled at her orchids. she had also to a high degree that excellent though slightly barbarous virtue which is called hospitality. she liked to feed people. but the human soul, as poets are unanimous in telling us, is ever aspiring upwards, and this point reached, mrs. murchison, as has been already stated, desired more. her tastes became childlike again; she yearned for simple little dinners with the mystic few, those dinners which never even appeared in the papers, and were followed by no ball, perhaps not even by a "few people." cold roast beef or bits of common bacon on skewers are sometimes served in the middle of banquets. mrs. murchison longed for her bits of bacon in suitable company. it was very nice to have the prince asking after your dachshund's cough, but she had got past that. these things passed vaguely through miss murchison's mind, as she and toby ate their ices. he was like a whiff of fresh air, she thought, to one who had been breathing a close and vitiated atmosphere. he did not ask her where she had been last night, and where she had dined to-day, and who was in the park in the morning. he seemed to be as little of the world which danced and capered in the next room, chattering volubly about itself, as she was herself. on that point she would like information. "do you like london?" she asked, at length, and then thought herself inane for saying that. it sounded like one of the _banalités_ she found so desperately stupid. but toby understood. he had just finished his ice, and with his spoon he made a comprehensive circle in the air. "this sort of thing, do you mean?" he asked. "all these fine people?" "yes, just that. all these fine people." "it seems to me perfectly idiotic," he replied. "then why do you come?" "why? oh, because there are a lot of people i really do like--real friends of mine, you understand, whom i see in this way. and they come for the same reason, i suppose." lily looked at him a moment out of her big dark eyes, and then nodded gravely. "yes, that makes all the difference," she said. "if you have a lot of friends here, there is a reason for coming. but----" and she stopped loyally. toby guessed what was on the end of her tongue, and with a certain instinct of delicacy changed the subject, or rather led it away from what he imagined was in her mind. "i know what you mean," he said, "and everyone finds it a bore at times. one goes to a party hoping to see a particular person, and the particular person is not there. really, i often wish i was never in london at all. but, you see, i am private secretary to my cousin pangbourne, and while they are in office and the house is sitting i have to be in town. what would happen to the british constitution if i wasn't, i don't dare to think." miss murchison laughed. "that must be interesting, though," she said. "i should love to be in the middle of the wheels. i notice in england that a sudden hush always comes over a room whenever a politician enters. somebody describes the english as a race of shopkeepers. it is a very bad definition; they are much more a race of politicians. the shopkeepers come from america." toby shook his head. "i wish i could notice a hush whenever i came into a room," he said. "i should feel as if i was making a mark. but i don't." "but it is interesting, is it not?" asked miss murchison--"being secretary to a minister, i mean." toby considered. "last week," he said, "i looked over the bills for the flowers in hyde park. they were immense, so i hope you approve of the flowers. i also checked the food of the ducks in st. james's park, so i hope you do not think they are looking thin. those ducks are the bane of my existence. since then i have done nothing. my cousin comes into the secretaries' room every morning to see that we are working. he invariably finds us playing cricket with the fire-shovel. i am usually in." "that also is interesting," said miss murchison. "i love games. oh, there's my mother! i think she is looking for me." "but i may have this dance?" asked toby. "i am sure she would allow me," said the girl; and as they both thought of her mother's feverish acceptance for her of the last, their eyes met. "let us go," said toby gravely; and he gave her his arm back into the ballroom. miss murchison, when she left half an hour later with her mother, was conscious of having enjoyed herself much more than she usually did at such parties. for the most part they seemed to her sad and strange forms of amusement. she danced with a certain number of young men, who admired her pearls or her profile. it is true that both were admirable, especially her profile. but to talk to them was like talking to order through a telephone; it seemed impossible to get beyond the _banalités_ of the day. she was labelled, as she knew, as the heiress of the year; and it was as difficult to forget that as to forget that other people remembered it. no doubt when she got to know people more intimately it would be different; but these first weeks of débutancy could not, she thought, be considered amusing. but toby had been a most delightful change. here was an ordinary human young man, who did not seem to be merely a weary automaton for going from one party to another. he was fairly stupid--an unutterable relief; for if there was one mode of conversation she detested, it was cheap epigram; and he was quite sensible and natural, a relief more unutterable. her mother drove home with her in a state of elation. the mystic innermost shrine was going to be unlocked at last. "lady conybeare said that simply no one was coming to-morrow night," she said. "we shall be six or eight only. lord comber, i think, is coming, and lord evelyn. it will be quite an arcanum. she said she would wear only a tea-gown--i should say a tea-gown only. so _chic_. we will have a little tea-gown party before the end of the season, dear. you and lord evelyn quite hobnailed together. did you enjoy yourself, lily?" "yes, very much." "so glad, darling. i saw no pearls so good as yours. wear them to-morrow, dear. lady conybeare said she adored pearls. 'ah, margerita!'" and mrs. murchison hummed a bar or two of siebel's song in a variety of keys. "and the evening after we go to see 'tristram and isolde,'" she continued. "it is a gala night, and jean de risky plays tristram. how lucky we were to get the box next the royal box! i hope it won't be very hot, for i hear that everybody stops to the end in 'tristram.' there is a leitmotif--or is it liebstod?--at the end, which is quite marvellous, i am told. however, we can go late. i hope it will be in italian. italian is the only language for singing. i remember when i was a girl i used to sing 'la donna è nobile.' i forget who wrote it; those italian names are so alike. and what did you talk to lord evelyn about, dear? was he amusing? we might ask him to our box on thursday to see 'tristram.'" "i don't think he cares about wagner," said lily; "indeed, he told me so." "how very unfashionable! we all like wagner now. personally i think it is quite enchanting; but it always sends me fast asleep, though i enjoy it very much until. but there is a great sameness in the operas; they are like those novels i used to read by mrs. austen--'sense and sensibleness,' and all the rest of them about bath and other watering-places. i thought them very tedious; but i was told one must read them. or was it sir george eliot who wrote them? dear me, how stupid of me! sir george was there to-night, and i never once thought of telling him how much i enjoyed his charming novels!" "george eliot was a woman," remarked lily, leaning back in her corner, tremulous with heroically-repressed amusement. "you may be right, dear; but it isn't a common name for a woman. of course, there's george sand. but if you are right, how lucky i did not speak about his novels to sir george! he would not have liked being mistaken for someone else. some of those literary men are so sensitive." "but, you see, he did not write any of those novels," said lily, with a sudden little spasm of laughter. "no, dear, that is just what i was saying. how you catch one up! my dearest, i am so glad you enjoyed yourself this evening. sometimes i have thought you looked a little bored and tired. really, london is charming! so much _jeu d'esprit_ about it, is there not? and to-morrow we dine at lady conybeare's! how pleasant, and what a wonderful dress she had on this evening! she made me feel quite a dodo--i should say a dowdy." lily broke into a sudden peal of laughter, and her mother beamed good-humouredly. "laughing again at your poor mother," she said, patting her hand. "you are always laughing, lily; you are a perfect _fille de joie_. dear me! i'm always saying the wrong word. here we are, darling. get out very carefully, because my dress is all over." lily stepped out into a perfect mob of powdered footmen who lined the steps of the murchison mansion. mrs. murchison, when she took her house, gave what she called _bête noire_ to a celebrated firm of london decorators (meaning, it is to be supposed, _carte blanche_) to make it as elegant and refined as money could. the result was an impression of extraordinary opulence; and the eminent firm of decorators, wise in their generation, had pleased mrs. murchison very well. not the smallest part of her gratification was the immense sum she had to pay them. money meant almost nothing to her, but it meant a good deal to other people; and to be able to say truthfully that one ceiling had cost a couple of thousand pounds was a solid cause of self-congratulation. indeed, the contemplation of the cheque she had drawn pleased her nearly as much as what the cheque had accomplished. she paused a moment in the hall, while one footman took off her cloak and handed it to another, and looked contentedly round on the stamped leather and the old oak, the louis xiv. chairs, the nankin ware, and the persian rugs; and her mind went back for a second to the days of pitch-pine and horsehair, and in her excellent heart there rose a sudden thrill of thankfulness. lily was already on the stairs, and her mother's eye followed her, and rested there so long that the third footman had closed the door, and stood to attention, waiting for her to move. and one hair of lily's head was dearer to her than all the old oak and the opulence and the powdered footmen. she gave a heavy sigh, all mother. "put the lights out, william," she said, "or is it thomas?" chapter vii the solitary financier mr. alington had not been present at the ball at the hungarian embassy, although kit had taken the trouble to get him an invitation. by the evening mail had come a long report from his australian manager, and as the report required considerable digestion, he, as always, put business before pleasure, especially since he did not dance, and devoted the evening to digesting it. it was all a report should be, concise, clear, and full, and since he had hitherto known very little, technically speaking, about his new venture, it demanded long and solitary consideration. there was a very careful map sent with it, drawn to scale, with the reef where found marked in red, where conjectured in yellow. west australian mining at this time was but in its infancy. a few reports only had reached england about unexplored goldfields of extraordinary richness, and, as is incident to first reports, they had gained but slender credence. but mr. alington had only just come back from queensland; he had seen gold-bearing quartz, he had made a few tentative experiments to prove the richness of the ore, and had subsequently bought a very large number of claims at a comparatively low cost. some of these he fully expected would turn out to be worthless, or scarcely worth the working; others he soberly believed would be found to be very rich. and when he opened his manager's report on the night of the hungarian ball, he had no more certain information about them. the manager advised, consonantly with alington's own desire, that a group of five mines should be started, which together embraced all his claims. in number one (see map) there was, as alington would recollect, a very rich vein of gold, which had now been traced in bore-holes through numbers four and five. numbers two and three were outliers from the direct line of this vein, but in both a good deal of outcrop gold might be profitably worked. all, so said the manager, were, as far as could be at present seen, well worth working, for the two on which the deeper vein did not lie had gold in smaller veins close to the surface, which could be got at with comparatively little cost. it was not yet known whether there was any deeper vein in them. then followed a good deal of technical advice. the main difficulty, as mr. alington would remember, was water, and they must be prepared for heavy expenses in this item. but otherwise the property could not be better. of the specimens sent at random for examination, those from numbers one, four, and five were very rich, and the yield appeared to be not less than five ounces to the ton. this was very high, but such were the results. the reef from which they were taken was five feet thick. then followed some discussion as to processes; there was certainly much to be said for cyanide, but he would not recommend corrosion. it was tediously long, and there was some talk of prohibiting women from being employed in it. certainly the white lead produced by it would bring it under the head of dangerous trades. in numbers two and three the ore was very refractory, and it was curious to find a vein so difficult in the matter of gold extraction close by the vein of one, four, and five. hitherto, in spite of repeated experiments, they had only been able to recover per cent. of the gold it contained. but a new process was being tried in certain mines in the rand--the bülow, was it not?--perhaps mr. alington would go into it and cable results. the worst of these chemical processes was that they were so expensive. mr. alington looked more than ever like a butler of superior benevolence, as he sat at his table by a green-shaded reading-lamp, and made himself master of this excellent report. as he read, he inscribed from time to time neat little notes in pencil on the margin of the page, and from time to time jotted down some figures on his blotting-pad. his rooms, above a gunmaker's in st. james's street--a temporary premise only--were admirably furnished for the wants of a business man of refined tastes and simple desires. a large revolving bookcase full of works of reference stood at his elbow, and a telephone was on the table before him. he was something of a connoisseur in pictures, and in his house on the sussex downs, to which he was extensively adding, he had a really fine collection of english masters. but the london fogs and corrosive smoke spelled death to pigments, and here in his modest quarters in london he had only prints. but these were truly admirable. reynolds' lady crosby undulated over the fireplace; lady hamilton smiled irresistibly on him from under her crown of vine leaves if he looked at the opposite wall; by her sat marie antoinette in an old-gold frame of french work, and mrs. siddons was a first state with the coveted blotted edge. but to-night mr. alington had no eye for these enchanting ladies; he sat long and studiously with the report in front of him, his broad, intelligent face alert with his work. from time to time he reached out a firm, plump hand to take a cigarette from a silver box which stood by his telephone, but often he sat with it unlit for ten minutes or so, absorbed in the page; or, again, he would put it down still only half smoked, as he made one of his little calculations, forget about it, and reach his hand out absently for another. in this way before midnight there were some half-dozen in his ash-tray scarcely touched. a spirit-case and a siphon stood on a tray to his right, and an hour before he had mixed himself a mild whisky-and-soda, which he had not yet tasted. the silver bell of his sèvres clock had already struck one when he took up the report, folded it carefully, and put it back in its registered envelope. the map, however, he spread out on the table in front of him, and continued to study it very attentively for ten minutes more. that, too, he then put in the envelope, and, leaning back in his chair, lit a cigarette in earnest and smoked it through. he was a little short-sighted, and for reading, particularly at night, he wore gold-rimmed spectacles, which gave him a scholastic, almost a theologian aspect. but these had long ago been pushed up on his forehead; the theologian had evidently some great matter in debate. at length he rose, still slowly, and stood for a moment in profound thought. then, with a sudden briskness, as of a man who had made up his mind, he took the envelope, and, putting it into a drawer in his knee-hole table, turned the key upon it. "it will be one of the very biggest deals," he remarked to himself. a grand piano by bechstein stood at the other side of the room, and bach's st. matthew passion music was open upon it. mr. alington took it up and turned over the pages with a loving reverence. he paused a moment, and hummed in his beautiful tenor voice the recitative of "and peter went out," and then, lighting the candles, played a few crescendo chords, and plunged into the intricacies of the great double chorus of the lightnings and thunders. the sonorous and terrible fugue grew and grew under his deft hands, rising from crescendo to crescendo with its maddened, tumultuous ground-bass. a pause of a bar, and with a great burst he attacked the second part. he sang the air of "the bottomless pit" with full voice, while his hands quivered mistily in the frenzied chromatic accompaniment. the appalling terrors of the music possessed him; he seemed like a man demented. in the last six bars he doubled the bass as if written for pedals, and with the tierce de picardy finished in a crashing chord. mr. alington pushed his rather scanty hair back from his forehead and gave a great sigh full of reverential awe, the sigh of a religious artist. he was a true musician, and his own admirable performance of the wonderful text moved him; it smelled of the flames. then after a moment he turned to the last chorus, the most perfect piece of pathos ever translated into sound, and played it through with all the reticence and sobriety of his utmost art. the wailing cadences, the simple phrases, touched him profoundly. unlike mrs. murchison, he did not consider himself bound to worship wagner, although the operas did not sound to him the least alike. he would have told you that he thought him artistically immoral, that he violated the canons of music, as binding, so he considered, on musicians as is the moral code on a civilized society. "a brilliant savage," he said once of that master; "but i know i am unfashionable." he sat for a long minute perfectly still when he had finished the chorus, as absorbed in the thought of it as he had been in the mines half an hour before. unaffected moisture stood in the man's eye; his face was that of a stout and rapturous saint in a stained-glass window contemplating some beatific vision. he was alone, and perfectly honest with himself. at length he shut the piano very softly, as if afraid of disturbing the exquisite sweetness and melancholy beauty of the music by any other sound, and, candle in hand, went to his bedroom. an admirable reproduction of holman hunt's "lux mundi" hung over his fireplace; the "triumph of the innocents" was directly above his anchorite-looking bed. they were favourite pictures of his, not only for their subject, but for the genuineness of their feeling. they seemed to him to have grasped something of the simplicity of the real pre-raphaelite school--something of its soberness, its constant love of form, its childlike straightforwardness. there was an old oak _prie-dieu_ by his bedside, with several well-thumbed books of devotion on it, and he knelt there a full ten minutes before he got into bed. he was thankful for many things--his health, his wealth, his perseverance, his brains, his power of appreciating beautiful things; and he prayed for their long continuance and well-being fervently. mr. alington was a sound sleeper and an early riser, and neither his new and dizzy schemes nor the pathos of the passion music kept him awake. he had various appointments in the city on the following morning, and was going to lunch with lord conybeare at white's. jack was not there when he arrived, and he had to solace his waiting moments with the inspection of the room set aside for the reception of strangers. it was furnished with a table, on which stood an empty inkstand and a carafe of stale-looking water, two horsehair chairs, a weighing-machine, and a row of hat pegs hung up inside a shelfless bookcase. he hoped, however, that he would not in the future have to confine himself to the stranger's room when he made an appointment there, since jack had put him up for the membership of the club, got tom abbotsworthy to second him, and had induced a large number of members to append their noble names to his candidature. jack came in before long, looking as he always looked, even in the most broiling weather--perfectly cool, unharassed, and ill to quarrel with. he never seemed to get either hot or dirty, even in the underground; smuts passed him by, and settled on the noses of his less fortunate neighbours. "sorry to keep you waiting," he said. "let us have lunch at once. you have not been here long, i hope." "only a few moments," said alington; "and i fancy i was here before my time." "a fine habit," murmured jack. "how punctual we should be between us!" they entered the dining-room, which was rather empty, and took their seat at a small table a little removed from other lunchers. "i did not see you last night at the embassy," said jack. "i thought you were sure to be there. kit told me she had an invitation sent you, and busy men like you always seem to have time for everything." "one has all the time there is," said alington; "and i meant to go. but the mail brought me news--important news from australia." "indeed? good news, i hope." "excellent news. we shall very soon require your services." "ah! what will you drink?" "thanks, i never touch wine at lunch. a little water, please. i am a bit of an ascetic in certain ways. yes, the news was excellent. i shall get out a prospectus at once, and float the companies. out of the five mines, the same reef, a very rich one, runs through three. the other two are outliers from this reef, but there appears to be a good deal of surface gold. they ought to begin paying at once almost. i propose making two groups out of these five mines--one comprising the outliers, the other three the main reef. or we might amalgamate them later. i strongly recommend your purchasing these outliers in large quantities. that, at least, is what i intend to do myself." jack laughed. "it is easy to recommend my making large purchases," he said; "and i wonder if i could run up a bill for them. but circumstances over which i have long ceased to have any control----" mr. alington held up his large white hand. "you will not need to cover," he said. "pay the first call, or, at most, the first two calls. i assure you that that will be all that is necessary. unless i am much more mistaken than i have ever been in my life, the price will rise very soon and very considerably. you must remember that you draw a salary as a director. if you wish, i will advance that for this year." "that would be very convenient," observed jack with truth and candour. "the first call will be half a crown," continued alington. "a thousand pounds will thus enable you to command eight thousand shares." "it is a long time since i have had eight thousand anythings," remarked jack; "of course, i don't count debts. i never count debts. but what will happen to me if the shares do not go up?" "the shares will go up," said alington dryly. "i should advise you to put yourself entirely in my hands about this. i simply cannot be wrong. as a director, you are bound to hold shares. i recommend you to put the greater part of them into these two outlying mines." "i ask nothing better than to be guided by you," said jack. "many thanks for the hint." mr. alington waved the thanks away, as if they were disproportionately large to the favour bestowed. "and i should like to have a meeting of the directors on tuesday," he said, "if that will suit you and lord abbotsworthy. i am going to see him this afternoon. i propose to employ my own brokers, men whom i have dealt with for years." by degrees the room filled up, and, as the tables near them had begun to be occupied, they dismissed for the present the subject of the mines. jack was more than content to leave his own financial venture in alington's hands, for he felt convinced that he was playing fair with him. habitually somewhat cynical, he would have thought twice about going bail for his most intimate acquaintance; but he believed that alington, as he himself candidly said, was acting for his own interests in making it worth a marquis's while to join the board. about alington's ability he had found no two opinions; extensive inquiries showed him that on all hands he was considered the shrewdest of the shrewd. the market had already got hints about the new issue, and was waiting with some impatience for the publication of its prospectus. and the interest extended far beyond the professional operators; the british public, as alington had said, were nearly ripe to go mad on the subject of australian gold, and he had chosen his moment well. chapter viii the simply nobody the "quiet dinner, simply nobody," to which kit had invited the gratified mrs. murchison and her daughter the night before had grown like a rolling snowball during the hours of the hungarian ball. if you are having a quiet dinner, one more does not make any difference or change the character of the entertainment, and there had been many such. among others, kit had met alice haslemere in the park next morning, and the latter had made an appeal _ad misericordiam_ to her. "i am bidden to meet a serene transparency or a transparent serenity of some sort to-night," she had said. "who? oh, some second-class little royalty made in germany, and i don't intend to go, and have said so. i gave an excuse, kit; i gave you as my excuse, because you are a sort of privileged person, and even royalty lets you do as you choose. how do you manage it, dear? i wish you would tell me. anyhow, i said that you asked me to dine to-night six weeks ago. you see, i owe you one over that disingenuous way you treated me about jack and the baccarat. so you did ask me, didn't you?" kit slowed down; she was riding a white bicycle picked out with crimson. "seven weeks ago, alice," she said; "and if you had forgotten i should never have forgiven you. quite quietly, you know; and so we are quits. lady conybeare's dinner," she said with some ceremony, "will be served as usual at eight-thirty." they were both riding the wrong side of the road, and lady haslemere cast an offended look at her father's coachman, who did not recognise her, and made way for the carriage. "i knew it was an old, old engagement," she said, with feeling. "and who is coming? i forget; it is so long since you told me." "murchison _mère et fille_," said kit; "and the _fille_ is going to marry toby. you just see. also ted and toby and the baccarat man. jack is very thick with him just now, and my ladyship smells money. oh, alice, we might play baccarat again to-night; i was thinking that it would be rather tiresome having to play gooseberry to toby all the evening, but a hand at cards would help to pass the time, would it not? let's see, baccarat is the game where you have to try and get nine, isn't it? how pleasant! there are some other people coming, too, and there will probably be more before evening. i notice that when there are dinners for transparencies people ask me to ask them. i am a sort of refuge from royalty." "yes, and how transparent!" remarked lady haslemere. "isn't it? and what a bad joke! but wear a tea-gown, alice, because i told mrs. m. to do so. yes, we'll play detectives on the alington this evening. i hope he'll cheat again. it must be so amusing to be a real detective. i think i shall become one if all else fails. and most things have failed." "to see if shopping takes so long, and whether the club accounts for late hours," quoted lady haslemere, with a touch of regret. "but, kit, what a blessing it is that one does not feel bound to watch one's husband! haslemere is so safe, you know; one might as well watch st. paul's cathedral to see if it flirted with st. mary magdalene's. it would bore me to death watching him. only once have i seen him at all excited." "who was the happy lady?" asked kit, with interest. "it wasn't a lady at all--not even me. it was a wire puzzle, and he said it was mathematically impossible, and woke me up about three in the morning to tell me so. he was really quite feverish about it. but in demonstrating to me how impossible it was he accidentally did it, upon which he became perfectly normal, and we lived happily ever afterwards." they turned into the road north of the serpentine by the achilles statue, and quickened their pace. "one always does live happily ever afterwards," said kit thoughtfully. "truth is quite as strange as fiction. there's the old duchess--what a cat! and just look at her wig all sideways! but i am also thankful that one's husband is not a detective. jack would make such a bad one. i should be ashamed of him." "i suppose he would. he is clever," said alice, "and criminals are so short-sighted. they make the obvious mistakes. but jack would make a ripping criminal." "that is just it. as a detective jack would overlook the obvious things because they are so obvious. consequently, he would never find out anything, because criminals always make stupid mistakes, not clever ones. jack never found out that the mine man cheated at baccarat, for instance. oh, i forgot, you guessed that. look, there's ted. how badly he rides!" "and he never finds out about ted," remarked lady haslemere, with extreme dryness. "never. you see, there's nothing to find out. i always tell him what a darling ted is, and so he never thinks he is a darling. i'm very fond of ted, but--but---- after all, frankness pays better than anything else, especially when you have nothing to conceal." lady haslemere considered the proposition for a moment, but found nothing to say about it. "how is the mine man?" she asked abruptly. "green bay-trees. so he must be wicked. a few nights ago, when he dined with us, i asked him to sing after dinner, and he sang a sort of evening hymn in four sharps. don't you know the kind? he has a really beautiful voice, and it nearly made me cry, i felt so regretful for something i had forgotten. now, that shows he must be wicked. good people only make me yawn, because they try and adapt themselves to me and talk about worldly things. and it is only wicked people who sing hymns with real feeling, who make me want to cry. luckily, they are rare." "and the mines?" asked alice. "well, jack is excited about the mines, like haslemere with the wire puzzle, and when jack is excited it means a good deal. he told me that if things went decently we should be solvent again--it sounds like a chemical--in fact, the mines are playing up. for to make jack and me solvent, alice, means a lot." they had reached the serpentine, and kit dismounted and rested by the rails. it was a typically fine june day. the sky was cloudless, the trees were comparatively green, large wood-pigeons wandered fatly about, and childlike old gentlemen were sailing miniature yachts across the water. "what a pity one is not a person of simple pleasures!" remarked lady haslemere. "there is an old gentleman there who takes more delight in his silly little boat than you do in the prospect of solvency, or haslemere even in a new wire puzzle. how happy he must be and how dull! i think dulness is really synonymous with happiness. think of cows! you never found an absorbing cow, nor an unhappy one. the old gentleman has eaten a good breakfast; he will eat a good lunch. and he has probably got a balance at his bank." "it's all stomach," said kit regretfully--"all except the balance, i mean." "yes, that's what it comes to. so we shall play detectives to-night, kit." kit started; she was absorbed in the toy yacht. "detectives? oh, certainly," she replied. "but i almost wish we were wrong about the whole concern." "the mine man cheated," said alice, with decision. "i was thinking of asking tom whether he saw." "oh, don't do that," said kit. "we don't want a scandal. look!" a squall shattered the reflections in the calm water, and the old gentleman's toy yacht bowed to it and skimmed off like a swallow. "oh, how nice!" cried kit, who was rapidly taking the colour of her surroundings. "alice, shall we save up our money and buy a little toy yacht? think how happy we should be!" "if you are going to play the milkmaid, kit," said alice severely, "i shall go home. i won't play milkmaid for anybody. playing gooseberry to toby is nothing to it." kit sighed. "dear old gentleman!" she said. "alice, i would give anything to be an old gentleman with white whiskers and a silly little yacht. yes, i know, it is an impossible dream. about the baccarat, what were you saying?" "i have things to say, if you will be so kind as to attend. try to forget about your white whiskers, kit." "yes, i will. there were no such white whiskers." "last night," said lady haslemere, "i lost two hundred and forty pounds and sixpence." "how sixpence? what small stakes you must have been playing! was it the game where you try to get nine?" "yes," said alice, "and i lost the sixpence because i dropped it on the floor. i don't know how i got it, and i don't know what happened to it." "like melchisedech," put in kit. "exactly. anyhow, i dropped it, and it just shows what extraordinary people people are. we all took candles and grovelled on the ground looking for that sixpence. losing it annoyed me more than i can say. i didn't care so much about the rest." "i should have cared much more," said kit very fervently. "but you are quite right. and it explains to a certain extent how a very rich man like mr. alington can cheat over a few shillings." "i dreamed about the sixpence too," said alice. "i thought my salvation depended on it." kit did not reply at once. "that seems inexpensive," she said at length. "i would go as far as that. look at the yacht--oh, i forgot, i mustn't look at the yacht. alice, i believe these mines are a big affair. jack got up this morning at nine in order to be in the city by half-past eight, and it takes a lot to make him as punctual as that. are you going to take a hand in them?" "i want to, but tom says no. he says he has more opportunity of judging, or something tedious, and will make enough for us both. he is willing to invest for me, but that is no fun." "that is so like jack," said kit. "he wants me to have nothing to do with the mines. he expects to make enough for two, which is absurd, considering that nobody can possibly make enough for one. but i shall call myself miss de rougemont, spinster, care of the daily chronicle, or something, and so invest." "have you got a little nest-egg, dear?" asked alice sympathetically. "how nice! i always have, but the stupid cards ate a big piece of the yolk last night." "i know; they do. but, on the other hand, they fill it up again. i expect most women have nest-eggs of some sort. it may be money, or virtue, or vice, or secrets. well, i'm going to drop mine slap into the australian goldfields." "i intend to be cautious," said lady haslemere. "but just to spite tom i shall risk something. tom was most tiresome and interfering. he says women know nothing about business. a lot he knows himself! if i had to pick out one man eminently unfitted to be director of anything, it would be tom." "i can't have jack left out in the cold like that," said kit. "they are a pretty pair. tom's honest; that is all that can be said for him." kit screamed with laughter. "i bet you that jack is as honest as tom," she said. "but that is just the way with your family, dear. they all think that they have a monopoly of the cardinal virtues, just as mr. leiter thought he could have a corner in corn. but, seriously, i do hope and trust that alington's mines are sound. think how the radical papers would shout if something--well, if something untoward happened. salaries, you know! supposing the british public dropped a lot of money and there was an inquiry? personally, i think jack is rash to be chairman. he is paid for his name--he knows that perfectly well; but directors are supposed to be dimly responsible. and his boss cheats at baccarat! also i think he shouldn't have a salary as director; that doesn't look well." "that will surely be periphrased in the accounts, won't it?" asked alice. "i hope so; periphrasis covers a multitude of cheques." they had got round to hyde park corner again, and rode slowly through the gate into the roaring street. kit's eye brightened at the sight of life; she forgot about her dream of white whiskers. "i think gold-mines are an excellent form of gambling," remarked alice. "you can play directly after breakfast. now, one can't play cards directly after breakfast. i tried the other day, but it was a hopeless failure. even naturals looked horrid by daylight." "gold-mines are a tonic," said kit "you take them after breakfast like easton's syrup, and they pick you up wonderfully. you should see how brisk jack is getting in the morning." "well, _au revoir_, dear. half-past eight, isn't it? may tom come too?" "oh yes, and haslemere if you like," said kit, turning up park lane. "i don't like," called out alice shrilly, going straight on. kit giggled at intervals all the way home. mrs. murchison's cup of happiness was very full that evening. though the quiet little dinner had grown about eighteen, yet everyone was of kit's own particular set, and it was what kit called a "christian dinner"--that is to say, everyone called each other by their christian names. "so much nicer than a heathen dinner," she said to mrs. murchison. "you may meet cannibals there." mrs. murchison herself was taken in by tom abbotsworthy, and it is doubtful which of them enjoyed their conversation most. she was enchanted to find herself with him, and her own remarks were really memorable. "i just adore english society," she said over the first mouthfuls of soup. "our brightest talkers in america cannot be compared with the ordinary clubmen in london. and the dinners, how charming!" "you find people amusing?" asked tom. "yes, and the substantiality of it. not only the viands and the drinks, but the really improving conversation--the--the _tout à fait_." tom had the greatest of all social gifts--gravity. "you think people have less _tout à fait_ in america?" he asked. "there's none of it; and now i come to think of it, i mean _tout ensemble_. how quick of you to see what i meant! but that's just it. my heart--and i told mr. murchison so the first time i saw him--is english. my head may be american, but my heart is english. those were my words, _ipse dixit_." "very remarkable," said tom. "the air of dignity," continued mrs. murchison (soup always thawed her), "and the simile of tastes which i find in england! the wealth without ostensity--i should say ostentiousness! the solid comfort and no gimcrackiness!" "i am afraid you will find plenty of gimcrackiness if you go to the suburbs," said tom. "i haven't yet projected any trips to the suburbs," said mrs. murchison with some dignity. "of course not. the proper definition of suburbs is the place to which one does not go. they are merely a negative geographical expression." "well, i'm an anglophobe," said mrs. murchison with conviction; "and i believe nothing against england, not even its suburbs. but what would you say, lord abbotsworthy, was the main tendency of the upper classes in england?" tom was slightly puzzled. "tendency in what line?" he asked. "by tendency i mean the direction in which they are advancing?" "we are advancing towards america," he replied, after a moment's thought. "that is where our fiction goes, and that is whence our inventions come." mrs. murchison dropped a large truffle off her fork, and remained a moment with it poised. "i guess that's deep," she said. "i shall cable that to mr. murchison." tom wondered silently whether mr. murchison would be as much puzzled by it as he was himself; but his wife proceeded to elucidate. "the fictions are the inventions, you mean," she said. "the one goes to where the other comes from. the oneness of the two countries, in fact. the brightest thing i've heard this summer," she observed. tom was lost in contemplation at the thought of the deep gloom in which all else that mrs. murchison had heard this summer must be involved, and he was grateful when that lady, after a reflective pause on his dazzling remark, changed the subject. "what a lovely man lord evelyn is!" she said. "lord evelyn? oh, toby! yes, he's an excellent fellow." "by lovely, i do not refer to his personal appearance," said mrs. murchison, "for that is homely. but by lovely i refer to his happy and amiable disposition." "you have hit him off completely," said tom. "happy and amiable is just what toby is." mrs. murchison's mind went off for a moment on a maternal excursion at the sight of lily and toby, who were talking eagerly together, but came quickly back again. "and the vivacity at present depicted in his face is considerable," went on mrs. murchison in a burst of analytic intuition. "i just adore vivacity. vivacity without screaming, lord abbotsworthy, is what i just adore. mr. murchison is very vivacious; but to hear him when he is being vivacious, why,--you'd think he had the chicken-pox--i should say whooping-cough." "that must be very alarming until you are used to it," said tom. "it is that. and the choking fit which sometimes ensues on his hilarity--why, i have seen times and again his life hung by a hair, like the sword of demosthenes at belshazzar's feast." mrs. murchison delivered herself of this surprising allusion with the most touching confidence. she liked a well-turned sentence, and repeated it softly to herself. "such anxieties are inseparable from the union of the married life," said tom in a voice that trembled slightly. kit from the other side of the table had just burst out into a loud meaningless laugh, and he suspected that she had overheard. "that's what i say," answered mrs. murchison; "and that's what the prayer-book says. the joys and the sorrows; the opportunities and the importunities." this was slightly cryptic, but it was probable that importunity was to be taken as the opposite of opportunity. tom chanced it, though he did not seem to remember anything in the prayer-book which suggested the widest parallel to mrs. murchison's quotation. she went ahead in such a surprising manner in conversation that it was really difficult to keep up. she positively scoured the plains of thought. "you find the opportunities, i am sure, much more numerous than the importunities," he said, faint, yet pursuing. "yes, champagne." "and that's just beautifully put, lord abbotsworthy," said mrs. murchison. the tide of conversation changed, and set to opposite sides. toby and lily alone refused to obey the action of the tide, as if they were a rebel moon, which demanded a system of its own, refusing allegiance elsewhere, and continued to talk, regardless of the isolated unit they left on each side of them. mrs. murchison, who liked the agreeable hovering of the mind over first one subject and then another, which reminded her, she said, of the way in which the puma birds in the southern states sucked honey from various flowers without alighting, was instantly involved in a sort of double-barrelled conversation with lord comber about the check system of baggage, and the relative position of women in england and the united states of america. as dinner went on conversation became louder and more desultory. no one listened particularly to what anyone else was saying; the tendency for everyone to talk at once (this may have been the tendency of the upper classes which mrs. murchison had inquired about) became more marked, and the inimitable atmosphere of laughter was abroad. at kit's house everyone always left the dining-room together as soon as cigarettes were handed round, for her excellent social sense told her that when people were getting on well (and at her house they always did), it was absurd for a party to go through the refrigerating process of isolation of the sexes, and waste time in thawing again. besides, she considered it obsolete for men to sit over wine; nobody ever drank now, it was only in england that so absurd a form was kept up. some of the party were going on to a vague elsewhere, and mrs. murchison's eye caught lily's soon after ten. she was most anxious on this first occasion not to outstay her welcome. "it's been just too charming, lady conybeare," she said; "but lily and i must go. we've got to go here and there, on and on till morning." kit rose. her plan was prospering, for lily and toby were still talking together, and she felt particularly pleased with herself and everybody else. "too unkind of you to go," she said; "and if you don't come to see us again very soon, now that you know the way, i shan't forgive you. send me a line any day and come to lunch. i am almost always in for lunch. and has toby been making himself pleasant, miss murchison? he can when he likes. i saw him shaking with laughter at something you were telling him at dinner, and i longed to shout across the table and ask what it was. good-night! too tiresome that you have to go! conybeare and i are going to be very domestic this evening, and not set one foot out, but sit and play cat's-cradle together when the others have gone. mind, i only let you go under the distinct understanding that you will come back very soon, unless we've bored you both beyond forgiveness." jack went down with them to the front-door, and kit as far as the head of the stairs, where she kissed her hand and looked regretfully after them, with her head a little on one side. as she expected, mrs. murchison gave one backward glance as she went out, and kit kissed her hand again, smiling. then, as soon as the front-door closed, she hurried back in a brisk business-like manner to join the others. chapter ix the plot miscarries some ten or twelve people only remained in the drawing-room when kit returned, for several had taken their departure before the murchisons, and toby seemed to be a target at which was being fired some straight, hard chaff. as usual, he was looking serene and pleasant, but it seemed to kit that his smile at this moment was more the result of habit than of any entertainment that the chaff afforded him. "toby has made an impression," explained alice, "and he's too modest to acknowledge it." "dear toby, you made an excellent impression," said kit, taking his arm, as he stood rather hot and stiff under the chandelier. "i'm very much pleased with you, and i'll remember you in my will." "if he'll promise to remember you in his!" said jack, who had returned from speeding the parting guest. "that should be worth something." "answer them back, toby," said kit. "hit out." "a lovely man," said tom, "but homely. a happy and amiable disposition." "more than can be said for you, old chap," remarked toby. "tom, how gray you are getting!" "yes, i've no chance. but you are in luck, toby. the girl is charming, and her mother is unique." "i haven't the slightest idea what you are talking about," said toby, amid loud laughter and a shrill cat-call from alice. "well, i'm going, kit. good-night; and try to teach tom manners." and toby, still smiling genially, went towards the door. but kit retained his arm. "don't go, toby," she said. "stop and play a bit. you like baccarat. and don't mind what tom says. you're a credit to the family." "toby will bring the family more credit," said tom, in a low, audible voice to his sister. "tom, be quiet," said alice. "when you try to chaff people, it is like an elephant dancing on eggshell china." "toby, alice is calling you eggshell china. lovely but homely." "awfully sorry, kit," said toby, "but i must go. i promised to go on to the keynes'." now, it was to the keynes' that the murchisons had gone, and kit knew it. she saw also that toby had had enough of the subject, and, without any more efforts to detain him, especially since he was rather tiresome at baccarat, and always won. "well, if you must go, you must," she said. "let's see you again soon, old boy." toby smiled and nodded and left the room. "dear toby!" said kit, "it was hard luck on him. how could you say such things, tom? it's serious. the poor boy is head over ears." "there is a phenomenon in hypnotism called suggestion, kit," he said, as she took a seat beside him. "if a thing is suggested to the subject, the suggestion is followed. did you suggest it?" "oh, in a sort of way. but toby isn't hypnotized; he's fascinated. i am delighted he takes it seriously. she is a sweet girl, and i would sooner have toby for my husband than anyone. i shall get him to marry me when jack dies, like the woman in the parable. oh, they have just put out a little green table. how queer of them! and cards! well, i suppose, as it is there---- you play baccarat, i think, mr. alington?" mr. alington paused, as usual, before replying, and looked benevolently at kit and lady haslemere in turn. "i shall be delighted to play," he said. "i find it very soothing after a tiring day; one does not have to think at all. i used to play a good deal in australia, and, dear me, yes! i had the pleasure of playing the other night at your house, lady haslemere. odd games we used to have in australia. one had to keep both eyes open to see that nobody cheated. indeed, that was not very soothing work. i have seen five nines on the table before now, which really is an excessive number. embarrassing almost." he had the manner of taking everybody into his confidence, and as the others were standing together as he spoke, and he a few steps from them, he had an easy opportunity to look several people in the face. kit and alice again received a special share of his kind and intelligent glance, and, as he finished speaking, he laughed in his pleasant voice, as if with considerable inward amusement. so, when they sat down at the card-table, out of the dozen of them there were at least two disconcerted people present, for it was not certain whether jack had heard. "i think he scored," said alice, in a low voice to kit; and kit looked impatient, and thought so too. when they had all taken their seats, alington was found, as kit and alice had wished (and he also, if they had known it), to be opposite them. there were a few moments' delay, as the table was lined, and, playing idly with the counters he had purchased, he looked up at them. "it is so simple to cheat at baccarat, without the clumsy device of five nines," he said. "one need only lay one's stake just on the white line, neither over it nor behind it. then, if you win, the slightest touch and the counters will go over, and it appears that you have staked; if not, you leave them as they are. a touch of the cards will do it. so!" he put a couple of cards face upwards on the table, as if showing his hand, and as he did it, drew his stake over the line so gently and imperceptibly that it was impossible to see that the counters moved. kit laughed, not very pleasantly. her laughter sounded a trifle cracked. "take care, all of you!" she cried. "there is a brilliant sharper present. mr. alington, how stupid of you to tell us! you might have won all our money without any of us being the wiser." alington laughed, and alice told kit in a low voice not to lose her temper. alington's laugh was a great contrast to kit's, pleasant and amused. "i make the company a present of the only safe way to cheat at baccarat," he said. "the bank? ah, i see lord conybeare takes the bank." death and baccarat are great levellers, and kit in her more sententious moments used to call the latter an escape from the trammels of civilization, and a return to the natural savage instincts. certainly nothing can be simpler; the cave-men, provided they could count as far as nine, might have played at it. and, indeed, unalloyed gambling is not a bad second, considered as a leveller, to death itself. rich men win, poor men lose; the countess rubs shoulders (it is not meant that she did at kit's house) with the cocotte; jew spoils jew, and gentile gentile. the simple turn of the cards is an affair as haphazard as life. if anyone, it must be the devil who knows where and when the nines will come up, and he is incorruptible on this point. the brute loses; the honest man wins; the honest man is made a pauper; the brute a millionaire. there is certainly something fascinating about what we call luck. no virtue or vice invented by the asceticism or perverted corruptness of man has yet made a bait that she will take. mathematicians tell us that she is purely mathematical; yet how emphatic a denial she gives to this shallow description of her if one tries to woo her on a system! one might as well make love on the prescriptions of the "complete letter-writer." on this particular night she showed herself the opposite of all the epithets with which her unintelligent worshippers have plastered her. she is called fickle--she was a pattern of devotion; she is called changeable--she exhibited an immutable face. wherever alington sat, whether to the right or to the left of the dealer, or whether he took the bank himself, she favoured him with a fixed, unalterable smile, a smile nailed to her features, as if her photograph was being taken. like the two-faced jannet, as mrs. murchison had once called that heathen deity, she kept the benignant aspect for him. now, it is one of the rules without exception in this world, that nobody likes losing at cards. people have been heard to say that they do not like winning. this statement is certainly incorrect. it is possible to play an interesting set at tennis, an enjoyable round of golf, an entrancing football match, a really memorable game of chess, and lose, but it is not humanly possible to enjoy losing at baccarat. the object of the game is to win the money of your friends in an exciting and diverting manner, but the diversion tends to become something worse than tedium if they consistently win yours. excuses and justifications may be found for most unprofitable pursuits, and perhaps the only thing to be said in favour of gambling is that there is no nonsense about it, and, as a rule, no nonsense about those who indulge in it. no one as yet has said that it improves the breed of cards, or that he has the prosperity of the card-makers at heart. the card-table is still a place where hypocrites do not win credence from anybody. the great goddess luck ignored lady haslemere that night (for she is no respecter of persons, and cuts people whenever she chooses), merely letting her lose a few inglorious sovereigns, and devoted her attention to alington and kit. the latter she visited with every mark of her peculiar disfavour, and the nest-egg in her jewel-case upstairs had to be heavily unyoked. kit seldom enjoyed herself less than she did this evening; as a rule, she had distinctly good luck at cards, and it was little short of maddening to sit there hour after hour, just to watch her stake being firmly and regularly taken away. like most people who are generally lucky at cards, she was considered admirably good form at play; but when she was losing in this unexampled manner, she found it difficult to remain cordial, and more than once she had to force herself with an effort to remember that a hostess had duties. alington's mild, intelligent face opposite her roused in her a kind of frenzy, and his unassumed quietness and utter absence of any signs of satisfaction at his huge winnings seemed to her in the worst taste. both she and lady haslemere had seen how completely their scheme of watching him to see whether he cheated had miscarried; indeed, from the moment when he gave his little exhibition of the ease with which it was possible to defraud the table, they had realized that they might play the detective till their eyes dropped out of their heads from weariness without catching him. lady haslemere had given it up at once, concluding that kit and she must have been mistaken before; kit continued to watch him furtively and angrily, but the little detective game was not nearly so amusing as she had anticipated. meantime, as her stakes vanished and revanished, kit found herself thinking absently of what alington had shown them. it was so simple, and she almost wished that she was one of the people who cheated at cards. but she was not. then occurred an incident. alington was taking the bank. nearly opposite him, and belonging to the party on the dealer's right, was kit. she had just been upstairs to get all that remained of her nest-egg, and in front of her lay several small counters, two of fifty pounds, and two of a hundred. she had just lost once, and counting up what remained to her, she put all her counters in a heap near the line. again she staked fifty pounds, and on receiving her cards took them up and looked at them. she was rather excited; her hand trembled a little, and the lower edge of her cards twitched forward. then she laid them on the table. "natural," she said, and as she said it, she saw that she had flicked one of her hundred-pound counters over the line, and it was staked. almost simultaneously she caught alington's eye; almost simultaneously tom's voice said: "one fifty. well done, kit! you've had the worst of luck all the evening." "a fine, bold stroke," said alington in his precise tones, still looking at her. "luck must turn, lady conybeare." for one moment kit paused, and in that pause she was lost. alington counted out her stake, pushed it over to her, and rose. "a thrilling end to my bank," he said. "the first big stake this evening. thank you, lady conybeare, for introducing big stakes. the game was getting a little slow." and he went to the side-table for a cigarette. kit had cheated, and she knew it, and she suspected alington knew it. she had neither meant, intended, contemplated, nor conceived possible such a thing, yet the thing was done. in point of fact, she had done it quite unwittingly. she had never intended to push her counters over the line with the edge of her cards. but then had followed--and she knew this, too--an appreciable moment in which she perceived what had happened before tom's voice broke in. but she had not been able to say _at once_, "i have made a mistake; i only staked fifty." after that each possible division of a single second made speech infinitely more impossible. to hesitate then was to be lost. thirty seconds later her stake was paid, and to say then what had happened was not only impossible, but inconceivable. besides, she thought to herself with a sudden relief, it was wholly unnecessary. she would tell alington about it quite candidly, and return the money. but it was a poor ending to the evening on which she and alice were going to watch him to see if he cheated. that moment when she did not speak was psychologically more important than kit knew. she had lived in the world some five-and-twenty years, and for five-and-twenty years her instincts had been forming. but during those years she had not formed an instinct of absolute, unwavering, instantaneous honesty. before now she had been in positions where there was a choice between the perfectly upright course and the course ever so slightly crooked, and had she known the history of her soul, she would have been aware that when she had stuck to the absolutely upright line she had done so after reflection. then came this moment when there was no time for reflection, and the habit of looking at her decisions as ever so faintly debatable had asserted itself. she had paused to consider what she should do. that, in such circumstances, was quite sufficient. that she was ashamed was natural; that she was angry was to her more natural still. she felt that the thing had been forced on her, and so in a manner, if we take into consideration all the instincts which were undoubtedly hers at that moment, it was; how far she was to be held responsible for those instincts is a question for psychologists and those who have got to the bottom of the problem of original sin, but not for story-tellers. she had a great command over herself, and she gathered up her stakes with a laugh. there had been no perceptible pause of any kind. "i was just going to order the carriage to take me to the workhouse," she said, "but i can still afford to breakfast without the assistance of the poor laws. must you go, mr. alington? half-past two; is it really? i had no idea. good-night. i hope jack is behaving himself on your board. mind you keep him in order; it is more than i can do." she looked mr. alington full in the face as she spoke, trying, but failing, to detect the least shadow of a change in his impassive and middle-class features. but when he looked benevolently at her through his spectacles and bowed with his accustomed awkwardness, she felt a sudden lightness of heart at the thought that he had not seen. she did not examine too closely into what this lightness of heart exactly implied. the others soon followed mr. alington's example, and took themselves off. jack had walked to the front-door with lady haslemere, and kit waited a moment in the drawing-room, after sending lord comber, who lingered, away, for him to come up again. whether she intended to tell him what had happened she scarcely knew; that must depend. but he did not return, and before long servants entered to put out the lights. they would have withdrawn when they saw her, but she got up. "yes, put the lights out," she said. "has his lordship gone out?" "no, my lady; his lordship went upstairs to his room ten minutes ago." kit abandoned the idea of telling him that night. if she went to his room, it would imply that she had something to say, and she did not wish to commit herself yet. so she went to her own room, and rang for her maid. the hair and unlacing processes seemed interminable this evening, and were intolerable even to the accompaniment of an excellent russian cigarette. she had been given on her birthday, only a few weeks before, by lord comber, a wonderful silver-framed antique mirror, with the old venetian motto on it, "sono felice, te videndo," and it had made dressing and undressing a positive pleasure. jack also had made himself amusing about it; he had come into her room the day after it arrived, and, seeing the motto on it, said, laughing: "god has given you a good conceit of yourself, kit. where did you buy it?" "i didn't buy it," she replied, never having intended to make a mystery about it. "ted gave it me." "ted comber? what damned impertinence!" kit burst out laughing. "jack, you are inimitable as the jealous husband," she had said. "it is a new _rôle_. poor ted! it must have cost a pot of money." and jack had permitted himself to leave the room, banging the door behind him. ted and she had laughed over the episode together. "so like a man to ask absurd questions, and then be angry because he is told the truth," kit had said. "it would have been quite as easy for me to lie." but to-night not even the mirror, with its amusing associations, nor the reflection of herself, nor the russian cigarette, could beguile the tedium of the toilet. the comb caught in her hair; her maid's hands were cold, she was clumsy; the evening post was stupid; it was late; kit was sleepy and discontented. in fact, she was in an abominable temper. at last it was over, and her maid left her. she got up from the chair in front of her glass, where she had been sitting in her wonderful lace dressing-gown, and took a turn up and down the room. she felt like a fractious child, out of sorts, out of gear, out of temper. then quite suddenly she stopped, threw herself face downwards on the bed, and began to cry from sheer rebellion and impatience of this stupid world. chapter x mrs. murchison's diplomacy mrs. murchison was sitting on a pile of cushions beneath her crimson parasol. the cushions were in a punt, and the punt was on the thames, and it was sunday afternoon, and she and her daughter were spending a saturday till monday, the last of the season, with the conybeares. toby, in flannels, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up to his elbows, was resting from his labours with the punt pole, and sitting opposite this lady. it was a blazing hot day, but, in spite of the glare of the water, cooler, so mrs. murchison has asserted, on the river than elsewhere. in point of fact, she felt positively frizzled with the heat; but she had weaned toby from his basket-chair under a tree on the lawn to have a private talk with him, ascertain how the land lay, and generally encourage him. this desire to speak to him privately took its birth from two words she had had with kit the evening before. these two words, again, were the result of a conversation which toby had had with kit in the train coming down, and thus the fact that toby was doomed to punt and swelter under a broiling sun instead of sitting coolly in the shade was indirectly his fault for having said what he had said to kit. for the last fortnight kit had been in a state of chronic exasperation with her tiresome brother-in-law. toby was gauging his own gait, and kit's efforts to make him march in time with her had brought no results. he was always to be found at the houses to which lily went, and at those houses he was always talking to her. but kit could not bring him to the point. elsewhere his demeanour was absent and slightly idiotic; he appeared to have something on his mind, and dressed with unusual care. thus, as they travelled down from london on the saturday, kit felt herself called upon to try to put the finishing touch to the work she flattered herself she had begun so well. she had not yet told him that the murchisons were coming. she had, in fact, only asked them the evening before. "who is to be there?" asked toby, as they left paddington. "oh, the usual lot: ted and the rest, and--oh yes, mrs. murchison and her daughter." toby looked fixedly out of the window with the idiotic expression on his face, and the dawnings of a very creditable blush. there was silence a moment, and kit watched him from behind her paper. toby turned and caught her eye. "oh bother you, kit!" he exclaimed. kit laid down the paper and began to laugh. "and don't laugh," said toby rudely; "it's all your fault." "i should say it was lily murchison's," remarked kit. "kit, will you be serious a minute?" said he. "i want to say things; i can't say them, you know, but you are clever--you will understand." kit laid her hand on his arm with a sympathetic pressure of her fingers. "dear toby," she said, "i understand perfectly, and i am delighted--delighted! it is charming." toby looked very serious. "kit, i wish you had never told me to fall in love with her," he said; "it has spoilt it all. of course, it is not in consequence of what you said that i have, but i wish you hadn't suggested it that evening at the hungarian dance. that she is rich, and that the world knows it, stands in front of me. it is a vile world; it will say i fell in love with her only because of that. oh, damn!" kit was divided between amusement and impatience. "it has been reserved for you, toby, to discover that riches are a bar to matrimony," she observed; "the reverse is usually believed to be the case." toby shook his head. kit appeared to him quite as tiresome as he to her. "you don't understand," he said. kit had a brilliant idea. she saw that toby wanted to talk about it, so she determined not to talk, but to leave in him a little barbed shaft that might do useful work. "we'll not talk about it, toby," she said; "i can see you don't want to. probably you are not in love at all, just a bit attracted. get over it as quick as you can, there's a good boy; it makes you unsocial and _distrait_. besides, how often has she seen you? with all your excellent qualities, dear toby, you are not exactly--well, anything more than quite a poor, pleasant, plain young man. so drop the whole thing; you will neither break your heart nor hers. i have made too much of it, no doubt. i was wrong, i feel sure i was wrong, and i beg your pardon. oh, there has been a hurricane in florida! how too terrible!" and she buried herself again behind her paper. toby gave a short preoccupied grunt, and subsided into his corner, frowning angrily at the innocent features of the landscape. with all his native modesty and candour, he was not quite of kit's way of thinking. the lover's devotion, which quite honestly swears that he is not fit to be the doormat to the beloved's boots, sees all the time that there is another possibility, and even in the ecstasy of humiliation aspires to worthier offices. even while he swears himself a doormat, yet with a magnificent inconsistence he lifts his eyes higher than her boots. though toby was all that those tame reptilia, who think that every woman they meet is in love with them, are not, yet he did not at all accept kit's suggestion that lily could not conceivably have anything to say to him. with perfect sincerity he would say he was not worthy, but he was not at all content to have it said for him. even more absurd was her suggestion that he was not in love himself. _distrait!_ he should just think he was. and he glared savagely at the outside page of kit's pall mall. just about as they went screaming and swaying through slough, kit laid her paper down and yawned elaborately. through her half-closed eyes she saw toby glowering darkly at her from the seat opposite, and waited with amused satisfaction the working of her darts. "nothing in the paper," she said. "i thought there was a famine in florida," he observed dryly. kit regarded him for a moment in irritating silence. "florida is a long way off," she said at length. "probably it is only a geographical expression. there are many places and people, toby, much nearer than florida." the second link in the chain of circumstances which led to toby's going punting in the heat was shorter. it occurred that same evening after dinner. kit was sitting with mrs. murchison in the window of the hall, while the others were out on the lawn, when lily entered, followed by toby. "i'm going to bed, mother," she said. "good-night, lady conybeare; good-night, lord evelyn." "let me give you a candle," said toby; and they left the room. then said kit very softly, as if to herself: "poor toby! poor dear toby." mrs. murchison heard (she was meant to hear). hence, on the following afternoon she wished for a private conversation with toby, and at this moment they were in the punt together. mrs. murchison was, considered as a conversationalist, a little liable to be discursive, and heat and a heavy lunch combined to emphasize this tendency; they melted her brains, and a perfect stream of information concerning all parts of the globe came rioting out. besides this natural bent, she considered it best to approach the subject, on which she particularly wanted to talk to toby, by imperceptible degrees, not run at him with it as if she was a charging dervish fighting for allah. this accounts for her saying that the thames reminded her so much of the nile. now, toby, like many others, snatched a fearful joy from mrs. murchison's conversation. he saw that the flood-gates were opening, and, with a sigh of delighted anticipation, he said that he supposed it was very like indeed. "quite remarkably like, quite," said mrs. murchison, "and the closer you look, the more the simile grows upon you. dear me, how i enjoyed that winter we spent in egypt! how often i thought over the psalm, 'when israel came out of egypt'! we spent a fortnight in cairo first, and what between the dances and the bazaars and the tombs of the marmadukes, and the excursions, we had plenty to do. i remember so well one ride to the pyramids of sahara, where we met a very famous archeologist whose name i forget, but he had red whiskers and a very nervous manner, and showed us over them." "that must have been very pleasant," said toby. "most delicious. then another day we went to see the tree under which the virgin mary sat when _she_ went to egypt, which was really a remarkable coincidence, because my name is mary, too, and the guide gave us a leaf from it as a memento mary. ah, dear me, how charming and quaint it all was! then we went up the river in our own private diabetes and stuck on a sandbank for weeks." toby's breath caught in his throat for a moment, but he stiffened his risible muscle like a man. "didn't you find that rather tedious?" he asked. "no, not at all; i was quite sorry when we got off, because the air was so fresh, like champagne, and the sunsets so beautiful, and every evening great flocks of ibexes and pelicans used to fly down to the river to drink. but now i come to think of it, we weren't there for weeks, but only for an hour or two, and very tiresome it was, as we wanted to get on, and mr. murchison's language---- then at luxor such sights, the great colossus of mammon, and the temples and the hotel gardens. and while we were there some professor or another--not the one with the red whiskers, you must understand--discovered a cylinder covered with cruciform writing, but it seemed to me quite common. and the donkey-boys were so amusing; we used to throw them piazzas, and see them scramble for them." "threw them what?" asked toby politely. "piazzas and half-piazzas. the small silver coin of the country." "oh yes. you must have travelled a good deal." "indeed we have: mr. murchison was so devoted to it; i used to call him the wandering jew. then from egypt we went on to the holy land, _la sainte terre_, you know the french call it--so poetical. and we saw tyre and sodom and all those places, and where cicero was killed at the brook jabbok, and where elijah went up to heaven, and damascus--quite lovely!--and the temples of baalzac--or was it the temple of baal?" "did you go with one of cook's tours?" "indeed we did not; it would have spoiled all the poetry and romance to me if we had done that. no, mr. murchison took his yacht, so we could go where we pleased and when we pleased and how we pleased. then from there we went to athens, and on through the straits of messina, and saw that volcano--hecla, is it not?--and got to rome for easter." "rome is delightful, is it not?" said toby, still playing the part of greek-play chorus. "i have hardly travelled at all." "most interesting; i quite longed to be one of those poky little professors who spend all their lives hunting for grafficos in the christian catafalques. i assure you we had quite a childe harold-al-raschid pilgrimage, what with egypt and all, quite like the arabian knight. it was wonderful. travelling is so opening to the mind; i am sure i never really understood what 'from dan even to beersheba,' meant until i went and did it too." "did you go to naples?" asked toby, who still wanted more. "indeed we did, and saw vesuvio in an eruction. vesuvius you call it, but, somehow, when one has been to italy, the italian _point-de-vue_ seems to strike one more. dear me, yes! vesuvio, napoli--all those names are so much more life-like than leghorn and florence. and those queer little dirty picturesque streets in napoli, where the gomorrah live! i have often given myself up as murdered." a spasm of inward laughter shook toby like an aspen leaf as this incomparable lady gave him this wonderful example of the widening effects of foreign travel. but it passed in a moment. "so like the nile--so like the nile," she murmured, as they slewed slowly through beds of water-lilies. "if you can imagine most of the trees taken away, lord evelyn, and the remainder changed into palms, and sand instead of meadows, you literally have the nile. indeed, the only other difference would be that the water of the nile is quite thick and muddy, not clear like this, and, of course, the sky is much bluer. dear lily, how she enjoyed it!" "was miss murchison with you?" asked toby. her mother settled herself comfortably in her cushions. this was more like business, and she congratulated herself on the diplomacy she had shown in leading the conversation round so naturally, via egypt, palestine, greece, and italy, to this point. "yes, indeed she was; i never stir anywhere without my sweet lily. lily of the valley, i call her sometimes. my precious child! you see, lord evelyn, she was brought up in england, and for years i never saw her once. and i shall so soon have to part with her again!" toby, who had been leaning over the side of the punt, dabbling his blunt fingers in the cool water, sat up suddenly. "how is that?" he asked. "oh, lord evelyn, you nearly upset the boat! these punts are so insecure! only a plank between us and death. you see, i can't expect her to live with me always. she will marry. therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and the same applies to a woman. i would not have her remain single all her life in order to be near me," said mrs. murchison, with a deep altruistic sigh. toby gave a little laugh of relief. "oh, i see. for the moment i thought you meant that--that something was already settled." "no," said mrs. murchison; "the dear child is not so easy to please. half london has been at her feet. but dear lily has nothing to say to them. she sends them empty away, like the _magnificat_." mrs. murchison sighed. "you are not a mother, lord evelyn," she went on, "and you cannot know all that is in a mother's heart, though i am sure you are delightfully sympathetic and understanding. i tell you i hardly sleep a wink at night for dreaming of lily's future. i want her to marry some englishman, of course. some nice pleasant man out of the titled classes. she was born to be titled. i often shut my eyes when i look at her, and say to myself, 'some day my darling will go into dinner before her own mother.' she has had the opportunity many times, and i have wondered lately whether my dearest has not someone in her eye--i should say her heart." "i wonder," said toby, with marked indifference. "so like the nile," said mrs. murchison diplomatically, giving it to be understood that the conversation was still quite general. "but the mysteries of a maiden's heart, lord evelyn!" she sighed. "lily takes after me; as a child, i was so mysterious that nobody thought i should live." "miss murchison is not delicate?" asked toby. "dear me, no! most indelicate. her health never gave me a moment's anxiety since she left her cradle. but she is very reticent about some things, and very thoughtful. when i was a child i used to fall in love a hundred times a day; it may have been vanderbilt or a postman, and i used to put down their initials in a little green morocco pocket-book; but i never used to tell anyone about it, just like lily. but you can see by her forehead how thoughtful she is, like marie antoinette. doesn't tennyson speak of the 'bar of marie antoinette'? she has it most marked above the eyes." toby's ignorance of "in memoriam" was even less profound than mrs. murchison's knowledge of it, and he only murmured that he seemed to remember it, which was not true. "thoughtful and pensive," said mrs. murchison. "dear child! how she looked forward to coming down here! and so gay at times. and never, lord evelyn," said mrs. muchison very earnestly, "has she said an unkind word to me." by this time toby had already turned the punt round, and was propelling it deftly back towards the lawn. "yes, if i could see her nicely married to some such man," said mrs. murchison, growing bolder. "i should be content to lie like some glorious milton in a country churchyard. dear me, how lovely the river is, and so like the nile! well, i suppose we must be going back; it should be near tea-time. i have so enjoyed my little excursion with you, lord toby--i beg your pardon, lord evelyn; and what a pleasant chat we have had, to be sure!" and the good, kind, excellent, worldly woman beamed at toby's brown face. toby never wasted time in making resolutions. instead, he went and did the thing; and now he walked cheerfully up to the group on the lawn with his coat on his arm, and inquired if anyone had seen miss murchison. "because perhaps she would like to go for a bit in the punt," he explained. she was not there; vague people had seen her vaguely, "some time ago"; and the advent of tea made him wait, not because he wanted tea, but because his chance of finding her was better at a well-defined centre. the rest of the party was spending sunday afternoon in various orthodox manners: lord comber was abstaining from a pile of yellow french novels he had brought out, kit was sleeping peacefully with her mouth open in a long deck-chair, jack was throwing sticks into the water for the spaniels, and lady haslemere was in her bedroom (a recognised sunday resort, like a public garden). but tea brought everyone flocking together, like eagles to a carcass, and among them came lily. toby had not seen her come out through the drawing-room window; her step on the velvet of the grass was noiseless, and it was not till she was close to the table that he looked up. then their eyes met, black eyes and blue; and so chance a meeting, a thing which had happened a dozen times before in the course of a meal, seemed strangely to disconcert each. the most simple of all changes had come over toby; mrs. murchison's words had fired his inflammable material--it was all ablaze. and that beacon must have shone from his honest open eyes, for lily saw the change that none other saw, the private signal flying for her; and when, soon afterwards, he lounged up to her, and asked her if she would care to go out in the punt, as it was cooler now, she knew, so she thought afterwards, what was coming. she assented, and the two went down over the close-shaven lawn to where it was moored. chapter xi mr. alington opens check kit, like most people who possess that master-key to immense enjoyment of life, namely, a ravenous, insatiable appetite for pleasure, had always a vital instinct to put off as long as possible anything which was unpleasant. she usually found plenty of delightful things to do every day of her life; indeed, with her tremendous _joie de vivre_, almost everything she did was delightful, and if there was something not delightful to be done, as a rule she did not do it. in this complicated hurly-burly of life, it is a great thing to be able to simplify, as in the tutor-ridden days one used to simplify the huge vulgar fractions which covered the page, and turned out in the end to be equivalent to zero. kit's methods of simplification were really notable; she cut out everything which looked as if it would give trouble, and did not care in the slightest degree about the result. and if you do not care about the result, life, like vulgar fractions and the wicked, ceases from troubling. but occasionally, so cruelly conducted is this world, she was driven to take odiously disagreeable steps, for fear of the speedy and inevitable disaster which would attend their omission. there were also certain prophylactic measures she used habitually to take, just as one goes to the dentist to avoid possible toothache in the future. under the latter head came such small affairs as bazaar-openings and tedious "grundy" dinners; also the yearly visit to jack's uncle, who was a bishop--a grim ordeal, but efficacious. they gave one a firmer stand, so to speak. it would have argued a shocking lack of worldly wisdom to neglect such simple little things, and whatever kit lacked, she had an admirable amount of that. but the avoidance of unpleasantness in the greed for the pleasures of the moment led her constantly to put off distasteful things, in the same way in which one puts off the writing of letters, blindly hoping that if they are left unanswered long enough they will, in a manner of speaking, answer themselves. this charming result is often attained, but sometimes it is not, whereby the children of eve are disconcerted. the tiresome baccarat incident had now been unanswered rather more than a fortnight, during which interval kit had not seen mr. alington. she told jack that the mine-man was rather too much for her. besides, she had introduced him to a hundred houses; if he could not swim for himself now, he never would. but when on the morning following this sunday, as kit, figuratively speaking, looked over her old letters to see what had to be done in the last week in london, she came upon the baccarat letter, and read it through again, hoping that she would feel that it had by now answered itself, for she had given it time. but though she was sedulous in taking a favourable view of this and all other matters concerning herself, she came to the disheartening conclusion that it had not. there was clearly only one of two things to be done--either give it more time and another chance to answer itself unaided, or answer it herself at once. and, as a wise and perhaps a good wife should, she determined to consult her husband about it, wishing that she had done so before. the confidence between the two was, in a certain well-defined area, of an intimate kind. there were, no doubt, certain things which kit did not tell jack, and she on her side felt that there might be developments in the alington scheme, for instance, into which she would not be permitted to enter. she did not resent this; everyone may have his own private sitting-room, where, if one knocks, one may be refused admittance. it was wiser then not to knock, and certainly there were things in hers which it was not her intention to show jack. but apart from these few exceptions, kit always told jack everything, especially if she was in difficulties. "it produces such peace of mind," she had said once to alice, "to know that no one can tell your husband worse things than he already knows about you. how some women can go on letting their husbands remain in ignorance about their bills and other indiscretions, i can't conceive. why, i should have to ask jack every evening what he had learned about me during the day. and that sort of revelations come much better from oneself. it wears," said kit thoughtfully, "the guise of candour, and also possibly of regret." the two women practised great freedom of speech with each other, and alice replied frankly: "sometimes i think you are a clever woman, kit; at other times i feel sure i am wrong, and that you are the most abject of fools." "i suppose you mean that i seem to you an abject fool now," said kit. "why, please?" "because you tell jack only the things that don't really matter. the things which if he heard from elsewhere would really make a row, you don't tell him." "ah, but those are the things which nobody can tell him," said kit, with her customary quickness, and more than her usual penetration. this conversation occurred to her mind to-day, when she determined to ask his advice about the baccarat. the only question was whether it, too, came under the head of what nobody else could tell him. if it had been someone of her own set who had seen, or whom she suspected to have seen, the little _faux pas_ of the hundred-pound counter, it would no doubt have come under the head of the things incommunicable. to tom, toby, jack, lord comber, it would have been impossible to repeat such a thing. but one could not guess what ideas of honour a wild west australian miner might have. to repeat such a thing about a woman was contrary to the code in use among her associates, and a good thing, too, thought kit, strictly confining the question to the particular instance, and not confounding issues by a consideration of honour in general. even after the lapse of a fortnight the thought of that evening was a smart and a mortification. jack was going to entrust the ship of his fortunes to the wild man who sang hymns, and played a harmonium, for aught she knew, and her really laudable desire to have some hold, some handle over him, had ended in this _débâcle_. it was not certain, indeed, that he had seen, but kit could not but admit that it was highly probable. after all, honesty was the best policy, and she determined to tell jack. he had gone up to town by an early train, and kit, who disliked getting up early almost as much as she disliked going to bed early, followed him later. he was out when she reached park lane, and it was close on lunch-time when she heard a cab drive up. next moment the butler had announced mr. alington. the two looked just like brothers. "good-morning, lady conybeare," he said very smoothly. "your husband asked me to lunch here, as we have some business to talk over. i was to give you a message, if he was not yet in, asking you not to wait lunch for him. he might"--mr. alington appeared to ponder deeply for a moment--"he might be detained." this meeting was intensely annoying to kit. she had told jack that she had had enough of the mine-man, and it was very tiresome to have this _tête-à-tête_, and quite particularly disagreeable after their last meeting to see him alone. however, she put on the best face she could to the matter, and spoke with familiar geniality. "oh, jack is always late," she said. "but why he should think it necessary to ask me not to wait for him is more than i can say. i suppose you have been imbuing him with business habits. jack a business man! you have no idea how droll that seems to his wife, mr. alington. let us lunch at once; i am so hungry. kindly ring that bell just behind you, please." mr. alington sat still a moment, and then rose with deliberation, but did not ring. "i am lucky to find you alone, lady conybeare," he said, "for the truth is, there was a little matter i wanted to talk over with you." kit rose swiftly from her seat before he had finished his sentence, and rang the bell herself. it was answered immediately, and as the man came into the room, "indeed; and what is that?" she said. "is lunch ready, poole? let us go in, mr. alington. i am always so hungry in london and elsewhere." kit could scarcely help smiling as she spoke. she had no intention whatever of talking any little matter over with mr. alington, especially if it was the one she had in her mind; and she could not help feeling amused by the simplicity of the means by which she had put the stopper on the possibility of a private talk. she wished to hold no private communications with the man. she had done her part in launching him, for the convenience of jack; she had given him to understand, or rather given other people to understand, that he was an _ami de la maison_, and she washed her hands of him. he was very kindly going to make jack's fortune in return for benefits received, but he had distinctly said that the arrangement was one of mutual advantage. it was give and take; he was on the same level as your grocer or bootmaker, except that those tradesmen gave in the hopes of eventually taking, while mr. alington took as he went along. at the best he was a sort of cash-down shop, and kit did not habitually deal with such. she did not consider him dangerous, and she was so well pleased with her own adroitness that she very unwisely determined to drive her advantage home. so, as he followed her through the folding-doors into the dining-room, "what is the little matter you referred to?" she asked again, feeling perfectly secure in the presence of servants in the room. mr. alington closed his eyes for a moment before he took his seat, and murmured a brief grace to himself. he opened them a moment afterwards with a short sigh, and kit's _riposte_ to his thrust did not seem to have ruffled or disconcerted him in the least. his broad butler-like face was as serene as ever. "it was a matter which i thought you might have preferred to discuss alone," he said; "but as you seem to wish it, i will tell you here. the other night when i had the pleasure of playing baccarat with you, you won on a natural----" a flush of anger rose to kit's face. the man was intolerable, insolent, before the servants, too; but as he spoke she felt a sudden fear of him. he looked her full in the face with mild firmness, breaking his toast with one hand, while with the other he manipulated his macaroni on the end of his fork. "stop!" said kit, quick as the curl of a whiplash. but mr. alington did not wince. "you will be so kind, then, as to give me the opportunity of speaking to you privately about it," he said. "i am quite of your way of thinking. it is far better discussed so. i quite see." kit felt herself trembling. she was not accustomed to such bland brutality at the hands of anyone. she would have been scarcely more surprised if her stationer or butcher had suddenly appeared in the room, and urged the propriety of a private talk. alington, it is true, had been to her house, had a right to consider himself a guest; but that made it even more intolerable. apparently he had no idea of the distinction between guests and guests, and it would be a shocking thing if this were overlooked. meantime he went on eating macaroni with a superb mastery over that elusive provender, in silence, since kit did not reply. the dining-room was one of the most charming rooms in london, rather dark, as dining-rooms should be, the walls of a sober, self-tint green, and bare but for some half-dozen small pictures of the barbizon school, which, if alienable, would long ago have been alienated to supply the chronic scarcity of money in the conybeare establishment. they were wonderful examples, but kit hated them, since they could not be sold. "they make me feel like a man on a desert island with millions of gold sovereigns and no food," she had said once. the chairs were all armed, and upholstered in green brocade, and the thick ispahan carpet made noiseless the feet of those "who stand and wait." partly this, partly the distraction of her thoughts, brought it about that red mullets were at kit's elbow a full ten seconds unperceived. she could not make up her mind what to do. she bitterly repented having said "stop!" just now to alington, for the vehemence of her interjection gave herself away. she had practically admitted that something had occurred on the night they played baccarat which she earnestly desired not to have discussed in public. a fool could have seen that, and with all her distaste for the man she did not put this label to him. and with odiously familiar deference he had agreed with her; he had assumed the right of discussing things with her in private. again, she could not quarrel with him. conybeare's application to business, his early visits to the city, his frequent conferences with alington, his unexampled preoccupation, all showed for certain that there were great issues at stake, for he would not give himself such trouble for a few five-pound notes. all this passed through her mind very rapidly, and at the end of ten seconds she leaned back in her chair, saw the red mullets, and took two of them. "yes, you are quite right," she said; "we will talk of it afterwards. ah, here is jack! morning, jack!" jack nodded to her and alington, and took his seat. "you have heard the news, kit?" he asked. "lots; but which?" "toby is engaged to miss murchison. the croesum told me in the train this morning. she is coming to see you this afternoon." kit for the moment forgot her other worries. "oh, how delightful!" she cried. "dear toby! and lily is most charming, and so pretty! do you know her, mr. alington?" "i have met her at your house, i think. and an heiress, is she not?" "i believe she has a little money," said kit. "one has heard people say so. but mere gossip, perhaps." jack laughed low and noiselessly. "that will be so pleasant for toby," he observed, "if it is true." kit sighed. "what a pity that it is not the custom for a bride to settle money on her husband's brother, jack!" she said. "yes, or give it in order to escape death duties. what opportunities for unusual kindness some people have!" "well, it is charming, anyhow," said kit. "i noticed they went for a stroll in the punt yesterday afternoon, which i thought promising. a punt is so often a matrimonial agency. you aren't afraid of tipping it up like an ordinary boat. you proposed to me in a racing pair, or something skittish--do you remember, jack?--and i said i'd do anything in the world if you would only row straight to shore. and you kept me to it. hardly fair, was it, mr. alington?" mr. alington smiled like an elderly clergyman at a school feast, and his smile was suggestive of his liking to see young people happy. "i wonder the matrimonial news doesn't keep a few punts for the use of clients," went on kit, in nervous anxiety to get lunch over as quickly as possible. she had made up her mind about alington in the last half-minute or so, and was desirous of getting a word with him, her intention being to deny his charge point-blank, and in turn accuse him. "punts and evening hymns do wonders with people who can't quite make up their minds to propose." mr. alington looked mildly interested at this surprising information, and he appeared to be weighing it carefully as he ate his quail before giving it his support. "they might keep a small choir and a harmonium as well," went on kit. "i believe all the respectable middle-class go to evening church on sunday and sing hymns very loud out of one book, and propose to each other afterwards. dear toby, how happy he will be! how nice--how exceedingly nice!" she murmured sympathetically. alington and kit had by this time finished lunch, and she rose. "i can't stop and see you eat, jack," she said. "come, mr. alington; we will go and have coffee, and jack will join us." on these hot july days kit often sat in the inner hall, which was cooler than the drawing-room. it was a charming place of palms and parquetry, with furniture at angles, and a general atmosphere of coolness and sequestered corners. coffee came immediately with cigarettes, and kit took one. mr. alington, however, explained that except on sundays he did not allow himself to smoke till after dinner. "i find a little abstinence very helpful," he gave as his modest excuse. the servants withdrew, and kit began playing with her subject. "i am afraid you thought me very abrupt at lunch," she said, "but i have a great objection to discussing matters, which it is conceivable might be better kept private, before servants, and when you mentioned baccarat i thought it better to stop you, even at the risk of seeming very brusque. you will hardly believe it, mr. alington"--here her voice sank to a low confidential murmur--"you will hardly believe it, but only a few weeks ago i saw a man cheat at baccarat at a friend's house. very distressing, was it not? i talked it over with a friend, and we found it most difficult to decide what to do. that sort of thing might so easily get about; it is so dangerous to speak before servants." "i think you talked it over with lady haslemere?" remarked mr. alington. kit was stirring her coffee and smiling sweetly. she was getting on beautifully. but at these words and their peculiarly calm delivery her hand stopped stirring, and her smile faded. "i think also you agreed to ask the suspect to play again, in order to watch him," went on the impassive butler. "was it not so, lady conybeare? and i think the suspect was none other than myself." kit put down her coffee-cup and leaned back in her chair. the thing had gone wrong; she had meant to have got first innings on the subject of baccarat cheating, and she was rather afraid she was clean bowled. quick as she was, she could not see her answer. mr. alington did not, however, look at her, nor did he pause longer than was necessary to sip his coffee. "your tactics were a little open, a little obvious, lady conybeare, if you will allow me to say so," he went on. "delicious coffee! you exchanged so many glances with lady haslemere, and then looked up at me, that i could not fail to see you were watching for something. no man, i expect, likes to be suspected of so very paltry a crime as cheating at baccarat--a crime so hopelessly void of any grandeur--and no man, i am sure, likes a trap being laid for him by those whom he is entitled to consider his friends. and before i go on to the point i have in my mind i should like to say a word about this." he cleared his throat and sipped his coffee again. "what you and lady haslemere saw," he went on--"did your husband suspect me too? it does not matter--what you saw was this: i had declared a natural, and you saw me, as you thought, push a fifty-pound counter over the line. was that not so?" "there is no question of 'thought,'" said kit, whom a sense of danger made the more incautious; "we saw you do it." "quite true. if you had observed a little more closely, you would have seen something else. now, i ask you, the few times we have played baccarat together, did you ever see me fail to stake?" "not to my knowledge." "quite so. if you had looked at the table a moment before, you would have seen i had nothing staked. what happened was this: i had staked four ten-pound counters and two fives; then, seeing that i had no more smaller ones, i withdrew them to substitute one fifty for them. at that moment i received my cards, and, taking them up i forgot for the moment to substitute my fifty. i looked at the cards, declared the natural, and you saw me push forward the fifty-pound counter quite openly, and, so you thought, clumsily. it never occurred to me for a moment there was any need of an explanation." kit's anger and alarm was growing on her. "very clumsily," she said; "we all saw it." "it was stupid of me, no doubt, not to have explained at the time," he said, "but really i had no idea the company was so suspicious." he paused for a moment, and his mild temper was roused at the thought of kit's behaviour. "but perhaps people are right to be suspicious," he added, with a raised intonation. the shot went home, and kit's face grew a shade paler. but she could not conceivably show that she knew what he meant, for that would be to accuse herself. instead, she put all the insolence her voice would hold into her reply. "and what proof have i of the truth of what you say?" she asked, fighting desperately on this battle-ground of her adversary's choosing. "the fact that i say it," said mr. alington. "also, there is corroborative evidence if i choose to adduce it. i showed you the other night, meaning merely to give you a hint, that, had i wanted, i could have cheated very neatly. is it credible, then, even supposing that i am one of those people who cheat, that i should have done it so clumsily?" kit in her heart believed the man, but her superficial woman's cunning refused to give up the hold she still hoped she might have over him, her only answer to the hold she was afraid he had over her. "we all make blunders at times," she said, in her most fiendish manner. "unfortunately, i don't believe what you say." mr. alington sipped his coffee again. his momentary irritation had quite died down; you could not have found a kinder christian in all england. "fortunately, however, that matters very little," he replied. "it does not make a man popular among us," observed kit, "if he is known to cheat at baccarat. i understood you the other night to say that sort of thing was common in australia. i should advise you to remember that we think differently here." kit had lost her temper completely, and did not stop to weigh her words. worse than that, she lost her head, and lashed out insults with foolish defiance. mr. alington crossed one leg over the other, his mouth grew a shade more compressed and precise, and his large pale eyes turned suddenly unluminous and stale like a snake's. kit grew frightened again, and when a woman is frightened as well as angry she is not likely to score off a perfectly cool man. there was a moment's pause. "lady conybeare," said he at length, "you have chosen to treat me as a knave and as a fool. and i dislike very much being treated as a knave or a fool by you. you accuse me of cheating: that i have reason to believe does not seem to you very shocking." "may i ask why?" interrupted kit. mr. alington held up his hand, as if to deprecate any reply just now. "and you accuse me of cheating clumsily, foolishly," he continued. "but can you really think i should be so tragic an ass as to come to you with my mere assertion that i did not cheat? i have given you your chance to believe me of your own free will; you have, i regret to say, refused it. i will now force you to believe me--force you," he repeated thoughtfully. "i have a witness, a person then present, who saw me withdraw those smaller counters and replace the larger." kit laughed, but uneasily. "how very convenient!" she said. "what is his name?" "lord abbotsworthy," remarked alington. "i even took the precaution of calling his attention to what i had done. it was lucky i did. ask lord abbotsworthy." "one of your directors," said kit, almost beside herself with anger, and rising from her chair. "one of my directors, as you say," he replied, "and your friend. i need hardly remind you that your husband is another of my directors." on the moment jack came out of the dining-room. he cast one glance at kit's face, took a cigarette, and strolled discreetly upstairs. when his wife was on the war-path and had not asked his alliance he did not give it. "i shall be upstairs when you and my wife have finished your talk," he said over his shoulder to alington. "come and see me before you go." the pause sobered kit. "yes," continued alington, "he had a moment before asked me to change him some money for small counters, and that left me with only a few small ones. luckily, he will remember seeing me withdraw and substitute my stake. you and lady haslemere would have been wise to consult him before taking this somewhat questionable step of watching me. a fault of judgment--a mere fault of judgment." kit, figuratively speaking, threw up her hand. the desperate hope that alington was lying was no longer tenable. "and i await your apology," he added. there was a long silence. kit was not accustomed to apologize to anybody for anything. her indifference to this man, except in so far as he could financially serve them, had undergone a startling transformation in the last hour. indifference had given place first to anger at his insolence, then to fear. his placid, serene face had become to her an image of some infernal juggernaut, whose car rolled on over bodies of men, yet whose eyelash never quivered. pride battled with fear in her mind, fury with prudence. and juggernaut (butler no longer), contrary to his ascetic habit, lit a cigarette. "well?" he said, when he judged that the pause was sufficiently prolonged. kit had sat down again in her chair, and was conscious only of two things--this inward struggle, and an absorbing hatred of the man seated opposite her. "supposing i refuse to apologize?" she asked at length. "i shall regret it very much," he said; "you probably will regret it more. come, lady conybeare, by what right do you make an enemy of me?" again there was silence. kit knew very well how everyone would talk if this detestable business became public, which she understood to be the threat contained in alington's words, and knew also that a rupture between jack and him, which must inevitably follow, would not be likely to lead to their financial success in this business of the mines. "i shall require you also to tell lady haslemere and your husband, if he also has at any time suspected me, into what a deplorable error you have fallen," continued alington, dropping out his words as you drop some strong drug into a graduated glass, careful to give neither too much nor too little. suddenly kit made up her mind, and having done that, she determined to act with the best possible grace. "i apologize, mr. alington," she said; "i apologize sincerely. i wronged you abominably. i will do in all points as you suggest." mr. alington did not move a muscle. "i accept your apology," he said. "and please do me the favour not to treat me like a fool again, for i am far from being a fool." this speech was not easy swallowing for kit, but she had to take what he threw her. alington got up. "i have to go upstairs to see your husband," he said, "because we have a good deal of business--the shares of the new group will be on the market in a few days." he paused a moment. "do not give another thought to the matter, lady conybeare," he said. "it is much better we should be friends. ah, by the way, regarding that matter on which i meant to speak to you, that unfortunate affair of the hundred-pound counter--you know what i mean. do not give another thought to that, either. i assure you that it will not be through me that it goes further. i fully believe you never meant it. only you did not correct your mistake instantaneously, and so correction became impossible. was it not so?" his broad face brightened and beamed, like the face of a father speaking lovingly and consolingly to a son about some petty fault, and he held out his hand to her. kit wavered. she would have given anything in the world to say, "what affair of the hundred-pound counter? i don't know what you mean." but she could not. she was physically, perhaps morally, incapable of giving the words utterance. alington had made her afraid; she was beaten, cowed. and the accuracy of his intuition astounded her. then she gave him her hand; she had no word for him on this subject. "good-bye," she said--"_au revoir_, rather. you will be in and out a good deal, i suppose, while we are in london. there is always lunch at two. my husband is in his room upstairs. you know the way, i think." many people have their own pet plan of sending themselves to sleep, such as counting imaginary sheep going through a visionary hedge, or marking out a lawn-tennis court, lifting the machine as seldom as possible. kit's method, though she usually fell asleep immediately, was to enumerate her dislikes. this was a long and remarkably varied list, beginning "marie corelli, parsnips," and she seldom got to the end of it. to-night she admitted mr. alington into the charming catalogue, and getting to his name, she did not continue the list, nor did she immediately go to sleep. chapter xii the cottage by the sea toby was sitting on the edge of an old weather-beaten breakwater, now running out lop-sidedly and burying its nose in the sand, some three miles north of stanborough-on-sea, making an exceedingly public toilet after his swim. his mother, old lady conybeare, had a charming house down here, which had, so to speak, risen from the ranks; in other words, it had originally been two cottages, and was now a sort of rustic palace. her husband had been a man of extraordinary good taste, and both his idea and execution of this transformation was on the high-water mark of felicity. brick with rough-cast was the delectable manner of it, and the old cottage chambers had been run one into another like the amalgamation of separate drops of quicksilver, to produce irregular-shaped rooms with fireplaces in odd corners. he had built out a wing on one side, a block on another, a dining-room on a third; the front-door was reached through a cloister open to the sea, and supported on brick pillars; and big green spanish oil-jars and venetian well-tops lined the terraced walk. opposite the front-door, on the other side of the carriage sweep, was a monastic-looking, three-sided courtyard, bounded by low-arched cloisters, and an italian tower, square and tapering towards the top, bisected the middle side. close abutting on this was a charming huddled group of red roofs, with beaten ironwork in the windows, suggestive of the refectory of this seaside monastery. in reality it comprised a laundry, a bakehouse, and the dynamos which supplied the electric light. for there was in reality nothing unpleasantly monastic about the place; the cloisters were admirable shelters from sun or wind, and were heavily cushioned; the bell in the tower rang folk not to prime, but to dinner; and the peas were not put in visitors' boots, but boiled and put in dishes. the house, in fact, was as habitable as it was picturesque, a high degree of merit; it was no penance at all to stay there; the electric light seemed to brighten automatically as dusk fell, even as the moon and stars begin to shine without visible lamplighter in the high-roofed hall of heaven; and there were about as many bathrooms, with hot and cold water, as there were bedrooms. toby was putting on his socks very leisurely; he had been down for a dip in the sea before lunch, and having lit the post-ablutive cigarette, sweetest of all that burn, he threw his towel round his neck, took his coat on his arm, and walked slowly up the steep sandy pathway to the top of the fifty-foot cliff on which the house and garden stood. several old fishermen were standing about at the top in nautical attitudes, hitching their trousers, folding their arms, and scanning the horizon like the chorus in light opera. one had a lately-taken haul, and toby inspected his wares with much interest. there were lobsters in blue mail--angry and irritable, which glanced sideways at one like vicious horses looking for a good opening to kick--feebly-flapping soles, anæmic whiting, a few rainbow mackerel, and, oh, heavens! crabs. now, temptation and crab were the two things in the world which toby found it idle to attempt to resist, and he ordered that the biggest and best should be sent instantly up to the house. perhaps it would be safer if he took it himself, for the mere possibility of its miscarrying was not to be borne, and grasping it gingerly by the fourth leg, he carried it, not without nervousness, wide angry pincers all agape, up across the lawn. he went through the cloister and in at the door leading to the servants' parts, where he met a stern, stark butler. "oh, lowndes," he said, "for lunch, if possible. by the hind-leg. for the cook, with my compliments, and dressed." the transference was effected, much to toby's relief, and he put down his towel and on his coat. there was still half an hour to wait for lunch, but that cloud had now its proverbial silver lining. half an hour seemed an impossible time, but the silver lining was the possibility of the crab being ready by then. how long a crab took dressing toby did not know, but if it took no longer than he did himself--and there was more of him to dress--half an hour should be sufficient for two. lily, who, like himself, held firmly the wholesome creed that it is impious to stop indoors while it is possible to be out, was sure to be in the garden somewhere, and toby walked out again in his white, sea-stained tennis-shoes to find her. the cottage had risen from the ranks, but not less remarkable had been the promotion of the garden. what a few years ago had been an unprofitable acreage of wind-swept corn, and more suggestive, by reason of its fine poppy-bearing qualities, of an opium rather than a wheat-field, was become a flowery wilderness of delight. buckthorn, gray and green like the olives of the south, and bearing berries as if of a jaundiced holly, had been planted in shrubberies in the centre of garden-beds as screens from the wind, robbing the sea-gales of their bitter saltness before they passed over the flowers, and letting the bracing quality alone reach the plants. mixed with the buckthorn were the yellow flames of the golden elder, noblest of the english shrubs, and rows of aspen all a-quiver with nervous feminine energy. thus sheltered, there ran on each side of a broad space of grass away from the house an avenue of herbaceous border. hollyhocks and sunflowers stood up behind, like tall men looking over the heads of an average crowd; shoulder-high to them were single dahlias and scarlet salvias; below them again a row of shirley poppies, delicate in tint and texture as liberty fabrics, and in a happy plebeian crowd at the edge mignonette, love-lies-a-bleeding, london-pride, and double daisies. toby sauntered silent-footed over the velvet carpet of grass up to the summer-house, faced with split planks of pollarded elm, which stood at the end, but drew an unavailing cover. thence crossing the broad gravel walk, he tried the tennis-court, and went down the steps past flowering fuchsia-trees, where two great bronze storks of japanese work turned a world-weary eye skywards, and explored the rose-garden. this lay in a natural dip of the land, studiously sheltered, and the wirework pergola which ran through it was on these august days one foam of pink sherbet petals. on either side were rockeries covered with creeping stonecrops, mountain-heaths, and alpine gentians, those remote sentinels of the vegetable world. and strange to their blue eyes, accustomed to see morning break on paths untrodden of man and fields of flashing snow, must have been the soft hint of dawn in this land of tended green. but toby saw them not, for there in a nook at the end, below an ivy-trained limb of tree, sat the queen of the rosebud garden. lily was not reading, in spite of the seeming evidence of an open book on her lap, for the breeze turned its leaves backwards and forwards like some student distractedly hunting up a reference. for a moment the page would lie open and unturned; then a scud of flying leaves would end in a long pause at p. ; then one leaf would be turned very slowly, as if the unseen reader was perusing the last words very carefully, while his fingers pushed the page over to be ready for the next. then with a bustle and scurry he would hurry on and study the advertisements at the end, and as like as not go suddenly back to the title-page. lily had been thinking pleasantly and idly about toby, and the many charming things in this delightful world, when he appeared. she welcomed him with a smile in those adorable dark eyes. "had a nice dip?" she asked, as he sat down by her. "oh, toby, when we are married i shall devote my whole life to getting your hair tidy for once. then i shall turn my face to the wall and softly expire." "if that's your object you'll be aiming at the impossible," remarked toby, "like that silly school-master you read me about in browning who aimed at a million." "grammarian," corrected lily, "and i'll read you no more browning." "well, it does seem to be a bit above my head," said toby, without regret. "and i bought a crab on my way up, and, oh, i love you!" lily laughed. "i thought you were going to say, 'oh, i love crab!'" she said. "and that would be true, too," said toby. "what a lot of true things there are, if one only looks for them!" he observed. "that's what the christian scientists say," remarked lily. "they say there is no such thing as lies or evil or pain." "who are the christian scientists?" asked toby. "and what do they make of toothache?" lily meditated a moment. "the christian scientists are unsuccessful female practitioners," she observed at length. "and there isn't any toothache; it's only you who think so." "seems to me it's much the same thing," said toby. "and how about lies? supposing i said i didn't love you?" "or crab?" "or crab, even. would that be true, therefore?" lily leaned forward, and put down toby's tie, which was rising above his collar. "well, i think we've disposed of them," she said. "oh dear, i wish i was a man!" "i don't," said toby. "why not? oh, i see. thanks. but i should like to be able to bathe from a breakwater, and buy crabs from fishermen, and have very short, untidy straight-up hair, and a profession, toby." "yes," said toby, wincing, for he knew or suspected what was coming. "don't say 'yes' like that. say it as if you meant it." toby took a long breath, and shut his eyes. "yes, so help me god!" he said, very loud. "that's better. well, toby, i want you--i really want you--to have a real profession. what is the use of your being secretary to your cousin? i don't believe you could say the names of the men in the cabinet, and, as you once told me yourself, all you ever do there is to play stump-cricket in the secretary's room." "you should have warned me that whatever i said would be used against me," said the injured toby. "but i saw after the flowers in hyde park last year." "the work of a life-time," said lily. "i wonder they don't offer you a peerage." "you see, i'm not a brewer," said toby. "beer, beerage--a very poor joke, toby." "very poor, and who made it? besides, i think you are being sarcastic about the flowers in hyde park. if there's one thing i hate," said toby violently, "it is cheap sarcasm." "who wouldn't be sarcastic when a great tousle-headed, able-bodied, freckle-faced scion of the aristocracy tells one that he is employed--employed, mark you--in looking after the flowers in hyde park?" asked lily, with some warmth. "why, you didn't even water them!" "i did the organization, the head work of the thing," said toby. "that's the rub." "bosh!" "lily, you are really very vulgar and common in your language sometimes," said toby. "i have often meant to speak to you about it; it makes me very unhappy." "indeed! try and cheer up. but really, toby, and quite seriously, i wish you would settle to do something; i don't care what. go into the foreign office." "languages," said toby; "i don't know any." "or some other office, or buy a farm, and work it properly, and try to make it pay. give your mind seriously to something. i hate a loafer. besides, a profession seems to me the greatest luxury in the world." "plain folk like me don't care for luxuries," said toby. "i'm not like kit. kit is perfectly happy without the necessaries of life, provided she has the luxuries." this diversion was more successful. lily was silent a moment. "toby, i'm afraid i don't like your sister-in-law," she said at length. toby plunged with fervour into the new topic. "oh, there you make a great mistake," he said. "i allow kit is not exactly a copy-book-virtue person, but--well, she's clever and amusing, and she is never a bore." "i don't trust her." "there, again, you make a mistake. i don't say that everybody should trust her, but i am sure she would never do a shabby thing to you or me, or----" "or?" said lily, with the straightforwardness which kit labelled "uncomfortable." "or anybody she really liked," said toby. "besides, lily, i owe her something; she brought us together. as i have told you, she simply insisted on introducing me, though i didn't want to be introduced at all." lily made the sound which is usually written "pshaw!" "as if we shouldn't have met!" she said. "toby, our meeting was in better hands than hers." "well, she hurried the better hands up," said toby, "and i am grateful for that. if it had not been for her, we should not have been introduced at that dance at the hungarians, and i shouldn't probably have dined at park lane the night after; i should have gone to the palace instead, so there would have been one, perhaps two, evenings wasted." "well, i'll make an effort to like her more," said lily. "oh, but that's no manner of use," said toby. "you may hold your breath, and shut your eyes, and try with both hands, and never get a yard nearer liking anybody for all your trying. and it's the same with disliking." "do you dislike anyone, toby?" asked lily, with a touch of wistfulness, for toby's habit of universal friendliness always seemed to her extremely enviable. toby considered a moment. "yes," he said. "who is that?" "ted comber," said toby. lily drew her brows together. toby's promptness in singling out this one person seemed hard to reconcile with his wide forbearance. "now why?" she asked. "tell me exactly why." "he ain't a man," said toby gruffly. "surely, lily, we can talk about something pleasanter." "yes, i'm sure we can," she replied fervently. "i quite share your view. oh, toby, promise me something!" "all right," said toby, taken off his guard. "hurrah! that you will instantly get a profession of some sort. dear toby, how nice of you! there's the gong, and i'm simply ravenous." toby got up rather stiffly. "if you consider that fair," he remarked, "i wonder at you. at least, i don't wonder, for it's extraordinary how little sense of honour women have." "i know. isn't it terrible?" said lily. "toby, it was nice of you to order that crab. i adore crab. oh, there's mamma! i suppose she must have crossed last night. i didn't expect her till this evening." mrs. murchison had been to the wagner festival at bayreuth, and was very communicative and astounding about it. she began by saying how delicious it had been at beyrout, and lily, whose real and tender affection for her mother did not blunt her sense of humour, began to giggle helplessly. "bayreuth, i should say," continued mrs. murchison without a pause. "lily dearest, if you laugh like that you'll get a piece of crab in your windgall. well, as i was saying, lady conybeare, it was all just too beautiful. you may be sure i studied the music a good deal before each opera; it is impossible to grasp it otherwise--the life-motive and all that. siegfried wagner conducted; they gave him quite an ovarium. but some people go just in order to say they have been, without thinking about the music. garibaldi to the general, i call it." lady conybeare, a fresh-faced, dark-eyed woman of not more than fifty, healthy as a sea-wind, and in her wholesome way as tyrannical, cast an appealing look at toby. toby was one of the few people who did not in the least fear her, and she was proportionately grateful. she had tried to spoil him as a child, and now depended on him. he had warned her what calls would be made on her gravity during mrs. murchison's visit, and she had promised to do her best. "so few people appreciate garibaldi," she said with emphatic sympathy. "yes it is so," said mrs. murchison, flying off at a tangent. "when i was a girl i used to adore him, and wore a photograph of him in a locket. but that is all gone out; it went out with plain living and high thinking;" and she helped herself for the second time to toby's crab and drank a little excellent moselle. "but bayreuth was very fatiguing," she went on; "or is it beyrout? until one has heard the operas once, it is a terrible effort of attention. _c'est le premier fois qui coûte._ really, i felt quite exhausted at the end of the circle, and i was so glad to get back to dear, delightful, foggy old london again, where one never has to attend to anything. and it looked so beautiful this morning as i drove down the embankment. i see they have put up a new statue at the corner of westminster bridge--queen casabianca, or some such person." toby choked suddenly and violently. "i've said something wrong, i expect," remarked mrs. murchison genially. "tell me what it is, lord evelyn, or i should say lord toby." "toby, please." "well, toby---- dear me! how funny it sounds, considering i only saw you first in june! ah, dear me, since first i saw your face, what a lot has happened! but if it's not casabianca, who is it?" "boadicea, i think," said toby. "dear me! so it is. how stupid of me! she comes in the anglo-saxon history, does she not? and she used to bleed beneath the roman rods in the blue poetry book--or was it pink? i never can remember. but how it all comes back to one! caractacus, too, and alfred and the cakes, and the seven hills." mrs. murchison beamed with happiness. she knew very well the difference between being a unit among a large house-party, and staying as an only guest, and this cottage by the sea seemed to her to be the very incarnation of the taste and culture of breeding. she knew also that several rich and aspiring acquaintances of hers were spending a week at stanborough, and she proposed after lunch to stroll along the beach towards there, and perhaps call at the hotel on the links. her friends were sure to ask where she was staying, and it would be charming to say: "oh, down at the cottage with lady conybeare. so delicious and rustic; there is no one there except lily and dear toby. of course we are very happy about it. and don't you find a hotel quite intolerable?" in the pause that followed mrs. murchison ran over her plans. "what a charming place this is," she went on; "and how delightful to be near stanborough! lord comber is there; he told me he was going on there from beyrout. at the links hotel, i think he said." toby looked up. "is comber there?" he asked. "are you sure?" his cheerful face had clouded, and his tone was peremptory. "of course i am sure," said mrs. murchison. "dear me, how annoyed you look, lord--i mean toby. and i thought he was such a friend of your sister-in-law's and all. what is the matter?" "nothing--nothing at all," he said quickly. but he looked at his mother and caught her eye. "what a very odd place for lord comber to come to!" said lily, who had grasped "watering-place" with greater distinctness than mrs. murchison. "i am sure i don't see why," said she. "stanborough is extremely bracing and fashionable. i saw they had quite a list of fashionable arrivals there in the world yesterday. isn't it so, toby?" "perhaps he has come to play golf," said toby in a tone of resolute credulity. "golf?" asked mrs. murchison vaguely. "oh, that's the game, isn't it, where you dig a sandpit, and then hit the ball into it and swear? so somebody told me. it sounds quite easy." toby laughed. "a very accurate description," he said. "i'm going to play this afternoon. hear me swear!" lady conybeare rose, as they had finished lunch. "come and see me before you go out, toby," she said. lily looked from one to the other, and saw the desire of a private word between them. "oh, mother, let me take you to the rose-garden!" she said. "shall we have coffee there as usual, lady conybeare?" "yes, dear. take your mother out." the two left the room, and lady conybeare turned to toby. "well, toby," she said. "i don't wish to be either indiscreet or absurd, mother," he answered. "nor i," said she. "kit told me she was coming to stanborough for a week, and i asked her, of course, to stay here. she said she had made arrangements to stay at the links hotel. jack is not coming." toby made two bread pellets, and flicked them out of the window with extraordinary accuracy of aim. "damn kit!" he said. "she comes to-morrow, and that beast, i suppose, came a day or two ago. i saw somebody in the distance the day before yesterday who reminded me of him, but i didn't give another thought to it. no doubt it was he." there was a pause. "but jack----" said lady conybeare, and it cost her something to say it. "oh, jack's a fool!" said toby quickly. "you know that as well as i do, mother. of course, he's awfully clever, and all that; but i'll be blowed if my wife ever stops at a seaside hotel with a comber-man." lady conybeare stretched out her hand. "thank god, i have you, toby!" she said. "what a fool kit is!" said toby thoughtfully. "there are hundreds of people there, as mrs. murchison says. telegraph for jack, mother," he said suddenly. lady conybeare shook her head. "we have no right, no reason to do that," she said. "toby, take the thing in hand. do your best." toby looked out of the window and hit an imaginary opponent with his closed fist. "perhaps we could manage something," he said. "don't say a word to lily, mother, or to mrs. murchison." lady conybeare smiled rather bitterly. "nor wash my dirty linen in public," she said. "is that my habit, dear?" toby got up and kissed his mother lightly on the forehead. "i'll do my best," he said. "i know you will." and they went out to coffee in the rose-garden. chapter xiii toby to the rescue half an hour later toby was on his way to stanborough, where he was to meet a friend at the club-house, and play a round of golf with him. as soon as that was over, he proposed to make a call at the links hotel and demand an interview with ted comber. lily, in this as in all else above the common level of womankind, made no suggestion that she should come round with them. in fact, she voluntarily repudiated such a possibility. "no proper man wants a girl hanging about when he is playing a game," she had said. "so if you ask me to come with you--if, in fact, you don't forbid me to--you'll be no proper man. now, shall i come with you? i want to, awfully." "yes--i mean, no," said toby, wavering, but deciding right. toby was playing with a friend after his own heart, who had just left oxford, more to the regret of undergraduates than of tutors, and so presumably his departure was really regrettable. he was a hater of cities and five-o'clock teas, capable of riding whatever on this unruly earth had been foaled, but perfectly incapable of what he called "simpering and finesse," meaning thereby the pretty little social gifts. furthermore, he was possessed of so much common-sense that at times he might have been unjustly suspected of being clever. him, as they played, toby determined to consult under secrecy as to what must be done with the ineffable comber, and "if buck and i," thought he, "aren't a match for that scented man, i'll brush my teeth with my niblick. lord, what a lark!" toby, it must be confessed, rather enjoyed the mission with which his mother had entrusted him. he was not naturally of a punitive or revengeful disposition, and, indeed, lord comber, had never done anything to him, except exist, which called for vengeance. but the thought of his discomfiture was sweet in his mouth, and, though he had not yet formed the vaguest idea as to how it was to be accomplished, he felt a serene confidence that he and buck would be able to hatch something immensely unpleasant between them. here was no case, he thought gleefully to himself, that called for tact or diplomacy, or any lady-like little weapons, which comber probably possessed. brutal means must be used, and he should use them. he regretted intensely that both he and comber were past the age when their difference could be settled with the straightforward simplicity which says, "will you go of your own accord, or do you prefer to be kicked?" dearly would he have liked that, for, indeed, his fists itched after the man. anyhow, the cause was good. comber was to be sat upon, and kit saved from making an egregious fool of herself. married women of her age and appearance, reasoned toby, do not stay alone with people like comber at watering-places like stanborough, and kit's brother-in-law did not intend that she should do risky things of this description if he could prevent it. toby's laudable determination on this point was not due, it must be confessed, to moral scruples. he did not know, and he did not care to know, whether kit's flirtation with this man was serious or not. but people, he was aware, talked about them, and certainly, if she and he stayed in a stanborough hotel for a week in august together, people would have an excellent reason for talking. still less had he any fancy, supposing the worst came to the worst, for seeing, as his mother said, conybeare linen, marked very plain, in the public wash-tub. also he hated comber with all the fine intensity with which a healthy, normal young man hates, and is right to hate, those smiling, wobbly, curled and scented of his sex, who powder themselves and take pills, and read ladies' papers, and are at their best (or worst) in a boudoir--lap-dogs of london. some women, and perhaps their creator knows why, appeared, so toby thought, to like them. kit liked comber--here was an instance of it that thrust sore at him. now, jack was no saint (here again toby was not judging on moral grounds), but he was a man. he would shoot straight or ride straight all day, and in the evening he would make himself, it might be, quite scandalously agreeable to other people's wives. it was not right, and toby did not defend him, but, anyhow, he behaved like a male. that was where the difference lay. he remembered how they had all howled at kit when one evening she had announced that she was going to stanborough for a week in august to get braced. no, she was not going to take any of her friends with her, and very likely she would not even take a maid. she proposed to live in some stark hotel swept by all the winds that blow, in a bedroom with only a small square of carpet, one damp sandy towel, and windows looking due north, and kept always wide open. she intended to bathe daily before breakfast in the cold, salt, terrible german ocean, to sit and walk on the sands all day, and go to bed directly after an eggy high tea, about seven. she would have eggs with her tea, and eggs with her breakfast, and cold roast beef for lunch, and possibly beer. she would not go to stay with jack's mother, which was the obvious thing to do, because the house was so comfortable, and she knew she would only sit indoors, and get up late and go to bed late if she did. she wanted to be cold and uncomfortable and early-birdish, and come back braced with a bronzed complexion like a sailor, and blowzy hair. it would be immensely healthy and exceedingly unpleasant. toby recollected these amazing plans of kit's very precisely. ted comber, he also remembered, had been there when she had enunciated them, and when he asked if he might come too, had received an unqualified negative. thus, whether kit had or had not made this subsequent arrangement with him mattered not at all. if she had, the perseus-toby was coming hot-foot over the downs to deliver her from her self-forged fetters; and if comber had come without being asked, still more peremptory should be his dismissal. what was to be done was clear to demonstration; how it must be done was a matter for council. toby found several friends at the club-house--it was of common occurrence that he found friends in casual and unlikely places--and got generally chaffed and slapped and offered various mixed and stimulating drinks warranted to improve his putting and shut the jaws of the bunkers. but in the course of time they got clear, and drove up the steep hill leading to the first hole. once started, toby gave the outlines of the problem to buck, who was highly and justifiably indignant with him. "it's a shabby trick, toby," he said, "to bring me up on to this fine turf under the pretence of playing golf, if you want to talk morals. good god! fancy talking moral problems on a golf links! if this was a lawn-tennis court, and you were a parson, i could understand it." "oh, don't be a fool, buck!" said toby; "the whole thing is stated--i have told you all--in ten words, and you needn't allude to it again till we get in. then you shall say what you advise me to do. but it must be settled to-day; my sister-in-law comes to-morrow. just let it simmer." buck grunted, waggled, frowned heavily at his ball, and laid the iron shot dead. "there, it's all rot saying that to think of something puts you off," said toby. "blast it all!" and his scudding half-topped ball ran very swiftly into the bunker. "of course, talking is one worse," said buck, a little soothed. fifty yards separated the first green from the second tee, and toby recapitulated the salient points of the problem. the man of few words answered nothing, and immediately afterwards drove a screamer. these great sea-blown downs, over which the wind scours as shrill and salt as in a ship's rigging, are admirably predisposing towards lucidity of thought. the northern airs cleanse and vivify the brain; they set the blood trotting equably through the arteries, they tone down overstrung nerves, and raise the slack to the harmonious mean, and in a naturally sane mind lodged in an extremely sane body they produce extraordinarily well-balanced results. and golf above all human pursuits gives full play to what is known as the subliminal self, a fine phrase, denoting that occult and ruling factor in man's brain--unconscious thought. the body is fully and harmoniously occupied; so, too, the conscious mind. the eye measures a distance; the hand and muscles take its order, and direct the swinging of the club. meantime that mysterious twin of entity, the inner brain, goes scenting along its private trails, without let or hindrance from the occupied conscious self. each goes his own way, on roads, maybe, as diverse as those of jekyll and hyde, unharassed by the other. once only in the round did buck laugh in a loud and appreciative manner for no clear cause. his inner brain had caught a hare, and sent the message to the golfer. it was still only a little after five when they returned to the club-house, and toby ordered tea in a sequestered corner. "of course you'll go and call on this worm now," remarked buck. "yes, that is what i meant to do. got anything for me to say?" "toby, can you lie?" "like the devil, in a good cause." "well, tell the comber man that you are coming to stay at the links hotel with your sister-in-law by her invitation. do the thing properly, and be prodigal of details. it's a pity you have such a despicable imagination. say that she wrote to you in despair because she would be bored to death with no one there to speak to, but that conybeare insisted on her going. nasty for the worm that? eh?" toby pondered a moment. "that's not up to much, buck," he said. "it wouldn't drive the man away unless he went simply from pique. and supposing he tells me kit didn't write to me? perhaps he has had a letter from her saying what fun they'll have." "oh, of course, if he says you lie," said buck suggestively. "do you know the man?" asked toby with rapture. "he is quite beautiful, with curly hair, rings, and scent, and i expect, if we knew all, stays." buck, it is idle to blink the fact, spat on the ground. "yes, i know him," he said. "hell is full of such. by the way, i haven't seen you since you were engaged to be married. what an idiotic thing to do!" "that happens to be your opinion, does it?" asked toby mildly. "yes. i'm delighted, really. congratulations. but the plan doesn't seem to suit you." "no; it's rotten," said toby. "i want something certain. this easily might not come off." "he's a real worm, is he?" asked buck. "i only know him by sight." "genuine, hall-marked," said toby. "well, then give him a chance. oh, not a chance of getting off. i mean, give him a chance of lying to you. tell him as news that lady conybeare is coming here to-morrow, and perhaps he may appear surprised to hear it. that will give you an opportunity. you can say things to him then." "yes, there's more sense in that," said toby. "oh! come and dine to-night." "all right. is the she there?" "yes; you'll like her." buck looked at him enviously. "what infernal good luck you have, toby!" he said. "oh, i know i have," said toby. "lily----" "don't know her yet. but about the worm. probably there will be a row. you've got to frighten him away, remember that. worms are always nervous." "there'll be a row afterwards with kit, i'm afraid," said toby. "oh, certainly. but it's all for her good. introduce me when she comes, and i'll say i have been her guardian angel." toby looked at buck's strong brown face for a moment in silence. "you'd look nice with wings and a night-shirt," he remarked. "pity raphael or one of those johnnies isn't alive." "if by johnnies you refer to the italian school of painters," said buck, "it isn't worth while saying so." "i know; that's why i didn't say so. good-bye; i'm off to the links hotel. dinner at eight." lord comber was in, and would toby come up to his sitting-room? he met him at the top of the stairs, like a perfect hostess, and took him down the broad passage, stopping once opposite a big glass to smooth his carefully-crimped hair. then he took toby's arm, and toby bristled, for he did not thrust his hand inside the curve of his elbow and let it lie there, but inserted it very daintily and gently, as if he was threading a needle, with a slight pressure of his long fingers. "it's quite too delightful to see you, toby," he said; "and how splendid you are looking! i wish i could get as brown as that. you must let me do a sketch of you. yes, i'm here all alone, and i've been terribly bored. i wonder if your mother would allow me to come and see her. is miss murchison there, too?" "yes; she came a couple of days ago." "how nice! i do want to see more of her. everyone is frightfully jealous of you. and i hear your mother's house is quite beautiful. round to the right." ted comber firmly held the creed that if you flatter people and make yourself pleasant you can do anything with them. there is quite an astonishing amount of truth in it, but, like many other creeds, it does not contain the whole truth. it does not allow for the possible instance of two personalities being so antagonistic that every effort, even to be pleasant, on the part of the one merely renders it more obnoxious to the other. this is a very disconcerting sort of exception, and the fact that it may prove the rule is a very slight compensation, practically considered. "you have some wonderful burne-jones drawings, someone told me," went on ted, innocently driving the exception up to the hilt, so to speak, in his own blood. "your father must have had such taste! it is so clever of people to see twenty years before what is going to be valuable. i wish i had known him. here's my den." toby looked round the den in scarcely veiled horror. daniel's den with all its lions, he thought, would be preferable to this. there was a french writing-table, and on it signed photographs of two or three women in silver frames, an empty inkstand, a gold-topped scent-bottle (not empty), and a small daintily-bound volume of french verse. against the wall stood a sofa, smothered in cushions, and on it a mandolin with a blue ribbon. a very big low armchair stood near the sofa, on the arm of which was cast a piece of silk embroidery, the needle still sticking in it, a damning proof of the worker thereof. there was a large looking-glass over the fireplace, and on the chimney-piece stood two or three saxe figures. a copy of the gentlewoman and the queen lay on the floor. "i can't get on without a few of my own things about me," said lord comber, fussing gently about the room. "i always take some of my things with me if i am going to stay in a hotel. this place is quite nice; they are very civil, and the cooking isn't bad. but it makes such a difference to have some of one's things about; it makes your rooms so much more homey." and he drew the curtain a shade more over the window to keep the sun out. "how long are you going to stop here?" asked toby. "oh, another week, i expect," said comber, removing the embroidery, and indicating the armchair to toby. "of course, it is rather lonely, and i don't know a soul here; but i'm out a good deal on these delicious sands, and another week alone will be quite bearable." "i wonder you didn't arrange to come with somebody," said toby quietly. lord comber took up the gold-topped scent-bottle and refreshed his forehead. this was a little awkward, but kit had told him to tell none of the cottage-party that she would be there. he remembered vaguely that kit had, one evening in july, announced her intention of coming to stanborough, but he could not recollect whether toby was there, and, besides, at the time she had not really meant to do anything of the kind. it was only afterwards that they had made their definite arrangements. the worst of it was, that there was a letter from kit lying on the table, and toby might or might not have seen it. "everyone is engaged now," he said. "it is hopeless trying to get people in august. oh, i heard from kit this morning," he added, by rather an ingenious afterthought. "she asked me to come down to goring in september." "was that all she said?" asked toby. "oh, you know what kit's letters are like," said he. "a delicious sort of hash of all that has happened to everybody." toby paused a moment. god was good. "she didn't happen to say by what train she was going to arrive to-morrow?" he asked. lord comber made a little impatient gesture, admirably spontaneous. he had often used it before. "oh, how angry kit will be!" he said. "she told me particularly not to tell anybody. how did you know, toby?" "she wrote to my mother some days ago declining her invitation to come to the cottage," he said. "also the thing was discussed at length in my presence. there was no question of concealment. i remember you asked if you might come too, and she said no." lord comber laughed, quite as if he was not annoyed. "yes, i remember," he said. "what fun kit was that night! it was at the haslemeres', wasn't it? i never saw her in such form." toby sat as stiff as a poker in the armchair. "i can't quite reconcile your statement that you were going to be all alone with the fact that you knew kit was coming to-morrow," he said. "not off-hand, at least." ted comber began to be aware that the position was a sultry one. kit had distinctly told him not to tell any of the people at the cottage that she was coming, and he had said that this was the wrong sort of precaution to take. they would be sure to know, and a failure in secrecy is a ghastly failure, and so difficult to explain afterwards, for people always think that if you keep a thing secret there is something to be kept secret. no doubt she had come round to his way of thinking, and had told them herself, forgetting the prohibition she had laid on him. altogether it was an annoying business. however, this scene with the barbarous brother-in-law had to be gone through with at once. he shrugged his shoulders. "kit told me not to mention it," he said. "we were going to have a rustic little time in all our worst clothes and no maid. that is all." "you have lied to me--that is all," said toby, with incredible rudeness. "that is not the way for one man to speak to another, toby," said lord comber, feeling suddenly cold and damp. "i followed kit's directions." "of course, it is the fashion to say that it is the woman's fault," observed toby fiendishly. lord comber was quite at a loss how to deal with such outrageous behaviour. people did not do such things. "did you come here in order to quarrel with me?" he asked. "no, i don't want to quarrel," said toby, "but i intend that you shall go away." "that is so thoughtful of you," said comber. he was getting a little agitated, and had recourse to the scent-bottle again. he did not like fencing with the buttons off. toby did not answer at once; he was thinking of the suggestion he had made to his mother. he determined to use it as a threat, at any rate. "look here," he said; "kit may choose her own friends as much as she pleases, but she cannot go staying alone with you at a place like this. either you go or i telegraph to jack." lord comber laughed. "do you really suppose jack would really mind?" he said. "and do you know that you are speaking of my brother?" asked toby. "i'm sure that is not jack's fault," remarked comber. "no. then, as you say, if jack won't mind, i'll telegraph to him at once. have you a form here? oh, it doesn't matter; i can get one in the office." "the fact that you telegraph to jack implies that there is something to telegraph about," said comber. "there is nothing." toby did not choose to acknowledge that there could be any truth in this. "i don't care a damn," he observed. "either you go or i telegraph. take your time, but please settle as soon as you can. i don't want to make things unpleasant, and if you say that your only aunt is very ill, and that you have been sent for, i won't contradict it--in fact, i'll bear you out if kit makes a fuss." "that is extraordinarily kind of you," said lord comber. "and since when have you become your sister-in-law's keeper in this astounding manner?" toby got quickly out of his chair, and stood very stiff and hot and uncompromising. "now, look here," he said: "my name is massingbird, and so is jack's, and i don't wish that it should be in everybody's mouth in connection with yours. people will talk; you know it as well as i do, and there is going to be no comber-conybeare scandal, thank you very much." "you seem to be doing your level best to make one," said lord comber. "oh, i don't mind a ted-toby scandal," said toby serenely. "i can take care of myself." "and of kit, it seems." "and of kit--at least, it seems so, as you say." there was a long silence, and toby drew a vile briar pipe out of his pocket. he noticed that lord comber, even in his growing agitation, cast an agonized glance towards it, and, putting it back in his pocket, he lit a cigarette. "you don't like pipes, i think?" he said. "i forgot for the moment." toby sat down again in the big chair and smoked placidly. he intended to get an answer, and if it was unsatisfactory (if the worm turned and refused to go), he would have to consider whether he should or should not telegraph to jack. he felt that this would be an extreme step, and hoped he should not have to take it. lord comber's reflections were not enviable. to begin with, toby had a most uncomfortable, angular mind and an attitude towards life which will not consent to be fitted into round holes nor adapt itself to nice easy compromises and tactful smoothings over of difficult places. he was all elbows, mentally considered--elbows and unbending joints. if he intended to carry his point, he would not meet one half-way; he held horrible threats over one's head, which, if defied, he might easily carry out. his own argument he considered excellent. to telegraph to jack implied that there was something to telegraph about, but this square, freckled brute could not or would not see it. it really was too exasperating. he himself conducted his own life so largely by the employment of tact, finesse, diplomacy (toby would have called these lies), that it was most disconcerting to find himself in conflict with someone who not only did not employ them, but refused to recognise them as legitimate weapons. indeed, he was in a dilemma. it was impossible to contemplate a telegram being sent to jack: it was equally impossible to contemplate what would happen if kit came and found him gone. and the annoyance of going, of missing this week with her, was immense. it gave him a sort of _cachet_ to be seen staying with kit alone at a watering-place. she was more indisputably than ever on a sort of pinnacle in his world this year, and everyone would think it so very daring. that was the sort of fame he really coveted--to be in the world's eye doing rather risky things with an extremely smart woman. moreover, in his selfish, superficial way, he was very fond of her. she was always amusing, and always ready to be amused; they laughed and chattered continually when they were alone, and a week with her was sure to be an excessively entertaining week. she had proposed that they should do this herself, and written a charming note, which he kept. "we shall be quite alone, and we won't speak to a soul," she had said. and that from kit, who, as a rule, demanded a hundred thousand people around and about, was an immense compliment. but because all his thoughts as he debated these things, while toby sat smoking, were quite contemptible, the struggle was no less difficult. a despicable man in a dilemma, though the motives and considerations which compose that dilemma are tawdry and ignoble, does not suffer less than a fine spirit, but, if anything, more, for he has no sustaining sense of duty to guide and reward him. ted comber's happiness and pleasure in life, of which he had a great deal, was chiefly composed of trivial and unedifying ingredients, and to be intimate, not only privately, but also publicly, with kit was one of them. and her unutterable brother-in-law sat smoking in his best armchair, after presenting his ultimatum. if a word from him would have sent toby to siberia, he would have gone. it would be a good deed to rid society of such an outrage. again, yielding with a bad grace had its disadvantages, for though he had no personal liking for toby, a great many people, with whom he desired to be on the best of terms, had. there were certain houses to which he liked to go where toby was eminently at home, and though he had enemies in plenty, and thought little about them, toby would be a most undesirable addition to them. he was perfectly capable of turning his back on one, assigning reasons, and of behaving with a brusqueness which ought, so lord comber thought, to be sufficient to ensure anybody's being turned neck and crop out of those well-cushioned society chariots in which he lounged. but he knew very well, and cursed the unfairness of fate, that toby's social position was far firmer than his own, while, whereas he cared very much for it, toby did not care at all. ted made himself welcome because he took great pains to be pleasant and to amuse people, and had always a quantity of naughty little stories, which had to be whispered very quietly, and then laughed over very loud, but the whole affair was an effort, though its reward was worthy. men, he knew, for the most part disliked him, and men are so terribly unreasonable. once last year only, his name had been cut out of a house-party by his hostess's absurd husband, and it was not well to multiply occasions for such untoward possibilities. he took up his gold-topped scent-bottle for the third time, and by an effort almost heroic, though there was so little heroic in its cause, resumed a frank and unresentful manner. "i disagree with you utterly, toby," he said, "but i will do as you suggest. you don't mind my speaking straight out what i think? no? well, you seem to me to have interfered in a most unwarrantable manner; but as you have done so, i dare say, from excellent motives, though i don't care a straw about your motives, i must make the best of it. i will go to-morrow morning, and i will telegraph now to kit, to say i can't stop here. now, you said you didn't wish to quarrel with me. that i hold you to. let us remain friends, toby, for if anyone has a grievance it is i. what i shall say to kit, god knows; she will be furious, and if the thing comes out i shall tell her the whole truth, and lay the whole blame on you." toby rose. "that is only fair," he said. "good-bye." lord comber smoothed his hair before the glass, when suddenly an idea struck him, so brilliant and so simple that he could hardly help smiling. he opened the door. "i shall just walk with you to the top of the stairs," he said, again taking toby's arm. "really i am quite sorry to leave; i have got quite attached to my dear little room, and don't you think it's rather pretty? so sorry i shan't be able to come and see your mother at the cottage, and it's all your fault. good-bye, toby." toby went downstairs, and lord comber hurried back to his room. he had no longer the smallest resentment against toby, and a smile of amused satisfaction testified to his changed sentiments. he rang for his man, and sat down to write a telegram. it was addressed to kit, and ran as follows: "impossible to remain here. excellent reasons. do come to aldeburgh instead. i arrive there to-morrow afternoon, and go to hotel." he read it over. "poor toby," he thought to himself. "what a lesson not to interfere!" chapter xiv the chairman and the director during this beautiful august weather mr. alington was very busily employed in london. at no time was he a notable lover of the country, taking it in homoeopathic doses only, and enjoying a copy of nature by turner far more than the original thing. he was, indeed, somewhat disposed to dr. johnson's characteristic and superficial heresy that one green field is like another green field, and though he took no walks for pleasure down fleet street, he took many hansoms to his brokers for business. for the financial scheme which had darted like a meteor across his augur's brain on the night on which he received his manager's report had, meteor-like, left a shining and golden furrow. the shining furrow, indeed, had grown ever more brilliant and golden; it illumined the whole of his speculative heaven. and by the end of the month the reading of the augur was ready to be practically fulfilled. now, the stock exchange is, justly or unjustly, supposed to be a place where sharp and shady deeds are done, but mr. alington, already a prince in the financial world, did not much fear bears or bulls or raids or rigging, and the market had a firm belief in his soundness. his board consisted of jack conybeare, tom abbotsworthy, his australian manager, mr. linkwood, a man as hard-headed as teak, and himself. at that time a board constituted on such lines was a new thing, and when the prospectus was sent out there were many business men who rather raised their eyebrows at it. but the effect, on the whole, was precisely what mr. alington had desired, and, indeed, anticipated. surely the names of a couple of noblemen, one of whom was a prominent supporter of the bishops in the house of lords, and whose wife was really synonymous with the word bazaar-opener, the other a prospective duke, were a guarantee of the good faith of the proceeding. the british public might not be aware that lord conybeare knew much about mines, but that department was well looked after by mr. alington and his manager, as shrewd a pair as could be found between the poles. certainly, innovation as it was, this sort of board, so reasoned its inventor, looked well. the british public followed these prognostications of alington with touching fidelity, though they did not give jack credit for ignorance about mining. such an authority on guano must certainly be a well-informed man, and if those of the aristocracy who were in indigent circumstances were sensible enough to set themselves to make a little money, who would quarrel with them? three acres and a gold-mine was just about what jack was worth. again the enemies of unearned increment were delighted. here was a fine example, a horny-handed marquis. a third section of the public, so small, however, as not to really have a voice at all, and who consisted chiefly of conybeare's acquaintances, sounded a discordant note. "god help the shareholders," said they. the prospectus gave a glowing but perfectly honest account of the property called the carmel group, for no one knew better than alington how excellent a policy honesty is, in moderation, and in the right place. mount carmel lay in the centre, on one diagonal carmel north and south, on the other carmel east and west. a very rich vein of ore ran through carmel north, mount carmel and carmel south, extending on the evidence of bore-holes the whole length of the three. carmel east and west were both outliers from this main reef, but in both there was a good deal of surface gold, very easy to get at, and they should soon become dividend-payers. the ore in these two, however, was much more refractory than in the main reef, and in two or three experiments which had been made it had been found possible to extract only per cent. of it. in the other three the ore was very different in quality, and very rich. experiments had yielded five ounces to the ton, but these mines could not become dividend-payers in the immediate future, as a good deal of developing work must necessarily be put through first. at one point, by a curious fault in strata, the reef came to the surface, and it was from here the specimens had been taken. there was now no difficulty about water, for a very satisfactory arrangement had been come to with a neighbouring property. a mill of a hundred stamps, which would soon be increased, if the mine developed as well as the directors had every reason to believe it would, was now in course of erection on carmel east. finally, they wished to draw special attention to the remarkable yield of five ounces to the ton from the vein running through carmel north and the other two. such a result spoke for itself. the directors proposed to put this property on the market in the following manner: two companies were offered for subscription, the one owning carmel east and west, the other the north, south, and central mines. the two groups would respectively be called carmel east and west, and carmel. the vendor, mr. alington, received fifty thousand pounds down, and fifty thousand pounds' worth of shares, and the rest of the shares, after certain allotments made to the directors, were thrown open to public subscriptions, and the capital to be subscribed for was three hundred thousand pounds in carmel east and west, five hundred thousand pounds in carmel. half a crown was to be paid on application, half a crown on allotment, and the remaining fifteen shillings for special settlement at not less time than two months. cheques to be paid into the carmel company, limited, at their account with lloyd's. this prospectus was quietly but favourably received; the public, as mr. alington had seen, were nearly ready to go mad about west australian gold, but he was not ill-pleased that the madness did not rise to raving-point at once. his new group he fully believed was a genuine paying concern; that is to say, supposing he had floated one company embracing all the mines, and that company was judiciously and honestly managed, the shareholders would be sure of large dividends for a considerable number of years. but the scheme he had formed did not have as its end and object large dividends for a considerable number of years, though it did not object to them as such, and this quiet, favourable reception of the prospectus pleased him greatly. he very much valued the reputation of a steady, shrewd man, and it would not have suited his plans nearly so well if one or other group had gone booming up immediately. the whole of the capital was very soon subscribed, and a large purchase or two had been made from australia. this looked well for the company; it showed that on the spot the carmel groups were well thought of. a friend of mr. alington's, whom he often spoke of as one of the acutest men he knew, a mr. richard chavasse, was one of these large holders, and this gave him a great deal of satisfaction, so he told jack. he himself was down at kit's cottage in buckinghamshire on the first sunday in september, alone with lord conybeare, and they had a good talk over the prospects of the mines, and collateral subjects. he and jack got on excellently alone, and were already in the "my dear conybeare and alington" stage. "i could not be better pleased with the reception the market has given to the carmel group," said alington. "i see you have followed my advice, my dear conybeare, and invested largely in the east and west company." jack was lounging in a long chair in the smoking-room. the morning was hopelessly wet, and violent scudding rain beat tattooes on the windows, and scourged its glory from the garden. "yes, i have paid ten thousand half-crowns twice," he said. "even half-crowns mount up, and i used to think nothing of them. i have followed your advice to the letter, and i can no more pay the special settlement than i can fly." "you were quite right," said alington. "i assure you there will not be the slightest need for that. by the way, the stock exchange have given us the special settlement at the mid-october account. dear me! what an opportunity poor lord abbotsworthy has missed! he would not take my advice. even now the shares are at a slight premium. you have invested, in fact, the larger half of your first year's salary." "exactly. by the way, i don't want my salary to be printed very large in the balance-sheet. put it in a sequestered corner and periphrase it, will you? people won't like it, you know, and the whole concern will be discredited; they are so prejudiced." "that also need not trouble you," said alington. "in fact, i have paid your salary myself. it does not appear at all in the balance-sheet." lord conybeare frowned. "do you mean you pay me five thousand pounds a year out of your own purse?" "certainly. your services to me are worth that, and i pay it most willingly, which the shareholders undoubtedly would not do. indeed, my dear conybeare, the benefit that your name and lord abbotsworthy's--yours particularly--have done me is immense. the british public is so aristocratic at heart and at purse; and unless i am some day bankrupt, which i assure you is not in the least likely, no one will ever know about your--your remuneration." "i don't know that i altogether like that," said jack in what kit called his "scruple voice," which always irritated her exceedingly. "a child," she said once, "could give points to jack in dissimulation." to alington also the scruple voice did not seem a thing to be taken very seriously. "i really do not see that that need concern you," he said, after his usual pause. "in fact, i thought we had settled to dismiss such matters for me to manage as i choose. you consented to be on my board. as a business matter, i am quite willing to give you this sum in return for your services. now, the shareholders would not, i think, rate you at that figure. shareholders know nothing about business; i do." jack laughed. "how unappreciated i have been all these years!" he said. "i think i shall put an advertisement in the times: 'a blameless marquis is willing to be a director of anything for a suitable remuneration.'" mr. alington held up his hand, a gesture frequent with him. "ah! that i should object to very strongly," he said. "consider your remuneration a retaining fee, if you like, but we must keep our directors exclusive. i cannot have you joining any threepenny concern that may be going about, or, indeed, any concern at all. carmel--you belong to carmel," he said thoughtfully. jack took a copy of the mining weekly from the table. "have you seen this?" he asked. "there is a column about the carmel mines, all most favourable, and written, i should say, by someone who knows." mr. alington did not appear particularly interested. "i am glad they have put it in this week," he said. "they promised to make an effort." "you have seen it? don't you think it is good?" "i wrote it--practically, at least, i wrote it. the city editor, at any rate, was kind enough to write it under my suggestions--i might say under my dictation." "one can't have too many friends," observed conybeare. "well, i can hardly call him a friend. i never set eyes on him till two days ago, and then he was more an enemy. he called and tried to blackmail me." "my dear alington, what have you been doing?" asked jack. mr. alington paused and laughed gently. "he tried to blackmail me not because i had been doing anything, but because i had not done something--because i had not offered him shares, in fact; but i squared that very easily." "you paid him?" asked jack. "of course. he was comparatively cheap, and he became like balaam. he came to curse, and he went away blessing me and the mine, and australia and you, with a small cheque in his pocket and copious notes for this article to which you have been referring." "do you mean to say that you are liable to be called on by any city editor, and made to give him money not to crab the mine?" asked jack incredulously. "well, not by any city editor," said mr. alington, "though i wish i was, but certainly by a fair percentage. it is a most convenient custom. when one is doing things, as i am, on a fairly large scale, it matters to me very little whether i pay the mining weekly a hundred pounds or so. that article is worth far more to me than that, just as you, my dear conybeare, are worth far more to me than the paltry sum i give you as my director and chairman." mr. alington spoke with silken blandness, yet with an under-current of proprietorship, as if he was a pupil-teacher delivering an address to school children, and was telling them beautiful little stories with morals. "i see you are surprised," he went on. "but really there is nothing surprising about it. a paper gives an opinion; what matter whose--mine or the editor's? the editor probably knows nothing about it, so it is mine. and if a small cheque change hands over the opinion, that is the concern of me and my balance. it is worth my while to pay it, and it appears to be worth the editor's while to accept it. i only wish the custom went further--that one could go direct to the times, say, and ask what is their price for a column. sometimes one can do that--i don't mean with the times--but it is always a little risky. i was very anxious, for instance, last week to get a good notice of this prospectus of ours in the city journal, and i did what was perhaps rather rash, though it turned out excellently. mr. metcalfe, their second editor, is slightly known to me, and i know him to be poor and blessed with a large family. poor men so often are. he has a son whom he wants to send to oxford." mr. alington paused again, with a look on his face like that which the embodied spirit of charity organization may be supposed to wear when it hears of a really deserving case. jack listened quite attentively, though long speeches were apt to bore him. he felt as if he was learning his business. "the lad is a charming young fellow," went on charity organization; "clever too, and likely to get an exhibition or scholarship. well, i asked his father to call on me, and offered him two hundred pounds for such an article as appears in the mining weekly which you have in your hand. he was indignant, most indignant, and wondered how i had the face to make such an offer. he said he would not do what i had suggested for twice the money. i took that, rightly, to mean that he would, and i gave it him. four hundred pounds will help very considerably, as i pointed out to him, in his son's expenses at oxford. and he went away, after a little further conversation, with tears of gratitude in his eyes--tears of gratitude, my dear conybeare. two days afterwards there appeared in the city journal a very nice article, if i may say so, considering i wrote the greater part of it myself--really a very nice article about carmel. and i was glad to help the young fellow, to give him a chance--very glad. i told his father so, putting it in exactly that way." mr. alington sighed gently and modestly at this reminiscence, like a retiring man humbly thankful for the opportunity of aiding in a good work, and jack for a moment was puzzled. then, remembering he was dealing with a man of business, he laughed. the thing was excellently recited with praiseworthy gravity. "the stage has lost an actor," he observed, "even if the world has gained a director. admirable, my dear alington. but why, why keep it up with me? i assure you i am not shocked." mr. alington looked up in surprise. "an actor? not shocked? keep it up?" he queried. "i do not understand." "you are inimitable," said jack. mr. alington got up. "you don't understand me," he said with a certain warmth, "and you wrong me. i gather from your words that you have doubts of my sincerity. by what right, if you please?" jack was grave in an instant. "i beg your pardon," he said. "i see that i was in the wrong." the heat died out of mr. alington's face; there was no reproach in his mild, benignant eye. a kind, christian gentleman looked gently at jack. "it is granted willingly," he said. "but please, my dear conybeare, do not make such mistakes in the future. let me ask you to assume that i am sincere till you have the vaguest cause for supposing i am not. the english law assumes a man's innocence till he is proved guilty. that is all i ask. treat me as you would treat a suspect. but when you have such cause, please come to me and state it. much harm can be done by nursing a suspicion, by not trying to clear it up. harm, you will remember, was nearly done to me in that way before. luckily, i had an opportunity of explaining her error to lady conybeare." jack had an uncomfortable sense that this man, for all the blandness of his respectability, could show claws. he suspected that claws had been shown quite unmistakably to kit on the occasion to which mr. alington so delicately alluded, for she had come upstairs, after her talk with him in the hall, with the distinct appearance of having been severely scratched. but mr. alington only paused long enough to let the bare justice of his demand sink in. "let me explain," he went on. "you have suspected me of insincerity, and, luckily, you have stated your suspicion with great frankness, beyond the reach of mistake. this is my case: i wanted very much an article by metcalfe in the city journal, and when he called that morning, i was prepared to pay as much as two hundred pounds for it, but not more. eventually i paid him four hundred pounds, twice that sum, partly, no doubt, because it was necessary that he should not be able to say that i had attempted to bribe him; but i must demand that you believe that the fact of my thereby giving the young fellow a good chance made me pay that sum willingly. i did not haggle over it, though i am perfectly certain i could have got what i wanted for less. you believe this?" jack found himself saying that he believed this, and mr. alington grew even more silken and seraphic. "i was delighted to do it," he said, "and in my private accounts i have entered two hundred and fifty pounds as a cheque to metcalfe senior for business purposes, one hundred and fifty pounds as charity. it was charity. i entered it as such." "certainly you must have made a friend of metcalfe senior, and junior if he only knew," said jack. "yes, i am delighted to have done so. i have also incidentally made metcalfe senior a--a confederate. from a business point of view that also pleases me. how marvellously all things work together for good! it comes in the morning lesson to-day." jack felt it difficult to know what decorum demanded of him. bribing and the morning lesson in one breath were a little hard to reconcile. but if you have assumed and stated that you believe a man to be an actor, and if he assures you he is not, and you beg his pardon, it must be understood that you accept his _bonâ fides_. at any rate, you have to appear to do so, and jack, who did not consider himself more than an amateur, found the task difficult, under the eye of one who was capable of such astonishing histrionic feats, who could act so containedly before no scenery and a sceptical audience. that unctuous voice quoting the lesson for the day was a miracle, and the miracle, like that of the barren fig-tree, seemed so unnecessary. however, everyone has an inalienable right to pose, and it is the point of good manners to assume that nobody exercises it. mr. alington rose with a sort of soft alacrity, and walked across to the window. sheets of rain were still flung against the streaming panes, and the glory of the garden was battered and beaten. a thick vapour, half steam, half mist, rose from the water of the river, warmed by its summer travel, but his careful eye detected a break on the horizon. "we shall have a fine afternoon," he said to jack. "with your leave, therefore, i will get the prospectus, for i shall be glad to run over a few points with you." jack looked out over the drenched landscape. "i bet you a sovereign it does not clear," he said. mr. alington took a little green morocco note-book from his pocket. "done, my dear fellow," he said. "i will just record it. you will certainly lose. i would have given you two to one, if you had asked it." he left the room, and in a few minutes returned with a sheaf of papers. "now, if you will give me your attention for half an hour or so," he said, "i will tell you all that you, as a director, need know." "and as a shareholder?" asked jack. mr. alington rattled his gold pencil-case between his teeth. he felt disposed to trust his chairman a good long way, and, ignoring the scruple-voice, "yes, i will tell you that also," he said. "but keep the two well apart, my dear conybeare." chapter xv the week by the sea toby thought it wise to call at the links hotel on the morning following his interview with lord comber, to make sure of the result of his interference, while buck waited and grinned in the garden. they both of them wanted to bet that the worm had kept his word and gone, and both were willing to lay odds on it, and thus no wager was possible. toby's face was agape with smiles when he came back, and they both laughed for a full minute behind a laurel-bush. this was satisfactory, everybody was pleased, and it was not the least unlikely that lord comber himself at that moment was laughing too. he had heard from kit the same evening in reply to his telegram that she would start for aldeburgh (not stanborough) next morning. all his neat and nasty little embroideries and dresden china, his violet powder, scent-bottles, manicure brushes, and little vellum-bound indecencies of french verse, had been packed the same evening by his man, and he left stanborough and the bowing proprietor of the links hotel in excellent spirits, with a new number of the queen. kit (she really was so clever about those things) had appeared in a gown exactly like one that was to-day given as a novelty in the paper a full three months before, and remarkably well she had looked in it. it was of pale lilac satin--ted always knew how dresses were made--trimmed with point-lace, and straps of narrow black velvet. the bottom of the skirt was outlined with a scroll-patterned lace insertion, and cut into scallops to fit the lace. there was a mantle which went with it--perhaps the queen would get hold of that in another month or two--which had suited kit admirably: whatever kit wore suited her. he felt quite proud to know a woman who antedated novelties in this way. art as reflected in the fashion papers may be long; art on the same authority was always late if you took your time from kit. packing and travelling by slow cross-country trains was naturally a nuisance, but, after all, how right toby had been, thought ted, though for wrong reasons. stanborough was too full, and full of the wrong sort of people, those, in fact, who fill their suburban minds with the movements of the aristocracy, and he did not care at all that he should be renowned in suburban circles for doing risky things with smart women. yes, how right toby had been, and how marvellously had his scheme miscarried. really, that sort of interference ought to be punishable; it was a brutal moral assault, and people ought to be taken up for such things, just as if they had kicked their wives. it was a crime with violence, and the cat, he believed, had been used with success on ruffians no more dastardly. toby fully deserved the cat, and lord comber would have laughed to see him get it. yet there was a distinctly amusing side to the affair, and it was really not possible to be angry for long with such feeble and futile attempts to interfere with his liberty and kit's. that red-headed, freckle-faced brother-in-law, with his large hands and idiotic smile, would be violently hitting little golf-balls over the down this morning, thinking to himself how exceedingly clever he had been, and what a fine manly fellow he was. lord comber hated fine manly fellows, and they returned the compliment. it would be very amusing to tell kit all about it. how she would scream! perhaps they might arrange some delicate and devilish revenge together on toby, something really nasty which would rankle. and the most amusing thing was that kit and he had gained their point, namely, a week at the seaside together, seeming all the time to have yielded. he had avoided quarrelling with toby, and had left him, victorious himself, to think that all the honours of the field were his. in his pretty drawing-room way toby comber was very artistic, and where many people would see only a flat green field or a level landscape, he caught a delicious glimpse of a picture of the dutch school. he looked out from his railway carriage window on placid cows standing knee-deep in pasture, or chewing a lazy cud beneath the narrow noon-day shade of drowsy elms, with a good deal of appreciation. he cared little either for cows or elms, except in so far as they reminded him of pictures which he admired, and which he knew to be valuable, and in the beauty of a landscape he looked mainly for an illustration of a picture. like a large number of the more artistic of his world, he had a genuine respect for any work of art that was valuable, especially if it was more valuable than it would naturally appear to someone who did not know. he had a real reverence for rare first editions, even though he cared not two straws for what the book was about, and though all subsequent editions were better printed, and mezzotints which he would not have given two thoughts to a few years ago had become admirable in his eyes simply because people had begun to collect them and to pay high prices for them. hurry, so prominent and distressing a factor in our modern world, so subversive of true progress, is still unknown to cross-country lines, and they remain invincibly leisurely. by the map he had not many miles to go, but before his journey was half over he had enjoyed the sweets of his triumph over toby and the quiet wayside pictures to the full, and his thoughts returned to their accustomed abiding-place, himself. he was a great admirer of personal beauty both in men and women; good looks always attracted him, and he was a devout admirer of his own. he was, so he considered, exceedingly nicely and suitably dressed for a hot august day. he wore a flannel suit of a yellowish-brown tinge, which matched divinely with the rich chestnut of his boots and the darker chestnut of his hair, and his tie was bandana, the prevailing tone of which was deep russet. he had been a little hurried over dressing this morning, and had not really had time to put a pin in it; but now there was ample leisure, and, opening his dressing-bag, he took out a looking-glass, which he propped on the seat opposite, and a little leather box in which he kept his pins and studs. he took off his straw hat and smoothed his hair once or twice with his hand, but, being still dissatisfied, got out a silver-handled brush, and drew it several times upwards across his front-hair, emphasizing that upward sweep in it which he admired so much. if he had had the choosing of his hair, he would not have given orders for a different shade, and for this reason he did not dye it, though people wronged him. even natural advantages, if too marked, like kit's teeth, have their drawbacks. his eyebrows were much darker, almost black, and his brown eyes were really fine, large, and liquid. he wore no moustache, though till lately he had not done so; but young men of the age which he desired himself to be had ceased wearing them, and now a moustache meant you were born in the sixties. then he smiled at himself, not because he was amused, but for professional reasons, noting two things, the first (with great satisfaction) being the whiteness and regularity of his teeth, the second (with misgiving) the regions round the eye. by daylight it was impossible not to notice that the outer corners were marked--disfigured almost--by two lines, hideously styled crow's-feet, and there were certainly other lines below the eye. however, kit had told him that massage had been tried with success for that, and he intended to see about it when he got back to town. after another lingering look, he put the glass down and unlocked his leather jewel-case. in it were pins of all kinds, made with screw heads, so that they could serve indiscriminately as studs, and he turned them over. there was a beautiful ruby set in tiny brilliants, which he saw at once was the proper colour for the tone of his dress. he had worn it as a solitaire the evening before, and he unscrewed it, and replaced the back of the stud with a pin. but then he stopped. not long ago kit had given him a charming turquoise of the _vieille roche_, a piece of noon-day sky, and incapable of turning green. it would be suitable to wear that when he met her, but unfortunately it did not go at all well with his clothes. however, sentimental considerations prevailed, and he put the ruby back, pinned the turquoise into his tie, and looked at himself again. "it is rather an experiment," he said half aloud. he had telegraphed to the aldeburgh arms for three rooms, two bedrooms and a sitting room, and, arriving there, he found they had been given him _en suite_, the sitting-room in the middle. he felt bound to ask whether these were the only rooms to be had, and finding there were no others, he was powerless to alter the arrangement. kit would not arrive for two hours yet, and he set his valet to work at once to make the sitting-room habitable. the saxe figures he took out himself, and gave a hand to the draping of embroideries; but the man had a great deal of taste, and he left him before long to his own ideas. after giving orders that masses of flowers should be sent up, and some plants for the fireplace, he went out to stroll by the beach till kit's train arrived. there was a fresh breeze off the sea, and he put a light dust-cloak over his arm, in case he should feel chilly. kit's train arrived punctually, and she in the highest spirits. she laughed till she cried over the immaculate toby turned missionary, and it was with difficulty that ted persuaded her not to write him a line. "think of his face," she cried, "if i just send a note!--'dear toby: how does stanborough suit you and your _fiancée_? i meant to come there, as you know, but only yesterday evening i decided to come to aldeburgh instead. oddly enough, ted comber arrived here to-day. it was so pleasant (and quite unexpected) meeting him, and we shall have the greatest fun. he has been at stanborough, he tells me, and had a long talk with you only yesterday. he is so fond of you.'--oh, ted, think of his face!" there was very little that was genuine about ted except his teeth and the colour of his hair, but his voice had the true ring of sincerity when he thought of toby's face. "oh, that would spoil it all!" he cried. "toby must never know--at least, not for a long time. he would certainly come here, too. how tiresome that would be! and i should quite lose my temper with him." kit laughed. "i know; that is just it," she said. "it would be so amusing. i love seeing scenes, and i should like to see you really angry, ted. what do you do?" "well, you will soon know, if you write to toby," he said. "kit, you simply mustn't. no, i won't say that, or else you will. but please don't." kit laughed again. "well, i won't to-night, at any rate," she said. "but i shall keep it as a hold over you, so you must behave nicely. oh, ted, how pretty you have made your room! and tea is ready; i am so hungry. really, it is quite too funny about toby." she sat down and poured out tea; then, looking up as she handed him his cup, saw he was looking at her. "well?" she asked. "when did i not behave nicely to you?" he said. "oh, a thousand times--yesterday, to-day, now, even," she said, "in expecting me to be sentimental. how can a woman who is just dying for her tea be sentimental?" she looked at him a moment with her head on one side. "yes, you look quite nice to-day," she said, "and, really, i am awfully pleased to be with you. but what evil genius prompted you to put a turquoise in a russet tie?" ted threw up his hands in half-mock despair. "i knew it was wrong," he said. "but don't you see?" kit looked at it a moment. "i remember now--i gave it you," she said. "really, i think that is the greatest compliment you ever paid me, spoiling your scheme of dress. sugar? yes, you take two lumps, i know." ted laughed. "it was an experiment, i felt," he said. "but i did right." kit was silent a moment, for she had just taken a large bite out of new-made bun. "_i_ think it will be the greatest fun down here," she said. "poor dear toby could not have played into our hands more beautifully. the poor child was quite right, and most thoughtful. stanborough is certainly too much _du monde_--of the wrong sort, that is to say--in august. he drove us to aldeburgh. it is on his head. and he actually threatened to telegraph to jack. i wonder if he would have carried it out. personally, i don't think he would; but, anyhow, it is all for the best. he couldn't have suited us better. dear boy, how nice to have such a careful little brother-in-law!" "he threatened me," said ted plaintively, "in a loud, angry voice, with 'my name is massingbird,' and all the rest of it. i told him that to telegraph meant there was a reason for telegraphing, and he had none. besides, we did not want jack. he was not part of the plan." "jack's nose has grown since he became a financier," remarked kit. "that is the worst of becoming anything. if you become a pianist, your hair grows. if you become a philanthropist, your front-teeth grow. i never intend to become anything, not even a good woman," she said with emphasis. "i hope not," remarked ted. "oh, how i hate people who are in earnest about things!" said kit in a sort of frenzy. "i mean i hate people being in earnest about the things they ought to be in earnest about. one should only take seriously things like one's hair and games and dress. for sheer social hopelessness give me a politician or a divine. ted, promise me you will never become a divine." "not to-day, at any rate," said ted; "but i shall keep it as a hold over you." kit laughed uproariously, and got up. "i've finished for what i have received," she said, "and so we'll go out. have you got a spade for me to dig in the sand with as i wade? oh, there's the bezique-box. i think we'll play bezique instead. is there a _café_ or anything of the sort, where there will be a band. bezique goes so well to a strauss valse." "there is a draper's shop and a church," said ted. "that is all." but after a couple of games the splendour of the evening weaned them from their cards. it had been a very hot day, but not long before sunset a cool wind was borne out of the sea, and they strolled out. sunset was imminent in the west, and the land enmeshed in a web of gold. high in the zenith floated a few flushed feathers of cloud, and the sea was level and waveless--a polished surface of reflected brightness. the tide was on the ebb, and the smooth sand, wet from its retreat, was a mirror of the sky, a strip framed in the sea, and the high-water mark. southward the land trended away in headland behind folded headland to an infinite distance of hazy and conjectured distances. the unbreathed air, a traveller over a hundred horizons of sea, was cool and tonic, and the whisper of the ripples crisp within the ear. and kit with her childlike impressionableness, which was at once her danger and her charm, caught surely at the spirit of the free large spaces. she had taken off her hat, and walked firm and lithe along the shining ripple-fringed beaches, each footstep crushing for a moment the moisture out of the sand in a circle round her tread, and breathing deep, with open mouth, of the vivifying air. like a chameleon she took instinctively the colour of her surroundings, and just now she was steeped in open air, freedom, and the great plains of sea and sky. she always gulped things down, camels and needles alike, thirsty of full sensations. "really, one's whole life is a series of mistakes, ted," she said, "except in a few short moments like these. why do we go to that rabbit-warren of a london, and live in little smoky boxes, when there is an empty sea-beach, and a great sea-wind within a few hours of us? oh! i wish i was a fisherman, or a day labourer, or a gallon of sea-water, to stop in the open always." ted laughed. "and if to-morrow is wet or cold, you will say, 'why did we come to this god-forsaken german ocean, when we could have stopped in our nice comfortable houses?'" "i know i shall; and the worst of me is that i shall feel just as keenly as i feel this now. jack called me a parasite once; he said i always found food in whatever i happened to be on. i dare say he is right. oh, look at that bit of red seaweed on the sand! it looks as if it had been set, as one used to set butterflies; every little fibre is spread out separately. but if i pick it up, it will be just a stringy pulp. there are a great many morals to be drawn from that, and one is, 'don't meddle.'" "what a lesson for tobys!" laughed ted. the sun set, and with the fading of the light they turned. moment by moment the colours paled, and the evening iridescences turned gray and cold. kit put on her hat; there was a chill in the air, and they walked faster. by the time they reached the hotel it was nearly dark, and the shining window-squares looked inviting and comfortable, and kit mentally revoked her desire to be a gallon of sea-water. it was already time to dress for dinner, and they went up to the sitting-room together. their bedrooms were on opposite sides of it, both communicating with it and with the passage outside, and as they dressed they talked loudly and cheerfully to each other through doors ajar, their conversation being punctuated by sounds of the sponge. ted was ready first, but a few moments afterwards kit came out of her room, and went downstairs with him, still in a fever of high spirits, but with all the cool sanity of the great expanses driven out of her worthless little soul, and dressed in red. they had a table to themselves in a corner of the plushy dining-room, where they could talk unheard and observe unobserved. lord comber, who always took the precaution of carrying wine with him when he was at hotels, had some excellent champagne, of which kit drank her share, and their talk rose in crescendo with more frequent bursts of laughter as dinner went on. toby again demanded their amused comments. "oh, if he could see us thus!" said kit; and the idea was immensely entertaining, viewed in the light of dinner and wine. then followed a _résumé_ of all the things which had not happened since the two had met, and which, even if they had, should never have been repeated. the world in which they lived is not noted for charitable impulses or moments of compassion, and that which should have called out pity, or if not pity, at least, have been accorded silence, was the occasion of great laughter. kit, among her many gifts, was an excellent mimic; and jack's shrug of the shoulders, when she really had her boxes packed to go to aldeburgh vice stanborough, was inimitable. but, as she said, she was no longer married to a man, but a company. jack was no longer jack, but a mixture of alington, deep levels, and cyanide process. then mrs. murchison came under review, and kit improvised a really first-rate soliloquy. but eventually the hush that comes with ice overtook them, and it was to break an appreciable silence that ted spoke. "how they stare at one!" he said. "haven't the people who stay at this hotel ever seen people before? you would think we were woaded early britons. really, it is much better than stanborough; there were all sorts of people there one knew. i am glad we came--and you, kit?" he looked up, and caught her eye for a moment. "i also," she said. "but, ted, i very nearly did not come. i could not conceive what your telegram meant; but i trusted you, you see; i assumed that your excellent reasons were excellent. and when i knew what they were, i was justified, and you too. they were more than excellent; they were funny." ted laughed. "they really were," he said. "but i don't know what i should have done if i had found a telegram here from you saying you were not coming." "did you think i should throw you over?" she asked. he paused before replying, and looked up at the long table where the most of the people in the hotel were sitting. "there is a man with a face like what you see in a spoon sitting there," he said. "no, i did not." kit followed his glance. "yes, i see him," she said, "and his mouth opens sideways. but how modest of you! what reason had you to think that?" ted felt his heart thump with a sudden riotous movement. he took up his glass to finish his champagne, and noticed that his hand shook a little. he drank the wine at a gulp. "because i think you like me a little, kit," he replied. he had never spoken to her quite like that before, though, for that matter, he might have used the identical words to her a score of times; never before had she given him exactly that sort of opportunity. but the presence of so many people close at hand of so utterly different a society to theirs that they might have been red indians, gave both him and her a strangely isolated feeling, as if they had been alone on a desert island. both knew also that he by proposing, she by acceding to this visit to aldeburgh, had taken another step in intimacy towards each other. but without a pause kit replied; and in spite of her reply, so far from disavowing it, she felt a sudden inward leap of exultation, and he, in spite of the lightness of her reply, was confirmed. "oh, ted, don't be serious!" she said. "it is such bad manners. think of toby; think of the man with the spoon-face." ted lifted his brown eyes to hers, but she sat with eyes downcast, playing with her dessert-knife. "are you never serious?" he asked. "not at dinner. a serious voice carries so. it is audible as far as a bishop's hat, if you see what i mean. have you finished? shall we go?" and she lifted her long, fringed eyelashes a moment, and returned his look. _book ii_ chapter i kit's meditations kit was sitting in her own room in the buckinghamshire cottage one day late in the following december, staring intently into the fire. the fire, it is true, was worth looking at, for it was made of that adorable combination, cedar-logs and peat, and it had attained to that fine flower of existence--a fragrant, molten core of heat, edged by little lilac-coloured bouquets of flame, smokeless and glowing, the very apotheosis of a fire. outside, the world was shrouded and made dizzy in a trouble of eddying snow, and as the great sonorous blasts trumpeted and lulled again, the reds of the fire would brighten and fade in a sort of mysterious sympathy with the bugling riot overhead. but that kit should be doing nothing but looking at the fire was an unusual thing; it was odd that she should be alone, even odder that, if alone, she should not be occupied. the toes of her bronze-coloured shoes rested on the fender, and she leaned forward in the low armchair in which she sat, stretching out her hands towards the heat, and the fire shining through the flesh of her fingers made them look as if they were lighted from within--things red and luminous in themselves. it was already growing dusk, but she had enough light to think by, and quite enough things to think about. the room was furnished with great simplicity, but the educated eye could see how extremely expensive such simplicity must have been. there was a rug or two on the floor, a few tables and chairs of the empire on the rugs, and a few pictures on the crimson satin walls. kit herself perhaps was the most expensive thing present, for she wore her pearls, and they glowed like mist-smoored moons in the fire-light. but she did not look as happy as the possessor of her pearls or her excellent digestion ought to look. there was something of the hard, tired look of suffering, mental and physical, about her face, and though she was alone, she made, now and then, nervous, apprehensive little movements. everything was going wrong, from money upwards, or downwards; for at the present moment kit hardly knew how to arrange the precedence of her various embarrassments. the financial ones were at any rate the most tangible, though perhaps the least feared, and for the fiftieth time that afternoon she ran over them. in the beginning it had been altogether jack's fault, but kit was past finding either consolation or added annoyance in that. she had great faith in alington's power of making their fortune, though personally he was detestable to her, for various excellent reasons, and she had wanted to invest the famous nest-egg, which from one cause and another had grown to upwards of three thousand pounds, in these mines under alington's advice. after their last private interview she did not like to go to him straight, and so asked jack to tell her in what mines to place a little money she had saved. the word "saved," when used by kit, always made jack smile. but he was absurd, and strongly opposed to her risking her "savings" at all. he had told her to make herself quite happy; if she would leave things to him, and go on "saving" quietly, there would be enough for both of them, a statement in itself repugnant and almost blasphemous to kit, who firmly held the doctrine that there never can be enough money for one, still less for two. "you don't know what it all means, kit," he had said, "and for that matter i don't either. one day perhaps your shares will go down, and you will sell out in a panic and lose a lot, or you will not sell out and you will lose more. it is impossible for me always to be instructing you; i have not got the data myself. i leave it all to alington. besides, i didn't know you had any money to invest." "that is my affair," said kit; "i have been lucky lately." "then put it into consols, and don't gamble any more," said jack, with the fine inconsistence of the gambling fever on him, "or come and talk about it some other time; i've got twenty hundred things to do now." then in a flare of pride and temper, kit had determined to manage for herself, and had put a couple of thousand pounds into carmel east. this was in november, at a time when, for some reason, known perhaps to alington, but certainly to no one else in the market, carmel was behaving in a peculiarly mercurial manner. a week after she had made her investment the pound shares, which were standing at a little above par, had declined rapidly to fourteen shillings. it might only be a bear raid, but she was too proud to ask jack for advice again, and remembering his ill-omened remark about not selling and so losing more, she telegraphed to her broker to sell out at once. this done, the shares began to rise again, and in less than a fortnight's time, owing to telegrams and reports from the mine, they stood at nearly two pounds. she reckoned up, almost with tears, what she had lost, which, added to what she might have gained, formed a maddening total. her eighteen hundred shares, if she had only held on, would have been worth close on three thousand six hundred pounds; instead, she had sold them when they stood at fourteen shillings for thirteen hundred pounds. and when jack, a few mornings later, came into her room with a cheque for five hundred pounds, which he gave her, she felt that this only accentuated the bitterness of it. "a little present, kit," he said, "just for you to play about with. what a good thing you were wise, and did not concern yourself with things you did not understand! oh, i bless the day when we went down to the city dinner and met alington. you wore an orange dress, i remember: it would be rather graceful if you paid for it now." "how much have you made, jack?" she asked. "eight thousand, and i wish it was eighty. but that is the result of having no capital. i'm going to pay some bills--perhaps; but it is all very wearing." kit was not accustomed to cry over spilt milk, and jack's present made up the greater part of what she had actually lost, though it was only a small proportion of what she might have gained. one learns by experience, she thought; for experience is a synonym for one's mistakes, and she had been a consummate fool to be frightened. the mine was still quite young, and if within a few months the shares were worth double their original value, it was likely to be a good investment even at the present price, and again she invested two thousand pounds in it. since then the price had steadily gone down, and the shares were quoted a week ago at nineteen shillings. but this time, though it taxed her admirable nerve, she was not going to be frightened, and with the object of averaging she had spent the remaining spoonfuls of her nest-egg in buying more, thus reducing the whole price to thirty-two shillings per share. thus, when they again went up, as she still believed they would do, she would sell as soon as they touched two pounds, as jack had sold, and clear, though not so much as he had done, still, something worth having. but the averaging had been singularly unsuccessful, and this morning the abominable things had stood again at fourteen shillings. this had been too much for kit's nerves, and she went to jack with the whole story. he had simply shrugged his shoulders; he was odiously unsympathetic. the "i told you so" rejoinder is always irritating, and the irritation it produces varies directly according to the amount of damage involved. kit's irritation, it follows, was considerable. "oh, jack, what is the use of saying that?" she had cried angrily. "i come to be helped, not to be moralized to. i ask you now as a favour to telegraph to mr. alington. you say you know nothing about these things, although you are a director. well, perhaps he does. and i want some money." it was not wise, and kit knew it even as she spoke, to take a fretful, discourteous tone. it had long been a maxim with her that courtesy was a duty, the greatest perhaps, which one owned to those with whom one was intimate, and that it was most foolish to let familiarity breed brusqueness. besides, it never paid, except with tradesmen and others, to put your nose in the air, and, as a rule, she was not guilty of this breach of prudence. but to-day she was horribly worried, and anxious about many things, and that jack should say "i told you so" seemed unbearable. he did not reply immediately, and then, taking a cigarette from a table near him, "you usually do want some money," he remarked. kit made a great effort, and recovered her temper and her self-control. "dear jack," she said, "i have been rude, and i apologize. but i very seldom am rude; do me the justice to admit that. also i have been stupid and foolish. i am in an awful hole. do telegraph to alington, like a good boy, and ask him what i am to do. and i should really be very glad of a little money if you can spare it." jack looked at her curiously. it was utterly unlike kit to behave like this. her debts hitherto had sat lightly on her; she had often said that nothing was so nice as having money, and nothing so easy as to get along without it. again, kit's nest-egg of three thousand pounds seemed to him a surprising sum. she had not, as far as he knew, played much in the summer, and all the autumn, except for a fortnight she spent at aldeburgh, they had been together, and her winnings certainly could not have been a fifth of that. he could not conceive how she had got it. "look here, kit," he said, "you shall have some money if you must, though just now i want literally every penny i can lay hands on for this mine affair. i am playing for big stakes. if the thing comes off as i expect--and, what is much more satisfactory, as alington expects--we shall be rich, and when i say rich it means a lot. but i think we had better have a talk. oh, i will telegraph to alington about your affair at once." kit felt wretchedly nervous and upset that morning, and while jack wrote the telegram, she threw herself into a chair that stood before the fire and lit a cigarette, hoping to soothe her jangled nerves. snow had already begun to fall, the air was biting; she shivered. but after a few whiffs she threw the cigarette away. it tasted evilly in her mouth, and she felt an undefined dread of what was coming, and not in the least inclined for a talk. luckily, jack was going up to town in half an hour; the talk could not last long. he waited till the servant had taken the telegram, and then came and stood in front of the fire. "how did you get that three thousand pounds?" he asked abruptly. "i won it. i have told you so," said kit. "where? when? it is a large sum. you know, kit, i don't often pry into your affairs. don't be angry with me." "my dear jack, i don't keep a book with the names and addresses of all the people from whom i have won sixpence. neither of us, if it comes to that, is famed for well-kept account-books. where? at a hundred places. when? this last summer and autumn," and her voice died a little on the words. jack turned and flicked the ash off his cigarette. he knew that kit could not have won that amount, and he hated to think that she was lying to him. true, he was asking the sort of question they did not ask each other, but he could not help it--the air was ominous. she must have borrowed it or been given it, and such a suspicion cut him to the quick, for though he, like her, did not give two thoughts to running up huge bills at tradesmen's risk, yet it was quite a different thing to borrow from one's own class (for he knew rightly that kit would never be so foolish as to go to a money-lender), or to be given money by one's friends. and her manner was so strange. he could not avoid the thought that there was something behind. "did alice haslemere lend you some?" he asked suddenly. kit, taken off her guard, saw a gleam of hope. "yes," she said quickly, not meaning to lie. then, remembering she had told him that she had won it, "no," she added in the same breath. jack made a quick step back to the table at which he had been writing. "there is no manner of use in talking if you can't tell me the truth," he said. "how much money do you want, kit?" kit tried to answer him, but could not. she was only conscious of a great desolating helplessness, and slowly the sobs gathered in her throat. jack, waiting for her answer, heard a quick-taken breath, and in a moment he was by her, the best of him ready to help, if possible, forgetting everything except that kit was in trouble. "my poor old girl!" he said. "what is the matter? is there something wrong, kit? won't you tell me? indeed i am your friend. don't cry so. never mind; tell me some other time if you like. there, shall i leave you? will you be better alone?" kit nodded her head, and he touched her lightly and kindly on the shoulder, and turned to go. but before he had got to the door she spoke. "no, it is nothing, jack," she said, controlling her voice with an effort. "i am out of sorts, i think. never mind about the money. i can push along." she got up from her chair and went towards the door. "don't worry, jack," she said. she went to her own room, where she knew that no one would disturb her, and shut herself in. jack would be away all day, and till evening she would be alone. a few people were coming down with him then from town, among them toby and his wife, ted comber, and several others of their set. on the whole, she was glad they were coming; it was better to be distracted than to brood over things which no brooding will mend. above all, she wanted an interval in which jack and she would not be alone. perhaps after a few days he might forget or remember only vaguely the affair of this morning. she had lunched alone in her sitting-room off a tray, for it was warmer there than in the dining-room, and had tried a dozen ways of making the hours pass. it was impossible to go out; the snow, which had begun before jack had left, was getting momently thicker and falling in giddy, frenzied wreaths. the air was bitterly cold, and she could see but dimly through the whirling atmosphere the lines of shrubs in the garden, standing with thick white mantles on. a couple of puffy-feathered sparrows crouched on her window-sill, and kit in the bitterness of her heart hated them, and, going to the window, frightened them away. they dropped stiffly down on the lawn below, and half walked, half fluttered, to the shelter of a bush near. then a sudden compunction came over her, and, throwing open the window, she flung out the crumbs from her lunch-tray, but the sudden movement only scared them off altogether. she stood long at the window, looking out on to the blinding desolation, and then by a violent effort detached herself for the moment from all the things that troubled her. they would all have to be taken and dealt with, but she could do nothing alone. jack had to be told something--jack and another. the electric light was out of order, and about a quarter past three of that howling winter's afternoon she left her place by the fire and her unread book and rang for lamps. then there were orders also to be sent to the stables, and she detained the man a minute to give them, knowing that when he had gone she would be alone again. the omnibus and the brougham must both meet the train, and the horses must be roughed, and was there any telegram for his lordship. one had come, and, guessing it was from alington, she opened it. "bad slump in carmel east," she read. "cannot advise." kit crumpled the telegram up, and threw it impatiently into the grate. here was another thing to be banished from her mind; truly this was a somewhat extensive exile. she determined not to sell; unless something happened to send the prices up, it would be a mere reminder of her losses to rescue so small a salvage from the wreck. she did not want a little money, she wanted a great deal, and she would just as soon have none as a little. so, having determined to dismiss the whole subject, she thought of nothing else for the next half-hour. outside the evening grew darker and wilder, and the windows on the north-east of her room, the quarter from which the wind blew, were already half blinded by the snow, and every now and then a furious, unseen hand would rattle their casements as if demanding instant admittance. the wind, which had been rising and falling and rising again all day in fitful gusts, now blew with an astonishing and ever increasing vehemence. the line would be deep in snow, perhaps almost impassable; in any case the train which should bring jack and the rest must be late. kit felt that the elements, the snow and the storm, were malignant beings fighting against her; the solitude of the next few hours became unbearable, and who knew how many hours she might still be alone? quick to catch at relief, it seemed to her that to have people about, to have the ordinary innumerable duties of a hostess to perform, would be the solution of her troubles, and the omnibus full of folk who had already left london were so many anchors to her. she would have to talk, laugh, entertain people, be her normal self, and hours and days would pass without giving her time or opportunity for thought or regret. she tried to tell herself that her present difficulties, like the unanswered letters, would manage and answer themselves. the nights she did not fear: hitherto she hardly knew what it was to be awake, and even if one did, there were those convenient things like morphia which one could always take. tea-time came; her room had grown intolerable to her, and she went to the hall, where they always had tea if there were people with them, waiting for the snow-muffled sounds of the carriage-wheels. the train was due half an hour before, and they might be here any moment if it had been punctual. punctual she knew it could not be against this hurly-burly; but still, every minute that passed now was a minute in which they might have reached the station, less hopeless than those she had passed since lunch. the tea-things were brought in, and she ate a piece of bread-and-butter, thinking she would not make tea till they came, but the minutes went on pushing at the hands of the clock, and at last she made enough for herself, and drank a cup. but it seemed neither to warm nor invigorate her; the taste of the cream made her feel sick, and pouring the half of it away, she left the table, and came to sit nearer the fire, book in hand. outside the storm went on like some senseless lunatic symphony. now the long steady note of a horn would blow weirdly in the chimney, and a choir of shrieking gusts like the violins would break in upon it, rising and rising higher and higher as if leading to some stupendous climax. but no climax came; they would die down again with nothing gained, and the slow sobbing of 'cellos would answer them. then for a moment there was hail mixed with the snow, and the sudden tattoo of the kettle-drums upon the window would seem to announce something, but nothing came except a long chromatic passage from the strings, leading nowhere, portending nothing. then the horn in the chimney would have a bar or two, repeating its _motif_, as if to emphasize it, and strings and horns came in simultaneously in crazy music. then for a moment there would be a dead, tense pause; the conductor seemed to stand with raised baton collecting the orchestra for the _finale_, but, instead of some immense riot of sound, only a flute would wail a broken note, and the whole movement begin again. the noise maddened kit; it seemed to her that her own thoughts were being made audible. like the blind, senseless blasts, she would take up one meaningless strand of her life and try to weave it into some sort of pattern. but before she could hit on any idea, she would drop it again, and her mind would fly off now to that evening when she had cheated alington at baccarat, now to the week at aldeburgh, now to the affairs of carmel east, and again, and yet again, to the week at aldeburgh. it was all in fragments, loud, jangling, terrifying, with hysterical bursts of false feeling. then, for the first time in her life, the horror of the days that were gone, the horror of the moment, the horror of the future, seized kit in their threefold grip, and shook her. she looked back on the years in which, day after day, she had clutched greedily, ravenously, at the pleasure of the moment; with both hands she had torn the blossoms off life, making herself great nosegays like a child in a hayfield, and now when she looked at them there was not a flower that was not withered and wilted. through the past she had arrived at this awful present. she looked forward; the future was a blank, save for one red spot of horror in it, which would come closer and closer every day till it was on her. there was no escape for her. just then there was a lull in the mad symphony outside, and in the stillness she heard the soft thud of snow-clogged wheels pass by the windows. with a sense of relief, almost painful in its intensity, she ran to the door and flung it open, letting in a great buffet of snow-stifled wind that extinguished the lamps, and left only the misshapen shadows from the fire leaping monstrously on the walls. but instead of the omnibus she had expected, there was only a postman's cart, from which the man had already descended, blanketed in snow, with a telegram in his hand. he had just rung the bell. kit ran with it to the fire, and read it by the blaze. it was from conybeare, sent off from two stations up the line. "blocked by snow," it said. "line will not be clear till to-morrow morning." a footman had come in answer to the bell. he found the door wide open, the snow blowing dizzily in, and on the hearthrug kit, in a dead faint. chapter ii the first deal mr. alington was an early riser, and it was barely half-past eight when he finished his plain but excellent breakfast the morning after he had received jack's telegram about kit's venture in carmel east. a certain instinct of perfection was characteristic of him; all his habits of living were of a finished character. he lived plainly, and he would sooner have his simple eggs and bacon off fine china, with alternate mouthfuls of admirably crisp toast and the freshest butter, than have rioted in the feasts of caligula with a napkin ever so slightly stained. the same snowfall which had blocked the line between tilehurst and goring had not spared london, and the streets on this sunday morning were dumb and heavy with snow. gangs of men were out at work clearing it away, and streaks and squares of brown, muddy pavement and roadway of contrasted sordidness were being disclosed in the solid whiteness of the street. mr. alington, looking from his window, was afraid that these efforts were likely to prove but lost labour, for the sky was still thick and overlaid with that soft, greasy look which portends more snow, and in spite of the hour, it was but an apology for twilight on to which he looked out. this thought was an appreciable pang to him. the street was empty but for the street-clearers, and had attained that degree of discomfort only realized in london after a snowfall. the gaunt, gray-faced houses opposite showed lights twinkling in their windows, and the yellow, unluminous atmosphere was like a jaundiced dream. the palace clock at the bottom of the street was still lit within, but it was no more than a blurred moon through the clogged air. but mr. alington, after his first comprehensive glance, gave but little attention to these atrocities of climate. his reading-lamp shone cheerily on his desk, and on the very satisfactory papers lying there, and carmel basked in a temperate sunshine. for up till now the ways of the new group had entirely fulfilled his expectations, which from the beginning had been sanguine, and the best, so he hoped, was yet to be. the scheme which he had formed in the summer, and which he had talked over with jack in september, had been simple, ingenious, and on the safe side of excessive sharpness. the dear, delightful public, as he had foreseen, was quite willing to fall in with his scheme, and had seconded his plans for general enrichment--particularly his own--with openhanded patronage. the scheme in brief was as follows, had the public only known: it will be remembered that he had formed two companies, carmel, and carmel east and west, with capitals respectively of three hundred thousand and five hundred thousand pounds. carmel east and west had exhibited remarkable fluctuations, as kit knew to her loss, alington, and jack following his advice, to their gain, and the way in which this had been worked was simplicity itself. the shares had been issued at par, and had risen almost immediately to twenty-five shillings. this alington was disposed to put down partly to his own reputation and as the result of reports from the mine, but chiefly--for he was modest even when alone--to the effect of his noble body of directors. he as vendor had fifty thousand shares fully paid, and at this point he sold out, unloading very carefully under several names, and taking a very decent little profit for a man of simple tastes and butler-like appearance. the natural effect of this extensive sale was to cause the shares to drop, and the downward tendency was accelerated by unpromising news from the mine, which followed immediately on his sale. the ore, as stated in the prospectus, was refractory, and extracting it was both costly and yielded a very small percentage of gold. mr. alington, whom several large holders and substantial city men consulted about this time, was not sanguine. the results were bad, there was no denying it. three weeks of a dropping market brought the shares to the condition they were in on that day of november on which kit sold out for the first time, and they closed at thirteen and ninepence sellers, fourteen and threepence buyers. this seemed to alington to be low enough for his second step, as he did not want the market to lose confidence altogether. he sent a telegram out to his manager in australia, mr. linkwood, laconic, but to that intelligent fellow perfectly comprehensible: "new process.--alington," it ran. he also sent one to mr. richard chavasse: "invest." the next morning he received from mr. linkwood the following reply: "carmel east. ninety per cent. of gold extracted by bülow process. strong support by australian markets.--linkwood." now, the evening before certain large purchases in carmel east had been made in england, not by the names under which mr. alington had previously unloaded, for the weakness of such a course was obvious, and he followed them up the next morning by a very large purchase in his own name, and by the publication of his telegram from mr. linkwood. he also saw several business men, to whom he gave a full explanation. he had telegraphed, he said with absolute truth, to his manager to try the bülow process, and, as they saw, it had yielded admirable results. instead of twenty, they got ninety per cent. of the gold out. concerning the strong support of the australian markets, they would no doubt receive further news by cable. he had no information later than that telegram which he had published. the effect of this on a market already predisposed to go a-booming after westralians was natural and inevitable. the shares went up nearly a half during the day, and next morning when a further private cable, instantly made public, recorded that that shrewdest of financiers, mr. richard chavasse, had bought to the extent of forty thousand pounds, they ran past thirty shillings. a week later they stood at two pounds, owing to steady support from private investors. there was a spurious report that a dividend might be expected, so extraordinary successful had the month's crushing proved to be, and this was the unfortunate moment selected by kit to make her second purchase. simultaneously alington, who for a week past had been very carefully unloading, telegraphed to jack to do the same, and sold out largely under his own name. a week passed, and the shares moved slowly back, depressed by these large sales, though there was still a considerable demand for them in england. then came another telegram from australia, saying the mine looked much less hopeful. the vein which they had been working so successfully for the past two or three months came suddenly to an end, owing to a dip in the strata, and if struck again, it could probably be struck only at a much deeper level. this would entail considerable development. following on this came large sales in australia, mr. richard chavasse (in consequence of a wire from england) being among them, and the shares went down to nineteen shillings. then the possibility of a war between england and france depressed them still further, and they subsided quietly to fourteen shillings, where, for all that mr. alington at present cared, they were at liberty to remain. thus closed the first act of the great deal, leaving a suspicious market. such was the position on this sunday morning with regard to carmel east and west when mr. alington looked out on the snow-muffled street. he had been to a concert the afternoon before, where they had performed palestrina's mass in b flat and fragments of those sweet, austere melodies still haunted his head. like many men who have a great aptitude for figures, he had a marvellous musical memory, and sitting down at his piano, he recalled gently several of the airs. that was the music which really appealed to him, pure, simple melody of a sacred kind. no one regretted more than he the utter decadence of english music, its fall from its natural genius, which came to perfection, so he considered, under the divine purcell. it had become _déclassé_, in the most awful sense of that awful word. an exotic german growth had spread like some parasitic plant over it; the native taste was still there, and every now and then parry, or some of his immediate school, would give one an air which was worthy of the english best, but otherwise everyone seemed emulous of indefinitely multiplying the most chaotic of wagner, or the music of those people whose names ended in "owski." then, and still from memory, by an act of unconscious cerebration, he played the last chorus out of "blest pair of syrens," and, closing the piano, got up and went to his desk with tear-dimmed eyes, in harmony with himself. he had anticipated events with the precision of a great general. the market had rushed, like starving folk when a granary is opened, at carmel east and west, and after they had reached their highest point, and the big sales began, there had followed something like a panic. west australian mines were still new to the public, and the greater financiers viewed them with suspicion. this sudden scare over carmel east and west suited mr. alington exactly, for it would be sure to bring down the price of the second carmel group--namely, the north, south, and central mines. he had seen this six months ago, and had worked for this very end. at present he had no holdings in mount carmel, except those shares which he held to qualify as a director, and he had delayed any purchase in them till the panic created by the mercurial behaviour of the sister group should have brought down the price. the lower it went, the better would he be pleased, for he intended to make a coup over this compared to which what he had pocketed over carmel east and west should be a mere bagatelle. but for carmel he required no adventitious aid from marquises, and consequently the sudden resignation of tom abbotsworthy from his board, which event had taken place the day before, did not trouble him at all, nor did he care to know what cause "his regret to find that press of work prevented him" covered. the mine he knew was a magnificent property, quite able to stand on its own feet, and in the prospectus he had purposely understated its probable value. in doing so, he was altogether free from possible censure; the mine had seemed to him promising, and he had said so, and when the shares were suitably low he intended to buy all he could lay hands on. purposely, also, he had undercapitalized it; eventually he meant to issue fresh shares. the five hundred thousand pounds already subscribed was not more than sufficient to work carmel north, and both mount carmel and carmel south of the same group he believed to be as remunerative as the others. the panic over carmel east and west had already affected the other group, and yesterday evening the one-pound shares, after a week's decline, stood at fifteen shillings. he proposed to let them go down, if they kindly would, till they had sunk to ten shillings or thereabouts, then buy for all he was worth, and send a telegram to mr. richard chavasse to do the same. and at the thought of mr. richard chavasse he put his thumbs into the armholes of his waistcoat, leaned back in his chair, and laughed aloud with a great mellowness of sound. in certain respects mr. alington, for all his staid conversation and butler-like appearance, was a true humorist; in this instance, at any rate, that he alone should appreciate his own joke was sufficient for him, and he required no sympathizer. indeed, it would have spoiled it all if other people had been able to appreciate it. though a modest man, he considered the chavasse joke very entertaining, and the chavasse joke was all his own, and the point of it as follows: some years ago, out in australia, he had a swiss valet, a clever, neat-handed rogue in his way, who one night was sufficiently ill-advised to open the house to burglars. but the alarm was given. mr. alington, with a revolver and pyjamas, came mildly but firmly downstairs, and though the burglars escaped, he held his valet in the hollow of his hand. the man stood detected, and, hoping to make the best of his miscarried job, confessed his complicity to his master. mr. alington made him give his confession in writing, and sent it to his bank for safe keeping, but for the time took no further steps. but not long before the formation of this new company, four or five months only before his own departure for england, he parted company with his servant, who left melbourne at once. three months afterwards a gentleman with a fine moustache and a short beard appeared--a personal friend, it would seem, of mr. alington's, and a man of wealth, interested in australian mines. a few weeks only after his arrival mr. alington left for england. mr. richard chavasse, however, remained, cultivated and linguistic, and lived in alington's house at, it was supposed, a suitable rent. altogether he may be best described as a creation. here, again, as in so many of the dealings of providence with man, mr. alington often marvelled to see the working of all things together towards good. in the first instance there had not been wanting to his forbearance to give mr. richard chavasse over to the police a vague feeling of compassion at the thought of those deft, shirt-studding hands given over bleeding to oakum-picking and the sewing of mail-bags; and how amply was that sweet pity rewarded! a man bound to him by fear was a far safer repository for the large sums of money, amounting sometimes to forty or fifty thousand pounds, over which mr. chavasse had control, than someone over whom he held no such check. should mr. chavasse attempt to get off with the money, or even--so stringent were alington's regulations for the strict and sober conduct of his life--leave the colony, a wired word from him to the bank would place the ex-valet's confession of complicity in the burglary in the hands of the police. alington, in fact, had speculated largely in chavasses, and he had the wit to see from the beginning that the more comfortable position he gave him, the more man of wealth and mark he made him, the securer he himself would be. a beggar with power of attorney may easily decamp with the spoils, and possibly baffle pursuit, but for the solid man interested in mines, though slightly recluse and exclusive, it is hardly possible to evade capture. besides, who in their senses would not prefer to live delicately than to dodge detectives? certainly mr. chavasse was completely in his senses, and did not attempt escape. what alington meant to do with him after the grand coup in carmels he had not yet certainly determined. in the interval mr. chavasse, ex-valet, lived in his house in melbourne rent-free, and cost mr. alington perhaps eighty pounds a month. but how admirable an investment was that; and how small a percentage of his coinings for his master did that eighty pounds a month represent! already it had often happened, as in the case of carmel east, that alington in england wanted to run up the price of some mine, and strong support in australia was exactly what was needed to give a hesitating market confidence. thus he exercised a dual control: here in england, no doubt, many investors followed his lead, for he was known to be an extremely shrewd man, with the instinct bred of knowledge equalled by none, and invariably his purchases seemed to herald a general advance. for as surely as mr. alington bought in london, so surely did a cable go out to mr. chavasse, "invest balance," or "invest half balance," and in due course came the answer, not necessarily to alington--indeed, seldom to him--"strong support in australia." the plan was simple--all practical plans are: the valet had his choice between two courses of life--the one to live extremely comfortably in alington's delightful house in melbourne, passing pleasant, independent days, and occasionally, as the telegram came from england, making large purchases for this mine or that, or selling still in obedience; the other, to leave his comfortable house, and start off in an attempt to outrun the detectives: for as surely as he tried to escape, so surely would his confession lying at the bank pass into the hands of the police. once a month, indeed, he had to send to england the statement of his accounts, and now and then he had been told that his cigar-bill was too large, or that whisky-and-soda for lunch would be a pleasant change from an expensive moselle. on leaving australia, mr. alington had transferred to him absolutely certain shares, certificates and balance at the melbourne bank in payment, it was supposed, of some large purchase; and not infrequently he could, if he chose, draw a cheque for as much as fifty thousand pounds to self. thus, for a few weeks, perhaps, he would be able to career over the world; but from that moment he would be mr. richard chavasse no longer, that solid, linguistic gentleman, but the man chavasse, earnestly wanted by the police for burglary. there was risk on both sides. alington knew that to convict the man, if he was so insane as to try to escape, meant exposure of his own side of the bargain and good-bye to the dual control. in his heart of hearts, indeed, he had hardly determined what to do should chavasse make so deplorable a blunder. no doubt he could be caught, no doubt his identity could be proved, and he could be landed in the place of tread-mills and oakum-picking, but there would be other revelations as well, not all touching chavasse. however, he never seriously contemplated such possibilities, for he did not believe that the man would ever try to escape. he was comfortable where he was, and comfortable people will think twice before they risk a prosecution for burglary. alington was far too acute to think of frightening him or keeping him continually cowering; exasperation might drive him to this undesirable ruin. instead, he gave him a very fair allowance, and complaints as to the length of his cigar-bill were few. indeed, he had gauged the immediate intentions of his ex-valet very correctly. mr. richard chavasse had no present thoughts of attempting to liberate himself from his extremely tolerable servitude, and probably get in exchange something far less soft, while that confession of his lay at the bank. he had the dislike of risks common to men who have been detected once. if, however, he could by any plan, not yet formulated, manage to remove those risks, his conscience, he felt, would not tell him that he was bound in gratitude to mr. alington never to do anything for himself. this morning, as alington sat working in his well-lighted room, or looked out with kind and absent gaze into the snowy, sordid street, or laughed with pleasure at the thought of mr. richard chavasse, he felt extremely secure, and humbly thankful to the providence which had so guided his feet into the ways of respectability and wealth. without being a miser in the ordinary usage of the word, he had that inordinate passion (in his case for money) which marks the monomaniac. yet he remained extremely sane; his willingness to provide himself not only with the necessaries but also the luxuries which money will buy, remained, in spite of his passion for it, unimpaired. he was not extravagant, for extravagance, like other excess, was foreign to his mild and well-regulated nature, and had not been induced by the possession of wealth, but a scarce print he seldom left unpurchased. he gave, moreover, largely to charitable institutions, and the giving of money to deserving objects was a genuine pleasure to him, quite apart from the satisfaction he undoubtedly felt at seeing his name head a subscription list. in addition to his own great passion also, he had a thousand tastes and interests, a gift that even genius itself often lacks, and it may have been these on the one hand pulling against the lust for money on the other that kept him so well-balanced, just as the telegraph post is kept straight by the strain on both sides. as well as the one great thing, the world held for him hundreds of desirable objects, and the hours in which he was not devoted to his business were not, as they are to so many, a blank and a pause. he closed his ledger and opened the passion music; he shut his piano and untied his portfolio of prints, and his sleek, respectable face would glow with inward delight at each. a certain kindliness of disposition, which was part of his nature, it must be confessed, he kept apart when he was engaged in business. this lived in an attic and never descended the stairs if he was at his desk. to give an instance, he had not the slightest impulse to help kit in her difficulty, though a word from him would have shown her how in the next few months to make good her losses. she had chosen to mix herself up in business, and he became a business man from head to heels. it even gave him a little pleasure to see her flounder in so stranded a fashion, for he had not effaced, and did not mean to efface, from his mind the very shabby thing she had chosen to do to him on the night of the baccarat affair. being very wealthy, it did not really matter to him whether she cheated him of a hundred pounds or a threepenny-bit, but he quite distinctly objected to being cheated of either. had the last trump summoned him on the moment to the open judgment-books, he might have sworn truthfully enough that he had forgiven her, for he did not ever intend to make her suffer for it, even if he had the opportunity of doing so. certainly he forgave her; he would not ever attempt to revenge himself on her, and he had not told a soul about it. but her difficulties aroused no compassion in him, nor would they have done so even if she had never cheated him at baccarat. business is business, and a statue of sentiment has no niche hewn in the mining market. one can do one's kindnesses afterwards, he said to himself, and, to do him justice, he often did. for the present there was a lull in the carmel transaction, and after a very short spell at the ledgers mr. alington closed them with a sigh. there were several receipts lying on his table, and he took them up, read each, and docketed it. one was for a considerable sum of money paid to a political agency. he hesitated a moment before putting the docket on it, and finally wrote on the top left-hand corner: "baronetcy." chapter iii lily draws a cheque toby was sitting after breakfast in the dining-room of his house in town reading the times. it had been settled for him by lily before their marriage that he was to have some sort of a profession, and, the choice being left to him, he had chosen politics. he was proposing to stand for a perfectly safe borough in about a month's time, and though hitherto he had known nothing whatever about the public management of his country's affairs, since he was going to take a hand in them himself, he now set himself, or had set for him, day by day to read the papers. he had just got through the political leaders in the times with infinite labour, and had turned with a sigh of relief for a short interval to the far more human police reports, when lily came in with a note in her hand. "good boy," she said approvingly, and toby rustled quickly back to the leaders again. "a most important speech by the screamer," he announced, honouring by this name a prominent member of the cabinet. "he seems to suggest an anglo-russo-germanic-french-italian-american alliance, and says with some justice that it ought to be a very fairly powerful combination. it is directed, as far as i can make out, against mr. and mrs. kruger." lily looked over his shoulder for a moment, and saw the justice of the _résumé_. "yes, read it all very carefully, very carefully indeed, toby," she said. "but just attend to me a moment first; i shan't keep you." toby put down the paper with alacrity. the sportsman tumbled out from underneath it, but he concealed this with the dexterity bred of practice. "what is it?" he asked, vexed at the interruption, you would have said, but patient of it. "toby, speaking purely in the abstract, what do you do if a man wants to borrow money from you?" she asked. "in the abstract i am delighted to lend it to him," he said. "in the concrete i tell him i haven't got a penny, as a rule." "i see," said lily; "but if you had, you would lend it him?" "yes; for, supposing that it is the right sort of person who asks you for money, it is rather a compliment. it must be a difficult thing to do, and it implies a sort of intimacy." "and if it is the wrong sort of person?" asked lily. "the wrong sort of person has usually just that shred of self-respect that prevents him asking you." lily sighed, and pulled his hair gently, rather struck by his penetration, but not wishing to acknowledge it. "door-mats--door-mats!" she observed. "all right; but why be personal? who wants to borrow money from you, lily?" "i didn't say anyone did," she replied, throwing the note of her envelope into the grate. "don't be inquisitive. i shall ask abstract questions if i like, and when i like, and how i like. read the screamer's speech with great care, and be ready by twelve. you are going to take me to the old masters." she went out of the room, leaving toby to his politics. but he did not at once pick up the paper again, but looked abstractedly into the fire. he did not at all like the thought that someone was borrowing money from his wife, for his brain involuntarily suggested to him the name of a possible borrower. lily had held a note in her hand, he remembered, when she came into the room, and it was the envelope of it, no doubt, which she had thrown into the grate. for one moment he had a temptation to pick it up and see whether the handwriting confirmed his suspicions, the next he blushed hotly at the thought, and, picking up the crumpled fragment from the grate with the tongs, thrust it into the hottest core of the fire. but the interruption had effectually destroyed his power of interesting himself in this world-wide combination against mr. and mrs. kruger. there was trouble in the air; what trouble he did not know, but he had been conscious of it ever since he had gone down one day late in last december to stay with kit and jack at goring, and they had been blocked by the snow a couple of stations up the line. he had noticed then, and ever since, that there was something wrong between kit and his brother. kit had been unwell when they were there: she had hardly appeared at all during those few days, except in the evenings. then, it is true, she had usually eaten and drank freely, screamed with laughter, and played baccarat till the small hours grew sensibly larger. but underneath it all lay an obvious sense of effort and the thundery, oppressive feeling of trouble--something impossible to define, but impossible not to perceive. in a way, supposing it was kit who wanted to borrow money from his wife, it would have been a relief to toby; he would have been glad to know that cash alone was at the bottom of it all. he feared--he hardly knew what he feared--but something worse than a want of money. he sat looking at the fire for a few minutes longer, and then, getting up, went to his wife's room. she was seated at the table, writing a note, and toby noticed that her cheque-book was lying by her hand. he abstained carefully from looking even in the direction of the note she was writing, and stood by the window with his broad back to the room. "lily," he said, "will you not tell me who it is who wants to borrow money from you? for i think i know." lily put down her pen. "toby, you are simply odious," she said. "it is not fair of you to say that." toby turned round quickly. "i am not a bit odious," he said. "if i had wanted not to play fair, i could have looked at the envelope you left in the dining-room grate. of course, i burnt it without looking at it. but i thought of looking at it. i didn't; that is all." lily received this in silence. for all his freckles, she admired toby too much to tell him so. and this simple act, necessitated by the crudest code of honour, impressed her. "that is true," she said. "all the same, i don't think it is quite fair of you to ask me who it was." toby came across the room, and sat down by the fire. the suspicion had become a certainty. "lily, if it is the person i mean," he said, "it will be a positive relief to me to know it. why, i can't tell you. i haven't spoken to you before about the whole thing; but since we went down to goring on that snowy day i have had a horrible feeling that something is wrong. don't ask me what: i don't know--i honestly don't know. but if it is only money i shall be glad." lily directed an envelope and closed it. "yes, it is kit," she said at length. "ah, what have you done?" "i have done what she asked." "how much?" the moment after he was ashamed of the question; it was immaterial. "that is my own affair, toby," she said. toby poked the fire aimlessly, and a dismal, impotent anger against kit burned in his heart. "borrowing! kit borrowing!" he said at length. "of course, i haven't let her borrow," said lily quietly, sealing the note. "you have made her a present of it?" "oh, toby, how you dot your i's this morning!" she said. "shall i unseal what i have written, and put a postscript saying you wish it to be understood that so much interest is charged on a loan? no, i am talking nonsense. come, it is time to go out. kit is coming to see me this afternoon, soon after lunch, so we must be back before two." "kit coming to see you? what for?" "she asked me if i would be in at three. i know no more. oh, my good child, why look like a boiled owl?" the boiled owl got up. "it is a disgrace," he said; "i've a good mind to tell jack." "if you do," remarked lily, "i shall get a divorce--that's all!" "i'm not certain about the law in england," said toby, with emphasis, "but i don't believe for a moment that they'd give it you for such a reason. but make the attempt. try--do try." "certainly i should," said she. "but, seriously, toby, you mustn't think of telling jack. he and kit have had a row, so i believe, and she doesn't like to ask him for money. i come next: i do really, because you haven't got any. besides, you said it was rather a compliment being asked; i agree with you. but to tell jack--preposterous!" she stood in front of him, drawing on her long gloves, her eyes fixed on her hands. then she looked up. "preposterous!" she said again. toby took one of the gloved hands in his. "i love and honour you," he said simply. "thank you, toby. and how dear it is to me to hear you say that, you know. so you'll be good, and let me manage my own affairs my own way?" "for this time. never again." "as often as i wish, dear. oh, am i a fool? you seem to think so." "it's not that--oh, it's not that," said toby. "money--who cares? i don't care a damn--sorry--what you do with it. it doesn't interest me. but that kit should ask you for money--oh, it beats me!" "i think you are hard on her, toby." "you don't understand kit," he said. "she is as thoughtless as a child in many things--i know that--but being thoughtless is not the same as being upscrupulous. and about money she is unscrupulous. pray god it is only----" and he paused, "well, it is time for us to go out, if we want to see the old masters. personally i don't; but you are a wilful woman. and i haven't even thanked you." "i should advise you not," remarked lily. "why? what would you do?" said the practical toby. "i should call you evelyn for a month." toby was sent to a political meeting directly after lunch, and lily was alone when kit arrived. fresh-faced as a child, and dressed with an exquisite simplicity, she rustled across the room, just as she rustled at church, and in her eye there was a certain soft pathos that was a marvel of art. a mournful smile held her mouth, and, giving a long sigh, she kissed lily and sat down close beside her, retaining her hand. it is far more difficult to be a graceful recipient than a graceful donor in affairs of hard cash, and it must be acknowledged that kit exhibited mastery in the precarious feat. with admirable grasp of the dramatic rights of the situation, for a long moment she said nothing, and only looked at lily, and even the doubting apostle might have gone bail that her feelings choked utterance. that she was very grateful for what lily had done is true, if gratitude can be felt without generosity; but it was not her feelings that choked her utterance, so much as her desire to behave really beautifully, and express her feelings with the utmost possible charm. at last she spoke. "what can i say to you?" she said. "oh, lily, if you only knew! what can you have thought of me? but you must believe i loathe myself for asking. and you--and you----" real moisture stood in kit's eyes ready to fall. lily was much moved and rather embarrassed. passionate relief was in kit's voice, beautifully modulated. "please say nothing more," she said. "it gave me real pleasure--i am speaking quite seriously--to do what i did. so all is said." kit had dropped her eyes as lily spoke, but here she raised them again, and the genuineness of the eyes that met hers brought her more nearly to a sense of personal shame than anything had done for years; for even the most undulating _poseur_ feels the force of genuineness when really brought into contact with it, for his own weapons crumple up before it like the paper lances and helmets with which children play. kit's life, her words, her works, were and had always been hollow. but lily's sincerity was dominant, compelling, and kit's careful calculated manner, a subject of so great preoccupation but two seconds ago, slipped suddenly from her. "let me speak," she said. "i want to speak. you cannot guess in what perplexities i am. in a hundred thousand ways i have been a wicked little fool; and, oh, how dearly one pays for folly in this world!--more dearly than for anything else, i think. i have been through hell--through hell, i tell you!" at last there was truth in kit's voice, a genuineness beyond question. her carefully studied speech and silences were swept away, as if by a wet sponge from a slate, and her soul spoke. a sudden unexpected, but imperative, need to speak to someone was upon her, to someone who was good, and these past weeks of silence were an intolerable weight. goodness, as a rule, was synonymous in kit's mind with dulness, but just now it had something infinitely restful and inviting about it. her life with jack had grown day by day more impossible; he, too, so kit thought, knew that there was always with them some veiled other thing about which each was silent. whether he knew what it was she did not even try to guess; but the small things of life, the eating and the drinking, the talk on indifferent subjects when the two were alone, became a ghastly proceeding in the invariable presence of the other thing. to lily also that presence was instantly manifest, the trouble about which toby had spoken that morning. it was there unmistakably, and she braced herself to hear kit give bodily form to it, for she knew that was coming. kit dropped her eyes and went on hurriedly. "i am in unutterable distress and perplexity," she said; "and i dread--oh, i dread what lies before me! for days and nights, ever since that snow-storm down at goring, i have thought only of what i have to go through--what is within a few months inevitable. i have tried to conceal it from jack. but you guess, lily. you know, i even went to a doctor to ask if anything could be done----" lily looked up with a glance of astonished horror. "stop, stop," she said; "you are saying horrible things!" "yes, i am saying horrible things," went on kit, with a strange calmness in her voice; "but i am telling you the truth, and the truth is horrible. the truth about a wicked person like me cannot be nice. you interrupted me. i went, as i told you, but when i got there i drove away again. i was not so wicked as i thought i was." lily gave a great sigh of relief. but she had not seen the other thing yet. "oh, my poor kit," she said; "i am so sorry for you; but--but you see the same thing lies before me. but fear it? i thank god for it every moment of my life. cannot you forget pain, risk, danger of death, even in that? nothing in this world seems to me to matter when perhaps soon one will be a mother. a mother--oh, kit! i would not change places with anyone in earth or heaven." kit did not look up. "it is different for you," she said. "different? how different?" she asked; but a sudden misgiving shook her voice. outlines of the other thing were discernible. a sudden spasm of impatience seized kit. "ah, you are stupid!" she cried. "you good people are always stupid." there was a long silence, and during that silence lily knew kit's secret, and as with everyone the world of trivial things swarmed into her mind. she heard the ticking of the clock, the low boom of life outside, the rustle of kit's dress as she moved slightly. something perfectly direct had to be said by the one or the other; anything else would be as out of place as a remark on the weather to a dying man. "what am i to do?" asked kit at length simply. and the answer was as simple: "tell your husband." "i think jack would kill me if i told him," said kit. "i am very sure he would not. besides, what does that matter? oh, what does that matter?" kit looked up at her in silence, but after a moment lily went on. "don't you see what i mean?" she said. "there are some situations in life, kit, and this is one, where no side-issue, like being killed, comes in. there is, as god is above us, absolutely only one thing to be done, though there are a hundred arguments against it. what is the use of telling him? you might ask. use? of course there is no use. why tell the disgrace? why make him miserable? why make him hate you, perhaps? simply because you must--you must! oh, my poor, poor kit, i am so glad you told me! it must be something to tell anyone, even a feeble little fool like me. how could you have borne it alone? oh, kit, kit!" again there was silence. lily sat leaning forward in her chair, bending towards the other, with all the pure sweet womanliness of her nature yearning in her eyes. perhaps she should have been shocked. she was not, for pity swallowed up the very ground on which censure should have stood. the two women, as asunder as the poles, were for the moment brought close by the divine identical experience of their sex; yet what was to be to one the flower of her life and the crown of her womanhood, was to the other a bitterness ineffaceable, a shuddering agony. "oh, it is difficult, it is difficult!" went on lily; "but when was anything worth doing easy? does not all in you that you know to be best point one way? you cannot imagine going on living with jack, day by day, week by week, without telling him. and when it comes----" lily broke off suddenly. here was no question of words. what could argument do in a case that admitted of none? there was one thing--one thing only--to be done; all else was impossible. if kit did not feel that in her very blood and bones, no words could conceivably make her. she had been sitting quite still and silent, apathetic apparently, during lily's speech. after her outbreak at the beginning, such entire composure was unnatural. the two might have been talking of danish politics for all the interest kit seemed to take in the subject. inwardly storm and tempest raged; old voices, memories, all that was innocent, called to her; the gales of her soul bugled and shook the foundations of her building, but as yet the moment had not come. then suddenly the slightest tremor seemed to shake her, and lily saw that she was beginning to feel, and that some fibre long dormant or numb was still vital. "all i say to you seems nothing more than platitude, perhaps?" she went on; "but platitudes are worth consideration when one touches the great things of life--when interest, tact, inclination, cleverness, are all sunk, and we are left with the real things, the big things--goodness, wickedness, what is right, what is wrong." her tone had a pleading wistfulness in it, her eyes were soft with tenderness, and the simple, homely words had the force of their simplicity. kit was drawing on her gloves very slowly, still not looking up. "tell me two things more," she said, with a tremor in her voice. "do you shrink from me? and the wrong i have done to--to your unborn child, what of that?" lily rose and kissed her on the forehead. "i have answered you," she said. kit got up, hands trembling and with twitching mouth. "let me go," she said. "let me go at once. come if i send for you." she hurried from the room without further good-bye, and lily was too wise to try to detain her. her carriage was still waiting, and she stepped quickly into it. "home," she said. outside the air was brisk with spring, the streets clean and dry, and populous with alert faces. shop-windows winked and sparkled in the lemon-coloured sunshine; at a corner was a barrow full of primroses from the country, and the news of the day lay on the cobbles of the crossing, with stones to keep it from flying, in scarlet advertisement. a shouting wind swept down piccadilly, hats flapped and struggled, errand-boys whistled and chaffed, buses towered and nodded, hansoms jingled and passed, but for once kit was blind to this splendid spectacle of life. her own brougham moved noiselessly and swiftly on its india-rubber tires, and she knew only, and that with a blank heaviness of spirit, that each beat of the horses' hoofs brought her a pace nearer to her home, to her husband--a step closer to what she was going to do. she got out at her own door, and, to her question whether her husband was in, was told that he was up in his room. he had ordered the carriage, however, which brought her back, to wait, as he was going out. kit went quickly up the staircase and along the parquetted floor of the passage, not loitering for fear she should not go at all. jack was standing in front of his fireplace, an opened letter in his hand. as she came in he looked up. kit had advanced a few steps into the room, but stopped there, looking at him with eyes of mute entreaty. she had not stopped to think over what she should say, and though her lips moved she could not speak. "what is it?" he said. kit did not reply, but her eyes dropped before his. "what is the matter?" he asked again. "are you ill, kit?" then the inward storm broke. she half ran across the room and flung her arms round his neck. "i wish i were dead!" she cried. "jack, jack--oh, jack!" chapter iv the darkened house toby was just turning into the bachelors' club next morning after another terrible wrestle with the screamer, when he ran into ted comber. they had met a dozen times since their interview in the links hotel at stanborough last august; indeed, they were both of the snowed-up party which went to the cottage in buckinghamshire in the winter. toby, still in ignorance that his interference had only changed the scene of the week by the seaside, bore him no ill-will at all; in fact, having been extremely rude and dictatorial to him, he felt very much more kindly disposed to him afterwards, and, as usual, on meeting him to-day, he said "hulloa!" in a genial and meaningless manner as they passed. but this morning there was something comparatively dishevelled about ted; the knotting of his tie was the work of a mere amateur, and he had no button-hole. as soon as he saw toby he stopped dead. "how is she?" he asked. toby stared. "how is who?" "kit. haven't you heard?" toby shook his head. "i called there this morning," he said, "for kit and i were going to an exhibition, and they told me she was ill in bed. and jack would not see me." "no, have heard nothing," said toby. "kit called on my wife yesterday, but i did not see her. lily did not say anything about her being ill." lord comber looked much relieved. "i suppose it is nothing, then," he said; "i do hope so. it would be terrible for kit to be ill, just when the season is beginning." toby stood for a moment thinking. "did you say jack refused to see you?" he asked. "yes; i dare say he was very busy. no one sets eyes on him now that he has become a gold-miner. i am told he lives in the city, and plays dominoes in his leisure hours with stockbrokers. probably he was only busy." toby bit his glove. "why else should he refuse to see you?" he asked. "i can't think, because i'm really devoted to jack. well, good-bye, toby. i'm so glad to have seen you. if there was anything serious, i'm sure they would have told you. isn't the morning too heavenly?" lord comber waved his hand delicately, and turned briskly into piccadilly. he had really had rather a bad moment before he met toby, and it was a great relief that that red-headed barbarian knew nothing of kit's illness. it could scarcely be anything serious. one way and another he had seen almost nothing of her since he was down at the cottage in december, for he himself had been out of england, and in the country, until this week, whereas the conybeares had been almost entirely in london. it was a delicious spring morning, and his spirits rose quickly as he went eastwards. he was proposing to do a little shopping in bond street, since kit could not come to the exhibition, and visit his hairdresser and his tailor. a play had just come out at the haymarket, in which the men wore very smart coats with a great deal of thick braid about them, and he intended to order a coat with thick braid at once. he remembered having seen in an old fashion-book of pictures of men with heavily braided coats, and had often thought how smart they looked. but they belonged to the crinoline age, and till now he had never seriously thought of getting one made. but this new play had quite convinced him; though they were the fashion when crinolines were in, they were not of the same ephemeral stamp as their feminine counterparts, and the late nineties should see them again. just at the corner of half-moon street was a flower-seller, with bunches and button-holes of spring flowers. the girl who sold them was pretty, and he looked at her a moment deftly twisting the wire round the stalks, wondering where the lower orders got their good looks from. there were yellow jonquils, breathing a heavy incense; creamy narcissi with flaming orange-coloured centres; exquisite single daffodils, most classic of all flowers, pure and girlish-looking; double daffodils, which reminded him of the same girls grown older and rather stout, overdressed, with fringes; and small fragrant bunches of violets. for violets, except in so far as they were of a lovely colour, he did not care; they were as formless as cotton-wool when put together for a button-hole (the object of flowers), and the scent of them was so precisely like essence of violets as to be _banale_. but as he was dressed in dark blue serge, with a violet satin tie and a sapphire pin, he bought a bunch, and put it in his button-hole, completing his scheme of colour. he gave the girl a shilling, and when she would have offered him a heavy copper change, told her to keep it, and walked on with a little warm charitable feeling, unencumbered by the dead weight of so many pennies. after his tailor's, a visit to perrin's was necessary. he had a very particular hairdresser there, whom he must really take into serious consultation about certain gray hairs. there were at least a dozen of them above each of his ears, and they had appeared there during the last two or three months. all his family went gray early, and it was as well to face it. it was no use getting hair dyes, which might either ruin one's hair or be the wrong colour; it was only wise to consult the very best authorities, and if hair dye was necessary, let it be put on, at any rate directed, by a professional hand. these were gloomy reflections; the shadow of age was beginning to peer over his shoulder, and he did not like it at all. he was as yet only thirty, but already ten years of being a young man, the only thing in the world worth being, were gone from him. five years ago, men of forty, young for their age, were objects of amusing horror to him; their whole life, so he thought, must be one effort to retain the semblance of youth, and their antics were grotesque to the _vraie jeunesse_. but now both the amusement and the horror were gone; it would soon be worth while trying to learn a wrinkle or two from them. at twenty-five forty had seemed beyond the gray horizons; at thirty it had come so near that already, and without glasses (which he did not need yet), one could see the details of that flat, uninteresting land. what he would do with himself when he was forty he could not imagine. marry very likely. but forty was still ten years off, thousands of days, and this morning was a jewel of spring, and he was so happy to think that probably kit had nothing much amiss. really, he had had some bad minutes, but toby must have known if there had been anything wrong. so his spirits rebounded, and he resumed his reflections on age with a strong disposition towards cheerfulness as regards the outlook. when he looked over his contemporaries in his own mind, he candidly found himself younger than they. there was tom abbotsworthy, for instance, whose forehead was already nearly one with the top of his head, separated only by the most scrannel isthmus of hair, and corrugated with wrinkles on its lower parts, smooth and shining above. there was jack conybeare, with a visible tinge of gray in his hair, and lines about his eyes which were plain even by candlelight. ted congratulated himself, when he thought of jack, on his having so promptly gone to the face _masseur_ on his return from aldeburgh in september. it had meant a week of tedious mornings, and an uncomfortable sort of mask at night over the upper part of the face two or three times a week ever since, but the treatment had been quite successful. "not only," as the somewhat sententious professor of massage had said to him, "had the growth and spread of the lines been arrested, but some had actually been obliterated." he congratulated ted on his elastic skin. again, his teeth were good, and really the only reconnoitring-parties of age at present in sight were this matter of gray hairs and a tendency to corpulency. for the former he was going to take prompt steps this morning, and he had already begun a course of gritty biscuits, most nutritious, but entirely without starch, which promised success in point of the latter. but while he was making his butterfly way down piccadilly, occasionally sipping at a jeweller's, or hovering lightly over a print-shop, toby, after a long meditation on the top step of the club, during which time the hall-porter had held the door open for him, turned away instead of going in, and went up park lane to his brother's house. kit's bedroom was directly over the front-door, and, looking up, he saw that the blinds were still down. jack was coming into the hall from his room when toby entered, and, seeing him, stopped. "i was just coming to see you, toby," he said. "i am glad you have come." jack's face looked curiously aged and drawn, as if he had spent a week of sleepless nights, and toby followed him in silence, with a heart sunk suddenly into his boots. there was deadly presage in the air. jack preceded him into the smoking-room, and threw himself down in a chair. "oh, jack, what is it?" asked toby. * * * * * the two remained together for nearly an hour, and at the end of that time came out together again. toby took his hat and gloves from the hall-table, and was putting on his coat, when the other spoke. "won't you go and see her?" he asked, and his voice was a little trembling. "i think i can't," said toby. "why not?" toby had thrust one hand through the arm of his coat, and with it dangling remained a moment thinking. "for two reasons: she is your wife--yours," he said, "and i am your brother; also you were a brute, jack." "for both reasons see her," he said; and his voice was sorry and ashamed. "and it will do no good," said toby, still irresolute. "but it will be a pleasure to kit," said jack. "don't, for god's sake, be always thinking about doing good, toby! oh, it maddens me!" toby disengaged the coated arm, and leaned against the hall-table. "i shouldn't know what to say," he replied. "you needn't know; just go and see her." jack spoke with some earnestness. "go and see her," he went on. "i can't, and i must know how she is. toby, i believe you are sorry for both of us. well, if that is so, i am sure kit would like to see you, and certainly i want you to go. she was asking for you, her maid told me, an hour ago." "i'm a damned awkward sort of fellow," said toby. "suppose she begins to talk, god knows what i shall say." "she won't; i know her better than you." toby put his hat down, and drew off a glove. "very well," he said. "send for her maid." jack laid his hand on toby's arm. "you're a good fellow, toby," he said, "and may god preserve you from the fate of your brother!" jack rang the bell, and sent for kit's maid. the two brothers remained together in the hall without speaking till she came down again. "her ladyship will see lord evelyn now," she said. toby went up the staircase behind the woman. they came to kit's door, and having tapped and been answered, he entered. the blinds, as he had seen from the street, were down, and the room in low half-light. the dressing-table was close in front of the window, and in the dim rose light that filtered through the red stuff, he could at first see nothing but a faint sparkle of silver-backed brushes and bottles. then to the right of the window the bed became outlined to his more accustomed gaze, and from it came kit's voice, rather gentler and lower-pitched than its wont. "toby, it is dear of you to come to see me," she said. "but isn't it stupid of me? directly after seeing lily yesterday i came back here, and tripped on those steps leading from jack's room. i came an awful bang. i must have been stunned, for i remember nothing till i found myself lying on the sofa here. oh dear, i've got such a headache!" toby found himself suddenly encouraged. of all moral qualities, he was disposed to put loyalty the first, and certainly kit was being magnificently loyal. her voice was perfectly her own; she did not say that she had stumbled over something of jack's, still less that he, as toby knew, had knocked her down. he drew a chair up to the bedside. "it is bad luck, kit," he said; "and really i am awfully sorry for you. is your head very bad?" "oh, it aches!" said kit; "but it was all my own fault. now, if anyone else had been to blame for it, i should have been furious, and that would have made it ache worse." she laughed rather feebly. "so one is saved something," she went on, "and even with this head i am duly grateful. it is a day wasted, which is always a bore, but otherwise----" and she stopped abruptly, for the glibness of her loyalty was suddenly cut short by a pang of pain almost intolerable, which pierced her like a sword. she bit the bedclothes in her determination not to cry aloud, and a twenty seconds' anguish left her weak and trembling. "i wanted to see you, toby," she said. "just to tell you how, how----" and she paused a moment thinking that her insistence on the fact that her accident was no one's fault but her own, might seem suspicious--"how glad i was to see lily yesterday!" she went on. "i wonder if she would come to see me; ask her. but you must go now; i can't talk. just ring the bell as you go out. i want my maid." she stretched a hand from under the bedclothes to him, and he took it with a sudden fright, feeling its cold feebleness. "good-bye, kit," he said. "get better soon." she could not reply, for another sword of pain pierced her, and he went quickly out, ringing the bell as he passed the mantelpiece. jack was still in the hall when he came downstairs again, and he looked up in surprise at the speed of toby's return. "she fell down, she told me," he said. "you were quite right, jack--not a word." jack had not time to reply when kit's maid hurried downstairs into the hall. "what is it?" asked jack. "her ladyship is in great pain, my lord," she said. "she told me to send for the doctor at once." jack rang the bell and looked up at toby blankly, appealingly. "go into your room, jack," he said. "i'll send for the doctor, and do all that." a footman was sent off at once for kit's doctor, and toby sat down at a writing-table in the hall and scribbled a note to his wife, to be taken by a messenger at once to his house. if lily was not at home, he was to find out where she had gone and follow her. the note only contained a few words: "my dearest: kit is in trouble--worse than i can tell you. come at once to her. she wants you. "toby." when he had written and sent this, he went back to jack. the latter was sitting at his table, his face in his hands, doing nothing. toby went up to him. "come, jack," he said, speaking as if with authority, "make an effort and pull yourself together. get to your work, or try to. there is a pile of letters there you haven't looked at. read them. some may want answers. if so, answer them. i have sent for kit's doctor, and for lily." jack looked up. "it isn't fit that lily should come here," he said. toby thought of kit's visit the afternoon before, and lily's refusal to him to say anything of what it had been about. that it had been private was all she would tell him, and not about money. and as they were sitting alone in the evening he thought he saw her crying once. "i think it is very possible she knows," he said. "kit had a private talk with her yesterday. wait till she comes." jack rose from his seat. "oh, toby, if you had only telegraphed for me from stanborough, instead of packing him off!" "i wish to god i had!" said toby drearily. jack took up his letters, as toby had told him, and began opening them. there was one from mr. alington enclosing a cheque. he barely looked at it. money, his heart's desire, had been given him, and the leanness of it had entered into his soul. but seeing the sense of toby's advice to do something, he answered some of these letters, mechanically and correctly. before long lily was announced, and toby rose quickly, and went out into the hall to meet her. "ah, toby," she said, "you did quite right to send for me. they just caught me before i went out. you needn't tell me anything. kit told me all." toby nodded. "will you see jack?" he asked. "yes, if he would care to see me. ask him whether he will or not." but jack had followed toby, and before he could answer had come out of his room. "it is awfully good of you to come, lily!" he said. "but go away again. it is not fit you should be here." "if kit wants me, i shall see her," she said. "please let her know that i am here, jack." "it isn't fit," said jack again. "i think differently," said lily gently. "please tell her at once, jack." jack looked at her a moment in silence, biting his lip nervously. "ah god!" he cried, suddenly stung by some helpless remorse and regret, and without more words he went upstairs to see whether kit would see her. he could not bring himself to go into the room, but asked through the maid. soon he appeared again at the head of the stairs, beckoning to lily, who was waiting in the hall below, and she went up. he held the door of kit's bedroom open for her, and she went in. the room was very dark, and, like toby, it took her a few seconds before she could distinguish objects. from the corner to the right of the rose-square of the window came a faint moaning. lily walked across to the bedside. "kit," she said, "my poor kit! i have come." there was silence, and the moaning ceased. then came kit's voice in a whisper: "lily," she said, "i told him. i told him all. then--then--i somehow fell down those stairs leading from his room, and hurt myself awfully. my fault entirely.... i was not looking where i was going. oh, i have felt so terribly ill since this morning, and it is only morning still, isn't it? have they sent for the doctor?" "yes, they expect him immediately. oh, kit, are you not glad you told him? it was the only way. now you have done all you can. it would be worse to bear if you had not told him. oh, i wish--i wish i could take the pain instead of you! hold my hand. grip it with all your force; it will make the pain seem easier. and oh, kit, pray to god without ceasing." "i can't--i can't," moaned kit; "i never pray. i have not prayed for years." "pray now, then. if you have turned your back on him, he has never turned his back on you. the man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, born of a woman! only be willing to let him help you--that is sufficient. think of the graciousness of that! and this is the very week of his passion." "i can't pray," moaned kit again; "but pray for me." the grip of kit's hand tightened in lily's, and she could feel the stones in her rings biting into her flesh. yet she hardly felt it; she was only aware of it. and her whole soul went up in supplication. "o most pitiful, have pity," she said. "help kit in the hour of her need; deliver her body from pain and death, and her soul, above all, from sin. give her amendment of life, and time to amend, and the will to amend. make her sorry. oh, almighty one, stand near one of thy children in her pain and need. help her--help her!" the door of the room opened quietly, and dr. ferguson entered. he held in his hand a little bag. he went to the window and drew up the blinds, letting in a splash of primrose-coloured sunshine; then shook hands with lily, who rose at his entrance, in silence. "you had better leave us, lady evelyn," he said. "please send the nurse up as soon as she comes." lily turned to the bedside once more before leaving the room, and kit smiled in answer to her. her face was terribly drawn and white, and the dew of pain stood on her forehead. lily bent and kissed her, and left the room. she rejoined toby and jack in the smoking-room. jack got up when she entered with eyes of questioning. "the doctor is with her," said lily. "he will be sure to tell us as soon as he can." "do you think she is very bad?" "i don't know. she is in dreadful pain. how on earth did she manage to fall so badly down these steps?" "did she tell you that?" "yes; she said it was entirely her own fault." jack turned away a moment. "i knocked her down," he said at length. lily's eye flashed, but grew soft again. "don't let her know that you have told me," she said. "oh, poor jack!" jack turned to her again quickly. "lily, do you think she will die?" he asked. "and will it be that which killed her?" "don't say such things, jack," said lily firmly. "you have no right to say or think them yet. we must hope for the best. dr. ferguson will certainly tell us as soon as he knows." for another half-hour they sat there, the most part in silence. lily took up a book, but did not read it; jack sat at a table beginning letter after letter, and tearing them up again, and all waited in the grip of sickening, quaking suspense for the doctor's report. footsteps, which at such times fall with a muffled sound, moved about the house, and occasionally the ceiling jarred with the reverberation of a step in kit's room, which was overhead. lunch was announced, but still none of them moved. at last a heavy footstep came downstairs, the door of the smoking-room opened, and dr. ferguson entered. "it is a very grave case," he said quietly. "i should like another opinion, lord conybeare." jack had faced round in his chair, and sat for a moment in silence, biting the end of his pen. his hands were perfectly steady, but one of his eyebrows kept twitching, and the colour was struck from his face. "please telegraph, or send a carriage to whomever you wish for," he said. "a hansom will be quickest," said dr. ferguson, "unless you have horses already in. excuse me, i will write a note." toby got up. "i'll take it, jack," he said. "lily's carriage is still waiting." "thank you, lord evelyn," said the doctor. "sir john fox will certainly see you if you send your card in. he will be at home now. in fact i need not write. bring him back with you, please." toby left the room, and dr. ferguson got up. "she is very ill?" said jack. "yes, the condition may become critical in an hour or two. i shall then"--and he looked at jack--"i shall then have to try to save lady conybeare at whatever cost." jack gave a sudden short crack of laughter, but recovered himself. "meanwhile, lord conybeare," continued the doctor, "you are to consider yourself a patient too. i insist on your having lunch." "i can't eat," said jack. "excuse me, but you have got to. and you too, lady evelyn. by the way, lady conybeare tells me she had a fall. that, of course, caused this premature event. when did it happen?" for a moment jack swayed where he stood, and sat down again heavily. he seemed about to speak; but lily interrupted him quickly: "yesterday afternoon, about four o'clock. lady conybeare told me about it. please come in to lunch, dr. ferguson, unless you are going upstairs again at once, in which case i will send you some up. come, jack." toby returned before long, bringing sir john with him. the two doctors had a short consultation together, and then went upstairs again. * * * * * outside the muffled house the spring day ran its course of exquisite hours. the trees in the park opposite were already covered with little green buds, not yet turned black by the soot of the city, and the flower-beds were bright and heavily fragrant with big, succulent hyacinths. up and down park lane surged the busy traffic; now a jingling hansom would cut in front of a tall, nodding bus, now a dray would slowly cross the park gate, damming up for a moment the two tides of carriages passing in and out. the great bourdon hum of london droned like some overladen bee, still intent on gathering more riches, and the yearly renewal of the lease of life granted every springtime made gay the tenants of this goodly heritage of earth. inside the house jack and lily sat alone, for she had sent toby away for an hour or two to get some air. they hardly spoke to each other; each listened intently for a foot on the stairs. about four o'clock, just as the sun, still high, was beginning to cut the rim of the taller trees in the park, dr. ferguson entered. he beckoned to jack, who left the room. outside in the hall he stopped. "you must decide," he said. "we cannot possibly save the mother and the child." "save the mother!" cried jack. "oh, save her!" his voice was suddenly raised almost to a shriek, and through the closed door, lily, hearing it, started up. in another moment he came back into the room, trembling frightfully, with a wild, scared look. "jack! jack!" she said. "my poor fellow! be brave. what is it?" "they have to try to save one," said jack. "oh, lily!" and with a sudden upheaval of his nature, and an uprising of all that was tender and remorseful, long overlaid by his selfish, unscrupulous life, he gave way utterly and abandonedly. "oh, kit! kit!" he moaned. "if she dies it will be my doing. i shall have murdered her. and we have been married six years! she was not twenty when we married--a child almost. and what have i done for her? have i ever made this wicked, difficult business of life any easier for her? i, too, have been false and faithless, and when poor, brave kit came to tell me--what she told me--i did that which may have killed her. she has to bear it all, and i, brute, bully and coward, go scot-free. she fell like a log, and i was not sorry, only frightened. and she told you, she told toby, she told the doctor, that she had fallen herself. poor, loyal kit! and i am a fine fellow to be loyal to! o god! god! god!" he writhed on the sofa, where he had flung himself in dumb, twisted agony. the pains of hell, a soul knowingly lost, were his. all the love he had once borne to kit, all the years of their excellent comradeship together, rose and filled the cup of unutterable remorse. lily, woman to her heart's core, was one throb of pity for them both, and could scarce find words. "oh, jack!" she said; "there is hope. it is not hopeless. they did not say that. it is awful; but be strong. we have to wait." he did not answer her, but lay like a man dead, his face hidden in the elbow of his arm. lily saw it was no use attempting to reach him by any words. for the time he lay outside the range of human sympathy, inaccessible. the outer darkness of remorse and regret was round him, not to be illuminated, but unpierceable and of necessity so. he was not a good man, but an utterly bad one would not have so suffered. so they sat silent, and the sun sank lower behind the trees, till at length a few rays through the yet thinly clad branches came in level at the window. suddenly jack sat up. "i hear a step," he said, and next moment lily perceived it, too. "go into the hall to them, jack," she said, thinking that he would rather face the inevitable moment of news alone. "i can't," said he. the step came down the stairs, across the flagged hall, and dr. ferguson entered. "she will pull through," he said. "unless anything quite unforeseen happens, lady conybeare will do well." chapter v toby acts without speaking ted comber had passed an arduous but most satisfactory morning. his own particular hairdresser had been kind, sympathetic and consoling. gray hairs were there, and it was no use denying it; but there was a wonderful new preparation, not really a hair-dye, but a natural product, which, like everything else connected with the hair, cost ten and sixpence the bottle, and was to be confidently recommended. he would send it round to south audley street. a little to be applied with a brush every day to the parts affected, and the smell was not unpleasant. from there he had gone to his tailor's, and had a long talk to mr. barrett, who fully appreciated the solemnity of the braid idea, and said it might be an epoch. down the edge of the coat--exactly so--and the waistcoat in the same manner, very broad. and what did his lordship think about the treatment of the trouser? braid on the outside of the leg, or not? and his lordship thought braid. the suit could be ready by saturday evening, and so ted could wear it for the first time on easter sunday, said kind mr. barrett. he came out of the shop humming a tune, very much pleased with himself and braid and mr. barrett. mr. barrett always consulted him as if his advice was worth having, with a bent back. to be a sort of _arbiter elegantiarum_ in town was one of ted's nasty little ideals, and he contrasted himself with a friend of his who was being measured as he came out, who, making some suggestion, not to mr. barrett, but only to an assistant, received the curt reply, "not worn like that now, sir." how different would be the reception of any suggestion of his! mr. barrett would look respectfully thoughtful for a moment or two, and then say, "very becoming, very becoming indeed." as likely as not he would recommend the same innovation to the next customer, endorsing it with, "lord comber has just ordered a coat of that cut, sir." it was already after one when he left bond street, and he turned briskly homewards. the morning was so lovely that he determined to walk, and he reached home just before lunch. the inimitable preparation had already arrived from perrin's, and he went up to his bedroom to try its properties. it was dark chestnut in colour, with a curious pungent smell about it, and he applied it carefully, as directed, to the affected regions. the affected regions smarted a little at the application, but the pain could not be called really serious. though ted had passed such assiduous hours since breakfast, the afternoon was so pleasant that he determined to have another stroll before tea. he had seen no one he knew that day except toby, and he yearned for a little light conversation. so, after changing his blue suit for a more rigorous costume, soon after four he was on his airy way to the bachelors' club. tea and toast always tasted so good at the bachelors' club, and he liked to think he was a bachelor. it was pleasant also, as he walked up the steps, to contrast the sunny content of his five o'clock mood with his moment of real anxiousness this morning. the reading-room was nearly empty, and he sank peacefully into his favourite chair by the window, and took up the pall mall. he abstained from the leading article, and from "silk and stuff," or something of the kind, at the bottom of the first page, cast a vague eye over "the wares of autolycus," without any definite idea as to what they might be, and turned to the small paragraphs to which he bore a closer affinity. royal highnesses were doing various tedious things, race-meetings among them; the german emperor had written a hymn, or climbed a tree, or ridden a locomotive; and about half-way down the page he saw the following: "the marchioness of conybeare is lying in a very critical condition at her residence in park lane." ted read it through once, hardly grasping it, and once more, thinking he must be the victim of some gigantic practical joke. the next moment he got hastily up from his chair, and at the door ran into an apologetic waiter, who was bringing his delicious tea and toast. but he did not pause for that, and going out into the street hailed a hansom, directing the man to drive him to toby's house. they would be sure to know there, and, for private reasons of his own, he did not wish after his repulse of this morning to make a target of himself again at park lane. now, barely half a minute before his hansom drew up there, toby, who had been sent out by his wife to get air, had come in. he was intending to see whether there were any letters for either of them, and then walk back to park lane. his straightforward, wholesome soul was full to brimming, and the ingredients of that cup were sympathy for jack, anxiety for kit, and blind anger and hatred for ted. he was not a canting analyst, and could not have said which ingredient usurped proportion, nor did he cultivate mixed emotions, and the three existed quite separately and individually, making him as wretched as his nature permitted him to be. between them all he felt pulled in pieces; any conclusion to either would make the other two more bearable. he found a couple of letters lying on the hall-table for his wife, and putting them in his pocket to take back to her, he was just turning to leave the house again, when the front-door bell rang. the man who had let him in was still there, and toby, half-way between unreasonable hope and sickening apprehension, thinking that it might be some news from park lane, advanced also towards the door, so that when it was opened he was close to it. outside, on the topmost of the four steps that led up from the pavement, in the most well-cut of raiment, the glossiest of patent-leather shoes, and the most faultless of hats, stood ted comber. toby gave one short gasp, licked his lips with the tip of his tongue, took one step towards him, and knocked him backwards down the four steps. a cry of passionate dismay escaped the falling body; the faultless hat rolled under the hansom, the gold-crutched stick flew in a wide parabola into the area, and toby, smiling for the first time since that morning, and not caring to improve or spoil the situation with words, walked away. the only regret that lingered in his mind was that there had not been a fuller gathering to observe the scene; however, the cabman and his own footman had an uninterrupted view of what had taken place. so toby's footsteps went briskly away along the wet pavement--there had been a cool spring shower some half-hour ago--and the footman at the front-door and the cabman on his exalted perch were left staring. the horse had shied and swerved at this considerable commotion on the pavement, and before the driver could stop it had taken a couple of prancing steps forward, bringing the off wheel with devilish precision over ted's hat, crushing it lengthways. its unenviable proprietor lay fallen across the pavement, his chestnut curls within a few inches of the curb, for the moment stunned. returning consciousness reminded him of a severe pain on the side of his head, a really acute anguish in his right elbow, another hardly less distressing in his shoulder, and two more in his leg. then he picked himself up, and a being more sunk beneath the zones of pity, take him body and mind together, could scarcely have been found in all big london. his frock coat was a fricassée of dirt, his face was vanished in a splash of mud, the elbow of his right sleeve, whence came one of the most excruciating pains, was torn through shirt, and as he got up he could feel the grating of his broken watch-glass. a footman, discreetly but undisguisedly grinning, watched him from the door of toby's house, a cabman from his perch. dignity is scarcely compatible with dirt, and ted knew it. he picked up his hat, which looked as if a drunken man had been trying to fold an opera hat the wrong way, and the battered remnants of what so lately had been so fine climbed into the hansom again, and requested to be driven home. it had not been a very successful visit. his reflections were not the most enviable. that act of toby's, for which he was now but a sorry parcel of aches, meant the worst. and at that thought all that was passably decent in the man came to the surface. there was not enough to cover a large surface, but there was a little. he pushed open the trap at the top of the hansom and changed his destination to park lane. aching and bleeding as he was, he would not wait, wait, wait for tardy news. nor was his anxiety wholly selfish; he had--god knows what proportion this bore to the whole--a fear based on affection. then, having given the order, he devoted himself to patching up a very sorry object. his face was bleeding under the right eye, and his cheek was scratched and raw; it seemed as if all the stray small objects in a london street had been inlaid into it in layers by an unpractised hand. his elbow was cut, his knee was cut, and both ached like toothache. but he mopped and brushed and dabbed till the balance of dirt was on his handkerchief, and when that was clear, realizing that to touch the breaches any more meant the transference of the dirt back again, he leaned idly against the cushions of the cab, in a state of mind compounded of anxiety and unutterable depression. little had he supposed that the mirrors in the corners, often by him so satisfiedly and light-heartedly used, would ever have reflected so battered a self. there was a carriage at the door when he drove up, but it gave him access, and after ringing the bell he huddled back into his cab again. even now, when, to do him justice, he was a prey to the most poignant emotions that had ever touched his putty soul, the instinct of regard for his own appearance, the desire to shield the shattering it had undergone, asserted itself. he leaned forward in the hansom when the front-door was opened, showing to the footman only his undamaged left. "how is lady conybeare?" he asked. "a great improvement, my lord," said the man. "thanks. please tell the coachman to drive to , south audley street." kit was alive--better. his spirits, elastic as his complimented skin, instantly began to recover themselves, and his thoughts straying out of selfishness, absorbed for an hour in another, turned homewards again like sheep to their fold. he had been afraid that he had dropped that nice box of toys, the world, and that they would have been broken. but it seemed that it was not so. he had dropped them, it is true, and some of them, himself particularly, were rather scratched and muddy, but they were not broken. he could play with them a long time yet. instinctively again he turned to the slip of looking-glass in the corner of his hansom. his scratched face had stopped bleeding, and it did not look so bad as he had feared. his hat, it is true, was a sorry sight, but it is easy to get new hats, and the thought that toby's barbarous revenge had mainly spent itself on a lincoln and bennett was even a little amusing. much more important was the patch of whitening hair above his ear, and he turned his face sideways to examine it. even that one application of the dark fluid he had made just before lunch had already changed it; the white hairs seemed to have been blotted with colour. how delightful! he paid the cabman, let himself into the house, and went with a slight limp up to his bedroom, where he rang for his valet. he had had a fall, he explained, and must change his clothes and have a bath. also, he would dine by himself at home, and a telegram must go at once to the haslemeres to say that he had hurt himself and could not come. on the whole, he was not sorry to absent himself. lady haslemere had really become rather tiresome lately. she was always talking about bulls and bears, and ted did not care in the least for the menagerie of the city. his warm bath with pine in it was soon ready, and he went to repair the damages of the day. as he dressed he reviewed the agitations of the hour that had passed. an undignified part had been thrust on him by toby, for the most complacent cannot flatter themselves that they show a brave figure when they are forcibly laid on pavements. but it was in the very nature of the case that the reason of the blow prevented the story going abroad. it was impossible that toby should cause it to be known that he had knocked him down, for people would ask why. secrecy, at any rate, was desired on both sides. as far, then, as that most unpleasant moment was to be regarded, he had only to apply vaseline to his cuts, order some new clothes, and live the occurrence down; not publicly--that would have been trying--but privately. he had only to get over it himself. anyhow, toby knew by this time how completely his bumble-bee diplomacy at stanborough had miscarried, and at that thought the smarting of his own wounds grew appreciably less. decidedly it had not been a pleasant moment when he flew backwards on to the pavement, but it was over. he smarted far more under the effect of the insult than under the insult itself. it was very like toby, he thought, to deal with him in that manner. anyhow, there was a smart in toby's soul which no vaseline could reach. against the violence that had been done him he could set the news of kit's ameliorated condition. he told himself with sublime _naïveté_ that it was worth while being knocked down to learn that. his anxiety had been terrible, really terrible, and he could not but balance that weight removed against other unpleasantnesses. things were not so bad as they might have been. but it had been terrible, and he easily persuaded himself that he was suffering horribly. what had happened he did not yet exactly know; in any case it was horrible, and it would be wise not to dwell on it. he would know to-morrow, and as he brushed his hair he saw again with satisfaction the working of his pungent fluid. he felt battered and tired, and, putting on a floss-silk dressing-gown, lay down on the sofa in his bedroom, and rang the bell for tea. really, he had been through a life-time of suffering since he rang the bell for tea an hour before at the bachelors' club, and he desired that restorative agent most acutely. most of all--and this was highly characteristic--he desired to dismiss the experiences of the day from his mind. it had all been extremely unpleasant, and there was a good deal that was unpleasant still hanging about, like the sultriness of a thundery day, low and imminent. but at the moment he could do nothing: no step that he could take would make matters better, no effort of will would disperse the thunder-clouds, and it was idle to brood over things, and mar one's natural cheerfulness with morose and gloomy reflections. his bright, shallow personality reflected like a wayside puddle whatever was immediately above it, and held no darkling shadows or remote lights of its own, and he was rightly very careful of the buoyancy of his spirits, since that was the best of him, and undeniably of the greatest use. there was a small table by his hand, with the gold-topped scent-bottle, the evening paper, and a few yellow-covered french books on it. he sprinkled his forehead with the scent, threw the evening paper away, for there was a little paragraph in it which he wanted to forget, and took up gautier's "mademoiselle de la maupin," and opened it at random. he read a page or two, and became interested, absorbed. the magic of words, a spell more potent than any wizard's incantation, took hold of him, and the indoor hot-house atmosphere of infinitesimal intrigue was most congenial. the low roar of london traffic outside grew dumb, the agitations of harsh experience grew remoter, the events of the day became to him as the remembrance of some book he had read, and the book he was reading grew flushed with the realities of life. toby in the meantime, after his short and decisive interview without words on the doorstep, had walked back to park lane, and got there not very many minutes after his interviewer had made his call. he went straight into jack's room, and found lily there alone. question and answer were alike needless; her face answered what he had not audibly asked. "she will get through," she said. "they think she will certainly get through." toby threw his hat on to the sofa. "thank god! oh, thank god!" he cried. "where is jack?" "upstairs. they let him see her for a moment. he will be down again immediately. but they could not save both kit and the child, toby." toby sat down by his wife. "oh, lily, what a difference five hours can make!" he observed with that grasp of the obvious which distinguished him. "by the way, i met someone when i was out." "whom?" "him. i went home to see if there were any letters for either of us--oh, there were two for you; catch hold--and as i came out i found him on the doorstep." "what had he come for?" "i didn't ask him. but i know what he went for. spread-eagle on the pavement. all in his beautiful clothes. and the hansom went over his hat; damned neat it was. oh, lily, that made me feel better, and i felt, too, it was a good omen. i wish you had been there. you would have roared." "toby, you are a barbarian! what good does that do?" she said with severity. "what that sort of a man wants is pain," remarked toby. "was he much hurt?" asked lily with extreme composure. "i don't know. i hope so. i hope he was very much hurt." "do you mean you left him lying there?" "yes. he may be there now." lily's severity broke down. "then please have him taken away before i get back," she said. "ah, here's jack!" jack could not speak, nor was there need, but he shook hands, first with lily, then with his brother, and nodded to them. then suddenly his mouth grew tremulous, and he sat down quickly by the table, and covered his face with his hands. lily looked at toby, and in answer to her look he went out of the room. as she passed jack, following her husband, she laid her hand for one moment on his bowed shoulder, and went out also, closing the door behind her softly. chapter vi lily's desire toby and his wife left london the day before easter to spend a fortnight at the cottage in buckinghamshire, which jack had lent them. kit was going on as well as possible, but she could not yet be moved; they hoped, however, that both of them would come down to goring before the others left. mrs. murchison was also spending easter there, before she went back to america, where she purposed at present to be with her husband for a fortnight at least. she had arrived just before tea, the others having come down in the morning, and was a torrent of amazing conversation. "and then on tuesday," she was saying, "i dined with dear ethel tarling at the criterion. we had a beautiful dinner, and most amusing; and all during dinner some glee-club sang in the gallery those delicious english what-do-you-call-thems, only i don't mean meringues." "madrigals?" suggested lily, in the wild hope it might be so. "madrigals, yes! they sang madrigals in the gallery--'celia's arbour' and 'glorious apollyon from on high beheld us.'" lily gave a little spurt of uncontrollable laughter. "always making fun of your poor old mother, you naughty child!" said mrs. murchison, with great good-humour. "toby, you should teach her better. and then afterwards we went to the palace theatre to see the biography. most interesting it was, and the one from the front of a train made me feel quite sick and giddy--most pleasant. oh! and i remember that it was that evening we heard about poor lady conybeare. how sad! i called there this morning, and they said she was much better, which is something." "yes, we hope that jack and kit will both come down here in ten days or so," said toby. "and lord comber, too," went on mrs. murchison guilelessly. "it was that same day he had a fall, and bruised himself very badly. misfortunes never come singly. did you not hear? he fell on his head, and i should think it was lucky he did not get percussion of the brain." toby did not glance at his wife. "very lucky," he said. "was it not? then i spent wednesday at oxford, which i was determined to see before i left england. most beautiful and interesting it is. i lunched with the master of magdalen college, whom i met in london several times, and saw the statue they put up on the place where shelley died." "i thought he was drowned," said lily. "very likely, dear," said mrs. murchison; "and now i come to think of it, the place is near the river, so i expect they put it up as near as they could. you couldn't wish to see them put a recumbent statue, a very recumbent statue indeed, so it is, in ten feet of water, dear," she observed, with great justice. mrs. murchison sipped her tea in a very ecstasy of content. it was barely a year since she had first seen toby, and marked him down as the ideal husband for lily; and there they were all three of them, drinking tea, as she said to herself, in the stately homes of england, how beautiful they stand! her siege of london had been rapid and brilliantly successful. the fortifications had fallen sudden and flat, like the walls of jericho; and she made no more of dining at the criterion with that marvellous lady tarling than of washing her hands or going to america. "yes, the master of magdalen college was most kind," continued mrs. murchison, "and said he remembered toby well. dear me, what a lot i shall have to tell your father, lily! and after lunch--really, a most excellent lunch, i assure you, with quails in asps--we went down to the ibis." "to the where?" asked lily. "to the river," said mrs. murchison, suspecting a difficulty, "and saw where the college boats rowed their races--torpedoes, i think the master called them, and i remember wondering why. his own torpedo won the last races." here toby choked violently over his tea, and left the room with a rapid uneven step. "perhaps it's not torpedoes, then," went on his mother-in-law, supposing that he would have corrected her if he had been able to speak; "but it's something very like. dear me, what a terrible noise poor toby makes! had we better go and pat him on the back? then yesterday i went to the 'messiah' at the albert hall, which made me cry." mrs. murchison looked welcomingly at toby, who here reappeared again, rather red and feeble. "dear toby," she said, "it's just lovely to think of you and lily so settled and titled and happy; and when i'm on the ocean, i shall often go to my state-room, and count the days till i come back. i must be in america at least a fortnight, if not ten days; and i shall try and persuade mr. murchison to come across with me when i return. i'm very lucky about ships: i go out in the lucania, and come back in the campagna. and is there anyone else coming down here before i go on wednesday, or shall we have a nice little no-place-like-home all by ourselves?" "oh, we are going to be simply domestic," said lily, rising, "and we shan't have a soul beside ourselves. you know both toby and i are naturally most domestic animals. we neither of us have any passion for the world. we like being out of doors, and playing the fool, and having high-tea--don't we, toby?" "i have no passion for high-tea," remarked toby. "oh yes, you have. don't be stupid! i don't mean literal high-tea, but figurative high-tea." "the less literalness there is about high-tea, the better i like it," said toby. lily passed behind his chair and pulled his wiry hair gently. "lord evelyn ronald anstruther d'eyncourt massingbird, m.p., is not such a fool as a person might suppose," she remarked. "at times he shows glimmerings of sense. his love for figurative high-teas as opposed to figurative high-dinners is an instance. don't blush, toby. you've little else to be proud of." "i've got you to be proud of," remarked toby, bending back his head to look at her. mrs. murchison rustled appreciatively. that was the sort of thing which english people could say naturally without gush or affectation. a frenchman would have bowed, put his heels together, and kissed his wife's hand. an italian would have struck the region of his heart. an american would have expressed it in four-syllable periphrasis. but toby did none of these things. he said it quite simply, lit a cigarette, and growled: "leggo my hair, lily!" lily "leggoed" his hair. "he is trying to blow rings," she explained, "but he can only blow ribands and streamers. also, he looks like an owl when he tries. rings on his fingers and bells on his toes," she added with immense thoughtfulness. "toby, i'll buy you a peal of bells if you will promise to wear them on your toes." toby got up from his chair. "if anyone has anything else of a peculiarly personal nature to say about me, now is their time," he remarked; "otherwise, we'll go out. dear me! the last time i was here we got snowed up at pangbourne, and slept in the elephant inn, and i remember i dreamed about boiled rabbit. i seldom dream, but i remember it when i do." lily sighed. "yes, and poor kit was waiting for us all here. she was quite alone, mother, and had an awful _crise des nerves_ over it." "i should have thought she was the last person in the world to be nervous," said mrs. murchison. "oh, _crise des nerves_ is not nervousness," said lily; "it is being strung up, and run down, and excited." "my mother," remarked mrs. murchison, "was of a very nervous temperament. i have seen her on the coldest days suddenly empty a carafe of water over the fire, for fear of the house catching. and evenings she would sometimes blow out the candle for the same reason." toby giggled explosively. "and the cruel part was," continued mrs. murchison, "that throughout life she was afraid of the dark, in which the blowing out of the candles naturally left her. so, between her dread of a conflagration and her terror of the dark, it was out of the fireplace into the fire." "frying-pan, mother," said lily. "maybe, dear; i thought it was fireplace. but it's six of one and half a dozen of another. poor mommer! she had a very nervous and excitable temperament, with sudden bursts of anger. at such times she would take out her false teeth--she suffered from early decay--and dash them to the ground, though it meant slops till they got repaired. most excitable she was." "very trying," said toby rather tremulously. "no, we didn't find her trying, toby," said this excellent lady. "we were very fond of her. poor dear mommer!" she sighed heavily, with memory-dim eyes, and toby's laughter died in his mouth. mrs. murchison got up. "well, i shall put on my hat," she said, "and come out with you both. i brought an evening paper down with me, but there is nothing in it, except that there has been a terrible tomato in the west indies, destroying five villages--tornado, i should say--and great loss of life." she went out of the room to fetch her hat, and lily and toby were left alone. toby looked furtively up, wondering what he should meet in lily's eye. her face, like his, was struggling for gravity, and both shook with hardly-suppressed laughter. neither could speak, and they turned feebly away from each other, toby leaning with trembling shoulder on the mantelpiece, and lily biting her lip as she looked helplessly out over lawn and river. now and then there would come from one or other a sobbing breath, and neither dared look round. once lily half turned towards her husband, to find him half turned towards her with a crimson strangling face, and both looked hastily away again. the plight was desperate, and after a moment lily said, in a choking, baritone voice: "toby, stop laughing." there was no answer, and she gave him another moment for recuperation. out of the corner of her eye she saw him wiping away the moisture of laughter. then with a violent effort he subdued the muscles round his mouth. "she's an old darling," he said; "but, lily, i shouldn't have liked your grandmother." lily heaved a long sigh, herself again. "toby, you behaved very well," she said, "and mother is an old darling. come, we'll go out." mrs. murchison took her cheerful presence away after three days, as she was sailing to america almost immediately, and the two were alone for the next week. spring had definitely come, and day after golden day ran its course. life, eternally renewed with the year, had burst from its winter chrysalis, and stood poised a moment with quivering, expanding wings before launching itself into the half-circle of summer months. everywhere, on field and tree, the effervescence of green and growing things foamed like some exquisite froth. one morning they would rise to see that the green buds on the limes had split, shedding their red sheaths; on another, the elms were in sudden tiny leaf; on another, the mesh of new foliage round the willows of the water's edge would make a delighted wonder for them. the meadows were scarce starred with pink-edged daisies when the buttercups sowed a sunshine on the fields, and in cool, damp places yellow-eyed forget-me-nots reflected the pale blue they gazed at so steadfastly. toby and his wife would spend long, lazy mornings in the punt or drive about the deep-banked, primrosed lanes--he all tenderness and solicitude for her, she happier than she had known it was given to mankind to be. they talked but little; to both it seemed that their joy lay beyond the region of words. on the evening of one such day they were strolling about the garden as dusk fell. birds called in the thickets and shrubs, now and then a rising fish broke the mirror of the river, and each moment the smell of the earth, as the dew fell, grew more fragrant. "i wish we were going to stay here a long time," said lily, her arm in his; "but we must go up to london when parliament meets after the easter holidays. the m.p.! good gracious, toby, to think that the welfare of your country depends upon a handful of people of whom you are one!" "parliament may go hang," said toby, "and jack will be delighted to let us stay here just as long as you like." "i am sure of it, but i don't like. what do you suppose i wanted you to get into parliament for, if you were not going near the house?" "never could guess," said toby. "it's much more important that you should stop here if you want to." "don't be foolish--but, oh, toby, when my time comes let me come down here again. it was here we were engaged; let it be here you take your first-born in your arms. i do want that." she turned to him with the light of certain motherhood in her eyes, a thing so wonderful that the souls of all men are incomplete until they have seen it, and her beauty and her love for him made him bow his head in awe. his wholesome humble soul was lost in an amazement of love and worship. "it shall be so, toby?" she asked, with a woman's delight in learning how unnecessary that question was. "will my lord grant the request of his handmaiden?" "ah, don't," he said suddenly. "don't say that, even in jest." "then will you, toby?" she asked. "if my queen wills it," said he. "nor must you say that, even in jest," she said. "i don't; i say it in earnest--in deadly earnest. it is the truest thing in the world." "in the world? oh, toby, a big place! then that is settled." she took his arm again, and they strolled slowly over the short velvet of the grass. "toby, there is another thing i want," she said after a moment. "it is yours--you know that." "i'm glad of it, then, because i don't think you will like it. it is this: i want you to see lord comber, and just shake hands with him." toby stopped. "i can't," he said--"i simply can't." "think over it. you see, toby, it is like this: you are part of me, and before this wonderful thing that is coming comes, i want to be 'all square' with everybody in the world. that's one of your silly golf expressions, so you'll understand it. and i can't be while you are not. don't misunderstand me; it isn't that i don't feel as you do about him, and if i had been you and knocked him down as you did, i think i should have kicked him as he lay on the pavement. but now it is over." "lily, you don't know what you ask," said toby. "if i had any reason to believe the man was sorry, that he had even any idea what a vile worm he is, it would be different. no doubt he had a bad time that day, for, as i told you, his tie was no better tied than mine; but having a bad time is not the same as being sorry, is it?" "no," said lily thoughtfully; "but whether he's sorry or not is not our concern; it doesn't affect what we ought to feel. he was vile; if he had not been, there would be nothing to forgive. besides, you knocked him down. people ought to shake hands after they have fought; and i want you to." "that is the best argument you have given me yet," said toby. "i don't want it to be an argument at all; i don't want my wish to be any reason at all why you should do it. you must do it because you agree with me." "but i don't," said toby. "well, tell me when you would shake hands with him," she said. "would you this day fifty years?" "no," said toby. "would you if he was dying, or if you were?" "i think i should; yes, i should." "oh, but, toby, it is far more important to live in charity with people than to die in charity with them! oh, indeed--indeed it is!" she stopped, and turned round, facing him, and all her soul shone in her eyes. "indeed it is, toby!" she said again. toby looked at her for a long moment, then drew her nearer him. "oh, my love!" he said, "what have i done to deserve any part of you? it is as you wish; how can you doubt it? how can i do otherwise?" she smiled at him. "but why do you do as i wish, toby?" she asked. "it must not be because i want you to." toby was much moved; never before had the wonder and splendour of love so held him. "oh, my beloved," he said, "it is because god has ordained that all you wish is right; i can give you no other reason." dusk began to fall layer on layer over the sky. in the west the sunken sun still illuminated a fleece of crimson cloud that hovered above it, and round them the gray, long english twilight grew more solemn and intense. the outlines of shadows melted and faded into the neutral tint of night, and from the house behind, and from the cottages that clustered together across the river, lights began to twinkle, and the wheeling points of remotest heaven were lit overhead. the crimson in the west died into the velvet blue of the sky, and in the east the horizon was dove-coloured with the imminent moon-rise. and as the two walked they spoke together, as they had not spoken before, of the dear event which june should bring. to lily, the happiness which, please god, should be hers lay in depths too abysmal for thought to plumb; and toby for the first time fully understood how compassion, and no other feeling, had whole possession of her soul, when she had been with kit and jack all that terrible day, hardly more than a week ago. for that which had been to kit a thing to dread was to the other the crown of her life, and that the experience to herself so blessed could be anything different to another woman called for pure pity. and other feelings--amazement, horror, shame--were trivial and superficial compared to that; it swept them utterly out of possibility of existence. the woman, the mother, had been between them a bond insoluble. and kit, so toby thought, had felt something of this. for the five days that had followed, he himself had seen almost nothing of his wife; she had been all day at the house in park lane, and had twice slept there. kit in the weakness and exhaustion of those days had held on, as if to a rock, to the sweet strength and womanliness of the other; that was the force that pulled her back to life. that evening when they went in, lily found waiting for her a letter from jack, saying that the doctor had sanctioned kit's being moved in a week's time, provided she went on as well as she was doing, and that they proposed to come down to goring. one condition, however, jack made himself, that lily should telegraph quite candidly (he trusted her for this) whether she and toby would rather they did not come. she laughed as she read the note, and sent her answer without even consulting toby. chapter vii the second deal it was some eight weeks after easter that mr. alington decided to make the next move in the game of carmel, a move which should be decisive and momentous. he would have preferred for certain reasons to put it off a little while yet, for he had much on his hands, but the balance on the whole inclined to immediate action. during the last four or five months he had done a considerable deal of business as a company-promoter, and at the present moment had some half-million of pounds engaged in other affairs than mines. motor-cars in particular had much occupied him, and he was the happy possessor of many patents for noiseless tires, automatic brakes, simpler steering-apparatus, and what not. he was a man of really large ideas where money was concerned, and a perfect godsend to patentees, for his policy was to buy up any invention concerning motors which possessed even the most modest merit, in the hopes that, say, in two years' time every motor-car that was built must probably carry one or more of the patents owned by him. he had, indeed, at the present moment in england not more than twenty thousand pounds which he could conveniently devote to the booming of carmel, but there was lodged with mr. richard chavasse in melbourne a sum of not less than fifty thousand pounds, with which it was his purpose to supply the "strong support in australia," to the end that carmel should rise rainbow-hued above the ruck of all other mines. altogether his position was a good one, for the last six weeks had brought him from his manager the most excellent private accounts of the mine, which for the most part he had saved up till the booming began. mr. linkwood also advised very strongly a fresh issue of shares. they had at present, for instance, only an eighty-stamp mill, whereas at the rate at which they were now getting gold out there was easily work for a mill of a hundred and fifty or two hundred stamps. it was on this "strong support in australia" by the convenient mr. chavasse that mr. alington chiefly relied; that at any rate should be the final touch. he intended first of all to make a large purchase of his own in england, ten thousand shares at least, and immediately publish encouraging news from the mine. this he would preface, as he had so often done before, by a wire to mr. richard chavasse, which in a few hours would bring forth the accustomed reply, "strong support in australia." but though he would have preferred having a somewhat larger sum at his own disposal for the grand _coup_, he had reason for wishing to start the boom at once. speculators had recovered from the scare of carmel east and west, and already, before he had himself moved in the matter, the quotation for carmel had risen from its lowest price of ten to eleven shillings up to sixteen. this was sufficient in his opinion to show that the public was already nibbling, for professional operators, he knew, were not entering this market, and this was the correct moment to give the fresh impetus. there had been a nineteen days' account just before easter, which had made the market dull, but since then it had begun to show more vitality. other reasons also were his. he was beginning, for instance, to be a little nervous about the immediate success of his dealings in the motor trade. his patents were floated into companies, but in few instances only had the shares been well supported, and in more than one he had incurred a loss--recoverable no doubt in time--which even to a man of his means was serious. worse than that, if this ill-success continued, it would not be the best thing for his name, and he was most anxious to get carmel really a-booming while his prestige was still high. again, many fresh mines had been started in western australia since the original flotation of the carmel group, and his financial sense led him to distrust the greater part of them. several had been grossly mismanaged from the first, some grossly misrepresented. others he suspected did not exist at all, and he wished to hit the psychological moment when speculators were ready, as the improvement in carmel shares had shown, to invest, and before they had seen too much of west australian mines to make them shy. that moment he considered had come. accordingly he instructed his broker to make his own large purchase. this was ten days before settling day, and he hoped to sell out again before those ten days were passed. he had at first intended to purchase only ten thousand shares, but going over his scheme step by step, and being unable to see how it was possible, with this combination of satisfactory news from the mine, his own purchase, and mr. chavasse's strong support in australia, that the shares could fail to rise, he decided to purchase five thousand shares more than he could pay for. it was humanly impossible that the shares should not rise. consequently on thursday he telegraphed out to his manager to send a long cablegram embodying all the private news he had himself been receiving for two months back, to his broker, made his own purchase on friday morning, and the same afternoon sent a cipher telegram to mr. chavasse, telling him to invest the whole of his capital then lying at melbourne bank in carmel, and another in cipher to the manager, bidding him wire "strong support in australia." thus in twenty-four hours his _coup_ was made, and he went back to his passion music and his prints, to wait quietly for the news of the strong support in australia. already in a few hours after his own purchase, backed up as it was with the first of the favourable reports from the mine, the shares had risen three-eighths; the effect on the market, therefore, of the australian support, he considered, level-headed man of business as he was, to be inevitable. he was dining out that evening with lord haslemere, and was disposed in anticipation to enjoy himself. lady haslemere, it is true, was apt to be tedious when she talked about her own transactions in the city, and asked him whether the rise in some mine of which nobody had even heard was likely to continue, and was it not clever of her to have bought the shares at one and a half, for within a week they had risen to two and a sixteenth. she got the tip out of truth. mr. alington, however, had all the indifference of the professional in money matters to the scrannel operations of the amateur, and when in answer to a question of his it appeared that lady haslemere had only twenty shares in this marvellous mine, and had worked herself up into a perfect fever of indecision as to whether they should take her certain eleven pounds profit, or be very brave and fly at fourteen, he felt himself really powerless to understand her agitations. this evening directly after dinner she collared and cornered him, and finance was in her eye. "i want to have a serious financial talk with you," she said, "so we'll go into the other drawing-room, where we shall be alone. come, mr. alington." good manners insisted on obedience, but it was an ill-content financier who followed her. for lady devereux, who played bach quite divinely, was among lady haslemere's guests, and even as he left the room to talk over his hostess's microscopic operations on the stock exchange, he saw her go across to the piano. it is true that he preferred a very large round sum of money of his own to half an hour of fugues and preludes, but he infinitely preferred half an hour of fugues and preludes to about seven and sixpence of lady haslemere's. she lit a cigarette with a tremulous hand. "i want to ask your advice very seriously," she said. "i put three hundred pounds into carmel a week ago, and since then the shares have gone up a half. now, what do you advise me to do, mr. alington? shall i sell out, or not? i don't want to make such a mess as poor dear kit did. she really was _too_ stupid! she took no one's advice, and lost most frightfully. poor thing! she has no head. all her little nest-egg, she told me. but i mean to put myself completely into your hands. do you expect carmel will go higher?" mr. alington stroked the back of his head, and tried hard to look genial yet serious. but it was difficult. lady haslemere had closed the door between them and the next room, and he could hear faintly and regretfully those divine melodies on the steinway grand. and here was this esteemed lady, who was quite as rich as anyone need be--certainly so rich as to be normally unconscious of the presence or absence of a fifty-pound note--consulting him gravely (she had let her cigarette go out in her anxiety) about these infinitesimal affairs. if she had had a fortune at stake, he would willingly have given her his very best attention, regretting only that lady devereux had chosen this moment for playing bach; but to be shut off from that exquisite treat for a small sum affecting a woman who was not affected by small sums was trying. "i can't undertake to advise you, lady haslemere," he said; "but i can tell you what i have done myself: i have bought twenty-five thousand shares in carmel to-day, and have not the faintest intention of selling out to-morrow." lady haslemere clasped her hands. this was a flash of lightning against her night-light. "good gracious! aren't you nervous?" she cried. "i shouldn't be able to eat or sleep. twenty-five thousand--and they've gone up three-eighths to-day. why, you've scored over nine thousand pounds since this morning!" "about that--if i sold, that is to say, which i don't mean to do." "and so you are going to chance the mine going still higher?" "certainly. i believe in it. i also believe the price will rise very considerably yet." lady haslemere bit her lip; she was clearly summoning up all her powers of resolution, and mr. alington for the moment felt interested. he was, as he might have told you, a bit of an observer. whether or no lady haslemere won eleven pounds or fourteen he did not care at all, but that she should care so much was instructive. then she struck her knee lightly with her fan. "i shall not touch my three hundred," she said, and she turned on mr. alington a face portentous with purpose. mr. alington sat equally grave for a moment, but the corners of his mouth lost their sedateness, and at last they both broke out laughing. "oh, i know how ridiculous it must seem to you," said lady haslemere; "but if you have never earned a penny all your life, you have no idea how extraordinarily interesting it is to do so. you may think that it can't matter to me whether i gain ten pounds or lose twenty. but to gain it oneself--oh, that is the thing!" mr. alington smiled with peculiar indulgence. "well, frankly, it is inexplicable to me," he said. "now, if you were playing for a large stake i could understand it, though i seldom get excited myself. well, that is what i am going to do; i am going to play for a very big stake indeed, and i confidently expect to turn up a natural. have you anything more to ask me?--for if not, and you will allow me, i shall go and listen to lady devereux. i have been so much looking forward to hearing her play again." lady haslemere rose. she had wanted to have a general financial talk as well about chaffers and brownhills and modder b, but the oracle had spoken about her grand _coup_, which was the main point. "yes, she plays divinely, does she not?" she said. "i knew lady devereux would be a magnet to draw you here. how busy you must have been lately, mr. alington! one has not seen you anywhere." "very busy indeed. but i intend to take a holiday after the carmel deal is over." "a deal? do you call it a deal?" she asked. "i always thought a deal meant something rather questionable?" mr. alington paused quite as long as usual before replying. "oh no; one uses 'deal' as quite a general term for an operation," he said. they went back into the other drawing-room, and mr. alington, with an elaborate softness, drew a chair up near the piano. lady devereux played with exquisite delicacy and sobriety, in the true spirit in which to interpret that sweet, formal music. she did not thunder and thump, she did not cover swift, catchy runs with the loud pedal, but let each note fill its own minute, inevitable place. she did not extemporize a _rallentando_ where passages were difficult, and make up for this by hurrying over minims, or give you a general idea of a bar. she played the music exactly as it was written with extreme simplicity. there were some twenty people in the room, some whispering together (for lady devereux played so well that nobody talked very loud when she was at the piano), some smoking, some playing cards, some passing under their breath the most screaming scandals; and the music was like a breath of fresh air let into a stuffy room. and by the piano, with his sleek face reposeful, beatific, and wearing an expression of sensual piety about it, sat the only listener--a man whose soul was steeped in money, whose god was mammon, who could roll on like some juggernaut-car over the bodies of those he had ruined without one thought of pity or remorse. yet the melody enchained him; while it lasted he was a child--a child, it is true, with respectable gray whiskers and an expansive baldness on the head, but happy, heedless of anything else in the world except the one exquisite tune, the one delicious moment. before long a baccarat table was made up, but he did not move from his place by the piano. lady devereux, a pretty, good-natured woman, who got on capitally with everybody except her husband, who, in turn, got on admirably with or without her, was delighted to go on playing to him, for she saw how real and how cultivated his enjoyment of her music was, and though she lost charmingly at baccarat, she really preferred playing even to one appreciative listener. she had an excellent memory, her taste was his, and the two wandered long in the enchanted land of early melody. at last she rose, and with her mr. alington. "i need not even thank you," he said; "for you know, i believe, what it has been to me. you are going to play? baccarat for bach! dear lady, how shocking! i think i shall go home. i do not want to disturb the exquisite memories. i shall remember this evening." he stood for a moment with her hand in his. his face looked like the representation of some realistic saint in bad stained glass. "good-night," he said. "and i, too, go and daub myself in actualities. but at soul i am no realist." it was a fine summer evening, fresh and caressing to the diner-out, and he walked back from berkeley street slowly, with the musician ascendant over the financier. of late he had been very much absorbed in business, and had heard hardly any music, and thus this evening had been really an immense treat. after all, there was nothing so essentially delightful to the bones and blood of the man as this: he was still conscious that the passion for money-making which was his, was, as he expressed it, with more fervour than it was his wont to throw into his daily conversation, a daubing in actualities; and to-night it was with a sense of distaste, rising almost to repugnance, that he contemplated an hour at his desk. the work, he knew, would bring its own consolations and rewards, but as he started back he wished neither to be consoled nor rewarded. of late, also, his delight in the polished artifices of money-making had been on the wane; for months now he had entertained, even in his hours of triumphant finance, the idea of retiring altogether from business when once he had brought to its inevitable climax this affair of the carmel mines. to-night this desire to concern himself no more in the jostle of the tokenhouse land was more than usually potent, taking almost the form of resolve. had an angel or devil, it mattered not which, offered him success such as he anticipated in these mines upon the signing of a bond that he would mine and motor no more, he would have signed. what allurements had that peaceful picture! he would sell out (so he figured to himself) his interest in all other businesses, invest his whole fortune in something safe and reliable, perhaps even consols; he would drop the financial times and take in the musical observer, and lead the life that in sober earnest he at the moment utterly believed himself to prefer. he had long been building a charming and palatially-simple house in sussex, where in his declining years he proposed to spend the greater part of his time. there, with his prints, his music, and his gardening, he would pass slow, charming, uneventful days. the "long dark autumn evenings" would wean him from his garden-beds to his priceless portfolios, the turning year entice him to his garden-beds again. he would watch the jostle and the race for money with fatherly, lucretian unconcern. he was tired, he felt sure he was tired, of the eternal struggle for what he held in sufficiency. how gross a parody of existence was the present for a man of truly artistic tastes and sensibilities! in ten days, if things went even passably well, he would have made enough to enable him to gratify these tastes to the full, and, soberly, he wanted no more than that. his beautiful home would be habitable within the year. he would have enough to marry on, for he fully intended to marry, since matrimony was a distinct factor in the social world, and he could say, "soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years." he was not given to excess of eating, drinking, or merriment--all that was foreign to him--but he would certainly have a string quartette belonging to his very complete establishment. mr. alington had all the coolness in action which ensures success in most human pursuits, from the art of war to the art of making money, and the absence of which postulates a corresponding inefficiency in all practical undertakings. he never lost his head, nor got either frightened or _exalté_ when he was at his work; but the intervals, after he had committed himself to some course of action, and before that action had produced its fruits, were sometimes tense periods to him. he went, no doubt, at forced draught when the great _coups_ were being made, and after he had taken his headlong excursions nature demanded a readjustment, and his fibres were relaxed. these periods of relaxation he usually tided over by the indulgence of his artistic tastes, which he used as a man of less fine sensibilities might use morphia or alcohol. but to-night the fugues and preludes so deftly exhibited by lady devereux seemed only temporarily efficacious. for a while they moved him, but he had not been home an hour when the effect wore off and left him, financially speaking, staring wide-awake. again and again he reviewed the natural effect of what he had done, the normal behaviour of the market towards the events which should be developed next day. already the prices of carmel were rising; to-morrow would come the announcement of strong support from australia, and later in the day the more specific news that mr. richard chavasse--that hard-headed operator--had bought to the extent of fifty thousand pounds. logically, for the money-market is as subject to logical conclusions as any set of syllogisms, its prices must leap. news of the most satisfactory description would continue to arrive from the mine; in a day or two, in a week at the outside, the shares should stand at not less than four to five--no feverish price, but well warranted, so thought mr. alington, by its inherent excellence. there was no doubt there would be some slight fall owing to realizations, but that, so he imagined, would be only a temporary reaction. by settling-day, ten days from now, his twenty-five thousand shares bought in england should be worth more than four times their present value; his fifty thousand pounds invested by mr. richard chavasse something over two hundred thousand. after that a firm good-bye to clamorous gold-getting. he strolled backwards and forwards in his room, now stopping to look for a moment at one of his beloved prints, now lighting a cigarette or sipping a little mild whisky-and-soda. how admirably, he reflected, had his carmel group hitherto turned out! how alluring had been his board of directors, how convincing to the public mind of the security of a scheme to which hereditary legislators lent their honoured names! already more than one new board had copied his example, but it had been a great thing to be first in the field; the novelty of the idea was half its success. but now his noble colleagues might go hang, for all he cared; they had served their turn and been his bell-wethers to the public. jack conybeare, he knew, had followed him in this last carmel speculation, investing largely; he was a shrewd fellow, so thought alington, and would have made a good business man had not the onus of hereditary obligations borne him elsewhere; and if he himself had been intending to start new companies, he would not have been sorry to have him again on his board--no mere name this time, but a man likely to be of practical use. yes; indeed he had struck a vein! though he believed that ninety per cent. of success is due to effort and wisdom, he had got, like most speculators, a secret faith in that "tide in the affairs of men." it was impossible not to believe in strokes of luck; if things showed a general tendency to prosper, it was well to put many things in hand at once. the stars or some occult influence happened to be favourable just then; in the remote, conjectured heavens there was a conjunction of planets of notable benignity to you; it was your chance; the line was clear; hurry, hurry, while it lasted! in the same way one had at other times to work with sobbing steps through a mire of ill-luck. perversity for the moment characterized the universe; inanimate objects were malign; sheathed, hooded presences waited to clutch you. nothing went right; the images of the gods were set awry; ominous mutterings were heard (not fancied) from the shrine. then was the time to venture little, not to ride unmanageable horses, not to use new silk umbrellas, to go gently, neither praising nor complaining, for fear of further provoking the blind forces that strike; above all, not to think to repair ill-luck by wild strokes. in the nature of this world things would come round; a calm, dewy dawn would break on the low-roofed night. wait! for a year his good luck had held. people whom he wished to know had been glad to know him; he was already much at home in london. carmel east and west had behaved with filial piety to their founder, and the greater carmel seemed likely to turn out a son as dutiful, but more magnificent. his name would almost certainly be included in the list of birthday honours, for he had made himself most useful to the conservative party, and was contesting an impossible seat, for which it had been really difficult to find a candidate, and he had given in a princely manner to the party's funds. recognition, he had reason to believe, was almost certain, and he would be delighted to be a baronet. again that discreet rogue mr. richard chavasse had played his part admirably in the pleasant _rôle_ allotted to him. like a person of sense, he had accepted the soft inevitable, and had preferred to live very comfortably at melbourne rather than attempt to get away with the large balance which stood to his name. he had not probably realized that it would have been almost impossible for mr. alington to bring him to justice, for the exposure of the "strong support in australia" would have been inevitable. or perhaps some feeling of gratitude to his benefactor had touched the accomplice of thieves; the criminal class had been diminished by one--a pleasant thought. the arrangement, however, had been a scheme of mutual advantage, and the man, at any rate, had been sensible enough to see that. it would almost immediately be necessary to think what must be done with that great operator, for to-morrow's purchase would be his last. mr. alington, in a gentle glow of charity, was determined to act most kindly to him; his confession should be destroyed, and perhaps he should have a couple of hundred pounds as well, and certainly some pious exhortations. indeed, the only eclipse of the lucky star had been the motor business. there were ugly losses in his ledger over that--uglier than he had quite realized; but carmel should gently heal the sore places with a golden lotion. next morning came a very favourable report from the mine, and about mid-day the news of the strong support in australia. the price had been opened at a little over thirty shillings, the mine was eagerly inquired for, and for a couple of hours it rose steadily, and as it rose seemed to get more and more in demand. then one of those strange periodical madnesses which sometimes affect that shrewd body the stock exchange took possession. everything else was neglected; it seemed that the whole world contained only one thing worth buying, and that shares in carmel. men bought and sold, and bought and sold again; now for half an hour would come a run of realizations, and the price would sink like a back-drawing wave in a swiftly advancing tide; but in another hour that was forgotten; the tide had risen again, covering the lost ground, and those who had realized were cursing their premature prudence, and bought again. steady-going, unemotional operators lost their heads and joined in the wild skying of carmel without a shred of justification, only hoping that they would find everyone else a shade madder than they, and that they would clear out on the top. men sold at three and a half, bought again at four, sold at four and a half, and were not yet content. nobody quite knew what was happening, except that they feverishly desired shares in carmel, and that those shares were getting every moment more expensive. bears who had sold ten minutes before came tumbling over each other to secure their shares before they had gone up out of sight, and having got them, as likely as not turned bulls and bought again, on the chance of carmel going higher, though half an hour ago they had sold in the hope of its going lower. all day this went on, and about an hour before the closing of the market alington, reading the tape record at his club, saw that the shares stood at five and a half--higher than he had ever hoped they would go in a week. for a moment he hesitated. if he chose, there was now within his grasp all that he had been playing for. a hansom to the city; two careful words to his broker, for the unloading must be done very swiftly; then to his music and his baronetcy. in an hour the market would close till monday, for saturday was a holiday; but before monday, on the other hand, would come fresh news from the mine. he debated with himself intently for a moment, and as he waited the tape ticked under his hand. "carmel," it spelled out, "five and five-eighths, five and three-quarters." that was enough. for to-day nothing could stop the rise. there would be time to sell on monday morning. he called for a hansom; he was going to spend from friday till monday in the country, and not having more than enough time to catch the train, drove straight to waterloo, where his valet would meet him with his luggage. chapter viii mr. alington leaves london mr. alington had never felt more at peace with himself, or in more complete harmony with his environment (a crucial test of happiness), than when he drove off to waterloo from the doors of the beaconsfield club, of which he had lately become a member, after reading the last quotation of carmel. all his life he had been working towards the consummation which was now practically his. his desire was satisfied, he had enough. a few forms only still remained to be put through, and he would be finally quit of all markets. on monday morning his broker would sell for him every share he held in carmel. on monday morning, too, would that shrewd operator, mr. richard chavasse, follow, as if by telepathic sympathy, the workings of mr. alington's mind, arriving at the same just conclusions, and a close with the offer made him by the varalet company in paris for all the patents he owned in the motor business _en bloc_--at a considerable sacrifice, it is true--completed his financial career. keen, active, and full of the most flattering triumphs as had been his progress towards this acme of his fortunes, yet he had never thought of it as anything but a progress, a road leading to a goal. never had he let the edge of his artistic sensibilities get blunt or rusty from want of use, and he found, now that his more material work was over, that he himself, the vital and essential man, who dwelt in the financier, looked forward, like an eager youth on the threshold of manhood, to the real and full life which he was about to enter. humble thankfulness and grateful contentment with the dealings of providence with him was his also. he had fifty years behind him; pleasant years and wholesome with hard work, during which he had used to great advantage many excellent gifts. the business of his life hitherto had been to make money; in that he had shown himself to be on the large scale. but more essential to him throughout all these years had been his growing artistic perceptions, his increasing love of beauty; that he felt to be the reason and the spring of his happiness. in this regard he had ever cultivated, with the assiduous patience born of love, his natural taste. that keen appreciation of palestrina and the early melodists was no original birthright of his; it was a cultivated pleasure; a pleasure, no doubt, of which the germ was inborn, but cultivated to a high degree and with effort, because, simply, he believed it to be his duty to make the most of a gift. in this matter of duty he had often suffered much wrong. the charitable impulse which had led him, one day in the spring, to draw so large a cheque to mr. metcalfe, had been an unjust derision in jack's mouth. alington really believed (and the most transcendent honesty cannot get below a genuine belief) that part of that notable cheque should be entered as a business transaction, part on the page devoted to charity. he may have deceived himself, but he was not aware of it; he acted, as far as he knew, with the most judicial fairness in the partition of its entry. but now for weeks past he had looked forward to the day when he should pass out of the money-making world to a fairer and more melodious one. he had no insane ambition to make inordinate wealth, nor to add a million to his million; his wealth he had steadily regarded as a means to an end, that end being the power to gratify his artistic tastes to the full. he did not forget to pray at his _prie-dieu_ morning and evening, nor had he forgotten it on the most feverish days of finance, and he was at peace, imperfectly, no doubt, but, as far as his capabilities went, perfectly, with regard to death and what lay beyond. meantime this life held for him much that was beautiful, much that was wonderful. he desired to realize its wonder and beauty as completely as possible. all his life he had been a getter of money, or so the world held him. but now no more. on monday morning all his connection with the market would be severed, the real man should lead his real life. these thoughts passed through his brain in a gentle glow of intimate pleasure, as his hansom went briskly towards waterloo. he was going to spend this friday till monday with mrs. murchison, in her charming house on the winchester downs, where the invigorating unused air would make more temperate this really tropical weather. a terrific heat-wave, from a positively scalding sea, had drowned london these last few days; the city had been a burning fiery furnace, and the consolation of being cast there, of having got there unwillingly, was denied him, for the flames had been of his own self-seeking. he might, indeed, as soon as he had made the _grand coup_, three days ago, have left london, and waited for the inevitable result in cool retirement, but this retreat from the scene of action had been morally impossible to him. never before, as far as he remembered, had an operation so taken hold of him; never before had the tickings of the tape, or the call-whistle of his telephone, been of so breathless an urgency. exciting as had often been the satisfaction with which he had watched the climbing of a quotation from twos into threes, or threes into fours, he could not recollect a restlessness so feverish as that with which he had watched the rise of carmel. for this had been the _comble_ of all: the rise of the price meant to him a perfect freedom from all future rises. to see carmel quoted above five had been equivalent to his emancipation from all that should hereafter touch the nerves. yet here was one weak spot. he had seen the quotation of over five and a half ticked out by the tape, yet he had not instantly sold. the old adam in his case, as in so many others, had inconveniently and inconsistently survived. he had not been able to resist the temptation of wanting to be richer than he truly wanted to be. but in order to cut himself off from any such weakness in the future, he immediately pushed open the trap-door, and told his driver to stop at the nearest telegraph office, and ten minutes after he had taken his final step, wiring both to his broker in london, and in cipher to mr. chavasse, at melbourne, to sell out on monday morning. but this weakness was but inconsiderable. he had attained success all down the line; the only wavering had been between completeness and more than completeness. here, as was natural, the instinct of years stepped in. the habit of making ten pounds in complete safety was more potent than the certainty of making nine. his own large purchase had heralded the rise, the good news from the mine had shouted an endorsement, the "strong support in australia," the news of which had reached the market with the infallible result so long foreseen by him, had put the seal on certainty. the deal was beyond doubt. at last and at last! this crippling of his life was over; he was free from the necessity of money-making, free also, thank god! from the desire. he no longer wanted more than he certainly had. how much can be said of how few! his inward happiness seemed reflected in all sorts of small external ways. his horse was fast, his driver nimble at picking an unsuspected way, and the porters at waterloo, miraculously recovered from the paralysis of the brain induced by ascot week, not only were in accord as to the platform from which his train would start, but, a thing far more rare and precious, were one and all perfectly correct in their information. to mr. alington, though his nature was far removed from the cynical, this seemed almost too good to be true, till, in his benignant strolls up and down the line of carriages, he met his hostess, mrs. murchison. she was feeling the heat acutely, but was inclined to be talkative. "so you've come by the early train," she said. "well, i call that just friendly, and it's the early bird that catches the train, mr. alington, and here we are. but the heat is such that if i was wicked and died this moment, i fancy i should send for a thicker mantle, and that's a chestnut. lady haslemere comes down by the four something, which slips a carriage at winchester--or is it five?--which i think perilous. they cast you adrift, the lord knows where, for i inquired about it, without engine, and if you haven't got an engine, where are you? a straw hat--that's just what we are going to be; a straw-hat party like lady conybeare and the tea-gowns, and dinner in the garden." "that will be delicious," said mr. alington after his usual pause. "dinner out of door is the only possible way of feeding without the impression of being fed. i always----" "well, that's just beautifully put," interrupted mrs. murchison. "you get so much all-fresco out of doors. and that's what i missed so much in my last visit to america, where i stopped a fortnight nearly. the set-banquet, with all the ceremonial of the barmecides, like what mr. murchison rejoices in, and the colour he turns over his dinner, seems to me an utter nihilism of the flow of soul. why, there's lady haslemere! so she's caught the early bird too." lady haslemere, according to her invariable habit, only arrived at the station one minute before the starting of the train, in a great condition of fuss, but she pressed mr. alington's hand warmly. "you were quite right," she said: "i didn't sell out two days ago, and, oh! the difference to me. i have just this moment sold at five and three-quarters. only think!" "i congratulate you heartily," said mr. alington, with a smile of kind indulgence; "i too am going to sell on monday morning." a shade of vexation crossed lady haslemere's face. "do you think it will go higher again?" she asked. "a shade, very likely. but possibly it may react a little. i was in two minds myself as to whether i should sell to-day." lady haslemere's brow cleared. "oh, well, one can't always sell out at the very top," she said; "but it will be annoying to me if it goes to six. two hundred and forty times five shillings. ye-s." "i think you have done very well," said mr. alington, with just a shade of reproof in his voice. the financier travelled in a smoking compartment, the two ladies in a carriage to themselves, and as the train slid out towards vauxhall high among the house-roofs, mr. alington felt that in more than this literal sense he was leaving london, that busy brain of the world, behind and below him. and though his parting glances were certainly not regretful, they were very kindly. he had been well treated by this inn at which he had passed so many years, laboriously building his house and the fortunes of his house. that was done; he needed hired chambers no longer. the newsboys, who at this very station had looked on him as a regular purchaser of the more financial of the evening papers, found him to-day quite indifferent to their wares, and even the placard "extraordinary scenes on the stock exchange" met an uninterested eye. one boy, indeed, had been so accustomed to give him the evening standard that, seeing his large profile against the carriage window before the train started, had without request handed him in the paper. but mr. alington pushed it gently aside. "not to-day, my lad--not to-day," he had said; "but here's your penny for you." the carriage was empty and, as london fell back behind the train, mr. alington's spirits, usually so equable and so seldom falling below the temperate figures of content, or rising into feverish altitudes, became strangely light and buoyant. he had often wondered in anticipation how this moment--the moment of casting off from him the chains of fortune-building--would affect him. exciting and exhilarating hours had often been his; numerous had been the triumphs which his clear-sighted scrutiny of the financial heavens had brought him. he had felt a real passion for his pursuit; but the joy of the pursuit had never blinded him to the fact that it was an object he was pursuing. he wanted a certain amount of money, and he had now got it, and already the joy of having attained had swallowed up the lesser joy of attaining. he had often asked himself whether the habit and the desire of obtaining were not becoming too integral a part of him; whether, when his purpose was achieved, he would not feel suddenly let down--put out of employment. if that should prove to be so, he felt that his life would largely be a failure: he would have elevated the means into the end. but the moment had come; it was his now, and he knew within himself that he had kept clear of so deplorable an error. he felt like a boy leaving school after a successful term, having won, and having deserved to win, some arduously-reached distinction. the thought gave gaiety to his glance: his eye sparkled unwontedly, he had a mind to dance. but the mood deepened; the surface gaiety became transformed into a thankfulness of a far more vital kind, and as the train devoured the miles between clapham junction and waterloo, he knelt down on the dusty carpet of his carriage, and, with bared head and closed eyes, he thanked god for having given him the brain and the will to succeed, and, during that pursuit of the transient stuff, for not having let his heart be hardened at the daily touch of gold. money-making, in the moment of this success, he still saw to be not an end in itself. the danger of that insidious delusion he had escaped. and before he rose he registered a vow to use the fortune of which he had thus been made steward temperately and wisely. a large party was going to gather at mrs. murchison's next day, but till then there would only be the three who had come down by this train, and four or five more who had proposed to embark on the danger of the slip-carriage train, which would, if it ever came to port, land them in winchester in time for dinner. mr. alington had eagerly accepted the earlier invitation, in order that he might spend the saturday in examining the monuments and antiquities of the old town. he had brought with him a compendious green guide to the city, and having mastered its principal contents in the train, he was able to point out to the ladies the buildings of interest which they passed in their drive out. the college, above all, attracted his benevolent gaze, and his pale-blue eyes grew dim as they rolled by those lines of gray wall, the dimpling river which crossed beneath the road, the mellow brick of the warden's house, and the delicate grace of the chapel tower, which dominated and blessed the whole. "a priceless heritage! a priceless heritage!" he murmured. "nothing can make up to me for not having been to one of the great public schools. the boys seem careless enough, heedless enough, god bless them!" he said, as a laughing mob of them streamed out of the college gate; "but the gracious influences are entering and working in them every day, every hour, forming an unsuspected foundation for the after-years. the peace and the coolness of this sweet corner of the world is becoming a part of them. all that i have missed--all that i have missed!" he sighed softly, while lady haslemere yawned elaborately behind her hand. but the elaborate yawn ended in a perfectly natural laugh. "dear mr. alington," she said, "you are quite deliciously unexpected and appropriate. for you to be discontented with your lot is a splendid absurdity. i would have lived in a suburb all my life if to-day i could have sold your number of carmel shares at the price i got." mr. alington looked at her a moment, pained but forbearing. "so would i," he said. then, leading the talk away from anything so intimate to him, "ah, that delicious stretch of water-meadow!" he said. "there is no green so vivid and delicate as that of english fields. and hark to the cool thunder of the weir." a far-away rapture illumined his stout face, and mrs. murchison, who had made a speciality of nature, struck in: "there is a solidarity about english landscape which i do not find in our country," she said. "like mr. alington, i could listen to that weir till i became an octogeranium. 'peace with plenty,' as lord beaconsfield used to say. i was down at goring yesterday with dear lily, and we sat on the lawn till midnight, or it might have been later, and i had a long discussion with jack conybeare about the duties of the london county council. most rural and refreshing it was! ah, dear me!" mrs. murchison sighed, not because she was sad, but because her feelings outstripped her power of expression. "so green and beautiful!" she murmured, as a sort of summary. lady haslemere put up her parasol, extinguishing the view for miles round. "mr. alington, do give me a hint as to what to go for next week. will there be a rise in south africans, do you think?" the rapture died from mr. alington's face, but it gave place to a purely benignant expression. he shook his head gently. "i cannot say," he answered. "i have followed nothing during these last weeks except the fortunes of carmel. but any broker will advise you, lady haslemere." mrs. murchison's house stood high on the broad-backed down, to the south of the town, and up at this height there was a wonderful freshness in the air, and the heat was without the oppressiveness of london. a vast stretch of rolling country spread out on every side, and line upon line of hills followed each other like great waves into the big distance. though the drought had been so severe, the reservoirs of the sub-lying chalk had kept the short, flower-starred grass still green, and the long-continued heat had not filched from it its exquisite and restful colour. alington took off his hat and let the wind lift his rather scanty hair. it was an extreme pleasure to him to get out from the overheated stagnation of london streets into this unvitiated air, and he wondered at the keenness of his enjoyment. he had never been a great lover of the country, but it seemed to him to-day as if a heavy accumulation of years had been lifted off him, disclosing capacities for enjoyment which none, himself perhaps least of all, had suspected could be his. he gently censured himself in this regard. he had made a mistake in thus stifling and shutting up so pure and proper a source of pleasure. he would certainly take himself to task for this, and put himself under the tuition of country sights and sounds. they had tea under the twinkling shade of a pine copse at the end of the lawn, and presently after mr. alington again took his straw hat, with the design of a stroll in the fresh cool of the approaching evening. the other two ladies preferred to enjoy it in inaction, waiting for the arrival of the adventurous slip-carriage guests, about whose fate mrs. murchison reiterated her anxiety. so mr. alington, secretly not ill-pleased, started alone. he was about half-way down the drive, when he met a telegraph-boy going towards the house, and, in his expansive, kindly manner, detained him a moment with a few simple questions as to his name and age. finally, just as he turned to walk on, he asked him for whom he was delivering a telegram, and the boy, drawing it out of his pouch, showed him the address. mr. alington opened it slowly, wondering, as he had often wondered before, why the envelope was orange and the paper pink. it was from his brokers, and very short; but he looked for some considerable time at the eight words it contained: "terrible panic in carmels. shares unnegotiable. wire instructions." at first he read it quite blankly; it seemed to him that the words, though they were simple and plain enough, conveyed nothing to his mind. then suddenly a huge intense light, hot and dazzling beyond description, appeared to have been uncovered somewhere in his brain, and the words burned and blinded him. he let the pink paper fall, bowing and sidling on the gravel of the drive, then stooped down with a curious groping manner and picked it up again. he put it neatly back inside the envelope, and asked the boy for a form, on which he scribbled a few words. "do nothing," he wrote. "i will come up immediately." he gave the boy a shilling, waving away the change, and then, going to the grassy bank that bounded the drive, he sat down. except for that moment, when his brain, no doubt instantaneously stunned, refused to tell him the meaning of the words, it had been absolutely composed and alert. the telegram gave no hint as to the cause of this panic, but without casting about for other possibilities, he put it down at once to his one weak point, mr. chavasse. that determined, he gave it no further thought, but wondered idly and without much interest what he felt. but this was beyond him. he had no idea what he felt, except that he was conscious of a slight qualm of sickness, so slight and so purely physical, to all seeming, that he would naturally have put it down, had it not appeared simultaneously with this news, to some small error of diet. otherwise his brain, though perfectly clear and capable of receiving accurate impressions, was blank. there was a whisper of fir-trees round him, and little points of sunlight flickered on the yellow gravel of the drive as the branches stirred in the wind. lady haslemere's voice sounded thin and high from the lawn near--he had always remarked the unpleasant shrillness of her tones--and his straw hat had fallen off. he was conscious of no dismay, no agony of regret that he had not sold out two hours ago, no sense of disaster. he sat there five minutes at the outside, and then went back to the lawn. the ladies looked up in surprise at the quickness of his return, but neither marked any change in his sleek features nor uncertainty in his step. his voice, too, when he spoke, was neither hurried, unsteady, nor differently modulated. "mrs. murchison," he said, "i have just received the worst news about--about a venture of mine, which is of some importance. in fact, there has been, i fear, a great panic on the stock exchange over carmel. may i be driven back to the station at once? it is necessary i should return to london. it is a great regret to me to miss my visit. lady haslemere, i congratulate you on your promptitude in selling." he stood there bland and respectable for a moment, while mrs. murchison murmured incoherent sympathy, surprised at the extraordinary ease with which polite commonplace rose to his lips. the courteous necessary words seemed to speak themselves, without any direction from him. the blow that had fallen upon him must, he thought, have descended internally, for his surface behaviour seemed as equable as ever. he was conscious only of the continuance of the qualm of sickness, and of a little uncertainty in movement and action. he had intended, for instance, as far as he intended anything, to go away as soon as he had said good-bye, and wait for the carriage alone. but he found himself lingering; his feet did not take him away, and he wondered why. his straw hat was in his hand, and he fanned himself with it, though he did not feel hot. perceiving this, yet still holding it, he stopped fanning, and bit the rim gently; then, aware that he was doing that, he put it on again. "so good-bye," he said for the second time. "ah, lady haslemere, you asked me for a tip. well, if this panic is really serious--and i have no doubt it is--buy carmels at the lower price, for all you are worth, if you have the nerve. i assure you that you cannot find a better investment. good-bye, good-bye again. perhaps--oh no, it doesn't signify. may i order the carriage, then, mrs. murchison? thank you so much!" he lifted his hat, turned, and went to the house. chapter ix the slump the london evening papers that day were full of the extraordinary scenes that had taken place on the stock exchange. before the opening of the market that morning carmel had been eagerly inquired for, owing to the activity produced by the very extensive purchases on the day before, and an hour before mid-day news had been cabled from australia that there was very strong support in the market there for the same, mr. richard chavasse alone having purchased fifty thousand pounds' worth of the shares. closely following on this came news from the mine itself: the last crushing had yielded five ounces to the ton, and a new, unsuspected reef had been struck. the combination of these causes led to one of the most remarkable rises in price ever known. the market (so said one correspondent) completely lost its head, and practically no business was done except by the mining brokers. the shares that day had started a little above thirty shillings, and by four o'clock they had reached the astounding figure of £ s. d. a well-known broker who had been interviewed on the subject said that never in the course of a long experience had he known anything like it. sober, steady dealers, in his own words, went screaming, raving mad. a boom in westralian gold, it is true, had long been expected, but nothing could account for this extraordinary demand. no doubt the fact that mr. alington had purchased largely the day before had prepared the way for it, for he was considered among mining operators the one certain man to follow. but the sequel to this unparalleled rise was even more remarkable. buying, as had been stated, was much stimulated by the news of strong support in australia (indeed, it was this that had been the signal for the rush); but about four o'clock, when the shares were at their highest, and some considerable realizations were being made, though the buying still went on, a sudden uneasiness was manifested. this was due to the fact that the telegram announcing the strong support in australia was contradicted by another and later one, saying that the market in carmel was absolutely inactive. upon this, first a general distrust of the telegrams from the mine itself was manifested, and then literally in a few minutes a panic set in, as unaccountable as the previous rise; business came to a standstill, for in half an hour everyone was wanting to sell carmel, and buyers could not be found. a few of the heaviest plungers cleared out, with thousands to their credit, but the majority of holders were caught. the shares became simply unnegotiable. the market closed on a scene of the wildest confusion, and when the exchange was shut the street became impassable. to a late hour a mob of excited jobbers continued trying to sell, and just before going to press came a report that mr. alington, who had left town that day, but suddenly returned, was picking up all the shares he could lay hands on at a purely nominal figure. settling-day, it would be remembered, occurred next week. a committee of the stock exchange was going to investigate the matter of the false telegram. kit and jack had come down to goring that day to join toby and his wife there. kit was steadily gaining strength, but this evening, being a little tired, she had gone to bed before dinner, and now, dinner being just over, lily had left the others to see how she was. neither jack nor toby was given to sitting over wine, and as soon as lily went upstairs, they removed into the hall to smoke. the evening paper had just come in, and jack took it up with some eagerness, for his stake in carmel was a large one. he read through the account of what had taken place quite quietly, and leaned back in his chair thinking. unlike lady haslemere, a few nights ago, he did not let his cigarette go out. at length he spoke. "i expect i have gone smash, toby," he said. he threw him over the paper. "read the account of what happened to-day on the stock exchange," he added. toby did not reply, but took the paper. "the only thing to be thankful for is that i didn't sell out just before the panic," remarked jack. toby read on in silence till he had finished it. "why?" he asked. "because it would look as if i had known that the first telegram was false. what extraordinary nerve alington must have! do you see that he has been buying every share he can lay hands on?" "i don't understand about the first telegram," said toby. "nor do i, thank god!" "supposing it is a real smash, will you have lost much, jack?" "eight thousand pounds--more than that, indeed, unless the price goes up again before settling-day, for i've only paid for about half my shares." toby was silent a moment, wondering how jack had ever had eight thousand pounds to invest of late years. the latter understood the silence, and acknowledged the justice of his difficulty. "i made three thousand over carmel east and west," he explained. "that with my year's salary as director, makes eight. i invested it all, and bought more." toby looked up. "did that fellow give you five thousand a year as director?" he asked. "that fellow did." toby whistled. "a committee of the stock exchange is going to investigate the whole affair, it appears," he said. "won't that be rather unpleasant if they get into salaries?" "exceedingly. mind you don't let kit know, toby, until one has more certain news." he took a turn up and down the room in silence. "extremely annoying," he said, with laudable moderation; "and i can't imagine what has happened, or who is responsible for the first telegram. alington cannot have caused it to be sent merely to make the market active, for it was certain to be contradicted." a man came into the room with a telegram on a salver, and handed it to jack. "reply paid, my lord," he said. jack turned it over in his hand without opening it, unable to make the effort. then he suddenly tore it open, and unfolded the thin pink sheet. it was from alington. "can you meet me to-morrow morning at my rooms, st. james's street?" it ran. he scribbled an affirmative, and gave it back to the man. "i shall have to go up to-morrow," he said to toby; "alington wants me to meet him in london; i shall go, of course. what a blessing one is a gentleman, and doesn't scream and sweat! now, not a word to anyone; it may not be as bad as it looks." jack started off early next morning, and drove straight to alington's rooms. sounds of piano-playing came from upstairs, and this somehow gave him a sense of relief. "people _in extremis_ do not play pianos," he said to himself, as he mounted the stairs. alington got up as soon as he came in. "i am glad you were able to come," he said; "it was expedient--necessary almost--that i should see you." "what has happened?" asked jack. mr. alington took a telegram from his pocket, and handed it to him. "the unexpected--it always does: this, in fact." jack took it and read: "chavasse left for england by p. and o. yesterday." "you don't understand, my dear conybeare, do you?" he said. "it is a very short story, and quite a little romance in its way." and, in a few words, he told jack the story of the burglary, chavasse's confession, and his idea of using him as an independent operator in australia. "i make no doubt what has occurred," he said. "the man has drawn out the somewhat considerable balance i left at melbourne for him to invest when ordered, and has taken it off with him. he has also, i expect, got hold of his own confession--a clever rogue." "but the telegram?" asked jack. "who sent the telegram about the strong support in australia?" mr. alington opened his mild eyes to their widest. "i, my dear fellow!" he said; "at least, of course i caused it to be sent. as usual, two days ago, i despatched one cipher telegram to this valet of mine, telling him to invest, and another to my manager telling him to wire, 'strong support in australia.' he did as i told him; chavasse did not. that is all." jack was silent a moment, but it did not take him long to grasp the whole situation, for it was very simple. "and what next?" he said. alington shrugged his shoulders. "unless the shares go up again before next settling-day, i shall almost certainly be bankrupt," he said. "then why, if the papers were correctly informed, did you go on buying last night?" "because i could get carmel dirt cheap," he said. "if they go up, i am so much the richer; if they do not, i am done in any case. this unfortunate _contretemps_ about my foolish valet does not affect the value of the mine. the gold is there just the same." "but nobody will believe that," put in jack. "for the present, as you say--for the immediate present--they will not realize it. they will think themselves lucky to part with their shares enormously below their value. my fortune depends on how soon they realize it." "there will be an inquiry into the matter?" "undoubtedly. bogus telegrams are not officially recognised by the stock exchange." alington was certainly at his best, so thought jack, when things happened. his sleek, unhurried respectability, a little trying and conventional at ordinary times, though unaltered in itself, became admirable, a rare manifestation of self-control. no flurried quickening marked his precise, unhurried sentences; they remained just as leisurely as ever. as in the days when carmel east and west was behaving in so mercurial a manner, though so consonantly with his wishes, so now, when the greater _coup_ had struck so back-handedly against himself, he did not cease to be imperturbably calm and lucid. though without breeding in the ordinary sense of the word, he had to a notable extent that most characteristic mark of breeding, utter absence of exaltation in unexpected prosperity and complete composure in disaster. there was nothing affected about him; he was, as always, unimpulsive master of himself, and this, which in the social mill seemed a lack of animation, in the mill of adversity became a thing to respect. "you take it very quietly," said jack. "it is mere habit," said alington. "by the way, i hope, my dear fellow, that your wife is better?" "much better, thanks. we went to goring yesterday." "so i saw in the papers. how much had you in carmel?" "eight thousand pounds cash. and half of my shares i have bought only, not paid for." "ah! will that be a difficulty?" "more like an impossibility, unless they go up before settling-day." "i am sorry for that," said alington, "for i should have recommended your buying even more. i am going to bluff the thing out. i am going to buy and buy. chavasse may go hang. i shall make no attempt to get him or his--my--fifty thousand pounds." "fifty thousand!" exclaimed jack involuntarily. "fifty thousand! indeed, i could not before the ship touches at the cape. but if i buy, and am known to be buying, it is still conceivable that confidence may be restored, that the damage done by that absurd, unreasonable panic yesterday may be repaired. i don't say that the rush for shares was not insane, but the panic was not less so. and now, my dear fellow, i congratulate you on the way you have taken it. you would make a financier. _Æquam memento rebus in arduis!_ how horace has the trick of stating simple things inspiritingly! a divine gift." "but what do you suppose they will find out at the inquiry?" asked jack. "ah, you need not fear the inquiry in the least. that will not touch your salary as director, which is the sort of thing which i see you have on your mind. no. what would perhaps be serious for you is, if i became bankrupt. then, it is true, my private accounts where your salary figures would be made public. the surest means of avoiding that is that shares should go up again before settling-day. it is with this view i am buying now; with this view i should recommend you to desperate measures! desperate? oh, certainly! but i must remind you that the case is fairly so. i see it is lunch time. you will lunch here, of course?" kit had not yet risen when jack went up to london that morning, and she found lily alone in the garden when she came down. her illness had left her very weak and frail, and though she was getting on rapidly, she felt very different from the kit who, a few weeks ago, would dress twenty times a day for twenty engagements, and sit up half the night with baccarat. physically and mentally, she had been much jarred by a very sudden and startling pull-up. all her life she had been content to go drifting giddily along, asking only of the moment that it should amuse her; and in those days when she lay in the darkened room it seemed as if somebody, not herself, had asked her some serious and frightening questions. at any rate, she had a scare, if no worse, and she felt disposed to go cautiously. out of she knew not where had leaped the forces that strike, that pay the wages of all action, of sin, of virtue, of justice and injustice, and to her had wages been given. she had heard of such things before; cant phrases of childhood reminded her that one reaped as one had sown, that causes lead to effects, but until now she had not any more certain news of them. but during those three days of semi-consciousness, in which she had clung instinctively to lily, it was as if some piece of herself, dormant and overlaid for the most part by the entertainment of ordinary every-day living, had, in the disablement of that, reasserted itself, and now that she was winning her way back to normal conditions this new consciousness had not been stilled again. lily, whom she had hitherto regarded as enviably rich, rather proper and _guindée_, had touched some chord in her which did not cease to vibrate. of all people in the world, kit would, _à priori_, have considered her the one who would naturally have shunned her. hitherto she had regarded her, viewed by any intimate standard, with all the complete indifference with which people who do not consider themselves good look upon those whom they regard as being so, and the sinner is always sublimely incurious of the attitudes and actions of the saint. but lily had come to her in her need; _guindée_ as she might be, she had yet been a comfort and an encouragement to her in the hopelessness of her desolation, just as if she was not, as kit supposed she must be, shocked at her. afterwards, during her convalescence, for days a secret fear had beset kit that the moment would come when lily would talk to her seriously, "jaw her," as she put it to herself--very sweetly and gently, no doubt, but still "jaw" her. that would spoil it all. but day had added itself to day, and the "jaw" was still unspoken. lily was only more patient with her than anyone, and more comfortable. she was not amusing, but kit for once did not want to be amused. her presence was pleasant; it was what kit wanted, and this gave her food for thought. more than once, again, during those darkened days kit had broken down, cried herself nearly hysterical, and it was lily who had soothed her back from the borders of insanity. she had not asked after the state of kit's soul, or urged repentance on her; she had not been improving, or told her that pain was sent her for a good reason. once, indeed, as we have seen, she had prayed with her, and kit, who would naturally have screamed at such an idea, or told all her friends what liberties a quite nice sister-in-law sometimes took, did neither. she found--it may have been imagination--that it did her good. all these things she had revolved secretly, but often, while they were staying at goring, and they seemed to her significant. her mind, indeed, used them as its ordinary provender, going to graze on them habitually. lily and toby were off next day, and when kit came down on the sunday morning following jack's departure to london, she had determined to talk to lily. it struck her as odd that three weeks ago she should have been so nervous that lily was going to talk to her, whereas now she herself was about to give her an intentional opportunity of doing so. also to-morrow she would be left alone with jack, who would return then, and sooner or later she and he would have to talk. hitherto both of them had avoided the one subject which filled their minds: while in london it was an ever-present dread to each that some day this must come, each continually apprehensive that the other would begin, yet half longing to get it over. both knew that the thing had to be talked out, there was no getting over that; nor was it any use waiting till the narcotic accumulation of time should dim the memories of that scene when kit had told him all, and been answered by a blow. there are certain things which no lapse of time will ever cover: this was one. words had to pass between them, and what those words should be neither could guess. here was another reason why kit wanted to be talked to by lily. they walked up and down the lawn for a few minutes, speaking of indifferent things, and lily made some reference to her leaving on the next day. "and i shall be alone with jack," said kit simply, but with purpose. "yes," said the other. then, after a pause: "you must have things to say to each other, kit. jack told toby yesterday he had hardly had a word with you since you were ill." kit stopped. "i dread it," she said, "and i know it must come. but, lily, what is to be said on either side? what can be said?" "ah, it's no use thinking over what you are going to say," said lily. "you will say what you must, what you feel." "i don't know what i feel," said kit. "let us sit down; it is warm. and i want to talk to you." they sat down on a garden-seat, shaded by the fan-branched cedar and looking out over the haze of summer sunshine and the slow, strong river. "i don't know what i feel," said kit again. "try to tell me as best you can," said lily quietly. "well, i won't be dishonest with myself, i am sure of that," said kit. "just now i have a horror of what--of what is past. but how can i know from what it springs? it may be only because the terrible consequences are still vivid to me. i have been wicked all my life--it is no use pretending otherwise. i have never tried to do good or to be good. well, i get paid out for a bad thing i have done. is it not most probable that i have a horror of it only because the punishment is very fresh to me?" "that is something," said lily. "if punishment makes you detest what you did, it is doing its work." "ah, but the burglar who is caught doesn't detest burglary, really. he may not commit it again, but that is a very different matter. you beat a dog for chasing a cat; when it sees a cat next time, it probably will put its tail down, but you have not eradicated its tendencies, or changed its nature." kit paused. she was groping about helplessly in her dim-lit soul. "you are a good woman, lily," she said. "you don't and you can't understand a person like me. oh, my dear, i should never have got through it but for you! i want to be good--before god, i believe i want to be good, but i don't know what it means. i can only say that i will not do certain things again. but how feeble is that! i want to see ted again--oh, how i want to!--but i believe that i want not to. is that any good? i want to love jack again. i did once, indeed i did, and i want him to love me. that is hopeless: he never will." lily was puzzled. kit's difficulties seemed, somehow, so elementary that explanation was impossible. but she knew that it was only through the acknowledgment and the facing of them that her salvation lay. kit was a child in matters of morals, and perfectly undeveloped; but, luckily, plain simplicity is the one means by which to approach children. tact, finesse, all the qualities which kit had and she had not were unneeded here. "kit, dear, it doesn't matter, so to speak, whether jack loves you or not," she said. "anyhow, it doesn't concern what you must do. oh, you will not find things easy, and i never heard that one was intended to. you will find a thousand things you want to do, and must not, a thousand things you must do which are hard--harder than the old bazaar-opening, kit. i am assuming, of course, that, on the whole, you want to be good. there is the great thing, broadly stated." kit nodded her head. "i don't know. i suppose i do," she said. "well, there is no master key to it," said lily. "separately and simply you have to take each thing, and do it or avoid it. you will need endless patience. i don't want to preach to you, and i don't know how; but you have asked me to help you. your life has been passed in a certain way: you have told me certain things about it. on the whole, you wish the future to be different. forget the past, then--try to forget it. do not dwell on it: it is a bad companion. it will only paralyze you, and you need all your power for what lies in front of you." "do you mean i must renounce the world, and all that?" asked kit. "no, nor go into a nunnery. you have a duty towards jack. do it; above all, keep on doing it, every day and always. consider whether there are not many things, harmless in themselves, which lead to things not harmless. avoid them." "don't flirt, you mean?" said kit quite sincerely. lily paused a moment. there was a certain coarse simplicity about kit which was at once embarrassing and helpful. never were appearances more misleading; for kit, with her pallor and exquisite face, looked the very image of a refined woman of the world, one who lived aloof from the grossness of life, yet of fine and complicated fibre. instead, as far as present purposes were concerned, she was as ignorant as a child, but without innocence. she had lost the latter without remedying the former. "certainly don't flirt," she said; "but don't do a great deal more than that. remember that you are a certain power in the world--many people take their tone from such as you--and let that power be on the right side. one knows dimly enough what goodness is, but one knows it sufficiently. i don't want you to be a raving reformer: that is not in your line. set your face steadily against a great many things which are commonly done by the people among whom you move." "the things i have done all my life," said kit. "yes, the things you have done all your life." kit sat silent, and the gentleness of her face to this straight speech was touching. at last she looked up. "and will you help me?" she asked. "oh, lily! i have been down into hell. and i didn't believe in it till i went there. but so it is--an outer darkness." she said it quite simply and earnestly, without bitterness, or the egotism which want of reticence so often carries with it. round them early summer was bright with a thousand blossoms and melodies; the mellow jangle of church bells was in the air; the time of the singing-bird had come. "but i can't feel--i am numb. i don't know where to go, or where i am going," she went on, her voice rising. "i only know that i don't want to go back to the life i have hitherto led; but there is nothing else. the great truths--god, religion, goodness--which mean so much, so everything to you, are nothing to me. i feel no real desire to be good, and yet i want to be not wicked. one suffers for being wicked. i can get no higher than that." "stick to that, dear kit," said lily. "i can tell you no more. only i know--i know that, if one goes on doing the thing one believes to be best, even quite blindly, the time comes that one's eyes are slowly opened. out of the darkness comes day. one sees from where one has come. then one look, and on again." "but for ever, till the end of one's life?" asked kit. "till the end of one's life. and the effort to behave decently has a great reward, which is decent behaviour." "and jack--what am i to say to jack?" "all you feel." "jack will think it so queer," said kit. "you did not see jack when you were at your worst that afternoon. oh, kit! it is an awful thing to see the helpless anguish of a man. he will not have forgotten that." "jack in anguish?" asked kit. "yes; just remember that it was so. here's toby. i thought he was at church. what a heathen my husband is!" toby strolled up, with his pipe in his mouth. "i meant to go to church," he said; "but eventually i decided to take--to take my spiritual consolation at home." "i, too, toby," said kit. chapter x toby draws the moral toby was sitting in the smoking-room of the bachelors' club some weeks later on a hot evening in july. the window was open, and the hum of london came booming in soft and large. it was nearly midnight, and the tide of carriages had set westward from the theatres, and was flowing fast. the pavements were full, the roadway was roaring, the season was gathered up for its final effort. now and then the door opened, and a man in evening dress would lounge in, ring for a whisky-and-soda, and turn listlessly over the leaves of an evening paper, or exchange a few remarks with a friend. as often as the door opened toby looked up, as if expecting someone. it had already struck midnight half an hour ago when jack entered. he looked worried and tired, and by the light of a match for his cigarette, which he lit as he crossed the room to where toby was sitting, the lines round his eyes, noticed and kindly commiserated a few months before by ted comber, seemed deeper and more harshly cut. he threw himself into a chair by toby. "drink?" asked the other. "no, thanks." toby was silent a moment. "i'm devilish sorry for you, jack," he said at length. "but i see by the paper that it is all over." "yes; they finished with me this afternoon. alington will have another week of it. jove! toby, for all his sleekness and hymn-singing, he is an iron fellow! he's got some fresh scheme on hand, and he's going about it with all his old quiet energy, and asked me to join him; but i told him i'd had enough of directorships. but there's a strong man for you! he is knocked flat, he picks himself up and goes straight on." he picked up the paper, and turned to the money-market. "and here's the cruel part of it all," he said, "for both of us: carmel is up to four pounds again. if they had only given him another month, he would have been as rich as ever, instead of having to declare bankruptcy; and i--well, i should have had a pound or two more. lord! on what small things life depends!" toby was silent. "about the park lane house," he said, after a pause. "i talked it over with lily, and if you'll let us have it at that price, we shall be delighted to take it. we only have our present house on a yearly lease, which expires in july." "you're a good fellow, toby." "oh, that's all rot!" said toby. "lily and i both want your house. it isn't as if we were doing you a kindness--it isn't really, jack. but it's such rough luck on you having to turn out. of course, you and kit will always come there whenever you like." jack lit another cigarette, flicking the end of the old one out of the window. "i think i will have a drink, toby," he said; "my throat is as dry as dust answering so many pertinent and impertinent questions, as to what i received as director, and what i made over carmel east and west. they let me off nothing, and the radical papers will be beautiful for the next week or two. they'll be enough to make one turn radical." "poor old jack! whisky? whisky-and-soda, waiter--two. well, it's all over." "ted comber was in court to-day," continued jack, "all curled, and dyed, and brushed, and manicured. he watched me all the time, toby. upon my word, i think that was the worst part of the whole show." toby showed his teeth for a moment. "i've made it up with him, i'm sorry to say," he remarked. "lily insisted on it. we shook hands, and i was afraid he was going to kiss me." "by the way, how is lily?" "happy as a queen when i left her this morning, and the boy, oh! jack, a beauty. he was shouting fit to knock the house down: you could have heard him in goring. i left early, but kit got up and breakfasted with me. knowing how she hates getting up early, i put that down at its proper value. but she didn't attend to me much: she has no thoughts except for lily and the boy." "kit has behaved like a real trump all through this," said jack. "never a word or a look of reproach to me. she's just been cheery, and simple, and splendid. you know, toby, she is utterly changed since--since that time before easter. we had a long talk the day after you and lily left us there two months ago. i was never so surprised in my life." "at what?" "at what she said, and at what i said--perhaps most of what i said. she told me she was going to try not to be such a brute. and, upon my soul, i thought it was an excellent plan. i said i would try too." toby laughed. "there's your whisky," he said. "hang it all! i haven't got any money. you'll have to pay for it yourself, jack--and mine, too. so you and kit made a bargain?" jack glanced round the room, which had emptied of all its well-dressed, weary occupants. he and toby were alone. "yes, we made a bargain. the worst of it was that neither of us know how to try, so we consulted lily. did it ever occur to you, toby, that you have married the nicest girl that ever breathed?" "i _had_ an idea of it. it was kit's doing, too. funny, that." "well, lily told us. she said some damned clever things. she said that turning over a new leaf meant not even looking back once to the old one. you know, toby, that's devilish good. i thought she'd tell us to think what brutes we had been, and repent. not a bit of it. we've just got to go straight on. don't grin; i'm perfectly serious." "i'm sure you are. i was only grinning at the notion of lily telling you to repent. you know, if there are two things that girl is not, jack, they are a preacher and a prig." "you're quite right, and i always thought that to be good you had to be either one or the other, and probably both. she tells me it is not necessarily so, and so kit and i are going to set to work. we are not going to run up any more huge bills which we can't pay; we are not going to invent or to listen to scandalous stories about other people; and we are going to flirt. we suggested that, and lily thought it would do to begin upon. also i was to tell the truth about alington's bankruptcy. i did that. really, toby, it's very easy to tell the truth: it requires no effort of the imagination. but the truth is a brute when it comes out." toby looked up smiling, but jack was perfectly grave and serious. "yes, you may think i don't mean it," he said, "but i do. we mean to reform, in fact; god knows it is high time. kit and i have lived in what i suppose you would call rather a careless manner all these years, and we have come to an almighty, all-round smash. we had a very serious talk--we had never talked seriously before, as far as i can remember--and we are going to try to do better." jack got up and went to the window, and leaned out for a moment into the warm summer night. then he turned into the room again. "we are indeed," he said. "good-night, toby;" and he walked off. ted comber had been to the opera that night, and was going on to a dance. they had been doing the "meistersingers," and it was consequently after twelve when he got out. the dance was in park lane, and he turned into the bachelors' club to freshen himself before going on. he had spent a really delightful day; for he had lunched with amusing people, had sat an hour listening to jack conybeare's examination in the alington bankruptcy case, and had had the opportunity of telling a very exalted personage about it afterwards, making him laugh for ten minutes, and ted, who had a fine loyal regard for exalted personages--some people called him a snob--was proportionately gratified. of course it was too terrible for poor jack, but it was absurd not to see the light side of it when properly considered. "i was really so sorry for him i didn't know what to do," he had said to lady coniston at dinner. "isn't it too terrible?" and they had both burst into shrieks of laughter, and discussed the question from every point and wondered how dear kit took it. the freshening up in the lavatory of the bachelors' club meant some little time and delicacy of touch. he had to be careful how he washed his face, for he had taken pains with it. certainly the effect was admirable; for the least touch of rouge on the cheek-bone, and positively only the shadow of an antimony pencil below his eyes had given his face the freshness of a boy's. he looked at himself quite candidly in the glass, and said, "not a day more than twenty-five." for he was no friend of false modesty, and any modesty he might have assumed about himself would have been undeniably false. all this care for one's appearance, it is true, made a terrible hole in one's time; but if it lengthened one's youth, it was an excellent investment of hours. there was nothing that could weigh against that paramount consideration. he dried his hands, still looking at himself, and put on his rings. a touch of the hairbrush was necessary, and for his hands the file of the nail-scissors. then he put on his coat again and went into the hall. jack conybeare was in the act of coming out of the smoking-room. ted had only a short moment for reflection, and almost without a pause he went on, meeting jack. "good-evening, jack," he said; "are you coming to the tauntons'? kit is in the country still, is she not?" jack had stopped on seeing him, and looked him over slowly from head to heel; then he walked by him without speaking, and went out. ted was only a little amused, and more than a little annoyed. just now it did not matter much what jack did, but, being wise in his generation, he did not care about being cut by anybody. the conybeares would probably pick up again in a year or two, and to be cut by the master of quite one of the nicest houses in london was a bore. besides, he was in an acme of good-fellowship after his amusing day. he went on into the smoking-room to look round before proceeding to his dance. toby was still sitting in the window where jack had left him. since their reconciliation a day or two before, ted had felt most friendly towards him, and he went delicately across the room to him, looking charming. "i just met jack in the hall," he said; "he looks terribly tired and old." toby bristled like a large collie dog. "naturally," he said. "in fact, he was rather short with me," said ted plaintively. this was too much. toby got up. "naturally," he said again. the poor little butterfly felt quite bruised. really, the conybeares had not any manners. it serves so little purpose to be rude to anyone, and it was so easy and repaying to be pleasant. he knew this well, for the whole of his nasty little life was spent in reaping the fruits of being constantly pleasant to people. they asked you to dinner, they asked you to stay at their country houses, and having asked you once they asked you again, because you took the trouble to talk and amuse people. what more can a butterfly want than a sunny garden with flowers always open? such a simple need! so easy to satisfy! well, there was a delicious flower open in park lane, and he went on to his dance. he must really give up the conybeares, he thought; they were becoming too prickly. he had written twice to kit, and had received no answer. jack had given him a dead cut; toby was a bear. and he sighed gently, thinking how stupid it was of the flowers to shut themselves up. as soon as he had gone, toby resumed his seat by the window. during the last few months he had touched life in a way he had never done before. to him this business of living had hitherto been a cheery, comfortable affair; the question of taking it seriously, even of taking it at all, had never formally presented itself to him. then quite suddenly, as it were, as he paddled pleasantly along, he had got out of his depth. the great irresistible forces of life had swept him away, the swift current of love had borne him far out into the great ocean of human experience. then, still encircled by that, he had seen storm-clouds gather, grim tempests had burst in hail and howling wind, the sea had grown black and foam-flecked. he had seen the tragedy of his brother's home--sin and its wages ruthlessly paid. there were such things as realities. and after that what? into what new forms would the wreckage be fashioned, these riven planks of a pleasure-boat? but underneath the lightness of jack's words to-night there had lain, toby felt, a seriousness which was new. and the change in kit was more marked still. outside, the world rolled on its way, and each unit in the crowd moved to his appointed goal, some of set purpose, others unconscious of it, but none the less on an inevitable way. in the brains of men stirred the thoughts which, for good or ill, should be the heritage of the next generation, part of their instinctive equipment. the vast design was being worked out, unerringly, unceasingly, unhurried and undelayed, through the sin of one, the virtue of another. to fall itself and to fail was but a step towards the ultimate perfection; behind all worked the master-hand. by strange pathways and chance meetings, by the death of the scarcely born and the innocent, by the unscathed life and health of the guiltiest, by love and beautiful things and terrible things, had all reached the spot where they stood to-day. devious might be the paths they should hereafter follow, but he who had led them thus far knew. and as toby thought on these things, moved beyond his wont, he looked out, and saw with a strange quickening of the blood that in the east already there were signs that out of night was shortly to be born another day. the end the honour of the clintons by archibald marshall _author of_ "elton manor," "the squire's daughter," "the eldest son," etc. new york dodd, mead and company copyright, , by dodd, mead and company _to_ _arthur marwood_ contents book i chapter i a home-coming ii a vulgar theft iii the squire is drawn in iv joan gives her evidence v a quiet talk vi the young birds vii the verdict book ii i bobby trench is asked to kencote ii joan and nancy iii humphrey and susan iv coming home from the ball v robert recumbent vi joan rebellious vii disappointments viii proposals book iii i the squire confronted ii a very present help iii the burden iv this our sister book iv i a return ii payment iii the straight path iv a conclave v waiting vi the power of the storm vii thinking it out viii skies clearing ix skies clear book i chapter i a home-coming the lilacs in the station-yard at kencote were heavy with their trusses of white and purple; the rich pastures that stretched away on either side of the line were yellow with buttercups. out of the smiling peace of the country-side came puffing the busy little branch-line train. it came to and fro half a dozen times a day, making a rare contact between the outside world and this sunny placid corner of meadow and brook and woodland. here all life that one could see was so quiet and so contented that the train seemed to lose its character as it crept across the bright levels, and to be less a noisy determined machine of progress than a trail of white steam, floating out over the grazing cattle and the willows by the brookside, as much in keeping with the scene as the wisps of cloud that made delicate the blue of the fresh spring sky. the white cloud detached itself from the engine and melted away into the sky, and the train slid with a cheerful rattle alongside the platform and came to a stand-still. nancy clinton, who had been awaiting its arrival with some impatience, waved her hand and hurried to the carriage from which she had seen looking out a face exactly like her own. by the time she had reached it her twin sister, joan, had alighted, and was ready with her greeting. "hullo, old girl!" "you're nearly ten minutes late." the twins had been parted for a fortnight, which had very seldom happened to them before in the whole nineteen years of their existence, and both of them were pleased to be together once more. if they had been rather less pleased they might have said rather more. more was, in fact, said by the maid who stood at the carriage door with joan's dressing-bag in her hand. "good-afternoon, miss nancy. lor, you _are_ looking well, and a sight for sore eyes. we've come back again, you see, and don't want to go away from you no more. miss joan, please ketch 'old of this, and i'll get the other things out. where's that porter? he wants somebody be'ind 'im with a stick." "hullo, hannah!" said nancy. "as talkative as ever! come along, joan. she can look after the things." the two girls went out through the booking-office, at the door of which the station-master expressed respectful pleasure at the return of the traveller, and got into the carriage waiting for them. there was a luggage cart as well, and the groom in charge of it touched his hat and grinned with pleasure; as did also the young coachman on the box. "i seem to be more popular than ever," said joan as she got into the carriage. "why aren't we allowed a footman?" "you won't find you're at all popular when you get home," said nancy. "the absence of a footman is intended to mark father's displeasure with you. he sent out to say there wasn't to be one, and william was to drive, instead of old probyn. father is very good at making his ritual expressive." "what's the trouble?" enquired joan. "my going to brummels for the week-end?" "yes. without a _with_-your-leave or _by_-your-leave. such a house as that is no place for a well-brought-up girl, and what on earth humphrey and susan were thinking of in taking you there he can't think. i say, why _did_ you all go in such a hurry? you didn't say anything about it when you wrote on friday." "because it was arranged all in a hurry. lady sedbergh is going through a month's rest cure at brummels, and she thought she'd have a lively party to say good-bye before she shuts herself up. it was bobby trench who made her ask us, at the last moment." "joan, is bobby trench paying you attentions? you never told me anything in your letters, but he seems to have been always about." joan laughed. "i'll tell you all about bobby trench later on," she said. "i've been saving it up. mother isn't annoyed at my going to brummels, is she?" "i don't think so. but she said humphrey and susan ought not to have taken you there without asking." "there wasn't time to ask. besides, i wanted to go, just to see how the smart set really do behave when they're all at home together." "well, how do they?" "it really is what frank calls '_chaude étoffe_.' i don't wonder that lady sedbergh wants a rest cure if that's how she spends her life. on sunday we had a fancy dress dinner--anything we could find--and she came down as the brummels ghost in a sort of nightgown with her hair down her back and her face whitened. she looked a positive idiot sitting at the head of the table. she must be at least fifty and the ghost was only seventeen." "what did you wear?" "oh, i borrowed hannah's cap and apron; and susan's maid lent me a black dress. i was much admired. susan was a flapper. she had on some clothes of betty trench's, who is only fourteen, and about her size. she looked rather silly. humphrey was properly dressed, except that he wore white trousers and a pink silk pyjama jacket. he said he was night and morning. he looked the most respectable of all the men, except lord sedbergh, who said he wasn't playing. he's a dear old thing and lets them all do just what they like, and laughs all the time. bobby trench was a bathing woman, with a sponge bag thing on his head. he was really awfully funny, but he was funniest of all when he forgot what he looked like and languished at me. i was having soup, and i choked, and lord rokeby, who was sitting next to me, thumped me on the back. all their manners are delightfully free and natural." "well, you seem to have enjoyed yourself." "we finished up the evening with a pillow fight. fancy!--lady sedbergh and some of the other older women joined in, and made as much noise as anybody. you should have seen hannah's face when i did at last get into my room, where she was waiting for me. she said a judgment was sure to fall on us for such goings on." "a judgment is certainly going to fall on _you_, my dear. father will seize you the moment you get into the house and ask you what you mean by it." "dear father!" said joan affectionately. "it _is_ jolly to be home again, nancy. how lovely the chestnuts are looking! dear peaceful old kencote!" they drove in through the lodge gates, where joan received a smile and a curtsey, and along the short drive through the park, and drew up beneath the porch of the big ugly square house. mrs. clinton was at the door, and joan enveloped her in an ardent embrace, which was interrupted by the appearance of the squire, big and burly, with a grizzled beard and a look of self-contented authority. "i've got something to say to you, miss joan. come into my room." he turned his back and marched off to the library, in which he spent most of his time when he was indoors. joan, after another hug and kiss, followed him. it may or may not have been a sign of the deterioration in manner, wrought by her visit to brummels, that she winked at nancy over her shoulder as she did so. "aren't you going to kiss me, father?" she asked, going up to him. "i am very pleased to see you again, and i'm sure you're just as pleased to see me." the face that she lifted up to him could not possibly have been resisted by any man who had not the privilege of close relationship. the squire, however, successfully resisted it. "i don't want to kiss you," he said. "i'm very displeased with you. what on earth possessed humphrey and susan to take you off to a house like that, without a with-your-leave or a by-your-leave? and what do you mean by going to places where you knew perfectly well you wouldn't be allowed to go?" "but, father darling," expostulated joan, with an expression of puzzled innocence, "i knew lord sedbergh was an old friend of yours. i didn't think you could _possibly_ object to my going there with humphrey and susan. they only got up their party on friday evening, and there wasn't time to write home. why do you mind so much?" "you know perfectly well why i mind," returned the squire irritably. "all sorts of things go on in houses like that, and all sorts of people are welcomed there that i won't have a daughter of mine mixed up with. you've been brought up in a god-fearing house, and you've got to content yourself with the life we live here. i tell you i won't have it." "well, i'm sorry, father dear. i won't do it again. now give me a kiss." but the squire was not yet ready for endearments. "won't do it again!" he echoed. "no, you won't do it again. i'll take good care of that. if you can't go on a visit to your relations without getting into mischief you'll stop at home." "i don't want anything better," replied joan tactfully. "i didn't know how ripping kencote was till i drove home just now. everything is looking lovely. how are the young birds doing?" "never mind about the young birds," said the squire. "we've got to get to the bottom of this business. you must have known very well that i should object to your going to a house like brummels. when that young trench came here a few years ago you heard me object very strongly to the way he behaved himself. cards on sunday, and using the house like an hotel, never keeping any hours except what suited himself, and i don't know what all. did they play cards on sunday at brummels?" joan was obliged to confess that they did. "of course! did _you_ play? did humphrey and susan play?" "oh no, father; i don't know how to play and i wouldn't think of it," replied joan hurriedly, to the first question. "did you go to church?" "oh yes, father. i went with lord sedbergh. he is a dear old man, and hates cards now." "i don't know why you should call him an old man. he is just the same age as i am. it's quite true that we were friends as young fellows. but that's a good many years ago. he has gone his way and i have gone mine. i don't suppose he is responsible for all the folly and extravagance that goes on in his house; still, he lives an altogether different sort of life, and we haven't met for years. if he remembers my name it's about as much as he would do." "oh, but he talked a lot about you, father. he told me all sorts of stories about when you were at cambridge together. he said once you began to play cards after dinner and didn't leave off until breakfast time the next morning." "h'm! ha!" said the squire. "of course young fellows do a number of foolish things that they don't do afterwards. did anyone but you and lord sedbergh go to church on sunday?" joan was obliged to confess that they had been the only attendants. "well, there it is!" said the squire. "out of all that household, only two willing to do their duty towards god almighty! i shall give humphrey and susan a piece of my mind. i blame them more for it than i do you. but at the same time you ought not to have gone, and i hope you fully understand that." "oh, yes, father dear," replied joan. "you have made it quite plain now. don't be cross any more, and give me a kiss. i've been longing for one ever since i came in." the squire capitulated. "now run away," he said when he had satisfied the calls of filial affection, and paternal no less. "i've got some papers to look through. what you've got to do is to put it all out of your mind, and settle down and make yourself happy at home. god knows i do all _i_ can to make my children happy. the amount that goes out in a house like this would frighten a good many people, and i expect some return of obedience to my wishes for all the sacrifices i make." when joan had left him the squire went to find his wife. "nina," he said, "i'm infernally worried about joan going to a house like brummels. the child's a good child, but wants looking after. she ought never to have been allowed to go up to susan. i thought trouble would come of it when it was suggested." mrs. clinton did not remind her husband that both the twins had stayed with their sister-in-law before, and that beyond a grumble at anybody preferring london to kencote he had never made any objection. "i think they ought not to have taken her away on a visit without asking," said mrs. clinton. "but joan and nancy are grown-up now, and i think they are both too sensible to take any harm by being with susan. what i feel is that they must see things for themselves, and not be kept always shut up at home." "shut up!" repeated the squire. "that's a foolish way of talking. home is the best place for young girls; and who could wish for a better home than kencote? the fact is that this london life is getting looser and more immoral every day. look what an effect it is having on humphrey and susan! what with all that money that old aunt laura left them, and the allowance i make to humphrey, and the few hundreds a year that susan has, they could very well afford to keep up quite a nice little place in the country, and live a sensible healthy life. as it is they live in a poky flat that you can hardly turn round in, and yet they spend twice as much money as dick, who is my eldest son, and is quite content to live here quietly in the dower house and not go running about all over the place. and they spend twice as much as walter, who has a family to keep. and they don't really get on well together, either. their marriage has been a great disappointment--a disappointment in every way. the fact is that a young couple without any children to look after and keep them steady are bound to get into mischief, especially if they've got the tastes that humphrey and susan have, and enough money to gratify them. nina, i _hate_ this set of people that they make their friends of. did you know that that mrs. amberley was staying at brummels?" "i saw her name in the paper," said mrs. clinton. "a nice sort of woman for a young girl like joan to be asked to meet! she's a notoriously loose character; and a good many other members of the party are no better than they should be. lady sedbergh herself is a frivolous fool, if she's no worse, and as for that young cub who came here a year or two ago, i don't know when i've seen a young fellow i object to more. i believe sedbergh himself has the remains of decency and dignity; but what does one person count amongst all that vicious gang? upon my word, humphrey and susan ought to be whipped for taking a girl of joan's age to such a place. the children shan't go to stay with them again. the fact is that they can't be trusted in anything. well, i can't stay talking here; i must go back to my papers." in the meantime joan had retired with nancy to their own quarters. they still occupied one of the large nurseries as their bedroom, and used the old schoolroom as a place where they could enjoy the privacy necessary for their own intimate pursuits. their elder sister and three of their brothers were married, their governess had left them at the end of the previous year, and as a rule they had these rooms on the second floor of the east wing entirely to themselves. but at this time, frank, their sailor brother, was at home on leave, and had taken up his old quarters there. he was a rising young lieutenant of twenty-six, and the twins had been presented to their sovereign and let loose generally on a grown-up world. but between them they managed to produce a creditable revival of the period when the east wing had been full of the noise and games of childhood; for they were all three young at heart and the cares of life as yet sat lightly on them. "frank and i have started schoolroom tea again," said nancy, as she and joan went up to their bedroom together. "he says he wants eggs, after being out the whole afternoon; and mother doesn't mind. you will preside over the urn at five o'clock." "jolly!" said joan. "where is frank?" "he hacked over to mountfield to see jim and cicely." (cicely, the eldest of the clinton girls, had married a country neighbour, jim graham, and lived about five miles from kencote.) "but he said he would be back for tea. i suppose you calmed father down all right?" "oh yes. he's a dear old lamb, but he must have his say out. you only have to give him his head, and he works it all off. you know, nancy, although father is rather tiresome at times, he is much better than all those silly old men you meet about london. he is over sixty, and he doesn't mind behaving like it. a lot of _them_ expect you to treat them as if they were your own age, whether they are married or not." "you seem to have gone through some eye-opening experiences." "i have. i feel that i know the world now." she had taken off her hat, and stood in front of the glass, touching the twined masses of her pretty fair hair. the lines of her slim body, and her delicate tapering fingers, were those of a woman; but the child's soul had not yet faded out of her eyes, and still set its impress on the curves of her mouth. "tell me about bobby trench." joan laughed, with a ringing note of amusement. "of course you know _why_ we were all given such a sudden and pressing invitation to brummels," she said. nancy jumped the implied question and answer. "well, it was bound to come sooner or later," she said. "with _both_ of us, i mean; not you only. there is no doubt we possess great personal attractions. but i don't think you have much to boast about, if it's only bobby trench. what is he like? has he changed at all since he came here?" "oh, he is just as silly and conceited as ever; but love has softened him." "i shouldn't want him softened, myself. he'd be sillier than ever. tell me all about it, joan. how did he behave?" joan told her all about it; and the recital would not have pleased mr. robert trench, if he had heard it. with those cool young eyes she had remorselessly regarded the antics of the attracted male, and found them only absurd. but she had not put a stop to them. "you know, nancy," she said guilelessly, "it's all very well to talk as they do in books about a man being able to make a girl like him if he keeps at her long enough; but i am quite sure bobby trench could never make me like him--in that way--if he tried for a hundred years. still, it _is_ rather nice to feel that one is grown up at last." "the fact of the matter is, you have been flirting with bobby trench," said nancy; "and you ought to be ashamed of yourself." but joan indignantly denied this. "what i did," she said, "was to prevent his flirting with me." there was a moment's pause. then nancy said unconcernedly, "i suppose i told you that john spence came here." joan turned round sharply, and looked at her. "no, you didn't," she said. after another moment's pause, she said, "you know you didn't." then came the question: "why didn't you?" "he was only here for two nights," said nancy. "at the dower house, of course. if i didn't tell you, i meant to." joan scrutinised her closely, and then turned away. "he was awfully sorry to miss you," nancy said. "he told me to give you his love." "thank you," said joan, rather stiffly. john spence was a friend of dick clinton, who had managed his estates for him for a year. he had first come to kencote when the twins were about fifteen, and had impressed himself on their youthful imaginations. he was nearly twenty years older than they, but simple of mind, free of his laughter, and noticeably warm-hearted. he liked all young things; and the clinton twins had afforded him great amusement. he had been to kencote occasionally as they were growing up, and the elder-brotherly intimacy with which he had treated them at the first had not altered. he was the friend of both of them, but when he had come twice to kencote to shoot, during the previous season, he had seemed to show a very slight preference for the society of joan. it had been so slight that the twins, who had never had thoughts which they had not shared, had made no mention of it between them. but now, at a stroke, the great fact of sex came rushing in to affect these young girls, who had played with it in a light unknowing way, but had never felt it. they could amuse themselves, and each other, with the amorous advances of bobby trench, but the fact that nancy had omitted to tell joan of john spence's visit was portentous, slight as the omission might seem. their habitual intercourse was one of intimate humour, varied by frank disputes, which never touched the close ties that bound them. but this was a subject on which they could neither joke nor quarrel. it was likely to alter the relations that had always existed between them, if it was not faced at once. it was impossible for either of them not to face it. for the whole of their lives each had known exactly what was in the mind of the other. each knew now, and the knowledge could not be ignored. "well, he was awfully nice," said nancy, rather as if she were saying something she did not want to. "i liked him better than ever. but he sent his love to you." "i don't see why you shouldn't have told me that he had come," said joan. but she saw very well, and in the light of her seeing john spence ceased to be the openly admired friend of her and nancy's childhood, and became something quite different. chapter ii a vulgar theft in the great square dining-room at kencote the squire was sitting over his wine, with his eldest and youngest sons. from the walls looked down portraits of clintons dead and gone, and of the horses and dogs that they had loved, as well as some pictures that by-gone owners of kencote had brought back from their travels, or bought from contemporary rising and since famous artists. there were some good pictures at kencote, but nobody ever took much notice of them, except a visitor now and then. yet their presence had its effect on these latest members of a healthy, ancient line. no family portraits went back further than two hundred years, because elizabethan kencote, with nearly all its treasures of art and antiquity, had been burnt down, and georgian kencote built in its place. even georgian kencote had suffered at the beginning of the nineteenth century, at the hands of a rich and progressive owner; rooms had been stripped of panelling, windows had been enlarged; and, but for a few old pieces here and there, the furniture was massive but ugly. the clintons were as old as any commoner's family in england, and had lived at kencote without any intermission for something like six hundred years; but there was little to show it in their surroundings as they were at present. only the portraits of the last six or seven generations spoke mutely but insistently of the past, and their prototypes were as well-known by name and character to their descendants as if they had been known in the flesh. to us, observing edward clinton, twentieth century squire of kencote, with the eldest son who would some day succeed him, and the youngest son, who had taken to one of those professions to which the younger sons of a line undistinguished for all except wealth and lineage had taken as a matter of course throughout long generations, this background of family portraits is full of suggestion. one might ask how much of the continuity of life and habit it represents is stable, how much of it dependent upon fast-changing circumstance. how far is this robust elderly man, living on his lands and desiring to live nowhere else, and the handsome younger man, whose life has been spent in the centre of all modern happenings,--how far are they what they appear to be, representative of the well-to-do classes of modern england; how far is their attitude to the life about them affected by ideas inherent in their long descent? are they really of the twentieth century, or in spite of superficial modernity, of a time already passed away? one might say that the life lived by the squire was the same life, in all but accidentals, as that of the squires who had gone before him, and whose portraits hung on the walls, and that it would be lived in much the same way by the son who was to come after him. and so it was. but the lives of those dead squires had been part of the natural order of things of their time. their lands had provided for it, and of themselves would provide for it no longer. it was only by the accident of our squire being a rich man, and being able to leave his son a rich man, that either of them could go on living it. to this extent his life was not based upon his descent, and was indeed as much cut off from that of the previous owners of kencote as if he had been a man of no ancestry at all, whose wealth, gained elsewhere, enabled him to enjoy an exotic existence as a country gentleman. if wealth disappeared the long chain would be broken, for a reason that would not have broken it before. but, when that is said, there still remains the whole ponderous weight of tradition, which makes of him something different from the rich outsider who, with no more than a generation or two behind him, or perhaps none at all, comes in to take the place of the dispossessed owner whose land alone will no longer support his state. what that counts for in inherited benevolence and sense of responsibility, qualified by strange spots of blindness where the awakened conscience of a community is beginning to see more clearly, it would be difficult to gauge. what one may say is that some flower whose perfume one can distinguish should be produced of a plant so many centuries rooted; that twenty generations of men preserved from the struggle for existence, and having power over their fellows, should end in something easily distinguishable from a man of yesterday; that such old established gentility should have some feelings not shared by the common mass, some peculiar sense of honour, some quality not dependent upon wealth alone, some clear principle emerging from the mists of prejudice and the mere dislike of all change. so we come back to the squire sitting with his sons over their wine, their pictured forebears looking down on them from the walls, and wonder a little whether there is anything in it all, or whether we are merely in the company of a man to whom chance has given the opportunity of ordering his life on obviously opulent lines, like many another with no forebears that he knows anything of. dick clinton had held a commission in his majesty's brigade of guards up to the time of his marriage four years before, and had been very much in the swim of everything that was going on in the world of rank and fashion. now he lived for the most part quietly at the dower house, which lay just across the park of kencote, and busied himself with country pursuits and the management of the estate to which he would one day succeed. he was beginning ever so little to put on flesh, to look more like his father, to lose his interest in the world outside the manor of kencote and the adjacent lands that went with it. but he was not yet a stay-at-home, as the squire had long since become, and he and his wife had just returned from a fortnight in london, well primed with the interests of their former associates. "have you heard about this business at brummels?" he said, as he passed the decanter. the squire frowned at the mention of brummels. "no. what business?" he asked. "lady sedbergh has had a pearl necklace stolen. it's said to be worth ten thousand pounds; say five. she says that she kept it in a secret hiding-place, and the only person who could have known where it was is rachel amberley. she accuses her of stealing it. there's going to be a pretty scandal." the squire frowned more ferociously than ever. "that's the sort of thing that goes on amongst people like that!" he said with disgust. "they have no more sense of honour than a set of convicts. a vulgar theft! and there's hardly one of the whole lot that wouldn't be capable of it." "well, i don't know about that," said dick; "but if mary sedbergh can be believed, there's not much doubt that mrs. amberley walked off with it. it seems that there's an old hiding-place in the morning-room at brummels. you press a spring in the wainscot, and find a cupboard." "there are plenty of those about," said the squire. "anybody might find it. still, i've no doubt that she's right, and it was that mrs. amberley who actually did steal it." frank laughed suddenly. he was accustomed to suck amusement out of the most unlikely sources, and his father, whether unlikely or not, was one of them. "why does she think mrs. amberley found it?" he asked. "because she showed her the hiding-place in a moment of expansion. it isn't just a cupboard behind the panelling. when you've found that you have only begun. there is another secret place behind the cupboard itself. only sedbergh and his wife knew of it. it's a secret that has been handed down; and well kept." "then why on earth did she tell a woman like mrs. amberley about it?" enquired the squire. "i don't know; though it's just like her to do it. i think mrs. amberley was at school with her, or something of that sort. she had a big party at brummels, and then emptied the house and went through a month's rest cure there. at the end of the month she looked for her necklace, and found it gone. a diamond star had gone as well; but other things she had put away had been left." "so, whoever the thief was, she had a month's start," said frank. "yes. sedbergh was called in, and they both went straight to rachel amberley and offered to hush it all up if she would give back the necklace." the squire snorted. "rachel amberley bluffed it out. she said she would have them up for scandal if they breathed a word of suspicion anywhere. they have been breathing a good many. in fact, it's all over the place. and nothing has happened yet. everybody is wondering who will make the first move." "_she_ won't," said the squire, who had never met mrs. amberley. "i am not in the way of hearing much that goes on amongst people of that sort, now, but she's a notoriously loose woman. that's why i was so annoyed when i heard that joan had been taken to a house where she was staying. by the by, this affair didn't take place at that particular time, did it?" "yes. that's when it happened." the squire's face was blacker than ever. "then it will be known who was of the party," he said. "our name will be dragged into one of these disgraceful scandals, and every dick, tom, and harry in the country will be talking about us. upon my word, it's maddening. i suppose i can't prevent humphrey and susan keeping what company they please, but it makes me furious every time i think of it--their taking joan there." "i don't suppose joan's name will come out," said dick. "there were lots of people in the house at the time, and they are not likely to mention all of them." the squire was forced to be content with this. "well, don't say anything about it to her," he said. "it's an unsavoury business, and the less she knows about that sort of thing the better." "you can't keep her shut up for ever," said dick; but his father pressed more insistently for silence. "i don't want it mentioned," he said irritably. "please don't say anything to her--or you either, frank." frank was mindful of this injunction when he next found himself alone with his sisters, which was at tea-time the next day. but he saw no harm in mentioning the name of mrs. amberley. what had joan thought of her during that visit to brummels, made memorable by the disturbance that had affected her home-coming? "oh, i'm sick of brummels," she said. "anyone would think it was--well, i won't sully my lips by repeating the name of the place. anyhow, it was a good deal more amusing than kencote." "kencote is the jolliest place in the world," said frank. "you and nancy are always running it down." "it may be the jolliest place in the world to you," said nancy, "because you are here so seldom, and you do exactly what you want to do when you _are_ here. it is pretty slow for joan and me, boxed up here all the year round." "well, never mind about that," said frank, "i want to know how the notorious mrs. amberley struck you, joan." "is she notorious?" asked joan. "she struck me as being old, if you want to know. much older than mother, although i suppose they are about the same age, and mother's hair is white, and hers is vermilion." "did you talk to her at all?" "not much. she isn't the sort of person who would care about girls. and i don't suppose they would care much about her, unless they were pretty advanced. i'm not, you know, frank. i'm a bread and butter miss from the country. i keep my mouth shut and my eyes open." "at the same time," said nancy, "our splendid youth is really a great attraction. if joan and i had lived in the eighteenth century, we should have been known as the beautiful miss clintons. and we should have had a very good time." "you have a very good time as it is," said frank, "only you're not sensible enough to know it. you ought not to want anything much jollier than this." the windows of the big airy upstairs room were wide open to the summer breezes. outside, the spreading lawns of the garden, bordered by ancient trees, and the grassy level of the park lay quiet and spacious, flooded with soft sunshine. there was an air of leisure and undisturbed seclusion about the scene, which was summed up in this room, retired from the rest of the house, where the happiness of childhood still lingered. it was not surprising that frank, coming back to it after his long sea wanderings, should have been seized by the opulent tranquillity of his home. he was as happy as he could be, all day and every day, woke up to a clear sensation of pleasure at finding himself where he was, and watched the dwindling tail of his leave with hardly less regret than the end of the holidays had brought him during his schooldays. at twenty-six, with ten years of the sea and the responsibilities of his profession behind him, he had stepped straight back into his boyhood. he was not reflective enough to realise that time would not stand still for him in this way for ever. it seemed to him that, whatever else might change, kencote would always be the same, and he could always recapture his boyhood there. that was partly why he disliked to hear his young sisters belittling its comparative stagnation, which was to him so delightful. he had thought them absurdly grown-up when he had first come home; but that effect had worn off. he was a boy, and they were children in the schoolroom again, their father and mother downstairs, out of the way of their noise. so it would be when he came home again in two or three years' time. so it would always be, as far as it was in him to look ahead. but his sisters had other ideas. their wing-feathers were growing, and they were already beginning to flutter them. perhaps in after years, whatever happiness might come to them--and all life in the future was, of course, to be happy, as well as much more exciting--they too would look back upon these midsummer months with regret, and wish for their childhood back again. a few days later joan and nancy were taking a country walk with their dogs. they were about a mile away from kencote, when a motor-car came suddenly along the road towards them, driven by a smart-looking young man in a green hat and a blue flannel suit. the girls were on the grass by the side of the road holding two of the dogs until it should have passed, when to their surprise it stopped, and a cheerful voice called out, "hullo, miss joan! here's a piece of luck! i was just on my way to see you." joan stood upright with a blush on her face, which she would have preferred not to have shown, while mr. robert trench jumped down from the car and advanced to shake hands with her. he also shook hands with nancy, remarking that he remembered her very well, and should have known her anywhere by her likeness to her sister. "what remarkable powers of observation you have!" observed joan, rallying her forces. bobby trench only grinned at her. "chaffing, as usual!" he said. "but, bless you, i don't mind. i say, i suppose you have heard about this beastly thing that has happened at brummels--about my mother's necklace?" "no, i haven't," said joan. "what, not heard that it was stolen! why, it was when you were staying in the house too. everybody is talking about it. wherever have you been burying yourself that you've heard nothing?" "at home at kencote," replied joan. "you don't think i brought the necklace away with me, do you?" bobby trench grinned again. "we were talking it over last night," he said. "i think we have seen everybody that was in the house at the time except you, and i said, 'by jove! i wonder whether miss joan noticed anything?' we don't want to leave any stone upturned, so i said i would run down and look you all up. it must be years since i came to kencote. you were both jolly little kids then." "i beg your pardon," said nancy, "we were fifteen. we weren't kids at all." "i apologise," said bobby. "anyhow, i thought it was a chance not to be missed. now, did you notice anything, miss joan? oh, i forgot; i haven't told you the story yet." "i think you had better do that first," said joan. bobby trench then told them the story, and when he came to describe the hiding-place joan gave an exclamation. "is it just where that little dutch picture hangs?" she asked. "the one with the old woman cleaning a copper pot?" "yes. that's the place," said bobby. "why? do you know anything about it?" joan's face was serious. "are you quite sure that mrs. amberley took the necklace?" she asked. "we're about as sure as we could be, unless we had actually seen her doing it. i'll tell you what we have found out afterwards. you didn't see her opening the cupboard by any chance, did you?" joan did not reply for a moment. nancy looked at her with some excitement on her face. "what _did_ you see?" she asked. still joan seemed unwilling to speak, and bobby trench said, "if you did see something, you ought to let us know. it's a very serious business. the things stolen are worth pots of money, and we know perfectly well that it can only be mrs. amberley who has taken them. besides, we've pretty well proved it now. we have found people to whom she sold separate pearls; but for goodness' sake don't let that out yet. i only tell you so that you may know that it wouldn't only rest on you." joan raised her eyes to his. "i went into the morning-room," she said, "and mrs. amberley was standing with her back to me by the fireplace." "by jove!" exclaimed bobby trench, staring at her as if fascinated. "she turned sharp round when i came in," said joan, "and then she asked me if i didn't love old dutch pictures, and showed me that one. that is why i remembered about it." "was she actually looking at it when you came in?" "well, no. i don't think she was. it was just a little to the right of where she was standing. i had forgotten all about it, but i remember now that when she mentioned the picture i thought to myself that she seemed to have been looking at the bare panels, and not at the picture at all. besides, she was blushing scarlet, and it was just as if i had caught her in something." "by jove! you must jolly nearly have caught her with the panel open. did you notice anything odd about the wall she was standing in front of as you came in?" joan thought for a moment. "no, i didn't," she said decidedly. "had she got anything in her hand?" joan thought again. "i didn't notice," she said. "but i believe she kept her hands behind her while she was talking to me. she didn't talk long. just as i was looking at the picture she suddenly said she had some letters to write, and went out of the room." bobby trench, with growing excitement, asked her further questions--as to the time at which this had happened, as to the exact words that mrs. amberley had said. "we've hit the bull's eye this time," he said. "what a brilliant idea it was of mine to come and ask you! look here, hadn't we better go and talk to mr. clinton about it? he's an old friend of my father's. i expect he'll be pleased to be able to give us a hand up over this business." "i should think he would be delighted," said nancy drily. "will joan have to give evidence at a trial?" "oh yes. there'll be a trial all right. we've got the good lady sitting, now. but you won't mind that, will you, miss joan? if you'll both hop in, i'll drive you back. we can take the dogs, too, if you like. i hope mr. clinton will be in. i shall be glad to see him again." chapter iii the squire is drawn in if bobby trench really felt the pleasure he had expressed at the prospect of seeing mr. clinton again, it was a sensation not shared by the squire, when his motor-car came swishing up the drive, and he alighted from it in company with joan and nancy. some few years before, humphrey clinton had brought him to kencote for some winter balls. lady susan clinton, a distant connection, now humphrey's wife, and her mother, had been members of the house-party, and trouble had ensued. they belonged to the fast modern world, which the squire abominated. they had essayed to play bridge on sunday; bobby trench had tried to get out of going to church, had made havoc of punctuality, had, in fact, seriously disturbed the serene, self-satisfied atmosphere of kencote. and the squire had never forgiven him. he was a "young cub," the sort of youth he never wished to see at kencote again, outside the pale of that god-fearing, self-respecting country aristocracy which was to the squire the head and front of all that was most admirable and best worth preserving in the body politic. bobby trench had been hardly less free of criticism on his own account. kencote was a cemetery of the dead, a little bit of hampstead stuck down ten miles from nowhere, which came to the same thing; its owner was an old clodhopper. never again would he permit himself to be inveigled into paying such a visit. yet here he was, advancing across the turf to where the tea-table was spread in the shade of a great cedar, with an ingratiating smile on his face, and apparently no doubt of the prospective warmth of his welcome. "how do you do, mrs. clinton? years since i saw you. how do you do, mr. clinton? you don't look a day older. the governor sent you messages, in case i should be lucky enough to see you. we are all at brummels for the week-end. i started at ten this morning; made about a hundred miles of it; lunched at bathgate. by jove, you live in a past century here! wonderful peaceful country, but a bit dull, eh?" the squire had somewhat recovered from his surprise during this speech, and was prepared to abide by his principles of hospitality, in spite of his distaste for bobby trench, and all he represented. but the last comment aroused his resentment, and emphasised the distance that lay between him and this glib young man. "we don't find it dull," he said; "but i dare say people who spend their lives rushing about from one place to another and never settling to anything might. they are welcome to their tastes, but the less i have to do with them the better i'm pleased." bobby trench laughed good-humouredly. "well, it's true we _are_ rather a rackety lot nowadays," he said. "i don't know that you haven't got the best of it, after all. i sometimes think i shouldn't mind settling down in the country myself, and doing a bit of gardening. we've started gardening at brummels. we quarrel like anything about it; it's the greatest sport. you don't go in for it here, i see. but it's a jolly place. you've got lots of opportunities." the squire found himself fast losing patience. it was true that he did not go in for gardening, in the modern way, judging that pursuit to be more fitted for the women of the family. mrs. clinton had her spring garden, in which she was allowed to have her own way, within limits, in the matter of designing patterns of bright-coloured flowers; and she was also allowed a say in the arrangement of the summer bedding, as long as she did not interfere too much with the ideas of the head gardener. but as for altering anything on a large scale, or even additional planting of anything more permanent than spring or summer flowers, that was not to be heard of. and yet the squire did love his garden, as he loved everything else about his home. he knew every tree and every shrub in it, and was immensely proud of the few rarities which every old garden that has at some time or other been in possession of an owner who has taken a living interest in it possesses. he knew nothing of the modern nurseryman's catalogue, but would gratefully accept a cutting or a root of something he admired from somebody else's garden, and see that it was brought on well and planted in the right place. he belonged to the days of will wimble, who was pleased "to carry a tulip-root in his pocket from one to another, or exchange a puppy between a couple of friends that lived perhaps on the opposite sides of the county"; and who shall say that that intimate sort of knowledge of an old-established garden gives less pleasure than the constant changes which modern gardening involves? if his great grandfather, who had called in an eighteenth century innovator to sweep away the old formal gardens of the elizabethan kencote, and lay the ground they covered all out afresh, had stayed his hand in the same way, he would have done a good deal better. the squire swallowed a cup of tea and rose from his seat. "well, i have a great deal of work to get through," he said, "so i'll ask you to excuse me. remember me to your father. it's years since we met, but we were a good deal together as young fellows." he held out his hand. it was as near a dismissal as he could bring himself to utter under the circumstances. he would have liked to be in a position to tell bobby trench that he did not want him at kencote, and the sooner he went the better; but he could not very well put his meaning into words. "oh, but wait a minute," said the totally unabashed bobby. "i've come over on important business, mr. clinton. i particularly want to have a word with you." "well, then, come into my room when you have had your tea," said the squire. "one of the girls will show you the way." "well, it's about miss joan i wanted to talk to you," persisted bobby. "of course, you've heard of that unfortunate business at brummels when she was there a few weeks ago--my mother's necklace being stolen, i mean." the squire's face showed rising temper. "i did hear of it," he said. "dick told me, and i asked him particularly not to say anything about it to joan. i don't want my girls to be mixed up in that sort of thing. have you told her about it?" bobby trench, marking the air of annoyance, chose to meet it with diplomatic lightness. "well, none of us want to be mixed up with that sort of thing," he said with a smile. "but i'm afraid we can't help ourselves in this instance. yes, i told miss joan. of course i thought she knew." the squire sat down again, the frown on his brow heavier than ever. "i must say it's very annoying," he said. "to be perfectly frank with you, i was annoyed at my daughter being taken to brummels at all. your father is an old friend of mine, and i should say the same to him. i don't like the sort of thing that goes on in houses like yours, and i don't want my children to know the sort of people that go to them. i may be old-fashioned; i dare say i am; but to my mind a woman like that mrs. amberley is no fit person for a young girl to come into contact with, and----" "well, you're about right there," broke in bobby trench, who may have been surprised at this exordium, but was unwilling to have to meet it directly. "she's no fit person for anybody to come in contact with, as it turns out. still, she's all right in a way, you know. she and my mother were friends as girls, and, of course, her people are all right. we couldn't tell that----" "i don't care who her people were," interrupted the squire in his turn. "she might be a royal princess for all i care; i say she would still be a disreputable woman. what's happened since only shows that she will stick at nothing. i should have objected just as much to a daughter of mine being asked to meet her if this vulgar theft hadn't happened. in fact, i did object. and a good many other people that haven't got themselves into trouble by stealing necklaces are no better than she is. it's the whole state of society, or what is called such nowadays, that i object to. i won't have my girls mixing with it. there are plenty of good people left who wouldn't have such women as mrs. amberley inside their houses, and they can find their friends amongst them. i'm annoyed that you should have said anything to joan about what has happened, and i don't want the subject mentioned again." "well, i'm sorry, mr. clinton," said bobby. "but we were bound to leave no stone unturned to get at the truth of things; and as it turns out miss joan will be a very valuable witness on our side. she saw mrs. amberley at the hiding-place, and can only just have escaped seeing her take out what was in it. she----" "what's this?" exclaimed the squire terrifically. joan met his gaze unflinchingly. the state of her conscience being serene, she was in truth rather enjoying herself, and her father's asperities had long ceased to terrify either her or nancy. "i told mr. trench what i saw," she said. "of course i hadn't thought about it before, because i knew nothing of what had happened." "what did you see?" enquired the squire. she told him. he received the information with a snort. "you saw a lady looking at a picture," he said. "what is there in that? i've no doubt that mrs. amberley did take the necklace, but if she is going to be charged with it there's not the slightest necessity for your name to be brought in at all. what you saw amounted to nothing." "oh, but i think it did," said bobby trench. "it was what she looked like when miss joan caught her. you said yourself that she looked as if she had been doing something she oughtn't to have done, and was startled at your coming in, didn't you, miss joan?" "yes," said joan. "it was just like that. and she blushed scarlet, and then ran away suddenly." "the fact is," said her father, "that you have imagined all this, because of what you were told. you think you will gain importance by telling a story of that sort; but i tell you i won't have it." "oh, father dear," expostulated joan, "i wouldn't tell stories, you know. i haven't imagined anything. it was all just as i have said." "well, then, you had better forget it as soon as you can," said the squire, changing his ground. "it's a most unpleasant subject, and i won't have you talking about it, do you hear?--either you or nancy. now mind what i say." he rose from his seat again, as if the subject was finally disposed of. and again bobby trench arrested his departure. "i'm afraid we can't leave it like that, you know, mr. clinton," he said. "miss joan's evidence is of the greatest possible importance to us. i'm bound to tell my people. besides, surely you wouldn't want to keep a fact like that back, would you? the necklace is worth six or seven thousand pounds, and if we bring the theft home to mrs. amberley, my mother may get some of the pearls back. we've already traced some of them, and know that she has been disposing of them separately." "tell your people by all means," said the squire. "but don't let joan's name be brought into the trial. i insist upon that. i won't have it." bobby trench stared at this exhibition of blindness to the necessities of the case. he made no reply, probably reflecting that the subpoena which would be served upon joan would bring those necessities home to the squire as readily as anything, and that it would be unnecessary to bring additional wrath upon himself by explaining matters beforehand. it was mrs. clinton who, observing his face, said, "i think mr. trench means that it will be necessary for joan to give evidence of what she saw at the trial, if it comes to that," she said. "what!" exclaimed the squire, bending his brows upon her. "what can you be thinking of to suggest such a thing, nina? a girl of joan's age to give evidence at a criminal trial! a pretty idea, indeed!" he transferred his glare upon bobby, who felt uncomfortable. "absurd old creature!" was his inward comment, but as he made it he looked at joan, standing in her white frock under the shade of her big hat, and the picture she made appealed so forcibly to his æsthetic sense that he was impelled to an endeavour to put the situation on a better footing. it would never do to go away saying nothing, and then to launch the bombshell of a subpoena into peaceful, prejudiced kencote. it would bring joan into the witness-box, but it would certainly keep bobby trench away from her, in the worst possible odour with her resentful parent. "i know it's a most awful bore, mr. clinton," he said. "i'll promise you this, that if miss joan can be kept out of it in any way, she shall be. i should hate to see her in the court myself." "you won't see her there," said the squire decisively. "but you'll excuse my saying that it won't matter to you one way or the other where you see her. i will write to your father about this business. it's all most infernally annoying, and i wish to goodness you had kept away from us--although i should have been glad enough to see you here if this hadn't happened." the last statement was not in the least true, but was drawn from him by the contest going on in his mind between his strong dislike of bobby trench and his sense of what was required of him towards a guest. he compelled himself to shake hands of farewell, and marched into the house, the set of his back and the way he held his head indicating plainly that he would give free rein to the acute irritation he was feeling when he got there. there was a pause when he had disappeared through the windows of the library, and then mrs. clinton asked quietly, "do you think there is any chance of joan not being required to give evidence at the trial?" "well, i'll tell you exactly how it is, mrs. clinton," said bobby, relieved at being able to address himself to somebody who was apparently capable of accepting facts. "if mrs. amberley would admit that she had stolen the necklace, and give back the pearls she hadn't made away with, we should drop it, and there wouldn't be any more bother. but i'm bound to say that i don't think she will now. it's gone too far. she brazened it out when my father and mother charged her with it, and she'll go on brazening it out. i think it is bound to come into the courts." "will she be charged with the theft?" "that's not quite settled on. she threatened to bring an action against us if we talked about it. and, of course, we _have_ talked. we are quite ready to meet her action, and would rather it came on in that way. but if she doesn't make a move soon, we shall be obliged to. it will be the only chance of getting anything back. we have had detectives working, and it is quite certain that she has sold pearls in paris within the last month. they are ready to swear to her. she has pawned one in london, too--in the city. so you see we're quite certain about her. yet it would only be circumstantial evidence, for, of course, nobody could swear to separate pearls; and she might get off. what miss joan saw would clinch it. i'm awfully sorry about it, since mr. clinton feels as he does, but i'm bound to say that i think she ought to be prepared to give her evidence. it wouldn't be fair on us to hold it back, even if it was possible--now would it?" mrs. clinton seemed unwilling to express an opinion, but she told her husband later on, when bobby trench had taken himself off, that she feared there would be no help for it, joan would have to give her evidence, whether they liked it or no. and so it proved. in answer to his letter to lord sedbergh, the squire received an intimation from his old friend that they had decided to prosecute at once. they had learnt that mrs. amberley, who was getting cold-shouldered everywhere, was making arrangements to leave england altogether. they were on the point of having her arrested. he was very sorry that a girl of joan's age should be mixed up in such an unpleasant affair, but it must be plain that her evidence could not be dispensed with, and he hoped that, after all, the ordeal might not be such a very trying one for her. she would only have to tell her story and stick to it. everything should be done on their side that was possible to make things easy for her, and the affair would soon blow over. the squire, raging inwardly and outwardly, had to bow to circumstances. the day after he had received lord sedbergh's letter a summons came for joan to present herself at a certain police court, and he and mrs. clinton took her up to london the same afternoon. chapter iv joan gives her evidence the june sunshine, beating through the dusty windows of the police court, fell upon a very different assembly from that which was usually to be found in that place of mean omen. the gay london crowd that was accustomed to pass continuously within a stone's throw of its walls, without giving a thought to those dubious stories of the underworld which were daily elucidated there, had made of it the centre of their interest this morning. many more than could be accommodated had sought for admission, in order to witness a scene in which the parts would be taken, not by the squalid professionals of crime, but by amateurs of their own high standing. the seedy loafers who were accustomed to congregate there had been shouldered out by a fashionable crowd, amongst which the actors who were to take part in the play found themselves the objects of attentions which some of them could well have dispensed with. joan sat between her father and mother, outwardly subdued, inwardly deeply interested. behind the natural shrinking of a young girl, compelled to stand up and be questioned in public, there was the pluck of her race to support her. it would not be worse than having a tooth stopped, and that prospect had never deterred her from appreciation of the illustrated papers in the dentist's waiting-room. so now she sat absorbed by the expectation of what was about to happen, and felt exactly as if she were waiting for the curtain to go up on the first scene of a play she eagerly wanted to see. she had almost come to feel as if she had been brought up to london to be accused of a crime herself. her father had been very trying, continually harping back upon that old grievance of her having gone to brummels in the first instance, and adding to it irritable censure of her fault in unburdening herself to bobby trench without consulting him beforehand. she held herself free of offence on either count, but had diplomatically refrained from asserting her innocence, to avoid still further arraignment. she had been inundated with instructions, often contradictory, as to how she should act and speak in the ordeal that lay before her; and if she had been of a nervous temperament might well have been driven into a panic long before she had come within measurable distance of undergoing it, and thus have acquitted herself in such a way as to draw an entirely new range of rebukes upon her head. her mother had simply told her that she must think before she said anything, and not say more than was necessary; and her uncle, the judge, at whose house they were staying, had repeated much the same advice, and had made light of what she would have to undergo. so, with her mind not greatly disturbed on that score, she felt a sense of relief at being now beyond her father's fussy attempts to blame and direct her at the same time, and able to turn her mind to the interests at hand. the squire would probably, even now, have been at her ear with repetitions of oft-given advice had not his own ear been engaged by lord sedbergh, who sat on the other side of him. lord sedbergh was an amiable, easy-going nobleman, not without some force of character, but too well off and indolent to care to exercise it in opposition to the society in which circumstances compelled him to move. he and the squire had been friends at eton, and also at cambridge, after which lord sedbergh had embraced a diplomatic career, until such time as he had succeeded to the family honours, while edward clinton, after a brief period of metropolitan glory as a cornet in the royal horse guards, had married early and settled down to a life of undiluted squiredom. the two had actually never met for over thirty years, and were now discovering that their youthful intimacy had not entirely evaporated during that period. at a moment more free from preoccupation they would have embarked on reminiscences which would have shed considerable warmth on this late meeting; and even as it was the squire felt that his old friend was still a friend, and that it was not such a bad thing after all to be in a position to lend strength to his just cause. "that's a very charming girl of yours, edward," lord sedbergh was saying. "bright and clever and pretty without being spoilt, as young women so quickly are now-a-days. we made great friends, she and i, when she stayed with us. i wish we could have spared her this, but i don't think she will be much bothered. they are bound to send the case for trial, and i should think the lady would reserve any defence she may have thought of putting up. still, i don't like to see young girls brought into a business of this sort, and if we could have done without little joan's evidence i should have been pleased." the squire was soothed by the expression of this very proper spirit, and after a little further conversation was even inclined to think with less annoyance of joan's disastrous visit to brummels, since the owner of that house was apparently sane and right-minded, whatever might be said of his family and their associates. "my boy bobby," said lord sedbergh, "has thrown himself into clearing this up heart and soul. he has a head on his shoulders, and i doubt if we should have been in the position we are if it hadn't been for him." but the squire was still incensed against bobby trench, and was not prepared to give him credit for being anything but the shallow-pated young fool with the over-free manners who had figured so frequently of late in his diatribes. he might have given some expression to this view of his friend's son, for he had not been accustomed in those early years of comradeship to hold back his opinions, and he was getting to feel more than ever that time and absence had wrought little change between them. but at this moment the curtain rang up for the play, and his attention was diverted. there was something of a sensation when mrs. amberley stood up before the court ready to meet her accusers. the squire's face, as he set eyes upon her for the first time, expressed surprise, condemnation, and disgust. the surprise was at the appearance of a woman of striking if somewhat strange and to him repellent beauty, whose eyes and cheeks flamed indignant protest against her situation, when he had expected to see some sort of haggard siren in an attitude combined of shame and impudence. the condemnation was directed against her air of arrogant scorn, and the bold way in which she looked round upon the assembled throng, allowing her gaze to rest upon those who had brought her there in such a way that she seemed to be the accuser and they the accused, and lady sedbergh for one dropped her eyes, unable to meet it. the disgust was at her appearance and attire, which seemed to the squire a bold flaunting of impudent wickedness in face of highly-placed respectability, as represented by the wives of people like himself, who were not ashamed to show the years which the almighty had caused to pass over their heads, and wore clothes which might indicate their rank, but were not intended to exhibit the unholy seductions of sex. joan, with the merciless arrogance of youth, had said that mrs. amberley had struck her as being old. she would not have said so if she had seen her now for the first time. whether it was owing to art, or to the stimulating flame of her indignation, her face showed none of the ravages of years. if that was owing to art alone, it was supreme art, for on a skin that was almost ivory in its pallor the flush stood, not crudely contrasted, but as if a rare variant of that strange whiteness. the great masses of her dull red hair even lady sedbergh, now violently antagonistic to her, must have acknowledged herself familiar with from before a time when art would have been brought to their production, whatever share it may have had now in preserving their arresting effect. her figure, in a gown of clear green, had all the slim suppleness of youth; her great black hat with its heavy plumes, might have been worn by joan herself. and yet, if she did not look old, or even middle-aged, still less did she look young. her eager lustrous eyes had seen the weariness of life as well as its consuming pleasures, and could not hide their knowledge; the lines of her face, delicate enough, were not those of youth. when the preliminaries had been gone through, lady sedbergh had to tell her story, which she did with a jumpy loquacity that seemed to indicate that whatever benefit she had obtained from her late rest-cure had by this time evaporated. the gist of it was that she and mrs. amberley had been discussing jewel robberies, and mrs. amberley had said that no place was safe for jewels if a clever thief was determined to get hold of them. they had been sitting by the morning-room fire, and the hiding-place in which she had always kept her own more valuable jewels was just at her side. she had not been able to refrain from mentioning it, and showing, under a promise of secrecy, where it was. you pressed a spring in the panelling, and found a recess in the stone of the thick wall behind. that might well have been discovered by chance; but what no one who did not know of the secret would expect was that, by turning one of the solid-looking stones on a pivot, a further receptacle was disclosed. no one had known of this but herself and husband, until she had told mrs. amberley. she was accustomed to carry her more valuable jewels with her wherever she went, especially the pearl necklace, and the diamond star, which had also been stolen. this she valued for sentimental reasons, which she did not disclose to the court. they were both in the secret receptacle when she showed it to mrs. amberley, as well as a few other cases containing more or less valuable jewels, none of which had been taken. it was on the day before her party was to break up that she had showed mrs. amberley her hiding-place. she had not worn any of the jewels she had put there that evening, nor visited it again until a month later, when she was about to return to london. then she had missed the necklace and the star. she had sent a telegram to her husband, who had come down at once, and after hearing her story had gone to see mrs. amberley with her. neither of them had any doubt that she was the only person who could possibly have taken the jewels, as she was the only person who knew where they were kept. "have you any questions to ask of the witness?" "yes." mrs. amberley spoke in a low-pitched vibrating voice. she was completely at her ease, and the contemptuous tone in which she asked her questions, and the significant pauses which she made after each confused voluble reply, not commenting upon it, but passing on to the next question, would have been effective if she had been a skilled criminal lawyer, and was much more so considering what she was and what she had at stake. "we have been intimate friends all our lives, you and i, haven't we?" lady sedbergh admitted it, but explained that she would never have made an intimate friend of anyone who would behave in that way, if she had known what she was really like. she was permitted to have her say out, with those scornful eyes fixed on her, until she trailed off into ineffective silence, when the next question came. "what was the first thing that i said to you when you had shown me the cupboard, and shut it up again?" it needed more than one intervention on the part of the magistrate before it was elicited that mrs. amberley had said, "well, now, if anything happens you can't accuse me. you would know i should be the last person." lady sedbergh volunteered the additional information that she had remembered those words, and even repeated them to her husband, but added that she put them down to mrs. amberley's cunning. "but isn't it true that if i had stolen your necklace i should have known positively that you would have suspected me at once?" no volubility would disguise the truth of that, and it had what weight it deserved. mrs. amberley asked no more questions, but her solicitor cross-examined lady sedbergh as to the means she had taken to preserve the knowledge of the hiding-place from her own maid, for instance, or from the other servants of the house. he made it appear rather absurd that in a great house, overrun with servants, like brummels, she could always have carried cases of jewels to and fro without being observed, or that her own maid would have had no curiosity as to where she kept them. the poor lady explained eagerly that she seldom wore the things she kept in her hiding-place when she was in the country, and that there was a safe in her husband's room in which she was supposed to keep what valuables she did not keep upstairs; but she explained so much and so incoherently that it had small effect in view of his persistence. it did seem rather absurd to everybody when her cross-examination was over, that anyone so foolish as she should have been able for so long to keep such a secret from everybody about her, especially in view of the irresponsible and causeless way in which she was shown finally to have let it out. if the case had rested on her testimony alone, mrs. amberley would have been acquitted, with hardly an additional stain on her character. joan, standing up bravely in her fresh girlhood to tell her story, was far more damaging. between mrs. amberley, completely self-possessed, and showing indignation only by the vibrations of her low voice, and lady sedbergh, with her flurried, rather pathetic efforts to put herself everywhere in the right, the advantage was on the side of the accused. she had no such foil in the frank bearing of the young girl, whose delicate bloom contrasted with her own exotic beauty only to show that whatever quality it may have had was not that of innocence. joan repeated what she had told bobby trench, in much the same words, and the only discount that could be taken off her evidence was the admission that she had thought nothing of it at all until after she had been told of what mrs. amberley was suspected. it was when she was just about to leave the witness-stand, and the squire, who had been following the process of question and answer with spasms of nervousness at each fresh speech, was beginning to breathe freely once more, that mrs. amberley looked at her with a glance from which, with all her care to avoid the expression of feeling, she could not banish the malice, and asked her, "would you have said what you did if it had been anybody but mr. trench who asked you?" the insinuation was plain enough, and joan met it with a warm blush which she would have given worlds to have been able to hold back. she felt the blood warming and reddening her cheeks and her neck, but she answered immediately in spite of it, "it was my sister who asked me what i had seen, when mr. trench told us both of what you were suspected"; and mrs. amberley let the answer pass, with an air of not finding it worth while to take further notice of such a childish person. joan made her way back to her seat between her father and mother, the blush slowly fading from her cheeks. she felt outraged at having had such a question put to her, and in such a tone, before all these knowing, sniggering people; and her distress was not lightened by her father saying to her in an angry whisper, "there now, you see what comes of making yourself free in that sort of company." he added, "confound the woman's impudence!" in a tone still more angry, which took off a little of the edge of his previous speech; and mrs. clinton took joan's hand in hers and pressed it. so presently she recovered her equanimity, and only blushed intermittently when she remembered what had been said to her. a french jeweller gave evidence of mrs. amberley having sold pearls to him in paris. she had been veiled and hooded, but he was sure it was the same lady. he should have recognised her by her voice alone. he gave the dates of the transactions, three in number; and other evidence was duly brought forward to show that mrs. amberley had been in paris on each of those dates. a london pawnbroker's assistant gave evidence of her having pawned a single pearl, which he produced. she had done it in her own name. he proved to be an indecisive witness under the pressure of mrs. amberley's lawyer, and said he was not sure now that it was the same lady, although he was nearly sure. but there was the transaction duly recorded, and mrs. amberley's name and london address entered in his books at the time. asked whether he thought it likely that a lady who was pawning stolen property, obviously with no idea of redeeming it, would give her own well-known name and address, he recovered himself sufficiently to answer very properly that he had nothing to do with what was likely or unlikely; there was his book. when all the witnesses had been examined, mrs. amberley's lawyer said that he should not oppose the case going for trial. he had advised his client to reserve her defence, but he might say that she had a full and convincing answer to the charge. when mrs. amberley had been duly committed for trial, there was a wrangle as to her being admitted to bail. it was stated in opposition that she was known to have contemplated leaving the country; she had in no way met the convincing evidence that had been brought against her, and in view of the gravity of the offence, &c., &c. finally, she was admitted to bail on heavy securities, which were immediately forthcoming. one of them was offered by sir roger amberley, her late husband's father, an old man who looked bowed down by shame; the other by lord colne, an elderly roué, who, so far from showing shame, appeared proud of his position as friend and supporter of the accused lady. mrs. amberley left the court with her father-in-law, and some who were within hearing when she thanked her other sponsor remarked that he did not seem likely to get much change out of his liability of two thousand pounds. the squire, with his wife and daughter, lunched at the extremely private hotel which he had patronised all his life, and left london for kencote by an early afternoon train. they were accompanied by humphrey and lady susan clinton, who had paid no visit to kencote since they had committed the fault of taking joan to brummels; and would not have paid the visit now if they could have got out of it. but the squire had insisted. he had sent mrs. clinton and joan on to his brother-in-law's house on their arrival in london the afternoon before, and had gone himself to his son's flat, with the object of unburdening his mind both to humphrey and his wife. but humphrey and susan had been out. he had waited for an hour, getting more and more angry, and convinced that they were seeking to evade him. he had then written a peremptory note, ordering them to join him at the station on the following afternoon, ready to go down to kencote, with instructions to wire acquiescence immediately on receipt of the order. the wire had arrived at his brother-in-law's house before he had reached it. "exceedingly sorry to have missed you. both delighted come kencote to-morrow. humphrey." the uncalled for expression of delight had not in the least softened his mood of anger, but he had gained a grim satisfaction from feeling that his word was law if he chose to make it so. this was added to by the determination to make the visit anything but an occasion of delight, and the anticipation of having somebody fresh on whom to wreak his anger; the satisfaction of relieving his feelings by censure of joan having now begun to wear rather thin. if humphrey was bent on smoothing out the situation, as was probably the case, it was impolitic of him to bring his own man to kencote as well as his wife's maid. the squire himself never took a man away with him, except on the rare occasions on which he went anywhere to shoot, and humphrey's servant was an additional offence. the squire's temper was not improved when humphrey, relieved of all anxieties about luggage and tickets and the rest of it, strolled up to him on the platform, dressed in the latest variety of summer country clothes, with the correct thing in spats, and the most modern shade in soft felt hats, and found him fussing over details that he might safely have left to mrs. clinton's capable maid. "oh, here you are," he said ungraciously. "if you're quite sure that your fellow has done everything for your own comfort, you might tell him to help parker with those things. i've engaged a carriage, but if i had thought you couldn't travel without your whole establishment i'd have told 'em to put on a saloon." "we've left the cook and the housemaid behind," said humphrey, outwardly undisturbed. "here, grant, take these things into your carriage." the squire turned his back and went up to the compartment at which his wife was standing with her daughter-in-law and joan. "better get in. better get in," he said. "we don't want to be left behind. how are you, susan? we've just had a pleasant result from your taking joan into the company of people like your precious mrs. amberley." lady susan made no attempt to avert his displeasure, which had evidently worked itself up to a point at which it must have immediate vent. she shook hands with him, and got into the carriage after mrs. clinton. she was a tall, fashionably-dressed woman, with a young, rather foolish face, not remarkably good-looking, but making the most of such points as she possessed. the squire rather liked her, in spite of his disapproval of many of her ways, partly because she had always treated him with deference, partly--although he would indignantly and conscientiously have denied it--because her title was a suitable ornament to the name she bore. he himself was the head of the family of which hers was a junior branch, but that branch had been ennobled at a date of quite respectable antiquity, and an earl's daughter is an earl's daughter wherever she may be found. the mild degree of satisfaction, however, that he felt on this head was quite sub-conscious, and did not lead him to pay any more deference to lady susan than he was accustomed to pay to the rest of the women of his family. the only lady in that position whom he treated with marked deference was the wife of his eldest son, who was an american, of no ancestry that he would have recognised as significant, who had once for a short period lowered even the ancestry she could claim by dancing on the stage. that story has been told elsewhere, and if the reader is inclined to cry snob, because the squire is admitted to have been pleased that one of his daughters-in-law bore a title, let it be considered that virginia, dick's wife, had made a complete conquest of him, and that he valued her little finger above lady susan's body. he began directly the train had started. "now look here, i've got a word to say to you two, and i may as well say it at once and get it over." humphrey, knowing that it was bound to come, was quite ready, but was also aware that to get it over was really the last thing his father wanted. whatever attitude he might take upon the subject, it would be returned to again and again as long as his visit to the paternal mansion should last. the best he could do was to get it over for the time being, and gain a respite in which to read the "field" and the other papers with which he had provided himself. to this end he put up no opposition, but admitted with grave face that he and his wife had done wrong, and agreed that subsequent events proved that they had done very wrong indeed. the squire would perhaps have preferred to have his annoyance warmed up by a difference of opinion, and was obliged to express it with all the more force, so that it might spontaneously acquire the requisite amount of heat. the end of it was rather surprising. he was getting along swimmingly, on a high note of displeasure, when he was brought to a sudden stop by lady susan bursting into tears. now tears from a woman were what the squire never could stand. he was essentially kind, and even tender-hearted, in spite of his usual attitude of irritable authority, and, since he had never lived with women who cried easily, he took tears from them very seriously. they meant, of course, for one thing, complete capitulation; for of tears of mere temper he had had no experience whatever; and they appealed to his chivalry as emphasising the weakness of the vessels from which they came. "oh, come now!" he said soothingly, and with an expression of discomfort. "no need to cry over it. it's over and done with for the present, and now i've pointed out quietly what a wrong thing it was, i'm quite sure it won't be repeated." but susan still continued to sob freely, and humphrey said with some indignation, "she's very much upset at what's happened. she's taken it much more to heart than you think. it doesn't want rubbing in any more." "well, perhaps i've said enough," admitted the squire, "but you've got to consider that we haven't done with this business yet. we shall have it hanging over us for months, until the trial comes on; and then we shall have to go through it all again. still, you know, susan, _you_ won't be called as a witness. _you've_ nothing to cry about. now, do leave off, my dear girl. let's put it out of our minds now, and think no more about it till we're obliged to. my dear child, what is the matter?" for susan's sobs had increased in volume, and now showed some signs of becoming hysterical. mrs. clinton essayed to soothe her in her calm sensible way, and humphrey said kindly, "all right, susan, we're not going to talk about it any more. we're both sorry we made the mistake we did, and you are not so much to blame for it as i am." but perhaps it was joan, who was not greatly moved by a woman's tears, who brought susan's to an end by remarking, "we are getting near lemborough. i think this train stops there." when susan had dried her eyes, and was able to speak with no more than an occasional hiccough, she said, "i am sorry for mrs. amberley. i don't know her very well, and i don't like her, but it's a horrible position to be put in." "well, i don't think you need waste much sympathy on her," said the squire. "if that's all you are crying about you might have saved your tears, my dear. she won't get more than she deserves." "it isn't what i was crying about," said susan. "you spoke as if all of us who were at brummels were just the same as she is." the squire did privately think that most of them, except humphrey and susan themselves, and lord sedbergh, and of course joan, would have been capable of acting in the same way as mrs. amberley, if necessity and opportunity had prompted them, but he said, "oh no, susan. i didn't mean to go nearly so far as that. still, there's a proverb about evil communications, you know, and i do hope you will take a lesson from this nasty business and steer clear of the sort of people who go in for that kind of thing." he spoke as if the people received into fashionable society who "went in" for stealing pearl necklaces were easily distinguishable from the rest. this was probably not precisely what he meant, and as susan plucked up a smile and said, "well, you've said some very unkind things to me, but i'm going to be a good girl now, and i hope you won't say any more," he allowed the subject to drop altogether, and the rest of the journey passed in peace. chapter v a quiet talk frank and nancy were on the platform at kencote. the squire, longing for his home whenever he was away from it, like any schoolboy detached from the dear familiar, was pleased to see their smiling faces. they were agreeably surprised by the warmth of his greeting, having expected him to reach home in even a worse state of mind than that in which he had left it, and not having realised that a dreaded ordeal has lost most of its sting when it has been gone through, even if its terrors have been worse than fancy had painted them. "well, young people," was his hearty greeting, "i hope you haven't been up to any pranks while we've been away." not a word about the police court proceedings; no black looks! they responded suitably to his geniality, and passed on to greet the other members of the family, looking on to the time when one of them could be detached to tell the story of what had happened. there was no stint of carriages in the squire's stables, nor of horses to draw or men to drive them. he himself invariably drove his phaeton from the station, enjoying, whatever the weather, the sense of being in the open air, doing one of the things that was a part of his natural life, after being cooped up for a couple of hours in a train. on this occasion there was also an open carriage, and the station omnibus for the servants and the luggage. this involved six horses, and five men, in the sober clinton livery of black cloth with dark green facings, and a general turn out in the way of fine upstanding satin-coated horseflesh, gloss of silver-plated harness, mirror-like carriage varnish, and spick and span retainerhood that would not have disgraced royalty itself. it was indeed with a sense almost akin to that of royalty that the squire took the salutes of his servants, and threw his eye over such of his vehicular possessions as met it. he was undisputed lord of this little corner of the world, and it was good to find himself back in his kingdom, after having been an undistinguished unit amongst london's millions, and especially to breathe its serene air after having had his nostrils filled with the sordid atmosphere of the police court. he took the reins of his pair of greys from his head coachman with a deep sense of satisfaction, and swung himself actively up on to his seat, but not before he had settled exactly who was to ride in which carriage. mrs. clinton always sat by the side of her husband, and did so now. but all the rest had wished to walk. the landau, however, was there, and could not be sent back empty. at least, the squire asked what was the good of having it sent down if nobody used it. so humphrey and susan sacrificed their desire for exercise to his sense of fitness, and joan, nancy, and frank set out to walk the short mile that lay between the station and the house, well pleased to find themselves alone together. the squire had completely recovered his equanimity for the time being, and his satisfaction at finding himself at home again translated itself into an impulse of good will towards his wife, sitting by his side. with her soft white hair and comely face, mrs. clinton looked a fitting helpmate for a country gentleman getting on in years, but still full of manly vigour. there was rather a splendid air about the squire, with his massive frame and his look of health and vigour, as he sat up driving his handsome horses; and his wife did not share it. he had married her for love when he had been a young man who might be called splendid without any qualification whatever, the owner of a fine estate at the pitch of its fruitfulness, and an admitted match for all but the very highest. he had chosen her, the daughter of an indian officer who lived in a small way on the outskirts of the neighbouring town, and had been considered by many to have made a misalliance. but he had never thought so himself. he had made of her a slave to his own preferences, kept her shut up from the time of her marriage, away from the pursuits and the friendships for which her understanding fitted her, and unconsciously belittled that understanding by demanding that in all things she should bring her intelligence down on a level with his. but he had trusted her more than he knew, and on the rare occasions on which she had quietly asserted herself to influence him he had followed her, and, without acknowledging or even feeling himself to have been in the wrong, had afterwards been glad of it. by giving way to him on an infinity of small matters, but not so small to her as to have avoided a sacrifice of many strong inclinations, she had kept her power to guide him in greater matters. whatever it may have been to her, his marriage had brought him all that he could ever have desired. she had brought him, perhaps, more submission than had been good for him. his native capacity for domineering had thriven on it; because he had never had to meet any big troubles in his married life, he had always made much of little ones; because she had so seldom opposed him, he took opposition from any quarter like a thwarted child. but she had made him always beneath the surface contented with her; never once in the forty years of their marriage, when he had gone about angrily chewing a grievance, had she been the cause of it. nothing that she might have struggled for and won in her own life would have outweighed that. now, with her own thoughts about what had happened strong in her, she had to sit and listen to his views, which were fortunately more cheerfully coloured than they had been for some days past. "well, that's over for the present," was the burden of his speech, but when he had so expressed himself with sundry variations, he found something else to comment upon. susan's tears! they had moved him. "i think she's all right at heart," he said. "she's had a shock." "yes," said mrs. clinton. "i am glad that she is to be with us for a day or two." the squire considered this. without any remarkable powers of discernment, he was yet not entirely incapable of interpreting his wife's sober judgments. "it will be a rest for her," he said. "she will want to forget it. yes. that's all very well--if she's learnt her lesson." mrs. clinton left him to make his own decision. "i shall certainly have a talk with humphrey," he said, rather grudgingly. "yes, edward. if you have a quiet talk with him, i feel sure that he will respond. he is in the mood for it." a quiet talk was not exactly what the squire had promised himself when he had summoned humphrey and susan to kencote. but perhaps his wife was right. she often was in these matters. and he had worked off a good deal of his irritation already in the train. yes, a quiet talk would be the thing; and susan should be left out of it. she had been reduced to tears once, and it would be disturbing if that should happen again. she might be considered to have learnt her lesson, as far as a woman could learn any lesson. the wholesome influence of kencote might be left to work in her repentant soul. he would deny himself the satisfaction of rubbing it in. the quiet talk took place as father and son walked out together after tea to see the young birds. frank had to be prevented from making a third in the expedition, and there was interruption from keepers, from dogs, and from the young birds themselves, whose place in the scheme of things it was to be discussed, in the month of june. but it was a satisfactory talk all the same, and the squire was pleased, and a little surprised, at his own kindly reasonableness. "i was sorry to make susan cry in the train. at least i wasn't altogether sorry--it showed she took to heart what i had said to her." "oh yes. she took it to heart all right. the whole business has given her a bit of a shock." "exactly what i said to your mother. she's had a shock. well, it isn't a bad thing to have a shock sometimes. it brings you to your senses if you've been going wrong. i don't want to be hard on you, my boy; but i shan't regret all the worry and unpleasantness i've been put to if it has the effect of making you think a bit about the way you have been going on, and changing your way of life--you and susan both." "yes." humphrey had not yet realised that the talk was to be a quiet one. it was not unusual for openings of this sort to develop into something that, however it might be viewed, could not be described as quiet. he was ready to be quiet himself; but he would give no handles if he could help it. the squire, however, could not altogether dispense with some sort of a handle, although he was prepared to grasp it softly. "you feel that yourself, eh?" he said. "you do recognise that you've been going wrong, what?" "oh yes," said humphrey readily. "we've been spending too much money, and i'm sick of it. it isn't good enough." this was not quite what the squire wanted. if humphrey had been spending too much money, he must be in debt; and if he was sick of it, he would obviously want to get out of debt. he did not want the quiet talk to follow the path of suggestions as to how that might be done. "well, if you've been spending too much money," he said, not without adroitness, "you can easily spend less. you have a very handsome income between you, and could have anything anybody could reasonably want if you only spent half of it. the fact is, you know, my boy, that you can't live the life you and susan have been living with any lasting satisfaction. your uncle tom preached a capital sermon about that last sunday. it was something to the effect of doing your duty in the world instead of looking out for pleasure, and it would be all the better for you, both here and hereafter. i don't pose as a saint--never have--but, after all, your religion's a real thing, or it isn't. i can only say that mine has been a comfort to me, many's the time. i have had my fair share of annoyances, and it has enabled me to get through them, hoping for a better time to come. and it has done more than that; it's made me see that a life of pleasure is a dangerous thing, by jove, and the man's a fool who goes in for it." "well, it depends on what you mean by pleasure." "that's not very difficult to see, is it? dancing about after amusement all day and half the night; rushing here, rushing there; never doing anything for the good of your fellow-creatures; getting more and more bored with yourself and everybody else; never----" "is that what you would call pleasure?" "what _i_ should call pleasure? no, thank god, it isn't. i'd sooner break stones on the road than live a life like that." "well, there you are, you see. what you would really call pleasure is something quite different. i suppose it would be to live quietly at home in the country, just as you _are_ doing. there's nothing dangerous in that." "of course there isn't. it's the best life for any man, if the almighty has put him into the position of enjoying it. it's a life of pleasure in a way--yes, that's perfectly true; but it's a life of duty too, and stern duty, by jove, very often. you can't be always thinking about yourself. you've got responsibilities, in a position like mine, and you've got to remember that some day you'll have to give an account of them. we'll just go in here and see gotch; i want a word with him about his bill for meal." gotch's bill for meal, and the welfare of the young birds under his charge having been duly discussed, the walk and the quiet talk were resumed. "well, as i was saying--what was it i was saying?" "you were pointing out that a big landowner had a jolly good time, but that he would have to give an account of all the fun he'd had by and by." "eh? well, that wasn't quite how i meant to put it. but you say yourself you are sick of the life you've been leading--and i don't wonder at it--and i wanted to show you that you can gain much more satisfaction by living quietly in the country, and amusing yourself in a healthy way, and doing your duty towards those dependent on you, than by living that unhealthy rackety london life. look at dick. there's no fellow who lived more in the thick of things than he did; but he kept his head through it all, and now the time has come for him to settle down here he's ready to do it, and i should think enjoys his life as much as any man could. it was just the same with me, only i gave it up sooner than he did. i had my two years in the blues, and then i married and settled down here; and i've never regretted it." "no, i don't suppose you have. the life suits you down to the ground, and dick too. it would suit me if i were in your place, or dick's." "well, you could easily live the life that dick lives, and you would find your money went a good deal further, if you made up your mind to do it. i wish you would. you would be a happier man in every way, and susan would be a happier woman." "i'm not sure of that. we might for a time, but we should miss a lot of things. you can amuse yourself in the country well enough half the year, but not all the year round; and we couldn't afford both." "my dear boy, i've been trying to tell you. you are going on the wrong tack altogether if you are always thinking about amusing yourself. it isn't the way to look at life. every man has duties to perform." "what duties should i have to perform? i'm not a landowner, and never likely to be one. if i lived in the country i should hunt a bit and shoot a bit; and for the rest of the time i don't know what i should do." "well, if you lived near here, you could be put on the bench. there's a lot of useful work that a man living on the income you have can do in keeping things going. in these times the more gentry there are living in a place, the better it is for the country all round. what do you do as it is? it can't be satisfactory to anybody to live year after year in a whirl. there's not a single thing you do in london that's good for you that you couldn't do better in the country." "i don't know about that. there's music for one thing, and pictures and plays. i'm not altogether the brainless voluptuary, you know. there's a lot goes on in london that keeps your mind alive, and you drop that if you bury yourself in the country." "stuff and nonsense!" exclaimed the squire, but with persistent good humour. "don't i keep my mind alive? you'd have the 'times' and the 'spectator'; and there are lots of clever people in the country. look at tom! he hardly ever goes near london. hates the place. but i'll guarantee that he reads as much as any bishop, and knows what's going on in the world as well as anybody. no, my dear boy, it won't do. i don't say there aren't people it suits to be in london. herbert birkett, for instance!" (this was mrs. clinton's brother, the judge.) "but he's been brought up to it. he hasn't got the tastes of a country gentleman, wouldn't be happy away from the athenæum club, and all that sort of thing. and george senhouse, with his parliament and his committees and so on. that's a different thing. they've got their work to do. but don't tell me you are like that. yours is a different life altogether. they spend theirs amongst sober, god-fearing people--at least george senhouse does. of course, herbert birkett was a radical, and i shouldn't like to answer for the morals of all _his_ friends, even now. but, anyhow, they're not the sort that would make a bosom friend of a woman like that mrs. amberley." "well, i don't know that i should make a bosom friend of her myself. but she's no worse than a lot of others. she's been found out--that's all--and, of course, the whole pack are in full cry after her now." "my dear boy, you are surely not going to stand up for a woman convicted of a vulgar theft!" "she hasn't been convicted yet. but even if she is guilty, as i suppose she is, one can't help feeling a bit sorry for her. you don't know what may have driven her to it. amberley left her badly off, and it's a desperate thing for a woman to be worried night and day by debt. that's what susan feels. she's known it in a sort of way herself. you know the dust-up we had a couple of years ago, when you kindly came to the rescue. well, i suppose that brings it home to her. she doesn't care for rachel amberley any more than i do, but she can't take the line about this business that most people take; and i'm inclined to think she's right. after all--you were talking about religion just now--it seems to me that religion ought to prevent you judging harshly of people who have got into trouble." the squire's upper lip went down. "flagrant dishonesty is not a thing that you can judge leniently, and no religion in the world would tell you to do so," he said. "you've got to keep to certain lines, or everything goes by the board. i don't like to hear you upholding such views." "it is all a question of how you are situated. it would be impossible to think of you, for instance, stealing anything. you wouldn't have the smallest temptation to. but you might do something else that would be just as bad." "_i_ might do something just as bad--something dishonourable!" "you never know. you might have a sudden temptation. of course, it wouldn't come in any way you expected! you might act on the spur of the moment." the squire stopped and faced his son. "that's a very foolish thing to say," he said with a frown. "a man of principle doesn't act dishonourably on the spur of the moment. doesn't honour count for anything with you?" humphrey walked on, and the squire walked with him. "i say you don't know what you'd do if an unexpected temptation came. you don't know how strong your principles are till they are tried." "they are tried. they are always being tried, in little ways. a man leads an upright life, as far as in him lies, and if a big question comes up, he's ready for it." "it depends on how much he is tried," said humphrey. "i say you never know." chapter vi the young birds "it's a horrid thing for a young girl to have to go through." john spence fitted two walnuts together in the palms of his big hands and cracked them with a sudden tightening of the muscles. his good-humoured ruddy face was solicitous. "i think they ought to have kept her out of it," he said. the dark-panelled dining-room of the dower house framed a warm picture of two men and two women sitting at the round table, bright with lights and flowers, old silver and sparkling glass. a fire of applewood twinkled on the hearth; for september had come round, and one section at least of the young birds, now adolescent, were about to discover for themselves what their elders had possibly warned them of: that those great brown creatures, whom they had hitherto known only as protective census-takers, became as dangerous as stoats and weasels when the dew began to lie thick on the grass. john spence had come down for the first day among the kencote partridges, leaving his own stubbles, which were more copiously populated, until later. dick clinton had generally started the season with him. the kencote partridges ranked second to the kencote pheasants, and could very well bide the convenience of those who were to kill them. but they had done very well this year, and it was becoming less easy to draw dick away from his home. "it's good of old john to put off his own shoot and come down here," he had said to his wife, when he had received the somewhat unexpected acceptance of his invitation. virginia had looked at him out of her great dark eyes, and there had been amusement in them, as well as the half-protective affection which they always showed towards her handsome husband; but she had said nothing to explain the amusement, and he had not noticed it. the party at the dinner-table was discussing mrs. amberley's trial, which was to come on in the following month. "joan has got her wits about her," said dick. "she answered up very well in the police court, and i don't suppose it will be any more terrible next month." "still, i think it's beastly for her," persisted his friend. "that woman--putting it to her publicly about trench! i read it in the evidence." "it was a piece of bluff," said dick. "still, she ought to have her neck wrung for it." "a cat!" said miss dexter, virginia's friend, square-faced and square-figured. "a spiteful, pilfering cat!" "poor darling little joan!" said virginia. "she hates the very name of bobby trench now, and she used to make all sorts of fun of him and his love-making before." "oh, he made love to her, did he?" asked spence. "don't talk such nonsense, virginia," said dick maritally. "he knew the twins when they were children; looks on them as children now. so they are. he's years older than joan." "still, she's a very pretty girl," said john spence. "and so is nancy." virginia laughed. "it's the same thing," she said. "well, i don't know," said john spence judicially. "in appearance, yes--perhaps so. but there is a difference. you see it more now they are grown up. i think nancy is cleverer. of course, they're both clever, but i should say nancy read more books and things. and what i like about nancy is that with all her brains she's a real good country girl. i must say i don't care about these knowing young women you meet about london, and in other people's houses." virginia laughed again. "tell mr. clinton that," she said. "he will think you one of the most sensible of men." "well, i don't profess to be a clever fellow myself," said john spence modestly; "but i like a girl to have brains and know how to use 'em, and i like her to like the country. it's what i like myself; and if mr. clinton thinks the same i'm with him all the time." "mr. clinton might not insist upon the brains," said miss dexter. virginia held up her finger. "toby!" she said warningly, "we don't criticise our relations-in-law." dick grinned indulgently at his neighbour. "how you'll let us have it when you go away from here!" he said. "i always do let you have it," she replied uncompromisingly. "you think such a deal of yourselves that it does you all the good in the world. but i don't wait till i go away." "i was rather sorry that joan got let into that gang of people at all," said john spence. "they're no good to anybody. it hasn't altered her at all, has it? she and nancy were the jolliest pair. lord, how they made me laugh when they were kids, and i first came down here!" he laughed now at the remembrance, a jolly, robust laugh which wrinkled his firm, weathered skin, and showed his white teeth. "i shouldn't like to see either of them spoiled by going about to houses like brummels," he said, with a return to seriousness. "i don't believe nancy would have cared about it." "she would have gone just the same as joan," said miss dexter, "if she had happened to be in the way of it, and she would have behaved just the same; that is, just as she ought to have behaved. you seem to think that joan is smirched because she has been let in, through no fault of hers, for this horrid thing. you're as bad as mrs. amberley." john spence received this charge with an "oh, i say!" but he added, "all the same, i wish it hadn't happened." the guns met the next morning at the corner by the dower house. the squire brought with him sir herbert birkett, the judge, and sir george senhouse, who had married the judge's daughter. neither of them would be expected to do much execution amongst the young birds, but the squire was strong on family ties, and liked to have his relatives to shoot with him, more especially when he was going to shoot partridges. the twins and lady senhouse were of the party, and virginia and miss dexter. it was a family occasion, and john spence, knowing that it was to be so, had felt glad, when he had looked out of his window in the morning, that he had put off the inauguration of his campaign amongst his own young birds in order to take part in it. joan and nancy, in workmanlike tweeds, gave him smiling welcome. previously, when he had shot at kencote, and they had gone out with the guns, they had disputed amicably as to which of them should walk and stand with him, and the one who had won the dispute had taken bold possession of him. neither did so this morning, and it was left to him to give an invitation. "well, joan," he said, when they were ready to move off, "are you going to keep me company?" "yes," said nancy instantly. "i am going with uncle herbert." "but you will come with me after lunch," said john spence, with a trifle of anxiety. "all right," she threw over her shoulder. they walked over a field of roots. a single bird got up some little distance away and flew parallel to the line. spence snapped it off neatly. "i'm going to shoot well to-day," he said with satisfaction. "i like a gallery, you know, joan. i say, nancy's not annoyed about anything, is she?" "not that i know of. why?" "oh, i don't know. i thought she seemed as if she didn't much want to come with me." "you see we're grown up now," said joan. "we can't seize you by the arm, as we used to do, and see which can pull hardest. we have to wait till you ask us." they had come to a high, rather blind fence, and the line had spread out, and was waiting. joan and john spence were practically alone, except for spence's wise and calm retriever. he looked down at her with the kind elder brotherly smile which, with his frank and simple appreciation of their humours, had so endeared him to the twins. "i say, that's awful rot, you know," he said. joan was conscious of pleasure and some relief as she met his eyes. she wanted nothing more than that things should be between the three of them as they had always been. she had come to think that perhaps, after all, nancy wanted nothing more, either; but she did not know, because they had not talked about john spence together lately. if this visit should show him to be what he had always been, they would talk about him together again, and perhaps that was what she wanted at the moment more than anything; for it was a source of discomfort to her that there was a subject taboo between nancy and herself. "it may be sad," she said. "but it isn't rot. we are grown up, and there is no getting over it." a shadow came over his face. "they've been teaching you things," he said. "when i came down here last, and you were away in london--and at brummels--nancy was just the same as she had always been. i don't see any reason why you should alter." "dear old jonathan! we'll never alter--to you," said joan affectionately. but she was conscious of a little pang. the birds began to come over. john spence accounted for his due share of them. "i wish i'd got another gun," he said. "you've done well with them this year." when they all came together for lunch, nancy said to joan, "uncle herbert is in splendid form--i don't mean over shooting, for he has hardly hit anything. has jonathan been amusing?" "no, not at all," said joan. "he has been lecturing me. he is getting old; he is just like father. i will gladly change with you." nancy stared, but said nothing. she and joan were accustomed to criticise everybody. but they had never yet criticised john spence. "well, my dear joan," said the judge, as she took her place by his side after lunch, "i heaped disgrace upon myself this morning, and i very much doubt if i shall wipe any of it off this afternoon. the kencote partridges are too many for me--too many and too fast. why do i still pursue them, at my age and with my reputation? is it a genuine love of sport, or mere vanity?" "vanity, i think," said joan. "you don't really care about it, you know. you are not like mr. spence, and father, and the boys, who think about nothing else." "it is true that i do think of other things occasionally. but where does the vanity come in? enlighten me for my good." "men are like that. mr. spence wouldn't be in the least ashamed at being ignorant of all the things that you know about, but you would be quite ashamed of not knowing something about sport." "a searching indictment, my dear joan. it comes home to me. i am a foolish and contemptible old man. and yet i do rather like it, you know. the colours of the trees and the fields, this delicious autumn air--the expectation--ah!" the advance guard of a covey had whizzed over his head unharmed; the rest came on, swerving in their rapid flight as if to dodge the charges from his barrels, which all except one of them succeeded in doing. "more coming. i shall be ready for them next time," he said, hastily ramming cartridges into his breach. more came--and most of them went. he had been in the best place, and had only killed three birds. "i must be content with that," he said with a sigh. "it is not bad for me. your john spence would have shot three times as many, but he would not have got more fun out of it than i have. joan, it is not all vanity." joan spent a pleasant afternoon, but she did not feel as happy over it as she would have done a year ago. when she and nancy summed up the experiences of the day she said, "i don't mind whether uncle herbert can shoot or not. it is much more amusing to be with him than with any of the others." "jonathan said you weren't half as keen on sport as you used to be," said nancy. "he thinks you are becoming fashionable." "idiot!" said joan. then she suddenly felt as if she wanted to cry, but terror at the idea of doing anything so unaccountable--before nancy--dried up the desire almost as soon as it was felt. "i am afraid i am getting too old for jonathan," she said. "he is beginning to bore me." chapter vii the verdict the squire rang his bell violently, with a loud exclamation of impatience. it was a handbell, on a table by the side of his easy chair, in front of which was a baize-covered rest, with his foot, voluminously swathed, upon it. a servant answered the bell with but little loss of time. "hasn't the groom come back yet?" asked the squire, in a tone of acute annoyance. "i told him to waste no time. he must have been dawdling." "he was just a-coming into the yard when your bell rang, sir," replied the man. "well, then, why----? ah, here they are at last. give them to me, porter." the butler had come in with a big roll of newspapers, which the squire seized from him and opened hurriedly, choosing the most voluminous of them, and throwing the others on to the floor by his side. the society trial. full report. verdict. it filled a whole page, and a column besides. the squire read steadily; his face, set to a frowning censure, showed gleams of surprise, and every now and then his lips forced an expression of disgust. he was not a rapid reader, and it was half an hour before he put down the paper, and after looking into the fire for a minute, took up another from the floor. at that moment the door opened, and a large elderly man with a mild and pleasant face came into the room. he was dressed in a dark pepper-and-salt suit, with a white tie, and shut the door carefully behind him. "ah, my dear tom!" said the squire. "you had nina's telegram, i suppose. i sent it down to you directly it came." "yes," said the rector. "i was surprised that it should all have been over so quickly. how is your foot this morning, edward?" "oh, all right. at least, it isn't all right. i had a horrible night--never slept a wink. i've got the papers here. the woman ought to have got penal servitude. yes, it was over quickly. it was all as plain as possible, and i'm glad she did herself no good by her monstrous lies. the gross impudence of it! evidently she'll stick at nothing. but i forgot. you haven't seen the evidence. here, read this! would it be believed that she could have put up such a defence? that bit there!" the rector deliberately fixed a pair of gold-rimmed glasses on to his nose, and took the paper, looking up occasionally from his reading as his brother interjected remarks, which interrupted but did not seem to irritate him. "i don't quite understand, edward," he said, when he had finished the passage to which his attention had been drawn. "she says the pearls she sold were given to her by somebody, but the name is not mentioned. apparently there was a wrangle about it." "oh, my dear tom," said the squire, "can't you see what it all means? it is as plain as the nose on your face. a wicked, baseless scandal." the rector returned to the newspaper, but his air of bewilderment remained. "oh well," said the squire with an impatient glance at him. "you don't live in the world where these things are talked about. i don't either, thank god. but one hears things. this infamous woman has posed as the--the friend--the mistress--yes, actually wanted it to be thought that she was the mistress, of---- no, i'm not going to say it; i won't sully my lips, or put ideas into your head. it's untrue, absolutely untrue, and people in that position are defenceless. she ought not to bring in their names even in idle talk. i'm very glad indeed that there was a strong stand made in the court." the rector had re-read the passage, and looked up with a slight flush on his cheeks--almost the look that an innocent girl might have shown if some shameful suggestion had come home to her. "it is not----" he hazarded. "oh, not here," the squire took him up. "paris. but it is all the more abominable. i don't believe a word of it. and even if it were true---- but is it a likely story?" "i hope not," said the rector gravely. "oh, these things do happen; i don't deny that. one can't judge these people quite the same as ourselves. but what a preposterous idea! pearls worth thousands! and at the very time when this necklace of lady sedbergh's was missing, and she was practically seen taking it! joan saw her. i'm glad they didn't worry joan too much over her evidence. i'm glad it's over for the child. it's annoyed me most infernally to be tied by the leg here, and not knowing what might be going on, where i couldn't direct or advise. however, she did very well--gave her answers simply and stuck to them, and there was no more of that impudent suggestion about young trench, i'm glad to say, except that they tried to make out he had put it all into her head. he's quite a decent fellow, that woman's counsel. herbert birkett knows him. it's pretty plain that he was only making the best of a bad job--couldn't expect to get the woman off, especially after she had put herself out of court in the way she did." "i see," said the rector, who had been reading steadily while this speech was being delivered, "that there was evidence from several people that she had worn a pearl necklace, before the time lady sedbergh's was stolen." "yes, and if you'll read further, you'll see that her maid declares that it was a sham one. she told her so herself. they tried to make out that she wanted to put her off the scent. but that won't wash. the maid gave her evidence very well. you'll see it towards the end. it is what clinched it. she had seen the diamond star in the woman's jewel-box. of course she has made away with it somehow, since; but the maid described it exactly. she had had it in her hands, and there was an unusual sort of catch, which she couldn't have heard about. she told her young man, and he went to the police. oh, it's _proved_. it isn't only circumstantial evidence, it's damning proof. and she's got far less than her deserts. a year's imprisonment! she ought to have had ten years' hard labour." "they seem to have convicted her on the theft of the diamond star alone." "yes, i don't quite understand why, except that there is no conceivable doubt as to that. i suppose her impudent lie about the necklace saved her, as far as that goes. it led them to drop the charge, as they had got her on the other. i must read the evidence again." the rector put the paper aside, and took off his glasses. "poor woman!" he said, with a sigh. "her life ruined! but it is well for her that she has been found out. her punishment will balance the account against her; she will get another start." "not in this country," said the squire vindictively. "she is done for. nobody will look at her again. i think one can say that much, at any rate. society is disgracefully loose now-a-days; but there are some things it can't stomach. i'm glad to think that this woman is one of them. we shall hear no more of mrs. amberley." "ah, well," said the rector, after a pause. "the world is not made up of what is called society. thank god there are men and women who will not turn away from a repentant sinner. who knows but what this poor woman may win her soul out of the disgrace that has befallen her?" "oh, my dear tom!" said the squire. "you live in the clouds. a woman like that hasn't got a soul." mrs. clinton and joan, with dick and virginia, returned to kencote that evening. the squire received his wife and daughter as if they had been playing truant, and intimated that now they had come home they had better put everything that had been happening out of their heads. they had seen for themselves what came of mixing with those sort of people, and he hoped that the lesson had not been wasted. the whole affair had given him an infinity of worry, and had no doubt brought on the attack from which he was suffering. it was all over now, and he didn't want to hear another word about it. in fact, it was not to be mentioned in the house. did joan understand that? he would not have her and nancy talking about it. they had plenty of other things to talk about. did she understand that? joan said that she quite understood it, and went off to give nancy a full account of her experiences. "my dear, she looked awful," she said. "she was wonderfully dressed, and had got herself up so that only a woman could have known that she was got up at all. but she looked as old as the hills. honestly, i felt sorry for her, although i hated her for what she said to me before. but she was fighting for her life, and she made a brave show." "but she couldn't say anything, could she? i thought the counsel did it all." "yes, that was the worst of it--for her. she had to stand there while they fought over her, and look all the time as if she didn't care. awful! poor thing, she's in prison now, and i should think she's glad of it." "i don't know in the least what happened, except that she was sent to prison for a year. father kept all the papers in his room." "i don't know much either. directly i had given my evidence mother took me away." "we'll get hold of a paper." "no, we mustn't. mother asked me not to." "what a bore! what was it like, giving your evidence? were you alarmed?" "no, not much. it wasn't worse than the other place. it wasn't so bad. sir edward logan, the sedberghs' counsel, was awfully sweet. he made me say exactly what i had seen, and when sir herbert jessop--that was _her_ man--tried to worry me into saying that bobby trench had put it all into my head, he got up and objected." "did he try to----" "no. he was quite nice about it, really. i suppose he had to try and make it out different, somehow. he left off directly our counsel objected, and the old judge said i had given my evidence very well and clearly. i don't think he really believed that i was making it all up." "you didn't hear what anybody else said?" "not a word. except when i was in the witness-box myself, i might just as well have been at home." "i wonder what the papers said about you. i wish we could see them." what those of the papers had said which gave their readers a description as well as a report of what had occurred, was that miss joan clinton had appeared in the witness-box in a simple but becoming costume, which some of them described, and given her evidence clearly and modestly. some of them said that she was pretty, and one, with a special appeal to the nonconformist conscience, said that it was a pity to see a young lady who from her appearance could not long since have left the schoolroom, and who looked and spoke as if she had been well brought up, involved in the sordid life of what was known as the higher circles, brought to light by these proceedings. the squire had read this comment with a snort of indignation. but for the quarter from which it came he would have recognised it as coinciding with his own frequently expressed opinion. as it was, he considered it an impertinent reflection upon himself and his order. when dick came up to see him that evening he did not insist that the subject should not be mentioned again. he asked him why he had not come in on his way from the station. "there has been nobody to tell me a thing," he said with some irritation. "i only know what i have read in the papers. upon my word, the woman's brazen insolence! was that why they dropped the charge of stealing the necklace, dick?" "the other was dead certain," said dick. "ah, that's what i thought. but people don't think--er----" "he _did_ give her pearls," said dick, with a matter-of-course air of inner knowledge. "and plenty of people have seen her wearing them, though she never seems to have worn them in london." "then it's true about----" "about him? of course it is." "oh! i thought she had made it up, shamelessly, because she knew it couldn't be contradicted." "it could have been contradicted easily enough if it hadn't been true. everybody has known about it for years." "but she told the maid the pearls were sham ones." "i dare say she did. but they weren't." "then there is really a doubt whether she did steal the necklace?" "oh, i don't think so. it makes it all the more likely. she would think, if it was found out she had got rid of single pearls, she could explain it by her own necklace. the mistake she made was in not being satisfied with taking the pearls. if she had left that rotten little star alone, which can't have been worth more than a hundred pounds or so, i doubt if they would have brought it home to her." "but she may have taken the star, and not have had time to find the necklace, when joan came in." "oh no. if she had been in the middle of it joan would have caught her at it. there was the stone to push back, as well as the panel to shut. besides, the necklace went. who did take it, if she didn't? nobody else knew." "oh, it's plain enough, of course. i haven't a doubt about it. but i thought you meant that there was some doubt." "no. i only meant there might have been, if she hadn't taken the star. of course, what she did was to get rid of those pearls as well as her own. she hasn't known which way to turn for money for ever so long. she went out of favour in _that_ quarter a couple of years ago, or more." "did she make any attempt to get her story backed up?" "moved heaven and earth, but found the doors shut. she found herself up against the police over there. they told her that if she dared to whisper such a story she would get into more serious trouble than she was in already. she's got pluck, you know. she must have seen it was no good, but she was in a royal rage, and made her people bring it up, out of spite. they say there were hints given; but i doubt that--in a court of law. anyhow, they wouldn't have it, and it didn't do her any good." "well, it's a most unsavoury story altogether," said the squire. "the woman's in prison now, and she richly deserves it." he and dick discussed the matter for another hour, and when the squire was helped up to bed he repeated his injunctions to mrs. clinton that it was not to be mentioned in the house again. book ii chapter i bobby trench is asked to kencote "well, old fellow, i think you might." it was bobby trench who spoke, in a voice of injured pleading. humphrey laughed. "my dear chap," he said, "i would, like a shot; but, to be perfectly honest with you, you haven't succeeded in commending yourself to the governor, and, after all, it's his house and not mine." they were driving to a meet of hounds. humphrey had so far taken to heart his father's criticisms upon his metropolitan mode of life that he had let his flat for the winter and taken a hunting box in northamptonshire, at which bobby trench was a frequent visitor. he was being asked by his friend to repeat the invitation he had given him some years before, to stay at kencote for some country balls, and he was kindly but firmly resisting the request. "i suppose you know what i want to go there for?" "well, i can form a rough guess. as far as i'm concerned, i should welcome the idea; but i won't disguise it from you that the governor wouldn't." "well, hang it! i may have trod on his corns--though i certainly never meant to, and i like him and all that--but you can't say that i'm not all right. i'm an only son, and all that sort of thing. i don't see how he could expect to get anybody better." "do you really mean business, bobby?" "yes, i do; if i can hit it off with her. she's bowled me over. she's as pretty as paint, and as bright and clever as they make 'em. sweet-tempered and kind-hearted too; and i like that about a girl. she was as nice as possible to my old governor; took a lot of trouble about him. he thinks the world of her. i tell you, he'd be as pleased as punch." "have you said anything to him?" "no, not yet. to tell you the truth--i'm a modest fellow, though i'm not always given the credit for it--i'm not in the least certain whether she'll see it in the same light as i do. i dare say that's what's brought it on, you know. they've been after me for years--it's only natural, i suppose--but what these old dowagers, and lots of the young women themselves too, don't seem to understand is that a man doesn't _like_ being run after. it puts him off. that's human nature. well, i needn't tell _you_ that it's me that's got to do all the running this time; and it's a pleasant change. i suppose she's never said anything to you about me, has she?" humphrey laughed. he remembered a few of the things that joan had said to him about his friend. "she looks on you as a stupendous joke so far," he said. "still, she's hardly more than a kid." "oh, i know. tell you the truth, when i first felt myself drawn that way, i said, 'no, robert. plenty of time yet. if you feel the same in a couple of years' time, you can let yourself go.' but i don't know. some other fellow might come along; and i'm not fool enough to think i've made such an impression that i can afford to keep away and let my hand play itself. no, what i want is to get my chance; i know now what i'm going to do with it, and i tell you i'm keener than i've ever been about anything in my life. look here, humphrey, you've got to get me down to kencote somehow after christmas. i never see her anywhere else. you ought not to keep those girls shut up as you do, you know." "_i_ keep them shut up! you talk as if i were the head of my respected family. well, look here. if it has really gone as far as you say it has, you'd better write to the governor. i tell you plainly, he doesn't think much of _you_; but he's an old friend of your father's, and he'd probably be no more averse to seeing one of his daughters marry a future peer than anybody else would. it wouldn't go all the way with him, but it would go some of the way." "no, thanks. that's not my way of doing things. i want to be loved for myself. if he did take to the idea, it wouldn't do me any good to be shoved forward in that sort of light. besides, to tell you the truth, i don't believe i should be half so keen if i was asked down with that idea." "oh, well!" said humphrey with a spurt of offence. "if that's how you feel about it----! i don't care a damn about your peerage, and all that sort of thing; i was only thinking it might help you over a fence with the governor. my young sister is good enough for any fellow." "i know that. i should consider myself jolly lucky if she took me. you needn't get shirty. it's just because she is the girl i want that i'm not going to lose any of the fun of winning off my own bat." "i'll see what i can do," said humphrey, after further conversation. "but if you go to rome you've got to do as rome does. you know what my governor is; and he's got a perfect right to run his own show as it suits him, and not as it suits other people. as far as i'm concerned, i've come to feel that kencote is a precious sight nicer house to go to than a great many. it's different, and the others are all just the same. you've got to keep to the rules, but if you do you have a very good time. it's a pleasant rest." "oh, i know. i feel just the same as you about it. it reminds you of the days of your childhood, and your mother's knee, and all that sort of thing. besides, they do you top-hole; i will say that. i'm old enough to appreciate it now; of course, five or six years ago i dare say i did think it a bit dull, and i may have shown it, though i never meant to rub your old governor up the wrong way. still, it will be quite different now. i'll teach in the sunday school if he wants me to." "if you go, you must observe strict punctuality as to meals, and you must do without games on sunday, and bally-ragging generally. that's about all, and it isn't so very desperate." "not a bit; and with your sister there it will be like heaven. oh, you've got to get me asked, humphrey." "i'll do what i can. by the by, don't say a word about the amberley business at kencote. he doesn't like that mentioned." "doesn't he? righto! it was the way your young sister showed up in that that clinched it with me. she was topping. looked as pretty as a picture, and never let them rattle her once. they took her off the moment she'd given her evidence, and i never got the chance of a word with her. i've actually never seen her since, and that's a couple of months ago now. well, here we are. i'm going to enjoy myself to-day." humphrey used his own discretion as to disclosing something of the state of his friend's affections when he and susan went down to kencote for christmas. "look here, father, i've got something rather interesting to tell you. bobby trench--oh, i know you don't like him, but you'll find him much improved--wants to pay his addresses to joan." "what!" the squire's expression was a mixture of disgust and incredulity. "it would be a very good match for her. they've been chasing him for years. he'll come in for all that money of lady sophia's, you know, as well as everything else." "oh, a good match!" exclaimed the squire impatiently. "i wouldn't have him about the place if he was the heir to a dukedom. and joan is hardly more than a child. time enough for all that in three or four years. and when the time comes i hope it will bring somebody as unlike master trench as possible." humphrey was rather dashed at this reception of his news. he was not quite so unaffected by bobby trench's place in the world and his prospective wealth as he had declared himself to be. to see one of his sisters married thus had struck him more and more as being desirable, and he had thought that his father would take much the same view, after a first expression of surprise and independence. "i know he annoyed you when he came here before," he said. "i told him that, and said i wasn't surprised at it." "well, i'm not sorry you told him that. i should have told him so myself pretty plainly if he hadn't been a guest in my house. what had he got to say to it?" "he said he was sorry he had offended you. but it was a good many years ago, and he was a fool in those days." "he's a fool now," said the squire. "when he came over here last summer, and let us in for all that infernal annoyance, which i shan't forgive him readily, he was just as impudent and superior as ever. a young cub like that--not that he's so very young now, but he's a cub all the same--seems to think that because a man chooses to live on his own property, and do his duty by the country, every smart gad-about with a handle to his name has got a right to look down upon him. there were clintons at kencote when _his_ particular trenches were pettifogging tradesmen in yorkshire, and centuries before that. i don't deny that sedbergh's title is a respectable one, as these things go nowadays, but to talk as if i ought to think myself honoured because a son of his wants to marry a daughter of mine is pure nonsense. does sedbergh know anything about this?" "no. but bobby says that he'll be as pleased as possible. he took a great fancy to joan. he said she had been better brought up than any girl he knew." "yes, he told me that himself, and i dare say it's true. i've brought up my children to fear god and behave themselves properly. if he'd done the same, or his idiot of a wife, i don't know that i should have objected to the idea. but your 'bobby' trench isn't what his father was at his age, and not likely to be. i suppose he hasn't had the impudence to say anything to joan yet?" "oh no. she doesn't know anything about it. in fact, he's not in the least sure about his chances with her. he only wants an opportunity of what i believe is called preferring his suit." "well, then, he won't get it. i don't care about the arrangement, and you can tell him so, if you like--from me." with this the squire strode out of the room, leaving humphrey not so convinced that bobby trench would not be given his opportunity as might have seemed likely. the squire spoke to his wife about it. what nonsense was this about something between joan and that young trench? surely a girl of joan's age might be doing something better than giving encouragement to every crack-brained young fool to make free with her name! that's what came of letting her run about all over the place, and in all sorts of company, instead of keeping her quietly at home, as girls of that age ought to be kept. when the proper time came he should have no objection to seeing her suitably married. no doubt some nice young fellow would come forward, whom they could welcome into the family, just as jim graham had come forward for cicely. in the meantime joan had better be kept from making herself too cheap. she seemed to think she could do anything she liked, now that she had done with her governess. if he heard any more of it, the governess should come back, and joan and nancy should go into the school-room again. mrs. clinton always had the advantage of time to think, when surprises of this sort were sprung upon her. when his speech came to an end she looked up at him and said, "i am sure that joan has not done or said anything that you could blame her for, edward. she does not like mr. trench. i do not like him either, and i know you don't. what is it you have heard?" "oh, i don't say that joan is to blame. i don't know. no, i don't think she is. sedbergh took to her, and said that she had been very well brought up. he told me that himself, and it is quite true. i've no fault to find with joan in this respect. she and nancy are good girls enough, though troublesome sometimes. they will grow out of that. she doesn't know anything about this, and i don't want it mentioned to her. young trench has been talking to humphrey. he wants to come here and pay his addresses to joan. that's what it comes to. i told humphrey i wouldn't have it, and there's an end of it." "i am glad of that, edward. i don't think he would have any chance with joan, and i should be sorry if it were otherwise." "well, as to that, joan needn't be encouraged to think that she's got the whole world to pick and choose from. if this young trench was the man his father was, it would be a very satisfactory arrangement. i don't deny that. he is the only son; and i shouldn't be entitled to expect a better marriage for a girl of mine, if position and money and all that sort of thing were everything." "oh, but they are not, are they?" said mrs. clinton. "they would not count at all if the man to whom they belonged were not what you could wish him to be." "well, i don't know that i should welcome a son-in-law who had no position and no money. i've a right to expect a daughter of mine to marry into the position in which she has been brought up. i wouldn't actually demand more than that. cicely did it, and i was quite satisfied. still, i shouldn't turn up my nose at a better match, and there's no doubt that this young trench, if he were all right, would be an excellent match." "but he is not, is he? you have always objected to him." "i can't say i know anything actually against him. i certainly shouldn't want to see more of him than i could help for my own sake. what is it _you_ object to in him?" "much the same as you do, edward. i dislike the sort of life he and those about him live. it is a different sort of life from that which we have encouraged any of our children to look forward to. i should be sorry to see joan thrown into it." "oh, thrown into it! nobody is going to throw her into it. i have said quite plainly that i don't like the idea. i may be old-fashioned--i dare say i am--but i'm not the sort of man to lose my head with pride because the heir to a peerage wants to marry my daughter." mrs. clinton looked down and said nothing, but her heart was rather heavy. "joan hasn't said anything about him, has she? nothing to show that she is aware that he--what shall i say--admires her?" "she has made fun of him constantly," said mrs. clinton. "i am glad that you have refused to have mr. trench here. if he came, and paid court to her, i cannot believe that she would have anything to say to him. nothing would come of it, except irritation and annoyance to you, and pain to me, and very possibly to joan." the squire left her and took his news to dick. "your mother has taken a strong prejudice against him," he said. "as far as i'm aware he has never done anything to deserve it, but women are like that. they take an idea into their heads and nothing will get it out." "well, you've never shown any strong partiality for him yourself, that i know of," said dick. "i don't care much about him, but he's a harmless sort of idiot. i always thought you were a bit rough on him." "did you? well, perhaps i am. i must say that he did annoy me infernally when he came here before, and if he comes here again it will be on the distinct understanding that he follows the rules of the house and behaves himself. kencote isn't brummels, and never will be as long as i'm alive. that has got to be made quite plain." "do you want him to marry joan, then?" "want it? no, i don't want it. why should i want anything of the sort? i'm not in the position of having to say 'thank you' to the first man who comes along and wants to marry one of my daughters. they'll marry well enough when the time comes. still, this young fellow is the son of one of my oldest friends, and i've never heard that there's actually anything against him; have you?" "no more than what's on the surface. if he married joan, i shouldn't want to live hand in glove with him." "you wouldn't object to the marriage if it came about?" dick did not reply at once. "it would be a good enough match from the worldly point of view," said the squire. dick looked up quickly. "i'm the wrong man to come to for that point of view," he said. "i didn't marry from it myself; nor did you." the squire digested this. "it's different for men," he said, with a shade of unwillingness. "you've got to take it into account with women." "i'm not going to advise either one way or the other," said dick. "if joan likes that sort of fellow, she's welcome to him; if she doesn't, i shan't blame her." "you think it's a matter for her to decide?" "it isn't a matter for me to decide." "she can't very well decide unless she sees him." "then let her see him, if you're satisfied with him yourself. he's not my fancy; but he may be hers, for all i can tell." the squire went back to his wife and told her that dick didn't care for bobby trench any more than he did himself, but had never heard anything against him. he didn't see any reason against his seeing joan. she could decide for herself. nobody would bring any pressure to bear on her. that wasn't the way things were done in these days. but lord sedbergh was one of his oldest friends, and wouldn't like it if he heard that they had refused to have his son in the house. he shouldn't like it himself. young trench had better be asked to kencote with the rest, for these balls that were coming on after christmas. if he showed that he had anything in him, well and good. if not, he needn't be asked again, and no harm would be done. "i will write to mr. trench," said mrs. clinton. "but i am sorry that you have decided to ask him here." the squire went away vaguely dissatisfied with himself, but took comfort in the thought that women didn't understand these things. chapter ii joan and nancy "my sweet old joan, tell me all about it." joan buried her fair head in virginia's skirts and burst into tears. she was sitting on the rug in front of the fire by virginia's side, in the gloaming. virginia put her slim hand on to her shoulder, and caressed her lightly. "it's too bad," she said gently, with her soft, hardly distinguishable american intonation. "i'm such a fool," said joan. "i don't know what i want. i don't want anything." she dried her eyes, but still kept her head on virginia's knee, and put up her hand to give virginia's a little squeeze. it was comforting to be with her, looking into the fire. "it's about john spence, isn't it, dear?" virginia asked. "i'm a fool," said joan again. "i don't like him as much as i used to." "is that why you're a fool?" asked virginia with a little laugh. "no," said joan seriously. "for caring about things changing, because one is grown up. i used to think it would be nothing but bliss to be grown up. now i wish nancy and i were little girls again. we used to be very happy together. we always talked about everything, it didn't matter what it was." "and now you don't. you don't talk about john spence." joan's tears flowed afresh. "i don't want to talk about it, virginia," she said. "i am sure you would never understand what i feel. whatever i said you would think i meant something else; and i don't a bit. i don't mind his liking nancy best. i don't want him to like me more than he does." "oh, my darling girl! i think i understand it all better than you do yourself. you are unhappy, and you don't know why." "then tell me why." "well, to begin with, you are just a little jealous." "oh, virginia! and you said you understood!" "you are jealous, just as you would be if dick were suddenly to show that he liked nancy better than you." "we used to have such fun together, all three of us. it never entered the heads of either of us to think which he liked the best. he liked us both just the same. why couldn't it go on like that? i've done nothing. it was after i came back from that horrid brummels. he didn't like my going there--not that it had anything to do with him. he was just like father about it, and tried to make out that it had altered me. it hadn't altered me at all. i was just the same as i had always been. it was he that had altered." "can't you see, little girl, that it couldn't always go on as it used to?" "why not?" "how can a man fall in love with two girls at once? he must choose one of them, or neither." "i didn't want him to fall in love with me," said joan quickly. "i am not in love with him. that's why it's so difficult to say anything. if i'm unhappy, it looks as if i must be." "not to me, dearest joan. but you can be jealous about people without being in love with them. you know, darling, i think john spence was almost bound to fall in love with one of you almost directly you grew up. i should have been very much surprised if he hadn't. but i could never tell which it would be. it was just as it happened to turn out. he came here when you were away, and that just turned the scale. after that it couldn't possibly be as it had been before, when you were both children; not even if you had behaved well about it." "what!" exclaimed joan, sitting up sharply. virginia smiled, and drew her back to her. "you haven't been kind to nancy, you know," she said. joan did not resist her, but said rather stiffly, "it's she who hasn't been kind to me." "how?" "she has said nothing to me. i don't know even what she thinks about it all. if you say i am jealous, that is what i am jealous about. i don't even know that he _is_ in love with her; and if he is, whether she knows it. she acts _exactly_ as we always used to with him, and as i did, until i saw he didn't want me to." "and then you became offended, and rather ostentatiously left them together whenever he came on the scene." "well, if he wanted nancy, and didn't want me, i wasn't going to push myself forward." "poor john spence!" said virginia. "he is very disturbed about you. i think he is very much in love with nancy. it has become plain even to my obtuse old dick now. but he might so easily have been very much in love with you, instead, that it troubles his dear simple candid old soul to think you have so changed. as far as he is concerned, he would like nothing better than to be on the old terms with you. he wouldn't like you any the less because he likes nancy more." "it is nancy i am thinking of," said joan after a pause. "she always has been just a little hard, and she is hard without a doubt now. fancy, virginia--somebody being in love with her, and showing it, and her never saying one single word to me about it! talking about anything else, but never about the only thing that she must be thinking about!" "don't you think she may be thinking you just a little hard? fancy--somebody being in love with her, and showing it, and joan not saying a word to her about it! talking about anything else, but never the one thing!" joan put her handkerchief to her eyes. "if it hadn't begun as it did i should have done everything i could to please her," she said. "i should have been just as interested and perhaps excited about it, for her sake, as she could have been herself. she could have told me everything she was feeling, and now she tells me nothing. i suppose when he has proposed to her, if he does, she will tell me, just as she might tell me if anybody had asked her the time; and then she will ask me what i am going to wear. oh, everything ought to be different between us just now." "yes, it ought," said virginia. "dear joan, you and nancy mustn't go on like this. i don't think nancy is hard; i am sure she isn't in this case. she must be feeling it--not to be able to talk to you." "if i thought that!" "darling, you know her so well--almost as well as you know yourself. can't you see that it must be so? can't you make it easy for her to talk to you? it would do away with your own unhappiness. it is that that you are really unhappy about. life is changing all about you. you are a child no longer, and you have nothing to put in the place of what you are losing. you are feeling lonely, and out of it all. isn't that it?" "yes, i suppose that is it. it used to be so jolly only a very short time ago--when frank was home in the summer. now kencote doesn't seem like the same place. i should like to go away." "you wouldn't feel the change so much if you and nancy were what you have always been to each other. joan dear, it is for you to take the first step. show nancy that you, of all people, are the most pleased at the happiness that is coming to her. i am quite sure she will respond." joan's tears came again. "i don't think she wants me now," she said. "she has somebody else, and i have nobody. at least, i have you--and mother. but nancy and i have been almost like one person." "she does want you, joan. she must want you, just as much as you want her. but she won't say so unless you give her the chance." "dear old nancy!" said joan softly. "i have been rather a pig to her. but i won't be any more." there was a long silence. then joan said, "there is something else, virginia. why has bobby trench been asked to come here to-morrow?" virginia laughed, after a momentary pause. "i expect he asked himself," she said. "hasn't he shown himself to be a great admirer of yours, joan?" "oh!" said joan without a smile. "i have never shown myself to be a great admirer of his. virginia, i can't understand it. i know mother wrote to him. i asked her why, and she said humphrey had wanted him asked, and father had said that he might be. she didn't seem to want to talk about him, and i could see that she didn't like him, and was sorry to have to ask him. it is father i don't understand. he has almost foamed at the mouth whenever bobby trench's name has been mentioned, and you know what a frightful fuss he made when i went to brummels, and when bobby trench came here about that amberley affair. he said he shouldn't be let in if he came again." "well, my dear, you know what your father is. he could no more act inhospitably to anybody than----" "oh, virginia, that's nonsense. he was quite rude to him when he came. besides, it's a different thing altogether, _asking_ him to come. he needn't have done that. why did he do it?" "isn't lord sedbergh an old friend of his?" "virginia, i believe you are in the conspiracy against me. i _hate_ bobby trench, and when he comes here i won't have a thing to say to him. if father wants him here, he can look after him himself. i couldn't believe it when it first came into my head; but father said something to me, after he had looked at me once or twice in an odd sort of way, almost as if i were a person he didn't know." "what did he say to you?" "oh, something about _him_, i forget what now. and when i said what an idiot i thought he was, he was quite annoyed, and said i ought not to talk about people in that way. how _can_ father be so changeable? he treats us as if nobody had any sense but himself, and lays down the law; and then, even in a question in which you agree with him, you find that all his sound and fury means nothing at all, and he has turned completely round." "well, my dear, we are not all the same. your father speaks very strongly whatever is in his mind at the moment, and if he has cause to change his mind he is just as strong on the other side. it was so with me, you know well enough. he wouldn't hear a word in my favour; and now he likes me almost as much as dick does. you have to dig down deeper than his speech to find what is fixed in him." "i don't believe that anything is fixed. anyone would have said that he had a _real_ dislike to brummels, and all that goes with it. i am sure he made fuss enough when i went there, and has gone on making it ever since; and bobby trench summed it all up for him. he wouldn't have this and he wouldn't have that; and kencote, and the way we live here, was the only sort of life that anybody ought to live. oh, _you_ know it all by heart. and then, just as one is beginning to think there is something in it, and that we _have_ been very happy living quietly here, one finds that _he_, of all people, wants something else." "what does he want?" "what does he want for _me_? does he want bobby trench, virginia? there! you don't say anything. you _are_ in the conspiracy. i _won't_. nothing will make me." "my dear child, there is no conspiracy. and if there were, i shouldn't be in it. _i_ don't want bobby trench for you; i want somebody much better. but i don't want anybody, yet awhile. i want to keep you." "doesn't mother want to keep me? does _she_ want bobby trench for me?" "no, i am quite sure she doesn't." "then what is it all about? oh, i am very unhappy, virginia. i want to talk it all over with nancy; but i can't now. it is just as if everything were falling away from me. nobody cares. a little time ago i should have gone to mother if i had hurt my finger. i feel all alone. why does father want to bring bobby trench worrying me, of all the people in the world?" "dearest joan, you are making too much of it. you talk as if you were going to be forced into something you don't like." "that is just what i feel is happening. it isn't like kencote; not like anything i have known. oh, i wish i were a little girl again." "my dear, put it like this; somebody is bound to want you, sooner or later. i suppose somebody wants you now. he moves mountains to get at you, and find out whether you want _him_. you don't, and that is all there is to say about it." "it might be," said joan, "if it weren't that father is one of the mountains. he is one that is very easily shifted. oh, i'm not a child any longer. i do know something about the world. i do know quite well that if he were not who he is, father would not have him near the place. money and rank--those are what he really cares about, though he pretends to despise them--in anybody else. what is the good of belonging to an old and proud family, as we do, if you can't be just a little prouder than the rest?" "well, my dear, as a product of a country where those things don't count for much, i am bound to say that i think it isn't much good. people are what their characters and surroundings make them." "father wouldn't say that. he would say that blood counted for a lot. i am quite sure he would say that people like us had a finer sense of honour than people who are nobodies by birth. i don't think he comes out of the test very well. i think if anything were to happen to him where his birth and his position wouldn't help him, his honour wouldn't be finer than anybody else's. if he were to lose all his money, for instance--i think he would feel that more than anything in the world. he would be stripped of almost everything. no-one would know him." "oh, joan darling, you mustn't say things like that. it isn't like you." poor joan, her mind at unrest, her first glimpse of the world outside the sheltered garden of her childhood showing her only the chill loneliness of its battling crowds, was not in a mood to insist upon her discoveries. "it does make me feel rather bitter," she said through her tears. "but i don't want to be." as she and nancy were dressing for dinner, she said lightly, but with a strained look in her eyes, "the conquering bobby trench will be here by this time to-morrow. nancy, you are not to go leaving me alone with him." nancy looked up at her sharply, but her face was hidden, and she did not see the look in it, the look which hoped for a warm return to their old habit of discussing everything and everybody together. "i suppose you would like me to take him off your hands so that you can devote yourself to john spence?" she said. if joan was ready to mention names, she was ready too. her meaning was not so unkind as her words; but how was joan, ready to smart at a touch, to know that? she could not speak for a moment. then she said with a quiver, "i don't want to devote myself to him. he likes you best." nancy heard the quiver, and it moved her; but not enough to soothe the soreness she felt against joan. joan might be ready now, unwillingly, to accept the fact that john spence liked nancy best; but she had stood out against it for a long time, and had not taken the discovery in the way that nancy was convinced she would have taken it herself, if joan had been the preferred. "if he does, it is your fault," she said. "i've not tried to make him. i have only been just the same as i always was; and you have been quite different." there was nothing in this speech that would have struck joan as unkind a few months before. but the tension was too great now to bear of the old outspokenness between them. how could virginia say that nancy wasn't hard? she only wanted to make friends, but nancy wanted to quarrel. but she would not be hard in return. "perhaps i have been rather a pig," she said. "i haven't meant to be; and i shan't be any more." nancy was conquered. the tears came into her own eyes. all that virginia said of her was true. she had been aching for the old intimacy with joan, more than ever now that such wonderful things were happening to her, and she had to keep them uncomfortably locked up in her own breast. but nancy would never cry if she could possibly stop herself. it was a point of honour with her, which joan, with whom tears came more readily, had always understood. if they were to get back on to the old ground, signs of emotion on joan's part would properly be met by a dry carelessness on hers. "well, you _have_ been rather a pig," she said, ready to fall on joan's neck, and give way to her own feelings without restraint, when the proprieties had once been observed. "but if you're not going to be any more, i'll forgive you." joan was too troubled to recognise this speech as a prelude to complete capitulation. she had gone as far as she could, and thought that nancy was repulsing her. she now burst into open tears, into which wounded pride entered as much as wounded affection. "you're a beast," she cried, using the free language of their childhood. "i don't want you to forgive me. i've done nothing to be forgiven for. i only thought you might want to be friends again. but if you don't, i don't either. i shan't try again." nancy wavered for a moment. then the memory of her own grievances rushed back upon her, and she shrugged her shoulders. "all right," she said. "if you're satisfied, i'm sure i am. i should have been quite ready to be friends, but it's impossible with you as you are now. i should leave off crying if i were you. you won't be fit to be seen." chapter iii humphrey and susan humphrey and susan arrived at kencote on a waft of good fortune. a widowed aunt of susan's, a lady of unaccountable actions, from whom it had never been safe to expect anything, whether good or bad, had died and left her niece a "little place." in the satisfaction induced by this acquisition, which seemed to endorse, almost supernaturally, his own oft-tendered advice, the squire looked upon his daughter-in-law with new eyes. her faults were forgotten; she was no longer, at best, a mere ornamental luxury of a wife, at worst a too expensive one; she had brought land into the family, or, at any rate--for there was very little land--property. she took her stand, in a small way, with those heiresses with whom the clintons had from time to time allied themselves, not infrequently to the permanent enhancement of the rooted kencote dignity, and occasionally to the swelling of one of the buds of the prolific clinton tree into the proud state of a branch. this had happened, many generations before, in the case of the ancestor from whom susan, a born clinton, had herself sprung, and had helped to the nurture of that particular branch so effectively that its umbrage was more conspicuous than that of the parent stem itself. what susan now brought would hardly have that effect. looked at rigorously in the mouth, her gift-horse might even have received a cool welcome in some stables. there was the house, situated on the borders of the new forest, charmingly enough, photographed as a pleasant, two-storied, creeper-decked villa suitable for the occupation of a lady of high rank and not more than adequate means. and there were gardens, paddocks, and a few acres of half-tamed forest, not more than twenty or five and twenty in all. there were also the contents of the house, faded carpets, crowded knick-knacks, berlin wool-work, theological library, crayon drawings, and all. but there was no money. that had been left to old servants, to "societies," and to the support of otherwise homeless cats and dogs, whose sad friendless state this old lady had had much at heart. "it will want a great deal of doing up," lady susan said. "the papers are too hideous for words, there's no sign of a bathroom, and the outbuildings are tumbling to pieces." nevertheless she seemed to be in high spirits over her legacy, and the squire, shutting his eyes to the state of the wallpapers and the outbuildings, and remembering only the acreage, congratulated her, and himself, warmly on the heritage. "my dear girl," he said, "it is a great piece of luck. you _are_ lucky, you know, you and humphrey. he could never have expected the life interest of practically the whole of old aunt laura's money, and now this has come just to point out the way in which you ought to enjoy your good fortune. the place produces nothing--well, that can't be helped. at any rate you live rent free, with your foot on your own little piece of ground; and you throw over all that nonsense which by this time i should think you're getting heartily sick and tired of." there was hint of interrogation in the tone of the last sentence, and it was responded to in a way to bring the squire into still closer approving accord with his daughter-in-law. "oh yes. we are both tired of it. we are going to get rid of the flat directly denny croft is ready for us. i am going to turn into a regular countrywoman. i shall wear thick boots, and keep chickens. we are going to economise too. we shall only keep three horses and a pony. and humphrey says he shall drink a great deal of beer. we are going to like ourselves tremendously in the country." the squire told mrs. clinton that nothing had pleased him better for a long time than the way susan was taking up with the idea of country life. "it is the best thing in the world," he said. "it has made a different woman of her already. she is brighter and steadier at the same time. it proves what i have always said, that that london life, if you go on living it year after year, is simply another name for boredom. who would have thought a year or two ago that susan would have been satisfied with anything else? yet here she is, overjoyed at the idea of escaping from it. nina, i can't help thinking that the finger of providence is to be seen here. the property is nothing much, after all--just a little bit of land to give them a hold on things. but if it hadn't come, i doubt if they would have made the change. i think we ought to be very thankful that things are ordered for us in the way they are." humphrey, accepting dick's congratulations on susan's legacy, expressed himself moderately satisfied. "it's not going to make millionaires of us," he said. "in fact, it will be a pretty tight squeeze to get the place made habitable. the old lady might have left something to go with it, instead of muddling away everything quite uselessly as she did. it would have made all the difference to us. still, it has shoved us into making the change, and i'm glad of it." "i should think you would be able to amuse yourself there all right," said dick. "you'll save three hundred a year over your rent, for one thing. but i don't know--if you get into the way of going up to london constantly, you'll soon mop that up." "oh, i know. i'm not going to. i don't say we're going to bury ourselves there entirely, but we shall stick to it pretty well. and when we do go up to town we can put up with susan's people, or somewhere." "yes. if you'll take a word of warning, it's quite possible you may find it a bit slow after the novelty has worn off. i don't myself, because i've got what amounts to a job here. but you won't have; and you were always keener on town pleasures than i was. you'll have to watch it a bit after the first month or two." "oh, my dear fellow, i've got all that in my mind. one has to do one or the other; one can't do both; or, at least, most of us can't. i tell you, i've had a sickener of the other. it isn't good enough. this will be a change, and i want a change." more seemed to be coming, and dick waited for it to come, after saying rather perfunctorily, "susan seems to like the idea too." "i'm glad to say she does," said humphrey; "more than i should have thought she would. of course, she's excited at having the place left to her, and she's going to have no end of fun over rigging it up. i shall have to be careful how i go, there. it's a new toy; and my experience is that new toys are apt to run you into a lot of money. still, i've warned her about that, and told her that when we go to denny croft we stop there; and she says she doesn't want anything better. i tell you, it's a weight off my mind to find her ready to take a sensible view of things." still dick waited for more. "we _ought_ to have been able to do all right," said humphrey, after a slight pause. "i don't like giving up london, and that's a fact. i can amuse myself in the country all right, couldn't do without it altogether--i'm not a born townsman, like some fellows--but i prefer it to go to, not to live in. but i'm ready to do anything and go anywhere, to get rid of the beastly burden of things. that's why i welcome the change." "you won't find it such an unpleasant change." "as things are, it will be the greatest relief. and yet other people manage to get on, and do everything we have done, on less than we have." "well, you've neither of you got what you might call a passion for economy." "i believe i'm getting it," said humphrey with a laugh. "i've begun to keep accounts. when i looked into things a year or two ago, and the governor squared us up, i told susan that it mustn't happen again. i made estimates and got her to agree with them." "it is the only way, if you want to know what you're spending. i do it as a matter of principle. besides, you get more for your money. the difficulty is to keep to your estimates, i suppose, if you've been spending too much." "i've kept to mine--the personal ones, i mean. but i don't know how it is--susan doesn't seem to be able to." "well, then, you've got to make her," said dick firmly. he had no love for his sister-in-law, and was prepared to resist on his father's behalf the further demands which he thought he saw coming. "after all, it's mostly your money, and it's for you to say how it shall be spent." humphrey, understanding quite well the source of this decisive speech, flushed. "i'm not in debt," he said shortly. "oh!" dick was rather taken aback. "i suppose when you've once played the fool, everybody you talk to about money thinks you must be trying to get something out of them. i believe the governor has an idea in his head that i'm coming to him shortly with another tale of woe. if you get an opportunity, you might disabuse his mind of it. i don't say i don't owe a bill or two, but they are nothing to count." "i'm sorry if i misunderstood you. i've had some experience of keeping within limits, and if i can lend you a hand over getting your house put into order without wasting money, i shall be glad to do so. in fact, if you want a hundred or two towards it, i dare say i can manage to let you have it. pleased to." "thanks, dick, it's awfully good of you." humphrey was moved by this offer. dick was generous with money, but knew its value. an offer of this sort from him meant more than was betokened by the matter-of-fact tone in which it was made. "as a loan, it might help me over a corner, for i've nothing in hand. but i shall keep things down for a year or two, and take the cost of doing up the place into account." "right you are, old chap. we'll go into it, and i'll let you know what i can do." "thanks. it will make things a good deal easier. i'm a reformed character. i hate not seeing my way, now." the phrase struck dick agreeably. it was what, with his cool robust sense, he regarded as the one thing necessary, if life was to be ordered on a satisfactory basis. he would have had no anxiety about money if his own income had been cut down to a pittance. he would have done without anything rather than forestall it by a week. he had expressed himself freely about humphrey's insane blindness, as it seemed to him, in this respect; but now he seemed to have learnt his lesson, and dick's feelings warmed towards him. "how has it gone wrong?" he asked, with more interest than he had shown hitherto. "it hasn't gone particularly wrong, lately. but we never seem to have a bob in hand; and it has meant doing without every sort of thing that one used to have as a matter of course." "oh, come now! only the two of you! you ought not to have to go without much." "i can only tell you that i've come to thinking twice before i take a taxi, and i've given up smoking cigars. it has to begin somewhere; but nothing seems to make any difference. susan's housekeeping! but what can i do? i put it at so much; i asked people about it, and they said it was ample. but she seems to want double as much as anybody else for whatever she does. she says it _must_ cost more because we chucked dining at restaurants, except occasionally. i don't know what it is. money simply flows away in london, and you get nothing for it. i chucked a couple of clubs at the beginning of this year. seems to me i've got to chuck everything if i'm to keep straight. and that's just what i'm going to do. it's been easier since we went up to northamptonshire, although even there you'd think we inhabited a mansion by the housekeeping bills, instead of a little dog's hole of a place just big enough to hold us. still, the main expense there is outside, and i've got that in hand." "she must spend a tremendous lot on clothes." "well, to do her justice, she's clever at that, and i haven't had any trouble with her beastly dressmakers and milliners since that time two years ago. they were the devil then, of course. she has got hold of some cheap woman who turns her out extraordinarily well for very little. i wish she'd tackle other things as she does that. no, i'm not going to put all the blame on susan. i really believe she's doing her best; but she doesn't seem to have it in her, except about her clothes. anyhow, she's ready to do anything, and it shows that she's as worried about what has gone on, in her way, as i am, that she's so keen to go and live at denny croft. she's going to garden, and all the rest of it, and she swears she'll keep to half her dress allowance and put the rest into doing up the house." "that's the way to go about it," said dick. "she certainly does seem much keener on it than i should have thought she would have been. virginia says so too. let's hope it will last." "it's going to," said humphrey. "i'll see to that." dick told virginia something of the conversation between himself and humphrey, and what he had offered to do for him. "oh, dick!" she cried, "make him a present of it. you must have lots laid by. we haven't been spending nearly up to our income." "it's what i meant," he said, smiling at her quick generosity. "but i don't think i will--not until later." "oh, why not? i can spare it, if you can't." "i can spare it. but it won't do him any harm to save a bit. when he offers to pay me back, i shall tell him he can keep it. go a bust with it, if he likes. he's tackling the situation well. i'm pleased about it. he does like his london pleasures, and he's quite ready to give them up." "so is susan, isn't she? she seems a different creature. as if a load were lifted off her mind." "i'm not so sure about susan. my idea is that humphrey will have to keep her to it. it will give him something to do. the trouble with him is that he has always been at a loose end. all the rest of us have got our jobs. it will be his job to keep his expenditure down, and look after susan. i've always thought she was a rotter, and i don't trust her simply because, as humphrey says himself, she's got a new toy to play with." "oh, i think she means it. i like her better than i did. she sees her faults. nobody who can do that is worthless. i'm sure she is not worthless." dick pinched her chin between his thumb and forefinger. he was still in love with this slim sweet candid creature, whose great eyes were lustrous with the flame of her eager spirit. "nobody is worthless in your eyes," he said. "you could even find excuses for rachel amberley." a shadow fell across her bright face. "poor woman!" she said. "oh, poor, poor woman! here we are, all of us together, happy at christmas-time; and she----! oh, dick--'for all prisoners and captives'! i thought of her in church this morning. the loneliness--the cold! i think we ought to pray to be forgiven, as well as she." dick kissed her gently. "you don't want to think too much about her," he said. "she's paying the price." chapter iv coming home from the ball "this is where we are going to shoot to-morrow. we've kept this side entirely until now. we ought to do pretty well." bobby trench, muffled up to the cigar he was smoking, sat by the side of dick, who was driving the big omnibus back from the west meadshire hunt ball. the two fine horses, making nothing of the load behind them, trotted rhythmically homewards. heavy rain had ceased, and the moon peeping through scudding clouds shone on pools of water lying on the muddy road. the yellow lamp-rays tinged the wide strips of turf bordering the roadway, and lit up successive tree trunks, posted sentinel-like, behind the oak fences. bobby trench had chosen to sit outside, with dick and frank. his evening had been disappointing. he had arrived at kencote in time for dinner, prepared to make himself pleasant all round, which he seemed to have succeeded in doing to everybody except joan, who had held somewhat coldly aloof, although he had kept strictly to his predetermined plan of treating her with cool friendliness until the ball should give him opportunities of carefully graded tenderness. but the ball had given him no opportunities, or none that joan would allow him to take advantage of. she had snubbed him, had shown herself, indeed, determined to find occasions for snubbing him; for he was agile in skipping out of the way of such occasions, but she had pursued his skippings and dealt her strokes in spite of them. she had primly refused him more than two dances, and had refused to go in to supper with him. his anticipated pleasure having thus resolved itself into puzzled pain, bobby trench had declared himself for tobacco and the night air, and left joan to her reflections inside, barbing them, as he handed her in, with a careless example of his own peculiar humour, which was founded on the basis of a cheery and always ready loquacity. snubs, or attempted snubs, received with no diminution of self-assurance or good-temper, at both of which they may be supposed to be aimed, are apt to recoil on those who administer them; and joan, taking refuge between the comforting skirts of virginia and miss dexter, was already reproaching herself for her treatment of one who had given her no cause for it except his presence, and whose persistent cheerfulness under persecution was a shining lesson to ill-temper. she was feeling miserable enough, in all conscience, and need not have beaten down the last sparks of enjoyment that she might have gained from the bright movement, hitherto eagerly anticipated, by setting herself to a task so little productive of satisfaction. but she did not occupy her thoughts for long with bobby trench. she made up her mind that, having shown him that particular attention from him would not be welcome, she might safely return to the chaffing intimacy which had hitherto been the note of their intercourse, and had been quite as efficacious in keeping him at the requisite distance as her recent manner. and having so decided she dismissed him from her mind and wrapped herself round with her unhappiness. it was dreadful to be going home from a ball, not only with no retrospective pleasure, but with nothing to look forward to in the way of disrobing talk. she and nancy, since her wrecked attempt at reconciliation, had carried their respective heads in the air, and had hardly spoken to one another, except in the presence of their handmaid, for the purpose of averting comment. and yet she knew that nancy's happy fate was marching upon her, and reproached herself a thousand times for her inability to cross the gulf between them, and share her sister's doubts and sweet tremors. john spence had danced with her three times--many times with nancy--and his manner had been brotherly-kind and protecting, as if to soothe her soreness, which yet he did not seem to have divined. his thoughts had not been much with her, that had been plain--but his quietness and simplicity had comforted her a little, and she had not wanted to talk. she had taken refuge in a plea of headache, and held to it on the homeward drive. nobody seemed to want to talk. something had gone wrong with the lamp inside the carriage, and they were in darkness, except for the faint irradiation of the moon. mrs. clinton had driven home earlier, with sir george and lady senhouse and muriel clinton, walter's wife. in the absence of bobby trench, the eight of them inside the omnibus were of such family intimacy that there was no necessity for conversation, if private thoughts sufficed, or snatches of slumber. john spence, the one exception, had no great initiative in conversation at any time, and in the far corner beside nancy much preferred the silent, ruminative progression through the dark country roads and lanes. greatly daring, he advanced his large muscular hand under the warm fur billowing down the carriage, and sought for nancy's. he found it and gave it a squeeze. she returned the squeeze and withdrew her hand. a year before, such a sign of appreciative affection might very well have come from her--or from joan--instead of from him. perhaps her ready acceptance of it might mean no more than that her affectionate appreciation was still of the same quality. but the chance of its meaning something more thrilled his big frame, and on it his thoughts fed sweetly in the dark silence. virginia was right. he was head over ears in love with nancy, but he shrank from telling her so. he was years older than she, almost as old as dick, almost an old bachelor, except that at heart he had kept his simple youthfulness; and his great body, hardened and kept fine by field-sports, was still as responsive to his mind as that of a youth in his glorious twenties. but modesty was a great part of him, and he could not envisage himself as a man likely to gain prizes usually reserved for gallant youth. the fresh, laughing friendliness of the twins, when he had first known them as girls of fifteen, had attracted him delightfully, and he had been surprised to find that the attraction had changed its quality; also, at first, a little incredulous. it was only when he discovered that he thrilled to nancy's touch and voice, and not to joan's, that he accepted his fate; and, ever since, he had been tormented with doubts as to whether an avowal of his new feeling would bring him a response, or only destroy the frank confidence with which he still loved to be treated. the poor man sometimes imagined nancy regarding him in the light of a fun-producing uncle, and felt that it would be sacrilege to her innocence to reveal himself as a lover. if he risked all, he might lose all, and be for ever disgraced in her eyes. he trembled, in his more darksome moods, at the thought. but love was urging him on. the time would soon come when the avuncular character would be more difficult to support than that of a rejected absentee. dick pulled up his horses at a gate opening on to a broad grass ride between the trees. a groom got down from behind and opened it. "we cut off nearly a mile and a half here," dick said. "but i'm afraid it will be rather soft going after this rain. we'll chance it. there's only one place where we might get stuck." the horses broke gently into a slow trot, their hoofs and the iron-shod wheels of the heavy carriage making no sound on the thick grass. they went down a long and very easy slope, and then dick pulled them to a walk through soft ground in the cup of the almost indistinguishable hollow. with a tightening of traces and no more than the stroke of a whip-lash they pulled the omnibus through, leaving sharp ruts behind it, and were once more on springy turf. just as they were about to quicken into a trot again, bobby trench seized dick's arm. "what's that!" he cried. "did you hear it?" "somebody shouted," said frank, standing up behind them; and had no sooner spoken when the silence of the woods was sharply broken by a gun-shot. "poachers, by jove!" said dick. "we shall catch them." he drove quickly on towards the point from which the report had come. suddenly there were shouts of men, and another report from a gun; then more shouting, and the cracking of trampled twigs quite near to them. "the keepers are out. good boys!" cried dick, in excitement, reining in his horses. frank and bobby trench were down and off into the covert. humphrey, who had been sitting next to the door, had followed them. dick was for doing the same, but paused irresolute when he had called a groom to take the reins, and swung himself down from his seat. there was a commotion inside the omnibus. the women must be thought of. walter stood at the door, calming them. john spence was on his feet ready to push out, but nancy had hold of his hand, and susan clinton was clinging to him terrified. "all right, i'll stay, but i must get out," he said, torn between his desire to be in the fray, and the appeal, not of susan's frightened cries, but of nancy's silent call for protection. "if you two will stay here, i'll go and see what's happening," said dick. "it's all right, virginia; there can't be many of them, and the men are there." another shot rang out above the sounds, hard by, of an angry struggle, and was followed by a cry of pain. dick began to run towards the sound. the moon now shining brightly made his progress easy. he saw three or four men, locked in a fierce struggle, and thought he recognised frank as one of them. then a cry to his right brought him round to see another group in combat. someone was lying prone on the grass. a few yards from the still figure two others were reeling to and fro, and as he approached went down. the one underneath was wrapped in a long coat, the uppermost was unhampered, a giant figure of a man as he seemed, with a gun in his hands, on the barrels of which a shaft of moonlight glinted. he looked to be striking at the head of the other figure, and a cry for help rose up, urgently. dick sprang forward, but caught his foot on a root and fell. as he picked himself up, another figure ran past him with a raised cudgel. "all right, sir, coming!" the thick stick went down resoundingly on the ruffian's head, who let go of the gun-barrels, and turned with his arm raised to guard himself. dick had him by the neck, and was screwing his knuckles into the throat. he gulped, put hands like vices on to his sleeves, and kicked with a great iron-shod boot. dick felt his shin peel through his thin trousers, but no pain. in a moment the keeper had thrown himself on to him, he ceased to struggle, and, dick's fists relaxing their hold, choked out submission. "all right, you got me. you can give over now." humphrey rose from the ground, white and shaking, the blood trickling from a wound over his eyebrow. "the brute!" he said. "he'd have killed me. lucky you came along. where's bobby?" bobby trench lay on the dark ground, motionless, his arm stretched at a peculiar angle. as they bent over him, he fluttered an eyelid, then opened both. "winged me," he said in a faint voice. "ugh!" then fainted again. "he shot at him," said humphrey. "i was just behind. he got it in the shoulder. look here; all torn; he'll bleed to death." dick set up a shout. the wood was still now of the louder clamour. the mimic battle was over. gotch, the keeper, had secured their captive with a rope. he took it calmly; even good-humouredly. "'aven't done for 'im, 'ave i, governor?" he called out. "hold your tongue, you swine!" said gotch, hitting him on the mouth, at which he expostulated mildly, as at an unreasonable act. "all right, mate; you got me. it's a lifer if i done for him. i on'y wanted to know." chapter v robert recumbent bobby trench, lying in bed, the seams of his pyjama jacket cut and ribboned at the left arm and shoulder to accommodate the bandages, was an interesting figure. he had gone through his time of fever and fiery pain, his probings and dressings; now, but for occasional discomfort, and a languorous but convalescent weakness, he was himself again, and prepared to take up his affairs at the point at which they had been interrupted by what had befallen him. the nurse, moving capably about the large, airy, chintz-bedecked room, in her trim livery, was besieged for news of the household. tall, handsome, and still young, she was on very good terms with her patient. regarded as a "case," he did her credit; and she couldn't help liking him, as she wrote to her relations. "look here, sarah gamp, you're a deceitful woman. you're keeping them all away from me; you know you are. i'm as fit as a fiddle, or shall be in about five minutes; and i want to see company." the nurse permitted herself a smile. "you're to be kept quiet for a day or two. doctor's orders." "doctor's orders! walter clinton! what sort of a bob sawyer is he, to give orders? you know much more about things than he does, don't you now? you want to keep me to yourself, that's what it is." "indeed, you're very ungrateful. dr. clinton is a rising man in the profession. there isn't a doctor in london could have done better for you." "you think so, mrs. gamp?" "yes, i do. it was lucky for you that he was there when you were shot." "yes, that was a piece of luck, wasn't it? he had a busy night of it. i say, who has been asking for me?" "oh, everybody, of course. you will have plenty of visitors when you are well enough to receive them." "i'm well enough now. you're trying to keep me to yourself, sarah. there's a sort of fatal fascination about me that no good-looking woman can resist? i say, do the doctors make love to you in the hospital?" "i think you are getting light-headed. you have talked quite enough for the present. would you like some jelly?" "i should like some strawberries and cream and a pint of champagne. look here, tell me about the doctors. are there any good-looking fellows amongst them?" the conversation was interrupted at this point by the arrival of walter clinton, whose knickerbockered homespuns only served to heighten the effect of his cool professional manner. "well, nurse, how's your patient?" "going on well, doctor; but you must please tell him that he must keep quiet for the present. he wants to see everybody in the house." walter took his seat by the bed and felt his patient's pulse. "you can see people to-morrow," he said, as he pocketed his watch. "you're doing all right. better have one more day to yourself, though. you've had a narrow squeak." "i know. mrs. gamp says that if it hadn't been for you, i should have snuffed out. she revels in gore. i don't think she's the woman for her job." "don't you believe what he says, doctor. he's full of his nonsense." "how's humphrey?" asked bobby. "oh, he's all right. he got off with a scalp wound. poor old dick had his shin laid bare. i've got him on my hands. but we're well out of it. that was a brute of a fellow. and there were two others; tough customers, all of them. if we hadn't come along they might have got the better of our fellows. they've quodded them. the governor went over to petty sessions to-day. by the by, he'd like to see you when you're ready." "i'm ready now. ask him to step up." "to-morrow--if you get a good night." "what are they all doing downstairs?" "slacking, and playing with my kiddies. they all sent messages to you." "they must have got a pretty good shock. you turned them out of the bus, didn't you? i don't remember much of what happened." "yes, but i'd sent one of the grooms on to get some more carriages. they didn't have to wait long. they're all right. joan got a bit of a chill, and is seedy." "i suppose she was--upset about it all? pretty funking to see a fellow brought along in the state i was in!" "oh, they all took it very well. susan was the worst, but of course humphrey looked worse than he really was--luckily." bobby trench, an incurable optimist, allowed himself the solace of imagining that joan's indisposition had been brought on by her agitation on his account, which it well might have been without undue partiality on her part. for after waiting for minutes that had seemed like hours, while the fight was going on in the wood, and being forsaken by walter, who had left them in answer to dick's shouts for help, they had been turned out of the omnibus, so that the bleeding, senseless figure of bobby trench might be laid there for walter to examine and bind up. humphrey had also needed attention, and susan had been frightened almost into hysterics by his appearance. they had walked for half a mile in satin shoes, mostly over grass wringing wet, until the carriages from kencote had picked them up; and after the fatigue of the ball and in her state of low spirits, it was small wonder that joan should have succumbed to her experiences. but her indisposition had caused some lessening of the tension between herself and nancy, who, possibly supported by the tender attentions of john spence, had escaped all ill effect from the excitements of the night. their differences were ignored. there had been no real reconciliation, but the events in which they had participated had formed a skin over the wounds that each had dealt the other, and they could behave with some approach to former freedom. bobby trench's first unofficial visitor was the squire, as was only fitting. mrs. clinton had been with him constantly until the arrival of the nurse, but he had then been delirious, and had not known her, and she had not entered his room since. the squire came in, bringing with him a breath of the now frosty outer air, but treading agag-like on complimentary slippers. "well, sir," was his hearty greeting, tuned to suitable lowness of pitch, "this is a pretty business to have brought you into! lucky it wasn't worse, eh? i told them on the bench to-day that you were the first in the field. there were many enquiries after you; and we've got those blackguards safely by the leg. you've got everything you want, i hope. nurse looking after you well?" "you wouldn't think it to look at her, but she's a bully, mr. clinton. if you get ill you send for somebody else." the squire, after a glance at the nurse's demurely smiling face, checked a laugh at the witticism. "keep up your spirits," he said. "that's capital. you'll soon be out of the wood if you take it cheerfully. we shall make a lot of you when you come downstairs. you did well; and i've written to tell your father so." bobby trench felt that a few torn muscles and splintered bones were a small price to pay for this approving geniality. on his arrival, the squire seemed to have swung back from the acquiescent mood in which he had caused his former aversion to be invited to kencote, and had greeted him with a manner not much more conciliatory than he had previously shown him. bobby trench, on reflection, had attributed his invitation to humphrey's having imparted as much of his confidence as would secure it; and, in view of his acknowledged eligibility, had expected a rather warmer welcome than he had received, either from his host or hostess. it had seemed to him that he would have other obstacles to surmount, in order to win joan, than those which she might be inclined to put between herself and him of her own accord. it was therefore gratifying to find the face of his host thus turned towards him, and would have been worth a substantial reduction in the sentence to be presently passed upon his assailant, if he had had the computing of his punishment. "i must write a line to my father," he said. "i'm glad you've written to him. he doesn't suggest coming here, i suppose?" "well, yes, he does. we shall be pleased to see him--and her ladyship too, if she cares about it." "oh, save us from her ladyship!" said bobby, unfilially. "she'd be hopeless in a sick-room; and this is a real keep-your-distance, sundays-only sick-room, ain't it, sarah gamp?" "mr. trench must be kept as quiet as possible," said the nurse; and the squire, with an unintentionally obvious lift of spirits, said that he did not gather that lady sedbergh was anything but content to leave her son in present hands. "i've said we are looking after you as well as we can," he said. "you'll have plenty of company when you're well enough to receive it. humphrey wants to have a look at you later on. if you hadn't been so sharp at the start, i expect he would have come in for what you got. he'd have been pretty well knocked out as it was, if it hadn't been for that young fellow, gotch, and dick. it's the first time anything of this sort has happened at kencote since my grandfather's time. i don't say we haven't had to teach our local sportsmen a lesson or two occasionally, but these were regular professional ruffians from a distance--ganton they come from--and that class of gentry sticks at nothing when he's interfered with. you see we've done very well with our young birds this year, and they must have got wind of the fact that we'd kept those coverts. that's why they turned their kind attentions on to us. they've been all round about, but mostly on more fully stocked places than mine generally is, and they've never been nabbed. fortunately my keeper had an idea that they might pay us a visit, and had all his watchers out there. otherwise you might have come upon them driving home, and then i don't know what would have happened. it's providential all round--the keepers being there, and you coming just in the nick of time to reinforce them. we're rid of a dangerous pest; and no particular harm is done--except to you, i'm afraid. i don't want to make light of that." but if the squire did not, bobby trench was not unwilling to do so, now that the worst was over. he saw himself an interesting, not to say petted, figure, with a perhaps undeserved but none the less convenient aura of heroism, and hoped accordingly. "you must have got a bit of a shock when you first heard of it," he said. "i suppose that was when the ladies came in." "i was waiting for them," said the squire on a note of detailed reminiscence. "they had knocked me up and told me that the groom had come in for carriages, and i had had him in and learnt what he could tell me. i should have gone myself, but thought it better to stay and direct any preparations that had to be made. i didn't know but what there might have been serious accidents, and it turned out i was right. my wife had the idea too; but women are apt to lose their heads in these emergencies, so i stayed to see that everything was got ready. i went down into the cellar myself for a bottle of my oldest brandy. you want to keep a cool head on these occasions." "the ladies were pretty much upset, eh?" "oh, i soon stopped their fuss. 'look here, _you're_ not hurt,' i said. 'you'd better all swallow something hot, and then tuck yourselves up in your blankets.' i packed them all off, except virginia and miss dexter--oh, and susan, who wouldn't go till she'd seen humphrey safe; and nancy was helping her mother; she's turning into a useful girl, that--didn't turn a hair." "then miss joan was the only one who went up?" "yes, she was upset--hasn't quite the head that nancy has. she's in bed now, but there's nothing really the matter with her. we're over it all very well, and ought to be thankful for it. depend upon it, there's a providence that looks after these things; and i say we're not doing our duty unless we recognise it, and show that we have some sense of gratitude. sure you've got everything you want here?" he looked round the large comfortable room with an air of complacent proprietorship. he kept habitually to half-a-dozen rooms of the big house, and had no such feeling for it and its hoarded contents as would impel some men and most women to occasional tours of inspection and appraisal. but it was all his, and it was all as it should be. he had not put foot inside this room perhaps for years, and took it in with a pleased feeling of proprietorship and recognition. "oh, every mortal thing, thanks," said bobby. "it's a jolly room, this; cheery and peaceful at the same time. just the room to be laid up in, if you've got to be laid up." "my grandfather died in this room," said the squire, by way of adding to its impression of cheerfulness. "had it before his father died and never would shift downstairs. it was done up later, but i see there are one or two of his pictures still on the walls. this was his wardrobe, too. a good piece of mahogany; they don't make furniture so solid now-a-days." he had got up to examine one or two of the old sporting prints on the walls, which he did with informative comment. "most of the furniture is the same," he said, now looking round him from the vantage point of the hearthrug, where he seemed more spaciously at his ease than sitting in a chair by the bedside. "yes, they only papered it, and put a new carpet and curtains. he wouldn't have curtains at all; liked to see the sun rise, and wasn't much behind it himself as a rule. he was a fine old fellow. have you read his diaries?" "yes, i have," said bobby, stretching the truth not unduly, for the two volumes of colonel clinton of kencote's record of his lifelong pursuit of fur and feathers were in every adequately furnished country house library, and had been at least dipped into by countless sportsmen. "jolly interesting! we don't take things so seriously now-a-days. good thing if we did. a book like that shows you that half the things we do aren't nearly as amusing as sticking at home in the country and looking about you." the squire warmed to him. "that's a very sensible thing to say. the nonsense people talk about the country being dull! dull! it's the people that say it who are dull. they've got no resources in themselves. now my grandfather--you can see what he knew about nature by his diaries. but that wasn't his only interest by any means. he had an electrical apparatus, when they weren't nearly as common as they are now. he read books--stiff books, some of them. he was a man of brains as well as muscle, and in the life he chose to lead he had time and opportunity for exercising his brains. oh, i say that the country life is the best life, undoubtedly. and i go further, and say that those who have a stake in the country--own land, and so forth--are doing a criminal thing if they don't spend a good part of their lives on their properties, instead of spending the money they get from them elsewhere." "i quite agree with you," said bobby trench, anxious to fix the good impression he had made, and also to put a point to these observations. "have your fling for a year or two when you're young, and then marry and settle down. you don't want to tie yourself by the leg, especially if you have a certain place in the world--house of lords--committees--all that sort of thing. but make your _home_ in the country, i say. bring up your children in pure air--fresh milk, and all that. you know, mr. clinton, a house like kencote makes you think how jolly a simple country life may be made for everybody concerned. early to bed, early to rise, church on sundays, good food and drink, something to shoot, and all that sort of thing, and your family and relations coming down to liven you up--oh, it's life, that's what it is. all the rest is footle, compared with it." a daniel come to judgment! saul among the prophets! never had the shining example of kencote, where wealth and ancestry adorned but did not overpower a god-fearing simplicity of life, received a more effective testimonial. forgotten were bobby trench's offences against its ordered ways, withdrawn the squire's strictures on his manners and character. he had found salvation. kencote--and its owner--had triumphed exceedingly. but bobby trench's speech, while offering most acceptable incense, had brought to mind the object with which he had installed himself at kencote. this the squire had, for the time, completely forgotten, and was not yet ready to exercise his mind upon it. so with a "well, i mustn't make you talk too much," he took his leave, promising to come again shortly, and in the meantime to send other visitors. these did not, on the first day of bobby trench's convalescence, include any of the ladies of the house; but, on the day after, mrs. clinton, urged by the squire, paid him a visit. bobby trench could make no headway with her. she was solicitous as to his welfare, ready to talk in an unembarrassed and even friendly fashion; but kept him, beneath her ostensible approach, so at arm's length that when she left him he had not found it possible to ask, as he had meant to do, that joan or nancy--he was prepared to blunt the point of his request by including nancy--might pay him a visit. and what bobby trench did not find it possible to ask of anybody was not likely to come about of itself. for further female society he had to be content with that of susan clinton, who, on already intimate terms with him, promised to do what she could to make things "easy all round." this she essayed to do by hymning his courage at the call of danger, patience in affliction, and amiability under all weathers; but found none to take up her praises, except humphrey, to a politic degree of indifference, and the squire, who admitted that he had been mistaken in that young fellow, and had found him with a head on his shoulders, and a very proper idea as to what he should do with his place in the world when he should succeed to it. this positive praise, after a long course of unmeasured abuse, only seemed to joan, listening to it dispiritedly, a flick of the lash to start her on the road along which she conceived her father wishing to drive her, and caused her, if the ungallant simile may be carried out, to set her feet the more obstinately against it. it had much the same effect upon mrs. clinton, who foresaw herself plied with an enlargement on this theme, and forced either to obey, or else openly resist, directions founded upon it. susan's intervention had only affected the already converted, except to insubordination, and would have been better omitted. but what lover can eschew the use of weapons so ready to hand as the good nature of uninterested parties, or gauge their dangerous futility? only in the case of the adored object being predisposed to adore is intentionally distilled praise treated without suspicion, and likely to achieve its object; which in that case is already achieved. chapter vi joan rebellious joan, more or less recovered from her indisposition, still looked upon the world as a place from which all happiness had for ever fled. she mooned about the house doing nothing, and only felt that youth had not altogether departed from her when she was with her mother, who, in her calm stability, was a refuge from the buffetings of life, but seemed to be holding aloof from the troubles she must have known her girl to be undergoing. dick had gone up to yorkshire to shoot with john spence, and taken virginia and nancy with him. the invitation had been extended to joan; but the squire had said, with what she felt to be treacherous affection, "surely, you're not _both_ going to desert your old father!" and she had refused; partly because she had dreaded lest acceptance should bring down upon her a direct prohibition, and the obliquity of a parent, whom she still wished to respect if she could, would stand revealed in all its nakedness; partly because nancy had given her no encouragement, and as things were between them, it would be a relief to be apart for a time. her mother had said nothing to influence her either way. walter had taken his wife and children back to london, leaving bobby trench in the care of the local surgeon. frank had gone back to greenwich, where he was taking a course. humphrey and susan were paying a flying visit to hampshire, to arrange about the work to be done at denny croft. but there would be a mild recrudescence of christmas gaieties in a week's time, when there was to be another ball, for which most of the party would reassemble. joan was sitting in the schoolroom, feeling very low and miserable, and wondering what was coming of it all, when she was surprised by the entrance of her father, who visited this quarter of the house at intervals so rare as to have permitted it to assume the character of a retreat. "well, my girl," he said paternally. "the house seems so empty that i thought i'd come up for a little chat." it was the hour when mrs. clinton visited her recumbent guest, leaving the nurse free for an airing. joan had occasionally accompanied her in her walks, but found them too apt to be filled with talk about her patient, couched in such laudatory language that joan suspected the patient of having taken her into his confidence. in justice to him it must be said that the suspicion was unfounded, and in justice to the nurse that she had eyesight not less acute than the rest of her sex. there were times when joan felt drawn to put her head on her father's broad shoulder, and receive the protective petting which in his milder moods he was as capable of administering as the most consistently doting of parents. this would have been one of those times if it had been possible to regard him as the solace as well as the occasion of her trouble. but enough of the impulse remained to cause her to welcome him with a sense of forgiveness, and to make room for him by her side on the broad sofa. he would have done well to respond to the movement, but, instead, he took up his attitude of harangue in front of her, with his back to the fire, and cleared his throat. she saw what was coming, and stiffened. "well, we shall have our invalid downstairs to-morrow," he made his clumsy opening. "wonderful recovery! 'pon my word i'm beginning to think that we shall see walter a medical knight and i don't know what all, before we're much older." "i dare say it wasn't so bad, after all, as it was thought to be," said joan. "men make such a fuss about a little pain. women bear it much better." this speech caused the squire to bend his brows upon her, traversing as it did all the traditions in which she had been brought up as to the relative values of the sexes, and challenging that prompt verbal chastisement with which precocious rebellion must be dealt with, if those values were to be preserved in his own household. but joan's eyes were downcast, and he took warning, without perceiving its source, from a certain angle between the lines of her neck and her back, not to pursue a by-path which would draw him--might indeed have been opened up to draw him--from the road he had sought her out to pursue. "well, that's as may be," he said, dismissing the offence; "but the pain has been borne well enough by this particular man; and if a charge of shot at such close quarters that it lays bare the bone and splinters it isn't pretty serious, i don't know what is. walter told me that he would never be able to raise that arm above his shoulder again, however well it might heal." joan shuddered at the staring picture, and felt herself convicted of brutal callousness. "however," proceeded her father, who might advantageously have left an interval for his words to make their effect, "the worst is over now, and we ought to do what we can to cheer him up and help him to forget it. it's been pretty dull for him, lying there, mostly alone. your mother has seen fit to object for some reason or other to your paying him a visit in his room, though i think those ideas can be carried too far, and there couldn't be any harm in it, especially as he's now on the sofa." then her mother _was_ on her side, although she had said nothing to her. joan perceived quite plainly that her father had asked that she might be taken to see bobby trench, and her mother had refused, as she sometimes did refuse the requests of her lord and master, but only if she considered them quite beyond reason. joan was drawn to one parent, and all the more set against the other. "i don't like mr. trench," she said. "i shouldn't have gone to see him, even if mother had said i might; unless she had said that i must." "well, she wouldn't be likely to say that, if you didn't want to," said the squire, determined to keep the interview on a note of mild reasonableness, in spite of provocation. "but now, i should like to know why you have taken a dislike to young trench. i saw nothing of it when he was here before." "you told me, after he had come here in the summer, that i had been making too free with him, and that you didn't want me to have anything to do with young cubs like that; and that if i wasn't careful how i behaved i should find myself back in the schoolroom with miss phipp." the squire had an uneasy feeling that he had given his younger daughters too much rope, and should have to bring them up with a round turn one of these days. but this was not the occasion. "well, i remember i did say something of the sort," he said. "i was upset by that amberley business, and i've never gone back from the view i took then that if you had behaved sensibly you need never have been brought into it at all." "how could i have helped it, father?" "how could you have helped it? why---- but i don't want to go into all that again. it's over and done with, thank god, and we can put it out of our minds." "i'm sure i don't want to talk about it. but it's rather hard to know what to do, when you scold me for having anything to do with mr. trench one day, and want to know why i won't have anything to do with him the next." it was probably at this moment that the squire realised that his daughter was grown up. she spoke to him as his sons were accustomed to speak, with an offhand air of equality, to which, in them, he did not object. it was not, however, fitting in his eyes that he should be thus addressed by joan, and he turned aside from his purpose to say, "i'm sure you don't mean to be impertinent, but that's not the way to speak to your father. besides--one day and the next day! that's nonsense, you know. it must be over six months since i said whatever it was i did say, and you were a good deal younger then." "i was six months younger--that's all." "well, six months is six months; and a good deal can happen in six months. i've nothing to regret in what i said six months ago, except that i may have said it rather more strongly than i need have done, annoyed as i was." "then you don't think that mr. trench was really a young cub, after all?" "i wish you wouldn't keep on repeating those words. they are not words for you to say, whatever _i_ may say. but if you ask me a plain question, and put it properly, i don't mind telling you that i was to a certain extent mistaken in young trench. he has a way with him, on the surface, that i didn't care about, though i don't know that it means anything more than that he has naturally high spirits, which are not a bad thing to have when you are young." "but he isn't so very young. he must be at least thirty-five. _i_ think his way is a very silly way, and he is quite old enough to know better." it was a choice of repeating her words, "_you_ think!" and going on to explain with strong irritability that it didn't matter what she thought; or swallowing the offence. for he could not very well follow his inclination to upbraid, without seriously impairing his efficacy for reasoning with her. he chose the latter course. "a man of thirty-five is a young man in these days, especially if he has led an active, temperate, open-air life, as young fellows in good circumstances do lead now-a-days." "but i thought one of your objections to him was that he lived too much in london." he waved the interruption aside. "even people who live for the most part in london--work there, perhaps--well, like walter does--have a taste for country life, and go in for sport and so forth whenever they have the opportunity. in the old days it wasn't so. there was a story of some big political wig--i forget who it was--fox or walpole or pitt, or one of those fellows--who had the front of his country house paved with cobble stones, and made them drive carriages about half the night whenever he had to be there, so as to make him think he was in st. james's, with the hackney-coaches. said he couldn't sleep otherwise. ha, ha!" "what a good idea!" said joan, brightening to an opportunity of diverting the conversation. "i think stories about people in the eighteenth century are awfully interesting. father, you have books of reminiscences about them in the library, haven't you?" "oh yes. your great grandfather used to read them. he knew fox; saw him come into the cocoa-tree one night and call for a bumper of---- however, that's not what we were talking about. but it's got this much to do with it, that men like fox were looked upon as middle-aged men at five and thirty, and old men, by george, at fifty; but a man of thirty-five now is a young man, and it's all owing to the revival of country life and country sport, which, as i say, everybody who is anybody takes part in now-a-days, whether he's a londoner or not." "yes, i see. but i like the people who live regularly in the country, like you, and dick, and jim. i think it's much the best life for a man, and a girl too. i should like to live it always, myself." "yes, well, i hope you will--for a good part of the year, at any rate. of course, you can't expect to live at home--here at kencote, i mean--all your life. you're grown up, now, and when young fledglings feel their wings, you know, the parent birds must make up their minds to lose them out of the nest." "but they would like to keep them if they could. you don't want to lose me, father, do you?" she looked up at him for the first time, and he was checked in the march of his desires. a doubt came to him whether he did want her to leave the nest just yet awhile. it was so very short a time since he had looked upon her and nancy as still children, hardly longer, indeed, as it seemed, since they had made their somewhat disconcerting arrival, and from being a laughable addition to his family, of which he had been the least little bit ashamed, had found their way to his heart, and sensibly heightened the already strong attraction of his home. if nancy was about to leave him, as to his great surprise he had recently heard was likely to happen, and to take just the kind of husband whom he had always desired for his daughters, could he not make up his mind to forego for a few years the advantages held out to joan, who had always been a little closer to the centre of his heart? was it so very important that she should marry a man of rank, if he took the form of bobby trench, when there were men like john spence--good, honest, well-born, wealthy country gentlemen, men after his own heart--who were ready to come forward in due time? these questions presented themselves to him in the form of an uneasy feeling that he might find himself obliged to change his course, if he should consider them carefully. he therefore shut his mind to them as quickly as possible; for there is nothing a hasty obstinate character dislikes more than to be compelled to prove himself in the wrong. when others try to prove him in the wrong, he can stand up to them. "my dear child," he said, "of course i don't want to lose you. but when one is getting on in years, you know--not that i'm an old man--hope to have many years in front of me yet, please god--one doesn't live only in the present. you look forward into the future, and you like to see your children married and settled down before the time comes when you must get ready to go. and now we've got on to the subject of marrying and settling down, i just want to say a word to you which you mustn't misunderstand, or think i'm trying in any way to influence you, which is the very last thing i should wish to do--but as a father one is bound to put these matters in a light--not the most important light perhaps, but still one that a young girl can hardly be expected to take much into consideration herself--it wouldn't be advisable that she should. in short--well, now we _are_ on the subject--this very young man--young trench, whom we've been discussing, as it turns out--er---- this is what i want to say to you--that i've reason to believe that--er--there's a certain young lady--ha! ha! that _he'd_ like to marry and settle down with, and--er----" "but wasn't that exactly what you came upstairs to say to me, father?" asked joan, with innocent open eyes, inwardly girding herself to contempt against this transparent duplicity, and hardening herself to make it as uncomfortable as possible for him to say what he had to say, even to the point of exhibiting herself as almost immodestly experienced. he stared at her. "what!" he exclaimed. "you have had it in your mind all along?" "you put it there, father," she retorted. "i'm grown up now. i've got eyes in my head. i knew there must be _some_ reason for your making mother ask him here, when she dislikes him just as much as i do, and after you had always said that _you_ disliked him just as much, or more." he gulped down oceans of displeasure and inclination to rebuke. "now look here," he said. "let's have no more harping on that string, and no more silly and undutiful speeches. you say you are grown-up. very well, then, you can listen to sense; and you can talk sense if you wish it. i've already said that young trench displeased me when he stayed here before; and, as you keep on reminding me, i said so at the time pretty plainly. it's my custom to speak plainly, and i've nothing to regret in that. if he acted in the same way now, i should object just as strongly. but the whole point is that he would _not_ act in the same way now. it is not i that have changed; it is he. perhaps you're right, to a certain extent, in saying that he was old enough to know better. but a young fellow in his position is apt to keep on sowing his wild oats when others who have to begin to take a serious view of life more early have left off doing it. anyhow, he has left off doing it now. he told me himself, and i was gratified to hear it, that seeing how life went in a house like this turned him round to see that he had been playing the fool. there's nothing wrong with him at bottom, any more than there is anything wrong with humphrey, who played the fool in much the same way for years after he ought to have done, but has come to see you can't go on playing the fool all your life, and is now quite ready to settle down in a sensible way. you'll find when you come to talk to young trench--when he comes down to-morrow--that----" "i'm not going to talk to him," joan interrupted. "i don't like him." well, really! was it possible to talk sensibly to women at all? would the clearest logic and reason weigh a grain against their obstinate likes and dislikes? was it worth while going on? "are you going to listen to what i have to say, or not?" he asked impatiently. "or do you want to be----" "sent to bed?" joan took him up. "yes, father, i think you had better send me to bed. i know i'm being a very naughty girl, but you won't make me like mr. trench, however long you talk." "you _are_ naughty. you are laying yourself out to annoy me. there is no question of my _making_ you like mr. trench, and you know that as well as i do. i am simply asking you to behave with ordinary courtesy to a visitor in my house, who has been seriously hurt in coming to the rescue of my own men--and in the pluckiest way too, and might very well have been killed. is that too much to expect my own daughter to do, i should like to know, or----?" "oh no, father. of course i shall be polite. i didn't know that was all you wanted." "yes, it _is_ all i want. you are taking up a most extraordinary and unwarrantable position. anyone would think, to hear you talk, that i had come up here to order you to marry young trench out of hand. you see how outrageous it sounds when you put it plainly." "yes, i know it does; but i thought it was what you meant." "well, then, it is _not_ what i meant, or anything like it. i'm the last man in the world who would put any pressure on his daughters to marry anybody; and when no word of marriage has been mentioned it seems to me indelicate in the highest degree for a girl as young as you to be turning it over and discussing it in the open way you do. it's what comes of letting you gad about here and there and everywhere, amongst all sorts of people; and i tell you i won't have it." joan was enchanted. his leg was over the back of his favourite horse now, and she only had to give it a flick in the flank to set it galloping off with him. "but, father dear, i haven't been gadding about. it is six months and more since i went to brummels; and i'm sure i never want to go there again, after all you said about it, and the people i met there." he reined in. the course was too difficult. "you're in a very tiresome and obstinate mood," he said, "and i don't like it. i come up here to spend a quiet half-hour with you, and you do nothing but set yourself to annoy me. but there's one thing i insist upon; i won't have you making yourself disagreeable to a guest in my house. when young trench comes downstairs to-morrow, it's our common duty to cheer him up and try to make up to him for all he has gone through on our account. and you have got to do your share of it, and nancy too, when she comes home. now do you quite understand that?" "oh yes, father," said joan. "i quite understand that." "very well, then. mind you do it." with which words the squire left the room with an air of victory. chapter vii disappointments joan was so far fortified by her conversation with her father that she was quite prepared to play her part in entertaining bobby trench when he exchanged the sofa in his bedroom for one in the morning-room. she had proved to herself that there was little to fear. her own weapons had been effective in turning aside any that had been brought, or could be brought, against her. her mother, although she had not spoken, was on her side, her father had been routed and was sulking. no one else was likely to assail her, unless it was bobby trench himself; and him alone she had never feared. she was even well-disposed towards him, and ready to amuse herself in the momentary dulness of the house, as well as him, by playing games, and forgetting, as far as was possible, in his spirited society, the troubles that beset her. she was, to tell the truth, not unsympathetically shocked at his appearance when she first gave him greeting. although his speech was as fluent and lively as ever, his face was pale and thin, and there was no ignoring the seriousness of his bound-up wound. but he took it all so lightly that some sense of the ready pluck he had shown came home to her, and abated her prejudice against him, which, indeed, had hardly existed until he had been presented to her mind as an encouraged wooer. as for him, his enforced absence from her society, while yet he knew that she was under the same roof, had set him thinking about her with ever-increasing desire; and to find her, in her fresh young beauty, not holding him at arm's length, as she had done on the night of the ball, but smiling and friendly--this was to bind the cords of love till more tightly around him, and cause him most sweet discomfort in keeping them hidden. and yet, by the time the house filled again, he could not congratulate himself on having made any progress with her. she would laugh with him and at him, and keep him agreeable company for an hour or two hours together, during which time their intimacy appeared to be founded on a complete and happy community of taste; but at a word or hint of love-making she would freeze, and if it was persisted in, she would leave him. the poor man was in torments, underneath his gay exterior. if her behaviour had been designed to draw him on and enmesh him completely, it could not have been more effective. she was merry with him, because now she liked him, as a diversion from her lonely, sad-coloured thoughts. she could forget her estrangement from nancy when she was playing with him, and the overcasting of her long-familiar life; and she felt so confident of being able to hold him in his place that the designs she knew him to be cherishing no longer troubled her at all. but how was he to escape the perpetual hope that her obvious increase of liking for him was developing into something warmer than mere liking? and how was he to avoid now and then putting that hope to the test, seeing her so frank and so sweetly desirable? he was always cast down to the ground when he did so. love had not blunted his native acuteness, and there was no mistaking the state of rising aversion in which she met and parried his tentative advances. in that only was she different from what she had been; for, before, she had parried them with a demure mischievousness, which had shown her taking enjoyment in the exercise of her wits. now she used other weapons, and made it plain that her friendliness would not stand the strain, if she was to be put to those contests. and yet liking and love cannot be kept in separate compartments in such circumstances as these. liking, if it grows big enough, becomes love some day or other. he knew that, and she didn't; which was why he put very strong constraint on himself, made few mistakes in the way of premature soundings, and set himself diligently to be the indispensable companion of her days. the underlying contest, viewed from without, would have been seen to turn upon the question of his possessing qualities which would satisfy the deeper currents of her nature. gaiety and courage he had, and self-control, if he cared to exercise it. some amount of goodwill towards the world at large, also; but that was apt to hang upon the satisfaction or otherwise that he received from it. it was likely to come out at its strongest in his present condition of mind, and to throw into shadow his innate triviality. it always seemed to joan that he showed up least attractively in the presence of her mother, and this although he seemed more anxious to please her than he did to please joan herself. bobby trench could never have said that mrs. clinton was not giving him his chance. she never came into the room as if she wished to keep guard, nor turned a disapproving face upon the merriment that he made with joan. she would respond to his sallies, and her smile was free, if it was aroused at all. he thought that he had taken her measure. she was at heart a serious woman, and on that account she could not be expected to take very readily to him, for he hated seriousness, and it was out of his power to disguise it. but she was a nonentity in this house: he had heard her husband speak to her. the squire was warmly in his favour, for reasons which were too obvious to need stating, and those reasons might be expected to appeal equally to mrs. clinton, who would also follow her husband's lead in everything. he did think that it was owing to her that joan had been prevented from visiting him upstairs, for the squire had given him that hint, without intending to do so. but he put that down to her old-fashioned prudery, and had forgiven her for it, since she now seemed quite willing to leave joan alone with him. she might practically be disregarded as far as effective opposition was concerned; but it would be as well to keep on her right side, for joan was evidently very fond of her, and by commending himself to her he would commend himself to joan. none but a shallow brain could have judged of mrs. clinton as a nonentity, when opportunities for observing her were such as bobby trench enjoyed. the very fact that when she was present his humour seemed even to him to wear thin, and the conversation always followed the paths into which she directed it, might have warned him of that error. the paths she chose were not such as he could disport himself in to any advantage, although she trod them naturally enough, and joan followed her as if she liked taking them. ideas make the best talk, someone has said, then things, then people. bobby trench could talk about people all day and all night if he were to be called upon; his experience had been wide, he had a fund of anecdote, and a quick eye for a point. to talk well about "things," you want reading and knowledge, of which he had little. to talk well about ideas, you want some of your own, and he had but few. he heard joan, to his surprise, venturing herself with interest on subjects to which he had never given a moment's thought, and on which his readily produced speeches were like those of a child pushing into and spoiling the converse of its elders. joan would sometimes look at him in surprise, as if he had said something particularly foolish, when he was not aware of having done so. he felt at a disadvantage. he could not see that the question of woman's suffrage, which he started himself, was not satisfactorily covered by funny stories about the suffragettes, and thought mrs. clinton a bore for going on with it. she asked him about plays which he had seen and of which she had read, and he told her about actors and actresses. of books he knew nothing. they were not much talked about at kencote, but mrs. clinton read a good deal, and so did joan and nancy, and talked between themselves of what they read. it was impossible to keep allusion altogether out of their talk, although they spared him as much as possible, having been trained to do so in the similar case of the squire, whose broad view of literature was that as nobody had written better than shakespeare, it was waste of time to read anything else until you had thoroughly mastered _him_, in which modest feat, however, he had not himself made any startling progress. but bobby trench, otherwise quite at ease as to his ignorance on such negligible matters, felt that it would have been to his benefit with mrs. clinton, and possibly with joan, if he could have done with rather less explanation of points that were readily appreciated by either of them. and yet no intellectual demands would have been made of a man like john spence that would have shown him to disadvantage if he had not been able to meet them. his simple modesty would have fared better than bobby trench's superficial smartness, because he would never have tried to shine, and, failing, made a parade of his ignorance. he would have been tried by other tests, and come through them. it was by these other tests that bobby trench stood or fell with mrs. clinton, not by his lack of intellectual interests. what did he ask of life for himself? a good time. how did he stand with regard to the wealth and position which were the unacknowledged cause of his being where he was? were they to be held as opportunities? yes, for giving him a good time. what had he to bestow on others? luncheons, dinners, suppers, boxes at theatres, motor trips, yachting trips--all the material for a good time--on his equals; money tips, drinks, an occasional patronising cigar, on such of his inferiors as served or pleased him, so that he might imagine them also to be having a good time, according to their degree. what did he demand from those of whom he made his friends? assistance in the great aim of having a good time, which cannot be enjoyed alone. nothing beyond that; no steadfastness in friendship, no character; only the power to amuse or to share amusement. that was bobby trench, as he revealed himself from day to day to the woman whom he treated with almost patronising attention, and considered a nonentity. whether he so revealed himself to joan there was nothing yet to show; but it was unlikely that she would have so clear a vision, or indeed that a good time, if he could persuade her that it was in his power to offer it, would not appeal to her, at her age, as of more importance than her mother could have desired. joan scanned nancy's face on her return home for signs of relenting, and of a story completed. neither appeared. nancy kissed her lightly, and said, "we've had an awfully cold journey." joan's heart sank again. "how did you enjoy yourself?" she asked. "oh, awfully. it is a splendid great house, bigger than this, and much older. there were a lot of people staying there. we danced in the ball-room every night, and had great fun. dick's leg is pretty well right now, though he had to shoot from a pony. how is mr. trench?" the bald sentences marked the gulf that had opened between them. and there had not been a word of john spence. he dined at kencote that night. joan saw how much in love he was with nancy; and indeed it was plain to everybody. the squire was in the highest state of good humour. he had had no more trouble with joan, and no longer sulked with her, having frequently made a third or fourth in the society of the morning-room, and judged everything to be going on there as he would have had it. and now there was this other affair, going also exactly as he would have it. he felt that providence was busily at work on his behalf, and showed that it had the welfare of the landed interest, in a general sort of way, at heart. the landed interest, though, had to keep a look-out on its own account, if those responsible were to be properly treated by the rank and file partly concerned in its continuance. there was a slight set-back the next morning, which the squire took more to heart than seemed warranted. the under-keeper, gotch, who had come to humphrey's rescue in the wood, and behaved well in the affair generally, had been thanked, and told that some substantial recognition of his merits would be considered, and in due course certainly made. the squire now had the satisfaction of being able to see his way to a more handsome reward than he had at first thought of, or than was, indeed, called for in the case of a man who had merely acted well in the course of his duty. but he prided himself on taking an interest in the welfare of all his servants; he was accustomed to say that he was not like those who treated them as machines; and he was genuinely pleased that circumstances brought it about that he could do gotch a very good turn, also at the prospect of telling him so. gotch came to see him, on summons, in his business room. he was a fine specimen of country-bred manhood, about thirty years of age, upright and clean of limb, with a resourceful look on his open, weather-tanned face, and speech quiet, but readier and more direct than is usual with men of his class. he stood in his well-kept velveteens, cap in hand before his master, and looked him in the face when he addressed him. "well, gotch," said the squire, taking up his usual position in front of the fire. "i hear you've been making love, what?" "yes, sir," said gotch, dropping his eyes for a moment. "clark, eh? lady susan clinton's maid. well, she seems a very respectable young woman, from what i've seen of her, and her ladyship tells me she's saved a bit of money, which is satisfactory, what? and i dare say you've saved a bit yourself." "yes, sir." "when do you want to get married?" the question was asked with business-like curtness, and was answered as shortly. "soon as possible, sir." "yes. well now, i've been turning things over in my mind, gotch. i told you that i should do something for you, to mark my appreciation of the way you behaved in the affair with those scoundrels in buckle wood. in one way, you only did your duty, as anybody in my employ is expected to do it; but that's not the way i look at things. those who do well by me--i like to do well by them; and there's not much doubt that if you hadn't--or somebody hadn't--hit that ruffian on the head--and just at the moment you did, too, by george--it might have gone very hard for mr. humphrey. i don't like to think of what would have happened." "thank you, sir," said gotch, as there came a pause in the flow of eloquence. "very well, then. you want to get married. in the ordinary way you couldn't just yet, because there isn't a cottage. now, gotch, i'll build you a cottage. i've been talking it over with captain clinton, and we've decided to do that. there's a site in buckle wood about a hundred yards in from the gate on the bathgate road that'll be the very thing. i dare say you know the place i mean--that clearing hard by the brook. you shall have a good six-roomed house and a nice bit of garden and so forth, and everything that you can want for bringing up a family. ha! ha! must look forward a bit, you know, in these matters. and there you'll be till the time comes when--well, i won't make any promises, and rattray isn't an old man yet--but when he comes to the end of his time, if you go on as you've begun, you take his place as head-keeper. and let me tell you that head-keeper on a place like kencote is about as good a job as any man has a right to look forward to. you'll follow some good men--men that have been written about in books, amongst them--and i believe you'll fill the place as well as any of them. you've got that to look forward to, gotch, and in the meantime you'll be very nearly as well off as rattray. in fact, your house will be a better house than his. we did think of moving him there and putting you into his cottage, but decided not. now what have you got to say, gotch? will that meet your views?" gotch turned his cap in his hands. "well, sir," he said. "i'm sure i'm very much obliged to you and captain clinton too. it's a handsome return for what i done, and kindly thought of." "well, we think kindly of you, gotch," said the squire. "i hope we think kindly of all the people on the place, and do what we can for their happiness. but we owe you something special, and it's right that we should _do_ something special." it was not, in fact, anything remarkably self-sacrificing that the squire intended to do. there was a dearth of cottages at kencote, as there is on so many otherwise well-managed country estates. young people who wished to marry were sometimes prevented from doing so for years, and there were cases of overcrowding in existing cottages, which, while not amounting to a scandal, might possibly be worked up into one by hostile critics. a new medical officer of health, residing outside the sphere of the squire's social influence, and more than suspected of radical tendencies, had caused notices to be served during the past year; and, worse than that, a london journalist spending his holidays at a farmhouse just outside the manor of kencote had poked his nose in where he had no business to take it, and written a very one-sided article on the depopulation of rural england, with kencote and its owner as a text. the squire had been greatly scandalised, and would have rushed instantly into print had not dick's cooler head restrained him. unfair and ill-informed as both of them judged the article to be, there was enough truth in it to give the enemy a handle. there _was_ overcrowding, though not to any serious extent; and there _was_ a dearth of cottage accommodation. "much better build a few, and stop their mouths," said dick. "it doesn't pay to build cottages," said the squire. "it can't pay, with these ridiculous bye-laws." "can't be helped," said dick. "we can afford to make this property a model one up to a point, and we'd much better take the bone out of their mouths. it isn't a very big one. it will only cost us a few hundreds to satisfy everybody. and they'll like our doing it less than anything. besides, we've got to do something. that fellow moxon has a wife and five children sleeping in two rooms, and that sort of thing simply doesn't do now-a-days." the squire looked at him suspiciously. "i think virginia has been putting some of her american notions into your head," he said. "it did well enough in my grandfather's time, and he was much ahead of his time in that sort of thing. he built model cottages before anybody, almost, and kencote has always been considered----" "oh, well, we needn't go into all that," interrupted dick. "moxon has been served with a notice, and if we don't do something for him we shall lose him. let's be ahead of _our_ time. there hasn't been a brick laid on the place for fifty years or more, except at the home farm and the stables here. it won't do any harm to improve the property in that way, and we've got the money in hand. we might begin with another keeper's cottage. we ought to have somebody in buckle wood." and that was how it all came to fit in so nicely with the reward due to gotch, turning his cap round in his hands in front of his master. "well, sir," said gotch, "if i was thinking of keeping to what i've been doing--and comfortable enough at it under you and captain clinton--for the rest of my life, nothing wouldn't have suited me better, and i take leave to thank you for it. but as you was so good as to say you was going to do something substantial for me, me and 'er talked it over, and we were going to ask you if you'd help us to get over to canada, to start farming. she's got a brother there what's doing well, and i'd look to do as well as him if i could get a fair start." the squire heard him out, but his heavy brows came together, and by the end of the speech had met in a frown of displeasure. one of the points made by the london journalist had been that the best blood and muscle of the countryside was being drafted overseas, because by the selfishness of landowners there was no room for them in rural england; and here was a man for whom room was being made in the most generous manner, who wished to join in the altogether unnecessary stampede. "canada!" he echoed impatiently. "i think you fellows think that the soil is made of gold in canada. what do _you_, of all people, want to go dancing off to canada for? you're not a practical farmer, and even if you were there'd be better chances for you in the old country than in all the canadas in the world." "well, you know more about these things than i do, sir," said gotch respectfully. "and i don't say as i should want to go if it was all in the air like. but there's 'er brother's offer open to me. he'll put me into the way of doing as well as he done himself, if i can take a bit of money out with me. he's a well-to-do man, and he wasn't no better than me when he went over there ten years ago." "well, and ain't i giving you the offer of being a well-to-do man, without pulling up stakes and starting again in a new country? what more can a man want than to have a good home and situation secured to him, on which he can marry and bring up a family, and work that he's fitted for and likes? you do like your work, don't you?" "yes, sir, i should like it better than anything, if----" "if what?" "well, i hope you won't take it amiss what i says, sir; but every man what's worth anything likes to be his own master, sir. it don't mean that he's any complaint to make of them as he serves; and i haven't no complaint--far otherwise. i've done my best by you, sir, and knowed as i should get credit for it, and be well treated, as i 'ave been most handsome, by your kind offer. but it isn't just what i want, sir, and i make bold to say so, hoping not to be misunderstood." "oh, you're not misunderstood," said the squire, unsoftened by this straightforward speech. "the fact is that you've got some pestilent socialistic notion in your head that i'm very sorry to see there. i didn't think it of you, gotch, and i don't like it. i don't like it at all. it's ungrateful." "i'm sure i shouldn't wish to be that, sir." "but you are that. don't you see that you are? a master has his duty towards those under him, and in my case i'm going out of my way to do more than my duty to you. but a man has his duty towards his master too. that's what seems to be forgotten now-a-days. it's all self. i'm offering you something that ninety-nine men out of a hundred would jump at in your position, and you throw it in my face. you won't be any happier as your own master, i can tell you that. you've learnt your catechism, and you know what it says about doing your duty in the state of life to which you are called. you are called plainly to the state of life in which you can do your share in keeping up the institutions that have made this country what it is; and you won't be doing right if you try to go outside it." "well, you'll excuse me, sir, if i don't see things quite in the same light. as long as i'm in your service, sir, i'll do my duty as well as i know how. but every man has got a right to try and better himself, to my way of thinking, and i did hope as how you'd see that, and lend me a hand to do well for myself." the squire straightened himself. "i see it's no use talking sensibly to you, gotch," he said. "you simply repeat the same things over and over again. if you want me to promise you money to take you out of the country when i think it's plainly pointed out by providence that you should stay in it, i'm sorry i don't see my way to oblige you. in the meantime you may consider the offer i made to you open for the present. it's a very good one, and you'll be a fool if you don't take it. and i shan't keep it open indefinitely. i shouldn't keep it open at all, after the way you have spoken, if it hadn't been for what you did a fortnight ago. and it's that or nothing." he turned towards his writing table. gotch, after a pause as if he were going to say something more, glanced at the profile presented to him, said, "thank you, sir," and went out. chapter viii proposals "well, my dear, everybody seems to be busily employed except you and me. it's a fine morning. supposing we go for a walk together!" lord sedbergh beamed upon joan affectionately. he was a stoutish, elderly man, with a large, clean-shaven face, not unhandsome, and noticeably kind, and a bald head fringed with grey-white hair. he had arrived at kencote the afternoon before, to find his son recovering as fast as could be hoped for, and to make a pleasant impression on the company there assembled by his readiness to make friends all round. he and the squire were cronies already, and took delight in reminiscences of their bright youth, which seemed to come nearer to them at every story told. the sky was clear and frosty, the sun bestowed mild brilliance on the browns and purples and greens of the winter landscape, the roads were hard and clean under foot. it was the right morning for a long walk, that form of recreation so seldom enjoyed for its own sake by the squire of kencote and his likes. he came to the door as joan and lord sedbergh were setting out together, and expressed a hope that joan was not boring her companion. "i've got things that i _must_ do for another hour or so," he said; "but we could go up to the home farm at eleven o'clock if that suited you; and the papers will be here in half-an-hour." "my dear edward," said lord sedbergh, "i wouldn't lose my walk with my friend joan for all the home farms in the world, or all the papers that were ever written. and as for her boring me, she couldn't do it if she tried. come along, joan." lord sedbergh had a trace of the garrulity that distinguished the conversation of his son, but it was a ripe garrulity, founded on wide experience of the world, and great good will towards mankind. and he had gifts of taste and knowledge besides, although his indolence had prevented him making any significant use of them. joan found him the most agreeable company, almost as diverting as her uncle, sir herbert birkett, and just as informative as an elderly man has a right to be with an intelligent young girl for her entertainment, and no more. he told her about his early life in foreign cities, and amused her with his stories. an easy strain of past intimacy with notable people and events ran through his talk. "life was very interesting in those days," he said. "i often wish i had stuck to diplomacy. i might have been an ambassador by this time--probably should have been." "why did you give it up?" asked joan. "well, to tell you the truth, my dear, if i hadn't given it up when i did i should have been appointed to the embassy at washington; and don't breathe a word of it to your charming sister-in-law, but i have no particular use for america. there it is, you see--probably, after all, i should not have been made an ambassador. it wasn't the diplomatic game i so much cared about, or washington would have done as well as any other place to play it in. no, it was the life of foreign cities i liked as a young man. i like it still. i go abroad a great deal, and wander all over the place. i like pictures and churches now, though i can't say i paid much attention to that sort of thing in the old days. yes, it is one of my chief pleasures now, to go abroad. i have been all over europe." "i should love to go abroad," said joan. "i have never been out of england, and very seldom away from kencote." he looked at her affectionately. "you have a great deal of pleasure to come," he said, "and i am very much hoping that it may come to me to give you some of it. tell me, my little joan, are you going to give that boy of mine what he wants?" the abrupt transition threw her into confusion. she put her muff to her mouth, and took it away again to stammer, "i don't know. i mean i haven't thought of it--of anything." he withdrew his eyes from her face. "well, i suppose it is rather impertinent of me to ask such a question," he said, "before he has asked it himself. but i think it is plain enough that he wants to ask it, if you will let him; and you see i'm so interested in the answer you are going to give him, on my own account, that i find it difficult to keep away from it. you must put it down to the impatience of old age, joan. the things old people want they want quickly." "you are not old," said joan in a turmoil. "not so old, my dear, but what we shall have many good times together, if you come to us, as i hope you will. i shouldn't allow bobby to monopolise you, you know. when he did his bit of soldiering in the summer you and i would go off on a trip together. and we'd drag him away from his hunting sometimes, and go off in search of sunshine--egypt, algiers, all sorts of places--make up a little party. and you and i would get together at brummels occasionally, and amuse ourselves quietly while the rest of them were making a noise, as we did before. oh, i tell you, i've got very selfish designs on you, my dear; but i shouldn't be in the way, you know; i should never be in the way. i shouldn't want to make bobby jealous." it crossed joan's mind that if he were to be always in the way, and bobby out of it, the proposal would be more attractive than it was at present. but so many thoughts crossed her mind while he was speaking, and she could not give expression to any one of them. he looked at her with kind eyes. "you do like him, little joan, don't you?" he asked. "yes," she said, "but--oh, not in that way." again her muff went to her face. a shade of disappointment crossed his. "then i mustn't press you," he said. "but you are very young, my dear. perhaps some day----! and i shall be a very pleased old man if i can one day have you for a daughter. there would be a house ready for you, and all--a charming house--you saw it--the lodge, you know. i lived there when i was first married. i should like to see _you_ there. i'd do it up for you from top to toe, exactly as you liked it. and i'd give you a motorcar of your own to get about in and pay your visits; and there are good stables if you want to ride. i hope you would live there a good part of the year, and there would be plenty of room for your friends and relations. you would come to us, i hope, in london. your own rooms would be kept for you in my house, and you could have them as you wanted them. there would be scotland in the autumn. you've never seen glenmuick. we're out all day there, and i don't know that it isn't even better than going abroad. bobby doesn't care about fishing, but i think you would. we'd leave him to his stalking, and go off and spend long days on the loch and by the river. you'd never get tired of that. then there's the yacht. you'd get lots of fun out of the yacht, if you like that sort of thing. we generally go to cowes, and have a little cruise afterwards, just to blow away the cobwebs we get from amusing ourselves too hard in london. you'd get lots of change, and your pretty house as a background to it all, where you'd be queen of your own kingdom, my little joan. there now, it looks as if i were trying to tempt you, with all sorts of things that wouldn't really matter, unless you---- well, of course, they do matter. love in a cottage is all very well, but i think young people are likely to get on better together if they've both got something to do. and you'd have plenty to do. i don't think you would ever feel dull." if mrs. clinton had heard this speech she might not have felt so confident of its failing of its purpose as she did when bobby trench disclosed his views on life at its most attractive. it amounted to the same exaltation of "a good time," but it sounded different from lord sedbergh's lips--fresher, opening up vistas, to a country-bred girl, who had only just sipped at the delights of change, and was in the first flush of adventurous youth. the inherent tendency of such a life as he had set forth to lose its salience, to satisfy no more than the stay-at-home life, which joan was beginning to find so dull, could hardly be known to her at her age. it held of itself glamorous possibilities, of which not the least was the astonishing change viewed in herself. the girl who was liable to be told at any moment that if she did not behave herself she should be sent to bed, by her father, was the same girl that her father's friend thought of as the honoured mistress of a household, one on whom gifts were to be showered, whose society was to be courted, whose every wish was to be considered. if only bobby trench were not included in the bright picture! and yet she liked him now, and his society was never irksome. "you are awfully kind to me," she fluttered. "but----" "oh, i know, my dear," he soothed her. "you couldn't possibly give me any answer that i should like to have now. only, i hope---- well, i do want you for bobby, my little joan. and he's very fond of you, you know. it has made a different man of him--er--wanting you as he does. that's the effect that the right sort of girl ought to have on a man. bobby will make a good husband, if he does get the right sort of girl; i'm quite sure of that. she would be able to do anything with him that she liked; make anything of him." this was flattery of a searching kind, and it did seem to joan that she would be able to do anything she liked with bobby trench. as for bobby trench's father, she would have liked to go home and tell nancy that he was the sweetest old lamb in the world. he had healed to some extent the wound caused by her sad discovery that nobody wanted her, caused in its turn--although she did not know it--by the discovery that john spence didn't want her. the fact that bobby trench wanted her didn't count; that lord sedbergh wanted her, did. wonderful things were happening to her as well as to nancy, and if nancy had a secret to hug, so had she. but her secret did not support her long; she was made of stuff too tender. a few hours after her exaltation at the hands of lord sedbergh she was shedding lonely tears because nancy had been so unkind to her, having coldly repulsed an effort to draw out of her some admission as to how she stood with regard to her own now plainly confessed lover. "i don't want to talk about that--to you," she said. "you seem to have affairs of your own to attend to, and you can leave mine alone." lord sedbergh took his departure, and with him went much of the glamour that he had thrown over the proposal which joan now knew must come. bobby trench, undiluted, pleased her less than before, and in a house full of people, with most of whom he had been wont to make common merriment, it vexed her to be constantly left with him in a solitude of two. there was an air of expectancy about the house. it hovered with amused gratification over john spence and nancy, but blew more coldly watchful upon herself and bobby trench. it seemed that if she did what she bitterly told herself was expected of her, she would not please anybody particularly, except bobby trench himself. even her father seemed to watch her suspiciously, but that she supposed was because he was doubtful whether naughtiness would not prevail in her after all. as for her mother, she invited no confidences. joan felt more and more alone, and more and more dissatisfied with herself and everybody about her. her intercourse with bobby trench was less evenly amicable than it had been, for she felt her power to make him suffer for some of her moods. but he did, sometimes, with his unfailing cheerfulness lift her out of them, and she wavered between resentment against him for being the past cause of her present troubles, and remorseful gratitude for his unconquerable fidelity. she had been unusually fractious with him on the afternoon preceding the ball. perhaps it was because she could not go to it herself, being out of sorts, and confined to the house by doctor's orders. the house-party was on the ice on the lake, enjoying itself exceedingly. she and bobby were sitting in front of the fire in the morning-room. "i say, you seem to have got out of bed the wrong side this morning," he said with a conciliatory grin. "what have you got the hump about?" "oh, i don't know," said joan. "everything is so dull, and everybody is so horrid." "you're not such good pals with nancy as you used to be, are you?" he asked after a pause. "that has nothing to do with you," she said, following her mood of snappish domination over him. his reply startled her. "look here," he said, "i'm getting fed up with this. i seem to be about the only person in the house who takes any trouble to make themselves agreeable to you, and i'm the only person you can't treat with ordinary politeness. what's the matter? what have i done?" he spoke sharply, as he had not spoken before, and his words brought home to her the sad state of isolation in which she imagined herself to be living. "i know perfectly well how things are going," he went on, as she did not reply. "there's going to be an engagement in this house in about five minutes, and a general flare up of congratulations and excitement all round; and you're feeling out of it. i can understand that; but why you should turn round upon me, when i've laid myself out to be agreeable to you--and haven't worried you either--i _don't_ understand. i call it devilish unfair." joan felt that it _was_ unfair. it was true that he had often caused her to forget her troubles; and it was true that he had not "worried" her for days. "i am rather unhappy, sometimes, about things i don't want to talk about," she said; "but i'm sorry if i've been disagreeable. i won't be any more. shall we play bezique?" "no, we won't play bezique. we'll talk. look here, you know quite well what i want of you. i've been----" "i don't want to talk about that." "well, i do, and you've got to listen this time. i've been playing the game exactly as you wanted it so far, and you can't refuse to give me my innings." this also was fair; and as love-making was apparently not to be introduced into the game, joan sat silent, looking into the fire, her chin on her hand, and a flush on her cheeks. "it's pretty plain," he went on, "that i haven't got much farther with you in the way i should like to have done. you've always shown you didn't want me to make love to you, and i haven't bothered you much in that way; now have i?" "no," said joan. "and i shan't listen to you if you do." "all right. i'm not going to. but there's another way of looking at things. we do get on well together, and you do like me a bit better than you used to, don't you? now answer straight." "i don't like you any better in the way i suppose you want me to, if that's what you mean." "no, it isn't what i mean. i've said that. i mean, we _are_ friends, aren't we? if i were to go away to-morrow, and you were never to see anything more of me, you would remember me as a friend, wouldn't you?" "yes, i think so." "well, then, look here! can't we fix it up together? no, don't say anything yet; i want to put it to you. you're having a pretty dull time here, and you'll have a jolly sight duller time when your sister gets married and goes away. but we'll give you the time of your life. my old governor is almost as much in love with you as i am, and that's saying a good deal, though you won't let me say it. he's longing to have you, and there's nothing he won't do for us in the way of setting us up. look here, joan, i'll do every mortal thing i can to make you happy; and so will all of us. you'll be the chief performer in _our_ little circus; and it won't be such a little one, either. we can give you anything, pretty well, that anybody could want, and will lay ourselves out to do it. you won't find me such a bad fellow to live with, joan. we _are_ pals, you know, already; you've said so. can't you give it a chance?" dispossessed of its emotional constituents, the proposal was not without its allure; and, so dispossessed, could be faced, or at least glanced at, without undue confusion of face. joan glanced at it, and said, "lord sedbergh is very sweet to me." "well, he's sweet _on_ you, you know," said bobby with a grin. "do say yes, joan. it'll make him the happiest man in the world--except me. i _know_ you won't regret it. i shan't let you. i shall lay myself out to do exactly what you want; and there's such a lot i can do, if you'll only let me. for one thing, you'd be taken out of everything that's bothering you now, at a stroke. you'll have such a lot of attention paid to you that you'll be likely to get your head turned; but i shan't mind that, if it's turned the right way. joan, let my old governor and me show what we can do to look after you and give you a good time." she twisted her handkerchief in her hands. "oh, it's awfully good of you both to want me so much," she said; and his eyes brightened, because hitherto she had shown that she thought it anything but good of him to want her so much. "but how can i? i don't love you, bobby." she said it almost as if she wished she did; and the childish plaintiveness in her voice moved him deeply. his voice shook a little as he replied, still in the same dispassionate tone, "i know you don't, my dear, but i'll put up with that. _i_ love _you_; and that will have to do for both of us." she looked at him with a smile. "that would be rather a one-sided bargain, wouldn't it?" "_i_ don't think so. it's as a pal i should want you chiefly, and you would be that. you are already." she looked into the fire again, with a slight frown on her face. but it was only a frown of indecision. how should she have known enough about men to detect the unreality in _that_ plea? he waited for her to speak, putting strong constraint on himself. "oh, i can't," she said at last. he took her hand. "joan, my dear," he said, "will you marry me? i'll wait for what you can't give me now, and never worry you for it. honour bright, i won't." she let her hand remain in his for a moment, and then sprang up. "oh, they're coming in," she cried. he swore under his breath, but rose too, and said, as voices were heard approaching, "think over it, and tell me to-morrow." joan lay awake for a long time that night. she had gone to bed when the others had driven off to their ball, about nine o'clock. she was offered a way of escape--she did not examine herself as to what from. bobby had been very nice to her--not silly, at all. nobody else wanted her, nancy least of all. very likely nancy was even now being offered _her_ escape; the idea had got about that john spence would unbosom himself to the sound of the violins. she would have liked to have talked to her mother, but had not had an opportunity. when she considered what she should say to her, when the opportunity came, she discovered that she did not want to say anything. if she had been able to tell her that she loved bobby trench, it would have been different. no, she did not love him. but she liked him--very much. and she liked lord sedbergh even more. she supposed she loved her father, in fact she was sure she did; but lord sedbergh would also be in the place of a father to her, if she married bobby trench, and it would not be wrong to love him, perhaps rather better. he would certainly know how to treat her better. should she--should she not? she had not quite made up her mind when she dropped off to sleep. she was awakened by nancy coming into the room, with hannah, both of them speaking softly. she pretended not to have been awakened, but through her lashes sought for signs in nancy's face. there were none, except that she seemed unusually gay for that time of the morning, made soft laughter with hannah, and dismissed her suddenly before she had finished undressing. when hannah had left the room nancy looked straight at joan, lying with her face turned towards her. joan shut her eyes, and did not see the expression with which she looked at her. when she opened them again nancy was standing by the fire, looking into the embers; and now there was no mistaking the look on her face. it was tender and radiant. all joan's soreness was wiped out. nancy was very happy, and she wanted to kiss her again and again, and cry, and tell her how much she loved her. she moved in her bed, coughed, and opened her eyes. nancy was looking at her with a face from which the radiance had melted; she left the fireplace and went to the dressing-table. "hullo!" she said. "are you feeling better?" "yes, thanks," said joan, choking her emotion. "have you enjoyed yourself?" "yes, thanks. i wish you'd been there. the band was ripping, and the floor was perfect." she talked on a little longer, and joan began to think nothing had happened after all. then she said suddenly, "by the by, i'm engaged to john spence. i thought you'd like to know." joan could not speak for the moment. nancy drew aside the curtain and looked out. "it's freezing hard," she said. "i shall wear my tweed coat and skirt to-morrow. well, good-night!" she did not look at joan as she turned away from the window, but blew out the lights and got into bed. there was a long silence. both girls lay perfectly still. by and by sounds came from joan's pillow, as if she were crying softly and trying to hide it. nancy lay quite still, and the sounds ceased. there was another long silence. "nancy, are you awake?" came in a voice that shook a little. "yes." "i'm m-most awfully glad." "then what are you crying for?" "because i'm sorry i've been such a pig; and i d-do so want to be friends again; and you won't." "oh, i will, darling old joan." nancy was out of bed, and had thrown herself on joan's neck. they were mingling tears and kisses together, nancy crying quite as freely as joan. they lay talking together for an hour or more, and fell asleep in one another's arms. when morning came, joan had the happiest waking she had known for many months. that afternoon she told bobby trench that she could not marry him. "i'm very sorry," she said. "i do like you, bobby, and i hope we shall always be friends; but i don't love you the least little bit, and i'm quite sure now that one ought not to marry anyone one doesn't love." book iii chapter i the squire confronted the lilacs in the station-yard at kencote were blossoming again. again the train crawled over the sun-dappled meadows, and joan was on the platform to meet it. this time it was humphrey who got out of it. "hullo!" she said brightly. "they've sent the luggage-cart. i thought you'd like to walk." he had hardly smiled when she greeted him, and now frowned. "i wanted to see the governor," he said. "however, it won't take long to walk. come along." "how's susan?" joan asked as they set out. "all right," said humphrey shortly. "she's gone to her people." he cleared the preoccupation from his face, and looked at his sister. "you look blooming," he said. "do you miss nancy?" "yes, awfully," she said, "but i'm going to stay with them the moment they get back. i hear from her every day. they're having a gorgeous time. they are going to take me abroad with them next year. i shall love it." "i've got a piece of news for you," said humphrey after a pause. "bobby trench is engaged to be married." a flush crept over her face and died away again before she said, "that's rather sudden, isn't it? who is he going to marry?" "lady bertha willersley. can't say i admire his taste much. she's amusing enough for a time, but i should think she'd tire you to death if you had too much of her. she can't be much younger than he is, either. she's been about almost ever since i can remember." "oh, well," said joan, with an embarrassed laugh, "it shows i was right." "i'm not sure that it doesn't," humphrey admitted. "bobby has always been a friend of mine, and i like him well enough; but he _is_ rather a rotter. i think you're pretty well out of it, joan." "i'm sure i am," she said. "but you didn't say so at the time." "poor old girl," he said. "we gave you rather a bad time, didn't we? but you did lead him on a bit, didn't you?" "i didn't," said joan indignantly. "i always said i wouldn't have him." "well, he told me himself that you would have said 'yes' one evening if somebody hadn't come in." she was silent. "it's true then?" he said, with a glance at her. "oh, i don't know. i _might_ have done, but i should have been very sorry for it afterwards." "you'd have had a topping good time." "i suppose that is what tempted me, just a little. but it would be horrid to marry for that." "what made you change? he was most awfully in love with you, to do him justice, though he seems to have got over it pretty quickly." "yes, he did seem to be. but it shows how little it was worth. it wasn't the sort of way john was in love with nancy." "it was when nancy fixed up her little affair that you sent bobby about his business." "yes. don't let's talk about it any more. i'm sick of bobby trench." "governor been at you about him?" "he has never forgiven me. perhaps he will now. but i know mother was glad, so i don't much care." "how is the governor?" asked humphrey, rather gloomily. "fairly amiable?" "fairly. i think he misses nancy; but of course he is glad she married john. he is so well off." humphrey took no notice of this shaft. he hardly spoke again until they reached the house, when he went straight into his father's room. "well, my boy," said the squire. "what good wind blows you here? i thought you were moving down to hampshire this week." "the house isn't quite ready yet. susan has gone to her people. i thought i'd run down. and--i've got something to talk to you about." "yes, well!" the squire was a little suspicious. he didn't want to part with any money for the moment. "what have you decided about gotch? clark is leaving us, and wants things settled. she doesn't want to find another place. she wants to get married." "well, then, let her get married," said the squire, with some show of heat. "it's nothing to do with me. let gotch marry her, and find a place to take her to, if he can. i've no room for another married keeper here, as i've filled up the place that mr. gotch saw fit to refuse." "yes, i know," said humphrey. "but look here, father, can't you forget that now, and do what he wants? he did me a jolly good turn, you know. i might have been killed, or injured for life, if it hadn't been for him." "i know all that, and i was ready to make him the most handsome reward for what he did. he saw fit to refuse it, as i think in the most ungrateful way, and there's an end. i kept the offer open for a month. i did everything that could be expected of me, and a good deal more. i've washed my hands of mr. gotch altogether." "i don't think he's ungrateful. but he has this exceptionally good offer in canada, if he can put down a few hundred pounds, and----" "then let him put down his few hundred pounds. i've no objection." "he hasn't got it, you know," said humphrey, with weary patience. "he and clark have both got a bit, but not enough, and i can't do anything for them at the moment. denny croft has cost a lot more than i thought it would to put right, and i haven't got a bob to spare." "now, look here, humphrey. i'm not going to do it, and that's flat. apart altogether from the fact that i don't think gotch has behaved well, and i feel myself relieved of all obligation to him now, i object to this emptying of the country that's going on. as long as there are places in england for men like gotch, i say it's their duty to stay by the old country. supposing every keeper and farm-hand and so on on this place took it into his head to go off to canada, where should we be, i should like to know? it's the duty of the people on the land to stick together, or the whole basis of society goes. _i_ stick here and do my duty in _my_ sphere; _i_ don't want to go rushing off to canada; and i expect others in _their_ sphere to do the same. it's quite certain i'm not going to put down money to help them to run away from their duty. so let's have no more talk about it." humphrey did not seem to have been listening very closely to this speech. he did not reply to it. "something very disagreeable has happened," he said. "i don't want to tell you the details of it. but it is important that clark should be got out of the country as soon as possible." the squire stared at him, and marked for the first time his serious face. "what do you mean?" he asked. "what has happened?" "i don't want to tell you more than this, that clark has it in her power to make mischief. i hope you won't ask any more, but will take my word for it; it's very serious mischief. it's _she_ who wants to go to canada. i think if gotch had been left to himself he would have accepted your offer; and i know he is upset at the way you have taken his refusal. do, for god's sake, let him have what he wants, and take her off, or i don't know what won't happen." his ordinary level speech had become agitated, but he returned to himself again as he said quietly, "i've said more than i meant to. take it from me that i'm not exaggerating, and do what i ask, for your own sake as well as mine." a stormy gleam of light had broken over the squire's puzzled features. "do you mean to tell me that you're in disgrace--with this woman?" he asked. humphrey looked at him, and then laughed, without amusement. "oh, it's nothing like that," he said. "but disgrace--yes. it will amount to that for all of us. mud will stick, and she's prepared to throw it. she has said nothing to gotch, and has promised not to. she'll say nothing to anybody, if we lend gotch the money. that's all he wants, you know. he'll pay it back when he's made his way. we must lend him three hundred pounds. he's a steady man and safe. i'd give it him, if i had it. it's the greatest luck in the world that we can close her mouth in that way. oh, you _must_ do it, father." he had become agitated again; and it was the rarest thing for him to show agitation. the squire was impressed. "i don't say i won't," he said; "but you must show me some cause, humphrey. i don't understand it yet. and anyhow, i'm not going to pay blackmail, you know. what's the story this woman has got hold of--if you've done nothing, as you say?" "no, i've done nothing. i don't want to tell you her story, father; and it will do you no good to hear it. besides, it simply _must_ be kept from getting out. you tell a thing in confidence to one person, and they tell it in confidence to another; and it's public property and the mischief done before you know where you are." "i shan't tell a soul." "can't you just trust me, and think no more about it?" "no, i can't, humphrey. you must tell me what it's all about. i can't act in the dark." humphrey sat silent, looking on the ground, while the squire, with a troubled look on his face, waited for him to speak. he looked up. "will you promise me definitely that you'll keep it absolutely to yourself?" he asked. "mother mustn't know, or dick, or anybody." "why not? neither of them would breathe a word." "i won't tell it to more than one person. if you won't promise to keep it sacred and give nobody a hint that might put them on the scent, i'll tell somebody else. i _must_ tell somebody, and get advice, as well as money." "i don't keep things from dick," said the squire slowly, "and very seldom from your mother. i'm not a man who likes hugging a secret. if i give you this promise it will be a weight on me. but i'll do it if you assure me that there is some special reason why neither of those two shall be told. i think they ought to be, if it's a question of disgrace, and a way of averting it. i shouldn't like to trust myself to give you the right advice, without consulting them--or at any rate, dick." humphrey considered again. "no, i won't risk it," he said. "yes; there _is_ a special reason. it is not to be a matter of consultation, except between you and me." "very well," said the squire unwillingly, "i will tell nobody." "not even if they see something is wrong, and press you?" "you have my word, humphrey," said the squire simply. humphrey wrung his hands together nervously. "oh, it's a miserable story," he said. "clark accuses susan of stealing that necklace from brummels." "what!" exclaimed the squire, horrified. "she's prepared to swear to it, and says she will go and lay information, unless we do what they want--help gotch to settle in canada." the squire sprang from his seat and strode the length of the room. his face was terrific as he turned and stood before humphrey. "but that's the most scandalous case of blackmail i ever heard of," he said. "you mean to say you are prepared to give in to that! and expect me to help you! you ought to be ashamed of asking such a thing, humphrey. and to extract a promise from me to keep _that_ to myself! what can you be thinking of? i've not much difficulty in advising you if that's the sort of trouble you're in. send for a policeman, and have the woman locked up at once. the brazen insolence of it! let the whole world know of it, if they want to, i say. your honour can't stand much if _that_ sort of mud is going to stain it. it's your positive duty. i can't think what you can have been thinking of not to do it at once. to give in to the woman! why, it's shameful, humphrey! disgrace! that's where the disgrace is." humphrey had sat silent under this exordium, his head bent and his eyes on the ground. he said no word when his father had finished. a half-frightened look came over the squire's face. "you've allowed this woman to impose upon you," he said in a quieter voice. "you've lost your head, my boy. take hold of yourself, and fling the lie back in her face. _punish_ her for it." there was another pause before humphrey said, raising his head, but not his eyes: "it isn't a lie. it's the truth. oh, my god!" his frame was shaken by a great sob. he leant forward and buried his face in his hands. the squire sat down heavily in his chair. he picked up a paper-knife from the writing-table and balanced it in his hand. for a moment his face was devoid of all expression. then he turned round to his son and said in a firm voice: "you say susan did steal them? are you sure of that? joan as good as saw that mrs. amberley take them. yes, and it was proved that she sold them, at her trial! aren't you allowing this woman to bluff you, humphrey?" his voice had taken a note of confidence. humphrey sat up, his face white and hard. "mrs. amberley's selling pearls was a coincidence--unlucky for her," he said. "we know where she got them from. the story they wouldn't listen to was true." "but joan!--seeing her at the very cupboard itself!" "she may have _wanted_ to steal them. she did steal the diamond star." the squire drooped. "still, it may be bluff," he said weakly. "how did clark know of it?" "oh, don't turn the knife round, father," said humphrey. "it isn't clark; it's susan. she told me herself." "she told you she was a thief!" the squire's voice had changed, and was harder. "yes. it's a wretched story. don't make it harder for me to tell." the control in which he had held himself, coming down in the train, walking from the station with joan, and first addressing his father, was gone. he spoke as if he were broken, but in a hard, monotonous voice. the squire's face softened. "go on, my boy," he said. "tell me everything. i'll help you if i can." "i taxed her with it. she's frightened to death. i could only get at it by degrees; and there are some things i don't understand now. i shall clear them up when she's better. she's ill now, and i don't wonder at it." "where is she?" "with her mother. _she_ doesn't know anything. she thinks we've had a row." "well, tell me." "i was a fool not to suspect what was going on. she was head over ears in debt. what she must have been spending on clothes it frightens me to think of. she told me that she had got somebody to make them for almost nothing, but i might have known that was nonsense, if i'd thought about it at all. i remember now some woman or other laughing at me when i told her she dressed herself on two hundred a year. 'i suppose you mean two thousand,' she said, and i should think it couldn't have been much less than that. she had things put away that i'd never seen. she didn't disclose half what she owed when you helped us two years ago. then she'd been playing bridge with a lot of harpies--auction--at sixpenny points--and she's no more head for it than an infant in arms." "sixpenny points!" repeated the squire. "well, it means she could easily lose forty or fifty pounds in an afternoon, and probably did, often enough. she had to find ready money for that. i haven't got at it all yet, but when we went down to brummels she didn't know which way to turn, and was desperate--ready to do anything. i know there was a---- no, i can't tell you that; and it doesn't matter. i'm not sure it isn't as well for her, and for me, that she did get the money in the way she did." the squire's face was very grave. "you know, humphrey, if she has deceived you, and is capable of this horrible theft, you ought to satisfy yourself----" humphrey broke down again, but recovered himself quickly. "thank god, i know everything," he said. "everything that matters. she was terrified. she turned to me. there's nothing between us. it's all partly my fault. i'd been in debt myself, and hadn't helped her to keep straight. and we'd had rows, and she was afraid to tell me things." "go on, my dear boy," said the squire very kindly. "it's soon told. she heard lady sedbergh and mrs. amberley talking about the hiding-place." "was she in the room?" "she was just outside. the door was open." "she listened?" "yes. she stayed outside, and listened. they went out by another door, and she went into the room at once and took the necklace. she pawned pearls here and there, going out in the evening, veiled, but in a foolish, reckless way. i can't conceive why something didn't come out at the trial. it was she who gave rachel amberley's name at that place in the city. she's about the same height. but imagine the folly of it! she says that it 'came over her' to do it, and she only did it that once. she seems to have made up names at the other places." "did she get rid of all the pearls?" "that's what i can't make out yet. she got enough money to pay up everything; but not more. she can't say how much, but it can't possibly have been what the pearls were worth. perhaps she let some of them go at an absurd value, which would be a reason for those who had got them to lie low. i couldn't get at everything; there was so much that i had to ask about; and she wasn't in a state---- oh, she'd have been capable of any folly--even throwing some of them away, if she got frightened. we've been dancing on gunpowder. clark knew all along; or almost from the first." "did she help her?" "oh no. she was fond of her; she was the daughter of one of their gardeners." "are you _sure_ she didn't help her? what do you mean--she was fond of her?" "i mean that she might have given her away." "she knew at the time of the trial?" "yes." "did she threaten susan, then?" "no. i think she never meant to do anything at all. susan had given her a lot of things. she was in with her to that extent--knew about her dressmaking bills. and she wanted to marry gotch, and gotch is loyal to us. she didn't want to make trouble. it was only gotch being kept hanging on about canada that put it into her head that she had a weapon." "but you say she threatened you. she must be a bad woman." "well, i put her back up. she came to me and said she wanted something done at once, and hinted that she knew things. i was angry at being pressed in that way, and made her speak out. i believe, at first, she thought i was in it; or she wouldn't have come to me in the way she did. i soon disabused her of that idea, if she really held it, and i was furious. i thought it was blackmail, as you did. i threatened to have her up. that scandalised her, and she convinced me that she was telling the truth. she told me to go and ask susan, if i didn't believe her. it was then, when she had burnt her boats, that she threatened." "well--however you look at it--it is blackmail. she's ready to compound a felony. and we are asked to do the same. humphrey, this is a terrible story. it's the blackest day i've ever known. i don't think i've quite taken it all in yet. susan a thief! all that we've said and thought about that other woman--and justly too, if she'd been guilty--applies to--to one of ourselves--to a clinton. i feel stunned by it. i don't know what to say or do." his face was grey. his very tranquillity showed how deeply he had been hit. "what we have to do," said humphrey, "is to avert the disgrace to our name. fortunately that can be done. it isn't blackmail; clark never thought of it in that light, or she would have moved long ago. she thought we were not treating gotch well in refusing him what he asked, after what he had done, and the promises we had made him. _he'll_ never know anything about it. have him in and tell him that you will lend him the money he wants. that cuts the whole horrible knot." the squire made no answer to this. "she is _more_ guilty than the other woman," he went on, as if humphrey had not spoken. "she stood by and saw an innocent woman suffer. humphrey, it was very base." "mrs. amberley _wasn't_ innocent," said humphrey. "she went to steal the necklace, and found it gone. she _did_ steal the star, and that was what she was punished for. her punishment was deserved. besides, it's over now. you know that she was let out. she has gone to america. we shall never hear of her over here again." "it's a very terrible story," said the squire again. "i don't know what's to be done. i'm all at sea. i must---- humphrey, why did you make me promise to keep this a secret? dick ought to be told. he's got a cooler head than i have." "dick shall _not_ be told," said humphrey, almost with violence. "nor anyone else. we've got to settle this between ourselves. nobody must suspect anything, and nobody must be put in the position of treating susan so that others will be tempted to talk about it. if she came down here, and there were two besides you--and me--who knew what she had done, it would be an impossible position. i've made up my mind absolutely about that, and you gave me your word." "susan down here!" repeated the squire, in a tone that made humphrey wince. "you won't be asked to have more to do with her than is necessary to keep away all suspicion," he said. "it isn't susan you have to think of--that's my business--it's yourself, and the whole lot of us. the scandal doesn't bear thinking of if it comes out. think what it would mean. think of all you said yourself about mrs. amberley. think of the whole country saying that about one of us; and saying much more, because of what you said--of her keeping quiet about it. oh, i'm not trying to defend her--but think of the ghastly disgrace. we should never hold up our heads again. think of the dock for her--and prison! father, you must put an end to it. thank god it can be done, without touching your honour." the knife had gone right home. the squire sprang up from his chair and strode down the room again. "my honour!" he cried. "oh, humphrey, what honour is left to us after this?" "susan is sorry," humphrey went on quickly. "bitterly sorry. she has been quite different lately. she had a terrible shock. she is spending next to nothing now, and----" "oh!" the squire glared at him, looking more like himself than he had done since humphrey's disclosure. "she paid her debts out of stolen money. yes, she was different, when she thought the danger had been removed, and that other woman was safe in prison. she was gay and light-hearted when she came here at christmas, with that--that crime on her conscience. you say that as if it was to her credit!" "i don't!" said humphrey sullenly. "but she is sorry now. she's punished. it isn't for us to punish her again; and punish ourselves. it's too ghastly to think about. oh, what's the use of going on talking about it, father, while the risk is still hanging over us? let me send a wire to clark; or let gotch do it, this evening. then we can breathe freely, and talk about all the rest later." the squire took another turn down the room. "i won't be hurried into anything," he said with some indignation. "i won't think of what may happen until i've made up my mind, in case i should do something wrong, out of fear. oh, why can't you let me call in dick?" "i won't. and you've _got_ to think of what will happen. the name of clinton horribly disgraced--held up to the most public scorn--not a corner to hide yourself in. it will last all _your_ lifetime, and mine too, and go on to your grandchildren. you will never know another happy moment. the stain will never come out; it will stick to every one of us." "oh, that's enough," said the squire, seating himself again. he turned sharply round again. "what do you want me to do?" he asked angrily. "send for gotch--send for him now this moment--and tell him that you have changed your mind. you will arrange to let him have the money he has asked for, and he can go off as soon as he likes." "i'm to say i've changed my mind?" "yes, of course. you don't want to set him wondering." "then he will let this woman, clark, know----" he began to speak more slowly. "yes. i shall go back to-morrow morning and see her. i shall have a hold over her, and she will certainly keep quiet, for her own sake." "she will be liable to prosecution if the truth becomes known from any other source." "it won't be. she is the only person who knows anything." "and _i_ shall have compounded a felony too, if it becomes known." "no. that isn't so. _you_ will have nothing to do with her at all. you will never see her." "that's true. but she will know why i pay this money." "not necessarily. no, she needn't know. i shall tell her i persuaded you. she doesn't know you were so definitely against it. she thinks it was just hanging fire." the squire rose from his seat, and went to the empty fireplace, where he took his stand, facing his son. he looked at him steadily, and said in a quiet but firm voice, "i won't do it, humphrey." chapter ii a very present help virginia among her flowers, in the sweet, old-fashioned retired garden of the dower house was a sight to refresh the eyes. she was gathering a sheaf of long-stalked may-flowering tulips as humphrey pushed open the gate leading from the park, and came in. he was not able to keep all signs of the terrible blow that had been dealt him, and the disappointment that had come of the appeal he had just made to his father, from showing on his face; but he had schooled himself, walking across the park, to a natural bearing. he had to make another effort to avert such ruin and disgrace as would overwhelm him utterly, and make the rest of his life a burden and a reproach. the sun was setting behind the tall elms that bordered the garden of the dower house. the rooks were busy with their evening conference. the westward windows of the ancient, mellowed house were shining. peace and hope sat brooding on the fair, home-enchanted place, and a lump sprang up in humphrey's throat as he came upon it, and saw his brother's wife, so sweet and gracious, protected here and shut in from the ugliness of life, and quietly happy in her seclusion. the contrast between virginia in her garden, and the desperate wreck of his own married life, was too poignant. he turned round to shut the door in the wall, but by the time she had looked up and seen him he had hardened himself against emotion. she gave a little cry of pleasure. "why, humphrey!" she said, "i had no idea you were here. i am so glad to see you. i am all alone. dick has gone up to dine and sleep in london." the disappointment was so keen that his taut-stretched nerves gave way for a moment, and he felt physically ill. "why, what's the matter?" she said. "is there any bad news? you look dreadful, humphrey." he forced a laugh. "i'm not very fit," he said. "but i had made sure of seeing dick, about something rather important. when will he be back?" "to-morrow afternoon. but isn't there anything that i can do? do tell me, humphrey. dick has no secrets from me, you know." he was afraid to make any mystery. "oh, it's only about the keeper, gotch," he said at once. "clark is leaving us, and they want to get married. they have both set their hearts on going to canada, and i came down to see if i could get the governor to consent to helping them. but he won't do it, and i was going to ask dick if _he_ could possibly raise the money." "oh, but, humphrey--easily--if it isn't too much. what do they want?" "three hundred pounds--only as a loan. he would pay it back after the first year--in instalments--when he had got himself settled. he has a fine opportunity waiting for him over there. he ought not to miss it. i do feel that i owe him a lot. that scoundrel would have battered me to death, very likely, if he hadn't come on the scene. i wish to goodness i could give him the money myself. i _could_ raise it, but it would take time. i want to go back to-morrow and tell clark that it is all settled." "oh, you shall, humphrey. let me do it for you. i have heaps of money that i don't know what to do with. dick won't let me spend a penny on living here. i believe he hates to think he has married a rich woman. i can write you a cheque now. come indoors." the relief was enormous. but many things had to be thought of. it was not only the money he had come for. he could have got that, as he had said, elsewhere, and no sacrifice would have been too great to make for it, if it had been all that was wanted. "my dear virginia," he said, "you are generosity itself; but i shouldn't like to take it from you without dick knowing of it." "oh, i shall tell him, of course. but he won't mind. why should he?" "i don't know how he feels about gotch going. the governor is up in arms at his wanting to leave ken cote at all. dick may feel the same, for all i know." she laughed. "oh, i see," she said. "we are up against the dear old feudal system. i am always forgetting about that; and i do try so hard to be british, humphrey." humphrey smiled. "you'll do as you are," he said. "i think myself that every fellow ought to have his chance. if he sees his way to doing well for himself it isn't fair to expect him to throw it away just because he's your servant, as his fathers were before him." virginia's face showed mock horror. "but, humphrey!" she said, "this is rank radicalism! _what_! a man who can have as many blankets and as much soup as he likes--to make up for the smallness of his wages--has a right to go off and be his own master! to think that i should hear such words from a clinton!" humphrey could not keep it up. he smiled, but had no light answer ready. "keepers get quite decent wages," he said, "and the governor was prepared to put gotch into that new cottage he's building; do well for him, in fact. that's why he thinks it ungrateful of him to want to go, and won't help in any way. the question is whether dick won't feel the same." "oh, i think not," she said. "dick is getting quite democratic. i, virginia clinton, have made him so. why, the other day he actually said that the will of the people ought to prevail--if we could only find out what it was. he is getting on fast. no, humphrey, i'm sure dick won't mind. if i thought he would, i wouldn't do it--without asking him first. i am going to do it. i _want_ to do it. i like to think of a young man like gotch, good and strong, going off to carve himself out a place in a new country. you have all been very patient with me, and i love you all dearly, but i shall _never_ come to think that it is a proper life for a man to spend all his days in bringing up birds for other people to kill. now who shall i make the cheque out to--you or gotch?" she was at her writing-table with her cheque-book in front of her, and a pen in her hand. it was difficult to restrain her. but the cheque was not all that humphrey wanted. "wait a minute," he said. "let's get it right in our minds. gotch doesn't want charity." she put down her pen, and her delicate skin flushed. "i shouldn't offer it to him," she said. "i hate charity--the charity of the money-bags." "oh, my dear girl!" he said, "i didn't mean to hurt you. we're a clumsy race, you know; we think things out aloud. i was only wondering what would be the best way." she smiled up at him, standing over her, her momentary offence gone. "why, of course," she said. "we must help him without putting him under any obligation. how shall we do it?" "you see, the money ought to come from the governor, or dick. if you or i were to give it him, and they had no hand in it, he would be leaving kencote under a sort of cloud. he wouldn't want that, and i shouldn't like it for him. and i don't want the money to come from me. that would look as if i thought a money payment would be a suitable acknowledgment of what he did in coming to my rescue." there was more earnestness in his voice than his words seemed to warrant. virginia looked a little puzzled. but her brow cleared again. perhaps this was only one of those little niceties of feudal honour which she never did and never would understand. "well then, i'll tell you what i'll do," she said. "let us go to gotch together, and i'll give him my cheque and tell him that it comes from dick, who is away." he breathed deeply. "are you sure dick won't mind?" he asked. "quite sure. he said the other day that gotch ought to be allowed to go if he wanted to." "did he really say that, virginia?" "yes, it was when your father settled that the other man should have the new cottage. no, dick won't mind. by the bye, are you sure that mr. clinton won't? if he objects to gotch going----" "he objects to helping him to go. i told him i should ask dick." "what did he say?" "he said he should wash his hands of it." "oh, then, that's all right. here is the cheque; we'll go and find gotch, and give it him, and wish him joy. there is just time before dinner." "virginia," said humphrey devoutly, "you are an angel." that night humphrey and his father sat up late together. the squire had gone through a terrible time since humphrey had left him to go down to the dower house, with the words, "whatever you do, or don't do, i'm going to fight hard to save our name." all the usual outlets through which he was accustomed to relieve the pressure of an offence were denied him. irritability would cause remark. and this was too deep and dreadful an offence to create irritability. high words would not assuage it; cries raised to heaven about the ingratitude of mankind, and his own liability to suffer from it, had been used too often over small matters to make them anything but a mockery as applied to this great one. he was stricken dumb by it. the night was black all around him. there was no light to guide his steps. even the one he had already taken he was in doubt about, now he had taken it. he did not question his own action in refusing to cut the knot. he had simply felt unable to do it, and had followed that light, as far as it had led him. but when humphrey had gone away to find dick, and ask him to provide money for gotch, without telling him why it _must_ be found, somewhere or other, he had hoped that dick would consent; and this troubled him. when he went upstairs to dress for dinner, after sitting motionless in the library for over an hour, he locked the door and knelt down by the bed in his dressing-room and prayed to god for help in his trouble and guidance in his difficulties. he had felt increasingly, as he sat and thought downstairs, that prayer was the only thing that would help him; but he could not kneel down in the library, and it was dishonouring to god almighty not to kneel down when you prayed. so he went upstairs, earlier than his wont, to the bedside at which he had said his daily and nightly prayers for over forty years. he never slept in this bed; it was the altar of his private devotions, which were never pretermitted, although by lapse of time they had slid into a kind of home-made liturgy, which demanded small effort of spirit, and less of mind. but now he prayed earnestly, with bowed head and broken words, repeating the lord's prayer at the close of his petitions, and rising from his knees purged somewhat of his fears, and supported in his deep trouble. at dinner he was a good deal silent, but not perceptibly brooding over disclosures made to him, as humphrey had feared of him. he even smiled once or twice, and spoke courteously to his wife and affectionately to joan. he took joan's hand in his as she passed him to go out of the room with her mother, and she gave him a hug, and a kiss, which he returned. she thought that humphrey had told him about bobby trench's engagement, and this was his way of showing that she was finally forgiven for rejecting that fickle suit. but it was his desire to find contact with innocence, and the tranquillity of his home, that had prompted the caress. "dick has gone up to london," he said, raising his eyes, when humphrey had shut the door and come back to the table. "yes," said humphrey. "but virginia had the money, and said that dick would like her to give it. he had told her that gotch ought to be helped to go away." "he never said that to me," said the squire, with no clear sense of relief at the news, except that it meant that a decision had been taken out of his hands. "well, he had said it to her, or she wouldn't have done it. she and i went to gotch together. she said just the right things, and he was as grateful as possible. he takes it that he's forgiven for holding out. i told him that you wouldn't do it yourself after all you had said, but you had withdrawn your opposition." "why do you say these things, humphrey?" asked the squire, in a pained and almost querulous voice. "none of them are lies, exactly, but they are not the truth, either." "i shouldn't care if they _were_ lies," said humphrey. "i'm long past caring about that." the squire sighed deeply. "i won't talk about it over the table," he said, rising, and leaving his glass of port half full. "we will go and ask joan to play to us, and talk in my room later." as joan played, he sat in his chair thinking. relief was beginning to find its way into his sombre thoughts. he took it to be in answer to his prayer. if you took your difficulties to god, a way of escape would be opened out. the old aunts who had brought him up in his childhood had impressed that upon him, and he had never doubted it, although he had had no occasion hitherto to try the experiment. he had not made it a subject of prayer when walter had so annoyed him by refusing to take holy orders with a view to the family living, and insisted on studying medicine, which no clinton had ever done before; or when cicely had gone off to stay in london without a with-your-leave or a by-your-leave; or when dick had gone against his strong wishes and insisted upon marrying virginia; or when humphrey had come to him with debts; or even when joan had refused to make a marriage which he thought to be well for her to make. soothed by joan's playing, his thoughts ran reflectively through these and other disturbances and difficulties that had marked his otherwise equable, prosperous life, and he saw for the first time how little he had really had to complain of. but that enlightenment only seemed to deepen the black shadows that lay in the gulf opened out before him. the props of position and wealth that had sustained him were of no avail here. they had supported him in other troubles; they would only make this one worse to bear. it would find him stripped naked for the world to jeer at. this was the sort of trouble in which a man wanted help from above. and the help had come, promptly; perhaps all the more promptly because he had acted uprightly. he could not have given in to humphrey's request, whatever the consequences, knowing what he did. but that it should have been immediately met, in a way to which no objection could be taken, elsewhere, seemed to show that it was not the will of god that disgrace should overwhelm the innocent as well as the guilty. he could look that disgrace in the face now, or rather in the flank, as a peril past; and he went through almost unendurable pangs as he did so. he turned in his chair, and the perspiration broke out on his brow as the horror of what he had escaped came home to him. he thanked god that he had acted aright. if he had pictured to himself fully what might come from his refusal, he might have stained his honour with almost any act that would avert such appalling humiliation. when he and humphrey were alone together he spoke with more of his usual manner than he had hitherto done. "i can't justly complain of what you have done," he said. "whether it would have been right to take any steps to save susan herself from the consequence of what she has done--to hush it up--fortunately we haven't got to decide on. we can leave that in the hands of a higher power." "she has been pretty well punished already," said humphrey. "right or wrong, i'm going to do what i can to keep the rest of her life from being ruined. thank god, it _has_ been done." "well, i think i can say 'thank god' too. others would have had to suffer--grievously--and, after all, no wrong has been done to anybody. with regard to gotch, i can wash my hands of it. i couldn't have given him money myself, knowing what i did, and you must take the responsibility of it--with dick." "oh, i'll take the responsibility," said humphrey with a shade of contempt. "it won't trouble my conscience much." "but now we have to consider what is to be done," said the squire. "i can't have susan here, humphrey. she must never come here again. i won't add to your troubles, my boy, by talking about what she has done. i couldn't trust myself to do it. but i couldn't see her and behave as i always have done. it would be beyond my power." "very well," said humphrey shortly. "i'll shoulder that, with the rest." the squire looked at him. "what are you going to do?" he asked. "what do you mean? with her?" "yes. how are you going to live together, after this?" "as we always have done. i took her for better or worse. i'm going to do my duty by her. i'm going to protect her first of all from suffering any more; and then i'm going to help her to live it down--with herself. i haven't helped her much, so far. she is weak, and i've been weak with her--weak and selfish. i've got something more in me than i've shown yet, and now's the time to show it, and to help her on as well as myself." the squire was deeply touched. "my dear boy," he said, "i'm glad to hear you talk like that. yes, you're right; you must be right. one can't judge of her leniently, perhaps, but what she must have gone through at the time of that trial--and before! you will be able to work on her; and nobody else could. perhaps, later on--i don't know--i might bring myself---" "i don't know that you need. i am going to take her away for some time--for some years, perhaps." "what! you're not going to live in your new house?" "no. i couldn't, yet awhile. so far, i've talked as if nothing mattered except getting clear of this horrible exposure that threatened us. i can't feel that anything does matter much until that is done. but that's not all i have been thinking of, father, since this blow came to me. it has gone pretty deep. i couldn't go on living the same sort of life, under rather different surroundings, but amongst people that we have known, and who would expect us to be just the same as we have always been. we've got to start together afresh, and get used to ourselves--to our new selves, if you like to put it so. we're going abroad. susan is ill now, and we can make it seem natural enough. we shall stay abroad for some time, and then i shall let the house, if i can, so that it won't seem odd that we shouldn't come back. in a few years, if we want to, we can come back; and then perhaps we shall live there." "well, it wants thinking over carefully, humphrey; but i think you are right. still, i shouldn't like to lose sight of you--for years." humphrey was silent. "i don't know--perhaps i was rather hasty, just now, when i said i couldn't have susan here. i couldn't, now. but later on---- oh, my boy, i don't want to make it harder for you than it is already. you've set yourself a big task. god help you to carry it through! bring her here, humphrey, in a year or so. i'm your father; i'll do what i can to help you." "thank you, father. you've been very good." "if you want any money----" "oh no. we shan't be spending much--not for a long time." neither spoke for some minutes. then the squire frowned and cleared his throat. "there's one thing that has to be done," he said. "the--the taking of that necklace--lady sedbergh's--she has had this loss----" "you mean about paying back the money. i've thought of that. i must do it by degrees. that's one reason why i'm going abroad. i can save more than half my income." "oh, you've thought of that." "yes. you didn't suppose i was going to hush it up, and do nothing about the money! i've not quite come down to that, father." "oh no, no, my boy. only--well, it didn't occur to me for some time. but how could you do it--if it were left to you? how could you send money by degrees?" "i haven't thought much about how to do it. perhaps i should have to wait until i had got it all. then i could send it in a lump, from some place where it couldn't be traced." the squire spoke after a thoughtful pause. "i don't like that, humphrey." "well, there is plenty of time to think out a way. i haven't got a penny of it yet." "no; and it can't wait until you have saved it. i should never have a moment's peace of mind while it was owing. i must help you there, humphrey. it's what i can do to help." "oh no, father. it's part of the price. i mean to pay it. it will keep it before us--going short. i wish i could have raised the money at once. i wish you hadn't made old aunt laura put that clause into her will." the squire rather wished he hadn't, too. seven thousand pounds was a large sum to find. something like thirty thousand pounds had been left to humphrey, with reversion to walter and his children. but the squire had advised that humphrey should be restrained from anticipation of his life interest, and this had been effected. "well," he said, "that's done. but this money must be paid at once. it will only be fair to the others, humphrey, that it shall come off your share. but i will find it for you now. if you like to pay it, or some of it, back again, i won't say no. but that shall be as you like. it will be the same in the end." "you are very good, father. but how can you do it without dick's knowing?" "dick doesn't take part in all my affairs; only in matters that have to do with the land. i can raise it without affecting the estate accounts. he will know, probably, that something is being done, but he won't ask questions. dick is very careful not to touch on my right to do what i please with my own." at any other time humphrey would have been interested in this statement. like the sons of many rich men, he knew little of his father's affairs, and had only the vaguest ideas as to the amount and sources of his wealth. but he was only interested now in the fact that his father was able, and willing, to provide so large a sum as seven thousand pounds at once. "it would be a tremendous relief to be rid of that burden," he said. "if you can do it, i would pay you back what i don't spend out of my income." "yes, i can do it, and i will, as soon as possible. but, humphrey, my boy, this money can't be sent anonymously." "why not?" "i don't think you can be expected to see everything very clearly yet. if you will think it over, you will see that we can't act in that way. you mustn't expect me to do it." humphrey thought for a time. "what do you suggest?" he asked. "either you or i must make a clean breast of it to sedbergh!" "oh, father!" "yes. that must be done. our honour demands it. you will see it plainly enough if you think it over. i believe you were right in stipulating for secrecy on my part, as you did. certainly i couldn't behave as i want to do to susan, when the time comes, if i knew that others in the house besides myself knew her story. but this is different. we mustn't act like cowards." "isn't he annoyed with us--about joan?" "not annoyed. he was sorry. so was i--though i'm not sure now. i think my first instinct was the right one. the sort of life that's lived in houses like brummels--well, you see what it leads to." it was the old familiar song; but set to how different a tune! humphrey, even in his pre-occupation, noted the change, and felt a sense of comfort and support in something stable, underlying the habitual crudities and inconsistencies in his father. "jim sedbergh was a very intimate friend of mine," said the squire, "many years ago. he is a friend still. we found we hadn't changed much to each other when he came here. i can trust him as i would trust myself. he will take the view i do, whatever it is. you had better let me see him, humphrey. he'll keep whatever i tell him to himself." they settled that he should go up to london the next day. that was all there was to settle for the present, and it was already very late. "well, good night, humphrey, my dear boy," said the squire. "you'll get through this great trouble. we shall all get through it in time. you know where to go for help and comfort. i've been there already, and i've got what i went for. god bless you, my dear boy. he will, if you ask him." chapter iii the burden "my dear edward, i am deeply sorry for you." the squire leant back in the big easy-chair and wiped his brow, which was beaded with perspiration. he had told his story, and it had been the bitterest task he had ever undertaken. lord sedbergh's face was very serious. the two men had lunched together at his club, and were sitting in the inner upstairs library, with coffee and liqueurs at their elbows, by the window looking on to the green of the park--two men of substantial fortune and accredited position, entrenched in one of the rich retreats dedicated to the leisure of their exclusive kind. but the squire's curaçoa was untouched, and his cigar had gone out. the retired and tranquil luxury of his surroundings brought no sense of refuge; he felt naked before those others of his untroubled equals who, out of hearing in the larger room, would have looked up with reprehensive curiosity if they could have imagined what breath from the sordid outer world was tainting the temple of their comfort. "i appreciate your courage in coming to tell me this; it must have cost you a deal. but i almost wish you hadn't." the squire sat forward again, and drank his liqueur at a gulp. "i couldn't leave it as it was," he said. "perhaps not; though most men in your case would have been inclined to do so. have another cigar, edward. that one hasn't lighted well." the squire accepted this offer. the worst was over; and his friend had taken the disclosure with all the kindness he had expected of him. "i couldn't do anything myself to stop its coming out," he said, when his wants had been supplied. "but i can't find it in my heart to blame humphrey for what he did. you couldn't say that this money that has been paid to somebody who knows nothing about it, by somebody who knows nothing about it, is in any way hush-money." whether you could or not, lord sedbergh was not prepared to say it. "no, no," he said comfortably, "you were quite right there, edward. you acted honourably--nothing to reproach yourself with. but what an astonishing story it is! to think that we were wrong all the time! and susan clinton, of all people! did you say she was hidden in the room when my wife was talking about the secret?" his mind was running on details which had long ceased to occupy the squire. his curiosity had to be satisfied to some extent, and his surprise vanquished, before he was ready to consider the story in its actual bearings. without intending to add to the pangs of his friend, he made clear by the way he discussed it, the position that susan must occupy in the view of anyone not influenced by the fact of relationship. she was the thief, found out and condemned, to the loss of all reputation and right of intercourse with her equals. so had mrs. amberley been condemned, by the self-protective code of society. the squire saw susan in mrs. amberley's place, more vividly and afflictively than he had seen her hitherto. "she will be kept out of the way," he said, struggling against the hurt to his pride. "humphrey is going to take her abroad. you don't think it is necessary for anyone else to know?" "oh no, no. good heavens, no! what you have told me shall be kept absolutely sacred, edward. i shouldn't breathe a word, or a hint, to any living soul." the squire breathed more freely. "we shall look after her," he said with a stronger feeling of the measure to be dealt out to the culprit than he had yet experienced. "she won't go scot-free. but exposure would bear so hard on the innocent--i couldn't have come to you, i believe--though i know it's the only right thing to do--if i hadn't been pretty sure that you would have felt that." "oh, of course, i feel it. it mustn't happen. it won't happen. it needn't happen." "thank you, jim," said the squire simply. "you were always a good friend of mine." "don't think any more of it, edward. lord, what a terrible time you must have gone through! let's put it out of our minds, for good. you and i have done nothing wrong, at any rate. why shouldn't we sustain ourselves with another----" "there's a detail that has to be settled between us," interrupted the squire, "before we can put it aside. what did you value that necklace at? seven thousand pounds, wasn't it? i have been to my people this morning. i can let you have it within a week or ten days." "that's a matter," said lord sedbergh after a pause of reflection, "that can only be considered with the help of some very old brandy. it hadn't occurred to me." "wonderful stuff this." neither of them had spoken since the brandy had been ordered. "i don't believe you'll get anything like it anywhere else. well now, my dear edward, i think we shall have to leave that business alone." "oh, i couldn't do that. humphrey doesn't want to, either. he mentioned it before i did. it is he who will pay it in the long run. that's only fair. but i can provide the money now, and he can't." "well, i don't want the money; and i'm glad to be in the position of being able to say so. what could i do with it? buy another necklace? that would be running the risk of questions being asked that it might be difficult to answer." "i don't think so. you are rich enough to be able to replace an heirloom--it was an heirloom, wasn't it?--and make up to your wife what has been lost, without occasioning remark. oh, you must take the money, jim. you're as generous as any man living--i know that. but the loss cannot fall on you, now it is known where the money went to. that poor misguided creature had it and spent it. it would be a burden on me all my life, if i couldn't put that right--and on humphrey too. he would feel it as much as i should." "i'm afraid you can't put it right," said lord sedbergh, speaking more seriously. "and it's a burden that you and humphrey will have to shoulder. i'll do everything i can for you, edward; but i won't carry that burden." "what do you mean?" asked the squire. lord sedbergh did not speak for a moment. then he looked up and asked, "what about mrs. amberley?" the squire frowned deeply. the question was a surprise to him. he had not thought much about mrs. amberley, except as an example of what susan might be made to appear before the world. "i ought to have told you how i regard that," he said unwillingly. "i didn't, because it seems to me perfectly plain, and i thought you would see it in the same light as i do." lord sedbergh waited for him to explain the light in which he saw it. "she isn't in prison any longer. they let her out, because she was ill--or so they said. she's as free as you or i. nothing that could be done--somebody else suffering in the same way--would wipe out what she has already undergone--and done with. besides, it wasn't on account of the necklace that she was sent to prison. it was on account of the other thing; and that she did steal." "yes, that's perfectly true. she has had no more than her deserts--rather less in fact. no, you couldn't reinstate her by publishing the truth." "well, then, what's the difficulty?" "there's no difficulty, edward, in my mind, about keeping quiet. it would be too much to expect any man in your situation to bring the heaviest possible misfortune on himself, and others, for the sake of doing justice to someone who could hardly benefit by it. at least that's how it seems to me." "justice!" echoed the squire. "there's no question of justice. she was punished for something quite different. if she had been found guilty of stealing the necklace, and were still undergoing punishment for it, the whole question would be different altogether. thank god, we haven't got to face that question. it would be terrible. as it has so mercifully turned out, no injustice is done to her at all. can't you see that?" "well, do you think _she_ would, if she were asked?" lord sedbergh did not leave time for his question to sink in. "my dear fellow," he went on, "your course is as difficult as it could be. who am i that i should put my finger on any one of its difficulties, and make it heavier? you have done nothing that i shouldn't have done myself if i had been in your place. at the same time, you have to take the responsibility for whatever you do, and i haven't." "yes, i know that; and it's just what i want to do--put things right wherever i can." "but you wouldn't be putting anything right by paying me money. you would only be making me share your difficulties--your great and very disagreeable difficulties; and that, with all the good will in the world towards you, my dear edward, i won't do." the squire saw it dimly, and what he saw did not please him. nor was his light enough to prevent him from pressing his point. when lord sedbergh had combated it for some time, with firm good humour, he said more seriously, "can't you see that if this story were ever to come out, and i had taken your money, i should be in a very awkward position?" "it never will come out now." "that's your risk, edward. i may be a monster of selfishness, but i won't make it mine." when the squire left the club half-an-hour later, his face was not that of a man who had been set free of a debt of seven thousand pounds. chapter iv this our sister "clinton. on the th inst. the lady susan clinton, aged ." how could such an announcement, to the squire reading it in the obituary column of his paper, cause any emotion stronger than the feeling that all was for the best? for one thing, although the direct cause of susan's death had been pneumonia, there was little doubt, to him who knew the state of mind she had been in when her illness had first attacked her, that she had succumbed to that, and not to any ailment of the body, which, otherwise, she could have shaken off. she had paid the price, poor girl! the account as against her was closed, her name dropped from the ledger. that she had died in full repentance, and would therefore escape the ultimate fate of branded sinners, his easy creed allowed him to take for granted. the very fact that she _had_ died seemed to make her state in the hereafter secure. for her it was well. and not less so for those whom she had, in the phrase that came readily to his lips, left behind. humphrey--poor humphrey--who was overwhelmed with grief, as it was only natural he should be, would come to feel in time that her death had been, if not a blessing in disguise--which would be a harsh way of putting it--then a merciful dispensation of providence. he had nothing to reproach himself with. he had cloven to his wife at a time when he might, justifiably, have played a very different part; had been prepared to share with her such of the punishment for her crime as could not be avoided; had even accepted--quixotically, as the squire thought--part responsibility for it; and in short had fulfilled his duty towards her with a fine loyalty such as his father, remembering certain episodes in his career, had hardly thought to be in him. he had been tried as by fire, and had come well out of the ordeal, a better man in every way. no, humphrey had nothing to reproach himself with. indeed, it would comfort him in the future to think that he had been tender to the poor girl in her disgrace, comforted her, been ready to throw over the life that suited him, so as to help her to recover herself, stood up for her, when she could not with reason be defended, been with her at the last, broken down when it was all over. his thoughts ran smoothly into the worn phrases apt to these sad occasions, when grief is subdued to not unpleasing melancholy, and melancholy is the shade of the tree of death, in which we are sitting for a time, but with the sunshine of life still before us. humphrey was still young. he could travel for a time, if he wanted to, or, perhaps better still, stay quietly at kencote, until he had got over his loss; and then he could take up his life as before. when time had healed his wound he might even marry again. but that was to look too far ahead, with poor susan not yet under the ground, and the squire checked the thought at once. if she had lived he would certainly have had a very difficult time with her. a high resolve is one thing; the power to carry it out, day by day, when the exaltation in which it was made has faded away, is another. humphrey was not trained to such efforts. he might have tired of it. susan might have "broken out" again. all sorts of trouble might have arisen, which--well, which, by the mercy of providence, it was not necessary now to conjecture. for humphrey, all was for the best. the squire was glad, on his own account, that he had withdrawn his embargo upon susan's visiting kencote, before this had happened. he had been very near to imposing it again after his interview with lord sedbergh; but susan had even then been dangerously ill; and the absorption caused by the rapid progress of her illness, and the contingent comings and goings, had fortunately taken his mind off the details of her past misdemeanour. he had been preserved--mercifully--from dealing his son that extra blow. and yet he doubted whether he would have been able to play his part with her. it was plain now, whatever it had been when he had walked down the steps of lord sedbergh's club, that strong reproaches would not have helped matters; that nothing he had had it in his mind, then, to do or say to ease himself of the burden, whose weight his old friend had made him compute by refusing to touch it, would have lightened it; and that the effect of his knowledge would only have been to make things more difficult alike for himself and for humphrey. his anger against the poor girl would be buried in her grave. it would not be difficult to speak of her now with that regretful affection that would be expected of him. and her death made him less vulnerable. he perceived now, not without a shudder, that his safety depended upon the silence of a woman who, wherever the responsibility lay, had been bought, and might be bought again; or, if that were unlikely, might lightly let loose the hint which, gathering other hints to itself, would grow into the avalanche that would involve him in the disgrace he so much feared. but an accusation against a dead woman--if it were made it would be less readily believed, more reprehensible, easier to cast off. and susan would not be there, a possible weakness to her own defence. here again he checked his thoughts. he was not ready to face a situation in which he would either have to deny untruthfully, or to keep damaging silence. but, certainly, for him, all was for the best. dick came in, as he was sitting with the paper on his knee. he wore a black tie, but was otherwise dressed as usual. his face was becomingly grave. they talked over details of the funeral. susan was to be buried at kencote, in the churchyard where so many generations of clintons had been buried, her own distant ancestors among them, but none within living memory who had not lived out the full tale of their years. her body would lie in the church that night, and the house would fill up with many of those who would follow her to the grave on the morrow, including some members of her own family, all of whom the squire disliked or was prepared to dislike. he ardently wished himself done with the painful ordeal. he doubted whether he would be able to acquit himself unremittingly in the manner that would be expected of him. he would have to wear a face of gloom, when he was already itching to be rid of these cheerless trailing postscripts to the message of death, and commit himself once more to the warm current of life. he would have to say so many things that he did not feel, and do so much that he hated doing. the shadow, not of grief but of the adjuncts of grief, lay over the house, and darkened the bright june sunshine, or such of it as was allowed to filter through the blinded windows. not for fifty years or more had such an assemblage been made at kencote. the successive funerals of the squire's six aunts, who had lived since his marriage at the dower house, and the last of whom had died at another house in the village only two years ago, had been untroublous, not to say brisk, ceremonies, occasions of meeting between seldom-seen relations, and of hospitality almost festive, but tempered by affectionate reminiscence of the departed, and the feeling that one might talk naturally and freely, so long as one did not actually laugh. ripe age had fallen on the rest laid up for it; there had been no occasion to feign deep sorrow. but--"the lady susan clinton, aged "!--there was material for sharp sorrow there; and the squire was disturbed by the fear that he might not be able to show it; might even, if he were off his guard, show that he did not feel it. "did you hear from mother this morning?" asked dick, when they had disposed of the details he had come to discuss. "yes. humphrey is bearing up; but, of course, poor fellow, he can't get used to the idea yet. we must keep him here for a bit, after we rid the house of all these people; and he'll soon come round to himself." "was there any trouble between them latterly?" dick asked, in a matter-of-fact voice, but gave the squire time to collect his thoughts by going on immediately, "i don't want to pry into your affairs or his, but i had an idea that that business of gotch's wasn't all he came to see you about the other day." "why do you think that?" asked the squire with undiplomatic directness. "well--your going up to town with him the next day, for one thing. i only wanted to say that if it's a question of money again, which hasn't been put right by poor susan's death, you can count on me for help if there's any difficulty in raising it." what a good son this was--safe, level-headed, coolly and responsibly generous! the squire would have given a good deal to have been released from his promise, and able to take him into full confidence then and there. "well," he said, "there _was_ trouble about money, and i was prepared to find it, without interfering with estate affairs. that's why i didn't come to you. but the necessity is over now." he mentally patted himself on the back for this masterpiece of statement, transgressing the strict truth by no more than perfectly allowable omission. "her settlement falls in, i suppose," said dick. "i'm glad you were spared the worry, although the way out of it is sad enough. i've been sorry for humphrey for some time. he had come to see that he had always played the fool about money, and was beginning to get his ideas straight; but poor susan--well, one doesn't want to think about her in that way now--but there's no doubt she was a terrible drag on him. i'd seen it coming for some time, and when he talked to me at christmas about settling down, i was pretty sure that he didn't know everything, and would be coming with another story soon." "why did you think that?" asked the squire, with the sensation of treading on very thin ice. "oh, it was common talk of how she was going on--_had_ been, i should say, for she did seem to have calmed down within the last year. otherwise, i think i should have made up my mind to give humphrey a hint, disagreeable as it would have been. things were being hinted at about a year ago that made me think we might find ourselves involved in some bad scandal before we were much older." "oh, dick," the squire broke out, "we mustn't talk like this about a dead woman. humphrey told me everything. it's all wiped out and done with now, for her, poor girl." "yes," said dick. "but i'm not going to pretend that i think her death is a calamity. i don't; although any feeling one may have had against her is wiped out, as you say. in fact, if she had begun to pull herself up, as i think she had, and had got it all off her mind before she died, as i suppose she did, it's possible to feel kindly towards her. still, i think she had made too big a mess of things. it would have come between them. as it is, he'll be able to think of her without bitterness. he'll get over the shock in time." this was all so much what the squire felt himself, summed up as it might have been in the comfortable phrase, "all for the best," that its effect upon him was much the same as if he had had the relief of telling dick everything. he cheered up palpably, until he remembered what lay immediately in front of him; but faced even that with more equanimity, upheld by dick's sympathetic support, and relieved of some doubt as to whether his thoughts about poor susan were quite of the right colour. the afternoon train, which in the course of these histories we have so often met at kencote station, brought the coffin and the mourners. humphrey looked pale and worn, but collected. he stood with his mother's arm in his while the coffin, covered with flowers, was taken out of the purple-lined van, and lifted on to a hand bier. the church was much nearer to the station than the house, and the little procession walked there, past the cottages with blinds all drawn, and the villagers standing by them, mostly in black, which only served to heighten the bright colours of the flowers with which the gardens were full. the sky was of the purest blue, and larks trilled unseen in its translucent vapours, as if to draw the thoughts of the mourners away from the earth in which they were presently to see these mortal remains laid. the elms and chestnuts whispered of life going on and renewing itself year by year until the end. the rich springing growth of early summer in this quiet country village spoke of life and of hope; and the black line of mourners moving slowly along was not incongruous with it, if the poor clay they were escorting was really only the husk from which new life had already sprung. the squire, sobered to becoming gravity by the sight of the coffin, yet felt his thoughts tuned to the beauty of the sky and the familiar surroundings. it was he who had planned this walking escort. there would be carriages, and a state suitable to the occasion on the morrow. this was to be a home-coming, a token of his forgiveness of her for the trouble she had caused him, a sort of last taste of the everyday life of kencote, into the intimacy of which she was finally to be received as a daughter of the house. it appealed also to that sense of common human life, which is the fine flower of squiredom. death levels all; he had no feeling that the cottagers standing at their garden gates were intruding their curiosity, as was felt by susan's mother for one, who thought this public tramp between a station and a church an outrage on her nobility. the cottagers were his friends on an occasion like this, had a right to share mourning as well as festival with the family in whose interests they were hereditarily bound up. he took comfort from seeing them there. they were his people; without them this quiet home-coming would have been incomplete. the coffin was taken into the chancel of the ancient church, and set down over the brass of a knightly clinton who had died and been buried there five centuries before. almost without exception those who followed it were his direct descendants, and the same stones surrounded them as had sheltered the mourners at his funeral. so many years, so little change! christening, marriage, burial--the renewal of life in the same stock had gone on through the centuries. this new burial was only a ripple in the steady, pauseless flow, and would have been no more if the head of the house himself had lain where this poor, foolish, erring girl, now hardly regretted, and soon to be forgotten, was laid. a few prayers were said, and a hymn sung, and then she was left to lie there alone. shafts of sunlight would slant across the stones, and fading, give place to twilight, then to dusk, then to darkness. the church would be very still. dawn would come, with the sweet twittering of birds, and the sun would once more strike through the armorial glass of the east window, and paint stone and timber with bright colour; and still she would be lying there, dead to the glory of a new day as she had been dead to the darkness of the night. nothing would matter to her any more. in a little while her dust would mingle with that of long generations of clintons forgotten, and her memory would pass away as theirs had passed. her life had been everything to her, her wants and hopes and regrets the centre of her being. now it was as if it had never been--for her, lying in the still church. but her acts lived. the ripples she had caused in the pond of life would spread, intersecting other ripples caused by other acts, until they reached the border. when they had returned to the house nancy went up with joan into her room--the room in which they had slept side by side for all but a few nights in their lives until nancy's marriage. there was only one bed in the room now. "how odd it looks!" said nancy. "do you miss me, my precious old joan?" "of course i do," said joan. "i had to make them take your bed out. it made me feel so horribly lonely." "if john is ever unkind to me," said nancy, "i shall come here and have it put back." she checked herself. no vestige of a joke was to be allowed until after to-morrow. she thought herself unfeeling for even inclining to light speech. to her and joan the death of someone not much older than themselves was a startling thing; and the death of anyone so close to them, in their inexperience of death, would have subdued them for a time. "let's go and talk in the schoolroom," nancy said. "nobody will come there." they sat together on the old comfortable sofa, arms entwined. the absence of sentiment with which they had been accustomed to treat one another had given place to frequent signs of affection. they had hardly been more together during their childhood than since nancy had come to kencote after her honeymoon the day before. their stream of talk flowed unceasingly. oceans of separate experience had to be bridged. now they put aside for a time their own affairs of the past and future, and talked about the immediate present. "did you speak to humphrey?" joan asked. "i didn't; but i thought he looked awful." "he kissed me when we came in," said nancy, "and said he was glad i had come back in time. he spoke much the same as usual, but went away directly. joan, how awful he must be feeling! just think what john would feel if he were to lose me!" "you haven't been married so long," said joan; but immediately added, "i suppose that wouldn't make any difference, though. i do feel frightfully sorry for humphrey. i almost think it would have been better if the funeral had been at once, instead of making it like two. it must be awful for him to think of her lying there all alone in the church. you know, uncle tom wanted to have tapers and somebody to watch; but father wouldn't." "no; i didn't know that. why?" "he said candles were roman catholic; and that there would be nobody who wanted to watch. i think he was right there. you know, nancy, i think the saddest thing about it is that there is nobody who is very sorry for poor susan's death--except humphrey. i don't think her own people are. none of them looked it." "lady aldeburgh cried." "she pretended to. her eyes were quite dry." "i liked susan. so did you." "yes, in a way. perhaps not very much. i wish i had liked her more, now. i _am_ sorry, of course. but i feel much more glad at having you again, than sorry because she is dead." nancy gave her a squeeze. "i can't realise that she is dead," she said, "that she was in that coffin. i felt just a little bit like choking when uncle tom read that part about a place of rest and peace. it was so dreadful to think of her being dead; but that seemed to alter it all. if she is somewhere alive still--and happy!" "yes," said joan seriously. "i hope humphrey is thinking about that." on the morrow there was a difficult time to get through before the funeral, at twelve o'clock. the squire took the "times" into his room when it came, but only glanced over it, standing up. he made occasion to go to the rectory, and to the dower house, and spent some little time at each; and the hour came round. it was over quickly. the large company walked and drove back to the house, which stood once more normally unshuttered, and ate and drank. there was a buzz of conversation in the crowded dining-room, which at times swelled beyond the limits of strict propriety, and suddenly subsided, only to rise and sink again. departures began to be taken. this was the hardest time for the squire to go through, for he had to say something in answer to the words of each. the end came with a rush, when most of those who had been staying in the house, with those who had come down that morning, left to take the special train back to london. when the last carriage had departed the squire turned back into the hall with a great sigh of relief. he went into his room and stood by the open window, breathing deeply of the soft summer air, as if his lungs had been cleared of some obstacle. "well, that's over," he said aloud as he turned away. the sound of his words checked him. he went to the window again, and looked across the garden and the park to where the church tower showed between the trees. "poor girl!" he said slowly. and then, after a pause, "poor dear girl!" this satisfied him, and he went briskly to the table where the newspapers were laid in order. book iv chapter i a return the squire shut to the gate in the garden wall of the dower house and stepped out across the park. his face was lit up with gratification, his step was as light as that of an elderly man of seventeen stone very well could be. he had been to see virginia, and she had given him the news that had caused this elation. she had just come down from scotland, where john spence had taken a moor, leaving dick amongst the grouse. mrs. clinton was there too, and joan, and a large house-party besides. the squire had been asked, but it was many years since the twelfth had caused a stir in his movements, and he had refused. didn't care much about it; might come to them later, when they moved down, for the pheasants. it was a not unpleasant change for him to have the house entirely to himself. but he had got a little tired of his solitary condition after a fortnight, and had been extremely glad to see virginia, who had come south to meet a friend on her way from america to switzerland. it seemed that young inverell--the earl of inverell, twenty-seven years of age, master of mines as well as acres, handsome and amiable as well as high-principled--in fact the very type and picture of young earls--whose highland property marched with that which john spence had rented, had been constantly of their party, even to the extent of putting off one of his own. the attraction? joan. there could be no doubt about it, virginia had said. he was head over ears. and joan was as gay as a lark. it was the sweetest thing to see them together--a picture of adorable youth, and love, unspoken as yet, but shining out of their eyes and ringing in their laughter for everyone to see and hear. she had enlarged on the enchanting spectacle, and the squire had listened to her tale, not so much because he "cared about that sort of thing," but so as to assure himself that it was undoubtedly a true one, on both sides, and that joan, especially, would not be likely to rebel a second time. how providentially things worked out! young inverell was a _parti_ beside whom the eligibility of bobby trench paled perceptibly. bobby trench, socially and financially, would have been a good match. this would be a great one. if it would not "lift" the clintons of kencote, which the squire was persuaded no marriage whatever could do, it would at least point their retiring worth. it would bring them into that prominence in which, to speak truth, they had always been somewhat lacking. and he was a nice young fellow too, so the squire had always heard; already beginning modestly to play the part in public affairs which was expected of the head of his house; untouched as yet by the staleness of the world, which had touched bobby trench so much to the squire's disgust, until he had closed his senses to it; and a fitting mate in point of youth and good looks for a beautiful young girl like joan, which bobby trench could hardly have been said to be, in spite of his ever youthful behaviour. really, it was highly gratifying. it just showed that there was no need to hurry these things. if joan had taken the first person that came along--a young fellow he had never thought much of himself, but had allowed to take his chances out of old friendship to his father--she would have missed this. the child was a good child. she would do credit to any station. countess of inverell! nothing in that, of course, but--well, really the whole thing was highly gratifying. why hadn't his wife written about it? there was nothing in that. she always left out of her letters the things she might have known he would like to hear. virginia was quite certain; and she could be trusted on such a subject, or indeed on any. well, one got through one's troubles. it was extraordinary how sunshine came after rain, or would be if one didn't believe in a wise providence overruling everything for our good. a few months ago there had been that terrible affair, now buried and forgotten---- the brightness left his face as his thoughts touched on that subject. it was buried, sadly, though perhaps mercifully, enough; but it was not forgotten. it was thought of as little as possible, but the debt still rankled--the debt that could not be paid. it came up at nights, when sleep tarried, which fortunately happened seldom. but time was adjusting the burden. it would not be felt much longer. the thought of it now came only as a passing shadow to heighten the sunshine of the present. in fact this gleam of sunshine seemed to remove the shadow finally. he had done, all that he could do, had kept back nothing, had satisfied his honour. an obligation to so old a friend as sedbergh need not weigh on any man. it would be ungrateful not to recognise how plainly things had been "ordered." apart from the curious accidents of the problem--the fact that "the woman" had not been condemned for _that_ crime; that she had already paid her penalty; that the other woman had been connected in such a way that it had been possible to silence her by a perfectly innocent transaction, carried out by perfectly innocent people--facts surely beyond coincidence, and of themselves demanding belief in an overruling providence--apart from all this there had been poor susan's death, no longer demanding the least pretence of lamentation, but to be regarded as a clear sign that the account had been squared and no further penalty would be exacted. and now there was this new satisfaction, as a further most bountiful token of favour. how was it possible that there could be those who did not believe in a god above, when signs were so plain to those who could read them? it would be churlish now not to throw off all disagreeable thoughts of the past, and not to take full pleasure in the brightness of present and future. as the squire came round a group of shrubs that masked the lawn from the carriage drive he saw a woman approaching the house. as he caught sight of her she caught sight of him, changed her course, and came towards him. he stopped short with a gasp of dismay. it was mrs. amberley. "mr. clinton," she said, "i have never had the pleasure of meeting you, but i expect you know who i am. i have come down from london on purpose to have a little talk with you." she had altered in no way that he could have described. she was fashionably dressed, in a manner suitable for the country, her wonderful hair had not lost its lustre, her face was still the beautiful mask of whatever lurked in secret behind it. yet she seemed to him a thing of horror, degraded and stained for all the world to see. and even the world might have been aware of some subtle change. whether it was that her neat boots were slightly filmed with dust, or that her clothes, smart as they were, were not of the very latest; or that it was no outward sign, but the consciousness of disgrace affecting her bearing, however she might try to conceal it--whatever it was, it was there. this was a woman who had come down very low, knew that the world was against her, and would fight the world with no shame for what it could still withhold from her. he stared at her open-mouthed, unable for the moment either to speak or think. she laughed at him elaborately. "you don't seem very pleased to see me," she said. "may we go into the house and sit down? i have walked from the station, and am rather tired." "no," he said quickly, reacting to his immediate impulse. "you will not enter my house." she looked at him with careful insolence. "shall we go into the churchyard?" she said, "and talk over susan clinton's grave?" the infamous taunt brought him to himself. "come this way," he said, and turned his back on her to stride off along a path between the shrubs. she followed him for a few steps, and then, feeling probably that this rapid progress in his wake did not accord with her dignity, stopped and said, "where are you taking me to, please? i haven't come here to look at your garden." he turned sharply and faced her. "i am taking you to where we can be neither seen nor heard," he said, and waited for her to speak. "very well," she said. "that will suit me very well--for a _first_ conversation--as long as it is not too far, and i am not expected to race there." he turned his back on her and went on again, but at a slower pace. they went through a thick shrubbery and out on to a little sloping lawn at the edge of the lake, which was entirely surrounded by great rhododendrons. there was a boat-house here, and a garden seat, to which he motioned her. she sat down, and looked up at him. "i am not going to talk to you standing over me like that," she said. "it will be giving you an unfair advantage." he sat down on the same seat, as far away from her as possible. "well, what have you got to say for yourself?" she asked him, in much the same tone as a schoolmaster might have asked the question of an errant schoolboy. he said nothing. he had nothing to say. his thoughts were still in a turmoil. perhaps silence was the best retort to her air of insolence. she had to find another opening. "you call yourself a man of honour!" she said in a slow contemptuous voice. "you pay hush-money, so that the innocent may suffer, and the guilty go free." "it's a lie," he said. "i paid no money. i refused to pay money." "ah, then you did know everything. it was what i could not be quite certain about. the story was confused. thank you for clearing it up." he felt himself trapped at the first opening of his mouth. he would need all his wits to cope with this shameless, cunning woman. he tried to break through her deliberate artifices. "what do you want?" he asked. "what have you come here for?" "you didn't pay the money yourself?" she went on. "that would hardly have done, would it? you let somebody else pay it, and washed your hands of it, i suppose." it had been his own phrase. her chance lighting on it seemed to make her uncannily aware of everything that had passed. how had she got hold of her information? he had not had time to think about that yet. "i refused to pay anything," he repeated. "nothing was paid to anybody who had anything to do with you. i refuse to discuss these affairs with you." "oh, do you?" she taunted him. "will you refuse to discuss them when you are brought up on a charge of conspiracy? you will be allowed to do it through counsel, of course. they allowed me counsel, when i was brought up on a charge of stealing something that a member of your family stole. i wish i could have done without him. i should have liked to defend myself. but it will suit _you_. you can shelter behind him. you seem rather good at that." "what do you want?" he asked her again. "what have you come here for?" "to talk it over quietly," she said, with the same mocking intonation. "do you want to know how i found out about it all? you seem to have forgotten entirely that i _knew_ that somebody staying in the house at the same time that i was must have stolen the things. it wasn't very difficult, afterwards, to decide on the thief. i have a few friends still, mr. clinton, and i heard that your precious susan, whom every one knew to have been head over ears in debt, had suddenly and miraculously become out of debt, and had money to throw about. i had enquiries made, and heard that the woman whom you bought--i beg your pardon, whom you made somebody else a cat's-paw to buy, so as to save your own skin, had been sent over to the other side of the water, to get her out of the way. it was the finger of providence, i think, that led me to follow her up. i expect you have been thinking that providence had been specially engaged in your interests; and it certainly did look like it--for a time." again the uncanny cognisance of his very thoughts! but this was only a very clever woman, who knew her man, and his type. "i went over myself, and found her," she went on. "she was going west to make a start on the money that her poor fool of a husband thought had been given him for his own sweet sake. she didn't intend to undeceive him. at one time i had had an idea of going 'west' myself. you see i had been hounded out of london for the crime that one of you clintons had committed, and as you had so chivalrously left me to bear the burden of it, and hushed up the truth, instead of clearing my name, i didn't know then that i should be able to come back again. i wanted to get away as far as possible." he was unendurably taunted. "your name couldn't have been cleared," he said. "you were not condemned for that; it was for stealing the other thing; and that will stick to you still." she affected bewilderment, and then enlightenment seemed to come to her, and she laughed. "oh, that's it, is it?" she said. "your mind seems to run so much in twists and curves that anyone who expects a straight sense of right and wrong in honourable men must be pardoned for being a little slow in following them. but i didn't steal that either, you know. the sainted susan stole it as well as the necklace--she was an expert in such things--and this woman clark told _my_ woman about it--the one who committed perjury at my trial, and is now going to suffer for it, if i can find her." the sneer at the dead girl pierced something in him which set his brain clear. this was a wicked woman, and she was lying to him. "that's a likely story!" he said with rough contempt, and she winced for the first time, although, with his eyes on the ground, he did not mark it. "it is one that will keep for the present," she said, instantly recovering her coolness. "well, fortunately i was able to make friends with susan's maid. it is a way i have with that sort of person, although it is true that my own brute of a woman gave me away." "yes, she gave you away," said the squire, more quick-witted than ordinarily. "lied about me, i ought to have said," she corrected herself, with a blink of the eyelids. "i see i must be careful to choose my words. words mean so much with you, don't they? acts so little. if you can say you haven't paid a bribe, it doesn't in the least matter that you have let it be done and taken advantage of it. well, i made friends with her to begin with. she had just heard of susan's death and wanted to talk about it. she couldn't keep her foolish mind off the connection between me and susan, and spoke in such a way that i soon knew i had been right to follow her up. i drew her on--i have always been considered rather clever, you know--and before she knew she had done it she had let out her story. you may be sure i frightened her, when i could safely do so, into telling me the whole of it. i heard what a fright dear humphrey was in--a nice young man that--came to my trial, i believe, jingling the stolen money in his pocket." "that's not true," said the squire. "he knew nothing of it whatever." "he may have told you so. but six or seven thousand pounds! to repeat your own words: 'that's a likely story, isn't it?'" "he didn't know. you can go on." "thank you. i heard how he came posting down here, to get the hush-money; and how it came by return of post--telegraph, i believe; i think he telegraphed to the woman, 'blackmail will be paid,' i suppose, 'on condition do not say from father.'" she laughed at her jest. the squire kept miserable silence. "well, there it is," she said. "to use my words more carefully this time--she gave you away. you never thought you could be given away, did you? you thought you were safe. your conscience hasn't troubled you much, i should think, to judge by your healthy appearance. conscience never does trouble cowards much, when they can once assure themselves they won't be found out." in the turbulent confusion of his mind, the squire still clung to certain fixities. he had acted for the best; he had acted so that the innocent should not suffer; and if he himself had been amongst the innocent who were to escape suffering, his own safety had not been his chief thought. and if his actions, or his refraining from action, had added to the burden justly borne by the guilty, that had been inevitable if the innocent were to be saved; in any case it had added so little that he could not be blamed for ignoring it. cowardice at least, he had thought, was no crime that could ever be laid to his charge, and he had not shown it when he had braved all consequences in refusing to lift a finger to avert the disaster that was now, in spite of all, threatening him. but she was dragging from him all his armour, piece by piece. he let it go, and clung to his naked manhood. "you may say what you like," he said, squaring himself and looking out over the water in front of him. "i simply stood aside. what could you--no, not you, what could anyone--have expected me to do? publish the truth--overwhelm the innocent with the guilty; and all for what? for nothing. you were free. you----" "free! yes. they had let me out of prison, that's quite true. would _you_ consider yourself free with that taint hanging over you? was i free to come back to my friends? was i free even to settle down anywhere where my story was known? susan, the thief, was to be sheltered, because she bore the honoured name of clinton. _she_ was to go free. yes. but _i_, who had taken her punishment, was to be left to bear the bitter results of it all my life. what meanness! what base cowardice!" he hardened himself, but said nothing. "susan had stolen this necklace, worth thousands of pounds," she went on. "she had----" "but not the jewel that you were imprisoned for stealing," he put in again. "i have already told you that she did; and i can prove it by that woman's evidence." he wavered, but stuck to his point. "i don't believe it," he said, "and you can leave it out." "i will, because it doesn't really matter whether you believe it or not. you will believe it when you see her in the witness-box." "you won't get her into the witness-box, to swear to that." "well, we shall see. there's no sense in haggling with you over that. we will leave it out, as you advised. i was talking about susan. she and your precious humphrey had spent the money that they had got from the sale, or pawning, or whatever it was, of the pearls she had stolen." "i have already said," he interposed quietly, "that humphrey knew nothing of it." "and i have already said, 'that's a likely story!' however, we need not press the point now. say she had had all the money if you like, and that he--dear innocent--never noticed that she was spending some thousands of pounds more than he allowed her. if you like to believe that it's your affair; we shall have plenty of opportunities of judging what view other people will take of it, by and by. at any rate, the money was spent--the stolen money--and you, a rich man, can sit down quietly and let somebody else bear the loss of it." he knew he was giving himself into her hands, but he could not help himself. "that's not true," he said. she looked at him, her lip curling. "oh! you sent it back--anonymously perhaps. you did have that much honesty." "you can make what use of the admission you like," he said. "i told lord sedbergh the story, and offered him the money." this set her a little aback. "_he_ knows the truth, then," she exclaimed. "another man of honour! _he_ lets me lie under the stigma of having stolen something that he's got the price of in his pocket all the time. upon my word! you're a pretty pair! i'm not certain that he's not worse than you are." he struggled with himself, but only for a moment, and then said, "he refused to take the money." she was quick to take that up. "oh! i see. dear me, how i should have enjoyed being present at that interview. you go to him with the delightful proposal that he shall make himself party to your meanness, and he refuses. yes. i suppose he would. i've no reason to suppose there are two men of supposed honour who could act quite as vilely as you have done. come now, mr. clinton, i've given you a piece of gratuitous information. supposing you return it by telling me what he said to you. did he tell you what he really thought of you, or only hint it?" "oh, let's have an end of this," he said, with agonised impatience. "what have you come here for? what do you want?" her manner changed. "yes, we will have an end of it," she said, with quick scorn. "it's useless to tell you what i think of your meanness, and how i despise your cowardice. i should have respected you much more if you had paid your blackmail down like a man, and then kept quiet about it, instead of running snivelling about trying to salve your own conscience. but a man who can believe as you have has no shame. you can't touch him by showing him up to himself. you can, though, by making him pay for it. and i'm going to make _you_ pay--to the last rag of reputation you've got left." she clenched her fist, and bent towards him fiercely. on his fathomless trouble her change of attitude made no new impression. what mattered it whether she sneered or stormed? the truth would be known; the pit of disgrace was already yawning for him. "i can't touch susan," she went on. "if i could, i'd drag her out of her grave and set her up for all the world to mock at." the intensity with which she said this affected him not merely to horror. he began to see dimly what an adversary he had to cope with, and the burning rage against circumstance that must consume her. even if all he had comforted himself with was true--if she was guilty of stealing the diamonds, and had suffered for that alone--still, she had suffered for susan's crime. for if susan had been found out, she would, or might, have gone undetected. how that knowledge must smoulder or blaze in her mind, night and day--all the worse if she was partly guilty! he might expect no mercy from her. "i _will_ make her name a mockery," she cried, "and i'll make yours stink in the nostrils of every decent honest man and woman in the country. i've only to tell my story. you can't deny it; you won't be allowed to. but i'll do more than that. i'll make you stand where i stood; first in the police court, then in the dock--you and humphrey together, and your other son too and his wife, who paid the money. tell your story _then_, and see what's thought of you! some of them may get off--but _you_ won't. you'll go where i went--to a vile and horrible prison, where you'll be with the scum of the earth; where you'll have plenty of time to think it all over, and whether it wouldn't have been better for you, after all, to tell the truth and shame the devil,--you dastardly coward!" her voice had risen almost to a shriek. he looked round him, in fear that it would bring someone to the scene. but the lake was retired, and seldom visited. they were quite alone. "yes, i suppose you would like to move away," she said in a voice more controlled, but still quivering with rage. "you can't run away. you'll have to face it now; you and your whole family, guilty and innocent. i'll make you suffer through them, as well as in yourself. you'll never wipe off the blot, never in all your life, not even when you come out of prison and come back here--a man that nobody will speak to again, for all your wealth and position. you can think of that when you're in your cell. they give you plenty of time to think. it's not more than _i_ suffered; it's not so much, because i was innocent. but i'd no children and grandchildren to make it worse. you have. it's your _name_ you've blackened. clinton will mean thief, and conspirator, and everything that's vile long after _you_ are dead." he had heard enough. he got up, turned his back on her, and began to walk very slowly across the little lawn, his head bent. she watched him with a look of hate, which gradually faded to scorn, then to cunning, then to expectation. but it became dismay when, having crossed the grass, he did not turn, but kept on between the shrubs, as if he had forgotten her, and were going to leave her there alone. she had to call to him. "where are you going?" he turned at once, and the look on his face might have made her pity him, if she had had any pity in her. "you must do what you will," he said. "there is nothing more to be said." then he turned from her again, and pursued his slow, contemplative walk along the path, his shoulders bent, his steps dragging a little, like those of an old man. chapter ii payment she forced a laugh. "oh, there's a lot more to be said," she called after him, in a voice almost gay. "please come back." he took no notice of her, but went on. she sprang up, a look of alarm on her face, and took a few quick steps across the grass. "mr. clinton!" she said. "mr. clinton! i have a proposal to make to you." he stopped and turned then. she expected him to come back on to the lawn; but he stood still, and she had to go up the path to him. she lifted her face, that some men, but not he, would have called beautiful, to his, and smiled. "it needn't happen, you know," she said. he did not understand in the least, and looked his puzzlement--and his disgust of her. she dropped her eyes, and her seductive manner at the same time. "come and sit down again," she said, "and let us talk sensibly. i have worked off my anger. now let us see what can be done." a slight gleam of hope came to him. perhaps--now susan was dead--she would see ... she could gain nothing.... he followed her to the seat obediently, and sat down. "i have told you what i think of you," she said, speaking now coolly and evenly. "i had to do that to clear my mind. you have treated me with the meanest cruelty, and i mean every word i have said to you. i have suffered bitterly, and perhaps i have succeeded in showing you that i have it in my power to make you suffer in the same way. revenge is very sweet, and i have tasted a little of it. but, after all, it can't do away with the past; and its savour soon goes. i shan't gain much by punishing you, though you ought to be punished." "no," he said eagerly. "you can gain nothing. and look at the terrible--awful suffering you would bring upon those who are innocent of any offence against you." "quite so," she said coolly. "i am glad you realise that. i meant you to." "it would be inhuman," he went on. "you would never be forgiven for it--in this world or the next." she laughed, this time without affectation. "you are really rather funny," she said. "well now, what do you suggest? that i shall hold my tongue and go away? back to america, for instance, and settle down there for good, perhaps under another name?" he could hardly believe his ears. "you would do that?" he cried. "i think perhaps i might be persuaded to. i am not unreasonable." "if you did that," he broke out, his face aflame, "the blessing of the innocent would be yours to the end of your life. you would be their saviour; you----" "i suppose i should," she interrupted dryly. "i should like that. but the trouble is, you see, that one can't live on the blessing of the innocent. it isn't sustaining enough. and i have very little to live on." the light died slowly out of his face as he listened to her. "you must help me," she said. "you are a rich man, and you can do it. you allowed money to be paid before, to hush up this scandal; you offered a very large sum of money to free yourself of a mere disagreeable feeling of indebtedness, and took some risk in doing it too--i give you that much justice. i am glad lord sedbergh refused that money. now you can lend it to me--i will pay you back some day--and a few thousands more. let me have ten thousand pounds, mr. clinton. you can ease your conscience of the wrong you have done me, and save your innocents at the same time--yourself, who are not innocent, into the bargain." perhaps she had mistaken the motives which had led him to refuse to pay money to gotch, and really thought that he had done it only to save his own skin, knowing that it would be paid elsewhere; in which case nothing in this proposal would shock him. or perhaps she relied overmuch on having frightened him into acquiescence with any proposal. otherwise, with all her powers of finesse, she would hardly have plumped out her demand in this careless fashion. she had restored him in some degree to himself. "what!" he cried, his brows terrifically together. "after all you have said, you now want me to pay blackmail to _you_. it's an impudent proposal; and i refuse it." she was quick to see her error. if he wanted his susceptibilities soothed, she was quite ready to do that. "oh, don't be absurd," she said. "i never really thought that you had looked on that transaction as blackmail; i only said so because i wanted to make you smart. is it likely that i should be fool enough to suggest such a thing to you? besides, whatever you may think of me, i am not a blackmailer; it wouldn't suit my book. you are not very clever, you know, mr. clinton. i will tell you what i want, and why i think you ought to help me to get it, as carefully as i can; and you must listen to me and try and understand it." poor man! how could he help listening to her, with so much at stake! "the mischief is done," she said. "i am innocent, but i am smirched--poor me!--and although i could make you suffer, and would, i tell you frankly, if i could do it without hurting myself, i don't believe i could ever get back--not all the way. i don't know that i want to try; i am not young now, whatever i look, and i have no heart for the struggle. i am young enough, at any rate, to enjoy my life, if i can begin it again, in quite new surroundings, and not dogged by poverty. it isn't much i want. what is ten thousand pounds for life to a woman like me, who has spent that in a year? i have something of my own, but not much. this would make me secure against that horrible wolf at the door, which frightens me more than anything." he was about to speak, but she silenced him with a lift of the hand, and said, "let me go on, please. why should _you_ give it to me? you were going to ask--i drop the pretence of a loan, though you can call it that if you like. because you are the only person i can ask it of. it is compensation; and nobody but you--except humphrey, of course--has offended against me. sedbergh _thinks_ i stole the star, and so does mary sedbergh, and it is true that that is all i was actually found guilty of. under the circumstances they are not to be blamed. the coincidences--and the perjury--were too strong for me. they owe me nothing--except out of kindness to an old friend whom they had done injustice to." "if you want me to listen to you in patience," said the squire angrily, "you'll drop that impudent pretence of not having stolen the star. my daughter saw you at the cupboard; and you would have stolen the necklace if you could. you hardly take the trouble to hide that you're lying. you must take me for a fool." "shall i drop it?" she asked. "i think perhaps i will, with you. it is quite safe. i can take it up again if you drive me to action; and nobody will believe that i could have been such a fool as to admit to you that i had stolen it." "you infamous creature!" he cried. "that was the plea you used before. it didn't save you, and it won't save you this time." she saw that she had made a mistake, but answered, "well, no; perhaps it wouldn't save me. but you see the question wouldn't arise. if i did take it, i couldn't be punished for taking it twice. i could confess it to all the world now, and nothing further would happen. besides, you see, it will be _you_ who will be standing in the dock, for an offence into which the question of the star wouldn't come." his eyes dropped. her specious reasoning--before she had made the mistake of interrupting it with her insolent cynicism--had made some way with him, and allowed his mind to detach itself ever so little from that frightful picture. "oh, you can't be prepared to face that," she said, pursuing her recovered advantage; "and it would be too absurd--quixotic. the same reasons hold good here as they did before, when you allowed silence to be kept, and were prepared to pay not much less than i ask for. you save your children as well as yourself. think what it would mean for that young girl of yours, when the time came for her to be married." ah! that was a sharper pang than she knew. oh, for the sunny satisfaction of that walk across the park back again! and the sun shining now on his black misery had only shifted a point or two. "and the other one," went on the cool voice, "who was married the other day. their father in the dock! in prison!" he rallied again. "you can drop that nonsense too," he said. "it's a bogy that doesn't frighten me." "not the dock? i admit that you _might_ escape the prison--though humphrey couldn't very well." "whatever mistake i may have made--and i'm not yet prepared to admit that i made any--i did nothing that i could be even asked to justify in a court of law." "well, i think you're wrong there. but in any case you would fear the court of your friends and neighbours and the whole public opinion of england hardly less than a court of law, wouldn't you?" this was so true that he showed his sense of it in his face. "oh, my dear good man, how can you be so foolish as to run the risk of it? look here, mr. clinton, supposing i admit the theft of the star, and say that i have deserved what i got for that, do i _really_ suffer nothing whatever by bearing the burden of susan's far bigger theft all my life? be honest now. take it as a woman's weakness. wouldn't it mean a good deal to me to be cleared of that?" she waited for his answer, which was slow in coming. he fought hard against his inclination to give an evasive one. "yes--it might--it would," he said. "then i bear it, and save her name, now she is dead; and your name. i save the honour of you clintons, who think so much of yourselves. if i do that, and allow the shame you have fastened on to me to rest where it is, don't i deserve some little kindness from you--some help in the life i shall have to live, right away from all that has ever made my life worth living to me before, right away from all my friends? i should get _some_ of them back, you know, if it were known that _that_, at least, wasn't true of me." her voice was pleading. it affected him no more than by the sense of the words it carried. perhaps if this had been her tone from the first it might have done so. but the words themselves did affect him. they were true. if it could be regarded as only help that she wanted! "this time," she said, "you wouldn't be doing injury to a living soul. you would only be doing something towards setting right a wrong. you wouldn't even be doing anything that the law would blame you for. susan is dead. there is nobody who could be prosecuted." "i could pay sedbergh his money," he said slowly. "yes, you could do that," she took him up eagerly. "honourably, now. he could take it without any scruple. the sedberghs would be sorry for me, i think. they would be glad that i had been helped. _they_ couldn't blame you. and who else could?" the squire knitted his brows hard, and tried to think, but couldn't. he could only feel. release might be in view from the chains that already seemed to have begun to rust on him. "i can't see my way," he said. "i must think it over." with her eyes fixed sharply and anxiously on him, she had seemed to be reading his very thoughts. she had influenced him; she could do nothing more by repetition of her plea; he must have time to think it over--and _would_ have time, whatever she might say; he was that sort of man. she rose from the seat. "i know you must have time," she said. "i know that the sum i ask for is a large one, especially if you are going to add another seven thousand on to it; but i can't take less. i won't take less. but remember what it buys you, mr. clinton, when you think it over. if you refuse me this money which you owe me for what you have done to me, if ever man owed woman anything, i shall speak out and bring it home to you. i would rather have peace for the rest of my days, and ease, than perpetual fighting. but i shall be ready to fight, if you refuse me, for i shall get _something_ out of that." he rose too. "you needn't go over all that again," he said. "if i consider it right to do this i will do it. if not, no threats will weigh with me." "very well," she said. "if you accept, as of course you will, for it _is_ right to do it, you will want to see me again to settle details. probably you won't want to pay the money all at once, and we can arrange that. you will want to be assured that i shan't come down on you again, that my silence will be absolutely unbroken. i can satisfy you as to that too; i have thought out a way. there will be other details to settle. you won't want to see me down here again. you must come to see me in london. i will help you in every way i can." she gave him an address. "now i will go," she said. "show me a way out without my passing the house." they walked round the lower end of the lake together, neither of them speaking a word. he took her to a gate leading into a lane. "if you follow that to the left," he said, "you will come to the village." she went through the gate which he held open for her. then she turned and looked at him out of level eyes, and said before she walked away: "if you do what i ask, you will hear nothing more of me after we have settled matters. if you don't, i will punish you somehow--in addition--for not receiving me into your house." chapter iii the straight path "mr. clinton has had to go to bathgate, ma'am. he told me to say he would dine at the club and might be late home. he partic'ly asked that you and miss joan--miss clinton--shouldn't sit up for him." the old butler gave his message as if there was more behind it than appeared from his words. mrs. clinton, standing in the hall, in her travelling cloak, looked puzzled and a little anxious. it was unlike her husband not to be at home to meet her, especially when she and joan were returning from so comparatively long a visit--and there was something so very interesting to talk about. and, although he frequently lunched at the county club in bathgate, he had not dined there half a dozen times since their marriage. "is mr. clinton quite well?" she asked, preparing to move away. "well, ma'am, i don't think he is quite well. we've all noticed it. or it seems more as if he was worried about something. but he's not eating well, ma'am, and not sleeping well." "poor father!" said joan, standing by her mother. "we've been too long away from him. we'll cheer him up, and soon put him right, mother." mrs. clinton went to bed at half-past ten, as usual. the squire came home at eleven o'clock. it was the hour when he expected her to have her light out, if he should come up then. he went straight to her room. it was in darkness. "well, nina," he said from the door, "you're back safely. sorry i had to be out when you arrived. i'll come to you in a few minutes." he went along to his dressing-room. just outside it, in the broad carpeted corridor was joan. she was in a white dressing-gown, her hair in a thick plait down her back. she looked hardly older than the child she had been five years before. "father dear!" she said. "how naughty of you to be away when we came home! have you heard about it?" her beautiful eyes, swimming with tender happiness, looked up into his. she had come close for his embrace. "my dear child!" he said, kissing her. "my little joan!" "i thought you'd be glad," she said, nestling to him. "i'm so frightfully happy, father." "well, run along to bed now," he said. "we'll talk about it to-morrow. you ought to have been in bed long ago." "i know. but i had to stop up and tell you. good-night, father." he strained her to him. "good-night, my darling!" he was not a man of endearments; he had not called her that since she was a tiny child. she flitted along the passage, and he went into his room and shut the door. the old butler came up to put out the lamps in the corridor. he had performed this duty nightly since he had been a very young butler, and had often thought, as he passed the closed doors, of those who were behind them. for many years there had been somebody behind most of the doors, except in the rooms reserved for visitors. now there were only three left out of all the big family in whose service he had grown old. he had seen all the children, who had crowded the nursery wing, with their nurses and governess, grow up and leave the nest one by one. it had been such a warm, protected nest for them. he had always liked to go up to the floor on which the nurseries were, and think of all the little white-robed sleepers behind those doors as he passed them. they were so safe, tucked up for the night, and so well-off in that great guarded house, where nothing that might affright other less fortunate children could touch them. the nursery wing was empty now. joan had come down to another room on the first floor; he only had one broad passage to see to upstairs. and soon she would have flown. he thought of her with the affection of an old servant as he put out the light outside her room. little miss joan! she was in there with her happiness. he smiled as he turned from that door. outside his master's dressing-room his face became solicitous. mr. clinton was not well--worried-like. well, he was apt to worry over-much about trifles. the old butler knew him by this time. he had seen him weather many storms, and they had never, after all, been more than mere breezes. whatever was going on behind the door of that room couldn't be very serious. its occupant was shielded from all real worries, except those he made for himself. he was one of the lucky ones. outside the big room of state, in which so many generations of clintons had been born to the easy lot awaiting them, and so many heads of that fortunate house had died after enjoying their appointed years of honour and invulnerable well-being, his face cleared. mrs. clinton had come home; she would put right whatever little thing was wrong. his master couldn't really do without her, though he thought he could. behind that door she was lying, waiting for him. he put out the lamp. the house was now dark and silent, though behind two of the three doors there were lights. the squire went along the passage in his dressing-gown, carrying his bedroom candlestick. he blew out the light directly he got inside the room. when he had given his wife greeting, he said, "i'm tired to-night. we must talk over this affair of joan's to-morrow." "you are pleased, edward, are you not?" she asked. "he is such a dear boy; and they are very much in love with one another." "i must hear all about it to-morrow," he said, composing himself for sleep. his usual habit was to go to sleep the moment he got into bed; but he was always ready to talk, if there was anything he wanted to talk about. he would freely express irritation if he was upset about anything, and it sometimes seemed as if he were ready to talk all night. but he would suddenly leave off and say, "well, good night, nina. god bless you!" and be fast asleep five minutes later. he never omitted this nightly benediction. until he said "god bless you, nina," it was permitted to her to speak to him. when he had said it, he was officially asleep, and not to be disturbed. he did not say it to-night after his postponement of discussion, but his movement showed that "good-night" was considered to have been said. the omission was ominous. for a very long time there was complete silence. then the squire turned in bed, with a sound that might have been a half-stifled groan, but also an involuntary murmur. again there was a long silence. mrs. clinton lay quite still, in the darkness. then he turned again, gently, so as not to wake her if she were asleep, and moaned. her voice, fully awake, broke through the silence, "edward, you are not asleep. porter said you were not well." he made no reply for a moment. then he turned towards her and said, "inverell--he is coming to see me here?" "yes. he is coming on friday." "you must put him off, nina. you must put off the whole thing for a time." he must have expected an expression of surprise, or a question. but none came. "there are reasons why i can't consider it for the present," he said. "what to say to him i don't quite know. by and by, perhaps. joan is very young yet.... i don't know what to say; we must think it over." "edward," she said, after a pause, "if there is trouble hanging over us, let me know of it. let me be prepared." this reply, so different from any that he could have expected, kept him silent for a time. then he took her hand in his and said, "i don't know why you say that; i had meant to keep it to myself till the trouble came; but i suppose you can always see through me. nina, there is dreadful trouble coming to us. i hardly know how to tell you about it--how to begin. there is such trouble as i sometimes think nobody ever had to bear before. oh, my god! how shall i break it to you!" it was a cry of agony, the first cry he had uttered. it rang through the room. joan caught the echo of it, and lifted her head from the pillow, but dropped it again and closed her eyes on her happy thoughts. "oh, edward!" mrs. clinton cried, clinging to him, "i can't bear to see you suffer like this. my dear husband, there is no need to break anything to me. i know." "what!" his voice was low and alarmed. "she has already----" "poor susan told me," she said. "she told me on her death-bed." he sighed momentary relief. "you have known for all these weeks!" he said. "oh, why didn't you speak?" "what could i have said? how could i have helped matters? what was there to do?" her usually calm, slow speech was agitated, and told him more of what she had gone through than words could have done. "i saw you anxious and troubled, and i longed for you to confide in me; but until you did----" "i couldn't," he said. "i gave humphrey my promise. he had his reasons, but whether he ought to have----" "oh, i am glad you have told me that," she said in a calmer voice. "no, i think he was wrong--to ask that i should be shut out. i can help you--i have helped you--sometimes, edward." he pressed her hand, which was lying in his. "my dear," he said, "i want your help now very much." "we needn't talk more about the past," she said. "it is known now, is it? you have heard something while i have been away." he told her, up to the point where mrs. amberley had left him. his story was often interrupted by exclamations of pain and disgust, as the intolerable things that had been said to him through that long drawn-out hour of his torture were brought to light. he went off into by-paths of explanation, of self-justification, of appeal. she soothed him, helped him to tell his story, was patient and loving with him, while all the time almost insupportably anxious to come to the end of it, and know the best or the worst. but when he came to mrs. amberley's plea for help, stumbling through the specious arguments she had used, as if for the thousandth time he were balancing them, defending them, inclining towards them, she kept silence. she trembled, as she followed the workings of his mind, groping towards a decision, with so little light to help him, or rather with lights so crossed that none shone out clearly above the rest. she thought--she hoped--she knew what his decision had been. but he must tell her of it himself. she could not cut him short with a question. the decision was his. whatever it had been, he had already made it. if it had been right, a question from her must have expressed doubt; if wrong, censure, or at least criticism. "i think, when she had left me," he said quietly, "i felt no doubt about what i was going to do. everything she had said seemed to be true. it seems to be true now, when i repeat it. she _had_ suffered wrongfully, and would, to the end of her days. if i had let it be kept dark before, and thought myself right, it wouldn't be less right to keep it dark now. i could pay sedbergh his money, which was the only thing that had worried me badly, after the rest had been done, and not done by me. the disgrace would be sharper still if it came out, because it had been hidden before, and certain things might have been misunderstood, or misrepresented. i knew she would do the worst she could, and wouldn't stick at lies. there was this marriage of joan's to make or mar---- oh, i don't know; i can't think straight about it even now. i thought it over for two days and nights. i prayed to god about it. before him, i don't know whether i've done right or wrong. i'm bringing misery on you, and everybody i love in the world. i'm dragging the name of clinton, that has stood high for five hundred years, down in the dust. but i couldn't do it, nina. i couldn't do it." she threw herself on his breast weeping. he had never known her weep. "oh, edward, my dear, dear husband," she cried, "i love you and honour you more than i have ever done. our feet are on the straight path. god will surely guide them." chapter iv a conclave "good heavens! what on earth can be the meaning of this?" dick was standing in his pyjamas at the window of virginia's bedroom. they were in a country house on the yorkshire coast, to which they had come for a few days on their way from scotland. letters had just been brought up to them with their morning tea. "what is it, dick?" said virginia from the bed. "give it to me." he hesitated for a moment, and then crossed the room to give her the letter he had been reading. as he did so he looked through the other envelopes he held in his hand. "here is one from the governor," he said, "which may explain it." the two letters ran as follows: dear captain clinton, i suppose your father has told you of the conversation he and i had together a few days ago, and of his refusal to entertain the request i made of him, to which i had understood him to assent. this is just a friendly note of advice to you to help him to see how absurd his refusal is, and what it will entail, not only to him but to you and all your family. i shall not take any steps for a day or two, so that you may have time to bring him to reason. but if that cannot be done, i shall take the steps of which i warned him. yours sincerely, rachel amberley. my dear dick, i want you to come home at once. a very serious trouble has arisen with regard to an action of poor susan's, of which i have known for some time, but which i was unable to talk to you about. i had thought we should hear no more about it, but i am afraid it must now be known. i wish to consult you about any steps that can be taken; but i fear that none can. in any case i want you to hear the whole story. your mother sends her love, and wants you and virginia here. she would like me to tell you the story, but i feel i cannot write it. you must wait until i see you. love to virginia. your affectionate father, edward clinton. dick's face was grave enough when he looked up from this missive, and handed it, without a word, to virginia. "rachel amberley!" she exclaimed. "yes--and susan," said dick. "trouble indeed! trouble and mystery! i wish the governor had told me what it is. just like him to keep us on tenterhooks for hours! we shall have to start early, virginia." virginia was frightened. "but, dick dear, what does it mean?" she cried. he went and stood at the window, looking out over the sea. his face was very grave. "it means," he said slowly, "that susan was concerned, somehow, in that amberley business; and she has found it out, and is asking for money to keep it dark." "but how could she have been concerned in it? oh, how dreadful, dick!" "she was at brummels at the time." he pieced his thoughts together slowly. "perhaps she knew, and took money to hold her tongue. she wanted money almost as much as the other woman. she did something she ought not to have done; the governor says so. something that she could have been punished for, or this amberley woman wouldn't have any grounds to go on. _she_ has been punished, and can't be punished any more--for that. she could for blackmail, though. she says the governor gave way to her. that would have been extraordinarily foolish. he refused afterwards, though--seems to have told her to go to the devil. i'm glad he did that. lord, how he must have been rushed! i wish i'd been there to lend him a hand." "oh, poor mr. clinton! but what can she do, dick, this woman?" "if susan had known----!" he paused. "she can't have been in it...." "oh no, dick!" virginia said in a frightened whisper. "no, the amberley woman would have given her away. i don't think she has found out anything. i think she has waited until she was free of everything herself, and now proposes to let out what she knew all the time about susan, unless she is paid to keep it to herself. that would be it, or something like it. well, we shan't know, if we cudgel our brains all day. i must go and dress; and you must get up. i'll tell finch to look up trains. don't worry about it, virginia." they arrived at kencote in the late afternoon. joan was on the platform. her face was troubled. virginia kissed her warmly. "what is it, darling?" she asked. "i don't know," said joan, as they walked out of the station together. "it is something about ronald. he is not to come here yet. oh, what can it be?" "it isn't anything about ronald," virginia said. "we know that much. but it is some great trouble, and i suppose your father has asked him not to come for the present." "yes," said joan. "mother said she would tell me more after they had talked to you and dick. father has been indoors all day. i believe he is ill. oh, virginia, i am sure something dreadful is going to happen." they drove straight to the house, and dick went in at once to his father's room. the squire was sitting in his chair, doing nothing. he looked aged and grey. "well, dick," he said, looking up, without a smile. "this is a black home-coming. ask your mother and virginia to come in. virginia must know. i'll tell you the story at once." he told his story, without the circumlocutions he had used to mrs. clinton. his voice was tired as he told it, and his narrative was almost bald. "there it is," he ended up. "i don't know whether i'm right or not. your dear mother says i am. i hope i am. it means untold misery and disgrace. but i shan't pay her a penny, directly or indirectly." virginia looked anxiously at dick, who had been sitting with downcast eyes, and now looked up at his father. "you needn't worry yourself about that, father," he said. the squire's face brightened a little. "you mean that you think i'm right," he said. "i suppose i am. but i can't be certain of it." "i can," said dick. "she can disguise it as she likes; but it's blackmail. we don't pay blackmail." there were visible signs of relief at this uncompromising statement. the squire began to argue against it, not because he was not glad it had been made, but to justify his doubts. "i know it's a difficult case," said dick. "it's a most extraordinarily difficult case. the only way through it is to act on a broad principle, and stick to it through thick and thin. that's what you've done, and i'm very glad of it. you couldn't have done anything else, really, though you may think you could. under no circumstances do we pay money to anybody to keep anything dark." "money _was_ paid," said the squire. "i had no idea whatever," said virginia, with frightened eyes. "oh, of course not," said dick. "it wasn't your fault." his face was clouded. "i can't blame humphrey," the squire said, with his eyes on him. dick made no reply. "he came on purpose to ask you," said virginia. "he didn't try to keep it from you." "he did keep it from me," said dick. "i ought to have known." "what should you have done?" asked the squire. dick did not answer. mrs. clinton broke in. "let us leave that alone," she said. "humphrey had poor susan to consider. we have no right to blame him for what he did." "i say nothing about that, for the present," said dick. "i must think it over. if i had been there he would not have got the money." "he wouldn't have told you why he wanted it," virginia said. "i think you would have paid it--to gotch--as i did." "you see how difficult it all is, dick," said mrs. clinton. "at every moment there have been difficulties. do not think harshly of poor humphrey." "he is out of it," said dick, "at the other side of the world. see what comes of his actions. we couldn't be touched if it were not for that--in any way that will harm us. susan is dead. nobody else had done anything they could have been accused of, or made sorry for, up till that time." "susan had," said mrs. clinton. "she was alive then; and she was humphrey's wife. and wouldn't it have been terrible for us then if she had been punished?" dick's face was hard. "dick, supposing it had been me!" said virginia. "oh, my dear!" he exclaimed impatiently. "no, but you must think of it in that way. he stood by her. he _couldn't_ let that happen to her." "well," said dick unwillingly, "when you've said that at every stage it has been a difficult question, perhaps you have said all that can be said. the trouble is that it is that payment to gotch that is coming home to us. that's why, even if father had thought it right, otherwise, to pay her this money now, it would have been the most foolish thing he could have done. he would have been endorsing that transaction. as it is, he can say quite truly that he refused to do it, and we, who did do it, had no idea what it was done for." "yes, i see that," said the squire, "and i never thought of it before. the two things would have hung together." "she would have made further demands," said dick. "we should have been under her thumb." "she said she would satisfy me of that," said the squire. "she may have said so. she would have been too clever for you. she would have drawn us in, until we should have had to do something downright dishonourable--that there couldn't have been any doubt about--or defy her and take the consequences, as we've got to do now. we should have been living under the sword, perhaps for years, never knowing when it was going to fall, shelling out money all the time. oh, it doesn't do to think about! and no better off at the end of it than we are now." "it's true," said the squire. "i wish i'd had you to show it all so clearly to me while i was going through that awful time, making up my mind. oh, lord!" he wiped his brow, damp with the horror of thinking of it. "you made up your mind without seeing clearly," said mrs. clinton. "you did what was right because it was right." "and now we've got to take our punishment for it," said the poor squire, with a wry smile. "that is what we'd better talk about," said dick. "the other is all over. we can talk about that later." "herbert birkett is coming down to-morrow," said the squire. "i wrote and told him he must, and he sent me a wire. he is playing golf at north berwick. it is her threat of an action for conspiracy that i want to ask him about." "that's bluff," said dick. "who conspired to do what? humphrey is out of the country. he had better stay there. she can't get at him. everybody else is blameless. you refused, and you were the only one besides him who knew anything about it." "i can't prove that, and she won't stick at lies." "that's true enough. but you _can_ prove it. she will have to get the gotches over to prove anything at all, and his evidence will clear you. besides, you refused her the second time." "i _can't_ prove that. there were only she and i." "by jove!" dick felt in his breast pocket. "she's given herself away there. i've got a letter from her. she says you refused. she isn't as clever as i thought she was." "it's all bluff," said dick contemptuously, when the letter had been read. "i don't think she could get the gotches over, for one thing. and supposing she did succeed in bringing it before a court, you could tell your story in the most public way. nobody would have a word of blame for you, or for any of us. i'm not certain it wouldn't be the best possible thing that could happen for us." "i shouldn't like it to come to that," said the squire. "well, i don't think it will. we've got other things to face--perhaps worse things. i shan't answer her letter, though i'll take good care to keep it. when she sees that nothing is coming she'll begin to spread reports. that's when we shall have to be on the lookout." "we have done nothing wrong," said mrs. clinton. "she will only be attacking poor susan; and anybody whose opinion of us we should value will think that a wicked thing to do, now that susan is dead." "but ought we not to defend susan's memory?" virginia asked. all three of them were silent. dick was the first to speak. "we have to think straight about it," he said. "you can't defend susan, alive or dead. it was shielding her that has put us in the wrong, where we are in the wrong. all that we can do is not to admit anything, not to deny anything; let people think what they will. keep quiet. that's a good deal to do, for if we liked to take the offensive we could clear ourselves once and for all." "how could we do that?" "have her up for slander." "but what she will say about susan will be true." "do you think she will stick to that? no, she will try to blacken us in every way she can. she'll tell lies about us. it's no good saying people won't believe them. they _will_ believe them, if we don't defend ourselves. we may have to have her up for slander, after all." "what can she get out of it all?" asked virginia in a voice of pain. "it will be horrible. every right-thinking person must abhor her." "she will have a right to try and clear herself," said mrs. clinton. "it is true that she was accused of doing what susan really did, and the accusation has never been cleared up." "that _is_ true," said dick, "and if she confines herself to truth, we have no right to try and stop her. under all the circumstances--her trying to get money for her silence, and so on--i don't see that we are under the smallest obligation--of honour or anything else--to help her. if we come out into the open we shan't be able to keep susan's guilt dark. that's why i think she will drag us into attacking her. we shall see what herbert birkett says. all we have to do in the meantime is to live on quietly here as usual, and wait for what comes." "there are the others to be thought of," said mrs. clinton. "jim and cicely, walter and muriel, frank, all of them. they must be prepared." "yes," said dick unwillingly. "they are bound to hear of it. we must tell them. get them down here as soon as possible. i will go over and tell jim and cicely to-morrow." the squire had been sitting in a blessed state of quiescence. he had done his part. dick had a clearer head than he. in his bruised state, he was only too ready to let dick take the lead in whatever had to be done. "there is my poor little joan to think of," he said. "young inverell--i have put him off. joan must be told why." "i will tell her," mrs. clinton said. "poor child, it is hardest for her, just now. but he will not give her up--i am sure of it." "i don't know," said the squire. "if the whole country is going to ring with our name---- his stands high. but i won't have him here until the worst has happened that can happen; and then only if he comes of his own accord. we stand on what honour is left to us. it won't be much. we've been talking as if we could all clear ourselves at susan's expense, if everything comes out. we can't. she was one of us, poor girl. we suffer for her sins." chapter v waiting brummels, carchester, sept. th, --. my dear edward, i have to thank you for your second letter, and for your cheque for £ , , which i cannot now refuse, but which, upon my soul, i don't know what to do with. if i buy another necklace with it, i publish to the world--or to such part of it as will see the pearls upon my wife's neck--what i intend to keep even from the partner of my joys and sorrows herself. if only a certain young woman had been able to bring herself to consent to the proposal made to her, the difficulty might have been got over by adding to _her_ stock of trinkets. but it is of no use to cry over that, and my little friend joan will assuredly have considered herself justified in her refusal by the somewhat startling suddenness with which the illustrious robert consoled himself for her loss. these affairs move too quickly for me in my old age. the young woman whom i now have the honour to call daughter-in-law is all that could be wished from the point of view of health and high spirits, and i have nothing against her. but i do not feel impelled to hang an extra seven thousand pounds' worth of pearls round her neck. if that is a criticism on her, so be it. but she is not joan. she is very far from being joan. i have much news for you, my dear edward, which only my inveterate habit of procrastination has caused to be left till now. the woman fastened upon mary at harrogate. this must have been after she had given up all idea of getting anything out of you. no doubt she followed her to that invigorating resort, and it is unfortunate that my poor wife should not be able to drink her waters of bitterness without being frightened out of her five wits by _that_ resurrection. fortunately i was within hail, and arrived on the scene in time to deal with the situation. i gathered from her account of her interview with you--my poor friend, what you must have gone through!--that you had very loyally exonerated me from all possibility of blame or misunderstanding, and i was pleased to be able in some sort to repay that loyalty. i did not lie, edward--at least not to her. what fine adjustments of veracity one may have made later, in connubial intimacy, let no man presume to sit in judgment upon. i had received your first letter. i said neither yea nor nay, but rang the changes upon a monotonous charge of her having tried to extort money from you. it was the first line of defence, and i had no other. but she never got behind it. there is a bland but dogged persistency in my nature which ought to have carried me far. it carried me to the point of driving her to uncontrollable rage, which is something of a triumph in itself. to mary i said before her, "this lady may not have stolen your necklace. you have her word for it. i have the word of my friend, edward clinton, that she asked him for money to stop her from spreading the report that his daughter-in-law stole it. she is dead and cannot defend herself. also, edward clinton refused to give her any money. these two facts are enough for me. i recognise this lady's existence for the last time. i do not presume to dictate your actions, but if you are wise i think you will do the same." we got rid of her, and she left harrogate the next morning. i let her know, by the bye, that you held a letter from her admitting the fact that she had made demands on you and that you had refused them; and you may tell your son that she probably regrets having written that letter as much as any she ever wrote. it is a master weapon. well, that is the attitude i shall take up--my wife too, although she will talk a great deal, and be swayed by whatever opinion may be held by whatever person she talks to. there is _bound_ to be talk, and a great deal of talk. you cannot help that. but it will die down. deny nothing, admit nothing, except that you refused to pay her money. that is my advice to you. they say that colne is going to marry her. birds of a feather! he is, at any rate, hot--spirituously so--in his defence of her, and in his offence against you and yours. i met him passing through london; for the sins of my youth i still belong to the bit and bridle club, and i went there for the first time for i should think twenty years, and fell upon him imbibing. rather, he fell upon me, and _i_ fell upon my parrot-cry. "if you have any influence over that lady," i said to him, "i should advise you to advise her to keep quiet. she _would_ have kept quiet--for money. it is known that she asked for it, and the less it has cause to be stated, the better for what reputation she has." i left my lord in the maudlin stage, crying out upon the world's iniquity, of which he has considerable first-hand knowledge; but when he comes to what senses he still possesses he will, i hope, remember my advice. let him marry the lady, by all means. she will have what protection she deserves, and there will be some who will accept her. they will cross neither my path nor yours, for our orbits and those of colne do not intersect. finally, my old friend, set your teeth against what must come, and never lose sight of the fact that it will pass. you have been remarkably tried, and have escaped more pit-falls than could have been expected of any fallible mortal. there are no more in front of you, and all you have to do is to walk straight on with your usual stride. ever very sincerely yours, sedbergh. this letter gave the squire some comfort. it contained almost the first definite news he had had. he had been living in that uncomfortable state in which the mind is wrought up to meet trouble which is bound to come, and the trouble tarries. every morning he had arisen with the anticipation of the storm breaking; every night he had lain down, having lived through such a day as he might have lived at this season of the year for the last forty years. the storm had not broken yet. was it too much to hope that it would, after all, pass over? he looked up from the letter with that enquiry in his mind. but his face soon clouded again. though not in the full downpour, he was already caught by it. poor little joan! she knew. she was going about the house, trying hard to be as bright as usual. sometimes he heard her singing. that was when she passed the door behind which he was sitting. she came in to him much more freely than she had ever done, and sat and talked to him. his daughters had never done that, nor his sons very frequently, with the exception of dick. it was an empty house now. he and joan and mrs. clinton were a good deal together. joan had even persuaded him to take her out cubbing. none of the clinton girls had ever been allowed to ride to hounds; but there were so many horses in the stable, and so few people to ride them now, that he had given way. but he had only been out cubbing twice himself this season. he was getting too old, he said. he had never said that of himself before, about anything, which was why joan had pressed him to take her. but three times it had happened that she had risen at dawn, and mrs. clinton had come in to her and said that her father had not slept all night, but was sleeping now, and had better be allowed to sleep on. joan had heard nothing from her young lover since the letter had been written asking him to postpone his visit. she said nothing to anybody about him, but went about the house as usual, singing sometimes. there had been one day amongst the young birds, in which sir herbert birkett, jim graham, and walter only had assisted from outside kencote. the squire could not bring himself to ask his neighbours to shoot, nor to shoot with them. the strain was too great. on his tall horse by the covert-side, in those early meets of the hounds, he had always been on the look-out for suspicion and avoidance, and fancied them when they had not been there. but the news might come at any moment, filtering through any one of a score of channels to this retired backwater of meadow and wood and stream, and darkening it, to him whose whole life had been spent in its pleasant ways, with shameful rumour. it had been settled that life was to go on as usual at kencote. but he had lost the spring of his courage. even if no one outside knew of his dishonour, he knew of it himself. when the trouble came he would face it with what courage he could. in the meantime he kept more and more to the house, where he sat in his room, over the fire, reading the papers, or doing nothing. his half-brother, the rector, came often to see him. he was some years the younger of the two, but for years had looked the older, until now. the squire was ageing under his trial. he had lost his confident, upright bearing, shambled just a very little when he walked, and carried his head a trifle forward. his face was beginning to lose its healthy ruddiness, and his beard was whiter, or seemed so. the two men had always been good friends, but were as unlike in character and pursuits as possible. the rector was gentle and retiring, a little bit of a scholar, a little bit of a naturalist, gardener, musician, artist. he had no sporting tastes, but liked the country and lived all the year round in his comfortable rectory. he was not a clinton, but had been so long in their atmosphere that their interests were largely his. he had been one of the first to be told of the catastrophe. he had made no comments on it, but had shown his sympathy by many kind but unobtrusive words and acts. he came in as the squire was sitting with lord sedbergh's letter in his hand. "well, my dear edward," he said, "it is such a lovely morning that i was tempted out of my study. it is my sermon morning, and i shall have a good one to preach to you on sunday. i was in the vein. i shall go back to it with renewed interest." "i've had a letter that may interest you," said the squire. "in a way it seems to shed a gleam of light. but i don't know. things are black enough. it's this waiting for the blow to fall that is so wretched. i had rather, almost, that everyone knew." the rector read through the letter carefully and handed it back. "if nothing but the truth is to be told...!" he said. "you mean that won't be so bad for us. it does look as if there might be a chance of her not telling more than the truth, for her own sake. if she is going to marry that creature! colne! bah! what mud we're mixed up with! to think it rests with a man like that to keep her quiet!" "is he so bad?" enquired the rector. "bad! the sort of man that makes his order a by-word, for all the world to spit upon. i should think even you must have some knowledge of him. his first wife divorced him; his second died because he ill-treated her." "is that known?" "yes. in the way these things _are_ known." "he was hubert legrange, wasn't he? he was in my tutor's house at eton--after your time. he wasn't bad then--high-spirited, troublesome, perhaps--that was all. but warm-hearted--merry. i liked him." "ah, my dear tom! that's the sad thing, when you get to our age. to see the men you've known as boys--how some of them turn out! i've sometimes thought lately that i ought to have been more grateful to god almighty for keeping me free from a good many temptations i might have had. i married young; i settled down here; it was what suited me. but i see now that those tastes were given to me for my good. if it hadn't been for that i might have gone wrong just as well as another. i had money from the moment i came of age. i could have done what i liked. money's a great temptation to a young fellow." the rector hardly knew whether to be pleased or sorry at this vein of moralising that had lately come over his brother. it showed his mind working as he might have wished to see it work, towards humility and a more lively faith; but it also showed him deeply affected by the waves that were passing over his head; and the waves were black and heavy. "what you say is very true," he said. "god keep us all faithful, as he kept you, edward. you were tempted, and you were upheld. you see that now, i think." "i thought," said the poor squire after a pause, "that god was working to avert this disgrace from me. everything seemed to have been ordered, in a way that was almost miraculous, to that end. it was just when i was shaking off the last uncomfortable thoughts about it, when everything seemed most bright for the future, that the blow fell. well, i suppose it was to be, and it will come right for us all in the end; though i don't think i shall know a happy moment again as long as i live. i was living in a fool's paradise. i don't quite understand it, tom." the rector thought he did. a fool's paradise is a paradise that the fool makes for himself, and when he is driven out of it blames a higher power. he was not inclined to think his brother the worse off, in all that really mattered, for having been driven out of his paradise. but it was a little difficult to tell him so. the necessity was spared him for the moment. dick came in, and was shown the letter. "i think that is the way things will work," he said. "she will be repulsed by decent people, and she will come to see that whatever mud she stirs up, more than half of it will stick to her. if she marries colne--or even if she only clings on to him as her champion--he'll come to see, if he has any sense, that the less she talks the better." "he would want to see her cleared," said the rector. "yes, and that's our difficulty. sedbergh is very good; but i don't like it, all the same." "don't like what?" asked the squire. "i wish to god we could come out into the open." he spoke with strong impatience. "she's in the wrong. yes. scandalously in the wrong--a blackmailer, everything you like to say of her. but she's also in the right, and that's just where she can hurt us--where she _is_ hurting us." "has anything happened?" asked the squire anxiously. "yes. it's reached us at last. it's creeping like a blight all over the country--above ground, underground. it will crop up where you never could have expected. and what satisfactory answer can we give, without telling the truth, and the whole truth?" "tell us what has happened," said the squire. "i went into bathgate, to brooks, the saddler. i always have a talk with the _old_ man, if he's in the shop; and he was there alone. he hummed and ha'd a lot, and said there was a story going about that he thought i ought to know of. and what do you think the story was? humphrey stole the necklace and gave it to mrs. amberley. susan found it out and it killed her. you gave humphrey money on condition he never showed his face in england again. that's the sort of thing we are up against." the squire's face was a sight to see. the rector relieved the tension by laughing, but not very merrily. "that story won't hurt us," he said. "that's all very well, tom," said dick. "it wouldn't hurt us if there was nothing behind. but what can you say? it's a lie. yes. and you say so. what do you look like, when you say it? brooks didn't believe it, of course. but he knew well enough there was _something_, or he wouldn't have told me. how did it come? who knows? he heard it in the 'george.' they were talking of us. they'll be talking of us all over bathgate; then all over the country. trace that story back, and you'll get something nearer the truth. that will spread into another story. there will be many different stories." "they will contradict one another," said the rector. "yes. and everyone who hears or tells us of them will want to know exactly where the truth lies. it will all go on behind our backs; but every now and then somebody, out of real consideration to us, as i think old brooks told me, or out of impudent curiosity, will bring it to our notice. then what are we to say? oh, why can't we tell the truth?" "we can't," said the squire, rousing himself. "we can only contradict the lies. well, now it has come, i am ready for it. i'll go to brooks. i'll talk to him. i'll go and sit on the bench. i've been sitting here doing nothing--shirking. i'm glad it has come at last." chapter vi the power of the storm the rumours grew, and spread everywhere. the story was discussed in all the clubs, in all the drawing-rooms, in every country house. allusions, carefully calculated to escape the law of libel by the narrowest margin, appeared in many newspapers. all about peaceful kencote it buzzed hotly, assuming many shapes, showing itself in awkward withholding of eyes, that bore the look of the cut direct, or in still more awkward geniality. it peered out at the squire wherever he went, and he now went everywhere within the orbit in which he had moved, a respected, honoured figure, all the days of his life. he fought gamely; his head was once more erect, his step firm. but he fought a losing battle. dick, with his clear sight, had seen the weak spot from the first. there was no answer to make. there was, indeed, nothing to answer. in the first flush of his determination to take the field, he had been for going straight to old brooks the saddler, with whom he had had friendly dealings ever since his schooldays, and asking him, in effect, what he meant by it. but cool-headed dick had restrained him. "what can you do more than i did? i laughed, and said, 'that's a pretty story to have told about you'; and he said, 'yes, captain, you ought to stop it. i'll tell everybody exactly what you tell me to tell them,' and waited with his head on one side for my version. what's your version going to be when you've told him the story he heard is a lie, which he knows well enough already?" so the squire went to brooks, the saddler, because he always did go in to have a chat with him at the commencement of the hunting season, but said nothing to him at all of what they were both thinking about. the chat was lively on both sides, but when he went out of the shop he knew that brooks knew why he had come. to brazen it out. no need to go through the places he went to, and the people he talked to. he went everywhere he had been accustomed to go, and he talked to everybody he had been accustomed to talk to. and because he was unused to playing a part, he overdid this one. he had been a hearty man with his equals. now he was almost noisy. he had been a cordially condescending man with his inferiors. now he was effusively patronising. he would have done better to sulk in his tent until the storm of rumour had died down. and he felt every curious look, every unasked question. it was ominous that none of his friends--for he had many lifelong friends amongst his country neighbours, though no very intimate ones--said to him that ugly rumours were going about, and that they thought he ought to know of them so that he could contradict them. it was obvious that he knew of them, and that they thought he could not contradict them, or they would have spoken. nobody could tell anybody else that he had heard the truth of these absurd stories from clinton himself, and it was so and so. nobody cut him, nobody even avoided him; it was, indeed, difficult to do so, he was so ubiquitous; but the unasked, unanswered questions behind all the surface sociality poisoned the air. the squire was in torment in all his comings and goings. dick fared better, because he took things more naturally. but nobody asked him questions either. he was not an easy man to ask questions of. if they had done so, he would have been ready with his answer: "i can't tell you the truth of the story, because it's a family matter. but i'll tell you this much: mrs. amberley tried to blackmail my father, and he told her to go to the devil." it would not have answered much, but it would have made some impression. but the trouble was, and dick felt it deeply, that he could take no steps of his own. he could go to nobody and say, "i know there are ugly rumours going about against us. tell me, as a friend, what they are, and i'll answer them." the answer, in that case, would have had to be different, and must have contained the truth of the story, if it were to be satisfying. the squire grew thinner and older, almost noticeably so, every day. mrs. clinton was in the deepest distress about him, but could do nothing. he would come home, from hunting, or from petty sessions, which he now attended regularly, and keep miserable silence, all his spirit gone. she and joan were companionable with him, as far as he would let them be, and he liked to have them with him; but he would not talk, or if he roused himself to do so, it was with such painful effort that it was plain that it was only to please them, and brought no relief to himself. he would have no one asked to the house. he was afraid of refusals. one morning a letter came to him with the stamp of a government office, franked by the minister at the head of that office. he opened it in surprise. it ran as follows: dear mr. clinton, my nephew, inverell, has made a communication to me concerning which i should like to have a conversation with you. if you will do me the honour of calling on me when you are next in london i will do my best to meet you at any hour you may arrange for. but as my time is apt to be occupied a good deal ahead, if you can make it convenient to see me here at o'clock next tuesday morning, i shall run no risk of disappointment. yours very truly, cheviot. "now i shall have something to take hold of," said the squire, brightening. he dressed that morning in better spirits than he had shown for some time. poor little joan! it had hurt him terribly that her happy love story had been cut off short, snuffed out altogether, as it had seemed, by the postponement of her young lover's visit. he had made no sign, and it was now a month ago and more since the letter had been written to him. joan must have given up hope by this time. she must be sick at heart, poor child! yet she never showed it. she was tender of _his_ wounds, anxious to brighten his life. but what did his life, now almost within sight of its end--broken, dishonoured--matter beside her young life, just opening into full flower, only to be stricken by the same blight of dishonour? he would have given anything--life itself--to lift the weight off her, so tender had his conscience become under the pummelling of fate, so big his heart for those to whom he owed love and shelter. as bitter as death itself it was to feel that he who had surrounded his dear ones--dear all through, though subjugated to his whims and prejudices--with everything that wealth and ease could provide for refuge, should see them stripped of his succour, and himself powerless to protect them. he shaved himself by the window looking out on to his broad, well-treed park, where his horses were being exercised. he looked at them with some stirring of interest. somehow, he had not cared to look at them of late, whether it was that the mirth of the stable-lads, subdued by reason of their being in sight of the windows of the house, but none the less patent in its youthful irresponsibility, jarred on his sombre mood; or that such signs of his own wealth as a string of little-used hunters, kept on because he had always kept them, hurt him because of the futility of his wealth to help in the present distress. what, after all, could young inverell have done? mrs. clinton's letter had, on instructions, been entirely non-committal. he had been asked to postpone his visit. no reason had been given; no future time suggested. he could only have waited--in surprise and dismay--for a renewal of the invitation. he could not, after that letter, have written to joan. perhaps he might, after a week or two had elapsed, have written to the squire himself. but by that time the blight had begun to spread. it must have reached his ears pretty quickly. the higher the rank the fresher the gossip; and the name of clinton would not have passed him by, if it had been whispered ever so lightly. well, what then? the squire, sensitive now to the very marrow, drooped again. he had held aloof. there was no gainsaying that. five weeks had passed, and joan had been left unhappy, to lose some little shred of hope every day. it was natural perhaps. he was almost a young prince--not one of those of his rank who marry lightly to please their fancy of the moment. he would be right to wait for a time if the house from which he had chosen his bride was under a cloud, to see what that cloud was and whether it would pass. if it continued to hang black and threatening over those who made no effort to lift it, he might come to ask himself in time whether he could not snatch his lady from under its dark canopy; but he would not ask it until time had been given for its removal. oh, the bitterness of the thought that it was kencote, of all houses, over which the cloud lay thick and heavy--kencote, which had basked in the mild sunshine of honour and dignity for as long as, or longer than his own house had attracted its more radiant beams! but now he had moved. this letter must mean that a chance was to be given for the head of the house to clear himself. whatever came of it, it was the first chance that the squire had had, and he was eager to take it. he regarded the letter from all points of view, and was inclined to think favourably of it. it bore a great name--that of a man of the highest honour in the counsels of the nation, known to everyone. it was courteously written. "dear mr. clinton." the squire could not remember ever having met him. he was of a younger generation than the great men he had foregathered with in his youth and theirs. dick would probably have some slight acquaintance with him, but even dick, who had been so much in the swim, had not habitually consorted with cabinet ministers of the first rank. the squire would know many of his friends and relations, of course. his own name would be known to the great man--clinton of kencote--there was still virtue in it. it was not as if the young man had gone to his guardian and told him that he wanted to marry the daughter of this or that country gentleman whose status would have to be explained and examined. this was a letter to an equal. it was nothing that he was asked to go up and present himself before the writer. the squire was quite ready to pay due deference to a man whose claim to deference was founded on distinction of a sort that he did not claim himself. it was hardly to be expected that a secretary of state in the middle of an autumn session should wait upon him. nothing more could have been desired than that he should put his request with courtesy, which he had done. dick, when he showed him the letter, was not so sure. "of course you would have to go to london to meet him," he said. "but it's really no less than a summons, for a time and place that he doesn't consult you about. however, we won't worry ourselves about that. what are you going to say to him?" the squire hadn't thought that out yet. he should know when he got there, and heard what lord cheviot wanted of him. "i think it's pretty plain what he wants," said dick. "you've got to show my lord that you're a fit and proper person to form an alliance with. that's what we're brought to. it's the most humiliating thing that has happened yet. if it weren't for poor little joan i should say chuck his letter into the fire, and don't answer it, and don't go." it was significant of the change that had been wrought in the squire that it was dick who should be expressing angry resentment at the hint of a slight to the kencote dignity, and he who should say, "i don't take it in that way. and in any case i would sink my own feelings for the sake of joan." "you'll have to be careful," said dick. "he will want to overawe you with his position. that's why you are to go and see him at his office. why couldn't he have asked you to his house or his club, or called on you at yours? this is a private matter, and privately we're as good as he is; or, at any rate, we want nothing from him." "but we do," said the squire. "we want joan's happiness." "if inverell wants joan, he will take her. she's good enough for him, or anybody, not only in herself but in her family." "she would be if we were not under this cloud." "she is in any case. don't lose sight of that when you are talking to him. he has a sort of cold air of immense dignity about him; he is polite and superior at the same time." "do you know him?" "no. at least i've been to his house. we nod in the street. he knows who i am. he came down to kemsale some years ago. he was a friend of old cousin humphrey's. didn't you meet him then?" "perhaps i did," said the squire. "i don't remember. ah, if poor old humphrey meadshire had been alive, a lot of this wouldn't be happening." lord meadshire, a kinsman of the squire's, had been lord lieutenant of the county, and the leading light in it, for very many years. but he had died, a very old man, two years before, and the grandson who had succeeded him was "no good to anybody." "don't let him overawe you," was dick's final advice, significant enough, as addressed to the squire, of what had been wrought in him. there was no attempt made to overawe him, unless by the ceremony that hedges round a great secretary of state in his inner sanctuary, when the squire presented himself at the time appointed. lord cheviot rose from his seat and came forward to meet him. "it is good of you, mr. clinton," he said, shaking hands, "to come to me here. if you had been in london i should have called on you." he was a tall, severe-looking man who seldom smiled, and did not smile now. he was so much in the public eye, and had for years played a part of such dignity, that it was impossible for the squire, bucolic as he was, not to be somewhat impressed, now that he was in his presence. but his greeting had removed any feeling that had been aroused by dick's criticism of his letter, and he put the squire still more at his ease by saying as he took his seat again, "i had the pleasure of meeting you some years ago at lord meadshire's. i think he was a relation of yours." "yes," said the squire. "poor old man, we miss him a great deal in my part of the world." lord cheviot bowed his head. he had finished with the subject of lord meadshire. "as you know, mr. clinton," he said, "i was guardian to my nephew during his minority. he was brought up as a member of my own family; i stand as a father to him, more than is the case with most guardians. that will excuse me to you, i hope, for interfering in a matter with which, otherwise, i should have had no concern." the squire did not quite like the word "interfering," and made no reply. "he has told me that he wishes to marry your daughter, that she is everything, in herself, that could be desired as a wife for him, which i have no sort of hesitation in accepting--in believing." "in herself!" again the squire kept silence, though invited by a slight pause to speak. "he tells me that it was understood that he should go to you immediately after he and this very charming young lady had parted in scotland, that he had mrs. clinton's invitation, and that it was withdrawn, and has not since been renewed." the squire had to speak now. he made a gulp at it. "there were reasons," he said, "why i wished the proposal deferred for a time. i needn't say," he added hurriedly, "that they had nothing to do with--with your nephew himself." "you mean that you would not object to a marriage between him and your daughter?" was there a trace of satire in this speech? none was apparent in the tone in which it was uttered, or in lord cheviot's face as he uttered it, sitting with his finger tips together, looking straight at his visitor. if there was satire its sting was removed by the squire answering simply: "such a marriage could only have been gratifying to me"; and perhaps it was rebuked by his adding, "i have never met your nephew, but he bears such a character that any father must have been gratified for his daughter's sake." this gave the word to lord cheviot, whose attitude had been that of one waiting for an explanation. he changed his position, and bent forward. "i think, under the circumstances, mr. clinton, we are entitled to ask why you wished the proposal--otherwise gratifying--to be deferred." there was a tiny prick in each of his speeches. the squire was made more uncomfortable by them than was due even from the general discomfort of the situation. he raised troubled eyes to those of his questioner. "i suppose you are not ignorant," he said, "of what is being said of us?" "of 'us'?" queried lord cheviot. "of me and my family. all the world seems to be talking of us." lord cheviot dropped his eyes. he may not have liked to be put into the position of questioned, instead of questioner. "i am not ignorant of it," he said. "it was for him," said the squire, "to come or to keep away. as long as my name was being bandied about in the wicked way it has been, i would not ask him to my house. i have my pride, lord cheviot. if your nephew marries my daughter, he marries her as an equal. my family has been before the world as long as his, or your lordship's. it has not reached the distinction, of late, of either; but that is a personal matter. if lord inverell takes a bride from kencote he takes her from a house where men as high in the world as he have taken brides for many generations past." dick, if he had heard this speech, might have been relieved of his fear that the squire would be overawed by the cabinet minister. he might also have felt that as an assertion of dignity it would have been more effective if postponed to a point in the conversation when that dignity should have been affronted. "if that were not so, mr. clinton," said lord cheviot, "i should not have done myself the honour of seeking an interview with you. let us come to the point--as equals--and as men of honour. you have said that your name is being bandied about in a wicked way. i take that to mean that accusations are being made which have no truth in them." "many accusations are being made," said the squire, "which have no word of truth in them. they will not be believed by anybody who knows me--who knows where i stand. but mud sticks. many people do not know me--most people, i may say, who have heard these stories; for they have spread everywhere. i stand as a mark. i shelter myself behind nobody; i draw in nobody, if i can help it. that is why i asked your nephew to put off his visit to my house, and why i have not renewed it since." "it was the right way to act," said lord cheviot, "and i thank you for acting so. but, for my nephew, it does not settle the question; it only postpones it. he loves your daughter, and she, i am assured, loves him. i will not disguise anything from you, mr. clinton. personally, i should prefer that this marriage should not take place. but i cannot dictate, i can only advise. i advised my nephew to wait awhile. he did so. and he is willing to wait no longer. mr. clinton, when slanders are circulated, there are ways of stopping them." "what are they?" cried the squire. "the slander takes many forms. none of them are brought before me. i know they are being circulated; that is all. i know where they spring from, but i can't trace them back. there is cunning at work, lord cheviot, as well as wickedness. there is nothing to take hold of." "if you had something definite to take hold of, you could meet it; you could disperse these slanders?" "yes," said the squire boldly. "then i can be of service to you. i have a letter from lord colne, in which he makes certain accusations. it was written in answer to one from me. i had heard that he had been making free with my nephew's name in connection with yours, and i wrote on his behalf for definite statements, which could be acted on. here is his letter." the squire took, and read it. my lord, in answer to your letter, my accusation against mr. clinton is that the theft of a pearl necklace of which mrs. amberley was accused last year was committed by a member of his family, that he knew of this, and allowed money to be paid to keep the secret; also that he offered lord sedbergh the price of the pearls, which offer was refused. i am, your lordship's obedient servant, colne. it was overwhelming. here was the truth, and nothing but the truth. that it was not the whole truth helped the squire not at all. "that letter," said lord cheviot, when he had given him time to read it, and his eyes were still bent on the page, "is the strongest possible ground for an action for libel. it is evidently meant to be taken so. lord colne has constituted himself mrs. amberley's champion. it is to him--or to her through him--that the slanders to which you have referred can be traced back." "may i take this letter?" asked the squire. "it is what i have wanted--something tangible to go upon." "certainly, mr. clinton. i am glad to have done you the service--incidentally." again the little prick. it was not on the squire's behalf that the fire had been drawn. the prick was left to work in. lord cheviot sat and waited. "this is a most infamous woman," the squire broke out. "she came herself and tried to trap me. i refused to give her money. this is her revenge." still lord cheviot waited. the squire began to feel that if he had escaped one trap, he was even now in the teeth of another. he wanted time to think it over; he wanted dick to advise him. but he had no time, and he was alone under the gaze of the cold eyes of the man who was waiting for him to speak. "i can't decide now exactly what steps i can take about this," he said, speaking hurriedly. "but i suppose you won't be satisfied to wait until i do take steps." "i shall be quite satisfied, mr. clinton," said the chilly voice, "if you tell me that there is no truth in that letter." now he was caught in the teeth. he could not think clearly; he had not time to think at all. he could only cling to one determination, that he had not known until now was in his mind. with humphrey on the other side of the world, and susan in her grave, he would not exonerate himself by inculpating them. he rose unsteadily from his chair. "i can only tell you this, my lord," he said. "i have been tried very terribly, and in whatever i have done or left undone, i have followed the path of honour. i can say no more than that now, and i can see that that is not enough. so i will wish you good-morning." he did not raise his head, or he might have seen the cold, watchful look in lord cheviot's eyes after a little fade into a look that was not unsympathetic. but there was little softening in the voice in which he said, "i must tell my nephew that i have given you the opportunity of denying, not a rumour that cannot be pinned down, but a categorical charge, and that you have not denied it." the squire made no reply. lord cheviot came forward, as if he would have accompanied him to the door; but he went out without a word, and shut it behind him. chapter vii thinking it out the squire went home in the afternoon. when he reached the junction at ganton, where trains were changed for kencote, he walked across the platform to send a telegram. the station-master, with whom he always exchanged a hearty word, touched his hat to him, and looked after him with concern on his face. he had taken no notice of the salutation, although he had seen it. he walked like an old and broken man. mrs. clinton met him at kencote with a brougham. he had wired for her to do so. for the first time in all the over forty years of their marriage he was not driving himself from the station. he stepped into the carriage, without so much as a glance at his horses, and took her hand. he had come home to her; not to his little kingdom. he went straight up to bed. he had no spirit even for the unexacting routine of his own home. he kissed joan, who met him in the hall, but without a word, and she went away, after a glance at his face. he would not see dick when he came. he slept through the evening, awoke to take some food and drink, but took very little, and slept again. if ever a man was ill, with whom no doctor could have found anything the matter, he was ill. mrs. clinton hoped that he would sleep through the night, but soon after she laid herself down beside him, in the silence of the night, he awoke. the heavy sleep that had drugged him into insensibility for a time had also refreshed and strengthened him, and for succeeding hours he cried aloud his despair. "what have i done?" that was the burden of his cry. "where have i been wrong? why am i so beaten down by punishment?" but by and by, spent with beating against the bars, he began to speak calmly and reasonably, as if he were discussing the case of someone else, searching for the truth of things, impartially. "when humphrey came and asked me to do what i might very well have done for gotch on my own account, i refused. i was right there. when he told me that virginia had given him the money, what was i to do? it was too late to get it back. i had no right to. i might have told virginia, perhaps, why the money had been wanted. no, i couldn't do that. i had promised humphrey. i do think he ought not to have asked me for that promise. but it was given. what _could_ i have done, nina, at that stage? i knew about it, that devilish letter says. i allowed money to be paid to keep it secret. was i to publish it abroad, directly humphrey told me? is there a man living who would have done that under the circumstances? would cheviot have done it himself? it might just as well have happened to him as to me. nina, was i bound, by any law of god or man, to do that?" "edward dear, you have done no wrong----" "no, but answer my question. if it had been you instead of me--that might _very_ well have happened. would _you_ have said--after you had been told under a promise of secrecy, mind--susan must be shown up? even that wouldn't have been enough; humphrey wouldn't have shown her up. you would have had to do it yourself. and how could you have done it? can you really seriously say it was my duty, when humphrey told me that story, to go and give information to the police?" "oh no, no, edward." "but what's the alternative? upon my soul, nina, i can't see any half-way house between that and what i did. i kept silence, they say. that was cheviot's charge, and because i couldn't deny it, i stood condemned before him. i wish i could have put the question to _him_, as to what he would have expected of me. confound him, and his supercilious way! nina, you haven't answered me. what would _you_ have done?" "exactly what you did, edward dear. i am not sure that i should even have had the strength to refuse humphrey's plea, as you so honourably did, without counting the cost in any way. you were ready to take any consequences, to yourself. oh, you could not have done more." "but then, why am i put in the wrong? those are the charges against me. those, and that i offered sedbergh the price of the necklace--which he refused. yes, he did refuse it, and made me feel, too, that i ought not to have asked him to accept it. why did i feel that? it isn't that he was wrong. he was right, and i should have acted as he did if i had been in his place. but why did i feel ashamed of having offered it to him? what was the alternative? to say nothing about it to him, when susan had spent thousands of pounds belonging to him, and i knew of it? can anyone seriously say that that was a more honourable course to take than the one i did take? nina, help me. tell me where i was wrong. i _must_ have been wrong there, because i felt ashamed." "it is easy enough now to mark down little errors. in the main, edward dear, you were right all through--nobly right." "little errors! what error was there there? i either offered him the money, or kept from him the fact that a member of my family had spent it. there was no alternative. _was_ there? do tell me, nina, if you can see anything that i can't see." "i think the better way would have been to tell lord sedbergh of what had been done, and leave it to him to take steps if he wished to. he would have taken none. you would have been justified. you could not justify yourself any more by paying him back what had been stolen." "yes, that is what he said. he would not bear my burden. why should he have? yes. i see that, nina. i was wrong there. i think i was very wrong there." oh, how it rent her heart to hear him, who had been so ready with his dictatorial censure of all dependent on him, so impervious to every shaft of censure that might have been attracted to himself, thus baring his breast to blame, accepting it, welcoming it, if it would only help to clear away his bewilderment. "it came to the same thing, dear, in the end," she reminded him. "you had told lord sedbergh." "ah, but it wasn't quite the same. i can see that now. if i had gone to him as you said, i could have denied the statement that i kept silence. i should have told the one man that perhaps it was right that i should have told. i am beginning to see a little light, nina. nothing more could have been expected of me than that. i should have had a complete answer. oh, why did i make that mistake? it looked to me, afterwards, such a small one. sedbergh set me right over it--snubbed me really, though in the kindest possible way--and i deserved it. but that didn't end it. that mistake put everything else wrong. i am beginning to see it. but, oh, how difficult it all is!" "edward, you _had_ told lord sedbergh. you told him before you made any suggestion as to payment. he had thought the matter was ended when he had said you were right to tell him, and there was nothing more to be done. you have told me that whenever you have gone over the conversation you had with him." he thought over this. his slow-moving mind was made preternaturally acute by long dwelling on the one interminable subject. "should i have told him anything?" he asked, "if i hadn't wanted to get the debt off my shoulders? no, i think not. humphrey would not have consented for one thing, and i had given him my word. i suppose i was wrong there too. i ought never to have given him my word. yet he would not have told me if i had not." "that is humphrey's blame. he asked you to keep dishonourable silence. you trusted him there. you would not have promised that." "then my silence was dishonourable?" "you told lord sedbergh. i think you would have told him in any case. i think that you would have seen that you must. you would have insisted with humphrey; and you must have had your way. you have acted so honourably where you did see clearly, that i have no doubt you would have seen clearly here. you had no time to think. you were under the influence of the sudden shock. you went up to london to see lord sedbergh the very next morning." "it was pride," he said slowly. "the wrong pride. i have been very blind to my faults, nina. pride of place, pride of wealth, pride of birth! what are they in a crisis like this? i was humiliated to the dust before that man this morning. oh, i have seen myself in a wrong light all my life. god has sent me this trial to show me how little worth i was in his sight. my pride led me wrong. why was i thinking then about the money at all? sedbergh was right. that woman was right, there. it was a base thought, and i have been very heavily punished for it." she lay by his side, comforting him. she thought that he would now cease his self-examination, since it had led him to a conclusion damaging to himself, but healing too, if he saw a fault and repented of it. but presently he returned to it again. "why did i feel beaten and ashamed before cheviot? why has he the right to say those damning words to his nephew, 'i shall tell him that i brought you a definite charge made against your honour, and you did not deny it'?" "edward dear, you might have denied it, but for one thing. the charge against you was not true." "but it was true. i knew of susan's guilt, and money was paid to keep it secret--money that i knew had been paid." "that you allowed to be paid," she corrected him. "you did not allow it. it was not paid to keep the secret. virginia paid it, on behalf of dick, and paid it with quite a different intention." "isn't that a mere quibble?" "no, it is not. a quibble is a half-truth that obscures a whole one. this is not like that. it is because the whole truth is so difficult to disengage here that it looked like the half-truth. i say nothing of humphrey; but as regards you it is the whole truth. it is not true--it is a lie--to say that you allowed money to be paid to conceal what you knew. you refused to pay money yourself, because you knew it would have the indirect effect of concealing the truth. it was not in your power to stop the money being paid with an innocent object. and when it is said that you knew of susan's guilt, if that is in itself a charge of keeping silence, the answer is that you did not keep silence. you told lord sedbergh. that you offered him the money afterwards is nothing--would, i mean, be considered nothing against you, as coming afterwards. as it is put in that letter it is as untrue as the rest; for it is intended there to look as if you had offered that money too in order to buy silence." "my dear," he said, "you have a very clever head. i wonder if you are right. that would exonerate me of everything." "you _are_ to be exonerated of everything," she said quietly, "except the mistake of thinking it more important that lord sedbergh should be told because of the debt that lay heavy on you than because it was right that he should be told in any case. you did tell him, which is all that anyone inclined to criticise you is concerned with, and _i_ know well enough that you would have told him if there were no question of payment. my dear husband, you have been so cast down by the blows you have received that you are inclined to blame yourself, knowing everything, as others are inclined to blame you, knowing nothing." this was sweet balm to him, and he lay comforting himself with it for some time. but his doubts came back to him. "then why did i feel so ashamed before cheviot?" she was ready with her answer at once. "for a reason that does you more honour than anything else. you took the sins of others upon you. you took shame before him, not for your own faults, but for theirs. if you could have told him everything, he would have seen what even you couldn't see at the time--that the apparent truth in that letter was not the truth. the only true thing in it was that susan was guilty." "and that i knew it." "there was no shame in that, to you, unless you kept silence, which you did not do." "i can't see that quite straight yet, nina, though i should like to. why are you so sure that i should have told sedbergh in any case, or insisted upon humphrey telling him?" "because i see so plainly how your mind has worked all along. it never did work on that point, because you took the right course at once--we will say, if you like, for not quite the right reason--and it was never a matter to be fought out with yourself. it had been done." "you are very comforting to me, my dearest. i do believe you are right. i say it in all humility; i think i should not have been allowed to go wrong there." "i am sure you would not; quite sure. even with your pride to guide you, as you say it did, you could not have consented long to hold back the truth from lord sedbergh. him, at least, you must have told--as you did." "well, i give in, nina. you give me great comfort." "and i give you great honour too, edward. you have taken the burden and the shame on yourself when a word would have removed it." "not only on myself, nina. you share it. we all share it; our poor little joan more heavily than any of us." "i cannot but think that joan will win her happiness in time. he would not be what he is if he allowed this to keep him from her. the talk will die down. no one will blame her--can blame her--even now, when it is at its loudest. we must wait in patience for what will come. dear joan will be all the happier when her trial is over, and the stronger. she is bearing it bravely. i am proud of my girl." the squire lay for a long time silent. then he said, "well, we have thought it out together, my dear. i can face what must come now. we face it together. we live on quietly here, as we have always lived. i ask no one, from now, to stand and deliver. i do my duty amongst my neighbours, and those dependent on me, and they think of me what they please. you who know me, love and trust me, and that shall be enough. we have our quiet home, and our children, and their children, and the friends who have stood by us. and we have our religion--our god, who has helped us, and will help us. we have our burden too, but he will make it light for us. i feel at peace about it now, nina--almost happy. i think i shall sleep to-night. good night, nina. god bless you. may god bless you, my dear wife!" chapter viii skies clearing the squire had slept late. mrs. clinton had stood by his bed when the breakfast gong had sounded, and looked down upon his face, older without a doubt than it had been a month before, more lined and furrowed, less firm of flesh, less ruddy of skin, but peaceful now, in its deep slumber. she had touched with her hand, lightly and tenderly, his grey head, and then gone downstairs to take the place which he had so seldom missed taking during all the years of their married life. he got up at once when he awoke, shocked at finding himself so late. the horses had gone back to the stables when he went into his dressing-room, but he stood for a moment or two looking out over the park, and then opened the window. unconsciously he was taking stock of his surroundings once more, breathing in with the mild autumn air that sense both of space and retirement which was the note of his much-loved home. it was his once more, to enjoy and to take pride in. lately it had seemed not to be his at all. mrs. clinton sat with him over his late breakfast. he had hardly begun it when dick came in. "well, my boy," said the squire cheerfully. "sorry i couldn't see you last night. i was done up. i'm all right now, ready for anything. your dear mother and i have talked it all over. there's nothing to be done but bide our time. it will pass over." there was a distinct change in his attitude towards his eldest son. he was accustomed to greet his other sons with that fatherly, "well, my boy!" but not dick. dick had the master-head. he never presumed on it to set up authority where it would be hurtful to his father's self-complacency, but he was accustomed to rule, none the less, and the squire to rely on him to decide in every difficulty. but now he had decided for himself. dick was his much-admired and trusted son, but not, in this matter, his director, nor even his adviser. "he got the better of you, i suppose," said dick, seating himself at the table. "i suppose he did. i don't know. is that how you would put it, nina?" "your father saw," said mrs. clinton, "when it came to the point, that it meant, if he was to clear himself, he must heap all the blame upon susan, and in a lesser degree on humphrey. if he had done that he must have satisfied lord cheviot. but he would not do it." "rather rough on joan," said dick with a slight frown. "i have told joan everything," said mrs. clinton, "and she sees it as we do. she is content to wait." "read that," said the squire, taking the fateful letter from his pocket. "that is what we have to face. i didn't see my way to deny it, so i left his lordship to attend to the affairs of the nation." "but it isn't true!" said dick, when he had read it. "it looks like the truth, but it isn't. you could have denied every word of it, except the first statement--about susan." the squire looked at his wife with a smile. "dick sees it at once," he said. "it took you and me half the night to get at it, nina; and i should never have got at it by myself. well, it isn't true, dick, as far as it puts blame on me which i don't deserve. but it's true about susan. i couldn't tell him the story; so i came away." "and he will tell inverell that he showed you this letter and you could make no reply to it." "yes, i suppose so." dick looked deeply disturbed. "i wish i had been there," he said. "if you had been there, dick," said mrs. clinton, "i think you would have done just the same as your father did. have you ever faced the necessity of bringing the charge against susan with your own lips? i don't think you could do it, if it came to the point." dick rose and went to the window. "we could not deny it if they brought us to the point," he said. "no; but that is different." he thought for a moment, swinging the tassel of the blind. "it seems to me," he said, "to have come to the point where humphrey ought to speak--ought to be sent for. _we_ can't do it. no; perhaps you are right; until we are pushed to a point where we shall have to do it. but he could; and it ought to be done. why should father be made to suffer these indignities? why should poor little joan lose her happiness in this way? i'm not sure that it isn't our duty to speak out, even now, however much we should dislike having to." "i can't see it in that way, dick," said the squire. "as i said to you once before, susan was one of us. we should have had to share her disgrace, as a family, if she had been alive; and a very terrible disgrace it would have been, though we might have been shown to be free of blame ourselves. we can't cut ourselves off from her now she is dead. to put it on the lowest ground, it wouldn't do us any good. nobody would respect us more for it. they would say that we could keep silence about it to save our own skins, but put it all on to her directly it became known. i wouldn't mind what they said, if i didn't feel the same myself. i am not going to mind for the future what anybody says. let them say what they like. we know that we have done nothing wrong--or very little--and that must be enough for us." dick returned to the letter in his hand. "they want us to go for them," he said. "cheviot must have seen that." "he did," said the squire. "i told him i should consider what was to be done." "have you considered it?" dick looked at him as if ready to hear a decision, not to advise on one. "your mother and i think we had better take no steps, for the reason i have already given." "it's plain enough what it means," said dick. "they want the story out. they think they will gain, even though it also comes out that she asked you for money. we put too much faith in that weapon. she would give the same reasons that she gave to you. they would sound plausible enough. they have chosen their ground well. i thought they would have spread lies, which we couldn't have proved to be lies, without taking action. i've no doubt that colne thinks this is the truth, and finds it serves their purpose best. it has certainly served it here." "for the time," said mrs. clinton. "well, say you take no notice of this. are they going to stop at this? on these lines they can force us to take action, sooner or later, if that is what they want. we ought to be prepared for it." "we must take each occasion as it comes," said the squire. "i think that humphrey ought to be written to. i don't think it will be possible to avoid taking action, if they press us. we can stand this. we don't know that we shall be able to stand the next move, or the one after. it is he who has got us into this--he, even more than poor susan, as it turns out. he ought to come home and face it with us. you ought to write to him by this mail, father; or i will, if you like." "wait a little, dick," said the squire. "i must think it out. your mother and i must think it out together." he was glad enough, a few days later, that humphrey had not been written to by that mail. for there was a letter from him, from australia. it was written from the union club in sydney, and ran as follows: my dear father, i did not write to you by the last mail, because there was something i wanted to say, and was not quite ready. on the voyage out here i thought constantly of what had happened at home before susan's death, and asked myself if there was anything i could do in the way of reparation. the money part of it we settled together before i left england; but i think there is something else that i ought to do. supposing the story were to come out in some way, and i were out of england, it might be very awkward for you. mrs. amberley would be sure to hear of it, and she would be sure to come down on you. you might not feel inclined to tell the whole story, to clear yourself of any complicity in what i did, and it might be weeks or months before you could get at me. so i have put down exactly what happened, in the form of an affidavit, which i am sending you under another cover. you can keep it by you, to use if the occasion should ever arise. i am not at all sure that if mrs. amberley ever comes back to england and makes any attempt to reinstate herself, it ought not to be sent to her; but i cannot bring myself to ask you to do that. i only say that if you think it ought to be done, i shall accept your decision. i should do again what i did to save susan, and of course it would be great pain to me to have her name brought forward now; but she was so sincerely sorry for what she had done before she died, that i believe she would have been glad for me to take any steps to put the wrong right as far as possible. but, as i say, it is too hard to make up my mind to take what i suppose would be the only step that could really put everything right as far as we are concerned. you might tell mother and dick about it now, and i will leave it in your hands. i have made up my mind to stay out here for a year or two, and possibly for good. i like the country, and i like the people. i have made a good many friends already, especially here in sydney. i am staying in this club, and it is like being amongst one's friends at home, except that everybody seems to have something to do. i have been up country, and i like that better still. in a month or so i am going on to a sheep station to learn the job, and if i find it suits me i shall ask you to help me buy one of my own. one gets a great deal of open-air life, and the work is interesting, and not too arduous. i mean that one could get down here, and to the other cities, and go home on a visit every few years. i shouldn't know what to do in england now, and i'm tired of doing nothing. here i should have plenty to do, and could forget a good deal of the past, which has been so painful to all of us. give my love to mother, and all of them. i will write to her by the next mail. your affectionate son, humphrey. the paper to which humphrey had referred was in a long envelope among the squire's other letters. he opened it, and read a plain, straightforward account of everything that had happened within humphrey's knowledge. "i went to my father on may th," part of it ran, "and asked him to pay this sum to gotch. when he refused, i told him under a promise of secrecy of my wife's action, and told him that a concession to gotch would have the indirect effect of keeping this from being known, and save himself and my family, as well as my wife, from the disgrace of an exposure. he told me that if that was the only way in which silence could be kept, matters must take their course, and refused to do anything. i then went to my sister-in-law, mrs. richard clinton, and persuaded her to let gotch have the money, which she did, knowing nothing of why i wanted it paid to him.... "my father advised me to tell lord sedbergh of what had happened, or to allow him to tell him, and if possible to get him to accept the price of the necklace that had been stolen.... "just before her death, my wife asked me to do what i could to put right the wrong that she had done, and i sign this account of what she told me, and of what happened afterwards within my knowledge, in the firm belief that she would have wished me to do it...." so there was the exoneration of the squire, of everything that he had done, in his hands, to use as he pleased. his thoughts were tender towards the son who had given him so much trouble, but now seemed to be in such a fair way of making up for the mistakes of his past life. as he sat and thought about him, it was not, at first, the relief that he had so honourably sent, little knowing how pat to the occasion it would come, that filled his thoughts, but the decision that humphrey had come to with regard to his own future. it seemed to the squire an eminently right one. humphrey was going on to the land, on which every man, according to his view, had the best chance of making the most of his life, and escaping the perils that beset the town-dweller. that it was in that great new country, where the land meant so much more even than it did in england, where there were still fields to conquer, still room in the great pastoral or agricultural armies, that humphrey was going to make himself a place, was an added fitness. he would be entering on a new life in a new land. he was young yet. he would forget the past, but he would not forget the lessons he had learnt from it. he might even marry again; the squire's vision broadened to embrace a new branch of the clinton tree, to flourish in years to come on the fertile soil of that britain overseas. life on the land--it was the same in essence wherever it was lived, healthy, useful, and honourable. thank god that humphrey had embraced it! thank god for one clinton more to live it, in honour and well-being! when he came to consider the document that humphrey had put into his hands, he could not quite make up his mind what to do with it. he thought he would go down to the dower house and consult dick; but went to find his wife instead. "i am glad that humphrey has done this," she said, "very glad indeed. i think it is plain what use he thinks should be made of it, although he cannot bring himself to say so." "you think that it ought to be sent to mrs. amberley?" "i think that if that is done, and you write and tell him so, he will recognise that it was that feeling that directed him to write it. it will be full restitution. no need for us to balance her guilt and her punishment. she was wronged there, whether she was actually punished for it or not. poor susan's last cry to me was, 'if i could only do something to put it right before i die!' this will put it right, as far as any sin can be put right. it has been the one thing lacking. and it comes from humphrey--from her, through humphrey." "i will send a copy to her lawyers," said the squire, "through mine. she will make what use she likes of it. we have to face her making a use of it that will hurt us. she may publish it in the papers. there would be nothing to prevent her." mrs. clinton looked serious. "well, we'll risk that," said the squire. "i think it would be a wicked thing to do; but she's a wicked woman. i haven't changed my mind about that, at any rate. we can only take the right course, and put up with the consequences." "i think you would be justified," said mrs. clinton, "in saying, when you write to your lawyers, that she may use this document to clear herself, in any way she pleases, and that you will take no steps if she uses it privately; but that if she publishes it, you will publish the fact that she asked you for money, and her letter to dick. i think she will not publish it. she can clear herself of so little. it is only as a weapon that she has been able to make use of her discovery. in spite of that letter of lord colne's, she must have used it to create the impression that she was innocent of everything. by publishing this, she will fasten on herself the guilt of what she was actually punished for, and remind the world of it. she would gain nothing; and if the fact of her having come to you for money is published as well, she will lose." "my dear," said the squire, "i think you have the clearest head of all of us. no, they won't let her use it in any way that can hurt us, for she will hurt herself as well. this is the end of it, thank god; and the talk will die down." that afternoon the squire sat in his room. mrs. clinton and joan were driving. he had been out with a gun, with dick, had come in and changed his boots, and was just beginning to nod, as he sat before the fire, with the "times" on his knee. the door was opened, and lord inverell was announced. the young man, tall, fair, and open-faced, came forward with a smile. "mr. clinton," he said, as the door was shut behind him, "i hope you will give me a welcome. i have seen my uncle, and heard what he had to say. now i have come to say what i want to say myself, and i hope you will listen to it." the squire was somewhat overcome. the memory of his interview with lord cheviot still rankled. the young man took the seat to which he was motioned. he still smiled. he had a very frank and pleasing expression of face, and was handsome besides, with his crisp hair, that curled as much as it was permitted to, his grey eyes, and white, even teeth. "mr. clinton," he said, "i have come to ask you for joan. will you give her to me?" the squire experienced a strong and agreeable feeling of everything having come right all at once. it was so strong that it was almost too much for him. he hardly knew what he was saying as he stammered: "you want my little joan? she's the last one i have left." "i know. i should have taken her from you before. but i waited, after mrs. clinton's letter. i wish i hadn't. but i didn't know for some time why it had been written. when i did know, i waited a little longer; and then my uncle heard--what i wanted, you know--and talked to me. he has a way with him--my uncle, mr. clinton. when he says a thing, you are inclined to give in to him--at first." his smile was inviting here. "he told you to wait a little longer, i suppose," said the squire. "yes, that was it. he kept me hanging on. there couldn't be any hurry, he said. then he seems to have written letters. he is rather fond of writing letters; they'll go into his biography by and by, you know. but not the one he wrote to colne. _i_ didn't ask him to write that. i wish he hadn't." "the answer he got was a very awkward one for me," said the squire. "i couldn't deal with it at the time to lord cheviot's satisfaction. fortunately, i can now." "i'm glad of that, mr. clinton. but it's not necessary, as far as i am concerned, you know. still, i shouldn't object to your squaring my uncle, if you can, without putting yourself out. i don't want to quarrel with him, if it can be helped." "why have you come here, after what he told you?" "because i made him tell me everything. rather a triumph for me, that! he told me that you had said you had been through a horrible time, and hadn't done anything that you were sorry for. i said, 'thanks, uncle, that's good enough for me. there are a lot of stories going about, and you can believe which of them you like. i choose to believe the one that joan's father tells, and i'm off there this afternoon. wish me luck!'" "he let you come, without any further discussion?" "oh no; not a bit. that was three or four days ago. he argued with me. i said, 'well, what do you want me to do?' he said, 'find out what truth there is in this story, before you go any further. there's _some_ truth in it.' then a bright idea struck me. i said, 'old sedbergh ought to know something about it. will it satisfy you if i go to him?'" "ah! i never thought of that. did it satisfy him?" "he had to say that it would. so i went. i couldn't get hold of the old man till this morning. but when i did, he looked at me in a funny, kind sort of way, and said, 'if you can get joan clinton for your wife, you'll be the luckiest young man in the world. go and get her. there's no reason why you shouldn't. i know what i'm saying.' well, that put the lid on, mr. clinton. i sent a note to my uncle; i'd promised to do that before i came; and here i am." the squire breathed a deep sigh of relief. "you have come at the right time," he said, "and i am very glad you have come as you have--knowing nothing more than you do. it's a thing that i shall think of with pleasure all my life. but, as i told your uncle, i wouldn't ask you here as long as my name was under a cloud. perhaps the name of clinton will be under a cloud some little time longer. but, thank god, the cloud no longer rests on this house. i can tell you everything that has happened, feeling that i am wronging nobody. i couldn't have told lord cheviot, and i couldn't have told _you_ yesterday. read this. it is a paper i received from my son, humphrey, from australia, this morning." "i'm satisfied for myself," he said. "can i tell my uncle what's in it?" "you can tell anyone you like," said the squire. as he was reading it, the door opened and joan came in, in her furs. it was beginning to get dusk. when she saw that there was somebody with her father, she would have withdrawn. when she saw who it was, her hand went to her heart; but her lover turned and saw her at that moment. a little later he confessed, with a happy laugh, that he had brought down a bag, and left it at the station. the squire went out of the room to procure somebody to fetch it, which he could very well have done by ringing the bell. chapter ix skies clear we began with the train, and will end with the train. it was the material link by which kencote, standing as it had done through so many centuries remote and aside from the turmoil of life, had been drawn into the centre of troublous events. it had brought joan home from her fateful visit to brummels, humphrey to tell his terrible story, susan to her sad resting-place, mrs. amberley to demand satisfaction and threaten vengeance, and latterly the young lover whose coming had brought joy in place of sorrow. now it was to bring, within a few days, enough guests to fill all the spare rooms of kencote for joan's wedding; and it was bringing, this afternoon, one of the most valued of them all. this was miss bird, affectionately known to the clinton family as "the old starling," who had first taught dick his letters nearly forty years before, and had gone on teaching letters, and other things, to all the young clintons in turn, until the twins had reached the ripe age of fifteen, six years before. then she had left, much regretted, partly because the twins had to be "finished," and she could not undertake suitably to finish them, partly because duty had called her from the spacious comforts of kencote to share the narrow home of a widowed sister. the twins were at the station to meet her--tall, beautiful, stately young women to the outward eye, but, for this occasion, children again at heart, and mischievous children at that. "oh, what fun it is!" said nancy, with a shiver of pleasure, as the train came into the station. "i don't feel a day older than fourteen. there she is, joan--the sweet old lamb!" it must be confessed that the years had robbed miss bird of such sweetness as she may at one time have presented to the impartial view. she was a diminutive, somewhat withered, elderly woman, but still sprightly in speech and movement, and of breathless volubility. she flung herself out of the carriage, almost before it had come to a standstill, and was enveloped in a warm, not to say undignified embrace by both the twins at once. "oh, my darlings," she cried, flinging to the winds all the stops in the language, "to see you both standing there just as it used to be though one married and the other going to be and such a _grand_ marriage too as sweet as ever my bonnet nancy darling and everything the same here but a new station-master i see oh it is _too_ much." joan and nancy marched her out of the station to the carriage, all three laughing and talking at once, and made her sit between them, which was just possible, as she took up very little room. she wiped away an unaffected tear, and broke out again. "this is one of the happiest days of my life and to think of _me_ being an honoured guest and amongst all the lords and ladies i hope i shall know how to behave myself and one of the first you wrote to darling joan as you said and mr. clinton saying whoever else was left out _i_ must be asked and how is dear mrs. clinton well i hope i'm sure the kindness i have received in this house i never can forget and never shall forget darling nancy my bonnet." "isn't she too sweet for words, joan?" said nancy. "she hasn't altered a bit. starling darling, you are the most priceless treasure. we didn't value you nearly enough when we had you with us." "now my pet that is not a thing to say," said miss bird, "two dearer and more affectionate children you might roam the world over and never find troublesome sometimes i do not say you were not but never really naughty no one could say it and now grown up quite and one a married woman it doesn't seem possible." "i was very hurt that you didn't come to my wedding," said nancy. "i know why it is. joan is going to be a countess, and i am only plain mrs." "the idea of such a thing," said miss bird in horror, "never so much as entered my head how can you say it nancy i'm sure if joan had been going to marry a crossing-sweeper not that i don't think she would adorn _any_ position and much more suitable as it is i should have come _just_ the same and you know quite well why i couldn't come to your wedding nancy and almost cried my eyes out but an infectious illness you would not have liked to be brought you should not say such things." "i'll forgive you," said nancy, "if you promise to love john. he is here, you know. but we wouldn't let anybody come to the station with us. we wanted you to ourselves." "pets!" said miss bird affectionately. "ronald is here too, but i wouldn't let him come either," said joan. "what is he like tell me about him," said miss bird. joan cast a quick glance at nancy, over the rather disordered bonnet. it was the look that had meant in their childhood, "let's have her on." "he is most awfully _good_," she said in rather an apologetic voice. "starling dear, i wanted to say something to you before you saw him. you don't think--if you love anybody very much, and they are really good--it matters about their looks, do you?" "oh, but i consider him _most_ handsome," said miss bird, "my sister gave me that illustrated paper with his photograph and yours in a full page to each i wrote and told you so and pleased and proud i was to have it and over my mantelpiece it is hanging now." "yes, i know you wrote, darling, and it was very sweet of you. i couldn't bring myself to answer your letter. you know papers _will_ make mistakes sometimes." "what do you mean what mistake?" asked miss bird. "it said plainly beneath the photographs 'the earl of inverell' and 'miss joan clinton.'" "yes, i know it did, and it was me all right. oh, starling darling, can't you guess? ronald is very good and very sweet, and i love him dearly; but----" "but he is no beauty," said nancy. "you can't expect us both to marry handsome men." "i shouldn't call him _scrubby_, exactly, should you, nancy?" enquired joan. "not to his face," replied nancy. joan gave a little gurgle, which she turned into a cough. "starling darling, you don't mind beards in a young man, do you?" she asked. "oh, you will get him to shave that off," said nancy, "after you are married. i shouldn't worry about that. and i don't think a _very_ slight squint really matters. you can always call it a cast in the eye, and some people like it." "you see, starling darling, i wanted you to be prepared," said joan. "i couldn't let you see him without saying something first, when you thought he was that good-looking young man in the picture. he is much better, really, and his looks don't put _me_ off in the least. i don't think about them. but if i hadn't told you, you might have been so surprised that you would have said something that would have hurt his feelings." "as if i should or could," exclaimed miss bird indignantly, "there was no occasion to say a single word joan and a good kind heart is _far_ better than good looks as i have often told you you do me a great injustice." "i knew she wouldn't really mind, nancy," said joan. "but i am glad to have warned her. she will get used to the beard." "and the cast in the eye," added nancy. "indeed," said miss bird, "i should never notice such things a beard is a sign of manly vigour your father has a beard." "ah, but it isn't a beard like father's," said joan. "it is more tufty and fluffy. i suppose you thought that young man in the picture _very_ handsome, didn't you, starling darling?" "indeed no such thing," said miss bird, "i said to my sister and she will bear witness good-looking yes but _not_ a match in looks for my darling joan and glad i am now that i said it." joan burst into a laugh, and embraced her warmly. "oh, you're too sweet and precious for words," she said. "that _was_ ronald, and i shall tell him you don't think he is very handsome." "what a donkey you are, joan!" said nancy. "why didn't you let her meet him in the hall?" "now that is _too_ bad joan 'n' nancy," said miss bird, quite in her old style of reproof, "a little piece of fun i can understand but you might have made it _most_ awkward for me joan my bonnet well there i suppose i must say nothing more you _will_ have your joke and neither of you have altered at all you are very naughty girls and i was just going to say if you did not behave i should tell mrs. clinton pets i love you more than ever." miss bird was almost overcome with emotion when she arrived at the house. the story was immediately told against her, and provoked laughter, especially from the squire, who said, "the young monkeys! they want husbands to keep them in order, both of them. 'pon my word, with you here, miss bird, i feel inclined to pack them off to the schoolroom, to get them out of the way. it makes me feel young again to see you here, miss bird. you seem to belong to kencote, and i'm very pleased to see you here again, very pleased indeed." miss bird's heart was full, as she was taken up to her old bedroom by joan and nancy. such a welcome! and from the squire too, of whom she had always stood much in awe, but to whom she looked up as the type and perfection of manhood! but how he had aged! when she was left alone, she looked out on to the spring green of the park, and the daffodils growing under the trees, and thought of how many years it was since she had first looked out on to that familiar scene, and how unchanged it was, although the children she had taught, and loved, had all grown up, and most of them were married. she thought of herself as a young, timid girl, for the first time away from her home, and of the squire as a splendid young man, bluff and hearty even then. she had spent the best part of her life at kencote, and had slept more nights in this room than in any other. kencote had been her home, and she had grown old in it. if the squire, who had always been so vigorous that the years had passed over him imperceptibly, was also at last growing old, it was in the place he loved above all others. she liked to think of him and dear mrs. clinton still living here, she hoped for many years to come, with nothing changed about them, but only an added peace and quietness, to suit the evening of their lives. later in the evening, before dinner, the squire paid a long-deferred visit to his cellars. the house would soon be filled from top to bottom with guests, and he wished to put the best he had before them, or before such of them as could appreciate it; also to take stock generally of the supply of wines in ordinary use, which he did regularly, but had not done for many months past. he was accompanied by his old butler with the cellar-book, and a footman with a candle, and spent nearly an hour among the bins and cobwebs. at the end of the inspection, some slight trouble arose. the old butler had been fetching up claret which the squire had intended should be kept for a time. he did not drink claret himself, and had not noticed the change. "if we had used the other lot up you ought to have come and told me, porter," he said. "i never meant this wine to be used every day. you come down here without a with-your-leave or a by-your-leave, and act as if you were master. you've been with me for a number of years, and have come to think you can do what you like. but you can't. i won't have it, porter." he marched off between the bins, and up the cellar steps. the old butler looked after him with a smile on his face, of which the attendant footman mistook the source, remarking, "he do give it you, don't he?" "they're the best words i've had from him for a long time," said the old man. "he's got back to himself again." but if the squire had got back to himself, it was not entirely to his old habits. it had never before been mrs. clinton's custom to sit with him in his room, as he now liked her to do, and as she did that evening, while the younger members of the party, including miss bird, were disporting themselves in the billiard-room. "this will be the last of it, nina," he was saying. "when frank marries it won't be from this house. they call it a quiet wedding, but, 'pon my word, i don't know how we could very well have found room for any more than are coming. i'm rather dreading it in a way, nina. i feel i'm getting too old for all this bustle." "we shall be very quiet when it is all over," said mrs. clinton. "yes, my dear," he said. "you and i will be quiet together for the rest of our lives. we shall have our children with us often, and our grandchildren; but for the most of the time we shall just be by ourselves. we've had a long life together, my dear. we've had a great deal of happiness in it, and have been through some very deep trouble. but the skies are clear now, and, please god, they'll keep clear. nina, my dear, we've got a great deal to thank him for." the end by the same author the house of merrilees exton manor the eldest son the squire's daughter the honour of the clintons the greatest of these the old order changeth watermeads upsidonia abington abbey the graftons richard baldock the clintons and others the eldest son by archibald marshall author of "exton manor" new york dodd, mead and company copyright, , by dodd, mead and company published september, to kathleen contents chapter i the squire is infernally worried ii a question of matrimony iii exit miss bird iv the dower-house v lady george vi blaythorn rectory vii the squire puts his foot down viii the squire feels trouble coming ix dick pays a sunday visit x the meet at apthorpe common xi dick leaves kencote and makes a discovery xii the house party xiii the hunt ball xiv a shoot xv the guns and the ladies xvi the money question xvii sunday and monday xviii mrs. clinton chooses a governess xix mrs. clinton in jermyn street xx aunt laura intervenes xxi an engagement xxii dick comes home xxiii humphrey counts his chickens xxiv virginia goes to kencote xxv a lawn meet xxvi what miss phipp saw xxvii the run of the season xxviii property xxix brothers xxx miss bird hears all about it chapter i the squire is infernally worried "nina," said the squire, "i'm most infernally worried." he was sitting in his wife's morning-room, in a low chair by the fire. in front of him was a table set for tea for one--himself. there were buttered toast and dry toast and preserves, a massive silver teapot, milk jug, cream jug, and sugar basin, a breakfast cup of china tea, and two boiled eggs, one of which he was attacking, sitting forward in his chair with his legs bent. he had come in from hunting a few minutes before, at about six o'clock, and it was his habit thus to consume viands which most men of his age and bulk might have been afraid of, as likely to spoil their dinner. but he was an active man, in spite of his fifty-nine years and his tendency to put on flesh, and it would have taken more than a tea that was almost a meal to reduce his appetite for dinner at eight, after a day in the saddle and a lunch off sandwiches and a flask of sherry. when his tea was over he would indulge himself in half an hour's nap, with the _times_ open at the leader page on his knee, and go up to dress, feeling every inch of him a sportsman and an english country gentleman. his tea was generally brought to him in his library. this evening a footman had followed him into that room immediately upon his entering the house, as usual, had unbuckled his spurs, pulled off his boots for him, and put on in their place a pair of velvet slippers worked in silk, which had been warming in front of the fire. only when his coat was wet or much splashed with mud did the squire change that. he considered smoking-jackets rather effeminate, and slippers, on ordinary occasions, "sloppy." it was only in his dressing-room or on these evenings after hunting that he wore them. otherwise, if he had to change his boots during the daytime he put on another pair. he was particular on little points like this. all his rules were kept precisely, by himself and those about him. this evening he had told the footman, and the butler who had followed him into the room with the tray, that he would have his tea in mrs. clinton's room, and he had marched across the hall with a firm and decisive step, in his red coat and buckskin breeches, between which and his hand-knitted heather-mixture socks showed a white expanse of under-drawers round a muscular calf. mrs. clinton sat opposite to him in another low chair, at work on a woollen waistcoat. he always wore waistcoats made by her, thick for the winter, light for the summer, and she knitted his socks for him, of which he required a large number, for he hated them to be darned. he liked to see her working for him like this. he was a rich man, but a woman ought to work with her hands for her husband, whether he was rich or poor. it was her wifely duty, and incidentally it kept her out of mischief. mrs. clinton, at the age of fifty-four, with her smooth yellow-grey hair and her quiet and composed face, did not look as if she would be up to serious mischief, even if this and other restrictions were removed from her. she looked up when her husband addressed her, and marked the furrow between his heavy eyebrows. then she looked down again at her work and waited for him to unbosom himself further. "how old is dick?" asked the squire, leaning forward to put a spoonful of yolk of egg into his mouth with one hand, while he shielded his grey beard with the other. she knew then the subject upon which he had expressed himself as infernally worried, for he was not accustomed to keep the first stirrings of discontent to himself. "he was thirty-four last april," she said. "thirty-four," he repeated. "yes; and i was _twenty_-four when i married you. that's early. i shouldn't advise any young man to marry at that age, unless, perhaps, he was the only one to keep a name going--as i was, of course--at least in my immediate family. but thirty-four! it's really time dick thought about it. he's the eldest son. it's his duty. and as far as i can see he never gives the matter a thought. eh?" "as far as i can see he is not thinking about it," said mrs. clinton. "well, if _i_ couldn't see _you_ couldn't see. i say it is time that he did begin thinking about it. i'm getting on now--good for another twenty years, i should hope, but i want to see the succession assured. walter is the only one of the boys that's married, and he's only got two girls. of course, he may have a son--they're coming pretty quick--but i've never got over that doctoring business. i shouldn't like the heir of kencote to be brought up in a place like melbury park, and i say so freely--to you." this was the echo of an old disturbance. the squire's third son had refused to take orders, with a view of occupying the family living, but had studied medicine, and was now practising in a suburb of london, and not one of the most genteel suburbs either. that furrow always appeared faintly in the squire's brow when he was forced to mention the distasteful words melbury park. "i think it would be a good thing if dick were to marry," said mrs. clinton. "good thing? of course it would be a good thing. that's just what i'm saying. there's humphrey; he doesn't look much like marrying, either. in fact, if he doesn't pick up a wife with a pot of money, i'd rather he didn't. he spends quite enough as it is. i've no opinion of that london life, except for a bit when a man's young and before he settles down. dick has been in the guards now for--what?--twelve years. i never meant that he should take up soldiering as a profession. just a few years spent with a good regiment--as i had myself, in the blues--that's all right for a young fellow who has a good property to succeed to. but an eldest son ought to settle down, _on_ the property, and get married, and have sons to succeed _him_." "dick comes here a good deal," said mrs. clinton, "and he takes an interest in the property." "well, i should hope he did," responded the squire. "the property will belong to him when my time's over. what do you mean?" "i only mean that dick is not wrapped up in london life and all that goes with it, as humphrey seems to be." "oh, humphrey! i've no patience with humphrey. if kencote isn't good enough for him let him stay away. only i won't pay any more bills for him. he has a good allowance and he must keep within it. i've told him so. now if i'd put _him_ into the army, instead of the foreign office, he might have stuck to it and made a profession of it. i wish i had--into a working regiment. it would have done him all the good in the world. however, i don't want to talk about humphrey. i don't expect an heir to come from him; and frank is too young to marry yet. besides--a sailor! it's better for him to marry later. dick _ought_ to marry, and there's an end of it. and when he comes down to-morrow i shall tell him so." mrs. clinton made no immediate reply, but after a pause, during which the squire came to the end of his eggs and began to attack the buttered toast, she said, "i have to tell you something, edward, which i am afraid will disturb you." "besides," pursued the squire in his loud, resolute voice, "there's the dower-house standing empty now. if dick were to get married soon i need not bother about finding a tenant for it. i don't _want_ to let it; it's too near here. if we got people there we didn't like it would be an infernal nuisance. eh, nina? what were you saying?" "i am sorry to say," said mrs. clinton, "that miss bird is going to leave us." the squire was just about to put a piece of toast into his mouth, which was half open for its reception. it remained half open while he looked at his wife, the toast arrested halfway. "miss bird! leave us!" he exclaimed when he had found his voice. he could hardly have been more astounded if his wife had announced that _she_ was going to leave him, and indeed miss bird had lived at kencote nearly as long as mrs. clinton, and had initiated into the mysteries of learning all the young clintons, from dick, who was now thirty-four, down to the twins, joan and nancy, who were fifteen. "she has talked about it for some time," said mrs. clinton. "she has felt that the children were getting beyond her, and ought to have better teaching than she can give them." "oh, stuff and nonsense!" exclaimed the squire. "i don't want the children turned into blue-stockings. i'm quite satisfied with what miss bird is doing for them, and if she wants telling so, for goodness' sake tell her, and let's have no more of such rubbish. miss bird indeed! who's she to upset the whole house?" "i am afraid she has determined to go, edward," said mrs. clinton in her equable voice. "her invalid sister, you know, has lost her husband, and there is no one else to look after her." the squire grunted. "well, if that's the reason," he said, rather grudgingly, "i suppose we can't complain, although it's a most infernal nuisance. i've got used to miss bird. she's a silly old creature in some respects, but she's faithful and honest. now we shall have to get used to somebody else. really, when one thing goes wrong, everything goes wrong. life is hardly worth living with all these worries. one never seems to get a moment's peace. i'm going into my room now, nina, to read the paper for a bit." "i should like to talk to you for a few minutes longer about the children," said mrs. clinton. "as a change has to be made, i want to make a thorough one. it is quite true that they are beyond miss bird, even if she could have stayed. i should like to send them to a good school for two or three years, and then to france or germany for a year." the squire bent his brows in an amazed frown. "what on earth can you be thinking of, nina?" he exclaimed. "france or germany? nice healthy english girls--teach 'em to eat frogs and horse-sausage--pick up a lot of affected nonsense! you can put that idea out of your head at once." mrs. clinton's calm face flushed. "there is no need to talk of that for two or three years," she said. "i should like them now--when miss bird leaves us--to go to a really good school in england, where they can learn something." "learn something? what do you mean--learn something? haven't they been learning something all their lives--at least since miss bird began to teach them? what does a girl want to learn, except how to read and write a good hand and add up accounts? i don't want any spectacled, short-haired, flat-chested females in _my_ house, thank you. the children are very well as they are. they're naughty sometimes, i've no doubt, but they're good girls on the whole. girls ought to be brought up at home under their mother's eye. i can't think what you want to send them away from you for, nina. it isn't like you. i should have thought you would have missed them. i know _i_ should, and they're not going to school." "i should miss them very much," said mrs. clinton. "very well, then, let them stop at home. it's quite simple." mrs. clinton was silent, bending her head over her work. "you would miss them and _i_ should miss them," pursued the squire, after a pause. "no, there's no sense in it." there was another pause, and then the squire asked, "why do you want to send them to school?" mrs. clinton laid down her work and looked at him. "i should be satisfied," she said, "if they could get the teaching they ought to have at home. perhaps i should prefer it. but it would mean a first-class governess living here, and----" "well, there's no objection to that," interrupted the squire. "i dare say old miss bird is a little out of date. get a good governess by all means; only not a blue-stocking, mind you." mrs. clinton smiled. "i'm afraid she would have to be what you would call a blue-stocking," she said. "but she needn't show it. clever girls don't wear spectacles and short hair necessarily nowadays." "oh, don't they?" said the squire good-humouredly. he was leaning back in his chair now, looking at the fire. "how are you going to set about getting one?" "i should ask emmeline to help me." emmeline was lady birkett, the wife of mrs. clinton's brother, the judge. "not a bad idea," said the squire. "but i won't have any of your suffragettes. herbert is a very good fellow, but he's a most pestilent radical." "you would let me offer a good salary, i suppose." "what do we pay miss bird?" "only thirty pounds a year. she has never asked for more." "she's a good old creature. i'm sorry for her sister. is she well off, do you know?" "i'm afraid very badly off." "then how will they get on? i suppose miss bird has saved a bit. she's had no expenses here except her clothes for many years." "she told me she had saved about four hundred pounds." "_has she_? out of thirty pounds a year! it's extraordinary. still, that won't give her much, capitalised, poor old creature. i'll tell you what, nina, i'll talk it over with dick and see if we can't fix up a little annuity for her. she's served us well and faithfully all these years, and we ought to do something for her." "oh, edward, i am so glad," said mrs. clinton. "i hoped you might see your way to helping her. she will be so very grateful." the squire lifted himself out of his chair. "oh yes, we'll do something or other," he said. "well, get another governess then, nina, and pay her--what do you want to pay her?--forty?" mrs. clinton hesitated a moment. "i want to get the best i can," she said. "i want to pay her eighty at least." the squire, in his moods of good humour, was proof against all annoyance over other people's follies. he laughed. "oh, i should make it a hundred if i were you," he said. "when the boys had mr. blake in their holidays," said mrs. clinton, "he had five pounds a week, and only had to teach them for an hour a day." "that's a very different thing," said the squire. "blake was a university man and a gentleman. you have to pay a private tutor well." "i want to get a lady," said mrs. clinton, "and i should like one who had been to a university." "oh, my dear girl," said the squire, moving off down the room, "have it your own way and pay her what you like. now is there anything else i can do for you before i go and write a few letters?" "you are very kind, edward, in letting me have my way about this. there is one more thing. if the children went to school they would have extra lessons for music and drawing or anything else that they might show talent in. joan and nancy have both got talent. i want to be able to have masters for them, from bathgate--or perhaps even from london--for anything special that their governess cannot teach them." the squire was at the door. "well, upon my word!" he said, nodding his head at her. then he went out of the room. chapter ii a question of matrimony dick clinton, the eldest son, arrived at kencote at a quarter to eight, and went straight up to his room to dress. this young man--for, with his spare, upright frame, sleek head, and well-fitting clothes, he looked less than his thirty-four years--was as well served as his father, although he did not get his will by the same means; and the little wrongs of life, each of which the squire, as they came along, dealt with as "a most infernal nuisance," he took more equably. he had brought his own servant with him, but had no need of him for the time, for his evening clothes were laid out for him, his shirt, with studs in and a collar attached, was hung over the back of a chair in front of the piled-up fire, and he had only to slip out of one suit and into another as if he had been in the house all day instead of having just reached the end of a journey of over three hours. these things were all a matter of course to him. the warm bright room, red-curtained, and quiet from the deep stillness of the country, gave him no particular sensation of pleasure when he entered it, except that he was cold from his journey and there was a good fire; nor, consciously, did the fact that this was his home, which he liked better than any other place, although he was more often than not away from it. he was thinking, as he began immediately in his quick neat way to change his clothes, that there was no apparent sign of the frost yielding, and fighting off his annoyance--for he hated to feel annoyed--at the stoppage of the morrow's hunting. he had very much wanted to hunt on the morrow, more than he usually wanted anything. and yet he was, though he hardly knew it, pleased to be at home, and in this room, which had been his ever since he had left the nursery. the little iron bedstead was the one on which he had slept as a boy; the flat tin bath, standing against a wall with the bath-mat hung over it, was only rather the worse for wear since those days; the worn carpet, now more worn, was the same; and the nondescript paper on the walls, which were hung with photographs of his "house" at eton, showing him amongst the rest in five stages, from the little fair-haired boy in his broad collar sitting cross-legged on the grass, to the young man with folded arms in a place of honour by his tutor. there were later cambridge groups too, exhibiting him as master of the drag, in the eighteenth-century dress of the true blue club, and in other conjunctures of pursuits and companions, but nothing to mark a later date than his university days, unless it were the big photographs in silver or tortoise-shell frames on the mantelpiece and writing-table. probably nothing had been added to the decoration of the room for a dozen years, only a few things for use--a larger wardrobe and dressing-table from another room in the house, a big easy-chair, a fur rug by the bed. the room contained everything he needed in such a room, and since he needed nothing there to please the eye, it had received nothing all these years, and would receive nothing until he should leave it for good, when he should be no longer the eldest son, but in his turn the head of the house. he had nearly finished dressing when there was a knock at the door, and a voice, "are you there, dick? can we come in?" his rather expressionless face changed a little, pleasantly. "yes, come along," he called out, and his young sisters came in in their fresh muslin frocks, their masses of fair hair tied back with big blue ribbons. they had that prim air of being dressed, which is different in the case of girls not quite grown up from that of their elder sisters. they were remarkably alike and remarkably pretty, and dick, who stood at the dressing-table in his shirt sleeves tying his tie, although he did not turn round to greet them, noticed their appearance with approval through the glass. "well, twankies," he said affably, as they went up to the mantelpiece and stood one on either side of the fire, "what's the news with you?" "we are to have a new preceptress," said joan, the elder, "_vice_ the old starling, seconded for service elsewhere." dick turned and stared at her. "old miss bird leaving!" he exclaimed. "surely not!" "you can't be more surprised than we were," said nancy--the twins generally spoke alternately. "she broke it to us in floods of tears this afternoon. joan cried too." "so did you," retorted joan. "you blubbered like a seal." "and it did me credit," said nancy, accepting the charge with complete equanimity. "what is she going for?" asked dick. "she has to go and look after her sister, poor old thing!" said joan. "and she doesn't think she knows enough to take us on any further." "we denied it hotly, to comfort her," continued nancy. "but it's quite true. we have the brains of the family, and are now going to leave childish things behind us. i wish you'd make your watch ring, dick." dick pressed the spring of his repeater, and the twins listened to its tinkle in silence. nancy sighed when he put it into his pocket. "even that isn't the treat that it used to be," she said. "we are getting too old for these simple pleasures. joan is beginning to take an interest in dress, and i am often to be seen absorbed in a book. dick, shall you kiss miss bird when you say good-bye? there's nothing she would love better." "when is she going?" asked dick, ignoring the question. "in about a week," joan replied. "dick, i think you ought to kiss her, if you possibly can. you are the eldest, and nearer her heart than any of us. she told us so." "i'll give you both a kiss and you can pass it on," said dick, with an arm round each. "come along down." they went down to the morning-room, and on the stroke of eight dick led his mother into dinner, the squire following. the twins settled themselves each in a corner of the big sofa in front of the fire. they usually read during the half-hour before they were summoned to dessert, but this evening they had something to talk about. "i wonder what she'll be like," nancy began. "if aunt emmeline chooses her i should think she would be all right," said joan. nancy considered this. "yes," she said. "but she will have to be kept in her place. of course we have always been able to do exactly as we like with the old starling. joan, we must conserve our liberties." "oh, i think we shall be able to do that," said joan. "we must remain calm and polite." "and keep up our reputation for eccentricity," added nancy. then they both giggled. "you know, joan, i think it's rather fun," nancy proceeded. "i shan't a bit mind learning things now. i should have hated it a year or two ago. but you can't deny that it is rather slow at home." "that's why cicely ran away," said joan. "she simply couldn't stand it any longer. but it doesn't worry me like that. we have a pretty good time on the whole." "yes, we see to that. but, of course, cicely was much older. and after all, she didn't run very far--only to london, to see walter and muriel. and she soon came back." "she had to. i believe there was more in that than we knew about." nancy looked up sharply. "do you? why?" she asked. "oh, i don't know. i believe it had something to do with her engagement to jim. she was married pretty soon after, anyhow, and there was no talk of it at the time." "i wonder if we could find out." "what's the good? and it's over two years ago now. i wonder if dick would drive us over to mountfield to see the babies to-morrow. he won't be able to hunt." "he won't want to see the babies. men are so silly in that way. they pretend they don't care for them." "father doesn't. he's just as silly about them as we are." "it isn't silliness in us. we are women, and we understand. if a man does like a baby it's just as a toy." "all the same, i think it does father credit liking his grandchildren. i should hardly have expected it of him." "he's getting softer in his old age. nancy, i wonder how mother persuaded him to let us have a really good governess. he'd think it quite absurd that girls should want to learn anything." "my dear child, you could get anything you wanted out of father if you tackled him in the right way." "only some things." "anything, i said." "i'll bet you four weeks' pocket-money that you couldn't get him to let us hunt." "oh, well! that's part of his religion. 'i may be old-fashioned--i dare say i am--but to see a pack of women scampering about the country and riding over the hounds--eh, what? no, thank you!' i didn't mean i could make him become a roman catholic, or anything of that sort. but i'll bet you what you like i'll get him to let us have a pony." "four shillings?" "right." "do you think you really can, nancy? it would be jolly." "i don't see why he shouldn't. cicely always rode old tommy, and so did we till he died." "only surreptitiously, and bare-backed. we should have to have habits and all that, now." "mother would see to that. anyhow, i'll tackle him." "how shall you manage it?" "i shall think out a scheme." "dick might help. nancy, i'll bet you eight weeks' pocket-money you can't get two ponies." "i'll begin with one, and see how i get on. now i think i'll immerse myself in a book." presently they were called into the dining-room and sat, one on each side of their father, cracking and peeling walnuts for him and eating grapes on their own account, demure and submissively responsive to his affectionate jocularity. "what big girls you're both getting!" he said. "and going to be turned into blue-stockings, eh, what! have to buy you a pair of spectacles each next time i go to bathgate." he laughed his big laugh, drank half a glass of port, and beamed on them. he thought they were the prettiest pair of young feminine creatures he had ever seen, and so little trouble too! it was a good thing for a man to have sons to carry on his name, but young girls were an attractive addition to a family, and to the pleasures of a big house. he had thought it rather ridiculous of his wife to present him with the twins fifteen years before, and seven years after his youngest son was born, but he had long since forgiven her, and would not now have been without them for anything. when he and dick were left alone over their wine there was a short pause, and then he cleared his throat and began: "i want to talk to you about something, dick." dick threw a glance at him and took a puff at his cigarette, but made no reply. the squire seemed a little nervous, which was not usual with him. "of course i don't want to interfere with you in any way," he said. "i've always given you a pretty free hand, even with the property, and all that sort of thing. i've consulted you, and you've had your way sometimes when we've differed. that's all right. it will belong to you some day, and you're--what?--thirty-four now." "yes," said dick. "thirty-four. time to think of settling down, eh?" the squire brightened. "yes, that's just it," he said. "time to think of settling down. you've had enough soldiering--much more than i had. i never expected you would stick to it so long." "i don't want to leave the service yet," said dick calmly. "i'm down here pretty often--almost all my leave." "yes, yes, i know," said the squire. "but if--if---- well, look here, dick--no use beating about the bush--why can't you get married?" dick smiled. "it wouldn't be a bad scheme," he said. the squire was pleased. he was getting on splendidly. "you feel that," he said. "well, i haven't liked to say anything, but it's been on my mind for a long time." he then recapitulated the reasons why he thought dick should marry, as he had enunciated them to mrs. clinton--his position as eldest son and heir to a fine property, his advancing age, the inadvisability of looking to melbury park as the cradle for a successor to the emoluments and amenities of kencote, or of leaving it to humphrey, the second son, to provide an heir. "the fact is, you ought to do it for your own sake," he wound up, "as well as for the sake of the place." "whom do you want me to marry?" asked dick, with a shade of flippancy. "oh, well, i'd leave that to you," the squire conceded handsomely. "you've a lot to offer. i should think you could pretty well take your pick--must have had plenty of opportunities all these years. you needn't look for money, though it's always useful. any nice girl of good birth--of course you wouldn't want to marry one who wasn't. good heavens! there must be a score of them presented every year, and you have been about london now for ten or twelve years. do you mean to say you haven't got one in your mind?" "haven't you?" asked dick. "well, if you like to consult me, why not grace ettien? old humphrey meadshire would be delighted. she is his favourite granddaughter, and i'm sure he would like to see her married before he goes." "grace is a charming girl," replied dick. "but i don't want to marry my cousin." "cousin! my dear fellow, old humphrey and your grandfather were first cousins. you're surely not going to let that stand in the way." "i've known her ever since she was a baby. she's a baby now. it would be like marrying one of the twankies." the squire began to get fussed. "you're talking nonsense, dick," he said. "she must be at least twenty-one. the fact is you have left it so long that an ordinary girl of a marriageable age seems a child to you. you'll be taking up with a widow next." there was an appreciable pause before dick asked, "well, should you object so much to that?" "of course i should," said the squire, "--for you. i shouldn't mind in the case of humphrey, if she wasn't too old, and had enough money for the pair of them. i'm not going to pay any more of his debts. i'm sick of it." dick allowed the conversation to travel down this byroad for a time, and when the squire brought it back to the original track, said, "well, i'll think over what you say. but i don't know that i should care, now, about marrying a young girl." the squire turned this over in his mind, looking down on his plate, and his brows came together. "what do you mean?" he asked shortly. "you wouldn't want to marry an old woman." dick took his cigarette out of his mouth and looked at it. "when i marry," he said decisively, "it will probably be a woman of nearer thirty than twenty." the squire made the best of it. "oh, well--as long as she's not over thirty," he said. "girls don't marry so young as they used to. but--well, you must think of an heir, dick." dick made no reply to this, and the conversation ended. chapter iii exit miss bird miss bird arose on the next morning to find her window glazed with frost, and it was characteristic of her and of the house in which she had lived for over thirty years that her first thought was, "no hunting to-day"; although the deprivation could not be expected to hold any disappointment for herself, or indeed to affect her in any way. her second thought marked a drop to the sombre uneasiness in which she had spent wakeful hours during the night. she would not rise many more times in this familiar room, nor look out on to a scene which she had come to know so well at all seasons of the year that she could not help loving it. she would have liked to see the trees of the park, for a farewell, in their early june dress, the grass about them powdered with the yellow of buttercups. but she hoped so to see them again. she had been made to feel that she was parting from friends, that she was by virtue of her long and faithful service part of the family, that she would not lose them altogether. the squire had said the day before, when he had made known to her that he had heard of her projected departure, "you must come and see us, you know, miss bird. the house won't be like itself without you." could anything be more gratifying--and from such a man? mrs. clinton, of course, had been kindness itself, had said just the right things to make a person feel herself valued, and said them as if she meant them, as no doubt, dear lady, she did, for she was always sincere. and the darling children had cried--she should never forget that as long as she lived--when she had told them that she was going. here the simple lady found a tear trickling down her own sharp nose, and put a hairpin in her mouth while she wiped it away. it seemed impossible that she should really be going. it was just upon thirty years since she had first come to kencote, and it seemed like yesterday. she summoned up a rueful little smile when she recalled, in the light of her now assured position as "a member of the family," her palpitating nervousness on her introduction to the great house, so different from anything she had known. she had never been "out" before. she had had a good education, for those days, in the day school that her mother, the doctor's widow, and her elder sister had carried on in a little town in which she had been born, and had taught in it till she was twenty-eight. then, after deep consultation, she had answered mrs. clinton's advertisement, and, her references having proved satisfactory, had been engaged to impart the rudiments of education to a child of five, which she had modestly thought she was as capable of doing as anybody, and at a salary that seemed to her munificent. she remembered arriving at kencote on a spring evening and being received by mrs. clinton, the pretty young wife and mother, who had been almost as shy as herself, but had been so anxious that everything should be "nice" for her that she had soon lost her awe of the big house and the many servants; and even the figure in the background from which all the splendour around her emanated lost some of its imaginative terror, since the lady of the house had proved so accessibly human. she had thought the little boy, whom she had been taken to see in bed, a darling, and so quaint when he asked her solemnly if she could jump a pony over a log, because he could. she had liked his quiet, elderly nurse, who had come to talk to her in her schoolroom when he had gone to sleep. she had called her "miss," and shown that she had no wish to "presume," but only the wish to be friendly, and they had, in fact, remained friends for years. she had been greatly pleased with the size and comfort of her schoolroom, which she had entirely to herself, to read or write or play the piano in, outside hours of lessons, which were at first as short as was conceivably possible. and she had not in the least expected that there would be a maid for the schoolroom, who was, as she wrote to her sister, practically her own maid, calling her in the morning and bringing her a cup of tea, lighting a fire for her every evening in her bedroom as a matter of course, and indeed treating her as if she might be the mistress of the house. she had been happy at kencote from the first, although she had been a good deal alone, for until her little pupil had grown bigger she had had all her meals sent up to her in the schoolroom, except on sundays, when she lunched downstairs in charge of little dick. those were nervous occasions, for it took her a long time to get used to the squire--the young squire, as he was then--with his loud laugh and hearty ways, who used to chaff her at table in a way to cause her uneasiness, although he was never anything but kind, and she was assured, even when she blushed deepest, that his manner was only intended to put her at her ease and make her feel "one of the family." she had soon lost any awe she may have started with of mrs. clinton, although her respect for that lady's character had only grown with the passage of time. mrs. clinton used to sit with her sometimes in the schoolroom, and in the summer time they would work under the big lime in the garden while little dick played about on the lawn. miss bird's simple gaiety of heart had had play, and her rather breathless volubility had never been checked by any stiffness on the part of mrs. clinton. mr. beach, the rector of kencote, and the squire's half-brother, had always treated her with consideration, and his wife had made her feel at home in the rectory, and expected her to visit there occasionally on her own account. the squire's six maiden aunts at the dower-house, all but one of whom were now dead, had also treated her kindly, but in a rather more patronising manner. she had not minded that. she had quite agreed with the opinion which underlay everything they said and did, though it was seldom expressed in words, that the clintons of kencote were great people in the land, and her native humility had led her to accept gratefully the attentions paid to her by them and their neighbours, and to "presume" on it no more than little dick's nurse had presumed on her own mild gentility. she had found little dick rather a handful as he grew older, but she had coped successfully with him, by the expenditure of much energy of speech and action, and had courageously beaten the beginnings of learning into his brain, so that he took a good place at his first school, and she was not disgraced. by that time humphrey was ready for her guiding hand, and then walter, and a few years later, cicely, hailed with joy as a pupil whom she might train up to the fine finish; for there could be no talk of school for a girl clinton, and miss bird's success with dick had given her a high place as an instructress in the squire's estimate of her abilities, so that there was never any idea of her being some day superseded, and the years at kencote stretched happily in front of her. cicely was nine, and frank, the sailor, seven, when the twins arrived. the day of their birth was a good day in miss bird's annals. it meant more years still at kencote, and by this time the idea of living with any other family would have been most distressing to her. and yet she would have had to seek another situation but for the arrival of the twins, for when she should have finished with cicely she would be fifty only, and would not have put by enough money to enable her to retire. these are the hardships of a governess's lot, and miss bird had them fully in her mind, saving and skimping all through the fruitful years for a time when not only the opulences of existence in a house like kencote should be hers no longer, but it might be difficult to make ends meet at all. the twins lifted a weight off her mind, which, with all her daily cheerfulness and courage, had never been quite absent from her; for another nine or ten years would just enable her to provide for her old age, and she knew that those nine or ten years would be hers if she could only keep her health, of which there seemed no reasonable doubt. "it is not many women in my position who are as fortunate as i," she had written to her sister at the time. "the squire, who _roared_ with laughter when he heard of the birth of the darling babies, said to me the first time he saw me afterwards, 'well, that fixes _you_ for another twenty years, miss bird.' and he added in a way which you might think profane if you had not heard him say it, 'thank god, eh?'" well, here was the end of those happy years, which seemed to have sped like a week or two since the birth of the twins. she had seen walter and cicely married and had dandled their babies. she had shared mrs. clinton's daily anxiety during the long months dick had served in south africa, and had taken his award of a d.s.o. almost as a personal compliment. she had been glad at all the joys of the family and saddened with their sorrows. she had seen the squire grow from a handsome young man to an elderly one, and mrs. clinton's hair turn nearly white. she had boxes and drawers full of the presents she had received at christmas and on her birthdays, which had never been forgotten, and the photographs of clintons of all ages from babyhood upwards were displayed on every available standing place in her room. they were more to her than her sister or her sister's children, but the call had come to her to leave them and to go to a place where she would have to work hard and anxiously for the rest of her life on a very small pittance and in very narrow surroundings, and it had never occurred to her to shirk it. it had all fitted in--she felt that she had been "guided." the teaching which she had never doubted that she was able to give to cicely now seemed to her inadequate for the finish of the twins' education, but she did doubt, now that her departure had been settled for her on other grounds, whether she would have had the strength to say so and cut herself adrift of her own accord. here was matter for thankfulness--that she had been led to see what her duty was, and to do it. she would always have kencote to look back to, and she was indeed fortunate to have spent the best part of her life in such a place, and with such people. the twins came in as she was finishing her toilette, to take her down to breakfast. this was a reversal of the procedure of the past, when it had been the first of her daily duties to hunt them out of whatever spot out of doors or in to which their vagrant fancy had led them, and see that they appeared to the public eye duly washed, combed, and brushed. they embraced her, enveloping her wizened form with their exuberant youth, like flowers round a peastick, and she was moved to the depths of her being, though all she said was, "now, joan 'n' nancy, don't be rough. you can love a person without untidying her hair." "are your nails quite clean, starling darling?" asked joan, taking one of her hands and examining it. "and are you quite sure you've brushed your teeth properly?" enquired nancy. "now don't _tease_, joan 'n' nancy," said miss bird, disengaging herself. "i shall only be here another week and you must try and be _good_ girls and let me go away remembering that." "joan was saying this morning as we were dressing," said nancy, "that she was very sorry now to think of all the trouble she had given you, starling darling, and if she could have the time over again she would behave very differently." "idiot!" retorted joan. "it's you who have given the trouble. starling has often said that if it weren't for your example i should be a very good girl, haven't you, starling darling?" "you would _both_ be good girls if it wasn't for the other's example," replied miss bird. "and you can be dear good girls as good as gold and i hope you will when the new governess comes to teach you." "i hope we shall, but i doubt it," said joan. "you see, starling darling, what we would do for you we couldn't be expected to do for a stranger whom we didn't love, could we?" said nancy. miss bird was moved by this, and would have liked to embrace the speaker, with words of endearment. but she had grown rather wary of exhibiting affection towards her pupils, who were apt to respond so voluminously as to leave her crumpled, if not actually dishevelled. "well, if you love me as much as you say you do," she said, "you will remember all the things i have told you; now are you _quite_ ready for breakfast, because it is time to go down?" "we told dick you would like him to kiss you before you went, and i think he will," said joan innocently, as they went down the broad staircase all three abreast. "now, joan, if you _really_ said a thing like that--oh, take care! take care!" miss bird had tried to stop on the stairs and withdraw her arm from joan's, who, assisted by nancy on the other side, had led her on so that she tripped over the next step, and would have fallen but for the firm grasp of the twins. she was led into the dining-room, protesting volubly, until she saw that mrs. clinton and dick were there, when the episode ended. when breakfast was over the squire surprised her by asking her immediate attendance in his room, to which she followed him across the hall in a flutter of apprehension. it would not be quite true to say that she had never been into this room during the thirty years of her sojourn at kencote, but it was certainly the first time she had entered it on the squire's invitation. he did not ask her to take a seat, nor did he take one himself, but stood in front of the fire with his coat tails over his arm and his hands in his pockets. "there's a little matter of business i should like to settle with you, miss bird," he said. "you've lived here a considerable number of years, and you've done remarkably well by us and the children. if everybody did their duty in life as well as you, miss bird, the world 'ud be a better place than it is, by george! now i want to do a little something for you, as you've done so much for us, and i've talked it over with dick, and we are going to buy you a little annuity of fifty pounds a year, which with what my wife tells me you've saved will put you out of anxiety for the future; and i'll tell you this, miss bird, that i never--eh, what! oh, my good woman ... god's sake ... here, don't take on like that ... gobblessme, what's to be done?" for miss bird, overcome by this last great mark of esteem, had broken down and was now sobbing into her handkerchief. knowing, however, the squire's dislike of a scene she succeeded in controlling herself, and addressed him with no more than an occasional hiccup. "i beg your pardon, mr. clinton; i couldn't help it and it's too much and i thank you from the bottom of my heart and shall never forget it as long as i live and it's just like all the rest of the kindness i've received in this house which i could never repay if i lived to be a hundred." "well, i'm very glad it meets your views, miss bird," said the squire, greatly relieved at the subsidence of emotion, and anxious to escape further thanks. "and i assure you the obligation's still on our side. now, i must write some letters, and i dare say you've got something to do, too." miss bird retired to her bedroom where, unrebuked, she shed her tears of thankfulness, then wiped her eyes and sponged her face and went about the duties of the day. these did not, this morning, include lessons for the twins, for it was saturday, which was for them a holiday, when complete freedom was tempered only by the necessity of "practising." dick had refused to drive them over to mountfield to see their sister and her babies, but had offered them a walk to the dower-house during the course of the morning. "i wonder what he wants to go there for?" said joan, as they went upstairs. "there's more in this," said nancy, "than meets the eye." there did not, however, seem to be more in it than a natural desire to see a house empty which one has always known occupied, and this desire the twins shared. they found dick in an affable mood as they walked across the park together--the sort of affectionately jovial mood of which they had occasionally taken advantage to secure a temporary addition to their income. indeed, it seemed to have brought dick himself a reminder of his young sisters' financial requirements, for he asked them, "have you saved up enough money for your camera yet, twankies?" neither of them replied for the moment, then joan said rather stiffly, "we shan't be able to buy that for some time." "why, you only wanted twenty-five shillings to make it up a month ago, and i gave you a sovereign towards it," said dick. another short pause, and then nancy said, "you gave it us!" "yes," said dick, "to buy a camera. i'm not certain you didn't screw it out of me. i never quite know whether it's my idea or yours when i tip you twankies. come now, what have you done with that sovereign?" "we have spent it on a good object," said joan. "but we do want the camera most frightfully badly, and if you would like to contribute to the fund again it would save us many weary months of waiting." "to say nothing of a severe economy painful to our generous natures," added nancy. "not till i know what you spent the last contribution on," said dick. "you're getting regular young spendthrifts. i shall have to look into this, or you'll be ruining me by and by." "won't you give us anything more unless we tell you?" enquired joan; and nancy amended the question: "will you give us something more if we do tell you?" "i'll see," said dick. "come, out with it!" "well, it's nothing to be ashamed of," said joan. "we wanted to buy the old starling a really good present, and out of our own money." "it took the form of a pair of silver-backed brushes with cupids' heads on them, and cost three pounds seventeen and sixpence," added nancy. "they are not cupids, but angels," said joan, "which are much more adapted to starling's tastes." "well--cupids or angels--it cleaned us entirely out," concluded nancy. dick put an arm round the shoulders of each and gave them a squeeze as they walked. "you're a pair of topping good twankies," he said. "i'll start your new camera fund. i'll give it you now." "thanks awfully, dick," said joan, as he took out his sovereign purse, "but i think we'd rather you didn't. you see, it's rather a special occasion--the poor old starling going away--and we wanted to give her something that would really cost us something." "i agree with my sister," said nancy. "but thanks awfully all the same, dick. you're always a brick." "well, i respect the delicacy of your feelings, twanks," said dick. "but isn't anybody ever going to be allowed to contribute to the camera fund? how long does the embargo last?" "there's a good deal in that," said joan thoughtfully. "of course we can't refuse tips for ever, can we, nancy?" nancy thought not. "let's say in a month from to-day," she suggested. "if dick likes to give us something then and happens to remember it--of course, we shan't remind him--then i think we might accept without feeling pigs." "i'll make a note of that," said dick gravely, "when i get home." chapter iv the dower-house surrounded by its winter woods and an over-thick growth of evergreens, the little jacobean hall, which had for centuries been the second home of the clintons of kencote, had an air slightly depressing as dick and the twins came to it through the yew-enclosed garden at the back. white blinds were down behind all the leaded mullioned windows, only one thin thread of smoke rose into the sky from the carved and twisted chimney-stacks. forty years before, when the squire had succeeded his grandfather, his six spinster aunts had left him in undisturbed possession of the great house and taken up their abode here, very seldom to leave, until one by one they had been carried off to their grave in kencote churchyard. aunt ellen, the eldest of them all, had died at a great age a few months before, and aunt laura, the youngest, who was now seventy-eight, had removed herself and her belongings to a smaller house in the village. neither dick nor, of course, the twins had ever known the dower-house unassociated with the quiet lives of the old ladies, and they shared in their different degree the same feeling of strangeness as they stood under the porch and listened to the bell echoing in the empty house. it was like a human body from which life had departed, but with its age and many memories it still kept a soul of its own which could be revivified by fresh occupancy. they went through all the rooms. there was a great deal of fine old furniture in them, things which clintons of past centuries had bought new, never thinking that they would some day acquire merit as antiquities. there were few such things in the great house, which had been rebuilt after a fire in the reign of queen anne and refurnished later still, in the reign of queen victoria. nor had the beautiful things of which the dower-house was full been valued in the least by their owners until long after the six maiden aunts had gone to live there. they had been simply old-fashioned in the eyes of the squire, their owner, and were so still, for he had no knowledge of such things, and no appreciation of them. dick knew a little more, and as he looked at one fine old piece of furniture after another, standing forlorn on the carpetless floors, or against the dark panelling of the walls, he said, "by jove! twankies, there's some good stuff in this old shanty." "who is going to live in it?" asked joan. "ah, that's the question!" replied dick. "tell you what, twankies, let's play a game. supposing i ever got married, _i_ should live here, you know. let's see how the rooms would pan out." the twins were quite ready to play this or any other game, although it did not promise much excitement, because there were only quite a limited number of rooms, and most of them were more or less obviously labelled. it seemed, however, that dick was prepared to play the game seriously, for after they had fixed the dining-room, drawing-room, morning-room, and smoking-room, and a tiny oak parlour which the aunts had used for garden chairs and implements and dick said would do for his guns if a baize-lined glass cupboard were put up in a recess by the fireplace, he inspected the kitchen premises with some thoroughness. "i say, dick, _are_ you going to get married and come and live here?" asked joan, as he began to make notes on the back of an envelope. "there's more in this than meets the eye," observed nancy. "small twankies mustn't ask impertinent questions," replied dick. "but i'll tell you exactly how it stands, and you mustn't let it go any further." "oh, rather not," said joan. "our ears are all agog," said nancy. "you see, twankies, _some_body has got to live in this house, haven't they? well, then, it must be done up, eh? and if _i_ come and live in it some day, i don't want to have to do it up again--see? so there you have it all in a nutshell." "yes, i see," said joan; "but it's a little disappointing." "it all sounds very reasonable," said nancy, "but i still think there's more in it than meets the eye." they were in the great stone-floored kitchen, which still retained its cavernous hearth and open chimney. "you could roast an ox here," said dick. "we'll turn this into a servants' hall, twankies, and rig up the other place for cooking. the cellar's all right, so is the pantry--and big enough for two. we'll divide it up, eh? and one part will do for a brushing-room. there's nowhere at present where a servant can brush your clothes." "what wonderful domestic knowledge you display, dick!"' observed nancy. "where are the maids to brush their mistresses' clothes? in here with the valets?" "yes, of course," said dick. "this isn't a palace. people who come to stay must expect some inconveniences. i don't see any place for a game larder. we must see about that outside. now we'll go upstairs." they went up the broad shallow stairs of age-worn oak, and through the hive of rooms, which opened into one another, and led out into little passages, closets, and stairways in the most confusing way, and made you wonder what scheme of daily life the old builder had in mind when he planned them. he had certainly wasted a great deal of room. the main corridor opened out here and there into broad spaces, where there was perhaps a bookcase, or a low seat under a latticed window, or only the rich emptiness of the square of oak panelling, the polished floor, and the plastered ceiling. whatever his aims, he had gained his effect of gracious ease and warm shelter. however varied might be the needs of its occupants through the succeeding years, the dower-house would be as much of a home as on the day it was first built. "a man might make himself very comfortable here, mr. copperfield," quoted nancy, as they stood at a window of the biggest bedroom, which had panels of linen pattern, with a plastered frieze and an oak-beamed ceiling. there was also a heavy carved oak bed, in which aunt ellen had recently looked her last upon surroundings that had continually reminded her of the age and importance of the family of which she was a member. "i shall have all these beastly laurels grubbed up, and some of the trees cut down," said dick. "the place is like a family vault. and i'm not sure that i won't have this woodwork painted white." joan looked doubtfully round her. she knew nothing of the value of old good things, but she felt dimly that the carved panelling, dark with age, ought to remain as it was. nancy felt so still more strongly. "it would be wicked to do that," she said. "this is a lovely room, and tells you stories. if you like i'll give you a rhapsody." joan grinned. "have you ever heard one of nancy's rhapsodies, dick?" she asked. "they're awfully good." dick had not, but expressed himself willing to listen to whatever foolishness might be in store for him for the space of one minute precisely. nancy stood against the dark woodwork on the other side of the room. her pretty, mischievous face was framed in the thick fall of her fair hair and the fur round her throat. she wore a little fur cap and a red coat, and a big muff hung from her shoulders. dick, always affectionately disposed towards his young sisters, thought he had never seen a girl of her age look prettier, and put his arm vicariously round joan, who was exactly like her, as they sat on the window-seat. "in this old house," began nancy, using her right hand for gesticulation and keeping the other in her muff, "lots of old clintons have died, and lots of new clintons have been born. think, my children, of the people who have come here to live. some of them were gallant young men clintons who had just taken to themselves fair young brides, and they were full of hope for the future, and pleasure in having such a jolly house to live in with her they loved best in the world. a few years would pass and the rooms would echo with the voices and steps of little children, and all would be gaiety and mirth. then a change would come over the spirit of the scene. the young couple would go with their family to the great house, and in their stead would come a sad-faced figure in deep black, a clinton widow, who had had her day of glory, and would now spend the rest of her years here in peace and seclusion. but all would not be dark to her. she would have great fun in suiting the dear old house to her taste, she would be cheered by the constant visits of the younger members of her family, and she could do a good deal more what she liked than she had done before." "well, upon my word!" interposed dick. nancy held up her hand. "hear, all ye clintons!" she concluded. "old men and women, young men and maidens, and especially the gallant warrior knight and the sweet young maiden i see before me--ye belong to a race which has its roots far back in history, and has been distinguished for many things, but not particularly for brains, as far as i can make out from my recent researches. but at last there has arisen one who will make up for that deficiency. you now behold her in the person of nancy caroline clinton, who addresses you. see that ye cherish her and tip her well, or ye will be eternally disgraced in the eyes of posterity." she ended with a ripple of laughter, shaking back her hair. "well, you're the limit," said dick, with a grin. "come on, let's go and look at the stables. is it true that you suddenly find yourself possessed of brains, twanky? i never suspected it of you." "my dear dick," said joan, as they went down the stairs, "she has been talking about nothing but her brains for the last month, ever since uncle herbert last came here to shoot." "they were always there," explained nancy, "but he put the match to the tinder. i'm going to write books when i get a little older. but of course i must be properly educated first. i suppose you know we're going to have a really up-to-date, top-hole governess, dick?" "yes, i've heard that," said dick, "although i don't admire your way of describing her. lord, what a place to put a horse!" "if it is the expression 'top-hole' you object to, i learnt it from you," said nancy. "my ears are receptive." "two loose-boxes and three stalls," said dick. "we can make that do, but they're all on the slant. we'd better begin by altering this at once; the house can wait for a bit." "of course the stables are more important than the house," said joan. "i say, dick, there is something we want to ask you. do be a brick and say, yes." dick was pursuing his investigations. "coach-house isn't bad," he said. "harness-room wants refurnishing. let's see what the rooms upstairs are like." they climbed up the steep staircase. "dick, will you persuade father to do something?" asked joan. "what?" asked dick. "this would be all right for an unmarried groom." "we want a pony. we've never had anything to ride since poor old tommy died." they were clattering down the stairs again. "you want--you want--you want everything," said dick. "you'll want a four-in-hand next. i don't know whether you want a pig-stye, by any chance. i'll give you this one if you do--ridiculous place to put it! this is where we'll build the game larder. come on, twankies, we'll go and look up old aunt laura. i want to see what she's taken away from here." he set off at a smart pace, the twins on either side of him. "i don't know why _you_ want to go putting your oar in about the pony," said nancy. "i was to tackle father about that." "tackle father!" repeated dick. "look here! that's not the way to talk about the governor, nancy." "oh, dick darling, don't call me nancy. i feel that i'm trembling under the weight of your displeasure." joan hastened to her relief. "when she said 'tackle,' she only meant that i betted her four weeks' pocket-money that father wouldn't let us have a pony," she said. "you mean well, but you've done it now," said nancy. "really, it's about time that you two had somebody to look after you," said dick. "who on earth taught you to bet, i should like to know?" "humphrey," replied nancy promptly. "we were standing by him, and he betted us a shilling each that he would bring down the next bird that came over. he didn't, and he paid up promptly." "we wanted him to bet again, but he refused," said joan. "but it gave us a taste for speculation which we shall probably never overcome," said nancy. dick grunted. "humphrey oughtn't to have done it," he said. "you are not to bet with each other, you two. and that bet about the pony--which was infernal cheek to make, anyhow--is off. do you hear?" "yes, dick dear," said joan obediently. "but what does a bet being 'off' mean, exactly?" "is it the same as hedging?" asked nancy. "it means--well, it means it's off. you know what it means as well as i do. and i don't like your arranging with each other to get things out of the governor, either--or anybody else. you get plenty given you, and it isn't nice for girls of your age to be always on the make." "but, dick darling," expostulated joan, "there are such lots of horses about the place. i think we might be allowed to ride now. of course, we didn't mean a pony, really. we are big enough to stick on a horse, and father wouldn't have to buy another one for us." "we are about to embark on an arduous course of study," said nancy, "and horse exercise would be the best possible thing for us." "you stick to your golf," said dick. "we spent a lot of money making those links in the park, and you get more fun out of them than anybody." "then you won't help us about riding?" asked joan. "no," said dick. "all the nags are wanted for hunting, and i'm not going to advise the governor to increase the stables." nancy breathed a deep sigh. "it's all your fault, joan," she said. "you don't know how to treat a man. you must never blurt things out that you want. you must remember women are a subject race." "but you won't mind our asking father, dick, will you?" pleaded joan. dick gave his ultimatum. "you'd better give up the idea," he said. "and remember what i told you about being on the make. you're nice kids, but you want keeping in order. i hope the new lady will do it." "i hope she will," said nancy; "but she's got a hard row to hoe. i can't help feeling a little sorry for her." aunt laura had taken up her abode in a little old house on the village street, with a square, brick-walled garden behind it. the agent had occupied it before the death of aunt ellen, but had now removed to a farm which was in hand. they found the old lady sitting by the fire in her parlour, knitting. she was frail and shrunken, and looked as if she might not long survive her transplantation. mrs. clinton or the twins came to see her every day, but a visit from the squire or one of his sons, and especially dick, was an honour which never failed mildly to excite her. she was now in a flurry, and told the elderly maid who had shown her visitors in to bring wine and cake, in the fashion of an earlier day. the men of the family never refused this entertainment, either because they were averse to wounding aunt laura's susceptibilities, or because they liked it. "well, i hope you've made yourself pretty comfortable, aunt laura," said dick in a loud, clear voice, for the old lady was rather deaf, although she did not like to acknowledge it. he was looking round the room as he spoke. its panelled walls were painted light green, and were hung with coloured prints. a recessed cupboard was full of beautiful old china; but there was nothing else of much value in the room, which was furnished with a victorian drawing-room suite and a round rosewood table. the old lady had a pretty modern french table by her side with conveniences for her work and her books. she had also her old cottage piano, with a front of fluted red silk, upon which she sometimes played. a canary hung in the window, which faced south and let in, between the curtains, a stream of wintry sunshine. "it is a bright little house," said aunt laura. "i sometimes wish that your dear aunt ellen had spent the last few years of her life here after your dear aunt anne died. the dower-house was a very dear home to us, and we were greatly attached to it, but in the winter it was dark, and this is much more cheerful. it is cold to-day, and i am sitting over the fire, as you see. but i often sit by the window and see the people going by. you could not do that in the dower-house, for nobody did go by." "did you bring all the furniture you wanted to make you comfortable, aunt laura?" asked dick. aunt laura looked up over her spectacles. "i am quite comfortable, i thank you, dick," she replied, "although i have not got quite used to things yet. it is not to be expected that i should, all at once, at my age, and after having lived with the same things round me for close upon forty years. but your dear father has been kindness itself, as he always is, and allowed me to have all my bedroom furniture brought here, so that in my room upstairs i feel quite at home. and for the downstairs rooms he told me that any pictures or china and so forth that i had a fancy for i might have, and i hope i have not taken advantage of his generosity. i shall not want the things for very long, and they are being well taken care of. he did not want me to take any of the furniture, as he said this house was furnished already, but he wanted me to feel at home here." dick seemed to consider for a moment. "if there's anything special you want in the way of furniture, aunt laura," he said, "anything you've got attached to and like to use, we'll see if we can't get it brought down for you." "well, of course, i got attached to it all," replied aunt laura. "but i can't expect to have it all, and what is here will do for me very well. hannah is making some pretty loose chintz covers for the chairs and sofa in this room, which will give it a more home-like appearance. i do not like the carpet, which is much worn, as you see, and was never a very good one, but i have half formed a plan of going over to bathgate when the spring comes and seeing if i can get one something after the pattern of that in the morning-room at the dower-house, which your aunts and i used much to admire. it was old and somewhat faded, but its colours were well blended, and i have heard that it was brought straight from persia, where they have always made excellent carpets, for my grandfather, who was in business in the city of london. he would be your great-great-grandfather, and they used to call him 'merchant jack,' even after he succeeded to kencote." if dick had known the true value of the carpet in question he might not have offered to have it sent down for aunt laura's use, but he immediately did so, and the old lady's gratitude ought sufficiently to have rewarded him. "now is there anything else, aunt laura?" he asked. "well, as you are so extremely kind, dick," she said, "--and i hope your dear father will not mind, or think that i have been grasping, which i should not like after all his generosity--i think if i might have the use of the old bureau upon which your aunts and i used to write our letters and in which we used to keep our few business papers--for there was a very good lock--not that there was any necessity to lock things up at the dower-house, for everything was under hannah's charge, and, although she is apt to be a little flighty in her dress, and your dear aunt ellen sometimes rebuked her for that, but always kindly, she was quite reliable, and _anything_ might have been left about in perfect safety.--as i was saying, if i might have the use of the old bureau for as long as i live--i should not want it longer--i do not think i should regret anything, except of course that your dear aunts are all gone now, and i am the last of them left." dick had prepared himself, during the foregoing speech, to promise, immediately it came to an end, that aunt laura should have the old bureau, although it was a very fine specimen of dutch marquetry, and the piece of furniture that had struck him as the most desirable of all he had just seen in the dower-house. "oh, of course, aunt laura," he said. "you shall have the bureau and the carpet sent down this afternoon. then you'll feel quite at home, eh?" "well, perhaps not this afternoon, dick," replied aunt laura. "it might upset the house for sunday to make a change, and i should not be quite ready to superintend it. but on monday, or even tuesday--i am not particular--i could make ready. there is no immediate hurry. it is enough for me to know that i am to have the things here, and i shall think upon them with very great pleasure. i'm sure i cannot thank you enough, dear dick, for your kindness. it is of a piece with all the rest. why, i do not believe you have yet seen my beautiful table. children dear, see here! is it not convenient? i can place my favourite book here by my side, and when i am tired of reading, without moving from my seat, i can lay it down, and there is my work ready for me underneath, and in this pocket, as you see, are all sorts of conveniences, such as scissors, little tape-measure in the form of a silver pig, and so on; and here an ivory paper-knife. it is indeed a handsome present, is it not?" "it's lovely, aunt laura," said joan. "who did it come from?" "on thursday," replied aunt laura. "thursday morning. no, i am telling you a story. it was thursday afternoon, for hannah was just about to bring in the tea." "who gave it you, aunt laura?" asked joan again. "did i not tell you?" said aunt laura. "it was dear humphrey. he sent it down from london. he came in to see me when he was last at kencote and described to me such a table as this, which i admit i _did_ say i should like to possess, but certainly with no idea that he would purchase one for me. but there! all you dear boys and girls are full of kind thoughts for your old aunt, and i am sure it makes me very happy in my loss of your dear aunt ellen to think i have so much left to be thankful for." when the twins were in their bedroom getting ready for luncheon joan said, "i wonder why humphrey is so attentive all of a sudden to aunt laura." "there's more in it than meets the eye," said nancy. "did you notice how surprised dick looked when she said humphrey gave it her? and then he frowned." "i expect dick thinks humphrey is too extravagant. it must have been an expensive table. and i know humphrey has debts, because he asked me to open a tailor's bill that came for him and tell him the 'demnition total,' as he was afraid to do it himself. it was more than a hundred pounds, and he said, 'i wish that was the only one, but if it was i couldn't pay it.'" "poor old humphrey!" said nancy. "i say, joan, do you think he is making up to aunt laura, so that she will pay his bills for him?" "what a beastly thing to say, nancy!" replied joan. "of course, none of the boys would do a thing like that. besides, aunt laura hasn't got any money." "no, i don't suppose so," said nancy reflectively. "i expect father gives her an allowance, poor old darling!" but aunt laura had money. she had the thirty-six thousand pounds which her father had left to her and her sisters, and she had, besides, the savings of all six ladies through a considerable number of years. chapter v lady george the squire had a touch of rheumatism, and was annoyed about it, but also inclined to give providence due credit for so visiting him, if he must be visited at all, at a time of hard frost. "if i coddle myself up to-day and perhaps to-morrow," he said over the luncheon table, "i shall be able to hunt all right on monday, if the frost breaks. i suppose you wouldn't care to go over those deepdene farm figures this afternoon, dick, eh?" "we might have an hour with them before dinner," replied dick. "i thought of riding over to mountfield to see jim this afternoon. i want a little exercise." "i don't know whether you will find jim in," said mrs. clinton. "muriel, and i think mrs. graham, are coming over here this afternoon." "i'll take my chance," said dick. the twins saw him off from the hall door. he rode a tall bay horse, which danced with impatience on the hard gravel of the drive as he looked him over, drawing on his gloves. "dear old cicero! doesn't he look a beauty?" said nancy. "what was his figure, dick?" "you will never be able to get on him," said joan. "shall i bring a chair?" but dick was up and cantering over the crisp grass of the park, managing his nervous powerful mount as if he and the horse were of one frame and as if nothing could separate them. "he does look jolly," said joan admiringly. "he's a good man on a horse," acquiesced nancy. "all the boys are. so they ought to be. they think about nothing else." "you know, i think dick is just the sort of man a girl might fall in love with," said joan. "he's very good-looking, and he has just that sort of way with him, as if he didn't care for anybody." "i expect lots of girls have fallen in love with him. the question is whether he is ever going to fall in love with them. i'm inclined to think he's turning it over in his mind. i dare say you were blinded by all that business at the dower-house this morning. i wasn't. you mark my word, joan, dick is going to get married." "i shouldn't wonder. he's grown softer somehow. see how interested he was in the kitchen. who do you think it is, nancy?" "my dear! don't you know that? it's grace ettien. didn't you notice what a fuss father made of her when she last come over? took her all round, and almost _gave_ her the place. he doesn't treat girls like that as a rule." "you didn't say so at the time." "no; but i've put two and two together since. you see if i'm not right. by this time next year the dower-house will be occupied by captain and lady grace clinton--and oh, joan! perhaps there'll be another baby in the family!" the ecstasy of the twins at this prospect was broken into by miss bird, who appeared behind them in the doorway and promised them their deaths of cold if they did not come indoors _at once_. in the meantime dick was trotting along the hard country lanes, between the silent silvered winter woods and the frozen fields, always with an eye about him to see what things of fur and feather might share with him the winter solitude, what was doing in the hard-bound soil, and what in the clear spaces of the air. he had the eye of the countryman, trained from boyhood to observe and assimilate. he had lived for years the life of court and camp, had adapted himself as readily to the turmoil of london gaieties as to regimental duties in other stations at home and abroad, or to months of campaigning in egypt and south africa. he had skimmed the cream of all such experiences as had come in his way, but here in the depths of the english country, just here where his ancestors had lived for generation after generation, were placed the foundations of his life. here he was at home, as nowhere else in the world. all the rest was mere accident of time and place, of no account as compared with this one spot of english soil. here alone he was based and firmly rooted. mountfield lay about four miles from kencote, and the two estates marched, although the one was small as compared with the other. two years before, jim graham, the owner of mountfield, had married cicely clinton, and his only sister just before that had married walter clinton, the doctor of melbury park, where the squire was so averse to looking for an heir. so the clintons and the grahams were bound together by close ties, and there was much coming and going between the two houses. cicely's carriage was before the door as dick rode up, and she herself came out as he dismounted. she looked very pretty in her thick furs, young and fresh, and matronly at the same time. "oh, dick, i'm so glad to see you," she said. "have you come to see jim? i'm afraid he's gone over to bathgate, and won't be back for some time." "h'm! that's a bore," said dick. "you're going over to kencote, aren't you, siskin?" "yes. i'm going to fetch mrs. graham and drive her over. but do come in for a minute or two." "oughtn't to keep the horses long in this weather," said dick. "drive 'em about for a few minutes, carter. i'll just come in and throw my eye over the babies, siskin." cicely's face brightened. she led the way into her morning-room, and turned to kiss her brother, her hands on his shoulders. "dear old dick!" she said. "do you really want to see the babies?" "of course i do," he replied. "you've given us the taste for them over at kencote. the twankies foam at the mouth with pleasure whenever the babies are mentioned, and even the governor looks as if a light were switched on in his face when anything is said about them." cicely rang the bell. "he is a doting grandfather," she said, with a smile. "i would take them over this afternoon, but it's too cold." "nice room, this!" said dick, looking round him. "are you glad to be settled down in the country again, sis?" "yes. awfully glad," she said. "i hated london, really. at least, i liked meeting the people, but you can only feel at home in the country." "there was a time," said dick. she blushed. "oh, don't talk about that, dick," she said, in some distress. "i was all wrong. i didn't know what i wanted. i know now. i want just this, and jim, and the babies. i was overjoyed when our two years in london were up, and jim said we could come back here if we kept quiet and lived carefully. here they are--the darlings!" the tiny morsels of lace and silk-clad humanity--dick, the boy, nina, the baby girl--who were brought into the room in charge of a staid elderly smiling nurse, looked as happy babies ought to look--as if they belonged to the house and the house belonged to them. dick took up his namesake and godson in his arms and his keen face softened. "he's getting a great little man," he said. "when are you going to cut his hair, cicely?" cicely scouted the idea. "men are always in such a hurry," she said. "dick, you ought to marry and have babies of your own." "ah, well! perhaps i shall some day," said dick. "now i must be pushing on, and you oughtn't to keep the horses waiting, sis. good-bye, little chap." "aren't you coming back to kencote?" cicely asked. "not just yet. going to hack a few more miles. i haven't been on a horse for three weeks." so cicely got into her carriage and dick's horse was brought round, and they went off in different directions. cicely picked up her mother-in-law at her house just outside the park. mrs. graham was waiting for her at her garden gate, in company with a deerhound, a spaniel, and an irish terrier. she had on a coat and skirt of thick tweed, and a cloth hat with a cock's feather. "i suppose there won't be a tea-party," she said, as she got into the carriage. "i did intend to put on smart clothes, but i found i couldn't be bothered when the time came. they must take me in my rags or not at all. _you_ look smart enough, my girl." "if i had your figure," said cicely, "i should never want to wear anything but country clothes." "ah! now that's very nice of you," said mrs. graham. "i do wear well for fifty-three, and i'm not going to deny it. my face is a bit battered, of course. i must expect that, riding and tramping about in all weathers. but i'm as fit as if i were thirty years younger, and i don't know what more you can ask of life--unless it's to have your own people round you instead of a pack of molly-coddles." cicely laughed. jim graham had let mountfield for two years after their marriage to a rich and childless couple, who spent most of their time in working at embroidery, and motoring about the country in a closed-in car, for neither of which pursuits mrs. graham had found it in her heart to forgive them. "well, _they're_ gone," she said. "and thank goodness for it. i should have let the lodge and gone away myself if they had stayed here any longer. cumberers of the ground, i call them, and what they wanted with a country house beats me. but you never know who you're going to get for neighbours nowadays. by the by, have you heard that old parson marsh has let blaythorn rectory for the hunting season?" blaythorn was about three miles from mountfield, on the opposite side to kencote. cicely had not heard this piece of news. "yes," said mrs. graham, "and to a lady of title, my dear--lady george dubec--no less. i haven't the ghost of an idea who she is. but no doubt your father will know. he is a regular walking peerage--knows who everybody is and whom everybody has married to the third and fourth generation. what accommodation poor old parson marsh has for hunters i don't know. i should think the lady must have been done in the eye. and as for the house--the last time i was in it it smelt so of dogs and tobacco-smoke that even i couldn't put up with it, and lord knows i'm not particular." "where is mr. marsh going to live?" asked cicely. "oh, i believe he has sacked his curate on the strength of it, and has taken his rooms. i don't know why he should have wanted a curate at all, except that he's so bone-idle, and i'm sure he can't afford one. he owes joynes the butcher over forty pounds. but, good gracious, cicely, don't encourage me to gossip. i'm getting a regular old hag. it's the influence of your late tenants, my dear. they _loved_ village tittle-tattle, and i had to join in with it whenever we met, because there was nothing else in the wide world i could talk to them about. the worst of it is i was acquiring quite a taste for scandal. but i've turned over a new leaf. so has old marsh i suppose, and is going to pay up all his debts. i wish him well over his difficulties." with such sprightly talk did mrs. graham pass away the time till they reached kencote, when she began all over again with mrs. clinton as audience. cicely had gone upstairs to see the twins and miss bird, and mrs. graham asked point-blank that mr. clinton might be informed of her arrival. "i have lots to tell him," she said, "and i want to ask him some questions besides." mrs. clinton rang the bell, without saying anything, and a footman was sent with a message to the squire, who presently came in, bluff and hearty, but walking with a slight list. "ah, mrs. graham!" he said as he shook hands. "come to cheer us up with a little gossip--what? but where are the grandchildren?" "dear me! i forgot to ask," said mrs. graham. "i suppose it is too cold for them. but i've brought the dogs, mr. clinton." "oh, the dogs!" said the squire, with his loud laugh. "no dogs in _this_ house." "i know," said mrs. graham. "and it's such a mistake. kencote is the only country house i know where there isn't a dog indoors. i never feel that it's properly inhabited." "it was swarming with them in my grandfather's time," said the squire, "and i dare say would be now if that mongrel hadn't gone for dick when he was a little fellow. always kept 'em outside since. outside is the place for a dog." "i don't agree with you," said mrs. graham. "and it isn't like a sportsman to say so. however, we needn't quarrel about that. who is lady george dubec, mr. clinton?" "lady george dubec?" repeated the squire. "i suppose she's the wife--or the widow rather--of george dubec, the duke of queenstown's brother, and a pretty good rascal _he_ was. got killed in a railway accident in america two or three years ago, and it was the best thing that could have happened to him. wish they'd kill off a few more like him. i didn't know he was married. why do you ask?" "she has taken blaythorn rectory to hunt from. she came down yesterday or the day before." "blaythorn rectory! to hunt from!'" exclaimed the squire. "well, that's the most extraordinary thing! are there any stables there? i never heard of marsh keeping anything but an old pony, and the whole place must be in the depths of dilapidation." "well, i don't know. but there she is. and you don't know _who_ she is. i thought you knew who everybody was, mr. clinton." "wait a minute," said the squire, and he went over to a table where there were books of reference. "no, there's no marriage here," he said, turning over the pages of one of them, "except his first marriage thirty years ago. poor lady bertha grange that was, and he drove her into her grave within five years. the fellow was a brute and a blackleg. i was at school with him, and he was sacked. and i was at cambridge with him and he was sent down, for some disgraceful business, i forget what. then he was in the guards, and had to clear out of the service within a year for some precious shady racing transaction. the fellow had every possible chance, and he _couldn't_ run straight. he went abroad after that, but used to turn up occasionally. nobody would have anything to do with him. i believe he settled down in america, if he could ever be said to settle down anywhere. i know he was in some scandalous divorce case. one used to hear his name come up occasionally, and always in an unsavoury sort of way. he was a wrong 'un, through and through, but a good-looking blackguard in his young days, and women used to stick up for him." "well, he seems to be better out of the world than in it," said mrs. graham. "but what about his widow? you say she isn't down there." "no, but this book is out of date. i've got a later one in my room. i'll send for it." the new book gave the information required. lord george dubec had married five years before miss virginia vanreden, of philadelphia. "oh, an american!" said mrs. graham. "well, i suppose i must go and call on her. even if i don't like her i shall be doing my duty to my neighbours in providing them with gossip. not that i like gossip--i detest it. still, one must find _some_thing to talk about. shall you call on her, mrs. clinton?" the squire answered. "oh, i think not," he said. "i don't like hunting--er! hum! ha!" "you don't like hunting women," said mrs. graham imperturbably. "i know you don't, mr. clinton. that's another point between us. but we're very good friends all the same." "oh, of course, of course," said the squire. "nearly put my foot in it that time, mrs. graham, eh? ha! ha! well, with such old friends one can afford to make a mistake or two. no, i think we'll leave lady george dubec alone. she won't be here long, and i've no wish to be mixed up with anybody belonging to george dubec--alive or dead. i had the utmost contempt for the fellow. besides, i don't like americans, and any woman who would have married him after the life he'd led ... well, she may be all right, but i don't want to know her--that's all. i _should_ like to know, though, how she got hold of blaythorn rectory, of all places, or why she has come to meadshire to hunt. the country pleases _us_ all right, and we're quite content with our sport, but we're not generally honoured by strangers in that way." "i dare say i can find out all about it," said mrs. graham. "and when i do i'll let you know." cicely was sitting on the great roomy shabby sofa in the schoolroom, with a twin on either side of her, and miss bird upright in the corner, alternately tatting feverishly a pattern of lace thread and dabbing her eyes with her handkerchief. for the subject of conversation was her approaching departure, and, as she said, with all the kindness that had been showered on her and the affection that she felt she never would lose, it was no use pretending that she was glad she was going away, for she was not, but, on the contrary, very sorry. "nancy and i are going to write to her once a week regularly," said joan. "we did think of writing every day at first, but we probably shouldn't keep it up." "the spirit is willing, but the flesh might be weak," said nancy. "and there's no sense in overdoing things. anyhow, we have promised that we will never love miss prim half as much as we love our darling starling, and she is pleased at that, aren't you, starling darling?" "of course i am pleased to be loved," replied miss bird; "but indeed, nancy, i should not like you to set yourself against your new governess on my account; it is not necessary and you can love one person without visiting it on another and i do not like you to call her miss prim." "she is sure to be," said nancy elliptically. "we must call her something, and that's as good a name as any till we see what she is like." "if you don't treat her respectfully she won't stay," said cicely. "we haven't treated starling respectfully, but _she_ has stayed all right," said joan. "i suppose you know we are going to have lessons besides, sis--drawing, and music, and deportment, and all sorts of things." "oh, we're going to be well finished off while we're about it," said nancy. "we shall be ready to fill _any_ position, from the highest to the lowest." "we shall be the ornament of every drawing-room to which we are introduced," said joan. "i think we're worth polishing off handsomely, don't you, sis? have you noticed how awfully pretty we're getting?" "now that is a thing," broke in miss bird, "that no well-brought-up girl ought to say of herself, joan." "but, starling darling, it's true, and you can't deny it," replied joan. "we must tell the truth, mustn't we?" "the new booking-clerk at the station casts admiring glances at us," said nancy. "at first it made us uncomfortable; we thought we must have smuts on our noses. but at last we tumbled to it. cicely, we are loved, not only for our worth, but our beauty." "you are a couple of donkeys," said cicely, laughing. "well, i'm glad you're going to apply yourselves to learning, although it's a dreadful thing to be losing our dear old starling. kencote will be quite changed." "there are many changes coming about at kencote," said nancy. "joan and i can feel them in the air. we'll let you know when there's anything more to tell you, cicely." "thank you very much," said cicely. "i think i had better go downstairs now." the twins went with her, and on the stairs cicely said, "i didn't like to say it before starling, but i think you're awfully lucky children, to be going to be taught things. _i_ never was. i do hope you'll take advantage of it." "oh, i _do_ hope we shall," said joan. "it is such a chance for us. we feel that." "deeply," acquiesced nancy. "if we don't we shall never forgive ourselves--never." chapter vi blaythorn rectory dick, when he had left mountfield, trotted on at a slightly faster pace than he had hitherto come, in the direction of blaythorn, and did not draw rein until he came to that rectory concerning whose occupancy his relations and connections were so exercised. it was a dull house, with a short, weed-grown drive behind a rather shabby brick wall and an overgrown shrubbery, on the outskirts of the village. he got off his horse and rang the bell, which was presently answered by a smart parlourmaid, who gave him a discreet smile of welcome, and whisked off at his request, with a flourish of petticoats, to fetch a groom from the stableyard hard by. then she showed him into the drawing-room, where two women were sitting by the fire, one of whom rose to greet him with an exclamation of pleasure, while the other gathered up her work deliberately and prepared to leave the room. lady george dubec was a tall, slender woman in the early thirties, or possibly only in the late twenties. her face was a little worn, but her eyes were deep and lustrous, and her features delicate. when she smiled she was beautiful. her dark hair was elaborately braided; her slim figure looked well in a black gown of soft folds. she had thin, almost transparent hands, covered with jewels. she moved gracefully, and her voice was low, but clear and musical, with only the suspicion of an un-english intonation. "oh, dick, what a godsend you are," she said as she gave him both her hands. "toby and i were wondering how on earth we were going to get through the rest of the afternoon and evening." "i wasn't wondering at all," said the other lady, who had now also risen and shaken hands with the visitor. "i knew you would come. so did virginia, really. we were talking about you. i will now retire to another apartment and leave you alone." "indeed you'll do no such thing," said virginia dubec, taking her by the shoulders and pushing her back into her chair. "we will have the lights and tea--although it is early--and a talk of three together. we're all friends, and you're not going to sit alone." "of course not," said dick. "a nice sort of state you'd work yourself up into against me! i know you, miss dexter." she took her seat again and unrolled her work. she was short and rather plain, with sandy-coloured hair and square-tipped fingers. she had not smiled since dick had entered the room. "oh, i don't deny that i'm jealous," she said. "i've had her to myself for three years, and you have come and stolen her away from me. but it's a harmless sort of jealousy. it doesn't make me object to you. it only makes me wonder sometimes." "what do you wonder?" asked dick, standing up before the fire and looking down at her with a glance that immediately transferred itself to her companion, on whom his eyes rested with an expression that had a hint of hunger in it. virginia answered for her. "she wonders what there is in a man for a woman to cling to--and especially after _my_ experience. she thinks a woman's friendship ought to be enough. _she_ wants no other. we talk over these things together, but we don't quarrel. she knows that i shall always love her, don't you, toby?" "perhaps i do, perhaps i don't," said miss dexter. "but we needn't discuss these matters before captain dick. i'll ring for the lights and the tea." dick breathed an inaudible sigh of relief. he was not at home in the discussions of abstract questions. "how do you find yourself here, virginia?" he asked, looking round him. "you have made this room very jolly, anyhow." "that's what mr. marsh said, in his own particular way," she said, with a smile. "he said, 'if i'd known a woman could do this sort of thing to a house, i'd have married a wife years ago.'" "and of course virginia immediately suggested he should marry me," said miss dexter. "she is so generous with her belongings." "it made us very good friends," said lady george. "a joke of that sort always does. we shall carry it on till the end of my tenancy, and then he will propose to toby. you'll see, dick." "i shouldn't blame him," said dick. "the stables aren't so very bad, are they?" "oh, wilson says they'll do. but i wish you had been able to get me a brighter house, dick. it is rather depressing, in spite of all my furbishing and knick-knacks." "my dear girl, it was absolutely the only one within reach. we don't let houses for hunting hereabouts. you wait till you see the dower-house. i was there this morning, and really i'd no idea what a jolly little place it is. with the few alterations i'm going to make, and all the jolly old furniture, it will be a topping place. you'll fall in love with it, virginia." she sighed. "there are some fences to take before we land up there," she said. "i'm rather frightened about it all, dick. when will your mother come and see me? have you told her i am here yet?" "no," he said shortly. "i shall tell them this evening." miss dexter dropped her work in her lap with a gesture of impatience, and looked up at him. "_why_ haven't you told them?" she asked. "are you ashamed of her?" dick's face flushed and his lips tightened. "that isn't a proper question to ask, miss dexter," he said. "i know what i'm about, and so does virginia." "my dear toby, for goodness' sake don't make him angry," said lady george. "i'm frightened of him when he looks like that." dick forced a smile. "my father is a good sort, but he wants managing," he said. "i'll state the case quite plainly once more, as miss dexter sees fit to question my action." "oh, good gracious!" put in that lady, "i'm not worth all these heavy guns." "toby! toby!" expostulated her friend. the maid came in at that moment with a lamp and stayed to draw curtains and light candles. dick dislodged himself from his stand in front of the fire and took a chair, but left it to the two women to carry on a desultory conversation until they were left alone again. then he rose once more. "look here," he said. "we've got to have this out once for all. i'm not going to be twitted for my actions, miss dexter." "well, please have it out," she said. "i'm listening." "you are the most tiresome creature in the world," said lady george. "i don't want to say anything to hurt you, virginia," dick went on, "but the name you bear would set my father against you--violently." "oh, my dear dick!" she said, "you don't hurt me in the least, but why go into all that? we understand each other. toby, i feel as if i could beat you." "well," said dick. "i won't say any more about that, but you have got to remember it. but there are prejudices to get over besides. he wants me to make the usual sort of marriage with a--oh, you know the sort of female child fellows like me are supposed to marry--his mind is running on it now, and he actually tackled me about it last night. he's got the young person all ready--that's the sort of man he is--my cousin, grace ettien. i said, no, thank you, and i told him i didn't want to marry a youngster--wouldn't, anyway. it's no good beating about the bush, virginia--until he sees you--_until_ he sees you, mind--you don't fill the bill." "that's a pleasant way of putting it," said miss dexter. "i won't have another word," said lady george decisively. "you two are just annoying each other. dick, my dear, i think it's just sweet of you to put all your faith in that seeing of me. i adore you for it. it eases all my spiritual aches and pains. toby, you irritating creature, can't you see how lovely it is of him? if he were all wrong about having me come down here, i shouldn't care. he has done it because he believes in his heart of hearts that his people have only got to set eyes on me and all their objections will vanish into thin air." "i don't say that quite--i don't know," said dick. "well, you needn't go and spoil it," said miss dexter. "i was just going to say that it did make up for a good deal." "look here, miss dexter," said dick. "if i were to go and tell my father straight off that i am going to marry virginia he would be all over bristles at once. all the things that don't matter a hang beside what she is, and what every one can see she is who knows her, would be brought up, and he'd put himself into a frantic state about it. he wouldn't let me bring her to kencote; he'd fight blindly with every weapon he could use. i'm heir to a fine property, and i'm as well off as i need be, even while my father is alive, as long as i don't set myself against all his dislikes and prejudices. if i do, he can make me a poor man, and he'd do it. he'd do anything by which he thought he could get his way. i shouldn't even be able to marry, unless i lived on my wife's money, which i won't do." "no, you're too proud for that," said miss dexter. "put it how you like. i won't do it. i'll take all a wife can give me except money. that i'll give. if there were no other way, i'd break down his opposition. i know how to treat him, and i could do it; but it would take time; i should cut myself off from kencote until i had brought him under, and virginia's name would be bandied about here, in the place where we are going to live all our lives, in a way that would affect us always, and in a way i won't subject her to. he'd do that, although he might be sorry for having done it afterwards, and i don't think i should be able to put up with it. we might quarrel in such a way that we shouldn't be able to come together again, and the harm would be done. as i say, if there were no other way i would run the risk. but there is another way, and i'm taking it. you asked me a foolish question just now--if i was ashamed of virginia. it is because i am so far from being ashamed of her--because i'm so proud of her--that i asked her to come down here, where he can get to know her before he has any idea that i'm going to marry her. _she_ can make her way, and make him forget all the rest. now, what have you got against that? let's have it plainly." "dear dick!" said virginia softly. "i have had many compliments paid me, but that is the best of all. answer him, toby, and don't keep up this tiresome irritation any longer. it spoils everything." "well, i'll give in," said miss dexter. "but in my inmost soul i'm against all this policy, and if your father isn't quite blind, captain dick, he will see through it, and you will be worse off than before." "my father can't see through anything," said dick. "besides, there's nothing to see through. i shouldn't mind telling him--in fact, i _shall_ tell him--that it was i who advised virginia to come down here. he knows i have heaps of friends all over the place that he doesn't know of. virginia is one of them, for the present." "i hope everything will turn out well," said miss dexter after a slight pause. "i won't say i think you're right, but i'll say you may be, and i hope you are. and i won't worry you with any more doubts." virginia dubec rose from her chair impulsively and kissed her. "my darling old toby!" she said. "you are very annoying at times, but i couldn't do without you." after tea miss dexter went out of the room, and they did not try to stop her. when they were left alone dick held virginia in his arms and looked into her eyes. "what have you done to me," he asked her, with a smile, "after all these years?" "am i really the first, dick?" she asked him. "you are the first, virginia--and the only one. you have changed everything. i have always thought i had everything i wanted. now i know i've had nothing." "and i have had nothing, either," she said. "every morning i wake up wondering what has happened to me. and when i remember i begin to sing. to think that at my age, and after my bitter experience, _this_ should come to me! oh, dick, you don't know how much i love you." "i know how much i love _you_," he said. "if there were no other way i would give up kencote and everything else for you. i love you enough for that, virginia, and the things i would give up for you are the only things i have valued so far. but we won't give up anything, my girl. my good old obstinate old father will fall at your feet when he knows you." "will he, dick?" "_i_ have fallen at your feet, virginia, and i'm rather like my father, although i think i can see a bit further into things, and i have a little more control over my feelings--and my speech." they had sat down side by side on a sofa, and dick was holding her slender hand in his brown one. "i used to think you had so much control over yourself that it would be impossible ever to get anything out of you," she said. "you are so frightfully and terrifyingly english." he laughed. "that gnat-like friend of yours has the power to make me explain myself," he said. "i've never tried to talk over any one to my side as i do her. i have always taken my own way and let people think what they like." "i think it is sweet of you to put yourself--and me--right with her, dick. she has been the best friend that i ever had, except you, dear dick. she stood by me in the worst days, and put up with untold insults without flinching, so that she could stay with me. of course, at first, she was terrified lest i should make another mistake. she is like a grim watch-dog over me. but she likes you, and trusts you. you must put up with her little ways." "oh, i do, my dear, and i will. she's a good sort." "dick, will your mother like me? you have never told me very much about her. i think i feel more nervous about her than about your father." "you needn't, virginia. she is one of the best of women. i think she is perhaps a little difficult to know. she is rather silent and keeps her thoughts to herself; but i know we shall have her on our side. she has only to know you. but in any case she wouldn't give us any trouble." "that sounds rather hard, dick. don't you love your mother? i loved mine." "of course i do. but she doesn't interfere with us. she never did. it was my father we had to consider, even when we were boys." "interfere with you! i don't like the sound of it. dick, i don't think i will talk to you about your mother. i will wait until i have seen her. you don't help me to know what she is like. i hope i shall get on with her. i shall know soon. will she be at the meet on monday, if there is one?" "no. but my father will. i shall introduce him to you then. i told you he had a foolish prejudice against women hunting, didn't i? it won't be quite the most propitious of times. but we can't help that." "well, i won't hunt on monday, then. i will drive toby to the meet instead, and follow on wheels." "h'm. perhaps it would be better--just at the first go off. and i don't believe you really care as much about hunting as you think you do, virginia." she looked into his face with her dark, sweet eyes. "i don't care about anything, except to please you, dick," she said. "as for hunting--it was the excitement--to keep my mind off. it was the only thing he let me do, over here. i believe he would have liked me to kill myself, and sometimes i used to try to." he put his hand before her mouth. "you are not to talk about those bad times," he said. she kissed his hand, and removed it. "i like to, sometimes," she said. "it is such a blessed relief to think of them as quite gone--it is like the cessation of bad neuralgia--just a sense of peace and bliss. perhaps i didn't really try to kill myself, but certainly i shouldn't have cared if i had. it was not caring that gave me my reputation, i suppose, for i didn't mind where i went or what i did. i do care now. i don't think i should very much mind giving it up altogether." "well, you mustn't do that for this winter, at any rate. you shall do what you like afterwards. and as for your reputation, my dear, i'm afraid we are so out of the smart hunting world in south meadshire that you will find very few of us aware of it. so you needn't run any risks in trying to keep it up." "very well, dick. but i expect when the hounds begin to run i shall forget that i have to be cautious. yes, i do love it. i don't want to give up hunting. and there won't be much for me to do here outside that, will there?" "i'm afraid i am condemning you to a dull three months, my poor virginia. but i want you to get to know the country, and love it, as i do. kencote means a lot to me. i want it to mean a lot to you too." "so it shall. i love it already, for your sake, and it seems a wonderful thing to me that you and all the people you have sprung from should have been settled down just in this little spot in the world for all those centuries. dick dear, i know you are giving up a lot for me. i know, although i wasn't brought up in all these traditions, that your father is right, really, and that it is not a woman like me you ought to choose for your wife." dick raised her hand and let it fall with his own. "i have chosen you for my wife, virginia, out of all the women i have known. i love and honour you, and i wouldn't have you different--not in the smallest particular. no clinton of kencote has ever chosen a wife more worthy to bear his name. let that be enough for you, and don't worry your pretty head about anything, except to make love to my old father when you meet him." when dick had ridden away, in the gloaming, and the two women were left to themselves for the long evening, virginia dubec said to miss dexter, "toby, tell me the truth; don't you think i am the most fortunate woman in the world?" "if all goes well," said the other soberly and decisively, "i think you will be happy. but your dick, virginia, is the sort of man who will want to rule, and to rule without question. he is very much in love with you now--that is quite plain, although he is one of those men who hold themselves in. but you won't get your way, my dear, when you are married, unless it is his way too--any more than you did before." "oh, my own way! what do i care about that? my way shall be his way. i love him and i can trust him. he is a strong man, and tender too. toby, i adore him. i will do everything in the world that i can to make him happy. he has raised me out of the dust, and given me to myself again. when i am married to him i shall forget all the pain and misery. it's a new life he is giving me, toby, and the old unhappy life will fall from me and be as if it had never been." "you are expecting a great deal, virginia," said miss dexter; "i hope some part of it will be realised." chapter vii the squire puts his foot down kencote was three hours' journey from london by a fast train, and it had always been the custom of the sons of the family--those of them whose avocations made it necessary for them at any time to live in town--to come down whenever they pleased, to spend a night or a few nights, without announcing their arrival. their rooms were there ready for them. kencote was their home. dick or humphrey, and, in the days before he was married, walter, would often walk into the house unexpectedly and go upstairs and dress without any one but the servants knowing they were there until dinner-time. the squire liked them to come and go in that way. it seemed to give him, in his retired, bucolic life, a tie with the world. he would always give them a hearty welcome, even if he had to object to something they had done, or had left undone, before they left again. it was humphrey who arrived on this saturday afternoon, reaching kencote by the half-past four train, and walking up from the station and into the morning-room, for his cup of tea. the squire's greeting was a shade less hearty than it would have been in the case of his other sons. humphrey had given him a good deal of trouble in the way of money. it is true that there had never been any big catastrophe, no sudden demand for a large sum to meet a debt of honour, from racing or cards, as fathers were sometimes confronted with by extravagant sons. humphrey was too cautious to run those sorts of risks. the squire, perhaps, would have preferred that the demands upon him should have come in that way rather than from the constant, rather cold-blooded exceeding of an allowance which he told himself, and humphrey, was as large as any younger son had a right to expect, and a good deal larger than most of them got. humphrey did not deny this. he simply said, whenever he did ask his father for more money, that he had not been able to do on it, but if his father would clear off his debts for him and give him a fresh start, he would try to do on it for the future. he had made the endeavour three times, and each time with less success than before, for the debts had been bigger. and now the squire was getting angry about it. it had always been the same. humphrey's debts after he had left cambridge had been about twice as large as dick's, although dick had been master of the drag and had had expenses that humphrey had not. walter had left oxford with no debts at all. and since their university days, humphrey had actually had more money than either of the others, although dick was the eldest son and a considerable sum had been paid to buy walter his practice. now it was not the squire's way to bear malice or to let any annoyance rankle when once it had been met and dealt with. in the ordinary course he would have expressed himself very strongly and felt very strongly on the subject when one of humphrey's periodical crises of debt was disclosed to him, but when he had so relieved his mind he would have paid up and forgotten all about it. he had done so the first time, and even the second, after a rather stronger explosion. it was the third, now nearly two years ago, which had rankled; and the reason was not only that humphrey, as seemed quite obvious, was living in just such a way as had brought him to exceed his income and get into trouble before, with the consequence that a new crisis and a new demand would probably arise before long. it was so much in the air that the squire was continually calling the gods to witness that _he_ was not going to pay any more of humphrey's debts. but he would not have felt so sore, when he did think about it, if it had not been for humphrey's attitude towards him in particular, and towards kencote and all that it represented in general. the fact was that humphrey, from the serene heights of his career as a very smart young man about town, patronised them. it is to be supposed that he could not help it, that it was an attitude which he would have corrected if he had been aware of it, for it was quite certain that, when once his father became aware of it, it would not help him in any plan he might have to make for further pecuniary assistance. the squire merely had a feeling of irritation against humphrey, which slumbered while he was away and always became sharper during his somewhat rare visits to kencote. it was not yet formulated, but was nearer to getting to a head every time they came together. the young man, if he had had an adviser, might have been told that if he acted in such a way as to bring it to a head, it would be time for him to look out. humphrey walked into the morning-room with a cool air, as if he had come from another room in the house instead of from london. he was the only one of all the clintons who was dark. he was not so good-looking as dick, but he was well set up, and his clothes were always the perfect expression of the requirements of the moment. so were dick's, but dick wore old clothes sometimes, humphrey never. he was a young man of the highest fashion, whenever and wherever he appeared. the squire was standing in front of the fire, as his habit was, mrs. clinton sitting behind her tea-table and mrs. graham near her. the twins were on the sofa on either side of cicely. humphrey kissed his mother, shook hands with his father and mrs. graham, and sat down by his sisters. "the frost is going to break," he said. "is it?" said the squire. "well, that's the best news you could have brought. look here, we were talking of lady george dubec. do you know anything about her?" "virginia dubec?" said humphrey. "she is a very beautiful lady." "well, but who is she? who _was_ she? an american they say. is she all right?" "she was an actress. musical comedy, or something of the sort. but that was some years ago. old george dubec married her in new york, and led her an awful life. she used to hunt with the quorn. went like a bird, and didn't care how she went or where she went. people used to say she wanted to break her neck and get away from george dubec. but dick knows her better than i do. he'll tell you all about her." mrs. clinton looked up from the teacups, mrs. graham arched her brows and her mouth twitched, the twins caught the sense of surprise and gazed open-eyed at their father. "dick knows her!" exclaimed the squire. "then why on earth----! does he know she has settled down here?" "_has_ she settled down here?" asked humphrey. "where has she settled, and what for?" "taken old marsh's rectory at blaythorn," said mrs. graham. "going to hunt with the south meadshire." "that seems an odd proceeding for one of the brightest ornaments of the shires," said humphrey. the squire knit his heavy brows. "we can show her very good sport," he said, "if that's what she wants. but i should like to know why she came here, all the same." "there's more in this than meets the eye," said nancy, very unwisely, for she and joan were instantly sent out of the room. "what are you children doing here?" asked the squire sharply. "why aren't you with miss bird? run along now; you've got lessons to do, or something." "we don't have lessons on saturday. can't we stay with cicely, father?" asked joan. "i must be going directly," said cicely, rising. "but i'll come with you and pay a last farewell to the dear old starling." so the three of them retired, and directly they got out of the room joan fell upon nancy. "what an idiot you are!" she said. "if you had kept quiet we should have heard everything. when you get hold of a new speech you must always be poking it in. we've had enough of 'there's more in this than meets the eye.' i wish you'd get hold of a new one." "i own it was foolish of me," said nancy. "i'm at the mercy of a phrase. still, it was quite true. we know who dick is in love with now. of course he got her down here. humphrey said she was very beautiful." "you are not to talk like that, children," said cicely. "you know nothing about these things." "darling!" said joan, squeezing her arm. "don't be so frightfully grown-up. we are not children any longer, and we know a good deal more than you think." "we are a force to be reckoned with now," said nancy, "and it's no use trying to keep family secrets from us, sending us out of the room, and all that. it's too transparent, and makes us talk all the more." there was a pause in the morning-room when the three sisters had left. humphrey's quick brain was adjusting many things. he knew dick admired virginia dubec, although it had not hitherto occurred to him that that admiration betokened anything serious. he suspected also, that since somebody must have suggested to the lady that she should spend a season hunting in meadshire instead of in leicestershire, that somebody was probably dick. but if his brother had not seen fit to disclose that fact at kencote, not even the fact of his acquaintanceship with lady george dubec, it was not for him to do so. therefore, when his father asked him whether dick knew that she had come to blaythorn, and why she had come, he said, "i don't know in the least. he'll tell you if you ask him." the squire bent his brows on him. "you said he knew her very well." "i didn't say he knew her very well. i said he knew her better than i did. lots of people know her. she goes about everywhere in london." "she was an actress, you say?" "well, that's what i've heard. it may not be true." "it is true," said mrs. graham. "virginia vanreden. i remember quite well now. i saw her when i was in new york with my husband ten years ago. and a lovely creature she was. i shall go and call on her at once." the squire frowned again. "what sort of an actress was she?" he asked. "was she a chorus girl?" "it was a play called _the flower of florida_," replied mrs. graham, "a very silly play with catchy music, only it didn't catch me, because i hate music, and i was bored to tears. no, she wasn't a chorus girl, and she wasn't the flower of florida either--i remember the flower, an exuberant lady with gold teeth, who seemed to be very popular, but i should have said she was past her job. this girl danced--oh, i remember her very well; she was the best of the bunch, and the flower grinned at her with her teeth and scowled at her with her eyes while she was performing. when we got back to new york on our way home she had caught on, and all the richly gilded youth was crowding to see her. the flower had departed, mad with jealousy." "a dancing girl!" said the squire. "of course! just the sort that george dubec would have married. well, you may call on her if you like, mrs. graham, but----" "oh, i shall," said mrs. graham. "perhaps she will dance for me. i liked her immensely. she was certainly beautiful, and i like beauty. she was quite young too. she can't be very old now." "what i want to know is what brings her to blaythorn," said the squire, which closed the discussion, for cicely's carriage was announced at that moment, and the welfare of the mountfield horses being of paramount importance it was not many minutes before she and mrs. graham had driven away. dick returned shortly after six o'clock, and when he had changed his clothes, came into the library where his father was sitting at his big writing-table looking over papers, his gold-rimmed glasses perched on his straight nose. "oh, here you are," he said, looking over them at his son. "i say, what's this about lady george dubec taking the rectory at blaythorn?" dick took a cigarette out of his case and went over to the smoking-table by the fire to get a match. "i've just been to see her," he said; "she's a friend of mine." "well, but----" the squire was puzzled, vaguely uneasy, though he could not have told why. "what on earth has she come _here_ for? who brought her? you didn't, i suppose?" dick sat down with rather elaborate unconcern in one of the big easy-chairs facing his father, who had turned round sideways in his seat. "i suppose you may say i did bring her, in a way," he said. "she wanted to do a bit of mild hunting somewhere, and i told her she'd better try the south meadshire." "but they tell me she's well known with the quorn and all that sort of thing." "now i should like to know who told you that," said dick to himself, but he did not ask. "she hasn't hunted there for two seasons," he said. "she wanted something a bit quieter. i said i'd see if i could find her a smallish house, and i wrote to wylie, the agent at bathgate. blaythorn rectory was the only place he could get hold of, and the stables there aren't much." "i should think not." "they are better than you'd think, though, and she has only brought three horses." "why didn't you tell us you were springing this strange lady upon us?" asked the squire, as a beginning out of all the questions he wanted to ask. "i haven't been home for a month," said dick, "and i'm not much of a correspondent." "you didn't say anything about it last night, and you didn't say you were going over to see her this afternoon." the squire's uneasiness was beginning to take shape, and dick realised with annoyance that he had given it something to feed on. "i'm sorry," he said. "but we were talking about other things. the poor lady had a brute of a husband--i expect you knew him, didn't you?" "oh yes, i knew him. a pretty sort of rascal he was too." "i've always heard so, though i never met him. he behaved like a swine to her, at any rate, and she's a very charming woman. i think you'll like her, father. i want to ask the mater to go over and see her as soon as she can. she doesn't know any one hereabouts, and it's a bit lonely for her." he could not keep the note of appeal, rarely heard from him, out of his voice, but it escaped the squire, who only saw himself at issue with his eldest son--a position he exceedingly disliked. "oh, my dear boy!" he said. "a woman that blackguard george dubec picked up off the music-hall stage! you can't be serious." "that's not true," said dick sharply. "who said she was on the music-hall stage?" "well, on the stage, anyhow--dancing on the stage--it's the same thing." "who told you that?" "humphrey said she had been on the stage, and mrs. graham remembered seeing her when she was in america." "is humphrey here?" "yes, he came this afternoon. an american dancer, you know, dick, and a woman who would marry george dubec--really, you might have thought twice before you brought a person of that sort here; and as for your mother calling on her--that's out of the question. surely you can see that." the squire's tone was conciliatory. he would not have spoken in that way, upon a subject on which he felt strongly, to any one else in the world, and when he had spoken he threw a glance at his son, whose face betokened nothing of all he was thinking at that moment. dick did not speak at once. when he did he said quietly, "when i suggested to lady george, who has been a friend of mine for some time, that she should spend a month or two in this part of the country, i told her that my people would be glad to see her and do what they could for her. it never crossed my mind that you would refuse to acknowledge a friend of mine. it is not my habit to make friends of women i couldn't introduce you or my mother to." "but, my dear boy!" expostulated the squire. "a woman who has danced on the stage, the widow of a notorious profligate and swindler--george dubec was a swindler, and he wasn't received latterly even in men's society--decent men. _i_ wouldn't have received him, for one." "you can say what you like about george dubec," replied dick. "it was the way he had treated her that made me sorry for her, first of all. then i found she was a good woman, as well as a very charming one. there isn't a soul who knows her--and lots of people know her--who could have a word to say against her. it isn't generally known that she was on the stage--it was for a very short time--and i wish to goodness humphrey had minded his own business and kept that to himself. her father was a planter in the south, and lost everything he had in the war. she had to support her mother, and that was the only way. she was very young. i honour her for what she did." "yes, oh yes, that's all right," said the squire, who was coming more and more to feel that it was all wrong. "but it's no good, dick. plenty of people in their different lines of life do things that you can honour them for, as you say, but you don't welcome them to houses like kencote. we live a quiet enough life here, i know that. we're not one of the modern smart country houses, thank god, and never will be as long as i'm alive. but we're of some account in this part of the world, and have been for generations. and the long and the short of it is, dick, that if you want to make friends with ladies of that sort, i can't stop you--i don't want to--it's your affair and you're old enough to look after yourself--but i won't have them at kencote." inwardly, dick was raging, and it needed all his self-control to keep his feelings from showing themselves in his face or in his speech. but he knew that if he did so everything was lost. it had been no vain boast that he had made to virginia dubec, that he could manage his father. he had the advantage over him that a man who controls his speech and his temper always has over a man who habitually controls neither. for many years past the squire, who pictured himself as the wise but undisputed autocrat of his household, had gone to his eldest son for advice upon any matter that bothered him, and had always taken his advice. in questions of estate management he had never taken a step of any importance without consulting dick, and dick had been the virtual ruler of the estate, although the squire did not know it. in his father's eyes dick was a model son. he had never once had to exercise his paternal authority over him since his schooldays. he knew that kencote, which was the apple of his own eye, was also the apple of dick's, and that he would have as worthy a successor as any head of an old-rooted family ever had. in course of years he had come to treat his eldest son with a respect and consideration which he gave to no other being alive. except that none but an eldest son who was some day to step into his place could have aroused the feelings he had towards him, his attitude towards dick was what he might have felt towards a brother, almost, it might be said, towards an elder brother. now dick was quite aware of all this, and he knew also that in his last speech his father had crossed a line that had never yet been crossed between them. he had done what he did almost every day of his life with some member or other of his family or household, but had never done with him since he was a child, because he had never given him the opportunity. he called it putting his foot down, and although in reference to other matters dick had frequently, by the exercise of his peculiar gift of cool tact, caused the taking up again of a foot that was announced to have been put down, and by no means despaired of being able to do so in this instance, he knew that this was not the time to undertake the removal. something of his moral supremacy had already disappeared if his father could take it into his hands to give an ultimatum against his expressed wishes. there was no knowing how much further it would be damaged if he were encouraged, as he would be by opposition now that he had once delivered himself, to back up his revolt by strong speech. it was what he always fortified himself with either before or after the process of putting his foot down, and dick had no mind to undergo it. "very well," he said quietly. "if you feel like that about it, there's no more to be said. it's damned awkward for me, but i suppose i took too much on myself." the squire immediately recrossed the line, on the other side of which only opposition could possibly make him wish to keep his footing. "oh, well," he said, "of course i don't say--in this instance--what i mean is--well, look here, dick, i don't say anything one way or the other. i'll say this, my boy, you've never given me the slightest trouble, and we've always seen eye to eye in pretty well everything, and where we haven't at first you have always come to see that i was right in the end--eh? better let me think the question over--what? i don't want you to feel you can't ask your friends to this house, which will be your own some day." "i can hardly help feeling that, can i?" said dick, with a short laugh. "eh? well, i must think it over, and talk it over with your mother. you'd better think it over too, old boy. i can't help thinking you'll feel you haven't been very wise. we're clintons of kencote, you know. we owe something to ourselves." but dick could stand no more. "all right," he said, rising. "i think i'll go up and have a bath before dinner. i'm a bit stiff." chapter viii the squire feels trouble coming dick went out of the room angry with himself, angry with his father, and still more angry with his brother. he wanted to meet humphrey and have it out with him, and he knew that humphrey at that hour--about seven o'clock--would be in the smoking-room. but he went upstairs, not because he wanted a bath before dinner as he had told his father, and certainly not because he was stiff after trotting a dozen miles or so along the roads, but because he knew that it was not wise to have anything out with anybody unless you had complete command over yourself. so he went into his big comfortable bedroom, where a bright fire was burning, lit some candles, and threw himself into an easy-chair to think matters out. that his father would give way, that he was already in process of giving way, he was well assured. he knew how to work that all right, and he had taken no false step, as far as he could remember, in dealing with him. but that little fact of virginia's having once danced on the stage, of which she had told him in the early days of their friendship, as she had told him everything else about her varied, unhappy life, he had never thought that he--and she--would have to face. if it had not been for that, his father, so he told himself, would have given way already. knowing it, it was surprising that he had left anything to be said on the subject at all. he need never have known it; so few people did know it, even in london, where virginia was beginning to be well known, or in leicestershire, where she was very well known indeed. of course, humphrey knew it--he knew all that sort of gossip about everybody--and dick's anger against him began to burn as he imagined the way in which he would have let it out. he was like a spiteful old woman, fiddling about in drawing-rooms, whispering scandal into other old women's ears and receiving it into his own in return. at this point humphrey came into the room. "hullo, old chap!" he said. "what on earth are you doing up here? it isn't time to dress yet." dick got up quickly out of his chair and faced him. he had better have gone to him in the smoking-room at once before he had begun to think things over. "what the devil do you mean by meddling with my affairs?" he said angrily. humphrey stopped short and stared as if he had held a pistol to his head. he and dick and walter had been closer friends than most brothers are. their ways for some time had begun to diverge, but they had remained friends, and since their boyhood they had never quarrelled. such a speech as dick's was in effect more than a pistol held to his head. it was a pistol shot. "i suppose you mean what i told them downstairs about virginia dubec," he said. "virginia dubec? who gave you the right to call her virginia?" said dick hotly, and could have bitten out his tongue for saying it the moment after, for of course it told humphrey everything. but humphrey was too deeply astonished at the moment to take in anything. he thought he knew his brother; he had always rather admired him, and above all for his coolness. but if this was dick, passionate and indiscreet, he did not know him at all, and it was difficult to tell how to deal with him. but humphrey was cool too, in his own way, hating the discomfort of passion, and he certainly did not want to have a row with his elder brother. "i don't know why you're up against me like this," he said. "i should have thought we knew each other well enough by this time to talk over anything that wants talking over, sensibly. i'm quite ready to talk over anything with you, but hadn't we better go and do it downstairs? they'll be up here putting out your clothes directly." "we'll go down to the smoking-room," said dick, not sorry to have a minute or two in which to pull himself together. so they went downstairs without a word, and along a stone passage to a big room which had been given over to them as boys, because it was right away from the other rooms, and in which they knew no one would disturb them. neither of them spoke at once, but both took cigarettes from a box on a table, and humphrey offered dick a match, which he refused, lighting one for himself. "lady george dubec," said dick--"virginia dubec, if you like to call her so--i've no objection--is a friend of mine, as you know. she wanted a quiet place to hunt from for a month or two, and i said i would try to find her a house here. of course i told her that they would make friends with her from here. i went to see her this afternoon, and i come back to find you have been talking scandal about her, and giving the governor the impression that she's an impossible sort of creature for respectable people to know. upon my word, humphrey, you ought to be kicked." humphrey grew a shade paler, but he asked quietly, "what scandal do you accuse me of spreading about her?" "well, it isn't scandal in the sense that it's untrue; but i don't suppose a dozen people know that she was ever on the stage. it was only for a few months, and the circumstances of it did her credit. but if it gets about, it will do her harm. as far as the governor goes, of course, it puts him up on his hind legs at once, and here am i in the position of getting this quite charming lady, against whom nobody can say a word, down here, and my own people refusing to go near her. it's too bad. if you happened to know that about her, which, of course, is just the sort of thing you would find out and remember and talk about, out of all the other things you might say about a woman like that, you ought to have kept it to yourself. and you would have done if you had had a spark of decent feeling." "i _should_ have kept it to myself if i had had any idea it was through you she came here." "you ought to have kept it to yourself in any case. you know her, you know what she is, and the first thing you find to blurt out about her when you hear she has come down here is the very thing that you know will put everybody against her!" "look here, dick, there's no sense in you going on blackguarding me like this. i hadn't a ghost of a notion she was anywhere near here when i told them what i did. the moment i came into the room the governor said, 'we've been talking about lady george dubec. do you know her?' i said, 'yes, she's a very charming lady.' that was the very first thing i said. then i said, 'she was an actress once upon a time.' there's nothing in that. you say very few people know it. you're quite wrong. lots of people know it. why, even mrs. graham knew it, and had seen her. nobody thinks anything the worse of her for it. why should they? and anyhow it wasn't until afterwards that they told me that she had come down here. then i said, 'dick knows her better than i do; he'll tell you all you want to know.' really, old chap, you're a bit unreasonable." both of them had been standing so far, but now humphrey, feeling perhaps that the crisis had been disposed of, threw himself into a chair. so it was, on the surface. dick stood for a time looking down on the floor. if it was as humphrey had said, and he had not known that virginia dubec was in the neighbourhood until after he had let out that fact about her, it was impossible to carry the attack further. but dick was no more satisfied with him than before. the hostility he had felt remained, and was destined to grow. from that moment the common ground of easy, tolerant brotherhood upon which they had both stood for so long was left behind. dick had begun to criticise, to find cause for dislike; humphrey had received an affront, and he did not easily forgive an affront. but the cement of their years of frictionless companionship still held, and could not be broken in a moment. dick also took a chair. "well, if you didn't know----" he said rather grudgingly. "no, i didn't know, and i'm sorry," said humphrey; "the governor won't hold out, dick; he's only got to see her." it was the best thing he could have said. dick was inwardly gratified, and some of his resentment departed. "you needn't say anything unless he opens the subject," he said. "but----" "oh, i know what to say if he does," said humphrey. "i say, dick, old chap, is it a case?" dick was not at all ready for this--from humphrey, although if walter had asked him he might have admitted how much of a case it was, and gained some contentment by talking it over. "i like her, of course," he said, somewhat impatiently; "i've never disguised it. i suppose one is permitted to make friendship with women occasionally?" "oh yes," said humphrey, with rather elaborate unconcern. then dick said he was going up to dress, and left the room without further word, while humphrey sat a while longer looking at the fire and turning things over in his mind. over the dinner-table that evening there was talk of the forthcoming hunt ball, and the one or two others which made the week after christmas a short season of gaiety in south meadshire. the birketts were coming to stay for them, the judge and his wife and unmarried daughter, and his other daughter, lady senhouse, with her husband. these were the only guests invited so far, and the squire, who liked a little bustle of gaiety about him now and again, said that they must ask one or two more people. "we shall be unusually gay this year," he said, "with the ball for grace at kemsale, which is sure to be well done. we must take a good party over from kencote. who can we ask?" it was a somewhat extraordinary thing that a question like that could not easily be answered at kencote. the squire very seldom left home, mrs. clinton practically never, and in the course of years the families from whom they could draw for visitors had dwindled down to those of relations and county neighbours. the squire was quite satisfied with this state of things. there were plenty of people about him with whom he could shoot, and who would shoot with him; and an occasional dinner party was all or more than he wanted in the way of indoor sociability--that, and this yearly little group of balls, the hunt ball, the bathgate ball, and whatever might be added to them from one or other of the big houses round. kencote had never been one of those houses. its women had never been considered of enough importance to make the trouble and expense of ball-giving worth while, and the men could get all the balls they wanted elsewhere. before cicely was married her brothers had generally brought a few men down for these local gaieties, but for the past two years there had been no party from kencote. "i think lady aldeburgh would bring susan clinton if you were to ask her," said humphrey. "in fact, i'm pretty sure she would." now the countess of aldeburgh was a person of some importance in the social world, and her husband was sprung from the same race as the squire, sprung, in fact, some distance back, from kencote, and represented, as the squire not infrequently pointed out, a junior branch of the family of which he himself was the head. he was accustomed to speak rather patronisingly of the aldeburgh clintons on that account, although not to them, for he did not know them, the present lord aldeburgh having been a small boy at school at that period of the squire's life when he had been about london and known everybody. "are they friends of yours?" he asked, not displeased at the idea. "yes," said humphrey. "i told susan clinton that she ought to see the home of her ancestors--i was lunching with them--and lady aldeburgh said they couldn't see it unless they were asked." "no difficulty about asking them," said the squire. "very pleased to see them, and show them what there is, although i dare say they won't think much of it after the sort of thing they're accustomed to. they must take us as they find us. did you say anything about these balls?" "well, yes, i did--threw out feelers, you know. i think they would come if mother were to ask them." "oh, write by all means, nina," said the squire. "include aldeburgh, of course." "oh, _he_ won't come," said humphrey. "he never goes where they do. he doesn't like them." the squire frowned. he knew there were people like that, but he didn't want to hear about them. according to his old-fashioned ideas, husbands and wives, if they went visiting at all, ought to go visiting together. of course it was different where a man might have to go up to london for a day or two. there was no necessity always to take his wife along with him. or he might perhaps go to a house to shoot. that was all right. but for women to make a point of going about by themselves--why, they had much better stop at home and look after their household duties. "well, ask him, of course," he said. "he can refuse if he likes. we can do very well without him. are either of you boys going to ask any men?" dick had thought of bringing a friend, captain vernon, who had been to kencote before and would be very welcome. and humphrey was going to ask lord edgeware. "what, that young fool who lost all his money racing?" asked the squire. "he didn't lose it all," said humphrey, "and he's had a lot more left to him." "we don't want that sort of person here," said the squire decisively. "all right," said humphrey. "but he's a very good chap all the same, and has finished sowing his wild oats." "he's an absolute rotter," said dick. "i quite agree; we don't want that sort of fellow here." humphrey threw a glance at him and flushed with annoyance, but he said lightly, "i beg to withdraw his candidature. is there any objection to bobby trench? he hasn't spent money racing because he has never had any to spend." dick was silent. the squire enquired if mr. trench was one of lord so-and-so's sons, and being informed that he was, said that he had known his father and should be pleased to see him at kencote. so the party was made up, and the men went on to talk about pheasants and hounds, until the twins came in for dessert, when they went on talking about pheasants and hounds. the squire and dick went into the library to go over their farm papers together almost immediately after dinner, leaving humphrey with his mother and the girls in the morning-room. when they had finished they betook themselves to easy-chairs to talk, as their custom was in the evening. they were very good friends, and had enough in common to make their conversation mutually agreeable. neither of them read much, and when dick was at kencote they usually spent their evenings talking. but dick was rather silent to-night, and the squire was uneasily conscious of the shadow that had fallen on their intercourse. and when he was uneasy about anything his uneasiness always found expression. "i say, my boy, i hope you don't take it amiss what i said about this lady george dubec this afternoon," he said. "you see my point all right, don't you?" "i see your point well enough," said dick. "only i don't think it's much of a point." he was accustomed thus to address his father on equal terms, and the squire liked to have it so. he was now only anxious, while having his own way, to avoid the unpleasantness of leaving a grudge against himself in dick's mind. "well, we needn't go all over it again," he said. "i haven't made up my mind yet. i don't say your mother shan't call and i don't say she shall. i must think it over. of course it's a bit awkward for you." "it's more than a bit awkward for me," said dick uncompromisingly. "when you do think it over you might consider how particularly awkward it is, after having helped this lady to a house here, to have to tell her that my people don't consider her respectable enough to know." "h'm! ha!" grunted the squire, at a loss how to meet this. then he made a clutch at his authority. "well, i think you ought to have asked me first, dick," he said, "and not taken things for granted. if i'm putting you in an awkward position now, it's because you have put me in an awkward position first." there was reason in this, perhaps more than the squire usually displayed in discussing a subject in which his feelings were already engaged, and dick did not want to go over the ground again until matters had advanced themselves a stage. "she will be at the meet on monday--driving," he said. "you will see what she is like, and that she isn't in the least like what you probably think she is. i should like to introduce you to her, but that shall be as you please." the squire did not reply to this. he sat looking at the fire with a puzzled frown on his face. then he turned to his son and said, "there's nothing between you and this lady, dick, is there? you hadn't got her in your mind last night when you said that you did not want to marry a young girl?" dick cursed himself inwardly for having made that unlucky speech. he was not cut out for however mild a conspiracy, and he hated to have to fence and parry. but he must answer quickly if suspicion, which would be disastrous at the present stage, were not to rest on him. he gave a little laugh. "is that what you have been thinking of?" he asked. "is that why you don't want mother to call on lady george?" the squire had only to push his question, and he would have learnt everything, for dick would not have denied virginia. but he did not do so. "no, of course not," he said. "but if it were so--if that's how the land lay----" dick did not tell him that that was not how the land lay. he said nothing, and the squire relinquished the subject, not to open it up again until he was alone with his wife that night. then his disquietude came out, for dick's reply to his question had not satisfied him, and putting two and two together, as he said, and impelled towards dreadful conclusions by his habit of making the most of vague fears, he had now fully convinced himself that the land did indeed lie in the direction of lady george dubec, now settled within a mile or two, at blaythorn, and that, unless he could do something to stop it, a most dreadful catastrophe was about to overtake the house of clinton. mrs. clinton could do little to calm his fears. privately she thought that he was making a mountain out of a mole-hill, and that dick was as little likely as the squire himself to marry such a woman as she imagined lady george dubec to be. for she knew how much alike her husband and her son were in all the essential aims and ambitions of their lives, although she knew also that dick had a far cooler head and a better brain than his father's. for that very reason he was the less likely to make a marriage which would be beneath the dignity of his family. she said what she could to persuade her husband that dick might be trusted in a matter of this sort, but he was in that stage of alarm when however much a man may desire to find himself mistaken he resists all attempts to prove him so. "i tell you, nina," he said, "that he told me himself that when he did marry it would be a middle-aged woman, or words to that effect. and he gets this woman down here without saying a word to us about it, and they say she's good-looking--you heard humphrey say that yourself, and mrs. graham too--and he goes over there this afternoon without mentioning it.--by jove! didn't he say he wanted to go and see jim at mountfield? yes, he did,--you remember--at luncheon. nina, i'm afraid there's no doubt about it. can't you _see_ what a dreadful thing it would be, and that we _must_ stop it at any cost?" "i hope it will not come about," said mrs. clinton. "dick is level-headed, and he sees questions of this sort in much the same light as you do, edward." "it would be intolerable," wailed the poor squire. "and dick of all people! i'd have trusted him anywhere. and now i shall have to stand up against him, and it will be one of the hardest things i have ever had to do. but i won't let him throw himself away and drag the old name in the dust if i can possibly prevent it. and, god helping me, i will prevent it, whatever it costs me. nina, you are not to go near this woman. the only way is to keep her at arm's-length. if we stand firm the affair will fade out, and dick will forget all about it. he has always been a good boy. i've been proud of my son. he will thank me some day for saving him from himself. good-night, nina, god bless you. there's a difficult time coming for us at kencote, i'm afraid." so night and silence fell on the great house. its master, always healthily tired after his day, spent mostly in the open, soon forgot his troubles in sleep; its mistress lay awake for a long time, wondering if trouble were really going to befall her first-born, who had gone so far from her since she had first hugged him to her breast. and in other rooms in the house there were those who lay awake and wearied themselves with the troubles of life or slept soundly without a care, some of them of account in the daily comings and goings, some of very little, but one and all acting and reacting on one another, concerned in some degree in a common life. chapter ix dick pays a sunday visit it did not take dick long to find out on that next (sunday) morning that his diplomacy had failed, that his father, urged by his fears, had discovered what he would have hidden from him for a time, or thought he had discovered it, which came to the same thing, since it was true, and that he might just as well have announced his intention of marrying virginia dubec, and entered at once upon the struggle which was now bound to come in any case. nothing was said on either side, and the squire did his best to behave as usual. but the attempt was too much for him, and there was no one who did not know before breakfast was over that there was a disturbance in the air. he would enter upon a course of conversation with gaiety, and relinquish it immediately to frown upon his plate. he grumbled at everything upon the table, and testily rebuked the twins for fidgeting. they took the rebuke calmly, knowing quite well what it portended, and were only anxious to discover the cause of the upset. "it's this lady george dubec," said joan, when they were alone together. "there's something fishy about her; it must have come out after we were sent away yesterday. father thinks he's emperor of this part of meadshire, and he doesn't like her coming here without his being consulted." "i don't think it's that at all," said nancy. "i believe it's humphrey's debts. father has got pots of money, but he hates shelling it out. he was snappy with humphrey this morning." "so he was with everybody but dick. that proves nothing. a week's pocket-money that it's this lady george." "dick said we weren't to bet." "oh, well, perhaps we'd better not, then. he was a brick about the camera. i don't suppose he's concerned in it, whatever it is. with father, dick does no wrong." "i'm not sure. joan, supposing dick has fallen in love with lady george and father is upset about it!" "oh, my dear, do talk sense. dick in love with a widow!" "stranger things have happened. anyhow, we'll leave no stone unturned to find out what it is." "oh, we'll ferret it out all right. it will add to the interest of life." there was one thing that the squire always did on the rare occasions on which he found himself in a dilemma, and that was to consult his half-brother, the rector. consequently when, after church, meeting mrs. beach, the rector's wife, in the churchyard, he asked her if she and tom would come up to luncheon, dick, overhearing him, smiled inwardly and a little ruefully, and pictured to himself the sitting that would be held in the afternoon, when the rector would be invited into the library and the squire would unbosom himself of his difficulties. dick himself had often joined in these conclaves. "let's see what tom has to say about it," his father would say. "he has a good head, tom." dick would be left out of this conclave, but as he thought of the line that his uncle was likely to take, he half wished that he had had a conclave with him himself beforehand. the rector was a man of peace, a lovable man, who hated to see any one uncomfortable, and perhaps, for a churchman, hated a little too much to run the risk of discomfort himself. probably he would have sympathised. certainly he would have brought no hard judgment to bear on virginia, whatever she had done and whatever she had been. however, it was too late to think of that now, and when joan asked him at luncheon if he would go for a walk with them in the afternoon, he took the bull by the horns and said that he was going to drive over to blaythorn. "by the by," said mrs. beach, not noticing the squire's sudden frown, "have you heard that mr. marsh has let his rectory to a hunting lady?" "yes," said dick, "lady george dubec. she is a friend of mine, and i'm going over to see her." never had the squire spoken with more difficulty. but it behoved him to speak, and to speak at once. "i am very sorry she has come," he said. "she is a friend of dick's in london, but we can't recognise her here at kencote." except that the servants were not in the room it was a public throwing down of the gage of battle. it amounted on the squire's part to an affront of his son, the being beloved best in the world, and he would have put it on him if the whole household had been present. but what it cost him to do so could be told from his moody fits of silence during the rest of the meal, his half-emptied plate and his twice-emptied glass. dick took the blow without flinching, although he was inwardly consumed with anger, not at the affront to himself, but to virginia. "we are a little behind the times at kencote," he said lightly. "but we shall probably fall into line by and by." the squire made no answer. he had shot his bolt and had none of the ammunition of repartee at hand. the awkward moment was covered by the immediate flow of conversation, but he took little or no part in it, and it was a relief when the meal was over. when the squire had led the way into the library and shut the door upon himself and the rector, he broke out at once. "tom, you heard what happened. dick is out of his mind about this woman. unless something can be done to stop it, a dreadful day is coming to kencote." the rector, tall, fleshy, slow in movement, mild of speech, was astonished. "my dear edward!" he exclaimed. "i did not gather from what passed that--that this meant anything serious." "oh, serious!" echoed the squire, half distraught. "it's as serious as it can be, tom." and he told him in his own decisive manner exactly how serious it seemed to him to be. "a hunting woman!" he ended up. "i could have forgiven that. i can't deny that women do hunt, now, who wouldn't have done in our young days. an american! well, people do marry them nowadays--but an american at kencote after all these generations! think of it, tom! and if that were only the worst! but a stage dancer! a woman who has shown herself before the public--for money! and a widow!--a woman who has been married to one of the worst blackguards in england. you remember him, tom--at eton." "no," said the rector. "he was before my time." "before your time--yes, and three or four years older than i am. he'd have been an old man if he'd been alive now. and it's the widow of that man my son wants to marry. isn't it too shameful, tom? what can have come over him? he has never acted in this sort of way before. my boy dick! in everything that has ever happened to annoy me, he has always behaved just exactly as i would have my son behave. and now he brings this trouble on me. oh, tom, tell me what on earth i'm to do." the poor gentleman was so overcome with distress that it was pitiful to witness. the rector knew how he took things--hard at first, and bringing his heaviest weight of resistance to bear upon the lightest obstacles, but calming down after he had been humoured a bit, accepting the inevitable like a sensible man, and making the best of it. but this was beyond the point at which he could be humoured. it struck at all that he held dearest in life, the welfare of his son, the dignity of his house. he would not give way here, whatever distress it cost him to hold out. "have you seen this lady, edward?" asked the rector. "oh, seen her! no," replied the squire. "why should i want to see her? she may be good-looking. they say she is. i suppose dick wouldn't have fallen in love with her if she were not, and at any rate women who are not good-looking don't become pets of the stage, as i'm told this woman was. pah! it's beyond everything i could have believed of dick. i would rather he had married the daughter of a farm-labourer--a girl of clean healthy english stock. to bring a creature from behind the footlights and make her mistress of kencote--a soiled woman--that's what she is, even if she has never sold herself--and who knows that she hasn't? she _did_ sell herself--to a broken-down _roué_, a man old enough to be her father--for his wretched title, i suppose. and now she wants to buy kencote, and my son, dick, the straightest, finest fellow a father ever had reason to be proud of. i tell you, tom, the world ought to be delivered of these harpies. they ought to be locked up, tom, locked up, and the wickedness whipped out of them." "has dick said that he wanted to marry her?" asked the rector, anxious to bring this tirade, which was gathering in intensity, to an end. "it's as plain as it can be. he has brought her down here, and he wants us to take her up." "well, but is that all, edward? surely you have more to go on than that, if you have made up your mind that he wants to marry her." "i _have_ more to go on. he told me only two nights ago that he was quite ready to marry, and that he wouldn't marry a girl. that's plain english, isn't it? and this comes just on top of it. why, he had her down here--fixed it all up for her--and never said a word to us till after we'd heard from outside that she was there. there are a lot of things. i can put two and two together as well as anybody, and i haven't a doubt of it. and i asked him definitely, yesterday, and he didn't deny it." "he didn't acknowledge it, i suppose." "i tell you he didn't deny it. he gave me an evasive answer. that isn't like dick. she has had a bad influence on him already. don't waste time in trying to persuade me that black is white, tom. tell me how i am to stop this." the rector could not tell him how to stop it. he knew very well that dick was a stronger man than his father, and that if he had made up his mind to do a thing he would do it. but he still doubted whether he had made up his mind to do this particular thing. he thought that the squire was probably alarming himself needlessly, and with all the art that lay in his power he tried to persuade him that it was so. "young men," he ended, "do make friends with women they wouldn't want to marry. you know that is so, edward. it is no use shutting your eyes to facts." "yes, but they don't bring them down to their homes for their mothers and sisters to make friends with," retorted the squire. "it's the last thing dick would do, and i'd rather he did what he's doing now, bad as it is, than do a thing like that. he's hypnotised--that's what it is--he thinks she's a good woman--everything she ought to be----" "and perhaps she _is_ a good woman, edward, and everything she ought to be," interrupted the rector, speaking more emphatically than was his wont, for in his simple unworldliness it had not occurred to him that his last words could bear the interpretation the squire had put upon them, and he was rather scandalised. "i say that you ought to hold your judgment until you have seen her, and know something of her at first hand. i do not believe that dick would expect his family to make friends with a lady who was not above reproach, and i certainly never meant for a moment to imply that he would do such a thing as make love to a woman he did not intend to marry. when i said that men make friends with women, i meant no more than i said." "well, you're a parson," said his brother, "and you've got to keep your eyes shut to certain things that go on, i suppose." "no, edward, that is not the duty of a parson," returned the rector. "i shut my eyes to nothing. it seems to me that you do. it seems to me that you shut your eyes to what you know of dick's character. you picture to yourself a vulgar, scheming adventuress. i say that if dick is in love with this lady, as you say he is, she is not that, but something very different, and i say again that you ought to withhold your judgment until you have seen her." "as far as seeing her goes," grumbled the squire, "there's nothing easier than that. i shall see her at the covert-side, and i dare say i shall see her scampering all over the county covered with mud, and getting in the way of the hounds. women are an infernal nuisance in the hunting-field. well, you don't give me much comfort, tom. still, it does one some good to talk over one's troubles. i'm afraid this is going to be a big trouble--the biggest i've ever had in my life." "then don't meet it half-way," said the rector. "you don't know for certain that dick wants to marry her, and if he does she can't be anything like you have imagined her. i'm afraid i must go now, edward. i have to look in at the sunday-school." "well, good-bye, tom, my dear fellow. tell 'em in the sunday-school to obey their parents. yes, for this is _right_, by george! the bible says. and so it is; if children would obey their parents, half the trouble in the world would disappear." dick was not best pleased, when he drove up to the door of blaythorn rectory, to hear that her ladyship had gone for a walk with miss dexter, and would not be back for an hour or more. he had not told her that he was coming over, and had not intended to do so. horses were not taken out of the kencote stables on sundays without necessity. he said he would wait, and went into the drawing-room to get what consolation he could out of his own thoughts until virginia should return. he had been there about half an hour, sometimes walking up and down the room, sometimes reading a few pages of a book and throwing it impatiently on one side, sometimes sitting staring moodily into the fire, when he heard voices in the hall. a look of relief came over his face and he got up, prepared to greet virginia, when the door was opened and mrs. graham was shown into the room. she was dressed in her usual serviceable walking clothes and had a dog-whip in her hand, although she had left her dogs for the time being outside. "good gracious, dick!" she exclaimed. "they told me there was nobody here." "the other maid let me in," said dick. he could not for the life of him prevent himself feeling and looking shamefaced. mrs. graham took no notice of it. she walked straight to a little writing-table in the corner of the room and sat down. "as i suppose you are wondering what on earth i am doing here," she said, "i'll tell you. i had a letter this morning from anne conyers, who asked me to come and see lady george, as she didn't know a soul in the county. i'm only too pleased to; we're such a set of rustics here that it does us good to get somebody new, if they're not nincompoops like those people we've just got rid of at mountfield. i thought i would drop in this afternoon. if she's sensible she won't mind my coming in these clothes. if she isn't i don't want to know her. you know her; you don't think she'll mind, eh?" "oh, of course not." "i'm just going to write her a note asking her to dine to-morrow. jim and muriel are coming, and roddy buckstone. will you and humphrey come, dick? we don't want too many women." "i don't know about humphrey. i shall be pleased to." "well, that's all right. you might take a message from me to humphrey." "i'd rather you wrote a note to him--and posted it." "oh!" said mrs. graham in a voice that invited explanation. but dick gave none. "lady george has a friend staying with her--miss dexter," he said. "you'd better ask her too, i think." "oh, of course. thank you for telling me. miss dexter." she wrote her note, fastened and directed it, dwelling rather deliberately on the process as she neared its completion. she seemed as if she were turning over in her mind something to say, but finally rose, and said, "well, i suppose she'll get that when she comes in. i'll take myself and the dogs back to mountfield now." "why don't you wait and see her?" asked dick, rather grudgingly, for he didn't want mrs. graham to stay. "she can't be long now." mrs. graham looked at him shrewdly. "i don't think i will," she said. "she'll be out with the hounds to-morrow, i suppose. look here, dick, i don't know whether i'm a fool to say anything or not, and i don't want to mix myself up in other people's business, but anne conyers told me that lady george was a friend of yours, and that you had got her this house. we'll see that she gets on here all right." she gave him a knowing nod which made him reply-- "oh, you mean that there's likely to be trouble at kencote. well, i don't mind telling you that there _is_ trouble. my father announced to-day before tom and grace and the whole family that lady george dubec might be good enough for me to know in london, but she wasn't good enough for him or anybody to know at kencote." he spoke bitterly, and as mrs. graham, who knew him well, had never heard him speak of his father. "did he?" she said. "well, that's what, if i were a man, i should call rather thick. still, he'll probably come round, and if he doesn't he is not the only person in south meadshire, though he sometimes behaves as if he thought he was. good-bye, dick; to-morrow at eight o'clock, then. i'll write to humphrey, though i shan't break my heart if he doesn't come." dick let her out at the front door, where she was vociferously greeted by her pack, and then returned to the drawing-room. "and i wonder what _she'll_ be thinking as she goes home," he said to himself. virginia came into the room alone when she and miss dexter returned. dick could hear her glad little cry of surprise outside when she was told he was there, and it made him catch his breath with a queer mixture of sensations. she brought a cool fresh fragrance into the room with her, and he thought he had never seen her look sweeter, with her rather frail beauty warmed into sparkling life by the exercise she had taken in the sharp winter air and her pleasure at finding him there on her return. sitting by her side on the sofa he told her what had happened, and she took the news thoughtfully and sadly. "he must be rather terrible, your father," she said, "and cleverer than you thought too, dick, if he suspects already what is between us." "oh, i suppose it's i who am not so clever as i thought myself," he said. "when he asked me point-blank i couldn't tell him a lie. but i own i never thought he would ask me. it was from something i had said to him the night before, about not wanting to marry a youngster. i don't know why on earth i was fool enough to say it, and put him on the scent. i suppose i was thinking such a lot of you, my girl. i can't get you out of my head, you know. but the fact is i'm not cut out for a conspirator, virginia, and now that all my carefully laid plans have come to nothing, i'm not sure that i'm not rather relieved." "you think they have quite come to nothing, dick?" "it looks like it. we shall know to-morrow. i still think--what i've always thought and built upon--that if he once sees you----" "dear dick! but it's rather late for that now, if he has heard all about me, and has made a picture of me in his mind." "well, it's such a preposterous picture, that the reality can't help striking him. we won't do anything until after we know what has happened at the meet. and by the by, there's a dinner invitation for you for to-morrow evening." he told her about mrs. graham and gave her her note. "that is very kind of mrs. graham," she said. "i forgot to tell you that i knew her sister-in-law. i'm afraid we shan't have much opportunity of talking there, dick." so they talked where they were for a long time, until the dusk fell and the maid came in with the lights and the tea, and miss dexter after her, and the result of their talk was that they felt things were not as bad as they looked. dick's father would relent some day, and until he did they had each other. chapter x the meet at apthorpe common the meet on monday was at apthorpe common, a distance of nine miles from kencote, and the three men appeared at breakfast in boots and breeches. the squire always did so, and donned his red coat, with the yellow collar of the south meadshire hunt, when he dressed for the day. dick came to breakfast in a tweed jacket, and humphrey in a quilted silk smoking-coat, and both had linen aprons tied round their waists to preserve their well pipe-clayed breeches. but the squire belonged to an older generation, having been born when boots and breeches still lingered as the normal dress of country gentlemen, and a red coat was as easy in the wearing as any other coat. he looked a fine figure of a man, as he stood up at the end of the table to read prayers to his household, and ready to go with the best if he got a horse up to his weight. at a quarter to ten punctually the squire stood at the front door enveloped in a heavy ulster, a serviceable but not very shiny hat on his head, a cigar in his mouth, drawing on his gloves, and looking over the handsome pair of greys in his phaeton. humphrey, whose hat lacked nothing in polish, stood by him in a fur coat. as the stable clock chimed the quarter, the squire turned to the butler, who stood behind him with a rug, and asked where captain clinton was. "dick is driving himself," said humphrey. "he started five minutes ago." the squire's face darkened, but he climbed up to his seat and took the reins. humphrey got up by his side, and with a clatter and jingle they started, while the groom swung himself into his seat behind. if humphrey's thoughts had not been taken up with his own affairs he might have felt sorry for his father. it was an unfailing custom at kencote that when there were only three to go to a meet far enough off to necessitate a drive, they should go in the phaeton. the squire enjoyed these drives, with his eldest son sitting by his side, especially on such a morning as this, soft and mild, and holding out every prospect of a good day at the sport that he loved. now he drove along at his usual steady pace without saying a word. the brightness had gone out of his day's pleasure before it had begun, and he would just as soon as not have turned his horses' heads and gone home again. there had been constraint between him and dick since the day before, but not unfriendliness, and he had thought that perhaps they might have come as closely together as usual during this drive, or at any rate have buried for a time the thought of what lay between them in the prospect of the day's sport. but dick had gone off alone without a word, and his heart was sore within him. dick might have spared him this, he thought. it meant, as nothing else he could have done would have meant, that their pleasant, almost brotherly, intimacy was to cease. each was to go his own way, until one or the other of them gave in. and the squire knew, although he may not have said as much to himself, that dick could support this sort of estrangement better than he could. dick had his friends, scores of them, and when he came down to kencote he was only leaving them behind him; while to him, surrounded by his family, but very much alone as far as the society of men of his own interests was concerned, dick's visits to his home were the brightest times in his life, when everything that was to be done seemed better worth the doing, because so much of it was done in his company, and the pleasures of life were redoubled in value because they shared them and could talk about them, beforehand and afterwards. his mind too was turned to what lay before him, which he had thought about as little as possible. he was going to where he could see this woman who had enslaved dick. she was to be there, spoiling for him even the pursuit he liked best. and dick no doubt would be at her side, piloting her, making himself conspicuous by his attentions to the whole county, providing food for gossip, perhaps for scandal. if this creature was to be hanging to his coat-tails, his son, who had followed hounds since his childhood, and whom he had always taken a pride in seeing well mounted and going with the best of them, would be pointed at as a man who had always been in the first flight until he had been caught by a woman, but was now of no account in the field. the squire had seen that happen before, and it covered him with shame and anger to think that it would happen to dick. his anger was directed against virginia alone. he felt none against his son, but only a kind of thwarted tenderness, which would have led him to do anything, short of allowing him to throw himself away and spoil his life, to bring back the old happy state of feeling between them. it crossed his mind that he might even be obliged to let him have his way in this matter. he knew that he would be sorely tried if he were to hold out, and that he might not have the power to do so. he thought that perhaps he would do as tom had advised and see this woman first, see if there were any saving grace in her which would enable him to give way, and comfort himself with the idea that things might have been worse. at any rate, he was bound to see her shortly, and without making any decision he could dismiss the subject from his mind now and prepare to enjoy himself as much as possible under the circumstances. he sat up straighter, drew the reins more firmly and laid his whip lightly across the flanks of the greys. "well, humphrey," he said as the horses quickened their pace, "i think we shall have a good day. scent ought to lie well, and we're sure to find a fox in that spinney of antill's. i've never known it draw blank yet." "yes, we ought to get off pretty quick," said humphrey, also rousing himself. "i say, i'm in rather a quandary." "well, what is it?" asked the squire rather shortly. humphrey's quandaries were generally of a financial nature, and he had no wish to add one of them to his present troubles. "mrs. graham has asked me to dine to-night." "well, why not? you can have something to take you over." "oh yes. dick is going. it is to meet lady george dubec."' the squire's face darkened instantly. here he was, plunged straight into it again, when he wanted to free his mind for the time being of lady george dubec and anything that had to do with her. "mrs. graham seems to have lost no time," he said. "she hadn't called on her on saturday. i suppose she must have done so yesterday. and she knows perfectly well that i don't want to have anything to do with the woman. are jim and cicely going?" "i don't know. she only mentions dick." "if she mixes cicely up with--with this lady, i shall be very much annoyed. not that i can say anything, i suppose, now she's married, but i think mrs. graham might respect my wishes a little more. well, you can do as you like. i suppose the modern way is to disregard the wishes of the head of the house entirely." "i don't want to disregard your wishes," said humphrey. "i think as long as one remains at home one ought to respect them." the squire was mollified at this, but he only said rather gruffly, "well, if you can put up with eating your dinner at home this evening, i'd rather you should. dick has taken the bit between his teeth, and he certainly doesn't think that my wishes should be respected. apparently nothing that i can say will influence him. he seems to me to be heading straight for the nastiest kind of fall. what sort of a woman is this, humphrey? you said you knew her, didn't you?" "oh, i've met her," said humphrey. "she's a very pretty woman. nobody can deny that." "people who have made a success on the stage generally are," said the squire; "at least, they used to be in my time. is she--well, is she a lady?" "oh lord, yes," said humphrey. "i'm sorry i let out that about her having been on the stage. you couldn't possibly guess it to look at her. dick tackled me about it yesterday and said that nobody knew it. people do know it, but there's no necessity to spread it all over the place." the squire thought for a moment. then he put his question point-blank. "does dick want to marry this woman, or doesn't he?" "if you had asked me that two days ago," replied humphrey glibly, "i should have smiled at the idea. now, i believe he does." "what has made you change your mind, then?" "well, his getting her down here, for one thing. then, as i told you, he was furious with me for letting out what i did about her. in fact, if i hadn't kept my head we should have had a devil of a row about it; and dick and i have never had a row since we were kids." the squire digested this information. it confirmed his worst fears and made his heart the heavier. "can't you help to stop it?" he asked shortly. "you and he have always been pretty good friends." "i can't do any more than the twins could," replied humphrey. "as i told you, we nearly had a row about it as it is. if i tried to interfere we should have one without a doubt." "i suppose you don't want a thing like that to happen in the family?" asked the squire, throwing him a side glance. "of course i don't want it," said humphrey. "i've nothing against the lady as she is, but i don't want her for a sister-in-law." "i should think not," said the squire emphatically. "well, i suppose _i'm_ the only person who can stop it, and by george! i will." again he stroked the greys with his whip, and their pace quickened. "look here, humphrey," he said, "tell me how on earth i _can_ stop it." humphrey smiled into his thick fur collar. it was so like his father, to issue a bold statement of his intentions and then immediately to ask for advice as to how to act. but he had not been accustomed to ask advice of humphrey. "well, it doesn't seem to be a very difficult matter," he said. "what do you mean?" asked the squire shortly. "he's not paying much regard to my wishes now." "i dare say you can't stop him amusing himself with the lady," said humphrey. "i don't know why you should want to. if you make it awkward for him he'll be all the keener; if you give him his head he's quite likely to come to his senses. but it will be a different thing if it comes to marrying." "why?" "well, what's he to marry on--his pay as a captain in the guards? what can any of us marry on if you don't see us through?" the squire's attitude towards his eldest son was such that, through all his anxiety and all his cogitations, he had never yet thought of this. he was a rich man, and he gave all his sons good allowances and dick a very handsome one. he did this as a matter of course, and never looked upon it otherwise than as rightly due from him. and, equally of course, he was prepared largely to increase the allowance when dick should marry. but it was quite true that there was nothing to prevent him from stopping it altogether. if the worst came to the worst he could exercise the power of the purse, but it would be extremely repugnant to him to do it, and the suggestion struck him like a temptation to act unworthily. "what on earth put that into your head?" he asked. humphrey was a little taken aback by his tone. he was annoyed with dick, as he had never been annoyed with him since their childhood, although he had often been jealous of his seniority. but they had been on such good terms together that he could not feel quite comfortable in putting a spoke in his wheel, as he felt he was now doing. "it doesn't want much putting there," he said. "the idea of marriage does cross one's mind occasionally, and one naturally wonders what you would do to make it possible. it wouldn't be possible at all without you." "well, i should be very sorry to have to take a step like that," said the squire after further consideration. "and i don't want to talk about it." now they came to the foot of a long hill, bounded on one side by a deep wood, on the other by open grass-land, which fell away gradually, and some distance off swelled again into a long undulating rise, dotted with pieces of woodland, arable fields, and farms here and there, and ended in the far distance in a range of hills lying mistily under parallels of soft grey clouds. it was the best bit of country the south meadshire could boast, and to the squire surveying it largely, as he walked his horses up the hill, every square mile within reach of the eye spoke of some remembered episode in the long course of years during which he had enjoyed his best-loved sport. there--a line of grey at the bottom of the green valley--was the brook into which he and his pony had soused head over ears when as a small boy he had thought to follow his grandfather over a place which that redoubtable sportsman himself had felt some qualms about taking. the old man, warned by the shouts, had looked round and trotted back to the brook, where he must have made up his mind that neither the small boy nor the small pony was in danger of drowning, for he had said, "well, if you're such a fool as to get in, let's hope you're not too much of a fool to get out," and had turned his horse's head and galloped off without further ado. there was the covert from which a cunning old dog fox had been hunted three times in two seasons, and had given them three separate runs, which were talked of still when the old stagers of the south meadshire got together at one end of the table over the port, although it was nearly thirty years ago. there was the fence over which, as a hard-riding subaltern, at the end of a season during which he had hunted for the most part in leicestershire, he had broken the back of the best mare he had ever owned, through over-anxiety to show his neighbours what riding straight to hounds really meant, and nearly broken his own neck into the bargain. there was the grass field in which, many years before, although it seemed like yesterday, hounds had pulled their fox down, and dick, riding his first pony, had been in at the death, had won his first brush, and had been duly blooded. he smiled within himself and remembered how his little boy had ridden home at his side with the smears on his face and shown himself proudly to his mother, and how, forgetting his new-found manhood, he had howled when it was proposed to wash them off. there were other exploits of dick's and of his other sons', who had all taken to the sport as he would have had sons of his take to it, which this wide stretch of country recalled. in fact, dick and he, driving up this long hill to a meet at apthorpe, or beyond it, had been wont to recall episodes which they both remembered, pointing out this and that spot, near or far. he liked best to recall the doings of his boys, although his own and those of his hard-bitten, redoubtable old grandfather had not been forgotten in the long tale. it was as if a sudden chill had struck him when the thought came to him, that if he and dick were to be kept apart by what had come between them, they would perhaps never drive together again up the apthorpe hill. the hoarse note of a motor-horn behind him, and the necessity of drawing to the side of the road as the machine swirled by, enabled him to relieve his feelings by an expression of abhorrence stronger than he usually allowed himself, although his ordinary language on the use of motor-cars in connection with hunting did not lack vigour. and this particular motor-car contained the master of the south meadshire himself, who waved to him as he passed, and received no very warm greeting in return. the squire had had a grudge against mr. warner during the greater part of his life. his grandfather had kept the hounds for forty years, hunted them himself, and spent money lavishly on the upkeep of kennels and general equipment. when he had died the squire had been too young to follow him, and mr. warner, who had made his money in trade as the squire averred, although he had actually inherited it, and was but recently come into the county, had taken them. he was now an old man getting on for eighty, and had kept them ever since, hunting with them as regularly and riding as straight as he had ever done--a wonderful old man, already beginning, in his lifetime, to pass into a proverb, as the squire's grandfather, colonel thomas clinton, had done. but the squire had never had a good word for him. of all the positions in life which he might have filled, he felt it hard that the mastership of the south meadshire should have been kept out of his hands. and that was his grudge against mr. warner, carefully nourished by that gentleman's late acceptance of mechanical traffic, and sundry other causes which need not be enquired into. other motor-cars passed them before they got to the top of the hill, and the squire had a word or two of condemnation to spare for each, as they forced him to draw aside and control his horses, which shared his dislike of the new-fangled things. at the top of the rise the wood curved away to the right, and there was nothing before them but the wide gorse-speckled common, with the broad highroad running through it. they drove on for a mile and came to a high-lying inn by the roadside, appropriately named the "fox and hounds," with a sign-post and a water-trough in front of it, and a broad piece of grass, which was now the centre of the best of all english country sights in the winter. the hounds were grouped about their huntsman, george winch, a grey-whiskered, weather-tanned man sitting upright on his tall bay horse, the two of them quiet and unmoved, ready for what was to come, but not unduly excited over it, and his three young whips, two of them his sons and the other his nephew. the master had already hoisted himself on to his horse and sat as straight as his huntsman, although he was twenty years his senior. and all round were the faithful followers of the south meadshire, some of whom had ridden with those hounds for as long as, or longer than, the squire himself, some of whom had only begun that season. the men were mostly in pink, with the yellow collar, and dressed for work and not for show, their breeches spotless, their boots well polished and their tops of the right mellow shade, but their coats not of the newest, and their hats lacking the mirror-like shine which was imparted to those of the young bloods such as humphrey. there was a sprinkling of ladies, amongst whom was mrs. graham, in a workmanlike habit that had seen better days, but many more of them had come on wheels than on horseback. there were boys on ponies, their round hats jammed on to their heads, their round legs in wrinkled cloth gaiters, and the master's two little granddaughters riding astride. on the outskirts of the loosely knit crowd was a good sprinkling of farmers, solid elderly men in hard felt hats, drab coats, corduroys and brown gaiters, and slim, active young men in smarter editions of the same attire, but not always so well mounted. the squire drove up to the front of the inn, where his horse and humphrey's were being walked up and down by their grooms, and climbed down from his seat with a side-look that was half a frown at the crowd. amongst the women on horseback he saw none that he did not know, and hoped that the dreaded lady had not come; but immediately he had satisfied himself that she was not riding he caught sight of dick, already mounted, standing by a smart little pony-cart which contained two women, and his frown deepened. when he was on his horse and had seen that his flask and sandwich-case were in place, he had another moment of indecision. through all his discomfort and annoyance, his heart yearned towards his son, and he was alternately and from minute to minute swayed by opposite impulses, to hold out firmly for dick's sake or to give way for his own. as he walked his horse on to the green it was in his mind to cross over to where dick was standing by the pony-cart and, with what graciousness he could, end it all. but he was stopped by one of his old friends, who had something quite unnecessary to say about the weather and the prospect of the day's sport, and before he could disengage himself he saw dick leave the pony-carriage and the two ladies, and come towards him. he did not pay much attention to his friend, but sat on his horse facing his son. he saw dick also stopped, and waited impatiently, hoping that he was coming to speak to him. then he saw a very smartly attired young man trot up to the pony-carriage, arms and legs akimbo, to be greeted, as it seemed to him, with complete cordiality by the lady who held the reins, but not so effusively by the lady by her side. this young man was his pet abomination, the vacuous, actress-hunting, spendthrift son of a rich father, already notorious for his "goings-on," and likely to be more so if he continued as he had begun. he heard his loud foolish laugh over something he had said to the lady, or something she had said to him, and saw, although he could not hear, her laugh in reply. then he saw him take out his cigarette-case and offer it to her, and at that he wrenched round his horse's head and exclaimed, apparently in answer to a question which he had not heard addressed to him, much to his friend's surprise, "no, i'm damned if i do." he had seen enough. if that vicious young fool was the sort of person the woman was on terms of intimacy with, then she was just what he had pictured, and there was no saving grace in her. a cigarette-smoking, loose-tongued, kind-to-everybody creature of the stage! he would rather be at enmity with his son all his days, he would rather see him dead, than married to such a woman. he walked his horse, not knowing where he was going to, except that he wanted to get as far as possible away from lady george dubec, to the outskirts of the crowd and beyond them, his mind in a ferment of disgust. he heard the creak of saddlery and the thud of a horse's hoofs on the hard turf behind him. dick trotted up to him, and said, as he reined up his horse, "i wish you'd let me introduce you to lady george." he spoke as if there had been no controversy between them on the subject. he knew his father, and he was giving him his chance. two minutes earlier and the squire would have taken it. now he turned round sharply, his face red. "i have no wish to be introduced to lady george, now or at any time," he said. "oh, all right!" said dick coldly, and turning his back on him, trotted off again. chapter xi dick leaves kencote and makes a discovery there was not much pleasure for the squire that day, although they found a fox without delay, and with one check hunted him across the best of the south meadshire country and killed him in the open after a fast run of forty minutes. the hounds got him out of the spinney where he was known to reside, in no time, but he immediately took refuge in another and a larger one half a mile or so off. the hunt straggled after him, those who had been on the wrong side of the covert when the music of the hounds first announced their prompt discovery riding hard to make up for lost time, the carts and carriages streaming along the road. then there was a pause while the hounds worked to and fro through the wood, and the groups formed again and waited for what should happen. the squire, more by instinct than design, for his thoughts were on far other matters, edged down the skirts of the wood to where he could see the fox break cover if he behaved as his experience told him most foxes would behave in like circumstances, and keeping well under cover he soon saw the cunning nose poking out of the brushwood and the furtive red form steal out to cross the road and make a bold bid for freedom. just at that moment, as he was preparing to give the view-hulloa when my gentleman should have taken irrevocably to the open, a cart drove smartly round the opposite corner of the wood and pulled up, but not before the fox had seen it and slunk cautiously back into shelter. the squire smothered a strong exclamation of disgust, but gave it vent and added something to it when he recognised the cart and its driver. if lady george dubec had come into the south meadshire country to head the south meadshire foxes, as well as to annoy him grossly in other ways, then good-bye to everything. but she should be told what she had done. with rage in his heart and a black scowl on his face he cantered along the strip of grass by the roadside, and lifting his hat and looking the offending lady straight in the face, said in an angry voice, "would you mind keeping behind the hounds, madam? you have just turned the fox back into covert." then he turned his back and rode off, leaving virginia and miss dexter looking at each other with horrified faces. however, reynard's caution did not save him long. he was bustled out of shelter again within ten minutes, and realising that his only chance of escape was to run for it, run he did and gave the hounds all they knew to catch him. the squire was away with the first, and, riding hard and straight, did for what would have been otherwise a blissful forty minutes succeed in losing the sharp sense of his unhappiness, although black care was perched all the time behind him, and when the fox had been killed, seized on him with claws so sharp that he had no heart left for anything further, and leaving the hounds to draw a gorsy common for another fox turned his horse's head round and rode off home. humphrey, not far away at the start, had been in at the finish, with half a dozen more, but he had seen nothing of dick, and no one who had set out to follow on wheels had been anywhere within sight for the last half-hour. the squire felt a grim satisfaction in the thought of lady george dubec left hopelessly out of it, but he also thought of dick missing the best run, so far, of the season to keep behind with her, and his satisfaction turned into sad disgust. his long ride home was the most miserable he had ever taken, and he wished before it was ended that he had seen out the day, on the chance of another burst of excitement which for the time would have eased his pain. he reached kencote about three o'clock, and expected to find the house empty, for he knew that mrs. clinton had been going to lunch at mountfield and he did not expect her to be back yet. but she met him in the hall and said, "i thought you might be home early, edward, so i did not go out." now the squire was never home early. he always saw out the day's sport, however bad it might be, and the number of times he had returned from hunting before dark during the last thirty years might have been counted on his ten fingers. he looked at his wife apprehensively and followed her into the morning-room, where she turned to him. "dick has gone," she said. he stared at her, not understanding. "he came back about twelve," she went on, "and changed his clothes. his servant was out, but he left word for him to pack and follow him to blaythorn. he wrote you a letter before he went." "where is it?" asked the squire. "didn't you see him before he went? didn't you speak to him?" he went out of the room and into his own, and mrs. clinton followed him. "i did see him," she said, as the squire went to his writing-table where an envelope was lying on the silver-mounted blotting-pad. "he said that you had made it impossible for him to remain at home, and he bade me good-bye, but he did not tell me anything more." but the squire was not listening to her. he turned the page of the letter and then put it into her hand. "read that," he said. "dear father" [it ran], "i had hoped at least that you would have consented to meet the woman i am going to marry. if you had you would have seen how unlike she is to your ideas of her and that i am doing myself honour by my choice. you have made the situation impossible now, and i cannot return to kencote until you consent to receive my affianced wife with the respect due to her. "your affectionate son, "richard clinton." the squire's face was purple, but he controlled the violent expression of his anger. "his affianced wife!" he exclaimed scornfully. "so now we have it all, and i was right from the beginning. well, if he waits till i receive her he may wait till i'm in my coffin. i told him this morning i would not recognise her, now or at any time, and i'll stick to my word. he has chosen to fight me, and he will find that i'm ready." he spoke bitterly, but firmly, and as if he meant everything that he said. mrs. clinton laid the letter on the table. her face was serious, and paler than its wont. "have you seen her, edward?" she asked. "is she so impossible?" "seen her! impossible!" echoed the squire, with a return to the unbridled violence he usually showed when he was disturbed. "yes, i've seen her, and she's as impossible as a wife for the heir of kencote as any woman on the face of the earth--a painted hussy, hand in glove with the worst sort of vicious loafer, puffing cigarettes in the face of a whole crowd of respectable people, shamelessly breaking up sport--oh, i've seen her, and seen enough of her. to my dying day i'll never willingly see her again, and if that means breaking with dick i'll break with him till he comes to his senses. i mean it. if she is going to stay here to hunt with the south meadshire, then i'll go and hunt somewhere else until she's gone; or i won't hunt at all. yes, she's impossible. you've spoken the right word. i shouldn't be doing my duty if i left any stone unturned to put an end to dick's unaccountable folly. he'll thank me for it some day, and i'll put up with all and every unhappiness until that day comes." he had calmed down during the course of his speech, as he often did, beginning on a note of unreasonable violence and ending on one completely different. but he did not usually end on a note of strong determination, as now, and mrs. clinton looked at him as if she hardly recognised him, with lines of perplexity and trouble in her smooth, comely face. she did not ask him what he was going to do, such questions being apt to provoke him to impatient anger and seldom bringing a direct reply. she said hesitatingly, "if he says definitely that he is going to marry her----" and left him to supply the end of her sentence. "i shall not let him marry her," he said quietly. "he can't marry on his pay, and i shall stop his allowance from to-day." this statement, revolutionary of all fixed notions that had their rise in kencote, affected mrs. clinton as nothing before in her married life had affected her. it showed her her husband as she had never known him, bent on a course of action, not ready to take advice about it, but prepared to turn his back on the most cherished principles of his life in order to carry it out. she had nothing to say. she could only look down and wonder apprehensively what her world was coming to. "i don't think i should have thought of doing such a thing," the squire admitted. "it gives me more pain to take a course like that than anything else could have done. it was humphrey who suggested it. he said, quite truly, that none of them could marry unless i saw them through. and i won't see dick through this. i'll do anything to stop it, however much i suffer by what i have to do. don't you think i'm right, nina?" this was more what mrs. clinton was accustomed to. she could not say that she thought he was right, nor that he was wrong. she could only say, as she did, that such a proceeding would be distressing to him. "i know that," said the squire, with a new simplicity. "i'm not thinking of myself. i'm thinking of dick. i love the boy, nina. he's got himself into trouble and i've got to help him out of it." "do you think this is the best way?" was all that she could find to say. "it's the only way. if there were any other i would take it. if it doesn't bring him to his senses at once, i shall keep the money for him till it does. god knows _i_ don't want to touch it." "he will have to give up the guards," said mrs. clinton. the squire had not thought of this, and he digested the statement. "he's not an absolute fool," he said, "although he has lost his head over this. as far as the service goes, i shouldn't mind if he did give it up. i never meant him to go on soldiering so long. still, if he does give it up, what's he to do, poor fellow, till he comes round? he wouldn't have a penny. i shall tell him that i will continue his allowance as long as he remains unmarried." he brightened up as this idea struck him. "yes," he said, "that will be the best way, and just as effective. i couldn't bear to think of dick hard up. i'll write now." he sat down to his table, muddy boots, spurs, and all, and mrs. clinton left him, a little relieved in her mind that he saw a gleam of light, but otherwise solicitous for his sake and unhappy on her own. she loved her firstborn too, although it was very long since she had been able to show it. she would have liked to have helped him now, but he had not asked for her help, had told her nothing, and had left her with scarcely more than a formal word of farewell. the squire, left to himself, wrote quickly, and sealed up his letter after he had read it over once, as if first thoughts were best, and he was uncertain to what second would lead him. "my dear dick" [his note ran], "i can only repeat that nothing will induce me to give my consent to the marriage you propose. if you marry in a way to please me i shall provide for you handsomely, as i have always intended to do, but if you persist in the course you have begun on i shall withdraw your allowance entirely. it will be paid to you for the present, but only as long as you remain unmarried. i am very sorry to have to take this course, but you leave me nothing else to do. "your affectionate father, "edward clinton." when he had closed and directed the envelope an unpleasant thought struck him, and he leant back in his chair and looked out of the window while he considered it. "i suppose she must have _some_ money," he said to himself; and then after a time, "but dick would never do that." the note was taken over to blaythorn, as all notes were that were despatched from kencote, by a groom on horseback. the squire was impatient of the workings of the penny post, except for distances impossible for a horse, and he would not ask if dick's soldier-servant had yet left the house with his master's belongings. "tell one of the grooms to take that over," were his curt instructions, and so well was the letter of his orders always obeyed that a groom rode off with it within a quarter of an hour, although another one was already harnessing a horse to the cart that was to take dick's servant to blaythorn as soon as he should be ready. but having got safely outside the park gates he dawdled till his fellow caught him up, and the three of them then continued the journey together and discussed the situation. dick's servant was loyal to his master, but it was not in human nature that he should have refrained from speculating upon what was doing, and between them they managed to attain to a fairly clear idea of what that was, their unanimous conclusion being that if the captain had made up his mind to marry the lady the squire might take what steps he liked, but he would not stop him. in this way began the rumours that presently spread all over the county and thence all over england, or to such of its inhabitants as are interested in the affairs of its captain clintons and lady georges. dick and virginia were alone together when the note was brought in, the mounted groom having ridden on when he got within a mile of his destination. "that means war," said dick, laconically, when he had read it; "but i didn't think he would use those tactics quite so soon. i wonder who put him up to it." he thought for a moment. "humphrey wouldn't have done it, i suppose," he said reflectively. virginia's eyes were serious as she looked up from the note written in the squire's big, rather sprawling hand on the thick white paper. "i wonder why he hates me so," she said a little plaintively. "is it because i headed the fox, dick?" dick took her chin between his thumb and finger and his face grew tender as he looked into her eyes. "you were a very foolish girl to do that, virginia," he said. "i should have thought you would have known better." "i didn't know there was such a sharp turn," she said. "i pulled up the moment i got round the corner." "oh, well! never mind about that," said dick. "it was unfortunate, but it wouldn't have made him want to disinherit me. he can't disinherit me, you know. it's just like him to go blundering into a course like this, which he hasn't got the firmness to keep up." "that letter doesn't look as if he lacked firmness," virginia said. "dick dear, what shall you do?" dick did not answer this question directly. he had his father's habit of following out his own train of thought and ignoring, or rather not noticing, interruption. "he must know perfectly well," he said, "that i can raise money quite easily on my prospects. i dare say he hasn't thought of that, though. he never does think a thing thoroughly out. he wouldn't be happy if i threatened to do it." "oh, dick, dick!" exclaimed virginia, "why do you want to worry about money? i have plenty for both of us." "my dear, i've told you that's impossible," said dick a little impatiently. "don't keep harping on it." it gave her a thrill of delight to be spoken to in that way--by him. she had been used to being ordered to do something or not to do something by a man, but not by the man she loved. she kept obedient silence, but gave dick's arm a little squeeze. "i'm not going to do it, though," he went on. "i should hate it as much as he would. let's sit down, virginia. i'll tell you what i'm going to do." they sat down on the sofa, and dick took a cigarette out of his case. virginia held it open. "couldn't i have just one?" she pleaded. "no," said dick, taking it from her. "you promised you would give it up when you came down here." "so i have," she said. "i think you are very cruel." dick put the case back into his pocket. "of course i'm not unprepared for this," he said, "though i hoped it wouldn't come to it. i shall have to give up the service and get some work." "oh, dick!" she said. "you don't want to give up the service." "no, i don't want to. i should have got my majority next year, and i wanted to go on till i commanded the regiment, though i never told _him_ so. but it's got to be done, and it's no use grizzling about it." "and you're doing this for me!" she said softly. "i am doing a great deal more than that for you," he said. "i'm giving up kencote, at least for a time." "do you think i'm worth it?" she asked drily. he looked down at her, and then took her hand in his. "you must get used to my little ways," he said, with a kind smile. "i must be able to say to you what is in my mind." "oh, i know," she said repentantly. "it was horrid of me. but i do know what you're giving up, and i love you for it. i hope it won't be for long--kencote, i mean. i suppose if you give up the army you won't be able to go back to it. i hate to think of that because it's your career. and what else can you work at, dear dick? fancy you in an office!" "the idea of me in an office needn't disturb you," said dick. "i don't intend to go into an office. there are two things i know about. one is soldiering, the other is estate management. if i'm to be prevented from managing the estate that's going to be my own some day, then i'll manage somebody else's in the meantime. there are lots of landowners who would be only too glad to give me a job." "tell me what it means exactly, dick. have you got to be a sort of steward to some rich person? i don't think i should like that." he laughed and patted her hand. "you must get rid of some of your american ideas," he said. "the 'rich person' wouldn't want to treat me as a servant. and it isn't necessary that he should be very rich. i might not be able to get a big agency all at once. i don't know that i should want to, as long as there was enough work to do. as far as your money goes, virginia, i shouldn't have any feeling about using it to help run the show. what i won't do is to live on it and do nothing. there ought not to be any difficulty in finding a place that would give us a good house, and enough money to run the stables on, and for my personal expenses, which wouldn't be heavy, as we would stick there and do our job. it would be just what i hoped we should be doing at kencote from the dower-house. with luck, if there happened to be a vacancy anywhere, i could do better than that. but that much, at any rate, it won't be difficult to get, with a month or so to look round in." "then all our difficulties are done away with!" she exclaimed. "oh, dick, why didn't you tell me before? i thought, if your father held out, we should have a terrible time, and you would be as obstinate as possible about my money. i'll tell you what i have. i have----" "i don't want to know what you have--yet," he interrupted her. "i didn't tell you before because i hoped it wouldn't come to that. i didn't want to face the necessity of giving up the service, and still less of having to give up kencote. but now there's no help for it; well, we must just let all that slide and make the best of things." she still thought his scruples about using her money to do what he wanted to do, and his absence of scruples about using it to do what he didn't want, needed more explanation. but she gave up that point as being only one more of the inexplicable tortuosities of a man's sense of honour. she was only too glad that the question could be settled as easily as that. but dick must have felt also that it needed more explanation, for he said, "when i said that i had no feeling about letting you help run the house--of course, i really hate it like poison. but there is just the difference." "oh, of course there is--all the difference in the world," she made haste to reply, terrified lest they should be going to split, after all, on this wretched simulacrum of a rock. then she had a bright thought. "but, dick dear, you told me once how lucky your ancestors had been in marrying heiresses--not that i'm much of an heiress!" "you're not an heiress at all," he said impatiently. "i suppose everything you've got comes from--from that fellow. can't you see the difference? i hate touching his beastly money. and i won't, longer than i can help." "but, dick!" she exclaimed wonderingly. "didn't you know? he never left me a cent. he hadn't a cent to leave." he stared at her. "then where _did_ it come from?" he asked. "why, from pigs--from chicago," she said, laughing. "my father was of an old family, my mother wasn't, and one of her brothers made a fortune in a bacon factory. unfortunately, he did not make it until after she was dead and i was married, or it might have stopped--oh, many things. but he left it to me--the bacon factory--and i sold it for---- but you won't let me tell you how much." "oh, you can tell me if it's yours," he said. "well, they told me i had been cheated. but what was i to do with a bacon factory? and i sold it for as much as i wanted to live comfortably on. i sold it for a quarter of a million dollars." dick's stare was still in evidence. "a quarter of a million! dollars!" he repeated. "that's--what? fifty thousand pounds. by the lord, virginia, you're an heiress after all." chapter xii the house party "my dear emmeline," said the judge, "if i hadn't such a profound contempt for edward's intellect and for everything represented or misrepresented by him, i could feel it in my heart to be very sorry for him." "my dear herbert," replied lady birkett, "if you weren't as deeply sorry for him as you actually are, you wouldn't be your own kind, sympathetic, would-be-cynical self." sir herbert and lady birkett with their two daughters and their son-in-law had arrived at kencote that afternoon to make part of the company gathered there for the south meadshire hunt ball. other guests had arrived by a later train, but there had been an interval during which the judge had been closeted with his brother-in-law, the squire, and heard from him everything that had taken place within the past month, which was the interval that had elapsed since dick had abruptly left kencote. he had now come into his wife's bedroom, where she was in the later stages of dressing for dinner, although dinner was as yet half an hour off. "i know you want to tell me everything," she said, "and although the lady who is doing my hair does not understand a word of english as yet, you will probably be able to talk more freely if she is not present. if you will come back in five minutes she will have gone to angela." so the judge went into his dressing-room and, finding his clothes already laid out, dressed and repaired again to his wife, not quite in five minutes, but in little more than ten. "i suppose you have heard all about it from nina?" he said, taking up the conversation where he had left it. "have you seen this lady george dubec?" "yes," said lady birkett. "she is not in the least what edward pictures her, according to nina. as far as her looks tell one anything, i should say she was a charming woman." "edward paints her as a voluptuous siren of the ballet. i suppose one may put that down as one of his usual excursions of imagination." "she certainly isn't that, and it was news to me that she had ever been on the stage. poor nina is very distressed about it. she says that they have had no word from dick since he left the house, that edward has only heard through humphrey that he has sent in his papers, but even humphrey doesn't know where he is or what he is doing." "i had the same news from edward, with the additions which might be expected of him. he takes it hard that after all he has done for dick he should be treated in that way, and i don't know that i shouldn't take it hard in his place. it makes me increasingly thankful that i haven't any sons." this was a polite little fiction on the judge's part which his wife respected. it was the chief regret of his life that he had no son. "nina says he is fretting himself into a fever," said lady birkett, "lest dick should be raising money on his expectations." "fretting himself into a fever," replied the judge, "is not the expression i should use of edward. but he certainly feels deep annoyance, and expresses it. he had not thought of that when he delivered his ultimatum, and, as he says, it would be the easiest possible thing for dick to do. but i was mercifully able to relieve his mind on that point. i did not exactly tell him that dick, although he has more brains in his little finger than his father has in his head, is so much like him that he would shrink from taking so sensible a step as much as edward himself would; but i gave him the gist of it. my dear emmeline, to men like edward and dick, land--landed property--is sacrosanct. dick would give up _any_ woman rather than embarrass an acre of kencote. kencote is his religion, just as much as it is edward's. edward gained comfort from my assuring him of the fact. he said that dick was behaving so badly that right and wrong seemed to have no distinction for him for the time being, but probably there were crimes that he would not commit, and this might be one of them." "i am glad you told him that," said lady birkett. "i should think it is probably true. but what is he doing, or thinking of doing?" "he may be thinking of doing a little honest work," said the judge, who had sat for some time in the house of commons as a wicked radical. "i put the suggestion to edward for what it was worth, but he scouted it. as he indicated, there is nothing that a man who has been through a public school and university training, and has been for ten or fifteen years in a position of responsibility in his majesty's army, can do. he has no money value whatever. i did not contradict him." "_she_ has money, i suppose," said lady birkett. "she must have some. but there again i felt able to reassure edward. i know the dicks of the world pretty well. they are not without their merits, and there are certain things they don't do. of course, if he were working, and making some sort of an income, with his prospects it would be different." lady birkett let this go by. "will edward hold out, do you think?" she asked. "well," said the judge reflectively, "i'm bound to say it surprises me, but there is every sign of his holding out till doomsday, or, which puts a more likely period to it, till something unforeseen happens." "till he hears that dick has married her, for instance." "there wouldn't be much object in his holding out after that. but there is seldom much object in edward's divagations. he is swayed by his prejudices and by the impulses of the moment. still, i'll do him justice: he is acting as sensibly as he knows how in this crisis. i believe he loves dick better than any being upon earth, with the possible exception of himself. i really believe he loves him better than himself. of course dick represents kencote, and the family, and the line, and all the whole clamjamphrie, which partly accounts for it. at any rate he is causing his stupid old self an infinity of worry and annoyance, and all for the sake of what he considers a principle. i should say that dick is acting foolishly in holding off altogether. i dare say nina told you he has not answered a single letter. it has always struck me that he had edward completely under his thumb, and i should have said that he had only to hang on here and play his cards well and edward would have given way. now he is stiffening himself up." "i suppose they are both stiffening themselves up." "you put it in a nutshell. fancy edward giving up his season's hunting so that he shan't be obliged to set eyes on his aversion! that impresses me. he is in dead earnest. he will stop this marriage if he can." "but dick is just as obstinate." "it is the case of the irresistible body and the immovable force." "didn't you make any suggestion?" "yes, i did. i suggested that he should stipulate for a year's delay. i pointed out that if the lady was the bad character he supposes her to be, dick, with the sense he has inherited from his father--i said that, god forgive me--would come to see it in that time." "did he take to the idea?" "not at all. when did edward ever take to any idea at first sight? but it will sink in, and i shall give tom beach a hint to follow it up." "i believe it will be the best way, and nina is going to try and see dick when she comes up with me next week." the judge stroked his chin. "h'm!" he said. "i'm afraid nina has very little power to help matters." "i am much more sorry for nina than i am for edward." "oh, so am i," interpolated the judge. "it is the thing i can least forgive dick--his treating his mother practically in the same way as edward treats her--as if she were of no account. it doesn't promise well for the happiness of this lady george, or whoever he does come to marry." "let's hope for her own sake that she won't make nina's mistake." "you mean----" "oh, nina laid herself down to be trampled on from the very first. she had plenty of character. she could have stood out. now, whatever character she has has been buried under a mountain weight of stolid stupidity. she can't call her soul her own." "i think she would act--and against edward--if she saw her way to act effectively." "she would be laying up a pretty bad time for herself if she did act against edward in any way." "oh, but she wouldn't mind that if she thought it was her duty." "well, she can try. and she might put that idea of mine to dick. let him promise not to marry the lady for a year. he has been a bachelor for thirty-five or so, and he can stand another. i believe it might be the solution. i suppose we had better be going down now." it was an unusually large party for kencote that assembled at dinner. the squire took in lady aldeburgh, who must have been five-and-forty if a day, but either by a special dispensation of providence, or by mysterious arts marvellously concealed, was still enabled to present herself to the world as eight-and-twenty. the squire did not quite approve of this, but the illusion was so complete that he found himself talking to her as if she were a girl. she was beautifully gowned in blue and silver, and wore the aldeburgh diamonds, which sparkled on the clear white skin of her neck, on her corsage, and in the smooth ripples of her hair. she was attractive enough to the eye to make it possible for her to indulge in moods for the heightening of her charm. sometimes she was all childish gaiety and innocence; sometimes the deep melancholy of her soul looked out of her violet eyes, which were so good that they had to be given their chance; sometimes she was ice. this evening she had begun on a pouting note, which she had often found effective with elderly gentlemen, but finding the squire impervious to its appeal and plainly puzzled by it, remembering also that she had on her diamonds, she had exchanged it for the air of a _grande dame_, humanised by maternal instinct. "mother is telling mr. clinton how she has devoted herself to my bringing-up," whispered lady susan to humphrey. "is he likely to be impressed at all, do you think?" "he is likely to be bowled over by the result," replied humphrey gallantly, and lady susan, who was not so pretty as her mother, and only slightly more sensible, told him not to be an idiot. of lady birkett's two daughters, beatrice, the elder, had been accompanied by her husband, sir george senhouse, the rising young politician, whose handsome, intellectual head would have made him remarked anywhere, but whose bent shoulders, grey temples, and carelessness of dress made him seem older than his years. the younger, angela, sat by the man she was going to marry, hammond-watt, the youngest k.c. at the bar. the inclusion of these two men in the party had caused bobby trench, humphrey's friend, to ask if he had come to kencote for a ball or a political meeting, and to suggest the advisability of clearing out again before he should be asked for a speech. this young gentleman, to whom the accident of birth had brought the privilege of taking in his hostess, and whose other neighbour had been beatrice birkett, asked himself before dinner was over what he had come for, ball or no ball. he was accustomed to shine in smart country houses, and kencote was not at all smart. he had found mrs. clinton unresponsive to his light chatter, and angela birkett so taken up with the conversation of her k.c. that she had little attention to spare for him. george senhouse, who sat opposite to him, made no effort to follow his lead, and, in fact, ignored him as far as possible, which secretly annoyed him. lady aldeburgh, who would have permitted him to flirt with her, was beyond his reach, and her daughter was too much taken up with humphrey to do more than exchange a light sally or two with him. he was reduced to eating his dinner, which was a very good one, and, in large intervals of silence, to gazing around upon the company and inwardly ejaculating, "never again!" when the ladies had left the room the squire, with old-fashioned courtesy, brought the decanters down to his end of the table and engaged him in conversation about his father. "i recollect very well," said the squire, in his loud, confident tones, "when cane chair won the derby at thirty-to-one, by george!--dear me, i should be afraid to say how many years ago. he belonged to your grandfather, and of course we were all on him. your father and i----" "oh yes, he's told me that story dozens of times," said bobby trench. "oh!" said the squire, somewhat disconcerted. "yes, i suppose he has." "we haven't heard it dozens of times," said george senhouse. "what was the story, mr. clinton?" the squire turned towards him and his face lightened. "i haven't thought about it for years," he said. "it's just come back to me. jim trench and i made up our minds we would go and see the horse run, so we got out of a window at four o'clock in the morning--did i say it was when we were at cambridge together?--and drove tandem to hitchin, where we got a train to london. i recollect we had sent on a change of horses to--to some place half-way. we slunk about amongst the crowd, as jim's father was particular--wouldn't bet even on his own horses and all that sort of thing, and i don't blame him; i haven't had a bet on a horse since i was in the blues;--and he wouldn't have taken it well to see jim at epsom when he ought to have been at cambridge. well, we saw the horse win, and, by george! i should be afraid to say how much money your father"--here he turned again towards bobby trench--"took off the bookies." "pots," said bobby laconically. "but he lost it all over the leger." "ah, well, the best thing he could have done," said the squire. "i had put on a tenner, and both of us had had a little ready-money transaction on the course after we'd seen the horse canter; so we went back to london with a pocketful each, and by george!"--here the squire laughed his great laugh--"we'd dropped it all to a pack of card-sharpers before we got there. we were pretty green in those days, and it was all our own fault, so we didn't quarrel with the fellows--we'd tried to have them, and they'd had us instead. we made 'em show us how it was done, so that we shouldn't be had again, and i recollect they said we were a couple of good sportsmen and gave us a sovereign or two back to get us to cambridge, or we should have had to walk there, by george! "but that wasn't the end of it," proceeded the squire after he had done justice to his youthful memories with a hearty laugh. "we celebrated the occasion with a supper of the true blue club, in your father's rooms--has he told you that?" "i don't know whether he's ever told me the truth about it," admitted bobby trench. "weil, it's a long time ago," said the squire, "and we were all young and foolish. it was a lively supper, and your father went out for a little fresh air. they used to keep the college buttery stores in barges on the river in those days, and after wandering about a bit and climbing a few fences and gates for purposes of his own he found himself on the st. john's barge. then he thought he'd like a bath, and it didn't somehow occur to him to go in over the side, so he knocked a hole in the bottom of the barge and sank her, by george!" here the squire interrupted himself to laugh again. "he had all the bath he wanted, and the wonder is he wasn't drowned," he concluded. "well, we had some pretty lively times in those days, and it doesn't do you any harm to recall them occasionally. i should like to see your father again. it must be thirty years since i set eyes on him. wonder if he'd care to come and shoot one of these days?" bobby trench said he was sure he would be delighted, and undertook to deliver a message, which he fulfilled later on by informing his father that his one-time friend had developed into a regular old turnip-hoer, and if he wanted to sit and listen to long-winded yarns about nothing kencote was the place to go to. chapter xiii the hunt ball the assembly room of the royal hotel at bathgate had been the scene of many fashionable gatherings in days gone by, when london had not been so easy of access, and the rank and fashion of south meadshire had been wont to meet there for their mutual enjoyment, on nights when the moon was round and roads not too deep in mire. the regent had once shown his resplendent presence there, having been entertained at kencote by beau clinton, who hated the place and spent its revenues in london, but had furbished it up at rare expense--to the tradesmen who did the work--for the reception of his royal patron. the prince had expressed himself pleased with what had been done, and told his host that it was surprising what you could do with a damned dull hole like that when you tried; but he had not repeated his visit, and beau clinton's extravagance had soon after been redeemed by his brother the merchant, who succeeded him as squire of kencote, and just in time, or there would have been nothing to succeed to. the royal visit to the assembly at bathgate was still to be recalled by the lustre chandelier in the middle of the room which was surmounted by the prince of wales's feathers. the landlord of those days had followed the example of beau clinton, except in the matter of forgetting to pay his tradespeople, and spent a large sum in decorating the room; and he thought himself well repaid when the princely patron of the arts had remarked that it was "devilish chaste." it had hardly been touched since. the red silk panels on the walls were faded, and here and there frayed, and the white paint which surrounded them was much the worse for wear. of the sheraton settees that had once surrounded the walls only one remained, on the daïs at the end of the room. it was that on which the royal form had reposed, and the present landlord had refused, it was reported, a large sum for it. there was a musicians' gallery at the opposite end of the room, and sconces for candles between the panels. it was still a handsome room, and on the annual occasion of the south meadshire hunt ball, its shabbiness disguised with flowers, it had quite an air. but it was small for these latter days, and, for the dancers, apt to be inconveniently crowded. bobby trench, after he had had his toes trodden on and his shirt-front crumpled, inwardly repeated his ejaculations of dinner-time, "never again!" but he was, fortunately, in a minority. the bulk of the healthy open-air-looking young men and the pretty country-bred girls who footed it to the strains of a brisk and enlivening string band were not so particular as he. they smiled at the mishaps of others and laughed at their own, and enjoyed themselves thoroughly, as young men and women do who are not surfeited with pleasure. their elders looked on from the rout seats placed round the room, or from their place of vantage on the daïs, and in the intervals of the babel of talk--for nearly all of them knew one another and had a great deal to say--thought of their own young days and were pleased to see their pleasure repeated by their sons and daughters. there is no ball like a country ball, not too overwhelmingly invaded from london or elsewhere. it has the essence of sociability, where people meet who do not meet too often, and there is something for the young ones to do and the old ones to look on at. if the bobby trenches who happen upon it compare it unfavourably with more splendid entertainments, it is to be doubted if those entertainments are so much enjoyed by those who take part in them, except perhaps by the novices, to whom all gaiety is glamour. the squire, sitting on the daïs as became a man of his position in the county, scanned the assembly after having conducted lady aldeburgh through the mazes of the opening quadrille, and the frown which had left his face for the past few hours, but had sat there almost invariably during the past month, appeared again. lady aldeburgh was talking to old lord meadshire, his kinsman, who in spite of age and chronic asthma was still an inveterate frequenter of local festivities, and he had a moment's interval in which his trouble rolled back upon him. he had had a dim hope that dick, who for the first time in his life, except when he was in south africa, had not come home for christmas, might show up at bathgate for this occasion. it had been a very small hope, for nothing had been heard from him, and he had even left them to take it for granted that he had put off captain vernon, the friend whom he had asked to stay at kencote for the balls. and, furthermore, if he should be there it would be as a guest of lady george dubec, who was known still to be at blaythorn. but even that disagreeable condition did not entirely do away with the squire's desire to set eyes on his son, for whose presence he longed more and more as the days went on. but there was no dick to be seen amongst the red-coated men in the room, and as yet there was no lady george dubec. but as he looked over the moving crowd of dancers, and the bordering rows of men and matrons sitting and standing, his bushy brows contracted still more, for he saw her come in beneath the musicians' gallery at the other end of the hall with miss dexter, and, which caused him still further disquietude, saw her instantly surrounded by a crowd of men. he turned his head away with an impatient shrug and broke into the conversation between lady aldeburgh and lord meadshire. but this did not save him, for lord meadshire, whose old twinkling eyes were everywhere, said in his low husky voice, "there's the lady i met driving yesterday. tell me who she is, my dear edward, and relieve my curiosity." the squire, mumbling inaudibly, got up from his seat and, turning his back upon the hall, entered into a conversation with the wife of the master of the south meadshire, whom he disliked, but who happened to be the only lady disengaged at the moment. but she said, when she had answered his first remark, "there is lady george. she looks handsomer than ever"; and turning his back again he went out into a room where there was a buffet and swallowed a glass of champagne, although he knew that a tablespoonful would have brought him discomfort. virginia was dressed in a gown of shimmering blue green which had the effect of moonlight. she had a row of turquoises round her slim neck. her colour was higher than usual and her eyes sparkled. no one of those who pressed round her admiring her beauty and gay charm could have guessed that it was excitement of no pleasurable sort that brought the light to her eyes and the laughter to her lips. but miss dexter, standing demurely by her side, dressed in black, her light hair combed unbecomingly back from her broad forehead, and receiving with equanimity the crumbs of invitation that fell from her friend's richly spread table, knew with what shrinking virginia had brought herself to make her appearance here. both of them knew very well why the squire had no more been seen in the hunting field since that first day; both of them had been aware of him the moment they had entered the room, had seen his movements, and interpreted them correctly. virginia was soon dancing with bobby trench, who had drawn her impatiently away from her suitors, telling her that the valse was half over and that she could fill up her card later. "jove!" he said, when they had danced once round the room in silence, "it's a relief to come across a friend amongst all these clodhoppers. how on earth do you find yourself here?" "i'm living near here at present," she said. "how do you?" "oh, i'm a visitor--a non-paying guest in a house like a hydropathic establishment, or what i imagine one to be like. fine house, but mixed company." "then if you are a guest you ought not to say so," said virginia, whose thoughts so ran on kencote that it was the first house that occurred to her as possibly affording him hospitality. "oh, they're all right, really," he said, "only they're the sort of people who take root in the country and grow there, like cabbages--except the chap who asked me. he's one of the sons, and he'd smarten 'em up if he had his way. humphrey clinton! do you know him?" "no," said virginia. "well, yes, i've met him in london. i don't like him." "eh? why not? i'll tell him." "very well. let's go and sit down. the room is too crowded." but bobby trench, who saw the end of the dance in sight, and knew that directly virginia sat down other men would come up to her, continued to dance. "i haven't bumped you yet," he said. "we'll steer through somehow. are you going to kemsale on monday?" "no," said virginia, and left off dancing, having come to the end of the room, where miss dexter was still standing. as her partner had foreseen, she was immediately besieged again, and as for some, to him, unaccountable reason, she refused to book another engagement with him, he went away and left her in a huff. he came across humphrey, who was partnerless for the moment. "let's go and get a drink," he said. "i'm dry. i say, you didn't tell me that virginia dubec lived in these parts." "she doesn't," replied humphrey as they made their way towards the room with the buffet. "she has taken a house here for a few months. my brother dick got it for her." "oh, i thought she said she didn't know your people. where is your brother, by the by?" humphrey considered for a moment as to whether he should enlighten him as to the state of the case, and decided not to, but wished almost immediately that he had, for as they went into the refreshment-room they met his father coming out, and bobby trench, who always spoke what was passing through his mind to the nearest available person, said, "i've found a friend, mr. clinton--lady george dubec. didn't know she was in your part of the country." the squire scowled at him, and went out of the room without a word. "nice manners!" commented bobby trench to himself. "the fact is," said humphrey, "that the governor won't know the lady." "why not? what's the matter with her?" asked his friend. "i should have thought she'd have been a godsend in a place like this. i thought you said your brother got her down here." "so he did," said humphrey, making a clean breast of it. "that's what the row's about. governor wouldn't have anything to do with her, and so dick has retired from the scene for a time. but don't say anything about it, old chap. little family disturbance we don't want to go any further." "course not," said bobby trench, delighted to get hold of the end of a piece of gossip and determined to draw out the rest as soon as possible. "so that's how the land lies, is it? now i see why she didn't want to have any more truck with this engaging youth. well, your brother's taste is to be commended. why does your father object to her?" "oh, i don't know. old-fashioned prejudice, i suppose; and he knew george dubec." "and he was a daisy, from all accounts. come on, we'd better be getting back." old lord meadshire, who had been lord-lieutenant of the county from which his title came for over forty years, and took an almost fatherly interest in its inhabitants, learnt from mrs. graham who the unknown lady was. "oh, i can tell you all about her," she said. "she's making a fine disturbance in this little duck-pond." "well, she's pretty enough to make a disturbance anywhere," said the old lord, whose kindly eye for youth and beauty was not dimmed by his eighty years. "and if there is anything going on, i know i can trust you to tell me all about it." "there it is again," replied mrs. graham. "i'm getting the reputation of a tale-bearer, and there's nothing i hate more. still, i think _you_ ought to know." and she told him who virginia was, and what was happening because she was what she was. the old man grew rather serious as the story was unfolded to him. "edward clinton was always headstrong," he said, "but it's unlike him to quarrel with dick. i think he ought to have waited to see what she was like first." "of course he ought," said mrs. graham. "i've no patience with him. he had the impudence to take me to task for asking her to dinner, and jim and cicely to meet her. but he didn't get much change out of me." "you told him what you thought about him--what?" "i told him what i thought about her, and left him to infer the rest. there's nothing wrong about her, if she did marry lord george dubec, and all the rest of it. i like her, and i told him so. and if i can't ask my own son and daughter-in-law to meet whom i like in my own house without being hauled over the coals by mr. clinton--well, he'll be expecting me to ask him what i'm to wear next." "he couldn't improve on that," said lord meadshire, with an appreciative glance at her pretty gown of pale blue silk under brown net. "thank you," returned mrs. graham. "i hate clothes, but i can get myself up if i'm flattered enough beforehand. cicely does that for me. i've no complaint to make of her as a daughter-in-law." "well, you had better introduce me to lady george," said lord meadshire. "she must be asked to kemsale on monday. and i'll find an opportunity of dropping a word of common sense into edward's ear, eh?" "it will go out at the other. there's nothing to stop it," said mrs. graham. "but it will be a good thing to show him he's not going to have it all his own way." the introduction was duly made, and virginia, palpitating under her air of assured ease, talked to him for some little time, sitting with him on the daïs. she knew that this kind old man who chatted pleasantly with her, making feeble little jokes in his asthmatic voice, which his eyes, plainly admiring her, asked her to smile at, was the most important of all dick's relations, besides being the most important man in the county, and that if she could win him to like her his influence might well avail to ease her lover's path. that he did like her and was prepared to accept her in friendly wise as a neighbour was plain. but she had a moment of fright when he said, "we are dancing at kemsale on monday night. you must come. where is eleanor, i wonder?" and he looked round for lady kemsale, his widowed daughter-in-law, who kept house for him. "i am not sure," she said hurriedly. she did not know in the least how much he knew, or whether he knew anything. "captain clinton found me my house here, but----" she did not know how to go on, and feared she had already said too much in her confusion, but he turned towards her. "oh, i know, i know," he said kindly, and then beckoned to his daughter-in-law, a stout, rather severe-looking lady in steely grey, who greeted virginia without smiling and gave the required invitation rather coldly. "i will send you a card," she said, "and please bring any friends you may have with you." lady kemsale had just heard the story of his troubles from the squire, who had found in her a sympathetic listener, and she had heard that virginia had once danced on the stage. she would have preferred to have ignored her, but lord meadshire's commands must be obeyed, and even as she obeyed them and gave the invitation her sympathy with the squire's troubles began to wane and she said to herself that he must have made a mistake. there was nothing of the stage-charmer about this woman, and lady kemsale thought she knew all about that class of temptress, for her own nephew had recently married one of them. she preserved her stately, unsmiling air as she turned away, but she was already softened, if virginia had only known it. but virginia's sensibilities had already taken renewed fright at her manner, and in a way the exhibition of which now somewhat disturbed old lord meadshire. she rose to her feet, and her air was no less stately than that of lady kemsale. "it is very kind of you to ask me to your house," she said, "but i think under the present circumstances i would rather not come." then she made him a bow and stepped off the daïs, and was immediately seized by her partner of the dance that was then in progress. she was angry, but did not speak to him until they had circled the room twice. she was willing to pay court to the people amongst whom she was going to marry if they treated her properly. she was willing to do even more than that for dick's sake, and to run the risk of slights, and she had done so by staying at blaythorn, as he had asked her to do, and by coming here to-night. but she was not going to put up with slights from women who chose to treat her as of no account and as if she were anxious at all costs to obtain their countenance. there might be women who would be glad to gain entrance to a house like kemsale even after such an invitation as lady kemsale had given her, but she was not one of them. the invitation, if it came after what she had said to lord meadshire, should be refused. the woman whom dick was going to marry would not be recognised on those terms. she would wait until she could go to kemsale as an equal, and if that time never came she would not go at all. in the meantime she was spending a very wearing evening, and had an impulse to cut it all short and summon miss dexter to accompany her home. but the thought that she was going through it for dick's sake sustained her, and she said to herself that since she had wrought up her courage to come she would not run away. the person who did run away, before the dancing was half over, was the squire. he could stand it no longer. he could not remain in the refreshment-room all the evening, and, as he hated cards, the solace of the tables, set out quite in old assembly-room style in another room, did not avail him. if he led out a dowager to take his part in a square dance there was always the haunting fear that virginia might be brought into the same set, and if he sat and looked on at the round dances the hateful sight of her dark head and slender form was always before him. moreover, he had not yet talked to any one who had not either made some remark about her or asked him why dick was not there, or, worse still, maintained an ominous silence on the subject of both of them, showing plainly that he or she was aware of the disturbance in his household, which galled him exceedingly, although to sympathetic and assumedly secret ears like those of lady kemsale he was ready to talk his fill, and gain relief from doing so. he could not keep what he felt out of his face, and he saw people looking at him with furtive amusement as he sat there glowering at the assembly, or trying his best to talk as if he had nothing on his mind. he felt instinctively that the story was being put all about the room, as indeed it was, for rumour was already in the air, and had gained impulse by dick's absence and his own behaviour. and then lord meadshire--cousin humphrey, as he had called him ever since he was a child, and called him still--had talked to him about dick and about virginia, coupling their names together, as he disgustedly said to himself, showing plainly that he knew what was on foot, and inviting confidences if the squire felt disposed to give them. he did not feel so disposed. he was angry with his kinsman for so publicly giving his countenance to virginia, flouting him in the face--so he felt it--making it appear as if he, in the place where he had all his life cut a distinguished figure, and his wishes, were not worth regarding. "i don't know the lady and don't want to," he said, one might say petulantly. "and as for dick--she wanted to come here and he told her of a house. considering he has scarcely been near the place since she came, it's most annoying to hear him talked about as if there was something between them. i hope you'll do what you can to contradict that report. you can do a lot if you want to." lord meadshire glanced at him quizzically. he knew well enough his ostrich-like habit of burying one fact in a sahara of words and leaving a dozen for all the world to see. "come now, my dear edward," he said persuasively, "why not make friends with the lady? you will find her everything she ought to be, and a charming woman into the bargain. if dick is a little struck with her charms, i don't wonder at it, and there's nothing to be alarmed at. the best thing you can do is to keep your eye on her while he is away." but this was a little too much. cousin humphrey had been his boyhood's idol, and was the only member left of an older generation of his family with the exception of aunt laura, but if he thought that he could treat him as an obstinate child who was to be coaxed into good behaviour, he was mistaken. "nothing will induce me to make friends with her or to recognise her in any way," he said, with decision. "where's nina? i'm going home. i can't stand this any longer." mrs. clinton, who was enjoying herself in a quiet way, talking to people whom she seldom saw, and infinitely relieved in her mind to find virginia what she was, and not what she had feared she might be, even a little fascinated by her grace and beauty, and watching her all the time even when she was talking, was disagreeably surprised at the curt request of her lord and master that she should instantly accompany him home. "but, edward!" she exclaimed, "we have not ordered the carriage until one o'clock, and it is not yet eleven. aren't you well?" "we can get a fly," snapped the squire. "yes, i'm quite well. but i can't put up with any more of this." still she hesitated. there were her guests to think of. how could she go off and leave them? "if you like i will go home with uncle edward," said angela senhouse, to whom she had been talking. "i think it would make people uneasy if you were to go." she looked at the squire with her calm, rather cold eyes, and he suddenly grew ashamed of himself. "i'll get a fly and go by myself. you had better stay here, nina." and he took himself off without further ado. chapter xiv a shoot on the morning after the hunt ball the clinton twins rose, as usual with them in the winter, about half-past eight o'clock. in the summer they were up and out of doors at all sorts of unorthodox hours, but in the cold long nights they slept like young hibernating animals, snuggling amongst their warm coverings, and occasionally having to be extricated by all the powers of persuasion, moral and physical, possessed by miss bird. miss bird had now departed and the new governess had not yet arrived, so they were their own mistresses within limits, and responsible for their own tidy and punctual appearance at the breakfast-table. hannah, the schoolroom maid, brought in their tea and bread and butter at eight o'clock, drew up their blinds, set out their bath (for there were no bathrooms at kencote), and then applied herself to the task of arousing them. "now, miss joan and miss nancy," she said in a loud, confident voice, as if she had only to tell them to get up and they would get up immediately. "i've brought your 'ot water. miss joan! miss nancy! eight o'clock! time to get up! miss joan! miss nancy!" joan stirred, opened her eyes, closed them again, turned over and buried herself in the bedclothes again. "now, miss joan," said hannah, quick to pursue her advantage, "don't go dropping off to sleep again. 'ere's yer tea all ready and yer 'ot water gitting cold. miss nancy! time to get up!" "go away," said joan in a sleepy voice. "i'm awake." "yes, and you'll be asleep again in a minute if you don't set up and drink yer tea. now, miss joan, you don't want me to stand 'ere all the morning wasting me time with the whole 'ouse full and me wanted to 'elp." "then go and 'elp, and don't bother," replied joan sleepily. "miss nancy!" cried hannah. "i know you ain't asleep. set up and drink yer tea. miss nancy! lor'! the trouble i 'ave now miss bird's gone, and only me to see that everything's right up 'ere and you ain't late downstairs, which you know i should be blamed and not you if you wasn't down in time." this roused joan, who opened her eyes again and said, "it's nothing to do with you whether we're late or not. you're always full of your own importance. i'm quite awake now and you can clear out," and she sat up in bed, and took her cup from the table between the two beds. "not till miss nancy sets up i won't," said hannah. "i know she's awake and it's only contrariness as makes her pretend not to be." "nancy, do sit up and let her go," entreated joan, "or she'll go on jabbering like a monkey for hours. my nerves won't stand it at this time of the morning." nancy sat up suddenly and reached for her cup. "depart, minion!" she commanded. "now you won't go to sleep again after you've 'ad yer tea," said hannah. "i shall come back in 'alf an hour to do yer 'airs, and if you ain't up and ready for me, i shall acquaint mrs. clinton, for reelly the trouble i 'ave in this very room every morning as sure as the sun rises, no young ladies as calls theirselves young ladies wouldn't be'ave so." "parse that sentence," said nancy, and hannah, with a toss of the head, left the room. "hannah's getting above herself," said joan. "she seems to think now starling's gone she's been promoted to her place." "we'll let her go a little further," said nancy, "and then we'll pull her off her perch. what's the weather like? not raining, is it? i say, we ought to have some fun to-day, joan. who shall you stand with?" the kencote coverts were to be shot over that day, and the twins were allowed to accompany the guns on such occasions as these. "i don't know; uncle herbert, i think. he's the most amusing." "joan, you know quite well i bagged uncle herbert in the schoolroom yesterday," said nancy. "did you? i'd forgotten. you can have him in the morning and i'll go with him in the afternoon. i think i shall go with bobby trench, and see if he's as clever as he thinks he is." "you can't, my dear; you're too old. it would be considered forward. besides, he's an awful little ass." "that's what i wanted to convey to him. but i think i'll go with humphrey. he hasn't tipped us for ages, and _one_ of us must attend to business." "you can't do that either. he'll want that simpering lady susan. joan, i believe there's more in that than meets the eye." "penny, please," said joan, holding out her hand. "you said you would if i caught you saying that again." "all right, when i get up. i forgot. why don't you go with george senhouse?" "he's too serious, and this is a holiday. besides, he doesn't hit them. i hate bloodshed, but i like to see _something_ done. i wish dear old dick were here. he'd bowl them over all right." "i wonder," said nancy, "when all that bother is going to stop. dear papa will have to give way in the end, you know. he might just as well do it now and save time." "if i were dick i should just marry her and let him make the best of it. i wish he'd do something. father has really been too tiresome for words for the last month. if you and i behaved like he does we should be sent to bed, and serve us right. i wonder what happened last night. i expect she was at the ball." "he wouldn't take any notice of her if she was. i wish we could set eyes on her. i should like to see what she's really like." "cicely says she's very pretty." "well, i suppose she'd have to be that if dick wants to marry her. aren't men funny about women, joan? now i suppose you'd call that silly little bobby trench good-looking, but i should no more want to marry him than the ugliest man in the world." "that isn't much of a discovery. you needn't have lived very long to find out that women are much more sensible than men." with this aphorism joan rose and proceeded to her toilette, and nancy, after indulging in another short nap, followed her example. the squire, refreshed by his night's slumber, rose determined to do his duty by his guests and put from him for the day all thoughts of lady george dubec and, what was more difficult, of his son dick. mrs. clinton, when she had returned from the ball, very late, had found him in a deep sleep in the great canopied bed which she had shared with him for so many years. he had not awakened during her long muffled process of undressing, nor when she slipped, careful to make no noise and as little movement as possible, into bed by his side. but before she slept he had turned over and, half asleep still, murmured, "good-night, nina. god bless you." it had been his nightly farewell of her for nearly forty years, uttered often with no special meaning, sometimes even without interval at the end of some unreasonable expression of annoyance. but last night the words had come softly and affectionately, as if, returning for a moment from the pleasant land of oblivion, where he had been wandering and to which he was immediately returning, he had been glad to find her waiting for him, his close companion, valued above others. she had put her hand softly on to his, and lain for a long time, in the deep silence of the night, in that light contact. the common life of the household at kencote began with family prayers at a quarter-past nine, at which, on this saturday morning, lady aldeburgh and her daughter, sir herbert birkett, bobby trench, and humphrey failed to put in an appearance. the judge had been up at seven, reading in his bedroom, and appeared with the breakfast dishes, but humphrey did not arrive until five minutes later, and the presence of guests did not avert from him the invariable rebuke of unpunctuality. "i wish you'd manage to get up in decent time when you're here," said the squire. "where's young trench?" "in his bedroom, i suppose," replied humphrey coolly, inspecting the dishes on the side-table. the squire said nothing further, but when he, with most of the party, was leaving the room half an hour later, and met bobby trench, to whom the morning light had apparently brought a renewal of self-content, entering it, he greeted him with an earnest enquiry after his health. "oh, i'm as bobbish as possible, thank you," replied bobby trench brightly. "i'm glad of that," said the squire, passing on. "i thought as you didn't come down at the proper time you must have been feeling poorly." bobby trench stared at his broad retreating back in amazement. "lor'! what a house!" was his inward exclamation, as he went on into the dining-room. humphrey, who was deliberate in his meals, was still at the table, and joan was leaning on the back of his chair. she was making some suggestion as to pecuniary profit to herself and nancy from the day's sport, which yet should not amount to a bet. "hullo, old man!" said humphrey. "joan, ring the bell. everything must be cold by this time." joan hesitated. such a proceeding was unheard of at kencote, where, if people came down late for breakfast, they must expect it to be cold. but bobby trench politely anticipated her. "don't you trouble, miss joan," he said, going to the bell himself. "i say, are you going to stand with me to-day and see me shoot?" if nancy had been there to support her she would have asked innocently, "can you shoot?" for although she liked being addressed as "miss joan," she did not like bobby trench's free and easy air. but maiden modesty replied for her, "i think i'm going with humphrey." "she wants me to give her a shilling for every bird i miss, and she'll give me sixpence for every one i knock over. how does that strike you for a soft thing?" a footman came in at that moment, and looked surprised at the order that was given him. "do you want heverythink cooked, sir, or only some fresh tea?" he asked, with a glance at the table where the lamps were still sizzling under the hot dishes. "we live a life of rigid punctuality in this house," humphrey apologised, when he had retired with his order. "they don't understand renewing the supplies." "sorry to give so much trouble," replied bobby trench, "but i'm pretty peckish, to tell you the truth. dancing always gives me a twist. look here, miss joan, i'll bet you half a dozen pair of gloves i kill more birds than humphrey." "take him, joan; it's a certainty," said humphrey. joan was secretly enchanted at being treated as of a glovable age, but she answered primly, "thank you, mr. trench, i'm not allowed to bet." "oh, ho!" jeered humphrey. "what about that shilling you and nancy got from me?" "dick said we ought not to have done it, and we weren't to do it any more," said joan. humphrey was silent. bobby trench, who was good-natured enough to take pleasure in the innocent conversation of extreme feminine youth, especially when it was allied to beauty, as in the case of the twins, said, "well, of course, you must always do what you're told, mustn't you? but i'll tell you what, we won't call it a bet, but if i don't kill more birds than humphrey i'll give you six pairs of gloves--see? only you'll have to stand by me half the time and him half the time, to count." "oh, she doesn't want gloves," said humphrey, with some approach to his father's manner. "cut along upstairs, joan, or you'll have miss bird after you." "miss bird has departed," said joan, but she went out of the room, somewhat relieved at the conclusion of what might have developed into an embarrassing episode. at half-past ten the big shooting-brake appeared at the door, and the whole party, men and women, got into it, with the exception of mrs. clinton, and lady aldeburgh and her daughter, who had not yet made an appearance. the squire had been extremely annoyed at this. "she's as strong as a horse," he had said of his kinsman's wife, "and when she stays in other people's houses she ought to keep their hours. and as for the girl, if she can't get up to breakfast after a ball, she oughtn't to go to balls. i'll tell you what, nina, i'm hanged if i'm going to keep the whole party waiting for them. we start at half-past ten sharp, and if you can't rout 'em out by then, you must wait and bring 'em on afterwards in the carriage." mrs. clinton had not felt equal to the task of routing out her guests, and the brake had driven off, within three minutes of the half-hour, without them. it was a deliciously mild morning. the sun, shining palely in a sky of misty blue, gave it an illusive air of spring; blackbirds whistled in the copses; the maze of tree-twigs in distant woods showed purple against the wet green of the meadows; the air was virginally fresh, and had the fragrance of rich moist earth and a hint of wood smoke. brown beech leaves still clung to the hedges on either side of the deep muddy country lanes, and blackberries, saturated with dew, on the brambles. servants and dogs and guns had been sent on a quarter of an hour before. the squire, on these important occasions, when he took the cream of his preserves and began at an outlying wood, to finish up just before dark with the home coverts, liked to drive up to the place appointed and find everything ready for an immediate start. beaters must be in place ready for the whistle on the instant. guns must be posted for the first drive with no delay whatever. there was a lot to get through before dusk, and no time must be wasted. if those who were asked to shoot at kencote on the big days did their parts, he--and dick--and the keepers would do theirs and show them as pretty a succession of drives, with an occasional walk over stubble or a field of roots to vary the proceedings, as they would get anywhere in england. only there must be no dawdling, and the women who were permitted to look on must subordinate their uncontrolled natures to the business in hand. all the arrangements necessary to make the machinery run without a hitch, so that none of the full day's programme should be hurried, meant a great deal of preliminary consultation and adjustment. bunch, the head-keeper, admirable in his capacity for generalling his little army of beaters and for faithfully carrying out instructions, had no initiative of his own, and the squire had always relied upon dick--and relied on him much more than he knew--for arranging the plan of campaign. this time he had had to do it alone, with much consequent irritation to himself and bewilderment and head-scratching to honest, velveteen-clad bunch. and he had relied on dick's coolness--also much more than he knew--to get the guns posted expeditiously and with as little friction of talk and enquiry as possible. to-day he would have to rely on humphrey to help him, and humphrey was as yet untried in this capacity. he was anxious and worried as he drove, sitting on the high box-seat beside his coachman, and itching to handle his horses himself as he always did except on shooting days, when he wanted to save his hands. usually he sat behind, but this morning he felt he could not take his part in the talk and laughter that went on in the body of the brake. he was not at all sure how the day would turn out. there were several points at which a hitch might occur. following a light suggestion of dick's, he had arranged to take high beach wood the opposite way to that in which it had always been taken, and he was not at all sure that bunch had fully understood his testily given instructions--or, indeed, that he fully understood them himself. nor was he quite certain of his guns, and he wanted to kill a respectable head of game. the two local notabilities whom he had invited, old mr. wilkinson, of birfield, and colonel stacey, who lived in a villa in bathgate, and shot steadily through the season within a radius of forty miles, he could rely on. humphrey was a good shot, though not so good as dick. sir herbert birkett was surprisingly good, for a londoner, on his day, but when it wasn't his day he was surprisingly bad, and didn't even care enough about it to make the usual lamentations. george senhouse enjoyed it thoroughly, but never touched a feather. hammond-watt and bobby trench he knew nothing whatever about, but it was unlikely that either of them would turn out above the average. he could only hope that they would not turn out very much worse. at any rate, at the best, it was not a team that could be expected to create a record in the kencote preserves, and at the worst might bring disgrace on them. he could not help thinking of these things and worrying about them. if dick had been there he would have calmed those uneasy tremors. he would have told him that the birds would show up well, even if the guns didn't, that the experts were at least equal to the duffers and the doubtfuls, putting everything in a hopeful light, not anticipating any possible hitch, but quite ready to deal with it if it should come. dick never lost sight of the fact that they were out for a day's sport; the squire fussed and worried so about trifles that all such sense of pleasure was apt to leave him. he had an uneasy, half-defined feeling that his temperament caused him to err in this way, and it made him want dick, who could relieve him of the weight of small anxieties, all the more. he was learning how much he had been wont to depend on his son. one of the impulses of appeal and affection, which continually shot across the stiff web of his obstinate determination, came to him now, and if dick could have appeared at that moment he would have welcomed him with open arms, and given way in everything. but dick was away, he did not know where, and with a sigh he resigned himself to the prospect of a day of anxiety. they came to an open gate by the roadside and drove in through a strip of wood until they came to an open space in front of a keeper's cottage. it stood, backed by trees, facing a wide sloping meadow, which was completely surrounded by a wood of oak and beech, intermixed with spruce and some firs. the little group of loaders with their masters' guns and cartridge-bags stood ready by the palings, the glossy coated retrievers waved welcoming tails as the brake drove up, the hoof-beats of the horses muffled on the thick grass. the beaters were already in line at the other end of the wood, far out of sight, waiting for bunch's signal. there was nothing to do but place the guns and prepare for the stream of pheasants which would presently begin to fly over them. except that neither mr. wilkinson nor colonel stacey had yet arrived. it was the first check to the prompt orderly proceedings of the day. the squire, taking his gun from the hands of an under-keeper and filling the pockets of his wide shooting-jacket with cartridges, gave vent to a forcible expression of irritation. "now there we are, held back at the very start!" he exclaimed. "'pon my word, it's too bad of those fellows. i told 'em eleven o'clock sharp, and they've shot here dozens of times before and know the place as well as i do." "it's only just five minutes to eleven," said humphrey, and as he spoke mr. wilkinson's dog-cart drove in from the wood, bringing himself and colonel stacey, all ready for immediate business. before eleven o'clock struck from the cuckoo-clock in the keeper's kitchen the whole party was walking down the meadow to line the borders of the wood and do what execution they might. humphrey showed himself efficient in translating the squire's intentions as to the placing of the guns, from the notes he had jotted down on a sheet of letter paper. he knew that inextricable confusion would arise later if those notes were to be followed literally, but trusted to be able to arrange things by word of mouth when the time came, as most people were content to do. so they stood and waited. from the keeper's cottage up the hill you could have seen the eight little groups, standing expectantly on the grass at a short distance from the wood, following the curve of its line. behind each stood a gaitered loader with another gun ready to hand to his master. the women, in clothes not distinguishable in colour from those of the men, stood with them; the dogs squatted by the side of their masters or tugged at leashes held by the men. blackbirds popped in and out of the wood, and thrushes, but there were few sounds of life. there was a hush of expectancy, and otherwise only the deep winter stillness of nature, and the pale sun, and the wet odour of the soil. chapter xv the guns and the ladies nancy stood with her uncle, as she had announced her intention of doing. sir herbert, in a norfolk jacket of voluminous tweed and a green tyrolean hat, would hardly have been recognised by those who had only seen him in his judge's robes. he asked nancy as they were waiting whether she thought he was properly attired. "i like to do the thing thoroughly while i'm about it," he said. "i notice that nobody but myself is wearing these buttoned things--spats i think they call them. i think you might have written, nancy, to tell me they had gone out of fashion. do you think i could take them off and throw them away presently? i don't know what good they are. it is only a passion for being correctly dressed that induced me to put them on." "i think they look very nice," said nancy. "and as for your hat, uncle herbert, i'm sure it's the very latest thing, because humphrey has got one just like it. but it wants a woodcock's feather in it." "oh, does it? thank you for telling me. i shall direct my attention to-day to shooting a woodcock if one turns up, and robbing him of his feather. it is very unpleasant and takes away your conceit of yourself not to have everything exactly right. with your intelligence you no doubt understand that." "joan understands it better than i do," replied nancy. "she likes to be well dressed. i don't care about it one way or the other." "ah! but that's such a mistake," said sir herbert, "especially for a female, if i may call you so. when your body is well dressed your mind is well dressed. you should look into that." "i have," said nancy. "it's all a question of buttons." what she meant by this aphorism did not appear, for a shot from the right of the line made sir herbert spring to attention, and immediately after, with a sudden whir, a high pheasant shot like a bullet over his head, and flying straight into the charge from his gun, turned over in the air and fell with a thud on the grass far behind him. "glorious!" exclaimed the judge. "i'm in form." but although he fired many barrels during the next few minutes, in which a hot fusillade was going on on the right and on the left, and birds were falling, clean shot, or sliding to the ground with wings outspread, or continuing their swift flight unshaken, he brought only one down, with a broken wing, which ran off into the shaugh at the top of the hill. "now that is most disappointing," he said, when the tap-tap of the beaters' sticks could be heard, and they began to emerge from the wood one by one. "i really did think i was going to shoot well to-day. life is full of such delusive hopes." "i'm glad you didn't shoot too many," said nancy. "they're such pretty things, and i like to see them get away." "so do i, in theory," said sir herbert. "in practice, no. do you think it is the lust for killing, as some people say?" "oh no," said nancy. "i have thought about that. if it were, i shouldn't want to come out. it is the skill." "i think you're right, nancy. that, and what remains of the primitive instinct of the chase. you had to kill your food, and you kept your health by doing so. you killed two birds with one stone." "and now you don't even kill one bird with two barrels," said nancy, with a side-glance at his eye. he met her mischievous gaze. "nancy," he said, "if you had said that on the bench they would have put it in the papers--with headlines; as it is, i've a good mind to commit you for contempt of court." the divided groups began to congregate. the squire came round the corner very well pleased with himself. in spite of his preoccupation he had shot quite up to his form. and his good-humour was confirmed at the discovery that hammond-watt could be classed as a doubtful no longer, for he had killed more birds than anybody, and killed them clean, and that bobby trench had also given a fair account of himself. the day had begun well, and the fact that sir herbert had only shot two pheasants, one of which had got away, and george senhouse had shot none, although, as is the unaccountable way of driven birds, they had come over him more thickly than over any one else, did not avail to dash his satisfaction. he led the way to the next stand, down a woodland ride, in high good-humour, walking with great strides, which lady birkett, who accompanied him, found some difficulty in keeping up with. "i hope herbert will pick up," he said, laughing good-humoredly at his brother-in-law's misfortune. "now i'm never very much away from my form, either above or below. funny thing--form! even when i'm worried to death about things it don't seem to make much difference to my eye." but when the next drive was over, and he had only shot two pheasants, neither of them clean, and a rabbit, he said, "it's all this infernal worry. no man on earth, i don't care who he is, can shoot straight if he's got something weighing on his mind." lady birkett was consolatory. "my dear edward, don't think about it," she said. "it will all come right." "i wish i thought so," said the squire. "i think if i had that woman here i'd put a charge of shot into her." during the course of the morning the twins came together to compare notes. "humphrey is shooting quite well," said joan, "but, all the same, if he had fallen in with my suggestion we should have scooped twenty-four shillings. i reckon it up after every drive and tell him the result. i am hoping that he will be so pleased with himself that he will offer to settle up at the end of the day of his own accord." "don't make it too much," advised nancy. "ten shillings in our pockets are better than twenty in his." "bobby trench offered to take over the arrangement," said joan. nancy threw back her fair hair. "it's a pity to waste an opportunity," she said, "but of course you can't accept a tip from him." "my dear, as if i would!" exclaimed joan. "but he's very pushing. it's difficult to keep him at a distance. i think i shall go and stand with mr. wilkinson. he's a dear old thing, and i think he'd be flattered." "oh, don't forsake humphrey, for goodness' sake, if he's in a good temper," advised nancy. "well, bobby trench is such a nuisance. he comes over and talks to us while we're waiting." "if you stick on till lunch-time i'll change with you after. uncle herbert is shooting very badly, but he's full of conversation. and i didn't tell you--he asked after the camera fund. i don't know who can have told him--dick, i suppose. dear old dick; i wish he was here!" "so do i," said joan. "did uncle herbert show any signs of contributing?" "i expect he will. but i didn't want to appear too mercenary; i skilfully changed the subject." "that ought to do the trick," observed joan. "i don't mind a bit taking it from relations. they ought to be encouraged to do their duty." "all old people ought to tip all young ones," said nancy largely. "you might convey that truth delicately to mr. wilkinson." "i might, but i'm not going to." "or colonel stacey. why not try him? he's old enough." "you can do your own dirty work," said joan, preparing to leave her. "colonel stacey is very poor. he lives in a tiny little house. i shall sit next to him at luncheon, and see that he gets a jolly good one." the squire shot worse and worse as the morning went on, and through over-anxiety and confused instructions the birds were not driven properly out of high beech wood, which ought to have afforded the best drive of the day. they streamed away to the right of where the squire was standing, where there was neither a gun nor a stop, or went back over the heads of the keepers. humphrey had suggested placing a gun where those that were got out of the wood eventually came over, and because he had pooh-poohed the suggestion the squire was furious with him. dick would have put a gun there without asking him. but humphrey now could do nothing right. after this fiasco he suggested sending to the keeper's cottage, where luncheon was to be served, to tell them to set the tables outside. there was a warm grove of beeches at the back of it, where they sometimes did lunch earlier in the season, and to-day it was fine and sunny enough to have made it more pleasant to sit in the open than in a crowded room in a cottage. but the squire said, "for god's sake, don't be altering arrangements now, and throwing everything out," so humphrey had retired and told bobby trench that his governor was like a bear with a sore head. "i thought he seemed rather passionate," said bobby trench pleasantly. "not pulling 'em down, i suppose. it does put you out, you know." "he'd better manage for himself," said humphrey sulkily. "if he likes to make a mess of it, let him." joan, who was with them, grew red at this discussion. "father has had a lot of worries," she said. "i think you ought to help him all you can, humphrey." humphrey stared at her, and bobby trench said, "bravo, miss joan, you stick up for your own." "i'm going to," said joan, and turned back to join beatrice senhouse, who was just behind them. at the next stand, the last of the morning, she went up to her father and said, "i'm going to count your birds, daddy, and i'll give you a kiss for every one you let off." the squire's worried face brightened. "i thought you'd forsaken your poor old father," he said. "well, i'm letting plenty of them off, but we'll see what we can do this time." whether encouraged or not by his prospective reward, he acquitted himself well during the ensuing drive, in the course of which he got two high birds with a right and left, and another one going away with a quick change of guns; and when the drive was over he handed his gun to his loader, and put his hand on joan's shoulder to walk towards the cottage, with a face all smiles. mrs. clinton, with lady aldeburgh and her daughter, met them at the garden gate. "i have told them to put the table outside," she said, as they came up, and the squire said, "capital idea, nina, capital idea!" and turning to lady aldeburgh twitted her on her late appearance. "you've missed some good sport," he said. "but we'll see what we can show you this afternoon." lady aldeburgh, in a costume of lincoln green with a short skirt bound in brown leather, looked younger than her own daughter, and felt no older than a child. "oh, do let me stand by you, mr. clinton, and see you shoot," she said, clasping her hands appealingly. "i'll promise not to chatter." "that woman's a fool," said joan, who had withdrawn from the group to join nancy. she sat next to colonel stacey at luncheon, as she had undertaken to do, and was assiduous in attending to his bodily wants. he was of the skeleton-like, big-moustached order of retired warrior, and looked very much as if he suffered from a lack of nutriment, although as a matter of fact he was accustomed to "do himself" remarkably well, shirking nothing in the way of food and drink that other men of his age were apt to look askance at. he made an extremely good meal, and joan took credit to herself for his doing so, although he did not repay her attentions with much notice, being well able to forage for himself. mr. wilkinson, who sat on her other side, was far more communicative and friendly, in a sort of pleasant, grandfatherly way; and as the three of them were standing together when luncheon was over, he took half a sovereign out of his pocket and said, "now if i know anything of young women of your age, and i ought to by this time, i dare say you and nancy will find some use for that." joan accepted it with gratitude. her mind was at ease; she had not worked for it in any way. it was a most acceptable windfall. "oh, thank you so much, mr. wilkinson," she said. "now we shall be able to buy our camera. we have been saving up for it for a long time." "that's capital," said old mr. wilkinson, patting her on the shoulder and moving off. colonel stacey, now that he had satisfied the claims of appetite, had some attention to spare for his late neighbour, who was really a very nice-mannered child, and not greedy as most children are, but well-behaved towards her elders. he in his turn pulled out a well-worn leather purse and extracted half a sovereign from it. joan, seeing what was coming, had a moment of panic, and turned quickly away. but he stopped her and said, "there, take that; that makes one for each of you." joan's face was scarlet. "oh, thanks most awfully," she said hurriedly. "but we've got quite enough now," and then she fairly ran away, leaving colonel stacey, surprised at the curious ways of young girls, to put his half-sovereign philosophically back into his purse. lady aldeburgh accompanied the squire during most of the afternoon, and by a judicious use of flattery and girlish charm kept him in so good a humour with himself that he shot much better than in the morning, and fussed considerably less over details of arrangement than he would otherwise have done. he could not have told how it came to pass, although lady aldeburgh might have been able to enlighten him, that as they were walking together down a muddy country lane, with the rest of the party straggling after them, he poured into her sympathetic ear the story of what he was now accustomed to call dick's entanglement. lady aldeburgh bounded mentally over five-and-twenty or thirty years and became matronly, even maternal. "i have heard something about it, dear mr. clinton," she said, "and have been longing to tell you how much i sympathised with you. but i hardly liked to until you had spoken first. of course one's children do give one trouble in many ways, and an old married woman like myself who has had a long experience can often help, with sympathy if not with advice. so i am very glad you have told me." the squire found this attitude right, and soothing besides. "well, of course, it's an impossible idea," he said. "i shan't give in about it. have you seen this woman, by the by?" "i saw her last night," said lady aldeburgh, "and of course i've heard of her. she is not the sort of woman that i should care for a son of mine to marry. she seemed to me an affected, underbred minx." "you thought that, did you?" exclaimed the squire, his eyes brightening. "now it's the most extraordinary thing that the people round here can't see that. even my cousin, old humphrey meadshire, seemed to be quite taken in by her." "oh, well--men!" said lady aldeburgh meaningly. "ah, but it isn't only men," said the squire. "it's the women too. they're all ready to take her in as if she was one of themselves. now i saw at once, the first time i set eyes on her, what sort of a woman she was. i don't profess to be more clear-sighted than other people, but--but, still, there it is. you saw it, and of course you go about more than the women do here, most of 'em, and know more of the world." "i should hope i do, the frumps!" was lady aldeburgh's inward comment, but she said, "i know your dick--not so well as i do humphrey, but pretty well--and i say that he is much too fine a fellow to throw himself away like that. still, if he has made up his mind about it, what can you do?" he told her what he could do, and to some extent had done--withdraw or threaten to withdraw supplies, and she commended this course warmly. "that ought to bring him to his senses," she said. "and if it doesn't--well, you have other sons." the squire did not quite like this implication. he had never yet faced the question of what he would do after dick got married, if he should get married in spite of him. but certainly, the prospect of disinheriting him had never crossed his mind. "i have never met your second son, i think," said lady aldeburgh. "he's a doctor, isn't he?" "oh, that's walter," said the squire. "you'll see him this evening. he's the third. humphrey comes next to dick." "oh!" said lady aldeburgh, who had the same means of access to works of reference dealing with the county families of england as other people, and used them not less frequently. "you know we had to stop the same sort of thing with clinton a few years ago," said lady aldeburgh. "he was wild to marry one of the frivolity girls--pretty creature she was too, i must admit that, and quite respectable, and it really went to my heart to have to stop it. but of course it would never have done. and what made it so difficult for a time was that we had no hold over clinton about money and that sort of thing. he _must_ come in for everything." "oh, well," said the squire airily, "i couldn't cut dick out of kencote eventually, whatever he did. but he wouldn't find things very easy if kencote were all there was to come into." lady aldeburgh took this, and took it rightly, as meaning that there was a good deal of unsettled property which the squire could leave as he liked, which may or may not have been what she had wanted to find out. "then you have an undoubted hold over him," she said. "of course, i know it must be very unpleasant for you to have to exercise it, but, if i may say so, it seems to me that simply to threaten to withdraw his allowance if he should marry against your wishes won't stop him if he can look forward to having everything by and by." "he wouldn't have everything, anyhow," said the squire. "well, whatever he is going to have besides the place. you don't mind my talking of all this, do you? i've not the slightest desire to poke into affairs that don't concern me." "very good of you to take such an interest in it all," said the squire. "i don't mind telling you in the least--it's quite simple. kencote has always been entailed, but there's a good deal of land and a considerable amount of other property which doesn't go with it. dick won't be as well off as i was when i succeeded my grandfather, because there was nobody but me, except some old aunts, and i've got a large family to provide for. still, he'll be a good deal better off than most men with a big place to keep up, and there'll be plenty left for the rest." "that's if he does as you wish," said lady aldeburgh. "well, i hadn't thought of it in that way," admitted the squire. "but, my dear man," she exclaimed, "you are not using your best weapon--your only weapon. if he is infatuated with this woman do you think he will be prevented from marrying her by your stopping his allowance? of course he won't. he can get what money he wants for the present, and she has some, i suppose. he only has to marry and sit down and wait." "then what ought i to do?" asked the squire grumpily. he knew what she meant, and hated the idea of it. "why, tell him that if he makes this marriage you won't leave him a penny more than you're obliged to." "if i said that i should commit myself." "you mean if you threatened it, you'd have to do it. well, i think you would. yours--ours, i should say--is one of the oldest families in england, and you are the head of it. you can't see it let down like that." this was balm to the squire, but it did not relieve the heaviness of his heart. "i believe i shall have to do something of that sort," he said, "or threaten it anyhow," and having arrived at the place for the next drive, he turned with a sigh to the business in hand. the short winter day came to an end, and at dusk they found themselves on the edge of the park, after having shot the birds out of the last covert. they strolled home across the frosty grass, under the darkening sky already partly illumined by a round moon, merry or quiet, pleased or vexed with themselves, according to their several natures and the way they had acquitted themselves in the day's sport, and the warm, well-lighted house swallowed them up. joan and nancy went up to their room. "you haven't been near me all the afternoon," said nancy. "here's half a crown from humphrey. it's disappointing. did you do any business with uncle herbert?" for answer joan burst out crying. "i hate all this beastly cadging for money," she said through her tears, "and i won't do it any more." "well, don't howl," said nancy, "or you'll look awful when we go downstairs. what has happened?" "mr. wilkinson gave me ten b--bob," sobbed joan. "i didn't ask him for it. and then poor old colonel stacey thought he must do the same, so he took out a sh-shabby old purse and offered me another one, and i believe it was the only one in it. and i wouldn't take it." "do pull yourself together, old girl," entreated nancy. "well, if he's so hard up, i think it was rather a delicate action." joan turned on her, and her tears were dried up by the heat of her indignation. "you're always talking about your brains," she said, "and you can't see anything. of course, i should have felt a beast anyhow, but i feel much more of a beast for taking mr. wilkinson's tip and refusing his." "why?" asked nancy. "because he'd know i thought he was too poor," said joan, her tears breaking out afresh. nancy considered this. "i dare say he didn't think much about it," she said. "but why didn't you go and make up to him afterwards, if you felt like that? do leave off blubbering." joan took no heed of this advice. a physically tiring day and the distress she had kept down during the afternoon had been too much for her, and now she was lying on her bed sobbing unrestrainedly. "i w-would have gone to stand with him," she said. "p-poor old d-darling, he looked so lonely standing there all by himself, for no one went near him, except m-mother, once. b-but i thought he'd think i wanted the t-tip after all, so i d-didn't. here's mr. wilkinson's half-sovereign. you can take it. i don't want it." "well, if you don't, i don't," said nancy, picking up the coin which joan had thrown on to the floor, nevertheless, and putting it on to the dressing-table. "i don't know why you're always trying to make me out more hard-hearted than you are. shall i fetch mother?" "n-no. y-yes," said joan. so mrs. clinton was fetched, and heard the story, sitting on the bed, while joan sobbed on her shoulder. nancy leant on the rail and helped to explain matters. she now felt like crying herself. "we have a sort of joke with the boys," she said. "they understand it all right, but, of course, we wouldn't go asking everybody for money, mother." "i think you are getting rather too old to accept money presents from any one outside the family," mrs. clinton said, "although it was very kind of mr. wilkinson to give you one, and i don't mind your having taken it in the least. and i'm sure colonel stacey didn't think anything of your refusing, joan dear. so i shouldn't worry any more about that; and i think you had better have some tea up here and lie down till dinner-time." so joan's tender heart was comforted, and colonel stacey kept his half-sovereign, which if he could not have afforded to lose he would never have thought of offering. chapter xvi the money question walter clinton, with his wife and two little girls, arrived at kencote an hour or so before dinner-time, and the squire instantly seized upon him for a confabulation. "george senhouse is in my room," he said, "and the rest are playing pool. come into the smoking-room. i want to speak to you." walter followed him through the baize door and down the stone passage. he was not so handsome as dick nor so smart-looking as humphrey, but he was tall and well set up, with an air of energy and good-humour that was attractive. "it's jolly to be here for a bit again," he said. "i've been working like a nigger. we've got a regular plague of influenza at melbury park." the squire grunted. he was pleased enough to see his son, but he always shied at the words melbury park, and rather disliked mention of walter's profession, which had been none of his choosing. "well, i suppose you've heard of this wretched business of dick's," he said, as he lighted a big cigar. walter filled his pipe, standing by the fire. "yes. i've seen him," he said. the squire held the match in his hand as he exclaimed, "you've seen him, eh?" "yes, he spent christmas with us," said walter. the squire threw the match, which had begun to burn his fingers, into the grate. "why on earth didn't you let me know?" he asked. "he didn't want me to," replied walter, taking his seat in one of the shabby easy-chairs. the squire thought this over. it affected him disagreeably, making him feel very far from his son. "was he all right?" he asked. "of course, he was worried," said walter. "he was all right otherwise." "well, now, don't you think he's behaving in a most monstrous way?" asked the squire, anxious to substitute a mood of righteous anger for one of painful longing. "well, i can't say i do," replied walter. "oh, he's talked you over. but i'll tell you this, walter, he shall _not_ marry this woman, and drag us all in the mud. you ought to be doing what you can to stop it, too, instead of encouraging him." "i'm not encouraging him," said walter. "it wouldn't make any difference whether i encouraged him or discouraged him, either. he has made up his mind to marry her and he's going to do it." "i tell you he is _not_ going to do it." the squire hitched himself forward out of the depths of his chair to give more weight to his pronouncement. walter remained silent, with a mental shrug, and the squire was rather at a loss to know how to proceed. "do you know what this woman is like?" he asked. "i've seen her photograph and heard what dick has to say about her," said walter. "oh, dick! dick's infatuated, of course. i should have thought you would have had more sense than to swallow his description of her blindly. she's--oh, i can't trust myself to say what she is. but i'll tell you this. i'd rather kencote passed out of the clinton family altogether than that she came to be mistress of it." "well, that won't happen for a great many years, i hope," said walter. "it will _never_ happen," said the squire, with immense emphasis. again walter was silent, and his father slightly embarrassed. "how is he going to get married, i should like to know," he asked presently, "if i don't help him? i've told him that the moment he does marry i shall help him no longer. i don't suppose he's got a couple of hundred pounds in the world. he can marry with that, but he can't live on it. he's not going to live on her money, i suppose." "no, he's got a job," said walter calmly. again the squire stared. "got a job!" he repeated. "what sort of a job?" "quite a good one. agent to john spence up in norfolk--the chap who was in his regiment." the squire's surprise, and what must be called, in view of his thwarted diplomacy, discomposure, were indicated by his dropped jaw. walter went on in even tone. "he's to get six hundred a year and a house. there's a place in warwickshire too, which he'll have to look after. he was just going to take quite a small thing in ireland, but spence heard he was available and rushed up and booked him. you see, he knows his job well." of course he knew his job well. hadn't the squire taken a pride ever since he had been the smallest of small boys in initiating him into it? hadn't he seen to it that if he learned nothing else during his long and expensive school and university education, he should learn all that could be learnt about the land and the intricacies of estate management? and hadn't he rejoiced in seeing him take kindly to it ever since? he had been quite content to spend the greater part of his leave at home, often working as hard as if he were a paid agent, even taking papers up to london, working at them there, and writing long letters. he had not been content to take a general interest in the property to which he was one day to succeed, riding or walking about the place and leaving details to the agent and the estate staff. why, it had been possible, ten years before, when the old agent had been superannuated, to dispense with one altogether for six months, nobody suitable having come forward; and the present one, mr. haydon, was hardly more than a bailiff. and more convincingly still, lately, had the squire discovered that dick knew his job. he thought he knew it himself, but he had been lost without him, and if dick continued to keep away from kencote, he would have to make new arrangements altogether, and get some one in the place of mr. haydon to help him. and now all dick's knowledge and experience were to be used to thwart him. it would no longer be available for the benefit of kencote. that was bad enough in itself, but it was far worse to know that it had made dick independent of him and himself powerless. for the first time in this unhappy business he felt an impulse of pure anger against his son. hitherto he had been grieved about him, and only angry against others. now, as these thoughts passed through his mind, he broke out, "that's the most disgraceful thing i've heard of yet. going to throw the whole place over, is he, and leave me to do the best i can, while he goes and takes service under somebody else? very well, then. if he is going to throw kencote over, kencote will throw him over. i've had as much as i can stand. now i'll act, and act in a way that will surprise him." walter looked up in alarmed surprise. he thought he knew his father, and exactly how far he would go. he had known in discussing matters with dick that he would make a fuss, and go on making it, until things were accomplished which would make it useless for him to fuss any further. but he had always taken it for granted that dick had the cards in his hand, and that in the long run he must win the game. but this looked as if they had both miscalculated dick's hand, and that a trump they had thought to be in his possession was really in his father's. "what do you mean?" he asked. "i mean," said the squire boldly, "that if dick persists in the course he is taking, i shall make a new will, and i shan't leave him a penny or an acre of land beyond what he gets under the entail." this was plain enough, but walter could scarcely believe his ears as he heard it, so entirely subversive was it of all ideas in which he had been brought up. he had never bothered himself much about money. he knew that he would have something by and by, something probably more substantial than the average younger son's portion, that there was, indeed, plenty of money for all of them. but he had taken it for granted, in the same way that he took the daily rise of the sun for granted, that the bulk of it would go with the place--go, that is, to dick. and, knowing his father as he did, and the principles that guided him, he could not, even now, believe that he really meant to act in a way so destructive of all kencote ideals as he had indicated. "surely you're not going to break the place up!" he said. "if dick doesn't come to his senses that's what i will do," said the squire. "and if i once do it i shan't alter it. i shall have the will prepared, and the day dick marries this woman i shall sign it. you can tell him that. i'll have nothing more to do with him, directly. he has behaved disgracefully to me, never sending a line for over a month, and letting me know his plans through you. now you can tell him mine, and you can tell him i'm in earnest." he marched out of the room without further words, leaving walter with the feeling of a man who has just passed through an earthquake. late that night when everybody had gone up to bed walter went into humphrey's room. they had not had a chance of speaking together before. he told him of what had happened, of what dick had told him at melbury park, and the squire that evening downstairs. humphrey received the news in silence, and with mixed sensations. "i didn't know dick had been with you," he said presently. "he won't come here," said walter. "he doesn't say much about the governor, but he's furious with him." "i'm afraid he's furious with me too," said humphrey. "and really it's rather unreasonable." "he didn't say much about you," replied walter perfunctorily. "well, i can't help it. i've done nothing i'm ashamed of, as far as he's concerned. and as for virginia dubec, i don't care if he marries her to-morrow." walter was busy with his own thoughts. "i say, do you think the governor can really mean it?" he asked. humphrey gave rather an unpleasant little laugh. "i hope he does, for our sakes," he said. walter looked at him uncomprehendingly. "what do you mean?" he asked. "well, i suppose if dick doesn't get whatever it is, we shall. i could do with it very well." walter eyed him askance. "i never thought of that," he said rather coldly. "i should be very sorry to have dick cut out for my sake." "it's all very well for you," humphrey said. "you have your job, which you like, and plenty to get on with. and you're married." "there's no reason why you shouldn't get married if you want to," said walter. "i don't know whether it would surprise you to know that i do want to," replied humphrey. walter looked at him in surprise. "my dear chap," he said, "i'm awfully glad. who is it?" "well, i hadn't meant to say anything until i saw how the land lay, so keep it to yourself for the present. it's susan clinton." walter looked a little blank. he had not been particularly charmed either with lady aldeburgh or her daughter, and he was too straightforward to feign an enthusiasm which he did not feel. "will she have you?" he asked. "oh, i think so," said humphrey. "we're very good pals. but, of course, there's aldeburgh to settle with, or rather her ladyship, because he lets 'em go their own way and he goes his. it can't be said to be much of a match. still, there are four other girls, two of them out and about, and if the governor sees his way to greasing the wheels, i ought to be able to pull it off." there was something about this speech which displeased walter. he knew humphrey's way of talking and he knew that his dwelling on the financial side of a marriage, even before he was engaged, might possibly hide a feeling which he would not want to express. but somehow he found it difficult to believe that this speech did hide any particular feeling for lady susan clinton, and equally difficult to infuse any particular warmth into his congratulations. "well, i'm glad you told me," he said. "if you want to pull it off i hope you will, and i shouldn't think there would be much difficulty about money. besides, you want far less when you're married than you'd think. muriel and i aren't spending anything like what we've got, and we're as happy as possible. i'd advise every fellow to get married, if he finds a girl who'll fit in with him." "susan and i will fit in together all right," replied humphrey, "but we've both been used to crashing about a good deal, and i'm afraid we shouldn't save much on your income. besides, muriel brought you something, and i don't think aldeburgh will be likely to cough up much with susan. we shall be as poor as church mice, anyhow. but if she don't mind that i don't particularly, as long as we have enough to get along on." walter knew well enough that humphrey hated above all things to feel poor, and decided that if he was not wishing to marry susan clinton for what she could bring him, he must really love her, in spite of his mercenary speech. "well, old chap," he said, with more warmth, "i'm sure i hope you'll be happy. i haven't spoken to her much, but she seems a jolly good sort, and she's a sort of relation already, i suppose. so we ought all to get on with her. well, i think i'll go and lie down for a bit before breakfast." but humphrey still had something to say, something which he seemed to find it rather difficult to say. "dick and i are not particularly good friends now," he began. "oh, he was annoyed at your letting out something or other about his lady george," said walter. "but he's all right, really." "i shouldn't like him to think," said humphrey, "that i was working against him with the governor. but, of course, if he does marry her, and the governor does what he's threatened to do--well, it would make a lot of difference to me." "he's not likely to think you worked that," said walter rather coldly. "and i hope it won't happen. good-night." the next morning the whole party went to church, with the exception of lady aldeburgh, who was averse to making engagements as early as eleven o'clock. the squire was displeased at this defection on her part, and when bobby trench came into the hall, as they were setting out, on his way to the smoking-room, with a pipe in his mouth and a novel under his arm, he said to him, "haven't you got a watch? it's ten minutes to eleven. you'll be late for church." "to tell you the truth, i wasn't thinking of going," replied bobby trench. "still, i may as well. i can write my bits of letters afterwards." the squire grunted and went out. "i'll see that that young cub behaves himself as long as he's here, at any rate," he said to mrs. clinton. bobby trench winked at lady susan, who was standing alone in the hall. "cheery sort of place to come to, isn't it?" he said. "makes you think yourself back at school again." she turned away from him without smiling. "i'm enjoying myself very much," she said. "the deuce you are," said bobby trench to himself as he went to deposit his pipe and his book in the smoking-room. "sits the wind in that quarter? but never again, robert, never again!" after church humphrey said to susan clinton, "come and see old aunt laura with me. she can't get out much in the winter, but she likes to see people." so they went to the little house in the village and found aunt laura nursing the fire, with a shetland shawl round her bent old shoulders and a large church service on the table by her side. she was flattered by the visit of lady susan, but a little anxious lest she should be carrying about any false impression of the relative importance of the various families of clinton. "it must be very nice for you to come to kencote, my dear," she said. "i dare say you have often thought about it and wished to see the place. your great-grandfather--oh, but i suppose he was much more than that, great-great-great, very likely--did not behave at all well, but that is all forgiven and forgotten now, and i am sure there is nobody at kencote now who is not pleased to see you." "what did my great-great-grandfather do, miss clinton?" enquired lady susan indulgently. "i'm sorry he didn't behave well." "oh, my dear, haven't you read about it? it is all in the book about the clintons--a very interesting book indeed. he was a younger son and he fought for the dissenters against king charles the first, and when king charles was beheaded oliver cromwell turned his eldest brother, who of course was a royalist, out of kencote and gave it to your ancestor. when king charles the second came to the throne he gave it back to its rightful owner, but your ancestor had made a good deal of money, i'm sure i don't know how, and he was ennobled in the reign of king william and queen mary, but i don't know what for. i dare say the clintons of kencote could have been ennobled many times over if they had liked, but for my part i am glad they never were. there are very few commoners' families in england who have gone on for so many years in one place." "oh, i know," said lady susan, with an arch glance at humphrey. "i have been told that." "only once by me," replied humphrey. "i thought you had better know where you stood once for all. you belong to quite the junior branch, you know, and you must be properly humbled when you come to kencote." "oh, there is no necessity for humility," said aunt laura, who so long as she felt that matters were thoroughly understood was anxious that her visitor should not be unduly cast down. "there are other good families in england besides the clintons, and of course you do belong to us in a way, my dear." "we like her to feel that she belongs to us, don't we, aunt laura?" said humphrey, looking at the girl and not at the old lady. lady susan blushed. "oh, of course i belong to you," she said hurriedly, not meeting his gaze. "and i think kencote is a lovely place, much better than thatchover, where we live." "ah, i have never seen that," said aunt laura. "i have seen kemsale, my cousin humphrey's place. i hear there is to be a ball there to-morrow night, and i suppose you are all going. i shall not be able to be present, although i have received an invitation. it was very thoughtful of eleanor kemsale to send me one. she must have known that my advanced age would make it impossible for me to accept, but she knew also that i should feel it if i were left out, for for a number of years there was no entertainment of that sort at kemsale to which i and my dear sisters, who are now all dead, were not invited." lady susan had been looking round the room. "what lovely old prints you have!" she said. "they are old-fashioned things," replied aunt laura, "but i like them. they do not actually belong to me. i brought them from the dower-house, where i and my sisters lived for a number of years. but wait--if you will come into the dining-room, where there is a fire and you need not be afraid of catching cold, i will show you something that does belong to me, and very pleased i am to have it." "oh, i think we'd better stay here, aunt laura," said humphrey. but aunt laura had already risen. "no, humphrey," she said. "i must show lady susan the present you gave me, which has afforded me the greatest pleasure." so they followed her into the little square, panelled dining-room, where she led them to an old engraving of "kencote park, meadshire, the seat of john clinton, esq.," which showed, besides the many-windowed, rectangular house, a large sheet of water with a grecian temple on its banks, and certain gentlemen in tall hats and ladies with parasols feeding swans and apparently refusing the invitation of one of their number, who was seated in a boat, to go for a nice row. "that is the house," explained aunt laura, "as it was when my grandfather altered it, and made the lake, which is now all grown round with rhododendrons and other trees, so that you cannot see it, as it is represented there. but i think it is a fine picture." she put her little grey head crowned by its cap of lace and ribbons on one side, bird-like, as if she were trying to judge how the house might strike a stranger. "it was not in that house your ancestor lived," she told lady susan. "that was burnt down, more's the pity, for i believe it was still larger and finer than the present one. i should like to possess a picture of it, but that is impossible because none exists. at any rate, it was very kind of humphrey to find this one for me and have it well framed, as you see, and give it to me for a christmas present. it is such little attentions as that that people value, my dear, when they come to my age." as they walked away along the village street lady susan said to humphrey, "i do think it was nice of you to give the old lady that picture. it seems to have pleased her very much." "oh, it was nothing," said humphrey. "and she's worth pleasing." "yes, i think she's very nice," lady susan agreed. "i'm glad you like her," said humphrey, "and i think she's disposed to like you. i say, i wish you'd go and look her up with the twins some time to-morrow--without me, i mean. they go to see her every day, and she'd take it as a compliment if you went again of your own accord." "oh, certainly i will," said lady susan. chapter xvii sunday and monday on monday some of the party assembled at kencote hunted, but the squire, who had given up hunting for the season for reasons we know of, went out with sir herbert birkett and george senhouse to walk up partridges, and shoot whatever else came to their guns in an easy, pottering way. although he would not have admitted it, he was getting quite reconciled to the loss of his favourite sport. his wide lands afforded him plenty of game, and he enjoyed these small days with a few guns, walking for miles through roots and over grass, and watching his dogs work, descendants of the famous breed of pointers which had been the pride of his sporting old grandfather. he thought they had not been given half enough to do of late years, and now that his mind was turned in another direction he had begun to feel keenly interested and to follow it up with vigour. "driven birds are all very well," he said to his brother-in-law as they set out. "they're more difficult to hit and you get more shooting. but you don't get so much sport. any cockney who's got the trick of it can bring 'em down." "well, i can't, and i'm a cockney," said sir herbert. "still, i agree with you. this is the sort of day for pleasure." so they spent the whole of the mild winter day in the open, lunched simply on the warm side of a hedge, and came back at dusk, having thoroughly enjoyed themselves. the squire had been at his best, the country gentleman, busying himself in the open air with the pursuits his forefathers had found their pleasure in for generations, allied to his lands, simple in his enjoyment of what they provided for him, companionable, master of field-craft, perfect as a host. "i haven't had such a day for a long time," he said as they stood before the hall door being relieved of their paraphernalia. "i've forgotten all my troubles." sir herbert was touched. he found the man tiresome in so many aspects of life, stupid and overbearing. but he had also something of the appealing simplicity of a child. he was in trouble, and he had been able to forget it all while he had amused himself. "it's the best day i've had for a long time too," he said. "you've given me a great deal of pleasure, edward." but once in the house, the squire's worries rolled back on him--not the big trouble, which he had no time to brood over just now, although it was always present in the background of his mind, but the little annoyances incident to his entertaining a lot of people whose ways were not his ways, and who interfered with the settled course of his life. lady aldeburgh had given him great annoyance, and as for bobby trench, it was as much as he could do to be civil to him. on the other hand, he was more pleased with his son humphrey than he had been for a long time, and he had also come to feel that his son walter was a man to be relied on, in spite of his obstinate choice of a profession unsuitable for a son of his, and his management of his life since he had taken up that profession. if it had not been for this new-found satisfaction in his younger sons, perhaps he would not have been able to prevent the thoughts of his eldest son spoiling his day, and he would certainly have been far more actively annoyed with lady aldeburgh and bobby trench. for neither of those gay butterflies of fashion had been able or cared to adjust themselves to the sabbath calm of a house managed in the way that kencote was. lady aldeburgh, having spent the morning in her room, written her letters and done her duty to privacy for the day, came down to luncheon ready and willing to be amused. and there was no amusement provided for her. after luncheon she had played a game of running round the billiard-table and knocking balls into pockets with the bare hand with bobby trench, and fortunately the squire, at rest in his room, with the _spectator_ on his knee, had not known what they were doing. but this mild amusement had soon palled, and the problem was to find something for two active young things to do in its place. "have you _ever_ stayed in a house like this before, bobby dear?" asked lady aldeburgh. bobby dear said that he never had, and the powers above being favourable, never would again. "it's perfectly deadly," said lady aldeburgh. "what on earth are the rest of them doing?" "slumbering on their beds," replied bobby trench; "and in half an hour or so they will all appear, rubbing their eyes, and we shall go for a nice long walk." "not me," said her ladyship, with a glance at the leaden sky outside and the bare leafless trees shaking in a cold wind. "do let's get somewhere by a cosey fire and have a rubber of bridge." "who's the four?" asked bobby trench. "shall we wake up old clinton, and ask him? there are risks. it might be amusing to see somebody in an apoplectic fit, and again it might not." "don't be foolish," said lady aldeburgh, patting him on the arm. "humphrey would play, and i'll tell susan she's wanted." "they are going out for a walk together. it's a case," said bobby trench boldly. "whatever put that into your head?" enquired her ladyship, with wide-open eyes. "it's quite absurd." "oh, i think susan's a very nice girl," replied bobby trench. "though i admit it's absurd to take much notice of her while you're about." lady aldeburgh hit his sleeve again with her jewelled hand. "if you talk like that i shall go away," she said. "when i said it was absurd i meant that neither of them has a shilling." "humphrey ought to have a good many shillings if he plays his hand well with old papa beetroot just now," replied bobby trench. "there's a deuce of an upset. i should hold for a rise if i were you." "you shouldn't talk so disrespectfully. you are disrespectful to me, and to mr. clinton, who is a relation of mine--and the head of our family, or so he says. and as for humphrey, he's a nice boy--certainly the pick of this particular bunch--but susan wouldn't look at him." "why not? he's civilised, if his people aren't." "she could do much better, and i shouldn't allow it. of course they are friends, and i don't mind that. you must remember that they are cousins." "is it fifty-sixth or fifty-seventh cousins?" asked bobby trench innocently. "well, you know best, of course, but you've got other girls besides susan to look after, and if you don't take care she'll get left. no, my dear lady, it's no use trying to deceive me. you're quite ready to let susan marry humphrey if papa mangel-wurzel will put up the stakes. aren't you, now? confess." "i shan't confess anything so ridiculous," said lady aldeburgh petulantly. "what i want to do is to play bridge, and relieve myself of this frightful boredom. i shouldn't have come here if i'd known what it was like. _can't_ we get a four?" "i'll see about it later on," said bobby trench. "perhaps after tea. why not picquet in the meantime?" "it's a stupid game," said lady aldeburgh. "but if you make the stakes high enough it would be better than nothing." "i'll make the stakes what you like," said bobby trench. "i'll pay you if i lose, and if you lose you must pay me." lady aldeburgh having consented to this not unreasonable arrangement, bobby trench rang the bell and asked the servant who answered it to bring a card-table and some cards. although somewhat surprised at the order he presently fulfilled it, and the game proceeded until tea-time. all the members of the house party met over the tea-table, and afterwards lady aldeburgh, having whispered to her daughter, went out of the room followed by bobby trench. lady susan then whispered something to humphrey, who looked rather disturbed, and then also went out of the room with her. now the whispers had not been in the least obtrusive, or of the nature to arouse comment, but the squire happened to have observed them both, and told joan as he went back into his room to find humphrey and send him to him, not anticipating hearing of anything wrong, but thinking that he might as well know what was going on as not. joan was delighted with the errand. she also had observed the whispers, and was at least as eager as her father to find out what was on foot. she went to several rooms before she opened the door of the billiard-room, which was little used, and never on a sunday. there she found lady aldeburgh and bobby trench seated at a card-table, and humphrey standing by them with susan clinton at his side. "humphrey, father wants to speak to you for a minute," she said, and then ran away to find nancy and tell her of the terrible thing that was happening. "well, if you don't mind, then," said humphrey, preparing to obey the summons, and lady aldeburgh said, "oh no, not in the least. i didn't know there would be any objection." joan, passing through the hall, was again stopped by the squire, who was standing at the door of his room. "i told you to fetch humphrey," he said irritably. "why have you been so long? i want to speak to him." "i couldn't find him, father," said joan. "where was he?" asked the squire. "he's just coming," replied joan. "i asked you _where_ he was," persisted the squire, and when she said he had been in the billiard-room, asked her what he was doing there. "talking to lady aldeburgh," said joan; and the squire asked her what _she_ was doing. then it came out. "playing at cards with mr. trench," said joan, who disliked lady aldeburgh and bobby trench equally, and didn't see why she shouldn't answer a plain question in plain terms. then the squire went into his room, shutting the door decisively, and humphrey went in after him, joan having escaped for the second time. inside the squire's room there was an outbreak. "i will not have it in this house. i simply _will not_ have it," was the burden of his indignant cry. "well, look here, father," said humphrey quietly. "i didn't know what was happening, and directly i did i stopped them. they gave it up at once when i said you wouldn't like it. they couldn't tell, you know. everybody does it now." the squire spluttered his wrath. "i call it disgraceful," he said. "i don't know what the world's coming to. cards on sunday in a respectable god-fearing house! and you defend it!" "no, i don't," said humphrey. "i told you that i had stopped them." the squire looked at him. "did they want you to play?" he asked. "you and a girl like lady susan! you don't mean to tell me her mother wanted her to play? is the girl accustomed to that sort of thing, i should like to know?" humphrey did not want to give lady aldeburgh away, but rather her than susan, and rather bobby trench than either of them. "susan doesn't care about it," he said. "lady aldeburgh--well, you can see what she is, can't you?--nothing like as sensible as her daughter. she'll do what anybody wants her to." "oh, then it's master trench i'm to thank for making my house a gambling saloon on a sunday!" exclaimed the squire. "if he wasn't my guest, i would say something to that young cub that would surprise him. anyhow, he'll never come into this house again, and i must say, seeing what he is, that i wonder at your asking him at all." "i'm sorry i did," said humphrey. "but i hope you won't say anything to him about this. i'll take charge of them and see that they behave themselves." "then you'll have your work cut out for you," said the squire grumpily. "you'd better set about doing it at once. i wish to goodness i'd never consented to people like that coming into the house. i may be old-fashioned--i dare say i am--but i don't understand their ways, and i don't want to." that had been the end of it as far as he was concerned. if he could have heard what passed between lady aldeburgh and bobby trench when deprived of their legitimate amusement--but that thought is too painful. what had happened further on that sunday evening was that feeling vaguely the need of some sort of comfort in the anxieties that beset him he had suddenly taken it into his head to go to church to the evening service, a thing he hardly ever did, and striding with firm and audible steps into the chancel pew during the saying of the psalms, he had found, as well as most of the ladies from the house and george senhouse, assembled there, humphrey and susan clinton sitting together, and had come to the conclusion, during the sermon, that it was creditable on humphrey's part to have stopped the card-playing on his behalf, instead of joining in it, as might have been expected of him, and that he seemed to be turning over a new leaf, and was probably exercising a good influence over the harmless daughter of a foolish mother. so he was pleased with humphrey, but displeased with lady aldeburgh, who had shown herself perverse at the dinner-table and in the drawing-room afterwards, had refused to talk more than was necessary, and had gone up to her room on the stroke of ten; and furious with bobby trench, who had made no effort to disguise his yawns throughout the evening, and fallen openly asleep in the library after the ladies had retired. as for walter, he had talked to him very sensibly later still in the evening about dick. "don't do anything," he had said, "till i have seen him again. i don't know what can be done, or if anything can be done. but it's quite certain that if you threaten him you will drive him straight into doing what you don't want him to do." so he had consented to walter acting as his ambassador, and felt that he could rely on him in that capacity, and even take some comfort in the hope that he might do something to lighten the state of gloom and depression in which most of his waking hours were now passed. it was with a feeling of relief that he saw the whole party, with the exception of sir herbert birkett, set out later in the evening on their ten-mile drive to kemsale. it had been his intention to go with them, but the thought that virginia, with whom he had seen lord meadshire colloguing, would almost certainly have received an invitation, and would no doubt eagerly have accepted it, deterred him. when his wife's carriage, containing herself, lady birkett, and lady aldeburgh, who would far rather have been with the younger members of the party, had driven off, and the omnibus, with the rest of them, had followed it, he breathed a sigh of relief. "to-morrow we shall be able to settle down again, thank god!" he said to himself as the door was shut behind him. kemsale hall, towards which carriages from every country house in south meadshire within driving distance, and motor-cars from far beyond, were converging, was a very fine place, and the ball which lord meadshire gave that evening was a very fine ball. amongst the numerous guests, whose names were all chronicled in the _bathgate herald and south meadshire advertiser_, were lady george dubec and miss dexter. virginia had gone home from the hunt ball vowing that nothing would induce her to accept the invitation which lady kemsale had given her so patronisingly when it should be confirmed by the promised card, and miss dexter had backed her up in her own dry way, while professing to combat her resolution. "i don't know what you can be thinking of, virginia," she said. "refuse an invitation to a house like kemsale--the house of a marquis, a lord-lieutenant! why, lots of women would commit hari-kari to-morrow--or at least the day after the ball--if they could get an invitation." "well, i'm not one of them," said virginia. "to think that i would go anywhere on sufferance! lord meadshire's an old darling, but as for his daughter-in-law, i should very much like to tell her what i think of her." the opportunity of doing so occurred no later than the following afternoon, when lady kemsale came to blaythorn rectory to call, but virginia did not take it. lady kemsale's manners were naturally stiff, but she did her best to soften them when she was shown into virginia's drawing-room. "i thought i would come over before monday," she said, with a smile, "so as to put everything on the most approved basis of etiquette. we don't often get new people in this part of the world, and when we do we must make haste to show that we appreciate them." this was handsome enough, and it rather took virginia's breath away. when lady kemsale had been announced she had jumped to the conclusion that lord meadshire had sent her, which was true; but what was also true was that she had been quite pleased to come, and to have the opportunity of making amends for her frigidity at the hunt ball, which had been caused by the squire's tale and thawed again by her own observations. when she drove away half an hour later virginia said with a rare lapse into the american tongue, "why, she's a perfectly lovely woman, after all, toby. now you can't say that i was wrong to say i'd go, after the way she behaved." "just a little soft-sawder, and you fall at her feet," said miss dexter. but she was pleased, all the same, that virginia should be going to kemsale, and that one more of dick's people should have acknowledged her charm and her worth. she was pleased also to be going herself, for she had a little scheme of her own, which she had not imparted to her friend. she had, in fact, made up her mind to speak to mrs. clinton, if she could find an excuse to do so, unobserved by the squire. she had watched her in the bathgate assembly room, and she had seen her in her turn watching virginia with eyes whose meaning, whatever it was, was not one of hostility. "now there's a woman with sense," she had said to herself. "_she_ wouldn't be tiresome. i wonder how much she is under the influence of her old bear of a husband?" this was what she was going to find out, if she could, and she waited her opportunity, refusing invitations to dance, and wandering about the great string of rooms at kemsale, stalking her prey, with a whole-hearted indifference as to what might be thought of a single lady so apparently friendless and partnerless. it was lord meadshire himself, who, coming across her passing through one of the smaller drawing-rooms, did what she wanted. "what! not dancing?" he asked in his friendly way; and with a searching glance at his kind old face she said, "i have something else to do. i want to speak to mrs. clinton, but i don't know her." he looked at her in return with a momentary seriousness. "want to gain a convert, eh?" he asked. he liked her plain sensible face, and the way she stood, square to him and to the world. "tell me now, is this a serious business?" she did not answer him directly. "she's one of the best women in the world," she said. "perhaps i'm the only person who really knows what she's been through and how she has taken it. she has come out of her troubles pure gold. and anybody can see for themselves that she is beautiful and has a charm all her own." "oh yes, anybody can see that," said lord meadshire. "she's a sweet creature. and dick clinton wants to marry her. _he's_ serious, eh?" "i think he has proved it," said miss dexter. lord meadshire considered this. he had heard that dick had retired from the army, but not about his having taken an estate agency. "i suppose he is," he said. "they ought to know her," said miss dexter. "people ought not to hug prejudices that have no reason." lord meadshire looked at her with his mischievous smile. "a matter of abstract right and wrong--what?" he said. "well, come along, and i'll introduce you. but you must tell me your name, which i'm afraid i have forgotten, although i know quite well who you are, you know." "yes. i'm lady george dubec's companion, and my name is dexter," she said. lord meadshire loved a little conspiracy. his eyes twinkled at her as he said, "this dance is coming to an end, and people will be here in a minute. you would like to talk to her by yourselves. go into the conservatory there, and leave it all to me." so miss dexter went and deposited herself on one of two chairs under a palm. couples in search of privacy wondered, sometimes audibly, why on earth the woman couldn't find some other place to sit and mope in, but she sat on undisturbed. a man whom she had danced with before, also unattached, mooned in with his hands in his pockets, and showed a disposition to take the vacant chair. "please go away," she said. "i have got toothache, and anybody who talks to me will have his head snapped off," and he, being of a diffident nature, went. presently the lilting sweep of strings and the sweet penetrating sound of horns came sweeping in from the distant orchestra, and she was left alone once more, except for one couple, who still sat on in a distant corner. but by and by she heard voices approaching. these were from lord meadshire and mrs. clinton, whom he had brought in to look at the flowers, which were banked up in gay, scented masses underneath the spreading branches of the great palms. they came to where she was sitting, and lord meadshire said again, "what! not dancing?" she rose and stood before them. "i'm having a little rest," she said, with a smile; and then he made the introduction. "do you know miss dexter, nina?" he asked. "she has come to live here for a time, mrs. clinton." mrs. clinton acknowledged the introduction not without stiffness. she was taken by surprise, as was intended, but she was a woman whom it was not wise to take by surprise, if you wanted her to show you what was in her mind. lord meadshire had intended to leave her with miss dexter, slipping away on some excuse with a promise to return, but when he had borne the brunt of a light conversation for a little time he perceived that he could not do so. he paused in some bewilderment, and miss dexter said, "may i have a few words with you, mrs. clinton?" "ah yes," he said, visibly relieved. "i'll leave you both here together, and come back." but mrs. clinton said at once, "if it is about lady george dubec, i would rather not hear anything. i think i will go back to the ballroom, cousin humphrey." then she turned resolutely, with a bow to miss dexter, who had plumped herself into her seat again and did not return it, and lord meadshire had nothing to do but to go away with her. "but you mustn't sit here all the evening," he said kindly, over his shoulder, to miss dexter. "i shall come back and fetch you." but when he returned five minutes later she was not there, and he saw her dancing vigorously, and apparently anxious to avoid him. but she could not dance the whole evening, owing to a lack of partners, and he had an opportunity of speaking to her later. "i'm afraid our little scheme miscarried," he said, with some concern. she showed him a pink, angry face. "i wish to goodness i had left it alone," she said. "i don't like being snubbed." "she won't go behind her husband," he said rather lamely. "i thought, to look at her, she had a good deal more sense than he," said miss dexter uncompromisingly. "it seems i was mistaken." chapter xviii mrs. clinton chooses a governess mrs. clinton sat in lady birkett's drawing-room prepared to interview, one by one, twenty or more of the ladies who had answered her advertisement for a governess for the twins. she expected to devote two consecutive mornings to her task, and was prepared to listen, to weigh, and to judge with all her faculties alert. on the table by her side was an orderly pile of letters, most of them running to two or three sheets of notepaper. they were the residuum of some scores, and she had read the contents of each several times over. punctually on the stroke of ten entered miss winifred player, twenty-five, french, german, and italian, elementary hebrew, music, drawing, thorough english and composition, botany, physiology, dancing and calisthenics, needlework, swimming, elementary bookkeeping and typewriting; daughter of a clergyman of the church of england; bright, persevering, and makes friends with pupils (see testimonials); bicycles, good walker, tennis. it was astonishing that she should have acquired so much learning during her short term of life, and also spent eight years in imparting it. she proved to be a self-confident young woman with a voluble tongue, and mrs. clinton had only to sit and listen to her while she made it quite plain that she would not do at all. but by way of gaining experience which might be useful in dealing with further applicants, mrs. clinton asked her a few questions when a lull in the storm of words allowed her an opportunity, going through her list of "subjects" from the letter she held in her hand. miss player, it seemed, had not studied the languages she offered abroad. she had been neither to france, germany, italy, nor syria. french she had learned at school, german and italian she had taught herself in spare moments. hebrew--well, she had hardly supposed hebrew would be wanted, but she had put that in because she had learnt the letters and helped her father by copying. she knew the greek alphabet too. thorough english meant that she was fond of reading, and had once reviewed a novel for a parish magazine. she had the article in her little handbag, and offered it as corroborating evidence. botany and physiology she had "studied." but she seemed rather anxious to get away from her "subjects." "i always get on with my pupils," she said, "and i don't mind making myself useful in the house. in fact, i enjoy doing so, and feeling that i am one of the family. how old are your little girls, mrs. clinton?" "they are fifteen," replied mrs. clinton. "i am afraid your accomplishments are not quite what i want." there came a sudden droop. miss player was "bright" no longer, but plainly dejected. "you offer a very high salary," she said somewhat inconsequently. "yes, you see i want a lady of high education." "i'm bright in the house," said the girl. mrs. clinton could not repress a smile. "i hope you will get a good place where your qualities will be valued," she said, and miss player left her. the interview had only lasted five minutes, and mrs. clinton had allowed fifteen for each. she went to find her sister-in-law. "i think you had better come and support me," she said, "and i think you will be amused." so when miss janet phipp was shown in she found herself confronted by two ladies instead of one, and both of them asked her questions. miss phipp was thirty, very plain--there was no denying that--but also on her own showing very competent. she had been educated at a high school, and had taken the degree of bachelor of arts at the london university. she had taught in a high school ever since, but the work was rather too hard for her. her doctor had advised her to go into the country and avoid the strain of night as well as day work. "i am not an invalid," she said quietly, "and my health would give you no trouble." there was no doubt about her capacity, but she was quite uninspiring. mrs. clinton hesitated. "have you been used to living in the country?" she asked. "oh no," said miss phipp. "i told you--i have been at the high school for eight years. in my holidays i went abroad mostly, or to my home in manchester, as long as my parents were alive." "i am afraid you would find it very dull," said mrs. clinton. "i think not," she said. "but it wouldn't much matter if i did, would it, as long as i did my work well? i can teach, and i like teaching." "my daughters are active young persons," said mrs. clinton. "they are out of doors a great deal. do you play golf, or lawn tennis, or anything of that sort?" miss phipp's face hardened a little. "i don't care about games," she said. "i have always put work first. i would undertake to make your girls work, and if i were to look after them in their play-time--wouldn't that be all that would be wanted?" "i think not," said mrs. clinton. "i want them to work, but i want some one who would be a pleasant companion for them too, out of lesson hours." "did you find it easy to make friends with your pupils at the school?" asked lady birkett. "a few of them," said miss phipp. "the ones who wanted to get on. i used to have them in my rooms to help them. with the others i found it best to keep to work alone. i got more out of them that way. after school hours they went their own way and i went mine." "but that is just what you couldn't do in a private family," urged mrs. clinton. "you wouldn't have to be always with the children, but you would be much more with them than with girls you taught in a school." "yes. i know that," said miss phipp. "only i don't want to give you a wrong impression of myself. i would do my best to make friends with your girls, only i fancy it would rest with them more than with me. some teachers find it quite easy to have girls hanging on to them and adoring them, and my experience is that work suffers on account of it. i wouldn't go anywhere where work wasn't the chief thing." when she had gone out mrs. clinton said, "it is really very puzzling. i'm not at all sure that she wouldn't do, although she is far from being the sort of governess i had pictured." "we shall do better," said lady birkett. "there are plenty more to see yet." the next to arrive was miss judith gay, twenty-three, pretty and rather shy, daughter of an admiral deceased, perfect french, good piano and singing, otherwise not up to the mark scholastically. "if it were only a companion we wanted!" said mrs. clinton when she had gone out. "the twins would love her," said lady birkett, "but they would twist her round their little fingers." miss ella charman was the next arrival. she was thirty-four, well dressed, and talked after the manner of a lady of fashion. it was apparently her object to set both mrs. clinton and lady birkett thoroughly at their ease, and establish intimate relations before coming to business. "i have never been in that part of the world," she said when she had enquired where mrs. clinton lived, "but i know the palmers very well. i think they live in meadshire, don't they?" "not in our part of meadshire," replied mrs. clinton. "at least i do not know the name." "oh, you would know them, i should think, if they lived near you," said miss charman. "she was a daughter of sir james farley. lady farley was a sister of mrs. bingham, with whom i lived. mr. bingham, you know, is a brother of lord howley's. little edward, whom i taught until he went to school, will be lord howley some day. i was sorry to leave the binghams, but edward was the only child, and had to be sent to school, of course. do you know lord dorman, mrs. clinton?" "no," said that lady, taking up a letter, "you have not mentioned----" "i thought you might," interrupted miss charman. "he is only a new creation, of course. he was sir john thompson, the engineer or contractor or something; mrs. cottering told me that he had paid a hundred thousand pounds into the funds of the liberal party, and got his peerage in that way. the dormans were very anxious that i should go to them and take sole charge of their adopted niece. they have no children living of their own. mrs. dappering told me that it was a great sorrow to them. their only son was killed in the war. do you know lady edith chippering?" "no," said mrs. clinton. "are you still thinking of going to----" "she was a daughter of the earl of havering. i thought you might. she was staying with the binghams just before i left them. she did say something about my going to her. of course the dormans would be more---- by the way, do you know the lodderings? don't they live in meadshire?" mrs. clinton did not answer this question. "i have a good many people to see, miss charman," she said. "i think we had better talk about--about our business, hadn't we?" "oh, certainly," said miss charman. "should i have my meals with the family or not? that is rather a point with me. at the cotterings' i had everything sent up and lived entirely in the schoolroom, which i don't think a good arrangement. one gets dull and mopy, you know. at the binghams' i was one of the family, and used to help mr. bingham with his farm accounts after dinner; in fact, he used to call me his secretary. he _would_ look after everything on his property himself. would there be anything of that sort i could help mr. clinton in, do you think? i don't know whether he has landed property or not, but i should be delighted to do anything i could to help him." "you were asking about meals," said mrs. clinton. "you would have breakfast and luncheon with us, and you would dine upstairs. now will you kindly tell me what subjects you can teach?" "oh, the usual subjects," said miss charman. "i am a bachelor of arts of london university, you know, honours in french and mathematics. and there are the training certificates. you have all that, haven't you? i got hilda cottering into girton. her father didn't want her to go. with all that money coming he thought it was waste of time. but she was a clever girl, and we used to do a great deal of work, and have a great deal of fun besides. she married young spencer-morton, you know, the nephew of lord pickering. do you know the pickerings, by any chance?" and so it went on, and would have gone on interminably had not mrs. clinton at last risen and held out her hand as token of dismissal. miss charman retired affably, saying that she supposed she should hear in a day or two. she knew mrs. clinton must get through her list first, but she should be glad to come to her, and she would no doubt let her know the date later on. when she had left them the two ladies looked at one another and laughed. "how delighted edward would be with that flow of conversation!" said lady birkett. "it would be worth while engaging her if only to see his face when she asked him if he knew the potterings." "miss phipp is the only possible one so far," said mrs. clinton. miss margaret cunningham was the next. twenty-five, with an excellent record, nice-mannered and good-looking, but the unfortunate possessor of a cockney accent of remarkably pungency. she had been a "dyly" governess only, in "straoud" green, where she lived, but her father had married again and she was not happy at home. her father was scotch. "i don't think i've got his accent, though," she said, with a smile. if she had she might have beaten miss phipp out of the field. her own made her impossible. miss clara weyerhauser was young, but spectacled, short-haired and mannishly clothed. "edward would roar the house down if i took her to kencote," said mrs. clinton, when the tale of her numerous attainments had been extracted from her and she had stamped out of the room. "it seemed odd that she should keep her hat on in the house," said lady birkett. miss mary mansell was too nervous, miss gladys whiting too delicate-looking to make it likely that they could cope successfully with the twins. then came miss jessie barton. she was forty-two, and looked older, a lady by birth and in speech and manner, but poorly dressed, thin and worn. she had been teaching for over twenty years in good families, and had the best of references to show from each, but admitted, with a flush on her pale cheeks, that she had left her last place, over a year before, because the girls she had taught wanted a finishing governess. "but that is just what i want for my girls," said mrs. clinton. "ah, but they are younger," she said eagerly. "really, i am sure i could get them on well, mrs. clinton. and i am as strong and active as ever i was, and much more experienced. i am just coming to the time when it will be difficult to get work, and if i don't get work i must starve. i have no home to go to now, and very few friends." "i know those are the hardships of your calling," said mrs. clinton gently. "but i can't let them weigh with me, can i? i must do the best i can for my children." "well, i think a woman of my age can do better for them than a younger one with less experience," said the poor lady. "i _do_ hope you won't let my age stand in the way, mrs. clinton. i haven't taken a day off, as some women do. i am no older than i say." "if i hadn't been ready to take a woman of your age, other things being equal, i shouldn't have asked you to come and see me," said mrs. clinton. "but i cannot decide anything until i have seen every one i have written to." "ah well!" she said, with a sigh. "i know you won't choose me, or you would have told me more about the children, and what you wanted. i suppose i must go on with the weary round until i drop." "it is very depressing, poor thing!" said mrs. clinton when she had gone. "but i can't possibly engage a governess out of motives of pity." "she would be all right for younger children," said lady birkett. "it is hard that she should begin to find it difficult to get work at that age." miss gertrude wilson, twenty-nine, was brisk and business-like. she would have made an excellent commercial traveller, taking it cheerfully for granted when she entered a shop that she was going to get an order, and not leaving it until she had got one. it was she who asked the questions, not in the manner of miss player, obsessed by her own personality and experiences, but rather like a doctor, anxious thoroughly to diagnose a case so that he might do the best he could for his patient. "now i should like to know, first of all," she said, "what the characters of your girls are like, mrs. clinton. then one can form some idea as to how to treat them." "they are physically active," said mrs. clinton; "mentally too, especially nancy, who has developed greatly within the last year. she is a clever child, and is beginning to take a great interest in books, and i think one might say in everything she finds inside them." "ah, a student!" said miss wilson. "one ought not to let her overdo that at her age, although one must take pains to encourage her in anything she wants to take up, and try and concentrate her upon it. i don't believe much in desultory reading. i should feel inclined to curb that. but that is not quite what i want to know. i can deal with all that when i see the girls. it is their dispositions i want to get at. are they bright as a general rule, or inclined to be subdued?" "not at all inclined to be subdued," said lady birkett, with a laugh. "not spoilt, i hope?" asked miss wilson. "if they are, please say so. i can deal with them all right." "i don't think they are spoilt," said mrs. clinton. "they are both affectionate, and easily managed by any one they love. they are apt to be mischievous, perhaps, although they are growing out of that now. they are rather overfond of making fun of people, but i think no one would call them ill-natured." "well, that is a very satisfactory report on the whole," said miss wilson. "i expect i shall get fond of them. i generally do get fond of my pupils, and they of me. may i ask what other members of your family there are, mrs. clinton--brothers or sisters, older or younger?" "joan and nancy are the only ones regularly at home," replied mrs. clinton. "oh! no brothers at school coming home for the holidays?" "no," said mrs. clinton. "it is apt to make things difficult sometimes. girls get out of hand. are there older brothers, may i ask?" "yes, but you would see little of them, miss wilson. you need not take them into account." by the look of miss wilson's face, it might have been gathered that she would have preferred to take them into account, at any rate to the extent of hearing a little more about them. but her momentary dejection disappeared. she had to keep her control of the situation. "and now as to hours," she said. "my plan would be to work the _whole_ of the morning, with perhaps a quarter of an hour off for a glass of milk and a rock cake or something of that sort--say from nine o'clock to lunch time; exercise and games in the afternoon, till four. then three hours' work, with tea in between, and i should expect the girls to do an hour or so's preparation later in the evening. they do not dine with you, of course." "they come down to dessert," said mrs. clinton. "that would be about eight o'clock, i suppose. we can just fit in the other hour before they go to bed. i should like them to go to bed not later than half-past nine, and----" "i like them to go to bed at nine," mrs. clinton managed to break in. "and they would not do any work after they have come downstairs; there would not be time." "oh, well, we can settle all that later," miss wilson handsomely conceded. "i shall do my very best to get them on, mrs. clinton. wednesdays and saturdays i suppose we shall have half-holidays, or do you prefer a whole holiday on saturday? perhaps we had better settle that later too; it is all one to me. i shall do my best to fit in with the ways of the house. shall you wish me to take my meals downstairs?" "breakfast and luncheon, yes," said mrs. clinton. "you would dine in the schoolroom." miss wilson's face again fell. but she said, "that will suit me very well. i shall have time for my own reading when the children have gone to bed. when shall you wish me to come?" "if i engage you, about the tenth. now i should like to ask you a few questions, if you are ready to answer them." the cross-examination miss wilson underwent as to her scholastic attainments and previous experience, at the hands of both ladies, was somewhat searching, and she came through it admirably. she was, in fact, the ideal governess, as far as could be seen. and yet, neither of them liked her, and they would have been pleased rather than regretful to find some flaw which would give them an excuse to reject her. "well," said mrs. clinton at last, "i have others to see, but i will take up your references and write to you in a few days. you have given me all the addresses, i suppose?" she took up miss wilson's letter, which was shorter than the rest, confining itself to one sheet of note-paper. "yes, you will find them there," said miss wilson, rising a little hurriedly. "then i shall hope to hear from you, and i will say good-morning, mrs. clinton." mrs. clinton ignored her outstretched hand. "i will just pencil the dates at which you were with these three families," she said. "mrs. waterhouse was the first." "oh, i am very bad at dates," said miss wilson. "but they are all in order. you will have no difficulty." mrs. clinton looked at her in mild surprise. "surely you remember the number of years you were with each family," she said. "oh, i dare say i can remember that," she said, with a rather nervous laugh. "i was with mrs. waterhouse about three years, mrs. simkinson one and a half, i think it was." "that is all i wanted to know," said mrs. clinton, but lady birkett asked, "are those three all the posts you have filled?" miss wilson, who was still standing, drew herself up stiffly. "i was with some other people for about a year," she said. "but they were intensely disagreeable people, and i should be very sorry to have to rely on a testimonial from them. they behaved atrociously to me." "in what way?" asked mrs. clinton. "i prefer not to say," said miss wilson firmly. "i have no wish to talk about those people at all. i only wish to forget them. if you will take up the references i have given you i think you will know everything about me that you have a right to ask, and you will find it thoroughly satisfactory; and anything else i shall be pleased to tell you." "i think, then, i must ask why you left these people. were they the last you were with?" "yes," said miss wilson, "they were; and the whole subject is so painful to me that i must refuse to go into it." "you will not give me the name, so that i can at least hear their side of the story?" "certainly not, mrs. clinton," replied miss wilson indignantly. "if those are the only conditions on which i may accept your offer, then i must refuse it altogether." "i haven't made you an offer yet," said mrs. clinton, "and of course, under the circumstances, i cannot do so. so i will wish you good-morning." miss wilson seemed about to say something more, but changed her mind and left the room with her head in the air. the two ladies looked at one another. "what on earth can it have been?" asked mrs. clinton. "carrying on," replied lady birkett, with a laugh. "i can see it now. she's the sort that carries on. the details we must leave to the imagination, but we're well rid of her." chapter xix mrs. clinton in jermyn street it was about seven o'clock in the evening. mrs. clinton stood for a moment on the pavement, on which the light of a street lamp shone and was reflected from the wet stone, and paid her cabman. then she turned to the tall dull house and rang the bell. in this house, in one of the narrow streets just off st. james's, dick had had rooms for many years, but his mother had not been able to correct the cabman when he had first stopped at a wrong number. she had time to reflect on this fact before the door was opened to her. captain clinton was not in, said the man, but he generally came in to dress not later than half-past seven; and she said she would go to his room and wait. the hall was narrow and dimly lighted. on a table under a tiny gas-jet were a dozen or so of bedroom candlesticks, and hanging on the wall a rack for letters and telegrams. the stairs were darkly druggeted. the man opened a door on the first floor, turned on the light and retired, and she found herself in a furnished apartment such as is occupied by men of fashion in london. there was nothing to mark it off from superior furnished apartments anywhere. the furniture was of the solid victorian type, the paper on the walls ugly, the carpet of a nondescript colour. there was a gilt clock on the mantelpiece and two coloured glass vases. the pictures had no value or beauty. on a marble-topped sideboard were a collection of gloves, caps, and hats, the silk ones beautifully ironed and brushed, and on the sofa were two or three carefully folded overcoats. these were all that spoke of dick's occupancy of the rooms, on which otherwise he had made no sort of personal impress in a tenancy ranging over twelve years. there were no books, and not even a photograph belonging to him. yet he paid the rent of a good house for this room and a bedroom behind the grained and varnished folding-doors, and was quite content with them. there was no bathroom in the house, and he had to go out for all his meals except breakfast; but he was valeted as well as if he had been at home. mrs. clinton sat down in an easy-chair before the fire and looked around her once, her gaze resting for a minute on the closed doors between the two rooms. she might have wished to see what sort of bedroom dick occupied, but she did not do so. she sat still and waited for half an hour, and then dick came in. she heard him humming an air as he ran upstairs, but when he entered the room and saw her, half risen from her chair to receive him, he stopped short in utter surprise. "why, mother!" he exclaimed, and for a moment his face was not welcoming. then he came forward and kissed her. "whatever wind blows you here?" he asked lightly. "i am staying with eleanor birkett," she said. "i have come up to engage a governess for the children." "time to break them in, eh?" he said. "how are the young rascals? still raking in coins for their camera?" she allowed herself a faint smile. "they are very well," she said. "well, shall we go and have a little dinner somewhere together, or are you dining in queen's gate?" "i said i might not be back to dinner," she said. "i didn't know whether you would be engaged or not." "no, i was going to dine at the club. that's capital. i'll just go and shift, if you don't mind waiting, and in the meantime you consider what epicurean haunt you would like to go to." he went into his bedroom, giving her no time to say anything further if she had wished to, and left her to sit by the fire again and wait for him. he came out again in a quarter of an hour, during which time she had heard splashings and movements, but no further humming of airs. "verrey's, i think," he said. "you'll want to go somewhere quiet, eh?" "dick," she said, "i should like to have a little talk with you before we go out." he was already putting on his scarf. "let's dine first, mother," he said. "it's just upon eight, and i'm hungry. we can come back here afterwards, if you like." perhaps it was better that he should dine first, especially if he was hungry. "very well," she said, and rose to go with him. driving through the streets, sitting over their dinner for an hour, and driving back again, nothing was said between them of what was certainly occupying mrs. clinton's mind, and must have been in dick's. it was difficult for her to talk; they had so little in common besides the externals of home life, and at every turn in the conversation something came up that must not be said if there was to be no mention yet of the only thing that mattered at kencote. but dick seemed determined that there should be no mention of it, and by and by they got on to the subject of the twins and their new governess, and then the conversation was easier. she told him about the ladies she had interviewed, and he laughed at her descriptions of them. "capital, mother!" he said. "you ought to write it all down." he was pleased with her. she was entertaining him, where he had thought she would be a drag on his well-meant efforts to entertain her. and because he was very well disposed towards her, it was gratifying to be able to feel that they were getting on happily together. his manner became warmer as the dinner proceeded, reflecting his feelings, which also became warmer. they had some quite sensible conversation about the twins and their education. dick thought that the governess who had taught in the high school--miss phipp--was the right one. "they want discipline," he said. "that's what's missing in girls' education, especially when they are taught at home. it won't do those young women any harm to be made to grind at it. i'm for the school-marm, mother." as they waited for a minute for a cab to be called up to take them back to jermyn street, dick said, looking at her appreciatively, "what a pretty gown that is, mother! i've never seen it before." she flushed with pleasure, but said nothing. he handed her into the cab, and took his seat beside her. "we must have another little evening together before---- when are you going back, by the by?" "to-morrow," she said. "what a pity! can't you stay till the next day, and come and do a play? i've got to-morrow night free." but she said she must go back, and he did not press her further. when they reached dick's rooms and got out of the cab he told the man to wait and then turned to the door with his latch-key in his hand. "please send him away," said mrs. clinton. "i came on purpose to have a talk with you, dick." "you needn't hurry away, mother," he said. "but you will want a cab by and by to go home in." "i shan't feel comfortable while the minutes are ticking away," she said. "you can get me another one presently." dick laughed at her, but he paid the cabman, and they went up to his room together. "now, then, little mother," he said, as he took off his overcoat and scarf, "let's have it out. i'll mix myself a little liquid refreshment, and if you don't mind my smoking a cigar, i shall be in a mood to give you my whole attention." now that the time had come to speak she was nervous, and did not know how to begin. dick, apparently thoroughly at his ease, good-humoured with her, but not prepared, it seemed, to take her very seriously, lit another cigar, poured himself out whisky and undid the wire of a soda-water bottle before she spoke, and as she was beginning he spoke himself. "i'm going to be married next month," he said; "will you come to my wedding?" as he spoke the cord of the soda-water bottle flew out with a pop, and he said, "steady now, steady!" there was a pause, filled only with the sound of the water gurgling into the glass. then mrs. clinton spoke. "oh, dick!" she said, "why do you treat me like this?" he threw a glance at her, half furtive. he had never heard her speak in that tone. she was looking at him with hurt eyes. "i am your mother," she said. "do you think i have no feeling for my children? have i been such a bad mother to you that it is right to put me aside as if i were of no account when a crisis comes in your life?" he walked to the chair on the opposite side of the fire to hers, his glass in his hand, and sat down. there was a frown on his face. like his father, he hated a scene, unless it was one of his own making, and especially he hated a scene with a woman. but it was true that he had treated his mother as if she were of no account. in the presence of the pain which her face and her voice had shown, he felt a sense of shame at the easy mastery he had displayed towards her during the evening, putting her wishes and her feelings aside, thinking only that it was rather tiresome of her to have intruded herself into his plans, and that her intrusion must be repelled with as little disturbance as possible. she spoke again before he could reply to her. "you are always very charming to me, dick--on the surface. you treat me with the greatest possible politeness, always, as you have done this evening. i know that many young men do not behave with such courtesy towards their mother, especially those who do not live in the same world as they do. but that charming behaviour is a very poor return for what a mother does for her children when they are wholly dependent on her. you used to come to me with all your troubles when you were a little boy, dick. am i so changed that you must shut me out of your life altogether, now?" conflicting emotions caused him intense discomfort. "no, mother, no," he said. "but----" she took him up. "but you don't want me any longer," she said, "and you haven't enough kindness in you to think that i may want you." underneath her smooth-flowing speech there was bitterness, almost cruelty; certainly cruelty, if deliberately to pierce self-satisfaction is cruel. for if there were any qualities in dick against which he might have thought that no accusation could lie, they were his attitude towards women and the essential kindness of his heart. but she had shown him that external courtesy towards her had only hidden a deep discourtesy, and his kindness was base metal, not kindness at all. but she had aroused, if not resentment, opposition. her words had stung. if she wanted anything from him, that was not the way to get it. "oh, come now, mother," he said, with some impatience. "i----" but she would not let him go on until she had said all that she had to say. "if you don't care for me, dick, if you have lost all the love you had for me when you were a child, then i know it is of no use saying these things. words can't bring back love, nor reproaches. and after all, it wasn't about myself that i came here to speak to you. your indifference has caused me pain, but i should not have taxed you with it now; i should have kept silence as i have done for many years, if it had not been that my love for you has been there ready for you if you had ever wanted it, and i thought you might want it now. but i can do nothing to help you if you won't let me a little way into your heart. i must just stand aside and see the breach between you and your father widen, when it might be healed, and you could restore him to happiness as well as take your happiness yourself." dick's face became harder as she mentioned his father, who had not been mentioned between them during the evening. "what can you do with him?" he asked, with a shade of scorn in his voice. "he is utterly unreasonable. he gets an idea into his head, and nothing will get it out." her voice was softer as she replied. "dick dear, you know that isn't true." he stirred uneasily in his chair. "it is true in this case," he said. "i suppose you mean that as a rule if you give him his head about anything you can pull him up and make him go the other way if you treat him carefully. i know you can, as a rule. this is an unfortunate exception to the rule." "you have driven him into opposition by everything you have done," she said. "if you had been a little patient----" "oh, i was as patient as possible, at first," he interrupted her. "but he went beyond everything. the only thing was to go away until he had come to his senses. from what i have heard, through walter, he is worse than ever. he is going to cut me off with a shilling. well, let him. i can't imagine anything that will bother him more during the rest of his life than to have the prospect of kencote divided up after his death. i can't imagine him thinking of such a thing. i'm not thinking of myself and what i'm going to get when i say it's a wicked thing to do. he's always looked upon the place as a sort of trust. it _is_ a trust, and he is going to betray it for the sake of scoring off me. he must know that a threat of that sort would be the last thing to move me. it is spite, and spite that hurts him as much as it hurts me." "oh, dick! dick!" she said. he gave another uneasy hitch to his body. her gentle admonition showed him as no argument could have shown him from what source his speech had come. "of course i'm sore," he said, answering her implied reproach. "any man would be sore in such a case. i believe you have seen virginia. i ask you plainly, mother, if you are on his side--the sort of mud he throws at her--you know. because if you are----" "no, dick dear," she said. "i have seen her, and i am not--not on his side, in that." her words, and the tone in which they were spoken, softened his anger. "you would welcome her as my wife?" he asked. "oh yes, i would," she said. "and i will, dick, when this trouble is over. if she will love me i will love her. yes, i have seen her, twice." "thank you very much, mother," he said quietly, after a short pause. "dick," she began again, "you know your father. you know how unhappy it must make him to be parted from you. you are bearing very hardly on him." "and he on me, mother," said dick. "what do you want me to do? give up virginia? you haven't come here to ask me to do that?" "no, not that, dick." "or to wait for a year? that's walter's scheme--at least, i believe it's herbert birkett's. very kind of him to take a hand in the discussion. but i'm not going to wait a year. i'm not going to wait any time. why should i? if i make concessions of that sort i'm giving away my case, i'm admitting that there's some sense in the objections made--some reason in them. there's none. i won't submit virginia to the indignity. i'm sorry now i ever got her down to meadshire. i did that because i knew what--what his prejudices would be, and i thought he should have a chance of getting over them." "then you did think, at first, that there was something to be said for his prejudices." "er--yes--to the extent that if i had put it baldly that i was going to marry a widow, an american, who had been for a time on the stage--years ago--although i confess i didn't think that would be known--there might be trouble. i thought then, and i think now, that if he had given her a fair chance--if he had got to know her, he _couldn't_ possibly take the line he has. there isn't a soul down there--i've heard all about it--who isn't at her feet. it makes me furious--i hardly let myself think about it--that he should behave as he does. no, mother, it has gone too far. there is nothing i can do now, after all that has happened, that wouldn't be an admission of weakness." she did not speak immediately. "have you made up your mind," she asked, "to cut yourself off from all of us--never to come to kencote again until your father dies--never to see him again?" "when i am married," he said, rather sullenly, "he will come round--sooner or later." "not to make the first advance, dick. if you marry now, without his consent, definitely against his wishes, he will make the alteration as to the succession that he has threatened. that will be between you. he will be very unhappy--for the rest of his life--but he will have taken a step that will make it ten times more difficult for you to come together than it is now, and----" "as far as the alteration in his will goes," dick broke in on her, "i have thought all that over. as i say, it's a step he has no right to take under the circumstances, but if it is to come, if i am to come into the place--or what's left of it--with my wings clipped for money, then i say i'm ready to face it, and i don't mind as much as i thought i should. perhaps i've thought too much about money--having everything cut and dried, and nothing to do for it. it was that that made me make the mistake of getting virginia to go down to blaythorn. i was afraid of what might happen--what he might do. it was rather mean, in a way. i don't care what he does. at least, i care, but it isn't a thing one ought to think too much about. other fellows work to give their wives a home. i'm going to do that, and i like the idea of it." "i think that is a good thing to do," she said rather slowly. "but--well, you mustn't mind my speaking, plainly, dick--i think, too, that in your case you may make too much of it. i mean that your mind is probably full of it now, and it is a great relief to you that you have found a way out of what might have been a serious difficulty, and that you are not dependent on your father in your marriage. but there is kencote to be thought of. you are the eldest son, and your natural place in the world is there. at present, with your new happiness coming to you, you are able to detach your mind from it. but when the novelty of your new life has worn off----" "oh, mother, i am not a child," he interrupted her. "i know there is kencote to be thought of, but not for many years yet--at least, i hope so. and if i am to be partially disinherited, you know"--he looked at her with a smile--"i think i had better detach my mind from it as much as possible, don't you?" again she was silent for a time, and then she said, "do you remember when you were a little boy, dick, and we were together in the garden one summer evening, and i was telling you about the clintons, who had lived at kencote for so many hundreds of years, and you asked me why some people lived in beautiful places like that and others were poor and had no nice homes? and your father had come out to join us--he was a young man then--and he answered your question, and told you that things were arranged like that, and some day kencote would be yours, and you must learn to love every acre of it, and know all the people who lived about you and do the best you could for them when you were grown up and were the master of kencote." "yes, i remember quite well," said dick. "it was the first lesson i had in the duties of a landowner." "we were very happy then," she said. "we used to talk over things together, and father took a pride in you, and did all he could to make your childhood happy and make you take a pride in kencote." "yes, he did," said dick. "he gave me a very good time as a boy. and so did you, mother. i remember our talks in the garden and in the old schoolroom, and going to church with you, and about the village. i shall never forget those days." "you grew up at kencote," she said. "i know you have always loved it, and have come home to us whenever you could. dick, you can't give it up, and give us up, your parents who both love you. you will make yourself unhappy, as well as us." he was thoughtful and uneasy. "of course, it's a blow," he said. "i do love the place." "and us too, dick, don't you--a little?" "oh, mother!" he said. "you have always been very good to me. perhaps i've been rather a brute to you--taking things for granted, and not showing that i remembered. i do remember, you know. i had a good time as a child, and i owe a lot to you." "and to father too," she said. "think of all he did for you and how proud he has always been of you. he has made a mistake now--i think he has, and i tell you so--but, dick, you are not going to punish him--and me and yourself--by destroying, for always, everything that keeps us united as a family?" again he moved uneasily. "well, what on earth am i to do?" he asked. "i've told you what i feel about it all." "well, don't you feel exactly as your father does? aren't you acting just as you blame him for acting? don't you see how like you are to him in many ways?" "the poor old governor!" said dick. "i'm sorry for him in a way. but i hope i don't act with quite such disregard for common sense as he does." "you act from pique. he thinks you are in the wrong, and won't give way, although he would like to. and you think he is in the wrong and you won't move towards him. there's something better even than common sense, dick, which he shows and you don't. it is love." "i don't think you can reasonably say he has shown me much of that lately, mother," said dick. "you keep away from him," she said. "if you were to come home you would see how he has been longing for you, and you would be sorry for him. even if people wrong us, if they love us and we see it, it is not difficult to forgive them. if you would come home i think all your anger would disappear, however much you may think you are justified in it. i have never seen your father so unhappy and so troubled. for his sake, dick, for the sake of all that he has done for you, come home to us. that was what i came here to ask of you." he was silent for some time, struggling with himself. "i'll come," he said shortly, "but you must tell him, mother, that i am going to be married soon. i can't come to enter into that question again with him. it is settled." "very well," she said quietly, and there was silence between them for a time. "and now tell me of your plans, dick," she said presently in a lighter tone. "you must remember that i have heard nothing, and i want to hear everything." "oh, i'm going up to yorkshire next week to get the house ready. virginia is coming with me and we are going to stay with spence. it is a nice old stone house with a big garden and a view of the moors, and the sea beyond. look here, mother, can't you do anything? you have brought _me_ round, you know. i'm going to do what you want, against my own inclinations. i shan't be very comfortable at kencote. can't you go and see virginia? it's rather hard luck for her, poor girl, to be treated as if she were a pariah by all my people. something's owing to her, and a good deal, i think." "i should like very much to know her," she said. "whether i can go definitely against your father's wishes, whether i should do any good by doing so, is a difficult question to decide." "well, i suppose i can see that," he said. "you have got to live with him. but if we are to make it up at all, he and i, which i own i haven't much hope of, there'll have to be give and take on both sides. you ought not to get me down to kencote and then take his part against me." "we must wait a little," she said. "what i can do i will do. oh, dick dear, i am so glad you are going to be happy. i have thought about you such a lot." he came over to her and kissed her. "you're a good little mother," he said. "i wish i'd carried you off bodily to see virginia when she first went down there. you would have got on well together." "oh, and we shall," she said, "as soon as these unhappy difficulties are over. now i shall go back home with a quiet mind. i'm sure, dick, if you are patient with your father, all the difficulties will melt away. it rests with you, dear boy, and i'm sure you will act wisely. now i must be going back, if you will send for a cab for me." "i'll take you back," said dick. "i want to tell you all about everything, mother." chapter xx aunt laura intervenes for an old lady who did not enjoy the best of health, who had lived all her life in an atmosphere of congenial companionship and now lived alone, who had no place of importance to fill in the world, and small occupation except what she made for herself, aunt laura passed her days in unusual contentment. the life of an old maid blessed with a sufficiency of this world's goods is a cheerful if rather pathetic object of contemplation. you would think they missed so much, and they seem to miss so little. there is nothing that seems much worth their doing, unless they are particularly gifted, and yet they are always busy. if you had paid a visit to aunt laura at any time of the day you would never have found her sitting with her hands in her lap, idle, unless it happened to be at those times, after a meal or, as she would say, between lights, when a short period of contemplation was as ordered a part of the day's duties as any more active occupation. after breakfast she would be busy with household duties, "ordering," or passing in review some or other of her possessions, one of her three servants in attendance, giving her whole mind to it, although the weakness of her ageing body made it incumbent on her now chiefly to superintend from her habitation in front of the parlour fire. sometimes she was induced to stay in bed until the morning was well advanced, but it was a great trial to her. "if the mistress is not about," she would say, "all the house goes to pieces. and although i have good and trustworthy servants, who have been with me a long time, things go wrong if they are left too much to themselves." so even when in bed, she would sit propped up by pillows with a dressing-jacket round her shrunken old shoulders, giving her orders for the meals of the day to the stout, friendly cook, who stood by her bedside with her head on one side and made suggestions, which were sometimes accepted and sometimes overruled, and after that important duty was over, go through the linen with hannah, the parlour-maid, or arrange with jane, the housemaid, what room should be "turned out," and when, or other matters of like moment. then she had her letters to write, quite a number of them, considering that she had always lived at kencote and knew very few people outside it. when she was quite well, and the weather was quite fine, she would dress carefully and potter about her garden, giving minute directions to the gardener, who followed her about slowly, and took all she said in good part, although he went his own way afterwards. or she would walk out into the village, leaning on hannah's arm, sometimes go up to the great house, or to the rectory, sometimes into the cottages of her friends amongst the villagers, who were always pleased to see her, for she was of a charitable disposition, gave what rare financial aid was required of her in a community where no one was poor, and, what was valued more, ready sympathy and interest in trials or pleasures. after luncheon she had her nap and her needlework, or a book from the library at bathgate--one a week sent over to her by post--to occupy her. sometimes she played thin little pieces of music on the thin old piano. tea was an event, requiring much manipulation of old silver teapots, one for the leaves and one for the brew, and when she had company much pressing of dainty, unsubstantial viands. after tea there were needlework and reading again until it was time for her supper-tray. she had given up dining; her luncheon was her dinner, and a fairly substantial one. she talked a good deal, in quite a ladylike way, about her food. her state of health was gauged by whether she could "fancy" it or not. she always changed her gown in the afternoon, and wore a silken shawl instead of the shetland one without which she was never seen in the morning. in the evening she spent some time over her devotions, and with hannah's help made a long disrobing, beginning at a quarter to ten and ending about half-past. then at last she lay buried in the down of her great cumbrous bed, her night-light in the basin, her glass of milk and her biscuits on the table by her side, all ready for those long dead hours during which she might, if she were in perfect health, sleep quietly, but of which she was more likely to spend some patiently waiting for the blissful state of unconsciousness which was so soon to close down on her for all eternity. she had much to think of during those hours--scenes in the long-past years of her life when she had been young and active and had lived in her father's house with her sisters, or during the later but still far-off years when they had all lived together at the dower-house; of the quick passage of time which had brought age to them and robbed her of one after the other; of those she loved at the great house; of her nephew's early career, which seemed to her a most distinguished one; of his marriage; and of the coming of the dear babies, and of their growth and the things that had happened to them. here was abundance of incident to provide food for a mind pasturing on memories--as much as if she had known the great world and taken part in its many activities, instead of passing her blameless days in a small, secluded sameness. sometimes, if sleep was very long in coming, she would say over to herself some of the poetry she had learnt by heart, or some of her favourite passages in the bible. and sometimes she would pray. her faith was simple enough. god was her father, who knew best what was good for her, and had a sublime tenderness for her, and for all whom she loved. soon she would be with him, praising him with voice and harp in elysian fields and in endless happiness, joined to those who had gone before, who were waiting for her, and probably knew all that she was doing or thinking. life, for as long as she was spared, was a precious gift, and she did not want to die; but she looked forward with no dread to dying when her time should come. she was quite convinced that death was only a passing over, and her experience of death-beds had taught her that nothing very terrible took place when the spirit parted from the body. she would cease to be, and she would join her sisters in heaven; and whatever pain or weakness should come to her before her departure she would have strength given to her to bear, as her sisters had borne it. since she had come to live alone in the little old house in the village aunt laura's wealth had considerably increased. it did, now, amount to wealth, for she lived on less than half her income, which at the time of her sister's death had amounted to something like two thousand pounds a year. her father had left her and her sisters six thousand pounds apiece, and there had been six of them when they had first moved down to the dower-house. he had committed this rather extraordinary piece of generosity because shortly before his death he had inherited intact the considerable fortune of his brother, who had been a merchant in the city of london, as his father had been before him. merchant jack, of whom aunt laura had spoken to susan clinton, had inherited kencote as a younger son, had passed on the estates and his own acquired store of money to his eldest son, colonel thomas, and his business to his younger son, john clinton, who had lived and died a bachelor, having little use for the wealth he amassed, beyond that part of it which enabled him to live in solid comfort in his old house in bloomsbury and lay down a cellar of fine wine, the remainder of which still shed a golden glow over the cobwebby bins at kencote. the thirty-six thousand pounds with which colonel thomas portioned his daughters had still left the great bulk of this windfall to go with the estate, to go rather to the next heir, who was edward, our squire. the squire had succeeded at the age of nineteen to a large fortune, as well as to many thousands of acres of land, and was a much richer man than even his sons suspected. he cared little about money, or if he cared for it, it was not for the aggrandisement it might have brought him. he had an income far in excess of what was required to keep up his establishment and his property in the way he wanted to keep it up, and what was left over he had no further use for. he had simply allowed it to accumulate, investing the overplus of year after year in gilt-edged securities on the advice of his old-established firm of stockbrokers, whose forebears had also advised his, and not giving it a thought when it was once so disposed of. the bulk of his funded property came from the money which his great-uncle had bequeathed to his grandfather, and some of it was still invested in the securities which the shrewd old merchant had himself selected. it was this money out of which, after his widow and younger children had been handsomely provided for, dick would inherit the sum necessary to enable him to live at kencote as he himself had done--if dick behaved as he should behave. otherwise it would go--well, he had not yet made up his mind where it would go. now, if the jointure of the six maiden aunts had been chargeable on the estate, as it would have been but for the old merchant's bequest, only on a much lower scale, the squire would no doubt have busied himself about it, would have known exactly what proportion of it was being spent and what saved, and might have had some suggestion to make as to the disposal of what should remain after the death of the last sister had caused it to revert to the estate. as it was, he hardly ever gave it a thought. he knew that his aunts were well off, but he did not know what sum had been left to them, although he could easily have informed himself of it if he had cared to. nor did he know how aunt laura, in whose frail hands the whole of it had now come to lie, proposed to leave it. it would not be quite true to say that he had never given the matter a thought, but it would not be far from the truth. he had so much more than sufficed for his own needs that although he would be gratified if after aunt laura's death he found himself richer by several thousand pounds, the legacy would not actually do for him more than slightly increase his lightly borne business cares. it would go eventually to the children, and the amount of speculation he had ever expended on the subject was as to whether it would come first to him, or, by aunt laura's direct bequest, to them, as to which he did not care either the one way or the other. the possibility of its being left outside the family altogether never so much as crossed his mind, because he knew aunt laura quite well enough to know that, as to the bulk of it, there was no such possibility. happy aunt laura, to have been permitted to escape the siege which is not seldom laid against rich maiden aunts! and happy clintons, to have escaped, both in youth and age, those complications which the lack of plentiful coin brings into the lives of so many of their fellow-creatures! but perhaps they had not altogether escaped them. it was doubtful, as yet, whether the squire, who was now thinking of using his riches as a weapon in a way in which he had never had to think of using them before, was the happier for having that weapon ready to his hand. money was for the first time playing its part in dick's life in a way the outcome of which was still to be seen. humphrey, at least, had never had enough of it to do what he wished to do, and was becoming increasingly hungry for more. and aunt laura, lying sometimes for hours on a sleepless bed, was beginning to be a little worried about her responsibilities as the steward of a considerable fortune, concerning whose disposition she had to come to a decision before she could peaceably leave this world for a better one, in which money and the anxiety attendant on it would play no part. she was surprisingly innocent about money, although amongst the six sisters she had been considered the financial genius, and from the first had kept all the accounts. "dear laura," aunt ellen had been used to say, "has a wonderful head for pounds, shillings, and pence. her accounts are never out by so much as a farthing, and she would be an ideal wife for a poor man, such as a clergyman, with a fixed but limited income." she remembered this as she lay, now, in the night, turning over in her mind this question of money, and remembered it with pride. she remembered how upon their father's death old mr. pauncey, the bathgate solicitor, who was so old-established, and had had such a long connection with kencote that he might be regarded almost as an equal, and only treated with the merest shade more of consideration than one of the county neighbours, had explained to them all in conclave exactly what their financial position was, and how the sum that had been left to each of them was invested. he had had a sheet of paper with him, from which, after taking snuff, he had read out a long list of securities, and figures, and percentages, and left them at the end of it mentally gasping for breath, and no wiser at all than they had been before. then it was she, the youngest of them all, who had summoned up courage to say, "i think, mr. pauncey, if you would tell us exactly what sum of money is brought in by all those--those things, we could make our arrangements accordingly." she could see now, in the darkness, the admiring looks of her sisters bent upon her, and hear the ready acquiescence of mr. pauncey, as, with gold pencil-case in his hand, he made some rapid calculations, and gave her the figures required. after that it was she who, with pencil in hand, secretary and treasurer to a most serious committee, had set down on paper exactly how the comfortable income they had had secured to them should be spent--so much for the housekeeping, so much for wages, so much for stables, garden, dress, charity, and so on--a delightfully interesting occupation, as she well remembered, although readjustments had had to be made later, and it required a good many hours a week with account-books and paper ruled in money columns to keep unflinchingly to the course laid down. "laura is busy with accounts; she must not be disturbed. the amount of trouble she gives herself to keep all our affairs in perfect order you would hardly credit." she remembered as if it were yesterday sitting in the oak parlour on a warm september morning with the casement open and a scent of mignonette coming through it, and overhearing her eldest sister talking to the old rector, so many years since in his grave, and the thrill of happiness that the words had brought to her, struggling with her task and with rows of recalcitrant figures which would not add up twice alike. and it had been she who had been the medium of all arrangements with old mr. pauncey, who had been most attentive in coming over himself at frequent intervals to explain any little matter that wanted explanation, and had never changed an investment for them without explaining exactly why he thought it ought to be changed, and, what was perhaps more important still, giving her the exact alteration that would be made in the figures, so that she should have no further trouble with her accounts than was necessary. after a bit it was young mr. pauncey who had attended to their affairs, and she remembered very well that on the occasion of his first visit her sister ellen had considered it advisable to sit in the room while he disclosed the business upon which he had come over. "he is a very well-behaved _young_ man, my dear," miss clinton had said, "although perhaps not the equal of his father, who is one of nature's gentlemen. but in case he should presume----" young mr. pauncey never had presumed, and he looked after aunt laura's property to this day, and would continue to "attend on her" until her death, if he survived her, although he had long since devised all his other professional cases to his son and grandson. she relied greatly on young mr. pauncey's advice, and had long since forgiven him for the slight disturbance he had once made in objecting to carry out certain of their decisions. it had been necessary for aunt anne, upon whom it had always devolved to say the word that would put people in their places when that word had to be said, to end the discussion with a speech that shook a little in the middle: "mr. pauncey, we have asked you to come here to take our instructions. it will save time if you will kindly write them down at once." how splendid dear anne had been on that occasion--quite polite, but quite firm! and young mr. pauncey, it had afterwards been agreed, had behaved admirably too. with a courteous smile he had said, "very well, ladies, i will say no more," and had then helped them most lucidly to put their decision into proper form, and had since admitted handsomely that their carefully considered plan had worked well, adding that he had felt himself obliged to criticise it, entirely in their own interest. a trust had been formed with young mr. pauncey, in whom, as they assured him, they had complete confidence, as sole trustee. the six separate estates were pooled and the income from the whole capital could be drawn on by the cheque of any of the six beneficiaries. the disadvantage of this scheme, as young mr. pauncey had ventured to point out at the time, was that if any one of them quarrelled with the other five, or got married, it was in her power to cause them considerable inconvenience by appropriating more than her share of the income, or, if she wrote her cheques at the right moment, the whole of it. it was at this point that aunt anne had interposed with her famous speech, and young mr. pauncey had ceased to make objections, probably consoling himself with the reflection that, as trustee, he could put an end to the inconvenience at any time that it should arise. but the sisters had never quarrelled and none of them had married, and young mr. pauncey at the age of seventy-five was obliged to admit to himself that the most highly irregular arrangement he had ever legalised had also turned out to have worked with the least possible amount of friction. no further adjustments had had to be made as one sister after the other had died; none of them had made a will or had needed to; and aunt laura, the last survivor, was now in automatic possession of the whole, as all the sisters had wished that the last survivor should be. "we are agreed," aunt ellen had said in conclave, "that the bulk of the money shall go back to dear edward, or to his children if he marries and has any; let the last of us who is left alive carry out our joint wishes without being tied up by promises or papers. that to my mind is the ideal arrangement. circumstances may arise which we cannot now foresee. let the one of us who is spared longest have power to deal with them, under the kind advice of young mr. pauncey, if he also is spared so long, and not be hampered by what is called red tape." and so the passing away of one sister after another had not been harassed by questions of property, and it was not until aunt ellen the eldest and aunt laura the youngest had been left alone together that any discussion at all had arisen as to the disposal of the money which they shared. they had talked of it together, and had called young mr. pauncey into advice. young mr. pauncey, now a little deaf and a little feeble in body, though not in brain, and as courteous and helpful as ever, had advised that the money should be equally divided amongst the squire's younger children. "there are six of them," he had said very happily, "just as there were six of you ladies. mr. clinton would probably dispose of it in that way if you were to leave it to him, and i shall not be betraying confidence if i say that captain clinton is already very handsomely provided for." so it had been agreed upon provisionally, but the question of making a will had been left in abeyance, and later on it had been thought that cicely might possibly have rather more than the others, because jim was not too well off, owing to those wicked death duties, and later still that dick, perhaps, ought to have some, because they were not supposed to know what would be done for him, and they would not like him to feel himself left out in the cold; and by and by that it might be better, after all, to ask edward to decide the matter himself. but nothing had been done. aunt ellen had died, and aunt laura had postponed coming to a decision at all for two years past, thinking over the matter occasionally, but never finding herself, as she expressed it, "guided." now she had begun to feel that she must come to a decision, and the guidance, in a dim sort of way, seemed to be making itself felt. she had never had any particular favourite amongst her nephew's children. cicely would have been the favourite if she had not been a girl, for she had been much with her aunts before her marriage, and there had been more community of interest with her than with the rest. but it was impossible to put a girl clinton before a boy clinton, and her claim bulked no larger than those of dick, humphrey, walter, or frank. and hitherto, except in the case of dick, there had seemed to be no reason for preferring one of the boys before the other. but lately aunt laura had become considerably attached to humphrey, whom, in the past, she had perhaps liked least of all the boys, although she would not have admitted as much to herself. he had been much away from kencote, and had seemed so "grand" in his ways and ideas that she had been a little nervous of him on the rare occasions on which he had visited her. but lately, she thought, he had "softened." he must have felt, she told herself with a tremulous gratification, that she was the last of all his great-aunts left, that she would not be much longer with them, and that attention to her, although it could not bring him anything, would be deeply appreciated, as indeed it had been. he had been so very kind, cheering up her rather lonely days with constant visits, whenever he had been at home, making her those little presents which, because they showed real appreciation of what would give her pleasure, had meant so much to her, and latterly taking her into his confidence and telling her things about himself of a sort which no man, young or old, amongst her relatives, or indeed outside of them, had ever confided to her before. it was this which had caused her such intense gratification. throughout the whole of their lives she and her sisters had had to fight against the feeling that, although they were kindly treated, and even deferred to, by the members of their little world, they were of no real account. slights, which had not been intended for slights, had sometimes distressed them, and they had had on occasions to assure each other that nothing could have been further from the intention of those who had wounded them than to do so. to ask their advice, to prove that they were not unimportant members of a family to which they had given a life-long allegiance--this was the straight way to their hearts, and it had seldom been taken. all the kindnesses that could be heaped on them would have been outweighed by one cry for succour or sympathy. that cry had never come--perhaps there had been nothing in the even lives of their relations to bring it; but of all the talks she had ever had with any of her great-nieces and nephews aunt laura had most enjoyed those which she had lately had with humphrey, for they had come nearest to it. he had, indeed, shared a secret with her. he was in love, and nobody in the family knew it but she. and he was in love with that dear nice girl who had come once or twice to see her, had shown her more than friendliness, almost affection, and made for herself a warm little corner in a warm heart. susan clinton also had confided in her a little. at any rate she had permitted her to see that humphrey's feelings for her were returned. and when she had bid her farewell she had kissed her and said, "i have loved these talks with you, aunt laura"--yes, she had called her that, although, of course, the relationship was a very distant one--"it is so nice to feel that one has a friend at kencote." but falling in love is one thing and getting married--the natural result of falling in love--is another; and humphrey had confided to her that there were obstacles in the way of his getting married. of course, although susan clinton did not belong to the elder branch of the family, facts must be looked squarely in the face, and the daughter of an earl, even of an earl of no great wealth, had a right to expect something more elaborate in the setting up of married life than a girl of lesser lineage. humphrey very sensibly saw that. "i can't very well ask for her, you see, aunt laura," he had said, "unless i know that i can give her the sort of thing, more or less, that she has been accustomed to." aunt laura had quite seen it, and he had put it still more clinchingly when he had said on another occasion, "you see, it wouldn't do for them to think she was taking a step downward in marrying me." good gracious, no! a clinton of kencote was good enough to marry anybody, short of royalty. rich enough too--or ought to be--even a younger son, if the marriage was a desirable one, as this undoubtedly seemed to be. "i think your dear father would be pleased," she had said. "he would wish that all of you should marry in your own rank in life, and he would be well aware that that cannot be done, in these days when married life seems so much more expensive than it used to be, without an adequate income. i think, dear humphrey, that i should tell him if i were you, and throw yourself on his generosity, which i have no reason whatever for thinking would fail you." yes, humphrey had supposed that he would do that sooner or later; in fact, he would have to, because his profession was not one out of which a satisfactory income could be made, at any rate in its early stages. of course, if the worst came to the worst he could give up his profession, and take to something else out of which money could be made. aunt laura had resolutely combated this idea. his profession was a dignified and honourable one. she was sure that he would make his name at it and rise very high. it seemed unfair that the country should pay so badly for such important work, but it was an undoubted advantage in these radical days to have men of family serving their country, and she supposed that if diplomacy was a career out of which money could be made it would be thrown open to everybody. it was better as it was, and at any rate if his father had not been willing to provide for him he would not have put him where he was. she saw nothing for it but a frank opening up to him. he could not possibly intend that humphrey should never marry. he was of the age to marry, and the marriage he proposed was satisfactory in every way. humphrey had again acquiesced, but lukewarmly, and had said no more at the time. later on the reason of his lukewarmness and air of depression had come out, not without pressure on aunt laura's part. "well, i'll tell you how it is, aunt laura," he had said, "as you are so kind and have listened to everything i've told you. one likes unburdening one's self occasionally, as long as one knows it doesn't go any further." of course it would go no further, aunt laura had told him, and then came his story. he had been extravagant. he was in debt, rather heavily, and not for the first time. he blamed himself very much, especially now he wanted to make an alteration in his life altogether, and saw how important it was to keep strictly within one's income. his father had been good about it--over the other two crises--but she would see that when a thing like this had happened twice, with promises of amendment each time, which he must confess had not been kept, the third time there was likely to be a considerable disturbance. she knew what his father was. he would be much upset--naturally--he shouldn't blame him. he would most likely pay his debts and start him again, but he would not be likely to pass immediately from such an undertaking to the discussion of a large increase in humphrey's allowance, such as would enable him comfortably to contemplate married life with a wife who had a right to expect as much as susan. he thought his father would not be displeased with the marriage and not averse, eventually, to make it possible for him. if only these wretched debts had not been hanging round his neck like a millstone--if he were a free man--he would go to him at once. as it was--well, he was in a mess, and, frankly, he funked it. aunt laura, listening to this rigmarole, and gathering from it only that the poor boy was in trouble, not of a disgraceful sort, but in the way that young men of good birth and necessarily expensive habits did get into trouble, felt a warm pleasure rise, increase, and spread itself in a glow all over her. she had been deemed worthy of this affectionate confidence, which in itself would have caused her joy. how much more so when she felt herself capable of putting an end to it! with a flush on her withered cheeks and a light in her old eyes she had said, "i am so sorry for you, dear humphrey. could you tell me--do you mind--how much money your debts amount to?" "oh!" humphrey had said in an offhand manner, "i suppose about seven hundred pounds--no, more--nearer eight hundred. it's a lot, i know, considering that i was whitewashed a couple of years ago; but--oh, well, i won't make excuses. i've been very extravagant, and now i've got to pay for it." then aunt laura had offered to pay his debts for him, and he had at first refused, laughing at her, but expressing his surprise and deep gratitude at the same time, then, taking the offer a little more seriously, said that it was out of the question, because his father would be annoyed, and finally when she had told him that his father need not know, that it would be a little secret between them two, had accepted with the most heartfelt expressions of gratitude, which touched her, now, whenever she thought of them. she had written him a cheque there and then--for eight hundred pounds--and he had joked with her in his amusing way about her having such a large sum at her immediate disposal, asking if she was quite sure that the cheque would be honoured, because it would never do for a clinton to run any risks of that sort. he had seemed, she remembered, really surprised that she _should_ be able to draw a cheque for so large a sum, without ever, as he had expressed it, turning a hair, and she had explained that for the past two years she had not spent half her income, and that a large balance was lying in the bank to her credit, which young mr. pauncey had lately written to her about investing. "i have not been quite well enough to want to talk business with him for some time," she had said, "kind and considerate as he is, and i think it must have been ordained that i should not do so, for when i did say that i should be able to see him on such a morning--oh, i suppose now a fortnight ago, or perhaps three weeks--he was not well himself and went away afterwards, and so it got put off. i shall tell him now there will not be so much to invest as he had thought, knowing as he does about what my expenditure is, and i need not say, dear humphrey, how glad i am that it is so, for i do not want a larger income, and i _do_ want to help those who are dear to me." so that little episode was over and had been most agreeable to all parties concerned. humphrey had not yet told his father about his matrimonial projects, because, as he had explained to her, his debts would take a week or two to settle up, and he did not want to make a move until he was quite clear. but he had come down to kencote again in the meantime, and had amused and pleased her by his accounts of his debt-paying experiences, and of how he had told susan of what she had done, and of how grateful susan was to her--for they had fixed it up between them now. "whatever the governor does for us," humphrey had said, "we shall be able to get along somehow. _you_ have made that possible, aunt laura. we may have to be very economical, but with a clear run ahead of us we don't mind that. she is just as keen now to keep out of debt as i am." and the end of their talks so far had been on a note of still further possibility. "i should like to know," aunt laura had said, "exactly what your dear father is prepared to do for you, humphrey, when you tell him. when i know, i should like a little talk with him. for i may be able to help matters." chapter xxi an engagement mrs. clinton reached kencote in the dusk of the january afternoon and found the twins on the platform awaiting her. with the station staff and the other passengers in the train as audience, they gave her an all-embracing and, indeed, somewhat vociferous welcome, and led her to the carriage, one on each side of her, with little squeezings of the arms and continued expressions of joy. "we shan't let you out of our sight again, mother," said joan as they drove off. "it has been perfectly awful without you. we haven't known what to do at all." "i hope you haven't been getting into mischief," said mrs. clinton, with an indulgent smile. "we have been as good as gold," said nancy. "you would hardly have recognised us. haven't you noticed our gardenias? humphrey gave them to us. he said they were the white flowers of a blameless life." "is humphrey still at home?" mrs. clinton asked. "yes," said joan; "and something has happened, mother; we don't quite know what, but we think he has got engaged." "engaged!" exclaimed their mother. "yes. of course you know who it is." mrs. clinton thought for a moment. "what has put the idea into your heads?" she asked. "father is very pleased with him," explained joan. "and that is the only thing we can think of to account for it. but we have seen it coming for a long time." "well, for about a fortnight," corrected nancy. "it's susan clinton, of course. do you like her, mother?" mrs. clinton did not reply to this question, and joan said, "we are prepared to give her a sisterly welcome." "if she treats us well we'll treat her well," said nancy. "and we like the idea of mr. humphrey and lady susan clinton. it's so morning posty." "i think you are running ahead a little fast," said their mother. "don't you want to hear about your new governess?" "oh yes! what is she like?" exclaimed the twins in one breath. "she is very learned, and rather severe," said mrs. clinton. "you will have to work very hard with her." "we are quite ready to do that," said nancy. "is she ornamental?" "not at all," replied mrs. clinton. "and her name is miss phipp. she is coming in ten days, so you must make the best of your holidays until then." nancy sighed. "our happy childhood is over," she said. "no more will the house ring with our careless laughter. in ten days' time we shall become fevered students." "i hope it won't be quite so bad as that," said mrs. clinton. the squire was waiting at the door. he had never before kissed his wife before the servants, but he did so now. if they liked to go away and talk about it they might. "we'll have no more of this gadding about," he said jovially. "we want you at home, don't we, children?" "rather," said the twins, renewing their embraces; and mrs. clinton felt that there was nothing lacking in the warmth of her welcome. they went into the morning-room where the tea-table was already set and the kettle boiling over its spirit-lamp. "i told 'em to bring up tea," said the squire; "i want a word with you. now run along, children. you can talk to your mother afterwards." the twins obediently retired. "he's full of it," said joan. "what a childish pleasure he takes in a piece of news!" "if it is as we believe," said nancy, "we mustn't call her silky susan any more." "she's all right, really," said joan, "if you get her away from her awful old mother." the squire, left alone with his wife, took up his favourite attitude in front of the fire. "i've got a piece of news for you, nina," he said. "what would you think of another marriage in the family?" mrs. clinton, busy with her tea-making, looked up at him. "i'm pleased about it," said the squire, who, warming himself in the englishman's citadel, and keeping away the fire from his wife, who was cold after her journey, looked thoroughly pleased. "she's a nice girl, although i can't say i took much to her mother, and don't want to see more of her than is necessary. it's humphrey, nina--humphrey and susan clinton. it seems they've taken to each other, and if i can make it all right for them, they want to get married. i'm quite ready to do my part. i'm quite glad that humphrey wants to settle down at last. and if things are going wrong in other quarters, as unfortunately they seem to be, this will make up for it a little. they can have the dower-house, and if an heir to kencote comes from this marriage--well, it will be a very satisfactory arrangement." this was going ahead with a vengeance. mrs. clinton thought of dick. was he, then, to be finally shouldered out of his place, and humphrey installed in it, securely, instead? "would he give up his profession?" she asked. "we haven't talked about it yet," said the squire. "but that is my idea. i want somebody here to help me, and if dick has decided to cut the cable, then we had better face facts and arrange matters accordingly." his face changed as he mentioned his eldest son. that wound still rankled, but it was plain that the salve was already working. "i have done my best," he said, "and it has all been no good. now what we have to do is to forget all about it and do what we can in other directions. walter's a good boy, although a bit headstrong and obstinate. still, he's made his own life and is happy in it, and i will say for him that he's never given me any serious trouble. i've had that with humphrey. he has been extremely tiresome about money matters, and i own that i thought there was another storm of that sort blowing up, and haven't been quite so friendly towards the boy as i might have been. i'm sorry for it now, and i'll make up for it; for he tells me he doesn't owe a single penny." mrs. clinton looked up in surprise. "did he tell you that definitely?" she asked. "why, don't you believe him?' asked the squire rather sharply. "i should believe him if he said it plainly," she replied. "well, he did say it plainly. 'i don't owe anybody a penny,' he said, 'although i can't say i have much of a balance in the bank.' i never supposed he would have that. if the boys keep out of debt on what i allow them, that's all i ask. but i'll own it surprised me, as it seems to have surprised you, that he _has_ kept out of debt since the last time, and i put it to him again. 'if there's anything to settle up,' i said, 'you had better let me know now. you don't want to begin married life with anything hanging over you!' and he said again, 'there's nothing at all. i don't owe anybody a penny.' so there it is, nina. the boy's a good boy at heart, and i'm pleased with him. and as for the girl, i think she'll turn out well. get her away from all that nonsense she has been brought up to, and settle her down here, in a pretty place like the dower-house, with a good income to keep things going as they ought to be kept going--i'll do that for them--and i believe she'll turn out trumps, and i hope we shan't be wanting a grandson long. that's what pleases me, nina"--his face beamed as he said it. "i'm an active man, but i'm getting on a bit now, and i should like to see my grandson growing up before i have to go and leave it all. that's been at the bottom of half i've felt about this wretched affair of dick's; and it made me more annoyed than perhaps i need have been about walter settling down in a place like melbury park. to see a boy growing up at kencote, as i grew up, and taking to it from the time he's a baby--that'll be a great thing, nina, eh?" he was exalted by his rosy dream. he saw himself leading a tiny child by the hand, very tender with his littleness, showing him this and that, hearing his prattle about familiar things, putting him later on a pony, and later still teaching him to shoot, watching him grow, sending him off to school, perhaps as an old man hearing of his doings at the university or in the service,--a fine, tall, straight young clinton, fortunate inheritor of generations of good things, and made worthy of them, largely through his own guidance. so he had thought about dick, years before, sitting before the fire, or pacing his room downstairs, while his wife and his little son, the centre of all his hopes, lay sleeping above, or out of doors as he had followed his favourite pursuits, and found new zest in them. but in those days he had been young, and his own life stretched immeasurably before him, with much to do and many things to be enjoyed. his own life was still strong in him, to hold and enjoy, but what should come after it was far more important now than it had been then, and he desired much more ardently to see its beginnings. and dick had foiled his hopes. this was to be a new start, out of which better things should come. he wanted it keenly, and because he had had most things that he wanted in life, it seemed natural that it should be coming to him, and coming from a quarter whose signs he had not previously examined. "nina," he said again, "i want to see my grandson grow up at kencote." she paused a moment before she said quietly, "as you saw dick grow up years ago." his sunny vision was clouded. he frowned. "we must make up our minds to do without dick," he said; "he won't come here. he has practically thrown us off." "no," she said. "i have seen him, and he is coming here on friday." he stared at her, the frown still on his face. he was moved by her news, but not altogether to pleasure. his mind was running on new desires, and it was an effort to adjust it to old ones. "you've seen him?" he said. "what did you say to him? you didn't make him think that i was going to give way?" "no. he does not expect that, or, i think, hope for it now." "is _he_ going to give way, then?" "no. not that, either. he is going to be married very soon." "then what does he want to come here for? i won't receive that woman, whether he marries her or not. and if he marries her i'll disinherit him as far as i'm able to. i don't go back from my word. if he thinks he's going to turn me--if he's coming here with that idea--he'd better stop away." "he doesn't think that," said mrs. clinton. "i don't think he will want to speak of anything that has been between you. he knows, and he has made up his mind to it. don't you want to see him, edward? he is coming because he wants to see you." the squire's face showed a flush, and he looked down. "i shall be very glad to see him," he said, and went out of the room. the next morning at breakfast time a note was handed to the squire from aunt laura, asking him if he could make it quite convenient to come and see her during the day, as she wished to consult him upon matters of business. "matters of business!" he echoed, reading out the note. "now it's a remarkable thing that none of the old aunts has ever wished to consult me on matters of business before, though i should always have been ready to do what i could for them. i wonder what the old lady wants." "i think i know," said joan. humphrey looked at her sharply from across the table. "you can't possibly know anything about it," he said. "she wants to keep guinea-pigs," pursued joan, unmoved. "she told me about some she had when she was little, and said she should like to have them again." "humphrey might give her a hutch for a christmas present," suggested nancy. "don't talk nonsense, children," ordered the squire. "you might run down to her after breakfast and say i will come and see her at eleven o'clock." at the hour mentioned he marched into aunt laura's parlour, bringing with him into the rather close atmosphere a breath of the cold bright winter day. "well, aunt laura," he said in his hearty voice, "you want me to help you settle your affairs, eh? what about mr. pauncey? shan't i be making him jealous?" aunt laura, with thoughts of "refreshment" filling her mind, did not reply to this question until he was sitting opposite to her with a glass of sherry and a dry biscuit by his side. then she said, "it will be a matter for mr. pauncey by and by, edward. it is about humphrey. i wished to consult you about doing something for dear humphrey and the nice girl he is going to marry." "oh, you've heard about that already, have you?" exclaimed the squire. "good news travels fast, eh? well, it isn't a bad thing, is it? another young couple settling down--what? who let you into the secret, aunt laura?" "dear humphrey has told me all about it," said the old lady, with some pride. "i was the first to know. and he brought the nice girl to see me when she was here at christmas time, and she came by herself afterwards. i liked her very much, edward, and i hope you do too." "oh yes, i like her," said the squire. "it's an engagement that promises well. so you want to give them a wedding present, eh? well, now, if i might suggest, and you cared to spend the money, how about a smart little pony dogcart, with harness and everything, and a pony, which i'd look out for you and take some trouble about it?--very pleased to. that would be a very handsome present. i don't know whether you'd care to go up to it. it would cost you about--about----" "thank you, edward," aunt laura interrupted him. "i think that might be a good idea for one of my presents, and i will think it over and very likely accept your very kind offer. but it was not exactly a wedding present that i had in my mind when i asked you to come and see me, which you have so kindly and promptly done. as you know, i have an income far above my needs, and there is a considerable sum of money belonging to me which will go to the children after my death. how much it is i could not tell you exactly without consulting mr. pauncey, which i propose to do when i am better and he is better. but what i should wish to do is to make humphrey an allowance to supplement what you yourself propose to allow him, and in my will i should like--but this i will not settle upon against your wishes, not by any means--i should like to--well, if you understand what i mean--to make humphrey, as it were, more my heir, perhaps, than the other children." probably aunt laura had never before addressed a speech so long to her nephew without being interrupted, but his surprise at the disclosure of her wishes had kept him silent until she had finished. "well, that is certainly a generous proposal of yours, aunt laura," he said; "the allowance, i mean. as for the other----" but it was aunt laura who interrupted now. "you see, edward," she said eagerly, "it is like this--i have thought it over carefully--humphrey seems to me to want the money more than the others. dick, i take it--but of course i do not want to pry in the very least into your concerns--will be so well provided for that any little extra sum i left to him would be more in the nature of a compliment." she went on through the others, explaining why she thought humphrey might fairly be preferred to them, and emphasising the fact that they would all get _something_; but the squire was not listening to her. he was thinking about dick. dick, if he carried out his intentions, would not be well provided for. he would be, as the squire thought, a poor man. here were complications. he did not want aunt laura to make dick her heir to the exclusion of the rest; but the weight of his own apparently now fruitless threat to disinherit him was always growing heavier on him, and he certainly did not want her to deny him his share under a false conception of the true state of affairs. he regretted now that all news of what had been happening lately with regard to dick had been kept from aunt laura. must he give her a hint as to how the land lay? he could not make up his mind, on the spur of the moment, to do so. he shirked the laborious explanations that would be necessary, the surprise, and all that would follow. and even when she had adjusted her mind to the news, he did not know what he should advise her to do. "as far as that goes," he said, "--making humphrey your heir, as you say,--i should like to think that over a bit. of course, you can do what you like with your own money, but----" "oh, but i should not think of acting against your wishes, edward," said aunt laura. "no, you're very good about that," he said kindly. "i've always known you would do what was right, and i haven't interfered with you in any way, and don't want to. but let's leave that for a bit. don't make any decision till we've had another talk. as far as the allowance goes, i'm going to treat the boy generously. i haven't made up my mind yet about the exact sum, but of course i needn't say it wouldn't be altered by anything you liked to add. that would be an extra bit of spending for them, and i've no doubt they would make good use of it. what was it you thought of, aunt laura?" "well," said the old lady slowly, "i think, edward--if you don't mind--you won't be offended with me, i do hope--i have no wish in the _least_ to make it conditional--but i should take it as a great compliment if you would tell me first--when you have made up your mind--what allowance you yourself had thought of." the squire stared at her, and then burst out laughing. in an unwonted flash of insight he saw what she would be at, the diffident, submissive, gentle old woman, to whom he and everything he did or said were above all admitted criticism. "well, if you must push me into a corner, aunt laura," he said, "i may as well settle the figure with you now. i'll start them with fifteen hundred a year and a house. there now. what are you going to put to that?" "i will put to that," replied aunt laura, equally prompt, "another five hundred a year, and the dear young people will be very well off." the squire stared again. "by jove!" he said in astonishment, "i'd no idea you meant to do anything of that sort." "but you said it would make no difference to what you would do," she said a little anxiously. the squire leant forward in his chair and touched her knee. "aunt laura," he said, "you are a very clever old lady." "oh, edward," she expostulated, "i hope you don't think----" "oh, you knew," he said, leaning back again in great good-humour, "you knew well enough. if you had told me you were going to that figure at first, you knew that i should be thinking that twelve hundred a year from me instead of fifteen would do very well. and that's just what i should have thought, by jove! any man would. however, i have no wish to save my pocket at the expense of yours, and we'll let it stand at what i said. but i say, are you sure you can manage it all right? it's a good deal of money, you know. you won't be narrowing yourself, eh? i shouldn't like to feel that you weren't every bit as comfortable as you ought to be--what?" aunt laura assured him that she would remain every bit as comfortable as she ought to be, and finally he left her and walked home, whistling to himself every now and then as he went over the points of their conversation, and once or twice laughing outright at his memories. "by jove! she had me," he said to himself, after he had gained the comparative seclusion of his park and could stop in the road to give vent to his merriment. "who'd have thought it of old aunt laura?" chapter xxii dick comes home as the time came near for dick's visit the squire's mood changed from one of genial satisfaction to a nervous irascibility, which, as joan said to nancy, made him very difficult to live with. "i know," nancy agreed. "it is really rather degrading to have to try and keep him in a good temper." "good temper!" repeated joan. "it is as much as one can do to keep him from snapping off one's head for nothing at all; in fact, one can't do it." "i think," said nancy reflectively, "that a time will come when we shall have to take father in hand and teach him how to behave. that's darling mother's mistake--that she's never done it. my view is that a woman has got to keep a man in order, or he will tyrannise over her. don't you think that is so, joan?" "from what i have observed," replied joan--they were sitting on the big sofa before the schoolroom fire--"i should say it was. and it's a bad thing for men themselves. of course, we know quite well that father is frightened to death of what dick will say to him when he comes, but if we were old enough--and mother cared to do it--to make him hide it up when he's with us, it wouldn't have nearly such a bad effect on him. he would have to forget it sometimes; now he never does." whether or no the squire was frightened to death of what dick would say to him when he came, he was certainly upset at the idea of what lay before him. although he had as yet taken no definite steps, he had come to the decision that dick, as far as was possible, should be disinherited, if he made the marriage that now seemed inevitable. the news of humphrey's desirable engagement had made the other look still more undesirable, and it had taken off the edge of his strong aversion to act in a way so opposed to all his life-long intentions. it seemed almost to have justified his decision, and it had certainly softened to himself the sting of it. but it was one thing to allow his mind to dwell on the unhoped-for compensations of his decision, when dick by his own choice had cut himself off from kencote and remained away from it, and it was quite another to contemplate his coming back, before the decision was made irrevocable, on a footing so different from the one he had hitherto occupied. the squire was made intensely uncomfortable at the thought of how he should bear himself. he did now want to see his eldest son again, and to be friends with him. that desire had been greatly weakened while his mind had occupied itself with humphrey's affair, but he saw, dimly, that it had only been sleeping, that he would always want dick, however much he might have reason to be pleased with humphrey, and that he was laying up for himself unhappiness in the future in working to put humphrey into dick's place, as he had rashly promised himself that he would do. humphrey, perhaps unwisely as regards his own interest, had announced his departure for london soon after it was known that dick was coming down, and the squire was left to turn things over in his mind with the distraction of humphrey's affairs and humphrey's presence withdrawn from him. the twins went in the carriage to meet dick at the station. they squeezed in on either side of him and made their pleasure at seeing him both vocal and tangible. "dear, darling old dick," said joan, trying to seize his hand under the bearskin rug, "it is very wrong of you to stay away from home. we've missed you awfully." "you seem more of a fluffy angel than ever now we have got you back," said nancy. "how true it is what the old starling used to say, that we don't know our blessings till they have left us." "thanks very much," replied dick. "what's this i hear about humphrey being engaged? but i suppose they wouldn't have told you yet." "told us!" echoed joan. "we told _them_!" said nancy. "oh, you did! trust you for nosing out a secret." "it wasn't much of a secret," said joan. "silky susan--oh, i beg her pardon, we mustn't call her that now--i mean sweet sue, was all eyes--big round ones." "and she took a great deal of trouble to ingratiate herself with us," said nancy. "we're not considered worth it as a rule, and of course we see through it in a moment, because we're not really her sort." "but we're going to be," said joan. "humphrey told us that we ought to copy her in the way we behave, and we said we would." "jolly glad to get the chance," added nancy. "we want to be sweet girls, but nobody has ever shown us how, before." "oh, you're all right," said dick. "you needn't try to alter." "thank you, dear dick," replied joan. "you are blind to our faults, and it is very sweet of you. but there is room for improvement, and what with miss phipp to train our brains and sweet sue clinton to improve our manners, we feel we're getting a tremendous chance, don't we, nancy?" "rather!" acquiesced nancy; "the chance of a life time. we lie awake at night thinking about it." dick let them chatter on, and retired into his own thoughts. he would have liked to know how his father had taken the news of his coming, but was unwilling to question them, and he had never allowed them to exercise their critical faculties on their father before him; so they were not likely now to volunteer enlightenment. as the carriage rolled smoothly over the gravel of the drive through the park, he too, like his father, felt some discomfort at the thought of the meeting that lay before him. except that he had come out of his room and was waiting in the hall to receive his son, which had not been his usual custom, there was nothing in the squire's greeting which could arouse comment amongst the servants who were present at it. this was always a great point at kencote. "for god's sake, don't let the servants talk," was a phrase often on the squire's lips; but he himself, in any crisis, provided them with more food for talk than anybody else. "how are you, dick?" he said, shaking hands. "we were beginning to think we should never see you again." (this was for the benefit of the servants.) "the meet's at horley wood to-morrow, but i'm not going out. i've got a touch of rheumatism. come in and have a cup of tea." they all went into the morning-room. "mother, can't we begin to have tea downstairs now?" asked joan. "we're quite old enough. we don't make messes any more." thus by a timely stroke a long-desired concession was won, for the only obstacle hitherto in the way had been the squire's firm pronouncement that children ought to be kept in their proper place as long as they were children, and the proper place for joan and nancy at tea-time was the schoolroom. but he was now so greatly relieved at having them there to centre conversation on that he said with a strong laugh, taking joan by the shoulder and drawing her to him, "now, there's impudence for you! but i think we might let them off the chain now, mother, eh?" "in holiday time," acquiesced mrs. clinton, "and on the days when they're not at lessons." "but if they get sticky with jam," said dick, "they lose their privilege for a week." "and any one who drops crumbs on the carpet must have tea with us in the schoolroom for a week," said nancy. the subject was discussed at some length on those lines until mrs. clinton sent the twins up to take off their hats, when their elders still went on discussing them. "so you've chosen the blue-stocking, mother," said dick. "yes; she is coming next week," said mrs. clinton. "mother didn't want anybody dangerously attractive about the house," said the squire, hastening to take up that subject, which was continued until the twins returned, when they were allowed to dominate the conversation to an unusual degree. but at last the time came when the squire had always been accustomed to say, "well, we'll go into my room and have a cigar," or to go out without saying anything, with the certainty of dick's following him. he could not now go out of the room without saying anything, for that would have amounted to a declaration made before the children that he did not want dick's company, and he shirked the usual formula which would precipitate the "talk" that he dreaded. dick relieved him for the time being. "i'll go into the smoking-room and write a few letters," he said. "ah, well, i'll go into my room and smoke a cigar," said the squire, making a move. mrs. clinton asked joan to ring the bell. "they may not have lit the fire in the smoking-room," she said. the squire looked back. "eh? what!" he said sharply. "of course they've lit it, if one of the boys is at home." but it appeared that they had not lit it, and "they," in the person of a footman, were instructed to repair the oversight immediately. it was a disturbing episode. dick had used the smoking-room less than the others, having usually shared the squire's big room with him as if it were his own, and they had probably omitted to light the smoking-room fire when he only of the boys was at home, on occasions before, without the omission being noticed. but it looked as if differences were beginning to be made, as if the dread "they" had begun to talk; and the squire hated the suspicion of their talk like poison. at any rate, it drew attention to dick's announcement that he would write his letters in the smoking-room instead of in the library, and that would be food for talk. he said with a frown, "hadn't you better come into my room? you can write your letters there. you generally do." so dick followed him, and the door was shut on them. the spurt of annoyance had brought the squire up to the point of "tackling the situation." after all, it had to be talked out between them, and it was useless to put off the moment and pretend that things were as usual. "i suppose your mind is still made up?" he said, with his back to his son. "yes," replied dick. "we needn't go over all that again." "i don't want to," said the squire. "only we had better have things plain. i won't receive her, either before marriage or after." dick put constraint on himself, but his face grew red. "if you are going to talk like that," he said after a pause, "i had better not have come." the squire turned and faced him. the frown was still on his face, but it was one of trouble. "oh, my dear boy," he said, "i'm glad enough to see you. i wish you had never gone away. i wish to god you'd drop it all and come back, and let us be as we were before. but if you won't change, i won't change, and if we're to be comfortable together these few days, let's know at the beginning where we stand. that's all i meant." "all right," said dick rather ungraciously. "but i should like to know how i stand in other matters as well. you've sent me messages. you're going to make me pay pretty heavily for marrying the woman i've chosen. i'm not complaining and i'm not asking you to change your mind. but i think i've a right to know exactly where i stand." "well, then, sit down," said the squire, "and i'll tell you." they were confronted in a way neither of them had been prepared for. certainly dick had not come home to ask for explanations, nor had his father meant to open up the now closed dispute. some underling in the back regions, with his mouth full of bread and butter and tea and his mind relaxed from his duties to his own insignificant enjoyments, was responsible for what was now going to be said in his master's sanctum. a match struck and put to the smoking-room fire would have altered the course of affairs at kencote, perhaps only for an hour or two, perhaps for dick's lifetime. now, at any rate, there was to be a discussion which would otherwise have been deferred, and for their own future comfort neither the squire nor dick was in the most tractable mood for discussion. "you know how the property stands and what goes with it?" the squire began. "yes, i know all that," said dick. "there's about eight thousand acres, and a rent-roll in good times of perhaps a couple of thousand a year. then there are a couple of livings to present to, a house which might be let with the shooting by a fellow who couldn't afford to live in it for, let's say, a thousand a year. so i shall be fairly comfortably off somewhere else as long as i do let, and i dare say there won't be much difficulty about that. there are plenty of rich manufacturers who would like to take a place like kencote." although his mind had been on other plans, and he had no sort of intention of living anywhere but at kencote after he should have succeeded his father, still, in the background of his thoughts there had lain great bitterness at this preposterous punishment that his father was preparing for him; and the bitterness now showed plainly enough in his speech. it aroused in the squire a curious conflict of emotions. the picture of a rich outsider settled in the house which had sheltered none but clintons for unnumbered years appalled him, and, if dick had presented it for his inspection without heat, must have turned him from his purpose then and there; for that purpose had never been examined in its ultimate bearings, and would not have been formed except with the view of bending dick to his will. but, already ruffled, he became more so at dick's tone, and his uneasiness at the fearful idea which had been evolved, although it was rejected for the moment, translated itself into anger. "you've no right to talk like that," he said hotly. "if you would come to your senses you could be as well off living here as i am." "i know i could," said dick more quietly, "if i were blackguard enough to give up a woman for the sake of money. but there's no use at all in talking about that. i'm quite prepared for what you are going to do, and i haven't come here, as i told you, to ask you to change your mind. it's your affair; only if you haven't looked what you're going to do in the face yet, i'm interested enough to say that i think you ought to." "you'll have enough money," snapped the squire, not at all mollified by this speech, "to make it possible for you to live at kencote--you'll have much more than enough money, as i told you--if you give up this marriage. you say you won't give it up. very well, then, you can go and live somewhere else and humphrey can take your place here." dick's astonished stare recalled him to his senses. he had spoken out of his anger. he had never meant to go so far as this. but having gone so far he went on to make his position good. "now we won't beat about the bush any more," he said judicially. "as far as i'm concerned--what i'm going to leave him, i mean--humphrey couldn't afford to live at kencote. i'm not going to rob others to put him in your place, although i tell you this, he's going to be put in your place as soon as you get married, until my death. i dare say you have heard he's going to be married himself, and it's a marriage i'm pleased with. she won't bring him much money, i dare say, but that will be put right in another quarter. he'll be well off from the first, and i shouldn't wonder if he weren't better off still before long. he'll live at the dower-house and work with me at the management of the place, just as you have always done. and when you succeed, you'll probably find him a richer man than you are." dick rose from his chair. "thank you," he said. "i know where i stand now. and as there doesn't seem to be much more to stop here for, i'll get back to london." it was the squire's turn now to stare. "what do you mean?" he gasped. "you're not going!" but dick had already left the room. the squire remained sitting forward in his chair looking into the fire. his face, which had been red and hard, gradually changed its colour and expression. he looked a tried and troubled old man. he had burnt his boats now. he had allowed his anger to dictate words which he would not have used in cold blood. he had insulted his son, as well as injured him. dick was going out of his father's house in anger, and he would not return to it. as long as he lived he would not see him again. these thoughts were too much for him. his own anger had disappeared. he could not let his son go away from him like that. he had not meant what he had said--at least, he had not meant to say it in that way. he rose quickly and went out of the room. when dick had left him he had gone into the smoking-room, where the belated fire was burning briskly, summoned his servant and ordered his cart. his intention was to drive straight over to bathgate and wait there for a train to london. virginia was not at blaythorn, or he would have gone there. he had told her that he was going down to kencote to make one last effort at reconciliation with his father, and she had said that she would pay an overdue weekend visit at the same time, so that he should not complicate matters by coming over to see her from kencote. "for i'm sure you won't be able to keep away if you are so close to me," she had said, holding him by the lapels of his coat and smiling up in his face. it had been an old engagement between them that he should have spent this particular week-end with her at blaythorn, and he now wished heartily that he had not changed his plans. "kicked out of the house within ten minutes!" he said to himself, standing in front of the fire, when he had given his orders. he was consumed with anger against his father, and had an impulse to get away from the house at once, to start on foot, and let his cart catch him up. but it was raining hard, and there were a couple of notes that he had to write for the evening post. he might as well write them now, and he sat down at the table to do so. the door opened, and mrs. clinton came in. "dick dear," she said in her quiet voice, which hardly betokened the trouble that could be seen in her face, "you are not going to leave us like this!" he turned in his seat and faced her. "i'm going in a few minutes," he said, "and i'm not coming back again. it's good-bye this time, mother." "oh, why can't you be a little patient with him?" she cried. "he wanted so to see you here again. if he has said anything to offend you he will be very sorry for it. dick, don't go like this. it will be the end of everything." he got up from the table and put his arm round her shoulder, leading her up to the hearth. "you and i will see each other," he said kindly. "it isn't the end of everything between us, mother. but with him, and with kencote, it is. there's no help for it. he's definitely against me now. he's told me he's going to put humphrey in my place--straight out. i can't stand that, you know. if he's going to say things like that--and do them--what's the good of my staying here?" "he can't mean it," she pleaded. "he is pleased with humphrey now, but he has always loved you best of all his sons. it isn't in his power to put any one in your place." "i dare say he'll be sorry for having done it," he said, "but he's going to do it, all the same. i can put up with the idea, mother, as long as i'm not at kencote, but it's a bit too much to stay here and have that sort of thing said to you." he dropped his arm and turned round sharply, for the door had opened again, and now it was his father who came into the room. "dick," he said, shutting the door and coming forward, "i said too much just now. for god's sake forget it!" there was a moment's pause. then dick said in a hard voice, "what am i to forget?" the squire looked at him with his troubled, perplexed frown. "can't you give it up, my boy?" he asked. dick turned away with an impatient shrug of the shoulders. "god knows i don't want to make any changes," said his father. "it's worse for me than it is for you, dick. humphrey won't be to me what you have been. if you would only meet me half-way, i----" dick turned suddenly. "yes, i'll meet you half-way," he said. "it is what i came here to say i would do, only you went so far beyond everything that there was nothing left for me to say. if you are going to set yourself to make humphrey a richer man than i, as you said--well, that is beyond anything i had thought of--that you should be thinking of it in that way, i mean." "dick, i've never thought of it in that way," said his father. "and you must forget that i said it." mrs. clinton spoke. "you have heard of humphrey's engagement," she said. "your father's idea is that he shall live here, at the dower-house, and help him with the estate management." "that's it," said the squire. "it was either that or getting a regular agent in the place of haydon. i can't do it all myself. but if you would only come back, dick----" "i can't do that," said dick, "at least, not now. i'm tied. and i can't object to your getting humphrey in, if you think he'll take to the job. it isn't that. and it isn't that i mind much your leaving money to the others instead of to me--as long as you don't leave it all to one of them." "i told you i wasn't going to do that," said the squire. "i'd never thought of it. what i said about humphrey i said on the spur of the moment, and i'm sorry for it." "oh, all right," said dick; "we needn't worry about that any more. do what you like for humphrey. i've no wish to put a spoke in his wheel, and i wish i thought he felt the same about putting one in mine. i'll tell you what i told you at the beginning--i've more or less reconciled myself to the change you're going to make. at any rate, i shan't grumble at it. it'll only mean doing a bit more for myself instead of looking to you for everything." the squire did not like this. "you couldn't do much," he said, "to make up for the loss of the unsettled property, if i left it away from you." "i could do something," replied dick, "and i'm going to." "let us sit down," mrs. clinton said. "dick, if you have anything to tell us, if you are going to meet us half-way, as you say, let us hear." they sat down, and dick considered for a moment, and then looked up at his father. "neither of us has given way an inch yet," he said. the squire frowned. "there can be no giving way on the point of your marriage," he said. dick was about to reply, but mrs. clinton put her hand on his knee. "let him tell us what he has in his mind, edward," she said. "i was going to say," said dick, with a gulp, "that i am quite prepared to give way on the question of the property. i wanted you to receive virginia, and to give me everything you were going to give me. i don't ask that now. do what you have said you would do. i shan't grouse about it. i shan't let it make any difference between you and me. i promise you that. that's where i'll give way." the squire felt very uncomfortable. conciliation was in the air, and he was prepared to be conciliatory. but how was he to meet this? "what do you want me to do, then?" he asked, "short of----" dick took him up. "i'm going to marry virginia dubec," he said decisively. "that is settled, and you can't stop me. you haven't been fair either to me or to her about it. you have never given her a chance to prove to you, as she could prove, that she is as unlike the woman you take her for as any woman on earth could be. and you have gone to greater lengths in trying to stop me doing what i'm going to do than i think you were justified in going." the squire broke in on him. "oh, if you're going to open up----" he began; but mrs. clinton said, "edward, let dick finish what he has to say"; and dick went on quickly, "it's the last time i need mention all that. i'm ready to forget it, every bit of it, and you'll never hear a single word more about it, if--if----" the words that rose to his lips were, "if you'll undertake to behave yourself from now onwards," but since he had to find other words to express his meaning, and paused for a moment, the squire put in, "well, if what? i'm waiting to hear." "you can't stop my marriage," said dick. "the only thing you can do is to recognise it now, unless you deliberately choose that this shall be the last time we are to see one another." the squire's frown of perplexity became a frown of displeasure. "if those are your terms----" he began; but again mrs. clinton interrupted him. "when dick has been married some time," she said, "you will not want to keep him at arm's length. you will make the best of it. it is senseless for either you or him to talk of an estrangement that will last a lifetime. such a thing could not happen. there would be no grounds for it. edward, you have done what you could to prevent dick from following his will. now you must accept his decision, and not go on to make further unhappiness." he turned on her a reproachful eye. "what, you on his side, against me!" he exclaimed. "as long as there was a chance of your having your way," she said, "i would not act in any way against you. but now i say that i have seen for myself, and i do not believe that you have anything to fear. dick has chosen for himself, and we ought now to respect his choice." dick put out his hand and pressed his mother's. the squire, faced with decision, almost with authority, from a quarter in which he had hitherto expected and obtained nothing but submission, showed neither surprise nor resentment. he sat looking on to the ground, his frown of displeasure now once again changed into a frown of perplexity. in a moment or two he looked up and spoke, but without indignation. "you want me, now, after all i've said and done," he said, "to give in altogether and receive this lady george dubec as my daughter-in-law?" "i think," said mrs. clinton, "that the time has come when you must." "oh, for god's sake, let's have an end of it, father," said dick. "give her a chance. it's all i ask of you. let me bring her here. if you haven't changed your mind after her visit--then both of us will have done what we can for each other--and you need never see her again as long as you live." the squire sat without replying for a long time. then he got up and turned to leave the room. "very well, dick," he said, "you may bring her here." chapter xxiii humphrey counts his chickens humphrey went from kencote to thatchover, where lady aldeburgh was for the time being residing with her numerous family. this did not include her husband, who preferred to play a box and cox game with her in respect of his two houses; but on his way through london humphrey called on his prospective father-in-law to gain formal authorisation of his suit. lord aldeburgh had fitted himself up a suite of bachelor chambers on the top floor of his great house in manchester square, and had installed a lift, which no one was allowed to use without his permission, as its rumbling disturbed him in his chosen occupations. the chief of these was the collection of portraits of people and pictures of places, which he cut out of illustrated papers and magazines and pasted into large albums, indexing them up very thoroughly as he went on. he was also an ardent attender of plays and concerts and a persistent but indifferent bridge-player. he had found a club where the stakes were half a crown a hundred, and there was always a rubber to be had in the afternoon. so in the winter, which he spent mostly in london, his days were fully occupied. early in the year he went to the riviera or to egypt, and about the time that his family came up to london for the season he installed himself at thatchover and enjoyed his garden. in the autumn he went abroad again or travelled about england. he was not a rich man, but he was an entirely happy and contented one. "his lordship is very busy this morning and i don't think he would like to be disturbed," said the servant who opened the door. "well, take up my name and say i won't keep him long," said humphrey. "i'll come up with you." "i don't think his lordship will see you, sir," said the man; but humphrey climbed the four flights of stairs after him and waited in the hall of lord aldeburgh's self-contained flat until he was admitted to the presence. lord aldeburgh was in what he called his work-room. it was a large light room furnished chiefly with deal tables, each devoted to a particular pursuit. one had paste-pots and scissors and knives and rulers and a sheet of glass and a pile of papers and albums. another was for the making of jig-saw puzzles, a third for their elucidation, a fourth was for typewriting; and there was a reduplicating apparatus, and another table with materials for illuminating. the walls were covered with rubbings of monumental brasses, all ingeniously overlaid with colour and gilding. lord aldeburgh had hundreds more of these rubbings rolled up and put away in labelled drawers, and hoped before he died to have acquired one of every brass in england. he was standing by his scissors-and-paste table when humphrey went in, and there was a slight frown of annoyance on his otherwise amiable face. he was a big man, clean-shaven except for the rudiments of a pair of whiskers, and looked like an intelligent family solicitor, preoccupied with affairs of moment. his appearance had sometimes caused him to be taken for a serious politician and had caused him some annoyance. "i'm all for the constitution and that sort of thing," he was accustomed to say, "and my vote's safe enough when it's wanted. but i will _not_ take the chair at political meetings. it interferes with my work. besides, if they interrupt i don't know what to say." he had on a voluminous apron with bib and pockets over his tweed suit, which rather detracted from his habitual air of weight; but paste was sticky, and lord aldeburgh was careful of his clothes, which it was his custom to wear until they were hardly worth passing on to his valet. "always pleased to see you," he said, shaking hands, his habitual courtesy struggling with his annoyance at being disturbed. "but if you hadn't come straight up i should have asked you to call again to-morrow. friday is a very busy day with me. i have all these papers to get through, and there are so many of them now that if i don't clear them up at once the next week's are on me before i know where i am." "i'm sorry," said humphrey, looking with interest at the pile of cut-out pictures on the table and the pile of disjointed papers on the floor. "but i'm going down to thatchover this afternoon and i had to see you first." "oh, you're going down to thatchover!" repeated lord aldeburgh. "i wish i could get down. there's a good deal of replanting being done, and my gardener is such a fool that if i'm not on the spot something's bound to go wrong, though i type him out the most detailed instructions. but i really can't get away at present. i'll tell you what you might do. just see whether he's put glass over the androsaces and things in the rock-garden, will you? my wife's no good at that sort of thing; she don't care about it. i don't believe she knows the difference between a saxifrage and a sedum; and you can't trust to servants. if you'll do that, like a good fellow, i shall be very much obliged to you." "certainly i will," said humphrey, taking out his pocketbook. "better give me the name of the things." "i'll type out a list from my garden book and send it down to you," said lord aldeburgh. "they're all properly labelled, and if you'll just go through them---- thanks very much; you've relieved me of an anxiety. i very nearly threw everything up to go down for a day. but i'm glad i didn't now. well, if you don't mind i'll get on with my work now that's settled." he held out his hand with an engaging smile, but humphrey said, "i haven't told you what i came about yet. i want to marry susan. she's game, and lady aldeburgh doesn't object. but i wanted to know what you thought about it before we went ahead." a frown of perplexity showed itself on lord aldeburgh's face. "marry susan!" he repeated. "well, i don't see any objection, if you think she's old enough. but----" "she's twenty-four," interpolated humphrey. "twenty-four! is she really? well, it shows what i've always said, that time flies quicker than you think it does. twenty-four! my goodness! well, then, of course she's old enough, and i rather wonder my wife hasn't seen to it before. and what i was going to say was that my wife looks after all that sort of thing, and i'm much too busy a man to be worried about details. if i give my consent, which you're quite right in coming to ask for, i hope i shan't have any more bother about it. that's all i meant." "i don't see why you should be bothered," said humphrey. "there'll be questions of settlements, i suppose. but the lawyers will fix up all that." "oh, my goodness, yes!" said lord aldeburgh. "thank heaven all that sort of thing was fixed up when i was married myself. i don't want ever to go through it again. it was sign, sign, sign from morning to night. i've forgotten what the girls were to have when they married, but i know it wasn't much, and i'm not in a position to increase it. the rock-garden cost me an infernal lot of money last year, and i'm going to enlarge it. i suppose you don't know where i can get good blocks of limestone fairly cheap, do you? i don't care much about the sandstone i've got. at least, i don't want any more of it." "no, i don't know," said humphrey. "you had better give me the name of your solicitors, and we can get on to them. i suppose i can settle all the other points with lady aldeburgh." "oh, my goodness, yes!" said lord aldeburgh. "i'm much too busy to attend to it. look here, i'll show you an interesting thing. it just proves what we were talking about just now, how time flies. you see this picture of miss enid brown, of laurel lodge, reigate, who is going to marry this fellow, mr. bertie pearson, of the cromwell road?" "yes, i see," said humphrey. "i don't particularly envy mr. bertie pearson." "oh, i think she's a very nice-looking girl," said lord aldeburgh. "but that isn't the point. now twenty-two years ago, when i first began to make my collection, one of the first photographs i got was of a mr. horace brown, of petersfield house, reigate, who married--here he is--i was just looking it up when you came in--see?--miss mary carter, of croydon--turn to the c book for her--it's all carefully cross-indexed--here she is. now you've only got to compare these two faces--miss enid brown and mrs. horace brown--miss carter that was--taking reigate into consideration--to make it quite plain that they are mother and daughter. you see it at once, don't you?" "yes," said humphrey. "same silly sort of simper." "oh, well, i don't know about that. but that isn't the point. the point is that this particular work of mine, which i just took up five-and-twenty years or so ago to amuse myself with, is developing into something that will be of the greatest importance to the nation by and by. when i die i've a jolly good mind to leave it to the british museum; or if i could get some fellow to leave some money and have it carried on--why, there's no telling what it wouldn't come to. here you're beginning to have an illustrated register of every single soul in the country that amounts to anything. if you're good enough to have your portrait in some paper you're good enough to go down to posterity in my collection. i tell you, it's monumental. already i've got thousands and thousands of portraits--not only of people like ourselves that you can look up in a book, but of thousands of others--quite respectable people--and at all stages. why, if i were to begin to publish the whole thing in parts i should make a fortune, and i've a jolly good mind to see some publisher and get it done. there isn't a soul whose name was represented who wouldn't buy it. i can tell you it's turning into a jolly big thing." "well, it is rather interesting," said humphrey. "what have you got about the clintons?" "oh, of course, i've got a separate book about the clintons. like to see it? you'll find some pictures of your little lot there." "well, if i may, some other time," said humphrey. "my train goes in half an hour, and i must be getting off. then you've no objection to my urging my suit? i believe that's the correct expression." "not a bit in the world, my dear fellow," replied lord aldeburgh. "i'm not much of a family man. i'm too busy. but from what i've seen of her i should say susan would make you a good wife, and i'm sure you'll make her a good husband. so i wish you every sort of good luck. and now i must get to work again." so, blessed with lord aldeburgh's approval, humphrey went down to thatchover, and found a party of considerable size assembled there, all bent on extracting as much amusement as possible out of the passing hours. he arrived at dusk and found the family and its guests assembled in the big hall of the house. the men had been shooting, the women playing bridge, for the weather was too raw for them to care about leaving the warmth of the house. humphrey received a somewhat vociferous welcome, for there was no one in the house with whom he was not on terms of intimacy, and felt cheered by the warmth of social intercourse into which he was plunged. "this really is rather jolly," he said to susan clinton, with whom he found himself presently sitting a little apart from the noisy central group. "i don't know that i ever want anything better than a big house in the country and to have it filled with jolly people." "i shouldn't like to live in the country all the year round," said susan. "you'd soon get out of touch." "oh, lor', yes," said humphrey. "i didn't mean that. look at my people at kencote. it's jolly enough there every now and then in the winter when there's something to do, although it isn't exactly gay. but to settle down there year in and year out for ever--i'd just as soon emigrate. and that's what i want to talk to you about. things are going all right for us. we shall have enough to get along on. i tell you, i'm in high favour. but the idea is that we shall set up in the dower-house, and----" "oh, but that will be delightful!" susan interrupted him. "with all those jolly old things! and the presents we shall have! humphrey, how ripping! and there's plenty of room to have people there. if we can afford to do things well----" "yes, that'll be all right," said humphrey. "but the idea is that we shall cut all the rest. i'm to give up my job, which i don't care about either one way or the other, except that it keeps me about where i want to be, and i'm to be sort of head bailiff. that's the scheme, as it's shaping itself out. question is whether it's good enough." "do you mean we shouldn't be allowed to go to london at all?" "oh, allowed! we could go up for a day or two now and again--though if i know my respected parent there would be black looks even at that, if we did it too often--but as for anything more than that---- no, it's meant and it's intended to mean that i join the governor in business. he's really, if you look at it properly, a farmer in a big way, and he's not very good at it, though he thinks he is. it's where i come in over dick that he must have somebody to help him out of the muddles he makes, and that will be a pretty stiff job, and there won't be much running away from it." "then you mean we can't even pay visits?" "precious few of 'em. we shall be expected to stay at home and lead the domestic life. are we cut out for it, susan?" she smiled at him, and slipped her hand into his. "i shan't mind very much, humphrey," she said. humphrey returned her pressure. "good girl!" he said. "i don't know that i shall either for a few years. but we'd better look it all in the face. we shall feel cut off, there's no doubt of it. but there's this to be said, it won't last for ever. if we're submissive now--well, in the long run we shall come off all right. question is, can you make up your mind to stand it for as long as may be necessary?' "i can if you can," said susan. "oh, i shall be better off than you. i'm afraid there's no doubt you'll be dull at times. we'll have our own friends to stay with us, but there won't be much going on at home to enliven us. it isn't like other big houses in the country. still, there are the kids. they're growing up, and they're pretty bright. you ought to get some fun out of them, and it'll be a godsend to them to have somebody like you about the place." "i'm not certain that they care for me much," said susan; "and i'm a little afraid of them. in fact, i'm rather afraid of all your family, humphrey. do you think mrs. clinton likes me?" "oh, of course she does," said humphrey. "you'll get on well with the whole bunch of them. and as for the governor, you've only got to flatter him a bit and avoid treading on his corns, and you can live in his pocket--if you want to. i say, susan, excuse my asking, but is your own papa all there?" susan laughed. "he has never grown up. that's all," she said. "but his tastes are harmless enough. think what it would be if he had a taste for running after--well--er--you know--like clinton. he doesn't really spend much money. there are worse fathers." humphrey digested this point of view. "well, i think i would rather have mine," he said, "tiresome as he can be, and is, sometimes. anyhow he's going to do the right thing by us. i needn't go into details, but you'll be able to have some pretty frocks, old girl; and you may find yourself in a big house before you've done, yet." their conversation was interrupted by the breaking up of the tea-party and the setting up of the bridge tables. bridge was the serious pursuit at thatchover, and it was only, so to speak, at off times that the household indulged in their tastes for romps. there was never any paltering with the valuable hours between five o'clock and eight o'clock in the evening, and there were few of the present party who showed any inclination to shirk their duty, even to the extent of sitting out a rubber. but as the total number of players was divisible by two, but not by four, two of them were obliged to sit out, and lady aldeburgh suggested to humphrey that he and she should have a little talk and cut in later. "i hate doing it," she said, "because there's a certain sense of satisfaction in sitting down to begin, which you miss if you wait till everything is in full swing. still, it would look well for me to appear self-sacrificing, and if you don't mind we'll get our little chat over now, for i'm dying to hear what you've managed to fix up." humphrey, sitting with her in a corner by the fire away from the green tables, put her in possession of the state of affairs. "there'll be at least fifteen hundred a year, and probably more," he concluded, "and that ought to make it good enough." "if that were all, it wouldn't be good enough," said lady aldeburgh decisively. "you and susan couldn't live on fifteen hundred a year or anything like it. i shouldn't consider it for a moment." "oh yes, you would," said humphrey calmly. "still, it isn't all. we're to have a house, for one thing--a house more than half furnished, and there'll be all sorts of perquisites. i'm to go in for the land agency business; and by and by, if i behave myself, as i mean to, and susan behaves herself, as _she_ means to do, we shall be very well off." "what on earth are you talking about?" enquired lady aldeburgh, thoroughly bewildered. "the land agency business----' "we are to live at the dower-house at kencote," said humphrey. "i don't think you saw it, but it's a topping little house. and i'm to help the governor look after things. that's the scheme." "my _dear_ humphrey! what absolute nonsense!" exclaimed lady aldeburgh. "you and susan burying yourselves in the country! why, you'd be bored stiff in a week, and you'd get sick to death of one another in a month. you can't seriously consider such a ridiculous scheme." "why ridiculous?" enquired humphrey. "we're in the country at this moment, and we're not bored stiff--far from it." "that's entirely different, a big house, with crowds of people whenever you want them--and in winter, when there's something for the men to do. to settle down for good! and at a place like kencote! well, i don't want to be rude to your people, but i ask you, are they alive or dead?" humphrey flushed. "my people are all right," he said, keeping his voice level. "and susan will get on with them. you needn't worry yourself about that side of the question." "i can't help it if you are angry with me," said lady aldeburgh, with a slight recurrence to her infantile manner. "i say what i think, and although i have the greatest possible respect for your people, it would drive me crazy to live in the way they do. and i'm not going to let susan be killed and buried and made miserable for life." "all right," said humphrey. "then i'd better pack up and clear off." "oh, don't be silly. if you can screw a couple of thousand a year out of your father, with the little bit that susan will have, which will pay for her frocks, you could take a nice little flat and be fairly comfortable. i shouldn't mind your waiting for the rest to come later." "if i do that, the rest won't come later; it won't come at all. dick has kicked over the traces, and i'm to take his place--to a certain extent. i don't want to think too much about all that, but you force me to say it. you understand the situation well enough if you'd give your mind to it. i don't want to bury myself in the country all the year round any more than you would; but, hang it! isn't it worth making some sacrifice for a time? besides, it's such nonsense to talk as if living in the country, and living comfortably too, within three hours of london, were the same thing as going off to siberia or somewhere. anyhow, we're going to live at kencote. i'm game and susan's game. we don't ask you to come and live with us." "now you're positively insulting," said lady aldeburgh, entirely recovering her good-humour, for this was the way she liked to be treated by good-looking young men. it implied that she appeared as young as she felt. "of course if you have made up your mind to hoe turnips for the rest of your life, you naturally wouldn't expect me to come and hoe them with you, and i shouldn't come if you did. the question is, will susan be happy hoeing turnips? that's what i have to look at." "i dare say you will be pleased to do an occasional week-end's hoeing," replied humphrey. "and as for susan, i've already told you she's ready to hoe as long as is necessary. please don't upset her about it. we are going to eat our bread and butter quite contentedly for a few years, and we shall get the jam by and by. if you put your oar in and try and upset things, we shan't get nearly so much bread and butter, and we shall miss the jam altogether. after all, it's a question for us to decide; and we've already decided. we're going to be a good little boy and girl, and if all goes well, by and by we shall be little county magnates. i believe that's the proper expression." "what is your father going to do?" asked lady aldeburgh. "let's put it quite plainly, as we are talking confidentially. is he going to make an eldest son of you? is dick finally out of the way? i know he's going to marry virginia dubec in spite of everything. does your father still refuse to see him--or to see her, which is more to the point, for i'm not a cat like some women, and i'll say this, that i believe if he were to see her she would get round him; for she's a beautiful creature and could turn any man round her little finger if she cared to try." "she won't have a chance of trying with him," replied humphrey. "you may make your mind easy as to that. as for dick, i suppose he's seeing him at this moment. he was going down to kencote this afternoon." "what! oh, then they've made it up?" "no, they haven't. neither side budges. dick is going to marry virginia, as you say, and dick's father has sworn to leave all he can away from him if he does. both of them will keep their word, for they're both as obstinate as the devil. but they are going to patch up a sort of peace, and i'm not altogether sorry. dick hasn't behaved particularly well to me, and i should be a humbug if i pretended that i wanted him to get back what's now coming my way. but i don't want him to feel left out in the cold altogether." "how very sweet and forgiving! are you sure that he won't persuade your father to change his mind?" "he won't try." "how do you know that?" "because i know dick." "i suppose you wired to say you were coming down here because you didn't want to meet him?" "i suppose i did. we might have had a row. i haven't done anything to persuade the governor to alter his will, as he's going to do, but it's going to be altered in my favour, and dick might not feel inclined to do me justice over the matter. i don't want a row with him. we've been fairly good pals so far, and i don't want to be open enemies with him. besides, kencote will belong to him some day, and----" "well, when it does you won't be there any longer." "yes, i shall. i'm to have partisham--that's pretty well settled. there would be an explosion of wrath and surprise if i intimated that i knew that and was counting on it; but you can see the governor's brain working all the time. he lets everything out, and he's let out that. it's only a question of one farm at present. i may get it with the rest, or it may go to walter, for there's an old manor-house on it, and he thinks it would do for walter to do up and live in when he gets tired of doctoring. he can't quite make up his mind, but it's only a hundred and fifty acres out of about two thousand, and it doesn't much matter one way or the other." "well, you seem pretty sure about it. i hope you may not be making a mistake. if i were dick i should certainly have a try at getting back what he's lost. where is this place you're going to have?" "the house is about four miles from kencote, and the property adjoins. my great-grandfather bought it with money his brother left him, and some of it is good building land on the outskirts of bathgate. i've never been inside the house; it's let to a doctor and used as a private lunatic asylum." "that's pleasant!" "it's a fine house, and the property is rising in value every year. i shall be a richer man than dick before i've done." "how mercenary you are! well, i suppose it's all right, as you say so, and i must give my consent. oh, look, there's a table up. come on! i feel as if i'm going to win stacks." chapter xxiv virginia goes to kencote "my dear lady george dubec" [wrote mrs. clinton], "my husband and i will be glad if you will come to us here when you return to meadshire, which dick tells me will be next wednesday. we shall be pleased to welcome you at kencote and to make your acquaintance. we shall be pleased also to see miss dexter, and perhaps you will kindly tell her so, and let me know if she will accompany you. "with kindest regards to yourself and to her, "believe me, "very sincerely yours, "nina clinton." "there!" said virginia, tossing this missive over to her companion. she had opened dick's much longer letter, which had come by the same post, first of all, and half-way through its perusal had searched for mrs. clinton's amongst the rest. now she returned to dick's, while miss dexter read mrs. clinton's. "what on earth does it all mean?" asked miss dexter. "has the world come to an end, or has that preposterous old bear come to his senses at last?" "it means, my dear toby," said virginia, looking up at her with a happy smile, "that all this horrible business is at an end. dick has fought, and dick has won. and we owe everything to the help that his dearest of dear mothers has given us. i knew i should love that woman from the first time i set eyes on her, and now i adore her. three cheers for mrs. clinton." she waved dick's letter over her head. miss dexter looked down again at mrs. clinton's, and then again in dry surprise at her friend. "and do you really mean to tell me," she asked, "that you are satisfied with _this_ as an atonement for everything they have made you go through? i never read such a letter--as cold and unwilling as she is herself. i'll tell you what will happen, virginia, if you go to kencote. you will simply be insulted. do you think people like that can change? not a bit of it. 'kindest regards,' indeed! she may keep her kindest regards to herself as far as i'm concerned." "oh, toby, don't be so tiresome!" virginia adjured her. "you know you're just as pleased as i am--or very nearly. shall we go straight to kencote from london, or go to bathgate and leave some things at blaythorn and pick up some others? i think we'll do that. i must take my smartest frocks, and so must you. for you are really quite presentable if you would only give yourself a chance." "you may leave me out of it," said miss dexter. "i'm as likely to go to kencote as i am to windsor castle. if _you_ like to put your head into the bear's den and say 'thank you for having tried to eat me up, and now by all means finish me off,' you can. i have a little more self-respect, and nothing would induce me to go near those people." "ah!" said virginia, "you are still huffy because mrs. clinton snubbed you. quite right of her! you are a dear, loyal, faithful creature, and i know you would follow me to much more terrible places than kencote, where you will find yourself in a week's time; but you had no business to go interfering without consulting me about it. i'm too fond of you to snub you, as you so often deserve, so i'm quite pleased when other people do it for me." "yes, that's all i get for trying to help you," said miss dexter. "what do you suppose has happened? has captain dick told them that you have money? that's the only thing i can think of that would make that purse-proud old lunatic change his mind." "he doesn't say anything about that, and i'm sure he hasn't told them. _i_ shall tell mr. clinton, and it will make him love me even more than i'm going to make him as it is. i know i'm talking nonsense, but in the state of mind i find myself in at present that can't be helped. no, toby dear, it is mrs. clinton who has done it all. my dick says so. she was always on our side. she liked the look of me, toby, odd as it may seem to you; and if she could have got round the old bear's prejudices--but i mustn't call him that any longer--she would have done so before. i knew i was right about her. it was the only thing i didn't _quite_ like about dick--that he seemed always to think she was of no account. now he has come round, and my cup of happiness is brimming over. oh, toby, i've never been so happy in my life before." she put her handkerchief to her eyes, but she smiled gaily through her tears. "quite so," returned miss dexter, unmoved by this show of emotion. "you're all for the moment. next week, when you are alone amongst them all, and they show you what they really think of you, you will never have been so miserable in your life. people like that don't change. they haven't got it in them. and you are laying up a most uncomfortable time for yourself. i give you solemn warning. i know what i'm talking about. i'm not carried away by sentiment as you are. don't go, virginia. don't make yourself cheap." "my dear," said virginia in gentle seriousness, "if i were really making myself cheap by going to kencote, i would go, if dick asked me to. i can never be cheap to him. he'll be there, and nothing that can happen will touch me. but nothing will happen--nothing disagreeable. why should you think so?" miss dexter threw out her hands. "oh, when you talk like that!" she said. "well, go, my dear, and good luck go with you." "_you_ are my good luck, and you will go with me," said virginia. "now, toby darling, don't say no. you have done so much for me. surely you can do this." "i suppose i can," said miss dexter after a short pause. "but if mrs. clinton thinks i'm going to fall into her arms after her treatment of me, she'll find herself mistaken. and if the worst comes to the worst i can tell mr. clinton what i think of him. i should like an opportunity of doing that. yes, i'll come, virginia." they went straight to kencote from london, the state of virginia's travelling wardrobe having been decided to be capable of answering all necessary calls on it, and miss dexter having declared that if she appeared as a dowdy, she would find others to keep her company at kencote in spite of the airs they gave themselves. at the railway terminus humphrey clinton came up to them. "hulloa!" he said in the somewhat off-hand manner he adopted towards most ladies of his acquaintance. "going back to blaythorn?" "no," said virginia. "we are going to kencote. so are you, i suppose? we will travel down together, and you shall smoke to me." miss dexter's sharp eyes were upon him, and she saw him flinch, although virginia did not. it was the merest twitch of a muscle, and he had recovered himself instantly. "that's first class," he said. "and this seems to be first class too. shall we get in here?" "that nice-looking porter with the grey beard has found us a carriage," said virginia. "if we all three spread ourselves over it nobody will come in, and you can smoke when once the train has started." "you had better sit at the other end of the carriage, then," said humphrey, "and pull your veil down, or else _everybody_ will want to come in." "now, toby, don't you call that a perfectly lovely speech?" asked virginia. miss dexter emitted a sound indicative of scorn, but made no verbal reply, and they walked down the platform. a lady with spectacles, an unbecoming felt hat and a short skirt, was coming towards them, and as they approached one another she and miss dexter exclaimed, simultaneously, and then shook hands with expressions of pleasure. miss dexter then introduced the lady with the spectacles to virginia, as an old schoolfellow, janet phipp, whom she had not met for years and years, and who had not changed in the least in the meantime, and asked her where she was going. "i am going to a place called kencote," said miss phipp; "as governess," she added uncompromisingly, with an eye on virginia's fur and feathers and humphrey's general air of opulence. "oh, but that's where we are all going!" cried virginia. "how jolly! and this is mr. humphrey clinton, the brother of your pupils." humphrey shook hands with miss phipp. "you'll find them a rare handful," he said. "that won't worry me in the least," said miss phipp. "we'll all travel down together," said virginia, "and you shall be told all about the twins. i've never met them, and i'm dying to." "i'm going second class," said miss phipp, and miss dexter said, "i'll go with you. virginia, i shall just have time to change my ticket." she dashed off to the booking-office. "that's so like toby," said virginia. "always impulsive. she might have thought of changing miss phipp's ticket. what was she like at school, the dear thing?" "excellent at mathematics," replied miss phipp. "languages weak, as far as i remember." the train slipped off on its two hours' non-stop run, with virginia and humphrey in one carriage and miss dexter and miss phipp in another. the two ladies had much to say to one another as to the course of their respective lives since they had last met. miss phipp's career had been one of arduous work, punctuated by continental trips and an occasional period of bad health. "i suppose i have worked too hard," she said. "the doctors all say so, although i can't say i've ever been aware of it while i've actually been working. if i can't work i'd just as soon not live, and i've always had just the work that suited me. it's a blow to have to give it up. if it hadn't been for my health i should have been head-mistress of a big school long ago, and i'd have shown them what women's education could be. now i've got to settle down to take two girls instead of two hundred, and i suppose if i try to teach them anything i shall be thwarted at every turn. girls ought to be sent to school. i've no opinion of home education, and these two don't seem to have been taught anything. i'm low about it, margaret. still, i've got to do it, for a bit anyhow, and if they've got any brains i'll knock something into them, if i'm allowed to. however, we needn't worry ourselves about all that now. what have you been doing? leading a life of luxury and gaiety, i suppose." the smile with which she asked her question was affectionate. she had been a big girl at the school when margaret dexter had been a little one, and had mothered her. margaret dexter's father had been a consulting physician with a large practice. she had lived in different surroundings from most of her school-fellows. "i've always had rather more luxury than i cared about," replied miss dexter. "as for gaiety, i don't care about that at all. i'm not cut out for it." her companion regarded her with more attention than she had yet bestowed. "you have grown to look very sensible," she said. "thanks," replied miss dexter. "that means that my appearance is not prepossessing. i've always known that, and it doesn't bother me a bit." miss phipp laughed. "it is all coming back to me," she said. "at first, except that your face is much the same, i should hardly have recognised you for the little girl i used to be so fond of. but you haven't altered, margaret. you are just as direct as ever. i believe i first taught you to be direct." "if you did, you had easy ground to work on," replied miss dexter. "i suppose i had. but aren't you doing anything, margaret? you're not just spending your life like other rich people--going about and amusing yourself? you weren't like that as a child." "i'm not rich," returned miss dexter. "my father died too young to make a lot of money. and as for doing something, i'm companion to lady george dubec." miss phipp was visibly taken aback. "oh!" she exclaimed; and after a pause said, "i'm sorry. still, if you're obliged to earn your living, i should have thought you might have done something more useful than going out as a companion to a lady of fashion." miss dexter coloured and then laughed. "it's all coming back to me too," she said. "that's what you used to call talking straight, and we used to call janet's manners. if it is any comfort to you to know it, i don't have to earn my own living--i only said i wasn't rich. i live with virginia dubec because i love her, and i share some of the expenses. i'll tell you how much i pay if you like." "oh, don't be silly," said miss phipp. "you said you were her companion, and i took that to mean what anybody would. then you're _not_ doing anything, and i'm sorry for it. however, we needn't quarrel about that. what are these people like i'm going to? i've seen mrs. clinton, and on the whole i like her." "well, i don't," said miss dexter, "and if i weren't such a fool as to follow virginia about wherever she wants to go to, as if she were a baby, i shouldn't go within a mile of mrs. clinton. i don't mind telling you, as you're bound to find out for yourself directly you get to kencote, that virginia is going to marry captain clinton, the eldest son, and the whole family have hitherto turned up their stupid noses at her. now he seems to have persuaded them to inspect her and see whether she'll do, after all. she's worth a hundred of the whole lot of them put together, except, perhaps, captain clinton himself, who has behaved fairly well. no, i'll do him justice--he's behaved quite well. he's all right. but mrs. clinton--well, you say you like her, but you'll see; as for mr. clinton, he's the most odious, purse-proud, blood-proud, ignorant old pig you'll find anywhere." "h'm!'" commented miss phipp drily. "seems a nice sort of family i'm going to. what's that youth travelling with your lady virginia, or whatever her name is--what's _he_ like?" "what he looks like," replied miss dexter shortly. "and the girls i'm going to teach?"' "i don't know them, and don't want to." "but you will, if you're going to stay in the house. and you must have heard about them." "well, i believe they're rather fun," admitted miss dexter grudgingly. "and they're reported to be clever. still, they've been boxed up at home all their lives, and can't know much. i expect you'll have your work cut out." "they'll have their work cut out," returned miss phipp grimly, "and they'll have to do it too. i do hate having to go out as a governess, margaret." miss dexter glanced at her friend, who was so plain as to be almost unfeminine, and looked jaded and unwell besides; she had her eyes fixed on the suburban landscape now flying past at sixty miles an hour, and something in her aspect caused miss dexter's heart to contract. "poor old janet," she said, "i don't suppose it will be as bad as you expect. i'm a brute to be trying to put you against them. you won't see much of mr. clinton, and he probably won't bother you when you do. as for mrs. clinton, if you want the truth, she once gave me a snub, and i feel catty about her; so you needn't take any notice of what i say. the children are real characters, with any amount of brains, and you'll have a great opportunity with them if you can keep them in order." miss phipp brightened up. "ah, that's better hearing," she said. "as for keeping them in order, after a class of thirty high school girls, that's child's play." "well, i don't want to paint _too_ bright a picture," said miss dexter, "and from what i've heard of them i don't think that it will be quite that." in the meantime virginia and humphrey were getting on very well in their more luxurious compartment. humphrey had expressed his pleasure at the opening up of the home of his fathers to his brother's expectant bride, and in such a fashion that virginia had warmed to him and told him exactly how things stood. "you see, i'm going on what the shops call 'appro,'" she said. "if they don't like me they can turn me out again." "and if they _do_ like you," said humphrey, "which, of course, they will----" "then all will be well," concluded virginia. he looked out of the window before he asked, carelessly, "i suppose dick's there?" "of course dick's there," said virginia. "you don't suppose i should venture into the lion's den without my dick to support me, do you? dear old dick! i'm glad he's made it up with your father." "so am i," said humphrey, after the minutest pause. "family quarrels are the devil and all. and there was no sense in this one. i suppose he's chucked the idea of yorkshire, and he's returned to the bosom of the fold." "oh, good gracious, no!" said virginia. "at least he hasn't said so. why should he, anyway? i guess we shall want all the dollars we can grab at. a wife's an expensive luxury, you know, mr. humphrey." "especially a wife like you," returned humphrey genially. "still, i shouldn't be surprised if you find yorkshire 'off' when you get to kencote. if the governor has come round about you, he'll probably come round about--about other things." "you mean money?" said virginia. "we're not bothering ourselves about that." "_you're_ not, perhaps." "you mean that dick is? i don't know anything about it, and i don't care. that's not what i'm going to kencote for. why do men always think such a lot about money, i wonder?" "ah, i wonder," said humphrey. the four travellers joined up at bathgate, where they had to change, and travelled to kencote together in a second-class carriage, on virginia's decision, which humphrey accepted with some distaste, but did not combat. dick and the twins were on the platform at kencote. the twins were inveterate train-meeters, whenever they were allowed to be, and dick had brought them this evening with the idea of packing them and miss dexter and miss phipp into one carriage and accompanying virginia in the other. but humphrey had not been expected, and the greeting between the brothers was not particularly cordial. however, he grasped the situation when he saw a landau and a brougham in waiting outside instead of the station omnibus, which he had expected to see, and solved it by announcing his intention of walking. "we would come with you, darling," said joan in an aside, "but we must see it out with our image. what's she like, humphrey?" "oh, most lovable--as you can see," replied humphrey, disengaging his arm and setting out into the darkness. when the carriage into which the twins had packed themselves with miss phipp and miss dexter had rolled off in the wake of the other, miss phipp said, "well, girls, i hope we shall get on well together. you're not afraid of hard work, i suppose?" "oh no," replied joan readily; "we're looking forward to it immensely." "you will find our diligence one of our best points," said nancy. "if at first we don't succeed we always try, try, try again." there was a moment's silence, except for the sharp trot of the horse's hoofs and the wheels rolling on the frosty road. then miss dexter laughed suddenly. "there, you're answered," she said to miss phipp. "let's put them through an examination. what do you know of mathematics?" "don't be foolish, margaret," said miss phipp sharply. "they must not begin by making fun of their lessons." "oh, but we shouldn't think of doing that," said joan. "they're far too serious, and we have been taught not to make fun of serious things," said nancy. miss dexter laughed again. "what do you know of mathematics?" she asked. "nancy is not good at them," replied joan. "she got as far as the asses' bridge in euclid, with the starling, our last governess, and then she struck, as you might expect. her strong point is literature. she writes poems that bring tears to the eyes." "joan's weak point is history," said nancy. "she thought henry the eighth was a widower when he married anne boleyn, and starling made her learn all his wives in order before she went to bed." "that will do, girls," said miss phipp firmly. "and if miss starling was the name of your last governess, please call her so." the ensuing silence was broken by a smothered giggle from joan, which nancy covered up by asking in a rather shaky voice of miss dexter whether she and miss phipp had known each other before. "yes," said miss dexter, "we were at school together--oh, years ago--and have never seen each other since, until we met on the platform. funny, wasn't it? i say, is there a ghost at kencote?" "oh, no, it isn't old enough," replied joan. "but there's one at the dower-house--an old man in one boot who goes about looking for the other one." "that's a jolly sort of ghost," said miss dexter. "do you know who he was?" "he is supposed to have been an ancestor in the time of charles the second--he's dressed like that--who kicked his servant to death, and----" "we've got some topping ancestors," put in nancy. "there's a book about them. joan and i read it the other day. one of them was called abraham, and he said if he had a name like that he must live up to it, so he called his sons jacob and esau----" "he only had one and he called him isaac," interrupted joan. "you have got it wrong." "that will do," said miss phipp decisively, and just then the carriage clattered under the porch and came to a standstill. the squire had not been able to bring himself to meet his guests in the hall, as was the hospitable custom at kencote. he had meant to do so. he had given in on the main point on which he had held out so long, and honestly intended to behave well about it. he had gone to and fro between his room and the morning-room across the hall, standing first before the fire near which his wife was sitting, and then reading the _times_ for a few minutes in his own easy-chair, and when the wheels of the first carriage had been heard, and mrs. clinton had put aside her work and risen according to custom, he had gone out with her into the hall. but when the servants came through to the door he thought that they cast curious looks at him, as possibly they did, and he bolted suddenly back to the shelter of his room, and stood there listening, until the door of the morning-room was shut and the noises outside had ceased. then he grew ashamed of himself. what would dick think of him? if he delayed any longer it would look as if he were holding off, after all--refusing to put at her ease and make welcome a guest in his own house. so he gathered up his courage, settled his waistcoat, and walked boldly into the morning-room, and straight up to miss dexter, who was nearest to the door, and with whom he shook hands warmly, somewhat to her confusion, before he distinguished virginia, who had risen when he came in. her colour was high, and her eyes sparkling, but she smiled in his face, and said, as americans do on an introduction, "mr. clinton," and then waited for him to speak, still standing and looking straight into his eyes, with the smile that invited friendliness. the squire turned away from her somewhat confused, and said, "tea ready, nina? lady george must be cold after her journey. what sort of weather was it in london?" miss dexter replied to the question, as his brows had been bent upon her when it was asked. she said it was rather raw, and the answer seemed to satisfy him, for he left that subject and remarked that the radicals seemed to be making a disgraceful mess of it as usual, and if this sort of thing went on we should all be driven out of the country. this led nowhere, and that awful pause seemed likely to ensue where people ill at ease with one another search for topics to hide up their discomfort. but virginia, who had sat down again, said, "mr. clinton, have you ever forgiven us for heading back the fox?" "eh! what!" asked the squire, with a lively recollection of the rebuke he had administered on the occasion referred to. virginia laughed. "you were terrible," she said. "but you had every right to be terrible. i'd never done such a thing before, and i hope i shall never do such a thing again. i feel like getting under the sofa every time i think of it." the squire thought the last statement just slightly verging on indelicacy, but its effect on his mind was only momentary, so relieved was he at having a subject held out to him. deep down in his heart he held to his aversion to virginia, and nothing in her appearance or attitude had in the least softened it. but, externally, it had to be covered up, and because she offered him a covering he was grateful, and for the moment well disposed towards her. "ladies who come into the hunting-field," he said, with a near approach to a smile, "and turn foxes, must expect to be spoken sharply to." this was enough for virginia to go on with, but not for miss dexter, who had heard the words, but missed the smile. "it is like interfering with a child's toys," she said. "he forgets his manners for the moment." the squire bent a look of puzzled displeasure on her, but before her words could sink in, virginia said, "toby, don't be tiresome. you don't know anything whatever about hunting, and you are so absurdly vain that you can't bear to be corrected when you've done wrong." dick laughed and said to his mother, "miss dexter gets a good deal of correction and puts up with it like an angel. she's not in the least vain, really." "nothing much to be vain of," said miss dexter, with complete equanimity. the squire was still looking at her as if adjusting his mind to her presence and potentialities, and she looked up at him and said, "miss phipp, your children's governess, is an old friend of mine. we were at school together." then she looked down again and took a sip of tea. the squire seemed at a loss to know what use to make of this piece of information, but dick said, "she looks as if she would be able to handle them all right." "you mean that she is plain," said miss dexter. "you seem to be in a very bad humour," dick retorted. "she's in an atrocious humour," said virginia. "she always is when she's been travelling. she will pick up and be thoroughly amiable when she's had two cups of tea." "do let me give you another one," said mrs. clinton, with a kind smile, and everybody laughed, including the squire, a second or two late. conversation went fairly easily after that, and by and by mrs. clinton took virginia and miss dexter up to their rooms. never very ready of speech, she had little to say as they went up the staircase and along the corridors, but when she had shown them their rooms, which were adjoining, she asked, "would you like to come and see the children in their quarters? i hope they are making miss phipp feel at home." "i should love to," said virginia; and miss dexter said, "they ought to have come to some understanding by now." joan and nancy were sitting one on either side of miss phipp at the tea-table. their demure air, which did not quite correspond to the look in their eyes, probably warned mrs. clinton that if any understanding had been come to it was of a one-sided nature, but miss phipp looked comfortable both in mind and body, and said, as she rose from the table, "we have been having a good talk about our future plans. we are going to do a great deal of hard work together, and put all our minds into it." the twins, for once, forbore to add to a statement of that nature. their bright eyes were fixed full upon virginia, who smiled radiantly on them and said, "what a lovely schoolroom you have! i shouldn't mind working in a room like this." "it _is_ rather nice," said joan. "miss starling, our last governess, taught us to keep it in order." "miss starling seems to have taught them some very useful things," said miss phipp, with firm complacency. "she was with you for a good many years, was she not, mrs. clinton?" "her name was 'miss bird,'" said mrs. clinton. "we were all very fond of her, and the boys gave her a nickname out of affection." "oh!" said miss phipp, casting a glance of disapproval on the twins, who met it with eyes of blameless innocence. later on when the twins went to their room to change their frocks they dismissed hannah from attendance on them. "we have something to talk over," said joan, "and we can do without you this evening." "you had better wait outside on the mat and we'll call you if we want you," said nancy. "indeed, miss nancy, i should demean myself by doing no such thing," said the indignant hannah. "if you wish to talk between yourselves as well i know what you want to talk about, though deny it you may, straight downstairs do i go, and you may do your 'airs yourself, for i shall not come up again till it's time to tidy." "hurry up," said nancy. "we'll ring if we want you." when hannah had departed joan said, "well, what do you think of her" "who do you mean--virginia, or pipp, or toby?" "virginia, of course. i think she's rather sweet. she's worth ten of sweet sue clinton, anyhow." "that's not saying much for her. i think she's all right, though. but i haven't seen any signs of the chocolates yet." "what chocolates?" "i thought she'd be sure, to bring us a great big expensive box tied up with pink ribbons, so as to make friends with us and get us on her side." "i shouldn't have thought nearly so much of her if she had. what i like about her is that she doesn't toady. she knows she's got to make a good impression, but she doesn't show she's trying. i'm sure mother likes her." "we haven't seen her with father yet." "we shall at dinner. i really think she's rather a darling, nancy. i think i shall give in." nancy announced her intention of holding out a little longer just to make sure. "she's just the merest trifle too sweet for my taste," she said. "i must be quite certain that it's part of her first." "i'm sure it's part of her," said joan. "she isn't any sweeter than aunt grace, and you like her." "aunt grace is too sweet for my taste, although it is part of her, and isn't put on. i like people with more character. toby, now--she's a ripper." "yes, i like her," admitted joan. "she likes us too. i think she wants to egg us on to deal with pipp." "we shan't want much egging. we've got her a bit puzzled already. i don't think she's a bad sort, you know, joan. i thought she'd give us bread and water when mother went away." "she's not quite sure of herself yet. we'll go on playing at being high school girls for a bit. it's rather fun. don't they wear their hair in pigtails?" "we might plait our hair after breakfast to-morrow. and they always say 'yes, miss phipp,' 'no, miss phipp.' you know that story we read?" "we'll go through it again. we'll do all the proper things at lesson time, and outside the schoolroom we'll be our own sweet selves. it will be rather a bore going for walks with her." "she can't be allowed to be instructive then." "rather not. she'll want firm handling, but i think we shall be equal to it." "it may come to a tussle. but we've only got to keep our heads. there are two of us, and there's only one of her. we'll be kind but firm, and when she's learnt her place i dare say we shall get on all right, and everything will go swimmingly. what _has_ hannah done with my hair-ribbon? ring the bell loud, joan, and go on ringing till she comes up." chapter xxv a lawn meet the squire may have forgotten, when he gave his consent to virginia being asked to kencote on this particular date, that on the following day the hounds would meet at kencote, and there was to be a hunt breakfast. he had his due share of stupidity, but he was clever enough to see, when he did realise what had happened, that virginia's presence at kencote on so public an occasion would spread abroad the fact of his surrender as nothing else could do so pointedly. he did not half like it. he was not quite sure in his mind exactly what he had surrendered by consenting to receive her, but he was quite sure that he had never meant to give up his right to make her first visit her last if he did not approve of her, and when the mild january day dawned and he went into his dressing-room it was with a mind considerably perplexed, for he did not know whether he approved of her or not, and yet here were all these people coming, who would see her there, and possibly--the more officious of them--actually go so far as to congratulate him on the approaching marriage in his family. he had gone as far as that. he recognised that, whatever he thought about the matter himself, the rest of the world, as represented by the people amongst whom he lived, would, undoubtedly, hold that there was cause for congratulation. he even went a little further, without admitting it to himself: he accepted the general verdict of his neighbours, that virginia was a very beautiful and a very taking person. only he had not taken to her himself. she had tried him hard, during the previous evening, and several times, especially after his first glass of port, he had nearly allowed himself to fall a victim to her charm. but he had just managed to hold out, and in the cold light of morning, and removed from her presence, thinking also of the company that was presently to assemble, he frowned when he thought of her, and said aloud as he brushed his hair, which he always did the first thing in the morning, even before he looked at the weather-glass, "confound the woman! infernal nuisance! i wish the day was well over." presently, however, his thoughts grew rather lighter. it was a perfect day for his favourite sport, and he was going to hunt once more. he felt as eager as a schoolboy for it. having received virginia in his house, there was no object in seeking to avoid her in the field, and the relief to his mind in having nothing before him actually to spoil his pleasure in a day with the hounds was so great that it reacted on his view of virginia, and he said, also aloud, as he folded his stock, "i wonder if she'll do after all." but no; that was too much. of course she wouldn't do. she was an american--well, perhaps that could be forgiven her: she was not glaringly transatlantic. she had been a stage-dancer. you had to remind yourself of the fact, but there was no doubt that it was a fact. ugh! she was the widow of a rascal, living on the money he had left her, which had been got, probably, by the shadiest of courses, if not dishonestly. that was positively damning, and he could not understand how dick could complaisantly accept such a situation and prepare to live partly upon it. but perhaps she had very little money and was deeply in debt, and there would be difficulty about that later on. he had not thought of that before, and slid away from the thought now, as quickly as possible. he did not want to spoil his day's pleasure. but a gloomy tinge was imparted to his thoughts, and again he frowned at the idea of what lay before him when the neighbours for miles round would be collected and he would have his difficult part to play before them. virginia came down to breakfast in her riding habit, which is a becoming costume to no woman unless she is on a horse. the squire had an old-fashioned grudge against hunting-women in general, and he was not cordial to virginia, although he made every effort to act conformably to his duties as her host. whatever inroads she might have made on his prejudice against her on the previous evening when, in a dress of black chiffon with touches of heliotrope about her neck and in her lustrous hair, she had looked lovely and surprisingly young, she held small charm for him now, and it was with difficulty that he brought himself to be polite to her, as she sat at his right hand during breakfast. fortunately some distraction was afforded to him by the presence of miss phipp, to whom he had just been introduced for the first time. he found her astonishingly plain, and he was the sort of man who finds food for humour in the contemplation of a plain woman. but in his present mild state of discomfort he found no food for humour in miss phipp's obvious disregard of her proper position in the house. miss bird had never spoken at the breakfast table unless spoken to. she would have considered it immodest to do so. miss phipp bore a leading part in the conversation, and as she had only one subject--the education of the young, in which the squire possessed no overmastering interest--by the end of the meal he was seriously considering the necessity of giving her a snub. miss phipp's thesis, which she developed with considerable force, and a wealth of illustration drawn from her previous experience, was that a woman's brains were every bit as good as a man's, and that she could do just as much in the way of scholarship if her training began early and was carried on on the right lines. "what do _you_ think about it?" miss dexter asked of nancy, who was sitting next to her. "i think," replied nancy, with a side glance at miss phipp, "that it depends a great deal on the teacher," at which miss dexter laughed, thus giving the answer a personal application. "_of course_ it depends a great deal upon the teacher. that is exactly what i said," miss phipp went on. "when i was at the high school there was a girl who had taken the highest possible honours at london university, but she was of no more use as a teacher than--than anything. teaching is a gift by itself, and sometimes the best scholars do not possess it." "i think we shall find a fox in hartover," said the squire. "i believe that fellow they lost a month ago has taken up his quarters there." "at the same time," said miss phipp, "for the higher forms of a school you _must_ have women who are good scholars as well as with a gift for teaching." when breakfast was over the twins went out of the room one on each side of miss dexter, to whom they had taken a warm fancy, and invited her to visit their animals with them. but miss phipp said at once, "oh, but i shall want you in the schoolroom, girls. we are not to begin lessons until monday, but we must lose no time then, and i want to find out beforehand exactly where you are." the twins looked at one another. they were all standing in the hall. "saturday is a whole holiday," said joan. "that i know," replied miss phipp, "but it is important that we should begin work on monday without any delay. you can spare an hour. i shall probably not keep you longer." the twins looked at one another again, and then at miss dexter, who preserved a perfectly passive demeanour. "i think, if you don't mind," said joan, "we would rather get up an hour earlier on monday. we always feed the animals ourselves on saturdays, directly after breakfast." "are you going to begin with me by showing disobedience?'" asked miss phipp. "i must insist now that you shall come upstairs with me." the high school girls would have recognised this tone and quailed before it. but nancy said, "we'll come if mother says we must," and miss phipp lost patience, and without another word walked into the morning-room, into which she had seen mrs. clinton go with virginia. the twins looked at one another once more, and then at miss dexter, who received their glance with a twinkle in her eyes. "now you're in for it," she said. but the twins were rather alarmed. "we weren't rude to her, were we?" asked joan. "hadn't we better go in to mother?" asked nancy. "no, it's all right; we'll wait here," said miss dexter, and they waited in silence until miss phipp marched out of the morning-room, passed them without a word, and went upstairs. "now we'll go and put our hats on and go out and see the animals," said miss dexter; but just then mrs. clinton came out to them, looking rather concerned, and miss dexter left them and joined virginia in the morning-room. "what happened?" she asked eagerly. "my dear toby," replied virginia, "are you going to foment a quarrel between those darling children and the bosom friend of your childhood?" "no, i'm not," replied miss dexter. "i'm going to put her in the way of settling down here. what happened?" "what happened? why, she came in looking as red as a tomato, and said, 'mrs. clinton, i want the children to come into the schoolroom for an hour, and they refuse. is it your wish that they shall disobey me?' or something like that." "they didn't refuse. what did mrs. clinton say?" "she said, 'oh, surely not, miss phipp,' and it turned out, as you say, that they had only said that they would rather not. then mrs. clinton said that she didn't want them to work on saturdays, especially to-day, because of the meet, and the friend of your childhood flounced out of the room without another word. toby, that good lady is as hot as pepper." then mrs. clinton came in again, and said, "i want the children to take miss phipp out to see their animals too. they have gone up to her. will you go too?" but miss phipp was not in the schoolroom. "you go and put on your hats, and i'll go and find her," said miss dexter. "mother wasn't annoyed with us," said joan. "we said we were quite polite. we were, weren't we?" "your manners were a lesson to us all," said miss dexter. miss phipp was in her bedroom, and miss dexter proffered the invitation, of which she took no notice. "it's perfectly preposterous," she said, turning an angry face upon her. "if this is the sort of thing that is to happen my position here will be impossible." "my dear girl, you shouldn't lose your temper," said miss dexter. "they were quite right. you've no right to expect them to work in their playtime. besides, you shouldn't have told mrs. clinton that they were disobedient. come out and see their rabbits and guinea-pigs." "i shall do nothing of the sort," said miss phipp. "i shall reconsider my position. i will not stay and teach girls who are encouraged to set my authority at naught." "look here, janet," said miss dexter firmly. "you are going the wrong way to work here. you have every chance of having a real good time, and doing something useful besides, but you can't behave in a private family as if you were in a school." for answer miss phipp burst into most feminine tears. "i'm not well," she sobbed. "i've got a splitting headache after yesterday's journey, and i've lost control over myself." "well, lie down for a bit," advised miss dexter. "you'll have the whole day to yourself, and you needn't begin to think about work until monday. i'll put a match to your fire. is there anything you'd like? if there is i'm sure you can have it." "i'm a fool," said miss phipp, drying her eyes. "for goodness' sake don't let those two know i broke down. i dare say i was wrong, but i do want to do all i can to get them on quickly." "i know you do. and you'll have no difficulty when the proper time comes. they're clever girls, and nice ones too. they are quite upset at the idea of having upset _you_." "are they?" said miss phipp drily. "well, i think i _will_ lie down for a bit and take some phenacetin. no, i don't want anything else. if i do, i can ring the bell." so she was left to herself, and miss dexter accompanied the twins in their various errands of mercy, and expressed unbounded admiration of the breeding and intelligence of the rodents submitted to her inspection, after which they took her for a walk round the rhododendron dell. they, were a little less ready with their conversation than usual, for the late episode had been something quite new in their experience and given them occasion for thought. at last miss dexter said, "if you are worrying about janet phipp, i shouldn't, if i were you. she's a good sort, and you'll get on with her all right." "i hope we shall," said joan, "but i'm inclined to doubt it. she's so _very_ different to the old starling. we had any amount of fun with her, but then, we loved her." "well, you'll love miss phipp when you know her. i've known her for--well, i won't tell you how many years, but we're neither of us chickens, as you can see." "and do you love her?" asked nancy. "i used to, and i should again if i saw anything of her." "well, that's something in her favour," said joan. "but nancy and i will have to talk it over and settle our course of action." "well, talk it over now. i shan't repeat anything you say." "we like you very much," said nancy. "but as you're a friend of hers, we might not like to speak quite plainly. it's rather a serious situation." "oh, you can talk quite plainly before me. i can see the situation well enough, and it isn't as serious as you think. she has never been in a private family before, and has had no experience except with a horde of schoolgirls. of course you have to keep a tight hand over them, and when they're at school nobody has authority over them except the teachers. she'll soon tumble to it that your mother has more say in things than she can have. but you mustn't always be appealing to your mother against her." "of course we shouldn't do that," said joan indignantly. "we never did with starling, except in fun." "besides, we are quite capable of controlling the situation by ourselves, when once we've settled on a course of action," said nancy. miss dexter laughed. "i've no doubt you are," she said. "only give her a chance. that's all i ask." "i suppose you don't object to our exercising our humour on her?" asked nancy. "we have our reputation to keep up. and you must admit that she was rather trying this morning." "look here," said miss dexter. "she's been ill, and she's not well now. you may think it funny, but when i went in to see her just now she cried." "oh, poor darling!" exclaimed joan. "of course we'll be kind to her, won't we, nancy?" "we'll think it over," said nancy. "we mustn't be sentimental. you're rather inclined to it, joan. she may have shed tears of rage at being thwarted." "you're a beast," said joan uncompromisingly. "i hate to think of people being unhappy." "you see," miss dexter put in, "she's suffering under a great disappointment. she's a splendid teacher and was getting on awfully well, and then she broke down and has had to take a private job. many people would much prefer to live in a place like this, and have a good time, instead of toiling hard at a school. but, for her, it's good-bye to a career in life, and she can't help feeling rather sore about it." "poor darling!" exclaimed joan again. "we'll take her to our hearts and make up for it. don't you be afraid, toby dear--you don't mind us calling you that, do you?--if nancy misbehaves i know how to deal with her." "i don't want to misbehave," said nancy, "and if i did you couldn't stop me. if she treats us well we'll treat her well. i shan't make any rash promises. i think we'd better be getting back now. people will begin to turn up soon, and it's such fun to see them." they went back to the house, and presently there came riding up the drive two men in pink, and immediately after there came a dogcart and then a carriage and then more men on horses and a lady or two, and after that a constant succession of riders and people on wheels and on foot, until the open stretch of park in front of the house was full of them. and at last the huntsman and whips came trotting slowly along the drive and on to the grass, and the hounds streaming along with them waving their sterns, a useful, well-matched pack, much alike in the mass, but each with as much individuality as the men and women who thronged around them. then the members of the hunt began to drift by twos and threes into the house and into the dining-room, where the squire was very hospitable and hearty in pressing refreshments on them--"just a sandwich, or something to keep out the draught," he kept on repeating, full of pleasure at being able to feed dozens of people who didn't want feeding, and quite forgetting for the time being his fears as to the effect of virginia's presence. virginia, not wishing any more than he to make herself a centre of the occasion, was on her horse already, and dick was with her, and a handsome pair they made. so thought old aunt laura who had had herself drawn up by the porch in her bath chair, as far away as possible from "the horses' hoofs." she had just heard that a marriage was about to take place in the family and was full of twittering excitement at the news. "my nephew," she said, meaning the rector, "told me the glad news only this morning, my dear. i am overjoyed to hear it, and to have the opportunity of seeing you so soon. please do not bring your horse too close, if you do not mind. i am somewhat nervous of animals." "i'll bring her to see you this evening, aunt laura," said dick, "or, if she's too tired, to-morrow morning." "i shan't be too tired," said virginia, smiling at the old lady. "dick has often told me about you, miss clinton, but you know i have never been in kencote before." the rector had given aunt laura some hint of the difficulty there had been over the engagement, and she said soothingly, "i know, my dear, i know. but i have no doubt you will be here very often now, and i am sure nobody will be more pleased to see you than i shall. dear me, what with walter and cicely being married two years ago and dick and humphrey about to be married, one feels one belongs to a family in which things are always happening. i only wish that my dear sisters had been alive to take part in it all. they would have been so pleased. but the last of them died last year, as no doubt dick has told you, and i am no longer able to welcome you in our old home. but i have a very nice little house in the village, and if you will come and drink a cup of tea with me i shall feel great gratification, and i will show you some of my treasures. tell me, dick, for my eyes are not quite what they were, is that our cousin humphrey?" it was, in fact, lord meadshire, who in spite of a cold, which made him hoarser than ever, had driven over with his daughter, and now, looking frail and shrunken in his heavy fur coat, but indomitably determined to make the best of life, came slowly across the gravel to greet once again the only member of his own generation left alive amongst all his relations. "well, laura," he said, "this is like old times, eh?" and then he recognised virginia, and showed, although he did not say so, that he was pleasantly surprised to see her there. "you have heard, i suppose, humphrey," said aunt laura, with obvious pride in being first with the news, "that we are shortly to have yet another wedding in the family. i have not seen dear edward yet; i have no doubt he is busy indoors, but will be out soon--and i shall be able to tell him how glad i am that everything is happily settled." lord meadshire's sharp old eyes twinkled up at virginia, and at dick, who said, "don't you say anything to him about it yet, aunt laura. he's not quite ready for it"; and lord meadshire added, "you've been given early news, laura. we must keep it to ourselves until it is published abroad--what? my dear"--this to virginia--"i needn't tell you how glad i am, and i wish you every possible happiness and prosperity." he stayed to chat for a few minutes with aunt laura after virginia and dick had moved away. "it seems but yesterday," said aunt laura, "that my dear father, who, of course, kept these hounds, entertained his friends here in just such a way as this, and i was a little girl with all my dear sisters, and you were a young man, humphrey, very gay and active, riding over and talking and laughing with everybody. and it is just the same pretty scene now as it was then, although all the people who took part in it are dead, except you and i." "my dear laura," wheezed lord meadshire, "i'm gay and active now, if it comes to that, and so are you, in your heart of hearts. come, let us forget that tiresome number of years that lies behind us and go and amuse ourselves with the rest. if i stand out here in the cold, i shall have emily after me--what?" so aunt laura was helped out of her bath chair, and they went into the house together slowly, and arm in arm. the squire hastened to meet them and find chairs for them, rather uncomfortably near the fire. he was loud in his expressions of pleasure at seeing his kinsman there, and not unmindful, either, of the comfort of aunt laura. he would have been beyond measure scandalised at the charge of treating her with increased consideration since he had learnt of her wealth, and indeed he had shown himself, as has been said, indifferent to the possibility of her being wealthy, but there was no doubt that she had increased in importance in his eyes during the last week or two, and she was accordingly treated more as a personage at kencote than she had ever been before in her life. lord meadshire accepted a glass of champagne. it was a festive occasion, and he loved festive occasions of all sorts. everybody in the room came up and talked to him, and he was pleased to talk to everybody and said the right thing to each. but presently he found the opportunity of a word apart with the squire. "so you've given in, edward--eh, what?" he remarked, with a mischievous look in his old face, and before he could be answered, said, more seriously, "well, you were right to stick out if you thought it wouldn't do--to stick out as long as you could--but you must be glad all the bother's over now, and i feel sure you'll come to think it isn't so bad as you thought it would be. come now, weren't all the rest of us right? isn't she a dear creature?" "i haven't given in," said the squire shortly. "i don't know yet what i'm going to do. of course, if dick has made up his mind, i'm not going to keep him at arm's length all the rest of my life, however much i may object to what he's doing. that's why he's here, and why she's here." "ah!" said lord meadshire wisely. "that's the way to talk. when you say that you're nearly at the end of your troubles." as he drove off a little later with lady kemsale he told her that edward was conquered, although he wouldn't acknowledge it. "he's an obstinate fellow," said lord meadshire, "and from what nina told me i should say that he's having hard work to hold out against the dear lady. well, she's only got to keep on being herself and he'll be at her feet like all the rest of us." "dear papa," said lady kemsale, "lady george has bewitched you." "my dear," said lord meadshire, "i admit it fully. and if she can bewitch me she can bewitch edward. she's half-way on the road already." chapter xxvi what miss phipp saw miss phipp lay quite still on her bed for half an hour with her eyes closed, while the pain in her head grew and became almost insupportable, as she had known it would, and then, under the influence of the drug, slowly ebbed away until, exhausted as she was, her state was one of such relief as to amount to bliss. she could not afford to be angry, if she was to escape the punishment of these short-lived but agonising bursts of pain, and she had been very angry. now she told herself that she had been foolish to upset herself about nothing. her friend's words had borne fruit in her robust and sensible mind. it was quite true that she could not expect to exercise the same undivided authority in a private house as in a school, and she must find compensations elsewhere, which she very speedily did. at the school she had herself been under authority, and had not been able to carry out unchecked her favourite theories of education. here she would be free of that check, for she did not suppose that mrs. clinton would desire to interfere with her in her teaching. and the children were bright enough. surely there was opportunity here for doing something in a small way, which she had never been able to do at all as yet! they were nice children too, with some character. they had not given in to her, but they had held out without being in the least rude, and it was good of them, after what had happened, to want her to go with them to see their odious animals. at this point mrs. clinton, who had been told of her bad headache, knocked at her door and asked if she wanted anything. she thanked her and said "no," and mrs. clinton further asked if she would like to drive with her, for, if she was well enough, it might do her good. she got off her bed and opened the door, and when mrs. clinton saw the dark circles under her eyes she exclaimed in sympathy, and insisted upon fetching eau-de-cologne, and performing various little services for her, which, although she now scarcely needed them, made her feel that she was cared for. she was instructed to lie still for a while longer, and something should presently be sent up to her. then she was to lunch quietly by herself, and in the afternoon, if she was well enough, to take a short walk in the park. "it is so fine," said mrs. clinton, "that i expect we shall be out all day, and you will have the whole house to yourself, and can be as quiet as you like. and mind you ask garnett--my maid, you know--for anything you want. i will tell her to keep an eye on you." then she went away, and left miss phipp in a more comfortable frame of mind and body than before. she was not used to being looked after in illness, for she had lived a lonely life, and her near relations were long since dead. she felt extraordinarily grateful to this kind, thoughtful, sensible woman, who treated her as if she were a human being and not like a mere teaching machine, and the thought began to dawn upon her, that perhaps she might come to look upon kencote as a home, such as she had never hitherto had, and in the days of her health had scarcely missed. her bedroom was in the front of the house, and she had heard, without much heeding them, the wheels and the beat of horse-hoofs and the voices outside. now she began to be a little curious as to what was going on, and rose and drew up her blind and looked out. the scene was quite new to her, and in spite of herself she exclaimed at it. immediately beyond the wide gravel sweep in front of the house was the grass of the park, where the whole brave show of the south meadshire hunt was collected. it is doubtful if she had ever seen a pack of hounds in her life, and she watched them as if fascinated. presently, at some signal which she had not discerned, the huntsman and the whips turned and trotted off with them, and behind them streamed all the horsemen and horsewomen, the carriages and carts, and the people on foot, until the whole scene which had been so full of life and colour was entirely empty of all human occupation, and there was only the damp grass of the park and the big bare trees under the pearly grey of the winter sky. she saw the squire ride off on his powerful horse, and admired his sturdy erect carriage, and she saw dick and virginia, side by side, humphrey, the pink of sartorial hunting perfection, mrs. clinton in her carriage, with miss dexter by her side and the twins opposite to her, and for a moment wished she had accepted her invitation to make one of the party, although she did not in the least understand where they were going to, or what they were going to do when they got there. all this concourse of apparently well-to-do and completely leisured people going seriously about a business so remote from any of the interests in life that she had known struck her as entirely strange and inexplicable. she might have been in the midst of some odd rites in an unexplored land. the very look of the country in its winter dress was strange to her, for she was a lifelong londoner, and the country to her only meant a place where one spent summer holidays. decidedly it would be interesting--more interesting than she had thought--to gain some insight into a life lived apparently by a very large number of people in england, if this one little corner could produce so many exponents of it, but curiously unlike any life that she had lived herself or seen other people living. she went through the course prescribed for her by mrs. clinton, and enjoyed the quiet of the big house and the warm airy seclusion of the schoolroom, where she read a book and wrote a little, and after lunch went to sleep on the sofa before the fire. then at about half-past three, although she hated all forms of exercise and would have much preferred to stay indoors, she went out for a little walk. she went down the drive and through the village, and was struck by the absence of humanity. if she had to take a walk on a winter afternoon she would have wished to take it on pavements and to feel herself one of a crowd. here everybody she did meet stared at her, wondering, obviously, who she was, which rather annoyed her. but when she got out on to the country road and met nobody at all, she liked it still less, and walked on from a sheer sense of duty. she had no eyes for the mild beauty of the winter evening, nor ears for the breathing of the sleeping earth. she plodded doggedly on, hating the mud, and only longing to get back again to her book by the fireside. when she met a slow farm cart jogging homewards, she made no reply to the touch of the hat accorded her by the carter, but showed unfeigned terror at the friendly inquisitiveness of his dog. in her soft felt hat, black skirt, and braided jacket, she was as much out of place in the wide brooding landscape as if she had been in the desert of sahara, and disliked the one as much as she would have disliked the other. as she was going up the drive on her return, she felt a little glow at the sight of the lighted windows of the house. if she had thought of it she would have known that it was her first experience of the pleasures of the country in winter, for a house in a city does not arouse exactly that feeling of expectant warmth, however much one may desire to get inside it. but, even if she had been prepared to examine the causes of the impulse, she would not have been able to, for it was immediately ejected from her mind by one of terror. it was caused by the sudden sharp trot of a horse on the gravel immediately behind her. she turned round, terribly startled and prepared for instant annihilation. but the horse had only crossed the drive, and was now cantering across the turf away from her. it was riderless, the stirrups swinging against its flanks, the reins broken and trailing. at first she did not, so entirely ignorant was she of such things, attach any meaning at all to the empty saddle. for all she knew, horses without riders might roam the wilds of the country, adding greatly to its dangers, as a matter of recognised habit. but when she had recovered from her shock, some connection between what she had just seen and something she had read or heard of or seen in a picture formed itself in her mind, and it occurred to her that probably the horse had got rid of its rider, and there might conceivably have been an unpleasant accident. then she made a further rapid and brilliant induction, and came to the conclusion that a riderless horse which made his way home to his stable at kencote had probably set out from kencote with some one on his back, and, as his saddle had no pommels, that either the squire or dick or humphrey had been thrown. she knew nothing about grooms and second horses, and narrowed her convictions still further by the recollection of dick's having ridden a grey. the riderless horse was brown--it was really a bright bay, but it was brown to her. therefore either the squire or humphrey must have been thrown from his horse in the hunting-field, and from scraps of recollection of old novels in which hunting scenes had occurred the outcome of such accidents presented itself to her alarmed mind as probably fatal. she stood at the door after having rung the bell--it did not occur to her to open it and walk in--a prey to the liveliest fears, and when she had waited for some time and rung again and then waited some time more, she was not at all relieved by the face of the servant who opened it to her. "the horse!" she said quickly. "whose horse?" "i'm afraid it's mr. clinton's, miss," said the man. "mrs. clinton and the young ladies are in the morning-room and nobody's told 'em yet. we don't know what to do." it was not the grave and decorous butler who had answered the bell, but the same young footman who had omitted to see to the smoking-room fire a week or so before, or miss phipp would not have had the unpleasant duty thrust upon her of breaking the news to mrs. clinton. but she accepted it at once, and went straight into the morning-room, where mrs. clinton, still in her furs, and miss dexter and the twins were drinking tea. "oh, miss phipp, i do hope you are better," said mrs. clinton. "sit down and have some tea and tell me how you have been getting on." "may i speak to you for a moment?" said miss phipp, standing at the door, and mrs. clinton rose from her seat and came out into the hall with her, where some of the servants were beginning to collect. their scared faces did not reassure her, and she put her hand to her heart as she turned to miss phipp for an explanation. "i saw mr. clinton's horse galloping across the park," said miss phipp. "i am afraid he must have had an accident." mrs. clinton showed no further signs of weakness, but asked at once for porter, the butler; and when it was explained to her that he was in his cottage in the park, but had been sent for, she asked for probyn, the head coachman, who came pushing through the group by the service door as she spoke. he had already done what she would have ordered, sent out grooms on horseback, and got a carriage ready to go to any point on the receipt of further news. "then there is nothing more to do," said mrs. clinton after a moment's consideration, "and we must wait. send garnett to me upstairs." she asked a few more questions and then made a step towards the staircase, but turned again towards the morning-room. "i must tell the children," she said. "please come in and have some tea." miss phipp followed her, in admiration of her calm self-control. mrs. clinton said, "i am afraid your father has had a fall, as bay laurel has come back to the stable without him. but he has fallen before and not hurt himself, so there is no need to be frightened. i am just going upstairs for a minute and then i will come down again." the twins looked at one another and at their two elders with frightened eyes. "bay laurel was father's second horse," said joan. "he rode kenilworth this morning and we passed him coming home, so it can't have been the groom." nancy got up from her chair. "oh, i wish mother would come down," she said. "sit down, dear," said miss dexter. "your mother told you not to be frightened." but nancy went to the window, and joan followed her. they drew aside the curtains and looked out on the park, lying still and empty in the now fading light. "isn't that something near the gate?" asked joan. "no, it is only a tree. bay laurel is as quiet as any horse in the stable, nancy. he must have fallen at a fence." "i should have thought he would have stood until father got up," said nancy. "it looks as if he had been too much hurt to get up," said joan, and then began to cry. miss dexter came over to them and drew the curtains again firmly. "don't make a fuss," she said, "or you will make your mother anxious. pull yourselves together and come and sit down. joan, give miss phipp some tea." joan did as she was told, still crying softly. nancy said, "father has never had a bad fall, and he has been hunting all his life. he knows how to take a toss. don't be a fool, joan. i expect it will be all right." "don't talk like that," said miss phipp sharply, her nerves on edge, "and, joan, stop crying at once." upon which joan cried the more. "i'm sure he's badly hurt," she said, "and he's lying out in the c-cold, or they'll b-bring him home on a shutter." mrs. clinton came in, looking much the same as usual, except that she was paler. she sat down at the tea-table and said, "don't cry, joan dear. probyn says that there are no signs of bay laurel's having come down, so it was probably not a bad fall, and i expect father will be home soon." but joan knew too much to be comforted in this way, and her imagination was working. she threw herself on her mother and sobbed, "if f-father had fallen and b-bay laurel hadn't, he'd have kept hold of the reins, unless he was too b-badly hurt." mrs. clinton said nothing, but drew her to her, and they sat, for the most part in silence, and waited, for a long time. presently joan, who had been sitting with her head on mrs. clinton's shoulder, started up and said, "there! there! i heard wheels." then she began to sob uncontrollably. mrs. clinton got up. the sound of wheels was now plain outside. joan clung to her, and cried, "oh, don't go, mother. you don't know what you may see. oh, please don't go." her cries frightened the rest. they heard the clang of the heavy bell in the back regions and voices and steps in the hall outside. none of them knew what would be brought into it. even mrs. clinton was paralysed in her movements for a moment, and did not know what to do with the terrified child clinging to her. the door opened and joan shrieked. then the squire walked into the room with his hat on and his arm bound up in a black sling over his red coat. "hulloa! what's this?" he exclaimed in a voice not quite so strong as ordinary. "nothing to make a fuss about. i took a nasty toss, and i've broken my collar-bone." chapter xxvii the run of the season the breaking of a collar-bone is not a very serious matter. men have been known to suffer the mishap and continue for a time the activity that brought it about without being any the worse. but to a man of the squire's age and weight the shock he had sustained was not altogether a light one, and when he had reassured his anxious family as to his comparatively perfect safety, he retired to his bed and kept to it for a few days. it was the first time in his life that such a thing had happened to him, and he did not take kindly to the confinement. but it was eased of some of its rigour, after the first day, during which he suffered from a slight fever, by his making his big bedroom an audience chamber, in the manner of a bygone age, and most people in the house, as well as a good many from outside it, were bidden to sit with him and entertain him in turn. amongst the most welcome of his visitors was virginia, for it was she who had, by good fortune, released him from what might have been a far worse predicament than was indicated by the slight damage he had sustained, and although she would have done what she had for any other member of the hunt, still, she had done it, and his gratitude to her had the effect of removing from his mind the last vestiges of the prejudice he had nursed against her, which in its latest stages had been far weaker than he knew. what had happened was as follows. a stout fox had been turned out of hartover copse within a few minutes of the hounds being put into it, and had made off straight across country with a business-like determination that seemed to show that he knew exactly where safety lay and was going to lose no time in making for it. the squire, old in his knowledge of the ways of a fox and the lie of the south meadshire country, had posted himself hard by the point where the fox broke covert, and was one of the first away. for fifteen minutes it was straight hard going, leaving little chance for those who had not secured a good start to make up their distance, and none at all for those who were following on wheels and hoped by taking short cuts to come up with the hounds again at some point or other. when the score or so who were in front obtained a minute of breathing space, while the hounds, which had been running so straight that they overran the line where the fox had turned hard by gorsey common, five miles from kencote, were casting about to recover the scent, there was little of the main field to be seen. the squire, with joy and exhilaration in his breast, reined up and looked behind him. they had come down a long slope and up another, and in all the mile-wide valley across which they had ridden there were not more than a dozen others to be seen, and some of them very far away. but amongst them were virginia and dick, who were even now breasting the grassy, gorsey slope, at the top of which he sat on his horse. taken unawares, he could not but admire virginia's slim, graceful figure, swaying so lightly to every move of the mare under her, and he had ready some words to call out to her when she should reach him. but before that happened the deep note of corsican, the oldest and wisest hound in the south meadshire pack, and the thrilling chorus which immediately answered it, warned him that the hounds had found what they had been looking for, and immediately he was off again, with all thought of those behind him forgotten, and nothing in his mind but that baying dappled stream that was leading him, now as fast as before, straight across a country as well grassed as any in the shires. right through the middle of it too; and when he had galloped across half a dozen wide meadows, and kenilworth had landed him, without the least little vestige of hesitation or clumsiness, on the other side of a stiffish bullfinch, his heart went up in a pæan of gratitude to whatever power directs these matters, at the thought that he had taken chances and had his second horse sent on to beeston holt, which lay midway between kencote and trensham woods, to which he now began greatly to hope that this brave fox was leading them. only once before, during all the long years in which he had hunted over this country, had such a thing happened. the line between kencote and trensham, a distance of twenty-five miles at least, pierced lengthwise this stretch of low-lying grazing country, which, intersected by a brook or two, by stout fences of post and rail, and thick hedges which had no need of barbed wire to aid their defence, was like the fairway of a golf-course, perfect while you were on it, but beset with hazards on either side. only the most determined of foxes would keep to it for the whole distance. there was pailthorpe spinney to the left, before you got to the first brook, and no stopping of earths there could prevent master reynard from poking his nose amongst them to try, if he were so minded. and although he could always be bustled out again, it was unlikely that, having once turned aside, he would take to the grass again. he might make for greenash wood across heavy ploughs, or for spilling, where thick orchards made it impossible to follow the hounds, and you had to take one or two wide circuits. but this fox had already scorned the delusive shelter of pailthorpe spinney, and if he was not bending all his attention on the trensham woods, where he probably would find safety, if he got there in time, he was at least bound to lead them over grass for another four miles, to where, at beeston holt, he might possibly decide to turn aside and cross the river and the railway and try for the first of a long chain of coverts which circled round towards blaythorn. in that case the best of the day would be over, but if they could keep him on the move there would be something to look forward to before they ran into him, and the run would still be a memorable one. yes, he was most likely to do that. it was too much to hope for that that glorious day of five-and-thirty years before would be repeated, when the high-stomached ancestor of countless good meadshire foxes had travelled straight as an arrow, scorning all lesser chances of safety, for the high deep woods of trensham, and the squire, not long since married, and in the very flower of his tireless youthful vigour, mounted on his great horse merrydew, with no change, had kept with the hounds all the way and shaken off master, huntsman, whips, and all, when they ran into him at last within two fields of safety. and yet!--there was that quick determined start, the sudden turn on gorsey common, which meant contempt of the line pointing to the coverts at mountfield, the passing of pailthorpe spinney, and now this direct, rattling run across brook and fence and hedge down the very middle of the grasslands. it might happen--the run of a lifetime repeated. his only fear now was that his second horse would not be up at beeston holt in time, for there wasn't a horse in the country or in the wide world which could carry his weight through to trensham at the pace hounds were running. beeston holt lay on the bank of the river with the railway beyond it. it was a straggling village, facing a stretch of common land, and there was a wide space in front of its chief inn, where the squire expected to see his second horse waiting for him, if his groom had reached the point. the hounds swept across the common no farther than a couple of hundred yards away, going as strong as ever, and even the time lost in riding that distance away from their line and changing horses might lose him the good place he had hitherto kept. but there was no horse waiting for him, and with angry despair settling down on him he sat and saw the hounds disappear out of sight and the few who still kept with or near them following at ever-increasing intervals. dick was one of them. he was riding roland, the best horse, not a weight carrier, in the kencote stables, who was quite capable of carrying him to the end of the great run that now seemed certain; for the fox had not turned aside towards the nearer coverts and must have had trensham in his cunning mind since he had first set out. dick waved a hand to him as he galloped past. there was no sign of virginia; on such an occasion as this women, even the best beloved, must look after themselves. the squire fussed and fumed, and kenilworth, his blood thoroughly up, could hardly be held, so anxious was he to go on with what he had begun. in another second he would have let him have his way, but just as he was about to do so he saw his man coming up the road, controlling as best he could the antics of his horse, which had got wind somehow of the passing of the hounds, in spite of the silence in which they were now running. the squire beckoned him to hurry his pace and as he came up jumped off kenilworth and on to bay laurel with all the activity he might have shown on that memorable run of five-and-thirty years before, and was off on to the turf in a twinkling. but not before he had seen, out of the corner of his eye, virginia, sailing gaily along on her black mare, just behind him. in a moment he had forgotten her; bay laurel was as fresh as if he had just left his stable, for the groom had brought him along steadily according to instructions, the fulfilment of which, however, had been like to have cost him his place. the squire felt the spring and lift of the powerful frame under him, as, keeping him well in hand, and riding as if he had been five stone lighter and had not forsaken the hunting saddle for weeks past, he pounded the short, springy turf and sent it flying now and again far behind him. there was a brook to take just beyond the village, wide enough to have given him at his age occasion for thought if it had come earlier in the day, and set him casting about in his mind for the whereabouts of the nearest bridge. but he went straight at it, and bay laurel took it like a skimming swallow. then came a five-barred gate--the only way from one field into another, unless valuable time was to be wasted--and the squire had not jumped a five-barred gate since he had ridden thirteen stone. but he jumped it now, and felt a fierce joy, as he galloped across the meadow grass, at the surging up in him of his vanished youth, and all the fierce delights that such days as this had brought him in years gone by. he was as good as ever. his luck was in. there must be some check before long, and a check, however short, would bring him within sight of them. a sudden memory born of his long past experience came to him. in a field or two he would come to a footpath which led across stiles through what had then been a peninsula of plough-land sticking out into the pastures. the old mid-victorian fox had stuck to the grass and gone round the heavy land in a wide circle. if the edwardian fox should take the same line, that footpath would cut off half a mile, and he made up his mind to follow it. ah! there it was--the path across the crest of the field, the stile, and, beyond the hedge to the left, the dark plough ribbons and the footway running down them. he jumped the stile and cantered carefully down the narrow path, well content to go slow for the advantage to be gained. bay laurel hopped over another stile and they were on grass again and galloping freely, still keeping to the line of the scarcely discernible field path. they topped a short rise, and the squire just caught sight of the hounds topping another away to the right. his heart gave another bound of gratitude. he would be up with them yet. there was the next stile and he knew the line to take. he was already in front of some of those who had passed him waiting before the inn. but his time had come. the last stile was flanked by a high thick fence, on the other side of which, although he could not see it, was a ditch wider and deeper than ordinary. there was nothing formidable about the stile itself; it was no higher than the two bay laurel had just hopped over in his stride, but looked rather more dilapidated. just as the horse was rising to it, he saw that the ditch on the other side ran right along and was crossed by a plank, and although the horse saw it too and was preparing for it, he instinctively checked him, and then saw that it was too late. bay laurel blundered into the rotten woodwork, and the squire pitched forward over his shoulder, and the next moment had rolled into the ditch with the stile, but fortunately not the horse, on top of him. the ditch was newly dug and nearly dry, or he might have been drowned, for he was wedged closely in and could hardly stir. bay laurel had jammed the timbers down upon him, and without waiting to consider the damage he had done was now off in the wake of the hounds, which he also had seen topping the distant rise. the squire was left alone, powerless to extricate himself, in the remote stillness of the fields. he had heard a crack, different somehow from the crack of the timbers, as he fell, but did not at first connect it with broken bones of his own. it was not until he realised that his left arm and shoulder were lying under a beam in a very strange and uncomfortable position, and tried to move them, that he knew what had happened to him and began to feel any pain. then he felt, suddenly, a good deal, not only in his shoulder, but in his side, upon which a corner of the stile was pressing, and thought he had broken every bone in his body. the pain and the shock and the loneliness frightened him. unless help came he was likely to die at the bottom of this ditch, and he had a moment of blind terror before he lifted up his voice and called for help most lustily. there was an instant answer. virginia, who had followed his lead across the plough, at some little distance, because she knew he would not like her riding in his pocket, came through the gap, and drew rein by his side. she was off her horse in a moment and trying her hardest to lift the heavy timbers off him. but she only succeeded in shifting their weight from one part of his body to another, and under his agonised expostulations soon desisted. she stood up, white and terror-stricken, the reins of her mare over her arm, and cried, "oh, i must get the weight off you, and then i will go for help." then she tried again, and did succeed in easing him a trifle, whereupon he fainted, but soon came to again, to find her with her hat full of water sprinkling his forehead. "i'm all right now for a bit," he said. "go and get somebody. can you mount?" "yes, if you don't look," she said. she led her horse a little way out into the field, threw herself across the saddle, and scrambled up somehow. then she set off at a gallop towards the chimneys of a farm peeping above a grove of trees a quarter of a mile away. the squire lay still, and looked up into the sky. except for the aching in his neck he was now free from pain, and having tested by movement all the muscles of his body, was relieved to find that he had got off rather lightly after all. it was an awkward, and rather an absurd predicament to be in, but with the certainty of getting free very shortly, he was not overmuch disposed to grumble at it. virginia's appearance had been providential, and she had been as concerned for him as he was for himself. the stile was an old and very solid one, and had come down on him _en masse_. it was doubtful whether a man could have done more with it, single-handed, than she had done, and a man might not have thought of loosening his stock and fetching water when he had fainted. he had never fainted before. it was a curious, not wholly unpleasant, sensation. he allowed his thoughts to dwell on it, idly, as he lay still, staring up at the sky, not now in great discomfort. he became aware of something soft under his head. when he had first fallen into the ditch he had lain with his head in the mud and had had to raise it to see what he could now see comfortably. his right arm had been disengaged, and he put up his hand to feel what it was that was beneath him. he felt warm silk and the smooth hardness of melton cloth, and then he remembered that virginia had looked rather curious as to her attire when he had come to himself after his little fainting fit. she had taken off her jacket and propped up his head with it. at that discovery he arrived definitely at the point of liking her. it was not long before he heard her calling to him, and then the trot of her horse across the grass. "they are coming in a moment," she cried out as she rode up to him; "two men from the farm, and they will get you free in no time." he looked at her a little curiously, and she blushed as she met his gaze. when a woman has taken off the coat of her riding habit she has begun to undress, and whatever comes next to it is not meant for the public gaze. but she had not cared about that. if she had he would not have been lying with a pillow under his head and she looked down upon him, so to speak, in her shirt sleeves. "put on your coat before they come," said the squire. "i'm all right now; and thank you." the two farm labourers who came running up the meadow made short work of pulling the stile off him, and virginia helped him to rise and to climb out of the ditch. he stood on the grass stiff, and rather dazed, with his left arm hanging uselessly, and she supported him for a moment, until he said, "i'm all right now. i'll walk over to the farm, and perhaps they'll lend me something to take me home in." "the farmer has gone for the doctor," she said, "and they are going to send a pony carriage up for you. see, i've brought a rug for you to sit on till they come." she spread it on the ground, and he sat down heavily, giving an exclamation of pain as he jarred the broken bone. virginia knelt beside him and put the handkerchief she had already damped to his brow. but he hitched himself away from her. he did not want the men, now staring at him with bovine concern, to see him dependent on a woman. "don't bother any more," he said. "i'm all right now." she got him to the farm, the doctor, who happened to be in the village, bound up his arm, a fly was procured, and he set off for home, virginia, who had left her horse at the farm, by his side. by the time they had gone, half-way, his accident now being known, a neighbour's motor-car was sent to meet him, and in it they performed the rest of the journey. but he refused to allow virginia to send a telegram. "it'll only upset 'em," he said, "and there's nothing the matter with me now." and that was why he arrived in on his wife and daughters and himself brought the news that there was nothing to make a fuss about. chapter xxviii property it may be imagined that the high favour in which virginia was now held was extremely gratifying to dick. "i knew you could do it if you tried," he said, smiling down on her, his arm round her shoulder, "and, by jove, you've done it to some tune. he wouldn't have any one else now for a daughter-in-law, if i were to offer him his pick of the royal princesses of europe." "he's an old dear," said virginia. "you didn't give me in the least a true picture of his character." dick laughed. he could afford to let this feminine charge go by. "he wants me to talk business with him this evening, after dinner," he said. "but he wants to talk to you again first, in spite of the fact, that he's been talking to you nearly all day. mind you keep calm, my girl. we're not going to throw up our job yet awhile. if he wants us here he'll have to wait for us." virginia went up with mrs. clinton to the big room, in the big bed of which the squire was sitting propped up with pillows, in a camel's-hair dressing-gown, the seams of which had been slit up and tied again over his bound-down arm. "ah, here you are," he said in his usual hearty tone. "nina, i want a word or two with virginia. she'll call you when she goes." mrs. clinton took her dismissal and virginia her seat in a low chair by the bed, facing him. "look here," he said; "no good beating about the bush any longer. we're very good friends now, and i hope we shall remain so all our lives. but there's no good disguising that we've been at cross-purposes, and i want all that put right now. let's look facts in the face. it was more my fault than yours, i dare say, but there have been faults on both sides, and we shan't gain anything by pretending that we've all behaved as we ought to have done." "you're quite right," said virginia, smiling at him. "i'll listen to anything you have to say, and you might begin by telling me where my fault has been." "eh! what!" exclaimed the squire. "well, i suppose you won't deny that you came down here to steal a march on me?" "i wanted to know you," said virginia sweetly. "i knew i should love you if i did. and i was quite right. i do know you now, and i do love you, better than any other man, except dick." the squire thought this a very pretty speech, and, as it came from a very pretty woman, its effect on him was beneficial. "well, you have taken a liking to me," he said, "and i have taken a liking to you. so we're quits, and it's a pity both of us didn't do it before, for i tell you frankly i have made certain promises which i shouldn't have made if i had felt about you as i do now, and i don't quite see how i can get out of them." "you mean about money?" said virginia. "dear mr. clinton, please don't worry any more about that. dick and i have got over whatever disappointment we may have felt about it--_i_ never felt any at all except for his sake--long ago. he has been lucky in getting this job, and we shall be as comfortable as possible." "this job!" repeated the squire, with much distaste of the word. "dick oughtn't to be wanting a job at all, and he won't be wanting one now. he must give it up." "i don't think he will do that at once," said virginia. "he will consider himself bound, for a time at least, to mr. spence. however, that needn't worry you. we shall hope to be here a good deal, if you want us, and later on we may be able to be here, or hereabouts, altogether, if you still want us." "of course i want you," said the squire. "i've wanted dick all along, in the place to which he belongs; i've never felt comfortable about humphrey taking his place, and as for my lady susan, i shall be very pleased to welcome her as a daughter-in-law, but, if you want the truth, my dear, you're worth six of her, and if _you_ can't live here, well, i won't have _her_, and that's flat. i'll keep the place empty." "oh, but surely!" exclaimed virginia. "you've promised, haven't you? humphrey told me it was arranged that he should live in the dower-house when he was married." "he did, did he? seems to me master humphrey is counting his chickens before they are hatched. no, i never promised. i never promised him anything. at least, i believe i did promise him a certain allowance, which is to be increased from another quarter. but beyond that nothing was said definitely." "no, but it was implied. oh, mr. clinton, please don't make us the cause of disappointment to others. we don't want it. we shall be very well off as it is. we don't want any more, really we don't. dick has a fine position, handsomely paid, and i have money of my own too, you know, and a good deal of it." for the first time the squire frowned. "i suppose you have," he said shortly. "but to tell you the plain truth, i don't like the quarter it comes from, and i very much doubt if dick does either." "i don't much, either," said virginia, smiling to herself. "i'm glad of that, at any rate. no, you're loyal enough to dick. you'll be able to forget the past; it hasn't soiled you. that's what i was afraid of, and i see i was wrong. still, this money--it's stuck in my throat as much as anything." "well, then," said virginia, "it need not stick in your throat any longer. i know what you think as to where it came from. dick thought the same, and it stuck in his throat too, till i told him the truth. now i'll tell it to you. it's my own money, every cent of it, and it came to me after--after my husband died. i have nothing that comes from him. i wouldn't keep it if i had. i'm an heiress, mr. clinton--not a very heavily gilded one, it's true, and the money my uncle left me was made out of pork-packing, which is a dreadful thing to talk about in this house. still, you must forget that. only the capital sum comes from pork, and it's all invested in nice clean things like railways." the squire stared at her during this recital as if fascinated. the moment was almost too solemn for words. "well, my dear," he said after a short pause, "you lifted one weight from me yesterday, and now you've lifted another, and a bigger one. go away, and leave me to think about it." he thought about it for some time after she had left him, propped up on his pillows, his mind growing ever lighter. in the midst of all his perversities, his dislike of the thought of his son living, in part, on money that had come from "that blackguard" had been an honourable and unselfish feeling, and the removal of the fear swept away with it every other trace of his long-nurtured objections to virginia as a wife for dick. now all he desired was that dick should return to his honoured place at kencote, and all should be as it had been before, with only the addition of virginia's charming presence to complete the happiness of the tie. he did not think at all about humphrey, nor of the new interests on which, a week or so before, he had been anxious to pin his anticipations. but humphrey had to be thought of, all the same. mrs. clinton, coming into his room, said that humphrey would like to come and see him and have a talk, and asked if he felt well enough to talk to him. "oh, well enough? yes," he said. "never felt better in my life. i've a good mind to get up for dinner. nina, virginia has just told me something that i wish i had known before. it has pleased me beyond measure." he imparted to her virginia's disclosure, and she expressed herself pleased too, wondering a little at the ways of men about money, that potent disturber of lives. "that removes every difficulty," he said. "and i'm very glad of it, for dick's sake. i don't know how much it is and i haven't asked her, but she must be pretty well off. dick won't need it, but it's always useful." "it will make it easier to do what you promised for humphrey," said mrs. clinton. "for humphrey?" he echoed. "oh yes. fifteen hundred a year is a pretty big allowance for a younger son. he's a lucky fellow, master humphrey. did you say he wanted to see me? well, send him up." humphrey came in, and stood by his father's bedside. "well, my boy!" said the squire pleasantly. "picking up all right, i hope?" said humphrey. "might have been a nasty business." "sit down," said the squire. "i've just heard a thing that has pleased me amazingly. funny how one gets an idea into one's head when there's no foundation for it!" then he told humphrey about virginia's money. humphrey had not much to say in answer to the information, but sat thinking. "well, now," said the squire, with the air of one turning from thoughts of pleasure to thoughts of business. "of course, all this makes a difference. dick and i have had a row--you may put it like that if you please--and we've made it up. he'll come back here, i hope, and settle down, and things will be as they were before. i don't think you're cut out for a country life altogether, and dare say you won't be sorry for the change. so it will suit us all pretty well, taking one thing with another, eh?" humphrey said nothing for a moment. then he asked shortly, "do you mean that i'm not to have the dower-house, after all?" "have the dower-house?" repeated the squire, as if that were the last thing that had ever crossed his mind. "when did i ever say that you were to have the dower-house? it isn't mine to give you. it goes with the property--to dick eventually; you know that perfectly well." "oh yes, i know that," said humphrey, with some impatience. "i meant, have it to live in. that's what was arranged, and i told susan so, and lady aldeburgh." "then i think you were in a bit of a hurry," said the squire. "i told you i should settle nothing till dick's marriage." humphrey found it difficult to keep his temper. "if you'll excuse my saying so," he said, with a slight tremor in his voice, "we've been talking of nothing else for weeks past, and as to what part i was to take in the management of the place. i'd every right to tell them that at thatchover." "well, perhaps you had," assented the squire tolerantly. "and i don't go so far as to say that you can't live there for a bit either. i want dick and virginia to live there, and i tell you so plainly, and i shall do all i can to persuade him to. but he may think he's bound to this fellow, spence, for six months or so, and if you get married in time, and care to occupy the house for a bit and keep it warm for him, well, you'll be very welcome. but, on the whole, i think you'd be wiser to settle down where you're going to stay. with the very handsome allowance i'm going to make you, and what old aunt laura has promised to add to it, and whatever susan brings you, though i dare say that won't be much, you'll be exceptionally well off, and can live pretty well where you like." humphrey choked down his anger. "what about partisham?" he asked, but it was an unwise question, for whatever definite arrangement the squire had had in his mind and allowed to be talked about, partisham had not come into it, although it was true that he had let it be seen what was in his mind. "do you mean to say you want me to leave partisham away from dick, and give it to you?" he asked. "i want you to keep to your promises," replied humphrey doggedly. "you've been feeding me up for the last month with all sorts of statements as to what you were going to do for me; then you suddenly make it up with dick, and want to kick me out altogether, and expect me to take it all without a word, and consider myself lucky. i call it grossly unfair. i haven't only myself to think of. you even want to chuck the arrangement that you say i'd a perfect right, relying on what you said, to tell susan about." "i think you're most infernally ungrateful," said the squire angrily. "point me out another younger son in england who is given two thousand a year to set up house on." "that doesn't all come from you," said humphrey, "and there are plenty of younger sons whose fathers are as rich as you who would get that. besides, that isn't the point. if that's all you'd said you'd do for me, i'd have said thank you and cut my coat according to my cloth. but you know quite well it isn't all. the dower-house was a definite understanding at any rate, and if you didn't mean that partisham was to come to me eventually, and checquers come either to me or go to walter, then your words don't mean anything at all." the accusation had too much truth in it even for the squire to contradict it altogether. "partisham is likely to be one of the best bits of the whole estate," he said. "in ten years' time half of it will be building land, and even with these wicked taxes, it will be a very valuable piece of property. it isn't likely, now dick has come to reason, that i'm going to leave it away from him, and you oughtn't to expect it." "now dick has come to reason!" repeated humphrey bitterly. "dick stands exactly where he's always stood. it's you who've changed your mind, and you expect me to fall in and take it smiling. i say again, it's grossly unfair." "that's not the way to talk to me," said the squire hotly. "you're forgetting yourself. if you're not precious careful you won't get the money i'd put aside for you, let alone anything else." humphrey got up from his chair. "i'd better go," he said. "if your word means nothing at all, i may as well break off my engagement. i thought it was good enough to get married on," and he left the room. the squire lay and fumed. a pretty return he was getting for all he had promised to do for humphrey! was ever such ingratitude? his mind dwelt wholly on the very handsome provision that was to be made for his immediate marriage, and he grew more and more indignant as he asked himself, again and yet again, what younger son of a plain country gentleman could possibly expect more. at last he rang his bell and told his servant to ask captain clinton to come to him. but before dick arrived mrs. clinton came in again, and to her he unburdened himself of some of his indignation at humphrey's ingratitude. she heard him without comment, and then said slowly, "i think humphrey and susan ought to have the dower-house, edward." "what!" exclaimed the squire. "turn dick out of the place that has always been his, and put a younger son into it! you say i ought to do that, nina? what can you be thinking of?" "_has_ dick's place always been his, edward?" she asked, with her calm eyes on his. "what do you mean?" he snapped at her; and then went on quickly in his loud, blustering tone, "dick and i fell out, it's true, and if he had married without my sanction i should have acted in a way i'm not going to act now. i've come round--i don't deny i've come round--to be in favour of his marriage, and i'm not going to make him suffer for the misunderstanding." at this point dick came into the room, and the squire said, "well, i'll talk to you later, nina. i want to get things settled up with dick now." but dick looked at her kindly. "mother may as well stay and take a hand in the discussion," he said. "we owe it to her that we're all friends again, and i think she's got a better head than any of us." "your mother was just saying," said the squire, "that i ought to let humphrey and susan have the dower-house. i'm not going to do anything of the sort. there _was_ a sort of an understanding that they should live there when i thought you and i weren't coming together again. i had to make _some_ arrangements. but even if i didn't want you there, i don't know that i should consent to it now. humphrey has taken up a most extraordinary attitude, and i'm very much annoyed with him. he's going to be most handsomely treated, more handsomely than he could ever have expected. yet he's just been up here and flung out of the room in a rage because i won't promise to leave him partisham, if you please." "leave him what?" asked dick. "partisham; and all the land that came in with it; and checquers too. no, i'm wrong; i'm instructed to leave that to walter. i say it's a scandalous position for a son to take up. i'm not an old man, and i hope i've got a good many years to live yet, and i'm to have my sons quarrelling already about what i'm to do with my property after i'm dead." "i suppose he saw his chance when i was out of favour," said dick, "and is wild because what he hoped for didn't come off. what did you actually promise to do for him?" "i promised to make him an allowance of fifteen hundred a year, and i'm prepared to keep my word, of course." "well, that's pretty good to begin with." "but, good gracious me, that isn't all of what he's going to have. old aunt laura is going to give him another five hundred, and she's consulted me about leaving him the bulk of her money when she goes." "aunt laura! five hundred a year!" exclaimed dick, in utter surprise. "can she do it?" the squire gave a short laugh. "i might have known that the old ladies had saved a good deal," he said, "but i never thought much about it. at any rate that's a definite offer from her--the allowance, i mean. whether i let her make a will almost entirely in his favour, is another matter; and if he doesn't behave himself i shall do all i can to stop it." "he must have been pretty clever in getting round her," said dick. "i know he's been working hard at it. rather a dirty trick, to my mind--working on an old woman for her money. still, different people have different ideas. did you promise him the dower-house?" the squire began humming and hahing, and mrs. clinton broke in. "it was a very definite understanding," she said. "i must take humphrey's part there. it was understood that he should give up the foreign office as soon as possible, and settle down here to help look after the property." "_if_ things had been as we then feared they would be," said the squire. "that was always understood." mrs. clinton was silent, and dick said, rather unwillingly, "you'd better let him have the dower-house--say for two years. i can't throw spence over now, and i can't do my best for him under that." the squire expostulated loudly. he wanted dick and virginia near him. he was getting on in years. he might be in his grave in two years' time. but dick remained firm. "i don't want to rake up old scores," he said. "but you mustn't forget that until a week or so ago you were going to cut me off with a shilling. i had to find a job, and i was precious lucky to get this one. i owe something to the fellow who gave it to me." "i think you do," mrs. clinton said before the squire could speak; "and, edward, i think you must remember, in justice to humphrey, that what applies to dick applies to him too. you took a certain course, very strongly, and both dick and humphrey acted on it." "i don't want to hear any more about humphrey," said the squire. "i don't want him in the dower-house, nor susan either." "well, you must settle that with him," said dick. "i dare say he'll be quite ready to make a bargain with you. he seems rather good at it. he hasn't concerned himself much with my side of the question, and i'm not going to stick up for his, especially as he comes off so well, anyhow." that was practically the end of the discussion, and the squire was left lamenting the frowardness of human nature. chapter xxix brothers when dick went downstairs again he said to virginia, "put on your hat and let's go and have tea with old aunt laura." she went obediently upstairs, and presently they were walking down the drive together in the gathering dusk. "is everything going to be all right?" virginia asked him. "are we quite forgiven, and is our own to be restored to us?" "i don't think we shall have much difficulty in getting all we're entitled to," replied dick. virginia put her arm into his. "it's nearly dark and nobody's about," she said in apology. "dear dick, it is nice to be here on these terms. i do really feel that i belong to you, now--and to kencote." dick pressed her hand to his side. "i nearly had to give up kencote to get you," he said. "now i've got you _and_ kencote, and i've nothing left to ask for. my experience in life is that you generally get all you want if you go to work in a straightforward way." "then your experience in life is a very fortunate one," replied virginia. "i've never had what i wanted before, although i think i've been fairly straightforward. but i've got it now, dear dick, and _i_ won't ask for anything further, either. i feel very happy and comfortable, and if we weren't near the lodge i should lift up my voice in song." aunt laura was, it is needless to say, both flattered and genuinely pleased at their visit, for this modest old lady liked company, but was diffident of her own powers of attracting it. "this is the nicest thing that could have happened," she said, when she had settled down in close proximity to her tea-table. "the dear children came in this morning with their new governess--a very competent person, i should say, though not quite so respectful in her manner as miss bird used to be--not that she was in any way _rude_, i don't mean that, but miss bird was always cheerful and bright, and yet knew her place; and humphrey paid me a visit this afternoon; so i said to myself as i sat down to tea, 'i have had two very pleasant visits to-day and can hardly hope for a third. i must drink my tea by myself.' however, here you both are, and i am very pleased indeed to see you, very pleased indeed. your dear father is none the worse since i last had word, i hope, dick?" "he's as well as can be, and talks about getting up for dinner," replied dick. "oh, indeed, he must not do that," said aunt laura earnestly. "it would be the greatest mistake. he has such courage and vitality that he cannot realise what a terrible shock he has undergone. his only chance, if he is to escape all ill effects from it, is to keep as quiet as possible for a long time yet. i am sure when i think of what _might_ have happened to him, if you, my dear, had not been, so mercifully, on the spot, i go cold all over. indeed, his escape was, in the highest sense of the word, providential, and i am sure we are all deeply grateful for it, and can lift up our hearts in thanksgiving. humphrey told me the whole story, in the most graphic way, and while it made me shudder it also made me rejoice, that you were there, my dear, to give such ready assistance. he made much of it." "that was very kind of him," said virginia. "but it was nothing to make much of. i only went for help. and i've been well rewarded, you know. mr. clinton didn't like me much before, and now he likes me very much indeed. that makes me very happy." "of course it does," said aunt laura kindly. "edward is a man whose good opinion is worth having, for he does not give it without reason, but, once given, it can be depended on. well, as i say, it is very good of you to come and see me. i'm sure the kind and thoughtful way in which i am treated by one and all is highly gratifying. you have not met susan clinton, i think, dear humphrey's bride that is to be? she also visited me frequently while she was at kencote, and humphrey comes to see me every day. since you are unable to live here, dick, i am very glad that we shall have him and his wife in our old home. i shall be very glad to see the dear place lived in again, for i spent many happy years of my life there." "has he settled how he's going to arrange the rooms?" asked dick, in a tone that made virginia look at him, although aunt laura noticed nothing unusual in the question. "yes, he has talked a good deal about it," she said, "and i have given him advice upon the matter, some of which he thinks it quite likely that he will take." "i hear you've been very generous to him, aunt laura," dick said. "oh, but there was no need for him to have said anything to you about that," said aunt laura. "i wanted to help him to marry the girl he loved, and it was quite true that a girl of her rank--not that her branch of the family is better than ours, but they have rank and we have not, although i have no doubt that we _could_ have had it if we had wished--would expect rather more in her marriage than other girls, and i told humphrey that i quite understood that, as he seemed rather low about his prospects. i didn't want your dear father to have all the burden, and he has responded wonderfully to my offer. i am only glad that it was possible for me to help humphrey in his desire, and that it should be possible for me to do so without doing _you_ or any of the others an injustice, dick; for i know you are well provided for, and will not grudge your brother his share of good things." "i don't grudge him anything that he's entitled to have," replied dick. "now i want you to tell virginia about kencote in the old days, when my great-grandfather was alive. she wants to hear all about kencote that she can." aunt laura was nothing loath, and poured forth a gentle stream of reminiscence until it was time for dick and virginia to go. as they let themselves out of the house and walked down the dark village street, dick said, "humphrey ought to be kicked. fancy sponging on that simple old woman! and getting her to leave the bulk of her money to him, and away from the rest of us; because that's what it means. i'll have it out with him as soon as i get home." "oh, my dear!" said virginia. "money, money, money! what does it matter to us? we shall have plenty." "we shouldn't have had plenty, or anything like it, if he'd had his way. it isn't only old aunt laura he's been working on. he's taken advantage of my being out of favour to get the governor to consider leaving the best part of the property to him. he was actually at it this afternoon. he tried to get a definite promise out of him to leave him partisham, which will be worth all the rest put together some day." "but, dick dear! you knew all that. it was your father's own decision. you told me so." "humphrey had no right to take advantage of his threats to work against me. that's what he's been doing. it wasn't like the governor. i can see a good deal more daylight now. i thought i'd only got his obstinacy to fight against. now i see i've had an enemy at court, who's been playing the sneak all along." "i don't think so," virginia said boldly. "humphrey isn't bad. he has been very nice to me. he told me he was glad that all this quarrelling was at an end." "i dare say he did," said dick, unsoftened. "now he sees that we can't be kept out of it any longer he'd like to curry favour." "oh, what an uncharitable dick! that's not like you, dick. we're going to be happy together, aren't we, my own beloved?" she was walking with her hands clasped over his arm. "i hope so," said dick. "well, then, think of him a little too. _he_ loves a woman, and wants to be happy with her." "oh, love! i don't believe he loves her the least in the world. i know her well enough. she's an insipid clothes-peg. i don't believe he'd look at her if she hadn't got a title. he's like that. i don't know where he gets it from. the governor likes a title too, but not in that rotten way." "you didn't choose me for _my_ title, did you?" asked virginia. he laughed at her. "your title will disappear when you marry me," he said. "mrs. richard clinton will have to do for you, my girl, for the present." "you never told me that," she said. "and i do love being called 'my lady.' americans do. however, i would rather be mrs. richard clinton than what i am now. but, dick dear, please don't have a row with humphrey. please don't. let's try and make everybody happy. he must be feeling disappointed, and perhaps angry. we can afford to be generous." "i'll tell him what i think of him," said dick. "then tell him what you really think of him. he's your brother. you have been friends all your lives. tell him, if you must, that you don't think he has behaved well. but don't tell him that you think it isn't in his nature to behave well. there's a good deal to be said for him. let him say it. and, even if there wasn't----" "well, i don't think there is. he's behaved in a selfish, underhand way." "supposing he has, dick! make allowances for him. he's done himself more harm than he's done you. we ought to be sorry for people who have done wrong. that's what i believe christianity means." "oh, well, yes; if they're sorry for it themselves." "you can make them so; but not by being angry with them. it isn't hard to forgive people when they admit they're in the wrong. it is hard, otherwise, but that doesn't make it any less right to do it. i'm preaching, but we're going to be always together, dick, and you must put up with a little sermon sometimes." "you're a sweet saint, virginia, but what on earth are you asking me to do? am i to go to humphrey and say, 'you've acted like a cur, but i forgive you; take all that you can get that has always been looked upon as mine, and let's say no more about it'?" "oh, don't talk about the money or the property at all. let that look after itself. only remember that you were little boys together, and were very fond of each other, as i'm sure you were; and remember that you have been made happy, and he has been disappointed. that ought to make you kind. and you can be so kind, dick." "i believe you think i can be everything that's good." "i know you can. and it will make me love you even more than i do now, if that's possible, if you make friends with humphrey, instead of quarrelling with him for good. after all, we're rather tired of quarrels, aren't we?" "i think we are," said dick. he did not see humphrey alone until the women had gone to bed. he had gone up to his father when they had left the dining-room, and humphrey had avoided speaking to him, if he could help it, all the evening. otherwise he had taken his part in the mild gaiety of the conversation and hidden his wounds gallantly. he was going upstairs with his candle when dick said to him, "are you coming into the smoking-room?" he looked at him with a momentary hostility. "yes, when i've changed my coat," he said. "mine's down here," said dick, turning away. when his servant had helped him on with his smoking-jacket and gone away, he stood in front of the fire and filled a pipe. he was ready to do virginia's bidding and make friends with humphrey, but he disliked the job, and didn't know exactly how he was going to begin. and he was going to speak plainly too. humphrey had behaved badly, and he was going to tell him so--kindly. humphrey came in and lit a cigarette before either of them spoke. as he threw the match into the fire he said, "i suppose you want to have it out." his tone was not conciliatory. he was both angry and nervous. dick's brain cleared as if by magic. he had a situation to control. "well, i think we ought to have a talk," he said. "things have been going wrong with me, and now they've come right, and you don't appear to be quite as much rejoiced at it as you might be." "if you put it like that, i'm not rejoiced at all," said humphrey, "and i'm not going to pretend to be." "but you told virginia you were," dick put in. humphrey was for a moment disconcerted. "i'm glad as far as she's concerned," he said. "she oughtn't to have been treated as she has been, and i've always said so." "oh, have you?" commented dick. humphrey flushed angrily. "if you think i've been working against you," he said, "it's quite untrue." "well, you've been working for your own hand, and it comes to much the same thing." "i haven't even been doing that. the governor made me a lot of promises, and i didn't ask him to make one of them." "what about partisham?" "you know as well as i do that he'd definitely made up his mind to leave as much away from you as he could, and that was the chief thing he had to leave away. i didn't ask him to do it, but----" "it didn't occur to you to ask him not to do it, i suppose? because it's a pretty stiff thing to do--to leave away most of what keeps up the place." "no, it didn't occur to me, and it wouldn't have occurred to you if you'd been in my place. i tell you i didn't ask for anything, except for enough to get married on. but when it came to having it chucked at me--well, if you want the plain truth, it happened to suit my book." "yes, i dare say it did. and what about aunt laura? you've been doing pretty well out of her too, haven't you?" humphrey flushed again. "look here," he said, "i'm not going to talk to you any longer. you stand there sneering because you've got everything you want now, and you think you can amuse yourself by baiting me. i'm going upstairs, and you can do your sneering by yourself. only i'll tell you this before i go. i'm going to play my hand, and i don't care whether i've got you up against me or not. i consider i've been precious badly treated. i'm encouraged to go and tell the aldeburghs all sorts of things about what's going to be done for me when i'm married, and i come back and am told coolly that none of it's going to happen at all, and i'm to consider myself d----d lucky to get just enough to live on." "well, you're going to have a bit more than enough to live on, and you're welcome to it as far as i'm concerned. and the dower-house too--for a bit." "thanks very much. i'm likely to take that on--live in a house by your kind permission and get kicked out the moment you want it for yourself!" "you won't get kicked out, as you call it, for two years at least. i should think that's good enough." humphrey threw a glance at him. he was standing, looking down on the carpet, with his hands in the pockets of his jacket. "look here," he said, looking up suddenly. "we've had enough of this. i don't think you've acted straight, and i was bound to say so before i said anything else. and now i've said it, i've said it for the last time. let's forget all about it. we've been pretty good pals up to now, and there's no reason why we shouldn't go on being good pals up to the end of the chapter." humphrey sat down and looked into the fire. "perhaps i haven't behaved very well," he said slowly. "it's precious easy to behave well when you've got everything you want, as you've always had." "it may be," said dick. "anyhow, you're not going to do so badly now. if you haven't got all you want, you'll have a good slice of it." there was silence between them for a time, and then humphrey said, "if you don't want to quarrel, i'm hanged if i do. only, i must confess i feel a bit sore. the way the governor swings round from one position to another's enough to make anybody sick. you've had a dose of it yourself; you know how you felt before you made it up with him." dick's self-esteem received nourishment from the recollection that he had not behaved in the same way as humphrey had, but he did not bring forward the statement in that form. "it was awkward," he admitted. "it made him think of doing things that he'd never thought of doing, and i don't think he'd any right to think of doing. that's why i haven't the slightest hesitation now in taking back whatever he may have made use of to offer to--to, well, let's say to you, as a means of getting his own way. they have always been looked on as coming to me eventually, and if this disturbance hadn't come about nobody would have thought of their being disposed of in any other way. so you're really no worse off than you were before; in fact, you're a good deal better off, and i'm quite agreeable, as far as it rests with me, that you should be. can't you manage to settle it with yourself that what you're going to have is as much as you could have expected, and give up trying for the rest?" "i dare say i can manage that feat," said humphrey, "especially as i suppose i've got to. still, when you look at it all round, there's a good deal of difference in my expectations and yours. two thousand a year on the one side, and--well, i don't know what, but say ten thousand a year and a big property on the other." "oh, if you're going to kick against the law of primogeniture--!" said dick. "question is, would you kick at it if you happened to be the eldest son? if not, you oughtn't to bring it in." humphrey was silent. they had been talking quietly. hostility had gone out of their talk, but friendliness had not yet come in. dick seated himself and began again. "perhaps it isn't for me to say, now that i've got everything i want, but i do say it all the same, because i found it out when i didn't think i was going to have everything i wanted. money isn't everything. if you have as much as you can live comfortably on, and something to do, you've just as much chance of happiness as the next fellow. 'specially if you're going to marry the right woman." "i dare say you're right," said humphrey. "if you're disappointed of something you can always fall back on philosophy. but it's just because i am going to marry the right woman that i am disappointed. i'd told her all sorts of things, and she was as ready as i was to chuck the fun we've both had in london and other places, and settle down here quietly." "well, my dear good chap!" exclaimed dick. "if you looked upon it in that light, what on earth is there to grumble at if you're free now to live as you like, and anywhere you like? i don't know much about your young woman, but i should imagine she'd rather settle herself in london on a couple of thousand a year, which will give you enough to go about with too, than bury herself down here." "i don't think you do know much about her," said humphrey. "i believe the general opinion here is that i'm going to marry her without knowing much about her myself, though what i shall gain by it, considering that she hasn't got a _sou_, isn't quite clear. however, the general opinion happens to be wrong." dick felt a little uncomfortable. "she's the one girl in the world for you, eh?" he said lightly. "that's about what it comes to. i know her mother's a fool; and she suffers by it. but she's quite different herself, and i know what a jolly good sort she is, if others don't." dick was touched. humphrey's "poor thing but mine own" opinion of the girl he was going to marry was so different from the pride he felt in virginia. "well, old chap," he said, "we'll do our best to make her feel one of the family. we're not a bad lot, take us all round, and if she wants to, i dare say she'll get to like us. we ought to be able to have some fun together when we all meet. i like her all right--what i've seen of her--and now things have been more or less settled up i should like to see more of her, and so would virginia. i believe in a family sticking together, even after they begin to marry off, and new-comers ought to get a warm welcome. you've been very decent to virginia, and she likes you; and i should like to have an opportunity of ingratiating myself with susan." humphrey was conquered by this. "you're a jolly good sort, dick," he said. "i didn't know you were going to behave like that, or perhaps i wouldn't have behaved as i have done. i'm not proud of myself, exactly, now i look back on it, and if you'll forget all about it, as you said you were ready to do, i'll chuck the whole beastly business, and we'll go back to where we used to be." "there won't be any difficulty about that, old boy," said dick. "peace and goodwill is all _i_ want, and we may as well have it all round." chapter xxx miss bird hears all about it the twins were meeting a train, but the train was late. they walked up and down the platform, by the side of which the station-master's arabis and aubrietia, primroses and daffodils, were making a fine show. it was the thursday before easter, which miss bird was coming to spend at kencote, miss phipp having already departed for a week in lovely lucerne; and the twins, out of the innumerable trains they had met, had never met one with greater pleasure. they had spent an arduous term with miss phipp, with whom they had established relations amicable on the whole, but not marked by the affection they had felt for miss bird; and although they had rather liked working hard, they had had enough of it for the present, and enough of miss phipp. "i wish the train would hurry up. i do want to see the sweet old lamb," said joan. "let's ask mr. belper when it's coming." the station-master, jovially respectful, told them that she was signalled, and they wouldn't have long to wait. "but i think you ought to see that your trains are up to time," said nancy. "didn't you learn at school that punctuality was a virtue?" "ah! i see you want to have one of your jokes with me, miss," said the station-master. "i don't know what it's about, but, bless you, have your laugh. i like to see young ladies enjoying themselves." "thank you very much," said joan. "but there's nothing to laugh at in a train being _always_ unpunctual. we want very much to see miss bird, who is coming, and you keep her on the line somewhere between here and ganton. you ought to turn over a new leaf, and see that people don't get disappointed like that." "well, it isn't my fault, miss, and here she comes," said mr. belper, snatching up a metal instrument in shape something between a sceptre and a door-scraper and hurrying up the platform, as the engine fussed up the last incline and snorted itself to rest. miss bird--diminutive, excited, voluble--cast herself out of her carriage and into the arms of the twins, who gave vent to their affection in a series of embraces that left her breathless and crumpled, but blissfully happy. "that will do joan 'n' nancy for the present," she said. "let me get my things out and then we can have a nice long talk. oh dear to find myself at kencote again it is almost too good to be true the umbrella on the rack porter and the hat-box my precious pets how you have grown a brown box with 'e.b.' in the van and that is all. how do you do mr. belper you see i have come back again once more like a bad penny as they say and how is mrs. clinton darlings and your father and all i have _such_ a lot to hear that i'm sure we shall never leave off talking until i go away again." "precious lamb!" said joan tenderly. "_you_ won't leave off talking, and i could listen to you for ever, like the brook. you're such a relief after pipp." "we didn't know when we were well off," said nancy. "we often lie awake at night and cry for you." they were now walking towards the booking-office. "but surely miss phipp isn't _cruel_ to you my pets mrs. clinton would never allow that oh my ticket mr. belper now i _know_ i put it somewhere here it is in my bag and i give up this half and retain the other, good-afternoon ah to see these nice horses again it is like coming home indeed i have not ridden in a private carriage since i left kencote. _good_-afternoon william i see you are still here and promoted to the box one more of the old faces." thus expressing her pleasure, miss bird got into the carriage and the twins after her, and they drove off. "well my pets," she began, "let me take a good look at you many's the time i've longed to set eyes on you, and you have not altered at all just a _trifle_ pale i do hope that you have not been working _too_ hard." joan and nancy exchanged glances, and then heaved a simultaneous sigh. they acted habitually so much in accord that the acceptance of an idea striking them simultaneously could be indicated by a look. "you were often unkind to us, starling darling," said joan plaintively, "although we've quite forgiven you for it; but in your most headstrong moments you were never actually cruel." "don't cry, joan," said nancy. "we have nearly three weeks' holiday, and with starling here we shall be able to forget everything, and be as happy as possible." miss bird's face showed perplexed horror. "but surely it isn't possible----" she began. nancy interrupted her. "i don't mind so much for myself, because i'm not so tender-hearted as joan and don't feel things so much, and--oh, starling darling, please don't press that arm." she winced realistically, and joan took her up immediately. "nancy, i wonder if there's time to get long sleeves put into our frocks for to-night. mother will ask what the marks are, and we _can't_ tell her a lie, and if we tell her the truth---- oh, starling darling, _don't_ go away from us again. we can't _bear_ it any more;" and she wept audibly on miss bird's inadequate shoulder. miss bird was too overcome for the moment to give words to her horror, but she put her arm round joan, who winced in her turn, and said, "not that shoulder," through her convulsive sobs. "don't be silly, joan," said nancy firmly. "william will wonder what is the matter, and you know what you will get if you let it out. starling darling, you _won't_ say anything to anybody, will you? it will be much worse for us if you do, and after all when a bruise gets blue and green it doesn't hurt so very much." "do you mean to say that she _beats_ you?" exclaimed miss bird, her eyebrows almost up to her hat-brim. "then i shall go _at once_ to mrs. clinton the _moment_ i get into the house and tell her that----" joan threw her arms round her neck and laughed. "angel lamb!" she said, "it's too bad to tease her. she's just as green and sweet as ever." "oh, why do you spoil everything?" exclaimed nancy. then she too relented and added her embraces to joan's. "oh, you're too priceless," she said. "are you really glad to see us again?" "well i suppose i must not be angry and i know your naughty ways too well," said miss bird, "but you gave me quite a _turn_ and i suppose really miss phipp is all she should be and you love her very much as you ought to do and it is only natural that those who are near should take the place of those who are far." "i believe she's really disappointed that pipp doesn't beat us black and blue," said joan. "but she'll never take _your_ place, starling, my own. you're the one and only. i suppose you know we're aunts again. walter and muriel have got a boy." "a boy!" exclaimed miss bird, enraptured. "now that _is_ good news and how _delighted_ your father will be the pet how i should like to see him." "starling _darling_," expostulated nancy. "you _will_ see him directly, but father won't like your calling him a pet." miss bird blushed. "you know very well i should say no such thing, nancy," she said; "it was the baby i meant if you repeat that untruth in the house i shall go _straight_ back where i came from." the twins laughed. "isn't she pathetic and cherubic?" said joan. "_we_ haven't seen him yet, though we're going to to-morrow. he was only born yesterday. we'll take you over." "isn't everybody very pleased?" asked miss bird, meaning by "everybody" the squire, but not liking to mention his name again. "_we_ are," replied joan, "and so is mother. father isn't quite certain about it, although he is glad that he was born at mountfield--at the lodge, you know--instead of at melbury park. unless dick or humphrey have sons he'll succeed to the property, you see, and it is very important that he should be touched by nothing common or unclean. we've got such a lot to tell you--all about the weddings and the rows. everything is made up now, but we had the very deuce of a time since you left." "now, joan," said miss bird sharply, "if you talk like that i shall be sorry i came and i am sure miss phipp would be very angry you must act while she is away as if she were _present_, here we are and i declare there is dear mrs. clinton at the door how pleased i am to see her once more oh it is almost too much." and she began waving her hand and bobbing up and down and saying, "oh how do you do how do you do," until the carriage drew up under the porch, when she hopped out of it and received a greeting from mrs. clinton which put the seal on her happiness. the squire came out of his room as they were going into the morning-room. "why, miss bird!" he exclaimed heartily, "here's a sight for sore eyes! how de do, miss bird, how de do! 'pon my word, it looks so natural to see you here that i wonder we ever allowed you to go. we've got a very learned lady in your place, and a dangerously attractive one, by george--ha, ha!--but we don't forget you, miss bird, and we often wish you were back again." now could anything have been handsomer than this! as miss bird asked of her sister when she went back home again. from such a man too! who had so many important things and people to think of. "i'm sure mr. clinton all your kindness i never shall forget and never _can_ forget," she began; but joan and nancy stopped her by pushing her into a chair, and the squire laughed and said, "they don't play tricks like that with miss phipp, the young monkeys! how do you think they're looking, miss bird? pretty good specimens for kencote air, eh? well, i suppose you've heard all our news--dick married, and humphrey going to be. you've never seen mrs. dick, i think; she was after your time." "no but she wrote me the kindest possible letter mr. clinton when i sent a small gift to dick and there was really no necessity for _anybody_ to write but dick wrote at once and _she_ wrote too and said she should hope to see me soon which touched me very deeply and made me feel that i _knew_ her though i had never seen her." "ah, yes," said the squire complacently; "she thinks of everybody and identifies herself with all dick's interests, and you're not the _least_ of them, miss bird. you'll see her to-night, for they're dining here, and if you don't take to her out of hand, miss bird, i shall be very much surprised. we're all in love with her here--eh, children?" "rather!" said the twins in one breath; and mrs. clinton said, "they are at the dower-house for a week or two. dick is looking after some other properties, but he has arranged it so that it does not take up all his time. they live chiefly in yorkshire, but they will be able to live at the dower-house for a week or two every now and then, and by and by we hope that they will be able to live there altogether." "and where is humphrey going to live?" enquired miss bird, who had gathered certain facts from her correspondence with the twins, and had no wish to be indiscreet, but did wish to know. "oh, he'll settle down in london," said the squire. "it will suit him and lady susan better; and he's getting on well with his work and has to be near it," and miss bird was too discreet to indicate that she had heard that he had been going to give up his work. "we hope that they will come here often," said mrs. clinton. "the idea was that they should go to the dower-house when dick and virginia didn't want it, but there is plenty of room here, as you know, and they chose not to have the responsibility of another house." miss bird was well posted in the general hang of family affairs when she presently went upstairs with the twins, but it remained for them to enlighten her on the events that had led up to the existing state of things. they took her to her old room, which had been in the occupancy of miss phipp. "we told mother we were sure you would like to sleep here," said joan, "and we've cleared all her things out, and made it just like it used to be for you." "darlings!" said miss bird. "it will be like old times and i shall scarcely be able to sleep for happiness oh, look at the daffodils under the trees." "we didn't think you'd want to be bothered up with her books," said nancy, "so we've put the ones you like instead. _the pilgrim's progress_ and longfellow and _the wide, wide world_. you'll be able to cry over that to-morrow before you get up." miss bird was nearly overcome again by these thoughtful preparations for her happiness. "now i'll just take off my things pets and then we'll have a cosey time in the schoolroom i'm so looking forward to seeing it again you go and take off your things too and i'll come in a minute." "if you would like to look through her photographs," said nancy, as they were leaving the room, "they're all in this drawer; but they're not very interesting. hullo, here's hannah--always on the spot when she isn't wanted, and never there when she is." "indeed, miss nancy," said hannah, "and i suppose i may come and see miss bird without stepping out of my place, which unwilling i should be to do, and miss bird always treating me as a perfect lady, and very pleased all are to see her back again, high and low." "you treat her as a perfect lady, starling darling, for a minute while we go and take our things off," said nancy, "and try and persuade her to do her work better, or she'll have to go." hannah was left indignantly spluttering something about working her fingers to the bone and getting small thanks for it, while miss bird soothed her ruffled spirits, and told her that if she didn't know how to put up with her young ladies' nonsense by this time she wasn't as sensible as she had thought, but she was delighted to see her again, and was sure that she was doing her duty as she always had done it. a little later she was sitting between the twins on the schoolroom sofa, having duly expressed her rapture at finding herself once more in that dear old room. "now we'll tell you all about everything," began joan. "you heard father say how much he liked virginia, didn't you?" "yes," said miss bird, "and mrs. clinton too and very pleasant it is when some one comes into a family to be welcomed so _lovingly_ and i hope you and nancy are equally fond of her joan for i am sure she deserves it so kind and considerate as she has shown herself." "we adore her," said nancy. "it is very easy for people to make us like them if they take a little trouble. we are very simple-minded." "it's a question of chocolates judiciously administered," said joan. "but we could do without them from her, because we like her immensely. well, you'd hardly believe, from the way father talked, that he threatened to cut dick off with a shilling if he married her, could you?" "now joan i don't want to listen to any nonsense," said miss bird. "you have taken me in _once_ this evening and let that be enough." "but, starling darling, it's _true_. it wasn't till she saved his life out hunting that he would put up with her at all. of course, now he thinks he always liked her, but that's what he is." "i don't wish to hear any more of that tell me about the wedding," said miss bird. "well, if you won't believe it, you won't," said nancy. "and it doesn't much matter now, because it is all over, and we are a united family once more; but you have no idea of the trouble joan and i had with them all. except mother, we were the only ones who kept our heads." "at one time"--joan took up the tale--"humphrey was going to be put in to lord it over us, and sweet sue clinton; but directly dick turned up and took father in hand we didn't hear any more about that, and they are going to have a scrumptious flat in town, and we are going up, one at a time, to stay with them, because they only have one spare room." "sue isn't bad," said nancy. "we didn't care for her at first, but she's got a horrible old painted dragon of a mother, and when she's away from her she's quite decent, and i dare say we shall be able to make something of her." "now i don't want to hear any more gossip about people joan 'n' nancy," said miss bird, "tell me about dick's wedding." "ivory satin," said joan, "with sable hats and stoles and muffs, which dick gave us, and shower bouquets of violets. we were the admired of all beholders." "toby dexter acted as sort of best man to virginia," said nancy. "she's up in yorkshire now, keeping the house warm for them." the twins gave the rest of their news in alternate sentences. "cousin humphrey gave virginia away. he was very sweet, and made a lot of jokes afterwards." "it was a very quiet wedding--at blaythorn. uncle tom married them, and made several mistakes in the service. i suppose he was overcome. humphrey was dick's best man. they hadn't been very good friends at one time, but they had made it up, and now they like each other very much." "we only had relations staying here for the wedding, except mr. spence, dick's friend, whose property he is looking after. he was such fun. we simply loved him. he used to roar at all our jokes, especially at nancy's rhapsodies, and we egged him on to make love to miss phipp." "she was immensely flattered. she said he was a true gentleman, and when we told him we thought he'd have had a fit." "he didn't really make love to her. he was too kind. he used to pay her a lot of attention, and asked her to teach him to spell." "he wrote us a letter when he'd gone back and spelt appearance with one 'p.'" "and other mistakes too. but we did adore him." "old mr. marsh was at the wedding. we _think_ he proposed to toby dexter afterwards, but she would never tell us. he drank too much champagne." "now nancy you are not to say things like that," said miss bird, quite in her old authoritative manner. nancy embraced her warmly. "you're too sweet for words," she said. "uncle herbert and aunt emmeline and angela came. angela is going to be married in june at holy trinity, sloane street, and we're to be bridesmaids; and to sweet sue clinton, too, at st. george's, hanover square. our portraits will be in the papers, and we'll send you copies. we shall be much admired." "uncle herbert was very angelic. he talked about ibsen to miss phipp, and when she found out that he had been a liberal member of parliament she almost wept for joy. we didn't know she was a radical before, but if uncle herbert was one, they can't be as bad as father makes out." "she's a suffragette too, but she has never been able to answer father's question, 'who would cook the dinner on polling-day?'" "well, she's answered it, but father won't listen to her." "aunt laura is ill. we'll take you to see her to-morrow. she made us promise to." "oh dear miss clinton," broke in miss bird, "i do hope it is nothing serious." "she's very old. she can't live much longer, i'm afraid. she remembers the battle of trafalgar, or the crimean war--i forget which." they talked for some time longer, and when miss bird went to her room to dress for dinner it was with a heart full of thankfulness to find herself still so much beloved, and with a lively curiosity as to what virginia would be like when she should presently meet her. she and the twins were together in the morning-room when dick and virginia arrived. while the twins were throwing themselves upon virginia, dick came forward grinning and gave her a resounding kiss on either cheek. "there, old lady," he said. "that's what you deserve and what you'll get from me now i'm married. virginia, come and do likewise." miss bird, once more, was overcome almost to the point of tears. "i'm sure this is a very happy day for me," she twittered, but could get no further. "they're all happy days for all of us," said virginia, who looked radiant, and not much older than her young sisters-in-law. "the twins are to bring you down to see me early to-morrow morning, when dick is out. i want to hear all about him when he was a little boy, and i'm sure a very naughty one." "oh indeed," said miss bird; "he was high-spirited but as for naughtiness what i call real naughtiness no child could have been freer from it." "if you think you're going to get anything against me out of miss bird, you may save yourself the trouble and enquire elsewhere," said dick. "she thinks there was never such a family as the clintons, don't you, starling?" "i think they're rather nice too," said virginia, with her hands on the shoulders of joan and nancy and her eyes on dick. the squire coming in at this moment with mrs. clinton greeted virginia as if she were his daughter, and it being on the stroke of eight immediately led her in to dinner. he was in the best of spirits, and talked and laughed, during the whole of the meal, in his old, rather boisterous fashion. gone were the moody silences and the frowning perplexity of a few months back. he had not, apparently, a care in the world, and, with his healthy, rubicund visage, and active, though massive form, looked as if he were prepared to enjoy the good things with which his life was filled for a further indefinite number of years. there was only one little shadow of a cloud. as he got into bed that night, he said, "i'm very glad you asked old miss bird here, nina. she's a faithful old soul, and it does me good to see her about the place. she seems to belong to it, and it brings us back to where we were before all this infernal worry came to us." "we are better off than we were then," said mrs. clinton, "for you were worrying about dick getting married, and now his marriage has come about and you need worry over it no longer." "ah, yes," said the squire. "i remember i did say something to you, and to him too, just before he sprang it on us--what was in his mind. if i had known virginia then it would have saved us months of bother. i've never quite forgiven dick for not introducing me to her at first. i should have given way at once, of course. however, we needn't think about that now; but now this little chap of walter's has come--i must go over and have a look at him to-morrow--it does make me wish that we were in the way of looking forward to a son of dick's. i suppose, nina----" "there is plenty of time to hope for that," said mrs. clinton. "i suppose there is, and we mustn't be impatient. still, i shan't be quite easy in my mind about the succession until there are children at the dower-house. however, the matter is in higher hands than ours, and there's never failed an heir to kencote yet. how long was virginia married before?" "seven years, i think," said mrs. clinton. "ah, well, if the worst comes to the worst, there's a boy clinton sleeping over at mountfield now, and we must put up with our disappointment. good-night, nina. god bless you!" (images generously made available by the hathi trust.) dodo a detail of the day by e.f. benson in two volumes vol. i fourth edition methuen & co london and far out, drifting helplessly on that grey, angry sea, i saw a small boat at the mercy of the winds and waves. and my guide said to me, 'some call the sea "falsehood," and that boat "truth," and others call the sea "truth," and the boat "falsehood;" and, for my part, i think that one is right as the other.'--the professor of ignorance. chapter one poets of all ages and of all denominations are unanimous in assuring us that there was once a period on this grey earth known as the golden age. these irresponsible hards describe it in terms of the vaguest, most poetic splendour, and, apart from the fact, upon which they are all agreed, that the weather was always perfectly charming, we have to reconstruct its characteristics in the main for ourselves. perhaps if the weather was uniformly delightful, even in this nineteenth century, the golden age might return again. we all know how perceptibly our physical, mental and spiritual level is raised by a few days of really charming weather; but until the weather determines to be always golden, we can hardly expect it of the age. yet even now, even in england, and even in london, we have every year a few days which must surely be waifs and strays from the golden age, days which have fluttered down from under the hands of the recording angel, as he tied up his reports, and, after floating about for years in dim, interplanetary space, sometimes drop down upon us. they may last a week, they have been known to last a fortnight; again, they may curtail themselves into a few hours, but they are never wholly absent. at the time at which this story opens, london was having its annual golden days; days to be associated with cool, early rides in the crumbly row, with sitting on small, green chairs beneath the trees at the corner of the park; with a general disinclination to exert oneself, or to stop smoking cigarettes; with a temper distinctly above its normal level, and a corresponding absence of moods. the crudeness of spring had disappeared, but not its freshness; the warmth of the summer had come, but not its sultriness; the winter was definitely over and past, and even in hyde park the voice of the singing bird was heard, and an old gentleman, who shall be nameless, had committed his annual perjury by asserting in the _morning post_ that he had heard a nightingale in the elm-trees by the ladies' mile, which was manifestly impossible. the sky was blue; the trees, strange to say, were green, for the leaves were out, and even the powers of soot which hover round london had not yet had time to shed their blackening dew upon them. the season was in full swing, but nobody was tired of it yet, and "all london" evinced a tendency to modified rural habits, which expressed themselves in the way of driving down to hurlingham, and giving water parties at richmond. to state this more shortly, it was a balmy, breezy day towards the middle of june. the shady walks that line the side of the row were full of the usual crowds of leisurely, well-dressed people who constitute what is known as london. anyone acquainted with that august and splendid body would have seen at once that something had happened; not a famine in china, nor a railway accident, nor a revolution, nor a war, but emphatically "something." conversation was a thing that made time pass, not a way of passing the time. obviously the larger half of london was asking questions, and the smaller half was enjoying its superiority, in being able to give answers. these indications are as clear to the practised eye as the signs of the weather appear to be to the prophet zadkiel. to the amateur one cloud looks much like another cloud: the prophet, on the other hand, lays a professional finger on one and says "thunder," while the lurid bastion, which seems fraught with fire and tempest to the amateur, is dismissed with the wave of a contemptuous hand. a tall, young man was slowly making his way across the road from the arch. he was a fair specimen of "the exhausted seedlings of our effete aristocracy"--long-limbed, clean-shaven, about six feet two high, and altogether very pleasant to look upon. he wore an air of extreme leisure and freedom from the smallest touch of care or anxiety, and it was quite clear that such was his normal atmosphere. he waited with serene patience for a large number of well-appointed carriages to go past, and then found himself blocked by another stream going in the opposite direction. however, all things come to an end, even the impossibility of crossing from the arch at the entrance of the park to the trees on a fine morning in june, and on this particular morning i have to record no exception to the rule. a horse bolting on to the row narrowly missed knocking him down, and he looked up with mild reproach at its rider, as he disappeared in a shower of dust and soft earth. this young gentleman, who has been making his slow and somewhat graceful entrance on to our stage, was emphatically "london," and he too saw at once that something had happened. he looked about for an acquaintance, and then dropped in a leisurely manner into a chair by his side. "morning, bertie," he remarked; "what's up?" bertie was not going to be hurried. he finished lighting a cigarette, and adjusted the tip neatly with his fingers. "she's going to be married," he remarked. jack broxton turned half round to him with a quicker movement than he had hitherto shown. "not dodo?" he said. "yes." jack gave a low whistle. "it isn't to you, i suppose?" bertie arbuthnot leaned back in his chair with extreme languor. his enemies, who, to do him justice, were very few, said that if he hadn't been the tallest man in london, he would never have been there at all. "no, it isn't to me." "is she here?" said jack, looking round. "no i think not; at least i haven't seen her." "well, i'm----" jack did not finish the sentence. then as an after-thought he inquired: "whom to?" "chesterford," returned the other. jack made a neat little hole with the ferrule of his stick in the gravel in front of him, and performed a small burial service for the end of his cigarette. the action was slightly allegorical. "he's my first cousin," he said. "however, i may be excused for not feeling distinctly sympathetic with my first cousin. must i congratulate him?" "that's as you like," said the other. "i really don't see why you shouldn't. but it is rather overwhelming, isn't it? you know dodo is awfully charming, but she hasn't got any of the domestic virtues. besides, she ought to be an empress," he added loyally. "i suppose a marchioness is something," said jack. "but i didn't expect it one little bit. of course he is hopelessly in love. and so dodo has decided to make him happy." "it seems so," said bertie, with a fine determination not to draw inferences. "ah, but don't you see----" said jack. "oh, it's all right," said bertie. "he is devoted to her, and she is clever and stimulating. personally i shouldn't like a stimulating wife. i don't like stimulating people, i don't think they wear well. it would be like sipping brandy all day. fancy having brandy at five o'clock tea. what a prospect, you know! dodo's too smart for my taste." "she never bores one," said jack. "no, but she makes me feel as if i was sitting under a flaming gas-burner, which was beating on to what nature designed to be my brain-cover." "nonsense," said jack. "you don't know her. there she is. ah!" a dog-cart had stopped close by them, and a girl got out, leaving a particularly diminutive groom at the pony's head. if anything she was a shade more perfectly dressed than the rest of the crowd, and she seemed to know it. behind her walked another girl, who was obviously intended to walk behind, while dodo was equally obviously made to walk in front. just then dodo turned round and said over her shoulder to her,-- "maud, tell the boy he needn't wait. you needn't either unless you like." maud turned round and went dutifully back to the dog-cart, where she stood irresolutely a few moments after giving her message. dodo caught sight of the two young men on the chairs, and advanced to them. the radiant vision was evidently not gifted with that dubious quality, shyness. "why, jack," she exclaimed in a loudish voice, "here i am, you see, and i have come to be congratulated! what are you and bertie sitting here for like two patiences on monuments? really, jack, you would make a good patience on a monument. "was patience a man? i never saw him yet. i would come and sketch you if you stood still enough. what are you so glum about? you look as if you were going to be executed. i ought to look like that much more than you. jack, i'm going to be a married woman, and stop at home, and mend the socks, and look after the baby, and warm chesterford's slippers for him. where's chesterford? have you seen him? oh, i told maud to go away. maud," she called, "come back and take bertie for a stroll: i want to talk to jack. go on, bertie; you can come back in half an hour, and if i haven't finished talking then, you can go away again--or go for a drive, if you like, with maud round the park. take care of that pony, though; he's got the devil of a temper." "i suppose i may congratulate you first?" asked bertie. "that's so dear of you," said dodo graciously, as if she was used to saying it. "good-bye; maud's waiting, and the pony will kick himself to bits if he stands much longer. thanks for your congratulations. good-bye." bertie moved off, and dodo sat down next jack. "now, jack, we're going to have a talk. in the first place you haven't congratulated me. never mind, we'll take that as done. now tell me what you think of it. i don't quite know why i ask you, but we are old friends." "i'm surprised," said he candidly; "i think it's very odd." dodo frowned. "john broxton," she said solemnly, "don't be nasty. don't you think i'm a very charming girl, and don't you think he's a very charming boy?" jack was silent for a minute or two, then he said,-- "what is the use of this, dodo? what do you want me to say?" "i want you to say what you think. jack, old boy, i'm very fond of you, though i couldn't marry you. oh, you must see that. we shouldn't have suited. we neither of us will consent to play second fiddle, you know. then, of course, there's the question of money. i must have lots of money. yes, a big must _and_ a big lot. it's not your fault that you haven't got any, and it wouldn't have been your fault if you'd been born with no nose; but i couldn't marry a man who was without either." "after all, dodo," said he, "you only say what every one else thinks about that. i don't blame you for it. about the other, you're wrong. i am sure i should not have been an exacting husband. you could have had your own way pretty well." "oh, jack, indeed no," said she;--"we are wandering from the point, but i'll come back to it presently. my husband must be so devoted to me that anything i do will seem good and charming. you don't answer that requirement, as i've told you before. if i can't get that--i have got it, by the way--i must have a man who doesn't care what i do. you would have cared, you know it. you told me once i was in dreadfully bad form. of course that clinched the matter. to my husband i must never be in bad form. if others did what i do, it might be bad form, but with me, no. bad form is one of those qualities which my husband must think impossible for me, simply because i am i. oh, jack, you must see that--don't be stupid! and then you aren't rich enough. it's all very well to call it a worldly view, but it is a perfectly true one for me. don't you see i must have everything i want. it is what i live on, all this," she said, spreading her hands out. "all these people must know who i am, and that they should do that, i must have everything at my command. oh, it's all very well to talk of love in a cottage, but just wait till the chimney begins to smoke." dodo nodded her head with an air of profound wisdom. "it isn't for you that i'm anxious," said jack, "it's for chesterford. he's an awfully good fellow. it is a trifle original to sing the husband's praise to the wife, but i do want you to know that. and he isn't one of those people who don't feel things because they don't show it--it is just the other way. the feeling is so deep that he can't. you know you like to turn yourself inside out for your friend's benefit, but he doesn't do that. and he is in love with you." "yes, i know," she said, "but you do me an injustice. i shall be very good to him. i can't pretend that i am what is known as being in love with him--in fact i don't think i know what that means, except that people get in a very ridiculous state, and write sonnets to their mistress's front teeth, which reminds me that i am going to the dentist to-morrow. come and hold my hand--yes, and keep withered flowers and that sort of thing. ah, jack, i wish that i really knew what it did mean. it can't be all nonsense, because chesterford's like that, and he is an honest man if you like. and i do respect and admire him very much, and i hope i shall make him happy, and i hear he's got a delightful new yacht; and, oh! do look at that arbuthnot girl opposite with a magenta hat. it seems to me inconceivably stupid to have a magenta hat. really she is a fool. she wants to attract attention, but she attracts the wrong sort. now _she_ is in bad form. bertie doesn't look after his relations enough." "oh, bother the arbuthnot girl," said jack angrily. "i want to have this out with you. don't you see that that sort of thing won't do with chesterford? he is not a fool by any means, and he knows the difference between the two things." "indeed he doesn't," said dodo. "the other day he was talking to me, and i simply kept on smiling when i was thinking of something quite different, and he thought i was adorably sympathetic. and, besides, i am not a fool either. he is far too happy for me to believe that he is not satisfied." "well, but you'll have to keep it up," said jack. "don't you see i'm not objecting to your theory of marriage in itself--though i think it's disgusting--but it strikes me that you have got the wrong sort of man to experiment upon. it might do very well if he was like you." "jack, you sha'n't lecture me," said dodo; "i shall do precisely as i like. have you ever known me make a fool of myself? of course you haven't. well, if i was going to make a mess of this, it would be contrary to all you or anyone else knows of me. i'm sorry i asked your opinion at all. i didn't think you would be so stupid." "you told me to tell you what i thought," said jack in self-defence. "i offered to say what you wanted, or to congratulate or condole or anything else; it's your own fault, and i wish i'd said it was charming and delightful, and just what i had always hoped." dodo laughed. "i like to see you cross, jack," she remarked, "and now we'll be friends again. remember what you have said to-day--we shall see in time who is right, you or i. if you like to bet about it you may--only you would lose. i promise to tell you if you turn out to be right, even if you don't see it, which you must if it happens, which it won't, so you won't," she added with a fine disregard of grammar. jack was silent. "jack, you are horrible," said dodo impatiently, "you don't believe in me one bit. i believe you are jealous of chesterford; you needn't be." then he interrupted her quickly. "ah, dodo, take care what you say. when you say i needn't be, it implies that you are not going to do your share. i want to be jealous of chesterford, and i am sorry i am not. if i thought you loved him, or would ever get to love him, i should be jealous. i wish to goodness i was. really, if you come to think of it, i am very generous. i want this to be entirely a success. if there is one man in the world who deserves to be happy it is chesterford. he is not brilliant, he does not even think he is, which is the best substitute. it doesn't much matter how hard you are hit if you are well protected. try to make him conceited--it is the best you can do for him." he said these words in a low tone, as if he hardly wished dodo to hear. but dodo did hear. "you don't believe in me a bit," she said. "never mind, i will force you to. that's always the way--as long as i amuse you, you like me well enough, but you distrust me at bottom. a woman's a bore when she is serious. isn't it so? because i talk nonsense you think i am entirely untrustworthy about things that matter." dodo struck the ground angrily with the point of her parasol. "i have thought about it. i know i am right," she went on. "i shall be immensely happy as his wife, and he will be immensely happy as my husband." "i don't think it's much use discussing it," said he. "but don't be vexed with me, dodo. you reminded me that we were old friends at the beginning of this extremely candid conversation. i have told you that i think it is a mistake. if he didn't love you it wouldn't matter. unfortunately he does." "well, jack," she said, "i can't prove it, but you ought to know me well enough by this time not to misjudge me so badly. it is not only unjust but stupid, and you are not usually stupid. however, i am not angry with you, which is the result of my beautiful nature. come, jack, shake hands and wish me happiness." she stood up, holding out both her hands to him. jack was rather moved. "dodo, of course i do. i wish all the best wishes that my nature can desire and my brain conceive, both to you and him, him too; and i hope i shall be outrageously jealous before many months are over." he shook her hands, and then dropped them. she stood for a moment with her eyes on the ground, looking still grave. then she retreated a step or two, leaned against the rail, and broke into a laugh. "that's right, jack, begone, dull care. i suppose you'll be chesterford's best man. i shall tell him you must be. really he is an excellent lover; he doesn't say too much or too little, and he lets me do exactly as i like. jack, come and see us this evening; we're having a sort of barnum's show, and i'm to be the white elephant. come and be a white elephant too. oh, no, you can't; chesterford's the other. the elephant is an amiable beast, and i am going to be remarkably amiable. come to dinner first, the show begins afterwards. no, on the whole, don't come to dinner, because i want to talk to chesterford all the time, and do my duty in that state of life in which it has pleased chesterford to ask me to play my part. that's profane, but it's only out of the catechism. who wrote the catechism? i always regard the catechism as only a half-sacred work, and so profanity doesn't count, at least you may make two profane remarks out of the catechism, which will only count as one. i shall sing, too. evelyn has taught me two little nigger minstrel songs. shall i black my face? i'm not at all sure that i shouldn't look rather well with my face blacked, though i suppose it would frighten chesterford. here are maud and bertie back again. i must go. i'm lunching somewhere, i can't remember where, only maud will know. maud, where are we lunching, and have you had a nice drive, and has bertie been making love to you? good-bye, jack. remember to come this evening. you can come, too, bertie, if you like. i have had a very nice talk with jack, and he has been remarkably rude, but i forgive him." jack went with her to her dog-cart, and helped her in. "this pony's name is beelzebub," she remarked, as she took the reins, "because he is the prince of the other things. good-bye." then he went back and rejoined bertie. "there was a scene last night," said bertie. "maud told me about it. she came home with dodo and chesterford, and stopped to open a letter in the hall, and when she went upstairs into the drawing-room, she found dodo sobbing among the sofa cushions, and chesterford standing by, not quite knowing what to do. it appeared that he had just given her the engagement ring. she was awfully-pleased with it, and said it was charming, then suddenly she threw it down on the floor, and buried her face in the cushions. after that she rushed out of the room, and didn't appear again for a quarter of an hour, and then went to the foreign office party, and to two balls." jack laughed hopelessly for a few minutes. then he said,-- "it is too ridiculous. i don't believe it can be all real. that was drama, pure spontaneous drama. but it's drama for all that. i'm sure i don't know why i laughed, now i come to think of it. it really is no laughing matter. all the same i wonder why she didn't tell me that. but her sister has got no business to repeat those kind of things. don't tell anyone else, bertie." then after a minute he repeated to himself, "i wonder why she didn't tell me that." "jack," said bertie after another pause, "i don't wish you to think that i want to meddle in your concerns, and so don't tell me unless you like, but was anything ever up between you and dodo? lie freely if you would rather not tell me, please." "yes," he said simply. "i asked her to marry me last april, and she said 'no.' i haven't told anyone till this minute, because i don't like it to be known when i fail. i am like dodo in that. you know how she detests not being able to do anything she wants. it doesn't often happen, but when it does, dodo becomes damnable. she has more perseverance than i have, though. when she can't get anything, she makes such a fuss that she usually does succeed eventually. but i do just the other thing. i go away, and don't say anything about it. that was a bad failure. i remember being very much vexed at the time." jack spoke dreamily, as if he was thinking of something else. it was his way not to blaze abroad anything that affected him deeply. like dodo he would often dissect himself in a superficial manner, and act as a kind of showman to his emotions; but he did not care to turn himself inside out with her thoroughness. and above all, as he had just said, he hated the knowledge of a failure; he tried to conceal it even from himself. he loved to show his brighter side to the world. when he was in society he always put on his best mental and moral clothes, those that were newest and fitted him most becomingly; the rags and tatters were thrown deep into the darkest cupboard, and the key sternly turned on them. now and then, however, as on this occasion, a friend brought him the key with somewhat embarrassing openness, and manners prevented him from putting his back to the door. but when it was unlocked he adopted the tone of, "yes, there are some old things in there, i believe. may you see? oh, certainly; but please shut it after you, and don't let anyone else in. i quite forget what is in there myself, it's so long since i looked." bertie was silent. he was on those terms of intimacy with the other that do not need ordinary words of condolence or congratulation. besides, from his own point of view, he inwardly congratulated jack, and this was not the sort of occasion on which to tell him that congratulation rather than sympathy was what the event demanded. then jack went on, still with the air of a spectator than of a principal character,-- "dodo talked to me a good deal about her marriage. i am sorry about it, for i think that chesterford will be terribly disillusioned. you know he doesn't take things lightly, and he is much too hopelessly fond of dodo ever to be content with what she will grant him as a wife. but we cannot do anything. i told her what i thought, not because i hoped to make any change in the matter, but because i wished her to know that for once in her life she has made a failure--a bad, hopeless mistake. that has been my revenge. come, it's after one, i must go home. i shall go there this evening; shall i see you?" chapter two jack went home meditating rather bitterly on things in general. he had a sense that fate was not behaving very prettily to him. she had dealt him rather a severe blow in april last, which had knocked him down, and, having knocked him down, she now proceeded in a most unsportsmanlike way to kick him. jack had a great idea of fair play, and fate certainly was not playing fair. he would have liked to have a few words with her on the subject. the world had been very kind on the whole to him. he had always been popular, and his life, though perhaps rather aimless, was at least enjoyable. and since the world had been kind to him, he was generous to the world in general, and to his friends in particular. it had always held a high opinion of him, as a thoroughly healthy-minded and pleasant companion, and he was disposed to hold a similar opinion of it. consequently, when dodo had refused him that spring, he had not thought badly of her. he did not blame her, or get bitter about it; but though he had flattered himself that he was used to dodo's ways, and had always recognised her capabilities in the way of surprising her friends, he had not been quite prepared for the news of her engagement. in fact, he was surprised, and also rather resentful, chiefly against the general management of mundane affairs, but partly also against dodo herself. dodo had not told him of her engagement; he had been left to find it out for himself. then, again, she was engaged to a man who was hopelessly and entirely in love with her, and for whom, apart from a quiet, unemotional liking, she did not care two straws, except in so far as he was immensely rich and had a title, two golden keys which unlocked the most secret doors of that well-furnished apartment known as society, which constituted dodo's world. hitherto her position had been precarious: she had felt that she was on trial. her personality, her great attractiveness and talents, had secured for herself a certain footing on the very daïs of that room; but she had always known that unless she married brilliantly she would not be sure of her position. if she married a man who would not be always certain of commanding whatever money and position--for she would never have married a wealthy brewer--could command, or, worst of all, if in her unwillingness to accept anything but the best she could get, she did not marry at all, dodo knew that she never would have that unquestioned position that she felt was indispensable to her. jack knew all this perfectly well--in fact dodo had referred to it that morning--and he accepted it philosophically as being inevitable. but what he did not like was being told that he would not have done on general grounds, that he was too fond of his own way, that he would not have given dodo rein enough. he had known dodo too long and too well, when he proposed to her, to have any of a lover's traditional blindness to the faults of his love. he knew that she was, above all things, strongly dramatic, that she moved with a view to effect, that she was unscrupulous in what she did, that her behaviour was sometimes in questionable taste; but this he swallowed whole, so to speak. he was genuinely attached to her, and felt that she possessed the qualities that he would most like to have in his wife. bertie had said to him that morning that she was stimulating, and would not wear well. stimulating she certainly was--what lovable woman is not?--and personally he had known her long, and she did wear well. the hidden depths and unsuspected shallows were exactly what he loved her for; no one ever fell in love with a canal; and though the shallows were commoner than the depths, and their presence was sometimes indicated by a rather harsh jarring of the keel, yet he believed, fully and sincerely, in the dark, mysterious depths for love to lose itself in. besides, a wife, whose actions and thoughts were as perfectly calculable and as accurately calculated as the trains in a bradshaw, was possessed of sterling qualities which, however estimable, were more suited to a housekeeper than a mistress. these reflections were the outcome of an intimate knowledge of dodo in the mind of a man who was in the habit of being honest with himself and the object of his love, a quality rare enough whether the lover is rejected or accepted. he had had time to think over the matter quietly to himself. he knew, and had known for many weeks, that dodo was out of his reach, and he sat down and thought about the inaccessible fruit, not with the keen feelings of one who still hoped to get it, but with a resignation which recognised that the fruit was desirable, but that it must be regarded from a purely speculative point of view. and to do him justice, though he was very sorry for himself, he was much more sorry for chesterford. chesterford was his cousin, they had been brought up together at eton and oxford, and he knew him with that intimacy which is the result of years alone. chesterford's old friends had all a great respect and liking for him. as dodo had said, "he was an honest man if you like." slight acquaintances called him slow and rather stupid, which was true on purely intellectual grounds. he was very loyal, and very much devoted to what he considered his duty, which consisted in being an excellent landlord and j.p. of his county, in voting steadily for the conservative party in the house of lords, in giving largely and anonymously to good objects, in going to church on sunday morning, where he sang hymns with fervour, and read lessons with respect, in managing a hunt in a liberal and satisfactory manner, and in avoiding any introspection or speculation about problems of life and being. he walked through the world with an upright gait, without turning his eyes or his steps to the right hand or the left, without ever concerning himself with what was not his business, but directing all his undoubtedly sterling qualities to that. he had a perfect genius for doing his duty. nobody had ever called him shallow or foolish, but nobody on the other hand had ever, called him either deep or clever. he had probably only made one real mistake in his life, and that was when he asked dodo to marry him; and we have seen that jack, who knew dodo well, and whose opinion might be considered to be based on good grounds, thought that dodo had committed her first grand error in accepting him. the worst of the business certainly was that he was in love with dodo. if he had been a different sort of man, if he had proposed to dodo with the same idea that dodo had, when she accepted him, if he had wanted a brilliant and fascinating woman to walk through life with, who could not fail to be popular, end who would do the duties of a mistress of a great house in a regal fashion, he could not have chosen better. but what he wanted in a wife was someone to love. he loved dodo, and apparently it had not entered his calculations that she, in accepting him, might be doing it from a different standpoint from his own in proposing to her. dodo had smiled on him with the air of a benignant goddess who marries a mortal, when he offered her his hand and heart, and he had taken that smile as a fulfilment of his own thought. decidedly jack might have justification for feeling apprehensive. jack's only hope lay in that vein which did exist in dodo, and which she had manifested in that outburst of tears the night before. he put it down to her dramatic instincts to a large extent, but he knew there was something besides, for dodo did not care to play to an empty house, and the presence of her future husband alone constituted anything but a satisfactory audience. jack had always had a considerable belief in dodo: her attractiveness and cleverness were, of course, beyond dispute, and required proof no more than the fact that the sun rose in the morning; but he believed in something deeper than this, which prompted such actions as these. he felt that there was some emotion that she experienced at that moment, of which her tears were the legitimate outcome, and, as he thought of this, there occurred to him the remark that dodo had made that morning, when she expressed her regret at never having felt the sort of love that she knew chesterford felt for her. mrs. vane was perhaps perfectly happy that night. was not her daughter engaged to a marquis and a millionaire? was not her house going to be filled with the brightest and best of our land? she had often felt rather resentful against dodo, who alternately liked and despised people whom mrs. vane would have given her right hand to be in a position to like, and both hands to be in a position to despise. dodo was excellent friends with "london," only "london" did not come and seek her at her own house, but preferred asking her to theirs. consequently, on mrs. vane and maud devolved the comparatively menial duty of leaving their cards and those of dodo, and attending her in the capacity of the necessary adjunct. they would be asked to the same houses as dodo, but that was all; when they got there they had the privilege of seeing dodo performing her brilliant evolutions, but somehow none of dodo's glory got reflected on to them. to be the mirror of dodo was one of mrs. vane's most cherished ideas, and she did not recollect that there are many substances whose nature forbids their acting as such to the most brilliant of illuminations. mr. vane was kept still more in the background. it was generally supposed that he was looking after his affairs in the country, whilst the rest of the family were amusing themselves in london. it was well known that he was the proprietor of a flourishing iron foundry somewhere in lancashire, and apparently the iron needed special care during the months of may, june and july. in any case he was a shadow in the background, rather than a skeleton at the banquet, whom it was not necessary to ignore, because he never appeared in a position in which he could be ignored. mrs. vane had two principal objects in life, the first of which was to live up to dodo, and the second to obtain, in course of time, a suitable brilliant son-in-law. the latter of these objects had been practically obtained by dodo herself, and the first of them was in a measure realised by the large and brilliant company who assembled in her rooms that night. mrs. vane was a large, high-coloured woman of about middle age, whose dress seemed to indicate that she would rather not, but that, of course, may only have been the fault of the dressmaker. she had an effusive manner, which sometimes made her guests wonder what they could have done to have made her so particularly glad to see them. she constantly lamented mr. vane's absence from london, and remarked, with a brilliant smile, that she felt quite deserted. mrs. vane's smile always suggested a reformed vampire, who had permanently renounced her bloodthirsty habits, but had not quite got out of the way of gloating on what would have been her victims in the unregenerate days. it is only fair to say that this impression was due to the immensity of her smile, which could hardly be honestly accounted for by this uncharitable world. she was busily employed in receiving her guests when jack came, and was, perhaps, more stupendously cordial than ever. "so kind of you to come," she was just saying to a previous arrival when jack came in. "i know dodo was dying to see you and be congratulated. darling," she said, turning to maud, "run and tell dodo that lord burwell has arrived. so good of you to come. and how do you do, dear mr. broxton? of course dodo has told you of our happiness. thanks, yes--we are all charmed with her engagement. and the marquis is your cousin, is he not? how nice! may i tell maud she may call you cousin jack? _such_ pleasure to have you. dodo is simply expiring to see you. did she see you this morning? really! she never told me of it, and my sweet child usually tells me everything." dodo was playing the amiable white elephant to some purpose. she was standing under a large chandelier in the centre of the room, with chesterford beside her, receiving congratulations with the utmost grace, and talking nonsense at the highest possible speed. jack thought to himself that he had never seen anyone so thoroughly charming and brilliant, and almost wondered whether he had not been doing her an injustice all day. he saw it was impossible to get near her for the present, so he wandered off among other groups, exchanging greetings and salutations. he had made the circuit of the room, and was standing about near the door, feeling a little lonely, when dodo came quickly towards him. she was looking rather white and impatient. "come away out of this, jack," she said; "this is horrible. we've done our duty, and now i want to talk. i've been smiling and grinning till my cheeks are nearly cracked, and everyone says exactly the same thing. come to my room--come." she turned round, beckoning to him, and found herself face to face with chesterford. "dear old boy," she said to him, "i'm not going to bore you any more to-night. i shall bore you enough after we are married. jack and i are going away to talk, and he's going to tell me to be a good girl, and do as his cousin bids me. good-night; come again to-morrow morning." "i came here on purpose to congratulate you," said jack, grasping chesterford's hand, "and i wish you all joy and prosperity." "come, jack," said dodo. "oh, by the way, chesterford, ask jack to be your best man. you couldn't have a better, and you haven't got any brother, you know." "i was just going to," said chesterford. "jack, you will be, won't you? you must." "of course i will," said jack. "all the same we're all awfully jealous of you, you know, for carrying dodo off." "so you ought to be," said he, enthusiastically. "why, i'm almost jealous of myself. but now go and talk to dodo, if she wants you." the sight of chesterford with dodo made jack groan in spirit. he had accepted dodo's rejection of him as quite final, and he never intended to open that closed book again. but this was too horrible. he felt a genuine impulse of pure compassion for chesterford, and an irritated disgust for dodo. dodo was an admirable comrade, and, for some, he thought, an admirable wife. but the idea of her in comradeship with chesterford was too absurd, and if she could never be his comrade, by what perversity of fate was it that she was going to become his wife? jack's serenity was quite gone, and he wondered what had become of it. all he was conscious of was a chafing refusal to acquiesce just yet, and the anticipation of a somewhat intimate talk with dodo. he felt half inclined to run away from the house, and not see her again, and as he followed her up to her room, he began to think that his wisdom had followed his serenity. after all, if he asked her again about her resolution to marry chesterford, what was he doing but continuing the conversation they had in the park that morning, in which dodo herself had taken the initiative. "these things are on the knees of the gods," thought jack to himself piously, as the door of dodo's room closed behind him. dodo threw herself down in a low arm-chair with an air of weariness. "go on talking to me, jack," she said. "interest me, soothe me, make me angry if you like. chesterford's very nice. don't you like him immensely? i do." jack fidgeted, lit a match and blew it out again. really it was not his fault that the conversation was going to be on this subject. he again laid the responsibility on the knees of the gods. then he said,-- "dodo, is this irrevocable? are you determined to marry this man? i swear i don't ask you for any selfish reasons, but only because i am sincerely anxious for your happiness and his. it is a confounded liberty i am taking, but i sha'n't apologise for it. i know that it isn't any business of mine, but i risk your displeasure." dodo was looking at him steadily. her breath came rather quickly, and the look of weariness had left her face. "jack," she said, "don't say this sort of thing to me again. you are quite right, it is a confounded liberty, as you say. i shall do as i please in this matter. ah, jack, don't be angry with me," she went on as he shrugged his shoulders, and half turned away. "i know you are sincere, but i must do it. i want to be safe. i want to be married. chesterford is very safe. jack, old boy, don't make me quarrel with you. you are the best friend i have, but i'm sure you're wrong about this." she rose and stood by him, and laid one hand on his as it lay on the mantelpiece. he did not answer her. he was disappointed and baffled. then she turned away from him, and suddenly threw up her arms. "oh, my god," she said, "i don't know what to do. it isn't my fault that i am made like this. i want to know what love is, but i can't--i can't. you say i shall make him unhappy, and i don't want to do that. i don't believe i shall. jack, why did you come here suggesting these horrible things?" there was a great anger in her voice, and she stood trembling before him. just then the door opened, and a middle-aged lady walked in. she did not seem at all surprised. nobody who had known dodo long was often surprised. she walked up to dodo and kissed her. "i came late," she said, "and your mother said you were in your room, so i came up to congratulate you with all my heart." "thank you very much," said dodo, returning the kiss. "jack, do you know mrs. vivian?--mr. broxton." mrs. vivian bowed, and jack bowed, and then nobody seemed quite to know what to say next. mrs. vivian recovered herself first. "i wish you would show me the necklace lord chesterford has given you," she said to dodo. "mrs. vane said the diamonds were magnificent." "certainly, i will fetch it," said dodo, with unusual docility. "don't go away, jack." dodo left the room, and mrs. vivian turned to jack. "my dear young man," she said, "i am old enough to be your mother, and you mustn't mind what i am going to say. this sort of thing won't do at all. i know who you are perfectly well, and i warn you that you are playing with fire. you were at liberty to do so before dodo was engaged, and i daresay you have burned your fingers already. several young men have--but now it won't do. besides that, it isn't fair on either chesterford or dodo herself." jack wanted to think "what an impertinent old woman," but there was something in her manner that forbade it. "i believe you are right," he said simply; "but it wasn't wholly my fault." then he felt angry with himself for having shifted any of the blame on to dodo. "_honi soit_," said the other ambiguously. "i don't mean that--ah, here is dodo." the diamonds were duly shown and admired, and the three went downstairs again. mrs. vivian took her leave shortly. she was very gracious to jack, and as they parted she said,-- "come and see me at any time; i should like to talk to you. here is my address." jack sought mrs. vane to inquire who mrs. vivian was. mrs. vane was even more effusive than usual. "oh, she is quite one of our leading people," she said.--"she has not been in london, or, in fact, in england for two years. she was unhappily married. her husband was a scamp, and after his death she suddenly left london, and has only just returned. she is quite an extraordinary woman--everyone used to rave about her. she never gave herself airs, but somehow she was more looked up to than anyone else. quite royal in fact. i feel immensely honoured by her presence here. i hardly dared to ask her--so fascinating, and so clever." dodo came up to jack before he left. "jack," she said, "i was angry with you, and i am sorry. don't bear me malice. if mrs. vivian had not come in, i should have said something abominable. i am afraid of her. i don't quite know why. she always seems to be taking stock of one, and noticing how very small one is. don't forget to-morrow. we're all going on a water-party at richmond. mind you come." "i think i had better not," said jack bluntly. dodo lifted her eyebrows in surprise that may have been genuine. "why not?" she asked. jack had no reasonable answer to give her. "what did mrs. vivian say to you?" asked dodo suddenly. jack paused. "a few polite nothings," he said; "and half the royal motto. mrs. vane said she was quite royal, which, of course, explains it." "i can't conceive what you're talking about," remarked dodo. "it seems to me to be sheer nonsense." jack smiled. "on the whole, i think it is sheer nonsense," he said. "yes, i'll come." dodo swept him the prettiest little curtsey. "how good of you," she said. "good-night, jack. don't be cross, it really isn't worth while, and you can behave so prettily if you like. oh, such a nice gentleman!" "no, i expect it isn't worth while," said jack. chapter three there is a particular beauty about the thames valley for which you may search for years elsewhere, and not find; a splendid lavishness in the way that the woods are cast down broadcast along the river, and a princely extravagance of thick lush hayfields, that seem determined not to leave a spare inch of land between them and the water. the whole scene has been constructed with a noble disregard of expense, in the way of water, land, and warm wood-land air. the tall, clean-limbed beech-trees have room to stretch their great, lazy arms without being prosecuted for their clumsy trespasses, and the squirrels that chatter at you from their green houses seem to have a quite unusual sleekness about them, and their insolent criticisms to each other about your walk, and general personal unattractiveness, are inspired by a larger share of animal spirits than those of other squirrels. as you row gently up in the middle of the stream, you may see a heron standing in the shallows, too lazy to fish, too supremely confident to mind the approach of anything so inferior as yourself, and from the cool shadow of the woods you may hear an old cock pheasant talking to himself, and not troubling to practise a new and original method of rocketing in june, for he knows that his time is not yet. at this time of year, too, you need not trouble to look round, to see if there are large boats full of noisy people bearing down on you; like the pheasant, their time is not yet. but now and then the long strings of creamy bubbles appearing on the deep, quiet water, and a sound rich in associations of cool plunges into frothy streams, warns you that a lock is near. and above you may see some small village clustering down to the river's edge, to drink of its sweet coolness, or a couple of shaggy-footed cart-horses, looking with mild wonder at this unexpected method of locomotion, lifting their dripping noses from the bright gravelly shallows to stare at you, before they proceed to finish their evening watering. dodo was very fond of the thames valley, and she really enjoyed giving up a day of june in london to the woods and waters. they were to start quite early in the morning, dodo explained, and everyone was to wear their very oldest clothes, for they were going to play ducks and drakes, and drink milk in dairies, and pick buttercups, and get entirely covered with freckles. dodo herself never freckled, and she was conscious of looking rather better for a slight touch of the sun, and it would be very dear of mrs. vivian if she would come too, if she didn't mind being silly all day; and, if so, would she call for them, as they were on her way? chesterford, of course, was going, and jack, and maud and her mother; it was quite a small party; and wasn't jack a dear? mrs. vane had got hold of a certain idea about mrs. vivian, distinctly founded on fact. she was one of those women who cannot help making an impression. how it is done, or exactly what it is, one would be puzzled to define, but everyone noticed when she came info a room, and was aware when she went out. it was not her personal appearance, for she was short rather than tall, stout rather than graceful, and certainly middle-aged rather than young. dodo has mentioned the effect she produced on her, and many people felt in the same way that mrs. vivian was somehow on a higher plane than they, that her mind was cast in a larger mould. happily for our peace of mind such people are not very common; most of our fellow-men are luckily much on the same level, and they are not more than units among units. but mrs. vivian was much more than a unit. dodo had said of her that she was two or three at least. and evidently nothing was further from mrs. vivian's wishes than trying to make an impression, in fact, the very impressive element was rather due to her extreme naturalness. we are most of us so accustomed to see people behave, and to behave ourselves, in a manner not quite natural, that to see anyone who never does so, is in itself calculated to make one rather nervous. mrs. vivian evidently intended to take her life up again at the point where she had left off, so to speak--in other words, at the period before her marriage. of her husband, perhaps, the less said the better. he died, owing to an accident, after ten years of married unhappiness, and left mrs. vivian poorer than she had been before. after his death she had travelled abroad for two years, and then returned to england to live with her sister, who had married a rich judge and kept house rather magnificently in prince's gate. lady fuller had always disapproved of her sister's marriage, and she was heartily glad to see her well quit of her husband, and, on her return to england, received her with open arms, and begged her, on behalf of her husband and herself, to make their home hers. mrs. vivian accordingly settled down in the "extremely commodious" house in prince's gate, and, as i said, took up her life where it had left off. a standing grievance that her husband had had with her was, that she interested herself in the poor, and in the east end slums, that she went to cabmen's shelters, and espoused the cause of overdriven factory girls. he had told her that it was meddling with other people's business; that nothing was so objectionable as an assumption of charitable airs; that a woman who went to balls and dinner-parties was a hypocrite if she pretended to care about the state of the poor, and that she only did it because she wished to appear unlike other people. but he altogether failed to perceive that her actions were entirely uninfluenced by the impression they were to make, and mistook her extreme naturalness for the subtlest affectation. however, mrs. vivian resolutely banished from her mind the remembrance of those ten years, and, being unable to think of her husband with tenderness or affection, she preferred to forget her married life altogether. the vanes had been their neighbours in the country for many years, and she had known dodo since she was a child. dodo had once asked to accompany her in her visits to the east end, and had been immensely struck by what she saw, and determined to be charitable too. this sort of thing seemed extremely chic to dodo's observant mind. so she took up a factory of miserable match-girls, and asked them all to tea, and got mrs. vivian to promise her help; but when the afternoon came, dodo particularly wished to go to a morning concert, and on mrs. vivian's arrival she found, indeed, plenty of match-girls, but no dodo. dodo came back later and made herself extremely fascinating. she kissed the cleanest of the girls, and patted the rest on the shoulder, and sang several delightful little french songs to them to her own accompaniment on the banjo, and thanked mrs. vivian for being "such a dear about the slums." but on the next occasion when she had nothing to do, and called on mrs. vivian to ask to be taken to another of those "darling little slums," mrs. vivian hinted that, though she would be charmed to take her, she thought that dodo had perhaps forgotten that the four-in-hand club met that day in hyde park. dodo had forgotten it, and, as she had bespoken the box seat on one of her friends' coaches, she hurried home again, feeling it freshly borne in upon her that mrs. vivian thought she was very contemptible indeed. altogether mrs. vivian knew dodo well, and when she went home that evening, she thought a good deal about the approaching marriage. she was glad to have had that occasion of speaking to jack, he seemed to her to be worth doing it for. she knew that she ran the risk of being told, in chillingly polite english, that she was stepping outside her province, and that jack did not belong to the east end class who welcomed any charitable hand; but she had a remarkably keen eye, and her intuitive perception told her at once that jack's sense of the justice of her remark would stifle any feeling he might have that she was officious and meddlesome, and the event had justified her decision. in the course of the next few days she met jack several times. they both went to the water-party dodo spoke of, and she took the opportunity to cultivate his acquaintance. they were sitting on the bank of the river below the clivedon woods, a little apart from the others, and she felt that as he had behaved so well, she owed him some apology. "it was very nice of you, mr. broxton," she said, "to be so polite to me last night. to tell you the truth, i did know you, though you didn't know me. i was an old friend of your mother's, but i hadn't time to explain that, and you were good enough to take me without explanations. i always wonder what our attitude towards old friends of our mothers ought to be. i really don't see why they should have any claim upon one." jack laughed. "the fact was that i knew you were right as soon as you spoke to me, though i wanted to resent it. i had been putting it differently to myself; that was why i spoke to dodo." "tell me more," she said. "from the momentary glance i had of you and her, i thought you had been remonstrating with her, and she had been objecting. i don't blame you for remonstrating in the general way. dodo's conduct used not to be always blameless. but it looked private, and that was what i did object to. i daresay you think me a tiresome, impertinent, old woman." jack felt more strongly than ever that this woman could not help being well-bred in whatever she did. "it sounds disloyal to one's friends, i know," he said, "but it was because i really did care for both of them that i acted as i did. what will happen will be that he will continue to adore her, and by degrees she will begin to hate him. he will not commit suicide, and i don't think dodo will make a scandal. her regard for appearances alone would prevent that. it would be a confession of failure." mrs. vivian looked grave. "did you tell dodo this?" "more or less," he replied. "except about the scandal and the suicide." mrs. vivian's large, grey, serious eyes twinkled with some slight amusement. "i think while i was about it i should have told her that too," she said; "that's the sort of argument that appeals to dodo. you have to scream if you want her to listen to what she doesn't want to hear. but i don't think it was quite well judged of you, you know." "i think she ought to know it," said jack, "though i realise i ought to have been the last person to tell her, for several reasons." mrs. vivian looked at him inquiringly. "you mean for fear of her putting a wrong construction on it? i see," she said. jack felt that it could not have been more delicately done. "how did you know?" "oh," she said, "that is the kind of intuition which is the only consolation we women have for getting old. we are put on the shelf, no doubt, after a certain age, but we get a habit of squinting down into the room below. that is the second time i have shown myself a meddling old woman, and you have treated me very nicely both times. let us join the others. i see tea is ready." dodo meanwhile had walked chesterford off among the green cool woods that bordered the river. she had given jack's remarks a good deal of consideration, and, whether or no she felt that he was justified in them on present data, she determined that she would make the event falsify his predictions. dodo had an unlimited capacity for interfering in the course of destiny. she devoted herself to her aims, whatever they might be, with a wonderful singleness of purpose, and since it is a fact that one usually gets what one wants in this world, if one tries hard enough, it followed that up to this time she had, on the whole, usually got her way. but she was now dealing with an unknown quantity, which she could not gauge. she had confessed to jack her inability to understand what love meant, and it was with a certain sense of misgiving that she felt that her answers for the future would be expressed in terms of that unknown quantity "x." to dodo's concrete mind this was somewhat discouraging, but she determined to do her best to reduce things to an equation in which the value of "x" could be found in terms of some of those many symbols which she did know. dodo had an inexhaustible fund of vivacity, which was a very useful instrument to her; like a watch-key that fits all watches, she was able to apply it as required to very different pieces of mechanism. when she wished to do honour to a melancholy occasion, for instance, her vivacity turned any slight feeling of sorrow she had into hysterical weeping; when the occasion was joyful, it became a torrent of delightful nonsense. to-day the occasion was distinctly joyful. she had a large sense of success. chesterford was really a very desirable lover; his immense wealth answered exactly the requirements of dodo's wishes. furthermore, he was safe and easily satisfied; the day was charming; jack was there; she had had a very good lunch, and was shortly going to have a very good tea; and chesterford had given orders for his yacht to be in readiness to take them off for a delightful honeymoon, directly after their marriage--in short, all her circumstances were wholly satisfactory. she had said to him after lunch, as they were sitting on the grass, "come away into those delicious woods, and leave these stupid people here," and he was radiant in consequence, for, to tell the truth, she had been rather indulgent of his company than eager for it the last day or two. she was in the highest spirits as they strolled away. "oh do give me a cigarette," she said, as soon as they had got out of sight. "i didn't dare smoke with that vivian woman there. chesterford, i am frightened of her. she is as bad as the inquisition, or that odious man in browning who used to walk about, and tell the king if anything happened. i am sure she puts it down in a book whenever i say anything i shouldn't. you know that's so tantalising. it is a sort of challenge to be improper. chesterford, if you put down in a book anything i do wrong, i swear i shall go to the bad altogether." to chesterford this seemed the most attractive nonsense that ever flowed from female lips. "why, you can't do anything wrong, dodo," he said simply; "at least not what i think wrong. and what does it matter what other people think?" dodo patted his hand, and blew him a kiss approvingly. "that's quite right," she said; "bear that in mind and we shall never have a quarrel. chesterford, we won't quarrel at all, will we? everybody else does, i suppose, now and then, and that proves it's vulgar. mrs. vivian used to quarrel with her husband, so she's vulgar. oh, i'm so glad she's vulgar. i sha'n't care how much she looks at me now. bother! i believe it was only her husband that used to swear at her. never mind, he must have been vulgar to do that, and she must have vulgar tastes to have married a vulgar person. i don't think i'm vulgar, do you? really it's a tremendous relief to have found out that she's vulgar. but i am afraid i shall forget it when i see her again. you must remind me. you must point at her and say v, if you can manage it. or are you afraid of her too?" "oh, never mind mrs. vivian," said he, "she can wait." "that's what she's always doing," said dodo. "waiting and watching with large serious eyes. i can't think why she does it, for she doesn't make use of it afterwards. now when i know something discreditable of a person, if i dislike him, i tell everybody else, and if i like him, i tell him that i know all about it, and i am _so_ sorry for him. then he thinks you are charming and sympathetic, and you have a devoted admirer for life." chesterford laughed. he had no desire to interrupt this rapid monologue of dodo's. he was quite content to play the part of the greek chorus. "i'm going to sit down here," continued dodo. "do you mind my smoking cigarettes? i'm not sure that it is in good form, but i mean to make it so. i want to be the fashion. would you like your wife to be the fashion?" he bent over her as she sat with her head back, smiling up at him. "my darling," he said, "do you know, i really don't care a straw whether you are the fashion or not, as long as you are satisfied. you might stand on your head in piccadilly if you liked, and i would come and stand too. all i care about is that you are you, and that you have made me the happiest man on god's earth." dodo was conscious again of the presence of this unknown quantity. she would much prefer striking it out altogether; it seemed to have quite an unreasonable preponderance. chesterford did not usually make jokes, in fact she had never heard him make one before, and his remark about standing on his head seemed to be only accounted for by this perplexing factor. dodo had read about love in poems and novels, and had seen something of it, too, but it remained a puzzle to her. she hoped her calculations might not prove distressingly incorrect owing to this inconvenient factor. but she laughed with her habitual sincerity, and replied,-- "what a good idea; let's do it to-morrow morning. will ten suit you? we can let windows in all the houses round. i'm sure there would be a crowd to see us. it really would be interesting, though perhaps not a very practical thing to do. i wonder if mrs. vivian would come. she would put down a very large bad mark to me for that, but i shall tell her it was your suggestion." chesterford laughed with pure pleasure. "dodo," he said, "you are not fair on mrs. vivian. she is a very good woman." "oh, i don't doubt that," said dodo, "but, you see, being good doesn't necessarily make one a pleasant companion. now, i'm not a bit good, but you must confess you would rather talk to me than to the vivian." "oh, you are different," said he rapturously. "you are dodo." dodo smiled contentedly. this man was so easy to please. she had felt some slight dismay at jack's ill-omened prophecies, but jack was preposterously wrong about this. they rejoined the others in course of time. dodo made fearful ravages on the eatables, and after tea she suddenly announced,-- "mrs. vivian, i'm going to smoke a cigarette. do you feel dreadfully shocked?" mrs. vivian laughed. "my dear dodo, i should never venture to be shocked at anything you did. you are so complete that i should be afraid to spoil you utterly, if i tried to suggest corrections." dodo lit a cigarette with a slightly defiant air. mrs. vivian's manner had been entirely sincere, but she felt the same sort of resentment that a prisoner might feel if the executioner made sarcastic remarks to him. she looked on mrs. vivian as a sort of walking inquisition. "my darling dodo," murmured mrs. vane, "i do so wish you would, not smoke, it will ruin your teeth entirely." dodo turned to mrs. vivian. "that means you think it would be very easy to spoil me, as you call it." "not at all," said that lady. "i don't understand you, that's all, and i might be pulling out the key-stone of the arch unawares. not that i suppose your character depends upon your smoking." dodo leaned back and laughed. "oh, this is too dreadfully subtle," she exclaimed. "i want to unbend my mind. chesterford, come and talk to me, you are deliciously unbending." chapter four lord and lady chesterford were expected home on the th of december. the marriage took place late in august, and they had gone off on the yacht directly afterwards, in order to spend a few warm months in the mediterranean. dodo had written home occasionally to mrs. vane, and now and then to jack. to jack her letters had never been more than a word or two, simply saying that they were enjoying themselves enormously, and that jack had been hopelessly wrong. mrs. vane also had much reason to be satisfied. she had spent her autumn in a variety of fashionable watering-places, where her dresses had always been the awe and wonder of the town; she had met many acquaintances, to whom she had poured out her rapture over dodo's marriage; had declared that chesterford was most charming, and that he and dodo were quite another adam and eve in paradise, and that she was really quite jealous of dodo. when they left england, they had intended to spend the winter abroad and not come back till february, but early in december a telegram had arrived at winston, lord chesterford's country house, saying that they would be back in ten days. about the same time jack received a letter, saying that their change of plans was solely owing to the fact that dodo was rather tired of the sea, and the weather was bad, and that she had never been so happy in her life. dodo's eagerness to assure jack of this struck him as being in rather bad taste. she ought to have entirely ignored his warnings. the happiness of a newly-married woman ought to be so absorbing, as to make her be unaware of the existence of other people; and this consciousness in dodo of her triumphant superiority of knowledge, led him to suppose he was right rather than wrong. he was unfeignedly sorry not to be sure that she had been right. when he told dodo that he wished to be jealous of chesterford, he was quite sincere. since he could not have dodo himself, at any rate let her make someone happy. dodo also informed him that they were going to have a house-party that christmas and that he must come, and she had asked mrs. vivian, to show that she wasn't afraid of her any longer, and that maud was coming, and she wished jack would marry her. then followed a dozen other names belonging to dodo's private and particular set, who had all been rather disgusted at her marrying what they chose to call a philistine. it had been quite hoped that she would marry jack. jack was not a philistine at all, though the fact of his having proposed to her remained a secret. maud, on the other hand, was a philistine; and it was one of dodo's merits that she did not drop those who originally had claims on her, when she became the fashion. she was constantly trying to bring maud into notice, but maud resisted the most well-meant shoves. she had none of dodo's vivacity and talents; in fact, her talents lay chiefly in the direction of arranging the places at a dinner-party, and in doing a great deal of unnecessary worsted work. what happened to her worsted work nobody ever knew. it was chiefly remarkable for the predominance of its irregularities, and a suggestion of damaged goods about it, in consequence of much handling. to dodo it seemed an incredible stupidity that anyone should do worsted work, or, if they did do it, not do it well. she used to tell maud that it was done much more cheaply in shops, and much better. then maud would drop it for a time, and take to playing the piano, but that was even more oppressively stupid to dodo's mind than the worsted work. maud had a perfect genius for not letting her right hand know what her left hand was doing, a principle which was abhorrent to dodo in every application. the consequence of all this was, that dodo was apt to regard her sister as a failure, though she still, as in the present instance, liked giving maud what she considered a helping hand. it must be confessed that dodo's efforts were not altogether unselfish. she liked her environment to be as great a success as herself, as it thus added to her own completeness, just as a picture looks better in a good frame than in a shabby one. maud, however, had no desire to be a success. she was perfectly happy to sit in the background and do the worsted work. she longed to be let alone. at times she would make her escape to the iron works and try to cultivate the domestic virtues in attending to her father. she thought with a kind of envy of the daughters of country clergymen, whose mediocre piano-playing was invaluable to penny readings and village concerts, and for whose worsted work there was a constant demand, in view of old women and almshouses. she had hoped that dodo's slumming experiences would bring her into connection with this side of life, and had dispensed tea and buns with a kind of rapture on the occasion of dodo's tea-party, but her sister had dropped her slums, as we have seen, at this point, and maud was too shy and uninitiative to take them up alone. she had an excellent heart, but excellent hearts were out of place in mrs. vane's establishment. dodo had confessed her inability to deal with them. dodo's general invitation to jack was speedily followed by a special one from winston, naming the first week in january as the time of the party. jack was met on his arrival by chesterford, and as they drove back the latter gave him particulars about the party in the house. "they are chiefly dodo's friends," he said. "do you know, jack, except for you, i think i am rather afraid of dodo's friends, they are so dreadfully clever, you know. of course they are all very charming, but they talk about character. now i don't care to talk about character. i know a good man when i see him, and that's all that matters as far as i can judge. dodo was saying last night that her potentiality for good was really much stronger than her potentiality for evil, and that her potentiality for evil was only skin deep, and they all laughed, and said they didn't believe it. and dodo said, 'ask chesterford if it isn't,' and god only knows what i said." jack laughed. "poor old fellow," he said, "you and i will go to the smoking-room, and talk about nothing at all subtle. i don't like subtleties either." "ah, but they expect great things of you," said chesterford ruefully. "dodo was saying you were an apostle. are you an apostle, jack?" "oh, that's only a nickname of dodo's," he said, smiling. "but who are these dreadfully clever people?" "oh, there's ledgers--you know him, i suppose--and a miss edith staines, and a girl whom i don't know, called miss grantham, whom ledgers said, when she was out of the room last night, that he had 'discovered.' what he meant heaven knows. then there's maud, who is a nice girl. she went round to the keeper's with me this afternoon, and played with the baby. then there's bertie arbuthnot, and i think that's all." jack laughed. "i don't think we need mind them," he said. "we'll form a square to resist cavalry.". "bertie's the best of the lot," said chesterford, "and they laughed at him rather, i think. but he is quite unconscious of it." they drove on in silence a little way. then. chesterford said,-- "jack, dodo makes me the happiest of men. i am afraid sometimes that she is too clever, and wishes i was more so, but it makes no difference. last night, as i was in the smoking-room she sent to say she wanted to see me, and i went up. she said that she wanted to talk to me, now she had got rid of all those tiresome people, and said so many charming things that i got quite conceited, and had to stop her. i often wonder, jack, what i have done to deserve her. and she went on talking about our yachting, and those months in london when we were first engaged, and she told me to go on smoking, and she would have a cigarette too. and we sat on talking, till i saw she was tired, and then i went away, though he would hardly let me." this communication had only the effect of making jack rather uncomfortable. knowing what he did, he knew that this was not all genuine on dodo's part. it was obviously an effort to keep it up, to use a vulgar term. and since it was not all genuine, the doubt occurred as to whether any of it was. jack had a profound belief in dodo's dramatic talents. that the need for keeping it up had appeared already was an alarming symptom, but the real tragedy would begin on that day when dodo first failed to do so. and from that moment jack regarded his prophecy as certain to be fulfilled. the overture had begun, and in course of time the curtain would rise on a grim performance. they drove up to the door, and entered the large oak-panelled hall, hung all round with portraits of the family. the night was cold, and there was a fire sparkling in the wide, open grate. as they entered, an old collie, who was enjoying the fruits of a well-spent life on the hearthrug, stretched his great, tawny limbs, and shoved a welcoming nose into chesterford's hand. this produced heartburnings of the keenest order in the mind of a small fox-terrier pup, who consisted mainly of head and legs, which latter he evidently considered at present more as a preventive towards walking than an aid. being unable to reach his hand the puppy contented himself with sprawling over his boots, and making vague snaps at the collie. it was characteristic of chesterford that all animals liked him. he had a tender regard for the feelings of anything that was dependent on him. dodo thought this almost inexplicable. she disliked to see animals in pain, because they usually howled, but the dumb anguish of a dog who considers himself neglected conveyed nothing to her. from within a door to the right, came sounds of talking and laughter. there was something pathetic in the sight of this beautiful home, and its owner standing with his back to the fire, as jack divested himself of his coat. chesterford was so completely happy, so terribly unconscious of what jack felt sure was going on. he looked the model of the typical english gentleman, with his tall stature and well-bred face. jack remembered passing on the road a labourer who was turning into his cottage. the firelight had thrown a bright ray across the snow-covered road, and inside he had caught a momentary glimpse of the wife with a baby in her arms, and a couple of girls laying the table-cloth. he remembered afresh dodo's remark about waiting until the chimney smoked, and devoutly hoped that the chimney of this well-appointed house was in good order. chesterford led the way to the drawing-room door, and pushed it open for jack to enter. dodo was sitting at the tea-table, talking to some half-dozen people who were grouped round her. as jack entered, she rose and came towards him with a smile of welcome. "ah, jack," she said, "this is delightful; i am tremendously glad to see you! let's see, whom do you know? may i introduce you to miss grantham? mr. broxton. i think you know everybody else. chesterford, come here and sit by me at once. you've been an age away. i expect you've been getting into mischief." she wheeled a chair up for him, and planted him down in it. he looked radiantly happy. "now, jack," she went on, "tell us what you've been doing all these months. it's years since we saw you. i think you look all right. no signs of breaking down yet. i hoped you would have gone into a rapid consumption, because i was married, but it doesn't seem to have made any difference to anybody except chesterford and me. jack, don't you think i shall make an excellent matron? i shall get maud to teach me some of her crochet-stitches. have you ever been here before? chesterford, you shut it up, didn't you, for several years, until you thought of bringing me here? sugar, jack? two lumps? chesterford, you mustn't eat sugar, you're getting quite fat already. you must obey me, you know. you promised to love, honour and obey. oh, no; i did that. however, sugar is bad for you." "dodo keeps a tight hand on me, you see," said chesterford, from the depths of his chair. "dodo, give me the sugar, or we shall quarrel." dodo laughed charmingly. "he would quarrel with his own wife for a lump of sugar," said dodo dramatically; "but she won't quarrel with him. take it then." she glanced at jack for a moment as she said this, but jack was talking to miss grantham, and either did not see, or did not seem to. jack had a pleasant impression of light hair, dark grey eyes, and a very fair complexion. but somehow it produced no more effect on him than do those classical profiles which are commoner on the lids of chocolate boxes than elsewhere. her "discoverer" was sitting in a chair next her, talking to her with something of the air of a showman exhibiting the tricks of his performing bear. his manner seemed to say, "see what an intelligent animal." the full sublimity of lord ledgers' remark had not struck him till that moment. miss grantham was delivering herself of a variety of opinions in a high, penetrating voice. "oh, did you never hear him sing last year?" she was saying to lord ledgers. "mr. broxton, you must have heard him. he has the most lovely voice. he simply sings into your inside. you feel as if someone had got hold of your heart, and was stroking it. don't you know how some sounds produce that effect? i went with dodo once. she simply wept floods, but i was too far gone for that. he had put a little stopper on my tear bottle, and though i was dying to cry, i couldn't." "i always wonder how sorry we are when we cry," said lord ledgers in a smooth, low voice. "it always strikes me that people who don't cry probably feel most." "oh, you are a horrid, unfeeling monster," remarked miss grantham; "that's what comes of being a man. just because you are not in the habit of crying yourself, you think that you have all the emotions, but stoically repress them. now i cultivate emotions. i would walk ten miles any day in order to have an emotion. wouldn't you, mr. broxton?" "it obviously depends on what sort of emotion i should find when i walked there," said jack. "there are some emotions that i would walk further to avoid." "oh, of course, the common emotions, 'the litany things,' as dodo calls them," said miss grantham, dismissing them lightly with a wave of her hand. "but what i like is a nice little sad emotion that makes you feel so melancholy you don't know what to do with yourself. i don't mean deaths and that sort of thing, but seeing someone you love being dreadfully unhappy and extremely prosperous at the same time." "but it's rather expensive for the people you love," said jack. "oh, we must all make sacrifices," said miss grantham. "it's quite worth while if you gratify your friends. i would not mind being acutely unhappy, if i could dissect my own emotions, and have them photographed and sent round to my friends." "what a charming album we might all make," said lord ledgers. "page . miss grantham's heart in the acute stage. page . mortification setting in. page . the lachrymatory gland permanently closed by a tenor voice." "poor old chesterford," thought jack, "this is rather hard on him." but chesterford was not to be pitied just now, for dodo was devoting her exclusive conversation to him in defiance of her duties as hostess. she was recounting to him how she had spent every moment of his absence at the station. certainly she was keeping it up magnificently at present. "and mrs. vivian comes to-morrow," she was saying. "you like her, don't you, chesterford? you must be awfully good to her, and take her to see all the drunken idlers in the village. that will be dear of you. it's just what she likes. she has sort of passion for drunken cabmen, who stamp on their wives. if you stamped on me a little every evening, she would cultivate you to any extent. shall i lie down on the floor for you to begin?" chesterford leant back in his chair in a kind of ecstasy. "ah, dodo," he said, "you are wonderfully good to me. but i must go and write two notes before dinner; and you must amuse your guests. i am very glad jack has come. he is a very good chap. but don't make him an apostle." dodo laughed. "i shall make a little golden hoop for him like the apostles in the arundels, and another for you, and when nobody else is there you can take them off, and play hoops with them. i expect the apostles did that when they went for a walk. you couldn't wear it round your hat, could you?" miss grantham instantly annexed dodo. "dodo," she said, "come and take my part. these gentlemen say you shouldn't cultivate emotions." "no, not that quite," corrected jack. "i said it was expensive for your friends if they had to make themselves miserable, in order to afford food for your emotions." "now, isn't that selfish?" said miss grantham, with the air of a martyr at the stake. "here am i ready to be drawn and quartered for anyone's amusement, and you tell me you are sorry for your part, but that it costs too much. maud, come off that sofa, and take up the daggers for a too unselfish woman." "i expect i don't know much about these things," said maud. "no; maud would not go further than wrapping herself in a winding-sheet of blue worsted," remarked dodo incisively. maud flushed a little. "oh, dodo!" she exclaimed deprecatingly. "it's no use hitting maud," said dodo pensively. "you might as well hit a feather bed. now, if you hit jack, he will hit back." "well, i'd prefer you hit me," said jack, "than that you should hit anyone who can't hit back." "can't you see that i have determined not to hit feather beds," said dodo in a low tone. "really, jack, you do me an injustice." jack looked up at her quickly. "do you say that already?" he asked. "oh, if you are going to whisper, i shall whisper too," remarked miss grantham calmly. "lord ledgers, i want to tell you a secret." "i was only telling. jack he was stupid," said dodo. "i thought i would spare him before you all, but i see i have to explain. have you seen bertie yet, jack? he's in the smoking-room, i think. edith staines is probably there too. she always smokes after tea, and chesterford doesn't like it in the drawing-room. you know her, don't you? she's writing a symphony or something, and she's no use except at meal-times. i expect she will play it us afterwards. we must make bertie sing too. there's the dressing-bell. i'm going to be gorgeous to-night in honour of you, jack." jack found himself making a quantity of reflections, when he retired to his room that night. he became aware that he had enjoyed himself more that evening than he had done for a very long time. he questioned himself as to when he had enjoyed himself so much, and he was distinctly perturbed to find that the answer was, when he had last spent an evening with dodo. he had formed an excellent habit of being exactly honest with himself, and he concluded that dodo's presence had been the cause of it. it was a very unpleasant blow to him. he had accepted her refusal with an honest determination to get over it. he had not moped, nor pined, nor striven, nor cried. he had no intentions of dying of a broken heart, but the stubborn fact remained that dodo exercised an unpleasantly strong influence over him. he could have repeated without effort all she had said that night. she had not said anything particularly remarkable, but somehow he felt that the most striking utterances of other men and women would not have produced any such effect on him. it really was very inconvenient. dodo had married a man who adored her, for whom she did not care two pins' heads, and this man was one of his oldest friends. decidedly there was something left-handed about this particular disposition of destiny. and the worst of it was that chesterford was being hopelessly duped. about that he felt no doubt. dodo's acting was so remarkably life-like, that he mistook it at present for reality. but the play must end some time, and the sequel was too dark and involved to be lightly followed out. he could not conceive why this elaborate drama on dodo's part did not disgust him more. he wished he had been deceived by it himself, but having been behind the scenes, he had seen dodo, as it were, in the green-room, putting on the rouge and powder. but failing that, he wished that a wholesome impulse of disgust and contempt had superseded his previous feelings with regard to her. but he believed with her that under the circumstances it was the best thing to do. the marriage was a grand mistake, true, but given that, was not this simply so many weeks of unhappiness saved? then he had an immense pity for dodo's original mistake. she had told him once that she was no more responsible for her philosophy than for the fact that she happened to be five foot eight in height, and had black eyes and black hair. "it was nature's doing," she had said; "go and quarrel with her, but don't blame me. if i had made myself, i should have given myself a high ideal; i should have had something to live up to. now, i have no ideal. the whole system of things seems to me such an immense puzzle, that i have given up trying to find a solution. i know what i like, and what i dislike. can you blame me for choosing the one, and avoiding the other? i like wealth and success, and society and admiration. in a degree i have secured them, and the more i secure them the more reason i have to be satisfied. to do otherwise would be like putting on boots that were too large for me--they are excellent for other people, but not for me. i cannot accept ideals that i don't feel. i can understand them, and i can sympathise with them, and i can and do wish they were mine; but, as nature has denied me them, i must make the best of what i have." jack felt hopeless against this kind of reasoning, and angry with himself for letting this woman have such dominion over him. in a measure he felt himself capable of views bounded by a horizon not so selfishly fatalistic, and the idea of the smoking chimney in the cottage did not seem to matter, provided that dodo was sitting on the other side of the hearthrug. he would willingly have sacrificed anything else, to allow himself to give full reins to his thought on this point. but the grand barrier which stood between him and dodo, was not so much her refusal of him, but the existence of her husband. at this jack pulled himself up sharp. there are certain feelings of loyalty that still rank above all other emotions. miss grantham would certainly have classed such among the litany things. there was nothing heroic about it. it simply consisted in a sturdy refusal to transgress, even in vaguest thought, a code which deals with the most ordinary and commonplace virtues and vices. there is nothing heroic in a street boy passing by the baker's cart without a grab at the loaves, and it sounds almost puritanical to forbid him to cast a glance at them, or inhale a sniff of their warm fragrance. "certainly this side of morality is remarkably dull," thought jack; and the worst of it is, that it is not only dull but difficult. with practice most of us could become a simeon stylites, provided we are gifted with a steady head, and a constitution that defies showers. it is these commonplace acts of loyalty, the ordinary and rational demands of friendship and society, that are so dreadfully taxing to most of us who have the misfortune not to be born saints. then jack began to feel ill-used. "why the deuce should chesterford be born a marquis and not i? what has he done to have a title and fortune and dodo that i have been given the chance to do?" it struck him that his reflections were deplorably commonplace, and that his position ought to be made much more of. he wondered whether this sort of situation was always so flat. in novels there is always a touch of the heroic in the faithful friend who is loyal to his cousin, and steadily avoids his cousin's wife; but here he is in identically the same situation, feeling not at all heroic, but only discontented and quarrelsome with this ill-managed world. decidedly he would go to bed. owing to a certain habit that he had formed early in life he slept soundly, and morning found him not only alive, but remarkably well and hearty, and with a certain eagerness to follow up what he had thought out on the previous night. he was in an excellently managed household, which imposed no rules on its inhabitants except that they should do what they felt most inclined to do; he was in congenial company, and his digestion was good. it is distressing how important those material matters are to us. the deeper emotions do but form a kind of background to our coarser needs. we come down in the morning feeling rather miserable, but we eat an excellent breakfast, and, in spite of ourselves, we are obliged to confess that we feel distinctly better. as jack crossed the hall, he met a footman carrying a breakfast tray into the drawing-room. the door was half open, and there came from within the sounds of vigorous piano-playing, and now and then a bar or two of music sung in a rich, alto voice. these tokens seemed to indicate that miss edith staines was taking her breakfast at the piano. jack found himself smiling at the thought; it was a great treat to find anyone so uniformly in character as miss staines evidently was. he turned into the dining-room, where he found miss grantham sitting at the table alone. dodo was lolling in a great chair by the fire, and there were signs that lord chesterford had already breakfasted. dodo was nursing a little persian kitten with immense tenderness. apparently she had been disagreeing with miss grantham on some point, and had made the kitten into a sort of arbitrator. "oh, you dear kitten," she was saying, "you must agree with me, if you think it over. now, supposing you were very fond of a tom-cat that had only the woodshed to lie in, and another very presentable torn belonging to the queen came--ah, jack, here you are. chesterford's breakfasted, and there's going to be a shoot to-day over the home covers. edith is composing and breakfasting. she says she has--an idea. so grantie and i are going to bring you lunch to the keeper's cottage at half-past one." "and bertie?" asked jack. "oh, you must get edith to tell you what bertie's going to do. perhaps she'll want him to turn over the pages for her, or give her spoonfuls of egg and bacon, while she does her music. he's in the drawing-room now. edith's appropriated him. she usually does appropriate somebody. we told chesterford to get bertie to come if possible, but edith's leave is necessary. maud is going to meet mrs. vivian, who comes this afternoon, and, as she has some shopping to do, she will lunch in harchester, and drive out afterwards; ledgers has had a telegram, and has made a blasphemous departure for town. he comes back this evening." "well, dodo," remarked miss grantham, "now let's go on with what we were discussing. mr. broxton will make a much better umpire than the kitten." "oh, shut up, grantie," said dodo, with fine candour, "jack agrees with neither of us." "tell me what it is," said jack, "and then i'll promise to agree with somebody." "i don't care about your agreeing with me," said miss grantham. "i know i'm right, so it doesn't signify what anybody else thinks." miss grantham, it may be noticed, showed some signs of being ruffled: "oh, now, grantie's angry," said dodo. "grantie, do be amiable. call her grantie, jack," she added with feeling. "dodo, darling," said miss grantham, "you're really foolish, now and then. i'm perfectly amiable. but, you know, if you don't care for a man at all, and he does care for you a great deal, it's sure to be a failure. i can't think of any instance just now, but i know i'm right." dodo looked up and caught jack's eye for a moment. then she turned to miss grantham. "dear grantie, please shut up. it's no use trying to convince me. i know a case in point just the other way, but i am not at liberty to mention it. am i, jack?" "if you mean the same as the case i'm thinking of, certainly not," said jack. "well, i'm sure this is very pleasant for me," said miss grantham, in high, cool tones. at this moment a shrill voice called dodo from the drawing-room. "dodo, dodo," it cried, "the man brought me two tepid poached eggs! do send me something else. is there such a thing as a grilled bone?" these remarks were speedily followed up by the appearance of miss staines at the dining-room door. in one hand she held the despised eggs, in the other a quire of music paper. behind her followed a footman with her breakfast-tray, in excusable ignorance as to what was required of him. "dear dodo," she went on, "you know when i'm composing a symphony i want something more exciting than two poached eggs. mr. broxton, i know, will take my side. you couldn't eat poached eggs at a ball--could you? they might do very well for a funeral march or a nocturne, but they won't do for a symphony, especially for the scherzo. a brandy-and-soda and a grilled bone is what one really wants for a scherzo, only that would be quite out of the question." edith staines talked in a loud, determined voice, and emphasised her points with little dashes and nourishes of the dish of poached eggs. at this moment one of them flew on to the floor and exploded. but it is an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and at any rate this relieved the footman from his state of indecision. his immediate mission was clearly to remove it. dodo threw herself back in her chair with a peal of laughter. "go on, go on," she cried, "you are too splendid. tell us what you write the presto on." "i can't waste another moment," said edith. "i'm in the middle of the most entrancing motif, which is working out beautifully. do you mind my smoking in the drawing-room? i am awfully sorry, but it makes all the difference to my work. burn a little incense there afterwards. do send me a bone, dodo. come and hear me play the scherzo later on. it's the best thing i've ever done. oh, by the way, i telegraphed to herr truffen to come to-morrow--he's my conductor, you know. you can put him up in the village or the coal-hole, if you like. he's quite happy if he gets enough beer. he's my german conductor, you know. i made him entirely. i took him to the princess the other day when i was at aix, and we all had beer together in the verandah of the beau site. you'll be amused with him." "oh, rather," said dodo; "that will be all right. he can sleep in the house. will he come early to-morrow? let's see--to-morrow's sunday. edith, i've got an idea. we'll have a dear little service in the house--we can't go to church if it snows--and you shall play your mass, and herr what's-his-name shall conduct, and bertie, and grantie, and you and i will sing. won't it be lovely? you and i will settle all that this afternoon. telegraph to truffler, or whatever his name is, to come by the eight-twenty. then he'll be here by twelve, and we'll have the service at a quarter past." "dodo, that will be grand," said edith. "i can't wait now. good-bye. hurry up my breakfast--i'm awfully sharp-set." edith went back to the drawing-room, whistling in a particularly shrill manner. "_oh_, did you ever!" said dodo, who was laughing feebly in her chair. "edith really is splendid. she is so dreadfully sure of herself, and she tells you so. and she does talk so loud--it goes right through your head like a chirping canary. chesterford can't bear her." jack laughed. "she was giving him advice about the management of his kennels at dinner last night," he said. "i heard her say to him impressively, as she left the room, 'try brimstone.' it took chesterford at least five minutes to recover. he was dreadfully depressed." "he must take mrs. vivian in to-night," said dodo. "you'll hear them talking about slums, and over-crowding, and marriage among minors, and the best cure for dipsomaniacs. the other night they were talking about someone called 'charlie,' affectionately but gravely, and i supposed they meant your brother, jack, but it was the second laundress's young man. oh, they shook their heads over him." "i don't think common people are at all interesting," said miss grantham. "they only think about things to eat, and heaven, and three aces, and funerals." she had by this time finished her breakfast, and stood warming her back in a gentlemanly manner by the fire. the door opened and lord chesterford came in. "morning, jack," he said, "what a lazy chap you are. it's half-past ten, and you're still breakfasting. dodo, what a beastly smell of smoke." "oh, it's edith," remarked dodo. "you mustn't mind her, dear. you know she's doing a symphony, and she has to smoke to keep the inspiration going. dear old boy, you are so sweet about these things; you've never made a fuss since i knew you first. you look very nice this morning. i wish i could dress in a homespun norfolk jacket and knickerbockers. grantie and i are going to bring you lunch. what should you like? you'd better have some champagne. don't step in that egg, dear; it will make your nice brown boots all beastly. it's awfully cold. you'd better have two bottles. tell raikes to send you two. chesterford, i wish you'd tell raikes to cut off the end of his nose. i'm always afraid he'll hit me with it when he hands things. he might have it grafted into his chin, you know; he hasn't got any chin. jack, have you finished? yes, you'd better start. we'll meet you at the bothy. i'll go and ask edith if she can spare bertie." "what does she want bertie for?" said chesterford. "oh, i expect she'll let him come," remarked dodo; "she's really busy this morning. she's been composing since a quarter past eight." dodo went across the hall and opened the drawing-room door. edith was completely absorbed in her work. the grilled bone lay untouched on a small table by the piano. bertie was sitting before the fire. "bertie," said dodo, "are you coming shooting?" this woke edith up. "oh, it's splendid," she said. "dodo, listen to this." she ran her hands over the piano, and then broke out into a quick, rippling scherzo. the music flew on, as if all the winds of heaven were blowing it; then it slowed down, halted a moment, and repeated itself till dodo burst out: "oh, edith, it's lovely! i want to dance." she wheeled a table out of the way, kicked a chair across the room, and began turning and twisting with breathless rapidity. her graceful figure looked admirable in the quick movements of her impromptu dance. bertie thought he had never seen anything so deliciously fresh. dodo danced with peculiar abandon. every inch of her moved in perfect time and harmony to the music. she had caught up a thin, indian shawl from one of the sofas, and passed it behind her back, round her head, this way and that, bending, till at one moment it swept the ground in front of her, at another flew in beautiful curves high above her head, till at last the music stopped, and she threw herself down exhausted in an arm-chair. "oh, that was glorious," she panted. "edith, you are a genius. i never felt like that before. i didn't dance at all, it was the music that danced, and pulled me along with it." "that was the best compliment my music has ever received," said edith. "that scherzo was meant to make you want to dance. now, dodo, could i have done that after eating two poached eggs?" "you may have grilled bones seven times a day," said dodo, "if you'll compose another scherzo." "i wanted a name for the symphony," said edith, "and i shall call it the 'dodo.' that's a great honour, dodo. now, if you only feel miserable during the 'andante,' i shall be satisfied. but you came about something else, i forget what." "oh, about bertie. is he coming shooting?". "i wish it was right for women to shoot," said edith. "i do shoot when i'm at home, and there's no one there. anyhow i couldn't to-day. i must finish this. dodo, if you are going to take lunch with them, i'll come with you, if you don't go too early. you know this music makes me perfectly wild, but it can't be done on poached eggs. now set me down at the handel festival, and i'll be content with high, tea--cold meat and muffins, you know. handel always reminds me of high tea, particularly the muffins. he must have written the 'messiah' between tea and dinner on sunday evening, after an afternoon service in summer. i've often thought of taking the salvation army hymn-book and working the tunes up into fugual choruses, and publishing them as a lost work of handel's, noah, or zebedee's children, or the five foolish virgins. i don't believe anyone would know the difference." dodo was turning over the leaves of edith's score book. "i give it up," she said at last; "you are such a jumble of opposites. you sit down and write a sanctus, which makes one feel as if one wants to be a roman catholic archbishop, and all the time you are smoking cigarettes and eating grilled bone." "oh, everyone's a jumble of opposites," said edith, "when you come to look at them. it's only because my opposites are superficial, that you notice them. a sanctus is only a form of expression for thoughts which everyone has, even though their tastes appear to lie in the music-hall line; and music is an intelligible way of expressing these thoughts. most people are born dumb with regard to their emotions, and you therefore conclude that they haven't got any, or that they are expressed by their ordinary actions." "no, it's not that," said dodo. "what i mean is that your sanctus emphasises an emotion i should think you felt very little." "i!" said edith with surprise. "my dear dodo, you surely know me better than that. just because i don't believe that grilled bones are necessarily inconsistent with deep religious feeling, you assume that i haven't got the feeling." dodo laughed. "i suppose one associates the champions of religion with proselytising," she said. "you don't proselytise, you know." "no artist does," said edith; "it's their business to produce--to give the world an opportunity of forming conclusions, not to preach their own conclusions to the world." "yes; but your music is the expression of your conclusions, isn't it?" "yes, but i don't argue about it, and try to convert the world to it. if someone says to me, 'i don't know what you mean! handel seems to me infinitely more satisfactory, i can understand him,' i simply say, 'for heaven's sake, then, why don't you go to hear handel? why leave a creed that satisfies you?' music is a conviction, but handel's music has nothing to do with my convictions, nor mine with handel's." edith sat down sternly, and buried herself in heir convictions. chapter five it was a perfect winter's day, and when, two hours afterwards, dodo and the others drove off to meet the shooting-party, the grass in the shadow was still crisp with the light, hoar frost, but where the sun had touched it, the fields were covered with a moist radiance. it had just begun to melt the little pieces of ice that hung from the bare, pendulous twigs of the birch-trees, and send them, shivering to the ground. through the brown bracken you could hear the startled scuttle of the rabbit, or the quick tapping of a pheasant, who had realised that schemes were on foot against him. a night of hard frost had turned the wheel-ruts into little waves and billows of frozen mud, which the carriage wheels levelled as they passed over them. they caught up the shooting party shortly before lunch, and, as it was cold, edith and dodo got out, leaving miss grantham, who preferred being cold to walking under any circumstances, to gather up the extra rugs round her. "see that there's a good fire, grantie," called dodo after her, "and tell them to have the champagne opened." the sight of abundant game was too much for edith, and, as lord chesterford fell out of line to join dodo, she asked him if she might have a couple of shots. the keeper's face expressed some reasonable surprise when he observed edith snapping the cartridges into her gun with a practised hand. his previous views with regard to women in connection with guns were based upon the idea that most women screamed, when they saw a gun, and considered it a purely unaccountable weapon, which might go off without the least encouragement or warning, and devastate the country for miles round. he was still more surprised when he saw her pick off a couple of pheasants with precision and deadliness of aim. she gave her gun back to lord chesterford as they neared the lodge, and volunteered to join them after lunch for an hour, if they didn't mind. chesterford stole an appealing glance, at dodo, who, however, only gave him a half-amused, half-pitying look, and nodded assent. "the worst of it is," said edith, "i care for such lots of things. there's my music, and then there's any sort of game--have you ever seen me play tennis?--and there isn't time for everything. i am a musician, and a good shot, and an excellent rider, and a woman, and heaps of other things. it isn't conceit when i say so--i simply know it." dodo laughed. "well, you know, edith, you're not modest. your worst enemies don't accuse you of that. i don't mean to say that i am, for that matter. did you ever play, the game of marking people for beauty, and modesty, and cleverness, and so on? we played it here the night before you came, and you didn't get a single mark from anybody for modesty. i only got eleven, and five of those were from chesterford, and six from myself. but i don't believe your husband will ever give you five. you see, bertie didn't give you any, if you're thinking of marrying him." "oh, i'm not going to marry anybody," said edith. "you know i get frightfully attached to someone about three times a week, and after that never think of any of them again. it isn't that i get tired of them, but somebody else turns up, and i want to know him too. there are usually several good points about everyone, and they show those to new acquaintances first; after that, you find something in them you don't like, so the best thing is to try somebody else." "oh, that depends on the people," said dodo, meditatively. "some people wear well, you know, and those improve on acquaintance. now i don't. the first time a man sees me, he usually thinks i'm charming, and sympathetic, and lively. well, so i am, to do myself justice. that remains all through. but it turns out that i've got a bad temper, that i smoke and swear, and only amuse myself. then they begin to think they rated me too high at first, and if they happen to be people who wear well themselves, it is just then that you begin to like them, which is annoying. so one goes on, disgusting the people one wants to like, and pleasing people whom one doesn't like at all. it's fate, i suppose." dodo plucked a piece of dead bracken, and pulled it to bits with a somewhat serious air. "you oughtn't to complain, dodo," said edith. "you're married to a man who, i am sure, wears well, as you call it, though it's a dreadfully coarse expression, and he doesn't seem to get tired of you. i always wonder if it's really worth while trotting oneself out or analysing one's nature in this way. i don't think it is. it makes one feel small and stupid." "ah, but it's better to do it yourself, than to feel that other people think you small and stupid," said dodo. "that's disagreeable, if you like. wait till mrs. vivian comes, and she'll do it for you. she's the only person who makes me feel really cheap--about three-halfpence a dozen, including the box." "oh, but she won't make me feel small," said edith coolly, "because i'm not small really. it's only myself that makes me feel small." "i don't think i should call you morbidly modest," said dodo. "but here's the keeper's cottage. i'm awfully hungry. i hope they've brought some _pâté,_ don't you like _pâté_? of course one's very sorry for the poor, diseased goose with a bad inside, but there are so many other things to think about besides diseased geese, that it doesn't signify much. come on, chesterford, they can count the dead things afterwards. grantie's waiting. jack, pick up that pheasant by you. have you shot well? look at the sun through those fir-trees--isn't it lovely? edith, why aren't we two nice, little simple painters who could sit down, and be happy to paint that, instead of turning ourselves inside out? but, after all, you know, one is much more interesting than anybody or anything else, at least i am. aren't you? what a blessing it is one didn't happen to be born a fool!" dodo was sitting alone late in the afternoon. the shooting-party had come back, and dispersed to their rooms to wash and dress. "you all look remarkably dirty and funny," dodo had said when they came in, "and you had better have tea sent up to you. does shooting bring on the inspiration, edith? take a bath." edith had gone up to her room, after insisting on having two of dodo's bottles of eau-de-cologne in her hot bath. "there is nothing so refreshing," she said, "and you come out feeling like a goddess." certainly edith looked anything but a goddess just now. her hat was pushed rakishly on to the side of her head, there was a suggestion of missing hair-pins about her hair; she wafted with her about the room a fine odour of tobacco and gunpowder; she had burned her dress with a fusee head that had fallen off; her boots were large and unlaced, and curiously dirty, and her hands were black with smoke and oil, and had a sort of trimming in the way of small feathers and little patches of blood. decidedly, if she came out feeling or looking like a goddess, the prescription ought to want no more convincing testimonial. but she insisted she had never enjoyed herself so much, she talked, and screamed, and laughed as if nothing serious had occurred since breakfast. as dodo sat in the drawing-room, opening a few letters and skipping all except the shortest paragraphs in the _times_, she heard the noise of wheels outside, and hurried into the hall to meet mrs. vivian. somehow she looked forward to mrs. vivian's coming with a good deal of pleasure and interest. she was aware that another strain in the house might be advisable. bertie and jack, and miss grantham and edith, were all somewhat on the same lines. personally, she very much preferred those lines; and it was chiefly for her husband's sake that she wanted the new arrival. lord chesterford had done his duty nobly, but dodo's observant eye saw how great an effort it was to him; at lunch he had been silent, at tea even more so. dodo acknowledged that edith had relieved the party from any sense of the necessity of supporting conversation, but it was obvious to her that chesterford was hopelessly out of his element, and she felt a keen desire to please him. she had sat by him after lunch, as they smoked and talked, before resuming the shooting, and dodo had patted his hand and called him a "dear old darling" when nobody happened to be listening, but she had a distinct sense of effort all day in attending to him, and enjoying the company of the others as much as she wished. there was certainly a want of balance in the party, and mrs. vivian's weight would tend to keep things even. dodo had even aroused herself to a spasmodic interest in the new curate, but lord chesterford had exhibited such unmistakable surprise at this new departure, that she at once fell back on the easier and simpler expedient of blowing smoke rings at him, and drinking out of the same glass by mistake. mrs. vivian was extremely gracious, and apparently very much pleased to see dodo. she kissed her on both cheeks, and shook both her hands, and said what a pleasant drive she had had with dear maud, and she hoped lord chesterford was as well and happy as dodo appeared to be, and they both deserved to be. "and you must have a great talk with me, dodo," she said, "and tell me all about your honeymoon." dodo was pleased and rather flattered. apparently mrs. vivian had left off thinking she was very small. anyhow, it was a good thing to have her. lord chesterford would be pleased to see her, and he was building some charming almshouses for old women, who appeared to dodo to be supremely uninteresting and very ugly. dodo had a deep-rooted dislike for ugly things, unless they amused her very much. she could not bear babies. babies had no profiles, which seemed to her a very lamentable deficiency, and they were not nearly so nice to play with as kittens, and they always howled, unless they were eating or sleeping. but mrs. vivian seemed to revel in ugly things. she was always talking to drunken cabmen, or workhouse people, or dirty little boys who played in the gutter. dodo's cometic interest in the east end had been entirely due to her. that lady had a masterly and efficient way of managing, that won dodo's immediate admiration, and had overcome for the moment her distaste for the necessary ugliness. anything masterly always found a sympathetic audience in dodo. success was of such paramount importance in her eyes, that even a successful organiser of days in the country for match-girls was to be admired, and even copied, provided the other circumstances of success were not too expensive. mrs. vivian was a complete and immediate success on this occasion. dodo made a quantity of mental notes on the best way to behave, when you have the misfortune to become middle-aged and rather plain. everyone who already knew her seemed to consider her arrival as the last drop in their cup of happiness. lord chesterford, on entering the room, had said, "my dear mrs. vivian, this is too delightful of you. we are all charmed to see you," and he had sat down by her, and quite seemed to forget that dodo was sitting on the other side of the fire. jack also had, so to speak, flown into her arms. dodo immediately resolved to make a friend of her; a person who could be as popular among the aristocracy as she was among cabmen was distinctly a person to cultivate. she decidedly wanted the receipt. "it is so good of you, dodo, to ask me like this," said mrs. vivian, when dodo went and sat by her. "it always seems to me a great compliment to ask people quietly to your house when only a few friends are there. if you have a great houseful of people, it does not matter much whom you ask, but i mean to take this as a sign that you consider me an old friend." dodo was always quick at seeing what was required of her. "of course i do," she answered. "who are my old friends if you are not?" "that is so nice of you," said mrs. vivian. "i want to have a long talk with you, and learn all about you. i am going to stay with your mother next week, and she will never forgive me unless i give a full and satisfactory account of you. satisfactory it cannot help being." she looked across to lord chesterford, who was talking to miss grantham, and laughing politely at her apostolic jokes. "oh, dodo, you ought to be very happy!" dodo felt that this was rather like the ten minutes before dinner. she had a vague idea of telling chesterford to sound the gong, but she was skilled at glances with meaning, and she resorted to this method. "lord chesterford tells me you have miss staines with you," continued mrs. vivian. "i am so anxious to meet her. she has a wonderful gift for music, i hear." at this moment the sound of hurrying feet was heard in the hall. the drawing-room door flew open and edith entered. dodo laughed inwardly and hopelessly. edith began to talk at the top of her voice, before, she was fairly inside the room. "dodo, dodo," she screamed, "we must settle about the service at once. i have heard from herr truffen, and he, will be here by twelve; and we must have everything ready, and we'd better do my mass in g flat; on the whole it's the easiest. i suppose you couldn't hire four or five french horns in the village. if you could, we might do the one in a; but we must have them for the gloria. we must have a practice to-night. have you got any musical footmen or housemaids?" "mrs. vivian, miss edith staines," remarked dodo sweetly. there was a moment's silence, and then dodo broke down. "oh, edith, you are a good chap; isn't she, mrs. vivian? mrs. vivian was just talking about you, and you came in so opportunely that, until you began talking about masses, i really thought you must be the other thing. oh, chesterford, i haven't told you. we're going to have a delicious little service in the drawing-room to-morrow morning, and we are going to sing a mass. grantie can't possibly go to church in this weather, and jack and bertie are not as good about it as they might be, so you see it would be really removing the temptation of not going to church if we have church here, and can you sing, mrs. vivian? will you come, chesterford? you might go to church first, and then come in here afterwards; that will be two services. how dreadfully unbearably conceited you will be all the afternoon. you might read the second lesson for us; no, i think i shall read both. yes, edith, i'll come in a few minutes. i don't know of any musical footmen. you might have them up one by one and make them sing scales, and jack can try the housemaids' voices. i'm awfully glad herr truffen is coming. he's a tremendous german swell, mrs. vivian, and conducts at the crystal palace, and st. james's, and st. paul's and everywhere." "that will be charming," said mrs. vivian. "i shall certainly avail myself of it, dodo, if i may, only i think i shall go to church first with lord chesterford. he has promised to show me all his schemes for the village. i think maud means to go too. but if you will let me, i will go to my room, and write a few letters, and then you will be free to practise. it will be a great pleasure to hear your mass, miss staines; i am very fortunate in coming just in time." "really, dodo," said edith, "you ought to cultivate the musical talents of your establishment. last winter i was in the pyrenees, and there was only an old sexton, who was also a charcoal burner, and my maid, and charlie and his valet and his wife, but we had magnificent music, and a midnight service on new year's eve. charlie took tenor, and sybil treble, and i alto, and the sexton bass. you have no idea of the trouble it was to get the sexton to learn his part. i had to hunt him up in those little brutal sheds, and thrust the book into his hand, and forbid him to eat chestnuts, and force him to drink porter and spanish liquorice. come on; let's begin." the practice went off satisfactorily, and edith expressed herself as pleased. she and dodo then had a talk to arrange what dodo called the "play-bill." dodo had arranged to read the lessons, and wished to make a small selection of prayers, but there edith put her foot down. "no, dodo," she said, "you're taking a wrong idea of it. i don't believe you're serious. now i am. i want to do this mass because i believe we can do it well, but i haven't the least confidence in your reading prayers well, or caring at all about them. i am rather in doubt about the lessons, but i suppose we can have those." it was distinctly news to dodo that edith was serious. for herself she had only wished to have a nice little amusement for sunday morning, which, in dodo's experience, was rather a tiresome time if you stopped at home, but on the whole preferable there than at a country church. but edith was really in earnest whatever she did, whether it was shooting, or music, or playing lawn-tennis. frivolity, was the one charge she could not brook for a moment. her amusements might, indeed, be frivolous, but she did them with all her heart. so the service was arranged to consist of a lesson, a mass, and another lesson. the choice of lessons was left to dodo. accordingly, next morning lord chesterford and mrs. vivian drove off with maud to eleven o'clock church, leaving the others still at breakfast. after that meal was over dodo announced she was going to get the drawing-room ready. "we must move all the sofas out of the room, because they don't look religious," she said; "and i shall cover up the picture of venus and adonis. i have got the sweetest little praying-table upstairs, and a skull. do you think we'd better have the skull, edith? i think it makes one feel sunday-like. i shall put the praying-table in the window, and shall read the lessons from there. perhaps the skull might frighten old truffler. i have found two dreadfully nice lessons. i quite forgot the bible was such a good book. i think i shall go on with it. one of them is about the bones in ezekiel, which were very dry--you know it--and the other is out of the revelation. i think----" "dodo," broke in edith, "i don't believe you're a bit serious. you think it will be rather amusing, and that's all. if you're not serious i sha'n't come." "dear edith," said dodo demurely, "i'm perfectly serious. i want it all to be just as nice as it can be. do you think i should take all the trouble with the praying-table and so on, if i wasn't?" "you want to make it dramatic," said edith decidedly. "now, i mean to be religious. you are rather too dramatic at times, you know, and this isn't an occasion for it. you can be dramatic afterwards, if you like. herr truffen is awfully religious. i used to go with him to roman catholic services, and once to confession. i nearly became a roman catholic." "oh, i should like to be a nice little nun," said dodo; "those black and white dresses are awfully becoming, with a dear trotty rosary, you know, on one side, and a twisty cord round one's waist, and an alms-box. but i must go and arrange the drawing-room. tell me when your conductor comes. i hope he isn't awfully german. would he like some beer first? i think the piano is in tune. i suppose he'll play, won't he? make him play a voluntary, when we come in. i'm afraid we can't have a procession though. that's a pity. oh, i'm sorry, edith. i'm really going to be quite serious. i think it will be charming." dodo completed her arrangements in good time, and forebore to make any more frivolous allusions to the service. she was sitting in the drawing-room, regarding her preparations with a satisfied air, when herr truffen was announced. dodo greeted him in the hall as if it was the most natural thing in the world that he should be called upon to accompany edith's mass. "we're going to have service directly, if you're ready. we want you to accompany miss staines's mass in g flat, but you mustn't take the kyrie too quick, if you don't mind. bertie arbuthnot's singing tenor, and he's not very quick--are you, bertie? oh, by the way, this is bertie. his other name is mr. arbuthnot." herr truffen was most gratified by so charming an arrangement, and so great a musical treat. when edith came down she greeted him effusively. "my dear professor, this is delightful," she said. "it's quite like old times, isn't it? we're going to do the mass in g flat. i wanted the one in a, only there are no french horns in the village--isn't that benighted? and would you believe it, lady chesterford has positively got not one musical footman." herr truffen was a large, spectacled german, who made everyone else look unnecessarily undersized. he laughed and fitted his fingers together with great nicety. "are we to begin at once?" he asked. "the congregation--haf they arrived?" "oh, there's no congregation," explained dodo; "we are all performers. it is only a substitute for going to church. i hope you aren't shocked; it was such a disgusting morning." "lady chesterford is surely a congregation in herself," remarked herr truffen, with elephantine elegance. "lord chesterford is coming by-and-by," continued dodo. "he has gone to church. i don't know whether he will be in time for the mass." "then you haf all the service in a little chapel here, no doubt," said the professor. "oh, no," said dodo; "we're going to have two lessons and the mass, and there isn't a chapel, it's only in the drawing-room. i'm going to read the lessons." herr truffen bowed with undiminished composure, and dodo led the way back into the drawing-room. miss grantham and jack were introduced, and dodo took her place at the praying-table, and herr truffen at the piano. dodo gave out the lesson, and read the chapter through.. "oh, it is nice!" she exclaimed. "sha'n't i go on to the next chapter? no, i think i won't." "it would spoil the delightful impression of the very dry bones?" interrogated herr truffen from the piano. "ah, that is splendid; but you should hear it in the fatherland tongue." "now, dodo, come here," said edith. "we must go on with this. you can discuss it afterwards. on the third beat. will you give us the time, professor?" the mass had scarcely begun when lord chesterford came in, followed by mrs. vivian and maud. the professor, who evidently did not quite understand that he was merely a sort of organist, got up and shook hands all round with laboured cordiality. edith grew impatient. "come," she said, "you mustn't do that. remember you are practically in church, professor. please begin again." "ah, i forgot for the moment," remarked the professor; "this beautiful room made me not remember. come--one, two. we must begin better than that. now, please." this time the start was made in real earnest. edith's magnificent voice, and the professor's playing, would alone have been sufficient to make it effective. the four performers knew their parts well, and when it was finished, there followed that silence which is so much more appreciative than applause. then herr truffen turned to edith. "ah, how you have improved," he said. "who taught you this? it is beyond me. perhaps you prayed and fasted, and then it came to you." as edith had chiefly written the mass while smoking cigarettes after a hearty breakfast she merely said,-- "how does anything come to anyone? it is part of oneself, as much as one's arms and legs. but the service is not over yet." dodo meanwhile had gone back to the praying-table. "i can't find it," she said, in a distracted whisper. "it's a chapter in the revelation about a grey horse and a white horse." "dodo," said edith, in an awful voice. "yes, dear," said dodo. "ah, here it is." dodo read the chapter with infinite feeling in her beautiful clear, full voice. chesterford was charmed. he had not seen this side of dodo before. after she had finished, he came and sat by her side, while the others got up and began talking among themselves. "dodo," he said, "i never knew you cared about these things. what an unsympathetic brute i must seem to you. i never talked to you about such things, because i thought you did not care. will you forgive me?" "i don't think you need forgiveness much," said dodo softly. "if you only knew----" she stopped and finished her sentence by a smile. "dodo," he said again, "i've often wanted to suggest something to you, but i didn't quite like to. why don't we have family prayers here? i might build a little chapel." dodo felt a sudden inclination to laugh. her æsthetic pleasure in the chapter of revelation was gone. she felt annoyed and amused at this simple-minded man, who thought her so perfect, and ascribed such fatiguingly high interpretations to all her actions. he really was a little stupid and tiresome. he had broken up all her little pleasant thoughts. "oh, family prayers always strike me as rather ridiculous," she said, with a half yawn. "a row of gaping servants is not conducive to the emotions." she got up and joined the other groups, and then suddenly became aware that, for the first time, she had failed in her part. jack was watching her, and saw what had happened. chesterford had remained, seated at the window, pulling his long, brown moustache, with a very perceptible shade of annoyance on his face. dodo felt a sudden impulse of anger with herself at her stupidity. she went back to chesterford. "dear old boy," she said, "i don't know why i said that. i was thinking of something else. i don't know that i like family prayers very much. we used to have them at home, when my father was with us, and it really was a trial to hear him read the litany. i suppose it is that which has made me rather tired of them. come and talk to the professor." then she went across to jack. "jack," she said, in a low voice, "don't look as if you thought you were right." chapter six the same afternoon chesterford took mrs. vivian off to see "almshouses and drunkards," as dodo expressed it to jack. she also told him that edith and her herr were playing a sort of chopsticks together in the drawing-room. maud had, as usual, effaced herself, and bertie was consuming an alarming number of cigarettes in the smoking-room, and pretending to write letters. it was natural, therefore, that when jack strolled into the hall, to see what was going on, he should find dodo there with her toes on the fender of the great fireplace, having banished the collie to find other quarters for himself. dodo was making an effort to read, but she was not being very successful, and hailed jack's entrance with evident pleasure. "come along," she said; "i sent the dog off, but i can find room for you. sit here, jack." she moved her chair a little aside, and let him pass. "i can't think why a merciful providence sends us a day like this," she said. "i want to know whom it benefits to have a thick snowfall. listen at that, too," she added, as a great gust of wind swept round the corner of the house, and made a deep, roaring sound up in the heart of the chimney. "it makes it all the more creditable in chesterford and mrs. vivian to go to see the drunkards," remarked jack. "oh, but that's no credit," said dodo. "they like doing it, it gives them real pleasure. i don't see why that should be any better, morally speaking, than sitting here and talking. they are made that way, you and i are made this. we weren't consulted, and we both follow our inclinations. besides, they will have their reward, for they will have immense appetites at tea." "and will give us something to talk about now," remarked jack lazily. "don't you like grantie, jack?" asked dodo presently. "she and ledgers are talking about life and being in my room. i went to get a book from here, and the fire was so nice that i stopped." "i wish ledgers wouldn't treat her like a menagerie, and put her through her tricks," said jack. "i think she is very attractive, but she belongs too much to a class." "what class?" demanded dodo. "oh, the class that prides itself on not being of any class--the all things to all men class." "oh, i belong to that," said dodo. "no, you don't," said he. "you are all things to some men, i grant, but not to all." "oh, jack, that's a bad joke," said dodo, reprovingly. "it's quite serious all the same," said he. "i'm all things to the only man to whom it matters that i should be," said dodo complacently. jack felt rather disgusted. "i wish you would not state things in that cold-blooded way," he said. "your very frankness to me about it shows you know that it is an effort." "yes," she said, "it is an effort sometimes, but i don't think i want to talk about it. you take things too ponderously. don't be ponderous; it doesn't suit you in the least. besides, there is nothing to be ponderous about." dodo turned in her chair and looked jack full in the face. her face had a kind of triumph about it. "i want to say something more," said jack. "well, i'm magnanimous to-day," said dodo. "go on." "all you are doing," said he gravely, "is to keep up the original illusion he had about you. it is not any good keeping up an illusion, and thinking you're doing your whole duty." "jack, that's enough," said dodo, with a certain finality in her tone. "if you go on, you may make me distrust myself. i do not mean that as a compliment to your powers, but as a confession to a stupid superstitious weakness in myself. i am afraid of omens." they sat silent a minute or two, until a door at the far end of the hall opened and miss grantham came through, with her showman in tow. "lord ledgers and i were boring each other so," said miss grantham, "that we came to bore someone else. when you are boring people you may as well do it wholesale. what a pity it is that one hasn't got a tail like a dog, that cannot help wagging if the owner is pleased, and which stops wagging when he isn't." "i shall certainly buy a tail," said dodo, with grave consideration. "one or two, in case the first gets out of order. must you wag it whenever you are pleased, grantie? is it to be an honest tail? suppose you only think you are pleased, when you are not really, what does the tail do then? oh, it's very complicated." "the tail shares the same illusions as the dog," said miss grantham. "jack and i were talking about illusions," said dodo. "i'm going to get a quantity of illusions," said miss grantham. "in any case, what did you find to say about them?" "jack said it was a bad thing to keep an illusion up," said dodo, broadly. miss grantham was staring pensively at the fire. "i saw two boys sitting on a gate yesterday," she said, "and they pushed each other off, and each time they both roared with laughter. i'm sure it was an illusion that they were amused. i would go and sit on a gate with pleasure and get my maid to push me off, if i thought it would amuse either of us. mr. broxton, would you like me to push you off a gate?" "oh, i'm certain that the people with many illusions are the happiest," said dodo. "consequently, i wouldn't willingly destroy any illusion anyone held about anything." "what a lot of anys," said miss grantham. lord ledgers was leaning back in his chair with a sense of pleased proprietorship. it really was a very intelligent animal. jack almost expected him to take a small whip from his pocket and crack it at her. but his next remark, jack felt, was a good substitute; at any rate, he demanded another performance. "what about delusions, miss grantham?" he said. "oh, delusions are chiefly unpleasant illusions," she said. "madmen have delusions that somebody wants to kill them, or they want to kill somebody, or that king charles's head isn't really cut off, which would be very unsettling now." "grantie, i believe you're talking sheer, arrant nonsense," said dodo. "it's all your fault, tommy. when one is asked a question, one has to answer it somehow or other in self-defence. if you asked me about the habits of giraffes i should say something. edith is the only really honest person i know. she would tell you she hadn't any idea what a giraffe was, so would chesterford, and you would find him looking up giraffes in the _encyclopædia_ afterwards." lord ledgers laughed a low, unpleasant laugh. "a very palpable hit," he murmured. the remark was inaudible to all but jack. he felt quite unreasonably angry with him, and got up from his chair. dodo saw something had happened, and looked at him inquiringly. jack did not meet her eye, but whistled to the collie, who flopped down at his feet. "i really don't know where i should begin if i was going to turn honest," said miss grantham. "i don't think i like honest people. they are like little cottages, which children draw, with a door in the middle, and a window at each side, and a chimney in the roof with smoke coming out. long before you know them well, you are perfectly certain of all that you will find inside them. they haven't got any little surprises, or dark passages, or queer little cupboards under the stairs." "do you know the plant called honesty, grantie?" asked dodo. "it's a very bright purple, and you can see it a long way off, and it isn't at all nicer when you get close than it looks from a distance." "oh, if you speak of someone as an honest man," said miss grantham, "it implies that he's nothing particular besides. i don't mind a little mild honesty, but it should be kept in the background." "i've got a large piece of honesty somewhere about me," said jack. "i can't always lay my hand on it, but every now and then i feel it like a great lump inside me." "yes," said dodo, "i believe you are fundamentally honest, jack. i've always thought that." "does that mean that he is not honest in ordinary matters?" asked miss grantham. "i've noticed that people who are fundamentally truthful, seldom tell the truth." "in a way it does," said dodo. "but i'm sure jack would be honest in any case where it really mattered." "oh, i sha'n't steal your spoons, you know," said miss grantham. "that's only because you don't really want them," remarked dodo. "i can conceive you stealing anything you wanted." "trample on me," said miss grantham serenely. "tell us what i should steal." "oh, you'd steal lots of things," said dodo. "you'd steal anyone's self-respect if you could manage to, and you couldn't get what you wanted any other way. oh, yes, you'd steal anything important. jack wouldn't. he'd stop just short of that; he would never be really disloyal. he'd finger things to any extent, but i am pretty sure that he would drop them at the last minute." "how dreadfully unpleasant i am really," said miss grantham meditatively. "a kind of eugene aram." jack was acutely uncomfortable, but he had the satisfaction of believing that what dodo said about him was true. he had come to the same conclusion himself two nights ago. he believed that he would stop short of any act of disloyalty, but he did not care about hearing dodo give him so gratuitous a testimonial before miss grantham and the gentleman whom he mentally referred to as "that ass of a showman." the front door opened, and a blast of cold wind came blustering round into the inner hall where they were sitting, making the thick tapestry _portière_ belly and fill like a ship's sail, when the wind first catches it. the collie pricked his ears, and thumped his tail on the floor with vague welcome. mrs. vivian entered, followed by lord chesterford. he looked absurdly healthy and happy. "it's a perfectly beastly day," he said cheerfully, advancing to the fireplace. "mrs. vivian, let dodo send you some tea up to your room. you must be wet through. surely it is tea-time, dodo." "i told you so," said dodo to jack. "has jack been saying it isn't tea-time?" asked chesterford. "no," said dodo. "i only said that your virtue in going to see almshouses would find its immediate reward in an appetite for tea." mrs. vivian laughed. "you mustn't reduce our virtues to the lowest terms, as if we were two vulgar fractions." "do you suppose a vulgar fraction knows how vulgar it is?" asked miss grantham. "vulgar without being funny," said. jack, with the air of helping her out of a difficulty. "i never saw anything funny in vulgar fractions," remarked lord ledgers. "chesterford and i used to look up the answers at the end of the book, and try to make them correspond with the questions." dodo groaned. "oh, chesterford, don't tell me you're not honest either." "what do you think about honesty, mrs. vivian?" asked miss grantham. mrs. vivian considered. "honesty is much maligned by being called the best policy," she said; "it' isn't purely commercial. honesty is rather fine sometimes." "oh, i'm sure mrs. vivian's honest," murmured miss grantham. "she thinks before, she tells you her opinion. i always give my opinion first, and think about it afterwards." "i've been wanting to stick up for honesty all the afternoon," said dodo to mrs. vivian, "only i haven't dared. everyone has been saying that it is dull and obtrusive, and like labourers' cottages. i believe we are all a little honest, really. no one has got any right to call it the best policy. it makes you feel as if you were either a kind of life assurance, or else a thief." chesterford looked a trifle puzzled. dodo turned to him. "poor old man," she said, "did they call him names? never mind. we'll go and be labelled 'best policy. no others need apply.'" she got up from her chair, and pulled chesterford's moustache. "you look so abominably healthy, chesterford," she said. "how's charlie getting on? tell him if he beats his wife anymore, i shall; beat you. you wouldn't like that, you know. will you ring for tea, dear? mrs. vivian, i command you to go to your room. i had your fire lit, and i'll send tea up. you're a dripping sop." mrs. vivian pleaded guilty, and vanished. sounds of music still came from the drawing-room. "it's no use telling edith to come to tea," remarked dodo. "she said the other day that if anyone ever proposed to her, whom she cared to marry, she will feel it only fair to tell him that the utmost she can offer him, is to play second fiddle to her music." edith's music was strongly exciting, and in the pause that followed, dodo went to the door and opened it softly, and a great tangle of melody poured out and filled the hall. she was playing the last few pages of the overture to an opera that she had nearly completed. the music was gathering itself up for the finale. note after note was caught up, as it were, to join an army of triumphant melody overhead, which grew fuller and more complete every moment, and seemed to hover, waiting for some fulfilment. ah, that was it. suddenly from below crashed out a great kingly motif, strong with the strength of a man who is pure and true, rising higher and higher, till it joined the triumph overhead, and moved away, strong to the end. there was a dead silence; dodo was standing by the door, with her lips slightly parted, feeling that there was something in this world better and bigger, perhaps, than her own little hair-splittings and small emotions. with this in her mind, she looked across to where chesterford was standing. the movement was purely instinctive, and she could neither have accounted for it, nor was she conscious of it, but in her eyes there was the suggestion of unshed tears, and a look of questioning shame. though a few bars of music cannot change the nature of the weakest of us, and dodo was far from weak, she was intensely impressionable, and that moment had for her the germ of a possibility which might--who could say it could not?--have taken root in her and borne fruit. the parable of the mustard seed is as-old and as true as time. but chesterford was not musical; he had taken a magazine from the table, and was reading about grouse disease. chapter seven dodo was sitting in a remarkably easy-chair in her own particular room at the house in eaton square. as might have been expected, her room was somewhat unlike other rooms. it had a pale orange-coloured paper, with a dado of rather more intense shade of the same colour, an orange-coloured carpet and orange-coloured curtains. dodo had no reason to be afraid of orange colour just yet. it was a room well calculated to make complete idleness most easy. the tables were covered with a mass of albums, vases of flowers, and a quantity of entirely useless knick-knacks. the walls were hung with several rather clever sketches, french prints and caricatures of dodo's friends. a small bookcase displayed a quantity of flaring novels and a large tune hymn-book, and in a conspicuous corner was dodo's praying-table, on which the skull regarded its surroundings with a mirthless and possibly contemptuous grin. the mantelpiece was entirely covered with photographs, all signed by their prototypes. these had found their quarters gradually becoming too small for them, and had climbed half way up the two-sides of a louis quinze mirror, that formed a sort of overmantel. the photographs were an interesting study, and included representatives from a very wide range of classes. no one ever accused dodo of being exclusive. in the corner of the room were a heap of old cotillion toys, several hunting-whips, and a small black image of the virgin, which dodo had picked up abroad. above her head a fox's mask grinned defiantly at another fox's brush opposite. on the writing table there was an inkstand made of the hoof of dodo's favourite hunter, which had joined the majority shortly after christmas, and the "dodo" symphony, which had just come out with great _éclat_ at the albert hall, leant against the wall. a banjo case and a pair of castanets, with a dainty silver monogram on them, perhaps inspired dodo when she sat down to her writing-table. dodo's hands were folded on her lap, and she was lazily regarding a photograph of herself which stood oh the mantelpiece. though the afternoon was of a warm day in the end of may, there was a small fire on the hearth which crackled pleasantly. dodo got up and looked at the photograph more closely. "i certainly look older," she thought to herself, "and yet that was only taken a year ago. i don't feel a bit older, at least i sha'n't when i get quite strong again. i wish jack could have been able to come this afternoon. i am rather tired of seeing nobody except chesterford and the baby. however, mrs. vivian will be here soon." dodo had made great friends with mrs. vivian during the last months. her sister and brother-in-law had been obliged to leave england for a month at easter, and dodo had insisted that mrs. vivian should spend it with them, and to-day was the first day that the doctor had let her come down, and she had written to jack and mrs. vivian to come and have tea with her. a tap was heard at the door, and the nurse entered, bearing the three weeks' old baby. dodo was a little disappointed; she had seen a good deal of the baby, and she particularly wanted mrs. vivian. she stood with her hands behind her back, without offering to take it. the baby regarded her with large wide eyes, and crowed at the sight of the fire. really it was rather attractive, after all. "well, lord harchester," remarked dodo, "how is your lordship to-day? did it ever enter your very pink head that you were a most important personage? really you have very little sense of your dignity. oh, you _are_ rather, nice. come here, baby." she held out her arms to take it, but his lordship apparently did not approve of this change. he opened his mouth in preparation for a decent protest. "ah, do you know, i don't like you when you howl," said dodo; "you might be an irish member instead of a piece of landed interest. oh, do stop. take him please, nurse; i've got a headache, and i don't like that noise. there, you unfilial scoundrel, you're quiet enough now." dodo nodded at the baby with the air of a slight acquaintance. "i wonder if you'll be like your father," she said; "you've got his big blue eyes. i rather wish your eyes were dark. do a baby's eyes change when he gets older? ah, here's your godmother. i am so glad to see you," she went on to mrs. vivian. "you see his lordship has come down to say how do you do." "dear dodo," said mrs. vivian, "you are looking wonderfully better. why don't they let you go out this lovely day?" "oh, i've got a cold," said dodo, "at least i'm told so. there--good-bye, my lord. you'd better take him upstairs again, nurse. i am so delighted to see you," she continued; pouring out tea. "i've been rather dull all day. don't you know how, when you particularly want to see people; they never come. edith looked in this morning, but she did nothing but whistle and drop things. i asked jack to come, but he couldn't." "ah," said mrs. vivian softly, "he has come back, has he?" "yes," said dodo, "and i wanted to see him. did you ever hear of anything so ridiculous as his going off in that way. you know he left england directly after his visit to us in january, and he's only just back. it's too absurd for jack to pretend he was ill. he swore his doctor had told him to leave england for three months. of course that's nonsense. it was very stupid of him." mrs. vivian sipped her tea reflectively without answering. "chesterford is perfectly silly about the baby," dodo went on. "he's always afraid it's going to be ill, and he goes up on tiptoe to the nursery, to see if it's all right. last night he woke me up about half-past ten, to say that he heard it cough several times, and did i think it was the whooping cough." mrs. vivian did not seem to be listening. "i heard from mr. broxton once," she said; "he wrote from moscow, and asked how you were, and three weeks ago he telegraphed, when he heard of the birth of the baby." "i don't know what's the matter with jack," said dodo, rather petulantly. "he wrote to me once, the silliest letter you ever saw, describing the kremlin, and trèves cathedral, and the falls of the rhine. the sort of letter one writes to one's great-aunt. now i'm not jack's great-aunt at all." there was another tap at the door. "that's chesterford," remarked dodo, "he always raps now, and if i don't answer he thinks i'm asleep, and then he goes away. you just see." the tap came again, and after a moment's interval the door opened. "jack!" exclaimed dodo. she got up from her chair and went quickly towards him. jack was pale, and his breath came rather short, as if he had been running. "why, dodo," he cried, "i thought i couldn't come, and then i thought i could, so i did." he broke off rather lamely, and greeted mrs. vivian. "dear old jack," said dodo, "it does me good to see you. your face is so nice and familiar, and i've wanted you awfully. jack, what do you mean by writing me such a stupid letter? especially when i'd written to you so nicely. really, i'm not your grand-mother yet, though i am a mother. have you seen the baby? it isn't particularly interesting at present, though of course it's rather nice to think that that wretched little morsel of flesh and bones is going to be one of our landed proprietors. he'll be much more important than you will ever be, jack. aren't you jealous?" dodo was conscious of quite a fresh tide of interest in her life. her intellectual faculties, she felt, had been neglected. she could not conceive why, because she had a husband and baby, she should be supposed not to care for other interests as well. chesterford was an excellent husband, with a magnificent heart; but dodo had told herself so often that he was not very clever, that she had ceased trying to take an intellectual pleasure in his society, and the baby could not be called intellectual by the fondest parent at present. there were a quantity of women who were content to pore on their baby's face for hour after hour, with no further occupation than saying "didums" occasionally. dodo had given what she considered a fair trial to this treatment, and she found it bored her to say "didums" for an indefinite period, and she did not believe it amused the baby. she had a certain pride in having given birth to the son and heir of one of the largest english properties, and she was extremely glad to have done so, and felt a certain pleased sort of proprietorship in the little pink morsel, but she certainly had experienced none of the absorbing pleasures of maternity. she had got used to not being in love with her husband, and she accepted as part of this same deficiency the absence of absorbing pleasure in the baby. not that she considered it a deficiency, it was merely another type turned out of nature's workshop. dodo laid all the blame on nature. she shrugged her shoulders and said: "you made me so without consulting me. it isn't my fault!" but dodo was aware that nature had given her a brain, and she found a very decided pleasure in the company of clever people. perhaps it was the greatest pleasure of her life to be admired and amused by clever people. of course chesterford always admired her, but he was in love with her, and he was not clever. dodo had felt some difficulty before her marriage in dealing with this perplexing unknown quantity, and she had to confess it puzzled her still. the result was, that when it occurred, she had to admit her inability to tackle it, and as soon as possible to turn to another page in this algebra of life. but she still felt that her marriage had been a great success. chesterford had entirely fulfilled what she expected of him: he was immensely rich, he let her do as she liked, he adored her. dodo quite felt that it was better that he should adore her. as long as that lasted, he would be blind to any fault of hers, and she acknowledged that, to a man of chesterford's character, she must seem far from faultless, if he contemplated her calmly. but he was quite unable to contemplate her calmly. for him she walked in a golden cloud that dazzled and entranced him. dodo was duly grateful to the golden cloud. but she felt that the element which jack, and mrs. vivian, and other friends of hers brought, had been conspicuously absent, and she welcomed its return with eagerness. "you know we haven't been leading a very intellectual life lately," dodo continued. "chesterford is divinely kind to me, but he is careful not to excite me. so he talks chiefly about the baby, and how he lost his umbrella at the club; it is very soothing, but i have got past that now. i want stimulating. sometimes i go to sleep, and then he sits as still as a mouse till i wake again. pity me, jack, i have had a dull fortnight; and that is worse than anything else. i really never remember being bored before!" dodo let her arms drop beside her with a little hopeless gesture. "i know one's got no business to be bored, and it's one's own fault as a rule if one is," she went on. "for instance, that woman in the moated grange ought to have swept away the blue fly that buzzed in the pane, and set a mouse-trap for the mouse that shrieked, and got the carpenter to repair the mouldering wainscot, and written to the psychical research, how she had heard her own sad name in corners cried, and it couldn't have been the cat, or she would have caught the shrieking mouse. oh, there were a hundred things she might have done, before she sat down and said, 'he cometh not,' but i have had a period of enforced idleness. if i had set a trap for the mouse, the doctor would have told me not to exert myself so much.' i used to play halma with chesterford, only i always beat him; and then nobody ever cried my name in sad corners, that i remember; it would have been quite interesting." jack laughed. "what a miserable story, dodo," he said. "i always said--you had none of the domestic virtues, and i am right, it seems." "oh, it isn't that," said dodo, "but i happen to have a brain as well, and if i don't use it, it decays, and when it decays, it breeds maggots. i've got a big maggot in my head now, and that is, that the ineffable joys of maternity are much exaggerated. don't look shocked, geraldine. i know it's a maggot, and simply means that i haven't personally experienced them, but the maggot says, 'you are a woman, and if you don't experience them, either they don't exist, or you are abnormal.' well, the maggot lies, i know it, i believe they do exist, and i am sure i am not abnormal. ah, this is unprofitable, isn't it. you two have come to drive the maggot out." mrs. vivian felt a sudden impulse of anger, which melted into pity. "poor dodo," she said, "leave the maggot alone, and he will die of inanition. at present give me some more tea. this really is very good tea, and you drink it the proper way, without milk or sugar, and with a little slice of lemon." "tea is such a middle-aged thing any other way," said dodo, pouring out another cup. "i feel like an old woman in a workhouse if i put milk and sugar in it. besides, you should only drink tea at tea. it produces the same effect as tobacco, a slight soothing of the nerves. one doesn't want to be soothed at breakfast, otherwise the tedious things we all have to do in the morning are impossible. chesterford has a passion for the morning. he quoted something the other day about the divine morning. it isn't divine, it is necessary; at least you can't get to the evening without a morning, in this imperfect world. now if it had only been 'the evening and the evening were the first day,' what a difference it would have made." mrs. vivian laughed. "you always bring up the heavy artillery to defend a small position, dodo," she said. "keep your great guns for great occasions." "oh, i always use big guns," said jack. "they do the work quicker. besides, you never can tell that the small position is not the key to the large. the baby, for instance, that dodo thinks very extremely insignificant now, may be horribly important in twenty years." "yes, i daresay chesterford and i will quarrel about him," said dodo. "supposing he falls in love with a curate's daughter, chesterford will say something about love in a cottage, and i shall want him to marry a duke's daughter, and i shall get my way, and everybody concerned will be extremely glad afterwards." "poor baby," said mrs. vivian, "you little think what a worldly mother you have." "oh, i know i am worldly," said dodo. "i don't deny it for a moment. jack and i had it out before my marriage. but i believe i am capable of an unworldly action now and then. why, i should wish maud to marry a curate very much. she would do her part admirably, and no one could say it was a worldly fate. but i like giving everybody their chance. that is why i have maud to stay with me, and let her get a good look at idle worldly people like jack. after a girl has seen every sort, i wish her to choose, and i am unworldly enough to applaud her choice, if it is unworldly; only i shouldn't do it myself. i have no ideal; it was left out." jack was conscious of a keen resentment at dodo's words. he had accepted her decision, but he didn't like to have it flaunted before him in dodo's light voice and careless words. he made an uneasy movement in his chair. dodo saw it. "ah, jack, i have offended you," she said; "it was stupid of me. but i have been so silent and lonely all these days, that it is such a relief to let my tongue wag at all, whatever it says. ah, here's chesterford. what an age you have been! here am i consoling myself as best i can. isn't it nice to have jack again?" chesterford saw the fresh light in her eyes, and the fresh vivaciousness in her speech, and he was so unfeignedly glad to see her more herself again, that no thought of jealousy entered his heart. he thought without bitterness, "how glad she must be to have her friends about her again! she looks better already. decidedly i am a stupid old fellow, but i think dodo loves me a little." he shook hands with jack, and beamed delightedly on dodo. "jack, it is good of you to come so soon," he said; "dodo has missed you dreadfully. have you seen the boy? dodo, may i have him down?" "oh, he's been down," said she, "and has only just gone up again. he's rather fractious to-day. i daresay it's teeth. it's nothing to bother about; he's as well as possible." lord chesterford looked disappointed, but ac-quiesced. "i should like jack to see him all the same," he remarked. "may he come up to the nursery?" "oh, jack doesn't care about babies," said dodo, "even when they belong to you and me. do you, jack? i assure you it won't amuse you a bit." "i can't go away without seeing the baby," said jack, "so i think i'll go with chesterford, and then i must be off. good-bye, dodo. get well quickly. may i come and see you to-morrow?" "i wish chesterford wouldn't take jack off in that way," said dodo rather querulously, as they left the room. "jack came to see me, and i wanted to talk more to him--i'm very fond of jack. if he wasn't so fearfully lazy, he'd make no end of a splash. but he prefers talking to his friends to talking to a lot of irish members. i wonder why he came after he said he wouldn't. jack usually has good reasons." dodo lay back in her chair and reflected. "you really are the most unnatural mother," said mrs. vivian, with a laugh. "i am glad mr. broxton went with your husband, or he would have been disappointed, i think." dodo looked a little anxious. "he wasn't vexed, was he?" she asked. "i hate vexing people, especially chesterford. but he really is ridiculous about the baby. it is absurd to suppose it is interesting yet." "i don't suppose he would call it interesting," said mrs. vivian. "but you know there are other things beside that." dodo grew a trifle impatient. "ah, that's a twice-told tale," she said. "i consider i have done my duty admirably, but just now i confess i am pining for a little amusement. i have been awfully dull. you know one can't exist on pure love." mrs. vivian rose to go. "well, i must be off," she said. "good-night, dodo; and remember this, if ever anything occurs on which you want advice or counsel, come to me for it. you know i have been through all this; and--and remember lord chesterford loves you very deeply." dodo looked up inquiringly. "yes, of course, i know that," she said, "and we get on magnificently together. in any case i should always ask you for advice. you know i used to be rather afraid of you." mrs. vivian stood looking out of the window. her eyes suddenly filled with tears. "ah, my dear, don't be afraid of me," she said. dodo wondered, when she had gone, what made her so suddenly grave. her own horizon was singularly free from clouds. she had been through an experience which she had looked forward to with something like dread. but that was over; she and the baby were both alive and well. chesterford was more devoted than ever, and she?--well, she was thoroughly satisfied. and jack had come back, and all was going delightfully. "they all talk about love as if it were something very dreadful," she thought. "i'm sure it isn't dreadful at all. it is rather a bore sometimes; at least one can have enough of it, but that is a fault on the right side." the door opened softly, and chesterford came in. "i am glad to find you alone, darling," he said, "i haven't seen you all day. you are looking much better. get jack to come and see you again as soon as he can." dodo smiled benignantly on him. "the baby really is wonderful," he continued. "it was sitting up with its bottle just now, and i really believe it winked at me when it saw me. do you think it knows me?" "oh, i daresay it does," said dodo; "it sees enough of you anyhow." "isn't it all wonderful," he went on, not noticing her tone. "just fancy. sometimes i wonder whether it's all real." "it's real enough when it cries," said dodo. "but it is rather charming, i do think." "it's got such queer little fists," said he, "with nice pink nails." dodo laughed rather wearily. "are you a little tired, darling?" he said. "won't you go to bed? you know you've been up quite a long time. perhaps you'd like to see the baby before you go." "oh, i said good-night to the baby," said dodo. "i think i will go to bed. i wish you'd send wilkins here." he bent over her and kissed her forehead softly. "ah, my darling, my darling," he whispered. dodo lay with half-shut eyes. "good-night, dear," she said languidly. chapter eight the questions about which a man is apt to, say that he alone can judge, are usually exactly those questions in which his judgment is most likely to be at fault, for they concern him very intimately--a truth which he expresses by saying that he alone can judge about them, and for that very reason his emotions are apt to colour what he considers his sober decision. jack was exactly in this position when he left the chesterfords' door that afternoon. it was only six o'clock when he went away, and he wished to be alone, and to think about it. but the house seemed stuffy and unsuggestive, and he ordered a horse, and sat fuming and frowning till it came round. it fidgeted and edged away from the pavement when he tried to mount it, and he said, "get out, you brute," with remarkable emphasis, and asked the groom whether he hadn't yet learned to hold a horse quiet. this was sufficient to show that he was in a perturbed frame of mind. the row was rather empty, for a great race meeting was going on, and jack cantered quickly up to the end, and cursed his stupidity for not having gone to sandown. then he put his horse to a quiet pace, and determined to think the matter out. he had left the chesterfords in january with a full realisation of his position. he was in love with dodo, perhaps more deeply than ever, and dodo was hopelessly, irrevocably out of his reach. the only thing left to be done was to get over it; but his ordinary circle and its leisurely duties were quite impossible just at present, and he adopted the traditional english method of travelling, and shooting unoffending animals. whether the absence of faith was responsible, is an open question; at any rate, the remedy did not result in a cure. he was intensely bored with foreign countries; they were quite as distasteful as england, and, on the whole, had less to offer. and he came back to london again as suddenly as he had left it. he only remembered one incident in his four months abroad which gave him any pleasure; that was when he received a letter from dodo at berlin, which said nothing particular, and wound up with a little mild chaff on the absurdity of his going abroad at all. "i hope you are really better," wrote dodo, "though i didn't know that you were in any immediate danger of breaking down when you left us. anyhow, come back. london is particularly wholesome, and, to tell you the truth, it's just a wee bit dull. don't be conceited." of course he came back; it was no good remaining abroad, and yawning in front of the sistine madonna, who, in her impossible serene mildness, had no message whatever for him. he wanted to see dodo; why on earth shouldn't he? she was the only thing he really cared about, and she was quite out of his reach. where was the harm? for two days after his arrival in london he was still undecided, and made no effort to see her, and on the third day her note came. london was as bad as dresden, and again, where was the harm? he wrote a note saying he would come, then he tore that up and sent a refusal, offering no excuse; and after all, he had gone, and parted from her with the words that he would come again the next day. but ah, how sweet it was to see her again! such were the facts upon which jack wished to form a conclusion. all this indecision was really too annoying. what was the use of a conscience that took the sugar out of your tea, and yet could not prevent you from drinking it? it was not strong enough to prevent him going to see dodo, and it took the malicious line of making the visit as little enjoyable as possible. well, it must be settled one way or the other. the problem obviously depended on one question. did his desire for dodo grow stronger with seeing her? he decided that it did not make much difference to the quality or degree of his longing, but, on the other hand, her society gave him an inestimable pleasure. when she had refused him a year ago, he had gone on seeing her day after day, without the horrible, unsatisfied emptiness he had felt abroad. that absorbing craving for her, he remembered, began when she was on her wedding tour. then why not see her freely and frequently? no harm could possibly come out of it. dodo, he thought, cared for him only as she cared for a dozen other friends, why should he, then, who cared so deeply for her, cut himself off from her? again his deep-rooted affection and respect for her husband was an immense safeguard. quixotism was a doubtful virtue at the best, and decidedly out of date, and besides, what would dodo think if she suddenly found that one of her best friends invariably declined to meet her under any circumstances? she would certainly guess the reason, and if there was one possible solution of this stupid problem more undesirable than another, it was that. and jack made up his mind. well, that was settled, and here was bertie riding down upon him. he felt as if he wished to record a deliberate and sober conclusion. they joined forces and rode up together. then jack said suddenly,-- "bertie, i have been making a fool of myself, but i am better now." "that's good," said bertie placidly. there was something indefinably soothing about bertie's manner. jack determined to be more explicit. it is often a relief to tell a friend one's own resolutions, especially if one does not expect unseasonable objections. "it's about dodo," he said. "you see i'm dreadfully in love with her. awkward, isn't it?" "devilish," said bertie, without a shade of emotion passing over his face. "and the less i see of her," said jack, "the worse i get, so i've determined that the more i see of her in the ordinary way, the better. it sounds an unusual treatment, i know, but you must acknowledge i gave the other method a fair chance. i went and killed pigs in austria, and climbed the matterhorn, but it wouldn't do." they rode on a little time in silence. then bertie said,-- "do you want my advice?" "well, yes," said jack rather dubiously. "then i'm dashed if i like it, jack," he said. "it's too dangerous. just think----" but jack broke in,-- "don't you see my friendship for chesterford is an absolute safeguard. dodo gives me more pleasure than anyone i know, and when i can't see her, life becomes unbearable. chesterford is one of those men to whom one couldn't do a mean thing, and, furthermore, dodo doesn't love me. if those two facts don't ensure safety, i don't know what would. besides, bertie, i'm not a rascal." "i can't like it," said bertie. "if one has a propensity for falling into the fire, it's as well to keep off the hearthrug. i know you're not a rascal, but this is a thing one can't argue about. it is a matter of feeling." "i know," said jack, "i've felt it too. but i think it's outweighed by other considerations. if i thought any mischief could come of it, i should deserve to be horse-whipped." "i don't like it," repeated bertie stolidly. jack went to see dodo the next afternoon, and for many afternoons during the next fortnight he might have been seen on chesterford's doorstep, either coming or going. her husband seemed almost as glad as dodo that jack should come often. his visits were obviously very pleasant to her, and she had begun to talk nonsense again as fluently as ever. with jack, however, she had some rather serious talks; his future appeared to be exercising her mind somewhat. jack's life at this time was absolutely aimless. before he had gone abroad he had been at the bar, and had been called, but his chambers now knew him no more. he had no home duties, being, as dodo expressed it, "a poor little orphan of six foot two," and he had enough money for an idle bachelor life. dodo took a very real interest in the career of her friends. it was part of her completeness, as i have said before, to be the centre of a set of successful people. jack could do very well, she felt, in the purely ornamental line, and she by no means wished to debar him from the ornamental profession, but yet she was vaguely dissatisfied. she induced him one day to state in full, exactly the ideas he had about his own future. "you dangle very well indeed," she said to him, "and i'm far from wishing you not to dangle, but, if it's to be your profession, you must do it more systematically. lady wrayston was here yesterday, and she said no one ever saw you now. that's lazy; you're neglecting your work." jack was silent a few minutes. the truth of the matter was that he was becoming so preoccupied with dodo, that he was acquiring a real distaste for other society. his days seemed to have dwindled down to an hour or two hours each, according to the time he passed with dodo. the interval between his leaving the house one day and returning to it the next, had got to be merely a tedious period of waiting, which he would gladly have dispensed with. in such intervals society appeared to him not a distraction, but a laborious substitute for inaction, and labour at any time was not congenial to him. his life, in fact, was a series of conscious pulses with long-drawn pauses in between. he was dimly aware that this sort of thing could not go on for ever. the machine would stop, or get quicker or slower, and there were endless complications imminent in either case. "i don't know that i really care for dangling," said jack discontentedly. "at the same time it is the least objectionable form of amusement." "well, you can't dangle for ever in any case," said dodo. "you ought to marry and settle down. chesterford is a sort of apotheosis of a dangler. by performing, with scrupulous care, a quantity of little things that don't matter much, like being j.p., and handing the offertory plate, he is in a way quite a busy man, to himself at least, though nothing would happen if he ceased doing any or all of these things; and the dangler, who thinks himself busy, is the happiest of men, because he gets all the advantages of dangling, and none of the disadvantages, and his conscience--have you got a conscience, jack?--so far from pricking him, tells him he's doing the whole duty of man. then again he's married--to me, too. that's a profession in itself." "ah, but i can't be married to you too," remarked jack. "you're absurd," said dodo; "but really, jack, i wish you'd marry someone else. i sha'n't think you unfaithful." "i don't flatter myself that you would," said jack, with a touch of irritation. dodo looked up rather surprised at the hard ring in his voice. she thought it wiser to ignore this last remark. "i never can quite make out whether you are ambitious or not," she said. "now and then you make me feel as if you would rather like to go and live in a small cathedral town----" "and shock the canons?" suggested jack. "not necessarily; but cultivate sheer domesticity. you're very domestic in a way. bertie would do admirably in a cathedral town. he'd be dreadfully happy among dull people. they would all think him so brilliant and charming, and the bishop would ask him over to dine at the palace whenever anyone came down from london." "i'm not ambitious in the way of wanting to score small successes," said jack. "anyone can score them. i don't mind flying at high game and missing. if you miss of course you have to load again, but i'd sooner do that than make a bag of rabbits. besides, you can get your rabbits sitting, as you go after your high game. but i don't want rabbits." "what is your high game?" asked dodo. jack considered. "it's this," he said. "you may attain it, or at any rate strive after it, by doing nothing, or working like a horse. but, anyhow, it's being in the midst of things, it's seeing the wheels go round, and forming conclusions as to why they go round, it's hearing the world go rushing by like a river in flood, it's knowing what everyone thinks about, it's guessing why one woman falls in love with one man, and why another man falls in love with her. you don't get that in cathedral towns. the archdeacon's daughter falls in love with the dean's son, and nobody else is at all in love with either of them. the world doesn't rattle in cathedral towns, they take care to oil it; the world doesn't come down in flood in cathedral towns, there is nothing so badly regulated as that. i don't know why i should choose cathedral towns particularly to say these things about. i think you suggested that i should live in one. if you like you can plunge into the river in flood and go down with it--that's what they call having a profession--but it's just as instructive to stand on the bank and watch it; more instructive, perhaps, because you needn't swim, and can give your whole attention to it. on the whole, that is what i mean to do." "that's good, jack," said dodo; "but you're not consistent. the fact that you haven't been going out lately, shows that you're standing with your back to it, with your hands in your pocket. after all, what you say only conies to this, that you are interested in the problem of human life. well, there's just as much human life in your cathedral town." "ah, but there's no go about it," said he. "it's no more like life than a duck pond is to the river in flood." "oh, you're wrong there," said dodo. "it goes on just the same, though it doesn't make such a fuss. but in any case you are standing with your back to it now, as i said." "i'm going into details, just at present," said jack. "how do you mean?" "i'm watching a little bit of it." "i suppose you mean chesterford and me. do you find us very interesting?" demanded dodo. "very." jack was rather uncomfortable. he wanted to say more, and wished he hadn't said so much. he wondered how dodo would take it. dodo did not take it at all. she was, for the time at any rate, much more interested in jack's prospects as they concerned him, than as they bore on herself. "what is the upshot of all your observations?" she asked. jack hardly knew whether to feel relieved or slighted. was dodo's apparent unconsciousness of the tenor of what he had said genuine or affected? on that he felt a great deal depended. but whether it was genuine or not, the matter was closed for the present. dodo repeated her question. "my observations on you, or on the world in general?" he asked. "either will do," said dodo; "we're very normal. any conclusion you have formed about the rest of the world will apply to us." "my conclusion is that you are not quite normal," said he. dodo laughed. "oh, i'm dreadfully normal," she said; "all my inconsistencies lie on the surface--i'm married, i've got a baby, i'm honest, i'm lazy. i'm all i should and shouldn't be. and chesterford----" "oh, then chesterford's normal too," said jack. chapter nine june was drawing to a close in a week of magnificent weather. it was too hot to do much during the middle of the day, and the park was full of riders every morning from eight till ten. dodo' was frequently to be seen there, usually riding a vicious black mare, that plunged and shied more than lord chesterford quite liked. but dodo insisted on riding it. "the risks one runs every moment of one's life," she told him, "are so many, that one or two more really don't matter. besides, i can manage the brute." on this particular morning dodo descended the stairs feeling unusually happy. the period of enforced idleness was over, and she was making up for lost time with a vengeance. they had given a dance the night before, and dodo had not gone to bed till after four; but for all that she was down again at half-past eight, and her mare was waiting for her. she turned into the dining-room to have a cup of tea before starting, and waited somewhat impatiently for lord chesterford to join her. he came in, in the course of a few minutes, looking rather worried. "you look as if you had not gone to bed for a week," said dodo, "and your hair is dreadfully untidy. look at me now. here i am a weak little woman, and i feel fit to move mountains, and you look as if you wanted quinine and iron. don't come, if you'd rather not. stop at home and play with the baby." "i'm all right," said he, "but i'm rather worried about the boy. the nurse says he's not been sleeping much all night, but kept waking and crying, and he looks rather flushed. i think i'll send for the doctor." dodo felt a little impatient. "he's as right as possible," she said. "you shouldn't worry so, chesterford. you've wanted to send for the doctor a hundred times in the last month, either for him or me. but don't come if you'd rather not. vivy is coming to breakfast at half-past nine; i quite forgot that. if you feel inclined to stop, you might give her breakfast, and i'll lengthen my ride. i shall be back at half-past ten. she's going to take me to see wainwright's new turner." "are you sure you don't mind, dodo?" said he, still wavering. "if you don't, i really think i will stop, and perhaps see the doctor about him. the nurse says she would like to have the doctor here." "just as you like," said dodo. "you'll have to pay a swinging bill anyhow. good-bye, old boy. don't worry your silly old head. i'm sure it's all right." dodo went off perfectly at ease in her mind. chesterford was rather fussy, she thought, and she congratulated herself on not being nervous. "a pretty pair we should make if i encouraged him in his little ways," she said to herself. "we should one of us, live in the nursery." she put her horse into a quick trot, and felt a keen enjoyment in managing the vicious animal. the streets were somewhat crowded even at this hour, and dodo had her work cut out for her. however, she reached the park in safety, and went up the row at a swinging gallop, with her horse tearing at the rein and tossing its head. after a time the brute grew quieter, and dodo joined a well-known figure who was riding some way in front of her. "good old jack," she cried, "isn't it splendid! i had no idea how i loved motion and exercise and dancing and all that till i began again. didn't you think our ball went off rather well? did you stop, to the end? oh, of course you did. that silly dowager what's-her-name was quite shocked at me, just because we had the looking-glass figure in the cotillion. it's the prettiest of the lot, i think. old major ewart gave me a pair of ivory castanets with silver mountings last night, the sweetest things in the world. i really think he is seriously gone on me, and he must be sixty if he's an hour. i think i shall appeal to chesterford for protection. what fun it would be to make chesterford talk to him gravely like a grandson. he stopped at home this morning to look after the baby. i think i shall get jealous of the nurse, and pretend that he's sweet on her, and that's why he goes to the nursery so much." jack laughed. "between you, you hit the right average pretty well," he said. "if it wasn't for chesterford, the baby would certainly have fallen downstairs half a dozen times. you don't half realise how important he is." "oh, you're entirely wrong, jack," said dodo calmly. "it's just that which i do recognise; what i don't recognise is that i should be supposed to find ineffable joys in watching it eat and sleep and howl. you know one baby is very much like another." "in other words, supposing the boy had no expectations," said jack, "and was not the heir-apparent of half staffordshire, you would find him much less interesting." "would you think me very heartless if i said 'yes'?" asked dodo. "well, i never held a very high opinion of your heart, you know," said jack, laughing, "and i don't know that i think much worse of it now." "you judge so stupidly," said dodo; "you elevate matrimony into a sacrament. now i don't. it is a contract for mutual advantage. the husband gives wealth, position and all that, and the wife gives him a housekeeper, and heirs to his property. don't frown, jack. that's my eminently common-sense view of the question. it answers excellently, as i find by experience. but, of course, there are marriages for love. i suppose most of the lower middle-class marry for love, at least they haven't got any position or wealth to marry for. but we, the disillusioned and unromantic upper classes, see beyond that. i daresay our great grandfathers married for love, but the fact that so many of us don't, shows that ours is the more advanced and probably correct view. you know all wine-tasters agree on the superiority of one wine, and the inferiority of another. that's the result of education. the amateur thinks they are all more or less alike, and very probably prefers some sweet bad kind. that's the middle-class view of love-marriages. the more i think of it, the more i feel that love is an illusion. think of all the people who marry for love, and get eternally tired of each other afterwards. they can't keep it up. the lovers grow into friends, and the friends into enemies. those are the enviable ones who remain friends; but it is better to marry as a friend than as a lover, because in the latter case there is a reaction and a disappointment, which may perhaps ruin the friendship. aren't i a wise woman, jack? i think i shall set up a general advice office." jack was, rather pale, and his fingers twitched nervously at his reins. "have you never felt that illusion?" he asked, in a low voice. "really, jack," said dodo, "you behave as if you were the inquisition. but i don't see why i shouldn't tell you. for chesterford i never have. he is the most excellent husband, and i esteem and admire him immensely. don't make your horse so fidgety, jack. as i was saying, i don't see why i shouldn't tell you, considering you proposed to me once, and confessed to the same illusion yourself. have you got over it, by the way? if i had married you, you certainly would have by this time." there was a long pause. then jack said,-- "no, dodo, i have never got over it." the moment after he had said it, he would have given his right hand to have it unsaid. dodo was silent for a moment, and jack found himself noticing the tiny, trivial things about him. he observed a fly trying to alight oh his horse's ear, but the animal flicked it off with a little jerk, before it got fairly settled. he wondered whether the fly had illusions about that ear, and whether it imagined that it would be happy for ever and ever, if it could once settle there. "you know we are saying the most frightfully unconventional things to each other," said dodo. "i am very sorry for you, jack, and i will administer consolation. when i said 'no' to you, i did it with real regret, with quite a different sort of feeling to that which i should have had if i had said 'no' to chesterford. it was quite an unreasonable feeling, i couldn't define it, but i think it must have been because----" then jack recovered his self-respect in a moment, by one of those strange contradictions in our nature, which urged him to stop his ears to what, a week before, he had been almost tempting her to say. "ah, stop, stop," he said, "you don't know what you are saying. dodo, this won't do. think of chesterford." "chesterford and the baby," said dodo softly. "i believe you are right, jack. this is unprofitable. but, jack, since we renounce that, let us still be friends. don't let this have made any difference to us. try and realise that it is all an illusion." dodo half turned towards him, with a long glance in her brown eyes, and a little smile playing about her mouth. "yes, yes," said jack, laughing nervously. "i told bertie so the other day. i have been a madman for half an hour, but that is over. shall we turn?" they wheeled their horses round, and cantered down the row. "oh, this beautiful world," exclaimed dodo. "you've no idea what it is to me to come out of the house again, and ride, and dance and sing. i really believe, jack, that i enjoy things more than anyone else i know. everything that enjoys itself appeals to me. jack, do enjoy yourself, although we settled you mustn't appeal to me. who is that girl standing there with the poodle? i think i shall get chesterford to buy me a poodle. there's a woman next her awfully like vivy, do you see, shading her eyes with her hand. it is vivy." dodo's face suddenly grew grave and frightened. she reined her horse in opposite to where mrs. vivian was standing. "quick, quick," she said, "tell me what has happened!" mrs. vivian looked up at dodo with infinite compassion in her eyes. "dodo, darling," she said, "give your horse to the groom. please help her to dismount, mr. broxton." dodo got off, and mrs. vivian led her to a seat. dodo had a sudden flash of remembrance of how she had sat here with jack a year ago. "tell me quickly," she said again. "my poor dodo," said mrs. vivian, softly stroking the back of dodo's hand. "you will be brave, won't you? it is worth while being brave. it is all over. the baby died this morning, half an hour after you had gone." dodo's first feeling was one of passionate anger and resentment. she felt she had been duped and tricked in a most unjustifiable manner. fate had led her to expect some happy days, and she had been cruelly disappointed. it was not fair; she had been released from two tedious months of inactivity, only to be caught again. it was like a cat playing with a mouse. she wanted to revenge herself on something. "oh, it is too awful," she said. "vivy, what can i do? it is cruel." then her better nature came to her aid. "poor chesterford, poor dear old boy," she said simply. mrs. vivian's face grew more tender. "i am glad you thought of him," she said. "his first thought was for you. he was there all the time. as soon as it was over he said to himself, 'please, god, help dodo to bear it.' you bear it very well, dear. come, the carriage is waiting." "oh, i can't, i can't," said dodo passionately; "let me sit here a little while, and then go away somewhere else. i can bear it better alone. i can't see chesterford." "no, dodo," she said, "you must not be cowardly. i know it is the worst part of it for you. but your duty lies with him. you must comfort him. you must make him feel that he has got you left. he is terribly broken, but he will be brave for your sake. be brave for his." dodo sighed wearily. "i suppose you are right," she said; "i will come." she turned and looked round on to the gay scene. the row was full of riders, and bright with the flooding sunlight. "oh, it is cruel," she said. "i only wanted to be happy, and i mayn't even be that. what is the good of it all, if i mayn't enjoy it? why was the baby ever born? i wish it never had been. what good does it do anyone that i should suffer?" mrs. vivian felt horribly helpless and baffled. how could she appeal to this woman, who looked at everything from only her own standpoint? "come, dodo," she said. they drove back in silence. chesterford was standing in the hall as they entered, waiting for them. he came forward to meet dodo. "my poor, poor darling," he said, "it is very hard on you. but we can bear it together, dodo." dodo turned from him passionately, and left him standing there. dodo was sitting in the window of her morning-room late on the same afternoon. she and lord chesterford had been together to look at the baby as it lay there, with the little features that had been racked and distorted with pain, calm and set again, as if it only slept; and dodo had at that moment one real pang of grief. her first impulse, as we have seen, was one of anger and impatience at the stupidity of destiny. she had been enjoying herself, in a purely animal way so intensely, at that moment when she saw mrs. vivian waiting for her under the trees. she was just released from a tedious period of inactivity, and inactivity was to dodo worse than anything in the inferno. "i daresay i should get accustomed to being roasted," she had said once to miss grantham. "it really would be rather interesting seeing your fingers curling up like fried bacon, but imagine being put in a nicely-furnished room with nobody to talk to, and a view over hyde park one side and melton mowbray the other, and never being able to get out! the longer that lasted, the worse it would become." and so she had felt the sort of rapture with which "the prisoner leaps to loose his chains" when she had gone out that morning, and again knew the infinite delight of feeling a fine horse answer to her hand, under a sort of playful protest. then this had come upon her, and dodo felt that language, failed her to express her profound contempt and dislike for the destiny that shapes our ends. but her generosity and sense of fair play had come to her aid. she was not alone in this matter, and she quite realised that it was worse for chesterford than herself. chesterford had evinced the most intense interest in the baby in itself. dodo, on the other hand, had frankly declared that the baby's potentialities possessed a far greater attraction, for her than its actualities. but she had voluntarily linked her life with his; and she must do her part--they had had a great loss, and he must not feel that he bore it alone. dodo shook her head hopelessly over the unknown factor, that made her so much to him, and left him so little to her, but she accepted it as inevitable. almost immediately after she had left him in the hall, she felt angry with herself for haying done so, just as she had been vexed at her reception of his proposal of family prayers, and a few minutes afterwards she sent for him, and they had gone together to see the baby. and then, because she was a woman, because she was human, because she was genuinely sorry for this honest true man who knelt beside her and sobbed as if his heart was broken, but with a natural instinct turned to her, and sorrowed more for her than for himself, her intense self-centredness for the time vanished, and with a true and womanly instinct she found her consolation in consoling him. dodo felt as if she had lived years since this morning, and longed to cut the next week out of her life, to lose it altogether. she wanted to get away out of the whole course of events, to begin again without any past. from a purely worldly point of view she was intensely vexed at the baby's death; she had felt an immense pride in having provided an heir, and it was all no use; it was over, it might as well never have been born. and, as the day wore on, she felt an overwhelming disgust of all the days that were to follow, the darkened house, the quieted movements, the enforced idleness. if only no one knew, dodo felt that she would fling herself at once, this very minute, into the outside world again. what was the use of all this retirement? it only made a bad job worse. surely, when misfortune comes on one, it is best to forget it as soon as possible, and dodo's eminently practical way of forgetting anything was to absorb herself in something else. "what a sensible man david was," she thought. "he went and oiled himself, which, i suppose, is the equivalent of putting on one's very best evening dress." she felt an inward laughter, more than half hysterical, as to what would happen if she went and oiled chesterford. she got up and went languidly across to the window. lord chesterford's room was on the story below, and was built on a wing by itself, and a window looked out on her side of the house. looking down she saw him kneeling at his table, with his face buried in his hands. dodo was conscious of a lump rising in her throat, and she went back to her chair, and sat down again. "he is such a good, honest old boy," she thought, "and somehow, in a dim-lit way, he finds consolation in that. it is a merciful arrangement." she walked downstairs to his study, and went in. he had heard her step, and stood near the door waiting to receive her. dodo felt infinitely sorry for him. chesterford drew her into a chair, and knelt down beside her. "you've no idea what a help you have been to me, darling," he said. "it makes me feel as if i was an awful coward, when i see you so brave." dodo stroked his hand. "yes, yes," she said, "we must both be brave, we must help one another." "ah, my own wife," he said, "what should i have done if it had been you? and i was dreadfully afraid at one time! you know you are both the baby and yourself to me now, and yet i thought before you were all you could be." dodo felt horribly uncomfortable. she had been aware before that there had been moments when, as jack expressed it, she was "keeping it up," but never to this extent. "tell me about it, chesterford," she said. "it was only half an hour after you went," he said, "that he suddenly got worse. the doctor came a few minutes after that. it was all practically over by then. it was convulsions, you know. he was quite quiet, and seemed out of pain for a few minutes before the end, and he opened his eyes, and put out his little arms towards me. do you think he knew me, dodo?" "yes, dear, yes," said dodo softly. "i should be so happy to think he did," said lord chesterford. "poor little chap, he always took to me from the first, do you remember? i hope he knew me then. mrs. vivian came very soon after, and she offered to go for you, and met you in the park, didn't she?" "yes," said dodo; "jack and i were together. she is very good to us. would you like to see her to-night?" "ah no, dodo," he said, "i can't see anyone but your dear self. but make her come and see you if you feel inclined, only come and talk to me again afterwards." "no, dear," said dodo. "i won't have her, if you feel against it." "then we shall have an evening together again, dodo," he said. "i seem to have seen you so little, since you began to go about again," he added wistfully. "oh, it must be so," said dodo; "you have one thing to do, and i have another. i've seen so many different people this last week, that i feel as if i had seen no one person." "you are so active," he said; "you do half a dozen things while i am doing one." "oh, but you do great important man things," said dodo, "and i do silly little woman things." she felt the conversation was becoming much more bearable. chesterford smiled. dodo seized on it as a favourable omen. "i like seeing you smile, old boy," she said; "you look more yourself than you did two hours ago." he looked at her earnestly. "dodo, you will not think me preaching or being priggish, will you, darling? you know me too well for that. there is one way of turning this into a blessing. we must try and see why this was sent us, and if we cannot see why, we must take it in faith, and go on living our lives simply and straightforwardly, and then, perhaps, we shall know sometime. ah, my darling, it has taught me one thing already, for i never knew before how much i loved you. i loved you all i could before this, but it has somehow given me fresh power to love. i think the love i had for the boy has been added to the love i had for you, and it is yours, darling, all of it, always." chapter ten that same evening edith staines and miss grantham were seated together in a box at the opera. the first act was just over, and edith, who had mercilessly silenced every remark miss grantham had made during it, relaxed a little. miss grantham's method of looking at an opera was to sit with her hack to the stage, so as to command a better view of the house, and talk continuously. but edith would not stand that. she had before her a large quarto containing the full score, and she had a pencil in her hand with which she entered little corrections, and now and then she made comments to herself. "i shall tell mancinelli of that," she murmured. "the whole point of the motif is that rapid run with the minim at the end, and he actually allowed that beast to make a rallentando." but the act was over now, and she shut the book with a bang. "come outside, grantie," she said, "it's so fearfully hot. i had to hurry over dinner in order to get here in time. the overture is one of the best parts. it isn't like so many overtures that give you a sort of abstract of the opera, but it hints at it all, and leaves you to think it out." "oh, i didn't hear the overture," said miss grantham. "i only got here at mephistopheles' appearance. i think edouard is such a dear. he really looks a very attractive devil. i suppose it's not exactly the beauty of holiness, but extremes meet, you know." "i must open the door," said edith. "i want to sit in a draught." "there's mr. broxton," remarked miss grantham. "i think he sees us. i hope he'll come up. i think it's simply charming, to see how devoted he still is to dodo. i think he is what they call faithful." "i think it's scandalous," said edith hotly. "he's got no business to hang about like that. it's very weak of him--i despise weak people. it's no use being anything, unless you're strong as well; it's as bad as being second-rate. you may be of good quality, but if you're watered down, it's as bad as being inferior." jack meantime had made his way up to the box. "we've just been saying all sorts of nice things about you," remarked miss grantham sweetly. "have you seen dodo to-day?" "haven't you heard?" asked jack. edith frowned. "no; what?" she asked. "their baby died this morning," he said. edith's score fell to the ground with a crash. "good heavens! is it true?" she asked. "who told you?" "i was riding with dodo this morning," said he, "and mrs. vivian met dodo and told her. i knew something had happened, so i went to inquire. no one has seen either of them again." "did you try and see her?" said edith severely. "yes, i went this evening." "ah!" edith frowned again. "how does he take it?" she asked. "i don't know," he said; "no one has seen them since." edith picked up her score. "good-night, grantie," she said. "good-night, mr. broxton. i must go." miss grantham looked up in astonishment. edith was folding her opera cloak round her. jack offered to help her. "thanks, i can do it," she said brusquely. "what are you going for?" asked miss grantham, in surprise. "it's all right," said edith. "i've got to see someone. i shall come back, probably." the door closed behind her. "of course it's awfully sad," remarked miss grantham, "but i don't see why edith should go like that. i wonder where she's gone. don't you adore the opera, mr. broxton? i think it's simply lovely. it's so awfully sad about marguerite, isn't it? i wish life was really like this. it would be so nice to sing a song whenever anything important happened. it would smooth things so. oh, yes, this is the second act, isn't it? it's where mephisto sings that song to the village people. it always makes me feel creepy. poor dodo!" "i am more sorry for him," said jack; "you know he was simply wrapped up in the baby." "dodo certainly finds consolation quickly," said miss grantham. "i think she's sensible. it really is no use crying over spilt milk. i suppose she won't go out again this season. dear me, it's lady bretton's ball the week after next, in honour of lucas's coming of age. dodo was to have led the cotillion with lord ledgers. that was a good note. isn't the scene charming?" "i don't know what dodo will do," said jack. "i believe they will leave london, only--only--" miss grantham looked at him inquiringly. "you see dodo has to be amused," said jack. "i don't know what she would do, if she was to have to shut herself up again. she was frightfully bored after the baby's birth." miss grantham was casting a roving london eye over the occupants of the stalls. "there's that little mr. spencer, the clergyman at kensington," she said. "i wonder how his conscience lets him come to see anything so immoral. isn't that maud next him? dear me, how interesting. bring them up here after the act, mr. broxton. i suppose maud hasn't heard?" "i think she's been with her father somewhere in lancashire," said jack. "she can only have come back to-day. there is mrs. vane, too. dodo can't have telegraphed to them." "oh, that's so like dodo," murmured miss grantham; "it probably never occurred to her. dear me, this act is over. i am afraid we must have missed the 'virgo.' what a pity. do go, and ask them all to come up here." "so charmed,", murmured mrs. vane, as she rustled into the box. "isn't it a lovely night? dear prince waldenech met me in the hall, and he asked so affectionately after dodo. charming, wasn't it? yes. and do you know mr. spencer, dear miss grantham? shall we tell miss grantham and mr. broxton our little secret, maud? cupid has been busy here," she whispered, with a rich elaborateness to miss grantham. "isn't it charming? we are delighted. yes, mr. spencer, miss grantham and mr. broxton, of course--mr. spencer." mr. spencer bowed and smiled, and conducted himself as he should. he was a fashionable rector in a rich parish, who had long felt that the rich deserved as much looking after as the poor, and had been struck with maud's zeal for the latter, and thought it would fit in very well with his zeal for the former, had won maud's heart, and now appeared as the happy accepted lover. mrs. vane was anxious to behave in the way it was expected that she should, and, finding that miss grantham sat with her back to the stage and talked, took up a corresponding attitude herself. miss grantham quickly decided that she did not know about the death of dodo's baby, and determined not to tell her. in the first place, it was to be supposed that she did not know either, and in the second, she was amused by the present company, and knew that to mention it was to break up the party. mr. spencer had a little copy of the words, with the english on one side and the italian on the other. when he came to a passage that he thought indelicate, he turned his attention to the italian. maud sat between him and miss grantham. "i am so delighted, maud," miss grantham was saying, "and i am sure dodo will be charmed. she doesn't know yet, i suppose? when is it to be?" "oh, i don't quite know," said maud confusedly. "algy, that is mr. spencer, is going to leave london, you know, and take a living at gloucester. i shall like that. there is a good deal of poverty at gloucester." miss grantham smiled sympathetically. "how sweet of you," she said; "and you will go and work among the poor, and give them soup and prayer-books, won't you? i should love to do that. mrs. vivian will tell you all about those things, i suppose?" "oh, she took me to an awful slum before we left london," said maud, in a sort of rapture--"you know we have been away at manchester for a week with my father--and i gave them some things i had worked. i am doing a pair of socks for dodo's baby." miss grantham turned her attention to the stage. "the jewel song is perfectly lovely," she remarked. "i wish edith was here. don't you think that girl sings beautifully? i wonder who she is." at that moment the door of the box opened, and edith entered. she grasped the situation at once, and felt furiously angry with miss grantham and jack. she determined to put a stop to it. "dear mrs. vane, you can't have heard. i only knew this evening, and i suppose mrs. vivian's note has missed you somehow. i have just left her, and she told me she had written to you. you know dodo's baby has been very ill, quite suddenly, and this morning--yes, yes--" mrs. vane started up distractedly. "oh, my poor dodo," she cried, "i never knew! and here i am enjoying myself, when she--maud, did you hear? dodo's baby--only this morning. my poor dodo!" she began crying in a helpless sort of way. maud turned round with a face full of horror. "how awful! poor dodo! come, mother, we must go." mr. spencer dropped his english and italian version. "let me see you to your carriage," he said. "let me give you an arm, mrs. vane." maud turned to jack, and for once showed some of dodo's spirit. "mr. broxton," she said, "i have an idea you knew. perhaps i am wrong. if i am, i beg your pardon; if not, i consider you have behaved in a way i didn't expect of you, being a friend of dodo's. i think--" she broke off, and followed the others. jack felt horribly uncomfortable. he and edith and miss grantham stood in silence for a moment. "it was horrible of you, grantie," said edith, "to let them sit here, and tell them nothing about it." "my dear edith, i could do nothing else," said miss grantham, in an even, calm voice. "there would have been a scene, and i can't bear scenes. there has been a scene as it is, but you are responsible for that. you are rather jumpy to-night. where have you been?" "i have been to see mrs. vivian," said edith. "i wanted to know about this. i told her i was coming back here, and she gave me this for you, mr. broxton." she handed him a note. then she picked up her big score, and sat down again with her pencil. the note contained only two lines, requesting mr. broxton to come and see her in the morning. jack read it and tore it up. he felt undecided how to act. edith was buried in her score, and gave no sign. miss grantham had resumed her place, and was gazing languidly, at the box opposite. he picked up his hat, and turned to leave. edith looked up from her score. "i think i ought to tell you," she said, "that mrs. vivian and i talked about you, and that note is the result. i don't care a pin what you think." jack opened his eyes in astonishment. edith had always struck him as being rather queer; and this statement seemed to him very queer indeed. her manner was not conciliatory. he bowed. "i feel complimented by being the subject of your conversation," he replied with well-bred insolence, and closed the door behind him. miss grantham laughed. a scene like this pleased her; it struck her as pure comedy. "really, edith, you are very jumpy; i don't understand you a bit. you are unnecessarily rude. why did you say you did not care a pin what he thought?" "you won't understand, grantie," said edith. "don't you see how dangerous it is all becoming? i don't care the least whether i am thought meddlesome. jack broxton is awfully in love with dodo, anyone can see that, and dodo evidently cares for him; and that poor, dear, honest fool chesterford is completely blind to it all. it was bad enough before, but the baby's death makes it twice as bad. dodo will want to be amused; she will hate this retirement, and she will expect mr. broxton to amuse her. don't you see she is awfully bored with her husband, and she will decline to be entirely confined to his company. while she could let off steam by dancing and riding and so on, it was safe; she only met mr. broxton among fifty other people. but decency, even dodo's, will forbid her to meet those fifty other people now. and each time she sees him, she will return to her husband more wearied than before. it is all too horrible. i don't suppose she is in love with jack broxton, but she finds him attractive, and he knows it, and he is acting disgracefully in letting himself see her so much. everyone knows he went abroad to avoid her--everyone except dodo, that is, and she must guess. i respected him for that, but now he is playing the traitor to chesterford. and mrs. vivian quite agrees with me." "oh, it's awfully interesting if you're right," said miss grantham reflectively; "but i think you exaggerate. jack is not a cad. he doesn't mean any harm. besides, he is a great friend of chesterford's." "well, he's got no business to play with fire," said edith. "his sense of security only increases the real danger. if chesterford knew exactly how matters stood it would be different, but he is so simple-hearted that he is only charmed to see jack broxton, and pleased that dodo likes him." "oh, it's awfully interesting," murmured miss grantham. "i could cry when i think of chesterford," said edith. "the whole thing is such a fearful tragedy. if only they can get over this time safely, it may all blow over. i wish dodo could go out again to her balls and concerts. she finds such frantic interest in everything about her, that she doesn't think much of any particular person. but it is this period, when she is thrown entirely on two or three people, that is so dangerous. she really is a frightful problem. chesterford was a bold or a blind man to marry her. oh, i can't attend to this opera to-night. i shall go home. it's nearly over. faust is singing hopelessly out of tune." she shut her book, and picked up her fan and gloves. "dear edith," said miss grantham languidly, "i think you mean very well, but you are rather over-drawing things. are you really going? i think i shall come too." jack meantime was finding his way home in a rebellious and unchristian frame of mind. in the first place, he had just lost his temper, which always seemed to him to be a most misdirected effort of energy; in the second place, he resented edith's interference with all his heart and soul; and in the third, he did not feel so certain that she was wrong. of course he guessed what mrs. vivian's wish to see him meant, for it had occurred to him very vividly what consequences the death of the baby would have on him and dodo: and he anticipated another period like that which had followed the birth. jack could hardly dare to trust himself to think of that time. he knew it had been very pleasant to him, and that he had enjoyed dodo's undisturbed company during many days in succession, but it was with a certain tingling of the ears that he thought of the events of the morning, and his mad confession to her. "i have a genius for spoiling things," thought jack to himself. "everything was going right; i was seeing dodo enough to keep me happy, and free from that hateful feeling of last autumn, and then i spoilt it all by a stupid remark that could do no good, nor help me in any conceivable way. how will dodo have taken it?" but he was quite sure of one thing--he would not go and see mrs. vivian. he was, he felt, possessed of all the facts of the case, and he was competent to form a judgment on them--at any rate mrs. vivian was not competent to do it for him. no, he would give it another chance. he would again reason out the pros and cons of the case, he would be quite honest, and he would act accordingly. that he should arrive at the same conclusion was inevitable. the one thing in the world that no man can account for, or allow for, is change in himself. if jack had been able to foresee, when he went abroad, that he would be acting thus with regard to dodo, he would have thought himself mad, and it would have been as impossible for him to act thus then, as it was inevitable for him to act thus now. if we judge by our own standards, and our own standards alter, we cannot expect our verdicts to remain invariable. under a strong attachment a man drifts, and he cannot at any one moment allow for, or feel the force of the current, for he is moving in it, though he thinks himself at rest. the horrible necessities of cause and effect work in us, as well as around us. as edith had said, his sense of security was his danger, for his standard of security was not the same as it had been. he sat down and wrote a note to mrs. vivian, saying that he regretted being unable to call on her to-morrow, and purposely forebore to give any reason. he had considerable faith in her power of reading between the lines, and the fact, baldly stated, was an unnecessary affront to her intellect. mrs. vivian read the note with very little surprise, but with a good deal of regret. she was genuinely sorry for him, but she had other means at her disposal, though they were not so pleasant to use. they involved a certain raking up of old dust-heaps, and a certain awakening of disagreeable memories. but it never occurred to her to draw back. naturally enough she went to see dodo next morning, and found her alone. mrs. vivian had her lesson by heart, and she was only waiting for dodo to tell her to begin, so to speak. dodo hailed her with warmth; she had evidently found matters a little tedious. "dear vivy," she said, "i'm so glad you've come; and chesterford told me to ask you to see him, before you went away, in case you called. so you will, won't you? but i must have you for a long time first." "how is he?" asked mrs. vivian. "oh, he's quite well," said dodo, "but he feels it frightfully. but he is fortunate, he has spiritual consolation as his aid. i haven't, not one atom. it's a great nuisance, i know, but i don't see how to help it. can the ethiopian change his skin?" "ah, dodo," said she, with earnestness in her tone, "you have a great opportunity--i don't think you realise how great." "why, what do you mean?" said dodo. "of course i know what you feel," said mrs. vivian, "and it is necessary that with your grief there must be mixed up a great deal of vexation and annoyance. isn't it so?" "yes, yes," said dodo. "you don't despise me for feeling that?" "despise you!" said mrs. vivian. "you know me better than that. but you must not dwell on it. there is something more important than the cancelling of your smaller engagements. you have a big engagement, you know, which must not be cancelled." dodo rose from her chair with wide eyes. "ah, vivy," she said, "you have guessed it, have you? it is quite true. let me tell you all about it. it is just that which bothers me. these days when i only see chesterford bore me more than i can say. i don't know why i tell you this; it isn't want of loyalty to him, but i want help. i don't know how to deal with him.. yes, he bores me. i always foresaw this, but i hoped i shouldn't mind. i was wrong and jack was right. he warned me of it, but he must never know he was right. of course you see why. i think i did not expect that chesterford's love for me would last. i thought he would cease being my lover, and i am terribly wrong. it gets stronger and stronger. he told me so last night, and i felt a brute. but i comforted him and deceived him again. ah, what could i do? i don't love him. i would give anything to do so. i think i felt once what love was, but only once, and not for him." mrs. vivian looked up inquiringly. "no, i shan't tell you about that," said dodo, speaking rapidly and excitedly; "it would be a sort of desecration. there is something divine about chesterford's feeling for me. i know it, but it doesn't really touch me. i am not capable of it, and what happens is that i continue to amuse myself on my own lines, and all that goes over my head. but i make him believe i understand. it makes him happy. and i know, i know, that when i am out of this, i shall go on just as usual, except that i shall feel like a prisoner escaped, and revel in my liberty. i know i shall. sometimes i almost determine to make some sacrifice for him in a blind sort of way, like a heathen sacrificing to what he fears, yes, fears, but then that mood passes and i go on as usual. i long to get away from him. sometimes i am afraid of hating him, if i see him too much or too exclusively." "yes, dodo, i know, i know," said mrs. vivian. "i don't see how you are to learn it, unless it comes to you; but what you can do, is to act as if you felt it, not only in little tiny ways, like calling him an 'old darling,' but in living for him more." "ah, those are only words," said dodo impatiently. "i realise it all, but i can't do it." there was a long silence. then mrs. vivian said,-- "dodo, i am going to tell you what i have never told anyone before, and that is the story of my marriage. i know the current version very well, that i married a brute who neglected me. that he neglected me is true, but that is not all. like you, i married without love, without even liking. there were reasons for it, which i need not trouble you with. i used to see a good deal of a man with whom i was in love, when i married mr. vivian. he interested me and made my life more bearable. my husband grew jealous of him, almost directly after my marriage. i saw it, and, god forgive me, it amused me, and i let it go on--in fact, i encouraged it. that was my mistake, and i paid dearly for it. i believe he loved me at first; it was my fault that he did not continue to do so. then my baby was born, and, a month afterwards, somehow or other we quarrelled, and he said things to me which no woman ever forgets. he said it was not his child. i never forgot it, and it is a very short time ago that i forgave it. for two years after his death, as you know, i travelled abroad, and i fought against it, and i believe, before god, that i have forgiven him. then i came back to london. but after that day when he said those things to me, we grew further and further apart. i interested myself in other things, in the poor, and so on, and he took to drinking. that killed him. he was run over in the street, as he came back from somewhere where he had been dining. but he was run over because he was dead drunk at the time. when i was abroad i came under the influence of a certain roman catholic priest. he did not convert me, nor did he try to, but he helped me very much; and one day, i remember the day very well, i was almost in despair, because i could not forgive the wrong my dead husband had done me, somehow a change began in me. i can tell you no more than that a change comes, and it is there. it is the grace of god. there, dodo, that is my history, and there is this you may learn from it, that you must be on your guard against making a mistake. you must never let chesterford know how wide the gulf is between you. it will be a constant effort, i know, but it is all you can do. set a watch on yourself; let your indifference be your safeguard, your warning." mrs. vivian stood up. her eyes were full of tears, and she laid her hands on dodo's shoulders. dodo felt comfort in the presence of this strong woman, who had wrestled and conquered. dodo looked affectionately at her, and, with one of those pretty motions that came so naturally to her, she pressed her back into her chair, and knelt beside her. "dear vivy," she said, "my little troubles have made you cry. i am so sorry, dear. you are very good to me. but i want to ask you one thing. about that man your husband was jealous of--" "no, no," said mrs. vivian quickly; "that was only one of the incidents which i had to tell you to make the story intelligible." dodo hesitated. "you are sure you aren't thinking of anyone in my case--of jack, for instance?" she suddenly said. mrs. vivian did not answer for a moment. then she said,-- "dodo, i am going to be very frank with you. he is an instance--in a way. i don't mean to suppose for a moment that chesterford is jealous of him, in fact, i know he can't be--it isn't in him; but he is a good instance of the sort of thing that makes you tend to neglect your husband." "but you don't think he is an instance in particular?" demanded dodo. "i don't mean to bind myself in any way, but i simply want to know." mrs. vivian went straight to the point: "that is a question which you can only decide for yourself," she said. "i cannot pretend to judge." dodo smiled. "then i will decide for myself," she said. "you see, jack is never dull. i daresay you may think him so, but i don't. he always manages to amuse me, and, on the whole, the more i am amused the less bored i get in the intervals. he tides me over the difficult places. i allow they are difficult." "ah, that is exactly what you mustn't allow," said mrs. vivian. "you don't seem to realise any possible deficiency in yourself." "oh, yes, i do," said dodo, as if she was announcing the most commonplace fact in the world. "i know i am deficient. i don't appreciate devotion, i don't appreciate the quality that makes one gaze and gaze, as it says in the hymn. it is rather frog-like that gazing; what do you call it--batrachian. now, maud is batrachian. i daresay it is a very high quality, but i don't quite live up to it. there are, of course, heaps of excellent things one doesn't live up to, like the accounts of the stock exchange in the _times_. i fully understand that the steadiness of stockings makes a difference to somebody, only it doesn't make any difference to me." "dodo, you are incorrigible," said mrs. vivian, laughing in spite of herself. "i give you up--only, do the best you can. i believe, in the main, you agree with me. and now i must be off. you said lord chesterford wished to see me. i suppose he is downstairs." "i think i shall come too," said dodo. so they went down together. lord chesterford was in his study. "do you know what mrs. vivian has been saying to me?" remarked dodo placidly, as she laid her hand on his shoulder. "she has been telling me i do not love you enough--isn't she ridiculous?" mrs. vivian for the moment was nonplussed, but she recovered herself quickly. "dodo is very naughty to-day," she said. "she misconstrues everything i say." "i don't think it's likely you said that," said he, capturing dodo's hand, "because it isn't true." "i am certainly _de trop_," murmured mrs. vivian, turning to go. dodo's hand lay unresistingly in his. "she has been so good and brave," said lord chesterford to mrs. vivian, "she makes me feel ashamed." mrs. vivian felt an immense admiration for him. "i said you deserved a very great deal," she said, putting out her hand to him. "i must go, my carriage has been waiting an hour." he retained dodo's hand, and they saw her to the door. the footman met them in the hall. "mr. broxton wants to know whether you can see him, my lady," he said to dodo. "would you like to see jack?" she asked chesterford. "i would rather you told him you can't," he said. "of course i will," she answered. she turned to the footman. "say i am engaged, but he may come again to-morrow and i will see him. you don't mind my seeing him, do you, chesterford?" "no, no, dear," he said. dodo and chesterford turned back to the drawing-room. jack was on the steps. "i thought you were engaged at this hour," mrs. vivian said to him. "so i was," he answered. "dodo asked me to come and see her." dodo a detail of the day by e.f. benson in two volumes vol. ii fourth edition methuen & co london and far out, drifting helplessly on that grey, angry sea, i saw a small boat at the mercy of the winds and waves. and my guide said to me, 'some call the sea "falsehood," and that boat "truth," and others call the sea "truth," and the boat "falsehood;" and, for my part, i think that one is right as the other.'--the professor of ignorance. chapter eleven it was just three weeks after the baby's death, and dodo was sitting in her room about eleven o'clock in the morning, yawning dismally over a novel, but she was conscious of a certain relief, a sense of effort suspended. late the evening before, lord chesterford had consulted her about some business down at harchester, and dodo, in a moment of inspiration, had said that it must be done by someone on the spot, that an agent was not to be trusted, and that if chesterford liked she would go. this, of course, led to his offering to go himself, and would dodo come with him? dodo had replied that she was quite willing to go, but that there was no need of both of them making a tiresome journey on an infernally hot day. chesterford had felt, rather wistfully, that he would not mind the journey if dodo was with him, but he had learned lately not to say such things. dodo was apt to treat them as nonsense. "my coming with you wouldn't make it any cooler, or less insufferably dusty," she would have said. the result was that chesterford went, and dodo was left alone' in london, with a distinct sense of relief and relaxation. dodo's next move was to send a note to jack, saying that he was going to come and lunch with her. she was not conscious of any sense of deception in this, but she had seen that chesterford had not cared to see anybody since the baby's death, except mrs. vivian, whereas she longed to be in the midst of people again. so, whenever opportunities occurred, she had been in the habit of seeing what she could of her friends, but was very careful not to bore her husband with them. she was quite alive to the truth of mrs. vivian's remarks. but though dodo felt a great relief in her husband's absence, she was more than ever conscious of the unutterable stupidity of spending, day after day doing nothing. it was something even to keep it up with chesterford, but now there was nothing to do--nothing. still, jack, was coming to lunch, and perhaps she might get through a few hours that way. chesterford had said be would be back that night late or next morning. the footman came in bearing a card. "jack already," thought dodo, with wonder. but it was not jack. dodo looked at it and pondered a moment. "tell lady bretton i will see her," she said. a few moments afterwards lady bretton rustled into the room. dodo had always thought her rather like a barmaid, and she was sure that she would attract many customers at any public-house. she was charmingly pretty, and always said the right thing. dodo felt she ought to know why she had come, but couldn't quite remember. but she was not left in doubt long. "dearest dodo," said lady bretton, "i have wanted to come and see you dreadfully, only i haven't been able. you know lucas has been at home all this week." then it flashed upon dodo. "he comes of age to-day, you know, and we are giving a ball. i was so dreadfully shocked to hear your bad news, and am delighted to see you looking so well considering. is lord chesterford at home?" "no," said dodo, as if weighing something in her mind. "he may come to-night, but i don't really expect him till to-morrow morning." "has he gone on some visit?" asked she. "i didn't suppose--" "no, he's only gone on business to harchester. he hasn't, of course, been out at all. but--" dodo paused. then she got quickly up from her chair, and clapped her hands. "yes, i will come. i am dying to go out again. who leads the cotillion with me? tommy ledgers, isn't it? oh, i shall enjoy it. i'm nearly dead for want of something to do. and he can dance, too. yes, i'll come, but i must be back by half-past two. chesterford will perhaps come by the night train getting here at two. i daresay it will be late. are you going to have the mirror figure? do have it. there's no one like ledgers for leading that. he led it here with me. it will be like escaping from penal servitude for life. talk of treadmills! i'm at the point of death for want of a dance. let it begin punctually. i'll be there by ten sharp if you like. tell prince waldenech i'm coming. he wrote to say he wouldn't go unless i did. he's badly in love with me. that doesn't matter, but he can dance. all those austrians can. i'm going to have a regular debauch." "i'm delighted," said lady bretton. "i came here to ask you whether you couldn't possibly come, but i hardly dated. dear dodo, it's charming of you. it will make all the difference. i was in despair this morning. i had asked milly cornish to lead with ledgers, but she refused, unless i asked you again first. we'll have a triumphant arch, if you like, with 'welcome to dodo' on it." "anything you like," said dodo; "the madder the merrier. let's see, how does the hoop figure go?" dodo snatched up an old cotillion hoop from where it stood in the corner with fifty other relics, and began practising it. "we must have this right," she said; "it's quite new to most people. you must tell tommy to come here for an hour this afternoon, and we'll rehearse. you start with it in the left hand, don't you? and then cross it over, and hold your partner's hoop in the right. damn--i beg your pardon--but it doesn't go right. no, you must send ledgers. shall i want castanets? i think i'd better. we must have the new spanish figure. ah, that is right." dodo went through a series of mysterious revolutions with the hoop. "i feel like a vampire who's got hold of blood again," said dodo, pausing to get her breath. "i feel like a fish put back into the water, like a convict back in his own warm nest. no charge for mixed metaphors. supplied free, gratis, _and_ for nothing," she said, with emphasis. lady bretton put her head a little on one side, and gushed at her. her manners were always perfect. "now, i'm going to send you off," said dodo. "jack's coming to lunch, and i've got a lot to do. jack who?' jack broxton, of course. will he be with, you to-night? no?--i shall tell him i'm coming. you see if he doesn't come too. you sent him a card, of course. after lunch i shall want tommy. mind he comes. good-bye." dodo felt herself again. there was the double relief of chesterford's absence, and there was something to do. she hummed a little french song, snapped her castanets, and pitched her novel into the grate. "oh, this great big world," she said, "you've been dead, and i've been dead for a month. won't we have a resurrection this evening! come in, jack," she went on, as the door opened. "here's your hoop. catch it! do you know the hoop figure? that's right; no, in your left hand. that's all with the hoop. now we waltz." jack had a very vague idea as to why he happened to be waltzing with dodo. it seemed to him rather like "alice in wonderland." however, he supposed it was all right, and on they went. a collision with the table, and a slow stygian stream of ink dropping in a fatal, relentless manner on to the carpet, caused a stoppage, and dodo condescended to explain, which she did all in one sentence. "chesterford's gone to harchester after some stuffy business, and i'm going to the brettons' ball, you must come, jack, i'm going to lead the cotillion with tommy, i simply must go, i'm dying to go out again; and, oh, jack, i'm awfully glad to see you, and why haven't you been here for the last twenty years, and i'm out of breath, never mind the ink." dodo stopped from sheer exhaustion, and dropped a blotting-pad on to the pool of ink, which had now assumed the importance of an inland lake. "blanche has been here this morning," she continued, "and i told her i'd come, and would bring you. you must come, jack. you're an awfully early bird, and i haven't got any worms for you, because they've all turned, owing to the hot weather, i suppose, and i feel so happy i can't talk sense. tommy's coming this afternoon to practise. what time is it? let's go and have lunch. that will do instead of worms. if chesterford goes to attend to bailiff's business, why shouldn't i go and dance? it really is a kindness to blanche. nothing ought to stand in the way of a kindness. she was in despair; she told me so: herself. she might have committed suicide. it would have been pleasant to have a countess's corpse's blood on your head, wouldn't it?" "i thought chesterford was here," said jack. "oh, i'm not good enough for you," remarked dodo. "that's very kind of you. i suppose you, wouldn't have come, if you had known i should have had no one to meet you. well, there isn't a soul, so you can go away if you like, or join the footmen in the servants' hall. oh, i am so glad to be doing something again." "i'm awfully glad you're coming to-night," said jack; "it'll do you good." "ain't it a lark?" remarked dodo, in pure lancashire dialect, helping herself largely to beefsteak. "jack, what'll you drink? do you want beer? i'll treat you to what you like. you may dissolve my pearls in vinegar, if it will give you any satisfaction. fetch mr. broxton my pearls, i mean some beer," said dodo, upsetting the salt. "really, jack, i believe i've gone clean cracked. i've upset a lot of salt over your coat. pour some claret upon it. oh, no, that's the other way round, but i don't see why it shouldn't do. have some more steak, jack. where's the gravy spoon? jack, have you been trying to steal the silver? oh, there it is. have some chopped carrots with it. who's that ringing at our door-bell? i'm a little--who is it, walter? just go out and see. miss staines? tell her there's lunch going on and jack's here. there's an inducement. jack, do you like edith? she's rather loud. yes, i agree, but we all make a noise at times. can't she stop? oh, very well, she may go away again. i believe she wouldn't come because you were here, jack. i don't think she likes you, but you're a very good sort in your way. jack, will you say grace? chesterford always says grace. well, for a christian gentleman not to know a grace! bring some cigarettes, walter, or would you rather have a cigar, jack? and some black coffee. well, i'm very grateful for _my_ good dinner, and i don't mind saying so." dodo went on talking at the top of her voice, quite continuously. she asked jack a dozen questions without waiting for the answer. "where shall we go now, jack?" she continued, when they had finished coffee--dodo took three cups and a cigarette with each. "we must go somewhere. i can leave word for ledgers to wait. let's go to the zoo and see all the animals in cages. ah, i sympathise with them. i have only just got out of my cage myself." dodo dragged jack off to the zoo, on the top of a bus, and bought buns for the animals and fruit for the birds, and poked a fierce lion with the end of her parasol, which the brute bit off, and nearly fell over into the polar bear's tank, and had all her money stolen by a pickpocket. then she went back home, and found lord ledgers, whom she put through his paces, and then she had tea, and dressed for the ball. she had ordered a very remarkable ball-dress from worth's, just before the baby's death, which had never yet seen the light. it was a soft grey texture, which dodo said looked like a sunlit mist, and it was strictly half mourning. she felt it was a badge of her freedom, and put it on with a fresh burst of exultation. she had a large bouquet of orchids, which lord bretton had caused to be sent her, and a fan painted by watteau, and a french hair-dresser came and "did" her hair. by this time dinner was ready; and after dinner she sat in her room smoking and singing french songs to lord ledgers, who had come to fetch her, and at half-past nine the carriage was announced. about the same moment another carriage drove up to the door, and as dodo ran downstairs she found her husband in the hall. she looked at him a moment with undisguised astonishment, and a frown gathered on her forehead. "you here?" she said. "i thought you weren't coming till late." "i caught the earlier train," he said; "and where are you off to?" "i'm going to the brettons' ball," said dodo frankly; "i can't wait." he turned round and faced her. "oh, dodo, so soon?" he said. "yes, yes, i must," said dodo. "you know this kills me, this, sticking here with nothing to do from day to day, and nothing to see, and nobody to talk to. it's death; i can't bear it." "very well," he said gently, "you are quite right to go if you want to. but i am not coming, dodo." dodo's face brightened. "no, dear, they don't expect you. i thought you wouldn't be back." "i shouldn't go in any case," said he. lord ledgers was here heard to remark "by gad!" dodo laid her hand on his shoulder, conscious of restraining her impatience. "no, that's just the difference between us," she said. "go on, tommy, get into the carriage. you don't want me not to go, dear, do you?" "no, you are right to go, if you wish to," he said again. dodo grew impatient. "really, you might be more cordial about it," she said. "i needn't have consulted you at all." lord chesterford was not as meek as moses. he was capable of a sense of injustice. "i don't know that you did consult me much," he said, "you mean to go in any case." "very well," said dodo, "i do mean to go. good-night, old boy. i sha'n't be very late. but i don't mean to quarrel with you." lord chesterford turned into his room. but he would not keep dodo, as she wished to go, even if he could have done so. ledgers was waiting in the carriage. "oh, the devil," said dodo, as she stepped in. lady bretton's ball is still talked about, i believe, in certain circles, though it ought to have been consigned, with all other events of last year, to oblivion. it was very brilliant, and several princes shed the light of their presence on it. but, as lord ledgers was heard to remark afterwards, "there are many princes, but there is only one dodo." he felt as if he was adapting a quotation from the koran, which was somehow suitable to the positive solemnity of the occasion. dodo can only be described as having been indescribable. lucas, lady bretton's eldest son, in honour of whose coming of age the ball was given, can hardly allude to it even now. his emotions expressed themselves feebly in his dressing with even more care than usual, in hanging round eaton square, and in leaving cards on the chesterfords as often as was decent. dodo was conscious of a frenzied desire to make the most of it, and to drown remembrance, for in the background of her mind was another picture, that she did not care to look at. there was a man she knew, leaning over a small dead child. the door of the room was half open, and a woman, brilliantly dressed, was turning to go out, looking back over her shoulder with a smile, half of impatience, half of pity, at the kneeling figure in the room. through the half-open door came sounds of music and rhythmical steps, and a blaze of light. this picture had started unbidden into dodo's mind, as she and ledgers drove up to lady bretton's door, with such sudden clearness that she half wondered whether she had ever actually seen it. it reminded her of one of orchardson's silent, well-appointed tragedies. in any case it gave her a rather unpleasant twinge, and she determined to shut it out for the rest of the evening, and, to do her justice, no one would have guessed that dodo's brilliance was due to anything but pure spontaneity, or that, even in the deepest shades of her inmost mind, there was any remembrance that it needed an effort to stifle. many women, though few men, were surprised to see her there, and there was no one who was not glad; but the question arose more than once in the minds of two or three people, "would society stand it if she didn't happen to be herself?" dodo had treated a select party of her friends to a private exhibition of skirt-dancing during supper-time. the music from the band was quite loud enough to be heard distinctly in a small, rather unfrequented sitting-out room, and there dodo had displayed her incomparable grace of movement and limb to the highest advantage. dodo danced that night with unusual perfection, and who has not felt the exquisite beauty of such motion? her figure, clad in its long, clinging folds of diaphanous, almost luminous texture, stood out like a radiant statue of dawn against the dark panelling of the room; her graceful figure bending this way and that, her wonderful white arms now holding aside her long skirt, or clasped above her head; above all, the supreme distinction and conscious modesty of every posture seemed, to the little circle who saw her, to be almost a new revelation of the perfection of form, colour and grace. jack knew dodo pretty well, but he stood and wondered. was she a devil? was she a tiger? or was she, after all, a woman? dodo had told him what had happened that evening, and yet he did not condemn her utterly. he knew how prison-like her life must have been to her during the last month. it was a thousand pities that dodo's meat was chesterford's poison, but he no more blamed dodo for eating her meat than he blamed chesterford for avoiding his poison; and to advance the conventional argument against dodo, that her behaviour was not usual, was, equivalent to saying, "why do you behave like yourself?" rather than, "why don't you behave like other people?" dodo's estimate of herself, as purely normal, was only another instance of her very abnormalness. no, on the whole, she was not a devil. the other question was harder to settle. jack remembered a tigress he had seen that day with her at the zoo. the brute had a small and perfectly fascinating tiger cub, in which she took a certain maternal pride; but when feeding-time came near, and the cub continued to be importunate, she gave it a cuff with her big velvety paw, and sent it staggering to the corner. dodo's tiger cub was a mixture between chesterford and the dead child, and dodo's feeding-time had come round. here she was feeding with an enviable appetite, and where was the cub? the tigress element was not wholly absent. and yet, withal, she was a woman. is it that certain attributes of pure womanliness run through the female of animals, or that every woman has a touch of the tigress about her? jack felt incompetent to decide. dodo's dance came to an end. she accepted prince waldenech's arm, and went down to supper. as he advanced to her, dodo dropped a curtsey, and he stooped and kissed her hand. "the brute," thought jack, as he strolled out into the ballroom, where people were beginning to collect again. many turned and looked at dodo as, she passed out with her handsome partner. the glow of exercise and excitement and success burned brightly in her cheeks, and no one accused dodo of using rouge. the supper was spread on a number of small tables, laid for four or six each. the prince led her to an empty one, and sat down by her side. "i have seen many beautiful things," he said, in french, which permits a man to say more than he may i in english, "but none so beautiful as what i have seen to-night." dodo was far too accomplished a coquette to pretend not to know what he meant. she made him a charming little obeisance. "politeness required that of your highness," she said. "that is only my due, you know." "i can never give you your due," said he. "my due in this case is the knowledge i have pleased you." dodo felt suddenly a little uncomfortable. the forgotten picture flashed for a moment across her inward eye. she spoke of other things: praised the prettiness of the ballroom, the excellence of the band. "lady bretton has given a fine setting to the diamond," said the prince, "but the diamond is not hers." dodo laughed. he was a little ponderous, and he deserved to be told so. "you austrians have beautiful manners," she said, "but you are too serious. english are always accused of sharing that fault, but anyhow, when they pay compliments, they have at least the air of not meaning what they say." "that is the fault of the english, or of the compliment." "no one means what they say when they pay compliments," said dodo. "they are only a kind of formula to avoid the unpleasantness of saying nothing." "austrians seldom pay compliments," said he; "but when they do, they mean them." "ouf," said dodo; "that sounds homelike to you, doesn't it? all austrians say 'ouf' in books--do they really say 'ouf,' by the way?--what a bald way of saying that i needn't expect any more to-night. really, prince, that's rather unflattering to you. no, don't excuse yourself; i understand perfectly. i'm not fishing for any more. come, there's the _pas de quatre_ beginning. that's the 'old kent road' tune. it's much the best. what do you suppose 'knocked 'em in the old kent road' means? no foreigner has ever been able to translate it to me yet. this is your dance, isn't it? o dear me, half the night's gone, and i feel as if i hadn't begun yet. some people are in bed now; what a waste of time, you know." the ball went on and on, and dodo seemed to gather fresh strength and brilliance with each hour. extra dances were added and still added, and many who were tired with dancing stayed and watched her. the princes went away, and nobody noticed their departure. if cleopatra herself had suddenly entered the ballroom, she would have found herself at a discount. it was the culmination of dodo's successes. she seemed different in kind, as well as in degree, from the crowd around her. pretty women seemed suddenly plain and middle-aged; well-dressed women looked dowdy beside her, and when at length, as the electric light began to pale perceptibly before the breaking day, dodo asked her partner to take her to lady bretton, the dancers stopped, and followed dodo and prince waldenech, for she was dancing with him, to where lady bretton was standing. "it has been heavenly," said dodo. "it's a dreadful bore to have people come and say how much they have enjoyed themselves, but i've done it now. tell lucas i wish he would come of age every year; he really is a public benefactor." she took prince waldenech's arm, and stood waiting with him, while her carriage detached itself from the others which lined the square, and drove up to the door. and, as they stood there, the crowd followed her slowly out of the ballroom, still silent, and still watching her, and lined the stairs, as she passed down to the front door. then, when she had got into her carriage, and had driven off, they looked at each other as if they had all been walking in their sleep, and no one knew exactly why they were there. and a quarter of an hour later the rooms were completely empty. meanwhile, as dodo drove back through the still, cool, morning air, she threw down the windows of her carriage, and drew in deep satisfied breaths of its freshness. she thought of the crowds who had followed her down to the door, and laughed for pleasure. "it's life, it's life," she thought. "they followed me like sheep. ah, how i love it!" it was nearly six when she reached home; "decidedly it would be too absurd to go to bed," she thought. "i shall go for a glorious gallop, and come back to breakfast with chesterford. tell them to saddle starlight at once," she said to the footman: "i sha'n't want a groom. and tell lord chesterford, when he wakes, that i shall be back to breakfast." chapter twelve chesterford did not let dodo see how strongly he had felt on the subject of the ball. he argued to himself that it would do no good. dodo would not understand, or, understanding, would misunderstand the strength of his feeling, and he did not care that she should know that he thought her heartless. he was quite conscious that matters were a little strained between them, though dodo apparently was sublimely unaware, of it. she had a momentary nervousness when they met at breakfast, on the morning after the ball, that chesterford was going to make a fuss, and she could not quite see what it would end in, if the subject was broached. but he came in looking as usual. he told her how matters had gone with him on the previous day, and had recounted, with a certain humour, a few sharp words which an old lady in his railway carriage had addressed to him, because he didn't help her to hand out two large cages of canaries which she was taking home. dodo welcomed all this as a sign of grace, and was only too happy to meet her husband half-way. he had been a trifle melodramatic on the previous evening, but we are all liable to make mountains out of molehills at times, she thought. personally her inclination was to make molehills out of mountains, but that was only a difference in temperament; both implied a judgment at fault, and she was quite willing to forgive and forget. in a word, she was particularly nice to him, and when breakfast was over she took his arm, and led him away to her room. "sit down in that very big chair, old boy," she said, "and twiddle your thumbs while i write some notes. i'm going to see mrs. vivian this morning, and your lordship may come in my ladyship's carriage if it likes. is lordship masculine, feminine, or neuter, chesterford? anyhow, it's wrong to say your lordship may come in your carriage, because lordship is the nominative to the sentence, and is in the third person--what was i saying? oh, yes, you may come if it likes, and drop me there, and then go away for about half an hour, and then come back, and then we'll have lunch together at home." "i've got to go to some stupid committee at the club," said chesterford, "but that's not till twelve. i'll send your carriage back for you, but i sha'n't be able to be in at lunch." "oh, very good," remarked dodo. "i'm sorry i married you. i might be a lone lorn widdy for all you care. he prefers lunching at his club," she went on, dramatically, addressing the black virgin, "to having his chop at home with the wife of his bosom. how sharper than a serpent's tooth to have a thankless chesterford!". dodo proceeded to write her notes, and threw them one by one at her husband as he sat contentedly by the window, in the very big chair that dodo had indicated. dodo's correspondence was as varied as the collection of photographs on her mantelpiece. the first note was to her groom at winston, telling him to have another riding-horse sent up at once, as her own particular mare had gone lame. it missed chesterford's head, and fell with an ominous clatter among some _bric-à-brac_ and china. "that'll be a bill for you to pay, darling," said dodo sweetly. "why didn't you put your silly old head in the light?" the next was a slightly better shot, and fell right side upwards on to chesterford's knee, but with the address upside down to him. he looked at it vaguely. "his serene highness who?" he asked, spelling it out. "that's not grammar," said dodo. "it's only to prince waldenech. he is serene, isn't he? he looks it, anyhow. he was at the brettons' last night. austrian but amiable." chesterford was fingering the envelope. "he's an unmitigated blackguard," he said, after a little consideration. "i wish you'd let me tear it up, dodo. what on earth have you got to say to him?" "i shall have to write it again, dear, if you do," said she, conscious of bridling a rising irritation. "he really is an awful brute," he repeated. "oh, my dear chesterford, what does that matter?" asked dodo, impatiently tapping the floor with the toe of her shoe. "it isn't my business to go raking up the character of people i'm introduced to." "you mean you don't mind what a man's character is as long as he's agreeable." "it isn't my business to be court inquisitor," she said. "half of what one hears about people isn't true, and the other half--well, all you can say is, that it isn't exactly false." dodo could lose her temper very quickly on occasions, especially when she was in a hurry, as she was now. "my dear dodo, do you happen to know the story of--" "no, i don't," she said vehemently. "shall i seem rude if i say i don't want to? i really think you might find something better to do than tell scandalous stories about people you don't know." "i know all i want to know about prince waldenech," said chesterford, rising. "you'll know more about him soon," remarked dodo, "because i've asked him to stay at winston. i suppose you think i wanted to make a secret about it. i have no such intention, i assure you." "is this note to ask him to come?" he inquired. "certainly it is," said dodo defiantly. "i may as well tear it up," said he. "i don't mean him to be asked, dodo. i don't wish to have him in the house." dodo had lost her temper thoroughly. "his being asked to winston is immaterial," she said, with scorn in her voice. "you certainly have the power to prevent his coming to your house. your power i must regard, your wishes i shall not. i can see him in london with perfect ease." "you mean you attach no weight to my wishes in this matter?" said chesterford. "none." "will no knowledge of what the man is really like, stop you holding further intercourse with him?" he asked. "none whatever, now!" "i don't wish it to be known that my wife associates with such people," he said. "your wife does not regard it in that light," replied dodo. "i have no intention of proclaiming the fact from the housetops." to do chesterford justice he was getting angry too. "it's perfectly intolerable that there should be this sort of dispute between you and me, dodo," he said. "that is the first point on which we have not differed." "you entirely decline to listen to reason?" "to your reason, you mean," said dodo. "to mine or any honest man's." dodo burst out into a harsh, mirthless laugh. "ah, you're beginning to be jealous," she said. "it is very bourgeois to be jealous." chesterford coloured, angrily. "that is an insult, dodo," he said. "remember that there is a courtesy due even from a wife to her husband. besides that, you know the contrary." "really, i know nothing of the sort," she remarked. "your whole conduct, both last night and this morning, has been so melodramatic, that i begin to suspect all sorts of latent virtues in you." "we are wandering from the point," said he. "do you mean that nothing will deter you from seeing this austrian?" "he is received in society," said dodo; "he is presentable, he is even amusing. am i to tell him that my husband is afraid he'll corrupt my morals? if people in general cut him, i don't say that i should continue to cultivate his acquaintance. it is absurd to run amuck of such conventions. if you had approached me in a proper manner, i don't say that i mightn't have seen my way to meeting your wishes." "i don't feel i am to blame in that respect," said he. "that shows you don't know how far we are apart," she replied. he was suddenly frightened. he came closer to her. "far apart, dodo? we?" "it seems to me that this interview has revealed some astonishing differences of opinion between us," she said. "i don't wish to multiply words. you have told me what you think on the subject, and i have told you what i think. you have claimed the power a husband certainly possesses, and i claim the liberty that my husband cannot deprive me of. or perhaps you wish to lock me up. we quite understand one another. let us agree to differ. give me that note, please. i suppose you can trust me not to send it. i should like to keep it. it is interesting to count the milestones." dodo spoke with the recklessness of a woman's anger, which is always much more unwanton than that of a man. a man does not say cruel things when he is angry, because they are cruel, but because he is angry. dodo was cruel because she wished to be cruel. he gave her the note, and turned to leave the room. dodo's last speech made it impossible for him to say more. the only thing he would not sacrifice to his love was his honour or hers. but dodo suddenly saw the horrible impossibility of the situation. she had not the smallest intention of living on bad terms with her husband. they had quarrelled, it was a pity, but it was over. a storm may only clear the air; it is not always the precursor of bad weather. the air wanted clearing, and dodo determined that it should not be the prelude of rain and wind. to her, of course, the knowledge that she did not love her husband had long been a commonplace, but to him the truth was coming in fierce, blinding flashes, and by their light he could see that a great flood had come down into his happy valley, carrying desolation before it, and between him and dodo stretched a tawny waste of water. but dodo had no intention of quarrelling with him, or maintaining a dignified reserve in their daily intercourse. that would be quite unbearable, and she wished there to be no misunderstanding on that point. "chesterford," she said, "we've quarrelled, and that's a pity. i hardly ever quarrel, and it was stupid of me. i am sorry. but i have no intention of standing on my dignity, and i sha'n't allow you to stand on yours. i shall pull you down, and you'll go flop. you object to something which i propose to do, you exert your rights, as far as having him in the house goes, and i exert mine by going to see him. i shall go this afternoon. your veto on his coming to winston seems quite as objectionable to me, as my going to see him does to you. that's our position; accept it. let us understand each other completely. _c'est aimer_." as she spoke she recovered her equanimity, and she smiled serenely on him. scenes like this left no impression on her. the tragedy passed over her head; and, though it was written in the lines of her husband's face, she did not trouble to read it. she got up from her chair and went to him. he was standing with his hands clasped behind him near the door. she laid her hands on his shoulder, and gave him a little shake. "now, chesterford, i'm going to make it up," she said. "twenty minutes is heaps of time for the most quarrelsome people to say sufficient nasty things in, and time's up. i'm going to behave exactly as usual. i hate quarrelling, and you don't look as if it agreed with you. kiss me this moment. no, not on the top of my head. that's better. my carriage ought to be ready by this time, and you are coming with me as far as prince's gate." chapter thirteen lord and lady chesterford were sitting at breakfast at winston towards the end of september. he had an open letter in front of him propped up against his cup, and between mouthfuls of fried fish he glanced at it. "dodo." no answer. "dodo," rather louder. dodo was also reading a letter, which covered two sheets and was closely written. it seemed to be interesting, for she had paused with a piece of fish on the end of her fork, and had then laid it down again. this time, however; she heard. "oh, what?" she said abstractedly. "jack's coming to-day; i've just heard from him. he's going to bring his hunter. you can get some cub-hunting, i suppose, chesterford? the hunt itself doesn't begin till the th, does it?" "ah, i'm glad he can come," said chesterford. "little spencer would be rather hard to amuse alone. but that isn't what i was going to say." "what is it?" said dodo, relapsing into her letter. "the bailiff writes to tell me that they have discovered a rich coal shaft under the far oaks." a pause. "but, dodo, you are not listening." "i'm sorry," she said. "do you know, jack nearly shot himself the other day at a grouse drive?" "i don't care," said chesterford brutally. "listen, dodo. tompkinson says they've discovered a rich coal shaft under the far oaks. confound the man, i wish he hadn't." "oh, chesterford, how splendid!" said dodo, dropping her letter in earnest. "dig it up and spend it on your party, and they'll make you a duke for certain. i want to be a duchess very much. good morning, your grace," said dodo reflectively. "oh, that's impossible," said he. "i never thought of touching it, but the ass tells me that he's seen the news of it in the _staffordshire herald_. so i suppose everybody knows, and i shall be pestered." "but do you mean to say you're going to let the coal stop there?" asked dodo. "yes, dear, i can't possibly touch it. it goes right under all those oaks, and under the memorial chapel, close to the surface." "but what does that matter?" asked dodo, in real surprise. "i can't possibly touch it," said he; "you must see that. why, the chapel would have to come down, and the oaks, and we don't want a dirty coal shaft in the park." "chesterford, how ridiculous!" exclaimed dodo. "do you mean you're going to leave thousands of pounds lying there in the earth?" "i can't discuss it, dear, even with you," said he. "the only question is whether we can stop the report of it going about." dodo felt intensely irritated. "really you are most unreasonable," she said. "i did flatter myself that i had a reasonable husband. you were unreasonable about the brettons' ball, and you were unreasonable about prince waldenech's coming here, and you are unreasonable about this." chesterford lost his patience a little. "about the brettons' ball," he said, "there was only one opinion, and that was mine. about the prince's coming here, which we agreed not to talk about, you know the further reason. i don't like saying such things. you are aware what that officious ass clayton told me was said at the club. of course it was an insult to you, and a confounded lie, but i don't care for such things to be said about my wife. and about this--" "about this," said dodo, "you are as obstinate as you were about those other things. excuse me if i find you rather annoying." chesterford felt sick at heart. "ah, dodo," he said, "cannot you believe in me at all?" he rose and stood by her. "my darling, you must know how i would do anything for love of you. but these are cases in which that clashes with duty. i only want to be loved a little. can't you see there are some things i cannot help doing, and some i must do?" "the things that you like doing," said dodo, in a cool voice pouring out some more tea. "i don't wish to discuss this either. you know my opinion. it is absurd to quarrel; i dislike quarrelling with anybody, and more especially a person whom i live with. please take your hand away, i can't reach the sugar." dodo returned to her letter. chesterford stood by her for a moment, and then left the room. "it gets more and more intolerable every day. i can't bear quarrelling; it makes me ill," thought dodo, with a fine sense of irresponsibility. "and i know he'll come and say he was sorry he said what he did. thank goodness, jack comes to-day." chesterford, meanwhile, was standing in the hall, feeling helpless and bewildered. this sort of thing was always happening now, do what he could; and the intervals were not much better. dodo treated him with a passive tolerance that was very hard to bear. even her frank determination to keep on good terms with her husband had undergone considerable modification. she was silent and indifferent. now and then when he came into her room he heard, as he passed down the passage, the sound of her piano or her voice, but when he entered dodo would break off and ask him what he wanted. he half wished that he did not love her, but he found himself sickening and longing for dodo to behave to him as she used. it would have been something to know that his presence was not positively distasteful to her. dodo no longer "kept it up," as jack said. she did not pat his hand, or call him a silly old dear, or pull his moustache, as once she did. he had once taken those little things as a sign of her love. he had found in them the pleasure that dodo's smallest action always had for him; but now even they, the husk and shell of what had never existed, had gone from him, and he was left with that which was at once his greatest sorrow and his greatest joy, his own love for dodo. and dodo--god help him! he had learned it well enough now--dodo did not love him, and never had loved him. he wondered what the end would be--whether his love, too, would die. in that case he foresaw that they would very likely go on living together as fifty other people lived--being polite to each other, and gracefully tolerant of each other's presence; that nobody would know, and the world would say, "what a model and excellent couple." so he stood there, biting the ends of his long moustache. then he said to himself, "i was beastly to her. what the devil made me say all those things." he went back to the dining-room, and found dodo as he had left her. "dodo, dear," he said, "forgive me for being so cross. i said a lot of abominable things." dodo was rather amused. she knew this would happen. "oh, yes," she said; "it doesn't signify. but are you determined about the coal mine?" chesterford was disappointed and chilled. he turned on his heel and went out again. dodo raised her eyebrows, shrugged her shoulders imperceptibly, and returned to her letter. if you had asked dodo when this state of things began she could probably not have told you. she would have said, "oh, it came on by degrees. it began by my being bored with him, and culminated when i no longer concealed it." but chesterford, to whom daily intercourse had become an awful struggle between his passionate love for dodo and his bitter disappointment at what he would certainly have partly attributed to his own stupidity and inadequacy, could have named the day and hour when he first realised how far he was apart from his wife. it was when he returned by the earlier train and met dodo in the hall going to her dance; that moment had thrown a dangerous clear light over the previous month. he argued to himself, with fatal correctness, that dodo could not have stopped caring for him in a moment, and he was driven to the inevitable conclusion that she had been drifting away from him for a long time before that; indeed, had she ever been near him? but he was deeply grateful to those months when he had deceived himself, or she had deceived him, into believing that she cared for him. he knew well that they had been the happiest in his life, and though the subsequent disappointment was bitter, it had not embittered him. his love for dodo had a sacredness for him that nothing could remove; it was something separate from the rest of his life, that had stooped from heaven and entered into it, and lo! it was glorified. that memory was his for ever, nothing could rob him of that. in august dodo had left him. they had settled a series of visits in scotland, after a fortnight at their own house, but after that dodo had made arrangements apart from him. she had to go and see her mother, she had to go here and there, and half way through september, when chesterford had returned to harchester expecting her the same night, he found a postcard from her, saying she had to spend three days with someone else, and the three days lengthened into a week, and it was only yesterday that dodo had come and people were arriving that very evening. there was only one conclusion to be drawn from all this, and not even he could help drawing it. jack and mr. spencer and maud, now mrs. spencer, arrived that evening. maud had started a sort of small store of work, and the worsted and crochet went on with feverish rapidity. it had become a habit with her before her marriage, and the undeveloped possibilities, that no doubt lurked within it, had blossomed under her husband's care. for there was a demand beyond the limits of supply for her woollen shawls and comforters. mr. spencer's parish was already speckled with testimonies to his wife's handiwork, and maud's dream of being some day useful to somebody was finding a glorious fulfilment. dodo, i am sorry to say, found her sister more unsatisfactory than ever. maud had a sort of confused idea that it helped the poor if she dressed untidily, and this was a ministry that came without effort. dodo took her in hand as soon as she arrived, and made her presentable. "because you are a clergy-man's wife, there is no reason that you shouldn't wear a tucker or something round your neck," said she. "your sister is a marchioness, and when you stay with her you must behave as if you were an honourable. there will be time to sit in the gutter when you get back to gloucester." dodo also did her duty by mr. spencer. she called him algernon in the friendliest way, and gave him several lessons at billiards. this done, she turned to jack. the three had been there several days, and dodo was getting impatient. jack and chesterford went out shooting, and she was left to entertain the other two. mr. spencer's reluctance to shoot was attributable not so much to his aversion to killing live animals, as his inability to slay. but when dodo urged on him that he would soon learn, he claimed the higher motive. she was rather silent, for she was thinking about something important. dodo was surprised at the eagerness with which she looked forward to jack's coming. somehow, in a dim kind of way, she regarded him as the solution of her difficulties. she felt pretty certain jack would do as he was asked, and she had made up her mind that when jack went away she would go with him to see friends at other houses to which he was going. and chesterford? dodo's scheme did not seem to take in chesterford. she had painted a charming little picture in her own mind as to where she should go, and whom she would see, but she certainly was aware that chesterford did not seem to come in. it would spoil the composition, she thought, to introduce another figure. that would be a respite, anyhow. but after that, what then? dodo had found it bad enough coming back this september, and she could not contemplate renewing this _tête-à-tête_ that went on for months. and by degrees another picture took its place--a dim one, for the details were not worked out--but in that picture there were only two figures. the days went on and dodo could bear it no longer. one evening she went into the smoking-room after tea. chesterford was writing letters, and maud and her husband were sitting in the drawing-room. it may be presumed that maud was doing crochet. jack looked up with a smile as dodo entered. "hurrah," he said, "i haven't had a word with you since we came. come and talk, dodo." but dodo did not smile. "how have you been getting on?" continued jack, looking at the fire. "you see i haven't lost my interest in you." "jack," said dodo solemnly, "you are right, and i was wrong. and i can't bear it any longer." jack did not need explanations. "ah!"--then after a moment, "poor chesterford!" "i don't see why 'poor chesterford,'" said dodo, "any more than 'poor me.' he was quite satisfied, anyhow, for some months, for a year in fact, more or less, and i was never satisfied at all. i haven't got a particle of pride left in me, or else i shouldn't be telling you. i can't bear it. if you only knew what i have been through you would pity me as well. it has been a continual effort with me; surely that is something to pity. and one day i broke down; i forget when, it is immaterial. oh, why couldn't i love him! i thought i was going to, and it was all a wretched mistake." dodo sat with her hands clasped before her, with something like tears in her eyes. "i am not all selfish," she went on; "i am sorry for him, too, but i am so annoyed with him that i lose my sorrow whenever i see him. why couldn't he have accepted the position sooner? we might have been excellent friends then, but now that is impossible. i have got past that. i cannot even be good friends with him. oh, it isn't my fault; you know i tried to behave well." jack felt intensely uncomfortable. "i can't help you, dodo," he said. "it is useless for me to say i am sincerely sorry. that is no word between you and me." dodo, for once in her life, seemed to have something to say, and not be able to say it. at last it came out with an effort. "jack, do you still love me?" dodo did not look at him, but kept her eyes on the fire. jack did not pause to think. "before god, dodo,", he said, "i believe i love you more than anything in the world." "will you do what i ask you?" this time he did pause. he got up and stood before the fire. still dodo did not look at him. "ah, dodo," he said, "what are you going to ask? there are some things i cannot do." "it seems to me this love you talk of is a very weak thing," said dodo. "it always fails, or is in danger of failing, at the critical point. i believe i could do anything for the man i loved. i did not think so once. but i was wrong, as i have been in my marriage." dodo paused; but jack said nothing; it seemed to him as if dodo had not quite finished. "yes," she said; then paused again. "yes, you are he." there was a dead silence. for one moment time seemed to jack to have stopped, and he could have believed that that moment lasted for years--for ever. "oh, my god," he murmured, "at last." he was conscious of dodo sitting there, with her eyes raised to his, and a smile on her lips. he felt himself bending forward towards her, and he thought she half rose in her chair to receive his embrace. but the next moment she put out her hand as if to stop him. "stay," she said. "not yet, not yet. there is something first. i will tell you what i have done. i counted on this. i have ordered the carriage after dinner at half-past ten. you and i go in that, and leave by the train. jack, i am yours--will you come?" dodo had taken the plunge. she had been wavering on the brink of this for days. it had struck her suddenly that afternoon that jack was going away next day, and she was aware she could not contemplate the indefinite to-morrow and to-morrow without him. like all dodo's actions it came suddenly. the forces in her which had been drawing her on to this had gathered strength and sureness imperceptibly, and this evening they had suddenly burst through the very flimsy dam that dodo had erected between the things she might do, and the things she might not, and their possession was complete. in a way it was inevitable. dodo felt that her life was impossible. chesterford, with infinite yearning and hunger at his heart, perhaps felt it too. jack felt as if he was waking out of some blissful dream to a return of his ordinary everyday life, which, unfortunately, had certain moral obligations attached to it. if dodo's speech had been shorter, the result might have been different. he steadied himself for a moment, for the room seemed to reel and swim, and then he answered her. "no, dodo," he said hoarsely, "i cannot do it. think of chesterford! think of anything! don't tempt me. you know i cannot. how dare you ask me?" dodo's face grew hard and white. she tried to laugh, but could not manage it. "ah," she said, "the old story, isn't it? potiphar's wife again. i really do not understand what this love of yours is. and now i have debased and humbled myself before you, and there you stand in your immaculate virtue, not caring--" "don't, dodo," he said. "be merciful to me, spare me. not caring--you know it is not so. but i cannot do this. my dodo, my darling." the strain was too great for him. he knelt down beside her, and kissed her hand passionately. "i will do anything for you," he whispered, "that is in my power to do; but this is impossible. i never yet did, with deliberate forethought, what seemed to me mean or low, and i can't now. i don't want credit for it, because i was made that way; i don't happen to be a blackguard by nature. don't tempt me--i am too weak. but you mustn't blame me for it. you know--you must know that i love you. i left england last autumn to cure myself of it, but it didn't answer a bit. i don't ask more than what you have just told me. that is something--isn't it, dodo? and, if you love me, that is something for you. don't let us degrade it, let it be a strength to us and not a weakness. you must feel it so." * * * * * there was a long silence, and in that silence the great drama of love and life; and good and evil, which has been played every day of every year since the beginning of this world, and which will never cease till all mankind are saints or sexless, filled the stage. dodo thought, at any rate, that she loved him, and that knowledge made her feel less abased before him. all love--the love for children, for parents, for husband, for wife, for lover, for mistress--has something divine about it, or else it is not love. the love jack felt for her was divine enough not to seek its own, to sacrifice itself on the altar of duty and loyalty and the pure cold gods, and in its tumultuous happiness it could think of others. and dodo's love was touched, though ever so faintly, with the same divine spark, a something so human that it touched heaven. now it had so happened that, exactly three minutes before this, maud had found that she had left a particularly precious skein of wool in another room. about ten seconds' reflection made her remember she had left it in the smoking-room, where she had sat with dodo after lunch, who had smoked cigarettes, and lectured her on her appearance. the smoking-room had two doors, about eight yards apart, forming a little passage lighted with a skylight. the first of those doors was of wood, the second, which led into the smoking-room, of baize. the first door was opened in the ordinary manner, the second with a silent push. maud had made this silent push at the moment when jack was kneeling by dodo's side, kissing her hand. maud was not versed in the wickedness of this present world, but she realised that this was a peculiar thing for jack to do, and she let the door swing quietly back, and ran downstairs, intending to ask her husband's advice. chesterford's study opened into the drawing-room. during the time that maud had been upstairs he had gone in to fetch dodo, and seeing she was not there he went back, but did not close the door behind him. a moment afterwards maud rushed into the drawing-room from the hall, and carefully shutting the door behind her, lest anyone should hear, exclaimed:-- "algy, i've seen something awful! i went into the smoking-room to fetch my wool, and i saw jack kissing dodo's hand. what am i to do?" algernon was suitably horrified. he remarked, with much reason, that it was no use telling dodo and jack, because they knew already. at this moment the door of lord chesterford's study was closed quietly. he did not wish to hear any more just yet. but they neither of them noticed it. he had overheard something which was not meant for his ears, related by a person who had overseen what she was not meant to see; he hated learning anything that was not his own affair, but he had learned it, and it turned out to be unpleasantly closely connected with him. his first impulse was to think that jack had behaved in a treacherous and blackguardly manner, and this conclusion surprised him so much that he set to ponder over it. the more he thought of it, the more unlikely it appeared to him. jack making love to his wife under cover of his own roof was too preposterous an idea to be entertained. he held a very high opinion of jack, and it did not at all seem to fit in with this. was there any other possibility? it came upon him with a sense of sickening probability that there was. he remembered the long loveless months; he remembered dodo's indifference to him, then her neglect, then her dislike. had jack been hideously tempted and not been able to resist? chesterford almost felt a friendly feeling for not being able to resist dodo. what did all this imply? how long had it been going on? how did it begin? where would it stop? he felt he had a right to ask these questions, and he meant to ask them of the proper person. but not yet. he would wait; he would see what happened. he was afraid of judging both too harshly. maud's account might have been incorrect; anyhow it was not meant for him. his thoughts wandered on dismally and vaguely. but the outcome was, that he said to himself, "poor dodo, god forgive her." he had been so long used to the altered state of things that this blow seemed to him only a natural sequence. but he had been used to feed his starved heart with promises that dodo would care for him again; that those months when they were first married were only the bud of a flower that would some day blossom. it was this feeble hope that what he had heard destroyed. if things had gone as far as that it was hopeless. "yes," he repeated, "it is all gone." if anything could have killed his love for dodo he felt that it would have been this. but, as he sat there, he said to himself, "she shall never know that i know of it." that was his final determination. dodo had wronged him cruelly; his only revenge was to continue as if she had been a faithful wife, for she would not let him love her. dodo should never know, she should not even suspect. he would go on behaving to her as before, as far as lay in his power. he would do his utmost to make her contented, to make her less sorry--yes, less sorry--she married him. meanwhile dodo and jack were sitting before the fire in the smoking-room. he still retained dodo's hand, and it lay; unresistingly in his. dodo was the first to speak. "we must make the best of it, jack," she said; "and you must help me. i cannot trust myself any longer. i used to be so sure of myself, so convinced that i could be happy. i blame myself for it, not him; but then, you see, i can't get rid of myself, and i can of him. hence this plan. i have been a fool and a beast. and he, you know, he is the best of men. poor, dear old boy. it isn't his fault, but it isn't mine. i should like to know who profits by this absurd arrangement. why can't i love him? why can't i even like him? why can't i help hating him? yes, jack, it has come to that. god knows there is no one more sorry than i am about it. but this is only a mood. i daresay in half an hour's time i shall only feel angry with him, and not sorry at all. i wonder if this match was made in heaven. oh, i am miserable." jack was really to be pitied more than dodo. he knelt by her with her hand in his, feeling that he would have given his life without question to make her happy, but knowing that he had better give his life than do so. the struggle itself was over. he felt like a chain being pulled in opposite directions. he did not wrestle any longer; the two forces, he thought, were simply fighting it out over his rigid body. he wondered vaguely whether something would break, and, if so, what? but he did not dream for a moment of ever reconsidering his answer to dodo. the question did not even present itself. so he knelt by her, still holding her hand, and waiting for her to speak again. "you mustn't desert me, jack," dodo went on. "it is easier for chesterford, as well as for me, that you should be with us often, and i believe it is easier for you too. if i never saw you at all, i believe the crash would come. i should leave chesterford, not to come to you, for that can't be, but simply to get away." "ah, don't," said jack, "don't go on talking about it like that. i can't do what you asked, you know that, simply because i love you and am chesterford's friend. think of your duty to him. think, yes, think of our love for each other. let it be something sacred, dodo. don't desecrate it. help me not to desecrate it. let it be our safeguard. it is better to have that, isn't it? than to think of going on living, as you must, without it. you said so yourself when you asked me to be with you often. to-night a deep joy has come into my life; let us keep it from disgrace. ah, dodo, thank god you love me." "yes, jack, i believe i do," said dodo. "and you are right; i always knew i should rise to the occasion if it was put forcibly before me. i believe i have an ideal--which i have never had before--something to respect and to keep very clean. fancy me with an ideal! mother wouldn't know me again--there never was such a thing in the house." they were silent for a few minutes. "but i must go to-morrow," said jack, "as i settled to, by the disgusting early train. and the dressing-bell has sounded, and the ideal inexorably forbids us to be late for dinner, so i sha'n't see you alone again." he pressed her hand and she rose.. "poor little ideal," said dodo. "i suppose it would endanger its life if you stopped, wouldn't it, jack? it must live to grow up. poor little ideal, what a hell of a time it will have when you're gone. poor dear." dinner went off as usual. dodo seemed to be in her ordinary, spirits. chesterford discussed parochial help with mrs. vivian. he glanced at dodo occasionally through the little grove of orchids that separated them, but dodo did not seem to notice. she ate a remarkably good dinner, and talked nonsense to mr. spencer who sat next her, and showed him how to construct a sea-sick passenger out of an orange, and smoked two cigarettes after the servants had left the room. maud alone was ill at ease. she glanced apprehensively at jack, as if she expected him to begin kissing dodo's hand again, and, when he asked her casually where she had been since tea, she answered; "in the smoking-room--i mean the drawing-room." jack merely raised his eyebrows, and remarked that he had been there himself, and did not remember seeing her. in the drawing-room again dodo was in the best spirits. she gave mr. spencer lessons as to how to whistle on his fingers, and sang a french song in a brilliant and somewhat broad manner. the ladies soon retired, as there was a meet early on the following morning, and, after they had gone, jack went up to the smoking-room, leaving chesterford to finish a letter in his study. shortly afterwards the latter heard the sound of wheels outside, and a footman entered to tell him the carriage was ready. chesterford was writing when the man entered, and did not look up. "i did not order the carriage," he said. "her ladyship ordered it for half-past ten," said the man. "she gave the order to me." still lord chesterford did not look up, and sat silent so long that the man spoke again. "shall i tell her ladyship it is round?" he asked. "i came to your lordship, as i understood her ladyship had gone upstairs." "you did quite right," he said. "there has been a mistake; it will not be wanted. don't disturb lady chesterford, or mention it to her." "very good, my lord." he turned to leave the room, when lord chesterford stopped him again. he spoke slowly. "did lady chesterford give you any other orders?" "she told me to see that mr. broxton's things were packed, my lord, as he would go away to-night. but she told me just before dinner that he wouldn't leave till the morning." "thanks," said lord chesterford. "that's all, i think. when is mr. broxton leaving?" "by the early train to-morrow, my lord." "go up to the smoking-room and ask him to be so good as to come here a minute." the man left the room, and gave his message. jack wondered a little, but went down. lord chesterford was standing with his back to the fire. he looked up when jack entered. he seemed to find some difficulty in speaking. "jack, old boy," he said at last, "you and i have been friends a long time, and you will not mind my being frank. can you honestly say that you are still a friend of mine?" jack advanced towards him. "i thank god that i can," he said simply, and held out his hand. he spoke without reflecting, for he did not know how much chesterford knew. of course, up to this moment, he had not been aware that he knew anything. but chesterford's tone convinced him. but a moment afterwards he saw that he had made a mistake, and he hastened to correct it. "i spoke at random," he said, "though i swear that what i said was true. i do not know on what grounds you put the question to me." lord chesterford did not seem to be attending. "but it was true?" he asked. jack felt in a horrible mess. if he attempted to explain, it would necessitate letting chesterford know the whole business. he chose between the two evils, for he would not betray dodo. "yes, it is true," he said. chesterford shook his hand. "forgive me for asking you, jack," he said. "then that's done with. but there is something more, something which it is hard for me to say." he paused, and jack noticed that he was crumpling a piece of paper he held in his hand into a tight hard ball. "then--then dodo is tired of me?" jack felt helpless and sick. he could not trust himself to speak. "isn't it so?" asked chesterford again. jack for reply held out both his hands without speaking. there was something horrible in the sight of this strong man standing pale and trembling before him. in a moment chesterford turned away, and stood warming his hands at the fire. "i heard something i wasn't meant to hear," he said, "and i know as much as i wish to. it doesn't much matter exactly what has happened. you have told me you are still my friend, and i thank you for it. and dodo--dodo is tired of me. i can reconstruct as much as is necessary. you are going off to-morrow, aren't you? i sha'n't see you again. good-bye, jack; try to forget i ever mistrusted you. i must ask you to leave me; i've got some things to think over." but jack still lingered. "try to forgive dodo," he said; "and forgive me for saying so, but don't be hard on her. it will only make things worse." "hard on her?" asked chesterford. "poor dodo, it is hard on her enough without that. she shall never know that i know, if i can help. i am not going to tell you what i know either. if you feel wronged that i even asked you that question, i am sorry for it, but i had grounds, and i am not a jealous man. the whole thing has been an awful mistake. i knew it in july, but i shall not make it worse by telling dodo." jack went out from his presence with a kind of awe. he did not care to know how chesterford had found out, or how much. all other feelings were swallowed up in a vast pity for this poor man, whom no human aid could ever reach. the great fabric which his love had raised had been shattered hopelessly, and his love sat among its ruins and wept. it was all summed up in that short sentence, "dodo is tired of me," and jack knew that it was true. the whole business was hopeless. dodo had betrayed him, and he knew it. he could no longer find a cold comfort in the thought that some day, if the difficult places could be tided over, she might grow to love him again. that was past. and yet he had only one thought, and that was for dodo. "she shall never know i know it." truly there is something divine in those men we thought most human. jack went to his room and thought it all over. he was horribly vexed with himself for having exculpated himself, but the point of chesterford's question was quite clear, and there was only one answer to it. chesterford obviously did mean to ask whether he had been guilty of the great act of disloyalty which dodo had proposed, and on the whole he would reconstruct the story in his mind more faithfully than if he had answered anything else, or had refused to answer. but jack very much doubted whether chesterford would reconstruct the story at all. the details had evidently no interest for him. all that mattered was expressed in that one sentence, "dodo is tired of me." jack would have given his right hand to have been able to answer "no," or to have been able to warn dodo; but he saw that there was nothing to be done. the smash had come, chesterford had had a rude awakening. but his love was not dead, though it was stoned and beaten and outcast. with this in mind jack took a sheet of paper from his writing-case, and wrote on it these words:-- "do not desecrate it; let it help you to make an effort." he addressed it to dodo, and when he went downstairs the next morning he slipped it among the letters that were waiting for her. the footman told him she had gone hunting. "is lord chesterford up yet?" said jack. "yes, sir; he went hunting too with her ladyship," replied the man. chapter fourteen dodo was called that morning at six, and she felt in very good spirits. there was something exhilarating in the thought of a good gallop again. there had been frost for a week before, and hunting had been stopped, but dodo meant to make up all arrears. and, on the whole, her interview with jack had consoled her, and it had given her quite a new feeling of duty. dodo always liked new things, at any rate till the varnish had rubbed off, and she quite realised that jack was making a sacrifice to the same forbidding goddess. "well, i will make a sacrifice, too," she thought as she dressed, "and when i die i shall be st. dodo. i don't think there ever was a saint dodo before, or is it saintess? anyhow, i am going to be very good. jack really is right; it is the only thing to do. i should have felt horribly mean if i had gone off last night, and i daresay i should have had to go abroad, which would have been a nuisance. i wonder if chesterford's coming. i shall make him, i think, and be very charming indeed. westley, go and tap at the door of lord chesterford's room, and tell him he is coming hunting, and that i've ordered his horse, and send his man to him, and let us have breakfast at once for two instead of one." dodo arranged her hat and stood contemplating her own figure at a cheval glass. it really did make a charming picture, and dodo gave two little steps on one side, holding her skirt up in her left hand. "just look at that, just look at this, i really think i'm not amiss," she hummed to herself. "hurrah for a gallop." she ran downstairs and made tea, and began breakfast. a moment afterwards she heard steps in the hall, and chesterford entered. dodo was not conscious of the least embarrassment, and determined to do her duty. "morning, old boy," she said, "you look as sleepy as a d. p. or dead pig. look at my hat. it's a new hat, chesterford, and is the joy of my heart. isn't it sweet? have some tea, and give me another kidney --two, i think. what happens to the sheep after they take its kidneys out? do you suppose it dies? i wonder if they put india-rubber kidneys in. kidneys do come from sheep, don't they? or is there a kidney tree? kidneys look like a sort of mushroom, and i suppose the bacon is the leaves, kidnonia baconiensis; now you're doing latin, chesterford, as you used to at eton. i daresay you've forgotten what the latin for kidneys is. i should like to have seen you at eton, chesterford. you must have been such a dear, chubby boy with blue eyes. you've got rather good eyes. i think i shall paint mine blue, and we shall have a nice little paragraph in the _sportsman_. extraordinary example of conjugal devotion. the beautiful and fascinating lady c. (you know i am beautiful and fascinating, that's why you married me), the wife of the charming and manly lord c. (you know you are charming and manly, or i shouldn't have married you, and where would you have been then? like methusaleh when the candle went out), who lived not a hundred miles from the ancient city of harchester,' etc. now it's your turn to say something, i can't carry on a conversation alone. besides, i've finished breakfast, and i shall sit by you and feed you. don't take such large mouthfuls. that was nearly a whole kidney you put in then. you'll die of kidneys, and then people will think you had something wrong with your inside, but i shall put on your tombstone, 'because he ate them, two at a time.'" chesterford laughed. dodo had not behaved like this for months. what did it all mean? but the events of the night before were too deeply branded on his memory to let him comfort himself very much. but anyhow it was charming to see dodo like this again. and she shall never know. "you'll choke if you laugh with five kidneys in your mouth," dodo went on. "they'll get down into your lungs and bob about, and all your organs will get mixed up together, and you won't be able to play on them. i suppose americans have american organs in their insides, which accounts for their squeaky voices. now, have you finished? oh, you really can't have any marmalade; put it in your pocket and eat it as you go along." dodo was surprised at the ease with which she could talk nonsense again. she abused herself for ever having let it drop. it really was much better than yawning and being bored. she had no idea how entertaining she was to herself. and chesterford had lost his hang-dog look. he put her hat straight for her, and gave her a little kiss just as he used to. after all, things were not so bad. it was a perfect morning. they left the house about a quarter to seven, and the world was beginning to wake again. there was a slight hoar-frost on the blades of grass that lined the road, and on the sprigs of bare hawthorn. in the east the sky was red with the coming day. dodo sniffed the cool morning air with a sense of great satisfaction. "decidedly somebody washes the world every night," she said, "and those are the soapsuds which are still clinging to the grass. what nice clean soap, all in little white crystals and spikes. and oh, how good it smells! look at those poor little devils of birds looking for their breakfast. poor dears, i suppose they'll be dead when the spring comes. there are the hounds. come on, chesterford, they're just going to draw the far cover. it is a sensible plan beginning hunting by seven. you get five hours by lunch-time." none of dodo's worst enemies accused her of riding badly. she had a perfect seat, and that mysterious communication with her horse that seems nothing short of magical. "if you tell your horse to do a thing the right way," she used to say, "he does it. it is inevitable. the question is, 'who is master?' as humpty dumpty said. but it isn't only master; you must make him enjoy it. you must make him feel friendly as well, or else he'll go over the fence right enough, but buck you off on the other side, as a kind of protest, and quite right too." dodo had a most enjoyable day's hunting, and returned home well pleased with herself and everybody else. she found jack's note waiting for her. she read it thoughtfully, and said to herself, "he is quite right, and that is what i mean to do. my young ideal, i am teaching you how to shoot." she took up a pen, meaning to write to him, but laid it down again. "no," she said, "i can do without that at present. i will keep that for my bad days. i suppose the bad days will come, and i won't use my remedies before i get the disease." the days passed on. they went hunting every morning, and dodo began to form very high hopes of her new child, as she called her ideal. the bad days did not seem to be the least imminent. chesterford behaved almost like a lover again in the light of dodo's new smiles. he kept his bad times to himself. they came in the evening usually when the others had gone to bed. he used to sit up late by himself over his study fire, thinking hopelessly, of the day that had gone and the day that was to come. it was a constant struggle not to tell dodo all he knew. he could scarcely believe that he had heard what maud had said, or that he ever had had that interview with jack. he could not reconcile these things with dodo's altered behaviour, and he gave it up. dodo was tired of him, and he knew that he loved her more than ever. a more delicately-strung mind might almost have given way under the hourly struggle, but it is the fate of a healthy simple man to be capable of more continued suffering than one more highly developed. the latter breaks down, or he gets numbed with the pain; but chesterford went on living under the slow ache, and his suffering grew no less. but through it all he looked back with deep gratitude to the chance that had sent dodo in his way. he did not grow bitter, and realised in the midst of his suffering how happy he had been. he had only one strong wish. "oh, god," he cried, "give me her back for one moment! let her be sorry just once for my sake." but there is a limit set to human misery, and the end had nearly come. it was about a fortnight after jack had gone. maud and mr. spencer had gone too, but mrs. vivian was with them still. dodo had more than once thought of telling her what had happened, but she could not manage it. when mrs. vivian had spoken of going, dodo entreated her to stop, for she had a great fear of being left alone with chesterford. they had been out hunting, and dodo had got home first. it was about three in the afternoon, and it had begun to snow. she had had lunch, and was sitting in the morning-room in a drowsy frame of mind. she was wondering whether chesterford had returned, and whether he would come up and see her, and whether she was not too lazy to exert herself. she heard a carriage come slowly up the drive, and did not feel interested enough to look out of the window. she was sitting with her shoes off warming her feet at the fire, with a novel in her lap, which she was not reading, and a cigarette in her hand. she heard the opening and shutting of doors, and slow steps on the stairs. then the door opened and mrs. vivian came in. dodo had seen that look in her face once before, when she was riding in the park with jack, and a fearful certainty came upon her. she got up and turned towards her. "is he dead?" she asked. mrs. vivian drew her back into her seat. "i will tell you all," she said. "he has had a dangerous fall hunting, and it is very serious. the doctors are with him. there is some internal injury, and he is to have an operation. it is the only chance of saving his life, and even then it is a very slender one. he is quite conscious, and asked me to tell you. you will not be able to see him for half an hour. the operation is going on now." dodo sat perfectly still. she did not speak a word; she scarcely even thought anything. everything seemed to be a horrible blank to her. "ah god, ah god!" she burst out at last. "can't i do anything to help? i would give my right hand to help him. it is all too horrible. to think that i--" she walked up and down the room, and then suddenly opened the door and went downstairs. she paced up and down the drawing-room, paused a moment, and went into his study. his papers were lying about in confusion on the table, but on the top was a guide-book to the riviera. dodo remembered his buying this at mentone on their wedding-tour, and conscientiously walking about the town sight-seeing. she sat down in his chair and took it up. she remembered also that he had bought her that day a new volume of poems which had just come out, and had read to her out of it. there was in it a poem called "paris and helen." he had read that among others, and had said to her, as they were being rowed back to the yacht again that evening, "that is you and i, dodo, going home." on the fly-leaf of the guide-book he had written it out, and, as she sat there now, dodo read it. as o'er the swelling tides we slip that know not wave nor foam, behold the helmsman of our ship, love leads us safely home. his ministers around us move to aid the westering breeze, he leads us softly home, my love, across the shining seas. my golden helen, day and night love's light is o'er us flung, each hour for us is infinite, and all the world is young. there is none else but thou and i beneath the heaven's high dome, love's ministers around us fly, love leads us safely home. dodo buried her face in her hands with a low cry. "i have been cruel and wicked," she sobbed to herself. "i have despised the best that any man could ever give me, and i can never make him amends. i will tell him all. i will ask him to forgive me. oh, poor chesterford, poor chesterford!" she sat there sobbing in complete misery. she saw, as she had never seen before, the greatness of his love for her, and her wretched, miserable return for his gift. "it is all over; i know he will die," she sobbed. "supposing he does not know me--supposing he dies before i can tell him. oh, my husband, my husband, live to forgive me!" she was roused by a touch on her shoulder. mrs. vivian stood by her. "you must be quick, dodo," she said. "there is not much time." dodo did not answer her, but went upstairs. before the bedroom door she stopped. "i must speak to him alone," she said. "send them all out." "they have gone into the dressing-room," said mrs. vivian; "he is alone." dodo stayed no longer, but went in. he was lying facing the door, and the shadow of death was on his face. but he recognised dodo, and smiled and held out his hand. dodo ran to the bedside and knelt by it. "oh, chesterford," she sobbed, "i have wronged you cruelly, and i can never make it up. i will tell you all." "there is no need," said he; "i knew it all along." dodo raised her head. "you knew it all?" she asked. "yes, dear," he said; "it was by accident that i knew it." "and you behaved to me as usual," said dodo. "yes, my darling," said he; "you wouldn't have had me beat you, would you? don't speak of it--there is not much time." "ah, forgive me, forgive me!" she cried. "how could i have done it?" "it was not a case of forgiving," he said. "you are you, you are dodo. my darling, there is not time to say much. you have been very good to me, and have given me more happiness than i ever thought i could have had." "chesterford! chesterford!" cried dodo pleadingly. "yes, darling," he answered; "my own wife. dodo, i shall see the boy soon, and we will wait for you together. you will be mine again then. there shall be no more parting." dodo could not answer him. she could only press his hand and kiss his lips, which were growing very white. it was becoming a fearful effort for him to speak. the words came slowly with long pauses. "there is one more thing," he said. "you must marry jack. you must make him very happy--as you have made me." "ah, don't say that," said dodo brokenly; "don't cut me to the heart." "my darling," he said, "my sweet own wife, i am so glad you told me. it has cleared up the only cloud. i wondered whether you would tell me. i prayed god you might, and he has granted it me. good-bye, my own darling, good-bye." dodo lay in his arms, and kissed him passionately. "good-bye, dear," she sobbed. he half raised himself in bed. "ah, my dodo, my sweet wife," he said. then he fell back and lay very still. how long dodo remained there she did not know. she remembered mrs. vivian coming in and raising her gently, and they left the darkened room together. chapter fifteen picture to yourself, or let me try to picture for you, a long, low, rambling house, covering a quite unnecessary area of ground, with many gables, tall, red-brick chimneys, unexpected corners, and little bow windows looking out from narrow turrets-a house that looks as if it had grown, rather than been designed and built. it began obviously with that little grey stone section, which seems to consist of small rooms with mullion windows, over which the ivy has asserted so supreme a dominion. the next occupant had been a man who knew how to make himself comfortable, but did not care in the least what sort of appearance his additions would wear to the world at large; to him we may assign that uncompromising straight wing which projects to the right of the little core of grey stone. then came a series of attempts to screen the puritanical ugliness of the offending block. some one ran up two little turrets at one end, and a clock tower in the middle; one side of it was made the main entrance of the house, and two red-tiled lines of building were built at right angles to it to form a three-sided quadrangle, and the carriage drive was brought up in a wide sweep to the door, and a sun-dial was planted down in the grass plot in the middle, in such a way that the sun could only peep at it for an hour or two every day, owing to the line of building which sheltered it on every side except the north. so the old house went on growing, and got more incongruous and more delightful with every addition. the garden has had to take care of itself under such circumstances, and if the house has been pushing it back in one place, it has wormed itself in at another, and queer little lawns with flower beds of old-fashioned, sweet-smelling plants have crept in where you least expect them. this particular garden has always seemed to me the ideal of what a garden should be. it is made to sit in, to smoke in, to think in, to do nothing in. a wavy, irregular lawn forbids the possibility of tennis, or any game that implies exertion or skill, and it is the home of sweet smells, bright colour, and chuckling birds. there are long borders of mignonette, wallflowers and hollyhocks, and many old-fashioned flowers, which are going the way of all old fashions. london pride, with its delicate spirals and star-like blossoms, and the red drooping velvet of love-lies-a-bleeding. the thump of tennis balls, the flying horrors of ring-goal, even the clash of croquet is tabooed in this sacred spot. down below, indeed, beyond that thick privet hedge, you may find, if you wish, a smooth, well-kept piece of grass, where, even now--if we may judge from white figures that cross the little square, where a swinging iron gate seems to remonstrate hastily and ill-temperedly with those who leave these reflective shades for the glare and publicity of tennis--a game seems to be in progress. if you had exploring tendencies in your nature, and had happened to find yourself, on the afternoon of which i propose to speak, in this delightful garden, you would sooner or later have wandered into a low-lying grassy basin, shut in on three sides by banks of bushy rose-trees. the faint, delicate smell of their pale fragrance would have led you there, or, perhaps, the light trickling of a fountain, now nearly summer dry. perhaps the exploring tendency would account for your discovery. there, lying back in a basket-chair, with a half-read letter in her hand, and an accusing tennis racquet by her side, you would have found edith staines. she had waited after lunch to get her letters, and going out, meaning to join the others, she had found something among them that interested her, and she was reading a certain letter through a second time when you broke in upon her. after a few minutes she folded it up, put it back in the envelope, and sat still, thinking. "so she's going to marry him," she said half aloud, and she took up her racquet and went down to the tennis courts. ten days ago she had come down to stay with miss grantham, at the end of the london season. miss grantham's father was a somewhat florid baronet of fifty years of age. he had six feet of height, a cheerful, high-coloured face, and a moustache, which he was just conscious had military suggestions about it--though he had never been in the army--which was beginning to grow grey. his wife had been a lovely woman, half spanish by birth, with that peculiarly crisp pronunciation that english people so seldom possess, and which is almost as charming to hear as a child's first conscious grasp of new words. she dressed remarkably well; her reading chiefly consisted of the _morning post_, french novels, and small books of morbid poetry, which seemed to her very _chic_, and she was worldly to the tips of her delicate fingers. she had no accomplishments of any sort, except a great knowledge of foreign languages. she argued, with much reason, that you could get other people to do your accomplishments for you. "why should i worry myself with playing scales?" she said. "i can hire some poor wretch" (she never could quite manage the english "r") "to play to me by the hour. he will play much better than i ever should, and it is a form of charity as well." edith had made great friends with her, and disagreed with her on every topic under the sun. lady grantham admired edith's vivacity, though her own line was serene elegance, and respected her success. success was the one accomplishment that she really looked up to (partly, perhaps, because she felt she had such a large measure of it herself), and no one could deny that edith was successful. she had enough broadness of view to admire success in any line, and would have had a vague sense of satisfaction in accepting the arm of; the best crossing-sweeper in london to take her in to dinner. she lived in a leonine atmosphere, and if you did not happen to meet a particular lion at her house, it was because "he was here on monday, or is coming on wednesday"; at any rate, not because he had not been asked. edith, however, felt thoroughly pleased with her quarters. she had hinted once that she had to go the day after to-morrow, but nora grantham had declined to argue the question. "you're only going home to do your music," she said. "we've got quite as good a piano here as you have, and, we leave you entirely to your own devices. besides, you're mother's lion just now--isn't she, mother?--and you're not going to get out of the menagerie just yet. there is going to be a big feeding-time next week, and you will have to roar." edith's remark about the necessity of going had been dictated only by a sense of duty, in order to give her hosts an opportunity of getting rid of her if they wished, and she was quite content to stop. she strolled down across the lawn to the tennis courts in a thoughtful frame of mind, and met miss grantham, who was coming to look for her. "where have you been, edith?" she said. "they're all clamouring for you. mother is sitting in the summer-house wondering why anybody wants to play tennis. she says none of them will ever be as good as cracklin, and he's a cad." "grantie," said edith, "dodo's engaged." "oh, dear, yes," said miss grantham. "i knew she would be. how delightful. jack's got his reward at last. may i tell everyone? how funny that she should marry a lord chesterford twice. it was so convenient that the first one shouldn't have had any brothers, and dodo won't have to change her visiting cards; or have new handkerchiefs or anything. what a contrast, though!" "no, it's private at present," said edith. "dodo has just written to me; she told me i might tell you. do you altogether like it?" "of course i do," said miss grantham. "only i should like to marry jack myself. i wonder if he asked dodo, or if dodo asked him." "i suppose it was inevitable," said edith. "dodo says that chesterford's last words to her were that she should marry jack." "that was so sweet of him," murmured miss grantham. "he was very sweet and dear and remembering, wasn't he?" edith was still grave and doubtful. "i'm sure there was nearly a crash," she said. "do you remember the brettons' ball? chesterford didn't like that, and they quarrelled, i know, next morning." "oh, _how_ interesting," said miss grantham. "but dodo was quite right to go, i think. she was dreadfully bored, and she will not stand being bored. she might have done something much worse." "it seems to be imperatively necessary for dodo to do something unexpected," said edith. "i wonder, oh, i wonder--jack will be very happy for a time," she added inconsequently. edith's coming was the signal for serious play to begin. she entirely declined to play except with people who considered it, for the time being, the most important thing in the world, and naturally she played well. a young man, of military appearance on a small scale, was sitting by lady grantham in the tent, and entertaining her with somewhat unfledged remarks. "miss staines does play so arfly well, doesn't she?" he was saying. "look at that stroke, perfectly rippin' you know, what?" mr. featherstone had a habit of finishing all his sentences with "what?" he pronounced it to rhyme with heart. lady grantham was reading loti's book of pity and death. it answered the double purpose of being french and morbid. "what book have you got hold of there?" continued featherstone. "it's an awful bore reading books, dontcherthink, what? i wish one could get a feller to read them for me, and then tell one about them." "i rather enjoy some books," said lady grantham. "this, for instance, is a good one," and she held the book towards him. "oh, that's french, isn't it?" remarked featherstone. "i did french at school; don't know a word now. it's an arful bore having to learn french, isn't it? couldn't i get a feller to learn it for me?" lady grantham reflected. "i daresay you could," she replied. "you might get your man--tiger--how do you call him?--to learn it. it's capable of comprehension to the lowest intellect," she added crisply. "oh, come, lady grantham," he replied, "you don't think so badly of me as that, do you?" lady grantham was seized with a momentary desire to run her parasol through his body, provided it could be done languidly and without effort. her daughter had come up, and sat down in a low chair by her. featherstone was devoting the whole of his great mind to the end of his moustache. "nora," she said, quietly, "this little man must be taken away. i can't quite manage him. tell him to go and play about." "dear mother," she replied, "bear him a little longer. he can't play about by himself." lady grantham got gently up from her chair, and thrust an exquisite little silver paper-knife between the leaves of her book. "i think i will ask you to take my chair across to that tree opposite," she said to him, without looking at him. he followed her, dragging the chair after him. halfway across the lawn they met a footman bringing tea down into the ground. "take the chair," she said. then she turned to her little man. "many thanks. i won't detain you," she said, with a sweet smile. "so good of you to have come here this afternoon." featherstone was impenetrable. he lounged back, if so small a thing can be said to lounge, and sat down again by miss grantham. "fascinatin' woman your mother is," he said. "arfly clever, isn't she? what? knows french and that sort of thing. i can always get along all right in france. if you only swear at the waiters they understand what you want all right, you know." two or three other fresh arrivals made it possible for another set to be started, and mr. featherstone was induced to play, in spite of his protestations that he had quite given up tennis for polo. lady grantham finished her loti, and moved back to the tea-table, where edith was sitting, fanning herself with a cabbage leaf, and receiving homage on the score of her tennis-playing. lady grantham did not offer to give anybody any tea; she supposed they would take it when they wanted it, but she wished someone would give her a cup. "what's the name of the little man and his moustache?" she asked edith, indicating mr. featherstone, who was performing wild antics in the next court. edith informed her. "how did he get here?" demanded lady grantham. "oh, he's a friend of mine. i think he came to see me," replied edith. "he lives somewhere about. i suppose you find him rather trying. it doesn't matter; he's of no consequence." "my dear edith, between your sporting curate, and your german conductor, and your roman catholic cure, and this man, one's life isn't safe." "you won't see the good side of those sort of people," said edith. "if they've got rather overwhelming manners, and aren't as silent and bored as you think young men ought to be, you think they're utter outsiders." "i only want to know if there are any more of that sort going to turn up. think of the positions you put me in! when i went into the drawing-room yesterday, for instance, before lunch, i find a roman catholic priest there, who puts up two fingers at me, and says 'benedicite.'" edith lay back in her chair and laughed. "how i should like to have seen you! did you think he was saying grace, or did you tell him not to be insolent?" "i behaved with admirable moderation," said lady grantham. "i even prepared to be nice to him. but he had sudden misgivings, and said, 'i beg your pardon, i thought you were miss staines.' i saw i was not wanted, and retreated. that is not all. bob told me that i had to take a curate in to dinner last night, and asked me not to frighten him. i suppose he thought i wanted to say 'bo,' or howl at him. the curate tried me. i sat down when we got to the table, and he turned to me and said, 'i beg your pardon'--they all beg my pardon--'but i'm going to say grace.' then i prepared myself to talk night schools and district visiting; but he turned on me, and asked what i thought of orme's chances for the st. leger." "oh, dear! oh, dear!" cried edith; "he told me afterwards that you seemed a very serious lady." "i didn't intend to encourage that," continued lady grantham; "so i held on to district visiting. we shook our heads together over dissent in wales. we split over calvinism--who was calvin? we renounced society; and i was going to work him a pair of slippers. we were very edifying. then he sang comic songs in the drawing-room, and discussed the methods of cheating at baccarat. i was a dead failure." "anyhow, you're a serious lady," said edith. "that young man will come to a bad end," said lady grantham; "so will your german conductor. he ordered beer in the middle of the morning, to-day--the second footman will certainly give notice--and he smoked a little clay pipe after dinner in the dining-room. then this afternoon comes this other friend of yours. he says, 'arfly rippin' what.'" "he said you were arfly fascinatin' what," interpolated miss grantham, "when you went away to read your book. you were very rude to him." sir robert grantham had joined the party. he was a great hand at adapting his conversation to his audience, and making everyone conscious that they ought to feel quite at home. he recounted at some length a series of tennis matches which he had taken part in a few years ago. a strained elbow had spoiled his chances of winning, but the games were most exciting, and it was generally agreed at the time that the form of the players was quite first-class. he talked about wagner and counterpoint to edith. he asked his vicar abstruse questions on the evidence of the immortality of the soul after death; he discussed agriculture and farming with tenants, to whom he always said "thank ye," instead of "thank you," in order that they might feel quite at their ease; he lamented the want of physique in the english army to mr. featherstone, who was very short, and declared that the average height of englishmen was only five feet four. as he said this he drew himself up, and made it quite obvious that he himself was six feet high, and broad in proportion. a few more cups of tea were drunk, and a few more sets played, and the party dispersed. edith was the only guest in the house, and she and frank, the oxford son, stopped behind to play a game or two more before dinner. lady grantham and nora strolled up through the garden towards the house, while sir robert remained on the ground, and mingled advice, criticism, and approbation to the tennis players; frank's back-handed stroke, he thought, was not as good as it might be, and edith could, certainly put half fifteen on to her game if judiciously coached. neither of the players volleyed as well as himself, but volleying was his strong point, and they must not be discouraged. frank's attitude to his father was that of undisguised amusement; but he found him very entertaining. they were all rather late for dinner, and lady grantham was waiting for them in the drawing-room. frank and his father were down before edith, and lady grantham was making remarks on their personal appearance. "you look very, hot and red," she was saying to her son, "and i really wish you would brush your hair better. i don't know what young men are coming to, they seem to think that everything is to be kept waiting for them." frank's attitude was one of serene indifference. "go on, go on," he said; "i don't mind." edith was five minutes later. lady grantham remarked on the importance of being in time for dinner, and hoped they wouldn't all die from going to bed too soon afterwards. frank apologised for his mother. "don't mind her, miss staines," he said, "they're only her foreign manners. she doesn't know how to behave. it's all right. i'm going to take you in, mother. are we going to have grouse?" that evening miss grantham and edith "talked dodo," as the latter called it, till the small hours. she produced dodo's letter, and read extracts. "of course, we sha'n't be married till after next november," wrote dodo. "jack wouldn't hear of it, and it would seem very unfeeling. don't you think so? it will be odd going back to winston again. mind you come and stay with us at easter." "i wonder if dodo ever thinks with regret of anything or anybody," said edith. "imagine writing like that--asking me if i shouldn't think it unfeeling." "oh, but she says she would think it unfeeling," said miss grantham. "that's so sweet and remembering of her." "but don't you see," said edith, "she evidently thinks it is so good of her to have feelings about it at all. she might as well call attention to the fact that she always puts her shoes and stockings on to go to church." "there's a lot of women who would marry again before a year was out if it wasn't for convention," said miss grantham. "that's probably the case with dodo," remarked edith. "dodo doesn't care one pin for the memory of that man. she knows it, and she knows i know it. why does she say that sort of thing to me? he was a good man, too, and i'm not sure that he wasn't great. chesterford detested me, but i recognised him." "oh, i don't think he was great," said miss grantham. "didn't he always strike you as a little stupid?" "i prefer stupid people," declared edith roundly. "they are so restful. they're like nice; sweet, white bread; they quench your hunger as well as _pâté de foie gras_, and they are much better for you." "i think they make you just a little thirsty," remarked miss grantham. "i should have said they were more like cracknels. besides, do you think that it's an advantage to associate with people who are good for you? it produces a sort of rabies in me. i want to bite them." "you like making yourself out worse than you are, grantie," said edith. "i think you like making dodo out worse than she is," returned nora. "i always used to think you were very fond of her." "i am fond of her," said edith; "that's why i'm dissatisfied with her." "what a curious way of showing your affection," said miss grantham. "i love dodo, and if i was a man i should like to many her." "dodo is too dramatic," said edith. "she never gets off the stage; and sometimes she plays to the gallery, and then the stalls say, 'how cheap she's making herself.' she has the elements of a low comedian about her." "and the airs of a tragedy queen, i suppose," added miss grantham. "exactly," said edith; "and the consequence is that she as a burlesque sometimes: she is her own parody." "darling dodo," said grantie with feeling. "i _do_ want to see her again." "all her conduct after his death," continued edith, "that was the tragedy queen; she shut herself up in that great house, quite alone, for two months, and went to church with a large prayer-book every morning, at eight. but it was burlesque all the same. dodo isn't sorry like that. the gallery yelled with applause." "i thought it was so sweet of her," murmured grantie. "i suppose i'm gallery too." "then she went abroad," continued edith, "and sat down and wept by the waters of aix. but she soon took down her harp. she gave banjo parties on the lake, and sang coster songs." "mrs. vane told me she recovered her spirits wonderfully at aix," remarked miss grantham. "and played baccarat, and recovered other people's money," pursued edith. "if she'd taken the first train for aix after the funeral, i should have respected her." "oh, that would have been horrid," said miss grantham; "besides, it wouldn't have been the season." "that's true," said edith. "dodo probably remembered that." "oh, you sha'n't abuse dodo any more," said miss grantham. "i think it's perfectly horrid of you. go and play me something." perhaps the thought of chesterford was in edith's mind as she sat down to the piano, for she played a piece of mozart's "requiem," which is the saddest music in the world. miss grantham shivered a little. the long wailing notes, struck some chord, within her, which disturbed her peace of mind. "what a dismal thing," she said, when edith had finished. "you make me feel like sunday evening after a country church." edith stood looking out of the window. the moon was up, and the great stars were wheeling in their courses through the infinite vault. a nightingale was singing loud in the trees, and the little mysterious noises of night stole about among the bushes. as edith thought of chesterford she remembered how the greeks mistook the passionate song of the bird for the lament of the dead, and it did not seem strange to her. for love, sometimes goes hand-in-hand with death. she turned back into the room again. "god forgive her," she said, "if we cannot." "i'm not going to bed with that requiem in my ears," said miss grantham. "i should dream of hearses." edith went to the piano, and broke into a quick, rippling movement. miss grantham listened, and felt she ought to know what it was. "what is it?" she said, when edith had finished. "it is the scherzo from the 'dodo symphony,'" she said. "i composed it two years ago at winston." chapter sixteen dodo had written to edith from zermatt, where she was enjoying herself amazingly. mrs. vane was there, and mr. and mrs. algernon spencer, and prince waldenech and jack. as there would have been some natural confusion in the hotel if dodo had called herself lady chesterford, when lord chesterford was also there, she settled to be called miss vane. this tickled prince waldenech enormously; it seemed to him a capital joke. dodo was sitting in the verandah of the hotel one afternoon, drinking black coffee and smoking cigarettes. half the hotel were scandalised at her, and usually referred to her as "that miss vane"; the other half adored her, and went [on] expeditions with her, and took minor parts in her theatricals, and generally played universal second fiddle. dodo enjoyed this sort of life. there was in her an undeveloped germ of simplicity, that found pleasure in watching the slow-footed, cows driven home from the pastures, in sitting with jack--regardless of her assumed name--in the crocus-studded meadows, or by the side of the swirling glacier-fed stream that makes the valley melodious. she argued, with great reason, that she had already shocked all the people that were going to be shocked, so much that it didn't matter what she did; while the other contingent, who were not going to be shocked, were not going to be shocked. "everyone must either be shocked or not shocked," she said, "and they're that already. that's why prince waldenech and i are going for a moonlight walk next week when the moon comes back." dodo had made great friends with the prince's half-sister, a russian on her mother's side, and she was reading her extracts out of her unwritten book of the _philosophy of life_, an interesting work, which varied considerably according to dodo's mood. just now it suited dodo to be in love with life. "you are a russian by nature and sympathy, my dear princess," she was saying, "and you are therefore in a continual state of complete boredom. you think you are bored here, because it is not paris; in paris you are quite as much bored with all your _fêtes_, and dances, and parties as you are here. i tell you frankly you are wrong. why don't you come and sit in the grass, and look at the crocuses, and throw stones into the stream like me." the princess stretched out a delicate arm. "i don't think i ever threw a stone in my life," she said dubiously. "would it amuse me, do you think?" "not at first," said dodo; "and you will never be amused at all if you think about it." "what am i to think about then?" she asked. "you must think about the stone," said dodo decisively, "you must think about the crocuses, you must think about the cows." "it's all so new to me," remarked the princess. "we never think about cows in russia." "that's just what i'm saying," said dodo. "you must get out of yourself. anything, does to think about, and nobody is bored unless they think about being bored. when one has the whole world to choose from, and only one subject in it that can make one feel bored, it really shows a want of resource to think about that. then you ought to take walks and make yourself tired." the princess cast a vague eye on the matterhorn. "that sort of horror?" she asked. "no, you needn't begin with the matterhorn," said dodo, laughing. "go to the glaciers, and get rather cold and wet. boredom is chiefly physical." "i'm sure being cold and wet would bore me frightfully," she said. "no, no--a big no," cried dodo. "no one is ever bored unless they are comfortable. that's the great principle. there isn't time for it. you cannot be bored and something else at the same time. being comfortable doesn't count; that's our normal condition. but you needn't be uncomfortable in order to be bored. it's very comfortable sitting here with you, and i'm not the least bored. i should poison myself if i were bored: i can't think why you don't." "i will do anything you recommend," said the princess placidly. "you are the only woman i know who never appears to be bored. i wonder if my husband would bore you. he is very big, and very good, and he eats a large breakfast, and looks after his serfs. he bores me to extinction. he would wear black for ten years if i poisoned myself." a shade of something passed over dodo's face. it might have been regret, or stifled remembrance, or a sudden twinge of pain, and it lasted an appreciable fraction of a second. "i can imagine being bored with that kind of man," she said in a moment. the princess was lying back in her chair,' and did not notice a curious hardness in dodo's voice. "i should so-like to introduce you to him," said she. "i should like to shut you up with him for a month at our place on the volga. it snows a good deal there, and he goes out in the snow and shoots animals, and comes back in the evening with a red face, and tells me all about it. it is very entertaining, but a trifle monotonous. he does not know english, nor german, nor french. he laughs very loud. he is devoted to me. do go and stay with him. i think i'll join you when you've been there three weeks. he is quite safe. i shall not be afraid. he writes to me every day, and suggests that he should join me here." dodo shifted her position and looked up at the matterhorn. "yes," she said. "i should certainly be bored with him, but i'm not sure that i would show it." "he wouldn't like you at all," continued the princess. "he would think you loud. that is so odd. he thinks it unfeminine to smoke. he has great ideas about the position of women. he gave me a book of private devotions bound in the parchment from a bear he had shot on my last birthday." dodo laughed. "i'm sure you need not be bored with him," she said. "he must have a strong vein of unconscious humour about him." "i'm quite unconscious of it," said the princess. "you cannot form the slightest idea of what he's like till you see him. i almost feel inclined to tell him to come here." "ah, but you russian women have such liberty," said dodo. "you can tell your husband not to expect to see you again for three months. we can't do that. an english husband and wife are like two siamese twins. until about ten years ago they used to enter the drawing-room, when they were going out to dinner, arm-in-arm." "that's very bourgeois," said the princess. "you are rather a bourgeois race. you are very hearty, and pleased to see one, and all that. there's lord chesterford. you're a great friend of his, aren't you? he looks very distinguished. i should say he was usually bored." "he was my husband's first cousin," said dodo. princess alexandrina of course knew that miss vane was a widow. "i was always an old friend of his--as long as i can remember, that's to say. jack and i are going up towards the eiffel to watch the sunset. come with us." "i think i'll see the sunset from here," she said. "you're going up a hill, i suppose?" "oh, but you can't see it from here," said dodo. "that great mass of mountain is in the way." the princess considered. "i don't think i want to see the sunset after all," she said. "i've just found the _kreutzer sonata._ i've been rural enough for one day, and i want a breath of civilised air. do you know, i never feel bored when you are talking to me." "oh, that's part of my charm, isn't it?" said dodo to jack, who had lounged up to where they were sitting. "dodo's been lecturing me, lord chesterford," said the princess. "does she ever lecture you?" "she gave me quite a long lecture once," said he. "she recommended me to live in a cathedral town." "a cathedral town," said the princess. "that's something fearful, isn't it? why did you tell him to do that?" she said. "i think it was a mistake," said dodo. "anyhow, jack didn't take my advice. i shouldn't recommend him to do it now, but he has a perfect genius for being domestic. everyone is very domestic in cathedral towns. they all dine at seven and breakfast at a quarter past eight--next morning, you understand. that quarter past is delightful. but jack said he didn't want to score small successes," she added, employing a figure grammatically known as "hiatus." "my husband is very domestic," said the princess. "but he isn't a bit like lord chesterford. he would like to live with me in a little house in the country, and never have anyone to stay with us. that would be so cheerful during the winter months." "jack, would you like to live with your wife in a little house in the country?" demanded dodo. "i don't think i should ever marry a woman who wanted to," remarked jack, meeting dodo's glance. "imagine two people really liking each other better than all the rest of the world," said the princess, "and living on milk, and love, and wild roses, and fresh eggs! i can't bear fresh eggs." "my egg this morning wasn't at all fresh," said dodo. "i wish i'd thought of sending it to your room." "would you never get tired of your wife, don't you think," continued the princess, "if you shut yourselves up in the country? supposing she wished to pick roses when you wanted to play lawn tennis?" "oh, jack, it wouldn't do," said dodo. "you'd make her play lawn tennis." "my husband and i never thought of playing lawn tennis," said the princess. "i shall try that when we meet next. it's very amusing, isn't it?" "it makes you die of laughing," said dodo, solemnly. "come, jack, we're going to see the sunset. good-bye, dear. go and play with your maid. she can go out of the room while you think of something, and then come in and guess what you've thought of." jack and dodo strolled up through the sweet-smelling meadows towards the riffelberg. a cool breeze was streaming down from the "furrow cloven alls" of the glacier, heavy with the clean smell of pine woods and summer flowers, and thick with a hundred mingling sounds. the cows were being driven homewards, and the faint sounds of bells were carried down to them from the green heights above. now and then they passed a herd of goats, still nibbling anxiously at the wayside grass, followed by some small ragged shepherd, who brushed his long hair away from his eyes to get a better look at this dazzling, fair-skinned woman, who evidently belonged to quite another order of beings from his wrinkled, early-old mother. one of them held out to dodo a wilted little bunch of flowers, crumpled with much handling, but she did not seem to notice him. after they had passed he tossed them away, and ran off after his straying flock. southwards, high above them, stretched the long lines of snow spread out under the feet of the matterhorn, which sat like some huge sphinx, unapproachable, remote. just below lay the village, sleeping in the last rays of the sun, which shone warmly on the red, weathered planks. light blue smoke curled slowly up from the shingled roofs, and streamed gently down the valley in a thin, transparent haze. "decidedly, it's a very nice world," said dodo. "i'm so glad i wasn't born a russian. the princess never enjoys anything at all, except telling one how bored she is. but she's very amusing, and i gave her a great deal of good advice." "what have you been telling her to do," asked jack. "oh, anything. i recommended her to sit in the meadows, and throw stones and get her feet wet. it's not affectation at all in her, she really is hopelessly bored. it's as easy for her to be bored as for me not to be. jack, what will you do to me if i get bored when we're married?" "i shall tell you to throw stones," said he. "as long as you don't look at me reproachfully," said dodo, "i sha'n't mind. oh, look at the matterhorn. isn't it big?" "i don't like it," said jack; "it always looks as if it was taking notice, and reflecting how dreadfully small one is." "i used to think vivy was like that," said dodo. "she was very good to me once or twice. i wonder what i shall be like when i'm middle-aged. i can't bear the thought of getting old, but that won't stop it. i don't want to sit by the fire and purr. i don't think i could do it." "one won't get old all of a sudden, though," said jack; "that's a great consideration. the change will come so gradually that one won't know it." "ah, don't," said dodo quickly. "it's like dying by inches, losing hold of life gradually. it won't come to me like that. i shall wake up some morning and find i'm not young any more." "well, it won't come yet," said jack with sympathy. "well, i'm not going to bother my head about it," said dodo, "there isn't time. there's maud and her little spencer. he's a dear little man, and he ought to be put in a band-box with some pink cotton-wool, and taken out every sunday morning." dodo whistled shrilly on her fingers to attract their attention. mr. spencer had been gathering flowers and putting them into a neat, little tin box, which he slung over his shoulders. he was dressed in a norfolk jacket carefully buttoned round his waist, with knickerbockers and blue worsted stockings. he wore a small blue ribbon in his top button-hole, and a soft felt hat. he carried his flowers home in the evening, and always remembered to press them before he went to bed. he and maud were sitting on a large grey rock by the wayside, reading the psalms for the seventeenth evening of the month. dodo surveyed her critically, and laid herself out to be agreeable. "well, algy," she said, "how are the flowers going on? oh, what a sweet little gentian. where did you get it? we're going to have some theatricals this evening, and you must come. it's going to be a charade, and you'll have to guess the word afterwards. jack and i are going to look at the sunset. we shall be late for dinner. what's that book, maud?" "we were reading the psalms for the evening," said maud. "oh, how dear of you!" said dodo. "what a lovely church this makes. algy, why don't you have service out of doors at gloucester? i always feel so much more devotional on fine evenings out in the open air. i think that's charming. good-bye. jack and i must go on." dodo was a good walker, and they were soon among the pines that climb up the long steep slope to the eiffel. their steps were silent on the carpet of needles, and they walked on, not talking much, but each intensely conscious of the presence of the other. at a corner high up on the slope they stopped, for the great range in front of them had risen above the hills on the other side of the valley, and all the snow was flushed with the sunset. dodo laid her hand on jack's. "how odd it is that you and i should be here together, and like this," she said. "i often used to wonder years ago whether this would happen. jack, you will make me very happy? promise me that." and jack promised. "i often think of chesterford," dodo went on. "he wished for this, you know. he told me so as he was dying. did you ever know, jack--" even dodo found it hard to get on at this moment--"did you ever know--he knew all? i began to tell him, and he stopped me, saying he knew." jack's face was grave. "he told me he knew," he said; "at least, i saw he did. i never felt so much ashamed. it was my fault. i would have given a great deal to save him that knowledge." "god forgive me if i was cruel to him," said dodo. "but, oh, jack, i did try. i was mad that night i think." "don't talk of it," said he suddenly; "it was horrible; it was shameful." they were silent a moment. then jack said,-- "dodo, let us bury the thought of that for ever. there are some memories which are sacred to me. the memory of chesterford is one. he was very faithful, and he was very unhappy. i feel as if i was striking his dead body when you speak of it. requiescat." they rose and went down to the hotel; the sun had set, and it grew suddenly cold. the theatricals that night were a great success. dodo was simply inimitable. two maiden ladies left the hotel the next morning. chapter seventeen dodo's marriage was announced in september. it was to be celebrated at the beginning of december, and was to be very grand indeed. duchesses were expected to be nothing accounted of. she was still in switzerland when it was made known, and events had developed themselves. the announcement came out in the following manner. she had taken her moonlight walk, but not with prince waldenech. she had mentioned to him incidentally that jack was coming as well, and after dinner the prince found he had important despatches waiting for him. dodo was rather amused at the inadequacy of this statement, as no post had come in that morning. the thought that the prince particularly wished to take a romantic walk with her was entertaining. next morning, however, while dodo was sitting in her room, looking out over the wide, green valley, her maid came in and asked if prince waldenech might have permission to speak to her. "good morning," said dodo affably, as he entered. "i wish you had been with us last night. we had a charming walk, but jack was dreadfully dull. why didn't you come?" the prince twisted his long moustaches. "certainly i had no despatches," he declared with frankness; "that was--how do you call it?--oh, a white lie." "did you expect me to believe it?" asked dodo. "assuredly not," he returned. "it would have been an insult to your understanding. but such statements are better than the truth sometimes. but i came here for another purpose--to say good-bye." "you're not going?" said dodo surprisedly. "unless you tell me to stop," he murmured, advancing to her. dodo read his meaning at once, and determined to stop his saying anything more. "certainly i tell you to stop," she said. "you mustn't break up our charming party so soon. besides, i have a piece of news for you this morning. i ask for your congratulations." "ah, those despatches," murmured the prince. "no, it was not the fault of your despatches," said dodo, laughing. "it was settled some time ago. i shall be lady chesterford again next year. allow me to introduce the marchioness of chesterford elect to your highness," and she swept him a little curtsey. the prince bowed. "the marquis of chesterford is a very fortunate man," he said. "decidedly i had better go away to-morrow." dodo felt annoyed with him. "i thought he was clever enough not to say that," she thought to herself. "no, my dear prince, you shall do nothing of the sort," she said. "you are very happy here, and i don't choose that you should go away--i tell you to stop. you said you would if i told you." "i am a man of honour still," said he, with mock solemnity. he put both hands together and bowed. "i shall be the first to congratulate the marquis," he said, "and may i hope the marchioness will think with pity on those less fortunate than he." dodo smiled benignantly. he really had got excellent manners. the scene was artistic, and it pleased her. "i should think you were too proud to accept pity," she said. "have you ever seen me other than humble--to you?" he asked. "take it then," said dodo; "as much as your case requires. but i feel it is insolent of me to offer it." "i take all the pity you have," said he, smiling gravely. "i want it more than any other poor devil you might think of bestowing it on." he bowed himself gracefully out of the room. he and dodo had been discussing english proverbs the day before, and dodo asserted broadly that they were all founded on universal truths. the prince thought that pity was quite a promising gift. dodo was a little uneasy after he had gone. she was always a trifle afraid of him, though, to do her justice, no one would have guessed it. he had acted the rejected lover in the theatricals of the week before, and his acting had been rather too good. the scene she had just gone through reminded her very forcibly of it. she had found that she could not get the play out of her head afterwards, and had had long waking dreams that night, in which the prince appeared time after time, and her refusal got more faint as he pressed his suit. she felt that he was the stronger of the two, and such a scene as the last inspired her with a kind of self-distrust. "he will not make himself 'cheap,'" dodo said to herself. she was very glad he was going to stop, and had been surprised to feel how annoyed she was when he said he had come to wish good-bye. but she felt he had a certain power over her, and did not quite like it. she would take jack out for a walk and make things even. jack had no power over her, and she thought complacently how she could turn him round her little finger. dear old jack! what a good time they were going to have. she went downstairs and met the prince and jack on the verandah. the former was murmuring congratulatory speeches, and jack was saying "thanks awfully" at intervals. he had once said to dodo that the prince was "an oily devil," which was putting it rather strongly. dodo had stuck up for him. "you only say he's oily," she said, "because he's got much better manners than you, and can come into the room without looking ridiculous, and i rather like devils as a rule, and him in particular, though i don't say he is one. anyhow he is a friend of mine, and you can talk about something else." jack followed dodo into the square, and sat down by her. "what made you tell that chap that we were engaged?" he asked. "oh, i had excellent reasons," said dodo. the memory of the interview was still rather strong in her mind, and she felt not quite sure of herself. "no doubt," said jack; "but i wish you'd tell me what they were." "don't talk as if you were the inquisition, old boy," she said. "i don't see why i should tell you if i don't like." "please yourself," said jack crossly, and got up to walk away. "jack, behave this minute," said dodo. "apologise instantly for speaking like that." "i beg its little pardon," said jack contentedly. he liked being hauled over the coals by dodo. "that's right; now, if you'll be good, i'll tell you. has he gone quite away?" "quite; thank goodness," said jack. "well," said dodo, "i told him because he was just going to propose to me himself, and i wanted to stop him." "nasty brute," said jack. "i hope you gave it him hot." "that's a very rude thing to say, jack," said she. "it argues excellent taste in him. besides, you did it yourself. nasty brute!" "what right has he got to propose to you, i should like to know?" asked jack. "just as much as you had." "then i ought to be kicked for doing it." dodo applied the toe of a muddy shoe to jack's calf. "now, i've dirtied your pretty stockings," she said. "serves you right for proposing to me. how dare you, you nasty brute!" jack made a grab at her foot, and made his fingers dirty. "jack, behave," said dodo; "there are two thousand people looking." "let them look," said jack recklessly. "i'm not going to be kicked in broad daylight within shouting distance of the hotel. dodo, if you kick me again i shall call for help." "call away," said dodo. jack opened his mouth and howled. an old gentleman, who was just folding his paper into a convenient form for reading, on a seat opposite, put on his spectacles and stared at them in blank amazement. "i told you i would," remarked jack parenthetically, "it's only lord chesterford," exclaimed dodo, in a shrill, treble voice, to the old gentleman. "i don't think he's very well. i daresay it's nothing." "most distressin'," said the old gentleman, in a tone of the deepest sarcasm, returning to his paper. "most distressin'," echoed dodo pianissimo to jack, who was laughing in a hopeless internal manner. dodo led him speechless away, and they wandered off to the little, low wall that separates the street from the square. "now, we'll go on talking,", said jack, when he had recovered somewhat. "we were talking about that austrian. what did you say to him?" "oh, i've told you. i simply stopped him asking me by telling him i was going to marry someone else." "what did he say then?" demanded jack. "oh, he asked me for sympathy," said dodo. "which you gave him?" "certainly," she answered. "i was very sorry for him, and i told him so; but we did it very nicely and politely, without stating anything, but only hinting at it." "a nasty, vicious, oily brute," observed jack. "jack, you're ridiculous," said she; "he's nothing of the sort. i've told him to come and see us when we're in england, and you'll have to be very polite and charming to him." "oh, he can come then," said jack, "but i don't like him." they strolled down the street towards the church, and dodo insisted on buying several entirely useless brackets, with chamois horns stuck aimlessly about them. "i haven't got any money," she observed. "fork up, jack. seven and eight are fifteen and seven are twenty-two. thanks." dodo was dissatisfied with one of her brackets before they reached the hotel again, and presented it to jack. "it's awfully good of you," said he; "do you mean that you only owe me fifteen?" "only fourteen," said dodo; "this was eight francs. it will be very useful to you, and when you look at it, you can think of me," she observed with feeling. "i'd sooner have my eight francs." "then you just won't get them," said dodo, with finality; "and you sha'n't have that unless you say, 'thank you.'" the verandah was empty, as lunch had begun; so jack said, "thank you." the news of their engagement soon got about the hotel, and caused a much more favourable view to be taken of dodo's behaviour to jack, in the minds of the hostile camp. "of course, if she was engaged to lord chesterford all along," said the enemy, "it puts her conduct in an entirely different light. they say he's immensely rich, and we hope we shall meet them in london. her acting the other night was really extremely clever." mrs. vane gave quite a number of select little teas on the verandah to the penitent, and showed her teeth most graciously. "darling dodo, of course it's a great happiness to me," she would say, "and the marquis is such a very old friend of ours. so charming, isn't he? yes. and they are simply devoted to each other."--the speeches seemed quite familiar still to her. dodo regarded the sudden change in the minds of the "shocked section" with much amusement. "it appears i'm quite proper after all," she thought. "that's a blessing anyhow. the colonial bishop will certainly ask me to share his mitre, now he knows i'm a good girl." "jack," she called out to him as he passed, "you said the salon smelled like a church this morning. well, it's only me. i diffuse an odour of sanctity, i find." the princess expressed her opinions on the engagement. "i'm sorry that you can't marry my brother," she said. "you would have suited him admirably, and it would have been only natural for you to stay with your brother-in-law. what shall i give you for a wedding present? there's the bear-skin prayer-book, if you like. waldenech is very cross about it. he says you told him he mightn't go away, so he has to stop. are you going out on the picnic? waldenech's getting up a picnic. he's ordered champagne. do you think it will be amusing? they will drink the health of you and lord chesterford. if you'll promise to reply in suitable terms i'll come. why didn't you come and see me this morning? i suppose you were engaged. of course my brother was proposing to you after breakfast, and then you had to go and talk to your young man. come to the picnic, dodo. you shall show me how to throw stones." they were going to walk up to a sufficiently remote spot in the rising ground to the east of zermatt, and find their lunch ready for them. the prince had no sympathy with meat sandwiches and a little sherry out of a flask, and his sister had expressed her antipathy to fresh eggs; so he had told the hotel-keeper that lunch would be wanted, and that there were to be no hard-boiled eggs and no sandwiches, and plenty of deck-chairs. the princess firmly refused to walk as far, and ordered what she said "was less unlike a horse than the others"; and asked dodo to wait for her, as she knew she wouldn't be in time. she was one of those people who find it quite impossible to be punctual at whatever time she had an engagement. she was always twenty minutes late, but, as dodo remarked, "that's the same thing as being punctual when people know you. i think punctuality is a necessity," she added, "more than a virtue." "haven't you got a proverb about making a virtue of necessity?" said the princess vaguely. "that's what i do on the rare occasions on which i am punctual. all my virtues are the result of necessity, which is another word for inclination." "yes, inclination is necessity when it's sufficiently strong," said dodo; "consequently, even when it's weak, it's still got a touch of necessity about it. that really is a comfortable doctrine. i shall remember that next time i want not to go to church." "my husband is a very devout roman catholic," remarked the princess. "he's got an admirable plan of managing such things. first of all, he does what his conscience--he's got a very fine conscience--tells him he shouldn't. it must be very amusing to have a conscience. you need never feel lonely. then he goes and confesses, which makes it all right, and to make himself quite safe he gives a hundred roubles to the poor. he's very rich, you know; it doesn't matter to him a bit. that gets him an indulgence. i fancy he's minus about six weeks' purgatory. he's got a balance. i expect he'll give it me. you have to be very rich to have a balance. he pays for his pleasures down in hard cash, you see; it's much better than running up a bill. he is very anxious about my spiritual welfare sometimes." "does he really believe all that?" asked dodo. "dear me, yes," said the princess. "he has a most childlike faith. if the priest told him there was an eligible building site in heaven going cheap, he'd buy it at once. personally i don't believe all those things. they don't seem to me in the least probable." "what do you believe?" asked dodo. "oh, i've got plenty of beliefs," said the princess. "i believe it's wiser being good than bad, and fitter being sane than mad. i don't do obviously low things, i am sorry for the poor devils of this world, i'm not mean, i'm not coarse, i don't care about taking an unfair advantage of other people. my taste revolts against immorality; i should as soon think of going about with dirty nails. if i believed what the priests tell me i should be a very good woman, according to their lights. as it is, though my conduct in all matters of right and wrong is identical with what it would be, i'm one of the lost." "english people are just as irrational in their way," said dodo, "only they don't do such things in cold blood. they appeal to little morbid emotions, excited by sunday evening and slow tunes in four sharps. i went to a country church once, on a lovely summer evening, and we all sang, 'hark, hark, my soul!' at the tops of our voices, and i walked home with my husband, feeling that i'd never do anything naughty any more, and maud and her husband, and he and i, sang hymns after dinner. it was simply delicious. the world was going to be a different place ever afterwards, and i expected to die in the night. but i didn't, you know, and next morning all the difference was that i'd caught a cold sitting in a hayfield--and that was the end." "no, it's no use," said the princess. "but i envy those who have 'the religion,' as they say in our country. it makes things so much easier." "what i couldn't help wondering," said dodo, "was whether i should be any better if i had kept up the feeling of that sunday night. i should have stopped at home singing hymns, i suppose, instead of going out to dinner; but what then? should i have been less objectionable when things went wrong? should i have been any kinder to--to anybody? i don't believe it." "of course you wouldn't," said the princess. "you go about it the wrong way. we neither of us can help it, because we're not made like that. it would be as sensible to cultivate eccentricity in order to become a genius. people who have 'the religion' like singing hymns, but they didn't get the religion by singing hymns. they sing hymns because they've got it. what is so absurd is to suppose, as my husband does, that a hundred roubles at stated intervals produces salvation. that's his form of singing hymns, and the priests encourage him. i gave it up long ago. if i thought singing hymns or encouraging priests would do any good, i'd sell my diamonds and buy a harmonium, and give the rest away. but i don't think anything so absurd." "david was so sensible," said dodo. "i've got a great affection for david. he told his people to sing praises with understanding. you see you've got to understand it first. i wonder if he would have understood 'hark, hark, my soul!' i didn't, but it made me feel good inside." "somebody said religion was morality touched with emotion," said the princess. "my husband hasn't got any morality, and his emotions are those excited by killing bears. yet the priests say he's wonderfully religious." "there's something wrong somewhere," said dodo. the party were waiting for them when they came up. the prince led dodo to a place next him, and the princess sat next jack. "i'm so sorry," said dodo; "i'm afraid we're dreadfully late." "my sister is never in time," said the prince. "she kept the emperor waiting half an hour once. his imperial majesty swore." "oh, you're doing me an injustice,", said she. "i was in time the other day." "let us do her justice," said the prince. "she was in time, but that was because she forgot what the time was." "that's the cause of my being unpunctual, dear," remarked the princess. "to-day it was also because the thing like a horse wouldn't go, and dodo and i talked a good deal." mrs. vane was eating her chicken with great satisfaction. a picnic with a prince was so much capital to her. "i can't think why we don't all go and live in the country always," she said, "and have little picnics like this every day. such a good idea of your highness. so original--_and_ such a charming day." the prince remarked that picnics were not his invention, and that the credit for the weather was due elsewhere. "oh, but you said last night you were sure it was going to be fine," said mrs. vane, floundering a little. "dodo, dear, didn't you hear the prince say so?" "here's to the health of our zadkiel," said dodo, "may his shadow, etc: drink to old zadkiel, jack, the founder of the feast, who stands us champagne. i'll stand you a drink when you come to see us in england. his serenity," she said, emptying her glass. "what a lot of things i am," murmured the prince. "don't forget i'm a poor devil whom you pity as well." "do you find pity a satisfactory diet?" asked dodo saucily. she was determined not to be frightened of him any more. the prince decided on a bold stroke. "pity is akin to love," he said below his breath. but he had found his match, for the time being, at any rate. "don't mistake it for it's cousin, then," laughed dodo. the conversation became more general. the princess said the mountains were too high and large, and she didn't like them. jack remarked that it was purely a matter of degree, and the princess explained that it was exactly what she meant, they were so much bigger than she was. mr. spencer plunged violently into the conversation, and said that mount everest was twice as high as the matterhorn, and you never saw the top. the princess said, "oh," and jack asked how they knew how high it was, if the top was never seen, and mr. spencer explained vaguely that they did it with sextants. maud said she thought he meant theodolites, and dodo asked a bad riddle about sextons. on the whole the picnic went off as well as could be expected, and dodo determined to have lunch out of doors every day for the rest of her natural life. after lunch mr. spencer and maud wandered away to pick flowers, presumably. mrs. vane moved her chair into the shade, in such a position that she could command a view of the mountain, and fell asleep. jack smoked a short black pipe, chiefly because the prince offered him a cigar, and dodo smoked cigarettes and ate cherries backwards, beginning with the stalk, and induced the princess to do the same, receiving two seconds' start. "it's a form of throwing stones," dodo explained. the "most distressin'" old gentleman was sighted under a large white umbrella, moving slowly up the path a little below them, and dodo insisted on inviting him to lunch, as it was certain that he had just left the _table d'hôte_. "he thought it simply charming of me," she said, as she came back. "he's quite forgiven jack for shouting. besides, i took him the princess's compliments. he's english, you know." chapter eighteen edith had stayed on with the granthams till nearly the end of august. she declined to have breakfast with the family, after she had been there about a week, because she said it spoiled her mornings, and used to breakfast by herself at seven or half-past, which gave her extra' two hours at her music; and lady grantham complained of being wakened in the middle of the night by funeral marches. so edith promised to play with the soft pedal down, which she never did. at lunch sir robert used to make a point of asking her how she had got on, and described to her the admirable band in the casino at monte carlo. he was always extremely genial to her, and, when she played to them in the evening, he would beat time with one hand. now and then he even told her that she was not playing staccato enough, or that he heard it taken rather quicker at bayreuth. dodo had written to edith saying that she was coming to stay with her in september, and that edith must be at home by the second, because she would probably come that day or the third. edith happened to mention this one night in the hearing of lady grantham, who had been firing off home-truths at her husband and son like a minute gun, in a low, scornful voice. this habit of hers was rather embarrassing at times. at dinner, for instance, that evening, when he had been airing his musical views to edith as usual, she had suddenly said,-- "you don't know how silly you're making yourself, bob. everyone knows that you can't distinguish one note from another!" though edith felt on fairly intimate terms with the family, there were occasions when she didn't quite know how to behave. she attempted to continue her conversation with the baronet, but lady grantham would not allow it. "edith, you know he doesn't know 'god save the queen' when he hears it. you'll only make him conceited." "she's only like this when she's here, miss staines," remarked frank, alluding to his mother in the third person. "she's awfully polite when she's in london; she was to you the first week you were here, you know, but she can't keep it up. she's had a bad education. poor dear!" "oh, you are a queer family," said edith sometimes. "you really ought to have no faults left, any of you, you are so wonderfully candid to each other." "some people think mother so charming," continued frank. "i never yet found out what her particular charm is." on this occasion, when edith mentioned that dodo was coming to stay with her, lady grantham sounded truce at once, and left her unnatural offspring alone. "i wish you'd ask me to come and stay with you, too," said she presently. "bob and frank will be going off partridge shooting all day, and nora and i will be all alone, and they'll be sleepy in the evening, and snore in the drawing-room." "i'd make her promise to be polite, miss staines," remarked frank. "i want to meet lady chesterford very much," she continued. "i hear she is so charming. she's a friend of yours; isn't she, nora? why have you never asked her to stay here? what's the good of having friends if you don't trot them out?" "oh, i've asked her more than once, mother," said miss grantham, "but she couldn't ever come." "she's heard about ma at home," said frank. "i'm backing you, frank," remarked the baronet, who was still rather sore after his recent drubbing. "go in and win, my boy." "bob, you shouldn't encourage frank to be rude," said lady grantham. "he's bad enough without that." "that's what comes of having a mamma with foreign manners. there's no word for 'thank you' in spanish, is there, mother? were you here with charlie broxton, miss staines? she told him he didn't brush his hair, or his teeth, and she hated little men. charlie's five feet three. he was here as my friend." "do come," said edith, when this skirmishing was over. "nora will come with you, of course. we shall be only four. i don't suppose there will be anyone else at home." "hurrah," said frank, "we'll have a real good time, father. no nagging in the evenings. we won't dress, and we'll smoke in the drawing-room." "i long to see dodo again," remarked miss grantham. "she's one of the few people i never get at all tired of." "i know her by sight," said lady grantham. "she was talking very loud to prince waldenech when i saw her. it was at the brettons'." "dodo can talk loud when she wants," remarked miss grantham. "did you see her dance that night, mother? i believe she was splendid." "she was doing nothing else," replied lady grantham. "oh, but by herself," said edith. "she took a select party away, and tucked up her skirts and sent them all into raptures." "that's so like dodo," said miss grantham. "she never does anything badly. if she does it at all, it's good of its kind." "i should like to know her," said lady grantham. the remark was characteristic. lady grantham returned to the subject of dodo in the course of the evening. "everyone says she is so supremely successful," she said to edith. "what's her method?" all successful people, according to lady grantham, had a method. they found out by experience what _rôle_ suited them best, and they played it assiduously. to do her justice, there was a good deal of truth in it with regard to the people among whom she moved. "her method is purely to be dramatic, in the most unmistakable way," said edith, after some consideration. "she is almost always picturesque. to all appearance her only method is to have no method. she seems to say and do anything that comes into her head, but all she says and does is rather striking. she can accommodate herself to nearly any circumstances. she is never colourless; and she is not quite like anybody else i ever met. she has an immense amount of vitality, and she is almost always doing something. it's hopeless to try and describe her; you will see. she is beautiful, unscrupulous, dramatic, warm-hearted, cold-blooded, and a hundred other things." "oh, you don't do her justice, edith," remarked miss grantham. "she's much more than all that. she has got genius, or something very like it. i think dodo gives me a better idea of the divine fire than anyone else." "then the divine fire resembles something not at all divine on occasions," observed edith. "i don't think that the divine fire talks so much nonsense either." lady grantham got up. "i expect to be disappointed," she said. "geniuses are nearly always badly dressed, or they wear spectacles, or they are very short. however, i shall come. come, nora, it's time to go to bed." lady grantham never said "good-night" or "good-morning" to the members of her family. "they all sleep like hogs," she said, "and they are very cheerful in the morning. they get on quite well enough without my good wishes. it is very plebeian to be cheerful in the morning." although, as i have mentioned before, sir robert was an adept at choosing his conversation to suit his audience, there was one subject on which he considered that he might talk to anyone, and in which the whole world must necessarily take an intelligent and eager interest. the romans used to worship the bones and spirits of their ancestors, and sir robert, perhaps because he was undoubtedly of roman imperial blood, kept up the same custom. frank used irreverently to call it "family prayers." to know how the granthams were connected with the campbells, and the vere de veres, and the stanleys, and the montmorencies, and fifty other bluest strains, seemed to sir robert to be an essential part of a liberal education. to try to be late for family prayers was hopeless. they were at no fixed hour, and were held as many times during the day as necessary. sometimes they were cut down to a sentence or two; suggested by the mention of some ducal name; sometimes they involved a lengthy, pious orgie in front of the portraits. to-night edith was distinctly to blame, for she deliberately asked the name of the artist who had painted the picture hanging over the door into the library. sir robert, according to custom, seemed rather bored by the subject. "let's see," he said; "i've got no head for names. i think that's the one, of my great-grandfather, isn't it? a tall, handsome man in peer's robes?" "now he's off." this _sotto voce_ from frank, who was reading badminton on cover shooting. sir robert drew his hand over his beautiful moustache once or twice. "ah, yes, how stupid of me. that's the reynolds, of course. reynolds was quite unknown when he did that portrait. lord linton, that was my great-grand-father--he was made an earl after that portrait was taken--saw a drawing in a little shop in piccadilly, which took his fancy, and he inquired the name of the artist. the shopman didn't know; but he said that the young man came very often with drawings to sell, and he gave him a trifle for them. well, lord linton sent for him, and gave him a commission to do his portrait, had it exhibited, and young reynolds came into notice. the portrait came into possession of my grandfather, who, as you know, was a younger son; don't know how, and there it is." "it's a beautiful picture," remarked edith. "ah, you like it? lord sandown, my first cousin, was here last week, and he said, 'didn't know you'd been raised to the peerage yet, bob.' he thought it was a portrait of me. it is said to be very like. you'd noticed the resemblance, no doubt?" "a tall, handsome man," remarked frank to the fireplace. "i don't know as much as i ought about my ancestors," continued sir robert, who was doing himself a gross injustice. "you ought to get sandown on the subject. i found a curious old drawing the other day in a scrapbook belonging to my father. the name grantham is printed in the centre of a large folio sheet, with a circle round it to imitate the sun, and from it go out rays in all directions, with the names of the different families with which we have intermarried." "i haven't got any ancestors," remarked edith. "my grandfather was a draper in leeds, and made his fortune there. i should think ancestors were a great responsibility; you have to live up to them, or else they live down to you." "i'm always saying to frank," said sir robert, "that you have to judge a man by himself, and not by his family. if a man is a pleasant fellow it doesn't matter whether his family came over with the conqueror or not. our parson here, for instance, he's a decent sensible fellow, and i'm always delighted to give him a few days' shooting, or see him to dinner on sunday after his services. his father was a tobacconist in the village, you know. there's the shop there now." edith rose to go. sir robert lighted her candle for her. "i should like to show you the few portraits we've got," he said. "there are some interesting names amongst them; but, of course, most of our family things are at langfort." "my grandfather's yard measure is the only heirloom that we've got," said edith. "i'll show it to lady grantham when she comes to stay with me." frank had followed them into the hall. "family prayers over yet, father?" he asked. "i shall go and smoke. i hope you've been devout, miss staines." edith left the granthams two days after this, "to buy legs of mutton," she explained, "and hire a charwoman. i don't suppose there's anyone at home. but i shall have things straight by the time you come." sir robert was very gracious, and promised to send her a short memoir he was writing on the fortunes of the family. it was to be bound in white vellum, with their arms in gilt upon the outside. edith, found no one at home but a few servants on board wages, who did not seem at all pleased to see her. she devoted her evening to what she called tidying, which consisted in emptying the contents of a quantity of drawers on to the floor of her room, and sitting down beside them. she turned them over with much energy for about half an hour, and then decided that she could throw nothing away, and told her maid to put them back again, and played her piano till bed-time. lady grantham and nora followed in a few days, and dodo was to come the same evening. they were sitting put in the garden after dinner, when the sound of wheels was heard, and edith went round to the front door to welcome her. dodo had not dined, so she went and "made hay among the broken meats," as she expressed it. travelling produced no kind of fatigue in her; and the noise, and shaking, and smuts, that prey on most of us in railway carriages always seemed to leave her untouched. dodo was particularly glad to get to england. she had had rather a trying time of it towards the end, for jack and the prince got on extremely badly together, and, as they both wished to be with dodo, collisions were frequent. she gave the story of her adventure to edith with singular frankness as she ate her broken meats. "you see, jack got it into his head that the prince is a cad and a brute," said dodo. "i quite admit that he may be, only neither jack nor i have the slightest opportunity for judging. socially he is neither, and what he is morally doesn't concern me. how should it? it isn't my business to inquire into his moral character. i'm not his mother nor his mother confessor. he is good company. i particularly like his sister, whom you must come and see, edith. she and the prince are going to stay with us when we get back to winston; and he knows how to behave. jack has a vague sort of feeling that his morals ought to prevent him from tolerating the prince, which made him try to find opportunities for disliking him. but jack didn't interfere with me." "no," said edith; "i really don't see why private individuals shouldn't associate with whom they like. one doesn't feel bound to be friends with people of high moral character, so i don't see why one should be bound to dislike people of low ditto." "that's exactly my view," said dodo; "morals don't come into the question at all. i particularly dislike some of the cardinal virtues--and the only reason for associating with anybody is that one takes pleasure in their company. of course one wouldn't go about with a murderer, however amusing, because his moral deficiencies-might produce unpleasant physical consequences to yourself. but my morals are able to look after themselves. i'm not afraid of moral cut-throats. morals don't come into the social circle. you might as well dislike a man because he's got a sharp elbow-joint. he won't use it on your ribs, you know, in the drawing-room. to get under the influence of an immoral man would be different. we'll, i've finished. where are the others? give me a cigarette, edith. i sha'n't shock your servants, shall i? i've given up shocking people." dodo and edith strolled out, and dodo was introduced to lady grantham. "what an age you and edith have been," said miss grantham. "i have been dying to see you, dodo." "we were talking," said dodo, "and for once edith agreed with me." "she never agrees with me," remarked lady grantham. "i wonder if i should always agree with you then," said dodo. "do things that disagree with the same thing agree with one another?" "what did edith agree with you about?" asked miss grantham. "i'm not sure that i did really agree with her," interpolated edith. "oh, about morals," said dodo. "i said that a man's morals did not matter in ordinary social life. that they did not come into the question at all." "no, i don't think i do agree with you," said edith. "all social life is a degree of intimacy, and you said yourself that you wouldn't get under the influence of an immoral man--in other words, you wouldn't be intimate with him." "oh, being intimate hasn't anything to do with being under a man's influence," said dodo. "i'm very intimate with lots of people. jack, for instance, but i'm not under his influence." "then you think it doesn't matter whether society is composed of people without morals?" said edith. "i think it's a bad thing that morals should deteriorate in any society," said dodo; "but i don't think that society should take cognisance of the moral code. public opinion don't touch that. if a man is a brute, he won't be any better for knowing that other people disapprove of him. if he knows that, and is worth anything at all, it will simply have the opposite effect on him. he very likely will try to hide it; but that doesn't make it any better. a whited sepulchre is no better than a sepulchre unwhitened. you must act by your own lights. if an action doesn't seem to you wrong nothing in the world will prevent your doing it, if your desire is sufficiently strong. you cannot elevate tone by punishing offences. there are no fewer criminals since the tread-mill was invented and botany bay discovered." "you mean that there would be no increase in crime if the law did not punish?" "i mean that punishment is not the best way of checking crime, though that is really altogether a different question. you won't check immorality by dealing with it as a social crime." there was a short silence, broken only by the whispering of the wind in the fir trees. then on the stillness came a light, rippling laugh. dodo got out of her chair, and plucked a couple of roses from a bush near her. "i can't be serious any longer," she said; "not a single moment longer. i'm so dreadfully glad to be in england again. really, there is no place like it. i hate the insolent extravagant beauty of switzerland --it is like chromo lithographs. look at that long, flat, grey distance over there. there is nothing so beautiful as that abroad." dodo fastened the roses in the front of her dress, and laughed again. "i laugh for pure happiness," she continued. "i laughed when i saw the cliff of dover to-day, not because i was sea-sick--i never am sea-sick--but simply because i was coming home again. jack parted from me at dover. i am very happy about jack. i believe in him thoroughly." dodo was getting serious again in spite of herself. lady grantham was watching her curiously, and without any feeling of disappointment. she did not wear spectacles, she was, at least, as tall as herself, and she dressed, if anything, rather better. she was still wearing half-mourning, but half-mourning suited dodo very well. "decidedly it's a pity to analyse one's feelings," dodo went on, "they do resolve themselves into such very small factors. i am well, i am in england, where you can eat your dinner without suspicion of frogs, or caterpillars in your cauliflower. i had two caterpillars in my cauliflower at zermatt one night. i shall sleep in a clean white bed, and i shall not have to use keating. i can talk as ridiculously as i like, without thinking of the french for anything. oh, i'm entirely happy." dodo was aware of more reasons for happiness than she mentioned. she was particularly conscious of the relief she felt in getting away from the prince. for some days past she had been unpleasantly aware of his presence. she could not manage to think of him quite as lightly as she thought of anyone else. it was a continual effort to her to appear quite herself in his presence, and she was constantly rushing into extremes in order to seem at her ease. he was stronger, she felt, than she was, and she did not like it. the immense relief which his absence brought more than compensated for the slight blankness that his absence left. in a way she felt dependent on him, which chafed and irritated her, for she had never come under such a yoke before. she had had several moments of sudden anger against herself on her way home. she found herself always thinking about him when she was not thinking about anything else; and though she was quite capable of sending her thoughts off to other subjects, when they had done their work they always fluttered back again to the same resting-place, and dodo was conscious of an effort, slight indeed, but still an effort, in frightening them off. her curious insistence on her own happiness had struck edith. she felt it unnatural that dodo should mention it, and she drew one of two conclusions from it; either that dodo had had a rather trying time, for some reason or other, or that she wished to convince herself, by constant repetition, of something that she was not quite sure about; and both of these conclusions were in a measure correct. "who was out at zermatt when you were there?" inquired miss grantham. "oh, there was mother there, and maud and her husband, and a russian princess, waldenech's sister, and jack, of course," said dodo. "wasn't prince waldenech there himself?" she asked. "the prince? oh yes, he was there; didn't i say so?" said dodo. "he's rather amusing, isn't he?" said miss grantham. "i don't know him at all." "oh, yes," said dodo; "a little ponderous, you know, but very presentable, and good company." edith looked up suddenly at dodo. there was an elaborate carelessness, she thought, in her voice. it was just a little overdone. the night was descending fast, and she could only just see the lines of her face above the misty folds of her grey dress. but even in that half light she thought that her careless voice did not quite seem a true interpretation of her expression. it might have been only the dimness of the shadow, but she thought she looked anxious and rather depressed. lady grantham drew her shawl more closely round her shoulders, and remarked that it was getting cold. edith got up and prepared to go in, and miss grantham nestled in her chair. only dodo stood quite motionless, and edith noticed that her hands were tearing one of the roses to pieces, and scattering the petals on the grass. "are you going in, dodo?" she asked; "or would you rather stop out a little longer?" "i think i won't come in just yet," said dodo; "it's so delightful to have a breath of cool air, after being in a stuffy carriage all day. but don't any of you stop out if you'd rather go in. i shall just smoke one more cigarette." "i'll stop with you, dodo," said miss grantham. "i don't want to go in at all. edith, if you're going in, throw the windows in the drawing-room open, and play to us." lady grantham and edith went towards the house. "i didn't expect her to be a bit like that," said lady grantham. "i always heard she was so lively, and talked more nonsense in half an hour than we can get through in a year. she's very beautiful." "i think dodo must be tired or something," said edith. "i never saw her like that before. she was horribly serious. i hope nothing has happened." the piano in the drawing-room was close to a large french window opening on to the lawn. edith threw it open, and stood for a moment looking out into the darkness. she could just see dodo and nora sitting where they had left them, though they were no more than two pale spots against the dark background. she was conscious of a strange feeling that there was an undercurrent at work in dodo, which showed itself by a few chance bubbles and little sudden eddies on the surface, which she thought required explanation. dodo certainly was not quite like herself. there was no edge to her vivacity: her attempts not to be serious had been distinctly forced, and she was unable to keep it up. edith felt a vague sense of coming disaster; slight but certain. however, she drew her chair to the piano and began to play. miss grantham was conscious of the same sort of feeling. since the others had gone in, dodo had sat quite silent, and she had not taken her cigarette. "you had a nice time then, abroad?" she remarked at length. "oh, yes," said dodo, rousing herself. "i enjoyed it a good deal. the hotel was full of the hotel class, you know. a little trying at times, but not to matter. we had a charming party there. algernon is getting quite worldly. however, he is ridiculously fond of maud, and she'll keep him straight. do you know the prince?" "hardly at all," said miss grantham. "what do you think of him, as far as you've seen?" asked dodo. "i think he is rather impressive," said miss grantham. "i felt i should do as he told me." "ah, you think that, do you?" asked dodo, with the most careful carelessness. "he struck me that way, too, a little." "i should think he was an instance of what edith meant when she said that to be intimate with anyone was to be under their influence." "edith's awfully wrong, i think, about the whole idea," said dodo, hastily. "i should hate to be under anyone's influence; yet, i think, the only pleasure of knowing people is to be intimate. i would sooner have one real friend than fifty acquaintances." "did you see much of him?" asked miss grantham. "yes, a good deal," she said, "a great deal, in fact. i think edith's right about intimacy as regards him, though he's an exception. in general, i think, she's wrong. what's that she's playing?" "anyhow, it's wagner," said miss grantham. "i know it," said dodo. "it's the 'tannhauser' overture. listen, there's the venus motif crossing the pilgrim's march. ah, that's simply wicked. the worst of it is, the venus part is so much more attractive than the other. it's horrible." "you're dreadfully serious to-night, dodo," said miss grantham. "i'm a little tired, i think," she said. "i was travelling all last night, you know. come, let's go in." dodo went to bed soon afterwards. she said she was tired, and a little overdone. edith looked at her rather closely as she said good-night. "you're sure it's nothing more?" she asked. "there's nothing wrong with you, is there?" "i shall be all right in the morning," said dodo, rather wearily. "don't let them call me till nine." dodo went upstairs and found that her maid had unpacked for her. a heap of books was lying on the table, and from among these she drew out a large envelope with a photograph inside. it was signed "waldenech." dodo looked at it a moment, then placed it back in its envelope, and went to the window. she felt the necessity of air. the room seemed close and hot, and she threw it wide open. she stood there for ten minutes or more quite still, looking out into the night. then she went back to the table and took up the envelope again. with a sudden passionate gesture she tore it in half, then across again, and threw the pieces into the grate. chapter nineteen dodo slept long and dreamlessly that night; the deep, dreamless sleep which an evenly-balanced fatigue of body and mind so often produces, though we get into bed feeling that our brain is too deep in some tangle of unsolved thought to be able to extricate itself, and fall into the dim immensity of sleep. the waking from such a sleep is not so pleasant. the first moment of conscious thought sometimes throws the whole burden again on to our brain with a sudden start of pain that is almost physical. there is no transition. we were asleep and we are awake, and we find that sleep has brought us only a doubtful gift, for with our renewed strength of body has come the capability of keener suffering. when we are tired, mental distress is only a dull ache, but in the hard, convincing morning it strikes a deadlier and deeper pain. but sometimes nature is more merciful. she opens the sluices of our brain quietly, and, though the water still rushes in turbidly and roughly, yet the fact that our brain fills by degrees makes us more able to bear the full weight, than when it comes suddenly with a wrenching and, perhaps, a rending of our mental machinery. it was in this way that dodo woke. the trouble of the day came to her gradually during the moments of waking. she dreamed she was waiting for jack in the garden where she had been sitting the night before. it was perfectly dark, and she could not see him coming, but she heard a step along the gravel path, and started up with a vague alarm, for it did not sound like his. then a greyness, as of dawn, began to steal over the night, and she saw the outline of the trees against the sky, and the outline of a man's figure near her, and it was a figure she knew well, but it was not jack. on this dream the sense of waking was pure relief; it was broad day, and her maid was standing by her and saying that it was a quarter past nine. dodo lay still a few moments longer, feeling a vague joy that her dream was not true, that the helplessness of that grey moment, when she saw that it was not jack, was passed, that she was awake again, and unfettered, save by thoughts which could be consciously checked and stifled. it was with a vast sense of satisfaction that she remembered her last act on the evening before, of which the scattered fragments in the grate afforded ocular proof. she felt as if she had broken a visible, tangible fetter--one strand, at any rate, of the cord that hound her was lying broken before her eyes. if she had been quite securely tied she could not have done that..-- the sense of successful effort, with a visible result, gave her a sudden feeling of power to do more; the absence of bodily fatigue, and the presence of superfluous physical health, all seemed part of a different order of things to that of the night before. she got up and dressed quickly, feeling more like her own self than she had done for several days. the destruction of his photograph was really a great achievement. she had no idea how far things had gone till she felt the full effect of conscious effort and its result. she could see now exactly where she had stood on the evening before, very unpleasantly close to the edge of a nasty place, slippery and steep. anyhow, she was one step nearer that pleasant, green-looking spot at the top of the slope--a quiet, pretty place, not particularly extensive, but very pleasing, and very safe. the three others were half-way through breakfast when dodo came down. lady grantham was feeling a little bored. dodo flung open the door and came marching in, whistling "see the conquering hero comes." "that's by handel, you know, edith," she said. "handel is very healthy, and he never bothers you with abstruse questions in the scandalous way that wagner does. i'm going to have a barrel-organ made with twelve tunes by handel, you only have to turn the handle and out he comes. i don't mean that for a pun. your blood be on your own head if you notice it. i shall have my barrel-organ put on the box of my victoria, and the footman shall play tunes all the time i'm driving, and i shall hold out my hat and ask for pennies. some of jack's tenants in ireland have refused to pay their rents this year, and he says we'll have to cut off coffee after dinner if it goes on. but we shall be able to have coffee after all with the pennies i collect. i talked so much sense last night that i don't mean to make another coherent remark this week." dodo went to the sideboard and cut a large slice of ham, which she carried back to her place on the end of her fork. "i'm going for a ride this morning, edith, if you've got a horse for me," she said. "i haven't ridden for weeks. i suppose you can give me something with four legs. oh, i want to take a big fence again." dodo waved her fork triumphantly, and the slice of ham flew into the milk-jug. she became suddenly serious, and fished for it with the empty fork. "the deep waters have drowned it," she remarked, "and it will be totally uneatable for evermore. make it into ham-sandwiches and send it to the workhouse, edith. _jambon au lait_. i'm sure it would be very supporting." "it's unlucky to spill things, isn't it?" dodo went on. "i suppose it means i shall die, and shall go, we hope, to heaven, at the age of twenty-seven. i'm twenty-nine really. i don't look it, do i, lady grantham? how old are you, edith? you're twenty-nine too, aren't you? we're two twin dewdrops, you and i; you can be the dewdrops, and i'll be the twin. i suppose if two babies are twins, each of them is a twin. twin sounds like a sort of calico. two yards of twin, please, miss. there was a horrid fat man in the carriage across france, who called me miss. jack behaved abominably. he called me miss, too, and wore the broadest grin on his silly face all the time. he really is a perfect baby, and i'm another, and how we shall keep house together i can't think. it'll be like a sort of game." dodo was eating her breakfast with an immense appetite and alarming rapidity, and she had finished as soon as the others. "i want to smoke this instant minute," she said, going to the door as soon as she had eaten all she wanted. "where do you keep your cigarettes, edith? oh, how you startled me!" as she opened the door two large collies came bouncing in, panting from sheer excitement. "oh, you sweet animals," said dodo, sitting down on the floor and going off at another tangent. "come here and talk at once. edith, may i give them the milky ham? here you are; drink the milk first, and then eat the ham, and then say grace, and then you may get down." dodo poured the milk into two clean saucers, and set them on the floor. there were a few drops left at the bottom of the jug, and she made a neat little pool on the head of each of the dogs. "what are their names?" she asked. "they ought to be tweedledum and tweedledee, or huz and buz, or ananias and sapphira, or darby and joan, or harris and ainsworth. it ought to be harris and ainsworth. i'm sure, no one man could have written all that rot himself. little spencer is very fond of harrison ainsworth; he said it was instructive as well as palatable. i don't want to be instructed, and it isn't palatable. i hate having little bits of information wrapped up and given to me to swallow, like a powder in jam. did you have to take powders when you were little, lady grantham?" dodo's questions were purely rhetorical; they required no answer, and she did not expect one. "it is much nicer being completely ignorant and foolish like me," she said. "nobody ever expects me to know anything, or to be instructive on any subject under the sun. jack and i are going to be a simple little couple, who are very nice and not at all wise. nobody dislikes one if one never pretends to be wise. but i like people to have a large number of theories on every subject. everyone is bound to form conclusions, but what i dislike are people who have got good grounds for their conclusions, who knock you slap down with statistics, if you try to argue with them. it's impossible to argue with anyone who has reasons for what he says, because you get to know sooner or later, and then the argument is over. arguments ought to be like epic poems, they leave off, they don't come to an end." dodo delivered herself of these surprising statements with great rapidity, and left the room to get her cigarettes. she left the door wide open, and in a minute or two her voice was heard from the drawing-room, screaming to edith. "edith, here's the 'dodo symphony'; come and play it to me this moment." "there's not much wrong with her this morning," thought edith, as she went to the drawing-room, where dodo was playing snatches of dance music. "play the scherzo, edith," commanded dodo. "here you are. now, quicker, quicker, rattle it out; make it buzz." "oh, i remember your playing that so well," said dodo, as edith finished. "it was that morning at winston when you insisted on going shooting. you shot rather well, too, if i remember right." lady grantham had followed edith, and sat down, with her atmosphere of impenetrable leisure, near the piano. dodo made her feel uncomfortably old. she felt dodo's extravagantly high spirits were a sort of milestone to show, how far she herself had travelled from youth. it was impossible to conceive of dodo ever getting middle-aged or elderly. she had racked her brains in vain to try to think of any woman of her own age who could possibly ever have been as insolently young as dodo. she had the habit, as i have mentioned before, of making strangely direct remarks, and she turned to dodo and said:-- "i should so like to see you ten years hence. i wonder if people like you ever grow old." "i shall never grow old," declared dodo confidently. "something, i feel sure, will happen to prevent that. i shall stop young till i go out like a candle, or am carried off in a whirlwind or something. i couldn't be old; it isn't in me. i shall go on talking nonsense till the end of my life, and i can't talk nonsense if i have to sit by the fire and keep a shawl over my mouth, which i shall have to do if i get old. wherefore i never shall. it's a great relief to be certain of that. i used to bother my head about it at one time! and it suddenly flashed upon me, about ten days ago, that i needn't bother about it any more, as i never should be old." "would you dislike having to be serious very much?" asked edith. "it isn't that i should dislike it," said dodo; "i simply am incapable of it. i was serious last night for at least an hour, and a feverish reaction has set in. i couldn't be serious for a week together, if i was going to be beheaded the next moment, all the time. i daresay it would be very nice to be serious, just as i'm sure it would be very nice to live at the bottom of the sea and pull the fishes' tails, but it isn't possible." dodo had quite forgotten that she had intended to go for a ride, and she went into the garden with nora, and played ducks and drakes on the pond, and punted herself about, and gathered water-lilies. then she was seized with an irresistible desire to fish, and caught a large pike, which refused to be killed, and dodo had to fetch the gardener to slay it. she then talked an astonishing amount of perfect nonsense, and thought that it must be lunch-time. accordingly, she went back to the house, and was found by edith, a quarter of an hour later, playing hide-and-seek with the coachman's children, whom she had lured in from the stable-yard as she went by. the rules were that the searchers were to catch the hiders, and dodo had entrenched herself behind the piano, and erected an impregnable barricade, consisting of a revolving bookcase and the music-stool. the two seekers entirely declined to consider that she had won, and dodo, with a show of reason, was telling them that they hadn't caught her yet at any rate. the situation seemed to admit of no compromise and no solution, unless, as dodo suggested, they got a pound or two of blasting powder and destroyed her defences. however, a _deus ex machina_ appeared in the person of the coachman himself, who had come in for orders, and hinted darkly that maternal vengeance was brewing if certain persons did not wash their hands in time for dinner, which was imminent. "there's a telegram for you somewhere," said edith to dodo, as she emerged hot and victorious. "i sent a man out into the garden with it. the messenger is waiting for an answer." dodo became suddenly grave. "i suppose he's gone to the pond," she said; "that's where i was seen last. i'll go and get it." she met the man walking back to the house, having looked for her in vain. she took the telegram and opened it. it had been forwarded from her london house. it was very short. "i arrive in london to-day. may i call? --"waldenech." dodo experienced, in epitome at that moment, all she had gone through the night before. she went to a garden-seat, and remained there in silence so long that the footman asked her: "will there be an answer, my lady? the messenger is waiting." dodo held out her hand for the telegraph form. she addressed it to the caretaker at her london house. it also was very short: "address uncertain; i leave here to-day. forward nothing." she handed it to the man, and gave orders that it should go at once. dodo did not move. she sat still with her hands clasped in front of her, unconscious of active thought, only knowing that a stream of pictures seemed to pass before her eyes. she saw the prince standing on her doorstep, learning with surprise that lady chesterford was not at home, and that her address was not known. she saw him turn away, baffled but not beaten; she saw him remaining in london day after day, waiting for the house in eaton square to show some signs of life. she saw--ah, she dismissed that picture quickly. she had one sudden impulse to call back the footman and ask for another telegraph form; but she felt if she could only keep a firm hand on herself for a few moments, the worst would be passed; and it was with a sense of overwhelming relief that she saw the telegraph boy walk off down the drive with the reply in his hand. then it suddenly struck her that the prince was waiting for the answer at dover station. "how savage he will be," thought dodo. "there will be murder at the telegraph office if he waits for his answer there. well, somebody must suffer, and it will be the telegraph boys." the idea of the prince waiting at dover was distinctly amusing, and dodo found a broad smile to bestow on the thought before she continued examining the state of her feelings and position. the prince's influence over her she felt was local and personal, so to speak, and now she had made her decision, she was surprised at the ease with which it had been made. had he been there in person, with his courtly presence and his serene remoteness from anything ordinary, and had said, in that smooth, well-modulated, voice, "may i hope to find you in to-morrow?" dodo felt that she would have said "come." her pride was in frantic rebellion at these admissions; even the telegram she had sent was a confession of weakness. she would not see him, because she was afraid. was there any other reason? she asked herself. yes; she could not see him because she longed to see him. "has it come to that?" she thought, as she crumpled up the telegram which had fluttered down from her lap on to the grass. dodo felt she was quite unnecessarily honest with herself in making this admission. but what followed? nothing followed. she was going to marry jack, and be remarkably happy, and prince waldenech should come and stay with them because she liked him very much, and she would be delightfully kind to him, and jack should like him too. dear old jack, she would write him a line this minute, saying when she would be back in london. dodo felt a sudden spasm of anger against the prince. what right had he to behave like this? he was making it very hard for her, and he would get nothing by it. her decision was irrevocable; she would not see him again, for some time at any rate. she would get over this ridiculous fear of him. what was he that other men were not? what was the position, after all? he had wanted to marry her; she had refused him because she was engaged to jack. if there had been no jack--well, there was a jack, so it was unnecessary to pursue that any further. he had given her his photograph, and had said several things that he should not have said. dodo thought of that scene with regret. she had had an opportunity which she had missed; she might easily have made it plain to him that his murmured speeches went beyond mere courtesy. instead of that she had said she would always regard him as a great friend, and hoped he would see her often. she tapped the ground impatiently as she thought of missed opportunities. it was stupid, inconceivably stupid of her. then he had followed her to england, and sent this telegram. she did not feel safe. she longed, and dreaded to see him again. it was too absurd that she should have to play this gigantic game of hide-and-seek. "i shall have to put on a blue veil and green goggles when i go back to london," thought dodo. "well, the seekers have to catch the hiders, and he hasn't caught me yet." meanwhile the prince was smoking a cigar at dover station. the telegram had not come, though he had waited an hour, and he had settled to give it another half-hour and then go on to london. he was not at all angry; it was as good as a game of chess. the prince was very fond of chess. he enjoyed exercising a calculating long-sightedness, and he felt that the marchioness of chesterford elect was a problem that enabled him to exercise this faculty, of which he had plenty, to the full. he had a sublime sense of certainty as to what he was going to do. he fully intended to marry dodo, and he admitted no obstacles. she was engaged to jack, was she? so much the worse for jack. she wished to marry jack, did she? so much the worse for her, and none the worse, possibly the better, for him. as it was quite certain that he himself was going to marry dodo, these little hitches were entertaining than otherwise. it is more fun to catch your salmon after a quarter of an hour's rather exciting fight with him than to net him. half the joy of a possession lies in the act of acquisition, and the pleasure of acquisition consists, at least in half of the excitement attendant on it. to say that the prince ever regarded anyone's feelings would be understating the truth. the fact that his will worked its way in opposition to, and at the expense of others, afforded him a distinct and appreciable pleasure. if he wanted anything he went straight for it, and regarded neither man, nor devil, nor angel; and he wanted dodo. his mind, then, was thoroughly made up. she seemed to him immensely original and very complete. he read her, he thought, like a book, and the book was very interesting reading. his sending of the telegram with "reply paid," was a positive stroke of genius. dodo had told him that she was going straight to london, but, as we have seen, she did not stop the night there, but went straight on to edith's home in berkshire. there were two courses open to her; either to reply "yes" or "no" to the telegram, or to leave it unanswered. if she left it "unanswered" it would delight him above measure, and it seemed that his wishes were to be realised. not answering the telegram would imply that she did not think good to see him, and he judged that this decision was probably prompted by something deeper than mere indifference to his company. it must be dictated by a strong motive. his calculations were a little at fault, because dodo had not stopped in london, but this made no difference, as events had turned out, to the correctness of his deductions. he very much wished dodo to be influenced by strong motives in her dealings with him. he would not have accepted, even as a gift, the real, quiet liking she had for jack. real, quiet likings seemed to him to be as dull as total indifference. he would not have objected to her regarding him with violent loathing, that would be something to correct; and his experience in such affairs was that strong sympathies and antipathies were more akin to each other than quiet affection or an apathetic indifference were to either. he walked up and down the platform with the smile of a man who is waiting for an interesting situation in a theatrical representation to develop itself. he had no wish to hurry it. the by-play seemed to him to be very suitable, and he bought a morning paper. he glanced through the leaders, and turned to the small society paragraphs. the first that struck his eye was this: "the marchioness of chesterford arrived in london yesterday afternoon from the continent." he felt it was the most orthodox way of bringing the scene to its climax. enter a newsboy, who hands paper to prince, and exit. prince unfolds paper and reads the news of--well, of what he is expecting. he snipped the paragraph neatly out from the paper, and put it in his card-case. his valet was standing by the telegraph office, waiting for the message. the prince beckoned to him. "there will be no telegram," he said. "we leave by the next train." the prince had a carriage reserved for him, and he stepped in with a sense of great satisfaction. he even went so far as to touch his hat in response to the obeisances of the obsequious guard, and told his valet to see that the man got something. he soon determined on his next move--a decided "check," and rather an awkward one; and for the rest of his journey he amused himself by looking out of the window, and admiring the efficient english farming. all the arrangements seemed to him to be very solid and adequate. the hedges were charming. the cart horses were models of sturdy strength, and the hop harvest promised to be very fine. he was surprised when they drew near london. the journey had been shorter than he expected. he gave a few directions to his valet about luggage, and drove off to eaton square. the door was opened by an impenetrable caretaker. "is lady chesterford in?" asked the prince. "her ladyship is not in london, sir," replied the man. the prince smiled. dodo was evidently acting up to her refusal to answer his telegram. "ah, just so," he remarked. "please take this to her, and say i am waiting." he drew from his pocket a card, and the cutting from the _morning post_. "her ladyship is not in london," the man repeated. "perhaps you would let me have her address," said the prince, feeling in his pockets. "a telegram has come to-day, saying that her ladyship's address is uncertain," replied the caretaker. "would you be so good as to let me see the telegram?" certainly, he would fetch it. the prince waited serenely. everything was going admirably. the telegram was fetched. it had been handed in at wokingham station at a quarter to one. "after she had received my telegram," reflected the prince. "do you know with whom she has been staying?" he asked blandly. "with miss staines." the prince was very much obliged. he left a large gratuity in the man's hand, and wished him good afternoon. he drove straight to his house, and sent for his valet, whom he could trust implicitly, and who had often been employed on somewhat delicate affairs. "take the first train for wokingham to-morrow morning," he said. "find out where a miss staines lives. inquire whether lady chesterford left the house to-day." "yes, your highness." "and hold your tongue about the whole business," said the prince negligently, turning away and lighting a cigar. "and send me a telegram from wokingham: 'left yesterday,' or 'still here.'" the prince was sitting over a late breakfast on the following morning, when a telegram was brought in. he read it, and his eyes twinkled with genuine amusement. "i think," he said to himself, "i think that's rather neat." chapter twenty if dodo had felt some excusable pride in having torn up the prince's photograph, her refusal to let him know where she was gave her a still more vivid sense of something approaching heroism. she did not blame anyone but herself for the position into which she had drifted during those weeks in switzerland. she was quite conscious that she might have stopped any intimacy of this sort arising, and consequently the establishment of this power over her. but she felt she was regaining her lost position. each sensible refusal to admit his influence over her was the sensible tearing asunder of the fibres which enveloped her. it was hard work, she admitted, but she was quite surprised to find how comfortable she was becoming. jack really made a very satisfactory background to her thoughts. she was very fond of him, and she looked forward to their marriage with an eager expectancy, which, was partly, however, the result of another fear. she was sitting in the drawing-room next day with miss grantham, talking about nothing particular very rapidly. "of course, one must be good to begin with," she was saying; "one takes that for granted. the idea of being wicked never comes into my reckoning at all. i should do lots of things if i didn't care what i did, that i shouldn't think of doing at all now. i've got an admirable conscience. it is quite good, without being at all priggish. it isn't exactly what you might call in holy orders, but it is an ecclesiastical layman, and has great sympathy with the church. a sort of lay-reader, you know." "i haven't got any conscience at all," said miss grantham. "i believe i am fastidious in a way, though, which prevents me doing conspicuously beastly things." "oh, get a conscience, grantie," said dodo fervently, "it is such a convenience. it's like having someone to make up your mind for you. i like making up other people's minds, but i cannot make up my own; however, my conscience does that for me. it isn't me a bit. i just give it a handful of questions which i want an answer upon, and it gives me them back, neatly docketed, with 'yes' or 'no' upon them." "that's no use," said miss grantham. "i know the obvious 'yeses' and 'noes' myself. what i don't know are the host of things that don't matter much in themselves, which you can't put down either right or wrong." "oh, i do all those," said dodo serenely, "if i want to, and if i don't, i have an excellent reason for not doing them, because i am not sure whether they are right. when i set up my general advice office, which i shall do before i die, i shall make a special point of that for other people. i shall give decided answers in most cases, but i shall reserve a class of things indifferent, which are simply to be settled by inclination." "what do you call indifferent things?" asked miss grantham, pursuing the socratic method. "oh, whether you are to play lawn tennis on sunday afternoon," said dodo, "or wear mourning for second cousins, or sing alto in church for the sake of the choir; all that sort of thing." "your conscience evidently hasn't taken orders," remarked miss grantham. "that's got nothing to do with my conscience," said dodo. "my conscience doesn't touch those things at all. it only concerns itself with right and wrong." "you're very moral this morning," said miss grantham. "edith," she went on, as miss staines entered in a howling wilderness of dogs, "dodo has discovered a conscience." "whose?" asked edith. "why, my own, of course," said dodo; "but it's no discovery. i always knew i had one." "there's someone waiting to see you," said edith. "i brought his card in." she handed dodo a card. "prince waldenech," she said quietly to herself, "let him come in here, edith. you need not go away." dodo got up and stood by the mantelpiece, and displayed an elaborate attention to one of edith's dogs. she was angry with herself for needing this minute of preparation, but she certainly used it to the best advantage; and when the prince entered she greeted him with an entirely natural smile of welcome. "ah, this is charming," she said, advancing to him. "how clever of you to find out my address." "i am staying at a house down here," said the prince, lying with conscious satisfaction as he could not be contradicted, "and i could not resist the pleasure." dodo introduced him to edith and miss grantham, and sat down again. "i sent no address, as i really did not know where i might be going," she said, following the prince's lead. "that i was not in london was all my message meant. i did not know you would be down here." "lord chesterford is in england?" asked the prince. "oh, yes, jack came with me as far as dover, and then he left me for the superior attractions of partridge-shooting. wasn't it rude of him?" "he deserves not to be forgiven," said the prince. "i think i shall send you to call him out for insulting me," said dodo lightly; "and you can kill each other comfortably while i look on. dear old jack." "i should feel great pleasure in fighting lord chesterford if you told me to," said the prince, "or if you told him to, i'm sure he would feel equal pleasure in killing me." dodo laughed. "duelling has quite gone out," she said. "i sha'n't require you ever to do anything of that kind." "i am at your service," he said. "i wish you'd open that window then," said dodo; "it is dreadfully stuffy. edith, you really have too many flowers in the room." "why do you say that duelling has done out?" he asked. "you might as well say that devotion has gone out." "no one fights duels now," said dodo; "except in prance, and no one, even there, is ever hurt, unless they catch cold in the morning air, like mark twain." "certainly no one goes out with a pistol-case, and a second, and a doctor," said the prince; "that was an absurd way of duelling. it is no satisfaction to know that you are a better shot than your antagonist." "still less to know that he is a better shot than you," remarked miss grantham. "charming," said the prince; "that is worthy of lady chesterford. and higher praise--" "go on about duelling," said dodo, unceremoniously. "the old system was no satisfaction, because the quarrel was not about who was the better shot. duelling is now strictly decided by merit. two men quarrel about a woman. they both make love to her; in other words, they both try to cut each other's throats, and one succeeds. it is far more sensible. pistols are stupid bull-headed weapons. words are much finer. they are exquisite sharp daggers. there is no unnecessary noise or smoke, and they are quite orderly." "are those the weapons you would fight lord chesterford with, if dodo told you to?" asked edith, who was growing uneasy. the prince, as dodo once said, never made a fool of himself. it was a position in which it was extremely easy for a stupid man to say something very awkward. lady grantham, with all her talent for asking inconvenient questions, could not have formed a more unpleasant one. he looked across at dodo a moment, and said, without a perceptible pause,-- "if i ever was the challenger of lady chesterford's husband, the receiver of the challenge has the right to choose the weapons." the words startled dodo somehow. she looked up and met his eye. "your system is no better than the old one," she said. "words become the weapons instead of pistols, and the man who is most skilful with words has the same advantage as the good shot. you are not quarrelling about words, but about a woman." "but words are the expression of what a man is," said the prince. "you are pitting merit against merit." dodo rose and began to laugh. "don't quarrel with jack, then," she said. "he would tell the footman to show you the door. you would have to fight the footman. jack would not speak to you." dodo felt strongly the necessity of putting an end to this conversation, which was effectually done by this somewhat uncourteous speech. the fencing had become rather too serious to please her, and she did not wish to be serious. but she felt oppressively conscious of this man's personality, and saw that he was stronger than she was herself. she decided to retreat, and made a desperate effort to be entirely flippant. "i hope the princess has profited by the advice i gave her," she said. "i told her how to be happy though married, and how not to be bored though a russian. but she's a very bad case." "she said to me dreamily as i left," said the prince, "'you'll hear of my death on the matterhorn. tell lady chesterford it was her fault.'" dodo laughed. "poor dear thing," she said, "i really am sorry for her. it's a great pity she didn't marry a day labourer and have to cook the dinner and slap the children. it would have been the making of her." "it would have been a different sort of making," remarked the prince. "i believe you can even get _blasé_ of being bored," said miss grantham, "and then, of course, you don't get bored any longer, because you are bored with it." this remarkable statement was instantly contradicted by edith. "being bored is a bottomless pit," she remarked. "you never get to the end, and the deeper you go the longer it takes to get out. i was never bored in my life. i like listening to what the dullest people say." "oh, but it's when they don't say anything that they're so trying," said miss grantham. "i don't mind that a bit," remarked dodo. "i simply think aloud to them. the less a person says the more i talk, and then suddenly i see that they're shocked at me, or that they don't understand. the prince is often shocked at me, only he's too polite to say so. i don't mean that you're a dull person, you know, but he always understands. you know he's quite intelligent," dodo went on, introducing him with a wave of her hand, like a showman with a performing animal. "he knows several languages. he will talk on almost any subject you wish. he was thirty-five years of age last may, and will be thirty-six next may." "he has an admirable temper," said the prince, "and is devoted to his keeper." "oh, i'm not your keeper," said dodo. "i wouldn't accept the responsibility. i'm only reading extracts from the advertisement about you." "i was only reading extracts as well," observed the prince. "surely the intelligent animal, who knows several languages, may read its own advertisement?" "i'm not so sure about your temper," said dodo, reflectively: "i shall alter it to 'is believed to have an admirable temper.'" "never shows fight," said the prince. "but is willing to fight if told to," said she. "he said so himself." "oh, but i only bark when i bite," said the prince, alluding to his modern system of duelling. "then your bite is as bad as your bark," remarked dodo, "which is a sign of bad temper. and now, my dear prince, if we talk any more about you, you will get intolerably conceited, and that won't do at all. i can't bear conceited men. they always seem to me to be like people on stilts. they are probably not taller than oneself really, and they're out of all proportion, all legs, and no body or head. i don't want anyone to bring themselves down to my level when they talk to me. conceited people always do that. they get off their stilts. if there's one thing that amuses me more than another, it is getting hold of their stilts and sawing them half through. then, when they get up again they come down 'bang,' and you say: 'oh, i hope you haven't hurt yourself. i didn't know you went about on stilts. they are very unsafe, aren't they?'" dodo was conscious of talking rather wildly and incoherently. she felt like a swimmer being dragged down by a deep undercurrent. all she could do was to make a splash on the surface. she could not swim quietly or strongly out of its reach. she stood by the window playing with the blind cord, wishing that the prince would not look at her. he had a sort of deep, lazy strength about him that made dodo distrust herself--the indolent consciousness of power that a tiger has when he plays contemptuously with his prey before hitting it with one deadly blow of that soft cushioned paw. "why can't i treat him like anyone else?" she said to herself impatiently. "surely i am not afraid of him. i am only afraid of being afraid. he is handsome, and clever, and charming, and amiable, and here am i watching every movement and listening to every word he says. it's all nonsense. here goes." dodo plunged back into the room, and sat down in the chair next him. "what a charming time we had at zermatt," she said. "that sort of place is so nice if you simply go there in order to amuse yourself without the bore of entertaining people. half the people who go there treat it as their great social effort of the year. as if one didn't make enough social efforts at home!" "ah, zermatt," said the prince, meditatively. "it was the most delightful month i ever spent." "did you like it?" said dodo negligently. "i should have thought that sort of place would have bored you. there was nothing to do. i expected you would rush off as soon as you got there, and go to shoot or something." "like lord chesterford and the partridges," suggested edith. "oh, that's different," said dodo. "jack thinks it's the duty of every english landlord to shoot partridges. he's got great ideas of his duty." "even when it interferes with what must have been his pleasure, apparently," said the prince. "oh; jack and i will see plenty of each other in course of time. i'm not afraid he will go and play about without me." "you are too merciful," said the prince. "oh, i sha'n't be hard on jack. i shall make every allowance for his shortcomings, and i shall expect that he will make allowance for mine." "he will have the best of the bargain;" said the prince. "you mean that he won't have to make much allowance for me?" asked dodo. "my dear prince, that shows how little you really know about me. i can be abominable. ask miss staines if i can't. i can make a man angry quicker than any woman i know. i could make you angry in a minute and a quarter, but i am amiable this morning, and i will spare you." "please make me angry," said the prince. dodo laughed, and held out her hand to him. "then you will excuse my leaving you?" she said. "i've got a letter to write before the midday post. that ought to make you angry. are you stopping to lunch? no? _au revoir_, then. we shall meet again sometime soon, i suppose. one is always running up against people." "dodo shook hands with elaborate carelessness and went towards the door, which the prince opened for her. "you have made me angry," he murmured, as she passed out, "but you will pacify me again, i know." dodo went upstairs into her bedroom. she was half frightened at her own resolution, and the effort of appearing quite unconcerned had given her a queer, tired feeling. she heard a door shut in the drawing-room below, and steps in the hall. a faint flush came over her face, and she got up quickly from her chair and rah downstairs. the prince was in the hall, and he did not look the least surprised to see dodo again. "ah, you are just off?" she asked. then she stopped dead, and he waited as if expecting more. dodo's eyes wandered round the walls and came back to his face again. "come and see me in london any time," she said in a low voice. "i shall go back at the end of the week." the prince bowed. "i knew you would pacify me again," he said. chapter twenty-one dodo was up again in london at the end of the week, as she had told the prince. jack was also staying in town, and they often spent most of the day together; riding occasionally in the deserted row, or sitting, as they were now, in dodo's room in the eaton square house. they were both leaving for the country in a few days' time, where they had arranged to come across one another at various houses, and dodo, at least, was finding these few days rather trying. she and jack had arranged to have them together, quite alone, while they were in switzerland, and dodo had overlooked the fact that they might be rather hard to fill up. not that she was disappointed in jack. he was exactly what she had always supposed him to be. she never thought that he was very stimulating, though never dull, and she was quite conscious of enough stimulus in herself for that. for the rest he was quite satisfactory. but she was distinctly disappointed in herself. she felt as if her taste had been vitiated by drinking brandy. mild flavours and very good bouquets of vintages that had pleased her before, sent no message from her palate to her brain. it was like the effect produced by the touch of hot iron on the skin, that forms a hard numb surface, which is curiously insensitive to touch. dodo felt as if her powers of sensation had been seared in this way. her perceptions no longer answered quickly to the causes that excited them; a layer of dull, unresponsive material lay between her and her world. she thought that her nerves and tissues were sound enough below. this numbness was only superficial, the burn would heal, and her skin would become pliant and soft again; and if she was conscious of all this and its corresponding causes, it could hardly be expected that jack would be unconscious of it and its corresponding effects. on this particular morning dodo was particularly aware of it. it was raining dismally outside, and the sky was heavy and grey. the road was being repaired, and a traction engine was performing its dismal office in little aimless runs backwards and forwards. the official with a red flag had found there were no vehicles for him to warn and he had sat down on a heap of stones, and was smoking. there was a general air of stagnation, a sense of the futility of doing anything, and no one was more conscious of it than dodo. she felt that there was only one event that was likely to interest her, and yet, in a way, she shrank from that. it was the searing process over again. she wondered whether it would do any good to tell jack of the fact that the prince was down at wokingham. she found the burden of an unshared secret exceptionally trying. dodo had been so accustomed to be before the footlights all her life, that anything of the nature of a secret was oppressive. her conduct to her first husband she did not regard as such. it was only an admirable piece of by-play, which the audience fully appreciated. did dodo then never think of her late husband with tenderness? well, not often. a thought seldom remained long in dodo's mind without finding expression. she turned round suddenly. "jack, prince waldenech was at wokingham." "what was he there for?" asked jack quickly. "i think he came to see me," remarked dodo serenely. "i hope you didn't see him," he replied. dodo felt a slight stimulus in this subject. "i saw him," she said, "because he came to see me, as they say in the french exercise books. i couldn't hide my head under the hearthrug like an ostrich--hot that they hide their heads under hearth-rugs, but the principle is the same. he walked in as cool as a cucumber, and said, 'howdy?' so we talked, and he said he'd be glad to call you out, and you'd be glad to call him out, and we generally chattered, and then i made him angry." "why did he propose to call me out?" asked jack coldly. "oh, he said he wouldn't call you out," remarked dodo. "he said nothing would induce him to. i never said he proposed to call you out. you're stupid this morning, jack." "that man is an unutterable cad." dodo opened her eyes. "oh, he's nothing of the kind," she said. "besides, he's a great friend of mine, so even if he was a cad it wouldn't matter." "how did you make him angry?" demanded jack. "i told him i was going away to write some letters. it was rather damping, wasn't it? i hadn't got any letters to write, and he knew it, and i knew he knew it, and so on." jack was silent. he had been puzzled by dodo's comparative reserve during the last few days. he felt as if he had missed a scene in a play, that there were certain things unexplained. he had even gone so far as to ask dodo if anything was the matter, an inquiry which she detested profoundly. she laid down a universal rule on this occasion. "nothing is ever the matter," she had said, "and if it was, my not telling you would show that i didn't wish for sympathy, or help, or anything else. i tell you all i want you to know." "you mean something is the matter, and you don't want me to know it," said jack, rather unwisely. they had been riding together when this occurred, and at that point dodo had struck her horse savagely with her whip, and put an end to the conversation by galloping furiously off. when jack caught her up she was herself again, and described how a selection of edith's dogs had kept the postman at bay one morning, until the unusual absence of barking and howling had led their mistress to further investigations, which were rewarded by finding the postman sitting in the boat-house, and defending himself with the punt pole. jack was singularly easy-going, and very trustful, and he did not bother his head any more about it at the time. but we have to attain an almost unattainable dominion over our minds to prevent thoughts suddenly starting up in front of us. when a thought has occurred to one, it is a matter of training and practice to encourage or dismiss it, but the other is beyond the reach of the general. and as dodo finished these last words, jack found himself suddenly face to face with a new thought. it was so new that it startled him, and he looked at it again. at moments like these two people have an almost supernatural power of intuition towards each other. dodo was standing in the window, and jack was sitting in a very low chair, looking straight towards her, with the light from the window full on his face, and at that moment she read his thought as clearly as if he had spoken it, for it was familiar already to her. she felt a sudden impulse of anger. "how dare you think that?" she said. jack needed no explanation, and he behaved well. "dodo," he said gently, "you have no right to say that, but you have said it now. if there is not anything i had better know, just tell me so, for your own sake and for mine. i can only plead for your forgiveness. it was by no will of mine that such a thought crossed my mind. you can afford to be generous, dodo." something in his speech made dodo even angrier. "you are simply forcing my confidence," she said. "if it was something you had better know, do you suppose that----" she stopped abruptly. jack rose from his chair and stood by her in the window. "you are not very generous to me," he said. "we are old friends though we are lovers." "take care you don't lose my friendship, then," said dodo fiercely. "it is no use saying 'auld lang syne' when 'auld lang syne' is in danger. it would be like singing 'god save the queen' when she was dying. you should never recall old memories when they are strained." jack was getting a little impatient, though he was not frightened yet. "dodo, you really are rather unreasonable," he said. "to begin with, you quarrel with an unspoken thought, and you haven't even given me a definite accusation." "that is because it is unnecessary, and you know it," said dodo. "however, as you like. you think you have cause to be jealous or foolish or melodramatic about prince waldenech. dear me, it is quite like old times." jack turned on her angrily. "if you propose to treat me as you treated that poor man, who was the best man i ever knew," he said, "the sooner you learn your mistake the better for us both. it would have been in better taste not to have referred to that." "at present that is beside the point," said dodo. "was that your unspoken thought, or was it not?" "if i would not insult you by speaking my thought whether you are right or not," said jack, "i shall not insult you by answering that question. my answer shall take another form. listen, dodo. the prince is in love with you. he proposed to you at zermatt. that passionless inhuman piece of mechanism, his sister, told me how much he was in love with you. she meant it as a compliment. he is a dangerous, bad man. he forces himself on you. he went down to wokingham to see you; you told me so yourself. he is dangerous and strong. for god's sake keep away from him. i don't distrust you; but i am afraid you may get to distrust yourself. he will make you afraid of crossing his will. dodo, will you do this for me? it is quite unreasonable probably, but i am unreasonable when i think of you." "oh, my dear jack," said dodo impatiently, "you really make me angry. it is dreadfully bad form to be angry, and it is absurd that you and i should quarrel. you've got such a low opinion of me; though i suppose that's as much my fault as yours. your opinion is fiction, but i am the fact on which it is founded, and what do you take me for? the prince telegraphed from dover to ask if i would see him, and i deliberately sent no answer. how he found out where i was i don't know. i suppose he got hold of the telegram i sent here to say my address was uncertain. does that look as if i wanted to see him so dreadfully?" "i never said you did want to see him," said jack. "i said he very much wanted to see you, and what you say proves it." "well, what then?" said dodo. "you wanted to see me very much when i was married. would you have thought it reasonable if chesterford had entreated me never to see you--to keep away for god's sake, as you said just now?" "i am not the prince," said jack, "neither am i going to be treated as you treated your husband. do not let us refer to him again; it is a desecration." "you mean that in the light of subsequent events it would have been reasonable in him to ask me to keep away from you?" "yes," said he. jack looked dodo full in the face, in the noble shame of a confessed sin: in that moment he was greater, perhaps, and had risen higher above his vague self-satisfied indifference than ever before. dodo felt it, and it irritated her, it seemed positively unpardonable. "perhaps you do not see that you involve me in your confession," she said with cold scorn. "i decline to be judged by your standards, thanks." jack felt a sudden immense pity and anger for her. she would not, or could not, accept the existence of other points of view than her own. "apparently you decline to consider the fact of other standards at all." "i don't accept views which seem to me unreasonable," she said. "i only ask you to consider this particular view. the story you have just told me shows that he is anxious to see you, which was my point. that he is dangerous and strong i ask you to accept." "what if i don't?" she asked. "this," said he. "when a man of that sort desires anything, as he evidently desires you, there is danger. if you are alive to it, and as strong as he is, you are safe. that you are not alive to it you show by your present position; that you are as strong as he, i doubt." "you assume far too much," said dodo. "what you mean by my present position i don't care to know. but i am perfectly alive to the whole state of the case. wait. i will speak. i entirely decline to be dictated to. i shall do as i choose in this matter." "do you quite realise what that means?" said jack, rising. dodo had risen too; she was standing before him with a great anger burning in her eyes. her face was very pale, and she moved towards the bell. when a boat is in the rapids the cataract is inevitable. "it means this," she said. "he will be here in a minute or two; i told him i should be in at twelve. i am going to ring the bell and tell the man to show him up. you will stay here, and treat him as one man should treat another. if you are insolent to him, understand that you include me. you will imply that you distrust me. perhaps you would ring the bell for me, as you are closer to it." she sat down by her writing-table and waited. jack paused with his hand on the bell. "i will be perfectly explicit with you," he said. "if you see him, you see him alone. i do not wish to hear what he has to say to you. as he enters the door i leave it. that is all. you may choose." he rang the bell. "there is no reason for you to wait till then," said dodo. "i am going to see him as soon as he comes. tell prince waldenech that i am in," she said to the footman. "show him up as soon as he comes." jack leant against the chimney-piece. "well?" said dodo. "i am making up my mind." there was a dead silence. "what on earth are we quarrelling about?" thought jack to himself. "is it simply whether i stop here and talk to that cad? i wonder if all women are as obstinate as this." it did seem a little ridiculous, but he felt that his dignity forbade him to yield. he had told her he did not distrust her; that was enough. no, he would go away, and when he came back to-morrow dodo would be more reasonable. "i think i am going," remarked he. "i sha'n't see you again till to-morrow afternoon. i am away to-night." dodo was turning over the pages of a magazine and did not answer. jack became a little impatient. "really, this is extraordinarily childish," he said. "i sha'n't stop to see the prince because he is a detestable cad. think it over, dodo." at the mention of the prince, if jack had been watching dodo more closely, he might have seen a sudden colour rush to her face, faint but perceptible. but he was devoting his attention to keeping his temper, and stifling a vague dread and distrust, which he was too loyal to admit. at the door he paused a moment. "ah, dodo," he said, with entreaty in his voice. dodo did not move nor look at him. he left the room without more words, and on the stair he met the prince. he bowed silently to his greeting, and stood aside for him to pass. the prince glanced back at him with amusement. "his lordship does me the honour to be jealous of me," he said to himself. * * * * * next day jack called at dodo's house. the door was opened by a servant, whose face he thought he ought to know; that he was not one of dodo's men he felt certain. in another moment it had flashed across him that the man had been with the prince at zermatt. "is lady chesterford in?" he asked. the man looked at him a moment, and then, like all well-bred servants, dropped his eyes before he answered,-- "her serene highness left for paris this morning." dynevor terrace. vol. ii. by charlotte m. yonge contents . the tryste. ii. the third time. iii. mists. iv. outward bound. v. the new world. vi. the two pendragons. vii. roland and oliver viii. the restoration. ix. the giant of the western star. x. the wrong woman in the wrong place. xi. aunt catharine's home. xii. the frost household. xiii. the conway household. xiv. the trustees' meeting. xv. sweet uses of adversity. xvi. the valley of humiliation. xvii. 'bide a wee.' xviii. the crash. xix. farewell to greatness. xx. western tidings. xxi. stepping westward. xxii. rather sudden. xxiii. the marvel of peru. chapter i. the tryste. one single flash of glad surprise just glanced from isabel's dark eyes, then vanished in the blush of shame that as its penance instant came-- 'o thought unworthy of my race!' the lord of the isles. as little recked fitzjocelyn of the murmurs which he had provoked, as he guessed the true secret of his victory. in his eyes, it was the triumph of merit over prejudice, and mrs. frost espoused the same gratifying view, though ascribing much to her nephew's activity, and james himself, flushed with hope and success, was not likely to dissent. next they had to make their conquest available. apart from louis's magnificent prognostications, at the lowest computation, the head master's income amounted to a sum which to james appeared affluence; and though there was no house provided, it mattered the less since there were five to choose from in the terrace, even if his grandmother had not wished that their household should be still the same. with miss conway's own fortune and the terrace settled on herself, where could be any risk? would lady conway think so? and how should the communication be made? james at first proposed writing to her, enclosing a letter to isabel; but he changed his mind, unable to satisfy himself that, when absent from restraint, she might not send a refusal without affording her daughter the option. he begged his grandmother to write to isabel; but she thought her letter might carry too much weight, and, whatever might be her hopes, it was not for her to tell the young lady that such means were sufficient. louis begged to be the bearer of the letter. his aunt would certainly keep terms with him, and he could insure that the case was properly laid before isabel; and, as there could be no doubt at present of his persuasive powers, james caught at the offer. the party were still at beauchastel, and he devised going to his old quarters at ebbscreek, and making a descent upon them from thence. when he came to take up his credentials, he found james and his little black leathern bag, determined to come at least to ebbscreek with him, and declaring it made him frantic to stay at home and leave his cause in other hands, and that he could not exist anywhere but close to the scene of action. captain hannaford was smoking in his demi-boat, and gave his former lodgers a hearty welcome, but he twinkled knowingly with his eye, and so significantly volunteered to inform them that the ladies were still at beauchastel, that james's wrath at the old skipper's impudence began to revive, and he walked off to the remotest end of the garden. the captain, remaining with louis, with whom he was always on far more easy terms, looked after the other gentleman, winked again, and confessed that he had suspected one or other of them might be coming that way this summer, though he could not say he had expected to see them both together. 'mind, captain,' said louis,' it wasn't _i_ that made the boat late this time last year.' 'well! i might be wrong, i fancied you cast an eye that way. then maybe it ain't true what's all over the place here.' louis pressed to hear what. 'why, that when the french were going on like robert spear and them old times, he had convoyed the young lady right through the midst of them, and they would both have been shot, if my lady's butler hadn't come down with a revolver, killed half-a-dozen of the mob, and rescued them out of it, but that lord fitzjocelyn had been desperately wounded in going back to fetch her bracelet, and mr. delaford had carried him out in his arms.' 'well!' said louis, coolly, without altering a muscle of his face, as the captain looked for an angry negative. 'and when they got home,--so the story went,--mr. frost, the tutor, was so mad with jealousy and rage, that my lady declared those moorings would not suit her no longer, but had let go, and laid her head right for beauchastel.' 'pray what was the young lady supposed to think of the matter?' 'stories appeared to vary. one version said that mr. delaford had found him on his knees to her; and that my lady had snatched her cruelly away, because she would not have her married before her own daughters, and looked over all the post, for fear there should be a letter for her. another declared that miss conway would not have him at any price, and was set upon the poor tutor, and that he was lying dangerously ill of a low fever. --the women will have it so,' observed the captain, 'the story's everywhere, except maybe in the parlour at beauchastel, and i wouldn't wonder if mrs. mansell knew it all herself, for her maid has a tongue a yard long. i won't say but i thought there might be some grain of truth at the bottom--' 'and you shall hear it by-and-by, when i know what it is myself.' 'i'd not say i would have believed it the more if that fine gentleman had taken his oath of it--a fellow that ain't to be trusted,' observed the captain. this might have led to a revelation, if louis had had time to attend to it; but he had pity on james's impatient misery, and proceeded to ask the loan of the boat. the tide would not, however, serve; and as waiting till it would was not to be endured, the two cousins set off to walk together through the woods, louis beguiling the way by chaffing james, as far as he would bear, with the idea of isabel's name being trifled with by the profane crowd. he left james at the gate of the park, prowling about like a panther to try for a glimpse of isabel's window, and feeding his despair and jealousy that louis should boldly walk up to the door, while he, with so much better a right, was excluded by his unguarded promise to lady conway. all the tumultuary emotions of his mind were endlessly repeated, and many a slow and pealing note of the church-clock had added fuel to his impatience, and spurred him to rush up to the door and claim his rights, before louis came bounding past the lodge-gates, flourishing his cap, and crying, 'hurrah, jem! all right!' 'i'm going to her at once!' cried jem, beginning to rush off; but louis caught and imprisoned his arm. 'not so fast, sir! you are to see her. i promise you shall see her if you wish it, but it must be in my aunt's way.' 'let me go, i say!' 'when i have walked five miles in your service, you won't afford me an arm to help me back. i am not a horse with wings, and i won't be cupid's post except on my own terms. come back.' 'i don't stir till i have heard the state of the case.' 'yes, you do; for all the sportsmen will be coming home, and my aunt would not for all the world that mr. mansell caught you on the forbidden ground.' 'how can you give in to such shuffling nonsense! if i am to claim isabel openly, why am i not to visit her openly? you have yielded to that woman's crooked policy. i don't trust you!' 'when you are her son, you may manage her as you please. just now she has us in her power, and can impose conditions. come on; and if you are good, you shall hear.' drawing james along with him through the beechwood glades, he began, 'you would have been more insane still if you had guessed at my luck. i found isabel alone. mrs. mansell had taken the girls to some juvenile fete, and delaford was discreet enough not to rouse my aunt from her letters. i augured well from the happy conjunction.' 'go on; don't waste time in stuff.' 'barkis is willing, then. is that enough to the point?' 'fitzjocelyn, you never had any feelings yourself, and therefore you trifle with those of others.' 'i beg your pardon. it was a shame! jem, you may be proud. she trusts you completely, and whatever you think sufficient, she regards as ample.' 'like her! only too like her. such confidence makes one feel a redoubled responsibility.' 'i thought i had found something at which you could not grumble.' 'how does she look? how do they treat her?' 'apparently they have not yet fed her on bread and water. no; seriously, i must confess that she looked uncommonly well and lovely! never mind, jem; i verily believe that, in spite of absence and all that, she had never been so happy in her life. if any description could convey the sweetness of voice and manner when she spoke of you! i could not look in her face. those looks can only be for you. we talked it over, but she heeded no ways and means; it was enough that you were satisfied. she says the subject has never been broached since the flight from northwold, and that lady conway's kindness never varies; and she told me she had little fear but that her dear mamma would be prevailed on to give sanction enough to hinder her from feeling as if she were doing wrong, or setting a bad example to her sisters. they know nothing of it; but walter, who learnt it no one knows how, draws the exemplary moral, that it serves his mother right for inflicting a tutor on him.' 'has she had my letter? does she know i am here?' 'wait! all this settled, and luncheon being ready, down came my lady, and we played unconsciousness to our best ability. i must confess my aunt beat us hollow! isabel then left us to our conference, which we conducted with the gravity of a tailor and an old woman making a match in brittany.' 'you came out with that valuable improvable freehold, the terrace, i suppose?' 'i told the mere facts! my aunt was rather grand about a grammar-school; she said even a curacy would sound better, and she must talk it over with isabel. i gave your letter, conjuring her to let isabel have it, and though she declared that it was no kindness, and would put the poor darling into needless perplexity, she was touched with my forbearance, in not having given it before, when i had such an opportunity. so she went away, and stayed a weary while: but when she came, it was worth the waiting. she said isabel was old enough to know her own mind, and the attachment being so strong, and you so unexceptionable, she did not think it possible to object: she had great delight in seeing you made happy, and fulfilling the dictates of her own heart, now that it could be done with moderate prudence. they go to scarborough in a fortnight, and you will be welcome there. there's for you!' 'louis, you are the best fellow living! but you said i was to see her at once.' 'i asked, why wait for scarborough?' and depicted you hovering disconsolately round the precincts. never mind, jem, i did not make you more ridiculous than human nature must needs paint a lover, and it was all to melt her heart. i was starting off to fetch you, when i found she was in great terror. she had never told the mansells of the matter, and they must be prepared. she cannot have it transpire while she is in their house, and, in fact, is excessively afraid of mr. mansell, and wants to tell her story by letter. now, i think, considering all things, she has a right to take her own way.' 'you said i was not to go without meeting her!' 'i had assented, and was devising how to march off my lunatic quietly, when the feminine goodnatured heart that is in her began to relent, and she looked up in my face with a smile, and said the poor dears were really exemplary, and if isabel should walk to the beach and should meet any one there, she need know nothing about it.' 'what says isabel?' 'she held up her stately head, and thought it would be a better return for mr. mansell's kindness to tell him herself before leaving beauchastel; but lady conway entreated her not to be hasty, and protested that her fears were of mr. mansell's displeasure with her for not having taken better care of her--she dreaded a break, and so on,--till the end of it was, that though we agree that prudence would carry us off to-morrow morning, yet her ladyship will look the other way, if you happen to be on the southern beach at eleven o'clock to-morrow morning. i suppose you were very headlong and peremptory in your note, for i could not imagine isabel consenting to a secret tryste even so authorized.' 'i never asked for any such thing! i would not for worlds see her led to do anything underhand.' 'she will honour you! that's right, jem!' 'neither as a clergyman, nor as a dynevor, can i consent to trick even those who have no claim to her duty!' 'neither as a gentleman, nor as a human creature,' added louis, in the same tone. 'shall i go back and give your answer?' 'no; you are walking lame enough already.' 'no matter for that.' 'to tell you the truth, i can't stand your being with her again, while i am made a fool of by that woman. if i'm not to see her, i'll be off. i'll send her a note; we will cross to bickleypool, and start by the mail-train this very night.' louis made no objection, and james hurried him into the little parlour, where in ten minutes the note was dashed off:-- my own most precious one!--(as, thanks to my most unselfish of cousins, i may dare to call you,)--i regret my fervency and urgency for an interview, since it led you to think i could purchase even such happiness by a subterfuge unworthy of my calling, and an ill return of the hospitality to which we owed our first meeting. we will meet when i claim you in the face of day, without the sense of stolen felicity, which is a charm to common-place minds. my glory is in the assurance that you understand my letter, approve, and are relieved. with such sanction, and with ardour before you like mine, i see that you could do no other than consent, and there is not a shadow of censure in my mind; but if, without compromising your sense of obedience, you could openly avow our engagement to mr. mansell, i own that i should feel that we were not drawn into a compromise of sincerity. what this costs me i will not say; it will be bare existence till we meet at scarborough. 'your own, j. e. f. d.' having written this and deposited it in the ebbscreek post-office, james bethought himself that his submissive cousin had thrown himself on the floor, with his bag for a pillow, trying to make the most of the few moments of rest before the midnight journey. seized with compunction, james exclaimed, 'there, old fellow, we will stay to-night.' 'thank you--' he was too sleepy for more. the delay was recompensed. james was trying to persuade louis to rouse himself to be revived by bread-and-cheese and beer, and could extort nothing but a drowsy repetition of the rhyme, in old days the war-cry of the grammar-school against the present headmaster,-- 'the welshman had liked to be choked by a mouse, but he pulled him out by the tail,'-- when an alarum came in the shape of a little grinning boy from beauchastel, with a note on which james had nearly laid hands, as he saw the writing, though the address was to the viscount fitzjocelyn. 'you may have it,' said louis. 'if anything were wanting, the coincidence proves that you were cut out for one another. i rejoice that the moon does not stoop from her sphere.' 'my dear cousin,--i trust to you to prevent mr. f. dynevor from being hurt or disappointed; and, indeed, i scarcely think he will, though i should not avail myself of the permission for meeting him so kindly intended. i saw at once that you felt as i did, and as i know he will. he would not like me to have cause to blush before my kind friends--to know that i had acted a deceit, nor to set an example to my sisters for which they might not understand the justification. i know that you will obtain my pardon, if needed; and to be assured of it, would be all that would be required to complete the grateful happiness of 'isabel.' the boy had orders not to wait; and these being seconded by fears of something that 'walked' in ebbscreek wood after dark, he was gone before an answer could be thought of. it mattered the less, since isabel must receive james's note early in the morning; and so, in fact, she did--and she was blushing over it, and feeling as if she could never have borne to meet his eye but for the part she had fortunately taken, when louisa tapped at her door, with a message that mr. mansell wished to speak with her, if she were ready. she went down-stairs still in a glow; and her old friend's first words were a compliment on her roses, so pointed, that she doubted for a moment whether he did not think them suspicious, especially as he put his hands behind his back, and paced up and down the room, for some moments. he then came towards her, and said, in a very kind tone, 'isabel, my dear, i sent for you first, because i knew your own mother very well, my dear; and though lady conway is very kind, and has always done you justice,--that i will always say for her,--yet there are times when it may make a difference to a young woman whether she has her own mother or not.' isabel's heart was beating. she was certain that some discovery had been made, and longed to explain; but she was wise enough not to speak in haste, and waited to see how the old gentleman would finally break it to her. he blundered on a little longer, becoming more confused and distressed every minute, and at last came to the point abruptly. 'in short, isabel, my dear, what can you have done to set people saying that you have been corresponding with the young men at ebbscreek?' 'i sent a note to my cousin fitzjocelyn last night,' said isabel, with such calmness, that the old gentleman fairly stood with his mouth open, looking at her aghast. 'fitzjocelyn! then it is fitzjocelyn, is it?' he exclaimed. 'then, why could he not set about it openly and honourably? does his father object? i would not have thought it of you, isabel, nor of the lad neither!' 'you need not think it, dear mr. mansell. there is nothing between lord fitzjocelyn and myself but the warmest friendship.' 'isabel! isabel! why are you making mysteries? i do not wish to pry into your affairs. i would have trusted you anywhere; but when it comes round to me that you have been sending a private messenger to one of the young gentlemen there, i don't know what to be at! i would not believe mrs. mansell at first; but i saw the boy, and he said you had sent him yourself. my dear, you may mean, very rightly--i am sure you do, but you must not set people talking! it is not acting rightly by me, isabel; but i would not care for that, if it were acting rightly by yourself.' and he gazed at her with a piteous, perplexed expression. 'let me call mamma,' said isabel. 'as you will, my dear, but cannot you let the simple truth come out between you and your own blood-relation, without all her words to come between? can't you, isabel? i am sure you and i shall understand each other.' 'that we shall,' replied isabel, warmly. 'i have given her no promise. dear mr. mansell, i have wished all along that you should know that i am engaged, with her full consent, to mr. frost dynevor.' 'to the little black tutor!' cried mr. mansell, recoiling, but recollecting himself. 'i beg your pardon, my dear, he may be a very good man, but what becomes of all this scrambling over barricades with the young lord?' isabel described the true history of her engagement; and it was received with a long, low whistle, by no means too complimentary. 'and what makes him come and hide in holes and corners, if this is all with your mamma's good will?' 'mamma thought you would be displeased; she insisted on taking her own time for breaking it to you,' said isabel. 'was there ever a woman but must have her mystery? well, i should have liked him better if he had not given into it!' 'he never did!' said isabel, indignant enough to disclose in full the whole arrangement made by lady conway's manoeuvres and lax good-nature. 'i knew it would never do,' she added, 'though i could not say so before her and fitzjocelyn. my note was to tell them so: and look here, mr. mansell, this is what mr. dynevor had already written before receiving mine.' she held it out proudly; and mr. mansell, making an unwilling sound between his teeth, took it from her; but, as he read, his countenance changed, and he exclaimed, 'ha! very well! this is something like! so that's it, is it? you and he would not combine to cheat the old man, like a pair of lovers in a trumpery novel!' 'no, indeed!' said isabel, 'that would be a bad way of beginning.' 'where is the young fellow?--at ebbscreek, did you say? i'll tell you what, isabel,' with his hand on the bell, 'i'll have out the dogcart this minute, and fetch him home to breakfast, to meet my lady when she comes down stairs, if it be only for the sake of showing that i like plain dealing!' 'isabel could only blush, smile, look doubtful, and yet so very happy and grateful, that mr. mansell became cautious, lest his impulse should have carried him too far, and, after having ordered the vehicle to be prepared, he caught her by the hand, and detained her, saying, 'mind you, miss, you are not to take this for over-much. i'm afraid it is a silly business, and i did not want you to throw yourself away on a schoolmaster. i must see and talk to the man myself; but i won't have anything that's not open and above-board, and that my lady shall see for once in her life!' 'i'm not afraid,' said isabel, smiling. 'james will make his own way with you.' isabel ran away to excuse and explain her confession to lady conway; while mr. mansell indulged in another whistle, and then went to inform his wife that he was afraid the girl had been making a fool of herself; but it was not lady conway's fault that she was nothing worse, and he was resolved, whatever he did, to show that honesty was the only thing that would go down with him. the boat was rocking on the green waves, and louis was in the act of waving an adieu to deaf mrs. hannaford, when a huntsman's halloo caused james to look round and behold mr. mansell standing up in his dogcart, making energetic signals with his whip. he had meant to be very guarded, and wait to judge of james before showing that he approved, but the excitement of the chase betrayed him into a glow of cordiality, and he shook hands with vehemence. 'that's right!--just in time! jump in, and come home to breakfast. so you wouldn't be a party to my lady's tricks!--just like her--just as she wheedled poor conway. i will let her see how i esteem plain dealing! i don't say that i see my way through this business; but we'll talk it over together, and settle matters without my lady.' james hardly knew where he was, between joy and surprise. the invitation was extended to his companion; but fitzjocelyn discerned that both james and mr. mansell would prefer being left to themselves; he had a repugnance to an immediate discussion with the one aunt, and was in haste to carry the tidings to the other: and besides, it was becoming possible that letters might arrive from the travellers. actuated by all these motives, he declined the offer of hospitality, and rowed across to bickleypool, enlightening the captain on the state of affairs as far as he desired. chapter ii. the third time. tho' this was fair, and that was braw, and you the toast of all the town, i sighed and said, amang them a', ye are not mary morison. burns. mrs. frost and louis were very merry over the result of lady conway's stratagems, and sat up indulging in bright anticipations until so late an hour, that louis was compelled to relinquish his purpose of going home that night, but he persisted in walking to ormersfield before breakfast, that he might satisfy himself whether there were any letters. it was a brisk october morning, the sportsman's gun and whistle re-echoing from the hill sides; where here and there appeared the dogs careering along over green turnip-fields or across amber stubble. the little northwold trees, in dark, sober tints of brown and purple, hung over the grey wall, tinted by hoary lichen; and as louis entered the ormersfield field paths, and plunged into his own ferny dell, the long grass and brackens hung over the path, weighed down with silvery dew, and the large cavernous web of the autumnal spider was all one thick flake of wet. if he could not enter the ravine without thankfulness for his past escape, neither could he forget gratitude to her who had come to his relief from hopeless agony! he quickened his pace, in the earnest longing for tidings, which had seized him, even to heart sickness. it was the reaction of the ardour and excitement that had so long possessed him. the victory had been gained--he had been obliged to leave james to work in his own cause, and would be no longer wanted in the same manner by his cousin. the sense of loneliness, and of the want of an object, came strongly upon him as he walked through the prim old solitary garden, and looked up at the dreary windows of the house, almost reluctant to enter, as long as it was without mary's own serene atmosphere of sympathy and good sense, her precious offices of love, her clear steady eyes, even in babyhood his trustworthy counsellors. was it a delusion of fancy, acting on reflections in the glass, that, as he mounted the steps from the lawn, depicted mary's figure through the dining-room windows? nay, the table was really laid for breakfast--a female figure was actually standing over the tea-chest. 'a scene from the vicar of wakefield deluding me,' decided louis, advancing to the third window, which was open. it was mary ponsonby. 'mary!' 'you here?--they said you were not at home!' 'my father!--where?' 'he is not come down. he is as well as possible. we came at eleven last night. i found i was not wanted,' added mary, with a degree of agitation, that made him conclude that she had lost her father. one step he made to find the earl, but too much excited to move away or to stand still, he came towards her, wrung her hand in a more real way than in his first bewildered surprise, and exclaimed in transport, 'o mary! mary! to have you back again!' then, remembering his inference, added, low and gravely, 'it makes me selfish--i was not thinking of your grief.' 'never mind,' said mary, smiling, though her eyes overflowed, 'i must be glad to be at home again, and such a welcome as this--' 'o mary, mary!' he cried, nearly beside himself, 'i have not known what to do without you! you will believe it now, won't you?'--oh, won't you?' mary would have been a wonderful person had she not instantly and utterly forgotten all her conclusions from frampton's having declared him gone to beauchastel for an unlimited time; but all she did was to turn away her crimson tearful face, and reply, 'your father would not wish it now.' 'then the speculations have failed? so much the better!' 'no, no! he must tell you--' she was trying to withdraw her hand, when lord ormersfield opened the door, and in the moment of his amazed 'louis!' mary had fled. 'what is it? oh! what is it, father? cried louis for all greeting, 'why can she say you would not wish it now?' 'wish it? wish what?' asked the earl, without the intuitive perception of the meaning of the pronoun. 'what you have always wished--mary and me--what is the only happiness that life can offer me!' 'if i wished it a year ago, i could only wish it the more now,' said the earl. 'but how is this?--i fully believed you committed to miss conway.' 'miss conway! miss conway!' burst out louis, in a frenzy. 'because jem frost was in love with her himself, he fancied every one else must be the same, and now he will be married to her before christmas, so that's disposed of. as to my feeling for her a particle, a shred of what i do for mary, it was a mere fiction--a romance, an impossibility.' 'i do not understand you, louis. why did you not find this out before?' 'mrs. ponsonby called it my duty to test my feelings, and i have tested them. that one is a beautiful poet's dream. mary is a woman, the only woman i can ever love. not an hour but i have felt it, and now, father, what does she mean?' 'she means, poor girl, what only her own scrupulous delicacy could regard as an objection, but what renders me still more desirous to have a right to protect her. the cause of our return--' 'how? i thought her father was dead.' 'far worse. at valparaiso we met robson, the confidential agent. i learnt from him that mr. ponsonby had hardly waited for her mother's death to marry a limenian, a person whom everything pointed out as unfit to associate with his daughter. even robson, cautious as he was, said he could not undertake to recommend miss ponsonby to continue her journey.' 'and this was all?' exclaimed louis, too intent on his own views for anything but relief. 'all? is it not enough to set her free? she acquiesced in my judgment that she could do no otherwise than return. she wrote to her father, and i sent three lines to inform him that, under the circumstances, i fulfilled my promise to her mother by taking her home. i had nearly made her promise that, should we find you about to form an establishment of your own, she would consider herself as my child; but--' 'oh, father! how shall we make her believe you care nothing for her scruple? the wretched man! but--oh! where is she?' 'it does not amount to a scruple in her case,' deliberately resumed the earl. 'i always knew what ponsonby was, and nothing from him could surprise me--even such an outrage on feeling and decency. besides, he has effectually shut himself out of society, and degraded himself beyond the power of interfering with you. for the rest, mary is already, in feeling, so entirely my child, that to have the right to call her so has always been my fondest wish. and, louis, the months i have spent with her have not diminished my regard. my mary! she will have a happier lot than her mother!' the end of the speech rewarded louis for the conflict by which he had kept himself still to listen to the beginning. lord ormersfield had pity on him, and went in search of mary; while he, remembering former passages, felt that his father might be less startling and more persuasive, but began to understand what james must have suffered in committing his affairs to another. the earl found mary in what had been her mother's sitting-room, striving to brace her resolution by recalling the conversation that had taken place there on a like occasion. but alas! how much more the heart had now to say! how much it felt as if the only shelter or rest in the desolate world was in the light of the blue eyes whose tender sunshine had been on her for one instant! yet she began firmly--'if you please, would you be so kind as to let me go to aunt melicent?' 'by-and-by, my dear, when you think fit.' 'oh, then, at once, and without seeing any one, please!' 'nay, mary,' with redoubled gentleness, 'there is one who cannot let you go without seeing him. mary, you will not disappoint my poor boy again. you will let him be an amendment in my scheme.' 'you have been always most kind to me, but you cannot really like this.' 'you forget that it has been my most ardent wish from the moment i saw you what only your mother's child could be.' 'that was before-- no, i ought not! yours is not a family to bring disgrace into.' 'i cannot allow you to speak thus. i knew your trials at home when first i wished you to be my son's wife, and my opinion is unchanged, except by my increased wish to have the first claim to you.' 'lord ormersfield,' said mary, collecting herself 'only one thing. tell me, as if we were indifferent persons, is this a connexion such as would do louis any harm? i trust you to answer.' he paced along the room, and she tried to control her trembling. he came back and spoke: no, mary. if he were a stranger, i should give the same advice. your father's own family is unexceptionable; and those kind of things, so far off--few will ever hear of them, and no one will attach consequence to them. if that be your only scruple, it does you infinite credit; but i can entirely remove it. what might be an injury to you, single, would be of comparatively little importance to him.' 'miss conway,' faltered mary, who could never remember her, when in louis's presence. 'a mere delusion, of our own. there was nothing in it. he calls you the only woman who can make him happy, as i always knew you were. he must explain all. you will come to him, my dear child.' mary resisted no more; he led her down stairs, and left her within the dining-room door. 'mary, you will now--' was all louis said; but she let him draw her into his arms, and she rested against his breast, as when he had come to comfort her in the great thunderstorm in auld lang-syne. she felt herself come at length to the shelter and repose for which her heart had so long yearned, in spite of her efforts, and as if the world had nothing more to offer of peace or joy. 'oh, mary, how i have wanted you! you believe in me now!' 'i am sure mamma would!' murmured mary. he could have poured forth a torrent of affection, but the suspicion of a footstep made her start from him; and the next moment she was herself, glowing, indeed, and half crying with happiness, but alarmed at her own agitation, and struggling to resume her common-place manner. 'there's your father not had a morsel of breakfast!' she exclaimed, hurrying back to her teacups, whose ringing betrayed her trembling hand. 'call him, louis.' 'must i go?' said louis, coming to assist in a manner that threatened deluge and destruction. 'oh yes, go! i shall be able to speak to you when you come back.' he had only to go into the verandah. his father was watching at the library window, and they wrung each other's hand in gladness beyond utterance. mary had seated herself in the solid stately chair, with the whole entrenchment of tea equipage before her. they knew it signified that she was to be unmolested; they took their places, and the earl carved ham, and louis cut bread, and mary poured out tea in the most matter-of-fact manner, hazarding nothing beyond such questions as, 'may i give you an egg?' then curiosity began to revive: louis ventured, 'where did you land?' and his father made answer, 'at liverpool, yesterday,' and how the custom-house had detained them, and he had, therefore, brought mary straight home, instead of stopping with her at northwold, at eleven o'clock, to disturb mrs. frost. 'you would have found us up,' said louis. 'you were sleeping at the terrace?' 'yes, i walked here this morning.' 'then your ankle must be pretty well,' was mary's first contribution to the conversation. 'quite well for all useful purposes,' said louis, availing himself of the implied permission to turn towards her. 'but, louis,' suddenly exclaimed the earl, 'did you not tell me something extraordinary about james frost? whom did you say he was going to marry?' 'isabel conway.' never was his love of electrifying more fully gratified! lord ormersfield was surprised into an emphatic interjection, and inquiry whether they were all gone mad. 'not that i am aware of,' said louis. 'perhaps you have not heard that mr. lester is going to retire, and jem has the school?' 'then, it must be calcott and the trustees who are out of their senses.' 'do you not consider it an excellent appointment?' 'it might be so some years hence,' said the earl. 'i am afraid it will tie him down to a second-rate affair, when he might be doing better; and the choice is the last thing i should have expected from calcott.' 'he opposed it. he wanted to bring in a very ordinary style of person, from ---- school, but jem's superiority and the general esteem for my aunt carried the day.' 'what did ramsbotham and his set do?' 'they were better than could have been hoped; they gave us their votes when they found their man could not get in.' 'ha? as long as that fellow is against calcott, he cares little whom he supports. i am sorry that calcott should be defeated, even for james's sake. how did richardson vote?' 'he was doubtful at first, but i brought him over.' lord ormersfield gave a quick, searching glance as he said,' james frost did not make use of our interest in this matter.' 'jem never did. he and my aunt held back, and were unwilling to oppose the squire. they would have given it up, but for me. father, i never supposed you could be averse to my doing my utmost for jem, when all his prospects were at stake.' 'i should have imagined that james was too well aware of my sentiments to allow it.' what a cloud on the happy morning! louis eagerly exclaimed: 'james is the last person to be blamed! he and my aunt were always trying to stop me, but i would not listen to their scruples. i knew his happiness depended on his success, and i worked for him, in spite of himself. if i did wrong, i can only be very sorry; but i cannot readily believe that i transgressed by setting the question before people in a right light. only, whose fault soever it was, it was not jem's.' lord ormersfield had not the heart to see one error in his son on such a day as this, more especially as mary peeped out behind the urn to judge of his countenance, and he met her pleading eyes, swimming in tears. 'no, i find no fault,' he kindly said. 'young, ardent spirits may be excused for outrunning the bounds that their elders might impose. but you have not removed my amazement. james intending to marry on the grammar-school!--it cannot be worth pounds a year.' 'isabel is satisfied. she never desired anything but a quiet, simple, useful life.' 'your aunt catharine delighted, of course? no doubt of that; but what has come to lady conway?' 'she cannot help it, and makes the best of it. she gave us very little trouble.' 'ah! her own daughter is growing up,' said the earl, significantly. 'isabel is very fond of northwold,' said mary, feeling that louis was wanting her sympathy. 'she used to wish she could settle there--with how little consciousness!' 'if i had to judge in such a case,' said lord ormersfield, thoughtfully, 'i should hesitate to risk a woman's happiness with a temper such as that of james frost.' 'oh, father!' cried louis, indignantly. 'i suspect,' said lord ormersfield, smiling, 'that of late years, james's temper has been more often displayed towards me than towards you.' 'a certain proof how safe his wife will be,' returned louis. his father shook his head, and looking from one to the other of the young people, congratulated himself that here, at least, there were no perils of that description. he asked how long the attachment had existed. 'from the moment of first sight,' said louis; 'the fine spark was lighted on the euston square platform; and it was not much later with her. he filled up her beau ideal of goodness--' 'and, in effect, all lady conway's pursuit of you threw them together,' said lord ormersfield, much entertained. 'lady conway has been their very best friend, without intending it. it would not have come to a crisis by this time, if she had not taken me to paris. it would have been a pity if the catastrophe of the barricades had been all for nothing.' lord ormersfield and mary here broke out in amazement at themselves, for having hitherto been oblivious of the intelligence that had greeted them on their first arrival, when frampton had informed them of lord fitzjocelyn's wound and gallant conduct, and his father had listened to the story like the fastening of a rivet in miss conway's chains, and mary with a flush of unselfish pride that isabel had been taught to value her hero. they both claimed the true and detailed account, as if they had hitherto been defrauded of it, and insisted on hearing what had happened to him. 'i dare say you know best,' said louis, lazily. 'i have heard so many different accounts of late, that i really am beginning to forget which is the right one, and rather incline to the belief that delaford brought a rescue or two with his revolver, and carried us into a fortress where my aunt had secured the windows with feather-beds--' 'you had better make haste and tell, that the true edition may be preserved,' said mary, rallying her spirits in her eagerness. 'i have begun to understand why there never yet has been an authentic account of a great battle,' said louis. 'life would make me coincide with sir robert walpole's judgment on history. all i am clear about is, that even a red republican is less red than he is painted; that isabel conway is fit to visit the sentinels in a beleaguered castle--a noble being-- but oh, mary! did i not long sorely after you when it came to the wounded knight part of the affair! i am more sure of that than of anything else!' mary blushed, but her tender heart was chiefly caring to know how much he had been hurt, and so the whole story was unfolded by due questioning; and the earl had full and secret enjoyment of the signal defeat of his dear sister-in-law, the one satisfaction on which every one seemed agreed. it was a melancholy certainty that mary must go to mrs. frost, but the earl deferred the moment by sending the carriage with an entreaty that she would come herself to fetch her guest. mary talked of writing a note; but the autumn sun shone cheerily on the steps, and louis wiled her into seating herself on the upper step, while he reclined on the lower ones, as they had so often been placed when this was his only way of enjoying the air. the sky was clear, the air had the still calm of autumn, the evergreens and the yellow-fringed elms did not stir a leaf--only a large heavy yellow plane leaf now and then detached itself by its own weight and silently floated downwards. mary sat, without wishing to utter a word to disturb the unwonted tranquillity, the rest so precious after her months of sea-voyage, her journey, her agitations. but louis wanted her seal of approval to all his past doings, and soon began on their inner and deeper story, ending with, 'tell me whether you think i was right, my own dear governess--' 'oh no, you must never call me that any more.' 'it is a name belonging to my happiest days.' 'it was only in play. it reverses the order of things. i must look up to you.' 'if you can!' said louis, playfully, slipping down to a lower step. a tear burst out as mary said, 'mamma said it must never be that way.' then recovering, she added, 'i beg your pardon, louis; i was treating it as earnest. i think i am not quite myself to-day, i will go to my room!' 'no, no, don't,' he said; 'i will not harass you with my gladness, dearest.' he stepped in-doors, brought out a book, and when mrs. frost arrived to congratulate and be congratulated, she found mary still on the step, gazing on without seeing the trees and flowers, listening without attending to the rich, soothing flow of lope de vega's beautiful devotional sonnets, in majestic spanish, in louis's low, sweet voice. chapter iii. mists. therefore thine eye through mist of many days shines bright; and beauty, like a lingering rose, sits on thy cheek, and in thy laughter plays; while wintry frosts have fallen on thy foes, and, like a vale that breathes the western sky, thy heart is green, though summer is gone by. f. tennyson. happy aunt kitty!--the centre, the confidante of so much love! perhaps her enjoyment was the most keen and pure of all, because the most free from self--the most devoid of those cares for the morrow, which, after besetting middle life, often so desert old age as to render it as free and fresh as childhood. she had known the worst: she had been borne through by heart-whole faith and love, she had seen how often frettings for the future were vain, and experienced that anticipation is worse than reality. where there was true affection and sound trust, she could not, would not, and did not fear for those she loved. james went backwards and forwards in stormy happiness. he had come to a comfortable understanding with old mr. mansell, who had treated him with respect and cordiality from the first, giving him to understand that isabel's further expectations only amounted to a legacy of a couple of thousands on his own death, and that meantime he had little or no hope of helping him in his profession. he spoke of isabel's expensive habits, and the danger of her finding it difficult to adapt herself to a small income; and though, of course, he might as well have talked to the wind as to either of the lovers, his remonstrance was so evidently conscientious as not to be in the least offensive, and mr. frost dynevor was graciously pleased to accept him as a worthy relation. all was smooth likewise with lady conway. she and mr. mansell outwardly appeared utterly unconscious of each other's proceedings, remained on the most civil terms, and committed their comments and explanations to mrs. mansell, who administered them according to her own goodnatured, gossiping humour, and sided with whichever was speaking to her. there was in lady conway much kindness and good-humour, always ready to find satisfaction in what was inevitable, and willing to see all at ease and happy around her--a quality which she shared with louis, and which rendered her as warm and even caressing to 'our dear james' as if he had been the most welcome suitor in the world; and she often sincerely congratulated herself on the acquisition of a sensible gentleman to consult on business, and so excellent a brother for walter. it was not falsehood, it was real amiability; and it was an infinite comfort in the courtship, especially the courtship of a pendragon. as to the two young sisters, their ecstasy was beyond description, only alloyed by the grief of losing isabel, and this greatly mitigated by schemes of visits to northwold. the marriage was fixed for the end of november, so as to give time for a little tranquillity before the commencement of james's new duties. as soon as this intelligence arrived, mrs. frost removed herself, mary, and her goods into the house beautiful, that no. might undergo the renovations which, poor thing! had been planned twenty years since, when poor henry's increasing family and growing difficulties had decided her that she could 'do without them' one year more. 'even should miss conway not like to keep house with the old woman,' said she, by way of persuading herself she had no such expectation, 'it was her duty to keep the place in repair.' that question was soon at rest: isabel would be but too happy to be allowed to share her home, and truly james would hardly have attached himself to a woman who could not regard it as a privilege to be with the noble old lady. clara was likewise to be taken home; isabel undertook to complete her education, and school and tuition were both to be removed from the contemplation of the happy girl, whose letters had become an unintelligible rhapsody of joy and affection. isabel had three thousand pounds of her own, which, with that valuable freehold, dynevor terrace, james resolved should be settled on herself, speaking of it with such solemn importance as to provoke the gravity of those accustomed to deal with larger sums. with the interest of her fortune he meant to insure his life, that, as he told louis, with gratified prudence, there might be no repetition of his own case, and his family might never be a burden on any one. the income of the school, with their former well-husbanded means, was affluence for the style to which he aspired; and his grandmother, though her menus plaisirs had once doubled her present revenue, regarded it as the same magnificent advance, and was ready to launch into the extravagance of an additional servant, and of fitting up the long-disused drawing-room, and the dining-parlour, hitherto called the school-room, and kicked and hacked by thirty years of boys. she and clara would betake themselves to their present little sitting-room, and make the drawing-room pleasant and beautiful for the bride. and in what a world of upholstery did not the dear old lady spend the autumn months! how surpassingly happy was jane, and how communicative about cheveleigh! and how pleased and delighted in little charlotte's promotion! and charlotte! she ought to have been happy, with her higher wages and emancipation from the more unpleasant work, with the expectation of one whom she admired so enthusiastically as miss conway, and, above all, with the long, open-hearted, affectionate letter, which miss ponsonby had put into her hand with so kind a smile. somehow, it made her do nothing but cry; she felt unwilling to sit down and answer it; and, as if it were out of perverseness, when she was in mrs. martha's very house, and when there was so much to be done, she took the most violent fit of novel-reading that had ever been known; and when engaged in working or cleaning alone, chanted dismal ballads of the type of 'alonzo the brave and the fair imogens,' till mrs. martha declared that she was just as bad as an old dumbledore, and not worth half so much. one day, however, miss ponsonby called her into her room, to tell her that a parcel was going to lima, in case she wished to send anything by it. miss ponsonby spoke so kindly, and yet so delicately, and charlotte blushed and faltered, and felt that she must write now! 'i have been wishing to tell you, charlotte,' added mary, kindly, 'how much we like mr. madison. there were some very undesirable people among the passengers, who might easily have led him astray; but the captain and mate both spoke to lord ormersfield in the highest terms of his behaviour. he never missed attending prayers on the sundays; and, from all i could see, i do fully believe that he is a sincerely good, religions man; and, if he keeps on as he has begun, i think you are very happy in belonging to him.' charlotte only curtsied and thanked; but it was wonderful how those kind, sympathizing words blew off at once the whole mists of nonsense and fancy. tom was the sound, good, religious man to whom her heart and her troth were given; the other was no such thing, a mere flatterer, and she had known it all along. she would never think of him again, and she was sure he would not think of her. truth had dispelled all the fancied sense of hypocrisy and double-dealing: she sat down and wrote to tom as if delaford had never existed, and forthwith returned to be herself again, at least for the present. poor mary! she might speak cheerfully, but her despatches were made up with a trembling heart. louis and mary missed the security and felicity that seemed so perfect with james and isabel. in the first place, nothing could be fixed without further letters, although the earl had tried to persuade mary that her father had virtually forfeited all claim to her obedience, and that she ought to proceed as if in fact an orphan, and secure herself from being harassed by him, by hastening her marriage. of this she would not hear, and she was exceedingly grateful to louis for abstaining from pressing her, as well as for writing to mr. ponsonby in terms against which no exception could be taken. till secure of his consent, she would not consider her engagement as more than conditional, nor consent to its being mentioned to any one. if isabel knew it, that was james's fault. even the faithfull sisters were kept in ignorance; and she trusted thus to diminish the wrong that she felt her secrecy to be doing to aunt melicent, who was so much vexed and annoyed at her return, that she dreaded exceedingly the effect of the knowledge of her engagement. miss ponsonby was convinced that the news had been exaggerated, and insisted that but for lord ormersfield's dislike, it would have been further sifted; and she wrote to mary to urge her coming to her to await the full tidings, instead of delaying among her father's avowed enemies. mary settled this point by mentioning her promise to mrs. frost to remain with her until her grandchildren should be with her; and miss ponsonby's correspondence ceased after a dry, though still kind letter, which did not make mary more willing to bestow her confidence, but left her feeling in her honest heart as if she were dealing insincerely by aunt melicent. the discretion and reserve rendered requisite by the concealment were such as to be very tormenting even to so gentle a temper as that of louis, since they took from him all the privileges openly granted to the cousin, and scarcely left him those of the friend. she, on whose arm he had leant all last summer, would not now walk with him without an escort, and, even with mrs. frost beside her, shrank from ormersfield like forbidden ground. her lively, frank tone of playful command had passed away; nay, she almost shrank from his confidence, withheld her counsel, and discouraged his constant visits. he could not win from her one of her broad, fearless comments on his past doings; and in his present business, the taking possession of inglewood, the choice of stock, and the appointment of a bailiff, though she listened and sympathized, and answered questions, she volunteered no opinions, ahe expressed no wishes, she would not come to see. poor louis was often mortified into doubts of his own ability to interest or make her happy; but he was very patient. if disappointed one day, he was equally eager the next; he submitted obediently to her restrictions, and was remorseful when he forgot or transgressed; and they had real, soothing, comforting talks just often enough to be tantalizing, and yet to convince him that all the other unsatisfactory meetings and partings were either his own fault, or that of some untoward circumstance. he saw, as did the rest, that mary's spirits had received a shock not easily to be recovered. the loss of her mother was weighing on her more painfully than in the first excitement; and the step her father had taken, insulting her mother, degrading himself, and rending away her veil of filial honour, had exceedingly overwhelmed and depressed her; while sorrow hung upon her with the greater permanence and oppression from her strong self-control, and dislike to manifestation. all this he well understood; and, reverent to her feeling, he laid aside all trifling, and waited on her mood with the tenderest watchfulness. when she could bear it, they would dwell together on the precious recollections of her mother; and sometimes she could even speak of her father, and relate instances of his affection for herself, and all his other redeeming traits of character; most thankful to louis for accepting him on her word, and never uttering one word of him which she could wish unsaid. what louis did not see, was that the very force of her own affection was what alarmed mary, and caused her reserve. to a mind used to balance and regulation, any sensation so mighty and engrossing appeared wrong; and repressed as her attachment had been, it was the more absorbing now that he was all that was left to her. admiration, honour, gratitude, old childish affection, and caressing elder-sisterly protection, all flowed in one deep, strong current; but the very depth made her diffident. she could imagine the whole reciprocated, and she feared to be importunate. if the day was no better than a weary turmoil, save when his voice was in her ear, his eyes wistfully bent on her, the more carefully did she restrain all expression of hope of seeing him to-morrow, lest she should be exacting and detain him from projects of his own. if it was pride and delight to her to watch his graceful, agile figure spring on horseback, she would keep herself from the window, lest he should feel oppressed by her pursuing him; and when she found her advice sought after as his law, she did not venture to proffer it. she was uncomfortable in finding the rule committed to her, and all the more because lord ormersfield, who had learnt to talk to her so openly that she sometimes thought he confounded her with her mother, used in all his schemes to appear to take it for granted that she should share with him in the managing, consulting headship of the house, leaving louis as something to be cared for and petted like a child, without a voice in their decisions. these conversations used to make her almost jealous on louis's account, and painfully recall some of her mother's apprehensions. that was the real secret source of all her discomfort--namely, the misgiving lest she had been too ready to follow the dictates of her own heart. would her mother have been satisfied? had not her fondness and her desolation prevailed, where, for louis's own sake, she should have held back! every time she felt herself the elder in heart, every time she feared to have disappointed him, every time she saw that his liveliness was repressed by her mournfulness, she feared that she was letting him sacrifice himself. and still more did she question her conduct towards her father. she had only gradually become aware of the extent of the mutual aversion between him and the earl; and miss ponsonby's reproaches awakened her to the fear that she had too lightly given credence to hostile evidence. her affection would fain have justified him; and, forgetting the difficulties of personal investigation in such a case, she blamed herself for having omitted herself to question the confidential clerk, and having left all to lord ormersfield, who, cool and wary as he ordinarily was, would be less likely to palliate mr. ponsonby's errors than those of any other person. her heart grew sick as she counted the weeks ere she could hear from lima. none of her troubles were allowed to interfere with mrs. frost's peace. outwardly, she was cheerful and helpful; equable, though less lively. those carpets and curtains, tables and chairs, which were the grand topics at the house beautiful, were neither neglected nor treated with resigned impatience. mary's taste, counsel, and needle did good service; her hearty interest and consideration were given to the often-turned volume of designs for bedsteads, sofas, and window-curtains; and miss mercy herself had hardly so many resources for making old furniture new. many of her happiest half-hours with louis were spent as she sewed the stiff slippery chintz, and he held the curtain rings, while aunt catharine went to inspect the workmen, and many a time were her cares forgotten, and her active spirits resumed, while louis acted carpenter under her directions, and rectified errors of the workmen. it might not be poetical, but the french sky-blue paper, covered with silvery fern-leaves, that louis took such pains to procure, and the china door-handles that he brought over in his pockets, and the great map which mary pasted over the obstinate spot of damp in the vestibule, were the occasions of the greatest blitheness and merriment that they shared together. much did they enjoy the prediction that james would not know his own house; greatly did they delight in sowing surprises, and in obtaining aunt catharine's never-failing start of well-pleased astonishment. each wedding present was an event;--mr. mansell's piano, which disconcerted all previous designs; lord ormersfield's handsome plate; and many a minor gift from old scholars, delighted to find an occasion when an offering would not be an offence. even mr. calcott gave a valuable inkstand, in which mrs. frost and louis beheld something of forgiveness. isabel had expressed a wish that mary should be one of her bridesmaids. a wedding was not the scene which poor mary wished to witness at present; but she saw louis bent on having her with him, and would not vex him by reluctance. he had also prevailed on his father to be present, though the earl was much afraid of establishing a precedent, and being asked to act the part of father on future contingencies. there was only one bride, as he told louis, whom he could ever wish to give away. however, that trouble was spared him by mr. mansell; but still louis would not let him off, on the plea that james's side of the house should make as imposing a demonstration as possible. mrs. frost was less manageable. though warmly invited by the conways, and fondly entreated by her grandson, she shook her head, and said she was past those things, and that the old mother always stayed at home to cook the wedding dinner. she should hear all when clara came home the next day, and should be ready for the happy pair when they would return for christmas, after a brief stay at thornton conway, which isabel wished james to see, that he might share in all her old associations. all the rest of the party journeyed to london on a november day; and, in gaslight and gloom, they deposited mary at her aunt's house in bryanston square. gaslight was the staple of hymen's torch the next morning. london was under one of the fogs, of which it is popularly said you may cut them with a knife. the church was in dim twilight; the bride and bridegroom loomed through the haze, and the indistinctness made clara's fine tall figure appear quite majestic above the heads of the other bridesmaids. the breakfast was by lamp-light, and the mist looked lurid and grim over the white cake, and no one talked of anything but the comparative density of fogs; and mr. mansell's asthma had come on, and his speech was devolved upon lord ormersfield, to whom louis had imprudently promised exemption. what was worse, lady conway had paired them off in the order of precedence; and louis was a victim to two dowagers, between whom he could neither see nor speak to mary. he was the more concerned, because he had thought her looking depressed and avoiding his eye. he tried to believe this caution, but he thought she was also eluding his father, and her whole air gave him a vague uneasiness. the whole party were to dine with lady conway; and, trusting in the meantime to discover what was on her spirits, he tried to resign himself to the order of the day, without a farther glimpse of her. when the married pair took leave, walter gave his sister a great hug, but had no perception of his office of handing her downstairs; and it was fitzjocelyn who gave her his arm, and put her into the carriage, with an augury that the weather would be beautiful when once they had left the fog in london. she smiled dreamily, and repeated, 'beautiful,' as though all were so beautiful already to her that she did not so much as perceive the fog. james pressed his hand, saying, 'i am glad you are to be the one to be happy next.' 'you do not look so,' said clara, earnestly. the two sisters had come partly downstairs, but their london habits had restrained them from following to the street-door, as clara had done; and now they had rushed up again, while clara, with one foot on the staircase, looked in her cousin's face, as he tried to smile in answer, and repeated, 'louis, i hoped you were quite happy.' 'i am,' said louis, quickly. 'then why do you look so grave and uneasy?' 'louis!' said an entreating voice above, and there stood mary--'pray say nothing, but call a cab for me, please. no, i am not ill--indeed, i am not--but i cannot stay!' 'you look ill! it has been too much for you! clara, take her--let her lie down quietly,' cried louis, springing to her side. 'oh no, thank you-no,' said mary, decidedly, though very low; 'i told lady conway that i could not stay. i settled it with aunt melicent.' 'that aunt of yours--' 'hush! no, it is for my own sake--my own doing. i cannot bear it any longer! please let me go!' 'then i will take you. i saw the brougham waiting. we will go quietly together.' 'no, that must not be.' 'i was thoughtless in urging you to come. the turmoil has been too much. my poor mary! that is what comes of doing what i like instead of what you like. why don't you always have your own way? let me come; nay, if you will not, at least let clara go with you, and come back.' mary roused herself at last to speak, as she moved downstairs--'you need not think of me; there is nothing the matter with me. i promised aunt melicent to come home. she is very kind--it is not that.' 'you must not tell me not to think. i shall come to inquire. i shall be with you the first thing tomorrow.' 'yes, you must come to-morrow,' said mary, in a tone he could not interpret, and a tight lingering grasp on his hand, as he put her into his father's carriage. he stood hesitating for a moment as it drove off; then, instead of entering the house, walked off quickly in the same direction. clara had stood all the time like a statue on the stairs, waiting to see if she were wanted, and gazing intently, with her fingers clasped. when both were gone she drew a long breath, and nodded with her head, whispering to herself, in a grave and critical voice--'that is love!' she did not see fitzjocelyn again till nearly dinner-time; and, as he caught her anxious interrogating eye, he came to her and said, very low, 'i was not let in; miss ponsonby was engaged. miss mary lying down--i believe they never told her i was there.' 'it is all that aunt--horrid woman!' 'don't talk of it now. i _will_ see her to-morrow.' clara grieved for him whenever she saw him called on to exert himself to talk; and she even guarded him from the sallies of his young cousins. once, when much music and talk was going on, he came and sat by her, and made her tell him how fondly and affectionately she had parted with her schoolfellows; and how some of her old foes had become, as she hoped, friends for life; but she saw his eye fixed and absent even while she spoke, and she left off suddenly. 'go on,' he said, 'i like to hear;' and with a manifest effort he bent his mind to attend. 'oh!' thought clara, as she went up that night--'why will the days one most expects to be happy turn out so much otherwise? however, he will manage to tell me all about it when he and his father take me home to-morrow.' chapter iv. outward bound. the voice which i did more esteem than music in her sweetest key-- those eyes which unto me did seem more comfortable than the day-- those now by me, as they have been, shall never more be heard or seen. george wither. in suspense and impatience, fitzjocelyn awaited the end of his father's breakfast, that he might hasten to learn what ailed mary. the post came in, vexing him at first merely as an additional delay, but presently a sound of dissatisfaction attracted his notice to the foreign air of two envelopes which had been forwarded from home. 'hem!' said the earl, gravely, 'i am afraid this fellow ponsonby will give us some trouble.' 'then mary had heard from him!' cried louis. 'she was keeping it from me, not to spoil the day. i must go to her this moment--'but pausing again, 'what is it? he cannot have had my letter!' 'no, but he seems to have anticipated it. puffed up as they are about these speculations, he imagines me to have brought mary home for no purpose but to repair our fortunes; and informs me that, in the event of your marriage, she will receive not a farthing beyond her mother's settlements. i am much obliged! it is all i ever thought you would receive; and but for me, it would have been in the bottom of some mine long ago! do you wish to see what he says?' louis caught up the missive. it was the letter of a very angry man, too violent to retain the cold formality which he tried to assume. 'he was beholden to his lordship for his solicitude about his daughter. it was of a piece with other assistance formerly rendered to him in his domestic arrangements, for which he was equally obliged. he was happy to inform his lordship that, in this instance, his precautions had been uncalled for; and referred him to a letter which he would receive from mr. dynevor by the same mail, for an explanation of the circumstances to which he referred. he had been informed, by undoubted authority, that lord fitzjocelyn had done his daughter the honour of soliciting her hand. it might console his lordship to learn that, should the union take place, the whole of his property would be secured to mrs. ponsonby, and his daughter's sole fortune would be that which she inherited by her mother's marriage settlements. possibly this intelligence might lead to a cessation of these flattering attentions.' 'mrs. ponsonby! he can mention her in the same sentence with mary's mother!' said the earl. louis turned pale as he read, and scarcely breathed as he looked up at his father, dreading that he might so resent the studied affronts as to wish to break off the connexion, and that he might have him likewise to contend with; but on that score he was set at rest. the earl replied to his exclamation of angry dismay, 'it is little more than i looked for. it is not the first letter i have had from him. i find he has some just cause for offence. the marriage is less disgraceful than i had been led to believe. here is oliver dynevor's testimony.' oliver dynevor's was a succinct business-like letter, certifying his cousin that he had been mistaken in his view of the marriage. dona rosita de guzman was an orphan of a very respectable family, who had come to spend the year before her intended noviciate at the house of an uncle. she was very young, and mr. dynevor believed that the marriage had been hastened by her relations making her feel herself unwelcome, and her own reluctance to return to her convent, and that she might not be aware how very recently mr. ponsonby had become a widower. for his own part, he was little used to ladies' society, and could form no judgment of the bride; but he could assure lord ormersfield that she had been guilty of no impropriety; she was visited by every one; and that there was no reason against mary ponsonby associating with her. 'what could the clerk be thinking of?' exclaimed louis. 'my first impression was not taken from the clerk. what i heard first, and in the strongest terms, was from the captain of a ship at valparaiso. in fact, it was in the mouth of all who had known the family. robson neither confirmed nor contradicted, and gave me the notion of withholding much from regard for his employer. he lamented the precipitation, but seemed willing to make excuses. he distinctly said, he would not take it on himself to recommend miss ponsonby's continuing her journey. he was right. if i had known all this, i should still have brought her home. i must write an apology, as far as her character is concerned; but, be that as it may, the marriage is atrocious--an insult--a disgrace! he could not have waited six weeks--' 'but i must go to mary!' cried louis, as though reproaching himself for the delay. 'oh! that she should have forced herself to that wedding, and spared me!' 'i am coming with you,' said the earl. 'she will require my personal assurance that all this makes no difference to me.' 'i am more afraid of the difference it may make to her,' said louis. 'you have never believed how fond she is of her father.' on arriving, they were ushered into the room where miss ponsonby was at breakfast, and a cup of tea and untasted roll showed where her niece had been. she received them with stiff, upright chillness; and to their hope that mary was not unwell, replied--'not very well. she had been over-fatigued yesterday, and had followed her advice in going to lie down.' louis began to imagine a determination to exclude him, and was eagerly beginning to say that she had asked him to come that morning--could she not see him? when the lady continued, with the same severity--'until yesterday, i was not aware how much concern lord fitzjocelyn had taken in what related to my niece.' at that moment, when louis's face was crimson with confusion and impatience, the door was softly pushed ajar, and he heard himself called in low, hoarse tones. miss ponsonby was rising with an air of vexed surprise, but he never saw her, and, hastily crossing the room, he shut the door behind him, and followed the form that flitted up the stairs so fast, that he did not come up with her till she had entered the drawing-room, and stood leaning against a chair to gather breath. she was very pale, and her eyes looked as if she had cried all night, but she controlled her voice to say, 'i could not bear that you should hear it from aunt melicent.' 'we had letters this morning, dearest. always thinking for me! but i must think for you. you can hardly stand--' he would have supported her to the sofa, but she shrank from him; and, leaning more heavily on the chair, said--'do you not know, louis, all that must be at an end?' 'i know no such thing. my father is here on purpose to assure you that it makes not the slightest difference to him.' 'yours! yes! but oh, louis!' with a voice that, in its faintness and steadiness, had a sound of anguish--'only think what i allowed him to make me do! to insult my father and his choice! it was a mistake, i know,' she continued, fearing to be unjust and to grieve louis; 'but a most dreadful one!' 'he says he should have brought you home all the same--' began louis. 'mary, you must sit down!' he cried, interrupting himself to come nearer; and she obeyed, sinking into the chair. 'what a state you are in! how could you go through yesterday? how could you be distressed, and not let me know?' 'i could not spoil their wedding-day, that we had wished for so long.' 'then you had the letter?' 'in the morning. oh, that i had examined farther! oh, that i had never come home!' 'mary! i cannot hear you say so.' 'you would have been spared all this. you were doing very well without me--as you will--' he cried out with deprecating horror. 'louis!' she said, imploringly. 'oh, louis! do not make it harder for me to do right.' 'why--what? i don't understand! your father has not so much as heard how we stand together. he cannot be desiring you to give me up.' 'he--he forbids me to enter on anything of the sort with you. i don't know what made him think it possible, but he does. and--' again mary waited for the power of utterance, 'he orders me to come out with mrs. willis, in the valdivia, and it sails on the th of december!' 'but mary, mary! you cannot be bound by this. it is only fair towards him, towards all of us, to give him time to answer our letters.' mary shook her head. 'the only condition, he says, on which he could allow me to remain, would be if i were engaged to james frost.' 'too late for that, certainly,' said louis; and the smile was a relief to both. 'at any rate, it shows that he can spare you. only give him time. when he has my father's explanation--and my father is certain to be so concerned at having cast any imputation on a lady. his first thought was to apologize--' 'that is not all! i remember now that dear mamma always said she did not know whether he would consent. oh! how weak i was ever to listen--' 'no, mary, that must not be said. it was my presumptuous, inveterate folly that prevented you from trusting my affection when she might have helped us.' 'i don't know. it would have caused her anxiety and distress when she was in no state for them. i don't think it did,' said mary, considering; 'i don't think she ever knew how much i cared.' the admission could only do louis's heart good, and he recurred to his arguments that her father could be persuaded by such a letter as he felt it in him to write. 'you do not know all,' said mary. 'i could not show you his letter; but, from it and from my aunt, i better understand what impressions he has of you all, and how hopeless it is.' 'tell me!' she could not help giving herself the relief, when that most loving, sympathizing face was pleading with her to let him comfort her. she knew there was no fiery nor rancorous temper to take umbrage, and it was best for him to know the completeness of the death-blow. 'oh, louis! he fancies that my dear mother's fondness for her own family destroyed his domestic peace. he says their pride and narrow notions poisoned--yes, that is the word--poisoned her mind against him; and that was the reason he insisted on my being brought up here, and kept from you all.' 'but i don't understand why he let you come straight home to us, and live in dynevor terrace?' 'then he was really sorry mamma was so ill; and--and for all that was past; i am sure he felt it was the last parting, and only wished to do anything that could make up to her. he freely gave her leave to go wherever she pleased, and said not a word against northwold. it was one of her great comforts that he never seemed in the least vexed at anything she had done since we went home. besides, my aunt says that he and mr. dynevor had some plans about james and me.' 'he will have that out of his head. he will come to reason. fond of you, and sorry for the past, he will listen. no wonder he was in a passion; but just imagine what it would be to heed half jem frost says when he is well worked up!' 'papa is not like james,' said mary; 'things go deeper with him. he never forgets! i shall never forgive myself for not having spoken to robson! i know his manner, seeming to assent and never committing himself, and i ought to have gone through anything rather than have taken such an accusation for granted.' to hinder his pleading against her self-conviction, she re-opened her letter to prove the cruelty of the injustice. mr. ponsonby professed to have been unwilling to enter so speedily on the new tie; but to have been compelled, by the species of persecution which was exercised on rosita, in order to make her return to her nunnery. he dwelt on her timid affection and simplicity, and her exceeding mortification at the slur which mary had been induced to cast upon her; though, he said, her innocent mind could not comprehend the full extent of the injury; since the step his daughter had taken would, when known, seriously affect the lady's reception into society, in a manner only to be repaired by mary's immediately joining them at lima. he peremptorily indicated the ship and the escort--a merchant's wife, well known to her and charged her, on her duty, as the only proof of obedience or affection which could remedy the past, to allow no influence nor consideration whatever to detain her. 'you see?' said mary. 'i see!' was the answer. 'mary, you are right, you must go.' the words restored her confiding look, and her face lost almost all the restless wretchedness which had so transformed it. 'thank you,' she said, with a long breath; 'i knew you would see it so.' 'it will be a very pretty new style of wedding tour. andes for alps! no, mary, you need not suspect me of trifling now! i really mean it, and, seriously, our going in that way would set this rosita straight with society much more handsomely and effectually. don't doubt my father--i will fetch him.' 'stop, louis! you forget! did i not tell you that he expressly warns me against you? he must have heard of what happened before: he says i had prudence once to withstand, and he trusts to my spirit and discretion to--' mary stopped short of the phrase before her eyes--to resist the interested solicitations of necessitous nobility, and the allurements of a beggarly coronet. 'no,' she concluded; 'he says that you are the last person whom he could think of allowing me to accept.' she hid her face in her hands, and her voice died away. 'happily that is done,' said louis, not yet disconcerted; 'but if you go, as i own you must, it shall be with a letter of mine, explaining all. you will plead for me--i think you will, and when he is satisfied that we are no rebels, then the first ship that sails for peru--say that will do, mary.' 'no, louis, i know my father.' she roused herself and sat upright, speaking resolutely, but not daring to look at him--'i made up my mind last night. it was weak and selfish in me to enter into this engagement, and it must be broken off. you must be left free--not bound for years and years.' 'oh, mary! mary! this is too much. i deserved distrust by my wretched folly and fickleness last year, but i did not know what you were to me then--my most precious one! can you not trust me! do you not know how i would wait?' 'you would wait,' said poor mary, striving with choking tears, 'and be sorry you had waited.' 'are you talking madness, mary? i should live for the moment to compensate for all.' 'you would waste your best years, and when the time came, you would still be young, and i grown into an old careworn woman. you would find you had waited for what was nothing worth!' 'how can you talk so!' cried louis, wounded, 'when you know that to cherish and make up to you would be my dearest, fondest wish! no, don't shake your head! you know it is not a young rose and lily beauty that i love,--it is the honest, earnest glance in my mary's eyes, the rest, and trust, and peace, whenever i do but come near her. time can't take that away!' 'pray,' said mary, feebly, 'don't let us discuss it now. i know it is right. i was determined to say it to-day, that the worst might be over, but i can't argue, nor bear your kindness now. please let it wait.' 'yes, let it wait. it is depression. you will see it in a true light when you have recovered the shock, and don't fancy all must be given up together. lie down and rest; i am sure you have been awake all night.' 'i may rest now i have told you, and seen you not angry with poor papa, nor with me. oh! louis--the gratitude to you, the weight off my mind!' 'i don't think any one could help taking the same view,' said louis. 'it seems to me one of the cases where the immediate duty is the more clear because it is so very painful. mary, i think that you are committing your way unto the lord, and you know 'he shall bring it to pass.'' as he spoke there was a tap at the door, and miss ponsonby, stiffly entering, said, 'excuse my interruption, but i hope lord fitzjocelyn will be considerate enough not to harass you any longer with solicitations to act against your conscience.' 'he is not persuading me,' said mary, turning towards her aunt a face which, through all her dejection, proved her peace in his support and approval, 'he is helping me.' 'yes,' said louis to the astonished aunt; 'since i have heard the true state of the case, i have been convinced that there is no choice for her but to go out, to repair the injustice so unfortunately done to this poor lady. it is a noble resolution, and i perfectly concur with her.' 'i am glad you think so properly, sir,' returned miss ponsonby. 'lord ormersfield seems quite of another opinion. he was desirous of seeing you, mary; but i have been telling him i could permit no more interviews to-day.' 'oh no,' said mary, putting her hand to her head, as if it could bear no more; 'not to-day! louis, tell him how it is. make him forgive me; but do not let me see him yet.' 'you shall see no one,' said louis, tenderly; 'you shall rest. there--' and, as if he had the sole right to her, he arranged the cushions, placed her on the sofa, and hung over her to chafe her hands, and bathe her forehead with eau de cologne; while, as he detected signs of hasty preparations about the room, he added, 'don't trouble yourself with your arrangements; i will see about all i can to help you. only rest, and cure your head.' 'say that one thing to me again,' whispered mary, ere letting his hand go. again he murmured the words, 'commit thy way unto the lord, and he shall bring it to pass.' then mary felt her hand pressed to his lips, but she would not unclose her burning eyes; she would fain sleep beneath the impress of that spell of patient confidence. the gentle authority of his manner had deprived miss ponsonby of all notion of interfering. this 'odious, frivolous young man of fashion,' so entirely disconcerted her ideas of ardent lovers, or of self-interested puppies, that she gazed at him, surprised and softened; and when he looked at her anxiously, to judge whether mary would find in her a kind comforter, her eyes were full of tears, and she said as they left the room, 'it must be a great relief to my poor mary that you see it so sensibly. she has been suffering much in anticipation of this meeting.' 'her unselfishness goes to one's heart!' said louis, almost overcome. 'if she would but have spared herself yesterday!' 'ah! she said she could not bear that you should be pained on your friend's wedding-day. i am much comforted to find that you appreciate the effort.' this was not what miss ponsonby had intended to say, but there was something about the young man that touched her exceedingly; even when fresh from a very civil and decorous combat with his father, and a ripping-up of all the ancient grievances of the married life of their two relations, rendering wider than ever the breach between the houses of ponsonby and fitzjocelyn. lord ormersfield came forward to learn whether he might see mary, and was met by assurances that she must be kept as quiet as possible; upon which he took leave, making a stately bend of the head, while louis shook miss ponsonby's hand, and said he should come to the door to inquire before the day was over. 'i never saw her so broken down,' he said, in answer to his father's compassionate but indignant exclamation as they walked home. 'yesterday was a terrible strain on her.' 'i wish we had never brought her here,' said lord ormersfield. 'the aunt is your enemy, as she always was that of mary's mother. she nearly avowed that she set her brother on making this premature prohibition.' 'i do not think she is unkind to mary,' said louis; 'i could be almost glad that the dear aunt kitty is spared all this worry. it would make her so very miserable.' 'her influence would be in your favour, whereas this woman is perfectly unreasonable. she justifies her brother in everything, and is actually working on that poor girl's scruples of conscience to send her out by this ship.' 'nay,' said louis, 'after hearing her father's letter, i do not see that it is possible for her to do otherwise.' lord ormersfield hastily turned to look at his son's countenance,--it was flushed and melancholy, but fully in earnest; nevertheless the earl would not believe his ears, and made a sound as if he had missed the words. 'i am grieved enough to say so,' repeated louis; 'but, as he puts it, i do not see how mary can refuse to obey him.' 'i declare, fitzjocelyn,' exclaimed his father, with some anger, 'any one who takes the trouble, may talk you into anything imaginable!' 'not into believing her wrong.' 'i did not think you so weak!' continued his father. 'it is the very case where a woman's exaggerated notions of right may be wrought on to do her infinite harm! they become quite ridiculous without some one to show that such things may be carried too far! i must say, i did expect strength of mind and common sense for your own interest. i esteem it a mere matter of duty to put an end to such nonsense.' 'my dear father,' said louis, 'it was mary and her mother who first taught me my own obligations. i should never dare to interfere with any one's filial duty--above all, where my own happiness is so deeply concerned.' 'yours! i am not talking of yours. what is to become of mary with such a man as that? and this spanish woman, who, if she does not deserve all that has been said of her, no doubt soon will?--no education, no principles, breaking out of her convent! and you let yourself be drawn into calling it mary's duty to run into such company as that! you are not fit to protect her.' 'from all i have heard of mr. ponsonby, i am convinced he has too much regard for his daughter to summon her into any improper society. i do not hear that he has been to blame as a father. i wish i could see it as you do; but not only do i know that mary could not have an instant's peace under the sense of his displeasure, but it seems to me that this is one of the express commands which could not be disobeyed without setting aside the law of heaven. if i gave my voice against it, i should fear to bring on us a curse, and not a blessing.' 'fitzjocelyn, i always knew how it would be if you took to being one of those very good people. nothing is so weak, and yet so unmanageable. any rational being would look on it as a duty to rescue her from such a man as that; but that is too ordinary a virtue for you. you must go higher.' louis made no answer. never had his father pained him so much, and he could ill brook additional suffering. 'however,' said the earl, recovering, 'i shall see her. i shall put the matter in a just light. she is a sensible girl, and will understand me when she has recovered the shock. on one head i shall give warning. she must choose between us and her father. if she persist in going out to join this establishment, i will have your engagement given up.' 'father! father! you would not be so cruel!' 'i know what i am saying. am i to allow you to be encumbered all the time she is on the other side of the world, waiting ponsonby's pleasure, to come home at last, in ten or fifteen years' time, worried and fretted to death, like her poor mother? no, louis, it must be now or never.' 'you are only saying what i would not hear from her. she has been insisting on breaking off, and all my hope was in you.' 'she has? that is like her! the only reasonable thing i have heard yet.' 'then you will not help me? you, who i thought loved her like your own daughter, and wished for nothing so much!' 'so i might; but that is a different thing from allowing you to wear out your life in a hopeless engagement. if she cast off her family, nothing could be better, otherwise, i would never connect you with them.' it did not occur to his lordship that he was straining pretty hard the filial duty of his own son, while he was arguing that mary should snap asunder the same towards her father. the fresh discomfiture made poor louis feel utterly dejected and almost hopeless, but lest silence should seem to consent, he said, 'when you see mary, you will be willing for me to do anything rather than lose what is so dear and so noble.' 'yes, i will see mary. we will settle it between us, and have it right yet; but we must give her to-day to think it over, and get over the first shock. when she has had a little time for reflection, a few cool arguments from me will bring her to reason.' so it was all to be settled over louis's passive head; and thus satisfied, his father, who was exceedingly sorry for him, forgot his anger, and offered to go home alone as clara's escort, promising to return on the monday, to bring the full force of his remonstrances to bear down mary's scruples. lord ormersfield believed clara too much of a child to have any ideas on what was passing; and had it depended on him, she must have gone home in an agony of ignorance on the cause of her cousin's trouble, but louis came with them to the station, and contrived to say to her while walking up and down the platform, 'her father is bitter against me. he has sent for her, and she is going!' clara looked mutely in his face, with a sort of inquiring dismay. 'you'll hear all about it when my father has told aunt kitty,' said louis. 'clara,'--he paused, and spoke lower--'tell her i see what is right now; tell her to--to pray for me, that i may not be talked into tampering with my conscience or with hers. don't let it dwell on you or on my aunt,' he added, cheerfully. 'no, it won't; you will be thinking of jem and isabel.' and as his father came up, his last words were, in his own bright tone, 'tell granny from me that giraffes ought always to be seen by gaslight.' clara's countenance returned him a look of sorrowful reproach, for thinking her capable of being amused when he was in distress; and she sat in silent musings all the way home--pondering over his words, speculating on his future, wondering what mary felt, and becoming blunt and almost angry, when her grave escort in the opposite corner consulted civility by addressing some indifferent remark to her, as if, she said to herself, 'she were no better than a stuffed giraffe, and knew and cared nothing about anybody!' he might have guessed that she understood something by the sudden way in which she curtailed her grandmother's rapturous and affectionate inquiries about the wedding, ran upstairs on the plea of taking off her bonnet, and appeared no more till he had gone home; when, coming down, she found granny, with tearful eyes, lamenting that mr. ponsonby was so harsh and unkind, and fully possessed with the rational view which her nephew had been impressing on her. 'ha!' said clara, 'that is what louis meant. i'll tell you what, granny, lord ormersfield never knew in his life what was right, half as well as louis does. i wish he would let him alone. if mary is good enough for him, she will go out and wait till her father comes round. if she is not, she won't; and lord ormersfield has no business to tease her.' 'then you would like her to go out?' said mrs. frost. 'i like anything that makes louis happy. i thought it would have been delightful to have him married--one could be so much more at ormersfield, and mary would be so nice; but as to their being over-persuaded, and thinking themselves half wrong! why, they would never be happy in their lives; and louis would be always half-asleep or half mad, to save himself the trouble of thinking. but he'll never do it!' on the saturday morning mary's healthy and vigorous spirit had quite resumed its tone. the worst was over when she had inflicted the stroke on louis, and seen him ready to support instead of adding to her distress. he found her pale and sorrowful, but calm, collected, and ready for exertion. by tacit consent, they avoided all discussion of the terms on which they were to stand. greatly touched by her consideration for him on the wedding-day, he would not torture her with pleadings, and was only too grateful for every service that he was allowed to render her without protest, as still her chief and most natural dependence. she did not scruple to allow him to assist her; she understood the gratification to him, and it was only too sweet to her to be still his object. she could trust him not to presume, his approval made her almost happy; and yet it was hard that his very patience and acquiescence should endear him so much as to render the parting so much the more painful. the day was spent in business. he facilitated much that would have been arduous for two solitary women, and did little all day but go about for mary, fulfilling the commissions which her father had sent home; and though he did it with a sore heart, it was still a privilege to be at work for mary. rigid as miss ponsonby was, she began to be touched. there was a doubt as to his admission when he came on sunday morning--'mistress saw no one on sunday,' but when his name was carried in, miss ponsonby could not withstand mary's face. she took care to tell him her rule; but that, considering the circumstances, she had made an exception in his favour, on the understanding that nothing was to break in upon the observance of the sabbath. louis bent his head, with the heartfelt answer that he was but too glad to be permitted to go to church once more with mary. aunt melicent's sunday was not quite their own sunday, but all that they could desire was to be quietly together, and restricted from all those agitating topics and arrangements. it was a day of rest, and they valued it accordingly. in fact, miss ponsonby found the young lord so good and inoffensive, that she broke her morning's resolution, invited him to partake of the cold dinner, let him go to church with them again in the evening, and remain to tea; and when he took leave, she expressed such surprised admiration at his having come and gone on his own feet, his church-going, and his conduct generally, that mary could not help suspecting that her good aunt had supposed that he had never heard of the fourth commandment. miss ponsonby was one of the many good women given to hard judgments on slight grounds, and to sudden reactions still more violent; and the sight of lord fitzjocelyn spending a quiet, respectable sunday, had such an effect on her, that she transgressed her own mandate, and broached 'the distressing subject.' 'mary, my dear, i suppose this young gentleman is an improved character?' 'he is always improving,' said mary. 'i mean, that an important change must have taken place since i understood you to say you had refused him. i thought you acted most properly then; and, as i see him now, i think you equally right in accepting him.' 'he was very much what he is now,' said mary. 'then it was from no doubt of his being a serious character?' 'none whatever,' said mary, emphatically. 'well, my dear, i must confess his appearance, his family, and your refusal, misled me. i fear i did him great injustice.' a silence, and then miss ponsonby said, 'after all, my dear, though i thought quite otherwise at first, i do believe that, considering what the youth is, and how much attached he seems, you might safely continue the engagement.' mary's heart glowed to her aunt for having been thus conquered by louis--she who, three nights back, had been so severely incredulous, so deeply disappointed in her niece for having been deluded into endurance of him. but her resolution was fixed. 'it would not be right,' she said; 'his father would not allow it. there is so little chance of papa's relenting, or of my coming home, that it would be wrong to keep him in suspense. he had better turn his thoughts elsewhere while he is young enough to begin again.' 'it might save him from marrying some mere fine lady.' 'that will never be, whatever woman he chooses will--' she could not go on, but presently cleared her voice--'no; i should like to leave him quite free. i was less his choice than his father's; and, though i thought we should have been very happy, it does not seem to be the leading of heaven. i am so far his inferior in cleverness, and everything attractive, and have been made so like his elder sister, that it might not have been best for him. i want him to feel that, in beginning afresh, he is doing me no injury; and then in time, whenever i come home, it may be such a friendship as there was between our elders. that is what i try to look forward to,--no, i don't think i look forward to anything. good night, aunt melicent--i am so glad you like him!' in this mind mary met lord ormersfield. the delay had been an advantage, for he was less irritated, and she had regained self-possession. her passage had been taken, and this was an argument that told on the earl, though he refused to call it irrevocable. he found that there was no staggering her on the score of the life that awaited her; she knew more on that subject than he did, had confidence in her father, and no dread of rosita; and she was too much ashamed and grieved at the former effect of his persuasions to attend to any more of a like description. he found her sense of duty more stubborn than he had anticipated, and soon had no more to say. she might carry it too far; but the principle was sound, and a father could not well controvert it. he had designed the rupture with louis as a penalty to drive her into his measures; but he could not so propound it, and was wondering how to bring it in, when mary relieved him by beginning herself, and stating the grounds with such sensible, unselfish, almost motherly care of louis's happiness, that he was more unwilling than ever to let him resign her, and was on the point of begging her to re-consider, and let louis wait for ever rather than lose her. but he knew they ought not to be bound, under such uncertainties, and his conviction was too strong to give way to emotion. he thanked her, and praised her with unwonted agitation, and regretted more than ever; and so they closed the conference by deciding that, unless mr. ponsonby should be induced to relent by his daughter's representations on her arrival, mary and louis must consider themselves as mutually released. that loophole--forlorn, most forlorn hope, as they knew it to be--was an infinite solace to the young people, by sparing them a formal parting, and permitting them still to feel that they belonged to each other. if he began declaring that nothing would ever make him feel disconnected with mary, he was told that it was not time to think of that, and they must not waste their time. and once mary reminded him how much worse it would be if they had been separated by a quarrel. 'anger might give one spirits,' he said, smiling mournfully. 'at the time; but think what it would be not to be able to remember happy times without remorse.' 'then you do mean to recollect, mary?' 'i trust to bring myself to remember rightly and wisely. i shall try to set it for a reward for myself to cure me of repinings,' said mary, looking into his face, as if the remembrance of it must bring cheerfulness and refreshment. 'and when shall i not think, mary! when i leave off work, i shall want you for a companion; when i go to work, the thought must stir me up. your judgment must try my own.' 'oh, hush, louis! this is not good. be yourself, and be more than yourself, and only think of the past as a time when we had a great deal of pleasantness, and you did me much good.' 'did i?' 'yes; i see it now i am with aunt melicent. you put so many more thoughts in my head, and showed me that so much more was good and wholesome than i used to fancy. dear mamma once said you were educating me; and i hope to go on, and not let your lessons waste away.' 'nay, mary, you won good everywhere. if you had not been mary, i might have made you a great goose. but you taught me all the perseverance i ever had. and oh! mary, i don't wonder you do not trust it.' 'there is the forbidden subject,' said mary, firmly. that was the sort of conversation into which they fell now and then during those last days of busy sadness. truly it could have been worse. suffering by their own fault would have rent them asunder more harshly, and louis's freedom from all fierceness and violence softened all ineffably to mary. james frost's letter of fiery indignation, almost of denunciation, made her thankful that he was not the party concerned; and louis made her smile at isabel's copy of all his sentiments in ladylike phrases. the last day came. louis would not be denied seeing mary on board the valdivia; and, in spite of all miss ponsonby's horror of railways, he persuaded her to trust herself under his care to liverpool. she augured great things from the letter which she had entrusted to mary, and in which she had spoken of lord fitzjocelyn in the highest terms her vocabulary could furnish. they parted bravely. spectators hindered all display of feeling, and no one cried, except miss ponsonby. 'good-bye, louis; i will not forget your messages to tom madison. my love to your father and aunt catharine.' 'good-bye, mary; i shall see tom and chimborazo yet.' chapter v. the new world. still onward, as to southern skies, we spread our sails, new stars arise, new lights upon the glancing tide, fresh hues where pearl and coral hide: what are they all but tokens true of grace for ever fresh and new! prayers for emigrants. there are some days in the early year, devoid indeed of spring brilliance, but full of soft, heavy, steaming fragrance, pervading the grey air with sweet odours, and fostering the growth of tender bud and fragile stem with an unseen influence, more mild and kindly than even the smiling sunbeam or the gushing shower. 'a growing day,' as the country-people term such genial, gentle weather, might not be without analogy to the brief betrothal of louis and mary. subdued and anxious, there had been little of the ordinary light of joy, hope, or gaiety, and their pleasures had been less their own than in preparing the happiness of their two friends. it was a time such as to be more sweet in memory than it was in the present; and the shade which had hung over it, the self-restraint and the forbearance which it had elicited, had unconsciously conduced to the development of the characters of both, preparing them to endure the parting far more effectually than unmixed enjoyment could have done. the check upon louis's love of trifling, the restraint on his spirits, the being thrown back on his own judgment when he wanted to lean upon mary, had given him a habit of controlling his boyish ways. it was a call to train himself in manliness and self-reliance. it changed him from the unstable reed he once had been, and helped him to take one steady and consistent view of the trial required of him and of mary, and then to act upon it resolutely and submissively. with mary gone, he cared little what became of him until her letters could arrive; and his father, with more attention to his supposed benefit than to his wishes, carried him at once, without returning home, to a round of visits among all his acquaintance most likely to furnish a distracting amount of christmas gaieties. in the midst of these, there occurred a vacancy in the representation of a borough chiefly under the influence of sir miles oakstead; and, as it was considered expedient that he should be brought into parliament, his father repaired with him at once to oakstead, and involved him in all the business of the election. on his success, he went with his father to london for the session, and this was all that his friends at northwold knew of him. he wrote hurried notes to james or to mr. holdsworth on necessary affairs connected with his farm and improvements, mentioning facts instead of feelings, and promising to write to aunt catharine when he should have time; but the time did not seem to come, and it was easy to believe that his passiveness of will, increased by the recent stroke, had caused him to be hurried into a condition of involuntary practical activity. mary, meanwhile, was retracing her voyage, in the lull of spirits which, after long straining, had nothing to do but to wait in patience, bracing themselves for a fresh trial. never suffering herself, at sea, her first feelings, after the final wrench of parting, were interrupted by the necessity of attending to her friend, a young mother, with children enough to require all the services that the indefatigable mary could perform. if mrs. willis always averred that she never could have gone through the voyage without miss ponsonby, mary felt, in return, that the little fretful boy and girl, who would never let her sit and think, except when both were asleep, had been no small blessing to her. yet mary was not so much absorbed and satisfied with the visible and practical as had once been the case. the growth had not been all on louis's side. if her steadfast spirit had strengthened his wavering resolution, the intercourse and sympathy with him had opened and unfolded many a perception and quality in her, which had been as tightly and hardly cased up as leaf-buds in their gummy envelopes. a wider range had been given to her thoughts; there was a swelling of heart, a vividness of sensation, such as she had not known in earlier times; she had been taught the mystery of creation, the strange connexion with the unseen, and even with her fellow-men. beyond the ordinary practical kind offices, for which she had been always ready, there was now mingled something of louis's more comprehensive spirit of questioning what would do them good, and drawing food for reflection from their diverse ways. she was sensible of the change again and again, when sights recurred which once had only spoken to her eye. that luminous sea, sparkling like floods of stars, had been little more than 'how pretty! how funny!' at her first voyage. now, it was not only 'how louis would admire it!' but 'how profusely, how gloriously has the creator spread the globe with mysterious beauty! how marvellously has he caused his creatures to hold forth this light, to attract others to their needful food!' and the furrow of fire left by their vessel's wake spoke to her of that path 'like a shining light, shining more and more unto the perfect day.' if with it came the remembrance of his vision of the threads of light, it was not a recollection which would lead to repining. and when at cape horn, a mighty ice mountain drifted within view, spired, pinnacled, encrusted with whiteness, rivalled only by the glory of the summer cloud, caverned here and there into hollows of sapphire blue, too deeply dazzling to behold, or rising into peaks of clear, hard, chill green; the wild fantastic points sometimes glimmering with fragments of the rainbow arch; the rich variety, endless beyond measure in form and colouring, and not only magnificent and terrible in the whole mass, but lovely beyond imagination in each crystal too minute for the eye. mary had once, on a like occasion, only said, 'it was very cold;' and looked to see whether the captain expected the monster to bear down on the ship. but the present iceberg put her in mind of the sublime aspirations which gothic cathedrals seem as if they would fain embody. and then, she thought of the marvellous interminable waste of beauty of those untrodden regions, whence yonder enormous iceberg was but a small fragment--a petty messenger--regions unseen by human eye--beauty untouched by human hand-the glory, the sameness, yet the infinite variety of perfect purity. did it not seem, with all the associations of cold, of peril, of dreariness, to be a visible token that indeed he who fashioned it could prepare 'good things past man's understanding!' it was well for mary that southern constellations, snowy, white-winged albatross, leaping flying-fish, and white-capped mountain-coast, had been joined in her mind with something higher, deeper, and less personal, or their recurrence would have brought her nothing but pain unmitigated in the contrast with the time when first she had beheld them six years ago. then she was full of hope and eager ardour to arrive, longing for the parental presence of which she had so long been deprived, hailing every novel scene as a proof that she was nearer home, and without the anticipation of one cloud, only expecting to be loved, to love, and to be useful. and now, all fond illusions as to her father had been snatched away, her very love for him rendering the perception doubly cruel; her mother, her precious mother, far away in ormersfield churchyard--her life probably shortened by his harshness--her place occupied by a young girl, differing in language, in church, in everything--mary's own pardon uncertain, after all her sacrifices--a sense of having deeply offended, hung upon her; and her heart was so entirely in england, that had her home been perfect, her voyage must still have been a cruel effort. that one anticipation of being set at rest by her father's forgiveness, and the forlorn despairing hope of his relenting towards louis, were all she dared to dwell on; and when mrs. willis counted the days till she could arrive and meet her husband, poor mary felt as if, but for these two chances of comfort, she could gladly have prolonged the voyage for the rest of her life. but one burning tropical noon, the valdivia was entering callao harbour, and mary, sick and faint at heart, was arraying herself in a coloured dress, lest her mourning should seem to upbraid her father. the voyage was over, the ship was anchored, boats were coming offshore, the luggage was being hoisted out of the hold, the passengers were congregated on deck, eager to land, some gazing with curious and enterprising eyes on the new country, others scanning every boat in hopes of meeting a familiar face. mrs. willis stood trembling with hope, excitement, and the strange dread often rushing in upon the last moment of expectation. she clung to mary for support, and once said-- 'oh, miss ponsonby, how composed you are!' mary's feelings were too deep--too much concentrated for trembling. she calmed and soothed the wife's sudden fright, lest 'something should have happened to george;' and she even smiled when the children's scream of ecstacy infected their mother, when the papa and uncle they had been watching for with straining eyes proved to be standing on deck close beside them. mary cast her eyes round, and saw nothing of her own. she stood apart, while the willis family were in all the rapture of the meeting; she saw them moving off, too happy and sufficient for themselves even to remember her. she had a dull, heavy sensation that she must bear all, and this was the beginning; and she was about to begin her arrangements for her dreary landing, when mrs. willis's brother, mr. ward, turned back. he was a middle-aged merchant, whom her mother had much liked and esteemed, and there was something cheering in his frank, hearty greeting, and satisfaction in seeing her. it was more like a welcome, and it brought the willises back, shocked at having forgotten her in the selfishness of their own joy; but they had made sure that she had been met. mr. ward did not think that she was expected by the valdivia; mr. ponsonby had not mentioned it as likely. so they were all seated in the boat, with the black rowers; and while the willises fondled their children, and exchanged home-news, mr. ward sat by mary, and spoke to her kindly, not openly referring to the state of her home, but showing a warmth and consideration which evinced much delicate sympathy. they all drove together in the willises' carriage up the sloping road from callao to lima, and mary heard astonishment, such as she had once felt, breaking out in screams from the children at the sight of omnibuses filled with gaily-dressed negroes, and brown horsewomen in panama hats and lace-edged trousers careering down the road. but then, her father had come and fetched her from on board, and that dear mamma was waiting in the carriage! they entered the old walled town when twilight had already closed in, and mrs. willis was anxious to take her tired little ones home at once. they were set down at their own door; but mr. ward, with protecting anxious kindness, insisted on seeing miss ponsonby safely home before he would join them. as they drove through the dark streets, mary heard a little restless movement, betraying some embarrassment; and at last, with an evident desire of reassuring her, he said, 'senora rosita is thought very pleasing and engaging;' and then, as if willing to change the subject, he hastily added, 'i suppose you did not speak the pizarro?' 'no.' 'she has sailed about three weeks. she takes home your cousin, mr. dynevor.' mary cried out with surprise. 'i thought him a complete fixture, but he is gone home for a year. it seems his family property was in the market, and he was anxious to secure it.' 'how glad his mother will be!' was all mary could say, as there rushed over her the thought of the wonderful changes this would make in dynevor terrace. her first feeling was that she must tell louis; her second, that two oceans were between them; and then she thought of aunt catharine having lived, after all, to see her son. she had forgotten to expect the turn when the carriage wheeled under the arched entry of her father's house. all was gloom and stillness, except where a little light shone in a sort of porter's lodge upon the eager negro features of two blacks, with much gesticulation, playing at dice. they came out hastily at the sound of the carriage; and as mr. ward handed out mary, and inquired for mr. ponsonby, she recognised and addressed the white-woolled old xavier, the mayor domo. poor old xavier! often had she hunted and teased him, and tried to make him understand 'cosas de inglaterra,' and to make him cease from his beloved dice; but no sooner did he see her face than, with a cry of joy, 'la senorita maria! la senorita maria!' down he went upon his knees, and began kissing the hem of her dress. all the rest of the negro establishment came round, capering and chattering spanish; and, in the confusion, mary could not get her question heard--where was her father? and xavier's vehement threats and commands to the others to be silent, did not produce a calm. at last, bearing a light, there came forward a faded, sallow dame, with a candle in her hand, who might have sat for the picture of the duena rodriguez, and at her appearance the negroes subsided. she was an addition to the establishment since mary's departure; but in her might be easily recognised the tia, the individual who in limenian households holds a position between companion and housekeeper. she introduced herself by the lugubrious appellation of senora dolores, and, receiving mary with obsequious courtesy, explained that the senor and senora were at a tertulia, or evening party. she lighted mary and mr. ward into the quadra; and there mr. ward, shaking hands with her as if he would thereby compensate for all that was wanting in her welcome, promised to go and inform her father of her arrival. mary stood in the large dark room, with the soft matted floor, and the windows high up near the carved timbered ceiling, the single lamp, burning in rum, casting a dim gleam over the well-known furniture, by which her mother had striven to give an english appearance to the room. it was very dreary, and she would have given the world to be alone with her throbbing head, her dull heartache, and the weariness of spirits over-long wound up for the meeting; but her own apartment could be no refuge until it had been cleansed and made ready, and dolores and xavier were persecuting her every moment with their hospitality and their inquiries. then came a quick, manly tread, and for a moment her heart almost seemed to stand still, in the belief that it was her father; but it was only robson, hurrying in to offer his services and apologies. perhaps he was the very last person she could bear to see, feeling, as she did, that if he had been more explicit all the offence would have been spared. he was so much aware of all family matters, and was accustomed to so much confidence from her father, that she could not believe him unconscious; and there was something hateful to her in the plausible frankness and deferential familiarity of his manners, as, brushing up his sandy hair upon his forehead, he poured forth explanations that mr. ponsonby would be delighted, but grieved that no one had met her--valdivia not expected so soon--not anticipated the pleasure--if they had imagined that miss ponsonby was a passenger-- 'my father desired that i would come out by her,' said mary. 'ay, true--so he informed me; but since later intelligence'--and he cast a glance at mary, to judge how much further to go; but meeting with nothing but severity, he covered the impertinence by saying, 'in fact, though the valdivia was mentioned, and mrs. willis, mr. ponsonby had reason to suppose you would not receive his letters in time to avail yourself of the escort.' 'i did so, however,' said mary, coldly. 'most gratifying. mr. and mrs. ponsonby will be highly gratified. in fact, miss ponsonby, i must confess that was a most unfortunate blunder of mine last august. i should not have fallen into the error had i not been so long absent at guayaquil that i had had no opportunity of judging of the amiable lady; and i will own to much natural surprise and some indignation, before i had had the pleasure of personal acquaintance with the charms and the graces--hem! in effect, it was a step that no one could have recommended; and when your noble relative put it to me in so many words whether i would counsel your continuing your journey, i could not take it on me to urge a measure so painful to your feelings, unaware as i was then of the amiable qualities of the lady who occupies the situation of the highly beloved and esteemed--' mary could not bear to hear her mother's name in his mouth, so she cut him short by saying, 'i suppose you thought you acted for the best, mr. robson; it was very unfortunate, but it cannot be helped. pray can you tell me where the lad madison is?' she added, resolved to show him that she would not discuss these matters with him; 'i have a parcel for him.' 'he is at the san benito mine, miss ponsonby.' 'how does he go on?' 'well--i may say very well, allowing for inexperience. he appears a steady, intelligent lad, and i have no doubt will answer the purpose well.' there was one gratification for mary, at least, in the pleasure this would afford at home; but robson continued making conversation about mr. dynevor's visit to england, and the quantity of work this temporary absence entailed on him; and then on the surprise it would be to his patron to find her, and senora rosita's interest in her, and the numerous gaieties of the bride, and the admiration she excited, and his own desire to be useful. this afforded mary an opportunity for getting rid of him at last, by sending him to make arrangements for her baggage to be sent from callao the next morning. ten minutes more, half spent in conquering her disgust, half in sick anticipation, and other feet were crossing the matted sala, the curtain over the doorway was drawn aside, and there stood her father, and a lady, all white and diamonds, by his side. he held out his arms, mary fell into them, and it was the same kind rough kiss which had greeted her six years back. it seemed to be forgiveness, consolation, strength, all at once; and their words mingled--'papa, you forgive me'--'mary, my good girl, i did not think they would have let you come back to me. this was but a dreary coming home for you, my dear.' and then, instantly changing his language to spanish, he added, appealing to his wife, that had they guessed she was on board, they would have come to meet her. rosita replied earnestly to that effect, and warmly embraced mary, pitying her for such an arrival, and hoping that dolores had made her comfortable. the rest of the conversation was carried on in the same tongue. rosita was much what mary had expected--of a beautiful figure, with fine eyes, and splendid raven hair, but without much feature or expression. she looked almost like a dream to-night, however, with her snowy robes, and the diamonds sparkling with their dewdrop flashes in her hair and on her arms, with the fitful light caught from the insufficient candles. all she ventured to say had a timid gracefulness and simplicity that were very winning; and her husband glanced more than once to see if she were not gaining upon his daughter; and so in truth she was, personally, though it was exceedingly painful to see her where mary had been used to see that dear suffering face; and it was impossible not to feel the contrast with her father as painfully incongruous. mr. ponsonby was a large man, with the jovial manner of one never accustomed to self-restraint; good birth and breeding making him still a gentleman, in spite of his loud voice and the traces of self-indulgence. he was ruddy and bronzed, and his eyebrows and hair looked as if touched by hoar frost; altogether as dissimilar a partner as could be devised for the slender girlish being by his side. after a little spanish conversation, all kind on his aide, and thus infinitely relieving mary, they parted for the night. she laid before him the packet of letters, which she had held all this time as the last link to louis, and sought his eye as she did so with a look of appeal; but he carefully averted his glance, and she could read nothing. weary as she was, mary heard again and again, through her unglazed windows, the watchman's musical cry of 'ave maria purisima, las--es temblado!' 'viva peru y sereno!' and chid herself for foolish anticipations that louis would hear and admire all the strange sounds of the new world. the kindness of her welcome gave her a little hope; and she went over and over again her own part of the discussion which she expected, almost persuading herself, that louis's own conduct and her aunt's testimony must win the day. she need not have spent so many hours in preparation for the morning. she was up early, in hopes of seeing her father before he went to his office, but he was gone for a ride. the english breakfast, which had been established, much to his content, by her own exertions, had quite vanished, each of the family had a cup of chocolate in private, and there was no meeting till, late in the morning, rosita sauntered into her room, embraced her, made inquiries as to her rest, informed her that she was going to the opera that night, and begged her to accompany her. to appear in public with rosita was the tribute for which mary had come out, so she readily agreed; and thereupon the senora digressed into the subject of dress, and required of mary a display of all her robes, and an account of the newest fashions of the english ladies. it was all with such innocent, earnest pleasure, that mary could not be annoyed, and good-naturedly made all her disappointing display. the midday meal brought her father--still kind and affectionate, but never dropping the spanish, nor manifesting any consciousness of her letters. she had hopes of the period allotted to the siesta, to which custom, in old days, she had never acceded, but had always spent the interval on any special occupation--above all, to writing for him; but he went off without any notice of her, and she was in no condition to dispense with the repose, for her frame was tired out, though her hopes and fears could not even let her dreams rest. then came a drive with rosita, resplendent in french millinery, then supper; then the opera, to which her father accompanied them, still without a word. another day was nearly the same, only that this time she had to do her best to explain the newest fashions in behalf of a dress of rosita's, then being made, and in the evening to go to a party at the consul's, where she met mr. ward, and had some talk which she might have enjoyed but for her suspense. on the third, rosita was made happy by unpacking an elegant little black papier mache table, a present from miss ponsonby. good melicent! were ever two sisters-in-law more unlike? but lord ormersfield had done rosita and her husband good service. if aunt melicent had first learned the real facts, her wrath would have been extreme--a mere child, a foreigner, a roman catholic, a nun! her horror would have known no bounds, and she would, perhaps, have broken with her brother forever. but by making the newly-married pair victims of injustice, the earl had made the reality a relief, and melicent had written civilly to her brother, and a sisterly sort of stiff letter to the bride--of which the limenian could not understand one word; so that mary had to render it all into spanish, even to her good aunt's hopes that rosita would be kind to her, and use all her influence in favour of her happiness. whether rosita would have comprehended this without mary's blushes might be questioned, but she did say, 'ah! yes! you were to have married the visconde, were you not? el senor was so angry! did his father forbid when your father refused your portion?' 'oh no, he would receive me if i brought nothing.' 'and you wish to marry?' said rosita. 'if my father would only consent.' 'but why did you come here then?' said rosita, opening her large eyes. 'my father commanded me.' 'england is a long way off,' said rosita, languidly, 'he could not have reached you there. you would have been a great lady and noble! how could you come away, if he would still have you?' 'because it would have been wrong. we could not have been happy in disobeying my father.' 'ah! but you could have done penance. i had many penances to do for quitting my convent; padre inigo was very severe, but they are over at last, and i am free for giving alms twice a week, and the sisters have forgiven me, and send me so many silver flowers and dulces; i will show them to you some day. could you not have done penance?' 'i am afraid not.' 'ah! i forgot you were a heretic, poor thing! how inconvenient! and so you will not come with me to the bull-fight next sunday?' such being rosita's ideas on the point, mary gave up much hope in her influence, and tried what a good-humoured announcement of her re-establishment of the english breakfast would effect towards bringing her father to a tete-a-tete, but he never came near it. the waiting in silence was miserable enough for herself, but she would have continued to bear it except for the injustice to louis, who must not be kept in suspense. the departure of the next english mail should be the limit of her endurance, and after a day of watching, she finally went up to her father when he would have bidden her good night, and said, in english, 'papa, if you please, i must speak to you.' 'so you shall, my dear, but we are all tired; we must have our night's rest.' 'no, papa, it must be to-night, if you please. it is necessary for me to know before to-morrow how i am to write to lord fitzjocelyn.' 'pshaw! mary, i've settled that young fellow!' 'papa, i don't think you know--' 'i've written him a civil answer, if that's what you mean, much civiller than he or his father deserve,' he said, speaking loud, and trying to fling away from her, but she stood her ground, and spoke calmly and steadily, though her heart beat violently. 'you do not understand the true state of the case, papa; and without doing so, you cannot write such an answer as they deserve.' 'i know this, that old ormersfield has been the curse of my life!' and out poured one of those torrents of fierce passion which had been slowly but surely the death of his wife. mary had never heard one in the full tide before, but she stood firm; there were none of the tears, auch as, in her mother, had been wont to exasperate him further, but with pale cheeks, compressed lips, and hands locked together, her heart was one silent entreaty that it might be forgiven him above. thus she stood while the storm of anger raged, and when at last it had exhausted itself, he said, in a lower voice, 'and so you are still taken with this fellow's son, this young puppy! i thought you had more spirit and sense, mary, or i never would have trusted you among them.' 'there are very few people in this world half so good or so right-minded as fitzjocelyn,' said mary, earnestly and deliberately. 'it was he who bade me come to you, well knowing that we could never be happy without your consent.' 'oh! he did so, did he? he is deeper than i thought would not risk your fortune. why, mary, i did not think a girl of your sense could be so taken in! it is transparent, i tell you. they get you there, flatter you up with their attentions, but when they find you too wise for them the first time, off goes this youth to miss conway, finds her a bad speculation, no heiress at all, and disposes of her to his cousin. i wonder if he'll find old dynevor grateful. meanwhile the old lord must needs come out here, finds our gains a better prize than he expected, trumps up this story at valparaiso, takes you in, and brings you home to this precious youth. and you, and your aunt too, are ready to believe it all! i always knew that women were fools whenever a title came in their way, i see it more than ever now, since you and melicent are both like the rest of 'em.' 'papa,' said mary, again rallying her firmness, 'we have found sadly how easy it is to be deceived when one is not on the spot. will you listen to me, who saw it all?' 'no, mary, i will not hear the nonsense they have put into your head, my poor girl. no! i tell you it is of no use! it is my resolute purpose that not one farthing of mine shall go to patch up the broken-down ormersfield property! the man is my enemy, and has sown dissension in my family from the first moment i connected myself with him. i'll never see my daughter his son's wife. i wonder he had the impudence to propose it! i shall think you lost to all feeling for your father, if you say another word about it.' 'very well,' said mary, with steady submission. 'then i will only write one more letter to fitzjocelyn, and tell him that your objections are insuperable, and that he must think of it no more.' 'that's right, mary! you are a good girl, after all! you'll stand by your father, in spite of all the house of peers! i'm glad to see you hold up your head so bravely. so you did fancy being a viscountess, did you! but it is not a heartbreaking matter either, my girl!' this was too much for mary, and when her father would have kissed her, she laid her head on his shoulder and wept silently but bitterly. 'ha! what's all this? why, you don't pretend to care for a young mercenary scamp like that?' 'he is the noblest, most generous, most disinterested man i ever knew!' said mary, standing apart, and speaking clearly. 'i give him up because--you command me, father, but i will not hear him spoken of unjustly.' 'ha! ha! so long as you give him up, we won't quarrel. he shall be all that, and more too, if you like; and we'll never fight over the matter again, since i have you safe back, my child.' 'i do not mean to mention him again,' said mary; 'i wish to obey you.' 'then there's an end of the matter. you'll get over it, my girl, and we'll find some honest man worth two of your niggardly, proud-spirited earls. there, i know you are a reasonable girl that can be silent, and not go on teasing. so, mary, you may have a cup of tea for me to-morrow in the sala, like old times. goodnight, my dear.' waiting upon himself! that was the reward that mr. ponsonby held out to his daughter for crushing her first love! but it was a reward. anything that drew her father nearer to her was received with gratitude by mary, and the words of kindness in some degree softened the blow. she had never had much hope, though now she found it had been more than she had been willing to believe; and even now she could not absolutely cease to entertain some hopes of the results of oliver's return, nor silence one lingering fancy that louis might yet wait unbound; although she told herself of his vacillation between herself and isabel, of his father's influence, and of the certainty that he would see many more worthy of his love than herself. not any one who could love him so well--oh no! but when mary found her thoughts taking this turn, she rose up as she lay, clasped her hands together, and repeated half aloud again and again, 'be thou my all!' and by the morning, though mary's cheek was very white, and her eyes sunken for want of sleep, she had a cheerful word for her father, and a smile, the very sight of which would have gone to the heart of any one of those from whom he had cut her off. then she wrote her letters. it was not so hard to make this final severance as it had been to watch louis's face, and think of the pain she had to inflict. many a time had she weighed each phrase she set down, so that it might offend neither against sincerity nor resignation, and yet be soothing and consoling. some would have thought her letter stiff and laboured, but she had learned to believe that a grave and careful style befitted a serious occasion, and would have thought incoherency childish or affected. she released him entirely from his engagement, entreating him not to rebel against the decision, but to join her in thankfulness that no shade need be cast over the remembrance of the happy hours spent together; and begging him not to grieve, since she had, after the first pain, been able to acquiesce in the belief that the separation might conduce to his happiness; and she should always regard him as one of those most near and dear to her, and rejoice in whatever was for his welfare, glad that his heart was still young enough to form new ties. 'forgive me for speaking thus,' she added; 'i know that it may wound you now, but there may come a time when it may make you feel more at ease and unfettered; and i could not endure to imagine that the affection which you brought yourself to lavish on one so unworthy, should stand in the way of your happiness for life.' she desired him to make no answer, but to consider this as the final dissolution: and she concluded by all that she thought would prove most consoling, as to the present state of affairs with her; and with a few affectionate words, to show that he was still a great deal to her, though everything he might not be. this done, mary faced her life in the new world. she had to form her habits for herself, for her importance in the house was gone; but she went to work resolutely, and, lonely as she was, she had far more resources than if she had never been at ormersfield. she had many hours to herself, and she unpacked her books, and set herself courses of study, to which louis had opened the door. she unveiled her eyes to natural history, and did not find flower or butterfly unsoothing. she undertook the not very hopeful task of teaching a tiny negro imp, who answered the purpose of a bell, to read and work; and she was persevering in her efforts to get xavier and dolores to make her father comfortable. her father was decidedly glad of her company. he liked conversation, and enjoyed the morning meeting, to which mr. ward was often a welcome addition, delighting in anything so english, and finding miss ponsonby much improved by her introduction to english society. sometimes mary wrote for her father, and now and then was consulted; and she was always grateful for whatever made her feel herself of use. she was on kind and friendly terms with rosita, but they did not become more intimate than at first. the senora was swinging in a hammock half-asleep, with a cigarette between her lips, all the morning; and when she emerged from this torpid state, in a splendid toilette, she had too many more congenial friends often to need her step-daughter in her visits, her expeditions to lotteries, and her calls on her old friends the nuns. on a fast-day, or any other occasion that kept her at home, she either arranged her jewels, discussed her dresses, or had some lively chatter, which she called learning english. she coaxed, fondled, and domineered prettily over mr. ponsonby; and he looked on amused, gratified her caprices, caressed her, and seemed to regard her as a pretty pet and plaything. chapter vi. the two pendragons. the red dragon and the white, hard together gan they smite, with mouth, paw, and tail, between hem was full hard batail. the history of merlin. spring was on the borders of summer, when one afternoon, as clara sat writing a note in the drawing-room, she heard a tap at the door of the little sitting-room, and springing to open it, she beheld a welcome sight. 'louis! how glad i am! where do you come from?' 'last from the station,' said louis. 'what makes you knock at that door, now the drawing-room is alive?' 'i could not venture on an unceremonious invasion of mrs. james frost's territory.' 'you'll find no distinction of territory here,' laughed clara. 'it was a fiction that we were to live in separate rooms, like naughty children. does not the drawing-room look nice?' 'as much improved as the inhabitant. where are the other natives?' 'granny and isabel are walking, and will end by picking up jem coming out of school. we used to wait for him so often, that at last he said we should be laughed at, so there's a law against it which no one dares to transgress but granny.' 'so i conclude that you are a happy family.' 'after all, it was worth spending two years at school to enjoy properly the having it over.' 'i give jem credit for having secured a first-rate governess for you.' 'that she is! why, with her i really do like reading and drawing all the morning! i almost believe that some day i shall wake up and find myself an accomplished young lady! and, louis, have you read the last western magazine?' 'i have read very little for sport lately.' 'then i must tell you. jem was bemoaning himself about having nothing to give to the new blind asylum, and the next evening isabel brought out the prettiest little manuscript book, tied with blue ribbon, and told him to do as he pleased with it. it was a charming account of her expedition to the hebrides, written out for her sisters, without a notion of anything further; but jem sent it to this magazine, and it is accepted, and the first part is out. she will have quite a sum for it, and all is to go to the blind asylum!' 'capital!--let me take it home to night, clara, and i will stand an examination on it to-morrow.' 'we ask her whether she projects a sketch of the paris revolution,' said clara, laughing. 'she has a famous heap of manuscripts in her desk, and one long story about a sir roland, who had his name before she knew jem, but it is all unfinished, she tore out a great many pages, and has to make a new finish; and i am afraid the poor knight is going to die of a mortal wound at his lady's feet. isabel likes sad things best;--but oh! here they come, and i'm talking dreadful treason.' three more joyous-looking people could hardly have been found than those who entered the room, welcoming louis with delight, and asking what good wind had brought him. 'partly that inglewood is crying out for the master's eye,' said louis; 'and partly that my father fancied i looked fagged, and kindly let me run down for a holiday.' 'i am of his mind,' said mrs. frost, tenderly; 'there is an m.p. expression gathering on your brows, louis.' 'for you to dispel, aunt kitty. i told him you were the best dissipation, and virginia was of the same mind. isabel, she says dynevor terrace is the only place she ever wishes to see again.' 'do you often see virginia?' asked isabel. 'not unless i go early, and beg for her; and then she generally has some master. that last onset of accomplishments is serious!' 'yes,' said isabel, 'the sense of leisure and tranquillity here is marvellous!' 'not leisure in the sense of idleness,' said james. 'no,' said isabel; 'but formerly idle requirements thronged my time, and for nothing worth doing could i find leisure.' 'there is nothing more exacting than idle requirements,' said james. 'pray is clara accepting that invitation? come to dinner, louis, and give us an excuse.' 'no, he won't,' said mrs. frost, 'he will take my side. these young people want to cast off all their neighbours.' 'now, granny,' exclaimed james, 'have we not dutifully dined all round? did not isabel conduct clara to that ball? is it not hard to reproach us with sighing at an evening immolated at the shrine of the richardsons?' 'well, my dears, you must judge.' 'i am ready to do whatever you think right; i leave you to settle it,' said isabel, moving out of the room, that louis might be free for a more intimate conversation. 'now,' cried james, 'is it in the nature of things that she should live in such society as mrs. walby's and mrs. richardson's? people who call her mrs. james!' 'such a queen as she looks among them!' said clara. 'one comfort is, they don't like that,' said james. 'even mrs. calcott is not flattered by her precedence. i hope we shall soon be dropped out of their parties. as long as i do my duty by their sons, what right have they to impose the penance of their society on my wife? all the irksomeness of what she has left, and none of the compensations!' 'blissful solitude' said louis, 'thereto i leave you.' 'you are not going yet! you mean to dine here?' was the cry. 'my dear friends,' he said, holding up his hands, 'if you only knew how i long to have no one to speak to!' 'you crying out for silence!' exclaimed james. 'i am panting for what i have not had these five months--space for my thoughts to turn round.' 'surely you are at liberty to form your own habits!' said james. 'i am told so whenever my father sees me receive a note,' said louis, wearily; 'but i see that, habituated as he is to living alone, he is never really at ease unless i am in the way; so i make our hours agree as far as our respective treadmills permit; and though we do not speak much, i can never think in company.' 'don't you have your rides to yourself?' 'why, no. my father will never ride enough to do him good, unless he wants to do me good. people are all surprised to see him looking so well; the country lanes make him quite blooming.' 'but not you, my poor boy,' said his aunt; 'i am afraid it is a sad strain.' 'there now, aunt kitty, i am gone. i must have the pleasure of looking natural sometimes, without causing any vituperation of any one beyond seas.' 'you shall look just as you please if you will only stay. we are just going to dinner.' 'thank you, let me come to-morrow. i shall be better company when i have had my sulk out.' his aunt followed him to the stairs, and he turned to her, saying, anxiously, 'no letter?' she shook her head. 'it would be barely possible,' he said, 'but if it would only come while i am at home in peace!' 'ah! this is sadly trying!' said she, parting his hair on his brow as he stood some steps below her, and winning a sweet smile from him. 'all for the best,' he said. 'one thing may mitigate another. that political whirlpool might suck me in, if i had any heart or hopes for it. and, on the other hand, it would be very unwholesome to be left to my own inertness--to be as good for nothing as i feel.' 'my poor dear boy, you are very good about it. i wish you could have been spared.' 'i did not come to make you sad, aunt kitty,' he replied, smiling; 'no; i get some energy back when i remember that this may be a probation. her mother would not have thought me man enough, and that is what i have to work for. whether this end well or not, she is the leading star of my life.' and, with the renewal of spirit with which he had spoken, he pressed his aunt's hand, and ran down stairs. when he rode to northwold, the following afternoon, having spent the morning in walking over his fields, he overtook a most comfortable couple--james and isabel, returning from their holiday stroll, and louis, leaving his horse at the inn, and joining them, began to hear all their school affairs. james had thrown his whole heart into his work, had been making various reforms, introducing new studies, making a point of religious instruction, and meditating on a course of lectures on history, to be given in the evenings, the attendance to be voluntary, but a prize held out for proficiency. louis took up the subject eagerly, and isabel entered into the discussion with all her soul, and the grammar-school did indeed seem to be in a way to become something very superior in tone to anything northwold had formerly seen, engrossing as it did all the powers of a man of such ability, in the full vigour of youth. talking earnestly, the trio had reached the terrace, and james was unlatching the iron gate, when he interrupted himself in the midst of detailing his views on modern languages to say, 'no, i have nothing for you.' 'sir, i beg your pardon!' was the quick reply from a withered, small, but not ill-dressed old man, 'i only asked--' 'let the lady pass,' said james, peremptorily, wishing to save his wife from annoyance, 'it is of no use, i never look at petitions.' 'surely he is not a beggar!' said isabel, as he drew her on. 'you may be easy about him, my dear,' said james. 'he has laid hold of louis, who would swallow the whole spanish legion of impostors. he will be after us directly with a piteous story.' louis was after him, with a face more than half arch fun--'jem, jem, it is your uncle!' 'nonsense! how can you be so taken in! don't go and disappoint granny--i'll settle him.' 'take care, jem--it is oliver, and no mistake! why, he is as like you as pendragon blood can make him! go and beg his pardon.' james hastened down stairs, as louis bounded up--sought mrs. frost in the sitting-rooms, and, without ceremony, rushed up and knocked at the bed-room door. jane opened it. 'he is come!' cried louis--'oliver is come.' old jane gave a shriek, and ran back wildly, clapping her hands. her mistress started forward--'come!--where?' 'here!--in the hall with jem.' he feared that he had been too precipitate, for she hid her face in her hands; but it was the intensity of thanksgiving; and though her whole frame was in a tremor, she flew rather than ran forward, never even seeing louis's proffered arm. he had only reached the landing-place, when beneath he heard the greeting--'mother, i can take you home--cheveleigh is yours.' but to her the words were drowned in her own breathless cry--'my boy! my boy!' she saw, knew, heard nothing, save that the son, missed and mourned for thirty-four years, was safe within her arms, the longing void filled up. she saw not that the stripling had become a worn and elderly man,--she recked not how he came. he was oliver, and she had him again! what was the rest to her? those words? they might be out of taste, but fitzjocelyn guessed that to speak them at the first meeting had been the vision of oliver's life--the object to which he had sacrificed everything. and yet how chill and unheeded they fell! louis could have stood moralizing, but his heart had begun to throb at the chance that oliver brought tidings of mary. he felt himself an intrusive spectator, and hastened into the drawing-room, when clara nearly ran against him, but stood still. 'i beg your pardon, but what is isabel telling me? is it really?' 'really! kindred blood signally failed to speak.' clara took a turn up and down the room. 'i say, louis, ought i to go down?' 'no; leave him and granny to their happiness,' said louis; and james, at the same moment running up, threw himself into a chair, with an emphatic 'there!' 'dear grandmamma!' said isabel; 'i hope it is not too much for her.' james made no answer. 'are you disappointed in him, dear james?' she continued. 'i could not be disappointed,' he answered, shortly. 'poor man--he has a poor welcome among you,' said louis. 'welcome is not to be bought,' said james. 'i could not stand hearing him reply to poor granny's heartfelt rapture with his riches and his cheveleigh, as if that were all she could prize.' steps were mounting the stairs, and the alert, sharp tones of oliver were heard--'married then? should have waited--done it in style.' james and isabel glanced at each other in amused indignation; and mrs. frost entered, tremulous with joy, and her bright hazel eyes lustrous with tears, as she leant on the arm of her recovered son. he was a little, spare, shrivelled man, drolly like his nephew, but with all the youthfulness dried out of him, the freckles multiplied by scores, and the keen black eyes sunken, sharpened, and surrounded with innumerable shrewd puckers. the movements were even more brisk, as if time were money; and in speech, the small change of particles was omitted, and every word seemed bitten off short at the end; the whole man, in gesture, manner, and voice, an almost grotesque caricature of all james's peculiarities. 'mrs. roland dynevor, i presume? said oliver, as isabel came forward to meet him. 'never so known hitherto,' returned her husband. 'my wife is mrs. james frost, if you please.' 'that is over now,' said oliver, consequentially; and as his mother presented to him 'poor henry's little clara,' he kissed her affectionately, saying, 'well-grown young lady, upon my word! like her father--that's right.' 'here is almost another grandchild,' said mrs. frost--'louis fitzjocelyn--not much like the fitzjocelyn you remember, but a new m.p. as he was then.' 'humph!' said oliver, with a dry sound, apparently expressing, 'so that is what our parliament is made of. father well?' he asked. 'quite well, thank you, sir.' oliver levelled his keen eyes on him, as though noting down observations, while he was burning for tidings of mary, yet held back by reserve and sense of the uncongeniality of the man. his aunt, however, in the midst of her own joy, marked his restless eye, and put the question, whether mary ponsonby had arrived? 'ha! you let her go, did you?' said oliver, turning on louis. 'i told her father you'd be no such fool. he was in a proper rage at your letter, but it would have blown over if you had stuck by her, and he is worth enough to set you all on your legs.' louis could not bring himself to make any answer, and his mother interrupted by a question as to dona rosita. 'like all the rest. eyes and feet, that's all. foolish business! but what possessed ormersfield to make such a blunder? i never saw ponsonby in such a tantrum, and his are no trifles.' 'it was all the fault of your clerk, robson,' said james; 'he would not refute the story.' 'sharp fellow, robson,' chuckled oliver; 'couldn't refute it. no; as he told me, he knew the way ponsonby had gone on ever since his wife went home, and of late he had sent him to guayaquil, about the equatorial navigation--so he had seen nothing;--and, says he to me, he had no notion of bringing out poor miss ponsonby--did not know whether her father would thank him; and yet the best of it is, that he pacifies ponsonby with talking of difficulty of dealing with preconceived notions. knows how to get hold of him. marriage would never have been if he had been there, but it was the less damage. mary would have had more reason to have turned about, if she had not found him married.' 'but, oliver,' said his mother, 'i thought this robson was an honest man, in whom you had entire confidence!' 'ha! ha! d'ye think i'd put that in _any_ man? no, no; he knows how far to go with me. i've plenty of checks on him. can't get business done but by a wide-awake chap like that.' 'is madison under him?' asked louis, feeling as if he had been apprenticing the boy to a chief of banditti. 'the lad you sent out? ay. left him up at the mines. sharp fellow, but too raw for the office yet.' 'too scrupulous!' said james, in an undertone, while his uncle was explaining to his mother that he could not have come away without leaving robson to manage his affairs, and mr. ponsonby, and telling exultingly some stories of the favourite clerk's sharp practice. the party went down together in a not very congenial state. next to mrs. frost's unalloyed gladness, the most pleasant spectacle was old jane, who volunteered her services in helping to wait, that she might have the delight of hovering about master oliver, to whom she attended exclusively, and would not let charlotte so much as offer him the potatoes. and charlotte was in rather an excited state at the presence of a peruvian production, and the flutter of expecting a letter which would make her repent of the smiles and blushes she had expended over an elaborate valentine, admired as an original production, and valued the more, alas! because poor marianne had received none. charlotte was just beginning to repent of her ungenerous triumph, and agitation made her waiting less deft and pretty than usual; but this mattered the less, since to oliver any attendance by women-servants was a shock, as were the small table and plain fare; and he looked round uneasily. 'here is an old friend, oliver,' said his mother, taking up a curious old soup-ladle. 'i see. it will take some time to get up the stock of plate. i shall give an order as i pass through london. to be engraved with the dynevor crest as before, or would you prefer the lozenge, ma'am?' 'oh, my dear, don't talk of it now! i am only sorry this is nothing but mutton-broth; but that's what comes of sudden arrivals, oliver.' 'it shall be remedied at home,' said oliver, as if he considered mutton-broth as one degree from famine. 'i know you had it for me,' said louis. 'if jane excels in one art before all others, it is in mutton-broth.' oliver darted a glance as if he imagined this compliment to be mere derision of his mother and jane. things went on in this style all the evening. oliver had two ideas--cheveleigh, and the equatorial steam navigation company--and on these he rang the changes. there was something striking in his devotion of a lifetime to redeem his mother's fortunes, but the grandeur was not easily visible in the detail. he came down on dynevor terrace as a consequential, moneyed man, contemptuous of the poverty which he might have alleviated, and obtruding tardy and oppressive patronage. he rubbed against the new generation in too many places for charity or gratitude to be easy. he was utterly at variance with taste, and openly broached unworthy sentiments and opinions, and his kindness and his displeasure were equally irksome. if such repugnance to him were felt even by louis, the least personally affected, and the best able to sympathize with his aunt; it was far stronger in james, abhorring patronage, sensible that, happen what might, his present perfect felicity must be disturbed, and devoid of any sentiment for cheveleigh that could make the restoration compensate for the obligation so unpleasantly enforced; and isabel's fastidious taste made her willing to hold aloof as far as might be without vexing the old lady. there was no amalgamation. fitzjocelyn and isabel were near the window, talking over her former home and her sisters, and all the particulars of the society which she had left, and he had entered; highly interesting to themselves and to the listening clara, but to the uninitiated sounding rather like 'taste, shakspeare, and the musical glasses.' oliver and his mother, sitting close together, were living in an old world; asking and answering many a melancholy question on friends, dead or lost sight of, and yet these last they always made sure that they should find when they went home to cheveleigh--that home to which the son reverted with unbroken allegiance; while the whole was interspersed with accounts of his plans, and explanations of his vast designs for the renovation of the old place. james hovered on the outskirts of both parties, too little at ease to attach himself to either; fretted by his wife's interest in a world to which he was a stranger, impatient of his uncle's plans, and trebly angered by observing the shrewd curious glances which the old man cast from time to time towards the pair by the window. fortunately, mrs. frost was still too absolutely wrapt in maternal transport to mark the clouds that were gathering over her peace. to look at her son, wait on him, and hear his voice, so fully satisfied her, that as yet it made little difference what that voice said, and it never entered her mind to suppose that all her dear ones were not sharing her bliss. 'you were the first to tell me,' she said, as she bade louis good night with fondness additional to her messenger of good news; but, as he pressed her dear old trembling hand, his heart misgave him whether her joy might not be turned to pain; and when he congratulated jane, and heard her call it a blessed day, he longed to be certain that it would prove so. and, before he could sleep that night, he wrote a letter to tom madison, warning him to let no temptation nor bad example lead him aside from strict justice and fair dealing; and advising him rather to come home, and give up all prospects of rising, than not preserve his integrity. james and isabel were not merciful to their uncle when they could speak of him without restraint; and began to conjecture his intentions with regard to them. 'you don't wish to become an appendage to cheveleigh?' said james, fondly. 'i! who never knew happiness till i came here!' 'i do not know what my uncle may propose,' said james, 'but i know you coincide in my determination that he shall never interfere with the duties of my office.' 'you do not imagine that he wishes it?' 'i know he wishes i were not in holy orders. i knew he disliked it at the time of my ordination; but if he wished me to act according to his views, he should have given himself the right to dictate.' 'by not neglecting you all your youth.' 'not that i regret or resent what concerns myself; but it was his leaving me a burden on my grandmother that drove me to become a clergyman, and a consistent one i will be, not an idle heir-apparent to this estate, receiving it as his gift, not my own birthright.' 'an idle clergyman! never! never!' cried isabel. 'i should not believe it was you! and the school--you could not leave it just as your plans are working, and the boys improving?' 'certainly not; it would be fatal to abandon it to that stick, powell. ah! isabel,' as he looked at her beautiful countenance, 'how i pity the man who has not a high-minded wife! suppose you came begging and imploring me not to give any umbrage to the man, because you so doted upon diamonds.' 'the less merit when one has learnt that they are very cold hard stones,' said isabel, smiling. isabel was a high-minded wife, but she would have been a still better one if her loving admiration had allowed her to soften james, or to question whether pride and rancour did not lurk unperceived in the midst of the really high and sound motives that prompted him. while their grandmother could only see oliver on the best side, james and isabel could only see him on the worst, and lost the greatness of the design in the mercenary habits that exclusive perseverance in it had produced. it had been a false greatness, but they could not grant the elevation of mind that had originally conceived it. the following day was sunday, and nothing worse took place than little skirmishes, in which the uncle and nephew's retort and rejoinder were so drolly similar, that clara found herself thinking of miss faithfull's two sandy cats over a mouse; but she kept her simile to herself, finding that isabel regarded the faintest, gentlest comparison of the two gentlemen almost as an affront. all actual debate was staved off by mrs. frost's entreaty that business discussion should be deferred. 'humph!' said oliver, 'you reign here, ma'am, but that's not the way we get on at lima.' 'i dare say,' said james. mrs. frost's joy was still undimmed. it was almost a trance of gladness, trembling in her smile, and overflowing in her eye, at every congratulation and squeeze of the hand from her friends. 'dear jemmy,' said she, taking his arm as they went home in the evening, 'did not that psalm seem meant for us?--'if riches increase, set not your heart upon them.'' james had been thinking it meant for some one; but, as he said, 'certainly not for you, dear granny.' 'ah! snares of wealth were set far enough from me for a time! i never felt so covetous as when there was a report that there was to be an opposition school. but now your dear uncle is bringing prosperity back, i must take care not to set my heart even on what he has gained for me.' 'i defy riches to hurt you,' said james, smiling. 'ah! jemmy, you didn't know me as a county grandee,' she said, with a bright sad look, 'when your poor grandpapa used to dress me up. i'm an old woman now, past vanities, but i never could sit as loose to them as your own dear wife does. i never tried. well, it will be changed enough; but i shall be glad to see poor old cheveleigh. it does me good to hear poor oliver call it home. if only we had your dear father!' 'to me dynevor terrace is home,' said james. 'a happy home it has been,' said the old lady. ''goodness and mercy have followed me all the days of my life!' and now, oliver, whom i never thought to see again--oh! what can i do to be thankful enough! i knew what he was doing! i knew he was not what you all thought him! and roughing it has been no harm to you or clara, and it is all over now! and the dear old place comes back to the old name. oh, james, i can sometimes hardly contain myself--that my poor boy has done it, and all for me, and his brother's children!' james could scarcely find it in his heart to say a single word to damp her joy, and all his resolution enabled him to do was to say gently, 'you know, dear granny, we must not forget that i am a clergyman.' 'i know. i have been telling your uncle so; but we can do something. you might take the curacy, and do a great deal of good. there used to be wild places sadly neglected in my time. i hope that, since it has been given back to us, we may feel it more as a stewardship than i did when it was mine.' james sighed, and looked softened and thoughtful. 'your uncle means to purchase an annuity for jane,' she added; 'and if we could only think what to do for the faithfulls! i wonder whether they would come and stay with us. at least they can never vex themselves again at not paying rent!' after a pause--'jem, my dear, could you manage to give your uncle the true account of your marriage? he admires isabel very much, i can tell you, and is pleased at the connexion. but i fancy, though he will not say so, that mr. ponsonby has desired him to find out all he can about louis; and unluckily they have persuaded themselves that poor louis courted isabel, supposing that she was to have beauchastel, and, finding his error, betook himself to mary.' 'turning isabel over to me! extremely flattering.' 'now, jem, don't be angry. it is only foolish talk! but unluckily i can't persuade your uncle not to think the real story all my partiality; and you might do much more, if it be not too unpleasant to you.' 'thank you, granny, it is out of the question. if it were as he does us the honour to imagine, i should be the last person to confess it. my evidence could be of no service to fitzjocelyn, when my uncle's maxim is to place confidence in no one. the sole refutation in my power is the terms on which we meet.' 'now, i have vexed you. i wish i had said nothing about it; but when dear louis's happiness may depend on his report--' 'if i were base enough to have acted as he supposes, i should be base enough to deny it. there is not enough to be hoped to make me speak with unreserve on such a subject.' he saved himself from saying--to such a man; but the shrewd, suspicious old bachelor was not an inviting confidant for the vicissitudes of delicate and tender feelings of such recent date, and mrs. frost reproached herself with asking too much of her proud, sensitive grandson. the black gown and trencher cap by no means gratified oliver, when james set off to school on monday morning; but he consoled himself with observing, 'we shall soon put an end to that.' 'james is quite devoted to the school,' said isabel, and she was answered by the dry growl. 'it will be a hard thing to transplant our young people,' said mrs. frost, 'they have managed to be very happy here.' 'so hard of transplantation that i doubt the possibility,' said isabel. 'you have made us take very deep root here.' 'have you ever seen cheveleigh, mrs. dynevor?' 'never.' 'poor oliver! you and i think no place equal to our birthplace,' said mrs. frost. 'i should think mrs. roland dynevor would find it compensation. how many beds did we make up, mother, the year my father was sheriff?' 'you must go to jane for that,' said his mother, laughing. 'i'm sure i never knew.' 'i believe it was twenty-seven,' said oliver, gravely. 'i know there were one hundred and eighty-five persons at the ball, and that the room was hung with blue brocade, mother; and you opened the ball with lord francis. i remember you had violet satin and white blonde.' 'my dear, how can you remember such things! you were a little bit of a schoolboy!' 'i was sixteen' said oliver. 'it was the year ' . i will have the drawing-room hung with blue brocade, and i think mrs. roland dynevor will own that nothing can exceed it.' 'very likely,' said isabel, indifferently; and she escaped, beckoning with her clara, who was rather entertained with the reminiscences over which granny and uncle oliver seemed ready to linger for ever; and yet she was rather ashamed of her own amusement and interest, when she heard her sister-in-law say, 'if he did but know how weary i am of that hateful thing, a great house!' 'i hope cheveleigh is not grander than ormersfield,' said clara, in an odd sort of voice. the ladies, for the first time, did not sit together this morning. clara practised, and isabel took the chapel in the valley out of her desk, and began a process of turning the sir roland into sir hubert. oliver and his mother were in the sitting-room, and, on james's return from school in the middle of the day, he was summoned thither. mrs. frost was sitting by the fire, rather tearful and nervous, and her son stood full in the front, as dignified and magnanimous as size and features would permit, and the same demeanour was instantly and unconsciously assumed by his nephew, who was beyond measure chafed by the attempt at a grand coup. 'i have requested your presence,' began oliver, 'as the eldest son of my elder brother, and thus, after my mother, the head of our family. you are aware that when unfortunate circumstances involved my mother's property, it was my determination to restore the inheritance to her, and to my dear brother henry. for this object, i have worked for the last thirty-four years, and a fortunate accident having brought our family estate into the market, i have been enabled to secure it. i am now ready to make it over to my mother, with entail to yourself and your heirs, as representatives of my brother henry, and settling five thousand pounds on your sister, as the portion to which the younger children of our family have always been entitled. if you are willing to reside at our family seat with my mother, i will assure you of a suitable allowance during her lifetime, and--' nothing was more intolerable to a man like james than a shower of obligations; and his spirit, angered at the very length of the address, caught at the first opening for avoiding gratitude, and beheld in the last proposal an absolute bribe to make him sacrifice his sacred ministry, and he burst forth, 'sir, i am much obliged to you, but no offers shall induce me to forsake the duties of my calling.' 'you mistake, if you think i want anything unclerical. no occasion to hunt--mr. tresham used in my day--no one thought the worse of him--unlucky your taking orders.' 'there is no use in entering on that point,' said james. 'no other course was left open to me, and my profession cannot be taken up nor laid down as a matter of convenience.' 'young men are taught to think more seriously than they were in our day,' said mrs. frost. 'i told you that you must not try to make him turn squire.' 'well! well! good living may be had perhaps. move to cheveleigh, and look out for it at leisure, if nothing else will content him. but we'll have this drudgery given up. i'll not go home and show my nephew, heir of the dynevors, keeping a third-rate grammar-school,' said oliver, with his one remaining eton quality of contempt for provincial schools. the northwold scholar and master were both roused to arms in james. 'sir,' he said, 'you should have thought of that when you left this heir of the dynevors to be educated by the charity of this third-rate grammar-school.' 'is this your gratitude, sir!' passionately exclaimed oliver; 'i, who have toiled my whole life for your benefit, might look for another return.' 'it was not for me,' said james. 'it was for family pride. had it been from the affection that claims gratitude, you would not have left your mother in her old age, to labour unaided for the support of your brother's orphans. for ourselves, i thank you; the habits nurtured by poverty are the best education; but i cannot let you suppose that a grand theatrical restoration can atone to me for thirty years' neglect of my grandmother, or that my gratitude can be extorted by benefactions at the expense of her past suffering.' 'jem! dear jem! what are you saying!' cried mrs. frost. 'don't you know how kindly your uncle meant? don't you know how happy we have been?' 'you may forgive. you are his mother, and you were injured, but i can never forget what i have seen you undergo.' 'you foolish boy, to forget all our happiness--' 'nor,' proceeded james, 'can i consent to forego the career of usefulness that has been opened to me.' 'but, jem, you could be so useful in the parish! and your uncle could not wish you to do anything unhandsome by the trustees--' 'i wish him to do nothing, ma'am,' said oliver. 'if he is too high and mighty to accept a favour, it is his own loss. we can do without him, if he prefers the fitzjocelyn patronage. much good may it do him!' james deigned no answer, looked at his watch, and found it time to return to the school. oliver broke out into angry exclamations, and his mother did her utmost to soothe him. he had no turn for being a country-gentleman, he was fit for nothing but his counting-house, and he intended to return thither as soon as he had installed his mother at cheveleigh; and so entirely did all his plans hinge upon his nephew, that even now he was persuaded to hold out his forgiveness, on condition that james would apologize, resign the school, and call himself dynevor. mrs. frost hoped that isabel would prevail on her husband to listen favourably; but isabel gloried in his impracticability, and would have regarded any attempt at mediation as an unworthy effort to turn him aside from the path of duty. she replied, that she would never say a word to change his notions of right, and she treated poor oliver with all the lofty reserve that she had formerly practised upon possible suitors. when fitzjocelyn came in the afternoon to take leave, before his return to london, mrs. frost begged him to use his influence with james. 'who would have thought it would have so turned out?' she said. 'my poor oliver! to be so met after all his generous plans! and yet jem does want to do right!' unfortunately, louis felt that, to own oliver's generosity, it was necessary to be out of sight of him; and finding that there was silence and constraint in the drawing-room, he asked isabel to walk with him to meet james. 'one breathes freely!' said she, as they left the house. 'was there ever a more intolerable man?' 'never was a man who made a more unlucky error in judgment.' 'and that is all you call it?' 'the spurious object warped the mind aside,' said louis. 'the grand idea was too exclusive, and now he suffers for the exclusiveness. it is melancholy to see the cinder of a burnt-offering to mammon, especially when the offering was meant for better things.' in this strain he chose to talk, without coming to particulars, till, near the corner of the old square, they met the shouting throng of boys, and presently james himself, descending the steps of the grim old grey building. 'i thought you would forgive me for coming to meet you under such an escort,' said isabel, 'especially as it was to escape from our peruvian relative.' 'poor man! it was a great pity he did not come last year!' said louis. 'i am glad i have no temptation to bend to his will,' returned james. 'ha! i like the true core of the quarrel to display itself.' 'fitzjocelyn, you do not mean that you do not fully approve of the course i have taken!' 'extremely magnanimous, but not quite unprecedented. witness st. ronan's well, where the younger scrogie abjures the name of mowbray.' 'pshaw! louis, can't you understand? frost is a glorious name to me, recording my grandmother's noble exertions on our behalf, but i can imagine it to be hateful to him, recalling the neglect that made her slaving necessary.' 'for which amiable reason you insist on obtruding it. pray, are the houses henceforth to be frost terrace or arctic row?' 'are you come to laugh or to remonstrate?' exclaimed james, stopping. 'oh! you want to put on your armour! certainly, i should never tell if i were come to remonstrate, nor should i venture in such a case--' 'then you are come to approve,' said isabel. i knew it!' 'little you two care--each of you sure of an admiring double.' 'i care for your opinion as much as ever i did,' said james. 'exactly so,' said louis, laughing. 'i desire to have your judgment in this matter.' 'if i could judge, i would,' said louis. 'i see you right in principle, but are you right in spirit? i own my heart bleeds for aunt kitty, regaining her son to battle with her grandson.' 'i am very sorry for her,' said james; 'but it can't be helped. i cannot resign my duties here for the sake of living dependent on a suitable allowance.' 'ah! jem! jem! oliver little knew the damage his neglect did you.' 'what damage?' 'the fostering an ugly little imp of independence.' 'aye! you grandees have naturally a distaste for independence, and make common cause against it.' 'especially when in a rabid state. take care, jem. independence never was a christian duty yet--' 'then, you want me to go and live on the hoards for the sake of which my grandmother was left to toil. you would like to see me loitering about, pensioned to swell the vanity of cheveleigh, neglecting my vows, forsaking my duties--' 'you unreasonable man! is there no way in this whole world for you to do your duty as a clergyman, but hearing northwold boys the latin grammar?' 'then, what do you want me to do?' 'i don't want you to do anything. you are the man to know what is right; only, isabel, don't help him to hate people more than can possibly be avoided; and don't break dear aunt kitty's heart amongst you. that's what i care most about!' when louis bade his aunt farewell, he threw his arm round her neck, looked fondly at her, and said, 'dear aunt, you won't let them tease you?' 'no, my dear, i am getting past being teased,' she said. 'vexations don't hurt me as much as love does me good, and they'll not forget their affection. it is all goodness in jem, and poor oliver will understand it when i have got him into our home ways again; but he has been so long away from home, poor fellow!' 'that's right. i won't be uneasy for you. squabble as they will, they won't hurt you. but, oh! dynevor terrace without you!' 'ah! you must come to me at _home_!' 'home! i'm like jem, jealous for this old house.' 'it is odd how little i feel these things,' said his aunt. 'if any one had told me, when i tore myself away from cheveleigh, that i should have it back, how little i should have thought that i could take it so easily! i wonder at myself when i wake in the morning that i am not more moved by it, nor by leaving this dear old place. i suppose it is because i have not long to stay anywhere. i can keep nothing in my head, but that i have got my oliver!' 'i believe it is the peace that is not of this world!' said louis. chapter vii. roland and oliver 'twas old ancestral pride, 'twas hope to raise a fallen house from penury's disgrace, to purchase back from usurers the birthright of his race. the lump of gold--c. mackay. mary's letter arrived not long after louis's return to london; and her calm, serious, beautifully-expressed farewell came upon him at last like a blow which had been long impending, but of which preparation had failed to lessen the weight. 'ah!' said the earl, when the chief part had been read to him, 'she is admirable and excellent as ever. it is a great disappointment that she is unattainable, but i am glad she writes so sensibly, and sees that it is right you should think no more about her. after all, the connexion with that fellow ponsonby might have been very troublesome, and it is well, as she says, that it was all over while you are so young.' 'young or old, there is no other mary in the world,' said louis, sadly. 'we will say no more about it now. i understand you, but you will think differently by-and-by.' louis did not answer. he knew that others might have been deceived by the tardiness and uncertainty of his attachment, but that it had taken such deep root, that he believed he could no more detach himself from mary than if she were his wife. his heart fainted as he thought of years without the strength and soothing which her very letter breathed forth; as he pictured to himself alternations between his chill and stately home and the weary maze of london, foresaw persuasions from his father to induce him to form some new attachment, and dreaded to think of the facility with which, perhaps, he might still be led out of his own convictions. yet he still believed that patience and perseverance would win the day, and tried to derive encouragement and energy from the thought that this might be a trial sent for the very purpose of training him in steadfastness. a strong impulse drew him to bryanston square, where miss ponsonby was very kind and warm, the more so because she had discovered how much easier it had been to say than to unsay, and strongly regretted the injustice she had done him. he had the satisfaction of talking for a good hour about mary, and of sending a message, that he did not write because he wished to be guided by her in everything, and that he was striving to work so as to please her. the conversation ended with some good auguries as to the effect of oliver's return to peru; and louis went away cheered, bearing the final dismissal better than his father had expected. lord ormersfield attributed his tranquillity to having his mind settled; and so it was, though not quite as his lordship imagined. meantime, there was a lull at dynevor terrace. oliver was gone to take possession and furnish the mansion, and mrs. frost's great object was to keep the subject from irritating her grandson, so as to save him from binding himself by any rash vows. cheveleigh was treated in the domestic circle with judicious silence, oliver's letters were read by his mother in private, and their contents communicated to jane alone, whose happiness was surpassing, and her contempt for dynevor terrace quite provoking to poor mrs. martha. 'really,' said charlotte one day, 'i don't think a catastrophe is half so pretty as it ought to be. mr. oliver is but a poor little puny man, and i never knew mr. james so hard to please.' charlotte and marianne had begun to merge their rivalry in honest friendship, cemented by marianne's increasing weakness, and difficulty in getting through even the light work her mistress required. jane petted her now still more than charlotte, and was always promising her the delightful air and the luxuries of cheveleigh. 'see here, charlotte,' said marianne, one afternoon when they sat down together to their sewing; marianne's eyes were brighter, and her cheeks pinker, than for many days--'see here; it is for your good i show it you, that you mayn't build on no false expectations. it was marked private; but i think it but fair you should see.' 'mine was marked private too,' said charlotte, slowly, as she fixed her eyes on the envelope marianne held out to her, and putting her hand into her pocket, pulled out a similar one, directed to miss arnold. marianne scarcely suppressed a shriek, gasped, and turned pale. each lady then proceeded to unfold a pink sheet of note-paper, containing an original copy of verses, each labelled, 'on a hair of ----.' then came a scented shining note, requesting to be informed whether the right construction had been put on some words that had dropped from the miss conways, and if it were true that the reverend and respected mr. f. dynevor had come into a large fortune. in that case, mr. delaford, mercenary considerations apart, would take the earliest opportunity of resigning his present position, and entering the family which contained his charmer. the merry wives were parodied by the hysterical maids. charlotte might afford to laugh, but marianne's heart was more in the matter, and they struck up such a chorus that jane broke upon them, declaring that they would frighten mrs. james frost out of her senses. when charlotte told her what was the matter, her comment was, 'and a very good thing, too, that you should find him out in time! a pair of silly girls you! i always was thankful i never could write, to be deluded with nonsense by the post; and i am more so than ever now! come, leave off crying, marianne; he ain't worth it.' 'but how shall we answer him, mrs. beckett?' said charlotte. 'never demean yourself to answer him,' said jane; 'let him never hear nought about you--that's the best for the like of him. i can tell him he need not be in no hurry about giving warning to lady conway. at cheveleigh we'll have a solemn, steady butler, with no nonsense, nor verses, nor guitars--forty years old--and a married man.' charlotte took the advice, and acted with dignified contempt and silence, relieved to imagine that tom had never been in danger from such a rival. marianne did not divulge the tender and melancholy letter of reproach that she posted privately; but she grew paler, and coughed more, all that bright summer. mrs. frost had refused to let any cause remove her from northwold, until after an event which it was hoped would render james less disdainful of his inheritance. but--'was there ever anything more _contrary_?' exclaimed jane, as she prepared to set out the table for a grand tea. 'there's master james as pleased and proud of that there little brown girl, as if she was as fine a boy as master henry himself. i do believe, upon my word, it is all to spite poor dear master oliver.' poor jane, she was almost growing tart in her partizanship of oliver. the little brown girl was no dove of peace. her father decidedly triumphed in the mortification that her sex was to others of the family; and though he averred that the birth of a son would not have made him change his mind, he was well satisfied to be spared the attack which would have ensued. oliver, like jane, appeared to regard the poor child as a wilful offence, and revenged himself by a letter announcing that clara would be his heiress, information which mrs. frost kindly withheld from her granddaughter, in the hope of a reconciliation. lord ormersfield took james in hand, undertaking to make him hear common sense; but the sense was unfortunately too common, and the authoritative manner was irritating, above all when a stately warning was given that no church-preferment was to be expected from his influence; whereupon james considered himself insulted, and they parted very stiff and grand, the earl afterwards pronouncing that nothing was so wrongheaded as a conscientious man. but they were too much accustomed to be on respectfully quarrelsome terms to alter their regard for one retort more or less; and after all, there were very few men whom lord ormersfield liked or esteemed half so much as the fearless and uncompromising james frost--james frost--as he curtly signed himself, in spite of all louis's wit on rolands and olivers--and yet those soft satirical speeches did more than all direct attacks to shake his confidence in his own magnanimity; more especially because fitzjocelyn always declared himself incompetent to judge, and never failed to uphold that he was so far right, that his ministry must stand above all worldly considerations. the breach had become so wide, that oliver would not have accepted the terms he had formerly offered. his object seemed to be to pique his nephew and niece, by showing them what they had lost. he wrote the most magnificent descriptions of cheveleigh, and insisted that his mother and clara should come and take possession on the eightieth birthday of the former, the th of september; and isabel was recovering so rapidly, that there was nothing to oppose to his project, although the new catharine would be scarcely three weeks old by that time. thereupon came down, addressed to clara, a case of peruvian jewels, newly set in london--intended doubtless to excite great jealousy in her sister-in-law. poor oliver! could he but have known that isabel only glanced at them to tell clara the names of the ornaments, and to relieve her mind by assurances that the whole of a set need not be worn at once! next arrived an exceedingly smart french milliner, who, by the help of jane and marianne, got clara into her toils, and pinned and measured her for a whole mortal morning; and even grandmamma ordered a black velvet gown and accompaniments. lastly, there descended on clara's devoted head a cheque for a sum which terrified her imagination, and orders to equip herself suitably as miss dynevor of cheveleigh, who was to enjoy the same allowance half-yearly. her first idea was what delightful presents could be made to every one; but as she was devising showers of gifts for her niece, james cut her short,--'i am sorry to give you pain, clara, but it must be understood that neither directly nor indirectly can i nor mine receive anything bought with my uncle's money.' 'that was the only thing to make me not hate it.' 'it is best you should hate it.' 'i do! why did he come home to bother us? oh, jem, can't i still live here, and only visit there?' 'no, clara. the care of granny is your first duty; and during her life, so long as you are single, her home must be yours.' the edict was given in stern self-abnegation; but james was very kind to her, treating her as a victim, and spending his leisure in walking about with her, that she might take leave of every favourite haunt. he was indulgent enough even to make no objection to going with her to ormersfield, where she wandered about the park, visited old scenes with louis, and went over all his improvements. his cottages had as yet the sole fault of looking too new, and one of his tenants would not shut up his pigs; but otherwise all was going on well, and inglewood was in the excitement of louis's first harvest. he walked about with ears of wheat in his hand, talked knowingly of loads and acres, and had almost taught his father to watch the barometer. it added to clara's regrets that she should miss the harvest-supper, for which he and mr. holdsworth had wonderful designs; but it was not to take place until fitzjocelyn's return from cheveleigh. oliver had invited him and his father to conduct mrs. frost thither, and add eclat to her reception; and this, as clara said, 'was the only comfort in the business.' james had effectually destroyed all pleasure on her part, and had made the change appear an unmitigated misfortune, even though she did not know what she would have thought the worst. congratulations were dreadful to her, and it was all that isabel could do to persuade her to repress her dislike so as not to distress her grandmother. to mrs. frost it was pain to leave what she owned, with thankful tears, to have been a happy, peaceful refuge for her widowhood and poverty; she grieved over each parting, clung to the faithfulls, reiterated fond counsels to isabel, and could hardly bear to detach herself from the great-grandchild. but still it was her own son, and her own home, and oliver and cheveleigh were more to her than even james and dynevor terrace; so that, though she was sorry, it was not with a melancholy sorrow, and she could still hope against hope, that uncle and nephew might be brought together at last, and that a son of james would yet reign in the dear old place. besides, she had not time to be unhappy. she was fully employed nursing isabel, doing honour to the little one, answering oliver's letters, superintending clara's wardrobe; choosing parting gifts for innumerable friends, high and low; and making arrangements for the inexperienced household. jane's place was to be--not exactly supplied, but occupied by a cook. miss dynevor was to have 'a personal attendant;' and mrs. beckett begged that marianne might be chosen, since she could not bear to see the poor thing sent away, when in so much need of care. the diamonds, the french millinery, and jane's motherly care, came in strong contrast to the miserable lodging, or the consumptive hospital, which poor marianne had begun to anticipate; and weeping with gratitude, she declared that she had never seen nor thought of such kindness since her mother died. isabel seldom roused herself to understand anything about her servants; but she liked marianne, and was glad clara should have her, since she was not strong enough to undertake nursery cares. she believed it had not agreed with her to sit up late. compunction for having been the cause had never dawned on isabel's mind. charlotte was to remain at dynevor terrace; james and isabel wished to keep her, and mrs. beckett thought her sufficiently indoctrinated with her ways to have some chance of going on well. 'besides,' as jane said, 'i can't be accountable for taking her into that large family, until i see what company there may be. she's a well-behaved girl enough, but she's too pretty and too simple-like for me to have her among the common run of servants. i'll see what i can do for her, when i see what sort of a housekeeper it is.' and jane gave charlotte infinite injunctions, varying from due care of the 'chaney images' to reserve with mankind. 'because you see, charlotte' she said, 'you'll be terribly forsaken. mrs. james, poor dear!--she would not know if the furniture weren't rubbed once in ten years; but you must make it a pride to yourself to be faithful.' 'i am faithful!' cried charlotte. 'i never cared for that traitor, delaford, and his guitar; but i could not get rid of him. and i'll tell you what--i'll seal up his fine red book, and all his verses; and you shall leave them in london as you go through, with my compliments. i think that will be proper and scornful.' 'hoity-toity! that's what she's at! the best thing you can do too, charlotte; and i'm glad that you've too much spirit to pine like poor marianne. i'd take my affidavit that if the crowner could sit upon her when she dies--and die she will--that there fine gentleman and his guitar will be found at the bottom of her chest. but don't go off about that now--though 'tis the reason i won't part from the poor thing till i can help--the better luck for you that you'd got more in your head than vanities and furbelows. what i meant was not being faithful to him out in peru--that's your own affair, but the being faithful to your duty to your mistress, whether she's after you or not. you know what a good servant is, and you've got to show it ain't all eye-service.' charlotte cried heartily. no one else was allowed that privilege when the th came, excepting mrs. frost herself. james, afraid that a scene would hurt his wife, severely forbade clara to give way; and the poor girl, mute and white, did as she was told, and ventured not a word of farewell, though her embraces were convulsive, and when she went down stairs she could not help kissing charlotte. james handed his grandmother to her seat in the carriage which was to take her to the station. 'good-bye, my dear,' she said; 'i know the day will come when all this will be made up. you know how i have loved you both.' 'i wish my uncle all good.' 'i see it now,' she said, holding his hand between both of hers. 'it is my fault. i fostered our family pride. may god take away the sin from us both!' the words were hardly articulate through tears, and perhaps james did not hear. he hurried clara down the garden and into the carriage, and she had her last nod from miss faithfull at the open window. miss mercy was at the station, whither school-hours had hindered james from accompanying them, but where they found lord ormersfield and louis. the warm-hearted little woman was all tears and smiles. 'oh! dear mrs. frost, i am so sorry, and yet it is selfish. i am so happy! but where shall we find such another neighbour?' 'come and see us. you know you are to persuade your sister.' 'ah!' she shook her head. 'salome is hard to move. but you--you are such a traveller--you will come to see mr. james?' 'i'm eighty to-morrow: i little expect to make any more journeys except one, mercy. i never look to see poor northwold more; but it has been a place of blessings to me, and you have been one of them. don't think i'm too glad to go away, but i cannot but be thankful that my dear boy is bringing me home to lay me down where my father and his father lie.' it was said with that peculiar cheerfulness with which happy old age can contemplate the end of the pilgrimage, and she looked at louis with a sunny smile. chapter viii. the restoration. when silent time, wi' lightly foot, had trod on thirty years, i sought again my native land wi' mony hopes and fears. as i drew near my ancient pile, my heart beat a' the way; the place i passed seemed yet to speak of some dear former day. some pensy chiels, a new-sprung race, wad next their welcome pay; * * * * * but sair on ilka well-kenned face i missed the youthful bloom. miss blamire oliver had sent orders to his mother to sleep in london, and proceed the next morning by a train which would arrive at about two o'clock. on that eventful morning, clara was the prey of mrs. beckett, marianne, and the french milliner, and in such a flounced glace silk, such a lace mantle, and such a flowery bonnet was she arrayed, that lord ormersfield bowed to her as a stranger, and louis talked of the transformations of the giraffe. 'is it not humiliating,' she said, 'to be so altered by finery? you might dress isabel for ever, and her nobleness would surmount it all.' 'if you are not the rose, at least you have lived near the rose,' said louis. 'you don't fall quite short of the character of miss dynevor.' 'i wish i were going to school,' said clara, as they passed along familiar streets; 'then, at least, some one would pity me.' after two hours spent on the railroad, the train entered a district with the bleakness, but not the beauty, of the neighbourhood of mountains; the fresh september breeze was laden with smoke, and stations stood thick upon the line. as the train dashed up to one of these, a flag was seen waving, and the shout of 'cheveleigh, cheveleigh road!' greeted them. on the platform stood a tall footman, in the most crimson of coats, powdered hair, and a stupendous crimson and white shoulder-knot, auch as clara had only seen going to st. james's. she would never have imagined that she had any concern with such splendour; but her grandmother asked him if the carriage were there, as a mere matter of course, and jane devolved on him all luggage cares, as coolly as if she had been ruling over him all his life. as they issued from the station, a thin, uncertain, boyish cheer rang out, and before them stood a handsome open carriage and four chestnut horses, with crimson postillions, and huge crimson-and-white satin rosettes. 'wont they all turn to rats and pumpkins?' whispered clara to louis. 'bless the poor boy!' cried mrs. frost, between laughing and crying, 'what has he been about? does he think i am the sheriff's lady still?' the party entered the carriage, and the crowd of little boys and girls, flymen and porters, got up another 'hurrah!' as the four horses went thundering off, with mrs. frost apologizing--'poor oliver's notions were on such a grand scale!--he had been so long absent, that he did not know how much these things had been disused.' but no one could look at her bright tearful eyes, and quivering mouth, without seeing that she exulted in her son's affection and his victory; and after all it was natural to her, and a resumption of old habits. they drove through two miles of brown flat heath, with far-away mountain outlines, which she greeted as dear friends. here and there the engine-house of a mine rose up among shabby buildings, and by-and-by was seen a square church-tower, with lofty pinnacles, among which floated forth a flag. the old lady caught hold convulsively of clara's hand--'the old church!--my old church!--see, clara, that is where your dear grandfather lies!--my last home!' with brimming eyes mrs. frost gazed on it as it came forth more distinctly, and clara looked with a sense of awe; but rending her away from grave thoughts, shouts burst upon her ears, and above them the pealing crash of all the bells, as they dashed under a splendid triumphal arch, all evergreens and dahlias, forming the word 'welcome!' and were met by a party on horseback waving their hats, while a great hurrah burst out from the numbers who lined the street. mrs. frost bowed her thanks and waved her hand. 'but oh!' she said, almost sobbing, 'where am i? this is not cheveleigh.' lord ormersfield showed her a few old houses that they both recognised, looking antiquated in the midst of a modern growth of narrow, conceited new tenements. the shouting crowd had, to fitzjocelyn's eyes, more the aspect of a rabble than of a genuine rejoicing peasantry. what men there were looked beer-attracted rather than reputable, and the main body were whooping boys, women, nurse-girls, and babies. the suspicion crossed him that it was a new generation, without memories of forty years since, wondering rather than welcoming, in spite of arches, bells, and shouts. after another half-mile, a gate swung wide beneath another arch, all over c. d., the f. studiously omitted; and the carriage wheeled in amid a shower of tight little nosegays from a squadron of school-children. they drove up the long approach, through fir plantations, which drew from mrs. frost a cry of friendly recognition--for her husband had planted them; but they had not taken kindly to the soil, and fifty years had produced but a starveling growth. beyond lay an expanse of parched brown turf, here and there an enclosure of unprosperous trees, and full in front stood the wide space of stuccoed wall, with a great gothic window full in the midst, and battlements in the castellated style of the early years of the nineteenth century. no one spoke. after the first glance, mrs. frost shut her eyes to restrain the hot tears that arose at the thought of the wintry morning, when ice-drops hung hoary on the fir-trees, as she had driven away from the portal, whence music was now pealing forth a greeting, and where oliver was standing on the very spot where, with clenched hand, he had vowed that all should be restored. alas! how much was in his power to restore? gaily-dressed people surrounded the entrance, and, amid triumphant strains from the band, the carriage stopped, and oliver held out his hand, saying, 'welcome home, mother!' she leant forward, kissed his brow, and suffered him to lead her up the steps to the hall-door, lord ormersfield conducting clara. at the door mrs. frost paused, to turn, curtsey, and sign her thanks to the throng who had followed. her noble aspect and demeanour, so full of dignity and feeling, obtained a fresh and more genuine acclamation; but throughout there was a strange sense of unreality; she seemed like one performing a part to gratify her son. clara asked her cousin if it were not like acting a play; and it was plain to him that the spectators beheld it with more curiosity than sympathy. they were a new race. property had changed hands rapidly in a region of trade and manufacture, and the old dynevor name had been forgotten past recall, amid the very population who were thriving upon the identical speculations which had swamped mr. frost's fortune. if the crowd without looked like a mob, the assembly within had a parvenu appearance; and as oliver handed his mother across the hall, he muttered something, as if he were disappointed both in the number and consequence of his guests. he led her into a magnificent apartment, all gilding, blue brocade, and mirrors, as far as might be after the model of the days of the shrievalty; but the bare splendour could ill recall the grace and elegance that had then reigned there without effort. peru had not taught oliver taste either of the eye or of the mind, and his indefatigable introductions--'my mother, mrs. dynevor, my niece, miss dynevor, lord ormersfield, lord fitzjocelyn,' came so repeatedly as quite to jingle in their ears. sir andrew britton, a burly cotton lord, with a wife in all the colours of the rainbow, seemed to be the grand guest. his lady seated herself beside mrs. frost, and began to tell her, with a tone of patronage, how good a neighbourhood it was, and how much pleasure she should have in introducing miss dynevor. in vain did mrs. frost look for a face she knew, and inquire from her new acquaintance after familiar old names of places and people. the places were either become factories, or some charming new family lived there; and for the people, it seemed as if she might as well ask for antediluvians; lady britton had seldom heard their names, or if any trace survived, they had never been on her visiting list. at last oliver came up to her, saying, 'here, ma'am, mr. henderson claims an early acquaintance with you.' 'mr. henderson!' and she eagerly started up, but looked baffled. 'little george henderson,' said the grey-headed gentleman--for once a real gentleman--'i assure you i have not forgotten the happy days i have spent here.' 'little george!' as she took him by both hands--'who would have thought it! you were little george with the apple cheeks. and are no more of you here?' he shook his head sadly. 'they would have been even more glad than i am to welcome you home; they were older, and knew you better.' 'ah! i must learn to ask no questions. and yet, that dear sister fanny of yours--' 'gone many years since, ma'am. she died in india. i hope my daughter fanny may put you a little mind of her.' 'is she not here?' 'why, no. i wished to bring her, but she is but fifteen, and mamma will not trust her out without herself. we are quiet people, and the world is growing too gay for us.' 'clara and i must come to find you out. can you believe this tall creature is poor dear henry's daughter?' as clara hastened to greet her father's playfellow, with an alacrity which piqued lady britton into a supercilious aside to lord fitzjocelyn that the hendersons were in poor circumstances, and no one visited them. 'and is no one here whom i know? not one of the old set, george?' asked the old lady, mournfully. 'i fear there is hardly any one,' said mr. henderson. 'all seem even to me new people. stay, do you recollect old mrs. golding?' after a little confusion, mr. henderson's old mrs. golding proved to be mrs. frost's young mrs. golding; and, on the eager inquiry whether she were present, ensued the melancholy answer that she was deaf and infirm, only just able to smile with pleasure at the tidings of her old friend's restoration; and the daughter, whom she could only just believe to be grown up, was a worn, elderly woman. not even the one heartfelt greeting was without sadness; and clara likewise met with one solitary satisfaction, and that a very mixed one. mr. danvers, the young curate, whom oliver had not thought worth presenting, was hailed by fitzjocelyn as if their slight oxford acquaintance had been an intimacy, and was by him introduced to clara as belonging to james's college. she frankly held out her hand, but was discomfited by his inquiry for her brother, whom he had hoped to meet. louis said something about not expecting the schoolmaster abroad in the half-year, and clara was not at all grateful to him for relieving her from the embarrassment, but regarded the reply as a shabby prevarication, and was much inclined to speak out; but louis was drawing the curate into conversation about the population, and hearing but a desponding history. it was interrupted when oliver, after waiting in vain for more distinguished company, began to marshal his guests to the grand hall, paved with black and white marble, and with a vast extent of wall and window, decked with evergreens, flags, and mottoes. here a cold collation was prepared, with a band in a music-gallery above, and all the et ceteras dear to county papers. oliver himself handed in lady britton, his mother fell to the lot of the earl, and fitzjocelyn received orders to conduct a handsome, young, giggling mrs. smithers, who, never having been in contact with a live lord, wanted to make the most of him, and, before she had arrived at her place, was declaring that it was a most interesting occasion, just like a scene at the opera. louis glanced back to see what became of clara, and, finding her following with sir andrew britton, contrived to sit immediately opposite to her, at the long, narrow table, with nothing between them but a couple of cold chickens and a tongue garnished with transfixed crayfish. his eyes were, perhaps, a greater support to her than even conversation, for she gathered a little philosophy and charity from their cheering smile and arch twinkling, and she managed to listen civilly to her neighbour, while she saw that her cousin was being very polite to mrs. smithers. she was a great way from all other friends, for the table had been spread for a more numerous assembly, and the company sat in little clusters, with dreary gaps between, where moulds of jelly quaked in vain, and lobster-salads wasted their sweetness on the desert air. her uncle could just be seen in the far perspective at the head of the table, and, between him and the earl, louis descried his aunt catharine, looking bright, with a little embellishing flush on her withered cheek. sir andrew was not a lady's man; and, after he had heard how far miss dynevor had come to-day, that she had never ridden, and had not seen the menai tubular bridge, he discontinued the difficult task; and she, finding that he had not even seen the cathedral, which she had passed only fifteen miles off, gave him up, and occupied herself with watching the infinite variety of affectations which mrs. smithers was playing off, and the grave diversion with which louis received them. the lady was evidently trying to discover what had been the intermediate history of mrs. and miss dynevor; and louis was taking pleasure in baffling her, with cool, quiet answers, especially when she came to the question whether miss dynevor had not a brother, and why he was not present. it appeared that oliver had made almost as if his mother had been buried and dug up again; involving the thirty-four years of her exile in such utter mystery, that people had begun to make all sorts of wild stories to account for her proceedings; and lord fitzjocelyn's explanation that she had lived in her own house in northwold, and taught him the latin grammar, seemed quite a disappointment from the simplicity and want of romance. the weary banquet had arrived at ices, and clara hoped the end was near, when the worse trial of speeches began. mr. henderson was declaring how strongly he felt the honour which had been devolved on him, of expressing the universal joy in having so excellent and much-beloved a neighbour restored by the noble exertions of her son. he said all that the rest of the world ought to have felt, and so heartily and sincerely as to make every one imagine the whole the general sentiment, and the welcoming hurrah was cordial and joyous. mrs. frost was deeply touched and gratified, and lord ormersfield congratulated himself on having instigated oliver to give this toast to mr. henderson. if clara could have driven james from her mind, she would have been delighted, but there could be no triumph for her where he was excluded. the earl returned thanks on behalf of his aunt, and said a great deal that could have come from the mouth of no one 'unaccustomed to public speaking,' ending by proposing the health of 'mr. oliver frost dynevor.' in the midst of 'the fine old english gentleman,' while louis was suppressing a smile at the incongruity, a note was brought to him, which he tossed to clara, purporting that he was to return thanks for her. she bent over the table to say, 'you will say nothing i cannot bear to hear,' folded her hands, and shut her eyes, as if she had been going to stand fire. oliver's clear, harsh tones, incapable of slowness or solemnity, began to return thanks for himself, and pronounce this to be the happy day to which he had been looking throughout his life--the day of restoring the family inheritance to his mother, and the child of his elder brother; he faltered--he never could calmly speak of henry. failing the presence of one so dear, he rejoiced, however, to be able to introduce to them his only daughter, and he begged that his friends would drink the health of the heiress of cheveleigh, miss dynevor. never did toast apparently conduce so little to the health of the subject. unprepared as clara was for such a declaration, it was to her as if she had been publicly denounced as the supplanter of her brother. she became deadly white, and sat bolt upright, stiff and motionless, barely stifling a scream, and her eyes fixed between command and entreaty on her cousin without seeing, far less acknowledging, the bows levelled at her. louis, alarmed by her looks, saw that no time was to be lost; and rising hastily before any one was ready, perilled his fame for eloquence by rapidly assuring the gentlemen and ladies that miss dynevor was truly sensible of the kindness of their welcome, and their manner of receiving the toast. then pushing back his chair, with 'never mind,' to mrs. smithers and her scent-bottle, he was at the back of clara's chair almost before her confused eyes had missed him in her gasps for breath, and impulse to do something desperate; and so she might, if his voice had not been in her ear, his hand grasping hers, both to console and raise her. 'clara, come, take care.' she obeyed, but trembling so much that he was obliged to support her. others would have risen in alarm, but he silenced them by signs, and entreaties that no one would frighten her grandmother. there was a large glass door standing open under the gothic window, and through it he led her out upon a wide green lawn. she drew her breath in sobs, but could not speak. louis asked her to untie her bonnet, and touched the string, which was merely a streamer. this brought a kind of laugh, but she unfastened the bonnet herself, and the first use she made of her breath was fiercely to exclaim--'how could you! why did you not tell them i never will--' 'sit down,' said louis, gently. 'let me fetch some water.' 'no--no--let me get away from this place!' and she almost dragged him along, as fresh cheers and peals of music broke out, till they had entered a lonely walk in a sort of wilderness of shrubs. still she hurried on, till they came out on a quiet little garden, where the tinkling of a little fountain was the only sound; the water looked clear and fresh with the gold-fish darting in it, and the sun shone calmly on the bright flowers and wavy ferns adorning the rockwork. 'what are you doing, clara? you must rest here,' said he, drawing her down on a rustic bench, intended to represent a crocodile. 'i can't rest here! i must go home! i'm going home to jem!' she exclaimed, obeying, however, because, though she could run, she could not stand. 'dear clara,' he said, affectionately, 'it was much worse than i expected. i never believed he could have committed himself to such an open declaration, especially without warning.' 'i'll not stay!' cried clara, with all the vehemence of her dynevor nature. 'i'll go straight home to northwold to-morrow morning--to-night if i could. yes, i will! i never came here for this!' 'and what is to become of my poor aunt kitty?' 'she has her oliver! she would not have me put jem out of his birthright.' 'james will not be put into it.' she wrenched away her hand, and looked at him with all her brother's fierceness. 'and you!' she cried, 'why could not you speak up like a man, and tell them that i thank none of them, and will have nothing to say to any of them; and that if this is to belong to any one, it must be to my noble, my glorious, generous brother; and, if he hasn't it, it may go to the queen, for what i care! i'll never have one stone of it. why could you not say so, instead of all that humbug'!' 'i thought the family had afforded quite spectacles enough for one day,' said louis; 'and besides, i had some pity upon your grandmother, and on your uncle too.' 'jem told me grandmamma claimed my first duty; but he never knew of this wicked plan.' 'yes, he did.' 'knew that i was to supplant him!' 'yes; we all knew it was a threat of your uncle; but we spared you the knowledge, thinking that all might yet be accommodated, and never expecting it would come on you in this sudden way.' 'then i think i have been unfairly used,' cried clara; 'i have been brought here on false pretences. as if i would have come near the place if i had known it!' 'a very false pretence that your grandmother must not be left alone at eighty, by the child whom she brought up.' 'oh, louis! you want to tear me to pieces!' 'i have pity on my aunt; i have far more pity on your uncle.' clara stared at him. 'here is a man who started with a grand heroic purpose to redeem the estate, not for himself, but for her and his brother; he exiles himself, he perseveres, till this one pursuit, for which he denies himself home, kindred, wife or child, absorbs and withers him up. he returns to find his brother dead; and the children, for whom he sacrificed all, set against him, and rejecting his favours.' this was quite a new point of view to clara. 'it is his own fault,' she said. 'that a misfortune is by our own fault is no comfort,' said louis. 'his apparent neglect, after all, arose from his absorption in the one object.' 'yes; but how shameful to wish james to forget his ordination.' 'a strong way of putting it. he asked too much: but he would have been, and may yet be, contented with concessions involving nothing wrong. his way of life can hardly have taught him to appreciate james's scruples, as we do; and even if right and wrong were more neatly partitioned between them than i think they are, it would still be hard on him to find this destined heir spurning his benefits.' 'what are you coming to, louis! you think james right? 'i would give the world to think so, clara. one motive is too high for praise, the other--no, i will say nothing of it. but i could wish i had not precipitated matters last year.' 'what, would you have robbed us of our few happy months?' 'it was your uncle whom i robbed; he would otherwise have come home like a good genius; but he found you all happy without him, and with no gratitude to spare for him. and there he sits at the head of that long melancholy table, trying to bring back days that have gone too far ever to be recalled, and only raising their spectres in this mocking finery; scarcely one man present, whose welcome comes from his heart; his mother past the days of heeding the display, except for his sake; his nephew rejecting him; you indignant and miserable. oh, clara! i never saw more plainly money given for that which is not bread, and labour for that which satisfieth not. empty and hollow as the pageant was, i could better bear to take my part in it, so far as truth would let me, than tell that poor man that the last of his brother's children rejects him and his benefits.' 'at this rate, you will make a hero of uncle oliver.' 'it is because he is one of this world's heroes that he is distasteful to you.' 'i don't understand.' 'exclusive devotion to one object, grand though it was, has made him the man he appears to us. think what the spirit must have been that conceived and carried out such a design! depend upon it there is a greatness in him, which may show, when, as dear granny says, she has cured him of all he learnt away from home. i think that must be the work for which you are all brought together here.' 'but i can't thrust out jem. i won't stay here on those terms. i shall protest--' 'it is not graceful to make an uproar about your own magnanimity, nor to talk of what is to happen after a man's death. you don't come here to be heiress, but to take care of your grandmother. there is no need to disturb the future, unless, to be sure, you were obliged to explain your expectations.' 'ah! to be sure, any way i could restore it all to james.' 'or, better still, you may yet be able to draw the uncle and nephew together, and bring back peace and union.' 'then i must stay and bear all this, you think?' 'as a mere matter of obedience, certainly.' clara's countenance fell. 'that may deprive it of the brilliance of a voluntary sacrifice; but, after all, it is what makes your course safe and plain.' 'and very dismal, just because no one will believe so.' 'so the safer for humility,' said louis. 'perhaps the dear old terrace did not offer training and trial enough. i try to believe something of the kind in my own case. if choice had been mine, i should hardly have been exactly what i am; and you know how my chief happiness has been put far from me; but i can imagine that to be at the summit of my wishes might foster my sluggishness, and that i might rest too much on better judgment than my own, if it were beside me. probation maybe safer than joy; and you may do more good to yourself and others than even under isabel's wing. only think of the means in your hands, and all the wretched population round! there will be some hope of help for the curate now--besides, i shall know where to come for subscriptions next time i run crazy about any wonderful charity.' clara smiled. 'i suppose i must bear it,' she said. 'for shame, clara! with aunt kitty, who would make a palace of a dungeon, in the glorious glow of such a sunset, turning each cloud to red and purple radiance by the very force of love and faith, who could regret the being beside her? my own dear and precious aunt, to see her so happy, with bliss and peace so undisturbed, so far above these toys, and these distresses, gives me a sort of fear--' 'oh, don't, louis--' they were interrupted by approaching voices. clara hastily started up, as her uncle and lady britton appeared in the green alley. 'oh, must i go back to them all! my head does ache!' louis gave her his arm, pursued the path in the opposite direction, and emerged at the lower end of the bowling-green, with the battlemented front of the house rising before them. presently, he met his father searching for him. 'poor clara has been overcome,' he said, in explanation. 'the speechifying has been too much for her.' it was the first time that clara had appeared to the earl in any light but that of an idle school-girl, and he said, kindly, 'it must have been very trying. there should have been more preparation. your uncle would have shown better taste in sparing your grandmamma so obtrusive a reception, and i was much pained both for her and for you during some of the speeches.' sympathy from lord ormersfield nearly overthrew clara again, and she involuntarily squeezed louis's arm. he asked for his aunt, and was told, 'she is in the house, entertaining these people. they do not know when to go away. how could oliver inflict such a party on her and such a style of people!' 'i must go and help her,' said louis. clara was in no condition to appear, but louis caused mrs. beckett to be summoned, and committed her to her care. her transport was one of the few pleasant things of that day. 'oh, miss clara! oh, my lord! was there ever the like? isn't master oliver the most blessed boy? missus in her own home again! eight men, and a french man-cook! if ever i thought to see the day! her old room just as it was, only grander! oh, if poor mr. james was but here!' 'ay, jane, and here's clara thinking herself ill about mr. james. take her up and give her some tea, and make her fit to behave prettily by-and-by, that granny may not be vexed.' having seen her safe under jane's fondling care and infectious exultation, he betook himself to the drawing-room, relieved his aunt's anxiety by a whisper, and won golden opinions from the whole company, before they were fairly got rid of; and oliver begged to conduct his mother to her apartment. 'yes, my dear, i must go to poor little clara.' 'i've no fears for clara,' said oliver, as he led her upstairs. 'knowing young fellow to wait for my announcement! i can give her near double what ponsonby could. i'd not object--old dynevor blood--' 'my poor oliver, you have so learnt to think of money, that you can't believe others live for anything else. you'll learn your mistake.' 'you think the young chap meant nothing? i shall look sharp after him, then. i look on clara as my own. i'll have no trifling.' 'you may save yourself the trouble,' said his mother. 'they understand each other--they have always been like brother and sister, and i cannot have the children teased, or things put into their heads.' oliver laughed his scornful chuckle, and said he did not understand that sort of brother and sister, but happily he became absorbed in showing his mother the fittings of her splendid bedroom. clara had the comfort of clinging round her grandmother's neck, and being told that it was all nonsense. jem should have his rights, and uncle oliver would learn to love and honour him at last; and she was a good child, and ought to have been prepared, if granny could have guessed he would do it so publicly and suddenly, but she must forgive him, for he was beside himself at having got them home again, and he could not make enough of her because she was poor henry's child. so she saw granny must not be grieved, and she let herself be dressed for a constrained dinner in the vast dining-room, where the servants outnumbered the diners, and the silver covers bore the dynevor dragon as a handle, looking as spiteful as some of the race could do. oliver was obliged to conclude that no offer had passed between the two young people; but on the way home next morning the earl observed, 'clara frost has a fine figure, and is much improved by dress. she shows excellent feeling, and does credit to her education.' 'the pendragon blood never had a finer development,' said louis. 'even supposing justice done to poor james, she will have a handsome portion. oliver will have far more to dispose of than the five thousand pounds guaranteed to her.' 'poor child!' said louis. 'yes, i pity her for being exposed to his parading. he forgot the gentleman in his merchant's office. if you should ever have any thoughts of rescuing her from him, my approval would not be wanting, and it would be the easiest way of restoring her brother.' 'my dear father, if clara and i were always sister and brother when she was poor, we certainly shall be no more now.' lord ormersfield mentally execrated mr. ponsonby, and felt that he had spoken too soon. jane's felicity was complete when, a few days after, she received, addressed in lord fitzjocelyn's handwriting, an illustrated news, with a whole page containing 'the reception of mrs. dynevor of cheveleigh,' with grand portraits of all the flounces and veils, many gratuitous moustaches, something passing for oliver standing up with a wine-glass in his hand, a puppy that would have perfectly justified mr. ponsonby's aversion representing lord fitzjocelyn, and no gaps at the banquet-table. that picture mrs. beckett caused to be framed and glazed, kept it as her treasure for life, and put it into her will as a legacy to charlotte arnold. chapter ix. the giant of the western star. come, let us range the subterranean vast, dark catacombs of ages, twilight dells, and footmarks of the centuries long past, which look on us from their sepulchral cells. then glad emerge we to the cheering day, some sun-ranged height, or alpine snowy crown, or chimborazo towering far away o'er the great andes chain, and, looking down, on flaming cordilleras, mountain thrown o'er mountain, vast new realms. the creation--rev. i. williams. the same impression of the illustrated london news which delighted jane beckett's simple heart in england, caused no small sensation at lima. dona rosita cast one glance at el visconde there portrayed, and then became absorbed in clara's bonnet; mr. robson pronounced lord ormersfield as good a likeness as mr. dynevor, mr. ponsonby cast a scornful look and smile at the unlucky figure representing fitzjocelyn; and not a critical voice was heard, excepting tom madison's, who indignantly declared that they had made the young lord look as if he had stood behind a counter all his life. the juxtaposition of lord fitzjocelyn and mr. dynevor's niece, was not by any means forgotten. it looked very like a graceful conclusion to oliver's exertions that he should crown their union, and the county paper, which had likewise been forwarded, very nearly hinted as much. mr. ponsonby took care that the paragraph should be laid in his daughter's way, and he offered her the sight of oliver dynevor's own letter. mary suspected that he regarded it as something conclusive, and took care to read it when there were no eyes to mark her emotions. 'ormersfield and his son were there,' wrote oliver. 'the young man is not so soft as he looks. they tell me he is going to work sensibly at the estate, and he has a sharp eye for the main chance. i hear he played fast and loose till he found your daughter had better prospects than miss conway, whom my fool of a nephew chose to marry, and now he is making up to my niece. my mother dotes on him, and i shall make no objection--no extravagance that i can see, and he will take care of the property. you will take no offence, since you refuse the tender altogether.' of this mary believed two sentences--namely, that aunt catharine doted on fitzjocelyn, and that he was not so soft as he looked, which she took as an admission that he was not comporting himself foolishly. she was quite aware that the friendship between him and clara might deceive an uninitiated spectator; and, though she commanded herself to think that an attachment between them would be equally natural and desirable, she could not but look with great satisfaction at the easy unsuspicious tone of mrs. frost's letter, which, after mentioning with much affection and gratitude all oliver's attempts to make her happy, in spite of the many sad changes around, ended by saying that poor clara felt the separation from her brother so much, that without dear louis she did not know how she would have gone through the festivities. 'you can guess how he is everything to us all,' said aunt kitty, 'and i brightened up his looks with giving him your last letter to read. i dare say, miss mary, you would like to scold me.' aunt kitty! aunt kitty! you dearly loved a little kindly mischief! let that be as it might, mr. ponsonby thought that mr. dynevor's letter had certainly not had much effect, for mary was more lively and cheerful than he had seen her since her first arrival. mary's cheerfulness was becoming the more necessary to him, since he was beginning a little to weary of the childish charms of his young limenian wife. rosita had neither education nor conversation; and when all her pretty ways had been tried on him in succession, they began to grow tedious. moreover, the playful submission which she had brought from her convent was beginning to turn into wilfulness. her extravagances in dress were appalling. she refused to wear the same dresses twice, and cried, stamped her graceful foot, and pouted when he remonstrated. she managed to spend every evening in amusement, either at the opera, or at evening parties, where her splendid eyes, and scraps of broken english, made great havoc among young lieutenants and midshipmen visiting lima. mr. ponsonby was growing tired of these constant gaieties, and generally remained at home, sending mary in his stead, as a sort of guard over her; and mary, always the same in her white muslin, followed rosita through all the salas of lima--listened to the confidences of limenian beauties--talked of england to little naval cadets, more homesick than they would have chosen to avow--and felt sure of some pleasure and interest for the evening, when mr. ward came to stand by her chair. one afternoon, as mary sat in her window reading, a gay voice exclaimed, 'beso las manos a usted;' and looking up, she saw one of the prettiest figures imaginable. a full dark purple satin skirt just revealed the point of a dainty white satin shoe. it was plaited low on the hips, and girded loosely with a brightly striped scarf. the head and upper part of the person were shrouded in a close hood of elastic black silk webbing, fastened behind at the waist, and held over the face by the hand, which just allowed one be-ringed finger and one glancing dark eye to appear, while the other hand held a fan and a laced pocket-handkerchief. so perfectly did the costume suit the air and shape of the lady, that, as she stood among mary's orange trees, it was like an illusion, of the fancy, but consternation took away all the charm from mary's eyes. 'tapada, she cried; 'you surely are not going out, tapada?' 'ah, you have found me out,' cried rosita. 'yes, indeed i am! and i have the like saya y manto ready for you. come, we will be on the alameda; xavier waits to attend us. your senor ouard will be at his evening walk.' but mary drew back. this pretty disguise was a freak, such as only the most gay ladies permitted themselves; and she had little doubt that her father would be extremely displeased at his wife and daughter so appearing, although danger there was none; since, though any one might accost a female thus veiled, not the slightest impertinence was ever allowed. mary implored bosita to wait till mr. ponsonby's views should be known; but she was only laughed at for her english precision, and the pretty creature danced away to her stolen pleasure. she came in, all glory and delight at the perplexity in which she had involved the english officers, the guesses and courtesies of her own countrymen, and her mystification of mr. robson, who had evidently recognised her, though pretending to treat her as a charming stranger. the triumph was of short duration. for the first time, she had aroused one of mr. ponsonby's gusts of passion; she quailed under it, wept bitterly, and made innumerable promises, and then she put on her black mantilla, and, with xavier behind her, went to her convent chapel, and returned, half crying over the amount of repetitions of her rosary by which her penance was to be performed, and thereby all sense of the fault put away. responsibility and reflection never seemed to be impressed on that childish mind. mary had come in for some of the anger, for not having prevented rosita's expedition; but they were both speedily forgiven, and mary never was informed again of her using the saya y manto. their minds were diverted by the eager desire of one of the young officers to visit the silver mines. it had been an old promise to mary from her father to take her to see them; but in her former residence in peru, it had never been fulfilled. he now wished to inspect matters himself, in order to answer the numerous questions sent by oliver; and rosita, eagerly catching at any proposal which promised a variety, a party was made up for ascending to the san benito mines, some days' journey from lima. mary and rosita were the only ladies; but there were several gentlemen, three naval officers, and mr. ward, who was delighted to have an opportunity of visiting the wonders which had been, for many years, within his reach without his rousing himself from his business to see them. tents, bedding, and provisions were to be carried with them, and mary had full occupation in stimulating dolores to bring together the requisite preparations; while mr. ward and robson collected guides, muleteers, and litters. it was a merry party, seated on the gaily-trapped mules, with an idle young midshipman to make mischief, and all in spirits to enjoy his nonsense, in the exhilaration of the mountain air blowing freshly from the snowy summits which seemed to rise like walls before them. the steaming, misty, relaxing atmosphere of lima was left behind, and with it many a care and vexation. mr. ponsonby brought his mule to the side of his wife's litter, and exchanged many a joke in anglo-spanish with her and the lieutenant; and mr. ward, his brow unfurrowed from counting-house cares, walked beside mary's mule, gathered each new flower for her, and listened to her narrative of some of the causes for which she was glad, with her own eyes, to see tom madison in his scene of action. the first day of adventure they slept at a hacienda, surrounded with fields where numerous llamas were pasturing. the next began the real mountain work; the rock looked like a wall before them, and the white summits were sharply defined against the blue sky. the sharper air made rosita shiver; but the english travellers congratulated themselves on something like a breeze, consoling them for the glow with which the sunbeams beat upon the rocks. the palms and huge ferns had given place to pines, and these were growing more scanty. once or twice they met a brown indian, robed in a coloured blanket, with a huge straw hat, from beneath which he gazed with curious, though gentle eyes, upon the cavalcade. by-and-by, looking like a string of ants descending a perpendicular wall, mary beheld a row of black specks slowly moving. she was told that these were the mules bringing down the metal in panniers--the only means of communication, until, as the lieutenant promised, a perpendicular railroad should be invented. the electricity of the atmosphere made jokes easily pass current. the mountain was 'only' one of the spurs of the andes, a mere infant among the giants; but, had it been set down in europe, mont blanc must have hid his diminished head; and the view was better than on some of the more enormous neighbours, which were both further inland, and of such height, that to gaze from them was 'like looking from an air-balloon into vacancy.' whereas here mary had but to turn her head, as her mule steadily crept round the causeway--a legacy of the incas--to behold the expanse of the pacific, a sheet of glittering light in the sunshine, the horizon line raised so high, that the first moment it gave her a sense of there being something wrong with her eye, before the feeling of infinity rushed upon her. they were turning the flank of the mountain, and losing the sunshine. the evening air was almost chill, and the clearness such that they already saw the ragged height whither they were bound rising in craggy shattered grandeur, every flat space or gentler declivity covered with sheds and huts for the work-people, and cavernous mouths opening on the cliff-side. dark figures could be distinctly seen moving about; and as to the descending mules, they seemed to be close on the other side of a narrow ravine. rosita, who, now it came to the point, was not without fears of sleeping on the bare mountain-side, wanted to push on; she was sure they could arrive before night, but she was told that she knew nothing of mountain atmosphere; and she was not discontented with the bright fire and comfortable arrangements on which they suddenly came, after turning round a great shoulder of rock. mr. robson and the sumpter-mules had quietly preceded them, and the gipsying on the andes was likely to be not much less luxurious than an english pic-nic. the negro cook had done his best; mary made her father's coffee, and rosita was waited on to her satisfaction. and when darkness came on, too early for english associations with warm days, the lights of the village at the mine glittered merrily, and, apparently, close at hand; and the stars above shone as mary had never seen them, so marvellously large and bright, and the magellan clouds so white and mysterious. mr. ward came and told her some of the observations made on them by distinguished travellers; and after an earnest conversation, she sought her matted bed, with a pleasant feeling on her mind, as if she had been unusually near louis's world. clear, sharp, and cold was the air next day; the snow-fields glistened gloriously in the rising sun, and a rose-coloured mist seemed to rise from them. rosita was shown the unusual spectacle of hoar frost, and shiveringly profited by mary's ample provision of wraps. the hill-sides were beyond conception desolate and bare. birds were an almost unknown race in peru; and here even green things had departed, scarcely a tuft of blossom looking out on the face of the red and purple rock; and the exceeding stillness so awful, that even the boy-sailor scarce dared to speak above his breath. rosita began to repent of having come near so horrible a place; and when she put her head out of her litter, and beheld herself winding along a ledge projecting from the face of a sheer precipice, she would have begged to go back instantly; but her husband spoke in a voice of authority which subdued her; she drew in her head into her basket-work contrivance, and had recourse to vows to sta rosa of lima of a chaplet of diamond roses, if she ever came safely down again. mary had made up her mind that they should not have been taken thither if there were any real danger; and so, though she could have preferred her mule taking the inner side of the ledge, and was not too happy when it climbed like a cat, she smiled, and answered all inquiries that she did not think she ought to be frightened. the region was in general more stern than beautiful, the clefts between the hills looking so deep, that it seemed as if an overthrown mountain could hardly fill them; but now and then came sudden peeps of that wonderful ocean; or almost under her feet, as if she could throw a stone into it, there would lie an intensely green valley, shut in with feathering pines, and the hacienda and grazing llamas dwindled, so that they could have been taken for a swiss farm and flocks of sheep. not till the middle of the day did they meet the line of mules, and not until the sunset did they find themselves close before the wonderful perforated san benito summit. it was, unlike many other metalliferous hills, an isolated, sharply-defined mass of rock, breaking into sudden pinnacles and points, traversed with veins of silver. these veins had been worked with galleries, which, even before the spanish conquest, had honeycombed the solid rock, and had been thought to have exhausted its riches; but it had been part of oliver dynevor's bold speculations to bring modern science to profit by the leavings of the peruvians and their destroyers. it was a marvellous work, but it might still be a question whether the profit would bear out the expense. however, that was not the present consideration. no one could feel anything but admiring astonishment at the fantastic craggy height of peaks and spires, rising against the darkening sky, like the very stronghold of the giant of the western star; and, with the black openings of the galleries, here and there showing the lights of the workmen within. mary remembered the tales, in which louis used vainly to try to interest her, of metal-working dwarfs within the mountains; and would have been glad to tell him that, after all, reality was quite as strange as his legends. the miners, indians and negroes, might truly have been trolls, as, with their brown and black countenances, and wild bright attire, they came thronging out of their rude houses, built of piled stones on every tolerably level spot. three or four stout, hearty cornish miners, with picks on their shoulders, made the contrast stranger; and among them stood a young man, whose ruddy open face carried mary home to ormersfield in one moment; and she could not but blush almost as if it had been louis, when she bent her head in acknowledgment of his bow. he started towards her as if to help her off her mule; but mr. ponsonby was detaining him by questions, and mr. ward, as usual, was at her rein. in a wonderfully brief time, as it seemed to her, all the animals were led off to their quarters; and robson, coming up, explained that madison's hut, the only habitable place, had been prepared for the ladies--the gentlemen must be content to sleep in their tent. 'the hut was at least clean,' said robson, as he ushered them in; and mary felt as if it were a great deal more. it was rudely built, and only the part near the hearth was lined with matting; the table and the few stools and chairs were rough carpentry, chiefly made out of boxes; but upon the wall hung a beautiful print from raffaelle, of which she knew the giver as surely as if his name had been written on it; and the small bookcase suspended near contained, compressed together, an epitome of louis's tastes--the choicest of all his favourites, in each class of book. mary stood by it, reading the names, and trying to perceive louis's principle of selection in each case. it jarred upon her when, as the gentlemen loitered about, waiting for the evening meal, they came and looked at the titles, with careless remarks that the superintendent was a youth of taste, and a laugh at the odd medley--spenser, shakspeare, 'don quixote,' calderon, fouque, and selections from jeremy taylor, &c. mary would hear no more comments. she went to the fire, and tried to persuade rosita they would come safe down again; and then, on the apology for a mantelshelf, she saw some fossils and some dried grasses, looking almost as if fitzjocelyn had put them there. she did not see madison that night; but the next morning he presented himself to act as their guide through the wonders of the extraordinary region where his lot had been cast. she found that this was only the first floor of the wondrous castle. above and above, rose galleries, whence the ore was lowered down to the buildings here placed, where it underwent the first process of separation. the paths above were fit for none, save a chamois, or a barefooted indian, or a sailor--for the midshipman was climbing aloft in such places, that tom's chief work was to summon him back, in horror lest he should involve himself in endless galleries, excavated before the days of atahualpa. much of the desperate scrambling which madison recommended as plain-sailing, was beyond mr. ponsonby; but where he went, mary went; and when he stopped, she, though she had not drawn since the master at her school had resigned her, as a hopeless case, applied herself to the perpetration of an outline of the rocks, that, as she said, 'her aunts might see what sort of place it was.' her steady head, and firm, enterprizing hand and foot, enabled her to see the crowning wonder of the mountain, one of the ventanillas or windows. mr. ward, having visited it, came back bent on taking her thither; there was no danger, if she were not afraid. so, between him and tom madison, she was dragged up a steep path, and conducted into a gallery cut out in the living rock, growing gloomier and gloomier, till suddenly there was a spot of light on the sparkling floor, and mary found herself beneath an opening through the mountain crown, right up into the sky, which, through the wild opening, looked of the deepest, most ultra-marine, almost purple blue, utterly beyond conception in the glory of intense colour, bringing only to her mind those most expressive, yet most inexpressive words, 'the body of heaven in his clearness.' she felt, what she had often heard said, that to all mountain tops is given somewhat of the glory that dwelt on sinai. that ineffable blue was more dazzling than even the fields beyond fields of marvellous white that met her eye on emerging from the dark gallery. 'i never wish so much that lord fitzjocelyn should see anything as that,' said tom madison, when mary, in her gratitude, was trying to say something adequate to the trouble she had given, though the beauty was beyond any word of admiration. 'he would--' she began to answer, but the rest died away, only answered by tom with an emphatic 'he _would_!' and then began the difficulties of getting down. but mary had the pleasure at the next pause of hearing mr. ward say, 'that is a very fine intelligent young fellow, worthy of his library. i think your father has a prize in him!' mary's eyes thanked mr. ward, with all her heart in them. it was worth going up the andes for such a sentence to put into a letter that aunt kitty would show to louis. robson seemed anxious to monopolize the attention of the gentlemen, to the exclusion of madison; and while tom was thus thrust aside, mary succeeded in having a conversation with him, such as she felt was a sort of duty to louis. she asked him the names of the various mountain-peaks in sight, whose bare crags, too steep to support the snow, here and there stood out dark in salient contrast to the white scenery, and as he gave them to her, mentioning the few facts that he had been able to gather respecting them, she was able to ask him whether he was in the habit of seeing anything approaching to society. he smiled, saying that his nearest neighbours were many miles off--an engineer conducting some far more extensive mining operations, whom he sometimes met on business, and an old spanish gentleman, who lived in a valley far down the mountain side, with whom he sometimes smoked his cigar on a sunday, if he felt inclined for a perpendicular promenade on a peruvian causeway for nearly four miles. mary asked whether he often did feel inclined. no, he thought not often; he had generally worked hard enough in the week to make his book the best company; but he liked now and then to see something green for a change after these bare mountains and rocks, and the old don manrique was very civil and agreeable. then, after a few minutes' conversation of this kind, something of the old conscious abruptness of tone seemed to come over the young man, and looking down, he said bluntly, 'miss ponsonby, do you think there would be any objection to my coming into lima just for christmas?' 'i suppose not; i cannot tell.' tom explained that all the miners would be making holiday, and the senior cornishman might safely be left in charge of the works, while he only wished to spend christmas-day itself in the city, and would be a very short time absent. he blushed a little as he spoke, and mary ventured to reply to what she gathered of his thought, 'no other day would suit you as well?' 'no, ma'am, it hardly would,' he answered, gravely. 'i will try what can be done,' said mary, 'unless you would speak to mr. ponsonby yourself.' he looked inquiringly at mr. ponsonby's figure some paces distant, and shook his head. 'i will try,' repeated mary; and then she added, 'these grand hill-tops and blue sky almost make a church--' 'yes, ma'am,' said tom, his black eyes lighting at the thought; 'i've felt so sometimes, but 'tis a mighty lonely one after a time. i've taken my book, and got out of earshot of the noise the blacks make; and i do assure you, miss ponsonby, the stillness was enough to drive one wild, with nothing but savage rocks to look at either! not a green plant, nor a voice to answer, unless one got to the mountain echoes, and they are worse--' 'but surely you have the cornishmen! what do they do on a sunday?' 'they lie about, and smoke and sleep, or go down to the valley,' said tom. 'i never thought of them.' 'i think you should,' said mary, gravely. 'if you are in any authority over them, it must give you a charge over their souls. i think you should, at least, give them the choice of reading the service with you.' 'i'll think about it,' said madison, gruffly. 'i will send up some books for them to make an opening,' said mary. 'i should not like to think of men living in such scenes, without being the better for them.' robson was here obliged to call madison to refer some question to him; but mary had another talk with him, when he begged to know if there were likely soon to be an opportunity of sending to england. he had some fossils which he wished to send to lord fitzjocelyn; and he fetched them, and explained his theories with regard to them as if he had almost forgotten that she was not his young lord. she carried his request to her father, and was answered that of course he might take a holiday if he could leave the works with safety; he had better spend a few days in the town when he did come. with this answer she made him happy; and they set off, to the extreme joy of rosita, who had engrossed much less attention than she had expected, and declared she would never have come into these horrible places if she could have imagined what they were like. certainly, no one wished to have her company there again. when mr. ponsonby mentioned the permission which he had accorded to madison, robson coughed and looked annoyed. mary could not help suspecting that this was because the request had not been preferred through himself. 'so the young fellow wants to be coming down, does he? i thought his ardour was too hot to last long.' 'very natural that the poor lad should want a holiday,' said mr. ponsonby. 'it must take a tolerable flow of spirits to stand long, being so many feet above the level of the sea, in caves fit for a robber's den at the theatre.' 'oh, i am making no objection, sir,' returned robson; 'the young man may take his pleasure for what i care, so he can be trusted not to neglect his business.' here the path narrowed, and mary had to fall back out of hearing; but she had an unpleasant suspicion that robson was telling her father something to tom's disadvantage, and she had to consider how to avoid rousing a jealousy, which she knew might be dangerous. mr. ward, however, came up to interrupt her thoughts and watch the steps of her mule. the worst difficulties of the descent had precluded all conversation; and the party were just beginning to breathe freely, think of terra firma as not far off, and gaze with easier minds on the marvellous ocean. mary went on in very comfortable discussion of the wonders they had seen, and of madison's remark that the performances of the incas made one quite ashamed of the achievements of modern science--a saying in which mr. ward perfectly agreed; and then he began to say something rather long, and a little disconnected, and mary's mind took an excursion to aunt kitty, and the reading of the letter that she was going to write, when suddenly something in mr. ward's voice startled her, and recalling her attention, she discovered, to her dismay, that he was actually making her an offer! an offer! she would as soon have expected one from her father! and oh! how well expressed--how entirely what it ought to be! how unlike every one of those three of her past experience! in great distress she exclaimed, 'oh, mr. ward, pray do not--indeed, i cannot!' 'i feared that i was but too likely to meet with such an answer,' said mr. ward; 'and yet your father encouraged me to hope, that in course of time--' 'then papa has told you what he thinks?' said mary. 'i applied to him before i could venture to join this party. mary, i am aware that i can bring none of the advantages which have'--his voice faltered--'which have forestalled me; but the most true and earnest affection is already yours.' 'i am very sorry for it, mr. ward,' said mary, gravely, though much touched. 'it is very kind of you, but it is only fair and candid to tell you that papa has probably led you into a mistake. he thinks that the--the object was weak and unworthy, and that my feelings could be easily overcome. he does not know--' 'he assured me that all was at an end--' 'it is,' said mary; 'but i am certain that i shall never feel for any one else the same as'--and the tears were coming last. 'you are very kind, mr. ward, but it is of no use to think that this can ever be.' 'forgive me for having harassed you,' said mr. ward, and they went on so long in silence that mary hoped it was over, and yet he did not go away from her. she was sorry to see the grieved, dejected expression on his good, sensible, though somewhat worn countenance; and she esteemed him highly; but who could have thought of so unlucky a fancy coming into his head? when, at length, he spoke again, it was to say that he begged that she would forget what was past, and allow him to continue on his former footing. mary was glad to have something grateful to say, and answered that she should have been very sorry to lose him as a friend; whereupon his face cheered up, he thanked her, and fell back from her rein. in spite of her past trials of the futility of the attempt to live with a rejected suitor as if nothing had happened, she had hopes of the possibility when her own heart was untouched, and the gentleman nearly doubled her years; but when she talked to her father, she gathered that it was considered by both gentlemen that the proposal had been premature, and that her final detachment from louis was reckoned on as so certain that mr. ward was willing to wait, as if it were only a matter of time. he was so wealthy and prosperous, and a connexion with him would have been so useful to the firm, that mary was grateful to her father for forbearing to press her on what he evidently wished so earnestly. mr. ward had exactly the excellent, well-balanced character, which seemed made to suit her, and she could have imagined being very happy with him, if--no, no--mr. ward could not be thought of at the same moment. yet, whatever she might say, no one would believe her; so she held her peace, and wrote her history of the silver mines; and mr. ward haunted the house, and was most kindly forbearing and patient, and mary found at every turn, how good a man he was, and how cruel and mistaken his sister thought her. and christmas came, when the churches were perfect orange-groves, and the scene of the wanderers of bethlehem was acted from house to house in the twilight. the scanty english congregation met in the room that served as a chapel in the consul's house--poor mary alone of all her household there to keep the feast; and mr. ward was there, and madison had come down from his mountain. there were hearts at home that would rejoice to hear that. mary saw him afterwards, and he thanked her for her suggestion respecting the miners. two had been only as shy as tom himself; they had been reading alone, and were glad to join company, a third was beginning to come, and it had led to a more friendly intercourse. mary sent him away, very happy with some books for them, some new spanish reading for himself, an astronomical book, and her little celestial globe--for the whole firmament of stars had been by no means lost on him. that interview was her christmas treat. well for her that she did not hear robson say, 'that young man knows how to come over the ladies. i shall keep a sharper look-out after him. i know no harm of him, but if there's one man i trust less than another, it is one that tries the serious dodge.' chapter x. the wrong woman in the wrong place. give me again my hollow tree, my crust of bread, and liberty. the town mouse and the country mouse--pope. the new cook's first compliment to charlotte was, 'upon my word, you are a genteel young woman, i dare say you have a lot of sweethearts.' the indignant denial of the lady of eschalott was construed into her being 'sly,' and mrs. cook promised herself to find her out. those were not happy days with the little maiden. the nurse looked down on her, and the cook filled the kitchen with idlers, whose looks and speeches were abhorrent to her. sometimes the woman took offence at her for being high; at others, she forced on her advice upon her dress, or tried to draw out confidences either on lovers or the affairs of the family. charlotte was sadly forlorn, and shut herself up in her pantry, or in her own little attic with jane's verbenas which cook had banished from the kitchen, and lost her sorrows in books hired at the library. she read, and dreamt, created leisure for reading, lived in a trance, and awoke from it to see her work neglected, reproach herself, and strain her powers to make up for what was left undone. then, finding her efforts failing, she would be distressed and melancholy, until a fresh novel engrossed her for a time, and the whole scene was enacted over again. still, it was not all idleness nor lost ground. the sense of responsibility was doing her good, she withstood the cook's follies, and magnanimously returned unopened a shining envelope of mr. delaford's. at christmas, when mr. and mrs. frost went to pay a visit at beauchastel, and the cook enjoyed a course of gaieties, the only use she made of her liberty was to drink tea once with mrs. martha, and to walk over to marksedge to see old madison, who was fast breaking, and who dictated to her his last messages to his grandson. james and isabel spent a pleasant lively christmas with their hospitable old friends, and james returned full of fresh vigour and new projects. his first was to offer his assistance to the vicar, so as to have a third service on the sunday; but there were differences of opinion between them, and his proposal was received so ungraciously, that a coolness arose, which cut him off from many openings for usefulness. however, he had enough to occupy him in his own department, the school. he was astonished at his boys' deficiency in religious instruction, and started a plan for collecting them for some teaching for an hour before morning service. mr. calcott agreed with him that nothing could be more desirable, but doubted whether the parents would compel their sons to attend, and advised james to count the cost, doubting whether, in the long run, he would be able to dispense with one day of entire rest. this was the more to be considered, since james expended a wonderful amount of energy in his teaching, did his utmost to force the boys on, in class and in private, drilled his usher, joined in the games, and gave evening lectures on subjects of general information. some responded to his training, and these he strenuously encouraged, asking them to dinner and taking them to walk; and these were enthusiastically fond of him, and regarded his beautiful wife as a being of a superior order. fitzjocelyn and james used to agree that intercourse with her was a very important element in their training, and the invitations were made as impartial as possible, including the intelligent and well-conducted, irrespective of station. isabel's favourite guest was a good, well-mannered lad, son to mr. ramsbotham's follower, the butcher, but, unluckily, mrs. richardson and her friends did not esteem it a compliment when their sons were asked to meet him, and, on the other hand, james did not always distinguish real merit from mere responsiveness to his own mind. dull boys, or such as had a half sullen, half conservative dislike to change, did not gain notice of an agreeable kind, and while intending to show strict justice, he did not know how far he was affected by his prepossessions. his lectures had emancipated him from evening parties; and, after mrs. frost's departure, visiting gave isabel little trouble. the calm, lofty manners that had been admired in miss conway, were thought pride in mrs. james frost, and none of the ladies of northwold even wished to do more than exchange morning calls with her, and talk among themselves of her fine-ladyism. she recked nothing of their keeping aloof; her book and her pen were far pleasanter companions on her alternate evenings of solitude, and in them she tried to lose her wishes for the merry days spent with granny and clara, and her occasional perceptions that all was not as in their time. james would sometimes bring this fact more palpably before her. the separation of the families had not diminished the income of the household, but the difference in comfort was great. isabel knew nothing of management, and did not care to learn. she had been willing to live on a small scale, but she did not understand personal superintendence, she was careless of display, and perfectly happy as long as she was the guest of the grandmother, but she had no comprehension of petty tidinesses or small economies. now james, brought up on a very different scale, knew in detail how the household ought to live, and made it a duty not to exceed a fixed sum. he had the eye for neatness that she wanted; he could not believe it a hardship to go without indulgences to which his grandmother and sister had not been accustomed. thus, he protested against unnecessary fires; isabel shivered and wore shawls; he was hurt at seeming to misuse her, resigned his study fire, and still found the coals ever requiring to be renewed, insisted that his wife should speak to the cook, and mystified her by talking about the regulation of the draught of the kitchen fire; and when isabel understood, she forgot the lecture. he was a devoted and admiring husband, but he could not coolly discover innumerable petty neglects and wasteful habits. impatient words broke out, and isabel always received them so meekly that he repented and apologized; and in the reconciliation the subject was forgotten, but only to be revived another time. isabel was always ready to give warm aid and sympathy in all his higher cares and purposes, and her mild tranquillity was repose and soothing to him, but she was like one in a dream. she had married a vision of perfection, and entered on a romance of happy poverty, and she had no desire to awaken; so she never exerted her mind upon the world around her, when it seemed oppressive; and kept the visionary james frost before her, in company with adeline and the transformed sir hubert. it was much easier to line his tent with a tapestry of maltese crosses, than to consider whether the hall should be covered with cocoanut matting. how christmas passed with clara, may be seen in the following letter:-- 'cheveleigh, jan. . 'dearest jem,--i can write a long letter to-night, for a fortunate cold has spared me from one of sir andrew's dinner-parties. it is a reminiscence of the last ball, partly brought on by compunction at having dragged poor granny thither, in consideration of my unguarded declaration of intense dislike to be chaperoned by lady britton. granny looks glorious in black velvet and diamonds, and i do trust that her universal goodwill rendered the ball more tolerable to her than it was to me. she, at least, is all she seems; whereas i am so infested with civilities, that i long to proclaim myself little clara frost, bred up for a governess, and the laughing-stock of her school. oh! for that first ball where no one danced with me but mr. richardson, and i was not a mere peg for the display of uncle oliver's peruvian jewels! i have all the trouble in the world to be allowed to go about fit to be seen, and only by means of great fighting and coaxing did i prevail to have my dress only from london instead of paris. 'and no wonder i shivered all the way to the ball. fancy jane insisting on my going to display my dress to that poor dying marianne; i was shocked at the notion of carrying my frivolities into such a scene, but jane said her mind ran on it, and it was 'anything to take off her thoughts from that man.' so i went into her room, and oh! if you could have seen the poor thing, with her short breath and racking cough, her cheeks burning and her eyes glistening at that flimsy trumpery. one bunch of the silver flowers on my skirt was wrong; she spied it, and they would not thwart her, so she would have the needle, and the skeleton trembling fingers set them right. they said she would sleep the easier for it, and she thanked me as if it had really set her more at rest; but how sad, how strange it seems, when she knows that she is sinking fast, and has had mr. danvers with her every day. he thinks all is well with her; but it was a melancholy, blank, untaught mind, to begin to work on. louis would call her life a mournful picture of our civilization. she has told it all to jane: she was of the mechanic class, just above the rank that goes to sunday-schools; she went to a genteel weekly school, and was taken out pleasuring on sunday--no ground-work at all. an orphan at fifteen, she never again knew tenderness. then came dressmaking till her health failed, and she tried service. she says, isabel's soft tones made a paradise for her; but late hours, which she did not feel at the time, wore her out, and delaford trifled with her. always when alone he pretended devotion to her, then flirted with any other who came in his way, and worry and fretting put the finish to her failing health. she had no spirit to break entirely with him, and even now is pining for one kind word, which he seems to be too hard and selfish to send to her, in answer to a letter of forgiveness that she wrote a fortnight back. what a wretch he must be! jane says, he tried flirting with poor little charlotte, and that she was a little 'took up' with his guitar and his verses; but then, jane says, 'charlotte has somewhat at the bottom, and knows better than to heed a man as wasn't real religious.' i suppose that is the true difference between charlotte and marianne, and even if we looked into delaford's history, most likely we should find him another nineteenth-century victim to an artificial life. at least, i trust that jane has been the greatest blessing, marianne herself speaks of her as more than a mother to her; and i believe i told you of the poor girl's overpowering gratitude, when she found we would not turn her out to die homeless. we read, and we talk, and mr. danvers comes; but i believe dear old jane does more for her than all. 'poor jane! when her task of nursing is over, i do not know what she will turn to. the grand servants only keep terms with her because uncle oliver gave notice that no one should stay in the house who did not show respect to his _friend_ mrs. beckett. it takes all her love for missus and master oliver to make her bear it; and her chief solace is in putting me to bed, and in airing master oliver's shirt and slippers. you would laugh to hear her compassionating the home minced-pies! and she tells me she would give fifty pounds rather than bring charlotte here. my uncle wished grandmamma to manage the house, and she did so at first, but she and the servants did not get on well together; and she said, what i never knew her say before, that she is too old, and so we have an awful dame who rules with a high hand. 'you ask whether the dear granny is happy. you know she is all elasticity, and things are pleasanter here to her than to me, but i do not think she enjoys life as she did at home. it is hard to have her whole mission reduced to airing those four horses. we have tormented my uncle out of making us use more than two at a time, by begging for six and the lord mayor's coach; but aired alternately they must be, and we must do it, and by no road but what the coachman chooses; and this does not seem to me to agree with her like trotting about the town on her errands. there is no walking here, excepting in the pleasure-ground, where all my grandfather's landscape-gardening has been cut up so as to be a mere vexation to her. the people round are said to be savage and disaffected, and the quarter of a mile between the park and the village is subject to miners going home. they did once holloa at me, and orders were issued that i should walk no more. i believe that if they saw me fearless, and coming among them for friendly purposes, they would leave off hooting; but the notion frightens granny, so i am a prisoner. they are the people to think it a mockery to be visited by a lady bedizened as i am, and stuck up in a carriage; so we can do very little except through mr. danvers, and my uncle is always discontented at the sight of him, and fancies he is always begging. a little sauciness on my part has the best effect when anything is wanted, for my uncle is very kind to me in his own fashion, which is not mine. 'we have made something of a nest in the last of the suite of rooms, the only one habitably small; but it is wonderful where all the time in the day goes. my uncle likes me to ride with him in the morning, and i have to help granny air the horses in the afternoon; and in the evening, when we are lucky enough to dine alone, i play them both asleep, unless they go to backgammon. think of granny reduced to that! we should be very happy when he is detained in his study, but that granny thinks it is bad for him. dear granny! i see the object of her life is to win him back to serious thoughts. she seems to think of him like a schoolboy who must be lured to find home pleasanter than idle ways; and she begs me quite sadly to bear with him, and make him happy, to prevent him from longing after his counting-house at lima. she tried to make him promise never to go back, but he has only promised never to go while she lives, and she seems to think it would be fatal, and to charge all his disregard of religious matters upon herself for having sent him out. if you could see her pleased smile when we extort a subscription, or when she gets him to church; but when those south american mails come in on sundays--alas! those accounts are his real element, and his moments of bliss are over the 'money-market and city intelligence,' or in discussing railway shares with sir andrew. all the rest is an obstinate and dismal allegiance to the days of shrievalty, about as easy to recall as the days when the pendragons wore golden collars and armlets. imitated hospitality turns into ostentation; and the people who seek after silver covers and french cookery are no more to my taste than they are, in good earnest, to uncle oliver's. the nice people, if there are any, won't come in our way, except mr. henderson; and when we do pluck up courage to disgust mr. coachman by calling on mrs. henderson, we are very happy. but she is a wise woman, and will not bring her pretty fanny into our world; and when i press her, behold! i remember what i used to think of patronage. 'but louis has promised to come at easter, and he will teach me a little more charity, i hope; and, what is better (no, i don't mean that), will tell me about the dear, dear, trebly dear terrace and all the doings. i hope you will begin your sunday scheme; but granny fears the bad set will not care, and the good will prefer having their families together. it is worse than i expected even of mr. purvis to refuse the afternoon service, when you offered to take all the trouble off his hands; granny hopes you will take care what you are about with him. tell louis we have a famous letter from mary to show him if he will bring us all news of every one, and especially of his godchild. contrary to custom, you tell us more about her than her mamma does. 'your most affectionate sister, 'clara.' before easter, charlotte's poor rival was lying at rest in cheveleigh churchyard, and jane's task of love was at an end. chapter xi. aunt catharine's home. the lady sleeps--o may her sleep, as it is lasting, so be deep! heaven have her in its sacred keep! this bed being changed for one more holy, this room for one more melancholy, some tomb, that oft hath flung its black and wing-like panels fluttering back, triumphant o'er the fluttering palls of her grand family funerals. e. a. poe. the summer was nearly over, when, one morning at breakfast, louis surprised his father by a sound, half consternation, half amusement, and handed him a note, containing these words:-- 'dear f.,--there were three of us last night; there are five this morning. isabel and the twins are doing well. heaven knows what is to become of us! 'yours, j. f.' 'what would you have?' said lord ormersfield, calmly. 'the poorer people are, the more children they have!' he went on with his own letters, while louis laughed at the enunciation of this inverse ratio; and then took up the note again, to wonder at the tone of anxiety and distress, so unlike james. he went to call on lady conway, and was better satisfied to find that james had written in a lively strain to her, as if proud of his little daughters, and resolved not to be pitied. of this he was in no danger from his sisters-in-law, who looked upon twin-girls as the only blessing needed to complete isabel's felicity, had devised three dozen names for them, and longed to be invited to northwold to see them. nothing was heard of james for more than a week, and, as london grew hotter, dustier, and drearier than ever, fitzjocelyn longed, more than he thought wholesome to confess, after ormersfield turf, the deep ravines, and rushing brooks. the sun shone almost through the blind of the open window on the large library table, where sat louis at his own end, writing to his inglewood bailiff, and now and then solacing himself by lifting with the feather of his pen one of the bells of a delicate lily in a glass before him--a new spectacle on the earl's writing-table; and so was a strip of vellum, with illuminations rich and rare--louis's indulgence when he felt he had earned an hour's leisure. there was a ring at the door, a step on the stairs, and before the father and son stood james, his little black bag in his hand, like himself, all dust, and his face worn, heated, and tired. 'then you have not heard from cheveleigh?' he said, in answer to their astonished greetings, producing a note, which was eagerly read:-- 'dearest jem,--my uncle says i may write to you, in case you can leave isabel, that he will be glad to see you. i told you that dear grandmamma had a cold, and so we would not let her come to isabel; but i little guessed what was coming. it only seemed a feverish cold, and jane and i almost laughed at my uncle for choosing to send for a doctor. he was not alarmed at first, but yesterday she was inert and sleepy, and he asked for more advice. dr. hastings came to-day, and oh! jem, he calls it a breaking up of the constitution, and does not think she will rally. she knows us, but she is almost always drowsy, and very hard to rouse. if you can come without hurting isabel, i know you will. we want you all the more, because my uncle will not let me send for mr. danvers. poor uncle oliver is dreadfully troubled. 'your most affectionate clara.' 'transplantation has killed her--i knew it would!' said james, as louis stood, with the note in his hand, as if not yet understanding the blow. 'nay,' said the earl, 'it is an age at which we could hardly hope she would long be spared. you could leave mrs. james frost with comfort?' 'yes, miss mercy undertakes her--she is doing well--she would not hear of my staying. i must go on, the train starts at two,' he added, hastily, looking at the time-piece. 'we will send you,' said lord ormersfield. 'take time to rest. you look very ill! you should have some luncheon.' 'no, thank you!' said james, at first with the instinct of resistance; but yielding and confessing, 'charlotte went into hysterics, and i had nothing to eat before i came away.' louis came forward from the window where he had been standing as in a dream, he laid his hand on james's shoulder, and said, 'i will go!' his voice was hardly audible, but, clearing it, and striving to recall his thoughts, he added, 'father, i can be spared. the division is not coming on to-night, or you could get me a pair.' the earl looked doubtfully at james. 'yes, let me go,' said louis. 'i must see her again. it has been mother and son between us.' and, hiding his face in his hands, he hurried out of the room. 'let him come,' said james. 'if duty and affection claim a right, none have such as he.' 'i hesitate only as to acting unceremoniously by your uncle.' 'this is no moment for ceremony--no time to deprive her of whatever she loves best.' 'be it so, then. his own feelings are his best passport, and well has she deserved all that he can ever feel! and, james, if she should express any desire to see me, if i can be of any use in settling matters, or could promote any better understanding with your uncle, i am ready at a moment's notice. i would come at once, but that many might be burdensome to your uncle and sister.' the two cousins were quickly on their way. james took a second-class ticket, the first time he had ever done so in travelling with his cousin. fitzjocelyn placed himself beside him without remark. james dozed as well as the narrow seat would permit, and only woke to chafe at each halt, and louis mused over the associations of those scenes, and last year's triumphant return. had the change of habits truly hastened the decay of her powers? had her son's toil and success been merely to bring her home to the grave of her fathers, at the expense of so many heartburnings, separations, and dissensions? at least, he trusted that her last hours might be crowned by the peacemaker's joy, and that she might see strife and bitterness laid aside between oliver, and henry's only surviving son. alas! it was not to be. the shutters and blinds were closed, and clara met them at the door, her pale face and streaming eyes forestalling the tidings. the frame, hitherto so vigorous and active, had been spared long or weary decay; and tranquil torpor had mildly conducted the happy, gentle spirit to full repose. she had slumbered away without revival or suffering, as one who did 'rest from her labours,' and her eyes had been closed on the previous night. clara wept as she spoke, but she had been alone with her sorrow long enough to face it, and endure calmly. not so her brother. it was anguish to have come too late, and to have missed the last word and look; and he strode madly up and down the room, almost raving at the separation and removal which he declared had killed her. 'oh, speak to him, louis!' cried clara. 'oh, what shall i do?' as she spoke, the door was opened, and mr. dynevor came in, with a grief-stricken look and quieter manner, but his entrance instantly silenced all james's demonstrations, and changed them into a haughty, compressed bitterness, as though he actually looked on him in the light of his grandmother's destroyer. 'ah! james,' began his uncle, gently, 'i wish you had been here earlier!' 'i left home by the first train after hearing. i ought to have heard sooner.' 'i could not suppose you would choose to come here without serious reason,' said oliver, with more dignity than usual. 'however, i would willingly forget, and you will remain here for the present.' 'i must apologize for having thrust myself on you, sir,' said louis, 'but, indeed, i could not stay away. after what she has been to me, ever since i can remember her--' and tears cut him short. 'sir, it does you honour!' returned oliver. 'she was attached to you. i hope you will not leave us as yet.' louis felt as if he could not leave the house where what was mortal of his dear old aunt yet remained, and he likewise had a perception that he might be a support and assistance to clara in keeping the peace between her brother and uncle; so he gratefully accepted the invitation. mr. dynevor presently explained that he intended the funeral to take place at the end of the week. 'i can not be so long from home,' said james, in a quick, low voice. clara ran up to her uncle, laid her hand on his arm, and drew him into a window, whence he presently turned, saying, 'your sister tells me that you cannot be so long absent in the present state of your family. if possible, the day shall be hastened.' james was obliged to say, 'thank you!' but any concession seemed to affect him like an injury. grievous work was it to remain at cheveleigh, under the constant dread of some unbecoming outbreak between uncle and nephew. fortunately, oliver had too much on his hands to have much time to spend with the others; but when they were together, there was scarcely a safe subject, not even the intended names of the twins. james made hasty answer that they had already received their names, mercy and salome. louis and clara both cried out incredulously. 'yes,' said james. 'we don't like family names.' 'but such as those!' 'i wish nothing better for them than to be such another pair of faithful sisters. may they only do as well, poor children!' the end was softer than the beginning, and there was a tight short sigh, that seemed to burst upward from a whole world of suppressed anxiety and despondence. it was not easy to understand him, he would not talk of home, was brief about his little catharine; and when clara said something of isabel's writings, formerly his great pride, and feared that she would have no more time for them, his blunt answer was, 'she ought not.' these comparatively indifferent topics were the only resource; for he treated allusions to his grandmother as if they were rending open a wound, and it was only in his absence that louis and clara could hold the conversations respecting her, which were their chief comfort and relief. if they were certain that oliver was busy, and james writing letters, they would walk up and down the sheltered alley, where louis had last year comforted clara. the green twilight and chequered shade well accorded with the state of their minds, darkened, indeed, by one of the severest losses that could ever befall either of them, and yet it was a sorrow full of thankfulness and blessed hope. louis spoke of his regret that scenes of uncongenial gaiety should have been forced upon her last year. 'i believe it made very little difference to her,' said clara. 'she did just what uncle oliver wished, but only as she used to play with us, no more; nay, rather less for her own amusement than as she would play at battledore, or at thread-paper verses.' 'and she was not teased nor harassed?' 'i think not. she was grieved if i were set against uncle oliver's plans, and really hurt if she could not make him think as she did about right and wrong, but otherwise she was always bright. she never found people tiresome; she could find something kind to say to and for the silliest; and when my uncle's display was most provoking, she would only laugh at 'poor oliver's' odd notions of doing her honour. i used to be quite ashamed of the fuss i would make when i thought a thing vulgar; when i saw that sort of vanity by the side of her real indifference, springing from unworldliness.' 'and then her mornings were quiet?' 'more quiet than at home. while we were riding, she used to sit with her dear old big bible, and the two or three old books she was so fond of. you remember her sutton and her bishop home, and often she would show me some passage that had struck her as prettier than ever, well as she had always known it. once she said she was very thankful for the leisure time, free from household cares, and even from friendly gossip; for she said first she had been gay, then she had been busy, and had never had time to meditate quietly.' 'so she made a cloister of this grand house. ah! i trusted she was past being hurt by external things. that grand old age was like a pure glad air where worldly fumes could not mount up. my only fear would have been this unlucky estrangement making her unhappy.' 'i think i may tell you how she felt it,' said clara; 'i am trying to tell james, but i don't know whether i can. she said she had come to perceive that she had confounded pride with independence. she blamed herself, so that i could not bear to hear it, for the grand fine things in her life. she said pride had made her stand alone, and unkindly spurn much that was kindly meant. i don't mean that she repented of the actions, but of the motives; she said the glory of being beholden to no one had run through everything; and had been very hurtful even to uncle oliver. she never let him know all her straits, and was too proud, she said, to ask, when she was hurt at his not offering help, and so she made him seem more hard-hearted, and let us become set against him. she said she had fostered the same temper in poor jem, who had it strongly enough by inheritance, and that she had never known the evil, nor understood it as pride, till she saw the effects.' 'did they make her unhappy?' 'she cried when she spoke of it, and i have seen her in tears at church, and found her eyes red when she had been alone, but i don't think it was a hard, cruel sorrow; i think the sunshine of her nature managed to beam through it.' 'the sunshine was surely love,' said louis, 'making the rainbow of hope on the tears of repentance. perhaps it is a blessing vouchsafed to the true of heart to become aware of such a hidden constitutional infirmity in time to wash it out with blessed tears like those.' 'hidden,' said clara, 'yes, indeed it was, even from herself, because it never showed in manner, like my pride; she was gracious and affable to all the world. i heard the weeding-women saying, 'she had not one bit of pride,' and when i told her of it, she shook her head, and laughed sadly, and said that was the kind of thing which had taken her in.' 'common parlance is a deceitful thing,' said louis, sighing; 'people can't even be sincere without doing harm! well, i had looked to see her made happy by harmony between those two!' 'she gave up the hope of seeing it,' said clara, 'but she looked to it all the same. she said meekly one day that it might be her penalty to see them at variance in her own lifetime, but over her grave perhaps they would be reconciled, and her prayers be answered. how she did love uncle oliver! do you know, louis, what she was to him showed me what the mother's love must be, which we never missed, because--because we had her!' 'don't talk of it, clara,' said louis, hastily; 'we cannot dwell on ourselves, and bear it patiently!' it was truly the loss of a most tender mother to them both; bringing for the first time the sense of orphanhood on the girl, left between the uncongenial though doting uncle, and the irritable though affectionate brother; and louis, though his home was not broken up, suffered scarcely less. his aunt's playful sweetness had peculiarly accorded with his disposition, and the affection and confidence of his fond, clinging nature had fastened themselves upon her, all the more in the absence of his own mary. each loss seemed to make the other more painful. aunt kitty's correspondence was another link cut away between him and peru, and he had never known such a sense of dreariness in his whole life. clara was going patiently and quietly through those trying days, with womanly considerateness; believing herself supported by her brother, and being so in fact by the mere sisterly gratification of his presence, though she was far more really sustained and assisted by fitzjocelyn. how much happier was the sorrow of louis and clara than that of james or oliver! tempers such as those in which the uncle and nephew but too closely resembled each other were soured, not softened by grief, and every arrangement raised discussions which did not tend to bring them nearer together. oliver designed a stately funeral. nothing was too much for him to lavish on his mother, and he was profuse in orders for hangings, velvet, blazonry, mutes, and hired mourners, greedy of offers of the dreary state of empty carriages, demanding that of lord ormersfield, and wanting james to write to lady conway for the same purpose. nothing could be more adverse to the feelings of the grandchildren; but clara had been schooled into letting her uncle have his way, and knew that dear granny would have said oliver might do as he pleased with her in death as in life, owning the affection so unpleasantly manifested; james, on the other hand, could see no affection, nothing but disgusting parade, as abhorrent to his grandmother's taste as to his own. he thought he had a right to be consulted, for he by no means believed himself to have abdicated his headship of the family; and he made his voice heard entirely without effect, except the indignation of his uncle, and the absence of the conway carriage; although lord ormersfield wrote that he should bring sir walter in his own person, thus leaving james divided between satisfaction in any real token of respect to his grandmother, and dislike to gratifying oliver's ostentation by the production of his baronet kin. sydney calcott wrote to him in the name of various former scholars of mrs. frost, anxious to do her the last honours by attending the funeral. homage to her days of gallant exertion in poverty was most welcome and touching to the young people; but their uncle, without taste to understand it, wishing to forget her labours, and fancying them discreditable to a daughter of the dynevors, received the proposal like an indignity; and but for fitzjocelyn's mediation and expostulations, it would have been most unsuitably rejected. he was obliged to take the answer into his own hands, since oliver insisted that his mother was to be regarded in no light save that of mrs. dynevor, of cheveleigh; and james was equally resolved that she should be only mrs. frost, of dynevor terrace. it was heart-sickening to see these bickerings over the grave of one so loving and so beloved; and very trying to be always on the alert to obviate the snappings that might at any time become a sharp dissension; but nothing very distressing actually arose until the last day before the funeral, when the three cousins were sitting together in the morning-room; james writing letters. 'i am asking lady conway to give you a bed to-morrow night, clara,' he said. 'we shall be at home by three o'clock.' 'oh, jem!' said clara, clasping her hands to keep them from trembling; 'i never thought of that.' 'you are not ready! that is unlucky, for i cannot come to fetch you; but i suppose you can travel down with jane. only i should have thought it easier to do the thing at once.' 'but, jem! has my uncle said anything? does he wish me to go?' james laid down his pen, and stood upright, as if he did not understand her words. clara came up to him, saying, 'i believe i ought to do what he may wish.' 'i told you,' said james, as if her words were not worth considering, 'that you need only remain here on her account, who no longer needs you.' louis would have left them to themselves, but clara's glance sued for his protection, and, as he settled himself in his chair, she spoke with more decision.--'dear james, nothing would make me so happy as to go to dear home; but i do not think grandmamma would like me to leave uncle oliver.' 'oh, very well,' said james, sitting down to his writing, as if he had done with her; 'i understand.' 'dear james! o tell me you are not angry with me! tell me you think i am right!' cried clara, alarmed by his manner. 'quite right in one point of view,' he said, with acrimony. 'james,' said louis, very low, but so as to make them both start, 'that is not the way to treat your sister!' 'we will renew the discussion another time, if you wish it, clara,' said james. 'no,' said clara, 'i wish louis to be here. he will judge for me,' and she spoke clearly, her face colouring. 'it was grandmamma's great wish that i should love my uncle. she used to beg me to be patient with him, and rejoiced to see us together. she often said he must not be left with no one to make a home for him, and to go out to lima again.' 'did she ever desire you to remain here?' 'no,' said clara, 'she never did; but i am convinced that if she had known how soon she was to leave us, she would have done so. i feel as much bound as if she had. i have heard her call him my charge. and not only so, but my uncle has never varied in his kindness to me, and when he worked all his life for grandmamma, and my father, it would be wicked and cruel in me--if he does care for me--to forsake him, now he has lost them all, and is growing old.' 'you need not scruple on that score,' said james. 'he has attained his object, and made the most of it. he is free now, and he will soon find a rosita, if his mines are not sufficient for him.' 'james, you should not say wrong things,' said clara. 'i am not likely to think it wrong, whatever you may. i have no expectations. do not rise up in arms against me, fitzjocelyn, i do not accuse her. i might have foreseen it. she meant well at first, but the terrace cannot bear competition with a place like this. where two so-called duties clash, she is at perfect liberty to make her choice. it would not be easy to come down to what i have to offer. i understand. the world will call it a wise choice. say no more, clara, i feel no anger.' she attempted no words; she clasped her hands over her face, and ran out of the room. 'james,' said louis, rising, indignation rendering his voice more low and clearly distinct than ever, 'i little thought to hear you insult that orphan sister of yours in her grief. no! i shall not defend her, i shall go to give her what comfort i can. heaven help her, poor lonely child!' he was gone. james paced about in desperation, raving against louis for maintaining what he thought clara's self-deception; and, in the blindness of anger, imagining that their ultra-generosity would conduct them to the repair of ormersfield with the revenues of cheveleigh; and, disdainful as he was, it seemed another cruel outrage that his rightful inheritance should be in the hands of another, and his children portionless. he was far too wrathful to have any consistency or discrimination in his anger, and he was cruelly wounded at finding that his sister deserted him, as he thought, for her uncle's riches, and that his own closest friend was ready to share the spoil. in the stillness of the house, the sound of a door had revealed to louis where to seek his cousin. it was in the grand saloon, where the closed shutters availed not to exclude the solid beams of slanting sunlight falling through the crevices, and glancing on the gilding, velvet, and blazonry upon the costly coffin, that shut her out from the dear tender hands and lips that had never failed to caress away her childish griefs. at first, the strange broad lines of shadowy light in the gloom were all he could see, but one ray tinged with paly light a plaited tress, which could only be clara's flaxen hair. she had flung herself, crouching in a heap, on the floor, never stirring, so that he almost feared she had fainted; and, kneeling on one knee beside her, spoke soothingly: 'my poor little dear clary, this is the worst of all, but you know it was not jem who spoke. it was only prejudice and temper. he is not himself.' the dim light seemed to encourage clara to lift her head to listen to the kind words. 'was i so very wrong?' she murmured; 'you know i never thought of that! will he forgive me, and let me come home? but, oh, granny! and what is to become of my uncle?' she ended, with a sound of misery. 'not here, not now, clara--' said louis; 'she is in perfect peace; unhurt by our unhappy dissensions; she is with him who looks at hearts, who can take away all variance.' there was a short space of silence, as the two cousins knelt in the darkened room, in the sunbeams, which seemed as if they could not yet forsake her who had lived in the light of love. presently louis gave clara his hand to raise her, and led her into the adjoining room, also dim, but full of sweet fragrant breezes from the garden. he seated her on a low couch, and stood by, anxiously watching her. 'if he had only told me i was wrong!' she sighed. 'he could not tell you so, clara, for it is not wrong, and he knows it is not. he will thank you by-and-by for not attending to him, now that he does not know what he says. he is fairly distracted with this grief coming upon his home cares.' 'cares at dear, dear happy home!' cried clara. 'never!' 'ah, clara! i fear that much comfort went away with dear granny. i think he is overtasking himself at the school; and three children within a year may well make a man anxious and oppressed.' 'and i have vexed and disappointed him more!' exclaimed she. 'no wonder he was angry, and ready to impute anything! but he will believe me, he will forgive me, he will take me home.' 'it is my belief,' said fitzjocelyn, in his peculiar way, 'that the worst injury you could do to james would be to give way to the spirit that has possessed him.' 'but, louis,' cried clara, wildly astonished, 'i must go; i can't have jem saying these things of me.' 'his saying them does not make them true.' 'he is my brother. he has the only right to me. if i must choose between him and my uncle, he must be mine--mine.' 'you have not to choose between him and your uncle. you have to choose between right and wrong, between his frenzy and his true good.' 'my brother! my brother! i go with my brother!' was still her vehement cry. without listening to her cousin's last words, she made a gesture to put him aside, and rose to hurry to her brother. but louis stood before her, and spoke gravely. 'very well. yield yourself to his management. go back to be another burden upon a household, poor enough already to sour him with cares. let him tell your uncle that both his brother's children loathe the fruit of the self-sacrifice of a lifetime. transgress your grandmother's wishes; condemn that poor man to a desolate, objectless, covetous old age; make the breach irreconcilable for ever; and will james be the better or the happier for your allowing his evil temper the full swing?' clara wrung her hands. 'my uncle! yes, what shall i do with my uncle? if i could only have them both?' 'this way you would have neither. keep the straight path, and you may end in having both.' 'straight--i don't know what straight is! it must be right to cling to my own brother in his noble poverty. oh! that he should imagine me caring for this horrid, horrid state and grandeur!' louis recurred to the old argument, that james did not know what he was saying, and recalled her to the remembrance of what she had felt to be the right course before james's ebullition. she owned it most reluctantly; but oh! she said, would james still forgive her, and not believe such dreadful things, but trust and be patient with her, and perhaps uncle oliver might after all be set on going to peru, and beyond remonstrance. then it would all come right--no, not right, for granny had dreaded his going. confused and distressed by the conflicting claims, clara was thankful for the present respite given to her by louis's promise that his father should sound her uncle as to his wishes and intentions. lord ormersfield's upright, unimpassioned judgment appeared like a sort of refuge from the conflict of the various claims, and he was besides in a degree, her guardian, being the sole executor of the only will which mrs. frost had ever made, soon after the orphans came under her charge, giving the terrace to james, and dividing the money in the funds between the two. weeping, but not unhopeful--convinced, though not acknowledging it--only praying for strength and patience, and hungering for one kind word from james--clara quitted that almost brother, in whose counsel he had constrained her to seek relief, and went to her own chamber, there to throw herself on the guidance of that friend, who sticketh closer than a brother. the remaining part of the day passed quietly. james did not consciously make any difference in his manner, meaning to be still affectionate, though disappointed, and pitying her mistake, both as to her present happiness and future good. lord ormersfield and walter arrived in the evening, and james applied himself to finding occupation for his brother-in-law, whom he kept out of the way in the garden very satisfactorily. the earl was so softened and sorrowful, that clara hardly knew him. he deeply felt the loss of the kind, gentle aunt, whose sympathy had been more to him than he had known at the time; the last remnant of the previous generation, the last link with his youth, and he was even more grieved for the blank she left with louis than for himself. by louis's desire, he inquired into oliver's intentions. 'must stay here,' was the answer. 'can't leave that child alone with the property. i can look to the equatorial company here--must do without me out there. no, no, i can't leave the girl to her brother; he'd teach her his own nasty, spiteful temper, and waste the property on all those brats. no, i'm fixed here; i must look after henry's child, fine girl, good-tempered girl; takes after henry, don't you think so?' that clara took after her father in anything but being tall and fair, would hardly have been granted by any one who knew her better than the earl, but he readily allowed it, and oliver proceeded:--'as long as she does not marry, here i am; but i trust some one will soon take the care of her off my hands--man who would look after the property well. she's a good girl too, and the finest figure in the whole county; lucky him who gets her. i shall be sorry to part with the child, too, but i shall be working for her, and there's nothing left that cares a rush for me now, so i might as well be out of the way of the young things. i know the old place at lima, and the place knows me; and what do i care for this now my mother is gone? if i could only see clara safe settled here, then i should care as little what became of me as i suppose she would.' the earl was touched by the dreary, desponding tone of the reply, and reported it to louis and clara with such terms, that clara's decision was made at once, namely, that it would be wrong and cruel to cast away her uncle, and be swayed by james's prejudice; and lord ormersfield told her with grave approval that she was quite right, and that he hoped that james would recover from his unreasonable folly. 'make jem forgive me,' said clara, faintly, as her announcement of her purpose, when she finally sought her room, obliged to be thought meanly of, rather than do ill, denying her fondest affections, cutting herself off from all she loved, and, with but this consolation, that she was doing as grandmamma would have bidden her. oh, how her heart yearned after home! on the morrow, clara sorrowed in her solitary chamber alone with faithful jane, who, amid her bursts of tears, felt the one satisfaction, that her dear mistress had lived to be buried like the stock she came of, and who counted the carriages and numbered the scarfs, like so many additional tributes from the affection of her dear master oliver. once on that day james was visibly startled from his heavy, stern mood of compressed, indignant sorrow. it was as he advanced to the entrance of the vault, and his eye was struck by a new and very handsome tablet on the wall. it was to the father, mother, and young brother and sisters, whose graves had been hastily made far away in the time of the pestilence, the only dynevors who did not lie in the tombs of their fathers. for one moment james moved nearer to his uncle. could he have spoken then, what might not have followed? but it was impossible, and the impulse passed away. but he was kind when he hurried upstairs for a last embrace to clara. he still felt fondly, brotherly, and compassionate; and all the more, because she had proved more weak against temptation than he had expected. his farewell was, 'good-bye, my poor clara, god bless you.' 'oh, thank you!' cried clara, from the bottom of her heart. 'you forgive me, james?' 'i forgive; i am sorry for you, my poor child. mind, dynevor terrace is still your home, if you do not find the happiness you expect in your chosen lot.' 'happiness!' but he had no time to hear. he was gone, while she sobbed out her message of love for isabel, and louis ran up, pale with repressed suffering, and speaking with difficulty, as he wrung her hand, and murmured, 'oh, clara! may we but abide patiently.' after his good-bye, he turned back again to say, 'i'm selfish; but let me put you in mind not to let the lima correspondence drop.' 'oh, no, no; you know i won't.' 'thank you! and let me leave you mary's keynote of comfort, 'commit thy way unto the lord, and he will bring it to pass.'' 'thank you,' said clara, in her turn, and she was left alone. chapter xii. the frost household. the wind of late breathed gently forth, now shifted east, and east by north, bare trees and shrubs but ill, you know, could shelter them from rain or snow, stepping into their nests they paddled, themselves were chilled, their eggs were addled, soon every father bird and mother grew quarrelsome, and pecked each other. pairing time anticipated--cowper. three weeks longer did the session drag on, but on the joyful day when release was given, lord ormersfield was surprised to find mr. dynevor's card upon his table, with an address at farrance's hotel. louis alone was at leisure to repair thither. he found clara alone, looking as if her grief were still very fresh, and, though striving to speak gaily, the tears very near the surface. 'we are going abroad,' she said; 'uncle oliver thinks it a part of my education, and declares he will not have me behind the miss brittons. we are bound straight for switzerland.' 'lucky girl,' said louis. 'i'm sure i don't care for it,' said clara; 'mountains and pictures are not a bit in my line, unless i had isabel and you, louis, to make me care.' 'learn, then,' said louis; 'it shows that your education is defective. yes, i see,' he continued, as clara signed heavily, 'but you don't know the good it will do you to have your mind forcibly turned aside.' 'if i could only sit quiet in a corner,' said clara. 'so you will, in many a corner of a railway carriage.' she smiled a little. 'the truth is,' she said, 'that poor uncle oliver cannot be quiet. i can't see what pleasure italy will be to him, but he is too miserable at home. i never saw such restless unhappiness!' and her eyes filled with tears. 'oh, louis! i am glad you would not let me say anything about leaving him. sometimes when he bids me good night, he puts his arm round me, and says so pitifully that i do not care for him. do you know, i think mine is the little spar of love that he tries to cling to in the great ship wreck; and i feel quite sorry and hypocritical that it is such a poor, miserable shred.' 'it will grow,' said louis, smiling. 'i don't know; he is terribly provoking sometimes--and without dear granny to hinder the rubs. o, louis! it is true that there is no bearing to stay at home in those great empty rooms!' 'and jane?' 'oh, she goes,' said clara, recovering a smile; 'she is firmly persuaded that we shall run into another revolution, and as she could not frighten us by the description of your wounds, she decides to come and dress ours when we get any. dear old jenny, i am glad she goes; she is the only creature i can talk to; but, louis, before my uncle comes in, i have something to give you.' it was the letters that mary had written to her aunt since the parting, and the spanish books which she had left in her charge. 'it is very kind in you, clara,' said louis, fervently. they talked of mary, and a little of james, from whom clara had once heard; but it had been a stiff letter, as if a barrier were between them, and then mr. dynevor came in, and seemed pleased to find louis there; even asking him whether he could not join them on their tour, and help clara to speak french. 'no, thank you, sir,' said louis, 'i am afraid my company brought no good luck last time.' 'never mind that--manage better now--ha, clara.' 'it would be very nice; but he has a great deal too much to do at home,' said clara. oliver would not be persuaded that fitzjocelyn would not meet them abroad, and began magniloquently talking of his courier, and his route, and while he was looking for the map, the two cousins smiled, and clara said,--'lucky you to have work at home, and to stay with it.' 'only i say, clara, when you break down anywhere, send me a telegraph.' 'no such good luck,' sighed clara. 'so he won't come,' said her uncle, when he was gone; 'but we shall have him following us yet--ha! ha! never mind, clara.' clara laughed. she knew what her uncle meant, but the notion was to her too impossible and ridiculous even to need a blush. she did not think the world contained louis's equal; but she had always known that his love was disposed of, and she no more thought of wishing for it than for any other impossible thing. his affection for mary gave her no more pain than did that of james for isabel; and she would have treated with scorn and anger anything that impeached his constancy. the pleasure with which he received mary's letters was the single satisfaction that she carried away with her. and so she was borne away, and her sad heart could not choose but be somewhat enlivened by change and novelty, while her uncle made it his business to show her everything as rapidly as it could be seen, apparently with no relish himself for aught but perpetual movement. so passed the autumn with clara. it was not much brighter at dynevor terrace. clara, being still under age, had it not in her power to resign her half of her grandmother's income, even if her brother would have accepted it; and pounds made a difference in such an income as james's, more especially as his innovations did not tend to fill the school. murmurs were going about that mr. frost was severe, or that he was partial. some censured his old opinions, others his new studies; one had been affronted by being almost told his boy was a dunce, another hated all this new-fangled nonsense. the ladies were all, to a woman, up against his wife, her airs, her poverty, her twins, and her housekeeping; and seldom spoke of her save to contrast her with good old mrs. frost. and then it was plain that something was wrong between him and his uncle, and no one could believe but that his temper had been the cause. the good miss faithfulls struggled in vain to silence scandal, and keep it from 'coming round;' and luckily isabel was the last person likely either to hear or resent. the boys met with decreased numbers after the holidays; and james received them with undiminished energy, but with failing patience, and a temper not improved by the late transactions at cheveleigh, and fretted, as louis had divined, by home cares. of all living women, isabel was one of the least formed by habits or education to be an economical housewife and the mother of twins. maternal love did not develop into unwearied delight in infant companionship, nor exclusive interest in baby smiles; and while she had great visions for the future education of her little maidens, she was not desirous to prolong the time spent in their society, but in general preferred peace and sir hubert. on the other hand, james was an unusually caressing father. after hours among rough inattentive boys, nothing rested him so much as to fondle those tender creatures; his eldest girl knew him, and was in ecstasy whenever he approached; and the little pair of babies, by their mere soft helplessness, gave him an indescribable sense of fondness and refreshment. his little ones were all the world to him, and he could not see how a pattern mother should ever be so happy as with them around her. he forgot the difference between the pastime of an hour and the employment of a day. the need of such care on her part was the greater since the nursery establishment was deficient. the grand nurse had almost abdicated on the double addition to her charge, and had only been bribed to stay by an ill-spared increase in wages, and a share in an underling, who was also to help charlotte in her housemaid's department. nevertheless, the nurse was always complaining; the children, though healthy, always crying, and their father always certain it was somebody's fault. nor did the family expenses diminish, retrench his own indulgences as he might. it was the mistress's eye that was wanting, and isabel did not know how to use it. the few domestic cares that she perceived to be her duty were gone through as weary tasks, and her mind continued involved in her own romantic world, where she was oblivious of all that was troublesome or vexatious. now and then she was aware of a sluggish dulness that seemed to be creeping over her higher aspirations--a want of glow and feeling on religious subjects, even in the most sacred moments; and she wondered and grieved at a condition, such as she had never experienced in what she had thought far more untoward circumstances. she did not see the difference between doing her best when her will was thwarted, and her present life of neglect and indulgence. nothing roused her; she did not perceive omissions that would have fretted women of housewifely instincts, and her soft dignity and smooth temper felt few annoyances; and though james could sometimes be petulant, he was always withheld from reproving her both by his enthusiastic fondness, and his sense that for him she had quitted her natural station of ease and prosperity. on a dark hazy november afternoon, when the boys had been unusually obtuse and mischievous, and james, worn-out, wearied, and uncertain whether his cuts had alighted on the most guilty heads, strode home with his arm full of latin exercises, launched them into the study, and was running up to the drawing-room, when he almost fell over charlotte, who was scouring the stairs. she gave a little start and scream, and stood up to let him pass. he was about to rebuke her for doing such work at such an hour; but he saw her flushed, panting, and evidently very tired, and his wrath was averted. hurrying on to the drawing-room, he found isabel eagerly writing. she looked up with a pretty smile of greeting; but he only ran his hand through his already disordered hair, and exclaimed-- 'our stairs are like the captain of knockdunder's. you never know they are cleaned, except by tumbling over the bucket and the maid.' 'are they being done?' said isabel, quietly. 'i suppose the maids were busy this morning.' 'and charlotte, too! she looks half dead. i thought ellen was to do such work, and ought to have done it in proper time.' 'little catharine is so fretful, that ellen cannot be spared from the nursery.' 'i suppose she might be, if you were not absorbed in that writing.' 'i had the children with me, while the servants were at dinner; but kitty was so troublesome, that i could not keep her. i am particularly anxious to finish this.' 'some people would think a sick child more engrossing than that--' he had very nearly said trash, but he broke off short. 'there is nothing really the matter with her,' began isabel, composedly; but james did not wait to listen, and muttering, 'that girl will be killed if she goes on,' he ran up to the nursery, whence he already heard a sound of low fretting. the child was sitting on the nurse's lap, with a hot red spot on one cheek, teased and disturbed by the noises that the lesser ones were constantly making, as one lay in her cot, and the other was carried about by the girl. as he entered, she shrieked joyously, and stretched out her arms, and kitty was at once clinging, hugging round his neck. sending ellen down to finish the stairs, he carried off the little girl, fondling and talking to her, and happy in her perfect content. but he did not go to the drawing-room. 'no, no, mamma must not be interrupted,' he bitterly thought, as he carried her down to the fireless study, hung his plaid round himself and her, and walked up and down the room with her, amusing her till she fell into a slumber on his shoulder. isabel could not at once resume her pen. her even temper was for once ruffled, and her bosom swelled at the thought that his reproach was unjust; she was willing to do what was fitting, and he ought not to expect her to be an absolute nursery-maid. women must keep up the tone of their own minds, and she might be being useful to the world as well as to her own family. if he wanted a mere household drudge, why had he not looked elsewhere? up went her queenly head, as she believed her powers were meant for other things; but her heart gave a painful throb at the recollection that poverty had been her voluntary choice, and had seemed perfect felicity with james. alas! she loved, honoured, and admired him, as her upright, unselfish, uncompromising husband, but worries, and rebukes, and tart answers, had made many a rent in the veil in which her fancy had enfolded him. sir roland had disappeared, and james and sir hubert were falling farther and farther asunder. and isabel sighed, partly at the memory of the imaginary being for whom she had taken james, and partly at the future prospect, the narrow sphere, the choice between solitude and dull society, the homely toils that must increase, worn-out garments, perpetual alphabets, children always whining, and james always irritated, thinking her remiss, and coming in with that furrow on his forehead, and his hair standing up wildly. she shrank from the contemplation, took her letter-case on her knee, moved close to the fire to profit by the light, stirred up a clear flame, and proceeded with the benevolent hermit, who came to the rescue when sir hubert was at the last gasp, and adeline had received his beautiful resigned words. the hermit had transported him into his hut, and comforted adeline, and was beginning a consolatory harangue, making revelations that were to set everything right, when just as he had gone as far as 'my son, know that i did not always wear this amice,' there was a tap at the door, and she saw fitzjocelyn, who had been at oakstead for the last few weeks, attending to some matters connected with his constituency. 'ah! is it you?' she said, her lap too full of papers for her to rise. 'i did not know you were come home.' 'i came yesterday; and what company do you think i had in the train as far as estminster?' 'ah, i can guess! how does louisa look?' 'rather languid; but estminster is to work wonders. she declares that northwold is her best cure, and i am speculating whether she will prevail. i think lady conway dreads your example.' 'mamma does not allow for the force of imagination,' said isabel, not exactly knowing what prompted either the words or the sigh. 'i am come to ask if you will kindly give me a dinner. my father is gone to the book-club meeting, so i thought we would try to revive old times,' he said, smiling, but sadly, for the present scene was little like the no. of old times. 'we shall be delighted,' said isabel, with alacrity, relieved at avoiding a tete-it-tete with her husband at present, and refreshed by the sight of one belonging to her former life, and external to her present round of monotonous detail. 'fortunately, it is not a lecture night and james will be very glad.' i suppose he is not come in from school?' 'yea, he is. i think he is in the study. i will let him know,' she said, with her hand on the bell. 'i will go to him,' said louis, departing out of consideration that she might wish for space to attend to dinner, room, and dress. the two last were scarcely in such a state as he had been used to see at no. : books were on the sofa, the table-cover hung awry; the dresden shepherd's hat was grimed, and his damsel's sprigged gown hemmed with dust; there were no flowers in the vases, which his aunt had never left unsupplied; and isabel, though she could not be otherwise than handsome and refined, had her crape rumpled, and the heavy folds of her dark hair looking quite ready for the evening toilette; and, as she sat on her low seat by the fire, the whole had an indescribable air of comfort passing into listless indulgence. fitzjocelyn politely apologized to ellen for a second time stepping over her soapy deluge, and, as he opened the study door with a preliminary knock, a voice, as sharp and petulant as it was low, called out, 'hollo! be quiet there, can't you! you've no business here yet, and i have no time to waste on your idleness.' 'i am sorry to hear it,' said louis, advancing into the dim light of the single bed-room candle, which only served to make visible the dusky, unshuttered windows, and the black gulf of empty grate. james was sitting by the table, with his child wrapped in the plaid, asleep on his breast, and his disengaged hand employed in correcting exercises. without moving, he held it out, purple and chilled, exclaiming, 'ha! fitzjocelyn, i took you for that lout of a garett.' 'is this an average specimen of your reception of your scholars?' 'i was afraid of his waking the child. she has been unwell all day, and i have scarcely persuaded her to go to sleep.' 'emulating hooker.' 'as little in patience as in judgment,' sighed james. 'and which of them is it who is lulled by the strains of 'as in proesenti?'' 'which?' said james, somewhat affronted. 'can't you tell sixteen months from five?' 'i beg her pardon; but i can't construct a whole child from an inch of mottled leg--as professor owen would a megalosaurus from a tooth. does she walk?' 'poor child, she _must_!' said james. 'she thinks it very hard to have two sisters so little younger than herself,' and he peeped under the plaid at the little brown head, and drew it closer round, with a look of almost melancholy tenderness, guarding carefully against touching her with his cold hands. 'she will think it all the better by-and-by,' said louis. 'you had better not stay here in the cold. i'll come when i have heard that boy's imposition and looked over these exercises.' and he ran his hand through his hair again. 'don't! you look like enough to a lion looking out of a bush to frighten ten boys already,' said louis. 'i'll do the exercises,' pulling the copy-books away. 'what, you don't trust me?' as james detained them. 'no, i don't,' said james, his cousin's brightness awakening his livelier manner. 'it needs an apprenticeship to be up to their blunders.' 'let me read them to you. i gave notice to isabel that i am come to dinner, and no doubt she had rather i were disposed of.' james objected no farther, and the dry labour was illuminated by the discursive remarks and moralizings which louis allowed to flow in their natural idle course, both to divert his dispirited cousin, and to conceal from himself how much cause there was for depression. when the victim of the imposition approached, louis prevented the dreaded clumsy entrance, seized on a virgil, and himself heard the fifty lines, scarcely making them serve their purpose as a punishment, but sending the culprit away in an unusually amiable temper. services from louis were too natural to james to be requited with thanks; but he was not uncivil in his notice of a wrong tense that had been allowed to pass, and the question was argued with an eagerness which showed that he was much enlivened. on the principle that louis must care for all that was his, as he rose to take the still-sleeping child upstairs, he insisted that his cousin should come with him, if only for the curiosity of looking at the other two little animals, and learning the difference between them and kitty, at whom he still looked as if her godfather had insulted her. it was pretty to see his tenderness, as he detached the little girl from her hold, and laid her in the cot, making a little murmuring sound; and boasted how she would have shown off if awake, and laughed over her droll little jealousies of his even touching the twins. as she was asleep, he might venture; and it was comical to hear him declaring that no one need mistake them for each other, and to see him trying to lay them side by side on his knees to be compared, when they would roll over, and interlace their little scratching fingers; and louis stood by teasing him, and making him defend their beauty in terms that became extravagant. he was really happy here; the careworn look smoothed away, the sharpness left his tones, and there was nothing but joyous exultation and fondness in his whole manner. the smile did not last long, for louis was well-nigh thrown downstairs by a dustpan in a dark corner, and james was heard muttering that nothing in that house was ever in its right place; and while louis was suggesting that it was only himself who was not in the right place, they entered the drawing-room, which, like the lady, was in the same condition as that in which he had left it. since isabel had lost marianne and other appliances, she had thought it not worth while to dress for dinner; so nothing had happened, except that the hermit had proved to be adeline's great uncle, and had begun to clear up the affair of the sacrilege. he was reluctant to leave off when the gentlemen appeared; but isabel shut him up, and quietly held out the portfolio to james, who put it on the side-table, and began to clear the books away and restore some sort of order; but it was a task beyond his efforts. dinner was announced by charlotte, as usual, all neat grace and simplicity, in her black dress and white apron, but flushed and heated by exertions beyond her strength. all that depended on her had been well done; but it would not seem to have occurred to her mistress that three people ate more than two; and to louis, who had been too busy to take any luncheon, the two dishes seemed alarmingly small. one was of haricot mutton, the other of potatoes; and charlotte might be seen to blush as she carried lord fitzjocelyn the plate containing a chop resembling indian rubber, decorated with grease and with two balls of nearly raw carrot, and followed it up with potatoes apparently all bruises. louis talked vigorously of virginia and louisa--secretly marvelling how his hosts had brought themselves down to such fare. isabel was dining without apparently seeing anything amiss, and james attempted nothing but a despairing toss of his chin, as he pronounced the carrots underdone. after the first course there was a long interval, during which isabel and louis composedly talked about the public meeting which he had been attending, and james fidgetted in the nervousness of hardly-restrained displeasure; but suddenly a frightful shrieking arose, and he indignantly cried, 'that girl!' 'poor charlotte in her hysterics again,' said isabel, moving off, quickly for her, with the purple scent-bottle at her chatelaine. 'isabel makes her twice as bad,' exclaimed james; 'to pet her with eau-de-cologne is mere nonsense. some day i shall throw a bucket of cold water over her.' isabel had left the door open, and they heard her softly comforting charlotte with 'never mind,' and 'lord fitzjocelyn would not care,' till the storm lulled. charlotte crept off to her room, and isabel returned to the dinner-table. 'well, what's the matter now?' said james. 'poor charlotte!' said isabel, smiling; 'it seems that she trusted to making a grand appearance with the remains of yesterday's pudding, and that she was quite overset by the discovery that ellen and miss catharine had been marauding on them.' 'you don't mean that kitty has been eating that heavy pudding at this time of night?' cried james. 'kitty eats everything,' was the placid answer, 'and i do not think we can blame ellen, for she often comes down after our dinner to find something for the nursery supper.' 'things go on in the most extraordinary manner,' muttered james. 'i suppose charlotte misses jane,' said louis. 'she looks ill.' 'no wonder,' said james, 'she is not strong enough for such work. she has no method, and yet she is the only person who ever thinks of doing a thing properly. i wish your friend madison would come home and take her off our hands, for she is always alternating between fits of novel-reading and of remorse, in which she nearly works herself to death with running after lost time.' 'i should be sorry to part with her,' said isabel; 'she is so quiet, and so fond of the children.' 'she will break down some day,' said james; 'if not before, certainly when she hears that madison has a peruvian wife.' 'there is no more to come,' said isabel, rising; 'shall we come upstairs?' james took up the candles, and louis followed, considerably hungry, and for once provoked by isabel's serene certainty that nobody cared whether there were anything to eat. however, he had forgotten all by the time he came upstairs, and began to deliver a message from lady conway, that she was going to write in a day or two to beg for a visit from isabel during her sojourn at estminster, a watering-place about thirty miles distant. isabel's face lighted with pleasure. 'i could go?' she said, eagerly turning towards james. 'oh, yes, if you wish it,' he answered, gruffly, as if vexed at her gratification. 'i mean, of course, if you can spare me,' she said, with an air of more reserve. 'if you wish it, go by all means. i hope you will.' 'the christmas holidays are so near, that we may both go,' said isabel; but james still had not recovered his equanimity, and louis thought it best to begin talking of other things; and, turning to james, launched into the results of his inglewood crops, and the grand draining plan which was to afford marksedge work for the winter, and in which his father had become much interested. but he did not find that ready heed to all that occupied him of which he used to be certain at the terrace. isabel cared not at all for farming, and took no part in 'mere country squire's talk;' and james was too much overburthened with troubles and anxieties to enter warmly into those of others. of those to whom louis's concerns had been as their own, one had been taken from him, the other two were far away; and the cold 'yes,' 'very good,' fell coldly on his ear. the conversation reverted to the school; and here it appeared that two years' experience had taken away the freshness of novelty, and the cycle of disappointment had begun. more boys were quitting the school than the new-comers could balance; and james spoke with acute vexation of the impracticability of the boys, and the folly of the parents. the attendance at his evening lectures had fallen off; and he declared that there was a spirit of opposition to whatever he did. the boys disobeyed, knowing that they should be favoured at home, and if they were punished, the parents talked of complaints to the trustees. the sunday teaching was treated as especially obnoxious: the genteel mothers talked ridiculously about its resembling a charity-school, the fathers did not care whether their sons went or not, and he had scarcely five boys who appeared there regularly, and of them one was the butcher's son, who came rather in spite of his parents than with their consent. attendance at church was more slack than ever; and when he lectured the defaulters, and gave them additional tasks in the week, it was resented as an injustice. to crown all, mr. ramsbotham had called, and had been extremely insolent about a boy whose ears had been boxed for reading pickwick in school, under cover of his latin grammar, and isabel was almost indignant with miss faithfull for having ventured to hint to her that she wished mr. frost would be a little more gentle with the boys. isabel was fully alive now, and almost as vehement as her husband, in her complaints against his many foes. there was no lack of sympathy here, indeed, there might be rather too much, for she did not afford the softening influence that james had hitherto found at home. 'well, jem,' said louis, at last, 'i think you should keep your hands off the boys.' 'you are not bitten with the nonsense about personal dignity and corporal punishment?' said james. 'by no means. i have an infinite respect for the great institution of flogging; but a solemn execution is one thing, a random stroke another.' 'theories are very good things till you come to manage two score dunces without sense or honour. there is only one sort of appeal to their feelings that tells.' 'maybe so, but i have my doubts whether you are the man to make it.' louis was sorry he had so spoken, for a flush of pain came up in james's face at the remembrance of what fitzjocelyn had long ago forgotten--a passionate blow given to deter him from a piece of wilful mischief, in which he was persisting for the mere amusement of provoking. it stood out among all other varieties of cuff, stroke, and knock, by the traces it had left, by mrs. frost's grief at it, and the forgiveness from the earl, and it had been the most humiliating distress of james's childhood. it humbled him even now, and he answered-- 'you may be right, louis; i may be not sufficiently altered since i was a boy. i have struck harder than i intended more than once, and i have told the boys so.' 'i am sure, if they had any generosity, they would have been touched with your amends,' cried isabel. 'after all, a schoolmaster's life does not tend to mend the temper,' concluded james, sighing, and passing his hand over his forehead. 'no,' thought louis, 'nor does isabel's mutton!' chapter xiii. the conway household. and ye shall walk in silk attire, and siller hae to spare, gin ye'll consent to be his bride, nor think of donald mair. miss blamire. what makes you so lame to-day?' asked lord ormersfield, as louis crossed the library, on returning from an interview to which he had been summoned in another room. 'i only stumbled over an obstruction on the frost staircase yesterday,' said louis. 'poor jem chose to have me up to the nursery; and to see him in the paternal character is the funniest as well as the pleasantest spectacle the house affords.' 'ah! it is not what it was,' said the earl. 'i suppose i must call there before the holidays, though,' he added, reluctantly. 'but what did that man, ramsbotham, want with you?' 'to ask our interest for that appointment for his friend grant.' 'indeed! what could bring him here?' 'why, unluckily, he fancied he had some claim on me, on the score of jem frost's election. i was too innocent then to know what those things go for.' 'you may say so!' ejaculated the earl. 'so he was insolent enough to bring that up, was he?' 'worse,' said fitzjocelyn; 'he wanted to threaten that, unless i would oblige him now, there were matters which it was his duty to lay before the trustees. i told him he would do, of course, whatever was his duty; whereupon he thought my lordship was interested in mr. frost.' 'intolerably impertinent! i hope you set him down!' 'i told him that neither mr. frost nor i should wish him to pretermit his duty on any consideration whatever. then he harked back to what he did for us at the election; and i was forced to tell him that if he considered that he had thereby established a claim on me, i must own myself in his debt; but as to reciprocating it, by putting in a person like grant, that was against my conscience. he flew into a passion, informed me that mr. frost would take the consequences, mounted the british lion, and i bowed him out upon that majestic quadruped, talking grandly of illiberal prejudices and the rising generation.' 'you acknowledged that he had a claim on you?' 'as things go in this world, i suppose it is true.' 'louis! you will never know how to deal with those people.' 'i am afraid not. i could not, either boldly or diplomatically, get rid of the charge; so there was nothing for it but to confess. that's not the worst of it. i am afraid he really will be able to take revenge on poor jem, and i'm sure he can't afford to lose any more scholars.' 'such a fellow as that will not have much in his power against james,' said lord ormersfield. 'what i am afraid of is, that you have cut the ground from under your feet. i cannot see how you are ever to stand for northwold.' 'nor i,' said louis. 'in fact, father, i have always thought it most wonderfully kind forbearance that you never reproached me more for my doings on that occasion. i believe we were all too happy,' he presently added, with a sigh, which was re-echoed by his father, at the same time trying to say something about youthfulness, to which louis, who had been leaning thoughtfully on the mantelpiece, presently answered--'how much wiser old people are than young! an original axiom, is not it? but it is the last which one learns!' 'you would hardly act in the same way now?' said his father. 'i wonder when it ever answers to interfere with the natural course of events!' responded louis, musingly. 'there were two things that mr. calcott told me once upon a time.' those two things he left unuttered. they were--that the gentleman would be wasted on the school, and that the lady was not made for a poor man's wife. no wonder they made him sigh, but he concluded by exclaiming aloud-- 'well, i hope they will both go to estminster, and come back with fresh life!' the estminster invitation was already on the road; but, unfortunately, lady conway had been unable to secure lodgings large enough to receive the children. she was urgent, however, that isabel should come as soon as possible, since louisa had been more unwell than usual, and was pining for her eldest sister; and she hoped that james would join her there as soon as the holidays should set him free. james was hurt to find isabel so much delighted to go, but resolved that she should not be deprived of the pleasure, and petulantly denied the offers, which became even entreaties, that she might wait till he could accompany her. he arranged, therefore, that he should follow her in a fortnight's time, the miss faithfulls undertaking the charge of their small namesakes; and lady conway wrote to fix a day when delaford should come to take care of isabel on her journey. james and isabel laughed at this measure. mrs. james frost was certainly not in circumstances to carry such a hero of the buttery in her suite; and lady conway herself had more sense than to have proposed it, but for delaford's own representations. in fact, there was a pretty face at dynevor terrace, and he had been piqued enough by the return of his letters to be resolved on re-establishing his influence. therefore did he demonstrate to my lady that the only appropriate trains would bring him to northwold at seven in the evening, and take him and mrs. james frost dynevor away at eleven next morning; and therefore did isabel look up in a sudden fit of recollection, as the breakfast was being removed, and say, 'charlotte, delaford is coming on tuesday to fetch me to estminster, and will sleep here that night.' isabel little guessed that in the days when she viewed the fantastic viscount as her greatest enemy, the announcement of his approach would have been far less appalling to her. 'the wretch! the traitor! the vile deceiver!' thought charlotte, not chary of her epithets, and almost ready to wreak her vengeance on the silver spoons. 'he has gone and broken poor marianne's heart, and now he wants to treat me the same, and make me faithless to poor tom, that is up in the mountain-tops and trusts to me! o me, what shall i do? mrs. beckett is gone, and there's no one to give me an advice! if i speak to him or scorn him, he'll take his advantage all alike--and his words are so fine and so soft, that do what i will to hate him when i'm away, he is sure to wind round me when he's there; and i can't get away, and i'm a poor, lonely, fatherless and motherless orphan, and a vain girl, that has listened already to his treacherous suit more than poor tom would think for.' charlotte worked on in much grief and perplexity for some minutes, revolving the vanity that had led to her follies, and humbling herself in her own eyes. suddenly, a flash of thought crossed her, and woke a smile upon her face, almost a look of mischief. she tied on a clean apron, and running upstairs, opened the drawing-room door, and said, 'if you please, ma'am, might i ask miss faithfull's martha to tea on tuesday night?' 'oh yes, if you like,' said isabel, never raising her eyes from the rebuilding of the ruined chapel in the valley. away skipped charlotte, and in two minutes was at the back door of the house beautiful. mrs. martha had been grimly kind to her ever since she had been afflicted with the cook for a fellow-servant, and received her only with a reproof for coming gadding out, when she ought to be hard at work; but when she heard the invitation, she became wrathful--she had rather go ten miles out of her way than even look at 'that there ford.' but charlotte explained her purpose, and implored, and put her in mind that mrs. beckett was gone, and she had no protector; and martha relented, told her that if she had minded her she would never have been in the scrape at all, but agreed, not without satisfaction, to afford mr. delaford the society of his old acquaintance. and so when mr. delaford, with his whiskers freshly curled and his boots in a state of fascinating polish, walked up dynevor terrace, the door was opened by ellen, and the red-faced cook and the upright mrs. martha sat on either side the fire. daintily did he greet them, and stand warming himself before the fire, adapting his conversation to them for the next ten minutes, before he ventured to ask whether miss arnold were still an inmate. 'taking out dinner--taking in tea,' gruffly replied martha. mr. delaford waited, but ellen only ran in for one moment to fetch the kettle, and martha discoursed as usual on the gold mines in peru. by-and-by, when the parlour tea could by no possibility be supposed to be farther prolonged, there swept into the kitchen the stately nurse. charlotte had run up to the nursery, and begged as a favour that she might be left to watch the children, while mrs. nurse entertained mr. delaford below-stairs; and in pity to so grand a gentleman, constrained to mix with such 'low servants,' the nurse had yielded, and charlotte sat safe and sound by the nursery fire, smiling at his discomfiture, and reading over tom's letters with an easier conscience than for many a day. mr. delaford was too much of a gentleman to be uncivil to the three dames by the kitchen fire, but he watched every step and every creaking door. he even went the length of coming up to family prayers, in hopes of there meeting charlotte; but she only joined the procession at the parlour door, and had flown upstairs, like a little bird, before he was out again. the gentleman was affronted, and resolved to make her feel it. they could not but meet at the kitchen breakfast, and he barely acknowledged her. this was the most trying stroke of all, for it set her, in the eyes of the cook and nurse, on a level with the inferior servants, to whom he would not have deigned a look, and it was not easy to resist showing that she was on more familiar terms with him than all. but the instinct of self-protection and the wisdom of sincerity came to her aid. she abstained from raising her eyes to his face, from one conscious word or glance; she locked herself into her pantry when she took down the breakfast-things, and avoided every encounter, even when she had begun to feel that it would have been more flattering had he made more efforts. at last, dire necessity obliged her to accept his aid in carrying her mistress's box down the stairs. he walked backwards, she forwards. she would not meet his eye, and he was too well-bred for one word on the stairs; but in the garden he exclaimed, 'miss arnold, what have i done?' 'i never ought to have listened to you,' said charlotte. 'it was not right by neither of us; so please say no more.' 'if you could understand--' 'i don't want to understand nothing.' charlotte drove him on with the box till they were close to the fly, and then, leaving him and the man to adjust the packing, flew back to announce that all was ready for her mistress. the last kisses were given to the children, and a message left with charlotte for her master, who was in school; then she stood with miss catharine in her arms, and saw the fly drive off. 'well,' said mrs. cook, 'that butler thinks himself a great beau, no doubt! i asked him whether he thought you pretty, charlotte, and he said you hadn't no air nor no complexion. it's as i tells you--nobody will never take no notice of you while you goes about so dowdy.' charlotte did not know whether she was glad that the cook could not tease her about delaford, or mortified to be supposed beneath his notice. no air, forsooth! she who had often heard it said that she looked like any lady! 'but oh,' said charlotte to herself, as she spent her daily five minutes at noonday in quiet thought, 'am i not a poor silly thing not to be thankful that care has been round me this time, and that i have not been let to do nothing giddy nor false by tom, whatever i may have thought!' meanwhile, isabel had found it much harder to part with her babies for three weeks than it had seemed at the first proposal; and there were tears in her eyes as she gazed at the peaked, red-tiled roof of the old grammar-school, and reckoned the days and hours before her husband would join her. other associations revived when she found herself at estminster, and was received with shrieks of joy, caresses, and exclamations too fond and foolish to bear repetition; and then the pale louisa rested against her, stroking her hand, and lady conway fondled her, and virginia, looking formed and handsome, retreated a little way to study her and declare that she was the same isabel, neither altered nor grown older--it was all a dream that she had ever left them. she almost felt it so herself, so entirely did she fit into the old habits, the little quiet dinner (only it seemed unusually good), the subsequent closing round the fire with the addition of miss king and louisa, the easy desultory chat, the books with mudie's stamp lying about, the music which must be practised. it was very like being miss conway still; and when she awoke the next morning to find it late, and to the impulse of hurrying up, or _not_ hurrying, expecting to find james making breakfast himself, and cross at being made late for school, she turned on her pillow, half doubting whether she had dreamt these two years in one long night, and remembering that captive mermaid, who had but to resume her maritime headgear and return to her native element, to forget the very existence of her fisherman husband and children. no! isabel was not come to that! but she was almost ashamed to enjoy her extra hour's repose; and then the leisurely breakfast--nay, even the hot rolls and clear coffee were appreciated; and she sighed as she called up the image of the breakfast over an hour ago, the grim kettle, the bad butter, the worse fire, and james, cold and hurried, with kitty on his knee gnawing a lump of crust. it was a contrast to lady conway reading her letters and discussing engagements with comfortable complacency, and virginia making suggestions, and louisa's grave bright eyes consulting hers, and miss king quietly putting in a remark, and the anticipation of walter's return, as if he were the only person wanting. the sisters always resented their mother's habit of talking of 'poor isabel,' regarding her as the happiest of women; and they were confirmed in their belief by seeing her looking exceedingly well and handsome, with perhaps a little more dignity and a sweeter smile. virginia loved to snatch private interviews with miss king, to express her confidence in dear isabel's felicity, in the infallibility and other perfections of james, and in the surpassing cleverness of little catharine; and louisa was always sighing to behold the twins. but, to the delight of the school-room, the chapel in the valley was produced in a complete form, and a very pretty romance it was; but the hermit and the brilliant denouement were quite a shock to the young ladies, just when their tears were prepared, and virginia was almost angry. 'oh, my dear, there is trouble enough in the world!' said isabel; 'hubert and adeline have been my companions so long, that at least i must leave them happy.' 'indeed,' said miss king, 'i am almost surprised that you have been able to finish them at all, with so much re-writing.' to her surprise, isabel blushed, and her answer partook of self-defence. 'james is so busy, and the children so young, that this has been my great resource. when my little girls are older, i must begin educating in earnest. i want to talk over madame neckar's book with you, miss king.' 'all systems begin alike from infant obedience, i believe,' said the governess. 'yes,' said isabel, 'little catharine is obedience itself with us. it is curious to see how well she knows the difference between us and the nurses. there are great tempests upstairs, and her papa takes them very much to heart. he always has her downstairs when he is at home; and he has accustomed her to so much attention, that there is no doing anything while she is by, or i would have her more with me.' the self-justifying tone rather puzzled miss king. she noted likewise that isabel was backward in entering into details of her home life, and that she never said a word to encourage her sister's wishes to visit her at northwold. knowing isabel as the governess did, she was sure that she would not merely talk of things on the surface, if her spirit were fully content. only once did she go any deeper, and that was as she took up a little book of religious poetry of which she had been very fond. 'ah!' she said, 'i don't feel these things as i used. i think practical life dulls one.' 'i should have said, practical life made things real,' said miss king. isabel had not found out that having duties and not doing them was less practical than having no particular task. another cloud of mystery was over the relations with mr. dynevor and clara. isabel baffled all lady conway's inquiries and advice by entering into no particulars, but adhering to her own version of the matter, 'that mr. dynevor had required of james conditions incompatible with his duty,' and not deigning to explain either duty or conditions, as beyond the capacity of her hearer. of clara no account was vouchsafed, except that isabel believed she was abroad; 'they had been very much disappointed in her,' and isabel was afraid that she was a good deal altered; and the subject seemed so painful, that virginia did not venture to push her inquiries any farther. the great subject of interest in the conway family was that virginia and louisa were going to lose their maid; and the suggestion somehow arose that charlotte should be her successor. it was agreed on all hands that nature had formed her for a lady's-maid, and a few lessons from a hairdresser would make her perfection; and she would be invaluable in reading to louisa when restless and unable to sleep. isabel gave herself credit for the most notable arrangement she had ever made--promoting the little maiden, whom she really liked, and relieving herself from the constant annoyance about sparing ellen from the nursery by obtaining a stronger housemaid. she had only a few scruples, or rather she knew that james would have some, as to exposing charlotte to delaford's attentions after what she had heard in clara's letter; but the least hint on this score led to a panegyric upon delaford's perfections--his steadiness, his prudence, his cleverness on journeys, his usefulness in taking care of walter. 'i know that walter is safe when he is with delaford,' said lady conway. and even the sensible miss king observed, smiling, 'that there always _would_ be nonsense between men and maidservants; and there were many more dangerous places than the present. she would watch over charlotte, and fanshawe was quite to be trusted.' the conway family knew rather less about their own servants' hall than they did of feudal establishments five hundred years ago. still, isabel, in her superior prudence, resolved to consult fanshawe on the true state of affairs. fanshawe was a comfortable portly personage, chiefly absorbed in her caps and her good cheer, and faring smoothly through life, on the principle of always saying what was expected of her, and never seeing anything to anybody's disadvantage. she assured mrs. james frost that she did not think delaford to blame; many girls would be foolish about a man with personal advantages, but she could not see it was his fault. poor marianne had been always weakly, and, 'after all, ma'am, some young women will put constructions upon anything,' said mrs. fanshawe, deciding that at least she should make no mischief by sacrificing poor marianne. isabel did not like to come to more individual inquiries, lest she should prepare discomfort for charlotte; but she easily satisfied herself that all was as right as convenient, and having occasion to write some orders to charlotte, communicated the proposal, saying that all should be settled on her return. there was wild work in the brain of the poor little lady of eschalott. no more stairs to scrub! no more mats to shake! no more hurrying after lost time, and an uneasy remembrance of undone duties! no more hardening of fingers, no more short-sleeved lilac, no more vulgarities from the cook! ladylike dress, high wages, work among flowers and gauzes, reading to miss louisa, housekeeper's-room society, rank as 'arnold' or 'miss arnold!' how much more suitable to the betrothed of the superintendent at san benito! to be sure, she was aware that a serpent lurked among the flowers; but she had shown him a bit of her mind once, and she found she could take care of herself, and keep him at a distance. with her eyes shut, she already beheld jane beckett meeting her, when seated at the back of a carriage, with a veil and a parasol, addressing her as a grand lady, and kissing and praising her when she found her little charlotte after all. chapter xiv. the trustees' meeting. know you not, master, to some kind of men their graces serve them but as enemies? as you like it. 'my lord,' said frampton, entering the library late one evening, in visible perturbation, and addressing himself to fitzjocelyn, 'there is a person wishing to see you.' 'what person at this time of night?' said louis. 'in fact, my lord,' said the butler, hesitating, 'it is the young person at mr. frost's.' 'something must be the matter!' cried louis, starting up. 'she would explain nothing to me, she insisted on seeing your lordship; and--in fact--she was in such a state of agitation that i left her with mrs. bowles.' louis lost no time in hurrying into the hall. charlotte must have followed frampton without his knowledge, for she was already there; and, springing with clasped hands towards fitzjocelyn, she cried, sobbing, 'my lord, my lord, come to master!' 'is he ill? or the children?' 'no, no! but he'll be off, he'll be off like poor tom!' exclaimed charlotte, between her gasps; 'but i've locked it!' and she waved a door-key, and seemed about to laugh hysterically. 'sit down, charlotte,' said louis, authoritatively, bringing a chair. 'if you do not explain yourself reasonably at once, i shall call mrs. bowles, and desire her to put you to bed.' she made an imploring gesture, sank trembling into the chair, and, after a few incoherent efforts, managed to speak--'if you would but come to master, my lord--i know it is something bad.' louis thought it wisest to despatch frampton at once to order the carriage to be brought out immediately; and this so far pacified charlotte, that she could speak comprehensibly on the cause of her alarm. 'he is in such a way!' she began. 'he went out to the school-examination, i believe, in his cap and gown, this morning; he was gone all day, but just at dusk i heard him slam-to the front door, fit to shake the house down, like he does when he is put out. i'd a thought nothing of that; but by-and-by i heard him stamping up and down the study, like one in a frenzy, and i found his cap and gown lying all of a heap in a corner of the hall. then, mr. calcott came to call; and when i went into the study, master had his head down on the table, and wouldn't see no one; he fairly stamped to me to be gone, and bring him no more messages. mr. calcott, he looked so sorry and concerned, and sent in again. i was to say that he hoped some arrangement might be made, if mr. frost would only see him; but master had locked the door, and hallooed out that i was to say he was obliged, but couldn't see nobody. so mr. calcott was forced to go; and there was poor master. not one morsel of dinner has he had. i knocked, but he would not open, only said he did not want for nothing. no, not even when 'twas time for miss catharine to come down. she thumped at the door, and called 'papa' so pretty; but he never heeded, except to call out, 'take her away!' charlotte was crying so much that she could hardly proceed. 'then i knew it must be something very melancholy indeed. but by-and-by he opens the door with a great jerk, and runs right up to the lumber-room. i saw his face, and 'twas like a corpse, my lord; and he brings down his portmanteau into his dressing-room, and i hears him pulling out all his drawers. 'he'll be gone!' i thinks, 'he'll be off to america, too! and my poor mistress!' so i went up quietly, and in secret, unbeknown to them all, and got my bonnet; and i've run every step of the way--for you are the only one, my lord, as can soothe his wounded spirit; and i've locked both the doors, and here's the key, so he can't be gone till you come.' 'locked the doors!' cried louis. 'what have you done? suppose your mistress or miss clara were ill?' 'oh, no--no, it is not that,' said charlotte; 'or why should he flee from the face of his children? why, i took miss salome up to the top of the stairs, when she was screaming and crying with all her might, and you would not have thought he was within a mile of her. no, my lord, no one can't do nothing but you.' 'i'll come at once,' said louis. 'you did quite right to fetch me; but it was a frightful thing to lock the door.' sending charlotte to the housekeeper, he went to communicate her strange intelligence to his father, who shared his dismay so much as almost to wish to come with him to northwold; but louis felt he could deal better alone with james. his fears took the direction of the italian travellers, knowing that any misfortune to them must recoil on james with double agony after such a parting. in very brief space the carriage was at northwold, and desiring that it should wait at the corner of the terrace, louis followed charlotte, who had jumped down from the box, and hastened forward to unlock the door; and he was in time to hear the angry, though suppressed, greeting that received her. 'pretty doings, ma'am! so i have caught you out at last, though you did think to lock me in! he shan't come in! i wonder at your impudence! the very front door!' 'oh, cook, don't!' the poor breathless voice managed at last to be heard. 'this is lord fitzjocelyn.' cook had vanished out of sight or hearing before louis's foot was within the threshold. the study-door was open, the fire expiring, the books and papers pushed back; and james's fierce, restless tread was heard pacing vehemently about his own room. louis ran hastily up, and entered at once. his cousin stood staring with wild eyes, his hair was tossed and tangled, his face lividly pale, and the table was strewn with fragments of letters, begun and torn up again; his clothes lay tumbled in disorder on the floor, where his portmanteau lay open and partly packed. all louis's worst alarm seemed fulfilled at once. 'what has happened?' he cried, catching hold of both james's hands, as if to help him to speak. 'who is ill?--not clara?' 'no--no one is ill,' said james, withdrawing his hands, and kneeling down by his box, with an air of feigned indifference; 'i am only going to london.' 'to london?' 'aye, to see what is to be done,--ship--chaplaincy, curacy, literature, selling sermons at five shillings each,--what not. i am no longer master of northwold school!' he strove to speak carelessly, but bending over his packing, thrust down the clothes with desperate blows. louis sat down, too much dismayed to utter a word. 'one morning's work in the conclave,' said james, with the same assumed ease. 'here's their polite reprimand, which they expected me to put up with,--censuring all my labour, forbidding sunday-classes, accusing me of partiality and cruelty, with a lot of nonsense about corporal punishment and dignity. i made answer, that if i were master at all, i must be at liberty to follow my own views, otherwise i would resign; and, would you believe it, they snapped at the offer--they thought it highly desirable! there's an end of it.' 'impossible!' cried louis, casting his eye over the reprimand, and finding that the expressions scarcely warranted james's abstract of them. 'you must have mistaken!' 'do you doubt _that_?' and james threw to him a sheet where, in richardson's clerkly handwriting, the trustees of king edward's northwold grammar school formally accepted the resignation of the reverend james roland frost dynevor. 'they cannot be so hasty! did not mr. calcott call to gee you?' 'an old humbug!' 'i'll go and see him this instant. something may be done.' 'no,' said james, holding him down by the shoulder, 'i will not be degraded by vain solicitations.' 'this must be that wretched ramsbotham!' exclaimed louis. 'oh, jem! i little thought he had so much power to injure you.' 'it is as well you did not,' said james. 'it would have made no difference, except in the pain it would have cost you; and the only gratification in this business is, that i suffer because neither you nor i would deny our principles. i thank you, fitzjocelyn!' and he straightened himself in the satisfaction of persecuted rectitude. 'you have very little to thank me for,' said louis, wringing his hand, and turning aside, as if unable yet to face the full extent of the evil. 'never fear for us,' continued james, boldly; 'we shall struggle on. mens conscia,--you see i can't forget to be a schoolmaster.' 'but what are you about? where are you going?' 'to london. you spoke to a publisher about my lectures on history; they will serve for introduction. he may make me his hack--a willing one, while i advertise--apply for anything. i must be gone!' 'you do not look fit for a night journey. you would be too early at estminster to see isabel.' 'don't name her!' cried james, starting round as if the word were a dart. 'thank heaven that she is away! i must write to her. maybe, lady conway will keep her till i am settled--till i have found some lodging in london where no one will know us.' 'and where you may run up a comfortable doctor's bill.' with a gesture--half passion, half despair--james reiterated, 'there's no staying here. i must be gone. i must be among strangers.' 'your mens conscia would better prove that it has no cause for shame by staying here, instead of rushing out of sight into the human wilderness, and sacrificing those poor little--' james struck his foot on the floor, as though to intercept the word; but louis continued, apparently unmoved by his anger--'those poor little children. if misfortune and injury be no disgrace to the injured, i call it cowardly pride to fly off by night to hide oneself, instead of living in your own house, like an honest man.' 'live!--pray what am i to live on?' cried james, laughing hoarsely. 'you will not find out by whirling to london in your present state.' in fact, louis's most immediate care was to detain him for that one night. there was a look of coming illness about him, and his desperate, maddened state of mind might obscure his judgment, and urge him into some precipitate measure, such as he might afterwards rue bitterly for the sake of the wife and children, the bare thought of whom seemed at present to sting him so intolerably. moreover, louis had a vague hope that so harsh a proceeding would be abandoned by the trustees; his father would remonstrate, and james might be able to think and to apologize. he was hardly a rational being to-night, and probably would have driven away any other companion; but long habit, and external coolness, enabled louis to stand his ground, and to protract matters till the clock, striking eleven, relieved him, as much as it exasperated james, by proving it so late that the last train would have already past. he persisted in declaring that he should go by the first in the morning, and louis persuaded him to go to bed, after charlotte had brought them some tea, which, he said, choked him. deciding on sleeping at no. , louis sent home the carriage, with a note to his father; and charlotte pressed her hands together in a transport of gratitude when she found that he was not going to abandon her master. she did her best to make the forlorn house comfortable; but it was but cold comfort, with all the fires gone out, and he was too sad and anxious to heed it. she was at his door early the next morning, with a summons more alarming than surprising. she was sure that master was very ill. there was james lying across his bed, half-dressed, turned away from the dim morning light, and more frightfully pale than ever. he started angrily at louis's entrance, and sprang up, but fell back, insisting with all his might that nothing ailed him but a common headache, which needed only to be left quiet for an hour or two. he said it venomously. 'a very uncommon headache,' thought louis. 'my belief is, that it is little short of brain fever! if i could only feel his pulse! but it would be very like taking a mad dog's hand. there's nothing for it but to fetch old walby. he may have some experience of refractory patients.' 'go home, louis,' reiterated james, savagely, on opening his eyes and finding him not gone. 'i tell you i want nobody. i shall be in london before night.' and starting up, he tried to draw the curtain at his feet, to shut out the tardy dawn; but too giddy to persevere, he sank back after one noisy pull. louis drew it completely, shaded the window, and would have settled the pillows, but was not allowed; and obtaining an impatient grunt by way of dismissal, he ran down stairs, caught up hat and stick, and set off to summon mr. walby from his comfortable family breakfast-table. the good old doctor was more concerned than amazed. he could hardly surmount the shock to his trustee conscience, on hearing of the consequence of yesterday's proceedings. 'i was much grieved at the time,' he said, as they walked to the terrace together. 'you will believe me that i was no willing party, my lord.' 'i could never believe that you would do anything hard towards any one, mr. walby,' said louis, kindly; and a few more like assurances led the old man to volunteer the history of the case in confidence. ramsbotham had brought before the meeting of the trustees a serious mass of charges, on which he founded a motion that mr. frost should be requested to resign. every one rejected such a measure, and the complaints were sifted. some were palpably false, others exaggerated, others related to matters of principle; but deducting these, it still was proved that the sunday attendance and evening lectures were too visibly the test of his favour, and that the boys were sometimes treated with undue severity, savouring of violent temper. 'i must confess, my lord,' said mr. walby, sinking his voice, 'i am afraid mr. frost is too prompt with his hand. a man does not know how hard he hits, when he knocks a boy over the ears with a book. mrs. barker's little boy really had a gathering under the ear in consequence;--i saw it myself.' louis was confounded; he had nothing to say to this; he knew the force that irritation gave to james's hand too well to refuse his credence, and he could only feel shame and dismay, as if himself guilty by his misjudged patronage. mr. walby proceeded to say that, under the circumstances, the trustees had decided on remonstrating by letter, after the examination; and it was easy to perceive that the reprimand, which might have been wise and moderate from the squire, had gained a colour from every one concerned, so as to censure what was right and aggravate what was wrong. mr. frost's reply had been utterly unexpected; ramsbotham and the bookseller had caught at the resignation, and so did the butcher, who hated the schoolmaster for having instilled inconveniently high principles into his son. richardson abstained from voting; mr. calcott fought hard for mr. frost, but the grocer was ill, and only poor old mr. walby supported him, and even they felt that their letter had not deserved such treatment. alas! had not fitzjocelyn himself taught northwold that the squire was not a dictator? even then, mr. calcott, still hoping that an apology might retrieve the day, had set forth to argue the matter with james frost, whom he could not suppose serious in his intentions, but thought he meant to threaten the trustees into acquiescence. the doors had been closed against him, and mr. walby feared that now the step was known, it was too late to retract it. 'the ladies would never allow it,' he declared; 'there was no saying how virulent they were against mr. frost; and as to consideration for his family, that rather inflamed their dislike. they had rich relations enough! it would be only too good for so fine a lady to be brought down.' every one had some story of her pride, neglect, or bad housewifery. 'and i can tell you,' said mr. walby, 'that i am not in their good books for declaring that i never saw anything from her but very pretty, affable manners.' with these words they reached the house; and with sighs and murmurs of 'ah! poor young man!' mr. walby followed louis to the landing-place, where they both paused, looking at each other in doubt how to effect an entrance, louis suddenly remembering that no presence would be more intolerable to the patient than that of a trustee. however, there was nothing for it but to walk in, and announce, as a matter of course, that he had thought it right to call in mr. walby. the extremity of displeasure brought james to his feet, and out into the passage, saying, with grave formality, that he was much obliged, and glad to see mr. walby as a friend, but lord fitzjocelyn was mistaken in thinking him in need of his advice. many thanks, he would trouble him no further; and affecting a laugh, he said that fitzjocelyn seemed never to have heard of a bad headache. 'acting does not mend matters, jem,' said louis. 'you had much better confess how really ill you are.' excessive giddiness made james stagger against his cousin, and louis, throwing his arms round him, looked in great alarm to the doctor for help, but was answered by something very like a smile. 'aye, aye, sir, there's nothing for it but to go to bed. if his lordship there had seen as many cases of jaundice as i have, he would not look so frightened. very wholesome disorder! yes, lie down, and i'll send you a thing or two to take.' so saying, mr. walby helped louis to lay their unwilling invalid on the bed without much resistance or reply, and presently departed, so infinitely relieved that he could not help indulging in a little chuckle at the young viscount's mistake. as soon as he was gone, james revived enough to protest that it was all nonsense, doctors must needs give a name to everything; if they would only let him alone, he should be himself and off to london in two hours; and that it was fitzjocelyn himself who was looking excessively ill, and as yellow as a guinea. he would not hear of undressing and going absolutely to bed, and fairly scolded every one out of sight. good miss mercy, who had trotted in at the tidings of illness, stood at the nursery-door, telegraphing signs of commiseration in answer to louis's looks of perplexity. 'at least,' she said, 'you had better come to breakfast with us, and hear what my sister says--salome always knows what is best.' he soon found himself in the snug parlour, where the small round breakfast-table, drawn close to miss faithfull's fireside chair, had a sort of doll's-house air of cheerful comfort, with the tiny plates, tea-cups, and the miniature loaf, and the complicated spider-legs, among which it was not easy to dispose of his own length of limb. the meal passed in anxious consultation. there might be no danger, but the disorder was severe and increasing. james's health had long been suffering from harass of mind, want of exercise, and unwholesome diet; and the blow of the previous day had brought things to a crisis. there he lay, perfectly unmanageable, permitting neither aid nor consolation, unable to endure the sight of any one, and too much stupefied by illness to perceive the impracticability of his wild scheme of seeking employment in london. miss faithfull pronounced that either mercy or lord fitzjocelyn must go and fetch mrs. james frost home. 'i was only thinking how long we could keep her away,' said louis. 'pray don't be shocked, dear miss mercy, but i thought i could nurse poor jem much better alone than with another dead weight on our hands.' 'they would neither of them thank you,' said miss faithfull, laughing. 'depend upon it, she will know best how to deal with him.' 'well, you see more of their household than i do, but i have never dared to think of her! do you remember the words, 'if thou hast run with the footmen and they have wearied thee--'' 'there are some people who can run with the horsemen better than with the footmen,' said miss salome. 'you know we are very fond of young mrs. frost. we cannot forget her sweetness when she lived in this house, and she has always been most kind and friendly. i do believe that to display the most admirable qualities, she only needs to be roused.' 'to live in the house with jem, and jem's three babies, and yet want rousing!' 'i have thought,' said salome, diffidently, 'that he was only too gentle with her.' 'do you know how very severe you are growing, miss faithfull?' said louis, looking her in the face, in the gravity of amusement. 'i mean,' said miss faithfull, blushing, 'though of course i do not know, that i have fancied it might be better for both if he could have gone to the root of the matter, and set fairly before her the prime duties requisite in the mistress of such a family. he may have done so.' 'i think not,' said louis; 'it would be awkward when a woman fancied she embraced poverty voluntarily for his sake. poverty! it was riches compared with their present condition. isabel on pounds a-year! it may well make poor jem ill to think about it! i only wonder it is not a brain-fever!' 'lord fitzjocelyn regrets that brain-fever,' said miss faithfull. 'probably my ideas on the subject are derived from the prevalence of the complaint in light literature,' said louis, smiling. 'it would be more dignified, and suit isabel better. poor isabel! i hope i have done her injustice. she behaved gloriously at the barricades, and has a great soul after all; but i had begun to think heroines not calculated for moderate circumstances. may they do better in no circumstances at all! heighho! how a heavy heart makes one talk nonsense! so i am to fetch the poor thing home, miss faithfull.' this was determined on, whether with or without james's consent; miss mercy undertaking that she and martha would help charlotte, and dispose of the children in the house beautiful; and she went back with louis to fetch them, when little catharine was found peeping through the bars of her prison-gate at the top of the nursery-stairs, shouting lustily for papa. she graciously accepted her godfather as a substitute, and was carried by him to her kind neighbour's house, already a supplementary home. as to her father, louis found him more refractory than ever. his only greeting was, 'why are not you gone home?' he scorned mr. walby's prescriptions, and made such confident assertions that he should be off to london in the evening, that fitzjocelyn almost reverted to the brain-fever theory, and did not venture to hint his intention to any one but charlotte, telling her that he should now almost think her justified in locking the doors. sending information to his father, he started for estminster, very disconsolate, and full of self-reproach for the hasty proceedings which had borne such bitter fruits. the man and the situation had been an injustice to each other; a sensitive irritable person was the very last to be fit for a position requiring unusual judgment and temper, where his energy had preyed upon itself. his being placed there had been the work of louis's own impetuous scorn of the wisdom of elder and graver heads. such regrets derived additional poignancy from the impossibility of conferring direct assistance upon james, and from the degree of justice in the hard measure which had been dealt to him, would make it for ever difficult to recommend him, and yet the devising future schemes for his welfare was the refuge which louis's mind most willingly sought from the present perplexity of the communication in store for poor isabel. as he put out his head at the estminster station, a familiar voice shouted, 'hollo! fitzjocelyn, how jolly! have you got james there? i told isabel it would be no use; but when she did not get a letter this morning, she would have it that he was coming, and got me to walk up with her.' 'where is she?' asked louis, as he jumped out and shook hands with walter. 'walking up and down the esplanade. she would not come into the station, so i said i would run up to satisfy her. i don't know what she will say to you for not being frost.' 'do you mean that she is anxious!' 'it is the correct thing, isn't it, when wives get away from their husbands, and have not the fragment of a letter for twenty-four whole hours? but what do you mean, fitzjocelyn?' asked the boy, suddenly sobering. 'is anything really the matter?' 'yes, walter,' said louis; 'we must tell your sister as best we can. james is ill, and i am come for her.' walter was silent for a few minutes, then drew a sigh, saying, 'poor isabel, i wish it had not been! these were the only comfortable holidays i have had since she chose to marry.' isabel here came in sight, quickening her pace as she first saw that her brother had a companion, but slackening in disappointment when she perceived that it was not her husband; then, the next moment hurrying on, and as she met them, exclaiming, 'tell me at once! what is it?' 'nothing serious,' said louis. 'the children are all well, but i left james very uncomfortable, though with nothing worse than a fit of jaundice.' the inexperienced isabel hardly knew whether this were not as formidable as even the cherished brain-fever, and becoming very pale, she said, 'i am ready at once--walter will let mamma know.' 'there will be no train for two hours,' said louis. 'you will have plenty of time to prepare.' 'you should have telegraphed,' said isabel, 'i could have come by the first train.' trembling, she grasped walter's arm, and began hastening home, impatient to be doing something. 'i knew something was wrong,' she exclaimed; 'i ought to have gone home yesterday, when there was no letter.' 'indeed, there--was nothing the matter yesterday, at least, with his health,' said louis. 'you are alarming yourself far too much--' 'to be sure, isabel,' chimed in walter. 'a fellow at my tutor's had it, and did nothing but wind silkworm's silk all the time. we shall have james yet to spend christmas with us. everybody laughs at the jaundice, though fitzjocelyn does look so lugubrious that he had almost frightened _me_.' 'is this true?' said isabel, looking from one to the other, as if she had been frightened in vain. 'quite true, isabel,' said walter. 'never mind fitzjocelyn's long face; i wouldn't go if i were you! don't spoil the holidays.' 'i must go, walter dear,' said isabel, 'but i do not think lord fitzjocelyn would play with my fears. either he is very ill, or something else is wrong.' 'you have guessed it, isabel,' said louis. 'this illness is partly the effect of distress of mind.' 'that horrid meeting of trustees!' cried isabel. 'i am sure they have been impertinent.' 'they objected to some of his doings; he answered by threatening to resign, and i am sorry to say that the opposition set prevailed to have his resignation accepted.' 'a very good thing too,' cried sir walter. 'i always thought that school a shabby concern. to be under a lot of butchers and bakers, and nothing but cads among the boys! he ought to be heartily glad to be rid of the crew.' isabel's indignation was checked by a sort of melancholy amusement at her brother's view, but louis doubted whether she realized the weight of her own words as she answered--'unfortunately, walter, it is nearly all we have to live upon.' 'so much the better,' continued walter. 'i'll tell you--you shall all go to thornton conway, and i'll come and spend my holidays there, instead of kicking my heels at these stupid places. i shan't mind your babies a bit, and frost may call himself my tutor if he likes. i don't care if you take me away from eton.' 'a kind scheme, walter,' said isabel, 'but wanting in two important points, mamma's consent and james's.' 'oh, i'll take care of mamma!' 'i'm afraid i can't promise the same as to james.' 'ah! i see. delaford was quite right when he said mr. frost was a gentleman who never knew what was for his own advantage.' as they arrived at the house, isabel desired to know how soon she must be ready, and went upstairs. walter detained his cousin--'i say, fitzjocelyn, have they really got nothing to live on?' 'no more than will keep them from absolute want.' 'i shall take them home,' said walter, with much satisfaction. 'i shall write to tell james that there is nothing else to be done. i cannot do without isabel, and i'll make my mother consent.' fitzjocelyn was glad to be freed from the boy on any terms, and to see him go off to write his letter. walter was at least sincere and warm-hearted in his selfishness, and so more agreeable than his mother, whom louis found much distressed, under the secret conviction that something might be expected of her. 'poor isabel! i wish she could come to me; but so many of them--and we without a settled home. if there were no children--but london houses are so small; and, indeed, it would be no true kindness to let them live in our style for a little while. they must run to expenses in dress; it would be much more economical at home, and i could send walter to them if he is very troublesome.' 'thank you,' said louis. 'i think james will be able to ride out the storm independently.' 'i know that would be his wish. and i think i heard that mr. dynevor objected to the school. that might be one obstacle removed.' lady conway comforted herself by flourishing on into predictions that all would now be right, and that poor dear isabel would soon be a much richer woman than herself; while louis listened to the castle-building, not thinking it worth while to make useless counter-prophecies. the sisters were upstairs, assisting isabel, and they all came down together. the girls were crying; but isabel's dark, soft eyes, and noble head, had an air of calm, resolute elevation, which drove all louis's misgivings away, and which seemed quite beyond and above the region of lady conway's caresses and affectionate speeches. walter and virginia came up to the station, and parted with their sister with fondness that was much mure refreshing, walter reiterating that his was the only plan. 'now, fitzjocelyn,' said isabel, when they were shut into a coupe, 'tell me what you said about distress of mind. it has haunted me whether you used those words.' 'could you doubt his distress at such a state of affairs?' 'i thought there could be no distress of mind where the suffering is for the truth.' 'ah! if he could quite feel it so!' 'what do you mean? there has been a cabal against james from the first to make him lay aside his principles, and i cannot regret his refusal to submit to improper dictation, at whatever cost to myself.' 'i am afraid he better knows than you do what that cost is likely to be.' 'does he think i cannot bear poverty?' exclaimed isabel. 'he had not said so--' began louis; 'but--' 'you both think me a poor, helpless creature,' said isabel, her eyes kindling as they had done in the midst of danger. 'i can do better than you think. i may be able myself to do something towards our maintenance.' he could not help answering, in the tone that gave courtesy to almost any words, 'i am afraid it does not answer for the wife to be the bread-winner.' 'then you doubt my writing being worth anything?' she asked, in a hurt tone of humility. 'tell me candidly, for it would be the greatest kindness;' and her eye unconsciously sought the bag where lay sir hubert, whom all this time her imagination was exalting, as the hero who would free them from their distresses. 'worth much pleasure to me, to the world at large,' said louis; 'but--you told me to speak plainly--to your home, would any remuneration be worth your own personal care?' isabel coloured, but did not speak. louis ventured another sentence--'it is a delicate subject, but you must know better than i how far james would be likely to bear that another, even you, should work for his livelihood.' when isabel spoke again, it was to ask further particulars; and when he had told all, she found solace in exclaiming at the folly and injustice of james's enemies, until the sense of fairness obliged him to say, 'i wish the right and the wrong ever were fairly divided in this world; and yet perhaps it is best as it is: the grain of right on either side may save the sin from being a presumptuous one.' 'it would be hard to find the one grain of right on the part of the ramsbotham cabal.' 'perhaps you would not think so, if you were a boy's mother.' 'oh!' cried isabel, with tears in her eyes, 'if he thought he had been too hasty, he always made such reparation that only cowards could help being touched. i'm sure they deserved it, and much more.' 'no doubt,' said louis; 'but, alas! if all had their deserts--' 'then you really think he was too severe?' 'i think his constitutional character was hardly fit for so trying a post, and that his family and school troubles reacted upon each other.' 'you mean clara's conduct; and dear grandmamma--oh! if she could but have stayed with us! if you could have seen how haggard and grieved he came home from cheveleigh! i do not think he has been quite the same ever since.' 'and no. has never been the same,' said louis. 'tell me,' said isabel, suddenly, 'are we very poor indeed?' 'i fear so, isabel. till james can find some employment, i fear there is a stern struggle with poverty before you.' 'does that mean living as the faithfulls do?' 'yes, i think your means will be nearly the same as theirs.' 'fitzjocelyn,' said isabel, after a long pause, 'i see what you have been implying all this time, and i have been feeling it too. i have been absorbed in my own pursuits, and not paid attention enough to details of management, and so i have helped to fret and vex my husband. you all think my habits an additional evil in this trial.' 'james has never said a word of the kind,' cried louis. 'i know he has not; but i ought to have opened my eyes to it long ago, and i thank you for helping me. there--will you take that manuscript, and keep it out of my way? it has been a great tempter to me. it is finished now, and it might bring in something. but i can have only one thought now--how to make james happier and more at ease.' 'then, isabel, i don't think your misfortunes will be misfortunes.' 'to suffer for right principles should give strength for anything,' said isabel. 'think what many better women than i have had to endure, when they have had to be ashamed of their husband, not proud of him! now, i do hope and trust that god will help us, and carry us and the children through with it!' louis felt that in this frame she was truly fit to cheer and sustain james. how she might endure the actual struggle with penury, he dared not imagine; at present he could only be carried along by her lofty composure. james still lay on his tossed, uncomfortable bed in the evening twilight. the long, lonely hours, when he imagined louis to have taken him at his word and gone home, had given him a miserable sense of desertion, and as increasing sensations of illness took from him the hopes of moving on that day, he became distracted at the thought of the anxiety his silence would cause isabel, and, after vainly attempting to write, had been lying with the door open, watching for some approaching step. there was the familiar sound of a soft, gliding step on the stairs, then a pause, and the sweet soft voice, 'my poor james, how sadly uncomfortable you are!' 'my dear!' he cried, hastily raising himself, 'who has been frightening you?' 'no one, fitzjocelyn was so kind as to come for me.' 'ah! i wished you to have been spared this unpleasant business.' 'do you think i could bear to stay away! oh, james! have i been too useless and helpless for you even to be glad to see me?' 'it was for your own sake,' he murmured, pressing her hand. 'has fitzjocelyn told you?' 'yes,' said isabel, looking up, as she sat beside him. 'never mind, james. it is better to suffer wrong than to do it. i do not fear but that, if we strive to do our duty, god will help us, and make it turn out for the best for our children and ourselves.' he grasped her hand in intense emotion. 'i know you are anxious about me,' added isabel. 'my ways have been too self-indulgent for you to think i can bear hardness. i made too many professions at first; i will make no more now, but only tell you that i trust to do my utmost, and not shrink from my duties. and now, not a word more about it till you are better.' chapter xv. sweet uses of adversity. one furnace many times the good and bad will hold; but what consumes the chaff will only cleanse the gold. r. c. trench. during the succeeding days, james had little will or power to consider his affairs; and isabel, while attending on him, had time to think over her plans. happily, they had not a debt. mrs. frost had so entirely impressed her grandson's mind with her own invariable rule of paying her way, that it had been one of his grounds for pride that he had never owed anything to any man. they were thus free to choose their own course, but lord ormersfield urged their remaining at northwold for the present. he saw mr. calcott, who had been exceedingly concerned at the turn affairs had taken, and very far from wishing to depose james, though thinking that he needed an exhortation to take heed to his ways. it had been an improper reprimand, improperly received; but the earl and the squire agreed that nothing but morbid fancy could conjure up disgrace, such as need prevent james frost from remaining in his own house until he could obtain employment, provided he and his wife had the resolution to contract their style of living under the eye of their neighbours. this gave neither of them a moment's uneasiness. it was not the direction of their pride; and even before james's aching head was troubled with deliberation, isabel had discussed her plan with the miss faithfulls. she would imagine herself in a colony, and be troubled with no more scruples about the conventional tasks of a lady than if she were in the back-woods. they would shut up some of the rooms, take one servant of all-work, and isabel would be nursery-maid herself. 'we may do quite as well as the carpenter's wife,' she said; 'she has more children and less income, and yet always seems to me the richest person whom i know.' james groaned, and turned his face away. he could not forbid it, for even isabel's exertion must be permitted rather than the dishonour of living beyond their means; and he consoled himself with thinking that when the deadening inertness of his illness should leave him, he should see some means of finding employment for himself, which would save her from toil and exertion, and, in the meantime, with all his keen self-reproach, it was a blessed thing to have been brought back to his enthusiastic admiration for her, all discontents and drawbacks utterly forgotten in her assiduous affection and gallant cheerfulness. lord ormersfield had readily acceded to his son's wish to bring the party to spend christmas at ormersfield, as soon as james could be moved. during their visit the changes were to be made, and before setting out isabel had to speak to the servants. charlotte's alacrity and usefulness had made her doubly esteemed during her master's illness; and when he heard how she was to be disposed of, he seemed much vexed. he said that she was a legacy from his grandmother, and too innocent and pretty to be cast about among strange servants in all the places where the conways visited; and that he would not have consented to the transfer, but that, under their present circumstances, it was impossible to keep her. if any evil came to her, it would be another miserable effect of his own temper. isabel thought he exaggerated the dangers, and she spoke brightly to charlotte about fixing the day of her going to estminster, so as to be put into the ways of the place before her predecessor departed. the tears at once came into charlotte's eyes, and she answered, 'if you please, ma'am, i should be very sorry to leave, unless i did not give satisfaction.' 'that is far from being the reason, charlotte; but we cannot keep so good a servant--mr. frost has given up--' 'i have been put out of the school,' said james, from his sofa, in his stern sense of truth. 'we must live on as little as possible, and therefore must part with you, charlotte, though from no fault of yours. you must look on us as your friends, and in any difficulty apply to us; for, as mrs. frost says, we look on you as a charge from my grandmother.' charlotte escaped to hide her tears; and when, a few minutes after, the ormersfield carriage arrived, and nurses and babies were packed in, and her master walked feebly and languidly down stairs, and her mistress turned round to say, kindly, 'you will let me know, charlotte?' she just articulated, 'thank you, ma'am, i will write.' mr. frost's words had not been news to charlotte. his affairs had been already pretty well understood and discussed, and the hard, rude, grasping comments of the vulgar cook--nay, even of the genteel nurse--had been so many wounds to the little maiden, bred up by jane in the simplicity of feudal reverence and affection for all that bore the name of frost dynevor. her mistress left to the tender mercies of some servant such as these, some one who might only care for her own ease and profit, and not once think of who and what she had been! the little children knocked about by some careless girl! never, never! all the doubts and scruples about putting her own weak head and vain heart in the way of being made faithless to tom revived, reinforced by her strong and generous affection. a romantic purpose suddenly occurred to her, flushing her cheek and brightening her eye. in that one impulse, scrubbing, washing dishes, short lilac sleeves were either forgotten, or acquired a positive glory, and while the cook was issuing her invitations for a jollification and gossip at the expense of mr. and mrs. frost, charlotte sat in her attic, amid jane's verbenas, which she had cherished there ever since their expulsion from the kitchen, and wrote and cried, and left off, to read over, and feel satisfied at, the felicity of her phrases, and the sentiment of her project. 'dear and honoured madam,--pardon the liberty i am taking but i am sure that you and my reverend and redoubted master would not willingly have inflicted so much pain as yesterday on a poor young female which was brought up from an orphan child by my dear late lamented mistress and owes everything to her and would never realize the touching lines of the sublime poet deserted in his utmost need by those his former bounty fed. as to higher wages and a situation offering superior advantages such as might prove attractive to other minds it has none to me. my turn is for fidelity in obscurity and dear and honoured lady i am a poor unprotected girl which has read in many volumes of the dangers of going forth into the snares of a wealthy and powerful family and begs you not to deprive her of the shelter of the peaceful roof which has been her haven and has been the seen of the joys and sorrows of her career. dear lady pardon the liberty that i have taken but it would brake my heart to leave you and master and the dear children espeshilly in the present winter of adversity which i have hands to help in to the best of my poor abilities. dear and honoured lady i have often been idle but i will be so no more i love the dear little ladies with all my heart and i can cook and act in any capacity and wages is no object i will not take none nor beer neither--and the parlour tea-leaves will be sufficient. dear and honoured master and mistress forgive the liberty a poor girl has taken and lend a favourable ear to my request for if you persist in parting with me i know i shall not survive it. 'your humble and faithful servant, 'charlotte arnold.' isabel received this letter while she was at breakfast with lord ormersfield and louis, and it was, of course, impossible to keep it to herself. 'talking of no wages!' said the earl. 'send her off at once.' 'you will despise me,' said isabel, with tears in her eyes; 'but there is something very touching in it, in spite of the affectation. i believe she really means it.' 'affectation is only matter of taste,' said louis. 'half the simplicity of our day is only fashion; and charlotte's letter, with a few stops, and signed chloe, would have figured handsomely in mrs. radcliffe's time.' 'it does not depend on me,' said isabel; 'james could not bear her going before, and i am sure he will not now.' 'i think he ought not,' said louis. 'poor girl! i do believe the snares of wealthy families and fidelity in obscurity, really mean with her the pomps and vanities versus duty and affection.' 'i am sure i would not drive her back to them,' said isabel; 'but i am only afraid the work will be too much for her strength.' 'the willing heart goes all the way,' said louis; 'and maybe it will be more wholesome than london, and sitting up.' isabel coloured and sighed; but added, that it would be infinite relief on the children's account to keep some one so gentle-handed, and so entirely to be trusted. james's decision was immediate. he called the letter a farrago, but his laugh was mixed with tears at the faithful affection it displayed. 'it was mere folly,' he said, 'to think of keeping her without wages; but, if she would accept such as could be afforded after taking a rough village girl for her food to do the hard work, the experiment should be made, in the hope that the present straits would only endure for a short time. this little event seemed to have done him much good, and put him more at peace with the world. he was grateful for lord ormersfield's kindness and forbearance, and the enforced rest from work was refreshing him; while isabel had never been so cheerful and lively in her life as now, when braced manfully for her work, full of energy, and feeling that she must show herself happy and courageous to support his depressed spirits. she was making a beginning--she was practising herself in her nursery duties, and, to her surprise, finding them quite charming; and little kitty so delighted with all she did for her, that all the hitherto unsounded depths of the motherly heart were stirred up, and she could not think why she had never found out her true happiness. she looked so bright and so beautiful, that even lord ormersfield remarked it, pitying her for trials which he thought she little realized; but louis augured better, believing that it was not ignorance but resolution which gave animation and brilliancy to her dark eye and cheerfulness to her smile. fitzjocelyn took her to dynevor terrace in the afternoon to settle the matter with charlotte; and, on the way, he took the opportunity of telling her that he had been reading sir hubert, and admired him very much, discussing him and adeline with the same vivid interest as her own sisters showed in them as persons, not mere personages. isabel said they already seemed to her to belong to a world much farther back than the last fortnight. 'there is some puzzle in the middle,' said louis. 'i can't make out the hero whose addresses were so inconvenient to adeline, and who ran away from the pirates. he began as a crabbed old troubadour, who made bad verses; and then he went on as a fantastic young viscount, skipping and talking nonsense.' 'oh!' cried isabel, much discomposed. 'did i leave that piece there? i took it to estminster by mistake, and they told me of it. i should have taken it out.' 'that would have been a pity,' said louis, 'for the viscount is a much more living man than the old troubadour. when he had so many plans of poems for the golden violet that he made none at all, i was quite taken with him. i began to think i was going to have a lesson.' isabel blushed and tried to laugh, but it was so unsuccessful that louis exclaimed in high glee--'there! i do believe i was the fantastic viscount! oh! isabel, it was too bad! i can fairly acquit myself of skipping ever since i had the honour of your acquaintance.' 'or of running away from the pirates,' said isabel. 'no, it was a great deal too bad, and very wrong indeed. it was when you did not run away that i was so much ashamed, that i thought i had torn out every atom. i never told any one--not even virginia!' louis had a very hearty laugh, and, when isabel gaw him so excessively amused, she ventured to laugh too at her ancient prejudice, and the strange chance which had made the fantastic viscount, sir roland's critic. 'you must restore him,' said louis, returning to business. 'that old troubadour is the one inconsistency in the story, evidently not fitting into the original plot. i shall be delighted to sit for the portrait.' 'i don't think you could now,' said isabel. 'i think the motley must have been in the spectacles with which i looked at you.' 'ah! it is a true poem,' said louis, 'it must have been a great relief to your feelings! shall i give it back to you? 'oh! i can't touch it now!' cried isabel. 'you may give it to me, and if ever i have time to think again of it, i may touch it up, but certainly not now.' 'and when you do, pray don't omit the viscount. i can't lose my chance of going down to posterity.' he went his way, while isabel repaired to the terrace, and found charlotte awaiting her answer in much trepidation. the low wages, instead of none at all, were a great disappointment, doing away with all the honour and sentiment, and merely degrading her in the eyes of her companions; but her attachment conquered this objection, and face to face with her mistress, the affectation departed, and left remaining such honest and sincere faithfulness and affection, that isabel felt as if a valuable and noble-hearted friend had suddenly been made known to her. it was a silly little fanciful heart, but it was sound to the core; and when isabel said, 'there will be very hard work, charlotte, but we will try to do our best for mr. frost and the children, and we will help each other,' charlotte felt as if no task could be too hard if it were to be met with such a look and smile. 'is it settled?' asked lord fitzjocelyn, as charlotte opened the door for him. 'oh, yes, thank you, my lord--' 'but, charlotte, one thing is decided. mrs. frost can afford no more eau de cologne. the first hysterics and you go!' he passed upstairs, and found isabel beginning to dismantle the drawing-room--'which you arranged for us!' she said. a long, deep sigh was the answer, and louis mused for some moments ere he said--'it is hard work to say good-bye to trifles with which departed happiness seems connected.' 'oh, no!' cried isabel, eagerly. 'with such a home, the happiness cannot be departed.' 'no, not with such a home!' said louis, with a melancholy smile; 'but i was selfish enough to be thinking who hung that picture--' 'i don't think you were the selfish person,' said isabel. 'patience and work!' said louis, rousing himself. 'some sort of good time _must_ come,'--and he quickly put his hand to assist in putting the dresden shepherd and shepherdess into retirement, observing that they seemed the genii of the place, and he set his mind on their restoration. 'i do not think,' said isabel, as she afterwards narrated this scene to her husband, 'that i ever realized his being so much attached to mary ponsonby; i thought it was a convenient suitable thing in which he followed his father's wishes, and i imagined he had quite recovered it.' 'he did not look interesting enough? yes! he was slow in knowing his own mind; but his heart once given there is no recalling it, whatever his father may wish.' 'or my mother,' said isabel, smiling. 'ah! i have never asked you what your party say of him in the london world.' 'they say he quite provokes them by being such a diligent member, and that people debate as to whether he will distinguish himself. some say he does not care enough, and others, that he has too many crotchets.' 'just so! public men are not made of that soft, scrupulous stuff, which only hardens and toughens when principle is clear before him. well, as to society--' 'virginia says he is hardly ever to be had; he is either at the house, or he has something to do for his father; he slips out of parties, and they never catch him unless they are in great want of a gentleman to take them somewhere, and then no one is so useful. mamma has been setting innumerable little traps for him, but he marches straight through them all, and only a little tone of irony betrays that he sees through them. every one likes him, and the only complaint is, that he is so seldom to be seen, keeping almost entirely to his father's set, always with his father--' 'ay! i can bear to watch his submission better than formerly. his attentions are in such perfect good taste that they are quite beautiful; and his lordship has quite ceased snubbing, and begins to have a glimmering that when louis says something never dreamt of in his philosophy, the defect may be in his understanding, and not in fitzjocelyn's.' 'i could excuse him for not always understanding fitzjocelyn! but there never were two kinder people in the world; and i could not have imagined that i should ever like lord ormersfield half so much.' 'he is improved. louis's exclusive devotion has not been lost on him. holdsworth has been sitting with me, and talking of the great change in the parish. he told me that at his first arrival here, seven years ago, when he was very young, he found himself quite disheartened and disgusted by the respectability of the place. every one was cold, distant, correct, and self-esteeming; so perfectly contented with themselves and the routine, that he felt all his ardour thrown away, and it seemed to him that he was pastor to a steam-engine--a mere item in the proprieties of ormersfield. he was almost ready to exchange, out of weariness and impatience, when fitzjocelyn came home, and awoke fresh life and interest by his absurdities, his wonderful philanthropies, and extraordinary schemes. his sympathy and earnestness were the first refreshment and encouragement; and holdsworth declares that no one can guess the benefit that he was to him even when he was most ridiculous. since that, he says, the change has been striking, though so gradual. louis has all the same freshness and energy, but without the fluctuation and impetuosity. and his example of humility and sincerity has worked, not only in reclaiming the wild outlying people, but even awakening the comfortable dependents from their self-satisfaction. even frampton is far from the impenetrable person he used to be.' 'and i suppose they have done infinite good to the wild marksedge people!' 'some are better, some are worse. i believe that people always are worse when they reject good. i am glad to find, too, that the improvements answer in a pecuniary point of view. his lordship is amazed at his son's sagacity, and they have never been so much at ease in money matters.' 'indeed! well, i must own that i have always been struck with the very small scale on which things are done here. just the mere margin of what is required by their station, barely an indulgence!' 'i fancy you must look into subscriptions for fitzjocelyn's means,' said james; 'and for the rest, they have no heart for new furniture till he marries.' 'well! i wonder if mary is worth so much heart! it might be the best thing for him if she would find some worthy merchant. he is very young still, and looks younger. i should like him to begin the world again.' 'ha! isabel, you want to cook up a romance of your own for him.' james was recovering cheerfulness. he thought he was bracing himself to bear bravely with an unmerited wrong. the injustice of his sentence hid from him the degree of justice; and with regard to his own temper, he knew better what he restrained than what he expressed, and habitually gave himself credit for what he did not say or do. there was much that was really good in his present spirit, and it was on the way to be better; but his was not the character to be materially altered by the first brunt of a sudden shock. it was a step that he had brought himself to forgive the trustees. he did not yet see that he had any need to be forgiven. at the end of three weeks james and isabel returned to their home, and to their new way of life; and fitzjocelyn had only time to see that they were beginning their struggle with good courage, before the meeting of parliament summoned him to london. isabel fully justified miss faithfull's prediction. she was too truly high-minded to think any task beneath her; and with her heart in, not out of her immediate work, she could not fail to be a happier woman. success gave as much pleasure in a household duty as in an accomplishment--nay, far more when it was a victory over herself, and an increase to the comfort of her husband. her strength was much tried, and the children often fatigued and harassed her; but there was unspeakable compensation in their fondness and dependence on her, and even in the actual services themselves. the only wonder began to be how she could have ever trusted them in any hands but her own. her husband's affection and consideration were sources of joy ever renewed; and though natural irritability and pressing anxieties might now and then betray him into a hasty word, his penitence so far surpassed the momentary pain it might have cost her, that she was obliged to do her utmost to comfort him. she sometimes found herself awkward or ignorant, and sometimes flagged from over-exertion; yet throughout, james's approval, and her own sense that she was striving to do her best, kept her mind at rest. above all, the secret of her happiness was, that the shock of adversity had awakened her from her previous deadness and sluggishness of soul, and made her alive to a feeling of trust and support, a frame of mind ever repenting, ever striving onwards. thus she went bravely through the very class of trials that she would once have thought merely lowering, inglorious, and devoid of poetry. what would have been in itself sordid, gained a sweetness from the light of love and duty, and never in all her dreamy ease had she been as cheerful and lighthearted as in the midst of hardship and rigid economy. her equable temper and calm composure came to her aid; and where a more nervous and excitable woman would have preyed upon herself, and sunk under imaginary troubles, she was always ready to soothe and sustain the anxious and sensitive nature of her husband. after all, hers was the lightest share of the trial. to her, the call was to act, and to undergo misfortunes occasioned by no fault of hers; to him, the call was the one most galling to an active and eager man--namely, to endure, and worse, to see endured, the penalty of his own errors. in vain did he seek for employment. a curacy, without a fair emolument, would have been greater poverty than their present condition, as long as the house was unlet; and, though he answered advertisements and made applications, the only eligible situations failed; and he knew, among so many candidates, the last to be chosen would be a person of violent temper, unable to bear rebuke. disappointment came upon disappointment, and the literary work, with which, through louis's exertions, he had been supplied, was not likely to bring in any speedy return. all that he could do was to take more than his part in domestic trifles, such as most men would have scorned, and to relieve his wife as far as possible of the children, often at the cost of his writing. he bore the brunt of many a trial of which she was scarcely aware--slights from the harsh vulgar, and compassion from the kind vulgar; and the proud self-assertion was gone which had hardened him to all such stings. to his lot fell the misery of weighing and balancing what comforts could best be cut off without positive injury to his wife and little ones. to consider whether an empty house should be repaired for a doubtful tenant, to make the venture, and have it rejected, was a severe vexation, when the expense trenched on absolute necessaries, and hardly less trying was it to be forced to accept the rent of the house beautiful, knowing how ill it could be spared; and yet, that without it he must lapse into the hopeless abyss of debt. moreover, there was the terrible heart thrill to have no power of giving to some of the poor who had learnt to look to the terrace in his grandmother's time, and meals were curtailed, that those in greater need might not be left quite unaided. nor was this the only cause for which james underwent actual stern privation. the reign of bad cookery was over. charlotte, if unmethodical, was delicately neat; and though she kept them waiting for their dinner, always served it up with the precision of past prosperity. cheap cookery and cottage economy were the study, and the results were pronounced admirable; but the master was the dispenser; and when a modicum of meat was to make nourishing a mountain of rice, or an ocean of broth, it would occur to him, as he helped isabel, that the piece de resistance would hardly hold out for the kitchen devourers. he would take the recipe at its word, and dine on the surrounding structure; and in spite of the cottage economy, he was nearly as hungry after dinner as before it, and people began to say that he had never recovered his looks since his illness. these daily petty acts of self-denial and self-restraint had begun to tame his spirit and open his eyes in a manner that neither precept nor example had yet effected. charlotte had imbibed to the full the spirit of patient exertion which pervaded the house. mrs. martha had told her she was a foolish girl, and would be tired of the place in a fortnight; but when she did not see her tired, she would often rush in after her two mistresses were shut up for the evening, scold charlotte for her want of method, and finish all that was left undone, while charlotte went up to the nursery to release her mistress. as to novels and sentiment, they had gone after sir hubert; and though charlotte was what martha expressively called 'fairly run off her feet,' she had never looked better nor happier. her mistress treated her like a friend; she doted on the children, and the cook was out of the kitchen; delaford was off her mind, and neither stairs nor even knife-cleaning could hurt her feelings. to be sure, her subordinate, a raw girl from marksgedge, devoured all that was set before her, and what was not eatable, she broke; but as she had been sent from home with no injunctions but to 'look sharp and get stout,' so she was only fulfilling her vocation, and on some question of beer, her mother came and raved at charlotte, and would have raved at mrs. frost, if her dignified presence had not overawed her. so she only took the girl away in offence, and charlotte was much happier with an occasional charwoman to share her labours. there was much happiness in no. , notwithstanding that the spring and summer of were very hard times; and perhaps felt the more, because the sunny presence of louis fitzjocelyn did not shine there as usual. he was detained in london all the easter recess by his father's illness. lord ormersfield was bound hand and foot by a severe attack of rheumatism, caught almost immediately after his going to london. it seemed to have taken a strong hold of his constitution, and lingered on for weeks, so that he could barely move from his armchair by the fire, and began to give himself up as henceforth to be a crippled old man--a view out of which louis and sir miles oakstead tried by turns to laugh him; indeed, sir miles accused him of wanting to continue his monopoly of his son--and of that doubly-devoted attention by which louis enlivened his convalescence. society had very little chance with fitzjocelyn now, unless he was fairly hunted out by the earl, who was always haunted by ungrounded alarms for his health and spirits, and never allowed him to fail in the morning rides, which were in fact his great refreshment, as much from the quiet and the change of scene, as from the mere air and exercise. 'father,' said he, coming in one day a little after easter, 'you are a very wise man!' 'eh!' said the earl, looking up in wonder and expectation excited by this prelude, hoping for the fulfilment of some political prediction. 'he is a wise man,' proceeded louis, 'who does not put faith in treasures, especially butlers; also, who does not bring a schoolboy to london with nothing to do!' 'what now?' said the earl. 'is young conway in a scrape?' 'i am,' said fitzjocelyn; 'i have made a discovery, and i don't exactly see what to do with it. you see i have been taking the boy out riding with me, as the only thing i could well do for him these holidays. you must know he is very good and patronizing; i believe he thinks he could put me up to a few things in time. well, to-day, as we passed a questionable-looking individual, walter bowed, as if highly elated by the honour of his acquaintance, and explained to me that he was the celebrated--i forget who, but that's owing to my defective education. the fact is, that this delaford, to whom my aunt implicitly trusts, has been introducing this unlucky boy to a practical course of bell's life--things that i went through eton, and never even heard of.' and he detailed some of them. 'no more than she might have expected,' said lord ormersfield. 'and what is to be done?' 'i should say, never interfere between people and their servants, still less between them and their sons. you will do no good.' 'i cannot see this go on!' cried louis. 'the boy told me all, by way of showing me his superiority. i believe he wants to introduce me to some of his distinguished friends. they flatter him, and make him a great man; and as to any scruples about his mother, delaford has disposed of her objections as delicate weaknesses. when i began to look grave, the poor boy set it down to my neglected training, always spending my holidays in the country, and not knowing what fast men are up to.' 'and so he goes to destruction--just the sort of boy that does,' said the earl, with due acquiescence in the course of the world. 'he need not,' exclaimed louis. 'he is a nice boy, a very nice boy, if only he cared for his mother, or knew right from wrong.' lord ormersfield smiled at these slight exceptions. 'he is heartily fond of isabel,' said louis. 'if i thought jem could do any good, i would send for him; but he has made my aunt so much afraid of unworldliness just now, that i only wonder she lets miss king stay on.' 'you had better leave it alone,' said the earl, 'unless you can do anything with the boy. i am glad that i am not his guardian!' 'i wish i was,' sighed louis. 'i suppose you will grow older some day,' said lord ormersfield. 'however, i see you will not be contented without going your own way to work.' 'when the earl saw his son the next day, louis looked radiant at having taken one step. he had seen his aunt, and she had endured the revelation with more equanimity than he could have supposed possible. 'it was a house where they took things easily,' as he said; a house where nothing was more feared than a scene; and lady conway had thanked her nephew greatly for his communication; promised what he did not ask, that he should not be betrayed to walter; assured him that the butler should be dismissed, without giving any reason, before the summer holidays; and for the few remaining days before walter returned to eton, she thought she might reckon on her dear fitzjocelyn for keeping his eye upon him: no doubt all would be right when delaford was once gone. it was the old want of a high standard--the love of ease rather than the love of right. the earl laughed at her short-sighted policy, and resented her saddling louis with the care of her son; while louis philosophized upon good-nature, and its use and abuse. whether mr. delaford learnt that sir walter had betrayed him to lord fitzjocelyn, or whether he took alarm from the young gentleman being kept under surveillance, he scented danger; and took the initiative, by announcing to my lady that he intended to retire from his situation into private life at the month's end. lady conway rejoiced in being spared the fabrication by which she had intended to dismiss her paragon without hurting his feelings, thanked fitzjocelyn more than ever, and was sure that dear walter would do very well. but no sooner had delaford departed than a series of discoveries began to be made. lady conway's bills reached back to dates far beyond those of the cheques which she had put into delaford's hands to pay them, and a tissue of peculation began to reveal itself, so alarming and bewildering to her, that she implored her nephew to investigate it for her. louis, rather against the will of his father, who was jealous of any additional tasks thrown on him, entered into the matter with the head of an accountant, and the zeal of a pursuer of justice; and stirred up a frightful mass of petty and unblushing fraud, long practised as a mere matter of course upon the mistress, who had set the example of easy-going, insincere self-seeking. it involved the whole household so completely, that there was no alternative but a clearance of every servant, whether innocent or guilty, and a fresh beginning. indeed, so great had been the debts which had accumulated, that there was no doubt that the treacherous butler must have been gambling to a great extent with his mistress's money; and the loss was so heavy that lady conway found she should be obliged to retrench, 'just when she should have been so glad to have helped poor dear isabel!' she must even give up a season in london, but dear virginia was far too good and sensible to repine. lord ormersfield, who had become much interested in the investigation, and assisted much by his advice, wanted her to go to thornton conway; and louis urged the step warmly as the best hope for walter. but she could not live there, she said, without far too heavy an expenditure; and she would make visits for the present, and find some cheap place abroad, where the girls could have masters. and so her establishment was broken up, and louis wrote warm congratulations to james that poor little charlotte had not been tempted into the robber's den. isabel could not help reading the whole history to charlotte, who turned white at the notion of such wickedness, and could hardly utter a word; though afterwards, as she sat rocking little mercy to sleep, she bestowed a great deal of good advice on her, 'never to mind what nobody said to her, above all, when they talked like a book, for there were a great many snakes and vipers in the grass, and 'twas best to know good friends when one had them.' and coupled with her moralizing, there was no small degree of humble thankfulness for the impulse that had directed her away from the evil. how could she ever have met tom again if she had shared in the stigma on the dishonest household? simple-hearted loyalty had been a guard against more perils than she had even imagined! chapter xvi. the valley of humiliation. this valley is that from whence also the king will give to his their vineyards; and they that go through it shall sing, as christian did, for all he met with apollyon.--pilgrim's progress. the close of the session still found lord ormersfield so stiff, bent, and suffering, that louis with some difficulty persuaded him into trying the experiment of foreign baths, and in a few weeks' time they were both established at the hotel du grand monarque at aix-la-chapelle. the removing his son to a dull watering-place, when he had so many avocations at home, had been a great vexation to the earl; but he was delighted at the versatile spirits which made a holiday and delight of the whole, and found an endless fund of interest and occupation even in his attendance on the wearisome routine of health-seeking. german books, natural history, the associations of the place, and the ever-fresh study of the inhabitants and the visitors, were food enough for his lively conversation; and the earl, inspirited by improving health, thought he had never enjoyed his son so much. they were already old inhabitants of their hotel, when one afternoon they were much amused by finding a consequential courier gesticulating vehemently to the whole establishment on the apartments he was to secure for a superb milord anglais, who seemed to require half the hotel. their sitting-room, overlooking the court, was especially coveted, and the landlord even followed them upstairs with many excuses to ask if they could exchange it for another for only two days. lord ormersfield's negative had all the exceeding politeness of offended dignity; and louis was much amused at the surmises, with which he consoled himself, that this was nothing but some trumpery speculator, most likely a successful quack doctor--no one else went about in such a style. in a grave, grand way, he was not a little curious, and took care to place himself where he could command a view of the court; while louis, making no secret of his own amusement, worked up an excitement to entertain his father, and stood watching at the window. 'crack! crack! there are the postilion's whips! now for the grand monarque himself--thundering under the archway! why, there are only two of them, after all!--a lady and a little yellow old man! father, you are right after all--he is the very pattern of a successful quack! how tall the lady is! halloo!' and he stood transfixed for a moment, then sprang to the door, replying to his father's astonished question--'clara! clara dynevor!' the party were in course of proceeding up the principal staircase--the tall figure of a young lady in mourning moving on with so stately, so quiet, and almost weary a manner, that louis for a moment drew back, doubting whether the remarkable height had not deceived him. her head was turned away, and she was following the host, scarcely exerting herself to gaze round, when she came close to the open door, where louis moved slightly forwards. there was a little ecstatic shriek, and both her hands were clasped in his, while her face was glowing with animation and delight. 'i don't know how to believe it!' she said; 'can you be here?' 'we are curing my father. had you not heard of his illness?' 'i hear nothing,' said clara, sadly, as she held out her hand to lord ormersfield, who had also come to meet her; and her uncle, who followed close behind, was full of cordial rejoicings on the encounter. there was jane beckett also, whom louis next intercepted on her way to the bedrooms, laden with bags, and smiling most joyously to see him. 'to be sure, my young lord! and your papa here too, my lord! well! who'll be coming abroad next, i wonder?' 'i wonder at nothing since i have met you here, jane.' 'and i am right glad of it, my lord. you'll cheer up poor miss clara a bit, i hope--for--bless me! wont those frenchmen never learn to carry that box right side up?' and off rushed jane to a never-ending war of many tongues in defence of clara's finery; while louis, following into the sitting-room, found mr. dynevor inviting his father to the private dinner which he had ordered for greater dignity. the proposal was accepted for the sake of spending the evening together, but little was thus gained; for, excepting for that one little scream, louis would hardly have felt himself in the company of his giraffe. she had become a very fine-looking person, not quite handsome, but not many degrees from it, and set off by profuse hair, and every advantage of figure and dress; while her manner was self-possessed and formal, indifferent towards ordinary people, but warm and coaxing towards her uncle. blunt--almost morose to others--he was fondling and affectionate towards her; continually looking at the others as if to claim admiration of her, appealing to her every moment, and even when talking himself, his keen eye still seeming to watch every word or gesture. the talk was all switzerland and italy--routes and pictures, mountains and cathedrals--all by rote, and with no spirit nor heart in the discussion--not a single word coming near home, nothing to show that dynevor terrace had any existence. louis bade clara good-night, mortified at the absence of all token of feeling for her brother, and more than half repenting his advice to remain with her uncle. how could the warm-hearted girl have become this cold, haughty being, speaking by mechanism? he scarcely felt inclined to see her again; but early the next morning, as he was at breakfast with his father, there was a knock at the door, and a voice said, 'may i come in?' and as louis opened, there stood the true clara, all blushes and abruptness. 'i beg your pardon if it is wrong,' she said, 'but i could not help it. i must hear of him--of james.' lord ormersfield welcomed her in an almost fatherly manner, and made her sit down, telling her that she had come at a good moment, since louis had just received a letter; but he feared that it was not a very good account of isabel. 'isabel! is anything the matter?' 'you are behindhand. had you not heard of the arrival of number four?' 'i never hear anything,' said clara, her eyes overflowing. 'ha! not since we last met?' asked the earl. 'they wrote once or twice; but you know they thought me wrong, and it has all died away since i went abroad. the last letter i had was dated in november.' 'you know nothing since that time!' 'no; i often thought of writing to miss faithfull, but i could not bear to show how it was, since they would not answer me. so i made bold to come to you, for i cannot ask before my uncle. he is quite passionate at the very name.' 'he is kind to you?' asked lord ormersfield, hastily. 'most kind, except for that, the only thing i care about. but you have a letter! oh! i am famishing to hear of them!' she did not even know of the loss of the school; and her distress was extreme as she heard of their straits. 'it must be killing isabel,' she said; 'if i could but be at home to work for her!' 'isabel has come out beyond all praise,' said louis. 'i am afraid there is much for them to undergo; but i do believe they are much happier in the midst of it.' 'everybody must be happy in dynevor terrace,' said clara. louis shook his head and smiled, adding, 'but, clara, i do believe, if it were to come over again, jem would hardly act in the same way.' 'do you think he has forgiven me?' 'judge for yourself.' her hand trembling, she caught at the well-known handwriting that to her seemed as if it could hardly be the property of any one else; and it was well for her that louis had partly prepared her for the tone of depression, and the heavy trials it revealed, when she had been figuring to herself the writer enjoying all the felicity from which she was banished. 'no. , dynevor terrace, sept. th, . 'dear fitzjocelyn,--i ought to have written yesterday; but i took the whole duty at ormersfield on sunday, and was too lazy the next day to do more than keep the children out of the way, and look after isabel; for, though i am told not to be uneasy, she does not regain strength as she has done before. over-exertion, or bad nursing, one or both, tell upon her; and i wish we may not have too dear a bargain in the nurse whom she chose for cheapness' sake. my lectures were to have paid the expenses, but the author's need is not always the first consideration; the money will not be forthcoming till christmas, and meantime we cannot launch out. however, ormersfield partridges are excellent fare for isabel, and i could return thanks for the abundant supply that would almost seem disproportionate; but you can guess the value as substantial comforts. a box of uneatable grouse from beauchastel, carriage twelve shillings, was a cruel subject of gratitude; but those good people mean more kindly than i deserve; and when isabel is well again, we shall rub on. this little one promises more resemblance to her than the others. we propose to call her frances, after my poor mother and sister. do you remember the thrill of meeting their names in cheveleigh church? that memorial was well done of my uncle. if these children were to be left as we were, you would, i know, be their best friend; but i have a certain desire to see your own assurance to that effect. don't fancy this any foreboding, but four daughters bind a man to life, and i sometimes feel as if i hardly deserved to see good days. if i am spared to bring up these children, i hope to make them understand the difference between independence and pride. 'i have been looking back on my life; i have had plenty of time during these months of inaction, which i begin to see were fit discipline. till holdsworth left his parish under my charge the other day for six weeks, i have exercised no office of my ministry, as you know that mr. purvis's tone with me cut me off from anything that could seem like meddling with him. i never felt more grateful to any man than i did when holdsworth made the proposal. it was as if my penance were accepted for the spirit against which you too justly warned me before my ordination. sunday was something between a very sorrowful and a very happy day. 'i did not see the whole truth at first. i was only aware of my unhappy temper, which had provoked the immediate punishment; but the effort (generally a failure) to prevent my irritability from adding to the distresses i had brought on my poor wife, opened my eyes to much that i had never understood. yet i had presumed to become an instructor--i deemed myself irreproachable! 'i believe the origin of the whole was, that i never distinguished a fierce spirit of self-exaltation from my grandmother's noble resolution to be independent. it was a demon which took the semblance of good, and left no room for demons of a baser sort. even as a boy at the grammar-school, i kept out of evil from the pride of proving myself gentlemanly under any circumstances; the motive was not a bit better than that which made me bully you. i can never remember being without an angry and injured feeling that my uncle's neglect left my grandmother burdened, and obliged me to receive an inferior education; and with this, a certain hope that he would never put himself in the right, nor lay me under obligations. you saw how this motive actuated me, when i never discerned it. i trust that i was not insincere, though presumptuous and self-deceiving i was to an extent which i can only remember with horror. if it approached to sacrilege, may the wilful blindness be forgiven! at least, i knew it not; and with all my heart i meant to fulfil the vows i had taken on me. thus, when my uncle actually returned, there was a species of revengeful satisfaction in making my profession interfere with his views, when he had made it the only one eligible for me. how ill i behaved--how obstinately i set myself against all mediation--how i wrapped myself in self-approval--you know better than i do. my conceit, and absurdity, and thanklessness, have risen up before me; and i remember offers that would have involved no sacrifice of my clerical obligations--offers that i would not even consider--classing them all as 'mere truckling with my conscience.' what did i take for a conscience? 'ever since, things have gone from bad to worse, grieving my dear grandmother's last year, and estranging me from my poor little sister because she would not follow my dictation. at last my sins brought down the penalty, and i would not grieve except for the innocent who suffer with me. perhaps, but for them, i should never have felt it. nor do i feel tempted to murmur; for there is a strange peace with us throughout, in spite of a sad heart and too many explosions of my miserable temper, and the sight of the hardships so bravely met by my dear wife. but for all this, i should never have known what she is! she whispered to me last evening, when she saw me looking tired and depressed, that she had no fears for the future, for this had been the happiest year of her life. nothing can make her forget to soothe me! 'i have written a long rigmarole all about myself; but an outpouring is sometimes a relief, and you have borne with me often enough to do so now. my poor clara's pardon, and some kind of clerical duty, are my chief wishes; but my failures in the early part of the year have taught me how unworthy i am to stir a step in soliciting anything of the kind. did i tell you how some ten of the boys continue to touch their hats to me? and smith, the butcher's son, often comes to borrow a book, and consult me on some of the difficulties that his father throws in his way. he is a fine fellow, and at least i hope that my two years at the school did him no harm. i was much impressed with the orderliness at ormersfield sunday-school. i wish i could have got half as much religious knowledge into my poor boys. i walked through your turnips in the south field, and thought they wanted rain. frampton tells me the inglewood harvest is in very good condition; but i will see the bailiff, and give you more particulars, when i can be better spared from home for a few hours. kitty's assistance in writing has discomposed these last few lines. 'yours ever, 'j.r.f.d.' clara turned away and groaned aloud several times as she read; but all she said, as she gave it back to louis, was, 'what is to be done? you must talk to my uncle.' 'ah, clara! young gentlemen of the nineteenth century make but a bad hand of the part of benevolent fairy.' 'i don't think my speaking would be of any use,' said clara. 'oh, if this only would have been a boy!' lord ormersfield undertook to sound mr. dynevor, and found an early opportunity of asking whether he had heard of poor james's misfortune. yes, he had known it long ago. no wonder, with such a temper. kept it from the child, though. would not have her always hankering after them. was he aware of his great distress and difficulties? ha, ha! thought so! fine lady wife! no end of children--served him right!--to bring down his pride. lord ormersfield hazarded a hint that james had seen his errors, and the school was no longer in the way. 'no, no!' said oliver. 'too late now. drink as he has brewed. he should have thought twice before he broke my poor mother's heart with his cantankerous ways. cheveleigh beneath him, forsooth! i'm not going to have it cut up for a lot of trumpery girls! i've settled the property and whatever other pickings there may be upon my little clara--grateful, and worthy of it! her husband shall take dynevor name and arms--unless, to be sure, he had a title of his own. the girl was much admired at rome last winter, had a fair offer or two, but not a word will she say to any of them. i can't tell what's in her head, not i!' and he looked knowingly at lord ormersfield, and willingly extended his stay at aix-la-chapelle, letting fitzjocelyn organize expeditions from thence to liege and other places in the neighbourhood. the two cousins were so glad to be together, and the earl so much pleased that louis should have anything which gave him so much delight as this meeting with his old playfellow, that he did all in his power to facilitate and prolong their intercourse. he often sacrificed himself to oliver's prosings on the equatorial navigation, that the two young people might be at liberty; and he invited clara to their early breakfast and walk before her uncle wanted her in the morning. these were clara's times of greatest happiness, except that it gave her a new and strange sensation to be talked to by his lordship like a grown-up--nay, a sensible woman. once she said to herself, laughing, 'he really treats me almost as if i were poor mary herself.' and then came another flash: 'perhaps he would even like me on the same terms!' and then she laughed again, and shook her head: 'no, no, my lord, your son is much too good for that! uncle oliver would not have looked so benignant at us when we were sitting in the gardens last night, if he had known that i was giving louis all my lima letters. i wish they were more worth having! it was very stupid of me not to know mary better, so that we write like two old almanacs. however, my letter from hence will be worth its journey to peru.' clara's heart was several degrees lighter, both from the pleasure of the meeting and a suggestion of the earl's, upon which she had at once acted, and which seemed, even as she laid pen to paper, to bring her somewhat nearer to her brother. her letter arrived at no. , on the next monday morning at breakfast-time. it did not at first attract the attention of james. the sunday exertions had again left a mental and physical lassitude, showing how much care and privation had told upon his strength; and isabel's still tardy convalescence weighed him down with anxiety for the future, and almost with despair, as he thought of the comforts for want of which she suffered, though so patiently and silently dispensing with them. to his further vexation, he had, on the previous saturday, seen charlotte receiving at the back-door an amount of meat beyond her orders; and, having checked himself because too angry and too much grieved to speak at once, had reserved the reproof for the monday, when charlotte brought in her book of petty disbursements. failing to detect the obnoxious item, he said, 'where's the account of the meat that came in on saturday?' 'there, sir!' said charlotte, indicating the legitimate amount, but blushing violently. 'that was not all?' he said, with a look of stern, interrogation. 'oh! if you please, sir, that was nothing!' 'this will not do, charlotte! i can have nothing taken into my house without being paid for. i insist on knowing what you could mean?' 'oh, sir!' tearfully exclaimed the girl, 'it is paid for--i'll show you the account, if you will--with my own money. i'd not have had you hear of it for the world; but i could not bear that nurse's insinuations about her meat five times a-day--she that never nursed nothing like a real lady before! but i meant no harm, sir; and i hope you'll excuse the liberty, for i did not mean to take none; and i'm sure i'm quite contented for my own part, nor never meant to complain.' 'i know you did not, charlotte! you are only too patient and kind--' but his voice broke down, and he was forced silently to sign to her to leave him. 'can humiliation go farther!' he thought. 'my boasted independence ending in this poor, faithful servant being stung, by the sneers of this hired woman, into eking out her scanty meals with her own insufficient wages!' little catharine, who had been gazing with dilated black eyes, came scrambling on his knee to caress him, perceiving that he was grieved. 'ah! kitty, kitty!' he said, 'it is well that you are too young to feel these troubles!' 'papa! letter!' cried kitty, waving the unregarded letter in the triumph of discovery. 'the reverend james frost.' it was the writing formed by his own copies, which he could not see without a sharp pang of self-reproach for cruel injustice and unkindness. kitty slid down with the empty envelope to act reading to the twins, whom she caught by turns as they crawled away, and set up straight before her. her operations and their remonstrances, though as loud as they were inarticulate, passed utterly unheard and unheeded by their father, as he read:-- 'hotel du grand monarque. aix-la-chapelle, sept. th. 'my dearest james,--as a mere matter of honesty and justice, i may venture to write to you. you always accepted from dear grandmamma the income from the money in the stocks. i did not know that half of it has since come to me, till lord ormersfield paid me this last year's dividend; and if you will not have his enclosed cheque for it, put it in the fire, for i will never have it in any form. it is not my uncle's, but my own; and if you would make me very happy, write to me here. you must not suppose that i am trying to buy a letter; but i look on this as yours, and i thought you had it till lord ormersfield told me about it. we met him and louis quite unexpectedly--the best thing that has happened to me for years, though they told me much that grieves me exceedingly--but i cannot write about it till i know that i may. tell me of dear isabel and the babes. my heart yearns after them! it would leap up at the sight of a stone from the terrace! 'your ever affectionate 'clara.' his first impulse was, as though he feared to repent, to turn to his desk, the tears of feeling still in his eyes, and dash off these words:-- 'your bounty, my dearest sister, is scarcely less welcome than the forgiving spirit which prompted it. i will not conceal that i was sorely in need of means to supply isabel with the comforts that she requires. that your affection can survive my treatment last year, makes me equally grateful to you and ashamed of what then took place.' he scarcely dared to look upon those phrases. great as were his needs, and kindly as the proffer was made, it was new and painful to him to be under any such obligation, and he could hardly bend his spirit to know that never again should he be able to feel that he had never been beholden for money to a living creature. and while he felt it due to his sister to own the full extent of the benefit, he weighed his words as he wrote on, lest the simplest facts should look like a craving for further assistance. charlotte came up to remove the breakfast, and he looked up to give an order for some nourishing dainty for her mistress, adding, 'what did that mutton come to? no, i am not displeased with you, but miss clara has sent me some money.' his assurance was needed, for charlotte went down thinking she had never seen master look so stern. he had spoken from a sense that the truth was due to the generous girl, but each word had been intense pain. he wrote on, often interrupted by little riots among the children, and finally by a sharp contention, the twins having possessed themselves of a paper-knife, which kitty, with precocious notions of discipline, considered as forbidden; and little mercy was rapped over the fingers in the struggle. the roar brought down interference, and kitty fell into disgrace; but when, after long persuasion, she was induced to yield the paper-cutter, kiss and make friends, mercy, instead of embracing, locked her fingers into her dark curls, and tugged at them in a way so opposite to her name, that all kitty's offence was forgotten in her merit for stopping her scream half-way at the sight of her father's uplifted finger, and his whisper of 'poor mamma!' that life of worry and baby squabbles, the reflection of his own faults, was hard to bear; and with a feeling of seeking a refuge, when the two little ones had fallen into their noonday sleep, and were left with their mother to the care of good miss mercy, he set out for some parish work at ormersfield, still taking with him little kitty, whose quicksilver nature would never relieve her elders by a siesta. he was afraid to speak to isabel until he should have composed himself, and, harassed and weary in spirits and in frame, he walked slowly, very sore at the domestic discovery, and scarcely feeling the diminution of the immediate pressure in the new sense of degradation. he could own that it was merited, and was arguing with himself that patience and gratitude were the needful proofs that the evil temper had been expelled. he called back his thankfulness for his wife's safety, his children's health, the constancy of his kind friends, and the undeserved ardour of his young sister's affection, as well as poor little charlotte's unselfishness. the hard exasperated feeling that once envenomed every favour, and barbed every dart that wounded him, was gone; he could own the loving kindness bestowed on him, both from heaven and by man, and began to find peace and repose in culling the low fragrant blossoms which cheered even the valley of humiliation. he turned down the shady lane, overhung by the beech-trees of mr. calcott's park, and as he lifted kitty in his arms to allow her the robin-redbreast, he did not feel out of tune with the bird's sweet autumnal notes, nor with the child's merry little voice, but each refreshed his worn and contrite spirit. the sound of hoofs approaching made him turn his head; and while kitty announced 'horse!' and 'man!' he recognised mr. calcott, and felt abashed, and willing to find a retreat from the meeting; but there was no avoiding it, and he expected, as usual, to be passed with a bow; but the squire slackened his pace as he overtook him, and called out, good-humouredly, 'ha, mr. frost, good morning' (once it would have been jem). 'i always know you by the little lady on your shoulder. i was intending to call on you this afternoon on a little business; but if you will step up to the house with me, i shall be much obliged.' james's heart beat thick with undefined hope; but, after all, it might be only to witness some paper. after what had occurred, and mrs. calcott considering herself affronted by isabel, bare civility was forgiveness; and he walked up the drive with the squire, who had dismounted, and was inquiring with cordial kindness for mrs. frost, yet with a little awkwardness, as if uncertain on what terms they stood, more as if he himself were to blame than the young clergyman. arriving at the house, james answered for his little girl's absence of shyness, and she was turned over to the miss calcotts, while the squire conducted him to the study, and began with hesitation and something of apology--'it had struck him--it was not worth much--he hardly liked to propose it, and yet till something better should turn up--anything was better than doing nothing.' to which poor james heartily agreed. the board of guardians, where mr. calcott presided, were about to elect a chaplain to the union workhouse; the salary would be only fifty pounds, but if mr. frost would be willing to offer himself, it would be a great blessing to the inmates, and there would be no opposition. mr. calcott, making the proposal from sincere goodwill, but with some dread how the pendragon blood would receive it, was absolutely astounded by the effect. fifty pounds additional per annum was a boon only to be appreciated after such a pinching year as the past; the gratitude for the old squire's kind pardon was so strong, and the blessing of re-admission to pastoral work touched him so deeply, that, in his weakened and dejected state, he could not restrain his tears, nor for some moments utter a word. at last he said, 'oh, mr. calcott, i have not deserved this at your hands.' 'there, there,' said the squire, trying to laugh it off, though he too became husky, 'say no more about it. it is a poor thing, and can't be made better; but it will be a real kindness to us to look after the place.' 'let me say thus much,' said james, 'for i cannot be at peace till i have done so--i am aware that i acted unjustifiably in that whole affair, both when elected and dismissed.' 'no, no, don't let's go over that again!' said mr. calcott, in dread of a scene. 'an over-ardent friend may be a misfortune, and you were very young. not that i would have taken your resignation if it had been left to me, but the world is grown mighty tender. i dare say you never flogged a boy like what i underwent fifty years ago, and was the better for it,' and he launched into some frightful old-world stories of the like inflictions, hoping to lead away from personalities, but james was resolved to say what was on his mind. 'it was not severity,' he said, 'it was temper. i richly deserved some portion of the rebuke, and it would have been well for me if that same temper had allowed me to listen to you, sir, or to reason.' 'well,' said mr. calcott, kindly, 'you think very rightly about the matter, and a man of six-and-twenty has time to be wiser, as i tell mrs. calcott, when sydney treats us to some of his theories. and now you have said your say, you must let me say mine, and that is, that there are very few young couples--aye, or old ones--who would have had the sense to go on as you are doing, fighting it out in your own neighbourhood without nonsense or false shame. i honour you and mrs. frost for it, both of you!' james coloured deeply. he could have found commendation an impertinence, but the old squire was a sort of patriarch in the county, and appreciation of isabel's conduct must give him pleasure. he stammered something about her having held up wonderfully, and the salary being an immense relief, and then took refuge in matter-of-fact inquiries on his intended functions. this lasted till nearly half-past one, and mr. calcott insisted on his staying to luncheon. he found the ladies greatly amused with their little guest--a very small, but extremely forward and spirited child, not at all pretty, with her brown skin and womanly eyes, but looking most thoroughly a lady, even in her little brown holland frock, and white sun-bonnet, her mamma's great achievement. neither shy nor sociable, she had allowed no one to touch her, but had entrenched herself in a corner behind a chair, through the back of which she answered all civilities, with more self-possession than distinctness, and convulsed the party with laughing, when they asked if she could play at bo-peep, by replying that 'the children did.' she sprang from her place of refuge to his knee as soon as he entered, and occupied that post all luncheon time, comporting herself with great discretion. there was something touching in the sight of the tenderness of the young father, taking off her bonnet, and settling her straggling curls with no unaccustomed hands; and mrs. calcott's heart was moved, as she remarked his worn, almost hollow cheeks, his eyes still quick, but sunk and softened, his figure spare and thin, and even his dress not without signs of poverty; and she began making kind volunteers of calling on mrs. frost, nor were these received as once they would have been. 'he is the only young man,' said mr. calcott, standing before the fire, with his hands behind him, as soon as the guest had departed, 'except his cousin at ormersfield, whom i ever knew to confess that he had been mistaken. that's the difference between them and the rest, not excepting your son sydney, mrs. calcott.' mamma and sisters cried in chorus, that sydney had no occasion for such confessions. the squire gave his short, dry laugh, and repeated that 'jem frost and young fitzjocelyn differed from other youths, not in being right but in being wrong.' on which topic mrs. calcott enlarged, compassionating poor mr. frost with a double quantity of pity for his helpless beauty of a fine lady-wife; charitably owning, however, that she really seemed improved by her troubles. she should have thought better of her if she had not kept that smart housemaid, who looked so much above her station, and whom the housekeeper had met running about the lanes in the dark, the very night when mr. frost was so ill. 'pshaw! my dear,' said her husband, 'cannot you let people be judges of their own affairs?' it was what he had said on the like occasions for the last thirty years; but mrs. calcott was as wise as ever in other folks' matters. the fine lady-wife had meanwhile been arranging a little surprise for her husband. she was too composed to harass herself at his not returning at midday, she knew him and kitty to be quite capable of taking care of each other, and could imagine him detained by parish work, and disposing of the little maiden with betty gervas, or some other ormersfield friend, but she had thought him looking fagged and worried, she feared his being as tired as he had been on the sunday, and she could not bear that he should drink tea uncomfortably in the study, tormented by the children. so she had repaired to the parlour, and miss mercy, after many remonstrances, had settled her there; and when the good little lady had gone home to her sister's tea, isabel lay on the sofa, wrapped in her large soft shawl, languidly attempting a little work, and feeling the room dreary, and herself very weak, and forlorn, and desponding, as she thought of james's haggard face, and the fresh anxieties that would be entailed on him if she should become sickly and ailing. the tear gathered on her eyelash as she said to herself, 'i would not exert myself when i could; perhaps now i cannot, when i would give worlds to lighten one of his cares!' and then she saw one little bit of furniture standing awry, in the manner that used so often to worry his fastidious eye; and, in the spirit of doing anything to please him, she moved across the room to rectify it, and then sat down in the large easy chair, wearied by the slight exertion, and becoming even more depressed and hopeless; 'though,' as she told herself, 'all is sure to be ordered well. the past struggle has been good--the future will be good if we can but treat it rightly.' just as the last gleams were fading on the tops of the ormersfield coppices, she heard the hall-door, and james's footstep; and it was more than the ordinary music of his 'coming up the stair;' there was a spring and life in it that thrilled into her heart, and glanced in her eye, as she sat up in her chair, to welcome him with no forced smile. and as he came in with a pleased exclamation, his voice had no longer the thin, worn sound, as if only resolute resignation prevented peevishness; there was a cheerfulness and solidity in the tone, as he came fondly to her side, regretted having missed her first appearance, and feared she had been long alone. 'oh, no; but i was afraid you would be so tired! carrying kitty all the way, too! but you look so much brighter.' 'i am brighter,' said james. 'two things have happened for which i ought to be very thankful. my dear, can you bear to be wife to the chaplain of the union at fifty pounds a-year!' 'oh! have you something to do? cried isabel; 'i am so glad! now we shall be a little more off your mind. and you will do so much good! i have heard miss mercy say how much she wished there were some one to put those poor people in the right way.' 'yes; i hope that concentrated earnestness of attention may do something to make up for my deficiency in almost every other qualification,' said james. 'at least, i feel some of the importance of the charge, and never was anything more welcome.' 'and how did it happen?' 'people are more forgiving than i could have hoped. mr. calcott has offered me this, in the kindest way; and as if that were not enough, see what poor little clara says.' 'poor little clara!' said isabel, reading the letter; 'you don't mean to disappoint her!' 'i should be a brute if i did. no; i wrote to her this morning to thank her for her pardoning spirit.' 'you should have told me; i should like to send her my love. i am glad she has not quite forgotten us, though she mistook the way to her own happiness.' 'isabel! unless i were to transport you to cheveleigh a year ago, nothing would persuade you of my utter wrong-headedness.' 'nor that, perhaps,' said isabel, with a calm smile. 'not my having brought you to be grateful for the union chaplaincy?' 'not if you had brought me to the union literally,' said isabel, smiling. 'indeed, dear james, i think we have both been so much the better and happier for this last year, that i would not have been without it for any consideration; and if any mistakes on your part led to it, they were mistakes on the right side. don't shake your head, for you know they were what only a good man could have made.' 'that may be all very well for a wife to believe!' and the rest of the little dispute was concluded, as charlotte came smiling up with the tea. chapter xvii. 'bide a wee.' come unto these yellow sands, and then take hands! tempest the ponsonby family were spending the hot season at chorillos, the peruvian watering-place, an irregular assembly of cane-built, mud-besmeared ranches, close on the shore of the pacific, with the mountains seeming to rise immediately in the rear. they had gone for mr. ponsonby's health, and rosita's amusement; and in the latter object they had completely succeeded. in her bathing-dress, full trousers, and a beautifully-embroidered blouse, belted at the waist, a broad-brimmed straw hat, and her raven hair braided in two long tresses, she wandered on the shore with many another fair limenian, or entered the sea under the protection of a brown indian; and, supported by mates or gourds, would float for hours together among her companions, splashing about, and playing all sorts of frolics, like so many mermaids. in the evening she returned to more terrestrial joys, and arraying herself in some of her infinite varieties of ball-dresses, with flowers and jewels in her hair, a tiny panama hat cocked jauntily on the top of her head, and a rich shawl with one end thrown over the shoulder, she would step daintily out in her black satin shoes, with old xavier in attendance, or sometimes with robson as her cavalier, to meet her friends on the beach, or make a call in the lamp-lit corridor of some other rancho. there were innumerable balls, dances, and pic-nics to the rich and fertile villages and haciendas around, and fetes of every description almost every evening; visits to the tombs of the old peruvians, whose graves were often rudely and lightly searched for the sake of their curious images and golden ornaments. the senora declared it was the most lovely summer she had ever spent, and that nothing should induce her to return to lima while her friends remained there. the other object, of re-invigorating mr. ponsonby, had not been attained. he had been ailing for some time past, and, instead of deriving benefit from the sea-breezes, only missed the comforts of home. he was so testy and exacting that mary would have seldom liked to leave him to himself, even if she had been disposed to lead the life of a fish; and she was seldom away from him, unless robson came down from lima to transact business with him. mary dreaded these interviews, for her father always emerged from them doubly irritable and dispirited; and when rosita claimed the senor robson as her knight for her evening promenade, and the father and daughter were left alone together, he would blame the one lady for going, the other for staying--then draw out his papers again, and attempt to go over them, with a head already aching and confused--be angry at mary's entreaties that he would lay them aside, or allow her to help him--and presently be obliged with a sigh to desist, and lie back in his chair, while she fanned him, or cooled his forehead with iced water. yet he was always eager and excited for robson to come; and a delay of a day would put his temper in such a state that his wife kept out of his sight, leaving mary to soothe him as she might. 'mary,' said her father one evening, when she was standing at the window of the corridor, refreshing her eye with gazing at the glorious sunset in the midst of a pile of crimson and purple clouds, reflected in the ocean--'mary, ward is going to mew york next week.' 'so soon?' said mary. 'aye, and he is coming here to-morrow to see you.' mary still looked out with a sort of interest to see a little gold flake change its form as it traversed a grand violet tower. 'i hope you will make him a more reasonable answer than you did last time,' said her father; 'it is too bad to keep the poor man dangling on at this rate! and such a man!' 'i am very sorry for it, but i cannot help it,' said mary; 'no one can be kinder or more forbearing than he has been, but i wish he would look elsewhere.' 'so you have not got that nonsense out of your head!' exclaimed mr. ponsonby, with muttered words that mary would not hear. 'all my fault for ever sending you among that crew! coming between you and the best match in lima--the best fellow in the world--strict enough to content melicent or your mother either! what have you to say against him, mary? i desire to know that.' 'nothing, papa,' said mary, 'except that i wish he could make a better choice.' 'i tell you, you and he were made for each other. it is the most provoking thing in the world, that you will go on in this obstinate way! i can't even ask the man to do me a kindness, with having an eye to these abominable affairs, that are all going to the dogs. there's old dynevor left his senses behind him when he went off to play the great man in england, writing every post for remittances, when he knows what an outlay we've been at for machinery; and there's the equatorial company cutting its own throat at guayaquil, and that young fellow up at the san benito not half to be trusted--robson can't make out his accounts; and here am i such a wretch that i can hardly tell what two and two make; and here's ward, the very fellow to come in and set all straight in the nick of time; and i can't ask him so much as to look at a paper for me, because i'm not to lay myself under an obligation.' 'but, papa, if our affairs are not prosperous, it would not be fair to connect mr. ward or any one with them.' 'never you trouble yourself about that! you'll come in for a pretty fortune of your own, whatever happens to that abominable cheat of a company; and that might be saved if only i was the man i was, or dynevor was here. if ward would give us a loan, and turn his mind to it, we should be on our legs in an instant. it is touch and go just now!--i declare, mary,' he broke out again after an interval, 'i never saw anything so selfish as you are! lingering and pining on about this foolish young man, who has never taken any notice of you since you have been out here, and whom you hear is in love with another woman--married to her very likely by this time--or, maybe, only wishing you were married and out of his way.' 'i do not believe so,' answered mary, stoutly. 'what! you did not see oliver's letter from that german place?' 'yes, i did,' said mary; 'but i know his manner to clara.' 'you do? you take things coolly, upon my word!' 'no,' said mary. 'i know they are like brother and sister, and clara could never have written to me as she has done, had there been any such notion. but that is not the point, papa. what i know is, that while my feelings are what they are at present, it would not be right of me to accept any one; and so i shall tell mr. ward, if he is still determined to see me. pray forgive me, dear papa. i do admire and honour him very much, but i cannot do any more; and i am sorry i have seemed pining or discontented, for i tried not to be so.' a grim grunt was all the answer that mr. ponsonby vouchsafed. his conscience, though not his lips, acquitted poor mary of discontent or pining, as indeed it was the uniform cheerfulness of her demeanour that had misled him into thinking the unfortunate affair forgotten. he showed no symptoms of speaking again; and mary, leaning back in her chair, had leisure to recover herself after the many severe strokes that had been made at her. there was one which she had rebutted valiantly at the moment, but which proved to have been a poisoned dart--that suggestion that it might be selfish in her not to set louis even more free, by her own marriage! she revolved the probabilities: clara, formed, guided, supported by himself, the companion of his earlier youth, preferred to all others, and by this time, no doubt, developed into all that was admirable. what would be more probable than their mutual love? and when mary went over all the circumstances of her own strange courtship, she could not but recur to her mother's original impression, that louis had not known what he was doing. those last weeks had made her feel rather than believe otherwise, but they were far in the distance now, and he had been so young! it was not unlikely that even yet, while believing himself faithful to her, his heart was in clara's keeping, and that the news of her marriage would reveal to them both, in one rush of happiness, that they were destined for each other from the first. mary felt intense pain, and yet a strange thrill of joy, to think that louis might at last be happy. she drew clara's last letter out of her basket, and re-read it, in hopes of some contradiction. clara's letters had all hitherto been stiff. she had not been acknowledged to be in the secret of mary's engagement while it subsisted, and this occasioned a delicacy in writing to her on any subject connected with it; and so the mention of the meeting at the 'grand monarque' came in tamely, and went off quickly into lord ormersfield's rheumatism and charlemagne's tomb. but the remarkable thing in the letter was the unusual perfume of happiness that pervaded it; the conventional itinerary was abandoned, and there was a tendency to droll sayings--nay, some shafts from a quiver at which mary could guess. she had set all down as the exhilaration of louis's presence, but perhaps that exhilaration, was to a degree in which she alone could sympathize. mary was no day-dreamer; and yet, ere rosita's satin shoe was on the threshold, she had indulged in the melancholy fabric of a castle at ormersfield, in which she had no share, except the consciousness that it had been her self-sacrifice that had given louis at last the felicity for which he was so well fitted. but at night, in her strange little room, lying in her hammock, and looking up through her one unglazed window, high up in the roof, to the stars that slowly travelled across the space, she came back to a more collected opinion. she had no right to sacrifice mr. ward as well as herself. louis could not be more free than she had made him already, and it would be doing evil that good might come, to accept the addresses of one man while she could not detach her heart from another. 'have i ever really tried yet? she thought. 'perhaps i am punishing him and poor mr. ward, because, as papa says, i have languished, and have never tried in earnest to wean my thoughts from him. he was the one precious memory, besides my dear mother, and she never thought it would come to good. he will turn out to have been constant to clara all the time, though he did not know it.' even if mr. ponsonby had been in full health, he would have had no inclination to spare mary the conversation with mr. ward, who took his hot nine miles' ride from lima in the early morning, before the shadow of the mountains had been drawn up from the arid barren slope leading to chorillos. he came in time for the late breakfast, when the table was loaded with various beautiful tropical fruits, tempting after his ride, and in his state of suspense. he talked of his journey, and of his intended absence, and his regret, in a manner half mechanical, half dreamy, which made mary quite sorry for him; it was melancholy for a man of his age to have fixed so many fond hopes where disappointment was in store for him. she wished to deal as kindly with him as she could, and did not shrink away when her father left them, muttering something about a letter, and rosita went to take her siesta. with anxious diffidence he ventured to ask whether she remembered what had passed between them on the san benito mountain. 'yes, mr. ward, but i am afraid i do not think differently now, in spite of all your kindness.' poor mr. ward's countenance underwent a change, as if he had hoped more. 'your father had given me reason to trust,' he said, 'that you had recovered your spirits; otherwise i should hardly have presumed to intrude on you. and yet, before so long an absence, you cannot wonder that i longed to hear something decisive.' 'indeed i wished what i said before to be decisive. i am very sorry to give pain to one so much kinder than i deserve, and to whom i look up so much, but you see, mr. ward, i cannot say what is untrue.' 'miss ponsonby,' said mr. ward, 'i think you may be acting on a most noble but mistaken view. i can well believe that what you have once experienced you can never feel again. that would be more than i should dare to ask. my own feeling for you is such that i believe i should be able to rejoice in hearing of the fulfilment of your happiness, in your own way; but since there seems no such probability, cannot you grant me what you can still give, which would be enough to cause me the greatest joy to which i have ever aspired; and if my most devoted affection could be any sufficient return, you know that it is yours already.' the grave earnestness with which he spoke went to mary's heart, and the tears came into her eyes. she felt it almost wrong to withstand a man of so much weight and worth; but she spoke steadily--'this is very kind--very kind indeed; but i do not feel as if it would be right.' 'will you not let me be the judge of what will satisfy me?' 'you cannot judge of my feelings, mr. ward. you must believe me that, with all my esteem and gratitude, i do not yet feel as if i should be acting rightly by you or by any one else, under my present sentiments.' 'you do not _yet_ feel?' mary felt that the word was a mistake. 'i do not think i ever shall,' she added. 'you will not call it persecution, if i answer that perhaps i may make the venture once more,' he said. 'i shall live on that word 'yet' while i am at new york. i will tease you no more now; but remember that, though i am too old to expect to be a young lady's first choice, i never saw the woman whom i could love, or of whom i could feel so sure that she would bring a blessing with her; and i do believe that, if you would trust me, i could make you happy. there! i ask no answer. i only shall think of my return next year, and not reckon on that. i know you will tell me whatever is true.' he pressed her hand, and would fain have smiled reassuringly. he took leave much more kindly than mary thought she deserved, and did not appear to be in low spirits. she feared that ahe had raised unwarrantable hopes, but the truth was, that mr. ponsonby had privately assured him that, though she could not yet believe it, poor girl! the young man in england would be married before many months were over to old dynevor's niece. there would be no more difficulty by the time he came back, for she liked him heartily already, and was a sensible girl. so mr. ward departed, and mary was relieved, although she missed his honest manly homage, and sound wise tone of thought, where she had so few to love or lean on. she thought that she ought to try to put herself out of the way of her cousins at home as much as possible, and so she did not try to make time to write to clara, and time did not come unsought, for her father's health did not improve; and when they returned to lima, he engrossed her care almost entirely, while his young wife continued her gaieties, and mary had reason to think the saya y manto disguise was frequently donned; but it was so much the custom of ladies of the same degree, that mary thought it neither desirable nor likely to be effectual to inform her father, and incite him to interfere. she devoted herself to his comfort, and endeavoured to think as little as she heard of english cousins. there was not much to hear. after returning home quite well, lord ormersfield was laid up again by the first cold winds, and another summer of german brunnens was in store for him and louis. lady conway had taken a cottage in the isle of wight, where walter, having found the christmas holidays very dull, and shown that he could get into mischief as well without delaford as with him, she sent him off in a sort of honourable captivity to james and isabel, expecting that he would find it a great punishment. instead of this, the change from luxury to their hard life seemed to him a sort of pic-nic. he enjoyed the 'fun' of the waiting on themselves, had the freedom of ormersfield park for sport; and at home, his sister, whom he had always loved and respected more than any one else. james had time to attend to him, and to promote all his better tastes and feelings; and above all, he lost his heart to his twin nieces. it was exceedingly droll to see the half quarrelsome coquetries between the three, and to hear walter's grand views for the two little maidens as soon as he should be of age. james and louis agreed that there could not be much harm in him, while he could conform so happily to such a way of life. everything is comparative, and the small increase to james's income had been sufficient to relieve him from present pinching and anxiety in the scale of life to which he and isabel had become habituated. his chaplaincy gave full employment for heart and head to a man so energetic and earnest; he felt himself useful there, and threw himself into it with all his soul; and, what was more wonderful, he had never yet quarrelled with the guardians; and the master told mr. calcott that he had heard mr. frost was a fiery gentleman, but he had always seen him particularly gentle, especially with the children in school. the old women could never say enough in his praise, and doated on the little brown fairy who often accompanied him. there was plenty to be done at home--little luxury, and not much rest; but isabel's strength and spirits seemed a match for all, in her own serene quiet way, and the days passed very happily. charlotte had a workhouse girl under her, who neither ate nor broke so vehemently as her predecessor. one night, when charlotte sat mending and singing in the nursery, the girl came plodding up in her heavy shoes, saying, 'there's one wanting to see ye below.' 'one! who can it be?' cried charlotte, her heart bounding at the thought of a denouement to her own romance. 'he looks like a gentleman,' said the girl, 'and he wanted not to see master, but miss arnold most particular.' more hopes for charlotte. she had nearly made one bound downstairs, but waited to lay awful commands on the girl not to leave the children on no account; then flew down, pausing at the foot of the stairs to draw herself up, and remember dignity and maidenliness. alas for her hopes! it was delaford! his whiskers still were sleek and curly; he still had a grand air; but his boots were less polished--his hat had lost the gloss--and he looked somewhat the worse for wear. poor charlotte started back as if she had seen a wild beast in her kitchen. she had heard of his dishonesty, and her thoughts flew distractedly to her spoons, murder, and the children. and here he was advancing gracefully to take her hand. she jumped back, and exclaimed, faintly, 'mr. delaford, please go away! i can't think what you come here for!' 'ah! i see, you have listened to the voice of unkind scandal,' said mr. delaford. 'i have been unfortunate, miss arnold--unfortunate and misunderstood--guilty never. on the brink of quitting for ever an ungrateful country, i could not deny myself the last sad satisfaction of visiting the spot where my brightest hours have been passed;' and he looked so pathetic, that charlotte felt her better sense melting, and spoke in a hurry-- 'please don't, mr. delaford, i've had enough of all that. please go, and take my best wishes, as long as you don't come here, for i know all about you.' but the intruder only put his hand upon his heart, and declared that he had been misrepresented; and let a cruel world think of him as it might, there was one breast in which he could not bear that a false opinion, of him should prevail. and therewith he reached a chair, and charlotte found herself seated and listening to him, neither believing, nor wishing to believe him, longing that he would take himself away, but bewildered by his rhetoric. in the first place, he had been hastily judged; he had perhaps yielded too much to sir walter--but youth, &c.; and when lady conway's means were in his hands, it had seemed better--he knew now that it had been a weakness, but so he had judged at the time--to supply the young gentleman's little occasions, than to make an eclat. moreover, if he had not been the most unfortunate wretch in the world, a few lucky hits would have enabled him to restore the whole before lord fitzjocelyn hurried on the inquiry; but the young gentleman thought he acted for the best, and mr. delaford magnanimously forgave him. charlotte could not follow through half the labyrinth; and sat pinching the corner of her apron, with a vague idea that perhaps he was not so bad as was supposed; but what would happen if her master should find him there? she never looked up, nor made any answer, till he began to give her a piteous account of his condition; how he did not know where to turn, nor what to do; and was gradually beginning to sell off his 'little wardrobe to purchase the necessaries of life.' then the contrast began to tell on her soft heart, and she looked up with a sound of compassion. in the wreck of his fortunes and hopes, he had thought of her; he knew she had too generous a spirit to crush a wretch trodden down by adversity, who had loved her truly, and who had once had some few hopes of requital. those were, alas! at an end; yet still he saw that 'woman, lovely woman, in our hours of ease'--and here he stumbled in his quotation, but the fact was, that his hopes being blasted in england, he had decided on trying his fortune in another hemisphere; but, unfortunately, he had not even sufficient means to pay for a passage of the humblest description, and if he could venture to entreat for a--in fact, a loan--it should be most faithfully and gratefully restored the moment the fickle goddess should smile on him. charlotte felt a gleam of joy at the prospect of getting rid of him on any terms. she belonged to a class who seldom find the golden mean in money matters, being either exceedingly close and saving, or else lavish either on themselves or other people. good old jane had never succeeded in saving; all her halfpence went to the beggars, and all her silver melted into halfpence, or into little presents; and on the receipt of her wages, she always rushed on to the shop like a child with a new shilling. reading had given charlotte a few theories on the subject, but her practice had not gone far. she always meant to put into the savings' bank; but hiring books, and daintiness, though not finery, in dress, had prevented her means from ever amounting to a sum, in her opinion, worth securing. the spirit of economy in the household had so far infected her that she had, in spite of her small wages, more in hand than ever before, and when she found what mr. delaford wanted, a strange mixture of feelings actuated her. she pitied the change in his fortunes; she could not but be softened by his flattering sayings,--she could not bear that he should not have another chance of retrieving his character--she knew she had trifled unjustifiably with his feelings, if he had any,--and she had a sense of being in fault. and so the little maiden ran upstairs, peeped into her red-leather work-box, pulled out her bead-purse, and extracted therefrom three bright gold sovereigns, and ran downstairs again, trembling at her own venturesomeness, afraid that their voices might be heard. she put the whole before delaford, saying-- 'there--that is all that lays in my power. don't mention it, pray. now, please go, and a happy journey to you.' how she wished his acknowledgments and faithful promises were over! he did hint something about refreshment, bread-and-cheese and beer, fare which he used to despise as 'decidedly low,' but charlotte was obdurate here, and at last he took his leave. there stood the poor, foolish, generous little thing, raking out the last embers of the kitchen fire, conscious that she had probably done the silliest action of her life, very much ashamed, and afraid of any one knowing it; and yet strangely light of heart, as if she had done something to atone for the past permission that she had granted him to play with her vanity. 'some day she might tell tom all about it, and she did not think he would be angry, for he knew what it was to have nowhere to go, and to want to try for one more chance.' chapter xviii. the crash. late and early at employ; still on thy golden stores intent; thy summer in heaping and hoarding is spent, what thy winter will never enjoy. southey. 'stitch! stitch!' said james frost, entering the nursery on a fine august evening, and finding his wife with the last beams of sunshine glistening on her black braids of hair, as she sat singing and working beside the cot where slept, all tossed and rosy, the yearling child. 'stitch! stitch! if i could but do needlework!' 'ah!' said isabel, playfully, lifting up a sweeter face than had ever been admired in miss conway, 'if you will make your kittens such little romps, what would you have but mending?' 'is it my fault? i am very sorry i entailed such a business on you. you were at that frock when i went to evening prayers at the union, and it is not mended yet.' 'almost; and see what a perfect performance it is, all the spots joining as if they had never been rent. i never was so proud of anything as of my mending capabilities. besides, i have not been doing it all the time: this naughty little fanny was in such a laughing mood, that she would neither sleep herself nor let the rest do so; and kitty rose up out of her crib, and lectured us all. now, don't wake them--no, you must not even kiss the twin cherries; for if they have one of papa's riots, they will hardly sleep all night.' 'then you must take me away; it is like going into a flower-garden, and being told not to gather.' 'charlotte is almost ready to come to them, and in the meantime here is something for you to criticise,' said she, taking from the recess of her matronly workbasket a paper with a pencilled poem, on the martyrs of carthage, far more terse and expressive than anything she used to write when composition was the object of the day. james read and commented, and was disappointed when they broke off short-- 'ah! there baby woke.' 'some day i shall give you a subject. do you know how sta. francesca romana found in letters of gold the verse of the psalm she had been reading, and from which she had been five times called away to attend to her household duties?' 'i thought you were never to pity me again--' 'do you call that pitying you?' 'worse,' said isabel, smiling. 'well, then, what i came for was to ask if you can put on your bonnet, and take a walk in the lanes this lovely evening.' a walk was a rare treat to the busy mother, and, with a look of delight, she consented to leave her mending and her children to charlotte. there seldom were two happier beings than that pair, as they wandered slowly, arm-in-arm, in the deep green lanes, in the summer twilight, talking sometimes of the present, sometimes of the future, but with the desultory, vague speculation of those who feared little because they knew how little there was to fear. 'it is well they are all girls,' said james, speaking of that constant topic, the children; 'we can manage their education pretty well, i flatter myself, by the help of poor clara's finishing governess, as louis used to call you.' 'if the edge of my attainments be not quite rusted off. meantime, you teach kitty, and i teach nothing.' 'you don't lose your singing. your voice never used to be so sweet.' 'it keeps the children good. but you should have seen kitty chaunting 'edwin and angelina' to the twins this morning, and getting up an imitation of crying at 'turn angelina, ever dear,' because, she said, charlotte always did.' 'that is worth writing to tell fitzjocelyn! it will be a great disappointment if they have to stay abroad all this winter; but he seems to think it the only chance of his father getting thoroughly well, so i suppose there is little hope of him. i should like for him to see kitty as she is now, she is so excessively droll!' 'yes; and it must be a great deprivation to have to leave all his farm to itself, just as it is looking so well; only he makes himself happy with whatever he is doing.' 'how he would enjoy this evening! i never saw more perfect rest!' 'yes;--the sounds of the town come through the air in a hush! and the very star seems to twinkle quietly!' they stood still without speaking to enjoy that sense of stillness and refreshment, looking up through the chestnut boughs that overshadowed the deep dewy lane, where there was not air enough even to waft down the detached petals of the wild rose. 'such moments as these must be meant to help one on,' said james, 'to hinder daily life from running into drudgery.' 'and it is so delightful to have a holiday given, now and then, instead of having a life all holiday. ah! there's a glow-worm--look at the wonder of that green lamp!' 'i must show it to kitty,' said james, taking it up on a cushion of moss. 'her acquaintance will begin earlier than mine. do you remember showing me my first glow-worm at beauchastel? i used to think that the gem of my walks, before i knew better. it is a great treat to have poor walter here in the holidays, so good and pleasant; but i must say one charm is the pleasure of being alone together afterwards.' 'a pleasure it is well you do not get tired of, my dear, and i am afraid it will soon be over for the present. i do believe that is richardson behind us! an attorney among the glow-worms is more than i expected.' 'good evening, sir,' said the attorney, coming up with them; 'is mrs. frost braving the dew?' and then, after some moments, 'have you heard from your sister lately, mr. frost?' 'about three weeks ago.' 'she did not mention then,' said mr. richardson, hesitating, 'mr. dynevor's health?' 'no! have you heard anything?' 'i thought you might wish to be aware of what i learnt from, i fear, too good authority. it appears that mr. dynevor paid only a part of the purchase-money of the estate, giving security for the rest on his property in peru; and now, owing to the failure of the equatorial steam navigation company, mr. dynevor is, i fear, actually insolvent.' 'did you say he was ill?' 'i heard mentioned severe illness--paralytic affection; but as you have not heard from miss clara, i hope it may be of no importance.' after a few more inquiries, and additional information being elicited, good-nights were exchanged, and mr. richardson passed on. at first neither spoke, till isabel said-- 'and clara never wrote!' 'she would identify herself too much with her uncle in his misfortune. poor dear child! what may she not be undergoing!' 'you will go to her?' 'i must. whether my uncle will forgive me or not, to clara i must go. shall i write first?' 'oh! no; it will only make a delay, and your uncle might say 'don't come.'' 'right; delay would prolong her perplexities. i will go to-morrow, and mr. holdsworth will see to the workhouse people.' his alert air showed how grateful was any excuse that could take him to clara, the impulse of brotherly love coming uppermost of all his sensations. then came pity for the poor old man whose cherished design had thus crumbled, and the anxious wonder whether he would forgive, and deign to accept sympathy from his nephew. 'my dear,' said james, doubtfully; 'supposing, what i hardly dare to imagine, that he should consent, what should you say to my bringing him here? 'i believe it would make you happy,' said isabel. 'oh! yes, pray do--and then we should have clara.' 'i should rejoice to offer anything like reparation, though i do not dare to hope it will be granted; and i do not know how to ask you to break up the home comfort we have prized so much.' 'it will be all the better comfort for your mind being fully at ease; and i am sure we should deserve none at all, if we shut our door against him now that he is in distress. you must bring him, poor old man, and i will try with all my might to behave well to him.' 'it is a mere chance; but i am glad to take your consent with me. as to our affording it, i suppose he may have, at the worst, an allowance from the creditors, so you will not have to retrench anything.' 'don't talk of that, dearest. we never knew how little we could live on till we tried; and if no. is taken, and you are paid for the new edition of the lectures, and walter's pay besides--' 'and sir hubert,' added james. 'of course we shall get on,' said isabel. 'i am not in the least afraid that the little girls will suffer, if they do live a little harder for the sake of their old uncle. i only wish you had had your new black coat first, for i am afraid you won't now.' 'you need not reckon on that. i don't expect that i shall be allowed the comfort of doing anything for him. but see about them i must. oh, may i not be too late!' early the next morning james was on his way, travelling through the long bright summer day; and when, after the close, stifling railway carriage, full of rough, loud-voiced passengers, he found himself in the cool of the evening on the bare heath, where the slanting sunbeams cast a red light, he was reminded by every object that met his eye of the harsh and rebellious sensations that he had allowed to reign over him at his last arrival there, which had made him wrangle over the bier of one so loving and beloved, and exaggerate the right till it wore the semblance of the wrong. by the time he came to the village, the parting light was shining on the lofty church tower, rising above the turmoil and whirl of the darkening world below, almost as sacred old age had lifted his grandmother into perpetual peace and joy, above the fret and vexation of earthly cares and dissensions. the recollection of her confident trust that reconciliation was in store, came to cheer him as he crossed the park, and the aspect of the house assured him that at least he was not again too late. the servant who answered the bell said that mr. dynevor was very ill, and miss dynevor could see no one. james sent in his card, and stood in an agony of impatience, imagining all and more than all he deserved, to have taken place--his uncle either dying, or else forcibly withholding his sister from him. at last there was a hurried step, and the brother and sister were clasping each other in speechless joy. 'o jem! dear jem! this is so kind!' cried clara, as with arms round each other they crossed the hall. 'now i don't care for anything!' 'my uncle?' 'much better,' said clara; 'he speaks quite well again, and his foot is less numb.' 'was it paralysis?' 'yes; brought on by trouble and worry of mind. but how did you know, jem?' 'richardson told me. oh, clara, had i offended too deeply for you to summon me?' 'no, indeed,' said clara, pressing his arm, 'i knew you would help us as far as you could; but to throw ourselves on you would be robbing the children, so i wanted to have something fixed before you heard.' 'my poor child, what could be fixed?' 'you gave me what is better than house and land,' said clara. 'i wrote to miss brigham; she will give me employment in the school till i can find a place as daily governess, and she is to take lodgings for us.' 'and is this what it has come to, my poor clara?' 'oh, don't pity me! my heart has felt like an india-rubber ball ever since the crash. even poor uncle oliver being so ill could not keep me from feeling as if the burthen were off my back, and i were little clara frost again. it seemed to take away the bar between us; and so it has! o jem! this is happiness. tell me of isabel and the babies.' 'you will come home to them. do you think my uncle would consent?' she answered with an embrace, a look of rapture and of doubt, and then a negative. 'oh, no, we cannot be a burthen on you. you have quite enough on your hands. and, oh! you have grown so spare and thin. i mean to maintain my uncle, if--' and her spirited bearing softened into thoughtfulness, as if the little word conveyed that she meant not to be self-confident. 'but, clara, is this actual ruin? i know only what richardson could tell me.' 'i do not fully understand,' said clara. 'it had been plain for a long time that something was on uncle oliver's mind; he was so restless all the winter at paris, and at last arranged our coming home very suddenly. i think he was disappointed in london, for he went out at once, and came back very much discomposed. he even scolded me for not having married; and when i tried to coax him out of it, he said it was for my good, and he wanted to see after his business in peru. i put him in mind how dear granny had begged him to stay at home; but he told me i knew nothing about it, and that he would have gone long ago if i had not been an obstinate girl, and had known how to play my cards. i said something about going home, but that made him more furious than ever. but, after all, it is not fair to tell all about the last few months. dr. hastings says his attack had been a long time coming on, and he must have been previously harassed.' 'and you had to bear with it all?' 'he was never unkind. oh, no; but it was sad to see him so miserable, and not to know why--and so uncertain, too! sometimes he would insist on giving grand parties, and yet he was angry with the expense of my poor little pony-carriage. i don't think he always quite knew what he was about; and while he hoped to pull through, i suppose he was afraid of any one guessing at his embarrassments. on this day fortnight he was reading his letters at breakfast--i saw there was something amiss, and said something stupid about the hot rolls, because he could not bear me to notice. i think that roused him, for he got up, but he tottered, and by the time i came to him he seemed to slip down into my arms, quite insensible. the surgeon in the village bled him, and he came to himself, but could not speak. i had almost sent for you then, but dr. hastings came, and thought he would recover, and i did not venture. indeed, jane forbade me; she is a sort of lioness and her whelps. well, the next day came mr. morrison, who is the mr. richardson to this concern, and by-and-by he asked to see me. he kept the doctor in the next room. i believe he thought i should faint or make some such performance, for he began about his painful duty, and frightened me lest my poor uncle should be worse, only he was not the right man to tell me. so at last it came out that we were ruined, and i was not an heiress at all, at all! if it had not been for poor uncle oliver, i should have cried 'hurrah!' i did nearly laugh to hear him complimenting my firmness. i believe the history is this:--hearing that this place was for sale, brought uncle oliver home before his affairs could well do without him. he paid half the price, and promised to pay the rest in three years, giving security on the mines and the other property in peru; but somehow the remittances have never come properly, and he trusted to some great success with the equatorial company to set things straight, but it seems that it has totally failed, and that was the news that overthrew him. then the creditors, who had been put off with hopes, all came down on him together, and there seems to be nothing to be done but to give up everything to them. poor uncle oliver!--i sat watching him that evening, and thinking how louis would say the sea had swept away his whole sand castle with one wave.' 'does he know it? have any steps been taken?' 'mr. morrison showed me what my poor uncle had done. he had really executed a deed giving me the whole estate; he would have borne all the disgrace and persecution himself--for you know it would have been a most horrible scrape, as he had given them security on property that was not really secure. mr. morrison said the deed would hold, and that he would bring me counsel's opinion if i liked. but, oh, jem! i was so thankful that my birthday was over, and i was my own woman! i made him draw up a paper, and i signed it, undertaking that they shall have quiet possession provided they will come to an amicable settlement, and not torment my uncle.' 'i hope he is a man of sense, who will make the best terms?' 'you may see to that now. i'm sure he is a man of compliments. he tells me grand things about my disinterestedness, and the creditors and they have promised to let us stay unmolested as long as i please, which will be only till my uncle can move, for i must get rid of all these servants and paraphernalia, and in the meantime they are concocting the amicable adjustment, and mr. morrison said he should try to stipulate for a maintenance for my uncle, but he was not sure of it, without giving up what may yet come from peru. jane's annuity is safe--that is a comfort! what work i had to make her believe it! and now she wants us all to live upon it.' 'that was a rare and beautiful power by which my grandmother infused such faithful love into all her dependants. but now for the person really to be pitied.' 'it was only three days ago that it was safe to speak of it, but then he had grown so anxious that the doctors said i must begin. so i begged and prayed him to forgive me, and then told what i had done, and he was not so very angry. he only called me a silly child, and said i did not know what i had done in those few days that i had been left to myself. so i told him dear granny had had it, and that was all that signified, and that i never had any right here. then,' said clara, tearfully, 'he began to cry like a child, and said at least she had died in her own home, and he called me henry's child: and then jane came and turned me out, and wont let me go near him unless i promise to be good and say nothing. but i must soon; for however she pats him, and says, 'don't, master oliver,' i see his mind runs on nothing else, and the doctor says he may soon hear the plans, and be moved.' 'can you venture to tell him that i am here?' before clara could answer, jane opened the door--'miss clara, your uncle;' and there she stopped, at the unexpected sight of the brother and sister still hand in hand. 'here, jane, do you see him?' cried clara; and james came forward with outstretched hand, but he was not graciously received. 'now, master james, you ain't coming here to worrit your poor uncle?' 'no, indeed, jane. i am come in the hope of being of some use to him.' 'i'd rather by half it had been lord fitzjocelyn,' muttered jane, 'he was always quieter.' 'now, jane, you should not be so cross,' cried clara, 'when it is your own jemmy, come on purpose to help and comfort us all! you are going to tell uncle oliver, and make him glad to see him, as you know you are.' 'i know,' said james, 'that last time i was here, i behaved ill enough to make you dread my presence, jane; but i have learnt and suffered a good deal since that time, and i wish for nothing so much as for my uncle's pardon.' mrs. beckett would have been more impressed, had she ever ceased to think of master jemmy otherwise than as a self-willed but candid boy; and she answered as if he had been throwing himself on her mercy after breaking a window, or knocking down lord fitzjocelyn-- 'well, sir, that is all you can say. i'm glad you are sorry. i'll see if i can mention, it to your uncle.' off trotted jane, while clara's indignation and excited spirits relieved themselves by a burst of merry laughter, as she hung about her brother, and begged to hear of the dear old home. the old servant, in her simplicity, went straight upstairs, and up to her nursling, as he had again become. 'master oliver,' said she, 'he is come. master jem is come back, and 'twould do your heart good to see how happy the children are together--just like you and poor master henry.' 'did she ask him here?' said mr. dynevor, uneasily. 'no, sir, he came right out of his own head, because he thought she would feel lost.' oliver vouchsafed no reply, and jane pressed no farther. he never alluded to his guest; but when clara came into the room, his eye dwelt on her countenance of bright content and animation, and the smiles that played round her lips as she sat silent. her voice was hushed in the sick-room, but he heard it about the house with the blithe, lively ring that had been absent from it since he carried her away from northwold; and her steps danced upstairs, and along the galleries, with the light, bounding tread unknown to the constrained, dignified miss dynevor. ah the notice he took that night was to say, petulantly, when clara was sitting with him, 'don't stay here; you want to be down-stairs.' 'oh, no, dear uncle, i am come to stay with you. i don't want, in the least, to be anywhere but here.' he seemed pleased, although he growled; and next morning jane reported that he had been asking for how long his nephew had come, and saying he was glad that miss dynevor had someone to look after her--a sufferance beyond expectation. in his helpless state, jane had resumed her nursery relations with him; and he talked matters over with her so freely that it was well that the two young people were scarcely less her children, and had almost an equal share of her affection, so that clara felt that matters might be safely trusted in her hands. clara's felicity could hardly be described, with her fond affections satisfied by her brother's presence, and her fears of managing ill, removed by reliance on him; and many as were the remaining cases, and great as was the suspense lest her uncle should still nourish resentment, nothing could overcome the sense of restored joy ever bubbling up, not even the dread that james might not bear patiently with continued rebuffs. but james was so much more gentle and tolerant than she had ever known him, that at first she could not understand missing the retort, the satire, the censure which had seemed an essential part of her brother. she was always instinctively guarding against what never happened, or if some slight demonstration flashed out, he caught himself up, and asked pardon before she had perceived anything, till she began to think marriage had altered him wonderfully, and almost to owe isabel a grudge for having cowed his spirit. she could hardly believe that he was waiting so patiently in the guise of a suppliant, when she thought him in the right from the first; though she could perceive that the task was easier now that the old man was in adversity, and she saw that he regarded his exclusion from his uncle's room in the light of a just punishment, to be endured with humility. james, on his side, was highly pleased with his sister. having only seen her as the wild, untamed giraffe, he was by no means prepared for the dignity and decision with which miss dynevor reigned over the establishment. her tall figure, and the simple, straightforward ease of her movements and manners, seemed made to grace those large, lofty rooms; and as he watched her playing the part of mistress of the house so naturally in the midst of the state, the servants, the silver covers, and the trappings, he felt that heiress-ship became her so well, that he could hardly believe that her tenure there was over, and unregretted. 'even isabel could not do it better,' he said, smiling; and she made a low curtsey for the compliment, and laughed back, 'i'm glad you have come to see my performance. it has been a very long, dull pageant, and here comes mr. morrison, i hope with the last act.' morrison was evidently much relieved that miss dynevor should have some relative to advise with, since he did not like the responsibility of her renunciation, though owning that it was the only thing that could save her uncle from disgraceful ruin, and perhaps from prosecution; whereas now the gratitude and forbearance of the creditors were secured, and he hoped that mr. dynevor might be set free from the numerous english involvements, without sacrificing his remaining property in peru. the lawyer seemed to have no words to express to james his sense of miss dynevor's conduct in the matter, her promptitude and good sense having apparently struck him as much as her generosity, and there was no getting him to believe, as clara wished, that the sacrifice was no sacrifice at all--nothing, as she said, but 'common honesty and a great riddance.' he promised to take steps in earnest for the final settlement with the creditors; and though still far from the last act, clara began to consider of hastening her plans. it was exceedingly doubtful whether oliver would hear of living at dynevor terrace, and clara could not be separated from him; besides which, she was resolved that her brother should not be burthened, and she would give james no promises, conditional or otherwise. mr. dynevor had discovered that morrison had been in the house, and was obviously restless to know what had taken place. by-and-by he said to jane, with an air of inquiry, 'why does not the young man come near me?' mrs. beckett was too happy to report the invitation, telling 'master jem' at the same time that 'he was not to rake up nothing gone and past; there was quite troubles enough for one while.' clara thought the same, and besides was secretly sure that if he admitted that he had been wrong in part, his uncle would imagine him to mean that he had been wrong in the whole. their instructions and precautions were trying to james, whose chaplaincy had given him more experience of the sick and the feeble than they gave him credit for; but he was patient enough to amaze clara and pacify jane, who ushered him into the sick-chamber. there, even in his worst days, he must have laid aside ill-feeling at the aspect of the shrunken, broken figure in the pillowed arm-chair, prematurely aged, his hair thin and white, his face shrivelled, his eyelid drooping, and mouth contracted. he was still some years under sixty; but this was the result of toil and climate--of the labour generously designed, but how conducted, how resulting? he had not learned to put out his left hand--he only made a sharp nod, as james, with tender and humble respect, approached, feeling that, how his grandmother was gone, this frail old man, his father's brother, was the last who claimed by right his filial love and gratitude. how different from the rancour and animosity with which he had met his former advances! he ventured gently on kindly hopes that his uncle was better, and they were not ill taken, though not without fretfulness. presently oliver said, 'come to look after your sister? that's right--good girl, good girl!' 'that she is!' exclaimed james, heartily. 'too hasty! too great hurry,' resumed oliver; 'she had better have waited, saved the old place,--never mind what became of the old man, one-half dead already.' 'she would not have been a clara good for much, if she had treated you after that fashion, sir,' said james, smiling. he gave his accustomed snort. 'the mischief a girl let alone can do in three days, when once she's of age, and one can't stop her! women ought never to come of age, ain't fit for it, undo all the work of my lifetime with a stroke of her pen!' 'for your sake, sir!' 'pshaw! pity but she'd been safe married--tied it up well with settlements then out of her power. can't think what that young fitzjocelyn was after--it ain't the old affair. ponsonby writes me that things are to be settled as soon as ward comes back.' 'indeed!' 'aye, good sort of fellow--no harm to have him in our concerns--i hope he'll look into the accounts, and find what robson is at. after all, i shall soon be out there myself, and make master robson look about him. mad to allow myself to stay--but i'll wait no longer. morrison may put the fellows off'--i'll give him a hint; we'll save the place, after all, when i once get out to lima. if only i knew what to do with that girl!' james could not look at him without a conviction that he would never recover the use of his hand and foot; but this was no time to discourage his spirits, and the answer was--'my sister's natural home would be with me.' 'ha! the child would like it, i suppose. i'd make a handsome allowance for her. i shall manage that when my affairs are in my own hands; but i may as well write to the mountains as to ponsonby. aye, aye! clara might go to you. she'll have enough any way to be quite worth young fitzjocelyn's while, you may tell him. that mine in the san benito would retrieve all, and i'll not forget. pray, how many children have you by this time?' 'four little girls, sir,' said james, restraining the feeling which was rising in the contact with his uncle, revealing that both were still the same men. 'hm! no time lost, however! well, we shall see! any way, an allowance for clara's board won't hurt. what's your notion?' james's notion was profound pity for the poor old man. 'indeed, sir,' he said, 'clara is sure to be welcome. all we wish is, that you would kindly bring her to us at once. perhaps you would find the baths of service; we would do our utmost to make you comfortable, and we are not inhabiting half the house, so that there would be ample space to keep the children from inconveniencing you.' 'clara is set on it, i'll warrant.' 'clara waits to be guided by your wishes; but my wife and i should esteem it as the greatest favour you could do us.' 'ha! we'll see what i can manage. i must see morrison'--and he fell into meditation, presently breaking from it to say fretfully, 'i say, roland, would you reach me that tumbler?' never had james thought to be grateful for that name! he would gladly have been roland dynevor for the rest of his days, if he could have left behind him the transgressions of james frost! but the poor man's shattered thoughts had been too long on the stretch; and, without further ceremony, jane came in and dismissed his nephew. clara hardly trusted her ears when she was told shortly after, by her uncle, that they were to go to northwold. roland wished it; and, poor fellow! the board and lodging were a great object to him. he seemed to have come to his senses now it was too late; and if clara wished it, and did not think it dull, there she might stay while he himself was gone to lima. 'a great object the other way,' clara had nearly cried, in her indignation that james could not be supposed disinterested in an invitation to an old man, who probably was destitute. brother and uncle appeared to have left her out of the consultation; but she was resolved not to let him be a burthen on those who had so little already, and she called her old friend jane to take counsel with her, whether it would not be doing them an injury to carry him thither at all. so much of jane's heart as was not at cheveleigh was at dynevor terrace, and her answer was decided. 'to be sure, miss clara, nothing couldn't be more natural.' 'nothing, indeed, but i can't put them to trouble and expense.' 'i'll warrant,' said jane, 'that i'll make whatever they have go twice as far as charlotte ever will. why, you know i keeps myself; and for the rest, it will be a mere saving to have me in the kitchen! there's no air so good for master oliver.' 'i see you mean to go, jane,' said clara. 'now, i have to look out for myself.' 'bless me, miss clara, don't you do nothing in a hurry. go home quiet and look about you.' jane had begun to call northwold home; and, in spite of her mournings over the old place, clara thought she had never been so happy there as in her present dominion over master oliver, and her prospects of her saucepans and verbenas at no. . poor oliver! what a scanty measure of happiness had his lifelong exertions produced! many a human sacrifice has been made to a grim and hollow idol, failing his devotees in time of extremity. had it not been thus with oliver dynevor's self-devotion to the honour of his family? chapter xix. farewell to greatness. soon from the halls my fathers reared their scutcheons must descend. scott mr. holdsworth contrived to set james at liberty for a fortnight, and he was thus enabled to watch over the negotiation, and expedite matters for the removal. the result was, that the resignation of the estate, furniture, and of clara's jewels, honourably cleared off the debts contracted in poor mr. dynevor's eagerness to reinstate the family in all its pristine grandeur, and left him totally dependent on whatever might be rescued in peru. he believed this to be considerable, but the brother and sister founded little hopes on the chance; as, whatever there might be, had been entangled in the equatorial company, and nothing could be less comprehensible than mr. robson's statements. clara retained her own seventy pounds per annum, which, thrown into the common stock, would, james assured her, satisfy him, in a pecuniary point of view, that he was doing no wrong to his children; though he added, that even if there had been nothing, he did not believe they would ever be the worse for what might be spent on their infirm old uncle. notice was sent to isabel to prepare, and she made cordial reply that the two rooms on the ground-floor were being made ready for mr. dynevor, and clara's own little room being set in order; miss mercy faithfull helping with all her might, and little kitty stamping about, thinking her services equally effectual. oliver was in haste to leave a place replete with disappointment and failure, and was so helpless and dependent as to wish for his nephew's assistance on the journey; and it was, therefore, fixed for the end of james's second week. no one called to take leave, except the curate and good mr. henderson, who showed clara much warm, kind feeling, and praised her to her brother. she begged james to walk with her for a farewell visit to her grandmother's other old friend. great was her enjoyment of this expedition; she said she had not had a walk worth having since she was at aix-la-chapelle, and liberty and companionship compensated for all the heat and dust in the dreary tract, full of uncomfortable shabby-genteel abodes, and an unpromising population. 'one cannot regret such a tenantry,' said clara. 'poor creatures!' said james. 'i wonder into whose hands they will fall. your heart may be free, clara; you have followed the clear path of duty; but it is a painful thought for me, that to strive to amend these festering evils, caused very likely by my grandfather's speculations, might have been my appointed task. i should not have had far to seek for occupation. when i was talking to the curate yesterday, my heart smote me to think what i might have done to help him.' 'it would all have been over now.' 'it ought not. nay, perhaps, my presence might have left my uncle free to attend to his own concerns.' 'i really believe you are going to regret the place!' 'after all, clara, i was a dynevor before my uncle came home. it might have been my birthright. but, as isabel says, what we are now is far more likely to be safe for the children. i was bad enough as i was, but what should i have been as a pampered heir! let it go.' 'yes, let it go,' said clara; 'it has been little but pain to me. we shall teach my poor uncle that home love is better than old family estates. i almost wish he may recover nothing in peru, that he may learn that you receive him for his own sake.' 'that is more than i can wish,' said james. 'a hundred or two a-year would come in handily. besides, i am afraid that mary ponsonby may be suffering in this crash.' 'she seems to have taken care of herself,' said clara. 'she does not write to me, and i am almost ready to believe her father at last. i could not have thought it of her!' 'isabel has always said it was the best thing that could happen to louis.' 'isabel never had any notion of louis. i don't mean any offence, but if she had known what he was made of, she would never have had you.' 'thank you, clara! i always thought it an odd predilection, but no one can now esteem fitzjocelyn more highly than ahe does.' 'very likely; but if she thinks louis can stand mary's deserting him--' 'it will be great pain, no doubt; but once over, he will be free.' 'it never will be over.' 'that is young-ladyism.' 'i never was a young lady, and i know what i mean. mary may not be all he thinks her, and she may be dull enough to let her affection wear out; but i do not believe he will ever look at any one again, as he did after mary on your wedding-day.' 'so you forbid him to be ever happy again!' 'not at all, only in that one way. there are many others of being happy.' 'that one way meaning marriage.' 'i mean that sort of perfect marriage that, according to the saying, is made in heaven. whether that could have been with mary, i do not know her well enough to guess; but i am convinced that he will always have the same kind of memory of her that a man has of a first love, or first wife.' 'it may have been a mistake to drive him into the attachment, which isabel thinks has been favoured by absence, leaving scope for imagination; but i cannot give up the hope that his days of happiness are yet to come.' 'nor do i give up mary, yet,' said clara. 'till she announces her defection i shall not believe it, for it would be common honesty to inform poor louis, and in that she never was deficient.' 'it is not a plant that seems to thrive on the peruvian soil.' 'no; and i am dreadfully afraid for tom madison. there were hints about him in mr. ponsonby's letters, which make me very anxious; and from what my uncle says, it seems that there is such an atmosphere of gambling and trickery about his office, that he thinks it a matter of course that no one should be really true and honest.' 'that would be a terrible affair indeed! i don't know for which i should be most concerned, louis or our poor little charlotte. but after all, clara, we have known too many falsehoods come across the atlantic, to concern ourselves about anything without good reason.' so they talked, enjoying the leisure the walk gave them for conversation, and then paying the painful visit, when clara tried in vain to make it understood by the poor old lady that she was going away, and that james was her brother. they felt thankful that such decay had been spared their grandmother, and clara sighed to think that her uncle might be on the brink of a like loss of faculties, and then felt herself more than ever bound to him. on the way home they went together to the church, and pondered over the tombs of their ancestry,--ranging from the grim, defaced old knight, through the polished brass, the kneeling courtier, and the dishevelled grief embracing an urn, down to the mural arch enshrining the dear revered name of catharine, daughter of roland, and wife of james frost dynevor, the last of her line whose bones would rest there. her grave had truly been the sole possession that her son's labours had secured for her; that grave was the only spot at cheveleigh that claimed a pang from clara's heart. she stood beside it with deep, fond, clinging love and reverence, but with no painful recollections to come between her and that fair, bright vision of happy old age. alas! for the memories that her brother had sown to spring up round him now! apart from all these vipers of his own creating, james after all felt more in the cession of cheveleigh than did his sister. these were days of change and of feudal feeling wearing out; but james, long as he had pretended to scorn 'being sentimental about his forefathers,' was strongly susceptible of such impressions; and he was painfully conscious of being disinherited. he might have felt thus, without any restoration or loss, as the mere effect of visiting his birthright as a stranger; but, as he received all humbly instead of proudly, the feeling did him no harm. it softened him into sympathy with his uncle, and tardy appreciation of his single-minded devotion to the estate, which he had won not for himself, but for others, only to see it first ungratefully rejected, and then snatched away. then, with a thrill of humiliation at his own unworthiness, came the earnest prayer that it might yet be vouchsafed to him to tend the exhausted body, and train the contracted mind to dwell on that inheritance whence there could be no casting out. poor oliver was fretful and restless, insisting on being brought down to his study to watch over the packing of his papers, and miserable at being unable to arrange them himself. even the tenderest pity for him could not prevent him from being an exceeding trial; and james could hardly yet have endured it, but for pleasure and interest in watching his sister's lively good-humour, saucy and determined when the old man was unreasonable, and caressing and affectionate, when he was violent in his impotence; never seeming to hear, see, or regard anything unkind or unpleasant; and absolutely pleased and gratified when her uncle, in his petulance, sometimes ungraciously rejected her services in favour of those of 'roland,' who, he took it for granted, must, as a man, have more sense. it would sometimes cross james, how would isabel and the children fare with this ill-humour; but he had much confidence in his wife's sweet calm temper, and more in the obvious duty; and, on the whole, he believed it was better not to think about it. the suffering that the surrender cost oliver was only shown in this species of petty fractiousness, until the last morning, when his nephew was helping him across the hall, and clara close at his side, he made them stand still beside one of the pillars, and groaned as he said, 'here i waited for the carriage last time! here i promised to get it back again!' 'i wish every one kept promises as you did,' said james, looking about for something cheerful to say. 'i had hope then,' said oliver; and well might he feel the contrast between the youth, with such hopes, energies, and determination mighty within him, and the broken and disappointed man. 'hope yet, and better hope!' james could not help saying. 'not while there's such a rascal in the office at lima,' cried oliver, testily. 'oh! uncle oliver, he did not mean that!' exclaimed clara. mr. dynevor grumbled something about parsons, which neither of them chose to hear; and clara cut it short by saying, 'after all, uncle oliver, you have done it all! dear grandmamma came back and was happy here, and that was all that signified. you never wanted it for yourself, you know, and my dear father was not here to have it. and for you, what could you have had more than your nephew and niece to--to try to be like your children! and hadn't you rather have them without purchase than with?' and as she saw him smile in answer to her bright caress, she added merrily, 'there's nothing else to pity but the fir trees and gold fish; and as they have done very happily before without the pendragon reign, i dare any they will again; so i can't be very sorry for them!' this was clara's farewell to her greatness, and cheerily she enlivened her uncle all the way to london, and tried to solace him after the interviews that he insisted on with various men of business, and which did not tend to make him stronger in health or spirits through the next day's journey. the engine whistled its arriving shriek at northwold. happy clara! what was the summer rain to her? every house, every passenger, were tokens of home; and the damp rain-mottled face of the terrace, looking like a child that had been crying, was more welcome to her longing eyes than ever had been lake or mountain. isabel and little catharine stood on the step; but as mr. dynevor was lifted out, the little girl shrank out of sight with a childish awe of infirmity. the dining-room had been made a very comfortable sitting-room for him, and till he was settled there, nothing else could be attended to; but he was so much fatigued, that it was found best to leave him entirely to jane; and clara, after a few moments, followed her brother from the room. as she shut the door, she stood for some seconds unobserved, and unwilling to interfere with the scene before her. halfway upstairs, james had been pulled down to sit on the steps, surrounded by his delighted flock. the baby was in his arms, flourishing her hands as he danced her; kitty, from above, had clasped tightly round his neck, chattering and kissing with breathless velocity; one twin in front was drumming on his knee, and shrieking in accordance with every shout of the baby; and below, leaning on the balusters, stood their mother's graceful figure, looking up at them with a lovely smiling face of perfect gladness. she was the first to perceive clara; and, with a pretty gesture to be silent, she pointed to the stand of the wedgewood jar, under which sat the other little maid, her two fat arms clasped tight round her papa's umbrella, and the ivory handle indenting her rosy cheek, as she fondled it in silent transport. 'my little salome,' whispered isabel, squeezing clara's hand, 'our quiet one. she could not sleep for expecting papa, and now she is in a fit of shy delight; she can't shout with the others; she can only nurse his umbrella.' just then james made a desperate demonstration, amid peals of laughter from his daughters. 'we are stopping the way! get out, you unruly monsters! let go, kitty--mercy; i shall kick! mamma, catch this ball;' making a feint of tossing the crowing fanny at her. assuredly, thought clara, pity was wasted; there was not one too many. and then began the happy exulting introductions, and a laugh at little mercy, who stood blank and open-mouthed, gazing up and up her tall aunt, as if there were no coming to the top of her. clara sat down on the stairs, to bring her face to a level, and struck up a friendship with her on the spot, while james lilted up his little salome, her joy still too deep and reserved for manifestation; only without a word she nestled close to him, laid her head on his shoulder, and closed her eyes, as if languid with excess of rapture--a pretty contrast to her sister's frantic delight, which presently alarmed james lest it should disturb his uncle, and he called them up-stairs. but clara must first run to the house beautiful, and little mercy must needs come to show her the way, and trotted up before her, consequentially announcing, 'aunt cara.' miss faithfull alone was present; and, without speaking, clara dropped on the ground, laid her head on her dear old friend's lap, and little mercy exclaimed, in wondering alarm, 'aunt cara naughty--aunt cara crying!' 'my darling,' said miss faithfull, as she kissed clara's brow and stroked her long flaxen hair, 'you have gone through a great deal. we must try to make you happy in your poor old home.' 'oh, no! oh, no! it is happiness! oh! such happiness! but i don't know what to do with it, and i want granny!' she was almost like little salome; the flood of bliss in returning home, joined with the missing of the one dearest welcome, had come on her so suddenly that she was almost stifled, till she had been calmed and soothed by the brief interval of quiet with her dear old friend. she returned to no. , there to find that her uncle was going to bed, and charlotte, pink and beautiful with delight, was running about in attendance on jane. she went up straight to her own little room, which had been set out exactly as in former times, so that she could feel as if she had been not a day absent; and she lost not a moment in adding to it all the other little treasures which made it fully like her own. she looked out at the ormersfield trees, and smiled to think how well louis's advice had turned out; and then she sighed, in the fear that it might yet be her duty to leave home. if her uncle could live without her, she must tear herself away, and work for his maintenance. however, for the present, she might enjoy to the utmost, and she proceeded to the little parlour, which, to her extreme surprise, she found only occupied by the four children--kitty holding the youngest upon her feet, till, at the new apparition, fanny suddenly seated herself for the convenience of staring. 'are you all alone here!' exclaimed clara. 'i am taking care of the little ones,' replied kitty, with dignity. 'where's mamma!' 'she is gone down to get tea. papa is gone to the union; but we do not mean to wait for him,' answered the little personage, with an air capable, the more droll because she was on the smallest scale, of much less substance than the round fat twins, and indeed chiefly distinguishable from them by her slender neat shape; for the faces were at first sight all alike, brown, small-featured, with large dark eyes, and dark curly hair--mercy, with the largest and most impetuous eyes, and salome with a dreamy look, more like her mother. fanny was in a different style, and much prettier; but her contemplation ended in alarm and inclination to cry, whereupon kitty embraced her, and consoled her like a most efficient guardian; then seeing mercy becoming rather rude in her familiarities with her aunt, held up her small forefinger, and called out gravely, 'mercy, recollect yourself!' wonders would never cease! here was isabel coming up with the tea-tray in her own hands! 'my dear, do you always do that?' 'no, only when charlotte is busy; and,' as she picked up the baby, 'now kitty may bring the rest.' so, in various little journeys, the miniature woman's curly head arose above the loaf, and the butter-dish, and even the milk-jug, held without spilling; while isabel would have set out the tea-things with one hand, if clara had not done it for her; and the workhouse girl finally appeared with the kettle. was this the same isabel whom clara last remembered with her baby in her lap, beautiful and almost as inanimate as a statue? there was scarcely more change from the long-frocked infant to the bustling important sprite, than from that fair piece of still life to the active house-mother. unruffled grace was innate; every movement had a lofty, placid deliberation and simplicity, that made her like a disguised princess; and though her beauty was a little worn, what it had lost in youth was far more than compensated by sweetness and animation. the pensive cast remained, but the dreaminess had sobered into thought and true hope. her dress was an old handsome silk, frayed and worn, but so becoming to her, that the fading was unnoticed in the delicate neatness of the accompaniments. and the dear old room! it looked like a cheerful habitation; but clara's almost instant inquiry was for the porcelain arcadians, and could not think it quite as tidy and orderly as it used to be in old times, when she was the only fairy disorder. 'however, i'll see to that,' quoth she to herself. and she gave herself up to the happy tea-drinking, when james was welcomed by another tumult, and was pinned down by kitty and salome on either side--mamma making tea in spite of fanny on her lap--mercy adhering to the new-comer--the eager conversation--kitty thrusting in her little oar, and being hushed by mamma--the grand final game at romps, ending with isabel carrying off her little victims, one by one, to bed; and james taking the tea-tray down stairs. clara followed with other parts of the equipage, and then both stood together warming themselves, and gossiped over the dear old kitchen fire, till isabel came down and found them there. and then, before any of the grand news was discussed, all the infant marvels of the last fortnight had to be detailed; and the young parents required clara's opinion whether they were spoiling kitty. next, clara found her way to the cupboard, brought the shepherd and shepherdess to light, looked them well over, and satisfied herself that there was not one scar or wound on either--nay, it is not absolutely certain that she did not kiss the damsel's delicate pink cheek--set them up on the mantelpiece, promised to keep them in order, and stood gazing at them till james accused her of regarding them as her penates! 'why, jem!' she said, turning on him, 'you are a mere recreant if you can feel it like home without them!' 'i have other porcelain figures to depend on for a home!' said james. 'take care, james!' said his wife, with the fond sadness of one whose cup overflowed with happiness; 'clara's shepherdess may look fragile, but she has kept her youth and seen many a generation pass by of such as you depend on!' 'she once was turned out of cheveleigh, too, and has borne it as easily as clara,' said james, smiling. 'i suspect her worst danger is from fanny. there's a lady who, i warn you, can never withstand fanny!' isabel took up her own defence, and they laughed on. poor uncle oliver! could he but have known how little all this had to do with cheveleigh! chapter xx. western tidings. o lady! worthy of earth's proudest throne! nor less, by excellence of nature, fit beside an unambitious hearth to sit domestic queen, where grandeur is unknown-- queen and handmaid lowly. wordsworth. a house in the terrace was let, and the rent was welcome; and shortly after, clara had an affectionate letter from her old school-enemy, miss salter, begging her to come as governess to her little brother, promising that she should be treated like one of the family, and offering a large salary. clara was much afraid that it was her duty to accept the proposal, since her uncle seemed very fairly contented, and was growing very fond of 'roland,' and the payment would be so great an assistance, but james and isabel were strongly averse to it; and her conscience was satisfied by miss mercy faithfull's discovery of a family at the baths in search of a daily governess. miss frost was not a person to be rejected, and in another week she found herself setting out to breakfast with a girl and three boys, infusing latin, french, and geography all the forenoon, dining with them, sometimes walking with them, and then returning to the merry evening of dynevor terrace. mr. dynevor endured the step pretty well. she had ascendancy enough over him always to take her own way, and he was still buoyed up by the hope of recovering enough to rectify his affairs in peru. he was better, though his right side remained paralysed, and mr. walby saw little chance of restoration. rising late, and breakfasting slowly, the newspaper and visits from james wiled away the morning. he preferred taking his meals alone; and after dinner was wheeled out in a chair on fine days. clara came to him as soon as her day's work was over; and, when he was well enough to bear it, the whole party were with him from the children's bedtime till his own. altogether, the invalid-life passed off pretty well. he did not dislike the children, and kitty liked anything that needed to be waited on. he took clara's services as a right, but was a little afraid of 'mrs. dynevor,' and highly flattered by any attention from her; and with james his moods were exceedingly variable, and often very trying, but, in general, very well endured. peruvian mails were anticipated in the family with a feeling most akin to dread. the notice of a vessel coming in was the signal for growlings at everything, from the post-office down to his dinner; and the arrival of letters made things only worse. as clara said, the galleons were taken by the pirates; the equatorial company seemed to be doing the work of caleb balderston's thunderstorm, and to be bearing the blame of a deficit such as oliver could not charge on it. the whole statement was backed by mr. ponsonby, whose short notes spoke of indisposition making him more indebted than ever to the exertions of robson. this last was gone to guayaquil to attempt to clear up the accounts of the equatorial company, leaving the office at lima in the charge of madison and the new clerk, ford; and mr. dynevor was promised something decisive and satisfactory on his return. of mary there was no mention, except what might be inferred in a postscript:--'ward is expected in a few weeks.' mr. dynevor was obliged to resign himself; and so exceedingly fractious was he, that clara had been feeling quite dispirited, when her brother called her to tell her joyously that lord ormersfield and louis were coming home, and would call in on their way the next evening. those wretched children must not take her for a walk. nevertheless, the wretched children did want to walk, and clara could not get home till half-an-hour after she knew the train must have come in; and she found the visitors in her uncle's room. louis came forward to the door to meet her, and shook her hand with all his heart, saying, under his breath, 'i congratulate you!' 'thank you!' she said, in the same hearty tone. 'and now, look at him! look at my father! have not we made a good piece of work of keeping him abroad all the winter? does not he look as well as ever he did in his life?' this was rather strong, for lord ormersfield was somewhat grey, and a little bent; but he had resumed all his look of health and vigour, and was a great contrast to his younger, but far older-looking cousin. he welcomed clara with his tone of courteous respect, and smiled at his son's exultation, saying, fitzjocelyn deserved all the credit, for he himself had never thought to be so patched up again, and poor oliver was evidently deriving as much encouragement as if rheumatism had been paralysis. 'i must look in at the house beautiful,' said louis, presently. 'clara, i can't lose your company. won't you come with me?' of course she came; and she divined why, instead of at once entering the next house, he took a turn along the terrace, and, after a pause, asked, 'clara, when did you last hear from lima?' 'not for a long time. i suppose she is taken up by her father's illness.' he paused, collected himself, and asked again, 'have you heard nothing from your uncle?' 'yes,' said clara, sadly, 'but louis,' she added, with a lively tone, 'what does not come from herself, i would not believe.' 'i do not.' 'that's right, don't be vexed when it may be nothing.' 'no; if she had found any one more worthy of her, she would not hesitate in making me aware of it. i ought to be satisfied, if she does what is best for her own happiness. miss ponsonby believes that this is a man of sterling worth, probably suiting her better than i might have done. she was a good deal driven on by circumstances before, and, perhaps, it was all a mistake on her side.' and he tried to smile. clara exclaimed that 'mary could not have been all he had believed, if--' 'no,' he said, 'she is all, and more than all. i comprehend her better now, and could have shown her that i do. she has been the blessing of my life so far, and her influence always will be so. i shall always be grateful to her, be the rest as it may, and i mean to live on hope to the last. now for the good old ladies. really, clara, the old dynevor terrace atmosphere has come back, and there seems to be the same sort of rest and cheering in coming into these old iron gates! after all, isabel is growing almost worthy to be called mrs. frost.' and in this manner he talked on, up to the very door of the house beautiful, as if to cheat himself out of despondency. 'that was a very pretty meeting,' said isabel to her husband, when no witness was present but little fanny. 'what, between his lordship and my uncle?' 'you know better.' 'my dear, your mother once tried match-making for fitzjocelyn. be warned by her example.' 'i am doing no such thing. i am only observing what every one sees.' 'don't be so common-place.' 'that's all disdain--you must condescend. i have been hearing from mr. dynevor of the excellent offers that clara refused.' 'do you think uncle oliver and clara agree as to excellence?' 'still,' continued isabel, 'considering how uncomfortable she was, it does not seem improbable that she would have married, unless some attachment had steeled her heart and raised her standard. i know she was unconscious, but it was fitzjocelyn who formed her.' 'he has been a better brother to her than i have been; but look only at their perfect ease.' 'now it is my belief that they were made for each other, and can venture to find it out, since she is no longer an heiress, and he is free from his peruvian entanglement.' 'fanny, do you hear what a scheming mamma you have? i hope she will have used it all upon sir hubert before you come out as the beauty of the terrace!' 'well, i mean to sound clara.' 'you had better leave it alone.' 'do you forbid me?' 'why, no, for i don't think you have the face to say anything that would distress her, or disturb the friendship which has been her greatest benefit.' 'thank you. all i intend is, that if it should be as i suppose, the poor things should not miss coming to an understanding for want--' 'of a christmas-tree,' said james, laughing. 'you may have your own way. i have too much confidence in your discretion and in theirs to imagine that you will produce the least effect.' isabel's imagination was busily at work, and she was in haste to make use of her husband's permission; but it was so difficult to see clara alone, that some days passed before the two sisters were left together in the sitting-room, while james was writing a letter for his uncle. isabel's courage began to waver, but she ventured a commencement. 'mr. dynevor entertains me with fine stories of your conquests, clara.' clara laughed, blushed, and answered bluntly, 'what a bother it was!' 'you are very hard-hearted.' 'you ought to remember the troubles of young ladyhood enough not to wonder.' 'i never let things run to that length; but then i had no fortune. but seriously, clara, were all these people objectionable?' 'do you think one could marry any man, only because he was not objectionable? there was no harm in one or two; but i was not going to have anything to say to them.' 'really, clara, you make me curious. had you made any resolution?' 'i know only two men whom i could have trusted to fulfil my conditions,' said clara. 'conditions?' 'of course! that if cheveleigh was to belong to any of us, it should be to the rightful heir.' 'my dear, noble clara! was that what kept you from thinking of marriage?' 'wasn't it a fine thing to have such a test? not that i ever came to trying it. simple no answered my purpose. i met no one who tempted me to make the experiment.' 'two men!' said isabel, 'if you had said one, it would have been marked.' 'jem and louis, of course,' said clara. 'oh! that is as good as saying one.' 'as good as saying none,' said clara, with emphasis. 'there may be different opinions on that point,' returned isabel, not daring to lift her eyes from her work, though longing to study clara's face, and feeling herself crimsoning. 'extremely unfounded opinions, and rather--' 'rather what?' 'impertinent, i was going to say, begging your pardon, dear isabel.' 'nay, i think it is i who should beg yours, clara.' 'no, no,' said clara, laughing, but speaking gravely immediately after, 'lookers-on do not always see most of the game. i have always known his mind so well that i could never possibly have fallen into any such nonsense. i respect him far too much.' isabel felt as if she must hazard a few words more--'can you guess what he will do if mr. ponsonby's reports prove true?' 'i do not mean to anticipate misfortunes,' said clara. isabel could say no more; and when clara next spoke, it was to ask for another of james's wristbands to stitch. then isabel ventured to peep at her face, and saw it quite calm, and not at all rosy; if it had been, the colour was gone. thus it was, and there are happily many such friendships existing as that between louis and clara. many a woman has seen the man whom she might have married, and yet has not been made miserable. if there be neither vanity nor weak self-contemplation on her side, nor trifling on his part, nor unwise suggestions forced on her by spectators, the honest, genuine affection need never become passion. if intimacy is sometimes dangerous, it is because vanity, folly, and mistakes are too frequent; but in spite of all these, where women are truly refined, and exalted into companions and friends, there has been much more happy, frank intercourse and real friendship than either the romantic or the sagacious would readily allow. the spark is never lighted, there is no consciousness, no repining, and all is well. fresh despatches from lima arrived; and after a day, when oliver had been so busy overlooking the statement from guayaquil that he would not even take his usual airing, he received clara with orders to write and secure his passage by the next packet for callao. 'dear uncle, you would never dream of it! you could not bear the journey!' she cried, aghast. 'it would do me good. do not try to cross me, clara. no one else can deal with this pack of rascals. your brother has not been bred to it, and is a parson besides, and there's not a soul that i can trust. i'll go. what! d'ye think i can live on him and on you, when there is a competence of my own out there, embezzled among those ragamuffins?' 'i am sure we had much rather--' 'no stuff and nonsense. here is roland with four children already--very likely to have a dozen more. if you and he are fools, i'm not, and i won't take the bread out of their mouths. i'll leave my will behind, bequeathing whatever i may get out of the fire evenly between you two, as the only way to content you; and if i never turn up again, why you're rid of the old man.' 'very well, uncle, i shall take my own passage at the same time.' 'you don't know what you are talking of. you are a silly child, and your brother would be a worse if he let you go.' 'if jem lets you go, he will let me. he shall let me. don't you know that you are never to have me off your hands, uncle? no, no, i shall stick to you like a burr. you may go up to the tip-top of chimborazo if you please, but you'll not shake me off.' it was her fixed purpose to accompany him, and she was not solicitous to dissuade him from going, for she could be avaricious for james's children, and had a decided wish for justice on the guilty party; and, besides, clara had a private vision of her own, which made her dance in her little room. mary had written in her father's stead--there was not a word of mr. ward--indeed, mr. ponsonby was evidently so ill that his daughter could think of nothing else. might not clara come in time to clear up any misunderstanding--convince mr. ponsonby--describe louis's single-hearted constancy during all these five years, and bring mary home to him in triumph? she could have laughed aloud with delight at the possibility; and when the other alternative occurred to her, she knit her brows with childish vehemence, as she promised miss mary that she would never be her bridesmaid. presently she heard fitzjocelyn's voice in the parlour, and, going down, found him in consultation over a letter which charlotte had brought to her master. it was so well written and expressed, that louis turned to the signature before he could quite believe that it was from his old pupil. tom wrote to communicate his perplexity at the detection of the frauds practised on his employers. he had lately been employed in the office at lima, where much had excited his suspicion; and, finally, from having 'opened a letter addressed by mistake to the firm, but destined for an individual, he had discovered that large sums, supposed to be required by the works, or lost in the equatorial failure, had been, in fact, invested in america in the name of that party.' the secret was a grievous burthen. mr. ponsonby was far too ill to be informed; besides that, he should only bring suspicion on himself; and miss ponsonby was so much occupied as to be almost equally inaccessible. tom had likewise reason to believe that his own movements were watched, and that any attempt to communicate with her or her father would be baffled; and, above all, he could not endure himself to act the spy and informer. he only wished that, if possible, without mentioning names, charlotte could give a hint that mr. dynevor must not implicitly trust to all he heard. james was inclined to suppress such vague information, which he thought would only render his uncle more restless and wretched in his helplessness, and was only questioning whether secrecy would not amount to deceit. 'the obvious thing is for me to go to peru,' said louis. 'my uncle and i were intending to go,' said clara. 'how many more of you?' exclaimed james. 'i would not change my native land for rich peru and all her gold;' chanted little kitty from the corner, where she was building houses for the 'little ones.' 'extremely to the purpose,' said louis, laughing. 'follow her example, clara. make your uncle appoint me his plenipotentiary, and i will try what i can to find out what these rogues are about.' 'are you in earnest?' 'never more so in my life.' james beckoned him to the window, and showed him a sentence where tom said that the best chance for the firm was in miss ponsonby's marriage with mr. ward, but that engagement was not yet declared on account of her father's illness. 'the very reason,' said louis, 'i cannot go on in this way. i must know the truth.' 'and your father?' 'it would be much better for him that the thing were settled. he will miss me less during the session, when he is in london with all his old friends about him. it would not take long, going by the isthmus. i'll ride back at once, and see how he bears the notion. say nothing to mr. dynevor till you hear from me; but i think he will consent. he will not endure that she should be left unprotected; her father perhaps dying, left to the mercy of these rascals.' 'and forgive me, louis, if you found her not needing you!' 'if she be happy, i should honour the man who made her so. at least, i might be of use to you. i should see after poor madison. i have sent him to the buccaneers indeed! good-bye! i cannot rest till i see how my father takes it!' it was long since louis had been under an excess of impetuosity; but he rode home as fast as he had ridden to northwold to canvass for james, and had not long been at ormersfield before his proposition was laid before his father. it was no small thing to ask of the earl, necessary as his son had become to him; and the project at first appeared to him senseless. he thought mary had not shown herself sufficiently sensible of his son's merits to deserve so much trouble; and if she were engaged to mr. ward, fitzjocelyn would find himself in an unpleasant and undignified position. besides, there was the ensuing session of parliament! no! oliver must send out some trustworthy man of business, with full powers. louis only answered, that of course it depended entirely on his father's consent; and by-and-by his submission began to work. lord ormersfield could not refuse him anything, and took care, on parting for the night, to observe that the point was not settled, only under consideration. and consideration was more favourable than might have been expected. the earl was growing anxious to see his son married, and of that there was no hope till his mind should be settled with regard to mary. it would be more for his peace to extinguish the hope, if it were never to be fulfilled. moreover, the image of mary had awakened the earl's own fatherly fondness for her, and his desire to rescue her from her wretched home. even mr. ponsonby could hardly withstand louis in person, he thought, and must be touched by so many years of constancy. the rest might be only a misunderstanding which would be cleared up by a personal interview. added to this, lord ormersfield knew that clara would not let her uncle go alone, and did not think it fit to see her go out alone with an infirm paralytic; james could not leave his wife or his chaplaincy, and the affair was unsuited to his profession; a mere accountant would not carry sufficient authority, nor gain madison's confidence; in fact, fitzjocelyn, and no other, was the trustworthy man of business; and so his lordship allowed when louis ventured to recur to the subject the next morning, and urge some of his arguments. the bright clearing of louis's face spoke his thanks, and he began at once to detail his plans for his father's comfort, lord ormersfield listening as if pleased by his solicitude, though caring for little until the light of his eyes should return. 'the next point is that you should give me a testimonial that i _am_ a trustworthy man of business.' 'i will ride into northwold with you, and talk it over with oliver.' here lay the knotty point; but the last five years had considerably cultivated fitzjocelyn's natural aptitude for figures, by his attention to statistics, his own farming-books, and the complicated accounts of the ormersfield estate,--so that both his father and richardson could testify to his being an excellent man of business; and his coolness, and mildness of temper, made him better calculated to deal with a rogue than a more hasty man would have been. they found, on arriving, that james had been talking to mr. walby, who pronounced that the expedition to lima would be mere madness for mr. dynevor, since application to business would assuredly cause another attack, and even the calculations of the previous day had made him very unwell, and so petulant and snappish, that he could be pleased with nothing, and treated as mere insult the proposal that he should entrust his affairs to 'such a lad.' even james hesitated to influence him to accept the offer. 'i scruple,' he said, drawing the earl aside, 'because i thought you had a particular objection to fitzjocelyn's being thrown in the way of speculations. i thought you dreaded the fascination.' 'thank you, james; i once did so,' said the earl. 'i used to believe it a family mania; i only kept it down in myself by strong resolution, in the very sight of the consequences, but i can trust fitzjocelyn. he is too indifferent to everything apart from duty to be caught by flattering projects, and you may fully confide in his right judgment. i believe it is the absence of selfishness or conceit that makes him so clear-sighted.' 'what a change! what a testimony!' triumphantly thought james. it might be partial, but he was not the man to believe so. that day was one of defeat; but on the following, a note from james advised fitzjocelyn to come and try his fortune again; mr. dynevor would give no one any rest till he had seen him. thereupon louis was closeted with the old merchant, who watched him keenly, and noted every question or remark he made on the accounts; then twinkled his eyes with satisfaction as he hit more than one of the very blots over which oliver had already perplexed himself. so clear-headed and accurate did he show himself, that he soon perceived that mr. dynevor looked at him as a good clerk thrown away; and he finally obtained from him full powers to act, to bring the villain to condign punishment, and even, if possible, to dispose of his share in the firm. miss ponsonby was much relieved to learn that lord fitzjocelyn was going out, though fearing that he might meet with disappointment; but, at least, her brother would be undeceived as to the traitor in whom he was confiding. no letters were to announce louis's intentions, lest the enemy should take warning; but he carried several with him, to be given or not, according to the state of affairs; and when, on his way through london, he went to receive miss ponsonby's commissions, she gave him a large packet, addressed to mary. 'am i to give her this at all events!' he asked, faltering. 'it would serve her right.' 'then i should not give it to her. pray write another, for she does not deserve to be wounded, however she may have decided.' 'i do not know how i shall ever forgive her,' sighed aunt melicent. 'people are never so unforgiving as when they have nothing to forgive.' 'ah! lord fitzjocelyn, that is not your case. this might have been far otherwise, had i not misjudged you at first.' 'do not believe so. it would have been hard to think me more foolish than i was. this probation has been the best schooling for me; and, let it end as it may, i shall be thankful for what has been.' and in this spirit did he sail, and many an anxious thought followed him, no heart beating higher than did that of little charlotte, who founded a great many hopes on the crisis that his coming would produce. seven years was a terrible time to have been engaged, and the little workhouse girl thought her getting almost as old as mrs. beckett. she wondered whether tom thought so too! she did not want to think about martha's first cousin, who was engaged for thirty-two years to a journeyman tailor, and when they married at last, they were both so cross that she went out to service again at the end of a month. charlotte set up all her caps with tom's favourite colour, and 'turned angelina' twenty times a-day. then came the well-known peruvian letters, and a thin one for charlotte. without recollecting that it must have crossed lord fitzjocelyn on the road, she tore it open the instant she had carried in the parlour letters. alas! poor charlotte! 'i write to you for the last time, lest you should consider yourself any longer bound by the engagements which must long have been distasteful. when i say that mr. ford has for some months been my colleague, you will know to what i allude, without my expressing any further. i am already embarked for the u. s. my enemies have succeeded in destroying my character and blighting my hopes. i am at present a fugitive from the hands of so-called justice; but i could have borne all with a cheerful heart if you had not played me false. you will never hear more of one who loved you faithfully. 'th. madison.' poor charlotte! the wound was a great deal too deep for her usual childish tears, or even for a single word. she stood still, cold, and almost unconscious till she heard a step, then she put the cruel letter away in her bosom, and went about her work as usual. they thought her looking very pale, and jane now and then reproached her with eating no more than a sparrow, and told her she was getting into a dwining way; but she made no answer, except that she 'could do her work.' at last, one sunday evening, when she had been left alone with the children, her mistress found her sitting at the foot of her bed, among the sleeping little ones, weeping bitterly but silently. isabel's kindness at length opened her heart, and she put the letter into her hand. poor little thing, it was very meekly borne: 'please don't tell no one, ma'am,' she said; 'i couldn't hear him blamed!' 'but what does he mean? he must be under some terrible error. who is this ford?' 'it is delaford, ma'am, i make no doubt, though however he could have got there! and, oh dear me! if i had only told poor tom the whole, that i was a silly girl, and liked his flatteries now and then, but constant in my heart i always was!' isabel could not but suppose that delaford, if it were he, might have exaggerated poor charlotte's little flirtation; but there was small comfort here, since contradiction was impossible. the u. s., over which the poor child had puzzled in vain, was no field in which to follow him up--he had not even dated his letter; and it was a very, very faint hope that lord fitzjocelyn might trace him out, especially as he had evidently fled in disgrace; and poor charlotte sobbed bitterly over his troubles, as well as her own. she was better after she had told her mistress, though still she shrank from any other sympathy. even jane's pity would have been too much for her, and her tender nature was afraid of the tongues that would have discussed her grief. perhaps the high-toned nature of isabel was the very best to be brought into contact with the poor girl's spirit, which was of the same order, and many an evening did isabel sit in the twilight, beside the children's beds, talking to her, or sometimes reading a few lines to show her how others had suffered in the same way. 'it is my own fault,' said poor charlotte; 'it all came of my liking to be treated like one above the common, and it serves me right. yes, ma'am, that was a beautiful text you showed me last night, i thought of it all day, and i'll try to believe that good will come out of it. i am sure you are very good to let me love the children! i'm certain sure miss salome knows that i'm in trouble, for she never fails to run and kiss me the minute she comes in sight; and she'll sit so quiet in my lap, the little dear, and look at me as much as to say, 'charlotte, i wish i could comfort you.' but it was all my own fault, ma'am, and i think i could feel as if i was punished right, so i knew poor tom was happy.' 'alas!' thought isabel, after hearing charlotte's reminiscences; 'how close i have lived to a world of which i was in utter ignorance! how little did we guess that, by the careless ease and inattention of our household, we were carrying about a firebrand, endangering not only poor walter, but doing fearful harm wherever we went!' chapter xxi. stepping westward. on darien's sands and deadly dew. rokeby. enterprise and speed both alike directed fitzjocelyn's course across the isthmus of panama, which in had newly become practicable for adventurous travellers. a canal conducted him as far as cruces, after which he had to push on through wild forest and swamp, under the escort of the muleteers who took charge of the various travellers who had arrived by the same packet. it was a very novel and amusing journey, even in the very discomforts and the strange characters with whom he was thrown, and more discontented travellers used to declare that don luis, as he told the muleteers to call him, always seemed to have the best success with the surly hotel-keepers, though when he resigned his acquisitions to any resolute grumbler, it used to be discovered that he had been putting up with the worst share. a place called guallaval seemed to be the most squalid and forlorn of all the stations--outside, an atmosphere of mosquitoes; inside, an atmosphere of brandy and smoke, the master an ague-stricken yankee, who sat with his bare feet high against the wall, and only deigned to jerk with his head to show in what quarter was the drink and food, and to 'guess that strangers must sleep on the ground, for first-comers had all the beds'--hammocks slung up in a barn, or unwholesome cupboards in the wall. at the dirty board sat several of the party first arrived, washing down tough, stringy beef with brandy. louis was about to take his place near a very black-bearded young man, who appeared more civilized than the rest, and who surprised him by at once making room for him, leaving the table with an air of courtesy; and when, in his halting spanish, he begged 'his grace' not to disturb himself, he was answered, in the same tongue, 'i have finished.' after the meal, such as it was, he wandered out of the hut, to escape the fumes and the company within; but he was presently accosted by the same stranger, who, touching his slouched panama hat, made him a speech in spanish, too long and fluent for his comprehension, at the same time offering him a cigar. he was civilly refusing, when, to his surprise, the man interrupted him in good english. 'these swamps breed fever, to a certainty. a cigar is the only protection; and even then there is nothing more dangerous than to be out at sunset.' 'thank you, i am much obliged,' said louis, turning towards the hut. 'have you been long out here?' 'the first time on the isthmus; but i know these sort of places. pray go in, my lord.' the title and the accent startled louis, and he exclaimed, 'you must be from the northwold country?' he drew back, and said bluntly, 'never mind me, only keep out of this pestiferous air.' but the abrupt surliness completed the recognition, and, seizing his hand, louis cried, 'tom! how are you?' you have turned into a thorough spaniard, and taken me in entirely.' 'only come in, my lord; i would never have spoken to you, but that i could not see you catching your death.' 'i am coming: but what's the matter? why avoid me, when you are the very man i most wished to see?' 'i'm done for,' said tom. 'the fellows up there have saddled their rogueries on me, and i'm off to the states. i--' 'what do you say? there, i am coming in. be satisfied, tom; i am come out with a commission from mr. dynevor, to see what can be arranged.' 'that's right,' cried tom, 'now poor miss ponsonby will have one friend.' 'your letter to charlotte brought me out--' began louis; but madison broke in with an expression of dismay and self-reproach at seeing him walking somewhat lame. 'it is only when i am tired, and not thinking of it,' said louis; 'do you know that old ash stick, tom, my constant friend? see, here are the names of all the places i have seen cut out on it.' 'i knew it, and you, the moment you sat down by the table,' said tom, in a tone of the utmost feeling, as louis took his arm. 'you are not one to forget.' 'and yet you were going to pass me without making yourself known.' 'a disgraced man has no business to be known,' said tom, low and hoarsely. 'no, i wish none of them ever to hear my name again; and but for the slip of the tongue that came so naturally, you should not, but i was drawn to you, and could not help it. i am glad i have seen you once more, my lord--' he would have left him at the entrance, but louis held him fast. 'you are the very man i depend on for unravelling the business. a man cannot be disgraced by any one but himself, and that is not the case with you, tom.' 'no, thank heaven,' said tom, fervently; 'i've kept my honesty, if i have lost all the rest.' little more was needed to bring madison to a seat on a wooden bench beside fitzjocelyn, answering his anxious inquiries. the first tidings were a shock--mr. ponsonby was dead. he had long been declining, and the last thing tom had heard from lima was, that he was dead; but of the daughter there was no intelligence; tom had been too much occupied with his own affairs to know anything of her. robson had returned from guayaquil some weeks previously, and in the settlement of accounts consequent on mr. ponsonby's death, tom had demurred giving up all the valuable property at the mines under his charge, until he should have direct orders from mr. dynevor or miss ponsonby. a hot dispute ensued, and robson became aware that tom was informed of his nefarious practices, and had threatened him violently; but a few hours after he had returned, affecting to have learnt from the new clerk, ford, that madison's peculations required to be winked at with equal forbearance, and giving him the alternative of sharing the spoil, or of being denounced to the authorities. he took a night to consider; and, as louis started at hearing of any deliberation, he said, sadly, 'you would not believe me, my lord, but i had almost a mind. they would take away my character, any way; and what advantage was my honesty without that? and as to hurting my employers, they would only take what i did not; and such as that is thought nothing of by very many. i'd got no faith in man nor woman left, and i'd got nothing but suspicion by my honesty; so why should i not give in to the way of the world, and try if it would serve me. but then, my lord, it struck me that if i had nothing else, i had still my god left.' louis grasped his hand. 'yes, i'm thankful that miss ponsonby asked me to read to the cornish miners,' said madison. 'one gets soon heathenish in a heathenish place; and but for that i don't believe i should ever have stood it out. but joseph's words, 'how can i do this great wickedness, and sin against god,' kept ringing in my ears like a peal of bells, all night, and by morning i sent in a note to mr. robson, to say no to what he proposed.' every other principle would have cracked in such a conflict, and louis looked up at tom with intense admiration, while the young man spoke on, not conscious that it had been noble, but ashamed of owning himself to have been brought to a pass where mere integrity had been an effort. he had gone back at once to his mines, in some hopes that the threats might yet prove nothing but blustering; but he had scarcely arrived there when an indian muleteer, to whom he had shown some kindness, brought him intelligence that la justida was in quest of him, but in difficulties how to get up the mountains. the poor indians guided his escape, conducting him down wonderful paths only known to themselves, hiding him in strange sequestered huts, and finally guiding him safely to callao, where he had secretly embarked on board an american vessel bound for panama. louis asked why he had fled, instead of taking his trial, and confuting robson; but he smiled, and said, my lord knew little of foreign justice; besides, ford was ready to bear any witness that robson might put into his mouth;--and his face grew dark. who was this ford? he could not tell; mr. robson had picked him up a few months back, when there was a want of a clerk; like loved like, he supposed, but it was no concern of his. would it be safe for him to venture back to peru, under fitzjocelyn's protection, and assist him in unmasking the treacherous robson! to this he readily agreed, catching at the hope of establishing his innocence; but declaring that he should then go at once to the states.--'what, not even go home to see charlotte? i've got a letter for you, when i can get at it.' tom made no answer, and fitzjocelyn feared that, in spite of all his good qualities, his fidelity in love had not equalled his fidelity to his employers. he could not understand his protege during the few days of their journey. he was a great acquisition to his comfort, with his knowledge of the language and people, and his affectionate deference. at home, where all were courtly, he had been almost rude; but here, in the land of ill manners, his attentions were so assiduous that louis was obliged to beg him to moderate them lest they should both be ridiculous. he had become a fine-looking young man, with a foreign air and dress agreeing well with his dark complexion; and he had acquired much practical ability and information. mountains, authority, and a good selection of books had been excellent educators; he was a very superior and intelligent person, and, without much polish, had laid aside his peasant rusticities, and developed some of the best qualities of a gentleman. but though open and warm-hearted on many points with his early friend, there was a gloom and moodiness about him, which louis could only explain by thinking that his unmerited disgrace preyed on him more than was quite manly. to this cause, likewise, louis at first attributed his never choosing to hear a word about charlotte; but as the distaste--nay almost sullenness, evoked by any allusion to her, became more apparent, louis began unwillingly to balance his suspicions between some fresh attachment, or unworthy shame at an engagement to a maidservant. the poor little damsel's sweet blushing face and shy courtesy, and all her long and steady faithfulness, made him feel indignant at such a suspicion, and he resolved to bring madison to some explanation; but he did not find the opportunity till after they had embarked at the beautiful little islet of toboga for callao. on board, he had time to find in his portmanteau the letter with which she had entrusted him, and, seeking madison on deck, gave it to him. he held it in his hand without opening it; but the sparkle in his dark eye did not betoken the bashfulness of fondness, and louis, taking a turn along the deck to watch him unperceived, saw him raise his hand as if to throw the poor letter overboard at once. a few long steps, and louis was beside him, exclaiming, 'what now, tom--is that the way you treat your letters?' 'the little hypocrite! i don't want no more of her false words,' muttered tom, returning, in his emotion, to his peasant's emphatic double negative. 'hypocrite! do you know how nobly and generously she has been helping mr. and mrs. frost through their straits? how faithfully--' 'i know better,' said tom, hoarsely; 'don't excuse her, my lord; you know little of what passes in your own kitchens.' 'too true, i fear, in many cases,' said louis; 'but i have seen this poor child in circumstances that make me feel sure that she is an admirable creature. what misunderstanding can have arisen?' 'no misunderstanding, my lord. i saw, as plain as i see you, her name and her writing in the book that she gave to ford--her copying out of his love-poems, my lord, in the blank pages,--if i had wanted any proof of what he alleged.' and he had nearly thrown the letter into the pacific; but louis caught his arm. 'did you ever read cymbeline, tom?' 'yes, to be sure i have,' growled tom, in surprise. 'then remember iachimo, and spare that letter. what did he tell you?' with some difficulty fitzjocelyn drew from madison that he had for some time been surprised at ford's knowledge of northwold and the neighbourhood; but had indulged in no suspicions till about the epoch of robson's return from guayaquil. chancing to be waiting in his fellow-clerk's room, he had looked at his books, and, always attracted by poetry as the rough fellow was, had lighted on a crimson watered-silk volume, in the first page of which he had, to his horror, found the name of charlotte arnold borne aloft by the two doves, and in the blank leaves several extremely flowery poems in her own handwriting. with ill-suppressed rage he had demanded an explanation, and had been met with provokingly indifferent inuendoes. the book was the gift of a young lady with whom ford had the pleasure to be acquainted; the little effusions were trifles of his own, inscribed by her own fair hands. oh, yes! he knew miss arnold very well--very pretty, very complaisant! ah! he was afraid there were some broken hearts at home! poor little thing! he should never forget how she took leave of him, after forcing upon him her little savings! he was sorry for her, too; but a man cannot have compassion on all the pretty girls he sees. 'and you could be deceived by such shallow coxcombry as this!' said louis. 'i tell you there was the book,' returned tom. 'well, tom, if mr. ford prove to be the ford i take him to be, i'll undertake that you shall see through him, and be heartily ashamed of yourself. give me back the letter,--you do not deserve to have it.' 'i don't want it,' said tom, moodily; 'she has not been as true to me as i've been to her, and if she isn't what i took her for, i do not care to hear of her again. i used to look at the mountain-tops, and think she was as pure as they; and that she should have been making herself the talk of a fellow like that, and writing so sweet to me all the time!--no, my lord, there's no excusing it; and 'twas her being gone after the rest that made it so bitter hard to me! if she had been true, i would have gone through fire and water to be an honest man worthy of her; but when i found how she had deceived me, it went hard with me to cut myself off from the wild mountain life that i'd got to love, and my poor niggers, that will hardly have so kind a master set over them.' 'you have stood the fiery ordeal well,' said louis; 'and i verily believe that you will soon find that it was only an ordeal.' the care of tom was a wholesome distraction to the suspense that became almost agony as louis approached peru, and beheld the gigantic summits of the more northern andes, which sunset revealed shining out white and fitfully, like the pilgrim's vision of the celestial city, although, owing to their extreme distance, even on a bright noonday, nothing was visible but clear deep-blue sky. they seemed to make him realize that the decisive moment was near, when he should tread the same soil with mary, and yet, as he stood silently watching those glorious heights, human hopes and cares seemed to shrink into nothing before the eternity and infinite greatness of which the depth and the height spoke. yet he remembereth the hairs of our heads, who weigheth the mountains in the balance, and counteth the isles as a very little thing. louis took comfort, but nerved himself for resignation; his prayer was more, that he might bear rightly whatever might be in store, than that he should succeed. he could hardly have made the latter petition with that submissiveness and reserve befitting all entreaty for blessings of this passing world. chapter xxii. rather sudden. o! would you hear of a spanish lady, how she woo'd an englishman? garments gay, as rich as may be, decked with jewels she had on. old ballad. the white buildings of callao looked out of the palm gardens, and, with throbbing heart, fitzjocelyn was set on shore, leaving madison on board until he should hear from him that evening or the next morning. hiring a calesa, he drove at once to lima, to the house of the late mr. ponsonby. the heavy folding gates admitted him to the archway, where various negroes were loitering; and as he inquired for the ladies, one of them raised a curtain, and admitted him into the large cool twilight hall, so dark that, with eyes dazzled by the full glare of day, he could hardly discern at the opposite end of the hall, where a little more light was admitted from one of the teatina windows, two figures seated at a table covered with ledgers and papers. as if dreaming, he followed his barefooted guide across the soft india matting, and heard his spanish announcement, that, might it please her grace, here was a senor from england. both rose; the one a well-dressed man, the other--it was the well-known action--'mary!' it was all that he had the power to say; he was hardly visible, but what tone was ever like that low, distinct, earnest voice? mary clasped her hands together as if in bewilderment. 'xavier should not--i will speak,' whispered her companion to her, and beginning, 'address yourself to me, sir!' but mary sprang forward, signing him back with her hand. 'it is my cousin, lord fitzjocelyn!' she said, as if breath and effort would serve no more, and she laid her hand in that of louis. 'mr. ward?' said louis, barely able to frame the question, yet striving for a manner that might leave no thorns behind. 'no; oh, no! mr. robson.' the very sound of the 'no' made his heart bound up again, and his hand closed fast on that which lay within it, while a bow passed between him and robson. 'and you are come?' as if it were too incredible. 'i told you i should,' he answered. 'i will leave you, miss ponsonby,' said robson; 'we will continue our little business when you are less agreeably engaged.' he began to gather the papers together, an action which suddenly recalled louis to the recollection of tom's cautions as to prudence and alertness, and he forced himself to a prompt tone of business. 'i hope to be able to be of use,' he said, turning to mary. 'mr. dynevor has given me a commission to look into his affairs,' and he put into robson's hands the letter written by james, and signed by oliver. 'thank you, lord fitzjocelyn, i shall be very happy to give any explanations you may wish,' said robson, measuring with his eye his youthful figure and features, and piling up the books. 'i should prefer having these left with me,' said louis; 'i have but little time before me, and if i could look them over to-night, i should be prepared for you to-morrow.' 'allow me. you would find it impossible to understand these entries. there is much to be set in order before they would be ready for the honour of your lordship's inspection.' 'i particularly wish to have them at once. you give me authority to act for you, miss ponsonby?' he added, looking at her, as she stood holding by the table, as one half awake. 'oh! yes, i put the whole into your hands,' she answered, mechanically, obeying his eye. 'allow me, my lord,' said robson, as fitzjocelyn laid the firm hand of detention on the heavy ledgers, and great leathern pocket-book. 'yes; we had better know exactly what you leave in my charge, mr. robson,' said louis, beginning to suspect that the clerk fancied that the weight and number of the books and bundles of bills might satisfy his unpractised eye, and that the essential was to be found in the pocket-book, on which he therefore retained a special hold; asking, as robson held out his hand for it, 'is this private property?' 'why, yes; no, it is and it is not,' said robson, looking at the lady, as though to judge whether she were attending. 'i only brought it here that miss ponsonby might have before her--always a satisfaction to a lady, you know, sir--though miss ponsonby's superior talents for business quite enable her to comprehend. but our affairs are not what i could wish. the equatorial bubble was most unfortunate, and that unfortunate young man, who has absconded after a long course of embezzlement, has carried off much valuable property. i was laying the case before miss ponsonby, and showing her what amount had been fortunately secured.' 'what is in the pocket-book?' asked louis of mary; and, though she was apparently conscious of nothing around her, he obtained a direct reply. 'the vouchers for the shares.' 'in the equatorial. unlucky speculation--so much waste paper,' interrupted robson. 'your lordship had better let me clear away the trash, which will only complicate the matter, and distract your understanding.' 'thank you; as you say there has been fraud, i should be better satisfied to be able to tell mr. dynevor that the papers have never been out of my hands. i will call on you early to-morrow.' mr. robson waited to make many inquiries for mr. dynevor's health, and to offer every attention to lord fitzjocelyn, to introduce him to the consul, to find apartments for him, &c.; but at last he took leave, and louis was free to turn to the motionless mary, who had done nothing all this time but follow him with her eyes. all his doubts had returned, and, in the crisis of his fate, he stood irresolute, daring neither to speak nor ask, lest feelings should be betrayed which might poison her happiness. 'is it you?' were her first words, as though slowly awakening. 'it is i, come to be whatever you will let me be,' he answered, as best he could. 'oh, louis!' she said, 'this is too much!' and she hid her face in her hands. 'tell me--one word, mary, and i shall know what to do, and will not harass nor grieve you.' 'grieve me! you!' exclaimed mary, in an inexpressibly incredulous tone. 'enough! it is as it was before!' and he drew her into his arms, as unresistingly as five years ago, and his voice sank with intense thankfulness, as he said, 'my mary--my mary! has he not brought it to pass?' the tears came dropping from her eyes, and then she could speak. 'louis, my dear father withdrew his anger. he gave full consent and blessing, if you still--' 'then nothing is wanting--all is peace!' said louis. 'you know how you are longed for at home--' 'that you should have come--come all this way! that lord ormersfield should have spared you!' exclaimed mary, breaking out into happy little sentences, as her tears relieved her. 'oh, how far off all my distress and perplexity seem now! how foolish to have been so unhappy when there you were close by! but you must see dona rosita,' cried she, recollecting herself, after an interval, 'i must tell her.' mary hurried into another room by a glass door, and louis heard her speaking spanish, and a languid reply; then returning, she beckoned to him to advance, whispering, 'don't be surprised, these are the usual habits. we can talk before her, she never follows english.' he could at first see no one, but presently was aware of a grass hammock swung from the richly-carved beams, and in it something white; then of a large pair of black eyes gazing full at him with a liquid soft stare. he made his bow, and summoned his best spanish, and she made an answer which he understood, by the help of mary, to be a welcome; then she smiled and signed with her head towards him and mary, and said what mary only interpreted by colouring, as did louis, for such looks and smiles were of all languages. then it was explained that only as a relation did she admit his excellency el visconde, before her evening toilette in her duelos was made--mary would take care of him. and dismissing them with a graceful bend of her head, she returned to her doze and her cigarito. mary conducted louis to the cool, shaded, arched doorway, opening under the rich marble cloister of the court-yard, where a fountain made a delicious bubbling in the centre. she clapped her hands--a little negro girl appeared, to whom she gave an order, and presently two more negroes came in, bringing magnificent oranges and pomegranates, and iced wine and water, on a silver tray, covered with a richly-embroidered napkin. he would have felt himself in the alhambra, if he could have felt anything but that he was beside mary. 'sit down, sit down, you have proved yourself mary enough already by waiting on me. i want to look at you, and to hear you. you are not altered!' he cried joyfully, as he drew her into the full light. 'you have your own eyes, and that's your very smile! only grown handsomer. that's all!' she really was. she was a woman to be handsomer at twenty-seven than at twenty-one; and with the glow of unexpected bliss over her fine countenance, it did not need a lover's eye to behold her as something better than beautiful. and for her! who shall tell the marvel of scarcely-credited joy, every time she heard the music of his softly-dropped distinct words, and looked up at the beloved face, perhaps a little less fair, with rather less of the boyish delicacy of feature, but more noble, more defined--as soft and sweet as ever, but with all the indecision gone; all that expression that had at times seemed like weakness. he was not the mere lad she had loved with a guiding motherly love, but a man to respect and rely on--ready, collected, dealing with easy coolness with the person who had domineered over that house for years. he was all, and more than all, her fondest fancy had framed; and coming to her aid at the moment of her utmost difficulty, brought to her by the love which she had not dared to confide in nor encourage! no wonder that she feared to move, lest she should find herself awakened from a dream too happy to last. 'but oh, louis,' said she, as if it were almost a pledge of reality to recollect a vexation, 'i must tell you first, for it will grieve you, and we did not take pains enough to keep him out of temptation. that unhappy runaway clerk--' 'is safe at callao,' said louis, 'and is to help me to release you from the meshes they have woven round you. save for the warning he sent home, i could never have shown cause for coming to you, mary, while you would not summon me. that was too bad, you know, since you had the consent.' 'that was only just at last,' faltered mary. 'it was so kind of him, for i had disappointed him so much!' 'what? i know, mary; his letters kept me in a perpetual fright for the last year; and not one did you write to poor little clara to comfort us.' 'it was not right in me,' said mary; 'but i thought it might be so much better for you if you were never put in mind of me. i beg your pardon, louis.' 'we should have trusted each other better, if people would have let us alone,' said louis. 'in fact, it was trust after all. it always came back again, if it were scared away for a moment.' 'till i began to doubt if i were doing what was kind by you,' said mary. 'oh, that was the most distressing time of all; i thought if i were out of the way, you might begin to be happy, and i tried to leave off thinking about you.' 'am i to thank you?' 'i _could_ not,--that is the truth of it,' said mary. 'i was able to keep you out of my mind enough, i hope, for it not to be wrong; but as to putting any one else there--i was forced at last to tell poor papa so, when he wanted to send for mr. ward; and then--he said that if you had been as constant, he supposed it must be, and he hoped we should be happy; and he said you had been a pet of my mother, and that lord ormersfield had been a real friend to her. it was so kind of him, for i know it would have been the greatest relief to his mind to leave things in mr. ward's charge.' mary had been so much obliged to be continually mentioning her father, that, though the loss was still very recent, she was habituated to speak of him with firmness; and it was an extreme satisfaction to tell all her sorrows, and all the little softening incidents, to louis. mr. ponsonby had shown much affection and gratitude to her during the few closing days of his illness, and had manifested some tokens of repentance for his past life; but there had been so much pain and torpor, that there had been little space for reflection, and the long previous decline had not been accepted as a warning. perhaps the intensity of mary's prayers had been returned into her bosom, in the strong blindness of filial love; for as she dwelt fondly on the few signs of better things, the narration fell mournfully on louis's ears, as that of an unhopeful deathbed. an exceeding unwillingness to contemplate death, had prevented mr. ponsonby from making a new will. by one made many years back, he had left the whole of his property, without exception, to his daughter, his first wife having been provided for by her marriage settlements, and now, with characteristic indolence and selfishness, he had deferred till too late the securing any provision for his limenian wife; and only when he found himself dying, had he said to mary, 'you will take care to provide for poor rosita!' so mary had found herself heiress to a share in the miserably-involved affairs of dynevor and ponsonby; and as soon as she could think of the future at all, had formed the design of settling rosita in a convent with a pension, and going herself to england. but rosita was not easily to be induced to give up her gaieties for a convent life; and, moreover, there was absolutely such a want of ready money, that mary did not see how to get home, though robson assured her there was quite enough to live upon as they were at present. nor was it possible to dispose of the mines and other property without mr. dynevor's consent, and he might not be in a state to give it. the next stroke was young madison's sudden disappearance, and the declaration by robson that he had carried off a great deal of property--a disappointment to her even greater than the loss. robson was profuse in compliments and attentions, but continually deferred the statement of affairs that he had promised; and mary could not bear to accept the help of mr. ward, the only person at hand able and willing to assist her. she had at last grown desperate, and, resolved to have something positive to write to mr. dynevor, as well as not to go on living without knowing her means, she had insisted on robson bringing his accounts. she knew just enough to be dissatisfied with his vague statements; and the more he praised her sagacity, the more she saw that he was taking advantage of her ignorance, which he presumed to be far greater than it really was. at the very moment when she was most persuaded of his treachery, and felt the most lonely and desolate--when he was talking fluently, and she was seeking to rally her spirits, and discover the path of right judgment, where the welfare of so many was concerned--it was then that fitzjocelyn's voice was in her ear. she had scarcely explained to louis why his coming was, if possible, doubly and trebly welcome, when the negro admitted another guest, whom rosita received much as she had done his predecessor, only with less curiosity. mary rose, blushing deeply, and crossing the room held out her hand, and said simply, but with something of apology, 'mr. ward, this is lord fitzjocelyn.' mr. ward raised his eyes to her face for one moment. 'i understand,' he said, in a low, not quite steady voice. 'it is well. will you present me?' he added, as though collecting himself like a brave man after a blow. 'here is my kindest friend,' she said, as she conducted him to louis, and they shook hands in the very manner she wished to see, learning mutual esteem from her tone and each other's aspect. 'i am sorry to have intruded,' said mr. ward. 'i came in the hope that you might find some means of making me of use to you; and, perhaps, i may yet be of some assistance to lord fitzjocelyn.' he enforced the proposal with so much cordiality, and showed so plainly that it would be his chief pleasure and consolation to do anything for miss ponsonby, that they did not scruple to take him into their counsels; and mary looked on with exulting wonder at the ability and readiness displayed by louis in the discussion of business details, even with a man whose profession they were. in remote space, almost beyond memory, save to enhance the present joy of full reliance, was the old uncomfortable sense of his leaning too much upon her. to have him acting and thinking for her, and with one touch carrying off her whole burthen of care, was comfort and gladness beyond what she had even devised in imagination. the only drawback, besides compassion for mr. ward, was the shock of hearing of the extent of the treachery of robson, in whom her father had trusted so implicitly, and to whom he had shown so much favour. they agreed that they would go to the consul, and concert measures; mary only begging that robson might not be hardly dealt with, and they went away, leaving her to her overwhelming happiness, which began to become incredible as soon as louis was out of sight. by-and-by, he came back to the evening meal, when rosita appeared, with her uncovered hair in two long, unadorned tresses, plaited, and hanging down on each shoulder, and arrayed in black robes, which, by their weight and coarseness, recalled eastern fashions of mourning, which spain derived from the moors. she attempted a little spanish talk with el visconde, much to his inconvenience, though he was too joyous not to be doubly good-natured, especially as he pitied her, and regarded her as a very perplexing charge newly laid on him. he had time to tell mary that he was to sleep at the consul's, whence he had sent a note and a messenger to fetch tom madison, since it appeared that the prosecution, the rumour of which had frightened the poor fellow away, had not been actually set on foot before he decamped; and even if it had been, there were many under worse imputations at large in the peruvian republic. fitzjocelyn had appointed that robson should call on him early in the morning, and, if he failed to detect him, intended to confront him with madison before the consul, when there could be little doubt that his guilt would be brought home to him. he found that the consul and mr. ward had both conceived a bad opinion of robson, and had wondered at the amount of confidence reposed in him; whereas madison had been remarked as a young man of more than average intelligence and steadiness, entirely free from that vice of gambling which was the bane of all classes in spanish south america. mary sighed as she heard louis speak so innocently of 'all classes'--it was too true, as he would find to his cost, when he came to look into their affairs, and learn what rosita had squandered. next, he asked about the other clerk, ford, of whom mary knew very little, except that she had heard robson mention to her father, when preparing to set out for guayaquil, that in the consequent press of business he had engaged a new assistant, who had come from rio as servant to a traveller. she had sometimes heard robson speak in praise of his acquisition, and exalt him above madison; and once or twice she had seen him, and fancied him like some one whom she had known somewhere, but she had for many months seldom left her father's room, and knew little of what passed beyond it. louis took his leave early, as he had to examine his prize, the pocket-book, and make up his case before confronting robson; and he told mary that he should refrain from seeing her on the morrow until the 'tug of war should be over.' 'mr. ward promises to come to help me,' he added. 'really, mary, i never saw a more generous or considerate person. i am constantly on the point of begging his pardon.' 'i must thank him some way or other,' said mary; 'his forbearance has been beautiful. i only wish he would have believed me, for i always told him the plain truth. it would have spared him something; but nobody would trust my account of you.' the morning came, and with it madison; but patient as fitzjocelyn usually was, he was extremely annoyed at finding his precious time wasted by robson's delay in keeping his appointment. after allowing for differing clocks, for tropical habits, and every other imaginable excuse for unpunctuality, he decided that there must have been some mistake, and set off to call at the counting-house. a black porter opened the door, and he stepped forward into the inner room, where, leaning lazily back before a desk, smoking a cigar over his newspaper, arrayed in a loose white jacket, with open throat and slippered feet, reposed a gentleman, much transformed from the spruce butler, but not difficult of recognition. he started to his feet with equal alacrity and consternation, and bowed, not committing himself until he should see whether he were actually known to his lordship. fitzjocelyn was in too great haste to pause on this matter, and quickly acknowledging the salutation, as if that of a stranger, demanded where mr. robson was. in genuine surprise and alarm, ford exclaimed that he had not seen him; he thought he was gone to meet his lordship at the consular residence. no! could he be at his own house? it was close by, and the question was asked, but the senor robson had gone out in the very early morning. ford looked paler and paler, and while louis said he would go and inquire for him at miss ponsonby's, offered to go down to the consul's to see if he had arrived there in the meantime. mary came to meet louis in the sala, saying that she was afraid that they had not shown sufficient consideration for poor dona rosita, who really had feeling; she had gone early to her convent, and had not yet returned, though she had been absent two hours. louis had but just explained his perplexity and vexation, when the old negro xavier came in with looks of alarm, begging to know whether la senora were come in, and excusing himself for having lost sight of her. she had not gone to the convent, but to the cathedral; and he, kneeling in the crowded nave while she passed on to one of the side chapels, had not seen her again, and, after waiting far beyond the usual duration of her devotions, had supposed that she had gone home unattended. as he finished his story, there was a summons to lord fitzjocelyn to speak to mr. ford, and on mary's desiring that he should be admitted, he came forward, exclaiming, 'my lord, he has not been at the consul's! i beg to state that he has the keys of all the valuables at the office; nothing is in my charge.' louis turned to consult mary; but, as if a horrible idea had come over her, she was already speeding through the door of the quadra, and appearing there again in a few seconds, she beckoned him, with a countenance of intense dismay, and whispered under her breath, 'louis! louis! her jewels are gone! poor thing! poor thing! what will become of her?' mary had more reasons for her frightful suspicion than she would detain him to hear. robson, always polite, had been especially so to the young limenian; she had been much left to his society, and mary had more than once fancied that they were more at ease in her own absence. she was certain that the saya y manto had been frequently employed to enable rosita to enjoy dissipation, when her husband's condition would have rendered her public appearance impossible; and at the opera or on the alameda, robson might have had every opportunity of paying her attention, and forwarding her amusements. there could be no doubt that she had understood more of their plans than had been supposed, had warned him, and shared his flight. pursuit, capture, and a nunnery would be far greater kindness to the poor childish being, than leaving her to the mercy of a runaway swindler; and all measures were promptly taken, ford throwing himself into the chase with greater ardour and indignation than even madison; for he had trusted to robson's grand professions that he could easily throw dust into the young lord's inexperienced eyes, come off with flying colours, and protect his subordinate. if he had changed his mind since the senora's warning, he had not thought it necessary to inform his confederate; and ford was not only furious at the desertion, but anxious to make a merit of his zeal, and encouraged by having as yet seen no sign that he was recognised. regardless of heat and fatigue, fitzjocelyn, mr. ward, and the two clerks, were indefatigable throughout the day, but it was not till near sunset that a spanish agent of mr. ward's brought back evidence that a limenian lady and english gentleman had been hastily married by a village padre in the early morning, and madison shortly after came from callao, having traced such a pair to an american vessel, which was long since out of harbour. it was well that the pocket-book had been saved, for it contained securities to a large amount, which robson, after showing to mary to satisfy her, doubtless intended to keep in hand for such a start as the present. without it, he had contrived, as madison knew, to secure quite sufficient to remove any anxieties as to the senora rosita owning a fair share of her late husband's property. the day of terrible anxiety made it a relief to mary to have any certainty, though she was infinitely shocked at the tidings, which louis conveyed to her at once. mrs. willis, whom mr. ward had sent to be her companion, went to her brother in the outer room, and left the lovers alone in the quadra, where mary could freely express her grief and disappointment, her sorrow for the insult to her father, and her apprehensions for the poor fugitive herself, whom she loved enough to lament for exceedingly, and to recall every excuse that could be found in a wretched education, a miserable state of society, a childish mind, and religion presented to her in a form that did nothing to make it less childish. mary's first recovery from the blow was shown by her remembering how fatigued and heated louis must be, and when she had given orders for refreshment for him, and had thus resumed something of her ordinary frame, he sat looking at her anxiously, and presently said, 'and what will you do next, mary!' 'i cannot tell. mrs. willis and mrs. ---- have both been asking me very kindly to come to them, but i cannot let mrs. willis stay with me away from her children. yet it seems hard on mr. ward that you should be coming to me there. i suppose i must go to mrs. ----; but i waited to consult you. i had rather be at home, if it were right.' 'it may easily be made right,' quietly said louis. 'how!' asked mary. 'i find,' he continued, 'that the whole affair may be easily settled, if you will give me authority.' 'i thought i had given you authority to act in my name.' 'it might be simplified.' 'shall i sign my name!' 'yes--once--to make mine yours. if your claims are mine, i can take much better care of the dynevor interest.' mary rested her cheek on her hand, and looked at him with her grave steady face, not very much discomposed after the first glimpse of his meaning. 'will you, mary?' 'you know i will,' she said. 'then there is no time to be lost. let it be to-morrow. yes'--going on in the quiet deliberate tone that made it so difficult to interrupt him--'then i could, in my own person, negotiate for the sale of the mines. i find there is an offer that robson kept secret. i could wind up the accounts, see what can be saved for the northwold people, and take you safe home by the end of a fortnight.' 'oh, louis!' cried mary, almost sobbing, 'this will not do. i cannot entangle you in our ruinous affairs.' 'insufficient objections are consent,' said louis, smiling. 'do you trust me, mary?' 'it is of no use to ask.' 'you think i am not to be trusted with affairs that have become my own! i believe i am, mary. you know i must do my utmost for the dynevors; and i assure you i see my way. i have no reasonable doubt of clearing off all future liabilities. you mean to let me arrange?' 'yes, but--' 'then why not obviate all awkward situations at once?' 'my father! you should not ask it, louis.' 'i would not hasten you, but for the sake of my own father, mary. he is growing old, and i could not have left him for anything but the hope of bringing him his own chosen daughter. i want you to help me take care of him, and we must not leave him alone to the long evenings and cold winds.' mary was yielding--'i must not keep you from him,' she said, 'but to-morrow--a sunday, too--' 'ah! mary, do you want gaiety! no, if we cannot have it in a holy place, let it at least have the consecration of the day--let us have fifty-two wedding days a year instead of one. indeed, i would not press you, but that i could take care of you so much better, and it is not as if our acquaintance had not begun--how long ago--twenty-seven years, i think?' 'settle it as you like,' she managed to say, with a great flood of tears-but what soft bright tears! 'i trust you.' he saw she wanted solitude; he only stayed for a few words of earnest thanks, and the assurance that secrecy and quietness would be best assured by speed. 'i will come back,' he said, 'when i have seen to the arrangement. and there is one thing i must do first, one poor fellow who must not be left in suspense any longer.' tired as he ought to have been, he lightly crossed the sala to the room appropriated to business, where he had desired the two clerks to wait for him, and where tom madison stood against the wall, with folded arms, while ford lounged in a disengaged attitude on a chair, but rose alert and respectful at his appearance. louis asked one or two necessary questions on the custody of the office for the night and ensuing day, and ford made repeated assurances that nothing would be found missing that had been left in his charge. 'i believe you, mr. delaford,' said fitzjocelyn, quietly. 'i do not think the lower species of fraud was ever in your style.' delaford tried to open his lips, but visibly shook. louis answered, what he had not yet said, 'i do not intend to expose you. i think you had what excuse neglect can give, and unless i should be called on conscientiously to speak to your character, i shall leave you to make a new one.' delaford began to stammer out thanks, and promises of explaining the whole of robson's peculations (little he knew the whole of them). 'there is one earnest of your return to sincerity that i require,' said louis. 'explain at once the degree of your acquaintance with charlotte arnold.' tom madison still stood moody--affecting not to hear. 'oh! my lord, i did not know that you were interested in that young person.' 'i am interested where innocence has been maligned,' said louis, sternly. 'i am sure, my lord, nothing has ever passed at which the most particular need take umbrage,' exclaimed delaford. 'if mr. madison will recollect, i mentioned nothing as the most fastidious need--' mr. madison would not hear. 'you only inferred that she had not been insensible to your attractions?' 'why, indeed, my lord, i flatter myself that in my time i have had the happiness of not being unpleasing to the sex,' said delaford, with a sigh and a simper. 'it is a mortifying question, but you owe it to the young woman to answer, whether she gave you any encouragement.' 'no, my lord. i must confess that she always spoke of a previous attachment, and dashed my earlier hopes to the ground.' 'and the book of poems! how came that to be in your possession? delaford confessed that it had been a little tribute, returned upon his hands by the young lady in question. 'one question more, mr. delaford: what was the fact as to her lending you means for your voyage?' delaford was not easily brought to confession on this head; but he did at length own that he had gone in great distress to charlotte, and had appealed to her bounty; but he distinctly acknowledged that it was not in the capacity of suitor; in fact, as he ended by declaring, he had the pleasure of saying that there was no young person whom he esteemed more highly than miss arnold, and that she had never given him the least encouragement, such as need distress the happy man who had secured her affections. the happy man did not move till delaford had left the room, when louis walked up to him and said, 'i can further tell you, of my own knowledge, that that good girl refused large wages, and a lady's-maid's place, partly because she would not live in the same house with that man; and she has worked on with a faithful affection and constancy, beyond all praise, as the single servant to mr. and mrs. frost in their distress.' 'don't talk to me, my lord,' cried tom, turning away; 'i'm the most unhappy man in the world!' 'i did not ask you to shake hands with delaford to-night. you will another day. he is only a vain coxcomb, and treated you to a little of his conceit, with, perhaps, a taste of spite at a successful rival; but he has only shown you what a possession you have in her.' 'you don't know what i've done, my lord. i have written her a letter that she can never forgive!' 'you don't know what i've done, tom. i posted a letter by the mail just starting from callao--a letter to mr. frost, with a hint to charlotte that you were labouring under a little delusion; i knew, from your first narration, that ford could be no other than my old friend, shorn of his beams.' 'that letter--' still muttered tom. 'she'll forgive, and like you all the better for having afforded her a catastrophe, tom. you may write by the next mail; unless, what is better still, you come home with us by the same, and speak for yourself. if i am your master then, i'll give you the holiday. yes, tom, it was important to me to clear up your countenance, for i want to bespeak your services to-morrow as my friend.' 'my lord!' cried tom, aghast. 'if you do require any such service, though i should not have thought it, there are many nearer your own rank, officers and gentlemen fitter for an affair of the kind. i never knew anything about fire-arms, since i gave up poaching.' 'indeed, tom, i am very far from intending to dispense with your services. i want you to guide me to procure the required weapon!' 'surely,' said tom, with a deep, reluctant sigh, 'you never crossed the isthmus without one?' 'yes, indeed, i did; i never saw the party there whom i should have liked to challenge in this way. why, tom, did you really think i had come out to peru to fight a duel on a sunday morning?' 'that's what comes of living in this sort of place. duels are meat and drink to the people here,' said tom, ashamed and relieved, 'and there have been those who told me it was all that was wanting to make me a gentleman. but in what capacity am i to serve you, my lord!' 'in the first place, tell me where i may procure a wedding-ring! yes, tom, that's the weapon! you've no objection to being my friend in that capacity!' tom's astonished delight went beyond the bounds of expression, and therefore was compressed into an almost grim 'whatever you will, my lord;' but two hot tears were gushing from his eyes. he dashed them away, and added, 'what a fool i am! you'll believe me, my lord, though i can't speak, that, though there may be many nearer and more your equals, there's none on earth more glad and happy to see you so, than myself.' 'i believe it, indeed, tom; shake hands, to wish me joy; i am right glad to have one here from ormersfield, to make it more home-like. for, though it is a hurry at last, you can guess what she has been to me from the first. knowing her thoroughly has been one of the many, many benefits that ferny dell conferred on me.' there was no time for more than to enjoin silence. louis had to hurry to the consul and the chaplain, and to overcome their astonishment. on the other hand, mary was, as usual, seeking and recovering the balance of her startled spirits in her own chamber. she saw the matter wisely and simply, and had full confidence in louis, with such a yearning for his protection that, it may be, the strange suddenness of the proposal cost her the less. she came forth and announced her intention to mrs. willis, who was inclined to resent it as derogatory to the dignity of womanhood, and the privileges of a bride; but mary smiled and answered that, 'when he had taken so much trouble for her, she could not give him any more by things of that sort. she must be as little in his way as possible.' and mrs. willis sighed, and pitied her, but was glad that she should be off her poor brother's mind as soon as might be, and was glad to resign her task of chaperoning her. only three persons beyond the consul's family knew what was about to happen, when miss ponsonby, in her deep mourning, attended the morning service in the large hall at the consul-house; and such eyes as were directed towards the handsome stranger, only gazed at the unwonted spectacle of an english nobleman, not with the more eager curiosity that would have been attached to him had all been known. mr. ward lingered a few moments, and begged for one word with miss ponsonby. she could not but comply, and came to meet him, blushing, but composed, in that simple, frank kindness which only wished to soften the disappointment. 'mary,' he said, 'i am not come to harass you. i have done so long enough, and i would not have tormented you, but on that one head i did not do justice to your judgment. i see now how vain my hope was. i am glad to have met him--i am glad to know how worthy of you he is, and to have seen you in such hands.' 'you are very kind to speak so,' said mary. 'yes, mary, i could not have borne to part with you, if i were not convinced that he is a good man as well as an able man. i might have known that you would not choose otherwise. i shall see your name among the great ladies of the land. i came to say something else. i wished to thank you for the many happy hours i have spent with you, though you never for a moment trifled with me. it was i who deceived myself. good-bye, mary. perhaps you will write to my sister, and let her know of your arrival.' 'i will write to you, if you please,' said mary. 'it will be a great pleasure,' he said, earnestly. 'and will you let me be of any use in my power to you and lord fitzjocelyn?' 'indeed, we shall be most grateful. you have been a most kind and forbearing friend. i should like to know that you were happy,' said mary, lingering, and hardly knowing what to say. 'my little nieces are fond enough of their uncle. my sister wants me. in short, you need not vex yourself about me. some day, when i am an old man, i may come and bring you news of lima. meanwhile, you will sometimes wear this bracelet, and remember that you have an old friend. i shall call on lord fitzjocelyn at the office to-morrow, and see if we can find any clue to robson's retreat. good-bye, and blessings on you, mary.' mary rejoined louis, to speak to him of the kind and noble man who so generously and resolutely bore the wreck of his hopes. they walked up and down together in the cool shade of the trees in the consul's garden, and they spoke of the unselfishness which seemed to take away the smart from the wound of disappointment. they spoke sometimes, but the day was for the most part spent in the sweetness of pensive, happy silence, musing with full hearts over this crowning of their long deferred hopes, and not without prayer that the same protecting hand might guide them, as they should walk together through life. by-and-by mary disappeared. she would perhaps have preferred her ordinary dress--but the bridal white seemed to her to be due both to louis and to the solemn rite and mystery; and when the time came, she met him, in her plain white muslin and long veil, confined by a few sprays of real orange flowers, beneath which her calmly noble face was seen, simple and collected as ever, forgetting in her earnestness all adjuncts that might have been embarrassing or distressing. the large hall was darkening with twilight, and the flowers and branches that decked it showed gracefully in the subdued light. prayer and praise had lately echoed there, and louis and mary could feel that he was with them who blessed the pair at cana, far distant as they were from their own church--their own home. yes, the church, their mother, their home, was with them in her sacred ritual and her choice blessings, and their consciences were free from self-will, or self-pleasing, such as would have put far from them the precious gifts promised in the name of their lord. when it was over, and they first raised their eyes to one another's faces, each beheld in the other a look of entire thankful content, not the less perfect because it was grave and peaceful. 'i think mamma would be quite happy,' said mary. chapter xxiii. the marvel of peru. turn, angelina, ever dear, my charmer, turn to see thy own, thy long-lost edwin here, restored to love and thee, goldsmith. lord ormersfield sat alone in the library, where the fire burnt more for the sake of cheerfulness than of warmth. his eyes were weary with reading, and, taking off his spectacles, he turned his chair away from the table, and sat gazing into the fire, giving audience to dreamy thoughts. he missed the sunny face ever prompt to watch his moods, and find or make time for the cheerful word or desultory chat which often broke and refreshed drier occupation. he remembered when he had hardly tolerated the glass of flowers, the scraps of drawing, the unbusinesslike books at his son's end of the table, but the room looked dull without them now, and he was ready to own the value of the grace and finish of life, hindering the daily task from absorbing the whole man, as had been the case with himself in middle life. somewhat of the calm of old age had begun to fall on the earl, and he had latterly been wont to think more deeply. these trifles could not have spoken to his heart save for their connexion with his son, and even louis's tastes would have worn out with habit, had it not been for the radiance permanent in his own mind, namely, the thankful, adoring love that finds the true brightness in "whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report." this spirit it was which had kept his heart fresh, his spirit youthful, and changed constitutional versatility into a power of hearty adaptation to the least congenial tastes. gentleness, affection, humility, and refinement were in his nature. mrs. frost had trained these qualities into the beauty of christian graces; and mrs. ponsonby and her daughter had taught him to bring his high principles to supply that which was wanting. indolence of will, facility of disposition, unsteadiness of purpose, inconsiderate impulses without perseverance, had all betokened an inherent weakness, which the earl's cure, ambition, had been powerless to remedy; but duty had been effectual in drawing strength out of what had been feeble by nature. it was religion that had made a man of louis; and his father saw and owned it, no longer as merely the woman's guide in life and the man's resource chiefly in death, to be respected and moderately attended to, but never so as to interfere unreasonably with the world. no; he had learnt that it was the only sure and sound moving-spring: he knew it as his son's strengthening, brightening thread of life; and began to perceive that his own course might have been less gloomy and less harsh, devoid of such dark strands, had he held the right clue. the contrast brought back some lines which, without marking, he had heard louis and his aunt reading together, and, albeit little wont to look into his son's books, he was so much haunted by the rhythm that he rose and searched them out-- yea, mark him well, ye cold and proud, bewildered in a heartless crowd, starting and turning pale at rumour's angry din: no storm can now assail the charm he bears within. rejoicing still, and doing good, and with the thought of god imbued, no glare of high estate, no gloom of woe or want, the radiance may abate, where heaven delights to haunt. the description went to his heart, so well did it agree with louis. yet there was a sad feeling, for the south american mail had been some days due, and he had not heard of his son since he was about to land at callao. five months was a long absence; and as the chances of failure, disappointment, climate, disease, and shipwreck arose before him, he marvelled at himself for having consented to peril his sole treasure, and even fancied that a solitary, childless old age might be the penalty in store for having waited to be led heavenward by his son. it was seldom that the earl gave way, and, reproaching himself for his weakness, he roused himself and rang the bell for better light. there was a movement in the house, and for some moments the bell was not answered; but presently the door was opened. 'bring the other lamp.' 'yes, my lord.' the slow, soft voice did not belong to frampton. he started up, and there stood louis! 'my dear father,' he said; and lord ormersfield sprang up, grasped his son's hand, and laid the other hand on his shoulder, but durst ask no questions, for the speedy return seemed to bespeak that he had failed. he looked in louis's face, and saw it full of emotion, with dew on the eyelashes; but suddenly a sweet archness gleamed in the eyes, and he steadied his trembling lip to say with a smile, 'lady fitzjocelyn!' and that very moment mary was in lord ormersfield's arms. 'my children! my dear children, happy at last! god bless you! this is all i ever wished!' he held a hand of each, and looked from one to the other till mary turned away to hide her tears of joy; and louis, with his eyes still moist, began talking, to give her time to recover. 'you will forgive our not writing? we landed this morning, found the last mail was not come in, and could not help coming on. we knew you would be anxious, and thought you would not mind the suddenness.' 'no, indeed,' said his father; 'if all surprises were like this one! but you are the loser, mary. i am afraid this is not the reception for a bride!' 'mary has dispensed with much that belongs to a bride,' said louis. 'see here!' and, seizing her hand, he began pulling off her glove, till she did it for him; 'did you ever see such a wedding-ring?--a great, solid thing of peruvian gold, with a spanish posy inside!' 'i like it,' said mary; 'it shows--' 'what you are worth, eh, mary? well! here we are! it seems real at last! and you, father, have you been well?' 'yes, well indeed, now i have you both! but how came you so quickly? you never brought her across the isthmus?' 'indeed i did. she would come. it was her first act of rebellion; for we were not going to let you meet the frosts alone--the october frosts, i mean; i hope the dynevor frosts are all right?' frampton was here seen at the open door, doubtful whether to intrude; yet, impelled by necessity, as he caught fitzjocelyn's eye, he, hesitating, said-- 'my lord, the spanish gentleman!' 'the greatest triumph of my life!' cried louis, actually clapping his hands together with ecstacy, to the butler's extreme astonishment. 'why, frampton, don't you know him?' 'my lord!!!' 'let me introduce you, then, to--mr. thomas madison!' and, as frampton still stood perplexed, looking at the fine, foreign-looking man, who was keeping in the background, busied with the luggage, louis continued, 'you cannot credit such a marvel of peru!' 'young madison, my lord!' repeated frampton, slowly coming to his senses. 'no other. he has done lady fitzjocelyn and all of us infinite service,' continued louis, quickly, to prevent madison's reception from receiving a fall in proportion to the grandeur of the first impression. 'he is to stay here for a short time before going to his appointment at bristol, in mr. ward's counting-house, with a salary of pounds. i shall be much obliged if you will make him welcome.' and, returning in his glee to the library, louis found mary explaining how 'a gentleman at lima,' who had long professed to covet so good a clerk as madison, had, on the break-up of their firm, offered him a confidential post, for which he was well fitted by his knowledge of the spanish language and the south american trade, to receive the cargoes sent home. 'in truth,' said louis, coming in, 'i had reason to be proud of my pupil. we could never have found our way through the accounts without him; and the old cornish man, whom we sent for from the mines, gave testimony to him such as will do mr. holdsworth's heart good. but nothing is equal to frampton's taking him for a spanish don!' 'and poor delaford's witness was quite as much to his credit,' said mary. 'ay! if delaford had not been equally willing to depose against him when he was the apparent catiline!' said louis. 'poor delaford! he was very useful to us, after all; and i should be glad to know he had a better fate than going off to the diggings with a year's salary in his pocket!' (footnote. a recent writer relates that he found the near relation of a nobleman gaining a scanty livelihood as shoe-black at the diggings. query. might not this be mr. delaford?) 'then everything is settled?' asked his father. 'almost everything. the mines are off our hands, and the transfer will be completed as soon as oliver has sent his signature; and there's quite enough saved to make them very comfortable. you have told me nothing of them yet?' 'they are all very well. james has been coming here twice a-week since i have been at home, and has been very attentive and pleasant; but i have not been at the terrace much. there never was such a houseful of children. oliver's room is the only place where one is safe from falling over two or three. however, they seem to like it, and to think, the more the better. james came over here the morning after the boy was born, as much delighted as if he had had any prospects.' 'a boy at last! poor mr. dynevor! does he take it as an insult to his misfortunes?' 'he seems as well pleased as they; and, in fact, i hope the boy may not, after all, be unprovided for. mr. mansell wrote to offer to be godfather, and i thought i could not do otherwise than ask him to stay here. i am glad i did so, for he told me that now he has seen for himself the noble way they are going on in, he has made up his mind. he has no relation nearer than isabel, and he means to make his will in favour of her son. he asked whether i would be a trustee, but i said i was growing old, and had little doubt you would be glad enough. you will have plenty of such work, louis. it is very dangerous to be known as a good man-of-business, and good-natured.' 'pray, how does jem bear it?' 'with tolerable equanimity. it may be many years before the child is affected by it, if mrs. mansell has it for her life. besides, james is a wiser man than he used to be.' 'he has been somewhat like robinson crusoe's old goat,' said louis. 'poor jem! the fall and the scanty fare tamed him. i liked him so well before, that i did not know how much better i was yet to like him. mary, you must see his workhouse. giving up his time to it as he does, he does infinite good there.' 'yes, mr. calcott says that he lives in fear of some one offering him a living,' said lord ormersfield. 'and the dear old giraffe?' said louis. 'clara? she is looking almost handsome. i wish some good man would marry her. she would make an excellent wife.' 'i am not ready to spare her yet,' said mary; 'i must make acquaintance with her before any excellent man carries her off.' 'but there is a marriage that will surprise you,' said the earl; 'your eldest cousin, whose name i can never remember--' 'virginia,' cried louis. 'captain lonsdale, i hope!' 'what could have made you fix on him?' 'because the barricades could not have been in vain, and he was an excellent fellow, to whom i owe a great deal of gratitude. he kept my aunt's terrors in abeyance most gallantly; and little virginia drank in his words, and built up a hero! but how was it?' 'you remember that lady conway would not take our advice, and stay quietly at home. on the first steamer she fell in with this captain, and it seems that she was helpless enough, without her former butler, to be very grateful to him for managing her passports and conducting her through germany. and the conclusion was, that she herself had encouraged him so far, that she really had not any justification in refusing when he proposed for the young lady, as he is fairly provided for.' 'my poor aunt! no one ever pities her when she is 'hoist with her own petard!' i am glad poor virginia is to be happy in her own way.' 'i shall send my congratulations to-morrow,' said the earl, smiling triumphantly, 'and a piece of intelligence of my own. at h. b. m. consul's, lima--what day was it, louis?' mary ran away to take off her bonnet, as much surprised by the earl's mirth as if she had seen primroses in december. yet such blossoms are sometimes tempted forth; and affection was breathing something like a second spring on the life so long unnaturally chilled and blighted. if his shoulders were bowed, his figure had lost much of its rigidity; and though his locks were thinned and whitened, and his countenance slightly aged, yet the softened look and the more frequent smile had smoothed away the sternness, and given gentleness to his dignity. no sooner was she out of the room than lord ormersfield asked, 'and what have you done with the spanish woman?' the answer excited a peal of laughter, which made louis stand aghast, both at such unprecedented merriment and at the cause; for hitherto he had so entirely felt with mary, as never to have seen the ludicrous aspect of the elopement. presently, however, he was amused by perceiving that his father not merely regarded it as a relief from an embarrassing charge, but as an entire acquittal for his own conscience for any slanders he had formerly believed of dona rosita. louis briefly explained that, the poor lady being provided for by robson's investments in america, he had thought it right that the ponsonby share of the firm should bear the loss through these embezzlements; and he had found that her extravagance had made such inroads on the property, that while the dynevor share (always the largest) resulted in a fair competence, louis had saved nothing out of the wreck of the ponsonby affairs but mary herself. 'can you excuse it, father?' he said, with all the old debonnaire manner. 'you will never be a rich man, louis. you and she will have some cares, but--' and his voice grew thick--'you are rich in what makes life happy. you have left me nothing more to ask or wish for!' 'except that i may be worthy of her, father. you first taught me how she ought to be loved. you have been very patient with me all this time. i feel as if i must thank you for her--' and then, changing his tone as she opened the door--'look at her now she has her bonnet off--does not she look natural?' 'i am sure i feel so,' said mary. 'you know this always seemed more like home than anything else.' 'yes, and now i do feel sure that i have you at last, mary. that moorish castle of yours used to make me afraid of wakening: it was so much fitter for isabel's fantastic viscount. by-the-bye, has she brought that book out?' 'oh, yes, and james is nearly as proud of it as he is of his son. he actually wanted me to read it! he tells me it is selling very well, and i hope it may really bring them in something.' 'now, then--there's the tea. sit down, mary, and look exactly as you did the morning i came home and found you.' 'i'm afraid i cannot,' said mary, looking up in his face with an arch, deprecating expression. 'why not?' 'don't you know that i am so much happier?' before breakfast next morning fitzjocelyn must visit his farm, and mary must come with him. how delicious was that english morning after their voyage; the slant rays of the sun silvering the turf, and casting rainbows across the gossamer threads from one brown bent to another; the harvest fields on the slopes dotted with rich sheaves of wheat; the coppices, in their summer glory, here and there touched with the gold of early autumn, and the slopes and meadows bright with lively green, a pleasant change for eyes fresh from the bare, rugged mountain-side and the rank unwholesome vegetation of panama. shaggy little scottish oxen were feeding on the dewy grass, their black coats looking sleek in the sun beyond the long shadows of the thorns; but as mary said, laughing, 'only farmer fitzjocelyn's cattle came here now,' and she stopped more than once to be introduced to some notable animal, or to hear the history of experiments in fatting beasts. 'there! they have found you out! that's for you,' said louis, as a merry peal of bells broke out from the church tower, and came joyously up through the tranquil air. 'yes, ormersfield, you are greeting a friend! you may be very glad, old place! i wish mr. holdsworth would come up to breakfast! is it too wet for you this way, mary?' this way was into fernydell, and mary answered, 'oh, no--no; it is where i most wanted to go with you. we have never been there together since--' 'no, you never would walk with me after i could go alone!' said louis, with a playful tone of reproach, veiling deep feeling. in silence he handed her down the rocky steps, plunging deeper among the hazels and rowan-trees; then pausing, he turned aside the luxuriant leaves of a tuft of hartstongue, and showed her, cut on a stone, veiled both by the verdure and the form of the rock, the letters-- deo gratias, l. f. . 'i like that!' was all that mary's full heart allowed her to say. 'yes,' said louis, 'i feel quite as thankful for the accident as for the preservation.' 'and that dear mamma was with us,' added mary. 'between her and you, it was a blessing to us all. i see these letters are not new; you must have cut them out long ago.' 'as soon as i could get here without help,' he answered. 'i thought i should be able to find the very spot where i lay, by remembering the cross which the bare mountain-ash boughs made against the sky; but by that time they were all leaf and flower; and now, do you see, there they are, with the fruit just formed and blushing.' 'like other things,' said mary, reaching after the spray, 'once all blossom, now--' 'fruit very unripe,' as he said, between a smile and a sigh; 'but there is some encouragement in the world after all, and every project of mine has not turned out like my two specimens of copper ore. you remember them, mary and our first encounter?' 'remember it!' said mary. 'i don't think i forgot a day of that summer.' 'what i brought you here for,' said louis, 'was to ask you to let me do what i have long wished--to let me put the letter m here?' 'i think you might have done it without leave,' said mary. 'so i might at first, but by the time i came here again, mary, you had become in my estimation 'a little more than kin,' and less than--no, i wont say that, but one could not treat you as comfortably as clara. i lost a cousin one august day, and never found her again!' 'never?' 'never--but the odd thing is, that i cannot believe that what i did find has been away these seven years.' 'yes, that is very strange,' said mary; 'i have felt it so. wo do seem to understand and guess each other's thoughts as if we had been going on together all this time. i believe it is because you gave me the first impulse to think, and taught me the way.' 'and i know who first taught me to think to any purpose,' said louis, smiling. 'but who is this descending on us?' it was the spanish gentleman, reddening all over at such an encounter, in mid-career towards her at the terrace, and muttering something, breathless and almost surly, about begging pardon. 'look here, tom,' said louis, lifting the leaves to show the letters. 'that is all i ever could feel on that matter, and so should you. there, no more about it,--you want to be on your way; and tell mr. frost that we shall be at northwold in the afternoon.' about half an hour after, clara was delicately blowing the dust out of the wreath of forget-me-nots on the porcelain shepherdess's hat, when a shriek resounded through the house, and, barely saving the arcadian in her start, she rushed downstairs. james, in his shirt-sleeves, was already on his way to the kitchen. there kitty was found, too much frightened, to run away, making lunges with the toasting-fork at a black-bearded figure, who held in his arms charlotte arnold, in a fit of the almost forgotten hysterics. the workhouse girl shrieked for the police; jane was at master oliver's door, prepared for flight or defence; isabel stood on the stairs, with her baby in her arms, and her little flock clinging to her skirts, when clara darted back, laughing too much to speak distinctly, as she tried to explain who the ruffian really was. 'and louis is coming, and mary! oh! isabel, he has her at last! oh! jem! jem! did we ever want dear granny so much! i always knew it would come right at last! jane, jane, do you hear, lord fitzjocelyn is married! let me in; i must go and tell uncle oliver!' james looked at isabel, and read in her smile clara's final acquittal from all suspicions beneath the dignity of both. uncle oliver would have damped her joy, had it been in his power. he gave up his affairs as hopeless, as soon as he found that young fitzjocelyn had only made them an excuse for getting married, and he was so excessively angry with her for being happy, that she found she must carry her joyous face out of his sight. it was not easy to be a dignified steady governess that morning, and when the lessons were finished, she could have danced home all the way. she had scarcely reached the terrace gate, when the well-known sound of the wheels was heard, and in another moment she was between the two dear cousins; fitzjocelyn's eyes dancing with gladsomeness, and mary's broad tranquil brow and frank kindly smile, free from the shadow of a single cloud! clara's heart leapt up with joy, joy full and unmixed, the guerdon of the spirit untouched by vanity or selfishness, without one taint that could have mortified into jealous, disappointed pain. it was bliss to one of those whom she loved best, it was the winning of a brother and sister, and perhaps clara's life had never had a happier moment. lord ormersfield could have thanked her for that joyous, innocent welcome. he had paid her attentions for his son's sake, of which he had become rather ashamed; and as louis and mary hastened on to meet james and isabel, he detained her for a moment, to say some special words of kindness. clara, perhaps, had an intuitive perception of his meaning, and reference to her past heiress state, for she laughed gaily, and said, 'yes, i never was more glad of anything! he was so patient that i was sure he deserved it! i always trusted to such a time as this, when he used to talk to me for want of dear grandmamma.' mary was led upstairs to be introduced to the five children, while the gentlemen went over the accounts in oliver's room. enough had been rescued from the ruin to secure, not wealth, but fair competence; the mines were disposed of to a company which would pay the value by instalments, and all the remainder of the business was in train to be easily wound up by mr. ward. mr. dynevor's gratitude was not overpowering: he was short and dry, privately convinced that he could have managed matters much better himself, and charging all the loss on fitzjocelyn's folly in letting robson escape. but, though james was hurt at his unthankfulness, and lord ormersfield could have been very angry, the party most concerned did not take it much to heart; he believed he had done his best, but an experienced eye might detect blunders, and he knew it was hard to trust affairs out of one's own hands. even the earl was glad to escape to the sitting-room, though every one was talking at once, and mercy the loudest; and louis, as the children would call him in spite of their mamma, was at once seized on by kitty to be introduced to 'our brother.' 'and what is his name, kitty?' 'woland!' shouted all the young ladies in chorus. 'sir woland is in the book that mamma did make,' said kitty. louis looked at isabel with laughing eyes. 'it was uncle oliver's great wish,' she said, 'and we did not wish to remember the days of sir hubert.' before lord ormersfield was quite deafened, louis recollected that they must show mary at the house beautiful; and they took leave. the earl begged james to come back to dinner with them, and louis asked if clara could not find room in the carriage too. it was the earnest of what ormersfield was to be to her henceforth, and she was all delight, and earnestness to be allowed to walk home with james by starlight. and the evening realized all she could wish. the gentlemen had their conversation in the dining-room, and mary and clara sat on the steps together in the warm twilight, and talked of granny; and clara poured out all that mary did not yet know of louis. 'i hear you have been in hysterics again,' had been lord fitzjocelyn's greeting to charlotte. 'you are prepared for the consequences.' charlotte was prepared. the mutual pardon had not been very hard to gain, and tom had only to combat her declarations that it was downright presumptuous for her to have more than master had a year, and her protests that she could not leave her mistress and the dear children in their poverty. the tidings that they were relieved from their present straits answered this scruple, and charlotte was a pretty picture of shrinking exultation when she conducted her betrothed to mrs. martha, who, however, declared that she would not take his hundred and eighty pounds a year--no, nor twice that,--to marry him in that there black beard. mrs. beckett made him exceedingly welcome, and he spent the chief part of his time at no. , where he was much more at ease than at ormersfield. he confessed that, though not given to bashfulness before any man, there was something in mr. frampton's excessive civility that quite overcame him, and made him always expect to be kicked out of doors the next minute for sauciness. charlotte's whirlwinds of feeling had nearly expended themselves in that one shock of meeting. the years of cheerful toil, and the weeks of grief and suspense, had been good training for that silly little heart, and the prospect of her new duties brought on her a sobering sense of responsibility. she would always be tender and clinging, but the fragrant woodbine would be trained round a sound, sturdy oak, and her modesty, gentleness, and sincerity, gave every promise of her being an excellent wife. tom had little time to spare before undertaking his new office, and it was better that the parting should be speedy, for it was a grievous one, both to the little bride and to isabel and the children. friend rather than servant, her place could be ill supplied by the two maids who were coming in her room, and isabel could have found it in her heart to sympathize with mercy and salome in their detestation of the black man who was coming to take away their dear charlotte. clara's first outlay, on her restoration to comparative wealth, was on charlotte's wedding-dress. it was a commission given to mary, when with fitzjocelyn, she went to london for one day, to put the final stroke to the dissolution of the unfortunate firm, and to rejoice aunt melicent with the sight of her happiness. good old miss ponsonby's heart was some degrees softer and less narrow than formerly. she had a good many prejudices left, but she did not venture on such sweeping censures as in old times, and she would have welcomed lord ormersfield with real cordiality, for the sake of his love to her mary. indeed, louis's fascinations and mary's bright face had almost persuaded her into coming home with them; but the confirmed londoner prevailed, and she had a tyrant maid-servant, who would not let her go, even to the festival at ormersfield in honour of her niece. the earl was bent on rejoicings for his son's marriage, and louis dexterously managed that the banquet should take place on the day fixed for tom's wedding, thus casting off all oppressive sense of display, by regarding it as madison's feast instead of his own. clara, who seemed to have been set free from governess tasks solely to be the willing slave of all the world, worked as hard as mary and louis at all the joyous arrangements; nor was the festival itself, like many such events, less bright than the previous toils. the wedding took place in ormersfield church, on a bright september morning; james frost performed the marriage, lord fitzjocelyn gave the bride away, and little kitty was the bridesmaid. the ring was of peruvian gold, and the brooch that clasped the bride's lace collar was of silver from the san benito mine. in her white bonnet and dove-coloured silk, she looked as simple and ladylike as she was pretty, and a very graceful contrast to her spanish gentleman bridegroom. the ormersfield bowling-green, which was wont to be so still and deserted, hemmed in by the dark ilex belt, beheld such a scene as had not taken place there since its present master was a boy. there were long tables spread for guests of all ranks and degrees. louis had his own way with the invitations, and had gathered a miscellaneous host. sir miles oakstead had come to see his old friend made happy, and to smile as he was introduced to the rose-coloured pastor in his glass case. mr. calcott was there, and mrs. calcott, all feuds with mrs. james frost long since forgotten; and sir gilbert brewster shone in his colonel's uniform,--for lady fitzjocelyn had intimated a special desire that all the members of the yeomanry should appear in costume; and many a young farmer's wife and sister came all the more proudly, in the fond belief that her own peculiar hero looked in his blue and silver 'as well as lord fitzjocelyn himself.' and miss mercy faithful was there, watching over oliver, to make up for the want of her sister. and old mr. walby was bowing and gossiping with many a patient; and james, with his little brown woman in his hand, was looking after the party of paupers for whom he had obtained a holiday; and mr. holdsworth was keeping guard over his village boys, whose respectable parents remained in two separate throngs, male and female; and clara frost was here, there, and everywhere--now setting mrs. richardson at ease, now carrying little mercy to look at the band, now conveying away salome when frightened, now finding a mother for a village child taken with a sobbing fit of shyness, now conducting a stray schoolboy to his companions, now running up for a few gay words to her old uncle, to make sure that he was neither chilly nor tired. how pleasant it was to her to mingle with group after group of people, and hear from one and another how handsome and how happy lord fitzjocelyn looked, and lady fitzjocelyn quite beautiful; and, then, as they walked from party to party, setting all at ease and leaving pleased looks wherever they went, to cross them now and then, and exchange a blithe smile or merry remark. no melancholy gaps here! thought she, as she helped her uncle to the easy chair prepared for him at the dinner-table; no spiritless curiosity, no forced attempts to display what no one felt! there must needs be toasts, and such as thought themselves assembled for the sake of the 'marriage in high life,' were taken by surprise when lord fitzjocelyn rose, and began by thanking those assembled for assisting in doing honour to the event of the day--the marriage of two persons, for each of whom he himself as well as those most dear to him felt the warmest respect and gratitude for essential services and disinterested attachment, alike in adversity and in prosperity. unpleasant as he knew it was to have such truths spoken to one's face, he could not deny himself the satisfaction of expressing a portion of the esteem and reverence he felt for such noble conduct as had been displayed by those whose health he had the pleasure to propose--mr. and mrs. thomas madison. 'there,' was his aside, as he sat down, 'i only hope i have not made him surly; poor fellow, i have put him in a predicament, but it could not be otherwise!' clara had tears in her eyes, but not like those she had shed at cheveleigh; james gave louis a look of heartfelt gratitude, bowed the lowest to the happy pair, and held up little kitty that her imitative nod and sip might not be lost upon them. mrs. beckett said, 'well, i never! if ever a girl deserved it,' choked, and flourished her white handkerchief; frampton saluted like my lord and louis xiv. rolled into one; and warren and gervas privately agreed that they did not know what was coming of the world, since marksedge poachers had only to go to foreign parts to be coined goold in the silver mines. mrs. madison's pretty face was all blushes, smiles, and tears. mr. madison rose to reply with unexpected alacrity, and louis was soon relieved from anxiety, at least, as far as regarded his eloquence, for he thought in the majestic spanish idiom, and translated as he went-- 'my lords,' he began, 'gentlemen and ladies and neighbours, my lord fitzjocelyn has done my wife and myself an honour as unlooked-for as undeserved; and the manner of the favour is such that we shall carry the grateful remembrance to the end of our lives. he has been so condescending as to speak of such services as it was in our power to render; but he has passed over in silence that which gives him a claim to the utmost that i could place at his feet. he will forgive me for speaking openly, for i cannot refrain from disburthening my mind, and letting you know, even more than you are at present aware of, what your senor--what your lord truly is. most of you have known me but too well. it is not ten years since i was a rude, untaught boy upon the heath, such as a large proportion of those present would deem beneath their notice: lord fitzjocelyn did not think so. his kindness of manner and encouraging words awakened in me new life and energy. he gave me his time and his teaching, and, what was far more, he gave me his sympathy and his example. it was these which gave vitality to lessons dimly understood, or which had fallen dead on my ears, when only heard in my irregular attendance at school. but the work in me was tardy, and at first i requited his kindness with presumption, insubordination, and carelessness. then, when i had been dismissed, and when my wilful neglect had occasioned the accident of which the traces are still only too visible, then, did i not merit to be exposed and cast off for ever? i knew it, and i fled, as if i could leave behind me my grief and my shame. little did i dare to guess that he was dealing with me as though i had been his own brother, and scrupulously concealing my share in the misfortune. when i returned, sullen and overwhelmed, he alone--yes! and while still suffering severely--spoke a kind word to me, and exerted himself to rescue me from the utter ruin and degradation to which despair would have led me. he placed me in the situation which conducted me to my present position; he gave me the impulse to improve myself; and, above all, he infused into me the principles without which the rest would have been mere temptations. if i have been blest beyond my deserts--if i have been prosperous beyond reasonable expectation--if, among numerous failures, i have withstood some evils--all, under the greatest and highest benefactor, is owing to the kindness, and, above all, to the generous forbearance of lord fitzjocelyn. i wish i could testify my gratitude in any better manner than by speaking of him to his face; but i am sure you will all drink his health more heartily, if possible, for knowing one more trait in addition to your own personal experience of his character!' alas! that all things hidden, and yet to be proclaimed on the house-tops, would bear the light as well as fitzjocelyn's secret! the revelation of this unobtrusive act of patience and forbearance excited a perfect tumult of enthusiasm among persons already worked up to great ardour for one so beloved; and shouts, and even tears, on every side strove in vain to express the response to madison's words. 'too bad, tom!' was louis's muttered comment. 'you are paid in your own coin,' retorted mary, raising her glistening eyes, full of archness. 'i perceive it is no surprise to you, lady fitzjocelyn!' said sir miles oakstead; 'and, i own, nothing from that quarter' (nodding at louis) 'surprises me greatly.' 'she practised eavesdropping,' said louis, 'when the poor fellow was relieving his mind by a confession to the present mrs. madison.' 'and i think mrs. madison and i deserve credit for having kept the secret so long,' said mary. 'it explains,' observed mr. holdsworth. 'i did not understand your power over madison.' 'it was the making of us both,' said louis; 'and a very fine specimen of the grandeur of that rough diamond. it elucidates what i have always said, that if you can but find the one vulnerable place, there is a wonderful fund of nobleness in some of these people.' 'do you take this gentleman as an average specimen?' 'every ploughboy is not an undeveloped madison; but in every parish there may be some one with either the _thinking_ or the rising element in his composition; and if the right ingredient be not added, the fermentation will turn sour, as my neglect had very nearly made it do with him. he would have been a fine demagogue by this time, if he had not had a generous temper and sunday-school foundation.' 'hush!' said mary, smiling--'you must not moralize. i believe you are doing it that poor farmer norris may not catch your eye.' louis gave a debonnaire glance of resignation; and the farmer, rising in the full current of feeling caused by madison's speech, said, with thorough downright emotion, that he knew it was of no use to try to enhance what had been already so well expressed, but he believed there was scarcely a person present who did not feel, equally with mr. madison, the right to claim lord fitzjocelyn as a personal friend,--and an irrepressible hum of fervent assent proved how truly the farmer spoke. 'yes,--each had in turn experienced so much of his friendly kindness, and, what was more, of his sympathy, that he could confidently affirm that there was scarcely one in the neighbourhood who had not learnt the news of his happiness as if some good thing had happened to himself individually. they all as one man were delighted to have him at home again, and to wish him joy of the lady, whom many of them know already well enough to rejoice in welcoming her for her own sake, as well as for that of lord fitzjocelyn.' again and again did the cheers break forth--hearty, homely, and sincere; and such were the bright, tearful, loving eyes, which sought those of fitzjocelyn on every side, that his own filled so fast that all seemed dazzled and misty, and he hastily strove to clear them as he arose; but the swelling of his heart brought the happy dew again, and would scarcely let him find voice. 'my friends, my dear, good friends, you are all very kind to me. it is of no use to tell you how little i deserve it, but you know how much i wish to do so, and here is one who has helped me, and who will help me. we thank you with all our hearts. you may well wish my father and me joy, and yourselves too. thank you; you should not look at me so kindly if you wish me to say more.' the earl, who had studied popularity as a useful engine, but had never prized love beyond his own family, was exceedingly touched by the ardour of enthusiastic affection that his son had obtained,--not by courting suffrages, not by gifts, not by promises, but simply by real open-hearted love to every one. lord ormersfield himself came in for demonstrations of warm feeling which he would certainly never have sought nor obtained ten years ago, when he was respected and looked up to as an upright representative of certain opinions; but personally, either disliked or regarded with coldness. he knew what these cheers were worth, and that even fitzjocelyn might not long be the popular hero; but he was not the less gratified and triumphant, and felt that no success of his whole life had been worth the present. 'after all, clara,' said oliver dynevor, as his nephew and niece were assisting him to the carriage, 'they have managed these things better than we did, though they did not have gunter.' 'gunter can't bring heart's love down from town in a box,' said clara, in a flash of indignation. 'no, dear uncle, there are things that can't be got unless by living for them.' 'nor even by living for them, clara,' said james; 'you must live for something else.' lord ormersfield had heard these few last words, and there was deep thought in his eye as he bade his cousins farewell at the hall door. clara was the last to take her place; and, as she turned round with a merry smile to wish him goodbye, he said, 'you have been making yourself very useful, clara, i am afraid you have had no time to enjoy yourself.' 'that's a contradiction,' said clara, laughing; 'here's busy little kitty, who never is thoroughly happy but when she thinks she is useful, and i am child enough to be of the same mind. i never was unhappy but when i was set to enjoy myself. it has been the most beautiful day of my life. thank you for it. goodbye!' the earl crossed the hall, and found mary standing alone on the terrace steps, looking out at the curling smoke from the cottage chimneys, and on the coppices and hedge-rows. 'are you tired, my dear?' he said. 'oh no! i was only thinking of dear mamma's persuading louis to go on with the crumpled plans of those cottages. how happy she would be.' 'i was thinking of her likewise,' said the earl. 'she spoke truly when she told me that he might not be what i then wished to make him, but something far better.' mary looked up with a satisfied smile of approval, saying, 'i am so glad you think so.' 'yes,' said lord ormersfield, 'i have thought a good deal since. i have been alone here, and i think i see why louis has done better than some of his elders. it seems to me that some of us have not known the duties that lay by the way-side, so to speak, from the main purpose of life. i wish i could talk it over with your mother, my dear, what do you think she would say?' mary thought of louis's vision of the threads. 'i think,' she said, 'that i have heard her say something like it. the real aim of life is out of sight, and even good people are too apt to attach themselves to what is tangible, like friendship or family affection, or usefulness, or public spirit; but these are like the paths of glory which lead but to the grave, and no farther. it is the single-hearted, faithful aim towards the one thing needful, to which all other things may be added as mere accessories. it brings down strength and wisdom. it brings the life everlasting already to begin in this life, and so makes the path shine more and more unto the perfect day!' the end. the custom of the country by edith wharton the custom of the country i "undine spragg--how can you?" her mother wailed, raising a prematurely-wrinkled hand heavy with rings to defend the note which a languid "bell-boy" had just brought in. but her defence was as feeble as her protest, and she continued to smile on her visitor while miss spragg, with a turn of her quick young fingers, possessed herself of the missive and withdrew to the window to read it. "i guess it's meant for me," she merely threw over her shoulder at her mother. "did you ever, mrs. heeny?" mrs. spragg murmured with deprecating pride. mrs. heeny, a stout professional-looking person in a waterproof, her rusty veil thrown back, and a shabby alligator bag at her feet, followed the mother's glance with good-humoured approval. "i never met with a lovelier form," she agreed, answering the spirit rather than the letter of her hostess's enquiry. mrs. spragg and her visitor were enthroned in two heavy gilt armchairs in one of the private drawing-rooms of the hotel stentorian. the spragg rooms were known as one of the looey suites, and the drawing-room walls, above their wainscoting of highly-varnished mahogany, were hung with salmon-pink damask and adorned with oval portraits of marie antoinette and the princess de lamballe. in the centre of the florid carpet a gilt table with a top of mexican onyx sustained a palm in a gilt basket tied with a pink bow. but for this ornament, and a copy of "the hound of the baskervilles" which lay beside it, the room showed no traces of human use, and mrs. spragg herself wore as complete an air of detachment as if she had been a wax figure in a show-window. her attire was fashionable enough to justify such a post, and her pale soft-cheeked face, with puffy eye-lids and drooping mouth, suggested a partially-melted wax figure which had run to double-chin. mrs. heeny, in comparison, had a reassuring look of solidity and reality. the planting of her firm black bulk in its chair, and the grasp of her broad red hands on the gilt arms, bespoke an organized and self-reliant activity, accounted for by the fact that mrs. heeny was a "society" manicure and masseuse. toward mrs. spragg and her daughter she filled the double role of manipulator and friend; and it was in the latter capacity that, her day's task ended, she had dropped in for a moment to "cheer up" the lonely ladies of the stentorian. the young girl whose "form" had won mrs. heeny's professional commendation suddenly shifted its lovely lines as she turned back from the window. "here--you can have it after all," she said, crumpling the note and tossing it with a contemptuous gesture into her mother's lap. "why--isn't it from mr. popple?" mrs. spragg exclaimed unguardedly. "no--it isn't. what made you think i thought it was?" snapped her daughter; but the next instant she added, with an outbreak of childish disappointment: "it's only from mr. marvell's sister--at least she says she's his sister." mrs. spragg, with a puzzled frown, groped for her eye-glass among the jet fringes of her tightly-girded front. mrs. heeny's small blue eyes shot out sparks of curiosity. "marvell--what marvell is that?" the girl explained languidly: "a little fellow--i think mr. popple said his name was ralph"; while her mother continued: "undine met them both last night at that party downstairs. and from something mr. popple said to her about going to one of the new plays, she thought--" "how on earth do you know what i thought?" undine flashed back, her grey eyes darting warnings at her mother under their straight black brows. "why, you said you thought--" mrs. spragg began reproachfully; but mrs. heeny, heedless of their bickerings, was pursuing her own train of thought. "what popple? claud walsingham popple--the portrait painter?" "yes--i suppose so. he said he'd like to paint me. mabel lipscomb introduced him. i don't care if i never see him again," the girl said, bathed in angry pink. "do you know him, mrs. heeny?" mrs. spragg enquired. "i should say i did. i manicured him for his first society portrait--a full-length of mrs. harmon b. driscoll." mrs. heeny smiled indulgently on her hearers. "i know everybody. if they don't know me they ain't in it, and claud walsingham popple's in it. but he ain't nearly as in it," she continued judicially, "as ralph marvell--the little fellow, as you call him." undine spragg, at the word, swept round on the speaker with one of the quick turns that revealed her youthful flexibility. she was always doubling and twisting on herself, and every movement she made seemed to start at the nape of her neck, just below the lifted roll of reddish-gold hair, and flow without a break through her whole slim length to the tips of her fingers and the points of her slender restless feet. "why, do you know the marvells? are they stylish?" she asked. mrs. heeny gave the discouraged gesture of a pedagogue who has vainly striven to implant the rudiments of knowledge in a rebellious mind. "why, undine spragg, i've told you all about them time and again! his mother was a dagonet. they live with old urban dagonet down in washington square." to mrs. spragg this conveyed even less than to her daughter, "'way down there? why do they live with somebody else? haven't they got the means to have a home of their own?" undine's perceptions were more rapid, and she fixed her eyes searchingly on mrs. heeny. "do you mean to say mr. marvell's as swell as mr. popple?" "as swell? why, claud walsingham popple ain't in the same class with him!" the girl was upon her mother with a spring, snatching and smoothing out the crumpled note. "laura fairford--is that the sister's name?" "mrs. henley fairford; yes. what does she write about?" undine's face lit up as if a shaft of sunset had struck it through the triple-curtained windows of the stentorian. "she says she wants me to dine with her next wednesday. isn't it queer? why does she want me? she's never seen me!" her tone implied that she had long been accustomed to being "wanted" by those who had. mrs. heeny laughed. "he saw you, didn't he?" "who? ralph marvell? why, of course he did--mr. popple brought him to the party here last night." "well, there you are... when a young man in society wants to meet a girl again, he gets his sister to ask her." undine stared at her incredulously. "how queer! but they haven't all got sisters, have they? it must be fearfully poky for the ones that haven't." "they get their mothers--or their married friends," said mrs. heeny omnisciently. "married gentlemen?" enquired mrs. spragg, slightly shocked, but genuinely desirous of mastering her lesson. "mercy, no! married ladies." "but are there never any gentlemen present?" pursued mrs. spragg, feeling that if this were the case undine would certainly be disappointed. "present where? at their dinners? of course--mrs. fairford gives the smartest little dinners in town. there was an account of one she gave last week in this morning's town talk: i guess it's right here among my clippings." mrs. heeny, swooping down on her bag, drew from it a handful of newspaper cuttings, which she spread on her ample lap and proceeded to sort with a moistened forefinger. "here," she said, holding one of the slips at arm's length; and throwing back her head she read, in a slow unpunctuated chant: '"mrs. henley fairford gave another of her natty little dinners last wednesday as usual it was smart small and exclusive and there was much gnashing of teeth among the left-outs as madame olga loukowska gave some of her new steppe dances after dinner'--that's the french for new dance steps," mrs. heeny concluded, thrusting the documents back into her bag. "do you know mrs. fairford too?" undine asked eagerly; while mrs. spragg, impressed, but anxious for facts, pursued: "does she reside on fifth avenue?" "no, she has a little house in thirty-eighth street, down beyond park avenue." the ladies' faces drooped again, and the masseuse went on promptly: "but they're glad enough to have her in the big houses!--why, yes, i know her," she said, addressing herself to undine. "i mass'd her for a sprained ankle a couple of years ago. she's got a lovely manner, but no conversation. some of my patients converse exquisitely," mrs. heeny added with discrimination. undine was brooding over the note. "it is written to mother--mrs. abner e. spragg--i never saw anything so funny! 'will you allow your daughter to dine with me?' allow! is mrs. fairford peculiar?" "no--you are," said mrs. heeny bluntly. "don't you know it's the thing in the best society to pretend that girls can't do anything without their mothers' permission? you just remember that. undine. you mustn't accept invitations from gentlemen without you say you've got to ask your mother first." "mercy! but how'll mother know what to say?" "why, she'll say what you tell her to, of course. you'd better tell her you want to dine with mrs. fairford," mrs. heeny added humorously, as she gathered her waterproof together and stooped for her bag. "have i got to write the note, then?" mrs. spragg asked with rising agitation. mrs. heeny reflected. "why, no. i guess undine can write it as if it was from you. mrs. fairford don't know your writing." this was an evident relief to mrs. spragg, and as undine swept to her room with the note her mother sank back, murmuring plaintively: "oh, don't go yet, mrs. heeny. i haven't seen a human being all day, and i can't seem to find anything to say to that french maid." mrs. heeny looked at her hostess with friendly compassion. she was well aware that she was the only bright spot on mrs. spragg's horizon. since the spraggs, some two years previously, had moved from apex city to new york, they had made little progress in establishing relations with their new environment; and when, about four months earlier, mrs. spragg's doctor had called in mrs. heeny to minister professionally to his patient, he had done more for her spirit than for her body. mrs. heeny had had such "cases" before: she knew the rich helpless family, stranded in lonely splendour in a sumptuous west side hotel, with a father compelled to seek a semblance of social life at the hotel bar, and a mother deprived of even this contact with her kind, and reduced to illness by boredom and inactivity. poor mrs. spragg had done her own washing in her youth, but since her rising fortunes had made this occupation unsuitable she had sunk into the relative inertia which the ladies of apex city regarded as one of the prerogatives of affluence. at apex, however, she had belonged to a social club, and, until they moved to the mealey house, had been kept busy by the incessant struggle with domestic cares; whereas new york seemed to offer no field for any form of lady-like activity. she therefore took her exercise vicariously, with mrs. heeny's help; and mrs. heeny knew how to manipulate her imagination as well as her muscles. it was mrs. heeny who peopled the solitude of the long ghostly days with lively anecdotes of the van degens, the driscolls, the chauncey ellings and the other social potentates whose least doings mrs. spragg and undine had followed from afar in the apex papers, and who had come to seem so much more remote since only the width of the central park divided mother and daughter from their olympian portals. mrs. spragg had no ambition for herself--she seemed to have transferred her whole personality to her child--but she was passionately resolved that undine should have what she wanted, and she sometimes fancied that mrs. heeny, who crossed those sacred thresholds so familiarly, might some day gain admission for undine. "well--i'll stay a little mite longer if you want; and supposing i was to rub up your nails while we're talking? it'll be more sociable," the masseuse suggested, lifting her bag to the table and covering its shiny onyx surface with bottles and polishers. mrs. spragg consentingly slipped the rings from her small mottled hands. it was soothing to feel herself in mrs. heeny's grasp, and though she knew the attention would cost her three dollars she was secure in the sense that abner wouldn't mind. it had been clear to mrs. spragg, ever since their rather precipitate departure from apex city, that abner was resolved not to mind--resolved at any cost to "see through" the new york adventure. it seemed likely now that the cost would be considerable. they had lived in new york for two years without any social benefit to their daughter; and it was of course for that purpose that they had come. if, at the time, there had been other and more pressing reasons, they were such as mrs. spragg and her husband never touched on, even in the gilded privacy of their bedroom at the stentorian; and so completely had silence closed in on the subject that to mrs. spragg it had become non-existent: she really believed that, as abner put it, they had left apex because undine was too big for the place. she seemed as yet--poor child!--too small for new york: actually imperceptible to its heedless multitudes; and her mother trembled for the day when her invisibility should be borne in on her. mrs. spragg did not mind the long delay for herself--she had stores of lymphatic patience. but she had noticed lately that undine was beginning to be nervous, and there was nothing that undine's parents dreaded so much as her being nervous. mrs. spragg's maternal apprehensions unconsciously escaped in her next words. "i do hope she'll quiet down now," she murmured, feeling quieter herself as her hand sank into mrs. heeny's roomy palm. "who's that? undine?" "yes. she seemed so set on that mr. popple's coming round. from the way he acted last night she thought he'd be sure to come round this morning. she's so lonesome, poor child--i can't say as i blame her." "oh, he'll come round. things don't happen as quick as that in new york," said mrs. heeny, driving her nail-polisher cheeringly. mrs. spragg sighed again. "they don't appear to. they say new yorkers are always in a hurry; but i can't say as they've hurried much to make our acquaintance." mrs. heeny drew back to study the effect of her work. "you wait, mrs. spragg, you wait. if you go too fast you sometimes have to rip out the whole seam." "oh, that's so--that's so!" mrs. spragg exclaimed, with a tragic emphasis that made the masseuse glance up at her. "of course it's so. and it's more so in new york than anywhere. the wrong set's like fly-paper: once you're in it you can pull and pull, but you'll never get out of it again." undine's mother heaved another and more helpless sigh. "i wish you'd tell undine that, mrs. heeny." "oh, i guess undine's all right. a girl like her can afford to wait. and if young marvell's really taken with her she'll have the run of the place in no time." this solacing thought enabled mrs. spragg to yield herself unreservedly to mrs. heeny's ministrations, which were prolonged for a happy confidential hour; and she had just bidden the masseuse good-bye, and was restoring the rings to her fingers, when the door opened to admit her husband. mr. spragg came in silently, setting his high hat down on the centre-table, and laying his overcoat across one of the gilt chairs. he was tallish, grey-bearded and somewhat stooping, with the slack figure of the sedentary man who would be stout if he were not dyspeptic; and his cautious grey eyes with pouch-like underlids had straight black brows like his daughter's. his thin hair was worn a little too long over his coat collar, and a masonic emblem dangled from the heavy gold chain which crossed his crumpled black waistcoat. he stood still in the middle of the room, casting a slow pioneering glance about its gilded void; then he said gently: "well, mother?" mrs. spragg remained seated, but her eyes dwelt on him affectionately. "undine's been asked out to a dinner-party; and mrs. heeny says it's to one of the first families. it's the sister of one of the gentlemen that mabel lipscomb introduced her to last night." there was a mild triumph in her tone, for it was owing to her insistence and undine's that mr. spragg had been induced to give up the house they had bought in west end avenue, and move with his family to the stentorian. undine had early decided that they could not hope to get on while they "kept house"--all the fashionable people she knew either boarded or lived in hotels. mrs. spragg was easily induced to take the same view, but mr. spragg had resisted, being at the moment unable either to sell his house or to let it as advantageously as he had hoped. after the move was made it seemed for a time as though he had been right, and the first social steps would be as difficult to make in a hotel as in one's own house; and mrs. spragg was therefore eager to have him know that undine really owed her first invitation to a meeting under the roof of the stentorian. "you see we were right to come here, abner," she added, and he absently rejoined: "i guess you two always manage to be right." but his face remained unsmiling, and instead of seating himself and lighting his cigar, as he usually did before dinner, he took two or three aimless turns about the room, and then paused in front of his wife. "what's the matter--anything wrong down town?" she asked, her eyes reflecting his anxiety. mrs. spragg's knowledge of what went on "down town" was of the most elementary kind, but her husband's face was the barometer in which she had long been accustomed to read the leave to go on unrestrictedly, or the warning to pause and abstain till the coming storm should be weathered. he shook his head. "n--no. nothing worse than what i can see to, if you and undine will go steady for a while." he paused and looked across the room at his daughter's door. "where is she--out?" "i guess she's in her room, going over her dresses with that french maid. i don't know as she's got anything fit to wear to that dinner," mrs. spragg added in a tentative murmur. mr. spragg smiled at last. "well--i guess she will have," he said prophetically. he glanced again at his daughter's door, as if to make sure of its being shut; then, standing close before his wife, he lowered his voice to say: "i saw elmer moffatt down town to-day." "oh, abner!" a wave of almost physical apprehension passed over mrs. spragg. her jewelled hands trembled in her black brocade lap, and the pulpy curves of her face collapsed as if it were a pricked balloon. "oh, abner," she moaned again, her eyes also on her daughter's door. mr. spragg's black eyebrows gathered in an angry frown, but it was evident that his anger was not against his wife. "what's the good of oh abner-ing? elmer moffatt's nothing to us--no more'n if we never laid eyes on him." "no--i know it; but what's he doing here? did you speak to him?" she faltered. he slipped his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets. "no--i guess elmer and i are pretty well talked out." mrs. spragg took up her moan. "don't you tell her you saw him, abner." "i'll do as you say; but she may meet him herself." "oh, i guess not--not in this new set she's going with! don't tell her anyhow." he turned away, feeling for one of the cigars which he always carried loose in his pocket; and his wife, rising, stole after him, and laid her hand on his arm. "he can't do anything to her, can he?" "do anything to her?" he swung about furiously. "i'd like to see him touch her--that's all!" ii undine's white and gold bedroom, with sea-green panels and old rose carpet, looked along seventy-second street toward the leafless tree-tops of the central park. she went to the window, and drawing back its many layers of lace gazed eastward down the long brownstone perspective. beyond the park lay fifth avenue--and fifth avenue was where she wanted to be! she turned back into the room, and going to her writing-table laid mrs. fairford's note before her, and began to study it minutely. she had read in the "boudoir chat" of one of the sunday papers that the smartest women were using the new pigeon-blood notepaper with white ink; and rather against her mother's advice she had ordered a large supply, with her monogram in silver. it was a disappointment, therefore, to find that mrs. fairford wrote on the old-fashioned white sheet, without even a monogram--simply her address and telephone number. it gave undine rather a poor opinion of mrs. fairford's social standing, and for a moment she thought with considerable satisfaction of answering the note on her pigeon-blood paper. then she remembered mrs. heeny's emphatic commendation of mrs. fairford, and her pen wavered. what if white paper were really newer than pigeon blood? it might be more stylish, anyhow. well, she didn't care if mrs. fairford didn't like red paper--she did! and she wasn't going to truckle to any woman who lived in a small house down beyond park avenue... undine was fiercely independent and yet passionately imitative. she wanted to surprise every one by her dash and originality, but she could not help modelling herself on the last person she met, and the confusion of ideals thus produced caused her much perturbation when she had to choose between two courses. she hesitated a moment longer, and then took from the drawer a plain sheet with the hotel address. it was amusing to write the note in her mother's name--she giggled as she formed the phrase "i shall be happy to permit my daughter to take dinner with you" ("take dinner" seemed more elegant than mrs. fairford's "dine")--but when she came to the signature she was met by a new difficulty. mrs. fairford had signed herself "laura fairford"--just as one school-girl would write to another. but could this be a proper model for mrs. spragg? undine could not tolerate the thought of her mother's abasing herself to a denizen of regions beyond park avenue, and she resolutely formed the signature: "sincerely, mrs. abner e. spragg." then uncertainty overcame her, and she re-wrote her note and copied mrs. fairford's formula: "yours sincerely, leota b. spragg." but this struck her as an odd juxtaposition of formality and freedom, and she made a third attempt: "yours with love, leota b. spragg." this, however, seemed excessive, as the ladies had never met; and after several other experiments she finally decided on a compromise, and ended the note: "yours sincerely, mrs. leota b. spragg." that might be conventional. undine reflected, but it was certainly correct. this point settled, she flung open her door, calling imperiously down the passage: "celeste!" and adding, as the french maid appeared: "i want to look over all my dinner-dresses." considering the extent of miss spragg's wardrobe her dinner-dresses were not many. she had ordered a number the year before but, vexed at her lack of use for them, had tossed them over impatiently to the maid. since then, indeed, she and mrs. spragg had succumbed to the abstract pleasure of buying two or three more, simply because they were too exquisite and undine looked too lovely in them; but she had grown tired of these also--tired of seeing them hang unworn in her wardrobe, like so many derisive points of interrogation. and now, as celeste spread them out on the bed, they seemed disgustingly common-place, and as familiar as if she had danced them to shreds. nevertheless, she yielded to the maid's persuasions and tried them on. the first and second did not gain by prolonged inspection: they looked old-fashioned already. "it's something about the sleeves," undine grumbled as she threw them aside. the third was certainly the prettiest; but then it was the one she had worn at the hotel dance the night before and the impossibility of wearing it again within the week was too obvious for discussion. yet she enjoyed looking at herself in it, for it reminded her of her sparkling passages with claud walsingham popple, and her quieter but more fruitful talk with his little friend--the young man she had hardly noticed. "you can go, celeste--i'll take off the dress myself," she said: and when celeste had passed out, laden with discarded finery. undine bolted her door, dragged the tall pier-glass forward and, rummaging in a drawer for fan and gloves, swept to a seat before the mirror with the air of a lady arriving at an evening party. celeste, before leaving, had drawn down the blinds and turned on the electric light, and the white and gold room, with its blazing wall-brackets, formed a sufficiently brilliant background to carry out the illusion. so untempered a glare would have been destructive to all half-tones and subtleties of modelling; but undine's beauty was as vivid, and almost as crude, as the brightness suffusing it. her black brows, her reddish-tawny hair and the pure red and white of her complexion defied the searching decomposing radiance: she might have been some fabled creature whose home was in a beam of light. undine, as a child, had taken but a lukewarm interest in the diversions of her playmates. even in the early days when she had lived with her parents in a ragged outskirt of apex, and hung on the fence with indiana frusk, the freckled daughter of the plumber "across the way," she had cared little for dolls or skipping-ropes, and still less for the riotous games in which the loud indiana played atalanta to all the boyhood of the quarter. already undine's chief delight was to "dress up" in her mother's sunday skirt and "play lady" before the wardrobe mirror. the taste had outlasted childhood, and she still practised the same secret pantomime, gliding in, settling her skirts, swaying her fan, moving her lips in soundless talk and laughter; but lately she had shrunk from everything that reminded her of her baffled social yearnings. now, however, she could yield without afterthought to the joy of dramatizing her beauty. within a few days she would be enacting the scene she was now mimicking; and it amused her to see in advance just what impression she would produce on mrs. fairford's guests. for a while she carried on her chat with an imaginary circle of admirers, twisting this way and that, fanning, fidgeting, twitching at her draperies, as she did in real life when people were noticing her. her incessant movements were not the result of shyness: she thought it the correct thing to be animated in society, and noise and restlessness were her only notion of vivacity. she therefore watched herself approvingly, admiring the light on her hair, the flash of teeth between her smiling lips, the pure shadows of her throat and shoulders as she passed from one attitude to another. only one fact disturbed her: there was a hint of too much fulness in the curves of her neck and in the spring of her hips. she was tall enough to carry off a little extra weight, but excessive slimness was the fashion, and she shuddered at the thought that she might some day deviate from the perpendicular. presently she ceased to twist and sparkle at her image, and sinking into her chair gave herself up to retrospection. she was vexed, in looking back, to think how little notice she had taken of young marvell, who turned out to be so much less negligible than his brilliant friend. she remembered thinking him rather shy, less accustomed to society; and though in his quiet deprecating way he had said one or two droll things he lacked mr. popple's masterly manner, his domineering yet caressing address. when mr. popple had fixed his black eyes on undine, and murmured something "artistic" about the colour of her hair, she had thrilled to the depths of her being. even now it seemed incredible that he should not turn out to be more distinguished than young marvell: he seemed so much more in the key of the world she read about in the sunday papers--the dazzling auriferous world of the van degens, the driscolls and their peers. she was roused by the sound in the hall of her mother's last words to mrs. heeny. undine waited till their adieux were over; then, opening her door, she seized the astonished masseuse and dragged her into the room. mrs. heeny gazed in admiration at the luminous apparition in whose hold she found herself. "mercy, undine--you do look stunning! are you trying on your dress for mrs. fairford's?" "yes--no--this is only an old thing." the girl's eyes glittered under their black brows. "mrs. heeny, you've got to tell me the truth--are they as swell as you said?" "who? the fairfords and marvells? if they ain't swell enough for you. undine spragg, you'd better go right over to the court of england!" undine straightened herself. "i want the best. are they as swell as the driscolls and van degens?" mrs. heeny sounded a scornful laugh. "look at here, now, you unbelieving girl! as sure as i'm standing here before you, i've seen mrs. harmon b. driscoll of fifth avenue laying in her pink velvet bed with honiton lace sheets on it, and crying her eyes out because she couldn't get asked to one of mrs. paul marvell's musicals. she'd never 'a dreamt of being asked to a dinner there! not all of her money couldn't 'a bought her that--and she knows it!" undine stood for a moment with bright cheeks and parted lips; then she flung her soft arms about the masseuse. "oh mrs. heeny--you're lovely to me!" she breathed, her lips on mrs. heeny's rusty veil; while the latter, freeing herself with a good-natured laugh, said as she turned away: "go steady. undine, and you'll get anywheres." go steady, undine! yes, that was the advice she needed. sometimes, in her dark moods, she blamed her parents for not having given it to her. she was so young... and they had told her so little! as she looked back she shuddered at some of her escapes. even since they had come to new york she had been on the verge of one or two perilous adventures, and there had been a moment during their first winter when she had actually engaged herself to the handsome austrian riding-master who accompanied her in the park. he had carelessly shown her a card-case with a coronet, and had confided in her that he had been forced to resign from a crack cavalry regiment for fighting a duel about a countess; and as a result of these confidences she had pledged herself to him, and bestowed on him her pink pearl ring in exchange for one of twisted silver, which he said the countess had given him on her deathbed with the request that he should never take it off till he met a woman more beautiful than herself. soon afterward, luckily. undine had run across mabel lipscomb, whom she had known at a middle western boarding-school as mabel blitch. miss blitch occupied a position of distinction as the only new york girl at the school, and for a time there had been sharp rivalry for her favour between undine and indiana frusk, whose parents had somehow contrived--for one term--to obtain her admission to the same establishment. in spite of indiana's unscrupulous methods, and of a certain violent way she had of capturing attention, the victory remained with undine, whom mabel pronounced more refined; and the discomfited indiana, denouncing her schoolmates as a "bunch of mushes," had disappeared forever from the scene of her defeat. since then mabel had returned to new york and married a stock-broker; and undine's first steps in social enlightenment dated from the day when she had met mrs. harry lipscomb, and been again taken under her wing. harry lipscomb had insisted on investigating the riding-master's record, and had found that his real name was aaronson, and that he had left cracow under a charge of swindling servant-girls out of their savings; in the light of which discoveries undine noticed for the first time that his lips were too red and that his hair was pommaded. that was one of the episodes that sickened her as she looked back, and made her resolve once more to trust less to her impulses--especially in the matter of giving away rings. in the interval, however, she felt she had learned a good deal, especially since, by mabel lipscomb's advice, the spraggs had moved to the stentorian, where that lady was herself established. there was nothing of the monopolist about mabel, and she lost no time in making undine free of the stentorian group and its affiliated branches: a society addicted to "days," and linked together by membership in countless clubs, mundane, cultural or "earnest." mabel took undine to the days, and introduced her as a "guest" to the club-meetings, where she was supported by the presence of many other guests--"my friend miss stager, of phalanx, georgia," or (if the lady were literary) simply "my friend ora prance chettle of nebraska--you know what mrs. chettle stands for." some of these reunions took place in the lofty hotels moored like a sonorously named fleet of battle-ships along the upper reaches of the west side: the olympian, the incandescent, the ormolu; while others, perhaps the more exclusive, were held in the equally lofty but more romantically styled apartment-houses: the parthenon, the tintern abbey or the lido. undine's preference was for the worldly parties, at which games were played, and she returned home laden with prizes in dutch silver; but she was duly impressed by the debating clubs, where ladies of local distinction addressed the company from an improvised platform, or the members argued on subjects of such imperishable interest as: "what is charm?" or "the problem-novel" after which pink lemonade and rainbow sandwiches were consumed amid heated discussion of the "ethical aspect" of the question. it was all very novel and interesting, and at first undine envied mabel lipscomb for having made herself a place in such circles; but in time she began to despise her for being content to remain there. for it did not take undine long to learn that introduction to mabel's "set" had brought her no nearer to fifth avenue. even in apex, undine's tender imagination had been nurtured on the feats and gestures of fifth avenue. she knew all of new york's golden aristocracy by name, and the lineaments of its most distinguished scions had been made familiar by passionate poring over the daily press. in mabel's world she sought in vain for the originals, and only now and then caught a tantalizing glimpse of one of their familiars: as when claud walsingham popple, engaged on the portrait of a lady whom the lipscombs described as "the wife of a steel magnet," felt it his duty to attend one of his client's teas, where it became mabel's privilege to make his acquaintance and to name to him her friend miss spragg. unsuspected social gradations were thus revealed to the attentive undine, but she was beginning to think that her sad proficiency had been acquired in vain when her hopes were revived by the appearance of mr. popple and his friend at the stentorian dance. she thought she had learned enough to be safe from any risk of repeating the hideous aaronson mistake; yet she now saw she had blundered again in distinguishing claud walsingham popple while she almost snubbed his more retiring companion. it was all very puzzling, and her perplexity had been farther increased by mrs. heeny's tale of the great mrs. harmon b. driscoll's despair. hitherto undine had imagined that the driscoll and van degen clans and their allies held undisputed suzerainty over new york society. mabel lipscomb thought so too, and was given to bragging of her acquaintance with a mrs. spoff, who was merely a second cousin of mrs. harmon b. driscoll's. yet here was she. undine spragg of apex, about to be introduced into an inner circle to which driscolls and van degens had laid siege in vain! it was enough to make her feel a little dizzy with her triumph--to work her up into that state of perilous self-confidence in which all her worst follies had been committed. she stood up and, going close to the glass, examined the reflection of her bright eyes and glowing cheeks. this time her fears were superfluous: there were to be no more mistakes and no more follies now! she was going to know the right people at last--she was going to get what she wanted! as she stood there, smiling at her happy image, she heard her father's voice in the room beyond, and instantly began to tear off her dress, strip the long gloves from her arms and unpin the rose in her hair. tossing the fallen finery aside, she slipped on a dressing-gown and opened the door into the drawing-room. mr. spragg was standing near her mother, who sat in a drooping attitude, her head sunk on her breast, as she did when she had one of her "turns." he looked up abruptly as undine entered. "father--has mother told you? mrs. fairford has asked me to dine. she's mrs. paul marvell's daughter--mrs. marvell was a dagonet--and they're sweller than anybody; they won't know the driscolls and van degens!" mr. spragg surveyed her with humorous fondness. "that so? what do they want to know you for, i wonder?" he jeered. "can't imagine--unless they think i'll introduce you!" she jeered back in the same key, her arms around his stooping shoulders, her shining hair against his cheek. "well--and are you going to? have you accepted?" he took up her joke as she held him pinioned; while mrs. spragg, behind them, stirred in her seat with a little moan. undine threw back her head, plunging her eyes in his, and pressing so close that to his tired elderly sight her face was a mere bright blur. "i want to awfully," she declared, "but i haven't got a single thing to wear." mrs. spragg, at this, moaned more audibly. "undine, i wouldn't ask father to buy any more clothes right on top of those last bills." "i ain't on top of those last bills yet--i'm way down under them," mr. spragg interrupted, raising his hands to imprison his daughter's slender wrists. "oh, well--if you want me to look like a scarecrow, and not get asked again, i've got a dress that'll do perfectly," undine threatened, in a tone between banter and vexation. mr. spragg held her away at arm's length, a smile drawing up the loose wrinkles about his eyes. "well, that kind of dress might come in mighty handy on some occasions; so i guess you'd better hold on to it for future use, and go and select another for this fairford dinner," he said; and before he could finish he was in her arms again, and she was smothering his last word in little cries and kisses. iii though she would not for the world have owned it to her parents, undine was disappointed in the fairford dinner. the house, to begin with, was small and rather shabby. there was no gilding, no lavish diffusion of light: the room they sat in after dinner, with its green-shaded lamps making faint pools of brightness, and its rows of books from floor to ceiling, reminded undine of the old circulating library at apex, before the new marble building was put up. then, instead of a gas-log, or a polished grate with electric bulbs behind ruby glass, there was an old-fashioned wood-fire, like pictures of "back to the farm for christmas"; and when the logs fell forward mrs. pairford or her brother had to jump up to push them in place, and the ashes scattered over the hearth untidily. the dinner too was disappointing. undine was too young to take note of culinary details, but she had expected to view the company through a bower of orchids and eat pretty-coloured entrees in ruffled papers. instead, there was only a low centre-dish of ferns, and plain roasted and broiled meat that one could recognize--as if they'd been dyspeptics on a diet! with all the hints in the sunday papers, she thought it dull of mrs. fairford not to have picked up something newer; and as the evening progressed she began to suspect that it wasn't a real "dinner party," and that they had just asked her in to share what they had when they were alone. but a glance about the table convinced her that mrs. fairford could not have meant to treat her other guests so lightly. they were only eight in number, but one was no less a person than young mrs. peter van degen--the one who had been a dagonet--and the consideration which this young lady, herself one of the choicest ornaments of the society column, displayed toward the rest of the company, convinced undine that they must be more important than they looked. she liked mrs. fairford, a small incisive woman, with a big nose and good teeth revealed by frequent smiles. in her dowdy black and antiquated ornaments she was not what undine would have called "stylish"; but she had a droll kind way which reminded the girl of her father's manner when he was not tired or worried about money. one of the other ladies, having white hair, did not long arrest undine's attention; and the fourth, a girl like herself, who was introduced as miss harriet ray, she dismissed at a glance as plain and wearing a last year's "model." the men, too, were less striking than she had hoped. she had not expected much of mr. fairford, since married men were intrinsically uninteresting, and his baldness and grey moustache seemed naturally to relegate him to the background; but she had looked for some brilliant youths of her own age--in her inmost heart she had looked for mr. popple. he was not there, however, and of the other men one, whom they called mr. bowen, was hopelessly elderly--she supposed he was the husband of the white-haired lady--and the other two, who seemed to be friends of young marvell's, were both lacking in claud walsingham's dash. undine sat between mr. bowen and young marvell, who struck her as very "sweet" (it was her word for friendliness), but even shyer than at the hotel dance. yet she was not sure if he were shy, or if his quietness were only a new kind of self-possession which expressed itself negatively instead of aggressively. small, well-knit, fair, he sat stroking his slight blond moustache and looking at her with kindly, almost tender eyes; but he left it to his sister and the others to draw her out and fit her into the pattern. mrs. fairford talked so well that the girl wondered why mrs. heeny had found her lacking in conversation. but though undine thought silent people awkward she was not easily impressed by verbal fluency. all the ladies in apex city were more voluble than mrs. fairford, and had a larger vocabulary: the difference was that with mrs. fairford conversation seemed to be a concert and not a solo. she kept drawing in the others, giving each a turn, beating time for them with her smile, and somehow harmonizing and linking together what they said. she took particular pains to give undine her due part in the performance; but the girl's expansive impulses were always balanced by odd reactions of mistrust, and to-night the latter prevailed. she meant to watch and listen without letting herself go, and she sat very straight and pink, answering promptly but briefly, with the nervous laugh that punctuated all her phrases--saying "i don't care if i do" when her host asked her to try some grapes, and "i wouldn't wonder" when she thought any one was trying to astonish her. this state of lucidity enabled her to take note of all that was being said. the talk ran more on general questions, and less on people, than she was used to; but though the allusions to pictures and books escaped her, she caught and stored up every personal reference, and the pink in her cheeks deepened at a random mention of mr. popple. "yes--he's doing me," mrs. peter van degen was saying, in her slightly drawling voice. "he's doing everybody this year, you know--" "as if that were a reason!" undine heard mrs. fairford breathe to mr. bowen; who replied, at the same pitch: "it's a van degen reason, isn't it?"--to which mrs. fairford shrugged assentingly. "that delightful popple--he paints so exactly as he talks!" the white-haired lady took it up. "all his portraits seem to proclaim what a gentleman he is, and how he fascinates women! they're not pictures of mrs. or miss so-and-so, but simply of the impression popple thinks he's made on them." mrs. fairford smiled. "i've sometimes thought," she mused, "that mr. popple must be the only gentleman i know; at least he's the only man who has ever told me he was a gentleman--and mr. popple never fails to mention it." undine's ear was too well attuned to the national note of irony for her not to perceive that her companions were making sport of the painter. she winced at their banter as if it had been at her own expense, yet it gave her a dizzy sense of being at last in the very stronghold of fashion. her attention was diverted by hearing mrs. van degen, under cover of the general laugh, say in a low tone to young marvell: "i thought you liked his things, or i wouldn't have had him paint me." something in her tone made all undine's perceptions bristle, and she strained her ears for the answer. "i think he'll do you capitally--you must let me come and see some day soon." marvell's tone was always so light, so unemphasized, that she could not be sure of its being as indifferent as it sounded. she looked down at the fruit on her plate and shot a side-glance through her lashes at mrs. peter van degen. mrs. van degen was neither beautiful nor imposing: just a dark girlish-looking creature with plaintive eyes and a fidgety frequent laugh. but she was more elaborately dressed and jewelled than the other ladies, and her elegance and her restlessness made her seem less alien to undine. she had turned on marvell a gaze at once pleading and possessive; but whether betokening merely an inherited intimacy (undine had noticed that they were all more or less cousins) or a more personal feeling, her observer was unable to decide; just as the tone of the young man's reply might have expressed the open avowal of good-fellowship or the disguise of a different sentiment. all was blurred and puzzling to the girl in this world of half-lights, half-tones, eliminations and abbreviations; and she felt a violent longing to brush away the cobwebs and assert herself as the dominant figure of the scene. yet in the drawing-room, with the ladies, where mrs. fairford came and sat by her, the spirit of caution once more prevailed. she wanted to be noticed but she dreaded to be patronized, and here again her hostess's gradations of tone were confusing. mrs. fairford made no tactless allusions to her being a newcomer in new york--there was nothing as bitter to the girl as that--but her questions as to what pictures had interested undine at the various exhibitions of the moment, and which of the new books she had read, were almost as open to suspicion, since they had to be answered in the negative. undine did not even know that there were any pictures to be seen, much less that "people" went to see them; and she had read no new book but "when the kissing had to stop," of which mrs. fairford seemed not to have heard. on the theatre they were equally at odds, for while undine had seen "oolaloo" fourteen times, and was "wild" about ned norris in "the soda-water fountain," she had not heard of the famous berlin comedians who were performing shakespeare at the german theatre, and knew only by name the clever american actress who was trying to give "repertory" plays with a good stock company. the conversation was revived for a moment by her recalling that she had seen sarah bernhard in a play she called "leg-long," and another which she pronounced "fade"; but even this did not carry them far, as she had forgotten what both plays were about and had found the actress a good deal older than she expected. matters were not improved by the return of the men from the smoking-room. henley fairford replaced his wife at undine's side; and since it was unheard-of at apex for a married man to force his society on a young girl, she inferred that the others didn't care to talk to her, and that her host and hostess were in league to take her off their hands. this discovery resulted in her holding her vivid head very high, and answering "i couldn't really say," or "is that so?" to all mr. fairford's ventures; and as these were neither numerous nor striking it was a relief to both when the rising of the elderly lady gave the signal for departure. in the hall, where young marvell had managed to precede her. undine found mrs. van degen putting on her cloak. as she gathered it about her she laid her hand on marvell's arm. "ralphie, dear, you'll come to the opera with me on friday? we'll dine together first--peter's got a club dinner." they exchanged what seemed a smile of intelligence, and undine heard the young man accept. then mrs. van degen turned to her. "good-bye, miss spragg. i hope you'll come--" "--to dine with me too?" that must be what she was going to say, and undine's heart gave a bound. "--to see me some afternoon," mrs. van degen ended, going down the steps to her motor, at the door of which a much-furred footman waited with more furs on his arm. undine's face burned as she turned to receive her cloak. when she had drawn it on with haughty deliberation she found marvell at her side, in hat and overcoat, and her heart gave a higher bound. he was going to "escort" her home, of course! this brilliant youth--she felt now that he was brilliant--who dined alone with married women, whom the "van degen set" called "ralphie, dear," had really no eyes for any one but herself; and at the thought her lost self-complacency flowed back warm through her veins. the street was coated with ice, and she had a delicious moment descending the steps on marvell's arm, and holding it fast while they waited for her cab to come up; but when he had helped her in he closed the door and held his hand out over the lowered window. "good-bye," he said, smiling; and she could not help the break of pride in her voice, as she faltered out stupidly, from the depths of her disillusionment: "oh--good-bye." iv "father, you've got to take a box for me at the opera next friday." from the tone of her voice undine's parents knew at once that she was "nervous." they had counted a great deal on the fairford dinner as a means of tranquillization, and it was a blow to detect signs of the opposite result when, late the next morning, their daughter came dawdling into the sodden splendour of the stentorian breakfast-room. the symptoms of undine's nervousness were unmistakable to mr. and mrs. spragg. they could read the approaching storm in the darkening of her eyes from limpid grey to slate-colour, and in the way her straight black brows met above them and the red curves of her lips narrowed to a parallel line below. mr. spragg, having finished the last course of his heterogeneous meal, was adjusting his gold eye-glasses for a glance at the paper when undine trailed down the sumptuous stuffy room, where coffee-fumes hung perpetually under the emblazoned ceiling and the spongy carpet might have absorbed a year's crumbs without a sweeping. about them sat other pallid families, richly dressed, and silently eating their way through a bill-of-fare which seemed to have ransacked the globe for gastronomic incompatibilities; and in the middle of the room a knot of equally pallid waiters, engaged in languid conversation, turned their backs by common consent on the persons they were supposed to serve. undine, who rose too late to share the family breakfast, usually had her chocolate brought to her in bed by celeste, after the manner described in the articles on "a society woman's day" which were appearing in boudoir chat. her mere appearance in the restaurant therefore prepared her parents for those symptoms of excessive tension which a nearer inspection confirmed, and mr. spragg folded his paper and hooked his glasses to his waistcoat with the air of a man who prefers to know the worst and have it over. "an opera box!" faltered mrs. spragg, pushing aside the bananas and cream with which she had been trying to tempt an appetite too languid for fried liver or crab mayonnaise. "a parterre box," undine corrected, ignoring the exclamation, and continuing to address herself to her father. "friday's the stylish night, and that new tenor's going to sing again in 'cavaleeria,'" she condescended to explain. "that so?" mr. spragg thrust his hands into his waistcoat pockets, and began to tilt his chair till he remembered there was no wall to meet it. he regained his balance and said: "wouldn't a couple of good orchestra seats do you?" "no; they wouldn't," undine answered with a darkening brow. he looked at her humorously. "you invited the whole dinner-party, i suppose?" "no--no one." "going all alone in a box?" she was disdainfully silent. "i don't s'pose you're thinking of taking mother and me?" this was so obviously comic that they all laughed--even mrs. spragg--and undine went on more mildly: "i want to do something for mabel lipscomb: make some return. she's always taking me 'round, and i've never done a thing for her--not a single thing." this appeal to the national belief in the duty of reciprocal "treating" could not fail of its effect, and mrs. spragg murmured: "she never has, abner,"--but mr. spragg's brow remained unrelenting. "do you know what a box costs?" "no; but i s'pose you do," undine returned with unconscious flippancy. "i do. that's the trouble. why won't seats do you?" "mabel could buy seats for herself." "that's so," interpolated mrs. spragg--always the first to succumb to her daughter's arguments. "well, i guess i can't buy a box for her." undine's face gloomed more deeply. she sat silent, her chocolate thickening in the cup, while one hand, almost as much beringed as her mother's, drummed on the crumpled table-cloth. "we might as well go straight back to apex," she breathed at last between her teeth. mrs. spragg cast a frightened glance at her husband. these struggles between two resolute wills always brought on her palpitations, and she wished she had her phial of digitalis with her. "a parterre box costs a hundred and twenty-five dollars a night," said mr. spragg, transferring a toothpick to his waistcoat pocket. "i only want it once." he looked at her with a quizzical puckering of his crows'-feet. "you only want most things once. undine." it was an observation they had made in her earliest youth--undine never wanted anything long, but she wanted it "right off." and until she got it the house was uninhabitable. "i'd a good deal rather have a box for the season," she rejoined, and he saw the opening he had given her. she had two ways of getting things out of him against his principles; the tender wheedling way, and the harsh-lipped and cold--and he did not know which he dreaded most. as a child they had admired her assertiveness, had made apex ring with their boasts of it; but it had long since cowed mrs. spragg, and it was beginning to frighten her husband. "fact is, undie," he said, weakening, "i'm a little mite strapped just this month." her eyes grew absent-minded, as they always did when he alluded to business. that was man's province; and what did men go "down town" for but to bring back the spoils to their women? she rose abruptly, leaving her parents seated, and said, more to herself than the others: "think i'll go for a ride." "oh, undine!" fluttered mrs. spragg. she always had palpitations when undine rode, and since the aaronson episode her fears were not confined to what the horse might do. "why don't you take your mother out shopping a little?" mr. spragg suggested, conscious of the limitation of his resources. undine made no answer, but swept down the room, and out of the door ahead of her mother, with scorn and anger in every line of her arrogant young back. mrs. spragg tottered meekly after her, and mr. spragg lounged out into the marble hall to buy a cigar before taking the subway to his office. undine went for a ride, not because she felt particularly disposed for the exercise, but because she wished to discipline her mother. she was almost sure she would get her opera box, but she did not see why she should have to struggle for her rights, and she was especially annoyed with mrs. spragg for seconding her so half-heartedly. if she and her mother did not hold together in such crises she would have twice the work to do. undine hated "scenes": she was essentially peace-loving, and would have preferred to live on terms of unbroken harmony with her parents. but she could not help it if they were unreasonable. ever since she could remember there had been "fusses" about money; yet she and her mother had always got what they wanted, apparently without lasting detriment to the family fortunes. it was therefore natural to conclude that there were ample funds to draw upon, and that mr. spragg's occasional resistances were merely due to an imperfect understanding of what constituted the necessities of life. when she returned from her ride mrs. spragg received her as if she had come back from the dead. it was absurd, of course; but undine was inured to the absurdity of parents. "has father telephoned?" was her first brief question. "no, he hasn't yet." undine's lips tightened, but she proceeded deliberately with the removal of her habit. "you'd think i'd asked him to buy me the opera house, the way he's acting over a single box," she muttered, flinging aside her smartly-fitting coat. mrs. spragg received the flying garment and smoothed it out on the bed. neither of the ladies could "bear" to have their maid about when they were at their toilet, and mrs. spragg had always performed these ancillary services for undine. "you know, undie, father hasn't always got the money in his pocket, and the bills have been pretty heavy lately. father was a rich man for apex, but that's different from being rich in new york." she stood before her daughter, looking down on her appealingly. undine, who had seated herself while she detached her stock and waistcoat, raised her head with an impatient jerk. "why on earth did we ever leave apex, then?" she exclaimed. mrs. spragg's eyes usually dropped before her daughter's inclement gaze; but on this occasion they held their own with a kind of awe-struck courage, till undine's lids sank above her flushing cheeks. she sprang up, tugging at the waistband of her habit, while mrs. spragg, relapsing from temerity to meekness, hovered about her with obstructive zeal. "if you'd only just let go of my skirt, mother--i can unhook it twice as quick myself." mrs. spragg drew back, understanding that her presence was no longer wanted. but on the threshold she paused, as if overruled by a stronger influence, and said, with a last look at her daughter: "you didn't meet anybody when you were out, did you, undie?" undine's brows drew together: she was struggling with her long patent-leather boot. "meet anybody? do you mean anybody i know? i don't know anybody--i never shall, if father can't afford to let me go round with people!" the boot was off with a wrench, and she flung it violently across the old-rose carpet, while mrs. spragg, turning away to hide a look of inexpressible relief, slipped discreetly from the room. the day wore on. undine had meant to go down and tell mabel lipscomb about the fairford dinner, but its aftertaste was flat on her lips. what would it lead to? nothing, as far as she could see. ralph marvell had not even asked when he might call; and she was ashamed to confess to mabel that he had not driven home with her. suddenly she decided that she would go and see the pictures of which mrs. fairford had spoken. perhaps she might meet some of the people she had seen at dinner--from their talk one might have imagined that they spent their lives in picture-galleries. the thought reanimated her, and she put on her handsomest furs, and a hat for which she had not yet dared present the bill to her father. it was the fashionable hour in fifth avenue, but undine knew none of the ladies who were bowing to each other from interlocked motors. she had to content herself with the gaze of admiration which she left in her wake along the pavement; but she was used to the homage of the streets and her vanity craved a choicer fare. when she reached the art gallery which mrs. fairford had named she found it even more crowded than fifth avenue; and some of the ladies and gentlemen wedged before the pictures had the "look" which signified social consecration. as undine made her way among them, she was aware of attracting almost as much notice as in the street, and she flung herself into rapt attitudes before the canvases, scribbling notes in the catalogue in imitation of a tall girl in sables, while ripples of self-consciousness played up and down her watchful back. presently her attention was drawn to a lady in black who was examining the pictures through a tortoise-shell eye-glass adorned with diamonds and hanging from a long pearl chain. undine was instantly struck by the opportunities which this toy presented for graceful wrist movements and supercilious turns of the head. it seemed suddenly plebeian and promiscuous to look at the world with a naked eye, and all her floating desires were merged in the wish for a jewelled eye-glass and chain. so violent was this wish that, drawn on in the wake of the owner of the eye-glass, she found herself inadvertently bumping against a stout tight-coated young man whose impact knocked her catalogue from her hand. as the young man picked the catalogue up and held it out to her she noticed that his bulging eyes and queer retreating face were suffused with a glow of admiration. he was so unpleasant-looking that she would have resented his homage had not his odd physiognomy called up some vaguely agreeable association of ideas. where had she seen before this grotesque saurian head, with eye-lids as thick as lips and lips as thick as ear-lobes? it fled before her down a perspective of innumerable newspaper portraits, all, like the original before her, tightly coated, with a huge pearl transfixing a silken tie.... "oh, thank you," she murmured, all gleams and graces, while he stood hat in hand, saying sociably: "the crowd's simply awful, isn't it?" at the same moment the lady of the eye-glass drifted closer, and with a tap of her wand, and a careless "peter, look at this," swept him to the other side of the gallery. undine's heart was beating excitedly, for as he turned away she had identified him. peter van degen--who could he be but young peter van degen, the son of the great banker, thurber van degen, the husband of ralph marvell's cousin, the hero of "sunday supplements," the captor of blue ribbons at horse-shows, of gold cups at motor races, the owner of winning race-horses and "crack" sloops: the supreme exponent, in short, of those crowning arts that made all life seem stale and unprofitable outside the magic ring of the society column? undine smiled as she recalled the look with which his pale protruding eyes had rested on her--it almost consoled her for his wife's indifference! when she reached home she found that she could not remember anything about the pictures she had seen... there was no message from her father, and a reaction of disgust set in. of what good were such encounters if they were to have no sequel? she would probably never meet peter van degen again--or, if she did run across him in the same accidental way, she knew they could not continue their conversation without being "introduced." what was the use of being beautiful and attracting attention if one were perpetually doomed to relapse again into the obscure mass of the uninvited? her gloom was not lightened by finding ralph marvell's card on the drawing-room table. she thought it unflattering and almost impolite of him to call without making an appointment: it seemed to show that he did not wish to continue their acquaintance. but as she tossed the card aside her mother said: "he was real sorry not to see you. undine--he sat here nearly an hour." undine's attention was roused. "sat here--all alone? didn't you tell him i was out?" "yes--but he came up all the same. he asked for me." "asked for you?" the social order seemed to be falling in ruins at undine's feet. a visitor who asked for a girl's mother!--she stared at mrs. spragg with cold incredulity. "what makes you think he did?" "why, they told me so. i telephoned down that you were out, and they said he'd asked for me." mrs. spragg let the fact speak for itself--it was too much out of the range of her experience to admit of even a hypothetical explanation. undine shrugged her shoulders. "it was a mistake, of course. why on earth did you let him come up?" "i thought maybe he had a message for you, undie." this plea struck her daughter as not without weight. "well, did he?" she asked, drawing out her hat-pins and tossing down her hat on the onyx table. "why, no--he just conversed. he was lovely to me, but i couldn't make out what he was after," mrs. spragg was obliged to own. her daughter looked at her with a kind of chill commiseration. "you never can," she murmured, turning away. she stretched herself out moodily on one of the pink and gold sofas, and lay there brooding, an unread novel on her knee. mrs. spragg timidly slipped a cushion under her daughter's head, and then dissembled herself behind the lace window-curtains and sat watching the lights spring out down the long street and spread their glittering net across the park. it was one of mrs. spragg's chief occupations to watch the nightly lighting of new york. undine lay silent, her hands clasped behind her head. she was plunged in one of the moods of bitter retrospection when all her past seemed like a long struggle for something she could not have, from a trip to europe to an opera-box; and when she felt sure that, as the past had been, so the future would be. and yet, as she had often told her parents, all she sought for was improvement: she honestly wanted the best. her first struggle--after she had ceased to scream for candy, or sulk for a new toy--had been to get away from apex in summer. her summers, as she looked back on them, seemed to typify all that was dreariest and most exasperating in her life. the earliest had been spent in the yellow "frame" cottage where she had hung on the fence, kicking her toes against the broken palings and exchanging moist chewing-gum and half-eaten apples with indiana frusk. later on, she had returned from her boarding-school to the comparative gentility of summer vacations at the mealey house, whither her parents, forsaking their squalid suburb, had moved in the first flush of their rising fortunes. the tessellated floors, the plush parlours and organ-like radiators of the mealey house had, aside from their intrinsic elegance, the immense advantage of lifting the spraggs high above the frusks, and making it possible for undine, when she met indiana in the street or at school, to chill her advances by a careless allusion to the splendours of hotel life. but even in such a setting, and in spite of the social superiority it implied, the long months of the middle western summer, fly-blown, torrid, exhaling stale odours, soon became as insufferable as they had been in the little yellow house. at school undine met other girls whose parents took them to the great lakes for august; some even went to california, others--oh bliss ineffable!--went "east." pale and listless under the stifling boredom of the mealey house routine, undine secretly sucked lemons, nibbled slate-pencils and drank pints of bitter coffee to aggravate her look of ill-health; and when she learned that even indiana frusk was to go on a month's visit to buffalo it needed no artificial aids to emphasize the ravages of envy. her parents, alarmed by her appearance, were at last convinced of the necessity of change, and timidly, tentatively, they transferred themselves for a month to a staring hotel on a glaring lake. there undine enjoyed the satisfaction of sending ironic post-cards to indiana, and discovering that she could more than hold her own against the youth and beauty of the other visitors. then she made the acquaintance of a pretty woman from richmond, whose husband, a mining engineer, had brought her west with him while he inspected the newly developed eubaw mines; and the southern visitor's dismay, her repugnances, her recoil from the faces, the food, the amusements, the general bareness and stridency of the scene, were a terrible initiation to undine. there was something still better beyond, then--more luxurious, more exciting, more worthy of her! she once said to herself, afterward, that it was always her fate to find out just too late about the "something beyond." but in this case it was not too late--and obstinately, inflexibly, she set herself to the task of forcing her parents to take her "east" the next summer. yielding to the inevitable, they suffered themselves to be impelled to a virginia "resort," where undine had her first glimpse of more romantic possibilities--leafy moonlight rides and drives, picnics in mountain glades, and an atmosphere of christmas-chromo sentimentality that tempered her hard edges a little, and gave her glimpses of a more delicate kind of pleasure. but here again everything was spoiled by a peep through another door. undine, after a first mustering of the other girls in the hotel, had, as usual, found herself easily first--till the arrival, from washington, of mr. and mrs. wincher and their daughter. undine was much handsomer than miss wincher, but she saw at a glance that she did not know how to use her beauty as the other used her plainness. she was exasperated too, by the discovery that miss wincher seemed not only unconscious of any possible rivalry between them, but actually unaware of her existence. listless, long-faced, supercilious, the young lady from washington sat apart reading novels or playing solitaire with her parents, as though the huge hotel's loud life of gossip and flirtation were invisible and inaudible to her. undine never even succeeded in catching her eye: she always lowered it to her book when the apex beauty trailed or rattled past her secluded corner. but one day an acquaintance of the winchers' turned up--a lady from boston, who had come to virginia on a botanizing tour; and from scraps of miss wincher's conversation with the newcomer, undine, straining her ears behind a column of the long veranda, obtained a new glimpse into the unimagined. the winchers, it appeared, found themselves at potash springs merely because a severe illness of mrs. wincher's had made it impossible, at the last moment, to move her farther from washington. they had let their house on the north shore, and as soon as they could leave "this dreadful hole" were going to europe for the autumn. miss wincher simply didn't know how she got through the days; though no doubt it was as good as a rest-cure after the rush of the winter. of course they would have preferred to hire a house, but the "hole," if one could believe it, didn't offer one; so they had simply shut themselves off as best they could from the "hotel crew"--had her friend, miss wincher parenthetically asked, happened to notice the sunday young men? they were queerer even than the "belles" they came for--and had escaped the promiscuity of the dinner-hour by turning one of their rooms into a dining-room, and picnicking there--with the persimmon house standards, one couldn't describe it in any other way! but luckily the awful place was doing mamma good, and now they had nearly served their term... undine turned sick as she listened. only the evening before she had gone on a "buggy-ride" with a young gentleman from deposit--a dentist's assistant--and had let him kiss her, and given him the flower from her hair. she loathed the thought of him now: she loathed all the people about her, and most of all the disdainful miss wincher. it enraged her to think that the winchers classed her with the "hotel crew"--with the "belles" who awaited their sunday young men. the place was forever blighted for her, and the next week she dragged her amazed but thankful parents back to apex. but miss wincher's depreciatory talk had opened ampler vistas, and the pioneer blood in undine would not let her rest. she had heard the call of the atlantic seaboard, and the next summer found the spraggs at skog harbour, maine. even now undine felt a shiver of boredom as she recalled it. that summer had been the worst of all. the bare wind-beaten inn, all shingles without and blueberry pie within, was "exclusive," parochial, bostonian; and the spraggs wore through the interminable weeks in blank unmitigated isolation. the incomprehensible part of it was that every other woman in the hotel was plain, dowdy or elderly--and most of them all three. if there had been any competition on ordinary lines undine would have won, as van degen said, "hands down." but there wasn't--the other "guests" simply formed a cold impenetrable group who walked, boated, played golf, and discussed christian science and the subliminal, unaware of the tremulous organism drifting helplessly against their rock-bound circle. it was on the day the spraggs left skog harbour that undine vowed to herself with set lips: "i'll never try anything again till i try new york." now she had gained her point and tried new york, and so far, it seemed, with no better success. from small things to great, everything went against her. in such hours of self-searching she was ready enough to acknowledge her own mistakes, but they exasperated her less than the blunders of her parents. she was sure, for instance, that she was on what mrs. heeny called "the right tack" at last: yet just at the moment when her luck seemed about to turn she was to be thwarted by her father's stupid obstinacy about the opera-box... she lay brooding over these things till long after mrs. spragg had gone away to dress for dinner, and it was nearly eight o'clock when she heard her father's dragging tread in the hall. she kept her eyes fixed on her book while he entered the room and moved about behind her, laying aside his hat and overcoat; then his steps came close and a small parcel dropped on the pages of her book. "oh, father!" she sprang up, all alight, the novel on the floor, her fingers twitching for the tickets. but a substantial packet emerged, like nothing she had ever seen. she looked at it, hoping, fearing--she beamed blissful interrogation on her father while his sallow smile continued to tantalize her. then she closed on him with a rush, smothering his words against her hair. "it's for more than one night--why, it's for every other friday! oh, you darling, you darling!" she exulted. mr. spragg, through the glittering meshes, feigned dismay. "that so? they must have given me the wrong--!" then, convicted by her radiant eyes as she swung round on him: "i knew you only wanted it once for yourself. undine; but i thought maybe, off nights, you'd like to send it to your friends." mrs. spragg, who from her doorway had assisted with moist eyes at this closing pleasantry, came forward as undine hurried away to dress. "abner--can you really manage it all right?" he answered her with one of his awkward brief caresses. "don't you fret about that, leota. i'm bound to have her go round with these people she knows. i want her to be with them all she can." a pause fell between them, while mrs. spragg looked anxiously into his fagged eyes. "you seen elmer again?" "no. once was enough," he returned, with a scowl like undine's. "why--you said he couldn't come after her, abner!" "no more he can. but what if she was to get nervous and lonesome, and want to go after him?" mrs. spragg shuddered away from the suggestion. "how'd he look? just the same?" she whispered. "no. spruced up. that's what scared me." it scared her too, to the point of blanching her habitually lifeless cheek. she continued to scrutinize her husband broodingly. "you look fairly sick, abner. you better let me get you some of those stomach drops right off," she proposed. but he parried this with his unfailing humour. "i guess i'm too sick to risk that." he passed his hand through her arm with the conjugal gesture familiar to apex city. "come along down to dinner, mother--i guess undine won't mind if i don't rig up to-night." v she had looked down at them, enviously, from the balcony--she had looked up at them, reverentially, from the stalls; but now at last she was on a line with them, among them, she was part of the sacred semicircle whose privilege it is, between the acts, to make the mere public forget that the curtain has fallen. as she swept to the left-hand seat of their crimson niche, waving mabel lipscomb to the opposite corner with a gesture learned during her apprenticeship in the stalls, undine felt that quickening of the faculties that comes in the high moments of life. her consciousness seemed to take in at once the whole bright curve of the auditorium, from the unbroken lines of spectators below her to the culminating blaze of the central chandelier; and she herself was the core of that vast illumination, the sentient throbbing surface which gathered all the shafts of light into a centre. it was almost a relief when, a moment later, the lights sank, the curtain rose, and the focus of illumination was shifted. the music, the scenery, and the movement on the stage, were like a rich mist tempering the radiance that shot on her from every side, and giving her time to subside, draw breath, adjust herself to this new clear medium which made her feel so oddly brittle and transparent. when the curtain fell on the first act she began to be aware of a subtle change in the house. in all the boxes cross-currents of movement had set in: groups were coalescing and breaking up, fans waving and heads twinkling, black coats emerging among white shoulders, late comers dropping their furs and laces in the red penumbra of the background. undine, for the moment unconscious of herself, swept the house with her opera-glass, searching for familiar faces. some she knew without being able to name them--fixed figure-heads of the social prow--others she recognized from their portraits in the papers; but of the few from whom she could herself claim recognition not one was visible, and as she pursued her investigations the whole scene grew blank and featureless. almost all the boxes were full now, but one, just opposite, tantalized her by its continued emptiness. how queer to have an opera-box and not use it! what on earth could the people be doing--what rarer delight could they be tasting? undine remembered that the numbers of the boxes and the names of their owners were given on the back of the programme, and after a rapid computation she turned to consult the list. mondays and fridays, mrs. peter van degen. that was it: the box was empty because mrs. van degen was dining alone with ralph marvell! "peter will be at one of his dinners." undine had a sharp vision of the van degen dining-room--she pictured it as oak-carved and sumptuous with gilding --with a small table in the centre, and rosy lights and flowers, and ralph marvell, across the hot-house grapes and champagne, leaning to take a light from his hostess's cigarette. undine had seen such scenes on the stage, she had come upon them in the glowing pages of fiction, and it seemed to her that every detail was before her now, from the glitter of jewels on mrs. van degen's bare shoulders to the way young marvell stroked his slight blond moustache while he smiled and listened. undine blushed with anger at her own simplicity in fancying that he had been "taken" by her--that she could ever really count among these happy self-absorbed people! they all had their friends, their ties, their delightful crowding obligations: why should they make room for an intruder in a circle so packed with the initiated? as her imagination developed the details of the scene in the van degen dining-room it became clear to her that fashionable society was horribly immoral and that she could never really be happy in such a poisoned atmosphere. she remembered that an eminent divine was preaching a series of sermons against social corruption, and she determined to go and hear him on the following sunday. this train of thought was interrupted by the feeling that she was being intently observed from the neighbouring box. she turned around with a feint of speaking to mrs. lipscomb, and met the bulging stare of peter van degen. he was standing behind the lady of the eye-glass, who had replaced her tortoise-shell implement by one of closely-set brilliants, which, at word from her companion, she critically bent on undine. "no--i don't remember," she said; and the girl reddened, divining herself unidentified after this protracted scrutiny. but there was no doubt as to young van degen's remembering her. she was even conscious that he was trying to provoke in her some reciprocal sign of recognition; and the attempt drove her to the haughty study of her programme. "why, there's mr. popple over there!" exclaimed mabel lipscomb, making large signs across the house with fan and play-bill. undine had already become aware that mabel, planted, blond and brimming, too near the edge of the box, was somehow out of scale and out of drawing; and the freedom of her demonstrations increased the effect of disproportion. no one else was wagging and waving in that way: a gestureless mute telegraphy seemed to pass between the other boxes. still, undine could not help following mrs. lipscomb's glance, and there in fact was claud popple, taller and more dominant than ever, and bending easily over what she felt must be the back of a brilliant woman. he replied by a discreet salute to mrs. lipscomb's intemperate motions, and undine saw the brilliant woman's opera-glass turn in their direction, and said to herself that in a moment mr. popple would be "round." but the entr'acte wore on, and no one turned the handle of their door, or disturbed the peaceful somnolence of harry lipscomb, who, not being (as he put it) "onto" grand opera, had abandoned the struggle and withdrawn to the seclusion of the inner box. undine jealously watched mr. popple's progress from box to box, from brilliant woman to brilliant woman; but just as it seemed about to carry him to their door he reappeared at his original post across the house. "undie, do look--there's mr. marvell!" mabel began again, with another conspicuous outbreak of signalling; and this time undine flushed to the nape as mrs. peter van degen appeared in the opposite box with ralph marvell behind her. the two seemed to be alone in the box--as they had doubtless been alone all the evening!--and undine furtively turned to see if mr. van degen shared her disapproval. but mr. van degen had disappeared, and undine, leaning forward, nervously touched mabel's arm. "what's the matter. undine? don't you see mr. marvell over there? is that his sister he's with?" "no.--i wouldn't beckon like that," undine whispered between her teeth. "why not? don't you want him to know you're here?" "yes--but the other people are not beckoning." mabel looked about unabashed. "perhaps they've all found each other. shall i send harry over to tell him?" she shouted above the blare of the wind instruments. "no!" gasped undine as the curtain rose. she was no longer capable of following the action on the stage. two presences possessed her imagination: that of ralph marvell, small, unattainable, remote, and that of mabel lipscomb, near-by, immense and irrepressible. it had become clear to undine that mabel lipscomb was ridiculous. that was the reason why popple did not come to the box. no one would care to be seen talking to her while mabel was at her side: mabel, monumental and moulded while the fashionable were flexible and diaphanous, mabel strident and explicit while they were subdued and allusive. at the stentorian she was the centre of her group--here she revealed herself as unknown and unknowing. why, she didn't even know that mrs. peter van degen was not ralph marvell's sister! and she had a way of trumpeting out her ignorances that jarred on undine's subtler methods. it was precisely at this point that there dawned on undine what was to be one of the guiding principles of her career: "it's better to watch than to ask questions." the curtain fell again, and undine's eyes flew back to the van degen box. several men were entering it together, and a moment later she saw ralph marvell rise from his seat and pass out. half-unconsciously she placed herself in such a way as to have an eye on the door of the box. but its handle remained unturned, and harry lipscomb, leaning back on the sofa, his head against the opera cloaks, continued to breathe stentorously through his open mouth and stretched his legs a little farther across the threshold... the entr'acte was nearly over when the door opened and two gentlemen stumbled over mr. lipscomb's legs. the foremost was claud walsingham popple; and above his shoulder shone the batrachian countenance of peter van degen. a brief murmur from mr. popple made his companion known to the two ladies, and mr. van degen promptly seated himself behind undine, relegating the painter to mrs. lipscomb's elbow. "queer go--i happened to see your friend there waving to old popp across the house. so i bolted over and collared him: told him he'd got to introduce me before he was a minute older. i tried to find out who you were the other day at the motor show--no, where was it? oh, those pictures at goldmark's. what d'you think of 'em, by the way? you ought to be painted yourself--no, i mean it, you know--you ought to get old popp to do you. he'd do your hair ripplingly. you must let me come and talk to you about it... about the picture or your hair? well, your hair if you don't mind. where'd you say you were staying? oh, you live here, do you? i say, that's first rate!" undine sat well forward, curving toward him a little, as she had seen the other women do, but holding back sufficiently to let it be visible to the house that she was conversing with no less a person than mr. peter van degen. mr. popple's talk was certainly more brilliant and purposeful, and she saw him cast longing glances at her from behind mrs. lipscomb's shoulder; but she remembered how lightly he had been treated at the fairford dinner, and she wanted--oh, how she wanted!--to have ralph marvell see her talking to van degen. she poured out her heart to him, improvising an opinion on the pictures and an opinion on the music, falling in gaily with his suggestion of a jolly little dinner some night soon, at the café martin, and strengthening her position, as she thought, by an easy allusion to her acquaintance with mrs. van degen. but at the word her companion's eye clouded, and a shade of constraint dimmed his enterprising smile. "my wife--? oh, she doesn't go to restaurants--she moves on too high a plane. but we'll get old popp, and mrs.--, mrs.--, what'd you say your fat friend's name was? just a select little crowd of four--and some kind of a cheerful show afterward... jove! there's the curtain, and i must skip." as the door closed on him undine's cheeks burned with resentment. if mrs. van degen didn't go to restaurants, why had he supposed that she would? and to have to drag mabel in her wake! the leaden sense of failure overcame her again. here was the evening nearly over, and what had it led to? looking up from the stalls, she had fancied that to sit in a box was to be in society--now she saw it might but emphasize one's exclusion. and she was burdened with the box for the rest of the season! it was really stupid of her father to have exceeded his instructions: why had he not done as she told him?... undine felt helpless and tired... hateful memories of apex crowded back on her. was it going to be as dreary here as there? she felt lipscomb's loud whisper in her back: "say, you girls, i guess i'll cut this and come back for you when the show busts up." they heard him shuffle out of the box, and mabel settled back to undisturbed enjoyment of the stage. when the last entr'acte began undine stood up, resolved to stay no longer. mabel, lost in the study of the audience, had not noticed her movement, and as she passed alone into the back of the box the door opened and ralph marvell came in. undine stood with one arm listlessly raised to detach her cloak from the wall. her attitude showed the long slimness of her figure and the fresh curve of the throat below her bent-back head. her face was paler and softer than usual, and the eyes she rested on marvell's face looked deep and starry under their fixed brows. "oh--you're not going?" he exclaimed. "i thought you weren't coming," she answered simply. "i waited till now on purpose to dodge your other visitors." she laughed with pleasure. "oh, we hadn't so many!" some intuition had already told her that frankness was the tone to take with him. they sat down together on the red damask sofa, against the hanging cloaks. as undine leaned back her hair caught in the spangles of the wrap behind her, and she had to sit motionless while the young man freed the captive mesh. then they settled themselves again, laughing a little at the incident. a glance had made the situation clear to mrs. lipscomb, and they saw her return to her rapt inspection of the boxes. in their mirror-hung recess the light was subdued to a rosy dimness and the hum of the audience came to them through half-drawn silken curtains. undine noticed the delicacy and finish of her companion's features as his head detached itself against the red silk walls. the hand with which he stroked his small moustache was finely-finished too, but sinewy and not effeminate. she had always associated finish and refinement entirely with her own sex, but she began to think they might be even more agreeable in a man. marvell's eyes were grey, like her own, with chestnut eyebrows and darker lashes; and his skin was as clear as a woman's, but pleasantly reddish, like his hands. as he sat talking in a low tone, questioning her about the music, asking her what she had been doing since he had last seen her, she was aware that he looked at her less than usual, and she also glanced away; but when she turned her eyes suddenly they always met his gaze. his talk remained impersonal. she was a little disappointed that he did not compliment her on her dress or her hair--undine was accustomed to hearing a great deal about her hair, and the episode of the spangles had opened the way to a graceful allusion--but the instinct of sex told her that, under his quiet words, he was throbbing with the sense of her proximity. and his self-restraint sobered her, made her refrain from the flashing and fidgeting which were the only way she knew of taking part in the immemorial love-dance. she talked simply and frankly of herself, of her parents, of how few people they knew in new york, and of how, at times, she was almost sorry she had persuaded them to give up apex. "you see, they did it entirely on my account; they're awfully lonesome here; and i don't believe i shall ever learn new york ways either," she confessed, turning on him the eyes of youth and truthfulness. "of course i know a few people; but they're not--not the way i expected new york people to be." she risked what seemed an involuntary glance at mabel. "i've seen girls here to-night that i just long to know--they look so lovely and refined--but i don't suppose i ever shall. new york's not very friendly to strange girls, is it? i suppose you've got so many of your own already--and they're all so fascinating you don't care!" as she spoke she let her eyes rest on his, half-laughing, half-wistful, and then dropped her lashes while the pink stole slowly up to them. when he left her he asked if he might hope to find her at home the next day. the night was fine, and marvell, having put his cousin into her motor, started to walk home to washington square. at the corner he was joined by mr. popple. "hallo, ralph, old man--did you run across our auburn beauty of the stentorian? who'd have thought old harry lipscomb'd have put us onto anything as good as that? peter van degen was fairly taken off his feet--pulled me out of mrs. monty thurber's box and dragged me 'round by the collar to introduce him. planning a dinner at martin's already. gad, young peter must have what he wants when he wants it! i put in a word for you--told him you and i ought to be let in on the ground floor. funny the luck some girls have about getting started. i believe this one'll take if she can manage to shake the lipscombs. i think i'll ask to paint her; might be a good thing for the spring show. she'd show up splendidly as a pendant to my mrs. van degen--blonde and brunette... night and morning... of course i prefer mrs. van degen's type--personally, i must have breeding--but as a mere bit of flesh and blood... hallo, ain't you coming into the club?" marvell was not coming into the club, and he drew a long breath of relief as his companion left him. was it possible that he had ever thought leniently of the egregious popple? the tone of social omniscience which he had once found so comic was now as offensive to him as a coarse physical touch. and the worst of it was that popple, with the slight exaggeration of a caricature, really expressed the ideals of the world he frequented. as he spoke of miss spragg, so others at any rate would think of her: almost every one in ralph's set would agree that it was luck for a girl from apex to be started by peter van degen at a café martin dinner... ralph marvell, mounting his grandfather's doorstep, looked up at the symmetrical old red house-front, with its frugal marble ornament, as he might have looked into a familiar human face. "they're right,--after all, in some ways they're right," he murmured, slipping his key into the door. "they" were his mother and old mr. urban dagonet, both, from ralph's earliest memories, so closely identified with the old house in washington square that they might have passed for its inner consciousness as it might have stood for their outward form; and the question as to which the house now seemed to affirm their intrinsic rightness was that of the social disintegration expressed by widely-different architectural physiognomies at the other end of fifth avenue. as ralph pushed the bolts behind him, and passed into the hall, with its dark mahogany doors and the quiet "dutch interior" effect of its black and white marble paving, he said to himself that what popple called society was really just like the houses it lived in: a muddle of misapplied ornament over a thin steel shell of utility. the steel shell was built up in wall street, the social trimmings were hastily added in fifth avenue; and the union between them was as monstrous and factitious, as unlike the gradual homogeneous growth which flowers into what other countries know as society, as that between the blois gargoyles on peter van degen's roof and the skeleton walls supporting them. that was what "they" had always said; what, at least, the dagonet attitude, the dagonet view of life, the very lines of the furniture in the old dagonet house expressed. ralph sometimes called his mother and grandfather the aborigines, and likened them to those vanishing denizens of the american continent doomed to rapid extinction with the advance of the invading race. he was fond of describing washington square as the "reservation," and of prophesying that before long its inhabitants would be exhibited at ethnological shows, pathetically engaged in the exercise of their primitive industries. small, cautious, middle-class, had been the ideals of aboriginal new york; but it suddenly struck the young man that they were singularly coherent and respectable as contrasted with the chaos of indiscriminate appetites which made up its modern tendencies. he too had wanted to be "modern," had revolted, half-humorously, against the restrictions and exclusions of the old code; and it must have been by one of the ironic reversions of heredity that, at this precise point, he began to see what there was to be said on the other side--his side, as he now felt it to be. vi upstairs, in his brown firelit room, he threw himself into an armchair, and remembered... harvard first--then oxford; then a year of wandering and rich initiation. returning to new york, he had read law, and now had his desk in the office of the respectable firm in whose charge the dagonet estate had mouldered for several generations. but his profession was the least real thing in his life. the realities lay about him now: the books jamming his old college bookcases and overflowing on chairs and tables; sketches too--he could do charming things, if only he had known how to finish them!--and, on the writing-table at his elbow, scattered sheets of prose and verse; charming things also, but, like the sketches, unfinished. nothing in the dagonet and marvell tradition was opposed to this desultory dabbling with life. for four or five generations it had been the rule of both houses that a young fellow should go to columbia or harvard, read law, and then lapse into more or less cultivated inaction. the only essential was that he should live "like a gentleman"--that is, with a tranquil disdain for mere money-getting, a passive openness to the finer sensations, one or two fixed principles as to the quality of wine, and an archaic probity that had not yet learned to distinguish between private and "business" honour. no equipment could more thoroughly have unfitted the modern youth for getting on: it hardly needed the scribbled pages on the desk to complete the hopelessness of ralph marvell's case. he had accepted the fact with a humorous fatalism. material resources were limited on both sides of the house, but there would always be enough for his frugal wants--enough to buy books (not "editions"), and pay now and then for a holiday dash to the great centres of art and ideas. and meanwhile there was the world of wonders within him. as a boy at the sea-side, ralph, between tides, had once come on a cave--a secret inaccessible place with glaucous lights, mysterious murmurs, and a single shaft of communication with the sky. he had kept his find from the other boys, not churlishly, for he was always an outspoken lad, but because he felt there were things about the cave that the others, good fellows as they all were, couldn't be expected to understand, and that, anyhow, it would never be quite his cave again after he had let his thick-set freckled cousins play smuggler and pirate in it. and so with his inner world. though so coloured by outer impressions, it wove a secret curtain about him, and he came and went in it with the same joy of furtive possession. one day, of course, some one would discover it and reign there with him--no, reign over it and him. once or twice already a light foot had reached the threshold. his cousin clare dagonet, for instance: there had been a summer when her voice had sounded far down the windings... but he had run over to spain for the autumn, and when he came back she was engaged to peter van degen, and for a while it looked black in the cave. that was long ago, as time is reckoned under thirty; and for three years now he had felt for her only a half-contemptuous pity. to have stood at the mouth of his cave, and have turned from it to the van degen lair--! poor clare repented, indeed--she wanted it clearly but she repented in the van degen diamonds, and the van degen motor bore her broken heart from opera to ball. she had been subdued to what she worked in, and she could never again find her way to the enchanted cave... ralph, since then, had reached the point of deciding that he would never marry; reached it not suddenly or dramatically, but with such sober advisedness as is urged on those about to take the opposite step. what he most wanted, now that the first flutter of being was over, was to learn and to do--to know what the great people had thought, think about their thinking, and then launch his own boat: write some good verse if possible; if not, then critical prose. a dramatic poem lay among the stuff at his elbow; but the prose critic was at his elbow too, and not to be satisfied about the poem; and poet and critic passed the nights in hot if unproductive debate. on the whole, it seemed likely that the critic would win the day, and the essay on "the rhythmical structures of walt whitman" take shape before "the banished god." yet if the light in the cave was less supernaturally blue, the chant of its tides less laden with unimaginable music, it was still a thronged and echoing place when undine spragg appeared on its threshold... his mother and sister of course wanted him to marry. they had the usual theory that he was "made" for conjugal bliss: women always thought that of a fellow who didn't get drunk and have low tastes. ralph smiled at the idea as he sat crouched among his secret treasures. marry--but whom, in the name of light and freedom? the daughters of his own race sold themselves to the invaders; the daughters of the invaders bought their husbands as they bought an opera-box. it ought all to have been transacted on the stock exchange. his mother, he knew, had no such ambitions for him: she would have liked him to fancy a "nice girl" like harriet ray. harriet ray was neither vulgar nor ambitious. she regarded washington square as the birthplace of society, knew by heart all the cousinships of early new york, hated motor-cars, could not make herself understood on the telephone, and was determined, if she married, never to receive a divorced woman. as mrs. marvell often said, such girls as harriet were growing rare. ralph was not sure about this. he was inclined to think that, certain modifications allowed for, there would always be plenty of harriet rays for unworldly mothers to commend to their sons; and he had no desire to diminish their number by removing one from the ranks of the marriageable. he had no desire to marry at all--that had been the whole truth of it till he met undine spragg. and now--? he lit a cigar, and began to recall his hour's conversation with mrs. spragg. ralph had never taken his mother's social faiths very seriously. surveying the march of civilization from a loftier angle, he had early mingled with the invaders, and curiously observed their rites and customs. but most of those he had met had already been modified by contact with the indigenous: they spoke the same language as his, though on their lips it had often so different a meaning. ralph had never seen them actually in the making, before they had acquired the speech of the conquered race. but mrs. spragg still used the dialect of her people, and before the end of the visit ralph had ceased to regret that her daughter was out. he felt obscurely that in the girl's presence--frank and simple as he thought her--he should have learned less of life in early apex. mrs. spragg, once reconciled--or at least resigned--to the mysterious necessity of having to "entertain" a friend of undine's, had yielded to the first touch on the weak springs of her garrulity. she had not seen mrs. heeny for two days, and this friendly young man with the gentle manner was almost as easy to talk to as the masseuse. and then she could tell him things that mrs. heeny already knew, and mrs. spragg liked to repeat her stories. to do so gave her almost her sole sense of permanence among the shifting scenes of life. so that, after she had lengthily deplored the untoward accident of undine's absence, and her visitor, with a smile, and echoes of divers et ondoyant in his brain, had repeated her daughter's name after her, saying: "it's a wonderful find--how could you tell it would be such a fit?"--it came to her quite easily to answer: "why, we called her after a hair-waver father put on the market the week she was born--" and then to explain, as he remained struck and silent: "it's from undoolay, you know, the french for crimping; father always thought the name made it take. he was quite a scholar, and had the greatest knack for finding names. i remember the time he invented his goliath glue he sat up all night over the bible to get the name... no, father didn't start in as a druggist," she went on, expanding with the signs of marvell's interest; "he was educated for an undertaker, and built up a first-class business; but he was always a beautiful speaker, and after a while he sorter drifted into the ministry. of course it didn't pay him anything like as well, so finally he opened a drug-store, and he did first-rate at that too, though his heart was always in the pulpit. but after he made such a success with his hair-waver he got speculating in land out at apex, and somehow everything went--though mr. spragg did all he could--." mrs. spragg, when she found herself embarked on a long sentence, always ballasted it by italicizing the last word. her husband, she continued, could not, at the time, do much for his father-in-law. mr. spragg had come to apex as a poor boy, and their early married life had been a protracted struggle, darkened by domestic affliction. two of their three children had died of typhoid in the epidemic which devastated apex before the new water-works were built; and this calamity, by causing mr. spragg to resolve that thereafter apex should drink pure water, had led directly to the founding of his fortunes. "he had taken over some of poor father's land for a bad debt, and when he got up the pure water move the company voted to buy the land and build the new reservoir up there: and after that we began to be better off, and it did seem as if it had come out so to comfort us some about the children." mr. spragg, thereafter, had begun to be a power in apex, and fat years had followed on the lean. ralph marvell was too little versed in affairs to read between the lines of mrs. spragg's untutored narrative, and he understood no more than she the occult connection between mr. spragg's domestic misfortunes and his business triumph. mr. spragg had "helped out" his ruined father-in-law, and had vowed on his children's graves that no apex child should ever again drink poisoned water--and out of those two disinterested impulses, by some impressive law of compensation, material prosperity had come. what ralph understood and appreciated was mrs. spragg's unaffected frankness in talking of her early life. here was no retrospective pretense of an opulent past, such as the other invaders were given to parading before the bland but undeceived subject race. the spraggs had been "plain people" and had not yet learned to be ashamed of it. the fact drew them much closer to the dagonet ideals than any sham elegance in the past tense. ralph felt that his mother, who shuddered away from mrs. harmon b. driscoll, would understand and esteem mrs. spragg. but how long would their virgin innocence last? popple's vulgar hands were on it already--popple's and the unspeakable van degen's! once they and theirs had begun the process of initiating undine, there was no knowing--or rather there was too easy knowing--how it would end! it was incredible that she too should be destined to swell the ranks of the cheaply fashionable; yet were not her very freshness, her malleability, the mark of her fate? she was still at the age when the flexible soul offers itself to the first grasp. that the grasp should chance to be van degen's--that was what made ralph's temples buzz, and swept away all his plans for his own future like a beaver's dam in a spring flood. to save her from van degen and van degenism: was that really to be his mission--the "call" for which his life had obscurely waited? it was not in the least what he had meant to do with the fugitive flash of consciousness he called self; but all that he had purposed for that transitory being sank into insignificance under the pressure of undine's claims. ralph marvell's notion of women had been formed on the experiences common to good-looking young men of his kind. women were drawn to him as much by his winning appealing quality, by the sense of a youthful warmth behind his light ironic exterior, as by his charms of face and mind. except during clare dagonet's brief reign the depths in him had not been stirred; but in taking what each sentimental episode had to give he had preserved, through all his minor adventures, his faith in the great adventure to come. it was this faith that made him so easy a victim when love had at last appeared clad in the attributes of romance: the imaginative man's indestructible dream of a rounded passion. the clearness with which he judged the girl and himself seemed the surest proof that his feeling was more than a surface thrill. he was not blind to her crudity and her limitations, but they were a part of her grace and her persuasion. diverse et ondoyante--so he had seen her from the first. but was not that merely the sign of a quicker response to the world's manifold appeal? there was harriet ray, sealed up tight in the vacuum of inherited opinion, where not a breath of fresh sensation could get at her: there could be no call to rescue young ladies so secured from the perils of reality! undine had no such traditional safeguards--ralph guessed mrs. spragg's opinions to be as fluid as her daughter's--and the girl's very sensitiveness to new impressions, combined with her obvious lack of any sense of relative values, would make her an easy prey to the powers of folly. he seemed to see her--as he sat there, pressing his fists into his temples--he seemed to see her like a lovely rock-bound andromeda, with the devouring monster society careering up to make a mouthful of her; and himself whirling down on his winged horse--just pegasus turned rosinante for the nonce--to cut her bonds, snatch her up, and whirl her back into the blue... vii some two months later than the date of young marvell's midnight vigil, mrs. heeny, seated on a low chair at undine's knee, gave the girl's left hand an approving pat as she laid aside her lapful of polishers. "there! i guess you can put your ring on again," she said with a laugh of jovial significance; and undine, echoing the laugh in a murmur of complacency, slipped on the fourth finger of her recovered hand a band of sapphires in an intricate setting. mrs. heeny took up the hand again. "them's old stones, undine--they've got a different look," she said, examining the ring while she rubbed her cushioned palm over the girl's brilliant finger-tips. "and the setting's quaint--i wouldn't wonder but what it was one of old gran'ma dagonet's." mrs. spragg, hovering near in fond beatitude, looked up quickly. "why, don't you s'pose he bought it for her, mrs. heeny? it came in a tiff'ny box." the manicure laughed again. "of course he's had tiff'ny rub it up. ain't you ever heard of ancestral jewels, mrs. spragg? in the eu-ropean aristocracy they never go out and buy engagement-rings; and undine's marrying into our aristocracy." mrs. spragg looked relieved. "oh, i thought maybe they were trying to scrimp on the ring--" mrs. heeny, shrugging away this explanation, rose from her seat and rolled back her shiny black sleeves. "look at here, undine, if you really want me to do your hair it's time we got to work." the girl swung about in her seat so that she faced the mirror on the dressing-table. her shoulders shone through transparencies of lace and muslin which slipped back as she lifted her arms to draw the tortoise-shell pins from her hair. "of course you've got to do it--i want to look perfectly lovely!" "well--i dunno's my hand's in nowadays," said mrs. heeny in a tone that belied the doubt she cast on her own ability. "oh, you're an artist, mrs. heeny--and i just couldn't have had that french maid 'round to-night," sighed mrs. spragg, sinking into a chair near the dressing-table. undine, with a backward toss of her head, scattered her loose locks about her. as they spread and sparkled under mrs. heeny's touch, mrs. spragg leaned back, drinking in through half-closed lids her daughter's loveliness. some new quality seemed added to undine's beauty: it had a milder bloom, a kind of melting grace, which might have been lent to it by the moisture in her mother's eyes. "so you're to see the old gentleman for the first time at this dinner?" mrs. heeny pursued, sweeping the live strands up into a loosely woven crown. "yes. i'm frightened to death!" undine, laughing confidently, took up a hand-glass and scrutinized the small brown mole above the curve of her upper lip. "i guess she'll know how to talk to him," mrs. spragg averred with a kind of quavering triumph. "she'll know how to look at him, anyhow," said mrs. heeny; and undine smiled at her own image. "i hope he won't think i'm too awful!" mrs. heeny laughed. "did you read the description of yourself in the radiator this morning? i wish't i'd 'a had time to cut it out. i guess i'll have to start a separate bag for your clippings soon." undine stretched her arms luxuriously above her head and gazed through lowered lids at the foreshortened reflection of her face. "mercy! don't jerk about like that. am i to put in this rose?--there--you are lovely!" mrs. heeny sighed, as the pink petals sank into the hair above the girl's forehead. undine pushed her chair back, and sat supporting her chin on her clasped hands while she studied the result of mrs. heeny's manipulations. "yes--that's the way mrs. peter van degen's flower was put in the other night; only hers was a camellia.--do you think i'd look better with a camellia?" "i guess if mrs. van degen looked like a rose she'd 'a worn a rose," mrs. heeny rejoined poetically. "sit still a minute longer," she added. "your hair's so heavy i'd feel easier if i was to put in another pin." undine remained motionless, and the manicure, suddenly laying both hands on the girl's shoulders, and bending over to peer at her reflection, said playfully: "ever been engaged before, undine?" a blush rose to the face in the mirror, spreading from chin to brow, and running rosily over the white shoulders from which their covering had slipped down. "my! if he could see you now!" mrs. heeny jested. mrs. spragg, rising noiselessly, glided across the room and became lost in a minute examination of the dress laid out on the bed. with a supple twist undine slipped from mrs. heeny's hold. "engaged? mercy, yes! didn't you know? to the prince of wales. i broke it off because i wouldn't live in the tower." mrs. spragg, lifting the dress cautiously over her arm, advanced with a reassured smile. "i s'pose undie'll go to europe now," she said to mrs. heeny. "i guess undie will!" the young lady herself declared. "we're going to sail right afterward.--here, mother, do be careful of my hair!" she ducked gracefully to slip into the lacy fabric which her mother held above her head. as she rose venus-like above its folds there was a tap on the door, immediately followed by its tentative opening. "mabel!" undine muttered, her brows lowering like her father's; and mrs. spragg, wheeling about to screen her daughter, addressed herself protestingly to the half-open door. "who's there? oh, that you, mrs. lipscomb? well, i don't know as you can--undie isn't half dressed yet--" "just like her--always pushing in!" undine murmured as she slipped her arms into their transparent sleeves. "oh, that don't matter--i'll help dress her!" mrs. lipscomb's large blond person surged across the threshold. "seems to me i ought to lend a hand to-night, considering i was the one that introduced them!" undine forced a smile, but mrs. spragg, her soft wrinkles deepening with resentment, muttered to mrs. heeny, as she bent down to shake out the girl's train: "i guess my daughter's only got to show herself--" the first meeting with old mr. dagonet was less formidable than undine had expected. she had been once before to the house in washington square, when, with her mother, she had returned mrs. marvell's ceremonial visit; but on that occasion ralph's grandfather had not been present. all the rites connected with her engagement were new and mysterious to undine, and none more so than the unaccountable necessity of "dragging"--as she phrased it--mrs. spragg into the affair. it was an accepted article of the apex creed that parental detachment should be completest at the moment when the filial fate was decided; and to find that new york reversed this rule was as puzzling to undine as to her mother. mrs. spragg was so unprepared for the part she was to play that on the occasion of her visit to mrs. marvell her helplessness had infected undine, and their half-hour in the sober faded drawing-room remained among the girl's most unsatisfactory memories. she re-entered it alone with more assurance. her confidence in her beauty had hitherto carried her through every ordeal; and it was fortified now by the feeling of power that came with the sense of being loved. if they would only leave her mother out she was sure, in her own phrase, of being able to "run the thing"; and mrs. spragg had providentially been left out of the dagonet dinner. it was to consist, it appeared, only of the small family group undine had already met; and, seated at old mr. dagonet's right, in the high dark dining-room with mahogany doors and dim portraits of "signers" and their females, she felt a conscious joy in her ascendancy. old mr. dagonet--small, frail and softly sardonic--appeared to fall at once under her spell. if she felt, beneath his amenity, a kind of delicate dangerousness, like that of some fine surgical instrument, she ignored it as unimportant; for she had as yet no clear perception of forces that did not directly affect her. mrs. marvell, low-voiced, faded, yet impressive, was less responsive to her arts, and undine divined in her the head of the opposition to ralph's marriage. mrs. heeny had reported that mrs. marvell had other views for her son; and this was confirmed by such echoes of the short sharp struggle as reached the throbbing listeners at the stentorian. but the conflict over, the air had immediately cleared, showing the enemy in the act of unconditional surrender. it surprised undine that there had been no reprisals, no return on the points conceded. that was not her idea of warfare, and she could ascribe the completeness of the victory only to the effect of her charms. mrs. marvell's manner did not express entire subjugation; yet she seemed anxious to dispel any doubts of her good faith, and if she left the burden of the talk to her lively daughter it might have been because she felt more capable of showing indulgence by her silence than in her speech. as for mrs. fairford, she had never seemed more brilliantly bent on fusing the various elements under her hand. undine had already discovered that she adored her brother, and had guessed that this would make her either a strong ally or a determined enemy. the latter alternative, however, did not alarm the girl. she thought mrs. fairford "bright," and wanted to be liked by her; and she was in the state of dizzy self-assurance when it seemed easy to win any sympathy she chose to seek. for the only other guests--mrs. fairford's husband, and the elderly charles bowen who seemed to be her special friend--undine had no attention to spare: they remained on a plane with the dim pictures hanging at her back. she had expected a larger party; but she was relieved, on the whole, that it was small enough to permit of her dominating it. not that she wished to do so by any loudness of assertion. her quickness in noting external differences had already taught her to modulate and lower her voice, and to replace "the i-dea!" and "i wouldn't wonder" by more polished locutions; and she had not been ten minutes at table before she found that to seem very much in love, and a little confused and subdued by the newness and intensity of the sentiment, was, to the dagonet mind, the becoming attitude for a young lady in her situation. the part was not hard to play, for she was in love, of course. it was pleasant, when she looked across the table, to meet ralph's grey eyes, with that new look in them, and to feel that she had kindled it; but i it was only part of her larger pleasure in the general homage to her beauty, in the sensations of interest and curiosity excited by everything about her, from the family portraits overhead to the old dagonet silver on the table--which were to be hers too, after all! the talk, as at mrs. fairford's, confused her by its lack of the personal allusion, its tendency to turn to books, pictures and politics. "politics," to undine, had always been like a kind of back-kitchen to business--the place where the refuse was thrown and the doubtful messes were brewed. as a drawing-room topic, and one to provoke disinterested sentiments, it had the hollowness of fourth of july orations, and her mind wandered in spite of the desire to appear informed and competent. old mr. dagonet, with his reedy staccato voice, that gave polish and relief to every syllable, tried to come to her aid by questioning her affably about her family and the friends she had made in new york. but the caryatid-parent, who exists simply as a filial prop, is not a fruitful theme, and undine, called on for the first time to view her own progenitors as a subject of conversation, was struck by their lack of points. she had never paused to consider what her father and mother were "interested" in, and, challenged to specify, could have named--with sincerity--only herself. on the subject of her new york friends it was not much easier to enlarge; for so far her circle had grown less rapidly than she expected. she had fancied ralph's wooing would at once admit her to all his social privileges; but he had shown a puzzling reluctance to introduce her to the van degen set, where he came and went with such familiarity; and the persons he seemed anxious to have her know--a few frumpy "clever women" of his sister's age, and one or two brisk old ladies in shabby houses with mahogany furniture and stuart portraits--did not offer the opportunities she sought. "oh, i don't know many people yet--i tell ralph he's got to hurry up and take me round," she said to mr. dagonet, with a side-sparkle for ralph, whose gaze, between the flowers and lights, she was aware of perpetually drawing. "my daughter will take you--you must know his mother's friends," the old gentleman rejoined while mrs. marvell smiled noncommittally. "but you have a great friend of your own--the lady who takes you into society," mr. dagonet pursued; and undine had the sense that the irrepressible mabel was again "pushing in." "oh, yes--mabel lipscomb. we were school-mates," she said indifferently. "lipscomb? lipscomb? what is mr. lipscomb's occupation?" "he's a broker," said undine, glad to be able to place her friend's husband in so handsome a light. the subtleties of a professional classification unknown to apex had already taught her that in new york it is more distinguished to be a broker than a dentist; and she was surprised at mr. dagonet's lack of enthusiasm. "ah? a broker?" he said it almost as popple might have said "a dentist?" and undine found herself astray in a new labyrinth of social distinctions. she felt a sudden contempt for harry lipscomb, who had already struck her as too loud, and irrelevantly comic. "i guess mabel'll get a divorce pretty soon," she added, desiring, for personal reasons, to present mrs. lipscomb as favourably as possible. mr. dagonet's handsome eye-brows drew together. "a divorce? h'm--that's bad. has he been misbehaving himself?" undine looked innocently surprised. "oh, i guess not. they like each other well enough. but he's been a disappointment to her. he isn't in the right set, and i think mabel realizes she'll never really get anywhere till she gets rid of him." these words, uttered in the high fluting tone that she rose to when sure of her subject, fell on a pause which prolonged and deepened itself to receive them, while every face at the table, ralph marvell's excepted, reflected in varying degree mr. dagonet's pained astonishment. "but, my dear young lady--what would your friend's situation be if, as you put it, she 'got rid' of her husband on so trivial a pretext?" undine, surprised at his dullness, tried to explain. "oh that wouldn't be the reason given, of course. any lawyer could fix it up for them. don't they generally call it desertion?" there was another, more palpitating, silence, broken by a laugh from ralph. "ralph!" his mother breathed; then, turning to undine, she said with a constrained smile: "i believe in certain parts of the country such--unfortunate arrangements--are beginning to be tolerated. but in new york, in spite of our growing indifference, a divorced woman is still--thank heaven!--at a decided disadvantage." undine's eyes opened wide. here at last was a topic that really interested her, and one that gave another amazing glimpse into the camera obscura of new york society. "do you mean to say mabel would be worse off, then? couldn't she even go round as much as she does now?" mrs. marvell met this gravely. "it would depend, i should say, on the kind of people she wished to see." "oh, the very best, of course! that would be her only object." ralph interposed with another laugh. "you see, undine, you'd better think twice before you divorce me!" "ralph!" his mother again breathed; but the girl, flushed and sparkling, flung back: "oh, it all depends on you! out in apex, if a girl marries a man who don't come up to what she expected, people consider it's to her credit to want to change. you'd better think twice of that!" "if i were only sure of knowing what you expect!" he caught up her joke, tossing it back at her across the fascinated silence of their listeners. "why, everything!" she announced--and mr. dagonet, turning, laid an intricately-veined old hand on, hers, and said, with a change of tone that relaxed the tension of the listeners: "my child, if you look like that you'll get it." viii it was doubtless owing to mrs. fairford's foresight that such possibilities of tension were curtailed, after dinner, by her carrying off ralph and his betrothed to the theatre. mr. dagonet, it was understood, always went to bed after an hour's whist with his daughter; and the silent mr. fairford gave his evenings to bridge at his club. the party, therefore, consisted only of undine and ralph, with mrs. fairford and her attendant friend. undine vaguely wondered why the grave and grey-haired mr. bowen formed so invariable a part of that lady's train; but she concluded that it was the york custom for married ladies to have gentlemen "'round" (as girls had in apex), and that mr. bowen was the sole survivor of laura fairford's earlier triumphs. she had, however, little time to give to such conjectures, for the performance they were attending--the debut of a fashionable london actress--had attracted a large audience in which undine immediately recognized a number of familiar faces. her engagement had been announced only the day before, and she had the delicious sense of being "in all the papers," and of focussing countless glances of interest and curiosity as she swept through the theatre in mrs. fairford's wake. their stalls were near the stage, and progress thither was slow enough to permit of prolonged enjoyment of this sensation. before passing to her place she paused for ralph to remove her cloak, and as he lifted it from her shoulders she heard a lady say behind her: "there she is--the one in white, with the lovely back--" and a man answer: "gad! where did he find anything as good as that?" anonymous approval was sweet enough; but she was to taste a moment more exquisite when, in the proscenium box across the house, she saw clare van degen seated beside the prim figure of miss harriet ray. "they're here to see me with him--they hate it, but they couldn't keep away!" she turned and lifted a smile of possessorship to ralph. mrs. fairford seemed also struck by the presence of the two ladies, and undine heard her whisper to mr. bowen: "do you see clare over there--and harriet with her? harriet would come--i call it spartan! and so like clare to ask her!" her companion laughed. "it's one of the deepest instincts in human nature. the murdered are as much given as the murderer to haunting the scene of the crime." doubtless guessing ralph's desire to have undine to himself, mrs. fairford had sent the girl in first; and undine, as she seated herself, was aware that the occupant of the next stall half turned to her, as with a vague gesture of recognition. but just then the curtain rose, and she became absorbed in the development of the drama, especially as it tended to display the remarkable toilets which succeeded each other on the person of its leading lady. undine, seated at ralph marvell's side, and feeling the thrill of his proximity as a subtler element in the general interest she was exciting, was at last repaid for the disappointment of her evening at the opera. it was characteristic of her that she remembered her failures as keenly as her triumphs, and that the passionate desire to obliterate, to "get even" with them, was always among the latent incentives of her conduct. now at last she was having what she wanted--she was in conscious possession of the "real thing"; and through her other, diffused, sensations ralph's adoration gave her such a last refinement of pleasure as might have come to some warrior queen borne in triumph by captive princes, and reading in the eyes of one the passion he dared not speak. when the curtain fell this vague enjoyment was heightened by various acts of recognition. all the people she wanted to "go with," as they said in apex, seemed to be about her in the stalls and boxes; and her eyes continued to revert with special satisfaction to the incongruous group formed by mrs. peter van degen and miss ray. the sight made it irresistible to whisper to ralph: "you ought to go round and talk to your cousin. have you told her we're engaged?" "clare? of course. she's going to call on you tomorrow." "oh, she needn't put herself out--she's never been yet," said undine loftily. he made no rejoinder, but presently asked: "who's that you're waving to?" "mr. popple. he's coming round to see us. you know he wants to paint me." undine fluttered and beamed as the brilliant popple made his way across the stalls to the seat which her neighbour had momentarily left. "first-rate chap next to you--whoever he is--to give me this chance," the artist declared. "ha, ralph, my boy, how did you pull it off? that's what we're all of us wondering." he leaned over to give marvell's hand the ironic grasp of celibacy. "well, you've left us lamenting: he has, you know. miss spragg. but i've got one pull over the others--i can paint you! he can't forbid that, can he? not before marriage, anyhow!" undine divided her shining glances between the two. "i guess he isn't going to treat me any different afterward," she proclaimed with joyous defiance. "ah, well, there's no telling, you know. hadn't we better begin at once? seriously, i want awfully to get you into the spring show." "oh, really? that would be too lovely!" "you would be, certainly--the way i mean to do you. but i see ralph getting glum. cheer up, my dear fellow; i daresay you'll be invited to some of the sittings--that's for miss spragg to say.--ah, here comes your neighbour back, confound him--you'll let me know when we can begin?" as popple moved away undine turned eagerly to marvell. "do you suppose there's time? i'd love to have him to do me!" ralph smiled. "my poor child--he would 'do' you, with a vengeance. infernal cheek, his asking you to sit--" she stared. "but why? he's painted your cousin, and all the smart women." "oh, if a 'smart' portrait's all you want!" "i want what the others want," she answered, frowning and pouting a little. she was already beginning to resent in ralph the slightest sign of resistance to her pleasure; and her resentment took the form--a familiar one in apex courtships--of turning on him, in the next entr'acte, a deliberately averted shoulder. the result of this was to bring her, for the first time, in more direct relation to her other neighbour. as she turned he turned too, showing her, above a shining shirt-front fastened with a large imitation pearl, a ruddy plump snub face without an angle in it, which yet looked sharper than a razor. undine's eyes met his with a startled look, and for a long moment they remained suspended on each other's stare. undine at length shrank back with an unrecognizing face; but her movement made her opera-glass slip to the floor, and her neighbour bent down and picked it up. "well--don't you know me yet?" he said with a slight smile, as he restored the glass to her. she had grown white to the lips, and when she tried to speak the effort produced only a faint click in her throat. she felt that the change in her appearance must be visible, and the dread of letting marvell see it made her continue to turn her ravaged face to her other neighbour. the round black eyes set prominently in the latter's round glossy countenance had expressed at first only an impersonal and slightly ironic interest; but a look of surprise grew in them as undine's silence continued. "what's the matter? don't you want me to speak to you?" she became aware that marvell, as if unconscious of her slight show of displeasure, had left his seat, and was making his way toward the aisle; and this assertion of independence, which a moment before she would so deeply have resented, now gave her a feeling of intense relief. "no--don't speak to me, please. i'll tell you another time--i'll write." her neighbour continued to gaze at her, forming his lips into a noiseless whistle under his small dark moustache. "well, i--that's about the stiffest," he murmured; and as she made no answer he added: "afraid i'll ask to be introduced to your friend?" she made a faint movement of entreaty. "i can't explain. i promise to see you; but i ask you not to talk to me now." he unfolded his programme, and went on speaking in a low tone while he affected to study it. "anything to oblige, of course. that's always been my motto. but is it a bargain--fair and square? you'll see me?" she receded farther from him. "i promise. i--i want to," she faltered. "all right, then. call me up in the morning at the driscoll building. seven-o-nine--got it?" she nodded, and he added in a still lower tone: "i suppose i can congratulate you, anyhow?" and then, without waiting for her reply, turned to study mrs. van degen's box through his opera-glass. clare, as if aware of the scrutiny fixed on her from below leaned back and threw a question over her shoulder to ralph marvell, who had just seated himself behind her. "who's the funny man with the red face talking to miss spragg?" ralph bent forward. "the man next to her? never saw him before. but i think you're mistaken: she's not speaking to him." "she was--wasn't she, harriet?" miss ray pinched her lips together without speaking, and mrs. van degen paused for the fraction of a second. "perhaps he's an apex friend," she then suggested. "very likely. only i think she'd have introduced him if he had been." his cousin faintly shrugged. "shall you encourage that?" peter van degen, who had strayed into his wife's box for a moment, caught the colloquy, and lifted his opera-glass. "the fellow next to miss spragg? (by george, ralph, she's ripping to-night!) wait a minute--i know his face. saw him in old harmon driscoll's office the day of the eubaw mine meeting. this chap's his secretary, or something. driscoll called him in to give some facts to the directors, and he seemed a mighty wide-awake customer." clare van degen turned gaily to her cousin. "if he has anything to do with the driscolls you'd better cultivate him! that's the kind of acquaintance the dagonets have always needed. i married to set them an example!" ralph rose with a laugh. "you're right. i'll hurry back and make his acquaintance." he held out his hand to his cousin, avoiding her disappointed eyes. undine, on entering her bedroom late that evening, was startled by the presence of a muffled figure which revealed itself, through the dimness, as the ungirded midnight outline of mrs. spragg. "mother? what on earth--?" the girl exclaimed, as mrs. spragg pressed the electric button and flooded the room with light. the idea of a mother's sitting up for her daughter was so foreign to apex customs that it roused only mistrust and irritation in the object of the demonstration. mrs. spragg came forward deprecatingly to lift the cloak from her daughter's shoulders. "i just had to, undie--i told father i had to. i wanted to hear all about it." undine shrugged away from her. "mercy! at this hour? you'll be as white as a sheet to-morrow, sitting up all night like this." she moved toward the toilet-table, and began to demolish with feverish hands the structure which mrs. heeny, a few hours earlier, had so lovingly raised. but the rose caught in a mesh of hair, and mrs. spragg, venturing timidly to release it, had a full view of her daughter's face in the glass. "why, undie, you're as white as a sheet now! you look fairly sick. what's the matter, daughter?" the girl broke away from her. "oh, can't you leave me alone, mother? there--do i look white now?" she cried, the blood flaming into her pale cheeks; and as mrs. spragg shrank back, she added more mildly, in the tone of a parent rebuking a persistent child: "it's enough to make anybody sick to be stared at that way!" mrs. spragg overflowed with compunction. "i'm so sorry, undie. i guess it was just seeing you in this glare of light." "yes--the light's awful; do turn some off," ordered undine, for whom, ordinarily, no radiance was too strong; and mrs. spragg, grateful to have commands laid upon her, hastened to obey. undine, after this, submitted in brooding silence to having her dress unlaced, and her slippers and dressing-gown brought to her. mrs. spragg visibly yearned to say more, but she restrained the impulse lest it should provoke her dismissal. "won't you take just a sup of milk before you go to bed?" she suggested at length, as undine sank into an armchair. "i've got some for you right here in the parlour." without looking up the girl answered: "no. i don't want anything. do go to bed." her mother seemed to be struggling between the life-long instinct of obedience and a swift unformulated fear. "i'm going, undie." she wavered. "didn't they receive you right, daughter?" she asked with sudden resolution. "what nonsense! how should they receive me? everybody was lovely to me." undine rose to her feet and went on with her undressing, tossing her clothes on the floor and shaking her hair over her bare shoulders. mrs. spragg stooped to gather up the scattered garments as they fell, folding them with a wistful caressing touch, and laying them on the lounge, without daring to raise her eyes to her daughter. it was not till she heard undine throw herself on the bed that she went toward her and drew the coverlet up with deprecating hands. "oh, do put the light out--i'm dead tired," the girl grumbled, pressing her face into the pillow. mrs. spragg turned away obediently; then, gathering all her scattered impulses into a passionate act of courage, she moved back to the bedside. "undie--you didn't see anybody--i mean at the theatre? anybody you didn't want to see?" undine, at the question, raised her head and started right against the tossed pillows, her white exasperated face close to her mother's twitching features. the two women examined each other a moment, fear and anger in their crossed glances; then undine answered: "no, nobody. good-night." ix undine, late the next day, waited alone under the leafless trellising of a wistaria arbour on the west side of the central park. she had put on her plainest dress, and wound a closely, patterned veil over her least vivid hat; but even thus toned down to the situation she was conscious of blazing out from it inconveniently. the habit of meeting young men in sequestered spots was not unknown to her: the novelty was in feeling any embarrassment about it. even now she--was disturbed not so much by the unlikely chance of an accidental encounter with ralph marvell as by the remembrance of similar meetings, far from accidental, with the romantic aaronson. could it be that the hand now adorned with ralph's engagement ring had once, in this very spot, surrendered itself to the riding-master's pressure? at the thought a wave of physical disgust passed over her, blotting out another memory as distasteful but more remote. it was revived by the appearance of a ruddy middle-sized young man, his stoutish figure tightly buttoned into a square-shouldered over-coat, who presently approached along the path that led to the arbour. silhouetted against the slope of the asphalt, the newcomer revealed an outline thick yet compact, with a round head set on a neck in which, at the first chance, prosperity would be likely to develop a red crease. his face, with its rounded surfaces, and the sanguine innocence of a complexion belied by prematurely astute black eyes, had a look of jovial cunning which undine had formerly thought "smart" but which now struck her as merely vulgar. she felt that in the marvell set elmer moffatt would have been stamped as "not a gentleman." nevertheless something in his look seemed to promise the capacity to develop into any character he might care to assume; though it did not seem probable that, for the present, that of a gentleman would be among them. he had always had a brisk swaggering step, and the faintly impudent tilt of the head that she had once thought "dashing"; but whereas this look had formerly denoted a somewhat desperate defiance of the world and its judgments it now suggested an almost assured relation to these powers; and undine's heart sank at the thought of what the change implied. as he drew nearer, the young man's air of assurance was replaced by an expression of mildly humorous surprise. "well--this is white of you. undine!" he said, taking her lifeless fingers into his dapperly gloved hand. through her veil she formed the words: "i said i'd come." he laughed. "that's so. and you see i believed you. though i might not have--" "i don't see the use of beginning like this," she interrupted nervously. "that's so too. suppose we walk along a little ways? it's rather chilly standing round." he turned down the path that descended toward the ramble and the girl moved on beside him with her long flowing steps. when they had reached the comparative shelter of the interlacing trees moffatt paused again to say: "if we're going to talk i'd like to see you. undine;" and after a first moment of reluctance she submissively threw back her veil. he let his eyes rest on her in silence; then he said judicially: "you've filled out some; but you're paler." after another appreciative scrutiny he added: "there's mighty few women as well worth looking at, and i'm obliged to you for letting me have the chance again." undine's brows drew together, but she softened her frown to a quivering smile. "i'm glad to see you too, elmer--i am, really!" he returned her smile while his glance continued to study her humorously. "you didn't betray the fact last night. miss spragg." "i was so taken aback. i thought you were out in alaska somewhere." the young man shaped his lips into the mute whistle by which he habitually vented his surprise. "you did? didn't abner e. spragg tell you he'd seen me down town?" undine gave him a startled glance. "father? why, have you seen him? he never said a word about it!" her companion's whistle became audible. "he's running yet!" he said gaily. "i wish i could scare some people as easy as i can your father." the girl hesitated. "i never felt toward you the way father did," she hazarded at length; and he gave her another long look in return. "well, if they'd left you alone i don't believe you'd ever have acted mean to me," was the conclusion he drew from it. "i didn't mean to, elmer ... i give you my word--but i was so young ... i didn't know anything...." his eyes had a twinkle of reminiscent pleasantry. "no--i don't suppose it would teach a girl much to be engaged two years to a stiff like millard binch; and that was about all that had happened to you before i came along." undine flushed to the forehead. "oh, elmer--i was only a child when i was engaged to millard--" "that's a fact. and you went on being one a good while afterward. the apex eagle always head-lined you 'the child-bride'--" "i can't see what's the use--now--." "that ruled out of court too? see here. undine--what can we talk about? i understood that was what we were here for." "of course." she made an effort at recovery. "i only meant to say--what's the use of raking up things that are over?" "rake up? that's the idea, is it? was that why you tried to cut me last night?" "i--oh, elmer! i didn't mean to; only, you see, i'm engaged." "oh, i saw that fast enough. i'd have seen it even if i didn't read the papers." he gave a short laugh. "he was feeling pretty good, sitting there alongside of you, wasn't he? i don't wonder he was. i remember. but i don't see that that was a reason for cold-shouldering me. i'm a respectable member of society now--i'm one of harmon b. driscoll's private secretaries." he brought out the fact with mock solemnity. but to undine, though undoubtedly impressive, the statement did not immediately present itself as a subject for pleasantry. "elmer moffatt--you are?" he laughed again. "guess you'd have remembered me last night if you'd known it." she was following her own train of thought with a look of pale intensity. "you're living in new york, then--you're going to live here right along?" "well, it looks that way; as long as i can hang on to this job. great men always gravitate to the metropolis. and i gravitated here just as uncle harmon b. was looking round for somebody who could give him an inside tip on the eubaw mine deal--you know the driscolls are pretty deep in eubaw. i happened to go out there after our little unpleasantness at apex, and it was just the time the deal went through. so in one way your folks did me a good turn when they made apex too hot for me: funny to think of, ain't it?" undine, recovering herself, held out her hand impulsively. "i'm real glad of it--i mean i'm real glad you've had such a stroke of luck!" "much obliged," he returned. "by the way, you might mention the fact to abner e. spragg next time you run across him." "father'll be real glad too, elmer." she hesitated, and then went on: "you must see now that it was natural father and mother should have felt the way they did--" "oh, the only thing that struck me as unnatural was their making you feel so too. but i'm free to admit i wasn't a promising case in those days." his glance played over her for a moment. "say, undine--it was good while it lasted, though, wasn't it?" she shrank back with a burning face and eyes of misery. "why, what's the matter? that ruled out too? oh, all right. look at here, undine, suppose you let me know what you are here to talk about, anyhow." she cast a helpless glance down the windings of the wooded glen in which they had halted. "just to ask you--to beg you--not to say anything of this kind again--ever--" "anything about you and me?" she nodded mutely. "why, what's wrong? anybody been saying anything against me?" "oh, no. it's not that!" "what on earth is it, then--except that you're ashamed of me, one way or another?" she made no answer, and he stood digging the tip of his walking-stick into a fissure of the asphalt. at length he went on in a tone that showed a first faint trace of irritation: "i don't want to break into your gilt-edged crowd, if it's that you're scared of." his tone seemed to increase her distress. "no, no--you don't understand. all i want is that nothing shall be known." "yes; but why? it was all straight enough, if you come to that." "it doesn't matter ... whether it was straight ... or ... not ..." he interpolated a whistle which made her add: "what i mean is that out here in the east they don't even like it if a girl's been engaged before." this last strain on his credulity wrung a laugh from moffatt. "gee! how'd they expect her fair young life to pass? playing 'holy city' on the melodeon, and knitting tidies for church fairs?" "girls are looked after here. it's all different. their mothers go round with them." this increased her companion's hilarity and he glanced about him with a pretense of compunction. "excuse me! i ought to have remembered. where's your chaperon, miss spragg?" he crooked his arm with mock ceremony. "allow me to escort you to the bew-fay. you see i'm onto the new york style myself." a sigh of discouragement escaped her. "elmer--if you really believe i never wanted to act mean to you, don't you act mean to me now!" "act mean?" he grew serious again and moved nearer to her. "what is it you want, undine? why can't you say it right out?" "what i told you. i don't want ralph marvell--or any of them--to know anything. if any of his folks found out, they'd never let him marry me--never! and he wouldn't want to: he'd be so horrified. and it would kill me, elmer--it would just kill me!" she pressed close to him, forgetful of her new reserves and repugnances, and impelled by the passionate absorbing desire to wring from him some definite pledge of safety. "oh, elmer, if you ever liked me, help me now, and i'll help you if i get the chance!" he had recovered his coolness as hers forsook her, and stood his ground steadily, though her entreating hands, her glowing face, were near enough to have shaken less sturdy nerves. "that so, puss? you just ask me to pass the sponge over elmer moffatt of apex city? cut the gentleman when we meet? that the size of it?" "oh, elmer, it's my first chance--i can't lose it!" she broke out, sobbing. "nonsense, child! of course you shan't. here, look up. undine--why, i never saw you cry before. don't you be afraid of me--_i_ ain't going to interrupt the wedding march." he began to whistle a bar of lohengrin. "i only just want one little promise in return." she threw a startled look at him and he added reassuringly: "oh, don't mistake me. i don't want to butt into your set--not for social purposes, anyhow; but if ever it should come handy to know any of 'em in a business way, would you fix it up for me--after you're married?'" their eyes met, and she remained silent for a tremulous moment or two; then she held out her hand. "afterward--yes. i promise. and you promise, elmer?" "oh, to have and to hold!" he sang out, swinging about to follow her as she hurriedly began to retrace her steps. the march twilight had fallen, and the stentorian facade was all aglow, when undine regained its monumental threshold. she slipped through the marble vestibule and soared skyward in the mirror-lined lift, hardly conscious of the direction she was taking. what she wanted was solitude, and the time to put some order into her thoughts; and she hoped to steal into her room without meeting her mother. through her thick veil the clusters of lights in the spragg drawing-room dilated and flowed together in a yellow blur, from which, as she entered, a figure detached itself; and with a start of annoyance she saw ralph marvell rise from the perusal of the "fiction number" of a magazine which had replaced "the hound of the baskervilles" on the onyx table. "yes; you told me not to come--and here i am." he lifted her hand to his lips as his eyes tried to find hers through the veil. she drew back with a nervous gesture. "i told you i'd be awfully late." "i know--trying on! and you're horribly tired, and wishing with all your might i wasn't here." "i'm not so sure i'm not!" she rejoined, trying to hide her vexation in a smile. "what a tragic little voice! you really are done up. i couldn't help dropping in for a minute; but of course if you say so i'll be off." she was removing her long gloves and he took her hands and drew her close. "only take off your veil, and let me see you." a quiver of resistance ran through her: he felt it and dropped her hands. "please don't tease. i never could bear it," she stammered, drawing away. "till to-morrow, then; that is, if the dress-makers permit." she forced a laugh. "if i showed myself now you might not come back to-morrow. i look perfectly hideous--it was so hot and they kept me so long." "all to make yourself more beautiful for a man who's blind with your beauty already?" the words made her smile, and moving nearer she bent her head and stood still while he undid her veil. as he put it back their lips met, and his look of passionate tenderness was incense to her. but the next moment his expression passed from worship to concern. "dear! why, what's the matter? you've been crying!" she put both hands to her hat in the instinctive effort to hide her face. his persistence was as irritating as her mother's. "i told you it was frightfully hot--and all my things were horrid; and it made me so cross and nervous!" she turned to the looking-glass with a feint of smoothing her hair. marvell laid his hand on her arm, "i can't bear to see you so done up. why can't we be married to-morrow, and escape all these ridiculous preparations? i shall hate your fine clothes if they're going to make you so miserable." she dropped her hands, and swept about on him, her face lit up by a new idea. he was extraordinarily handsome and appealing, and her heart began to beat faster. "i hate it all too! i wish we could be married right away!" marvell caught her to him joyously. "dearest--dearest! don't, if you don't mean it! the thought's too glorious!" undine lingered in his arms, not with any intent of tenderness, but as if too deeply lost in a new train of thought to be conscious of his hold. "i suppose most of the things could be got ready sooner--if i said they must," she brooded, with a fixed gaze that travelled past him. "and the rest--why shouldn't the rest be sent over to europe after us? i want to go straight off with you, away from everything--ever so far away, where there'll be nobody but you and me alone!" she had a flash of illumination which made her turn her lips to his. "oh, my darling--my darling!" marvell whispered. x mr. and mrs. spragg were both given to such long periods of ruminating apathy that the student of inheritance might have wondered whence undine derived her overflowing activity. the answer would have been obtained by observing her father's business life. from the moment he set foot in wall street mr. spragg became another man. physically the change revealed itself only by the subtlest signs. as he steered his way to his office through the jostling crowd of william street his relaxed muscles did not grow more taut or his lounging gait less desultory. his shoulders were hollowed by the usual droop, and his rusty black waistcoat showed the same creased concavity at the waist, the same flabby prominence below. it was only in his face that the difference was perceptible, though even here it rather lurked behind the features than openly modified them: showing itself now and then in the cautious glint of half-closed eyes, the forward thrust of black brows, or a tightening of the lax lines of the mouth--as the gleam of a night-watchman's light might flash across the darkness of a shuttered house-front. the shutters were more tightly barred than usual, when, on a morning some two weeks later than the date of the incidents last recorded, mr. spragg approached the steel and concrete tower in which his office occupied a lofty pigeon-hole. events had moved rapidly and somewhat surprisingly in the interval, and mr. spragg had already accustomed himself to the fact that his daughter was to be married within the week, instead of awaiting the traditional post-lenten date. conventionally the change meant little to him; but on the practical side it presented unforeseen difficulties. mr. spragg had learned within the last weeks that a new york marriage involved material obligations unknown to apex. marvell, indeed, had been loftily careless of such questions; but his grandfather, on the announcement of the engagement, had called on mr. spragg and put before him, with polished precision, the young man's financial situation. mr. spragg, at the moment, had been inclined to deal with his visitor in a spirit of indulgent irony. as he leaned back in his revolving chair, with feet adroitly balanced against a tilted scrap basket, his air of relaxed power made mr. dagonet's venerable elegance seem as harmless as that of an ivory jack-straw--and his first replies to his visitor were made with the mildness of a kindly giant. "ralph don't make a living out of the law, you say? no, it didn't strike me he'd be likely to, from the talks i've had with him. fact is, the law's a business that wants--" mr. spragg broke off, checked by a protest from mr. dagonet. "oh, a profession, you call it? it ain't a business?" his smile grew more indulgent as this novel distinction dawned on him. "why, i guess that's the whole trouble with ralph. nobody expects to make money in a profession; and if you've taught him to regard the law that way, he'd better go right into cooking-stoves and done with it." mr. dagonet, within a narrower range, had his own play of humour; and it met mr. spragg's with a leap. "it's because i knew he would manage to make cooking-stoves as unremunerative as a profession that i saved him from so glaring a failure by putting him into the law." the retort drew a grunt of amusement from mr. spragg; and the eyes of the two men met in unexpected understanding. "that so? what can he do, then?" the future father-in-law enquired. "he can write poetry--at least he tells me he can." mr. dagonet hesitated, as if aware of the inadequacy of the alternative, and then added: "and he can count on three thousand a year from me." mr. spragg tilted himself farther back without disturbing his subtly-calculated relation to the scrap basket. "does it cost anything like that to print his poetry?" mr. dagonet smiled again: he was clearly enjoying his visit. "dear, no--he doesn't go in for 'luxe' editions. and now and then he gets ten dollars from a magazine." mr. spragg mused. "wasn't he ever taught to work?" "no; i really couldn't have afforded that." "i see. then they've got to live on two hundred and fifty dollars a month." mr. dagonet remained pleasantly unmoved. "does it cost anything like that to buy your daughter's dresses?" a subterranean chuckle agitated the lower folds of mr. spragg's waistcoat. "i might put him in the way of something--i guess he's smart enough." mr. dagonet made a gesture of friendly warning. "it will pay us both in the end to keep him out of business," he said, rising as if to show that his mission was accomplished. the results of this friendly conference had been more serious than mr. spragg could have foreseen--and the victory remained with his antagonist. it had not entered into mr. spragg's calculations that he would have to give his daughter any fixed income on her marriage. he meant that she should have the "handsomest" wedding the new york press had ever celebrated, and her mother's fancy was already afloat on a sea of luxuries--a motor, a fifth avenue house, and a tiara that should out-blaze mrs. van degen's; but these were movable benefits, to be conferred whenever mr. spragg happened to be "on the right side" of the market. it was a different matter to be called on, at such short notice, to bridge the gap between young marvell's allowance and undine's requirements; and her father's immediate conclusion was that the engagement had better be broken off. such scissions were almost painless in apex, and he had fancied it would be easy, by an appeal to the girl's pride, to make her see that she owed it to herself to do better. "you'd better wait awhile and look round again," was the way he had put it to her at the opening of the talk of which, even now, he could not recall the close without a tremor. undine, when she took his meaning, had been terrible. everything had gone down before her, as towns and villages went down before one of the tornadoes of her native state. wait awhile? look round? did he suppose she was marrying for money? didn't he see it was all a question, now and here, of the kind of people she wanted to "go with"? did he want to throw her straight back into the lipscomb set, to have her marry a dentist and live in a west side flat? why hadn't they stayed in apex, if that was all he thought she was fit for? she might as well have married millard binch, instead of handing him over to indiana frusk! couldn't her father understand that nice girls, in new york, didn't regard getting married like going on a buggy-ride? it was enough to ruin a girl's chances if she broke her engagement to a man in ralph marvell's set. all kinds of spiteful things would be said about her, and she would never be able to go with the right people again. they had better go back to apex right off--it was they and not she who had wanted to leave apex, anyhow--she could call her mother to witness it. she had always, when it came to that, done what her father and mother wanted, but she'd given up trying to make out what they were after, unless it was to make her miserable; and if that was it, hadn't they had enough of it by this time? she had, anyhow. but after this she meant to lead her own life; and they needn't ask her where she was going, or what she meant to do, because this time she'd die before she told them--and they'd made life so hateful to her that she only wished she was dead already. mr. spragg heard her out in silence, pulling at his beard with one sallow wrinkled hand, while the other dragged down the armhole of his waistcoat. suddenly he looked up and said: "ain't you in love with the fellow, undie?" the girl glared back at him, her splendid brows beetling like an amazon's. "do you think i'd care a cent for all the rest of it if i wasn't?" "well, if you are, you and he won't mind beginning in a small way." her look poured contempt on his ignorance. "do you s'pose i'd drag him down?" with a magnificent gesture she tore marvell's ring from her finger. "i'll send this back this minute. i'll tell him i thought he was a rich man, and now i see i'm mistaken--" she burst into shattering sobs, rocking her beautiful body back and forward in all the abandonment of young grief; and her father stood over her, stroking her shoulder and saying helplessly: "i'll see what i can do, undine--" all his life, and at ever-diminishing intervals, mr. spragg had been called on by his womenkind to "see what he could do"; and the seeing had almost always resulted as they wished. undine did not have to send back her ring, and in her state of trance-like happiness she hardly asked by what means her path had been smoothed, but merely accepted her mother's assurance that "father had fixed everything all right." mr. spragg accepted the situation also. a son-in-law who expected to be pensioned like a grand army veteran was a phenomenon new to his experience; but if that was what undine wanted she should have it. only two days later, however, he was met by a new demand--the young people had decided to be married "right off," instead of waiting till june. this change of plan was made known to mr. spragg at a moment when he was peculiarly unprepared for the financial readjustment it necessitated. he had always declared himself able to cope with any crisis if undine and her mother would "go steady"; but he now warned them of his inability to keep up with the new pace they had set. undine, not deigning to return to the charge, had commissioned her mother to speak for her; and mr. spragg was surprised to meet in his wife a firmness as inflexible as his daughter's. "i can't do it, loot--can't put my hand on the cash," he had protested; but mrs. spragg fought him inch by inch, her back to the wall--flinging out at last, as he pressed her closer: "well, if you want to know, she's seen elmer." the bolt reached its mark, and her husband turned an agitated face on her. "elmer? what on earth--he didn't come here?" "no; but he sat next to her the other night at the theatre, and she's wild with us for not having warned her." mr. spragg's scowl drew his projecting brows together. "warned her of what? what's elmer to her? why's she afraid of elmer moffatt?" "she's afraid of his talking." "talking? what on earth can he say that'll hurt her?" "oh, i don't know," mrs. spragg wailed. "she's so nervous i can hardly get a word out of her." mr. spragg's whitening face showed the touch of a new fear. "is she afraid he'll get round her again--make up to her? is that what she means by 'talking'?" "i don't know, i don't know. i only know she is afraid--she's afraid as death of him." for a long interval they sat silently looking at each other while their heavy eyes exchanged conjectures: then mr. spragg rose from his chair, saying, as he took up his hat: "don't you fret, leota; i'll see what i can do." he had been "seeing" now for an arduous fortnight; and the strain on his vision had resulted in a state of tension such as he had not undergone since the epic days of the pure water move at apex. it was not his habit to impart his fears to mrs. spragg and undine, and they continued the bridal preparations, secure in their invariable experience that, once "father" had been convinced of the impossibility of evading their demands, he might be trusted to satisfy them by means with which his womenkind need not concern themselves. mr. spragg, as he approached his office on the morning in question, felt reasonably sure of fulfilling these expectations; but he reflected that a few more such victories would mean disaster. he entered the vast marble vestibule of the ararat trust building and walked toward the express elevator that was to carry him up to his office. at the door of the elevator a man turned to him, and he recognized elmer moffatt, who put out his hand with an easy gesture. mr. spragg did not ignore the gesture: he did not even withhold his hand. in his code the cut, as a conscious sign of disapproval, did not exist. in the south, if you had a grudge against a man you tried to shoot him; in the west, you tried to do him in a mean turn in business; but in neither region was the cut among the social weapons of offense. mr. spragg, therefore, seeing moffatt in his path, extended a lifeless hand while he faced the young man scowlingly. moffatt met the hand and the scowl with equal coolness. "going up to your office? i was on my way there." the elevator door rolled back, and mr. spragg, entering it, found his companion at his side. they remained silent during the ascent to mr. spragg's threshold; but there the latter turned to enquire ironically of moffatt: "anything left to say?" moffatt smiled. "nothing left--no; i'm carrying a whole new line of goods." mr. spragg pondered the reply; then he opened the door and suffered moffatt to follow him in. behind an inner glazed enclosure, with its one window dimmed by a sooty perspective barred with chimneys, he seated himself at a dusty littered desk, and groped instinctively for the support of the scrap basket. moffatt, uninvited, dropped into the nearest chair, and mr. spragg said, after another silence: "i'm pretty busy this morning." "i know you are: that's why i'm here," moffatt serenely answered. he leaned back, crossing his legs, and twisting his small stiff moustache with a plump hand adorned by a cameo. "fact is," he went on, "this is a coals-of-fire call. you think i owe you a grudge, and i'm going to show you i'm not that kind. i'm going to put you onto a good thing--oh, not because i'm so fond of you; just because it happens to hit my sense of a joke." while moffatt talked mr. spragg took up the pile of letters on his desk and sat shuffling them like a pack of cards. he dealt them deliberately to two imaginary players; then he pushed them aside and drew out his watch. "all right--i carry one too," said the young man easily. "but you'll find it's time gained to hear what i've got to say." mr. spragg considered the vista of chimneys without speaking, and moffatt continued: "i don't suppose you care to hear the story of my life, so i won't refer you to the back numbers. you used to say out in apex that i spent too much time loafing round the bar of the mealey house; that was one of the things you had against me. well, maybe i did--but it taught me to talk, and to listen to the other fellows too. just at present i'm one of harmon b. driscoll's private secretaries, and some of that mealey house loafing has come in more useful than any job i ever put my hand to. the old man happened to hear i knew something about the inside of the eubaw deal, and took me on to have the information where he could get at it. i've given him good talk for his money; but i've done some listening too. eubaw ain't the only commodity the driscolls deal in." mr. spragg restored his watch to his pocket and shifted his drowsy gaze from the window to his visitor's face. "yes," said moffatt, as if in reply to the movement, "the driscolls are getting busy out in apex. now they've got all the street railroads in their pocket they want the water-supply too--but you know that as well as i do. fact is, they've got to have it; and there's where you and i come in." mr. spragg thrust his hands in his waistcoat arm-holes and turned his eyes back to the window. "i'm out of that long ago," he said indifferently. "sure," moffatt acquiesced; "but you know what went on when you were in it." "well?" said mr. spragg, shifting one hand to the masonic emblem on his watch-chain. "well, representative james j. rolliver, who was in it with you, ain't out of it yet. he's the man the driscolls are up against. what d'you know about him?" mr. spragg twirled the emblem thoughtfully. "driscoll tell you to come here?" moffatt laughed. "no, sir--not by a good many miles." mr. spragg removed his feet from the scrap basket and straightened himself in his chair. "well--i didn't either; good morning, mr. moffatt." the young man stared a moment, a humorous glint in his small black eyes; but he made no motion to leave his seat. "undine's to be married next week, isn't she?" he asked in a conversational tone. mr. spragg's face blackened and he swung about in his revolving chair. "you go to--" moffatt raised a deprecating hand. "oh, you needn't warn me off. i don't want to be invited to the wedding. and i don't want to forbid the banns." there was a derisive sound in mr. spragg's throat. "but i do want to get out of driscoll's office," moffatt imperturbably continued. "there's no future there for a fellow like me. i see things big. that's the reason apex was too tight a fit for me. it's only the little fellows that succeed in little places. new york's my size--without a single alteration. i could prove it to you to-morrow if i could put my hand on fifty thousand dollars." mr. spragg did not repeat his gesture of dismissal: he was once more listening guardedly but intently. moffatt saw it and continued. "and i could put my hand on double that sum--yes, sir, double--if you'd just step round with me to old driscoll's office before five p. m. see the connection, mr. spragg?" the older man remained silent while his visitor hummed a bar or two of "in the gloaming"; then he said: "you want me to tell driscoll what i know about james j. rolliver?" "i want you to tell the truth--i want you to stand for political purity in your native state. a man of your prominence owes it to the community, sir," cried moffatt. mr. spragg was still tormenting his masonic emblem. "rolliver and i always stood together," he said at last, with a tinge of reluctance. "well, how much have you made out of it? ain't he always been ahead of the game?" "i can't do it--i can't do it," said mr. spragg, bringing his clenched hand down on the desk, as if addressing an invisible throng of assailants. moffatt rose without any evidence of disappointment in his ruddy countenance. "well, so long," he said, moving toward the door. near the threshold he paused to add carelessly: "excuse my referring to a personal matter--but i understand miss spragg's wedding takes place next monday." mr. spragg was silent. "how's that?" moffatt continued unabashed. "i saw in the papers the date was set for the end of june." mr. spragg rose heavily from his seat. "i presume my daughter has her reasons," he said, moving toward the door in moffatt's wake. "i guess she has--same as i have for wanting you to step round with me to old driscoll's. if undine's reasons are as good as mine--" "stop right here, elmer moffatt!" the older man broke out with lifted hand. moffatt made a burlesque feint of evading a blow; then his face grew serious, and he moved close to mr. spragg, whose arm had fallen to his side. "see here, i know undine's reasons. i've had a talk with her--didn't she tell you? she don't beat about the bush the way you do. she told me straight out what was bothering her. she wants the marvells to think she's right out of kindergarten. 'no goods sent out on approval from this counter.' and i see her point--_i_ don't mean to publish my meemo'rs. only a deal's a deal." he paused a moment, twisting his fingers about the heavy gold watch-chain that crossed his waistcoat. "tell you what, mr. spragg, i don't bear malice--not against undine, anyway--and if i could have afforded it i'd have been glad enough to oblige her and forget old times. but you didn't hesitate to kick me when i was down and it's taken me a day or two to get on my legs again after that kicking. i see my way now to get there and keep there; and there's a kinder poetic justice in your being the man to help me up. if i can get hold of fifty thousand dollars within a day or so i don't care who's got the start of me. i've got a dead sure thing in sight, and you're the only man that can get it for me. now do you see where we're coming out?" mr. spragg, during this discourse, had remained motionless, his hands in his pockets, his jaws moving mechanically, as though he mumbled a tooth-pick under his beard. his sallow cheek had turned a shade paler, and his brows hung threateningly over his half-closed eyes. but there was no threat--there was scarcely more than a note of dull curiosity--in the voice with which he said: "you mean to talk?" moffatt's rosy face grew as hard as a steel safe. "i mean you to talk--to old driscoll." he paused, and then added: "it's a hundred thousand down, between us." mr. spragg once more consulted his watch. "i'll see you again," he said with an effort. moffatt struck one fist against the other. "no, sir--you won't! you'll only hear from me--through the marvell family. your news ain't worth a dollar to driscoll if he don't get it to-day." he was checked by the sound of steps in the outer office, and mr. spragg's stenographer appeared in the doorway. "it's mr. marvell," she announced; and ralph marvell, glowing with haste and happiness, stood between the two men, holding out his hand to mr. spragg. "am i awfully in the way, sir? turn me out if i am--but first let me just say a word about this necklace i've ordered for un--" he broke off, made aware by mr. spragg's glance of the presence of elmer moffatt, who, with unwonted discretion, had dropped back into the shadow of the door. marvell turned on moffatt a bright gaze full of the instinctive hospitality of youth; but moffatt looked straight past him at mr. spragg. the latter, as if in response to an imperceptible signal, mechanically pronounced his visitor's name; and the two young men moved toward each other. "i beg your pardon most awfully--am i breaking up an important conference?" ralph asked as he shook hands. "why, no--i guess we're pretty nearly through. i'll step outside and woo the blonde while you're talking," moffatt rejoined in the same key. "thanks so much--i shan't take two seconds." ralph broke off to scrutinize him. "but haven't we met before? it seems to me i've seen you--just lately--" moffatt seemed about to answer, but his reply was checked by an abrupt movement on the part of mr. spragg. there was a perceptible pause, during which moffatt's bright black glance rested questioningly on ralph; then he looked again at the older man, and their eyes held each other for a silent moment. "why, no--not as i'm aware of, mr. marvell," moffatt said, addressing himself amicably to ralph. "better late than never, though--and i hope to have the pleasure soon again." he divided a nod between the two men, and passed into the outer office, where they heard him addressing the stenographer in a strain of exaggerated gallantry. xi the july sun enclosed in a ring of fire the ilex grove of a villa in the hills near siena. below, by the roadside, the long yellow house seemed to waver and palpitate in the glare; but steep by steep, behind it, the cool ilex-dusk mounted to the ledge where ralph marvell, stretched on his back in the grass, lay gazing up at a black reticulation of branches between which bits of sky gleamed with the hardness and brilliancy of blue enamel. up there too the air was thick with heat; but compared with the white fire below it was a dim and tempered warmth, like that of the churches in which he and undine sometimes took refuge at the height of the torrid days. ralph loved the heavy italian summer, as he had loved the light spring days leading up to it: the long line of dancing days that had drawn them on and on ever since they had left their ship at naples four months earlier. four months of beauty, changeful, inexhaustible, weaving itself about him in shapes of softness and strength; and beside him, hand in hand with him, embodying that spirit of shifting magic, the radiant creature through whose eyes he saw it. this was what their hastened marriage had blessed them with, giving them leisure, before summer came, to penetrate to remote folds of the southern mountains, to linger in the shade of sicilian orange-groves, and finally, travelling by slow stages to the adriatic, to reach the central hill-country where even in july they might hope for a breathable air. to ralph the sienese air was not only breathable but intoxicating. the sun, treading the earth like a vintager, drew from it heady fragrances, crushed out of it new colours. all the values of the temperate landscape were reversed: the noon high-lights were whiter but the shadows had unimagined colour. on the blackness of cork and ilex and cypress lay the green and purple lustres, the coppery iridescences, of old bronze; and night after night the skies were wine-blue and bubbling with stars. ralph said to himself that no one who had not seen italy thus prostrate beneath the sun knew what secret treasures she could yield. as he lay there, fragments of past states of emotion, fugitive felicities of thought and sensation, rose and floated on the surface of his thoughts. it was one of those moments when the accumulated impressions of life converge on heart and brain, elucidating, enlacing each other, in a mysterious confusion of beauty. he had had glimpses of such a state before, of such mergings of the personal with the general life that one felt one's self a mere wave on the wild stream of being, yet thrilled with a sharper sense of individuality than can be known within the mere bounds of the actual. but now he knew the sensation in its fulness, and with it came the releasing power of language. words were flashing like brilliant birds through the boughs overhead; he had but to wave his magic wand to have them flutter down to him. only they were so beautiful up there, weaving their fantastic flights against the blue, that it was pleasanter, for the moment, to watch them and let the wand lie. he stared up at the pattern they made till his eyes ached with excess of light; then he changed his position and looked at his wife. undine, near by, leaned against a gnarled tree with the slightly constrained air of a person unused to sylvan abandonments. her beautiful back could not adapt itself to the irregularities of the tree-trunk, and she moved a little now and then in the effort to find an easier position. but her expression was serene, and ralph, looking up at her through drowsy lids, thought her face had never been more exquisite. "you look as cool as a wave," he said, reaching out for the hand on her knee. she let him have it, and he drew it closer, scrutinizing it as if it had been a bit of precious porcelain or ivory. it was small and soft, a mere featherweight, a puff-ball of a hand--not quick and thrilling, not a speaking hand, but one to be fondled and dressed in rings, and to leave a rosy blur in the brain. the fingers were short and tapering, dimpled at the base, with nails as smooth as rose-leaves. ralph lifted them one by one, like a child playing with piano-keys, but they were inelastic and did not spring back far--only far enough to show the dimples. he turned the hand over and traced the course of its blue veins from the wrist to the rounding of the palm below the fingers; then he put a kiss in the warm hollow between. the upper world had vanished: his universe had shrunk to the palm of a hand. but there was no sense of diminution. in the mystic depths whence his passion sprang, earthly dimensions were ignored and the curve of beauty was boundless enough to hold whatever the imagination could pour into it. ralph had never felt more convinced of his power to write a great poem; but now it was undine's hand which held the magic wand of expression. she stirred again uneasily, answering his last words with a faint accent of reproach. "i don't feel cool. you said there'd be a breeze up here.". he laughed. "you poor darling! wasn't it ever as hot as this in apex?" she withdrew her hand with a slight grimace. "yes--but i didn't marry you to go back to apex!" ralph laughed again; then he lifted himself on his elbow and regained the hand. "i wonder what you did marry me for?" "mercy! it's too hot for conundrums." she spoke without impatience, but with a lassitude less joyous than his. he roused himself. "do you really mind the heat so much? we'll go, if you do." she sat up eagerly. "go to switzerland, you mean?" "well, i hadn't taken quite as long a leap. i only meant we might drive back to siena." she relapsed listlessly against her tree-trunk. "oh, siena's hotter than this." "we could go and sit in the cathedral--it's always cool there at sunset." "we've sat in the cathedral at sunset every day for a week." "well, what do you say to stopping at lecceto on the way? i haven't shown you lecceto yet; and the drive back by moonlight would be glorious." this woke her to a slight show of interest. "it might be nice--but where could we get anything to eat?" ralph laughed again. "i don't believe we could. you're too practical." "well, somebody's got to be. and the food in the hotel is too disgusting if we're not on time." "i admit that the best of it has usually been appropriated by the extremely good-looking cavalry-officer who's so keen to know you." undine's face brightened. "you know he's not a count; he's a marquis. his name's roviano; his palace in rome is in the guide-books, and he speaks english beautifully. celeste found out about him from the headwaiter," she said, with the security of one who treats of recognized values. marvell, sitting upright, reached lazily across the grass for his hat. "then there's all the more reason for rushing back to defend our share." he spoke in the bantering tone which had become the habitual expression of his tenderness; but his eyes softened as they absorbed in a last glance the glimmering submarine light of the ancient grove, through which undine's figure wavered nereid-like above him. "you never looked your name more than you do now," he said, kneeling at her side and putting his arm about her. she smiled back a little vaguely, as if not seizing his allusion, and being content to let it drop into the store of unexplained references which had once stimulated her curiosity but now merely gave her leisure to think of other things. but her smile was no less lovely for its vagueness, and indeed, to ralph, the loveliness was enhanced by the latent doubt. he remembered afterward that at that moment the cup of life seemed to brim over. "come, dear--here or there--it's all divine!" in the carriage, however, she remained insensible to the soft spell of the evening, noticing only the heat and dust, and saying, as they passed under the wooded cliff of lecceto, that they might as well have stopped there after all, since with such a headache as she felt coming on she didn't care if she dined or not. ralph looked up yearningly at the long walls overhead; but undine's mood was hardly favourable to communion with such scenes, and he made no attempt to stop the carriage. instead he presently said: "if you're tired of italy, we've got the world to choose from." she did not speak for a moment; then she said: "it's the heat i'm tired of. don't people generally come here earlier?" "yes. that's why i chose the summer: so that we could have it all to ourselves." she tried to put a note of reasonableness into her voice. "if you'd told me we were going everywhere at the wrong time, of course i could have arranged about my clothes." "you poor darling! let us, by all means, go to the place where the clothes will be right: they're too beautiful to be left out of our scheme of life." her lips hardened. "i know you don't care how i look. but you didn't give me time to order anything before we were married, and i've got nothing but my last winter's things to wear." ralph smiled. even his subjugated mind perceived the inconsistency of undine's taxing him with having hastened their marriage; but her variations on the eternal feminine still enchanted him. "we'll go wherever you please--you make every place the one place," he said, as if he were humouring an irresistible child. "to switzerland, then? celeste says st. moritz is too heavenly," exclaimed undine, who gathered her ideas of europe chiefly from the conversation of her experienced attendant. "one can be cool short of the engadine. why not go south again--say to capri?" "capri? is that the island we saw from naples, where the artists go?" she drew her brows together. "it would be simply awful getting there in this heat." "well, then, i know a little place in switzerland where one can still get away from the crowd, and we can sit and look at a green water-fall while i lie in wait for adjectives." mr. spragg's astonishment on learning that his son-in-law contemplated maintaining a household on the earnings of his muse was still matter for pleasantry between the pair; and one of the humours of their first weeks together had consisted in picturing themselves as a primeval couple setting forth across a virgin continent and subsisting on the adjectives which ralph was to trap for his epic. on this occasion, however, his wife did not take up the joke, and he remained silent while their carriage climbed the long dusty hill to the fontebranda gate. he had seen her face droop as he suggested the possibility of an escape from the crowds in switzerland, and it came to him, with the sharpness of a knife-thrust, that a crowd was what she wanted--that she was sick to death of being alone with him. he sat motionless, staring ahead at the red-brown walls and towers on the steep above them. after all there was nothing sudden in his discovery. for weeks it had hung on the edge of consciousness, but he had turned from it with the heart's instinctive clinging to the unrealities by which it lives. even now a hundred qualifying reasons rushed to his aid. they told him it was not of himself that undine had wearied, but only of their present way of life. he had said a moment before, without conscious exaggeration, that her presence made any place the one place; yet how willingly would he have consented to share in such a life as she was leading before their marriage? and he had to acknowledge their months of desultory wandering from one remote italian hill-top to another must have seemed as purposeless to her as balls and dinners would have been to him. an imagination like his, peopled with such varied images and associations, fed by so many currents from the long stream of human experience, could hardly picture the bareness of the small half-lit place in which his wife's spirit fluttered. her mind was as destitute of beauty and mystery as the prairie school-house in which she had been educated; and her ideals seemed to ralph as pathetic as the ornaments made of corks and cigar-bands with which her infant hands had been taught to adorn it. he was beginning to understand this, and learning to adapt himself to the narrow compass of her experience. the task of opening new windows in her mind was inspiring enough to give him infinite patience; and he would not yet own to himself that her pliancy and variety were imitative rather than spontaneous. meanwhile he had no desire to sacrifice her wishes to his, and it distressed him that he dared not confess his real reason for avoiding the engadine. the truth was that their funds were shrinking faster than he had expected. mr. spragg, after bluntly opposing their hastened marriage on the ground that he was not prepared, at such short notice, to make the necessary provision for his daughter, had shortly afterward (probably, as undine observed to ralph, in consequence of a lucky "turn" in the street) met their wishes with all possible liberality, bestowing on them a wedding in conformity with mrs. spragg's ideals and up to the highest standard of mrs. heeny's clippings, and pledging himself to provide undine with an income adequate to so brilliant a beginning. it was understood that ralph, on their return, should renounce the law for some more paying business; but this seemed the smallest of sacrifices to make for the privilege of calling undine his wife; and besides, he still secretly hoped that, in the interval, his real vocation might declare itself in some work which would justify his adopting the life of letters. he had assumed that undine's allowance, with the addition of his own small income, would be enough to satisfy their needs. his own were few, and had always been within his means; but his wife's daily requirements, combined with her intermittent outbreaks of extravagance, had thrown out all his calculations, and they were already seriously exceeding their income. if any one had prophesied before his marriage that he would find it difficult to tell this to undine he would have smiled at the suggestion; and during their first days together it had seemed as though pecuniary questions were the last likely to be raised between them. but his marital education had since made strides, and he now knew that a disregard for money may imply not the willingness to get on without it but merely a blind confidence that it will somehow be provided. if undine, like the lilies of the field, took no care, it was not because her wants were as few but because she assumed that care would be taken for her by those whose privilege it was to enable her to unite floral insouciance with sheban elegance. she had met ralph's first note of warning with the assurance that she "didn't mean to worry"; and her tone implied that it was his business to do so for her. he certainly wanted to guard her from this as from all other cares; he wanted also, and still more passionately after the topic had once or twice recurred between them, to guard himself from the risk of judging where he still adored. these restraints to frankness kept him silent during the remainder of the drive, and when, after dinner, undine again complained of her headache, he let her go up to her room and wandered out into the dimly lit streets to renewed communion with his problems. they hung on him insistently as darkness fell, and siena grew vocal with that shrill diversity of sounds that breaks, on summer nights, from every cleft of the masonry in old italian towns. then the moon rose, unfolding depth by depth the lines of the antique land; and ralph, leaning against an old brick parapet, and watching each silver-blue remoteness disclose itself between the dark masses of the middle distance, felt his spirit enlarged and pacified. for the first time, as his senses thrilled to the deep touch of beauty, he asked himself if out of these floating and fugitive vibrations he might not build something concrete and stable, if even such dull common cares as now oppressed him might not become the motive power of creation. if he could only, on the spot, do something with all the accumulated spoils of the last months--something that should both put money into his pocket and harmony into the rich confusion of his spirit! "i'll write--i'll write: that must be what the whole thing means," he said to himself, with a vague clutch at some solution which should keep him a little longer hanging half-way down the steep of disenchantment. he would have stayed on, heedless of time, to trace the ramifications of his idea in the complex beauty of the scene, but for the longing to share his mood with undine. for the last few months every thought and sensation had been instantly transmuted into such emotional impulses and, though the currents of communication between himself and undine were neither deep nor numerous, each fresh rush of feeling seemed strong enough to clear a way to her heart. he hurried back, almost breathlessly, to the inn; but even as he knocked at her door the subtle emanation of other influences seemed to arrest and chill him. she had put out the lamp, and sat by the window in the moonlight, her head propped on a listless hand. as marvell entered she turned; then, without speaking, she looked away again. he was used to this mute reception, and had learned that it had no personal motive, but was the result of an extremely simplified social code. mr. and mrs. spragg seldom spoke to each other when they met, and words of greeting seemed almost unknown to their domestic vocabulary. marvell, at first, had fancied that his own warmth would call forth a response from his wife, who had been so quick to learn the forms of worldly intercourse; but he soon saw that she regarded intimacy as a pretext for escaping from such forms into a total absence of expression. to-night, however, he felt another meaning in her silence, and perceived that she intended him to feel it. he met it by silence, but of a different kind; letting his nearness speak for him as he knelt beside her and laid his cheek against hers. she seemed hardly aware of the gesture; but to that he was also used. she had never shown any repugnance to his tenderness, but such response as it evoked was remote and ariel-like, suggesting, from the first, not so much of the recoil of ignorance as the coolness of the element from which she took her name. as he pressed her to him she seemed to grow less impassive and he felt her resign herself like a tired child. he held his breath, not daring to break the spell. at length he whispered: "i've just seen such a wonderful thing--i wish you'd been with me!" "what sort of a thing?" she turned her head with a faint show of interest. "a--i don't know--a vision.... it came to me out there just now with the moonrise." "a vision?" her interest flagged. "i never cared much about spirits. mother used to try to drag me to seances--but they always made me sleepy." ralph laughed. "i don't mean a dead spirit but a living one! i saw the vision of a book i mean to do. it came to me suddenly, magnificently, swooped down on me as that big white moon swooped down on the black landscape, tore at me like a great white eagle-like the bird of jove! after all, imagination was the eagle that devoured prometheus!" she drew away abruptly, and the bright moonlight showed him the apprehension in her face. "you're not going to write a book here?" he stood up and wandered away a step or two; then he turned and came back. "of course not here. wherever you want. the main point is that it's come to me--no, that it's come back to me! for it's all these months together, it's all our happiness--it's the meaning of life that i've found, and it's you, dearest, you who've given it to me!" he dropped down beside her again; but she disengaged herself and he heard a little sob in her throat. "undine--what's the matter?" "nothing...i don't know...i suppose i'm homesick..." "homesick? you poor darling! you're tired of travelling? what is it?" "i don't know...i don't like europe...it's not what i expected, and i think it's all too dreadfully dreary!" the words broke from her in a long wail of rebellion. marvell gazed at her perplexedly. it seemed strange that such unguessed thoughts should have been stirring in the heart pressed to his. "it's less interesting than you expected--or less amusing? is that it?" "it's dirty and ugly--all the towns we've been to are disgustingly dirty. i loathe the smells and the beggars. i'm sick and tired of the stuffy rooms in the hotels. i thought it would all be so splendid--but new york's ever so much nicer!" "not new york in july?" "i don't care--there are the roof-gardens, anyway; and there are always people round. all these places seem as if they were dead. it's all like some awful cemetery." a sense of compunction checked marvell's laughter. "don't cry, dear--don't! i see, i understand. you're lonely and the heat has tired you out. it is dull here; awfully dull; i've been stupid not to feel it. but we'll start at once--we'll get out of it." she brightened instantly. "we'll go up to switzerland?" "we'll go up to switzerland." he had a fleeting glimpse of the quiet place with the green water-fall, where he might have made tryst with his vision; then he turned his mind from it and said: "we'll go just where you want. how soon can you be ready to start?" "oh, to-morrow--the first thing to-morrow! i'll make celeste get out of bed now and pack. can we go right through to st. moritz? i'd rather sleep in the train than in another of these awful places." she was on her feet in a flash, her face alight, her hair waving and floating about her as though it rose on her happy heart-beats. "oh, ralph, it's sweet of you, and i love you!" she cried out, letting him take her to his breast. xii in the quiet place with the green water-fall ralph's vision might have kept faith with him; but how could he hope to surprise it in the midsummer crowds of st. moritz? undine, at any rate, had found there what she wanted; and when he was at her side, and her radiant smile included him, every other question was in abeyance. but there were hours of solitary striding over bare grassy slopes, face to face with the ironic interrogation of sky and mountains, when his anxieties came back, more persistent and importunate. sometimes they took the form of merely material difficulties. how, for instance, was he to meet the cost of their ruinous suite at the engadine palace while he awaited mr. spragg's next remittance? and once the hotel bills were paid, what would be left for the journey back to paris, the looming expenses there, the price of the passage to america? these questions would fling him back on the thought of his projected book, which was, after all, to be what the masterpieces of literature had mostly been--a pot-boiler. well! why not? did not the worshipper always heap the rarest essences on the altar of his divinity? ralph still rejoiced in the thought of giving back to undine something of the beauty of their first months together. but even on his solitary walks the vision eluded him; and he could spare so few hours to its pursuit! undine's days were crowded, and it was still a matter of course that where she went he should follow. he had risen visibly in her opinion since they had been absorbed into the life of the big hotels, and she had seen that his command of foreign tongues put him at an advantage even in circles where english was generally spoken if not understood. undine herself, hampered by her lack of languages, was soon drawn into the group of compatriots who struck the social pitch of their hotel. their types were familiar enough to ralph, who had taken their measure in former wanderings, and come across their duplicates in every scene of continental idleness. foremost among them was mrs. harvey shallum, a showy parisianized figure, with a small wax-featured husband whose ultra-fashionable clothes seemed a tribute to his wife's importance rather than the mark of his personal taste. mr. shallum, in fact, could not be said to have any personal bent. though he conversed with a colourless fluency in the principal european tongues, he seldom exercised his gift except in intercourse with hotel-managers and head-waiters; and his long silences were broken only by resigned allusions to the enormities he had suffered at the hands of this gifted but unscrupulous class. mrs. shallum, though in command of but a few verbs, all of which, on her lips, became irregular, managed to express a polyglot personality as vivid as her husband's was effaced. her only idea of intercourse with her kind was to organize it into bands and subject it to frequent displacements; and society smiled at her for these exertions like an infant vigorously rocked. she saw at once undine's value as a factor in her scheme, and the two formed an alliance on which ralph refrained from shedding the cold light of depreciation. it was a point of honour with him not to seem to disdain any of undine's amusements: the noisy interminable picnics, the hot promiscuous balls, the concerts, bridge-parties and theatricals which helped to disguise the difference between the high alps and paris or new york. he told himself that there is always a narcissus-element in youth, and that what undine really enjoyed was the image of her own charm mirrored in the general admiration. with her quick perceptions and adaptabilities she would soon learn to care more about the quality of the reflecting surface; and meanwhile no criticism of his should mar her pleasure. the appearance at their hotel of the cavalry-officer from siena was a not wholly agreeable surprise; but even after the handsome marquis had been introduced to undine, and had whirled her through an evening's dances, ralph was not seriously disturbed. husband and wife had grown closer to each other since they had come to st. moritz, and in the brief moments she could give him undine was now always gay and approachable. her fitful humours had vanished, and she showed qualities of comradeship that seemed the promise of a deeper understanding. but this very hope made him more subject to her moods, more fearful of disturbing the harmony between them. least of all could he broach the subject of money: he had too keen a memory of the way her lips could narrow, and her eyes turn from him as if he were a stranger. it was a different matter that one day brought the look he feared to her face. she had announced her intention of going on an excursion with mrs. shallum and three or four of the young men who formed the nucleus of their shifting circle, and for the first time she did not ask ralph if he were coming; but he felt no resentment at being left out. he was tired of these noisy assaults on the high solitudes, and the prospect of a quiet afternoon turned his thoughts to his book. now if ever there seemed a chance of recapturing the moonlight vision... from his balcony he looked down on the assembling party. mrs. shallum was already screaming bilingually at various windows in the long facade; and undine presently came out of the hotel with the marchese roviano and two young english diplomatists. slim and tall in her trim mountain garb, she made the ornate mrs. shallum look like a piece of ambulant upholstery. the high air brightened her cheeks and struck new lights from her hair, and ralph had never seen her so touched with morning freshness. the party was not yet complete, and he felt a movement of annoyance when he recognized, in the last person to join it, a russian lady of cosmopolitan notoriety whom he had run across in his unmarried days, and as to whom he had already warned undine. knowing what strange specimens from the depths slip through the wide meshes of the watering-place world, he had foreseen that a meeting with the baroness adelschein was inevitable; but he had not expected her to become one of his wife's intimate circle. when the excursionists had started he turned back to his writing-table and tried to take up his work; but he could not fix his thoughts: they were far away, in pursuit of undine. he had been but five months married, and it seemed, after all, rather soon for him to be dropped out of such excursions as unquestioningly as poor harvey shallum. he smiled away this first twinge of jealousy, but the irritation it left found a pretext in his displeasure at undine's choice of companions. mrs. shallum grated on his taste, but she was as open to inspection as a shop-window, and he was sure that time would teach his wife the cheapness of what she had to show. roviano and the englishmen were well enough too: frankly bent on amusement, but pleasant and well-bred. but they would naturally take their tone from the women they were with; and madame adelschein's tone was notorious. he knew also that undine's faculty of self-defense was weakened by the instinct of adapting herself to whatever company she was in, of copying "the others" in speech and gesture as closely as she reflected them in dress; and he was disturbed by the thought of what her ignorance might expose her to. she came back late, flushed with her long walk, her face all sparkle and mystery, as he had seen it in the first days of their courtship; and the look somehow revived his irritated sense of having been intentionally left out of the party. "you've been gone forever. was it the adelschein who made you go such lengths?" he asked her, trying to keep to his usual joking tone. undine, as she dropped down on the sofa and unpinned her hat, shed on him the light of her guileless gaze. "i don't know: everybody was amusing. the marquis is awfully bright." "i'd no idea you or bertha shallum knew madame adelschein well enough to take her off with you in that way." undine sat absently smoothing the tuft of glossy cock's-feathers in her hat. "i don't see that you've got to know people particularly well to go for a walk with them. the baroness is awfully bright too." she always gave her acquaintances their titles, seeming not, in this respect, to have noticed that a simpler form prevailed. "i don't dispute the interest of what she says; but i've told you what decent people think of what she does," ralph retorted, exasperated by what seemed a wilful pretense of ignorance. she continued to scrutinize him with her clear eyes, in which there was no shadow of offense. "you mean they don't want to go round with her? you're mistaken: it's not true. she goes round with everybody. she dined last night with the grand duchess; roviano told me so." this was not calculated to make ralph take a more tolerant view of the question. "does he also tell you what's said of her?" "what's said of her?" undine's limpid glance rebuked him. "do you mean that disgusting scandal you told me about? do you suppose i'd let him talk to me about such things? i meant you're mistaken about her social position. he says she goes everywhere." ralph laughed impatiently. "no doubt roviano's an authority; but it doesn't happen to be his business to choose your friends for you." undine echoed his laugh. "well, i guess i don't need anybody to do that: i can do it myself," she said, with the good-humoured curtness that was the habitual note of intercourse with the spraggs. ralph sat down beside her and laid a caressing touch on her shoulder. "no, you can't, you foolish child. you know nothing of this society you're in; of its antecedents, its rules, its conventions; and it's my affair to look after you, and warn you when you're on the wrong track." "mercy, what a solemn speech!" she shrugged away his hand without ill-temper. "i don't believe an american woman needs to know such a lot about their old rules. they can see i mean to follow my own, and if they don't like it they needn't go with me." "oh, they'll go with you fast enough, as you call it. they'll be too charmed to. the question is how far they'll make you go with them, and where they'll finally land you." she tossed her head back with the movement she had learned in "speaking" school-pieces about freedom and the british tyrant. "no one's ever yet gone any farther with me than i wanted!" she declared. she was really exquisitely simple. "i'm not sure roviano hasn't, in vouching for madame adelschein. but he probably thinks you know about her. to him this isn't 'society' any more than the people in an omnibus are. society, to everybody here, means the sanction of their own special group and of the corresponding groups elsewhere. the adelschein goes about in a place like this because it's nobody's business to stop her; but the women who tolerate her here would drop her like a shot if she set foot on their own ground." the thoughtful air with which undine heard him out made him fancy this argument had carried; and as be ended she threw him a bright look. "well, that's easy enough: i can drop her if she comes to new york." ralph sat silent for a moment--then he turned away and began to gather up his scattered pages. undine, in the ensuing days, was no less often with madame adelschein, and ralph suspected a challenge in her open frequentation of the lady. but if challenge there were, he let it lie. whether his wife saw more or less of madame adelschein seemed no longer of much consequence: she had so amply shown him her ability to protect herself. the pang lay in the completeness of the proof--in the perfect functioning of her instinct of self-preservation. for the first time he was face to face with his hovering dread: he was judging where he still adored. before long more pressing cares absorbed him. he had already begun to watch the post for his father-in-law's monthly remittance, without precisely knowing how, even with its aid, he was to bridge the gulf of expense between st. moritz and new york. the non-arrival of mr. spragg's cheque was productive of graver tears, and these were abruptly confirmed when, coming in one afternoon, he found undine crying over a letter from her mother. her distress made him fear that mr. spragg was ill, and he drew her to him soothingly; but she broke away with an impatient movement. "oh, they're all well enough--but father's lost a lot of money. he's been speculating, and he can't send us anything for at least three months." ralph murmured reassuringly: "as long as there's no one ill!"--but in reality he was following her despairing gaze down the long perspective of their barren quarter. "three months! three months!" undine dried her eyes, and sat with set lips and tapping foot while he read her mother's letter. "your poor father! it's a hard knock for him. i'm sorry," he said as he handed it back. for a moment she did not seem to hear; then she said between her teeth: "it's hard for us. i suppose now we'll have to go straight home." he looked at her with wonder. "if that were all! in any case i should have to be back in a few weeks." "but we needn't have left here in august! it's the first place in europe that i've liked, and it's just my luck to be dragged away from it!" "i'm so awfully sorry, dearest. it's my fault for persuading you to marry a pauper." "it's father's fault. why on earth did he go and speculate? there's no use his saying he's sorry now!" she sat brooding for a moment and then suddenly took ralph's hand. "couldn't your people do something--help us out just this once, i mean?" he flushed to the forehead: it seemed inconceivable that she should make such a suggestion. "i couldn't ask them--it's not possible. my grandfather does as much as he can for me, and my mother has nothing but what he gives her." undine seemed unconscious of his embarrassment. "he doesn't give us nearly as much as father does," she said; and, as ralph remained silent, she went on: "couldn't you ask your sister, then? i must have some clothes to go home in." his heart contracted as he looked at her. what sinister change came over her when her will was crossed? she seemed to grow inaccessible, implacable--her eyes were like the eyes of an enemy. "i don't know--i'll see," he said, rising and moving away from her. at that moment the touch of her hand was repugnant. yes--he might ask laura, no doubt: and whatever she had would be his. but the necessity was bitter to him, and undine's unconsciousness of the fact hurt him more than her indifference to her father's misfortune. what hurt him most was the curious fact that, for all her light irresponsibility, it was always she who made the practical suggestion, hit the nail of expediency on the head. no sentimental scruple made the blow waver or deflected her resolute aim. she had thought at once of laura, and laura was his only, his inevitable, resource. his anxious mind pictured his sister's wonder, and made him wince under the sting of henley fairford's irony: fairford, who at the time of the marriage had sat silent and pulled his moustache while every one else argued and objected, yet under whose silence ralph had felt a deeper protest than under all the reasoning of the others. it was no comfort to reflect that fairford would probably continue to say nothing! but necessity made light of these twinges, and ralph set his teeth and cabled. undine's chief surprise seemed to be that laura's response, though immediate and generous, did not enable them to stay on at st. moritz. but she apparently read in her husband's look the uselessness of such a hope, for, with one of the sudden changes of mood that still disarmed him, she accepted the need of departure, and took leave philosophically of the shallums and their band. after all, paris was ahead, and in september one would have a chance to see the new models and surprise the secret councils of the dressmakers. ralph was astonished at the tenacity with which she held to her purpose. he tried, when they reached paris, to make her feel the necessity of starting at once for home; but she complained of fatigue and of feeling vaguely unwell, and he had to yield to her desire for rest. the word, however, was to strike him as strangely misapplied, for from the day of their arrival she was in state of perpetual activity. she seemed to have mastered her paris by divination, and between the hounds of the boulevards and the place vendome she moved at once with supernatural ease. "of course," she explained to him, "i understand how little we've got to spend; but i left new york without a rag, and it was you who made me countermand my trousseau, instead of having it sent after us. i wish now i hadn't listened to you--father'd have had to pay for that before he lost his money. as it is, it will be cheaper in the end for me to pick up a few things here. the advantage of going to the french dress-makers is that they'll wait twice as long for their money as the people at home. and they're all crazy to dress me--bertha shallum will tell you so: she says no one ever had such a chance! that's why i was willing to come to this stuffy little hotel--i wanted to save every scrap i could to get a few decent things. and over here they're accustomed to being bargained with--you ought to see how i've beaten them down! have you any idea what a dinner-dress costs in new york--?" so it went on, obtusely and persistently, whenever he tried to sound the note of prudence. but on other themes she was more than usually responsive. paris enchanted her, and they had delightful hours at the theatres--the "little" ones--amusing dinners at fashionable restaurants, and reckless evenings in haunts where she thrilled with simple glee at the thought of what she must so obviously be "taken for." all these familiar diversions regained, for ralph, a fresh zest in her company. her innocence, her high spirits, her astounding comments and credulities, renovated the old parisian adventure and flung a veil of romance over its hackneyed scenes. beheld through such a medium the future looked less near and implacable, and ralph, when he had received a reassuring letter from his sister, let his conscience sleep and slipped forth on the high tide of pleasure. after all, in new york amusements would be fewer, and their life, for a time, perhaps more quiet. moreover, ralph's dim glimpses of mr. spragg's past suggested that the latter was likely to be on his feet again at any moment, and atoning by redoubled prodigalities for his temporary straits; and beyond all these possibilities there was the book to be written--the book on which ralph was sure he should get a real hold as soon as they settled down in new york. meanwhile the daily cost of living, and the bills that could not be deferred, were eating deep into laura's subsidy. ralph's anxieties returned, and his plight was brought home to him with a shock when, on going one day to engage passages, he learned that the prices were that of the "rush season," and one of the conditions immediate payment. at other times, he was told the rules were easier; but in september and october no exception could be made. as he walked away with this fresh weight on his mind he caught sight of the strolling figure of peter van degen--peter lounging and luxuriating among the seductions of the boulevard with the disgusting ease of a man whose wants are all measured by money, and who always has enough to gratify them. his present sense of these advantages revealed itself in the affability of his greeting to ralph, and in his off-hand request that the latter should "look up clare," who had come over with him to get her winter finery. "she's motoring to italy next week with some of her long-haired friends--but i'm off for the other side; going back on the sorceress. she's just been overhauled at greenock, and we ought to have a good spin over. better come along with me, old man." the sorceress was van degen's steam-yacht, most huge and complicated of her kind: it was his habit, after his semi-annual flights to paris and london, to take a joyous company back on her and let clare return by steamer. the character of these parties made the invitation almost an offense to ralph; but reflecting that it was probably a phrase distributed to every acquaintance when van degen was in a rosy mood, he merely answered: "much obliged, my dear fellow; but undine and i are sailing immediately." peter's glassy eye grew livelier. "ah, to be sure--you're not over the honeymoon yet. how's the bride? stunning as ever? my regards to her, please. i suppose she's too deep in dress-making to be called on? don't you forget to look up clare!" he hurried on in pursuit of a flitting petticoat and ralph continued his walk home. he prolonged it a little in order to put off telling undine of his plight; for he could devise only one way of meeting the cost of the voyage, and that was to take it at once, and thus curtail their parisian expenses. but he knew how unwelcome this plan would be, and he shrank the more from seeing undine's face harden; since, of late, he had so basked in its brightness. when at last he entered the little salon she called "stuffy" he found her in conference with a blond-bearded gentleman who wore the red ribbon in his lapel, and who, on ralph's appearance--and at a sign, as it appeared, from mrs. marvell--swept into his note-case some small objects that had lain on the table, and bowed himself out with a "madame--monsieur" worthy of the highest traditions. ralph looked after him with amusement. "who's your friend--an ambassador or a tailor?" undine was rapidly slipping on her rings, which, as he now saw, had also been scattered over the table. "oh, it was only that jeweller i told you about--the one bertha shallum goes to." "a jeweller? good heavens, my poor girl! you're buying jewels?" the extravagance of the idea struck a laugh from him. undine's face did not harden: it took on, instead, almost deprecating look. "of course not--how silly you are! i only wanted a few old things reset. but i won't if you'd rather not." she came to him and sat down at his side, laying her hand on his arm. he took the hand up and looked at the deep gleam of the sapphires in the old family ring he had given her. "you won't have that reset?" he said, smiling and twisting the ring about on her finger; then he went on with his thankless explanation. "it's not that i don't want you to do this or that; it's simply that, for the moment, we're rather strapped. i've just been to see the steamer people, and our passages will cost a good deal more than i thought." he mentioned the sum and the fact that he must give an answer the next day. would she consent to sail that very saturday? or should they go a fortnight later, in a slow boat from plymouth? undine frowned on both alternatives. she was an indifferent sailor and shrank from the possible "nastiness" of the cheaper boat. she wanted to get the voyage over as quickly and luxuriously as possible--bertha shallum had told her that in a "deck-suite" no one need be sea-sick--but she wanted still more to have another week or two of paris; and it was always hard to make her see why circumstances could not be bent to her wishes. "this week? but how on earth can i be ready? besides, we're dining at enghien with the shallums on saturday, and motoring to chantilly with the jim driscolls on sunday. i can't imagine how you thought we could go this week!" but she still opposed the cheap steamer, and after they had carried the question on to voisin's, and there unprofitably discussed it through a long luncheon, it seemed no nearer a solution. "well, think it over--let me know this evening," ralph said, proportioning the waiter's fee to a bill burdened by undine's reckless choice of primeurs. his wife was to join the newly-arrived mrs. shallum in a round of the rue de la paix; and he had seized the opportunity of slipping off to a classical performance at the français. on their arrival in paris he had taken undine to one of these entertainments, but it left her too weary and puzzled for him to renew the attempt, and he had not found time to go back without her. he was glad now to shed his cares in such an atmosphere. the play was of the greatest, the interpretation that of the vanishing grand manner which lived in his first memories of the parisian stage, and his surrender such influences as complete as in his early days. caught up in the fiery chariot of art, he felt once more the tug of its coursers in his muscles, and the rush of their flight still throbbed in him when he walked back late to the hotel. xiii he had expected to find undine still out; but on the stairs he crossed mrs. shallum, who threw at him from under an immense hat-brim: "yes, she's in, but you'd better come and have tea with me at the luxe. i don't think husbands are wanted!" ralph laughingly rejoined that that was just the moment for them to appear; and mrs. shallum swept on, crying back: "all the same, i'll wait for you!" in the sitting-room ralph found undine seated behind a tea-table on the other side of which, in an attitude of easy intimacy, peter van degen stretched his lounging length. he did not move on ralph's appearance, no doubt thinking their kinship close enough to make his nod and "hullo!" a sufficient greeting. peter in intimacy was given to miscalculations of the sort, and ralph's first movement was to glance at undine and see how it affected her. but her eyes gave out the vivid rays that noise and banter always struck from them; her face, at such moments, was like a theatre with all the lustres blazing. that the illumination should have been kindled by his cousin's husband was not precisely agreeable to marvell, who thought peter a bore in society and an insufferable nuisance on closer terms. but he was becoming blunted to undine's lack of discrimination; and his own treatment of van degen was always tempered by his sympathy for clare. he therefore listened with apparent good-humour to peter's suggestion of an evening at a petit theatre with the harvey shallums, and joined in the laugh with which undine declared: "oh, ralph won't go--he only likes the theatres where they walk around in bathtowels and talk poetry.--isn't that what you've just been seeing?" she added, with a turn of the neck that shed her brightness on him. "what? one of those five-barrelled shows at the français? great scott, ralph--no wonder your wife's pining for the folies bergère!" "she needn't, my dear fellow. we never interfere with each other's vices." peter, unsolicited, was comfortably lighting a cigarette. "ah, there's the secret of domestic happiness. marry somebody who likes all the things you don't, and make love to somebody who likes all the things you do." undine laughed appreciatively. "only it dooms poor ralph to such awful frumps. can't you see the sort of woman who'd love his sort of play?" "oh, i can see her fast enough--my wife loves 'em," said their visitor, rising with a grin; while ralph threw, out: "so don't waste your pity on me!" and undine's laugh had the slight note of asperity that the mention of clare always elicited. "to-morrow night, then, at paillard's," van degen concluded. "and about the other business--that's a go too? i leave it to you to settle the date." the nod and laugh they exchanged seemed to hint at depths of collusion from which ralph was pointedly excluded; and he wondered how large a programme of pleasure they had already had time to sketch out. he disliked the idea of undine's being too frequently seen with van degen, whose parisian reputation was not fortified by the connections that propped it up in new york; but he did not want to interfere with her pleasure, and he was still wondering what to say when, as the door closed, she turned to him gaily. "i'm so glad you've come! i've got some news for you." she laid a light touch on his arm. touch and tone were enough to disperse his anxieties, and he answered that he was in luck to find her already in when he had supposed her engaged, over a nouveau luxe tea-table, in repairing the afternoon's ravages. "oh, i didn't shop much--i didn't stay out long." she raised a kindling face to him. "and what do you think i've been doing? while you were sitting in your stuffy old theatre, worrying about the money i was spending (oh, you needn't fib--i know you were!) i was saving you hundreds and thousands. i've saved you the price of our passage!" ralph laughed in pure enjoyment of her beauty. when she shone on him like that what did it matter what nonsense she talked? "you wonderful woman--how did you do it? by countermanding a tiara?" "you know i'm not such a fool as you pretend!" she held him at arm's length with a nod of joyous mystery. "you'll simply never guess! i've made peter van degen ask us to go home on the sorceress. what. do you say to that?" she flashed it out on a laugh of triumph, without appearing to have a doubt of the effect the announcement would produce. ralph stared at her. "the sorceress? you made him?" "well, i managed it, i worked him round to it! he's crazy about the idea now--but i don't think he'd thought of it before he came." "i should say not!" ralph ejaculated. "he never would have had the cheek to think of it." "well, i've made him, anyhow! did you ever know such luck?" "such luck?" he groaned at her obstinate innocence. "do you suppose i'll let you cross the ocean on the sorceress?" she shrugged impatiently. "you say that because your cousin doesn't go on her." "if she doesn't, it's because it's no place for decent women." "it's clare's fault if it isn't. everybody knows she's crazy about you, and she makes him feel it. that's why he takes up with other women." her anger reddened her cheeks and dropped her brows like a black bar above her glowing eyes. even in his recoil from what she said ralph felt the tempestuous heat of her beauty. but for the first time his latent resentments rose in him, and he gave her back wrath for wrath. "is that the precious stuff he tells you?" "do you suppose i had to wait for him to tell me? everybody knows it--everybody in new york knew she was wild when you married. that's why she's always been so nasty to me. if you won't go on the sorceress they'll all say it's because she was jealous of me and wouldn't let you." ralph's indignation had already flickered down to disgust. undine was no longer beautiful--she seemed to have the face of her thoughts. he stood up with an impatient laugh. "is that another of his arguments? i don't wonder they're convincing--" but as quickly as it had come the sneer dropped, yielding to a wave of pity, the vague impulse to silence and protect her. how could he have given way to the provocation of her weakness, when his business was to defend her from it and lift her above it? he recalled his old dreams of saving her from van degenism--it was not thus that he had imagined the rescue. "don't let's pay peter the compliment of squabbling over him," he said, turning away to pour himself a cup of tea. when he had filled his cup he sat down beside undine, with a smile. "no doubt he was joking--and thought you were; but if you really made him believe we might go with him you'd better drop him a line." undine's brow still gloomed. "you refuse, then?" "refuse? i don't need to! do you want to succeed to half the chorus-world of new york?" "they won't be on board with us, i suppose!" "the echoes of their conversation will. it's the only language peter knows." "he told me he longed for the influence of a good woman--" she checked herself, reddening at ralph's laugh. "well, tell him to apply again when he's been under it a month or two. meanwhile we'll stick to the liners." ralph was beginning to learn that the only road to her reason lay through her vanity, and he fancied that if she could be made to see van degen as an object of ridicule she might give up the idea of the sorceress of her own accord. but her will hardened slowly under his joking opposition, and she became no less formidable as she grew more calm. he was used to women who, in such cases, yielded as a matter of course to masculine judgments: if one pronounced a man "not decent" the question was closed. but it was undine's habit to ascribe all interference with her plans to personal motives, and he could see that she attributed his opposition to the furtive machinations of poor clare. it was odious to him to prolong the discussion, for the accent of recrimination was the one he most dreaded on her lips. but the moment came when he had to take the brunt of it, averting his thoughts as best he might from the glimpse it gave of a world of mean familiarities, of reprisals drawn from the vulgarest of vocabularies. certain retorts sped through the air like the flight of household utensils, certain charges rang out like accusations of tampering with the groceries. he stiffened himself against such comparisons, but they stuck in his imagination and left him thankful when undine's anger yielded to a burst of tears. he had held his own and gained his point. the trip on the sorceress was given up, and a note of withdrawal despatched to van degen; but at the same time ralph cabled his sister to ask if she could increase her loan. for he had conquered only at the cost of a concession: undine was to stay in paris till october, and they were to sail on a fast steamer, in a deck-suite, like the harvey shallums. undine's ill-humour was soon dispelled by any new distraction, and she gave herself to the untroubled enjoyment of paris. the shallums were the centre of a like-minded group, and in the hours the ladies could spare from their dress-makers the restaurants shook with their hilarity and the suburbs with the shriek of their motors. van degen, who had postponed his sailing, was a frequent sharer in these amusements; but ralph counted on new york influences to detach him from undine's train. he was learning to influence her through her social instincts where he had once tried to appeal to other sensibilities. his worst moment came when he went to see clare van degen, who, on the eve of departure, had begged him to come to her hotel. he found her less restless and rattling than usual, with a look in her eyes that reminded him of the days when she had haunted his thoughts. the visit passed off without vain returns to the past; but as he was leaving she surprised him by saying: "don't let peter make a goose of your wife." ralph reddened, but laughed. "oh, undine's wonderfully able to defend herself, even against such seductions as peter's." mrs. van degen looked down with a smile at the bracelets on her thin brown wrist. "his personal seductions--yes. but as an inventor of amusements he's inexhaustible; and undine likes to be amused." ralph made no reply but showed no annoyance. he simply took her hand and kissed it as he said good-bye; and she turned from him without audible farewell. as the day of departure approached. undine's absorption in her dresses almost precluded the thought of amusement. early and late she was closeted with fitters and packers--even the competent celeste not being trusted to handle the treasures now pouring in--and ralph cursed his weakness in not restraining her, and then fled for solace to museums and galleries. he could not rouse in her any scruple about incurring fresh debts, yet he knew she was no longer unaware of the value of money. she had learned to bargain, pare down prices, evade fees, brow-beat the small tradespeople and wheedle concessions from the great--not, as ralph perceived, from any effort to restrain her expenses, but only to prolong and intensify the pleasure of spending. pained by the trait, he tried to laugh her out of it. he told her once that she had a miserly hand--showing her, in proof, that, for all their softness, the fingers would not bend back, or the pink palm open. but she retorted a little sharply that it was no wonder, since she'd heard nothing talked of since their marriage but economy; and this left him without any answer. so the purveyors continued to mount to their apartment, and ralph, in the course of his frequent nights from it, found himself always dodging the corners of black glazed boxes and swaying pyramids of pasteboard; always lifting his hat to sidling milliners' girls, or effacing himself before slender vendeuses floating by in a mist of opopanax. he felt incompetent to pronounce on the needs to which these visitors ministered; but the reappearance among them of the blond-bearded jeweller gave him ground for fresh fears. undine had assured him that she had given up the idea of having her ornaments reset, and there had been ample time for their return; but on his questioning her she explained that there had been delays and "bothers" and put him in the wrong by asking ironically if he supposed she was buying things "for pleasure" when she knew as well as he that there wasn't any money to pay for them. but his thoughts were not all dark. undine's moods still infected him, and when she was happy he felt an answering lightness. even when her amusements were too primitive to be shared he could enjoy their reflection in her face. only, as he looked back, he was struck by the evanescence, the lack of substance, in their moments of sympathy, and by the permanent marks left by each breach between them. yet he still fancied that some day the balance might be reversed, and that as she acquired a finer sense of values the depths in her would find a voice. something of this was in his mind when, the afternoon before their departure, he came home to help her with their last arrangements. she had begged him, for the day, to leave her alone in their cramped salon, into which belated bundles were still pouring; and it was nearly dark when he returned. the evening before she had seemed pale and nervous, and at the last moment had excused herself from dining with the shallums at a suburban restaurant. it was so unlike her to miss any opportunity of the kind that ralph had felt a little anxious. but with the arrival of the packers she was afoot and in command again, and he withdrew submissively, as mr. spragg, in the early apex days, might have fled from the spring storm of "house-cleaning." when he entered the sitting-room, he found it still in disorder. every chair was hidden under scattered dresses, tissue-paper surged from the yawning trunks and, prone among her heaped-up finery. undine lay with closed eyes on the sofa. she raised her head as he entered, and then turned listlessly away. "my poor girl, what's the matter? haven't they finished yet?" instead of answering she pressed her face into the cushion and began to sob. the violence of her weeping shook her hair down on her shoulders, and her hands, clenching the arm of the sofa, pressed it away from her as if any contact were insufferable. ralph bent over her in alarm. "why, what's wrong, dear? what's happened?" her fatigue of the previous evening came back to him--a puzzled hunted look in her eyes; and with the memory a vague wonder revived. he had fancied himself fairly disencumbered of the stock formulas about the hallowing effects of motherhood, and there were many reasons for not welcoming the news he suspected she had to give; but the woman a man loves is always a special case, and everything was different that befell undine. if this was what had befallen her it was wonderful and divine: for the moment that was all he felt. "dear, tell me what's the matter," he pleaded. she sobbed on unheedingly and he waited for her agitation to subside. he shrank from the phrases considered appropriate to the situation, but he wanted to hold her close and give her the depth of his heart in long kiss. suddenly she sat upright and turned a desperate face on him. "why on earth are you staring at me like that? anybody can see what's the matter!" he winced at her tone, but managed to get one of her hands in his; and they stayed thus in silence, eye to eye. "are you as sorry as all that?" he began at length conscious of the flatness of his voice. "sorry--sorry? i'm--i'm--" she snatched her hand away, and went on weeping. "but, undine--dearest--bye and bye you'll feel differently--i know you will!" "differently? differently? when? in a year? it takes a year--a whole year out of life! what do i care how i shall feel in a year?" the chill of her tone struck in. this was more than a revolt of the nerves: it was a settled, a reasoned resentment. ralph found himself groping for extenuations, evasions--anything to put a little warmth into her! "who knows? perhaps, after all, it's a mistake." there was no answering light in her face. she turned her head from him wearily. "don't you think, dear, you may be mistaken?" "mistaken? how on earth can i be mistaken?" even in that moment of confusion he was struck by the cold competence of her tone, and wondered how she could be so sure. "you mean you've asked--you've consulted--?" the irony of it took him by the throat. they were the very words he might have spoken in some miserable secret colloquy--the words he was speaking to his wife! she repeated dully: "i know i'm not mistaken." there was another long silence. undine lay still, her eyes shut, drumming on the arm of the sofa with a restless hand. the other lay cold in ralph's clasp, and through it there gradually stole to him the benumbing influence of the thoughts she was thinking: the sense of the approach of illness, anxiety, and expense, and of the general unnecessary disorganization of their lives. "that's all you feel, then?" he asked at length a little bitterly, as if to disguise from himself the hateful fact that he felt it too. he stood up and moved away. "that's all?" he repeated. "why, what else do you expect me to feel? i feel horribly ill, if that's what you want." he saw the sobs trembling up through her again. "poor dear--poor girl...i'm so sorry--so dreadfully sorry!" the senseless reiteration seemed to exasperate her. he knew it by the quiver that ran through her like the premonitory ripple on smooth water before the coming of the wind. she turned about on him and jumped to her feet. "sorry--you're sorry? you're sorry? why, what earthly difference will it make to you?" she drew back a few steps and lifted her slender arms from her sides. "look at me--see how i look--how i'm going to look! you won't hate yourself more and more every morning when you get up and see yourself in the glass! your life's going on just as usual! but what's mine going to be for months and months? and just as i'd been to all this bother--fagging myself to death about all these things--" her tragic gesture swept the disordered room--"just as i thought i was going home to enjoy myself, and look nice, and see people again, and have a little pleasure after all our worries--" she dropped back on the sofa with another burst of tears. "for all the good this rubbish will do me now! i loathe the very sight of it!" she sobbed with her face in her hands. xiv it was one of the distinctions of mr. claud walsingham popple that his studio was never too much encumbered with the attributes of his art to permit the installing, in one of its cushioned corners, of an elaborately furnished tea-table flanked by the most varied seductions in sandwiches and pastry. mr. popple, like all great men, had at first had his ups and downs; but his reputation had been permanently established by the verdict of a wealthy patron who, returning from an excursion into other fields of portraiture, had given it as the final fruit of his experience that popple was the only man who could "do pearls." to sitters for whom this was of the first consequence it was another of the artist's merits that he always subordinated art to elegance, in life as well as in his portraits. the "messy" element of production was no more visible in his expensively screened and tapestried studio than its results were perceptible in his painting; and it was often said, in praise of his work, that he was the only artist who kept his studio tidy enough for a lady to sit to him in a new dress. mr. popple, in fact, held that the personality of the artist should at all times be dissembled behind that of the man. it was his opinion that the essence of good-breeding lay in tossing off a picture as easily as you lit a cigarette. ralph marvell had once said of him that when he began a portrait he always turned back his cuffs and said: "ladies and gentlemen, you can see there's absolutely nothing here," and mrs. fairford supplemented the description by defining his painting as "chafing-dish" art. on a certain late afternoon of december, some four years after mr. popple's first meeting with miss undine spragg of apex, even the symbolic chafing-dish was nowhere visible in his studio; the only evidence of its recent activity being the full-length portrait of mrs. ralph marvell, who, from her lofty easel and her heavily garlanded frame, faced the doorway with the air of having been invited to "receive" for mr. popple. the artist himself, becomingly clad in mouse-coloured velveteen, had just turned away from the picture to hover above the tea-cups; but his place had been taken by the considerably broader bulk of mr. peter van degen, who, tightly moulded into a coat of the latest cut, stood before the portrait in the attitude of a first arrival. "yes, it's good--it's damn good, popp; you've hit the hair off ripplingly; but the pearls ain't big enough," he pronounced. a slight laugh sounded from the raised dais behind the easel. "of course they're not! but it's not his fault, poor man; he didn't give them to me!" as she spoke mrs. ralph marvell rose from a monumental gilt arm-chair of pseudo-venetian design and swept her long draperies to van degen's side. "he might, then--for the privilege of painting you!" the latter rejoined, transferring his bulging stare from the counterfeit to the original. his eyes rested on mrs. marvell's in what seemed a quick exchange of understanding; then they passed on to a critical inspection of her person. she was dressed for the sitting in something faint and shining, above which the long curves of her neck looked dead white in the cold light of the studio; and her hair, all a shadowless rosy gold, was starred with a hard glitter of diamonds. "the privilege of painting me? mercy, _i_ have to pay for being painted! he'll tell you he's giving me the picture--but what do you suppose this cost?" she laid a finger-tip on her shimmering dress. van degen's eye rested on her with cold enjoyment. "does the price come higher than the dress?" she ignored the allusion. "of course what they charge for is the cut--" "what they cut away? that's what they ought to charge for, ain't it, popp?" undine took this with cool disdain, but mr. popple's sensibilities were offended. "my dear peter--really--the artist, you understand, sees all this as a pure question of colour, of pattern; and it's a point of honour with the man to steel himself against the personal seduction." mr. van degen received this protest with a sound of almost vulgar derision, but undine thrilled agreeably under the glance which her portrayer cast on her. she was flattered by van degen's notice, and thought his impertinence witty; but she glowed inwardly at mr. popple's eloquence. after more than three years of social experience she still thought he "spoke beautifully," like the hero of a novel, and she ascribed to jealousy the lack of seriousness with which her husband's friends regarded him. his conversation struck her as intellectual, and his eagerness to have her share his thoughts was in flattering contrast to ralph's growing tendency to keep his to himself. popple's homage seemed the, subtlest proof of what ralph could have made of her if he had "really understood" her. it was but another step to ascribe all her past mistakes to the lack of such understanding; and the satisfaction derived from this thought had once impelled her to tell the artist that he alone knew how to rouse her 'higher self.' he had assured her that the memory of her words would thereafter hallow his life; and as he hinted that it had been stained by the darkest errors she was moved at the thought of the purifying influence she exerted. thus it was that a man should talk to a true woman--but how few whom she had known possessed the secret! ralph, in the first months of their marriage, had been eloquent too, had even gone the length of quoting poetry; but he disconcerted her by his baffling twists and strange allusions (she always scented ridicule in the unknown), and the poets he quoted were esoteric and abstruse. mr. popple's rhetoric was drawn from more familiar sources, and abounded in favourite phrases and in moving reminiscences of the fifth reader. he was moreover as literary as he was artistic; possessing an unequalled acquaintance with contemporary fiction, and dipping even into the lighter type of memoirs, in which the old acquaintances of history are served up in the disguise of "a royal sorceress" or "passion in a palace." the mastery with which mr. popple discussed the novel of the day, especially in relation to the sensibilities of its hero and heroine, gave undine a sense of intellectual activity which contrasted strikingly with marvell's flippant estimate of such works. "passion," the artist implied, would have been the dominant note of his life, had it not been held in check by a sentiment of exalted chivalry, and by the sense that a nature of such emotional intensity as his must always be "ridden on the curb." van degen was helping himself from the tray of iced cocktails which stood near the tea-table, and popple, turning to undine, took up the thread of his discourse. but why, he asked, why allude before others to feelings so few could understand? the average man--lucky devil!--(with a compassionate glance at van degen's back) the average man knew nothing of the fierce conflict between the lower and higher natures; and even the woman whose eyes had kindled it--how much did she guess of its violence? did she know--popple recklessly asked--how often the artist was forgotten in the man--how often the man would take the bit between his teeth, were it not that the look in her eyes recalled some sacred memory, some lesson learned perhaps beside his mother's knee? "i say, popp--was that where you learned to mix this drink? because it does the old lady credit," van degen called out, smacking his lips; while the artist, dashing a nervous hand through his hair, muttered: "hang it, peter--is nothing sacred to you?" it pleased undine to feel herself capable of inspiring such emotions. she would have been fatigued by the necessity of maintaining her own talk on popple's level, but she liked to listen to him, and especially to have others overhear what he said to her. her feeling for van degen was different. there was more similarity of tastes between them, though his manner flattered her vanity less than popple's. she felt the strength of van degen's contempt for everything he did not understand or could not buy: that was the only kind of "exclusiveness" that impressed her. and he was still to her, as in her inexperienced days, the master of the mundane science she had once imagined that ralph marvell possessed. during the three years since her marriage she had learned to make distinctions unknown to her girlish categories. she had found out that she had given herself to the exclusive and the dowdy when the future belonged to the showy and the promiscuous; that she was in the case of those who have cast in their lot with a fallen cause, or--to use an analogy more within her range--who have hired an opera box on the wrong night. it was all confusing and exasperating. apex ideals had been based on the myth of "old families" ruling new york from a throne of revolutionary tradition, with the new millionaires paying them feudal allegiance. but experience had long since proved the delusiveness of the simile. mrs. marvell's classification of the world into the visited and the unvisited was as obsolete as a mediaeval cosmogony. some of those whom washington square left unvisited were the centre of social systems far outside its ken, and as indifferent to its opinions as the constellations to the reckonings of the astronomers; and all these systems joyously revolved about their central sun of gold. there were moments after undine's return to new york when she was tempted to class her marriage with the hateful early mistakes from the memories of which she had hoped it would free her. since it was never her habit to accuse herself of such mistakes it was inevitable that she should gradually come to lay the blame on ralph. she found a poignant pleasure, at this stage of her career, in the question: "what does a young girl know of life?" and the poignancy was deepened by the fact that each of the friends to whom she put the question seemed convinced that--had the privilege been his--he would have known how to spare her the disenchantment it implied. the conviction of having blundered was never more present to her than when, on this particular afternoon, the guests invited by mr. popple to view her portrait began to assemble before it. some of the principal figures of undine's group had rallied for the occasion, and almost all were in exasperating enjoyment of the privileges for which she pined. there was young jim driscoll, heir-apparent of the house, with his short stout mistrustful wife, who hated society, but went everywhere lest it might be thought she had been left out; the "beautiful mrs. beringer," a lovely aimless being, who kept (as laura fairford said) a home for stray opinions, and could never quite tell them apart; little dicky bowles, whom every one invited because he was understood to "say things" if one didn't; the harvey shallums, fresh from paris, and dragging in their wake a bewildered nobleman vaguely designated as "the count," who offered cautious conversational openings, like an explorer trying beads on savages; and, behind these more salient types, the usual filling in of those who are seen everywhere because they have learned to catch the social eye. such a company was one to flatter the artist as much his sitter, so completely did it represent that unamity of opinion which constitutes social strength. not one the number was troubled by any personal theory of art: all they asked of a portrait was that the costume should be sufficiently "life-like," and the face not too much so; and a long experience in idealizing flesh and realizing dress-fabrics had enabled mr. popple to meet both demands. "hang it," peter van degen pronounced, standing before the easel in an attitude of inspired interpretation, "the great thing in a man's portrait is to catch the likeness--we all know that; but with a woman's it's different--a woman's picture has got to be pleasing. who wants it about if it isn't? those big chaps who blow about what they call realism--how do their portraits look in a drawing-room? do you suppose they ever ask themselves that? they don't care--they're not going to live with the things! and what do they know of drawing-rooms, anyhow? lots of them haven't even got a dress-suit. there's where old popp has the pull over 'em--he knows how we live and what we want." this was received by the artist with a deprecating murmur, and by his public with warm expressions of approval. "happily in this case," popple began ("as in that of so many of my sitters," he hastily put in), "there has been no need to idealize-nature herself has outdone the artist's dream." undine, radiantly challenging comparison with her portrait, glanced up at it with a smile of conscious merit, which deepened as young jim driscoll declared: "by jove, mamie, you must be done exactly like that for the new music-room." his wife turned a cautious eye upon the picture. "how big is it? for our house it would have to be a good deal bigger," she objected; and popple, fired by the thought of such a dimensional opportunity, rejoined that it would be the chance of all others to. "work in" a marble portico and a court-train: he had just done mrs. lycurgus ambler in a court-train and feathers, and as that was for buffalo of course the pictures needn't clash. "well, it would have to be a good deal bigger than mrs. ambler's," mrs. driscoll insisted; and on popple's suggestion that in that case he might "work in" driscoll, in court-dress also--("you've been presented? well, you will be,--you'll have to, if i do the picture--which will make a lovely memento")--van degen turned aside to murmur to undine: "pure bluff, you know--jim couldn't pay for a photograph. old driscoll's high and dry since the ararat investigation." she threw him a puzzled glance, having no time, in her crowded existence, to follow the perturbations of wall street save as they affected the hospitality of fifth avenue. "you mean they've lost their money? won't they give their fancy ball, then?" van degen shrugged. "nobody knows how it's coming out that queer chap elmer moffatt threatens to give old driscoll a fancy ball--says he's going to dress him in stripes! it seems he knows too much about the apex street-railways." undine paled a little. though she had already tried on her costume for the driscoll ball her disappointment at van degen's announcement was effaced by the mention of moffatt's name. she had not had the curiosity to follow the reports of the "ararat trust investigation," but once or twice lately, in the snatches of smoking-room talk, she had been surprised by a vague allusion to elmer moffatt, as to an erratic financial influence, half ridiculed, yet already half redoubtable. was it possible that the redoubtable element had prevailed? that the time had come when elmer moffatt--the elmer moffatt of apex!--could, even for a moment, cause consternation in the driscoll camp? he had always said he "saw things big"; but no one had ever believed he was destined to carry them out on the same scale. yet apparently in those idle apex days, while he seemed to be "loafing and fooling," as her father called it, he had really been sharpening his weapons of aggression; there had been something, after all, in the effect of loose-drifting power she had always felt in him. her heart beat faster, and she longed to question van degen; but she was afraid of betraying herself, and turned back to the group about the picture. mrs. driscoll was still presenting objections in a tone of small mild obstinacy. "oh, it's a likeness, of course--i can see that; but there's one thing i must say, mr. popple. it looks like a last year's dress." the attention of the ladies instantly rallied to the picture, and the artist paled at the challenge. "it doesn't look like a last year's face, anyhow--that's what makes them all wild," van degen murmured. undine gave him back a quick smile. she had already forgotten about moffatt. any triumph in which she shared left a glow in her veins, and the success of the picture obscured all other impressions. she saw herself throning in a central panel at the spring exhibition, with the crowd pushing about the picture, repeating her name; and she decided to stop on the way home and telephone her press-agent to do a paragraph about popple's tea. but in the hall, as she drew on her cloak, her thoughts reverted to the driscoll fancy ball. what a blow if it were given up after she had taken so much trouble about her dress! she was to go as the empress josephine, after the prudhon portrait in the louvre. the dress was already fitted and partly embroidered, and she foresaw the difficulty of persuading the dress-maker to take it back. "why so pale and sad, fair cousin? what's up?" van degen asked, as they emerged from the lift in which they had descended alone from the studio. "i don't know--i'm tired of posing. and it was so frightfully hot." "yes. popple always keeps his place at low-neck temperature, as if the portraits might catch cold." van degen glanced at his watch. "where are you off to?" "west end avenue, of course--if i can find a cab to take me there." it was not the least of undine's grievances that she was still living in the house which represented mr. spragg's first real-estate venture in new york. it had been understood, at the time of her marriage, that the young couple were to be established within the sacred precincts of fashion; but on their return from the honeymoon the still untenanted house in west end avenue had been placed at their disposal, and in view of mr. spragg's financial embarrassment even undine had seen the folly of refusing it. that first winter, more-over, she had not regretted her exile: while she awaited her boy's birth she was glad to be out of sight of fifth avenue, and to take her hateful compulsory exercise where no familiar eye could fall on her. and the next year of course her father would give them a better house. but the next year rents had risen in the fifth avenue quarter, and meanwhile little paul marvell, from his beautiful pink cradle, was already interfering with his mother's plans. ralph, alarmed by the fresh rush of expenses, sided with his father-in-law in urging undine to resign herself to west end avenue; and thus after three years she was still submitting to the incessant pin-pricks inflicted by the incongruity between her social and geographical situation--the need of having to give a west side address to her tradesmen, and the deeper irritation of hearing her friends say: "do let me give you a lift home, dear--oh, i'd forgotten! i'm afraid i haven't the time to go so far--" it was bad enough to have no motor of her own, to be avowedly dependent on "lifts," openly and unconcealably in quest of them, and perpetually plotting to provoke their offer (she did so hate to be seen in a cab!) but to miss them, as often as not, because of the remoteness of her destination, emphasized the hateful sense of being "out of things." van degen looked out at the long snow-piled streets, down which the lamps were beginning to put their dreary yellow splashes. "of course you won't get a cab on a night like this. if you don't mind the open car, you'd better jump in with me. i'll run you out to the high bridge and give you a breath of air before dinner." the offer was tempting, for undine's triumph in the studio had left her tired and nervous--she was beginning to learn that success may be as fatiguing as failure. moreover, she was going to a big dinner that evening, and the fresh air would give her the eyes and complexion she needed; but in the back of her mind there lingered the vague sense of a forgotten engagement. as she tried to recall it she felt van degen raising the fur collar about her chin. "got anything you can put over your head? will that lace thing do? come along, then." he pushed her through the swinging doors, and added with a laugh, as they reached the street: "you're not afraid of being seen with me, are you? it's all right at this hour--ralph's still swinging on a strap in the elevated." the winter twilight was deliriously cold, and as they swept through central park, and gathered impetus for their northward flight along the darkening boulevard, undine felt the rush of physical joy that drowns scruples and silences memory. her scruples, indeed, were not serious; but ralph disliked her being too much with van degen, and it was her way to get what she wanted with as little "fuss" as possible. moreover, she knew it was a mistake to make herself too accessible to a man of peter's sort: her impatience to enjoy was curbed by an instinct for holding off and biding her time that resembled the patient skill with which her father had conducted the sale of his "bad" real estate in the pure water move days. but now and then youth had its way--she could not always resist the present pleasure. and it was amusing, too, to be "talked about" with peter van degen, who was noted for not caring for "nice women." she enjoyed the thought of triumphing over meretricious charms: it ennobled her in her own eyes to influence such a man for good. nevertheless, as the motor flew on through the icy twilight, her present cares flew with it. she could not shake off the thought of the useless fancy dress which symbolized the other crowding expenses she had not dared confess to ralph. van degen heard her sigh, and bent down, lowering the speed of the motor. "what's the matter? isn't everything all right?" his tone made her suddenly feel that she could confide in him, and though she began by murmuring that it was nothing she did so with the conscious purpose of being persuaded to confess. and his extraordinary "niceness" seemed to justify her and to prove that she had been right in trusting her instinct rather than in following the counsels of prudence. heretofore, in their talks, she had never gone beyond the vaguest hint of material "bothers"--as to which dissimulation seemed vain while one lived in west end avenue! but now that the avowal of a definite worry had been wrung from her she felt the injustice of the view generally taken of poor peter. for he had been neither too enterprising nor too cautious (though people said of him that he "didn't care to part"); he had just laughed away, in bluff brotherly fashion, the gnawing thought of the fancy dress, had assured her he'd give a ball himself rather than miss seeing her wear it, and had added: "oh, hang waiting for the bill--won't a couple of thou make it all right?" in a tone that showed what a small matter money was to any one who took the larger view of life. the whole incident passed off so quickly and easily that within a few minutes she had settled down--with a nod for his "everything jolly again now?"--to untroubled enjoyment of the hour. peace of mind, she said to herself, was all she needed to make her happy--and that was just what ralph had never given her! at the thought his face seemed to rise before her, with the sharp lines of care between the eyes: it was almost like a part of his "nagging" that he should thrust himself in at such a moment! she tried to shut her eyes to the face; but a moment later it was replaced by another, a small odd likeness of itself; and with a cry of compunction she started up from her furs. "mercy! it's the boy's birthday--i was to take him to his grandmother's. she was to have a cake for him and ralph was to come up town. i knew there was something i'd forgotten!" xv in the dagonet drawing-room the lamps had long been lit, and mrs. fairford, after a last impatient turn, had put aside the curtains of worn damask to strain her eyes into the darkening square. she came back to the hearth, where charles bowen stood leaning between the prim caryatides of the white marble chimney-piece. "no sign of her. she's simply forgotten." bowen looked at his watch, and turned to compare it with the high-waisted empire clock. "six o'clock. why not telephone again? there must be some mistake. perhaps she knew ralph would be late." laura laughed. "i haven't noticed that she follows ralph's movements so closely. when i telephoned just now the servant said she'd been out since two. the nurse waited till half-past four, not liking to come without orders; and now it's too late for paul to come." she wandered away toward the farther end of the room, where, through half-open doors, a shining surface of mahogany reflected a flower-wreathed cake in which two candles dwindled. "put them out, please," she said to some one in the background; then she shut the doors and turned back to bowen. "it's all so unlucky--my grandfather giving up his drive, and mother backing out of her hospital meeting, and having all the committee down on her. and henley: i'd even coaxed henley away from his bridge! he escaped again just before you came. undine promised she'd have the boy here at four. it's not as if it had never happened before. she's always breaking her engagements." "she has so many that it's inevitable some should get broken." "all if she'd only choose! now that ralph has had into business, and is kept in his office so late, it's cruel of her to drag him out every night. he told us the other day they hadn't dined at home for a month. undine doesn't seem to notice how hard he works." bowen gazed meditatively at the crumbling fire. "no--why should she?" "why should she? really, charles--!" "why should she, when she knows nothing about it?" "she may know nothing about his business; but she must know it's her extravagance that's forced him into it." mrs. fairford looked at bowen reproachfully. "you talk as if you were on her side!" "are there sides already? if so, i want to look down on them impartially from the heights of pure speculation. i want to get a general view of the whole problem of american marriages." mrs. fairford dropped into her arm-chair with a sigh. "if that's what you want you must make haste! most of them don't last long enough to be classified." "i grant you it takes an active mind. but the weak point is so frequently the same that after a time one knows where to look for it." "what do you call the weak point?" he paused. "the fact that the average american looks down on his wife." mrs. fairford was up with a spring. "if that's where paradox lands you!" bowen mildly stood his ground. "well--doesn't he prove it? how much does he let her share in the real business of life? how much does he rely on her judgment and help in the conduct of serious affairs? take ralph for instance--you say his wife's extravagance forces him to work too hard; but that's not what's wrong. it's normal for a man to work hard for a woman--what's abnormal is his not caring to tell her anything about it." "to tell undine? she'd be bored to death if he did!" "just so; she'd even feel aggrieved. but why? because it's against the custom of the country. and whose fault is that? the man's again--i don't mean ralph i mean the genus he belongs to: homo sapiens, americanus. why haven't we taught our women to take an interest in our work? simply because we don't take enough interest in them." mrs. fairford, sinking back into her chair, sat gazing at the vertiginous depths above which his thought seemed to dangle her. "you don't? the american man doesn't--the most slaving, self-effacing, self-sacrificing--?" "yes; and the most indifferent: there's the point. the 'slaving's' no argument against the indifference to slave for women is part of the old american tradition; lots of people give their lives for dogmas they've ceased to believe in. then again, in this country the passion for making money has preceded the knowing how to spend it, and the american man lavishes his fortune on his wife because he doesn't know what else to do with it." "then you call it a mere want of imagination for a man to spend his money on his wife?" "not necessarily--but it's a want of imagination to fancy it's all he owes her. look about you and you'll see what i mean. why does the european woman interest herself so much more in what the men are doing? because she's so important to them that they make it worth her while! she's not a parenthesis, as she is here--she's in the very middle of the picture. i'm not implying that ralph isn't interested in his wife--he's a passionate, a pathetic exception. but even he has to conform to an environment where all the romantic values are reversed. where does the real life of most american men lie? in some woman's drawing-room or in their offices? the answer's obvious, isn't it? the emotional centre of gravity's not the same in the two hemispheres. in the effete societies it's love, in our new one it's business. in america the real crime passionnel is a 'big steal'--there's more excitement in wrecking railways than homes." bowen paused to light another cigarette, and then took up his theme. "isn't that the key to our easy divorces? if we cared for women in the old barbarous possessive way do you suppose we'd give them up as readily as we do? the real paradox is the fact that the men who make, materially, the biggest sacrifices for their women, should do least for them ideally and romantically. and what's the result--how do the women avenge themselves? all my sympathy's with them, poor deluded dears, when i see their fallacious little attempt to trick out the leavings tossed them by the preoccupied male--the money and the motors and the clothes--and pretend to themselves and each other that that's what really constitutes life! oh, i know what you're going to say--it's less and less of a pretense with them, i grant you; they're more and more succumbing to the force of the suggestion; but here and there i fancy there's one who still sees through the humbug, and knows that money and motors and clothes are simply the big bribe she's paid for keeping out of some man's way!" mrs. fairford presented an amazed silence to the rush of this tirade; but when she rallied it was to murmur: "and is undine one of the exceptions?" her companion took the shot with a smile. "no--she's a monstrously perfect result of the system: the completest proof of its triumph. it's ralph who's the victim and the exception." "ah, poor ralph!" mrs. fairford raised her head quickly. "i hear him now. i suppose," she added in an undertone, "we can't give him your explanation for his wife's having forgotten to come?" bowen echoed her sigh, and then seemed to toss it from him with his cigarette-end; but he stood in silence while the door opened and ralph marvell entered. "well, laura! hallo, charles--have you been celebrating too?" ralph turned to his sister. "it's outrageous of me to be so late, and i daren't look my son in the face! but i stayed down town to make provision for his future birthdays." he returned mrs. fairford's kiss. "don't tell me the party's over, and the guest of honour gone to bed?" as he stood before them, laughing and a little flushed, the strain of long fatigue sounding through his gaiety and looking out of his anxious eyes, mrs. fairford threw a glance at bowen and then turned away to ring the bell. "sit down, ralph--you look tired. i'll give you some tea." he dropped into an arm-chair. "i did have rather a rush to get here--but hadn't i better join the revellers? where are they?" he walked to the end of the room and threw open the dining-room doors. "hallo--where have they all gone to? what a jolly cake!" he went up to it. "why, it's never even been cut!" mrs. fairford called after him: "come and have your tea first." "no, no--tea afterward, thanks. are they all upstairs with my grandfather? i must make my peace with undine--" his sister put her arm through his, and drew him back to the fire. "undine didn't come." "didn't come? who brought the boy, then?" "he didn't come either. that's why the cake's not cut." ralph frowned. "what's the mystery? is he ill, or what's happened?" "nothing's happened--paul's all right. apparently undine forgot. she never went home for him, and the nurse waited till it was too late to come." she saw his eyes darken; but he merely gave a slight laugh and drew out his cigarette case. "poor little paul--poor chap!" he moved toward the fire. "yes, please--some tea." he dropped back into his chair with a look of weariness, as if some strong stimulant had suddenly ceased to take effect on him; but before the tea-table was brought back he had glanced at his watch and was on his feet again. "but this won't do. i must rush home and see the poor chap before dinner. and my mother--and my grandfather? i want to say a word to them--i must make paul's excuses!" "grandfather's taking his nap. and mother had to rush out for a postponed committee meeting--she left as soon as we heard paul wasn't coming." "ah, i see." he sat down again. "yes, make the strong, please. i've had a beastly fagging sort of day." he leaned back with half-closed eyes, his untouched cup in his hand. bowen took leave, and laura sat silent, watching her brother under lowered lids while she feigned to be busy with the kettle. ralph presently emptied his cup and put it aside; then, sinking into his former attitude, he clasped his hands behind his head and lay staring apathetically into the fire. but suddenly he came to life and started up. a motor-horn had sounded outside, and there was a noise of wheels at the door. "there's undine! i wonder what could have kept her." he jumped up and walked to the door; but it was clare van degen who came in. at sight of him she gave a little murmur of pleasure. "what luck to find you! no, not luck--i came because i knew you'd be here. he never comes near me, laura: i have to hunt him down to get a glimpse of him!" slender and shadowy in her long furs, she bent to kiss mrs. fairford and then turned back to ralph. "yes, i knew i'd catch you here. i knew it was the boy's birthday, and i've brought him a present: a vulgar expensive van degen offering. i've not enough imagination left to find the right thing, the thing it takes feeling and not money to buy. when i look for a present nowadays i never say to the shopman: 'i want this or that'--i simply say: 'give me something that costs so much.'" she drew a parcel from her muff. "where's the victim of my vulgarity? let me crush him under the weight of my gold." mrs. fairford sighed out "clare--clare!" and ralph smiled at his cousin. "i'm sorry; but you'll have to depute me to present it. the birthday's over; you're too late." she looked surprised. "why, i've just left mamie driscoll, and she told me undine was still at popple's studio a few minutes ago: popple's giving a tea to show the picture." "popple's giving a tea?" ralph struck an attitude of mock consternation. "ah, in that case--! in popple's society who wouldn't forget the flight of time?" he had recovered his usual easy tone, and laura sat that mrs. van degen's words had dispelled his preoccupation. he turned to his cousin. "will you trust me with your present for the boy?" clare gave him the parcel. "i'm sorry not to give it myself. i said what i did because i knew what you and laura were thinking--but it's really a battered old dagonet bowl that came down to me from our revered great-grandmother." "what--the heirloom you used to eat your porridge out of?" ralph detained her hand to put a kiss on it. "that's dear of you!" she threw him one of her strange glances. "why not say: 'that's like you?' but you don't remember what i'm like." she turned away to glance at the clock. "it's late, and i must be off. i'm going to a big dinner at the chauncey ellings'--but you must be going there too, ralph? you'd better let me drive you home." in the motor ralph leaned back in silence, while the rug was drawn over their knees, and clare restlessly fingered the row of gold-topped objects in the rack at her elbow. it was restful to be swept through the crowded streets in this smooth fashion, and clare's presence at his side gave him a vague sense of ease. for a long time now feminine nearness had come to mean to him, not this relief from tension, but the ever-renewed dread of small daily deceptions, evasions, subterfuges. the change had come gradually, marked by one disillusionment after another; but there had been one moment that formed the point beyond which there was no returning. it was the moment, a month or two before his boy's birth, when, glancing over a batch of belated paris bills, he had come on one from the jeweller he had once found in private conference with undine. the bill was not large, but two of its items stood out sharply. "resetting pearl and diamond pendant. resetting sapphire and diamond ring." the pearl and diamond pendant was his mother's wedding present; the ring was the one he had given undine on their engagement. that they were both family relics, kept unchanged through several generations, scarcely mattered to him at the time: he felt only the stab of his wife's deception. she had assured him in paris that she had not had her jewels reset. he had noticed, soon after their return to new york, that she had left off her engagement-ring; but the others were soon discarded also, and in answer to his question she had told him that, in her ailing state, rings "worried" her. now he saw she had deceived him, and, forgetting everything else, he went to her, bill in hand. her tears and distress filled him with immediate contrition. was this a time to torment her about trifles? his anger seemed to cause her actual physical fear, and at the sight he abased himself in entreaties for forgiveness. when the scene ended she had pardoned him, and the reset ring was on her finger... soon afterward, the birth of the boy seemed to wipe out these humiliating memories; yet marvell found in time that they were not effaced, but only momentarily crowded out of sight. in reality, the incident had a meaning out of proportion to its apparent seriousness, for it put in his hand a clue to a new side of his wife's character. he no longer minded her having lied about the jeweller; what pained him was that she had been unconscious of the wound she inflicted in destroying the identity of the jewels. he saw that, even after their explanation, she still supposed he was angry only because she had deceived him; and the discovery that she was completely unconscious of states of feeling on which so much of his inner life depended marked a new stage in their relation. he was not thinking of all this as he sat beside clare van degen; but it was part of the chronic disquietude which made him more alive to his cousin's sympathy, her shy unspoken understanding. after all, he and she were of the same blood and had the same traditions. she was light and frivolous, without strength of will or depth of purpose; but she had the frankness of her foibles, and she would never have lied to him or traded on his tenderness. clare's nervousness gradually subsided, and she lapsed into a low-voiced mood which seemed like an answer to his secret thought. but she did not sound the personal note, and they chatted quietly of commonplace things: of the dinner-dance at which they were presently to meet, of the costume she had chosen for the driscoll fancy-ball, the recurring rumours of old driscoll's financial embarrassment, and the mysterious personality of elmer moffatt, on whose movements wall street was beginning to fix a fascinated eye. when ralph, the year after his marriage, had renounced his profession to go into partnership with a firm of real-estate agents, he had come in contact for the first time with the drama of "business," and whenever he could turn his attention from his own tasks he found a certain interest in watching the fierce interplay of its forces. in the down-town world he had heard things of moffatt that seemed to single him out from the common herd of money-makers: anecdotes of his coolness, his lazy good-temper, the humorous detachment he preserved in the heat of conflicting interests; and his figure was enlarged by the mystery that hung about it--the fact that no one seemed to know whence he came, or how he had acquired the information which, for the moment, was making him so formidable. "i should like to see him," ralph said; "he must be a good specimen of the one of the few picturesque types we've got." "yes--it might be amusing to fish him out; but the most picturesque types in wall street are generally the tamest in a drawing-room." clare considered. "but doesn't undine know him? i seem to remember seeing them together." "undine and moffatt? then you know him--you've' met him?" "not actually met him--but he's been pointed out to me. it must have been some years ago. yes--it was one night at the theatre, just after you announced your engagement." he fancied her voice trembled slightly, as though she thought he might notice her way of dating her memories. "you came into our box," she went on, "and i asked you the name of the red-faced man who was sitting in the stall next to undine. you didn't know, but some one told us it was moffatt." marvell was more struck by her tone than by what she was saying. "if undine knows him it's odd she's never mentioned it," he answered indifferently. the motor stopped at his door and clare, as she held out her hand, turned a first full look on him. "why do you never come to see me? i miss you more than ever," she said. he pressed her hand without answering, but after the motor had rolled away he stood for a while on the pavement, looking after it. when he entered the house the hall was still dark and the small over-furnished drawing-room empty. the parlour-maid told him that mrs. marvell had not yet come in, and he went upstairs to the nursery. but on the threshold the nurse met him with the whispered request not to make a noise, as it had been hard to quiet the boy after the afternoon's disappointment, and she had just succeeded in putting him to sleep. ralph went down to his own room and threw himself in the old college arm-chair in which, four years previously, he had sat the night out, dreaming of undine. he had no study of his own, and he had crowded into his narrow bed-room his prints and bookshelves, and the other relics of his youth. as he sat among them now the memory of that other night swept over him--the night when he had heard the "call"! fool as he had been not to recognize its meaning then, he knew himself triply mocked in being, even now, at its mercy. the flame of love that had played about his passion for his wife had died down to its embers; all the transfiguring hopes and illusions were gone, but they had left an unquenchable ache for her nearness, her smile, her touch. his life had come to be nothing but a long effort to win these mercies by one concession after another: the sacrifice of his literary projects, the exchange of his profession for an uncongenial business, and the incessant struggle to make enough money to satisfy her increasing exactions. that was where the "call" had led him... the clock struck eight, but it was useless to begin to dress till undine came in, and he stretched himself out in his chair, reached for a pipe and took up the evening paper. his passing annoyance had died out; he was usually too tired after his day's work for such feelings to keep their edge long. but he was curious--disinterestedly curious--to know what pretext undine would invent for being so late, and what excuse she would have found for forgetting the little boy's birthday. he read on till half-past eight; then he stood up and sauntered to the window. the avenue below it was deserted; not a carriage or motor turned the corner around which he expected undine to appear, and he looked idly in the opposite direction. there too the perspective was nearly empty, so empty that he singled out, a dozen blocks away, the blazing lamps of a large touring-car that was bearing furiously down the avenue from morningside. as it drew nearer its speed slackened, and he saw it hug the curb and stop at his door. by the light of the street lamp he recognized his wife as she sprang out and detected a familiar silhouette in her companion's fur-coated figure. then the motor flew on and undine ran up the steps. ralph went out on the landing. he saw her coming up quickly, as if to reach her room unperceived; but when she caught sight of him she stopped, her head thrown back and the light falling on her blown hair and glowing face. "well?" she said, smiling up at him. "they waited for you all the afternoon in washington square--the boy never had his birthday," he answered. her colour deepened, but she instantly rejoined: "why, what happened? why didn't the nurse take him?" "you said you were coming to fetch him, so she waited." "but i telephoned--" he said to himself: "is that the lie?" and answered: "where from?" "why, the studio, of course--" she flung her cloak open, as if to attest her veracity. "the sitting lasted longer than usual--there was something about the dress he couldn't get--" "but i thought he was giving a tea." "he had tea afterward; he always does. and he asked some people in to see my portrait. that detained me too. i didn't know they were coming, and when they turned up i couldn't rush away. it would have looked as if i didn't like the picture." she paused and they gave each other a searching simultaneous glance. "who told you it was a tea?" she asked. "clare van degen. i saw her at my mother's." "so you weren't unconsoled after all--!" "the nurse didn't get any message. my people were awfully disappointed; and the poor boy has cried his eyes out." "dear me! what a fuss! but i might have known my message wouldn't be delivered. everything always happens to put me in the wrong with your family." with a little air of injured pride she started to go to her room; but he put out a hand to detain her. "you've just come from the studio?" "yes. it is awfully late? i must go and dress. we're dining with the ellings, you know." "i know... how did you come? in a cab?" she faced him limpidly. "no; i couldn't find one that would bring me--so peter gave me a lift, like an angel. i'm blown to bits. he had his open car." her colour was still high, and ralph noticed that her lower lip twitched a little. he had led her to the point they had reached solely to be able to say: "if you're straight from the studio, how was it that i saw you coming down from morningside?" unless he asked her that there would be no point in his cross-questioning, and he would have sacrificed his pride without a purpose. but suddenly, as they stood there face to face, almost touching, she became something immeasurably alien and far off, and the question died on his lips. "is that all?" she asked with a slight smile. "yes; you'd better go and dress," he said, and turned back to his room. xvi the turnings of life seldom show a sign-post; or rather, though the sign is always there, it is usually placed some distance back, like the notices that give warning of a bad hill or a level railway-crossing. ralph marvell, pondering upon this, reflected that for him the sign had been set, more than three years earlier, in an italian ilex-grove. that day his life had brimmed over--so he had put it at the time. he saw now that it had brimmed over indeed: brimmed to the extent of leaving the cup empty, or at least of uncovering the dregs beneath the nectar. he knew now that he should never hereafter look at his wife's hand without remembering something he had read in it that day. its surface-language had been sweet enough, but under the rosy lines he had seen the warning letters. since then he had been walking with a ghost: the miserable ghost of his illusion. only he had somehow vivified, coloured, substantiated it, by the force of his own great need--as a man might breathe a semblance of life into a dear drowned body that he cannot give up for dead. all this came to him with aching distinctness the morning after his talk with his wife on the stairs. he had accused himself, in midnight retrospect, of having failed to press home his conclusion because he dared not face the truth. but he knew this was not the case. it was not the truth he feared, it was another lie. if he had foreseen a chance of her saying: "yes, i was with peter van degen, and for the reason you think," he would have put it to the touch, stood up to the blow like a man; but he knew she would never say that. she would go on eluding and doubling, watching him as he watched her; and at that game she was sure to beat him in the end. on their way home from the elling dinner this certainty had become so insufferable that it nearly escaped him in the cry: "you needn't watch me--i shall never again watch you!" but he had held his peace, knowing she would not understand. how little, indeed, she ever understood, had been made clear to him when, the same night, he had followed her upstairs through the sleeping house. she had gone on ahead while he stayed below to lock doors and put out lights, and he had supposed her to be already in her room when he reached the upper landing; but she stood there waiting in the spot where he had waited for her a few hours earlier. she had shone her vividest at dinner, with revolving brilliancy that collective approval always struck from her; and the glow of it still hung on her as she paused there in the dimness, her shining cloak dropped from her white shoulders. "ralphie--" she began, a soft hand on his arm. he stopped, and she pulled him about so that their faces were close, and he saw her lips curving for a kiss. every line of her face sought him, from the sweep of the narrowed eyelids to the dimples that played away from her smile. his eye received the picture with distinctness; but for the first time it did not pass into his veins. it was as if he had been struck with a subtle blindness that permitted images to give their colour to the eye but communicated nothing to the brain. "good-night," he said, as he passed on. when a man felt in that way about a woman he was surely in a position to deal with his case impartially. this came to ralph as the joyless solace of the morning. at last the bandage was off and he could see. and what did he see? only the uselessness of driving his wife to subterfuges that were no longer necessary. was van degen her lover? probably not--the suspicion died as it rose. she would not take more risks than she could help, and it was admiration, not love, that she wanted. she wanted to enjoy herself, and her conception of enjoyment was publicity, promiscuity--the band, the banners, the crowd, the close contact of covetous impulses, and the sense of walking among them in cool security. any personal entanglement might mean "bother," and bother was the thing she most abhorred. probably, as the queer formula went, his "honour" was safe: he could count on the letter of her fidelity. at moment the conviction meant no more to him than if he had been assured of the honesty of the first strangers he met in the street. a stranger--that was what she had always been to him. so malleable outwardly, she had remained insensible to the touch of the heart. these thoughts accompanied him on his way to business the next morning. then, as the routine took him back, the feeling of strangeness diminished. there he was again at his daily task--nothing tangible was altered. he was there for the same purpose as yesterday: to make money for his wife and child. the woman he had turned from on the stairs a few hours earlier was still his wife and the mother of paul marvell. she was an inherent part of his life; the inner disruption had not resulted in any outward upheaval. and with the sense of inevitableness there came a sudden wave of pity. poor undine! she was what the gods had made her--a creature of skin-deep reactions, a mote in the beam of pleasure. he had no desire to "preach down" such heart as she had--he felt only a stronger wish to reach it, teach it, move it to something of the pity that filled his own. they were fellow-victims in the noyade of marriage, but if they ceased to struggle perhaps the drowning would be easier for both...meanwhile the first of the month was at hand, with its usual batch of bills; and there was no time to think of any struggle less pressing than that connected with paying them... undine had been surprised, and a little disconcerted, at her husband's acceptance of the birthday incident. since the resetting of her bridal ornaments the relations between washington square and west end avenue had been more and more strained; and the silent disapproval of the marvell ladies was more irritating to her than open recrimination. she knew how keenly ralph must feel her last slight to his family, and she had been frightened when she guessed that he had seen her returning with van degen. he must have been watching from the window, since, credulous as he always was, he evidently had a reason for not believing her when she told him she had come from the studio. there was therefore something both puzzling and disturbing in his silence; and she made up her mind that it must be either explained or cajoled away. these thoughts were with her as she dressed; but at the ellings' they fled like ghosts before light and laughter. she had never been more open to the suggestions of immediate enjoyment. at last she had reached the envied situation of the pretty woman with whom society must reckon, and if she had only had the means to live up to her opportunities she would have been perfectly content with life, with herself and her husband. she still thought ralph "sweet" when she was not bored by his good advice or exasperated by his inability to pay her bills. the question of money was what chiefly stood between them; and now that this was momentarily disposed of by van degen's offer she looked at ralph more kindly--she even felt a return of her first impersonal affection for him. everybody could see that clare van degen was "gone" on him, and undine always liked to know that what belonged to her was coveted by others. her reassurance had been fortified by the news she had heard at the elling dinner--the published fact of harmon b. driscoll's unexpected victory. the ararat investigation had been mysteriously stopped--quashed, in the language of the law--and elmer moffatt "turned down," as van degen (who sat next to her) expressed it. "i don't believe we'll ever hear of that gentleman again," he said contemptuously; and their eyes crossed gaily as she exclaimed: "then they'll give the fancy ball after all?" "i should have given you one anyhow--shouldn't you have liked that as well?" "oh, you can give me one too!" she returned; and he bent closer to say: "by jove, i will--and anything else you want." but on the way home her fears revived. ralph's indifference struck her as unnatural. he had not returned to the subject of paul's disappointment, had not even asked her to write a word of excuse to his mother. van degen's way of looking at her at dinner--he was incapable of graduating his glances--had made it plain that the favour she had accepted would necessitate her being more conspicuously in his company (though she was still resolved that it should be on just such terms as she chose); and it would be extremely troublesome if, at this juncture, ralph should suddenly turn suspicious and secretive. undine, hitherto, had found more benefits than drawbacks in her marriage; but now the tie began to gall. it was hard to be criticized for every grasp at opportunity by a man so avowedly unable to do the reaching for her! ralph had gone into business to make more money for her; but it was plain that the "more" would never be much, and that he would not achieve the quick rise to affluence which was man's natural tribute to woman's merits. undine felt herself trapped, deceived; and it was intolerable that the agent of her disillusionment should presume to be the critic of her conduct. her annoyance, however, died out with her fears. ralph, the morning after the elling dinner, went his way as usual, and after nerving herself for the explosion which did not come she set down his indifference to the dulling effect of "business." no wonder poor women whose husbands were always "down-town" had to look elsewhere for sympathy! van degen's cheque helped to calm her, and the weeks whirled on toward the driscoll ball. the ball was as brilliant as she had hoped, and her own part in it as thrilling as a page from one of the "society novels" with which she had cheated the monotony of apex days. she had no time for reading now: every hour was packed with what she would have called life, and the intensity of her sensations culminated on that triumphant evening. what could be more delightful than to feel that, while all the women envied her dress, the men did not so much as look at it? their admiration was all for herself, and her beauty deepened under it as flowers take a warmer colour in the rays of sunset. only van degen's glance weighed on her a little too heavily. was it possible that he might become a "bother" less negligible than those he had relieved her of? undine was not greatly alarmed--she still had full faith in her powers of self-defense; but she disliked to feel the least crease in the smooth surface of existence. she had always been what her parents called "sensitive." as the winter passed, material cares once more assailed her. in the thrill of liberation produced by van degen's gift she had been imprudent--had launched into fresh expenses. not that she accused herself of extravagance: she had done nothing not really necessary. the drawing-room, for instance, cried out to be "done over," and popple, who was an authority on decoration, had shown her, with a few strokes of his pencil how easily it might be transformed into a french "period" room, all curves and cupids: just the setting for a pretty woman and his portrait of her. but undine, still hopeful of leaving west end avenue, had heroically resisted the suggestion, and contented herself with the renewal of the curtains and carpet, and the purchase of some fragile gilt chairs which, as she told ralph, would be "so much to the good" when they moved--the explanation, as she made it, seemed an additional evidence of her thrift. partly as a result of these exertions she had a "nervous breakdown" toward the middle of the winter, and her physician having ordered massage and a daily drive it became necessary to secure mrs. heeny's attendance and to engage a motor by the month. other unforeseen expenses--the bills, that, at such times, seem to run up without visible impulsion--were added to by a severe illness of little paul's: a long costly illness, with three nurses and frequent consultations. during these days ralph's anxiety drove him to what seemed to undine foolish excesses of expenditure and when the boy began to get better the doctors advised country air. ralph at once hired a small house at tuxedo and undine of course accompanied her son to the country; but she spent only the sundays with him, running up to town during the week to be with her husband, as she explained. this necessitated the keeping up of two households, and even for so short a time the strain on ralph's purse was severe. so it came about that the bill for the fancy-dress was still unpaid, and undine left to wonder distractedly what had become of van degen's money. that van degen seemed also to wonder was becoming unpleasantly apparent: his cheque had evidently not brought in the return he expected, and he put his grievance to her frankly one day when he motored down to lunch at tuxedo. they were sitting, after luncheon, in the low-ceilinged drawing-room to which undine had adapted her usual background of cushions, bric-a-brac and flowers--since one must make one's setting "home-like," however little one's habits happened to correspond with that particular effect. undine, conscious of the intimate charm of her mise-en-scene, and of the recovered freshness and bloom which put her in harmony with it, had never been more sure of her power to keep her friend in the desired state of adoring submission. but peter, as he grew more adoring, became less submissive; and there came a moment when she needed all her wits to save the situation. it was easy enough to rebuff him, the easier as his physical proximity always roused in her a vague instinct of resistance; but it was hard so to temper the rebuff with promise that the game of suspense should still delude him. he put it to her at last, standing squarely before her, his batrachian sallowness unpleasantly flushed, and primitive man looking out of the eyes from which a frock-coated gentleman usually pined at her. "look here--the installment plan's all right; but ain't you a bit behind even on that?" (she had brusquely eluded a nearer approach.) "anyhow, i think i'd rather let the interest accumulate for a while. this is good-bye till i get back from europe." the announcement took her by surprise. "europe? why, when are you sailing?" "on the first of april: good day for a fool to acknowledge his folly. i'm beaten, and i'm running away." she sat looking down, her hand absently occupied with the twist of pearls he had given her. in a flash she saw the peril of this departure. once off on the sorceress, he was lost to her--the power of old associations would prevail. yet if she were as "nice" to him as he asked--"nice" enough to keep him--the end might not be much more to her advantage. hitherto she had let herself drift on the current of their adventure, but she now saw what port she had half-unconsciously been trying for. if she had striven so hard to hold him, had "played" him with such patience and such skill, it was for something more than her passing amusement and convenience: for a purpose the more tenaciously cherished that she had not dared name it to herself. in the light of this discovery she saw the need of feigning complete indifference. "ah, you happy man! it's good-bye indeed, then," she threw back at him, lifting a plaintive smile to his frown. "oh, you'll turn up in paris later, i suppose--to get your things for newport." "paris? newport? they're not on my map! when ralph can get away we shall go to the adirondacks for the boy. i hope i shan't need paris clothes there! it doesn't matter, at any rate," she ended, laughing, "because nobody i care about will see me." van degen echoed her laugh. "oh, come--that's rough on ralph!" she looked down with a slight increase of colour. "i oughtn't to have said it, ought i? but the fact is i'm unhappy--and a little hurt--" "unhappy? hurt?" he was at her side again. "why, what's wrong?" she lifted her eyes with a grave look. "i thought you'd be sorrier to leave me." "oh, it won't be for long--it needn't be, you know." he was perceptibly softening. "it's damnable, the way you're tied down. fancy rotting all summer in the adirondacks! why do you stand it? you oughtn't to be bound for life by a girl's mistake." the lashes trembled slightly on her cheek. "aren't we all bound by our mistakes--we women? don't let us talk of such things! ralph would never let me go abroad without him." she paused, and then, with a quick upward sweep of the lids: "after all, it's better it should be good-bye--since i'm paying for another mistake in being so unhappy at your going." "another mistake? why do you call it that?" "because i've misunderstood you--or you me." she continued to smile at him wistfully. "and some things are best mended by a break." he met her smile with a loud sigh--she could feel him in the meshes again. "is it to be a break between us?" "haven't you just said so? anyhow, it might as well be, since we shan't be in the same place again for months." the frock-coated gentleman once more languished from his eyes: she thought she trembled on the edge of victory. "hang it," he broke out, "you ought to have a change--you're looking awfully pulled down. why can't you coax your mother to run over to paris with you? ralph couldn't object to that." she shook her head. "i don't believe she could afford it, even if i could persuade her to leave father. you know father hasn't done very well lately: i shouldn't like to ask him for the money." "you're so confoundedly proud!" he was edging nearer. "it would all be so easy if you'd only be a little fond of me..." she froze to her sofa-end. "we women can't repair our mistakes. don't make me more miserable by reminding me of mine." "oh, nonsense! there's nothing cash won't do. why won't you let me straighten things out for you?" her colour rose again, and she looked him quickly and consciously in the eye. it was time to play her last card. "you seem to forget that i am--married," she said. van degen was silent--for a moment she thought he was swaying to her in the flush of surrender. but he remained doggedly seated, meeting her look with an odd clearing of his heated gaze, as if a shrewd businessman had suddenly replaced the pining gentleman at the window. "hang it--so am i!" he rejoined; and undine saw that in the last issue he was still the stronger of the two. xvii nothing was bitterer to her than to confess to herself the failure of her power; but her last talk with van degen had taught her a lesson almost worth the abasement. she saw the mistake she had made in taking money from him, and understood that if she drifted into repeating that mistake her future would be irretrievably compromised. what she wanted was not a hand-to-mouth existence of precarious intrigue: to one with her gifts the privileges of life should come openly. already in her short experience she had seen enough of the women who sacrifice future security for immediate success, and she meant to lay solid foundations before she began to build up the light super-structure of enjoyment. nevertheless it was galling to see van degen leave, and to know that for the time he had broken away from her. over a nature so insensible to the spells of memory, the visible and tangible would always prevail. if she could have been with him again in paris, where, in the shining spring days, every sight and sound ministered to such influences, she was sure she could have regained her hold. and the sense of frustration was intensified by the fact that every one she knew was to be there: her potential rivals were crowding the east-bound steamers. new york was a desert, and ralph's seeming unconsciousness of the fact increased her resentment. she had had but one chance at europe since her marriage, and that had been wasted through her husband's unaccountable perversity. she knew now with what packed hours of paris and london they had paid for their empty weeks in italy. meanwhile the long months of the new york spring stretched out before her in all their social vacancy to the measureless blank of a summer in the adirondacks. in her girlhood she had plumbed the dim depths of such summers; but then she had been sustained by the hope of bringing some capture to the surface. now she knew better: there were no "finds" for her in that direction. the people she wanted would be at newport or in europe, and she was too resolutely bent on a definite object, too sternly animated by her father's business instinct, to turn aside in quest of casual distractions. the chief difficulty in the way of her attaining any distant end had always been her reluctance to plod through the intervening stretches of dulness and privation. she had begun to see this, but she could not always master the weakness: never had she stood in greater need of mrs. heeny's "go slow. undine!" her imagination was incapable of long flights. she could not cheat her impatience with the mirage of far-off satisfactions, and for the moment present and future seemed equally void. but her desire to go to europe and to rejoin the little new york world that was reforming itself in london and paris was fortified by reasons which seemed urgent enough to justify an appeal to her father. she went down to his office to plead her case, fearing mrs. spragg's intervention. for some time past mr. spragg had been rather continuously overworked, and the strain was beginning to tell on him. he had never quite regained, in new york, the financial security of his apex days. since he had changed his base of operations his affairs had followed an uncertain course, and undine suspected that his breach with his old political ally, the representative rolliver who had seen him through the muddiest reaches of the pure water move, was not unconnected with his failure to get a footing in wall street. but all this was vague and shadowy to her even had "business" been less of a mystery, she was too much absorbed in her own affairs to project herself into her father's case; and she thought she was sacrificing enough to delicacy of feeling in sparing him the "bother" of mrs. spragg's opposition. when she came to him with a grievance he always heard her out with the same mild patience; but the long habit of "managing" him had made her, in his own language, "discount" this tolerance, and when she ceased to speak her heart throbbed with suspense as he leaned back, twirling an invisible toothpick under his sallow moustache. presently he raised a hand to stroke the limp beard in which the moustache was merged; then he groped for the masonic emblem that had lost itself in one of the folds of his depleted waistcoat. he seemed to fish his answer from the same rusty depths, for as his fingers closed about the trinket he said: "yes, the heated term is trying in new york. that's why the fresh air fund pulled my last dollar out of me last week." undine frowned: there was nothing more irritating, in these encounters with her father, than his habit of opening the discussion with a joke. "i wish you'd understand that i'm serious, father. i've never been strong since the baby was born, and i need a change. but it's not only that: there are other reasons for my wanting to go." mr. spragg still held to his mild tone of banter. "i never knew you short on reasons, undie. trouble is you don't always know other people's when you see 'em." his daughter's lips tightened. "i know your reasons when i see them, father: i've heard them often enough. but you can't know mine because i haven't told you--not the real ones." "jehoshaphat! i thought they were all real as long as you had a use for them." experience had taught her that such protracted trifling usually concealed an exceptional vigour of resistance, and the suspense strengthened her determination. "my reasons are all real enough," she answered; "but there's one more serious than the others." mr. spragg's brows began to jut. "more bills?" "no." she stretched out her hand and began to finger the dusty objects on his desk. "i'm unhappy at home." "unhappy--!" his start overturned the gorged waste-paper basket and shot a shower of paper across the rug. he stooped to put the basket back; then he turned his slow fagged eyes on his daughter. "why, he worships the ground you walk on, undie." "that's not always a reason, for a woman--" it was the answer she would have given to popple or van degen, but she saw in an instant the mistake of thinking it would impress her father. in the atmosphere of sentimental casuistry to which she had become accustomed, she had forgotten that mr. spragg's private rule of conduct was as simple as his business morality was complicated. he glowered at her under thrust-out brows. "it isn't a reason, isn't it? i can seem to remember the time when you used to think it was equal to a whole carload of whitewash." she blushed a bright red, and her own brows were levelled at his above her stormy steel-grey eyes. the sense of her blunder made her angrier with him, and more ruthless. "i can't expect you to understand--you never have, you or mother, when it came to my feelings. i suppose some people are born sensitive--i can't imagine anybody'd choose to be so. because i've been too proud to complain you've taken it for granted that i was perfectly happy. but my marriage was a mistake from the beginning; and ralph feels just as i do about it. his people hate me, they've always hated me; and he looks at everything as they do. they've never forgiven me for his having had to go into business--with their aristocratic ideas they look down on a man who works for his living. of course it's all right for you to do it, because you're not a marvell or a dagonet; but they think ralph ought to just lie back and let you support the baby and me." this time she had found the right note: she knew it by the tightening of her father's slack muscles and the sudden straightening of his back. "by george, he pretty near does!" he exclaimed bringing down his fist on the desk. "they haven't been taking it out of you about that, have they?" "they don't fight fair enough to say so. they just egg him on to turn against me. they only consented to his marrying me because they thought you were so crazy about the match you'd give us everything, and he'd have nothing to do but sit at home and write books." mr. spragg emitted a derisive groan. "from what i hear of the amount of business he's doing i guess he could keep the poet's corner going right along. i suppose the old man was right--he hasn't got it in him to make money." "of course not; he wasn't brought up to it, and in his heart of hearts he's ashamed of having to do it. he told me it was killing a little more of him every day." "do they back him up in that kind of talk?" "they back him up in everything. their ideas are all different from ours. they look down on us--can't you see that? can't you guess how they treat me from the way they've acted to you and mother?" he met this with a puzzled stare. "the way they've acted to me and mother? why, we never so much as set eyes on them." "that's just what i mean! i don't believe they've even called on mother this year, have they? last year they just left their cards without asking. and why do you suppose they never invite you to dine? in their set lots of people older than you and mother dine every night of the winter--society's full of them. the marvells are ashamed to have you meet their friends: that's the reason. they're ashamed to have it known that ralph married an apex girl, and that you and mother haven't always had your own servants and carriages; and ralph's ashamed of it too, now he's got over being crazy about me. if he was free i believe he'd turn round to-morrow and marry that ray girl his mother's saving up for him." mr. spragg listened with a heavy brow and pushed-out lip. his daughter's outburst seemed at last to have roused him to a faint resentment. after she had ceased to speak he remained silent, twisting an inky penhandle between his fingers; then he said: "i guess mother and i can worry along without having ralph's relatives drop in; but i'd like to make it clear to them that if you came from apex your income came from there too. i presume they'd be sorry if ralph was left to support you on his." she saw that she had scored in the first part of the argument, but every watchful nerve reminded her that the hardest stage was still ahead. "oh, they're willing enough he should take your money--that's only natural, they think." a chuckle sounded deep down under mr. spragg's loose collar. "there seems to be practical unanimity on that point," he observed. "but i don't see," he continued, jerking round his bushy brows on her, "how going to europe is going to help you out." undine leaned close enough for her lowered voice to reach him. "can't you understand that, knowing how they all feel about me--and how ralph feels--i'd give almost anything to get away?" her father looked at her compassionately. "i guess most of us feel that once in a way when we're youngy, undine. later on you'll see going away ain't much use when you've got to turn round and come back." she nodded at him with close-pressed lips, like a child in possession of some solemn secret. "that's just it--that's the reason i'm so wild to go; because it might mean i wouldn't ever have to come back." "not come back? what on earth are you talking about?" "it might mean that i could get free--begin over again..." he had pushed his seat back with a sudden jerk and cut her short by striking his palm on the arm of the chair. "for the lord's sake. undine--do you know what you're saying?" "oh, yes, i know." she gave him back a confident smile. "if i can get away soon--go straight over to paris...there's some one there who'd do anything... who could do anything...if i was free..." mr. spragg's hands continued to grasp his chair-arms. "good god, undine marvell--are you sitting there in your sane senses and talking to me of what you could do if you were free?" their glances met in an interval of speechless communion; but undine did not shrink from her father's eyes and when she lowered her own it seemed to be only because there was nothing left for them to say. "i know just what i could do if i were free. i could marry the right man," she answered boldly. he met her with a murmur of helpless irony. "the right man? the right man? haven't you had enough of trying for him yet?" as he spoke the door behind them opened, and mr. spragg looked up abruptly. the stenographer stood on the threshold, and above her shoulder undine perceived the ingratiating grin of elmer moffatt. "'a little farther lend thy guiding hand'--but i guess i can go the rest of the way alone," he said, insinuating himself through the doorway with an airy gesture of dismissal; then he turned to mr. spragg and undine. "i agree entirely with mrs. marvell--and i'm happy to have the opportunity of telling her so," he proclaimed, holding his hand out gallantly. undine stood up with a laugh. "it sounded like old times, i suppose--you thought father and i were quarrelling? but we never quarrel any more: he always agrees with me." she smiled at mr. spragg and turned her shining eyes on moffatt. "i wish that treaty had been signed a few years sooner!" the latter rejoined in his usual tone of humorous familiarity. undine had not met him since her marriage, and of late the adverse turn of his fortunes had carried him quite beyond her thoughts. but his actual presence was always stimulating, and even through her self-absorption she was struck by his air of almost defiant prosperity. he did not look like a man who has been beaten; or rather he looked like a man who does not know when he is beaten; and his eye had the gleam of mocking confidence that had carried him unabashed through his lowest hours at apex. "i presume you're here to see me on business?" mr. spragg enquired, rising from his chair with a glance that seemed to ask his daughter's silence. "why, yes. senator," rejoined moffatt, who was given, in playful moments, to the bestowal of titles high-sounding. "at least i'm here to ask you a little question that may lead to business." mr. spragg crossed the office and held open the door. "step this way, please," he said, guiding moffatt out before him, though the latter hung back to exclaim: "no family secrets, mrs. marvell--anybody can turn the fierce white light on me!" with the closing of the door undine's thoughts turned back to her own preoccupations. it had not struck her as incongruous that moffatt should have business dealings with her father: she was even a little surprised that mr. spragg should still treat him so coldly. but she had no time to give to such considerations. her own difficulties were too importunately present to her. she moved restlessly about the office, listening to the rise and fall of the two voices on the other side of the partition without once wondering what they were discussing. what should she say to her father when he came back--what argument was most likely to prevail with him? if he really had no money to give her she was imprisoned fast--van degen was lost to her, and the old life must go on interminably...in her nervous pacings she paused before the blotched looking-glass that hung in a corner of the office under a steel engraving of daniel webster. even that defective surface could not disfigure her, and she drew fresh hope from the sight of her beauty. her few weeks of ill-health had given her cheeks a subtler curve and deepened the shadows beneath her eyes, and she was handsomer than before her marriage. no, van degen was not lost to her even! from narrowed lids to parted lips her face was swept by a smile like retracted sunlight. he was not lost to her while she could smile like that! besides, even if her father had no money, there were always mysterious ways of "raising" it--in the old apex days he had often boasted of such feats. as the hope rose her eyes widened trustfully, and this time the smile that flowed up to them was as limpid as a child's. that was the was her father liked her to look at him... the door opened, and she heard mr. spragg say behind her: "no, sir, i won't--that's final." he came in alone, with a brooding face, and lowered himself heavily into his chair. it was plain that the talk between the two men had had an abrupt ending. undine looked at her father with a passing flicker of curiosity. certainly it was an odd coincidence that moffatt should have called while she was there... "what did he want?" she asked, glancing back toward the door. mr. spragg mumbled his invisible toothpick. "oh, just another of his wild-cat schemes--some real-estate deal he's in." "why did he come to you about it?" he looked away from her, fumbling among the letters on the desk. "guess he'd tried everybody else first. he'd go and ring the devil's front-door bell if he thought he could get anything out of him." "i suppose he did himself a lot of harm by testifying in the ararat investigation?" "yes, sir--he's down and out this time." he uttered the words with a certain satisfaction. his daughter did not answer, and they sat silent, facing each other across the littered desk. under their brief about elmer moffatt currents of rapid intelligence seemed to be flowing between them. suddenly undine leaned over the desk, her eyes widening trustfully, and the limpid smile flowing up to them. "father, i did what you wanted that one time, anyhow--won't you listen to me and help me out now?" xviii undine stood alone on the landing outside her father's office. only once before had she failed to gain her end with him--and there was a peculiar irony in the fact that moffatt's intrusion should have brought before her the providential result of her previous failure. not that she confessed to any real resemblance between the two situations. in the present case she knew well enough what she wanted, and how to get it. but the analogy had served her father's purpose, and moffatt's unlucky entrance had visibly strengthened his resistance. the worst of it was that the obstacles in the way were real enough. mr. spragg had not put her off with vague asseverations--somewhat against her will he had forced his proofs on her, showing her how much above his promised allowance he had contributed in the last three years to the support of her household. since she could not accuse herself of extravagance--having still full faith in her gift of "managing"--she could only conclude that it was impossible to live on what her father and ralph could provide; and this seemed a practical reason for desiring her freedom. if she and ralph parted he would of course return to his family, and mr. spragg would no longer be burdened with a helpless son-in-law. but even this argument did not move him. undine, as soon as she had risked van degen's name, found herself face to face with a code of domestic conduct as rigid as its exponent's business principles were elastic. mr. spragg did not regard divorce as intrinsically wrong or even inexpedient; and of its social disadvantages he had never even heard. lots of women did it, as undine said, and if their reasons were adequate they were justified. if ralph marvell had been a drunkard or "unfaithful" mr. spragg would have approved undine's desire to divorce him; but that it should be prompted by her inclination for another man--and a man with a wife of his own--was as shocking to him as it would have been to the most uncompromising of the dagonets and marvells. such things happened, as mr. spragg knew, but they should not happen to any woman of his name while he had the power to prevent it; and undine recognized that for the moment he had that power. as she emerged from the elevator she was surprised to see moffatt in the vestibule. his presence was an irritating reminder of her failure, and she walked past him with a rapid bow; but he overtook her. "mrs. marvell--i've been waiting to say a word to you." if it had been any one else she would have passed on; but moffatt's voice had always a detaining power. even now that she knew him to be defeated and negligible, the power asserted itself, and she paused to say: "i'm afraid i can't stop--i'm late for an engagement." "i shan't make you much later; but if you'd rather have me call round at your house--" "oh, i'm so seldom in." she turned a wondering look on him. "what is it you wanted to say?" "just two words. i've got an office in this building and the shortest way would be to come up there for a minute." as her look grew distant he added: "i think what i've got to say is worth the trip." his face was serious, without underlying irony: the face he wore when he wanted to be trusted. "very well," she said, turning back. undine, glancing at her watch as she came out of moffatt's office, saw that he had been true to his promise of not keeping her more than ten minutes. the fact was characteristic. under all his incalculableness there had always been a hard foundation of reliability: it seemed to be a matter of choice with him whether he let one feel that solid bottom or not. and in specific matters the same quality showed itself in an accuracy of statement, a precision of conduct, that contrasted curiously with his usual hyperbolic banter and his loose lounging manner. no one could be more elusive yet no one could be firmer to the touch. her face had cleared and she moved more lightly as she left the building. moffatt's communication had not been completely clear to her, but she understood the outline of the plan he had laid before her, and was satisfied with the bargain they had struck. he had begun by reminding her of her promise to introduce him to any friend of hers who might be useful in the way of business. over three years had passed since they had made the pact, and moffatt had kept loyally to his side of it. with the lapse of time the whole matter had become less important to her, but she wanted to prove her good faith, and when he reminded her of her promise she at once admitted it. "well, then--i want you to introduce me to your husband." undine was surprised; but beneath her surprise she felt a quick sense of relief. ralph was easier to manage than so many of her friends--and it was a mark of his present indifference to acquiesce in anything she suggested. "my husband? why, what can he do for you?" moffatt explained at once, in the fewest words, as his way was when it came to business. he was interested in a big "deal" which involved the purchase of a piece of real estate held by a number of wrangling heirs. the real-estate broker with whom ralph marvell was associated represented these heirs, but moffatt had his reasons for not approaching him directly. and he didn't want to go to marvell with a "business proposition"--it would be better to be thrown with him socially as if by accident. it was with that object that moffatt had just appealed to mr. spragg, but mr. spragg, as usual, had "turned him down," without even consenting to look into the case. "he'd rather have you miss a good thing than have it come to you through me. i don't know what on earth he thinks it's in my power to do to you--or ever was, for that matter," he added. "anyhow," he went on to explain, "the power's all on your side now; and i'll show you how little the doing will hurt you as soon as i can have a quiet chat with your husband." he branched off again into technicalities, nebulous projections of capital and interest, taxes and rents, from which she finally extracted, and clung to, the central fact that if the "deal went through" it would mean a commission of forty thousand dollars to marvell's firm, of which something over a fourth would come to ralph. "by jove, that's an amazing fellow!" ralph marvell exclaimed, turning back into the drawing-room, a few evenings later, at the conclusion of one of their little dinners. undine looked up from her seat by the fire. she had had the inspired thought of inviting moffatt to meet clare van degen, mrs. fairford and charles bowen. it had occurred to her that the simplest way of explaining moffatt was to tell ralph that she had unexpectedly discovered an old apex acquaintance in the protagonist of the great ararat trust fight. moffatt's defeat had not wholly divested him of interest. as a factor in affairs he no longer inspired apprehension, but as the man who had dared to defy harmon b. driscoll he was a conspicuous and, to some minds, almost an heroic figure. undine remembered that clare and mrs. fairford had once expressed a wish to see this braver of the olympians, and her suggestion that he should be asked meet them gave ralph evident pleasure. it was long since she had made any conciliatory sign to his family. moffatt's social gifts were hardly of a kind to please the two ladies: he would have shone more brightly in peter van degen's set than in his wife's. but neither clare nor mrs. fairford had expected a man of conventional cut, and moffatt's loud easiness was obviously less disturbing to them than to their hostess. undine felt only his crudeness, and the tacit criticism passed on it by the mere presence of such men as her husband and bowen; but mrs. fairford' seemed to enjoy provoking him to fresh excesses of slang and hyperbole. gradually she drew him into talking of the driscoll campaign, and he became recklessly explicit. he seemed to have nothing to hold back: all the details of the prodigious exploit poured from him with homeric volume. then he broke off abruptly, thrusting his hands into his trouser-pockets and shaping his red lips to a whistle which he checked as his glance met undine's. to conceal his embarrassment he leaned back in his chair, looked about the table with complacency, and said "i don't mind if i do" to the servant who approached to re-fill his champagne glass. the men sat long over their cigars; but after an interval undine called charles bowen into the drawing-room to settle some question in dispute between clare and mrs. fairford, and thus gave moffatt a chance to be alone with her husband. now that their guests had gone she was throbbing with anxiety to know what had passed between the two; but when ralph rejoined her in the drawing-room she continued to keep her eyes on the fire and twirl her fan listlessly. "that's an amazing chap," ralph repeated, looking down at her. "where was it you ran across him--out at apex?" as he leaned against the chimney-piece, lighting his cigarette, it struck undine that he looked less fagged and lifeless than usual, and she felt more and more sure that something important had happened during the moment of isolation she had contrived. she opened and shut her fan reflectively. "yes--years ago; father had some business with him and brought him home to dinner one day." "and you've never seen him since?" she waited, as if trying to piece her recollections together. "i suppose i must have; but all that seems so long ago," she said sighing. she had been given, of late, to such plaintive glances toward her happy girlhood but ralph seemed not to notice the allusion. "do you know," he exclaimed after a moment, "i don't believe the fellow's beaten yet." she looked up quickly. "don't you?" "no; and i could see that bowen didn't either. he strikes me as the kind of man who develops slowly, needs a big field, and perhaps makes some big mistakes, but gets where he wants to in the end. jove, i wish i could put him in a book! there's something epic about him--a kind of epic effrontery." undine's pulses beat faster as she listened. was it not what moffatt had always said of himself--that all he needed was time and elbow-room? how odd that ralph, who seemed so dreamy and unobservant, should instantly have reached the same conclusion! but what she wanted to know was the practical result of their meeting. "what did you and he talk about when you were smoking?" "oh, he got on the driscoll fight again--gave us some extraordinary details. the man's a thundering brute, but he's full of observation and humour. then, after bowen joined you, he told me about a new deal he's gone into--rather a promising scheme, but on the same titanic scale. it's just possible, by the way, that we may be able to do something for him: part of the property he's after is held in our office." he paused, knowing undine's indifference to business matters; but the face she turned to him was alive with interest. "you mean you might sell the property to him?" "well, if the thing comes off. there would be a big commission if we did." he glanced down on her half ironically. "you'd like that, wouldn't you?" she answered with a shade of reproach: "why do you say that? i haven't complained." "oh, no; but i know i've been a disappointment as a money-maker." she leaned back in her chair, closing her eyes as if in utter weariness and indifference, and in a moment she felt him bending over her. "what's the matter? don't you feel well?" "i'm a little tired. it's nothing." she pulled her hand away and burst into tears. ralph knelt down by her chair and put his arm about her. it was the first time he had touched her since the night of the boy's birthday, and the sense of her softness woke a momentary warmth in his veins. "what is it, dear? what is it?" without turning her head she sobbed out: "you seem to think i'm too selfish and odious--that i'm just pretending to be ill." "no, no," he assured her, smoothing back her hair. but she continued to sob on in a gradual crescendo of despair, till the vehemence of her weeping began to frighten him, and he drew her to her feet and tried to persuade her to let herself be led upstairs. she yielded to his arm, sobbing in short exhausted gasps, and leaning her whole weight on him as he guided her along the passage to her bedroom. on the lounge to which he lowered her she lay white and still, tears trickling through her lashes and her handkerchief pressed against her lips. he recognized the symptoms with a sinking heart: she was on the verge of a nervous attack such as she had had in the winter, and he foresaw with dismay the disastrous train of consequences, the doctors' and nurses' bills, and all the attendant confusion and expense. if only moffatt's project might be realized--if for once he could feel a round sum in his pocket, and be freed from the perpetual daily strain! the next morning undine, though calmer, was too weak to leave her bed, and her doctor prescribed rest and absence of worry--later, perhaps, a change of scene. he explained to ralph that nothing was so wearing to a high-strung nature as monotony, and that if mrs. marvell were contemplating a newport season it was necessary that she should be fortified to meet it. in such cases he often recommended a dash to paris or london, just to tone up the nervous system. undine regained her strength slowly, and as the days dragged on the suggestion of the european trip recurred with increasing frequency. but it came always from her medical adviser: she herself had grown strangely passive and indifferent. she continued to remain upstairs on her lounge, seeing no one but mrs. heeny, whose daily ministrations had once more been prescribed, and asking only that the noise of paul's play should be kept from her. his scamperings overhead disturbed her sleep, and his bed was moved into the day nursery, above his father's room. the child's early romping did not trouble ralph, since he himself was always awake before daylight. the days were not long enough to hold his cares, and they came and stood by him through the silent hours, when there was no other sound to drown their voices. ralph had not made a success of his business. the real-estate brokers who had taken him into partnership had done so only with the hope of profiting by his social connections; and in this respect the alliance had been a failure. it was in such directions that he most lacked facility, and so far he had been of use to his partners only as an office-drudge. he was resigned to the continuance of such drudgery, though all his powers cried out against it; but even for the routine of business his aptitude was small, and he began to feel that he was not considered an addition to the firm. the difficulty of finding another opening made him fear a break; and his thoughts turned hopefully to elmer moffatt's hint of a "deal." the success of the negotiation might bring advantages beyond the immediate pecuniary profit; and that, at the present juncture, was important enough in itself. moffatt reappeared two days after the dinner, presenting himself in west end avenue in the late afternoon with the explanation that the business in hand necessitated discretion, and that he preferred not to be seen in ralph's office. it was a question of negotiating with the utmost privacy for the purchase of a small strip of land between two large plots already acquired by purchasers cautiously designated by moffatt as his "parties." how far he "stood in" with the parties he left it to ralph to conjecture; but it was plain that he had a large stake in the transaction, and that it offered him his first chance of recovering himself since driscoll had "thrown" him. the owners of the coveted plot did not seem anxious to sell, and there were personal reasons for moffatt's not approaching them through ralph's partners, who were the regular agents of the estate: so that ralph's acquaintance with the conditions, combined with his detachments from the case, marked him out as a useful intermediary. their first talk left ralph with a dazzled sense of moffatt's strength and keenness, but with a vague doubt as to the "straightness" of the proposed transaction. ralph had never seen his way clearly in that dim underworld of affairs where men of the moffatt and driscoll type moved like shadowy destructive monsters beneath the darting small fry of the surface. he knew that "business" has created its own special morality; and his musings on man's relation to his self imposed laws had shown him how little human conduct is generally troubled about its own sanctions. he had a vivid sense of the things a man of his kind didn't do; but his inability to get a mental grasp on large financial problems made it hard to apply to them so simple a measure as this inherited standard. he only knew, as moffatt's plan developed, that it seemed all right while he talked of it with its originator, but vaguely wrong when he thought it over afterward. it occurred to him to consult his grandfather; and if he renounced the idea for the obvious reason that mr. dagonet's ignorance of business was as fathomless as his own, this was not his sole motive. finally it occurred to him to put the case hypothetically to mr. spragg. as far as ralph knew, his father-in-law's business record was unblemished; yet one felt in him an elasticity of adjustment not allowed for in the dagonet code. mr. spragg listened thoughtfully to ralph's statement of the case, growling out here and there a tentative correction, and turning his cigar between his lips as he seemed to turn the problem over in the loose grasp of his mind. "well, what's the trouble with it?" he asked at length, stretching his big square-toed shoes against the grate of his son-in-law's dining-room, where, in the after-dinner privacy of a family evening, ralph had seized the occasion to consult him. "the trouble?" ralph considered. "why, that's just what i should like you to explain to me." mr. spragg threw back his head and stared at the garlanded french clock on the chimney-piece. mrs. spragg was sitting upstairs in her daughter's bedroom, and the silence of the house seemed to hang about the two men like a listening presence. "well, i dunno but what i agree with the doctor who said there warn't any diseases, but only sick people. every case is different, i guess." mr. spragg, munching his cigar, turned a ruminating glance on ralph. "seems to me it all boils down to one thing. was this fellow we're supposing about under any obligation to the other party--the one he was trying to buy the property from?" ralph hesitated. "only the obligation recognized between decent men to deal with each other decently." mr. spragg listened to this with the suffering air of a teacher compelled to simplify upon his simplest questions. "any personal obligation, i meant. had the other fellow done him a good turn any time?" "no--i don't imagine them to have had any previous relations at all." his father-in-law stared. "where's your trouble, then?" he sat for a moment frowning at the embers. "even when it's the other way round it ain't always so easy to decide how far that kind of thing's binding... and they say shipwrecked fellows'll make a meal of friend as quick as they would of a total stranger." he drew himself together with a shake of his shoulders and pulled back his feet from the grate. "but i don't see the conundrum in your case, i guess it's up to both parties to take care of their own skins." he rose from his chair and wandered upstairs to undine. that was the wall street code: it all "boiled down" to the personal obligation, to the salt eaten in the enemy's tent. ralph's fancy wandered off on a long trail of speculation from which he was pulled back with a jerk by the need of immediate action. moffatt's "deal" could not wait: quick decisions were essential to effective action, and brooding over ethical shades of difference might work more ill than good in a world committed to swift adjustments. the arrival of several unforeseen bills confirmed this view, and once ralph had adopted it he began to take a detached interest in the affair. in paris, in his younger days, he had once attended a lesson in acting given at the conservatoire by one of the great lights of the theatre, and had seen an apparently uncomplicated role of the classic repertory, familiar to him through repeated performances, taken to pieces before his eyes, dissolved into its component elements, and built up again with a minuteness of elucidation and a range of reference that made him feel as though he had been let into the secret of some age-long natural process. as he listened to moffatt the remembrance of that lesson came back to him. at the outset the "deal," and his own share in it, had seemed simple enough: he would have put on his hat and gone out on the spot in the full assurance of being able to transact the affair. but as moffatt talked he began to feel as blank and blundering as the class of dramatic students before whom the great actor had analyzed his part. the affair was in fact difficult and complex, and moffatt saw at once just where the difficulties lay and how the personal idiosyncrasies of "the parties" affected them. such insight fascinated ralph, and he strayed off into wondering why it did not qualify every financier to be a novelist, and what intrinsic barrier divided the two arts. both men had strong incentives for hastening the affair; and within a fortnight after moffatt's first advance ralph was able to tell him that his offer was accepted. over and above his personal satisfaction he felt the thrill of the agent whom some powerful negotiator has charged with a delicate mission: he might have been an eager young jesuit carrying compromising papers to his superior. it had been stimulating to work with moffatt, and to study at close range the large powerful instrument of his intelligence. as he came out of moffatt's office at the conclusion of this visit ralph met mr. spragg descending from his eyrie. he stopped short with a backward glance at moffatt's door. "hallo--what were you doing in there with those cut-throats?" ralph judged discretion to be essential. "oh, just a little business for the firm." mr. spragg said no more, but resorted to the soothing labial motion of revolving his phantom toothpick. "how's undie getting along?" he merely asked, as he and his son-in-law descended together in the elevator. "she doesn't seem to feel much stronger. the doctor wants her to run over to europe for a few weeks. she thinks of joining her friends the shallums in paris." mr. spragg was again silent, but he left the building at ralph's side, and the two walked along together toward wall street. presently the older man asked: "how did you get acquainted with moffatt?" "why, by chance--undine ran across him somewhere and asked him to dine the other night." "undine asked him to dine?" "yes: she told me you used to know him out at apex." mr. spragg appeared to search his memory for confirmation of the fact. "i believe he used to be round there at one time. i've never heard any good of him yet." he paused at a crossing and looked probingly at his son-in-law. "is she terribly set on this trip to europe?" ralph smiled. "you know how it is when she takes a fancy to do anything--" mr. spragg, by a slight lift of his brooding brows, seemed to convey a deep if unspoken response. "well, i'd let her do it this time--i'd let her do it," he said as he turned down the steps of the subway. ralph was surprised, for he had gathered from some frightened references of mrs. spragg's that undine's parents had wind of her european plan and were strongly opposed to it. he concluded that mr. spragg had long since measured the extent of profitable resistance, and knew just when it became vain to hold out against his daughter or advise others to do so. ralph, for his own part, had no inclination to resist. as he left moffatt's office his inmost feeling was one of relief. he had reached the point of recognizing that it was best for both that his wife should go. when she returned perhaps their lives would readjust themselves--but for the moment he longed for some kind of benumbing influence, something that should give relief to the dull daily ache of feeling her so near and yet so inaccessible. certainly there were more urgent uses for their brilliant wind-fall: heavy arrears of household debts had to be met, and the summer would bring its own burden. but perhaps another stroke of luck might befall him: he was getting to have the drifting dependence on "luck" of the man conscious of his inability to direct his life. and meanwhile it seemed easier to let undine have what she wanted. undine, on the whole, behaved with discretion. she received the good news languidly and showed no unseemly haste to profit by it. but it was as hard to hide the light in her eyes as to dissemble the fact that she had not only thought out every detail of the trip in advance, but had decided exactly how her husband and son were to be disposed of in her absence. her suggestion that ralph should take paul to his grandparents, and that the west end avenue house should be let for the summer, was too practical not to be acted on; and ralph found she had already put her hand on the harry lipscombs, who, after three years of neglect, were to be dragged back to favour and made to feel, as the first step in their reinstatement, the necessity of hiring for the summer months a cool airy house on the west side. on her return from europe, undine explained, she would of course go straight to ralph and the boy in the adirondacks; and it seemed a foolish extravagance to let the house stand empty when the lipscombs were so eager to take it. as the day of departure approached it became harder for her to temper her beams; but her pleasure showed itself so amiably that ralph began to think she might, after all, miss the boy and himself more than she imagined. she was tenderly preoccupied with paul's welfare, and, to prepare for his translation to his grandparents' she gave the household in washington square more of her time than she had accorded it since her marriage. she explained that she wanted paul to grow used to his new surroundings; and with that object she took him frequently to his grandmother's, and won her way into old mr. dagonet's sympathies by her devotion to the child and her pretty way of joining in his games. undine was not consciously acting a part: this new phase was as natural to her as the other. in the joy of her gratified desires she wanted to make everybody about her happy. if only everyone would do as she wished she would never be unreasonable. she much preferred to see smiling faces about her, and her dread of the reproachful and dissatisfied countenance gave the measure of what she would do to avoid it. these thoughts were in her mind when, a day or two before sailing, she came out of the washington square house with her boy. it was a late spring afternoon, and she and paul had lingered on till long past the hour sacred to his grandfather's nap. now, as she came out into the square she saw that, however well mr. dagonet had borne their protracted romp, it had left his playmate flushed and sleepy; and she lifted paul in her arms to carry him to the nearest cab-stand. as she raised herself she saw a thick-set figure approaching her across the square; and a moment later she was shaking hands with elmer moffatt. in the bright spring air he looked seasonably glossy and prosperous; and she noticed that he wore a bunch of violets in his buttonhole. his small black eyes twinkled with approval as they rested on her, and undine reflected that, with paul's arms about her neck, and his little flushed face against her own, she must present a not unpleasing image of young motherhood. "that the heir apparent?" moffatt asked; adding "happy to make your acquaintance, sir," as the boy, at undine's bidding, held out a fist sticky with sugarplums. "he's been spending the afternoon with his grandfather, and they played so hard that he's sleepy," she explained. little paul, at that stage in his career, had a peculiar grace of wide-gazing deep-lashed eyes and arched cherubic lips, and undine saw that moffatt was not insensible to the picture she and her son composed. she did not dislike his admiration, for she no longer felt any shrinking from him--she would even have been glad to thank him for the service he had done her husband if she had known how to allude to it without awkwardness. moffatt seemed equally pleased at the meeting, and they looked at each other almost intimately over paul's tumbled curls. "he's a mighty fine fellow and no mistake--but isn't he rather an armful for you?" moffatt asked, his eyes lingering with real kindliness on the child's face. "oh, we haven't far to go. i'll pick up a cab at the corner." "well, let me carry him that far anyhow," said moffatt. undine was glad to be relieved of her burden, for she was unused to the child's weight, and disliked to feel that her skirt was dragging on the pavement. "go to the gentleman, pauly--he'll carry you better than mother," she said. the little boy's first movement was one of recoil from the ruddy sharp-eyed countenance that was so unlike his father's delicate face; but he was an obedient child, and after a moment's hesitation he wound his arms trustfully about the red gentleman's neck. "that's a good fellow--sit tight and i'll give you a ride," moffatt cried, hoisting the boy to his shoulder. paul was not used to being perched at such a height, and his nature was hospitable to new impressions. "oh, i like it up here--you're higher than father!" he exclaimed; and moffatt hugged him with a laugh. "it must feel mighty good to come uptown to a fellow like you in the evenings," he said, addressing the child but looking at undine, who also laughed a little. "oh, they're a dreadful nuisance, you know; but paul's a very good boy." "i wonder if he knows what a friend i've been to him lately," moffatt went on, as they turned into fifth avenue. undine smiled: she was glad he should have given her an opening. "he shall be told as soon as he's old enough to thank you. i'm so glad you came to ralph about that business." "oh i gave him a leg up, and i guess he's given me one too. queer the way things come round--he's fairly put me in the way of a fresh start." their eyes met in a silence which undine was the first to break. "it's been awfully nice of you to do what you've done--right along. and this last thing has made a lot of difference to us." "well, i'm glad you feel that way. i never wanted to be anything but 'nice,' as you call it." moffatt paused a moment and then added: "if you're less scared of me than your father is i'd be glad to call round and see you once in a while." the quick blood rushed to her cheeks. there was nothing challenging, demanding in his tone--she guessed at once that if he made the request it was simply for the pleasure of being with her, and she liked the magnanimity implied. nevertheless she was not sorry to have to answer: "of course i'll always be glad to see you--only, as it happens, i'm just sailing for europe." "for europe?" the word brought moffatt to a stand so abruptly that little paul lurched on his shoulder. "for europe?" he repeated. "why, i thought you said the other evening you expected to stay on in town till july. didn't you think of going to the adirondacks?" flattered by his evident disappointment, she became high and careless in her triumph. "oh, yes,--but that's all changed. ralph and the boy are going, but i sail on saturday to join some friends in paris--and later i may do some motoring in switzerland an italy." she laughed a little in the mere enjoyment of putting her plans into words and moffatt laughed too, but with an edge of sarcasm. "i see--i see: everything's changed, as you say, and your husband can blow you off to the trip. well, i hope you'll have a first-class time." their glances crossed again, and something in his cool scrutiny impelled undine to say, with a burst of candour: "if i do, you know, i shall owe it all to you!" "well, i always told you i meant to act white by you," he answered. they walked on in silence, and presently he began again in his usual joking strain: "see what one of the apex girls has been up to?" apex was too remote for her to understand the reference, and he went on: "why, millard binch's wife--indiana frusk that was. didn't you see in the papers that indiana'd fixed it up with james j. rolliver to marry her? they say it was easy enough squaring millard binch--you'd know it would be--but it cost roliver near a million to mislay mrs. r. and the children. well, indiana's pulled it off, anyhow; she always was a bright girl. but she never came up to you." "oh--" she stammered with a laugh, astonished and agitated by his news. indiana frusk and rolliver! it showed how easily the thing could be done. if only her father had listened to her! if a girl like indiana frusk could gain her end so easily, what might not undine have accomplished? she knew moffatt was right in saying that indiana had never come up to her...she wondered how the marriage would strike van degen... she signalled to a cab and they walked toward it without speaking. undine was recalling with intensity that one of indiana's shoulders was higher than the other, and that people in apex had thought her lucky to catch millard binch, the druggist's clerk, when undine herself had cast him off after a lingering engagement. and now indiana frusk was to be mrs. james j. rolliver! undine got into the cab and bent forward to take little paul. moffatt lowered his charge with exaggerated care, and a "steady there, steady," that made the child laugh; then, stooping over, he put a kiss on paul's lips before handing him over to his mother. xix "the parisian diamond company--anglo-american branch." charles bowen, seated, one rainy evening of the paris season, in a corner of the great nouveau luxe restaurant, was lazily trying to resolve his impressions of the scene into the phrases of a letter to his old friend mrs. henley fairford. the long habit of unwritten communion with this lady--in no way conditioned by the short rare letters they actually exchanged--usually caused his notations, in absence, to fall into such terms when the subject was of a kind to strike an answering flash from her. and who but mrs. fairford would see, from his own precise angle, the fantastic improbability, the layers on layers of unsubstantialness, on which the seemingly solid scene before him rested? the dining-room of the nouveau luxe was at its fullest, and, having contracted on the garden side through stress of weather, had even overflowed to the farther end of the long hall beyond; so that bowen, from his corner, surveyed a seemingly endless perspective of plumed and jewelled heads, of shoulders bare or black-coated, encircling the close-packed tables. he had come half an hour before the time he had named to his expected guest, so that he might have the undisturbed amusement of watching the picture compose itself again before his eyes. during some forty years' perpetual exercise of his perceptions he had never come across anything that gave them the special titillation produced by the sight of the dinner-hour at the nouveau luxe: the same sense of putting his hand on human nature's passion for the factitious, its incorrigible habit of imitating the imitation. as he sat watching the familiar faces swept toward him on the rising tide of arrival--for it was one of the joys of the scene that the type was always the same even when the individual was not--he hailed with renewed appreciation this costly expression of a social ideal. the dining-room at the nouveau luxe represented, on such a spring evening, what unbounded material power had devised for the delusion of its leisure: a phantom "society," with all the rules, smirks, gestures of its model, but evoked out of promiscuity and incoherence while the other had been the product of continuity and choice. and the instinct which had driven a new class of world-compellers to bind themselves to slavish imitation of the superseded, and their prompt and reverent faith in the reality of the sham they had created, seemed to bowen the most satisfying proof of human permanence. with this thought in his mind he looked up to greet his guest. the comte raymond de chelles, straight, slim and gravely smiling, came toward him with frequent pauses of salutation at the crowded tables; saying, as he seated himself and turned his pleasant eyes on the scene: "il n'y a pas à dire, my dear bowen, it's charming and sympathetic and original--we owe america a debt of gratitude for inventing it!" bowen felt a last touch of satisfaction: they were the very words to complete his thought. "my dear fellow, it's really you and your kind who are responsible. it's the direct creation of feudalism, like all the great social upheavals!" raymond de chelles stroked his handsome brown moustache. "i should have said, on the contrary, that one enjoyed it for the contrast. it's such a refreshing change from our institutions--which are, nevertheless, the necessary foundations of society. but just as one may have an infinite admiration for one's wife, and yet occasionally--" he waved a light hand toward the spectacle. "this, in the social order, is the diversion, the permitted diversion, that your original race has devised: a kind of superior bohemia, where one may be respectable without being bored." bowen laughed. "you've put it in a nutshell: the ideal of the american woman is to be respectable without being bored; and from that point of view this world they've invented has more originality than i gave it credit for." chelles thoughtfully unfolded his napkin. "my impression's a superficial one, of course--for as to what goes on underneath--!" he looked across the room. "if i married i shouldn't care to have my wife come here too often." bowen laughed again. "she'd be as safe as in a bank! nothing ever goes on! nothing that ever happens here is real." "ah, quant à cela--" the frenchman murmured, inserting a fork into his melon. bowen looked at him with enjoyment--he was such a precious foot-note to the page! the two men, accidentally thrown together some years previously during a trip up the nile, always met again with pleasure when bowen returned to france. raymond de chelles, who came of a family of moderate fortune, lived for the greater part of the year on his father's estates in burgundy; but he came up every spring to the entresol of the old marquis's hotel for a two months' study of human nature, applying to the pursuit the discriminating taste and transient ardour that give the finest bloom to pleasure. bowen liked him as a companion and admired him as a charming specimen of the frenchman of his class, embodying in his lean, fatigued and finished person that happy mean of simplicity and intelligence of which no other race has found the secret. if raymond de chelles had been english he would have been a mere fox-hunting animal, with appetites but without tastes; but in his lighter gallic clay the wholesome territorial savour, the inherited passion for sport and agriculture, were blent with an openness to finer sensations, a sense of the come-and-go of ideas, under which one felt the tight hold of two or three inherited notions, religious, political, and domestic, in total contradiction to his surface attitude. that the inherited notions would in the end prevail, everything in his appearance declared from the distinguished slant of his nose to the narrow forehead under his thinning hair; he was the kind of man who would inevitably "revert" when he married. but meanwhile the surface he presented to the play of life was broad enough to take in the fantastic spectacle of the nouveau luxe; and to see its gestures reflected in a latin consciousness was an endless entertainment to bowen. the tone of his guest's last words made him take them up. "but is the lady you allude to more than a hypothesis? surely you're not thinking of getting married?" chelles raised his eye-brows ironically. "when hasn't one to think of it, in my situation? one hears of nothing else at home--one knows that, like death, it has to come." his glance, which was still mustering the room, came to a sudden pause and kindled. "who's the lady over there--fair-haired, in white--the one who's just come in with the red-faced man? they seem to be with a party of your compatriots." bowen followed his glance to a neighbouring table, where, at the moment, undine marvell was seating herself at peter van degen's side, in the company of the harvey shallums, the beautiful mrs. beringer and a dozen other new york figures. she was so placed that as she took her seat she recognized bowen and sent him a smile across the tables. she was more simply dressed than usual, and the pink lights, warming her cheeks and striking gleams from her hair, gave her face a dewy freshness that was new to bowen. he had always thought her beauty too obvious, too bathed in the bright publicity of the american air; but to-night she seemed to have been brushed by the wing of poetry, and its shadow lingered in her eyes. chelles' gaze made it evident that he had received the same impression. "one is sometimes inclined to deny your compatriots actual beauty--to charge them with producing the effect without having the features; but in this case--you say you know the lady?" "yes: she's the wife of an old friend." "the wife? she's married? there, again, it's so puzzling! your young girls look so experienced, and your married women sometimes so--unmarried." "well, they often are--in these days of divorce!" the other's interest quickened. "your friend's divorced?" "oh, no; heaven forbid! mrs. marvell hasn't been long married; and it was a love-match of the good old kind." "ah--and the husband? which is he?" "he's not here--he's in new york." "feverishly adding to a fortune already monstrous?" "no; not precisely monstrous. the marvells are not well off," said bowen, amused by his friend's interrogations. "and he allows an exquisite being like that to come to paris without him--and in company with the red-faced gentleman who seems so alive to his advantages?" "we don't 'allow' our women this or that; i don't think we set much store by the compulsory virtues." his companion received this with amusement. "if: you're as detached as that, why does the obsolete institution of marriage survive with you?" "oh, it still has its uses. one couldn't be divorced without it." chelles laughed again; but his straying eye still followed the same direction, and bowen noticed that the fact was not unremarked by the object of his contemplation. undine's party was one of the liveliest in the room: the american laugh rose above the din of the orchestra as the american toilets dominated the less daring effects at the other tables. undine, on entering, had seemed to be in the same mood as her companions; but bowen saw that, as she became conscious of his friend's observation, she isolated herself in a kind of soft abstraction; and he admired the adaptability which enabled her to draw from such surroundings the contrasting graces of reserve. they had greeted each other with all the outer signs of cordiality, but bowen fancied she would not care to have him speak to her. she was evidently dining with van degen, and van degen's proximity was the last fact she would wish to have transmitted to the critics in washington square. bowen was therefore surprised when, as he rose to leave the restaurant, he heard himself hailed by peter. "hallo--hold on! when did you come over? mrs. marvell's dying for the last news about the old homestead." undine's smile confirmed the appeal. she wanted to know how lately bowen had left new york, and pressed him to tell her when he had last seen her boy, how he was looking, and whether ralph had been persuaded to go down to clare's on saturdays and get a little riding and tennis? and dear laura--was she well too, and was paul with her, or still with his grandmother? they were all dreadfully bad correspondents, and so was she. undine laughingly admitted; and when ralph had last written her these questions had still been undecided. as she smiled up at bowen he saw her glance stray to the spot where his companion hovered; and when the diners rose to move toward the garden for coffee she said, with a sweet note and a detaining smile: "do come with us--i haven't half finished." van degen echoed the request, and bowen, amused by undine's arts, was presently introducing chelles, and joining with him in the party's transit to the terrace. the rain had ceased, and under the clear evening sky the restaurant garden opened green depths that skilfully hid its narrow boundaries. van degen's company was large enough to surround two of the tables on the terrace, and bowen noted the skill with which undine, leaving him to mrs. shallum's care, contrived to draw raymond de chelles to the other table. still more noticeable was the effect of this stratagem on van degen, who also found himself relegated to mrs. shallum's group. poor peter's state was betrayed by the irascibility which wreaked itself on a jostling waiter, and found cause for loud remonstrance in the coldness of the coffee and the badness of the cigars; and bowen, with something more than the curiosity of the looker-on, wondered whether this were the real clue to undine's conduct. he had always smiled at mrs. fairford's fears for ralph's domestic peace. he thought undine too clear-headed to forfeit the advantages of her marriage; but it now struck him that she might have had a glimpse of larger opportunities. bowen, at the thought, felt the pang of the sociologist over the individual havoc wrought by every social readjustment: it had so long been clear to him that poor ralph was a survival, and destined, as such, to go down in any conflict with the rising forces. xx some six weeks later. undine marvell stood at the window smiling down on her recovered paris. her hotel sitting-room had, as usual, been flowered, cushioned and lamp-shaded into a delusive semblance of stability; and she had really felt, for the last few weeks, that the life she was leading there must be going to last--it seemed so perfect an answer to all her wants! as she looked out at the thronged street, on which the summer light lay like a blush of pleasure, she felt herself naturally akin to all the bright and careless freedom of the scene. she had been away from paris for two days, and the spectacle before her seemed more rich and suggestive after her brief absence from it. her senses luxuriated in all its material details: the thronging motors, the brilliant shops, the novelty and daring of the women's dresses, the piled-up colours of the ambulant flower-carts, the appetizing expanse of the fruiterers' windows, even the chromatic effects of the petits fours behind the plate-glass of the pastry-cooks: all the surface-sparkle and variety of the inexhaustible streets of paris. the scene before her typified to undine her first real taste of life. how meagre and starved the past appeared in comparison with this abundant present! the noise, the crowd, the promiscuity beneath her eyes symbolized the glare and movement of her life. every moment of her days was packed with excitement and exhilaration. everything amused her: the long hours of bargaining and debate with dress-makers and jewellers, the crowded lunches at fashionable restaurants, the perfunctory dash through a picture-show or the lingering visit to the last new milliner; the afternoon motor-rush to some leafy suburb, where tea and musics and sunset were hastily absorbed on a crowded terrace above the seine; the whirl home through the bois to dress for dinner and start again on the round of evening diversions; the dinner at the nouveau luxe or the café de paris, and the little play at the capucines or the variétés, followed, because the night was "too lovely," and it was a shame to waste it, by a breathless flight back to the bois, with supper in one of its lamp-hung restaurants, or, if the weather forbade, a tumultuous progress through the midnight haunts where "ladies" were not supposed to show themselves, and might consequently taste the thrill of being occasionally taken for their opposites. as the varied vision unrolled itself, undine contrasted it with the pale monotony of her previous summers. the one she most resented was the first after her marriage, the european summer out of whose joys she had been cheated by her own ignorance and ralph's perversity. they had been free then, there had been no child to hamper their movements, their money anxieties had hardly begun, the face of life had been fresh and radiant, and she had been doomed to waste such opportunities on a succession of ill-smelling italian towns. she still felt it to be her deepest grievance against her husband; and now that, after four years of petty household worries, another chance of escape had come, he already wanted to drag her back to bondage! this fit of retrospection had been provoked by two letters which had come that morning. one was from ralph, who began by reminding her that he had not heard from her for weeks, and went on to point out, in his usual tone of good-humoured remonstrance, that since her departure the drain on her letter of credit had been deep and constant. "i wanted you," he wrote, "to get all the fun you could out of the money i made last spring; but i didn't think you'd get through it quite so fast. try to come home without leaving too many bills behind you. your illness and paul's cost more than i expected, and lipscomb has had a bad knock in wall street, and hasn't yet paid his first quarter..." always the same monotonous refrain! was it her fault that she and the boy had been ill? or that harry lipscomb had been "on the wrong side" of wall street? ralph seemed to have money on the brain: his business life had certainly deteriorated him. and, since he hadn't made a success of it after all, why shouldn't he turn back to literature and try to write his novel? undine, the previous winter, had been dazzled by the figures which a well-known magazine editor, whom she had met at dinner had named as within reach of the successful novelist. she perceived for the first time that literature was becoming fashionable, and instantly decided that it would be amusing and original if she and ralph should owe their prosperity to his talent. she already saw herself, as the wife of a celebrated author, wearing "artistic" dresses and doing the drawing-room over with gothic tapestries and dim lights in altar candle-sticks. but when she suggested ralph's taking up his novel he answered with a laugh that his brains were sold to the firm--that when he came back at night the tank was empty...and now he wanted her to sail for home in a week! the other letter excited a deeper resentment. it was an appeal from laura fairford to return and look after ralph. he was overworked and out of spirits, she wrote, and his mother and sister, reluctant as they were to interfere, felt they ought to urge undine to come back to him. details followed, unwelcome and officious. what right had laura fairford to preach to her of wifely obligations? no doubt charles bowen had sent home a highly-coloured report--and there was really a certain irony in mrs. fairford's criticizing her sister-in-law's conduct on information obtained from such a source! undine turned from the window and threw herself down on her deeply cushioned sofa. she was feeling the pleasant fatigue consequent on her trip to the country, whither she and mrs. shallum had gone with raymond de chelles to spend a night at the old marquis's chateau. when her travelling companions, an hour earlier, had left her at her door, she had half-promised to rejoin them for a late dinner in the bois; and as she leaned back among the cushions disturbing thoughts were banished by the urgent necessity of deciding what dress she should wear. these bright weeks of the parisian spring had given her a first real glimpse into the art of living. from the experts who had taught her to subdue the curves of her figure and soften her bright free stare with dusky pencillings, to the skilled purveyors of countless forms of pleasure--the theatres and restaurants, the green and blossoming suburbs, the whole shining shifting spectacle of nights and days--every sight and sound and word had combined to charm her perceptions and refine her taste. and her growing friendship with raymond de chelles had been the most potent of these influences. chelles, at once immensely "taken," had not only shown his eagerness to share in the helter-skelter motions of undine's party, but had given her glimpses of another, still more brilliant existence, that life of the inaccessible "faubourg" of which the first tantalizing hints had but lately reached her. hitherto she had assumed that paris existed for the stranger, that its native life was merely an obscure foundation for the dazzling superstructure of hotels and restaurants in which her compatriots disported themselves. but lately she had begun to hear about other american women, the women who had married into the french aristocracy, and who led, in the high-walled houses beyond the seine which she had once thought so dull and dingy, a life that made her own seem as undistinguished as the social existence of the mealey house. perhaps what most exasperated her was the discovery, in this impenetrable group, of the miss wincher who had poisoned her far-off summer at potash springs. to recognize her old enemy in the marquise de trezac who so frequently figured in the parisian chronicle was the more irritating to undine because her intervening social experiences had caused her to look back on nettie wincher as a frumpy girl who wouldn't have "had a show" in new york. once more all the accepted values were reversed, and it turned out that miss wincher had been in possession of some key to success on which undine had not yet put her hand. to know that others were indifferent to what she had thought important was to cheapen all present pleasure and turn the whole force of her desires in a new direction. what she wanted for the moment was to linger on in paris, prolonging her flirtation with chelles, and profiting by it to detach herself from her compatriots and enter doors closed to their approach. and chelles himself attracted her: she thought him as "sweet" as she had once thought ralph, whose fastidiousness and refinement were blent in him with a delightful foreign vivacity. his chief value, however, lay in his power of exciting van degen's jealousy. she knew enough of french customs to be aware that such devotion as chelles' was not likely to have much practical bearing on her future; but peter had an alarming way of lapsing into security, and as a spur to his ardour she knew the value of other men's attentions. it had become undine's fixed purpose to bring van degen to a definite expression of his intentions. the case of indiana frusk, whose brilliant marriage the journals of two continents had recently chronicled with unprecedented richness of detail, had made less impression on him than she hoped. he treated it as a comic episode without special bearing on their case, and once, when undine cited rolliver's expensive fight for freedom as an instance of the power of love over the most invulnerable natures, had answered carelessly: "oh, his first wife was a laundress, i believe." but all about them couples were unpairing and pairing again with an ease and rapidity that encouraged undine to bide her time. it was simply a question of making van degen want her enough, and of not being obliged to abandon the game before he wanted her as much as she meant he should. this was precisely what would happen if she were compelled to leave paris now. already the event had shown how right she had been to come abroad: the attention she attracted in paris had reawakened van degen's fancy, and her hold over him was stronger than when they had parted in america. but the next step must be taken with coolness and circumspection; and she must not throw away what she had gained by going away at a stage when he was surer of her than she of him. she was still intensely considering these questions when the door behind her opened and he came in. she looked up with a frown and he gave a deprecating laugh. "didn't i knock? don't look so savage! they told me downstairs you'd got back, and i just bolted in without thinking." he had widened and purpled since their first encounter, five years earlier, but his features had not matured. his face was still the face of a covetous bullying boy, with a large appetite for primitive satisfactions and a sturdy belief in his intrinsic right to them. it was all the more satisfying to undine's vanity to see his look change at her tone from command to conciliation, and from conciliation to the entreaty of a capriciously-treated animal. "what a ridiculous hour for a visit!" she exclaimed, ignoring his excuse. "well, if you disappear like that, without a word--" "i told my maid to telephone you i was going away." "you couldn't make time to do it yourself, i suppose?" "we rushed off suddenly; i'd hardly time to get to the station." "you rushed off where, may i ask?" van degen still lowered down on her. "oh didn't i tell you? i've been down staying at chelles' chateau in burgundy." her face lit up and she raised herself eagerly on her elbow. "it's the most wonderful old house you ever saw: a real castle, with towers, and water all round it, and a funny kind of bridge they pull up. chelles said he wanted me to see just how they lived at home, and i did; i saw everything: the tapestries that louis quinze gave them, and the family portraits, and the chapel, where their own priest says mass, and they sit by themselves in a balcony with crowns all over it. the priest was a lovely old man--he said he'd give anything to convert me. do you know, i think there's something very beautiful about the roman catholic religion? i've often felt i might have been happier if i'd had some religious influence in my life." she sighed a little, and turned her head away. she flattered herself that she had learned to strike the right note with van degen. at this crucial stage he needed a taste of his own methods, a glimpse of the fact that there were women in the world who could get on without him. he continued to gaze down at her sulkily. "were the old people there? you never told me you knew his mother." "i don't. they weren't there. but it didn't make a bit of difference, because raymond sent down a cook from the luxe." "oh, lord," van degen groaned, dropping down on the end of the sofa. "was the cook got down to chaperon you?" undine laughed. "you talk like ralph! i had bertha with me." "bertha!" his tone of contempt surprised her. she had supposed that mrs. shallum's presence had made the visit perfectly correct. "you went without knowing his parents, and without their inviting you? don't you know what that sort of thing means out here? chelles did it to brag about you at his club. he wants to compromise you--that's his game!" "do you suppose he does?" a flicker of a smile crossed her lips. "i'm so unconventional: when i like a man i never stop to think about such things. but i ought to, of course--you're quite right." she looked at van degen thoughtfully. "at any rate, he's not a married man." van degen had got to his feet again and was standing accusingly before her; but as she spoke the blood rose to his neck and ears. "what difference does that make?" "it might make a good deal. i see," she added, "how careful i ought to be about going round with you." "with me?" his face fell at the retort; then he broke into a laugh. he adored undine's "smartness," which was of precisely the same quality as his own. "oh, that's another thing: you can always trust me to look after you!" "with your reputation? much obliged!" van degen smiled. she knew he liked such allusions, and was pleased that she thought him compromising. "oh, i'm as good as gold. you've made a new man of me!" "have i?" she considered him in silence for a moment. "i wonder what you've done to me but make a discontented woman of me--discontented with everything i had before i knew you?" the change of tone was thrilling to him. he forgot her mockery, forgot his rival, and sat down at her side, almost in possession of her waist. "look here," he asked, "where are we going to dine to-night?" his nearness was not agreeable to undine, but she liked his free way, his contempt for verbal preliminaries. ralph's reserves and delicacies, his perpetual desire that he and she should be attuned to the same key, had always vaguely bored her; whereas in van degen's manner she felt a hint of the masterful way that had once subdued her in elmer moffatt. but she drew back, releasing herself. "to-night? i can't--i'm engaged." "i know you are: engaged to me! you promised last sunday you'd dine with me out of town to-night." "how can i remember what i promised last sunday? besides, after what you've said, i see i oughtn't to." "what do you mean by what i've said?" "why, that i'm imprudent; that people are talking--" he stood up with an angry laugh. "i suppose you're dining with chelles. is that it?" "is that the way you cross-examine clare?" "i don't care a hang what clare does--i never have." "that must--in some ways--be rather convenient for her!" "glad you think so. are you dining with him?" she slowly turned the wedding-ring upon her finger. "you know i'm not married to you--yet!" he took a random turn through the room; then he came back and planted himself wrathfully before her. "can't you see the man's doing his best to make a fool of you?" she kept her amused gaze on him. "does it strike you that it's such an awfully easy thing to do?" the edges of his ears were purple. "i sometimes think it's easier for these damned little dancing-masters than for one of us." undine was still smiling up at him; but suddenly her grew grave. "what does it matter what i do or don't do, when ralph has ordered me home next week?" "ordered you home?" his face changed. "well, you're not going, are you?" "what's the use of saying such things?" she gave a disenchanted laugh. "i'm a poor man's wife, and can't do the things my friends do. it's not because ralph loves me that he wants me back--it's simply because he can't afford to let me stay!" van degen's perturbation was increasing. "but you mustn't go--it's preposterous! why should a woman like you be sacrificed when a lot of dreary frumps have everything they want? besides, you can't chuck me like this! why, we're all to motor down to aix next week, and perhaps take a dip into italy--" "oh, italy--" she murmured on a note of yearning. he was closer now, and had her hands. "you'd love that, wouldn't you? as far as venice, anyhow; and then in august there's trouville--you've never tried trouville? there's an awfully jolly crowd there--and the motoring's ripping in normandy. if you say so i'll take a villa there instead of going back to newport. and i'll put the sorceress in commission, and you can make up parties and run off whenever you like, to scotland or norway--" he hung above her. "don't dine with chelles to-night! come with me, and we'll talk things over; and next week we'll run down to trouville to choose the villa." undine's heart was beating fast, but she felt within her a strange lucid force of resistance. because of that sense of security she left her hands in van degen's. so mr. spragg might have felt at the tensest hour of the pure water move. she leaned forward, holding her suitor off by the pressure of her bent-back palms. "kiss me good-bye, peter; i sail on wednesday," she said. it was the first time she had permitted him a kiss, and as his face darkened down on her she felt a moment's recoil. but her physical reactions were never very acute: she always vaguely wondered why people made "such a fuss," were so violently for or against such demonstrations. a cool spirit within her seemed to watch over and regulate her sensations, and leave her capable of measuring the intensity of those she provoked. she turned to look at the clock. "you must go now--i shall be hours late for dinner." "go--after that?" he held her fast. "kiss me again," he commanded. it was wonderful how cool she felt--how easily she could slip out of his grasp! any man could be managed like a child if he were really in love with one.... "don't be a goose, peter; do you suppose i'd have kissed you if--" "if what--what--what?" he mimicked her ecstatically, not listening. she saw that if she wished to make him hear her she must put more distance between them, and she rose and moved across the room. from the fireplace she turned to add--"if we hadn't been saying good-bye?" "good-bye--now? what's the use of talking like that?" he jumped up and followed her. "look here, undine--i'll do anything on earth you want; only don't talk of going! if you'll only stay i'll make it all as straight and square as you please. i'll get bertha shallum to stop over with you for the summer; i'll take a house at trouville and make my wife come out there. hang it, she shall, if you say so! only be a little good to me!" still she stood before him without speaking, aware that her implacable brows and narrowed lips would hold him off as long as she chose. "what's the matter. undine? why don't you answer? you know you can't go back to that deadly dry-rot!" she swept about on him with indignant eyes. "i can't go on with my present life either. it's hateful--as hateful as the other. if i don't go home i've got to decide on something different." "what do you mean by 'something different'?" she was silent, and he insisted: "are you really thinking of marrying chelles?" she started as if he had surprised a secret. "i'll never forgive you if you speak of it--" "good lord! good lord!" he groaned. she remained motionless, with lowered lids, and he went up to her and pulled her about so that she faced him. "undine, honour bright--do you think he'll marry you?" she looked at him with a sudden hardness in her eyes. "i really can't discuss such things with you." "oh, for the lord's sake don't take that tone! i don't half know what i'm saying...but you mustn't throw yourself away a second time. i'll do anything you want--i swear i will!" a knock on the door sent them apart, and a servant entered with a telegram. undine turned away to the window with the narrow blue slip. she was glad of the interruption: the sense of what she had at stake made her want to pause a moment and to draw breath. the message was a long cable signed with laura fairford's name. it told her that ralph had been taken suddenly ill with pneumonia, that his condition was serious and that the doctors advised his wife's immediate return. undine had to read the words over two or three times to get them into her crowded mind; and even after she had done so she needed more time to see their bearing on her own situation. if the message had concerned her boy her brain would have acted more quickly. she had never troubled herself over the possibility of paul's falling ill in her absence, but she understood now that if the cable had been about him she would have rushed to the earliest steamer. with ralph it was different. ralph was always perfectly well--she could not picture him as being suddenly at death's door and in need of her. probably his mother and sister had had a panic: they were always full of sentimental terrors. the next moment an angry suspicion flashed across her: what if the cable were a device of the marvell women to bring her back? perhaps it had been sent with ralph's connivance! no doubt bowen had written home about her--washington square had received some monstrous report of her doings!... yes, the cable was clearly an echo of laura's letter--mother and daughter had cooked it up to spoil her pleasure. once the thought had occurred to her it struck root in her mind and began to throw out giant branches. van degen followed her to the window, his face still flushed and working. "what's the matter?" he asked, as she continued to stare silently at the telegram. she crumpled the strip of paper in her hand. if only she had been alone, had had a chance to think out her answers! "what on earth's the matter?" he repeated. "oh, nothing--nothing." "nothing? when you're as white as a sheet?" "am i?" she gave a slight laugh. "it's only a cable from home." "ralph?" she hesitated. "no. laura." "what the devil is she cabling you about?" "she says ralph wants me." "now--at once?" "at once." van degen laughed impatiently. "why don't he tell you so himself? what business is it of laura fairford's?" undine's gesture implied a "what indeed?" "is that all she says?" she hesitated again. "yes--that's all." as she spoke she tossed the telegram into the basket beneath the writing-table. "as if i didn't have to go anyhow?" she exclaimed. with an aching clearness of vision she saw what lay before her--the hurried preparations, the long tedious voyage on a steamer chosen at haphazard, the arrival in the deadly july heat, and the relapse into all the insufferable daily fag of nursery and kitchen--she saw it and her imagination recoiled. van degen's eyes still hung on her: she guessed that he was intensely engaged in trying to follow what was passing through her mind. presently he came up to her again, no longer perilous and importunate, but awkwardly tender, ridiculously moved by her distress. "undine, listen: won't you let me make it all right for you to stay?" her heart began to beat more quickly, and she let him come close, meeting his eyes coldly but without anger. "what do you call 'making it all right'? paying my bills? don't you see that's what i hate, and will never let myself be dragged into again?" she laid her hand on his arm. "the time has come when i must be sensible, peter; that's why we must say good-bye." "do you mean to tell me you're going back to ralph?" she paused a moment; then she murmured between her lips: "i shall never go back to him." "then you do mean to marry chelles?" "i've told you we must say good-bye. i've got to look out for my future." he stood before her, irresolute, tormented, his lazy mind and impatient senses labouring with a problem beyond their power. "ain't i here to look out for your future?" he said at last. "no one shall look out for it in the way you mean. i'd rather never see you again--" he gave her a baffled stare. "oh, damn it--if that's the way you feel!" he turned and flung away toward the door. she stood motionless where he left her, every nerve strung to the highest pitch of watchfulness. as she stood there, the scene about her stamped itself on her brain with the sharpest precision. she was aware of the fading of the summer light outside, of the movements of her maid, who was laying out her dinner-dress in the room beyond, and of the fact that the tea-roses on her writing-table, shaken by van degen's tread, were dropping their petals over ralph's letter, and down on the crumpled telegram which she could see through the trellised sides of the scrap-basket. in another moment van degen would be gone. worse yet, while he wavered in the doorway the shallums and chelles, after vainly awaiting her, might dash back from the bois and break in on them. these and other chances rose before her, urging her to action; but she held fast, immovable, unwavering, a proud yet plaintive image of renunciation. van degen's hand was on the door. he half-opened it and then turned back. "that's all you've got to say, then?" "that's all." he jerked the door open and passed out. she saw him stop in the ante-room to pick up his hat and stick, his heavy figure silhouetted against the glare of the wall-lights. a ray of the same light fell on her where she stood in the unlit sitting-room, and her reflection bloomed out like a flower from the mirror that faced her. she looked at the image and waited. van degen put his hat on his head and slowly opened the door into the outer hall. then he turned abruptly, his bulk eclipsing her reflection as he plunged back into the room and came up to her. "i'll do anything you say. undine; i'll do anything in god's world to keep you!" she turned her eyes from the mirror and let them rest on his face, which looked as small and withered as an old man's, with a lower lip that trembled queerly.... xxi the spring in new york proceeded through more than its usual extremes of temperature to the threshold of a sultry june. ralph marvell, wearily bent to his task, felt the fantastic humours of the weather as only one more incoherence in the general chaos of his case. it was strange enough, after four years of marriage, to find himself again in his old brown room in washington square. it was hardly there that he had expected pegasus to land him; and, like a man returning to the scenes of his childhood, he found everything on a much smaller scale than he had imagined. had the dagonet boundaries really narrowed, or had the breach in the walls of his own life let in a wider vision? certainly there had come to be other differences between his present and his former self than that embodied in the presence of his little boy in the next room. paul, in fact, was now the chief link between ralph and his past. concerning his son he still felt and thought, in a general way, in the terms of the dagonet tradition; he still wanted to implant in paul some of the reserves and discriminations which divided that tradition from the new spirit of limitless concession. but for himself it was different. since his transaction with moffatt he had had the sense of living under a new dispensation. he was not sure that it was any worse than the other; but then he was no longer very sure about anything. perhaps this growing indifference was merely the reaction from a long nervous strain: that his mother and sister thought it so was shown by the way in which they mutely watched and hovered. their discretion was like the hushed tread about a sick-bed. they permitted themselves no criticism of undine; he was asked no awkward questions, subjected to no ill-timed sympathy. they simply took him back, on his own terms, into the life he had left them to; and their silence had none of those subtle implications of disapproval which may be so much more wounding than speech. for a while he received a weekly letter from undine. vague and disappointing though they were, these missives helped him through the days; but he looked forward to them rather as a pretext for replies than for their actual contents. undine was never at a loss for the spoken word: ralph had often wondered at her verbal range and her fluent use of terms outside the current vocabulary. she had certainly not picked these up in books, since she never opened one: they seemed rather like some odd transmission of her preaching grandparent's oratory. but in her brief and colourless letters she repeated the same bald statements in the same few terms. she was well, she had been "round" with bertha shallum, she had dined with the jim driscolls or may beringer or dicky bowles, the weather was too lovely or too awful; such was the gist of her news. on the last page she hoped paul was well and sent him a kiss; but she never made a suggestion concerning his care or asked a question about his pursuits. one could only infer that, knowing in what good hands he was, she judged such solicitude superfluous; and it was thus that ralph put the matter to his mother. "of course she's not worrying about the boy--why should she? she knows that with you and laura he's as happy as a king." to which mrs. marvell would answer gravely: "when you write, be sure to say i shan't put on his thinner flannels as long as this east wind lasts." as for her husband's welfare. undine's sole allusion to it consisted in the invariable expression of the hope that he was getting along all right: the phrase was always the same, and ralph learned to know just how far down the third page to look for it. in a postscript she sometimes asked him to tell her mother about a new way of doing hair or cutting a skirt; and this was usually the most eloquent passage of the letter. what satisfaction he extracted from these communications he would have found it hard to say; yet when they did not come he missed them hardly less than if they had given him all he craved. sometimes the mere act of holding the blue or mauve sheet and breathing its scent was like holding his wife's hand and being enveloped in her fresh young fragrance: the sentimental disappointment vanished in the penetrating physical sensation. in other moods it was enough to trace the letters of the first line and the last for the desert of perfunctory phrases between the two to vanish, leaving him only the vision of their interlaced names, as of a mystic bond which her own hand had tied. or else he saw her, closely, palpably before him, as she sat at her writing-table, frowning and a little flushed, her bent nape showing the light on her hair, her short lip pulled up by the effort of composition; and this picture had the violent reality of dream-images on the verge of waking. at other times, as he read her letter, he felt simply that at least in the moment of writing it she had been with him. but in one of the last she had said (to excuse a bad blot and an incoherent sentence): "everybody's talking to me at once, and i don't know what i'm writing." that letter he had thrown into the fire.... after the first few weeks, the letters came less and less regularly: at the end of two months they ceased. ralph had got into the habit of watching for them on the days when a foreign post was due, and as the weeks went by without a sign he began to invent excuses for leaving the office earlier and hurrying back to washington square to search the letter-box for a big tinted envelope with a straggling blotted superscription. undine's departure had given him a momentary sense of liberation: at that stage in their relations any change would have brought relief. but now that she was gone he knew she could never really go. though his feeling for her had changed, it still ruled his life. if he saw her in her weakness he felt her in her power: the power of youth and physical radiance that clung to his disenchanted memories as the scent she used clung to her letters. looking back at their four years of marriage he began to ask himself if he had done all he could to draw her half-formed spirit from its sleep. had he not expected too much at first, and grown too indifferent in the sequel? after all, she was still in the toy age; and perhaps the very extravagance of his love had retarded her growth, helped to imprison her in a little circle of frivolous illusions. but the last months had made a man of him, and when she came back he would know how to lift her to the height of his experience. so he would reason, day by day, as he hastened back to washington square; but when he opened the door, and his first glance at the hall table showed him there was no letter there, his illusions shrivelled down to their weak roots. she had not written: she did not mean to write. he and the boy were no longer a part of her life. when she came back everything would be as it had been before, with the dreary difference that she had tasted new pleasures and that their absence would take the savour from all he had to give her. then the coming of another foreign mail would lift his hopes, and as he hurried home he would imagine new reasons for expecting a letter.... week after week he swung between the extremes of hope and dejection, and at last, when the strain had become unbearable, he cabled her. the answer ran: "very well best love writing"; but the promised letter never came.... he went on steadily with his work: he even passed through a phase of exaggerated energy. but his baffled youth fought in him for air. was this to be the end? was he to wear his life out in useless drudgery? the plain prose of it, of course, was that the economic situation remained unchanged by the sentimental catastrophe and that he must go on working for his wife and child. but at any rate, as it was mainly for paul that he would henceforth work, it should be on his own terms and according to his inherited notions of "straightness." he would never again engage in any transaction resembling his compact with moffatt. even now he was not sure there had been anything crooked in that; but the fact of his having instinctively referred the point to mr. spragg rather than to his grandfather implied a presumption against it. his partners were quick to profit by his sudden spurt of energy, and his work grew no lighter. he was not only the youngest and most recent member of the firm, but the one who had so far added least to the volume of its business. his hours were the longest, his absences, as summer approached, the least frequent and the most grudgingly accorded. no doubt his associates knew that he was pressed for money and could not risk a break. they "worked" him, and he was aware of it, and submitted because he dared not lose his job. but the long hours of mechanical drudgery were telling on his active body and undisciplined nerves. he had begun too late to subject himself to the persistent mortification of spirit and flesh which is a condition of the average business life; and after the long dull days in the office the evenings at his grandfather's whist-table did not give him the counter-stimulus he needed. almost every one had gone out of town; but now and then miss ray came to dine, and ralph, seated beneath the family portraits and opposite the desiccated harriet, who had already faded to the semblance of one of her own great-aunts, listened languidly to the kind of talk that the originals might have exchanged about the same table when new york gentility centred in the battery and the bowling green. mr. dagonet was always pleasant to see and hear, but his sarcasms were growing faint and recondite: they had as little bearing on life as the humours of a restoration comedy. as for mrs. marvell and miss ray, they seemed to the young man even more spectrally remote: hardly anything that mattered to him existed for them, and their prejudices reminded him of sign-posts warning off trespassers who have long since ceased to intrude. now and then he dined at his club and went on to the theatre with some young men of his own age; but he left them afterward, half vexed with himself for not being in the humour to prolong the adventure. there were moments when he would have liked to affirm his freedom in however commonplace a way: moments when the vulgarest way would have seemed the most satisfying. but he always ended by walking home alone and tip-toeing upstairs through the sleeping house lest he should wake his boy.... on saturday afternoons, when the business world was hurrying to the country for golf and tennis, he stayed in town and took paul to see the spraggs. several times since his wife's departure he had tried to bring about closer relations between his own family and undine's; and the ladies of washington square, in their eagerness to meet his wishes, had made various friendly advances to mrs. spragg. but they were met by a mute resistance which made ralph suspect that undine's strictures on his family had taken root in her mother's brooding mind; and he gave up the struggle to bring together what had been so effectually put asunder. if he regretted his lack of success it was chiefly because he was so sorry for the spraggs. soon after undine's marriage they had abandoned their polychrome suite at the stentorian, and since then their peregrinations had carried them through half the hotels of the metropolis. undine, who had early discovered her mistake in thinking hotel life fashionable, had tried to persuade her parents to take a house of their own; but though they refrained from taxing her with inconsistency they did not act on her suggestion. mrs. spragg seemed to shrink from the thought of "going back to house-keeping," and ralph suspected that she depended on the transit from hotel to hotel as the one element of variety in her life. as for mr. spragg, it was impossible to imagine any one in whom the domestic sentiments were more completely unlocalized and disconnected from any fixed habits; and he was probably aware of his changes of abode chiefly as they obliged him to ascend from the subway, or descend from the "elevated," a few blocks higher up or lower down. neither husband nor wife complained to ralph of their frequent displacements, or assigned to them any cause save the vague one of "guessing they could do better"; but ralph noticed that the decreasing luxury of their life synchronized with undine's growing demands for money. during the last few months they had transferred themselves to the "malibran," a tall narrow structure resembling a grain-elevator divided into cells, where linoleum and lincrusta simulated the stucco and marble of the stentorian, and fagged business men and their families consumed the watery stews dispensed by "coloured help" in the grey twilight of a basement dining-room. mrs. spragg had no sitting-room, and paul and his father had to be received in one of the long public parlours, between ladies seated at rickety desks in the throes of correspondence and groups of listlessly conversing residents and callers. the spraggs were intensely proud of their grandson, and ralph perceived that they would have liked to see paul charging uproariously from group to group, and thrusting his bright curls and cherubic smile upon the general attention. the fact that the boy preferred to stand between his grandfather's knees and play with mr. spragg's masonic emblem, or dangle his legs from the arm of mrs. spragg's chair, seemed to his grandparents evidence of ill-health or undue repression, and he was subjected by mrs. spragg to searching enquiries as to how his food set, and whether he didn't think his popper was too strict with him. a more embarrassing problem was raised by the "surprise" (in the shape of peanut candy or chocolate creams) which he was invited to hunt for in gran'ma's pockets, and which ralph had to confiscate on the way home lest the dietary rules of washington square should be too visibly infringed. sometimes ralph found mrs. heeny, ruddy and jovial, seated in the arm-chair opposite mrs. spragg, and regaling her with selections from a new batch of clippings. during undine's illness of the previous winter mrs. heeny had become a familiar figure to paul, who had learned to expect almost as much from her bag as from his grandmother's pockets; so that the intemperate saturdays at the malibran were usually followed by languid and abstemious sundays in washington square. mrs. heeny, being unaware of this sequel to her bounties, formed the habit of appearing regularly on saturdays, and while she chatted with his grandmother the little boy was encouraged to scatter the grimy carpet with face-creams and bunches of clippings in his thrilling quest for the sweets at the bottom of her bag. "i declare, if he ain't in just as much of a hurry f'r everything as his mother!" she exclaimed one day in her rich rolling voice; and stooping to pick up a long strip of newspaper which paul had flung aside she added, as she smoothed it out: "i guess 'f he was a little mite older he'd be better pleased with this 'n with the candy. it's the very thing i was trying to find for you the other day, mrs. spragg," she went on, holding the bit of paper at arm's length; and she began to read out, with a loudness proportioned to the distance between her eyes and the text: "with two such sprinters as 'pete' van degen and dicky bowles to set the pace, it's no wonder the new york set in paris has struck a livelier gait than ever this spring. it's a high-pressure season and no mistake, and no one lags behind less than the fascinating mrs. ralph marvell, who is to be seen daily and nightly in all the smartest restaurants and naughtiest theatres, with so many devoted swains in attendance that the rival beauties of both worlds are said to be making catty comments. but then mrs. marvell's gowns are almost as good as her looks--and how can you expect the other women to stand for such a monopoly?" to escape the strain of these visits, ralph once or twice tried the experiment of leaving paul with his grand-parents and calling for him in the late afternoon; but one day, on re-entering the malibran, he was met by a small abashed figure clad in a kaleidoscopic tartan and a green velvet cap with a silver thistle. after this experience of the "surprises" of which gran'ma was capable when she had a chance to take paul shopping ralph did not again venture to leave his son, and their subsequent saturdays were passed together in the sultry gloom of the malibran. conversation with the spraggs was almost impossible. ralph could talk with his father-in-law in his office, but in the hotel parlour mr. spragg sat in a ruminating silence broken only by the emission of an occasional "well--well" addressed to his grandson. as for mrs. spragg, her son-in-law could not remember having had a sustained conversation with her since the distant day when he had first called at the stentorian, and had been "entertained," in undine's absence, by her astonished mother. the shock of that encounter had moved mrs. spragg to eloquence; but ralph's entrance into the family, without making him seem less of a stranger, appeared once for all to have relieved her of the obligation of finding something to say to him. the one question she invariably asked: "you heard from undie?" had been relatively easy to answer while his wife's infrequent letters continued to arrive; but a saturday came when he felt the blood rise to his temples as, for the fourth consecutive week, he stammered out, under the snapping eyes of mrs. heeny: "no, not by this post either--i begin to think i must have lost a letter"; and it was then that mr. spragg, who had sat silently looking up at the ceiling, cut short his wife's exclamation by an enquiry about real estate in the bronx. after that, ralph noticed, mrs. spragg never again renewed her question; and he understood that his father-in-law had guessed his embarrassment and wished to spare it. ralph had never thought of looking for any delicacy of feeling under mr. spragg's large lazy irony, and the incident drew the two men nearer together. mrs. spragg, for her part, was certainly not delicate; but she was simple and without malice, and ralph liked her for her silent acceptance of her diminished state. sometimes, as he sat between the lonely primitive old couple, he wondered from what source undine's voracious ambitions had been drawn: all she cared for, and attached importance to, was as remote from her parents' conception of life as her impatient greed from their passive stoicism. one hot afternoon toward the end of june ralph suddenly wondered if clare van degen were still in town. she had dined in washington square some ten days earlier, and he remembered her saying that she had sent the children down to long island, but that she herself meant to stay on in town till the heat grew unbearable. she hated her big showy place on long island, she was tired of the spring trip to london and paris, where one met at every turn the faces one had grown sick of seeing all winter, and she declared that in the early summer new york was the only place in which one could escape from new yorkers... she put the case amusingly, and it was like her to take up any attitude that went against the habits of her set; but she lived at the mercy of her moods, and one could never tell how long any one of them would rule her. as he sat in his office, with the noise and glare of the endless afternoon rising up in hot waves from the street, there wandered into ralph's mind a vision of her shady drawing-room. all day it hung before him like the mirage of a spring before a dusty traveller: he felt a positive thirst for her presence, for the sound of her voice, the wide spaces and luxurious silences surrounding her. it was perhaps because, on that particular day, a spiral pain was twisting around in the back of his head, and digging in a little deeper with each twist, and because the figures on the balance sheet before him were hopping about like black imps in an infernal forward-and-back, that the picture hung there so persistently. it was a long time since he had wanted anything as much as, at that particular moment, he wanted to be with clare and hear her voice; and as soon as he had ground out the day's measure of work he rang up the van degen palace and learned that she was still in town. the lowered awnings of her inner drawing-room cast a luminous shadow on old cabinets and consoles, and on the pale flowers scattered here and there in vases of bronze and porcelain. clare's taste was as capricious as her moods, and the rest of the house was not in harmony with this room. there was, in particular, another drawing-room, which she now described as peter's creation, but which ralph knew to be partly hers: a heavily decorated apartment, where popple's portrait of her throned over a waste of gilt furniture. it was characteristic that to-day she had had ralph shown in by another way; and that, as she had spared him the polyphonic drawing-room, so she had skilfully adapted her own appearance to her soberer background. she sat near the window, reading, in a clear cool dress: and at his entrance she merely slipped a finger between the pages and looked up at him. her way of receiving him made him feel that restlessness and stridency were as unlike her genuine self as the gilded drawing-room, and that this quiet creature was the only real clare, the clare who had once been so nearly his, and who seemed to want him to know that she had never wholly been any one else's. "why didn't you let me know you were still in town?" he asked, as he sat down in the sofa-corner near her chair. her dark smile deepened. "i hoped you'd come and see." "one never knows, with you." he was looking about the room with a kind of confused pleasure in its pale shadows and spots of dark rich colour. the old lacquer screen behind clare's head looked like a lustreless black pool with gold leaves floating on it; and another piece, a little table at her elbow, had the brown bloom and the pear-like curves of an old violin. "i like to be here," ralph said. she did not make the mistake of asking: "then why do you never come?" instead, she turned away and drew an inner curtain across the window to shut out the sunlight which was beginning to slant in under the awning. the mere fact of her not answering, and the final touch of well-being which her gesture gave, reminded him of other summer days they had spent together long rambling boy-and-girl days in the hot woods and fields, when they had never thought of talking to each other unless there was something they particularly wanted to say. his tired fancy strayed off for a second to the thought of what it would have been like come back, at the end of the day, to such a sweet community of silence; but his mind was too crowded with importunate facts for any lasting view of visionary distances. the thought faded, and he merely felt how restful it was to have her near... "i'm glad you stayed in town: you must let me come again," he said. "i suppose you can't always get away," she answered; and she began to listen, with grave intelligent eyes, to his description of his tedious days. with her eyes on him he felt the exquisite relief of talking about himself as he had not dared to talk to any one since his marriage. he would not for the world have confessed his discouragement, his consciousness of incapacity; to undine and in washington square any hint of failure would have been taken as a criticism of what his wife demanded of him. only to clare van degen could he cry out his present despondency and his loathing of the interminable task ahead. "a man doesn't know till he tries it how killing uncongenial work is, and how it destroys the power of doing what one's fit for, even if there's time for both. but there's paul to be looked out for, and i daren't chuck my job--i'm in mortal terror of its chucking me..." little by little he slipped into a detailed recital of all his lesser worries, the most recent of which was his experience with the lipscombs, who, after a two months' tenancy of the west end avenue house, had decamped without paying their rent. clare laughed contemptuously. "yes--i heard he'd come to grief and been suspended from the stock exchange, and i see in the papers that his wife's retort has been to sue for a divorce." ralph knew that, like all their clan, his cousin regarded a divorce-suit as a vulgar and unnecessary way of taking the public into one's confidence. his mind flashed back to the family feast in washington square in celebration of his engagement. he recalled his grandfather's chance allusion to mrs. lipscomb, and undine's answer, fluted out on her highest note: "oh, i guess she'll get a divorce pretty soon. he's been a disappointment to her." ralph could still hear the horrified murmur with which his mother had rebuked his laugh. for he had laughed--had thought undine's speech fresh and natural! now he felt the ironic rebound of her words. heaven knew he had been a disappointment to her; and what was there in her own feeling, or in her inherited prejudices, to prevent her seeking the same redress as mabel lipscomb? he wondered if the same thought were in his cousin's mind... they began to talk of other things: books, pictures, plays; and one by one the closed doors opened and light was let into dusty shuttered places. clare's mind was neither keen nor deep: ralph, in the past, had smiled at her rash ardours and vague intensities. but she had his own range of allusions, and a great gift of momentary understanding; and he had so long beaten his thoughts out against a blank wall of incomprehension that her sympathy seemed full of insight. she began by a question about his writing, but the subject was distasteful to him, and he turned the talk to a new book in which he had been interested. she knew enough of it to slip in the right word here and there; and thence they wandered on to kindred topics. under the warmth of her attention his torpid ideas awoke again, and his eyes took their fill of pleasure as she leaned forward, her thin brown hands clasped on her knees and her eager face reflecting all his feelings. there was a moment when the two currents of sensation were merged in one, and he began to feel confusedly that he was young and she was kind, and that there was nothing he would like better than to go on sitting there, not much caring what she said or how he answered, if only she would let him look at her and give him one of her thin brown hands to hold. then the corkscrew in the back of his head dug into him again with a deeper thrust, and she seemed suddenly to recede to a great distance and be divided from him by a fog of pain. the fog lifted after a minute, but it left him queerly remote from her, from the cool room with its scents and shadows, and from all the objects which, a moment before, had so sharply impinged upon his senses. it was as though he looked at it all through a rain-blurred pane, against which his hand would strike if he held it out to her... that impression passed also, and he found himself thinking how tired he was and how little anything mattered. he recalled the unfinished piece of work on his desk, and for a moment had the odd illusion that it was there before him... she exclaimed: "but are you going?" and her exclamation made him aware that he had left his seat and was standing in front of her... he fancied there was some kind of appeal in her brown eyes; but she was so dim and far off that he couldn't be sure of what she wanted, and the next moment he found himself shaking hands with her, and heard her saying something kind and cold about its having been so nice to see him... half way up the stairs little paul, shining and rosy from supper, lurked in ambush for his evening game. ralph was fond of stooping down to let the boy climb up his outstretched arms to his shoulders, but to-day, as he did so, paul's hug seemed to crush him in a vice, and the shout of welcome that accompanied it racked his ears like an explosion of steam-whistles. the queer distance between himself and the rest of the world was annihilated again: everything stared and glared and clutched him. he tried to turn away his face from the child's hot kisses; and as he did so he caught sight of a mauve envelope among the hats and sticks on the hall table. instantly he passed paul over to his nurse, stammered out a word about being tired, and sprang up the long flights to his study. the pain in his head had stopped, but his hands trembled as he tore open the envelope. within it was a second letter bearing a french stamp and addressed to himself. it looked like a business communication and had apparently been sent to undine's hotel in paris and forwarded to him by her hand. "another bill!" he reflected grimly, as he threw it aside and felt in the outer envelope for her letter. there was nothing there, and after a first sharp pang of disappointment he picked up the enclosure and opened it. inside was a lithographed circular, headed "confidential" and bearing the paris address of a firm of private detectives who undertook, in conditions of attested and inviolable discretion, to investigate "delicate" situations, look up doubtful antecedents, and furnish reliable evidence of misconduct--all on the most reasonable terms. for a long time ralph sat and stared at this document; then he began to laugh and tossed it into the scrap-basket. after that, with a groan, he dropped his head against the edge of his writing table. xxii when he woke, the first thing he remembered was the fact of having cried. he could not think how he had come to be such a fool. he hoped to heaven no one had seen him. he supposed he must have been worrying about the unfinished piece of work at the office: where was it, by the way, he wondered? why--where he had left it the day before, of course! what a ridiculous thing to worry about--but it seemed to follow him about like a dog... he said to himself that he must get up presently and go down to the office. presently--when he could open his eyes. just now there was a dead weight on them; he tried one after another in vain. the effort set him weakly trembling, and he wanted to cry again. nonsense! he must get out of bed. he stretched his arms out, trying to reach something to pull himself up by; but everything slipped away and evaded him. it was like trying to catch at bright short waves. then suddenly his fingers clasped themselves about something firm and warm. a hand: a hand that gave back his pressure! the relief was inexpressible. he lay still and let the hand hold him, while mentally he went through the motions of getting up and beginning to dress. so indistinct were the boundaries between thought and action that he really felt himself moving about the room, in a queer disembodied way, as one treads the air in sleep. then he felt the bedclothes over him and the pillows under his head. "i must get up," he said, and pulled at the hand. it pressed him down again: down into a dim deep pool of sleep. he lay there for a long time, in a silent blackness far below light and sound; then he gradually floated to the surface with the buoyancy of a dead body. but his body had never been more alive. jagged strokes of pain tore through it, hands dragged at it with nails that bit like teeth. they wound thongs about him, bound him, tied weights to him, tried to pull him down with them; but still he floated, floated, danced on the fiery waves of pain, with barbed light pouring down on him from an arrowy sky. charmed intervals of rest, blue sailings on melodious seas, alternated with the anguish. he became a leaf on the air, a feather on a current, a straw on the tide, the spray of the wave spinning itself to sunshine as the wave toppled over into gulfs of blue... he woke on a stony beach, his legs and arms still lashed to his sides and the thongs cutting into him; but the fierce sky was hidden, and hidden by his own languid lids. he felt the ecstasy of decreasing pain, and courage came to him to open his eyes and look about him... the beach was his own bed; the tempered light lay on familiar things, and some one was moving about in a shadowy way between bed and window. he was thirsty and some one gave him a drink. his pillow burned, and some one turned the cool side out. his brain was clear enough now for him to understand that he was ill, and to want to talk about it; but his tongue hung in his throat like a clapper in a bell. he must wait till the rope was pulled... so time and life stole back on him, and his thoughts laboured weakly with dim fears. slowly he cleared a way through them, adjusted himself to his strange state, and found out that he was in his own room, in his grandfather's house, that alternating with the white-capped faces about him were those of his mother and sister, and that in a few days--if he took his beef-tea and didn't fret--paul would be brought up from long island, whither, on account of the great heat, he had been carried off by clare van degen. no one named undine to him, and he did not speak of her. but one day, as he lay in bed in the summer twilight, he had a vision of a moment, a long way behind him--at the beginning of his illness, it must have been--when he had called out for her in his anguish, and some one had said: "she's coming: she'll be here next week." could it be that next week was not yet here? he supposed that illness robbed one of all sense of time, and he lay still, as if in ambush, watching his scattered memories come out one by one and join themselves together. if he watched long enough he was sure he should recognize one that fitted into his picture of the day when he had asked for undine. and at length a face came out of the twilight: a freckled face, benevolently bent over him under a starched cap. he had not seen the face for a long time, but suddenly it took shape and fitted itself into the picture... laura fairford sat near by, a book on her knee. at the sound of his voice she looked up. "what was the name of the first nurse?" "the first--?" "the one that went away." "oh--miss hicks, you mean?" "how long is it since she went?" "it must be three weeks. she had another case." he thought this over carefully; then he spoke again. "call undine." she made no answer, and he repeated irritably: "why don't you call her? i want to speak to her." mrs. fairford laid down her book and came to him. "she's not here--just now." he dealt with this also, laboriously. "you mean she's out--she's not in the house?" "i mean she hasn't come yet." as she spoke ralph felt a sudden strength and hardness in his brain and body. everything in him became as clear as noon. "but it was before miss hicks left that you told me you'd sent for her, and that she'd be here the following week. and you say miss hicks has been gone three weeks." this was what he had worked out in his head, and what he meant to say to his sister; but something seemed to snap shut in his throat, and he closed his eyes without speaking. even when mr. spragg came to see him he said nothing. they talked about his illness, about the hot weather, about the rumours that harmon b. driscoll was again threatened with indictment; and then mr. spragg pulled himself out of his chair and said: "i presume you'll call round at the office before you leave the city." "oh, yes: as soon as i'm up," ralph answered. they understood each other. clare had urged him to come down to long island and complete his convalescence there, but he preferred to stay in washington square till he should be strong enough for the journey to the adirondacks, whither laura had already preceded him with paul. he did not want to see any one but his mother and grandfather till his legs could carry him to mr. spragg's office. it was an oppressive day in mid-august, with a yellow mist of heat in the sky, when at last he entered the big office-building. swirls of dust lay on the mosaic floor, and a stale smell of decayed fruit and salt air and steaming asphalt filled the place like a fog. as he shot up in the elevator some one slapped him on the back, and turning he saw elmer moffatt at his side, smooth and rubicund under a new straw hat. moffatt was loudly glad to see him. "i haven't laid eyes on you for months. at the old stand still?" "so am i," he added, as ralph assented. "hope to see you there again some day. don't forget it's my turn this time: glad if i can be any use to you. so long." ralph's weak bones ached under his handshake. "how's mrs. marvell?" he turned back from his landing to call out; and ralph answered: "thanks; she's very well." mr. spragg sat alone in his murky inner office, the fly-blown engraving of daniel webster above his head and the congested scrap-basket beneath his feet. he looked fagged and sallow, like the day. ralph sat down on the other side of the desk. for a moment his throat contracted as it had when he had tried to question his sister; then he asked: "where's undine?" mr. spragg glanced at the calendar that hung from a hat-peg on the door. then he released the masonic emblem from his grasp, drew out his watch and consulted it critically. "if the train's on time i presume she's somewhere between chicago and omaha round about now." ralph stared at him, wondering if the heat had gone to his head. "i don't understand." "the twentieth century's generally considered the best route to dakota," explained mr. spragg, who pronounced the word rowt. "do you mean to say undine's in the united states?" mr. spragg's lower lip groped for the phantom tooth-pick. "why, let me see: hasn't dakota been a state a year or two now?" "oh, god--" ralph cried, pushing his chair back violently and striding across the narrow room. as he turned, mr. spragg stood up and advanced a few steps. he had given up the quest for the tooth-pick, and his drawn-in lips were no more than a narrow depression in his beard. he stood before ralph, absently shaking the loose change in his trouser-pockets. ralph felt the same hardness and lucidity that had come to him when he had heard his sister's answer. "she's gone, you mean? left me? with another man?" mr. spragg drew himself up with a kind of slouching majesty. "my daughter is not that style. i understand undine thinks there have been mistakes on both sides. she considers the tie was formed too hastily. i believe desertion is the usual plea in such cases." ralph stared about him, hardly listening. he did not resent his father-in-law's tone. in a dim way he guessed that mr. spragg was suffering hardly less than himself. but nothing was clear to him save the monstrous fact suddenly upheaved in his path. his wife had left him, and the plan for her evasion had been made and executed while he lay helpless: she had seized the opportunity of his illness to keep him in ignorance of her design. the humour of it suddenly struck him and he laughed. "do you mean to tell me that undine's divorcing me?" "i presume that's her plan," mr. spragg admitted. "for desertion?" ralph pursued, still laughing. his father-in-law hesitated a moment; then he answered: "you've always done all you could for my daughter. there wasn't any other plea she could think of. she presumed this would be the most agreeable to your family." "it was good of her to think of that!" mr. spragg's only comment was a sigh. "does she imagine i won't fight it?" ralph broke out with sudden passion. his father-in-law looked at him thoughtfully. "i presume you realize it ain't easy to change undine, once she's set on a thing." "perhaps not. but if she really means to apply for a divorce i can make it a little less easy for her to get." "that's so," mr. spragg conceded. he turned back to his revolving chair, and seating himself in it began to drum on the desk with cigar-stained fingers. "and by god, i will!" ralph thundered. anger was the only emotion in him now. he had been fooled, cheated, made a mock of; but the score was not settled yet. he turned back and stood before mr. spragg. "i suppose she's gone with van degen?" "my daughter's gone alone, sir. i saw her off at the station. i understood she was to join a lady friend." at every point ralph felt his hold slip off the surface of his father-in-law's impervious fatalism. "does she suppose van degen's going to marry her?" "undine didn't mention her future plans to me." after a moment mr. spragg appended: "if she had, i should have declined to discuss them with her." ralph looked at him curiously, perceiving that he intended in this negative way to imply his disapproval of his daughter's course. "i shall fight it--i shall fight it!" the young man cried again. "you may tell her i shall fight it to the end!" mr. spragg pressed the nib of his pen against the dust-coated inkstand. "i suppose you would have to engage a lawyer. she'll know it that way," he remarked. "she'll know it--you may count on that!" ralph had begun to laugh again. suddenly he heard his own laugh and it pulled him up. what was he laughing about? what was he talking about? the thing was to act--to hold his tongue and act. there was no use uttering windy threats to this broken-spirited old man. a fury of action burned in ralph, pouring light into his mind and strength into his muscles. he caught up his hat and turned to the door. as he opened it mr. spragg rose again and came forward with his slow shambling step. he laid his hand on ralph's arm. "i'd 'a' given anything--anything short of my girl herself--not to have this happen to you, ralph marvell." "thank you, sir," said ralph. they looked at each other for a moment; then mr. spragg added: "but it has happened, you know. bear that in mind. nothing you can do will change it. time and again, i've found that a good thing to remember." xxiii in the adirondacks ralph marvell sat day after day on the balcony of his little house above the lake, staring at the great white cloud-reflections in the water and at the dark line of trees that closed them in. now and then he got into the canoe and paddled himself through a winding chain of ponds to some lonely clearing in the forest; and there he lay on his back in the pine-needles and watched the great clouds form and dissolve themselves above his head. all his past life seemed to be symbolized by the building-up and breaking-down of those fluctuating shapes, which incalculable wind-currents perpetually shifted and remodelled or swept from the zenith like a pinch of dust. his sister told him that he looked well--better than he had in years; and there were moments when his listlessness, his stony insensibility to the small pricks and frictions of daily life, might have passed for the serenity of recovered health. there was no one with whom he could speak of undine. his family had thrown over the whole subject a pall of silence which even laura fairford shrank from raising. as for his mother, ralph had seen at once that the idea of talking over the situation was positively frightening to her. there was no provision for such emergencies in the moral order of washington square. the affair was a "scandal," and it was not in the dagonet tradition to acknowledge the existence of scandals. ralph recalled a dim memory of his childhood, the tale of a misguided friend of his mother's who had left her husband for a more congenial companion, and who, years later, returning ill and friendless to new york, had appealed for sympathy to mrs. marvell. the latter had not refused to give it; but she had put on her black cashmere and two veils when she went to see her unhappy friend, and had never mentioned these errands of mercy to her husband. ralph suspected that the constraint shown by his mother and sister was partly due to their having but a dim and confused view of what had happened. in their vocabulary the word "divorce" was wrapped in such a dark veil of innuendo as no ladylike hand would care to lift. they had not reached the point of differentiating divorces, but classed them indistinctively as disgraceful incidents, in which the woman was always to blame, but the man, though her innocent victim, was yet inevitably contaminated. the time involved in the "proceedings" was viewed as a penitential season during which it behoved the family of the persons concerned to behave as if they were dead; yet any open allusion to the reason for adopting such an attitude would have been regarded as the height of indelicacy. mr. dagonet's notion of the case was almost as remote from reality. all he asked was that his grandson should "thrash" somebody, and he could not be made to understand that the modern drama of divorce is sometimes cast without a lovelace. "you might as well tell me there was nobody but adam in the garden when eve picked the apple. you say your wife was discontented? no woman ever knows she's discontented till some man tells her so. my god! i've seen smash-ups before now; but i never yet saw a marriage dissolved like a business partnership. divorce without a lover? why, it's--it's as unnatural as getting drunk on lemonade." after this first explosion mr. dagonet also became silent; and ralph perceived that what annoyed him most was the fact of the "scandal's" not being one in any gentlemanly sense of the word. it was like some nasty business mess, about which mr. dagonet couldn't pretend to have an opinion, since such things didn't happen to men of his kind. that such a thing should have happened to his only grandson was probably the bitterest experience of his pleasantly uneventful life; and it added a touch of irony to ralph's unhappiness to know how little, in the whole affair, he was cutting the figure mr. dagonet expected him to cut. at first he had chafed under the taciturnity surrounding him: had passionately longed to cry out his humiliation, his rebellion, his despair. then he began to feel the tonic effect of silence; and the next stage was reached when it became clear to him that there was nothing to say. there were thoughts and thoughts: they bubbled up perpetually from the black springs of his hidden misery, they stole on him in the darkness of night, they blotted out the light of day; but when it came to putting them into words and applying them to the external facts of the case, they seemed totally unrelated to it. one more white and sun-touched glory had gone from his sky; but there seemed no way of connecting that with such practical issues as his being called on to decide whether paul was to be put in knickerbockers or trousers, and whether he should go back to washington square for the winter or hire a small house for himself and his son. the latter question was ultimately decided by his remaining under his grandfather's roof. november found him back in the office again, in fairly good health, with an outer skin of indifference slowly forming over his lacerated soul. there had been a hard minute to live through when he came back to his old brown room in washington square. the walls and tables were covered with photographs of undine: effigies of all shapes and sizes, expressing every possible sentiment dear to the photographic tradition. ralph had gathered them all up when he had moved from west end avenue after undine's departure for europe, and they throned over his other possessions as her image had throned over his future the night he had sat in that very room and dreamed of soaring up with her into the blue... it was impossible to go on living with her photographs about him; and one evening, going up to his room after dinner, he began to unhang them from the walls, and to gather them up from book-shelves and mantel-piece and tables. then he looked about for some place in which to hide them. there were drawers under his book-cases; but they were full of old discarded things, and even if he emptied the drawers, the photographs, in their heavy frames, were almost all too large to fit into them. he turned next to the top shelf of his cupboard; but here the nurse had stored paul's old toys, his sand-pails, shovels and croquet-box. every corner was packed with the vain impedimenta of living, and the mere thought of clearing a space in the chaos was too great an effort. he began to replace the pictures one by one; and the last was still in his hand when he heard his sister's voice outside. he hurriedly put the portrait back in its usual place on his writing-table, and mrs. fairford, who had been dining in washington square, and had come up to bid him good night, flung her arms about him in a quick embrace and went down to her carriage. the next afternoon, when he came home from the office, he did not at first see any change in his room; but when he had lit his pipe and thrown himself into his arm-chair he noticed that the photograph of his wife's picture by popple no longer faced him from the mantel-piece. he turned to his writing-table, but her image had vanished from there too; then his eye, making the circuit of the walls, perceived that they also had been stripped. not a single photograph of undine was left; yet so adroitly had the work of elimination been done, so ingeniously the remaining objects readjusted, that the change attracted no attention. ralph was angry, sore, ashamed. he felt as if laura, whose hand he instantly detected, had taken a cruel pleasure in her work, and for an instant he hated her for it. then a sense of relief stole over him. he was glad he could look about him without meeting undine's eyes, and he understood that what had been done to his room he must do to his memory and his imagination: he must so readjust his mind that, whichever way he turned his thoughts, her face should no longer confront him. but that was a task that laura could not perform for him, a task to be accomplished only by the hard continuous tension of his will. with the setting in of the mood of silence all desire to fight his wife's suit died out. the idea of touching publicly on anything that had passed between himself and undine had become unthinkable. insensibly he had been subdued to the point of view about him, and the idea of calling on the law to repair his shattered happiness struck him as even more grotesque than it was degrading. nevertheless, some contradictory impulse of his divided spirit made him resent, on the part of his mother and sister, a too-ready acceptance of his attitude. there were moments when their tacit assumption that his wife was banished and forgotten irritated him like the hushed tread of sympathizers about the bed of an invalid who will not admit that he suffers. his irritation was aggravated by the discovery that mrs. marvell and laura had already begun to treat paul as if he were an orphan. one day, coming unnoticed into the nursery, ralph heard the boy ask when his mother was coming back; and mrs. fairford, who was with him, answered: "she's not coming back, dearest; and you're not to speak of her to father." ralph, when the boy was out of hearing, rebuked his sister for her answer. "i don't want you to talk of his mother as if she were dead. i don't want you to forbid paul to speak of her." laura, though usually so yielding, defended herself. "what's the use of encouraging him to speak of her when he's never to see her? the sooner he forgets her the better." ralph pondered. "later--if she asks to see him--i shan't refuse." mrs. fairford pressed her lips together to check the answer: "she never will!" ralph heard it, nevertheless, and let it pass. nothing gave him so profound a sense of estrangement from his former life as the conviction that his sister was probably right. he did not really believe that undine would ever ask to see her boy; but if she did he was determined not to refuse her request. time wore on, the christmas holidays came and went, and the winter continued to grind out the weary measure of its days. toward the end of january ralph received a registered letter, addressed to him at his office, and bearing in the corner of the envelope the names of a firm of sioux falls attorneys. he instantly divined that it contained the legal notification of his wife's application for divorce, and as he wrote his name in the postman's book he smiled grimly at the thought that the stroke of his pen was doubtless signing her release. he opened the letter, found it to be what he had expected, and locked it away in his desk without mentioning the matter to any one. he supposed that with the putting away of this document he was thrusting the whole subject out of sight; but not more than a fortnight later, as he sat in the subway on his way down-town, his eye was caught by his own name on the first page of the heavily head-lined paper which the unshaved occupant of the next seat held between grimy fists. the blood rushed to ralph's forehead as he looked over the man's arm and read: "society leader gets decree," and beneath it the subordinate clause: "says husband too absorbed in business to make home happy." for weeks afterward, wherever he went, he felt that blush upon his forehead. for the first time in his life the coarse fingering of public curiosity had touched the secret places of his soul, and nothing that had gone before seemed as humiliating as this trivial comment on his tragedy. the paragraph continued on its way through the press, and whenever he took up a newspaper he seemed to come upon it, slightly modified, variously developed, but always reverting with a kind of unctuous irony to his financial preoccupations and his wife's consequent loneliness. the phrase was even taken up by the paragraph writer, called forth excited letters from similarly situated victims, was commented on in humorous editorials and served as a text for pulpit denunciations of the growing craze for wealth; and finally, at his dentist's, ralph came across it in a family weekly, as one of the "heart problems" propounded to subscribers, with a gramophone, a straight-front corset and a vanity-box among the prizes offered for its solution. xxiv "if you'd only had the sense to come straight to me, undine spragg! there isn't a tip i couldn't have given you--not one!" this speech, in which a faintly contemptuous compassion for her friend's case was blent with the frankest pride in her own, probably represented the nearest approach to "tact" that mrs. james j. rolliver had yet acquired. undine was impartial enough to note in it a distinct advance on the youthful methods of indiana frusk; yet it required a good deal of self-control to take the words to herself with a smile, while they seemed to be laying a visible scarlet welt across the pale face she kept valiantly turned to her friend. the fact that she must permit herself to be pitied by indiana frusk gave her the uttermost measure of the depth to which her fortunes had fallen. this abasement was inflicted on her in the staring gold apartment of the hotel nouveau luxe in which the rollivers had established themselves on their recent arrival in paris. the vast drawing-room, adorned only by two high-shouldered gilt baskets of orchids drooping on their wires, reminded undine of the "looey suite" in which the opening scenes of her own history had been enacted; and the resemblance and the difference were emphasized by the fact that the image of her past self was not inaccurately repeated in the triumphant presence of indiana rolliver. "there isn't a tip i couldn't have given you--not one!" mrs. rolliver reproachfully repeated; and all undine's superiorities and discriminations seemed to shrivel up in the crude blaze of the other's solid achievement. there was little comfort in noting, for one's private delectation, that indiana spoke of her husband as "mr. rolliver," that she twanged a piercing r, that one of her shoulders was still higher than the other, and that her striking dress was totally unsuited to the hour, the place and the occasion. she still did and was all that undine had so sedulously learned not to be and to do; but to dwell on these obstacles to her success was but to be more deeply impressed by the fact that she had nevertheless succeeded. not much more than a year had elapsed since undine marvell, sitting in the drawing-room of another parisian hotel, had heard the immense orchestral murmur of paris rise through the open windows like the ascending movement of her own hopes. the immense murmur still sounded on, deafening and implacable as some elemental force; and the discord in her fate no more disturbed it than the motor wheels rolling by under the windows were disturbed by the particles of dust that they ground to finer powder as they passed. "i could have told you one thing right off," mrs. rolliver went on with her ringing energy. "and that is, to get your divorce first thing. a divorce is always a good thing to have: you never can tell when you may want it. you ought to have attended to that before you even began with peter van degen." undine listened, irresistibly impressed. "did you?" she asked; but mrs. rolliver, at this, grew suddenly veiled and sibylline. she wound her big bejewelled hand through her pearls--there were ropes and ropes of them--and leaned back, modestly sinking her lids. "i'm here, anyhow," she rejoined, with "circumspice!" in look and tone. undine, obedient to the challenge, continued to gaze at the pearls. they were real; there was no doubt about that. and so was indiana's marriage--if she kept out of certain states. "don't you see," mrs. rolliver continued, "that having to leave him when you did, and rush off to dakota for six months, was--was giving him too much time to think; and giving it at the wrong time, too?" "oh, i see. but what could i do? i'm not an immoral woman." "of course not, dearest. you were merely thoughtless that's what i meant by saying you ought to have had your divorce ready." a flicker of self-esteem caused undine to protest. "it wouldn't have made any difference. his wife would never have given him up." "she's so crazy about him?" "no: she hates him so. and she hates me too, because she's in love with my husband." indiana bounced out of her lounging attitude and struck her hands together with a rattle of rings. "in love with your husband? what's the matter, then? why on earth didn't the four of you fix it up together?" "you don't understand." (it was an undoubted relief to be able, at last, to say that to indiana!) "clare van degen thinks divorce wrong--or rather awfully vulgar." "vulgar?" indiana flamed. "if that isn't just too much! a woman who's in love with another woman's husband? what does she think refined, i'd like to know? having a lover, i suppose--like the women in these nasty french plays? i've told mr. rolliver i won't go to the theatre with him again in paris--it's too utterly low. and the swell society's just as bad: it's simply rotten. thank goodness i was brought up in a place where there's some sense of decency left!" she looked compassionately at undine. "it was new york that demoralized you--and i don't blame you for it. out at apex you'd have acted different. you never never would have given way to your feelings before you'd got your divorce." a slow blush rose to undine's forehead. "he seemed so unhappy--" she murmured. "oh, i know!" said indiana in a tone of cold competence. she gave undine an impatient glance. "what was the understanding between you, when you left europe last august to go out to dakota?" "peter was to go to reno in the autumn--so that it wouldn't look too much as if we were acting together. i was to come to chicago to see him on his way out there." "and he never came?" "no." "and he stopped writing?" "oh, he never writes." indiana heaved a deep sigh of intelligence. "there's one perfectly clear rule: never let out of your sight a man who doesn't write." "i know. that's why i stayed with him--those few weeks last summer...." indiana sat thinking, her fine shallow eyes fixed unblinkingly on her friend's embarrassed face. "i suppose there isn't anybody else--?" "anybody--?" "well--now you've got your divorce: anybody else it would come in handy for?" this was harder to bear than anything that had gone before: undine could not have borne it if she had not had a purpose. "mr. van degen owes it to me--" she began with an air of wounded dignity. "yes, yes: i know. but that's just talk. if there is anybody else--" "i can't imagine what you think of me, indiana!" indiana, without appearing to resent this challenge, again lost herself in meditation. "well, i'll tell him he's just got to see you," she finally emerged from it to say. undine gave a quick upward look: this was what she had been waiting for ever since she had read, a few days earlier, in the columns of her morning journal, that mr. peter van degen and mr. and mrs. james j. rolliver had been fellow-passengers on board the semantic. but she did not betray her expectations by as much as the tremor of an eye-lash. she knew her friend well enough to pour out to her the expected tribute of surprise. "why, do you mean to say you know him, indiana?" "mercy, yes! he's round here all the time. he crossed on the steamer with us, and mr. rolliver's taken a fancy to him," indiana explained, in the tone of the absorbed bride to whom her husband's preferences are the sole criterion. undine turned a tear-suffused gaze on her. "oh, indiana, if i could only see him again i know it would be all right! he's awfully, awfully fond of me; but his family have influenced him against me--" "i know what that is!" mrs. rolliver interjected. "but perhaps," undine continued, "it would be better if i could meet him first without his knowing beforehand--without your telling him ... i love him too much to reproach him!" she added nobly. indiana pondered: it was clear that, though the nobility of the sentiment impressed her, she was disinclined to renounce the idea of taking a more active part in her friend's rehabilitation. but undine went on: "of course you've found out by this time that he's just a big spoiled baby. afterward--when i've seen him--if you'd talk to him; or it you'd only just let him be with you, and see how perfectly happy you and mr. rolliver are!" indiana seized on this at once. "you mean that what he wants is the influence of a home like ours? yes, yes, i understand. i tell you what i'll do: i'll just ask him round to dine, and let you know the day, without telling him beforehand that you're coming." "oh, indiana!" undine held her in a close embrace, and then drew away to say: "i'm so glad i found you. you must go round with me everywhere. there are lots of people here i want you to know." mrs. rolliver's expression changed from vague sympathy to concentrated interest. "i suppose it's awfully gay here? do you go round a great deal with the american set?" undine hesitated for a fraction of a moment. "there are a few of them who are rather jolly. but i particularly want you to meet my friend the marquis roviano--he's from rome; and a lovely austrian woman, baroness adelschein." her friend's face was brushed by a shade of distrust. "i don't know as i care much about meeting foreigners," she said indifferently. undine smiled: it was agreeable at last to be able to give indiana a "point" as valuable as any of hers on divorce. "oh, some of them are awfully attractive; and they'll make you meet the americans." indiana caught this on the bound: one began to see why she had got on in spite of everything. "of course i'd love to know your friends," she said, kissing undine; who answered, giving back the kiss: "you know there's nothing on earth i wouldn't do for you." indiana drew back to look at her with a comic grimace under which a shade of anxiety was visible. "well, that's a pretty large order. but there's just one thing you can do, dearest: please to let mr. rolliver alone!" "mr. rolliver, my dear?" undine's laugh showed that she took this for unmixed comedy. "that's a nice way to remind me that you're heaps and heaps better-looking than i am!" indiana gave her an acute glance. "millard binch didn't think so--not even at the very end." "oh, poor millard!" the women's smiles mingled easily over the common reminiscence, and once again, on the threshold. undine enfolded her friend. in the light of the autumn afternoon she paused a moment at the door of the nouveau luxe, and looked aimlessly forth at the brave spectacle in which she seemed no longer to have a stake. many of her old friends had already returned to paris: the harvey shallums, may beringer, dicky bowles and other westward-bound nomads lingering on for a glimpse of the autumn theatres and fashions before hurrying back to inaugurate the new york season. a year ago undine would have had no difficulty in introducing indiana rolliver to this group--a group above which her own aspirations already beat an impatient wing. now her place in it had become too precarious for her to force an entrance for her protectress. her new york friends were at no pains to conceal from her that in their opinion her divorce had been a blunder. their logic was that of apex reversed. since she had not been "sure" of van degen, why in the world, they asked, had she thrown away a position she was sure of? mrs. harvey shallum, in particular, had not scrupled to put the question squarely. "chelles was awfully taken--he would have introduced you everywhere. i thought you were wild to know smart french people; i thought harvey and i weren't good enough for you any longer. and now you've done your best to spoil everything! of course i feel for you tremendously--that's the reason why i'm talking so frankly. you must be horribly depressed. come and dine to-night--or no, if you don't mind i'd rather you chose another evening. i'd forgotten that i'd asked the jim driscolls, and it might be uncomfortable--for you...." in another world she was still welcome, at first perhaps even more so than before: the world, namely, to which she had proposed to present indiana rolliver. roviano, madame adelschein, and a few of the freer spirits of her old st. moritz band, reappearing in paris with the close of the watering-place season, had quickly discovered her and shown a keen interest in her liberation. it appeared in some mysterious way to make her more available for their purpose, and she found that, in the character of the last american divorcee, she was even regarded as eligible to the small and intimate inner circle of their loosely-knit association. at first she could not make out what had entitled her to this privilege, and increasing enlightenment produced a revolt of the apex puritanism which, despite some odd accommodations and compliances, still carried its head so high in her. undine had been perfectly sincere in telling indiana rolliver that she was not "an immoral woman." the pleasures for which her sex took such risks had never attracted her, and she did not even crave the excitement of having it thought that they did. she wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability; and despite her surface-sophistication her notion of amusement was hardly less innocent than when she had hung on the plumber's fence with indiana frusk. it gave her, therefore, no satisfaction to find herself included among madame adelschein's intimates. it embarrassed her to feel that she was expected to be "queer" and "different," to respond to pass-words and talk in innuendo, to associate with the equivocal and the subterranean and affect to despise the ingenuous daylight joys which really satisfied her soul. but the business shrewdness which was never quite dormant in her suggested that this was not the moment for such scruples. she must make the best of what she could get and wait her chance of getting something better; and meanwhile the most practical use to which she could put her shady friends was to flash their authentic nobility in the dazzled eyes of mrs. rolliver. with this object in view she made haste, in a fashionable tea-room of the rue de rivoli, to group about indiana the most titled members of the band; and the felicity of the occasion would have been unmarred had she not suddenly caught sight of raymond de chelles sitting on the other side of the room. she had not seen chelles since her return to paris. it had seemed preferable to leave their meeting to chance and the present chance might have served as well as another but for the fact that among his companions were two or three of the most eminent ladies of the proud quarter beyond the seine. it was what undine, in moments of discouragement, characterized as "her luck" that one of these should be the hated miss wincher of potash springs, who had now become the marquise de trezac. undine knew that chelles and his compatriots, however scandalized at her european companions, would be completely indifferent to mrs. rolliver's appearance; but one gesture of madame de trezac's eye-glass would wave indiana to her place and thus brand the whole party as "wrong." all this passed through undine's mind in the very moment of her noting the change of expression with which chelles had signalled his recognition. if their encounter could have occurred in happier conditions it might have had far-reaching results. as it was, the crowded state of the tea-room, and the distance between their tables, sufficiently excused his restricting his greeting to an eager bow; and undine went home heavy-hearted from this first attempt to reconstruct her past. her spirits were not lightened by the developments of the next few days. she kept herself well in the foreground of indiana's life, and cultivated toward the rarely-visible rolliver a manner in which impersonal admiration for the statesman was tempered with the politest indifference to the man. indiana seemed to do justice to her efforts and to be reassured by the result; but still there came no hint of a reward. for a time undine restrained the question on her lips; but one afternoon, when she had inducted indiana into the deepest mysteries of parisian complexion-making, the importance of the service and the confidential mood it engendered seemed to warrant a discreet allusion to their bargain. indiana leaned back among her cushions with an embarrassed laugh. "oh, my dear, i've been meaning to tell you--it's off, i'm afraid. the dinner is, i mean. you see, mr. van degen has seen you 'round with me, and the very minute i asked him to come and dine he guessed--" "he guessed--and he wouldn't?" "well, no. he wouldn't. i hate to tell you." "oh--" undine threw off a vague laugh. "since you're intimate enough for him to tell you that he must, have told you more--told you something to justify his behaviour. he couldn't--even peter van degen couldn't--just simply have said to you: 'i wont see her.'" mrs. rolliver hesitated, visibly troubled to the point of regretting her intervention. "he did say more?" undine insisted. "he gave you a reason? "he said you'd know." "oh how base--how base!" undine was trembling with one of her little-girl rages, the storms of destructive fury before which mr. and mrs. spragg had cowered when she was a charming golden-curled cherub. but life had administered some of the discipline which her parents had spared her, and she pulled herself together with a gasp of pain. "of course he's been turned against me. his wife has the whole of new york behind her, and i've no one; but i know it would be all right if i could only see him." her friend made no answer, and undine pursued, with an irrepressible outbreak of her old vehemence: "indiana rolliver, if you won't do it for me i'll go straight off to his hotel this very minute. i'll wait there in the hall till he sees me!" indiana lifted a protesting hand. "don't, undine--not that!" "why not?" "well--i wouldn't, that's all." "you wouldn't? why wouldn't you? you must have a reason." undine faced her with levelled brows. "without a reason you can't have changed so utterly since our last talk. you were positive enough then that i had a right to make him see me." somewhat to her surprise, indiana made no effort to elude the challenge. "yes, i did think so then. but i know now that it wouldn't do you the least bit of good." "have they turned him so completely against me? i don't care if they have! i know him--i can get him back." "that's the trouble." indiana shed on her a gaze of cold compassion. "it's not that any one has turned him against you. it's worse than that--" "what can be?" "you'll hate me if i tell you." "then you'd better make him tell me himself!" "i can't. i tried to. the trouble is that it was you--something you did, i mean. something he found out about you--" undine, to restrain a spring of anger, had to clutch both arms of her chair. "about me? how fearfully false! why, i've never even looked at anybody--!" "it's nothing of that kind." indiana's mournful head-shake seemed to deplore, in undine, an unsuspected moral obtuseness. "it's the way you acted to your own husband." "i--my--to ralph? he reproaches me for that? peter van degen does?" "well, for one particular thing. he says that the very day you went off with him last year you got a cable from new york telling you to come back at once to mr. marvell, who was desperately ill." "how on earth did he know?" the cry escaped undine before she could repress it. "it's true, then?" indiana exclaimed. "oh, undine--" undine sat speechless and motionless, the anger frozen to terror on her lips. mrs. rolliver turned on her the reproachful gaze of the deceived benefactress. "i didn't believe it when he told me; i'd never have thought it of you. before you'd even applied for your divorce!" undine made no attempt to deny the charge or to defend herself. for a moment she was lost in the pursuit of an unseizable clue--the explanation of this monstrous last perversity of fate. suddenly she rose to her feet with a set face. "the marvells must have told him--the beasts!" it relieved her to be able to cry it out. "it was your husband's sister--what did you say her name was? when you didn't answer her cable, she cabled mr. van degen to find out where you were and tell you to come straight back." undine stared. "he never did!" "no." "doesn't that show you the story's all trumped up?" indiana shook her head. "he said nothing to you about it because he was with you when you received the first cable, and you told him it was from your sister-in-law, just worrying you as usual to go home; and when he asked if there was anything else in it you said there wasn't another thing." undine, intently following her, caught at this with a spring. "then he knew it all along--he admits that? and it made no earthly difference to him at the time?" she turned almost victoriously on her friend. "did he happen to explain that, i wonder?" "yes." indiana's longanimity grew almost solemn. "it came over him gradually, he said. one day when he wasn't feeling very well he thought to himself: 'would she act like that to me if i was dying?' and after that he never felt the same to you." indiana lowered her empurpled lids. "men have their feelings too--even when they're carried away by passion." after a pause she added: "i don't know as i can blame him. undine. you see, you were his ideal." xxv undine marvell, for the next few months, tasted all the accumulated bitterness of failure. after january the drifting hordes of her compatriots had scattered to the four quarters of the globe, leaving paris to resume, under its low grey sky, its compacter winter personality. noting, from her more and more deserted corner, each least sign of the social revival, undine felt herself as stranded and baffled as after the ineffectual summers of her girlhood. she was not without possible alternatives; but the sense of what she had lost took the savour from all that was left. she might have attached herself to some migratory group winged for italy or egypt; but the prospect of travel did not in itself appeal to her, and she was doubtful of its social benefit. she lacked the adventurous curiosity which seeks its occasion in the unknown; and though she could work doggedly for a given object the obstacles to be overcome had to be as distinct as the prize. her one desire was to get back an equivalent of the precise value she had lost in ceasing to be ralph marvell's wife. her new visiting-card, bearing her christian name in place of her husband's, was like the coin of a debased currency testifying to her diminished trading capacity. her restricted means, her vacant days, all the minor irritations of her life, were as nothing compared to this sense of a lost advantage. even in the narrowed field of a parisian winter she might have made herself a place in some more or less extra-social world; but her experiments in this line gave her no pleasure proportioned to the possible derogation. she feared to be associated with "the wrong people," and scented a shade of disrespect in every amicable advance. the more pressing attentions of one or two men she had formerly known filled her with a glow of outraged pride, and for the first time in her life she felt that even solitude might be preferable to certain kinds of society. since ill health was the most plausible pretext for seclusion, it was almost a relief to find that she was really growing "nervous" and sleeping badly. the doctor she summoned advised her trying a small quiet place on the riviera, not too near the sea; and thither in the early days of december, she transported herself with her maid and an omnibus-load of luggage. the place disconcerted her by being really small and quiet, and for a few days she struggled against the desire for flight. she had never before known a world as colourless and negative as that of the large white hotel where everybody went to bed at nine, and donkey-rides over stony hills were the only alternative to slow drives along dusty roads. many of the dwellers in this temple of repose found even these exercises too stimulating, and preferred to sit for hours under the palms in the garden, playing patience, embroidering, or reading odd volumes of tauchnitz. undine, driven by despair to an inspection of the hotel book-shelves, discovered that scarcely any work they contained was complete; but this did not seem to trouble the readers, who continued to feed their leisure with mutilated fiction, from which they occasionally raised their eyes to glance mistrustfully at the new arrival sweeping the garden gravel with her frivolous draperies. the inmates of the hotel were of different nationalities, but their racial differences were levelled by the stamp of a common mediocrity. all differences of tongue, of custom, of physiognomy, disappeared in this deep community of insignificance, which was like some secret bond, with the manifold signs and pass-words of its ignorances and its imperceptions. it was not the heterogeneous mediocrity of the american summer hotel where the lack of any standard is the nearest approach to a tie, but an organized codified dulness, in conscious possession of its rights, and strong in the voluntary ignorance of any others. it took undine a long time to accustom herself to such an atmosphere, and meanwhile she fretted, fumed and flaunted, or abandoned herself to long periods of fruitless brooding. sometimes a flame of anger shot up in her, dismally illuminating the path she had travelled and the blank wall to which it led. at other moments past and present were enveloped in a dull fog of rancour which distorted and faded even the image she presented to her morning mirror. there were days when every young face she saw left in her a taste of poison. but when she compared herself with the specimens of her sex who plied their languid industries under the palms, or looked away as she passed them in hall or staircase, her spirits rose, and she rang for her maid and dressed herself in her newest and vividest. these were unprofitable triumphs, however. she never made one of her attacks on the organized disapproval of the community without feeling she had lost ground by it; and the next day she would lie in bed and send down capricious orders for food, which her maid would presently remove untouched, with instructions to transmit her complaints to the landlord. sometimes the events of the past year, ceaselessly revolving through her brain, became no longer a subject for criticism or justification but simply a series of pictures monotonously unrolled. hour by hour, in such moods, she re-lived the incidents of her flight with peter van degen: the part of her career that, since it had proved a failure, seemed least like herself and most difficult to justify. she had gone away with him, and had lived with him for two months: she, undine marvell, to whom respectability was the breath of life, to whom such follies had always been unintelligible and therefore inexcusable.--she had done this incredible thing, and she had done it from a motive that seemed, at the time, as clear, as logical, as free from the distorting mists of sentimentality, as any of her father's financial enterprises. it had been a bold move, but it had been as carefully calculated as the happiest wall street "stroke." she had gone away with peter because, after the decisive scene in which she had put her power to the test, to yield to him seemed the surest means of victory. even to her practical intelligence it was clear that an immediate dash to dakota might look too calculated; and she had preserved her self-respect by telling herself that she was really his wife, and in no way to blame if the law delayed to ratify the bond. she was still persuaded of the justness of her reasoning; but she now saw that it had left certain risks out of account. her life with van degen had taught her many things. the two had wandered from place to place, spending a great deal of money, always more and more money; for the first time in her life she had been able to buy everything she wanted. for a while this had kept her amused and busy; but presently she began to perceive that her companion's view of their relation was not the same as hers. she saw that he had always meant it to be an unavowed tie, screened by mrs. shallum's companionship and clare's careless tolerance; and that on those terms he would have been ready to shed on their adventure the brightest blaze of notoriety. but since undine had insisted on being carried off like a sentimental school-girl he meant to shroud the affair in mystery, and was as zealous in concealing their relation as she was bent on proclaiming it. in the "powerful" novels which popple was fond of lending her she had met with increasing frequency the type of heroine who scorns to love clandestinely, and proclaims the sanctity of passion and the moral duty of obeying its call. undine had been struck by these arguments as justifying and even ennobling her course, and had let peter understand that she had been actuated by the highest motives in openly associating her life with his; but he had opposed a placid insensibility to these allusions, and had persisted in treating her as though their journey were the kind of escapade that a man of the world is bound to hide. she had expected him to take her to all the showy places where couples like themselves are relieved from a too sustained contemplation of nature by the distractions of the restaurant and the gaming-table; but he had carried her from one obscure corner of europe to another, shunning fashionable hotels and crowded watering-places, and displaying an ingenuity in the discovery of the unvisited and the out-of-season that gave their journey an odd resemblance to her melancholy wedding-tour. she had never for a moment ceased to remember that the dakota divorce-court was the objective point of this later honeymoon, and her allusions to the fact were as frequent as prudence permitted. peter seemed in no way disturbed by them. he responded with expressions of increasing tenderness, or the purchase of another piece of jewelry; and though undine could not remember his ever voluntarily bringing the subject of their marriage he did not shrink from her recurring mention of it. he seemed merely too steeped in present well-being to think of the future, and she ascribed this to the fact that his faculty of enjoyment could not project itself beyond the moment. her business was to make each of their days so agreeable that when the last came he should be conscious of a void to be bridged over as rapidly as possible and when she thought this point had been reached she packed her trunks and started for dakota. the next picture to follow was that of the dull months in the western divorce-town, where, to escape loneliness and avoid comment, she had cast in her lot with mabel lipscomb, who had lately arrived there on the same errand. undine, at the outset, had been sorry for the friend whose new venture seemed likely to result so much less brilliantly than her own; but compassion had been replaced by irritation as mabel's unpruned vulgarities, her enormous encroaching satisfaction with herself and her surroundings, began to pervade every corner of their provisional household. undine, during the first months of her exile, had been sustained by the fullest confidence in her future. when she had parted from van degen she had felt sure he meant to marry her, and the fact that mrs. lipscomb was fortified by no similar hope made her easier to bear with. undine was almost ashamed that the unwooed mabel should be the witness of her own felicity, and planned to send her off on a trip to denver when peter should announce his arrival; but the weeks passed, and peter did not come. mabel, on the whole, behaved well in this contingency. undine, in her first exultation, had confided all her hopes and plans to her friend, but mabel took no undue advantage of the confidence. she was even tactful in her loud fond clumsy way, with a tact that insistently boomed and buzzed about its victim's head. but one day she mentioned that she had asked to dinner a gentleman from little rock who had come to dakota with the same object as themselves, and whose acquaintance she had made through her lawyer. the gentleman from little rock came to dine, and within a week undine understood that mabel's future was assured. if van degen had been at hand undine would have smiled with him at poor mabel's infatuation and her suitor's crudeness. but van degen was not there. he made no sign, he sent no excuse; he simply continued to absent himself; and it was undine who, in due course, had to make way for mrs. lipscomb's caller, and sit upstairs with a novel while the drawing-room below was given up to the enacting of an actual love-story. even then, even to the end, undine had to admit that mabel had behaved "beautifully." but it is comparatively easy to behave beautifully when one is getting what one wants, and when some one else, who has not always been altogether kind, is not. the net result of mrs. lipscomb's magnanimity was that when, on the day of parting, she drew undine to her bosom with the hand on which her new engagement-ring blazed, undine hated her as she hated everything else connected with her vain exile in the wilderness. xxvi the next phase in the unrolling vision was the episode of her return to new york. she had gone to the malibran, to her parents--for it was a moment in her career when she clung passionately to the conformities, and when the fact of being able to say: "i'm here with my father and mother" was worth paying for even in the discomfort of that grim abode. nevertheless, it was another thorn in her pride that her parents could not--for the meanest of material reasons--transfer themselves at her coming to one of the big fifth avenue hotels. when she had suggested it mr. spragg had briefly replied that, owing to the heavy expenses of her divorce suit, he couldn't for the moment afford anything better; and this announcement cast a deeper gloom over the future. it was not an occasion for being "nervous," however; she had learned too many hard facts in the last few months to think of having recourse to her youthful methods. and something told her that if she made the attempt it would be useless. her father and mother seemed much older, seemed tired and defeated, like herself. parents and daughter bore their common failure in a common silence, broken only by mrs. spragg's occasional tentative allusions to her grandson. but her anecdotes of paul left a deeper silence behind them. undine did not want to talk of her boy. she could forget him when, as she put it, things were "going her way," but in moments of discouragement the thought of him was an added bitterness, subtly different from her other bitter thoughts, and harder to quiet. it had not occurred to her to try to gain possession of the child. she was vaguely aware that the courts had given her his custody; but she had never seriously thought of asserting this claim. her parents' diminished means and her own uncertain future made her regard the care of paul as an additional burden, and she quieted her scruples by thinking of him as "better off" with ralph's family, and of herself as rather touchingly disinterested in putting his welfare before her own. poor mrs. spragg was pining for him, but undine rejected her artless suggestion that mrs. heeny should be sent to "bring him round." "i wouldn't ask them a favour for the world--they're just waiting for a chance to be hateful to me," she scornfully declared; but it pained her that her boy, should be so near, yet inaccessible, and for the first time she was visited by unwonted questionings as to her share in the misfortunes that had befallen her. she had voluntarily stepped out of her social frame, and the only person on whom she could with any satisfaction have laid the blame was the person to whom her mind now turned with a belated tenderness. it was thus, in fact, that she thought of ralph. his pride, his reserve, all the secret expressions of his devotion, the tones of his voice, his quiet manner, even his disconcerting irony: these seemed, in contrast to what she had since known, the qualities essential to her happiness. she could console herself only by regarding it as part of her sad lot that poverty and the relentless animosity of his family, should have put an end to so perfect a union: she gradually began to look on herself and ralph as the victims of dark machinations, and when she mentioned him she spoke forgivingly, and implied that "everything might have been different" if "people" had not "come between" them. she had arrived in new york in midseason, and the dread of seeing familiar faces kept her shut up in her room at the malibran, reading novels and brooding over possibilities of escape. she tried to avoid the daily papers, but they formed the staple diet of her parents, and now and then she could not help taking one up and turning to the "society column." its perusal produced the impression that the season must be the gayest new york had ever known. the harmon b. driscolls, young jim and his wife, the thurber van degens, the chauncey ellings, and all the other fifth avenue potentates, seemed to have their doors perpetually open to a stream of feasters among whom the familiar presences of grace beringer, bertha shallum, dicky bowles and claud walsingham popple came and went with the irritating sameness of the figures in a stage-procession. among them also peter van degen presently appeared. he had been on a tour around the world, and undine could not look at a newspaper without seeing some allusion to his progress. after his return she noticed that his name was usually coupled with his wife's: he and clare seemed to be celebrating his home-coming in a series of festivities, and undine guessed that he had reasons for wishing to keep before the world the evidences of his conjugal accord. mrs. heeny's clippings supplied her with such items as her own reading missed; and one day the masseuse appeared with a long article from the leading journal of little rock, describing the brilliant nuptials of mabel lipscomb--now mrs. homer branney--and her departure for "the coast" in the bridegroom's private car. this put the last touch to undine's irritation, and the next morning she got up earlier than usual, put on her most effective dress, went for a quick walk around the park, and told her father when she came in that she wanted him to take her to the opera that evening. mr. spragg stared and frowned. "you mean you want me to go round and hire a box for you?" "oh, no." undine coloured at the infelicitous allusion: besides, she knew now that the smart people who were "musical" went in stalls. "i only want two good seats. i don't see why i should stay shut up. i want you to go with me," she added. her father received the latter part of the request without comment: he seemed to have gone beyond surprise. but he appeared that evening at dinner in a creased and loosely fitting dress-suit which he had probably not put on since the last time he had dined with his son-in-law, and he and undine drove off together, leaving mrs. spragg to gaze after them with the pale stare of hecuba. their stalls were in the middle of the house, and around them swept the great curve of boxes at which undine had so often looked up in the remote stentorian days. then all had been one indistinguishable glitter, now the scene was full of familiar details: the house was thronged with people she knew, and every box seemed to contain a parcel of her past. at first she had shrunk from recognition; but gradually, as she perceived that no one noticed her, that she was merely part of the invisible crowd out of range of the exploring opera glasses, she felt a defiant desire to make herself seen. when the performance was over her father wanted to leave the house by the door at which they had entered, but she guided him toward the stockholders' entrance, and pressed her way among the furred and jewelled ladies waiting for their motors. "oh, it's the wrong door--never mind, we'll walk to the corner and get a cab," she exclaimed, speaking loudly enough to be overheard. two or three heads turned, and she met dicky bowles's glance, and returned his laughing bow. the woman talking to him looked around, coloured slightly, and made a barely perceptible motion of her head. just beyond her, mrs. chauncey elling, plumed and purple, stared, parted her lips, and turned to say something important to young jim driscoll, who looked up involuntarily and then squared his shoulders and gazed fixedly at a distant point, as people do at a funeral. behind them undine caught sight of clare van degen; she stood alone, and her face was pale and listless. "shall i go up and speak to her?" undine wondered. some intuition told her that, alone of all the women present, clare might have greeted her kindly; but she hung back, and mrs. harmon driscoll surged by on popple's arm. popple crimsoned, coughed, and signalled despotically to mrs. driscoll's footman. over his shoulder undine received a bow from charles bowen, and behind bowen she saw two or three other men she knew, and read in their faces surprise, curiosity, and the wish to show their pleasure at seeing her. but she grasped her father's arm and drew him out among the entangled motors and vociferating policemen. neither she nor mr. spragg spoke a word on the way home; but when they reached the malibran her father followed her up to her room. she had dropped her cloak and stood before the wardrobe mirror studying her reflection when he came up behind her and she saw that he was looking at it too. "where did that necklace come from?" undine's neck grew pink under the shining circlet. it was the first time since her return to new york that she had put on a low dress and thus uncovered the string of pearls she always wore. she made no answer, and mr. spragg continued: "did your husband give them to you?" "ralph!" she could not restrain a laugh. "who did, then?" undine remained silent. she really had not thought about the pearls, except in so far as she consciously enjoyed the pleasure of possessing them; and her father, habitually so unobservant, had seemed the last person likely to raise the awkward question of their origin. "why--" she began, without knowing what she meant to say. "i guess you better send 'em back to the party they belong to," mr. spragg continued, in a voice she did not know. "they belong to me!" she flamed up. he looked at her as if she had grown suddenly small and insignificant. "you better send 'em back to peter van degen the first thing to-morrow morning," he said as he went out of the room. as far as undine could remember, it was the first time in her life that he had ever ordered her to do anything; and when the door closed on him she had the distinct sense that the question had closed with it, and that she would have to obey. she took the pearls off and threw them from her angrily. the humiliation her father had inflicted on her was merged with the humiliation to which she had subjected herself in going to the opera, and she had never before hated her life as she hated it then. all night she lay sleepless, wondering miserably what to do; and out of her hatred of her life, and her hatred of peter van degen, there gradually grew a loathing of van degen's pearls. how could she have kept them; how have continued to wear them about her neck! only her absorption in other cares could have kept her from feeling the humiliation of carrying about with her the price of her shame. her novel-reading had filled her mind with the vocabulary of outraged virtue, and with pathetic allusions to woman's frailty, and while she pitied herself she thought her father heroic. she was proud to think that she had such a man to defend her, and rejoiced that it was in her power to express her scorn of van degen by sending back his jewels. but her righteous ardour gradually cooled, and she was left once more to face the dreary problem of the future. her evening at the opera had shown her the impossibility of remaining in new york. she had neither the skill nor the power to fight the forces of indifference leagued against her: she must get away at once, and try to make a fresh start. but, as usual, the lack of money hampered her. mr. spragg could no longer afford to make her the allowance she had intermittently received from him during the first years of her marriage, and since she was now without child or household she could hardly make it a grievance that he had reduced her income. but what he allowed her, even with the addition of her alimony, was absurdly insufficient. not that she looked far ahead; she had always felt herself predestined to ease and luxury, and the possibility of a future adapted to her present budget did not occur to her. but she desperately wanted enough money to carry her without anxiety through the coming year. when her breakfast tray was brought in she sent it away untouched and continued to lie in her darkened room. she knew that when she got up she must send back the pearls; but there was no longer any satisfaction in the thought, and she lay listlessly wondering how she could best transmit them to van degen. as she lay there she heard mrs. heeny's voice in the passage. hitherto she had avoided the masseuse, as she did every one else associated with her past. mrs. heeny had behaved with extreme discretion, refraining from all direct allusions to undine's misadventure; but her silence was obviously the criticism of a superior mind. once again undine had disregarded her injunction to "go slow," with results that justified the warning. mrs. heeny's very reserve, however, now marked her as a safe adviser; and undine sprang up and called her in. "my sakes. undine! you look's if you'd been setting up all night with a remains!" the masseuse exclaimed in her round rich tones. undine, without answering, caught up the pearls and thrust them into mrs. heeny's hands. "good land alive!" the masseuse dropped into a chair and let the twist slip through her fat flexible fingers. "well, you got a fortune right round your neck whenever you wear them, undine spragg." undine murmured something indistinguishable. "i want you to take them--" she began. "take 'em? where to?" "why, to--" she was checked by the wondering simplicity of mrs. heeny's stare. the masseuse must know where the pearls had come from, yet it had evidently not occurred to her that mrs. marvell was about to ask her to return them to their donor. in the light of mrs. heeny's unclouded gaze the whole episode took on a different aspect, and undine began to be vaguely astonished at her immediate submission to her father's will. the pearls were hers, after all! "to be re-strung?" mrs. heeny placidly suggested. "why, you'd oughter to have it done right here before your eyes, with pearls that are worth what these are." as undine listened, a new thought shaped itself. she could not continue to wear the pearls: the idea had become intolerable. but for the first time she saw what they might be converted into, and what they might rescue her from; and suddenly she brought out: "do you suppose i could get anything for them?" "get anything? why, what--" "anything like what they're worth, i mean. they cost a lot of money: they came from the biggest place in paris." under mrs. heeny's simplifying eye it was comparatively easy to make these explanations. "i want you to try and sell them for me--i want you to do the best you can with them. i can't do it myself--but you must swear you'll never tell a soul," she pressed on breathlessly. "why, you poor child--it ain't the first time," said mrs. heeny, coiling the pearls in her big palm. "it's a pity too: they're such beauties. but you'll get others," she added, as the necklace vanished into her bag. a few days later there appeared from the same receptacle a bundle of banknotes considerable enough to quiet undine's last scruples. she no longer understood why she had hesitated. why should she have thought it necessary to give back the pearls to van degen? his obligation to her represented far more than the relatively small sum she had been able to realize on the necklace. she hid the money in her dress, and when mrs. heeny had gone on to mrs. spragg's room she drew the packet out, and counting the bills over, murmured to herself: "now i can get away!" her one thought was to return to europe; but she did not want to go alone. the vision of her solitary figure adrift in the spring mob of trans-atlantic pleasure-seekers depressed and mortified her. she would be sure to run across acquaintances, and they would infer that she was in quest of a new opportunity, a fresh start, and would suspect her of trying to use them for the purpose. the thought was repugnant to her newly awakened pride, and she decided that if she went to europe her father and mother must go with her. the project was a bold one, and when she broached it she had to run the whole gamut of mr. spragg's irony. he wanted to know what she expected to do with him when she got him there; whether she meant to introduce him to "all those old kings," how she thought he and her mother would look in court dress, and how she supposed he was going to get on without his new york paper. but undine had been aware of having what he himself would have called "a pull" over her father since, the day after their visit to the opera, he had taken her aside to ask: "you sent back those pearls?" and she had answered coldly: "mrs. heeny's taken them." after a moment of half-bewildered resistance her parents, perhaps secretly flattered by this first expression of her need for them, had yielded to her entreaty, packed their trunks, and stoically set out for the unknown. neither mr. spragg nor his wife had ever before been out of their country; and undine had not understood, till they stood beside her tongue-tied and helpless on the dock at cherbourg, the task she had undertaken in uprooting them. mr. spragg had never been physically active, but on foreign shores he was seized by a strange restlessness, and a helpless dependence on his daughter. mrs. spragg's long habit of apathy was overcome by her dread of being left alone when her husband and undine went out, and she delayed and impeded their expeditions by insisting on accompanying them; so that, much as undine disliked sightseeing, there seemed no alternative between "going round" with her parents and shutting herself up with them in the crowded hotels to which she successively transported them. the hotels were the only european institutions that really interested mr. spragg. he considered them manifestly inferior to those at home; but he was haunted by a statistical curiosity as to their size, their number, their cost and their capacity for housing and feeding the incalculable hordes of his countrymen. he went through galleries, churches and museums in a stolid silence like his daughter's; but in the hotels he never ceased to enquire and investigate, questioning every one who could speak english, comparing bills, collecting prospectuses and computing the cost of construction and the probable return on the investment. he regarded the non-existence of the cold-storage system as one more proof of european inferiority, and no longer wondered, in the absence of the room-to-room telephone, that foreigners hadn't yet mastered the first principles of time-saving. after a few weeks it became evident to both parents and daughter that their unnatural association could not continue much longer. mrs. spragg's shrinking from everything new and unfamiliar had developed into a kind of settled terror, and mr. spragg had begun to be depressed by the incredible number of the hotels and their simply incalculable housing capacity. "it ain't that they're any great shakes in themselves, any one of 'em; but there's such a darned lot of 'em: they're as thick as mosquitoes, every place you go." and he began to reckon up, on slips of paper, on the backs of bills and the margins of old newspapers, the number of travellers who could be simultaneously lodged, bathed and boarded on the continent of europe. "five hundred bedrooms--three hundred bathrooms--no; three hundred and fifty bathrooms, that one has: that makes, supposing two-thirds of 'em double up--do you s'pose as many as that do, undie? that porter at lucerne told me the germans slept three in a room--well, call it eight hundred people; and three meals a day per head; no, four meals, with that afternoon tea they take; and the last place we were at--'way up on that mountain there--why, there were seventy-five hotels in that one spot alone, and all jam full--well, it beats me to know where all the people come from..." he had gone on in this fashion for what seemed to his daughter an endless length of days; and then suddenly he had roused himself to say: "see here, undie, i got to go back and make the money to pay for all this." there had been no question on the part of any of the three of undine's returning with them; and after she had conveyed them to their steamer, and seen their vaguely relieved faces merged in the handkerchief-waving throng along the taffrail, she had returned alone to paris and made her unsuccessful attempt to enlist the aid of indiana rolliver. xxvii she was still brooding over this last failure when one afternoon, as she loitered on the hotel terrace, she was approached by a young woman whom she had seen sitting near the wheeled chair of an old lady wearing a crumpled black bonnet under a funny fringed parasol with a jointed handle. the young woman, who was small, slight and brown, was dressed with a disregard of the fashion which contrasted oddly with the mauve powder on her face and the traces of artificial colour in her dark untidy hair. she looked as if she might have several different personalities, and as if the one of the moment had been hanging up a long time in her wardrobe and been hurriedly taken down as probably good enough for the present occasion. with her hands in her jacket pockets, and an agreeable smile on her boyish face, she strolled up to undine and asked, in a pretty variety of parisian english, if she had the pleasure of speaking to mrs. marvell. on undine's assenting, the smile grew more alert and the lady continued: "i think you know my friend sacha adelschein?" no question could have been less welcome to undine. if there was one point on which she was doggedly and puritanically resolved, it was that no extremes of social adversity should ever again draw her into the group of people among whom madame adelschein too conspicuously figured. since her unsuccessful attempt to win over indiana by introducing her to that group, undine had been righteously resolved to remain aloof from it; and she was drawing herself up to her loftiest height of disapproval when the stranger, as if unconscious of it, went on: "sacha speaks of you so often--she admires you so much.--i think you know also my cousin chelles," she added, looking into undine's eyes. "i am the princess estradina. i've come here with my mother for the air." the murmur of negation died on undine's lips. she found herself grappling with a new social riddle, and such surprises were always stimulating. the name of the untidy-looking young woman she had been about to repel was one of the most eminent in the impregnable quarter beyond the seine. no one figured more largely in the parisian chronicle than the princess estradina, and no name more impressively headed the list at every marriage, funeral and philanthropic entertainment of the faubourg saint germain than that of her mother, the duchesse de dordogne, who must be no other than the old woman sitting in the bath-chair with the crumpled bonnet and the ridiculous sunshade. but it was not the appearance of the two ladies that surprised undine. she knew that social gold does not always glitter, and that the lady she had heard spoken of as lili estradina was notoriously careless of the conventions; but that she should boast of her intimacy with madame adelschein, and use it as a pretext for naming herself, overthrew all undine's hierarchies. "yes--it's hideously dull here, and i'm dying of it. do come over and speak to my mother. she's dying of it too; but don't tell her so, because she hasn't found it out. there were so many things our mothers never found out," the princess rambled on, with her half-mocking half-intimate smile; and in another moment undine, thrilled at having mrs. spragg thus coupled with a duchess, found herself seated between mother and daughter, and responding by a radiant blush to the elder lady's amiable opening: "you know my nephew raymond--he's your great admirer." how had it happened, whither would it lead, how long could it last? the questions raced through undine's brain as she sat listening to her new friends--they seemed already too friendly to be called acquaintances!--replying to their enquiries, and trying to think far enough ahead to guess what they would expect her to say, and what tone it would be well to take. she was used to such feats of mental agility, and it was instinctive with her to become, for the moment, the person she thought her interlocutors expected her to be; but she had never had quite so new a part to play at such short notice. she took her cue, however, from the fact that the princess estradina, in her mother's presence, made no farther allusion to her dear friend sacha, and seemed somehow, though she continued to chat on in the same easy strain, to look differently and throw out different implications. all these shades of demeanour were immediately perceptible to undine, who tried to adapt herself to them by combining in her manner a mixture of apex dash and new york dignity; and the result was so successful that when she rose to go the princess, with a hand on her arm, said almost wistfully: "you're staying on too? then do take pity on us! we might go on some trips together; and in the evenings we could make a bridge." a new life began for undine. the princess, chained her mother's side, and frankly restive under her filial duty, clung to her new acquaintance with a persistence too flattering to be analyzed. "my dear, i was on the brink of suicide when i saw your name in the visitors' list," she explained; and undine felt like answering that she had nearly reached the same pass when the princess's thin little hand had been held out to her. for the moment she was dizzy with the effect of that random gesture. here she was, at the lowest ebb of her fortunes, miraculously rehabilitated, reinstated, and restored to the old victorious sense of her youth and her power! her sole graces, her unaided personality, had worked the miracle; how should she not trust in them hereafter? aside from her feeling of concrete attainment. undine was deeply interested in her new friends. the princess and her mother, in their different ways, were different from any one else she had known. the princess, who might have been of any age between twenty and forty, had a small triangular face with caressing impudent eyes, a smile like a silent whistle and the gait of a baker's boy balancing his basket. she wore either baggy shabby clothes like a man's, or rich draperies that looked as if they had been rained on; and she seemed equally at ease in either style of dress, and carelessly unconscious of both. she was extremely familiar and unblushingly inquisitive, but she never gave undine the time to ask her any questions or the opportunity to venture on any freedom with her. nevertheless she did not scruple to talk of her sentimental experiences, and seemed surprised, and rather disappointed, that undine had so few to relate in return. she playfully accused her beautiful new friend of being cachottiere, and at the sight of undine's blush cried out: "ah, you funny americans! why do you all behave as if love were a secret infirmity?" the old duchess was even more impressive, because she fitted better into undine's preconceived picture of the faubourg saint germain, and was more like the people with whom she pictured the former nettie wincher as living in privileged intimacy. the duchess was, indeed, more amiable and accessible than undine's conception of a duchess, and displayed a curiosity as great as her daughter's, and much more puerile, concerning her new friend's history and habits. but through her mild prattle, and in spite of her limited perceptions. undine felt in her the same clear impenetrable barrier that she ran against occasionally in the princess; and she was beginning to understand that this barrier represented a number of things about which she herself had yet to learn. she would not have known this a few years earlier, nor would she have seen in the duchess anything but the ruin of an ugly woman, dressed in clothes that mrs. spragg wouldn't have touched. the duchess certainly looked like a ruin; but undine now saw that she looked like the ruin of a castle. the princess, who was unofficially separated from her husband, had with her her two little girls. she seemed extremely attached to both--though avowing for the younger a preference she frankly ascribed to the interesting accident of its parentage--and she could not understand that undine, as to whose domestic difficulties she minutely informed herself, should have consented to leave her child to strangers. "for, to one's child every one but one's self is a stranger; and whatever your egarements--" she began, breaking off with a stare when undine interrupted her to explain that the courts had ascribed all the wrongs in the case to her husband. "but then--but then--" murmured the princess, turning away from the subject as if checked by too deep an abyss of difference. the incident had embarrassed undine, and though she tried to justify herself by allusions to her boy's dependence on his father's family, and to the duty of not standing in his way, she saw that she made no impression. "whatever one's errors, one's child belongs to one," her hearer continued to repeat; and undine, who was frequently scandalized by the princess's conversation, now found herself in the odd position of having to set a watch upon her own in order not to scandalize the princess. each day, nevertheless, strengthened her hold on her new friends. after her first flush of triumph she began indeed to suspect that she had been a slight disappointment to the princess, had not completely justified the hopes raised by the doubtful honour of being one of sacha adelschein's intimates. undine guessed that the princess had expected to find her more amusing, "queerer," more startling in speech and conduct. though by instinct she was none of these things, she was eager to go as far as was expected; but she felt that her audacities were on lines too normal to be interesting, and that the princess thought her rather school-girlish and old-fashioned. still, they had in common their youth, their boredom, their high spirits and their hunger for amusement; and undine was making the most of these ties when one day, coming back from a trip to monte-carlo with the princess, she was brought up short by the sight of a lady--evidently a new arrival--who was seated in an attitude of respectful intimacy beside the old duchess's chair. undine, advancing unheard over the fine gravel of the garden path, recognized at a glance the marquise de trezac's drooping nose and disdainful back, and at the same moment heard her say: "--and her husband?" "her husband? but she's an american--she's divorced," the duchess replied, as if she were merely stating the same fact in two different ways; and undine stopped short with a pang of apprehension. the princess came up behind her. "who's the solemn person with mamma? ah, that old bore of a trezac!" she dropped her long eye-glass with a laugh. "well, she'll be useful--she'll stick to mamma like a leech and we shall get away oftener. come, let's go and be charming to her." she approached madame de trezac effusively, and after an interchange of exclamations undine heard her say "you know my friend mrs. marvell? no? how odd! where do you manage to hide yourself, chere madame? undine, here's a compatriot who hasn't the pleasure--" "i'm such a hermit, dear mrs. marvell--the princess shows me what i miss," the marquise de trezac murmured, rising to give her hand to undine, and speaking in a voice so different from that of the supercilious miss wincher that only her facial angle and the droop of her nose linked her to the hated vision of potash springs. undine felt herself dancing on a flood-tide of security. for the first time the memory of potash springs became a thing to smile at, and with the princess's arm through hers she shone back triumphantly on madame de trezac, who seemed to have grown suddenly obsequious and insignificant, as though the waving of the princess's wand had stripped her of all her false advantages. but upstairs, in her own room. undine's courage fell. madame de trezac had been civil, effusive even, because for the moment she had been taken off her guard by finding mrs. marvell on terms of intimacy with the princess estradina and her mother. but the force of facts would reassert itself. far from continuing to see undine through her french friends' eyes she would probably invite them to view her compatriot through the searching lens of her own ampler information. "the old hypocrite--she'll tell them everything," undine murmured, wincing at the recollection of the dentist's assistant from deposit, and staring miserably at her reflection in the dressing-table mirror. of what use were youth and grace and good looks, if one drop of poison distilled from the envy of a narrow-minded woman was enough to paralyze them? of course madame de trezac knew and remembered, and, secure in her own impregnable position, would never rest till she had driven out the intruder. xxviii "what do you say to nice to-morrow, dearest?" the princess suggested a few evenings later as she followed undine upstairs after a languid evening at bridge with the duchess and madame de trezac. half-way down the passage she stopped to open a door and, putting her finger to her lip, signed to undine to enter. in the taper-lit dimness stood two small white beds, each surmounted by a crucifix and a palm branch, and each containing a small brown sleeping child with a mop of hair and a curiously finished little face. as the princess stood gazing on their innocent slumbers she seemed for a moment like a third little girl scarcely bigger and browner than the others; and the smile with which she watched them was as clear as theirs. "ah, si seulement je pouvais choisir leurs amants!" she sighed as she turned away. "--nice to-morrow," she repeated, as she and undine walked on to their rooms with linked arms. "we may as well make hay while the trezac shines. she bores mamma frightfully, but mamma won't admit it because they belong to the same oeuvres. shall it be the eleven train, dear? we can lunch at the royal and look in the shops--we may meet somebody amusing. anyhow, it's better than staying here!" undine was sure the trip to nice would be delightful. their previous expeditions had shown her the princess's faculty for organizing such adventures. at monte-carlo, a few days before, they had run across two or three amusing but unassorted people, and the princess, having fused them in a jolly lunch, had followed it up by a bout at baccarat, and, finally hunting down an eminent composer who had just arrived to rehearse a new production, had insisted on his asking the party to tea, and treating them to fragments of his opera. a few days earlier, undine's hope of renewing such pleasures would have been clouded by the dread of leaving madame de trezac alone with the duchess. but she had no longer any fear of madame de trezac. she had discovered that her old rival of potash springs was in actual dread of her disfavour, and nervously anxious to conciliate her, and the discovery gave her such a sense of the heights she had scaled, and the security of her footing, that all her troubled past began to seem like the result of some providential "design," and vague impulses of piety stirred in her as she and the princess whirled toward nice through the blue and gold glitter of the morning. they wandered about the lively streets, they gazed into the beguiling shops, the princess tried on hats and undine bought them, and they lunched at the royal on all sorts of succulent dishes prepared under the head-waiter's special supervision. but as they were savouring their "double" coffee and liqueurs, and undine was wondering what her companion would devise for the afternoon, the princess clapped her hands together and cried out: "dearest, i'd forgotten! i must desert you." she explained that she'd promised the duchess to look up a friend who was ill--a poor wretch who'd been sent to cimiez for her lungs--and that she must rush off at once, and would be back as soon as possible--well, if not in an hour, then in two at latest. she was full of compunction, but she knew undine would forgive her, and find something amusing to fill up the time: she advised her to go back and buy the black hat with the osprey, and try on the crepe de chine they'd thought so smart: for any one as good-looking as herself the woman would probably alter it for nothing; and they could meet again at the palace tea-rooms at four. she whirled away in a cloud of explanations, and undine, left alone, sat down on the promenade des anglais. she did not believe a word the princess had said. she had seen in a flash why she was being left, and why the plan had not been divulged to her before-hand; and she quivered with resentment and humiliation. "that's what she's wanted me for...that's why she made up to me. she's trying it to-day, and after this it'll happen regularly...she'll drag me over here every day or two...at least she thinks she will!" a sincere disgust was undine's uppermost sensation. she was as much ashamed as mrs. spragg might have been at finding herself used to screen a clandestine adventure. "i'll let her see... i'll make her understand," she repeated angrily; and for a moment she was half-disposed to drive to the station and take the first train back. but the sense of her precarious situation withheld her; and presently, with bitterness in her heart, she got up and began to stroll toward the shops. to show that she was not a dupe, she arrived at the designated meeting-place nearly an hour later than the time appointed; but when she entered the tea-rooms the princess was nowhere to be seen. the rooms were crowded, and undine was guided toward a small inner apartment where isolated couples were absorbing refreshments in an atmosphere of intimacy that made it seem incongruous to be alone. she glanced about for a face she knew, but none was visible, and she was just giving up the search when she beheld elmer moffatt shouldering his way through the crowd. the sight was so surprising that she sat gazing with unconscious fixity at the round black head and glossy reddish face which kept appearing and disappearing through the intervening jungle of aigrettes. it was long since she had either heard of moffatt or thought about him, and now, in her loneliness and exasperation, she took comfort in the sight of his confident capable face, and felt a longing to hear his voice and unbosom her woes to him. she had half risen to attract his attention when she saw him turn back and make way for a companion, who was cautiously steering her huge feathered hat between the tea-tables. the woman was of the vulgarest type; everything about her was cheap and gaudy. but moffatt was obviously elated: he stood aside with a flourish to usher her in, and as he followed he shot out a pink shirt-cuff with jewelled links, and gave his moustache a gallant twist. undine felt an unreasoning irritation: she was vexed with him both for not being alone and for being so vulgarly accompanied. as the couple seated themselves she caught moffatt's glance and saw him redden to the edge of his white forehead; but he elaborately avoided her eye--he evidently wanted her to see him do it--and proceeded to minister to his companion's wants with an air of experienced gallantry. the incident, trifling as it was, filled up the measure of undine's bitterness. she thought moffatt pitiably ridiculous, and she hated him for showing himself in such a light at that particular moment. her mind turned back to her own grievance, and she was just saying to herself that nothing on earth should prevent her letting the princess know what she thought of her, when the lady in question at last appeared. she came hurriedly forward and behind her undine perceived the figure of a slight quietly dressed man, as to whom her immediate impression was that he made every one else in the room look as common as moffatt. an instant later the colour had flown to her face and her hand was in raymond de chelles, while the princess, murmuring: "cimiez's such a long way off; but you will forgive me?" looked into her eyes with a smile that added: "see how i pay for what i get!" her first glance showed undine how glad raymond de chelles was to see her. since their last meeting his admiration for her seemed not only to have increased but to have acquired a different character. undine, at an earlier stage in her career, might not have known exactly what the difference signified; but it was as clear to her now as if the princess had said--what her beaming eyes seemed, in fact, to convey--"i'm only too glad to do my cousin the same kind of turn you're doing me." but undine's increased experience, if it had made her more vigilant, had also given her a clearer measure of her power. she saw at once that chelles, in seeking to meet her again, was not in quest of a mere passing adventure. he was evidently deeply drawn to her, and her present situation, if it made it natural to regard her as more accessible, had not altered the nature of his feeling. she saw and weighed all this in the first five minutes during which, over tea and muffins, the princess descanted on her luck in happening to run across her cousin, and chelles, his enchanted eyes on undine, expressed his sense of his good fortune. he was staying, it appeared, with friends at beaulieu, and had run over to nice that afternoon by the merest chance: he added that, having just learned of his aunt's presence in the neighbourhood, he had already planned to present his homage to her. "oh, don't come to us--we're too dull!" the princess exclaimed. "let us run over occasionally and call on you: we're dying for a pretext, aren't we?" she added, smiling at undine. the latter smiled back vaguely, and looked across the room. moffatt, looking flushed and foolish, was just pushing back his chair. to carry off his embarrassment he put an additional touch of importance; and as he swaggered out behind his companion, undine said to herself, with a shiver: "if he'd been alone they would have found me taking tea with him." undine, during the ensuing weeks, returned several times to nice with the princess; but, to the latter's surprise, she absolutely refused to have raymond de chelles included in their luncheon-parties, or even apprised in advance of their expeditions. the princess, always impatient of unnecessary dissimulation, had not attempted to keep up the feint of the interesting invalid at cimiez. she confessed to undine that she was drawn to nice by the presence there of the person without whom, for the moment, she found life intolerable, and whom she could not well receive under the same roof with her little girls and her mother. she appealed to undine's sisterly heart to feel for her in her difficulty, and implied that--as her conduct had already proved--she would always be ready to render her friend a like service. it was at this point that undine checked her by a decided word. "i understand your position, and i'm very sorry for you, of course," she began (the princess stared at the "sorry"). "your secret's perfectly safe with me, and i'll do anything i can for you...but if i go to nice with you again you must promise not to ask your cousin to meet us." the princess's face expressed the most genuine astonishment. "oh, my dear, do forgive me if i've been stupid! he admires you so tremendously; and i thought--" "you'll do as i ask, please--won't you?" undine went on, ignoring the interruption and looking straight at her under level brows; and the princess, with a shrug, merely murmured: "what a pity! i fancied you liked him." xxix the early spring found undine once more in paris. she had every reason to be satisfied with the result of the course she had pursued since she had pronounced her ultimatum on the subject of raymond de chelles. she had continued to remain on the best of terms with the princess, to rise in the estimation of the old duchess, and to measure the rapidity of her ascent in the upward gaze of madame de trezac; and she had given chelles to understand that, if he wished to renew their acquaintance, he must do so in the shelter of his venerable aunt's protection. to the princess she was careful to make her attitude equally clear. "i like your cousin very much--he's delightful, and if i'm in paris this spring i hope i shall see a great deal of him. but i know how easy it is for a woman in my position to get talked about--and i have my little boy to consider." nevertheless, whenever chelles came over from beaulieu to spend a day with his aunt and cousin--an excursion he not infrequently repeated--undine was at no pains to conceal her pleasure. nor was there anything calculated in her attitude. chelles seemed to her more charming than ever, and the warmth of his wooing was in flattering contrast to the cool reserve of his manners. at last she felt herself alive and young again, and it became a joy to look in her glass and to try on her new hats and dresses... the only menace ahead was the usual one of the want of money. while she had travelled with her parents she had been at relatively small expense, and since their return to america mr. spragg had sent her allowance regularly; yet almost all the money she had received for the pearls was already gone, and she knew her paris season would be far more expensive than the quiet weeks on the riviera. meanwhile the sense of reviving popularity, and the charm of chelles' devotion, had almost effaced the ugly memories of failure, and refurbished that image of herself in other minds which was her only notion of self-seeing. under the guidance of madame de trezac she had found a prettily furnished apartment in a not too inaccessible quarter, and in its light bright drawing-room she sat one june afternoon listening, with all the forbearance of which she was capable, to the counsels of her newly-acquired guide. "everything but marriage--" madame de trezac was repeating, her long head slightly tilted, her features wearing the rapt look of an adept reciting a hallowed formula. raymond de chelles had not been mentioned by either of the ladies, and the former miss wincher was merely imparting to her young friend one of the fundamental dogmas of her social creed; but undine was conscious that the air between them vibrated with an unspoken name. she made no immediate answer, but her glance, passing by madame de trezac's dull countenance, sought her own reflection in the mirror behind her visitor's chair. a beam of spring sunlight touched the living masses of her hair and made the face beneath as radiant as a girl's. undine smiled faintly at the promise her own eyes gave her, and then turned them back to her friend. "what can such women know about anything?" she thought compassionately. "there's everything against it," madame de trezac continued in a tone of patient exposition. she seemed to be doing her best to make the matter clear. "in the first place, between people in society a religious marriage is necessary; and, since the church doesn't recognize divorce, that's obviously out of the question. in france, a man of position who goes through the form of civil marriage with a divorced woman is simply ruining himself and her. they might much better--from her point of view as well as his--be 'friends,' as it's called over here: such arrangements are understood and allowed for. but when a frenchman marries he wants to marry as his people always have. he knows there are traditions he can't fight against--and in his heart he's glad there are." "oh, i know: they've so much religious feeling. i admire that in them: their religion's so beautiful." undine looked thoughtfully at her visitor. "i suppose even money--a great deal of money--wouldn't make the least bit of difference?" "none whatever, except to make matters worse," madame de trezac decisively rejoined. she returned undine's look with something of miss wincher's contemptuous authority. "but," she added, softening to a smile, "between ourselves--i can say it, since we're neither of us children--a woman with tact, who's not in a position to remarry, will find society extremely indulgent... provided, of course, she keeps up appearances..." undine turned to her with the frown of a startled diana. "we don't look at things that way out at apex," she said coldly; and the blood rose in madame de trezac's sallow cheek. "oh, my dear, it's so refreshing to hear you talk like that! personally, of course, i've never quite got used to the french view--" "i hope no american woman ever does," said undine. she had been in paris for about two months when this conversation took place, and in spite of her reviving self-confidence she was beginning to recognize the strength of the forces opposed to her. it had taken a long time to convince her that even money could not prevail against them; and, in the intervals of expressing her admiration for the catholic creed, she now had violent reactions of militant protestantism, during which she talked of the tyranny of rome and recalled school stories of immoral popes and persecuting jesuits. meanwhile her demeanour to chelles was that of the incorruptible but fearless american woman, who cannot even conceive of love outside of marriage, but is ready to give her devoted friendship to the man on whom, in happier circumstances, she might have bestowed her hand. this attitude was provocative of many scenes, during which her suitor's unfailing powers of expression--his gift of looking and saying all the desperate and devoted things a pretty woman likes to think she inspires--gave undine the thrilling sense of breathing the very air of french fiction. but she was aware that too prolonged tension of these cords usually ends in their snapping, and that chelles' patience was probably in inverse ratio to his ardour. when madame de trezac had left her these thoughts remained in her mind. she understood exactly what each of her new friends wanted of her. the princess, who was fond of her cousin, and had the french sense of family solidarity, would have liked to see chelles happy in what seemed to her the only imaginable way. madame de trezac would have liked to do what she could to second the princess's efforts in this or any other line; and even the old duchess--though piously desirous of seeing her favourite nephew married--would have thought it not only natural but inevitable that, while awaiting that happy event, he should try to induce an amiable young woman to mitigate the drawbacks of celibacy. meanwhile, they might one and all weary of her if chelles did; and a persistent rejection of his suit would probably imperil her scarcely-gained footing among his friends. all this was clear to her, yet it did not shake her resolve. she was determined to give up chelles unless he was willing to marry her; and the thought of her renunciation moved her to a kind of wistful melancholy. in this mood her mind reverted to a letter she had just received from her mother. mrs. spragg wrote more fully than usual, and the unwonted flow of her pen had been occasioned by an event for which she had long yearned. for months she had pined for a sight of her grandson, had tried to screw up her courage to write and ask permission to visit him, and, finally breaking through her sedentary habits, had begun to haunt the neighbourhood of washington square, with the result that one afternoon she had had the luck to meet the little boy coming out of the house with his nurse. she had spoken to him, and he had remembered her and called her "granny"; and the next day she had received a note from mrs. fairford saying that ralph would be glad to send paul to see her. mrs. spragg enlarged on the delights of the visit and the growing beauty and cleverness of her grandson. she described to undine exactly how paul was dressed, how he looked and what he said, and told her how he had examined everything in the room, and, finally coming upon his mother's photograph, had asked who the lady was; and, on being told, had wanted to know if she was a very long way off, and when granny thought she would come back. as undine re-read her mother's pages, she felt an unusual tightness in her throat and two tears rose to her eyes. it was dreadful that her little boy should be growing up far away from her, perhaps dressed in clothes she would have hated; and wicked and unnatural that when he saw her picture he should have to be told who she was. "if i could only meet some good man who would give me a home and be a father to him," she thought--and the tears overflowed and ran down. even as they fell, the door was thrown open to admit raymond de chelles, and the consciousness of the moisture still glistening on her cheeks perhaps strengthened her resolve to resist him, and thus made her more imperiously to be desired. certain it is that on that day her suitor first alluded to a possibility which madame de trezac had prudently refrained from suggesting, there fell upon undine's attentive ears the magic phrase "annulment of marriage." her alert intelligence immediately set to work in this new direction; but almost at the same moment she became aware of a subtle change of tone in the princess and her mother, a change reflected in the corresponding decline of madame de trezac's cordiality. undine, since her arrival in paris, had necessarily been less in the princess's company, but when they met she had found her as friendly as ever. it was manifestly not a failing of the princess's to forget past favours, and though increasingly absorbed by the demands of town life she treated her new friend with the same affectionate frankness, and undine was given frequent opportunities to enlarge her parisian acquaintance, not only in the princess's intimate circle but in the majestic drawing-rooms of the hotel de dordogne. now, however, there was a perceptible decline in these signs of hospitality, and undine, on calling one day on the duchess, noticed that her appearance sent a visible flutter of discomfort through the circle about her hostess's chair. two or three of the ladies present looked away from the new-comer and at each other, and several of them seemed spontaneously to encircle without approaching her, while another--grey-haired, elderly and slightly frightened--with an "adieu, ma bonne tante" to the duchess, was hastily aided in her retreat down the long line of old gilded rooms. the incident was too mute and rapid to have been noticeable had it not been followed by the duchess's resuming her conversation with the ladies nearest her as though undine had just gone out of the room instead of entering it. the sense of having been thus rendered invisible filled undine with a vehement desire to make herself seen, and an equally strong sense that all attempts to do so would be vain; and when, a few minutes later, she issued from the portals of the hotel de dordogne it was with the fixed resolve not to enter them again till she had had an explanation with the princess. she was spared the trouble of seeking one by the arrival, early the next morning, of madame de trezac, who, entering almost with the breakfast tray, mysteriously asked to be allowed to communicate something of importance. "you'll understand, i know, the princess's not coming herself--" madame de trezac began, sitting up very straight on the edge of the arm-chair over which undine's lace dressing-gown hung. "if there's anything she wants to say to me, i don't," undine answered, leaning back among her rosy pillows, and reflecting compassionately that the face opposite her was just the colour of the café au lait she was pouring out. "there are things that are...that might seem too pointed...if one said them one's self," madame de trezac continued. "our dear lili's so good-natured... she so hates to do anything unfriendly; but she naturally thinks first of her mother..." "her mother? what's the matter with her mother?" "i told her i knew you didn't understand. i was sure you'd take it in good part..." undine raised herself on her elbow. "what did lili tell you to tell me?" "oh, not to tell you...simply to ask if, just for the present, you'd mind avoiding the duchess's thursdays ...calling on any other day, that is." "any other day? she's not at home on any other. do you mean she doesn't want me to call?" "well--not while the marquise de chelles is in paris. she's the duchess's favourite niece--and of course they all hang together. that kind of family feeling is something you naturally don't--" undine had a sudden glimpse of hidden intricacies. "that was raymond de chelles' mother i saw there yesterday? the one they hurried out when i came in?" "it seems she was very much upset. she somehow heard your name." "why shouldn't she have heard my name? and why in the world should it upset her?" madame de trezac heaved a hesitating sigh. "isn't it better to be frank? she thinks she has reason to feel badly--they all do." "to feel badly? because her son wants to marry me?" "of course they know that's impossible." madame de trezac smiled compassionately. "but they're afraid of your spoiling his other chances." undine paused a moment before answering, "it won't be impossible when my marriage is annulled," she said. the effect of this statement was less electrifying than she had hoped. her visitor simply broke into a laugh. "my dear child! your marriage annulled? who can have put such a mad idea into your head?" undine's gaze followed the pattern she was tracing with a lustrous nail on her embroidered bedspread. "raymond himself," she let fall. this time there was no mistaking the effect she produced. madame de trezac, with a murmured "oh," sat gazing before her as if she had lost the thread of her argument; and it was only after a considerable interval that she recovered it sufficiently to exclaim: "they'll never hear of it--absolutely never!" "but they can't prevent it, can they?" "they can prevent its being of any use to you." "i see," undine pensively assented. she knew the tone she had taken was virtually a declaration of war; but she was in a mood when the act of defiance, apart from its strategic value, was a satisfaction in itself. moreover, if she could not gain her end without a fight it was better that the battle should be engaged while raymond's ardour was at its height. to provoke immediate hostilities she sent for him the same afternoon, and related, quietly and without comment, the incident of her visit to the duchess, and the mission with which madame de trezac had been charged. in the circumstances, she went on to explain, it was manifestly impossible that she should continue to receive his visits; and she met his wrathful comments on his relatives by the gently but firmly expressed resolve not to be the cause of any disagreement between himself and his family. xxx a few days after her decisive conversation with raymond de chelles, undine, emerging from the doors of the nouveau luxe, where she had been to call on the newly-arrived mrs. homer branney, once more found herself face to face with elmer moffatt. this time there was no mistaking his eagerness to be recognized. he stopped short as they met, and she read such pleasure in his eyes that she too stopped, holding out her hand. "i'm glad you're going to speak to me," she said, and moffatt reddened at the allusion. "well, i very nearly didn't. i didn't know you. you look about as old as you did when i first landed at apex--remember?" he turned back and began to walk at her side in the direction of the champs elysees. "say--this is all right!" he exclaimed; and she saw that his glance had left her and was ranging across the wide silvery square ahead of them to the congregated domes and spires beyond the river. "do you like paris?" she asked, wondering what theatres he had been to. "it beats everything." he seemed to be breathing in deeply the impression of fountains, sculpture, leafy' avenues and long-drawn architectural distances fading into the afternoon haze. "i suppose you've been to that old church over there?" he went on, his gold-topped stick pointing toward the towers of notre dame. "oh, of course; when i used to sightsee. have you never been to paris before?" "no, this is my first look-round. i came across in march." "in march?" she echoed inattentively. it never occurred to her that other people's lives went on when they were out of her range of vision, and she tried in vain to remember what she had last heard of moffatt. "wasn't that a bad time to leave wall street?" "well, so-so. fact is, i was played out: needed a change." nothing in his robust mien confirmed the statement, and he did not seem inclined to develop it. "i presume you're settled here now?" he went on. "i saw by the papers--" "yes," she interrupted; adding, after a moment: "it was all a mistake from the first." "well, i never thought he was your form," said moffatt. his eyes had come back to her, and the look in them struck her as something she might use to her advantage; but the next moment he had glanced away with a furrowed brow, and she felt she had not wholly fixed his attention. "i live at the other end of paris. why not come back and have tea with me?" she suggested, half moved by a desire to know more of his affairs, and half by the thought that a talk with him might help to shed some light on hers. in the open taxi-cab he seemed to recover his sense of well-being, and leaned back, his hands on the knob of his stick, with the air of a man pleasantly aware of his privileges. "this paris is a thundering good place," he repeated once or twice as they rolled on through the crush and glitter of the afternoon; and when they had descended at undine's door, and he stood in her drawing-room, and looked out on the horse-chestnut trees rounding their green domes under the balcony, his satisfaction culminated in the comment: "i guess this lays out west end avenue!" his eyes met undine's with their old twinkle, and their expression encouraged her to murmur: "of course there are times when i'm very lonely." she sat down behind the tea-table, and he stood at a little distance, watching her pull off her gloves with a queer comic twitch of his elastic mouth. "well, i guess it's only when you want to be," he said, grasping a lyre-backed chair by its gilt cords, and sitting down astride of it, his light grey trousers stretching too tightly over his plump thighs. undine was perfectly aware that he was a vulgar over-dressed man, with a red crease of fat above his collar and an impudent swaggering eye; yet she liked to see him there, and was conscious that he stirred the fibres of a self she had forgotten but had not ceased to understand. she had fancied her avowal of loneliness might call forth some sentimental phrase; but though moffatt was clearly pleased to be with her she saw that she was not the centre of his thoughts, and the discovery irritated her. "i don't suppose you've known what it is to be lonely since you've been in europe?" she continued as she held out his tea-cup. "oh," he said jocosely, "i don't always go round with a guide"; and she rejoined on the same note: "then perhaps i shall see something of you." "why, there's nothing would suit me better; but the fact is, i'm probably sailing next week." "oh, are you? i'm sorry." there was nothing feigned in her regret. "anything i can do for you across the pond?" she hesitated. "there's something you can do for me right off." he looked at her more attentively, as if his practised eve had passed through the surface of her beauty to what might be going on behind it. "do you want my blessing again?" he asked with sudden irony. undine opened her eyes with a trustful look. "yes--i do." "well--i'll be damned!" said moffatt gaily. "you've always been so awfully nice," she began; and he leaned back, grasping both sides of the chair-back, and shaking it a little with his laugh. he kept the same attitude while she proceeded to unfold her case, listening to her with the air of sober concentration that his frivolous face took on at any serious demand on his attention. when she had ended he kept the same look during an interval of silent pondering. "is it the fellow who was over at nice with you that day?" she looked at him with surprise. "how did you know?" "why, i liked his looks," said moffatt simply. he got up and strolled toward the window. on the way he stopped before a table covered with showy trifles, and after looking at them for a moment singled out a dim old brown and golden book which chelles had given her. he examined it lingeringly, as though it touched the spring of some choked-up sensibility for which he had no language. "say--" he began: it was the usual prelude to his enthusiasms; but he laid the book down and turned back. "then you think if you had the cash you could fix it up all right with the pope?" her heart began to beat. she remembered that he had once put a job in ralph's way, and had let her understand that he had done it partly for her sake. "well," he continued, relapsing into hyperbole, "i wish i could send the old gentleman my cheque to-morrow morning: but the fact is i'm high and dry." he looked at her with a sudden odd intensity. "if i wasn't, i dunno but what--" the phrase was lost in his familiar whistle. "that's an awfully fetching way you do your hair," he said. it was a disappointment to undine to hear that his affairs were not prospering, for she knew that in his world "pull" and solvency were closely related, and that such support as she had hoped he might give her would be contingent on his own situation. but she had again a fleeting sense of his mysterious power of accomplishing things in the teeth of adversity; and she answered: "what i want is your advice." he turned away and wandered across the room, his hands in his pockets. on her ornate writing desk he saw a photograph of paul, bright-curled and sturdy-legged, in a manly reefer, and bent over it with a murmur of approval. "say--what a fellow! got him with you?" undine coloured. "no--" she began; and seeing his look of surprise, she embarked on her usual explanation. "i can't tell you how i miss him," she ended, with a ring of truth that carried conviction to her own ears if not to moffatt's. "why don't you get him back, then?" "why, i--" moffatt had picked up the frame and was looking at the photograph more closely. "pants!" he chuckled. "i declare!" he turned back to undine. "who does he belong to, anyhow?" "belong to?" "who got him when you were divorced? did you?" "oh, i got everything," she said, her instinct of self-defense on the alert. "so i thought." he stood before her, stoutly planted on his short legs, and speaking with an aggressive energy. "well, i know what i'd do if he was mine." "if he was yours?" "and you tried to get him away from me. fight you to a finish! if it cost me down to my last dollar i would." the conversation seemed to be wandering from the point, and she answered, with a touch of impatience: "it wouldn't cost you anything like that. i haven't got a dollar to fight back with." "well, you ain't got to fight. your decree gave him to you, didn't it? why don't you send right over and get him? that's what i'd do if i was you." undine looked up. "but i'm awfully poor; i can't afford to have him here." "you couldn't, up to now; but now you're going to get married. you're going to be able to give him a home and a father's care--and the foreign languages. that's what i'd say if i was you...his father takes considerable stock in him, don't he?" she coloured, a denial on her lips; but she could not shape it. "we're both awfully fond of him, of course... his father'd never give him up!" "just so." moffatt's face had grown as sharp as glass. "you've got the marvells running. all you've got to do's to sit tight and wait for their cheque." he dropped back to his equestrian seat on the lyre-backed chair. undine stood up and moved uneasily toward the window. she seemed to see her little boy as though he were in the room with her; she did not understand how she could have lived so long without him...she stood for a long time without speaking, feeling behind her the concentrated irony of moffatt's gaze. "you couldn't lend me the money--manage to borrow it for me, i mean?" she finally turned back to ask. he laughed. "if i could manage to borrow any money at this particular minute--well, i'd have to lend every dollar of it to elmer moffatt, esquire. i'm stone-broke, if you want to know. and wanted for an investigation too. that's why i'm over here improving my mind." "why, i thought you were going home next week?" he grinned. "i am, because i've found out there's a party wants me to stay away worse than the courts want me back. making the trip just for my private satisfaction--there won't be any money in it, i'm afraid." leaden disappointment descended on undine. she had felt almost sure of moffatt's helping her, and for an instant she wondered if some long-smouldering jealousy had flamed up under its cold cinders. but another look at his face denied her this solace; and his evident indifference was the last blow to her pride. the twinge it gave her prompted her to ask: "don't you ever mean to get married?" moffatt gave her a quick look. "why, i shouldn't wonder--one of these days. millionaires always collect something; but i've got to collect my millions first." he spoke coolly and half-humorously, and before he had ended she had lost all interest in his reply. he seemed aware of the fact, for he stood up and held out his hand. "well, so long, mrs. marvell. it's been uncommonly pleasant to see you; and you'd better think over what i've said." she laid her hand sadly in his. "you've never had a child," she replied. xxxi nearly two years had passed since ralph marvell, waking from his long sleep in the hot summer light of washington square, had found that the face of life was changed for him. in the interval he had gradually adapted himself to the new order of things; but the months of adaptation had been a time of such darkness and confusion that, from the vantage-ground of his recovered lucidity, he could not yet distinguish the stages by which he had worked his way out; and even now his footing was not secure. his first effort had been to readjust his values--to take an inventory of them, and reclassify them, so that one at least might be made to appear as important as those he had lost; otherwise there could be no reason why he should go on living. he applied himself doggedly to this attempt; but whenever he thought he had found a reason that his mind could rest in, it gave way under him, and the old struggle for a foothold began again. his two objects in life were his boy and his book. the boy was incomparably the stronger argument, yet the less serviceable in filling the void. ralph felt his son all the while, and all through his other feelings; but he could not think about him actively and continuously, could not forever exercise his eager empty dissatisfied mind on the relatively simple problem of clothing, educating and amusing a little boy of six. yet paul's existence was the all-sufficient reason for his own; and he turned again, with a kind of cold fervour, to his abandoned literary dream. material needs obliged him to go on with his regular business; but, the day's work over, he was possessed of a leisure as bare and as blank as an unfurnished house, yet that was at least his own to furnish as he pleased. meanwhile he was beginning to show a presentable face to the world, and to be once more treated like a man in whose case no one is particularly interested. his men friends ceased to say: "hallo, old chap, i never saw you looking fitter!" and elderly ladies no longer told him they were sure he kept too much to himself, and urged him to drop in any afternoon for a quiet talk. people left him to his sorrow as a man is left to an incurable habit, an unfortunate tie: they ignored it, or looked over its head if they happened to catch a glimpse of it at his elbow. these glimpses were given to them more and more rarely. the smothered springs of life were bubbling up in ralph, and there were days when he was glad to wake and see the sun in his window, and when he began to plan his book, and to fancy that the planning really interested him. he could even maintain the delusion for several days--for intervals each time appreciably longer--before it shrivelled up again in a scorching blast of disenchantment. the worst of it was that he could never tell when these hot gusts of anguish would overtake him. they came sometimes just when he felt most secure, when he was saying to himself: "after all, things are really worth while--" sometimes even when he was sitting with clare van degen, listening to her voice, watching her hands, and turning over in his mind the opening chapters of his book. "you ought to write"; they had one and all said it to him from the first; and he fancied he might have begun sooner if he had not been urged on by their watchful fondness. everybody wanted him to write--everybody had decided that he ought to, that he would, that he must be persuaded to; and the incessant imperceptible pressure of encouragement--the assumption of those about him that because it would be good for him to write he must naturally be able to--acted on his restive nerves as a stronger deterrent than disapproval. even clare had fallen into the same mistake; and one day, as he sat talking with her on the verandah of laura fairford's house on the sound--where they now most frequently met--ralph had half-impatiently rejoined: "oh, if you think it's literature i need--!" instantly he had seen her face change, and the speaking hands tremble on her knee. but she achieved the feat of not answering him, or turning her steady eyes from the dancing mid-summer water at the foot of laura's lawn. ralph leaned a little nearer, and for an instant his hand imagined the flutter of hers. but instead of clasping it he drew back, and rising from his chair wandered away to the other end of the verandah...no, he didn't feel as clare felt. if he loved her--as he sometimes thought he did--it was not in the same way. he had a great tenderness for her, he was more nearly happy with her than with any one else; he liked to sit and talk with her, and watch her face and her hands, and he wished there were some way--some different way--of letting her know it; but he could not conceive that tenderness and desire could ever again be one for him: such a notion as that seemed part of the monstrous sentimental muddle on which his life had gone aground. "i shall write--of course i shall write some day," he said, turning back to his seat. "i've had a novel in the back of my head for years; and now's the time to pull it out." he hardly knew what he was saying; but before the end of the sentence he saw that clare had understood what he meant to convey, and henceforth he felt committed to letting her talk to him as much as she pleased about his book. he himself, in consequence, took to thinking about it more consecutively; and just as his friends ceased to urge him to write, he sat down in earnest to begin. the vision that had come to him had no likeness to any of his earlier imaginings. two or three subjects had haunted him, pleading for expression, during the first years of his marriage; but these now seemed either too lyrical or too tragic. he no longer saw life on the heroic scale: he wanted to do something in which men should look no bigger than the insects they were. he contrived in the course of time to reduce one of his old subjects to these dimensions, and after nights of brooding he made a dash at it, and wrote an opening chapter that struck him as not too bad. in the exhilaration of this first attempt he spent some pleasant evenings revising and polishing his work; and gradually a feeling of authority and importance developed in him. in the morning, when he woke, instead of his habitual sense of lassitude, he felt an eagerness to be up and doing, and a conviction that his individual task was a necessary part of the world's machinery. he kept his secret with the beginner's deadly fear of losing his hold on his half-real creations if he let in any outer light on them; but he went about with a more assured step, shrank less from meeting his friends, and even began to dine out again, and to laugh at some of the jokes he heard. laura fairford, to get paul away from town, had gone early to the country; and ralph, who went down to her every saturday, usually found clare van degen there. since his divorce he had never entered his cousin's pinnacled palace; and clare had never asked him why he stayed away. this mutual silence had been their sole allusion to van degen's share in the catastrophe, though ralph had spoken frankly of its other aspects. they talked, however, most often of impersonal subjects--books, pictures, plays, or whatever the world that interested them was doing--and she showed no desire to draw him back to his own affairs. she was again staying late in town--to have a pretext, as he guessed, for coming down on sundays to the fairfords'--and they often made the trip together in her motor; but he had not yet spoken to her of having begun his book. one may evening, however, as they sat alone in the verandah, he suddenly told her that he was writing. as he spoke his heart beat like a boy's; but once the words were out they gave him a feeling of self-confidence, and he began to sketch his plan, and then to go into its details. clare listened devoutly, her eyes burning on him through the dusk like the stars deepening above the garden; and when she got up to go in he followed her with a new sense of reassurance. the dinner that evening was unusually pleasant. charles bowen, just back from his usual spring travels, had come straight down to his friends from the steamer; and the fund of impressions he brought with him gave ralph a desire to be up and wandering. and why not--when the book was done? he smiled across the table at clare. "next summer you'll have to charter a yacht, and take us all off to the aegean. we can't have charles condescending to us about the out-of-the-way places he's been seeing." was it really he who was speaking, and his cousin who was sending him back her dusky smile? well--why not, again? the seasons renewed themselves, and he too was putting out a new growth. "my book--my book--my book," kept repeating itself under all his thoughts, as undine's name had once perpetually murmured there. that night as he went up to bed he said to himself that he was actually ceasing to think about his wife... as he passed laura's door she called him in, and put her arms about him. "you look so well, dear!" "but why shouldn't i?" he answered gaily, as if ridiculing the fancy that he had ever looked otherwise. paul was sleeping behind the next door, and the sense of the boy's nearness gave him a warmer glow. his little world was rounding itself out again, and once more he felt safe and at peace in its circle. his sister looked as if she had something more to say; but she merely kissed him good night, and he went up whistling to his room. the next morning he was to take a walk with clare, and while he lounged about the drawing-room, waiting for her to come down, a servant came in with the sunday papers. ralph picked one up, and was absently unfolding it when his eye fell on his own name: a sight he had been spared since the last echoes of his divorce had subsided. his impulse was to fling the paper down, to hurl it as far from him as he could; but a grim fascination tightened his hold and drew his eyes back to the hated head-line. new york beauty weds french nobleman mrs. undine marvell confident pope will annul previous marriage mrs. marvell talks about her case there it was before him in all its long-drawn horror--an "interview"--an "interview" of undine's about her coming marriage! ah, she talked about her case indeed! her confidences filled the greater part of a column, and the only detail she seemed to have omitted was the name of her future husband, who was referred to by herself as "my fiancé" and by the interviewer as "the count" or "a prominent scion of the french nobility." ralph heard laura's step behind him. he threw the paper aside and their eyes met. "is this what you wanted to tell me last night?" "last night?--is it in the papers?" "who told you? bowen? what else has he heard?" "oh, ralph, what does it matter--what can it matter?" "who's the man? did he tell you that?" ralph insisted. he saw her growing agitation. "why can't you answer? is it any one i know?" "he was told in paris it was his friend raymond de chelles." ralph laughed, and his laugh sounded in his own ears like an echo of the dreary mirth with which he had filled mr. spragg's office the day he had learned that undine intended to divorce him. but now his wrath was seasoned with a wholesome irony. the fact of his wife's having reached another stage in her ascent fell into its place as a part of the huge human buffoonery. "besides," laura went on, "it's all perfect nonsense, of course. how in the world can she have her marriage annulled?" ralph pondered: this put the matter in another light. "with a great deal of money i suppose she might." "well, she certainly won't get that from chelles. he's far from rich, charles tells me." laura waited, watching him, before she risked: "that's what convinces me she wouldn't have him if she could." ralph shrugged. "there may be other inducements. but she won't be able to manage it." he heard himself speaking quite collectedly. had undine at last lost her power of wounding him? clare came in, dressed for their walk, and under laura's anxious eyes he picked up the newspaper and held it out with a careless: "look at this!" his cousin's glance flew down the column, and he saw the tremor of her lashes as she read. then she lifted her head. "but you'll be free!" her face was as vivid as a flower. "free? i'm free now, as far as that goes!" "oh, but it will go so much farther when she has another name--when she's a different person altogether! then you'll really have paul to yourself." "paul?" laura intervened with a nervous laugh. "but there's never been the least doubt about his having paul!" they heard the boy's laughter on the lawn, and she went out to join him. ralph was still looking at his cousin. "you're glad, then?" came from him involuntarily; and she startled him by bursting into tears. he bent over and kissed her on the cheek. xxxii ralph, as the days passed, felt that clare was right: if undine married again he would possess himself more completely, be more definitely rid of his past. and he did not doubt that she would gain her end: he knew her violent desires and her cold tenacity. if she had failed to capture van degen it was probably because she lacked experience of that particular type of man, of his huge immediate wants and feeble vacillating purposes; most of all, because she had not yet measured the strength of the social considerations that restrained him. it was a mistake she was not likely to repeat, and her failure had probably been a useful preliminary to success. it was a long time since ralph had allowed himself to think of her, and as he did so the overwhelming fact of her beauty became present to him again, no longer as an element of his being but as a power dispassionately estimated. he said to himself: "any man who can feel at all will feel it as i did"; and the conviction grew in him that raymond de chelles, of whom he had formed an idea through bowen's talk, was not the man to give her up, even if she failed to obtain the release his religion exacted. meanwhile ralph was gradually beginning to feel himself freer and lighter. undine's act, by cutting the last link between them, seemed to have given him back to himself; and the mere fact that he could consider his case in all its bearings, impartially and ironically, showed him the distance he had travelled, the extent to which he had renewed himself. he had been moved, too, by clare's cry of joy at his release. though the nature of his feeling for her had not changed he was aware of a new quality in their friendship. when he went back to his book again his sense of power had lost its asperity, and the spectacle of life seemed less like a witless dangling of limp dolls. he was well on in his second chapter now. this lightness of mood was still on him when, returning one afternoon to washington square, full of projects for a long evening's work, he found his mother awaiting him with a strange face. he followed her into the drawing-room, and she explained that there had been a telephone message she didn't understand--something perfectly crazy about paul--of course it was all a mistake... ralph's first thought was of an accident, and his heart contracted. "did laura telephone?" "no, no; not laura. it seemed to be a message from mrs. spragg: something about sending some one here to fetch him--a queer name like heeny--to fetch him to a steamer on saturday. i was to be sure to have his things packed...but of course it's a misunderstanding..." she gave an uncertain laugh, and looked up at ralph as though entreating him to return the reassurance she had given him. "of course, of course," he echoed. he made his mother repeat her statement; but the unforeseen always flurried her, and she was confused and inaccurate. she didn't actually know who had telephoned: the voice hadn't sounded like mrs. spragg's... a woman's voice; yes--oh, not a lady's! and there was certainly something about a steamer...but he knew how the telephone bewildered her...and she was sure she was getting a little deaf. hadn't he better call up the malibran? of course it was all a mistake--but... well, perhaps he had better go there himself... as he reached the front door a letter clinked in the box, and he saw his name on an ordinary looking business envelope. he turned the door-handle, paused again, and stooped to take out the letter. it bore the address of the firm of lawyers who had represented undine in the divorce proceedings and as he tore open the envelope paul's name started out at him. mrs. marvell had followed him into the hall, and her cry broke the silence. "ralph--ralph--is it anything she's done?" "nothing--it's nothing." he stared at her. "what's the day of the week?" "wednesday. why, what--?" she suddenly seemed to understand. "she's not going to take him away from us?" ralph dropped into a chair, crumpling the letter in his hand. he had been in a dream, poor fool that he was--a dream about his child! he sat gazing at the type-written phrases that spun themselves out before him. "my client's circumstances now happily permitting... at last in a position to offer her son a home...long separation...a mother's feelings...every social and educational advantage"...and then, at the end, the poisoned dart that struck him speechless: "the courts having awarded her the sole custody..." the sole custody! but that meant that paul was hers, hers only, hers for always: that his father had no more claim on him than any casual stranger in the street! and he, ralph marvell, a sane man, young, able-bodied, in full possession of his wits, had assisted at the perpetration of this abominable wrong, had passively forfeited his right to the flesh of his body, the blood of his being! but it couldn't be--of course it couldn't be. the preposterousness of it proved that it wasn't true. there was a mistake somewhere; a mistake his own lawyer would instantly rectify. if a hammer hadn't been drumming in his head he could have recalled the terms of the decree--but for the moment all the details of the agonizing episode were lost in a blur of uncertainty. to escape his mother's silent anguish of interrogation he stood up and said: "i'll see mr. spragg--of course it's a mistake." but as he spoke he retravelled the hateful months during the divorce proceedings, remembering his incomprehensible lassitude, his acquiescence in his family's determination to ignore the whole episode, and his gradual lapse into the same state of apathy. he recalled all the old family catchwords, the full and elaborate vocabulary of evasion: "delicacy," "pride," "personal dignity," "preferring not to know about such things"; mrs. marvell's: "all i ask is that you won't mention the subject to your grandfather," mr. dagonet's: "spare your mother, ralph, whatever happens," and even laura's terrified: "of course, for paul's sake, there must be no scandal." for paul's sake! and it was because, for paul's sake, there must be no scandal, that he, paul's father, had tamely abstained from defending his rights and contesting his wife's charges, and had thus handed the child over to her keeping! as his cab whirled him up fifth avenue, ralph's whole body throbbed with rage against the influences that had reduced him to such weakness. then, gradually, he saw that the weakness was innate in him. he had been eloquent enough, in his free youth, against the conventions of his class; yet when the moment came to show his contempt for them they had mysteriously mastered him, deflecting his course like some hidden hereditary failing. as he looked back it seemed as though even his great disaster had been conventionalized and sentimentalized by this inherited attitude: that the thoughts he had thought about it were only those of generations of dagonets, and that there had been nothing real and his own in his life but the foolish passion he had been trying so hard to think out of existence. halfway to the malibran he changed his direction, and drove to the house of the lawyer he had consulted at the time of his divorce. the lawyer had not yet come up town, and ralph had a half hour of bitter meditation before the sound of a latch-key brought him to his feet. the visit did not last long. his host, after an affable greeting, listened without surprise to what he had to say, and when he had ended reminded him with somewhat ironic precision that, at the time of the divorce, he had asked for neither advice nor information--had simply declared that he wanted to "turn his back on the whole business" (ralph recognized the phrase as one of his grandfather's), and, on hearing that in that case he had only to abstain from action, and was in no need of legal services, had gone away without farther enquiries. "you led me to infer you had your reasons--" the slighted counsellor concluded; and, in reply to ralph's breathless question, he subjoined, "why, you see, the case is closed, and i don't exactly know on what ground you can re-open it--unless, of course, you can bring evidence showing that the irregularity of the mother's life is such..." "she's going to marry again," ralph threw in. "indeed? well, that in itself can hardly be described as irregular. in fact, in certain circumstances it might be construed as an advantage to the child." "then i'm powerless?" "why--unless there's an ulterior motive--through which pressure might be brought to bear." "you mean that the first thing to do is to find out what she's up to?" "precisely. of course, if it should prove to be a genuine case of maternal feeling, i won't conceal from you that the outlook's bad. at most, you could probably arrange to see your boy at stated intervals." to see his boy at stated intervals! ralph wondered how a sane man could sit there, looking responsible and efficient, and talk such rubbish...as he got up to go the lawyer detained him to add: "of course there's no immediate cause for alarm. it will take time to enforce the provision of the dakota decree in new york, and till it's done your son can't be taken from you. but there's sure to be a lot of nasty talk in the papers; and you're bound to lose in the end." ralph thanked him and left. he sped northward to the malibran, where he learned that mr. and mrs. spragg were at dinner. he sent his name down to the subterranean restaurant, and mr. spragg presently appeared between the limp portieres of the "adam" writing-room. he had grown older and heavier, as if illness instead of health had put more flesh on his bones, and there were greyish tints in the hollows of his face. "what's this about paul?" ralph exclaimed. "my mother's had a message we can't make out." mr. spragg sat down, with the effect of immersing his spinal column in the depths of the arm-chair he selected. he crossed his legs, and swung one foot to and fro in its high wrinkled boot with elastic sides. "didn't you get a letter?" he asked. "from my--from undine's lawyers? yes." ralph held it out. "it's queer reading. she hasn't hitherto been very keen to have paul with her." mr. spragg, adjusting his glasses, read the letter slowly, restored it to the envelope and gave it back. "my daughter has intimated that she wishes these gentlemen to act for her. i haven't received any additional instructions from her," he said, with none of the curtness of tone that his stiff legal vocabulary implied. "but the first communication i received was from you--at least from mrs. spragg." mr. spragg drew his beard through his hand. "the ladies are apt to be a trifle hasty. i believe mrs. spragg had a letter yesterday instructing her to select a reliable escort for paul; and i suppose she thought--" "oh, this is all too preposterous!" ralph burst out, springing from his seat. "you don't for a moment imagine, do you--any of you--that i'm going to deliver up my son like a bale of goods in answer to any instructions in god's world?--oh, yes, i know--i let him go--i abandoned my right to him...but i didn't know what i was doing...i was sick with grief and misery. my people were awfully broken up over the whole business, and i wanted to spare them. i wanted, above all, to spare my boy when he grew up. if i'd contested the case you know what the result would have been. i let it go by default--i made no conditions all i wanted was to keep paul, and never to let him hear a word against his mother!" mr. spragg received this passionate appeal in a silence that implied not so much disdain or indifference, as the total inability to deal verbally with emotional crises. at length, he said, a slight unsteadiness in his usually calm tones: "i presume at the time it was optional with you to demand paul's custody." "oh, yes--it was optional," ralph sneered. mr. spragg looked at him compassionately. "i'm sorry you didn't do it," he said. xxxiii the upshot of ralph's visit was that mr. spragg, after considerable deliberation, agreed, pending farther negotiations between the opposing lawyers, to undertake that no attempt should be made to remove paul from his father's custody. nevertheless, he seemed to think it quite natural that undine, on the point of making a marriage which would put it in her power to give her child a suitable home, should assert her claim on him. it was more disconcerting to ralph to learn that mrs. spragg, for once departing from her attitude of passive impartiality, had eagerly abetted her daughter's move; he had somehow felt that undine's desertion of the child had established a kind of mute understanding between himself and his mother-in-law. "i thought mrs. spragg would know there's no earthly use trying to take paul from me," he said with a desperate awkwardness of entreaty, and mr. spragg startled him by replying: "i presume his grandma thinks he'll belong to her more if we keep him in the family." ralph, abruptly awakened from his dream of recovered peace, found himself confronted on every side by. indifference or hostility: it was as though the june fields in which his boy was playing had suddenly opened to engulph him. mrs. marvell's fears and tremors were almost harder to bear than the spraggs' antagonism; and for the next few days ralph wandered about miserably, dreading some fresh communication from undine's lawyers, yet racked by the strain of hearing nothing more from them. mr. spragg had agreed to cable his daughter asking her to await a letter before enforcing her demands; but on the fourth day after ralph's visit to the malibran a telephone message summoned him to his father-in-law's office. half an hour later their talk was over and he stood once more on the landing outside mr. spragg's door. undine's answer had come and paul's fate was sealed. his mother refused to give him up, refused to await the arrival of her lawyer's letter, and reiterated, in more peremptory language, her demand that the child should be sent immediately to paris in mrs. heeny's care. mr. spragg, in face of ralph's entreaties, remained pacific but remote. it was evident that, though he had no wish to quarrel with ralph, he saw no reason for resisting undine. "i guess she's got the law on her side," he said; and in response to ralph's passionate remonstrances he added fatalistically: "i presume you'll have to leave the matter to my daughter." ralph had gone to the office resolved to control his temper and keep on the watch for any shred of information he might glean; but it soon became clear that mr. spragg knew as little as himself of undine's projects, or of the stage her plans had reached. all she had apparently vouchsafed her parent was the statement that she intended to re-marry, and the command to send paul over; and ralph reflected that his own betrothal to her had probably been announced to mr. spragg in the same curt fashion. the thought brought back an overwhelming sense of the past. one by one the details of that incredible moment revived, and he felt in his veins the glow of rapture with which he had first approached the dingy threshold he was now leaving. there came back to him with peculiar vividness the memory of his rushing up to mr. spragg's office to consult him about a necklace for undine. ralph recalled the incident because his eager appeal for advice had been received by mr. spragg with the very phrase he had just used: "i presume you'll have to leave the matter to my daughter." ralph saw him slouching in his chair, swung sideways from the untidy desk, his legs stretched out, his hands in his pockets, his jaws engaged on the phantom tooth-pick; and, in a corner of the office, the figure of a middle-sized red-faced young man who seemed to have been interrupted in the act of saying something disagreeable. "why, it must have been then that i first saw moffatt," ralph reflected; and the thought suggested the memory of other, subsequent meetings in the same building, and of frequent ascents to moffatt's office during the ardent weeks of their mysterious and remunerative "deal." ralph wondered if moffatt's office were still in the ararat; and on the way out he paused before the black tablet affixed to the wall of the vestibule and sought and found the name in its familiar place. the next moment he was again absorbed in his own cares. now that he had learned the imminence of paul's danger, and the futility of pleading for delay, a thousand fantastic projects were contending in his head. to get the boy away--that seemed the first thing to do: to put him out of reach, and then invoke the law, get the case re-opened, and carry the fight from court to court till his rights should be recognized. it would cost a lot of money--well, the money would have to be found. the first step was to secure the boy's temporary safety; after that, the question of ways and means would have to be considered...had there ever been a time, ralph wondered, when that question hadn't been at the root of all the others? he had promised to let clare van degen know the result of his visit, and half an hour later he was in her drawing-room. it was the first time he had entered it since his divorce; but van degen was tarpon-fishing in california--and besides, he had to see clare. his one relief was in talking to her, in feverishly turning over with her every possibility of delay and obstruction; and he marvelled at the intelligence and energy she brought to the discussion of these questions. it was as if she had never before felt strongly enough about anything to put her heart or her brains into it; but now everything in her was at work for him. she listened intently to what he told her; then she said: "you tell me it will cost a great deal; but why take it to the courts at all? why not give the money to undine instead of to your lawyers?" ralph looked at her in surprise, and she continued: "why do you suppose she's suddenly made up her mind she must have paul?" "that's comprehensible enough to any one who knows her. she wants him because he'll give her the appearance of respectability. having him with her will prove, as no mere assertions can, that all the rights are on her side and the 'wrongs' on mine." clare considered. "yes; that's the obvious answer. but shall i tell you what i think, my dear? you and i are both completely out-of-date. i don't believe undine cares a straw for 'the appearance of respectability.' what she wants is the money for her annulment." ralph uttered an incredulous exclamation. "but don't you see?" she hurried on. "it's her only hope--her last chance. she's much too clever to burden herself with the child merely to annoy you. what she wants is to make you buy him back from her." she stood up and came to him with outstretched hands. "perhaps i can be of use to you at last!" "you?" he summoned up a haggard smile. "as if you weren't always--letting me load you with all my bothers!" "oh, if only i've hit on the way out of this one! then there wouldn't be any others left!" her eyes followed him intently as he turned away to the window and stood staring down at the sultry prospect of fifth avenue. as he turned over her conjecture its probability became more and more apparent. it put into logical relation all the incoherencies of undine's recent conduct, completed and defined her anew as if a sharp line had been drawn about her fading image. "if it's that, i shall soon know," he said, turning back into the room. his course had instantly become plain. he had only to resist and undine would have to show her hand. simultaneously with this thought there sprang up in his mind the remembrance of the autumn afternoon in paris when he had come home and found her, among her half-packed finery, desperately bewailing her coming motherhood. clare's touch was on his arm. "if i'm right--you will let me help?" he laid his hand on hers without speaking, and she went on: "it will take a lot of money: all these law-suits do. besides, she'd be ashamed to sell him cheap. you must be ready to give her anything she wants. and i've got a lot saved up--money of my own, i mean..." "your own?" as he looked at her the rare blush rose under her brown skin. "my very own. why shouldn't you believe me? i've been hoarding up my scrap of an income for years, thinking that some day i'd find i couldn't stand this any longer..." her gesture embraced their sumptuous setting. "but now i know i shall never budge. there are the children; and besides, things are easier for me since--" she paused, embarrassed. "yes, yes; i know." he felt like completing her phrase: "since my wife has furnished you with the means of putting pressure on your husband--" but he simply repeated: "i know." "and you will let me help?" "oh, we must get at the facts first." he caught her hands in his with sudden energy. "as you say, when paul's safe there won't be another bother left!" xxxiv the means of raising the requisite amount of money became, during the next few weeks, the anxious theme of all ralph's thoughts. his lawyers' enquiries soon brought the confirmation of clare's surmise, and it became clear that--for reasons swathed in all the ingenuities of legal verbiage--undine might, in return for a substantial consideration, be prevailed on to admit that it was for her son's advantage to remain with his father. the day this admission was communicated to ralph his first impulse was to carry the news to his cousin. his mood was one of pure exaltation; he seemed to be hugging his boy to him as he walked. paul and he were to belong to each other forever: no mysterious threat of separation could ever menace them again! he had the blissful sense of relief that the child himself might have had on waking out of a frightened dream and finding the jolly daylight in his room. clare at once renewed her entreaty to be allowed to aid in ransoming her little cousin, but ralph tried to put her off by explaining that he meant to "look about." "look where? in the dagonet coffers? oh, ralph, what's the use of pretending? tell me what you've got to give her." it was amazing how his cousin suddenly dominated him. but as yet he couldn't go into the details of the bargain. that the reckoning between himself and undine should be settled in dollars and cents seemed the last bitterest satire on his dreams: he felt himself miserably diminished by the smallness of what had filled his world. nevertheless, the looking about had to be done; and a day came when he found himself once more at the door of elmer moffatt's office. his thoughts had been drawn back to moffatt by the insistence with which the latter's name had lately been put forward by the press in connection with a revival of the ararat investigation. moffatt, it appeared, had been regarded as one of the most valuable witnesses for the state; his return from europe had been anxiously awaited, his unreadiness to testify caustically criticized; then at last he had arrived, had gone on to washington--and had apparently had nothing to tell. ralph was too deep in his own troubles to waste any wonder over this anticlimax; but the frequent appearance of moffatt's name in the morning papers acted as an unconscious suggestion. besides, to whom else could he look for help? the sum his wife demanded could be acquired only by "a quick turn," and the fact that ralph had once rendered the same kind of service to moffatt made it natural to appeal to him now. the market, moreover, happened to be booming, and it seemed not unlikely that so experienced a speculator might have a "good thing" up his sleeve. moffatt's office had been transformed since ralph's last visit. paint, varnish and brass railings gave an air of opulence to the outer precincts, and the inner room, with its mahogany bookcases containing morocco-bound "sets" and its wide blue leather arm-chairs, lacked only a palm or two to resemble the lounge of a fashionable hotel. moffatt himself, as he came forward, gave ralph the impression of having been done over by the same hand: he was smoother, broader, more supremely tailored, and his whole person exhaled the faintest whiff of an expensive scent. he installed his visitor in one of the blue arm-chairs, and sitting opposite, an elbow on his impressive "washington" desk, listened attentively while ralph made his request. "you want to be put onto something good in a damned hurry?" moffatt twisted his moustache between two plump square-tipped fingers with a little black growth on their lower joints. "i don't suppose," he remarked, "there's a sane man between here and san francisco who isn't consumed by that yearning." having permitted himself this pleasantry he passed on to business. "yes--it's a first-rate time to buy: no doubt of that. but you say you want to make a quick turn-over? heard of a soft thing that won't wait, i presume? that's apt to be the way with soft things--all kinds of 'em. there's always other fellows after them." moffatt's smile was playful. "well, i'd go considerably out of my way to do you a good turn, because you did me one when i needed it mighty bad. 'in youth you sheltered me.' yes, sir, that's the kind i am." he stood up, sauntered to the other side of the room, and took a small object from the top of the bookcase. "fond of these pink crystals?" he held the oriental toy against the light. "oh, i ain't a judge--but now and then i like to pick up a pretty thing." ralph noticed that his eyes caressed it. "well--now let's talk. you say you've got to have the funds for your--your investment within three weeks. that's quick work. and you want a hundred thousand. can you put up fifty?" ralph had been prepared for the question, but when it came he felt a moment's tremor. he knew he could count on half the amount from his grandfather; could possibly ask fairford for a small additional loan--but what of the rest? well, there was clare. he had always known there would be no other way. and after all, the money was clare's--it was dagonet money. at least she said it was. all the misery of his predicament was distilled into the short silence that preceded his answer: "yes--i think so." "well, i guess i can double it for you." moffatt spoke with an air of olympian modesty. "anyhow, i'll try. only don't tell the other girls!" he proceeded to develop his plan to ears which ralph tried to make alert and attentive, but in which perpetually, through the intricate concert of facts and figures, there broke the shout of a small boy racing across a suburban lawn. "when i pick him up to-night he'll be mine for good!" ralph thought as moffatt summed up: "there's the whole scheme in a nut-shell; but you'd better think it over. i don't want to let you in for anything you ain't quite sure about." "oh, if you're sure--" ralph was already calculating the time it would take to dash up to clare van degen's on his way to catch the train for the fairfords'. his impatience made it hard to pay due regard to moffatt's parting civilities. "glad to have seen you," he heard the latter assuring him with a final hand-grasp. "wish you'd dine with me some evening at my club"; and, as ralph murmured a vague acceptance: "how's that boy of yours, by the way?" moffatt continued. "he was a stunning chap last time i saw him.--excuse me if i've put my foot in it; but i understood you kept him with you...? yes: that's what i thought.... well, so long." clare's inner sitting-room was empty; but the servant, presently returning, led ralph into the gilded and tapestried wilderness where she occasionally chose to receive her visitors. there, under popple's effigy of herself, she sat, small and alone, on a monumental sofa behind a tea-table laden with gold plate; while from his lofty frame, on the opposite wall van degen, portrayed by a "powerful" artist, cast on her the satisfied eye of proprietorship. ralph, swept forward on the blast of his excitement, felt as in a dream the frivolous perversity of her receiving him in such a setting instead of in their usual quiet corner; but there was no room in his mind for anything but the cry that broke from him: "i believe i've done it!" he sat down and explained to her by what means, trying, as best he could, to restate the particulars of moffatt's deal; and her manifest ignorance of business methods had the effect of making his vagueness appear less vague. "anyhow, he seems to be sure it's a safe thing. i understand he's in with rolliver now, and rolliver practically controls apex. this is some kind of a scheme to buy up all the works of public utility at apex. they're practically sure of their charter, and moffatt tells me i can count on doubling my investment within a few weeks. of course i'll go into the details if you like--" "oh, no; you've made it all so clear to me!" she really made him feel he had. "and besides, what on earth does it matter? the great thing is that it's done." she lifted her sparkling eyes. "and now--my share--you haven't told me..." he explained that mr. dagonet, to whom he had already named the amount demanded, had at once promised him twenty-five thousand dollars, to be eventually deducted from his share of the estate. his mother had something put by that she insisted on contributing; and henley fairford, of his own accord, had come forward with ten thousand: it was awfully decent of henley... "even henley!" clare sighed. "then i'm the only one left out?" ralph felt the colour in his face. "well, you see, i shall need as much as fifty--" her hands flew together joyfully. "but then you've got to let me help! oh, i'm so glad--so glad! i've twenty thousand waiting." he looked about the room, checked anew by all its oppressive implications. "you're a darling...but i couldn't take it." "i've told you it's mine, every penny of it!" "yes; but supposing things went wrong?" "nothing can--if you'll only take it..." "i may lose it--" "_i_ sha'n't, if i've given it to you!" her look followed his about the room and then came back to him. "can't you imagine all it will make up for?" the rapture of the cry caught him up with it. ah, yes, he could imagine it all! he stooped his head above her hands. "i accept," he said; and they stood and looked at each other like radiant children. she followed him to the door, and as he turned to leave he broke into a laugh. "it's queer, though, its happening in this room!" she was close beside him, her hand on the heavy tapestry curtaining the door; and her glance shot past him to her husband's portrait. ralph caught the look, and a flood of old tendernesses and hates welled up in him. he drew her under the portrait and kissed her vehemently. xxxv within forty-eight hours ralph's money was in moffatt's hands, and the interval of suspense had begun. the transaction over, he felt the deceptive buoyancy that follows on periods of painful indecision. it seemed to him that now at last life had freed him from all trammelling delusions, leaving him only the best thing in its gift--his boy. the things he meant paul to do and to be filled his fancy with happy pictures. the child was growing more and more interesting--throwing out countless tendrils of feeling and perception that delighted ralph but preoccupied the watchful laura. "he's going to be exactly like you, ralph--" she paused and then risked it: "for his own sake, i wish there were just a drop or two of spragg in him." ralph laughed, understanding her. "oh, the plodding citizen i've become will keep him from taking after the lyric idiot who begot him. paul and i, between us, are going to turn out something first-rate." his book too was spreading and throwing out tendrils, and he worked at it in the white heat of energy which his factitious exhilaration produced. for a few weeks everything he did and said seemed as easy and unconditioned as the actions in a dream. clare van degen, in the light of this mood, became again the comrade of his boyhood. he did not see her often, for she had gone down to the country with her children, but they communicated daily by letter or telephone, and now and then she came over to the fairfords' for a night. there they renewed the long rambles of their youth, and once more the summer fields and woods seemed full of magic presences. clare was no more intelligent, she followed him no farther in his flights; but some of the qualities that had become most precious to him were as native to her as its perfume to a flower. so, through the long june afternoons, they ranged together over many themes; and if her answers sometimes missed the mark it did not matter, because her silences never did. meanwhile ralph, from various sources, continued to pick up a good deal of more or less contradictory information about elmer moffatt. it seemed to be generally understood that moffatt had come back from europe with the intention of testifying in the ararat investigation, and that his former patron, the great harmon b. driscoll, had managed to silence him; and it was implied that the price of this silence, which was set at a considerable figure, had been turned to account in a series of speculations likely to lift moffatt to permanent eminence among the rulers of wall street. the stories as to his latest achievement, and the theories as to the man himself, varied with the visual angle of each reporter: and whenever any attempt was made to focus his hard sharp personality some guardian divinity seemed to throw a veil of mystery over him. his detractors, however, were the first to own that there was "something about him"; it was felt that he had passed beyond the meteoric stage, and the business world was unanimous in recognizing that he had "come to stay." a dawning sense of his stability was even beginning to make itself felt in fifth avenue. it was said that he had bought a house in seventy-second street, then that he meant to build near the park; one or two people (always "taken by a friend") had been to his flat in the pactolus, to see his chinese porcelains and persian rugs; now and then he had a few important men to dine at a fifth avenue restaurant; his name began to appear in philanthropic reports and on municipal committees (there were even rumours of its having been put up at a well-known club); and the rector of a wealthy parish, who was raising funds for a chantry, was known to have met him at dinner and to have stated afterward that "the man was not wholly a materialist." all these converging proofs of moffatt's solidity strengthened ralph's faith in his venture. he remembered with what astuteness and authority moffatt had conducted their real estate transaction--how far off and unreal it all seemed!--and awaited events with the passive faith of a sufferer in the hands of a skilful surgeon. the days moved on toward the end of june, and each morning ralph opened his newspaper with a keener thrill of expectation. any day now he might read of the granting of the apex charter: moffatt had assured him it would "go through" before the close of the month. but the announcement did not appear, and after what seemed to ralph a decent lapse of time he telephoned to ask for news. moffatt was away, and when he came back a few days later he answered ralph's enquiries evasively, with an edge of irritation in his voice. the same day ralph received a letter from his lawyer, who had been reminded by mrs. marvell's representatives that the latest date agreed on for the execution of the financial agreement was the end of the following week. ralph, alarmed, betook himself at once to the ararat, and his first glimpse of moffatt's round common face and fastidiously dressed person gave him an immediate sense of reassurance. he felt that under the circle of baldness on top of that carefully brushed head lay the solution of every monetary problem that could beset the soul of man. moffatt's voice had recovered its usual cordial note, and the warmth of his welcome dispelled ralph's last apprehension. "why, yes, everything's going along first-rate. they thought they'd hung us up last week--but they haven't. there may be another week's delay; but we ought to be opening a bottle of wine on it by the fourth." an office-boy came in with a name on a slip of paper, and moffatt looked at his watch and held out a hearty hand. "glad you came. of course i'll keep you posted...no, this way...look in again..." and he steered ralph out by another door. july came, and passed into its second week. ralph's lawyer had obtained a postponement from the other side, but undine's representatives had given him to understand that the transaction must be closed before the first of august. ralph telephoned once or twice to moffatt, receiving genially-worded assurances that everything was "going their way"; but he felt a certain embarrassment in returning again to the office, and let himself drift through the days in a state of hungry apprehension. finally one afternoon henley fairford, coming back from town (which ralph had left in the morning to join his boy over sunday), brought word that the apex consolidation scheme had failed to get its charter. it was useless to attempt to reach moffatt on sunday, and ralph wore on as he could through the succeeding twenty-four hours. clare van degen had come down to stay with her youngest boy, and in the afternoon she and ralph took the two children for a sail. a light breeze brightened the waters of the sound, and they ran down the shore before it and then tacked out toward the sunset, coming back at last, under a failing breeze, as the summer sky passed from blue to a translucid green and then into the accumulating greys of twilight. as they left the landing and walked up behind the children across the darkening lawn, a sense of security descended again on ralph. he could not believe that such a scene and such a mood could be the disguise of any impending evil, and all his doubts and anxieties fell away from him. the next morning, he and clare travelled up to town together, and at the station he put her in the motor which was to take her to long island, and hastened down to moffatt's office. when he arrived he was told that moffatt was "engaged," and he had to wait for nearly half an hour in the outer office, where, to the steady click of the type-writer and the spasmodic buzzing of the telephone, his thoughts again began their restless circlings. finally the inner door opened, and he found himself in the sanctuary. moffatt was seated behind his desk, examining another little crystal vase somewhat like the one he had shown ralph a few weeks earlier. as his visitor entered, he held it up against the light, revealing on its dewy sides an incised design as frail as the shadow of grass-blades on water. "ain't she a peach?" he put the toy down and reached across the desk to shake hands. "well, well," he went on, leaning back in his chair, and pushing out his lower lip in a half-comic pout, "they've got us in the neck this time and no mistake. seen this morning's radiator? i don't know how the thing leaked out--but the reformers somehow got a smell of the scheme, and whenever they get swishing round something's bound to get spilt." he talked gaily, genially, in his roundest tones and with his easiest gestures; never had he conveyed a completer sense of unhurried power; but ralph noticed for the first time the crow's-feet about his eyes, and the sharpness of the contrast between the white of his forehead and the redness of the fold of neck above his collar. "do you mean to say it's not going through?" "not this time, anyhow. we're high and dry." something seemed to snap in ralph's head, and he sat down in the nearest chair. "has the common stock dropped a lot?" "well, you've got to lean over to see it." moffatt pressed his finger-tips together and added thoughtfully: "but it's there all right. we're bound to get our charter in the end." "what do you call the end?" "oh, before the day of judgment, sure: next year, i guess." "next year?" ralph flushed. "what earthly good will that do me?" "i don't say it's as pleasant as driving your best girl home by moonlight. but that's how it is. and the stuff's safe enough any way--i've told you that right along." "but you've told me all along i could count on a rise before august. you knew i had to have the money now." "i knew you wanted to have the money now; and so did i, and several of my friends. i put you onto it because it was the only thing in sight likely to give you the return you wanted." "you ought at least to have warned me of the risk!" "risk? i don't call it much of a risk to lie back in your chair and wait another few months for fifty thousand to drop into your lap. i tell you the thing's as safe as a bank." "how do i know it is? you've misled me about it from the first." moffatt's face grew dark red to the forehead: for the first time in their acquaintance ralph saw him on the verge of anger. "well, if you get stuck so do i. i'm in it a good deal deeper than you. that's about the best guarantee i can give; unless you won't take my word for that either." to control himself moffatt spoke with extreme deliberation, separating his syllables like a machine cutting something into even lengths. ralph listened through a cloud of confusion; but he saw the madness of offending moffatt, and tried to take a more conciliatory tone. "of course i take your word for it. but i can't--i simply can't afford to lose..." "you ain't going to lose: i don't believe you'll even have to put up any margin. it's there safe enough, i tell you..." "yes, yes; i understand. i'm sure you wouldn't have advised me--" ralph's tongue seemed swollen, and he had difficulty in bringing out the words. "only, you see--i can't wait; it's not possible; and i want to know if there isn't a way--" moffatt looked at him with a sort of resigned compassion, as a doctor looks at a despairing mother who will not understand what he has tried to imply without uttering the word she dreads. ralph understood the look, but hurried on. "you'll think i'm mad, or an ass, to talk like this; but the fact is, i must have the money." he waited and drew a hard breath. "i must have it: that's all. perhaps i'd better tell you--" moffatt, who had risen, as if assuming that the interview was over, sat down again and turned an attentive look on him. "go ahead," he said, more humanly than he had hitherto spoken. "my boy...you spoke of him the other day... i'm awfully fond of him--" ralph broke off, deterred by the impossibility of confiding his feeling for paul to this coarse-grained man with whom he hadn't a sentiment in common. moffatt was still looking at him. "i should say you would be! he's as smart a little chap as i ever saw; and i guess he's the kind that gets better every day." ralph had collected himself, and went on with sudden resolution: "well, you see--when my wife and i separated, i never dreamed she'd want the boy: the question never came up. if it had, of course--but she'd left him with me when she went away two years before, and at the time of the divorce i was a fool...i didn't take the proper steps..." "you mean she's got sole custody?" ralph made a sign of assent, and moffatt pondered. "that's bad--bad." "and now i understand she's going to marry again--and of course i can't give up my son." "she wants you to, eh?" ralph again assented. moffatt swung his chair about and leaned back in it, stretching out his plump legs and contemplating the tips of his varnished boots. he hummed a low tune behind inscrutable lips. "that's what you want the money for?" he finally raised his head to ask. the word came out of the depths of ralph's anguish: "yes." "and why you want it in such a hurry. i see." moffatt reverted to the study of his boots. "it's a lot of money." "yes. that's the difficulty. and i...she..." ralph's tongue was again too thick for his mouth. "i'm afraid she won't wait...or take less..." moffatt, abandoning the boots, was scrutinizing him through half-shut lids. "no," he said slowly, "i don't believe undine spragg'll take a single cent less." ralph felt himself whiten. was it insolence or ignorance that had prompted moffatt's speech? nothing in his voice or face showed the sense of any shades of expression or of feeling: he seemed to apply to everything the measure of the same crude flippancy. but such considerations could not curb ralph now. he said to himself "keep your temper--keep your temper--" and his anger suddenly boiled over. "look here, moffatt," he said, getting to his feet, "the fact that i've been divorced from mrs. marvell doesn't authorize any one to take that tone to me in speaking of her." moffatt met the challenge with a calm stare under which there were dawning signs of surprise and interest. "that so? well, if that's the case i presume i ought to feel the same way: i've been divorced from her myself." for an instant the words conveyed no meaning to ralph; then they surged up into his brain and flung him forward with half-raised arm. but he felt the grotesqueness of the gesture and his arm dropped back to his side. a series of unimportant and irrelevant things raced through his mind; then obscurity settled down on it. "this man...this man..." was the one fiery point in his darkened consciousness.... "what on earth are you talking about?" he brought out. "why, facts," said moffatt, in a cool half-humorous voice. "you didn't know? i understood from mrs. marvell your folks had a prejudice against divorce, so i suppose she kept quiet about that early episode. the truth is," he continued amicably, "i wouldn't have alluded to it now if you hadn't taken rather a high tone with me about our little venture; but now it's out i guess you may as well hear the whole story. it's mighty wholesome for a man to have a round now and then with a few facts. shall i go on?" ralph had stood listening without a sign, but as moffatt ended he made a slight motion of acquiescence. he did not otherwise change his attitude, except to grasp with one hand the back of the chair that moffatt pushed toward him. "rather stand?..." moffatt himself dropped back into his seat and took the pose of easy narrative. "well, it was this way. undine spragg and i were made one at opake, nebraska, just nine years ago last month. my! she was a beauty then. nothing much had happened to her before but being engaged for a year or two to a soft called millard binch; the same she passed on to indiana rolliver; and--well, i guess she liked the change. we didn't have what you'd called a society wedding: no best man or bridesmaids or voice that breathed o'er eden. fact is, pa and ma didn't know about it till it was over. but it was a marriage fast enough, as they found out when they tried to undo it. trouble was, they caught on too soon; we only had a fortnight. then they hauled undine back to apex, and--well, i hadn't the cash or the pull to fight 'em. uncle abner was a pretty big man out there then; and he had james j. rolliver behind him. i always know when i'm licked; and i was licked that time. so we unlooped the loop, and they fixed it up for me to make a trip to alaska. let me see--that was the year before they moved over to new york. next time i saw undine i sat alongside of her at the theatre the day your engagement was announced." he still kept to his half-humorous minor key, as though he were in the first stages of an after-dinner speech; but as he went on his bodily presence, which hitherto had seemed to ralph the mere average garment of vulgarity, began to loom, huge and portentous as some monster released from a magician's bottle. his redness, his glossiness, his baldness, and the carefully brushed ring of hair encircling it; the square line of his shoulders, the too careful fit of his clothes, the prominent lustre of his scarf-pin, the growth of short black hair on his manicured hands, even the tiny cracks and crows'-feet beginning to show in the hard close surface of his complexion: all these solid witnesses to his reality and his proximity pressed on ralph with the mounting pang of physical nausea. "this man...this man..." he couldn't get beyond the thought: whichever way he turned his haggard thought, there was moffatt bodily blocking the perspective...ralph's eyes roamed toward the crystal toy that stood on the desk beside moffatt's hand. faugh! that such a hand should have touched it! suddenly he heard himself speaking. "before my marriage--did you know they hadn't told me?" "why, i understood as much..." ralph pushed on: "you knew it the day i met you in mr. spragg's office?" moffatt considered a moment, as if the incident had escaped him. "did we meet there?" he seemed benevolently ready for enlightenment. but ralph had been assailed by another memory; he recalled that moffatt had dined one night in his house, that he and the man who now faced him had sat at the same table, their wife between them... he was seized with another dumb gust of fury; but it died out and left him face to face with the uselessness, the irrelevance of all the old attitudes of appropriation and defiance. he seemed to be stumbling about in his inherited prejudices like a modern man in mediaeval armour... moffatt still sat at his desk, unmoved and apparently uncomprehending. "he doesn't even know what i'm feeling," flashed through ralph; and the whole archaic structure of his rites and sanctions tumbled down about him. through the noise of the crash he heard moffatt's voice going on without perceptible change of tone: "about that other matter now...you can't feel any meaner about it than i do, i can tell you that... but all we've got to do is to sit tight..." ralph turned from the voice, and found himself outside on the landing, and then in the street below. xxxvi he stood at the corner of wall street, looking up and down its hot summer perspective. he noticed the swirls of dust in the cracks of the pavement, the rubbish in the gutters, the ceaseless stream of perspiring faces that poured by under tilted hats. he found himself, next, slipping northward between the glazed walls of the subway, another languid crowd in the seats about him and the nasal yelp of the stations ringing through the car like some repeated ritual wail. the blindness within him seemed to have intensified his physical perceptions, his sensitiveness to the heat, the noise, the smells of the dishevelled midsummer city; but combined with the acuter perception of these offenses was a complete indifference to them, as though he were some vivisected animal deprived of the power of discrimination. now he had turned into waverly place, and was walking westward toward washington square. at the corner he pulled himself up, saying half-aloud: "the office--i ought to be at the office." he drew out his watch and stared at it blankly. what the devil had he taken it out for? he had to go through a laborious process of readjustment to find out what it had to say.... twelve o'clock.... should he turn back to the office? it seemed easier to cross the square, go up the steps of the old house and slip his key into the door.... the house was empty. his mother, a few days previously, had departed with mr. dagonet for their usual two months on the maine coast, where ralph was to join them with his boy.... the blinds were all drawn down, and the freshness and silence of the marble-paved hall laid soothing hands on him.... he said to himself: "i'll jump into a cab presently, and go and lunch at the club--" he laid down his hat and stick and climbed the carpetless stairs to his room. when he entered it he had the shock of feeling himself in a strange place: it did not seem like anything he had ever seen before. then, one by one, all the old stale usual things in it confronted him, and he longed with a sick intensity to be in a place that was really strange. "how on earth can i go on living here?" he wondered. a careless servant had left the outer shutters open, and the sun was beating on the window-panes. ralph pushed open the windows, shut the shutters, and wandered toward his arm-chair. beads of perspiration stood on his forehead: the temperature of the room reminded him of the heat under the ilexes of the sienese villa where he and undine had sat through a long july afternoon. he saw her before him, leaning against the tree-trunk in her white dress, limpid and inscrutable.... "we were made one at opake, nebraska...." had she been thinking of it that afternoon at siena, he wondered? did she ever think of it at all?... it was she who had asked moffatt to dine. she had said: "father brought him home one day at apex.... i don't remember ever having seen him since"--and the man she spoke of had had her in his arms ... and perhaps it was really all she remembered! she had lied to him--lied to him from the first ... there hadn't been a moment when she hadn't lied to him, deliberately, ingeniously and inventively. as he thought of it, there came to him, for the first time in months, that overwhelming sense of her physical nearness which had once so haunted and tortured him. her freshness, her fragrance, the luminous haze of her youth, filled the room with a mocking glory; and he dropped his head on his hands to shut it out.... the vision was swept away by another wave of hurrying thoughts. he felt it was intensely important that he should keep the thread of every one of them, that they all represented things to be said or done, or guarded against; and his mind, with the unwondering versatility and tireless haste of the dreamer's brain, seemed to be pursuing them all simultaneously. then they became as unreal and meaningless as the red specks dancing behind the lids against which he had pressed his fists clenched, and he had the feeling that if he opened his eyes they would vanish, and the familiar daylight look in on him.... a knock disturbed him. the old parlour-maid who was always left in charge of the house had come up to ask if he wasn't well, and if there was anything she could do for him. he told her no ... he was perfectly well ... or, rather, no, he wasn't ... he supposed it must be the heat; and he began to scold her for having forgotten to close the shutters. it wasn't her fault, it appeared, but eliza's: her tone implied that he knew what one had to expect of eliza ... and wouldn't he go down to the nice cool shady dining-room, and let her make him an iced drink and a few sandwiches? "i've always told mrs. marvell i couldn't turn my back for a second but what eliza'd find a way to make trouble," the old woman continued, evidently glad of the chance to air a perennial grievance. "it's not only the things she forgets to do," she added significantly; and it dawned on ralph that she was making an appeal to him, expecting him to take sides with her in the chronic conflict between herself and eliza. he said to himself that perhaps she was right ... that perhaps there was something he ought to do ... that his mother was old, and didn't always see things; and for a while his mind revolved this problem with feverish intensity.... "then you'll come down, sir?" "yes." the door closed, and he heard her heavy heels along the passage. "but the money--where's the money to come from?" the question sprang out from some denser fold of the fog in his brain. the money--how on earth was he to pay it back? how could he have wasted his time in thinking of anything else while that central difficulty existed? "but i can't ... i can't ... it's gone ... and even if it weren't...." he dropped back in his chair and took his head between his hands. he had forgotten what he wanted the money for. he made a great effort to regain hold of the idea, but all the whirring, shuttling, flying had abruptly ceased in his brain, and he sat with his eyes shut, staring straight into darkness.... the clock struck, and he remembered that he had said he would go down to the dining-room. "if i don't she'll come up--" he raised his head and sat listening for the sound of the old woman's step: it seemed to him perfectly intolerable that any one should cross the threshold of the room again. "why can't they leave me alone?" he groaned.... at length through the silence of the empty house, he fancied he heard a door opening and closing far below; and he said to himself: "she's coming." he got to his feet and went to the door. he didn't feel anything now except the insane dread of hearing the woman's steps come nearer. he bolted the door and stood looking about the room. for a moment he was conscious of seeing it in every detail with a distinctness he had never before known; then everything in it vanished but the single narrow panel of a drawer under one of the bookcases. he went up to the drawer, knelt down and slipped his hand into it. as he raised himself he listened again, and this time he distinctly heard the old servant's steps on the stairs. he passed his left hand over the side of his head, and down the curve of the skull behind the ear. he said to himself: "my wife ... this will make it all right for her...." and a last flash of irony twitched through him. then he felt again, more deliberately, for the spot he wanted, and put the muzzle of his revolver against it. xxxvii in a drawing-room hung with portraits of high-nosed personages in perukes and orders, a circle of ladies and gentlemen, looking not unlike every-day versions of the official figures above their heads, sat examining with friendly interest a little boy in mourning. the boy was slim, fair and shy, and his small black figure, islanded in the middle of the wide lustrous floor, looked curiously lonely and remote. this effect of remoteness seemed to strike his mother as something intentional, and almost naughty, for after having launched him from the door, and waited to judge of the impression he produced, she came forward and, giving him a slight push, said impatiently: "paul! why don't you go and kiss your new granny?" the boy, without turning to her, or moving, sent his blue glance gravely about the circle. "does she want me to?" he asked, in a tone of evident apprehension; and on his mother's answering: "of course, you silly!" he added earnestly: "how many more do you think there'll be?" undine blushed to the ripples of her brilliant hair. "i never knew such a child! they've turned him into a perfect little savage!" raymond de chelles advanced from behind his mother's chair. "he won't be a savage long with me," he said, stooping down so that his fatigued finely-drawn face was close to paul's. their eyes met and the boy smiled. "come along, old chap," chelles continued in english, drawing the little boy after him. "il est bien beau," the marquise de chelles observed, her eyes turning from paul's grave face to her daughter-in-law's vivid countenance. "do be nice, darling! say, 'bonjour, madame,'" undine urged. an odd mingling of emotions stirred in her while she stood watching paul make the round of the family group under her husband's guidance. it was "lovely" to have the child back, and to find him, after their three years' separation, grown into so endearing a figure: her first glimpse of him when, in mrs. heeny's arms, he had emerged that morning from the steamer train, had shown what an acquisition he would be. if she had had any lingering doubts on the point, the impression produced on her husband would have dispelled them. chelles had been instantly charmed, and paul, in a shy confused way, was already responding to his advances. the count and countess raymond had returned but a few weeks before from their protracted wedding journey, and were staying--as they were apparently to do whenever they came to paris--with the old marquis, raymond's father, who had amicably proposed that little paul marvell should also share the hospitality of the hotel de chelles. undine, at first, was somewhat dismayed to find that she was expected to fit the boy and his nurse into a corner of her contracted entresol. but the possibility of a mother's not finding room for her son, however cramped her own quarters, seemed not to have occurred to her new relations, and the preparing of her dressing-room and boudoir for paul's occupancy was carried on by the household with a zeal which obliged her to dissemble her lukewarmness. undine had supposed that on her marriage one of the great suites of the hotel de chelles would be emptied of its tenants and put at her husband's disposal; but she had since learned that, even had such a plan occurred to her parents-in-law, considerations of economy would have hindered it. the old marquis and his wife, who were content, when they came up from burgundy in the spring, with a modest set of rooms looking out on the court of their ancestral residence, expected their son and his wife to fit themselves into the still smaller apartment which had served as raymond's bachelor lodging. the rest of the fine old mouldering house--the tall-windowed premier on the garden, and the whole of the floor above--had been let for years to old fashioned tenants who would have been more surprised than their landlord had he suddenly proposed to dispossess them. undine, at first, had regarded these arrangements as merely provisional. she was persuaded that, under her influence, raymond would soon convert his parents to more modern ideas, and meanwhile she was still in the flush of a completer well-being than she had ever known, and disposed, for the moment, to make light of any inconveniences connected with it. the three months since her marriage had been more nearly like what she had dreamed of than any of her previous experiments in happiness. at last she had what she wanted, and for the first time the glow of triumph was warmed by a deeper feeling. her husband was really charming (it was odd how he reminded her of ralph!), and after her bitter two years of loneliness and humiliation it was delicious to find herself once more adored and protected. the very fact that raymond was more jealous of her than ralph had ever been--or at any rate less reluctant to show it--gave her a keener sense of recovered power. none of the men who had been in love with her before had been so frankly possessive, or so eager for reciprocal assurances of constancy. she knew that ralph had suffered deeply from her intimacy with van degen, but he had betrayed his feeling only by a more studied detachment; and van degen, from the first, had been contemptuously indifferent to what she did or felt when she was out of his sight. as to her earlier experiences, she had frankly forgotten them: her sentimental memories went back no farther than the beginning of her new york career. raymond seemed to attach more importance to love, in all its manifestations, than was usual or convenient in a husband; and she gradually began to be aware that her domination over him involved a corresponding loss of independence. since their return to paris she had found that she was expected to give a circumstantial report of every hour she spent away from him. she had nothing to hide, and no designs against his peace of mind except those connected with her frequent and costly sessions at the dress-makers'; but she had never before been called upon to account to any one for the use of her time, and after the first amused surprise at raymond's always wanting to know where she had been and whom she had seen she began to be oppressed by so exacting a devotion. her parents, from her tenderest youth, had tacitly recognized her inalienable right to "go round," and ralph--though from motives which she divined to be different--had shown the same respect for her freedom. it was therefore disconcerting to find that raymond expected her to choose her friends, and even her acquaintances, in conformity not only with his personal tastes but with a definite and complicated code of family prejudices and traditions; and she was especially surprised to discover that he viewed with disapproval her intimacy with the princess estradina. "my cousin's extremely amusing, of course, but utterly mad and very mal entourée. most of the people she has about her ought to be in prison or bedlam: especially that unspeakable madame adelschein, who's a candidate for both. my aunt's an angel, but she's been weak enough to let lili turn the hotel de dordogne into an annex of montmartre. of course you'll have to show yourself there now and then: in these days families like ours must hold together. but go to the reunions de famille rather than to lili's intimate parties; go with me, or with my mother; don't let yourself be seen there alone. you're too young and good-looking to be mixed up with that crew. a woman's classed--or rather unclassed--by being known as one of lili's set." agreeable as it was to undine that an appeal to her discretion should be based on the ground of her youth and good-looks, she was dismayed to find herself cut off from the very circle she had meant them to establish her in. before she had become raymond's wife there had been a moment of sharp tension in her relations with the princess estradina and the old duchess. they had done their best to prevent her marrying their cousin, and had gone so far as openly to accuse her of being the cause of a breach between themselves and his parents. but ralph marvell's death had brought about a sudden change in her situation. she was now no longer a divorced woman struggling to obtain ecclesiastical sanction for her remarriage, but a widow whose conspicuous beauty and independent situation made her the object of lawful aspirations. the first person to seize on this distinction and make the most of it was her old enemy the marquise de trezac. the latter, who had been loudly charged by the house of chelles with furthering her beautiful compatriot's designs, had instantly seen a chance of vindicating herself by taking the widowed mrs. marvell under her wing and favouring the attentions of other suitors. these were not lacking, and the expected result had followed. raymond de chelles, more than ever infatuated as attainment became less certain, had claimed a definite promise from undine, and his family, discouraged by his persistent bachelorhood, and their failure to fix his attention on any of the amiable maidens obviously designed to continue the race, had ended by withdrawing their opposition and discovering in mrs. marvell the moral and financial merits necessary to justify their change of front. "a good match? if she isn't, i should like to know what the chelles call one!" madame de trezac went about indefatigably proclaiming. "related to the best people in new york--well, by marriage, that is; and her husband left much more money than was expected. it goes to the boy, of course; but as the boy is with his mother she naturally enjoys the income. and her father's a rich man--much richer than is generally known; i mean what we call rich in america, you understand!" madame de trezac had lately discovered that the proper attitude for the american married abroad was that of a militant patriotism; and she flaunted undine marvell in the face of the faubourg like a particularly showy specimen of her national banner. the success of the experiment emboldened her to throw off the most sacred observances of her past. she took up madame adelschein, she entertained the james j. rollivers, she resuscitated creole dishes, she patronized negro melodists, she abandoned her weekly teas for impromptu afternoon dances, and the prim drawing-room in which dowagers had droned echoed with a cosmopolitan hubbub. even when the period of tension was over, and undine had been officially received into the family of her betrothed, madame de trezac did not at once surrender. she laughingly professed to have had enough of the proprieties, and declared herself bored by the social rites she had hitherto so piously performed. "you'll always find a corner of home here, dearest, when you get tired of their ceremonies and solemnities," she said as she embraced the bride after the wedding breakfast; and undine hoped that the devoted nettie would in fact provide a refuge from the extreme domesticity of her new state. but since her return to paris, and her taking up her domicile in the hotel de chelles, she had found madame de trezac less and less disposed to abet her in any assertion of independence. "my dear, a woman must adopt her husband's nationality whether she wants to or not. it's the law, and it's the custom besides. if you wanted to amuse yourself with your nouveau luxe friends you oughtn't to have married raymond--but of course i say that only in joke. as if any woman would have hesitated who'd had your chance! take my advice--keep out of lili's set just at first. later ... well, perhaps raymond won't be so particular; but meanwhile you'd make a great mistake to go against his people--" and madame de trezac, with a "chere madame," swept forward from her tea-table to receive the first of the returning dowagers. it was about this time that mrs. heeny arrived with paul; and for a while undine was pleasantly absorbed in her boy. she kept mrs. heeny in paris for a fortnight, and between her more pressing occupations it amused her to listen to the masseuse's new york gossip and her comments on the social organization of the old world. it was mrs. heeny's first visit to europe, and she confessed to undine that she had always wanted to "see something of the aristocracy"--using the phrase as a naturalist might, with no hint of personal pretensions. mrs. heeny's democratic ease was combined with the strictest professional discretion, and it would never have occurred to her to regard herself, or to wish others to regard her, as anything but a manipulator of muscles; but in that character she felt herself entitled to admission to the highest circles. "they certainly do things with style over here--but it's kinder one-horse after new york, ain't it? is this what they call their season? why, you dined home two nights last week. they ought to come over to new york and see!" and she poured into undine's half-envious ear a list of the entertainments which had illuminated the last weeks of the new york winter. "i suppose you'll begin to give parties as soon as ever you get into a house of your own. you're not going to have one? oh, well, then you'll give a lot of big week-ends at your place down in the shatter-country--that's where the swells all go to in the summer time, ain't it? but i dunno what your ma would say if she knew you were going to live on with his folks after you're done honey-mooning. why, we read in the papers you were going to live in some grand hotel or other--oh, they call their houses hotels, do they? that's funny: i suppose it's because they let out part of 'em. well, you look handsomer than ever. undine; i'll take that back to your mother, anyhow. and he's dead in love, i can see that; reminds me of the way--" but she broke off suddenly, as if something in undine's look had silenced her. even to herself. undine did not like to call up the image of ralph marvell; and any mention of his name gave her a vague sense of distress. his death had released her, had given her what she wanted; yet she could honestly say to herself that she had not wanted him to die--at least not to die like that.... people said at the time that it was the hot weather--his own family had said so: he had never quite got over his attack of pneumonia, and the sudden rise of temperature--one of the fierce "heat-waves" that devastate new york in summer--had probably affected his brain: the doctors said such cases were not uncommon.... she had worn black for a few weeks--not quite mourning, but something decently regretful (the dress-makers were beginning to provide a special garb for such cases); and even since her remarriage, and the lapse of a year, she continued to wish that she could have got what she wanted without having had to pay that particular price for it. this feeling was intensified by an incident--in itself far from unwelcome--which had occurred about three months after ralph's death. her lawyers had written to say that the sum of a hundred thousand dollars had been paid over to marvell's estate by the apex consolidation company; and as marvell had left a will bequeathing everything he possessed to his son, this unexpected windfall handsomely increased paul's patrimony. undine had never relinquished her claim on her child; she had merely, by the advice of her lawyers, waived the assertion of her right for a few months after marvell's death, with the express stipulation that her doing so was only a temporary concession to the feelings of her husband's family; and she had held out against all attempts to induce her to surrender paul permanently. before her marriage she had somewhat conspicuously adopted her husband's creed, and the dagonets, picturing paul as the prey of the jesuits, had made the mistake of appealing to the courts for his custody. this had confirmed undine's resistance, and her determination to keep the child. the case had been decided in her favour, and she had thereupon demanded, and obtained, an allowance of five thousand dollars, to be devoted to the bringing up and education of her son. this sum, added to what mr. spragg had agreed to give her, made up an income which had appreciably bettered her position, and justified madame de trezac's discreet allusions to her wealth. nevertheless, it was one of the facts about which she least liked to think when any chance allusion evoked ralph's image. the money was hers, of course; she had a right to it, and she was an ardent believer in "rights." but she wished she could have got it in some other way--she hated the thought of it as one more instance of the perverseness with which things she was entitled to always came to her as if they had been stolen. the approach of summer, and the culmination of the paris season, swept aside such thoughts. the countess raymond de chelles, contrasting her situation with that of mrs. undine marvell, and the fulness and animation of her new life with the vacant dissatisfied days which had followed on her return from dakota, forgot the smallness of her apartment, the inconvenient proximity of paul and his nurse, the interminable round of visits with her mother-in-law, and the long dinners in the solemn hotels of all the family connection. the world was radiant, the lights were lit, the music playing; she was still young, and better-looking than ever, with a countess's coronet, a famous chateau and a handsome and popular husband who adored her. and then suddenly the lights went out and the music stopped when one day raymond, putting his arm about her, said in his tenderest tones: "and now, my dear, the world's had you long enough and it's my turn. what do you say to going down to saint desert?" xxxviii in a window of the long gallery of the chateau de saint desert the new marquise de chelles stood looking down the poplar avenue into the november rain. it had been raining heavily and persistently for a longer time than she could remember. day after day the hills beyond the park had been curtained by motionless clouds, the gutters of the long steep roofs had gurgled with a perpetual overflow, the opaque surface of the moat been peppered by a continuous pelting of big drops. the water lay in glassy stretches under the trees and along the sodden edges of the garden-paths, it rose in a white mist from the fields beyond, it exuded in a chill moisture from the brick flooring of the passages and from the walls of the rooms on the lower floor. everything in the great empty house smelt of dampness: the stuffing of the chairs, the threadbare folds of the faded curtains, the splendid tapestries, that were fading too, on the walls of the room in which undine stood, and the wide bands of crape which her husband had insisted on her keeping on her black dresses till the last hour of her mourning for the old marquis. the summer had been more than usually inclement, and since her first coming to the country undine had lived through many periods of rainy weather; but none which had gone before had so completely epitomized, so summed up in one vast monotonous blur, the image of her long months at saint desert. when, the year before, she had reluctantly suffered herself to be torn from the joys of paris, she had been sustained by the belief that her exile would not be of long duration. once paris was out of sight, she had even found a certain lazy charm in the long warm days at saint desert. her parents-in-law had remained in town, and she enjoyed being alone with her husband, exploring and appraising the treasures of the great half abandoned house, and watching her boy scamper over the june meadows or trot about the gardens on the poney his stepfather had given him. paul, after mrs. heeny's departure, had grown fretful and restive, and undine had found it more and more difficult to fit his small exacting personality into her cramped rooms and crowded life. he irritated her by pining for his aunt laura, his marvell granny, and old mr. dagonet's funny stories about gods and fairies; and his wistful allusions to his games with clare's children sounded like a lesson he might have been drilled in to make her feel how little he belonged to her. but once released from paris, and blessed with rabbits, a poney and the freedom of the fields, he became again all that a charming child should be, and for a time it amused her to share in his romps and rambles. raymond seemed enchanted at the picture they made, and the quiet weeks of fresh air and outdoor activity gave her back a bloom that reflected itself in her tranquillized mood. she was the more resigned to this interlude because she was so sure of its not lasting. before they left paris a doctor had been found to say that paul--who was certainly looking pale and pulled-down--was in urgent need of sea air, and undine had nearly convinced her husband of the expediency of hiring a chalet at deauville for july and august, when this plan, and with it every other prospect of escape, was dashed by the sudden death of the old marquis. undine, at first, had supposed that the resulting change could not be other than favourable. she had been on too formal terms with her father-in-law--a remote and ceremonious old gentleman to whom her own personality was evidently an insoluble enigma--to feel more than the merest conventional pang at his death; and it was certainly "more fun" to be a marchioness than a countess, and to know that one's husband was the head of the house. besides, now they would have the chateau to themselves--or at least the old marquise, when she came, would be there as a guest and not a ruler--and visions of smart house-parties and big shoots lit up the first weeks of undine's enforced seclusion. then, by degrees, the inexorable conditions of french mourning closed in on her. immediately after the long-drawn funeral observances the bereaved family--mother, daughters, sons and sons-in-law--came down to seclude themselves at saint desert; and undine, through the slow hot crape-smelling months, lived encircled by shrouded images of woe in which the only live points were the eyes constantly fixed on her least movements. the hope of escaping to the seaside with paul vanished in the pained stare with which her mother-in-law received the suggestion. undine learned the next day that it had cost the old marquise a sleepless night, and might have had more distressing results had it not been explained as a harmless instance of transatlantic oddness. raymond entreated his wife to atone for her involuntary legereté by submitting with a good grace to the usages of her adopted country; and he seemed to regard the remaining months of the summer as hardly long enough for this act of expiation. as undine looked back on them, they appeared to have been composed of an interminable succession of identical days, in which attendance at early mass (in the coroneted gallery she had once so glowingly depicted to van degen) was followed by a great deal of conversational sitting about, a great deal of excellent eating, an occasional drive to the nearest town behind a pair of heavy draft horses, and long evenings in a lamp-heated drawing-room with all the windows shut, and the stout cure making an asthmatic fourth at the marquise's card-table. still, even these conditions were not permanent, and the discipline of the last years had trained undine to wait and dissemble. the summer over, it was decided--after a protracted family conclave--that the state of the old marquise's health made it advisable for her to spend the winter with the married daughter who lived near pau. the other members of the family returned to their respective estates, and undine once more found herself alone with her husband. but she knew by this time that there was to be no thought of paris that winter, or even the next spring. worse still, she was presently to discover that raymond's accession of rank brought with it no financial advantages. having but the vaguest notion of french testamentary law, she was dismayed to learn that the compulsory division of property made it impossible for a father to benefit his eldest son at the expense of the others. raymond was therefore little richer than before, and with the debts of honour of a troublesome younger brother to settle, and saint desert to keep up, his available income was actually reduced. he held out, indeed, the hope of eventual improvement, since the old marquis had managed his estates with a lofty contempt for modern methods, and the application of new principles of agriculture and forestry were certain to yield profitable results. but for a year or two, at any rate, this very change of treatment would necessitate the owner's continual supervision, and would not in the meanwhile produce any increase of income. to faire valoir the family acres had always, it appeared, been raymond's deepest-seated purpose, and all his frivolities dropped from him with the prospect of putting his hand to the plough. he was not, indeed, inhuman enough to condemn his wife to perpetual exile. he meant, he assured her, that she should have her annual spring visit to paris--but he stared in dismay at her suggestion that they should take possession of the coveted premier of the hotel de chelles. he was gallant enough to express the wish that it were in his power to house her on such a scale; but he could not conceal his surprise that she had ever seriously expected it. she was beginning to see that he felt her constitutional inability to understand anything about money as the deepest difference between them. it was a proficiency no one had ever expected her to acquire, and the lack of which she had even been encouraged to regard as a grace and to use as a pretext. during the interval between her divorce and her remarriage she had learned what things cost, but not how to do without them; and money still seemed to her like some mysterious and uncertain stream which occasionally vanished underground but was sure to bubble up again at one's feet. now, however, she found herself in a world where it represented not the means of individual gratification but the substance binding together whole groups of interests, and where the uses to which it might be put in twenty years were considered before the reasons for spending it on the spot. at first she was sure she could laugh raymond out of his prudence or coax him round to her point of view. she did not understand how a man so romantically in love could be so unpersuadable on certain points. hitherto she had had to contend with personal moods, now she was arguing against a policy; and she was gradually to learn that it was as natural to raymond de chelles to adore her and resist her as it had been to ralph marvell to adore her and let her have her way. at first, indeed, he appealed to her good sense, using arguments evidently drawn from accumulations of hereditary experience. but his economic plea was as unintelligible to her as the silly problems about pen-knives and apples in the "mental arithmetic" of her infancy; and when he struck a tenderer note and spoke of the duty of providing for the son he hoped for, she put her arms about him to whisper: "but then i oughtn't to be worried..." after that, she noticed, though he was as charming as ever, he behaved as if the case were closed. he had apparently decided that his arguments were unintelligible to her, and under all his ardour she felt the difference made by the discovery. it did not make him less kind, but it evidently made her less important; and she had the half-frightened sense that the day she ceased to please him she would cease to exist for him. that day was a long way off, of course, but the chill of it had brushed her face; and she was no longer heedless of such signs. she resolved to cultivate all the arts of patience and compliance, and habit might have helped them to take root if they had not been nipped by a new cataclysm. it was barely a week ago that her husband had been called to paris to straighten out a fresh tangle in the affairs of the troublesome brother whose difficulties were apparently a part of the family tradition. raymond's letters had been hurried, his telegrams brief and contradictory, and now, as undine stood watching for the brougham that was to bring him from the station, she had the sense that with his arrival all her vague fears would be confirmed. there would be more money to pay out, of course--since the funds that could not be found for her just needs were apparently always forthcoming to settle hubert's scandalous prodigalities--and that meant a longer perspective of solitude at saint desert, and a fresh pretext for postponing the hospitalities that were to follow on their period of mourning. the brougham--a vehicle as massive and lumbering as the pair that drew it--presently rolled into the court, and raymond's sable figure (she had never before seen a man travel in such black clothes) sprang up the steps to the door. whenever undine saw him after an absence she had a curious sense of his coming back from unknown distances and not belonging to her or to any state of things she understood. then habit reasserted itself, and she began to think of him again with a querulous familiarity. but she had learned to hide her feelings, and as he came in she put up her face for a kiss. "yes--everything's settled--" his embrace expressed the satisfaction of the man returning from an accomplished task to the joys of his fireside. "settled?" her face kindled. "without your having to pay?" he looked at her with a shrug. "of course i've had to pay. did you suppose hubert's creditors would be put off with vanilla eclairs?" "oh, if that's what you mean--if hubert has only to wire you at any time to be sure of his affairs being settled--!" she saw his lips narrow and a line come out between his eyes. "wouldn't it be a happy thought to tell them to bring tea?" he suggested. "in the library, then. it's so cold here--and the tapestries smell so of rain." he paused a moment to scrutinize the long walls, on which the fabulous blues and pinks of the great boucher series looked as livid as withered roses. "i suppose they ought to be taken down and aired," he said. she thought: "in this air--much good it would do them!" but she had already repented her outbreak about hubert, and she followed her husband into the library with the resolve not to let him see her annoyance. compared with the long grey gallery the library, with its brown walls of books, looked warm and home-like, and raymond seemed to feel the influence of the softer atmosphere. he turned to his wife and put his arm about her. "i know it's been a trial to you, dearest; but this is the last time i shall have to pull the poor boy out." in spite of herself she laughed incredulously: hubert's "last times" were a household word. but when tea had been brought, and they were alone over the fire, raymond unfolded the amazing sequel. hubert had found an heiress, hubert was to be married, and henceforth the business of paying his debts (which might be counted on to recur as inevitably as the changes of the seasons) would devolve on his american bride--the charming miss looty arlington, whom raymond had remained over in paris to meet. "an american? he's marrying an american?" undine wavered between wrath and satisfaction. she felt a flash of resentment at any other intruder's venturing upon her territory--("looty arlington? who is she? what a name!")--but it was quickly superseded by the relief of knowing that henceforth, as raymond said, hubert's debts would be some one else's business. then a third consideration prevailed. "but if he's engaged to a rich girl, why on earth do we have to pull him out?" her husband explained that no other course was possible. though general arlington was immensely wealthy, ("her father's a general--a general manager, whatever that may be,") he had exacted what he called "a clean slate" from his future son-in-law, and hubert's creditors (the boy was such a donkey!) had in their possession certain papers that made it possible for them to press for immediate payment. "your compatriots' views on such matters are so rigid--and it's all to their credit--that the marriage would have fallen through at once if the least hint of hubert's mess had got out--and then we should have had him on our hands for life." yes--from that point of view it was doubtless best to pay up; but undine obscurely wished that their doing so had not incidentally helped an unknown compatriot to what the american papers were no doubt already announcing as "another brilliant foreign alliance." "where on earth did your brother pick up anybody respectable? do you know where her people come from? i suppose she's perfectly awful," she broke out with a sudden escape of irritation. "i believe hubert made her acquaintance at a skating rink. they come from some new state--the general apologized for its not yet being on the map, but seemed surprised i hadn't heard of it. he said it was already known as one of 'the divorce states,' and the principal city had, in consequence, a very agreeable society. la petite n'est vraiment pas trop mal." "i daresay not! we're all good-looking. but she must be horribly common." raymond seemed sincerely unable to formulate a judgment. "my dear, you have your own customs..." "oh, i know we're all alike to you!" it was one of her grievances that he never attempted to discriminate between americans. "you see no difference between me and a girl one gets engaged to at a skating rink!" he evaded the challenge by rejoining: "miss arlington's burning to know you. she says she's heard a great deal about you, and hubert wants to bring her down next week. i think we'd better do what we can." "of course." but undine was still absorbed in the economic aspect of the case. "if they're as rich as you say, i suppose hubert means to pay you back by and bye?" "naturally. it's all arranged. he's given me a paper." he drew her hands into his. "you see we've every reason to be kind to miss arlington." "oh, i'll be as kind as you like!" she brightened at the prospect of repayment. yes, they would ask the girl down... she leaned a little nearer to her husband. "but then after a while we shall be a good deal better off--especially, as you say, with no more of hubert's debts to worry us." and leaning back far enough to give her upward smile, she renewed her plea for the premier in the hotel de chelles: "because, really, you know, as the head of the house you ought to--" "ah, my dear, as the head of the house i've so many obligations; and one of them is not to miss a good stroke of business when it comes my way." her hands slipped from his shoulders and she drew back. "what do you mean by a good stroke of business? "why, an incredible piece of luck--it's what kept me on so long in paris. miss arlington's father was looking for an apartment for the young couple, and i've let him the premier for twelve years on the understanding that he puts electric light and heating into the whole hotel. it's a wonderful chance, for of course we all benefit by it as much as hubert." "a wonderful chance... benefit by it as much as hubert!" he seemed to be speaking a strange language in which familiar-sounding syllables meant something totally unknown. did he really think she was going to coop herself up again in their cramped quarters while hubert and his skating-rink bride luxuriated overhead in the coveted premier? all the resentments that had been accumulating in her during the long baffled months since her marriage broke into speech. "it's extraordinary of you to do such a thing without consulting me!" "without consulting you? but, my dear child, you've always professed the most complete indifference to business matters--you've frequently begged me not to bore you with them. you may be sure i've acted on the best advice; and my mother, whose head is as good as a man's, thinks i've made a remarkably good arrangement." "i daresay--but i'm not always thinking about money, as you are." as she spoke she had an ominous sense of impending peril; but she was too angry to avoid even the risks she saw. to her surprise raymond put his arm about her with a smile. "there are many reasons why i have to think about money. one is that you don't; and another is that i must look out for the future of our son." undine flushed to the forehead. she had grown accustomed to such allusions and the thought of having a child no longer filled her with the resentful terror she had felt before paul's birth. she had been insensibly influenced by a different point of view, perhaps also by a difference in her own feeling; and the vision of herself as the mother of the future marquis de chelles was softened to happiness by the thought of giving raymond a son. but all these lightly-rooted sentiments went down in the rush of her resentment, and she freed herself with a petulant movement. "oh, my dear, you'd better leave it to your brother to perpetuate the race. there'll be more room for nurseries in their apartment!" she waited a moment, quivering with the expectation of her husband's answer; then, as none came except the silent darkening of his face, she walked to the door and turned round to fling back: "of course you can do what you like with your own house, and make any arrangements that suit your family, without consulting me; but you needn't think i'm ever going back to live in that stuffy little hole, with hubert and his wife splurging round on top of our heads!" "ah--" said raymond de chelles in a low voice. xxxix undine did not fulfil her threat. the month of may saw her back in the rooms she had declared she would never set foot in, and after her long sojourn among the echoing vistas of saint desert the exiguity of her paris quarters seemed like cosiness. in the interval many things had happened. hubert, permitted by his anxious relatives to anticipate the term of the family mourning, had been showily and expensively united to his heiress; the hotel de chelles had been piped, heated and illuminated in accordance with the bride's requirements; and the young couple, not content with these utilitarian changes had moved doors, opened windows, torn down partitions, and given over the great trophied and pilastered dining-room to a decorative painter with a new theory of the human anatomy. undine had silently assisted at this spectacle, and at the sight of the old marquise's abject acquiescence; she had seen the duchesse de dordogne and the princesse estradina go past her door to visit hubert's premier and marvel at the american bath-tubs and the annamite bric-a-brac; and she had been present, with her husband, at the banquet at which hubert had revealed to the astonished faubourg the prehistoric episodes depicted on his dining-room walls. she had accepted all these necessities with the stoicism which the last months had developed in her; for more and more, as the days passed, she felt herself in the grasp of circumstances stronger than any effort she could oppose to them. the very absence of external pressure, of any tactless assertion of authority on her husband's part, intensified the sense of her helplessness. he simply left it to her to infer that, important as she might be to him in certain ways, there were others in which she did not weigh a feather. their outward relations had not changed since her outburst on the subject of hubert's marriage. that incident had left her half-ashamed, half-frightened at her behaviour, and she had tried to atone for it by the indirect arts that were her nearest approach to acknowledging herself in the wrong. raymond met her advances with a good grace, and they lived through the rest of the winter on terms of apparent understanding. when the spring approached it was he who suggested that, since his mother had consented to hubert's marrying before the year of mourning was over, there was really no reason why they should not go up to paris as usual; and she was surprised at the readiness with which he prepared to accompany her. a year earlier she would have regarded this as another proof of her power; but she now drew her inferences less quickly. raymond was as "lovely" to her as ever; but more than once, during their months in the country, she had had a startled sense of not giving him all he expected of her. she had admired him, before their marriage, as a model of social distinction; during the honeymoon he had been the most ardent of lovers; and with their settling down at saint desert she had prepared to resign herself to the society of a country gentleman absorbed in sport and agriculture. but raymond, to her surprise, had again developed a disturbing resemblance to his predecessor. during the long winter afternoons, after he had gone over his accounts with the bailiff, or written his business letters, he took to dabbling with a paint-box, or picking out new scores at the piano; after dinner, when they went to the library, he seemed to expect to read aloud to her from the reviews and papers he was always receiving; and when he had discovered her inability to fix her attention he fell into the way of absorbing himself in one of the old brown books with which the room was lined. at first he tried--as ralph had done--to tell her about what he was reading or what was happening in the world; but her sense of inadequacy made her slip away to other subjects, and little by little their talk died down to monosyllables. was it possible that, in spite of his books, the evenings seemed as long to raymond as to her, and that he had suggested going back to paris because he was bored at saint desert? bored as she was herself, she resented his not finding her company all-sufficient, and was mortified by the discovery that there were regions of his life she could not enter. but once back in paris she had less time for introspection, and raymond less for books. they resumed their dispersed and busy life, and in spite of hubert's ostentatious vicinity, of the perpetual lack of money, and of paul's innocent encroachments on her freedom, undine, once more in her element, ceased to brood upon her grievances. she enjoyed going about with her husband, whose presence at her side was distinctly ornamental. he seemed to have grown suddenly younger and more animated, and when she saw other women looking at him she remembered how distinguished he was. it amused her to have him in her train, and driving about with him to dinners and dances, waiting for him on flower-decked landings, or pushing at his side through blazing theatre-lobbies, answered to her inmost ideal of domestic intimacy. he seemed disposed to allow her more liberty than before, and it was only now and then that he let drop a brief reminder of the conditions on which it was accorded. she was to keep certain people at a distance, she was not to cheapen herself by being seen at vulgar restaurants and tea-rooms, she was to join with him in fulfilling certain family obligations (going to a good many dull dinners among the number); but in other respects she was free to fill her days as she pleased. "not that it leaves me much time," she admitted to madame de trezac; "what with going to see his mother every day, and never missing one of his sisters' jours, and showing myself at the hotel de dordogne whenever the duchess gives a pay-up party to the stuffy people lili estradina won't be bothered with, there are days when i never lay eyes on paul, and barely have time to be waved and manicured; but, apart from that, raymond's really much nicer and less fussy than he was." undine, as she grew older, had developed her mother's craving for a confidante, and madame de trezac had succeeded in that capacity to mabel lipscomb and bertha shallum. "less fussy?" madame de trezac's long nose lengthened thoughtfully. "h'm--are you sure that's a good sign?" undine stared and laughed. "oh, my dear, you're so quaint! why, nobody's jealous any more." "no; that's the worst of it." madame de trezac pondered. "it's a thousand pities you haven't got a son." "yes; i wish we had." undine stood up, impatient to end the conversation. since she had learned that her continued childlessness was regarded by every one about her as not only unfortunate but somehow vaguely derogatory to her, she had genuinely begun to regret it; and any allusion to the subject disturbed her. "especially," madame de trezac continued, "as hubert's wife--" "oh, if that's all they want, it's a pity raymond didn't marry hubert's wife," undine flung back; and on the stairs she murmured to herself: "nettie has been talking to my mother-in-law." but this explanation did not quiet her, and that evening, as she and raymond drove back together from a party, she felt a sudden impulse to speak. sitting close to him in the darkness of the carriage, it ought to have been easy for her to find the needed word; but the barrier of his indifference hung between them, and street after street slipped by, and the spangled blackness of the river unrolled itself beneath their wheels, before she leaned over to touch his hand. "what is it, my dear?" she had not yet found the word, and already his tone told her she was too late. a year ago, if she had slipped her hand in his, she would not have had that answer. "your mother blames me for our not having a child. everybody thinks it's my fault." he paused before answering, and she sat watching his shadowy profile against the passing lamps. "my mother's ideas are old-fashioned; and i don't know that it's anybody's business but yours and mine." "yes, but--" "here we are." the brougham was turning under the archway of the hotel, and the light of hubert's tall windows fell across the dusky court. raymond helped her out, and they mounted to their door by the stairs which hubert had recarpeted in velvet, with a marble nymph lurking in the azaleas on the landing. in the antechamber raymond paused to take her cloak from her shoulders, and his eyes rested on her with a faint smile of approval. "you never looked better; your dress is extremely becoming. good-night, my dear," he said, kissing her hand as he turned away. undine kept this incident to herself: her wounded pride made her shrink from confessing it even to madame de trezac. she was sure raymond would "come back"; ralph always had, to the last. during their remaining weeks in paris she reassured herself with the thought that once they were back at saint desert she would easily regain her lost hold; and when raymond suggested their leaving paris she acquiesced without a protest. but at saint desert she seemed no nearer to him than in paris. he continued to treat her with unvarying amiability, but he seemed wholly absorbed in the management of the estate, in his books, his sketching and his music. he had begun to interest himself in politics and had been urged to stand for his department. this necessitated frequent displacements: trips to beaune or dijon and occasional absences in paris. undine, when he was away, was not left alone, for the dowager marquise had established herself at saint desert for the summer, and relays of brothers and sisters-in-law, aunts, cousins and ecclesiastical friends and connections succeeded each other under its capacious roof. only hubert and his wife were absent. they had taken a villa at deauville, and in the morning papers undine followed the chronicle of hubert's polo scores and of the countess hubert's racing toilets. the days crawled on with a benumbing sameness. the old marquise and the other ladies of the party sat on the terrace with their needle-work, the cure or one of the visiting uncles read aloud the journal des debats and prognosticated dark things of the republic, paul scoured the park and despoiled the kitchen-garden with the other children of the family, the inhabitants of the adjacent chateaux drove over to call, and occasionally the ponderous pair were harnessed to a landau as lumbering as the brougham, and the ladies of saint desert measured the dusty kilometres between themselves and their neighbours. it was the first time that undine had seriously paused to consider the conditions of her new life, and as the days passed she began to understand that so they would continue to succeed each other till the end. every one about her took it for granted that as long as she lived she would spend ten months of every year at saint desert and the remaining two in paris. of course, if health required it, she might go to les eaux with her husband; but the old marquise was very doubtful as to the benefit of a course of waters, and her uncle the duke and her cousin the canon shared her view. in the case of young married women, especially, the unwholesome excitement of the modern watering-place was more than likely to do away with the possible benefit of the treatment. as to travel--had not raymond and his wife been to egypt and asia minor on their wedding-journey? such reckless enterprise was unheard of in the annals of the house! had they not spent days and days in the saddle, and slept in tents among the arabs? (who could tell, indeed, whether these imprudences were not the cause of the disappointment which it had pleased heaven to inflict on the young couple?) no one in the family had ever taken so long a wedding-journey. one bride had gone to england (even that was considered extreme), and another--the artistic daughter--had spent a week in venice; which certainly showed that they were not behind the times, and had no old-fashioned prejudices. since wedding-journeys were the fashion, they had taken them; but who had ever heard of travelling afterward? what could be the possible object of leaving one's family, one's habits, one's friends? it was natural that the americans, who had no homes, who were born and died in hotels, should have contracted nomadic habits: but the new marquise de chelles was no longer an american, and she had saint desert and the hotel de chelles to live in, as generations of ladies of her name had done before her. thus undine beheld her future laid out for her, not directly and in blunt words, but obliquely and affably, in the allusions, the assumptions, the insinuations of the amiable women among whom her days were spent. their interminable conversations were carried on to the click of knitting-needles and the rise and fall of industrious fingers above embroidery-frames; and as undine sat staring at the lustrous nails of her idle hands she felt that her inability to occupy them was regarded as one of the chief causes of her restlessness. the innumerable rooms of saint desert were furnished with the embroidered hangings and tapestry chairs produced by generations of diligent chatelaines, and the untiring needles of the old marquise, her daughters and dependents were still steadily increasing the provision. it struck undine as curious that they should be willing to go on making chair-coverings and bed-curtains for a house that didn't really belong to them, and that she had a right to pull about and rearrange as she chose; but then that was only a part of their whole incomprehensible way of regarding themselves (in spite of their acute personal and parochial absorptions) as minor members of a powerful and indivisible whole, the huge voracious fetish they called the family. notwithstanding their very definite theories as to what americans were and were not, they were evidently bewildered at finding no corresponding sense of solidarity in undine; and little paul's rootlessness, his lack of all local and linear ties, made them (for all the charm he exercised) regard him with something of the shyness of pious christians toward an elfin child. but though mother and child gave them a sense of insuperable strangeness, it plainly never occurred to them that both would not be gradually subdued to the customs of saint desert. dynasties had fallen, institutions changed, manners and morals, alas, deplorably declined; but as far back as memory went, the ladies of the line of chelles had always sat at their needle-work on the terrace of saint desert, while the men of the house lamented the corruption of the government and the cure ascribed the unhappy state of the country to the decline of religious feeling and the rise in the cost of living. it was inevitable that, in the course of time, the new marquise should come to understand the fundamental necessity of these things being as they were; and meanwhile the forbearance of her husband's family exercised itself, with the smiling discretion of their race, through the long succession of uneventful days. once, in september, this routine was broken in upon by the unannounced descent of a flock of motors bearing the princess estradina and a chosen band from one watering-place to another. raymond was away at the time, but family loyalty constrained the old marquise to welcome her kinswoman and the latter's friends; and undine once more found herself immersed in the world from which her marriage had removed her. the princess, at first, seemed totally to have forgotten their former intimacy, and undine was made to feel that in a life so variously agitated the episode could hardly have left a trace. but the night before her departure the incalculable lili, with one of her sudden changes of humour, drew her former friend into her bedroom and plunged into an exchange of confidences. she naturally unfolded her own history first, and it was so packed with incident that the courtyard clock had struck two before she turned her attention to undine. "my dear, you're handsomer than ever; only perhaps a shade too stout. domestic bliss, i suppose? take care! you need an emotion, a drama... you americans are really extraordinary. you appear to live on change and excitement; and then suddenly a man comes along and claps a ring on your finger, and you never look through it to see what's going on outside. aren't you ever the least bit bored? why do i never see anything of you any more? i suppose it's the fault of my venerable aunt--she's never forgiven me for having a better time than her daughters. how can i help it if i don't look like the cure's umbrella? i daresay she owes you the same grudge. but why do you let her coop you up here? it's a thousand pities you haven't had a child. they'd all treat you differently if you had." it was the same perpetually reiterated condolence; and undine flushed with anger as she listened. why indeed had she let herself be cooped up? she could not have answered the princess's question: she merely felt the impossibility of breaking through the mysterious web of traditions, conventions, prohibitions that enclosed her in their impenetrable net-work. but her vanity suggested the obvious pretext, and she murmured with a laugh: "i didn't know raymond was going to be so jealous--" the princess stared. "is it raymond who keeps you shut up here? and what about his trips to dijon? and what do you suppose he does with himself when he runs up to paris? politics?" she shrugged ironically. "politics don't occupy a man after midnight. raymond jealous of you? ah, merci! my dear, it's what i always say when people talk to me about fast americans: you're the only innocent women left in the world..." xl after the princess estradina's departure, the days at saint desert succeeded each other indistinguishably; and more and more, as they passed, undine felt herself drawn into the slow strong current already fed by so many tributary lives. some spell she could not have named seemed to emanate from the old house which had so long been the custodian of an unbroken tradition: things had happened there in the same way for so many generations that to try to alter them seemed as vain as to contend with the elements. winter came and went, and once more the calendar marked the first days of spring; but though the horse-chestnuts of the champs elysees were budding snow still lingered in the grass drives of saint desert and along the ridges of the hills beyond the park. sometimes, as undine looked out of the windows of the boucher gallery, she felt as if her eyes had never rested on any other scene. even her occasional brief trips to paris left no lasting trace: the life of the vivid streets faded to a shadow as soon as the black and white horizon of saint desert closed in on her again. though the afternoons were still cold she had lately taken to sitting in the gallery. the smiling scenes on its walls and the tall screens which broke its length made it more habitable than the drawing-rooms beyond; but her chief reason for preferring it was the satisfaction she found in having fires lit in both the monumental chimneys that faced each other down its long perspective. this satisfaction had its source in the old marquise's disapproval. never before in the history of saint desert had the consumption of firewood exceeded a certain carefully-calculated measure; but since undine had been in authority this allowance had been doubled. if any one had told her, a year earlier, that one of the chief distractions of her new life would be to invent ways of annoying her mother-in-law, she would have laughed at the idea of wasting her time on such trifles. but she found herself with a great deal of time to waste, and with a fierce desire to spend it in upsetting the immemorial customs of saint desert. her husband had mastered her in essentials, but she had discovered innumerable small ways of irritating and hurting him, and one--and not the least effectual--was to do anything that went counter to his mother's prejudices. it was not that he always shared her views, or was a particularly subservient son; but it seemed to be one of his fundamental principles that a man should respect his mother's wishes, and see to it that his household respected them. all frenchmen of his class appeared to share this view, and to regard it as beyond discussion: it was based on something so much more immutable than personal feeling that one might even hate one's mother and yet insist that her ideas as to the consumption of fire-wood should be regarded. the old marquise, during the cold weather, always sat in her bedroom; and there, between the tapestried four-poster and the fireplace, the family grouped itself around the ground-glass of her single carcel lamp. in the evening, if there were visitors, a fire was lit in the library; otherwise the family again sat about the marquise's lamp till the footman came in at ten with tisane and biscuits de reims; after which every one bade the dowager good night and scattered down the corridors to chill distances marked by tapers floating in cups of oil. since undine's coming the library fire had never been allowed to go out; and of late, after experimenting with the two drawing-rooms and the so-called "study" where raymond kept his guns and saw the bailiff, she had selected the gallery as the most suitable place for the new and unfamiliar ceremony of afternoon tea. afternoon refreshments had never before been served at saint desert except when company was expected; when they had invariably consisted in a decanter of sweet port and a plate of small dry cakes--the kind that kept. that the complicated rites of the tea-urn, with its offering-up of perishable delicacies, should be enacted for the sole enjoyment of the family, was a thing so unheard of that for a while undine found sufficient amusement in elaborating the ceremonial, and in making the ancestral plate groan under more varied viands; and when this palled she devised the plan of performing the office in the gallery and lighting sacrificial fires in both chimneys. she had said to raymond, at first: "it's ridiculous that your mother should sit in her bedroom all day. she says she does it to save fires; but if we have a fire downstairs why can't she let hers go out, and come down? i don't see why i should spend my life in your mother's bedroom." raymond made no answer, and the marquise did, in fact, let her fire go out. but she did not come down--she simply continued to sit upstairs without a fire. at first this also amused undine; then the tacit criticism implied began to irritate her. she hoped raymond would speak of his mother's attitude: she had her answer ready if he did! but he made no comment, he took no notice; her impulses of retaliation spent themselves against the blank surface of his indifference. he was as amiable, as considerate as ever; as ready, within reason, to accede to her wishes and gratify her whims. once or twice, when she suggested running up to paris to take paul to the dentist, or to look for a servant, he agreed to the necessity and went up with her. but instead of going to an hotel they went to their apartment, where carpets were up and curtains down, and a care-taker prepared primitive food at uncertain hours; and undine's first glimpse of hubert's illuminated windows deepened her rancour and her sense of helplessness. as madame de trezac had predicted, raymond's vigilance gradually relaxed, and during their excursions to the capital undine came and went as she pleased. but her visits were too short to permit of her falling in with the social pace, and when she showed herself among her friends she felt countrified and out-of-place, as if even her clothes had come from saint desert. nevertheless her dresses were more than ever her chief preoccupation: in paris she spent hours at the dressmaker's, and in the country the arrival of a box of new gowns was the chief event of the vacant days. but there was more bitterness than joy in the unpacking, and the dresses hung in her wardrobe like so many unfulfilled promises of pleasure, reminding her of the days at the stentorian when she had reviewed other finery with the same cheated eyes. in spite of this, she multiplied her orders, writing up to the dress-makers for patterns, and to the milliners for boxes of hats which she tried on, and kept for days, without being able to make a choice. now and then she even sent her maid up to paris to bring back great assortments of veils, gloves, flowers and laces; and after periods of painful indecision she ended by keeping the greater number, lest those she sent back should turn out to be the ones that were worn in paris. she knew she was spending too much money, and she had lost her youthful faith in providential solutions; but she had always had the habit of going out to buy something when she was bored, and never had she been in greater need of such solace. the dulness of her life seemed to have passed into her blood: her complexion was less animated, her hair less shining. the change in her looks alarmed her, and she scanned the fashion-papers for new scents and powders, and experimented in facial bandaging, electric massage and other processes of renovation. odd atavisms woke in her, and she began to pore over patent medicine advertisements, to send stamped envelopes to beauty doctors and professors of physical development, and to brood on the advantage of consulting faith-healers, mind-readers and their kindred adepts. she even wrote to her mother for the receipts of some of her grandfather's forgotten nostrums, and modified her daily life, and her hours of sleeping, eating and exercise, in accordance with each new experiment. her constitutional restlessness lapsed into an apathy like mrs. spragg's, and the least demand on her activity irritated her. but she was beset by endless annoyances: bickerings with discontented maids, the difficulty of finding a tutor for paul, and the problem of keeping him amused and occupied without having him too much on her hands. a great liking had sprung up between raymond and the little boy, and during the summer paul was perpetually at his step-father's side in the stables and the park. but with the coming of winter raymond was oftener away, and paul developed a persistent cold that kept him frequently indoors. the confinement made him fretful and exacting, and the old marquise ascribed the change in his behaviour to the deplorable influence of his tutor, a "laic" recommended by one of raymond's old professors. raymond himself would have preferred an abbé: it was in the tradition of the house, and though paul was not of the house it seemed fitting that he should conform to its ways. moreover, when the married sisters came to stay they objected to having their children exposed to the tutor's influence, and even implied that paul's society might be contaminating. but undine, though she had so readily embraced her husband's faith, stubbornly resisted the suggestion that she should hand over her son to the church. the tutor therefore remained; but the friction caused by his presence was so irritating to undine that she began to consider the alternative of sending paul to school. he was still small and tender for the experiment; but she persuaded herself that what he needed was "hardening," and having heard of a school where fashionable infancy was subjected to this process, she entered into correspondence with the master. his first letter convinced her that his establishment was just the place for paul; but the second contained the price-list, and after comparing it with the tutor's keep and salary she wrote to say that she feared her little boy was too young to be sent away from home. her husband, for some time past, had ceased to make any comment on her expenditure. she knew he thought her too extravagant, and felt sure he was minutely aware of what she spent; for saint desert projected on economic details a light as different as might be from the haze that veiled them in west end avenue. she therefore concluded that raymond's silence was intentional, and ascribed it to his having shortcomings of his own to conceal. the princess estradina's pleasantry had reached its mark. undine did not believe that her husband was seriously in love with another woman--she could not conceive that any one could tire of her of whom she had not first tired--but she was humiliated by his indifference, and it was easier to ascribe it to the arts of a rival than to any deficiency in herself. it exasperated her to think that he might have consolations for the outward monotony of his life, and she resolved that when they returned to paris he should see that she was not without similar opportunities. march, meanwhile, was verging on april, and still he did not speak of leaving. undine had learned that he expected to have such decisions left to him, and she hid her impatience lest her showing it should incline him to delay. but one day, as she sat at tea in the gallery, he came in in his riding-clothes and said: "i've been over to the other side of the mountain. the february rains have weakened the dam of the alette, and the vineyards will be in danger if we don't rebuild at once." she suppressed a yawn, thinking, as she did so, how dull he always looked when he talked of agriculture. it made him seem years older, and she reflected with a shiver that listening to him probably gave her the same look. he went on, as she handed him his tea: "i'm sorry it should happen just now. i'm afraid i shall have to ask you to give up your spring in paris." "oh, no--no!" she broke out. a throng of half-subdued grievances choked in her: she wanted to burst into sobs like a child. "i know it's a disappointment. but our expenses have been unusually heavy this year." "it seems to me they always are. i don't see why we should give up paris because you've got to make repairs to a dam. isn't hubert ever going to pay back that money?" he looked at her with a mild surprise. "but surely you understood at the time that it won't be possible till his wife inherits?" "till general arlington dies, you mean? he doesn't look much older than you!" "you may remember that i showed you hubert's note. he has paid the interest quite regularly." "that's kind of him!" she stood up, flaming with rebellion. "you can do as you please; but i mean to go to paris." "my mother is not going. i didn't intend to open our apartment." "i understand. but i shall open it--that's all!" he had risen too, and she saw his face whiten. "i prefer that you shouldn't go without me." "then i shall go and stay at the nouveau luxe with my american friends." "that never!" "why not?" "i consider it unsuitable." "your considering it so doesn't prove it." they stood facing each other, quivering with an equal anger; then he controlled himself and said in a more conciliatory tone: "you never seem to see that there are necessities--" "oh, neither do you--that's the trouble. you can't keep me shut up here all my life, and interfere with everything i want to do, just by saying it's unsuitable." "i've never interfered with your spending your money as you please." it was her turn to stare, sincerely wondering. "mercy, i should hope not, when you've always grudged me every penny of yours!" "you know it's not because i grudge it. i would gladly take you to paris if i had the money." "you can always find the money to spend on this place. why don't you sell it if it's so fearfully expensive?" "sell it? sell saint desert?" the suggestion seemed to strike him as something monstrously, almost fiendishly significant: as if her random word had at last thrust into his hand the clue to their whole unhappy difference. without understanding this, she guessed it from the change in his face: it was as if a deadly solvent had suddenly decomposed its familiar lines. "well, why not?" his horror spurred her on. "you might sell some of the things in it anyhow. in america we're not ashamed to sell what we can't afford to keep." her eyes fell on the storied hangings at his back. "why, there's a fortune in this one room: you could get anything you chose for those tapestries. and you stand here and tell me you're a pauper!" his glance followed hers to the tapestries, and then returned to her face. "ah, you don't understand," he said. "i understand that you care for all this old stuff more than you do for me, and that you'd rather see me unhappy and miserable than touch one of your great-grandfather's arm-chairs." the colour came slowly back to his face, but it hardened into lines she had never seen. he looked at her as though the place where she stood were empty. "you don't understand," he said again. xli the incident left undine with the baffled feeling of not being able to count on any of her old weapons of aggression. in all her struggles for authority her sense of the rightfulness of her cause had been measured by her power of making people do as she pleased. raymond's firmness shook her faith in her own claims, and a blind desire to wound and destroy replaced her usual business-like intentness on gaining her end. but her ironies were as ineffectual as her arguments, and his imperviousness was the more exasperating because she divined that some of the things she said would have hurt him if any one else had said them: it was the fact of their coming from her that made them innocuous. even when, at the close of their talk, she had burst out: "if you grudge me everything i care about we'd better separate," he had merely answered with a shrug: "it's one of the things we don't do--" and the answer had been like the slamming of an iron door in her face. an interval of silent brooding had resulted in a reaction of rebellion. she dared not carry out her threat of joining her compatriots at the nouveau luxe: she had too clear a memory of the results of her former revolt. but neither could she submit to her present fate without attempting to make raymond understand his selfish folly. she had failed to prove it by argument, but she had an inherited faith in the value of practical demonstration. if he could be made to see how easily he could give her what she wanted perhaps he might come round to her view. with this idea in mind, she had gone up to paris for twenty-four hours, on the pretext of finding a new nurse for paul; and the steps then taken had enabled her, on the first occasion, to set her plan in motion. the occasion was furnished by raymond's next trip to beaune. he went off early one morning, leaving word that he should not be back till night; and on the afternoon of the same day she stood at her usual post in the gallery, scanning the long perspective of the poplar avenue. she had not stood there long before a black speck at the end of the avenue expanded into a motor that was presently throbbing at the entrance. undine, at its approach, turned from the window, and as she moved down the gallery her glance rested on the great tapestries, with their ineffable minglings of blue and rose, as complacently as though they had been mirrors reflecting her own image. she was still looking at them when the door opened and a servant ushered in a small swarthy man who, in spite of his conspicuously london-made clothes, had an odd exotic air, as if he had worn rings in his ears or left a bale of spices at the door. he bowed to undine, cast a rapid eye up and down the room, and then, with his back to the windows, stood intensely contemplating the wall that faced them. undine's heart was beating excitedly. she knew the old marquise was taking her afternoon nap in her room, yet each sound in the silent house seemed to be that of her heels on the stairs. "ah--" said the visitor. he had begun to pace slowly down the gallery, keeping his face to the tapestries, like an actor playing to the footlights. "ah--" he said again. to ease the tension of her nerves undine began: "they were given by louis the fifteenth to the marquis de chelles who--" "their history has been published," the visitor briefly interposed; and she coloured at her blunder. the swarthy stranger, fitting a pair of eye-glasses to a nose that was like an instrument of precision, had begun a closer and more detailed inspection of the tapestries. he seemed totally unmindful of her presence, and his air of lofty indifference was beginning to make her wish she had not sent for him. his manner in paris had been so different! suddenly he turned and took off the glasses, which sprang back into a fold of his clothing like retracted feelers. "yes." he stood and looked at her without seeing her. "very well. i have brought down a gentleman." "a gentleman--?" "the greatest american collector--he buys only the best. he will not be long in paris, and it was his only chance of coming down." undine drew herself up. "i don't understand--i never said the tapestries were for sale." "precisely. but this gentleman buys only this that are not for sale." it sounded dazzling and she wavered. "i don't know--you were only to put a price on them--" "let me see him look at them first; then i'll put a price on them," he chuckled; and without waiting for her answer he went to the door and opened it. the gesture revealed the fur-coated back of a gentleman who stood at the opposite end of the hall examining the bust of a seventeenth century field-marshal. the dealer addressed the back respectfully. "mr. moffatt!" moffatt, who appeared to be interested in the bust, glanced over his shoulder without moving. "see here--" his glance took in undine, widened to astonishment and passed into apostrophe. "well, if this ain't the damnedest--!" he came forward and took her by both hands. "why, what on earth are you doing down here?" she laughed and blushed, in a tremor at the odd turn of the adventure. "i live here. didn't you know?" "not a word--never thought of asking the party's name." he turned jovially to the bowing dealer. "say--i told you those tapestries'd have to be out and outers to make up for the trip; but now i see i was mistaken." undine looked at him curiously. his physical appearance was unchanged: he was as compact and ruddy as ever, with the same astute eyes under the same guileless brow; but his self-confidence had become less aggressive, and she had never seen him so gallantly at ease. "i didn't know you'd become a great collector." "the greatest! didn't he tell you so? i thought that was why i was allowed to come." she hesitated. "of course, you know, the tapestries are not for sale--" "that so? i thought that was only his dodge to get me down. well, i'm glad they ain't: it'll give us more time to talk." watch in hand, the dealer intervened. "if, nevertheless, you would first take a glance. our train--" "it ain't mine!" moffatt interrupted; "at least not if there's a later one." undine's presence of mind had returned. "of course there is," she said gaily. she led the way back into the gallery, half hoping the dealer would allege a pressing reason for departure. she was excited and amused at moffatt's unexpected appearance, but humiliated that he should suspect her of being in financial straits. she never wanted to see moffatt except when she was happy and triumphant. the dealer had followed the other two into the gallery, and there was a moment's pause while they all stood silently before the tapestries. "by george!" moffatt finally brought out. "they're historical, you know: the king gave them to raymond's great-great-grandfather. the other day when i was in paris," undine hurried on, "i asked mr. fleischhauer to come down some time and tell us what they're worth ... and he seems to have misunderstood ... to have thought we meant to sell them." she addressed herself more pointedly to the dealer. "i'm sorry you've had the trip for nothing." mr. fleischhauer inclined himself eloquently. "it is not nothing to have seen such beauty." moffatt gave him a humorous look. "i'd hate to see mr. fleischhauer miss his train--" "i shall not miss it: i miss nothing," said mr. fleischhauer. he bowed to undine and backed toward the door. "see here," moffatt called to him as he reached the threshold, "you let the motor take you to the station, and charge up this trip to me." when the door closed he turned to undine with a laugh. "well, this beats the band. i thought of course you were living up in paris." again she felt a twinge of embarrassment. "oh, french people--i mean my husband's kind--always spend a part of the year on their estates." "but not this part, do they? why, everything's humming up there now. i was dining at the nouveau luxe last night with the driscolls and shallums and mrs. rolliver, and all your old crowd were there whooping things up." the driscolls and shallums and mrs. rolliver! how carelessly he reeled off their names! one could see from his tone that he was one of them and wanted her to know it. and nothing could have given her a completer sense of his achievement--of the number of millions he must be worth. it must have come about very recently, yet he was already at ease in his new honours--he had the metropolitan tone. while she examined him with these thoughts in her mind she was aware of his giving her as close a scrutiny. "but i suppose you've got your own crowd now," he continued; "you always were a lap ahead of me." he sent his glance down the lordly length of the room. "it's sorter funny to see you in this kind of place; but you look it--you always do look it!" she laughed. "so do you--i was just thinking it!" their eyes met. "i suppose you must be awfully rich." he laughed too, holding her eyes. "oh, out of sight! the consolidation set me on my feet. i own pretty near the whole of apex. i came down to buy these tapestries for my private car." the familiar accent of hyperbole exhilarated her. "i don't suppose i could stop you if you really wanted them!" "nobody can stop me now if i want anything." they were looking at each other with challenge and complicity in their eyes. his voice, his look, all the loud confident vigorous things he embodied and expressed, set her blood beating with curiosity. "i didn't know you and rolliver were friends," she said. "oh jim--" his accent verged on the protective. "old jim's all right. he's in congress now. i've got to have somebody up in washington." he had thrust his hands in his pockets, and with his head thrown back and his lips shaped to the familiar noiseless whistle, was looking slowly and discerningly about him. presently his eyes reverted to her face. "so this is what i helped you to get," he said. "i've always meant to run over some day and take a look. what is it they call you--a marquise?" she paled a little, and then flushed again. "what made you do it?" she broke out abruptly. "i've often wondered." he laughed. "what--lend you a hand? why, my business instinct, i suppose. i saw you were in a tight place that time i ran across you in paris--and i hadn't any grudge against you. fact is, i've never had the time to nurse old scores, and if you neglect 'em they die off like gold-fish." he was still composedly regarding her. "it's funny to think of your having settled down to this kind of life; i hope you've got what you wanted. this is a great place you live in." "yes; but i see a little too much of it. we live here most of the year." she had meant to give him the illusion of success, but some underlying community of instinct drew the confession from her lips. "that so? why on earth don't you cut it and come up to paris?" "oh, raymond's absorbed in the estates--and we haven't got the money. this place eats it all up." "well, that sounds aristocratic; but ain't it rather out of date? when the swells are hard-up nowadays they generally chip off an heirloom." he wheeled round again to the tapestries. "there are a good many paris seasons hanging right here on this wall." "yes--i know." she tried to check herself, to summon up a glittering equivocation; but his face, his voice, the very words he used, were like so many hammer-strokes demolishing the unrealities that imprisoned her. here was some one who spoke her language, who knew her meanings, who understood instinctively all the deep-seated wants for which her acquired vocabulary had no terms; and as she talked she once more seemed to herself intelligent, eloquent and interesting. "of course it's frightfully lonely down here," she began; and through the opening made by the admission the whole flood of her grievances poured forth. she tried to let him see that she had not sacrificed herself for nothing; she touched on the superiorities of her situation, she gilded the circumstances of which she called herself the victim, and let titles, offices and attributes shed their utmost lustre on her tale; but what she had to boast of seemed small and tinkling compared with the evidences of his power. "well, it's a downright shame you don't go round more," he kept saying; and she felt ashamed of her tame acceptance of her fate. when she had told her story she asked for his; and for the first time she listened to it with interest. he had what he wanted at last. the apex consolidation scheme, after a long interval of suspense, had obtained its charter and shot out huge ramifications. rolliver had "stood in" with him at the critical moment, and between them they had "chucked out" old harmon b. driscoll bag and baggage, and got the whole town in their control. absorbed in his theme, and forgetting her inability to follow him, moffatt launched out on an epic recital of plot and counterplot, and she hung, a new desdemona, on his conflict with the new anthropophagi. it was of no consequence that the details and the technicalities escaped her: she knew their meaningless syllables stood for success, and what that meant was as clear as day to her. every wall street term had its equivalent in the language of fifth avenue, and while he talked of building up railways she was building up palaces, and picturing all the multiple lives he would lead in them. to have things had always seemed to her the first essential of existence, and as she listened to him the vision of the things he could have unrolled itself before her like the long triumph of an asiatic conqueror. "and what are you going to do next?" she asked, almost breathlessly, when he had ended. "oh, there's always a lot to do next. business never goes to sleep." "yes; but i mean besides business." "why--everything i can, i guess." he leaned back in his chair with an air of placid power, as if he were so sure of getting what he wanted that there was no longer any use in hurrying, huge as his vistas had become. she continued to question him, and he began to talk of his growing passion for pictures and furniture, and of his desire to form a collection which should be a great representative assemblage of unmatched specimens. as he spoke she saw his expression change, and his eyes grow younger, almost boyish, with a concentrated look in them that reminded her of long-forgotten things. "i mean to have the best, you know; not just to get ahead of the other fellows, but because i know it when i see it. i guess that's the only good reason," he concluded; and he added, looking at her with a smile: "it was what you were always after, wasn't it?" xlii undine had gained her point, and the entresol of the hotel de chelles reopened its doors for the season. hubert and his wife, in expectation of the birth of an heir, had withdrawn to the sumptuous chateau which general arlington had hired for them near compiegne, and undine was at least spared the sight of their bright windows and animated stairway. but she had to take her share of the felicitations which the whole far-reaching circle of friends and relations distributed to every member of hubert's family on the approach of the happy event. nor was this the hardest of her trials. raymond had done what she asked--he had stood out against his mother's protests, set aside considerations of prudence, and consented to go up to paris for two months; but he had done so on the understanding that during their stay they should exercise the most unremitting economy. as dinner-giving put the heaviest strain on their budget, all hospitality was suspended; and when undine attempted to invite a few friends informally she was warned that she could not do so without causing the gravest offense to the many others genealogically entitled to the same attention. raymond's insistence on this rule was simply part of an elaborate and inveterate system of "relations" (the whole of french social life seemed to depend on the exact interpretation of that word), and undine felt the uselessness of struggling against such mysterious inhibitions. he reminded her, however, that their inability to receive would give them all the more opportunity for going out, and he showed himself more socially disposed than in the past. but his concession did not result as she had hoped. they were asked out as much as ever, but they were asked to big dinners, to impersonal crushes, to the kind of entertainment it is a slight to be omitted from but no compliment to be included in. nothing could have been more galling to undine, and she frankly bewailed the fact to madame de trezac. "of course it's what was sure to come of being mewed up for months and months in the country. we're out of everything, and the people who are having a good time are simply too busy to remember us. we're only asked to the things that are made up from visiting-lists." madame de trezac listened sympathetically, but did not suppress a candid answer. "it's not altogether that, my dear; raymond's not a man his friends forget. it's rather more, if you'll excuse my saying so, the fact of your being--you personally--in the wrong set." "the wrong set? why, i'm in his set--the one that thinks itself too good for all the others. that's what you've always told me when i've said it bored me." "well, that's what i mean--" madame de trezac took the plunge. "it's not a question of your being bored." undine coloured; but she could take the hardest thrusts where her personal interest was involved. "you mean that i'm the bore, then?" "well, you don't work hard enough--you don't keep up. it's not that they don't admire you--your looks, i mean; they think you beautiful; they're delighted to bring you out at their big dinners, with the sevres and the plate. but a woman has got to be something more than good-looking to have a chance to be intimate with them: she's got to know what's being said about things. i watched you the other night at the duchess's, and half the time you hadn't an idea what they were talking about. i haven't always, either; but then i have to put up with the big dinners." undine winced under the criticism; but she had never lacked insight into the cause of her own failures, and she had already had premonitions of what madame de trezac so bluntly phrased. when raymond ceased to be interested in her conversation she had concluded it was the way of husbands; but since then it had been slowly dawning on her that she produced the same effect on others. her entrances were always triumphs; but they had no sequel. as soon as people began to talk they ceased to see her. any sense of insufficiency exasperated her, and she had vague thoughts of cultivating herself, and went so far as to spend a morning in the louvre and go to one or two lectures by a fashionable philosopher. but though she returned from these expeditions charged with opinions, their expression did not excite the interest she had hoped. her views, if abundant, were confused, and the more she said the more nebulous they seemed to grow. she was disconcerted, moreover, by finding that everybody appeared to know about the things she thought she had discovered, and her comments clearly produced more bewilderment than interest. remembering the attention she had attracted on her first appearance in raymond's world she concluded that she had "gone off" or grown dowdy, and instead of wasting more time in museums and lecture-halls she prolonged her hours at the dress-maker's and gave up the rest of the day to the scientific cultivation of her beauty. "i suppose i've turned into a perfect frump down there in that wilderness," she lamented to madame de trezac, who replied inexorably: "oh, no, you're as handsome as ever; but people here don't go on looking at each other forever as they do in london." meanwhile financial cares became more pressing. a dunning letter from one of her tradesmen fell into raymond's hands, and the talk it led to ended in his making it clear to her that she must settle her personal debts without his aid. all the "scenes" about money which had disturbed her past had ended in some mysterious solution of her difficulty. disagreeable as they were, she had always, vulgarly speaking, found they paid; but now it was she who was expected to pay. raymond took his stand without ill-temper or apology: he simply argued from inveterate precedent. but it was impossible for undine to understand a social organization which did not regard the indulging of woman as its first purpose, or to believe that any one taking another view was not moved by avarice or malice; and the discussion ended in mutual acrimony. the morning afterward, raymond came into her room with a letter in his hand. "is this your doing?" he asked. his look and voice expressed something she had never known before: the disciplined anger of a man trained to keep his emotions in fixed channels, but knowing how to fill them to the brim. the letter was from mr. fleischhauer, who begged to transmit to the marquis de chelles an offer for his boucher tapestries from a client prepared to pay the large sum named on condition that it was accepted before his approaching departure for america. "what does it mean?" raymond continued, as she did not speak. "how should i know? it's a lot of money," she stammered, shaken out of her self-possession. she had not expected so prompt a sequel to the dealer's visit, and she was vexed with him for writing to raymond without consulting her. but she recognized moffatt's high-handed way, and her fears faded in the great blaze of the sum he offered. her husband was still looking at her. "it was fleischhauer who brought a man down to see the tapestries one day when i was away at beaune?" he had known, then--everything was known at saint desert! she wavered a moment and then gave him back his look. "yes--it was fleischhauer; and i sent for him." "you sent for him?" he spoke in a voice so veiled and repressed that he seemed to be consciously saving it for some premeditated outbreak. undine felt its menace, but the thought of moffatt sent a flame through her, and the words he would have spoken seemed to fly to her lips. "why shouldn't i? something had to be done. we can't go on as we are. i've tried my best to economize--i've scraped and scrimped, and gone without heaps of things i've always had. i've moped for months and months at saint desert, and given up sending paul to school because it was too expensive, and asking my friends to dine because we couldn't afford it. and you expect me to go on living like this for the rest of my life, when all you've got to do is to hold out your hand and have two million francs drop into it!" her husband stood looking at her coldly and curiously, as though she were some alien apparition his eyes had never before beheld. "ah, that's your answer--that's all you feel when you lay hands on things that are sacred to us!" he stopped a moment, and then let his voice break out with the volume she had felt it to be gathering. "and you're all alike," he exclaimed, "every one of you. you come among us from a country we don't know, and can't imagine, a country you care for so little that before you've been a day in ours you've forgotten the very house you were born in--if it wasn't torn down before you knew it! you come among us speaking our language and not knowing what we mean; wanting the things we want, and not knowing why we want them; aping our weaknesses, exaggerating our follies, ignoring or ridiculing all we care about--you come from hotels as big as towns, and from towns as flimsy as paper, where the streets haven't had time to be named, and the buildings are demolished before they're dry, and the people are as proud of changing as we are of holding to what we have--and we're fools enough to imagine that because you copy our ways and pick up our slang you understand anything about the things that make life decent and honourable for us!" he stopped again, his white face and drawn nostrils giving him so much the look of an extremely distinguished actor in a fine part that, in spite of the vehemence of his emotion, his silence might have been the deliberate pause for a replique. undine kept him waiting long enough to give the effect of having lost her cue--then she brought out, with a little soft stare of incredulity: "do you mean to say you're going to refuse such an offer?" "ah--!" he turned back from the door, and picking up the letter that lay on the table between them, tore it in pieces and tossed the pieces on the floor. "that's how i refuse it!" the violence of his tone and gesture made her feel as though the fluttering strips were so many lashes laid across her face, and a rage that was half fear possessed her. "how dare you speak to me like that? nobody's ever dared to before. is talking to a woman in that way one of the things you call decent and honourable? now that i know what you feel about me i don't want to stay in your house another day. and i don't mean to--i mean to walk out of it this very hour!" for a moment they stood face to face, the depths of their mutual incomprehension at last bared to each other's angry eyes; then raymond, his glance travelling past her, pointed to the fragments of paper on the floor. "if you're capable of that you're capable of anything!" he said as he went out of the room. xliii she watched him go in a kind of stupour, knowing that when they next met he would be as courteous and self-possessed as if nothing had happened, but that everything would nevertheless go on in the same way--in his way--and that there was no more hope of shaking his resolve or altering his point of view than there would have been of transporting the deep-rooted masonry of saint desert by means of the wheeled supports on which apex architecture performed its easy transits. one of her childish rages possessed her, sweeping away every feeling save the primitive impulse to hurt and destroy; but search as she would she could not find a crack in the strong armour of her husband's habits and prejudices. for a long time she continued to sit where he had left her, staring at the portraits on the walls as though they had joined hands to imprison her. hitherto she had almost always felt herself a match for circumstances, but now the very dead were leagued to defeat her: people she had never seen and whose names she couldn't even remember seemed to be plotting and contriving against her under the escutcheoned grave-stones of saint desert. her eyes turned to the old warm-toned furniture beneath the pictures, and to her own idle image in the mirror above the mantelpiece. even in that one small room there were enough things of price to buy a release from her most pressing cares; and the great house, in which the room was a mere cell, and the other greater house in burgundy, held treasures to deplete even such a purse as moffatt's. she liked to see such things about her--without any real sense of their meaning she felt them to be the appropriate setting of a pretty woman, to embody something of the rareness and distinction she had always considered she possessed; and she reflected that if she had still been moffatt's wife he would have given her just such a setting, and the power to live in it as became her. the thought sent her memory flying back to things she had turned it from for years. for the first time since their far-off weeks together she let herself relive the brief adventure. she had been drawn to elmer moffatt from the first--from the day when ben frusk, indiana's brother, had brought him to a church picnic at mulvey's grove, and he had taken instant possession of undine, sitting in the big "stage" beside her on the "ride" to the grove, supplanting millard binch (to whom she was still, though intermittently and incompletely, engaged), swinging her between the trees, rowing her on the lake, catching and kissing her in "forfeits," awarding her the first prize in the beauty show he hilariously organized and gallantly carried out, and finally (no one knew how) contriving to borrow a buggy and a fast colt from old mulvey, and driving off with her at a two-forty gait while millard and the others took their dust in the crawling stage. no one in apex knew where young moffatt had come from, and he offered no information on the subject. he simply appeared one day behind the counter in luckaback's dollar shoe-store, drifted thence to the office of semple and binch, the coal-merchants, reappeared as the stenographer of the police court, and finally edged his way into the power-house of the apex water-works. he boarded with old mrs. flynn, down in north fifth street, on the edge of the red-light slum, he never went to church or attended lectures, or showed any desire to improve or refine himself; but he managed to get himself invited to all the picnics and lodge sociables, and at a supper of the phi upsilon society, to which he had contrived to affiliate himself, he made the best speech that had been heard there since young jim rolliver's first flights. the brothers of undine's friends all pronounced him "great," though he had fits of uncouthness that made the young women slower in admitting him to favour. but at the mulvey's grove picnic he suddenly seemed to dominate them all, and undine, as she drove away with him, tasted the public triumph which was necessary to her personal enjoyment. after that he became a leading figure in the youthful world of apex, and no one was surprised when the sons of jonadab, (the local temperance society) invited him to deliver their fourth of july oration. the ceremony took place, as usual, in the baptist church, and undine, all in white, with a red rose in her breast, sat just beneath the platform, with indiana jealously glaring at her from a less privileged seat, and poor millard's long neck craning over the row of prominent citizens behind the orator. elmer moffatt had been magnificent, rolling out his alternating effects of humour and pathos, stirring his audience by moving references to the blue and the gray, convulsing them by a new version of washington and the cherry tree (in which the infant patriot was depicted as having cut down the tree to check the deleterious spread of cherry bounce), dazzling them by his erudite allusions and apt quotations (he confessed to undine that he had sat up half the night over bartlett), and winding up with a peroration that drew tears from the grand army pensioners in the front row and caused the minister's wife to say that many a sermon from that platform had been less uplifting. an ice-cream supper always followed the "exercises," and as repairs were being made in the church basement, which was the usual scene of the festivity, the minister had offered the use of his house. the long table ran through the doorway between parlour and study, and another was set in the passage outside, with one end under the stairs. the stair-rail was wreathed in fire-weed and early golden-rod, and temperance texts in smilax decked the walls. when the first course had been despatched the young ladies, gallantly seconded by the younger of the "sons," helped to ladle out and carry in the ice-cream, which stood in great pails on the larder floor, and to replenish the jugs of lemonade and coffee. elmer moffatt was indefatigable in performing these services, and when the minister's wife pressed him to sit down and take a mouthful himself he modestly declined the place reserved for him among the dignitaries of the evening, and withdrew with a few chosen spirits to the dim table-end beneath the stairs. explosions of hilarity came from this corner with increasing frequency, and now and then tumultuous rappings and howls of "song! song!" followed by adjurations to "cough it up" and "let her go," drowned the conversational efforts at the other table. at length the noise subsided, and the group was ceasing to attract attention when, toward the end of the evening, the upper table, drooping under the lengthy elucubrations of the minister and the president of the temperance society, called on the orator of the day for a few remarks. there was an interval of scuffling and laughter beneath the stairs, and then the minister's lifted hand enjoined silence and elmer moffatt got to his feet. "step out where the ladies can hear you better, mr. moffatt!" the minister called. moffatt did so, steadying himself against the table and twisting his head about as if his collar had grown too tight. but if his bearing was vacillating his smile was unabashed, and there was no lack of confidence in the glance he threw at undine spragg as he began: "ladies and gentlemen, if there's one thing i like better than another about getting drunk--and i like most everything about it except the next morning--it's the opportunity you've given me of doing it right here, in the presence of this society, which, as i gather from its literature, knows more about the subject than anybody else. ladies and gentlemen"--he straightened himself, and the table-cloth slid toward him--"ever since you honoured me with an invitation to address you from the temperance platform i've been assiduously studying that literature; and i've gathered from your own evidence--what i'd strongly suspected before--that all your converted drunkards had a hell of a good time before you got at 'em, and that... and that a good many of 'em have gone on having it since..." at this point he broke off, swept the audience with his confident smile, and then, collapsing, tried to sit down on a chair that didn't happen to be there, and disappeared among his agitated supporters. there was a night-mare moment during which undine, through the doorway, saw ben frusk and the others close about the fallen orator to the crash of crockery and tumbling chairs; then some one jumped up and shut the parlour door, and a long-necked sunday school teacher, who had been nervously waiting his chance, and had almost given it up, rose from his feet and recited high tide at gettysburg amid hysterical applause. the scandal was considerable, but moffatt, though he vanished from the social horizon, managed to keep his place in the power-house till he went off for a week and turned up again without being able to give a satisfactory reason for his absence. after that he drifted from one job to another, now extolled for his "smartness" and business capacity, now dismissed in disgrace as an irresponsible loafer. his head was always full of immense nebulous schemes for the enlargement and development of any business he happened to be employed in. sometimes his suggestions interested his employers, but proved unpractical and inapplicable; sometimes he wore out their patience or was thought to be a dangerous dreamer. whenever he found there was no hope of his ideas being adopted he lost interest in his work, came late and left early, or disappeared for two or three days at a time without troubling himself to account for his absences. at last even those who had been cynical enough to smile over his disgrace at the temperance supper began to speak of him as a hopeless failure, and he lost the support of the feminine community when one sunday morning, just as the baptist and methodist churches were releasing their congregations, he walked up eubaw avenue with a young woman less known to those sacred edifices than to the saloons of north fifth street. undine's estimate of people had always been based on their apparent power of getting what they wanted--provided it came under the category of things she understood wanting. success was beauty and romance to her; yet it was at the moment when elmer moffatt's failure was most complete and flagrant that she suddenly felt the extent of his power. after the eubaw avenue scandal he had been asked not to return to the surveyor's office to which ben frusk had managed to get him admitted; and on the day of his dismissal he met undine in main street, at the shopping hour, and, sauntering up cheerfully, invited her to take a walk with him. she was about to refuse when she saw millard binch's mother looking at her disapprovingly from the opposite street-corner. "oh, well, i will--" she said; and they walked the length of main street and out to the immature park in which it ended. she was in a mood of aimless discontent and unrest, tired of her engagement to millard binch, disappointed with moffatt, half-ashamed of being seen with him, and yet not sorry to have it known that she was independent enough to choose her companions without regard to the apex verdict. "well, i suppose you know i'm down and out," he began; and she responded virtuously: "you must have wanted to be, or you wouldn't have behaved the way you did last sunday." "oh, shucks!" he sneered. "what do i care, in a one-horse place like this? if it hadn't been for you i'd have got a move on long ago." she did not remember afterward what else he said: she recalled only the expression of a great sweeping scorn of apex, into which her own disdain of it was absorbed like a drop in the sea, and the affirmation of a soaring self-confidence that seemed to lift her on wings. all her own attempts to get what she wanted had come to nothing; but she had always attributed her lack of success to the fact that she had had no one to second her. it was strange that elmer moffatt, a shiftless out-cast from even the small world she despised, should give her, in the very moment of his downfall, the sense of being able to succeed where she had failed. it was a feeling she never had in his absence, but that his nearness always instantly revived; and he seemed nearer to her now than he had ever been. they wandered on to the edge of the vague park, and sat down on a bench behind the empty band-stand. "i went with that girl on purpose, and you know it," he broke out abruptly. "it makes me too damned sick to see millard binch going round looking as if he'd patented you." "you've got no right--" she interrupted; and suddenly she was in his arms, and feeling that no one had ever kissed her before.... the week that followed was a big bright blur--the wildest vividest moment of her life. and it was only eight days later that they were in the train together, apex and all her plans and promises behind them, and a bigger and brighter blur ahead, into which they were plunging as the "limited" plunged into the sunset.... undine stood up, looking about her with vague eyes, as if she had come back from a long distance. elmer moffatt was still in paris--he was in reach, within telephone-call. she stood hesitating a moment; then she went into her dressing-room, and turning over the pages of the telephone book, looked out the number of the nouveau luxe.... xliv undine had been right in supposing that her husband would expect their life to go on as before. there was no appreciable change in the situation save that he was more often absent-finding abundant reasons, agricultural and political, for frequent trips to saint desert--and that, when in paris, he no longer showed any curiosity concerning her occupations and engagements. they lived as much apart is if their cramped domicile had been a palace; and when undine--as she now frequently did--joined the shallums or rollivers for a dinner at the nouveau luxe, or a party at a petit theatre, she was not put to the trouble of prevaricating. her first impulse, after her scene with raymond, had been to ring up indiana rolliver and invite herself to dine. it chanced that indiana (who was now in full social progress, and had "run over" for a few weeks to get her dresses for newport) had organized for the same evening a showy cosmopolitan banquet in which she was enchanted to include the marquise de chelles; and undine, as she had hoped, found elmer moffatt of the party. when she drove up to the nouveau luxe she had not fixed on any plan of action; but once she had crossed its magic threshold her energies revived like plants in water. at last she was in her native air again, among associations she shared and conventions she understood; and all her self-confidence returned as the familiar accents uttered the accustomed things. save for an occasional perfunctory call, she had hitherto made no effort to see her compatriots, and she noticed that mrs. jim driscoll and bertha shallum received her with a touch of constraint; but it vanished when they remarked the cordiality of moffatt's greeting. her seat was at his side, and her old sense of triumph returned as she perceived the importance his notice conferred, not only in the eyes of her own party but of the other diners. moffatt was evidently a notable figure in all the worlds represented about the crowded tables, and undine saw that many people who seemed personally unacquainted with him were recognizing and pointing him out. she was conscious of receiving a large share of the attention he attracted, and, bathed again in the bright air of publicity, she remembered the evening when raymond de chelles' first admiring glance had given her the same sense of triumph. this inopportune memory did not trouble her: she was almost grateful to raymond for giving her the touch of superiority her compatriots clearly felt in her. it was not merely her title and her "situation," but the experiences she had gained through them, that gave her this advantage over the loud vague company. she had learned things they did not guess: shades of conduct, turns of speech, tricks of attitude--and easy and free and enviable as she thought them, she would not for the world have been back among them at the cost of knowing no more than they. moffatt made no allusion to his visit to saint desert; but when the party had re-grouped itself about coffee and liqueurs on the terrace, he bent over to ask confidentially: "what about my tapestries?" she replied in the same tone: "you oughtn't to have let fleischhauer write that letter. my husband's furious." he seemed honestly surprised. "why? didn't i offer him enough?" "he's furious that any one should offer anything. i thought when he found out what they were worth he might be tempted; but he'd rather see me starve than part with one of his grand-father's snuff-boxes." "well, he knows now what the tapestries are worth. i offered more than fleischhauer advised." "yes; but you were in too much of a hurry." "i've got to be; i'm going back next week." she felt her eyes cloud with disappointment. "oh, why do you? i hoped you might stay on." they looked at each other uncertainly a moment; then he dropped his voice to say: "even if i did, i probably shouldn't see anything of you." "why not? why won't you come and see me? i've always wanted to be friends." he came the next day and found in her drawing-room two ladies whom she introduced as her sisters-in-law. the ladies lingered on for a long time, sipping their tea stiffly and exchanging low-voiced remarks while undine talked with moffatt; and when they left, with small sidelong bows in his direction. undine exclaimed: "now you see how they all watch me!" she began to go into the details of her married life, drawing on the experiences of the first months for instances that scarcely applied to her present liberated state. she could thus, without great exaggeration, picture herself as entrapped into a bondage hardly conceivable to moffatt, and she saw him redden with excitement as he listened. "i call it darned low--darned low--" he broke in at intervals. "of course i go round more now," she concluded. "i mean to see my friends--i don't care what he says." "what can he say?" "oh, he despises americans--they all do." "well, i guess we can still sit up and take nourishment." they laughed and slipped back to talking of earlier things. she urged him to put off his sailing--there were so many things they might do together: sight-seeing and excursions--and she could perhaps show him some of the private collections he hadn't seen, the ones it was hard to get admitted to. this instantly roused his attention, and after naming one or two collections he had already seen she hit on one he had found inaccessible and was particularly anxious to visit. "there's an ingres there that's one of the things i came over to have a look at; but i was told there was no use trying." "oh, i can easily manage it: the duke's raymond's uncle." it gave her a peculiar satisfaction to say it: she felt as though she were taking a surreptitious revenge on her husband. "but he's down in the country this week," she continued, "and no one--not even the family--is allowed to see the pictures when he's away. of course his ingres are the finest in france." she ran it off glibly, though a year ago she had never heard of the painter, and did not, even now, remember whether he was an old master or one of the very new ones whose names one hadn't had time to learn. moffatt put off sailing, saw the duke's ingres under her guidance, and accompanied her to various other private galleries inaccessible to strangers. she had lived in almost total ignorance of such opportunities, but now that she could use them to advantage she showed a surprising quickness in picking up "tips," ferreting out rare things and getting a sight of hidden treasures. she even acquired as much of the jargon as a pretty woman needs to produce the impression of being well-informed; and moffatt's sailing was more than once postponed. they saw each other almost daily, for she continued to come and go as she pleased, and raymond showed neither surprise nor disapproval. when they were asked to family dinners she usually excused herself at the last moment on the plea of a headache and, calling up indiana or bertha shallum, improvised a little party at the nouveau luxe; and on other occasions she accepted such invitations as she chose, without mentioning to her husband where she was going. in this world of lavish pleasures she lost what little prudence the discipline of saint desert had inculcated. she could never be with people who had all the things she envied without being hypnotized into the belief that she had only to put her hand out to obtain them, and all the unassuaged rancours and hungers of her early days in west end avenue came back with increased acuity. she knew her wants so much better now, and was so much more worthy of the things she wanted! she had given up hoping that her father might make another hit in wall street. mrs. spragg's letters gave the impression that the days of big strokes were over for her husband, that he had gone down in the conflict with forces beyond his measure. if he had remained in apex the tide of its new prosperity might have carried him to wealth; but new york's huge waves of success had submerged instead of floating him, and rolliver's enmity was a hand perpetually stretched out to strike him lower. at most, mr. spragg's tenacity would keep him at the level he now held, and though he and his wife had still further simplified their way of living undine understood that their self-denial would not increase her opportunities. she felt no compunction in continuing to accept an undiminished allowance: it was the hereditary habit of the parent animal to despoil himself for his progeny. but this conviction did not seem incompatible with a sentimental pity for her parents. aside from all interested motives, she wished for their own sakes that they were better off. their personal requirements were pathetically limited, but renewed prosperity would at least have procured them the happiness of giving her what she wanted. moffatt lingered on; but he began to speak more definitely of sailing, and undine foresaw the day when, strong as her attraction was, stronger influences would snap it like a thread. she knew she interested and amused him, and that it flattered his vanity to be seen with her, and to hear that rumour coupled their names; but he gave her, more than any one she had ever known, the sense of being detached from his life, in control of it, and able, without weakness or uncertainty, to choose which of its calls he should obey. if the call were that of business--of any of the great perilous affairs he handled like a snake-charmer spinning the deadly reptiles about his head--she knew she would drop from his life like a loosened leaf. these anxieties sharpened the intensity of her enjoyment, and made the contrast keener between her crowded sparkling hours and the vacant months at saint desert. little as she understood of the qualities that made moffatt what he was, the results were of the kind most palpable to her. he used life exactly as she would have used it in his place. some of his enjoyments were beyond her range, but even these appealed to her because of the money that was required to gratify them. when she took him to see some inaccessible picture, or went with him to inspect the treasures of a famous dealer, she saw that the things he looked at moved him in a way she could not understand, and that the actual touching of rare textures--bronze or marble, or velvets flushed with the bloom of age--gave him sensations like those her own beauty had once roused in him. but the next moment he was laughing over some commonplace joke, or absorbed in a long cipher cable handed to him as they re-entered the nouveau luxe for tea, and his aesthetic emotions had been thrust back into their own compartment of the great steel strong-box of his mind. her new life went on without comment or interference from her husband, and she saw that he had accepted their altered relation, and intended merely to keep up an external semblance of harmony. to that semblance she knew he attached intense importance: it was an article of his complicated social creed that a man of his class should appear to live on good terms with his wife. for different reasons it was scarcely less important to undine: she had no wish to affront again the social reprobation that had so nearly wrecked her. but she could not keep up the life she was leading without more money, a great deal more money; and the thought of contracting her expenditure was no longer tolerable. one afternoon, several weeks later, she came in to find a tradesman's representative waiting with a bill. there was a noisy scene in the anteroom before the man threateningly withdrew--a scene witnessed by the servants, and overheard by her mother-in-law, whom she found seated in the drawing-room when she entered. the old marquise's visits to her daughter-in-law were made at long intervals but with ritual regularity; she called every other friday at five, and undine had forgotten that she was due that day. this did not make for greater cordiality between them, and the altercation in the anteroom had been too loud for concealment. the marquise was on her feet when her daughter-in-law came in, and instantly said with lowered eyes: "it would perhaps be best for me to go." "oh, i don't care. you're welcome to tell raymond you've heard me insulted because i'm too poor to pay my bills--he knows it well enough already!" the words broke from undine unguardedly, but once spoken they nourished her defiance. "i'm sure my son has frequently recommended greater prudence--" the marquise murmured. "yes! it's a pity he didn't recommend it to your other son instead! all the money i was entitled to has gone to pay hubert's debts." "raymond has told me that there are certain things you fail to understand--i have no wish whatever to discuss them." the marquise had gone toward the door; with her hand on it she paused to add: "i shall say nothing whatever of what has happened." her icy magnanimity added the last touch to undine's wrath. they knew her extremity, one and all, and it did not move them. at most, they would join in concealing it like a blot on their honour. and the menace grew and mounted, and not a hand was stretched to help her.... hardly a half-hour earlier moffatt, with whom she had been visiting a "private view," had sent her home in his motor with the excuse that he must hurry back to the nouveau luxe to meet his stenographer and sign a batch of letters for the new york mail. it was therefore probable that he was still at home--that she should find him if she hastened there at once. an overwhelming desire to cry out her wrath and wretchedness brought her to her feet and sent her down to hail a passing cab. as it whirled her through the bright streets powdered with amber sunlight her brain throbbed with confused intentions. she did not think of moffatt as a power she could use, but simply as some one who knew her and understood her grievance. it was essential to her at that moment to be told that she was right and that every one opposed to her was wrong. at the hotel she asked his number and was carried up in the lift. on the landing she paused a moment, disconcerted--it had occurred to her that he might not be alone. but she walked on quickly, found the number and knocked.... moffatt opened the door, and she glanced beyond him and saw that the big bright sitting-room was empty. "hullo!" he exclaimed, surprised; and as he stood aside to let her enter she saw him draw out his watch and glance at it surreptitiously. he was expecting someone, or he had an engagement elsewhere--something claimed him from which she was excluded. the thought flushed her with sudden resolution. she knew now what she had come for--to keep him from every one else, to keep him for herself alone. "don't send me away!" she said, and laid her hand on his beseechingly. xlv she advanced into the room and slowly looked about her. the big vulgar writing-table wreathed in bronze was heaped with letters and papers. among them stood a lapis bowl in a renaissance mounting of enamel and a vase of phenician glass that was like a bit of rainbow caught in cobwebs. on a table against the window a little greek marble lifted its pure lines. on every side some rare and sensitive object seemed to be shrinking back from the false colours and crude contours of the hotel furniture. there were no books in the room, but the florid console under the mirror was stacked with old numbers of town talk and the new york radiator. undine recalled the dingy hall-room that moffatt had lodged in at mrs. flynn's, over hober's livery stable, and her heart beat at the signs of his altered state. when her eyes came back to him their lids were moist. "don't send me away," she repeated. he looked at her and smiled. "what is it? what's the matter?" "i don't know--but i had to come. to-day, when you spoke again of sailing, i felt as if i couldn't stand it." she lifted her eyes and looked in his profoundly. he reddened a little under her gaze, but she could detect no softening or confusion in the shrewd steady glance he gave her back. "things going wrong again--is that the trouble?" he merely asked with a comforting inflexion. "they always are wrong; it's all been an awful mistake. but i shouldn't care if you were here and i could see you sometimes. you're so strong: that's what i feel about you, elmer. i was the only one to feel it that time they all turned against you out at apex.... do you remember the afternoon i met you down on main street, and we walked out together to the park? i knew then that you were stronger than any of them...." she had never spoken more sincerely. for the moment all thought of self-interest was in abeyance, and she felt again, as she had felt that day, the instinctive yearning of her nature to be one with his. something in her voice must have attested it, for she saw a change in his face. "you're not the beauty you were," he said irrelevantly; "but you're a lot more fetching." the oddly qualified praise made her laugh with mingled pleasure and annoyance. "i suppose i must be dreadfully changed--" "you're all right!--but i've got to go back home," he broke off abruptly. "i've put it off too long." she paled and looked away, helpless in her sudden disappointment. "i knew you'd say that.... and i shall just be left here...." she sat down on the sofa near which they had been standing, and two tears formed on her lashes and fell. moffatt sat down beside her, and both were silent. she had never seen him at a loss before. she made no attempt to draw nearer, or to use any of the arts of cajolery; but presently she said, without rising: "i saw you look at your watch when i came in. i suppose somebody else is waiting for you." "it don't matter." "some other woman?" "it don't matter." "i've wondered so often--but of course i've got no right to ask." she stood up slowly, understanding that he meant to let her go. "just tell me one thing--did you never miss me?" "oh, damnably!" he brought out with sudden bitterness. she came nearer, sinking her voice to a low whisper. "it's the only time i ever really cared--all through!" he had risen too, and they stood intensely gazing at each other. moffatt's face was fixed and grave, as she had seen it in hours she now found herself rapidly reliving. "i believe you did," he said. "oh, elmer--if i'd known--if i'd only known!" he made no answer, and she turned away, touching with an unconscious hand the edge of the lapis bowl among his papers. "elmer, if you're going away it can't do any harm to tell me--is there any one else?" he gave a laugh that seemed to shake him free. "in that kind of way? lord, no! too busy!" she came close again and laid a hand on his shoulder. "then why not--why shouldn't we--?" she leaned her head back so that her gaze slanted up through her wet lashes. "i can do as i please--my husband does. they think so differently about marriage over here: it's just a business contract. as long as a woman doesn't make a show of herself no one cares." she put her other hand up, so that she held him facing her. "i've always felt, all through everything, that i belonged to you." moffatt left her hands on his shoulders, but did not lift his own to clasp them. for a moment she thought she had mistaken him, and a leaden sense of shame descended on her. then he asked: "you say your husband goes with other women?" lili estradina's taunt flashed through her and she seized on it. "people have told me so--his own relations have. i've never stooped to spy on him...." "and the women in your set--i suppose it's taken for granted they all do the same?" she laughed. "everything fixed up for them, same as it is for the husbands, eh? nobody meddles or makes trouble if you know the ropes?" "no, nobody ... it's all quite easy...." she stopped, her faint smile checked, as his backward movement made her hands drop from his shoulders. "and that's what you're proposing to me? that you and i should do like the rest of 'em?" his face had lost its comic roundness and grown harsh and dark, as it had when her father had taken her away from him at opake. he turned on his heel, walked the length of the room and halted with his back to her in the embrasure of the window. there he paused a full minute, his hands in his pockets, staring out at the perpetual interweaving of motors in the luminous setting of the square. then he turned and spoke from where he stood. "look here. undine, if i'm to have you again i don't want to have you that way. that time out in apex, when everybody in the place was against me, and i was down and out, you stood up to them and stuck by me. remember that walk down main street? don't i!--and the way the people glared and hurried by; and how you kept on alongside of me, talking and laughing, and looking your sunday best. when abner spragg came out to opake after us and pulled you back i was pretty sore at your deserting; but i came to see it was natural enough. you were only a spoilt girl, used to having everything you wanted; and i couldn't give you a thing then, and the folks you'd been taught to believe in all told you i never would. well, i did look like a back number, and no blame to you for thinking so. i used to say it to myself over and over again, laying awake nights and totting up my mistakes ... and then there were days when the wind set another way, and i knew i'd pull it off yet, and i thought you might have held on...." he stopped, his head a little lowered, his concentrated gaze on her flushed face. "well, anyhow," he broke out, "you were my wife once, and you were my wife first--and if you want to come back you've got to come that way: not slink through the back way when there's no one watching, but walk in by the front door, with your head up, and your main street look." since the days when he had poured out to her his great fortune-building projects she had never heard him make so long a speech; and her heart, as she listened, beat with a new joy and terror. it seemed to her that the great moment of her life had come at last--the moment all her minor failures and successes had been building up with blind indefatigable hands. "elmer--elmer--" she sobbed out. she expected to find herself in his arms, shut in and shielded from all her troubles; but he stood his ground across the room, immovable. "is it yes?" she faltered the word after him: "yes--?" "are you going to marry me?" she stared, bewildered. "why, elmer--marry you? you forget!" "forget what? that you don't want to give up what you've got?" "how can i? such things are not done out here. why, i'm a catholic; and the catholic church--" she broke off, reading the end in his face. "but later, perhaps ... things might change. oh, elmer, if only you'd stay over here and let me see you sometimes!" "yes--the way your friends see each other. we're differently made out in apex. when i want that sort of thing i go down to north fifth street for it." she paled under the retort, but her heart beat high with it. what he asked was impossible--and she gloried in his asking it. feeling her power, she tried to temporize. "at least if you stayed we could be friends--i shouldn't feel so terribly alone." he laughed impatiently. "don't talk magazine stuff to me, undine spragg. i guess we want each other the same way. only our ideas are different. you've got all muddled, living out here among a lot of loafers who call it a career to run round after every petticoat. i've got my job out at home, and i belong where my job is." "are you going to be tied to business all your life?" her smile was faintly depreciatory. "i guess business is tied to me: wall street acts as if it couldn't get along without me." he gave his shoulders a shake and moved a few steps nearer. "see here, undine--you're the one that don't understand. if i was to sell out to-morrow, and spend the rest of my life reading art magazines in a pink villa, i wouldn't do what you're asking me. and i've about as much idea of dropping business as you have of taking to district nursing. there are things a man doesn't do. i understand why your husband won't sell those tapestries--till he's got to. his ancestors are his business: wall street's mine." he paused, and they silently faced each other. undine made no attempt to approach him: she understood that if he yielded it would be only to recover his advantage and deepen her feeling of defeat. she put out her hand and took up the sunshade she had dropped on entering. "i suppose it's good-bye then," she said. "you haven't got the nerve?" "the nerve for what?" "to come where you belong: with me." she laughed a little and then sighed. she wished he would come nearer, or look at her differently: she felt, under his cool eye, no more compelling than a woman of wax in a show-case. "how could i get a divorce? with my religion--" "why, you were born a baptist, weren't you? that's where you used to attend church when i waited round the corner, sunday mornings, with one of old hober's buggies." they both laughed, and he went on: "if you'll come along home with me i'll see you get your divorce all right. who cares what they do over here? you're an american, ain't you? what you want is the home-made article." she listened, discouraged yet fascinated by his sturdy inaccessibility to all her arguments and objections. he knew what he wanted, saw his road before him, and acknowledged no obstacles. her defense was drawn from reasons he did not understand, or based on difficulties that did not exist for him; and gradually she felt herself yielding to the steady pressure of his will. yet the reasons he brushed away came back with redoubled tenacity whenever he paused long enough for her to picture the consequences of what he exacted. "you don't know--you don't understand--" she kept repeating; but she knew that his ignorance was part of his terrible power, and that it was hopeless to try to make him feel the value of what he was asking her to give up. "see here, undine," he said slowly, as if he measured her resistance though he couldn't fathom it, "i guess it had better be yes or no right here. it ain't going to do either of us any good to drag this thing out. if you want to come back to me, come--if you don't, we'll shake hands on it now. i'm due in apex for a directors' meeting on the twentieth, and as it is i'll have to cable for a special to get me out there. no, no, don't cry--it ain't that kind of a story ... but i'll have a deck suite for you on the semantic if you'll sail with me the day after to-morrow." xlvi in the great high-ceilinged library of a private hotel overlooking one of the new quarters of paris, paul marvell stood listlessly gazing out into the twilight. the trees were budding symmetrically along the avenue below; and paul, looking down, saw, between windows and tree-tops, a pair of tall iron gates with gilt ornaments, the marble curb of a semi-circular drive, and bands of spring flowers set in turf. he was now a big boy of nearly nine, who went to a fashionable private school, and he had come home that day for the easter holidays. he had not been back since christmas, and it was the first time he had seen the new hotel which his step-father had bought, and in which mr. and mrs. moffatt had hastily established themselves, a few weeks earlier, on their return from a flying trip to america. they were always coming and going; during the two years since their marriage they had been perpetually dashing over to new york and back, or rushing down to rome or up to the engadine: paul never knew where they were except when a telegram announced that they were going somewhere else. he did not even know that there was any method of communication between mothers and sons less laconic than that of the electric wire; and once, when a boy at school asked him if his mother often wrote, he had answered in all sincerity: "oh yes--i got a telegram last week." he had been almost sure--as sure as he ever was of anything--that he should find her at home when he arrived; but a message (for she hadn't had time to telegraph) apprised him that she and mr. moffatt had run down to deauville to look at a house they thought of hiring for the summer; they were taking an early train back, and would be at home for dinner--were in fact having a lot of people to dine. it was just what he ought to have expected, and had been used to ever since he could remember; and generally he didn't much mind, especially since his mother had become mrs. moffatt, and the father he had been most used to, and liked best, had abruptly disappeared from his life. but the new hotel was big and strange, and his own room, in which there was not a toy or a book, or one of his dear battered relics (none of the new servants--they were always new--could find his things, or think where they had been put), seemed the loneliest spot in the whole house. he had gone up there after his solitary luncheon, served in the immense marble dining-room by a footman on the same scale, and had tried to occupy himself with pasting post-cards into his album; but the newness and sumptuousness of the room embarrassed him--the white fur rugs and brocade chairs seemed maliciously on the watch for smears and ink-spots--and after a while he pushed the album aside and began to roam through the house. he went to all the rooms in turn: his mother's first, the wonderful lacy bedroom, all pale silks and velvets, artful mirrors and veiled lamps, and the boudoir as big as a drawing-room, with pictures he would have liked to know about, and tables and cabinets holding things he was afraid to touch. mr. moffatt's rooms came next. they were soberer and darker, but as big and splendid; and in the bedroom, on the brown wall, hung a single picture--the portrait of a boy in grey velvet--that interested paul most of all. the boy's hand rested on the head of a big dog, and he looked infinitely noble and charming, and yet (in spite of the dog) so sad and lonely that he too might have come home that very day to a strange house in which none of his old things could be found. from these rooms paul wandered downstairs again. the library attracted him most: there were rows and rows of books, bound in dim browns and golds, and old faded reds as rich as velvet: they all looked as if they might have had stories in them as splendid as their bindings. but the bookcases were closed with gilt trellising, and when paul reached up to open one, a servant told him that mr. moffatt's secretary kept them locked because the books were too valuable to be taken down. this seemed to make the library as strange as the rest of the house, and he passed on to the ballroom at the back. through its closed doors he heard a sound of hammering, and when he tried the door-handle a servant passing with a tray-full of glasses told him that "they" hadn't finished, and wouldn't let anybody in. the mysterious pronoun somehow increased paul's sense of isolation, and he went on to the drawing-rooms, steering his way prudently between the gold arm-chairs and shining tables, and wondering whether the wigged and corseleted heroes on the walls represented mr. moffatt's ancestors, and why, if they did, he looked so little like them. the dining-room beyond was more amusing, because busy servants were already laying the long table. it was too early for the florist, and the centre of the table was empty, but down the sides were gold baskets heaped with pulpy summer fruits-figs, strawberries and big blushing nectarines. between them stood crystal decanters with red and yellow wine, and little dishes full of sweets; and against the walls were sideboards with great pieces of gold and silver, ewers and urns and branching candelabra, which sprinkled the green marble walls with starlike reflections. after a while he grew tired of watching the coming and going of white-sleeved footmen, and of listening to the butler's vociferated orders, and strayed back into the library. the habit of solitude had given him a passion for the printed page, and if he could have found a book anywhere--any kind of a book--he would have forgotten the long hours and the empty house. but the tables in the library held only massive unused inkstands and immense immaculate blotters; not a single volume had slipped its golden prison. his loneliness had grown overwhelming, and he suddenly thought of mrs. heeny's clippings. his mother, alarmed by an insidious gain in weight, had brought the masseuse back from new york with her, and mrs. heeny, with her old black bag and waterproof, was established in one of the grand bedrooms lined with mirrors. she had been loud in her joy at seeing her little friend that morning, but four years had passed since their last parting, and her personality had grown remote to him. he saw too many people, and they too often disappeared and were replaced by others: his scattered affections had ended by concentrating themselves on the charming image of the gentleman he called his french father; and since his french father had vanished no one else seemed to matter much to him. "oh, well," mrs. heeny had said, discerning the reluctance under his civil greeting, "i guess you're as strange here as i am, and we're both pretty strange to each other. you just go and look round, and see what a lovely home your ma's got to live in; and when you get tired of that, come up here to me and i'll give you a look at my clippings." the word woke a train of dormant associations, and paul saw himself seated on a dingy carpet, between two familiar taciturn old presences, while he rummaged in the depths of a bag stuffed with strips of newspaper. he found mrs. heeny sitting in a pink arm-chair, her bonnet perched on a pink-shaded electric lamp and her numerous implements spread out on an immense pink toilet-table. vague as his recollection of her was, she gave him at once a sense of reassurance that nothing else in the house conveyed, and after he had examined all her scissors and pastes and nail-polishers he turned to the bag, which stood on the carpet at her feet as if she were waiting for a train. "my, my!" she said, "do you want to get into that again? how you used to hunt in it for taffy, to be sure, when your pa brought you up to grandma spragg's o' saturdays! well, i'm afraid there ain't any taffy in it now; but there's piles and piles of lovely new clippings you ain't seen." "my papa?" he paused, his hand among the strips of newspaper. "my papa never saw my grandma spragg. he never went to america." "never went to america? your pa never--? why, land alive!" mrs. heeny gasped, a blush empurpling her large warm face. "why, paul marvell, don't you remember your own father, you that bear his name?" she exclaimed. the boy blushed also, conscious that it must have been wrong to forget, and yet not seeing how he was to blame. "that one died a long long time ago, didn't he? i was thinking of my french father," he explained. "oh, mercy," ejaculated mrs. heeny; and as if to cut the conversation short she stooped over, creaking like a ship, and thrust her plump strong hand into the bag. "here, now, just you look at these clippings--i guess you'll find a lot in them about your ma.--where do they come from? why, out of the papers, of course," she added, in response to paul's enquiry. "you'd oughter start a scrap-book yourself--you're plenty old enough. you could make a beauty just about your ma, with her picture pasted in the front--and another about mr. moffatt and his collections. there's one i cut out the other day that says he's the greatest collector in america." paul listened, fascinated. he had the feeling that mrs. heeny's clippings, aside from their great intrinsic interest, might furnish him the clue to many things he didn't understand, and that nobody had ever had time to explain to him. his mother's marriages, for instance: he was sure there was a great deal to find out about them. but she always said: "i'll tell you all about it when i come back"--and when she came back it was invariably to rush off somewhere else. so he had remained without a key to her transitions, and had had to take for granted numberless things that seemed to have no parallel in the experience of the other boys he knew. "here--here it is," said mrs. heeny, adjusting the big tortoiseshell spectacles she had taken to wearing, and reading out in a slow chant that seemed to paul to come out of some lost remoteness of his infancy. "'it is reported in london that the price paid by mr. elmer moffatt for the celebrated grey boy is the largest sum ever given for a vandyck. since mr. moffatt began to buy extensively it is estimated in art circles that values have gone up at least seventy-five per cent.'" but the price of the grey boy did not interest paul, and he said a little impatiently: "i'd rather hear about my mother." "to be sure you would! you wait now." mrs. heeny made another dive, and again began to spread her clippings on her lap like cards on a big black table. "here's one about her last portrait--no, here's a better one about her pearl necklace, the one mr. moffatt gave her last christmas. 'the necklace, which was formerly the property of an austrian archduchess, is composed of five hundred perfectly matched pearls that took thirty years to collect. it is estimated among dealers in precious stones that since mr. moffatt began to buy the price of pearls has gone up over fifty per cent.'" even this did not fix paul's attention. he wanted to hear about his mother and mr. moffatt, and not about their things; and he didn't quite know how to frame his question. but mrs. heeny looked kindly at him and he tried. "why is mother married to mr. moffatt now?" "why, you must know that much, paul." mrs. heeny again looked warm and worried. "she's married to him because she got a divorce--that's why." and suddenly she had another inspiration. "didn't she ever send you over any of those splendid clippings that came out the time they were married? why, i declare, that's a shame; but i must have some of 'em right here." she dived again, shuffled, sorted, and pulled out a long discoloured strip. "i've carried this round with me ever since, and so many's wanted to read it, it's all torn." she smoothed out the paper and began: "'divorce and remarriage of mrs. undine spragg-de chelles. american marquise renounces ancient french title to wed railroad king. quick work untying and tying. boy and girl romance renewed. "'reno, november d. the marquise de chelles, of paris, france, formerly mrs. undine spragg marvell, of apex city and new york, got a decree of divorce at a special session of the court last night, and was remarried fifteen minutes later to mr. elmer moffatt, the billionaire railroad king, who was the marquise's first husband. "'no case has ever been railroaded through the divorce courts of this state at a higher rate of speed: as mr. moffatt said last night, before he and his bride jumped onto their east-bound special, every record has been broken. it was just six months ago yesterday that the present mrs. moffatt came to reno to look for her divorce. owing to a delayed train, her counsel was late yesterday in receiving some necessary papers, and it was feared the decision would have to be held over; but judge toomey, who is a personal friend of mr. moffatt's, held a night session and rushed it through so that the happy couple could have the knot tied and board their special in time for mrs. moffatt to spend thanksgiving in new york with her aged parents. the hearing began at seven ten p. m. and at eight o'clock the bridal couple were steaming out of the station. "'at the trial mrs. spragg-de chelles, who wore copper velvet and sables, gave evidence as to the brutality of her french husband, but she had to talk fast as time pressed, and judge toomey wrote the entry at top speed, and then jumped into a motor with the happy couple and drove to the justice of the peace, where he acted as best man to the bridegroom. the latter is said to be one of the six wealthiest men east of the rockies. his gifts to the bride are a necklace and tiara of pigeon-blood rubies belonging to queen marie antoinette, a million dollar cheque and a house in new york. the happy pair will pass the honeymoon in mrs. moffatt's new home, fifth avenue, which is an exact copy of the pitti palace, florence. they plan to spend their springs in france.'" mrs. heeny drew a long breath, folded the paper and took off her spectacles. "there," she said, with a benignant smile and a tap on paul's cheek, "now you see how it all happened...." paul was not sure he did; but he made no answer. his mind was too full of troubled thoughts. in the dazzling description of his mother's latest nuptials one fact alone stood out for him--that she had said things that weren't true of his french father. something he had half-guessed in her, and averted his frightened thoughts from, took his little heart in an iron grasp. she said things that weren't true.... that was what he had always feared to find out.... she had got up and said before a lot of people things that were awfully false about his dear french father.... the sound of a motor turning in at the gates made mrs. heeny exclaim "here they are!" and a moment later paul heard his mother calling to him. he got up reluctantly, and stood wavering till he felt mrs. heeny's astonished eye upon him. then he heard mr. moffatt's jovial shout of "paul marvell, ahoy there!" and roused himself to run downstairs. as he reached the landing he saw that the ballroom doors were open and all the lustres lit. his mother and mr. moffatt stood in the middle of the shining floor, looking up at the walls; and paul's heart gave a wondering bound, for there, set in great gilt panels, were the tapestries that had always hung in the gallery at saint desert. "well, senator, it feels good to shake your fist again!" his step-father said, taking him in a friendly grasp; and his mother, who looked handsomer and taller and more splendidly dressed than ever, exclaimed: "mercy! how they've cut his hair!" before she bent to kiss him. "oh, mother, mother!" he burst out, feeling, between his mother's face and the others, hardly less familiar, on the walls, that he was really at home again, and not in a strange house. "gracious, how you squeeze!" she protested, loosening his arms. "but you look splendidly--and how you've grown!" she turned away from him and began to inspect the tapestries critically. "somehow they look smaller here," she said with a tinge of disappointment. mr. moffatt gave a slight laugh and walked slowly down the room, as if to study its effect. as he turned back his wife said: "i didn't think you'd ever get them." he laughed again, more complacently. "well, i don't know as i ever should have, if general arlington hadn't happened to bust up." they both smiled, and paul, seeing his mother's softened face, stole his hand in hers and began: "mother, i took a prize in composition--" "did you? you must tell me about it to-morrow. no, i really must rush off now and dress--i haven't even placed the dinner-cards." she freed her hand, and as she turned to go paul heard mr. moffatt say: "can't you ever give him a minute's time, undine?" she made no answer, but sailed through the door with her head high, as she did when anything annoyed her; and paul and his step-father stood alone in the illuminated ball-room. mr. moffatt smiled good-naturedly at the little boy and then turned back to the contemplation of the hangings. "i guess you know where those come from, don't you?" he asked in a tone of satisfaction. "oh, yes," paul answered eagerly, with a hope he dared not utter that, since the tapestries were there, his french father might be coming too. "you're a smart boy to remember them. i don't suppose you ever thought you'd see them here?" "i don't know," said paul, embarrassed. "well, i guess you wouldn't have if their owner hadn't been in a pretty tight place. it was like drawing teeth for him to let them go." paul flushed up, and again the iron grasp was on his heart. he hadn't, hitherto, actually disliked mr. moffatt, who was always in a good humour, and seemed less busy and absent-minded than his mother; but at that instant he felt a rage of hate for him. he turned away and burst into tears. "why, hullo, old chap--why, what's up?" mr. moffatt was on his knees beside the boy, and the arms embracing him were firm and friendly. but paul, for the life of him, couldn't answer: he could only sob and sob as the great surges of loneliness broke over him. "is it because your mother hadn't time for you? well, she's like that, you know; and you and i have got to lump it," mr. moffatt continued, getting to his feet. he stood looking down at the boy with a queer smile. "if we two chaps stick together it won't be so bad--we can keep each other warm, don't you see? i like you first rate, you know; when you're big enough i mean to put you in my business. and it looks as if one of these days you'd be the richest boy in america...." the lamps were lit, the vases full of flowers, the foot-men assembled on the landing and in the vestibule below, when undine descended to the drawing-room. as she passed the ballroom door she glanced in approvingly at the tapestries. they really looked better than she had been willing to admit: they made her ballroom the handsomest in paris. but something had put her out on the way up from deauville, and the simplest way of easing her nerves had been to affect indifference to the tapestries. now she had quite recovered her good humour, and as she glanced down the list of guests she was awaiting she said to herself, with a sigh of satisfaction, that she was glad she had put on her rubies. for the first time since her marriage to moffatt she was about to receive in her house the people she most wished to see there. the beginnings had been a little difficult; their first attempt in new york was so unpromising that she feared they might not be able to live down the sensational details of their reunion, and had insisted on her husband's taking her back to paris. but her apprehensions were unfounded. it was only necessary to give people the time to pretend they had forgotten; and already they were all pretending beautifully. the french world had of course held out longest; it had strongholds she might never capture. but already seceders were beginning to show themselves, and her dinner-list that evening was graced with the names of an authentic duke and a not too-damaged countess. in addition, of course, she had the shallums, the chauncey ellings, may beringer, dicky bowles, walsingham popple, and the rest of the new york frequenters of the nouveau luxe; she had even, at the last minute, had the amusement of adding peter van degen to their number. in the evening there were to be spanish dancing and russian singing; and dicky bowles had promised her a grand duke for her next dinner, if she could secure the new tenor who always refused to sing in private houses. even now, however, she was not always happy. she had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them. and there had been moments lately when she had had to confess to herself that moffatt did not fit into the picture. at first she had been dazzled by his success and subdued by his authority. he had given her all she had ever wished for, and more than she had ever dreamed of having: he had made up to her for all her failures and blunders, and there were hours when she still felt his dominion and exulted in it. but there were others when she saw his defects and was irritated by them: when his loudness and redness, his misplaced joviality, his familiarity with the servants, his alternating swagger and ceremony with her friends, jarred on perceptions that had developed in her unawares. now and then she caught herself thinking that his two predecessors--who were gradually becoming merged in her memory--would have said this or that differently, behaved otherwise in such and such a case. and the comparison was almost always to moffatt's disadvantage. this evening, however, she thought of him indulgently. she was pleased with his clever stroke in capturing the saint desert tapestries, which general arlington's sudden bankruptcy, and a fresh gambling scandal of hubert's, had compelled their owner to part with. she knew that raymond de chelles had told the dealers he would sell his tapestries to anyone but mr. elmer moffatt, or a buyer acting for him; and it amused her to think that, thanks to elmer's astuteness, they were under her roof after all, and that raymond and all his clan were by this time aware of it. these facts disposed her favourably toward her husband, and deepened the sense of well-being with which--according to her invariable habit--she walked up to the mirror above the mantelpiece and studied the image it reflected. she was still lost in this pleasing contemplation when her husband entered, looking stouter and redder than ever, in evening clothes that were a little too tight. his shirt front was as glossy as his baldness, and in his buttonhole he wore the red ribbon bestowed on him for waiving his claim to a velasquez that was wanted for the louvre. he carried a newspaper in his hand, and stood looking about the room with a complacent eye. "well, i guess this is all right," he said, and she answered briefly: "don't forget you're to take down madame de follerive; and for goodness' sake don't call her 'countess.'" "why, she is one, ain't she?" he returned good-humouredly. "i wish you'd put that newspaper away," she continued; his habit of leaving old newspapers about the drawing-room annoyed her. "oh, that reminds me--" instead of obeying her he unfolded the paper. "i brought it in to show you something. jim driscoll's been appointed ambassador to england." "jim driscoll--!" she caught up the paper and stared at the paragraph he pointed to. jim driscoll--that pitiful nonentity, with his stout mistrustful commonplace wife! it seemed extraordinary that the government should have hunted up such insignificant people. and immediately she had a great vague vision of the splendours they were going to--all the banquets and ceremonies and precedences.... "i shouldn't say she'd want to, with so few jewels--" she dropped the paper and turned to her husband. "if you had a spark of ambition, that's the kind of thing you'd try for. you could have got it just as easily as not!" he laughed and thrust his thumbs in his waistcoat armholes with the gesture she disliked. "as it happens, it's about the one thing i couldn't." "you couldn't? why not?" "because you're divorced. they won't have divorced ambassadresses." "they won't? why not, i'd like to know?" "well, i guess the court ladies are afraid there'd be too many pretty women in the embassies," he answered jocularly. she burst into an angry laugh, and the blood flamed up into her face. "i never heard of anything so insulting!" she cried, as if the rule had been invented to humiliate her. there was a noise of motors backing and advancing in the court, and she heard the first voices on the stairs. she turned to give herself a last look in the glass, saw the blaze of her rubies, the glitter of her hair, and remembered the brilliant names on her list. but under all the dazzle a tiny black cloud remained. she had learned that there was something she could never get, something that neither beauty nor influence nor millions could ever buy for her. she could never be an ambassador's wife; and as she advanced to welcome her first guests she said to herself that it was the one part she was really made for. the end peter's mother new edition with introduction by mrs. henry de la pasture _and i left my youth behind for somebody else to find_. to the beloved memory of my only brother lt. colonel walter floyd bonham, d.s.o. to my american readers the author of "peter's mother" has been bidden of the publishers, who have incurred the responsibility of presenting her to the american public, to write a preface to this edition of her novel. she does so with the more diffidence because it has been impressed upon her, by more than one wiseacre, that her novels treat of a life too narrow, an atmosphere too circumscribed, to be understood or appreciated by american readers. no one can please everybody; i suppose that no one, except the old man in aesop's fable, ever tried to do so. but i venture to believe that to some americans, a sincere and truthful portrait of a typical englishwoman of a certain class may prove attractive, as to us are the studies of a "david harum," or others whose characteristics interest because--and not in spite of--their strangeness and unfamiliarity. we do not recognise the type; but as those who do have acknowledged the accuracy of the representation, we read, learn, and enjoy making acquaintance with an individuality and surroundings foreign to our own experience. there are hundreds of englishwomen living lives as isolated, as guarded from all practical knowledge of the outer world, as entirely circumscribed as the life of lady mary crewys; though they are not all unhappy. on the contrary, many diffuse content and kindness all around them, and take it for granted that their own personal wishes are of no account. indeed it would seem that some cease to be aware what their own personal wishes are. with anxious eyes fixed on others--the husband, father, sons, who dominate them,--they live to please, to serve, to nurse, and to console; revered certainly as queens of their tiny kingdoms, but also helpless as prisoners. calm, as fixed stars, they regard (perhaps sometimes a little wistfully) the orbits of brighter planets, and the flashing of occasional meteors, within their ken; knowing that their own place is unchangeable--immutable. that the views of such women are often narrow, their prejudices many, their conventions tiresome, who shall deny? that their souls are pure and tender, their hearts open to kindness as are their hands to charity, nobody who knows the type will dispute. they lack many advantages which their more independent sisters (no less gifted with noble and womanly qualities) enjoy, but they possess a peculiar gentleness, which is all their own, whether it be adored or despised. when one of their number happens to be cleverer, larger minded, more restless, and impatient, it may be, by nature than her sisters, tragedy may ensue. but not often. habit and public opinion are strong restrainers, stronger sometimes than even the most carefully inculcated abstract principles. to turn to another phase of the story--there was a time during the boer war when there was literally scarcely a woman in england who was not mourning the death of some man--be he son, brother, or husband, lover or friend,--and that time seems still very, very recent to some of us. the rights and wrongs of a war have nothing to do with the sympathy all civilised men and women extend to the soldiers on both sides who take part in it. "_theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do or die_," and whether they "do or die," the mingled suspense, pride, and anguish suffered by their women-kind rouses the pity of the world; but most of all, for the secret of sympathy is understanding, the pity of those who have suffered likewise. so that such escapades as peter's in the story, being not very uncommon at that dark period (and having its foundation in fact), may have touched hearts over here, which will be unmoved on the other side of the atlantic. i cannot tell. i have known very few americans, and though i have counted those few among my friends, they have been rarely met. my only knowledge of america has been gleaned from my observation of these, and from reading. as it happens, the favourite books of my childhood were, with few exceptions, american. partly from association and partly because i count it the most truly delightful story of its kind that ever was written, "little women" has always retained its early place in my affections. "meg," "jo," "beth," and "amy" are my oldest and dearest friends; and when i think of them, it is hard to believe that america could be a land of strangers to me after all. i confess to a weakness for the "wide, wide world" and a secret passion for "queechy." i loved "mr. rutherford's children," and was always interested to hear "what katy did," whilst the very thought of "melbourne house" thrills me with recollections of the joy i experienced therein. but this is all by the way; and for the egotism which is, i fear me, displayed in this foreword, i can but plead, not only the difficulty of writing a preface at all, when one has no personal inclination that way, but the nervousness which must beset a writer who is directly addressing not a tried and friendly public, but an unknown, and, it may be, less easily pleased and more critical audience. it appears to me that it would be a simpler thing to write another book; and i would rather do so. i can only hope that some of the readers of "peter's mother," if she is so happy as to find favour in american eyes, would rather i did so too; in i which case i shall very joyfully try to gratify their wishes, and my own. betty de la pasture. peter's mother chapter i above youlestone village, overlooking the valley and the river, and the square-towered church, stood barracombe house, backed by barracombe woods, and owned by sir timothy crewys, of barracombe. from the terrace before his windows sir timothy could take a bird's-eye view of his own property, up the river and down the river; while he also had the felicity of beholding the estate of his most important neighbour, colonel hewel, of hewelscourt, mapped out before his eyes, as plainly visible in detail as land on the opposite side of a narrow valley must always be. he cast no envious glances at his neighbour's property. the youle was a boundary which none could dispute, and which could only be conveniently crossed by the ferry, for the nearest bridge was seven miles distant, at brawnton, the old post-town. from brawnton the coach still ran once a week for the benefit of the outlying villages, and the single line of rail which threaded the valley of the youle in the year was still a novelty to the inhabitants of this unfrequented part of devon. sir timothy sometimes expressed a majestic pity for colonel hewel, because the railway ran through some of his neighbour's best fields; and also because hewelscourt was on the wrong side of the river--faced due north--and was almost buried in timber. but colonel hewel was perfectly satisfied with his own situation, though sorry for sir timothy, who lived within full view of the railway, but was obliged to drive many miles round by brawnton bridge in order to reach the station. the two gentlemen seldom met. they lived in different parishes, and administered justice in different directions. sir timothy's dignity did not permit him to make use of the ferry, and he rarely drove further than brawnton, or rode much beyond the boundaries of his own estate. he cared only for farming, whilst colonel hewel was devoted to sport. the crewys family had been squires of barracombe, cultivating their own lands and living upon them contentedly, for centuries before the hewels had ever been heard of in devon, as all the village knew very well; wherefore they regarded the hewels with a mixture of good-natured contempt and kindly tolerance. the contempt was because hewelscourt had been built within the memory of living man, and only two generations of hewels born therein; the tolerance because the present owner, though not a wealthy man, was as liberal in his dealings as their squire was the reverse. * * * * * in the reign of charles i., one peter crewys, an adventurous younger son of this obscure but ancient devonshire family, had gained local notoriety by raising a troop of enthusiastic yeomen for his majesty's service; subsequently his own reckless personal gallantry won wider recognition in many an affray with the parliamentary troops; and on the death of his royal master, peter crewys was forced to fly the country. he joined king charles ii. in his exile, whilst his prudent elder brother severed all connection with him, denounced him as a swashbuckler, and made his own peace with the commonwealth. the restoration, however, caused farmer timothy to welcome his relative home in the warmest manner, and the brothers were not only reconciled in their old age, but the elder made haste to transfer the ownership of barracombe to the younger, in terror lest his own disloyalty should be rewarded by confiscation of the family acres. a careless but not ungrateful monarch, rejoicing doubtless to see his faithful soldier and servant so well provided for, bestowed on him a baronetcy, a portrait by vandyck of the late king, his father, and the promise of a handsome sum of money, for the payment of which the new baronet forebore to press his royal patron. his services thus recognized and rewarded, old sir peter crewys settled down amicably with his brother at barracombe. presumably there had always been an excellent understanding between them. in any case no question of divided interests ever arose. sir peter enlarged the old elizabethan homestead to suit his new dignity; built a picture-gallery, which he stocked handsomely with family portraits; designed terrace gardens on the hillside after a fashion he had learnt in italy, and adopted his eldest nephew as his heir. old timothy meanwhile continued to cultivate the land undisturbed, disdaining newfangled ideas of gentility, and adhering in all ways to the customs of his father. presently, soldier and farmer also passed away, and were laid to rest side by side on the banks of the youle, in the shadow of the square-towered church. before the house rolled rich meadows, open spaces of cornland, and low-lying orchards. the building itself stood out boldly on a shelf of the hill; successive generations of the crewys family had improved or enlarged it with more attention to convenience than to architecture. the older portion was overshadowed by an imposing south front of white stone, shaded in summer by a prolific vine, which gave it a foreign appearance, further enhanced by rows of green shutters. it was screened from the north by the hill, and from the east by a dense wood. myrtles, hydrangeas, magnolias, and orange-trees nourished out-of-doors upon the sheltered terraces cut in the red sandstone. the woods of barracombe stretched upwards to the skyline of the ridge behind the house, and were intersected by winding paths, bordered by hardy fuchsias and delicate ferns. a rushing stream dropped from height to height on its rocky course, and ended picturesquely and usefully in a waterfall close to the village, where it turned an old mill-wheel before disappearing into the youle. if the squire of barracombe overlooked from his terrace garden the inhabitants of the village and the tell-tale doorway of the much-frequented inn on the high-road below--his tenants in the valley and on the hillside were privileged in turn to observe the goings-in and comings-out of their beloved landlord almost as intimately; nor did they often tire of discussing his movements, his doings, and even his intentions. his monotonous life provided small cause for gossip or speculation; but when the opportunity arose, it was eagerly seized. in the failing light of a february afternoon a group of labourers assembled before the hospitably open door of the crewys arms. "him baint been london ways vor uppard of vivdeen year, tu my zurtain knowledge," said the old road-mender, jerking his empty pewter upwards in the direction of the terrace, where sir timothy's solid dark form could be discerned pacing up and down before his white house. "tis vur a ligacy. you may depend on't. 'twas vur a ligacy last time," said a brawny ploughman. "volk doan't git ligacies every day," said the road-mender, contemptuously. "i zays 'tis master peter. him du be just the age when byes du git drubblezum, gentle are zimple. i were drubblezum myself as a bye." "'twas tu fetch down this 'ere london jintle-man as comed on here wi' him to-day, i tell 'ee. his cousin, are zuch like. zame name, anyways, var james coachman zaid zo." "well, i telled 'ee zo," said the road-mender. "he's brart down the nextest heir, var tu keep a hold over master peter, and i doan't blame 'un." "james coachman telled me vive minutes zince as zummat were up. 'ee zad such arders var tu-morrer morning, 'ee says, as niver 'ee had befar," said the landlord. "thart james coachman weren't niver lit tu come here," said the road-mender, slyly. his toothless mouth extended into the perpetual smile which had earned him the nickname of "happy jack," over sixty years since, when he had been the prettiest lad in the parish. "he only snicked down vor a drop o' brandy, vur he were clean rampin' mazed wi' tuth-ache. he waited till pretty nigh dusk var the ole ladies tu be zafe. 'ee says they du take it by turns zo long as daylight du last, tu spy out wi' their microscopes, are zum zuch, as none of sir timothy's volk git tarking down this ways. a drop o' my zider might git tu their 'yeds," said the landlord, sarcastically, "though they drinks sir timothy's by the bucket-vull up tu barracombe." "'tis stronger than yars du be," said happy jack. "there baint no warter put tu't, joe gudewyn. the warter-varl be tu handy vur yure brewin'." "zum of my customers has weak 'yeds, 'tis arl the better for they," said goodwyn, calmly. "then charge 'em accardin', mr. landlord, charge 'em accardin', zays i. warter doan't cost 'ee nart, du 'un?" said happy jack, triumphantly. "'ere be the doctor goin' on in's trap, while yu du be tarking zo," said the ploughman. "lard, he du be a vast goer, be joe blundell." "i drove zo vast as that, and vaster, when i kip a harse," said the road-mender, jealously. "'ee be a young man, not turned vifty. i mind his vather and mother down tu cullacott befar they was wed. why doan't he go tu the war, that's what i zay?" "sir timothy doan't hold wi' the war," said the landlord. "mar shame vor 'un," said happy jack. "but me and zur timothy, us made up our minds tu differ long ago. i'm arl vor vighting vurriners--turks, rooshans, vrinchmen; 'tis arl one tu i." "why doan't 'ee volunteer thyself, vather jack? thee baint turned nointy yit, be 'ee?" said a labourer, winking heavily, to convey to the audience that the suggestion was a humorous one. "ah, zo i wude, and shute boers wi' the best on 'un. but the governmint baint got the zince tu ax me," said happy jack, chuckling. "the young volk baint nigh zo knowing as i du be. old kruger wuden't ha' tuke in i, try as 'un wude. i be zo witty as iver i can be." dr. blundell saluted the group before the inn as he turned his horse to climb the steep road to barracombe. no breath of wind stirred, and the smoke from the cottage chimneys was lying low in the valley, hovering over the river in the still air. a few primroses peeped out of sheltered corners under the hedge, and held out a timid promise of spring. the doctor followed the red road which wound between sir timothy's carefully enclosed plantations of young larch, passed the lodge gates, which were badly in need of repair, and entered the drive. chapter ii the justice-room was a small apartment in the older portion of barracombe house; the low windows were heavily latticed, and faced west. sir timothy sat before his writing-table, which was heaped with papers, directories, and maps; but he could no longer see to read or write. he made a stiff pretence of rising to greet the doctor as he entered, and then resumed his elbow-chair. the rapidly failing daylight showed a large elderly, rather pompous gentleman, with a bald head, grizzled whiskers, and heavy plebeian features. his face was smooth and unwrinkled, as the faces of prosperous and self-satisfied persons sometimes are, even after sixty, which was the age sir timothy had attained. dr. blundell, who sat opposite his patient, was neither prosperous nor self-satisfied. his dark clean-shaven face was deeply lined; care or over-work had furrowed his brow; and the rather unkempt locks of black hair which fell over it were streaked with white. from the deep-set brown eyes looked sadness and fatigue, as well as a great kindness for his fellow-men. "i came the moment i received your letter," he said. "i had no idea you were back from london already." "dr. blundell," said sir timothy, pompously, "when i took the very unusual step of leaving home the day before yesterday, i had resolved to follow the advice you gave me. i went to fulfil an appointment i had made with a specialist." "with sir james power?" "no, with a man named herslett. you may have heard of him." "heard of him!" ejaculated blundell. "why, he's world-famous! a new man. very clever, of course. if anything, a greater authority. only i fancied you would perhaps prefer an older, graver man." "no doubt i committed a breach of medical etiquette," said sir timothy, in self-satisfied tones. "but i fancied you might have written _your_ version of the case to power. ah, you did? exactly. but i was determined to have an absolutely unbiassed opinion." "well," said blundell, gently. "well--i got it, that's all," said sir timothy. the triumph seemed to die out of his voice. "was it--unsatisfactory?" "not from your point of view," said the squire, with a heavy jocularity which did not move the doctor to mirth. "i'm bound to say he confirmed your opinion exactly. but he took a far more serious view of my case than you do." "did he?" said blundell, turning away his head. "the operation you suggested as a possible necessity must be immediate. he spoke of it quite frankly as the only possible chance of saving my life, which is further endangered by every hour of delay." "fortunately," said blundell, cheerfully, "you have a fine constitution, and you have lived a healthy abstemious life. that is all in your favour." "i am over sixty years of age," said sir timothy, coldly, "and the ordeal before me is a very severe one, as you must be well aware. i must take the risk of course, but the less said about the matter the better." dr. blundell had always regarded sir timothy crewys as a commonplace contradictory gentleman, beset by prejudices which belonged properly to an earlier generation, and of singularly narrow sympathies and interests. he believed him to be an upright man according to his lights, which were not perhaps very brilliant lights after all; but he knew him to be one whom few people found it possible to like, partly on account of his arrogance, which was excessive; and partly on account of his want of consideration for the feelings of others, which arose from lack of perception. people are disliked more often for a bad manner than for a bad heart. the one is their private possession--the other they obtrude on their acquaintance. sir timothy's heart was not bad, and he cared less for being liked than for being respected. he was the offspring of a _mésalliance_; and greatly over-estimating the importance in which his family was held, he imagined he would be looked down upon for this mischance, unless he kept people at a distance and in awe of him. the idea was a foolish one, no doubt, but then sir timothy was not a wise man; on the contrary, his lifelong determination to keep himself loftily apart from his fellow-men had resulted in an almost extraordinary ignorance of the world he lived in--a world which sir timothy regarded as a wild and misty place, peopled largely and unnecessarily with savages and foreigners, and chiefly remarkable for containing england; as england justified its existence by holding devonshire, and more especially barracombe. sir timothy had never been sent to school, and owed such education as he possessed almost entirely to his half-sisters. these ladies were considerably his seniors, and had in turn been brought up at barracombe by their grandmother; whose maxims they still quoted, and whose ideas they had scarcely outgrown. under the circumstances, the narrowness of his outlook was perhaps hardly to be wondered at. but the dull immovability and sense of importance which characterized him now seemed to the doctor to be almost tragically charged with the typical matter-of-fact courage of the englishman; who displays neither fear nor emotion; and who would regard with horror the suspicion that such repression might be heroic. "when is it to be?" said blundell. "to-morrow." "to-morrow!" "and here," said sir timothy; "dr. herslett objected, but i insisted. i won't be ill in a strange house. i shall recover far more rapidly--if i am to recover--among my people, in my native air. london stifles me. i dislike crowds and noise. i hate novelty. if i am to die, i will die at home." "herslett himself performs the operation, of course?" "yes. he is to arrive at brawnton to-night, and sleep there. i shall send the carriage over for him and his assistants early to-morrow morning. you, of course, will meet him here, and the operation is to take place at eleven o'clock." in his alarm lest the doctor might be moved to express sympathy, sir timothy spoke with unusual severity. dr. blundell understood, and was silent. "i sent for you, of course, to let you know all this," said sir timothy, "but i wished, also, to introduce you to my cousin, john crewys, who came down with me." "the q.c.?" "exactly. i have made him my executor and trustee, and guardian of my son." "jointly with lady mary, i presume?" said the doctor, unguardedly. "certainly not," said sir timothy, stiffly. "lady mary has never been troubled with business matters. that is why i urged john to come down with me. in case--anything--happens to-morrow, his support will be invaluable to her. i have a high opinion of him. he has succeeded in life through his own energy, and he is the only member of my family who has never applied to me for assistance. i inquired the reason on the journey down, for i know that at one time he was in very poor circumstances; and he replied that he would rather have starved than have asked me for sixpence. i call that a very proper spirit." the doctor made no comment on the anecdote. "may i ask how lady mary is bearing this suspense?" he asked. "lady mary knows nothing of the matter," said the squire, rather peevishly. "you have not prepared her?" "no; and i particularly desire she and my sisters should hear nothing of it. if this is to be my last evening on earth, i should not wish it to be clouded by tears and lamentations, which might make it difficult for me to maintain my own self-command. herslett said i was not to be agitated. i shall bid them all good night just as usual. in the morning i beg you will be good enough to make the necessary explanations. lady mary need hear nothing of it till it is over, for you know she never leaves her room before twelve--a habit i have often deplored, but which is highly convenient on this occasion." dr. blundell reflected for a moment. "may i venture to remonstrate with you, sir timothy?" he said. "i fear lady mary may be deeply shocked and hurt at being thus excluded from your confidence in so serious a case. should anything go wrong," he added bluntly, "it would be difficult to account to her even for my own reticence." sir timothy rose majestic from his chair. "you will say that _i_ forbade you to make the communication," he said, with rather a displeased air. "i beg your pardon," said dr. blundell, "but--" "i am not offended," interrupted sir timothy, mistaking remonstrance for apology. he was quite honestly incapable of supposing that his physician would presume to argue with him. "you do not, very naturally, understand lady mary's disposition as well as i do," he said, almost graciously. "she has been sheltered from anxiety, from trouble of every kind, since her childhood. to me, more than a quarter of a century her senior, she seems, indeed, still almost a child." dr. blundell coloured. "yet she is the mother of a grown-up son," he said. "peter grown-up! nonsense! a schoolboy." "eighteen," said the doctor, shortly. "you don't wish him sent for?" "most certainly not. the christmas holidays are only just over. rest assured, dr. blundell," said sir timothy, with grim emphasis, "that i shall give peter no excuse for leaving his work, if i can help it." there was a tap at the door. the squire lowered his voice and spoke hurriedly. "if it is the canon, tell him, in confidence, what i have told you, and say that i should wish him to be present to-morrow, in his official capacity, in case of--" it was the canon, whose rosy good-humoured countenance appeared in the doorway whilst sir timothy was yet speaking. "i hope i am not interrupting," he said, "but the ladies desired me--that is, lady belstone and miss crewys desired me--to let you know that tea was ready." the canon had an innocent surprised face like a baby; he was constitutionally timid and amiable, and his dislike of argument, or of a loud voice, almost amounted to fear. sir timothy mistook his nervousness for proper respect, and maintained a distant but condescending graciousness towards him. "i hear you came back by the afternoon train, sir timothy. a london outing is a rare thing for you. i hope you enjoyed yourself," said the canon, with a meaningless laugh. "i transacted my business successfully, thank you," said sir timothy, gravely. "brought back any fresh news of the war?" "none at all." "i hear the call for more men has been responded to all over the country. it's a fine thing, so many young fellows ready and willing to lay down their lives for their country." "very few young men, i believe," said sir timothy, frigidly, "can resist any opportunity to be concerned in brawling and bloodshed, especially when it is legalized under the name of war. my respect is reserved for the steady workers at home." "and how much peace would the steady workers at home enjoy without the brawlers abroad to defend them, i wonder!" cried the canon, flushing all over his rosy face, and then suddenly faltering as he met the cold surprise of the squire's grey eyes. "i have some letters to finish before post time," said sir timothy, after an impressive short pause of displeasure. "i will join you presently, dr. blundell, at the tea-table, if you will return to the ladies with canon birch." sir timothy rang for lights, and his visitors closed the door of the study behind them. dr. blundell's backward glance showed him the tall and portly form silhouetted against the window; the last gleam of daylight illuminating the iron-grey hair; the face turned towards the hilltop, where the spires of the skeleton larches were sharply outlined against a clear western sky. "what made you harp upon the war, man, knowing what his opinions are?" the doctor asked vexedly, as he stumbled along the uneven stone passage towards the hall. "i did not exactly intend to do so; but i declare, the moment i see sir timothy, every subject i wish to avoid seems to fly to the tip of my tongue," said the poor canon, apologetically; "though i had a reason for alluding to the war to-night--a good reason, as i think you will acknowledge presently. i want your advice, doctor." "not for yourself, i hope," said the doctor, absently. "come into the gun-room for one moment," said birch. "it is very important. do you know i've a letter from peter?" "from peter! why should _you_ have a letter from peter?" said the doctor, and his uninterested tone became alert. "i'm sure i don't know why not. i was always fond of peter," said the canon, humbly. "will you cast your eye over it? you see, it's written from eton, and posted two days later in london." dr. blundell read the letter, which was written in a schoolboy hand, and not guiltless of mistakes in spelling. "_dear canon birch_, "_as my father wouldn't hear of my going out to south africa, i've taken the law into my own hands. i wrote to my mother's cousin, lord ferries, to ask him to include me in his yeomanry corps. of course i let him suppose papa was willing and anxious, which perhaps was a low-down game, but i remembered that all's fair in love and war; and besides, i consider papa very nearly a pro-boer. we've orders to sail on friday, which is sharp work; but i should be eternally disgraced now if they stopped me. as my father never listens to reason, far less to me, you had better explain to him that if he's any regard for the honour of our name, he's no choice left. i expect my mother had better not be told till i'm gone, or she will only fret over what can't be helped. i'll write to her on board, once we're safely started. i know you're all right about the war, so you can tell papa i was ashamed to be playing football while fellows younger than me, and fellows who can't shoot or ride as i can, are going off to south africa every day._ "_yours affectionately_, "_peter crewys_. "_p.s._--_hope you won't mind this job. i did try to get papa's leave fair and square first_." "i always said peter was a fine fellow at bottom," said canon birch, anxiously scanning the doctor's frowning face. "he's an infernal self-willed, obstinate, heartless young cub on top, then," said blundell. "he's a chip of the old block, no doubt," said the canon; "but still"--his admiration of peter's boldness was perceptible in his voice--"he doesn't share his father's reprehensible opinions on the subject of the war." "sons generally begin life by differing from their fathers, and end by imitating them," said blundell, sharply. "birch, we must stop him." "i don't see how," said the canon; and he indulged in a gentle chuckle. "the young rascal has laid his plans too well. he sails to-morrow. i telegraphed inquiries. ferries' horse are going by the _rosmore castle_ to-morrow morning at eleven o'clock." dr. blundell made an involuntary movement, which the canon did not perceive. "i don't relish the notion of breaking this news to sir timothy. but i thought we could consult together, you and me, how to do it," said the innocent gentleman. "there's no doubt, you know, that it must be done at once, or he can't get to southampton in time to see the boy off and forgive him. i suppose even sir timothy will forgive him at such a moment. god bless the lad!" dr. blundell uttered an exclamation that did not sound like a blessing. "look here, birch," he said, "this is no time to mince matters. if the boy can't be stopped--and under the circumstances he's got us on toast--he can't cry off active service--_as_ the boy can't be stopped, you must just keep this news to yourself." "but i must tell sir timothy!" "you must _not_ tell sir timothy." "though all my sympathies are with the boy--for i'm a patriot first, and a parson afterwards--god forgive me for saying so," said birch, in a trembling voice, "yet i can't take the responsibility of keeping peter's father in ignorance of his action. i see exactly what you mean, of course. sir timothy will make unpleasantness, and very likely telegraph to his commanding officer, and disgrace the poor boy before his comrades; and shout at me, a thing i can't bear; and you kindly think to spare me--and peter. but i can't take the responsibility of keeping it dark, for all that," said the canon, shaking his head regretfully. "_i_ take the responsibility," said the doctor, shortly. "as sir timothy's physician, i forbid you to tell him." "is sir timothy ill?" the canon's light eyes grew rounder with alarm. "he is to undergo a dangerous operation to-morrow morning." "god bless my soul!" "he desires this evening--possibly his last on earth--to be a calm and unclouded one," said the doctor. "respect his wishes, birch, as you would respect the wishes of a dying man." "do you mean he won't get over it?" said the canon, in a horrified whisper. "you always want the _t's_ crossed and the _i's_ dotted," said blundell, impatiently. "of course there is a chance--his only chance. he's a d----d plucky old fellow. i never thought to like sir timothy half so well as i do at this moment." "i hope i don't _dislike_ any man," faltered the canon. "but--" "exactly," said the doctor, dryly. "but what shall i do with peter's letter?" said the unhappy recipient. "not one word to sir timothy. agitation or distress of mind at such a moment would be the worst thing in the world for him." "but i can't let peter sail without a word to his people. and his mother. good god, blundell! is lady mary to lose husband and son in one day?" "lady mary," said the doctor, bitterly, "is to be treated, as usual, like a child, and told nothing of her husband's danger till it's over. as for peter--well, devoted mother as she is, she must be pretty well accustomed by this time to the captious indifference of her spoilt boy. she won't be surprised, though she may be hurt, that he should coolly propose to set off without bidding her good-bye." "couldn't we tell her in confidence about peter?" said the canon, struck with a brilliant idea. "certainly not; she would fly to him at once, and leave sir timothy alone in his extremity." "couldn't we tell her in confidence about sir timothy?" "i have allowed sir timothy to understand that neither you nor i will betray his secret." "i'm no hand at keeping a secret," said the canon, unhappily. "nonsense, canon, nonsense," said dr. blundell, laying a friendly hand on his shoulder. "no man in your profession, or in mine, ought to be able to say that. pull yourself together, hope for the best, and play your part." chapter iii john crewys looked round the hall at barracombe house with curious, interested eyes. it was divided from the outer vestibule on the western side of the building by a massive partition of dark oak, and it retained the solid beams and panelled walls of elizabethan days; but the oak had been barbarously painted, grained and varnished. only the staircase was so heavily and richly carved, that it had defied the ingenuity of the comb engraver. it occupied the further end of the hall, opposite the entrance door, and was lighted dimly by a small heavily leaded, stained-glass window. the floor was likewise black, polished with age and the labour of generations. a deeply sunken nail-studded door led into a low-ceiled library, containing a finely carved frieze and cornice, and an oak mantelpiece, which john crewys earnestly desired to examine more closely; the shield-of-arms above it bore the figures of , but the hall itself was of an earlier date. parallel to it was the suite of lofty, modern, green-shuttered reception-rooms, which occupied the south front of the house, and into which an opening had been cut through the massive wall next the chimney. the character of the hall was, however, completely destroyed by the decoration which had been bestowed upon it, and by the furniture and pictures which filled it. john crewys looked round with more indignation than admiration at the home of his ancestors. in the great oriel window stood a round mahogany table, bearing a bouquet of wax flowers under a glass shade. cases of stuffed birds ornamented every available recess; mahogany and horsehair chairs were set stiffly round the walls at even distances. a heap of folded moth-eaten rugs and wraps disfigured a side-table, and beneath it stood a row of clogs and goloshes. round the walls hung full-length portraits of an early victorian date. the artist had spent a couple of months at barracombe fifty years since, and had painted three generations of the crewys family, who were then gathered together beneath its hospitable roof. his diligence had been more remarkable than his ability. at any other time john crewys would have laughed outright at this collection of works of art. but the air was charged with tragedy, and he could not laugh. his seriousness commended him favourably, had he known it, to the two old ladies, his cousins, sir timothy's half-sisters, who were seated beside the great log fire, and who regarded him with approving eyes. for their stranger cousin had that extreme gentleness and courtesy of manner and regard, which sometimes accompanies unusual strength, whether of character or of person. it was a pity, old lady belstone whispered to her spinster sister, that john was not a crewys, for he had a remarkably fine head, and had he been but a little taller and slimmer, would have been a credit to the family. certainly john was not a crewys. he possessed neither grey eyes, nor a large nose, nor the height which should be attained by every man and woman bearing that name, according to the family record. but though only of middle size, and rather square-shouldered, he was, nevertheless, a distinguished-looking man, with a finely shaped head and well-cut features. clean shaven, as a great lawyer ought to be, with a firm and rather satirical mouth, a broad brow, and bright hazel eyes set well apart and twinkling with humour. no doubt john's appearance had been a factor in his successful career. the sisters, themselves well advanced in the seventies, spoke of him and thought of him as a young man; a boy who had succeeded in life in spite of small means, and an extravagant mother, to whom he had been obliged to sacrifice his patrimony. but though he carried his forty-five years lightly, john crewys had left his boyhood very far behind him. his crisp dark hair was frosted on the temples; he stooped a little after the fashion of the desk-worker; he wore pince-nez; his manner, though alert, was composed and dignified. the restlessness, the nervous energy of youth, had been replaced by the calm confidence of middle age--of tested strength, of ripe experience. on his side, john crewys felt very kindly towards the venerable ladies, who represented to him all the womankind of his own race. both sisters possessed the family characteristics which he lacked. they were tall and surprisingly upright, considering the weight of years which pressed upon their thin shoulders. they retained the manners--almost the speech--of the eighteenth century, to which the grandmother who was responsible for their upbringing had belonged; and, with the exception of a very short experience of matrimony in lady belstone's case, they had always resided exclusively at barracombe. lady belstone, besides her widowed dignity, had the advantage of her sister in appearance, mainly because she permitted art, in some degree, to repair the ravages of time. a stiff _toupet_ of white curls crowned the withered brow, below a widow's cap; and, when she smiled, which was not very often, a double row of pearls was not unpleasantly displayed. miss crewys had never succumbed to the temptations of worldly vanity. she scrupulously parted her scanty grey locks above her polished forehead, and cared not how wide the parting grew. if she wore a velvet bow upon her scalp, it was, as she truly said, for decency, and not for ornament; and further, she allowed her wholesome, ruddy cheeks to fall in, as her ever-lengthening teeth fell out. the frequent explanations which ensued, regarding the seniority of the widow, were a source of constant satisfaction to miss crewys, and vexation to her sister. "you might be a hundred years old, georgina," she would angrily lament. "i very soon _shall_ be a hundred years old, isabella, if i live as long as my grandmother did," miss crewys would triumphantly reply. "it is surprising to me that a woman who was never good-looking at the best of times, should cling to her youth as you do." "it is more surprising to me that you should let yourself go to rack and ruin, and never stretch out a hand to help yourself." "i am what god made me," said the pious georgina, "whereas you do everything but paint your face, isabella; and i have little doubt but what you will come to that by the time you are eighty." but though they disputed hotly on occasion the sisters generally preserved a united front before the world, and only argued, since argue they must, in the most polite and affectionate terms. the firelight shed its cheerful glow over the laden tea-table, and was reflected in the silver urn, and the crimson and gold and blue of the crown derby tea-set. but the old ladies, though casting longing eyes in the direction of the teapot, religiously abstained from offering to touch it. "no, john," said miss crewys, in a tone of exemplary patience; "i have made it a rule never to take upon myself any of the duties of hospitality in my dear brother's house, ever since he married,--odd as it may seem, when we remember how he used once to sit at this very table in his little bib and tucker, whilst isabella poured out his milk, and i cut his bread and butter." "we _both_ make the rule, john," said lady belstone, mournfully, "or, of course, as the elder sister, _i_ should naturally pour out the tea in our dear lady mary's absence." "of course, of course," said john crewys. "forgive me, isabella, but we have discussed this point before," said miss crewys. "though i cannot deny, our cousin being, as he is, a lawyer, his opinion would carry weight. but i think he will agree with _me_"--john smiled--"that when the elder daughter of a house marries, she forfeits her rights of seniority in that house, and the next sister succeeds to her place." "i should suppose that might be the case," john, bowing politely in the direction of the widow. "i never disputed the fact, georgina. it is, as our cousin says, self-evident," said lady belstone, returning the bow. "but i have always maintained, and always shall, that when the married sister comes back widowed to the home of her fathers, the privileges of birth are restored to her." both sisters turned shrewd, expectant grey eyes upon their cousin. "it is--it is rather a nice point," said john crewys, as gravely as he could. he welcomed thankfully the timely interruption of an opening door and the entrance of canon birch and the doctor. at the same moment, from the archway which supported the great oak staircase, the butler entered, carrying lights. "is her ladyship not yet returned from her walk, ash?" asked lady belstone, with affected surprise. "her ladyship came in some time ago, my lady, and went to see sir timothy. she left word she was gone upstairs to change her walking things, and would be down directly." the sisters greeted the canon with effusion, and dr. blundell with frigid civility. john crewys shook hands with both gentlemen. "i am sorry i cannot offer you tea, canon birch, until my sister-in-law comes down," said miss crewys. "our dear lady mary is so very unpunctual," said lady belstone. "i dare say something has detained her," said the canon, good-humouredly. "it often happens that my sister and myself are kept waiting a quarter of an hour or more for our tea. we do not complain," said lady belstone. john crewys began to feel a little sorry for lady mary. as the sisters appeared inclined to devote themselves to their clerical visitor rather exclusively, he drew near the recess to which dr. blundell had retired, and joined him in the oriel window. "have you never been here before?" asked the doctor, rather abruptly. "never," said john crewys, smiling. "i understand my cousins are not much given to entertaining visitors. i have never, in fact, seen any of them but once before. that was at sir timothy's wedding, twenty years ago." "barely nineteen," said the doctor. "i believe it was nineteen, since you remind me," said john, slightly astonished. "i remember thinking sir timothy a lucky man." "i dare say _he_ looked much about the same as he does now," said the doctor. "well," john said, "perhaps a little slimmer, you know. not much. an iron-grey, middle-aged-looking man. no; he has changed very little." "he was born elderly, and he will die elderly," said the doctor, shortly. "neither the follies of youth nor the softening of age will ever be known to sir timothy." he paused, noting the surprised expression of john's face, and added apologetically, "i am a native of these parts. i have known him all my life." "and i am--only a stranger," said john. he hesitated, and lowered his voice. "you know why i came?" "yes, i know. i am very glad you did come," said the doctor. his tone changed. "here is lady mary," he said. john crewys was struck by the sudden illumination of dr. blundell's plain, dark face. the deeply sunken eyes glowed, and the sadness and weariness of their expression were dispelled. his eyes followed the direction of the doctor's gaze, and his own face immediately reflected the doctor's interest. lady mary was coming down the wide staircase, in the light of a group of wax candles held by a tall bronze angel. she was dressed with almost rigid simplicity, and her abundant light-brown hair was plainly parted. she was pale and even sad-looking, but beautiful still; with a delicate and regular profile, soft blue eyes, and a sweet, rather tremulous mouth. john's heart seemed to contract within him, and then beat fast with a sensation that was not entirely pity, because those eyes--the bluest, he remembered, that he had ever seen--brought back to him, suddenly and vividly, the memory of the exquisitely fresh and lovely girl who had married her elderly guardian nineteen years since. he recollected that some members of the crewys family had agreed that lady mary setoun had done well for herself, "a penniless lass wi' a lang pedigree;" for sir timothy was rich. others had laughed, and said that sir timothy was determined that his heirs should be able to boast some of the bluest blood in scotland on their mother's side,--but that he might have waited a little longer for his bride. she was so young, barely seventeen years old, and so very lovely, that john crewys had felt indignant with sir timothy, whose appearance and manner did not attract him. he was reminded that the bride owed almost everything she possessed in the world to her husband, but he was not pacified. the glance of the gay blue eyes,--the laugh on the curved young mouth,--the glint of gold on the sunny brown hair,--had played havoc with john's honest heart. he had not a penny in the world at that time, and could not have married her if he would; but from lady mary's wedding he carried away in his breast an image--an ideal--which had perhaps helped to keep him unwed during these later years of his successful career. why did she look so sad? john's kind heart had melted somewhat towards sir timothy, when the poor gentleman had sought him in his chambers on the previous day, and appealed to him for help in his extremity. he was sorry for his cousin, in spite of the pompousness and arrogance with which sir timothy unconsciously did his best to alienate even those whom he most desired to attract. he had come to devonshire, at great inconvenience to himself, in response to that appeal; and in his hurry, and his sympathy for his cousin's trouble, he had scarcely given a thought to the momentary romance connected with his first and only meeting with lady mary. yet now, behold, after nineteen years, the look on her sweet face thrilled his middle-aged bosom as it had thrilled his young manhood. john smiled or thought he smiled, as he came forward to be presented once more to sir timothy's wife; but he was, nevertheless, rather pleased to find that he had not outgrown the power of being thus romantically attracted. "i hope i'm not late," said the soft voice. "you see, no one expected sir timothy to come home so soon, and i was out. is that cousin john? we met once before, at my wedding. you have not changed a bit; i remember you quite well," said lady mary. she came forward and held out two welcoming hands to her visitor. john crewys bowed over those little white hands, and became suddenly conscious that his vague, romantic sentiment had given place to a very real emotion--an almost passionate anxiety to shield one so fair and gentle from the trouble which was threatening her, and of which, as he knew, she was perfectly unconscious. the warmth of her impulsive welcome did not, of course, escape the keen eyes of the sisters-in-law, which, in such matters as these, were quite undimmed by age. "why didn't somebody pour out tea?" said lady mary. "we know your rights, mary," said miss crewys. "never shall it be said that dear timothy's sisters ousted his wife from her proper place, because she did not happen to be present to occupy it." "besides," said lady belstone, "you have, no doubt, some excellent reason, my love, for the delay." lady mary's blue eyes, glancing at john, said quite plainly and beseechingly to his understanding, "they are old, and rather cranky, but they don't mean to be unkind. do forgive them;" and john smiled reassuringly. "i'm afraid i haven't much excuse to offer," she said ingenuously. "i was out late, and i tired myself; and then i heard sir timothy had come back, so i went to see him. and then i made haste to change my dress, and it took a long time--and that's all." the three gentlemen laughed forgivingly at this explanation, and the two ladies exchanged shocked glances. "our cousin john did his best to entertain us, and we him," said lady belstone, stiffly. "his best--and how good that must be!" said lady mary, with pretty spirit. "the great counsel whose eloquence is listened to with breathless attention in crowded courts, and read at every breakfast-table in england." "that is a very delightful picture of the life of a briefless barrister," said john crewys, smiling. "mary," said miss crewys, in lowered tones of reproof, "i understood that _divorce_ cases, unhappily, occupied the greater part of our cousin john's attention." "we've heard of you, nevertheless--we've heard of you, mr. crewys," said the canon, nervously interposing, "even in this out-of-the-way corner of the west." "but there is one breakfast-table, at least, in england, where divorce cases are _not_ perused, and that is my brother timothy's breakfast-table," said lady belstone, very distinctly. john hastened to fill up the awkward pause which ensued, by a reference to the beauty of the hall. "i'm afraid we don't live up to our beautiful old house," said lady mary, shaking her head. "there are some lovely things stored away in the gallery upstairs, and some beautiful pictures hanging there, including the vandyck, you know, which charles ii. gave to old sir peter, your cavalier ancestor. but the gallery is almost a lumber-room, for the floor is too unsafe to walk upon. and down here, as you see, we are terribly philistine." "this hall was furnished by my grandmother for her son's marriage," said miss crewys. "and she sent all your great-grandmother's treasures to the attics," said lady mary, with rather a wilful intonation. "i always long to bring them to light again, and to make this place livable; but my husband does not like change." "dear timothy is faithful to the past," said miss crewys, majestically. "i wish old lady crewys had been as faithful," said lady mary, shrugging her shoulders. "young people always like changes," said lady belstone, more leniently. "young people!" said lady mary, with a rather pathetic smile. "john will think you are laughing at me. am i to be young still at five-and-thirty?" "to be sure," said john, "unless you are going to be so unkind as to make a man only ten years your senior feel elderly." miss crewys interposed with a simple statement. "in my day, the age of a lady was never referred to in polite conversation. least of all by herself. i never allude to mine." "you are unmarried, georgina," said lady belstone, unexpectedly turning upon her ally. "unmarried ladies are always sensitive on the subject of age. i am sure i do not care who knows that my poor admiral was twenty years my senior. and _his_ age can be looked up in any book of reference. it would have been useless to try and conceal it,--a man so well known." "a woman is as old as she looks," said the canon, soothingly, for the annoyance of miss crewys was visible. "i am bound to say that miss crewys looks exactly the same as when i first knew her." "of course, a spinster escapes the wear and tear of matrimony," said miss crewys, glaring at her widowed relative. "h'm, h'm!" said dr. blundell. "by-the-by, have you inspected the old picture gallery, mr. crewys?" "not yet," said john. lady belstone shot a glance of speechless indignation at her sister. sympathy between them was immediately restored. prompt action was necessary on the part of the family, or this presumptuous physician would be walking round the house to show john crewys the portraits of his own ancestors. "_i_ shall be delighted to show our cousin the pictures in the gallery and in the dining-room," said miss crewys, "if my sister isabella will accompany me, and if lady mary has no objections." "you are very kind," said john. he rose and walked to a small rosewood cabinet of curios. "i see there are some beautiful miniatures here." "oh, those do not belong to the family." "they are setoun things--some of the few that came to me," said lady mary, rather timidly. "i am afraid they would not interest you." "not interest me! but indeed i care only too much for such things," said john. "here is a cosway, and, unless i very much mistake, a plimer,--and an engleheart." lady mary unlocked the cabinet with pretty eagerness, and put a small morocco case into his hands. "then here is something you will like to see." for a moment john did not understand. he glanced quickly from the row of tiny, pearl-framed, old-world portraits, of handsome nobles and rose-tinted court dames, to the very indifferent modern miniature he held. the portrait of a schoolboy,--an eton boy with a long nose and small, grey eyes, and an expression distinctly rather sulky and lowering than open or pleasing. not a stupid face, however, by any means. "it is my boy--peter," said lady mary, softly. to her the face was something more than beautiful. she looked up at john with a happy certainty of his interest in her son. "here he is again, when he was younger. he was a pretty little fellow then, as you see." "very pretty. but not very like you," said john, scarcely knowing what he said. he was strangely moved and touched by her evident confidence in his sympathy, though his artistic tastes were outraged by the two portraits she asked him to admire. he reflected that women were very extraordinary creatures; ready to be pleased with anything providence might care to bestow upon them in the shape of a child, even cross-looking boys with long noses and small eyes. the heir of barracombe resembled his aunts rather than his parents. "he is a thorough crewys; not a bit like me. all the setouns are fair, i believe. peter is very dark. he is such a big fellow now; taller than i am. i sometimes wish," said lady mary, laying the miniature on the table as though she could not bear to shut it away immediately, "that one's children never grew up. they are such darlings when they are little, and they are bound, of course, to disappoint one sometimes as they grow older." john crewys felt almost murderously inclined towards peter. so the young cub had presumed to disappoint his mother as he grew older! how dared he? poor lady mary was quite unconscious of the feelings with which he gazed at the little case in his hand. "not that my boy has ever _really_ disappointed me--yet," she said, with her pretty apologetic laugh. "i only mean that, in the course of human nature, it's bound to come, now and then." "no doubt," said john, gently. then she allowed him to examine the rest of the cabinet, whilst she talked on, always of peter--his horsemanship and his shooting and his prowess in every kind of sport and game. * * * * * meanwhile, lady belstone was holding a hurried consultation with her sister. "how thoughtless you are, georgina, asking our cousin into the dining-room just when ash must be laying the cloth for dinner. he will be sadly put about." "dear, dear, it quite slipped my memory, isabella." "you have no head at all, georgina." "can i frame an excuse?" said miss crewys, piteously, "or will he think it discourteous?" "leave it to me, georgina," said lady belstone, with the air of a diplomat. "mary, my love!" lady mary started. "yes, isabella." "georgina has very properly recalled to me that candles and lamps make a very poor light for viewing the family portraits. you know, my love, the vandyck is so very dark and black. she proposes, therefore, with your permission, to act as our cousin's cicerone to-morrow morning, in the daytime. shall we say--at eleven o'clock, john?" canon birch started nervously, and the doctor frowned at him. "at eleven o'clock," said john, in steady tones; and, as he spoke, sir timothy entered the hall. chapter iv "some tea, timothy?" said lady mary. "if you please, my dear," said sir timothy, dropping his letters into the box. "i am afraid the tea will be little better than poison, brother," said lady belstone, in warning tones; "it has stood so long." "perhaps dear mary intends to order fresh tea, isabella," said miss crewys. "it hasn't stood so _very_ long," said lady mary, looking appealingly at sir timothy; "and you know ash is always cross if we order fresh tea." "excuse me, my love," said miss crewys. "i am the last to wish to trouble poor ash unnecessarily, but the tea waited for ten minutes before you came down." "my dear mary," said sir timothy, "will you never learn to be punctual? no; i will take it as it is. poor ash has enough to do, as georgina truly says." lady mary sighed rather impatiently, and it occurred to john crewys that sir timothy spoke to his wife exactly as he might have addressed a troublesome child. his tone was gentler than usual, but this john did not know. "i should have liked to take a turn about the grounds with you," said sir timothy to his cousin, "if it had been possible; but i am afraid it is getting too dark now." "surely there will be time enough to-morrow morning for that, brother," said lady belstone. sir timothy had walked to the oriel window, but he turned away as he answered her. "i may be otherwise occupied to-morrow." "but i hope the opportunity may arise before very long," said john, cheerfully. "i should like to explore these woods." "you will have to come with _me_, then," said lady mary, smiling. "timothy hates walking uphill, and i should love to show our beautiful views to a stranger." "i do not like you to tire yourself, my dear," said sir timothy. "a walk through barracombe woods means simply a climb, mary," said lady belstone; "and you are not strong." "i am perfectly robust, isabella. do allow me at least the use of my limbs," said lady mary, impatiently. "no woman, certainly no _lady_, can be called _robust_," said miss crewys, severely. the sudden clanging of a bell changed the conversation. "visitors. how tiresome!" said lady mary. "my dear mary!" said sir timothy. "but i know it can't be anybody pleasant, timothy," said his wife, with rather a mischievous twinkle, "for i owe calls to all the nice people, and it's only the dull ones who come over and over again." "you _owe_ calls, mary!" said lady belstone, in horrified tones. "i am afraid," said miss crewys, considerately lowering her voice as the butler and footman crossed the hall to the outer vestibule, "that dear mary is more than a little remiss in civility to her neighbours." "my dear admiral never permitted me to postpone returning a call for more than a week. royalty, he always said, the same day; ordinary people within a week," said lady belstone. "when royalty calls i certainly will return the visit the same day," said lady mary, petulantly. "but i cannot spend my whole life driving along the high-roads from one house to another. i hate driving, as you know, isabella." "what did providence create carriages for but to be driven in?" said lady belstone. "you will give john a wrong impression of our worthy neighbours, mary," said sir timothy, pompously. "personally, i am always glad to see them." "but you don't have to return their calls, timothy," said lady mary. the canon inadvertently laughed. sir timothy looked annoyed. miss crewys whispered to lady belstone, unheard save by the doctor-- "how very odd and flippant poor mary is to-night--worse than usual! what can it be?" "it is just the presence of a strange gentleman that is upsetting her, poor thing," said her sister, in the same whisper. "her head is easily turned. we had better take no notice." the doctor muttered something emphatic beneath his breath. "mrs. and miss hewel," said ash, advancing into the hall. "is it only you and sarah, after all? what a relief! i thought it was visitors," cried lady mary, coming forward to greet them very kindly and warmly. "did you come across in the ferry?" "no, indeed. you know how i dislike the ferry. i have the long drive home still before me. but we were so close to barracombe, at the gilberts' tea-party. i thought we should be certain to meet you there," said mrs. hewel, in rather reproachful tones. "sarah, of course, wanted to go back in the ferry, but i am always doubly frightened at night--and in one's best clothes. it was quite a large party." "i'm afraid i forgot all about it," said lady mary, with a conscience-stricken glance at her husband. "i hope you sent the carriage round to the stables?" said sir timothy. "no, no; we mustn't stop a minute. but i couldn't help just popping in--so very long since i've seen you--and all this happening at once," said mrs. hewel. she was a large, stout woman, with breathless manner and plaintive voice. "and i wanted to show you sarah in her first grown-up clothes, and tell you about _her_ too," she added. "bless me!" said sir timothy. "you don't mean to say little sarah is grown up." "oh yes, dear sir timothy; she grew up the day before yesterday," said mrs. hewel. "sharp work," said the doctor, grimly. "i mean, of course, she turned up her hair, and let her dresses down. it's full early, i know, but it's such a chance for sarah--that's partly what i came about. after the trouble she's been all her life to me, and all--just going to that excellent school in germany--here's my aunt wanting to adopt her, or as good as adopt her--lady tintern, you know." everybody who knew mrs. hewel knew also that lady tintern was her aunt; and lady tintern was a very great lady indeed. "she is to come out this very season; that is why i took her to the gilberts', to prepare her for the great plunge," said mrs. hewel, not intending to be funny. "it will be a change for sarah, such a hoyden as she has always been. but my aunt won't wait once she has got a fancy into her head; though the child is only seventeen." "at seventeen _i_ was still in the nursery, playing with my dolls," said lady belstone. "oh, lady belstone!" said an odd, deep, protesting voice. john looked with amused interest at the speaker. the unlucky sarah had taken a low chair beside her hostess, and was holding one of the soft white hands in her plump gloved fingers. sarah hewel's adoration for lady mary dated from the days when she had been ferried over the youle with her nurse, to play with peter, in his chubby childhood. peter had often been cross and always tyrannical, but it was so wonderful to find a playmate who was naughtier than herself, that sarah had secretly admired peter. she was the black sheep of her own family, and in continual disgrace for lesser crimes than he daily committed with impunity. but her admiration of peter was tame and pale beside her admiration of lady mary. a mother who never scolded, who told no tales, who petted black sheep when they were bruised and torn or stained entirely through their own wickedness, who could always be depended on for kisses and bonbons and fairy-tales, seemed more angelic than human to poor little sarah; whose own mother was wrapt up in her two irreproachable sons, and had small affection to spare for an ugly, tiresome little girl. sarah, however, had slowly but surely struggled out of the ugliness of her childhood; and john crewys, regarding her critically in the lamplight, decided she would develop, one of these days, into a very handsome young woman; in spite of an ungainly stoop, a wide mouth that pouted rather too much, and a nose that inclined saucily upwards. her colouring was fresh, even brilliant--the bright rose, and creamy tint that sometimes accompanies vivid red hair--and of a vivid, uncompromising red were the locks that crowned miss sarah's little head, and shaded her blue-veined temples. miss crewys had, in consequence, long ago pronounced her to be a positive fright; and lady belstone had declared that such hair would prove an insuperable obstacle to her chances of getting a husband. "i know she's very young," said mrs. hewel, glancing apologetically at her offspring. "but what can i do? there's no going against lady tintern; and at seventeen she ought to be something more than a tomboy, after all." "_you_ were married at seventeen, weren't you?" said sarah to lady mary, in her deep, almost tragic voice--a voice that commanded attention, though it came oddly from her girlish chest. "sarah!" said mrs. hewel. lady mary started and smiled. "me? yes, sarah; i was married at seventeen." "mamma says nobody can be married properly--before they're one and twenty. i _knew_ it was rot," said sarah, triumphantly. "miss sarah retains the outspokenness of her recently discarded childhood, i perceive," said sir timothy, stiffly. "sarah!" said her mother, indignantly, "i said not unless they had their parents' consent. i was not thinking of lady mary, as you know very well." "_your_ people didn't say you were too young to marry at seventeen, did they?" said sarah, caressing lady mary's hand. lady mary smiled at her, but shook her head. "you want to know too much, sarah." "oh, i forgot," said sarah the artless. "sir timothy was your guardian, so, of course, there was nobody to stop his marrying you if he liked. i suppose you _had_ to do what he told you." "oh, sarah, will you cease chattering?" cried her mother. "i hope you have good news of your sons in south africa, mrs. hewel," said the canon, briskly advancing to the rescue. mrs. hewel's voice changed. "thank you, canon; they were all right when we heard last. tom is in natal, so i feel happier about him; but willie, of course, is in the thick of it all--and the news to-day--isn't reassuring." "but you are proud of them both," said lady mary, softly. "every mother must be proud to have sons able and willing to fight for their country." "we may feel differently concerning the justice of this war," said sir timothy, clearing his throat; and lady mary shrugged her shoulders, whilst the canon jumped from his chair, and sat meekly down again on catching the doctor's eye. "but in our sympathy with our brave soldiers we are all one, mrs. hewel." sarah sprang forward. "you don't mean to say you're _still_ a pro-boer, sir timothy?" she exclaimed. "well, mamma--talking of the justice of the war--when tom and willie are risking their lives"--she broke into a sudden sob--"and now _peter_--" "peter!" said lady mary. "oh, i'm sorry," said sarah, running to her friend. "i didn't mean to hurt _you_--talking of the war--and--and the boys--when you must be thinking only of peter." she wrung her hands together piteously. "of peter!" lady mary repeated. "we only heard to-day," said mrs. hewel, "and came in hoping for more details. my cousin george, who is also going out with lord ferries, happened to mention in his letter that peter had joined the corps." "i think i can explain how the mistake arose," said sir timothy, stiffly. "peter wrote for permission to join, and i refused. my son is fortunately too young to be of any use in a contest i regard with horror." "but cousin george was helping peter to get his kit, because they were to sail at such short notice," cried sarah. "sarah," said her mother, in breathless indignation, "_will_ you be silent?" "what does this mean, timothy?" said lady mary, trembling. she stood by the centre table; and the hanging lamp above shed its light on her brown hair, and flashed in her blue eyes, and from the diamond ring she wore. the doctor rose from his chair. "i am at a loss to understand," said sir timothy. "it means," said sarah, half-hysterically,--"oh, can't you see what it means? it just means that peter is going to south africa, whether you like it or not." "there must be some mistake, of course," said mrs. hewel, in distressed tones. "and yet--george's letter was so very clear." dr. blundell touched the canon's arm. "shall i--must i--" whispered the canon, nervously. "there is no help for it," said the doctor. he was looking at lady mary as he spoke. her face was deathly; her little frail hand grasped the table. "sir timothy," said the canon, "i--i have a communication to make to you." "on this subject?" said sir timothy. "a letter from peter." "why did you not say so earlier?" said sir timothy, harshly. "i will explain, if you will kindly give me five minutes in the study." "a letter from peter," said lady mary, "and not--to me." she looked round at them all with a little vacant smile. john crewys, who knew nothing of peter's letter, had already grasped the situation. he divined also that lady mary was fighting piteously against the conviction that sarah's news was true. "how could we guess you did not know?" said mrs. hewel, almost weeping. "i am still in the dark," said sir timothy, coldly. "birch will explain at once," said the doctor, impatiently. "peter writes--asking me,--i am sure i don't know why he pitched upon me,--to--break the news to you, that he has joined lord ferries' horse; feeling it his--his duty to his country to do so," said the unhappy canon, folding and unfolding the letter he held, with agitated fingers. "i knew there would be a satisfactory explanation," said mrs. hewel, tearfully. "dear lady mary, having so inadvertently anticipated peter's letter, there is only one thing left for me to do. i must at least leave you and sir timothy in peace to read it. come, sarah." "allow me to put you into your carriage," said sir timothy, in a voice of iron. sarah followed them to the door, paused irresolutely, and stole back to lady mary's side. "say you're not angry with me, dear, beautiful lady mary," she whispered passionately. "do say you're not angry. i didn't know it would make you so unhappy. it was partly my fault for telling peter in the holidays that only old men, invalids, and--and cowards--were shirking south africa. i thought you'd be glad, like me, that peter should go and fight like all the other boys." "sarah," said dr. blundell, gently, "don't you see that lady mary can't attend to you now? come away, like a good girl." he took her arm, and led her out of the hall; and sarah forgot she had grown up the day before yesterday, and sobbed loudly as she went away. lady mary lifted the miniature from the table, and looked at it without a word; but from the sofa, the two old sisters babbled audibly to each other. "i always said, isabella, that if poor mary spoilt peter so terribly, _something_ would happen to him." "what sad nonsense you talk, georgina. nothing has happened to him--_yet_." "he has defied his father, isabella." "he has obeyed his country's call, georgina. had the admiral been alive, he would certainly have volunteered." john crewys made an involuntary step forward and placed himself between the sofa and the table, as though to shield lady mary from their observation, but he could not prevent their words from reaching her ears. she whispered to him very softly. "will you get the letter for me? i want to see--for myself--what--what peter says." "go quietly into the library," said john, bending over her for a moment. "i will bring it you there immediately." she obeyed him without a word. john turned to the sofa. "i beg your pardon, canon," he said courteously, "but lady mary cannot bear this suspense. allow me to take her son's letter to her at once." "i--i am only waiting for sir timothy. it is to him i have to break the news; though, of course, there is nothing that lady mary may not know," said the canon, in a polite but flurried tone. "i really should not like--" "my brother must see it first," said miss crewys, decidedly. "exactly. i am sure sir timothy would not be pleased if--bless my soul!" for john, with a slight bow of apology, and his grave air of authority, had quietly taken the letter from the canon's undecided fingers, and walked away with it into the library. "how very oddly our cousin john behaves!" said lady belstone, indignantly. "almost snatching the letter from your hand." "depend upon it, mary inspired his action," said miss crewys, angrily. "i saw her whispering away to him. a man she never set eyes on before." "pray are _we_ not to hear the contents?" said lady belstone, quivering with indignation. "i suppose he thinks lady mary should make the communication herself to sir timothy," gasped the canon. "i am sure i have no desire to fulfil so unpleasing a task. still, the matter _was_ entrusted to me. however, the main substance has been told; there can be no further secret about it. my only care was that sir timothy should not be unduly agitated." "it is a comfort to find that _some one_ can consider the feelings of our poor brother," said miss crewys. "do give me your arm to the drawing-room, canon," said lady belstone, rightly judging that the canon would reveal the whole contents of peter's letter to her more easily in private. "the shock has made me feel quite faint. you, too, georgina, are looking pale." "it is not the shock, but the draught, which is affecting me, isabella,--sir timothy thoughtlessly keeping the door open so long. i will accompany you to the drawing-room." "but sir timothy may want me," said the canon, uneasily. "bless the man! they've got the letter itself, what can they want with _you?_" said her ladyship, vigorously propelling her supporter out of reach of possible interruption. "close the door behind us, georgina, i beg, or that odious doctor will be racing after us." "he takes far too much upon himself. i have no idea of permitting country apothecaries to be so familiar," said miss crewys. chapter v lady mary, coming from the library with the letter in her hand, met her husband in the hall. "timothy!" she looked at him wistfully. her face was very pale as she gave him the letter. sir timothy took out his glasses, wiped them deliberately, and put them on. "never mind reading it. i can tell you in one word," she said, trembling with impatience. "my boy is sailing for south africa to-morrow morning." "i prefer," said sir timothy, "to read the letter for myself." "oh, do be quick!" she said, half under her breath. but he read it slowly twice, and folded it. he was really thunderstruck. peter was accustomed to write polite platitudes to his parent, and had presumably not intended that his letter to the canon should be actually read by sir timothy, when he had asked that the contents of it should be broken to him. "selfish, disobedient, headstrong, deceitful boy!" said sir timothy. lady mary started. "how can you talk so!" her gentle voice sounded almost fierce. "at least he has proved himself a man.' and he is right. it was a shame and a disgrace for him to stay at home, whilst his comrades did their duty. i say it a thousand times, though i am his mother." then she broke down. "oh, peter, my boy, my boy, how could you leave me without a word!" "perhaps this step was taken with your connivance after all?" said sir timothy, suspiciously. he could not follow her rapid changes of mood, and had listened resentfully to her defence of her son. "timothy!" said lady mary, trembling, "when have i ever been disloyal to you in word or deed?" "never, i hope," said sir timothy. his voice shook a little. "i do not doubt you for a moment, mary. but you spoke with such strange vehemence, so unlike your usual propriety of manner." she broke into a wild laugh which pained and astonished him. "did i? i must have forgotten myself for a moment." "you must, indeed. pray be calm. i understand that this must be a terrible shock to you." "it is not a shock," said lady mary, defiantly. "i glory in it. i--i _wish_ him to go. oh, peter, my darling!" she hid her face in her hands. "it would be more to the purpose," said sir timothy, "to consider what is to be done." "could we stop him?" she cried eagerly, and then changed once more. "no, no; i wouldn't if i could. he would never forgive me." "of course, we cannot stop him," said sir timothy. he raised his voice as he was wont when he was angry. canon birch, in the drawing-room, heard the loud threatening tones, and was thankful for the door which shut him from sir timothy's presence. "he has laid his plans for thwarting my known wishes too well. i do not know what might be said if we stopped him. i--i won't have my name made a laughing-stock. i am a crewys, and the honour of the family lies in my hands. i can't give the world a right to suspect a crewys of cowardice, by preventing his departure on active service. we have fought before--in a better cause." "we won't discuss the cause," said lady mary, gently. when sir timothy began to shout, she always grew calm. "then you will not telegraph to my cousin ferries?" "ferries ought to have written to _me_, and not taken the word of a mere boy, like peter," stormed sir timothy. "but the fact is, i never flattered ferries as he expected; it is not my way to natter any one; and consequently he took a dislike to me. he must have known what my views are. i am sure he did it on purpose." "it was natural he should believe peter, and i don't think he knows you well enough to dislike you," said lady mary, simply. "he has only seen you twice, timothy." "that was evidently sufficient," said sir timothy, meaning to be ironical, and unaware that he was stating a plain fact. "i shall certainly not telegraph to tell him that my son has lied to him, well as peter deserves that i should do so." "oh, don't, don't; you are so hard!" she said piteously. "if you'd only listened to him when he implored you to let him go, we could have made his last days at home all they should be. he's been hiding in london, poor peter; getting his outfit by stealth, ashamed, whilst other boys are being _fêted_ and praised by their people, proud of earning so early their right to be considered men. and--and he's only a boy. and he said himself, all's fair in love and war. indeed, timothy, it is an exceptional case." "mary, your weakness is painful, and your idolatry of peter will bring its own punishment. the part of his deception that should pain you most is the want of heart he has displayed," said sir timothy, bitterly. "and doesn't it?" she said, with a pathetic smile. "but one oughtn't to expect too much heart from a boy, ought one? it's--it's not a healthy sign. you said once you were glad he wasn't sentimental, like me." "i should have wished him to exhibit proper feeling on proper occasions. his present triumph over my authority involves his departure to certain danger and possible death, without even affording us the opportunity of bidding him farewell. he is ready and willing to leave us thus." lady mary uttered a stifled scream. "but i won't let him. how can you think his mother will let him go like that?" "how can you help it?" she pressed her trembling hands to her forehead. "i will think. there is a way. there are plenty of ways. i can drive to the junction--it's not much further than brawnton--and catch the midnight express, and get to southampton by daybreak. i know it can be done. ash will look out the trains. why do you look at me like that? you're not going to stop my going, are you? you're not going to _try_ and stop me, are you? for you won't succeed. oh yes, i know i've been an obedient wife, timothy. but i--i defied you once before for peter's sake; when he was such a little boy, and you wanted to punish him--don't you remember?" "don't talk so, mary," said sir timothy, almost soothingly. her vehemence really alarmed and distressed him. "it is not like you to talk like this. you will be sorry--afterwards," he said; and his voice softened. she responded instantly. she came closer to him, and took his big shaking hand into her gentle clasp. "i should be sorry afterwards," she said, "and so would you. even _you_ would be sorry, timothy, if anything happened to peter. i'll try and not make any more excuses for him, if you like. i know he's not a child now. he's almost a man; and men seem to me to grow harsh and unloving as they grow older. i try, now and then, to shut my eyes and see him as he once was; but all the time i know that the little boy who used to be peter has gone away for ever and ever and ever. if he had died when he was little he would always have been my little boy, wouldn't he? but, thank god, he didn't die. he's going to be a great strong man, and a brave soldier, and--and all i've ever wanted him to be--when he's got over these wilful days of boyhood. but he mustn't go without his father's blessing and his mother's kiss." "he has chosen to do so, mary," said sir timothy, coldly. she clung to him caressingly. "but you're going to forgive him before he goes, timothy. there's no time to be angry before he goes. it may be too late to-morrow." "it may be too late to-morrow," repeated sir timothy, heavily. he resented, in a dull, self-pitying fashion, the fact that his wife's thoughts were so exclusively fixed on peter, in her ignorance of his own more immediate danger. "don't think i'm blind to his faults," urged lady mary, "only i can laugh at them better than you can, because i _know_ all the while that at the very bottom of his heart he's only my baby peter after all. he's not--god bless him--he's _not_ the dreary, cold-blooded, priggish boy he sometimes pretends to be. don't remember him like that now, timothy. think of that morning in june--that glorious, sunny morning in june, when you knelt by the open window in my room and thanked god because you had a son. think of that other summer day when we couldn't bear even to look at the roses because little peter was so ill, and we were afraid he was going back to heaven." her soft, rapid words touched sir timothy to a vague feeling of pity for her, and for peter, and for himself. but the voice of the charmer, charm she never so wisely, had no power, after all, to dispel the dark cloud that was hanging over him. the sorrow gave way to a keener anxiety. the calmness of mind which the great surgeon had prescribed--the placid courage, largely aided by dulness of imagination, which had enabled poor sir timothy to keep in the very background of his thoughts all apprehensions for the morrow--where were they? he repressed with an effort the emotion which threatened to master him, and forced himself to be calm. when he spoke again his voice sounded not much less measured and pompous than usual. "my dear, you are agitating yourself and me. let us confine ourselves to the subject in hand." lady mary dropped the unresponsive hand she held so warmly pressed between her own, and stepped back. "ah, forgive me!" she said in clear tones. "it's so difficult to--" "to--?" "to be exactly what you wish. to be always on guard. my feelings broke bounds for once." "calm yourself," said sir timothy. "and besides, so far as i am concerned, your pleading for peter is unnecessary." "you have forgiven him?" she cried joyfully, yet almost incredulously. he paused, and then said with solemnity: "i have forgiven him, mary. it is not the moment for me to cherish resentment, least of all against my only son." "ah, thank god! then you will come to southampton?" "that is impossible. but i will telegraph my forgiveness and the blessing which he has not sought that he may receive it before the ship sails." "i am grateful to you for doing even so much as that, timothy, and for not being angry. then i must go alone?" "no, no." "understand me," said lady mary, in a low voice, "for i am in earnest. i have never deceived you. i will not defy you in secret, like peter; but i _will_ go and bid my only son god-speed, though the whole world conspired to prevent me. _i will go!_" there was a pause. "you speak," said sir timothy, resentfully, "as though i had habitually thwarted your wishes." "oh, no," said his wife, softly, "you never even found out what they were." he did not notice the words; it is doubtful whether he heard them. "it has been my best endeavour to promote your happiness throughout our married life, mary, so far as i considered it compatible with your highest welfare. i do not pretend i can enter into the high-flown and romantic feelings engendered by your reprehensible habit of novel-reading." "you've scolded me so often for that," said lady mary, half mockingly, half sadly. "can't we--keep to the subject in hand, as you said just now?" "i have a reason, a strong reason," said sir timothy, "for wishing you to remain at home to-morrow. i had hoped, by concealing it from you, to spare you some of the painful suspense and anxiety which i am myself experiencing." lady mary laughed. "how like a man to suppose a woman is spared anything by being kept in the dark! i knew something was wrong. dr. blundell and canon birch are in your confidence, i presume? they kept exchanging glances like two mysterious owls. your sisters are not, or they would be sighing and shaking their heads. and john--john crewys? oh, he is a lawyer. when does a visitor ever come here except on business? he has something to do with it. ah, to advise you for nothing over your purchase of the crown lands! you have got into some difficulty over that, or something of the kind? you brought him down here for some special purpose, i am sure; but i did not know him well enough, and i knew you too well, to ask why." "mary, what has come to you? i never knew you quite like this before. i dislike this extraordinary flippancy of tone very much." "i beg your pardon," said lady mary; make allowance for me this once. i learnt ten minutes ago that my boy was going to the war. i must either laugh or--or cry, and you wouldn't like me to do that; but it's a way women have when their hearts are half broken." "i don't understand you," he said helplessly. lady mary looked at him as though she had awakened, frightened, to the consciousness of her own temerity. "i don't quite understand myself, i think," she said, in a subdued voice. "i won't torment you any more, timothy; i will be as calm and collected--as you wish. only let me go." "will you not listen to my reason for wishing you to remain at home?" he said sternly. "it is an important one." "i had forgotten," she said indifferently. "how can there be any business in the world half so important to _me_ as seeing my boy once more before he sails?" the colour of sir timothy's ruddy face deepened almost to purple, his grey eyes glowered sullen resentment at his wife. "since you desire to have your way in opposition to my wishes, _go!_" he thundered. "i will not hinder you further." but his sonorous wrath was too familiar to be impressive. lady mary's expression scarcely changed when sir timothy raised his voice. she turned, however, at the foot of the staircase, and spoke to him again. "let me just go and give the order for my things to be packed, timothy, and tell ash to go and find out about the trains, and i will return and listen to whatever you wish--i will, indeed. i could not pay proper attention to anything until i knew that was being done." sir timothy did not trust himself to speak. he bowed his head, and the slender figure passed swiftly up the stairs. sir timothy walked twice deliberately up and down the empty hall, and felt his pulse. the slow, steady throb reassured him. he opened the door of the study. "john," said sir timothy, "would you kindly come out here and speak to me for a moment? dr. blundell, would you have the goodness to await me a little longer? you will find the london papers there." "i have them," said dr. blundell, from the armchair by the study fire. john crewys closed the door behind him, and looked rather anxiously at his cousin. it struck him that sir timothy had lost some of his ruddy colour, and that his face looked drawn and old. but the squire placed himself with his back to the log fire, and made an effort to speak in his voice of everyday. his slightly pompous, patronizing manner returned upon him. "you are doubtless accustomed, john, in the course of your professional work," he said, "to advise in difficult matters. you come among us a stranger--and unprejudiced. will you--er--give me the benefit of your opinion?" "to the best of my ability," said john. he paused, and added gently, "i am sorry for this fresh trouble that has come upon you." "that is the subject on which i mean to consult you. do you consider that--that her husband or her child should stand first in a woman's eyes?" "her husband, undoubtedly," said john, readily, "but--" "but what?" said sir timothy, impatiently. a gleam of satisfaction had broken over his heavy face at his cousin's reply. "i speak from a man's point of view," said john. "woman--and possibly nature--may speak differently." "your judgment, however, coincides with mine, which is all that matters," said sir timothy. he did not perceive the twinkle in john's eyes at this reply. "in my opinion there are only two ways of looking at every question--the right way and the wrong way." "my profession teaches me," said john, "that there are as many different points of view as there are parties to a case." "then--from _my_ point of view," said sir timothy, with an air of waving all other points of view away as irrelevant, "since my wife, very naturally, desires to see her son again before he sails, am i justified in allowing her to set off in ignorance of the ordeal that awaits me?" "good heavens, no!" cried john. "should the operation prove unsuccessful, you would be entailing upon her a lifelong remorse." "i did not look upon it in that light," said sir timothy, rather stiffly. "the propriety or the impropriety of her going remains in any, case the same, whether the operation succeeds or fails. i feared that it would be the wrong thing to allow her to go at all; that it might cause comment were she absent from my side at such a critical juncture." "i see," said john. his mobile, expressive face and bright hazel eyes seemed to light up for one instant with scorn and wonder; then he recollected himself. "it is natural you should wish for her sustaining presence, no doubt," he said. "i trust you do not suppose that i should be selfishly considering my own personal feelings at such a time," said sir timothy, in a lofty tone of reproof. "i am only desirous of doing what is right in the matter. i am asking your advice because i feel that my self-command has been shaken considerably by this unexpected blow. i am less sure of my judgment than usual in consequence. however, if you think my wife ought to be told"--john nodded very decidedly--"let her be told. i am bound to say dr. blundell thought so too, though his opinion is neither here nor there in such a matter, but so long as you understand that my only desire is that both she and i should do what is most correct and proper." he came closer to john. "it is of vital importance for me to preserve my composure," said sir timothy. "i am not fitted for--for any kind of scene just now. will you undertake for me the task of explaining to--to my dear wife the situation in which i am placed?" "i will do my best," said john. he was touched by the note of piteous anxiety which had crept into the squire's harsh voice. "thank you," said sir timothy. "will you await her here? she is returning immediately. break it to her as gently as you can. i shall rest and compose myself by a talk with dr. blundell." he went slowly to the study, leaving john crewys alone. chapter vi "is that you, cousin john?" said lady mary. "is sir timothy gone? i have not been away more than a few minutes, have i?" she spoke quite brightly. her cheeks were flushed, and her blue eyes were sparkling with excitement. john looked at her, and found himself wishing that her soft, brown hair were not strained so tightly from her forehead, nor brushed so closely to her head; the fashion would have been trying to a younger face, and fatal to features less regularly delicate and correct. he also wished she were not dressed like a quaker's wife. the stiff, grey poplin fitted like a glove the pretty curves of lady mary's slender figure, but it lacked distinction, and appropriateness, to john's fastidious eye. then he reproached himself vehemently for allowing his thoughts to dwell on such trifles at such a moment. "will you forgive me for going away the very day you come?" said lady mary. how quickly, how surprisingly, she recovered her spirits! she had looked so weary and sad as she came down the stairs an hour ago. now she was almost gay. a feverish and unnatural gaiety, no doubt; but those flushed cheeks, and glittering blue eyes--how they restored the youthful loveliness of the face he had once thought the most beautiful he ever saw! "i am going to see the last of my boy. you'll understand, won't you? you were an only son too. and your mother would have gone to the ends of the earth to look upon your face once more, wouldn't she? mothers are made like that." "some mothers," said john; and he turned away his head. "not yours? i'm sorry," said lady mary, simply. "oh, well--you know, she was a good deal--in the world," he said, repenting himself. "i use to wish so much to live in the world too," said lady mary, dreamily; "but ever since i was fifteen i've lived in this out-of-the-way place." "don't be too sorry for that," said john; "you don't know what a revelation this out-of-the-way place may be to a tired worker like me, who lives always amid the unlovely sights and sounds of a city." "ah! but that's just it," she said quickly. "you see i'm not tired--yet; and i've done no work." "that is why it's such a rest to look at you," said john, smiling. "flowers have their place in creation as vegetables have theirs. but we only ask the flowers to bloom peacefully in sheltered gardens; we don't insist on popping them into the soup with the onions and carrots." lady mary laughed as though she had not a care in the world. "it is quite refreshing to find that a big-wig like you can talk just as much nonsense as a little-wig like me," she said; "but you don't know, for all that, what the silence and monotony of life here _can_ be. the very voice of a stranger falls like music on one's ears. i was so glad to see you, and you were so kind and sympathetic about--my boy. and then, all in a moment, my joy was turned into mourning, wasn't it? and peter is going to the war, and it's all like a dreadful dream; except that i know i shall wake up every morning only to realize more strongly that it's true." john remembered that he was dallying with his mission, instead of fulfilling it. "sir timothy cannot go to see his son off? that must be a grief to him," he said. "no; he isn't coming. he has business, i believe," said lady mary, a little coldly. "there has been a dispute over some crown lands, which march with ours. officials are often very dilatory and difficult to deal with. probably, however, you know more about it than i do. i am going alone. i have just been giving the necessary orders. i shall take a servant with me, as well as my maid, for i am such an inexperienced traveller--though it seems absurd, at my age--that i am quite frightened of getting into the wrong trains. i dread a journey by myself. even such a little journey as that. but, of course, nothing would keep me at home." "only one thing," said john, in a low voice, "if i have judged your character rightly in so short a time." "what is that?" "duty." she looked at him with sweet, puzzled eyes, like a child. "are you pleading sir timothy's cause, cousin john?" she said, with a little touch of offence in her tone that was only charming. "i am pleading sir timothy's cause," said john, seriously. "love is stronger than duty, isn't it?" said lady mary. "i hope not," said john, very simply. "you mean my husband doesn't wish me to go?" "don't think me too presuming," he said pleadingly. "i couldn't," said lady mary, naively. "you are older than i am, you know," she laughed, "and a q.c. and you know you would be my trustee and my boy's guardian if anything ever happened to sir timothy. he told me so long ago. and he reminded me of it to-day most solemnly. i suppose he was afraid i shouldn't treat you with proper respect." "he has honoured me very highly," said john. "in that case, it would be almost my--my duty to advise you in any difficulty that might arise, wouldn't it?" "that means you want to advise me now?" "frankly, it does." "and are _you_ going to tell me that i ought to stay at home, and let my only boy leave england without bidding him god-speed?" said lady mary incredulously. "if so, i warn you that you will never convince me of that, argue as you may." "no one is ever convinced by argument," said john. "but stern facts sometimes command even a woman's attention." "when backed by such powers of persuasion as yours, perhaps." she faced him with sparkling eyes. lady mary was timid and gentle by nature, but peter's mother knew no fear. yet she realized that if john crewys were moved to put forth his full powers, he might be a difficult man to oppose. she met his glance, and observed that he perfectly understood the spirit which animated her, and that it was not opposition that shone from his bright hazel eyes, as he regarded her steadily through his pince-nez. "i am going to deal with a hard fact, which your husband is afraid to tell you," said john, "because, in his tenderness for your womanly weakness, he underrates, as i venture to think, your womanly courage. sir timothy wants you to be with him here to-morrow because he has to--to fight an unequal battle--" "with the crown?" "with death." "what do you mean?" said lady mary. "he has been silently combating a mortal disease for many months past," said john, "and to-morrow morning the issue is to be decided. every day, every hour of delay, increases the danger. the great surgeon, dr. herslett, will be here at eleven o'clock, and on the success of the operation he will perform, hangs the thread of your husband's life." lady mary put up a little trembling hand entreatingly, and john's great heart throbbed with pity. he had chosen his words deliberately to startle her from her absorption in her son; but she looked so fragile, so white, so imploring, that his courage almost failed him. he came to her side, and took the little hand reassuringly in his strong, warm clasp. "be brave, my dear," he said, with faltering voice, "and put aside, if you can, the thought of your bitter, terrible disappointment. only _you_ can cheer, and inspire, and aid your husband to maintain the calmness of spirit which is of such vital importance to his chance of recovery. you can't leave him against his wish at such a moment; not if you are the--the angel i believe you to be," said john, with emotion. there was a pause, and though he looked away from her, he knew that she was crying. john released the little hand gently, and walked to the fireplace to give her time to recover herself. perhaps his eye-glasses were dimmed; he polished them very carefully. lady mary dashed away her tears, and spoke in a hard voice he scarcely recognized as hers. "i might be all--you think me, john," she said, "if--" "ah! don't let there be an _if_," said john. "but--" "or a _but_." "it is that you don't understand the situation," she said; "you talk as though sir timothy and i were an ordinary husband and wife, entirely dependent on one another's love and sympathy. don't you know _he_ stands alone--above all the human follies and weaknesses of a mere woman? can't you guess," said lady mary, passionately, "that it's my boy, my poor faulty, undutiful boy--oh, that i should call him so!--who needs me? that it's his voice that would be calling in my heart whilst i awaited sir timothy's pleasure to-morrow?" "his _pleasure_?" said john, sternly. "i am shocking you, and i didn't want to shock you," she cried, almost wildly. "but you don't suppose he needs _me_--me myself? he only wants to be sure i'm doing the right thing. he wants to give people no chance of saying that lady mary crewys rushed off to see her spoilt boy whilst her husband hovered between life and death. a lay figure would do just as well; if it would only sit in an armchair and hold its handkerchief to its eyes; and if the neighbours, and his sisters, and the servants could be persuaded to think it was i." "hush, hush!" said john. "do let me speak out; pray let me speak out," she said, breathless and imploring, "and you can think what you like of me afterwards, when i am gone, if only you won't scold now. i am so sick of being scolded," said lady mary. "am i to be a child for ever--i, that am so old, and have lost my boy?" he thought there was something in her of the child that never grows up; the guilelessness, the charm, the ready tears and smiles, the quick changes of mood. he rolled an elbow-chair forward, and put her into it tenderly. "say what you will," said john. "this is comfortable," she said, leaning her head wearily on her hand; "to talk to a--a friend who understands, and who will not scold. but you can't understand unless i tell you everything; and timothy himself, after all, would be the first to explain to you that it isn't my tears nor my kisses, nor my consolation he wants. you didn't think so _really_, did you?" john hesitated, remembering sir timothy's words, but she did not wait for an answer. "yes," she said calmly, "he wishes me to be in my proper place. it would be a scandal if i did such a remarkable thing as to leave home on any pretext at such a moment. only by being extraordinarily respectable and dignified can we live down the memory of his father's unconventional behaviour. i must remember my position. i must smell my salts, and put my feet up on the sofa, and be moderately overcome during the crisis, and moderately thankful to the almighty when it's over, so that every one may hear how admirably dear lady mary behaved. and when i am reading the _times_ to him during his convalescence," she cried, wringing her hands, "peter--peter will be thousands of miles away, marching over the veldt to his death." "you make very sure of peter's death," said john, quietly. "oh yes," said lady mary, listlessly. "he's an only son. it's always the only sons who die. i've remarked that." "you make very sure of sir timothy's recovery." "oh yes," lady mary said again. "he's a very strong man." something ominous in john's face and voice attracted her attention. "why do you look like that?" "because," said john, slowly--"you understand i'm treating you as a woman of courage--dr. blundell told me just now that--the odds are against him." she uttered a little cry. the doctor's voice at the end of the hall made them both start. "lady mary," he said, "you will forgive my interruption. sir timothy desired me to join you. he feared this double blow might prove too much for your strength." "i am quite strong," said lady mary. "he wished me to deliver a message," said the doctor. "yes." "on reflection, sir timothy believes that he may be partly influenced by a selfish desire for the consolation of your presence in wishing you to remain with him to-morrow. he was struck, i believe, with something mr. crewys said--on this point." "god bless you, john!" said lady mary. "hush!" said john, shaking his head. dr. blundell's voice sounded, john thought, as though he were putting force upon himself to speak calmly and steadily. his eyes were bent on the floor, and he never once looked at lady mary. "sir timothy desires, consequently," he said, "that you will consider yourself free to follow your own wishes in the matter; being guided, as far as possible, by the advice of mr. crewys. he is afraid of further agitation, and therefore asks you to convey to him, as quickly as possible, your final decision. as his physician, may i beg you not to keep him waiting?" he left them, and returned to the study. though it was only a short silence that followed his departure, john had time to learn by heart the aspect of the half-lighted, shadowy hall. there are some pauses which are illustrated to the day of a man's death, by a vivid impression on his memory of the surroundings. the heavy, painted beams crossing and re-crossing the lofty roof; the black staircase lighted with wax candles, that made a brilliancy which threw into deeper relief the darkness of every recess and corner; the full-length, early victorian portraits of men and women of his own race--inartistic daubs, that were yet horribly lifelike in the semi-illumination; the uncurtained mullioned windows,--all formed a background for the central figure in his thoughts; the slender womanly form in the armchair; the little brown head supported on the white hand; the delicate face, robbed of its youthful freshness, and yet so lovely still. "john," said lady mary, in a voice from which all passion and strength had died away, "tell me what i ought to do." "remain with your husband." "and let my boy go?" said lady mary, weeping. "i had thought, when he was leaving me, perhaps for ever, that--that his heart would be touched--that i should get a glimpse once more of the peter he used to be. oh, can't you understand? he--he's a little--hard and cold to me sometimes--god forgive me for saying so!--but you--you've been a young man too." "yes," john said, rather sadly, "i've been young too." "it's only his age, you know," she said. "he couldn't always be as gentle and loving as when he was a child. a young man would think that so babyish. he wants, as he says, to be independent, and not tied to a woman's apron-string. but in his heart of hearts he loves me best in the whole world, and he wouldn't have been ashamed to let me see it at such a moment. and i should have had a precious memory of him for ever. you shake your head. don't you understand me? i thought you seemed to understand," she said wistfully. "peter is a boy," said john, "and life is just opening for him. it is a hard saying to _you_, but his thoughts are full of the world he is entering. there is no room in them just now for the home he is leaving. that is human nature. if he be sick or sorry later on--as i know your loving fancy pictures him--his heart would turn even then, not to the mother he saw waving and weeping on the quay, amid all the confusion of departure, but to the mother of his childhood, of his happy days of long ago. it may be "--john hesitated, and spoke very tenderly--"it may be that his heart will be all the softer then, because he was denied the parting interview he never sought. the young are strangely wayward and impatient. they regret what might have been. they do not, like the old, dwell fondly upon what the gods actually granted them. it is _you_ who will suffer from this sacrifice, not peter; that will be some consolation to you, i suppose, even if it be also a disappointment." "ah, how you understand!" said peter's mother, sadly. "perhaps because, as you said just now, i have been a young man too," he said, forcing a smile. "oh, forgive me, but let me save you; for i believe that if you deserted your husband to-day, you would sorrow for it to the end of your life." "and peter--" she murmured. he came to her side, and straightened himself, and spoke hopefully. "give me your last words and your last gifts--and a letter--for peter, and send me in your stead to-night. i will deliver them faithfully. i will tell him--for he should be told--of the sore straits in which you find yourself. set him this noble example of duty, and believe me, it will touch his heart more nearly than even that sacred parting which you desire." lady mary held out her hand to him. "tell sir timothy that i will stay," she whispered. john bent down and kissed the little hand in silence, and with profound respect. then he went to the study without looking back. when he was gone, lady mary laid her face upon the badly painted miniature of peter, and cried as one who had lost all hope in life. chapter vii "her didn't make much account on him while him were alive; but now 'ce be dead, 'tis butivul tu zee how her du take on," said happy jack. there was a soft mist of heat; the long-delayed spring coming suddenly, after storms of cold rain and gales of wind had swept the youle valley. two days' powerful sunshine had excited the buds to breaking, and drawn up the tender blades of young grass from the soaked earth. the flowering laurels hung over the shady banks, whereon large families of primroses spent their brief and lovely existence undisturbed. the hawthorn put forth delicate green leaves, and the white buds of the cherry-trees in the orchard were swelling on their leafless boughs. in such summer warmth, and with the concert of building birds above and around, it was strange to see the dead and wintry aspect of the forest trees; still bare and brown, though thickening with the red promise of foliage against the april sky. john crewys, climbing the lane next the waterfall, had been hailed by the roadside by the toothless, smiling old rustic. "i be downright glad to zee 'ee come back, zur; ay, that 'a be. what vur du 'ee go gadding london ways, zays i, when there be zuch a turble lot to zee arter? and the ladyship oop barracombe ways, her bain't vit var tu du 't, as arl on us du know. tis butivul tu zee how her takes on," he repeated admiringly. john glanced uneasily at his companion, who stood with downcast eyes. "lard, i doan't take no account on miss zairy," said the road-mender, leaning on his hoe and looking sharply from the youthful lady to the middle-aged gentleman. "i've knowed her zince her wur a little maid. i used tu give her lolly-pops. yu speak up, miss zairy, and tell 'un if i didn't." "to be sure you did, father jack," said sarah, promptly. "ah, zo 'a did," said the old man, chuckling. "zo 'a did, and her ladyship avore yu. i mind _her_ when her was a little maid, and pretty ways her had wi' her, zame as now. none zo ramshacklin' as yu du be, miss zairy." "there's nobody about that he doesn't remember as a child," said sarah, apologetically. "he's so old, you see. he doesn't remember how old he is, and nobody can tell him. but he knows he was born in the reign of george the third, because his mother told him so; and he remembers his father coming in with news of the battle of waterloo, so i think he must be about ninety." "lard, mar like a hunderd year old, i be," said happy jack, offended. "and luke how i du wark yit. yif i'd 'a give up my wark, i shude 'a bin in the churchyard along o' the idlers, that 'a shude." he chuckled and winked. "i du be a turble vunny man," quavered the thin falsetto voice. "they be niver a dune a laughin' along o' my jokes. an' i du remember zur timothy's vather zo well as zur timothy hisself, though 'ee bin dead nigh sixty year. lard, 'ee was a bad 'un, was y' ould squire. an old devil. that's what 'ee was." "he only means sir timothy's father had a bad temper," explained sarah. "it's quite true." "ah, was it timper?" said jack, sarcastically. "i cude tell 'ee zum tales on 'un. there were a right o' way, zur, acrust the mead thereby, as the volk did claim. and 'a zays, 'a'll putt a stop tu 'un,' 'a zays. and him zat on a style, long zide the tharn bush, and 'a took 'ee's gun, and 'a zays, 'a'll shute vust man are maid as cumes acrust thiccy vield,' 'a zays. and us knowed 'un wude du 't tu. and 'un barred the gate, and there t'was." he laughed till the tears ran down his face, brown as gingerbread, and wrinkled as a monkey's. "mr. crewys is in a hurry, jack," said sarah. "he's only just arrived from london, and he's walked all the way from brawnton." "'tain't but a stip vur a vine vellar like 'ee, and wi' a vine maiden like yu du be grown, var tu kip 'ee company," said happy jack. "but 'ee'll be in a yurry tu git tu barracombe, and refresh hisself, in arl this turble yeat. when the zun du search, the rain du voller." "i dare say you want a glass of beer yourself," said john, producing a coin from his pocket. "no, zur, i doan't," said the road-mender, unexpectedly. "beer doan't agree wi' my inzide, an' it gits into my yead, and makes me proper jolly, zo the young volk make game on me. but i cude du wi' a drop o' zider zur; and drink your health and the young lady's, zur, zo 'a cude." he winked and nodded as he pocketed the coin; and john, half laughing and half vexed, pursued his road with sarah. "it seems to me that the old gentleman has become a trifle free and easy with advancing years," he observed. "he thinks he has a right to be interested in the family," said sarah, "because of the connection, you see." "the connection?" "didn't you know?" she asked, with wide-open eyes. "though you were sir timothy's own cousin." "a very distant cousin," said john. "but every one in the valley knows," said sarah, "that sir timothy's father married his own cook, who was happy jack's first cousin. when i was a little girl, and wanted to tease peter," she added ingenuously, "i always used to allude to it. it is the skeleton in their cupboard. we haven't got a skeleton in our family," she added regretfully; "least of all the skeleton of a cook." john remembered vaguely that there was a story about the second marriage of sir timothy the elder. "so she was a cook!" he said. "well, what harm?" and he laughed in spite of himself. "i wonder why there is something so essentially unromantic in the profession of a cook?" "her family went to australia, and they are quite rich people now: no more cooks than you and me," said sarah, gravely. "but happy jack won't leave youlestone, though he says they tempted him with untold gold. and he wouldn't touch his hat to sir timothy, because he was his cousin. that was another skeleton." "but a very small one," said john, laughing. "it might seem small to _us_, but i'm sure it was one reason why sir timothy never went outside his own gates if he could help it," said sarah, shrewdly. "luckily the cook died when he was born." "why luckily, poor thing?" said john, indignantly. "she wouldn't have had much of a time, would she, do you think, with sir timothy's sisters?" asked sarah, with simplicity. "they were in the schoolroom when their papa married her, or i am sure they would never have allowed it. their own mother was a most select person; and little thought when she gave the orders for dinner, and all that, who the old gentleman's _next_ wife would be," said sarah, giggling. "they always talk of her as the _honourable rachel_, since _lady crewys_, you know, might just as well mean the cook. i suppose the old squire got tired of her being so select, and thought he would like a change. he was a character, you know. i often think peter will be a character when he grows old. he is so disagreeable at times." "i thought you were so fond of peter?" said john, looking amusedly down on the little chatterbox beside him. "not exactly fond of him. it's just that i'm _used_ to him," said sarah, colouring all over her clear, fresh face, even to the little tendrils of red hair on her white neck. she wore a blue cotton frock, and a brown mushroom hat, with a wreath of wild roses which had somewhat too obviously been sewn on in a hurry and crookedly; and she looked far more like a village schoolgirl than a young lady who was shortly to make her _début_ in london society. but he was struck with the extraordinary brilliancy of her complexion, transparent and pure as it was, in the searching sunlight. "if she were not so round-shouldered--if the features were better--her expression softer," said john to himself--"if divine colouring were all--she would be beautiful." but her wide, smiling mouth, short-tipped nose, and cleft chin, conveyed rather the impression of childish audacity than of feminine charm. the glance of those bright, inquisitive eyes was like a wild robin's, half innocent, half bold. though her round throat were white as milk, and though no careless exposure to sun and wind had yet succeeded in dimming the exquisite fairness of her skin, yet the defects and omissions incidental to extreme youth, country breeding, and lack of discipline, rendered miss sarah not wholly pleasing in john's fastidious eyes. her carriage was slovenly, her ungloved hands were red, her hair touzled, and her deep-toned voice over-loud and confident. yet her frankness and her trustfulness could not fail to evoke sympathy. "it is--lady mary that i am fond of," said the girl, with a yet more vivid blush. he was touched. "she will miss you, i am sure, when you go to town," he said kindly. "if i thought so really, i wouldn't go," said sarah, vehemently. she winked a tear from her long eyelashes. "but i know it's only your good nature. she thinks of nothing and nobody but peter. and--and, after all, when i get better manners, and all that, i shall be more of a companion to her. i'm very glad to go, if it wasn't for leaving _her_. i like aunt elizabeth, whereas mamma and i never _did_ get on. she cares most for the boys, which is very natural, no doubt, as i was only an afterthought, and nobody wanted me. and aunt elizabeth has always liked me. she says i amuse her with my sharp tongue." "but you will have to be a little careful of the sharp tongue when you get to london," said john, smiling. he was struck by the half-sly, half-acquiescent look that sarah stole at him from beneath those long eyelashes. perhaps her outspokenness was not so involuntary as he had imagined. "if i had known you were coming to-day, i would have gone up to say good-bye to lady mary last night," said sarah, mournfully. "she won't want me now you are here." "i have a thousand and one things to look after. i sha'n't be in your way," said john, good-naturedly, "if she is not busy otherwise." "busy!" echoed sarah. "she sits _so_, with her hands in her lap, looking over the valley. and she has grown, oh, so much thinner and sadder-looking. i thought you would never come." "i have my own work," said john, hurriedly, "and i thought, besides, she would rather be alone these first few weeks." sarah looked up with a flash in her blue eyes, which were so dark, and large-pupilled, and heavily lashed, that they looked almost black. she ground her strong white teeth together. "if i were lady mary," she said, "i would have slammed the old front door behind me the very day after sir timothy was buried--and gone away; i would. there she is, like a prisoner, with the old ladies counting every tear she sheds, and adding them up to see if it is enough; and measuring every inch of crape on her gowns; and finding fault with all she does, just as they used when sir timothy was alive to back them up. and she is afraid to do anything he didn't like; and she never listens to the doctor, the only person in the world who's ever had the courage to fight her battles." "the doctor," said john, sharply. "has she been ill?" "no, no." "what has _he_ to do with lady mary?" said john. his displeasure was so great that the colour rose in his clean-shaven face, and did not escape little sarah's observation, for all her downcast lashes. "somebody must go and see her," said sarah; "and you were away. and the canon is just nobody, always bothering her for subscriptions; though he is very fond of her, like everybody else," she added, with compunction. "dear me, mr. crewys, how fast you are walking!" john had unconsciously quickened his pace so much that she had some ado to keep up with him without actually running. "i beg your pardon," he said. "it is so hot, and the hill is steep, and i am rather fat. i dare say i shall fine down as i get older," said sarah, apologetically. "it would be dreadful if i grew up like mamma. but i am more like my father, thank goodness, and _he_ is simply a mass of hard muscle. i dare say even i could beat you on the flat. but not up this drive. doesn't it look pretty in the spring?" "it was very different when i left barracombe," said john. he looked round with all a londoner's appreciation. in the sunny corner next the ivy-clad lodge an early rhododendron had burst into scarlet bloom. the steep drive was warmly walled and sheltered on the side next the hill by horse-chestnuts, witch-elms, tall, flowering shrubs and evergreens, and a variety of tree-azaleas and rhododendrons which promised a blaze of beauty later in the season. but the other side of the drive lay in full view of the open landscape; rolling grass slopes stretching down to the orchards and the valley. violets, white and blue, scented the air, and the primroses clustered at the roots of the forest trees. the gnarled and twisted stems of giant creepers testified to the age of barracombe house. before the entrance was a level space, which made a little spring garden, more formal and less varied in its arrangement than the terrace gardens on the south front; but no less gay and bright, with beds of hyacinths, red and white and purple, and daffodils springing amidst their bodyguards of pale, pointed spears. a wild cherry-tree at the corner of the house had showered snowy petals before the latticed window of the study; the window whence sir timothy had taken his last look at the western sky, and from which his watchful gaze had once commanded the approach to his house, and observed almost every human being who ventured up the drive. on the ridge of the hill above, and in clumps upon the fertile slopes of the side of the little valley, the young larches rose, newly clothed in that light and brilliant foliage which darkens almost before spring gives place to summer. they found lady mary in the drawing-room; the sunshine streamed towards her through the golden rain of a _planta-genista_, which stood on a table in the western corner of the bow window. she was looking out over the south terrace, and the valley and the river, just as sarah had said. he was shocked at her pallor, which was accentuated by her black dress; her sapphire blue eyes looked unnaturally large and clear; the little white hands clasped in her lap were too slender; a few silver threads glistened in the soft, brown hair. above all, the hopeless expression of the sad and gentle face went to john's heart. _was_ the doctor the only man in the world who had the courage to fight her battles for this fading, grieving woman who had been the lovely mary setoun; whom john remembered so careless, so laughing, so innocently gay? he was relieved that she could smile as he approached to greet her. "i did not guess you would come by the early train," she said, in glad tones. "but, oh--you must have walked all the way from brawnton! what will james coachman say?" "i wanted a walk," said john, "and i knew you would send to meet me if i let you know. my luggage is at the station. james coachman, as you call him, can fetch that whenever he will." "and i have come to say good-bye," said sarah, forlornly. she watched with jealous eyes their greeting, and lady mary's obvious pleasure in john's arrival, and half-oblivion of her own familiar little presence. when peter had first gone to school, his mother in her loneliness had almost made a _confidante_ of little sarah, the odd, intelligent child who followed her about so faithfully, and listened so eagerly to those dreamy, half-uttered confidences. she knew that lady mary wept because her boy had left her; but she understood also that when peter came home for the holidays he brought little joy to his mother. a self-possessed stripling now walked about the old house, and laid down the law to his mamma--instead of that chubby creature in petticoats who had once been peter. lady mary had dwelt on the far-off days of peter's babyhood very tenderly when she was alone with little sarah, who sat and nursed her doll, and liked very much to listen; she often felt awed, as though some one had died; but she did not connect the story much with the peter of every day, who went fishing and said girls were rather a nuisance. sarah, too, had had her troubles. she was periodically banished to distant schools by a mother who disliked romping and hoydenish little girls, as much as she doted on fat and wheezing lap-dogs. but as her father, on the other hand, resented her banishment from home almost as sincerely as sarah herself, she was also periodically sent for to take up her residence once more beneath the parental roof. thus her life was full of change and uncertainty; but, through it all, her devotion to lady mary never wavered. she looked at her now with a melancholy air which sat oddly upon her bright, comical face, and which was intended to draw attention to the pathetic fact of her own impending departure. "i only came to say good-bye," said sarah, in slightly injured tones. "ah! by-the-by, and i have promised not to intrude on the parting," said john, with twinkling eyes. "it is not an eternal farewell," said lady mary, drawing sarah kindly towards her. "it may be for _years_," said sarah, rather offended. "my aunt elizabeth is as good as adopting me. mamma said i was very lucky, and i believe she is glad to be rid of me. but papa says he shall come and see me in london. aunt elizabeth is going to take me to paris and to scotland, and abroad every winter." "oh, sarah, how you will be changed when you come back!" said lady mary; and she laughed a little, with a hand on sarah's shoulder; but sarah knew that lady mary was not thinking very much about her, all the same. "there is no fresh news, john?" she asked. "nothing since my last telegram," he answered. "but i have arranged with the exchange telegraph company to wire me anything of importance during my stay here." "you are always so good," she said. then he took pity on sarah's impatience, and left the little worshipper to the interview with her idol which she so earnestly desired. "i will go and pay my respects to my cousins," said john. but the banqueting-hall was deserted, and gaps in the row of clogs and goloshes suggested that the old ladies were taking a morning stroll. they had not thought it proper to drive, save in a close carriage, since their brother's death; and on such a warm day of spring weather a close carriage was not inviting to country-bred people. chapter viii john took his hat and stepped out once more upon the drive, and there met dr. blundell, who had left his dog-cart at the stables, and was walking up to the house. he did not pause to analyze the sentiment of slight annoyance which clouded his usual good humour; but dr. blundell divined it, with the quickness of an ultra-sensitive nature. he showed no signs that he had done so. "it was you i came to see," he said, shaking hands with john. "i heard--you know how quickly news spreads here--that you had arrived. i hoped you might spare me a few moments for a little conversation." "certainly," said john. "will you come in, or shall we take a turn?" "you will be glad of a breath of fresh air after your journey," said the doctor, and he led the way across the south terrace, to a sheltered corner of the level plateau upon which the house was built, which was known as the fountain garden. it was rather a deserted garden, thickly surrounded and overgrown by shrubs. through the immense spreading portuguese laurels which sheltered it from the east, little or no sunshine found its way to the grey, moss-grown basin and the stone figures supporting it; over which a thin stream of water continually flowed with a melancholy rhythm, in perpetual twilight. a giant ivy grew rankly and thickly about the stone buttresses of this eastern corner of the house, and around a great mullioned window which overlooked the fountain garden, and which was the window of lady mary's bedroom. "these shrubberies want thinning," said john, looking round him rather disgustedly. "this place is reeking with damp. i should like to cut down some of these poisonous laurels, and let in the air and the sunshine, and open out the view of the brawnton hills." "and why don't you?" said the doctor, with such energy in his tone that john stopped short in his pacing of the gravel walk, and looked at him. the two men were almost as unlike in appearance as in character. the doctor was nervous, irritable, and intense in manner; with deep-set, piercing eyes that glowed like hot coal when he was moved or excited. a tall, gaunt man, lined and wrinkled beyond his years; careless of appearance, so far as his shabby clothes were concerned, yet careful of detail, as was proven by spotless linen and well-preserved, delicate hands. he was indifferent utterly to the opinion of others, to his own worldly advancement, or to any outer consideration, when in pursuit of the profession he loved; and he knew no other interest in life, save one. he had the face of a fanatic or an enthusiast; but also of a man whose understanding had been so cultivated as to temper enthusiasm with judgment. he had missed success, and was neither resigned to his disappointment, nor embittered by it. the gaze of those dark eyes was seldom introspective; rather, as it seemed, did they look out eagerly, sadly, pitifully at the pain and sorrow of the world; a pain he toiled manfully to lessen, so far as his own infinitesimal corner of the universe was concerned. john crewys, on the other hand, was, to the most casual observer, a successful man; a man whose personality would never be overlooked. there was a more telling force in his composure than in the doctor's nervous energy. his clear eyes, his bright, yet steady glance, inspired confidence. the doctor might have been taken for a poet, but john looked like a philosopher. he was also, as obviously, in appearance, a man of the world, and a londoner, as the doctor was evidently a countryman, and a hermit. his advantages over the doctor included his voice, which was as deep and musical as the tones of his companion were harsh. the manner, no less than the matter of john's speech, had early brought him distinction. nature, rather than cultivation, had bestowed on him the faculty of conveying the impression he wished to convey, in tones that charm; and held his auditors, and penetrated ears dulled and fatigued by monotony and indistinctness. the more impassioned his pleading, the more utterly he held his own emotion in check; the more biting his subtly chosen words, the more courteous his manner; now deadly earnest, now humorously scornful, now graciously argumentative, but always skilfully and designedly convincing. the doctor, save in the presence of a patient, had no such control over himself as john crewys carried from the law-courts, into his life of every day. "why don't you," he said, in fiery tones, "let in air and life, and a view of the outside world, and as much sunshine as possible into this musty old house? you have the power, if you had only the will." "you speak figuratively, i notice," said john. "i should be much obliged if you would tell me exactly what you mean." he would have answered in warmer and more kindly tones had sarah's words not rung upon his ear. was the doctor going to fight lady mary's battles now, and with him, of all people in the world? as though there were any one in the world to whom her interests could be dearer than-- john stopped short in his thoughts, and looked attentively at the doctor. his heart smote him. how pallid was that tired face; and the hollow eyes, how sad and tired too! the doctor had been up all night, in a wretched isolated cottage, watching a man die--but john did not know that. he perceived that this was no meddler, but a man speaking of something very near his heart; no presuming and interfering outsider who deserved a snub, but a man suffering from some deep and hidden cause. the doctor's secret was known to john long before he had finished what he had to say; but he listened attentively, and gave no sign that this was so. "she will die," said blundell, "if this goes on;" and he neither mentioned any name, nor did john crewys require him to do so. the doctor's words came hurrying out incoherently from the depths of his anxiety and earnestness. "she will die if this goes on. there were few hopes and little enough pleasure in her life before; but what is left to her now? _de mortuis nil nisi bonum._ but just picture to yourself for a moment, man, what her life has been." he stopped and drew breath, and strove to speak calmly and dispassionately. "i was born in the valley of the youle," he said. "my people live in a cottage--they call it a house, but it's just a farm--on the river,--cullacott. i was a raw medical student when _she_ came here as a child. her father was killed in the afghan war. he had quarrelled with his uncle, they said, who afterwards succeeded to the earldom; so she was left to the guardianship of sir timothy, a distant cousin. every one was sorry for her, because sir timothy was her guardian, and because she was a little young thing to be left to the tender mercies of the two old ladies, who were old even then. if you will excuse my speaking frankly about the family"--john nodded--"they bullied their brother always; what with their superiority of birth, and his being so much younger, and so on. their bringing-up made him what he was, i am sure. he went nowhere; he always fancied people were laughing at him. his feeling about his--his mother's lowly origin seemed to pervade his whole life. he exaggerated the importance of birth till it became almost a mania. if you hadn't known the man, you couldn't have believed a human being--one of the million crawling units on the earth--could be so absurdly inflated with self-importance. it was pitiful. he went nowhere, and saw no one. i believe he thought that providence had sent a wife of high rank to his very door to enable him partially to wipe out his reproach. she looked like a child when she came, but she shot up very suddenly into womanhood. if you ask me if she was unhappy, i declare i don't think so. she had never realized, i should think, what it was to be snubbed or found fault with in her life. she was a motherless child, and had lived with her old grandfather and her young father, and had been very much spoilt. and they were both snatched away from her, as it were, in a breath; and she alone in the world, with an uncle who was only glad to get rid of her to her stranger guardian. well,--she was too young and too bright and too gay to be much downcast for all the old women could do. she laughed at their scolding, and when they tried severity she appealed to sir timothy. the old doctor who was my predecessor here told me at the time that he thought she had bewitched sir timothy; but afterwards he said that he believed it was only that sir timothy had made up his mind even then to quarter the setoun arms with his own. anyway, he went against his sisters for the first and only time in his life, and they learnt that lady mary was not to be interfered with. whether it was gratitude or just the childish satisfaction of triumphing over her two enemies, i can't tell, but she married him in less than two years after she came to live at barracombe. the old ladies didn't know whether to be angry or pleased. they wanted him to marry, and they wanted his wife to be well-born, no doubt; but to have a mere child set over them! well, the marriage took place in london." "i was present," said john. "the people here said things about it that may have got round to sir timothy; but i don't know. he never came down to the village, except to church, where he sat away from everybody, in the gallery curtained off. anyway, he wouldn't have the wedding down here. he invited all her relatives, and none of them had a word to say. it wasn't as if she were an heiress. i believe she had next to nothing. she was just like a child, laughing, and pleased at getting married, and with all her finery, perhaps,--or at getting rid of her lessons with the old women may be,--and the thought of babies of her own. who knows what a girl thinks of?" said the doctor, harshly. "i didn't see her again for a long time after. but then i came down; the brawnton doctor was getting old, and it was a question whether i should succeed him or go on in london, where i was doing well enough. and--and i came here," said the doctor, abruptly. john nodded again. he filled in the gaps of the doctor's narrative for himself, and understood. "she had changed very much. all the gaiety and laughter gone. but she was wrapt up in the child as i never saw any woman wrapt up in a brat before or since; and i've known some that were pretty ridiculous in that way," said the doctor, and his voice shook more than ever. "it was--touching, for she was but a child herself; and peter, between you and me, was an unpromising doll for a child to play with. he was ugly and ill-tempered, and he wouldn't be caressed, or dressed up, or made much of, from the first minute he had a will of his own. as he grew bigger he was for ever having rows with his father, and his mother was for ever interceding for him. he was idle at school; but he was a manly boy enough over games and sport, and a capital shot. anyway, she managed to be proud of him, god knows how. i shouldn't wonder if this war was the making of him, though, poor chap, if he's spared to see the end of it all." "i have no doubt the discipline will do him a great deal of good," said john, dryly. it cannot be said that his brief interview at southampton had impressed john with a favourable opinion of the sulky and irresponsive youth, who had there listened to his mother's messages with lowering brow and downcast eye. peter had betrayed no sign of emotion, and almost none of gratitude for john's hurried and uncomfortable journey to convey that message. "a few hard knocks will do you no harm, my young friend; and i almost wish you may get them," john had said to himself on his homeward journey; dreading, yet expecting, the news that awaited him at peter's home, and for which he had done his best to prepare the boy. "too much consideration hitherto has ruined him," said the doctor, shortly. "but it's not of peter i'm thinking, one way or the other. from the time he went first to school, she's had to depend entirely on her own resources--and what are they?" he paused, as though to gather strength and energy for his indictment. "from the time she was brought here--except for that one outing and a change to torquay, i believe, after peter's birth--she has scarce set foot outside barracombe. sir timothy would not, so he was resolved she should not. his sisters, who have as much cultivation as that stone figure, disapproved of novel-reading--or of any other reading, i should fancy--and he followed suit. books are almost unknown in this house. the library bookcases were locked. sir timothy opened them once in a while, and his sisters dusted the books with their own hands; it was against tradition to handle such valuable bindings. he hated music, and the piano was not to be played in his presence. have you ever tried it? i'm told you're musical. it belonged to lady belstone's mother, the honourable rachel. that is her harp which stands in the corner of the hall. her daughter once tinkled a little, i believe; but the prejudices of the ruling monarch were religiously obeyed. music was _taboo_ at barracombe. dancing was against their principles, and theatres they regard with horror, and have never been inside one in their lives. nothing took sir timothy to london but business; and if it were possible to have the business brought to barracombe, his solicitor, mr. crawley, visited him here." the doctor spoke in lower tones, as he recurred to his first theme. "i don't think she found out for years, or realized what a prisoner she was. they caught and pinned her down so young. there are no very near neighbours--i mean, not the sort of people they would recognize as neighbours--except the hewels. youlestone is such an out-of-the-way place, and sir timothy was never on intimate terms with any one. mrs. hewel is a fool--there was only little sarah whom lady mary made a pet of--but she had no friends. sir timothy and his sisters made visiting such a stiff and formal business, that it was no wonder she hated paying calls; the more especially as it could lead to nothing. he would not entertain; he grudged the expense. i was present at a scene he once made because a large party drove over from a distant house and stayed to tea. he said he could not entertain the county. she dared ask no one to her house--she, who was so formed and fitted by nature to charm and attract, and enjoy social intercourse." his voice faltered. "they stole her youth," he said. "what do you want me to do?" said john, though he was vaguely conscious that he understood for what the doctor was pleading. he sat down by the fountain; and the doctor, resting a mended boot on the end of the bench, leant on his bony knee, and looked down wistfully at john's thoughtful face, broad brow, and bright, intent eyes. "you are a very clever man, mr. crewys," he said humbly. "a man of the world, successful, accomplished, and, i believe, honest"--he spoke with a simplicity that disarmed offence--"or i should not have ventured as i have ventured. somehow you inspire me with confidence. i believe you can save her. i believe you could find a way to bring back her peace of mind; the interest in life--the gaiety of heart--that is natural to her. if i were in your place, not the two old women--not sir timothy's ghost--not that poor conceited slip of a lad who may be shot to-morrow--would stand in my way. i would bring back the colour to her cheek, and the light to her eye, and the music to her voice--" "whilst her boy is in danger?" john asked, almost scornfully. he thought he knew lady mary better than the doctor did, after all. "i tell you _nothing_ would stop me," said blundell, vehemently. "before i would let her fret herself to death--afraid to break the spells that have been woven round her, bound as she is, hand and foot, with the prejudices of the dead--i would--i would--take her to south africa myself," he said brilliantly. "the voyage would bring her back to life." john got up. "that is an idea," he said. he paused and looked at the doctor. "you have known her longer than i. have you said nothing to her of all this?" the doctor smiled grimly. "mr. crewys," he said, "some time since i spoke my mind--a thing i am over-apt to do--_of_ peter, and _to_ him. the lad has forgiven me; he is a man, you see, with all his faults. but lady mary, though she has all the virtues of a woman, is also a mother. a woman often forgives; a mother, never. don't forget." "i will not," said john. "and you'll do it--" "use the unlimited authority that has been placed in my hands, by improving this tumble-down, overgrown place?" said john, slowly. "let in light, air, and sunshine to barracombe, and do my best to brighten lady mary's life, without reference to any one's prejudices, past or present?" "you've got the idea," said the doctor, joyfully. "will you carry it out?" "yes," said john. chapter ix the new moon brightened above the rim of the opposite hill, and touched the river below with silver reflections. on the grass banks sloping away beneath the terrace gardens, sheets of bluebells shone almost whitely on the grass. the silent house rose against the dark woods, whitened also here and there by the blossom of wild cherry-trees. lady mary stepped from the open french windows of the drawing-room into the still, scented air of the april night. she stood leaning against the stone balcony, and gazing at the wonderful panorama of the valley and overlapping hills; where the little river threaded its untroubled course between daisied meadows and old orchards and red crumbling banks. a broad-shouldered figure appeared in the window, and a man's step crunched the gravel of the path which lady mary had crossed. "for once i have escaped, you see," she said, without turning round. "they will not venture into the night air. sometimes i think they will drive me mad--isabella and georgina." "mary!" cried a shrill voice from the drawing-room, "how can you be so imprudent! john, how can you allow her!" john stepped back to the window. "it is very mild," he said. "lady mary likes the air." there was a note of authority in his tone which somehow impressed lady belstone, who withdrew, muttering to herself, into the warm lamplight of the drawing-room. perhaps the two old ladies were to be pitied, too, as they sat together, but forlorn, sincerely shocked and uneasy at their sister-in-law's behaviour. "dear timothy not dead three months, and she sitting out there in the night air, as he would never have permitted, talking and laughing; yes, i actually hear her laughing--with john." "there is no telling what she may do _now_," said miss crewys, gloomily. "i declare it is a judgment, georgina. why did timothy choose to trust a perfect stranger--even though john is a cousin--with the care of his wife and son, and his estate, rather than his own sisters?" "it was a gentleman's work," said miss crewys. "gentleman's fiddlesticks! couldn't old crawley have done it? i should hope he is as good a lawyer as young john any day," said lady belstone, tossing her head. "but i have often noticed that people will trust any chance stranger with the property they leave behind, rather than those they know best." "isabella," said miss crewys, "blame not the dead, and especially on a moonlight night. it makes my blood run cold." "i am blaming nobody, georgina; but i will say that if poor timothy thought proper to leave everything else in the hands of young john, he might have considered that you and i had a better right to the dower house than poor dear mary, who, of course, must live with her son." "i am far from wishing or intending to leave my home here, isabella," said miss crewys. "it is very different in your case. you forfeited the position of daughter of the house when you married. but i have always occupied my old place, and my old room." this was a sore subject. on lady belstone's return as a widow, to the home of her fathers, she had been torn with anxiety and indecision regarding her choice of a sleeping apartment. sentiment dictated her return to her former bedroom; but she was convinced that the married state required a domicile on the first floor. etiquette prevailed, and she descended; but the eighty-year-old legs of miss crewys still climbed the nursery staircase, and she revenged herself for her inferior status by insisting, in defiance of old associations, that her maid should occupy the room next to her own, which her sister had abandoned. "for my part, i can sleep in one room as well as another, provided it be comfortable and _appropriate_," said lady belstone, with dignity. "there are very pleasant rooms in the dower house, and our great-aunts managed to live there in comfort, and yet keep an eye on their nephew here, as i have always been told. i don't know why we should object to doing the same. you have never tried being mistress of your own house, georgina, but i can assure you it has its advantages; and i found them out as a married woman." "a married woman has her husband to look after her," said miss crewys. "it is very different for a widow." "you are for ever throwing my widowhood in my teeth, georgina," said lady belstone, plaintively. "it is not my fault that i am a widow. i did not murder the admiral." "i don't say you did, isabella," said georgina, grimly; "but he only survived his marriage six months." "it is nice to be silent sometimes," said lady mary. "does that mean that i am to go away?" said john, "or merely that i am not to speak to you?" she laughed a little. "neither. it means that i am tired of being scolded." "i have wondered now and then," said john, deliberately, "why you put up with it?" "i suppose--because i can't help it," she said, startled. "you are a free agent." "you mean that i could go away?" she said, in a low voice. "but there is only one place i should care to go to now." "to south africa?" "you always understand," she said gratefully. "supposing this--this ghastly war should not be over as soon as we all hope," he said, rather huskily, "i could escort you myself, in a few weeks' time, to the cape. or--or arrange for your going earlier if you desired, and if i could not get away. probably you would get no further than cape town; but it might be easier for you waiting there--than here." "i shall thank you, and bless you always, for thinking of it," she interrupted, softly; "but there is something--that i never told anybody." he waited. "after peter had the news of his father's death," said lady mary, with a sob in her throat, "you did not know that he--he telegraphed to me, from madeira. he foresaw immediately, i suppose, whither my foolish impulses would lead me; and he asked me--i should rather say he ordered me--under no circumstances whatever to follow him out to south africa." john remembered the doctor's warning, and said nothing. "so, you see--i can't go," said lady mary. there was a pause. "i am bound to say," said john, presently, "that, in peter's place, i should not have liked my mother, or any woman i loved, to come out to the seat of war. he showed only a proper care for you in forbidding it. perhaps i am less courageous than he, in thinking more of the present benefit you would derive from the voyage and the change of scene, than of the perils and discomforts which might await you, for aught we can foretell now, at the end of it. peter certainly showed judgment in telegraphing to you." "do you really think so? that it was care for me that made him do it?" she asked. a distant doubtful joy sounded in her voice. "somehow i never thought of that. i remembered his old dislike of being followed about, or taken care of, or--or spied upon, as he used to call it." "boys just turning into men are often sensitive on those points," said john, heedful always of the doctor's warning. "it is odd i did not see the telegram in that light," said poor lady mary. "i must read it again." she spoke as hopefully as though she had not read it already a hundred times over, trying to read loving meanings, that were not there, between the curt and peremptory lines. "it is not odd," thought john to himself; "it is because you knew him too well;" and he wondered whether his explanation of peter's action were charitable, or merely unscrupulous. but lady mary was not really deceived; only very grateful to the man who was so tender of heart, so tactful of speech, as to make it seem even faintly possible that she had misjudged her boy. she said to herself that parents were often unreasonable, expecting impossibilities, in their wild desire for perfection in their offspring. an outsider, being unprejudiced by anxiety, could judge more fairly. john found that the telegram, which had almost broken her heart, was reasonable and justified; nay, even that it displayed a dutiful regard for her safety and comfort, of which no one but a stranger could possibly have suspected peter. she was grateful to john. it was a relief and joy to feel that it was she who was to blame, and not peter, whose heart was in the right place, after all. and yet, though john was so clever and had such an experience of human nature, it was the doctor who had put the key into his hands, which presently unlocked lady mary's confidence. "you mustn't think, john, that i don't understand what it will be like later, when peter comes of age. of course this house will be his, and he is not the kind of young man to be tied to his mother's apron-string. he always wanted to be independent." "it is human nature," said john. "i am not blind to his faults," said lady mary, humbly, "though they all think so. it is of little use to try and hide them from you, who will see them for yourself directly my darling comes back. i pray god it may be soon. of course he is spoilt; but i am to blame, because i made him my idol." "an only son is always more or less spoilt," said john. he remembered his own boyhood, and smiled sardonically in the darkness. "he will grow out of it. he will come back a man after this experience." "yes, yes, and he will want to live his life, and i--i shall have to learn to do without him, i know," she said. "i must learn while he is away to--to depend on myself. it is not likely that--that a woman of my age should have much in common with a manly boy like peter. sometimes i wonder whether i really understand my boy at all." "it is my belief," said john, "that no generation is in perfect touch with another. each stands on a different rung of the ladder of time. you may stoop to lend a helping hand to the younger, or reach upwards to take a farewell of the older. but there must be a looking down or a looking up. no face-to-face talk is possible except upon the same level. no real and true comradeship. the very word implies a marching together, under the same circumstances, to a common goal; and how can we, who have to be the commanding officers of the young, be their true companions?" he said, lightly and cheerfully. "i dare say i have expected impossibilities," said lady mary, as though reproaching herself. "it comforts me to think so. but i have had time to reflect on many things since--february." she paused. "i don't deny i have tried to make plans for the future. but there are these days to be lived through first--until he comes home." "i was going to propose," said john, "that, if agreeable to you, i should spend my summer and autumn holiday here, instead of going, as usual, to switzerland." "i should be only too glad," she said, in tones of awakened interest. "but surely--it would be very dull for you?" "not at all. there is a great deal to be done, and in accordance with my trust i am bound to set about it," said john. "i propose to spend the next few days in examining the reports of the surveys that have already been made, and in judging of their accuracy for myself. when i return here later, i could have the work begun, and then for some time i could superintend matters personally, which is always a good thing." "do you mean--the woods?" she asked. "i know they have been neglected. sir timothy would never have a tree cut down; but they are so wild and beautiful." "there are hundreds of pounds' worth of timber perishing for want of attention. i am responsible for it all until peter comes of age," said john, "as i am for the rest of his inheritance. it is part of my trust to hand over to him his house and property in the best order i can, according to my own judgment. i know something of forestry," he added, simply; "you know i was not bred a cockney. i was to have been a hertfordshire squire, on a small scale, had not circumstances necessitated the letting of my father's house when he died." "but it will be yours again some day?" "no," said john, quietly; "it had to be sold--afterwards." he gave no further explanation, but lady mary recollected instantly the abuse that had been showered on his mother, by her sisters-in-law, when john was reported to have sacrificed his patrimony to pay her debts. "i rather agree with you about the woods," she said. "it vexes me always to see a beautiful young tree, that should be straight and strong, turned into a twisted dwarf, in the shade of the overgrowth and the overcrowding. the woodman will be delighted; he is always grumbling." "it is not only the woods. there is the house." "i suppose it wants repairing?" said lady mary. "hadn't that better be put off till peter comes home?" "i cannot neglect my trust," said john, gravely; "besides," he added, "the state of the roof is simply appalling. many of the beams are actually rotten. then there are the drains; they are on a system that should not be tolerated in these days. nothing has been done for over sixty years, and i can hardly say how long before." "won't it all cost a great deal of money?" said lady mary. "a good deal; but there is a very large sum of money lying idle, which, as the will directs, may be applied to the general improvement of the house and estate during peter's minority; but over which he is to have no control, should it remain unspent, until he comes of age. that is to say, it will then--or what is left of it--be invested with the rest of his capital, which is all strictly tied up. so, as old crawley says, it will relieve peter's income in the future, if we spend what is necessary now, according to our powers, in putting his house and estate in order. it would have to be done sooner or later, most assuredly. sir timothy, as you must know," said john, gently, "did not spend above a third of his actual income; and, so far as mr. crawley knows, spent nothing at all on repairs, beyond jobs to the village carpenter and mason." "i did not know," said lady mary. "he always told me we were very badly off--for our position. i know nothing of business. i did not attend much to mr. crawley's explanations at the time." "you were unable to attend to him then," said john; "but now, i think, you should understand the exact position of affairs. surely my cousins must have talked it over?" "isabella and georgina never talk business before me. you forget i am still a child in their eyes," she said, smiling. "i gathered that they were disappointed poor timothy had left them nothing, and that they thought i had too much; that is all." "their way of looking at it is scarcely in accordance with justice," said john, shrugging his shoulders. "they each have ten thousand pounds left to them by their father in settlement. this was to return to the estate if they died unmarried or childless. you have two thousand a year and the dower house for your life; but you forfeit both if you re-marry." "of course," said lady mary, indifferently. "i suppose that is the usual thing?" "not quite, especially when your personal property is so small." "i didn't know i had any personal property." "about five hundred pounds a year; perhaps a little more." "from the setouns!" she cried. "from your father. surely you must have known?" lady mary was silent a moment. "no; i didn't know," she said presently. "it doesn't matter now, but timothy never told me. i thought i hadn't a farthing in the world. he never mentioned money matters to me at all." then she laughed faintly. "i could have lived all by myself in a cottage in scotland, without being beholden to anybody--on five hundred pounds a year, couldn't i?" "there is no reason you should not have a cottage in scotland now, if you fancy one," said john, cheerfully. "the only memories i have in the world, outside my life in this place, are of my childhood at home," she said. john suddenly realized how very, very limited her experiences had been, and wondered less at the almost childish simplicity which characterized her, and which in no way marred her natural graciousness and dignity. lady mary did not observe his silence, because her own thoughts were busy with a scene which memory had painted for her, and far away from the moonlit valley of the youle. she saw a tall, narrow, turreted building against a ruddy sunset sky; a bare ridge of hills crowned sparsely with ragged scotch firs; a sea of heather which had seemed boundless to a childish imagination. "i could not go back to scotland now," she said, with that little wistful-sounding, patient sob which moved john to such pity that he could scarce contain himself; "but some day, when i am free--when nobody wants me." "london is the only place worth living in just now, whilst we are in such terrible anxiety," he said boldly. "at least there are the papers and telegrams all day long, and none of this dreary, long waiting between the posts; and there are other things--to distract one's attention, and keep up one's courage." "i do not know what isabella and georgina would say," said lady mary. "but you--would you not care to come?" "oh!" she said, half sobbing, "it is because i am afraid of caring too much. life seems to call so loudly to me now and then; as though i were tired of sitting alone, and looking up the valley and down the valley. i know it all by heart. it would be fresh life; the stir, the movement; other people, fresh ideas, beautiful new things to see. but, indeed, you must not tempt me." there was an accent of yearning in her tone, a hint of eager anticipation, as of a good time coming; a dream postponed, which she would nevertheless be willing one day to enjoy. "i mustn't go anywhere; i couldn't--until my boy comes home, if he ever comes home," she added, under her breath. "but when he comes home safe and sound, as please god he may," said john, cheerfully, "why, then you have a great deal of lost time to make up." "ah, yes!" said lady mary, and again that wistful note of longing sounded. "i have thought sometimes i would not like to die before i have seen my birthplace once more. and there is--_italy_," she said, as though the one word conveyed every vision of earthly beauty which mortal could desire to behold--as, indeed, it does. and again she added, "but i don't know what my sisters-in-law would say. it would be against all the traditions." "surely lady belstone, at least, must be less absurdly narrow-minded," said john, almost impatiently. "shall i tell you the history of her marriage?" said lady mary. her pretty laugh rang out softly in the darkness, and thrilled john's heart, and shocked yet further the old ladies who sat within, straining their ears for the sound of returning footsteps. "it took place about forty years ago or less. a cousin of her mother's, sir william belstone, came to spend a few days here. i believe the poor man invited himself, because he happened to be staying in the neighbourhood. he was a gallant old sailor, and very polite to both his cousins; and one day isabella interpreted his compliments into a proposal of marriage. georgina has given me to understand that no one was ever more astounded and terrified than the admiral when he found himself engaged to isabella. but apparently he was a chivalrous old gentleman, and would not disappoint her. it is really rather a sad little story, because he died of heart disease very soon after the marriage. old mrs. ash, the housekeeper, always declares her mistress came home even more old-maidish in her ways than she went away, and that she quarrelled with the poor admiral from morning till night. perhaps that is why she has never lightened her garb of woe. and she makes my life a burden to me because i won't wear a cap. ah! how heartless it all sounds, and yet how ridiculous! dear cousin john, haven't i bored you? let us go in." with characteristic energy john crewys set in hand the repairs which he had declared to be so necessary. the late squire had apparently been as well aware of the neglected state of his ancestral halls as of his tangled and overgrown woods; but he had also, it seemed, been unable to make up his mind to take any steps towards amending the condition of either--or to part with his ever-increasing balance at his bankers'. sir timothy had carried both his obstinacy and his dullness into his business affairs. the family solicitor, mr. crawley, backed up the new administrator with all his might. "over sixty thousand pounds uninvested, and lying idle at the bank," he said, lifting his hands and eyes, "and one long, miserable grumbling over the expense of keeping up barracombe. one good tenant after another lost because the landlord would keep nothing in repair; gardener after gardener leaving for want of a shilling increase in weekly wages. in case sir peter should turn out to resemble his father, we had best not let the grass grow under our feet, mr. crewys," said the shrewd gentleman, chuckling, "but take full advantage of the powers entrusted to you for the next two years and a quarter. sir peter, luckily, does not come of age until october, ." "that is just what i intend to do," said john. "odd, isn't it," said the lawyer, confidentially, "how often a man will put unlimited power into the hands of a comparative stranger, and leave his own son tied hand and foot? not a penny of all this capital will sir peter ever have the handling of. perhaps a good job too. oh, dear! when i look at the state of his affairs in general, i feel positively guilty, and ashamed to have had even the nominal management of them. but what could a man do under the circumstances? he paid for my advice, and then acted directly contrary to it, and thought he had done a clever thing, and outwitted his own lawyer. but now we shall get things a bit straight, i hope. what about buying speccot farm, mr. crewys? it's been our naboth's vineyard for many a day; but we haggled over the price, and couldn't make up our minds to give what the farmer wants. he'll have to sell in the end, you know; but i suppose he could hold out a few years longer if we don't give way." "he's been to me already," said john. "the price he asked is no doubt a bit above its proper value; but it's accommodation land, and it would be disappointing if it slipped through our fingers. i propose to offer him pretty nearly what he asks." "he'll take it," said mr. crawley, with satisfaction. "i could never make sir timothy see that it wouldn't pay the fellow to turn out unless he got something over and above the value of his mortgages." "the next thing i want you to arrange is the purchase of those twenty acres of rough pasture and gorse, right in the centre of the property," said john, "rented by the man who lives outside youlestone, at what they call pott's farm, for his wretched, half-starved beasts to graze upon. he's saved us the trouble of exterminating the rabbits there, i notice." "he's an inveterate poacher. a good thing to give him no further excuse to hang about the place. what do you propose to do?" "compensate him, burn the gorse, cut the bracken, and plant larch. there are enough picturesque commons on the top of the hill, where the soil is poor, and land is cheap. we don't want them in the valley. now i propose to give our minds to the restoration of the house, the drains, the stables, and the home farm. here are my estimates." though mr. crawley was so loyal a supporter of the regent of barracombe, yet john's projected improvements were far too thorough-going to gain the approval of the pottering old retainers of the crewys family, though they were unable to question his knowledge or his judgment. "i telled 'im tu du things by the littles," said the woodman, who was kept at work marking trees and saplings as he had never worked before; though john was generous of help, and liberal of pay. "but lard, he bain't one tu covet nobody's gude advice. i was vair terrified tu zee arl he knowed about the drees. the squoire 'ee wur like a babe unbarn beside 'un. he lukes me straight in the eyes, and 'luke,' sezzee, 'us 'a' got tu git the place in vamous arder vur young zur peter,' sezzee, 'an' i be responsible, and danged but what 'a'll du't,' 'ee zays. an' i touched my yead, zo, and i zays, 'very gude, zur,' 'a zays. 'an' zo 'twill be, yu may depend on't.'" perhaps the unwonted stir and bustle, the coming and going of john crewys, the confusion of workmen, the novel interest of renovating and restoring the old house, helped to brace and fortify lady mary during the months which followed; months, nevertheless, of suspense and anxiety, which reduced her almost to a shadow of her former self. for peter's career in south africa proved an adventurous one. he had the good luck to distinguish himself in a skirmish almost immediately after his arrival, and to win not only the approval of his noble relative and commander, but his commission. his next exploit, however, ended rather disastrously, and peter found himself a prisoner in the now historic bird-cage at pretoria, where he spent a dreary, restless, and perhaps not wholly unprofitable time, in the society of men greatly his superior in soldierly and other qualities. john feared that his mother's resolution not to follow her boy must inevitably be broken when the news of his capture reached barracombe; but perhaps peter's letters had repeated the peremptory injunctions of his telegram, for she never proposed to take the journey to south africa. the wave of relief and thankfulness that swept over the country, when the release of the imprisoned officers became known, restored not a little of lady mary's natural courage and spirits. she became more hopeful about her son, and more interested daily in the beautifying and restoration of his house. she said little in her letters to peter of the work at barracombe, for john advised her that the boy would probably hardly understand the necessity for it, and she herself was doubtful of peter's approval even if he had understood. she had too much intelligence to be doubtful of john's wisdom, or of mr. crawley's zeal for his interest. the letters she received were few and scanty, for peter was but a poor correspondent, and he made little comment on the explanatory letter regarding his father's will which john and mr. crawley thought proper to send him. the solicitor was justly indignant at sir peter's neglect to reply to this carefully thought-out and faultlessly indited epistle. "he is just a chip of the old block," said mr. crawley. but his mother divined that peter was partly offended at his own utter exclusion from any share of responsibility, and partly too much occupied to give much attention to any matter outside his soldiering. she said to herself that he was really too young to be troubled with business; and she began to believe, as the work at barracombe advanced, that the results of so much planning and forethought must please him, after all. the consolation of working in his interests was delightful to her. her days were filling almost miraculously, as it seemed to her, with new occupations, fresh hopes, and happier ideas, than the idle dreaming which was all that had hitherto been permitted to her. john desired her help, or her suggestions, at every turn, and constantly consulted her taste. her artistic instinct for decoration was hardly less strong than his own, though infinitely less cultivated. he sent her the most engrossing and delightful books to repair the omission, and he brought her plans and drawings, which he begged her to copy for him. the days which had hung so heavily on her hands were scarcely long enough. the careful restoration of the banqueting-hall necessitated new curtains and chair-covers. lady mary looked doubtfully at john when this matter had been decided, and then at the upholstery of the drawing-rooms facing the south terrace. the faded magenta silk, tarnished gilded mirrors, and gold-starred wall-paper which decorated these apartments had offended her eye for years. john laughed at her hesitation, and advised her to consult her sisters-in-law on the subject; and this settled the question. "they would choose bottle-green" she said, in horror; and she salved her conscience by paying for the redecoration of the drawing-rooms out of her own pocket. john discovered that lady mary had never drawn a cheque in her life, and that mr. crawley's lessons in the management of her own affairs filled her with as much awe as amusement. * * * * * so the old order changed and gave place to the new at barracombe; and the summer grew to winter, and winter to summer again; and peter did not return, as he might, with the corps in which he had the honour to serve. want of energy was not one of his defects; he was a strong, hardy young man, a fine horseman and a good shot, and eager to gain distinction for himself. he passed into a fresh corps of newly raised yeomanry, and went through the winter campaign of , from april to september, without a scratch. his mother implored him to come home; but peter's letters were contemptuous of danger. if he were to be shot, plenty of better fellows than he had been done for, he wrote; and coming home to go to oxford, or whatever his guardian might be pleased to order him to do, was not at all in his line, when he was really wanted elsewhere. to do him justice, he had no idea how boastfully his letters read; he had not the art of expressing himself on paper, and he was always in a hurry. the moments when he was moved by a vague affection for his home, or his mother, were seldom the actual moments which he devoted to correspondence; and the passing ideas of the moment were all peter knew how to convey. lady mary could not but be aware of her son's complete independence of her, but the realization of it no longer filled her with such dismay as formerly. her outlook upon life was widening insensibly. the young soldier's luck deserted him at last. barely six weeks before the declaration of peace, peter was wounded at rooiwal. the war office, and the account of the action in the newspapers, reported his injuries as severe; but a telegram from peter himself brought relief, and even rejoicing, to barracombe-- "_shot in the arm. doing splendidly. invalided home. sailing as soon as doctor allows_." chapter x "i never complain, canon birch," said lady belstone, resignedly; "but it is a great relief, as i cannot deny, to open my mind to you, who know so well what this place used to be like in my dear brother's time." the canon had been absent from youlestone on a long holiday, and on his return found that the workmen, who had reigned over barracombe for nearly two years, had at length departed. the inhabitants had been hunted from one part of the house to another as the work proceeded; but now the usual living-rooms had been restored to their occupants, and peace and order prevailed, where all had been noise and confusion. "i should not have known the place," said the canon, gazing round him. "nor i. we make a point of _saying_ nothing," said miss crewys, pathetically, "but it's almost impossible not to _look_ now and then." "speak for yourself, georgina," said her sister, with asperity. "one can't _look_ furniture out of one room and into another." the old ladies sat forlornly in their corner by the great open hearth, whereon the logs were piled in readiness for a fire, because they often found the early june evenings chilly. but the sofa with broken springs, which they specially affected, had been mended, and recovered; and was no longer, they sadly agreed, near so comfortable as in its crippled past. the banqueting-hall, which was the very heart of barracombe house, had been carefully and skilfully restored to its ancient dignity. the paint and graining, which had disfigured its mighty beams and solid panelling, had been removed; and the freshly polished oak shone forth in its noble age, shorn of all tawdry disguise. the spaces of wall and roof between the beams, and above the panels, were now of a creamy tint not far removed, as the two indignant critics pointed out, from common whitewash. a great screen of spanish leather sheltered the door from the vestibule, and secured somewhat more privacy for the hall as a sitting-room. the vandyck commanded the staircase, attracting immediate attention, as it faced the principal entry. in the wide space between the two great windows were two portraits of equal size; the famous sir peter crewys, by lely, painted to resemble, as nearly as possible, his royal master, in dress and attitude; and his brother timothy, by kneller. farmer timothy's small, shrewd, grey eyes appeared to follow the gazer all over the hall; and his sober wearing apparel, a plain green coat without collar or cape, contrasted effectively with the cavalier's laced doublet and feathered hat. gone were the early victorian portraits; gone the big glass cases of stuffed birds and weasels; gone the round mahogany table, the waxen bouquets, and the horsehair chairs. the ancient tapestry beside the carven balustrade of the staircase remained, but it had been cleaned, and even mended. an oak dresser, black with age, and laden with blue and white china, lurked in a shadowy corner. comfortable easy-chairs and odd, old-fashioned settees furnished the hall. in the oriel window stood a spinning-wheel and a grandfather's chair. a great bowl of roses stood on the broad window-seat. there were roses, indeed, everywhere, and books on every table. but the crowning grievance of all was the cottage piano which john had sent to lady mary. the case had been specially made of hand-carven oak to match the room as nearly as might be. it was open, and beside it was a heap of music, and on it another bowl of roses. "ay, you may well look horrified," said miss crewys to the canon, whose admiration and delight were very plainly depicted on his rubicund countenance. "where are our cloaks and umbrellas? that's what i say to isabella. where are our goloshes? where is anything, indeed, that one would expect to find in a gentleman's hall? not so much as a walking-stick. everything to be kept in the outer hall, where tramps could as easily step in and help themselves; but our poor foolish mary fancies that peter will be delighted to find his old home turned upside down." "my belief is," said lady belstone, "that peter will just insist on all this wooden rubbish trotting back to the attics, where my dear granny, not being accustomed to wooden furniture, very properly hid it away. if you will believe me, canon, that dresser was brought up from the _kitchen_, and every single pot and pan that decorates it used to be kept in the housekeeper's room. that lumbering old chest was in the harness-room. pretty ornaments for a gentleman's sitting-room! if peter has grown up anything like my poor brother, he won't put up with it at all." "i suppose, in one sense, it's peter's house, or will be very shortly?" said the canon. "in _every_ sense it's peter's house," cried lady belstone; "and he comes of age, thank heaven, in october." "i had hoped to hear he had sailed," said the canon. "no news is good news, i hope." "the last telegram said his wound was doing well, but did not give any date for his return. young john says we may expect him any time. i do not know what he knows about it more than any one else, however," said miss crewys. "his letters give no details about himself," said lady belstone; "he makes no fuss about his wounded arm. he is a thorough crewys, not given to making a to-do about trifles." "he could only write a few words with his left hand," said miss crewys; "more could not have been expected of him. yet poor mary was quite put out, as i plainly saw, though she said nothing, because the boy had not written at greater length." "i find they've made a good many preparations for his welcome down in the village," said the canon, "in case he should take us by surprise. so many of the officers have got passages at the last moment, unexpectedly. and we shall turn out to receive him _en masse_. mr. crewys has given us _carte blanche_ for fireworks and flags; and they are to have a fine bean-feast." "our cousin john takes a great deal upon himself, and has made uncommonly free with peter's money," said lady belstone, shaking her head. "i wish he may not find himself pretty nigh ruined when he comes to look into his own affairs. in my opinion, fred crawley is little better than a fool." "he is most devoted to peter's interests, my dear lady," said the canon, warmly, "and he informed me that mr. john crewys had done wonders in the past two years." "he has turned the whole place topsy-turvy in two years, in my opinion," said miss crewys. "i don't deny that he is a rising young man, and that his manners are very taking. but what can a cockney lawyer know, about timber, pray?" "no man on earth, lawyer or no lawyer," said lady belstone, emphatically, "will ever convince me that one can be better than _well_." "my sister alludes to the drains. it is a sore point, canon," said miss crewys. "in my opinion, it is all this modern drainage that sets up typhoid fever, and nothing else." "bless me!" said the canon. "our poor mary has grown so dependent on john, however, that she will hear nothing against him. one has to mind one's p's and q's," said lady belstone. "he planned the alterations in this very hall," said miss crewys, "and the only excuse he offered, so far as i could understand, was that it would amuse poor mary to carry them out." "does a widow wish to be amused?" said lady belstone, indignantly. "and was she amused, dear lady?" asked the canon, anxiously. "when she saw our horror and dismay she smiled." "did you call that a smile, georgina? i called it a laugh. it takes almost nothing to make her laugh nowadays." "you would not wish her to be too melancholy," said the canon, almost pleadingly; "one so--so charming, so--" "canon birch," said lady belstone, in awful tones, "she is a widow." the canon was silent, displaying an embarrassment which did not escape the vigilant observation of the sisters, who exchanged a meaning glance. "well may you remind us of the fact, isabella," said miss crewys, "for she has discarded the last semblance of mourning." "time flies so fast," said the canon, as though impelled to defend the absent. "it is--getting on for three years since poor sir timothy died." "it is but two years and four months," said miss crewys. "it is thirty-three years since the admiral went aloft," said lady belstone, who often became slightly nautical in phrase when alluding to her departed husband; "and look at me." the pocket-handkerchief she held up was deeply bordered with ink. orthodox streamers floated on either side her severe countenance. the canon looked and shook his head. he felt that the mysteries of a widow's garments had best not be discussed by one who dwelt, so to speak, outside them. "poor mary can do nothing gradually," said miss crewys. "she leapt in a single hour out of a black dress into a white one." "her anguish when our poor timothy succumbed to that fatal operation surpassed even the bounds of decorum," said lady belstone, "and yet--she would not wear a cap!" she appealed to the canon with such a pathetic expression in her small, red-rimmed, grey eyes that he could not answer lightly. they faced him with anxious looks and drooping, tremulous mouths. they had grown curiously alike during the close association of nearly eighty years, though in their far-off days of girlhood no one had thought them to resemble each other. miss crewys crocheted a shawl with hands so delicately cared for and preserved, that they scarce showed any sign of her great age; her sister wore gloves, as was the habit of both when unoccupied, and she grasped her handkerchief in black kid fingers that trembled slightly with emotion. the canon realized that the old ladies were seriously troubled concerning their sister-in-law's delinquencies. "we speak to you, of course, as our _clergyman_," said miss crewys; and the poor gentleman could only bow sympathetically. "i am an old friend," he said feelingly, "and your confidences are sacred. but i think in your very natural--er--affection for lady mary"--the word stuck in his throat--"you are, perhaps, over-anxious. in judging those younger than ourselves," said the canon, gallantly coupling himself with his auditors,' though acutely conscious that he was some twenty years the junior of both, "we must not forget that they recover their spirits, by a merciful dispensation of providence, more quickly than we should ourselves in the like circumstances," said the canon, who was as light-hearted a cleric as any in england. "they do, indeed," said lady belstone, emphatically; "when they can sing and play all the day and half the night, like our dear mary and young john." "you see the piano blocking up the hall, though sir timothy hated music?" said miss crewys. her own mourning was thoughtfully graduated to indicate the time which had elapsed since sir timothy's decease. she wore a violet silk of sombre hue, ornamented by a black silk apron and a black lace scarf. the velvet bow which served so very imperfectly as a skull-cap was also violet, intimating a semi-assuaged, but respectfully lengthened, grief for the departed. "and now this maddest scheme of all," said miss crewys. "bless me! what mad scheme?" "a house in london is to be hired as soon as peter comes home." "is that all? but surely that is very natural. for my part, i have often wondered why none of you ever cared to go to london, if only for your shopping. i am very fond of a trip to town myself, now and then, for a few days." "a few days, it seems, would not suffice our cousin john's notions. he is pleased to think peter may require skilled medical attendance; and, since he wrote he was in rags, a new outfit. these, it seems, can only be obtained in the metropolis nowadays. my brother's tailor still lives in exeter; and with all his faults--and nobody can dislike him more than i do--i have never heard it denied that dr. blundell is a skilful apothecary." "_very_ skilful," added miss crewys. "you remember, isabella, how quickly he put your poor little fido out of his agony." "that is nothing; all doctors understand animals' illnesses. they kill numbers of guinea-pigs before they are allowed to try their hands on human beings," said lady belstone. "the point is, that if my poor brother timothy had not been mad enough to go to london, he would have been alive at this moment. i have never heard of dr. blundell finding it necessary--much as i detest the man--to perform an operation on anybody." "apart from this painful subject, my dear lady," murmured the canon, "i presume it is only a furnished house that lady mary contemplates?" "during all the years of his married life sir timothy never hired a furnished house," said miss crewys. "the home of his fathers sufficed him." "she may want a change?" suggested the canon. miss crewys interpreted him literally. "no; she is in the best of health." "better than i have ever seen her, and--and _gayer_" said lady belstone, with emphasis. "people who are gay and bright in disposition are the very ones who--who pine for a little excitement at times," said the courageous canon. "there is so much to be seen and done and heard in london. for instance, as you say--she is passionately fond of music." "she gets plenty. _we_ get more than enough," said miss crewys, grimly. "i mean _good_ music;" then he recollected himself in alarm. "no, no; i don't mean hers is not charming, and mr. john's playing is delightful, but--" "there is an organ in the parish church," said miss crewys, crocheting more busily than ever. "i have heard no complaints of the choir. have you?" "no, no; but--besides music, there are so many other things," he said dismally. "she likes pictures, too." "it does not look like it, canon," said lady belstone, sorrowfully. she waved her handkerchief towards the panelled walls. "she has removed the family portraits to the lumber-room." "at least the vandyck has never been seen to greater advantage," said the canon, hopefully; "and i hear the gallery upstairs has been restored and supported, to render it safe to walk upon, which will enable you to take pleasure in the fine pictures there." "i am sadly afraid that it is not pictures that poor mary hankers after, but _theatres_," said miss crewys. "john has persuaded her, if persuasion was needed, which i take leave to doubt, that there is nothing improper in visiting such places. my dear brother thought otherwise." "you know i do not share your opinions on that point," said the canon. "though not much of a theatre-goer myself, still--" "a widow at the theatre!" said lady belstone. "even in the admiral's lifetime i did not go. being a sailor, and _not_ a clergyman," she added sternly, "he frequented such places of amusement. but he said he could not have enjoyed a ballet properly with me looking on. his feelings were singularly delicate." "i am afraid people must be talking about dear mary a good deal, canon," said miss crewys, whisking a ball of wool from the floor to her knee with much dexterity. her keen eyes gleamed at her visitor through her spectacles, though her fingers never stopped for a moment. "i hope not. i've heard nothing." "my experience of men," said lady belstone, "is that they never _do_ hear anything. but a widow cannot be too cautious in her behaviour. all eyes are fixed, i know not why, upon a widow," she added modestly. "we do our best to guard dear mary's reputation," said miss crewys. the impetuous canon sprang to his feet with a half-uttered exclamation; then recollecting the age and temperament of the speaker, he checked himself and tried to laugh. "i do not know," he said, "who has said, or ever could say, one single word against that--against our dear and sweet lady mary. but if there _is_ any one, i can only say that such word had better not be uttered in my presence, that's all." "dear me, canon birch, you excite yourself very unnecessarily," said lady belstone, with assumed surprise. "you are just confirming our suspicions." "what suspicions?" almost shouted the canon, "that our dear lady mary's extraordinary partiality for our cousin john has _not_ escaped the observation of a censorious world." "though we have done our best never to leave him alone with her for a single moment," interpolated miss crewys. the canon turned rather pale. "there can be no question of censure," he said. "lady mary is a very charming and beautiful woman. who could dare to blame her if she contemplated such a step as--as a second marriage?" "a second marriage! we said nothing of a second marriage," said lady belstone, sharply. "you go a great deal too fast, canon. luckily, our poor mary is debarred from any such act of folly. i have no patience with widows who re-marry." "debarred from a second marriage!" "is it possible you don't know?" the sisters exchanged meaning glances. he looked from one to the other in bewilderment. "if our sister-in-law remarries," said miss crewys, "she forfeits the whole of her jointure." "is that all?" he cried. "is that all!" echoed miss crewys, much offended. "it is no less than two thousand a year. in my opinion, far too heavy a charge on poor peter's estate." "no man with any self-respect," said lady belstone, "would desire to marry a widow without a jointure. i should have formed a low opinion, indeed, of any gentleman who asked _me_ to marry him without first making sure that the admiral had provided for me as he ought, and as he _has_." the canon, though mentally echoing the sentiment with much warmth, thought it wiser to change the topic of conversation. experience had taught him to discredit most of the assumptions of lady mary's sisters-in-law, where she was concerned, and he rose in hope of effecting his escape without further ado. "i believe i am to meet mr. crewys at luncheon," he said, "and with your permission i will stroll out into the grounds, and look him up. he told me where he was to be found." "he is to be found all over the place. he seizes every opportunity of coming down here. i cannot believe in his making so much money in london, when he manages to get away so often. as for mary, you know her way of inviting people to lunch, and then going out for a walk, or up to her room, as likely as not. but i suppose she will be down directly, if you like to wait here," said lady belstone, who had plenty more to say. "i should be glad of a turn before luncheon," said the canon, who had no mind to hear it. "and there is an hour and a half yet. you lunch at two? i came straight from the school-house, as lady mary suggested. i wanted to have a look at the improvements." "sarah hewel is coming to lunch," said miss crewys. "i cannot say we approve of her, since she has been out so much in london, and become such a notorious young person." "it's very odd to me," said the canon, benevolently, "little sarah growing up into a fashionable beauty. i often see her name in the papers." "she is exactly the kind of person to attract our cousin john, who is quite foolish about her red hair. in my young days, red hair was just a misfortune like any other," said miss crewys. "dr. blundell is lunching here also, i need hardly say. since my dear brother's death we keep open house." "it used not to be the fashion to encourage country doctors to be tame cats," said lady belstone, viciously; "but he pretends to like the innovations, and gets round young john; and inquires after peter, and pleases mary." "ay, ay; it will be a great moment for her when the boy comes back. a great moment for you all," said the canon, absently. he stood with his back to the tall leather screen which guarded the entrance to the hall, and did not hear the gentle opening of the great door. "i trust," said miss crewys, "that we are not a family prone to display weak emotion even on the most trying occasions." "to be sure not," said the canon, disconcerted; "still, i cannot think of it myself without a little--a great deal--of thankfulness for his preservation through this terrible war, now so happily ended. and to think the boy should have earned so much distinction for himself, and behaved so gallantly. god bless the lad! you are well aware," said the canon, blowing his nose, "that i have always been fond of peter." "thank you, canon," said peter. for a moment no one was sure that it was peter, who had come so quietly round the great screen and into the hall, though he stood somewhat in the shadow still. a young man, looking older than his age, and several inches taller than peter had been when he went away; a young man deeply tanned, and very wiry and thin in figure; with a brown, narrow face, a dark streak of moustache, a long nose, and a pair of grey eyes rendered unfamiliar by an eyeglass, which was an ornament peter had not worn before his departure. the old ladies sat motionless, trembling with the shock; but the canon seized the hand which peter held out, and, scarcely noticing that it was his left hand, shook it almost madly in both his own. "peter! good heavens, peter!" he cried, and the tears ran unheeded down his plump, rosy cheeks. "peter, my boy, god bless you! welcome home a thousand thousand times!" "peter!" gasped lady belstone. "is it possible?" "why, he's grown into a man," said miss crewys, showing symptoms of an inclination to become hysterical. peter was aghast at the commotion, and came hurriedly forward to soothe his agitated relatives. "is this your boasted self-command, georgina?" said lady belstone, weeping. "we cannot always be consistent, isabella. it was the unexpected joy," sobbed miss crewys. "peter! your _arm_!" screamed lady belstone and she fell back almost fainting upon the sofa. peter stood full in the light now, and they saw that he had lost his right arm. the empty sleeve was pinned to his breast. his aunt tottered towards him. "my poor boy!" she sobbed. "oh, that's all right," said peter, in rather annoyed tones. "i can use my left hand perfectly well. i hardly notice it now." something in the tone of this speech caused his aunts to exclaim simultaneously-- "dear boy, he has not changed one bit!" "you never told us, peter," said the canon, huskily. "i didn't want a fuss," peter said, very simply, "so i just got the newspaper chap to cork it down about my being shot in the arm, without any details. it had to be amputated first thing, as a matter of fact." "it has given your aunt georgina and me a terrible shock," said lady belstone, faintly. "you can't expect a fellow who has been invalided home to turn up without a single scratch," said peter, in rather surly tones. "how like his father!" said miss crewys. "besides, you know very well my mother would have tormented herself to death if i had told her," said peter. "i want her to see with her own eyes how perfectly all right i am before she knows anything about it." "it was a noble thought," said the canon. "where is she?" demanded peter. he seemed about to cross the hall to the staircase but the canon detained him. "oughtn't some one to prepare her?" "oh, joy never kills," said peter. "she's quite well, isn't she?" "quite well." "very well _indeed_" said miss crewys, with emphasis that seemed to imply lady mary was better than she had any need to be. "i have never," said the canon, with a nervous side-glance at peter, "seen her look so well, nor so--so lovely, nor so--so brilliant. only your return was needed to complete--her happiness." peter looked at the canon through his newly acquired eyeglass with some slight surprise. "well," he said, "i wouldn't telegraph. i wanted to slip home quietly, that's the fact; or i knew the place would be turned upside down to receive me." "the people are preparing a royal welcome for you," said the canon, warmly. "banners, music, processions, addresses, and i don't know what." "that's awful rot!" said peter. "tell them i hate banners and music and addresses, and everything of the kind." "no, no, my dear boy," said the canon, in rather distressed tones. "don't say that, peter, pray. you must think of _their_ feelings, you know. there's hardly one of them who hasn't sent somebody to the war; son or brother or sweetheart. and all that's left for--for those who stay behind--not always the least hard thing to do for a patriot, peter--is to honour, as far as they can, each one who returns. they work off some of their accumulated feelings that way, you know; and in their rejoicings they do not forget those who, alas! will never return any more." there was a pause; and peter remained silent, embarrassed by the canon's emotion, and not knowing very well how to reply. "there, there," said the canon, saving him the trouble; "we can discuss it later. you are thinking of your mother now." as he spoke, they all heard lady mary's voice in the corridor above. she was humming a song, and as she neared the open staircase the words of her song came very distinctly to their ears-- _entends tu ma pensée qui le réspond tout bas_? _ton doux chant me rappelle les plus beaux de mes jours_. "my mother's voice," said peter, in bewildered accents; and he dropped his eyeglass. the canon showed a presence of mind that seldom distinguished him. he hurried away the old ladies, protesting, into the drawing-room, and closed the door behind him. peter scarcely noticed their absence. _ah! le rire fidèle prouve un coeur sans détours, ah! riez, riez--ma belle--riez, riez toujours_, sang lady mary. "i never heard my mother sing before," said peter. chapter xi lady mary came down the oak staircase singing. the white draperies of her summer gown trailed softly on the wide steps, and in her hands she carried a quantity of roses. a black ribbon was bound about her waist, and seemed only to emphasize the slenderness of her form. her brown hair was waved loosely above her brow; it was not much less abundant, though much less bright, than in her girlhood. the freshness of youth had gone for ever; but her loveliness had depended less upon that radiant colouring which had once been hers than upon her clear-cut features, and exquisitely shaped head and throat. her blue eyes looked forth from a face white and delicate as a shell cameo, beneath finely pencilled brows; but they shone now with a new hopefulness--a timid expectancy of happiness; they were no longer pensive and downcast as peter had known them best. the future had been shrouded by a heavy mist of hopelessness always--for lady mary. but the fog had lifted, and a fair landscape lay before her. not bright, alas! with the brightness and the promise of the morning-time; but yet--there are sunny afternoons; and the landscape was bright still, though long shadows from the past fell across it. peter saw only that his mother, for some extraordinary reason, looked many years younger than when he had left her, and that she had exchanged her customary dull, old-fashioned garb for a beautiful and becoming dress. he gave an involuntary start, and immediately she perceived him. she stretched out her arms to him with a cry that rang through the rafters of the hall. the roses were scattered. "my boy! o god, my darling boy!" in the space of a flash--a second--lady mary had seen and understood. her arms were round him, and her face hidden upon his empty sleeve. she was as still as death. peter stooped his head and laid his cheek against her hair; he felt for one fleeting moment that he had never known before how much he loved his mother. "forgive me for keeping it dark, mother," he whispered presently; "but i knew you'd think i was dying, or something, if i told you. it had to be done, and i don't care--much--now; one gets used to anything. my aunts nearly had a fit when i came in; but i knew _you'd_ be too thankful to get me home safe and sound, to make a fuss over what can't be helped. it's--it's just the fortune of war." "oh, if i could meet the man who did it!" she cried, with fire in her blue eyes. "it wasn't a man; it was a gun," said peter. "let's forget it. i say--doesn't it feel rummy to be at home again?" "but you have come back a man, peter. not a boy at all," said lady mary, laughing through her tears. "do let me look at you. you must be six feet three, surely." "barely six feet one in my boots," said peter, reprovingly. "and you have a moustache--more or less." "of course i have a moustache," said peter, gravely stroking it. he mechanically replaced his eyeglass. lady mary laughed till she cried. "do forgive me, darling. but oh, peter, it seems so strange. my boy grown into a tall gentleman with an eyeglass. nothing has happened to your eye?" she cried, in sudden anxiety. "no, no; i am just a little short-sighted, that is all," he mumbled, rather awkwardly. he found it difficult to explain that he had travelled home with a distinguished man who had captivated his youthful fancy, and caused him to fall into a fit of hero-worship, and to imitate his idol as closely as possible. hence the eyeglass, and a few harmless mannerisms which temporarily distinguished peter, and astonished his previous acquaintance. but there was something else in peter's manner, too, for the moment. a new tenderness, which peeped through his old armour of sulky indifference; the chill armour of his boyhood, which had grown something too strait and narrow for him even now, and from which he would doubtless presently emerge altogether--but not yet. though lady mary laughed, she was trembling and shaken with emotion. peter came to the sofa and knelt beside her there, and she took his hand in both hers, and laid her face upon it, and they were very still for a few moments. "mother dear," said peter presently, without looking at her, "coming home like this, and not finding my father here, makes me _realize_ for the first time--though it's all so long ago--what's happened." "my poor boy!" "poor mother! you must have been terribly lonely all this time i've been away." "i've longed for your return, my darling," said lady mary. her tone was embarrassed, but peter did not notice that. "you see--i went away a boy, but i've come back a man, as you said just now," said peter. "you're still very young, my darling--not one-and-twenty," she said fondly. "i'm older than my age; and i've been through a lot; more than you'd think, all this time i've been away. i dare say it hasn't seemed so long to you, who've had no experiences to go through," he said simply. she kissed him silently. "now just listen, mother dear," said peter, firmly. "i made up my mind to say something to you the very first minute i saw you, and it's got to be said. i'm sorry i used to be such a beast to you--there." "oh, peter!" "i dare say," said peter, "that it's all this rough time in south africa that's made me feel what a fool i used to make of myself, when i was a discontented ass of a boy; that, or being ill, or something, used to--make one think a bit. and that's why i made up my mind to tell you. i know i used to disappoint you horribly, and be bored by your devotion, and all that. but you'll see," said peter, decidedly, "that i mean to be different now; and you'll forgive me, won't you?" "my darling, i forgave you long ago--if there was anything to forgive," she cried, "you know there was," said peter; and he sounded like the boy peter again, now that she could not see his face. "well, my soldiering's done for." a faint note of regret sounded in his voice. "i had a good bout, so i suppose i oughtn't to complain; but i had hoped--however, it's all for the best. and there's no doubt," said peter, "that my duty lies here now. in a very few months i shall be my own master, and i mean to keep everything going here exactly as it was in my father's time. you shall devote yourself to me, and i'll devote myself to barracombe; and we'll just settle down into all the old ways. only it will be me instead of my father--that's all." "you instead of your father--that's all," echoed lady mary. she felt as though her mind had suddenly become a blank. "i used to rebel against poor papa," said peter, remorsefully. "but now i look back, i know he was just the kind of man i should like to be." she kissed his hand in silence. her face was hidden. "i want you--and my aunts, to feel that, though i am young and inexperienced, and all that," said peter, tenderly, "there are to be no changes." "but, peter," said his mother, rather tremulously, "there are--sure to be--changes. you will want to marry, sooner or later. in your position, you are almost bound to marry." "oh, of course," said peter. he released his hand gently, in order to stroke the cherished moustache. "but i shall put off the evil day as long as possible, like my father did." "i see," said lady mary. she smiled faintly. "and when it _does_ arrive," said peter, "my wife will just have to understand that she comes second. i've no notion of being led by the nose by any woman, particularly a young woman. i'm sure my father never dreamt of putting his sisters on one side, or turning them out of their place, when he married _you_, did he?" "never," said lady mary. "of course they were snappish at times. i suppose all old people get like that. but, on the whole, you managed to jog along pretty comfortably, didn't you?" "oh yes," said lady mary. "we jogged along pretty comfortably." "then don't you see how snug we shall be?" said peter, triumphantly. "i can tell you a fellow learns to appreciate home when he has been without one, so to speak, for over two years. and home wouldn't be home without you, mother dear." lady mary sank suddenly back among the cushions. her feelings were divided between dismay and self-reproach. yet she was faintly amused too--amused at peter and herself. her boy had returned to her with sentiments that were surely all that a mother could desire; and yet--yet she felt instinctively that peter was peter still; that his thoughts were not her thoughts, nor his ways her ways. then the self-reproach began to predominate in lady mary's mind. how could she criticize her boy, her darling, who had proved himself a son to be proud of, and who had come back to her with a heart so full of love and loyalty? "and _you_ couldn't live without _me_, could you?" said peter, affectionately; and he laughed. "i suppose you meant to go into that little, damp, tumble-down dower house, and watch over me from there; now didn't you, mummy?" "i--i thought, when you came of age," faltered lady mary, "that i should give up barracombe house to you, naturally. i could come and stay with you sometimes--whether you were married or not, you know. and--and, of course, the dower house _does_ belong to me." "i won't hear of your going there," said peter, stoutly, "whether i'm married or not. it's a beastly place." "it's very picturesque," said lady mary, guiltily; "and i--i wasn't thinking of living there all the year round." "why, where on earth else could you have gone?" he demanded, regarding her with astonishment through the eyeglass. "there are several places--london," she faltered. "london!" said peter; "but my father had a perfect horror of london. he wouldn't have liked it at all." "he belonged--to the old school," said lady mary, meekly; "to younger people, perhaps--an occasional change might be pleasant and profitable." "oh! to _younger_ people," said peter, in mollified tones. "i don't say i shall _never_ run up to london. i dare say i shall be obliged, now and then, on business. not often though. i hate absentee landlords, as my father did." "travelling is said to open the mind," murmured lady mary, weakly pursuing her argument, as she supposed it to be. "i've seen enough of the world now to last me a lifetime," said peter, in sublime unconsciousness that any fate but his own could be in question. "i didn't think you would have changed so much as this, peter," she said, rather dismally. "you used to find this place so dull." "i know i used," peter agreed; "but oh, mother, if you knew how sick i've been now and then with longing to get back to it! i made up my mind a thousand times how it should all be when i came home again; and that you and me would be everything in the world to each other, as you used to wish when i was a selfish boy, thinking only of getting away and being independent. i'm afraid i used to be rather selfish, mother?" "perhaps you were--a little," said lady mary. "you will never have to complain of _that_ again," said peter. she looked at him with a faint, pathetic smile. "i shall take care of you, and look after you, just as my father used to do," said peter. "now you rest quietly here"--and he gently laid her down among the cushions on the sofa--"whilst i take a look round the old place." "let me come with you, darling." "good heavens, no! i should tire you to death. my father never liked you to go climbing about." "i am much more active than i used to be," said lady mary. "no, no; you must lie down, you look quite pale." peter's voice took an authoritative note, which came very naturally to him. "the sudden joy of my return has been too much for you, poor old mum." he leant over her fondly, and kissed the sweet, pale face, and then regarded her in a curious, doubtful manner. "you're changed, mother. i can't think what it is. isn't your hair done differently--or something?" poor lady mary lifted both hands to her head, and looked at him with something like alarm in her blue eyes. "is it? perhaps it is," she faltered. "don't you like it, peter?" "i like the old way best," said peter. "but this is so much more becoming, peter." "a fellow doesn't care," said peter, loftily, "whether his mother's hair is becoming or not. he likes to see her always the same as when he was a little chap." "it is--sweet of you, to have such a thought," murmured lady mary. she took her courage in both hands. "but the other way is out of fashion, peter." "why, mother, you never used to follow the fashions before i went away; you won't begin now, at your age, will you?" "_at my age_" repeated lady mary, blankly. then she looked at him with that wondering, pathetic smile, which seemed to have replaced already, since peter came home, the joyousness which had timidly stolen back from her vanished youth. "at my age!" said lady mary; "you are not very complimentary, peter." "you don't expect a fellow to pay compliments to his mother," said peter, staring at her. "why, mother, what has come to you? and besides--" "besides?" "i'm sure papa hated compliments, and all that sort of rot," peter blurted out, in boyish fashion. "don't you remember how fond he was of quoting, 'praise to the face is open disgrace'?" the late sir timothy, like many middle-class people, had taken a compliment almost as a personal offence; and regarded the utterer, however gracious or sincere, with suspicion. neither had the squire himself erred on the side of flattering his fellow-creatures. "oh yes, i remember," said lady mary; and she rose from the sofa. "why, what's the matter?" asked peter. "i haven't vexed you, have i?" she turned impetuously and threw her arms round him as he stood by the hearth, gazing down upon her in bewilderment. "vexed with my boy, my darling, my only son, on the very day when god has given him back to me?" she cried passionately. "my poor wounded boy, my hero! oh no, no! but i want only love from you to-day, and no reproaches, peter." "why, i wasn't dreaming of reproaching you, mother." he hesitated. "only you're a bit different from what i expected--that's all." "have i disappointed you?" "no, no! only i--well, i thought i might find you changed, but in a different way," he said, half apologetically. "perhaps older, you know, or--or sadder." lady mary's white face flushed scarlet from brow to chin; but peter, occupied with his monocle, observed nothing. "i'd prepared myself for that," he said, "and to find you all in black. and--" "i threw off my mourning," she murmured, "the very day i heard you were coming home." she paused, and added hurriedly, "it was very thoughtless. i'm sorry; i ought to have thought of your feelings, my darling." "aunt isabella has never changed hers, has she?" said peter. "aunt isabella is a good deal more conventional than i am; and a great many years older," said lady mary, tremulously. "i don't see what that has to do with it," said peter. she turned away, and began to gather up her scattered roses. a few moments since the roses had been less than nothing to her. what were roses, what was anything, compared to peter? now they crept back into their own little place in creation; their beauty and fragrance dumbly conveyed a subtle comfort to her soul, as she lovingly laid one against another, until a glowing bouquet of coppery golden hue was formed. she lifted an ewer from the old dresser, and poured water into a great silver goblet, wherein she plunged the stalks of her roses. why should they be left to fade because peter had come home? "you remember these?" she said, "from the great climber round my bedroom window? i leant out and cut them--little thinking--" peter signified a gloomy assent. he stood before the chimneypiece watching his mother, but not offering to help her; rather as though undecided as to what his next words ought to be. "peter, darling, it's so funny to see you standing there, so tall, and so changed--" but though it was so funny the tears were dropping from her blue eyes, which filled and overflowed like a child's, without painful effort or grimaces. "you--you remind me so of your father," she said, almost involuntarily. "i'm glad i'm like him," said peter. she sighed. "how i used to wish you were a little tiny bit like me too!" "but i'm not, am i?" "no, you're not. not one tiny bit," she answered wistfully. "but you do love me, peter?" "haven't i proved i love you?" said peter; and she perceived that his feelings were hurt. "coming back, and--and thinking only of you, and--and of never leaving you any more. why, mother"--for in an agony of love and remorse she was clinging to him and sobbing, with her face pressed against his empty sleeve--"why, mother," peter repeated, in softened tones, "of course i love you." the drawing-room door was cautiously opened, and peter's aunts came into the hall on tiptoe, followed by the canon. "ah, i thought so," said lady belstone, in the self-congratulatory tones of the successful prophet, "it has been too much for poor mary. she has been overcome by the joy of dear peter's return." chapter xii "try my salts, dear mary," said miss crewys, hastening to apply the remedies which were always to be found in her black velvet reticule. "i blame myself," said the canon, distressfully--"i blame myself. i should have insisted on breaking the news to her gently." lady mary smiled upon them all. "on the contrary," she said, "i was offering, not a moment ago, to take peter round and show him the improvements. we have been so much occupied with each other that he has not had time to look round him." "i wish he may think them improvements, my love," said lady belstone. miss crewys, joyously scenting battle, hastened to join forces with her sister. "we are far from criticizing any changes your dear mother may have been induced to make," she said; "but as your aunt isabella has frequently observed to me, what _can_ a londoner know of landscape gardening?" "a londoner?" said peter. "your guardian, my boy," said the canon, nervously. "he has slightly opened out the views; that is all your good aunt is intending to say." peter's good aunt opened her mouth to contradict this assertion indignantly, but lady mary broke in with some impatience. "i do not mean the trees. of course the house was shut in far too closely by the trees at the back and sides. we wanted more air, more light, more freedom." she drew a long breath and flung out her hands in unconscious illustration. "but there are many very necessary changes that--that peter will like to see," said lady mary, glancing almost defiantly at the pursed-up mouths and lowered eyelids of the sisters. peter walked suddenly into the middle of the banqueting-hall and looked round him. "why, what's come to the old place? it's--it's changed somehow. what have you been doing to it?" he demanded. "don't you--don't you like it, peter?" faltered lady mary. "the roof was not safe, you know, and had to be mended, and--and when it was all done up, the furniture and curtains looked so dirty and ugly and inappropriate. i sent them away and brought down some of the beautiful old things that belonged to your great-grandmother, and made the hall brighter and more livable." peter examined the new aspect of his domain with lowering brow. "i don't like it at all," he announced, finally. "i hate changes." the sisters breathed again. "so like his father!" their allegiance to sir timothy had been transferred to his heir. "your guardian approved," said lady mary. she turned proudly away, but she could not keep the pain altogether out of her voice. neither would she stoop to solicit peter's approval before her rejoicing opponents. "mr. john crewys is a very great connoisseur," said the canon. he taxed his memory for corroborative evidence, and brought out the result with honest pride. "i believe, curiously enough, that he spends most of his spare time at the british museum." lady mary's lip quivered with laughter in the midst of her very real distress and mortification. but the argument appeared to the canon a most suitable one, and he was further encouraged by peter's reception of it. "if my guardian approves, i suppose it's all right," said the young man, with an effort. "my father left all that sort of thing in his hands, i understand, and he knew what he was doing. i say, where's that great vase of wax flowers that used to stand on the centre table under a glass shade?" "darling," said lady mary, "it jarred so with the whole scheme of decoration." "i am taking care of that in my room, peter," said miss crewys. "and the stuffed birds, and the weasels, and the ferrets that i was so fond of when i was a little chap. you don't mean to say you've done away with those too?" cried peter, wrathfully. "they--they are in the gun-room," said lady mary. "it seemed such a--such--an appropriate place for them." "i believe," said the canon, nervously, "that stuffing is no longer considered decorative. after all, _why_ should we place dead animals in our sitting-rooms?" he looked round with the anxious smile of the would-be peacemaker. "they were very much worm-eaten, peter," said lady mary. "but if you would like them brought back--" perhaps the pain in her voice penetrated even peter's perception, for he glanced hastily towards her. "it doesn't matter," he said magnanimously. "if you and my guardian decided they were rotten, there's an end of it. of course i'd rather have things as they used to be; but after all this time, i expect there's bound to be a few changes." he turned from the contemplation of the hall to face his relatives squarely, with the air of an autocrat who had decreed that the subject was at an end. "by-the-by," said peter, "where _is_ john crewys? they told me he was stopping here." "he will be in directly," said lady mary, "and sarah hewel ought to be here presently too. she is coming to luncheon." "sarah!" said peter. "i should like to see her again. is she still such a rum little toad? always getting into scrapes, and coming to you for comfort?" "i think," said lady mary, and her blue eyes twinkled--"i think you may be surprised to see little sarah. she is grown up now." "of course," said peter. "she's only a year younger than i am." lady mary wondered why peter's way of saying _of course_ jarred upon her so much. he had always been brusque and abrupt; it was the family fashion. was it because she had grown accustomed to the tactful and gentle methods of john crewys that it seemed to have become suddenly such an intolerable fashion? sir timothy had quite honestly believed tactfulness to be a form of insincerity. he did not recognize it as the highest outward expression of self-control. but lady mary, since she had known john crewys, knew also that it is consideration for the feelings of others which causes the wise man to order his speech carefully. the canon shook his head when peter stated that miss hewel was his junior by a twelvemonth. "she might be ten years older," he said, in awe-struck tones. "i have always heard that women were extraordinarily adaptable, but i never realized it before. however, to be sure, she has seen a good deal more of the world than you have. more than most of us, though in such a comparatively short space of time. but she is one in a thousand for quickness." "seen more of the world than i have?" said peter, astonished. "why, i've been soldiering in south africa for over two years." "i don't think soldiering brings much worldly wisdom in its train. i should be rather sorry to think it did," said lady mary, gently. "but sarah has been with lady tintern all this while." "a very worldly woman, indeed, from all i have heard," said miss crewys, severely. "but a very great lady," said lady mary, "who knows all the famous people, not only in england, but in europe. the daughter of a viceroy, and the wife of a man who was not only a peer, and a great landowner, but also a distinguished ambassador. and she has taken sarah everywhere, and the child is an acknowledged beauty in london and paris. lady tintern is delighted with her, and declares she has taken the world by storm." "we never thought her a beauty down here," said peter, rather contemptuously. "perhaps we did not appreciate her sufficiently down here," said lady mary, smiling. "why, who is she, after all?" cried peter. "a very beautiful and self-possessed young woman, and lady tintern's niece, 'whom not to know argues yourself unknown,'" said lady mary, laughing outright. "john says people were actually mobbing her picture in the academy; he could not get near it." "i mean," said peter, almost sulkily, "that she's only old colonel hewel's daughter, whom we've known all our lives." "perhaps one is in danger of undervaluing people one has known all one's life," said lady mary, lightly. peter muttered something to the effect that he was sorry to hear sarah had grown up like that; but his words were lost in the tumultuous entry of dr. blundell, who pealed the front door bell, and rushed into the hall, almost simultaneously. his dark face was flushed and enthusiastic. he came straight to peter, and held out his hand. "a thousand welcomes, sir peter. lady mary, i congratulate you. i came up in my dog-cart as fast as possible, to let you know the people are turning out _en masse_ to welcome you. they're assembling at the crewys arms, and going to hurry up to the house in a regular procession, band and all." "we're proud of our young hero, you see," said the canon; and he laid his hand affectionately on peter's shoulder. "you will have to say a few words to them," said lady mary. "must i?" said the hero. "let's go out on the terrace and see what's going on. we can watch them the whole way up." he opened the door into the south drawing-rooms; and through the open windows there floated the distant strains of the village band. "canon, your arm," said lady belstone. lady mary and her son had hastened out on to the terrace. the old ladies paused in the doorway; they were particular in such matters. "i believe i take precedence, georgina," said lady belstone, apologetically. "i am far from disputing it, isabella," said miss crewys, drawing back with great dignity. "you are the elder." "age does not count in these matters. i take precedence, as a married woman. will you bring up the rear, georgina, as my poor admiral would have said?" miss crewys bestowed a parting toss of the head upon the doctor, and followed her victorious sister. the doctor laughed silently to himself, standing in the pretty shady drawing-room; now gay with flowers, and chintz, and dresden china. "i wonder if she would not have been even more annoyed with my presumption if i _had_ offered her my arm," he said to himself, amusedly, "than she is offended by my neglect to do so?" he did not follow the others into the blinding sunshine of the terrace. he had had a long morning's work, and was hot and tired. he looked at his watch. "past one o'clock; h'm! we are lucky if we get anything to eat before half-past two. all the servants have run out, of course. no use ringing for whisky and seltzer. all the better. but, at least, one can rest." the pleasantness of the room refreshed his spirit. the interior of his own house in brawnton was not much more enticing than the exterior. the doctor had no time to devote to such matters. he sat down very willingly in a big armchair, and enjoyed a moment's quiet in the shade; glancing through the half-closed green shutters at the brilliant picture without. the top level of the terrace garden was carpeted with pattern beds of heliotrope, and lobelia, and variegated foliage. against the faint blue-green of the opposite hill rose the grey stone urns on the pillars of the balcony; and from the urns hung trailing ivy geraniums with pink or scarlet blossom, making splashes of colour on the background of grey distance. round the pillars wound large blue clematis, and white passion-flowers. lady mary stood full in the sunshine, which lent once more the golden glory of her vanished youth to her brown hair, and the dazzle of new-fallen snow to her summer gown. close to her side, touching her, stood the young soldier; straight and tall, with uncovered head, towering above the little group. the old sisters had parasols, and the canon wore his shovel hat; but the doctor wasted no time in observing their manifestations of delight and excitement. "so my beautiful lady has got her precious boy back safe and sound, save for his right arm, and doubly precious because that is missing. god bless her a thousand times!" he thought to himself. "but her sweet face looked more sorrowful than joyful when i came in. what had he been saying, i wonder, to make her look like that, _already_?" john crewys entered from the hall. "what's this i hear," he said, in glad tones--"the hero returned?" "ay," said the doctor. "sir timothy is forgotten, and sir peter reigns in his stead." "where is lady mary?" the doctor drew him to the window. "there," he said grimly. "why don't you go out and join her?" "she has her son," said john, smiling. he looked with interest at the group on the terrace; then he started back with an exclamation of horror. "why, good heavens--" "yes," said the doctor quietly, "the poor fellow has lost his right arm." there was a sound of distant cheering, and the band could be heard faintly playing the _conquering hero_. "he said nothing of it," said john. "no; he's a plucky chap, with all his faults." "has he so many faults?" said john. the doctor shook his head. "i'm mistaken if he won't turn out a chip of the old block. though he's better-looking than his father, he's got sir timothy's very expression." "he's turned out a gallant soldier, anyway," said john, cheerily. "don't croak, blundell; we'll make a man of him yet." "please god you may, for his mother's sake," said the doctor; and he returned to his armchair. john crewys stood by the open french window, and drank in the refreshing breeze which fluttered the muslin curtains. his calm and thoughtful face was turned away from the doctor, who knew very well why john's gaze was so intent upon the group without. "shall i warn him, or shall i let it alone?" thought blundell. "i suppose they have been waiting only for this. if that selfish cub objects, as he will--i feel very sure of that--will she be weak enough to sacrifice her happiness, or can i trust john crewys? he looks strong enough to take care of himself, and of her." he looked at john's decided profile, silhouetted against the curtain, and thought of peter's narrow face. "weak but obstinate," he muttered to himself. "shrewd, suspicious eyes, but a receding chin. what chance would the boy have against a man? a man with strength to oppose him, and brains to outwit him. none, save for the one undoubted fact--the boy holds his mother's heart in the hollow of his careless hands." there was a tremendous burst of cheering, no longer distant, and the band played louder. lady mary came hurrying across the terrace. weeping and agitated, and half blinded by her tears, she stumbled over the threshold of the window, and almost fell into john's arms. he drew her into the shadow of the curtain. "john," she cried; she saw no one else. "oh, i can't bear it! oh, peter, peter, my boy, my poor boy!" the doctor, with a swift and noiseless movement, turned the handle of the window next him, and let himself out on to the terrace. when john looked up he was already gone. lady mary did not hear the slight sound. "oh, john," she said, "my boy's come home--but--but--" "i know," john said, very tenderly. "i was afraid of breaking down before them all," she whispered. "peter was afraid i should break down, and i felt my weakness, and came away." "to me," said john. his heart beat strongly. he drew her more closely into his arms, deeply conscious that he held thus, for the first time, all he loved best in the world. "to you," said poor lady mary, very simply; as though aware only of the rest and support that refuge offered, and not of all of its strangeness. "alas! it has grown so natural to come to _you_ now." "it will grow more natural every day," said john. she shook her head. "there is peter now," she said faintly. then, looking into his face, she realized that john was not thinking of peter. for a moment's space lady mary, too, forgot peter. she leant against the broad shoulder of the man who loved her; and felt as though all trouble, and disappointment, and doubt had slidden off her soul, and left her only the blissful certainty of happy rest. then she laid her hand very gently and entreatingly on his arm. "i will not let you go," said john. "you came to me--at last--of your own accord, mary." she coloured deeply and leant away from his arm, looking up at him in distress. "i could not help it, john," she said, very simply and naturally. "but oh, i don't know if i can--if i ought--to come to you any more." "what do you mean?" said john. "i--we--have been thinking of peter as a boy--as the boy he was when he went away," she said, in low, hurrying tones; "but he has come home a man, and, in some ways, altogether different. he never used to want me; he used to think this place dull, and long to get away from it--and from me, for that matter. but now he's--he's wounded, as you know; maimed, my poor boy, for life; and--and he's counting on me to make his home for him. we never thought of that. he says it wouldn't be home without me; and he asked my pardon for being selfish in the past; my poor peter! i used to fear he had such a little, cold heart; but i was all wrong, for when he was so far away he thought of me, and was sorry he hadn't loved me more. he's come home wanting to be everything to me, as i am to be everything to him. and i should have been so glad, so thankful, only two years ago. oh, have i changed so much in two little years?" john put her out of his arms very gently, and walked towards the window. his face was pale, but he still smiled, and his hazel eyes were bright. "you're angry, john," said lady mary, very sweetly and humbly. "you've a right to be angry." "i am not angry," he said gently. "i may be--a little--disappointed." he did not look round. "you know i was too happy," said poor lady mary. she sank into a chair, and covered her face with her hands. "it was wicked of me to be so happy, and now i'm going to be punished for it." john's great heart melted within him. he came swiftly back to her and knelt by her side, and kissed the little hand she gave him. "too happy, were you?" he said, with a tenderness that rendered his deep voice unsteady. "because you promised to marry me when peter came home?" "that, and--and everything else," she whispered. "life seemed to have widened out, and grown so beautiful. all the dull, empty hours were filled. our music, our reading, our companionship, our long walks and talks, our letters to each other--all those pleasures which you showed me were at once so harmless and so delightful. and as if that were not enough--came love. such love as i had only dreamed of--such understanding of each other's every thought and word, as i did not know was possible between man and woman--or at least"--she corrected herself sadly--"between any man and a woman--of my age." "you talk of your age," said john, smiling tenderly, "as though it were a crime." "it is not a crime, but it is a tragedy," said lady mary. "age is a tragedy to every woman who wants to be happy." "no more, surely, than to every man who loves his work, and sees it slipping from his grasp," said john, slowly. "it's a tragedy we all have to face, for that matter." "but so much later," said lady mary, quickly. "i don't see why women should leave off wanting to be happy any sooner than men," he said stoutly. "but nature does," she answered. john's eyes twinkled. "for my part, i am thankful to fate, which caused me to fall in love with a woman only ten years my junior, instead of with a girl young enough to be my daughter. i have gained a companion as well as a wife; and marvellously adaptive as young women are, i am conceited enough to think my ideas have travelled beyond the ideas of most girls of eighteen; and i am not conceited enough to suppose the girl of eighteen would not find me an old fogey very much in the way. let boys mate with girls, say i, and men with women." lady mary smiled in spite of herself. "you know, john, you would argue entirely the other way round if you happened to be in love with--sarah," she said. "to be sure," said john; "it's my trade to argue for the side which retains my services. i am your servant, thank heaven, and not sarah's. and i have no intention of quitting your service," he added, more gravely. "we have settled the question of the future." "the empty future that suddenly grew so bright," said lady mary, dreamily. "do you remember how you talked of--italy?" "where we shall yet spend our honeymoon," said john. "but i believe you liked better to hear of my shabby rooms in london which you meant to share." "of course," she said simply. "i knew i should bring you so little money." "and you thought barristers always lived from hand to mouth, and made no allowance for my having got on in my profession." "ah! what did it matter?" "i think you will find it makes just a little difference," john said, smiling. "outside circumstances make less difference to women than men suppose," said lady mary. "they are, oh, so willing to be pampered in luxury; and, oh, so willing to fly to the other extreme, and do without things." "are they really?" said john, rather dryly. he glanced at the little, soft, white hand he held, and smiled. it looked so unfitted to help itself. lady mary was resting in her armchair, her delicate face still flushed with emotion. a transparent purple shade beneath the blue eyes betrayed that she had been weeping; but she was calmed by john's strong and tranquil presence. the shady room was cool and fragrant with the scent of heliotrope and mignonette. the band had reached a level plateau below the terrace garden, and was playing martial airs to encourage stragglers in the procession, and to give the principal inhabitants of youlestone time to arrive, and to regain their wind after the steep ascent. every time a batch of new arrivals recognized peter's tall form on the terrace, a fresh burst of cheering rose. from all sides of the valley, hurrying figures could be seen approaching barracombe house. the noise and confusion without seemed to increase the sense of quiet within, and the sounds of the gathering crowd made them feel apart and alone together as they had never felt before. "so all our dreams are to be shattered," said john, quietly, "because your prayer has been granted, and peter has come home?" "if you could have heard all he said," she whispered sadly. "he has come home loving me, trusting me, dependent on me, as he has never been before, since his babyhood. don't you see--that even if it breaks my heart, i couldn't fail my boy--just now?" there was a pause, and she regarded him anxiously; her hands were clasped tightly together in the effort to still their trembling, her blue eyes looked imploring. john knew very well that it lay within his powers to make good his claim upon that gentle heart, and enforce his will and her submission to it. but the strongest natures are those which least incline to tyranny; and he had already seen the results of coercion upon that bright and joyous, but timid nature. he knew that her love for him was of the fanciful, romantic, high-flown order; and as such, it appealed to every chivalrous instinct within him. though his love for her was, perhaps, of a different kind, he desired her happiness and her peace of mind, as strongly as he desired her companionship and the sympathy which was to brighten his lonely life. he was silent for a moment, considering how he should act. if love counselled haste, common sense suggested patience. "i couldn't disappoint him now. you see that, john?" said the anxious, gentle voice. "i am afraid i do see it, mary," he said. "our secret must remain our secret for the present." "god bless you, john!" said lady mary, softly. "you always understand." "i am old enough, at least, to know that happiness cannot be attained by setting duty aside," he said, as cheerfully as he could. there was a pause in the music outside, and a voice was heard speaking. john rose and straightened himself. "have you decided what is to be done--what we had best do?" she said timidly. "i am going to prove that a lover can be devoted, and yet perfectly reasonable; in defiance of all tradition to the contrary," he said gaily. "i shall return to town as soon as i can decently get away--probably to-morrow." she uttered a cry. "you are going to leave me?" "i must give place to peter." she came to his side, and clung to his arm as though terrified by the success of her own appeal. "but you'll come back?" "i have to account for my stewardship when peter comes of age in the autumn," he said, smiling down upon her. she was too quick of perception not to know that strength, and courage, too, were needed for the smile wherewith john strove to hide a disappointment too deep for words. he answered the look she gave him; a look which implored forgiveness, understanding, even encouragement. "i'm not yielding a single inch of my claim upon you when the time comes, my darling; only i think, with you, that the time has not come yet. i think peter may reasonably expect to be considered first for the present; and that you should be free to devote your whole attention to him, especially as he has such praiseworthy intentions. we will postpone the whole question until the autumn, when he comes of age; and when i shall, consequently, be able to tackle him frankly, man to man, and not as one having authority and abusing that same," he laughed. "meantime, we must be patient. write often, but not so often as to excite remark; and i shall return in the autumn." "to stay?" "ah!" said john, "that depends on you." he had not meant to be satirical, but the slight inflection of his tone cut lady mary to the heart. her vivid imagination saw her conduct in its worst light: vacillating, feeble, deserting the man she loved at the moment she had led him to expect triumph; dismissing her faithful servant without his reward. then, in a flash, came the other side of the picture--the mother of a grown-up son--a wounded soldier dependent on her love--seeking her personal happiness as though there existed no past memories, no present duties, to hinder the fulfilling of her own belated romance. "oh, john," said lady mary, "tell me what to do? no, no; don't tell me--or i shall do it--and i mustn't." "my darling," he said, "i only tell you to wait." he rallied himself to speak cheerfully, and to bring the life and colour back to her sad, white face. "just at this moment i quite realize i should be a disturbing element, and i am going to get myself out of the way as quickly as politeness permits. and you are to devote yourself to peter, and not to be torn with self-reproach. if we act sensibly, and don't precipitate matters, nobody need have a grievance, and peter and i will be the best of friends in the future, i hope. there is little use in having grown-up wits if we snatch our happiness at the expense of other people's feelings, as young folk so often do." the twinkle in his bright eyes, and the kindly humour of his smile, restored her shaken self-confidence. "oh, john, no one else could ever understand--as you understand. if only peter--" "peter is a boy," said john, "dreaming as a boy dreams, resolving as a boy resolves; and his dreams and his resolutions are as light as thistledown: the first breath of a new fancy, or a fresh interest, will blow them away. i put my faith in the future, in the near future. time works wonders." he stooped and kissed her hands, one after the other, with a possessive tenderness that told her better than words, that he had not resigned his claims. "now i'll go and offer my congratulations to the hero of the day," said john. "i must not put off any longer; and it is quite settled that our secret is to remain our secret--for the present." then he stepped out on to the terrace, and lady mary looked after him with a little sigh and smile. she lifted a hand-mirror from the silver table that stood at her elbow, and shook her head over it. "it's all very well for him, and it's all very well for peter," she said; "but time--time is _my_ worst enemy." chapter xiii sarah hewel ran into the drawing-room before lady mary found courage to put her newly gained composure to the test, by joining the crowd on the terrace. "oh, lady mary, are you there?" she cried, pausing in her eager passage to the window. "i thought you would be out-of-doors with the others!" "sarah, my dear!" said lady mary, kissing her. "i--i saw all the people," said sarah, in a breathless, agitated way, "i heard the news, and i wasn't sure whether i ought to come to luncheon all the same or not; so i slipped in by the side door to see whether i could find some one to ask quietly. oh!" cried sarah, throwing her arms impetuously round lady mary's neck, "tell me it isn't true?" "my boy has come home," said lady mary. sarah turned from red to white, and from white to red again. "but they said," she faltered--"they said he--" "yes, my dear," said lady mary, understanding; and the tears started to her own eyes. "peter has lost an arm, but otherwise--otherwise," she said, in trembling tones, "my boy is safe and sound." sarah turned away her face and cried. lady mary was touched. "why, sarah!" she said; and she drew the girl down beside her on the sofa and kissed her softly. "i am sorry to be so silly," said sarah, recovering herself. "it isn't a bit like me, is it?" "it is like you, i think, to have a warm heart," said lady mary, "though you don't show it to every one; and, after all, you and peter are old friends--playmates all your lives." "it's been like a lump of lead on my heart all these months and years," said sarah, "to think how i scoffed at peter in the christmas holidays before he went to the war, because my brothers had gone, whilst he stayed at home. perhaps that was the reason he went. i used to lie awake at night sometimes, thinking that if peter were killed it would be all my fault. and now his arm has gone--and tom and willie came back safely long ago." she cried afresh. "it may not have been that at all," said lady mary, consolingly. "i don't think peter was a boy to take much notice of what a goose of a little girl said. he felt he was a man, and ought to go--and his grandfather was a soldier--it is in the blood of the setouns to want to fight for their country," said lady mary, with a smile and a little thrill of pride; for, after all, if her boy were a crewys, he was also a setoun. "besides, poor child, you were so young; you didn't think; you didn't know--" "you always make excuses for me," said sarah, with subdued enthusiasm; "but i understand better now what it means--to send an only son away from his mother." "the young take responsibility so lightly," said lady mary. "but now he has come home, my darling, why, you needn't reproach yourself any longer. it is good of you to care so much for my boy." "it--it isn't only that. of course, i was always fond of peter," said sarah; "but even if i had nothing to do with his going"--her voice sounded incredulous--"you know how one feels over our soldiers coming home--and a boy who has given his right arm for england. it makes one so choky and yet so proud--i can't say all i mean--but you know--" "yes, i know," said lady mary; and she smiled, but the tears were rolling down her cheeks. "and what it must be to _you_," sobbed sarah, "the day you were to have been so happy, to see him come back like _that_! no wonder you are sad. one feels one could never do enough to--to make it up to him." "but i'm far more happy than sad," said lady mary; and to prove her words she leant back upon the cushions and cried. "you're not," said sarah, kneeling by her; "how can you be, my darling, sweet lady mary? but you _must_ be happy," she said; and her odd, deep tones took a note of coaxing that was hard to resist. "think how proud every one will be of him, and how--how all the other mothers will envy you! you--you mustn't care so terribly. it--it isn't as if he had to work for his living. it won't make any real difference to his life. and he'll let you do everything for him--even write his letters--" "oh, sarah, sarah, stop!" said lady mary, faintly. "it--it isn't that." "not that!" said sarah, changing her tone. she pounced on the admission like a cat on a mouse. "then why do you cry?" lady mary looked up confused into the severely inquiring young face. sarah's apple-blossom beauty, as was to have been expected, had increased a thousand-fold since her school girl days. she had grown tall to match the plumpness of her figure, which had not decreased. her magnificent hair showed its copper redness in every variety of curl and twist upon her white forehead, and against her whiter throat. she was no longer dressed in blue cotton. lady tintern knew how to give such glorious colouring its true value. a gauzy, transparent black flowed over a close-fitting white gown beneath, and veiled her fair arms and neck. black bébé ribbon gathered in coquettishly the folds which shrouded sarah's abundant charms, and a broad black sash confined her round young waist. a black chip hat shaded the glowing hair and the face, "ruddier than the cherry, and whiter than milk;" and the merry, dark blue eyes had a penthouse of their own, of drooping lashes, which redeemed the boldness of their frank and open gaze. "if it is not that--why do you cry?" she demanded imperiously. "it's--just happiness," said lady mary. sarah looked wise, and shook her head. "oh no," she quoth. "those aren't happy tears." "you're too old, dear sarah, to be an _enfant terrible_ still," said lady mary; but sarah was not so easily disarmed. "i will know! come, i'm your godchild, and you always spoil me. he's not come back in one of his moods, has he?" "who?" cried lady mary, colouring. "who! why, who are we talking of but peter?" said sarah, opening her big-pupilled eyes. "oh no, no! he's changed entirely--" "changed!" "i don't mean exactly changed, but he's--he's grown so loving and so sweet--not that he wasn't always loving in his heart, but-- "oh," cried sarah, impatiently, "as if i didn't know peter! but if it wasn't _that_ which made you so unhappy, what was it?" she bent puzzled brows upon her embarrassed hostess. "let me go, sarah; you ask too much!" said lady mary. "oh no, my darling, i'm not angry! how could i be angry with my little loyal sarah, who's always loved me so? it's only that i can't bear to be questioned just now." she caressed the girl eagerly, almost apologetically. "i must have a few moments to recover myself. i'll go quietly away into the study--anywhere. wait for me here, darling, and make some excuse for me if any one comes. i want to be alone for a few moments. peter mustn't find me crying again." "yes--that's all very well," said sarah to herself, as the slight form hurried from the drawing-room into the dark oak hall beyond. "but _why_ is she unhappy? there is something else." it was dr. blundell who found the answer to sarah's riddle. he had seen the signs of weeping on lady mary's face as she stumbled over the threshold of the window into the very arms of john crewys, and his feelings were divided between passionate sympathy with his divinity, and anger with the returned hero, who had no doubt reduced his mother to this distressful state. the doctor was blinded by love and misery, and ready to suspect the whole world of doing injustice to this lady; though he believed himself to be destitute of jealousy, and capable of judging peter with perfect impartiality. his fancy leapt far ahead of fact; and he supposed, not only that lady mary must be engaged to john crewys, but that she must have confided her engagement to her son, and that peter had already forbidden the banns. he wandered miserably about the grounds, within hearing of the rejoicings; and had just made up his mind that he ought to go and join the speechmakers, when he perceived john crewys himself standing next to peter, apparently on the best possible terms with the hero of the day. the doctor hastened round to the hall, intending to enter the drawing-room unobserved, and find out for himself whether lady mary had recovered, or whether john crewys had heartlessly abandoned her to her grief. the brilliant vision miss sarah presented, as she stood, drawn up to her full height, in the shaded drawing-room, met his anxious gaze as he entered. "why, miss sarah! not gone back to london yet? i thought you only came down for whitsuntide." "mamma wasn't well, so i am staying on for a few days. i am supposed to be nursing her," said sarah, demurely. she was a favourite with the doctor, as she was very well aware, and, in consequence, was always exceedingly gracious to him. "where is lady mary?" he asked. she stole to his side, and put her finger on her lips, and lowered her voice. "she went through the hall--into the study. and she's alone--crying." "crying!" said the doctor; and he made a step towards the open door, but sarah's strong, white hand held him fast. "play fair," she said reproachfully; "i told you in confidence. you can't suppose she wants _you_ to see her crying." "no, no," said the poor doctor, "of course not--of course not." she closed the doors between the rooms. "look here, dr. blundell, we've always been friends, haven't we, you and me?" "ever since i had the honour of ushering you into the world you now adorn," said the doctor, with an ironical bow. "then tell me the truth," said sarah. "why is she unhappy, to-day of all days?" the doctor looked uneasily away from her. "perhaps--the joy of peter's return has been too much for her," he suggested. "yes," said sarah. "that's what we'll tell the other people. but you and i--why, dr. blunderbuss," she said reproachfully, using the name she had given him in her saucy childhood, "you know how i've worshipped lady mary ever since i was a little girl?" "yes, yes, my dear, i know," said the doctor. "you love her too, don't you?" said sarah. he started. "i--i love lady mary! what do you mean?" he said, almost violently. "oh, i didn't mean _that_ sort of love," said sarah, watching him keenly. then she laid her plump hand gently on his shabby sleeve. "i wouldn't have said it, if i'd thought--" "thought what?" said the doctor, agitated. "what i think now," said sarah. he walked up and down in a silence she was too wise to break. when he looked at her again, sarah was leaning against the piano. she had taken off the picture-hat, and was swinging it absently to and fro by the black ribbons which had but now been tied beneath her round, white chin. she presented a charming picture--and it is possible she knew it--as she stood in that restful pose, with her long lashes pointed downwards towards her buckled shoes. the doctor stopped in front of her. "you are too quick for me, sarah. you always were, even as a little girl," he said. "you've surprised my--my poor secret. you can laugh at the old doctor now, if you like." "i don't feel like laughing," said sarah, simply. "and your secret is safe with me. i'm honest; you know that." "yes, my dear; i know that. god bless you!" said the doctor. "i'm sorry, dr. blundell," said sarah, softly. the deep voice which came from the full, white chest, and which had once been so unmanageable, was one of sarah's surest weapons now. when she sang, she counted her victims by the dozen; when she lowered it, as she lowered it now, to speak only to one man, every note went straight to his heart--if he had an ear for music and a heart for love. when sarah said, in these dulcet tones, therefore, that she was sorry for her old friend, the tears gathered to the doctor's kind, tired eyes. "for me!" he said gratefully. "oh, you mustn't be sorry for me. she--she could hardly be further out of _my_ reach, you know, if she were--an angel in heaven, instead of being what she is--an angel on earth. it is--of _her_ that i was thinking." "i know," said sarah; "but she has been looking so bright and hopeful, ever since we heard peter was coming home--until to-day--when he has actually come; and that is what puzzles me." "to-day--to-day!" said the doctor, as though to himself. "yes; it was to-day i saw her touch happiness timidly, and come face to face with disappointment." "you saw her?" "oh, when one loves," he said bitterly, "one has intuitions which serve as well as eyes and ears. you will know all about it one day, little sarah." "shall i?" said sarah. she turned her face away from the doctor. "you've not been here very much lately," he said, "but you've been here long enough to guess her secret, as you--you've guessed mine. eh? you needn't pretend, for my sake, to misunderstand me." "i wasn't going to," said sarah, gently. "john crewys is the very man i would have chosen--i did choose him," said the doctor, looking at her almost fiercely. it was an odd consolation to him to believe he had first led john crewys to interest himself in lady mary. he recognized his rival's superior qualifications very fully and humbly. "you know all about it, miss sarah, don't tell me; so quick as you are to find out what doesn't concern you." "i saw that--mr. john crewys--liked _her_," said sarah, in a low voice; "but, then, so does everybody. i wasn't sure--i couldn't believe that _she_--" "you haven't watched as i have," he groaned; "you haven't seen the sparkle come back to her eye, and the colour to her cheek. you haven't watched her learning to laugh and sing and enjoy her innocent days as nature bade; since she has dared to be herself. it was love that taught her an that." "love!" said sarah. her soft, red lips parted; and her breath quickened with a sudden sensation of mingled interest, sympathy, and amusement. "ay, love," said the doctor, half angrily. he detected the deepening of sarah's dimples. "and i am an old fool to talk to you like this. you children think that love is reserved for boys and girls, like you and--and peter." "i don't know what peter has to do with it," said sarah, pouting. "i heard peter explaining to his tenants just now," said the doctor, with a harsh laugh, "that he was going to settle down here for good and all--with his mother; that nothing was to be changed from his father's time. something in his words would have made me understand the look on his mother's face, even if i hadn't read it right--already. she will sacrifice her love for john crewys to her love for her son; and by the time peter finds out--as in the course of nature he will find out--that he can do without his mother, her chance of happiness will be gone for ever." sarah looked a little queerly at the doctor. "then the sooner peter finds out," she said slowly, "that he can live without his mother, the better. doesn't that seem strange?" "perhaps," said the doctor, heavily. "but life gives us so few opportunities of a great happiness as we grow older, little sarah. the possibilities that once seemed so boundless, lie in a circle which narrows round us, day by day. some day you'll find that out too." there was a sudden outburst of cheering. sarah started forward. "dr. blundell," she said energetically, "you've told me all i wanted to know. she sha'n't be unhappy if _i_ can help it." "you!" said the doctor, shrugging his shoulders rather rudely. "i don't see what _you_ can do." sarah reddened with lofty indignation. "it would be very odd if you did," she said spitefully; "you're only a man, when all is said and done. but if you'll only promise not to interfere, i'll manage it beautifully all by myself." "what will you do?" said the doctor, inattentively; and his blindness to sarah's charms and her powers made her almost pity such obtuseness. "i will go and fetch lady mary, for one thing, and cheer her up." "not a word to her!" he cried, starting up; "remember, i told you in confidence--though why i was such a fool--" "am i likely to forget?" said sarah; "and you will see one day whether you were a fool to tell _me_." she said to herself, despairingly, that the stupidity of mankind was almost past praying for. as the doctor opened the door for sarah, lady mary herself walked into the room. she had removed all traces of tears from her face, and, though she was still very pale, she was quite composed, and ready to smile at them both. "were you coming to fetch me?" she said, taking sarah's arm affectionately. "dr. blundell, i am afraid luncheon will be terribly late. the servants have all gone off their heads in the confusion, as was to be expected. the noise and the welcome upset me so that i dared not go out on the terrace again. ash has just been to tell me it's all over, and that peter made a capital speech; quite as good as mr. john's, he said; but that is hardly a compliment to our k.c.," she laughed. "i'm afraid ash is prejudiced." "ash was doing the honours with all his might," said the doctor, gruffly; "handing round cider by the hogshead. hallo! the speeches must be really all over," he said, for, above vociferous cheering, the strains of the national anthem could just be discerned. peter came striding across the terrace, and looked in at the open window. "are you better again, mother?" he called. "could you come out now? they've done at last, but they're calling for you." "yes, yes; i'm quite ready. i won't be so silly again," said lady mary. but peter did not listen. "why--" he said, and stopped short. "surely you haven't forgotten sarah," said lady mary, laughing--"your little playmate sarah? but perhaps i ought to say miss hewel now." "how do you do, sir peter?" said sarah, in a very stately manner. "i am very glad to be here to welcome you home." peter, foolishly embarrassed, took the hand she offered with such gracious composure, and blushed all over his thin, tanned face. "i--i should hardly have known you," he stammered. "really?" said sarah. "won't you," said peter, still looking at her, "join us on the terrace?" "the people aren't calling for _me_" said sarah. "but it might amuse you," said peter, deferentially. he put up his eyeglass--but though sarah's red lip quivered, she did not laugh. "it's rather jolly, really," he said. "they've got banners, and flags, and processions, and things. won't you come?" "well--i will," said sarah. she accepted his help in descending the step with the air of a princess. "but they'll be so disappointed to see me instead of your mother." "disappointed to see _you_!" said peter, stupefied. she stepped forth, laughing, and peter followed her closely. john crewys stood aside to let them pass. lady mary, half amazed and half amused, realized suddenly that her son had forgotten he came back to fetch her. she hesitated on the threshold. more cheers and confused shouting greeted peter's reappearance on the balcony. he turned and waved to his mother, and the canon came hurrying over the grass. "the people are shouting for lady mary; they want lady mary," he cried. john crewys looked at her with a smile, and held out his hand, and she stepped over the sill, and went away across the terrace garden with him. the doctor turned his face from the crowd, and went back alone into the empty room. "who _doesn't_ want lady mary?" he said to himself, forlornly. chapter xiv peter stood on his own front door steps, on the shady side of the house, in the fresh air of the early morning. the unnecessary eyeglass twinkled on his breast as he looked forth upon the goodliness and beauty of his inheritance. the ever-encroaching green of summer had not yet overpowered the white wealth of flowering spring; for the season was a late one, and the month of june still young. the apple-trees were yet in blossom, and the snowy orchards were scattered over the hillsides between patches of golden gorse. the lilacs, white and purple, were in flower, amid scarlet rhododendrons and branching pink and yellow tree-azaleas. the weeping barberry showered gold dust upon the road. on the lower side of the drive, the rolling grass slopes were thriftily left for hay; a flowering mass of daisies, and buttercups, and red clover, and blue speedwell. a long way off, but still clearly visible in the valley below, glistened the stone-tiled roof of the old square-towered church, guarded by its sentinel yews. a great horse-chestnut stood like a giant bouquet of waxen bloom beside a granite monument which threw a long shadow over the green turf mounds towards the west, and marked the grave of sir timothy crewys. peter saw that monument more plainly just now than all the rest of his surroundings, although he was short-sighted, and although his eyes were further dimmed by sudden tears. his memories of his father were not particularly tender ones, and his grief was only natural filial sentiment in its vaguest and lightest form. but such as it was--the sight of the empty study, which was to be his own room in future; the strange granite monument shining in the sun; the rush of home associations which the familiar landscape aroused--augmented it for the time being, and made the young man glad of a moment's solitude. there was the drooping ash--which had made such a cool, refreshing tent in summer--where he had learnt his first lessons at his mother's knee, and where he had kept his rabbit-hutch for a season, until his father had found it out, and despatched it to the stable-yard. his punishments and the troubles of his childhood had always been associated with his father, and its pleasures and indulgences with his mother; but neither had made any very strong impression on peter's mind, and it was of his father that he thought with most sympathy, and even most affection. partly, doubtless, because sir timothy was dead, and because peter's memories were not vivid ones, any more than his imagination was vivid; but also because his mind was preoccupied with a vague resentment against his mother. he could not understand the change which was, nevertheless, so evident. her new-born brightness and ease of manner, and her strangely increased loveliness, which had been yet more apparent on the previous evening, when she was dressed for dinner, than on his first arrival. it was absurd, peter thought, in all the arrogance of disdainful youth, that a woman of her age should have learnt to care for her appearance thus; or to wear becoming gowns, and arrange her hair like a fashion plate. if it had been sarah he could have understood. at the thought of sarah the colour suddenly flushed across his thin, tanned face, and he moved uneasily. sarah, too, was changed; but not even peter could regret the change in sarah. the loveliness of his mother, refined and white and delicate as she was, did not appeal to him; but sarah, in her radiant youth, with her brilliant colouring--fresh as a may morning, buxom as a dairymaid, scornful as a princess--had struck sir peter dumb with admiration, though he had hitherto despised young women. it almost enraged him to remember that this stately beauty had ever been an impudent little schoolgirl, with a turned-up nose and a red pigtail. in days gone by, miss sarah had actually fought and scratched the spoilt boy, who tried to tyrannize over his playmate as he tyrannized over his mother and his aunts. on the other hand, the recollection of those early days also became precious to peter for the first time. sarah! it was difficult to be sentimental on the subject, but difficulties are easily surmounted by a lover; and though sarah's childhood afforded few facilities for ecstatic reverie, still--there had been moments, and especially towards the end of the holidays, when he and sarah had walked on the banks of the river, with arms round each other's necks, sharing each other's toffee and confidences. poor sarah had been first despatched to a boarding school as unmanageable, at the age of seven, and thereafter her life had been a changeful one, since her father could not live without her, and her mother would not keep her at home. she had always presented a lively contrast to her elder brothers, who were all that a parent's heart could desire, and too old to be much interested in their little rebellious sister. her high spirits survived disgrace and punishment and periodical banishment. though not destitute of womanly qualities, she was more remarkable for hoydenish ones; and her tastes were peculiar and varied. if there were a pony to break in, a sick child to be nursed, a groom to scold, a pig to be killed--there was sarah; but if a frock to try on, a visit to be paid, a note to be written--where was she? peter, recalling these things, tried to laugh at himself for his extraordinary infatuation of the previous day; but he knew very well in his heart that he could not really laugh, and that he had lain awake half the night thinking of her. sarah had spent the rest of the day at barracombe after peter's return, and had been escorted home late in the evening. could he ever forget those moments on the terrace, when she had paced up and down beside him, in the pleasant summer darkness; her white neck and arms gleaming through transparent black tulle; sometimes listening to the sounds of music and revelry in the village below, and looking at the rockets that were being let off on the river-banks; and sometimes asking him of the war, in that low voice which thrilled peter as it had already thrilled not a few interested hearers before him? those moments had been all too few, because john crewys also had monopolized a share of miss sarah's attention. peter did not dislike his guardian, whose composed courtesy and absolute freedom from self-consciousness, or any form of affectation, made it difficult indeed not to like him. his remarks made peter smile in spite of himself, though he could not keep the ball of conversation rolling like miss sarah, who was not at all afraid of the great counsel, but matched his pleasant wit, with a most engaging impudence all her own. lady mary had stood clasping her son's arm, full of thankfulness for his safe return; but she, too, had been unable to help laughing at john, who purposely exerted himself to amuse her and to keep her from dwelling upon their parting on the morrow. her thoughtful son insisted that she must avoid exposure to the night air, and poor lady mary had somewhat ruefully returned to the society of the old ladies within; but john crewys did not, as he might, and as peter had supposed he would, join the other old folk. peter classed his mother and aunts together, quite calmly, in his thoughts. he listened to sarah's light talk with john, watching her like a man in a dream, hardly able to speak himself; and it is needless to say that he found her chatter far more interesting and amusing than anything john could say. who could have dreamt that little sarah would grow up into this bewitching maiden? there was a girl coming home on board ship, the young wife of an officer, whom every one had raved about and called so beautiful. peter almost laughed aloud as he contrasted sarah with his recollections of this lady. how easy it was to talk to sarah! how much easier than to his mother; whom, nevertheless, he loved so dearly, though always with that faint dash of disapproval which somehow embittered his love. he could not shake off the impression of her first appearance, coming singing down the oak staircase, in her white gown. _his mother!_ dressed almost like a girl, and, worst of all, looking almost like a girl, so slight and white and delicate. peter recollected that sir timothy had been very particular about his wife's apparel. he liked it to be costly and dignified, and she had worn stiff silks and poplins inappropriate to the country, but considered eminently suited to her position by the brawnton dressmaker. and her hair had been parted on her forehead, and smoothed over her little ears. sir timothy did not approve of curling-irons and frippery. peter did not know that his mother had cried over her own appearance often, before she became indifferent; and if he had known, he would have thought it only typical of the weakness and frivolity which he had heard attributed to lady mary from his earliest childhood. his aunts were not intentionally disloyal to their sister-in-law; but their disapproval of her was too strong to be hidden, and they regarded a little boy as blind and deaf to all that did not directly concern his lessons or his play. thus peter had grown up loving his mother, but disapproving of her, and the disapproval was sometimes more apparent than the love. after breakfast the new squire took an early walk with his guardian, and inspected a few of the changes which had taken place in the administration of his tiny kingdom. though peter was young and inexperienced, he could not be blind to the immense improvements made. he had left a house and stables shabby and tumble-down and out of repair; rotting woodwork, worn-off paint, and missing tiles had been painfully evident. broken fences and hingeless gates were the rule, and not the exception, in the grounds. now all deficiencies had been made good by a cunning hand that had allowed no glaring newness to be visible; a hand that had matched old tiles, and patched old walls, and planted creepers, and restored an almost magical order and comfort to peter's beautiful old house. where sir timothy's grumbling tenants had walked to the nearest brook for water, they now found pipes brought to their own cottage doors. the home-farm, stables, yards, and cowsheds were drained and paved; fallen outbuildings replaced, uneven roads gravelled and rolled; dead trees removed, and young ones planted, shrubberies trimmed, and views long obscured once more opened out. peter did not need the assurances of mr. crawley to be aware that his inheritance would be handed back to him improved a thousand-fold. he was astounded to find how easily john had arranged matters over which his father had grumbled and hesitated for years. even the dispute with the crown had been settled by mr. crawley without difficulty, now that sir timothy's obstinacy no longer stood in the way of a reasonable compromise. john crewys had faithfully carried out the instructions of the will; and there were many thousands yet left of the sum placed at his disposal for the improvements of the estate; a surplus which would presently be invested for peter's benefit, and added to that carefully tied-up capital over which sir timothy had given his heir no discretionary powers. peter spent a couple of hours walking about with john, and took an intelligent interest in all that had been done, from the roof and chimney-pots of the house, to the new cider-mill and stable fittings; but though he was civil and amiable, he expressed no particular gratitude nor admiration on his return to the hall, where his mother eagerly awaited him. it consoled her to perceive that he was on excellent terms with his guardian, offering to accompany him in the dog-cart to brawnton, whither john was bound, to catch the noon express to town. "you will have him all to yourself after this," said john crewys, smiling down upon lady mary during his brief farewell interview, which took place in the oriel window of the banqueting-hall, within sight, though not within hearing, of the two old sisters. "i am sorry to take him off to brawnton, but i could hardly refuse his company." "no, no; i am only glad you should take every opportunity of knowing him better," she said. "and you will be happier without any divided feelings at stake," he said. "give yourself up entirely to peter for the next three or four months, without any remorse concerning me. for the present, at least, i shall be hard at work, with little enough time to spare for sentiment." there was a tender raillery in his tone, which she understood. "when i come back we will face the situation, according to circumstances. by-the-by, i suppose it is not to be thought of that miss sarah should prolong her whitsuntide holidays much further?" "she ought to have returned to town earlier, but mrs. hewel was ill," said lady mary. "she is a tiresome woman. she moved heaven and earth to get rid of poor sarah, and, now the child has had a _succès_, she is always clamouring for her to come back." "ah!" said john, thoughtfully, "and you will moot to peter the scheme for taking a house in town? but i should advise you to be guided by his wishes over that. still, it would be very delightful to meet during our time of waiting; and that would be the only way. i won't come down here again until i can declare myself. it is a--false position, under the circumstances." "i know; i understand," said lady mary; "but i am afraid peter won't want to stir from home. he is so glad to be back, poor boy, one can hardly blame him; and he shares his father's prejudices against london." "does he, indeed?" said john, rather dryly. "well, make the most of your summer with him. _you_ will get only too much london--in the near future." "perhaps," lady mary said, smiling. but, in spite of herself, john's confidence communicated itself to her. when peter and john had departed, lady mary went and sat alone in the quiet of the fountain garden, at the eastern end of the terrace. the thick hedges and laurels which sheltered it had been duly thinned and trimmed, to allow the entrance of the morning sunshine. roses and lilies bloomed brightly round the fountain now, but it was still rather a lonely and deserted spot, and silent, save for the sighing of the wind, and the tinkle of the dropping water in the stone basin. a young copper beech, freed from its rankly increasing enemies of branching laurel and encroaching bramble, now spread its glory of transparent ruddy leaf in the sunshine above trim hedges, here and there diversified by the pale gold of a laburnum, or the violet clusters of a rhododendron in full flower. rare ferns fringed the edges of the little fountain, where diminutive reptiles whisked in and out of watery homes, or sat motionless on the brink, with fixed, glassy eyes. lady mary had come often to this quiet corner for rest and peace and solitude in days gone by. she came often still, because she had a fancy that the change in her favourite garden was typical of the change in her life,--the letting-in of the sunshine, where before there had been only deepest shade; the pinks and forget-me-nots which were gaily blowing, where only moss and fungi had flourished; the blooming of the roses, where the undergrowth had crossed and recrossed withered branches above bare, black soil. she brought her happiness here, where she had brought her sorrow and her repinings long ago. a happiness subdued by many memories, chastened by long anxiety, obscured by many doubts, but still happiness. there was to be no more of that heart-breaking anxiety. her boy had been spared to come home to her; and john--john, who always understood, had declared that, for the present, at least, peter must come first. the whole beautiful summer lay before her, in which she was to be free to devote herself to her wounded hero. she must set herself to charm away that shadow of discontent--of disapproval--that darkened peter's grey eyes when they rested upon her; a shadow of which she had been only too conscious even before he went to south africa. she made a thousand excuses for him, after telling herself that he needed none. poor boy! he had been brought up in such narrow ways, such an atmosphere of petty distrust and fault-finding and small aims. even his bold venture into the world of men had not enabled him to shake off altogether the influence of his early training, though it had changed him so much for the better; it had not altogether cured peter of his old ungraciousness, partly inherited, and partly due to example. but he had returned full of love and tenderness and penitence, though his softening had been but momentary; and when she had brought him under the changed influences which now dominated her own life, she could not doubt that peter's nature would expand. he should see that home life need not necessarily be gloomy; that all innocent pleasures and interests were to be encouraged, and not repressed. if he wanted to spend the summer at home--and after his long absence what could be more natural?--she would exert herself to make that home as attractive as possible. why should they not entertain? john had said there was plenty of money. peter should have other young people about him. she remembered a scene, long ago, when he had brought a boy of his own age in to lunch without permission. she would have to let peter understand how welcome she should make his friends; he must have many more friends now. while she was yet _châtelaine_ of barracombe, it would be delightful to imbue him with some idea of the duties and pleasures of hospitality. lady mary's eyes sparkled at the thought of providing entertainment for many young soldiers, wounded or otherwise. they should have the best of everything. she was rich, and peter was rich, and there was no harm in making visitors welcome in that great house, and filling the rooms, that had been silent and empty so long, with the noise and laughter of young people. she would ask peter about the horses to-morrow. john had purposely refrained from filling the stables which had been so carefully restored and fitted. there were very few horses. only the cob for the dog-cart, and a pair for the carriage, so old that the coachman declared it was tempting providence to sit behind them. they were calculated to have attained their twentieth year, and were driven at a slow jog-trot for a couple of hours every day, except sundays, in the barouche. james coachman informed lady belstone and miss crewys that either steed was liable to drop down dead at any moment, and that they could not expect the best of horses to last for ever; but the old ladies would neither shorten nor abandon their afternoon drive, nor consent to the purchase of a new pair. they continued to behave as though horses were immortal. sir timothy's old black mare was turned out to graze, partly from sentiment, and partly because she, too, was unfitted for any practical purposes; and peter had outgrown his pony before he went away, though he had ridden it to hounds many times, unknown to his father. lady mary thought it would be a pleasure to see her boy well mounted and the stables filled. john had said that the loss of his arm would certainly not prevent peter from riding. she found herself constantly referring to john, even in her plans for peter's amusement. strong, calm, patient john--who was prepared to wait; and who would not, as he said, snatch happiness at the expense of other people's feelings. how wise he had been to agree that, for the present, she must devote herself only to peter! she and peter would be all in all to each other as peter himself had suggested, and as she had once dreamed her son would be to his mother; though, of course, it was not to be expected that a boy could understand everything, like john. she must make great allowances; she must be patient of his inherited prejudices; above all, she must make him happy. afterwards, perhaps, when peter had learned to do without her--as he would learn too surely in the course of nature--she would be free to turn to john, and put her hand in his, and let him lead her whithersoever he would. peter saw his guardian off at brawnton, dutifully standing at attention on the platform until the train had departed, instead of starting home as john suggested. when he came out of the station he stood still for a moment, contemplating the stout, brown cob and the slim groom, who was waiting anxiously to know whether sir peter would take the reins, or whether he was to have the honour of driving his master home. "i think i'll walk back, george," said peter, with a nonchalant air. "take the cob along quietly, and let her ladyship know directly you get in that i'm returning by hewelscourt woods, and the ferry." "very good, sir peter," said the youth, zealously. "it would be only civil to look in on the hewels as sarah is going back to town so soon," said peter to himself. "and it's rot driving all those miles on the sunny side of the river, when it's barely three miles from here to hewelscourt and the ferry, and in the shade all the way. i shall be back almost as soon as the cart." a little old lady, dressed in shabby black silk, looked up from the corner of the sofa next the window, when peter entered the drawing-room at hewelscourt, after the usual delay, apologies, and barking of dogs which attends the morning caller at the front door of the average country house. peter, who had expected to see mrs. hewel and sarah, repented himself for a moment that he had come at all when he beheld this stranger, who regarded him with a pair of dark eyes that seemed several times too large for her small, wrinkled face, and who merely nodded her head in response to his awkward salutation. "ah!" said the old lady, rather as though she were talking to herself, "so this is the returned hero, no doubt. how do you do? the rejoicing over your home-coming kept me awake half the night." peter was rather offended at this free-and-easy method of address. it seemed to him that, since the old lady evidently knew who he was, she might be a little more respectful in her manner. "the festivities were all over soon after eleven," he said stiffly. "but perhaps you are accustomed to early hours?" "perhaps i am," said the old lady; she seemed more amused than abashed by peter's dignity of demeanour. "at any rate, i like my beauty sleep to be undisturbed; more especially in the country, where there are so many noises to wake one up from four o'clock in the morning onwards." "i have always understood," said peter, who inherited his father's respect for platitudes, "that the country was much quieter than the town. i suppose you live in a town?" "i suppose i do," said the old lady. peter put up his eyeglass indignantly, to quell this disrespectful old woman with a frigid look, modelled upon the expression of his board-ship hero. the door opened suddenly. he dropped his eyeglass with a start. but it was only mrs. hewel who entered, and not sarah, after all. her _embonpoint_, and consequently her breathlessness, had much increased since peter saw her last. "oh, peter," she cried, "this is nice of you to come over and see us so soon. we were wondering if you would. dear, dear, how thankful your mother must be! i know what i was with the boys--and decorated and all--though poor tom and willie got nothing; but, as the papers said, it wasn't always those who deserved it most--still, i'm glad _you_ got something, anyway; it's little enough, i'm sure, to make up for--" then she turned nervously to the old lady. "aunt elizabeth, this is sir peter crewys, who came home last night." "i have already made acquaintance with sir peter, since you left me to entertain him," said the old lady, nodding affably. "lady tintern arrived unexpectedly by the afternoon train yesterday," explained mrs. hewel, in her flustered manner, turning once more to peter. "she has only been here twice before. it was such a surprise to sarah to find her here when she came back." peter grew very red. who could have supposed that this shabby old person, whom he had endeavoured to snub, was the great lady tintern? "she _didn't_ find me," said the old lady. "i was in bed long before sarah came back. i presume this young gentleman escorted her home?" "i always send a servant across for sarah whenever she stays at all late at barracombe, and always have," said mrs. hewel, in hurried self-defence. "you must remember we are old friends; there never was any formality about her visits to barracombe." "my guardian and i walked down to the ferry, and saw her across the river, of course," said peter, rather sulkily. "but her maid was with her," cried mrs. hewel. "of course," peter said again, in tones that were none too civil. after all, who was lady tintern that she should call him to task? and as if there could be any reason why her oldest playmate should not see sarah home if he chose. at the very bottom of peter's heart lurked an inborn conviction that his father's son was a very much more important personage than any hewel, or relative of hewel, could possibly be. "that was very kind of you and your guardian," said the old lady, suddenly becoming gracious. "emily, i will leave you to talk to your _old friend_. i dare say i shall see him again at luncheon?" "i cannot stay to luncheon. my mother is expecting me," said peter. he would not express any thanks. what business had the presuming old woman to invite him to luncheon? it was not her house, after all. "oh, your mother is expecting you," said lady tintern, whose slightly derisive manner of repeating peter's words embarrassed and annoyed the young gentleman exceedingly. "i am glad you are such a dutiful son, sir peter." she gathered together her letters and her black draperies, and tottered off to the door, which peter, who was sadly negligent of _les petits soins_ forgot to open for her; nor did he observe the indignant look she favoured him with in consequence. sarah came into the drawing-room at last; fresh as the morning dew, in her summer muslin and fluttering, embroidered ribbons; with a bunch of forget-me-nots, blue as her eyes, nestling beneath her round, white chin. her bright hair was curled round her pretty ears and about her fair throat, but peter did not compare this _coiffure_ to a fashion plate, though, indeed, it exactly resembled one. neither did he cast the severely critical glance upon sarah's _toilette_ that he had bestowed upon the soft, grey gown, and the cluster of white moss-rosebuds which poor lady mary had ventured to wear that morning. "how have you managed to offend aunt elizabeth, peter?" cried sarah, with her usual frankness. "she is in the worst of humours." "sarah!" said her mother, reprovingly. "well, but she _is_," said sarah. "she called him a cub and a bear, and all sorts of things." she looked at peter and laughed, and he laughed back. the cloud of sullenness had lifted from his brow as she appeared. mrs. hewel overwhelmed him with unnecessary apologies. she could not grasp the fact that her polite conversation was as dull and unmeaning to the young man as sarah's indiscreet nothings were interesting and delightful. "i'm sure i don't mind," said peter; and his tone was quite alert and cheerful. "she told me the country kept her awake. if she doesn't like it, why does she come?" "she has come to fetch me away," said sarah. "and she came unexpectedly, because she wanted to see for herself whether mamma was really ill, or whether she was only shamming." "sarah!" "and she has decided she is only shamming," said sarah. "unluckily, mamma happened to be down in the stables, doctoring venus. you remember venus, her pet spaniel?" "of course." "nothing else would have taken me off my sofa, where i ought to be lying at this moment, as you know very well, sarah," cried mrs. hewel, showing an inclination to shed tears. "to be sure you ought," said sarah; "but what is the use of telling aunt elizabeth that, when she saw you with her own eyes racing up and down the stable-yard, with a piece of raw meat in your hand, and venus galloping after you." "the vet said that if she took no exercise she would die," said mrs. hewel, tearfully, "and neither he nor jones could get her to move. not even ash, though he has known her all her life. i know it was very bad for me; but what could i do?" "i wish i had been there," said sarah, giggling; "but, however, aunt elizabeth described it all to me so graphically this morning that it is almost as good as though i had been." "she should not have come down like that, without giving us a notion," said mrs. hewel, resentfully. "if she had only warned us, you could have been lying on a sofa, with the blinds down, and i could have been holding your hand and shaking a medicine-bottle," said sarah. "that is how she expected to find us, she said, from your letters." "i am sure i scarcely refer to my weak health in my letters," said mrs. hewel, plaintively, "and it is natural i should like my only daughter to be with me now and then. aunt elizabeth has never had a child herself, and cannot understand the feelings of a mother." sarah and peter exchanged a fleeting glance. she shrugged her shoulders slightly, and peter looked at his boots. they understood each other perfectly. freshly to the recollection of both rose the lamentations of a little red-haired girl, banished from the eden of her beloved home, and condemned to a cheap german school. mrs. hewel, in her palmiest days, had never found it necessary to race up and down the stable-yard to amuse sarah; and when her only daughter developed scarlatina, she had removed herself and her spaniels from home for months to escape infection. "here is papa," said sarah, breaking the silence. "he was so vexed to be out when you arrived yesterday. he heard nothing of it till he came back." colonel hewel walked in through the open window, with his dog at his heels. he was delighted to welcome his young neighbour home. a short, sturdy man, with red whiskers, plentiful stiff hair, and bright, dark blue eyes. from her father sarah had inherited her colouring, her short nose, and her unfailing good spirits. "i would have come over to welcome you," he said, shaking peter's hand cordially, "only when i came home there was all the upset of lady tintern's arrival, and half a hundred things to be done to make her sufficiently comfortable. and then i would have come to fetch sarah after dinner, only i couldn't be sure she mightn't have started; and if i'd gone down by the road, ten to one she'd have come up by the path through the woods. so i just sat down and smoked my pipe, and waited for her to come back. you'll stay to lunch, eh, peter?" "i must get back to my mother, sir," said peter. his respect for sarah's father, who had once commanded a cavalry regiment, had increased a thousand-fold since he last saw colonel hewel. "but won't you--i mean she'd be very glad--i wish you'd come over and dine to-night, all of you--as you could not come yesterday evening?" thus peter delivered his first invitation, blushing with eagerness. "i'm afraid we couldn't leave lady tintern--or persuade her to come with us," said the colonel, shaking his head. then he brightened up. "but as soon as she and sally have toddled back to town i see no reason why we shouldn't come, eh, emily?" he said, turning to his wife. peter looked rather blank, and a laugh trembled on sarah's pretty lips. "you know i'm not strong enough to dine out, tom," said his wife, peevishly. "i can't drive so far, and i'm terrified of the ferry at night, with those slippery banks." "well, well, there's plenty of time before us. later on you may get better; and i don't suppose you'll be running away again in a hurry, eh, peter?" said the colonel. "i'm told you made a capital speech yesterday about sticking to your home, and living on your land, as your father, poor fellow, did before you." "i wish sarah felt as you do, peter," said mrs. hewel; "but, of course, she has grown too grand for us, who live contentedly in the country all the year round. her home is nothing to her now, it seems; and the only thing she thinks of is rushing back to london again as fast as she can." sarah, contrary to her wont, received this attack in silence; but she bestowed a fond squeeze on her father's arm, and cast an appealing glance at peter, which caused the hero's heart to leap in his bosom. "of course i mean to live at barracombe," said peter, polishing his eyeglass with reckless energy. "but i said nothing to the people about living there all the year round. on the contrary, i think it more probable that i shall--run up to town myself, occasionally--just for the season." chapter xv on a perfect summer afternoon in mid-july, lady mary sat in the terrace garden at barracombe, before the open windows of the silent house, in the shade of the great ilex; sometimes glancing at the book she held, and sometimes watching the haymakers in the valley, whose voices and laughter reached her faintly across the distance. some boys were playing cricket in a field below. she noted idly that the sound of the ball on the bat travelled but slowly upward, and reached her after the striker had begun to run. the effect was curious, but it was not new to her, though she listened and counted with idle interest. the old sisters had departed for their daily drive, which she daily declined to share, having no love for the high-road, and much for the peace which their absence brought her. it was an afternoon which made mere existence a delight amid such surroundings. long shadows were falling across the bend of the river, below the wooded hill which faced the south-west; whilst the cob-built, whitewashed cottages, and the brown, square-towered church lay full in sunshine still. the red cattle stood knee-deep in the shallows, and an old boat was moored high and dry upon the sloping red banks. the air was sweet with a thousand mingled scents of summer flowers: carnations, stocks, roses, and jasmine. the creamy clusters of perpetual felicity rioted over the corner turret of the terrace, where a crumbling stair led to the top of a small, half-ruined observatory, which tradition called the look-out tower. flights of steps led downwards from the garden, where the bedded-out plants blazed in all their glory of ordered colour, to the walks on the lower levels. here were long herbaceous borders, backed by the mighty sloping walls of old red sandstone, which, like an ancient fortification, supported the terrace above. the blue larkspur flourished beside scarlet gladioli, feather-headed spirea, and hardy fuchsia. there were no straight lines, nor any order of planting. the madonna lilies stood in groups, lifting up on thin, ragged stems their pure and spotless clusters, and overpowering with their heavy scent the fainter fragrance of the mignonette. tall, green hollyhocks towered higher yet, holding the secret of their loveliness, until these should wither; when they too would burst into blossom, and forestall the round-budded dahlia. in the silence, many usually unheeded sounds made themselves very plainly heard. the tapping of the great magnolia-leaves upon the windows of the south front; the rustling of the ilex; the ceaseless murmur of the river; the near twittering or distant song of innumerable birds; the steady hum of the saw-mill below; the call of the poultry-woman at the home-farm, and the shrieking response of a feathered horde flying and fighting for their food--sounds all so familiar as to pass unnoticed, save in the absence of companionship. as lady mary mused alone, she could not but recall other summer afternoons, when she had not felt less lonely because her husband's voice might at any moment break the silence, and summon her to his side. days when peter had been absent at school, instead of, as now, at play; and when the old ladies had also been absent, taking their regular and daily drive in the big barouche. then she had prized and coveted the solitude of a summer afternoon on the lawn, and had stolen away to read and dream undisturbed in the shadow of the ilex. it was now, when no vexatious restraint was exercised over her--when there was no one to reprove her for dreaming, or to criticize or forbid her chosen book--that solitude had become distasteful to her. she was restless and dissatisfied, and the misty sunlit landscape had lost its charm, and her book its power of enchaining her attention. she had tasted the joy of real companionship; the charm of real sympathy; of the fearless exchange of ideas with one whose outlook upon life was as broad and charitable as sir timothy's had been narrow and prejudiced. she had scarcely dared to acknowledge to herself how dear john crewys had become to her, even though she knew that she rested thankfully upon the certainty of his love; that she trusted him in all things; that she was in utter sympathy with all his thoughts and words and ways. yet she had wished him to go, that she might be free to devote herself to her boy--to be very sure that she was not a light and careless mother, ready to abandon her son at the first call of a stranger. and john crewys had understood as another might not have understood. his clear head and great heart had divined her feelings, though perhaps he would never quite know how passionately grateful she was because he had divined them; because he had in no way fallen short of the man he had seemed to be. she had sacrificed john to peter; and john, who had shown so much wisdom and delicacy in leaving her alone with her son, was avenged; for only his absence could have made clear to her how he had grown into the heart she had guarded so jealously for peter's sake. she knew now that peter's companionship made her more lonely than utter solitude. the _joie de vivre_, which had distinguished her early days, and was inherent in her nature, had been quenched, to all appearance, many years since; but the spark had never died, and john had fanned it into brightness once more. his strong hand had swept away the cobwebs that had been spun across her life; and the drooping soul had revived in the sunshine of his love, his comradeship, his warm approval. timidly, she had learnt to live, to laugh, to look about her, and dare utter her own thoughts and opinions, instead of falsely echoing those she did not share. lady mary had recovered her individuality; the serene consciousness of a power within herself to live up to the ideal her lover had conceived of her. but now, in his absence, that confidence had been rudely shaken. she had come to perceive that she, who charmed others so easily, could not charm her sullen son. it was part of the penalty she paid for her quick-wittedness, that she could realize herself as peter saw her, though she was unable to present herself before him in a more favourable light. "i must be myself--or nobody," she thought despairingly. but peter wanted her to be once more the meek, plainly dressed, low-spirited, silent being whom sir timothy had created; and who was not in the least like the original laughing, loving, joyous mary setoun. it did not occur to her, in her sorrowful humility, that possibly her qualities stood on a higher level than peter's powers of appreciation. yet it is certain that people can only admire intelligently what is good within their comprehension; and their highest flights of imagination may sometimes scarcely touch mediocrity. the noblest ideals, the fairest dreams, the subtlest reasoning, the finest ethics, contained in the writings of the mighty dead, meant nothing at all to sir timothy. his widow knew that she had never heard him utter one high or noble or selfless thought. but with, perhaps, pardonable egotism, she had taken it for granted that peter must be different. whatever his outward humours, he was _her_ son; rather a part of herself, in her loving fancy, than a separate individual. the moment of awakening had been long in coming to lady mary; the moment when a mother has to find out that her personality is not necessarily reproduced in her child; that the being who was once the unconscious consoler of her griefs and troubles may develop a nature perfectly antagonistic to her own. she had kept her eyes shut with all her might for a long time, but necessity was forcing them open. perhaps her association with john crewys made it easier to see peter as he was, and not as she had wished him to be. and yet, she thought miserably to herself, he had certainly tried hard to be affectionate and kind to her--and probably it did not occur to him, as it did to his mother, how pathetic it was that he should have to try. peter did not think much about it. sometimes, during his short stay at barracombe, he had walked through a game of croquet with his mother--it was good practice for his left hand--or he listened disapprovingly to something she inadvertently (forgetting he was not john) read aloud for his sympathy or admiration; or he took a short stroll with her; or bestowed his company upon her in some other dutiful fashion. but these filial attentions over, if he yawned with relief--why, he never did so in her presence, and would have been unable to understand that lady mary saw him yawning, in her mind's eye, as plainly as though he had indulged this bad habit under her very nose. he bestowed a portion of his time on his aunts in much the same spirit, taking less trouble to be affectionate, because they were less exacting, as he would have put it to himself, than she was. the scheme of renting a house in london had duly been laid before him, and rejected most decisively by the young gentleman. his father had never taken a house in town, and he could see no necessity for it. his aunts were lost in admiration for their nephew's firmness. peter had inherited somewhat of his father's dictatorial manner, and their flattery did not tend to soften it. when his aged relatives mispronounced the magic word _kopje_, or betrayed their belief that a _donga_ was an inaccessible mountain--he brought the big guns of his heavy satire to bear on the little target of their ignorance without remorse. he mistook a loud voice, and a habit of laying down the law, for manly decision, and the gift of leadership; and imagined that in talking down his mother's gentle protests he had convinced her of his superior wisdom. when he had made it sufficiently clear, however, that he did not wish lady mary to accompany him to town, young sir peter made haste to depart thither himself, on the very reasonable plea that he required a new outfit of clothes. was it possible that his departure brought a dreadful relief to the mother who had prayed day and night, for eight-and-twenty months, that her son might return to her? she tried and tried, on her knees in her own room, to realize what her feelings would have been if peter had been killed in south africa. she tried to recall the first ecstasy of joy at his home-coming. she remembered, as she might have remembered a dream, the hours of agony she had passed, looking out over these very blue hills, and dumbly beseeching god to spare her boy--her only son--out of all the mothers' sons who were laying down their lives for england. a terrible thought assailed her now and then, like an ugly spectre that would not be laid--that if peter had died of his wound--if he had fallen as so many of his comrades had fallen, in the war--he would have been a hero for all time; a glorious memory, safely enshrined and enthroned above all these miserable petty doubts and disappointments. she cast the thought from her in horror and piteous grief, and reiterated always her passionate gratitude for his preservation. but, nevertheless, the living, breathing peter was a daily and hourly disappointment to the mother who loved him. his ways were not her ways, nor his thoughts her thoughts; and often she felt that she could have found more to say to a complete stranger, and that a stranger would have understood her better. the old ladies, returning from their drive, generally took a little turn upon the terrace. this constituted half their daily exercise, since their morning walk consisted of a stroll round the kitchen garden. "it prevents cramp after sitting so long," one would say to the other. "and it is only right to show the gardener that we take an interest," the other would reply. the gardener translated the interest they took into a habit of fault-finding, which nearly drove him mad. "it du spile the vine weather vor i," he would frequently grumble to his greatest crony, james coachman, who, for his part, bitterly resented the abnormal length of the daily drives. "zure as vate, when i zits down tu my tea, cumes a message from one are t'other on 'em, an' oop i goes. 'yu bain't been lukin' round zo careful as 'ee shude; there be a bit o' magnolia as want nailding oop, my gude man.' 'oh, be there, mum?' zays i. 'yiss, there be; an' thart i'd carl yure attention tu it,' zess she, are zum zuch. 'thanky, mum, i'm zure,' zezz i." "i knows how her goes on," groaned james coachman. "mother toime 'tis zummat else," said the aggrieved gardener. "'thic 'ere geranum's broke, willum; but ef yu tuke it vor cuttings, zo vast's iver yu cude, 'twon't take no yarm, willum. yu zee as how us du take a turble interest.' ah! 'tis arl i can du tu putt oop wi' 'un; carling a man from's tea, tu tark zuch vamous vule's tark." lady mary was not much less weary than the gardener and coachman of the old sisters' habits of criticism. but only the shadow of their former power of vexing her remained, now that they could no longer appeal to sir timothy to join them in reproving his wife. she was no more to be teased or exasperated into alternate submission and rebellion. their cousin john, the administrator of barracombe, had chosen from the first to place her opinions and wishes above all their protests or advice. they said to each other that john, before he grew tired of her and went away, had spoilt poor dear mary completely; but their hopes were centred on peter, who was a true crewys, and who would soon be his own master, and the master of barracombe; when he would, doubtless, revert to his father's old ways. they chose to blame his mother for his sudden departure to london, and remarked that the changes in his home had so wrought upon the poor fellow, that he could not bear to look at them until he had the power of putting them right again. a deeply resented innovation was the appearance of the tea-table on the lawn before the windows, in the shade of the ilex-grove, which sheltered the western end of the terrace from the low rays of the sun. during the previous summer, on their return from a drive, they had found their cousin john in his white flannels, and lady mary in her black gown, serenely enjoying this refreshment out-of-doors; and the poor old ladies had hardly known how to express their surprise and annoyance. in vain did their sister-in-law explain that she had desired a second tea to be served in the hall, in their usual corner by the log fireplace. it had never been the custom in the family. what would ash say? what would he think? how could so much extra trouble be given to the servants? "the servants have next to nothing to do," lady mary had said; and young john had actually laughed, and explained that he had had a conversation with ash which had almost petrified that tyrant of the household. either ash would behave himself properly, and carry out orders without grumbling, or he would be superseded. _ash_ superseded! this john had said with quite unruffled good humour, and with a smile on his face, as though such an upheaval of domestic politics were the simplest thing in the world. though for years the insolence and the idleness of ash had been favourite grievances with lady belstone and miss crewys, they were speechlessly indignant with young john. habit had partially inured, though it could never reconcile them, to the appearance of that little rustic table and white cloth in lady mary's favourite corner of the terrace; and though they would rather have gone without their tea altogether than partake of it there, they could behold her pouring it out for herself with comparative equanimity. "i trust you are rested, dear mary, after your terrible long climb in the woods this morning?" "it has been very restful sitting here. i hope you had a pleasant drive, isabella?" "no; it was too hot to be pleasant. we passed the rectory, and there was that idle doctor lolling in the canon's verandah--keeping the poor man from his haymaking. has the second post come in? any news of dear peter?" "none at all. you know he is not much of a correspondent, and his last letter said he would be back in a few days." "for my part," said lady belstone, "i think peter will come home the day he attains his majority, and not a moment before." "he is hardly likely to stay in london through august and september," said lady mary, in rather displeased tones. "perhaps not in london; but there are other places besides london," said miss crewys, significantly. "we met mrs. hewel driving. _she_, poor thing, does not expect to see sarah before christmas, if then, from what she told us." "she should not have let lady tintern adopt sarah if she is to be for ever regretting it. it was her own doing," said lady mary. "that is just what i told her," said lady belstone, triumphantly. "though how she can be regretting such a daughter i cannot conjecture." "sarah is a saucy creature," said miss crewys. "the last time i saw her she made one of her senseless jokes at me." "she has no tact," said lady belstone, shaking her head; "for when peter saw you were annoyed, and tried to pass it off by telling her the crewys family had no sense of humour, instead of saying, 'what nonsense!' she said, 'what a pity!'" "her mother was full of a letter from lady tintern about some grand lord or other, who wanted to marry sarah. i did my best to make her understand how very unlikely it was that any man, noble or otherwise, would care to marry a girl with carroty hair." "i doubt if you succeeded in convincing her, georgina, though you spoke pretty plain, and i am very far from blaming you for it. but she is ate up with pride, poor thing, because sarah gets noticed by lady tintern's friends, who would naturally wish to gratify her by flattering her niece." "i am afraid the girl is setting her cap at peter," said miss crewys; "but i took care to let her mother know, casually, what our family would think of such a marriage for him." "peter is a boy," said lady mary, quickly; "and sarah, for all practical purposes, is ten years older than he. she is only amusing herself. lady tintern is much more ambitious for her than i am for peter." "how you talk, mary!" said miss crewys, indignantly. "she is hardly twenty years of age, and the most designing monkey that ever lived. and peter is a fine young man. a boy, indeed! i hope if she succeeds in catching him that you will remember i warned you." "i will remember, if anything so fortunate should occur," said lady mary, with a faint smile. "i cannot think of any girl in the world whom i would prefer to sarah as a daughter." "i, for one, should walk out of this house the day that girl entered it as mistress, let peter say what he would to prevent me," said lady belstone, reddening with indignation. "i wonder where you would go to?" said lady mary, with some curiosity. "of course," she added, hastily, "there is the dower house." "i am sure it is very generous of you to suggest the dower house, dear mary," said miss crewys, softening, "since our poor brother, in his unaccountable will, left it entirely to you, and made no mention of his elder sisters; though we do not complain." "it is in accordance with custom that the widow should have the dower house. a widow's rights should be respected; but i thought our names would be mentioned," said lady belstone, dejectedly. "of course he knew," said lady mary, in a low voice, "that peter's house would be always open to us all, as my boy said himself." "dear boy! he has said it to us too," said the sisters, in a breath. "i don't say that, in my opinion," said lady mary, "it would not be wiser to leave a young married couple to themselves; i have always thought so. but peter would not hear of your turning out of your old home; you know that very well." "peter would not; but nothing would induce _me_ to live under the same roof as that red-haired minx," said lady belstone, firmly. "and besides, as you say, my dear mary, you could not very well live by yourself at the dower house." "since mary has been so kind as to mention it, there would be many advantages in our accompanying her there, in case sarah should succeed in her artful aims," said miss crewys. "it would be near peter, and yet not _too_ near, and we could keep an eye on _her_." "if she does not succeed, somebody else will," said lady belstone, sensibly; "and, at least, we know her faults, and can put peter on his guard against them." a host of petty and wretched recollections poured into lady mary's mind as she listened to these words. poor timothy; poor little hunted, scolded, despairing bride; poor married life--of futile reproaches and foolish quarrelling. how many small miseries she owed to those ferret searching eyes, and those subtly poisonous tongues! but such miseries lurked in the dull shadows of the past. standing now in the bright sunshine of the present, she forgave the sisters with all her heart, and thought compassionately of their great age, their increasing infirmities, their feeble hold on life. not to them did she owe real sorrow, after all; for nothing that does not touch the heart can reach the fountain of grief. peter's hand--the hand she loved best in the world--had set the waters of sorrow flowing not once, but many times; but she had become aware lately of a stronger power than peter's guarding the spring. she looked from one sister to the other. despite the narrowness of brow, and sharpness of eye and feature, they were both venerable of aspect, as they tottered up and down the terrace where they had played in their childhood and sauntered through youth and middle age to these latter days, when they leant upon silver-headed sticks, and wore dignified silk attire and respectable poke-bonnets. "don't you think it would be better," said lady mary, slowly, "if you left peter to find out his wife's faults for himself; whether she be sarah--or another?" chapter xvi torrents of falling rain obscured the valley of the youle. the grey clouds floated below the ridges of the hills, and wreathed the tree-tops. against the dim purple of the distance, the october roses held up melancholy, rain-washed heads; and sudden gusts of wind sent little armies of dead, brown leaves racing over the stone pavement of the terrace. lady mary leant her forehead against the window, and gazed out upon the autumn landscape; and john crewys watched her with feelings not altogether devoid of self-reproach. perhaps he had carried his prudent consideration too far. his reverence for his beautiful lady--who reigned in john's inmost thoughts as both saint and queen--had caused him to determine that she must come to him, when she did come, without a shadow of self-reproach to sully the joy of her surrender, the fulness, of her bliss, in the perfect sympathy and devotion which awaited her. but john crewys--though passionately desiring her companionship, and impatient of all barriers, real or imaginary, which divided her from him--yet lived a life very full of work and interest and pleasure on his own account. he was only conscious of his loneliness at times; and when he was as busy as he had been during the early half of this summer, he was hardly conscious of it at all. he had not fully realized the effect that this time of waiting and uncertainty might have upon her, in the solitude to which he had left her, and which he had at first supposed would be altogether occupied by peter. her letters--infrequent as he, in his self-denial, had suggested--were characterized by a delicate reserve and a tacit refusal to take anything for granted in their relations to each other, which half charmed and half tantalized john; but scarcely enlightened him regarding the suspense and sadness which at this time she was called upon to bear. when he came to barracombe, he knew that she had suffered greatly during these months of his absence, and reproached himself angrily for blindness and selfishness. he had spent the first weeks of his long vacation in switzerland, in order to bring the date of his visit to the youle valley as near as possible to the date of peter's coming of age; but, also, he had been very much overworked, and felt an absolute want of rest and change before entering upon the struggle which he supposed might await him, and for which he would probably need all the good humour and good sense he possessed. so far as he was personally concerned, there was no doubt that his proceedings had been dictated by wisdom and judgment. the fatigue and irritability, consequent upon too much mental labour, and too little fresh air and exercise, had vanished. john was in good health and good spirits, clear of brain and eye, and vigorous of person, when he arrived at barracombe; in the mild, wet, misty weather which heralded the approach of a typical devonshire autumn. but when he looked at lady mary, he knew that he would have been better able to dispense with that holiday interval than she was to have endured it. she had always been considered marvellously young-looking for her age. the quiet country life she had led had bestowed that advantage upon her; and her beauty, fair as she was, had always been less dependent on colouring than upon the exquisite delicacy of her features and general contour. but now a heaviness beneath the blue eyes,--a little fading of her brightness--a little droop of the beautifully shaped mouth,--almost betrayed her seven and thirty years; and the soft, abundant, brown hair was threaded quite perceptibly with silver. her sweet face smiled upon him; but the smile was no longer, he thought, joyous--but pathetic, as of one who reproaches herself wonderingly for light-heartedness. john looked at her in silence, but the words he uttered in his heart were, "i will never leave you any more." perhaps his face said everything that he did not say, for lady mary had turned from him with a little sob, and leant her forehead on her hands, looking out at the rain which swept the valley. she felt, as she had always felt in john's presence, that here was her champion and her protector and her slave, in one; returned to restore her failing courage and her lost self-confidence. "so you saw something of peter in london?" she said tremulously, breaking the silence which had fallen between them after their first greeting. "please tell me. you know i have seen almost nothing of him since he came home." "so i gather," said john. "yes, i saw something--not very much--of master peter in london. you see i am not much of a society man;" and he laughed. "was peter a society man?" said his mother, laughing also, but rather sadly. "he went out a good deal, and was to be met with in most places," john answered. "i read his name in lists of dances given by people i did not know he had ever heard of. but i did not like to ask him how he managed to get invited. he rather dislikes being questioned," said lady mary, describing peter's prejudices as mildly as possible. "i fancy miss sarah could tell you," said john, with twinkling eyes. "i did not know--just a girl--could get a stranger, a boy like peter, invited everywhere," said lady mary, innocently. john laughed. "peter is a very eligible boy," he said, "and sarah is not 'just a girl,' but a very clever young woman indeed; and lady tintern is a ball-giver. but if he had been the most ordinary of youths, a bachelor's foothold on the dance-lists is the easiest thing in the world to obtain. it means nothing in itself." "i think it meant a good deal to peter," said his mother, with a sigh. "if only i could think sarah were in earnest." "i don't see why not," said john. then he came and took lady mary's hand, and led her to a seat next the fire. "come and sit down comfortably," he said, "and let us talk everything over. it looks very miserable out-of-doors, and nothing could be more delightful than this room, and nobody to disturb us. i want the real history of the last few months. do you know your letters told me almost nothing?" the room was certainly delightful, and not the less so for the chill rain without, which beat against the windows, and enhanced the bright aspect of the scene within. a little fire burned cheerfully in the polished grate, and cast its glow upon the burnished fender, and the silver ornaments and trifles on a rosewood table beyond. the furniture was bright with old-fashioned glossy chintz; the rose-tinted walls were hung with fine water-colour drawings; the windows with rose-silk curtains. the hardy outdoor flowers were banished to the oaken hall. lady mary's sense of the fitness of things permitted the silver cups and venetian glasses of this dainty apartment to be filled only with waxen hothouse blooms and maidenhair fern. she could not but be conscious of the restfulness of her surroundings, and of john's calm, protecting presence, as he placed her tenderly in the corner of the fireside couch, and took his place beside her. "i don't think the last months have had any history at all," she said dreamily. "i have missed you, john. but that--you know already. i--i have been very lonely--since--since peter came home. i think it was sarah who persuaded him to go away again so soon. i believe she laughed at his clothes." "i suppose they _were_ a little out of date, and he must surely have outgrown them, besides," said john, smiling. "i suppose so; anyway, i think it must have been that which put it into his head to go to london and buy more. it was a little awkward for the poor boy, because he had just been scolding _me_ for wishing to go to london. but he said he would only be a few days." "and he stayed to the end of the season?" "yes. of course the aunts put it down to sarah. i dare say it _was_ her doing. i don't know why she should wish to rob me of my boy just for--amusement," said lady mary, rather resentfully. "but i have not understood sarah lately; she has seemed so hard and flippant. you are laughing, john? i dare say i am jealous and inconsistent. you are quite right. one moment i want to think sarah in earnest--and willing to marry my boy; and the next i remember that i began to hate his wife the very day he was born." "it appears to be the nature of mothers," said john, indulgently. "but you will allow _me_ to hope for peter's happiness, and quite incidentally, of course, for our own?" she smiled. "seriously, john, i wish you would tell me how he got on in london." "he dined with me once or twice, as you know," said john, "and was very friendly. i think he was relieved that i made no suggestion of tutors or universities, and that i took his eyeglass for granted. in short, that i treated him as i should treat any other young man of my acquaintance; whereas he had greatly feared i might presume upon my guardianship to give him good advice. but i did not, because he is too young to want advice just now, and prefers, like most of us, to buy his own experience." "i hope he was really nice to you. you won't hide anything? you'll tell me exactly?" "i am hiding nothing. the lad is a good lad at bottom, and a manly one into the bargain," said john. "his defects are of the kind which get up, so to speak, and hit you in the eye; and are, consequently, not of a kind to escape observation. what is obviously wrong is easiest cured. he has yet to learn that 'manners maketh man,' but he was learning it as fast as possible. the mistakes of youth are rather pathetic than annoying." "sometimes," said lady mary. "he fell, very naturally, into most of the conventional errors which beset the inexperienced londoner," said john, smiling slightly at the recollection. "he talked in a familiar manner of persons whose names were unknown to him the day before yesterday; and told well-known anecdotes about well-known people whom he hadn't had time to meet, as though they had only just happened. the kind of stories outsiders tell to new-comers. and he professed to be bored at every party he attended. i won't say that the _habitué_ is always too well bred, or too grateful to his entertainers, to do anything of the kind; but he is certainly too wise or too cautious." "perhaps he was bored?" said lady mary, wistfully. "knowing nobody, poor boy." "the first time i met him on neutral ground was at a dance," said john. "he looked very tall and nervous and lonely, and, of course, he was not dancing; but, nevertheless, he was the hero of the evening, or so miss sarah gave me to understand. but you can imagine it for yourself. the war just over, and a young fellow who has lost so much in it; the gallant nephew of the gallant ferries; besides his own romantic name, and his eligibility. i took him off to the national gallery, to make acquaintance with the portrait of our cavalier ancestor there; and i declare there is a likeness. miss sarah had visited it long ago, it appears. for my part, i am glad to think that these fashionable young women can still be so enthusiastic about a wounded soldier. sarah said they were all wild to dance with him, and ready to shed tears for his lost arm." "and was he much with sarah?" john laughed and shrugged his shoulders. "miss sarah is a star with many satellites. she raised my hopes, however, by appearing to have a few smiles to spare for peter." "and she must have got him the invitation to tintern castle," said lady mary. "that is why he went up to scotland." "i see." "then she got him another invitation, i suppose, for he went to the next house she stayed at; and to a third place for some yachting." "what did lady tintern say?" "that's just it. sarah is in lady tintern's black books just now. she is furious with her, mrs. hewel tells me, because she has refused lord avonwick." "hum!" said john. "he has forty thousand a year." "i don't think money would tempt sarah to marry a man she did not love," said lady mary, reproachfully. "there was mr. van graaf, the african millionaire. she wouldn't look at him, and he offered to settle untold sums upon her." "did he? what a brute!" "why?" "never mind. you've not seen him. i'm glad he found sarah wasn't for sale. but doesn't all this look as if it were peter, after all?" "if only i could think she were in earnest," lady mary said again. "but he is such a boy. she has three times his cleverness in some ways, and three times his experience, though she is younger than he. i suppose women mature much earlier than men. it galls my pride when she orders him about, and laughs at him. but he--he doesn't understand." "perhaps," said john, slowly, "he understands better than you think. each generation has a freemasonry of its own. i must confess i have heard scraps of chatter and chaff in ballrooms and theatres which have filled me with amazement, wondering how it could be possible that such poor stuff should pass muster as conversation, or coquetry, or gallantry, with the youths and maidens of to-day. but when i have observed further, instead of an offended fair, or a disillusioned swain, behold! two young heads close together, two young faces sparkling with smiles and satisfaction. and the older person, who would fatuously join in with a sensible remark, spoils all the enjoyment. the fact is, the secret of real companionship is not quality, but equality. there's a punning platitude for you." "it may be a platitude, but i am beginning to discover that what are called platitudes by the young are biting truths to the old," said lady mary. "i've felt it a thousand times. words come so easily to my lips when i'm speaking to you, i am so certain you will understand and respond. but with peter, i sometimes feel as though i were dumb or stupid. perhaps you've been too--too kind; you've understood too quickly. i've been too ready to believe that you've found me--" "everything i wanted to find you," interrupted john, tenderly; "and that was something quite out of the common." she smiled and shook her head. "i am ready to believe all the nice things you can say, as fast as you can say them, when i am with _you_" she said, with a raillery rather mournful than gay. "but when i am with peter, i seem to realize dreadfully that i'm only a middle-aged woman of average capacity, and with very little knowledge of the world. he does his best to teach me. that's funny, isn't it?" "it's very like--a very young man," said john, gently. "you mustn't think i'm mocking at my boy--like sarah," she said vehemently. "perhaps i am wrong to tell you. perhaps only a mother would really understand. but it makes me a little sad and bewildered. my boy--my little baby, who lay in my arms and learnt everything from me. and now he looks down and lectures me from such an immense height of superiority, never dreaming that i'm laughing in my heart, because it's only little peter, after all." "and he doesn't lecture sarah?" "oh no; he doesn't lecture sarah. she is too young to be lectured with impunity, and too wise. besides, i think since he went away, and saw sarah flattered and spoilt, and queening it among the great people who didn't know him even by sight, that he has realized that their relative positions have changed a good deal. you see, little sarah hewel, as she used to be, would have been making quite a great match in marrying peter. but lady tintern's adopted daughter and heiress--old tintern left an immense fortune to his wife, didn't he?--is another matter altogether. and how could she settle down to this humdrum life after all the excitement and gaiety she's been accustomed to?" "women do such things every day. besides--" "yes?" "is peter still so much enamoured of a humdrum life?" said john, dryly. "i have had no opportunity of finding out; but i am sure he will want to settle down quietly when all this is over--" "you mean when he's no longer in love with sarah?" "he's barely one-and-twenty; it can't last," said lady mary. "i don't know. if she's so much cleverer than he, i'm inclined to think it may," said john. "oh, of course, if he married her--it would last," said lady mary. "and then?" said john, smiling. "perhaps _then_," said lady mary; and she laid her hand softly in the strong hand outstretched to receive it. chapter xvii there was a tap at the door of lady mary's bedroom, and peter's voice sounded without. "mother, could i speak to you for a moment?" "come in," said lady mary's soft voice; and peter entered and closed the door, and crossed to the oriel window, where she was sitting at her writing-table, before a pile of notes and account books. long ago, in peter's childhood, she had learned to make this bedroom her refuge, where she could read or write or dream, in silence; away from the two old ladies, who seemed to pervade all the living-rooms at barracombe. peter had been accustomed all his life to seek his mother here. she had chosen the room at her marriage, and had had an old-fashioned paper of bunched rosebuds put up there. it was very long and low, and looked eastward into the fountain garden, and over the tree-tops far away to the open country. the sisters had thought one of the handsome modern rooms of the south front would be more suitable for the bride, but lady mary had her way. she preferred the older part of the house, and liked the steps down into her room, the uneven floor, the low ceiling, the quaint window-seats, and the powdering closet where she hung her dresses. the great oriel window formed almost a sitting-room apart. here was her writing-table, whereon stood now a green jar of scented arums and trailing white fuchsias. a bunch of sweet peas in a corner of the window-seat perfumed the whole room, already fragrant with potpourri and lavender. a low bookcase was filled with her favourite volumes; one shelf with the story-books of her childhood, from which she had long ago read aloud to peter, on rainy days when he had exhausted all other kinds of amusement; for he had never touched a book if he could help it, therein resembling his father. in the corner next the window stood the cot where peter had slept often as a little boy, and which had been playfully designated the hospital, because his mother had always carried him thither when he was ill. then she had taken him jealously from the care of his attendant, and had nursed and guarded him herself day and night, until even convalescence was a thing of the past. she had never suffered that little cot to be moved; the white coverlet had been made and embroidered by her own hands. a gaudy oleograph of a soldier on horseback--which little peter had been fond of, and which had been hung up to amuse him during one of those childish illnesses--remained in its place. how often had she looked at it through her tears when peter was far away! beside the cot stood a table with a shabby book of devotions, marked by a ribbon from which the colour had long since faded. the book had belonged to lady mary's father, young robbie setoun, who had become lord ferries but one short month before he met with a soldier's death. his daughter said her prayers at this little table, and had carried thither her agony and petitions for her boy in his peril, during the many, many months of the south african war. the morning was brilliant and sunny, and the upper casements stood open, to let in the fresh autumn air, and the song of the robin balancing on a swaying twig of the ivy climbing the old walls. white clouds were blowing brightly across a clear, blue sky. lady mary stretched out her hand and pulled a cord, which drew a rosy curtain half across the window, and shaded the corner where she was sitting. she looked anxiously and tenderly into peter's face; her quick instinct gathered that something had shaken him from his ordinary mood of criticism or indifference. "are you come to have a little talk with me, my darling?" she said. she was afraid to offer the caress she longed to bestow. she moved from her stiff elbow-chair to the soft cushions in her favourite corner of the window-seat, and held out a timid hand. peter clasped it in his own, threw himself on a stool at her feet, and rested his forehead against her knee. "i have something to tell you, mother, and i am afraid that, when i have told you, you will be disappointed in me; that you will think me inconsistent." her heart beat faster. "which of us is consistent in this world, my darling? we all change with circumstances. we are often obliged to change, even against our wills. tell me, peter; i shall understand." "there's not really anything to tell," said peter, nervously contradicting himself, "because nothing is exactly settled yet. but i think something might be--before very long, if you would help me to smooth away some of the principal difficulties." "yes, yes," said lady mary, venturing to stroke the closely cropped black head resting against her lap. "you know--sarah--has been teaching me the new kind of croquet, at hewelscourt, since we came back from scotland?" he said. "i don't get on so badly, considering." "my poor boy!" "oh, i was always rather inclined to be left-handed; it comes in usefully now," said peter, who generally hurried over any reference to his misfortune. "well, this morning, whilst we were playing, i asked sarah, for the third time, to--to marry me. the third's the lucky time, isn't it?" he said, with a tremulous laugh, "and--and--" "she said yes!" cried lady mary, clasping her hands. "she didn't go so far as that," said peter, rather reproachfully. his voice shook slightly. "but she didn't say no. it's the first time she hasn't said no." "what did she say?" said lady mary. she tried to keep her feelings of indignation and offence against sarah out of her voice. after all, who was sarah that she should presume to refuse peter? or for the matter of that, to accept him? either course seems equally unpardonable at times to motherly jealousy, and lady mary was half vexed and half amused to find herself not exempt from this weakness. "impudent little red-headed thing!" she said to herself, though she loved sarah dearly, and admired her red hair with all her heart. "she told me a few of the reasons why she--she didn't want to marry me," said peter. lady mary's dismay was rather too apparent. "surely that doesn't sound very hopeful." peter moved impatiently. "oh, mother, it is always so difficult to make you understand." "is it, indeed?" she said, with a faint, pained smile. "i do my best, my darling." "never mind; i suppose women are always rather slow of comprehension," said the young lord of creation--"that is, except sarah. _she_ always understands. god bless her!" "god bless her, indeed!" said lady mary, gently, and the tears started to her blue eyes, "if she is going to marry my boy." peter repented his crossness. "forgive me, mother. i know you mean to be kind," he said. "you will help me, won't you?" "with all my heart," she said, anxiously; "only tell me how." "you see, i can't help feeling," said peter, bashfully, "that she wouldn't have told me why she _couldn't_ marry me, if she hadn't thought she might bring herself to do it in the end, if i got over the difficulties she mentioned. i've been--hopeful, ever since she refused that ass of an avonwick, in spite of lady tintern. it wants some courage to defy lady tintern, i can tell you, though she's such a little object to look at. by george! i'd almost rather walk up to a loaded gun than face that woman's tongue. of course, even if _my_ share of the difficulties were removed, there'd still be lady tintern against us. but if sarah can defy lady tintern in one thing, she might in another. she's afraid of nobody." "sarah certainly does not lack courage," said lady mary, smiling. "i never saw anybody like her," said peter, whose love possessed him, mind, body, and soul. "why, i've heard her keep a whole roomful of people laughing, and every one of them as dull as ditch-water till she came in. and to see her hold her own against men at games--she's more strength in one of her pretty, white wrists," said peter, looking with an air of disparagement at his mother's slender, delicate hand, "than you have in your whole body, i do believe." "she is splendidly strong," said lady mary; "the very personification of youth and health." she sighed softly. "and beauty," said peter, excitedly. "don't leave that out. and a good sort, through and through, as even _you_ must allow, mother." he spoke as though he suspected her of begrudging his praise of sarah, and she made haste to reply: "indeed, she is a good sort, dear little sarah." "she is very fond of you," peter said, in a choking voice. it seemed to him, in his infatuation, so touching that sarah should be fond of any one. "she was dreadfully afraid of hurting your feelings; but yet, as she said, she was bound to be frank with me." "oh, peter, do tell me what you mean. you are keeping me on thorns," said lady mary. she grew red and white by turns. was john's happiness in sight already, as well as peter's? "it's--it's most awfully hard to tell you," said peter. he rose, and leant his elbow against the stone mullion nearest her, looking down anxiously upon her as he spoke. "after all i said to you when we first came home, it's awfully hard. but if you would only understand, you could make it all easy enough." "i will--i do understand." but peter could not make up his mind even now to be explicit. "you see," he said, "sarah is--not like other girls." "of course not," said his mother. she controlled her impatience, reminding herself that peter was very young, and that he had never been in love before. "she's a kind of--of queen," said peter, dreamily. "i only wish you could have seen what it was in london." "i can imagine it," said lady mary. "no, you couldn't. i hadn't an idea what she would be there, until i went to london and saw for myself," said peter, who measured everybody's imagination by his own. "you see," he explained "my position here, which seems so important to you and the other people round here, and _used_ to seem so important to me--is--just nothing at all compared to what has been cast at her feet, as it were, over and over again, for her to pick up if she chose. and this house," said peter, glancing round and shaking his head--"this house, which seems so beautiful to you now it's all done up, if you'd only _seen_ the houses _she's_ accustomed to staying at. tintern castle, for instance--" "i was born in a greater house than tintern castle, peter," said lady mary, gently. "oh, of course. i'm saying nothing against ferries," said peter, impatiently. "but you only lived there as a child. a child doesn't notice." "some children don't," said lady mary, with that faint, wondering smile which hid her pain from peter, and would have revealed it so clearly to john. "it isn't that sarah _minds_ this old house," said peter; "she was saying what a pretty room she could make of the drawing-room only the other day." lady mary felt an odd pang at her heart. she thought of the trouble john had taken to choose the best of the water-colours for the rose-tinted room--the room he had declared so bright and so charming--of the pretty curtains and chintzes; and the valuable old china she had collected from every part of the house for the cabinets. "you see, she's got that sort of thing at her fingers' ends, lady tintern being such a connoisseur," said the unconscious peter. "but she's so afraid of hurting your feelings--" "why should she be?" said lady mary, coldly, in spite of herself. "if she does not like the drawing-room, she can easily alter it." "that's what i say," said peter, with a touch of his father's pomposity. "surely a bride has a right to look forward to arranging her home as she chooses. and sarah is mad about old french furniture--louis seize, i think it is--but i know nothing about such things. i think a man should leave the choice of furniture, and all that, to his wife--especially when her taste happens to be as good as sarah's." "i--i think so too, peter," said lady mary. her thoughts wandered momentarily into the past; but his eager tones recalled her attention. "then you won't mind, so far?" said peter, anxiously. "i--why should i mind?" said lady mary, starting. "i believe--i have read--that old french furniture is all the rage now." then she bethought herself, and uttered a faint laugh. "but i'm afraid your aunts might make it a little uncomfortable for her, if she--tried to alter anything. i--go my own way now, and don't mind--but a young bride--does not always like to be found fault with. she might find that relations-in-law are sometimes--a little trying." lady mary felt, as she spoke these words, that she was somehow opening a way for herself as well as for peter. she wondered, with a beating heart, whether the moment had come in which she ought to tell him-- "that's just it," said peter's voice, breaking in on her thoughts. "that's just what sarah means, and what i was trying to lead up to; only i'm no diplomatist. but that's one of the greatest objections she has to marrying me, quite apart from disappointing her aunt. i can't blame lady tintern," said peter, with a new and strange humility, "for not thinking me good enough for sarah; and _that's_ not a difficulty _i_ can ever hope to remove. sarah is the one to decide that point. but about relations-in-law--it's what i've been trying to tell you all this time." he cleared his throat, which had grown dry and husky. "she says that when she marries she--she intends to have her house to herself." there was a pause. "i see," said lady mary. she was silent; not, as peter thought, with mortification; but because she could not make up her mind what words to choose, in which to tell him that it was freedom and happiness he was thus offering her with both hands; and not, as he thought, loneliness and disappointment. twice she essayed to speak, and failed through sheer embarrassment. the second time peter lifted her hand to his lips. she felt through all her consciousness the shy remorse which prompted that rare caress. "the--the dower house," faltered peter, "is only a few yards away." a sudden desire to laugh aloud seized lady mary. his former words returned upon her memory. "it's--it's rather damp, isn't it?" she said, in a shaking voice. he looked into her face, and did not understand the brightness of the smile that was shining through her tears. "but it's very picturesque," said peter, "and--and roomy. you and my aunts would be quite snug there; and it could be very prettily decorated, sarah says." "perhaps sarah would advise us on the subject?" said lady mary, unable to resist this thrust. "i'm sure she'd be delighted," said peter, simply. lady mary fell back on her cushions and laughed helplessly, almost hysterically. "i don't see why you should laugh," said peter, in a rather sore tone. "i don't know how it is, but i never _can_ understand you, mother." "i see you can't. never mind, peter," said lady mary. she sat up, and lifted her pretty hands to smooth the soft waves of her brown hair. "so i'm to settle down happily in my dower house, and take your aunts to live with me?" "why, you see," said peter, "we couldn't very well let the poor old things wander away alone into the world, could we?" "i think," said lady mary, slowly, "that they can take care of themselves. and it is just possible that they may have foreseen--your change of intentions." "women can never take care of themselves," said peter. "and how can they have foreseen? i had no idea myself of _this_ happening. but they would be perfectly happy in the dower house; it is close by, and i could see them very often. it wouldn't be like leaving barracombe." "yes, i think they could be happy there," said lady mary. she felt that the moment had come at last. her heart beat thickly, and her colour came and went. "but if _they_ were happily settled at the dower house," she said slowly, for her agitation was making her breathless, and she did not want peter to notice it,"--i would willingly give it up to them altogether. it could not matter whether _i_ were there or not. though they are old, they are perfectly able to look after themselves--and other people; and if they were not, they would not like _me_ to take care of them. they have their own servants and mrs. ash. and they have never liked me, peter, though we have lived together so many years." "that is nonsense," said peter, very calmly; "and if _they_ don't want you there, mother, _i_ do. of course you must live at the dower house; my father left it to you. and i shall want you more than ever now." "i don't see how," said lady mary. "why, _we_--sarah and i," said peter, lingering fondly over the words which linked that beloved name with his own, "if we ever--if _it_ ever came off--we shall naturally be away from home a good deal. i couldn't ask sarah to tie herself down to this dull old place, could i?" "i suppose not," said lady mary. "she's accustomed to going about the world a good deal," said peter. "no doubt." "even _i_," said peter, turning a flushed face towards his mother--"i am too young, as sarah says--and i feel it myself since i have seen something of the life she lives--to become a complete fixture, like my father was. it's--it's, as sarah says--it's narrowing. i can see the effects of it upon you all," said peter, calmly, "when i come back here." he could not fathom the wistfulness which clouded the blue eyes she lifted to his face. "it is very narrowing," she said humbly. "one may devote one's self to one's duties as a landed proprietor," said peter, with another recurrence of pomposity, "and yet see something of one's fellow-men." he replaced the eyeglass, and walked up and down the room for a few moments, as though he were pacing a quarter-deck. he looked very tall, and very, very slight and thin; older than his years, tanned and dried by the african sun, which had enhanced his natural darkness. though he spoke as a boy, he looked like a man. his mother's heart yearned over him. peter had taken his lack of perception with him into the heart of south africa, and brought it back intact. because his body had travelled many hundreds of miles over land and sea, he believed that his mind had opened in proportion to the distance covered. he knew that men and women of action pick up knowledge of the world without pausing on their busy way; but he did not know that it is to the silent, the sorrowful, and the solitary--to those who have time to listen--that god reveals the secrets of life. she said to herself that everything about him was dear to her; his grey eyes, that never saw below the surface of things; his thin, brown face; his youthful affectation; the strange, new growth which shaded his long upper lip, and softened the plainness of the crewys physiognomy, which peter would not have bartered for the handsomest set of greek features ever imagined by a sculptor. even for his faults lady mary had a tender toleration; for peter would not have been peter without them. "it would not be fair on sarah, knowing all london--worth knowing--as she does," said peter with pardonable exaggeration, "to rob her of the season altogether. we shall go up regularly, every year, if--if she marries me. of that i am determined, and so"--incidentally--"is she." "nothing could be nicer," said lady mary, heartily enough to satisfy even peter. he spoke with more warmth and naturalness. "she likes to go abroad, mother, too, now and then," he said. "that would be delightful," said lady mary, eagerly. her blue eyes sparkled. her interest and enthusiasm were easily roused, after all; and surely these new ideas would make it much easier to tell peter. "oh, peter!" she said, clasping her hands, "paris--rome--switzerland!" "wherever sarah fancies," said peter, magnanimously. "i can't say i care much. all i am thinking of is--being with her. it doesn't matter _where_, so long as she is pleased. what does anything matter," he said, and his dark face softened as she had never seen it soften yet, "so long as one is with the companion one loves best in the world?" "it would be--paradise," said lady mary, in a low voice; and she thought to herself resolutely, "i will tell him now." peter ceased his walk, and came close to her and took her hand. the emotion had not altogether died out of his voice and face. "but you are not to think, mother, that i shall ever again be the selfish boy i used to be--the boy who didn't value your love and devotion." "no, dear, no," she answered, with wet eyes; "i will never think so. we can love each other just the same, perhaps even batter, even though--oh, peter--" but peter was in no mind to brook interruption. he was burning to pour out his plans for her future, and his own. "wherever we may go, and whatever we may be doing," he said emotionally, "it will be a joy and a comfort to me to know that my dear old mother is always _here_. taking care of the place and looking after the people, and waiting always to welcome me, with her old sweet smile on her dear old face." peter was not often moved to such enthusiasm, and he was almost overcome by his own eloquence in describing this beautiful picture. lady mary was likewise overcome. she sank back once more in her cushioned corner, looking at him with a blank dismay that could not escape even his dull observation. how impossible it was to tell peter, after all! how impossible he always made it! "i know you must feel it just at first," he said anxiously; "but you--you can't expect to keep me all to yourself for ever." she shook her head, and tried to smile. he grew a little impatient. "after all," he said, "you must be reasonable, mother. every one has to live his own life." then lady mary found words. a sudden rush of indignation--the pent-up feelings of years--brought the scarlet blood to her cheeks and the fire to her gentle, blue eyes. "every one--but _me_" she said, trembling violently. "you!" said peter, astonished. she clasped her hands against her bosom to still the panting and throbbing that, it seemed to her, must be evident outwardly, so strong was the emotion that shook her fragile form. "every one--but me," she said. "does it never--strike you--peter--that i, too, would like to live before i die? whilst you are living your own life, why shouldn't i be living mine? why shouldn't _i_ go to london, and to paris, and to rome, and to switzerland, or wherever i choose, now that you--_you_--have set me free?" "mother," said peter, aghast, "are you gone mad?" "perhaps i am a little mad," said poor lady mary. "people go mad sometimes, who have been too long--in prison--they say." then she saw his real alarm, and laughed till she cried. "i am not really mad," she said. "do not be frightened, peter. i--i was only joking." "it is enough to frighten anybody when you go on like that," said peter, relieved, but angry. "talking of prison, and rushing about all over the world--i see no joke in that." "why should i be the only one who must not rush all over the world?" said lady mary. "you must know perfectly well it would be preposterous," said peter, sullenly, "to break up all your habits, and leave barracombe and--and all of us--and start a fresh life--at your age. and if this is how you mock at me and all my plans, i'm sorry i ever took you into my confidence at all. i might have known i should repent it," he said; and a sob of angry resentment broke his voice. "indeed, i am not mocking at you, peter," she said, sorely repentant and ashamed of her outburst. "forgive me, darling! i see it was--not the moment. you do not understand. you are thinking only of sarah, as is natural just now. it was not the moment for me to be talking of myself." "you never used to be selfish," said peter, thawing somewhat, as she threw her arms about him, and rested her head against his shoulder. she laughed rather sadly. "but perhaps i am growing selfish--in my old age," said peter's mother. later, lady mary sought john crewys in the smoking-room. he sprang up, smiled at her, and held out his hand. "so peter has been confiding his schemes to you?" "how did you know?" "i only guessed. when a man seeks a _tête-à-tête_ so earnestly, it is generally to talk about himself. did the schemes include--sarah?" "they include sarah--marriage--travelling--london--change of every kind." "already!" cried john, "bravo, peter! and hurray for one-and-twenty! and you are free?" "oh, no; i am not to be free." "what! do his schemes include you?" "not altogether." "that is surely illogical, if yours are to include him?" she smiled faintly. "i am to be always here, to look after the place when he and sarah are travelling or in london. i am to live with his aunts. he wants to be able to think of me as always waiting here to welcome him home, as--as i have been all his life. not actually in this house, because--sarah--my little sarah--wouldn't like that, it seems; but in the dower house, close by." "i see," said john. "how delightfully ingenuous, and how pleasingly unselfish a very young man can sometimes be!" "ah! don't laugh at me, john," she said tremulously. "indeed, just now, i cannot bear it." "laugh at you, my queen--my saint! how little you know me!" said john, tenderly. "it was at peter that i was presuming to smile." "is it a laughing matter?" she said wistfully. "i think it will be, mary." "i tried so hard to tell him," said lady mary, "but i couldn't. somehow he made it impossible. he looks upon me as quite, quite old." john laughed outright. a laugh that rang true even to lady mary's sensitive perceptions. "but didn't _you_ look upon everybody over thirty as, quite old when you were one-and-twenty? i'm sure i did." "perhaps. but yet--i don't know. i am his mother. it is natural he should feel so. he made me realize how preposterous it was for me, the mother of a grown-up son, to be thinking selfishly of my own happiness, as though i were a young, fresh girl just starting life." "i had hoped," said john, quietly, "that you might be thinking a little of my happiness too." "oh, john! but your happiness and mine seemed all the same thing," she said ingenuously. "yet he thinks of my life as finished; and i was thinking of it as though it were beginning all over again. he made me feel so ashamed, so conscience-stricken." she hid her face in her hands. "how could i tell him?" "i think," said john, "that the time has come when he must be told. i meant to put it off until he attained his majority; but since he has broached the subject of your leaving this house himself, he has given us the best opportunity possible. and i also think--that the telling had better be left to me." chapter xviii john crewys stood on the walk below the terrace, with peter by his side, enjoying an after-breakfast smoke, and watching a party of sportsmen climbing up the bracken-clothed slopes of the opposite hillside. a dozen beaters were toiling after the guns, among whom the short and sturdy figure of colonel hewel was very plainly to be distinguished. a boy was leading a pony-cart for the game. sarah had accepted an invitation to dine and spend the evening with her beloved lady mary at barracombe; but peter had another appointment with her besides, of which lady mary knew nothing. he was to meet her at the ferry, and picnic on the moor at the top of the hill, on his side of the river. but through all the secret joy and triumph that possessed him at the remembrance of this rendezvous, he could not but sigh as he watched the little procession of sportsmen opposite, and almost involuntarily his regret escaped him in the half-muttered words-- "i shall never shoot again." "there are things even better worth doing in life," said john, sympathetically. "colonel hewel wouldn't give in to that," said peter. "he's rather a one-idea'd man," john agreed. "but if you asked him whether he'd sacrifice all the sport he's ever likely to enjoy, for one chance to distinguish himself in action--why, you're a soldier, and you know best what he'd say." peter's brow cleared. "you've got a knack," he said, almost graciously, "of putting a fellow in a good humour with himself, cousin john." "i generally find it easier to be in a good humour with myself than with other people," said john, whimsically. "one expects so little from one's self, that one is scarcely ever disappointed; and so much from other people, that nothing they can do comes up to one's expectations." "i don't know about that," said peter, bluntly. "old crawley says _you_ take it out of yourself like anything. since i came back this time, he's been holding forth to me about all you've done for me and the estate, and all that. i didn't know my father had left things in such a mess. and that was a smart thing you did about buying in the farm, and settling the dispute with the crown, which my father used to be so worried over. i see i've got a good bit to thank you for, cousin john. i--i'm no end grateful, and all that." "all right," said john. "don't bother to make speeches, old boy." "i must say one thing, though," said peter, awkwardly. "i was against all the changes, and thought they might have been left till i came home; but i didn't realize it was to be now or never, as old crawley puts it, and that i'm not to have the right to touch my capital when i come of age." "the whole arrangement was rather an unusual one; but everything's worked out all right, and, as far as the estate goes, you'll find it in pretty fair order to start upon, and values increased," said john, quietly. "but crawley has the whole thing at his fingers' ends, and the interest of the place thoroughly at heart. you couldn't have a better adviser." "he's well enough," said peter, somewhat ungraciously. "shall we take a turn up and down?" said john. he lighted a fresh cigarette. "there is a chill feeling in the air, though it is such a lovely morning." "it will be warmer when the sun has conquered the mist," said peter, with a slight shiver. the white dew on the long grass, and the gossamer cobwebs spun in a single night from twig to twig of the rose-trees, glittered in the sunshine. the autumn roses bloomed cheerfully in the long border, and the robins were singing loudly on the terrace above. the heavy heads of the dahlias drooped beneath their weight of moisture, in these last days of their existence, before the frost would bring them to a sudden end. capucines, in every shade of brown and crimson and gold, ran riot over the ground. peter drew a pipe from his pocket, put it in his mouth, took out his tobacco-pouch, and filled the pipe with his left hand. john watched him with interest. "that was dexterously done." "i'm getting pretty handy," said the hero, with satisfaction, striking a match; "but"--his face fell anew--"no more football; one feels that sort of thing just at the beginning of the season. no more games. it wouldn't tell so much on a fellow like you, cousin john, who's perfectly happy with a book, and who--" "who's too old for games," suggested john. "oh, there's always golf," said peter. "a refuge for the aged, eh?" said john, and his eyes twinkled. "but miss sarah says you bid fair to beat her at croquet." "oh, she was--just rotting," said peter; and the tone touched john, though he detested slang. "and what's croquet, after all, to a fellow that's used to exercise? i suppose i shall be all right again hunting, when i've got my nerve back a bit. at present it's rotten. a fellow feels so beastly helpless and one-sided. however, that'll wear off, i expect." "i hope so," said john. they reached the end of the long walk, and stood for a moment beneath the eastern turret, watching the sparkles on the brown surface of the river below, and the white mist floating away down the valley. "talking of advice," said peter, abruptly--"if i wanted _that_, i'd rather come to you than to old crawley. after all, though you won't be my guardian much longer, you're still my mother's trustee." "yes," said john, smiling; "the law still entitles me to take an interest in--in your mother." "of course i shouldn't dream of mentioning her affairs, or mine either, for that matter, to any one else," said peter. he made an exception in his own mind, but decided that it was not necessary to explain this to john, for the moment. "thank you, peter," said john. "my mother--seems to me," said peter, slowly, "to have changed very much since i went to south africa. have you noticed it?" "i have," said john, dryly. "i don't suppose," said peter, quickening his steps, "that any one could realize exactly what i feel about it." "i think--perhaps--i could," said john, without visible satire, "dimly and, no doubt, inadequately." "the fact is," said peter, and the warm colour rushed into his brown face, even to his thin temples, "i--i'm hoping to get married very soon; though nothing's exactly settled yet." "a man in your position generally marries early," said john. "i think you're quite right." "as my mother likes--the girl i want to marry," said peter, "i hoped it would make everything straight. but she seems quite miserable at the thought of settling down quietly in the dower house." "ah! in the dower house," said john. "then you will not be wanting her to live here with you, after all?" "it's the same thing, though," said peter, "as i've tried to explain to her. she'd be only a few yards off; and she could still be looking after the place and my interests, and all that, as she does now. and whenever i was down here, i should see her constantly; you know how devoted i am to my mother. of course i can't deny i did lead her to hope i should be always with her. but a man can't help it if he happens to fall in love. of course, if--if all happens as i hope, as i have reason to hope, i shall _have_ to be away from her a good deal. but that's all in the course of nature as a fellow grows up. i sha'n't be any the less glad to see her when i _do_ come home. and yet here she is talking quite wildly of leaving barracombe altogether, and going to london, and travelling all over the world, and doing all sorts of things she's never done in her life. it's not like my mother, and i can't bear to think of her like that. i tell you she's changed altogether," said peter, and there were tears in his grey eyes. john felt an odd sympathy for the boy; he recognized that though peter's limitations were obvious, his anxiety was sincere. peter, too, had his ideals; if they were ideals conventional and out of date, that was hardly his fault. john figured to himself very distinctly that imaginary mother whom peter held sacred; the mother who stayed always at home, and parted her hair plainly, and said many prayers, and did much needlework; but who, nevertheless, was not, and never could be, the real lady mary, whom peter did not know. but it was a tender ideal in its way, though it belonged to that past into which so many tender and beautiful visions have faded. the maiden of to-day still dreams of the knightly armour-clad heroes of the twelfth century; it is not her fault that she is presently glad to fall in love with a gentleman on the stock exchange, in a top hat and a frock coat. "i have seen something of women of the world," said peter, who had scarcely yet skimmed the bubbles from the surface of that society, whose depths he believed himself to have explored. "i suppose that is what my mother wants to turn into, when she talks of london and paris. _my mother_! who has lived in the country all her life." "i suppose some women are worldly," said john, as gravely as possible, "and no doubt the shallow-hearted, the stupid, the selfish are to be found everywhere, and belonging to either sex; but, nevertheless, solid virtue and true kindness are to be met with among the dames of mayfair as among the matrons of the country-side. their shibboleth is different, that's all. perhaps--it is possible--that the speech of the town ladies is the more charitable, that they seek more persistently to do good to their fellow-creatures. i don't know. comparisons are odious, but so," he added, with a slight laugh, "are general conclusions, founded on popular prejudice rather than individual experience--odious." here john perceived that his words of wisdom were conveying hardly any meaning to peter, who was only waiting impatiently till he had come to an end of them; so he pursued this topic no further, and contented himself by inquiring: "what do you want me to do?" "i want you to explain to her," said peter, eagerly, "how unsuitable it would be; and to advise her to settle down quietly at the dower house, as i'm sure my father would have wished her to do. that's all." "i see," said john, "you want me to put the case to her from your point of view." "i wish you would," said peter, earnestly; "every one says you're so eloquent. surely you could talk her over?" "i hope i am not eloquent in private life," said john, laughing. "but if you want to know how it appears to me--?" peter nodded gravely, pipe in mouth. "let us see. to start with," said john, thoughtfully, "you went off, a boy from eton, to serve your country when you thought, and rightly, that your country had need of you. you distinguished yourself in south africa--" "surely you needn't go into all that?" said peter, staring. "excuse me," said john, smiling. "in putting your case, i can't bear to leave out vital details. merely professional prejudice. shortly, then, you fully sustained your share in a long and arduous campaign; you won your commission; you were wounded, decorated, and invalided home." he stopped short in the brilliant sunshine which now flooded their path, and looked gravely at peter. "some of us," said john, "have imagination enough to realize, even without the help of war-correspondents, the scenes of horror through which you, and scores of other boys, fresh from school, like you, had to live through. we can picture the long hours on the veldt--on the march--in captivity--in the hospitals--in the blockhouses--when soldiers have been sick at heart, wearied to death with physical suffering, and haunted by ghastly memories of dead comrades." peter hurriedly drew his left hand from the pocket where the beloved tobacco-pouch reposed, and pulled his brown felt hat down over his eyes, as though the october sunlight hurt them. "i think at such times, peter," said john, quietly continuing his walk by the boy's side, "that you must have longed now and then for your home; for this peaceful english country, your green english woods, and the silent hall where your mother waited for you, trembled for you, prayed for you. i think your heart must have ached then, as so many men's hearts have ached, to remember the times when you might have made her happy by a word, or a look, or a smile. and you didn't do it, peter--_you didn't do it_." peter made a restless movement indicative of surprise and annoyance; but he was silent still, and john changed his tone, and spoke lightly and cheerfully. "well, then you came home; and your joy of life, of youth, of health all returned; and you looked forward, naturally, to taking your share of the pleasures open to other young men of your standing. but you never meant to forget your mother, as so many careless sons forget those who have watched and waited for them. even though you fell in love, you still thought of her. when you were weary of travel, or pleasure connected with the outside world, you meant always to return to her. you liked to think she would still be waiting for you; faithfully, gratefully waiting, within the sacred precincts of your childhood's home. and now, when you remember her submission to your father's wishes in the past, and her single-hearted devotion to yourself, you are shocked and disappointed to find that she can wish to descend from her beautiful and guarded solitude here, and mix with her fellow-creatures in the work-a-day world. why," said john, in a tone rather of dreaming and tenderness than of argument, "that would be to tear the jewel from its setting--the noble central figure from the calm landscape, lit by the evening sun." there was a pause, during which peter smoked energetically. "well," he said presently, "of course i can't follow all that highfalutin' style, you know--" "of course not," said john, "i understand. you're a plain englishman." "exactly," said peter, relieved; "i am. but one thing i will say--you've got the idea." "thank you," said john. "if you can put it like that to my mother," said peter, still busy with his pipe, but speaking very emphatically, "why, all i can say is, that i believe it's the way to get round her. i've often noticed how useless it seems to talk common-sense to her. but a word of sentiment--and there you are. strange to say, she likes nothing better than--er--poetry. i hope you don't mind my calling you rather poetical," said peter, in a tone of sincere apology. "i wish, john, you'd go straight to my mother, and put the whole case before her, just like that." "the whole case!" said john. "but, my dear fellow, that's only half the case." "what do you mean?" "the other half," said john, "is the case from _her_ point of view." "i don't see," said peter, "how her point of view can be different from mine." john's thoughts flew back to a february evening, more than two years earlier. it seemed to him that sir timothy stood before him, surprised, pompous, argumentative. but he saw only peter, looking at him with his father's grey eyes set in a boy's thin face. "my experience as a barrister," he said, with a curious sense of repeating himself, "has taught me that it is possible for two persons to take diametrically opposite views of the same question." "and what happens then?" said peter, stupidly. "our bread and butter." "but _why_ should my mother leave the place she's lived in for years and years, and go gadding about all over the world--at her time of life? i don't see what can be said for the wisdom of that?" "nothing from your point of view, i dare say," said john. "much from hers. if you are willing to listen, and if," he added smiling, as an afterthought, "you will promise not to interrupt?" "well," said peter, rather doubtfully, "all right, i promise. you won't be long, i suppose?" he glanced stealthily down towards the ferry, though he knew that sarah would not be there for a couple of hours at least, and that he could reach it in less than ten minutes. but half the pleasure of meeting sarah consisted in waiting for her at the trysting-place. john observed the glance, and smiled imperceptibly. he took out his watch. "i shall speak," he said, carefully examining it, "for four minutes." "let's sit," said peter. "it's warm enough now, in all conscience." they sat upon an old stone bench below the turret. peter leant back with his black head resting against the wall, his felt hat tipped over his eyes and his pipe in his mouth. he looked comfortable, even good-humoured. "go ahead," he murmured. "to understand the case from your mother's point of view, i am afraid it is necessary," said john, "to take a rapid glance at the circumstances of her life which have--which have made her what she is. she came here, as a child, didn't she, when her father died; and though he had just succeeded to the earldom, he died a very poor man? your father, as her guardian, spared no pains, nor expense for that matter, in educating and maintaining her. when she was barely seventeen years old, he married her." there was a slight dryness in john's voice as he made the statement, which accounted for the gruffness of peter's acquiescence. "of course--she was quite willing," said john, understanding the offence implied by peter's growl. "but as we are looking at things exclusively from her point of view just now, we must not forget that she had seen nothing of the world, nothing of other men. she had also"--he caught his breath--"a bright, gay, pleasure-loving disposition; but she moulded herself to seriousness to please her husband, to whom she owed everything. when other girls of her age were playing at love--thinking of dances, and games and outings--she was absorbed in motherhood and household cares. a perfect wife, a perfect mother, as poor human nature counts perfection." lady mary would have cried out in vehement contradiction and self-reproach, had she heard these words; but peter again growled reluctant acquiescence, when john paused. "in one day," said john, slowly, "she was robbed of husband and child. her husband by death; her boy, her only son, by his own will. he deserted her without even bidding, or intending to bid her, farewell. hush--remember, this is from _her_ point of view." peter had started to his feet with an angry exclamation; but he sat down again, and bent his sullen gaze on the garden path as john continued. his brown face was flushed; but john's low, deep tones, now tender, now scornful, presently enchained and even fascinated his attention. he listened intently, though angrily. "her grief was passionate, but--her life was not over," said john. "she, who had been guided from childhood by the wishes of others, now found that, without neglecting any duty, she could consult her own inclinations, indulge her own tastes, choose her own friends, enjoy with all the fervour of an unspoilt nature the world which opened freshly before her: a world of art, of music, of literature, of a thousand interests which mean so much to some of us, so little to others. to her returns this formerly undutiful son, and finds--a passionately devoted mother, indeed, but also a woman in the full pride of her beauty and maturity. and this boy would condemn _her_--the most delightful, the most attractive, the most unselfish companion ever desired by a man--to sit in the chimney-corner like an old crone with a distaff, throughout all the years that fate may yet hold in store for her--with no greater interest in life than to watch the fading of her own sweet face in the glass, and to await the intervals during which he would be graciously pleased to afford her the consolation of his presence." "have you done?" said peter, furiously. "i could say a good deal more," said john, growing suddenly cool. "but"--he showed his watch--"my time is up." "what--what do you mean by all this?" said the boy, stammering with passion. "what is my mother to _you_?" the time had come. john's bright hazel eyes had grown stern; his middle-aged face, flushed with the emotion his own words had aroused, yet controlled and calm in every line of handsome feature and steady brow, confronted peter's angry, bewildered gaze. "she is the woman i love," said john. "the woman i mean to make my wife." he remained seated, silently waiting for peter to imbibe and assimilate his words. after a quick gasp of incredulous indignation, peter, too, sat silent at his side. john gave him time to recover before he spoke again. "i hope," he said, very gently, "that when you have thought it over, you won't mind it so much. as it's going to be--it would be pleasanter if you and i could be friends. i think, later on, you may even perceive advantages in the arrangement--under the circumstances; when you have recovered from your natural regret in realizing that she must leave barracombe--" "it isn't that," said peter, hoarsely. he felt he must speak; and he also desired, it must be confessed, to speak offensively, and relieve himself somewhat of the accumulated rage and resentment that was burning in his breast. "it's--it's simply"--he said, flushing darkly, and turning his face away from john's calm and friendly gaze--"that to me--to _me_, the idea is--ridiculous." "ah!" said john. he rose from the stone bench. a spark of anger came to him, too, as he looked at peter, but he controlled his voice and his temper. "the time will come," he said, "when your imagination will be able to grasp the possibility of love between a man in the forties and a woman in the thirties. at least, for your sake, i hope it will." "why for my sake?" said peter. "because i should be sorry," said john, "if you died young." chapter xix nearly a thousand feet above the fertile valley of the youle, stretched a waste of moorland. here all the trees were gnarled and dwarfed above the patches of rust-coloured bracken; save only the delicate silver birch, which swayed and yielded to the wind. great boulders were scattered among the thorn bushes, and over their rough and glistening breasts were flung velvet coverings of green moss and grey lichen. on this october day, the heather yet sturdily bore a few last rosy blossoms, and the ripe blackberries shone like black diamonds on the straggling brambles. here and there a belated furze-bush erected its golden crown. over the dim purple of the distant hills, a brighter purple line proclaimed the sea. closer at hand, on a ridge exposed to every wind of heaven, sighed a little wood of stunted larch and dull blue pine, against a clear and brilliant sky. sarah was enthroned on a mossy stone, beneath the yellowing foliage of a sheltering beech. her glorious ruddy hair was uncovered, and a tyrolese hat was hung on a neighbouring bramble, beside a little tweed coat. she wore a loose white canvas shirt, and short tweed skirt; a brown leather belt, and brown leather boots. being less indifferent to creature-comforts than to the preservation of her complexion, miss sarah was paying great attention to the contents of a market-basket by her side. she had chosen a site for the picnic near a bubbling brook, and had filled her glass with clear sparkling water therefrom, before seating herself to enjoy her cold chicken and bread and butter, and a slice of game-pie. peter was very far from feeling any inclination towards displaying the hilarity which an outdoor meal is supposed to provoke. he was obliged to collect sticks, and put a senseless round-bottomed kettle on a damp reluctant fire; to himself he used much stronger adjectives in describing both; he relieved his feelings slightly by saying that he never ate lunch, and by gloomily eying the game-pie instead of aiding sarah to demolish it. "it wouldn't be a picnic without a kettle and a fire; and we _must_ have hot water to wash up with. i brought a dish-cloth on purpose," said sarah. "i can't think why you don't enjoy yourself. you used to be fond of eating and drinking--_anywhere_--and most of all on the moor--in the good old days that are gone." "i am not a philosopher like you," said peter, angrily. "i am anything but that," said sarah, with provoking cheerfulness. "a philosopher is a thoughtful middle-aged person who puts off enjoying life until it's too late to begin." "i hate middle-aged people," said peter. "i am not very fond of them myself, as a rule," said sarah, indulgently. "they aren't nice and amusing to talk to, like you and me; or rather" (with a glance at her companion's face), "like _me_; and they aren't picturesque and fond of spoiling us, as _really_ old people are. they are just busy trying to get all they can out of the world, that's all. but there are exceptions; or, of course, it wouldn't be a rule. your mother is an exception. no one, young or old, was ever more picturesque or--or more altogether delicious. it was i who taught her that new way of doing her hair. by-the-by, how do you like it?" "i don't like it at all," growled peter. "perhaps you preferred the old way," said sarah, turning up her short nose rather scornfully. "parted, indeed, and brushed down flat over her ears, exactly like that horrid old mrs. ash!" "mrs. ash has lived with us for thirty years," said peter, in a tone implying that he desired no liberties to be taken with the names of his faithful retainers. "that doesn't make her any better looking, however," retorted sarah. "in fact, she might have had more chance of learning how to do her hair properly anywhere else, now i come to think of it." "of course everything at barracombe is ugly and old-fashioned," said peter, gloomily. "except your mother," said sarah. "sarah! i can't stand any more of this rot!" said peter, starting from his couch of heather. "will you talk sense, or let me?" sarah shot a keen glance of inquiry at his moody face. "well," she said, in resigned tones, "i did hope to finish my lunch in peace. i saw there was something the matter when you came striding up the hill without a word, but i thought it was only that you found the basket too heavy. of course, if i had known it was only to be lunch for one, i would not have put in so many things; and certainly not a whole bottle of papa's best claret. in fact, if i had known i was to picnic practically alone, i would not have crossed the river at all." then she saw that peter was in earnest, and with a sigh of regret, sarah returned the dish of jam-puffs to the basket. "i couldn't talk sense, or even listen to it, with those heavenly puffs under my very nose," she said. "now, what is it?" "i hate telling you--i hate talking of it," said peter, and a dark flush rose to his frowning eyebrows. he threw himself once more at sarah's feet, and turned his face away from her, and towards the blue streak of distant sea. "john crewys wants to marry--my mother," he said in choking tones. "is that all?" said sarah. "i've seen that for ages. aren't you glad?" "glad!" said peter. "i thought," sarah said innocently, "that _you_ wanted to marry _me_?" "sarah!" "well!" said sarah. she looked rather oddly at peter's recumbent figure. then she pushed the loosened waves of her red hair from her forehead with a determined gesture. "well," she said defiantly, "isn't that one obstacle to our marriage removed? your aunts will go to the dower house, and your mother will leave barracombe, and you'll have the place all to yourself. and you dare to tell me you're sorry?" "yes," said peter, sitting up and facing her, "i dare." "i'm glad of that," said sarah. her deep voice softened. "i should have thought less of you if you hadn't dared." suddenly she rose from her mossy throne, shook the crumbs off her skirt, and looked down upon peter with blue eyes sparkling beneath her long lashes, and the fresh red colour deepening and spreading in her cheeks, until even the tips of her delicate ears and her creamy throat turned pink. "_well_," said sarah, "go and stop it. make your mother sorry and ashamed. it would be very easy. tell her she's too old to be happy. but say good-bye to me first." "sarah!" "why is it to be all sunshine for you, and all shade for her?" said sarah. "hasn't she wept enough to please you? mayn't she have her st. martin's summer? god gives it to her. will _you_ take it away?" "sarah!" he looked up at her crimsoned tearful face in dismay. was this sarah the infantile--the pink-and-white--the seductive, laughing, impudent sarah? and yet how passionately peter admired her in this mood of virago, which he had never seen since the days of her childish rages of long ago. "why do you suppose," said sarah, disdainfully, "that i've been letting you follow _me_ about all this summer, and desert _her_; except to show her how little you are to be depended upon? to bring home to her how foolish she'd be to fling away her happiness for your sake. _you_, who at one word from me, were willing to turn her out of her own home, to live in a wretched little villa at your very door. don't interrupt me," said sarah, stamping, "and say you weren't willing. you told her so. i meant you to tell her, and yet--i could have killed you, peter, when i heard her sweet voice faltering out to me, that she would be ready and glad to give up her place to her boy's wife, whenever the time should come." "_she_ told you?" cried peter. "but she didn't say you'd asked her," cried sarah, scornfully. "_i_ knew it, but she never guessed i did. she was only gently smoothing away, as she hoped, the difficulties that lay in the path to _your_ happiness. oh, that she could have believed it of me! but she thinks only of your happiness. _you_, who would snatch away hers this minute if you could. she never dreamt i knew you'd said a word." she paused in her impassioned speech, and the tears dropped from the dark blue eyes. sarah was crying, and peter was speechless with awe and dismay. "i think she would have died, peter," said sarah, solemnly, "before she would have told me how brutal you'd been, and how stupid, and how selfish. i meant you to show her all that. i thought it would open her eyes. i was such a fool! as if anything could open the eyes of a mother to the faults of her only son." peter looked at her with such despair and grief in his dark face that her heart almost softened towards him; but she hardened it again immediately. "do you mean that you--you've been playing with me all this time, sarah? they--everybody told me--that you were only playing--but i've never believed it." "i _meant_ to play with you," said sarah, turning, if possible, even redder than before; "i meant to teach you a lesson, and throw you over. and the more i saw of you, the more i didn't repent. you, who dared to think yourself superior to your mother; and, indeed, to any woman! kings are enslaved by women, you know," said miss sarah, tossing her head, "and statesmen are led by them, though they oughtn't to be. and--and poets worship them, or how could they write poetry? there would be nothing to write about. it is reserved for boys and savages to look down upon them." she sat scornfully down again on her boulder, and put her hands to her loosened hair. "i can't think why a scene always makes one's hair untidy," said sarah, suddenly bursting into a laugh; but the whiteness of peter's face frightened her, and she had some ado to laugh naturally. "and i am lost without a looking-glass," she added, in a somewhat quavering tone of bravado. she pulled out a great tortoise-shell dagger, and a heavy mass of glorious red-gold hair fell about her piquant face, and her pretty milk-white throat, down to her waist. "dear me!" said miss sarah. she looked around. near the bubbling brook, dark peaty hollows held little pools, which offered nature's mirror for her toilet. she went to the side of the stream and knelt down. her plump white hands dexterously twisted and secured the long burnished coil. then she glanced slyly round at peter. he lay face downwards on the grass. his shoulders heaved. the pretty picture miss sarah's coquetry presented had been lost upon the foolish youth. she returned in a leisurely manner to her place, and leaning her chin on her hand, and her elbow on her knee, regarded him thoughtfully. "where was i? yes, i remember. it is a lesson for a girl, peter, never to marry a boy or a savage." "sarah!" said peter. he raised his face and looked at her. his eyes were red, but he was too miserable to care; he was, as she had said, only a boy. "sarah, you're not in earnest! you can't be! i--i know i ought to be angry." miss sarah laughed derisively. "yes, you laugh, for you know too well i can't be angry with you. i love you!" said peter, passionately, "though you are--as cruel as though i've not had pretty well as much to bear to-day, as i know how to stand. first, john crewys, and now you--saying--" "just the truth," said sarah, calmly. "i don't deny," said peter, in a quivering voice, "that--that some of the beastly things he said came--came home to me. i've been a selfish brute to _her_, i always have been. you've said so pretty plainly, and i--i dare say it's true. i think it's true. but to _you_--and i was so happy." he hid his face in his hand. "i'm glad you have the grace to see the error of your ways at last," said sarah, encouragingly. "it makes me quite hopeful about you. but i'm sorry to see you're still only thinking of _our_ happiness--i mean _yours_," she corrected herself in haste, for a sudden eager hope flashed across peter's miserable young face. "yours, yours, _yours_. it's your happiness and not hers you think of still, though you've all your life before you, and she has only half hers. but no one has ever thought of her--except me, and one other." "john crewys?" said peter, angrily. "not john crewys at all," snapped sarah. "he is just thinking of his own happiness like you are. all men are alike, except the one i'm thinking of. but though i make no doubt that john crewys is just as selfish as you are, which is saying a good deal, yet, as it happens, john crewys is the only man who could make her happy." "what man are you thinking of?" said peter. jealousy was a potent factor in his love for sarah. he forgot his mother instantly, as he had forgotten her on the day of his return, when sarah had walked on to the terrace--and into his heart. "i name no names," said sarah, "but i hope i know a hero when i see him; and that man is a hero, though he is--nothing much to look at." it amused her to observe the varying expressions on her lover's face, which her artless words called forth, one after another. "if you are really not going to eat any luncheon, peter," she said, "i must trouble you to help me to wash up and pack the basket. the fire is out and the water is cold, but it can't be helped. the picnic has been a failure." "we have the whole afternoon before us. i cannot see that there is any hurry," said peter, not stirring. "i didn't mean to break bad news to you," said sarah, "until we'd had a pleasant meal together in comfort, and rested ourselves. but since you insist on spoiling everything with your horrid premature disclosures, i don't see why i shouldn't do the same. i must be at home by four o'clock, because aunt elizabeth is coming to hewelscourt this very afternoon." "lady tintern!" cried peter, in dismay. "then you won't be able to come to barracombe this evening?" "i am not in the habit of throwing over a dinner engagement," said sarah, with dignity. "but in case they won't let me come," she added, with great inconsistency, "i'll put a lighted candle in the top window of the tower, as usual. but you can guess how many more of these enjoyable expeditions we shall be allowed to make. not that we need regret them if they are all to be as lively as this one. still--" she helped herself to a jam-puff, and offered the dish to peter, with an engaging smile. he helped himself absently. "i don't deny i am fond of taking meals in the open air, and more especially on the top of the moor," said sarah, with a sigh of content. "what has she come for?" said peter. "i shall be better able to tell you when i have seen her." "don't you know?" "i can pretty well guess. she's going to forgive me, for one thing. then she'll tell me that i don't deserve my good luck, but that lord avonwick is so patient and so long-suffering, that he's accepted her assurance that i don't know my own mind (and i'm not sure i do), and he's going to give me one more chance to become lady avonwick, though i was so foolish as to say 'no' to his last offer." "you didn't say 'no' to _my_ last offer!" cried peter. "i don't believe an offer of marriage is even legal before you're one-and-twenty," said miss sarah, derisively. "what did it matter what i said? haven't i told you i was only playing?" "you may tell me so a thousand times," said peter, doggedly, "but i shall never believe you until i see you actually married to somebody else." chapter xx lady tintern was pleased to leave paddington by a much earlier train than could have been expected. she hired a fly, and a pair of broken-kneed horses, at brawnton, and once more took her relations at hewelscourt by surprise. on this occasion, however, she was not fortunate enough to find her invalid niece at play in the stable-yard, though she detected her at luncheon, and warmly congratulated her upon her robust appearance and her excellent appetite. her journey had, no doubt, been undertaken with the very intentions sarah had described; but another motive also prompted her, which sarah had not divined. much as she desired to marry her grand-niece to lord avonwick, she was not blind to the young man's personal disadvantages, which were undeniable; and which peter had rudely summed up in a word by alluding to his rival as an ass. he was distinguished among the admirers of miss sarah's red and white beauty by his brainlessness no less than by his eligibility. nevertheless, lady tintern had favoured his suit. she knew him to be a good fellow, although he was a simpleton, and she was very sure that he loved sarah sincerely. "whoever the girl marries, she will rule him with a rod of iron. she had better marry a fool and be done with it. so why not an eligible and titled and good-natured fool?" the old lady had written to mrs. hewel, who was very far from understanding such reasoning, and wept resentfully over the letter. why should lady tintern snatch her only daughter away from her in order to marry her to a fool? mrs. hewel was of opinion that a sensible young man like peter would be a better match. she supposed nobody would call sir peter crewys of barracombe a fool; and as for his being young, he was only a few months younger than lord avonwick, and sarah would have just as pretty a title, even if her husband were only a baronet instead of a baron. thus she argued to herself, and wrote the gist of her argument to her aunt. why was sarah to go hunting the highways and byways for titled fools, when there was peter at her very door,--a young man she had known all her life, and one of the oldest families in devon, and seven thousand acres of land only next week, when he would come of age, and could marry whomever he liked? though, of course, sarah must not go against her aunt, who had promised to do so much for her, and given her so many beautiful things, whether young girls ought to wear jewellery or not. this was the distracted letter which was bringing lady tintern to hewelscourt. she had been annoyed with sarah for refusing lord avonwick, and thought it would do the rebellious young lady no harm to return for a time to the bosom of her family, and thus miss newmarket, which sarah particularly desired to attend, since no society function interested her half so much as racing. the old lady had not in the least objected to sarah's friendship for young sir peter crewys. sarah, as john had truly said, was a star with many satellites; and among those satellites peter did not shine with any remarkable brilliancy, being so obviously an awkward country-bred lad, not at home in the surroundings to which her friendship had introduced him, and rather inclined to be surly and quarrelsome than pleasant or agreeable. lady tintern had not taken such a boy's attentions to her grand-niece seriously; but if sarah were taking them seriously, she thought she had better inquire into the matter at once. therefore the energetic old woman not only arrived unexpectedly at hewelscourt in the middle of luncheon, but routed her niece off her sofa early in the afternoon, and proposed that she should immediately cross the river and call upon peter's mother. "i have never seen the place except from these windows; perhaps i am underrating it," said lady tintern. "i've never met lady mary crewys, though i know all the setouns that ever were born. never mind who ought to call on me first! what do i care for such nonsense? the boy is a cub and a bear--_that_ i know--since he stayed in my house for a fortnight, and never spoke to me if he could possibly help it. he is a nobody! sir peter fiddlesticks! who ever heard of him or his family, i should like to know, outside this ridiculous place? his name is spelt wrong! of course i have heard of crewys, k.c. everybody has heard of him. that has nothing to do with it. yes, i know the young man did well in south africa. all our young men did well in south africa. pray, is sarah to marry them all? if _that_ is what she is after, the sooner i take it in hand the better. lunching by herself on the moors indeed! no; i am not at all afraid of the ferry, emily. if you are, i will go alone, or take your good man." "the colonel is out shooting, as you know, and won't be back till tea-time," said mrs. hewel, becoming more and more flurried under this torrent of lively scolding. "the colonel! why don't you say tom? colonel indeed!" said lady tintern. "very well, i shall go alone." but this mrs. hewel would by no means allow. she reluctantly abandoned the effort to dissuade her aunt, put on her visiting things with as much speed as was possible to her, and finally accompanied her across the river to pay the proposed visit to barracombe house. lady mary received her visitors in the banqueting hall, an apartment which excited lady tintern's warmest approval. the old lady dated the oak carving in the hall, and in the yet more ancient library; named the artists of the various pictures; criticized the ceilings, and praised the windows. mrs. hewel feared her outspokenness would offend lady mary, but she could perceive only pleasure and amusement in the face of her hostess, between whom and the worldly old woman there sprang up a friendliness that was almost instantaneous. "and you are like a cosway miniature yourself, my dear," said lady tintern, peering out of her dark eyes at lady mary's delicate white face. "eh--the bright colouring must be a little faded--all the setouns have pretty complexions--and carmine is a perishable tint, as we all know." "sarah has a brilliant complexion," struck in mrs. hewel, zealously endeavouring to distract her aunt from the personalities in which she preferred to indulge. "sarah looks like a milkmaid, my love," said the old lady, who did not choose to be interrupted, "and when she can hunt as much as she wishes, and live the outdoor life she prefers, she will get the complexion of a boatwoman." she turned to lady mary with a gracious nod. "but _you_ may live out of doors with impunity. time seems to leave something better than colouring to a few heaven-blessed women, who manage to escape wrinkles, and hardening, and crossness. i am often cross, and so are younger folk than i; and your boy peter--though how he comes to be your boy i don't know--is very often cross too." "you have been very kind to peter," said lady mary, laughing. "i am sorry you found him cross." "no; i was not kind to him. i am not particularly fond of cross people," said the old lady. "it is sarah who has been kind," and she looked sharply again at lady mary. "i am getting on in years, and very infirm," said lady tintern, "and i must ask you to excuse me if i lean upon a stick; but i should like to take a turn about the garden with you. i hear you have a remarkable view from your terrace." lady mary offered her arm with pretty solicitude, and guided her aged but perfectly active visitor through the drawing-room--where she stopped to comment favourably upon the water colours--to the terrace, where john was sitting in the shade of the ilex-tree, absorbed in the london papers. lady mary introduced him as peter's guardian and cousin. "how do you do, mr. crewys? your name is very familiar to me," said the old lady. "though to tell you the truth, sir peter looks so much older than his age that i forgot he had a guardian at all." "he will only have one for a few days longer," said john, smiling. "my authority will expire very shortly." "but you are, at any rate, the very man i wanted to see," said lady tintern, who seldom wasted time in preliminaries. "i would always rather talk business with a man than with a woman; so if mr. crewys will lend me his arm to supplement my stick, i will take a turn with him instead of with you, my dear, if you have no objection." "did you ever hear anything like her?" said poor mrs. hewel, turning to lady mary as soon as her aunt was out of hearing. "what mr. crewys must think of her, i cannot guess. she always says she had to exercise so much reticence as an ambassadress, that she has given her tongue a holiday ever since. but there is only one possible subject _they_ can have to talk about. and how can we be sure her interference won't spoil everything? she is quite capable of asking what peter's intentions are. she is the most indiscreet person in the world," said sarah's mother, wringing her hands. "i think _peter_ has made his intentions pretty obvious," said lady mary. she smiled, but her eyes were anxious. "and you are sure you don't mind, dear lady mary? for who can depend on lady tintern, after all? she is supposed to be going to do so much for sarah, but if she takes it into her head to oppose the marriage, i can do nothing with her. i never could." "i am very far from minding," said lady mary. "but it is sarah on whom everything depends. what does she say, i wonder? what does she want?" "it's no use asking _me_ what sarah wants," said mrs. hewel, plaintively. "time after time i have told her father what would come of it all if he spoilt her so outrageously. he is ready enough to find fault with the boys, poor fellows, who never do anything wrong; but he always thinks sarah perfection, and nothing else." "sarah is very fortunate, for peter has the same opinion of her." "fortunate! lady mary, if i were to tell you the chances that girl has had--not but what i had far rather she married peter--though she might have done that all the same if she had never left home in her life." "i am not so sure of that," said peter's mother. lady tintern's turn took her no further than the fountain garden, where she sank down upon a bench, and graciously requested her escort to occupy the vacant space by her side. "i started at an unearthly hour this morning, and i am not so young as i was," she said; "but i am particularly desirous of a good night's rest, and i never can sleep with anything on my mind. so i came over here to talk business. by-the-by, i should have come over here long ago, if any one had had the sense to give me a hint that i had only to cross a muddy stream, in a flat-bottomed boat, in order to see a face like _that_--" she nodded towards the terrace. john's colour rose slightly. he put the nod and the smile, and the sharp glance of the dark eyes together, and perceived that lady tintern had drawn certain conclusions. "there is some expression in her face," said the old lady, musingly, "which makes me think of marie stuart's farewell to france. i don't know why. i have odd fancies. i believe the queen of scots had hazel eyes, whereas this pretty lady mary has the bluest eyes i ever saw--quite remarkable eyes." "those blue eyes," said john, smiling, "have never looked beyond this range of hills since lady mary's childhood." the old lady nodded again. "eh--a state prisoner. yes, yes. she has that kind of look." then she turned to john, with mingled slyness and humour, "on va changer tout cela?" "as you have divined," he answered, laughing in spite of himself. "though how you have divined it passes my poor powers of comprehension." lady tintern was pleased. she liked tributes to her intelligence as other women enjoy recognition of their good looks. "it is very easy, to an observer," she said. "she is frightened at her own happiness. yes, yes. and that cub of a boy would not make it easier. by-the-by, i came to talk of the boy. you are his guardian?" "for a week." "what does it signify for how long? five minutes will settle my views. thank heaven i did not come later, or i should have had to talk to him, instead of to a man of sense. you must have seen what is going on. what do you think of it?" "the arrangement suits me so admirably," said john, smiling, "that i am hardly to be relied upon for an impartial opinion." "will you tell me his circumstances?" john explained them in a few words, and with admirable terseness and lucidity; and she nodded comprehensively all the while. "that's capital. he can't make ducks and drakes of it. all tied up on the children. i hope they will have a dozen. it would serve sarah right. now for my side. whatever sum the trustees decide to settle upon sir peter's wife, i will put down double that sum as sarah's dowry. our solicitors can fight the rest out between them. the property is much better than i had been given any reason to suspect. i have no more to say. they can be married in a month. that is settled. i never linger over business. we may shake hands on it." they did so with great cordiality. "it is not that i am overjoyed at the match," she explained, with great frankness. "i think sarah is a fool to marry a boy. but i have observed she is a fool who always knows her own mind. the fancies of some girls of that age are not worth attending to." "miss sarah is a young lady of character," said john, gravely. "ay, she will settle him," said lady tintern. her small, grim face relaxed into a witchlike smile. "the lad is a good lad. no one has ever said a word against him, and he is as steady as old time. i believe miss sarah's choice, if he is her choice, will be justified," said john. "i didn't think he was a murderer or a drunkard," said lady tintern, cheerfully. her phraseology was often startling to strangers. "but he is absolutely devoid of--what shall i say? chivalry? yes, that is it. few young men have much nowadays, i am told. but sir peter has none--absolutely none." "it will come." "no, it will not come. it is a quality you are born with or without. he was born without. sarah knows all about it. it won't hurt her; she has the methods of an ox. she goes direct to her point, and tramples over everything that stands in her way. if he were less thick-skinned she would be the death of him; but fortunately he has the hide of a rhinoceros." "i think you do them both a great deal less than justice," said john; but he was unable to help laughing. "oh, you do, do you? i like to be disagreed with." her voice shook a little. "you must make allowances--for an old woman--who is--disappointed," said lady tintern. john said nothing, but his bright hazel eyes, looking down on the small, bent figure, grew suddenly gentle and sympathetic. "it is a pleasure to be able to congratulate somebody," she said, returning his look. "i congratulate _you_--and lady mary." "thank you." "most of all, because there is nothing modern about her. she has walked straight out of the middle ages, with the face of a saint and a dreamer and a beautiful woman, all in one. i am an old witch, and i am never deceived in a woman. men, i am sorry to say, no longer take the trouble to deceive me. now our business is over, will you take me back?" she took the arm he offered, and tottered back to the terrace. "bring her to see me in london, and bring her as soon as you can," said. lady tintern. "she is the friend i have dreamed of, and never met. when is it going to be?" "at once," said john, calmly. "you are the most sensible man i have seen for a long time," said lady tintern. * * * * * peter and sarah hardly exchanged a word during their return journey from the moors after the unlucky picnic; and at the door of happy jack's cottage in youlestone village she commanded her obedient swain to deposit the luncheon basket, and bade him farewell. the aged road-mender, to his intense surprise and chagrin, had one morning found himself unable to rise from his bed. he lay there for a week, indignant with providence for thus wasting his time. "there bain't nart the matter wi' i! then why be i a-farced to lie thic way?" he said faintly. "if zo be i wor bod, i cude understand, but i bain't bod. there bain't no pain tu speak on no-wheres. it vair beats my yunderstanding." "tis old age be the matter wi' yu, vather," said his mate, a young fellow of sixty or so, who lodged with him. "i bain't nigh so yold as zum," said happy jack, peevishly. "tis a nice way vor a man tu be tuke, wi'out a thing the matter wi' un, vor the doctor tu lay yold on." dr. blundell soothed him by giving his illness a name. "it's anno domini, jack." "what be that? i niver yeard till on't befar," he said suspiciously. "it's incurable, jack," said the doctor, gravely. happy jack was consoled. he rolled out the word with relish to his next visitor. "him's vound it out at last. 'tis the anny-dominy, and 'tis incurable. you'm can't du nart vor i. i got tu go; and 'taint no wonder, wi' zuch a complaint as i du lie here wi'. the doctor were vair beat at vust; but him worried it out wi' hisself tu the last. him's a turble gude doctor, var arl he wuden't go tu the war." sarah visited him every day. he was so frail and withered a little object that it seemed as though he could waste no further, and yet he dwindled daily. but he suffered no pain, and his wits were bright to the end. this evening the faint whistle of his voice was fainter than ever, and she had to bend very low to catch his gasping words. he lay propped up on the pillows, with a red scarf tied round the withered scrag of his throat, and his spotless bed freshly arrayed by his mate's mother, who lived with them and "did for" both. "they du zay as master peter be _carting_ of 'ee, miss zairy," he whispered. "be it tru?" "yes, jack dear, it's true. are you glad?" "i be glad if yu thinks yu'll git 'un," wheezed poor jack. "'twude be a turble gude job var 'ee tu git a yusband. but doan't 'ee make tu shar on 'un, miss zairy. 'un du zay as him be turble vond on yu, and as yu du be playing vast and loose wi' he. that's the ways a young maid du go on, and zo the young man du slip thru' 'un's vingers." "yes, jack," said sarah, with unwonted meekness. she looked round the little unceiled room, open on one side to the wooden staircase which led to the kitchen below; at the earth-stained corduroys hanging on a peg; at the brown mug which held happy jack's last meal, and all he cared to take--a thin gruel. "'twude be a grand marriage vor the likes o' yu, miss zairy, vor the crewys du be the yoldest vambly in all devonsheer, as i've yeard tell; and yure volk bain't never comed year at arl befar yure grandvather's time. eh, what a tale there were tu tell when old sir timothy married mary ann! 'twas a vine scandal vor the volk, zo 'twere; but i wuden't niver give in tu leaving youlestone. but doan't 'ee play the vule wi' master peter, miss zairy. take 'un while yu can git 'un, will 'ee? and be glad tu git 'un. yu listen tu i, vor i be a turble witty man, and i be giving of yu gude advice, miss zairy." "i am listening, jack, and you know i always take your advice." "ah! if 'twerent' for the anny-dominy, i'd be tu yure wedding," sighed happy jack, "zame as i were tu mary ann's. zo i wude." she took his knotted hand, discoloured with the labour of eighty years, and bade him farewell. "thee be a lucky maid," said happy jack, closing his eyes. * * * * * the tears were yet glistening on sarah's long lashes, when she met the doctor on his way to the cottage she had just quitted. she was in no mood for talking, and would have passed him with a hasty greeting, but the melancholy and fatigue of his bearing struck her quick perceptions. she stopped short, and held out her hand impulsively. "dr. blunderbuss," said sarah, "did you _very_ much want peter to find out that--that he could live without his mother?" "has anything happened?" said the doctor; his thin face lighted up instantly with eager interest and anxiety. "only _that_" said sarah. "you trusted me, so i'm trusting you. peter's found out everything. and--and he isn't going to let her sacrifice her happiness to him, after all. i'll answer for that. so perhaps, now, you won't say you're sorry you told me?" "for god's sake, don't jest with me, my child!" said the doctor, putting a trembling hand on her arm. "is anything--settled?" "do i ever jest when people are in earnest? and how can i tell you if it's settled?" said sarah, in a tone between laughing and weeping. "i--i'm going there to-night. i oughtn't to have said anything about it, only i knew how much you wanted her to be happy. and--she's going to be--that's all." the doctor was silent for a. moment, and sarah looked away from him, though she was conscious that he was gazing fixedly at her face. but she did not know that he saw neither her blushing cheeks, nor the groups of tall fern on the red earth-bank beyond her, nor the whitewashed cob walls of happy jack's cottage. his dreaming eyes saw only lady mary in her white gown, weeping and agitated, stumbling over the threshold of a darkened room into the arms of john crewys. "you said you wished it," said sarah. she stole a hasty glance at him, half frightened by his silence and his pallor, remembering suddenly how little the fulfilment of his wishes could have to do with his personal happiness. the doctor recovered himself. "i wish it with all my heart," he said. he tried to smile. "some day, if you will, you shall tell me how you managed it. but perhaps--not just now." "can't you guess?" she said, opening her eyes in a wonder stronger than discretion. how was it possible, she thought, that such a clever man should be so dull? the doctor shook his head. "you were always too quick for me, little sarah," he said. "i am only glad, however it happened, that--she--is to be happy at last." he had no thoughts to spare for sarah, or any other. as she lingered he said absently, "is that all?" she looked at him, and was inspired to leave the remorseful and sympathetic words that rushed to her lips unsaid. "that is all," said sarah, gently, "for the present." then she left him alone, and took her way down to the ferry. chapter xxi "the very last of the roses," said lady mary. she looked round the banqueting hall. the wax candles shed a radiance upon their immediate surroundings, which accentuated the shadows of each unlighted corner. bowls of roses, red and white and golden, bloomed delicately in every recess against the black oak of the panels. the flames were leaping on the hearth about a fresh log thrown into the red-hot wood-ash. the two old sisters sat almost in the chimney corner, side by side, where they could exchange their confidences unheard. lady belstone still mourned her admiral in black silk and _crêpe_, whilst miss georgina's respect for her brother's memory was made manifest in plum-coloured satin. lady mary, too, wore black to-night. since the day of peter's return she had not ventured to don her favourite white. her gown was of velvet; her fair neck and arms shone through the yellowing folds of an old lace scarf which veiled the bosom. a string of pearls was twisted in her soft, brown hair, lending a dim crown to her exquisite and gracious beauty in the tender light of the wax candles. candlelight is kind to the victims of relentless time; disdaining to notice the little lines and shadows care has painted on tired faces; restoring delicacy to faded complexions, and brightness to sad eyes. the faint illumination was less kind to sarah, in her white gown and blue ribbons. the beautiful colour, which could face the morning sunbeams triumphantly in its young transparency, was almost too high in the warmth of the shadowy hall, where her golden-red hair made a glory of its own. the october evening seemed chilly to the aged sisters, and even lady mary felt the comfort of her velvet gown; but sarah was impatient of the heat of the log fire, and longed for the open air. she envied peter and john, who were reported to be smoking outside on the terrace. "the very last of the roses," said lady mary. "there will be a sharp frost to-night; they won't stand that," said sarah, shaking her head. "the poor roses of autumn," said lady mary, rather dreamily, "they are never so sweet as the roses of june." "but they are much rarer, and more precious," said sarah. lady mary looked at her and smiled. how quickly sarah always understood! sarah caught her hand and kissed it impulsively. her back was turned to the old sisters in the chimney corner. "lady mary," she said, "oh, never mind if i am indiscreet; you know i am always that." a little sob escaped her. "but i _must_ ask you this one thing--you--you didn't really think _that_ of me, did you?" "think what, dear child?" said lady mary, bewildered. sarah looked round at the two old ladies. the head of miss crewys was inclined towards the crochet she held in her lap. she slumbered peacefully. lady belstone was absently gazing into the heart of the great fire. the heat did not appear to cause her inconvenience. she was nodding. "they will hear nothing," said lady mary, softly. "tell me, sarah, what you mean. i would ask you," she said, with a little smile and flush, "to tell me something else, only, i--too--am afraid of being indiscreet." "there is nothing i would not tell you," murmured sarah, "though i believe i would rather tell you--out in the dark--than here," she laughed nervously. "the drawing-room is not lighted, except by the moon," said lady mary, also a little excited by the thought of what sarah might, perhaps, be going to say; "but there is no fire there, i am afraid. the aunts do not like sitting there in the evening. but if you would not be too cold, in that thin, white gown--?" "i am never cold," said sarah; "i take too much exercise, i suppose, to feel the cold." "then come," said lady mary. they stole past the sleeping sisters into the drawing-room, and closed the communicating door as noiselessly as possible. here only the moonlight reigned, pouring in through the uncurtained windows and rendering the gay, rose-coloured room, with its pretty contents, perfectly weird and unfamiliar. sarah flung her warm, young arms about her earliest and most beloved friend, and rested her bright head against the gentle bosom. "you never thought i meant all the horrid, cruel things i made peter say to you? you never believed it of me, did you? that i wouldn't marry him unless _you_ went away. you whom i love best in the world, and always have," she said defiantly, "or that i would ever alter a single corner of this dear old house, which used to be so hideous, and which you have made so beautiful?" "sarah! my--my darling!" said lady mary, in frightened, trembling tones. "you needn't blame peter for saying any of it," said sarah, "for it was i who put the words into his mouth. it made him miserable to say them; but he could not help himself. he wasn't really quite responsible for his actions. he isn't now. when people are--are in love, i've often noticed they're not responsible." "but why--" "i only wanted to show him what a goose he really was," murmured sarah, hanging her head. "he came back so pompous and superior; talking about his father's place, and being the only man in the house, and obliged to look after you all; and it was all so ridiculous, and so out of date. i didn't mean to hurt _you_ except just for a moment, because it could not be helped," said sarah. she hid her face in lady mary's neck, half laughing and half crying. "i was so afraid you--you were taking him seriously; and--and he was so selfish, wanting to keep you all to himself." "oh, sarah, hush!" lady mary cried. she divined it all in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye. it was to sarah that she owed the pain and mortification, not to her boy. sarah had said peter was not responsible. was he only a puppet in the hands of the girl he loved? could john ever have been thus blindly led and influenced? her wounded heart said quickly that john was of a different, nobler, stronger nature. but the mother's instinct leapt to defend her son, and cried also that john was a man, and peter but a boy in love, ready to sacrifice the whole world to her he worshipped. his father would never have done that. lady mary was even capable of an unreasoning pride in peter's power of loving; though it was not her--alas! it never had been her--for whom her boy was willing to make the smallest sacrifice. but he had honestly meant to devote himself to his mother, according to his lights, had sarah's influence not come in the way. sarah, who must have divined her secret all the while, and who, with the dauntlessness of youth, had not hesitated to force open the door into a world so bright that lady mary almost feared to enter it, but trembled, as it were, upon the threshold of her own happiness--and peter's. they were silent, holding each other in a close embrace, both conscious of the passing and repassing footsteps upon the gravel path without. sarah was the first to recover herself. she put lady mary into her favourite chair, and came and knelt by her side. "that's over, and i'm forgiven," she said softly. "you will make my boy--happy?" whispered lady mary. "i can't tell whether he will be happy or not, if--if he marries me," said sarah. she appeared to smother a laugh. "but aunt elizabeth seems reconciled to the idea. i think you bewitched her this afternoon. she is in love with you, and with this house, and with mr. john. but more particularly with you. when i said i had refused peter over and over again, she said i was a fool. but she says that whatever i do. i--i suppose i let her think," said sarah, leaning her head against lady mary's knee, "that _some day_--if he is still idiotic enough to wish it--and if _you_ don't mind--" "my pretty sarah--my darling!" "i'm sure it's only because he's your son," said sarah, vehemently; "i've always wanted to be your child. what's the use of pretending i haven't? think what a time poor mamma used to give me, and what an angel of goodness you were to the poor little black sheep who loved you so." sarah's white dress, shining in the moonlight, caught the attention of john crewys, through the open window. he paused in his walk outside. peter's voice uttered something, and the two dark figures passed slowly on. "they won't interrupt us," said sarah, serenely. "i told peter at dinner that i wanted to talk to you, and that he was to go and smoke with mr. john, and behave as if nothing had happened. he said he hadn't spoken to him since this morning. he is all agog to know what lady tintern came for. but he won't dare to come and interrupt." "what have you done to my boy," said lady mary, half laughing and half indignant, "that your lightest word is to be his law? and oh, sarah"--her tone grew wistful--"it is strange--even though he loves you, that you should understand him better than i, who would lay down my life for him." "it's very easy to see why," said sarah, calmly. the deep contralto music of her voice contrasted oddly with her matter-of-fact manner and words. "it's just that peter and i are made of common clay, and that you are not. so, of course, we understand each other. i don't mean to say that we don't quarrel pretty often. i dare say we always shall. i am good-tempered, but i like my own way; and, besides"--she spoke quite cheerfully--"anybody would quarrel with peter. but you and he are a little like aunt elizabeth and me. _she_ wants me to behave like a _grande dame_, and to know exactly who everybody is, and treat them accordingly, and be never too much interested in anything, but never bored; and always look beautiful, and, above all, _appropriate_. and _i_--would rather be taking the dogs for a run on the moors, in a short skirt and big boots; or up at four in the morning otter-hunting; or out with the hounds; or--or--digging in the garden, for that matter;--than be the prettiest girl in london, and going to a state ball or the opera. you see, i've tried both kinds of life now, and i know which i like best. and--and flirting with people is pleasant enough in its way, but it gives you a kind of sick feeling afterwards, which hunting never does. i don't think i'm really much of a hand at sentiment," said sarah, with great truth. "and peter?" asked lady mary, gently. "you wanted peter to be a--a noble kind of person, a great statesman, or something of that sort, didn't you?" her soft lips caressed lady mary's hand apologetically. "to be fond of reading and poetry, and all sorts of things; and _he_ wanted to shoot rabbits and go fishing. but, of course, he couldn't help _knowing_ you wanted him to be something he wasn't, and never could be, and didn't want to be." "oh, sarah!" said poor lady mary. "but--yes, it is true what you are saying." "it's true, though i say it so badly; and i know it, because, as i tell you, peter and i are just the same sort at heart. i've been teasing him, pretending to be a worldling, but foreign travel and entertaining in london are just about as unsuited to me as to peter. i--i'm glad"--she uttered a quick, little sob--"that i--i played my part well while it all lasted; but you know it wasn't so much me as my looks that did it. and because i didn't care, i was blunt and natural, and they thought it _chic_. but it wasn't _chic_; it was that i _really_ didn't care. and i don't think i've ever quite succeeded in taking peter in either; for he _couldn't_ believe i could really think any sort of life worth living but the dear old life down here, which he and i love best in the world, in our heart of hearts." the twinkling, frosty blue points of starlight glittered in the cloudless vault of heaven, above the moonlit stillness of the valley. the clear-cut shadows of the balcony and the stone urns fell across the cold paths and whitened grass of the terrace. ghostlike, sarah's white form emerged from the darkness of the room, and stood on the threshold of the window. john threw away the end of his cigar, and smiled. "i presume the interview we were not to interrupt is over?" he said, good-humouredly. "surely it is not very prudent of miss sarah to venture out-of-doors in that thin gown; or has she a cloak of some kind--" but peter was not listening to him. sarah, wrapped in her white cloak and hood, had already flitted across the moonlit terrace, into the deep shadow of the ilex grove; and the boy was by her side before john could reach the window she had just quitted. "oh, is it you, peter?" said miss sarah, looking over her shoulder. "i was looking for you. i have put on my things. it is getting late, and i thought you would see me home." "must you go already?" cried peter. "have they sent to fetch you?" "i dare say i could stay a few moments," said sarah; "but, of course, my maid came ages ago, as usual. but if there was anything you particularly wanted to say--you know how tiresome she is, keeping as close as she can, to listen to every word--why, it would be better to say it now. i am not in such a hurry as all that." "you know very well i want to say a thousand things," said peter, vehemently. "i have been walking up and down till i thought i should go mad, making conversation with john crewys." peter was honestly unaware that it was john who had made the conversation. "has lady tintern come to take you away, sarah? and why did she call on my mother this afternoon, the very moment she arrived?" "your mother would be the proper person to tell you that. how should i know?" said sarah, reprovingly. "have you asked her?" "how can i ask her?" said peter. his voice trembled. "i've not spoken to her once--except before other people--since john crewys told me--what i told you this afternoon. i've scarcely seen any one since i left you. i wandered off for a beastly walk in the woods by myself, as miserable as any fellow would be, after all you said to me. do you think i--i've got no feelings?" his voice sounded very forlorn, and sarah felt remorseful. after all, peter was her comrade and her oldest friend, as well as her lover. at the very bottom of her heart there lurked a remnant of her childish admiration for him, which would, perhaps, never quite be extinguished. the boy who got into scrapes, and was thrashed by his father, and who did not mind; the boy who vaulted over fences she had to climb or creep through; who went fishing, and threw a fly with so light and sure a hand, and filled his basket, whilst she wound her line about her skirts, and caught her hook, and whipped the stream in vain. he had climbed a tall fir-tree once, and brought down in safety a weeping, shame-stricken little girl with a red pigtail, whose daring had suddenly failed her; and he had gone up the tree himself like a squirrel afterwards, and fetched her the nest she coveted. nor did he ever taunt her with her cowardice nor revert to his own exploit; but this was because peter forgot the whole adventure in an hour, though sarah remembered it to the end of her life. he climbed so many trees, and went birds'-nesting every spring to his mother's despair. sarah thought of him wandering all the afternoon in his own woods, lonely and mortified, listening to the popping of the guns on the opposite side of the hill, which echoed through the valley; she knew what those sounds meant to peter--the boy who had shot so straight and true, and who would never shoulder a gun any more. "i don't see why you should be so miserable," she said, as lightly as she could; but there were tears in her eyes, she was so sorry for peter. "i dare say you don't," said peter, bitterly. "nobody has ever made a fool of you, no doubt. a wretched, self-confident fool, who gave you his whole heart to trample in the dust. i suppose i ought to have known you were only--playing with me--as you said--a wretched object as i am now, but--" "an object!" cried sarah, so anxious to stem the tide of his reproaches that she scarce knew what she was saying, "which appeals to the soft side of every woman's heart, high or low, rich or poor, civilized or savage--a wounded soldier." "do you think i want to be pitied?" said peter, glowering. "pitied!" said sarah, softly. "do you call this pity?" she leant forward and kissed his empty sleeve. peter trembled at her touch. "it is--because you are sorry for me," he said hoarsely. "sorry!" said sarah, scornfully; "i glory in it." then she suddenly began to cry. "i am a wicked girl," she sobbed, "and you _were a_ fool, if you ever thought i could be happy anywhere but in this stupid old valley, or with--with any one but you. and i am rightly punished if my--my behaviour has made you change your mind. because i _did_ mean, just at first, to throw you over, and to--to go away from you, peter. but--but the arm that wasn't there--held me fast." "sarah!" she hid her face against his shoulder. * * * * * john crewys was playing softly on the little oak piano in the banqueting hall, and lady mary stood before the open hearth, absently watching the sparks fly upward from the burning logs, and listening. the old sisters had gone to bed. sarah's bright face, framed in her white hood, fresh and rosy from the cold breath of the october night, appeared in the doorway. "peter is in there--waiting for you," she whispered, blushing. john crewys rose from the piano, and came forward and held out his hand to sarah, with a smile. lady mary hurried past them into the unlighted drawing-room. her eyes, dazzled by the sudden change, could distinguish nothing for a moment. but peter was there, waiting, and perhaps lady mary was thankful for the darkness, which hid her face from her son. "peter!" "mother!" she clung to her boy, and a kiss passed between them which said all that was in their hearts that night--of appeal--of understanding--of forgiveness--of the love of mother and son. and no foolish words of explanation were ever uttered to mar the gracious memory of that sacred reconciliation. the end doctor jolliffe's boys by lewis hough ________________________________________________________________ this a very enjoyable book about life in a boy's boarding school in the late nineteenth century. despite school-rules, the boys get out of bounds for a number of reasons, for instance visiting a forbidden tuck shop; engaging in various cruel country sports, like rat baiting; going skating on a frozen lake, especially near the thin ice; poaching on a large nearby estate; and suchlike attractions. every scene is beautifully drawn, and i have wondered many times why the author did not write more, and indeed why this book is not more well known than it is. until i found a copy in an old book shop i had never heard of either the author or of the book. the characters of the various principal actors in the story are very well drawn, and one feels one knows them all quite well by the end of the book. there was in fact another contemporary author of the same name, who was an expert in economic and currency affairs, and who also wrote using, and about, a novel way of getting books printed. n.h. ________________________________________________________________ doctor jolliffe's boys by lewis hough chapter one. a tale of weston school. weston _versus_ hillsborough. "well cut, saurin, well cut! run it out! four!" the ball was delivered again to the bowler, who meditated a shooter, but being a little tired, failed in his amiable intention, and gave the chance of a half-volley, which the batsman timed accurately, and caught on the right inch of the bat, with the whole swing of his arms and body thrown into the drive, so that the ball went clean into the scorer's tent, as if desirous of marking the runs for itself. "well hit indeed! well hit!" the westonians roared with delight, and their voices were fresh, for they had had little opportunity of exercising them hitherto. crawley, the captain of their eleven, the hero in whom they delighted, had been declared out, leg before wicket, when he had only contributed five to the score. only two of the westonians believed that the decision was just, crawley himself, and the youth who had taken his place, and was now so triumphant. but he hated crawley, and rejoiced in his discomfiture, even though it told against his own side, so his opinion went for nothing. well, no more did anybody's else except the umpire's, who after all is the only person capable of judging. "saurin has got his eye in; we may put together a respectable score yet." "he is the best player we have got, when he only takes the trouble; don't you think so?" said edwards, who believed in saurin with a faith which would have been quite touching if it had not been so irritating. "he thinks so himself at any rate," replied the boy addressed, "and we are a shocking bad lot if he is right. anyhow he seems to be in form to-day, and i only hope that it will last." the batsman under discussion hoped so too. if he could only make an unprecedented score, restore the fortunes of the day, and show the world what a mistake it was to think crawley his superior in anything whatever, it would be a glorious triumph. he was not of a patriotic disposition, and did not care for the success of his school except as it might minister to his own personal vanity and gain, for he had a bet of half-a-crown on his own side. but his egotism was quite strong enough to rival the public spirit of the others, and raise his interest to the general pitch. the match between weston and hillsborough was an annual affair, and excited great emulation, being for each school the principal event of the cricketing season. one year it was played at weston and the next at hillsborough, and it was the westonians' turn to play on their own ground on this occasion. hillsborough went in first and put together runs. then weston went to the wickets and could make nothing of it. there was a certain left- handed hillsburian bowler who proved very fatal to them; it was one of his twists which found crawley's leg where his bat should have been. result, eight wickets down for twenty, and then saurin went in and made the we have witnessed. between ourselves the cut was a fluke, but the half-volley was a genuine well-played hit, which deserved the applause it got. the next ball came straight for the middle stump, but was blocked back half-way between the creases, and another run was stolen. "over!" the new bowler went in for slows. the first, a very tempting ball, saurin played forward at, and hit it straight and hard into the hands of long field on, who fumbled and dropped it, amidst groans and derisive cheers. warned by this narrow shave he played back next time, and seemed to himself to have missed a really good chance. this feeling induced hesitation when the next ball was delivered, and the result of hesitation was that the insidious missile curled in somehow over his bat and toppled his bails off. saurin was so much mortified as he walked back to the tent that he could not even pretend to assume a jaunty careless air, but scowled and carried his bat as if he would like to hit someone over the head with it. which, indeed, he would. there was one consolation for him, he had made ten, and that proved to be the top score. for the first time within living memory weston had to follow its innings! now when you consider that the presidents of oxford and cambridge clubs kept an eye on this match with a view to promising colts, you may imagine the elation of the hillsburians and the dejection of the westonians when crawley and robarts walked once more to the wickets. their schoolmates clapped their hands vigorously indeed, and some of them talked about the uncertainty of cricket, but the amount of hope they had would not have taken the room of a pair of socks in pandora's box. but crawley was a bowler as well as a batsman, and robarts was the westonian wicket-keeper, so that both were somewhat fagged when they first went in, whereas they were now quite fresh. again, the hillsburian bowling champion found his dangerous left arm a little stiff, and his eyesight not so keen as it had been an hour before. one is bound to find a cause for everything, so these may be the reasons why the pair, after defending their wickets cautiously for an over or two, began to knock the bowling about in great style. "what a jealous brute that crawley is!" said saurin, sitting down by edwards. "awful!" replied edwards, not at all knowing why, but following saurin blindfold, as he always did. "i was the only one who made any stand in the first innings, and yet he does not send me in early. he will keep me to the last, i daresay." the wonderful stand spoken of had not lasted two overs, but edwards only observed: "it's mean." "not that i care," said saurin. "of course not." "only i do hate spite and jealousy." "he ought not to be captain." "bah! the soft-spoken humbug; it's a wonder to me that fellows don't see through him." "it _is_ strange," echoed the complacent edwards. the number went up amidst a storm of clapping, and saurin relapsed into prudent silence, but he thought "hapes," like the irishman's dumb parrot. the dinner-bell rang, the pair were not separated, and the score stood at . "it will be a match yet," was the general opinion on the weston side, and their opponents also thought that the affair did not look quite such a certainty, and agreed that they must not throw a chance away, though they hoped much from dinner, which sometimes puts a batsman off his play, the process of digestion inducing, especially in hot weather, a certain heaviness which impairs that clearness of brain necessary for timing a ball accurately. at the same time the bowlers would get a good rest, and the left-handed artist, who had been acting as long-stop, might reasonably be expected to regain his cunning. true that the midday meal tells most upon the field, which very generally grows sluggish after eating: but the hillsborough boys fancied that would not matter so much, if they could only separate those two. but "those two" had a due sense of their responsibilities, and ate a very moderate meal, which they washed down with nothing stronger than water. they also played very careful cricket on first going in again, and risked nothing until they had got their hands in. _item_, crawley had mastered the left-handed bowler's favourite ball, and by playing very forward hit it away before it took the dangerous twist. it looked very risky, and the hillsborough wicket-keeper was in constant hope of stumping him, but he never missed, and scored off every ball of that sort which came to him. when the same twisters came to robarts he played back, contenting himself with simply guarding his wickets with an upright bat. altogether the two put together before robarts was caught at point. as they were going in to dinner crawley had said to saurin: "you go in the first wicket down. you showed good form in the first innings, and it was a very unlucky ball that settled you so soon. but you will have a good chance again presently." which speech had the unintended effect of making saurin more exasperated than ever. "confound his patronising!" he said to himself; but he could not find any excuse for any audible utterance except the conventional "all right," and he now drew on his gloves, took up his bat, and issued from the tent. "play careful cricket, saurin," said robarts as he passed him; "the great thing is to keep crawley at the wicket as long as we can." "a likely story!" he thought to himself as he strode across the turf, "to make myself a mere foil and stop-gap for that conceited brute! not i." far from practising the abstinence of the other two, he had eaten as much as he could stuff and drunk all the beer he could get, and this, combined with resentment at robarts' words, caused him to go in for slogging just to show that he was not to be dictated to. the first ball he got he hit as hard as he could, and well on to the ground, but it was cleverly stopped before a run could be made. the second he sent into the hands of the fielder standing at mid-wicket, who stuck to it, fast as it came, and threw it up amidst the cheers of his friends. saurin stalked away with his duck's egg. four more wickets fell before crawley was run out, by which time he had scored off his own bat, the total standing at . thirty more was added before the westonians were all out, and the score stood--first innings, ; second, ; total, , against . so that hillsborough now had to make to tie, and to win. it was a good match; anybody's game. during the remainder of the afternoon saurin behaved disgracefully. his temper had completely mastered him, and he was sulky and careless to an extent which made even edwards ashamed for him. he let balls pass with hardly an attempt to stop them, picked them up and threw them in in a leisurely manner, which gave more than one run to the other side, and showed such indifference that he was hissed. for every run was of importance. the fact was that weston that year was decidedly weak in the bowling, crawley being the only one to be depended upon, and he could not be kept at it for ever; and, though the fielding generally was good, the hillsburians scored fast. at seven o'clock they were for seven wickets, and the excitement was very great when crawley, who had had an hour's interval, went on once more to bowl. his first ball was cut for five. his second took the middle stump clean. his third came back into his hands. his fourth, the nastiest of shooters, glided under the bat into the wicket. three wickets in three consecutive balls--something like a sensational over! the match was over, and weston had won by runs. there could be no doubt to whom the victory was due, and crawley was pounced upon, hoisted, and carried home in triumph amidst the most enthusiastic cheering. "all right!" he said, colouring and laughing as they put him down; "i am glad we won, but that last ball was the most awful fluke i ever made in my life. i lost my balance as i delivered it, and nearly came down. to tell the truth, i feared it would be wide, and could hardly believe my eyes when i saw the bails off." one would have imagined that saurin's evil genius was taking part in the events of the day, and piling success upon the rival he hated in order to exasperate him to madness. his state of mind, indeed, was little short of that as he went sullenly to his tutor's house, with the sight of crawley, raised on his comrades' shoulders, in his eyes, their cheers ringing in his ears, and the thoughts of cain in his heart. "i shall give up cricket," he said to edwards next day; "it's a beastly game." "i don't care for it myself," replied his friend; "only, what is one to do?" "lots of things; you don't know slam's. i tell you what--i'll take you there." "thank you; that will be very jolly; only don't you think if one were caught, you know--eh?" "we should get into a jolly row, no doubt; but there is no fear of being caught. and, as you say, if one does not play cricket, what is one to do?" one thing which induced saurin to relinquish the game which he had at one time practised with some hope of success, was that he shrewdly suspected that, after what occurred, he would no longer be retained in the eleven. and he was right, for at the very next meeting of the committee it was unanimously agreed that a fellow who failed so utterly to keep his temper was of no use at all, even if he were a much better player than saurin; and this opinion was intimated to him without any squeamishness in the choice of terms. had weston lost the match his conduct on the occasion might have resulted in his being sent to coventry; but success is the parent of magnanimity, and, since his lack of public spirit had not proved fatal, it was condoned. but it certainly did not increase his popularity. the whole affair was most unfortunate. saurin was a disappointing sort of fellow. he was rather good-looking, and on ordinary occasions his manners were those of a gentleman. his abilities were certainly above the average, and his eye and hand worked together in a manner which was calculated to ensure success in all games, especially as he was fleet of foot and muscular. thus he was always giving promise of distinguishing himself, and dying away to nothing. the explanation is that he was very vain and very indolent, and his vanity induced him to engage in different pursuits which would excite admiration, while his indolence prevented him from persevering long enough for success. directly anything bored him he dropped it. self-indulgence seemed to him the only true wisdom. he never resisted the whim of the moment except through fear of the consequences, and unfortunately many of his propensities were vicious. he had taken up cricket rather warmly, and seemed less inclined to get tired of it than of most healthy and innocent diversions, and cricket kept him out of mischief; so it was very unlucky, both for himself and for those over whom he had influence, that his jealousy of crawley had led him to make such an idiot of himself. chapter two. slam's. about a mile from weston college there was a dilapidated old house with a large yard and an orchard. there had been a farm attached to it once, but the land had been taken into the next estate, and the old homestead let separately many years before. the landlord would gladly have got rid of the present tenant, but he had a long lease, and, while he paid his rent, he was secure, and could snap his fingers at the squire, the clergyman, the magistrates, and all other people who did not appreciate him. not that he ever did so snap his fingers; on the contrary, mr slam, though practically defiant, was remarkably civil, not to say obsequious, in his demeanour when he came into contact with the gentry. by profession he was a rat-catcher, and he had an intimate knowledge of the habits and frailties of all the small predatory animals of great britain, and knew well how to lure them to their destruction. in a game-preserving community such talents ought, one would imagine, to have met with appreciative recognition; but unfortunately slam was suspected of being far more fatal to pheasants, hares, and rabbits than to all the vermin he destroyed. he protested his innocence, and was never caught in the act of taking game; but if anyone wanted to stock his preserves, slam could always procure him a supply of pheasants' eggs, and more than one village offender who had been sent to expiate his depredations in jail was known to have paid visits to slam's yard. slam was a dog-fancier as well as a rat-catcher, and therefore doggy boys were attracted to his premises, which, however, were sternly interdicted. in the first place they were out of bounds, though this of itself did not go for very much. there was no town very near weston, and so long as the boys made their appearance at the specified hours they were not overmuch interfered with. paper chases, or hare and hounds as they are sometimes called, were openly arranged and encouraged; and if boys liked to take walks in the country, they could do so with a minimum of risk. if they were awkward enough to meet a master face to face when out of bounds, he could hardly help turning them back and giving them a slight imposition; but if they saw him coming, and got out of his way, he would not look in their direction. but to enter an inn, or to visit slam's, was a serious offence, entailing severe punishment, and even expulsion, if repeated. yet one beautiful warm summer's evening, when the birds were singing and the grasshoppers chirruping, and all nature invited mankind to play cricket or lawn-tennis, if there were no river handy for boating, four youths might have been seen (but were not, luckily for them) approaching the forbidden establishment. a lane with high banks, now covered with ferns and wild flowers, and furrowed with ruts which were more like crevasses, ran up to the house; but they left this and went round the orchard to the back of the yard, in the wall of which there was a little door with a bell-handle beside it. on this being pulled there was a faint tinkle, followed by a canine uproar of the most miscellaneous description, the deep-mouthed bay of the blood-hound, the sharp yap-yap of the toy terrier, and a chorus of intermediate undistinguishable barkings, some fierce, some frolicsome, some expectant, being mixed up with the rattling of chains. then an angry voice was heard amidst the hubbub commanding silence, and a sudden whine or two seemed to imply that he had shown some practical intention of being obeyed. a bolt was drawn, the door opened, and a short wiry man, dressed in fustian and velveteen, with a fur cap on his head and a short pipe in his mouth, stood before them. "come in, gents," said he. "your dawg's at the other end of the yard, mr stubbs, that's why you don't see him. he's had an orkardness with sayres, mr robarts' dog, as was in the next kennel, and i thought they'd have strangled themselves a-trying to get at one another, and so i had to separate them." "will it be safe to let him loose?" asked stubbs. "no fear; he will never go near the other while he's loose and the other one chained up; besides, he'll be took up with seeing you, he will." it was very pleasant to the feelings of stubbs that his dog knew him, which he evidently did, for he danced on his hind-legs, and wagged his tail, and whimpered, and did all that a bull-terrier can do in the way of smiling, when his proprietor approached for the purpose of freeing him from his chain. their interviews were not as frequent as either dog or boy would have desired, but then they were very pleasant, for they brought the former a short spell of liberty, a meal of biscuit or paunch, and sometimes--oh, ecstasy!--the worrying of a rat, while stubbs enjoyed the sense of proprietorship, and the knowledge that he was doing what was forbidden. he had dreams of leaving school and taking topper home with him, and owning him as his friend before all the world, and he talked to topper of that happy prospect, and topper really quite seemed to understand that stubbs was his master, who had paid money for him, and was now put to considerable expense for his board and lodging, let alone the danger he ran in coming to visit him. to an outsider, calmly reflecting, it did not seem a very good bargain for stubbs, but still very much better than that of perry, his friend and present companion, who kept a hawk, and vainly endeavoured to teach the bird to know him and perch on his wrist. but perry was fond of hawks, and much regretted that the days were gone by when hawking was a favourite pastime. the other two visitors at slam's that evening were saurin and edwards. edwards had never been there before, and consequently his feelings were curiously compounded of fear and pleasurable expectation. he had looked from a distance at the place, the entrance to which was so sternly forbidden, and imagined all sorts of delightful wickedness--how delightful or why wicked he had no idea--going on inside. he was considerably disappointed to find himself in a dirty yard full of kennels, to which dogs of all sorts and sizes were attached, none of whom looked as if it would be safe to pat them. there were a good many pigeons flying about, but he did not care for pigeons except in a pie. perry's hawk was only interesting to perry. there was a monkey on a pole in a corner, but he was a melancholy monkey, who did nothing but raise and lower his eyebrows. "does the gentleman want a dawg?" asked slam. "he will see," replied saurin; "if there is a real good one that takes his fancy he may buy him. it's all right; he's a friend of mine. have you got that tobacco for me?" "to be sure; you will find it in your drawer." saurin went to a little wooden outhouse which contained a table, a chest of drawers, a cask of dog-biscuits, cages of rats, and other miscellaneous articles, and opening a locker which seemed to be appropriated to him, he took out a meerschaum pipe and a tobacco-pouch, and came out presently, emitting columns of blue fragrant smoke from his mouth. edwards looked at his friend with increased respect, the idea of being intimate with a fellow who could smoke like that made him feel an inch taller. "i think it's beginning to colour, eh?" asked saurin. "beautifully, i should say," replied edwards. "won't you try?" "thanks; i think i should rather like," said edwards, who began to feel ambitious, "but i have not got anything to smoke." "oh, slam will let you have a pipe, or a cigar if you like it better." edwards, calling to mind that cigars smelt nicer than pipes, thought he should prefer one. "slam, my friend wants a cigar." "well, sir, as you know, i can't sell such things without a licence; but if the gent likes to have a few rats for one of the dawgs to show a bit of sport, i'll _give_ him a cigar with pleasure. it's sixpence for half a dozen." "and, by the by, edwards, it is usual to stand some beer to pay your footing. a couple of quarts of sixpenny will do." "that will make eighteenpence altogether," responded edwards cheerfully, producing that sum. "i'll send out for the beer at once," said mr slam, taking the money and going towards the house. where he sent to is a mystery, for there was no public-house within a mile, and yet the can of beer arrived in about five minutes. it is much to be feared that slam set the excise law at defiance when he felt perfectly safe from being informed against. "rats for topper!" exclaimed stubbs. "oh, i say, edwards, you _are_ a brick, you know. i have been hard up lately, and he has not had a rat for ever so long. you won't mind my letting them out for him, will you? you see, i should like him to think it was i who gave him the treat, if you don't mind." edwards had no objection to become a party to this innocent deception, and the cage of rats was brought out from some mysterious place where there was an unlimited supply of those vermin. whereupon every individual dog in the establishment went off his head with excitement, and began barking and tearing at his chain in a manner to soften the hardest heart. that rats should be so near and yet so far! the building, which was once a stable, had been fitted up expressly as an arena, where dogs might exhibit their prowess, and thither the cage was now carried by stubbs, topper going almost the whole way on his hind- legs, with his nose close to the wires. considering the amount of excitement the entertainment did not last long; the rats were turned out into the arena, where topper pounced upon them one after the other with a nip and a shake which was at once fatal. in a couple of minutes there were six fewer rats in the world, and topper was extremely anxious to diminish the number still further. doctor johnson, the compiler of the dictionary, said he had never in his life had as many peaches and nectarines as he could eat, and that was topper's feelings with regard to rats. edwards did not enjoy the spectacle quite as much as he felt that he ought. besides, he was engaged in desperate efforts to light his cigar. match after match did he burn, sucking away all the time like a leech, but no smoke came into his mouth. "let us go into the orchard and finish the beer," said saurin. the orchard was surrounded by so thick a hedge that it was just as private as the yard. a cobby horse was cropping the grass, an ungroomed, untrimmed animal, very much better than he looked, his master, for reasons of his own, being as anxious to disguise his merits as most proprietors of the noble animal are to enhance them as much as possible. there were possibilities of recreation here, though they were somewhat of a low order. quoits hung up on several large nails driven into a wall, and there was a covered skittle alley. for there were a good many small farmers of the class just above that of the a labourer in the neighbourhood, and some of them frequented slam's, and were partial to skittles. the four boys and the proprietor of the establishment seated themselves on benches in this orchard and gulped the beer. "your cigar does not seem to draw well," said saurin. "no," replied edwards; "i can't think what is the matter with it; i never smoked a cigar like this before." which was perfectly true, as it was the first he had ever put into his mouth. "let me look at it. why, you have not bitten the end off! you might as well expect smoke to go up a chimney that is bricked up at the top. here, i'll cut it for you with my penknife; now you will find it go all right. what a row that hawk of yours makes, perry!" "yes, he ought to be hooded, you know. hateful times we live in, don't we! how jolly it must have been when education meant learning to ride, fly a hawk, train a hound, shoot with the bow, and use the sword and buckler, instead of mugging at abominable lessons." "right you are, sir," said mr slam; "why, even when i was a lad a fight or a bit of cocking could be brought off without much trouble, but nowadays the beaks and perlice are that prying and interfering there's no chance hardly. and as for them times mr perry was speaking of, why, i've heard tell that the princes and all the nobs used to go to see a prize-fight in a big building all comfortable, just as they goes now to a theayter. and every parish had to find a bull or a bear to be bated every sunday. ah! them was the good old times, them was." edwards did not find his cigar very nice. the smoke got down his throat and made him cough till his eyes watered, and the taste was not so pleasant as the smell. however, saurin seemed to like it, so there must be some pleasure about it if he only persevered. he laboured under a delusion here, for saurin would rather not have smoked, as a matter of fact, though he had a great object in view, the colouring of his pipe, which supported him. his real motive in this, as in all other matters, was vanity. other boys would admire him for smoking like a full-grown man, and so he smoked. he would never have done it alone, without anyone to see him, being too fond of himself to persevere in anything he did not like, out of whim, or for the sake of some possible future gratification, of the reality of which he was not very well assured. "did you ever play at quoits, edwards?" asked saurin presently. "yes, i have played at home; we have some." "suppose we have a game, then. why, hulloa, how pale you look! don't smoke any more of that cigar." "i do fee--feel a little queer," said edwards, who certainly did not exaggerate his sensations. a cold sweat burst out on his forehead, his hands were moist and clammy, and though it was a warm evening he shivered from head to foot, while he had a violent pain in his stomach which prevented his standing upright. "come, man alive, don't give way. we must be getting back soon," said saurin, who was rather dismayed at the idea of taking his friend to his tutor's in that condition, and the consequent risk of drawing suspicion on himself. "would not a drop of brandy be a good thing, slam?" "well, no, not in this here case," said slam. "the missus shall mix him a little mustard and warm water; that's what he wants." "you are sure it's only the cigar," groaned edwards. "i am not poisoned or anything?" "poisoned! how can you be? you have taken nothing but the beer, and we have all drunk that. no, it's the tobacco; it always makes fellows rather seedy at first, and i expect you swallowed a lot of the smoke." "i did." "well, then, drink this and you will be all right presently." edwards took the emetic, which had the effect peculiar to that description of beverage. it was not a pleasant one; indeed, he thought he was going to die; but after a while the worst symptoms passed off, and he was able to walk home. saurin and edwards lodged at the same tutors, and they went up to the room of the latter without attracting attention. here edwards, under the other's directions, washed his face, cleaned his teeth, changed his jacket and neck-tie, and put some scented pomatum on his hair, and then lay down on his bed till the supper-bell should ring. "i shall not be able to eat," he remonstrated. "do you think i need go down?" "oh, yes; come and have a try, or else it will excite suspicion. you would have to show at prayers directly afterwards, you know, so it will not make much difference. you have nothing to do with old cookson between this and supper--no exercise or anything?" "no, thank goodness!" "that's all right. you have a good hour for a nap, and your head will be better then. i must go and sweeten myself now." i regret to say that "old cookson" was the shockingly disrespectful way in which this flagitious youth spoke of his reverend and learned tutor. chapter three. tom buller. weston college was a polishing-up establishment. boys were not admitted under the age of fourteen, or unless they showed a certain proficiency in greek and latin, in the first book of euclid, in arithmetic and algebra up to simple equations. and the entrance examination, mind you, was no farce. if a candidate was not well grounded they would not have him; and it was necessary to be particular, because the first or lowest form assumed a certain amount of knowledge in the commencement of that course which proposed to land the neophyte in the indian civil service, the army, or a good scholarship at one of the universities. though fourteen was the age of possible admission, very few boys were qualified until they were at least a year older, and consequently there was no organised system of fagging, and flogging was a very rare and extreme measure; but otherwise the system somewhat resembled that of the large public schools. the head-master and three other masters each had a house full of boarders, whose preparation of lessons on certain subjects he superintended; and every boy had a separate apartment, which was his study and bedroom. it was an expensive school, and the discipline of dr jolliffe was more lax than many parents and guardians quite liked; and yet few of the boys who went there were rich. it was very rarely, that is, that one of them had not to make his own way in the world. and the number, which was limited, was always complete. for results speak for themselves, and the examination lists showed triumphant successes for weston. it is true that if they only took boys of considerable proficiency, and got rid of all who made no progress, they might be expected to show a good average; but then, on the other hand, there was no cramming, and every encouragement was given to healthy athletic exercise. three or four years were taken to do the work which is too often jammed into a few months. that was the secret; and, though of course there were failures, it answered well on the whole. this is an explanatory digression, just to let you know what sort of stage our characters are acting upon. it was saturday afternoon, and a half-holiday, and there was only one boy left in dr jolliffe's house. his name was buller, and he was neither sick nor under punishment. his window was wide open, for it was very hot and stuffy in his little room, into which the sun poured, and on the other side of a lane which ran underneath was the cricket-field, from which the thud of balls struck by the bat, voices, and laughter resounded in a way to tempt any fellow out of his hole. but there he stuck with his elbows on the table and his head in his hands, forcing himself to concentrate his attention upon a book which lay open before him. "because _a divided by b_ equals _c divided by d_," he murmured, "the first quotients _m m_ are equal. yes, i see that; again, since _a divided by b_ equals _m_ plus _x divided by b_, and _c divided by d_ equals _m_ plus _r divided by d_, hum, hum, why, in the name of all that's blue--oh, yes! i see. but then--oh, a thousand blisters on the idiot who invented this rot! but i won't be licked." and he began again and again, sticking to it for another half-hour, when he suddenly cried out, "i have it! what a double-distilled ass i am! of course it is simple enough. if _a divided by b_ equals _c divided by d_, and _a_ and _b_ be prime to each other, _c_ and _d_ are equimultiples of _a_ and _b_. of course they are; how could they be anything else? the other fellows saw it at once, no doubt. what a lot of trouble it gives one to be a fool! now, i'll go and practise bowling." buller was no fool; indeed he would not have thought himself one if he had been; but he was slow at everything--learning, games, accomplishments--though he had this compensation, no slight one either, that when he had once mastered a thing he had got it for ever. his school-fellows called him a duffer, but it did not vex him in the least, for he considered it a mere statement of a patent fact, and was no more offended than if they had said that he had two legs. but he had a strong belief that perseverance, _sticking_, he called it, could make up in a great measure for want of natural ability. the fable of the hare and tortoise had given him great encouragement, and, finding in practice that he passed boys who had far more brilliant parts than himself, he never gave way to despair, however hopeless the task before him might seem. his ambition--never expressed, however, to anyone--was to get into the eleven. had it been known it would have been thought the very height of absurdity, and have become such a standing joke that its realisation would have been rendered well nigh impossible. it proved that buller had sound sense that he was able to see this. he did not much expect to succeed, but he meant to try all he knew, ever since the day he was called "old butter-fingers" in a game in which he showed especial incapacity to catch the ball. he began by mastering that; whenever he could he got fellows to give him catches. he practised throwing the ball up in the air and catching it again. when he went home for the holidays he would carry a tennis-ball in his pocket, and take every opportunity of throwing it against a wall and taking it at the rebound with both hands, with the right hand, and with the left. at last he got quite dexterous--and sinistrous, too, for that matter. but the mere fact of being able to manipulate the ball smartly, though it is of supreme importance in cricket, would never gain him admission into the eleven of his house, let alone that of the school. for that, as he well knew, he must cultivate a speciality, and he decided upon bowling. wicket-keeping could only be practised in a regular game, and no side would agree to let him fill the post--it was not likely. batting everyone wanted to practise, and it would be very rarely that he would be able to get a good bowler to bowl for him. there was a professional, indeed, who was always in the cricket-fields during the season, but his services were generally in request, and, besides, they were expensive, and tom buller had not much pocket-money. but there was almost always some fellow who was glad to get balls given to him, and, if not, you can set a stump up in front of a net and bowl at that. to have worked all this out in his mind did not look like lack of intelligence or observation, and to act upon it steadily, without saying a word about it to anybody, showed considerable steadfastness and resolution. he now put his algebra and papers into his bureau, took out his cricket-ball and ran down-stairs and round to the fields. at first it seemed as if he would be obliged to have recourse to his solitary stump, for, it being the saturday half-holiday, there were two matches going on, and those present not taking part in them were playing lawn- tennis. but presently he espied robarts, who had been in and out again in the game he was engaged in, and was now waiting for the innings of his side to be over, standing in front of a net, bat in hand, with two boys bowling to him. "may i give you a ball, robarts?" he asked. "of course you may, buller; the more the merrier," was the reply; "only, if you are so wide as to miss the net, you must go after the ball yourself." and robarts raised his bat, prepared for a good swipe if the ball came within reach, which he did not much expect. buller measured his distance, took a short run, and sent the ball in with the energy begotten of long mugging at algebra on a fine afternoon. every muscle in his body seemed to long for violent exertion; the pent- up strength in him, like steam, demanded an outlet, and, with his hand rather higher than the shoulder, he sent the ball in with a will. "by jove! that was straight enough, and a hot one too!" exclaimed robarts, who had only just managed to block it. "it made my hands tingle." the two others delivered their balls, which were hit away right and left, and then buller came again with another which had to be blocked. the other bowlers who had been playing, and were going in again presently, were glad to stop and leave buller to work away alone, which he did in a deliberate, determined manner, proving that his first attempts were not chance shots. twice he sent the wickets down, and once, when the ball was driven back to him, he caught it with the left hand, high up. "well," said robarts when he was called away to go and field, "and you are the fellow they called a duffer! why, it is like magic! were you playing dark last year, or what?" "no; but i have been practising." "you have practised to some purpose, then. if you could only vary your bowling a little more you would be very dangerous. you see, if you always send the same sort of ball, a fellow knows how to meet it after a bit." robarts as an all-round player was only reckoned inferior to crawley, and his words of approval were very gratifying to buller, who felt himself a step nearer one particular goal. he did not indulge in daydreams, however, not being of an imaginative disposition. the actual difficulty which he had to master at the time took up all his thoughts and energies, and the distant object to be attained, though never absolutely lost sight of, was never dwelt upon or brooded over. he at once looked about for someone else to bowl for, and found his particular chum, penryhn, who, after fagging out through the heat of the day, had gone to the wicket with the sun in his eyes, and been clean bowled the first ball. "will you really bowl for me?" he said eagerly in reply to buller's offer. "what a good fellow you are!" "why? for doing what i want? that is laying in a stock of good works cheap. you won't mind a few wides, i hope; robarts says there is too great a sameness about my bowling, so i want to practise twisters and shooters. you won't mind if i bowl at your legs?" "not a bit; _ignis via_--fire away." the necessity for violent exertion had been taken out of buller, indeed it was now oozing away from every pore of his skin. so he did not try fast bowling, except now and then when he attempted to put in a shooter, but concentrated his attention principally upon placing his ball, or on pitching it to leg with an inward twist towards the wicket. he constantly failed; sent easy ones which were hit about to the peril of neighbouring players; cut penryhn over once on the knee-cap and once on the ankle. but he never once delivered the ball carelessly, or without a definite object. and when his arm got so tired that his mind could no longer direct it, he left off and penryhn bowled in turn to him, his great object then being to keep an upright bat rather than to hit. "i'll tell you what, tom, you have improved in your cricket awfully," said penryhn as they strolled back in the dusk. "why, you took robarts' wickets twice." "yes, but i should not have done it in a game; fellows step out and hit recklessly in practice." "no matter for that; you are quite a different bowler from what you were." "the fact is it takes me all my time to learn to do what comes to other fellows naturally." "that's a bit too deep for me; some fellows can do one thing easily and others another, and every fellow has to work hard to learn those things which belong, as it were, to the other fellows. there are chaps, i suppose, like the admirable crichton, who are born good all round, and can play the fiddle, polish off euclid, ride, shoot, lick anyone at any game, all without the slightest trouble, but one does not come across them often, thank goodness. i say, do you know what genius is?" "not exactly; that is, i could not define it." "well, i have heard my father say that some very clever chap has said that it is `an infinite capacity for taking pains,' and if that's true, by jove, you must be a genius, tom!" and they both burst out laughing at the notion, and went in and changed their flannels. and buller lit his candle and mugged at a german exercise till the supper-bell rang. half-holidays did not necessarily preclude work in the tutor's pupil- rooms, which was preparatory to that in school, though practically the hours of recreation were never interfered with in fine weather. but after the hour of "all in," as the local phrase went, when the roll was called, and every boy had to be in for the night, an hour which varied with the time of the year, it was different. and on this saturday evening mr cookson had some arrears of historical theme correction to make up. for since history plays a considerable part in modern competitive examinations, every boy had to read up a certain portion of some standard work every week, and write a theme upon it, without the book, in the pupil-room. this theme was looked over with him by his tutor before being sent in to the head-master, and if it did not reach a certain standard it was torn up, and he had to read the subject again and write another one. edwards was one of the essayists whose paper had not yet been examined, and he stood at this tutor's elbow while he read it over. "`after he had been some years in england sir elijah impey was tried by doctors' commons.'" "_house_ of commons, boy," said mr cookson, "people are not impeached at doctors' commons, that's where wills are proved," and he made a correction,--"`and proved he hadn't murdered the rajah. and so sir philip francis, the author of a book called _junius_, the writer of which was never discovered,'"--"why, that's a bull;" mr cookson could not help chuckling as he made a dash and a correction,--"`and deaf burke,'"--"`i never heard that he was deaf--oh, that was another man, a prize-fighter, ho, ho, ho, ahem!'"--"`and burke were very much ashamed of themselves, and were hissed, and never alluded to the subject, from which originated the phrase of "burking the question,"'"--"pooh, pooh, never make shots like that:"--"`and sir elijah impey was found not guilty, and all his property was taken from him to pay the lawyers with.'" "well, well, it's not so bad," said mr cookson, signing his name at the bottom of the last page. "and now, edwards," he added, turning and looking the boy straight in the eyes, "i have a good mind to have you flogged." "me, sir!" exclaimed edwards, turning pale; "what for, sir?" "doctor jolliffe does not flog for many things, but there are certain offences he never fails to visit with the utmost severity. smoking is one of them." "i assure you, sir, i have not--" "lying is another, so do not finish your sentence. i can smell the stale tobacco." and indeed edwards was wearing the jacket in which he had indulged in that emetical luxury, his first cigar, two evenings previously. "but really, sir, it is no lie," he urged; "i have not been smoking, and i cannot tell where the smell comes from, unless it is my jacket, which i wore in the holidays, when i sat in the room with my father when he was having his cigar sometimes, and which has been in my box till the other day. i am certain it cannot be my breath or anything else." "come nearer; no, your breath and hair are free from the taint. well, it may be as you say, and i am loth to suspect you of falsehood. but listen to me, my boy; i am not assuming that you have been smoking, mind, but only, as we are on the subject, that you might do so. it may seem very arbitrary that the rules against it are so very severe, considering how general the practice is, but they are wise for all that. however harmless it may be for those who have come to their full growth, smoking tobacco is certainly very injurious to lads who are not matured. and indeed until the habit is acquired--it affects the digestion and the memory of every one. now, in these days of competitive examinations, when every young fellow on entering life has to struggle to get his foot on the first rung of the ladder, and all his future prospects depend on his doing better than others, how inexpressibly silly it is for him to handicap himself needlessly by taking a narcotic which confuses his brain and impairs his memory, and which affords him no pleasure whatever. i treat you as a rational being, and appeal to your common sense, and speak as your friend. now, go." edwards was not such a ready liar as you may think him, though he certainly prevaricated. he _had_ worn that jacket in his father's smoking-room, and it _had_ lain in his box during the early part of the term. he had not smoked again since the occasion commemorated, and that was two days previously, and he persuaded himself that his tutor's question applied to that day. but he knew in his heart that it didn't, and with the kind tones of his tutor's voice ringing in his ears he felt as if he ought to be kicked. but when he went up to his room he found saurin there, and any feelings of self-reproach he had had soon melted away. "what's up, now?" asked his friend. "you look as if you had seen a ghost." "i nearly got into an awful row, i can tell you!" replied edwards. "my tutor smelt my jacket of smoke while he was correcting my theme." "by jove! and how did you get out of it?" "i told him i had worn the jacket in my father's smoking-room." "ha, ha, ha! that was a good un. well done, old fellow! i did not think you had so much presence of mind. you will make your way yet." edwards was on the point of protesting that what he said was the fact, but his guide, philosopher, and friend seemed so much pleased with the ingenuity of his plea that he could not bear to rob himself of the credit of it, and so he looked as knowing as he conveniently could, and chuckled, taking a pride in what five minutes before he was ashamed of. "that's the worst of cigar-smoking, the smell clings so to the clothes and hair. now, a pipe is much easier to get sweet again after, unless, of course, you carry it about in your pocket. wore the jacket in your father's smoking-room about a month ago! and old cookson was soft enough to swallow that. how old slam would chuckle! i must tell him." "do you know, i am not quite certain that my tutor did altogether believe that i had not been smoking," said edwards, his conscience stirring again a little bit now that he saw the man who had spoken so kindly to him incurring the terrible risk of forfeiting saurin's esteem through a false imputation of too great credulity. "you see, he's a good-natured chap, and i think he wanted to believe if he could, and as my hair and breath did not smell, he gave me the benefit of the doubt." "thought it would bring discredit on his house if it were known to contain a monster who smoked tobacco," said saurin, "and so was glad to pretend to believe the papa-smoking-room story. well, it is possible; old cookson may not be so great a fool as he looks. anyhow, i am glad for your sake that he did not report you; old jolliffe would not have been humbugged. he would have said, `your jacket stinks of tobacco, and jackets don't smoke of themselves.' and you would have got it hot, old fellow, for jolliffe is mad against smoking." chapter four. an outside professor. saurin's master passion of vanity caused him to be fond of low company. this may sound odd to some, because many vain people are sycophants, who will do anything to be seen in the company of persons of title or high social position, and who cut the acquaintance of old friends, and even benefactors when they dare and can do without them, when they are of inferior grade. these are contented to shine with a reflected light; but saurin's pride was of a different description, and he chafed at being a satellite, and always wanted to figure as a sun, the centre of his companions, who must revolve around him. how small a sun did not matter. and so, though really possessed of considerable abilities, he was happier when in the company of boors and clodhoppers, who owned his superiority and deferred to all he said, than he was with his equals, who presumed to question his opinions, differ in their tastes, and laugh at his failures. this natural disposition had, unfortunately, been fostered by circumstances. he was an only child, born in india, and had been sent over to england in his early infancy, and committed to the care of an uncle. his parents died before they could come home, and he never knew them. his uncle and guardian lost his wife very soon after the boy was sent to him. he was older and had settled in life very much earlier than his brother, and his two children (girls) were married and living, at a distance. he resided nominally in the country, but after his wife's death lived a great deal in london. so there was no one to look properly after the orphan, who associated with grooms and gamekeepers, and played with the village boys. unfortunately the best of these went to work, and it was only the idle good-for-nothings who were available as playmates. when his uncle had an inkling of what was going on he sent him to school, where he did not get on badly so far as learning was concerned, but unfortunately he did not unlearn the lessons taught him by bumpkin ne'er-do-weels, and when he went home for the holidays he renewed his acquaintance with them with fresh zest. he had a good voice, and would sing to the revellers at harvest homes and other rural festivities as they sipped their ale, and delighted in their applause and wonder at his cleverness, and in the deference they paid him. when he went to weston his ambition took at first a higher flight, and he dreamed of dominating the school. with this idea he began to study with some ardour, and his natural ability enabled him to make good progress. at all the games in which success brought consideration he also tried to attain proficiency, and he endeavoured in every way he could think of to court popularity. but there were others as clever and cleverer than himself, as good and better at football, running, and cricket, and very many whose manners and disposition were more attractive. he had not got the patient persistency of tom buller, or with his superior quickness he might have gone far towards success. but he wanted to establish his position at a jump, and every failure discouraged and irritated him. and so his efforts became more and more spasmodic, and he confined himself to trying to become the head of a clique. but his overbearing vanity and selfishness would show itself too glaringly at times, and many who accepted him as a leader at first grew weary of him, and edwards was his only really faithful follower. therefore he fell back upon slam's, where certain young farmers of the neighbourhood, for whom he sometimes provided drink, applauded his songs and jokes, and fooled him to the top of his bent. but he none the less chafed at his want of appreciation in the school, and bitterly hated crawley, who in a great measure filled the place which he coveted. since the cricket match in which he had figured so ignominiously, saurin had become a confirmed loafer, and frequented the old reprobate's yard almost daily. and, indeed, a new attraction had been added to the establishment. wobbler, the pedestrian, a candidate for the ten-miles championship of somersetshire, was residing there during his training for that world-renowned contest. it cannot be correctly said that wobbler was very good company, for indeed his conversational powers were limited, which was perhaps fortunate, seeing that his language was not very choice when he did speak. but he was a man of varied accomplishments; not only could he walk, but he could run, and swim, and box. indeed he had only deserted the pugilistic for the pedestrian profession because the former was such a poor means of livelihood, closely watched as its members were by the police. now, saurin had long wished to learn to box, an art which was not included in the curriculum of the weston gymnasium, and here was an opportunity. the professor's terms were half-a-crown a lesson, provided there was a class of at least four. the ordinary allowance of pocket-money at weston was eighteenpence a week, _plus_ tips, _plus_ what was brought back to school after the holidays. in the words of mr slam, "it wouldn't run to it." there were seven occasional frequenters of the forbidden yard who were anxious to acquire the rudiments of the noble art of self- defence, but half-a-crown a lesson was a prohibitive tariff. indeed it seemed contrary to principle to pay to learn anything. saurin hit on a way out of the difficulty; he wrote this letter to his guardian: "my dear uncle,--i should like to learn gymnastics, fencing, boxing, and those things, but the regular man appointed to teach such things here is a duffer, and makes it a bore, keeping you at dumb-bells and clubs and such stupid work for ever, just to make the course last out, for the charges are monstrous. and so, hearing about this, professor wobbler, a first-rate instructor, i am told, has engaged a room in the neighbourhood, where he gives lessons at half-a-crown each, or a course of ten for one pound. it has to be kept secret, because the man appointed by the school would have the boys forbidden to go there if he knew. if you don't mind, will you please send the pound to me or to professor wobbler. i will send you his receipt if you pay him through me. please do not mention the matter if it does not meet with your approval, as i should be very sorry to take the poor man's bread out of his mouth." this part of the epistle, a cunning combination of the _suppressio veri_ and _suggestio falsi_, was given to all the others who were in the plot to copy. i am sorry to say that in several instances, including those of saurin and edwards, it was successful, and the class was formed. the professor was not beautiful to look at. his forehead was low and projecting, his eyes small, his nose flat, his lower jaw square and massive. neither were his words of instruction characterised by that elegance which public lecturers often affect, but they were practical and to the point, which after all is the chief thing to be looked at. "you stands easy like," he said to saurin, who was taking his first lesson in an unfurnished room of slam's house, the fine weather having terminated in a thunderstorm, and a wet week to follow. "don't plant your feet as if you meant to grow to the floor, and keep your knees straight--no, not stiff like that, i mean don't bend them. you wants to step forwards or to step backwards, quick as a wink, always moving the rear foot first, or else you'd stumble over it and get off your balance, and that would give t'other a chance. you must be wary, wary, ready to step up and hit, or step back out of reach. keep your heyes on t'other's, and that will help you to judge the distance. take 'em off for a bit of a second and you'll have his mawley well on your nose at once. now, your left arm and fut in advance, not too much; keep your body square to the front. your right arm across, guarding what we calls the mark, that's just above the belt, where the wind is. let your left play up and down free, your foot and body moving with it graceful like. that's better. now, try to hit me in the face as hard as you can; you won't do it, no fear; i should like to bet a pound to a shilling on that every time, and i won't hold my hands up neither. it's just to show yer what judging the distance is." saurin hesitated at first, and hit gently; but urged to try his best he at last struck out sharply, but could not reach the professor's visage. sometimes he turned it slightly to the right, sometimes to the left, and the blow went past his ear. some times he just drew his head back, and the pupil's fist came to within an inch of what he called his nose, but never touched it. this was a way the professor had of showing his credentials--it was his unwritten diploma proving his efficiency to instruct in the noble art. after this the boxing gloves were put on, and the pupil was directed to walk round the professor in a springy manner, leading off at his face, the instructor throwing off the blows with an upward movement of the right arm. next, after a pause for rest, they went on again, saurin leading off, the professor parrying and returning the blow, slowly at first, then quicker as the pupil gained skill and confidence in warding off the hit. then the instructor led off, and the pupil parried and returned. then one, two, three, four. and so the first lesson ended, and stubbs, who was another of the class, was taken in hand. now stubbs had naturally let his beloved topper loose as he passed through the yard, and the dog followed him into the room where the lesson was going on. so long as stubbs led off at the professor topper was quiet and happy; his master he thought was worrying someone, it was his human equivalent to killing a rat; but when the professor led off at _him_, the case was different, and topper, without warning, went straight at the supposed assailant's throat. fortunately the professor had a bird's-eye handkerchief round his neck, which protected it from the dog's teeth, for topper sprang right up and fixed him. it was frightful to look at, but stubbs had the presence of mind to seize his animal round the throat with both hands immediately and drag him away; his teeth were so firmly set in the handkerchief that that came too. no one is a hero at all hours, and wobbler came as near being frightened as a soldier or a pugilist can be supposed, without libel, to do. this made him angry, and he used language towards the dog and his anatomy, and his own anatomy, which is not customary in polite society. stubbs carried the offender down to his kennel and chained him up, and on his return offered a peace-offering of beer, which was well meant but unkind, seeing that the professor was in training and restricted as to his potations. however, topper's fangs had not broken the skin, thanks to the handkerchief, though certainly not to topper. mr wobbler recovered his equanimity, and affably condescended to apologise for his remarks. "i'm almost afeard as i swore, gents," he observed, and his fear was certainly well founded. "i was a trifled startled, you see, and expressed myself as i felt, strong. bull-terriers is nice dogs, and i'm very partial to them, in their proper place, but that's not a hanging on to my wind pipe; at least that's _my_ opinion. but i'm sorry if i spoke rough, which is not in my habits. nobody can say that job wobbler is uncivil to his backers or his patrons." a speech which was perhaps rather lacking in dignity for a professor. the lesson then went on, and was succeeded by others, sometimes in the room, sometimes in the orchard, according to the weather. and when the pupils had attained a certain degree of proficiency they were paired off against one another, first for leads-off, at the head, parry and return at the body, stop and return at the head, and so forth. finally, for loose sparring, the professor standing by and stopping them when they got wild, or began punching indiscriminately. saurin made considerable progress, and was a long way the best of the class--so much so, indeed, that he had to play lightly with the others, or they would not all set to with him. even such a critic as slam expressed his approval, and this superiority was sugar and sack to saurin, being indeed the first consolation he had received since the mortification of being turned out of the eleven. but, alas! sparring was not a recognised item of weston athletics, and he could not gain the applause of the whole school by his proficiency, which was only known to a very few of the initiated. unless, indeed,--and here a thought which had long lain dormant in his mind, for the first time assumed a distinct shape. suppose he happened to come to an open outbreak with crawley, and it ended in a fight, what an opportunity it would be to gratify his ambition and his hatred at the same time! he did not actually plan anything of the kind, or say to himself that he would pick a quarrel. the idea was merely a fancy, a daydream. man or boy must be bold as well as bad deliberately to form a scheme for bringing about an encounter with a formidable enemy, and saurin was not particularly bold, certainly not rashly so, and crawley would be likely to prove a very awkward customer. instructors of any sort, whether they are professors of mathematics, or hebrew, or of dancing, or boxing, have this in common, that they are sure to take a special interest in apt pupils; and so mr wobbler paid more attention to saurin than to the others, and showed him certain tricks, feints, and devices which he did not favour everybody with. he also gave him some hints in wrestling, and taught him the throw called the cross-buttock. saurin used likewise to go to the highroad along which the professor took his daily walks in preparation for his match, and sometimes held the stop-watch for him, and learned how to walk or run in a way to attain the maximum of speed with a minimum of exertion. the mere learning to box, and the necessary association with a man like wobbler, would not have done the boys much harm of itself. the deception practised in order to obtain the money to pay him with, and the skulking and dodging necessary for approaching and leaving slam's premises without being seen, were far more injurious to them, especially since the great freedom allowed to the boys at weston was granted on the assumption that they would not take advantage of it to frequent places which were distinctly forbidden. and to do them justice, the great majority felt that they were on honour, and did not abuse the trust. but for saurin, and for edwards and a few others who followed saurin's lead, the mischief did not end here. mr wobbler sometimes unbended-- mr saurin was such a "haffable gent" there was no resisting him--and told anecdotes of his past experiences, which were the reverse of edifying. it was a curious fact that every action upon which he prided himself, or which he admired in his friends, was of a more or less fraudulent nature; and mr slam, who was always present on these occasions, shared these sentiments, and contributed similar reminiscences of his own. it was true that the boys looked upon these two, and upon the young sporting farmers who sometimes dropped in, and boasted of poaching, and horse-cheating exploits in a spirit of emulation, as "cads," who had a different code from their own; but it is very difficult to associate with persons of any station in life who think it clever to defraud others, and consider impunity as the only test of right or wrong, and to laugh at their dishonourable tricks, without blunting our own moral sense. we cannot touch pitch without being defiled. another great evil was the beer-drinking, at any time, whether they were thirsty or not, which went on. worse still, spirits were sometimes introduced. the frequenters of slam's spent all their pocket-money at that place in one way or another; and the pity of it was, that most of them would much rather, certainly at starting, have laid it out in oyster-patties, strawberry messes, and ices, than in forming habits which they would very probably give their right arms to be rid of in after-life. the best hope for them, next to being found out, was that their course of boxing lessons would soon be over, and mr wobbler would go away to walk his match and clear out of the neighbourhood, and that then they would give up frequenting this disreputable hole before the bad habits which they were so sedulously acquiring got a complete hold upon them. as it was at present, topper was the only living being that had tried to do a good turn for them; if he had succeeded in worrying the professor, the whole clique would have broken up. chapter five. hostilities commenced. many weston boys who had nothing to do with slam, who did not care for ratting, and saw no fun in being the proprietor of a dog that could only be seen occasionally and by stealth, took a perfectly legitimate interest in wobbler as a competitor in the somersetshire ten-miles championship, and when it became generally known that he was training in the neighbourhood (which was not for some time, nor until the number of boxing lessons subscribed for by the saurin class had been pretty well exhausted), a good many repaired when time allowed to the nice bit of straight highroad some two miles off where the pedestrian pounded along daily, with his body inclined somewhat forward, his arms held in front of his chest, a little stick in his right hand, fair heel and toe, at a rate of over seven miles in the hour. a group, of which penryhn was one, were walking in that direction one afternoon, when buller overtook them at a sharp run, pulling up alongside his friend. "so you have come then after all?" said penryhn. "yes," replied buller, mopping his forehead. "i finished the task i set myself directly after you started, and thought i could catch you up. but it's hot!" "is it true that you have been elected into the house eleven?" "yes," replied buller; "it seems rum, doesn't it?" "i don't know why it should. i am sure i am very glad, old fellow, for i know that you wished it." "well, yes i did. i am uncommonly fond of cricket, don't you see, and have tried hard to improve." "that you must have done, by jove! but how was it?" "well, robarts said something to crawley, and crawley came up to me the day before yesterday and said he had heard that i could bowl a bit; would i come and give him a few balls. so i went and bowled to him for an hour, and the result was that he called a house meeting, and i was put into the eleven." "you will be in the school eleven next year, you see." "i don't know," replied buller; "it depends on how i get on, you know. i might make a regular mull of it." "bosh! not you; you have gone on improving too steadily for that," said penryhn confidently. "this is one of the milestones the chap comes to; he will be here presently if we wait. what's the row over there?" "oh! one of those men with images, and some of our fellows, saurin, edwards, and that lot, chaffing him." an italian with a large tray of plaster of paris figures on his head was tramping from one town to another, and seeing the groups of boys gathered in different parts of the road, thought he might do a stroke of business, so taking down the tray he solicited attention. "i makes them all myself; i am poor man, but artist." "ah! and how do you sell them?" asked saurin. "sheap, oh mosh too sheap; what you like to give." "will you take a shilling for the whole lot?" "oh! young gentleman, you make fun, you joke. ha, ha! one shilling for the beautiful little statues! what joke!" "too much, is it? i thought so; not but what they would make capital cockshies." a large pile of flints, hammered into a convenient size and form for missiles, lay handy, ready for repairing the road, and the coincidence caused saurin's idea to become popular at once. "let's have one for a cockshy. here's bismark." "he's a german, and i hate german; most abominable language i have had to tackle yet. stick bismark up on that gate, and we will shy from the other side of the road. stick him up, i say, you jabbering idiot." "oh! sare, what pity to throw stone at the beautiful cast! buy him and take him home, no break him." in spite of his remonstrances the great chancellor was set up on the five-barred gate, and the boys began to pelt him from the heap of stones on the opposite side of the road. "and who is to pay me for my beautiful images?" asked the italian, in some trepidation for his money, it being difficult to say which of all these eccentric young savages was the actual purchaser. "oh! whoever does not hit it shall owe you for it." "but i should like that you pay now, before you throw." "why, you idiot, how can we tell who hits and who misses beforehand. stand out of the way can't you!" "good shot!" "that was near." "that has got him!" and down went the bust in fragments. then a cupid was exposed to missiles far more substantial than his own, and succumbed. his mama was next sent up by these young goths; fancy venus herself being put in the pillory and stoned! what one thing after that could they be expected to respect? not the infant samuel, who, in spite of his supplicatory attitude, found no pity. not sir garnet wolseley, who was exposed to as hot a fire as he had ever been under before, with worse luck; not mr gladstone, nor minerva, nor tennyson. the spirit of mischief, the thirst for destruction, grew wilder by gratification, and soon the whole stock of models was reduced to a heap of plaster fragments. "ah! well, i have sell them all quick to-day," said the italian, putting a good face on the business, which yet looked to him rather doubtful, and it is very rare for people to indulge in mischief at their own expense. "it is twenty shilling, one pound you owe me, sare," he added to saurin. "i owe you!" cried saurin. "i like that! why, i hit more of them than anyone else, and it was those who missed the lot who were to be responsible. go to them, man." "oh! gentleman, kind gentleman, you are making fun of me. you speak to me first; you say, `put up the figures for shy.' i poor man, you gentleman. you laugh! give me my money, you sare, or you, or you;" and the italian grasped his long black hair with both hands, and danced about in a manner which amused his tormentors greatly, and their laughter put him a rage. "you rob me," he cried, "i will go to the police; i will have you put in prison if you no pay me. give me my money." "we will make a cockshy of you if you don't look out," said one; and another actually threw a stone at him, an example which others were preparing to follow, when crawley, with a group of boys who had seen nothing of the early part of the business, came up, and seemed inclined to take the italian's part. the aggressors dropped their stones quietly and began to slip away. "it's a beastly shame, and a disgrace to the school," said crawley indignantly. saurin heard him as he hurried off, and if he had had any money in his pocket he would have turned back, thrown it to the image man, and asked crawley what he meant. but being without funds he was obliged to make off while he could, or the italian would fix on him and follow him home. for to break away and show him a fair pair of heels across country would be impossible after an altercation with his school- fellow; it would be putting himself in too humiliating a position. so he walked on at a sharp pace, choking with suppressed passion. "where he live, that fellow; where he live?" cried the italian. "per baccho, i will have the police to him! you know him, excellenza; tell me where he live?" "i will not tell you that," said crawley. "but here's half-a-crown for you." a considerable number of boys had now collected, and as example, whether for good or evil, has an extraordinary effect on either boys or men, a collection was started. some gave a shilling, some sixpence, and a sum of ten shillings was made up altogether, which was probably quite as much as the figures were worth. so the italian calmed down and dried his eyes, for he had been crying like a child, and with a profusion of thanks took up his board and went his way. and it being time to go back to weston, all the boys started off in that direction, leaving mr wobbler to tramp backwards and forwards between his milestones in solitude. of course some kind friend told all this to saurin, and it exasperated him still more, if that was possible. one thing he was determined upon, crawley must be repaid the money he had given to the italian figure-seller at once. after hunting in all his waistcoat pockets and his drawers he could only raise eighteenpence, so he went to edwards' room. "look here, old fellow," he said; "lend me a shilling till monday, i want it particularly." "i'm awfully sorry," replied edwards, "i have not got one." "i'll pay you back on monday, honour bright." "i know you would; it isn't that. i assure you i am not making excuses; you should have it directly if it were possible; but i am as penniless as a fellow can be, not so much as a postage-stamp have i got." "i must get a shilling somehow; whom to ask?" "ask griffiths; he always has money," suggested edwards. "hang the fellow, yes," said saurin. "but he will make such a favour of it if he lends it, and he is just as likely as not to refuse. i have it, though! he offered me half-a-crown for my crossbow last term, and i would not let him have it; he shall now." the crossbow in question was an ingenious little thing about six inches long, the bow of steel, the string of catgut, the stock and barrel of wood, and it projected marbles or spherical bullets with very considerable force. it would raise a bump on the head at twenty yards, and break a window at thirty. griffiths also lived in mr cookson's house, so that saurin had only to go to his own room, get out, dust, and rub up the article, which had lain in a corner forgotten, and go up the other staircase. "i say, griffiths," he began; "in turning out some old things i have just come across this little steel bow which you wanted to buy of me, you know. i am tired of it now, and so you can have it if you like. half-a-crown, i think, you said that you would give, was it not?" griffiths coveted the toy as much or more than ever he had done, but he was a born dealer; and when he saw that the other was anxious to sell he assumed indifference in order to lower the price. "why, you see," he said, "last term is not this term. i was pretty flush just then, and had a fancy for the thing. now the money has gone, and i don't so much care." "you won't have it then? oh! very well; all right." "stop, don't be in a hurry; i'll give you eighteenpence for it." "make it two shillings," urged saurin. "no; eighteenpence or nothing," griffiths persisted. "you old jew! well, here it is then," said saurin. "have you got a shilling?" asked griffiths. "i have only got half-a- crown; but if you can give me change--" saurin took the coin, giving back a shilling without further remark. he was thinking that it would be more effective to offer crawley the larger coin, instead of fumbling with small money, and the notion pleased him. besides he was not particularly disappointed; so long as he got what he wanted at the moment, it was not his nature to look much further. but he did not sleep much that night. again this crawley had scored off him, by putting himself in the position of generous benefactor and chivalrous defender of the weak, with him (saurin) for his foil. there was one comfort; he was not so much afraid of crawley as he did not conceal from himself that he had once been. hitherto he had feared that if it came to a quarrel, he would not get the best of it, and this had caused him to restrain himself on many occasions when he had longed to give vent to his feelings. but, now that he had skill and science on his side, the case was different, and the balance in his favour; and if this wonderful crawley, whom everybody made such a fuss about, did not like what he had to say to him, he might do the other thing. the boys were gathered about the quadrangle in groups, waiting to go in for eight o'clock school, for the different class-rooms were not open till the master of each came with his key and unlocked the door, by which time all the class were expected to be outside, ready to go in with him. and so it was the custom to assemble rather early, and now, though it was ten minutes to the hour by the big clock, the majority had arrived. directly saurin came he looked for crawley, and saw him standing chatting with some other fellows. he walked straight up to him. "oh, crawley!" he said, "i hear that you paid that italian blackguard half-a-crown for his broken crockery yesterday, and since he made his claim upon _me_, though i owed him nothing, i don't choose to let it look as if you had paid anything for me, so here is your money back;" and he tendered the half-crown, which the other did not put his hand out to receive. this exasperated saurin still more. "take it," he said; "only i'll thank you not to be so confoundedly officious again." "i don't want your money," said crawley quietly. "you are entirely mistaken; i paid nothing for you. if i knew the image man's address i would forward him your half-crown, but i do not. so you must hunt it up for yourself if you want to make restitution." "but you paid him the money." "that was an act of private charity. the man whom you call a blackguard--i don't know why, for _he_ had not been destroying any defenceless person's property--had had a scoundrelly trick played him, and i and some other fellows got up a subscription for him, as anyone with a spark of gentlemanly feeling would be inclined to do. i am sorry that your contribution is tendered too late, but so it is." "so you call me a blackguard and a scoundrel, do you?" hissed saurin, who was quite beside himself with rage; and certainly crawley's speech was the reverse of soothing. "you stuck-up, hypocritical, canting, conceited prig, i should like to break your nose for you." "break away, my hearty," said crawley, putting his hands up; "but i am not a plaster of paris image, mind you, and can hit back." the sneer was another spur to saurin's passion; his temples throbbed as if they would burst, and his look was as evil as a painter, wanting a model for mephistopheles, could have desired, as he sprang at his enemy with an inarticulate cry, and struck at him with all his force. the boys closed round them, eager, expectant, those at a distance running up. but blows were hardly exchanged before someone cried, "look out; here's the doctor!" and the combatants were separated, and the crowd dispersed in an instant. "we will meet again, i hope," said saurin. "any time you like," replied crawley. "on saturday afternoon in the dell, then." "i shall be there, and i hope we shall not be interrupted." and they walked off in different directions, trying to look as if nothing was the matter, which was not so easy, saurin being hardly able to restrain his excitement, and crawley being flushed about the forehead, where the other's fist had struck him; otherwise he was no more discomposed than usual, and, being put on to construe soon after entering the school, acquitted himself very well and with the most perfect _sang froid_. fortunately saurin was not subjected to the same ordeal or he would have been considerably flustered, if not totally unable to fix his mind on the subject; and he might have excited suspicion as to something unusual going on, which again might have caused inquiry, and so spoiled sport. but he was not called up, the redness of crawley's brow remained unnoticed, and all was satisfactory. this was thursday, so there was a day's intermission before the fight, which was the general school topic. the weather, which had been very fine in the early part of the term, had broken up, the sodden grass was unfavourable for cricket and lawn- tennis, so that this little excitement came in just at the convenient time. i wonder why everything connected with fighting is so interesting! little children love playing at soldiers best of all games, and delight in destroying whole tin armies with pea-shooting artillery. with what silent eagerness the newspapers are devoured in war-time when the details of a battle appear! if two cocks in a farm- yard get at one another the heaviest bumpkin from the plough-tail, who seems incapable of an emotion, grows animated. i suppose it is because of the animal nature of which we partake which frequently excites us to prey on other animals and quarrel with one another. fights were very rare at weston, but they took place occasionally, and there was even a traditional spot called the fairies' dell, or more commonly the dell, where they were brought off. but for a boy of the standing and position of crawley,--in the highest form, captain of the eleven, secretary and treasurer of the cricket and football clubs--to be engaged in such an affair was unprecedented, and the interest taken in it was so great as to set the whole school in a ferment. the dislike borne by saurin to the other was well known, as also that he had attributed his expulsion from the eleven to him, though unjustly, since public opinion had been well nigh unanimous on the point. as for the chances of the combatants, only the small clique who frequented slam's, most of whom had seen him sparring with the gloves, favoured that of saurin. the general idea was that the latter was mad to try conclusions with one so superior to him in every way, and that crawley would lick him into fits in about ten minutes. as for the champions themselves, they awaited the ordeal in very different frames of mind. to crawley the whole thing was an unmitigated bore. it would get him into some trouble with the authorities probably; it was inconsistent with his position in the school, and was setting a bad example; then he could hardly expect to avoid a black eye, and it was only three weeks to the holidays, by which time his bruises would hardly have time to disappear. his family were staying for the summer at scarborough, and his sisters wrote him enthusiastic accounts of the lawn-tennis parties there. how could he present himself in decent society, with one of his eyes in mourning? but he saw something comic in his own annoyance, and it did not affect him sufficiently to interfere with his studies or amusements. he neither feared the contest nor desired it. he had no wish to quarrel with saurin, a fellow he did not care for, it is true, but whom he did not think sufficiently about to dislike. he thought rather better of him for having the pluck to attack him, and was a little ashamed of his own bitter words which had goaded the other into doing it. but really the fellow had addressed him in such an overbearing and insolent manner that he could not help replying as he did. after all, if he had to fight someone, he would rather it were saurin than anyone else, since he appeared to hate him so much. but if crawley was cool about the matter, his antagonist was very much the reverse. when his passion expended itself, he was not free from apprehension of the consequences of what he had done. supposing he were ignominiously defeated, after having provoked the contest, what a humiliating position he would be placed in? in every way in which he had competed with crawley he had hitherto been worsted, and he could not help fearing lest this superiority should still be maintained. however, the die was cast, he was in for it now, and must go through with it as best he could, and, after all, his recently acquired skill must stand him in good stead. reason in this way as he might, however, he was nervous, and could not settle to anything for long. on friday night, while crawley was working in his room, there came a knock at the door, and when he called out, "come in!" tom buller entered. "i have got something i want to tell you, crawley," he said. "i have just found out that saurin has been taking lessons in boxing." "oh! of whom? stubbs, edwards, or someone equally formidable?" "no; of wobbler the pedestrian, who was once a pugilist, and who has been giving boxing lessons at slam's." "oh! i see, that is what has screwed his courage up to the proper pitch. i understand it all now." "yes, but avoid wrestling with him; he is good at the cross-buttock, i hear. may i be your second?" "certainly you may, if you like; robarts is the other, and thank you for wishing it, buller." chapter six. the fight. beyond the fields where cricket was played there was a little wood, and in this wood a circular hollow, like a pond, only there was no water in it. it was a wonderful spot for wild flowers in the spring, and that was probably the reason why some romantic person had named it the fairies' dell. the boys, who were not romantic, as a rule, dropped the fairies, and called it the dell. as has been said, this spot was chosen as the arena for the few fistic encounters which the annals of weston could enumerate, and a better place for the purpose there could hardly be. there was plenty of room for a ring at the bottom, and the gently sloping sides would accommodate a large number of spectators, all of whom had a good sight of what was going on, while the whole party were concealed from view. at four o'clock on the saturday afternoon this hollow was thickly studded with westonians, and all the best places taken. the masters usually took advantage of the half-holiday to go out somewhere for the afternoon, but still ordinary precautions to avoid observation had not been neglected. the boys did not repair to the appointed spot in large noisy bodies, but in small groups, quietly and unostentatiously. some of them took their bats and balls out, and began playing at cricket, and then stole off to the rendezvous, which was close to them. saurin was first on the ground; he stood under the trees at the edge of the dell with edwards and stubbs, who acted as his seconds, trying to laugh and chat in an unconcerned manner, but he was pale, could hardly keep himself still in one position, and frequently glanced stealthily in the direction by which the other would come. not to blink matters between the reader and myself, he was in a funk. not exactly a _blue_ funk, you know, but still he did not half like it, and wished he was well out of it. presently there was a murmur, and a movement, and crawley, with robarts and tom buller on each side of him, and a knot of others following, appeared. without saying a word both boys went down the sides of the dell to the circular space which had been carefully left for them at the bottom, took off their jackets, waistcoats, and braces, and gave them to their seconds, who folded them up and laid them aside, tied pocket- handkerchiefs round their waists, turned up the bottoms of their trousers, and stepped into the middle of the arena. "won't you offer to shake hands?" said stubbs to saurin. "i believe it is usual on such occasions." "pooh!" replied saurin, "that is in friendly encounters, to show there is no malice. there is plenty of malice here, i can promise you." he finished rolling up his shirt sleeves to the armpits as he spoke, and walked to the middle of the ring, where crawley confronted him. all were wrapped in breathless attention as the two put up their hands, and every note of a thrush singing in a tree hard by could be distinctly heard. the two boys were just about the same height and age, but crawley had a slightly longer reach in the arms, and was decidedly more "fit" and muscular. but, on the other hand, it was evident directly they put their hands up, that saurin was the greatest adept at the business. the carriage of his head and body, and the way he worked his arm and foot together, showed this. he moved round his adversary, advancing, retiring, feinting, watching for an opening. crawley stood firm, with his eyes fixed on those of his antagonist, merely turning sufficiently to face him. at length saurin, judging his distance, sent out his left hand sharply, and caught crawley on the right cheekbone. crawley hit back in return, but beat the air; saurin was away. again saurin came weaving in, and again he put a hit in without a return. the same thing happened a third, a fourth, and a fifth time, and then crawley, stung by the blows, went at the other wildly, hitting right and left, but, over- reaching himself, lost his balance and rolled over. the lookers on were astonished; they had expected saurin to be beaten from the first, and though crawley was so popular, murmurs of applause were heard, such is the effect of success. buller knelt on his left knee so that crawley might sit on his right. in the same manner saurin sat on edwards' knee. saurin's face had not been touched, while that of crawley was flushed and bleeding. "you will not be able to touch his face just yet," said buller. "fight at his body and try to hit him in the wind. and never mind what i said yesterday about closing with him, we must risk his cross-buttock, and your superior strength may serve you." "time! time!" cried the boys, and the antagonists jumped up from their seconds' knees, and met again. saurin had lost all his nervousness now; his superiority was evident, and he felt nothing but triumph and gratified malice. he did not stop to spar now, but directly he was within reach hit out with confidence. crawley took the blow without flinching or attempting to parry it, and sent his right fist with all his strength into saurin's ribs, just as buller had directed him. saurin recovered himself, and the round went on, crawley being further mauled about the face, neck, and head, but getting a hit in now on the other's body, now a round right-hander on his side or the small of his back. in the end they grappled, wrestled, and rolled over together, and were then helped by their seconds to their respective corners. saurin's face was still untouched, but he puffed and panted for breath, and seemed to feel the effect of the body blows. "that is capital," said buller to crawley; "stick to that for the present, he will soon begin to tire." "why, buller, you seem to be quite up to this sort of thing!" said robarts in surprise. "my elder brother went in for the queensbury cups, and is always talking about boxing and fighting: that's how i know," replied buller quietly. "and that is why you wished to be my second?" asked crawley, who, though his face was a pitiable object, was perfectly cool and self-possessed, and not a bit blown or tired. "yes," replied buller; and "time!" was again called. the mass of the spectators looked upon the fight as won by saurin already, and all the cheering was for him now. this opinion was further strengthened presently, for crawley, seeing his antagonist panting, thought that at last he might get on equal terms with him, and rushed in to fight at close quarters, but he was met by a straight blow from saurin's left fist right between the eyes, which knocked him fairly down on the broad of his back, where he lay quite dazed for a moment, till robarts and buller assisted him to his corner. the cheering and the cries of "bravo, saurin!" "well hit, saurin!" were loud and long; many thought that crawley would not come up again. but though puffed about both eyes, and with a considerably swollen nose, crawley was soon all right again, and as lively as when he began. "if i only could mark him!" he said to his seconds. "it is so absurd to see him with his face untouched." "wait a bit," replied buller. "keep on pegging at his body and wrestling; i'll tell you when to go for his face. he is getting weaker for all that hit last round." this was true, for saurin's blows, though they got home, had no longer the force they had at first. in one round, after a severe struggle, he threw crawley heavily, but the exertion told more upon himself than upon the one thrown. and he began to flinch from the body blows, and keep his hands down. loafing, beer-drinking, and smoking began to tell their tale, in fact, and at last buller said, "now you may try to give him one or two in the face." they had been at it nearly half an hour, and crawley, who had been taking hard exercise daily and leading a healthy temperate life, was as strong as when he first took his jacket off. he could hardly see out of his right eye, and his face and neck were so bruised and tender that every fresh blow he received gave him exquisite pain. but his wits were quite clear, he had not lost his temper, and when down, in a few minutes he was ready to stand up again. he easily warded off a nerveless blow of his antagonist, returned it with one from his left hand on the body, and then sent his right fist for the first time straight into saurin's face. saurin got confused and turned half round; crawley following up his advantage, followed him up step by step round the ring, and at last fairly fought him down amidst cheers from the boys, the tide of popularity turning in his favour again. "you have marked him now, and no mistake," said buller to crawley as he sat on his knee. and there could be no doubt about that. the revulsion of feeling saurin had gone through was great. after establishing his superiority, and feeling confident of an easy victory, to find his adversary refuse so persistently to know when he was beaten! to see him come up time after time to take more hammering without flinching was like a nightmare. and he felt his own strength going from the sheer exertion of hitting; and when he knocked crawley down he hurt his left hand, which it was painful to strike with afterwards. again, the body blows he received and thought little of at first began to make him feel queer, and now, when the other took a decided lead, he lost his head and got wild. for he was not thoroughly "game:" he had not got that stubborn, somewhat sullen spirit of endurance which used to be so great a characteristic of the english, and we will hope is not extinct yet, for it would be sad indeed to think that it had passed away. a brilliant act of daring with plenty of spectators and high hope of success is one thing; but to stand at bay when all chance seems gone, determined to die hard and never give in, is quite another. i like to see a fellow spurting when he is distanced; catching his horse, remounting, and going in pursuit after a bad fall; going back to his books and reading harder than ever for another try directly the list has come out without his name in it--never beaten, in short, until the last remotest chance is over. that is the spirit which won at agincourt, at waterloo, at meeanee, at dubba, at lucknow, at rorke's drift. it was this that saurin was deficient in, and that would have now stood him in such stead. edwards was not the one to infuse any of it into him, for he was as much dismayed by the effects of the last round as his friend himself. stubbs, indeed, tried to cheer him, inciting him to pull himself together, spar for wind, and look out for a chance with his sound right hand, but he was not a youth to carry influence with him. in the next round crawley closed with his adversary, who, when he at last struggled loose, rolled ignominiously over on the ground, and in point of beauty there was nothing to choose now between the visages of the two combatants. "i--i can't fight any more," said saurin, as he was held up on edwards' knee, to which he had been dragged with some difficulty. "oh! have another go at him," urged stubbs; "he is as bad as you are, and you will be all right presently if you keep away a bit, and get down the first blow. just get your wind, and science must tell." "but i'm so giddy, i--i can't stand," said saurin. "time!" was called, and crawley sprang off his second's knee as strong as possible, but he stood in the middle of the ring alone. "it's no good; he can't stand," cried edwards. and then a tremendous cheering broke out, and everybody pressed forward to congratulate crawley and pat him on the back. but he made his way over to saurin, and offered to shake hands. "it all luck," he said. "you are better at this game than i am, and you would have licked me if you had not hurt your left hand. and look here, i had no right to speak as i did. and--and if you thought i wanted to get you out of the eleven you were mistaken." saurin was too dazed to feel spiteful just then; he had a vague idea that crawley wanted to shake hands, and that it would be "bad form" to hold back, so he put his right hand out and murmured something indistinctly. "stand back, you fellows," said crawley, "he is fainting. give him a chance of a breath of air." and indeed saurin had to be carried up out of the dell, laid on his back under the trees, and have water dashed in his face, before he could put on his jacket and waistcoat and walk back to his tutor's house. and when he arrived there he was in such pain in the side that he had to go to bed. crawley himself was a sorry sight for a victor. but his discomforts were purely local, and he did not feel ill at all; on the contrary, he was remarkably hungry. buller was with him when he washed and changed his shirt, for he had been applying a cold key to the back of his neck to stop the nose-bleeding, and now remained, like a conscientious second, lest it should break out again. "i say, buller," said crawley suddenly, "_you_ never go to slam's, i hope?" "not i." "then how do you know such a lot about prize-fighting?" "i told robarts; my elder brother is very fond of everything connected with sparring, and has got a lot of reports of matches, and i have read all the prize-fights that ever were, i think. i used to take great interest in them, and thought i might remember something which would come in useful. there is a great sameness in these things, you know, and the principles are simple." "i am sure i am much obliged to you for offering to be my second; i should have been licked but for you." "i don't know that. i think you would have thought of fighting at his wind when you could not reach his face for yourself, and tired him out anyhow. but if i have been useful i am glad. you took pains to try my bowling when most fellows would have laughed at the idea; and there is the honour of the house too. what i feared was that you would not follow what i said, but persist in trying to bore in." "why," replied crawley, laughing, "saurin backed up your advice with such very forcible and painful examples of the common sense of it, that i should have been very pig-headed not to catch your meaning. but what rot it all is!" he added, looking in the glass. "a pretty figure i shall look at scarborough, with my face all the colours of the prism, like a disreputable damaged rainbow!" "there are three weeks yet to the holidays; you will be getting all right again by then," said buller. "i doubt it; it does not feel like it now, at all events," replied crawley; and when supper-time came he was still more sceptical of a very speedy restoration to his ordinary comfortable condition. it was an absurd plight to be in; he felt very hungry, and there was the food; the difficulty was to eat it. it hurt his lips to put it in his mouth--salt was out of the question--and it hurt his jaws to masticate it, and it hurt his throat to swallow it. but he got it down somehow, and then came prayers, conducted as usual every evening by dr jolliffe, who, when the boys filed out afterwards, told him to remain. "by a process of elimination i, recognising all the other boys in my house, have come to the conclusion that you are crawley," said the doctor solemnly. "yes, sir," replied crawley. "quantum mutatus ab illo! i should not have recognised you. circumstantial evidence seems to establish the fact that you have engaged in a pugilistic encounter." "yes, sir." "and with whom?" "i beg your pardon, sir; i hope that you will not insist on my telling. it was my fault; we had a dispute, and i spoke very provokingly." "your mention of his name would not make much difference, if you were as busy with your fists as he seems to have been. but i am disappointed in you, crawley; it vexes me that a boy of your age and standing in the school, and whose proficiency in athletic sports gives you a certain influence, should brawl and fight like this." "it vexes me too, sir, i assure you." "you should have thought of that before." "so i did, sir, and also of the figure i should cut when i went home." "well, certainly," said the doctor, unable to help smiling, "i do not advise you to have your photograph taken just at present. but you know," he added, forcing himself to look grave again, "i cannot overlook fighting, which is a very serious offence. you must write a greek theme of not less than two pages of foolscap, on the blessings of peace, and bring it me on tuesday. and apply a piece of raw meat, which i will send up to your room, to your right eye." crawley ran up-stairs rejoicing, for he had got off easier than he expected, and the application of raw meat gave him great relief, so that next day the swellings had very much subsided, though his eyes were blood-shot, and his whole face discoloured. but saurin did not come round so soon: there were symptoms of inflammation which affected his breathing, and induced his tutor, mr cookson, to send for the doctor, who kept his patient in bed for two days. he soon got all right again in body, but not in mind, for he felt thoroughly humiliated. this was unnecessary, for it was agreed on all sides that he had made a first- rate fight of it, and he decidedly rose in the estimation of his school- fellows. but saurin's vanity was sensitive to a morbid degree, and he brooded over his defeat. a fight between two healthy-minded boys generally results in a close friendship, and crawley made several overtures to his late antagonist; but as they were evidently not welcome, he soon desisted, for after all saurin was not one of "his sort." and the term, as it is the fashion now to call a "half," came to an end, and though his wounds were healed, and his features restored to their original shape, crawley had to go to scarborough like one of gibson's statues, tinted. chapter seven. treating of an air-gun and a door-key. saurin met with a disappointment when he returned home. his uncle had intended to go abroad and take him with him, but this intention was frustrated by an attack of gout, which kept him to his country home, where his nephew had to spend the entire vacation, and he found it the reverse of lively. sir richard saurin's house stood in the midst of a well-timbered park, and there were some spinneys belonging to the place also. at one time he had rented the shooting all round about, and preserved his own woods; but it was a hunting country, and the havoc made by foxes was found to be so great that he gave up preserving in disgust, and so, growing lazy, made that an excuse for dropping the other field shooting, which passed into different hands. so now there was no partridge-shooting, unless a stray covey chose to light in the park, and there were very few pheasants, though the rabbits were pretty numerous. sir richard, being free from any paroxysm of his complaint when his nephew arrived, laughed at his black eye. "is that the result of your course of lessons in boxing?" he asked. "well, uncle richard, i should have come worse off if i had not had them," replied saurin; "but one cannot fight without taking as well as giving." "but why fight at all? that is not what you are sent to school for." "i never did before, and it is not likely to happen again, only i was forced on this occasion to stand up for myself." "well, well," said sir richard, "i have something more serious to speak to you about." saurin felt his heart beat; he feared for a moment that his visits to slam's, and the impositions he had practised, had been discovered; but this was not the case. "it is not a very good report i have received of you this time," continued his guardian. "it seems that you have grown slack in attention to your studies, and have not made the progress which might fairly be expected from a boy of your age and abilities. now, it is only right to warn you that the income left you by your father very little more than covers the expense of your education; and since a considerable portion of it consists of a pension, which will cease on your being twenty-one, it will not be sufficient for your support, so that you must make up your mind speedily what profession you will adopt, and must exert every effort to get into it. our vicar here, a young man newly come, is a mathematician and a good german scholar, two subjects which gain good marks, i am told, in all these competitive examinations, and i have made arrangements for you to read with him every morning for a couple of hours." this was not a very bright look-out for the summer holidays. "since it was so very necessary for him to work, it was perhaps well that he should not have too much to distract him," he said sarcastically; but found some truth in the words, for he was forced into taking an interest in a german novel which the clergyman, with some tact, chose for him to translate. but the life _was_ dull; when he sought out his former companions, the village scapegraces, he found that there had been a grand clear out of them; it was as if the parish had taken a moral purgative. bill had enlisted; tom, the worst of the lot, had (it was his mother who spoke) "got into bad company and gone to lunnon;" dick and jim were in prison, and harry had reformed and been taken into a gentleman's stables. solitude! his principal amusement was shooting rabbits. september was close at hand, and if he had sought the society of his equals, instead of making a bad name in the neighbourhood in former years, he would probably have had more than one invitation to better sport amongst the partridges; but he had such an evil reputation that the gentlemen of the county did not covet his society for their sons. now, rabbit shooting in the winter, with dogs to hunt the bunnies through brushwood, furze, or bracken, so that snap-shots are offered as they dart across open places, is very good fun; but the only way saurin had of getting at them at this season was by lying in wait in the evening outside the woods and shooting them when they came louping cautiously out. he found excitement in this at first, but it was impossible to miss such pot-shots for one thing, and he got very few chances for another. the report of the gun frightened them all into the wood, not to venture out again for some time, probably till it was too dark to distinguish them. the only chance was, when a rabbit had been got at one place, to go off at once to another wood at some distance and lie in ambush again there. in this way two, or at most three shots might be got in the short period of dusk. fond as he was of carrying a gun, saurin found this sport unsatisfactory after a week or so, though it was infinitely better than not shooting anything at all. but one day when he rode over to the county town, seven miles off, for cartridges, he saw a small air-gun of a new and improved pattern in the shop, which took his fancy very much indeed. it was beautifully finished, charged in the simplest way imaginable, and would carry either a bullet or a small charge of shot, killing easily, the man said, with the former at fifty yards, and with the latter at five-and- twenty. it would require some skill to hit a rabbit in the head with a bullet; and as there was no report to speak of, only a slight crack, killing or missing one would not scare the others. the price was not high, and as sir richard never objected to his having anything in reason that he wanted, and was, moreover, glad that the rabbits who committed sad havoc in the garden should be thinned down, he took it home with him and tried it that evening. just about sunset he repaired to his favourite spot, a clump of three trees growing close together, behind which he could easily conceal himself. a wood, full of thick undergrowth, well nigh impenetrable, ran in front and made an angle to the right, so that there were two sides from which the rabbits might come out. the air was perfectly still, not a leaf was stirring, and every note of a bird that was warbling his evening song, positively the very last before shutting up for the night, fell sharp and clear upon the ear, as saurin knelt behind the trees, gun in hand, eagerly watching. presently he saw something brown, rather far on his left, close to the wood. it came a little further out, and the long ears could be distinguished. saurin was rather doubtful about the distance, but, eager to try his new weapon, he took a steady aim and pulled. no smoke, no fire, nothing but a slight smack such as a whip would make. the rabbit raised its head, listened, and hopped quietly back into the wood. a palpable miss. but there on the right was another, not thirty yards off this one. saurin slewed round, got the sight well on its head, and pulled again. this rabbit did _not_ go back to the wood, but turned over, struggled a little, and then lay still. saurin did not run out to pick it up, but kept quiet, and presently another came out, to see what was the matter with its friend apparently, for it louped up to the body; and he nailed that. and he missed two and killed two more, and then the rabbit community began to suspect there was something wrong, and kept in the wood. but, returning home, he stalked and shot another in the park, making a bag of five altogether, which pleased him immensely. next day he tried the shot cartridges on blackbirds and sparrows in the garden, and slaughtered not a few, to the gardener's great delight. it was not only the efficiency of so toy-like a weapon which pleased saurin; the silence and secrecy with which it dealt death had a charm for him. and so it happened that when the time came for him to return to weston, he took the air-gun with him. it went into a very small compass, and was easily stowed in his portmanteau. he could smuggle it to slam's and keep it there, and if he had no chance of using it, he could still show it off to edwards and his other intimates, and also to the perhaps more appreciative eyes of edwin marriner and another, perhaps two other scamps of sporting tastes whom he met at slam's on certain afternoons, when they guzzled beer, and smoked, and played sometimes at bagatelle, sometimes at cards, or tossed for coppers. and they won his money in a small way, and laughed at his jokes, and took interest in his bragging stories, and went into ecstasies over his songs, and really liked and admired him in their fashion. so the departure of mr wobbler did not keep him away, and he went to the yard as much as ever. if he had won the fight it would probably have made a difference, and he might have tried once more to compete for influence and popularity in the school. but now he had quite given up all ideas of that kind. he spoke to crawley, and shook his hand with apparent cordiality when they first met after coming back, because he felt that it would be ridiculous to show a resentment which he had proved himself powerless to gratify; but he hated him worse than ever, if possible. if the breaking up of the boxing-class did not diminish saurin's visits to slam's, it had that effect on the other members of it. stubbs was faithful to his dog, and perry to his hawk, and there were other boys who had pets there, or who liked to go on a wet day to see ratting, or the drawing of the badger, an animal who lived in a tub, like diogenes, and was tugged out of it by a dog, not without vigorous resistance, when anyone chose to pay for the spectacle; the poor badger deriving no benefit from the outlay. but such visits were fitful. edwards, indeed, was faithful to his friend, but even edwards did not care for slam's any longer. he had taken a violent passion for football, and often played, leaving saurin to go to the yard alone. on sundays, indeed, he could not play football, but neither did he like playing cards on that day. saurin laughed him out of his scruples, but not all at once. but saurin did not want companionship; he preferred that of marriner and company. edwin marriner was a young farmer in the neighbourhood of weston college, and he farmed his own land. certainly it was as small an estate as can well be imagined, consisting of exactly two acres, pasture, arable, cottage, and pig-stye included, but undoubted freehold, without a flaw in the title. he was just twenty-one when his father died, a year before the time we are treating of, and then lord woodruff's agent made him an offer for his inheritance, which he stuck to like a very naboth. the price named was a good and tempting one, far more indeed than the land was worth; but when the money was spent he would have nothing for it but to become a mere labourer, or else to enlist, and he did not fancy either alternative, while he could manage to live, as his father did before him, on his patch, which spade-labour made remunerative. he worked for hire in harvest-time, and that brought something; the pig- stye yielded a profit, so did a cow, and there were a few pounds reaped annually from a row of beehives, for the deceased marriner, though not very enlightened generally, had learned, and taught his son the "depriving" system, and repudiated the idiotic old plan of stifling the stock to get the honey. all these methods of making both ends meet at the end of the year were not only innocent but praiseworthy; but the marriners had the reputation of making less honourable profits, and that was why lord woodruff was so anxious to get rid of them. the two acres lying indeed in the midst of his lordship's estates, was of itself a reason why he should be inclined to give a fancy price for them; but when the proprietor was suspected of taking advantage of his situation to levy considerable toll on the game of his big neighbour, who preserved largely, he became a real and an aggravated nuisance. marriner, as his father had done, openly carried a gun, for which he paid his license, and it was impossible, with reason, to blame him, for the rabbits alone would have eaten up every particle of his little stock if he took no measures against them. if he shot an occasional pheasant, or his dog caught a hare, or even two, in the course of the season on his own land, why, no one could wonder. but it was not necessary to sow buckwheat in order to attract the pheasants. and he had no right whatever to set snares in lord woodruff's covers, which, though they could not catch him, the gamekeepers were certain he did. one thing decidedly against him in the opinion of the gentry round about, was that he frequently visited slam's, and slam was regarded as a receiver of stolen goods, certainly so far as game was concerned, perhaps in other matters also. edwin marriner was a wiry-looking little man, with red hair and whiskers, quick bright eyes, and a look of cunning about his mouth. he had two propensities which interfered with one another: he was very fond of strong drink and very fond of money. the drink was delightful, but to spend the money necessary to procure it was a fearful pang. the best way out of the dilemma was to get someone to treat him, and this he did as often as he could. he had plenty of cunning and mother wit, and was skilled in woodcraft, but he was utterly innocent of anything which could fairly be called education. he had been taught to read, but never exercised the gift; he could do an addition sum, and write, with much labour, an ill-spelled letter, and that was all. and this was the individual selected by saurin for a companion, and, whose society he preferred to that of all his schoolfellows, edwards not excepted. on half-holidays he would go to his little farm (which was half-an-hour's walk too far for ordinary occasions, now the days had grown short, and "all in," was directly after five-o'clock school), and talk to him while he was at work, for marriner was industrious, though with a dishonest twist, and if he went to slam's yard so often now it was because his gentleman friend brought some grist to his mill, besides often standing beer for him, and because he had business relations with slam; though he liked the boy's company too, and admired his precocious preference for crooked ways, and hatred of lawful restraint. the fact was that they were drawn together by a strong propensity which was common to both, and which formed a never-failing topic of interesting conversation. this propensity was a love of sport, especially if indulged secretly, unlawfully, and at the expense of somebody else; in a word, they were arrant poachers, the man in fact, the boy at heart. not but what saurin had snared a hare too in his time. for some time marriner had been chary of confessing his depredations, for he was careful about committing himself, especially to a gentleman, who might naturally be supposed to side with the game-preservers. but when the ice was broken he talked freely enough, and from that time the intimacy commenced. yet at times he had qualms, and feared that he had been rash to depart from his custom of close secrecy; and it often occurred to him that it would be well to draw saurin into some act of complicity, and so seal his lips effectually and for ever. he felt and expressed great admiration for the air-gun, and suggested that they should try it some moonlight night upon the roosting pheasants. this was treated as a joke at first; a romantic idea which could not, of course, be carried into practice; but after it had been referred to, and discussed again and again, it did not look so utterly impossible. the principal difficulty was the getting out at night, but after many careful inspections of his tutor's premises saurin saw how this might be managed. there was a small back-yard into which the boys had access at any time; this was surrounded by a high wall with a _chevaux de frise_ at the top, which might be considered insurmountable unless one were jack sheppard or the count of monte christo. but there was a door at the bottom, seldom used, hardly ever, indeed, except when coals came in. outside there was a cart track, and then open field. it was the simplest thing, a mere question of obtaining a key to this door, and he could walk out whenever he liked. yes, but how to get the key, which was taken by the servant to mrs cookson when not in use? to watch when coals were next brought in for an opportunity of purloining it would be worse than useless, for a new lock would be put to the door, and suspicion aroused. an idea occurred to him; he had read of impressions of keys being taken in wax, and duplicates being made from them. he asked marriner if it were possible to get this done, and the reply was yes, that he knew a friendly blacksmith who would make a key to fit any lock, of which he had the wards in wax, for a matter of say five shillings, which was leaving a handsome margin of profit for himself, we may remark in passing. five shillings was a lot, saurin thought, when he was not sure that he would use the key if he had it. marriner did not know, perhaps it could be done for three; at any rate he might as well have the wax by him in case he got a chance. curiously enough, he thought he had some in the house, though he sold all his honey in the comb as a rule. but a hive had been deserted, and he knew he had melted the wax down, and it must be somewhere. it was, and he found it, and he got a key and showed saurin how to take an impression of it. "why, you have done it before then!" said saurin. "p'raps," replied marriner, with a side glance of his cunning eyes. "a poor man has to turn his hand to a bit of everything in these hard times." it was an early winter, and the weather turned very cold, which caused a great consumption of fuel. and one morning, on coming in to his tutor's from early school, saurin heard the small thunder of coals being poured into the cellar, and saw the yard door open, a wagon outside, and a man staggering from it under a sack. he ran up to his room, threw down his books, took the wax, and went back to the yard door, where he took a great interest in the unlading of the sacks. a fine sleet was falling, with a bitter north-east wind, to make it cut the face, so that there were none of the servants outside, and no one to see him but the two men who were busied in their work. never was such an opportunity. he had the least possible difficulty in taking the key out of the lock, pressing it on the wax in the palm of his hand, in the way marriner had shown him, and replacing it without attracting observation. then he returned to his room, whistling carelessly, and putting the wax, which had the wards of the key sharply defined upon it, in a seidlitz-powder box, to prevent the impression being injured, he locked it up in his bureau and went to breakfast. now that this had been accomplished so favourably, it seemed a pity not to have the key made. he might probably never want to use it; but still, there was a pleasant sense of superiority in the knowledge that he was independent of the "all in," and could get out at any hour of the night that he chose. so the next time he went to marriner's cottage he took the box containing the wax with him, and marriner paid him the high compliment that a professional burglar could not have done the job better. a week after, he gave him the key, and one night, after everyone had gone to bed, saurin stole down-stairs, out into the yard, and tried it. it turned in the lock easily, the door opened without noise, and he was free to go where he liked. only there was no place so good as bed to go to, so he closed and locked the door again, and went back to his room, feeling very clever and a sort of hero. i am sure i do not know why. no one was taken into his confidence but edwards, and he only because it was necessary to talk to somebody about his poaching schemes, and to excite wonder and admiration at his inventive skill and daring courage, and this edwards was ready at all times to express. he was never taken to marriner's, but he still occasionally accompanied his friend to the yard--on sundays, usually, because of the card-playing, to which he had taken a great fancy. he still thought in his heart that it was very wrong, but saurin laughed at such scruples as being so very childish and silly that he was thoroughly ashamed of them. saurin, who was so clever and manly that he must know better than he did, saw no harm. besides, he was very fond of playing at cards, and though he did not much like the very low company he met at slam's yard now, he told himself that what was fit for saurin was fit for him, and it was desirable, beneficial, and the correct thing to see life in all its phases. his hero's defeat by crawley had not diminished his devotion one iota, for he attributed it entirely to saurin having crippled his left hand when he knocked his adversary down. even then he believed that saurin would have won, only crawley was in training, and the other was not. crawley was all very well, but he lacked that bold and heroic defiance of authority which fascinated edwards (himself the most subordinate soul by nature, by the way). the idea of crawley's daring even to dream of going poaching, or breaking out at night, or having a false key made! no, he was a good commonplace fellow enough, but saurin was something unusual,--which it is fervently to be hoped he was. poor edwards, with his weak character, which made it necessary for him to believe in someone and yield him homage; what a pity it was he had not fixed on a different sort of hero to worship! chapter eight. another project of evasion. frost, hard, sharp, crisp, and unmistakable; do you like it? it is very unpleasant when you get up of a morning; the water is so cold. and then going to school shivering, and being put on to construe when you have the hot ache in your fingers, is trying to the patience, especially if one is inclined to self-indulgence, and is aided and abetted when at home by one's mother. but everything has its compensations. without work play would become a bore; if there were no hunger and thirst there would be no pleasure in eating and drinking; even illness is followed by convalescence, with story-books to read instead of lessons, and licence to lie in bed as long as you like, and so there is the delight, in very cold weather, of getting warm again; and there is also skating. whether we like it or not we have to put up with it when it comes, and it came that year at an unusual time, before the end of november. we often indeed have just a touch at that period, three days about, and then sleet and rain; but this was a regular good one, thermometer at nineteen fahrenheit, no wind, no snow, and the gravel-pits bearing. the gravel-pits were so called because there was no gravel there. there had been, but it was dug out, and carted away before the memory of the oldest inhabitant, and the cavities were filled with water. there were quite three acres of available surface altogether, and not farther than a mile from weston; but "_ars longa, vita brevis est_;" the art of cutting figures is long, and the period of practice short indeed. considering the price spent on skates in england, and the few opportunities of putting them on, it seems barbarous of masters not to give whole holidays when the ice _does_ bear. but then what would parents and guardians say? a boy cannot skate himself into the smallest public appointment, and the rule of three is of much more importance to his future prospects than the cutting of that figure. the westonians made the most they could of their opportunity, however, and whenever they had an hour to spare the gravel-pits swarmed with them. their natural tendency was to rapid running, racing, and hockey; but leblanc, who was born in canada, where his father held an appointment, and who had worn skates almost as soon as he had shoes, did such wonderful things as set a large number of them practising figure skating. buller was bitten by the mania; he had never tried anything before but simple straightforward running on the flat of the skate with bent knees, so he had a great deal to learn; but with his usual persistency, when he once took anything in hand he did not regard the difficulties, and only dreaded lest he should not have sufficient opportunity of practising. he began, of course, by endeavouring to master the outside edge, which is the grammar of figure skating, and watched leblanc, but could make nothing out of that, for leblanc seemed to move by volition, as some birds appear to skim along without any motion of the wings. he could not give hints, or show how anything was done, because he could not understand where any difficulty lay. it was like simple walking to him; you get up and walk, you could not show any one exactly _how_ to walk. but there were two or three other fair skaters from whom more could be learned; penryhn, for example, was a very decent performer of simple figures. he came from a northern county, where there was yearly opportunity of practice, and had been taught by his father, who was an excellent skater. "the first great thing you must always bear in mind," said he, "is that the leg upon which you stand, while on the outside edge, must be kept straight and stiff, with the knee rigidly braced. you see some fellows there practising by crossing the legs; while they are on one leg they bring the other in front, and across it, before they put it down on the ice. this certainly forces you to get on to the outside edge, but it twists the body into a wrong position--one in which the all-important thing in skating, balance, cannot be acquired. besides, it gets you into a way of bringing the foot off the ground to the front, whereas it ought always to be a little behind the one you are skating on, and it takes as long to get out of that habit as to learn the outside edge altogether pretty well. why, here is old algebra positively with a pair of skates on!" "old algebra," as a mathematical genius, whose real name was smith, was called, skated very well too. "look here, algebra," cried penryhn, "i am trying to show buller how to do the outside edge; can't you give him a scientific wrinkle?" "the reason why you find an initial difficulty in the matter," said algebra gravely, adjusting his spectacles, "is that you naturally suppose that if you bend so far out of the perpendicular, the laws of gravity must cause you to fall. but that is because you omit the centrifugal force from your consideration; remember what centrifugal force is, buller, and it will give you confidence." "oh, i have confidence enough!" said buller; "it's the power of getting on to the edge without overbalancing myself that i want, and all that rot about the laws of gravity won't help me." "i fancied they wouldn't, but penryhn asked for a scientific wrinkle. if you want a practical one, keep the head and body erect, never looking down at the ice; when you strike out with the right foot, look over the right shoulder; body and foot are sure to follow the eye, and clasp your hands behind you, or keep them at your sides; do anything but sway them about. that's it, you got on to the outside edge then; now boldly with the left foot, and look over the left shoulder. never mind (buller had come a cropper); you fell then because you did not let yourself go, but when your skate took the outside edge you tried to recover. you lacked confidence, in short, in the centrifugal force, and bothered yourself, instinctively, without knowing it, with the laws of gravity. try again; you stick to that. rigidity. right foot--look over right shoulder, not too far, just a turn of the head. left foot--look over left shoulder. there, you did not fall then. trust to the centrifugal force, that's the thing," and he swept away with a long easy roll. "a capital coach he would make," said penryhn, admiringly. "he always tells you just what you want to know without bothering." "yes," said buller, "i have asked him things in lessons once or twice, and he made it all as clear as possible, but i didn't know he was good for anything else. this is a grand idea for learning to skate, though; look here, this is all right, is it not?" "yes, you have got it now; lean outwards a little more, and don't bend forward. the weight should be on the centre of the foot." there are few sensations more delightful than the first confident sweep on the outside edge, with the blade biting well into the clear smooth ice, and buller felt as if he could never have enough of it, and he kept on, trying to make larger and larger segments of a circle, not heeding the falls he got for the next half-hour, when it was time to be getting back, and he had reluctantly to take his skates off, and jog home at a trot. the next chance he had he was back to the ice and at it again. others who had got as far as he had began practising threes, or trying to skate backwards, but not so buller. he must have that outside edge perfectly, and make complete circles on it, without hesitation or wobbling, much less falling, before he attempted anything else. progress did not seem slow to him, he was used to that in everything, and he was surprised at improving as quickly as he did. all he dreaded was a heavy snow-fall, or a breaking up of the frost, and either calamity was to be expected from hour to hour. before going to bed on the night of the third day of the ice bearing, he drew the curtain and looked out of window. the moon was nearly full, there was not a breath of wind stirring to shake the hoar-frost off the trees; all was hard, and bright, and clear. how splendid the pits would be now! how glorious to have the whole sheet of ice to one's self! why, with such a chance of solitary practice he might well expect to cut an eight, for he could already complete entire circles on each foot. if it were not for the bars to his window he would certainly go. the lane below had no building to overlook it; none of the windows of that part of the house where dr jolliffe and his family, and the servants slept, commanded the lane. he would have no other house to pass on the way to the gravel- pits; really there would be no risk to speak of at all. the window was barely more than six feet, certainly not seven from the ground, and the brick wall old and full of inequalities where the mortar had fallen out, and the toe might rest; with a yard of rope dangling from the sill, to get in again would be the easiest thing possible. the more he thought about it the more simple the whole scheme seemed; if it were not for the bars. he examined them. the removal of one would be sufficient. "you beast!" said buller, seizing and shaking it. it seemed to give a little, and he shook it again: it certainly was not very tight, and he examined it further. it fitted into the woodwork of the window-frame at the top, and terminated at the bottom in a flat plate, perforated with three holes, by which it was secured by nails to the sill. nails? no, by jove, screws! only the paint had filled in the little creases at the top of them, and it was simple enough to pick that off. his pocket- knife had a screw-driver at the top of it, he applied this and turned it; the screw came up like a lamb. so did the second; so did the third. the bar was free at the bottom, and when he pulled it towards him it came out in his hand! he replaced it, just to see if it would be all right. it was the simplest thing in the world, you could not tell that it had been touched. so he took it out again, laid it aside carefully, and considered. he had no rope, but there was a leather belt, which he buckled round one of the other bars, dropping the end outside. perhaps that would give rather a slight grip, so he also got out a woollen scarf, such as is sometimes called a "comforter," which he possessed, and fastened that to the bar also. with that there could be no difficulty in getting in again. should he give penryhn or any other fellow a chance of accompanying him? well, on the whole, no. it was impossible that it should be discovered, but still, apparent impossibilities do happen sometimes. suppose one of the masters had a fancy for a moonlight skate! he did not mind risking his own skin, when the risk was so slight, but to get another fellow into a row was an awful idea. besides, two would make more noise getting out and in than one, and the other might laugh, or call out, or play the fool in some way or another. and as for being alone in the expedition, buller rather liked that than otherwise. he was rather given to going his own way, and carrying out his own ideas unhampered by other people's suggestions. so he quickly determined to keep his counsel and disturb no one. he had blown his candle out before first trying the bar, and had been working by the bright moonlight. then he fastened his skates round his neck, so that they should neither impede his movements, nor clatter, and put one leg out of window, then the other, turned round, let himself down by the hands, and dropped into the lane. he looked up to see that the scarf was hanging all right; it was within easy reach of both hands; he gave it a pull to try it, and being satisfied, got over into the field, and started at a jog-trot for the gravel-pits. it was glorious; utter stillness--the clear sheet of ice flooded with the moonbeams, a romantic sense of solitude, and a touch of triumphant feeling in having got the best of the world, and utilising such a magnificent time, while others were wasting it in bed. he put his skates on and began. whether the exhilaration of stealing a march upon everybody, or the impossibility of running up against anyone, or the confidence inspired by solitude, and the absolute freedom from being laughed at if he fell, were the cause, he had never gone like this before. striking out firmly from the start, he went round the sheet of ice in splendid curves, the outside edge coming naturally to him now. a long sweep on the right foot, a long sweep on the left, round and round, with arms folded or clasped behind him. not a trip, not a stumble, not a momentary struggle to retain the balance. it was splendid! then at last he began with the circles which he was so anxious to perfect himself in. round he went on his right, in smaller compass than he had ever accomplished one yet, with plenty of impetus to bring him round at the end. then round on the left, quite easily, without an effort. again with the right, and so on, a capital eight. it was like magic, as if he had acquired the art in an instant. or was he in bed and dreaming that he was skating? it really seemed like it. if it were so, he did not care how long it was before he was roused. but no, he was wide awake, and the phenomenon was simply the result of confidence, following on good and persevering practice in the right direction. breaking away from his eight, he swung round and round the pond again as fast as he could go. then he tried a three; the first half on the outside edge, forwards was easy enough, and he found no difficulty in turning on the toe, but he could not complete the tail on the inside edge backwards without staggering and wobbling. he had a good two hours of it, and then the moon disappeared behind a bank of clouds and he prepared to go home. skating in the dark would be poor fun, and besides it was very late, so he made for the bank, took his skates off, and jogged back. mr rabbits, one of the masters, who was great at chemistry, and could tell you to a grain how much poison you swallowed in that water for which the gradus sarcastically gives _pura_ as a standing epithet, had been asked by the vicar of penredding, a village five miles off, to give a lecture in his school-room to the parishioners, one of a series of simple entertainments which were got up to cheer the long evenings in the winter months. the vicar was an old college friend of mr rabbits, who gladly consented, and like a wise man chose the subject which he was best up in, writing a very amusing and instructive but very elementary paper on light, with plenty of illustrations and simple experiments, which kept his audience in a state of wonder and delight the whole evening, and sent them home with plenty to think and talk about afterwards. it was necessary to have a very early and hurried dinner, the lecture beginning at seven, so mr rabbits went back to the vicarage after it was over, to supper, after which there was a chat about the old college boat and so forth, and it was rather late when he started for home. he had refused the offer of a conveyance, considering that the five miles walk on a bright still frosty night would be a luxury, and so he found it, though for the latter part of his journey the moon was obscured. it was not so dark, however, as to prevent his distinguishing objects, and as he passed along the lane by which he entered weston he was sure he saw someone lurking under the wall at the back of dr jolliffe's house. suspecting there was something wrong, he got into the shade under the hedge and crept noiselessly along, taking out of his pocket a piece of magnesium wire which he had made use of in his lecture, and a match-box. presently he saw the figure raise itself from the ground towards a window, and immediately struck a match and ignited the wire, which he held over his head. the whole side of the house was at once as bright as day, and a boy was distinctly seen getting in at the window. "buller!" exclaimed mr rabbits, "what are you doing there?" "please, sir, i am getting in," said poor buller. "so i perceive," said mr rabbits; "but what right have you there?" "it's my own room, please, sir." "well, but what right then had you out of it at this time of night?" "none at all, sir, i am afraid." "then why did you do it?" "i hoped not to be seen, sir." "hum! what have you been doing?" "skating, sir." "i shall report you in the morning." poor tom buller! how crest-fallen he felt as he conscientiously replaced the bar, and screwed it down again. how heavy his heart was as he took his clothes off and got into bed? what a fool he had been, he thought, and yet at the same time how awfully unlucky. wrecked at the moment of entering the port! however, it was done now, and could not be helped; he must stand the racket. he supposed he should get off with a flogging. surely they would not expel him for such a thing as that. of course they would make an awful row about his breaking out at night, but he had not done any harm when he _was_ out. and the doctor was a good- natured chap, he certainly would let him off with a rowing and a flogging. he had never been flogged; did it hurt very much, he wondered? at all events it would soon be over. he had thought for a moment while skating that perhaps it was a dream; how jolly it would be if it could only prove a dream, and he could wake up in the morning and find that the whole business was fancy. what a good job that he had not told penryhn, and got him into a row as well. what a nuisance that old rabbits was to come by just at the wrong moment; five minutes earlier or five minutes later it would have been all right. what thing was that he lighted? what a tremendous flare it made, to be sure. well, it was no use bothering; happen what might he had a jolly good skate, and was firm on the outside edge for ever. now the thaw might come if it liked, and tom, who was a bit of a philosopher, went to sleep. chapter nine. the poachers. buller was not the only weston boy who broke out unlawfully that night. from mr cookson's house as from dr jolliffe's an adventurer stole forth. but saurin's object was not so innocent as buller's, neither was it so unpremeditated. for he nursed felonious designs against lord woodruff's pheasants, and the project had been deliberately planned, and, as we know, the key which was to open the yard door cunningly manufactured, a long time beforehand. edwards, as a result of talking about the expedition, and his friend's glowing anticipation of the fun of it, became quite anxious to join in. but marriner did not think this advisable when saurin put the matter to him. they only had one air-gun, and two were quite enough for a stealthy excursion of this kind. a third could take no part in the proceedings, and would only be an extra chance of attracting observation. as a matter of fact, marriner would rather have been quite alone, as his custom was on these predatory occasions, and it was only his desire to make saurin an accomplice, and so seal his mouth, which induced him to depart from his ordinary custom now. and to tell the truth, when the time actually came, and edwards saw his friend steal along the yard, unlock and open the door at the further end, and close it behind him, he was glad in his heart that he was not going too. not because it was wrong: he had got his ideas so twisted that he thought it an heroic piece of business altogether, and admired saurin for his lawless daring. but he felt conscious of not being cast in the heroic mould himself, and actually shuddered at the thought of gliding about the woods at dead of night, thinking that someone was watching him behind every tree, and might spring out upon him at any moment. especially when he curled himself up in bed, and pulled the blankets snugly round him, did he feel convinced that he was far more comfortable where he was than he would have been in lord woodruff's preserves. saurin had no compunctions of this sort; _he_ did not flinch when the time came; on the contrary, when he found himself out in the fields he felt a keen thrill of enjoyment. there was just enough sense of danger for excitement, not enough for unpleasant nervousness. to be engaged in what was forbidden was always a source of delight to him, and here he was braving the rules of his school and breaking the laws of his country all at once: it was like champagne to him. yet it was the very height of absurdity to risk expulsion, imprisonment, perhaps penal servitude for _nothing_, literally for _nothing_. he had no earthly use for the game when it was stolen, marriner would have it and sell it, but the question of saurin's sharing in the profits had not even been mooted. to do him justice he had not thought of such a thing, the sport was all that tempted him. the field of their operations was not to be near marriner's house, but in a part of the estates a good bit nearer weston, and on the other side of it. marriner had learned that there was to be a poaching expedition on a large scale that night at the other extremity of the preserves, a good three miles off. he knew the men and their method. they used ordinary guns, killed off all they could in a short time, and got away before the keepers could assemble in force, or if they were surprised they showed fight. he never joined in such bold attacks, but when he knew of them took advantage, as he proposed to do on the present occasion, of the keepers being drawn away, to do a little quiet business on his own account in another direction. the place appointed for saurin to meet marriner was a wood-stack reached by a path across the fields, two miles from weston. closing the yard door behind him, but not locking it, he started off at a sharp walk, keeping in the shade whenever he could, though all was so still and noiseless that he seemed almost to be the only being in the world, when he had once got quite out of the sight of houses. but no, a night-hawk swept by him, so close as to make him start, and a stoat met him in the middle of a trodden path across a ploughed field; showing that there were other game depredators besides himself abroad. the way seemed longer than it was in the daytime, but at last he got to the wood-stack, where he saw no one, but presently a figure stole round the corner and joined him: marriner with the air-gun and a sack. "it's all right," he said, "i heard the guns nigh half-an-hour ago. there's never a watcher nor keeper within more nor a couple of miles off, and we have a clear field to ourselves." saurin took the gun, for it was an understood thing beforehand that he was to have all the shooting, which indeed was but fair, and marriner, carrying the sack, led the way to a coppice hard by, indeed the wood forming the stack had been cut out of it. he crept on hands and knees through the hedge and glided into the brushwood, saurin following, for some little distance. suddenly he stopped, laid his hand on his companion's arm, and pointed upwards. perched on the branch of a tree, and quite clear against the moonlit sky, was a round ball. "pheasant?" asked saurin. "yes," was the reply. "and there's another roosting there, and another yonder, and another--" "i see them," replied saurin in the same whispered tones. and raising his air-gun he got the roosting bird in a line with the sights, which was as easy to do pretty nearly as in broad day, and pressed the trigger. the black ball came tumbling down with a thump on the ground, and marriner, pouncing upon it, put it in his sack. a second, a third were bagged without stirring from the spot. a few steps farther on another, who had been disturbed by the whip-cracks of the air-gun, had withdrawn his head from under his wing. but he did not take to flight at once, being comfortable where he was and the sounds not very alarming, and while he hesitated he received a violent shock in the middle of his breast, which knocked him off his perch powerless and dying. a little further on another, and then yet another were bagged: it was a well-stocked coppice, and had not been shot yet. lord woodruff was reserving that part for some friends who were coming at christmas, and with the prospects of whose sport i fear that saurin somewhat interfered that night. the sack indeed was pretty heavy by the time they had gone through the wood, and then marriner thought that it would be more prudent to decamp, and they retraced their steps by a path which traversed the coppice. once back at the wood-stack they were to separate, so before they left the coppice marriner put down his now heavy sack, and saurin handed him the air-gun, which he stowed away in his capacious pocket. then they went on, and just as they were on the edge of the wood came suddenly upon a man. "hulloa! young gentleman," exclaimed he to saurin, who was leading, "what are you up to? what has the other got in that sack?" marriner slipped behind the trees. "i have got _you_, at any rate," said the man, seizing saurin by the collar. the latter would not speak lest his voice should be recognised afterwards, but he struggled all he knew. the man soon overpowered him; but marriner came to the rescue. throwing down the sack of pheasants, he had taken from his pocket an implement of whalebone with a heavy knob of lead at the end, and coming behind the man, both whose hands were holding on to saurin, he struck him with it on the head as hard as he could. the keeper's grasp relaxed, he fell heavily to the ground, and saurin was free. the man lay on his back with his head on the path, and the moonbeams fell on his face. "simon bradley," muttered marriner. "to be sure he lives this way, and was going home after the alarm on t'other side." saurin was seized with a violent shivering from head to foot. "he isn't, i mean to say you have not--eh?" he said. "dunno, and don't much care, curse him!" replied marriner. "it would be laid to t'other chaps if he is." "but we ought to do something; get him some help," urged saurin, who had not become sufficiently hardened to like such devil's work as this. "if he is living he will be frozen to death lying out such a night as this." "oh, he will be all right!" said marriner. "he's only stunned a bit. he will come to in ten minutes and get up and walk home." "but can't we leave word at his house, and then be off?" "that would be a fool's trick, that would. why, it would bring suspicion on us, and if he is a gone coon--it's impossible, you know, almost--but _if_ he is, we should get scragged for it. come, i didn't think you was so chicken-hearted, or i wouldn't have brought you out. let's get away home at once while we can, and don't go a putting your neck in a halter for nowt." fear overcame compunction, and saurin turned and fled. how he got home he did not know, but he seemed to be at the back-door of the yard immediately almost. then he steadied himself, went in, locked the door, and stole up to his room and to bed. _he_ did not sleep that night. the face of the gamekeeper lying there in the moonlight haunted him. he wished, like buller, but oh, much more fervently, that the whole business might turn out to have been a nightmare. but the morning dawned cold and grey, and he got up and dressed himself and went in to school, and it was all real. he could not fix his attention; his mind would wander to that coppice. had the gamekeeper come to, tried to struggle up, fainted, fallen back, perished for want of a little assistance? or had he got up, not much the worse, and had he seen his face clearly, and, recognising that it was a weston boy, would he come to the school and ask to go round and pick him out? "saurin!" it was only the voice of the master calling on him to go on with the construing, but he had so entirely forgotten where he was that he started and dropped his book, which caused a titter, for saurin was not habitually either of a meditative or a nervous turn. he felt that he really must pull himself together or he would excite suspicion. "i beg your pardon, sir," he said; "my hands are numb, and i dropped the book. where's the place?" he added _sotto voce_ to his neighbour. "i think your attention was numb," said the master. saurin had the chorus in the play of euripides, which was undergoing mutilation at his fingers' ends, so he went on translating till he heard, "that will do. maxwell!" and then he relapsed into his private meditations. after all, he had not struck the blow, marriner's trying to drag him into a share of the responsibility was all nonsense. they might say he ought to have given the alarm, or gone for a doctor, but nothing more. and yet he fancied he had heard somewhere that to be one of a party engaged in an unlawful act which resulted in anyone being killed was complicity or something, which included all in the crime. one thing was clear, he must keep his counsel, and not let edwards or anyone know anything about it, because they might be questioned; and he must guard against showing that he was at all anxious. and why should he be? a man did not die for one knock on the head; he was probably all right again. and he could not have seen his face so as to recognise him; it was quite in the shade where they had been struggling. it was all nonsense his worrying himself; and yet he could not help listening, expecting a messenger to come with some alarming intelligence, he could not define what. after school edwards came up to him and drew him aside confidentially, full of eagerness and curiosity. "well," he said, "was it good fun? how did it all go off?" "it was a regular sell," replied saurin, smothering his impatience at being questioned, and forcing himself to take the tone he was accustomed to assume towards his chum in confidential communications. "how! did you not meet marriner?" "oh, yes! i met him all right; but it was no good. there were other poachers out last night, and we heard their guns, so of course we could not attempt anything, because the gamekeepers would all have been on the look-out. you were well out of it, not coming, for it was precious cold work waiting about, and no fun after all." "what a bore! but you will have better luck next time, perhaps." "i hope so, if i go; but the fact is, i have lost confidence in marriner rather. he ought to have found out that those other fellows were going out last night, don't you see? at least he always brags that he knows their movements. and it will be some time before the moon serves again; and then the christmas holidays will be coming on; and by next term the pheasants will all have been shot off. the chance has been missed." "well, at all events, you have got all right and not been discovered. do you know, when one comes to think about it, it was an awful risk," said edwards. "of course it was," replied saurin; "that made all the fun of it. rather idiotic, though, too, since one hopes to preserve game one's self some day. it would be a better lark to go out to catch poachers than to go out poaching." "a great deal, i should say. not but what that is risky work too. those fellows do not flinch from murder when they are interrupted." "what makes you say that?" cried saurin quickly, turning and catching him sharply by the arm. "i don't know!" replied edwards, astonished at the effect of his words. "i have read about fights between gamekeepers and poachers in books, and heard of them, and that; haven't you? how queer you look! is there anything the matter?" "not a bit of it," said saurin, regretting his imprudence; "only, i was frozen hanging about last night, and when i got back i could not sleep for cold feet, so i am a bit tired. and i think i have caught cold too. and you know," he added, laughing, "having enlisted in the ranks of the poachers last night, at least in intention, i feel bound to resist any attacks on their humanity. "but, as a matter of fact, i believe that they do show fight for their spoil and their liberty when they find themselves surprised. shots are exchanged and mischief happens sometimes. but my poor little air-gun would not be a very formidable weapon in a row, i expect. its peppercorn bullets are good for a rabbit or pheasant, but would hardly disable a man. the gamekeeper with his double-barrel would have a good deal the best of it. but, i say, my cold has not taken away my appetite. let us get in to breakfast, and hang poaching." chapter ten. the fates are down upon buller. tom buller had finished his breakfast, and was ruefully preparing his lesson in his room, when he heard his name being called up the staircase. "buller! i say, buller!" "well, what's the row?" he asked, opening his door with a sinking heart. the voice of the caller sounded singularly harsh and discordant, he thought. "oh, buller! the doctor wants to see you in his study." "all right!" replied buller; "i will come at once." but though his mouth said "all right," his mind meant "all wrong." he had entertained the absurd hope, though he hardly admitted the fact to himself, that mr rabbits, with whom he was rather a favourite, would not report him, forgetting, or not realising, the great responsibility which mr rabbits would incur by failing to do so. well, he would know the worst soon now at any rate, that was one consolation, for there is nothing so bad as suspense, as the man said who was going to be hanged. dr jolliffe's study was in a retired part of the house, not often visited by the boys. here the uproar of their voices, and their noisy tread as they rushed up and down the uncarpeted staircases, could not be heard. here thick curtains hung before the doors, which were of some beautifully grained wood (or painted to look like it), and gilded round the panels. thick carpets lined the passages, rich paper covered the walls; all the surroundings were in violent contrast to the outer house given up to the pupils, and gained an exaggerated appearance of luxury in consequence. buller, with his heart somewhere about his boots, tapped at the awful door. "come in!" was uttered in the dreamy tones of one whose mind was absorbed in some occupation, and who answered instinctively, without disturbance of his thoughts. buller entered and closed the door behind him. the doctor, who was writing, and referring every now and then to certain long slips of printed paper which were lying on the table at his side, did not speak or look up, but merely raised his hand to intimate that he must not be disturbed for a moment. so buller looked round the room; and noted things as one does so vividly whenever one is in a funk in a strange place; in a dentist's waiting-room, say. the apartment was wonderfully comfortable. the book-cases which surrounded it were handsome, solid, with nice little fringes of stamped leather to every shelf. the books were neatly arranged, and splendidly bound, many of them in russia leather, as the odour of the room testified. between the book-cases, the wall-paper was dark crimson, and there were a few really good oil-paintings. the fireplace was of white marble, handsomely carved, with bacchantes, and silenus on his donkey--not very appropriate guardians of a sea-coal fire. on the mantel-piece was a massive bronze clock, with a figure of prometheus chained to a rock on the top, and the vulture digging into his ribs. and buller, as he noticed this, remembered, with the clearness afforded by funk spoken of above, that an uncle of his, who was an ardent homeopathist, had an explanation of his own of the old promethean myth. he maintained that prometheus typified the universal allopathic patient, and that the vulture for ever gnawing his liver was calomel. the clock was flanked on each side by a grotesque figure, also in bronze. two medieval bullies had drawn their swords, and were preparing for a duel, which it was apparent that neither half liked. a very beautiful marble group, half life-size, stood in one corner, and gave an air of brightness to the whole room. and on a bracket, under a glass case, there was a common pewter quart pot, which the doctor would not have exchanged for a vase of gold. for it was a trophy of his prowess on the river in old college days, and bore the names of good friends, now dead, side by side with his own. the table at which the doctor sat was large, with drawers on each side for papers, and a space in the middle for his legs, and was covered with documents collected under paper-weights. it took tom buller just two minutes to note all these objects, and then the doctor looked up with an expression of vacancy which vanished when he saw who stood before him. he tossed his quill-pen down, took off his spectacles, and said: "well, buller, what have you got to say for yourself?" tom hung his head, fiddled with a button of his jacket, and murmured something to the effect that he did not know. "it is a very serious offence of yours that has been reported to me, nothing less than breaking out of the house, out of _my_ house, in the dead of night. a most enormous and unparalleled proceeding. why, in the whole course of my experience i never knew of a boy having the audacity--at least it is extremely rare," said the doctor, somewhat abruptly breaking the thread of his sentence. for he suddenly remembered, conscientious man, that when an eton boy himself he had committed a similar offence for the purpose of visiting the windsor theatre. "suppose that in consequence of your example the custom spread, and the boys of weston took to escaping from their rooms at night and careering about the country like--" he was going to say like rabbits, but the name of the master who had detected the offender occurred to him, and dreading the suspicion of making a joke he changed it to--"jackals, howling jackals." "have you been in the habit of these evasions?" "oh, no, sir!" cried tom, encouraged by something in the doctor's tones to speak out. "i never thought of such a thing till last night, just as i was going to bed. but the moon was so bright, and the bar was so loose, and the ice bears such a short time, and i take so much longer than others to learn anything, and i was so anxious to get perfect on the outside edge, that i gave way to the temptation. it was very wrong, and i am very sorry, and will take care nothing of the sort ever happens again." "so will i," said the doctor drily. "these bars shall be looked to. and who went with you?" "no one, sir, no one else knew of it. i just took my skates and went. i did not see how wrong it was, sir, then, as i do now. i am slow, sir, and can only think of one thing at a time." "and the outside edge engrossed all your faculties, i suppose." "yes, sir." dr jolliffe would have given something to let him off, but felt that he could not; to do so would be such a severe blow to discipline. so he set his features into the sternest expression he could assume, and said, "come into my class-room after eleven-o'clock school." "yes, sir," replied buller, retiring with a feeling of relief; he was to get off with a flogging after all, and he did not imagine that castigation at the hands of the doctor would be particularly severe. for the head-master's class-room contained a cupboard, rarely opened, and in that cupboard there were rods, never used at weston for educational purposes. for if a boy did not prepare his lessons properly it was assumed that they were too difficult for him, and he was sent down into a lower form. if he still failed to meet the school requirements, his parents were requested to remove him, and he left, without a stain on his character, as the magistrates say, but he was written down an ass. such a termination to the weston career was dreaded infinitely more than any amount of corporal punishment or impositions, and the prospect of being degraded from his class caused the idlest boy to set to work, so that such disgraces were not common. the birch, then, was had recourse to simply for the maintenance of discipline, all forms of imprisonment being considered injurious to the health. and an invitation to the doctor's class-room after school meant a short period, quite long enough, however, of acute physical sensation, which was not of a pleasurable character. but everything is comparative in this world, and tom buller, who had feared that expulsion might be the penalty exacted for his offence, or at any rate that his friends at home would be written to, and a great fuss made, was quite in high spirits at the thought of getting the business over so quickly and easily. he found a group of friends waiting for him to come out of the doctor's study, curious to know what he had been wanted for, tom not being the sort of fellow, they thought, to get into a serious scrape; and when he told them that he had got out of his window the night before to go skating, that mr rabbits had caught him as he was getting in again by lighting up some chemical dodge which illuminated the whole place, and that he was to be flogged after eleven-o'clock school, they were filled with admiration and astonishment. what a brilliant idea! what courage and coolness in the execution! what awfully bad luck that old rabbits had come by just at the wrong moment! they took his impending punishment even more cheerfully than he did himself, as our friends generally do, and promised to go in a body and see the operation. one, indeed, simmonds, lamented over his sad fate, and sang by way of a dirge-- "`here a sheer hulk lies poor tom bowling, the darling of our crew,'" in a fine tenor voice for which he was celebrated. and this being taken as an allusion to the branch of cricket, in which buller had learned to become a proficient, was considered a joke, and from that time forth the object of it was known as tom bowling. eleven o'clock came, and they all went into school, and buller did his best, to fix his attention on what he was about, instead of thinking of what was coming afterwards. dr jolliffe's class was select, consisting of a dozen of the most proficient scholars, crawley and smith being the only two of those mentioned in this story who belonged to it. he had hardly taken his chair ten minutes before a servant came in with a card and a note, stating that a gentleman was waiting outside, and that his business was very pressing. the doctor glanced at the card, which was lord woodruff's, and then tore open the note, which ran thus: "dear dr jolliffe, can i speak to you a moment. i would not, you may be sure, disturb you during school hours if there were not urgent reason for the interruption." "where is lord woodruff?" he asked, rising from his seat. "waiting in the cloister at the foot of the stair, sir." and there indeed he found him, an excitable little man, walking up and down in a fume. "dr jolliffe," he cried, directly he saw him, "were any of your boys out last night? tut, tut, how should you know! look here. there were poachers in my woods last night, and the keepers, hearing the firing, of course went to stop, and if possible arrest them. the rascals decamped, however, before they could reach the place, and the keepers dispersed to go to their several homes. one of them, simon bradley, had some distance to walk, his cottage being two miles and more from the place. as he passed through a coppice on his way he came upon a boy and a figure following with a sack, whether man or boy he could not say, as it was in deep shadow. he collared the boy, who was big and strong, and while he was struggling with him he was struck from behind with a life- preserver or some such instrument, which felled him to the ground, bleeding and senseless. after some time he came to, and managed to crawl home, and his wife sent off to tell me, and i despatched a man on horseback to fetch a surgeon. and bradley is doing pretty well; there is no immediate fear for his life. of course he has recovered his wits, or i could not give you these details, and he is certain that the fellow he was struggling with was a weston boy." "well, you see, lord woodruff," said the doctor, "unless the poor fellow knew the boy, he could hardly be sure upon that point, could he?" "pretty nearly, i think, dr jolliffe. your boys wear a distinctive cap of dark flannel?" "yes; but when they get shabby they are thrown aside, and many of the village youths round about get hold of them and wear them." "aye," said lord woodruff, "but bradley is confident that this was a young gentleman; he wore a round jacket, with a white collar, and stiff white cuffs with studs in them, for he felt them when he tried to grasp his wrists. no young rustic would be dressed in that fashion, and, taken together with the cap, i fear that it must have been one of your boys." "it looks suspicious, certainly," said the doctor, somewhat perplexed. "i am very sorry indeed to give you trouble, and to risk bringing any discredit on the school," said lord woodruff. "but you see one of my men has been seriously injured, and that in my service, and if we could find this boy, his evidence would enable us to trace the cowardly ruffian who struck the blow." "then you would want to--to prosecute him, in short." "in confidence, doctor, i should be glad not to do so if i could help it, and if he would give his evidence freely it might be avoided. but it may be necessary to frighten him, if we can find him, that is. and, doctor, allow me to say that if this were merely a boyish escapade, a raid upon my pheasants, i should be content to leave the matter in your hands, considering that a sound flogging would meet the case. but my man being dangerously hurt alters the whole business. i owe it to him, and to all others in my employ, not to leave a stone unturned to discover the perpetrator of the outrage, and i call upon you, dr jolliffe, to assist me." the doctor bowed. "can your lordship suggest anything you would like done towards the elucidation of this mystery?" he said. "in spite of the jacket and cuffs, i find it difficult to suppose that any weston boy is in league with poachers. but you may rely on my doing all in my power to aid you in any investigation you may think desirable." "i expected as much, and thank you," replied lord woodruff. "it occurred to me, then, that it might be well, as a preliminary measure, to collect the boys together in one room and lay the case before them, promising impunity to the offender, if present, on condition of his turning queen's evidence." "it shall be done at once," said the doctor. "will you speak to them, or shall i?" "it does not much matter," replied lord woodruff. "perhaps the pledge would come better from me, the natural prosecutor." "very good." the doctor returned to his class-room, not too soon. one of the young scamps had taken his chair, and was delivering a burlesque lecture, near enough to the head-master's style to excite irreverent laughter. they listened for his step upon the stair, however, and when he entered the room they might have been taken for a synod discussing a revised edition by the extreme gravity of their demeanour. "we must interrupt our studies for a short time, i am sorry to say," observed dr jolliffe. "i wish you to assemble at once, but without noise, in the schools. and, probyn, run round to the other class-rooms, and tell the masters, with my compliments, that i wish their classes also to go there at once, and arrange themselves in their proper places, as on examination days." the "schools" was a large room which held all weston; but the college was liberal in the matter of accommodation, and only three classes were habitually held in it, that so the hubbub of voices might not be inconvenient. for some persons are so constituted that when you seek to instruct them in greek, they take an intense interest in mathematics, if treated upon within their hearing, and _vice versa_. but every class had its appointed place in the schools, all the same, and in a few minutes after the summons had gone forth, the boys, not quite broken- hearted at having to shut up their books, were reassembled in the large room, wondering what on earth had happened to cause such an unparalleled infraction of the daily routine. one sanguine youth suggested that they were to have an extra half-holiday in consequence of the fine condition of the ice, and he had many converts to his opinion; but there were many other theories. saurin alone formed a correct guess at the real matter in hand, conscience prompting him. no sooner were all settled in their places than the head-master came in accompanied by lord woodruff, who was known to most present by sight, and curiosity became almost painful. "it is he who has begged us the half-holiday," whispered the prophet of good to his neighbour. "shall we give him a cheer?" "better wait to make certain first," replied his more prudent auditor. next the roll was called, and when all had answered to their names dr jolliffe announced that their visitor had something serious to say to them; and then lord woodruff got up. "no doubt some of your fathers are preservers of game for sporting purposes," he said, "and you all know what it means. i preserve game in this neighbourhood; and last night one of my keepers was going home through a wood where there are a good many pheasants, for it has not been disturbed this year, when he met two persons. they may not have been poachers, but poaching was certainly going on last night, for the guns were heard, and the man naturally concluded that they were trespassing in pursuit of game, for why else should they be there at that hour of the night. and so, as was clearly his duty, he endeavoured to secure one of them. but just as he had succeeded in doing so, he was struck down from behind with some weapon which has inflicted serious injuries upon him. he has recovered his senses, and laid an information that the person he seized was a weston boy." there was a murmur and a movement throughout the assembly at this sensational announcement. saurin, who felt that he was very pale, muttered, "absurd!" and strove to assume a look of incredulous amusement. "now, boys, listen to me. i take a great interest in weston college, and should be sorry to see any disgrace brought upon it. and indeed it would be very painful to me that any one of you should have his future prospects blighted on first entering into life, for what i am willing to look upon as a thoughtless freak. but when the matter is once put into the hands of the police i shall have no further power to shield anyone, and if they trace the boy who was in that wood last night, which, mind you, they will probably do, safe as he may think himself, he will have to stand his trial in a court of justice. but now, i will give him a fair chance. if he will stand forward and confess that he was present on the occasion i allude to, and will say who the ruffian was that struck the blow, for of complicity in such an act i do not for a moment suspect him, i promise that he shall not be himself proceeded against in any way." there was a pause of a full minute, during which there was dead silence; no one moved. "what!" continued lord woodruff; "were you all in your beds at eleven o'clock last night? was there no one out of college unbeknown to the authorities?" he looked slowly round as he spoke, and it seemed to buller that his eyes rested upon him. though he knew nothing of this poaching business, he was certainly out, and perhaps dr jolliffe had told lord woodruff so, and this was a trap to see if he would own to it, and if he did not, they might suspect him of the other thing. he half rose, and sat down again, hesitating. "ah!" said lord woodruff, catching sight of the movement; "what is it, my lad? speak up, don't be afraid." "i was certainly out of the college last night," said buller, getting on to his feet, "but i was not near any wood, and i did not meet any man, or see or hear any struggling or fighting." "it has nothing to do with this case, my lord," interposed the doctor. "this boy went late to the gravel-pits to skate, and was seen by one of the masters. it was a breach of the regulations, for which he will be punished, but nothing more serious." "oh! if he was seen skating by one of the masters that is enough. might i speak to the gentleman?" "certainly." and mr rabbits was called forward and introduced. "oh! mr rabbits, you actually saw this boy skating last night, did you?" "no, not exactly. he was getting in again at his window when i surprised him?" "may i ask at what time?" "about half-past twelve." "and how, if you did not see him, do you know that he was out skating?" "he said so," replied mr rabbits innocently. "and his word is the only evidence you have that he was not elsewhere?" mr rabbits was obliged to confess that it was. "buller! come here," cried the doctor. "now, did anyone see you at the gravel-pits, or going there, or coming back?" "no, sir." "think well, because you may be suspected of having gone in an exactly opposite direction. if any friend was with you i am certain that he would be glad to give himself up to get you out of a really serious scrape. shall i put it to the boys, my lord?" "it is of no use, sir," said buller. "i was quite alone, just as i told you, and no one knew i was out. i did not think of it myself till a few minutes before, when i found the bar loose. and i did not open my door even. and i saw no one, going or returning, till mr rabbits lit his chemical as i was getting in at the window." "it is very painful to--ah--to seem to doubt your word, in short," said lord woodruff with hesitation, for he was a gentleman, and tom's manner struck him as remarkably open and straightforward. "but you know it is impossible to accept anyone's unsupported evidence in his own favour, and i really wish that you could produce some one to corroborate your rather unlikely story. assuming for a moment that you were in the company of poachers for a bit of fun last night, and that you saw something of this affray, and being caught as you got home, were frightened into accounting for your being out at so late an hour by this story of going skating in the moonlight; i say, assuming all this, i appeal to you to save yourself from serious consequences, and to forward the ends of justice by telling anything you know which may put us on the traces of the fellow who has injured my poor gamekeeper. a fellow who would come behind and strike a cowardly blow like that, trying to murder or maim a man who was simply doing his duty, does not deserve that you should shield him. come, will you not denounce him?" "but how can i tell about things of which i have no knowledge whatever?" cried buller, who was getting vexed as well as bewildered. "what i have said is the exact truth, and if it does not suit you i cannot help it. believe me or not, as you like, there is no good in my going on repeating my words." "i cannot accept the responsibility of taking your bare word in such a matter," said lord woodruff, more stiffly, for tom's tone had offended him; "a magistrate may do so. of course i shall not adjudicate in my own case," he added, turning to dr jolliffe. "mr elliot is the next nearest magistrate, and i shall apply for a warrant against this youth to him." tom buller experienced a rather sudden change of sensation in a short period. a quarter of an hour ago he felt like a culprit, now his heart swelled with the indignation of a hero and a martyr. to be accused of poaching, and asked to betray a supposed accomplice in what might prove a murder, just because he happened to be out after ten one night, was rather too strong, and tom's back was up. "you had better go to your room, buller, and wait there till you hear further," said dr jolliffe, not unkindly. to tell the truth the doctor was a good deal ruffled by this accusation, brought, as it seemed to him, on very insufficient grounds, against some member of the school. but he was determined to be as cool and quiet about it as possible, and not to give any one a chance of saying that he had obstructed the ends of justice. for if he took the highly indignant line, and it were proved after all that one of his boys was involved in the scrape, how foolish he would look! "and you really mean to have this boy up before mr elliot on a charge of poaching?" he asked. "what else can i do?" said lord woodruff. "his own obstinacy in refusing to tell what he knows is to blame." "but supposing that he really knows nothing, how can he tell it? i know the boy well, and he is remarkably truthful and straightforward. intensely interested, too, in the studies and sports of his school, and the very last to seek low company or get into a scrape of this kind." lord woodruff smiled and shook his head. chapter eleven. circumstantial evidence. have you ever stood near a bee-hive when something unusual was going on inside? when a swarm was meditated, or you had cut off the communication with a super which you meant to take? just such a buzz and murmur as then arises might have been heard in weston court-yard when the boys poured out from the schools, only increased so much in volume as the human vocal organs are more powerful than the apiarian. and surely not without cause, for the scene which had just been enacted, without any rehearsal, for their benefit was simply astounding. "fancy tom buller the chief of a gang of poachers!" cried saurin. "by jove, i did not think it was in him, and fairly confess that i have not done him justice. he is a dark horse and no mistake." "why, you don't for a moment suppose that there is anything in it, do you?" asked robarts, who heard him. "i don't know, i'm sure," replied saurin; "perhaps not. awful liars those keeper chaps, no doubt. we shall know all about it in time, i suppose." "it would not be bad fun if one got a fair price for the game one took," said griffiths. "but the risk and difficulty of selling it would be so great that one would be certain to be robbed." "what an ass tom bowling was to give himself up; it would have been all right if he had sat still." "i don't know that. he had already been caught breaking out of college, don't you see, and they would have been certain to put this and that together." "who would?" "old jolliffe." "not a bit of it. i twigged his face when buller stood up, and he looked as vexed as possible. _he'd_ never have told." "i am not sure of that, and i think buller was right not to risk it." "fussy old chap, lord woodruff!" "not a bad sort altogether, i believe, if you rub him the right way." "no more am i; give me everything i want, and never thwart me, and i am the easiest fellow to live with in the world." that is a sample of the way the matter was discussed and commented upon. but the most astonished of the whole school, and the only one who could not trust himself to make any remark at all in public, was edwards. for the second time that day he had to watch his opportunity for a private conference with saurin, and when he found it he opened on him eagerly. "what a chap you are! and so you had a regular fight with keepers, and nearly did for one; and all you said this morning was that the whole thing was a failure and a sell. and even when we talked about gamekeepers catching poachers, and the poachers resisting, you kept it all dark." "why, it was a serious thing to talk about, you see," said saurin. "well, i think you might have trusted me at all events," replied edwards somewhat reproachfully. "trust you! my dear fellow i would trust you with my life," said saurin. "but i thought it better to keep marriner's attack on this keeper secret for your sake. there was sure to be a row, and in case of the inquiry coming in this direction, and your being questioned, it would be so much jollier for you to be able to say that you knew nothing about it. whereas, if i had entered into all the details, it would have bothered you. for, to tell the truth, i feared the man was killed; now he is not hurt much, i don't care." "they would not have got anything out of me," said edwards. "perhaps not," replied saurin. "but those lawyers are awful fellows when they get you into the witness-box, and make you say pretty nearly what they like. i had much rather have nothing to tell them myself if i were to be put in such a position, and i thought you would feel the same." "you are right, so i do," said edwards. "what a fellow you are, saurin, you think of everything!" "it is different, now that they have got hold of that ass, buller; what a joke it all is, isn't it?" "yes," replied edwards, in a tone of hesitation, however, as if he did not quite see the humour of it. "rather rough upon buller, though, don't you think?" "not a bit of it; he has got off his flogging." "but suppose he comes in for something worse?" "how should he? they cannot prove that he was in the coppice when he was about three miles in the opposite direction, you know. now, if i were once suspected, they would find out that i constantly went to slam's, who finds agents to sell the game for all the poachers round, and some of the keepers too, if the truth were known, and that i had been seen in marriner's company; who is considered to make a regular income out of lord woodruff's pheasants, and they would have some grounds to go upon. but buller is all right." but though he spoke like this to quiet edwards, saurin did not care whether buller got into serious trouble or not. he was a friend of crawley's, had seconded him in the fight, and given him advice which contributed as much as anything else to saurin's defeat. if he were expelled and sent to prison it would not break his (saurin's) heart. the only fear was that if edwards blabbed--and he was so weak that he could not be absolutely trusted--fellows would think it horribly mean to let buller be punished unjustly, for what he himself had done. and on this account, and this account only, he hoped that buller would get off. mr elliot, the magistrate, lived at penredding, the village where mr rabbits had gone to lecture, and thither tom buller was driven in a close fly, the doctor accompanying him. lord woodruff, who had come to weston on horseback, rode over separately. mr elliot was a man of good common sense, though his opinions were not quite so weighty as his person, which declined to rise in one scale when fifteen stone was in the other. he was a just man also, though perhaps he was less dilatory in attending to the wishes of a member of one of the great county families than he might be in the case of a mere nobody. if a rich man and a poor one had a dispute, he considered that the presumption was in favour of the former, but he did not allow this prejudice to influence him one iota in the teeth of direct evidence. just after the fly had left weston some snow flakes began to fall. "ah!" thought tom, "it may snow as hard as it pleases now. i have had a good turn at any rate. i was not able to do the outside edge when the frost set in, and now i can cut an eight. i wish, though, i could keep my balance in the second curl of those threes. i must practise going backwards, and stick to that next time i have a chance." dr jolliffe, who saw that he was absorbed in reflection, thought that he was dwelling upon the serious nature of the position, in which he found himself, and would have been amused if he could have read the real subject of his meditations. but he could not do that, so he read the proof-sheets of his new treatise on the digamma. the snow fell thicker, and by the time they reached penredding the country was covered with a white sheet. mr elliot, who had been warned of their coming, was ready to receive them, and lord woodruff came forward with an inspector of rural police, and told his story, which was written down by a clerk and read over. then the whole party set out on their travels again and drove to the cottage of the wounded gamekeeper, where they were received by a young woman, who had been crying her eyes red, and to the folds of whose dress two little children clung, hiding their faces therein, but stealing shy glances now and then at the quality, and the awful representative of the law, who had come to visit them. "the doctor has told us that it would do your husband no harm to say before me what he has already told lord woodruff," said mr elliot to her. "i was rejoiced to hear that he is doing so well. it was a most shameful, brutal, and cowardly attack, and we are most anxious that the offender should be brought to justice." "yes, sir," said the woman. "doctor thinks it may quiet him like to have his dispositions took, and then he may go to sleep." "exactly. will you be so kind as to tell him that we are here?" she pushed the children into an inner room, ran up-stairs, and presently reappeared, asking them to walk up. bradley was in bed, propped with pillows. a handkerchief was tied round his head, and his face was pale from loss of blood. either from that cause, or on account of the shock to the nervous system, he was also very weak. "how do you feel now, bradley?" asked lord woodruff gently, going to the bed-head. "rayther queer as yet, my lord," was the reply. "no doubt. but you have a good hard head, and there is nothing serious the matter, the doctor says. but it may be some days before it will be prudent for you to go out, so, as we want to get on the traces of the fellow who struck you at once, mr elliot has kindly come over to take your deposition here, instead of waiting till you were fit to go to penredding." when tom buller saw the woman and children, and then afterwards their strong bread-earner reduced to such a condition, he indeed felt heartily glad that there was no truth in the accusation against him. to have had any part in bringing about such a scene of family distress would have been too much for him. the wounded man told his story clearly enough, and then tom buller was told to stand in the light where he could see him clearly. "noa," said the wounded man, "i could not say who it wor. there was a bright moon, but the boy was in the shadow, and i got no clear look at his face; but he wor one of the weston young gentlemen, i am sartin of that. a bit bigger than him, i should say, but i couldn't say for sure. he wor a strong un, i know that." when all this was written down, back they went to penredding again, slower now, for the snow was getting deep, and assembled once more in mr elliot's study, where buller was warned against criminating himself, and then allowed to speak. he had been out that night, but in a contrary direction, skating; no one had seen him, and he had no witnesses. "there is hardly any case," said mr elliot. "the boy owns that he was out the night of the assault, and the gamekeeper swears he was struggling with a boy, whom he thinks was rather bigger. but there are no marks of any struggle having taken place upon the lad. there may be reason for suspicion, but nothing more." "exactly; and i do not ask for a committal, but only for a remand, to give the police an opportunity of collecting further evidence," said lord woodruff. "and i do not oppose the remand," said dr jolliffe. "i am perfectly convinced of the boy's complete innocence; but in his interest i should like the matter to be gone into further, now the accusation has once been made." "very good; this day week, then. and i will take your bail for his appearance, dr jolliffe." and it being so arranged, everybody went home through the snow; and the police took up a wrong scent altogether, that, namely, of the gang that had been taking game in another part of the preserves earlier in the night, and to which it was somewhat naturally supposed the other two belonged. and one of them was traced, and a reward, together with impunity, was offered to him if he would turn queen's evidence, and say who had struck down the keeper. but the man, of course, could tell nothing about it. as for tom buller, he went back to his lessons as usual, and was a hero. it was something novel to have a fellow out of prison on bail at weston, and the boys racked their brains for some evidence in his favour. his flogging was put off _sine die_, for the doctor felt it unjust to deal with his case scholastically while the question of his punishment by the laws of the country was still pending. the only boy who thought of anything practical was smith, "old algebra," as they called him. he went up privately to mr rabbits one day and said, "i beg your pardon, sir, but might i speak to you for a moment?" "certainly, smith," said mr rabbits; "what is it?" "when you saw buller getting in at the window by the light of your magnesium wire, did you notice his skates?" "bless me!" cried mr rabbits; "now you mention it, i think--nay, i am sure i did. they were hanging round his neck. to be sure; why, that tends to corroborate his assertion that he went skating." "will it not be enough to clear him, sir?" "well, not quite, i fear. you see, they may say that he might have started to go skating, and met with this poacher, and gone off with him out of curiosity. but still it is worth something, and i shall make a point of appearing before the magistrate and giving evidence on the point. it was a very good idea of yours--very." when the snow ceased, the boys took brooms with them to the gravel-pits and cleared a space, which grew larger every time they went to skate on it, some of the hangers-on of the school helping forward the work, for what coppers and sixpences they could pick up. but they were lazy, loafing dogs, and the boys did most of it for themselves. buller did not go to the ice any more, however; though not expressly forbidden, he thought the doctor would not like it; it would look as if he did not take his position seriously enough. it was for the sake of skating that he had broken out at night and got into this scrape, and so now he would deny himself. the week passed, and buller again went over with dr jolliffe to mr elliot's house at penredding, mr rabbits this time accompanying him. the frost still held, and the boys went skating. i have said that there was no recognised system of fagging at weston; yet, when a fellow in the head-master's class told a boy in the lowest form to do anything, why, it so happened that he generally did it. so, when crawley observed: "there's a beautiful bit of smooth ice under here. i say, you two, penryhn and simmonds, suppose you take those brooms and clear a bit of it." penryhn and simmonds acted on the suggestion. after clearing some twenty square yards of beautiful black ice, simmonds turned up something hard, which he picked up and invoked jupiter. "what is it?" asked penryhn. "findings, keepings," responded simmonds. "let's look," said penryhn. "why, that is buller's knife!" "ah, ah! how do you know that?" "why, it has a punch in it; he lent it me to punch a hole in my strap when we got home from skating one day. it has his name engraved upon it somewhere; there it is, look, on that plate--`t. buller'." "like my luck!" sighed simmonds; "i never found anything yet but what it belonged to some other fellow." "what was that you said, penryhn, about buller lending you his knife?" asked crawley, who was cutting threes on the new bit of ice. "what day was it?" "the day before the snow; yesterday week, that was." "what time?" "in the evening, just before supper, when i was cleaning up my skates for next day. by jove! i see what you are driving at. buller has not been any day since, so he must have dropped it when he came that night." "of course. now, you and simmonds run back to school, find cookson, who is senior master now the doctor's out, ask leave to go over to penredding, and cut there as hard as you can split." the pair were off before he could finish his sentence. the party assembled in mr elliot's library was the same as on the week previously, with the addition of a detective, who had detected nothing, and mr rabbits, who now testified that he saw skates hanging round buller's neck when he was getting in at the window. the question was concerning a further remand, for the magistrate firmly refused to commit the boy for trial on the evidence before them. "i grant that it is suspicious; he was out late at night when he had no business to be, and that same night a weston boy was, almost to a certainty, seized by bradley in the coppice. but if one boy could get out another might, and now it is proved that this one had his skates with him at the time. no jury would convict on such evidence." he did not even like granting a remand, but neither did he like to stand out too strongly against the wishes of lord woodruff. at this juncture voices were heard outside, and presently a constable opened the door and said that two young gentlemen from weston had something to say. "found the real culprit, perhaps," muttered lord woodruff. "bring them in," said the magistrate, and simmonds and penryhn entered, hot, excited, and still panting for breath. "please, sir, we have leave from mr cookson, and i have found tom bowling--i mean buller's knife," said the former, addressing dr jolliffe, who waved his hand towards mr elliot in silence, and frowned. "wait a bit, my lad, do not be flurried," said the magistrate; "stand there. let him be sworn," he added to the clerk. and simmonds took his first legitimate oath. then he told the simple story which we know. and when he had done penryhn kissed the book in his turn and completed the chain of evidence. it was really quite sufficiently clear, that unless yet another boy had got out, and gone skating on the gravel-pits that night, taking buller's knife with him and losing it, that he himself had been there as he said; and therefore that he was not in the coppice, two miles on the other side of weston. lord woodruff himself was convinced, and buller was at once discharged, everybody shaking hands with him. "and, buller," said dr jolliffe as they left the house, "as i hope that the anxiety you have been subjected to by your own unlawful action will prove sufficient punishment, i shall not take any further notice of your breaking out that night. let it be a lesson to you, that you cannot engage in what is unlawful without assuming something which is common to _all_ criminals, and running the risk of being mixed up with them." which was a beautifully mild preachee to take the place of floggee. tom bowling received quite an ovation next day, and did not know what to do with his popularity. he was ready enough to skate now, but a thaw came, and there was no other chance afforded that term. chapter twelve. a holiday invitation. a week before the christmas holidays a boy named gould came up to crawley and said, "i wish you would come and stay with me a week or so this christmas at my father's place in suffolk, nugget towers. the best of the shooting is over, the partridges being very wild by now, and it is not a pheasant country, as there are no woods to speak of. but there are a good many snipe down towards the river, so you had better bring your gun. besides we will have a day's partridge driving, for there are plenty, if you could only get at them. and there is a pack of foxhounds that meets about ten miles off once a week at least, and some harriers close by. i generally go out with the harriers. we can give you a mount; you do not ride above twelve stone i should say, do you?" "no, i should think not, but i have not been weighed lately," replied crawley. "you are very kind, i am sure, but does your father know? perhaps he has made arrangements to fill his house." "oh no! it is all right. my father does not bother his head about such things; he is perpetually going to london, and thinking of business. but my mother and sisters want you to come, and have told me to ask you." "i am much obliged to them, they are very good. and i should like it very much," said crawley, somewhat more hesitatingly than it was his wont to speak. for this invitation was rather a hot coal on his head. gould had courted his acquaintance and he had rather snubbed him, not liking him particularly. he was rich, which mattered to nobody, but he gave himself airs on the strength of it, and that did. there are few things more irritating than to hear anyone perpetually bragging of his money, and if you happen to be poor yourself i do not think that it helps you to sit and listen more patiently. and then gould was an injudicious flatterer; he made the flattered fellow uncomfortable. it is a nice thing, flattery, and causes one to feel good all over, if it is delicately applied with a camel's-hair brush, as it were. but gould laid it on with a trowel. he only courted success; if anyone were down he would be the first to spurn him. now, crawley was undoubtedly the boy held in greatest estimation in the school: captain and treasurer of the cricket and football clubs, good- looking, pleasant in manners, open, generous, clever at lessons, he was a special favourite with masters and boys, and therefore gould burnt his incense before him. for to be crawley's chum was to gain a certain amount of consideration in the school, and gould did not mind shining with a reflected light. he was not like saurin in that respect, whose egotism saved him at least from being a toad-eater. gould was vain enough, but his vanity was of a different kind. but hitherto all his efforts had been in vain, and crawley had rather snubbed him. this had not prevented gould from talking about him, exaggerating his merits, and bragging about his intimacy with him at home. it was always "my friend crawley and i" did this, that, and the other. so that mrs gould wrote to him one day asking whether he would not like his inseparable to come and stay with him during the holidays; and clarissa gould added a postscript to the effect that as he was so clever he would be of great use to them in their private theatricals. crawley was one boy amongst a rather large family of girls; the father was dead, and the mother, though able to live in ordinary comfort, was far from rich. she could not indulge in carriages and horses, or men- servants, for example, and she lived near london for the sake of her daughters' education. so that crawley had never had an opportunity of gaining proficiency in those sports which cannot be indulged in without a good deal of expenditure, and he looked upon hunting and shooting as sublime delights far out of his reach at present, though perhaps he might attain to them by working very hard, some day. his ambition was to enter the army, not that he thought drill any particular fun, or desired the destruction of his fellow-creatures, or ever indulged in dreams of medals, bars, triumphal arches, and the thanks of parliament, but simply because he might get to india, stick pigs, and shoot tigers. shooting! hunting! gould's words made his nerves tingle from head to foot with excitement. and he had thought the fellow who now offered him a taste of such pleasures a muff, a bore, a sycophant, and done his best to avoid him! how wrong it is to have prejudices! "well, then, when will you come?" asked gould. "as soon as it is convenient to have me after christmas," replied crawley. "i must spend the christmas week at home, you know; but then i am free. i should tell you, though, that i cannot shoot or ride a little bit. i have never had any practice, and you will find me an awful duffer." "all right; fellows always say that." "yes, i know they do sometimes, in mock modesty. but in my case it's a fact, and i warn you, that i may not spoil your fun." "my dear fellow," said gould, "you could not do that unless your want of skill were catching. i should be glad if i could put you up to a wrinkle or two." "on those terms, then, i shall be very glad to come." "that is all right." what a happy stroke for gould! he had come to call crawley "my dear fellow" already. the idea of his new friend putting him up to a "wrinkle or two" rather tickled crawley. gould was so poor a performer at cricket, fives, lawn- tennis, football everything which required a ready hand, a quick eye, and firm nerves--that crawley could not imagine his beating him even with the advantage of previous knowledge. yet he had not exaggerated his own deficiencies. bring his gun, indeed! the only gun he had to bring was a single-barrelled muzzle-loader which had belonged to his father. with this he had shot water-rats, sparrows, and, on one occasion when they were very numerous, fieldfares; but not flying--he had never attempted that. no; he had stalked his small bird till he got within thirty yards of the bough where it was perched, and taken a steady pot-shot. as for riding, when a very little boy during his father's lifetime he had had a pony; and two or three times since, when staying at watering-places in the summer, he had mounted a hired hack. so that his ideas of sport were gathered entirely from books and pictures, to which, when they treated of that subject, he was devotedly attached. what happy hours he had spent poring over _jorrock's hunts, mr sponge's sporting tour_, and the works of the _old shekarry_! when he went to a picture-gallery he was listless until he came upon some representation of moving adventure by flood or field, and then the rest of the party could hardly drag him away. he had a little collection of coloured prints in his room at home, gathered at various times, and highly esteemed by him, which conveyed a somewhat exaggerated idea of equine powers. for in one a horse was clearing a stream about the width of the thames at reading, and in another an animal of probably the same breed was flying a solid stone wall quite ten feet high. now he was to have a little taste of these often-dreamed-of joys, and the idea absorbed his thoughts and made him restless at night. to do him justice, he did not think about it on first meeting his mother and sisters when he went home; but on the second day of his return the invitation and all it promised came back to him, and he broached the matter to mrs crawley at breakfast-time. "please, mother, i have had an invitation to spend a week with a school-fellow after christmas." "oh, and who is he?" asked mrs crawley. "a chap named gould; they are awfully rich people--just the sort i ought to know, you know. they live in suffolk at a place called nugget towers." "and what sort of boy is he? because, of course, vincent, we must ask him here in the summer in return." "well, he is always very civil to me, and i don't know any harm of him; but he is not good at games and that, and not much fun to talk to--so i have never been quite so thick with him as he wished. that makes it all the more civil of him. he must have talked about me at home, for his mother sent the invitation." "well, vincent, i am glad you spoke of it at once, for we must make haste to look over your linen, which generally comes home in a terrible state. you had better go to-day to the tailor and get measured for your dress clothes; but you were to have had them for christmas any way, so that will be nothing extra." for crawley, it must be mentioned, had arrived at an age and height when a tail-coat was a necessary garment if he went anywhere of an evening. "no, mother," he said, "except a pair of porpoise-hide boots and some leggings; and could i have a gun, do you think? there will be some shooting, you know." "a gun, vincent! will not the one you have already do?" "oh, no, mother--it is so old and out of date, i should be laughed at. i might just as well take an arquebus or a crossbow." "is not a gun a very expensive thing?" "why, you may make it so, of course; but i don't want that. i have been studying the _field_, and i can get a good central-fire breech-loader for £ ." "ten pounds is a good deal," said mrs crawley thoughtfully; "but i suppose you must have a gun if you want one. only remember, vincent, that i am not rich, and your education and other expenses are very heavy. and there are your sisters to be thought of--what with their dresses and their music, drawing and dancing, i have to be very careful." "oh, of course, mother," said crawley, going round and kissing her; "what a dear you are!" and his heart smote him as he thought of certain "ticks" he owed at school, and had not yet had the courage to confess to. for vincent crawley, though he had many good qualities, was by no means perfect. he was rather spoiled by indulgence at home and popularity at school, and thought a good deal too much of himself for one thing, and for another he was inclined to be thoughtless and extravagant in money matters. it is excellent to be generous with money which is absolutely our own; but to seek to get the credit for generosity at other people's expense is quite another, and not at all an admirable thing. crawley knew this in theory, but practically, if he wanted anything and could get it, he had it; and if a friend had a longing for ices, strawberry mess, oyster- patties, or any other school luxury, he would treat him, running up a score if he had not the cash in his pocket to pay with. and if there was generosity in this impulse, i fear that there was ostentation too. it added to his popularity, and popularity had become as the air he breathed. _for the only real test of generosity is self-denial_. if you go without something you really want in order to oblige someone else, that is genuine, admirable, and somewhat rare. but if you have everything you want and forego nothing whatever by conferring a favour, you may show good nature, careless indifference to the value of money, or a pleasant sense of patronage, but not necessarily true generosity. that _may_ be the spirit which dictates your conduct, but the act does not prove it. now, in crawley's case, his mother was the only one who had to exercise self-denial. but he never thought of that. he prided himself on being a very generous fellow, and so he was by nature, but not so much so as he took credit for, and he was growing more selfish than otherwise; which was a pity. he went up to london, and was measured for his dress clothes, and got his boots and gaiters, and then sought out and found the gun-shop, mentioned in the _field_, and instead of pretending to be knowing about firearms, wisely told the shopman why he came to him, and that he trusted him entirely, being quite unable to judge for himself, which made the man take particular pains to select him a good one, and show him how to judge if the stock suited him; namely, by fixing his eyes on an object, and bringing the gun sharply up to his shoulder. then closing the left eye, and looking along the barrel with the right, to see whether the sight was on the object. if he had to raise or lower the muzzle to obtain that result, it was obvious that it did not come up right for him. at length he got one which suited him exactly, and he was shown the mechanism by which the breeches were opened and closed, and learned how to take it to pieces, put it together again, clean it, and oil it. finally he bought it, together with a hundred cartridges, fifty being loaded with snipe-shot, and fifty with number five; all on the gunmaker's recommendation, to whom he explained the kind of shooting he expected to have. he would not let it be sent home for him, but took it off himself. "you only hold it straight, sir, and i'll guarantee the gun will kill well enough," said the maker as he left. what a charm there is in a new bat, a new gun, a new fly-rod, a new racket; how one longs for an opportunity to try it! really it is often a consolation to me to think that very rich people lose all that. when everything is so easily obtained, nothing is of any value. crawley at any rate was delighted with his new possession. he took it to pieces and put it together again for the benefit of every member of the family, besides a good many times for his own private delectation, and practised aiming drill and position drill by the hour together, without knowing that there were any such military exercises. the frost set in again, however, a week before christmas, and when the ice bore, he had to leave his new toy alone, for besides practising himself, his sisters required tuition in the art of skating. and you must not think that he found the time hang heavy to the day of his departure; he was too fresh home, and of too genial a disposition for that, besides which it was christmas time. but he did look forward with pleasurable excitement to his visit, for all that. the day came at length, and he started for barnsbury, snugly ensconsed in a first-class carriage, with wraps, and comic papers, and a story by manville fenn with a thrilling picture on the cover, and his beloved gun in the rack over his head. his mother had suggested travelling second- class, but he durst not, for fear someone should meet him at the station. he was right in that expectation, for when the train stopped at barnsbury he saw gould and a man in livery waiting for him on the platform. "all right! how are you, old fellow?" said gould, shaking him by the hand. "how good of you to come! no hunting in such a frost as this, so i thought i would drive over myself." crawley said something civil, and the groom touched his hat and asked what luggage he had, taking his gun-case from him as he spoke. "it will be brought after us in the tax-cart," said gould, "which has come over too. i hate a lot of luggage in the trap i am driving, don't you? leave it to william and come along; it will be all right;" and he led the way out of the station, where there was a dog-cart with another liveried servant on the seat, and a handsome nag in the shafts, waiting at the door. the man jumped down and touched his hat; crawley got in; gould gathered up the reins, sat beside him, and started, the man springing up behind as they moved off, and balancing himself, with folded arms, as smart and natty as you please. crawley wondered more and more that he had never perceived any superiority in gould; surely he must be very blind. "it is only half-an-hour's drive, behind an animal like this," said his new friend. "the frost is giving, so we may have a run with the harriers in a few days. in the meantime there are a good many snipe. we will have a crack at them to-morrow morning, if you like." "i should like very much," replied crawley. the country they were driving through was not very picturesque, as it wanted wood, a strange want for suffolk; but they soon came to a lodge with a gate, opened for them by a curtseying woman, and admitting them to a park where there were trees, and fine ones, though standing about by themselves, not grouped together. they spun along through this up to a large white house with a colonnade in front, and a terrace, with urns for flowers and statues all along it, looking bare and cheerless enough at this time of year. but the hall made amends when they entered it, for it was warm, luxurious, and bright enough for a sitting-room. two footmen in plush and with slightly powdered hair inhabited it, and one of them helped crawley to get rid of his wraps, and then gould led the way to the drawing-room, where mrs gould and three daughters were drinking tea and eating muffins and things, for fear they should have too good appetites for dinner, i suppose, and introduced him. crawley shook several hands and accepted a cup of tea, and sat down on a very low and very soft seat, which he could have passed the night in luxuriously if beds had run short, and felt as awkward as you please. he always was shy in ladies' society. not in that of his sisters, of course; he patronised them and made them fag for him. it was certainly their own fault if they did not like it, for they had taught him. but they did like it, he being one of his sort, and not often at home, and in return he waltzed with them, which was a bore, and gave them easy service at lawn-tennis, which made him slow, and was generally an amiable young turk. but the misses gould did not look like being fagged, rather the reverse. they were all grown up, at least to look at, though one was not yet "out." clarissa, the next, a girl of eighteen, came and sat down by him and talked to him, for which he felt very grateful, for he was beginning to wish the floor to open and let him through. at first, indeed, she talked of things he knew nothing about: balls, and levees, and the four- in-hand club, and the orleans. but finding the service was too severe, and he could not send the ball back, she asked if he was fond of the theatre, and as he was, very, and had been to one a few nights before, he became more like himself, and showed some animation in his description of the piece he had seen, and the performers. at this juncture a quiet-looking man out of livery came softly into the room, and asked him deferentially for his keys, as his luggage had arrived. seizing the idea that he proposed to unpack for him, an operation he disliked, he gladly gave them up, wondering whether these rich people ever did anything for themselves at all. "i see that you are great upon acting," said miss clarissa when the valet was gone, "and i am so glad! for we are getting up some private theatricals; you will take a part?" "why," said crawley in some dismay, "i never yet tried to act myself; i am afraid i should spoil everything." "oh no! we have heard all about you from my brother, you know; you have a good memory, have you not?" "i believe so; i have never found much difficulty in learning by heart." "that is one good thing to begin with; we will soon see if you can act at all. some of our friends are coming over to-morrow for rehearsal. we have agreed to try _st. cupid, or dorothy's fortune_, and we want a `bellefleur.' you will take the part, will you not? i am to be `dorothy budd.' you will not have so very much to do. do you know the play?" "no, unfortunately, and i--" crawley began, meaning to back out; but miss clarissa cut him short. "no matter," she said, "i will fetch you a copy," and she got up and returned presently with a little book. "you had better read it all through, and mark your parts with the tags. the tags, you know, are the last sentences of the speaker before you, to which you have to reply. you can learn some while you are dressing for dinner; that is a capital time. and i will give you a hint or two this evening in the billiard- room. you don't mind?" what could crawley say? he _did_ mind, not bargaining for learning lessons in the holidays; but he could not show himself so uncivil a boor as to refuse. so he promised to do his best, and when the gong sounded, took his little book up into the bedroom with him. chapter thirteen. crawley is taken down three pegs. "good gracious!" a large fire was burning in the grate; an easy-chair was drawn up on one side of it; over the back of an ordinary one opposite a clean shirt was warming itself, with the studs inserted in the front and the wristbands. on the bed the dress clothes were neatly laid out; the patent-leather boots stood at attention on the hearth-rug; hot water steamed from a japanned jug on the wash-hand stand; two wax candles lit up the dressing-table; two more stood on another near the fire, which had also writing materials on it. the room could not have been prepared for a duchess, because a duchess would not wear a black coat and trousers; and besides, they were certainly _his_ clothes. dressing took crawley about ten minutes, and he had an hour for the operation. so he looked hurriedly through the play, and marked the parts allotted to ensign bellefleur. it did not seem very much, so he felt a little encouraged, and taking miss clarissa's advice, set the book open on the table and began learning what he would have to say, while going on with his toilet. he had a really surprisingly retentive memory, and picked up a good bit even in that little time. he found mr gould in the drawing-room when he went down, and the old gentleman asked him after his progress in study, and what profession he intended to adopt, in a pompous and condescending way; but it was only a few sentences, for there were other gentlemen there, who came up and button-holed him seriously, and with whom he seemed to hold portentous conversation, politics, perhaps, or shares, or something of that kind. then the ladies assembled, and the second gong boomed, and the people paired off. crawley timidly offered his arm to miss clarissa, rather fearing he was doing wrong, and ought to go to someone else. but she took it all right; and he quoted from the play he had been studying: "`here we escape then. come, cousin! nay, your lips were set for pearls and diamonds, and i'll not lose the promised treasure.'" "`well, good counsel is a gem,'" the young lady responded smartly. "`but, george, i fear me you'll never carry the jewel in your ears.' the quotation is not apt, though, for you evidently have carried my good counsel in your ears, and been learning your part already. how good of you!" here was a chance for crawley to say something pretty; but he could not think of what it should be till afterwards. if the ladies' society was a little thrown away upon him he appreciated the dinner, which was by far the most luxurious meal he had ever seen in his life. a _table-d'hote_ at scarborough had hitherto been his _beau ideal_ of a feed, but that was not in the race with the gould banquet. and the champagne; on the few occasions when he had had a chance of tasting that wine, he had got all he could and wanted more. but now his only care was not to take too much of it, lest it should get into his head. "are you studying your part?" asked his neighbour, for he had been silent for some time. "no," he replied; "i was thinking that if your brother lives like this every day, he must find the fare rather unpalatable when he goes back to weston." "i believe he does," said miss clarissa laughing. "at least he writes home grumbling letters enough, and we have to send him hampers of good things--perigord pies and that. don't stop longer than you like," she added as the ladies rose. "papa will go on talking about stupid things all night." and shortly afterwards young gould, who had taken his sister's place when she went, proposed that they should go to the billiard-room and knock the balls about. so they went and made a four-handed game with two of the girls. and then miss clarissa read over the scenes in which crawley had to take part with her, and made him repeat what he had learned, with appropriate action. and he got partially over his shyness, and spent rather a pleasant evening, thanks, a little bit, i fancy, to a little vanity. his friend came to have a chat with him after they had gone up to their rooms, and when he left crawley could not help thinking what a pity it was that his sister clarissa had not been the boy and he the girl. she was such a much better sort of fellow for a friend; had more go, and was heartier. before he finally turned in he read the part of ensign bellefleur over again, for he felt too much excited by the novelty of everything to sleep, if he went to bed. at last, however, reading the same words over repeatedly quieted his nerves, and he slept soundly till morning. "you are still inclined to have a try for the snipe?" asked gould at breakfast. "it is still thawing, and the ground will be very sloshy; i hope you have got thick boots." "yes, and if i hadn't i do not mind a little wet," replied crawley. "but i can't find my gun anywhere." "oh, that is all right in the gun-room." this was another new idea to crawley, who previously thought that it was only ships in her majesty's navy, and not houses, that had gun-rooms. they visited it presently, and crawley found his property taken out of its case, put together, and standing side by side with others in a glass cupboard. he took it down and left the house with his companion. on the terrace they found a keeper with the dogs, and started off for the marshy ground by the river. "put a few cartridges loose in your pocket," said gould. "william will carry the rest." the low-lying lands were intersected by deep trenches, which divided them into fields just as hedges would. these were now frozen over, but the ice was melting fast, and water stood on the top. along them walked the two gunners, william the keeper following with scamp, the retriever, in a leash; for scamp would hunt about and put everything up far out of range. "look out, crawley!" cried gould, as a snipe flushed in front of him. he would not have known it was a snipe unless gould had told him, as it was the first he had ever seen alive. he tried to take aim at it, shutting the left eye as if he were shooting at a target with a rifle, which caused him to twiddle his gun about as if he were letting off a squib, for the bird darted about as though on purpose to dodge him. so he pulled one trigger, and then, quite by accident, for he did not know how to find it in his flurry, the other, and i don't suppose went within two yards of the snipe with either barrel. with a steadier flight, having now got well on the wing, it sailed within reach of gould, who knocked it over. "wiped your eye, old fellow!" he cried triumphantly as scamp came back with the bird in his mouth. "yes; i told you i was a duffer," replied crawley, who took note that the best way was to wait for the bird to have done his zigzagging. so he steadied himself, and the next chance he had he did wait. but not a bit could he cover the bird with that little knob of a sight, and when the smoke cleared away he saw it careering like a kite with too light a tail in the distance. gould also missed twice, and then shot one the moment it was off the ground, before the erratic course commenced. "that looks the easiest dodge," thought crawley, and the next shot he had he tried it with the first barrel, missed, waited till the snipe was flying more steadily and gave it the second barrel, missed again. he got quite hot, and felt sure the keeper was laughing at him, but that official only said: "i'd put in a cartridge with bigger shot now; there's some duck, i think, in yon bit of rushes by the river." they did as he advised, and they walked down to the spot. in went the spaniels, and out came a fine mallard, ten yards in front of crawley, and sailing away from him as steady as a ship. he could cover this large evenly-flying mark as easily as if it were on a perch nearly, and when he pulled trigger the duck stopped in his flight, and fell with a heavy splash in the river, into which scamp plunged as if it were midsummer, and presently brought the duck to land. crawley felt the elation which always accompanies the first successful shot at a bird on the wing; at any rate he had killed something, and might do well yet when the strangeness wore off. he had another chance at a duck a little while afterwards, but this time the bird flew across and not straight away from him, and as he held his gun still at the moment he got the sight on the duck and fired, of course, since the duck had not the politeness to stop too, the charge went about two yards behind it. "i beg your pardon, sir," said william, "but if you takes aim like that you will never hit 'em; 'tain't possible. you must forget all about your gun, and only look at the bird, and pull the trigger the moment you gets a full sight of him. the gun will follow your eye of itself, natural." "i know i ought to keep both eyes open," said crawley, "but i forget." "well, that is best, to my thinking, though i have known some good shots too who always shut the left eye. but whether or no the chiefest thing is not to see that sight on your gun when you shoot, but only to look at the bird." they went on to another snipe patch, and soon crawley missed again. "never mind, sir," said william, "it's a knack, snipe-shooting is, and no one can catch it without practice. i've seen good partridge, aye, and rabbit shots, miss 'em time after time, and i've knowed good snipe- shots poor at anything else too." at last, by trying to follow the keeper's directions, crawley did hit a snipe as it was flushed, but it was his only one. they were much more plentiful than usual in that part, and lay like stones, so that they had plenty of shooting, and william groaned in spirit over the opportunity of sport that had been wasted on two boys. what a tip sir harry would have given him in his delight if he had come out with him on such a day! thirty-five cartridges had crawley burned when they turned homewards in the afternoon, and the result was one duck, one snipe; if he had possessed a tail, how closely it would have been tucked between his legs! he hardly dared look the animals who had those appendages in the face; how they must have despised him! gould, who was a bad shot, had bagged five couple, and patronised him insufferably. when they got home he found a warm foot-bath ready in his room, which was a most refreshing luxury, and having made himself presentable he went down to the drawing- room, where the neighbours who were going to act in the forthcoming play were assembled at afternoon tea, preparatory to the rehearsal. and presently they adjourned to the library and went through the play, a certain mr foljambe, to whom everybody paid implicit obedience, directing and instructing them. crawley knew his part, and paid attention to what he was told, and the great man considered that he would do, if he could only get over a certain shy awkwardness. and indeed it was a provoking thing to clarissa gould, that when they went through their scenes alone together he acted in a manner that really showed great promise, but if a third person were present he was not so good, and with every additional spectator the merit of his performance diminished. there was only one scene in which he managed completely to forget himself and become the person he represented, and that was where he crosses swords with the hero, and is disarmed. he could fence a little, and did not quite like playing at getting the worst of it when it was not certain that he ought to have done so; but still, the violent action, and the clash of steel helped him to get rid of that feeling that he was making a tom-fool of himself, which confused him when he had to make a lot of spoony speeches to the girl. mr foljambe encouraged him with the assurance that being dressed for the part would give him confidence; in a strange dress, a false moustache, and a painted face, he would not know himself in the glass, and would feel that the spectators did not entirely recognise him either. it was necessary to make the best of him, for there was no other ensign bellefleur available. the men of the day before had taken their departure, and were succeeded by a more lively lot, for there was to be a partridge drive and a big lunch on the morrow, and most of those who were to take part in it slept at nugget towers that night. so, instead of shares and companies, mr gould the father held forth upon agricultural prospects, the amount of game, and the immediate renewal of hunting, in consequence of the complete change in the weather. "you ought to have had a good many snipe by the way, gould," said one of the guests. "they are always found in those water meadows of yours at the end of a frost." "my son and his young friend can tell you best about them," replied mr gould. "i believe they have been out after them to-day." "ah! and what sport had you?" asked the inquirer, turning to young gould. "oh, i got five couple." "and your friend?" "i only shot one," said crawley with an uneasy laugh. "come, i say, lionel," said clarissa gould to her brother, "i am not going to have my cousin bellefleur treated in this manner. you are a nice sort of host to leave your guest the worst of the shooting." "he had as many shots as i had," said young gould, whose desire of self- glorification smothered any soupcon of good taste which he might have acquired, "only he missed them all." "indeed, yes," said crawley, concealing his sense of humiliation in the very best way; "why i fired two barrels at one snipe before gould killed it for me. i am a perfect novice at all field sports." "ah!" observed the first inquirer, "i know i fired away a pound of lead before i touched a snipe when i first began. but what a lot of them there must have been if you killed five couple, lionel." "i do not think i should care for shooting if i were a man," said clarissa to crawley. "but hunting, now, i should be wild about. i hunt sometimes, but only with the harriers. mama will not let me go out with the foxhounds, and they meet so far off that i cannot fall in with them by accident, for there is no cover near here. but the harriers are to go out the day after to-morrow, if the frost does not return, and i am looking forwards to a good gallop. are you fond of hunting?" "i know that i should be," replied crawley, "but i do not own a horse, and never have a chance of it." "oh, well, we will mount you; i think daisy will be quite up to your weight, sir robert certainly would, but daisy is the nicest to ride." after dinner there was music, and crawley was asked if he could sing. there was no backing out, for young gould had bragged about his friend's voice, which was indeed a good one though untrained. but he only sang _tubal cain_, _simon the cellarer_, and one or two others of that sort, of which the music was not forthcoming. at last, however, julia gould, who was the pianist, found _john peel_, which he knew, and he found himself standing by that young lady, confused and shamefaced, trying to make his voice master a great lump there seemed to be in his throat. to make it worse the hubbub of voices ceased at the first notes, though it had swelled the louder during previous performances. all the men began marking the time with heads and hands, and when the chorus came first one and then another joined in, and it ended in a full burst of sound, just as when crawley sung it at school. this gave him confidence, and he sang the second and remaining verses with spirit, the choruses swelling louder and louder, and when he finished there was much hand- clapping. so at last he had a gleam of success, and lionel gould, who had been growing a little supercilious, returned partially to his old conciliatory manner. next day a large party sallied forth with their guns, and crawley was placed under a high, thick hedge, and told to look out for partridges as they came over his head. young gould was some little distance on his left; and at about the same interval on his right sir harry sykes, a neighbouring squire famous for his skill with the gun, had his station. beaters had gone round a long way off to drive the birds towards them, and soon shots were heard to right and left; and then crawley saw some dark specks coming towards his hedge, and prepared to raise his gun. but it was like a flash of lightning; they were over and away before he could bring his gun up. gould had fired, indeed, though ineffectually, but sir harry had a brace. three more appeared; this time crawley fired his first barrel at them before they were within shot, and then turning round, gave them the second after they had got far out of it. more came; gould got one, sir harry another; a brace, flying close together passed not directly over crawley, but a little to his right; and sir harry having just fired and being unloaded, crawley let fly at them, and by a lucky fluke they both came rushing to the ground, stone-dead. "good shot, boy!" cried sir harry. he had hardly spoken before more birds came directly towards him; crawley watched; he shot one as it came on, and immediately, without turning round, raised his gun, head, and arms, till it seemed as if he would go over backwards, and fired again with equally deadly effect. this second feat crawley did not attempt to imitate, but a steady shot as they came on he did keep trying, and not entirely without success, for every now and then a partridge came tumbling nearly into his face. but gould shot two to his one, and he did second worst of the party. however, it was such quick and wholesale work that individual prowess was taken little notice of. and then there was a long, hot luncheon, which some of the ladies came out to, and another drive a few miles off in the afternoon. it was all very exciting, and crawley found the day a great deal too short; but still he would have preferred the snipe-shooting, if he could only be alone with no one to see his misses. there seemed more sport in finding your game than in having it driven up to you. when he went up to dress for dinner he found a hamper of game there, with a blank label attached, for him to put any address he liked. so he wrote his mother's; and when it arrived she gave him most unmerited credit for skill, forethought, and trouble-taking. the goulds certainly did things in a princely way. it rained softly all that night, clearing up about nine in the morning, when those who were going out with the harriers had been half-an-hour at breakfast--miss clarissa, who was one of them, taking that meal in her habit. crawley could hardly eat for excitement. the moment the water for his tub had been brought he had jumped up, and, directly he was dressed, hurried to the stables to see the horse he was to ride. "and which is it to be?" asked miss clarissa. "well, i meant to take your advice and daisy; but the groom said she had a delicate mouth and required a light hand, which i cannot have, you know, for want of practice. and he said sir robert was the stronger animal and would stay better, though not so fast. so i fixed on sir robert." "and he will carry you very well if you can hold him; lionel can't." "what can't i do?" asked young gould across the table, with his mouth full of game-pie. "hold sir robert." "why, his mouth is a bit hard, but i can sit him anyhow." "oh, yes, he goes easy enough." the horses were soon brought round, and they all--a party of five--went out. miss clarissa, the only lady, put her foot into mr foljambe's proffered hand and vaulted lightly into the saddle. crawley could mount without awkwardness; he had learned enough for that, and he knew what length of stirrup suited him, and could trot along the road or canter over the grass without attracting attention; so all went well till they reached marley farm, where the meet was. but directly sir robert saw the hounds he got excited and wanted a gallop--a thing the frost had debarred him of for weeks. so he kicked up his heels and shook his head, and capered about in a manner very grateful to his own feelings, but most discomposing to his rider, who was first on the pommel, then on the crupper, then heeling over on the near side, then on the off--though both sides threatened to be off sides if these vagaries took a more violent form. when the hounds were turned into a field and working, sir robert evidently thought: "come! i can't be standing still all day while those dawdling dogs are bothering about after a hare; a gallop i must have!" and he began to fight for his head; and it took all crawley's strength-- and he was a very muscular youngster--to hold him. sir robert did get away half across the field once and nearly demolished a hound, with twenty voices halloing to crawley to come back, and the master using language which his godfathers and godmother never taught him, i am certain. i can only quote the mildest of his reproofs which was: "go home to your nursery and finish your pap, you young idiot, and don't come endangering the lives of animals a thousand times more valuable than yourself!" poor crawley, wild with shame and rage, managed to haul his horse round and get back to the others, when it did not improve his temper to see the broad grin on young gould's face. "don't fight with your horse, youngster," said an old gentleman kindly. "the more you pull, the more he will pull too." and crawley loved that old gentleman, and would have adopted him for a father, or at least an uncle, on the spot, especially when he found his advice serviceable; for, loosing his reins when sir robert did stand still, and only checking him lightly when he tried to dart forward, kept him much quieter. but would they never find that hare? yes, at last there was a whimper, and another, and then a full burst, and away went the hounds, and the field after them, and, with one final kick up of his heels, sir robert got into his stride. crawley forgot anger, vexation--everything but the rapture of the moment. the life of the scene, the contagious excitement of dogs, horses, and men, the rapid motion, it was even beyond what he had imagined. so across a field to a little broken hedge, which sir robert took in his stride without his rider feeling it. then sharp to the right towards a bigger fence, with a ditch beyond; nothing for a girl to crane at, but having to be jumped. crawley, straining his eyes after the hounds, and not sitting very tight, was thrown forward when the horse rose, and, when he alighted, lost his stirrup, reeled, and came over on to mother earth; and when he rose to his feet he had the mortification to see sir robert careering away in great delight, and he proceeded to plod through the heavy ground after him. "whatever made you tumble off? sir robert never swerved or stumbled!" cried miss clarissa as she swept by him. but his wounded vanity was hardly felt in the greater annoyance of being out of the hunt. but the best of harriers is that you hardly ever _are_ out of the hunt. the hare came round again; some good-natured man caught the horse and brought him back to the grateful crawley, who remounted and soon fell in with the hounds at a check. "i say, you know," said mr foljambe, "if you get another fall i shall exert my authority as theatrical manager and send you home. i cannot have my ensign bellefleur break his neck when the part is not doubled." "no!" said miss clarissa, "not before wednesday." whimper, whimper; they hit it off and away again. another fence with hurdles in it, and a knot of rustics looking on in delight. more cautious now, crawley stuck his knees in and leaned back, and, when sir robert alighted, was still on, with both feet in the stirrups, but very much on the pommel, and not in an elegant attitude at all. "oh, look at he!" cried a boy with a turnip-chopper in one hand and a fork for dragging that root out in the other. "he be tailor." "it's agwyne to rai-ain, mister lunnoner!" added another smockfrock; "won't yer get inside and pull the winders up?" even the clodhoppers jeered him; and that confounded friend of his, gould, was close beside and laughed, and would be sure to repeat what he heard. never mind, it was glorious fun. he came off again later in the afternoon, but that was at a good big obstacle, which most of the field avoided, going round by a gate, and sir robert stumbled a bit on landing, which made an excuse. but this time the horse, who was not so fresh now, waited for him to get up again. he felt very stiff and sore when it was all over and they were riding home again; especially it seemed as if his lower garments were stuffed with nettles. as for his tumbles, the ground was very soft, and he had not been kicked or trodden on, so that when he had had a warm bath he was as right as ninepence, only a little stiff. gould came to see after his welfare while he was dressing, and hoped he was not hurt, and expressed an opinion that he would learn to ride in time, and was glad they had only gone out with the jelly dogs instead of the foxhounds, or his friend and guest would not have seen anything of the run. all which was trying, coming from a fellow who had looked upon him as an oracle, and to whom he had condescended. at dinner, too, he was chaffed a little; but the hardest rider in the county, who had condescended to go out with the harriers to try a new horse, the foxhounds not meeting that day, and who was dining with mr gould afterwards, came to his rescue. "never mind them, lad," he said; "you went as straight as a die. i saw you taking everything as it came, never looking for a gap or a gate, and it is not many of them can say the same." this was saturday, and crawley was glad of a day of rest when he got up next morning, he was so stiff. on monday preparations for the private theatricals began in earnest. dresses came down from london, and were tried on and altered; the large drawing-room was given up to the hands of workmen, who fitted up a small stage at one end of it, with sloping seats in front, that all the guests might see. those who were to act were always going into corners and getting some one to hear them their parts, and there were rehearsals. it was all a great bore to crawley, who would fain have spent the time in shooting or riding, of which he got but little, so exacting was miss clarissa; and he was to go home on the thursday, the day after the entertainment. as the time approached, too, he felt more and more uncomfortable; he had found out from young gould that the whole thing had been got up by his sister clarissa, who thought herself a very good actress, and wished to show off; and he could easily see that he would not have been asked to the house at all, if it had not been for his school-fellow's talk, about what a clever individual he was--able to do everything. now, next to sir valentine may, no character in the comedy is so important for the display of dorothy budd's (clarissa's) performance as ensign bellefleur; and the more clearly crawley saw this, the more fervently did he wish that he was out of it. it was too late now, however, and as he got on very fairly in the rehearsals, he began to hope he should pull through somehow. on tuesday the house was filled with company, and he was asked to give up his room and go to the top of the house, which, however, was no trouble to him. his clothes of seventeen hundred and fifteen were though, when the eventful evening came, and his wig, and the man who fitted it and daubed his face. and yet, when all the fidgeting was over, he wished that it had to begin again, that he might have a further respite. the play began, and during the first scene he stood at the side envying the cool self-possession of captain wingfield, who had the part of "valentine," and every one of whose speeches was followed by laughter from the unseen audience. when the second scene opened miss clarissa joined him, looking charming in her old-world dress; they were to go on in company, and he made a strenuous effort to pull himself together. but when he found himself in the full glare of the foot-lights, and looking before him saw the mass of expectant faces which rose, rank behind rank, half-way to the ceiling, his head went round, his brain became confused, and his first sentence was inaudible. "speak up!" said miss clarissa in a loud whisper, and he uttered, "and have you no ambition?" in a louder key indeed, but in trembling accents, and standing more like a boy saying a lesson. the audience cannot hiss in private theatricals, but they could not help a suppressed titter, which confused crawley still more. he forgot what he had to say, and looked appealingly to the prompter, who prompted rather too loudly. altogether the scene was spoilt, and clarissa furious. he did a little better in the second act, but not one quarter so well as he had in rehearsals, and was ready to punch his own head with vexation when the whole thing was over, and he had got rid of his costume and the messes on his face. he went to bed instead of to supper, and next morning at breakfast no one alluded to the performance before him. soon afterwards he took his leave of all but miss clarissa, who kept out of his way, and lionel gould drove him to the station very sulkily, for his sister had vented her displeasure upon him. and so they said an uncomfortable good-bye, and crawley felt much relieved when he found himself alone in the train, with the humiliations of his visit behind him. they did not do him any harm, quite the contrary; he was made of better stuff than that. of course he felt sore at his failures, when he was used to play first fiddle. when the devil of conceit is cast out of us the throes are severe. but by the time he got home crawley was able to laugh at his own mishaps. perhaps gould got the worst of it after all. "_that_ friend of yours an admirable crichton!" said his sister. "a fine set you must be!" chapter fourteen. the descent of avernus. a worse resident than mr wobbler the pedestrian took up his abode at slam's, and this was no other than his son, josiah slam, who had gone to london as the only field wide enough for his talents ten years before, and had only been occasionally heard of since. now, however, he thought fit to pay his parents a visit, and did not appear to be in prosperous circumstances, though it is probable that he had money, or money's worth, or the prospect of it, for slam was not the man to kill the fatted calf for a prodigal son, unless he saw the way to making a good profit out of the veal, the hoofs, and the skin. josiah was a young man of varied accomplishments, all of which were practised for the purpose of transferring other people's cash from their pockets to his own. he called himself a sportsman, and no doubt the operation alluded to was sport, to him. arriving about christmas time, when holiday making was general, he gleaned a little at the game of skittles, at which many of the agriculturists round about thought they were somewhat proficient; but cunning as he was he could not go on disguising his game for ever, and so directly he saw that the yokels were growing shy of playing with him, he gave it up. the sunday pitch- and-toss and card assemblages were also a source of profit to him. marriner thought he could cheat, and had indeed stolen money in that way from his companions, and there was nothing josiah slam liked better than dealing with a weaker member of his own fraternity. he allowed marriner to cheat him a little, and pretended not to discover it; played at being vexed; drew him on, and fleeced him of his ill-gotten gains. but it was apparent that he played too well at these amusements also, so then he showed them a game at which everybody might win, except himself. where it was all chance, and skill could not interfere. roulette, in short. the room in which professor wobbler had given his boxing lessons had a table fitted up in it, and on this table the wheel-of-fortune, with its black and red compartments, and its little ivory ball to rattle round and finally fall into one of them, was placed, with a cloth marked in compartments answering to those in the wheel for the gamblers to stake their money upon. this game proved very fascinating to the dissipated amongst the farmers' sons round about, and to some of the farmers too, and money which ought to have gone to buy stock, or for the rent, was lost at that table. of course some of them won occasionally, and considerable sums, for them, too; that formed the fascination of it. but the agricultural interest was depressed, and ready money not forthcoming to the extent josiah slam desired; so upper servants of the neighbouring gentry were admitted, under strong vows of secrecy, and more than one gamekeeper's and huntsman's family was short of coals and meat that winter, because the money to provide such necessaries was left on that satanic, innocent-looking table. every night this gambling went on, and josiah made a good deal of money by it, being prepared, however, to clear out of the neighbourhood at the first symptom of the police having caught scent of the affair. ready money was waning and business growing slack when the weston boys came back from the christmas holidays, and josiah, who knew that some of them frequented his father's yard, saw a fine opportunity of augmenting his gains by setting his little ball rolling in the daytime for their especial benefit. the scheme was nearly stifled by its own success; on the very first occasion a boy won four pounds, and could not conceal the triumphant fact from two or three intimate friends, who each whispered it to two or three others, and the consequence was that on the next saturday afternoon no fewer than thirty westonians came to slam's yard seeking admittance. this alarmed old slam, who saw a speedy prospect of discovery, and of that hold upon him which the authorities had long been seeking, being afforded them, to the consequent break up of his establishment. better small safe profits which should last, he thought, than a haul, which after all must be limited to the amount of the school-boys' pocket-money, and be shared with his son, and the stoppage of all his little sources of profit. not to mention the prospect of legal punishment. so the thirty had to go away again grumbling, with their money in their pockets. _o fortunati, si sua bona norint_. but small parties of the initiated were still admitted, amongst them, of course, saurin and his shadow, edwards. the latter, who, as was said in a former chapter, had a peculiar fondness for games of chance, was positively infatuated with this device of young slam's. it interfered with his studies by day, and he dreamed of it by night, so much did it engross his thoughts. he was never easy unless staking his shillings on that table, and watching eagerly whether the little ball would drop into a red hole or a black one. saurin did not take half the interest in it at first, the principal attraction for him lying in the illegality, and the tampering with what he had heard and read of as having been the ruin of so many thousands. and he thought what fools they must be. there were many ways in which he could well imagine anyone spending his last penny, but not over a toy like this. but one day he came away a winner of a couple of sovereigns, and there was something in seeing the shillings and half-crowns gathering into a pile before him which caused him to catch the sordid fever with which his friend was infected. hitherto he had made his stakes carelessly, but now he took a deeper interest in the thing. sometimes he had won a few shillings and edwards had lost, and at other times it went the other way, but the winner's gains were never so great as the loser's losses, and it was evident that the difference must remain with the conductor of the game, josiah slam. "why, we have been practically playing against each other for that rogue's benefit!" exclaimed saurin, when he made this discovery. "in future we must always stake our money the same way." and this they did. then saurin had another bright idea. it was an even chance each time whether red or black won, just the same as heads or tails in tossing, so it could not go on very long being one or the other in succession. then, supposing they staked on red, and it turned up black several times, they had only to persevere with red and increase the stake and they must win their losses back, while if it was red several times they would have a clear gain. this appeared to edwards as a stroke of genius, and he was in a state of fever till they had an opportunity of putting it in practice. and it answered at first; but presently one colour, the wrong one, won so many times running that all their united capital went into josiah's bank. they looked at one another in blank dismay; there was an end to their speculations for the rest of that term, and by the next mr slam junior would have decamped from the paternal abode, for when the racing season commenced he flew at far higher game than the purses of rustics and school-boys. "can't come no more, can't yer?" said josiah. "i'm sorry for that, though i expect i should be a loser, for you play well and knows a thing or two, you do. but it's the sport i care for more than the money, and i should have liked yer to have another chance. i know what i did once when i were in that fix; i just took and pawned my watch, and with the money i got on it i won back all i'd lost and more on the back of it, in a brace of shakes, and then took the ticker out again all comfortable." "but there is no pawnbroker near here." "no, in course not, and such a thing might not suit gents like you neither. not but lords and markisses does it often; and if ever you really did want a pound or two very bad, for a short time, there's my father, as goes over to cornchester perpetually, would pop anything light and small for yer, and bring yer back the money and ticket safe enough." the hint took; old slam was intrusted with edwards' watch that evening, and shortly afterwards with saurin's; and later on with all the pins and rings they possessed, though these were not worth much. this may all sound accountable in edwards, who was so weak and soft; but saurin, though vicious, was no fool, and such excessively absurd conduct may appear to you inconsistent with his character. but that is because you do not know the rapidly enervating and at the same time fascinating mastery which gambling has on the mind of one who gives way to it. it is a sort of demoniacal possession; the kind-hearted, amiable man becomes hard and selfish, the generous man mean and grasping, the strong-minded superstitious under its influence. it may seem strange to enact laws to prevent people from risking their own money if they choose, but every civilised government has found it absolutely necessary to do so. for the losing gamester always thinks that with a little more money to risk he would certainly win all back again, and the thought maddens him so that he will not even shrink from crime to obtain it. one day when the pair were penniless, and had no more means of raising money, young slam generously offered them a loan, only requiring them to sign a paper acknowledging the transaction. to prevent their feeling themselves placed under an obligation he delicately allowed them to sign for more than they had received a proposition which saurin acceded to with alacrity. edwards, though he also signed, did so with hesitation, and expressed fears about the safety of the transaction afterwards. "pooh!" said saurin, "the i o u is mere waste paper; we are both under age, and can snap our fingers at him if he demands payment. besides, we will pay him back the first time we win enough." "but supposing we don't win enough? we have been very unlucky lately," objected edwards. "all the more reason why luck should change," replied saurin. "but suppose it does not, all the money will have gone into the fellow's pocket, so we shall have repaid him in reality, don't you see?" edwards didn't quite. if you borrow a shilling of any one to gamble with, and lose the stake and pay him with the shilling you have borrowed from him, he does not exactly get what is due to him. however, edwards made no reply; no doubt saurin knew best. crawley lost a little of the estimation in which he had been held that term. it was extremely mean of gould to gossip about his guest's discomfitures at nugget towers, but the temptation to glorify himself at the other's expense was too strong. he had plenty of pocket-money always, and rich men or rich boys are sure to have some one to listen to them with a certain amount of deference, and if gould was not popular exactly, his hampers were. "i had crawley to stay with me at christmas, you know," he said. "he's a good fellow; pity he's so awfully poor. he had never been in a decent house before, and was awfully astonished. he had what they call `the keeper's gun,' a ten-pound thing; our head-keeper twigged it. good gun enough, i daresay, but not what a gentleman has for himself. but he could not use it; worst shot i ever met, by jove! i showed him a thing or two, and he began to improve by my hints. he is not above taking hints, i will say that for him; and his riding! why, i thought from those prints in his room that he was ever such a swell; but i don't believe he was ever outside a horse before. even the ploughmen laughed at him. `get inside and pull up the windows!' they called out." and so he went on, somewhat exaggerating all crawley's failures, not so much out of any ill-will as for self-glorification. you may know the pastime of boring a hole through a chestnut, threading it on a string, and fighting it against other chestnuts: if you hit on a very tough chestnut, and with it broke another one, it is, or used to be the rule that your chestnut counted all the victories of the one it split in addition to its own, of which a careful account was kept. so that if a chestnut was a fiver, and it beat a tenner, it became at one leap a fifteener. in something the same way gould had an idea he might score by crawley, who was thought so much of for his proficiency in many things. if he himself was so much richer, such a better rider and shot, it ought to be assumed that if he took the trouble he could also beat him at cricket, football, mathematics, german, and freehand drawing. it was not very logical, and indeed he did not put the matter to himself so nakedly as that, but that was the sort of idea which influenced him nevertheless. at the same time i fear that there may have been a little spite in his feelings too; he had been a good deal snubbed by his sister clarissa for introducing a friend who had gone far to spoil her triumph in the play she had got up with such pains and forethought, and he much regretted having ever asked him. gould's bragging would not have been much believed, only crawley confirmed it. "yes," he said, "i went to stay with gould's people; very kind of them to ask me. they live in grand style; i thought i had got to windsor castle by mistake at first. i should have enjoyed it immensely if they had not made me act in private theatricals, which i hate, and i am afraid i came to utter grief over it. took me out snipe-shooting; did you ever shoot at a snipe? bad bird to hit; gould got some. i suppose one would pick up the knack of it in time. and, yes, we went out with the harriers; i had never sat a horse when he jumped anything before, and i came a couple of croppers. but it was great fun, and i did not hurt myself. gould did not get a fall, oh no; he is used to it." a good many were rather disgusted with gould when he talked in the way he did, and buller let him see it. "it's awfully bad form to ask a fellow to your house, and then boast that he can't do things that he never tried before, so well as you can," he blurted out. "oh, of course, we and know that crawley is perfect in _your_ eyes," sneered gould. "that's rot," said buller elegantly; "but i do know this, that you might have practised anything you know, shooting, riding, anything, all your life, and if crawley had a week's practice he would beat your head off at it; come, then, i'll bet you what you like." "that is impossible to prove." "no matter, it does not need proof; every fellow with eyes in his head must see it. but that's nothing. if you were ever so much better it would be just as mean to brag about it." crawley had no idea that gould bore him any grudge, and being grateful to him for his invitation, sought to give him those opportunities of intimacy which he had evidently coveted before. but it was gould now who drew back, somewhat to the other's relief, for he could not bring himself to care much about him. well, all this foolish talk of gould's did have a certain effect: a good many boys lost some faith in their idol, and began to suspect that its feet might be of clay. and then crawley took to reading very hard that term, for his time for trying to get into woolwich was approaching, and he was very anxious not to fail; and this made him less sociable, which affected his popularity. it did not interfere with his sports; he was as energetic at football as ever, and took his usual pains to make the boys pay up their subscriptions, for he was secretary and treasurer. but that was not exactly a genial duty, though everybody was glad that somebody else would take the trouble. and for the rest, he was now always working hard or playing hard. "hulloa, edwards!" he said one day about the middle of term, "you have been very lazy about your football lately; you promised to be good at it, you know. it's a pity to give it up." "but i have not," said edwards. "i am going in for it again now." and he meant it; for the last penny of the loan had vanished, and he felt the need of excitement and action of some kind. "that's right, old fellow," said crawley. "of course you play for your house against ours in the match." "i believe so." "come and have a game this afternoon," said crawley, turning back after they had parted; for the pallid and careworn face of the other struck him, and he thought very likely a little exercise and bustle was just what he wanted, but that he felt listless, as one does sometimes, when one is glad afterwards if some one else will save us the trouble of making up our minds, and start us. "no, thanks," replied edwards, "i can't come to-day, i have something else i must do. but i shall practise regularly after to-day." and he went on his way to meet saurin, and go with him to slam's yard. for a crisis had arrived in their affairs which assumed a most serious aspect. it was no longer a question of obtaining the means of continuing their gambling; they had awakened from that dream, and saw what dupes they had been. and indeed the slams, father and son, found that their little game was being talked about in the neighbourhood too freely for safety, and had abruptly discontinued it. josiah, indeed, was about to take his departure altogether, and in announcing that intention to saurin and edwards, demanded immediate payment of the money he had advanced them, in consideration of which they had jointly signed an acknowledgment for five pounds. they had, indeed, kept away from the yard when their money was all gone, but josiah slam was not to be balked in that manner. he went over to weston, and accosted saurin in the street. "i cannot pay you just now; don't speak to me here, we shall be seen," said saurin. "what do i care for that?" replied josiah. "if you don't come to me i'll come to you." "i will come to the yard to-morrow afternoon, only do go away now," urged saurin. "you had better," said the man significantly. and so saurin and edwards were now on their way to the yard. "well, gents, have you got the money?" asked josiah slam, who admitted them. "i hope so, for i wants to be off, and i'm only a-waiting for that." "no," replied saurin, "we have not got it; it is not likely. we did not sign that paper until we had lost everything to you, and we shall not have any more till after easter. perhaps we may pay you then, though i don't consider we owe you anything really. you have won it all back, and a lot more besides." "what's that to do with it?" cried young slam. "you had as good a chance of winning of me, hadn't yer?" "no, of course not," replied saurin. "i am not certain that we had any chance at all." "what d'yer mean? yer--" "oh, don't bluster and try to bully," said saurin. "i'm not afraid of you." "oh, you're not, ain't yer, my game chicken? but i have got your i o u." "much good may it do you! why, we are under age, and it's of no value at all." "and you call yerself a gentleman! yah! but i'm not so green as yer think, my boy. of course i knowed it warn't a legal dokiment. but it's proof enough for me. if you don't pay i shall take it to yer master, and see if he won't pay it for yer." "don't be a fool; you know very well he would not." "no, i don't; at any rate i shall try it on." "it would do you no good, i tell you." "if not, it would do you two chaps harm, i know; why, you would get it pretty hot if yer master knowed yer had come here at all; and if he found you'd been playing cards on a sunday, and roulette, and pawning yer watches and things, i'll bet a hundred it wouldn't make it better. gents like you can allus get money somehow; write to yer friends; it's only two pun ten apiece, and they won't stick at that to get you out of such a shindy as this will be. this here's thursday and i'm bound to go on monday. if you don't bring them five pounds by then, i'll go to your master with that 'ere i o u in my hand on monday morning as sure as i stand here. so now you know." and with this ultimatum the rascal dismissed them. they walked slowly along the lane leading to weston with hearts as heavy as could be, for indeed they were at their wits' end. if this fellow fulfilled his threat, and they had no doubt he would, it most certainly would result in expulsion for them both. to write home for more money was out of the question, for each had exhausted every conceivable excuse for doing so already, and any further application would only bring a letter to dr jolliffe asking the reason for all this extravagance, instead of cash, and so precipitate the calamity rather than ward it off. a less shameful peccadillo might have been confessed, but this low-lived gambling, this association with a fellow like josiah slam, how could it be spoken of? impossible! well, but what was to be done? anything, anything to stave off the immediate peril; but what? that thought haunted each of them all day and during a sleepless night, and when they met on the following morning each looked at the other to see if he could detect any gleam of hope in his face. "look here," said saurin, "there is just a chance, not a good one, but still a chance. that fellow gould always has heaps of money, and from all these stories of crawley's visit to him at christmas his people must be very rich. now he is not a generous fellow, but he likes to show off. and if we went to him and told him all about it, and that we were dead certain to be expelled if we could not raise five pounds, do you not think he might lend it us till after easter?" "i am afraid he won't," replied edwards, "but it is worth trying." "you see, it would be something for him to brag about afterwards," continued saurin. "it would make him look important and influential that he had got two fellows out of such a row, and was the only one in the school who could do it." "it is worth trying at any rate," said edwards. "ask him this afternoon." chapter fifteen. a crime. once every term the cricket and football committees assembled to transact business. they learned what funds were in hand, what subscriptions had been paid and what were in arrear, also the expenditure for balls, nets, goals, stumps, rolling the ground, and all other items. after which, rules were discussed, and arrangements for future matches made. it was part of the principle of the school that the boys should manage all these things for themselves, as it was considered that to learn practically how to set such matters going and keep them in order was quite as educational as to acquire the right use of the subjunctive. all that the authorities had to do with the arrangement was that when the day and hour for a committee meeting was fixed, the master in whose house the secretary was, gave leave for his pupil-room to be used for the occasion; and it was also customary to ask one of them to audit the accounts. these assemblages were of a twofold character: during the first part, when the accounts were read out, and what had been done gone over, any boy who liked might attend and ask questions. but when arrangements for the future were discussed, the room was cleared of all but the committee. experience had brought that about; for when outsiders had been allowed to remain, the number and variety of absurd and futile suggestions which were made, prevented any conclusion being come to at all. since crawley was the secretary and treasurer of both the cricket and football clubs there was only one general meeting, at which the accounts of both were taken together, instead of two in the term, as when those offices were vested in different individuals. crawley had found these burdens rather onerous this term; with that stiff examination looming nearer and nearer every month he began to feel serious, for he had set his heart upon getting into the artillery if he could, and he was going at his subjects in downright earnest, with no shirking or trifling when the humour was not on him. so that the time it took him to prepare these accounts, and still worse, to collect the subscriptions, he did rather grudge. but he never dreamed of resigning on that account; he had undertaken these duties, and would go on with them without grumbling. perhaps he had the feeling which energetic folk who are accustomed to other people leaning on them are naturally apt to acquire, that things would get into a muddle without him. however he had got in the subscriptions, docketed his papers, and prepared everything for the meeting that evening, and the last finishing stroke being put, he locked all up in the japanned box which he kept in his room, with "weston cricket club" neatly painted on it in white letters, changed his clothes for flannels, and ran out to the football field. he had not been gone a quarter of an hour before saurin and edwards approached the house on their visit to gould, who was also an inmate of dr jolliffe's. they had chosen that time in order to find him alone, for he had had a slight sprain of the ankle--not enough to lay him up altogether, but sufficient to prevent his playing at football; and as he was rather glad than otherwise of an excuse to sit in with a novel, the chances were that he was now so occupied. it was a fine march day, with a bright sun and a cold east wind--not high enough to be unpleasant though, unless you dawdled about. when they came to the side-door which led to the boys' part of the house, which was a separate block of buildings from the doctor's residence, though joined to and communicating with it, saurin stopped and said: "i think perhaps you had better wait here for me; i shall get on better with him alone." "all right!" replied edwards with a feeling of relief, for he dreaded the interview with gould beyond measure. it is nervous work to ask anyone to lend you money, unless you are quite hardened. saurin felt that too; it was a bitter pill for his pride to swallow, with the prospect on one side of a refusal and on the other of being subjected to insolent airs of superiority, for gould was not the fellow to grant a favour graciously. but he had a stronger will than edwards, and the situation made extreme measures necessary. he entered the passage alone, then, and mounted the staircase, not meeting anyone. dead stillness pervaded the house except for the trills of a canary at the far end of the second landing. crawley's door was open as he passed, and he saw his clothes strewn about over a couple of chairs and the japanned box standing in a corner by his bureau. saurin passed on, the song of the canary growing louder as he advanced, and knocked at gould's door; there was no response. "gould!" he cried, "gould! are you in?" as there was still no answer he turned the handle and looked in; there was the canary hanging in the window, through which the sun poured, and his shrill notes went through his head; but no gould. "plague take it!" muttered saurin; "it is all to do now another time, and i cannot get this suspense over. i wonder where the fellow has gone to!" he closed the door again and retraced his steps slowly. when he repassed crawley's room he stopped and listened. not a sound except the bird's song. his heart beat so quickly that it was like to choke him, and he grew quite giddy. "crawley!" he said in an unsteady voice, for though he saw the room was empty he had an insane fancy that he might be there, invisible, or that this mist before his eyes might prevent his seeing him. then he mastered his apprehensions with an effort, and stepped into the room. going to a chair, he felt the coat which hung over the back; there were keys in the pocket. then he listened again; not a sound, for the singing of the canary had stopped. ten minutes later saurin went down-stairs quietly, stealthily. he found edwards waiting for him outside, took him by the arm, and led him away. "have you seen anyone?" he asked eagerly, but in a voice which he could not keep from trembling. "not a soul," replied edwards. "then, come a long to my tutor's--quick! get your flannels on; and we will go into the football field. we are late, but can get in on one side or another." "but, have you succeeded? will gould lend the money?" "no, he won't; and i would not have fellows know i asked him for worlds; so i am glad no one saw us." saurin was as white as a sheet, he trembled all over, and there was a look in his eyes as of a hunted animal. that one in whose courage, presence of mind, and resources he trusted so entirely should be affected to such a degree as this, appalled poor edwards; what a black gulf, indeed, must yawn before them! "is there no chance at all, then?" he asked in piteous accents. "yes, it will be all right; i--i have thought of something else," stammered saurin. "don't mind me--i'm knocked over by asking a favour and being refused; that's all. i shall be all right directly. only swear you will never say a word to anyone about it. i tell you i have thought of a way to silence that villain slam, and i will go and see him the first chance. it will be all right if you only hold your tongue. and now look sharp and let us change and go and play football; there's lots of time." they had reached their own rooms by this, and edwards did what saurin told him, wondering, but partly reassured; and in a few minutes they were on their way to the football field, where they were hailed by their own house and paired off on different sides. saurin had sulkily retired from all the school sports for some time, and the boys wondered at the energy with which he now rushed into the game. the fact was he felt the necessity for violent exertion to escape reflection and drown thought in fatigue. he could not do it, but he succeeded in regaining the mastery over his nerves, his looks, his speech. as for edwards, he played more listlessly than usual; and the thought occurred to several that afternoon that if saurin would only take up regular practice again he would be a greater source of strength to the house team than edwards. and they wanted to be as strong as possible, for the match with the doctor's house was approaching, and they feared that they were a little overmatched. that evening a good many boys were assembled in dr jolliffe's pupil- room to hear the reports concerning the cricket and football clubs, which were really one, as the same subscribers belonged to both, and it was only for clearness and to avoid confusion of accounts that they were treated separately; besides that, one boy could not always be found to undertake, like crawley, the management of both. there were the committees, and besides them a sprinkling of the curious, who did not care to listen to the debit and credit accounts, but had the anglo-saxon instinct for attending public meetings of any kind, so that the room, though not half full, contained a respectable audience, when crawley with his japanned box in his hand entered, and went to the place reserved for him at the head of the table. "i have not a long story to tell you," he said, producing his keys and inserting one in the lock of the box. "fellows have paid up pretty well, and we are rather in funds. the principal expense has been a new roller which we were obliged to have, the old one being quite worn out, and besides, as many of you have often observed, not heavy enough. indeed the committee have been blamed rather severely by enthusiastic cricketers on this score, as if they had taken weight out of the roller, or could put extra weight into it; and i have sometimes thought that if the critics would have sat on the roller instead of on us, it would have been more effective." laughter; for a little joke goes a long way on these solemn occasions. "mr rabbits has kindly audited our accounts, which are satisfactory, i believe; here they are, if any one likes to look at them. we do not owe anything, and there are two pounds in hand for the football, and seven pounds twelve shillings for the cricket accounts, which i have here. hulloa! what is this?" and crawley changed countenance as he opened a _portmonnaie_ which he took out of the box, and drew from it a five-pound note. "i have been robbed!" he cried. "there were four half-sovereigns, two sovereigns, and twelve shillings in silver, besides this bank-note in the purse this morning, and now there is only the five-pound note here!" the consternation caused by this announcement was so great that for quite a quarter of a minute there was a dead silence, and then ejaculations, suggestions, questions, began to pour. "perhaps it is loose in the box," said some one, and the papers were immediately all taken out, and the box turned upside down to prove the futility of that perhaps. "well, never mind; of course i am responsible," said crawley presently, recovering himself. "i was taken by surprise, or i should not have made all this fuss. the money will not be wanted till the cricketing season begins next term, and i can make it good by then." outsiders then took their departure, leaving the committee to any deliberations that might remain, and carrying the news of the robbery far and wide, so that it became the principal topic of conversation throughout the school that evening. of course it lost nothing in the telling, and some received the information that crawley's room had been regularly cleared out that day, all his books, clothes, and pictures taken, besides five pounds of his own and twenty of the public money. the committee had not much business to transact. the day for the match at football between dr jolliffe's and mr cookson's houses was settled, a suggestion that some new turf should be laid down on a part of the cricket-field where the grass had been worn past recovery was agreed to, and the members who did not board at dr jolliffe's were back at their own houses before "all in." but the excitement about the loss of this money was naturally greater in the house where it had taken place than anywhere else, and as the boys talked about it at supper the servants heard of it. it was evident that though no accusation might be made, suspicion would be very likely to fall upon them, and as they were anxious to have the matter sifted, the butler was deputed to report the whole affair to the doctor. so when prayers were over dr jolliffe told all present to remain where they were, and then calling up crawley, he asked him whether the account he had heard was correct. "i did not mean to report it, sir," said crawley, "but it is true that four pounds in gold and twelve shillings in silver were taken from the tin box belonging to the cricket and football club this afternoon." "when did you last see this money?" "at about a quarter to three, sir. as it was a half-holiday i thought i would get all my papers ready against the cricket and football meeting this evening. i set to work at that at a little after two; it did not take me very long, as they were all ready before, and only wanted arranging, and a little memorandum written out of what i wanted to say, for fear i should forget anything. when i had done i counted out the money in hand, and put it in a purse which i have always used for the subscriptions; there was the sum i have mentioned and a five-pound note. i put the purse back in the box, locked it, placed the keys in my coat- pocket, changed my clothes, and went out to play at football. i heard the clock strike three just after i had begun to play." "and when did you miss the money." "at the meeting, when i opened the box." "you had not done so again till then after locking it up, when you went out?" "no, sir." "you are sure?" "positive, sir." "and the five-pound note was not taken?" "no, sir; that was left." "was it in the same compartment of the purse as the gold and silver?" "no, sir; but it could be seen if the purse was opened, and why it was not taken too i cannot imagine." "that is not so difficult of explanation. but now i must ask you a painful question; but it is your bounden duty to answer it without reserve. have you any suspicions as to who may have taken it?" "none whatever, sir. i am almost certain that there was not a boy in the house. i was the last to remain in. indeed i found all but three in the football field, and i know where they were, for i saw them playing at fives as i passed the court. at least two were playing, and the third, who had hurt his foot, was looking on." "do you mean to say, for it is necessary to be accurate, that you recognised every boy in the house except these three in the football field yourself?" "not exactly, sir; but we have been talking the matter over, and those whom i did see can answer for all the rest." "and who were the three boys in the fives court?" "i was the looker-on, sir," said gould, stepping forward. "and when did you leave?" "when the others left off play, sir. we all returned together at tea- time." "that is right, sir," said smith and simmonds. "we were the two playing at fives, and gould went and returned with us." (of course it is not meant that they said all this together, in chorus, as people do in a play; but they both stood forward, and smith was the spokesman.) "and now, crawley," resumed the doctor, "are you sure that the money was not taken _after_ your return. you left your room again, perhaps, before the meeting?" "yes, i did for a short time, sir; but then i had the keys in my pocket; and the box was fairly unlocked. there are no marks of violence; and it's a brahma, so, whoever did it, must have had the right key." "i am very glad that all the boys in my house seem able to prove so clear an _alibi_," said the doctor. "that will do." when they had all dispersed dr jolliffe made inquiries amongst the servants. the fat cook indignantly demanded that her boxes should be searched; but one coin of the realm is so like another that there did not appear to be much object in that, beyond the pleasure of inspecting a very smart bonnet in reserve for easter, and other articles of apparel. the maids who waited on the boys were very much cut up about it. they never went near the rooms after they had once cleaned them up in the morning till supper-time, when they turned down the beds (which were set on end, and shut up to look like cupboards during the day), and filled the jugs and cans with fresh water, etcetera. but it was impossible for them to prove their absence during those two hours--from three to five--so clearly as the boys could, though they could testify to one another's not having been away for many minutes at a time. it was extremely unpleasant for them, and for the butler and another man- servant in a less degree also, for, though they had no business to go into the boys' part of the house, it was possible that they might have gone there without having any business. but there was no reason to conclude that anyone residing in the house at all was the guilty party; any person could walk in from the street at any hour. itinerants often passed through the place with mice, squirrels, and other things, which they tried to sell to the boys, and one of these might have slipped up-stairs. but, no; a man like that would not have known that there was likely to be money in that particular box; it certainly looked more like the action of someone who had good information. such were the speculations and reasonings which were rife in weston for the next few days; and then the topic began to grow stale, for no one had been seen hanging about the house that afternoon, and there was no satisfactory peg upon which to hang conjecture. one hard fact remained; poor crawley was answerable for four pounds twelve shillings which had been stolen from him, and this came at a time when he was particularly anxious to spend as little money as possible. he did not make much fuss about it, and only to buller, his friendship with whom grew stronger the more they knew of one another, did he speak his mind. "my poor mother!" he said during a sunday walk the day after the robbery; "i shall have to ask her for the money, and it is precious hard upon her. i have been abominably extravagant, and she is not rich, and there are a lot of us. i owe a good bit to tiffin, and to my london tailor too, but he will wait any time. tiffin duns me, hang him! though why he should be devoted to capital punishment for asking for his due i don't know either. i should not have had such a lot of patties, fruit, ices, and stuff. he will have to be paid at latest when i leave; and at that time, if i get into woolwich, there will be my outfit. and then i must needs buy a gun and a license for just three days' shooting with gould last christmas; and tipping the groom and keeper was a heavy item besides. one of my sisters is delicate, and can't walk far; and they could keep a pony-carriage if it wasn't for me. and now, here is another flyer i must rob my mother of, just because i left my keys in my coat when i changed my dress--sheer carelessness!" "never mind; you will get into woolwich next examination, and then you will soon get a commission, and draw pay, and not want so much from your mother." "yes, i think of that, and it is some consolation; but still it is in the future, don't you see, and i must ask her for this stolen money at once. by jove! i wish i had come back unexpectedly for something, and caught the fellow taking it! i wonder who on earth it can be!" "i have no idea. not polly the maid, i'll take my davey; i have so often left money and things about, and never lost a halfpenny." that same sunday saurin and edwards were standing with two or three others in the quadrangle, when gould limped by. "how is your ankle getting on, gould?" one of the group called out. "better, thanks," he replied, joining them. "i say, if it had kept me in yesterday afternoon crawley might have thought i took the money! what a joke, eh? fancy my wanting a paltry four pounds odd." "you were not in?" cried edwards; and he could have bitten his tongue out immediately afterwards. but the surprise was too great for his prudence. he and saurin had gone to their own tutor's house before repairing to the football field, you may remember, and that route did not pass the fives court. so that it was the first intimation edwards had that saurin lied when he said he had asked gould for a loan, and been refused. "no," said gould, looking at him in surprise; "what made you think i was?" "only your sprain," said edwards, recovering himself. "some fellows were saying that if you were in, the thief must have trod very lightly for you not to have heard him, as your room is so near. but as you were out, and all the other fellows too, he had the coast clear, you know." "what is your idea about the whole thing, saurin?" asked gould; "you are a sharp chap." "oh, i don't know," said saurin. "i should not be very much surprised if the money turned up, and there proved to have been no robbery at all." "what on earth do you mean?" "the chances are i am wrong, no doubt, but it is possible. crawley is a very careless fellow, you know, about money matters." "but how could he have made a mistake, when he counted out the money such a short time before?" asked one of the group. "i was present at the meeting, and you should have seen his surprise when he took up the purse." "oh, i dare say it is all as you think," said saurin. "i only know that if i had charge of money i should always be in a muddle. i never know anything about my own, and it is little enough to calculate; if i had to keep it separate from that of other people i should always be bothered between the two. but no doubt crawley is better at business than i am." "i say; he is awfully poor, crawley is, and tries to make a show as if he were rich," said gould. "i know he has been dunned by old tiffin lately, and it is quite possible he may have paid him out of the club money and got confused, eh? of course, what i say is strictly between ourselves." chapter sixteen. an accident. "it is no business of mine," said saurin, turning on his heel. "but if any fellow likes to get up a subscription to make good crawley's loss, real or imaginary, i'll subscribe." and he sauntered off, whistling carelessly. edwards had already detached himself from the group, feeling that he must be alone to think upon the tremendous and horrible revelation which had just dawned upon his mind. as saurin passed him he hissed in his ear the one word "fool!" and there was such an evil look of mingled rage and fear on his face as the human countenance is seldom deformed by. but edwards met it without quailing, and there was nothing but aversion in the glance he gave him back. the scales had fallen from his eyes, and his infatuation was dissipated. never again was he to listen greedily to saurin's words, and think them wiser than any others. never more would he admire and applaud him; build castles in the air, forming wild projects for the future, in his company, or associate willingly with him. they exchanged no other word, and saurin went his way, strolling in a leisurely manner till he was out of sight; and then quickening his pace he took the direction of slam's yard. at the rate he was walking he soon got there, and going round to the well-known back-door, he knocked. it was not long before he saw an eye reconnoitring him through a crack. "come, do not keep me waiting here all day while you are squinting through that hole!" he cried with a savage oath. "let me in." josiah slam said apologetically that he wanted to make sure who it was, and admitted him. "have you got the money, master?" he asked. "i have got four pounds, and that is all we can raise. it is as much as we have had in cash, and if you will give up that memorandum for it i will pay it you." "nonsense! it's for five pund, i tell yer, and five pund i will have." "no you won't; i cannot get it. so if you won't take the four, let me out. you may do your worst." "come, say four ten." "you fool, don't you see i am in earnest!" cried saurin, his suppressed rage bursting out. "why, i would cut your dirty throat if--" he restrained himself and said, "fetch the paper if you mean to; i cannot breathe the same air as a man who has threatened me, and i won't stand bargaining here a minute longer." josiah slam knew when he had got his victim in a corner, and desperate to biting pitch; so without another word he fetched the i o u and gave it to saurin, who simultaneously handed him _two sovereigns and four half-sovereigns_. the fellow took it with a chuckle, for he had never had the slightest intention of getting himself into trouble, which he assuredly would by attempting to make any use of that bit of paper. call upon dr jolliffe indeed, to get a couple of school-boys, whom he had fleeced, into a shindy! not worth the trouble for him, indeed. but it occurred to him that the threat might bring cash, and it had. "won't yer come in and have something?" "let me out!" "well, if you must go, here you are. good-bye, young gent, and better luck next time. and if when yer goes racing, yer wants--" saurin was out of hearing. "bless 'em," continued mr slam, junior, "i should like to know a few more like them two young gents a good bit richer. well, they are about somewhere, if one could but light on 'em." saurin did not return to weston at once, but walked as fast as he could put foot to ground along the lanes and the highroad, trying by physical exertion to numb thought, and he partly succeeded, now and then, for a short time, but black care soon caught him up again, and brooded over his shoulder. a voice which did not seem to emanate from his own brain kept repeating, "what you have done can never be undone; never, never. not if you live to be a hundred; not for all eternity." "it can, it shall," he replied. "only let me escape suspicion, and i will make it up over and over again." "that would not make what has happened, not to have happened." "it is only one act." "self-deceiver, you have been growing to it for years, your corruption has been gradual, and this is the natural result. you will go on now; each time it will come easier to you, until you grow to think nothing of it. read your future--outcast, jail-bird." "no, no; i will lead a new life, work hard, avoid bad company." "avoid bad company! i like that! what company can be worse than your own _now_?" "i will _not_ sink deeper; no one knows." "you forget; one does know, others _may_ know, _will_ know." "i could not bear that; i would destroy myself and escape the shame." "destroy yourself indeed! i defy you; you cannot do it. you may kill yourself; it is not at all unlikely; but that is not destruction, but only the commission of another crime." this inward voice became so real to him that he thought he must be possessed or else going mad. suppose it were the latter, and he let the truth out in his delirium! he determined to live by rule, to study hard, to be conciliatory, not to draw observation on himself. and to begin with, he must be getting back to weston; it would never do to be late, and risk questioning. the first time he had an opportunity of speaking to edwards alone he said, "i have seen that man as i promised, and there is nothing to fear from him. i have secured his silence." "at what a price!" sighed edwards. "look here," murmured saurin, turning on him fiercely; "if it is as you think, you take advantage of it, which is just as bad. we are in the same boat, and must sink or swim together. what is done cannot be undone; don't be a fool. if your weakness excites suspicion it will be ruin to both of us." "i know, i know," said edwards, turning away with loathing. they hated the sight of one another now, these two inseparables. what revolted edwards most of all was the other's insinuation about crawley. it was all of a piece with his conduct when buller was accused of that poaching business, and showed his true character. days went by and they never spoke to one another of the shameful secret they shared, and indeed rarely on any other subject. they would have avoided all association if it had not been for the fear of exciting suspicion. they were more attentive to their studies, and at the same time took a more prominent part in the school games than either had done for a long time: edwards, because it was his natural bent to do so when freed from other influences; and saurin, partly from prudence, partly because he was making a struggle to escape from the net which he felt that evil habits had thrown around him. he was like one who has been walking in a fog along the brink of a precipice, and discovers his position by setting a foot on the very edge and nearly falling over. he shrank from the abyss which he now saw yawning for him. at the same time he exerted himself to become popular, and since he was no longer anxious to thrust himself perpetually into the foremost place, he was not without success. "what a much better fellow saurin is now he has given up going to that slam's yard!" said one of his intimates, and his hearers acquiesced. he had never repeated that abominable hint about the possibility of crawley's not having lost the money at all; but gould had taken up the idea, and the gossip had spread, as such ill-natured talk about any one who is popular or in a higher position than others, is sure to do. very few, if any, really believed that there was a grain of truth in the notion, but some thought it clever to talk as if they did, just to be different from the majority. others might jump to a conclusion, swallowing all that the popular idol chose to tell them, but they withheld their judgment. unluckily these rumours reached crawley's ears; some friendly ass "thought he ought to know," as is always the case when anything unpleasant is said, and it fretted and annoyed him exceedingly. it also had the effect of annulling a movement which was being set on foot to make up the missing money by subscription, the notion of which emanated curiously enough from the same source as the scandal. saurin had thrown out the hint as a sneer, not a suggestion, but it was taken up by some honest lad in the latter sense. it had been submitted to the masters, who not only approved but were anxious to head the subscription, and the whole thing could have been done at once without anyone feeling it. but crawley called a special meeting, and the pupil- room was crammed to overflowing this time to hear what he had to say, which was this: "i have asked you to come for a personal and not a public reason. i am told that it is proposed to raise a subscription to make up the four pounds twelve the fund has been robbed of. now, though i was perhaps not careful enough, i could hardly expect my keys to be taken out of a coat and the box opened during a short absence, and so i should have been very glad not to have to bear this loss, for which, of course, i am solely responsible, alone. but some kind friends (gould, i believe, started the idea) are pleased to say that i have robbed myself; that is, i have spent the money intrusted to me and invented the story of a robbery." ("oh! oh! shame! shame!") "well, yes, i think it was rather a shame, and i am glad you are indignant about it. but the accusation having been once made, of course i cannot accept the kind suggestion to make the loss good." there was a great hubbub and loud protestations, but crawley was firm. his honour was at stake, he said, and he must repay the money himself; then his traducers at all events could not say that he had profited by holding the office of treasurer. those who had indulged in idle innuendoes were heartily ashamed and sorry, and gould for a short time was the most unpopular boy in the school. crawley cut him dead. the day following this special meeting was saturday, exactly one week after the robbery, and the day appointed for the football match between the houses of head-master and cookson. i fear that a detailed account of this match would hardly interest you, for this reason. the head- master, whose scholarship and capacity worked up weston to that state of prosperity which it has maintained ever since, was an etonian, and the games instituted under his auspices were played according to eton rules. dr jolliffe had also been educated at the same school, and thought everything connected with it almost sacred. so it happened that the rugby game of hand-and-football had never supplanted the older english pastime, which it has now become so much the fashion to despise, and which, indeed, if it were not for the eton clubs at oxford, cambridge, and elsewhere, might disappear as the national rats did before the hanoverian. the westonians then used round, not oblong footballs; their object was to work the ball between the goal-posts, not over a bar at the top of them; and it was unlawful to touch it with the hands unless caught in the air, and then only for a drop-kick. i do not advocate one game more than the other; both to my thinking are excellent, and i have no sympathy with those who would suppress every pastime which is fraught with some roughness and danger. the tendency of civilisation is naturally towards softness, effeminacy, and a dread of pain or discomfort; and these evils are far more serious than bruises, sprains, broken collar-bones, or even occasionally a more calamitous accident. however, the chances are that my reader is all in favour of the rugby game, and would therefore follow the changes and chances of the present match with but little interest. it was exciting enough, however, to those who were engaged in it, for cookson's made a better fight of it than their opponents expected. they had been practising with great pains, and their team worked well together and backed each other up excellently. so that, quite early in the match, the ball having been some time at their end, and they acting solely on the defensive, jolliffe's thought they were going to carry all before them and got a little rash and careless; those who should have kept back to guard their own end pressing too far forwards, when edwards, who was fleet of foot and really good at seizing chances, got a clear kick at the ball which sent it over the heads of the attackers into the middle of the field, and, getting through to it again, began dribbling it towards the hostile goal with a series of short kicks, having a start of the field, who, seeing their error, were now racing back to their own end. the goal- keeper dashed out and met edwards in full career, both kicking the ball at the same time; but another on the cookson side, who had been keeping close in view of such a contingency, got a fair chance at the ball, which slipped sideways from the two, and sent it sheer between the posts, scoring a goal for cookson's. the success of such a simple manoeuvre was equivalent to a "fools' mate" at chess, and was a lesson to jolliffe's never to despise their enemy. they were not to be caught napping again, however, and, by dint of steady, persistent, concentrated play, they too got a goal and equalised matters. then, after a considerable period, during which the advantages fluctuated, they obtained a rooge. if, in the old game, the ball is kicked behind the goal-posts but not between them, there arises a struggle between the contending sides to touch it with the hand. if one of the defenders, those behind whose goal the ball has passed, does so first, nothing has happened, and the ball is kicked off again for renewal of the game. but should one of the opposite side so touch it, a rooge is gained. the rooge is formed close in front of the defenders' goal, they being clustered in a semicircle with their backs to it, and with a big and heavy member of the team for the central pillar, who plants his heel firmly in the ground, the ball being placed against his foot. the opposite side complete the circle, leaving an opening for one of their number to rush in and get a good kick at the ball--they instantly closing upon him and endeavouring to force the whole surging, struggling mass bodily back between the posts, ball and all; if they cannot make an opening they send the ball through alone--the defenders, of course, endeavouring to force the ball out sideways, and either touch it down behind their goal or get it away from their end altogether. one goal counts more than any number of rooges; but when no goal is made at all, or the number of them on each side is equal, the rooges decide the game. ends were changed, and after a good deal of play without result cookson's also scored a rooge, and matters were equal again; after which the jolliffe team, which was the strongest physically, kept the ball entirely in the neighbourhood of the cookson goals. for the latter had made great exertions, and were tiring fast. the time fixed for leaving off play was now approaching; and if they could only keep matters as they were a little longer they would make a drawn match of it, which would be of itself a triumph, considering that their opponents, with the redoubtable crawley at their head, were reckoned so much the stronger. "come, we _must_ get one more rooge," said the jolliffe captain, "and weak as they are getting we ought to turn it into a goal." and pursuing his determination he dribbled the ball up close to the base line, sent it behind the goal-posts, and rushed forward to touch it down. edwards ran up to it at the same time to touch it first, and a collision ensued which sent him flying. near that spot there was a tree with seats round it, and edwards fell heavily with his side against a corner of this wooden settle. crawley touched the ball down. "you have given us all our work to get this!" he called out to the other, laughing; and then seeing that edwards was lying on the ground, he added, "you are not hurt, old fellow, are you? only blown?" but as the other was not in the position in which any one would lie still a moment to get breath, he went up to him and repeated his question. "i don't know; i--i feel rather queer," was the reply. crawley stooped, and put his arms round his body to raise him up, but edwards shrieked out, "ah! don't; that hurts!" the other players now gathered round, and many offered well-meaning but absurd suggestions. one practical youth ran off, however, to cookson's house to report what had happened, and then returned with a chair. by the time he got back edwards had managed to rise, and was sitting on the settle, very faint. they managed to transfer him to the chair, and carried him home in it very gently, and by the time he was laid on his bed, which had been got ready, the doctor arrived. a couple of ribs were broken, he said, after an examination which made poor edwards groan a good deal; but he did not think there was much more the matter, which words were a great comfort to crawley, who began to fear that he might have been the cause of the boy's death. he was quite sufficiently sorry and vexed as it was, and would have liked to nurse him if he had been allowed. it was just as well for his reading that they were not in the same house, for he spent all the hours that he was out of school, and not necessarily in his own tutor's, by edwards' bedside. you cannot fall with your side against a sharp angle heavily enough to break a couple of ribs without feeling it afterwards, i can tell you, so you had better not try, and edwards suffered a good deal from pain and difficulty of breathing for a few days, and when the inflammation was got down, and he felt more easy, he was kept back by a great depression of spirits. "one would say that the boy had something on his mind!" said the doctor to mr cookson, "but that is impossible. at his age we possess no minds worth speaking about to have anything upon;" and so he lost the scent after hitting it off to go on the trail of a witticism, which after all was not very brilliant. edwards was delirious one night, and astonished the housekeeper, a motherly dame who sat up with him, by his talk on the occasion. "look here!" he said; and thinking he wanted drink or something she got out of her chair and leaned over him; "let us have five shillings on the black this time; it has gone red four times running, and that can't go on, can it?" "certainly not," said mrs blobbs, wondering whatever the boy's distracted fancy was running on. "don't do it! don't do it!" he then cried. "i'll have nothing to say to it. let us stand our chance rather. not that way; not that way; no, no, that's making bad worse. i won't! i won't!" that was only one night, however, the third after the accident, and he was all right in his head next morning, only so terribly depressed. saurin never came near him. chapter seventeen. compounding a felony. "i know what is the matter with you," said crawley, replacing the pieces on a backgammon board at the end of the game. "do you?" replied edwards, turning if possible a shade paler, while his heart palpitated under his sore ribs. "yes," continued the other; "you are worrying because you cannot get on with your reading, and the prospect of examination is getting uncomfortably distinct. i hear from mr cookson that you have been mugging lately, just as i have. well, you will not lose much time, and you will find yourself all the clearer for lying fallow a little. and look here, i am a little more forward than you, and if you will come and stay with us in the holidays i will read with you; i think i could help you a bit. my mother would be very glad to see you. or if that can't be, i'll come to you. i am sure we could more than make up for any lost time." edwards was able to sit up now, and crawley read amusing books, and played games with him whenever he could leave school or pupil-room. "what a kind chap you are!" said edwards with a broken voice, and with water in his eyes, for he was very weak and nervous; "i--i don't deserve it." "not?" exclaimed crawley. "why, surely i ought to do what i can, when it is my fault that you got hurt. i am most unlucky this term; i get robbed, and am suspected of inventing the story of it to cover my misappropriation of the money; and then i wind up with breaking a fellow's ribs!" "no one thinks for a moment that you were not robbed as you say; i am certain of it!" cried edwards. "i don't know about that; some of them said they did, and i would give anything to prove that they did me wrong. it will stick in my gizzard a long time, i can tell you." edwards buried his face in his hands and fairly sobbed. "i can bear it no longer," he cried at last. "you so kind to me and all! i know who robbed you." "you!" exclaimed crawley, thinking the boy had gone delirious again. "yes, i," repeated edwards. "i did not see it done, and he never told me he had done it, but i know he did, and--and, i profited by the money and never said anything." "come, come, edwards, you are ill and weak, and exciting yourself too much. we will talk about this another time." "no, no, now; i must speak; it is killing me." and then he rapidly told the whole story; how saurin and he had gambled and lost, and the peril they had brought themselves into; and how saurin had gone that fatal saturday afternoon to try and borrow money of gould--all he knew, in short. "saurin!" said crawley, when he had heard all. "i never thought very much of him, but i had no idea he was so bad as that. but don't you fret, edwards; you were put in a very queer position, and nobody could say what he would do if he suddenly found it his duty to denounce an intimate friend for a crime which was committed to get out of a scrape in which he himself was implicated. it would be an awful hole to be in! how far have you told me all this in confidence?" "i leave that quite to you. i do not ask to be spared myself, but if you could be cleared and satisfied without saurin being publicly tried and sent to prison, i should be very grateful." "all right! i think i can manage that. and now, don't you bother yourself; you shall not get into any row, that i promise." "oh, crawley, what a good fellow you are!" cried edwards. "i wish i had got killed, instead of only breaking a couple of ribs!" "and let me in for being tried for manslaughter!" exclaimed crawley, laughing. "thank you for nothing, my boy." crawley made up his mind that night what he would do. the next morning he asked robarts, buller, and smith, _alias_ "old algebra," to come to his room when they came out of school at twelve. then he made the same request of gould, who looked surprised and flustered. "you will condescend to speak to me at last, then?" he said, sulkily. "i could not suppose that you wished to hold any communication with a defaulter," replied crawley, "and i am sure i could not trust myself in the company of any fellow who thought me one. i ask you to come to my room now because i have discovered who took the money, and i want to clear myself in your eyes." "all right! i will come if you wish it." "thank you very much." having thus arranged for his court of inquiry, the next thing was to secure the attendance of the accused. he found saurin talking to a knot of boys, and asked if he could speak to him privately for a moment. "well, what is up?" saurin asked. "you look as grave as a mute at a funeral." "yes," said crawley, "what i have to say is rather grave. it is about that four pounds twelve shillings you took out of my box." "it's a lie!" cried saurin, turning pale as death. "and yet the evidence against you is very clear," said crawley quietly. "do you know a man named josiah slam, a son of the fellow who lives near here? come, i do not wish to prosecute you, unless you force me; i want to give you a chance. robarts, buller, smith, and gould are coming to my room at twelve o'clock to-day, and i mean to take their advice as to what should be done if you will come there too, and meet them." "and if i refuse?" said saurin. "in that case i shall go to dr jolliffe, and put the matter in _his_ hands," replied crawley. "well, i do not mind coming to hear what cock-and-bull story you have trumped up," muttered saurin, turning away. he feared lest an unguarded word should betray him. his anxiety was terrible. what did crawley know? what was mere conjecture? of course edwards had put him on the track; but had he done so distinctly, or had this suspicion been aroused by his wandering talk when delirious? everything might depend on his exercising calm judgment just now, but his head was in a whirl and he could not collect his wits. should he make a bolt? oh, no! that would be confessing himself guilty. should he defy crawley? that would bring about a trial, in which he might be found guilty. it seemed safest to go to crawley's room at twelve and hear what he had to say. so he went. robarts and gould sat on the two chairs with which the room was supplied, buller perched himself on the table, smith on a box--all full of curiosity and expectation. crawley and saurin remained standing. the door was closed and a mat placed against it, to prevent any sudden entry without warning. "i am not going to beat about the bush," said crawley. "i accuse saurin there of having come to this house, one saturday when we were all out; of having gone into my room, taken my keys out of the pocket of a coat lying there, opened the cricket and football japanned box, and abstracted four pounds twelve shillings from a purse inside it. then i assert that he put the keys back in the coat-pocket, having first locked the box and put it back in its place, and ran back to his tutor's house, where he changed and went out to play at football. the motive of this theft was that he had been gambling at slam's yard, lost all the money he had or could raise; went on playing on credit, lost again, and was threatened with exposure unless he paid up. he had meant to borrow the money he wanted of you, gould, and came to the house with that intention. but as you were not in, he got it the other way." "it is all a pack of lies!" cried saurin. "at least about robbing, i mean; for it is true that i lost money playing roulette, and that i meant to borrow of gould, only i squared matters with the man without." "what day did you come to apply to me for that loan?" asked gould. "i don't know exactly; it was not on a saturday i am not sure that i came at all," replied saurin, who could not for the life of him help stammering. "it's all lies; though appearances might be got up against me." "they certainly are so already," said crawley, "or i should not have accused you. of course, if you can prove your innocence, or even if you are convinced that no one can prove your guilt, you will prefer to stand a trial. otherwise you might prefer to pay back the money and leave weston quietly. what do you say?" he added, turning to the others. "would it not be best for the credit of the school?" "yes, yes," said robarts; "let us wash our dirty linen at home." "but how am i to leave?" asked saurin with a groan. "i don't know; tell your guardian the truth if you like, you must manage that. only, if you come back next term i shall lay the whole matter before the head-master. and if you leave, and the money does not come, i shall give information to the police." "that's fair enough," said buller; "take the chance, saurin, if you are not a fool." and the others assented. not one of them had any doubt as to saurin's guilt: his confusion and equivocation condemned him. "what a cool fish you were to suggest that crawley might have spent the money himself!" said gould. "you regularly humbugged me." "you are assuming a good deal, i think," said saurin bitterly; "making yourselves accusers, juries, judges, executioners, and all. and i am very much in your power, for if this came to a trial, though i should certainly be found innocent of robbery, yet i cannot deny the gambling and having gone to slam's yard, and i should be expelled for that. so i suppose i had better agree to your terms. i will not come back, and-- what sum did you say you demand as the price of your silence? four pounds ten, or twelve, i think; you shall have it." and turning on his heel with an attempt at swagger which was not very successful, saurin went out, kicking the mat aside, and banging the door after him. of course edwards had betrayed him, he said to himself; it was not for nothing that crawley had been constantly with him since his accident. he longed to go to edwards' room and upbraid him with his treachery, but he durst not trust himself. he was not out of the wood yet; the other three could be trusted, but gould _must_ tattle, and if the story got abroad and reached one of the master's ears, it would no longer be in crawley's power to hush it up. and then edwards almost always had some one with him; but if not, and he saw him alone, could he keep his hands off his throat? from the throbbing of his temples when the idea occurred to him he thought it doubtful. no, he must not see him. "how on earth did you find it out?" cried the others to crawley when saurin's footstep died away on the staircase. "i have promised not to name my witnesses unless it is necessary to call them forward," replied crawley. "i am very much obliged to you for coming here, and i feel that it is awfully bad not to take you into full confidence and give up names. but you see i have passed my word and cannot help myself. there's one thing i can tell you, buller. saurin was the poacher for whose moonlight excursion you were taken up." "by jove!" exclaimed buller. "well, i should have imagined that he might have done that, but not such a dirty business as this." "i suppose he felt himself up a regular tree, poor beggar!" said robarts. "well, gould," said crawley, "i hope that your doubts as to my story of having been robbed are set at rest." "i don't know that i ever had any," replied gould rather sullenly; "only when a thing like that happens, and nothing can be found out, one puts it in every possible light. saurin said you were a careless fellow about money matters, and might have mixed up the club money with your own and paid it away without knowing, and then thought you had been robbed. of course one sees now why he put the idea about; but at the time it looked just possible, and fellows discussed it, i amongst them." "well, it was not pleasant for me, as you may easily understand," said crawley. "however, that is all over, and we will say nothing more about it. and now, of course we will all keep our council about this business for some time. it would be breaking faith with saurin if we let a word escape before he has left the school; because, if the doctor heard of it, he would insist on expelling him at any rate." "yes; and we had better hold our tongues for our own sakes," observed robarts. "my father's a lawyer, and i have heard him talk about something of the same kind. and i have a strong idea that we have just committed a crime, as that chap in the french play talked prose without knowing it." "what do you mean?" "just this, that to make terms with a thief, by which you agree not to prosecute him, is a legal offence called `compounding a felony.'" this notion of robarts, whether right or wrong, had the useful effect of sealing gould's lips for some time to come. it only wanted a week to the holidays, so the struggle was not so very prolonged. crawley went to see edwards directly the council-board broke up, and found him nervous and depressed. "perhaps i had no right to speak," he said. "it was not for me to tell. i wouldn't; only you thought yourself under suspicion, and you have been so good to me." well, crawley could not but thank him and tell him he was quite right; but he was not able for the life of him to say so in very cordial tones. "look here!" persisted edwards, noticing this, "tell me honestly; if you had been situated like me, would you have told of him?" "not to save my life!" blurted out crawley; "i mean," he added hastily, "i fear that i should not have had the moral courage." the week passed, and weston school once more broke up. what story saurin told to sir richard to induce him to take his name off the boards quietly i do not know, but it had the desired effect; and when the boys reassembled for the summer term saurin's place was known no longer amongst them. the scandal about him soon began to leak out, and the story ran that but for crawley's extreme generosity towards him he would have now been in penal servitude at portland. stubbs, too, went away that easter vacation, taking topper with him, and the pair went out to china together, stubbs having lucrative employment in that country. crawley returned, but that was his last term, and soon afterwards he succeeded in getting into woolwich. chapter eighteen. epilogue. a young man stood on the platform of the south-western railway pointing out his luggage to a porter. there was a good deal of it, and every package had _serapis_ painted upon it. _serapis_, however, was not the name of that young man; that was inscribed on another part of the trunk, and ran, "vincent crawley, ra." _serapis_ indicated the ship into whose hold all these things were to go. they had other marks, for some were to go to the bottom--_absit omen_!--the bottom of the hold, i mean, not of the sea, and were to remain there till the end of the voyage. but one trunk was to lie atop, for it contained light clothing to be worn on entering the red sea. minute were the printed directions about these matters which had been sent him directly he got his route. it is the fashion to cry out against red tape, but red tape is a first-rate thing if it only ties up the bundles properly. there is nothing like order, method--routine in short. by following it too closely on exceptional occasions absurd blunders may now and then be committed; but think of the utter confusion that would prevail every hour for the want of it. with a cold march wind blowing how should a young fellow who had never been out of his own country know that in a few days it would be so hot that his present clothes would be unbearable? or how should he understand the way to meet the difficulty if he did know it? i am all for rules and regulations, and down with the grumblers. mrs crawley and the girls agreed with me, for the official directions saved them a world of trouble. they wanted to go down to portsmouth in a body and see him off, but he begged them not. "i had sooner say good-bye here, mother," he said, "if you don't mind. there's a detachment, and i shall have my men to look after, and if i am with you i shall be bothered. and, well, you know, parting is a melancholy sort of business, and it is better to get it over in private, don't you think?" mrs crawley saw wisdom in her son's words, and yielded with a sigh, for she yearned to see the very last of him. ah! we do not half value the love of our mothers until we miss it, and the opportunity for making any return is gone for ever. it seems such a matter of course, like the sun shining, which no one troubles to be grateful for. but if the sun _went out_. well, it was a painful business--a good deal worse than a visit to the dentist's--that morning's breakfast, with the table crowded with his favourite dainties, which he could not swallow. and then the final parting, when all the luggage was piled on the cab. it was a relief when it was over, and he found himself alone and trying to whistle. even now, as he stowed the smaller articles in the carriage, he had a great lump in his throat. the guard began shutting the doors, so he got in, and as he had fellow- passengers it was necessary to look indifferent, and as if he were accustomed to long journeys. the train moved out of the station and he found several things to distract his thoughts. presently on the right they passed the wimbledon lawn-tennis grounds, and he thought of a wonderful rally he had seen there between renshaw and lawson. then further on they came to sandown on the left, where a steeple-chase was in progress. the horses were approaching the water jump, and the travellers put down their newspapers and crowded to the window. "something in tom cannon's colours leading; he's over. that thing of lord marcus is pulling hard. by jove he is down! no, he has picked him up again. well ridden, sir!" "who is it up?" "why, beresford himself. he will win, too, i think. oh, hang it, i wish they would stop the train a moment!" everybody laughed at this, though it was provoking not to see them over the next fence; but the engine gave a derisive scream, and away they rushed to farnborough. "there's aldershot, and the long valley, and that cocked hat wood. british generals would beat creation if they might only let their left rest on cocked hat wood." they were all army men in the carriage, and the conversation never flagged now it had been started. "are you going by the _serapis_?" asked a gentleman sitting opposite crawley, seeing _cabin_ painted on his busby case in the net overhead. "yes," replied crawley. and then learning that he was bound for india the other inquired the presidency and the station, and it so happened that he had left that district only the year before, and was now settled in hampshire, having been superannuated, at which he grumbled much, and indeed he was a hale young-looking man to be laid on the shelf. and so the time sped rapidly till they reached portsmouth harbour, where a conspicuous white vessel, which was pointed out to crawley as the _serapis_, lay moored to a quay. then he superintended the loading of his luggage in a cart, and, taking a cab, accompanied it through the dock-yard gates to a shed, where he saw it deposited as per regulation. then he went to the "george," where he had secured a bed, and on entering the coffee-room heard his name uttered in a tone of pleased surprise: "crawley!" "what, buller! how are you, old fellow?" "all right. are you going out in the _serapis_?" "yes; and you?" "yes." "that is jolly. what regiment are you in?" "first battalion blankshire. do you know i got into sandhurst direct the first time i went up!" "of course you did; you would be sure to do anything you really meant; i always said so. i must go and report myself now and see about my detachment, for there are some men going out with me; but we shall meet at dinner." they dined together at a small table by themselves, and had a long talk afterwards about the old weston fellows, of whom buller had recent information through penryhn, who lived near his people at home. "i know about robarts," said crawley; "he is in the oxford eleven; but there is your chum penryhn, what is he doing?" "oh, he is in a government office in somerset house. not a large income, but safe, and rounded off with a pension. better than our line, so far as money goes anyhow." "i suppose so; but i should not like office work. and smith, old algebra, have you heard of him?" "yes, he is mathematical master at a big school." "and gould?" "why, don't you know? it was in all the papers. gould's father smashed and died suddenly; did not leave his family a penny. some friends got lionel gould a clerkship in some counting-house; his sister clarissa, your old friend, you know, supports herself and her mother by the stage." "dear, dear, i am sorry for them; it must be precious hard when they were used to such luxury. and that chap edwards, have you ever heard of him?" "oh, yes, he is at cambridge, and intends to take orders when he gets his degree." "i hope it will keep him out of mischief; i always fancied he might come to grief, he was such a weak beggar." "yes, he was, and is still, i hear. but he has had the luck to get into the clutches of a man who keeps him straight; a fellow as good as gold, and earnest enough to make all the edwardses in the country believe in him." "lucky for edwards; if he marries a stiffish sort of wife with the same opinions he will live and die a saint. saurin would have made the other thing of him. by the by, have you ever heard anything of that fellow?" "not lately. he had a row with his uncle and guardian, and went to australia, i believe; but i have heard nothing of him for years." they chatted late into the night, and when crawley went to bed his heart smote him to remember how little he had thought of his mother. the _serapis_ was to sail on the following day at noon, so when crawley had seen his gunners safely embarked, and the two friends had reported themselves at the little office outside the saloon, had traversed that lofty palatial apartment (how different from the cabins of the old troop-ships!), carefully removing their caps as a placard directed them, had made acquaintance with the little cabin which they were to share together, and had stowed away their minor properties within it, they took a last turn on shore, principally to get one or two little comforts which they had forgotten till then. as they passed a low public-house on their way back to the ship, a remarkably smart corporal of marines came out of it, and since they were in uniform, saluted. but as he did so, he suddenly turned his head away and quickened his pace. crawley and buller looked at one another. "did you recognise him?" "yes." it was saurin. the end. generously made available by the internet archive.) the colonial cavalier or southern life before the revolution by maud wilder goodwin illustrated by harry edwards new york lovell, coryell & company copyright, , by united states book company. _all rights reserved._ contents page preface, his home, sweethearts and wives, his dress, news, trade and travel, his friends and foes, his amusements, his man-servants and his maid-servants, his church, his education, laws, punishments and politics, sickness and death, the colonial cavalier preface two great forces have contributed to the making of the anglo-american character. the types, broadly classed in england as puritan and cavalier, repeated themselves in the new world. on the bleak massachusetts coast, the puritan emigrants founded a race as rugged as their environment. driven by the force of compelling conscience from their homes, they came to the new land, at once pilgrims and pioneers, to rear altars and found homes in the primeval forest. it was not freedom of worship alone they sought, but their own way. they found it and kept it. such a race produced a strong and hardy type of manhood, admirable if not always lovable. but there was another force at work, moulding the national character, a force as persistent, a type as intense as the puritan's own, and its exact opposite. the men who settled the southern colonies, virginia, maryland, and the carolinas, were cavaliers; not necessarily in blood, or even in loyalty to the stuart cause, but cavalier in sympathies, in the general view of life, in virtues and vices. so far as the provinces could represent the mother country, virginia and maryland reflected the cavaliers, as massachusetts and connecticut reflected the puritans. their settlers came, impelled by no religious motives, and driven by no persecution. they lacked, therefore, the bond of a common enthusiasm and the still stronger tie of a common antipathy. above all, they lacked the town-meeting. separated by the necessities of plantation life, they formed a series of tiny kingdoms rather than a democratic community. to the puritan, the village life of scrooby and its like was familiar and therefore dear; but to the southern settlers, the ideal was the great estate of the english gentry whose descendants many of them were. the term, "cavalier," came into vogue in the struggle between charles the first and his parliament, but the type itself was already well-developed in the reign of james, and under the fostering influence of buckingham. a great deal of energy has been wasted in the discussion as to how much of this cavalier blood was found among the early settlers. it is enough that we know that, between the coming of the first adventurers and the restoration, the number of "gentlemen" was sufficient to direct the policy of the state, and color the life of its society. when the earliest colonists left england, the cavalier was at the height of his glory. now he represents a lost cause, "and none so poor to do him reverence." the sceptre of royal authority is shattered; society has grown dull and decorous. even in dress, the puritan has prevailed. the people who speak of cromwell's followers as "roundheads" and "cropped ears," go closer cropped than they, and the costume of a gentleman of to-day is uglier and gloomier than any the puritan ever dreamed of introducing. these concessions of the modern world make the puritan a familiar figure, as he stands out in the page of hawthorne, or on the canvas of boughton. but the cavalier fades into the dim and shadowy background of the past. we cannot afford to have him slip away from us so, if we wish really to understand the history of our country; we must know both sides of its development. hitherto, the real comprehension of the colonial cavalier has been hindered by the florid enthusiasm of the south, and the critical coldness of the north. his admirers have painted him as a theatrical personage, always powdered and be-ruffled, fighting duels as frequently as he changed his dress, living in lordly state in a baronial mansion, or dancing in the brilliant halls of fashion in the season at the capital. all this is, of course, seen to be absurd, as one comes to study the conditions under which he lived. we find the "capital" a straggling village, the "estate" a half-cultivated farm, and the "host of retainers" often but a mob of black slaves, clad in motley, or lying half-naked in the sun. does it follow, then, that the lives of these men are not worth serious study? surely not. it is in the very primitiveness of environment that the chief interest of the study of that early life lies. here were men who brought to the new world a keen appreciation of the luxuries and refined pleasures of life, who had not eschewed them for conscience's sake like the puritan, yet who relinquished them all bravely and cheerfully, to face the hardships and dangers of a pioneer life; and when their descendants, growing rich with the increasing prosperity of the country, had once more surrounded themselves with beautiful homes and wide acres, they too stood ready to sacrifice them all at the call of liberty. if we would understand washington, and jefferson, and the lees, george mason, and john randolph, we must study them as the "autocrat" tells us we should all be studied, for at least a century before birth. the colonial cavalier must be painted, like a rembrandt, with high lights and deep shadows. it is idle to ignore his weaknesses or his vices. they are of the kind that insist on notice. yet, with all his faults, he will surely prove well worth our serious consideration, and however wide we open our eyes to his defects, however we seek to brush away the illusions with which tinsel hero-worship has surrounded him, we shall still find him, judged as he has a right to be, at his best, closely approaching lowell's definition of a gentleman: "a man of culture, a man of intellectual resources, a man of public spirit, a man of refinement, with that good taste which is the conscience of the mind, and that conscience which is the good taste of the soul." this little volume makes no pretensions to the dignity of a history. it aims only, through local gossip and homely details of life and customs, to open a side-door, through which we may, perchance, gain a sense of fireside intimacy with _the colonial cavalier_. his home [illustration: the colonial cavalier his home] i stood in the wide hall of the old brick mansion built, a century and a half ago, by "king carter," on the shore of the james river. it was autumn. the doors at either end of the saloon were open, and their casements framed the landscape like a picture. from the foot of the moss-grown steps at the rear, the drive stretched its length, under several closed gates, for half a mile, till it joined the little travelled high-road. from the porch in front, the ground fell away, in what had once been a series of terraces, to the brink of the river, across whose western hills the november sun was setting red. not a ripple stirred the surface of the water--the dead leaves on the ground never rustled. all was still; solitary, yet not melancholy. the place seemed apart from the present--a part of the past. within doors, everything was mellowed by the softening touch of twilight and age. the hospitable fire which blazed in the great throat of the library chimney, cast odd shadows on the high wainscot, and the delicately wrought mouldings over the chimney-breast, and its reflections danced in the small panes of the heavily framed windows as though the witches were making tea outside. the dark staircase wound upward in the centre of the hallway, its handrail hacked by the swords of soldiers in the revolution. as i glanced at it, and then out along the long avenue, i seemed to see tarleton's scarlet-clad dragoons dashing up to surround the house. then, as i turned westward, imagination travelled still further into the past, and pictured the slow approach of a british packet, gliding peacefully up to the little wharf down yonder, to discharge its household freight of tea and spices, of india muslins and "callamancoes" before it proceeded on its way to the town of williamsburg, a few miles farther up the river. at the period of which i was dreaming, williamsburg was the capital of the province, with a wide street named in honor of the duke of gloucester, and a college named after their late majesties, william and mary, with a jolly raleigh tavern and a stately governor's palace; but all this had come about some fifty years before the building of _carter's grove_. [illustration: hall in carter's grove james river va.] in the middle of the seventeenth century it was far more primitive,--indeed, it was not williamsburg at all, but only "the middle plantation," with a few pioneer houses surrounded by primeval forests, from which savage red faces now and then peered out, to the terror of the settlers; while at nightfall the heavy wooden shutters had been closed, lest the firelight should prove a shining mark for the indian's arrow. if the traveller found williamsburg in the eighteenth century "a straggling village," and its mansions "houses of very moderate pretensions," what would he have thought of those first modest homes, where the horse-trough was the family wash-basin; where stools and benches, hung against the wall, constituted the furniture; where the kitchen-table served for dining-table as well, and was handsomely set out with bowls, trenchers, and noggins of wood, with gourds and squashes daintily cut, to add color to the meal; while the family was counted well off that could muster a few spoons, and a plate or two of shining pewter! but those pioneers and their wives felt pride in their little homes, for they realized how favorably they contrasted with the cabins built at "james cittie" by wingfield and smith and their fellow-adventurers. they had indeed more cause for honest pride than the stay-at-homes in england could ever realize, for such knew nothing of the infinite toil and the difficulty of founding a settlement in a new country, thousands of miles from civilization, with forests to be cleared and savages to be fought, turbulent followers to be ruled, and food, shelter, and clothing to be provided. no sooner were the "ancient planters," as the chronicles call the first settlers, fairly ashore on their island, than the company at home opened its battery of advice upon them: "seeing order is at the same price with confusion," the secretary wrote, setting down a very dubious proposition as an aphorism, "it shall be advisably done to set your houses even and by a line, that your streets may have a good breadth, and be carried square about your market-place, and every street's end opening into it, that from thence, with a few field-pieces, you may command every street throughout; which market-place you may also fortify, _if you think it needful_." it must have seemed grimly humorous to those pioneers, huddling their cabins together within the shelter of the wooden fence, dignified by the name of a palisade, and mounted with all the guns they could muster, to be thus advised from a distance of three thousand miles to construct at once a model english village, and fortify the market-place, _if they thought best_. an italian proverb has it that "it is easy to threaten a bull from a window," and so the virginia company found no difficulty in regulating the affairs of the colonists and the indians, from their window in london. the settlers paid as little heed as possible to their interference, and struggled on through the sickness and the starving-time, as best they could, clearing away the brush, and felling trees, and putting up houses. but building went on so slowly that in , "in james cittie were only those houses that sir thomas gates built in the tyme of his government ( ), with one wherein the governor allwayes dwelt, and a church built wholly at the charge of the inhabitants of the citye, of timber, being fifty foote in length and twenty in breadth." the report from the town of henrico was still less encouraging, for there were found only "three old houses, a poor ruinated church, with some few poore buildings on the islande." yet, in spite of hindrances and drawbacks, the colony prospered. lord de la warre reported that all the enterprise needed was "a few honest laborers burdened with children"; and such alluring inducements were held out to immigrants, that i cannot understand how the london poor, swarming in their black alleys, could resist the invitation to come over to a land where pure air and plenty were to be had for nothing. ralph hamor wrote home: "the affairs of the colony being so well ordered and the hardest tasks already overpast, that whosoever, now or hereafter, shall happily arrive there, shall finde a handsome house of some four roomes or more, if he have a family, to repose himselfe in, rent-free, and twelve english acres of ground adjoining thereunto, very strongly impailed; which ground is only allotted unto him for roots, gardaine-herbs and corne; neither shall he need to provide himselfe victuals. he shall have for himselfe and family a competent twelvemonths' provision delivered unto him." in addition to all this, the colonist was to be furnished with tools of all sorts, and "for his better subsistence, he shall have poultry and swine, and if he prefer, a goate or two, and perhaps a cowe given him." i am at a loss to understand why all england did not emigrate at once to the land where such a gift-enterprise was on foot. perhaps the readers distrusted hamor's authority; perhaps they thought some extraordinary risks or dangers must lurk behind such fair promises, and when the indian massacre came, they possibly nodded their wise heads and said, "i told you so." the agent of the maryland company worked on a very different system from this gilded virginia offer. he published a pamphlet giving detailed directions to "intending settlers." they were not to depend on the resources of the colony, even for the first year, but to bring with them laborers and watch-dogs, grains and seeds of all kinds, and meal enough to last while their houses were a-building. [illustration] i find that i gain the best idea of what these first houses in america were like, by asking myself how i should have built, in the conditions under which the settlers worked, dropped down in a little forest-clearing, the ocean before and the indians behind, with few and imperfect tools, and with a pressure all the while of securing food for to-day, and sowing grain for to-morrow. i am sure i should have put up a shelter of the rudest kind that could be trusted to withstand the winds of autumn, and the storms of winter. i should not have planed my beams, nor matched my floorboards. only my doors and shutters i should have made both strong and stout, to meet the gales from the sea, or a sudden dash from lurking savages in the bush. this i find, therefore, without surprise, was just what the settlers did. they divided the house into a kitchen and a bedroom, with a shed joined on for the goats and pigs, or, if the owner were so lucky, a cow. their chimneys were chiefly constructed out of twigs plastered on both sides with clay, which dried in the sun, and served for some time, before it crumbled again to dust. as there were no mills, the corn-grinding had to be done at home; so the settlers, learning the trick from the indians, improvised a mortar, by burning out the stump of a tree into a hollow, and hanging over it a log, suspended from the limb of a tree close at hand, for a pestle. this was hard work, and the grinding in the little hand-mills brought from england was scarcely easier. a dying man, leaving his children to their uncle's care, expressly stipulated that they should not be put to the drudgery of pounding corn. [illustration] within the house, stood the great and small wheels for wool and flax, the carding-comb and the moulds for making those candles, of green myrtleberry wax which, as beverly writes, "are never greasie to the touch, nor melt with lying in the hottest weather. neither does the snuff of these ever offend the smell, like that of a tallow-candle; but instead of being disagreeable, if an accident puts a candle out, it yields a pleasant fragrancy to all that are in the room, insomuch that nice people often put them out on purpose to have the incense of the expiring snuff." it was no pitiable life that those pioneers lived, even in those most primitive days. their out-of-door existence was full of a wild charm, and their energy soon improved conditions indoors. every ship from england brought over conveniences and luxuries. the cabin was exchanged for a substantial house. first pewter, and then silver plate began to shine on sideboards of polished oak. four-post bedsteads decorated the sleeping rooms, and tapestry curtains kept out the cold. a maryland record of tells of a bargain between t. wilford and paul sympson, by which, in consideration of twenty thousand pounds of tobacco received from sympson, wilford agrees to support him for the rest of his life "like a gentleman." this gentleman-like provision consisted of a house fifteen feet square, with a welsh chimney, and lined with riven boards; a handsome joined bedstead, bedding and curtains; one small table, six stools, and three wainscot chairs; a servant to wait on him; meat, apparel, and washing; and every year an anker (ten gallons) of drams, one tierce of sack, and a case of english spirits for his own use. it is hard to imagine what more of luxury, an annuity could furnish to a gentleman of the nineteenth century, if indeed heaven had blessed him with a stomach capable of consuming such an "intolerable deal of sack." the next fifty years still further increased the elegance of living; and style as well as comfort began to be considered. in an inventory of household goods belonging to a virginian in , i find included, "a feather-bed, one sett kitterminster curtains, and vallens bedstead, one pair white linen sheets with two do. pillow biers, rusha-leather chaires, rush-bottom chaires, a burning glass, a flesk fork, and alchemy spoones" (alchemy being a mixed metal, originally supposed to be gold made by magic). in addition to these articles, the list includes a brass skimer and pairs of pot-hooks, and, as its crowning glory, " old silver dram-cup." no doubt the possessor had sat with his boon companions on many a cold night, by the great chimney, plunging the hot poker into the fire.-- "and nursed the loggerhead, whose hissing dip, timed by nice instinct, creamed the mug of flip." the house of a planter in virginia at the end of the seventeenth century, was substantial and comfortable. the inventory of such a planter mentions, as belonging to the homestead, a "parlor chamber, chamber over sd. chamber, chamber over the parlor, nursery, old nursery, room over the ladyes chamber, ladyes chamber, entry, store, home house quarter, home house, quarter over the creek, smiths shopp, barne, kitchen, dary, chamber over the old dary, flemings quarter, robinsons quarter, whitakers quarter, black wallnut quarter." by this time, the house of the rich in the towns boasted a parlor, but its furnishing was of the simplest. a white floor sprinkled with clean white sand, large tables, and heavy high-backed chairs of solid, dark oak decorated a parlor enough for anybody, says the chronicler of baltimore. william fitzhugh directs mistress sarah bland in london ( ) to procure him a suit of tapestry hangings for a room twenty feet long, sixteen feet wide, and nine feet high; "and half a dozen chairs suitable." the kitchen had long ago been separated from the dining-room, and, in the better houses, set off in a separate building, that its odours might not fill the other rooms when warm weather made open doors and windows necessary. the dining-room, with its broad buffet, its well-filled cellarette, its silver plate, and its quaint old english furniture, was generally the pleasantest room in the house. opening out of the dining-room, between it and the parlor, ran the wide hall, with doors at either end, with carved stairway and panelled walls, often hung with family portraits. early in the eighteenth century, spotswood came over as governor of virginia, and a new era of more elaborate living was introduced. his "palace" at williamsburg, according to the contemporary report of the reverend hugh jones--not to be taken, however, without a grain of salt--was "a magnificent structure, built at the publick expense, furnished and beautified with gates, fine gardens, offices, walks, a fine canal, orchards, etc," and most impressive of all, in those days, when sir christopher wren set the architectural fashions, "a cupola or lanthorn" illuminated on the king's birthnight, or other festival occasion. at germanna, a little settlement of germans clustered round the spotswood iron-works, the governor built him a house so fine that colonel byrd speaks of it as _the enchanted castle_, and has left an amusing account of a visit he made him there. "i arrived," he says, "about three o'clock, and found only mrs. spotswood at home. i was carried into a room elegantly set off with pier glasses, the largest of which came soon after to an odd misfortune. amongst other favorite animals that cheered this lady's solitude, a brace of tame deer ran familiarly about the house, and one of them came to stare at me as a stranger. but unluckily, spying his own figure in the glass, he made a spring over the tea-table that stood under it and shattered the glass to pieces, and, falling back upon the tea-table, made a terrible fracas." what a change is here, from the hewn timbers and bare walls and wooden trenchers of the pioneer, to enchanted castles and mirrors, and china and tea-tables! this colonel byrd, who writes so genially of his visit to germanna, was a typical cavalier--not godly, but manly--with a keen enjoyment of a jest, as the pucker at the corners of the lips in his portrait clearly shows, with a hearty good-will toward his neighbor and especially his neighbor's wife, with a fine, healthy appetite, and a zest for all good things to eat and drink. in his boundary-line trip to carolina and his journey to the mines, he smacks his lips over the fat things that fall in his way. now it is a prime rasher of bacon, fricasseed in rum; now a capacious bowl of bombo. in one and the same paragraph, he tells how he commended his family to the care of the almighty, fortified himself with a beefsteak, and kissed his landlady for good luck, before setting out on his travels. roughing it in camp, he dreams of the fine breakfast he will make on a fat doe, and a two-year-old bear, killed over night. at a stopping-place he records, "our landlady cherished us with roast-beef and chicken-pie." having eaten these with a relish, he pours down a basin of chocolate, wishes peace to that house, and takes up his line of march for home. there is something refreshing to our jaded generation in the hearty enjoyment that our ancestors took in their food. i am struck in all these old gastronomic records with the immense amount of meat, in proportion to the vegetables used. no wonder gout was a common disease, and the overheated blood needed to be reduced by cupping and leeching. the out-of-door life, the riding and hunting of maryland and virginia, enabled the men to eat freely and drink deep, and the southern table was always lavishly provided. a foreigner having remarked of mrs. madison that her table was like a harvest-home, she replied that, as the profusion which amused the visitor was the outgrowth of her country's prosperity, she was quite willing to sacrifice european elegance to virginia liberality. good housekeeping in those days consisted chiefly in setting a bountiful table, and the colonial dame, in spite of her troop of servants, was kept busy in planning the meals, the breakfasts of hot bread and griddle-cakes, the afternoon dinner, and "the bite before bedtime." to her it fell, to carry the keys, to portion out the rations for the negro quarters, and to lay aside the materials from which the turbanned queen of the kitchen should compound the savory sausage, the fried chicken, the sauces, and dumplings, and cakes, which have made southern cooking famous. the domestic life of women on those old plantations must have been rather monotonous. the travellers who visited them, describe them as sharing little in the amusements of their husbands, and brothers, and sons. chastellux says that, like the english, they are very fond of their _infants_, but care little for their _children_; but the annals and biographies do not bear out his statement. george wythe learned his greek at home, from a testament, while his mother held an english copy in her hand and prompted him as he went on. john mason, too, bore through life the impress of his mother's influence. he was only seven years old when she died, yet through life, "mother's room" was perfectly distinct to him, the old chest of drawers distinguished as _gown_ drawer, _shirt_ drawer, and _jacket_ drawer, the closet known as mistress' closet, containing his mother's dresses, and another cupboard, known as _the_ closet, in which hung a small green horsewhip with a silver head, carried by mrs. mason when she rode, and on other occasions used for purposes of correction, so that the children nicknamed it "the green doctor." an old letter recalls another "mother's room" in those eighteenth-century days: "on one side sits the chambermaid with her knitting; on the other a little colored pet, learning to sew. an old decent woman is there, with her table and shears, cutting out the negroes' winter clothes, while the old lady directs them all, incessantly knitting." home, rather than church, was the sacred spot to the colonial cavalier, in spite of his theoretical reverence for mother church. it was at home that most of the baptisms and funerals occurred, and hugh jones complains that "in houses also they most commonly marry, without regard to the time of the day, or season of the year." the central idea of the puritan religion was fear of god; the centre of the cavalier's religion was love of man. from this root sprung a radiant cheerfulness, an open-handed liberality, and an unbounded hospitality. if it be true that the best ornaments of a house are its guests, never were houses more brilliantly decorated than those southern mansions. the names of brandon, and berkeley, and westover, and mont clare, and doughoregan call up the procession of guests who have walked, and danced, and dined, and slept under their roofs. we see stately men, in lace and ruffles, pacing the minuet with powdered dames, in "teacup time of hood and hoop, and when the patch was worn." we see lovers and maidens, brides and bridegrooms spending the honeymoon under the sheltering trees, and patriot continentals arming in their halls for the struggle with the enemies of their country. [illustration] not the lofty alone, but the lowly as well, could claim a welcome at those always open doors. indians, half-breeds, and leather-clad huntsmen hung round the kitchen of greenaway court, while washington and lord fairfax dined in the saloon. not even acquaintance was considered necessary to ensure a cordial reception. "the inhabitants," wrote beverly, "are very courteous to travellers, who need no other recommendation than being human creatures. a stranger has no more to do but to inquire upon the road where any gentleman or good housekeeper lives, and there he may depend upon being received with hospitality. this good-nature is so general among their people, that the gentry, when they go abroad, order their principal servants to entertain all visitors with everything the plantation affords; and the poor planters who have but one bed, will often sit up, or lie upon a form, or couch, all night, to make room for a weary traveller to repose himself after his journey." in winter, the fire blazed high on the hearth, and the toddy hissed in the noggin; in summer, the basket of fruit stood in the breeze-swept hall, and lightly clad black boys tripped in, bearing cool tankards of punch and sangaree. the guest need only enter in, to be at home. no one was considered so contemptible, as he who consented to receive money for entertaining visitors. keeping an inn or "ordinary" was looked upon askance, and the law dealt with the proprietor rigorously, as with one who probably would cheat if he got a chance. his charges were carefully regulated, and he was subject to fine, and even imprisonment, if he went beyond them. a maryland statute provides that "noe ordinary-keeper within this province shall at any time charge anything to account for boles of punch, but shall only sell the severall ingredients to the said mixture according to the rates before in this act ascertained." a traveller, in those good old days, might ride from maryland to georgia, and never put up at an ordinary at all, sure, whenever he wished to stop by the way, of a cordial welcome at a private house. some planters even kept negroes posted at their gate, to give warning of a rider's approach, that he might be invited in, and that the household might be in readiness to receive him. such promiscuous hospitality could only exist in a community with a happy faculty for taking life easily, an ability to dispense with the slavery to method, and to be contented though things went wrong. the fastidious european found some of the manners and customs a little trying. "in private houses as well as inns," writes a traveller, "several people are crowded together in the same room; and in the latter it very commonly happens that after you have been some time in bed, a stranger of any condition comes into the room, pulls off his clothes, and places himself without ceremony between your sheets." another visitor says that the virginia houses are spacious, but the apartments are not commodious, "and they make no ceremony of putting three or four persons into the same room, nor do these make any objections to being thus heaped together." the colonial cavalier was gregarious by nature. he was warmly social, and, being so much shut off by plantation life from intercourse with his fellows, he welcomed a guest as a special providence, to relieve the monotony of his life. the gentleman-planter in affluent circumstances had nothing to do, and he did it in a very leisurely way. his occupations were such as could be shared by a guest. an observant traveller has left us a vivid picture of the daily routine of such an individual: "he rises about nine o'clock. he may perhaps make an excursion to walk as far as his stable to see his horses, which is seldom more than fifty yards from his house. he returns to breakfast between nine and ten, which is generally tea or coffee, bread and butter, and very thin slices of venison, ham, or hung beef. he then lies down on a pallet on the floor in the coolest room in the house, in his shirt and trousers only, with a negro at his head, and another to fan him and keep off the flies. between twelve and one, he takes a draught of toddy or bombo, a liquor composed of water, sugar, rum and nutmeg, which is made weak, and kept cool. he dines between two and three, and at every table, whatever else there may be, a ham and greens, or cabbage, is always a standing dish. at dinner he drinks cider, toddy, punch, port, claret, and madeira, which is generally excellent here. having drunk some few glasses of wine after dinner, he returns to his pallet, with his two blacks to fan him, and continues to drink toddy or sangaree all the afternoon. he does not always drink tea. between nine and ten in the evening, he eats a light supper of milk and fruit or wine, sugar and fruit, etc., and almost immediately retires to bed for the night." all this sounds as if smyth must have made his visit to virginia in midsummer, and fancied that the habits were the same all the year round, as in that semi-tropical season. as a picture, it is truer of carolina than of any section farther north. as we go south we find the character more indolent, the energies more relaxed, and even the houses changing their expression. the stately brick manor-houses, modelled on the english mansion, with their deep mullioned windows and heavy doors, give place to italian villas, with white pillars and porches gleaming from their green points of land up and down the rivers. under this shady porch the planter might lie at his ease, watching the boats on the streams as they come and go, and breathing the perfume from the garden at his feet. the garden of those days was laid out also on the italian pattern, in shapes of horseshoes, or stars, or palm-leaves, with avenues leading down bordered by tulips trees, with box-hedged paths, wherein corydon and phyllis might wander, quite hidden from the lounger on the portico. in its centre stood often a summer-house, where successive generations plighted troth, and exchanged love-tokens. everything about the garden, as about the house, suggested england. the lawn was sown with the seed of the silvery grass, so familiar in the great english parks. even birds were imported from the mother country. when spotswood came over, he brought with him a number of larks to delight his ears with their familiar strain, but either the climate was unpropitious, or the stronger native birds resented the coming of the foreigners, for the larks died out, and left only here and there a lonely descendant to startle the traveller as he rode along the solitary forest roads at sunrise, with a flow of melody that called up the leafy lanes of the old home. [illustration] sweethearts and wives [illustration: sweetehearts _and_ wives] the first settlers in america had no homes, for the first requisite for a home is a wife. they soon learned that "a better half, alone, gives better quarters." the indian squaws were almost the only women known to the voyagers on the _susan constant_ and her sister ships; and though the adventurers wrote home in glowing terms of their dusky charms, they looked askance upon the idea of marriage with the heathen natives. we cannot help, however, echoing the sentiments of colonel byrd of westover, when he says: "morals and all considered, i can't think the indians much greater heathens than the first adventurers," who, he adds, "had they been good christians, would have had the charity to take this only method of converting the natives to christianity. for, after all that can be said, a sprightly lover is the most prevailing missionary that can be sent amongst these, or any other infidels. besides," he proceeds candidly, "the poor indians would have had less reason to complain that the english took away their lands, if they had received them by way of portion with their daughters." it was, in truth, a great benefit both to the english and to the indians, when "bright-stream-between-two-hills"--called in the native dialect "pocahontas"--married john rolfe, with the approbation of both races. to this union some of the proudest families in virginia trace their descent. poor little princess! the first romance of america casts its pathetic charm around you. however apocryphal the legend of your saving smith's life, it is hard to resist the impression of your cherishing a sentimental attachment for the gallant captain, and a suspicion that you were tricked into a marriage with rolfe. smith records a sad interview with pocahontas when she was being lionized, under the name of lady rebecca, as a royal visitor in london. "being about this time preparing to set sail for new england," he writes, "i could not stay to do her that service i desired, and she well deserved; but, hearing she was at bradford with divers of my friends, i went to see her. after a modest salutation without any bow, she turned about, obscured her face as not seeming well contented. but not long after, she began to talk, and remembered me well what courtesies she had done, saying: 'you did promise powhatan what was yours should be his, and he the like to you; you called him father--being in his land a stranger--and by the same reason so must i doe you.'" smith objects on the ground of her royal lineage, which had well-nigh brought rolfe to grief, and she responds: "were you not afraid to come into my father's countrie and cause feare in him and all his people but mee, and feare you here i should call you father? i tell you then i will; and you shall call me childe; and soe will i be forever and ever your countrieman. they did tell me always you were dead, and i knew no other till i came to plymouth. yet powhatan did command ottamatomakkin to seek you and know the truth, because your countriemen will lie much." so ended the parting; and soon afterward the poor little princess died a stranger in a strange land. "she came to gravesend, to her end and grave." the first english wedding on american soil was solemnized between john laydon, a laborer, and anne buras, maid to mistress forest. they were "marry'd together" in . eleven years later came a ship bearing "ye maides," a company of ninety young women, "pure and uncorrupt," sent over to virginia, at the expense of the company in london, to be married to such settlers as were able and willing to support them, and to refund to the company the cost of passage. a little later, sixty more "maides" followed; and though the cost of a wife rose from a hundred and twenty, to a hundred and fifty pounds of tobacco, there was no slackening in the demand. in maryland, as late as , the market was equally brisk. "the first planters," says the record, "were so far from expecting money with a woman, that 'twas a common thing for them to buy a deserving wife, that carried good testimonials of her character, at the price of a hundred pound, and make themselves believe they had a bargain." we read of an adventurous young lady of some social consequence, being a niece of daniel defoe, who, suffering from an unfortunate love-affair in england, ran away from home, and came to maryland as a "redemptioner." her services were engaged by a farmer named job, in cecil county, and soon after, according to a frequent custom of the country, she married into the family of her employer. a maryland record of november , , runs thus: "this day came william lewis, planter, and made oath that he is not recontracted to any other woman than ursula gifford; and that there is no impediment why he should not be married to the said ursula gifford--and, further, he acknowledged himself to owe unto the lord proprietary a thousand pounds of tobacco, in case there be any precontract or other lawful impediment whatsoever, as aforesaid, either on the part of william lewis or ursula gifford." this arrangement of making the bridegroom responsible for the good faith of the lady as well as his own, is quite refreshing in these days of equal rights and responsibilities. the woman's rights question, however, was at the front in maryland, in the seventeenth century; and the strong-minded woman who introduced it, was mistress margaret brent, cousin to governor calvert, who had such confidence in her business sagacity and ability, that he appointed her his executrix, with the brief instructions, "take all: pay all." she made application to the maryland assembly to grant her a vote in the house for herself, and another as his lordship's attorney. the request was peremptorily refused by governor greene; but, nothing daunted, "the sd. mrs brent protested against all proceedings in this present assembly unlesse shee may be present and have a vote as aforesaid." another woman of force in those days was virlinda stone. in the maryland archives still exists a letter from her to lord baltimore, praying for an investigation of a fight in anne arundel county, during which her husband was wounded. at the end of the business-like document, she adds a fiery and altogether feminine postscript, in which she declares that "hemans, the master of the _golden lion_, is a very knave: and that will be made plainly for to appeare to your lordship, for he hath abused my husband most grossly." such women as these were not to be trifled with. no wonder alsop says: "all complimental courtships drest up in critical rarities are meer strangers to them. plain wit comes nearest to their genius; so that he that intends to court a maryland girle, must have something more than the tautologies of a long-winded speech to carry on his design, or else he may fall under the contempt of her frown and his own windy discourse." the virginia women were as high-spirited as their maryland sisters. they had no idea of being commanded into matrimony. when governor nicholson became infatuated with one of the fair daughters of master lewis burwell and demanded her hand with royally autocratic manner, neither she nor her parents were disposed to comply. the suitor became furious, and persisted for years in his determination, which seems to have been as much a matter of pride, as of sentiment. he took pains to wreak his wrath on every one who opposed the match, going so far as to threaten the lives of the unwilling young woman's father and brother. to commissary blair he declared that, if she married any one but himself, he would cut the throats of three men--the bridegroom, the minister, and the justice who issued the license. strangely enough, the damsel was not attracted by this wild wooing; and, as a candid friend wrote to the furious lover, "it is not here, as in some barbarous countries, where the tender lady is dragged into the sultan's arms reeking with the blood of her relatives." though this affair created such a stir throughout the colony of virginia and lasted so long a time, no record has remained of the young heroine's after fate, except the fact that she did not become lady nicholson; not even her christian name has come down to posterity, to whom she remains a shadowy divinity. a noticeable feature of colonial life in virginia, is the belleship of widows. the girls seem to have stood no chance against their fascinations. washington, and jefferson, and madison each married one. in the preceding century, sir william berkeley, who had brought no lady with him across the water, was taken captive by a young widow of warwick county, a certain dame frances stevens, who, after thirty-two years of married life, being again left a widow by berkeley's death, wedded with her late husband's secretary, philip ludwell--holding fast, however, to her title of lady berkeley. lord culpeper writes in a letter of , "my lady berkeley is married to mr. ludwell; and thinks no more of our world." it is to be hoped that the secretary whom the lady took for her third husband, proved a more amiable companion than the fiery old governor, whose pride and bitter obstinacy wrought such havoc after bacon's rebellion, that the reports of his cruelties echoed to the shores of england. edmund cheesman, a follower of bacon's, being brought up for trial, berkeley asked him: "why did you engage in bacon's designs?" before cheesman could answer, his young wife, falling on her knees, exclaimed: "my provocation made my husband join in the cause for which bacon contended. but for me he had never done what he has done. let me bear the punishment, but let my husband be pardoned!" where was the chivalry of that cavalier blood on which berkeley prided himself? we read that her prayer availed her husband nothing, and procured only insult to herself. our sympathy with bacon, in his rebellion against berkeley's tyranny, makes us doubly regretful that he should have stained his career by a deed of cowardice and cruelty. it was one of those blunders worse than crimes, and gave him and his followers the contemptuous appellation of "white aprons." when bacon made his sudden turn on sir william berkeley, he established his headquarters at _green spring_, berkeley's own mansion. there he threw up breastworks in front of his palisades, and then sent out detachments of horsemen, who scoured the country and brought back to camp the wives of prominent berkeleyites. among these dames were madam bray, madam page, madam ballard, and madam bacon--the last, the wife of the rebel's kinsman. bacon then sent one of the dames to the town under a flag of truce, to inform the husbands that he intended to place them in front of his men while he constructed his earthworks. "the poor gentlewomen were mightily astonished, and neather were their husbands void of amazement at this subtile invention. the husbands thought it indeed wonderful that their innocent and harmless wives should thus be entered a white garde to the divell"--the _divell_, of course, being general bacon, who, thus protected by _the white aprons_, finished his fortifications in security; gaining a reputation for "subtility," but tarnishing his character for gallantry. as society grew more stable, it grew also more complex. the buying of wives gave way to sentimental courtships, and men also began to learn the advantages of a single life. in maryland so many took this view, that we find the old statutes imposing a tax on bachelors over twenty-five years of age, of five shillings, for estates under three hundred pounds sterling, or twenty shillings when over; a tax which seems to have been more successful as a means of raising money than of promoting matrimony; for we find the record of its payment by a surprising number of bachelors, st. ann's parish vestry-books alone showing thirty-four such derelicts. perhaps, however, this celibacy did not indicate so much aversion to marriage, as inability to meet the growing demands for luxury. the obstinate bachelors may have felt with regard to matrimony as alsop did with regard to liberty, that "without money it is like a man opprest with the gout--every step he takes forward puts him to pain." the abbé robin at a later day says of annapolis: "female luxury here exceeds what is known in the provinces of france. a french hair-dresser is a man of importance; it is said a certain dame here, hires one of that craft at a thousand crowns a year salary." the very rumors of such extravagance must have frightened frugal young men! the colonial maiden came into society and married, at an age which now seems surprisingly early. chief-justice marshall met and fell in love with his wife when she was fourteen, and married her at sixteen. an unmarried woman of over twenty-five, was looked upon as a hopeless and confirmed old maid and spoken of, like miss wilkins, of boston, as "a pitiable spectacle." it may be that this extreme youth of the maids explains the attraction of the widows, who had more social experience. burnaby writes in a very unhandsome manner of his impressions of the virginia ladies whom he met in his american tour, and generalizes with true british freedom on slight acquaintance with the facts. he admits grudgingly that the women of virginia are handsome, "though not to be compared with our fair countrywomen in england. they have but few advantages, and consequently are seldom accomplished. this makes them reserved and unequal to any interesting or refined conversation. they are immoderately fond of dancing, and, indeed, it is almost the only amusement they partake of; but even in this, they discover great want of taste and elegance, and seldom appear with that gracefulness and ease which these movements are so calculated to display. toward the close of an evening, when the company are pretty well tired with contra-dances, it is usual to dance jigs--a practice originally borrowed, i am informed, from the negroes. the virginia ladies, excepting these amusements, and now and then a party of pleasure into the woods to partake of a barbecue, cheerfully spend their time in sewing and taking care of their families." another traveller makes a better report, and draws more favorable conclusions. "young women are affable with young men in america," he writes, "and married women are reserved, and their husbands are not as familiar with the girls as they were, when bachelors. if a young man were to take it into his head that his betrothed should not be free and gay in her social intercourse, he would run the risk of being discarded, incur the reputation of jealousy, and would find it very difficult to get married. yet if a single woman were to play the coquette, she would be regarded with contempt. as this innocent freedom between the sexes diminishes in proportion as society loses its purity and simplicity of manners, as is the case in cities, i desire sincerely that our good virginia ladies may long retain their liberty entire." the colonial age was the day of elaborate compliment. gentlemen took time to turn their sentences and polish them neatly, and ladies heard them to the end without suggesting by a word or glance that the climax had been foreseen for the last five minutes, at least. an essay on _woman_, by a certain mr. thomas, had a great vogue in the eighteenth century, and antedated tupper's poems as a well of sentimental quotation. _the spectator_ and _the tattler_ gave the tone to society literature, and enabled the provincial dame to reflect accurately the lady betty modish of london. the beaux, too, took many a leaf from _the spectator_ in the study of a compliment. when i read of the colonial maiden poring over the tiny glaze-paper note accompanying a book entitled "the art of loving"--in which the writer declares it to be "most convenient, presenting the _art of loving_ to one who so fully possesses the _art of pleasing_"--i am carried back to the days of sir charles grandison. there is a marked contrast in the social chronicles of the eighteenth century at home and abroad, between what the gentlemen said _to_ the ladies and what they said _about_ them. that wicked colonel byrd, for instance, after making himself agreeable to governor spotswood's ladies the whole evening, writes in his journal that their conversation was "like whip sillabub--very pretty, but with nothing in it." again he describes himself patronizingly as "prattling with the ladies after a nine o'clock supper." yet, underneath all the superficial bowing and scraping of courtesy and compliment, and the jesting asides at the expense of the fair sex, it must be set down to the cavalier's credit that he treated womankind with a great tenderness and respect. woman's influence made itself felt in private and in public--in the council, in the virginia house of burgesses, and in the assemblies of maryland and of carolina. the pride and folly of governor tryon of carolina led him to make a demand on the assembly for an extensive appropriation for the building of a palace at newbern suitable for the residence of a royal governor. to obtain this appropriation, lady tryon and her sister, the beautiful esther wake, used all their blandishments. lady tryon gave brilliant balls and dinners, and her sister's bright eyes rained influence to such good purpose, that the first appropriation and as much more was granted, and the palace was pronounced the most magnificent structure in america. the palace is fallen--its marble mantels, its colonnades, its carved staircases are in ruins; but the name of beautiful esther wake is preserved in wake county. the chronicles of the carolinas are full of romance. here, at cross creek, dwelt flora macdonald, the heroic rescuer of the pretender after the disasters of culloden. it seems a strange chance that brought her from such exciting masquerades, from the companionship of kings and the rôle of heroine on the stage of the great world, to the pioneer's cottage in the wild woods of the western wilderness. the only drawback to her career in eighteenth century eyes was that she married and lived happy ever after. the romance of that day demanded a broken heart, and tragedy was always in high favor. every locality had its story of blighted love and life. the dismal swamp, lying on the border between virginia and maryland, was a sort of gretna green, where many runaway marriages were celebrated. tradition tells of a lover whose sweetheart died suddenly; and he, driven mad by grief, fancied that she had gone to the dismal swamp, where he perished in the search for her. when tom moore was in this country he was impressed by the legend, and set it thus to the music--let us not dare to say the jingle--of his verse: they made her a grave too cold and damp for a soul so warm and true, and she's gone to the lake of the dismal swamp, where all night long, by her fire-fly lamp she paddles her white canoe. and her fire-fly lamp i soon shall see, her paddle i soon shall hear. long and loving our life shall be, and i'll hide the maid in a cypress tree, when the footsteps of death draw near. real life had its tragedies, too. in the deep wainscoted hall of the brandon mansion hangs a portrait of lovely evelyn byrd. she sits on a green bank, with a handful of roses and a shepherd's crook in her lap--her soft, dark eyes look out in pensive sadness as though they could, if they would, tell the story of a maiden's heart and a life ended untimely by unhappy love. one story says she broke her heart for parke custis, who left her to wear the willow, and married afterward the martha dandridge, who in the whirligig of time became lady washington. another rumor connects her name with that of the earl of peterborough, who loved her deeply, so the story runs; but his creed was not hers, and her father, colonel byrd, would not consent to the marriage. the maiden yielded to her father's will, but pined away and died; and there, in the westover burying-ground, she lies under a ponderous stone, which records this epitaph: "alas, reader, we can detain nothing, however valued, from unrelenting death, beauty, fortune, or exalted honour-- see here a proof!" [illustration: "brandon," james river, va.] i cannot help feeling that all these might have been detained on earth to a ripe age, had the maiden been left free to decide the most important question of her life to her liking; for, in a letter written by colonel byrd when evelyn was a slip of a girl, i read concerning the maiden, "she has grown a great romp and enjoys robust health." yet a few years later, the robust romp has faded to a shadow, and is laid away in the family graveyard, and only her portrait by sir godfrey kneller, remains to appeal to the sentiment and sympathy of posterity. the gentle evelyn byrd was not the only one whom the traditions of the colonial cavalier credit with carrying to the grave a heart scarred with the wounds of unhappy love. lord fairfax, who lived to be over sixty and kept open house at belvoir, where washington visited him and kept him company in riding to hounds over hill and dale; lord fairfax--with his gaunt, tall frame; his gray, near-sighted eyes, and prominent aquiline nose, little outward resemblance as he might bear to the original of the almond-eyed portrait at brandon--resembled her at least in a wounded heart and a broken career. in his youth, this solitary virginia recluse had been a brilliant man-about-town in the gay world of london. he had held a commission in "the blues"; he had known the famous men of the day, he had dabbled in literature, and contributed a paper now and then to the _spectator_. when his career of fashion was at its height, he paid his addresses to a young lady of rank and was accepted. the day for the wedding was fixed--the establishment furnished, even to equipage and servants--when the inconstant bride-elect, dazzled by a ducal coronet, broke her engagement. the blow wrought a complete change in the jilted lover. from that time he shrank from the society of all women, and finally came over to virginia to hide his hurt in the western forests. spite of such traditions of melancholy, the actual career of most of the people of those times forms a curious contrast to the ideals of their poetry and fiction. with scarcely an exception, they survived their unsuccessful love affairs, and lived in prosperous serenity with others than the first rulers of their hearts. there is jefferson, for instance. almost the first letter in his published correspondence is devoted to a confession of his tender passion for a young lady dwelling in the town of williamsburg. yet her name is not the one that stands next his own on the marriage register. this first love of his was a miss 'becca burwell. we chance upon the young collegian's secret as we open his letter to john page, written on christmas day, . he begins jocularly enough, yet only half in fun after all: "i am sure if there is such a thing as a devil in this world, he must have been here last night, and have had some hand in contriving what happened to me. do you think the cursed rats (at his instigation, i suppose) did not eat up my pocket-book, which was in my pocket, within a foot of my head? and not contented with plenty for the present, they carried away my jemmy-worked silk garters and half a dozen new minuets i had just got." "tell miss alice corbin," he adds, "that i verily believe the rats knew i was to win a pair of garters from her, or they never would have been so cruel as to carry mine away." christmas day, indeed, found him in sorry case. these losses he could have borne, but worse remained to tell: "you know it rained last night, or if you do not know it, i am sure i do. when i went to bed i laid my watch in the usual place; and going to take her up after i arose this morning, i found her in the same place, 'tis true, but--_quantum mutatus ab illo_--all afloat in water, let in at a leak in the roof of the house, and as silent and still as the rats that had eat my pocket-book. now, you know, if chance had had anything to do in this matter, there were a thousand other spots where it might have chanced to leak as well as this one, which was perpendicularly over my watch. but, i'll tell you, it's my opinion that the devil came and bored the hole over it on purpose." it was not the injury to his timepiece which drew forth these violent, half-real, half-jesting objurgations; no, there was a sentimental reason behind. the water had soaked a watch-paper and a picture, so that when he attempted to remove them, he says: "my cursed fingers gave them such a rent as i fear i shall never get over. i would have cried bitterly, but that i thought it beneath the dignity of a man!" the mystery of the original of the picture and the maker of the watch-paper is soon explained, for a page or two further on, he trusts that miss 'becca burwell will give him another watch-paper of her own cutting, which he promises to esteem much more, though it were a plain round one, than the nicest in the world cut by other hands. "however," he adds, "i am afraid she would think this presumption, after my suffering the other to get spoiled." a very real and tumultuous passion this of young tom jefferson's! every letter he writes to his friend teems with reference to _her_. now she is r. b.; again belinda; and again, with that deep secrecy of dog latin so dear to the collegian, she figures as _campana in die_ (bell in day); or, still more mysteriously, as adnileb, written in greek that the vulgar world may not pry into the sacred secret. oh, youth, youth, how like is the nineteenth century to the eighteenth, and that to its preceding, till we reach the courtship of adam and eve! in october, ' , he writes to his old confidant: "in the most melancholy fit that ever any poor soul was, i sit down to write you. last night, as merry as agreeable company and dancing with belinda in the apollo could make me, i never could have thought the succeeding sun could have seen me so wretched as i now am!... i was prepared to say a great deal. i had dressed up in my own mind such thoughts as occurred to me in as moving a language as i knew how, and expected to have performed in a tolerably creditable manner. but, good god! when i had an opportunity of venting them, a few broken sentences, uttered in great disorder and interrupted with pauses of uncommon length, were the too visible marks of my strange confusion." the framer of the declaration of independence, whose eloquence startled the world, found himself tongue-tied and stammering in a declaration of love to a provincial maiden. at twenty-nine or thirty jefferson had recovered enough to go a-courting again, to mistress martha skelton, a young and childless widow, of such great beauty that many rivals contested with him the honor of winning her hand. the story goes that two of these rivals met one evening in mrs. skelton's drawing-room. while waiting for her to enter, they heard her singing in an adjoining room, to the accompaniment of jefferson's violin. the love-song was so expressively executed that the admirers perceived that their doom was sealed, and, picking up their cocked hats, they stole out without waiting for the lady. if jefferson in his younger days was soft-hearted toward the gentler sex, his susceptibility was as nothing compared to washington's. the sentimental biography of that great man would be more entertaining than the story of his battles, or his triumphs of government. there are evidences in his own handwriting that, before he was fifteen years old, he had conceived a passion for a fair unknown beauty, so serious as to disturb his otherwise well-regulated mind, and make him seriously unhappy. his sentimental poems written at that age, are neither better nor worse than the productions of most boys of fifteen. one of them hints that bashfulness has prevented his divulging his passion: "ah, woe is me, that i should love and conceal! long have i wished and never dare reveal." at the mature age of sixteen, he writes to his "dear friend robin": "my residence is at present at his lordship's, where i might, _was my heart disengaged_, pass my time very pleasantly, as there's a very agreeable young lady lives in the same house; but as that's only adding fuel to the fire, it makes me the more uneasy; for by often and unavoidably (!) being in company with her, revives my former passion for your lowland beauty; whereas, was i to live more retired from young women, i might in some measure alleviate my sorrows by burying that chaste and troublesome passion in the grave of oblivion." this "chaste and troublesome passion" had subsided enough, when he went as a young officer to new york in all the gorgeousness of uniform and trappings, to enable him to fall in love with miss mary phillipse, whom he met at the house of her sister, mrs. beverly robinson. she was gay, she was rich, she was beautiful, and washington might have made her the offer of his heart and hand; but suddenly an express from winchester brought word to new york of a french and indian raid, and young washington hastened to rejoin his command, leaving the capture of the lady to captain morris. three years later we find him married to the widow custis, with two children and a fortune of fifteen thousand pounds sterling. shortly after, he writes of himself from mount vernon, temperately enough, as "fixed in this seat with an agreeable partner for life," and we hear no more of amatory verses in honor of his lowland beauty, or flirtations with fashionable young dames in new york. but when the marquis de chastellux announced his marriage, washington wrote him in a vein of humor rather foreign to him, and bespeaking a genial sympathy in his expectations of happiness. "i saw by the eulogium you often made on the happiness of domestic life in america," he writes, "that you had swallowed the bait, and that you would as surely be taken one day or other, as that you were a philosopher and a soldier. so your day has at length come! i am glad of it with all my heart and soul. it is quite good enough for you. now you are well served for coming to fight in favor of the american rebels all the way across the atlantic ocean, by catching that terrible contagion--domestic felicity--which, like the small-pox or plague, a man can have only once in his life." of all the joyous festivals among the southern colonists, none was so mirthful as a wedding. the early records of the wreck of the sea venture and the tedious and dangerous delay on the bermudas mention that in even that troublous time they held one "merry english wedding." in any new land marriages and births are joyful events. all that is needed for prosperity is multiplication of settlers, and so it is quite natural that the setting up of a new household should be celebrated with rejoicing and merry-making. in one respect the colonists broke with the home traditions. they insisted on holding their marriage ceremonies at home rather than in church, and no minister could move their determination. as civilization advanced, and habits grew more luxurious, the marriage festivities grew more elaborate and formal. the primitive customs gave way to pomp and display, till at length a wedding became an affair of serious expense. "the house of the parents," says scharf in his "chronicles of baltimore," "would be filled with company to dine; the same company would stay to supper. for two days punch was dealt out in profusion. the gentlemen saw the groom on the first floor, and then ascended to the second floor, where they saw the bride; there every gentleman, even to one hundred a day, kissed her." a virginia wedding in the olden time was a charming picture--the dancers making merry in the wide halls or on the lawn; the black servants dressed in fine raiment for the occasion and showing their white teeth in that enjoyment only possible to a negro; the jolly parson acting at once as priest and toast-master; the groom in ruffles and velvet, and the bride in brocade and jewels. never again will our country have so picturesque a scene to offer. let us recall it while we may! his dress [illustration: his dress. "_in teacup time of hood and hoop and when the patch was worn_"] if you have any curiosity to know what clothes these first colonial cavaliers wore, you may learn very easily by reading over the "particular of apparrell" upon which they agreed as necessary to the settler bound for virginia. the list includes: " dozen points, a monmouth cap, waste-coat, falling bands, suit of canvase, shirts, suit of frieze, suit of cloth, paire shoes, paire irish stockings, and paire garters." besides these he would need " armor compleat, light, a long peece, a sword, a belt and a bandelier," which may be reckoned among his wearing apparel, for it would be long before the settler could be safe without them when he ventured outside the palisade. englishmen in those days were fond of elaborate dress. it was the period of conical hats, and rosetted shoes, of doublets and sashes and padded trunk-hose, which his majesty, james the first, much affected because they filled out his ill-shaped legs. suits of clothes were a frequent form of gift and bequest. captain john smith's will declares, "i give unto thomas packer, my best suite of aparrell, of a tawney colour, viz., hose, doublet, jerkin and cloake." the peruke began its all-conquering career in england, under the stuarts. elizabeth, it is true, had owned eighty suits of hair, and mary of scotland had varied her hair to match her dresses. but a defect of the french dauphin introduced the use of the wig for men as well as women, and false hair became the rage throughout the world of fashion. a london peruke-maker advertised: "full-bottom wigs, full bobs, minister's bobs, naturals, half-naturals, grecian flyes, curleyroys, airey levants, qu perukes and baggwiggs." the customer must have been hard to please, who could find nothing to suit his style in such a stock. the settlers in colonial america did not allow themselves such luxuries of the toilet as a variety of wigs, though a well-planned peruke or "a bob" might have been a good device to trick the tomahawk of the savage into a bloodless scalping. with the poorer people, a single wig for sunday wear sufficed, and was replaced on week days by a cap, generally of linen. the colonial dames, being too far from court to copy the low-necked dresses, the stomachers and farthingales of the inner circle of fashion, wore instead, huge ruffs, full, short petticoats, and long, flowing sleeves, over tight undersleeves. even in the wilderness, however, they retained a feminine fondness for gay attire. john pory, a clever scapegrace intimately acquainted with gaming-tables and sponging-houses in london, but figuring in virginia as secretary to governor yeardley, wrote home to sir dudley carleton, "that your lordship may know that we are not the veriest beggars in the world, our cow-keeper here of james cittie, on sundays goes accoutred all in fresh flaming silk, and a wife of one that in england professed the black art, not of a scholar but of a collier of croydon, wears her rough beaver hat with a fair pearl hat-band and a silken suit, thereto correspondent." lively john was probably lying a little in the cause of immigration, but it is certain that the desire for fine clothes early called for a check, and at an early session of the virginia house of burgesses, a sumptuary law was passed "against excess in apparell," directing "that every man be ceffed in the church for all publique contributions--if he be unmarried, according to his own apparrell; if he be married, according to his own and his wives, or either of their apparell." here, surely, is a suggestion from the past, for the fashionable church of the present. a later law in the provinces enacts that "no silke stuffe in garments or in peeces, except for hoods or scarfes, nor silver or gold lace, nor bonelace of silke or thread, nor ribbands wrought with silver or gold in them, shall be brought into this country to sell, after the first of february." a maryland statute proposes that two sorts of "cloaths" only be worn, one for summer, the other for winter. but this was going too far, and the law was never enforced. it was permitted to none but members of the council and heads of hundreds in virginia to wear the coveted gold on their clothes, or to wear any silk not made by themselves. this last prohibition was intended not so much to discourage pomp and pride, as to stimulate the infant industry of silk production, which from the beginning had been a pet scheme of the colonists. they had imported silk-worms and planted mulberry trees; and as an inducement to go into the business, the burgesses offered a premium of five thousand pounds of tobacco to any one making a hundred pounds of wound silk in any one year. his gracious majesty, charles the second, sent to his loyal subjects in virginia, a letter, still to be seen in the college library at williamsburg. it is written by his majesty's private secretary and signed with the sacred "charles r." it is addressed to governor berkeley, and runs: "trusty & wellbeloved, we greet you well. wee have received w{th} much content ye dutifull respects of our colony in y{e} present lately made us by you & y{e} councell there, of y{e} first product of y{e} new manufacture of silke, which as a mark of our princely acceptation of yo{r} duteys & for y{r} particular encouragement, etc.--wee have commanded to be wrought up for y{e} use of our owne person." from this letter has sprung the legend, dear to loyalist hearts, that the robe worn by charles at his coronation was woven of virginia silk. so much material was needed "for y{e} use of our owne person," that the offering of silk was no doubt very welcome. the king's favorite, buckingham, had twenty-seven suits, one of them of white uncut velvet, set all over with diamonds and worn with diamond hat-bands, cockades and ear-rings, and yoked with ropes and knots of pearls. it was an era of wild extravagance. not satisfied with the elegance of the time of charles first, his son's courtiers added plumes to the wide-brimmed hats, enlarged the bows on the shoes, donned great wigs, loaded their vests with embroidery, and over their coats hung short cloaks, worth a fortune. the women dressed as befitted the court of a dissolute king. their artificial curls were trained in "heart-breakers" and "love-locks." the whiteness of their skin was enhanced by powder and set off by patches. their shoulders rose above bodices of costly brocade hung with jewels which had sometimes ruined both buyer and wearer. the puritans, by their opposition to the court, escaped the evil influences of these extravagances. but the colonial cavaliers, who bowed before the king lower than the courtiers at home, of course imitated his dress, so far as their fortunes allowed. every frigate that came into port at jamestown or st. maries brought the latest london fashions. a little before colonel fitzhugh in virginia was ordering his riding camblet cloak from london, mr. samuel pepys was writing in his journal, "this morning came home my fine camlete cloak with gold buttons." while this gentleman was attiring himself in his new shoulder-belt and tunique laced with silk, "and so very handsome to church," sir william berkeley and governor calvert were opening their eyes of a sunday morning three thousand miles away, and making ready to get into their rosetted shoes, and to lace their breeches and hose together with points as fanciful as his, and, like him, perhaps, having their heads "combed by y{e} maide for _powder and other troubles_." no doubt lady berkeley, in her fine lace bands, her coverchef and deep veil, was as fine as madam pepys in her paragon pettycoat and "_just a corps_." [illustration] with the beginning of the eighteenth century, the hoop appeared, and carried all before it, in more senses than one. "the ladies' petticoats," i read in the notes of a contemporary of the fashion, "are now blown up into a most enormous concave." over this concave the ladies wore, on ceremonious occasions, such as a ball at governor spotswood's or an assembly at annapolis, trailing gowns of heavy brocade, many yards in length. dragging these skirts behind, and bearing aloft on their heads a towering structure of feathers, ribbons and lace, it was no wonder these dames preferred slow and stately measures. at their side, or as near as the spreading hoop permitted, moved their favored cavaliers, their coat-skirts stiff with buckram, their swords dangling between their knees, their breeches of red plush or black satin, so tight that they fitted without a wrinkle. men of that day took their dress very seriously. washington, who had doubtless gained many ideas of fashion from the modish young officers of braddock's army, ordered his costumes with as much particularity as he afterward conducted his campaigns. shortly before he started with his little cavalcade of negro servants on his five-hundred-mile ride to massachusetts, in , he sent over to a correspondent in london an order for an extensive wardrobe. he wanted " complete livery suits for servants, with a spare cloak and all other necessary trimmings for two suits more." he omits no detail. "i would have you," he writes, "choose the livery by our arms; only as the field is white, i think the clothes had better not be quite so, but nearly like the inclosed. the trimmings and facings of scarlet, and a scarlet waistcoat. if livery lace is not quite disused, i should be glad to have the cloaks laced. i like that fashion best, and two silver-laced hats for the above servants." in addition to this, he wishes " set of horse-furniture with livery lace, with the washington crest on the housings, etc. the cloak to be of the same piece and color of the clothes, gold and scarlet sword-knots, silver and blue ditto, fashionable gold-laced hat." it is not strange that the gallant young officer made a sensation among the dames and damsels of philadelphia and new york as he journeyed northward, nor that mistress mary phillipse nearly lost her heart to the wearer of the gold and scarlet sword-knots and the fashionable gold-laced hat. all society went in gorgeous array in those gay days, before color had been banished to suit the grim taste of the puritan, and to meet the economical maxims of _poor richard_. judges, on the bench, wore robes of scarlet, faced with black velvet, exchanged in summer for thinner ones of silk. etiquette demanded equally formal costume for advocates at the bar. patrick henry, who began by indifference to dress, even rushing into court fresh from the chase, with mud and mire clinging to his leather breeches, at length yielded to social pressure, and donned a full suit of black velvet in which to address the court; and, on one occasion at least, a peach-colored coat effectively set off by a bag-wig, powdered, as pompous mr. wirt observes, "in the highest style of forensic fashion." a satirical description sets forth the dress of a dandy in the middle of the eighteenth century, as consisting of "a coat of light green, with sleeves too small for the arms, and buttons too big for the sleeves; a pair of manchester fine stuff breeches, without money in the pockets; clouded silk stockings, but no legs; a club of hair behind, larger than the head that carries it; a hat of the size of a sixpence, on a block not worth a farthing." in october, , the free-school at annapolis was broken into by robbers, and the wardrobe of the master stolen. when i remember the scanty salaries paid to these schoolmasters, i look with surprise on the inventory, which the victim of the robbery publishes. here we have a superfine blue broadcloth frock coat, a new superfine scarlet waistcoat bound with gold lace, a pair of green worsted breeches lined with dimity, besides a ruffled shirt, pumps, and doe-skin breeches. a very pretty wardrobe, i should say, for the teacher of a colonial village-school! it was a picturesque world in those days. the gentry rode gayly habited in bright-colored velvets and ruffles; the clergy swept along in dignified black; the judges wore their scarlet robes, and the mechanics and laborers were quite content to don a leather apron over their buckskin breeches and red-flannel jacket. the slaves in carolina were forbidden to wear anything, except when in livery, finer than negro-cloth, duffils, kerseys, osnaburgs, blue linen, check-linen, coarse garlix or calicoes, checked cotton, or scotch plaid. this prohibition was quite unnecessary, as the slave thought himself very lucky if he were clad in a new and whole garment of any sort. even paupers had their distinctive badges. a virginia statute commands that every person who shall receive relief from the parish, and be sent to the poorhouse, shall, upon the shoulder of the right sleeve of his, or her, uppermost garment, in an open and visible manner, wear a badge with the name of the parish to which he, or she, belongs, cut either in blue, red, or green cloth, at the will of the vestry or churchwardens. if any unfortunate were afflicted with pride as well as poverty and refused to wear this badge of pauperism, he was subject, by the law, to a whipping, not to exceed five lashes. the students of william and mary college were required to wear academical dress as soon as they had passed "y{e} grammar school," and thus another costume was added to the moving tableaux on the street of williamsburg. in the college-books, i find it resolved by the faculty in that mrs. foster be appointed stocking-mender in the college, and that she be paid annually the sum of £ , provided she furnishes herself with lodging, diet, fire, and candles. considering the length of stockings in those days, and assuming that the nature of boys has not materially changed, i cannot help thinking the salary somewhat meagre for the duties involved. stockings, however, were less troublesome than shirts. a mrs. campbell sends her nephews back to school accompanied by a note explaining that she returns all their clothes except _eleven_ shirts, not yet washed. if the clothes of boys were troublesome, those of girls were more so. madam mason, as guardian of her children, sends in an account, wherein the support of each child is reckoned at a thousand pounds of tobacco yearly. her son, thomson, is charged with linen and ruffled shirts, and her daughter, mary, with wooden-heeled shoes, petticoats, one hoop-petticoat, and linen. we may be sure that the needling on those petticoats and ruffled skirts would be a reproach, in its dainty fineness, to the machine-made garments of our age. little dolly payne, who afterward became mrs. madison and mistress of the white house, trotted off to school in her childhood (so her biographer tells us), equipped with "a white linen mask to keep every ray of sunshine from the complexion, a sun-bonnet sewed on her head every morning by her careful mother, and long gloves covering the hands and arms." gentlewomen, big and little, in y{e} olden time, seem to have had an inordinate fear of the sunshine, as is evidenced by their long gloves, their veils, and those riding-masks of cloth or velvet, which must have been most uncomfortable to keep in place, even with the aid of the little silver mouthpieces held between the teeth. but vanity enables people to endure many ills. in a correspondence between miss anna bland in virginia, and her brother theodorick in london, the young lady writes: "my papa has sent for me a dress and a pair of stays. i should be glad if you will be peticular (_sic_) in the choice of them. let the stays be very stiff bone, and much gored at the hips, and the dress any other color except yellow." no doubt, the consciousness of looking well, sustained the young martyr, as she gasped through the minuet, in her new dress and her stiff stays, drawn tight at home by the aid of the bed-post. the first directions to the attendant in a case of swooning, so common in our great-grandmothers' lifetime, was to cut the stays, that the imprisoned lungs might get room to breathe once more. human nature is oddly inconsistent. these people, who found it incomprehensible that savages should tattoo their bodies, hang beads round their necks, and wear ornaments of snakes and rats hung by the tails through their ears and noses, decked themselves with jewelry, wore wigs and patches, and pierced their ears for barbaric rings of gold or precious stones. i protest i don't know which would have looked queerer to the other, the indian squaw or the colonial belle of the eighteenth century; but, from the artistic standpoint, the advantage was all with the child of nature. in a grave business letter, written to washington on matters of state by george mason, the correspondent adds: "p.s. i shall take it as a particular favor if you'll be kind enough to get me two pairs of gold snaps made at williamsburg, for my little girls. they are small rings with a joint in them, to wear in the ears, instead of ear-rings--also a pair of toupée tongs." it is a pleasant glimpse we thus gain of one great statesman writing to another, and turning away from public enterprises to remember the private longings of the two little maidens at home, whose hearts are to be gladdened, though the flesh suffers, by these bits of finery. it was not little girls alone who were willing to endure discomfort in the cause of personal appearance. washington's false teeth still remain, a monument of his fortitude. they are a set of "uppers and unders" carved in ivory, inserted in a ponderous plate, with clamps in the roof that must have caused torture to the inexperienced mouth. the upper set is connected with the lower by a spiral spring, and the two are arranged to be held in place by the tongue. no one but the hero of trenton and valley forge, could have borne such an affliction and preserved his equanimity. tooth-brushes are a modern luxury. in the old times, the most genteel were content to rub the teeth with a rag covered with chalk or snuff, and there was more than a suspicion of effeminacy in a man's cleaning his teeth at all. it is not strange that there was such a demand for the implanted teeth which dr. le mayeur introduced toward the end of the century. i think it may be fairly claimed that the nineteenth century has marked a great advance in personal cleanliness. to this, as much as anything, except perhaps the use of rubber clothing, we owe its increase of longevity. it is impossible to overestimate the importance to modern hygiene of water-proof substances, keeping the feet and body dry. pattens and clogs were of service in their day and generation, but they were a clumsy contrivance as compared with the light overshoes of india-rubber. it was not till that the first efforts were made in baltimore to introduce the use of umbrellas. "these, like tooth-brushes," writes scharf, "were at first ridiculed as effeminate, and were only introduced by the vigorous efforts of the doctors, who recommended them chiefly as shields from the sun and a defence against vertigo and prostration from heat. the first umbrellas came from india. they were made of coarse oiled linen, stretched over sticks of rattan, and were heavy and clumsy, but they marked a wonderful step in the direction of hygienic dress. before their introduction, ministers and doctors, who, more than any one else in the community, were called to face the winter rains, wore a cape of oiled linen, called a _roquelaire_." if the dress of the period before the revolution was not hygienic, it was handsome, and eminently picturesque, as the old portraits of the last century show. the universally becoming ruffles of lace were in vogue, and women still young wore dainty caps, whose delicate lace, falling over the hair, lent softness and youth to the features. old ladies were not unknown as now, but, at an age when the nineteenth century woman of fashion is still frisking about in the costume of a girl of twenty, the colonial dame adopted the dress and manners which she conceived suited to her age and dignity. here, for instance, is the evidence of a portrait, marked on the stretcher, "amy newton, aged , , john durand, _pinxit_." the lady wears an ermine-trimmed cloak draped about her shoulders, over a bodice, lace-trimmed and cut square in the neck. the lace-bordered cap falls as usual over the matron's hair. there is, to me, something rather fine and dignified in the assumption of a matronly dress as a matter of pride and choice. in one respect the colonial dames, old and young, were gayly attired. their feet were clad in rainbow hues of brilliant reds and greens and their dresses were generally cut to show to advantage the high-heeled slipper and clocked stocking of bright color. washington's order-book forms an excellent guide to the prevailing modes of the day. the orders call for rich coats and waistcoats and cocked hats for himself; and for mrs. washington, a salmon tabby velvet, fine flowered lawn aprons, white callimancos hoes, perfumed powder, puckered petticoats, and black velvet riding masks. master custis is fitted out with two hair bags and a whole piece of ribbon, while the servants are provided with fifty ells of _osnabergs_ (a coarse cloth made of flax and tow manufactured at osnaberg, in germany, and much in vogue for servants' wear). the goods of the time, for high and low, were made to outlast more than one generation. charles carroll, of carrollton, was betrothed in his youth to a beautiful young lady. the wedding-dress was ordered from london, but before its arrival the bride elect had died, and the dress was laid aside. a century later, it appeared at a fancy dress ball, its fabric untarnished, and untouched by time. it was worth while to pay high prices for such stuffs. in many a household to-day is cherished some bit of the brocades, sarcenets, shalloons, and tammies worn by our great-grandmothers and their mothers. in the maryland _gazette_, somewhere in the middle of the last century, catherine rathel, milliner, from london, advertises a tempting assortment of white satin, india and other chintzes, calico, gingham, cloaks, cardinal's hats, flowered gauze aprons, bonnets, caps, égrettes, fillets, breast-flowers, fashionable ribbands, buttons and loops, silk hose, superfine white india stockings, box and ivory combs. the firm of rivington & brown present an equally attractive display for gentlemen: "an importation of hats, gold and silver-laced, and _cocked by his majesty's hatter_. london-made pumps and boot-garters, silk or buff sword-belts and gorgets, newest style paste shoe-buckles, gold seals, snuff-boxes of tortoise-shell, leather, or papier-maché." whatever luxuries or elegances of the toilet a man of fashion might possess, his snuff-box was his chief pride. this was the weapon with which he fought the bloodless battles of the drawing-room and, armed with it, he felt himself a cavalier indeed. the nice study of the times and seasons when it should be tapped, when played with, when offered or accepted, and when haughtily thrust into the pocket, marked the gentleman of the old school. but one use of the snuff-box, i am certain, was never devised by either steele or lilie, but was left for the brain or nerves of a colonial dame to invent. a widow, left alone and unprotected, occupied that ground-floor room generally designated in the colonial house as the parlor-chamber. fearing firearms more than robbers, she armed herself with a large snuff-box, which, in case of any suspicious noise in the night, she was wont to click loudly, in imitation of the cocking of a gun. the effect on the hypothetical robbers was instantaneous, and they never disturbed her twice in the same night. colonial dress, as we advance toward the time of the revolution, grows simpler. wigs fall by their own weight, and men begin to wear their own hair, drawn back and fastened in dignified fashion with a bow of broad ribbon, generally black. except for ruffled shirts and deep cuffs, the costume of society approaches the sobriety of to-day, and the lack of money and threat of war subdue the dress even of the women. the military alone still keep up the pomp and circumstance of costume worn by all men in the stuart era. in , the fairfax independent company of volunteers meet in virginia, and resolve to gather at stated seasons for practice of military exercise and discipline. it is further resolved that their dress shall be a uniform of blue turned up with buff, with plain yellow metal buttons, buff waistcoat, and breeches, and white stockings; and furnished with good flint-lock and bayonet, sling cartouch box and tomahawk. washington's orders from fort cumberland, dated the seventeenth of september, , prescribe the uniform to be worn by the virginia regiment in the opening struggle: "every officer of the virginia regiment to provide himself, as soon as he can conveniently, with suit of regimentals of good blue cloath; the coat to be faced and cuffed with scarlet, and trimmed with silver; a scarlet waistcoat, with silver lace; blue breeches, and a silver-laced hat, if to be had, for camp or garrison duty. besides this, each officer to provide himself with a common soldier's dress for detachments and duty in the woods." in looking back to the beginning of the revolutionary war, when that great wrench was made which separated america from the parent country, we have a feeling that men's minds were wholly occupied with the tremendous issues at stake; yet, as we study the old records, we find the same buying and selling, the planting and reaping, the same pondering and planning of dress and the trifles of daily life going on much in the old fashion. in jefferson's private note-book, under date of july th, , the day of the signing of the declaration of independence, i find, entered in his own hand, the item: "for seven pairs of women's gloves, twenty shillings." even so do great things and small jostle one another in this strange world of ours, and a woman's glove lies close to the document which changed the fate of nations. news, trade and travel [illustration: news, trade, and travell] in the early days, the highways of the cavalier colonies were the broad waters of bay and sound; their by-ways, the innumerable rivers and creeks; and their toll-gates, the ports of entry. road-making was tedious and costly, and the settlers saw no reason for wasting time and energy in the undertaking, when nature had spread her pathways at their feet, and they needed only to step into a canoe, or a skiff manned by black oarsmen, to glide from one plantation to another; or to hoist sail in a pinnace for distant settlements. many animals travel, but man is the only one who packs a trunk, and, except a few like the nautilus and the squirrel, the only one who sails a boat. there is a sentiment connected with a ship, which no other conveyance can ever have. the very names of those old colonial vessels are redolent of "amber-greece," "pearle," and treasure, of east india spices and seaweed "from bermuda's reefs, and edges of sunken ledges in some far-off bright azore." the history of the colonies might be written in the story of their ships. there were _the good speed_, _the discovery_, and _the susan constant_, which preceded the world-famous _half moon_ and _mayflower_ to the new world. there were _the ark_ and _the dove_ that brought over lord baltimore and his colonists; _the sea-venture_ which went to wreck on the somer isles; and _the patience_, and _the deliverance_ which brought her crew safe to virginia. these were the pioneers, followed by a long line of staunch craft, large and small, from the _golden lyon_ to _the peggy stewart_, which discharged her cargo of taxed tea into chesapeake bay. many ships in those days were named, as we name chrysanthemums, in honor of some prominent man or fair dame. these good folk must have followed the coming and going of their namesakes with curious interest. the sight of a sail on the horizon never lost its excitement, for every ship brought some wild tale of adventure. the story of shipwreck "on the still vexed bermoothes," and the wonderful escape of gates and somers, with their crew, has been made famous forever by the tradition that it suggested to shakespeare the plot of _the tempest_; but every "frygat" that touched at jamestown or annapolis brought accounts almost as thrilling, of storm and stress, of fighting tempests with a crew reduced by scurvy to three or four active seamen, of running for days from a spanish caravel or a french pickaroune. the _margaret and john_ set sail for america early in the seventeenth century, carrying eighty passengers, besides sailors, and armed with "eight iron peeces and a falcon." when she reached the "ile of domenica," the captain entered a harbor, that the men might stretch their limbs on dry land, "having been eleven weeks pestered in this vnwholesome ship." here, to their misfortune, they found two large ships flying hollander colors, but proving to be spaniards. these enemies sent a volley of shot which split the oars and made holes in the boats, yet failed to strike a man on the _margaret and john_. "perceiving what they were," writes one of the english crew, "we fitted ourselves the best we could to prevent a mischief: seeing them warp themselves to windward, we thought it not good to be boarded on both sides at an anchor; we intended to set saile, but the vice-admiral battered so hard at our starboard side, that we fell to our businesse, and answered their vnkindnesse with such faire shot from a demiculvering, that shot her betweene wind and water, whereby she was glad to leave us and her admirall together." the admiral then bespoke them, and demanded a surrender; to which the sturdy english replied that they had no quarrel with the king of spain, and asked only to go their way unmolested, but as they would do no wrong, assuredly they would take none. the spaniards answered these bold words with another volley of shot, returned with energy by the english guns. "the fight continued halfe an houre, as if we had been invironed with fire and smoke, untill they discovered the waste of our ship naked, where they bravely boorded us, loofe for loofe, hasting with pikes and swords to enter; but it pleased god so to direct our captaine and encourage our men with valour, that our pikes being formerly placed under our halfe deck, and certaine shot lying close for that purpose under the port holes, encountered them so rudely, that their fury was not onely rebated, but their hastinesse intercepted, and their whole company beaten backe; many of our men were hurt, but i am sure they had two for one." thus, all day and all night, the unequal battle continued, till at length the doughty little british vessel fairly fought off her two enemies, and they fell sullenly back and ran near shore to mend their leaks, while the _margaret and john_ stood on her course. it is hard, in these days, when the high seas are as safe as city streets, to realize the condition of terror to which merchantmen were reduced, two hundred years ago, by the rumor of a black flag seen in the offing, or of some "pyrat" lying in wait outside the harbor. in governor spotswood's time, williamsburg was thrown into a state of great excitement by the report that the dreaded buccaneer john theach, known by the name of blackbeard, had been seen cruising along the coasts of virginia and carolina. the governor rose to the occasion, however. he sent out lieutenant maynard with two ships, to look for blackbeard. maynard found him and boarded his vessel in pamlico sound. the pirate was no coward. he ordered one of his men to stand beside the powder-magazine with a lighted match, ready, at a signal from him, to blow up friends and foes together. the signal never came, for a lucky shot killed blackbeard on the spot and his crew surrendered. they might as well have died with their leader, for thirteen of them were hanged at williamsburg. blackbeard's skull was rimmed with silver and made into a ghastly drinking-cup, and we hear no more of pirates in those waters. the protection of vessels was not the only reason for policing the waterways. smuggling was much more common than piracy, and the laws against it were the harder to enforce, because the entire community was secretly in sympathy with the offenders. in the earliest maryland records is lord baltimore's commission, giving his lieutenant authority to "appoint fit places for public ports for lading, shipping, unlading and discharging all goods and merchandizes to be imported or exported into or out of our said province, and to prohibit the shipping or discharging of any goods or merchandizes whatsoever in all other places." any one violating the shipping law was subject to heavy fines and imprisonment. in virginia the statutes compelled ships to stop at jamestown, or other designated ports, before breaking bulk at the private landings along the river. who can picture the excitement in those lonely plantations when the frigate tied up at the wharf, and began to unload from its hold, its cargo of tools for the farm, furniture for the house, and, best of all, the square white letters with big round seals, containing news of the friends distant a three months' journey! sometimes the new comer would prove no ocean voyager, but a nearer neighbor, some stout, round-sterned packet, from new netherland or new england, laden with grain and rum, or hides and rum, to be exchanged for the tobacco of the old dominion. to journey from one colony to another thus, the trader must first secure a license and take oath that he would not sell or give arms or ammunition to the indians. on these terms lord baltimore, in , granted to a merchant mariner, liberty "to trade and commerce for corn, beaver or any other commodities with the dutchmen on hudson's river, or with any indians or other people whatsoever being or inhabiting to the northward, without the capes commonly called cape henry and cape charles." long after the waters of chesapeake bay were dotted with sails, and the creeks of maryland and virginia gay with skiffs, the land communication was still in an exceedingly primitive condition. the roads were little more than bridle-paths. the surveyors deemed their duty done if the logs and fallen trees were cleared away, and all virginia could not boast of a single engineer. bridges there were none; and the traveller, arriving at a river bank, must find a ford, or swim his horse across, counting himself fortunate if he kept his pouch of tobacco dry. planters at a distance from the rivers hewed out rolling-roads, on which they brought down their tobacco in casks, attached to the horses that drew them by hoop-pole shafts. roads, winding along the streams, were slowly laid out, and answered well enough in fair weather, but in storms they were impassable, and at night so bewildering that belated travellers were forced to come to a halt, make a fire, and bivouac till morning. in , the roads in maryland were so poor that we find the assembly passing an act declaring that "the roads leading to any county court-house shall have two notches on the trees on both sides of the roads, and another notch a distance above the other two; and any road that leads to any church shall be marked, into the entrance of the same, and at the leaving any other road, with a slip cut down the face of the tree near the ground." guide-posts were still unknown. the travel was as primitive as the roads. public coaches did not exist. horseback riding was the usual way of getting over the ground, though the rough roads made the jolting a torment. "travelling in this country," wrote a stranger, as late as the revolution, "is extremely dangerous, especially if it is the least windy, from the number of rotten pines continually blowing down." it was no uncommon thing for a driver to be obliged to turn into the woods half a dozen times in a single mile to avoid the fallen logs. a certain madame de reidefel, who was driving in a post-chaise with her children, had a narrow escape from death. a rotten tree fell directly across her path, but fortunately struck between the chaise and the horses, so that the occupants of the carriage escaped, though the front wheels were crushed, and one of the horses lamed. [illustration: ye "blaze."] between pirates on sea and pine-trees on land, so many perils beset the traveller that starting on a journey became a momentous undertaking. "it was no uncommon thing," writes the historian, "for one who went on business or pleasure from charleston to boston or new york, if he were a prudent and cautious man, to consult the almanac before setting out, to make his will, to give a dinner or a supper to his friends at the tavern, and there to bid them a formal goodbye." a journey being so great an affair, the traveller was of course a marked man, and his arrival at an ordinary was the signal for the gathering of all who could crowd in to hear of his adventures, and also to hear the public and private news of which he might be the bearer. "i have heard dr. franklin relate with great pleasantry," said one of his friends, "that in travelling when he was young, the first step he took for his tranquillity and to obtain immediate attention at the inns, was to anticipate inquiry, by saying: 'my name is benjamin franklin. i was born at boston, am a printer by profession, am travelling to philadelphia, shall have to return at such a time, and have no news. now what can you give me for dinner?'" this curiosity was rather peculiar to new england. the southerner, while perhaps as anxious to hear the news, was more restrained in asking questions. that good breeding and tact which were a cavalier inheritance, taught him to wait decorously for his news as for his food. a foreigner in the last century, in travelling through the south, came upon a party of virginians smoking and drinking together on a veranda. he reports that on his ascending the steps to the piazza, every countenance seemed to say, 'this man has a double claim to our attention, for he is a stranger in the place!' in a moment, there was room made for him to sit down; a new bowl was called for, and every one who addressed him did it with a smile of conciliation; but no man asked him whence he had come or whither he was going. all foreigners bear the same testimony to this universal courtesy, which smoothed rough roads and made travelling enjoyable, in spite of its difficulties and dangers. when i realize what those difficulties were, i am surprised at the willingness with which journeys were undertaken. i read of washington setting out on a mission to major-general shirley in boston, and riding the whole distance of five hundred miles on horseback in the depth of winter, escorted only by a few servants; yet little is made of his experiences. women, too, were quite accustomed to riding on long expeditions. an octogenarian described to irving the horseback journeys of his mother in her scarlet cloth riding-habit. "young ladies from the country," he said, "used to come to the balls at annapolis, riding, with their hoops arranged _fore and aft_ like lateen sails; and after dancing all night, would ride home again in the morning." annapolis, before the revolution, was a centre of gayety. its rich families came up to town for the season each fall, and in the spring moved back to their country-houses with their various belongings. the family coach which was used to transport these possessions was a curious affair to modern eyes. it was colored generally a light yellow, with smart facings. the body was of mahogany, with venetian windows on each side, projecting lamps, and a high seat upon which coachman and footman climbed at starting. as this old coach lumbered up and down the streets of annapolis, its occupants no doubt fancied that they had reached the final limit of speed and comfort in travel, and they looked back with scorn and pity on the primitive conveyances of their ancestors, just as posterity will doubtless look back from their balloons and electric motors on our steam engines. in one of jefferson's early letters we chance upon a curious prophecy. being about to make a visit, he asks to be met by his friend's "periagua," as a canoe was called, and suggests that some day a boat may be made, which shall row itself. after all, i question whether there was not more pleasure in travel in those days, before boats rowed themselves, and when horses were made of flesh and blood instead of iron and steam; when the rider ambled along, noting each tree and shrub, pausing to exchange greetings with every wayfarer, and stopping by night beneath some hospitable roof to make merry over the cup of sack or the glass of "quince drink" prepared for his refreshment. if the traveller was of a surly and unsocial nature, he was indeed to be pitied; since, for him who would not accept his neighbor's hospitality, there remained only the roadside tavern or "ordinary," and woe to him who was compelled to test its welcome! the universal practice of keeping open-house made the inns poorer in quality, and the contempt of the community for one who would receive money for the entertainment of guests, kept men of repute out of the business. a maryland statute, in , resolves "that noe person in that province shall have a licence to keep ordinary for the future but th{t} he shall give bond to his excellency with good sureties that he shall keep foure good ffeather beds for the entertainment of customers." in any place where the county court is held, he is directed to keep "eight ffeather or fflock beds at the least, and ffurniture suitable." the charges of the ordinary-keeper are fixed by law. he is allowed to charge ten pounds of tobacco per meal "for dyet," ten pounds "for small beare," and four "for lodging _in a bed with sheets_." while the traveller was loitering on the road, enjoying hospitality or enduring ordinaries, those he left at home were in ignorance of his whereabouts; and it was only after days or weeks of anxious waiting, that they could hope to hear of his safe arrival at his destination. meanwhile rumor, which always thrives in proportion to ignorance, might make their lives miserable by reports of a riderless horse seen galloping into some village, of storms and gales, or of trees crashing across the lonely roads. in the absence of the post and the telegraph, this spreading of false news became so troublesome that an act was passed in maryland declaring that, "whereas many idle and bussie-headed people doe forge and divulge falce rumors and reports," it is enacted that they be either fined or "receive such corporall punishment, not extending to life or member, as to the iustices of that court shall seeme meete." it was long before the idea of a postal service under government control dawned upon the colonies. throughout almost the whole of the seventeenth century letters were sent by the hand of the chance traveller. maryland directed that in the case of public state-papers the sheriff of one county should carry them to the sheriff of the next, and so on to their goal; but private letters had no such official care. an old virginia statute commanded that "all letters superscribed _for the publique service_, should be immediately conveyed from plantation to plantation to the place and person directed, under the penalty of one hogshead of tobacco for each default." another law, bearing date , orders that "when there is any person in the family where the letters come, as can write, such person is required to endorse the day and houre he received them, that the neglect or contempt of any person stopping them may be the better knowne and punished accordingly." a letter in those days merited the attention it received, for it represented a vast deal of labor and expense. paper was a costly luxury, as we may infer from those old yellow pages crossed and re-crossed with writing, and the tiny cramped hand in which the old sermons are written. in , i find colonel william fitzhugh ordering from london "two large paper-books, one to contain about fourteen or fifteen quires of paper, the other about ten quires, and one other small one." the paper was left blank on one side, and so folded that it formed its own envelope. it was fastened with a seal whose taste and elegance was a matter of pride with the writer. the style was formal, as became the dignity of a person who knew how to write. in those times people did not write letters; they indited epistles. a communication sent across the ocean, in , is addressed "to y{e} truly honorable & right worthy knight, s{r} thomas smith," and is signed: "at y{r} command to be disposed of." love-letters shared the formality of the time, and were written with a stateliness and elaboration of compliment which suggest a minuet on paper. family letters are often in the form of a journal, and cover a period of months. they cost both labor and money but they were worth their price. cheap postage has made cheap writing. we no longer compose; we only scribble. in , thomas neale was appointed by royal patent, "postmaster-general of virginia and _all other parts of north america_." the house of burgesses passed an act declaring that if post-offices were established in every county, neale should receive threepence for every letter not exceeding one sheet, or to or from any place not exceeding four score english miles distance. in , letters were forwarded eight times a year from philadelphia to the potomac, and afterward as far as williamsburg, with the proviso that the post-rider should not start for philadelphia till he had received enough letters to pay the expenses of the trip. [illustration] the average day's journey for a postman covered a distance of some forty miles in summer, and over good roads; but, when the heavy autumn rains washed out great gullies in his path or the winter storms beat him back, he was lucky if he accomplished half that distance. his letters were subject to so many accidents, that it is a wonder they ever reached the persons to whom they were addressed. it was not till the post-office passed into franklin's energetic and methodical hands that it was made regular and trustworthy. the estimate of the common post in early days is curiously illustrated by an episode which occurred in virginia. the hero was one mr. daniel park, "who," says the chronicle, "to all the other accomplishments that make a complete sparkish gentleman, has added one upon which he infinitely values himself; that is, a quick resentment of every, the least thing, that looks like an affront or injury." one september morning, when the governor of maryland was breakfasting with mr. commissary blair at middle plantation, colonel park marched in upon them, having a sword about him, much longer than what he commonly travelled with, and which he had caused to be ground sharp in the point that morning. addressing himself to the governor of maryland, he burst out: "captain nicholson, did you receive a letter that i sent you from new york?" "yes," answered nicholson, "i received it." "and was it done like a gentleman," fumed the fiery colonel, "to send that letter by the hand of a common post, to be read by everybody in virginia? i look upon it as an affront, and expect satisfaction!" fancy the number of affairs of honor that this "complete young sparkish gentleman" would have on hand if he lived in the present year of grace and resented every letter sent him by _the common post_! there is something which strikes us as infinitely diverting in his suggestion that everybody in virginia would be interested in his letter. but perhaps he was nearer the truth than we realize, for in his day all news came through such sources, and a letter was regarded as a good thing, which it would be gross selfishness not to share with one's neighbors. as for a letter from europe it was an affair of the greatest magnitude, exciting the interest of the whole community. those giant folios which entertain us every morning with their gossip from all quarters of the globe had no existence then. early in the last century, the colonial cavalier gleaned all his knowledge of the world and its affairs, from some three-month-old copy of the london papers and magazines, brought over by a british packet. even this communication, it seems, was uncertain, for complaint is made that the masters of vessels keep the packages till an accidental conveyance offers, and for want of better opportunities frequently commit them to boatmen, who care very little for their goods, so they get their freight. the colonists had struggled to establish a local journal, and a printing press had been started in virginia in the seventeenth century, but it had been strangled in its infancy by berkeley, who declared it the parent of treason and infidelity; and so it came about that the southern provinces had no public utterance for their news or their views, till the silence was broken by the voice of maryland, speaking through her _gazette_, in , when in all america there were only six rival sheets. franklin says that his brother's friends tried to dissuade him from publishing _the new england courant_, on the ground that there was already one newspaper in america. his memory lapsed a little, as _the courant_ had in fact three predecessors, but the incident shows how little notion there was at that time, of the public demand for news. in , was first issued _the virginia gazette_, a dingy little sheet about twelve by six inches in size, and costing to subscribers, fifteen shillings a year. the newspaper of the day had no editorial page. its comments on public affairs were in the form of letters, after the fashion of _the tatler_ and _the spectator_. it had a poet's corner, where many a young versemaker tried the wings of his pegasus, and it printed also poetical tributes under the notices of deaths and marriages. in this section, after the record of the wedding of mr. william derricoat and miss suckie tomkies, appear these lines: "hers the mild lustre of the blooming morn and his the radiance of the rising day-- long may they live and mutually possess a steady love and genuine happiness!" when edmund randolph married betsey nicholas, the poet found himself unable to express his emotions in less than two stanzas: "exalted theme, too high for common lays! could my weak muse with beauty be inspired, in numbers smooth i'd chant my betsy's praise, and tell how much her randolph is admired. "to light the hymeneal torch, since they're resolved, kind heaven, i trust, will make them truly blest; and when the gordian knot shall be dissolved, translate them to eternal peace and rest." it is safe to say that this figure, comparing matrimony with a gordian knot, was original with the poet. had the bridegroom been as fiery and "sparkish" as colonel park, he might have called out the writer, but he seems to have taken it in good part. the prospectus of the maryland _gazette_ for announces that its price will be twelve shillings a year, or fourteen shillings sealed and delivered. it promises the freshest advices, foreign and domestic, but adds, with much simplicity and candor: "in a dearth of news, which in this remote part of the world may sometimes reasonably be expected, we shall study to supply the deficit by presenting our readers with the best material we can possibly collect, having always due regard to the promotion of virtue and learning, the suppression of vice and immorality, and the instruction as well as entertainment of our readers." what more could the most exacting subscriber demand? advertisements, then, as now, served the double purpose of filling space, and supporting the paper. they were charged for, at the rate of five shillings for the first week, and one shilling for each week following, provided they were of moderate length--a vague provision, one would say. these old advertisements are of great value to the student of the life of the past. they give a better picture of the condition of society, than a ream of "notes." here we read of the shipping of a crew on a packet bound for england. half-way down the column a lost hog is advertised, and here, edward morris, breeches-maker, announces a sale of buckskin breeches, and gloves with high tops, and assures his customers that "they may depend on kind usage at reasonable rates." surely the resources of modern advertising have never devised anything more alluring than this promise of "kind usage at reasonable rates." since the art of reading was unknown to a considerable proportion of the community, it was natural that pictorial devices should be largely used. not only were the shops along the highways distinguished by such signs as "the blue glove," and "the golden keys," with appropriate illustrations; but in the advertising columns of the papers, the print was re-enforced by pictures of ships and horses, and runaway slaves. the purchase and sale of negroes formed a standing advertisement, beneath the caption of an auction-block. in the virginia _gazette_ of august, , we find the following under the curious headline: "sale of a musical slave." "a valuable young handsome negro fellow, about or years of age; has every qualification of a genteel and sensible servant, and has been in many different parts of the world. he shaves, dresses hair, and plays on the french horn. he lately came from london, and has with him two suits of new clothes, which the purchaser may have with him. inquire at the printing office." it is hard to understand why the owner should wish to part with a prodigy possessed of so many accomplishments. perhaps his playing on the french horn is the explanation. runaway servants, both black and white, form the subject of many advertisements in those old newspapers. in the maryland _gazette_ ( ) appears a description in rhyme of the disappearance of an indented servant: "last wednesday morn at break of day, from philadelphia ran away an irishman, named john mckeogn. to fraud and imposition prone, about five feet five inches high; can curse and swear, as well as lie. how old he is i can't engage, but forty-five is near his age. "he oft in conversation chatters of scripture and religious matters, and fain would to the world impart that virtue lodges in his heart. but, take the rogue from stem to stern, the hypocrite you'll soon discern "and find, though his deportment's civil, a saint without, within a devil. whoe'er secures said john mckeogn, (provided i should get my own), shall have from me in cash paid down five dollar bills, and half-a-crown." mary nelson is the owner and poet, or, in the fashion of the day, i should say poetess, and perhaps _owneress_, as i find it recorded of mary goddard that she was postmistress of baltimore and _printress_ and _editress_ of the _baltimore journal_. the world moves. the auction-block, and the runaway slave, with his bundle on his back, have disappeared from among the pictures in the advertising column; the packet has given way to the ocean steamer; the horse to the bicycle; the stage coach to the railroad; the little provincial gazettes, with their coarse gray paper and blurred type, to the great dailies, as large as the bible and as doubtful as the apocrypha. i wonder if another century will have such astounding tales to tell of progress in news, trade and travel! his friends and foes [illustration: his friendes and foes.] the early adventurers had never seen anything of savage life till they touched the shores of virginia. everything connected with the strange beings there was full of interest. they set down faithfully whatever they saw, and a good deal more besides. the susquehannocks impressed them most of all the indian tribes. their enormous height and fine proportions made them look like giants, and their attire was as impressive as their persons. one who saw them, writes home in those first pioneer days: "their attire is the skinnes of beares and woolves. some have cassacks made of beares heads and skinnes that a mans head goes through the skinnes neck, and the eares of the beare fastened to his shoulders, the nose and teeth hanging downe his breast, another beares face split behind him, and at the end of the nose hung a pawe. the half sleeves comming to the elbowes were the neckes of beares and the armes through the mouth with pawes hanging at their noses. one had the head of a wolfe hanging in a chaine for a iewell." one of their chiefs specially impressed the english. he was a giant among giants. the calf of his leg was three-quarters of a yard round, and "the rest of his limbs answerable to that proportion." his arrows were five quarters long, and he wore a wolf's skin at his back for a quiver. the picture of this indian hercules accompanied the maps which captain smith sent home to enlighten the company in england. the stories of the different adventurers were gathered together and printed as "the general history of virginia." the volume was adorned (i cannot say illustrated) by a series of woodcuts, which make us laugh aloud by their inaccuracy. the indians are simply gigantic englishmen naked and beardless, with the hair standing in a stiff ridge on top of the head, like a cock's comb. the wigwams look like haystacks, and the canoes like bathtubs. what a collection of pictures we might have had, if a kodak had been among the possessions of captain smith and his company! we should see king pamaunche with "the chaine of pearles round his necke thrice double, the third parte of them as bygg as pease," and catch a view of his "pallace" with its hundred-acre garden set with beans, pease, tobacco, gourdes, pompions, "and other thinges unknowne to us in our tongue." we should have the interiors of the smoky wigwams which spelman and archer visited, the forms of the squaws dimly outlined against the grimy mat, as they pounded corn, or dropped the bread into the kettle to boil. thanks to john smith's graphic pen, we have a picture of powhatan, that fierce old ancestor of so many first families of virginia, almost as vivid as a photograph. smith went to visit him, and found him proudly tying upon a bedstead a foot high, upon ten or twelve mats. "at head sat a woman, at his feet another. on each side, sitting upon a mat upon the ground, were ranged his chief men, on each side the fire, five or ten in rank, and behind them as many young women, each a great chaine of white beads over their shoulders, their heads painted in red, and with such a grave and majestical countenance as drove us into admiration to see such state in a naked savage." we might suppose these last words applied to the women, instead of to powhatan, did we not know how little state and majesty were allowed these copper-colored griseldas. the indian squaws were little more than slaves. when the braves moved, it was the squaws who carried the wigwams and set them up in the new camp. when the men sat at meals, they spread the mats, waited upon their masters, and finally contented their appetites with the remnants of the feast. in the field, too, they bore the brunt of the toil: "let squaws and hedgehogs scratch the ground," said an old warrior; "man was made for war and the chase." yet, wretched and abused as these women were, they seemed content with their lot, and when their husbands died, they not only mourned for them, but seemed quite ready to enter the same servitude with a new master. "i once saw a young widow," said jefferson, "whose husband, a warrior, had died about eight days before, hastening to finish her grief, and who, by tearing her hair, beating her breast, and drinking spirits, made the tears flow in great abundance in order that she might grieve much in a short space of time, and be married that evening to another young warrior." spelman, a virginia adventurer who, in the course of one of his exploring trips, witnessed an indian wedding, has left us an account of the ceremony. "ye man," he says, "goes not unto any place to be married, but ye woman is brought to him where he dwelleth. at her coming, her father or cheefe frend ioynes the hands togither, and then ye father, or cheefe frend of the man, bringeth a longe string of beades and, measuringe his armes leangth thereof, doth breake it over ye handes of those that ar to be married while their handes be ioyned together and gives it unto ye woman's father or him that brings hir. and so, with much mirth and feastinge they go togither." this "longe string of beades" of which spelman spoke, was probably made of the _peak_ and _roanoke_, which made the riches of the indian, and served him at once for money and ornament. both were made from shell--one dark, the other white. the darker was the more valuable, and was distinguished as _wampum_ peak. the english traders accepted it as coinage, and reckoned its value at eighteen pence a yard, while the white peak sold for ninepence. in the proceedings of the maryland council we find thomas cornwaleys licensed to trade with the indians for corn, roanoke, and peak. when the red men wished to make bargains with the english, before interpreters had been trained to speak both languages, the counting was done by dropping beans, one by one, amid total silence. woe to the offender who interrupted an indian during this critical operation, or indeed at any time! an interruption was looked upon as an unpardonable affront. once, in the time of bacon's rebellion, an indian chief, accompanied by several of his tribe, came to negotiate a treaty of peace with the english. in the course of the werrowance's address, one of his attendants ventured to put in a word. instantly, the chief snatched a tomahawk from his girdle, split the poor fellow's skull, motioned to his companions to carry him out, and continued his speech as calmly as though nothing had happened. the lack of ceremony in the white men's address, and the frequency with which they interrupted, struck the indian as amazing and unpardonable. there is a tradition that one of the early preachers strove to teach an old indian brave the doctrine of the trinity. the indian heard him calmly to the end, and then began in his turn to tell of the great spirit who spoke in the thunder, and whose smile was the sunshine. in the midst of his discourse, the clergyman broke in, "but all this is not true." the indian, turning to the circle around, remarked: "what sort of man is this? he has been talking for an hour of his three gods, and now he will not let me tell of my one." the character of the indian was a strange mixture of apparent contradictions. he would hunt and fish for a season, and then feast and make merry night and day while his supplies lasted. when they were exhausted, he would gird up his loins, and fast for a period long enough to end the life of a white man. he had an inordinate love of finery, upon which the english traded from the first. he would barter away a whole winter's provisions of corn for a scarlet blanket or a bunch of gay-colored beads. yet he was not without a natural shrewdness which enlightened him when he was being cheated. the story runs that some of the early missionaries taught the savages that their salvation depended on catching for them shad, which they sold to the settlers. in the course of time the indians discovered the trick, and drove out the deceivers. years afterward, another mission was established, and the first priest took as his text, "ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters!" the indians gathered round the preacher when the sermon was ended, and one of the tribe said: "white man, you speak in fine words of the waters of life; but before we decide on what we have heard, we would like to know _whether any shad swim in those waters_!" it must be confessed that the indians appear to better advantage than the english, in the early transactions. when hamor went to visit king powhatan, he was received with royal courtesy. the chief sent one of his attendants to bring what food he could find, though he explained that, as they were not expecting visitors, they had not kept anything ready. "presently," hamor recounts, "the bread was brought in two great wodden bowls, the quantity of a bushel sod bread, made up round, of the bygnesse of a tenise-ball, whereof we eat some few." after this repast, hamor and his comrades were regaled with "a great glasse of sacke," and then were ushered into the wigwam appropriated to them for the night. english and indian ideas of comfort did not correspond, however, for hamor complains: "we had not bin halfe an hour in the house, before the fleas began so to torment us that we could not rest there, but went forth and under a broade oake, upon a mat, reposed ourselves that night." hamor took with him on this visit, as an offering to the indian chief, five strings of blue and white beads, two pieces of copper, five wooden combs, ten fishhooks, and a pair of knives. in return for these costly presents, this pious english gentleman asked powhatan, who had already given pocahontas to the whites, to send them another daughter, really as a hostage, but nominally as a wife to sir thomas dale, the worthy governor of virginia, regardless of the slight objection that there was already a lady dale in england. pocahontas had good reason for saying to smith when she met him in london, "your countrymen will lie much." to the early settlers the savage seemed a strange being, not more than half human, who happened to be in possession of the land they coveted. they thought they did god service when they flung to the indian a bible and a handful of beads, in exchange for the land which had been his birthright for centuries. they cheated and cajoled him when he was angry, as they might have wheedled an angry tiger; yet, strange to say, they were quite off their guard when, at length, the tiger made his spring, and glutted the vengeance he had been nursing so long. when the news of the indian massacre reached england, it roused a frenzy of revenge equal in fury to that of the savages. the virginia company quite forgot that they had set forth in their charter that the conversion of the indians was one of the main objects of the new adventure, or if they remembered it at all, it was only to apologize lamely for a complete change of base. "we condemn their bodies," they wrote to the colonists, "the saving of whose souls we have so zealously affected. root them out from being any longer a people.... war perpetually without peace or truce: yet spare the young for servants" (the englishman even in a rage has an eye to the main chance). "starve them by destroying their corn, or reaping it for your own use! pluck up their weirs! obstruct their hunting! employ foreign enemies against them at so much a head! keep a band of your own men continually upon them, to be paid by the colony, which is to have half of their captives and plunder!" these short, nervous sentences fell like hammer-strokes on the ears of the englishmen in america, and they found an echo in their hearts. it is easy for us to characterize their revengeful spirit as inconsistent and unchristian. it is easy to tolerate a bear in a menagerie, or an indian on a reservation. it is quite another thing to exercise toleration toward either in the life-and-death grip of a frontier struggle. these men had seen their homes go up in flames. they had heard the blood-curdling war-whoop. they had counted the bloody scalps hanging at the indian's belt, and marked on them the hair of those they loved. it was idle to preach toleration to them. henceforward for many years it was war to the knife. yet, both as friend and foe, the indian had given the colonists many lessons. he had taught them the culture of maize and tobacco, he had taught them to stalk the deer, to trap the bear, and to blaze the forest path. many a lesson in woodcraft the settlers learned from him. washington's shrewdness in borrowing native methods of warfare, would, had his advice been taken, have saved braddock's army from utter rout in the western forests. the very enmity of the indian was a help to the colonial cavalier, whose ease-loving temperament might easily have sunk into sloth had it not felt the spur of danger and the necessity for being on the alert. the docility of the negro was a perpetual temptation to the white man to the abuse of arbitrary power, but the resistance of the indian was a constant reminder that here was a force unsubdued and unsubduable. of the influence of the white men on the indian, the less said the better. they eradicated none of his vices, and they lent him many of their own. they found him abstinent, and they made him a guzzler of firewater. they found him hospitable, and they made him suspicious and vindictive. they found him in freedom, the owner of a great country; they robbed him of the one, and crowded him out of the other. an old sachem in the eighteenth century, meeting a surveyor, said to him: "the french claim all the land on one side of the ohio, the english claim all the land on the other side. now, where does the indian's land lie?" the savages exchanged their corn and tobacco for the rum-cask and the firearms of civilization, and a strange jumble of a new religion, whose ceremonies they grafted onto their own, with grotesque results. it is hard to say whether they fared worst as the white man's friends or foes. when the english made a treaty with the chickahomanies, "a lustie and a daring people," these were the terms offered them by the whites: "first: they should for ever bee called englishmen and bee true subjects to king james and his deputies. "secondly: neither to kill nor detaine any of our men, nor cattell, but bring them home. "thirdly: to bee alwaies ready to furnish us with three hundred men, against the spaniards or any. "fourthly: they shall not enter our townes, but send word they are new englishmen. "fifthly: that every fighting man, at the beginning of harvest shall bring to our store two bushels of corne for tribute, for which they shall receive so many hatchets. "lastly: the eight chiefe men should see all this performed or receive the punishment themselves; for their diligence they should have a red coat, a copper chaine, and king james his picture, and be accounted his noblemen." this shameful bargain is recorded by the english with evident self-satisfaction, and apparently without a suspicion that they need blush for the transaction. yet when the indian met treachery with treachery, and fraud with guile, the civilized settlers were ablaze with indignation for no better reason than that the savages had learned of them, and bettered their instructions. his amusements [illustration: his amusements. 'let your recreations be manful/ not sinful.'] of all the amusements of the colonial cavalier, none was so popular as gambling. the law strove in vain to break it up. this statute in the colonial record, tells its own story: "against gaming at dice and cardes, be it ordained by this present assembly that the winners and loosers shall forfaicte ten shillings a man, one ten shillings thereof to go to the discoverer, and the rest to pious uses." i fear very little was ever collected for pious uses. the difficulty lay in the fact that, as every one played, there was no one to act the spy. this passion for gaming in the colonies was only a reflection of the craze in england. for more than a century after the return of charles the second, the rattle of the dice-box, and the shuffling of cards were the most familiar sounds in every london chocolate-house. young sinners and old spent their fortunes, and misspent their lives, playing for money at brooke's or boodle's. when a man fell dead at the door of white's, he was dragged into the hall amid bets as to whether he were dead or alive, and the surgeon's aid was violently opposed, on the ground of unfairness to those betting on the side of death. the duke of st. albans, at eighty, too blind to see the cards, went regularly to a gambling-house with an attendant. lady castlemaine lost twenty-five thousand pounds in one night's play. general braddock's sister, having gamed away her fortune at bath, finished the comedy by hanging herself. when her affectionate brother heard the news, he remarked jocularly, "poor fanny, i always thought she would play till she was forced to tuck herself up." i offer all this testimony to show that our colonial cavalier was only the child of his age, when he too shook the dice, and shuffled the cards. being short of cash, his bets were generally made in tobacco, or, failing that, in flesh and blood. many a slave found a new master in the morning, because his old master had been unlucky at play the night before. in a community so absorbed in the excitement of hazard, the lottery of course took deep hold. the first plantation in america was aided by a grand "standing lottery," with along list of "welcomes, prises and rewards," amounting to more than ten thousand crowns. the declaration sets forth that "all prises, welcomes and rewards drawne wherever they dwell, shall of the treasurer have present pay, and whosoever under one name or poesie payeth three pound in ready money, shall receive six shillings and eight pence, or a silver spoone of that value at his choice." "the money for the adventurers is to be paid to sir thomas smith, knight, and treasurer for _virginia_, or such officers as he shall appoint in city or country, under the common seale of the company for the receit thereof." the example thus set, was followed whenever the colonies felt a pressure for money. in virginia a lottery was established to meet the expenses of the french and indian war--the drawing directed to be "in the burgesses' room of the capital at williamsburgh at ten in the morning. prizes current money from £ to £ . the lucky numbers to be published in the _gazette_." in maryland, in the eighteenth century, a "scheme of lottery is humbly proposed to the public for raising the sum of pounds, current money, to be applied towards completeing the market-house in baltimore-town in baltimore co., buying two fire-engines and a parcel of leather-buckets for the use of the said town, enlarging the present public wharf and building a new one." if gambling was a favorite pastime and the lottery a popular excitement, the cavalier was not a stranger to manlier sports. of a brave and ardent temper, and a fine physique, he found at once his work and play in the hardy amusements of the chase. he had learned from the indian to stalk the deer, walking stealthily behind his horse till a good chance offered to shoot close at hand, and lay the unsuspecting deer at his feet. sometimes, in the bright october weather, the air would be blue with the smoke of the fires built to start the game. now, in his heavy leather boots, he would start afoot after wild hare, or by the light of the moon, with a band of servants and dogs, he would hunt the 'possum and the coon. this habit of hunting was so universal that the colonial cavalier well merited the sarcasm of _the spectator_, which described the english country gentleman as lying under the curse pronounced in the words of goliath, "i will give thee to the fowls of the air and to the beasts of the field." hunting as a sport may not be spiritualizing, but it certainly is not brutalizing, and as much cannot be said for all the sports of that day, in the southern colonies of america. the cock-fight and the gouging-match never lacked as eager a throng of spectators, as gathers to-day at a football game; yet both were brutal and disgusting. they roused the amazement of every foreigner, that such things should be tolerated in a civilized country. the gouging-match was simply a fight of the lowest order. not only were fists freely used, but the test of success was the ability of the stronger bully to gouge out the eye of his adversary. the under man could only save his sight by humiliating himself to cry out, "kings cruse!" or "enough!" anbury, who witnessed several of these matches, says: "i have seen a fellow, reckoned a great adept in gouging, who constantly kept the nails of both his thumb and second finger long and pointed; nay, to prevent their breaking or splitting, he hardened them every evening in a candle." so familiar was this brutal practice that it supplied a southern orator in after years with a rhetorical climax when, inciting his countrymen to make war on the mercantile interests of great britain, he exclaimed: "commerce is the apple of england's eye. there let us gouge her!" the cock-fight was scarcely less degrading than the gouging-match. when a fight was announced, the news spread like lightning, and from all over the country people came thronging, some bringing cocks to be entered in the match, but all with money or tobacco to bet on the result. the scene was one of wild excitement. men and boys cheered on their favorites, and watched with delight, while the furious cocks thrust at each other with their long spurs of cruel steel. it is pleasant to turn away from such scenes and sports as these, to read of the _knights of the golden horseshoe_ riding up into the wild fastnesses of the blue ridge mountains with governor spotswood. it was a right knightly expedition, and one of the most picturesque in american history. they wound through the forest, and forded the rivers, and climbed rocky mountains, and took possession of peak after peak in the name of "his majesty george the third." their horses were shod with iron, which was not usual in those days, and on their return, governor spotswood presented each of the cavaliers as a memento of the journey, with a tiny gold horse-shoe, set with jewels, and bearing the legend, "_sic juvat transcendere montes_." the thrifty old king disapproved of this extravagance, and left the governor to pay for the mementoes out of his own pocket. riding on horseback was the chief recreation, as well as the chief mode of getting about, at the south. as the planters grew richer, they delighted to own fine horses and outfits. washington's letter-book contains an order sent to london for elaborate equipments: " man's riding saddle, hogskin seat, large plated stirrups, double-reined bridle and pelham bit plated. a very neat and fashionable newmarket saddle-cloth. a large and best portmanteau, saddle, bridle and pillion, cloak-bag, and surcingle. a riding-frock of a handsome drab-coloured broadcloth with plain double gilt buttons. a riding waistcoat of superfine scarlet cloth and gold lace, with buttons like those of the coat. a blue surtout coat. a neat switch whip, silver cap. black velvet cap for servant." washington, as methodical in private affairs as in public, kept in his household books, a register of the names and ages of his horses and his dogs. here we may read the entire family history of _ajax_ and _blueskin_, _valiant_ and _magnolia_, or of the foxhounds _vulcan_, _singer_, _ringwood_, _music_, and _true love_. there was a peculiar intimacy between the foxhounds and their master, for they were associated with some of the happiest hours of his life, and when they came in from a field-day, torn by the briars through which they had struggled or limping from thorns in the foot, they were tenderly cared for, bandaged, and looked after. no amusement so delighted washington as riding across country with lord fairfax in one of the hunts which that gentleman and sportsman was so fond of organizing at greenaway court. on a brisk yet soft autumn morning, through the blue virginia haze, the gentry for miles around came to the "meet." the huntsmen might be heard urging on the dogs with cries of "yoicks! yoicks! have at him! push him up!" till the fox, which had doubled on its tracks, round and round the thick covert, at length broke away, and the cry was raised of "tally-ho! gone away!" the huntsman blew his horn, the whipper-in cracked his whip, the hounds were in full cry, and the entire field of scarlet-coated riders broke in, in a mad gallop, through brush and briar. a strong fox will "live" before hounds on an average of an hour, but sometimes the hunt lasted all day, and covered thirty miles or more. the lessons of endurance, of woodcraft, and of hardy strength, which the virginia gentlemen learned in these hunts, stood them in good stead in the life-and-death struggle on sterner fields. a great lover of animals was charles lee, who was always surrounded by a troop of dogs, and who made himself somewhat unwelcome as a visitor, by insisting on bringing them into the house with him wherever he went. "i must have some object to embrace," he once wrote to a friend. "when i can be convinced that men are as worthy objects as dogs, i shall transfer my benevolence, and become as staunch a philanthropist as the canting addison affected to be." apparently he never changed his mind, but died still devoted to his dogs and his horses. men who loved horses, of course loved horse-racing as well. the carolina jockey club was a famous institution. its annual races drew crowds from the neighboring country, and the population gave itself up to several days' festivity, ending in a ball. in virginia, the sport was no less popular. _the gazette_ of october, , announces that "on st. andrew's day, there are to be horse-races and several other diversions for the entertainment of the gentlemen and ladies at the old field." the programme of this entertainment recalls the days of merrie england. besides the race of twenty horses for a prize of five pounds, the advertisement gives notice: "that a hat of the value of s. be cudgelled for, and that after the first challenge be made, the drums are to beat every quarter of an hour for challenges round the ring, and none to play with their left hand. "that a violin be played for by fiddles, no person to have the liberty of playing unless he bring his fiddle with him. after the prize is won, they are all to play together, and each a different tune, and to be treated by the company. "that boys of years of age do run yds, for a hat of the cost of shillings. "that a flag be flying on said day, feet high. "that a handsome entertainment be provided for the subscribers and their wives; and such of them as are not so happy as to have wives, may treat any other lady. "that drums, trumpets and hautboys be provided to play at said entertainment. "that after dinner the royal health, his honor the governor's, etc., are to be drunk. "that a quire of ballads be sung for, by a number of songsters, all of them to have liquor sufficient to clear their wind-pipes. "that a pair of silver buckles be wrestled for, by a number of brisk young men. "that a pair of handsome shoes be danced for. "that a pair of handsome silk stockings, of one pistole value, be given to the handsomest young country maid that appears in the field--with many other whimsical and comical diversions too numerous to mention. "and as this mirth is designed to be purely innocent and void of offense, all persons resorting there are desired to behave themselves with decency and sobriety." there is a delightful heartiness and simplicity about all this racing, and chasing, and dancing, and jigging, and fiddling. folks had not learned to take their pleasure sadly. they still found clowns funny, and shouted with laughter over the efforts to climb greased poles and catch slippery pigs, and, above all, they delighted in the barbecue. at these great open-air feasts animals were roasted whole over enormous fires. huge bowls of punch circled round the long tables spread under the trees, and when the feast was done the negroes gathered up the fragments and made merry, late into the night. all the english holidays were observed in the cavalier colonies in addition to some local festivals. eddis writes from annapolis in old colony days: "besides our regular assemblies, every mark of attention is paid to the patron saint of each parent dominion; and st. george, st. andrew, st. patrick, and st. david are celebrated with every partial mark of national attachment. general invitations are given, and the appearance is always numerous and splendid. the americans on this part of the continent have likewise a saint, whose history, like those of the above venerable characters, is lost in sable uncertainty. the first of may is, however, set apart to the memory of saint _tamina_ (tammany); on which occasion the natives wear a piece of a buck's tail in their hats, or in some conspicuous situation. during the course of the evening, and generally in the midst of a dance, the company are interrupted by the sudden intrusion of a number of persons habited like indians, who rush violently into the room, singing the war-song, giving the whoop, and dancing in the style of those people; after which ceremony, a collection is made, and they retire, well satisfied with their reception and entertainment." in addition to such festivities as these, the king's birthnight was celebrated with illuminations and joy-fires, and christmas in maryland and virginia recalled the gayety of the dear old home festival. the halls were filled with holly and mistletoe, which refuse to grow in the chill new england air, but may be gathered in the woods of virginia as freely as in england; the yule log was kindled on the hospitable hearth, and the evening ended with a dance. it was a dancing age. none were too old or too dignified to join in the pastime. we have it on the authority of general greene that on one occasion washington danced for three hours without once sitting down. patrick henry would close the doors of his office to betake himself to dancing or fiddling, and jefferson dearly loved to rosin his bow for a merry jig. the story is told of him that once, when away from home, he received news of the burning of his father's house. "did you save any of my books?" he asked of the slave who brought him the tidings. "no, massa," answered the negro, "but we saved the fiddle!" at the entertainments in the "palace" at williamsburg, the governor himself opened the ball, with the most distinguished lady present, in the stately figures of the minuet. afterward young and old joined in the livelier motions of the _virginia reel_. this dance, in spite of its name, did not spring from virginia soil, but was adopted from an old english dance known as "the hemp-dressers," whose figures represent the process of weaving, as its couples shoot from side to side, then over and under, like a shuttle, and finally unite, as the threads tighten and draw the cloth together. the governor's palace did not absorb all the gayety of williamsburg. who has not heard of the raleigh tavern, with its leaden bust of sir walter, and its crowning glory of "the apollo room," named doubtless for that famous "apollo room" in the "devil's tavern," fleet street, where shakespeare and jonson held their bouts of wit and wine? if we could have crept up to the raleigh tavern some night, early in the last half of the last century, and peeped through the small-paned windows of "the apollo," we might have seen a party of gay collegians making merry with their sweethearts and friends. this tall youth, with sandy hair and gray eyes, is tom jefferson, who is offering his awkward homage at the shrine of miss 'becca burwell. near them is jefferson's most intimate friend, jack page, dancing with his nancy. yonder, near the wide fireplace, between sukey potter and betsy moore, stands ben harrison, a mere boy still, though soon to enter the house of burgesses, and over there in the corner, gravely surveying the dancers, is the uniformed figure of the young soldier, george washington. should we have read in these youthful faces a promise of the parts they were destined to play on the world's stage? probably no more than we should have foreseen this gay ballroom turned into the hall of a political assembly, where the first birth-cry of american freedom is heard. we can get whatever impression we choose of williamsburg and its society by selecting our authority judiciously. burnaby, who visited it in , describes it as a pleasant little town, with wooden houses straggling along unpaved streets; while hugh jones writes, thirty years earlier, that many good families live here "who dress after the same modes and behave themselves exactly as the gentry in london." "most families of any note," he adds, "have a coach, chariot, berlin or chaise." the city, so he says, is well stocked with rich stores, and "at the governor's house upon birthnights and at balls and assemblies, i have seen as fine an appearance, as good diversion, and as splendid entertainments in governor spotswood's time as i have seen anywhere." when governor botetourt (pronounced after the english fashion, _bottatot_) came over to virginia, he took the oath of office here at williamsburg, and rode in state in a great coach drawn by six milk-white horses. after the oath had been administered, a grand supper was given in his honor at the raleigh tavern. _the gazette_ gives a full account of the affair. an ode was sung, beginning: "he comes! his excellency comes to cheer virginia's plains. fill, your brisk bowls, ye loyal sons, and sing your loftiest strains! be this your glory, this your boast, lord botetourt's the favorite toast. triumphant wreaths entwine! fill your bumpers swiftly round, and make your spacious rooms resound with music, joy and wine!" the air being ended, the recitative took up the strain of effusive compliment: "search every garden, strip the shrubby bowers, and strew his path with sweet autumnal flowers! ye virgins, haste; prepare the fragrant rose and with triumphant laurels crown his brows!" the virgins thus called forth, appeared from their "shrubby bowers," bearing roses and laurel, and singing, as they advanced toward the hero of the evening: "see, we've stripped each flowery bed-- here's laurels for his lordly head, and while virginia is his care, may he protect the virtuous fair!" as i looked on lord botetourt's statue, and marked its moss-covered figure and its fatuously smiling face, robbed of its nose by the stone of contempt, i remembered this festival, and mused on the vicissitudes of fame. in the year a new delight was opened to the provincials. hallam's company of comedians came over in _the charming sally_ to act for them. a playbill of that year announces that "at the new theatre in annapolis by the company of comedians, on monday next, being the sixth of this instant july, will be performed _the busy body_, likewise a farce called _the lying valet_. to begin precisely at o'clock. tickets to be had at the printing-office. no persons to be admitted behind the scenes. box seats s., pit s. d, gallery s." a later bill announces that "children in laps will not be admitted." the favorite plays given by hallam's company seem to have been-- "the suspicious husband," "othello," "the mock doctor," "romeo and juliet," "the devil to pay," "a bold stroke for a wife," and "miss in her teens; or, a medley of lovers." our squeamish age would find much to shock, and perhaps little to amuse, in many of those old plays. congreve's shameless muse set the pace, and the nell gwynns of the stage kept it. if we wonder that our ancestors could listen and look, will not our descendants wonder equally at us? before hallam and his company came over to set up a professional standard, amateur theatricals were the rage. the virginia _gazette_ in announces a performance of "_the beaux' stratagem_ by the gentlemen and ladies of this county," and also that the students of the college are to give _the tragedy of cato_ at the theatre. somehow, addison's tragedies seem further removed from our sympathies than congreve's comedies, and we turn with relief to a form of amusement always in fashion and forever modern, the time-honored entertainment of feasting. in , a grand dinner was given by governor gooch to visiting statesmen at annapolis. william black, who was present, records in his journal that "punch was served before dinner, which was sumptuous, with wines in great abundance, followed by strawberries and ice-cream, a great rarity." these public banquets were momentous affairs, demanding a sound digestion and a steady head in those guests who wished to live to dine another day. chastellux gives a vivid account of their customs. "the dinner," he writes, "is served in the american or, if you will, in the english fashion, consisting of two courses, one comprehending the entrées, the roast meat and the warm side-dishes; the other, the sweet pastry and confectionery. when this is removed, the cloth is taken off, and apples, nuts, and chestnuts are served. it is then that healths are drunk." this custom of drinking healths, he finds pleasant enough, inasmuch as it serves to stimulate and prolong conversation. but he says, "i find it an absurd and truly barbarous practice, the first time you drink, and at the beginning of the dinner, to call out successively to each individual, to let him know you drink his health. the actor in this ridiculous comedy is sometimes ready to die with thirst, whilst he is obliged to inquire the names, or catch the eyes, of twenty-five or thirty persons." the woes of the diner and winer do not, it seems, end with this general call, for he is constantly called, and having his sleeve pulled, to attract his attention, now this way, now that. "these general and partial attacks end in downright duels. they call to you from one end of the table to the other: 'sir, will you permit me to drink a glass of wine with you?'" allowing for some exaggeration on the part of the lively frenchman, it is easy to see what quantities of madeira and "phyall" must have been drunk in those tournaments of courtesy, and i do not wonder to read in the journal of a young woman of the eighteenth century: "the gentlemen are returned from dinner. both tipsy!" "the tuesday club," of maryland, had many a jovial supper together. their toasts always began with "the ladies," followed by "the king's majesty," and after that "the deluge." i find a suggestive regulation made by this club, that each member should bring his own sand-box, "to save the carpet." parson bacon sanctified these convivial meetings by his presence and was, by all accounts, the ringleader of the boisterous revels. jonathan boucher, another clergyman, but of a very different type, was a great clubman too. he was one of the leading spirits of "the hommony club," whose avowed object was "to promote innocent mirth and ingenious humor." the days of women's clubs were still in the far future, and the chief excitement of the ladies was an occasional ball. the maryland assemblies began at six o'clock in the evening, and were supposed to end at ten, though the young folks often coaxed and cajoled the authorities into later hours. card parties were part of the entertainment, and whist was enlivened by playing for money. the supper was often furnished from the ladies' kitchens and the gentlemen's gamebags, and was a tempting one. the costumes were rich and imposing. a witness of one of these maryland balls writes: "the gentlemen, dressed in short breeches, wore handsome knee-buckles, silk stockings, buckled pumps, etc. the ladies wore--god knows what; i don't!" dancing and music were the chief branches of the eighteenth-century maiden's education. i can fancy, as i read that "patsy custis and milly posey are gone to colonel mason's to the dancing-school," how they held up their full petticoats, and pointed out the toes of their red-heeled shoes, and dreamed of future conquests, although for one of them the tomb was already preparing its chill embrace. for women, life in town was pleasant enough with its tea-drinkings, its afternoon visits, and its evening assemblies, but on the plantations far from neighbors time must often have hung heavy on their hands. yet even there, pleasures could be found, or made. when evening shut down over the lonely manor-houses along the chesapeake, the myrtleberry candles were lighted, the slender-legged mahogany tables drawn out, and the colonial dames seated themselves to an evening of cards. small stakes were played for to heighten the interest of "triumph, ruff and honors," "gleke," or "quadrille;" and when these lost their charm, there was the spinet to turn to. [illustration: spinet.] in those primitive days people still loved melody. "a little music" was called for with enthusiasm, and given without hesitation. there was no scientific criticism to be feared when the young men and maidens "raised a tune." their list of songs was not long; but familiarity lent a deeper charm than novelty. "gaze not on swans" was a favorite in the seventeenth century. "push about the brisk bowl," while well enough at the hunt supper table, was banished from the drawing-room in favor of "beauty, retire!" a song beginning-- "beauty, retire! thou dost my pitty move; believe my pitty and then trust my love." the writer does not make it quite clear why he wishes beauty to retire, nor why she moves his pity. in fact, the case seems quite reversed in the last stanza: "with niew and painfulle arts of studied warr i breake the hearts of half the world; and shee breakes mine; and shee, and shee, and _shee_ breakes mine!" through the lapse of more than one century, we hear the echo of those young voices, rising and falling in the air and counter of the quaint old melodies. oh, those shadowy corners of candle-lighted rooms, those spinets, those duos and trios, those ruffled squires and brocaded dames!--where are they now? his man-servants and his maid-servants [illustration: his man-servants _and_ his maid servants. "jove _fixed it certain that whatever day makes a man slave, takes half his worth away_"] a new england farmhouse and a southern plantation:--what a contrast the two presented in colonial days! in the homes of massachusetts and connecticut, the notable housewife was up before light, breaking the ice over the water, of a winter morning, preparing with her own hands the savory sausages and buckwheat cakes for the men's breakfast, and setting the house in order. to her it fell to take charge of the wool from the back of the sheep till it reached the back of her boy; carding, spinning, weaving, dyeing the wool, cutting the cloth, and sewing the seams, scouring floors and washing dishes; all these duties fell to the share of the puritan priscillas. yet, when evening fell, when the dishes were shelved on the dresser, these busy housewives, in their sanded kitchens, with the firelight reflected from their shining tins, were not to be pitied, even in comparison with their more luxuriously attended sisters in maryland or virginia. life at the south was at once grander and shabbier, than in new england. the southerner's ease-loving nature had the power to ignore detail; and it is attention to detail which brings well-being to the household and wrinkles to the housekeeper. a thousand slaves could not take the place of one woman of "faculty." in fact, the more shiftless, lazy negroes there were, the less order and tidiness prevailed. but order and tidiness were not indispensable to happiness there and then, and the sum of human enjoyment was large on those old plantations, in spite of shiftlessness and slavery. of that restless ambition which corrodes modern life, men had little, women had none, and servants less than none. the negro was a true child of the tropics, and with food and sunshine enough, was merry as the day is long. a healthy negro, on a prosperous estate, under the charge of a gentleman, not under the bane of an overseer, came perhaps as near to animal cheerfulness as mortal often does. the master enjoyed that serenity and leisure which freedom from manual labor gives; his children grew up, each with a personal retainer attached to himself with the old feudal loyalty; the lady of the house was again the old saxon _hlaefdige_, who gave out the bread to the tribe of servants day by day. yet with all the brightness which can be thrown into the picture, slavery was a curse alike to slave and slave-owner, on account both of what it brought and what it took away. it is strange to note how silently and unperceived the black cloud of slavery stole over the colonial cavalier. a casual entry in john rolfe's journal records: "about the last of august came in a dutch man of warre that sold vs twenty negars." before the arrival of this fatal vessel life-servitude was unknown. the system of apprenticeship, and what would now be called contract labor, prevailed. these indented white servants were either transported convicts, sold for a season to the planters, or, like the maryland _redemptioners_, poor immigrants, who contracted to serve for a period of time equivalent to the cost of their passage, which was prepaid to the master of the ship on which they came. the work of these indented servants was not excessive. "five dayes and a halfe in the summer," said one who knew the situation from experience, "is the allotted time that they worke and, for two months, when the sun predominates in the highest pitch of his heat, they claim an antient and customary priviledge, to repose themselves three hours in the day, within the house. in winter they do little but hunt and build fires." the sot-weed factor gives a much less rose-colored account of the life of a redemptioner. a woman-servant in the poem, looking back on her life in england, exclaims: "not then a slave for twice two year, my cloathes were fashionably new, nor were my shifts of linnen blue. but things are changed: now at the hoe i daily work and barefoot go, in weeding corn, or feeding swine i spend my melancholy time." a "melancholy time" many of the redemptioners must have had in their enforced service; but if the master proved too severe, the indented servant had the privilege of selecting another, and the original employer was indemnified for his loss. susan frizell, who had run away from her master, was recaptured and brought before the court for punishment; but her accounts of ill-usage so moved the authorities, that they remitted the extra term of service to which running away had made her liable, and only demanded that she should earn under a new master the five hundred pounds of tobacco to be paid to her old employer. the bystanders were so touched by poor susan's pitiful situation that they collected six hundred pounds on the spot, and sent susan on her way rejoicing, with a capital of one hundred pounds of tobacco to give her a new start in the world. the law provided that the servant, when his time of service expired, should receive a portion of goods sufficient to make him an independent freeman, who might rise to be a councillor or an assemblyman. a colonial statute directs that "at the end of said terme of service, the master or mistress of such servant shall give unto such man or maid-servant, barrels, a hilling hoe and a felling axe; and to a man-servant, one new cloth suite, one new shirte, new paire shoes, and a new monmouth capp; and to a maid-servant, new pettycoat and waistcoat, new smock, pair new shoes, pair new stockings and the cloaths formerly belonging to the servant." the advantage of this system of indented service lay in its gradual absorption of the immigrant population, who thus had time to understand the laws and institutions of their new country before they became in their turn citizens and lawmakers. the disadvantage lay in the encouragement it gave to kidnapping. many children and young people in the seaboard towns of england were beguiled, or carried by force, on shipboard, to be sold as servants in the colonies. the kidnappers, or "spirits," as they were commonly called, served as bugaboos in many an english nursery to frighten naughty children into obedience under threat of being spirited away to america. howells' "state-trials" contains a pitiful account of the experiences of a young nobleman sold as a white servant in virginia through the plot of his covetous uncle, who wanted his property. the nephew is a mere child when he begins his apprenticeship in the provinces, but, by a series of attempts to escape, he prolongs his term of service till, when he finally succeeds in getting back to england to claim his own from the treacherous uncle, he is a man grown, and as difficult of recognition as the tichborne claimant. the great majority of the first indented servants sent over, however, were convicts ripe for the jail or the gallows, and only respited to be transported to the colonies, which long suffered from the introduction of such a class of citizens. the records of middlesex county, england, tell their own story: _ april, james i._ stephen rogers, for killing george watkins against the form of statute of the first year of king james, convicted of manslaughter, was sentenced to be hung, but at the instance of sir thomas smith, kn't, was reprieved in the interest of virginia, because he was a carpenter. _ august, james i._ on his conviction of incorrigible vagabondage ralph rookes was reprieved at sheriff johnson's order so that he should be sent to virginia. _ april, james i._ on her conviction by a jury of stealing divers goods of mary payne, elizabeth handsley was reprieved for virginia. _ st may, james i._ on his conviction of stealing richard atkinson's bull, william hill asked for the book, and was respited, for virginia. the records teem with such cases. yet these were not the only representatives of indented servants. in the course of the various successive political upheavals which shook england, it chanced that many gentlemen of good birth and breeding were driven over to the colonies, to begin life there at the foot of the ladder. after monmouth's rebellion several hundred citizens, some of eminent standing, were sent to virginia. "take care," wrote the king, "that they continue to serve for ten years at least, and that they be not permitted in any manner to redeem themselves by money or otherwise, until that term be fully expired." despite the royal warning, these exiles were pardoned before the term was ended, and became most useful and valuable citizens. well had it been for the cavalier colonies had they adhered to this system of apprenticeship and indented service. their children and their children's children might then have sung of "the nobility of labor, the long pedigree of toil." but with the widespread introduction of negro slavery, came the degradation of labor. the negro represented a despised caste. he labored; therefore labor was contemptible. henceforth there was established an aristocracy of ease and wealth, resting on a foundation of unpaid labor. with the establishment of slavery there grew up a more marked distinction of classes among the whites. a wide gulf separated rich and poor. devereux jarratt, son of a virginia carpenter, writes in his autobiography: "we were accustomed to look upon gentlefolks as beings of a superior order. for my part, i was quite shy of them and kept off a humble distance. a periwig in those days was a distinguishing badge of gentlefolk; and when i saw a man riding the road with a wig on, it would so alarm my fears, and give me such a disagreeable feeling, that i dare say i would run as for my life." thus society became stratified: at the top, the great landholders, below them the small planters aping the manners and customs of their rich neighbors, and underneath, the population composed of poor whites and overseers. the negroes were no more part of the social system than the oxen they drove a-field. it is a curious commentary on the scriptural principle of turning the other cheek to the smiter, that the indians, who resisted the encroachments of the whites and waved the tomahawk in response to the echo of the englishman's gun, were feared and respected, while the blacks, who yielded meekly to the yoke of servitude, met at best only a good-natured contempt. the masters' consciousness of the injustice of slavery made them fearful of revolt and revenge, which the slaves had neither skill nor energy to plan. the whole machinery of the law was directed to the suppression of this imaginary danger. all gatherings of slaves were strictly forbidden. if found at a distance from the plantations, any negro was subject to lashes on the bare back. it was not counted a felony to kill a slave while punishing him. negroes, and indented servants as well, who attempted to escape were whipped and branded on the cheek with the letter r, and on a repetition of the offence they might be put to death. no punishment was too severe for this crime of running away, curiously denominated in the old statutes "stealth of one's self." among the enormous offences set forth in a maryland act of i find, "harboring or clokeing of another's servant without the knowledge and consent of the master or mistress." in spite of all precautions, a slave did succeed, now and then, in gaining his freedom. it is with great satisfaction that i read an old act of assembly, setting forth that "whereas a negro named billy, slave to john tillit, has for several years unlawfully absented himself from his master's service, said billy is pronounced an outlaw, and a bounty of a thousand pounds of tobacco set on his head." the bounty does not trouble me, for i feel sure that the craft and strength which made billy an outlaw, kept him safe from the bolts aimed against him by the colonial legislature. the statute-books of maryland and virginia are records of the barbarity into which injustice may drive a kindly, liberty-loving people who are forced into cruelty by the logic of events. having taken the wrong road, like bunyan's pilgrim, the cavaliers found the rocks ready to fall on them if they went forward, and the gulf yawning behind them if they tried to turn back. it must never be forgotten in their behalf that they did try to turn about, when they saw their error. their best men, over and over again, urged the prohibiting of slavery, and there is more than a probability that they would have won their cause, but for the attitude of that country whose air was afterward pronounced too pure to be breathed by a slave insomuch that his shackles fell off, when he touched the shore sacred to liberty. yet, in , this highly moral and philanthropic england declared in a statute, the opinion of its king and parliament, that the slave-trade was highly beneficial to the kingdom and colonies. in , queen anne boasted in her speech to parliament, of her success in securing to england a new market for slaves in spanish america. jefferson testified that virginia was constantly balked in her efforts to throw off slavery by the attitude of the home government. carolina attempted restriction and gained a rebuke. in , the earl of dartmouth haughtily replied to a colonial agent, "we cannot allow the colonies to check, or discourage in any degree, a traffic so beneficial to the nation." yet all the blame cannot be thrown on england. had the colonies been as firm in defence of their duties, as they were when their rights were in question, england must have yielded. virginia was the first state to enunciate the proposition of the equality of man, yet was blind to her own inconsistency. the leading supporters of the cause of liberty were themselves slave-owners. george washington owned negroes. john randolph had a bunk for his slave side by side with the bed of his pet horse. patrick henry wrote with admirable candor: "believe me, i shall honor the quakers for their noble efforts to abolish slavery; they are equally calculated to promote moral and political good. would any one believe that i am master of slaves of my own purchase? i am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living without them. i will not--i _can_ not--justify it." the great southern statesman said that he trembled for his country when he remembered that god was just. washington deplored the system, yet so closely were all commercial and political interests interwoven with it that it seemed impossible to disentangle them. even philanthropy did not scorn its alliance. whitefield expended the money raised by his eloquent preaching at charleston, on a plantation with slaves to work it for the benefit of an orphan asylum. the church spread its surplice of protection over the institution. baptism was permitted to the slave, but with the distinct understanding that it was to make no difference in the condition of bondage of these brothers in christ. one south carolina clergyman ventured to preach on the duties of masters to their servants, but his congregation said to him: "sir, we pay you a genteel salary to read to us the prayers of the liturgy and to explain to us such parts of the gospel as the rule of the church directs, but we do not want you to teach us what to do with our blacks." the northern colonies were freed from the curse of slaveholding as much by policy as by principle. they tried slave-owning, but, happily for them, it did not pay. the climate and the conditions of their industries forbade its spread among them. but their hands were not unstained. if they did not buy slaves, they sold them. there still exists, if bishop meade may be trusted, a bill of sale of a slave, bearing the signature of jonathan edwards. every year ships were fitted out from medford, salem, or new bedford, which sailed away loaded with rum to be exchanged in africa for negroes, who in turn were sold for molasses, to be made into rum again. the transactions of one of these slavers are preserved in the history of medford, and makes interesting reading for those who would hold up the puritan as innocent of the transgression which stains the character of the cavalier. the deadly parallel column tells its story, so that he who runs may read: ----------------------------------------------------------------------- dr. the natives of annamboe. | per contra. cr. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- . gals| gals |apr. apr. . to hh. of rum | by woman slave |may . may . " " " | by prime woman slave. |may . may . " " " | by boy slave ft. in. |may . may . " " " | by boy slave ft. in. |may . may . cash in gold oz. | prime man slave oz. |may . " . " " " oz. } | old man for a lingister oz. " . doz. of snuff oz. } | ----------------------------------------------------------------------- the negroes thus brought to the american colonies were not of one race. a slaver often carried men of different languages, habits, and characteristics, perhaps hereditary enemies. some were jet black, some mahogany-colored, and others still of a tawny yellow, with flat noses and projecting jaws. this last type belonged to the low, swampy ground at the niger's delta, and marked the race most adapted to the cultivation of the rice in its swamps, so fatal to white laborers. all this diversity among the negroes accounts for their lack of power and energy to combine in a struggle for freedom. "the negroes that have been slaves in their own country," hugh jones says, "make the best servants; for they that have been kings and great men there, are generally lazy, haughty and obstinate." alas, for these poor magnates from heathendom! the cavaliers did not find the problem of domestic service solved by life-ownership of servants. colonel fitzhugh writes mr. john buckner in : "i hope you will make an abatement for your dumb negro that you sold me. had she been a new negro, i must have blamed my fate, not you; but one that you had two years, i must conclude you knew her qualities, which is _bad at work, worse at talking_. you took advantage of the softness of my messenger to quit your hands of her." in spite of this unsuccessful experiment, we find him two years later making another venture in human live-stock, by ordering john withers to buy "mr. walton's boy for £ , or £ with him and others, unlesse you can make a better bargain." poor colonel fitzhugh might well be discouraged, for he had tried every kind of servant, black and white, bond and free, without satisfactory results. "i would have you," he writes in despair to a sea captain in england, "bring me in a good housewife. i do not intend or mean to be brought in, as the ordinary servants are, but to pay her passage and agree to give her fifty shillings or three pounds a year during the space of five years, upon which terms, i suppose, good servants may be had, because they have their passage clear, and as much money as they can have there. _i would have a good one or none._ i look upon the generality of wenches you bring in as not worth keeping." so the colonial cavaliers found trouble in their households with servants of any race or color, and the gentle nature of the blacks proving specially adaptable to servitude, and purchase money seeming so much less than wage-money, they gradually did away with other service. every plantation had its negro-quarters, where crowds of pickaninnies swarmed in the sunshine outside the little cabins with scarcely more clothing on than their parents had worn in their african jungle. the bread of indian corn was baked on the hoe over a smoky fire, or in the ashes. when the day's work was done, the negroes sat, with their banjos or rude musical instruments, playing accompaniments to their strange, weird music, a mixture of reminiscences of barbarism and the hymns they caught from the "new lights"; or they spent the evening more merrily, dancing jigs to the twanging of a broken fiddle. they were, on the whole, a careless, happy race, taking no thought for the morrow, content to accept food and clothing at the hands of "massa and missus," and, for the rest, to work when they must, shirk when they could, and carry a merry heart through life. the outward circumstances of their lot were hard. anbury, in his american travels, observed their condition closely and described it with what we must believe impartial accuracy. the life of these field-hands was much more severe than that of the household servants, both because the work itself was harder, and because it was ruled by the overseer, usually a brute. it is of these field negroes that anbury is writing, when he says: "they are called up at daybreak, and seldom allowed to swallow a mouthful of hominy or hoecake, but are driven out into the field immediately, where they continue at hard labor without intermission till noon, when they go to their dinners and are seldom allowed an hour for that purpose. their meals consist of hominy and salt, and if their master is a man of humanity, touched by the finer feelings of love and sensibility, he allows them twice a week a little fat, skimmed milk, rusty bacon or salt herring to relish this miserable and scanty fare.... after they have dined they return to labor in the field till dusk in the evening. here one naturally imagines the daily labor of these poor creatures over; not so. they repair to the tobacco-houses, where each has a task of _stripping_ allotted, which takes up some hours; or else they have such a quantity of indian corn to husk, and if they neglect it, are tied up in the morning, and receive a number of lashes from those unfeeling monsters, the overseers. when they lay themselves down to rest, their comforts are equally miserable and limited, for they sleep on a bench, or on the ground with an old scanty blanket, which serves them at once for bed and covering. their clothing is not less wretched, consisting of a shirt and trousers of coarse, thin, hard, hempen stuff in the summer, with an addition of a very coarse woolen jacket, breeches, and shoes in winter." yet, in spite of toil and privation, these negroes, so the traveller testifies, are jovial and contented. it seems incomprehensible to us that the noble, sensitive, kindly southern gentleman saw all these things in silence; that even when they had no share in the beating of the wayfarer, they still passed by on the other side with the priest or the levite and offered no succor. yet, do we not do the same thing every day? we know that the faces of the poor are ground while the rich prosper, that the animal world is abused and tortured, yet because we think ourselves powerless, we strive to make ourselves callous, and turn away our eyes that we may not see where we cannot help. many there were who had the courage as well as the impulse to protest. one of the firmest and the ablest of these was jefferson. he had the insight to perceive not only the injustice to the slave, but the injury to the slaveholder. "there must, doubtless," he writes, "be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people by the existence of slavery among us. the whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submission on the other. our children see this and learn to imitate it, for man is an imitative animal. this quality is the germ of all education in him. from his cradle to his grave, he is learning to do what he sees others do. if a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love for restraining the intemperance of passion toward his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present. but generally it is not sufficient. the parent storms; the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to the worst of his passions; and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. the man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances." yet we are constantly meeting such prodigies in the history of the cavalier. men whose pure lives, gentle manners, and courtesy to high and low, whose unselfishness and cheerful benignity may be matched against those of the hardest-working puritan or the most radical upholder of the equal rights of man. the old _noblesse oblige_ principle still held sway. governor gouch, of virginia, being once on a time reproached for having returned the bow of a negro, replied in the good old cavalier spirit: "i should be much ashamed that a negro should have better manners than i." the field hands were kept at a distance, but the house-servants were admitted to the closest intimacy, especially when acting in the capacity of maids and nurses. many a golden head was laid for comfort on the black breast of some faithful mammy, while the childish sorrows were poured into her listening ear, and many a gray-haired woman recalled as her truest friend, the humble slave whose life had been devoted to her service. an entry in washington's journal shows how well he understood the nature of the negro, and how wisely and firmly he dealt with it. one day four of his servants were employed at carpentering, but without accomplishing anything. instead of scolding, washington sat himself calmly down to watch their work. stimulated by his presence, they went on briskly. the wise master noted the work and the time, and then informed them that just so much must be done in his absence. it was owing to such management that the products of the mount vernon plantation ranked so high that all barrels marked with the name of george washington passed the inspectors without examination. here, if anywhere, was a man who might be trusted with arbitrary power over his fellow-men, yet he was one of the most outspoken in opposition to slavery; and he, like jefferson, realized the terrible strain on the character of the master. woe to the man who lives constantly with inferiors! he is doomed never to hear himself contradicted, never to be told unwelcome truth, never to sharpen his wits and learn to control his temper by argument with equals. the colonial cavaliers were little kings, and they proved the truth of the saying of the royal sage of rome, that the most difficult of tasks is to lead life well in a palace. his church [illustration: his church. williamsburg church bruton parish.] "_mixe not holy thinges with profane!_" so runs the inscription on the quaint old silver chalice used in the communion service of the jamestown church. had the advice been heeded, the history of the colonial church of england would not have been the sorry story it is. in point of fact, holy and profane things are so mixed in its chronicles that it is hard to write of it without seeming levity and flippancy. to call the differences between the parsons and their parishes in the southern colonies a struggle, would be to dignify it beyond the warrant of truth. it was simply a series of squabbles without ennobling principle on either side. yet, in the beginning, better things promised. great attention was paid to religious forms and observances, and the earliest laws are devoted to the regulation of church affairs. in the year after the landing of the settlers, edward maria wingfield, first president of the council in virginia, was brought to trial accused of various high crimes and misdemeanors. among the charges against him was one of atheism. the most damaging evidence against him was the absence of a bible from his belongings. he himself felt that this was a point needing explanation, which he made by saying that he had "sorted" many books to take with him to virginia, and was sure that a bible was among them, but that in the course of his journey he had found "the truncke" somehow broken open, and the bible "ymbeasiled." in rebuttal of evidence showing general godlessness and lack of respect for the sabbath, he explained that on the sunday in question, indian allarums had detained every one at the palisade "till the daie was farre spent." then, he goes on to say: "the preacher, master hunt, did aske me if it weare my pleasure to have a sermon. he said he was prepared for it. i made answer that our men were weary and hungry, and that if it pleased him wee would spare him till some other tyme." the tact of this reply should certainly have scored a point in wingfield's defence, especially as he adds: "i never failed to take such noates by wrighting out of his doctrine as my capacity could comprehend, _unless some raynie day hindered my endeavour_." these excuses, however, were not satisfactory to his judges, and the other charges against him proving only too well-founded, he was deposed from the council, and was glad enough to slip off back to england at the first chance. three years later, dale of the iron hand came over fresh from the netherlands, and put religion, like everything else, under martial law. the captain of the watch was made a sort of tithing-man, whose business it was to preserve order and encourage godliness at the point of the bayonet. it was his duty, half an hour before divine service, morning and evening, to shut the ports and place sentinels, and, the bell having tolled for the last time, to search all the houses, and to command every one (with the exception of the sick and hurt) to go to church. this done, he followed the guards with their arms into the church, where he laid the keys before the governor. on sunday he was ordered to see that the day was noways profaned by any disorders. the ancient planters were strict sunday keepers. the earliest law decrees "the sabbath to be kept holy, that no journeys be made except in case of emergent necessitie on that day, that no goods bee laden in boates, nor shooteing in gunns or the like tending to the prophanation of the day." the offender who disobeys this decree is sentenced to pay a fine of a hundred pounds of tobacco or "be layd in the stocks." henry coleman was excommunicated for forty days for scornful speeches, and putting on his hat in church. the minister as well as the church was protected by law from irreverence and disrespect. in , it was ordered by the court that, for slandering rev. mr. cotton, "henry charlton make a pair of stocks and set in them several sabbath-days during divine service, and then ask mr. cotton's forgiveness for using offensive and slanderous words concerning him." a few years later, mary powell, for slandering a minister, was sentenced to receive twenty lashes on her bare shoulders, and to be banished the country. i tremble to think what would have been the fate, had he fallen into episcopal hands, of the puritan who spoke of bishops as "proud, popish, presumptuous, paltry, pestilent, and pernicious prelates;" and further as "impudent, shameless, and _wainscot-faced_." i, for one, should have voted to take something from his punishment, on the ground of his supplying the world with a new and most expressive phrase. maryland, liberal in all sectarian matters, strictly forbade calling names such as "heretick, schismatick, idolator, papist, antinomian, etc.," and sentenced the offender to a fine of ten shillings. she also dealt summarily with unbelievers. her assembly ordained that "whatsoever person or persons shall deny the holy trinity, or shall utter reproachful speeches concerning the trinity or any of the said persons thereof, shall be punished with death and confiscation of land and goods to the lord proprietary." the first church in america was a very simple affair, an old rotten tent set up in the jamestown marsh under the pines and hemlocks. the soft may weather made even so much shelter unnecessary, and it was replaced by an awning stretched between the rustling boughs. but busy as the settlers were, they set to work at once on a chapel built of logs and covered with sedge and dirt, which in turn was replaced by a church of timber, fifty feet long, by more than twenty in breadth. this finally was replaced by the brick building whose ruined arches alone remain to tell its story. when lord de la warre arrived in virginia and found the colonists in desperate straits, he wisely occupied their attention by setting them to repair and refurnish the wooden church then in existence, and to decorate it with flowers. here during his government he worshipped in a degree of state more fitting for a cathedral than for a wooden chapel in the wilderness. he went to church in full dress, attended by his lieutenant-general, admiral, vice-admiral, master of the horse and the rest of the council, with a guard of fifty halberd-bearers in red cloaks behind him. when the service ended, the procession filed out with as much solemnity as it had entered, and escorted the governor to his house. religious observances played an important part in the early days of the settlement. the first statute made by an early legislative assembly, requires that in every plantation some house or room be specially dedicated to the worship of god, sequestered and set apart for that purpose, and not to be of any temporal use whatever. it is curious, in view of this last clause, to find it recorded of the house of burgesses itself: "the most convenient place wee could finde to site in was the quire of the churche." surely no place could have been more appropriate for the gathering of the first free assembly of the people in america, and it was equally fitting that their proceedings should open with a prayer for guidance in the path which was destined to be darker and more difficult than they knew. "forasmuch as men's affaires doe little prosper when god's service is neglected," a prayer was said by mr. bucke, the minister, "that it would please god to guide and sanctifie all our proceedings to his owne glory and the good of this plantation." if the church of that time was devoted to temporal uses, religious services were not confined within its walls. alexander whitaker, the apostle of virginia, writes home that he _exercises_ at the house of the governor, sir thomas dale, every saturday night. this "exercising," or hearing of the catechism, with prayer and song, in private houses, was a matter of necessity in days when a parish covered a space hardly to be crossed in a day's journey, with the roads or bridle-paths choked with undergrowth, and blocked by fallen logs. the rev. mr. forbes seems to have been of a complaining nature, yet he rouses one's sympathy when he tells of the difficulties under which he labored. "my parish," he says, "extendeth lx miles in length, in breadth about xi." over this distance were scattered some four hundred families, to whom he was expected to minister. "sometimes," he goes on plaintively, "after i have travelled fifty miles to preach at a private house, the weather happening to prove bad on the day of our meeting so that very few met, or else being hindred by rivers and swamps rendred impassable with much rain, i have returned with doing of nothing to their benefit or mine own satisfaction." few clergymen of that day and region took their duties so seriously. they were for the most part quite willing to have service read by some deputy-priest or layman in the "chapels of ease;" or if they must officiate, they chose some sermon from thomas fuller or jeremy taylor, or, as a last resort, constructed one at small expense of labor on a scaffolding of headings resting on an underpinning of text. a fine example of this method of sermon-building i find in the discourse sent home by the pious whitaker. he takes as his text, "cast thy bread upon the waters," and expounds it after this fashion: " . the dutie to be performed: _cast thy bread._ be liberal to all. " . the manner of bestowing alms: by _casting_ it away. " . what is to be given? _bread_; all things needful, yes, and of the best kind. " . who may be liberal? even those that have it. it must be _thy_ bread--thine own. " . to whom we must be liberal: to all; yea to the _waters_." this kind of sermon had the double advantage of being easy for the preacher, and restful to the congregation. it went along at a comfortable jog-trot, like a family horse, and the hearer was in no danger of being hurled over the head of revival eloquence into lurid threats of future punishment. if the preachers of the church of england did not kindle spiritual ardor, at least they did not keep children awake o' nights, nor frighten nervous women into hysterics. while these drowsy discourses were going on in the southern colonies, the puritan divine in the new england pulpit was throwing off such cheerful observations as these: "every natural man and woman is born full of all sin, as full as a toad is of poison, as full as ever his skin can hold; mind, will, eyes, mouth; every limb of his body and every piece of his mind." the future awaiting such a wretch, he sets forth vividly: "thou canst not endure the torments of a little kitchen-fire on the tip of thy finger, not one-half hour together. how wilt thou bear the fury of this infinite, endless, consuming fire in body and soul!" to these inspiring doctrines of the rev. thomas shepherd, another puritan preacher added his conviction that "there are infants in hell not a span long." to the credit of the colonial church of england be it recorded that no such sentiments disgraced its pulpit and made its sabbath terrible to little children. the day was one of innocent enjoyment, and the church building was dear to generation after generation, as a peaceful and memory-hallowed spot. the early settlers had little money to spend in adorning their churches, yet from the beginning there was a great difference between the bare and square wooden new england meeting-house and the quaint southern church of brick or stone, recalling in every line the beloved parish churches of old england. the churchmen, unlike the puritans, found no sin in beauty or adornment. st. john's church at hampton bore the royal arms carved on its steeple. colonel springer left by his will one thousand pounds of tobacco to pay for having the lord's prayer and commandments put up in the new church at northampton. by a statute of , parishes are enjoined to provide at their own cost a great church bible and two books of common prayer in folio for the minister and "clark"; also communion-plate, pulpit-cloth, and cushion, "that all things may be done orderly and decently in the church." in the next century, there is a record of an order sent to england for gold-leaf to enrich a chancel, which was to be made gorgeous with an original painting of an angel holding back a crimson curtain, draped with a golden cord and tassel. [illustration: y{e} pulpit.] the pulpits in the old churches were placed at an angle, if the church were in the form of a cross; or if the building were an oblong on one side. these pulpits were so high that, unless the preacher were very tall, nothing could be seen by the congregation but the top of his head. bishop meade confesses that when he was to speak from one of these old box-pulpits, he would often hurry to church before his hearers, in order to pile up bricks or boards on which to stand. the good bishop must sometimes have found his thoughts sadly distracted from the sermon by the necessity of keeping his balance on his improvised platform. the sharp distinction of classes, which was so marked a feature of the cavalier colonies, showed itself even in church. certain pews were set apart and marked "magistrates" and "magistrates' ladies." into these the great folks marched solemnly on sundays, followed by their slaves bearing prayer-books, and never suspecting that their conduct was at variance with gospel principles. the great families kept their private pews for generations, and held firmly to their privileges. matthew kemp, as churchwarden, was commended by his vestry for displacing "a presuming woman, who would fain have taken a pew above her degree." in the very earliest church, lord de la warre's seat was upholstered in green velvet with a green "cooshoon;" governor spotswood's pew in bruton parish church at williamsburg was raised from the floor, and covered with a canopy, while the interior was ornamented with his name in gilt letters. in , it was ordered by the vestry of st. paul's church, norfolk, that "three captains and mr. charles sweeny be allowed to build a gallery reaching from the gallery of mr. john taylor to the school-boys' gallery, to be theirs and their heirs' forever." washington's pew was an ample square, fitted with cushions for sitting and kneeling. the puritans would have thought it a glaring iniquity to pay such heed to creature comfort in the house of god. they would have been more in sympathy with the virginia dame of high degree who, in tardy atonement for her pride, directed that her body be buried under the pavement in the aisle occupied by the poor of the church, that they might trample on her dust. such gloomy and ascetic associations with the house of god were rare at the south. the church was a centre of cheerfulness, and the sabbath was supposed to be a day of innocent enjoyment. all work was frowned upon as inconsistent with a due observance of its sanctity, however; and the grand jury in middlesex county, virginia, in , presented thomas simms, for travelling on the road on sunday with a loaded beast, william montague and garrett minor for bringing oysters ashore on the sabbath, james senis for swearing and cursing on the holy day; but outside such restrictions as these, no blue laws enforced gloom as part of the decorum of sunday-keeping. when the church-bell, hung usually from the bough of a tree, began to ring for service, the roads were filled with worshippers moving churchward, full of peace and good-will. first might be seen the young men on horseback, with the tails of their coats carefully pinned in front, to protect them from the sweat of their horses' flanks. lumbering slowly after these equestrians came the great family-coaches, from which the ladies are assisted by the dismounted gallants. every young damsel is planning some social festivity. before or after service, invitations are given, and visits of weeks in length are arranged at the church door. it is to be feared that these colonial maidens sometimes allow their thoughts to wander in sermon-time, from their quaint little prayer-books, with their uneven type and crooked f's, and that they are thinking of dinners while they confess themselves sinners. but their levity is not treated severely by the priest, for he is as eager for his madeira as his young parishioners are eager for their minuet. they were jolly dogs, those colonial clergymen of the church of england in the eighteenth century, and no more to be taken seriously than friar tuck, whose apostolic successors they were. parishioners who wished spiritual counsel had difficulty in finding the parson. in the morning he was fox-hunting, in the afternoon he was over (or under) the dining-table, and the midnight candle shone on his wine-cup and dice-box. like their brethren across the atlantic, the colonial clergy were strong on doctrine. "they abhorred popery, atheism, and idolatries in general, and hiccupped 'church and state!' with fervor." yet their morals were at so low an ebb as to justify the complaint made against them that they were "such as wore black coats and could gabble in a pulpit, roar in a tavern, exact from their parishioners, and rather by their dissoluteness destroy than feed their flock." one clergyman assaulted a dignitary in vestry-meeting, pulling off his wig and subjecting him to various indignities, and capped the climax of audacity by preaching the next sunday from the text: "i contended with them and cursed them, and smote certain of them and pulled off their hair." another minister fought a duel behind his church, and a third, the rev. thomas blewer (pronounced probably _blower_), was presented by the grand jury as a common swearer. all efforts to reform the clergy were in vain. ministers were sometimes tried for drunkenness, and some of the tests of what constitutes drunkenness were laid down by the court: "sitting an hour or longer in the company where they are drinking strong drink and in the mean time drinking of healths, or otherwise taking the cups as they come round, like the rest of the company; striking or challenging or threatening to fight." staggering, reeling, and incoherent speech are justly regarded as suspicious circumstances, and the advice continues: "let the proof of these signs proceed so far till the judges conclude that behavior at such time was scandalous, undecent, unbecoming the dignity of a minister." there is unfortunately only too clear a case against the colonial clergy; but it is only fair to take into account the condition of the church at home. if the clergymen in maryland and virginia gambled and drank, so did those in england and wales. did not sterne grace the cassock? did not gay propose taking orders for a living, and did not swift write from a deanery stuff too vile for print? there was some talk at one time of sending this great dr. swift over to virginia as a bishop, and a worthy one he would have been, to such a church. the eighteenth century was a period of decadence in the colonial ministry. things had not always been so bad. when the first settlers came to america, the clergymen who accompanied them were men of sterling worth and character. they were moved by a hope of converting the indians, and came in a true missionary spirit. the journals of those adventurers testify to the courage with which their chaplain braved dangers and bore discomforts. "by unprosperous winds," they say, "we were kept six weeks in sight of england; all which time master hunt, our preacher, was so weake and sicke that few expected his recovery. yet, although we were but twentie myles from his habitation, and notwithstanding the stormy weather, nor the scandalous imputations against him, all this could never force from him so much as a seeming desire to leave the businesse." all through the journey he was brave and cheerful, though there was a constant ferment of wrath in that hot-headed ship's company, which might have ended in bloodshed, "had he not, with the water of patience and his godly exhortations, but chiefly by his true, devoted example, quenched those flames of envy and detraction." finally, after the fire at jamestown, master hunt lost all his library and "all he had but the cloathes on his backe, yet none never heard him repine at his loss." following hunt came the good whitaker, "a schollar, a graduate, a preacher well born and well friended in england," who from conscientious desire to help the savages left "his warm nest and, to the wonder of his kinsmen, and to the amazement of them that knew him," undertook this perilous enterprise. of such pith and worth were these first priests; but the indian massacre made a great change. friendly intercourse with the natives being cut off, there was no chance for missionary work among them, and the plantations were too far apart to make a vigorous church life possible. the pay was small and the field barren, so that there was little temptation either to the ambitious and intellectual, or to the spiritually minded class of the clergy, to come to america. they were as a rule, therefore, the ignorant, the dissipated, and the _mauvais sujets_ who filled the colonial livings. yet at the lowest ebb there were exceptions to this rule. there, for instance, was rector robert rose, whose tombstone describes him as discharging with the most tender piety the "domestick" duties of husband, father, son, and brother, and in short as "a friend to the whole human race." his journal gives a glimpse of his relations with his parish, very cheering in the dreary waste of quarrels and bickering so common in those days. on one occasion, during a drouth, when a famine threatened, he told his people that corn could be had from him. on the appointed day a crowd gathered before his house. he asked the applicants if they had brought money to pay for the corn. some answered cheerfully, "yes," others murmured disconsolately, "no." the good priest then said: "you who have money can get your corn anywhere, but these poor fellows with no money shall have my corn." he was quite human, this old parson, and liked his glass of "fyal" or madeira, but he knew when to stop, and he feared not to rebuke the rich and great among his parishioners when he saw them making too merry. he enters in his journal the date of a call on one of his leading families, when he found the father absent at a cock-fight. the rector adds the significant memorandum: "suffer it no more!" in spite of a few bright exceptions like this, it is idle to deny that the relations between parish and clergy in the southern church ill bore comparison with those of the puritan and his minister; and this not because of doctrine, but chiefly because the puritan minister represented the free choice of the people, who supported him willingly, and looked upon him with reverence, as the messenger of the lord. in south carolina, where the clergy were chosen by the vestries, the same harmony and good-will existed, but the church in virginia writhed under the injustice of taxation without representation. the parishioners were expected to receive and maintain the clergyman appointed them without criticism or question. how any attempt on the part of these vestries to discipline or dismiss the minister they supported was received, we may judge from this letter, sent by governor spotswood to the churchwardens and vestry of south farnham parish in : "gentlemen: i'm not a little surprised at the sight of an order of yours, wherein you take upon you to suspend from his office a clergyman who for near sixteen years has served as your minister.... as no vestry in england has ever pretended to set themselves up as judges over their ministers, so i know no law of this country that has given such authority to the vestry here. if a clergyman transgresses against the canons of the church, he is to be tried before a proper judicature, and though in this country there be no bishops to apply to, yet there is a substitute for a bishop in your diocesan.... in case of the misbehavior of your clergyman, you may be his accusers, but in no case his judges; but much less are you empowered to turn him out without showing cause." this haughty language recalls the messages of charles the first to his parliament. yet in spite of his support of the priest against the parish, the governor never dreamed of recognizing him as his own equal. some years later, when the stately old aristocrat was in his grave, a member of the clergy sued for the hand of his widow, lady spotswood. the reverend suitor writes after a very humble and apologetic fashion: "madam," he begins, "by diligently perusing your letter i perceive there is a material argument--upon which your strongest objection against completing my happiness would seem to depend, viz.: that you would incur ye censure of ye world for marrying a person in ye station of my station and character. by which i understand that you think it a diminution of your honour and ye dignity of your family to marry a person in ye station of a clergyman. now, if i can make it appear that ye ministerial office is an employment in its nature ye most honorable and in its effects ye most beneficial to mankind, i hope your objections will immediately vanish--that you will keep me no longer in suspense and misery, but consummate my happiness." after a long enumeration of the dignities, spiritual rather than social, appertaining to the clergy, he closes thus: "and, therefore, if a gentleman of this sacred and honourable character should be married to a lady, though of ye greatest extraction and most excellent personal qualities (which i am sensible you are endowed with), it can be no disgrace to her or her family; nor draw the censures of ye world upon them for such an action." such language is in curious contrast with the attitude of new england, where the praise bestowed on a woman by cotton mather as the highest possible compliment was, that she was worthy to be the wife of a priest. the chief cause of irritation between parson and parish in the colonial church was from the beginning the question of the ministers' salaries. in some places these were very small. it appears, for instance, in the record book of the church at edenton, in north carolina, that parson garzia in the year , was paid only £ for holding divine service. but in maryland and virginia the salaries were frequently higher than those paid in new england. in each virginia borough a hundred acres were set off as a glebe, or parsonage farm. besides this and the salary, there were fees of twenty shillings for a wedding by license and five shillings for every wedding by banns, beside forty shillings for a funeral sermon. it is easier to understand the fulsomeness of these old funeral discourses when we learn how well they were paid for, and realize that, in common honesty, the minister was bound to render a forty-shilling certificate of character to the deceased. as time went on, the salary question became a burning issue. the plantations being so widely separated, quarrels often arose as to the portion of the parish on which the chief burden of the minister's support should fall. in the records of the very early virginia church history, we come upon an instance of this in the proceedings in lower norfolk county, at a court held th may, . "whereas the inhabitants of this parrishe beinge this day conevented for the providinge of themselves an able minister to instruct them concerning their soules' health, mr. thomas harrison tharto hath tendered his service to god and the said inhabitants in that behalf wch his said tender is well liked of, with the genall approbacon of the said inhabitants, the parishoners of the parishe church at mr. sewell's point who to testifie their zeale and willingness to p'mote gods service doe hereby p'mise (and the court now sittinge doth likewise order and establish the same) to pay one hundreth pounds starling yearely to the sd mr. harrison, soe longe as hee shall continue a minister to the said parishe in recompence of his paynes." this arrangement apparently did not long prove satisfactory, for the record goes on to state that "whereas there is a difference amongst the inhabitants of the fforesaid pishe, concerninge the imployinge of a minister beinge now entertayned to live amongst them, the inhabitants from danyell tanner's creek and upward the three branches of elizabeth river (in respect they are the greatest number of tithable persons) not thinknge it fitt nor equall that they shall pay the greatest pte of one hundred pownds w{h} is by the ffore sd order allotted for the ministers annuall stipend, unlesse the sd minister may teach and instruct them as often as he shall teach at ye pishe church siytuate at mr. sewell's pointe. it is therefore agreed amongst the sd inhabitants that the sd minister shall teach evie other sunday amongst the inhabitants of elizabeth river at the house of robert glasscocke untill a convenyent church be built and erected there for gods service w{h} is agreed to bee finished at the charge of the inhabitants of elizabeth river before the first day of may next ensueinge." however little value they might set on gospel privileges, these danyell tanner's creek men meant to have what they paid for, or cease their payments. a virginia statue of declared that each minister of a parish should receive an annual stipend of sixteen thousand pounds of tobacco. this amounted to about £ , as tobacco sold for many years at two-pence the pound. but, in the year , there was a shortage in the tobacco crop, and the legislature passed an act enabling the inhabitants of the county to discharge their tobacco-debts in money for the present year. the clergy seem to have made no active opposition; but five years later, when a similar law was passed, and tobacco rose sharply in price, they took alarm, and started a violent campaign in defence of their rights. the reverend john camm published a sarcastic pamphlet on "the two penny act." this was answered by colonel bland and colonel carter in two very plain-spoken documents. camm again rode a tilt against them in a pamphlet called "the colonels dismounted." the community began by laughing, but ended by getting angry. mr. camm could find no more printers in virginia, and was obliged to go to maryland to carry on the war. the contest grew to larger proportions. it crossed the ocean and was laid before the king, who, always glad of an opportunity to repress anything which looked like popular sovereignty, declared in favor of the clergy. armed thus by royal approbation, the parsons brought their case to trial. the rev. james maury brought suit in hanover county against the collector. the defendants pleaded the law of , but the plaintiff demurred on the ground that that law, never having been confirmed by the king, was null and void. the case was tried, mr. lyons arguing for the plaintiff and mr. lewis for the defendant. the court sustained the demurrer, and the clergy looked upon their case as won. lewis was so sure of it that he retired from the cause, telling his clients that there was nothing more to be done in the matter. nothing remained but for a jury to fix the amount of damages. in this desperate state of affairs, patrick henry, though almost unknown at the bar, was called in, and he agreed to argue the case at the next term. on the first of december, accordingly, he came into the court-room, to find it densely packed with an excited throng of listeners. the bench was filled with clergymen. in the magistrate's seat sat the young orator's own father. the occasion might well have tried the nerve of an older and more experienced speaker. lyons opened the cause for the clergy, with the easy assurance of one who sees his case already won. he told the jury that the law of had been set aside, and that it only remained for them to enforce the law of by awarding suitable damages to his clients, whom he exalted to the skies in a eulogy which might have better fitted better men. lyons sat down, and young henry rose. awkwardly and falteringly he began, in painful contrast to the easy address of lyons. the plaintiffs on the bench looked at each other with smiles of derision. the people, who realized that his cause was theirs, hung their heads; but only for a moment. the young orator, whose timid commencement had caused winks and nods of satisfaction to pass along the bench of the clergy, suddenly changed his whole attitude. all at once he shook off embarrassment, and roused himself like a lion brought to bay. the people at first were cheered, then became intoxicated with his eloquence. the clergy listened to the flood of sarcasm and invective till they could bear no more, and fled from the bench as from a pillory. henry's eloquence swept the jury, who returned at once with a verdict of _one penny damages_ for the clergy. the people, wild with delight, seized their hero and carried him out on their shoulders. henceforward he was a marked man, and for years, wirt tells us, when the old people wished to praise any one's eloquence, they would say: "he is almost equal to patrick when he pled against the parsons." with so much hostile feeling toward their clergy, how shall we account for the strong affection felt by the virginians for their church? i find the explanation in that loyalty to lost causes and that aristocratic conservatism which always marked the cavalier. these, in spite of the debasement of the clergy, the zeal of the "new lights," the allurements of rome, and the eloquence of whitefield, fox, and the wesleys, long kept the cavalier colonies true to the church of their fathers. it was not till the church allied itself with the king against the people in the revolutionary struggle, that its doom fell. it was a matter of course that self-interest as well as sentiment should lead the clergy to espouse the cause of england. in a letter, dated , the rev. john camm writes from virginia to a mrs. mcclurg in the mother-country. he begins, as is natural, with what is nearest his heart, namely his own affairs, and requests the lady to use her influence with mr. pitt to secure him a living of one hundred pounds a year. fearing that his request is too modest: "observe," he says, "tho' a living of one hundred nett will _do_, i care not how much larger the living shall be. if by conversing with the great, you have learnt their manners, and are unwilling to bestow so considerable a favour on a friend without some way or other finding your account in the transaction, which the unpolished call a bribe, you shall make your own terms with me. i will submit to what you think reasonable, and then, you know, the larger the living or post is, the better for both." this pious worthy, having thus disposed of the affairs of the church, next deals in the same public spirited manner with the affairs of the colonial politics: "one of our most active, flaming and applauded sons of liberty, col. rich'd henry lee, who burnt poor mercer in effigy, raised a mob on archy ritchie, etc., etc., etc., has been lately blown up in the publick prints, it is said, by mr. james mercer. it appears that lee, previous to his patriotism, had made interest to be made stamp master himself, from letters it seems now in the possession of col. mercer, so that lee will find it difficult hereafter to deceive anybody into an opinion of his patriotism." posterity has quite definitely settled the question of the comparative patriotism of col. lee and the rev. john camm, and only wonders that a shrewd people tolerated that ecclesiastical fraud so long. peace to his ashes! since he and his fellows have given way to good and sincere men who have purged the church of her disgrace and brought her back to her older and better traditions. a gentleman of the old school, in cocked hat and knee-breeches, once said to madison that a man might be a _christian_ in any church, but a _gentleman_ must belong to the church of england. his education [illustration: his education.] governor berkeley, that old stumbling-block-head who stopped the wheels of progress in virginia for fifty years, wrote to the english commissioners in : "i thank god there are no free schools nor printing; and i hope we shall not have, for learning hath brought disobedience and heresy and sects into the world, and printing hath divulged them, and libels against the best government. god keep us from both!" the bigoted sir william set forth but too accurately the condition of affairs not only in virginia, but in maryland as well. it is impossible to avoid noting the striking contrast between the south and new england, where, by this time, every colony except rhode island had made education compulsory, where the school-house and the church stood side by side in every village. an old new england statute commands that "every township, after the lord hath increased them to the number of fifty households, shall appoint one to teach all the children to write and read, and when any town shall increase to the number of a hundred families, they shall set up a grammar school." all the energy of the puritan which was not absorbed in religion vented itself on education. ambition turned its current to learning as more desirable than wealth. "child," said a new england matron to her boy, "if god make thee a good christian and a good scholar, thou hast all that thy mother ever asked for thee." such a spirit bred a race of readers and students, trained to sift arguments and to weigh reasons. no such devotion to books or scholarship prevailed at the south. yet when the revolution came, the most thrilling eloquence, the highest statesmanship, the greatest military genius were found among these southerners. their education had been different from that of the puritans, but it had been an education none the less. the cavalier had been trained in the school of politics, in the responsibilities of power, and in the traditions of greatness. the very absence of the reading habit tended to develop action, and the power of thinking out problems afresh, unhampered by the trammels of other men's thoughts. the haughtiness begotten by slave-holding made it doubly hard for the master to bow the knee even to a sovereign. the habit of command and responsibility of power, which shone on the battlefield and in the council-chamber, were learned on the lonely estates, where each planter was a king. behind all these elements of training were the ideals which moulded the mind and the character. berkeley's taunting question to bacon, "have you forgot to be _a gentleman_?" owed its sting to this suggestion that he had been false to the traditions of his class. if we hold that tact and courtesy and gracious hospitality are results of education, we must admit that the puritans of new england might have learned much from their neighbors in maryland and virginia. the education of politics, of power, of high traditions in virtue and in manners the colonial cavalier possessed. the education of books he lacked. here and there, however, we find traces of some omnivorous reader even in the earliest times. books were highly valued and treasured by generation after generation. we find among the old wills that "richard russell left richard yates 'a booke called lyons play,' 'john porter junr. six books' 'john porter ( ) my exec'r, ten books,' 'katherin greene three bookes,' 'one book to sarah dyer,' 'unto wm. greene his wife two books & her mother a booke,' 'anna godby two books,' 'jno. abell one booke in quarto,' 'richard lawrence one booke.'"[ ] [ ] v. _library_ of edmund berkeley, esq., member of the council (died dec. ), from an inventory taken the and days of june, : the whole duty of mann one old bible and one old comon pray{r} book the christian sacrifice the great duty of frequenting the christian sacrifice a brief chronicle of the civil wars of england and ireland. cavalrie the first book the common prayer book the best companion. janna divoram. contemplations on the state of mann the first part of the english dixtionary the wel spring of sciences the young clerk guide a compendium of physick the athenian oracle a guide to constables some consideration touching the stile of the holy scriptures. a perfect guide for a studious young lawyer the p{r}sent state of london. a profitable book for those that are burnt with gunpowder. the first part of the english dictionary a compleat history of england the lives of the noble grecians and romans. the tragedy of darius and julius cæsar a compleat collections of all the laws of virginia the new world of english words. the history of the jews. the countrey justice the first part of compleat histrey the expotion of the creed the surgeons mate an essay concerning human understanding a breife treatise of testaments the decameron a compendius dictionary lexicon manuale. lord delamers works. sixteen sermons on several occasions ffarquhars works. an abridgment of all the statutes in fforce the standard of the quakers. the hearts ease. a tryal of faith several discourses of the great duties of natural religion the works of josephus in three volumes doctor reads works. abridgment of the statutes of king wm. plutarchs morals. bethel or a fform for ffamilys discourses on the history of the whole world of wisdom the second and third books. mr. john banisters works. the history of ffrance the first and fourth volumes of the turkish spy sermons on several occasions resolutions and devisions of cases of conscience plutarchs morals the second volume and the third. a manual anatomy england's general description shakespears works. second volume of tom browns works copies of certain letters. ancient and the present state of the empire of germany. the shepards oracles. physoignomie and chiromancy the genral view of the holy scriptures the practice of piety the great law of consideration trigonometrie of generosity and constancy in the faith the history of the revolutions in sweeden the marrow of chyrurgery toleration discuss'd. letters of remarkables in switzerland the office of executors a companion for a chyrurgeon the critick the lively oracles the heaven of health the history of the conquest of china valentine and orson. a discourse on the sacraments some motives to the love of god. an introduction to the skill of musick. sermons and discourses some of which never before printed. the nature of truth discuss'd the method of physick the new london dispensatory. a compendius dictionary milk for babes an introduction to the eight parts of latin speech the use of piety the european mercury the books of psalms. notes on mr. lockes essay of human understanding britains remembrancer an infallible way to contentment a view of all the religions in the world a description of the little world. the portraiture of his sacred maj{ty} in his solitudes and suferings the london dispensatory english examples a short introduction to gramar a short catechisme the esopps ffables works of m{r} tho{s} southerne eight lattin books. master ralph wormeley's library numbered several hundred volumes, and a man might have found enough among them to gratify any inclination. if his tastes were frivolous, here were "fifty comodys and tragedies," and "the genteel siner." were he an epicure, he might regale himself with "the body of cookery," and revel in its appetizing recipes for potpies and the proper method of roasting a sucking pig; and if his mind were piously inclined, the resources of the library were unlimited. side by side on its shelves stood "no cross, no crowne," "the ffamous doct{r} usher's body of divinity," "doct{r} ffuller's holy state," and last and longest, the ninety-six sermons of the good parson andros. some of these old colonial sermons came to an unprofitable end. a bundle of them was laid away in a drawer, and, when sought for, it was learned that they had been torn up and used by the damsels of the household as curling-papers. the writer might have been at least half-satisfied in the reflection that his discourses had touched the head, if not the heart. in spite of all the old inventories which are being brought to light to show the existence of books and book lovers in the south, the fact remains that the cavalier was no bookworm. he felt that a boy who had learned to ride, to shoot, and to speak the truth, had received the rudiments at least of education. whatever he learned more than this was acquired either in the old _field-school_ or more often from a private tutor, usually a clergyman of the church of england. some attempts were made by private persons to found public-schools. in , benjamin sym devised two hundred acres of land on the pocosan river, together with the milk and increase of eight cows, for "the maintenance of a learned, honest man, to keep, upon the said ground, a free-school for the education of the children of elizabeth city and kiquotan, from mary's mount downward to the pocosan river." "richard russell in his will made july th, , and proved december th, the same year, now among the records of lower norfolk county, declared: 'the other pte of my estate i give & bequeath one pte of itt unto six of the poorest mens children in eliz: riv'r, to pay for their teaching to read & after these six are entred then if six more comes i give a pte allsoe to enter them in like manner.'" in spite of private gifts, and individual effort, and public acts of assembly, the school system of new england did not and could not thrive at the south, because it was out of harmony with the spirit and institutions of the people. the plantations were so separated that any assembling of the children was difficult, the spirit of caste was too strong to encourage the free mingling of rich and poor, and the traditions of the cavalier were not traditions of scholarship. the sword, not the pen, had always been the weapon of the gentleman. montrose, and not milton, was his hero. when captain smith proudly boasted that he did not sit mewed up in a library writing of other men's exploits, but that what his sword did, his pen writ, he expressed the ideal of the colonial cavalier. "i observe," quoth spotswood ironically to the virginia burgesses, "that the grand ruling party in your house has not furnished chairmen of two of your standing committees who can spell english or write common-sense, as the grievances under their own hand-writing will manifest." ebenezer cook in his "voyage to maryland," writes with acrimonious sarcasm of "a reverend judge who, to the shame of all the bench, could write his name." the jest of the sot-weed factor scarcely outstripped the sober truth, and a century later the general ignorance was almost as dense. several instances are on record where the servant signed his name and the master made his mark. the cross or other conventional sign was not uncommon, and in general the letters of the names are evolved slowly and painfully, as by men more apt with the gun than with the quill. hugh jones, a fellow of william and mary college, writes of his countrymen that, for the most part, they are only desirous of learning what is absolutely necessary, in the shortest way. to meet this peculiarity mr. jones states that he has designed a royal road to learning, consisting of a series of text-books embracing an _accidence to christianity_, an _accidence to the mathematicks_, and an _accidence to the english tongue_. this last is "for the use of such boys and men as have never learned latin, and for the benefit of the female sex." the bishop of london addressed a circular to the virginia clergy inquiring as to the condition of their parishes. to the question, "are there any schools in your parish?" the almost invariable answer was: "none." to the question, "is there any parish library?" but a single affirmative response was received. one minister replied, "we have the _the book of homilies_, _the whole duty of man_, and _the singing psalms_." it may be to this very scarcity of books that we owe that originality and vigor of thought which distinguished the leaders of the revolution. governor page reported patrick henry as saying to him, "naiteral parts is better than all the larnin upon yearth," and when to _naiteral parts_ we add the mastery of a few english classics, we touch the secret of the dignity and virility which mark the utterances of these men who had known so little school-training. randolph of roanoke, the youngest son of his widowed mother, was taught by her as a little child. as he grew older he was left a good deal to his own devices, but his mind was not idle, and he had access to an unusually good library. before he was ten, he had read voltaire's "history of charles xii.," "reynard the fox," and odd volumes of _the spectator_. the "arabian nights" and shakespeare were his delight. "i had read them," he writes, "with don quixote, quintus curtius, plutarch, pope's homer, robinson crusoe, gulliver, tom jones, orlando furioso, and thomson's seasons, before i was eleven years old." washington, unlike most of his compeers, was sent to school, first in the little cabin taught by the sexton of the church, a man named hobby, and afterward to a more advanced school taught by a mr. williams. here he decorated his writing and ciphering books, school-boy fashion, with nondescript birds done in pen-flourishes, and with amateur profile portraits. here also he copied legal forms, bills of exchange, bonds, etc., till he acquired that methodical habit which afterward stood him in good stead. there were good and faithful teachers in those days, though they were not too common. the scotch seem to have done most of the teaching in the colonies, and to have done it well. jefferson recalls the "mouldy pies and good teaching" of the scotch minister who taught him the languages; and many a scotch name figures in the list of parish school-teachers. in an old file of the _maryland gazette_ we may read the advertisement of john and sally stott, who propose to open a school "where english, arithmetic, book-keeping, mensuration, knitting, sewing and sample-work on cat-gut and muslin are to be taught in an easy and intelligible manner." the charges for schooling were not extravagant. the reverend devereux jarratt taught a "plain school" for the equivalent of about thirty-three dollars a year. a tutor from london received a salary of thirty pounds sterling, and jonathan boucher charged for tuition twenty-five pounds a year, "the boy to bring his own bed." boucher was at one time tutor to parke custis, then a somewhat headstrong boy of sixteen. young custis wished to travel abroad with his tutor, but washington wrote to mr. boucher: "i can not help giving it as my opinion that his education is by no means ripe enough for a travelling tour. not that i think his becoming a mere scholar is a desirable education for a gentleman, but i conceive a knowledge of books is the basis upon which all other knowledge is to be built, and in travelling he is to become acquainted with men and things rather than books." later in the letter he adds: "it is to be expected that every man who travels with a view of observing the laws and customs of other countries should be able to give some description of the situation and government of his own." boucher took just the opposite ground from his patron. he argued that the best education consisted in mingling with men and seeing the culture of other lands. he lamented the provinciality of virginia and its lack of intercourse with the great world. "saving here and there a needy emigrant from great britain, an illiterate captain of a ship, or a subaltern merchant, to whom," he asks, "can a virginia youth apply for a specimen of the manners, etc., of any other people?" the majority of the landed gentry were in sympathy with the views of boucher rather than with those of washington. travel and education abroad, especially in england, were universally desired, and the influence on the colonies was marked, as the lad brought back with him from oxford the views of the cavaliers and their descendants, as the ship which bore him brought back the carved furniture, the massive plate, the leather-bound books, the coat of arms, and the panels for the hall fireplace. the record of matriculations at oxford contains many colonial names. here is "henry fitzhugh, s. william, of virginia, gent." (christ church) matriculated at the age of fifteen. christopher and peter robinson, and robert yates, set down as from "_insula virginiæ_," register at oriel, and lewis burwell at balliol. the average age of matriculation among these colonial youth is eighteen; but boys were often sent to england, or "home," as the colonists delighted to call it, long before they were old enough for university life. governor spotswood's grandsons were sent over seas to eton by their guardian, colonel moore, their father being dead. they boarded with a mrs. young, who showed a wonderfully good and tender heart, for when their guardian ceased to send remittances and the poor boys were left without resources, this kind landlady not only remitted the price of their board, which with charges for candles, fire and mending amounted to over twenty-eight pounds sterling, but actually supplied them with pocket-money to the extent of three pounds, and paid the expenses of "salt money, cost of montem poles, and montem dinner." when they left, alexander wrote from london to their benefactress a manly if somewhat prim little letter, commencing: "hon{d} madam, i write by this opportunity to thank you for all your past favors to me and my brother. i hope it will be in my power one day or another to make you amends for all you have done for us," and signing himself, "your humble servant, alexander spotswood." it is gratifying to know that these protestations did not come to naught, but that the good lady was repaid, not only in money, but in the life-long gratitude of the boys, who became distinguished american citizens. the inheritance of a high and quick spirit came fairly to the boys of their race. some quarter of a century before this letter was written, the virginia _gazette_ printed a communication from the father of these lads, then himself a boy. it is headed "an hint for a hint," and runs: "mr. parks, "i have learnt my book, so far as to be able to read plain english, when printed in your papers, and finding in one of them my papa's name often mentioned by a scolding man called edwin conway, i asked my papa whether he did not design to answer him. but he replyd: 'no child, this is a better contest for you that are a school boy, for it will not become me to answer every fool in his folly, as the lesson you learned the other day of the lion and the ass may teach you.' this hint being given me, i copied out the said lesson and now send you the same for my answer to mr. conway's hint from "sir, your humble servant "john spotswood. "fab. . a lion and an ass. "an ass was so hardy once as to fall a mopping and braying at a lion. the lion began at first to shew his teeth and to stomach the affront, but upon second thoughts, well, says he, jeer on and be an ass still, take notice only by the way, that it is the baseness of your character that has saved your carcass." no doubt young john and alexander treasured this piece of youthful audacity as a precious tradition to be told and retold to admiring schoolmates at montem dinner, under the shadow of eton towers. in the bland letters, there is an itemized account of the charges for a colonial boy at boarding school. master bland's expenses, when under the tuition of mr. clark, amounted to twenty-four pounds, ten shillings and two pence, and include the bills sent in by the apothecary, hosier, linen-draper, music-master and "taylor," and also the charges for "weekly allowance and lent, shugar and black-shoe." the charge for _shugar_ is twelve shillings and ninepence, which seems exorbitant in our day of cheap sweets. master bland's second half-year's account charges for "milliner, board, coal and candles, pocket-money and stockener." there is no record of the profit master bland received from his schooling abroad, but it is to be feared that he shared the character of his young fellow-countrymen, of whom jones reports that "they are noted to be more apt to spoil their school-fellows than improve themselves." the wildness of the young colonial students this reverend apologist accounts for very ingeniously, by explaining that the trouble lies in their being "put to learn to persons that know little of their temper, who keep them drudging in pedantick methods, too tedious for their volatile genius." the young colonial cavaliers exercised their _volatile genius_ at home as well as abroad, as any one may know who turns the yellow pages of the manuscript college records at william and mary. under stith's presidency we find "y{e} following orders unanimously agreed to": " . ordered y{t} no scholar belonging to any school in the college, of what age, rank or quality so ever, do keep any race horse at y{e} college in y{e} town, or anywhere in the neighborhood, y{t} they be not anyway concerned in making races or in backing or abetting those made by others, and y{t} all race-horses kept in y{e} neighborhood of y{e} college and belonging to any of y{e} scholars, be immediately dispatched and sent off and never again brought back, and all this under pain of y{e} severest animadversion and punishment." a second ordinance forbids any scholar belonging to the college, "to appear playing or betting at y{e} billiard or other gaming tables, or to be any way concerned in keeping or fighting cocks, under pain of y{e} like severe animadversions or punishments." they were an unruly and turbulent set of school-boys, these collegians, and the college records are full of their misdoings. thomas byrd, being brought before the faculty on a charge of breaking windows "in a rude and riotous mannor," was sentenced to submit to a whipping in the grammar-school, or be expelled the college. the blood of the byrds rebelled against such ignominy, and the boy refused to submit. his father then appeared before the faculty and offered to compel him to obey, but this vicarious submission was considered inadequate, and he was dropped from the college. again, it appears, that "whereas john hyde saunders has lately behaved himself in a very impudent and unheard-of mannor to the master of the grammar-school," he is directed to quit the college. the ushers are ordered to visit the rooms of the young gentlemen at least three times a week, after nine o'clock at night, and report to the president any irregularities. "no boy to presume to go into the kitchen." "no victuals sent to private rooms." "no boy to lounge upon the college steps." so run the rules. they further provide "y{t} a person be appointed to hear such boys as shall be recommended by their parents or guardians, a chapter in the bible every school-day at o'clock, and y{t} he have y{e} yearly salary of one pistole for each boy so recommended." all these regulations, "animadversions," and punishments make us realize that in spite of its high-sounding charter, william and mary was, after all, only a big boarding-school. when its charter was granted, a curious condition was attached, providing that the president and professors should yearly offer two copies of latin verses to the governor or lieutenant-governor of virginia. the bargain seems to have been strictly kept, for _the gazette_ records: "on this day sen-night, the president, masters and scholars of william and mary college went, according to their annual custom, in a body to the governor's, to present his honor with two copies of latin verses in obedience to their charter, as a grateful acknowledgement for two valuable tracts of land given the said college by their late majesties, king william and queen mary. mr president delivered the verses to his honor and two of the young gentlemen spoke them." in , the college authorities ushered in the century with a grand celebration, including prize declamations and various exercises. the novel and exciting entertainment roused such an interest that visitors came from annapolis and the maryland shore, and even from the far-away colony of new york, while indians thronged the streets to watch the gayety. the town then was at the height of its prosperity. not content with a palace, a capitol, and a college, williamsburg actually aspired to own a bookstore, which was after all not altogether unreasonable, since there was no considerable one south of boston. accordingly the college authorities met to consider the matter, and finally resolved that-- "m{r} w{m} parks intending to open a book-seller's shop in this town, and having proposed to furnish the students of this college with such books at a reasonable price as the masters shall direct him to send for, and likewise to take all the schoolbooks now in the college and pay p. cent on the sterling cost to make it currency, his proposals are unanimously agreed to." the first building of william and mary college was planned, so they say, by sir christopher wren, but it was burned down, one night only five years after the grand celebration, "the governor and all the gentlemen in town coming to the lamentable spectacle; many of them getting out of their beds." again and again the building has suffered from the flames. yet as it stands there to-day--with its stiff, straight walls stained and weather-beaten, its bricks laid up in the good old english fashion of stretchers and headers, its steps worn with the tread of generations--it is full of a pensive charm. its record is one for virginians to be proud of, since as one of them boasts: "it has sent out for their work in the world twenty-seven soldiers of the revolution, two attorney-generals, nearly twenty members of congress, fifteen senators, seventeen governors, thirty-seven judges, a lieutenant-general, two commodores, twelve professors, four signers of the declaration, seven cabinet officers, a chief justice, and three presidents of the united states." if i was tempted at first, as i stood before the brick, barn-like building, to exclaim at its ugliness, my frivolous criticism was abashed, as this phantom procession filed through its doorway, for i too, who am not of their blood, claim a share in their greatness, and salute their names with reverent humility. laws, punishments, and politics [illustration: laws, punishments, _and_ politics. y{e} stocks.] it is a far cry from patrick henry, pouring out defiance against the king, while his listeners as one man echoed his final words, "liberty or death!" back to the night of the arrival of the english ships in chesapeake bay, when the box given under the royal seal was opened, and the names of the council who were to govern virginia were found within. it would have seemed to the group of men standing about the sacred casket on that april night incredible that, within their province of virginia in the next century, the authority of the king and the power of all england should be openly and successfully set at defiance. yet so it came to pass, naturally, gradually and inevitably. the first settlers in virginia lived in a political condition which may be described as a communism, subject to a despotism. their goods were held in a common stock, and they drew their rations from "a common kettel," but all the time they felt the strong arm of royal authority stretched across the atlantic, to rule their affairs without consent of the governed. both communism and despotism worked badly for the settlers. the first promoted idleness, the second encouraged dissensions, discontent and tale-bearing, each party to a colonial quarrel being eager to be the first to run home and lay his side of the story before the king. sir thomas dale changed all this communistic living. "when our people were fed out of the common store," writes one of the earliest settlers, "glad was he who could slip from his labor, or slumber over his taske he cared not how; nay, the most honest among them would hardly take so much true paines in a weeke, as now for themselves they will doe in a day, neither cared they for the increase, presuming that howsoever the harvest prospered, the generall store must maintain them, so that wee reaped not so much corne from the labours of thirtie, as now three or foure doe provide for themselves." dale allotted to every man three acres of ground, and compelled each to work both for himself and for the public store. his rule was, on the whole, beneficent though arbitrary; but the settlers constantly suffered from the lack of power to make laws, or arrange their simplest affairs without seeking permission from king and council. fortunately, after a few years a radical change was wrought; a change whose importance cannot be overestimated. in sir george yeardley came over as governor of virginia. he proclaimed that "those cruel laws by which the ancient planters had so long been governed" were now done away with, and henceforth they were to be ruled by english law, like all other english subjects. nor was this all. shortly after, followed one of those epoch-making declarations which posterity always wonders not to find printed in italics: "that the planters might have a hande in the governing of themselves, yt was grannted that a general assemblie shoulde be helde yearly once, whereat were to be present, the governor and counsell, with two burgesses from each plantation, freely to be elected by the inhabitants thereof, this assemblie to have power to make and ordaine whatsoever lawes and orders should by them be thought good and profitable for their subsistence." thus the same year and almost the same month witnessed two events of deep significance to virginia, the purchase of the first african slaves, and the establishment of the first free assembly in america. so strangely are the threads of destiny blended! and thus, while the strife between king and people was just beginning to cast its shadow over england, there was quietly inaugurated here at james city a government essentially "of the people, by the people, and for the people." the measures they adopted at this first free assembly, the laws they made, the punishments they imposed, are of little importance. the fact of mighty moment is that they met, and though the scope of their power was limited, to be extended two years later, and though they were afterward to struggle on through varying fortunes to the heights of entire freedom, yet this assembly of was forever to be memorable as the germ of representative government on this continent. in the _quire_ of the old brick church, these burgesses gathered, twenty-two of them, from james city, charles city, henrico, kiccowtan (now hampton), martin-brandon, smythe's hundred, martin's hundred, argall's gift, lawne's plantation, ward's plantation, and flowerda hundred. first, led by parson bucke, they asked god's guidance; and on the principle that heaven helps those who help themselves, they then set themselves to the task of framing laws to take the place of the "iron code" which sir thomas dale had brought over from the netherlands, and which strongly suggested the methods of the inquisition. dale's code declared absence from sunday services a capital offense. one guilty of blasphemy a second time, was sentenced to have a bodkin thrust through his tongue. a mr. barnes, of bermuda hundred, having uttered a detracting speech against a worthy gentleman in dale's time, was condemned to have his tongue run through with an awl, to pass through a guard of forty men, and to be butted by every one of them, and at the head of the troop, knocked down, and footed out of the fort. a woman found guilty as a common scold, was sentenced to be ducked three times from a ship in the james river, and one mild statute declared that any person speaking disgraceful words of any person in the colony, should be tied, hand and foot together, upon the ground, every night for the space of one month. it must be said in excuse for the severities of dale that he had a turbulent mob to discipline. he himself describes them as gathered in riotous or infected places, persons "so profane, of so riotous and treasonable intendments, that in a parcel of three hundred, not many gave testimony beside their name, that they were christians." another point to be remembered in defence of this iron soldier, is that all punishments in those days were such as would seem to us cruel and unwarrantable in proportion to the offence. the gallows in london was never idle. almost every crime was capital. i read in the story of the virginia adventurers in the somer iles of a desperate fellow who, "being to be arraigned for stealing a turky, rather than he would endure his triall, secretly conveighed himself to sea in a little boat, and never since was heard of." i feel very confident that this poor "turky"-stealer would never have tempted those stormy waters in a skiff, had he not known full well that a worse fate than drowning awaited him, if he stayed to stand his trial. the laws introduced by the house of burgesses were strict enough, and their punishments sufficiently severe. the statutes enacted against "idlenesse" were so salutary that they would soon have exterminated such a social pest as the modern tramp. the law went even further than forbidding idleness, and undertook to discipline those guilty of any neglect of duty. thomas garnett, who was accused by his master of wanton and profligate conduct, "and extreame neglect of his businesse" was condemned "to stand fower dayes with his eares nayled to the pillory, and that he, every of those fower days, should be publiquely whipped." the humiliation of the criminal was the special end and aim of the punishment. richard buckland, for writing a slanderous song concerning ann smith, was ordered to stand at the church-door during service with a paper round his hat, inscribed "_inimicus libellus_," and afterward to ask forgiveness of god, and also in particular of the defamed ann smith. two convicted sinners were sentenced to stand in church with white sheets round their shoulders and white wands in their hands. [illustration: y{e} pillory.] throughout the century, the statute-books of virginia and maryland show a vindictiveness toward criminals which is out of accord with the degree of civilization existing in the colonies. the crime of hog-stealing is visited with special retributions. it is enacted by the maryland assembly that any person convicted as a hog-stealer "shall for the first offence stand in the pillory att the provincial court four compleat hours, & shall have his eares cropt, & pay treble damages; & for the second time, the offender shall be stigmatized in the forehead with the letter h, and pay treble damages; and for the third offence of hogg stealing, he or they so offending shall be adjudged as fellons. and the delinquent shall have noe benefite of clergy." in another note in the maryland archives i find: "putt to the vote. whither a law bee not necessary prohibiting negros or any other servants to keepe piggs, hoggs, or any other sort of swyne uppon any pretence whatsoever." hog-stealing seems to have ranked next to murder as an offence, and to have been punished almost as severely--perhaps on shylock's principle, that they took life who took the means of livelihood; and the hog in the early days was the chief wealth and maintenance of the settler. superstition, as well as cruelty, played its part in the old criminal processes. the blood-ordeal long survived, and the belief was general that a corpse would bleed beneath the murderer's touch. on one occasion, when a serving-woman in maryland had died under suspicious circumstances, her fellow-servants were summoned one by one to lay hands on the corpse; but as no blood appeared beneath their touch, the jury declared the woman's death to be the act of god. on the whole, the inhabitants of the southern colonies, excepting always the negroes, were singularly free from superstition. the witchcraft delusion, which played such havoc in new england, never obtained a foothold in the cavalier colonies. grace sherwood was, it is true, accused in princess anne county of being a witch, and sentenced to the test of sinking or floating when thrown into the water; but her case stands out quite alone in the annals of virginia, whereas the same county records show several suits against accusers as defamers of character. here we find "jn{o} byrd and anne his wife suing jn{o} pites" in an action of defamation; their petition sets forth "that the defend{t} had falsely & scandalously defamed them, saying they had rid him along the sea-side & home to his own house, by which kind of discourse they were reported & rendered as if they were witches, or in league with the devill, praying £ sterl. damage with cost. the deft. for answer acknowledgeth that to his thoughts, apprehension or best knowledge they did serve him soe." the jury found for the defendant, but brought no action against the witches who did serve him so. in lower norfolk county the defamer did not escape so easily, for "whereas ann godby, the wife of tho. godby hath contrary to an ord{r} of y{e} court bearing date in may , concerning some slanders & scandalls cast upon women under y{e} notion of witches, hath contemptuously acted in abusing & taking y{e} good name & credit of nic{o} robinson's wife, terming her a witche, as by severall deposicons appeares. it is therefore ord{d} that y{e} s{d} tho. goodby shall pay three hundred pounds of tob{o} & caske fine for her contempt of y{e} menconed order (being y{e} first time) & also pay & defray y{e} cost of sute together w{th} y{e} witnesses' charges at twenty pounds tob{o} p day." maryland, too, may boast of an unstained record, and of a vigorous warfare against the persecution. an old record tells how john washington, esquire, of westmoreland county, in virginia, having made complaint against edward prescott, merchant, "accusin s{d} prescott of ffelony under the governm{t} of this province (_i. e._ maryland) alleaging how that hee, the s{d} prescott, hanged a witch on his ship as hee was outward bound from england hither the last yeare. uppon w{ch} complaynt of the s{d} washington, the gov{r} caused the s{d} edward prescott to bee arrested." prescott admitted that one elizabeth richardson was hanged on his ship, outward bound from england, but claimed that john greene, being the master of the vessel, was responsible, and not he. "whereupon (standing upon his justificaon) proclamacaon was made by the sheriffe in these very words. o yes, &c. edward prescott prisoner at the bar uppon suspition of ffelony stand uppon his acquittall. if any person can give evidence against him, lett him come in, for the prisoner otherwise will be acquitt. and noe one appearing, the prisoner is acquitted by the board." yet, though there is not a single conviction of witchcraft to stain the legal records of maryland, her statute-book in declared sorcery, blasphemy and idolatry punishable with death; accessories before the fact to be treated as principals. the accusation of blasphemy or idolatry was always a serious one, and the more so on account of its vagueness. scant proof was required, and the punishment was severe. a virginia article of war enacted that swearing or drunkenness among the soldiery, at the third offense be punished by riding the wooden-horse for an hour, with a musket tied to each foot, and by asking forgiveness at the next meeting for prayer and preaching. this sentence requiring the offender to ask forgiveness is very common in the pages of the statute books as a sequel to the infliction of punishment. punishment was still disciplinary. society was a pedagogue and the criminal a naughty school-boy, who must go down on his knees in a proper state of humility before he can be pardoned. after bacon's rebellion, the rebels were sentenced to go through this form of begging forgiveness with a halter round the neck, as a symbol of the right of the governor to hang them all if he saw fit. one william potts, being of a haughty spirit, or perhaps possessed of a grim sense of humor, wore round his neck instead of the hempen halter, "a manchester binding," otherwise a piece of tape. but the jest, if jest it were, was not apparently appreciated by the authorities, for it appears that the sheriff was straightway deputed to see "that said potts performe the law." on the whole, the "said potts" must have thought himself fortunate, for trifling with magistrates was sternly dealt with in his day, and _answering back_ by no means tolerated. from the times of dale onward, a great many statutes were enacted, designed to silence women's tongues. an old virginia law runs: "whereas oftentimes many brabling women often slander and scandalize their neighbors, for which their poore husbands are often brought into chargeable and vexatious suits and cast in great damages," it is enacted that all women found guilty of the above offence be sentenced to ducking. the punishment was undoubtedly successful for the time--that is, while the criminal was underwater; but it is hard to believe that bad tempers or gossiping habits were permanently cured by the ducking-stool. this curious implement of discipline may still be seen in the old prints. it consists of a chair bound to the end of a long board, which, when released on the land side, plunged the occupant of the chair under water as many times as the magistrate or "her poore husband" required. near the court-house, in every town, stood a ducking-stool, a whipping-post, a pillory, and a pair of stocks. in the pillory the criminal stood on a raised platform, with his hands and head thrust through a board on the level with his shoulders, in helpless ignominy. at queenstown a man found guilty of selling short measure was compelled to stand thus for hours, with the word _cheat_ written on his back, while the populace pelted him with stones and eggs. the stocks, while equally ignominious, were somewhat more comfortable, since the malefactor was seated on a bench with his hands and feet pinioned by the jointed planks before him. these were mild forms of punishment. for serious offences, far harsher methods were adopted. ears were cropped from bleeding heads, hands and feet were cut off, or the offender was sentenced to whipping at the cart's tail, whereupon he was tied to the back of a cart, slowly driven through the town, and thus flogged, as he went, by the common executioner. a not unusual punishment was branding the cheek, forehead, or shoulder with the first letter of the crime committed--as r., for running away; p., for perjury, or s. l., for seditious libel. indeed, the man who escaped with his life from the hands of colonial justice, might count himself fortunate, though he were condemned to go through the remainder of his existence minus a hand, a foot, or an ear; or to have the ignominy of his sentence written on his face for all to read; for sterner punishment than any of these was possible. death itself was meted out not infrequently, and the barbarities of drawing and quartering in some instances, fortunately rare, added horror to punishment, and the statistics we find quite calmly set down make the blood run cold. at a court held for goochland county the ninth day of october anno domi mdccxxxiii for laying the county levey. present: john ffleming, daniel sfoner, tarlton ffleming, george payne, william cabbell, james skelton, gent. justices. goochland county dr. tobacco. to thomas walker & joseph dabbs sub-sherifs for a mistake in the levey in to do. for going to williamsburg for a comission of oyer & terminer to try champion, lucy, valentine, sampson, harry & george, negros miles going at lb and miles returning at lb p. mile to do. for sumoning the justices and attending the court for the tryal of the said negros. to do. for executing champion & valentine, lb each to do. for providing tarr, burying the trunk, cutting out the quarters a pott, carts & horses carrying and setting up the heads & quarters of the two negros at the places mentioned by order of court and this was in our own country, only a century and a half ago! a maryland statute enumerates among capital offences: manslaughter, malicious trespass, forgery, receiving stolen goods, and "stealth of one's self"--which is the unlawful departure of a servant out of service or out of the colony without the consent of his master or mistress--"offender to suffer pains of death by hanging except the offender can read clerk-like, and then he shall lose his hand, and be burned in the hand or forehead with a hot iron, and forfeit his lands at the time of the offense committed." this test of ability to read--"_legit aut non legit?_"--was manifestly a clause inserted to favor the clergy, and so woven into the tissue of mediæval law, that the reformation had been powerless to unravel it. it is noticeable that the economical planters wisely preferred those forms of punishment, which cost the state nothing but the services of the constable and the executioner, to the confinement in prison, which involved the support of the criminal at public expense. prisons, of course, existed almost from the beginning. in the maryland archives of , i read that "cap{t} quigly brought into this house the act for building the state house and prisson at s{t} maries, and desires to know what manner of windowes the house shall have." it is at length decided accordingly by the assembly "that the windowes are to bee of wood with substanciall iron barres and th{t} the wood of the frame of the windowes be layd in oyle." for the safer guarding of the prisoners, it is also directed that the windows, which were to be only twenty by thirty inches in size, be protected by "three iron barres upright, and two athwart." the prisons found little occupation as compared with the pillory and the whipping-post. the latter was the common corrector of drunkenness, which was a too frequent offence in those old days in the cavalier colonies, when the gentry sipped their madeira over the polished dining-table and the poor man mixed his toddy in his noggin of pewter or wood. all men drank, and most men drank too much. wines played an important part in the colonial imports. a virginia statute of fixed the price of canary and sherry at thirty pounds of tobacco, madeira and "fyall" at twenty pounds, while aqua-vitæ and brandy ran up to forty. a few years later master george fletcher, his heirs and executors, were granted by statute, the sole right to brew in wooden vessels for fourteen years. maryland laid a tax upon "rhume, perrie, molasses, sider, quince drink or strong beer imported, each lbs tob. per gal." the state, having made a handsome profit from the selling of all these wines and "hot waters," straightway became very virtuous against the poor wight who took too much. he was sentenced to the joys of the whipping-post, or to be laid in the stocks, or to pay a fine; thus again making liquor pay a revenue to the state. we have an amusing description of what constitutes drunkenness, from a colonial dogberry of the seventeenth century, who sapiently observes: "now, for to know a drunken man the better, the scripture describes them to stagger and reel to and fro; and so, where the same legs which carry a man into the house can not bring him out again, it is a sufficient sign of drunkenness." the difficulty in convicting these offenders with two pairs of legs, lay in the general sentiment of the community, that after all there was no great harm in taking a little too much of so good a thing as liquor. the same public sentiment protected duelling, which was under the ban of the statute-books; but these old laws show the futility of attempting to legislate far in advance of public opinion. the law opposed it, but the prevailing sentiment sustained it. the number of duels fought at the south in colonial times has been grossly over-estimated, but they were fought; and the general feeling in regard to the practice was accurately expressed by oglethorpe of georgia, that typical cavalier and true gentleman of the old school, who, when asked if he approved of duelling, made answer, "of course a man must protect his honor." this curious notion that a man's honor was a vague but very sensitive article, worn about the person, and capable of being injured by any brawler who chanced to jostle against it at an "ordinary," or any vagabond who wished to pick a quarrel with his betters on the road, was a relic of feudal days, when hostile factions met and fought at every corner; and the colonial cavalier held to it loyally, never asking himself why or wherefore. this theory, which makes the individual and not the state the avenger of insult and injury, found its logical climax in the methods adopted by colonel charles lynch, a virginia planter before the revolution, and the author of a quick and simple form of law called by his name, and very popular still, though, to do him justice, it must be said that his followers have carried his principles further than their author intended. he never took life, but aimed simply to vindicate his own honor and that of his country by inflicting lashes on those who differed with him politically, and thought he did god service when he strung up suspected tories, and forced them to shout "liberty forever!" thus our study of the lawmaking and law-breaking records has brought us all the way from that house of burgesses sitting at james cittie in --their hearts full of loyalty to his majesty king james the first, and full of gratitude for the slender liberties he has seen fit to loan rather than grant them--to the brink of the revolution, to parties of the crown and of the people, to the hall in the virginia capitol where the assembly is boiling with wrath and defiance against george the third and his ministers, who have dared to insult the rights and liberties of a free people. it is a mighty transformation to have been brought about in a century and a half. the southern colonies did not give up their allegiance without a bitter struggle of reason against sentiment, a struggle which new england never knew; but at length the loyalty which had bowed down to fallen royalty at breda and yielded charles ii. so early a recognition that he quartered the arms of virginia with those of england, france, and scotland, and spoke of it as the old dominion--at last, this generous, faithful, confiding loyalty had been outraged past endurance. but still the old traditions lingered. gen. john mason says: "so universal was the idea that it was treason and death to speak ill of the king, that i even now remember a scene in the garden at springfield, when my father's family were spending the day there on a certain sunday, when i must have been very small. several of the children having collected in the garden, after hearing in the house among our elders many complaints and distressing forebodings as to this oppressive course towards our country, we were talking the matter over in our own way, and i _cursed_ the king, but immediately begged and obtained the promise of the others not to tell on me." yet at this moment, when the young rebel was trembling in the garden for the effects of his awful temerity, america was already on the eve of the outbreak which severed her forever from the king and the kingdom of great britain. the allegiance of the loyal colonies could not have fallen so suddenly, but for the long years of sapping and mining which had gone on silently, yet surely, doing their work. from the time of the thrusting out of sir john harvey and his return, backed by the authority of charles the first, there had been a war waged by proxy between king and people. the governors represented tyranny, and the assembly opposed each encroachment. eye to eye they stood, like wrestlers, neither side yielding a point without a struggle, yet both expressing equal loyalty and love for the king, and equal reverence for his authority. virginia long preserved "an after-dinner allegiance" to the crown even when she openly defied its policy. virginians drank his majesty's health, wiped their lips, and imprecated his majesty's navigation acts. if their political creed bound them to the fiction that the king could do no wrong, they cherished no such delusion concerning his deputies. when sir william berkeley, as despotic at heart as his stuart master, undertook to play the tyrant in virginia, the country blazed out into a rebellion, which died only with the death of nathaniel bacon, its leader. bacon was a rebel, but a rebel of the type of washington and patrick henry--one who believed in the motto which jefferson engraved on his seal, "rebellion against tyrants is obedience to god." what vigor and eloquence are thrown into his proclamations! they belong to the brightest pages of american literature. read but the opening of "nathaniel bacon esq'r, his manifesto concerning the present troubles in virginia. "if vertue be a sin, if piety be giult, all the principles of morality goodness and justice be perverted, wee must confesse that those who are now called rebells may be in danger of those high imputations, those loud and severall bulls would affright innocents and render the defence of o{r} brethren and the enquiry into o{r} sad and heavy oppressions, treason. but if there bee, as sure there is, a just god to appeal too, if religion and justice be a sanctuary here, if to plead y{e} cause of the oppressed, if sincerely to aime at his mat{ies} honour and the publick good without any reservation or by interest, if to stand in the gap after soe much blood of o{r} dear brethren bought and sold, if after the losse of a great part of his ma{ties} colony deserted and dispeopled, freely with o{r} lives and estates to indeavor to save the remaynders bee treason, god almighty judge and lett guilty dye. but since wee cannot in o{r} hearts find one single spott of rebellion or treason or that wee have in any manner aimed at the subverting y{e} setled government or attempting of the person of any either magistrate or private man not with standing the severall reproaches and threats of some who for sinister ends were disaffected to us and censured o{r} ino[cent] and honest designes, and since all people in all places where wee have yet bin can attest o{r} civill, quiet, peaseable behaviour farre different from that of rebellion and tumultuous persons, let trueth be bold and all the world know the real foundations of pretended giult." when this ardent and impetuous nature was vanquished as alone it could be vanquished--by death--berkeley might, by judicious magnanimity, have healed the wounds of civil war; but, instead, he pursued the conquered rebels with a malignant perseverance, which seemed to grow by what it fed on. "mr. drummond," he said ironically to a follower of bacon brought to him as a prisoner, "you are very welcome! i am more glad to see you than any man in virginia. you shall be hanged in half an hour." twenty-three leaders of this rebellion were thus executed before berkeley stayed the bloody hand of his vengeance. "the old fool," quoth the king, "hath taken more lives in that naked country, than i for my father's murder!" bacon's death remains one of the mysteries of history. some said he died of miasma in the virginia swamps; some hinted that his foes poisoned his food, so sudden and mysterious was his ending; and lest berkeley's revenge should extend to insulting the very corpse of his foe, bacon's followers buried him with the greatest secrecy, and no man knoweth the resting place of this first colonial champion of popular rights. but the spirit of popular liberty did not die with bacon, nor vice-royal tyranny with berkeley. culpeper, howard, and a score of others came over from england, one after another, all differing on many points of provincial policy, but united in the determination to fill their own pockets and the royal exchequer by means of colonial revenue. "lord colepepper," commented beverley, "reduced the greatest perquisite of his place to a certainty, which before was only gratuitous; that is, instead of the masters of ships making presents of liquors or provisions toward the governor's housekeeping, as they were wont to do, he demanded a certain amount of money, remitting that custom." such petty exactions as this were a dangerous experiment with a vehement and high-spirited people, who were willing to _give_ much, but to _yield_ nothing. the justice and moderation of spotswood's government held back the tide of popular revolt for some time, and the french and indian war roused a final flicker of loyalty to the mother-country; but england's success in that struggle cost her the american provinces. when quebec surrendered to wolfe's troops, and the french force was withdrawn from canada, the comte de vergennes prophesied the coming revolution against england. "the colonies," said he, "will no longer need her protection. she will call on them to contribute toward supporting the burdens they have helped to bring on her, and they will answer by striking off all dependence." in affairs looked stormy in virginia, and lord botetourt was sent over to prophesy smooth things and allay popular irritation, without committing the government by definite promises. the man was well chosen for the task. junius described him as a cringing, bowing, fawning, sword-bearing courtier. horace walpole said his graciousness was enamelled on iron. he came, he saw, he conquered virginia in a bloodless victory, but virginia did not stay conquered. when the colonists presented an address which he was pleased to consider insubordinate, botetourt dissolved the assembly; but they retired to a private house, elected peyton randolph moderator, and prepared and signed a resolution to abstain from all merchandise taxed by parliament. the beginning of the end was at hand. the farce of the repeal of the stamp act and its reimposition went on. botetourt went home, and lord dunmore, the last of the hated race of governors, came over. his imbecile policy, at once timid and tyrannous, hastened the march of events, but the end was inevitable. "colonies," said turgot, "are like fruits, which cling to the tree only till they ripen." so the event proved in america--virginia and massachusetts, maryland and rhode island, travelling by different roads, reached the same point of determination at any cost to throw off the yoke of british oppression. henceforth they were to be no more provincials, but patriots; and cavalier and puritan struck hands in the hearty good-will of a common cause. sickness and death [illustration: sickness _and_ death.] pioneer life is all very well when the adventurer is in high health and spirits; but when sickness comes, he must be stout of heart indeed if he does not sigh for the comforts of a civilized home. the poor settlers had a sorry time of it in that first fatal summer on the banks of the james, when they breathed in malaria from the marshes and drank the germs of fever and "fluxes" in the muddy water. "if there were any conscience in men," wrote gallant george percy, "it would make their hearts bleed to hear the pitiful murmurings and outcries of our sick men, without relief, every day and night for the space of six weeks; some departing out of the world, many times three or four in a night, in the morning their bodies trailed out of their cabins, like dogs, to be buried." the adventurers profited by the lesson of these troublous times; for as soon as the settlement was fairly re-established under dale, they set to work upon a hospital. on the river opposite henrico, they put up "a guest-house for ye sicke people, a high seat and wholesome aire," and christened the place, _mount malado_. the chronicles are provokingly silent as to any details of this first american sanitorium. they say nothing of its arrangements, its comforts, or its conveniences. we do not know even the names of those who shared its rude shelter, or of the physicians who treated them. from time to time the mention of some doctor is interwoven with the history of the colonists, but he passes as a pale shadow, with none of the character and substance of the gallant captains, the doughty burgesses, and the tipsy parsons. doctor bohun, who is described as "brought up amongst the most learned surgeons and physitions in netherlands," came over and stayed with the settlers for a while, but lord la warre carried him off as his medical adviser to the "western iles," that his lordship's gout might be "asswaged by the meanes of fresh dyet, especially oranges and limons, an undoubted remedie for that disease"; and a little later the good doctor perished in a sea-fight with spaniards on the ship _margaret and john_. dr. simons' name is signed to one of the histories, but he too fades away and leaves no trace, and a dr. pot has survived only through honorable mention, as "our worthy physition." either the country was too healthy, or the inhabitants too poor to encourage immigration among doctors, for they were few and far between, and we find men of other trades acting in the capacity of physician. there was captain norton, for instance, "a valiant, industrious gentleman adorned with many good qualities besides physicke and chirurgery, which for the publicke good, he freely imparted to all _gratis_, but most bountifully to y{e} poore." it was common for barbers to combine the use of the knife with that of the razor, and for the apothecary to prescribe, as well as mix, his own drugs. colonel byrd writes that in fredericksburg, "besides col. willis, who is the top man of the place, there are only one merchant, a tailor, a smith, an ordinary-keeper, and a lady who acts both as doctress and coffee-house keeper." a list of prominent citizens in baltimore in the eighteenth century, includes a barber, two carpenters, a tailor, a parson, and an inn-keeper, but no doctor; unless we reckon as such dame hughes and dame littig, who are registered as midwives. the isolation of plantation life made it doubly difficult to depend on doctors, and as a result, each family had its own medicine-chest, and its own recipes and prescriptions handed down from generation to generation, and brought oftentimes from across the sea. herbs played an important part in the pharmacopoeia, both because they were easily obtained, and because tradition endowed them with mysterious virtues. an old medical treatise assures its readers that "nature has stamped on divers plants legible characters to discover their uses"; that baldness may be cured by hanging-moss, and freckles by spotted plants. ragwort, and periwinkle, and solomon's seal all had their special merits; but sage was prime favorite, and its votary declares it a question how one who grows it in his garden and uses it freely can ever die. next to ease of preparation, the prime requisite of a medicine was strength. violent purges and powerful doses of physic or of "the bark" were always in favor. the simple ailments of childhood were dosed with such abominations as copperas and pewter-filings, and these unhappy infants were fed on beverages of snake-root or soot-tea. one vile compound, common as it was odious, was _snail pottage_, made of garden shell-snails washed in small beer, mixed with earth-worms, and then fried in a concoction of ale, herbs, spices, and drugs. yet our ancestors knew how to brew good-tasting things. the letter book of francis jerdone, of yorktown, virginia, records under date , "a receit how to make burlington's universal balsam. balsam peru oz. best storax oz. benjamin, impregnated with sweet almonds oz. alloes succatrinx / oz. myrrh elect / oz. purest frankincense / oz. roots of angelica / oz. flowers of st. john wort / oz. one pint of the best spirit of wine. to be bottled up and set in the sun for or days together, to be shaken twice or thrice a day. take about drops going to bed in tea made of pennyroyal, balm or speer mint." this prescription has the great defect of being too good, and might have a tendency to tempt the young to acquire the disease in order to be treated to the remedy. _angelic snuff_ was another agreeable medicament, warranted to cure all head troubles and help the palsy, megrims, deafness, apoplexy, and gout. what a pity that only the name of this cure remains to our generation, whose megrims alone would empty so many boxes of the invaluable snuff! the early settlers could, if they would, have learned some useful lessons in the treatment of disease from the indians, who at least understood making the skin share the work of the stomach. a primitive, but very effective, way of treating fevers and similar ailments among the natives was by the sweating-oven. the indian patient would creep into these mounds, under which a fire had been lighted, while the medicine-man poured on water from above, creating a mighty steam, in which the patient would continue till even indian fortitude could hold out no longer, when he would crawl out, and, rushing down to the nearest stream, plunge headlong into its cold waters. all this process was, of course, performed amid incantations as mysterious to the whites as the phraseology of a modern physician to a savage. this treatment was more in harmony with modern ideas than the methods which prevailed among the english. when the two spotswood boys were sent across the sea to eton, to school, they spent their vacations with their aunt, mrs. campbell, who writes to their landlady at the end of their stay: "i am very sorry, madam, to send them back with such bad coughs, though i have nursed jack who was so bad that we were obliged to bleed him, and physick him, that he is much better. i can't judge how they got them (the coughs). my son came home with one, and has never been out of the house but once since, and these children have always laid warm, and lived constantly in the house." these poor little victims of the coddling system would probably have recovered rapidly in the steam-bath of their native virginia and the fresh air of her pine forests, but instead, they are sent back from one hothouse to another. "i beg," adds their affectionate, but misguided aunt, "that they may be kept in a very warm room, and take the drops i send every night, and the pectoral drink several times a day, and that they eat no meat or drink anything but warm barley water and lemon juice, and, if aleck increases, to get blooded." it is a great relief, and something of a surprise, to learn that aleck and his brother john lived to come back to america and figure in the revolution. perhaps their recollections of the dosing and "blooding" they received in their youth threw additional energy into their opposition to the oppression of england. cupping, leeching, and all sorts of blood-letting were the chief dependence in olden times in all cases of fever. the free use of water, now so universal, would then have been thought fatal. the poor patient dreaded the doctor more than the disease, and often with reason. anæsthetics, that best gift of science to a suffering world, were unknown, and surgery was vivisection with the victim looking on, conscious and quivering. the doctor in the cavalier colonies was regarded with almost as much suspicion as the parson--as a cormorant, ready and anxious to prey on the community, and to be held in check by all the severities of the law. virginia in passed statutes regulating surgeons' fees. in physicians were compelled to declare under oath the value of their drugs, and the court allowed them fifty per cent advance on the cost. if any physician was found guilty of neglecting a patient, he was liable to fine and punishment. in the eighteenth century, still stricter laws were framed, "because of surgeons, apothecaries and unskillful apprentices who exacted unreasonable fees, and loading their patients with medicine." the fees fixed by this statute are "one shilling per mile and all medicines to be set forth in the bill." the price for attending a common fracture is set down at two pounds, and double the sum for attending a compound fracture. a university degree entitled the practitioner to higher charges, but its possession was rare. most doctors were trained up in the offices of older men as apprentices, pounders of drugs, and cleaners of instruments, as the old painters began by preparing paints and brushes for the master. a modern man of science would smile at the titles of the old medical works solemnly consulted by our forbears. "a chirurgicall booke" sounds interesting, and "the universall body of physick"; but they are not so alluring as "the way to health, long life and happiness," nor so attractive to the ignorant as "the unlearned keymiss." perhaps the struggling physicians and chirurgians who doctored by these old books and their common-sense, helped as many and harmed no more than the chemist of to-day, with his endless pharmacopoeia of coal-tar products, tonics, and stimulants; or the specialist who, instead of "the whole body of physick," devotes himself wholly to a single muscle, or nerve-ganglion. in spite of the chill of popular disfavor and of the difficulties of professional training, good and noble men worked on faithfully at the business of helping the sick and suffering in the colonies. the maryland annals tell of a dr. henry stevenson, who built him a house near the york road so elegant, that the neighbors called it "stevenson's folly." if there was any envy in their hearts, however, it changed to gratitude and admiration when the small-pox appeared in their midst, and the large-hearted doctor turned his mansion into a hospital. it is hard for us who live after the days of jenner, to appreciate the terror of the word _small-pox_. in the eighteenth century pitted faces were the rule. fathers feared to send their sons to england, so prevalent was the disease there. an old journal advertises: "wanted, a man between twenty and thirty years of age, to be a footman and under-butler in a great family; he must be of the church of england, and have had the small-pox in the natural way." this enlightened dr. stevenson, of stevenson's folly, made maryland familiar with the process of inoculation, which antedated vaccination. he advertises in _the maryland gazette_ of that he is ready to inoculate "any gentlemen that are pleased to favor him in that way," and that his fees are two pistoles for inoculating, and twenty shillings per week board, the average cost to each patient being £ s. ryland randolph writes to his brother at a time when inoculation is still a new thing: "i wrote to my mother for her consent to be inoculated for the small-pox, but since see that she thinks it a piece of presumption. when you favor me with a line, pray let me have your opinion of it!" in , we find the authorities at _william and mary_ resolving "that an ad. be inserted in the gazette to inform the publick that the college is now clear of small-pox," and a few days later they frame another resolution that "fifty pounds be allowed to dr. carter for his care and attendance on those afflicted with said disorder at the college." meanwhile the colonists had not followed up their good beginning at mount malado. hospitals had not grown with the growth of the community. doctors had none of the advantages of the study of surgery and medicine which are given by the hospital system, but the sick were tenderly cared for, nevertheless. in jefferson's notes on the advantages enjoyed by the virginians, he speaks of: "their condition too when sick, in the family of a good farmer where every member is emulous to do them kind offices, where they are visited by all the neighbors, who bring them the little rarities which their sickly appetites may crave, and who take by rotation the nightly watch over them, without comparison better than in a general hospital where the sick, the dying and the dead are crammed together in the same room, and often in the same bed." when we read the accounts of hospitals in the eighteenth century, antiseptics unknown, and even ordinary cleanliness uncommon, we can readily agree with the conclusion that "nature and kind nursing save a much greater proportion in our plain way, at a smaller expense, and with less abuse." every wind that swept the sick-room in those colonial farm houses, brought balm from the pines, or vigor from the sea. three thousand miles of uncontaminated air stretched behind them and before. this pure, balmy, bracing air cured the sick, and kept the well in health, in spite of general disregard of hygiene, which prevailed almost universally, especially in all matters of diet. "we may venture to affirm," exclaims a horrified frenchman, fresh from the land of scientific cookery, "that if a premium were offered for a regimen most destructive to the teeth, the stomach and the health in general, none could be desired more efficacious for these ends than that in use among this people. at breakfast they deluge the stomach with a pint of hot water slightly impregnated with tea, or slightly tinctured, or rather coloured with coffee; and they swallow, without mastication, hot bread half-baked, soaked in melted butter, with the grossest cheese and salt or hung beef, pickled pork, or fish, all which can with difficulty be dissolved. at dinner, they devour boiled pastes, called absurdly puddings, garnished with the most luscious sauces. their turnips and other vegetables are floated in lard or butter. their pastry is nothing but a greasy paste imperfectly baked." the entire day, according to this cheerful observer, is passed in heaping one indigestible mass on another, and spurring the exhausted stomach to meet the strain, by wines and liquors of all sorts. the population who lived on such a diet, ought to have died young, to point the moral of the hygienist; but nature pardons much to those who live in the open air. if digestions were taxed, nerves remained unstrained. even in our age of hurry and bustle, anything like nervous prostration is rare, south of mason and dixon's line. the soft air and the easy life soothe the susceptibilities, and oil the wheels of existence. it is for these reasons, perchance, that the records of the burying-grounds in the southern colonies show such a proportion of names of octogenarians who had survived to a ripe old age, in spite of hot breads washed down with hotter liquors. these burying-grounds of the old south are robbed of much of the dreariness of their kind by being generally laid out in close proximity to the living world, as if the chill of the tomb were beaten back by the fire-light falling on it from the familiar hearth stone close at hand. it is a comfort to think of genial colonel byrd, who loved so well the good things of this world, resting under a monument which duly sets forth his virtues, on the edge of the garden at westover, beneath an arbor screened only by vines from the door where he passed in and out for so many years. hugh jones, that conservative son of the church, lamented that the virginians did not prefer to lie in the church-yard for their last long sleep. "it is customary," he says regretfully, "to bury in garden, or orchards, where whole families lye interred together, in a spot, generally handsomely enclosed, planted with evergreens, and the graves kept decently. hence, likewise, arises the occasion of preaching funeral sermons in houses where, at funerals, are assembled a great congregation of neighbors and friends; and if you insist on having the service and ceremony at church, they'll say they will be without it, unless performed after their own manner." here we have a flash of the spirit of resistance to undue encroachments from church or state, which flamed up half a century later into open revolt. there is something touching in this clinging to the home round which so many memories cluster, in this desire to lay the dead there close to all they had loved, and when their own time came, to lie down beside them under the shadow of the old walls which had sheltered their infancy, and youth, and age. if the burying-grounds were cheerful, still more so were the funerals. they partook, in fact, of the nature of an irish wake. wine was freely drunk, and funeral baked meats demolished, while the firing of guns was so common that many asked by will that it be omitted, as friends to-day are "kindly requested to omit flowers." the funeral expenses of a gentleman of baltimore town in the eighteenth century were somewhat heavy, as any one may judge from an itemized account preserved to us, which includes: "coffin £ s, yds. crape, yds. black tiffany, yds. black crape, - / broadcloth, - / yards of black shaloon, - / yds. linen, yds. sheeting, doz. pairs men's black silk gloves, doz. pairs women's do., pairs men's blk. gloves (cheaper), pr. women's do., black silk handkerchiefs, - / yards calamanco, mohair and buckram, - / yds. ribbon, - / lbs. loaf sugar, doz. eggs, oz. nutmegs, - / pounds alspice, - / gallons white wine, bottles red wine, - / gallons rum." the total cost of these preparations amounts to upward of fifty pounds sterling, besides the two pounds to be paid to dame hannah gash and mr. ireland for attendance, while ten shillings additional were allowed for "coffin furniture." when a thomas jefferson, ancestor of _the_ thomas jefferson, died in virginia in , his funeral expenses included the items: to benj. branch for a mutton for the funerall lbs. tobacco. to ann carraway and mary harris for mourning rings £ to sam'll branch for makeing y{e} coffin {s} for plank for y{e} coffin {s} {d} the list of expenses closes with unconscious satire, thus: "previous item--to dr. bowman for phisick, lbs. tobacco," showing that every arrangement for the taking under was complete. these inventories and wills cast wonderful sidelights on the manners and customs of "y{e} olden tyme." to our age, accustomed to endless post-mortem litigation, there is a refreshing simplicity in these old documents, which seem to take for granted that it is only necessary to state the wishes of the testator. richard lightfoote, ancestor of the virginia lightfoots, who made his will in , "in the first yeare of the raigne of our soveraigne lord king charles," feeling perhaps a little fearful of disputes among his heirs, appoints thomas jones "to bee overseer herof, to see the same formed in all things accordinge to my true meaninge; hereby requestinge all the parties legatees aforenamed to make him judge and decider of all controversies which shall arise between them or anie of them." but there is no record that the services of thomas jones were needed as mediator, and when jane lightfoote, his wife, makes her will, she goes about it in a still more childlike and trustful fashion. she leaves her "little cottage pott" to one, and her "little brasse pan" to another. no object is too trifling to be disposed of individually. the inventory of colonel ludlow, who departed this life in , is a curious jumble of things small and large. here we have "one rapier, one hanger, and black belt, three p'r of new gloves and one p'r of horn buckskin gloves, one small silver tankard, one new silver hat-band, two pair of silver breeches buttons, one wedding ring, one sealed ring, a pcell of sweet powder and p'r of band strings," besides which is specially mentioned: "judge richardson to y{e} wast in a picture," valued at fifty pounds of tobacco. in addition to these, colonel ludlow died possessed of " white servants and ten negroes, cattle, sheep and horses." the favorite testimonial of affection to survivors was the mourning ring or seal. these gifts figure in almost every will we examine, one mentioning a bequest of money for the purchase of "thirty rings for relatives." the keepsakes were carefully cherished, and the survivors in turn set up the memorial tablet, or carved the tombstone, or presented some piece of plate to the parish church, to keep fresh the name and memory of the deceased. in christ church, at norfolk, is an old alms bason marked with a lion passant and a leopard's head crowned, in the centre a coat of arms, three griffins' heads erased, and the inscription: "the gift of capt. whitwell in memory of mrs. whitwell who was intered in the church at norfolk, y{e} {th} of march, ." the same church owns a flagon with a crest, "a demi-man ppr-crowned in dexter three ostrich feathers," given by charles perkins as a memorial to his wife, elizabeth, who died in . it was a pleasant thought thus to renew the memory of departed friends by flagon, and plate, and alms-basin--a wiser way, one feels, than the carving of long epitaphs on gloomy stones surmounted by skull and cross-bones. how often, as we read these dreary tributes, we long for some shock of truth to nature, among all this decorous conventionalism! what tales these old colonial graveyards might have told us if they would! here lie men who, perchance, supped with shakespeare, or jested with jonson and marlow at _the mermaid_. here rest gallants who closed round the royal standard on the fatal field of marston moor, or danced at buckingham palace with the free and fair dames of the merry court of charles second after the restoration; but not a word of all this appears on the stones that represent them. their epitaphs plaster them over with all the christian virtues, and obscure their individuality as completely as the whitewash brushes of cromwell's soldiers obliterated the dark, quaintly carved oak of the cathedrals. _de mortuis nil nisi bonum_ makes churchyard literature very dull reading, when it should be the most interesting and instructive in the world. had the stones set forth the lives of those who rest beneath, we might learn much of such a man as sir george somers, whose strange experiences on the _sea-venture_ and his adventures on the bermudas make me want to know more of him. i want to know what caused the trouble between him and gates; how he built his cedar ships; how he looked, and walked, and talked; and what manner of man he was, all in all. instead of gratifying my innocent curiosity, his tombstone in whitchurch, where he is buried, puts me off with a florid verse of poor poetry, and i am little better helped when i turn to the records of the island where he died. here capt. nathaniel butler, "finding accidentally" (so runs the old chronicle) "a little crosse erected in a by-place amongst a great many of bushes, understanding there was buried the heart and intrailes of sir george somers, hee resolved to have a better memory of so worthy a souldier than that. so, finding also a great marble stone brought out of england, hee caused it to bee wrought handsomely, and laid over the place, which he invironed with a square wall of hewen stone, tombe-like, wherein hee caused to be graven this epitaph he had composed, and fixed it on the marble stone and thus it was: "in the year noble sir george summers went hence to heaven whose noble, well-tried worth that held him still imploid gave him the knowledge of the world so wide. hence 't was by heavens decree that to this place he brought new guests and name to mutual grace. at last his soule and body being to part, he here bequeathed his entrailes and his heart." even this gives us more information about the dead than most of the epitaphs. they are composed, as a rule, with jonsonian elaborateness, and might as well be set up over rasselas, as over those they commemorate. on the tomb of president nelson of his majesty's council, in the old york churchyard, a pompous inscription announces: "reader, if you feel the spirit of that exalted ardor which aspires to the felicity of conscious virtue, animated by those consolations and divine admonitions, perform the task and expect the distinction of the righteous man!" the "_distinction of the righteous_" is a delightful phrase, and sets forth the instinctive belief of the cavalier in aristocracy in heaven. a latin inscription was regarded as an appropriate tribute to the learning of the deceased, who, had his ghost walked o' nights, might have needed to brush up his classics to make quite sure of what his survivors were saying about him. in happy contrast to the frigidity of these epitaphs wherein the dead languages bury their dead, is the verse written by his son over the "hon{ble} coll. digges," who died in : "diggs, ever to extremes untaught to bend enjoying life, yet mindful of its end in thee the world an happy mingling saw of sprightly humor and religious awe." how it warms our hearts to find the word _humor_ on a gravestone! it takes the chill out of death itself, and inspires us with the hope that this most lovable of traits may stand as good a chance of immortality as faith, hope, or charity. a brief and business-like epitaph written over mistress lucy berkeley, declares that "she left behind her children viz. boys and girls. i shall not pretend to give her full character; it would take too much room for a grave-stone. shall only say she never neglected her duty to her creator in publick or private. she was charitable to the poor, a kind mistress, indulgent mother, and obedient wife." for a parallel to this matron who neglected no duty, "publick or private," we must seek the tomb of a maiden. on the crumbling stone the tribute still survives, and tells that "in a well grounded certainty of an immortal resurrection here lyes the remains of elizabeth the daughter of john and catharine washington she was a maiden virtuous without reservedness wise without affectation beautiful without knowing it she left this life on the fifth day of feb{r} in the year mdccxxxvi in the twentieth year of her age." one more epitaph of the colonial cavaliers i must quote in full, because it alone, of all i have studied, does give a picture of the man who lies under it. if it praises him too much, it is to be set down to his credit that one who knew him well believed it all; and i for one wish peace to the dust of this gallant old mariner who sailed the seas in colonial days. here he lies, sunk at his moorings, "one who never struck his flag while he had a shot in the locker; who carried sail in chace till all was blue; in peace whose greatest glory was a staggering top-sail breeze; in war to bring his broadside to bear upon the enemy, and who, when signals of distress hove out, never stood his course, but hauled or tacked or wore to give relief, though to a foe; who steered his little bark full fifty annual cruises over life's tempestuous ocean and moored her safe in port at last; where her timbers being crazy, and having sprung a leak in the gale, she went down with a clear hawse. if these traits excite in the breast of humanity that common tribute to the memory of the departed--a sigh--then traveller as thou passest this wreck, let thine be borne upon the breeze which bends the grassy covering of the grave of _old job pray_." this stone, like many another we find in these old brick-walled southern burying-grounds, brings a smile which borders close upon a tear. the very spelling and lettering in these primitive inscriptions seem moss-grown with age, and tell of generations passed away, bearing their manners and customs before them, as mary stuart bears her head on the charger in the abbotsford picture. here on one crumbling stone we read of a matron who hated strife with a capital "s" and loved peace with a little "p." here we read the touching little life-history of the young wife of john page, who "blest her said husband with a sonn and a daughter and departed this life, the twelfth day of november, anno dom , and in the th yeare of her age." the inscriptions on the oldest tombstones are undecipherable. the bluestone slab under the ruined arch at jamestown clasped by the roots of the sycamore was so broken and defaced even when lossing visited it that nothing remained but the shadowy date, . but in the earliest inscriptions that survive, we are struck by the virile and nervous english. it smacks of "great eliza's golden day." a fragment of one runs: "o death! all-eloquent, you only prove what dust we dote on when 't is man we love." but finest of all is the noble dirge, sung over bacon's lifeless body by some one whose name will never now be surely known, since he disguised his identity, prompted by a wise dread of berkeley's malignant revenge, and states that after bacon's death "he was bemoaned in these following lines, drawn by the man that waited upon his person as it is said, and who attended his corpse to their burial place." whoever the writer was, and a high authority designates him as a man named cotton, dweller at acquia creek, it is very sure that no serving-man composed these lines, which are like an echo of the age that gave us lycidas: "who is't must plead our cause? nor trump nor drum nor deputations; these, alas! are dumb; and can not speak. our arms, though ne'er so strong, will want the aid of his commanding tongue. "here let him rest; while we this truth report he's gone from hence unto a higher court to plead his cause, where he by this doth know, whether to cæsar he was friend or foe." these closing words may well form the epitaph written over the colonial cavalier. he is gone from hence unto a higher court--gone from this world forever. his open-handed hospitality, his reckless profusion, his chivalry to women, his quick-tempered, sword-thrusting honor, are as obsolete as his lace ruffles, his doublet and jerkin, his buckles and jewels and feathers. we are fallen on a prosaic age, and it is only in our dreams of the past that we conjure up, like a gay decoration against the neutral background of modern life, the figure of "the colonial cavalier." appendix list of authorities alden's collection of american epitaphs and inscriptions alsop's character of the province of maryland anburey's travels through the interior parts of america bancroft's history of the united states beverley's history and present state of virginia bozman's history of maryland browne's maryland buck's old plate burwell papers, the byrd's westover manuscripts campbell's history of the colony and ancient dominion of virginia chastellux's travels in north america cooke's virginia doyle's english colonies in america fisher's the colonial era hammond's leah and rachel; or, the two fruitful sisters, virginia and maryland hamor's true discourse of the present estate of virginia hening's virginia statutes at large hildreth's history of the united states howe's historical collections of virginia howell's state trials irving's life of washington jefferson's notes on the state of virginia jefferson, thomas, life and letters of jones' true relation of the present state of virginia lee, richard henry, life and letters of lossing's pictorial field-book of the revolution mcmaster's history of the people of the united states madison, mrs. dolly, life and letters of maryland archives magazine of american history meade's old churches, ministers, and families of virginia moore's history of north carolina purchas: his pilgrimes ramsay's history of south carolina ridgely's annals of annapolis robin, abbé, new travels through north america rowland's life of george mason scharf's chronicles of baltimore smith's general history of virginia smith's true relation of virginia tyler's life of patrick henry tyler's history of american literature virginia historical register, ed. by w. maxwell virginia magazine of history and biography whitaker's good newes from virginia william and mary college quarterly wirt's life of patrick henry transcriber's notes: passages in italics are indicated by _italics_. superscripted characters are indicated by {superscript}. scanned images of public domain material from the internet archive. [illustration: book cover] dodo's daughter dodo's daughter a sequel to dodo * * * * * by e. f. benson [illustration] * * * * * new york the century co. copyright, , by the century co. dodo's daughter chapter i nadine waldenech's bedroom was a large square apartment on the ground floor at her mother's cottage at meering in north wales. it was rather a large cottage, for it was capable of holding about eighteen people, but dodo was quite firm in the subject of its not being a house. in the days when it was built, forty years ago, this room of nadine's had been the smoking-room, but since everybody now smoked wherever he or she chose, which was mostly everywhere, just as they breathed or talked wherever they chose, nadine with her admirable commonsense had argued uselessness of a special smoking-room, for she wanted it very much herself, and her mother had been quite convinced. it opened out of the drawing-room, and so was a convenient place for those who wished to drop in for a little more conversation after bed-time had been officially proclaimed. bed-time, it may be remarked, was only officially proclaimed in order to get rid of bores, who then secluded themselves in their tiresome chambers. the room at this period was completely black with regard to the color of carpet and floor and walls and ceiling. that was nadine's last plan and since it was the last, of necessity, a very recent one. she had observed that when it was all white, people looked rather discolored, like mud on snow, whereas against a black background they seemed to be of gem-like brilliance. but since she always looked brilliant herself, the new scheme was prompted by a wholly altruistic motive. she liked her friends to look brilliant too, and she would have felt thus even if she had not been brilliant herself, for out of a strangely compounded nature, anything akin to jealousy had been certainly omitted. there had been a good many friends in her bedroom lately, and there were a certain number here to-night. she expected more. collectively they constituted that which was known as the clan. the bed was an enormous four-poster with mahogany columns at the corners of it. at present it was occupied by only three people. she herself lay on the right of it with her head on the pillow. she had already taken off her dinner-dress when her first visitor arrived, and had on a remarkable dressing-gown of oriental silk, which looked like a family of intoxicated rainbows and, leaving her arms bare, came down to her feet, so that only the tips of her pink satin shoes peeped out. in the middle of the bed was lying esther sturgis, and across it at the foot bertie arbuthnot the younger, who was twenty-one years old and about the same number of feet in height. in consequence his head dangled over one side like a tired and sunburnt lily, and his feet over the other. he and his hostess were both smoking cigarettes as if against time, the ash of which they flicked upon the floor, relighting fresh ones from a silver box that lay about the center of the bed. they neither of them had the slightest idea what happened to the smoked-out ends. esther sturgis on the other hand was occasionally sipping hot camomile tea. what she did not sip she spilt. "heredity is such nonsense," said nadine crisply, speaking with that precision which the english-born never quite attain. "look at me, for instance, and how nice i am, then look at mama and daddy." esther spilt a larger quantity of camomile tea than usual. "you shan't say a word against aunt dodo," she said. "my dear, i am not proposing to. mama is the biggest duck that ever happened. but i don't inherit. she had such a lot of hearts--it sounds like bridge--but she had, and here am i without one. first of all she married poor step-papa--is it step-papa?--anyhow the lord chesterford whom she married before she married daddy. that is one heart, but i think that was only a little one, a heartlet." "rhyme with tartlet," said bertie, as if announcing a great truth. "but we are not making rhymes," said nadine severely. "then she married daddy, which is another heart, and when she married him--of course you know she ran away with him at top-speed--she was engaged to the other lord chesterford, who succeeded the first." "oh, 'jack the ripper,'" said esther. bertie raised his head a little. "who?" he asked. "jack chesterford, because he is such a ripper," said nadine. "and he's coming here to-morrow. isn't it a thrill? mama hasn't seen him since--since she didn't see him one day when he called, and found she had run away--" "did he rip anybody?" asked bertie, who was famed for going on asking questions, until he completely understood. "no, donkey. you are thinking of some criminal. mama was engaged to him, and she thought she couldn't--so _she_ ripped--let her rip, is it not?--and got married to daddy instead. he was quite mad about darling mama, but recovered very soon. he made a very bad recovery. don't interrupt, berts: i was talking about heredity. well, there's mama, and daddy, well, we all know what daddy is, and let me tell you he is the best of the family, which is poor. he is a gentleman after all, whatever he has done. and he's done a lot. indeed he has never had an idle moment, except when he was busy!" esther gave a great sigh: she always sighed when she appreciated, and appreciation was the work of her life. she never got over the wonderfulness of nadine and was in a perpetual state of deep-breathing. she admired bertie too, and they used often to talk about getting engaged to each other some day, in a mild and sexless fashion. but they were neither of them in any hurry. "aren't your other people gentlemen?" he asked. "i thought in austria you were always all right if you quartered yourself into sixteen parts." nadine threw an almost unsmoked cigarette upon the floor with a huge show of impatience. "of course one has the ordinary number of great-grandparents, else you wouldn't be here at all," she said, "and you quarter anything you choose. two quarterings of my great-grandfathers were hung and drawn apart from their quarterings. but really i don't think you understand what i mean by gentlemen. i mean people who have brains, and who have tastes and who have fine perceptions. english people think they know the difference between the _bourgeoisie_ and the aristocrats. how wrong they are! as if living in a castle like poor esther's parents had anything to do with it! look at some of your marquises--esther darling, i don't mean lord ayr--what cads! your dukes? what aunt sallys! always making the float-face, don't you call it, the _bêtise_, the stupidity. is that the aristocracy? great solemn aunt sallys and the rest brewers! show me an idea: show me a brain, show me somebody with the distinction that thoughts and taste bring about. i do not want a mere busy prating monkey thinking it is a man. but i want people: somebody with a man or woman inside it. ah! give me a grocer. that will do!" bertie put down his head again. "let us be calm," he said. "i'll find you a grocer to-morrow." nadine laughed. she had a curiously unmelodious but wonderfully infectious laugh. people hearing it laughed too: they caught it. but there was no sound of silvery bells. she gave a sort of hiccup and then gurgled. "i get too excited over such things," she said. "and when i get excited i forget my english and talk execrably. i will be calm again. i do not mean that a man is not a gentleman because he is stupid, but much more i do not mean that quarterings make him one. the whole idea is so obsolete, so victorian, like the old mahogany sideboards. who cares about a grandfather? what does a grandfather matter any more? they used to say 'move with the times.' now we move instead with the 'daily mail.' i am half foreign and yet i am much more english than you all. the world goes spinning on. if we do not wish to become obsolete we spin too. i hate the common people, but i do not hate them because they have no grandfathers, but just because they are common. i hate quantities of your de veres for the same reason. their grandfathers make them no less common. but also i hate your sweet people, with blue eyes, of whom there are far too many. put them in bottles like lollipops, and let them stick together with their own sugar." there was a short silence. bertie broke it. "how old are you?" he asked. "going on twenty-two. i am as old as there is any need to be. there is only one person in the house younger than me, and that is darling mama. she is twenty." esther gave another huge sigh. she appreciated nadine very much, but she was not sure that she did not appreciate aunt dodo more. it may be remarked that there was no sort of consanguinity between them: the relationship was one of mere affection. she had a mother and dodo must be the next nearest relative. frankly, she would have liked to change the relationship between the two. and yet you could say things to an aunt who wasn't an aunt more freely than to a woman who happened to be your mother. apart from natural love, esther did not care for her mother. she would not, that is to say, have cared for her if she had been somebody else's mother, and indeed there was very little reason to do so. she had a roman nose and talked about the norman conquest, which in the view of her family was a very upstart affair. she had not a kind heart, but she had an immense coronet in her own right, and had married another. indeed she had married another coronet twice: there was a positive triple crown on her head like the pope. in other respects also she was like a pope, and was infallible with almost indecent frequency. nadine loved to refer to her as "holy mother." she felt herself perfectly capable of managing everybody's affairs, and instead of being as broad as she was long, was as narrow as she was tall, and resembled an elderly guardsman. her degenerate daughter finished her sigh. "go on about your horrible family," she said to nadine. "i think it's so illustrious of you to see them as they are." the door opened without any premonitory knock, and tommy freshfield entered with a large black cigar in his mouth. he was rather short, and had the misfortune to look extremely dissipated, whereas he was hopelessly, almost pathetically, incapable of anything approaching dissipation. he put down his bedroom candle and lay down on the bed next esther sturgis. "have you been comforting hughie?" she asked. "yes, until he went to play billiards with the bish-dean. he used to be a bishop but subsequently became a dean. i think aunt dodo believes he is a bishop still. lots of bishops do it now, he told me; it is the same as putting a carriage-horse out to grass: there is no work, but less corn. hughie's coming up here when he's finished his game." the appreciative esther sat up. "it's too wonderful of him," she said. "nadine, hugh is coming up here soon. do be nice to him." nadine sat up also. "of course," she said. "hughie has such tact, and i love him for it. berts has none: he would sulk if i had just refused to marry him and very likely would not speak to me till next day." "you haven't had the chance to refuse me yet," remarked berts. "that is mere scoring for the sake of scoring, berts darling," said she. "but hugh--" "o nadine, i wish you would marry him," said esther. "it would make you so gorgeously complete and golden. did you refuse him absolutely? or would you rather not talk about it?" nadine turned a little sideways on the bed. "no, we will not talk of it," she said. "what else were we saying? ah, my family! yes, it is a wonder that i am not a horror. daddy is the pick of the bunch, but such a bunch, _mon dieu_, such wild flowers; and poor daddy always gets a little drunk in the evening now; and to-night he was so more than a little. but he is such an original! fancy his coming to stay with mama here only a year after she divorced him. i think it is too sweet of her to let him come, and too sweet of him to suggest it. she is so remembering, too: she ordered him his particular brandy, without which he is never comfortable, and it is most expensive, as well as being strong. well, that's daddy: then there are my uncles: such histories. uncle josef murdered a groom (there is no doubt whatever about it) who tried to blackmail him. i think he was quite right; and i daresay the groom was quite right, but it is a horrible thing to blackmail; it is a cleaner thing to kill. then there is uncle anthony who ought to have been divorced like daddy, but he was so mean and careful and sly that they could do nothing with him. there was never anything careful about daddy." she was ticking off these agreeable relations on her white fingers. "then grandpapa waldenech committed suicide," she said, "and grandpapa vane fell into a cauldron at his own iron-works and was utterly burnt. so ridiculous; they could not even bury him, there was nothing left, except the thick smoke, and they had to open the windows. then the aunts. there was aunt lispeth who kept nothing but white rats in her house in vienna, hundreds and hundreds there were, the place crawled with them. daddy could not go near it: he was afraid of their not being real, whereas i was afraid because they were real. then there is aunt eleanor who stole many of daddy's gold snuff-boxes and said the emperor had given them her. of course it was a long time before she was ever suspected, for she was always going to church when she was not stealing; she made quite a collection. aunt julia is more modern: she only cares about the music of strauss and appendicitis." berts gave a sympathetic wriggle. "i had appendicitis twice," he said, "which was enough, and i went to electra once which was too much. how often did aunt julia have appendicitis?" "she never had it," said nadine. "that is why she is so devoted to it, an ideal she never attains. it is about the only thing she has never had, and the rest fatigue her. but she always goes to the opera whenever there is strauss, because she cannot sleep afterwards, and so lies awake and thinks about appendicitis. i go to the opera too, whenever there is not strauss, in order to think about hugh." "and then you refuse him?" "yes, but we will not talk of it. there is nothing to explain. he is like that delicious ginger-beer i drank at dinner in stone bottles. you can't explain! it is ginger-beer. so is hugh." "i had a bottle of it too," said bertie. "more than one, i think. i hate wine. wine is only fit for old women who want bucking up. there's an old man in the village at home who's ninety-five, and he never touched wine all his life." "that proves nothing," said nadine. "if he had drunk wine he might have been a hundred by now. but i like wine: perhaps i shall take after daddy." a long ash off tommy freshfield's cigar here fell into esther's camomile tea. it fizzed agreeably as it was quenched, and she looked enquiringly into the glass. "oh, that's really dear of you, tommy," she said. "i can't drink any more. john always insists upon my taking a glass of it to go to bed with." "your brother john is a prig, perhaps the biggest," said nadine. esther reached out across tommy, who did not offer his assistance and put down her glass on the small table at the head of the bed. "i hope there's no doubt of that," she said. "john would be very much upset if he thought he wasn't considered a prig. he is a snob too, which is so frightfully victorian, and thinks about lineage. of course he takes after mother. i found him reading debrett once." "what is that?" asked nadine. "oh, a red book about peers and baronets," said esther rather vaguely. "you can look yourself up, and learn all about yourself, and see who you are." "poor john!" said nadine. "he had his camomile tea brought into the drawing-room to-night while he was talking to the bishop about gothic architecture and the, well--the state of piccadilly. he was asking if confirmation was found to have a great hold on the masses. the bishop didn't seem to have the slightest idea." "john would make that all right," said his sister. "he would tell him. nadine, why does darling aunt dodo so often have a bishop staying with her?" nadine sighed. "nobody really understands mama except me," she said. "i thought perhaps you did, esther, but it is clear you don't. she is religious, that's why. just as artistic people like artists in their house, so religious people like bishops. i don't say that bishops are better than other people, any more than r.a.'s are finer artists, but they are recognized professionals. it is so: you may think i am laughing or mocking. but i am not. give me more pillow, and berts, take your face a little further from my feet. or i shall kick it, if i get excited again, without intending to, but it will hurt you just the same." bertie followed this counsel of commonsense. "that seems a simple explanation," he said. esther frowned; she was not quite so well satisfied. "but is darling aunt dodo quite as religious when a bishop doesn't happen to be here?" she asked. "i mean does she always have family prayers?" "no, not always, nor do you go to your slums if there is anything very amusing elsewhere." "but what have they got to do with religion?" asked bertie. "haven't they something to do with it? i thought they had. i know esther looks good when she has been to the slums; though of course, it's quite delicious of her to go. still if it makes you feel good, it isn't wholly unselfish. there is nothing so pleasant as feeling good. i felt good the day before yesterday. but after all there are exactly as many ways of being religious as there are people in the world. no one means quite the same. i feel religious if i drive home just at dawn after a ball when all the streets are clean and empty and pearl-colored. darling daddy feels religious when he doesn't eat meat on thursday or friday, whichever it is, and he has his immediate reward because he has the most delicious things instead--truffles stuffed with mushrooms or mushrooms stuffed with truffles. also he drinks a good deal of wine that day, because you may drink what you like, and he likes tremendously. he has a particular _chef_ for the days of meager, who has to sit and think for six days like the creation, and then work instead." nadine gurgled again. "i suppose i shock you all," she said; "but english people are so unexpected about getting shocked that it is no use being careful. but they don't get shocked at what they do or say themselves. whatever they do themselves they know must be all right, and they take hands and sing 'rule britannia.' they are the _enfant terrible_ of europe. they put their big stupid feet into everything and when they have spoiled it all, so that nobody cares for it any longer, they ask why people are vexed with them! and then they go and play golf. i am getting very english myself. except when i talk fast you would not know i was not english." esther, since her camomile tea was quite spoiled, took a cigarette instead, which she liked better. "well, darling, you know every now and then you are a shade foreign," she said. "especially when you talk about nationalities. as a nation i believe you positively loathe us. but that doesn't matter. it's he and she who matter, not they." bertie had sat up at the mention of golf and was talking to tommy. "yes, i won at the seventeenth," he said. "i took it in three. two smacks and one put." "gosh," said tommy. "i wish i hadn't mentioned that damned game," said nadine very distinctly. "you will talk about golf now till morning." "yes, but you needn't. go on about daddy," said esther. "certainly he is more interesting than golf, and gets into just as many holes. he is a creature of nature. he falls in love every year, when the hounds of spring--" a chorus interrupted her. "are on winter's traces, the mother of months--" "oh, ripping!" said bertie. "yes. how _chic_ to have written that and to have lived at putney," said nadine. "mama once took me to see mr. swinburne and told me to kiss his hand as soon as ever i got into the room. so when we got in, there was one little old man there, and i kissed his hand; but it was not mr. swinburne at all, but somebody quite different." again the door opened, and a woman entered, tall, beautiful, vital. there was no mistaking her. the others had not been lacking in vitality before, but she brought in with her a far more abundant measure. she was forty-five, perhaps, but clearly her age was the last thing to be thought about with regard to her. you could as well wonder what was the age of a sunlit wave breaking on the shore, or of a wind that blew from the sea. everybody sat up at once. "mama darling, come here," said nadine, "and talk to us." princess waldenech looked round her largely and brilliantly. "i thought i should find you all here," she said. "nadine dear, of course you know best, but is it usual for a girl to have two young gentlemen lying about with her on one bed? i suppose it must be, since you all do it. are they all going to bed here? have they brought their tooth-brushes and nighties? berts, is that you, berts? really one can hardly see for the smoke, but after all this used to be the smoking-room, and i suppose it has formed the habit. berts, you fiend, you made me laugh at dinner just when bishop spenser was telling me about the crisis of faith he went through when he was a young man so that he nearly became a buddhist instead of a bishop. or do buddhists have bishops, too? wasn't it dreadful? he's a dear, and he gives all his money away to endow other bishops, both black and white--like chess. of course he isn't a bishop any more, but only a dean, but he keeps his bible like one. hugh is playing billiards with him now, and told me in a whisper that he marked three for every cannon he made. of course hughie couldn't tell him it only counted two. it would have seemed unkind. hugh has such tact." "what i was saying," said nadine. "mama, he proposed to me again this evening, and i said 'no' as usual. is he depressed?" "no, dear, not in the least except about the cannons. probably you will say 'yes,' sometime. and i want a cigarette and something to drink, and to be amused for exactly half an hour, when i shall take myself to pieces and go to bed. i hate going to bed and it adds to the depression to know that i shall have to get up again. if only i could be a christian scientist i should know that there is no such thing as a bed, and that therefore you can't go there. on the other hand that would be fatiguing i suppose." tommy gave her a cigarette, and nadine fetched her mother her bedroom bottle of water out of which she drank freely, having refused camomile tea with cigar ash in it. "too delicious!" she said. "nadine darling, do marry hugh before you are twenty-two. nowadays if girls don't marry before that they take a flat or something and read at the british museum till they are thirty and have got spectacles, without even getting compromised--" "compromised? of course not," cried nadine. "you can't get compromised now. there is no such thing as compromise. we die in the ditch sooner, like poor lord halsbury. being compromised was purely a victorian sort of decoration like--like crinolines. oh, do tell us about those delicious victorian days about when you were a girl and people thought you fast and were shocked." "my dear, you wouldn't believe it," said dodo; "you would think i was describing what happened in noah's ark. bertie and tommy, for instance, would never have been allowed to come and lie on your bed." "oh, why not?" asked esther. "because you and nadine are girls and they are boys. that sounds simple nonsense, doesn't it? also because to a certain extent boys and girls then did as older people told them to, and older people would have told them to go away. you see we used to listen to older people because they were older; now you don't listen to them, for identically the same reason. we thought they were bores and obeyed them; you are perfectly sweet to them, but they have learned never to tell you to do anything. you would never do what i told you, dear, unless you wanted to." "no, mama, i suppose not. but i always do what you tell me, as it is, because you always tell me to do exactly what i want to." dodo laughed. "yes, that is just what education means now. and how nicely we get along. nobody is shocked now, in consequence, which is much better for them. you can die of shock, so doctors say, without any other injury at all. so it is clearly wise not to be shocked. i was shocked once, when i was eight years old, because i was taken to the dentist without being told. i was told that i was to go for an ordinary walk with my sister maud. and then, before i knew where i was, there was my mouth open as far as my uvula, and a dreadful man with a mirror and pincers was looking at my teeth. i lost my trust in human honor, which i have since then regained. i think maud was more shocked than me. i think it conduced to her death. you didn't remember auntie maud, nadine, did you? you were so little and she was so unrememberable. yes; a quantity of worsted work. but that's why i always want the bishop to come whenever he can." "i don't see why, even now," said nadine. "darling, aren't you rather slow? bishop spenser, you know, who was auntie maud's husband. surely you've heard me call him algie. who ever called a bishop by his christian name unless he was a relation? maud knew him when he was a curate. she fluffed herself up in him, just as she used to do in her worsted, and nobody ever saw her any more. but i loved maud, and i don't think she ever knew it. some people don't know you love them unless you tell them so, and it is so silly to tell your sister that you love her. i never say i love you, either, and i don't say i love esther, and that silly berts, and serious tommy. but what's the use of you all unless you know it? nadine, ring the bell, please. it all looks as if we were going to talk, and i had no dinner to speak of, because i was being anxious about daddy. i thought he was going to talk hungarian; he looked as if he was, and so i got anxious, because he only talks hungarian when he is what people call very much on. certainly he wasn't off to-night; he is off to-morrow. and so i want food. if i am being anxious i want food immediately afterwards, as soon as the anxiety is removed. at least i suppose daddy has gone to bed. you haven't got him here, have you? fancy me being as old as any two of you. you are all so delightful, that you mustn't put me on the shelf yet. but just think! i was nice the other day to berts' sister, and she told her mother she had got a new friend, who was quite old. 'not so old as grannie,' she said, 'but quite old!' and all the time i thought we were being girls together. at least i thought i was; i thought she was rather middle-aged. how is your mother, berts? she doesn't approve of me, but i hope she is quite well." bertie also was a nephew by affection. "aunt dodo," he said, "i think mother is too silly for anything." "i knew something was coming," said dodo; "what's she done now?" "well, it is. she said she thought you were heartless." "silly ass," said esther. "go on, berts." berts felt goaded. "of course mother is a silly ass," he said. "it's no use telling me that. your mother is a silly ass, too, with her coronets and all that sort of fudge. but altogether there is very little to be said for people over forty, except aunt dodo." "beloved berts," remarked dodo. "go on about edith." "but it is so. they're all antiques except you, battered antiques. let's talk about mothers generally. look at esther's mother. she doesn't want me to marry esther because my father is only an ordinary mister. there's a reason! and i don't want to marry esther because her mother is a marchioness. after all, mine has done more than hers, who never did anything except cut william the conqueror when he came over, and tell him he was of very poor, new family. but my mother wrote the 'dods symphony' for instance. she's something; she was edith staines, and when she has her songs sung at the queen's hall, she goes and conducts them." "bertie, in a short skirt and boots with enormous nails," said esther. "and why not? she may be a silly ass in some things, but she's done something." bertie uncoiled all his yards of height and stood up. "you began," he said. "i'm only answering you back. lady ayr has never done anything at all except talk about her family. she doesn't think about anything but family: she's the most antiquated and absurd type of snob there is. and your ridiculous brother john is exactly the same. you're the most awful family, and make one long for grocers, like nadine." "darling, what do you want a grocer for?" asked dodo. but berts had not finished yet. "and as for your brother seymour, all that can be said about him is that he is a perfect lady," he said, "but he ought to have been drowned when he was a girl, like a kitten." esther shouted with laughter. "oh, berts, i wish you would be roused oftener," she said; "i absolutely adore you when you are roused. but you aren't quite right about seymour. he isn't a lady any more than he's a gentleman. and after all he has got a brain, a real brain." "well, it takes all sorts to make a world," said dodo, "and, esther dear, i'm often extremely grateful to seymour. he will always come to dinner at the very last moment--" "that's because nobody else ever asks him," said bertie, still fizzing and spouting a little. "that's one of the objections to marrying you, esther, you will always be letting him come to dinner." "be quiet, berts. as i say, he never minds how late he is asked, and he invariably makes himself charming to the oldest and plainest woman present. here, for instance, he would be making himself pleasant to me." "poor chap!" said berts, lighting another cigarette, and lying down again. a tray with some cold ham, a plate of strawberries, and a small jug of iced lemonade which had been ordered by nadine for her mother was here brought in by a perfectly impassive footman, and placed on the bed between her and nadine. no servants in dodo's house ever felt the smallest surprise at anything which was demanded of them, and if nadine had at this moment asked him to wash her face, he would probably have merely said, "hot or cold water, miss?" nadine had not contributed anything to this discussion on seymour, because she was almost inconveniently aware that she did not know what she thought about him. certainly he had brains, and for brains she had an enormous respect. "seeing things to eat always makes me feel hungry," said nadine, absently taking strawberries, "just as the sight of a bed makes me very wide-awake. it is called suggestion. really the chief use of going to bed is that you are alone and have time to think." "and that is so exhausting that i instantly go to sleep," remarked tommy. "you get--how do you call it--into training, if you practise, tommy," said nadine. "people imagine that because they have a brain they can think. it isn't so: you have to learn to think. you have a tongue, but you must learn to talk: you have arms and yet you must learn how to play your foolish golf." "you don't learn it, darling," said dodo. "mama, you are eating ham and have not been following. really it is so. most people can't think. esther can't: she confesses it." "it's quite true," said esther. "i felt full of ideas this morning, and so i went away all alone along the beach to think them out. but i couldn't. there were my ideas all right, and that was all. i couldn't think about them. there they were, ideas: just that, framed and glazed." tommy rose. "i'm worse than that," he said. "i never have any ideas. in some ways it's an advantage, because if we all had ideas, i suppose we should want to express them. as it is i am at leisure to listen." dodo took a long draught of lemonade. "i have one idea," she said, "and that is that it's bed-time. i shall go and exhaust myself with thought. the process of exhaustion does not take long. besides, if i sit up much later than twelve, my maid always pulls my hair, and whips my head with the brush instead of treating me kindly." "i should dismiss her," said nadine. "i couldn't, dear. she is so imbecile that she would never get another situation. ah, there's hugh! hugh, did poor algie balearic-isles beat you?" a very large young man had just appeared in the doorway. he held in his hand a sandwich out of which he had just taken an enormous semi-circular bite. the rest of it was in his mouth, and he spoke with the mumbling utterance necessary to those who converse when their mouths are quite full. "oh, is that where he comes from?" he asked. "no, my dear, that is where he went to; then of course since he is here he did come from them in a sense. dear me, if he had been bishop there about fifty years earlier, he might have copied chopin. how thrilling!" "yes, the isles won," said hugh, his voice clearing as he swallowed. "oh, aunt dodo"--this again was a relationship founded only on affection--"he said your price was beyond rubies. so i said 'what price rubies?' and as he didn't understand nor did i, we parted. what a lot of people there seems to be here! i came to talk to nadine. oh, there she is. or would it be better taste if i didn't? perhaps it would. i shall go to bed instead." "then what you call taste is what i call peevishness," said nadine succinctly. "i don't understand. what is better peevishness, then?" "you take me at the foot of the letter," said she. "you see what i mean." "yes. i see that you mean 'literally.' but in any case there are too many people, chiefly upside down from where i am. that's esther, isn't it, and berts? tommy is the right way up. nadine upside down also." esther got up. "why, of course, if you want to talk to nadine, we'll go," she said. bertie gave a long sigh. "i shall lie here," he said, "like the frog-footman on and off for days and days--" "so long as you lie off now," said hugh. bertie got up. "you can all come to my room if you like," he said, "as long as you don't mind my going to bed. good-night, nadine; thanks awfully for letting me lie down. it has made me quite sleepy." hugh graves went to the window as soon as they had gone and threw it open. "the room smells of smoke and stale epigrams," he said in explanation. "that's not very polite, hugh," said she, "since i have been talking most, and not smoking least. but i suppose you will answer that you didn't come here to be polite." in a moment, even as the physical atmosphere of the room altered, so also did the spiritual. it seemed to nadine that she and hugh took hands and sailed through the surface foam and brightnesses in which they had been playing into some place which they had made for themselves, which was dim and sub-aqueous. the foam and brightness was all perfectly sincere, for she was never other than sincere, but it had no more than the sincerity of soap-bubbles. "no. i didn't come here to be polite," said hugh, "though i didn't come here to be rude. i came to ask you a couple of questions." nadine had lain down on the bed again, having put all the pillows behind her, so that she was propped up by them. her arms were clasped behind her head, and the folds of her rainbow dressing-gown fell back from them leaving them bare nearly to the shoulder. the shaded light above her bed fell upon her hair, burnishing its gold, and her face below it was dim and suggested rather than outlined. the most accomplished of coquettes would, after thought, have chosen exactly that attitude and lighting, if she wanted to appear to the greatest advantage to a man who loved her, but nadine had done it without motive. it may have been that it was an instinct with her to appear to the utmost advantage, but she would have done the same, without thought, if she was talking to a middle-aged dentist. hugh had seated himself at some little distance from her, and the same light threw his face into strong line and vivid color. he had still something of the rosiness of youth about him, but none of youth's indeterminateness, and he looked older than his twenty-five years. when he was moving, he moved with a boy's quickness; when he sat still he sat with the steadiness of strong maturity. "you needn't ask them," she said. "i can answer you without that. the answer to them both is that i don't know." "how? do you know the questions yet?" said he. "i do. you want to know whether my answer to you this evening is final. you want also to know why i don't say 'yes.'" his eyes admitted the correctness of this: he need not have spoken. "after all, there was not much divination wanted," he said. "i am as obvious as usual. and you understand me as well as usual." she shook her head at this, not denying it, but only deprecating it. "i always understand you too well," she said. "if only i didn't understand you, just as i don't understand seymour, you have suggested a reason for why i don't say 'yes.' i think it is correct. ah, don't quote silly proverbs about love's being complete understanding. most of the proverbs are silly; solomon was so old when he wrote them." his mouth uncurled from its gravity. "that wasn't one of solomon's," he said. "then it might have been. in any case exactly the opposite is true. if love is anything at all beyond the obvious physical sense of the word, it is certainly not understanding. it is the not-understanding--" "mis-understanding?" "no. the not-understanding, the mysterious, the unaccountable--" nadine gathered her legs up under her and sat clasping them round the knees, and her utterance grew more rapid. her face, young and undeveloped, and white and exquisite, was full of eager animation. "that is what i feel anyhow," she said. "of course i can't say 'this is love' and 'this is not love,' and label other people's emotions. there is one way of love and another way of love, and another and another. there are as many modes of love, i suppose, as there are people who are capable of it. and don't tell me everybody is capable of it. at least, tell me so if you like, but allow me to disagree. all i am certain of is that i look for something which you don't give me. perhaps i am incapable of love. and if i was sure of that, hughie, i would marry you. do you see?" she, as was always the case with her, made him forget himself. when he was with her, she absorbed his consciousness: his only desire was to follow her, not caring where she led. this desire to apprehend her corrugated his forehead into the soft wrinkles of youth, and narrowed his eyes. "tell me why that is not a bad reason," he said. "because i should see that the highest would be denied me," she said. "look what quantities of people marry quite without love. i don't refer to the obvious reason of marrying for position or wealth, but to the people who marry from admiration or from fear. mama, for instance: she married daddy because she was afraid of him. then she learned he was a bogey with a brandy bottle." "i am neither," said he. nadine gave a little sigh, and he saw his stupidity. "i am supplying the answer to my own question," he said. "another answer is that i don't understand you." somehow to nadine this was unexpected, but almost instantly she recognized the truth of it. "that is true," she said. "i want to be the inferior, mentally, spiritually, of the man i marry. i am just the opposite of those terrible people who want a vote, and say they are the equal of men. that is so _bourgeois_ an idea. what woman with any self-respect could stand being her husband's equal if she felt herself capable of loving? it is that. you are too easy, hugh. i understand you, and you don't understand me. i wish it was the other way round." "oh, you do wish that?" he asked. "yes, of course, my dear." "then you have answered the other question. your answer to me to-day is not final. i'll puzzle you yet." "you speak of it all as if it was a conjuring trick," she said. "don't make conjuring tricks. don't let me see your approaching engagement to somebody else be announced. that would not puzzle me at all. i shall simply see that it was meant to. conjuring tricks don't mystify you: you know you have been cheated and don't care." "no, i shan't make conjuring tricks," he said. nadine unclasped her knees, and got up, and began walking to and fro across the big room. "hugh, i wish i was altogether different," she said. "i wish i was like one of those simple girls whom you never by any chance meet outside the covers of six-shilling novels. they are quite human, only no human girl was ever like them. they like music and food and sentiment and sea-bathing and playing foolish games, just as we all do. but there is nobody behind them: they are tastes without character. if only one's character was nothing more than the sum total of one's tastes, how extraordinarily simple it would all be. we should spend our lives in making ourselves pleasant and enjoying ourselves. but there is something that sits behind all our tastes, and though those tastes express it, they do not express it all, nor do they express its essence. i am something beyond and back of the things i like, and the people i like. something inside me says 'i want: i want.' i daresay it wants the moon, and has as much chance of getting it as i have of reaching up into the sky and pulling it down. oh, hugh, i want the moon, and what will the moon be like? will it be hard and cold or soft and warm? i don't care. i shall slip it between my breasts and hold it close." she paused a moment opposite him. "am i talking damned rot?" she asked. "i daresay i am. i am a rotter then, because all i say is me. another thing, too: morally, i am not in the least worthy of you. i don't know any one who is. i don't really, and i'm not flattering you, because i don't rate the moral qualities very high. they are compatible with such low organizations. earwigs, i read the other day, are excellent mothers. how that seems to alter one's conception of the beauty of the maternal instinct! it does not alter my conception of earwigs in the least, and i shall continue to kill any excellent mothers that i find in my room." hugh laughed suddenly and uproariously and then became perfectly grave again. "your moral organization is probably extremely low," he said. "but i settled long ago to overlook that." "ah, there we are again," said nadine. "you deliberately propose to misconceive me, with the kindest intentions i know, but with how wrong a principle. you shut your eyes to me, as if--as if i was a smut! you settle to overlook the fact that i have no real moral perception. could you settle to overlook the fact if i had no nose and only one tooth? i assure you the lack of a moral nature is a more serious defect. but, poor devil that i am, how was i to get one? we were talking about heredity before you came in--" nadine paused a moment. "as a matter of fact," she said, "i was telling them that there was no truth in heredity. we will now take the other side of the question. how was i, considering my family, to have moral perceptions?" "are you being quite consistent?" asked hugh. "why should i be consistent? who is consistent except those simple people whom you buy so many of for six shillings, and they are consistently tiresome. how, i said, was i to have got moral perception? there is daddy! if i was a doctor i would certify any one to be insane who said daddy was a moral organism. there is darling mama! i would horse-whip any one who said the same of her, for his gross stupidity and insolence. the result is me; i am more pagan than heliogabalus. i do not think that anything is right or that anything is wrong. i want the moon, but i am afraid you are not the man in it." "and now you are flippant." "flippant, serious, moral, immoral," cried nadine, "do not label me like luggage. you will tell me my destination next, shall we call it abraham's bosom? dear hugh, you enrage me sometimes. chiefly you enrage me because you have such an angelic temper yourself. i am not sure that an angelic temper is an advantage: it is always set fair, and there are no surprises. ah, how it all leads round to that: there are no surprises: i understand you too well. i am very sorry. do me the justice to believe that. really i believe that i am as sorry that i can't marry you as you are." hugh got up. "i don't think i do quite believe that," he said. "and now as regards the immediate future. i think i shall go away to-morrow." this time he succeeded in surprising her. "himmel, but why?" she said. "if you understood me as well as you say, you would know," he said. "i don't find my own heart a satisfactory diet. of course, if i thought you would miss me--" nadine was quite silent for a moment. "you shall go if you like, of course," she said. "but you do me the most frightful injustice: you understand nothing about me if you think i should not miss you. you cannot be so dull as not to know that i should miss you more than if everybody else went, literally everybody, leaving me alone. but go if you wish." she walked across to the window, which hugh had thrown open, and leaned out. a moon rode high in mid-sky, and to the west a quarter of a mile away and far below the sea glimmered like a shield of dim silver. below the window the ground sloped sharply away down to the gray tumbled sand dunes that fringed the coast, and all lay blurred and melted under the uncertain light. and when she turned round again hugh saw that her eyes were blurred and melted also. "do exactly as you please, hughie," she said. he laughed. "would you be surprised if i did not go?" he asked. she came towards him with both hands out. "ah, that is dear of you," she said. "look out of the window with me a moment: how dim and mysterious. there is my moon which i want so much, too. i will build altars and burn incense to any god who will give it me. if only i knew what it was. my moon, i mean! now perhaps as it is nearly two o'clock, we had better go to bed, hughie. and i am so sorry that things are as they are." chapter ii it had been said, by edith arbuthnot, perhaps unkindly, but with sufficient humor to neutralize the acidity, that there was always somebody awake day and night in dodo's house tending the flame of egoistic introspection. edith did not generally use long words, but chose them carefully when she indulged in polysyllables. she had not been so careful in the choice of her confidant, for she had fired this withering criticism at her son berts, who in the true spirit of an affectionate nephew instantly repeated it to dodo, who had roared with laughter and sent edith an enormous telegram (costing nine shillings and a halfpenny, including sixpence for a paid reply in case edith wanted to continue the discussion) describing a terrible accident that had just happened to herself. "a most extraordinary and tragic affair" (this was all written out in full) "has just occurred at meering at the house of princess waldenech. the unfortunate lady has just died of a sudden though not unexpected attack of spontaneous egoism. loud screams were heard from her room, and mr. bertie arbuthnot, son of the celebrated edith arbuthnot, the musical composer, rushed in to find the princess enveloped in sheets of blue flame. the efforts made to quench her were of no avail and in a few moments all that was left of her was a small handful of ashes, which curiously enough, as they cooled, assumed the shape of a capital 'i.' fear is felt that this outbreak may prove to be contagious, and all those who have been in contact with the combusted princess are busy disinfecting themselves by talking about each other. it is believed that mrs. arbuthnot has begun to write a funeral march for her friend, for whom she felt an adoring affection amounting almost to worship, in the unusual key of ten sharps and eleven flats. it is in brisk waltz time and all the performers will blow their own trumpets. she is sending copies to nearly all the crowned heads of europe." edith's reply was equally characteristic. "dodo, i love you." the truth in edith's criticism was certainly exemplified in the night of which we are speaking, for hugh did not leave nadine's room, where she had been engaged on the self-analysis given in the last chapter till two o'clock, and at that precise moment dodo, who had gone to bed more than an hour before, woke up and began thinking about herself with uncommon intensity. and indeed there was sufficient to think about in the circumstances with which she had at this moment allowed herself to be surrounded. for the last two days, the husband whom she had divorced with such extreme facility had been staying with her, and to-morrow, directly on his departure, jack chesterford, to whom she had been engaged when she ran away with the husband she had just divorced, was arriving. all her life dodo had liked drama, as long as it occurred outside the walls of english theaters, but better than the theaters even of paris were the dramas which came into real life, especially when you could not possibly tell (even though you were acting yourself) what was going to happen next. best of all she liked acting herself, having a part to play, without the slightest idea what she or anybody else was going to do or say. dodo's zest for life did not decrease with years, nor did her interest in it in the least diminish as the time of her youth began to recede into horizons far behind her. for all the time other horizons were getting closer to her, and she could imagine herself being quite old--"as old as grannie" in fact--without any of the tragic envy of past years that so often make wormwood of the present. she had indeed settled the mode of her procedure for those years, which were still far enough off, with some exactitude, and was quite determined to have a mob-cap with a blue riband in it, and gold-rimmed spectacles. also she would read thomas à kempis a great deal,--she had read a little already, and was now deliberately keeping the rest until she was seventy--and walk about her garden with a tall cane and pick lavender. she had, moreover, promised herself to make no attempts at sprightliness or to have her hair dyed, since one of the few classes of women whom she really objected to were those whom she called grizzly kittens, who dabbed at you with their rheumatic old paws, and pretended that they had no need of spectacles, though it was quite clear they could not read the very largest print. but she fully intended to remain exceedingly happy when those years came, for happiness so it seemed to her was a gift that came from within and could not be taken from you by any amount of external calamities or accumulation of decades. certainly in the years that had passed she had had her share of annoyances, and in support of her theory with regard to happiness it must be confessed that they had not deprived her of one atom of it. her late husband's conduct, for instance, had for years been of the most disagreeable kind, and she had borne with it not in the least like a tearful lamb but more like a cheerful lion. it had not in the least discouraged her with life in general, but only disgusted her with him. for the last two years before she got her divorce, he had been, as she expressed it, "too bacchic for anything," and she had sent nadine away from their homes in austria to live with a variety of old friends in england. eventually dodo had decided that she would waste no more time with her husband and got her freedom coupled with an extremely handsome allowance. she continued to call herself "princess waldenech," because it was still rather pleasant being a princess, and waldenech told her that, as far as he was concerned, she might call herself "dowager-empress waldenech," or anything else she chose. so for a year now she had been in england, and had stepped back, or rather jumped back, into the old relations with almost all that numerous body of people who twenty years ago had helped to make life so enchanting. and with the same swiftness and sureness she had established herself in the hearts of the younger generation that had grown up since, so that the sons and daughters of her old friends became her nephews and nieces. nadine, with the beauty, the high spirits and power of enjoyment that was hers by birthright, had so it seemed to her mother succeeded to a place that was very like what her own had been rather more than twenty years ago. of course there was a tremendous difference in their modes, for the manners and outlook of one generation are as divergent from those of the last, as are the clothes they wear, but the same passionate love of life, the same curiosity and vividness inspired her daughter's friends, even as they had inspired her own. and since she herself had lost not one atom of her own vitality, it was not strange that the years between them and her were easily bridged over. * * * * * there were one or two voices that were silent in the chorus of welcome with which dodo's reappearance had been hailed. one of these was edith arbuthnot, who, though she did not desire to put any restrictions on berts' intimacy (which was lucky, since berts was a young gentleman hideously gifted with the power of getting his way) loudly proclaimed that she could never be friends with dodo again. but the answer she had sent to dodo's remarkable telegram about combusted egoism a few days before seemed to indicate that she had surrendered and, though she had subsequently announced that dodo was heartless, might be regarded as a convert, especially since jack had at last yielded too, and had invited himself down here. another fortress hitherto impregnable was mrs. vivian, for whom dodo in days gone by had felt as solid an affection as she was capable of. consequently she regretted that mrs. vivian was invariably unable to come and dine, and never manifested the slightest desire that dodo should come to see her. her regret was slightly tempered by the fact that mrs. vivian had an ear-trumpet in these days, which she presented to people whose conversation she desired to hear rather in the manner that elephants at the zoo hold out their trunks for refreshments. somehow that seemed to make her matter less, and dodo had not at present made any determined effort to beleaguer her. but she intended when she went back to town in july to capture what was now practically the only remaining stronghold of the disaffected. when dodo drowsily awoke that night just at the time that hugh and nadine had finished their talk it was the thought of jack that first stirred in her mind. instantly she was perfectly wide-awake. during this last year, though he was great friends with nadine, he had absolutely avoided coming into contact with herself. he never went to a house where dodo was expected, and once finding she was staying for a saturday-till-monday with the granthams, had left within ten minutes of his arrival. miss grantham had conceived this misbegotten plan of bringing them unexpectedly face to face, with the only result that the party numbered thirteen, and her father was very uncomfortable for weeks afterwards. once again they had been caught in a block in taxi-cabs exactly opposite each other. dodo, taking the bull by the horns, had leaned impulsively toward him with both hands outstretched and cried, "ah, jack, are we never to meet again?" on which the bull, so to speak, paid his fare, and continued his journey on foot. dodo had been considerably disappointed by this rebuff: it had seemed to her that no man should have resisted her direct appeal. on the other hand, jack on seeing her had nailed to his face so curiously icy a mask that his appearance became quite ludicrous. also he knocked his hat against the roof of the closed half of his cab, and it fell into the road, in the middle of an unusually deep puddle. she noticed that he was not bald yet, which was a great relief, since she detested the sight of craniums. and now jack had yielded, had walked out of his citadel without any further assault being delivered, and was to arrive to-day. at the thought, when she woke in the stillness of earliest morning, dodo's brain started into fullest activity, and, as always, as much interested in the motives that inspired actions as in the actions themselves, she set herself to ponder the nature of the impulse which had caused so complete a _volte-face_. but the action itself interested and charmed her also: all this year she had wanted to see jack again. he had understood her better than any one, and in spite of the vile way in which she had used him, she had more nearly loved him than either of the men she had married. her first husband had never been more to her than "an old darling," and often something not nearly that. of waldenech she had simply been afraid: under the fascination of fear she had done what he told her. but jack-- dodo felt for the switch of her electric light: the darkness was too close to her eyes, and she wanted to focus them on something. clearly there were several possibilities any of which would account for this change in him. he might perhaps merely wish to resume ordinary and friendly relations with her. but that did not seem a likely explanation, since, if that was all, he would more naturally have waited till she returned to town again after this sojourn in the country. there must have been in his mind a cause more potent than that. naturally the more potent cause occurred to her, and she sat up in bed. "it is too ludicrous," she said to herself, "it cannot possibly be that." and yet he had remained unmarried all these years, with how many charming girls about who would have been perfectly willing to share his wealth and title, not to speak of himself. * * * * * dodo got out of bed altogether; and went across the room to where a big looking-glass set in the door of her wardrobe reflected her entire figure. she wished to be quite honest in her inspection of herself, to see there not what she wanted to see but what there was to be seen. the room was brightly lit, and through her thin silk nightdress she could see the lines of her figure, molded in the soft swelling curves of her matured womanhood. yet something of the slimness and firm elasticity of youth still dwelt there, even as youth still shone in the smooth unwrinkled oval of her face and sparkled in the depths of her dark eyes. right down to her waist hung the thick coils of her black hair, still untroubled by gray, and slim and shapely were her ankles, soft and rosy from the warmth of her bed her exquisite feet. and at the sight of herself her mouth uncurled itself into a smile: the honesty of her scrutiny had produced no discouraging revelations. then frankly laughing at herself she turned away again, and wholly unconsciously and instinctively took half a dozen dance-steps across the persian rugs that were laid down over the polished floor. she could no more help that impulse of her bubbling vitality than she could help the fact that she was five feet eight in height. the coolness and refreshment of the two hours before dawn streamed in through her open window, and she put on the dressing-gown with its cascades of lace and blue ribands that lay on the chair by her dressing-table. supposing it was the case that jack was coming for her, that he wanted her now as in the old days when she had thrown his devotion back at him like a pail of dirty water, what answer would she make him? really she hardly knew. neither of her marriages had been a conspicuous success, but for neither of her husbands had she felt anything of that quality of emotion which she had felt for the man she had treated so infamously. she gave a great sigh and began ticking off certain events on her fingers. "first of all i refused him before i married poor darling chesterford the first," she said to herself. "secondly, having married chesterford the first, i asked jack to run away with me. but that was in a moment of great exasperation: it might have happened to anybody. thirdly, as soon as chesterford i. was taken, i got engaged to jack which i ought to have done originally; and fourthly, i jilted him and married waldenech." dodo had arrived at her little finger and held her other hand poised over it. "what the devil is fifthly to be?" she said aloud. she got out of her chair again. "it is very odd but i simply can't make up my mind," she thought, "and i usually can make it up without the slightest trouble; indeed it is usually already made up, just as one used to find eggs already boiled in that absurd machine that always stood by chesterford at breakfast. i hate boiled eggs! but i wonder if i owe it to jack to marry him if he wants me to? supposing he says i have spoiled his life, and he wants me to unspoil it now? is it my duty apart from whatever my inclination may be, and i wish i knew what it was?" dodo felt herself quite unable to make up her mind on this somewhat important point. she felt herself already embarked on an argument with jack, as she had been so often embarked in the old days, and on how pleasant and summery a sea. she would certainly tell him that nobody ought to let his life be spoiled by anybody else, and she would point to herself as a triumphant instance of how she had refused to let her joy of life get ever so slightly tarnished by the really trying experiences in her partnership with waldenech. here was she positively as good as new. and then unfortunately it occurred to her that jack might say "but then you didn't love him." and the ingenious dodo felt herself unable to frame any reply to this very bald suggestion. it really seemed unanswerable. there was a further reason which might account for jack's coming: nadine. dodo knew that the two were great friends. she had even heard it suggested that jack had serious thoughts with regard to her. very likely that was only invented by some friend who was curious to know how she herself would take the suggestion, but clearly this was not an improbable, far less an impossible, contingency. but that nadine had serious thoughts with regard to jack was less likely. dodo felt that her daughter took after herself in emotional matters and was probably not at that age seriously thinking about anybody. yet after all she herself had married at that age (though without serious thought) and the experiment which seemed so sensible and promising had been a distinct disappointment. ought she to warn nadine against marrying without love? or would that look as if, for other reasons, she did not wish her to marry jack? that would be an odious interpretation to put on it, and the worst of it was that she was not perfectly certain whether there was not some sort of foundation for it. something within her ever so faintly resented the idea of jack's marrying nadine. dodo's thought paused and was poised over this for a little, and she made an eager and a conscious effort to root out from her mind this feeling of which she was genuinely ashamed. then suddenly all her meditations were banished, for from outside there came the first faint chirrupings of an awakening bird. deep down in her, below the trivialities and surface-complications of life, below all her warm-heartedness and her egoism there lay a strain of natural untainted simplicity, and these first flutings of birds in the bushes roused it. she went to the window and drew up the blind. the dusk still hovered over the sea and low-lying land, and in the sky already turning dove-colored a late star lingered, remotely burning. the bird that had called her to look at the dawn had ceased again, and a pause holy and sweet and magical brooded over this virginal meeting of night and day. but far off to the right the hill-tops had got the earliest news of what was coming and were flecked with pale orient reflections and hints of gold and scarlet and faint crimson. but here below the dusk lay thick still, like clear dark water. just below her window lay the lawn, garlanded round with sleeping and dew-drenched flower-beds and the incense of their fragrant buds and folded petals still slept in the censer, till in the east should rise the gold-haired priest and swing it, tossing high to heaven the fragrance of its burning. and then from out of the bushes beyond there scudded a thrush, perhaps the same as had called dodo to the window. he scurried over the shimmering lawn with innumerable footfalls, and came so close underneath her window that she could see his eyes shining. then he swelled his throat, and sang one soft phrase of morning, paused as if listening and then repeated it. all the magic of youth and joy of life was there: there was also in dodo's heart the indefinable yearning for days that were dead, the sense of the fathomless well of time into which forever dropped beauty and youth and the soft sweet days. but that lasted but a moment, for as long as the thrush paused. another voice and yet another sounded from the bushes; there were other thrushes there, and in the ivy of the house arose the cheerful jangling of sparrows. fresh-feathered forms ran out upon the lawn, and the air was shrill with their pipings. every moment the sky grew brighter with the imminent day, the last star faded in the glow of pink translucent alabaster, and in the green-crowned elms the breeze of morning awoke, and stirred the tree-tops. then it came lower, and began to move in the flower-beds, and the wine of the dew was spilled from the chalices of new-blown roses, and the tall lilies quivered. there was wafted up to her the indescribable odor of moist earth and opening flowers, and on the moment the first yellow ray of sunlight shot over the garden. dodo stood there dim-eyed, unspeakably and mysteriously moved. she thought of other dawns she had seen, when coming back perhaps from a ball where she had been the central and most brilliant figure all night long; she thought of other troubled dawns when she had wakened from some unquiet dream and yet dreaded the day. but here was a perfect dawn and it seemed to symbolize to her the beginning of the life that lay in front of her. she looked forward to it with eager anticipation, she gave it a rapturous welcome. she was in love with life still, she longed to see what delicious things it held in store for her. she felt sure that god was going to be tremendously kind to her. and in turn (for she had a certain sense of fairness) she felt most whole-heartedly grateful and determined to deserve these favors. there were things in her life she was very sorry for: such omissions and commissions should not occur again. she felt that the sight of this delicious dawn had been a sort of revelation to her. and with a great sigh of content, she went back to bed, and without delay fell fast asleep and did not awake till her maid came in at eight o'clock with a little tray of tea that smelt too good for anything, and a whole sheaf of attractive-looking letters, large, stiff square ones, which certainly contained cards that bade her to delightful entertainments. she always breakfasted in her room, and when she came downstairs about half-past ten, and looked into the dining-room, she found to her surprise that waldenech was there eating sausages one after the other. this was a very strange proceeding for him, since in general he adopted slightly shark-like hours and did not breakfast till at least lunch-time. time, or at any rate, his habits and method of spending it, had not been so kind to him as to dodo and though it had not robbed him of that look of distinction which was always his it had conferred upon him the look of being considerably the worse for wear. he seemed as much older than his years as dodo appeared younger than hers, and she was no longer in the least afraid of him. indeed it struck her that morning as she came in, with a sense of wonder, that she had ever found him formidable. "good-morning, my dear," she said, "but how very surprising. has everybody else finished and gone out? waldenech, i am so glad you suggested coming here, and i hope you haven't regretted it." "i have not enjoyed any days so much since you left me," he said. "how dear of you to say that! every one thought it so extraordinary that you should want to come here or that i should let you, but i am delighted you did." he left his place, and came to sit in a chair next her. the remains of nadine's breakfast were on a plate opposite: half a poached egg, some melon rind, marmalade and a cigarette end. he pushed these rather discouraging relics away. "it is not extraordinary that i should want to come here," he said, "for the simple reason that you are the one woman i ever really cared about. i always cared for you--" "there are others who think you occasionally cared for them," remarked dodo. "that may be so. now i should like to stop on. may i do so?" "no, my dear, i am afraid that you certainly may not," she said. "jack comes to-day and the situation would not be quite comfortable, not to say decent." "do you think that matters?" he asked. "it certainly is going to matter. you haven't really got a european mind, waldenech. your mind is probably thibetan. is it thibet where you do exactly as you feel inclined? the place where there are llamas." "i do as i feel inclined wherever i am," said he. dodo remembered, again with wonder, the awful mastery that that sort of sentence as delivered by him used to have for her. now it had none of any kind: his personality had simply ceased to be dominant with regard to her. "but then you won't be here," said she. "you will go by that very excellent train that never stops at all; i have reserved a carriage for you." he lit a cigarette. "i must have been insane to behave to you as i did," he said. "it was most intensely foolish from a purely selfish point of view." she patted his hand which lay on the table-cloth. "certainly it was," she said, "if you wanted to keep me. i told you so more than once. i told you that there were limits, but you appeared to believe there were not. that was quite like you, my dear. you always thought yourself a czar. i do not think we need to go into past histories." he got up. "dodo, would you ever under any circumstances come back to me?" he said. "there is nadine, you know. it gives her a better chance--" dodo interrupted him. "you are not sincere when you say that. it isn't of nadine that you think. as for your question, i have never heard of any circumstances which would induce me to do as you suggest. of course we cannot say that they don't exist, but i have never come across them. don't let us think of it, waldenech: it is quite impossible. if you were dying, i would come, but under the distinct understanding that i should go away again, in case you got better, as i am sure i hope you would. i don't bear you the slightest ill-will. you didn't spoil my life at all, though it is true you often made me both angry and miserable. as regards nadine, she has an excellent chance, as you call it, under the present arrangements. all my friends have come back to me, except mrs. vivian." "mrs. vivian?" said he. "oh, yes, an english type, earnest widow." "with an ear-trumpet now," continued dodo; "and i shall get her some day. and jack comes this afternoon. _voilà_, the round table again! i take up the old life anew, with the younger generation as well, not a penny the worse." "you are a good many pennies the better," said he in self-justification. "as regards lord chesterford: why is he coming here?" "i suppose because, like you, he wants to see me and nadine or both of us." "do you suppose he wants to marry you?" he asked. "will you marry him?" dodo got up, reveling in her sense of liberty. "waldenech, you don't seem to realize that certain questions from you to me are impertinent," she said. "my dear, what i do now is none of your business. you have as much right to ask mrs. vivian whether she is thinking of marrying again. you have been so discreet and pleasant all these days: don't break down now. i have not the slightest idea if jack wants to marry me now, as a matter of fact; and i have really no idea if i would marry him in case he did. it is more than twenty years since i spoke to him--oh, i spoke to him out of a taxi-cab the other day, but he did not answer--and i have no idea what he is like. in twenty years one may become an entirely different person. however, that is all my business, and no one else's. now, if you have finished, let us take a stroll in the garden before your carriage comes round." "i ask then a favor of you," he said. "and what is that?" "that you be yourself just for this stroll: that you be as you used to be when we met that summer at zermatt." dodo was rather touched: she was also relieved that the favor was one so easy to grant. she took his arm as they left the dining-room and came out into the brilliant sunshine. "that is dear of you to remember zermatt," she said. "oh, waldenech, think of those great mountains still standing there in their silly rows with their noses in the air. how frightfully fatiguing! and they all used to look as if they were cuts with each other, and there they'll be a thousand years hence, not having changed in the least. but i'm not sure we don't have the better time scampering about for a few years, and running in and out like mice, though we get uglier and older every day. look, there is poor john sturgis coming towards us: let us quickly go in the opposite direction. ah, he has seen us!--dear john, nadine was looking for you, i believe. i think she expected you to read something to her after breakfast about goths or gothic architecture. or was it bishop algie you were talking to last night about cathedrals? one or the other, i am sure. he said he so much enjoyed his talk with you." waldenech felt that dodo was behaving exactly as she used to behave at zermatt. somehow in his sluggish and alcoholic soul there rose vibrations like those he had felt then. "talk to him or me, it does not matter," he said in german to her, "but talk like that. that is what i want." dodo gave him one glance of extraordinary meaning. this little muttered speech strangely reminded her of the pæan in the thrush's song at dawn. it recalled a poignancy of emotion that belonged to days long past, but the same poignancy of feeling was hers still. she could easily feel and habitually felt, in spite of her forty and more years, the mere out-bubbling of life that expressed itself in out-bubbling speech. she also rather welcomed the presence of a third party: it was easier for her to bubble to anybody rather than to waldenech. she buttonholed the perfectly willing john. "bishop algie is such a dear, isn't he?" she said. "he is accustomed not to talk at all, and so talking is a treat to him, and he loved you. he is taking a cinematograph show, all about the acts of the apostles, round the country next autumn to collect funds for maud's orphanage. the orphanage is already built, but there are no orphans. i think the money he collects is to get orphans to go there, scholarships i suppose. he made all his friends group themselves for scenes in the acts, and he is usually st. paul. there is a delicious shipwreck where they are tying up the boat with rug-straps and ropes. he had it taken in the bay here, and it was extremely rough, which made it all the more realistic because dear algie is a very bad sailor and while he was being exceedingly unwell over the side, his halo fell off and sank." "we did not talk about the acts of the apostles last night," said john firmly, "we talked about gothic architecture, and piccadilly, and wagner." "but how entrancing," said dodo. "i particularly love siegfried because it is like a pantomime. do you remember when the dragon comes out of his cave looking exactly like paddington station, with a red light on one side and a green one on the other, and a quantity of steam, and whistlings, and some rails? then afterwards a curious frosty female appears suddenly in the hole of a tree and tells wotan that his spear ought to be looked to before he fights. waldenech, we went together to baireuth, and you snored, but luckily on the right note, and everybody thought it was fafner. john, i was sitting in my window at dawn this morning, and all the birds in the world began to sing. it made me feel so common. nobody ought to see the dawn except the birds, and i suppose the worms for the sake of the birds." waldenech turned to her, and again spoke in german. "you are still yourself," he said. "after all these years you are still yourself." dodo's german was far more expressive than his, it was also ludicrously ungrammatical, and intensely rapid. "there are no years," she said. "years are only an expression used by people who think about what is young and what is old. every one has his essential age, and remains that age always. this man is about sixty, the age of his mother." john sturgis smiled in a kind and superior manner. "perhaps i had better tell you that i know german perfectly," he said. "also french and italian, in case you want to say things that i shan't understand." dodo stared for a moment, then pealed with laughter. "darling john," she said, "i think that is too nice of you. if you were nasty you would have let me go on talking. isn't my german execrable? how clever of you to understand it! but you are old, aren't you? of course it is not your fault, nor is it your misfortune, since all ages are equally agreeable. we grow up into our ages if we are born old, and we grow out of them, like missing a train, if our essential age is young. when you are eighty, you will still be sixty, which will be delightful for you. i make plans for what i shall be when i am old, but i wonder if i shall be able to carry them out. when i am old, i shall be what i shall be, i suppose. the inevitable doesn't take much notice of our plans, it sits there like the princess on the top of the glass-hill while we all try, without the slightest success, to get at it. ah, my dear waldenech, there is the motor come round for you. you will have to start, because i have at last trained my chauffeur to give one no time to wait at the station, and you must not jilt the compartment i have engaged you to. it will get to london all alone: so bad for a young compartment." he made no further attempt to induce her to let him stop, and dodo, with a certain relief of mind, saw him drive off and blew a large quantity of kisses after him. "he was such a dear about the year you were born, john," she said, "but you are too old to remember that. now i must be martha, and see the cook and all the people who make life possible. then i shall become mary again and have a delicious bathe before lunch. certainly the good part is much the pleasantest, as is the case always at private theatricals. i think we must act this evening: we have not had charades or anything for nearly two days." * * * * * john, like most prigs, was of a gregarious disposition, and liked that his own superiority of intellect, of which he was so perfectly conscious, should be made manifest to others and, literally, he could not imagine that dodo should not seem to prefer burying herself in household affairs when he was clearly at leisure to converse with her. he did not feel himself quite in tune with the younger members of the party, and sometimes wondered why he had come here. that wonder was shared by others. his tediousness in ordinary intercourse was the tediousness of his genus, for he always wanted to improve the minds of his circle. unfortunately he mistook quantity of information for quality of mind, and thought that large numbers of facts, even such low facts as dates, held in themselves the germ of culture. but since, at the present moment, dodo showed not the smallest desire to profit by his leisure, he wandered off to the tennis-courts, where he had reason to believe he should find companions. his faith was justified, for there was a rather typical party assembled. berts and hugh were playing a single, while esther was fielding tennis-balls for them. they were both admirable performers, equally matched and immeasurably active. at the moment esther standing, as before ahasuerus, with balls ready to give to berts, had got in his way, and he had claimed a let. "thanks awfully, esther," he said, as he took a couple of balls from her, "but would you get a little further back? you are continually getting rather in my way." "oh, berts, i'm so sorry," she said. "you are playing so well!" "i know. esther was in the light, hugh." "oh rather, lot, of course," said hugh. nadine took no active share. she was lying on the grass at the side of the court with tommy, and was reading "pride and prejudice" aloud. when esther had a few moments to spare she came to listen. john joined the reading party, and wore an appreciative smile. nadine came to the end of a chapter. "yes, art, oh, great art," she said, shutting the book, "but i am not enchained. it corresponds to madame bovary, or the dutch pictures. it is beautifully done; none but an artist could have done it. but i find a great deal of it dull." john's smile became indulgent. "ah, yes," he said, "but what you call dull, i expect i should call subtle. surely, nadine, you see how marvelous." esther groaned. "john, you make me feel sick," she began. "balls, please," said hugh. esther sprang up. "yes, hugh, i'll get them," she said. "aren't those two marvelous?" she added to nadine. "john is more marvelous," said nadine. "john, i wish you would get drunk or cheat at cards. it would do you a world of good to lose a little of your self-respect. you respect yourself far too much. nobody is so respectable as you think yourself. we were talking of you last night: i wish you had been there to hear; but you had gone to bed with your camomile tea. perhaps you think camomile tea subtle also, whereas i should only find it dull." "i think you are quibbling with words," he said. "but i, too, wish i had heard you talking last night. i always welcome criticism so long as it is sincere." "it was quite sincere," said nadine, "you may rest assured. it was unanimous, too; we were all agreed." john found this not in the least disconcerting. "i am not so sure that it matters then," he said. "when several people are talking about one thing--you tell me you were talking about me--they ought to differ. if they all agree, it shows they only see one side of what they are discussing." nadine sat up, while tommy buried his dissipated face in his hands. "we only saw one side of you," she said, "and that was the obvious one. you will say that it was because we were dull. but since you like criticism you shall know. we all thought you were a prig. esther said you would be distressed if we thought differently. she said you like being a prig. do tell me: is it pleasant? or i expect what i call prig, you call cultured. are you cultured?" tommy sat up. "come and listen, esther," he shouted. "those glorious athletes can pick up the balls themselves for a minute." esther emerged from a laurel bush triumphant with a strayed reveler. "oh, is nadine telling john what she thinks?" she asked. "nadine is!" said tommy. nadine meantime collected her thoughts. when she talked she ascertained for herself beforehand what she was going to say. in that respect she was unlike her mother, who ascertained what she thought when she found herself saying it. but the result in both cases had the spontaneous ring. "john, somehow or other you are a dear," she said, "though we find you detestable. you think, anyhow. that gives you the badge. anybody who thinks--" hugh, like mr. longfellow with his arrow, flung his racquet into the air, without looking where it went. he had a moment previously sent a fast drive into the corner of the court, which raised whitewash in a cloud, and won him the set. "nadine, are you administering the oath of the clan?" he said. "you haven't consulted either berts or me." nadine looked pained. "did you really think i was admitting poor john without consulting you?" she said. "though he complies with the regulations." hugh, streaming with the response that a healthy skin gives to heat, threw himself down on the grass. "i vote against john!" he said. "i would sooner vote for seymour. and i won't vote for him. also, it is surely time to go and bathe." "i don't know what you are all talking about," said john. "i daresay it doesn't matter. but what is the clan?" hugh sat up. "the clan is nearly prigs," he said, "but not quite. but you are, quite. we are saved because we do laugh at ourselves--" "and you are not saved because you don't," added nadine. "and is the whole object of the clan to think?" asked john. "no, that is the subject. also you speak as if we all had said, 'let there be a clan, and it was so,'" said nadine. "you mustn't think that. there was a clan, and we discovered it, like newton and the orange." "apple, surely," said john. nadine looked brilliantly round. "i knew he would say that," she said. "you see you correct what i say, whereas a clansman would be content to understand what i mean." "bishop algie is clan, by the way," said hugh. "i went down to bathe before breakfast, and found him kneeling down on the beach saying his prayers. that is tremendously clannish." "i don't see why," said john. esther sighed. "no, of course you wouldn't see," she said. "try him with another," said nadine. esther considered. "attend, john," she said. "when the last stevenson letters came out, berts bought them and looked at one page. then he took a taxi to paddington and took a return ticket to bristol." "swindon," said berts. "the station is immaterial, so long as it was far away. i daresay swindon is quite as far as bristol." john smiled. "there you are quite wrong," he said. "swindon comes before bath, and bristol after bath. no doubt it does not matter, though it is as well to be accurate." esther looked at him with painful anxiety. "but don't you see why berts went to swindon or bristol?" she said. "poor dear, you do see now. that is hopeless. you ought to have felt. to reason out what should have been a flash, is worse than not to have understood at all." john, again like all other prigs, was patient with those not so gifted as himself. "i daresay you will explain to me what it all amounts to," he said. "all i am certain of is that berts wanted to read stevenson's letters and so got into a train, where he would be undisturbed. wouldn't it have answered the same purpose if he had taken a room at the paddington hotel?" nadine turned to berts. "oh, berts, that would have been rather lovely," she said. "not at all," said he. "i wanted the sense of travel." john got up. "then i should have recommended the underground," he said. "you could have gone round and round until you had finished. it would have been much cheaper." nadine waved impotent arms of despair. "now you have spoiled it," she said. "there was a possibility in the paddington hotel, which sounds so remote. but the underground! you might as well say, why do i bathe, i who cannot swim? i can get clean in a bath, though i only get dirty in the sea, and if i want the salt i can put tiddle-de-wink salt or whatever the name is in my bath--" "tidman," said john. "i am sure you are right, though who cares? i am knocked down by cold waves, i am cut by stones on my soles. i am pinched by crabs and _homards_, at least i think i am; the wind gnaws at my bones, and my hair is as salt as almonds. between my toes is sand, and bits of seaweed make me a plaster, and my stockings fall into rock-pools, but do i go with rapture to have a bath in the bathroom? i hate washing. there is nothing so sordid as to wash my face, except to brush my teeth. but to bathe in the sea makes me think: it gives me romance. poor john, you never get romance. you amass information, and make a blue book. but we all, we make blue mountains, which we never reach. if we reached them they would probably turn out to be green. as it is, they are always blue, because they are beyond. it is suggestion that we seek, not attainment. to attain is dull, to aspire is the sugar and salt of life. don't you see? to realize an ideal is to lose the ideal. it is like a man growing rich: he never sees his sovereigns: when he has gained them he flings them forth again into something further. if he left them in a box, the real sovereigns, under his bed, what chance would there be for him to grow rich? but out they go, he never uses them, except that he makes them breed. it is the same with the riches of the mind. an idea, an ideal is yours. do you keep it? personally you do. but we, no. we invest it again. it is to our credit, at this bank of the mind. we do not hoard it, and spend it piecemeal. we put it into something else. what i have perceived in music, i put into plays: what i have perceived in plays i put into pictures. i never let it remain at home. but when i shall be a millionaire of the mind, what, what then? yes, that makes me pause. perhaps it will all be converted, as they convert bonds, is it not, and i shall put it all into love. who knows, la-la." nadine paused a moment, but nobody spoke. hugh was watching her with the absorption that was always his when she was there. but after a moment she spoke again. "we talk what you call rot," she said. "but it is not rot. the people who always talk sense arrive at less. there are sparks that fly, as when you strike one flint with another. your english philosophers--who are they?--mr. chesterton i suppose, is he not a philosopher?--or some machiavelli or other, they sit down soberly to think, and when they have thought they wrap up their thought in paradox, as you wrap up a pill for your dog, so that he swallows it, and his inside becomes bitter. that is not the way. you must start with pure enjoyment, and when a thought comes, you must fling it into the air. they hit a bird, or turn into a rainbow, or fall on your head--but what matter? you others sit and think, and when you have thought of something you put it in a beastly book, and have finished with it. you prigs turn the world topsy-turvy that way. you do not start with joy, and you go forth in a slough of despondent information. ah, yes: the child who picks up a match and rubs it against something and finds it catches fire removes the romance of the match, more than mr. bryant and may and boots is it? who made the match. matches are made on earth, but the child who knows nothing about them and strikes one is the person who is in heaven. you are not content with the wonder and romance of the world, you prefer to explain the rainbow away instead of looking at it. it is a sort of murder to explain things away: you kill their souls, and demonstrate that it is only hydrogen." she looked up at hugh. "we talked about it last night," she said. "we settled that it was a great misfortune to understand too well--" a footman arrived at this moment with a telegram which he handed to berts, who opened it. he gave a shout of laughter and passed it to nadine. "what shall i say?" he asked. "but of course 'yes,'" she said. "it is quite unnecessary to ask mama." berts scribbled a couple of words on the reply-paid form. "it's only my mother," he said in general explanation. "she wants to come over for a day or two, and see aunt dodo again, but she doesn't feel sure if aunt dodo wants to see her. are you sure there's a room, nadine?" "there always is some kind of room," said nadine. "she can sleep in three-quarters of my bed, if not." "i'm so glad she is tired of being a silly ass, as we settled she was last night," said berts. "perhaps i ought to ask aunt dodo, nadine." "pish-posh," said nadine. john got up, and prig-like had the last word. "i see all about the clan," he said. "you have a quantity of vague enthusiasm, and a lack of information. you swim like jelly-fish without any sense of direction, and admire each other." nadine considered this. "i do see what he means," she said. "and don't live what you mean," added john. chapter iii this sojourn at meering in the month of june, when london and its diversions were at their midmost, was nadine's plan. whatever nadine was or was not, she was not a _poseuse_, and her contention that it was a waste of time to spend all day in talking to a hundred people who did not really matter, and in dancing all night with fifty of them, was absolutely genuine. "as long as anything amuses you," she had said, "it is not waste of time; but when you begin to wonder if it really amuses you, it shows that it does not. darling mama, may i go down to meering for a week or ten days? i do not want any one to come, but if anybody likes to come, we might have a little cheerful party. besides it is coronation next week, and great _corvée_! i think it is likely that esther would wish to escape and perhaps one or two others, and it would be enchanting at meering now. it would be a rest cure; a very curious sort of rest, since we shall probably never cease bathing and talking and reading. but anyhow we shall not be tired over things that bore us. that is the true fatigue. you are never tired as long as you are interested, but i am not interested in the coronation." nadine's solitary week had proved in quality to be populous, and in quantity to exceed the ten days, and it was already beginning to be doubtful if july would see any of them settled in london again. dodo's house in portman square had been maintained in a state of habitableness with a kitchen-maid to cook, and a housemaid to sweep, and a footman to wait, and a chauffeur to drive, and an odd man to do whatever the other servants didn't, and occasionally one or two of the party made a brief excursion there for a couple of nights, if any peculiar attraction beckoned. the whole party had gone up for a shakespeare ball at the albert hall, but had returned next day, and dodo had hurried to st. paul's cathedral to attend a thanksgiving service, especially since she, on leaving london, had taken a season ticket, being convinced she would be continuously employed in rushing up and down. subsequently she had defrauded the railway-company by lending it, though strictly non-transferable, to any member of the party who wished to make the journey, with the result that bertie had been asked by a truculent inspector whether he was really princess waldenech. his passionate denial of any such identity had led to a lesser frequency of these excursions. nadine with the same sincerity had mapped out for herself a course of study at meering, and she read plato every afternoon in the original greek, with an admirable translation at hand, from three o'clock till five. during these hours she was inaccessible, and when she emerged rather flushed sometimes from the difficulty of comprehending what some of the dialogues were about, she was slightly socratic at tea, and tried to prove, as dodo said, that the muse of mr. harry lauder was the same as the muse of sir george alexander, and that she ought to be rude to hugh if she loved him. she was extremely clear-headed in her reason, and referred them to the symposium and the dialogue on lysis, to prove her point. but as nobody thought of contradicting her, since the socratic mood soon wore off, they did not attempt to find out the hellenic equivalents for those amazing doctrines. she was markedly socratic this afternoon, when the whole party were having tea on the lawn. esther and bertie had been down to bathe after lunch, and since everybody was going to bathe again after tea, they had left their clothes behind different rocky screens above the probable high-water level on the beach, and were clad in bathing-dress, moderately dried in the sun, with dressing-gowns above. berts had nothing in the shape of what is called foot-gear on his feet, since it was simpler to walk up barefoot, and he was wriggling his toes, one after the other, in order to divest them of an excess of sand. "but pain and pleasure are so closely conjoined," said nadine, in answer to an exclamation of his concerning stepping in a gorse-bush. "it hurts you to have a prickle in your foot, but the pleasure of taking it out compensates for the pain!" "that's socratic," said hugh, "when they took off his chains just before they hemlocked him. you didn't think of that, nadine." "i didn't claim to, but it is quite true. there is actual pleasure in the cessation of pain. if you are unhappy and the cause of your unhappiness is removed, your happiness is largely derived from the fact that you were unhappy. for instance, did you ever have a fish-bone stick in your throat, hugh?" "as a matter of fact, never," said hugh. "but as i am meant to say 'yes,' i will." "and did you cough?" "violently," said hugh. "upon which the fish-bone returned to your mouth?" "no," said hugh. "i swallowed it. it never returned at all." "it does not matter which way it went," said nadine; "but your feeling of pleasure at its going was dependent on the pain which its sticking gave you." "is that all?" said hugh. "does it not seem to you to be proved?" "oh, yes. it was proved long ago. but it's a pedantic point. the sort of point john would have made." he absently whistled the first two lines of "am stillen herd," and nadine was diverted from her platonisms. "ah, that is so much finer than the finished 'preislied,'" she said; "he has curled and oiled his verse like an assyrian bull. he and sachs had cobbled at it too much: they had brushed and combed it. it had lost something of springtime and sea-breeze. a finished work of art has necessarily less quality of suggestiveness. look at the leonardo drawings. is the 'gioconda' ever quite as suggestive? i am rather glad it was stolen. i think leonardo is greater without it." john drew in his breath in a pained manner. "'mona lisa' was the whole wonder of the world," he said. "i had sooner the thief had taken away the moon. do you remember--perhaps you didn't notice it--the painting of the circle of rock in which she sat?" "you are going to quote pater," said nadine. "pray do not: it is a deplorable passage, and though it has lost nothing by repetition--for there was nothing to lose--it shows an awful ignorance of the spirit of the renaissance. the eyelids are not a little weary: they are a little out of drawing only." esther looked across at berts. "berts is either out of drawing," she said, "or else his dressing-gown is. i think both are: he is a little too long, and also the dressing-gown is too short. they ought to proceed as far as the ankles, but berts' got a little weary at his knees." "i barked my knees on those foul rocks," said berts, examining those injured joints. "barking them is worse than biting them," said nadine. "i never bite my knees," said he. "it is a greedy habit. worse than doing it to your nails." "if you are not careful you will talk nonsense," said nadine. "i don't agree. if you are not careful you can't talk nonsense. if you want to talk nonsense, you've not got to be not careful." "there are too many 'nots,'" remarked nadine. "not at all. if you are careless some sort of idea creeps into what you say, and it ceases to be nonsense. there are lots of creeping ideas about like microbes, any of which spoil it. hardly anybody can be really meaningless for five minutes. that is why the mad tea party is a supreme work of art: you can't attach the slightest sense to anything that is said in it." "the question is what you mean by nonsense," said nadine. "is it what mr. bernard shaw writes in his plays, or what mrs. humphry ward writes in her books? they neither mean anything but they are not at all alike. in fact they are as completely opposed to each other as sense is to nonsense." berts threw himself back on the turf. "true," he said. "but they are neither of them nonsense. the lame and the halt and the blind ideas creep into both. they both talk sense mortally wounded." esther gave her appreciative sigh. "oh, berts, how true!" she said. "i went to a play by mrs. humphry ward the other day, or else i read a book by bernard shaw, i forget which, and all the time i kept trying to see what the sense of it had been before it had its throat cut. but no one ever tried to see what alice in wonderland meant, or what aunt dodo means." "mama is wonderful," said nadine. "she lives up to what she says, too. her whole life has been complete nonsense. i do hope jack will persuade her to do the most ridiculous thing of all, and marry him." "is that why he is coming?" asked esther. "oh, i hope so. it would be _the_ greatest and most absurd romance of the century." hugh was eating sugar meditatively out of the sugar basin. "i don't see that you have any right to lay down the law about nonsense, nadine," he said. "you are constantly reading plato, and making arguments, which are meant to be consecutive." "i do that to relax my mind," said nadine. "berts is quite right. nonsense is not the absence of sense, but the negative of sense, just as sugar is the negative of salt. to get non-salt with your egg, you must eat sugar with it, not only abstain from salt." "you will get a remarkably nasty taste," remarked john. "dear john, nobody ever wronged you so much as to suggest that you would like nonsense. when was leonardo born? and how old was he when he died? and how many golden crowns did francis of france give him for the 'gioconda'? your mind is full of interesting facts. that is why you are so tedious. you are like the sand they used to put on letters, which instantly made it dry." berts got up. "we will go and bathe again," he said, "and john shall remain on the beach and look older than the rocks he sits among. the rocks by the way are old red sandstone. they will blossom as the rose when granite john sits among them. his is the head on which all the beginnings of the world have come, and he is never weary. dear me, if i was not a teetotaller i should imagine i was drunk. i think it is the sea. what a heavenly time the man who stole the 'gioconda' must have had. he just took it away. i can imagine him going to the abbey at the coronation, and taking away the king's crown. there is genius, and it is also nonsense. it is pure nonsense to imagine going to the louvre and taking 'la gioconda' away." "i wonder what he has done with it," said nadine. "i think he must be a jig-saw puzzle maniac, and have felt compelled to cut it up. probably the louvre will receive bits of it by registered post. the nose will come, and then some rocks, and then a rather weary eyelid. i think john stole it: he was absorbed in jig-saw puzzles all morning. now that seems to me nonsense." "wrong again," said berts. "when it is put together it is sense. if people cut up the pictures and then threw the bits away, it might be nonsense. but they keep the pieces and these become the picture again." "the process of cutting it up is nonsense," said nadine. "yes, and the process of putting it together is nonsense," said esther. "and the two make sense," said berts. "let's go and bathe. nadine, take down some proper book, and read to us in the intervals." "'pride and prej?'" said nadine. "oh, do you think so? not good for the sea-shore. why not 'poems and ballads'?" "john will be shocked," said nadine. "not at all. he will be old red sandstone. i know aunt dodo has a copy. i think mr. swinburne gave it her," said esther. "she may value it," said nadine. "and it may fall into the sea." "not if you are careful. besides, that would be rather suitable. swinburne loved the sea, and also understood it. i think his spirit would like it, if a copy was drowned." "but mama's spirit wouldn't," said nadine. * * * * * on the moment of her mentioned name dodo appeared at the long window of the drawing-room that opened upon the lawn. simultaneously there was heard the buzz of a motor-car stopping at the front door just round the corner. "oh, all you darlings," said dodo, in the style of the 'omnia opera,' "are you going to bathe, or have you bathed? berts, dear, we know that above the knee comes the thigh, without your showing us. surely there are bigger dressing-gowns somewhere? of course it does not matter: don't bother, and you've got beautiful legs, berts." "aren't they lovely?" said esther. "they ought to be put in plaster of paris." "but if you have bathed, why not dress?" said dodo; "and if you haven't, why undress at present?" "oh, but it's both," said berts, "and so is esther. we have bathed, and are going to do it again, as soon as we've eaten enough tea." dodo looked appreciatively round. "you refreshing children!" she said. "if i bathed directly after tea i should turn blue and green like a bruise. i have wasted all afternoon in looking at a box of novels from melland's. i don't know what has happened to the novelists: their only object seems to tell you about utterly dull and sordid people. there is no longer any vitality in them: they are like leaders in the papers, full of reliable information. one instance shocked me: the heroine in 'no. lambeth walk' went to birmingham by a train that left euston at : p. m. and her ticket cost nine shillings and twopence halfpenny. an awful misgiving seized me that it was all true and i rang for an a.b.c. and looked out birmingham. it was so: there was a train at that hour and the tickets cost exactly that." "how wretched!" said nadine in a pained voice. "darling, don't take it too much to heart. and one of those novels was about home rule and another about soap, and another about tariff reform, and a fourth about christianity, which was absolutely convincing. but one doesn't go to a novel in order to learn christianity, or soap-making. one reads novels in order to be entertained and escape from real life into the society of imaginary and fiery people. another one--" dodo stopped suddenly, as a man came out of the drawing-room window. then she held both her hands out. "ah, jack," she said. "welcome, welcome!" * * * * * a very kind face, grizzled as to the hair and mustache, looked down on her from its great height, a face that was wonderfully patient and reasonable and trustworthy. jack chesterford wore his years well, but he wore them all; he did not look to be on the summer side of forty-five. he was spare still: life had not made him the unwilling recipient of the most voluminous and ironic of its burdens, obesity, but his movements were rather slow and deliberate, as if he was tired of the senseless repetition of the days. but there seemed to be no irritation mingled with his fatigue: he but yawned and smiled, and turned over fresh pages. but at the moment, as he stood there with both dodo's hands in his, there was no appearance of weariness, and indeed it would have been a man of dough who remained uninspired by the extraordinary perfection and cordiality of her greeting. it was almost as if she welcomed a lover: it was quite as if she welcomed the best of friends long absent. that she had thought out the manner of her salutation, said nothing against its genuineness, but she could have welcomed him quite as genuinely in other modes. she had thought indeed of putting pathos, penitence, and shamefacedness into her greeting: she could with real emotion to endorse it have just raised her eyes to his and let them fall again, as if conscious of the need of forgiveness. or (with perhaps a little less genuineness) she could have adopted the matronly and 'too late' attitude; but this would have been less genuine because she did not feel at all matronly, or think that it was in the least 'too late.' but warm and unmixed cordiality, with no consciousness of things behind, was perhaps the most genuine and least complicated of all welcomes, and she gave it. she did not hold his hands more than a second or two, for nadine and others claimed them. but after a few minutes he and dodo were alone again together, for jack declined the invitation to join the bathers, on the plea of senility and feeling cold like david. then when the noise of their laughter and talk had faded seawards, he dropped the trivialities that till now had engaged them, and turned to her. "i have been a long time coming, dodo," he said. "indeed, i meant never to come at all. but i could not help it. i do not think i need explain either why i stopped away or why i have come now." apart from the perfectly authentic pleasure that dodo felt in seeing her old friend again, there went through her a thrill of delight at jack's implication of what she was to him. she loved to have that power over a man; she loved to know how potent over him still was the spell she wielded. in days gone by she had not behaved well to him; it would be truer to acknowledge that she had behaved just as outrageously as was possible for anybody not a pure-bred fiend. but he had come back. it was unnecessary to explain why. and then suddenly with the rush of old memories revived, memories of his unfailing loyalty to her, his generosity, his unwearying loving-kindness, her eyes grew dim, and her hands caught his again. "jack dear," she said, "i want to say one thing. i am sorry for all i did, for my--my treachery, my--my damnedness. i was frightened: i have no other excuse. and, my dear, i have been punished. but i tell you, that what hurts most is your coming here--your forgiveness." she had not meant to say any of this; it all belonged to one of the welcomes of him which she had rejected. but the impulse was not to be resisted. "it is so," she said with mouth that quivered. "wipe it all out, dodo," he said. "we start again to-day." dodo's power of rallying from perfectly sincere attacks of emotion was absolutely amazing and quite unimpaired. only for five seconds more did her gravity linger. "dear old jack," she said. "it is good to see you. oh, jack, the gray hairs. what a lot, but they become you, and you look just as kind and big as ever. i used to think it would be so dreadful when we were all over forty, but i like it quite immensely, and the young generation are such ducks, and i am not the least envious of them. but aren't some of them weird? i wonder if we were as weird; i was always weirdish, i suppose, and i'm too old to change now. but i've still got one defect, though you would hardly believe it: i can't get enough into the day, and i haven't learned how to be in two places at once. but i have just had three telephone lines put into my house in town. even that isn't absolutely satisfactory, because the idea was to talk to three people at once, and i quite forgot that i hadn't three ears. i really ought to have been one of the people in the central exchange, who give you the wrong number. you must feel really in the swim, if you are the go-between of everybody who wants to talk to everybody else; but i should want to talk to them all. have you had tea? yes? then let us go down to the sea, because i must have a bathe before dinner.--oh, by the way, edith is coming to-night. i have not seen her yet. you and she were the remnant of the old guard who wouldn't surrender, jack, but went on sullenly firing your muskets at me. i forgot mrs. vivian, but her ear-trumpet seems to make her matter less." * * * * * they went together across the lawn, which that morning had been so sweetly bird-haunted, and down the steep hillside that led across the sand-dunes to the sea. here a mile of sands was framed between two bold headlands that plunged steeply into the sea, and jack and dodo walked along the firm, shining beach towards the huge boulders which had in some remote cataclysm been toppled down from the cliff, and formed the rocks than which john was so much older. like brown amphibious sheep with fleeces of seaweed they lay grazing on the sands, and dotted about in the water, and from the end of them a long reef of cruel-forked rocks jutted out a couple of hundred yards into the sea. higher up on the beach were more monstrous fragments, as big as cottages, behind which the processes of dressing and undressing of bathers could discreetly and invisibly proceed. dodo had forgotten about this and talking rapidly was just about to advance round one of them when an agonized trio of male voices warned her what sight would meet her outraged eyes. the tide was nearly at its lowest and but a little way out, at the side of the reef, these rocks ended altogether, giving place to the wrinkled sand, and in among them were delectable rock-pools with torpid strawberry-looking anemones, and sideways-scuttling crabs with a perfect passion for self-effacement, which, if effacement was impossible, turned themselves into wide-pincered grotesques, and tried to make themselves look tall. bertie and esther who were already prepared for the bathe were pursuing marine excavations in one of these, and dodo ecstatically pulled off her shoes and stockings, one of which fell into the rock-pool in question. "oh, jack, if you won't bathe you might at least paddle," she said. "berts, _do_ you see that very red-faced anemone? isn't it like nadine's maid? esther, do take care. there's an enormous crab crept under the seaweed by your foot. don't let it pinch you, darling: isn't cancer the latin for crab? it might give you cancer if it pinched you. here are the rest of them: i must go and put on my bathing-dress. it's in the tent. i put up a tent for these children, jack, at great expense, and they none of them ever use it. nadine, are you going to read to us all in the water? do wait till i come. what book is it? 'poems and ballads?' and so suspiciously like the copy mr. swinburne gave me. don't drop it into the water more often than is necessary. you shall read us 'dolores, our lady of pain,' as we step on sharp rocks and are pinched by crabs. how mr. swinburne would have liked to know that we read his poems as we bathed. and there's that other delicious one 'swallow, my sister, oh, sister swallow.' it sounds at first as if his sister was a pill, and he had to swallow her. jack, dear, you make me talk nonsense, somehow. come up with me as far as the tent, and while i get ready you shall converse politely from outside. it is so dull undressing without anybody to talk to." * * * * * jack, though cordially invited to take part in the usual symposium in nadine's room that night at bed-time, preferred to go to his own, though he had no intention of going to bed. he wanted to think, to ascertain how he felt. he imagined that this would be a complicated process; instead he found it extraordinarily simple. that there were plenty of things to think about was perfectly true, but they all faced one way, so to speak, one dominant emotion inspired them all. he was as much in love with dodo as ever. he did not, because he could not, consider how cruelly she had wronged him: all that she had done was but a rush-light in the mid-day sun of what she was. he was amazed at his stupidity in letting a day, not to speak of a year, elapse without seeing her since she was free again; it had been a wanton waste of twelve golden months to do so. often during these last two years, he had almost fancied himself in love with nadine; now he saw so clearly why. it was because in face and corporal presence no less than in mind she reminded him so often of what dodo had been like. she reproduced something of dodo's inimitable charm: but now that he saw the two together how utterly had the image of nadine faded from his heart. in his affection, in his appreciation of her beauty and vitality she was still exactly where she was, but out of the book of love her name had been quite blotted out. blotted out, too, were the years of his anger and the scars of a bleeding heart, and years of indignant suffering. but he had never let them take entire possession of him: in his immense soul there had ever been alight the still, secret flame that no winds or tempests could make to flicker. and to-day, at the sight of her, that flame had shot up again, a beacon that reached to heaven. hard work had helped him all these years to keep his nature unsoured. his great estates were managed with a care and consideration for those who lived on his land, unequaled in england, and politically he had made for himself a name universally respected for the absolute integrity of which it was the guarantee. but all that, so it seemed to him now, had been his employment, not his life. his life, all these years, had lain like some enchanted and sleeping entity, waiting for the spell that would awaken it again. now the spell had been spoken. for a moment his thought paused, wondering at itself. it seemed incredible that he should be so weak, so wax-like. yet that seemed to matter not at all. he might be weak or wax-like, or anything else that a man should not be, but the point was that he was alive again. for a little he let himself drift back upon the surface of things. he had passed a perfectly amazing evening. edith arbuthnot had arrived, bringing with her a violinist, a viola-player and a 'cellist, but neither maid nor luggage. her luggage, except her golf-clubs and a chest containing music (as she was only coming for a few days) was certainly lost, but she was not sure whether her maid had ever meant to come, for she could not remember seeing her at the station. so the violinist had her maid's room and the viola-player and 'cellist, young and guttural germans, had quarters found for them in the village, since dodo's cottage was completely crammed. but they had given positively the first performance of edith's new quartette, and at the end the violinist had ceremoniously crowned her with a wreath of laurels which he had picked from the shrubbery before dinner. then they went into wild ecstasies of homage; and drank more beer than would have been thought possible, while edith talked german even more remarkably than dodo, and much louder. with her laurel wreath tilted rakishly over one ear, a mug of beer in her hand, and wearing an exceedingly smart dinner-gown belonging to dodo, and rather large walking-boots of her own, since nobody else's shoes would fit her, she presented so astounding a spectacle, that jack had unexpectedly been seized with a fury of inextinguishable laughter, and had to go outside followed by dodo who patted him on the back. when they returned, edith was lecturing about the music they had just heard. apparently it was impossible to grasp it all at one hearing, while it was obviously essential that they must all grasp it without delay. in consequence it was performed all over again, while she conducted with her wreath on. there was more homage and more beer. then they had had charades by dodo and edith, and edith sang a long song of her own composition with an immense trill on the last note but one, which was 'shake'; and her band played a quantity of siegfried, while dodo with a long white beard made of cotton-wool was wotan, and edith truculently broke her walking-stick, and that was 'spear,' and they did whatever they could remember out of macbeth, which wasn't much, but which was 'shakespeare.' it was all intensely silly, but jack knew that he had not laughed so much during all those years which to-night had rolled away. then he left the surface and dived down into his heart again.... there was no question of forgiving dodo for the way in which she had treated him: the idea of forgiveness was as foreign to the whole question as it would have been to forgive the barometer for going down and presaging rain. it couldn't help it: it was like that. but in stormy weather and fine, in tempest and in the clear shining after rain, he loved dodo. what his chances were he could not at present consider, for his whole soul was absorbed in the one emotion. jack, for all his grizzled hair and his serious political years, had a great deal about him that was still boyish, and with the inconsistency of youth having settled that it was impossible to think about his chance, proceeded very earnestly to do so. the chance seemed a conspicuously outside one. she had had more than one opportunity of marrying him before, and had felt herself unable to take advantage of it: it was very little likely that she would find him desirable now. twice already she had embarked on the unaccountable sea; both times her boat had foundered. once the sea was made, in her estimate, of cotton-wool; the second time, in anybody's estimate, of amorous brandy. it was not to be expected that she would experiment again with so unexpected a proteus. * * * * * meantime a parliament of the younger generation in nadine's room were talking with the frankness that characterized them about exactly the same subject as jack was revolving alone, for dodo had gone away with edith in order to epitomize the last twenty years, and begin again with a fresh twenty to-morrow. "it is quite certain that it is mama he wants to marry and not me," said nadine. "i thought it was going to be me. i feel a little hurt, like when one isn't asked to a party to which one doesn't want to go. "you don't want to go to any parties," said hugh rather acidly, "but i believe you love being asked to them." nadine turned quickly round to him. "that is awfully unfair, hughie," she said in a low voice, "if you mean what i suppose you do. do you mean that?" "what i mean is quite obvious," he said. nadine got up from the window-seat where she was sitting with him. "i think we had all better go to bed," she said. "hugh is being odious." "if you meant what you said," he remarked, "the odiousness is with you. it is bad taste to tell one that you feel hurt that the ripper doesn't want you to marry him." nadine was silent a moment. then she held out her hand to him. "yes, you are quite right, hugh," she said. "it was bad taste. i am sorry. is that enough?" he nodded, and dropped her hand again. "the fact is we are all rather cross," said esther. "we haven't had a look in to-night." "mother is quite overwhelming," said berts. "she and aunt dodo between them make one feel exactly a hundred and two years old, as old as john. here we all sit, we old people, nadine and esther and hugh and i, and we are really much more serious than they." "your mother is serious enough about her music," said nadine. "and jack is serious about mama. the fact is that they are serious about serious things." "do you really think of mother as a serious person with her large boots and her laurel-crown?" asked berts. "certainly: all that is nothing to her. she doesn't heed it, while we who think we are musical can see nothing else. i couldn't bear her quartette either, and i know how good it was. i really believe that we are rotten before we are ripe. i except hugh." nadine got up, and began walking up and down the room as she did when her alert analytical brain was in grips with a problem. "look at jack the ripper," she said. "why, he's living in high romance, he's like a very nice gray-headed boy of twenty. fancy keeping fresh all that time! hugh and he are fresh. berts is a stale old man, who can't make up his mind whether he wants to marry esther or not. i am even worse. i am interested in plato, and in all the novels about social reform and dull people who live in sordid respectability, which mama finds so utterly tedious." nadine threw her arms wide. "i can't surrender myself to anybody or anything," she said. "i can be cool and judge, but i can't get away from my mind. it sits up in a corner like a great governess. whereas mama takes up her mind like one of those flat pebbles on the shore and plays ducks and drakes with it, throws it into the sea, and then really enjoys herself, lets herself feel. if for a moment i attempt to feel, my mind gives me a poke and says 'attend to your lessons, miss nadine!' the great judy! if only i could treat her like one, and take her out and throw brickbats at her. but i can't: i am terrified of her; also i find her quite immensely interesting. she looks at me over the top of her gold-rimmed spectacles, and though she is very hard and angular yet somehow i adore her. i loathe her you know, and want to escape, but i do like earning her approbation. silly old judy!" berts gave a heavy sigh. "what an extraordinary lot of words to tell us that you are an intellectual egoist," he said. "and you needn't have told us at all. we all knew it." nadine gave her hiccup-laugh. "i am like the starling," she said. "i can't get out. i want to get out and go walking with hugh. and he can't get in. for what a pack of miseries was _le bon dieu_ responsible when he thought of the world." "i should have been exceedingly annoyed if he had not thought of me," said berts. nadine paused opposite the window-seat, where hugh was sitting silent. "oh, hugh," she said, speaking very low, "there is a real me somewhere, i believe. but i cannot find it. i am like the poor thing in the fairy-tale, that lost its shadow. indeed i am in the more desperate plight, i have got my shadow, but i have lost my substance, though not in riotous living." "for god's sake find it," he said, "and then give it me to keep safe." she looked at him, with her dim smile that always seemed to him to mean the whole world. "when i find it, you shall have it," she said. "and last night it was the moon you wanted," said he, "not yourself." nadine shrugged her shoulders. "what would you have?" she said. "that was but another point of view. do not ask me to see things always from the same standpoint. and now, since my mama and berts have made us all feel old, let us put on our night-caps and put some cold cream on our venerable faces and go to bed. perhaps to-morrow we shall feel younger." chapter iv seymour sturgis (who, berts thought, ought to have been drowned when he was a girl) was employed one morning in july in dusting his jade. he lived in a small flat just off langham place, with a large, capable, middle-aged frenchwoman, who worshiped the ground on which he so delicately trod with the cloth-topped boots which she made so resplendent. she cooked for him in the inimitable manner of her race, she kept his flat speckless and shining, she valeted him, she did everything in fact except dust the jade. highly as seymour thought of antoinette he could not let her do that. he always alluded to her as "my maid," and used to take her with him, as valet, to country-houses. it must, however, be added that he did this largely to annoy, and he largely succeeded. the room which was adorned by his collection of jade, seemed somehow strangely unlike a man's room. a french writing-table stood in the window with a writing-case and blotting-book stamped with his initials in gilt; by the pen-tray was a smelling-bottle with a gold screw-top to it. thin lace blinds hung across the windows, and the carpet was of thick fawn-colored fabric with remarkably good persian rugs laid down over it. on the chimney-piece was a louis seize garniture of clock and candlesticks, and a quantity of invitation cards were stuck into the mirror behind. there were half-a-dozen french chairs, a sofa, a baby-grand, a small table or two, and a book-case of volumes all in morocco dress-clothes. on the walls there were a few prints, and in glazed cabinets against the wall was the jade. nothing, except perhaps the smelling-bottle, suggested a mistress rather than a master, but the whole effect was feminine. seymour rather liked that: he had very little liking for his own sex. they seemed to him both clumsy and stupid, and his worst enemies (of whom he had plenty) could not accuse him of being either the one or the other. on their side they disliked him because he was not like a man: he disliked them because they were. but while he detested his own sex, he did not regard the other with the ordinary feeling of a man. he liked their dresses, their perfumes, their hair, their femininity, more than he liked them. he was quite as charming to plain old ladies, even as dodo had said, as he was to girls, and he was perfectly happy, when staying in the country, to go a motor drive with aunts and grandmothers. he had a perfectly marvelous digestion; ate a huge lunch, sat still in the motor all afternoon, and had quantities of buttered buns for tea. he dressed rather too carefully to be really well-dressed and always wore a tie and socks of the same color, which repeated in a more vivid shade the tone of his clothes. he had a large ruby ring, a sapphire ring and an emerald ring: they were worn singly and matched his clothes. he spoke french quite perfectly. all these depressing traits naturally enraged such men as came in contact with him, but though they abhorred him they could not openly laugh at him, for he had a tongue, when he chose, of quite unparalleled acidity, and was markedly capable of using it when required and taking care of himself afterwards. in matters of art, he had a taste that was faultless, and his taste was founded on real knowledge and technique, so that really great singers delighted to perform to his accompaniment, and in matters of jewelry he designed for cartier. in fact, from the point of view of his own sex, he was detestable rather than ridiculous, while considerable numbers of the other sex did their very best to spoil him, for none could want a more amusing companion, and his good looks were quite undeniable. but somewhere in his nature there was a certain grit which quite refused to be ground into the pulp of a spoiled young man. in his slender frame, too, there were nerves of steel, and, most amazing of all, when not better employed in designing for cartier, or engaged in bloodless flirtations, he was a first-class golfer. but he preferred to go for a drive in the afternoon, and smoke a succession of rose-scented cigarettes, which could scarcely be considered tobacco at all. he was fond of food, and drank a good many glasses of port rather petulantly, after dinner, as if they were medicine. this morning he was particularly anxious that his jade should show to advantage, for nadine was coming to lunch with him, to ask his advice about something which she thought was old venetian-point lace. he had taken particular pains also about the lunch: everything was to be _en casserole_; there were eggs in spinach, and quails, and a marvelous casseroled cherry tart. he could not bear that anything about him, whether designed for the inside or the outside, should be other than exquisite, and he would have been just as sedulous a martha, if that strange barbarian called berts was coming, only he would have given berts an immense beefsteak as well. the bell of his flat tinkled announcing nadine. he did not like the shrill treble bells, and had got one that made a low bubbling note like the laugh of sir charles wyndham; and nadine came in. "enchanted!" he said. "how is philistia?" "not being the least glad of you," she said. "i wish i could make people detest me, as berts detests you. it shows force of character. oh, seymour, what jade! it is almost shameless! isn't it shameless jade i mean? is any one else coming to lunch?" "of course not. i don't dilute you with other people; i prefer nadine neat. now let's have the crisis at once. bring out the lace." nadine produced a small parcel and unfolded it. "pretty," said he. then he looked at it more closely, and tossed it aside. "i hoped it was more like venetian point than that," he said. "it's all quite wrong: the thread's wrong: the stitch is wrong: it smells wrong. don't tell me you've bought it." "no, i shan't tell you," she said. he took it up again and pondered. "you got it at ducane's," he said. "i remember seeing it. well, take it back to ducane, and tell him if he sold it as venetian, that he must give you back your money. my dear, it is no wonder that these dealers get rich, if they can palm off things like that. _c'est fini._--ah, but that is an exquisite aquamarine you are wearing. those little diamond points round it throw the light into it. how odd people usually are about jewelry. they think great buns of diamonds are sufficient to make an adornment. you might as well send up an ox's hind-leg on the table. what makes the difference is the manner of its presentation. who is that lady who employs herself in writing passionate love-novels? she says on page one that he was madly in love with her, on page two that she was madly in love with him, on page three that they were madly in love with each other, and then come some asterisks. (how much more artistic, by the way, if they printed the asterisks and left out the rest! then we should know what it really was like.) you can appreciate nothing until it is framed or cooked: then you can see the details. the poor lady presents us with chunks of meat and informs us that they are amorous men and women. i will write a novel some day, from the detached standpoint, observing and noting. then i shall go away, abroad. it is only bachelors who can write about love. do you like my tie?" seymour had a trick of putting expression into what he said by means of his hands. he waved and dabbed with them: they fondled each other, and then started apart as if they had quarreled. sometimes one finger pointed, sometimes another, and they were all beautifully manicured. antoinette did that, and as she scraped and filed and polished, he talked his admirable french to her, and asked after the old home in normandy, where she learned to make wonderful soup out of carrots and turnips and shin-bones of beef. at the moment she came in to announce the readiness of lunch. "oh, is it lunch already?" said nadine. "can't we have it after half an hour? i should like to see the jade." "oh, quite impossible," said he. "she has taken such pains. it would distress her. for me, i should prefer not to lunch yet, but she is the artist now. they are fragile things, nadine, eggs in spinach. you must come at once." "how greedy you are," she said. "for you that is a foolish thing to say. i am simply thinking of antoinette's pride. it is as if i blew a soap-bubble, all iridescent, and you said you would come to look at it in ten minutes. you shall tell me news: if you talk you can always eat. what has happened in philistia?" nadine frowned. "you think of us all as philistines," she said, "because we like simple pleasures, and because we are enthusiastic." "ah, you mistake!" he said. "you couple two reasons which have nothing to do with each other. to be enthusiastic is the best possible condition, but you must be enthusiastic over what is worth enthusiasm. is it so lovely really, that aunt dodo has settled to marry the ripper? surely that is a _rechauffée_. you wrote me the silliest letter about it. of course it does not matter at all. much more important is that you look perfectly exquisite. antoinette, the spinach is _sans pareil_: give me some more spinach. but it is slightly _bourgeois_ in jack the r. to have been faithful for so many years. it shows want of imagination, also i think a want of vitality, only to care for one woman." "that is one more than you ever cared for," remarked nadine. "i know. i said it was _bourgeois_ to care for one. there is a difference. it is also like a troubadour. i am not in the least like a troubadour. but i think i shall get married soon. it gives one more liberty: people don't feel curious about one any more. english people are so odd: they think you must lead a double life, and if you don't lead the ordinary double life with a wife, they think you lead it with somebody else and they get curious. i am not in the least curious about other people: they can lead as many lives as a piano has strings for all i care, and thump all the strings together, or play delicate arpeggios on them. nadine, that hat-pin of yours is simply too divine. i will eat it pin and all if it is not fabergé." nadine laughed. "i can't imagine you married," she said. "you would make a very odd husband." "i would make a very odd anything," said he. "i don't find any recognized niche that really fits me, whereas almost everybody has some sort of niche. indeed in the course of hundreds of years the niches, that is the manners of life, have been evolved to suit the sorts of types which nature produces. they live in rows and respect each other. but why it should be considered respectable to marry and have hosts of horrible children i cannot imagine. but it is, and i bow to the united strength of middle-class opinion. but neither you nor i are really made to live in rows. we are bedouins by nature, and like to see a different sunrise every day. there shall be another tent for antoinette." that admirable lady was just bringing them their coffee, and he spoke to her in french. "antoinette, we start for the desert of sahara to-morrow," he said. "we shall live in tents." antoinette's plump face wrinkled itself up into enchanted smiles. "_bien, m'sieur_," she said. "_a quelle heure?_" nadine crunched up her coffee-sugar between her white teeth. "you are as little fitted to cross the desert of sahara as any one i ever met," she said. "i should not cross it: i should--" "you would be miserable without your jade or your brocade and the sand would get into your hair, and you would have no bath," she said. "but every one who thinks has a bedouin mind: it always wants me to go on and find new horizons and get nearer to blue mountains." "the matter with you is that you want and you don't know what you want," said he. nadine nodded at him. sometimes when she was with him she felt as if she was talking to a shrewd middle-aged man, sometimes to a rather affected girl. then occasionally, and this had been in evidence to-day, she felt as if she was talking to some curious mixture of the two, who had a girl's intuition and a man's judgment. fond as she was of the friends whom she had so easily gathered round her, gleeful as was the nonsense they talked, serious as was her study of plato, she felt sometimes that all those sunny hours concerned but the surface of her, that, as she had said before, the individual, the character that sat behind was not really concerned in them. and seymour, when he made mixture of his two types, had the effect of making her very conscious of the character that sat behind. he had described it just now in a sentence: it wanted it knew not what. "and i want it so frightfully," she said. "it is a pity i don't know what it is. because then i should probably get it. one gets what one wants if one wants enough." "a convenient theory," he said, "and if you don't get it, you account for it by saying you didn't want it enough. i don't think it's true. in any case the converse isn't; one gets a quantity of things which one doesn't want in the least. whereas you ought not to get, on the same theory, the things you passionately desire not to have." nadine finished her sugar and lit a cigarette. "oh, don't upset every theory," she said. "i am really rather serious about it." he regarded her with his head on one side for a moment. "what has happened is that somebody has asked you to do something, and you have refused. you are salving your conscience by saying that he doesn't want it enough, or you would not have refused." she laughed. "you are really rather uncanny sometimes," she said. "only a guess," he said. "guess again then: define," she said. "the obvious suggestion is that hugh has proposed to you again." "you would have been burned as a witch two hundred years ago," said she. "i should have contributed fagots. oh, seymour, that was really why i came to see you. i didn't care two straws about the foolish lace. they all tell me i had better marry hugh, and i wanted to find somebody to agree with me. i hoped perhaps you might. he is such a dear, you know, and i should always have my own way: i could always convince him i was right." "most girls would consider that an advantage." "in that case i am not like most girls; i often wish i was. i wrote an article a month or two ago about tolstoi, and read it him, and he thought it quite wonderful. well, it wasn't. it was silly rot: i wrote it, and so of course i know. it came out in a magazine." "i read it," remarked seymour in a strictly neutral voice. "well, wasn't it very poor stuff?" asked nadine. "to be quite accurate," said seymour, "i only read some of it. i thought it very poor indeed. if was ignorant and affected." nadine gave him an approving smile. "there you are then! and with hugh it would be the same in everything else. he would always think what i did was quite wonderful. they say love is blind, don't they? so much the worse for love. it seems to me a very poor sort of thing if in order to love anybody you must lose, with regard to her, any power of mind and judgment that you may happen to possess. i don't want to be loved like that. i want people to sing my praises with understanding, and sit on my defects also with discretion. if i was perfectly blind too, i suppose it would be quite ideal to marry him. but i'm not, and i'm not even sure that i wish i was. again if hugh was perfectly critical about me, it would be quite ideal. it seems to me you must have the same quality of love on both sides, or at any rate the same quality of affection. people make charming marriages without any love at all, if they have affection and esteem and respect for each other." they had gone back to the drawing-room and seymour was handing pieces of his most precious jade to nadine, who looked at them absently and then gave them back to him, with the same incuriousness as people give tickets to be punched by the collector. this seymour bore with equanimity, for nadine was interesting on her own account, and he did not care whether she looked at his jade or not. but at this moment he screamed loudly, for she put a little round medallion of exquisitely carved yellow jade up to her mouth, as if to bite it. "oh, seymour, i'm so sorry," she said. "i wasn't attending to your jade, which is quite lovely, and subconsciously this piece appeared like a biscuit. tell me, do you like jade better than anything else? it is part of a larger question, which is: 'do you like things better than people?' personally i like people so far more than anything else in the world, but i don't like any particular person nearly as much. i like them in groups i suppose. if i married at all, i should probably be a polyandrist. certainly if i could marry four or five people at once, i should marry them all. but i don't want to marry any one of them." seymour put the priceless biscuit back into its cabinet. "who," he asked, "are this quartette of fortunate swains?" "well, hugh of course would be one," said she, "and i think berts would be another. and if it won't be a shock to you, you would be the third, and jack the r. would be the fourth. i should then have a variety of interests: this would be the world and the flesh and the devil, and a saint." "st. seymour," said he, as if trying how it sounded, like a liberal peer selecting his title. "i am afraid you are cast for the devil," said nadine candidly. "berts is the world because he thinks he is cynical. and jack is the flesh--" "because he is so thin?" "partly. but also because he is so rich." seymour turned the key on his jade. this interested him much more. but he had to make further inquiries. "if every girl wanted four husbands," he said, "there wouldn't be enough men to go round." "round what?" asked nadine, still entirely absorbed in what she was thinking. "round the marriageable females. or does your plan include poly-womany, whatever the word is, for men?" "but of course. there are such lots of bachelors who would marry if they could have two or three wives, just as there are such lots of girls who would marry if they could have two or three husbands. all those laws about 'one man, one wife' were made by ordinary people for ordinary people. and ordinary people are in the majority. there ought to be a small county set apart for ridiculous people, with a rabbit fence all round it, and any one who could be certified to be ridiculous in his tastes should be allowed to go and live there unmolested. that would be much better than your plan of going to the sahara with antoinette. you would have to get five householders to certify you as ridiculous, in order to obtain admission. then you would do what you chose within the rabbit fence, but when you wanted to be what they call sensible again you would come out, and be bound to behave like anybody else, as long as you were out, under penalty of not being admitted again." seymour considered this. "there's a lot in it," he said, "and there would be a lot of people in the rabbit fence. i should go there to-morrow and never come out at all. but a smaller county would be no use. i should start with kent, not rutlandshire, and be prepared to migrate to yorkshire. i accept the position of one of your husbands." "that is sweet of you. i think--" he interrupted. "i shall have some more wives," he said. "i should like a lunch wife and a dinner wife. i want to see a certain kind of person from about mid-day till tea-time." "is that a hint that it is time for me to go?" asked nadine. "nearly. don't interrupt. but then, if one is not in love with anybody at all, as you are not, and as i am not, you want a perfectly different kind of person in the evening. to be allowed only one wife, has evolved a very tiresome type of woman; a woman who is like a general servant, and can, so to speak, wait at table, cook a little, and make beds. you look for somebody who, on the whole, suits you. it is like buying a reach-me-down suit, which i have never done. it probably fits pretty well. but if it is to be worn every day until you die, it must fit absolutely. if it doesn't, there are fifty other suits that would do as well." "translate," said nadine. "surely there is no need. what i mean is that occasionally two people are ideally fitted. but the fit only occurs intermittently: it is not common. short of that, as long as people don't blow their noses wrong, or walk badly, or admire carlo dolci, or fail to admire bach, so long, in fact, as they do not have impossible tastes, any phalanx of a thousand men can marry a similar phalanx of a thousand women, and be as happy, the one with the other, as with any other permutation or combination of the thousand. there is a high, big, tremulous, romantic attachment possible, and it occasionally occurs. short of that, with the limitation about carlo dolci and bach, anybody would be as happy with anybody else, as anybody would be with anybody. we are all on a level, except the highest of all, and the lowest of all. life, not death, is the leveler!" "still life is as bad as still death," said she. seymour groaned and waved his hands. "you deserve a good scolding, nadine, for saying a foolish thing like that," he said. "you are not with your philistines now. there is not esther here to tell you how marvelous you are, nor berts to wave his great legs and say you are like the moon coming out of the clouds over the sea. i am not in the least impressed by a little juggling with words such as they think clever. it isn't clever: it is a sort of parrot-talk. you open your mouth and say something that sounds paradoxical and they all hunt about to find some sense in it, and think they do." seymour got up and began walking up and down the room with his little short-stepped, waggling walk. "it is the most amazing thing to me," he said, "that you, who have got brains, should be content to score absurd little successes with your dreadful clan, who have the most ordinary intelligences. i love your philistines, but i cannot bear that they should think they are clever. they are stupid, and though stupid people are excellent in their way, they become trying when they think they are wise. you are not made wise by bathing all day in the silly salt sea, and reading a book--" "how did you know?" asked nadine. "i didn't: it is merely the sort of thing i imagine you do at meering. aunt dodo is different: there is no rot about aunt dodo, nor is there about hugh. but esther, my poor sister, and the beautiful berts!" nadine took up the cudgels for the clan. "ah, you are quite wrong," she said. "you do us no justice at all. we are eager, we are, really: we want to learn, we think it waste of time to spend all day and night at parties and balls. we are critical, and want to know how and why. seymour, i wish we saw more of you. whenever i am with you, i feel like a pencil being sharpened. i can make fine marks afterwards." "keep them for the clan," he said. "no, i can't stand the clan, nor could they possibly stand me. when esther squirms and says, 'o nadine, how wonderful you are,' i want to be sick, and when i wave my hands and talk in a high voice as i frequently do, i can see berts turning pale with the desire to kill me. poor berts! once i took his arm and he shuddered at my baleful touch. i must remember to do it again. really, i don't think i can be one of your husbands if berts is to be another." "very well: i'll leave out berts," said she. "this is almost equivalent to a proposal," said seymour in some alarm. she laughed. "i won't press it," she said. "and now i must go. thanks for sharpening me, my dear, though you have done it rather roughly. i am going down to meering again to-morrow: london is a mere rabble of colonels and colonials. come down if you feel inclined." "god forbid!" said seymour piously. nadine had spent some time with him, but long after she had gone something of her seemed to linger in his room. some subtle aroma of her, too fine to be purely physical, still haunted the room, and the sound of her detached crisp speech echoed in the chambers of his brain. he had never known a girl so variable in her moods: on one day she would talk nothing but the most arrant nonsense; on another, as to-day, there mingled with it something extraordinarily tender and wistful; on a third day she would be an impetuous scholar; on the fourth she threw herself heart and soul (if she had a heart) into the gay froth of this london life. indeed "moods" seemed to be too superficial a word to describe her aspects: it was as if three or four different personalities were lodged in that slim body or directed affairs from the cool brain in that small poised head. it would be scarcely necessary to marry other wives, according to their scheme, if nadine was one of them, for it was impossible to tell even from minute to minute with which of her you were about to converse, or which of her was coming down to dinner. but all these personalities had the same vivid quality, the same exuberance of vitality, and in whatever character she appeared she was like some swiftly acting tonic, that braced you up and, unlike mere alcoholic stimulant, was not followed by a reaction. she often irritated him, but she never resented the expression of his impatience, and above all things she was never dull. and for once seymour left incomplete the dusting of the precious jade, and tried to imagine what it would be like to have nadine always here. he did not succeed in imagining it with any great vividness, but it must be remembered that this was the first time he had ever tried to imagine anything of the kind. * * * * * edith had left meering with dodo two days before and was going to spend a week with her in town since she was rather tired of her own house. but she had seen out of the railway-carriage window on the north coast of wales, so attractive-looking a golf-links, that she had got out with berts at the next station, to have a day or two golfing. the obdurate guard had refused to take their labeled luggage out, and it was whirled on to london to be sent back by dodo on arrival. but edith declared that it gave her a sense of freedom to have no luggage, and she spent two charming days there, and had arrived in london only this afternoon. she had gone straight to dodo's house, and had found jack with her and then learned the news of their engagement which had taken place only the day before. upon which she sprang up and remorselessly kissed both dodo and jack. "i can't help it if you don't like it," she said; "but that's what i feel like. of course it ought to have happened more than twenty years ago, and it would have saved you both a great deal of bother. dodo, i haven't been so pleased since my mass was performed at the queen's hall. you must get married at once, and must have some children. it will be like living your life all over again without any of those fatal mistakes, dodo. jack--i shall call you jack now--jack, you have been more wonderfully faithful than anybody i ever heard of. you have seen all along what dodo was, without being put off by what she did--" dodo screamed with laughter. "are these meant to be congratulations?" she said. "it is the very oddest way to congratulate a man on his engagement, by telling him that he is so wise to overlook his future wife's past. it is also so pleasant for me." edith was still shaking hands with them both, as if to see whether their hands were fixtures or would come off if violently agitated. "you know what i mean," she said. "it is useless my pretending to approve of most things you have done: it is useless for jack also. but he marries the essential you, not a parcel of actions." jack kept saying "thanks awfully" at intervals, like a minute gun, and trying to get his hand away. eventually edith released it. "i am delighted with you both," she said. "and to think that only a fortnight ago i was still not on speaking terms with you, dodo. and jack wasn't either. i love having rows with people if i know things are going to come straight afterwards, because then you love them more than ever. and i knew that some time i should have to make it up with you, dodo, though if i was jack i don't think i could have forgiven--well, you don't wish me to go on about that. anyhow, you are ducks, and i shall leave the young couple alone, and have a wash and brush-up. i have been playing golf quite superbly." * * * * * edith banged the door behind her, and they heard her shrilly whistling as she went off down the passages. then dodo turned to jack. "jack, dear, i thought i should burst when edith kissed you," she said. "you half shut your eyes and screwed up your face like a dog that is just going to be whipped. but i love edith. now come and sit here and talk. i have hardly seen you, since--well, since we settled that we should see a good deal more of each other in the future. i want you to tell me, oh, such lots of things. how often a month on the average have you thought about me during all these years? jack, dear, i want to be wanted, so much." "you have always been wanted by me," he said. "it is more a question of how many minutes in the month i haven't thought about you. they are easily counted." he sat down on the sofa by her, as her hand indicated. "dodo," he said, "i don't make demands of you, except that you should be yourself. but i do want that. we are all made differently: if we were not the world would be a very stupidly simple affair. and you must know that in one respect anyhow i am appallingly simple. i have never cared for any woman except you. that is the fact. let us have it out between us just once. i have never worn my heart on my sleeve, for any woman to pluck at, and carry away a mouthful of. there are no bits missing, i assure you. it is all there, and it is all yours. it is in no way the worse for wear, because it has had no wear. i feel as if--" jack paused a moment: he knew the meaning of his thought, but found it not so easy to make expression of it. "i feel as if i had been sitting all my life at a window in my heart," he said, "looking out, and waiting for you to come by. but you had to come by alone. you came by once with my cousin. you came by a second time with waldenech. you were bored the first time, you were frightened the second time. but you were not alone. i believe you are alone now: i believe you look up to my window. ah, how stupid all language is! as if you looked up to it!" dodo was really moved, and when she spoke her voice was unsteady. "i do look up to it, jack," she said. "oh, my dear, how the world would laugh at the idea of a woman already twice married, having romance still in front of her. but there is romance, jack. you see--you see you have run through my life just as a string runs through a necklace of pearls or beads: beads perhaps is better--yet i don't know. chesterford gave me pearls, all the pearls. a necklace of pearls before swine shall we say? i was swine, if you understand. but you always ran through it all, which sounds as if i meant you were a spendthrift, but you know what i do mean. really i wonder if anybody ever made a worse mess of her life than i have done, and found it so beautifully cleaned up in the middle. but there you were--i ought to have married you originally: i ought to have married you unoriginally. but i never trusted my heart. you might easily tell me that i hadn't got one, but i had. i daresay it was a very little one, so little that i thought it didn't matter. i suppose i was like the man who swore something or other on the crucifix, and when he broke his oath, he said the crucifix was such a small one." she paused again. "jack, are you sure?" she asked. "i want you to have the best life that you can have. are you sure you give yourself the best chance with me? my dear, there will be no syllable of reproach, on my lips or in my mind, if you reconsider. you ought to marry a younger woman than me. you will be still a man at sixty, i shall be just a thing at fifty-eight." dodo took a long breath and stood up. "marry nadine," she said. "she is so like what i was: you said it yourself. and she hasn't been battered like me. i think she would marry you. i know how fond she is of you, anyhow, and the rest will follow. i can't bear to think of you pushing my bath chair. god knows, i have spoiled many of your years. but, god knows, i don't want to spoil more of them. she will give you all that i could have given you twenty years ago. ah, my dear, the years. how cruel they are! how they take away from us all that we want most! you love children, for instance, jack. perhaps i shall not be able to give you children. nadine is twenty-one. that is a long time ago. you should consider. i said 'yes' to you yesterday, but perhaps i had not thought about it sufficiently. i have thought since. before you came down to meering i was awake so long one night, wondering why you came. i was quite prepared that it should be nadine you wanted. and, oh, how gladly i would give nadine to you, instead of giving myself: i should see: i should understand. at first i thought that i should not like it, that i should be jealous, to put it quite frankly, of nadine. but somehow now that i know that your first desire was for me, i am jealous no longer. take nadine, jack! i want you to take nadine. it will be better. we know each other well enough to trust each other, and now that i tell you that there will be nothing but rejoicing left in my heart, if you want nadine, you must believe that i tell you the entire truth. i know very well about nadine. she will not marry hugh. she wants somebody who has a bigger mind. she wants also to put hugh out of the question. she does not mean to marry him, and she would like it to be made impossible. woo nadine, dear jack, and win her. she will give you all i could once have given you, all that i ought to have given you." at that moment dodo was making the great renunciation of her life. she had been completely stirred out of herself and she pleaded against her own cause. she was quite sincere and she wanted jack's happiness more than her own. she believed even while she renounced all claim on him, that her best chance of happiness was with him, for it had taken her no time at all to make up her mind when he proposed to her yesterday. and she had not exaggerated when just now she told him that he ran through her life like a string that keeps the beads of time in place. she had never felt for another man what she had felt for him, and her declaration of his freedom was a real renunciation, made impulsively but most generously and completely. she really meant it, and she did not pause to consider that the offer was one of which no man could conceivably take advantage. and jack felt and knew her sincerity. "you are absolutely free, my dear," she said. "absolutely! and i will come to your wedding, and dance at it if you like, for joy that you are happy." he got up too. "there will be no wedding unless you come to it," he said. "dance at it, dodo, but marry me. nobody else will do." dodo looked him full in the face. "edith was quite right to remind you of--of what i have done," she said. "and i am quite right to forget it," said he. she shook her head, smiling a little tremulously. "oh, jack," she said in a sigh. he took her close to him. "my beloved," he said, and kissed her. chapter v dodo's wedding, which took place at the end of july in westminster abbey, was a very remarkable and characteristic affair. in the first place she arrived so late that people began to wonder whether she was going to throw jack over again, this time at the very last moment. jack himself did not share these misgivings and stood at the west door rather hot and shy but quite serene, waiting till his bride should come. eventually nadine who was to have come with her mother appeared in a taxi going miles above the legal limit, with the information that dodo was in floods of tears because she had been so horrible to jack before, and wanted to be so nice now. she said she would stop crying as soon as she possibly could, but would nadine ask jack to be a dear and put off the wedding till to-morrow, since her tears had made her a perfect fright. on which the bridegroom took a card and wrote on it: "i won't put off the wedding, and if you don't come at once, i shall go away. do be quick: there are millions and millions of people all staring." "oh, jack, what a brute you are," said nadine, as she read it, "i don't think i can take it." "you can and will," said he. "you will also take dodo by the hand and bring her here. bring her, do you understand? tell her that in twenty minutes from now i shall go." somehow dodo's marriage had seized the popular imagination, and the abbey was crammed, so also for half a mile were the pavements. the traffic by the abbey had been diverted, and all round the windows were clustered with sight-seers. the choir was reserved for the more intimate friends, and bishop algie who was to perform the ceremony was endorsed by a flock of eminent clergy. the news that dodo was in tears, but that nadine had been sent by the bridegroom to fetch her, traveled swiftly up the abbey, and a perfect babel of conversation broke out, almost drowning the rather debussy-like wedding march which edith had composed for the occasion. she had also written an anthem, "thy wife shall be as the fruitful vine," a highly original hymn-tune, and two chants for the psalms written for full orchestra with percussion and an eight-part choir. she had wanted to conduct the whole herself, and expressed her perfect willingness to wear a surplice and her music-doctor's hood, and keep on her cap or not, exactly as the dean preferred. but the dean preferred that she should take no part whatever, beyond contributing the whole of the music, which annoyed her very much, and several incisive letters passed between them in which the topics of conventionalism, pharisees and cant were freely introduced. edith had to give way, but consoled herself by arranging that the whole of the "marriage suite" should be shortly after performed at the queen's hall, where no dean or other unenlightened person could prevent her conducting in any costume she chose. but temporarily she had been extremely upset by this ridiculous bigotry. dodo arrived before the twenty minutes were over, and she came up the choir on jack's arm, looking quite superb and singing edith's hymn tune very loud and occasionally incorrectly. she had just come opposite edith, who had, in default of conducting, secured a singularly prominent position, when she sang a long bell-like b flat, and edith had said "b natural, dodo," in a curdling, sibilant whisper. there were of course no bridesmaids, but dodo's train was carried by pages, both of whom she kissed when they arrived at the end of their long march up the choir. mrs. vivian, who on dodo's engagement had finally capitulated, was next to edith, and dodo said "vivy, dear!" into her ear-trumpet, as she passed up the aisle. miss grantham alone among the older friends was absent: she had said from the beginning that it was dreadfully common of dodo to marry jack, as it was a "lived-happily-ever-afterwards" kind of ending to dodo's unique experiences. she knew that they would both become stout and serene and commonplace, instead of being wild and unhappy and interesting, and to mark her disapproval, made an appointment with her dentist at the hour at which the voice would be breathing over eden in the exceedingly up-to-date music which edith had composed. but so far from her dentist finding change and decay, he dismissed her five minutes after she had sat down, and seized by a sudden ungovernable fit of curiosity she drove straight off to the abbey to find that dodo had not arrived, and it seemed possible that there was a thrill coming, and everything might not end happily. but when it became known that dodo was only late for sentimental reasons, she left again in disgust, and ran into dodo at the west door, and said, "i am disappointed, dodo." dodo sang edith's psalm with equal fervor, but thought it would be egoistic to join in the anthem, since it was about herself. but she whispered to jack, "jack, dear, it's much the most delicious marriage i ever had. hush, you must be grave because dear algie is going to address us. i hope he will give us a nice long sermon." * * * * * the register was signed by almost everybody in the world, and there were so many royalties that it looked at first as if everybody was going to leave out their surnames. but the time of ambassadors and peers came at last, and then it looked as if the fashion was to discard christian names. "in fact," said dodo, "i suppose if you were much more royal than anybody else, you would lose your christian name as well, your royal highness, and simply answer to hie! or to any loud cry--oh, are we all ready again? we've got to go first, jack. darling, i hope you won't shy at the cinematographs. i hear the porch is full of them, like gatling guns, and to-night you and i will be in all the music-halls of london. where are my ducks of pages? that's right: one on each side. now give me your arm, jack. here we go! listen at edith's wedding march! i wonder if it's safe to play as loud as that in anything so old as the abbey. i should really be rather afraid of its falling down if algie hadn't told me not to be afraid with any amazement." it took the procession a considerable time to get down the choir, since dodo had to kiss her bouquet (not having a hand to spare) to such an extraordinary number of people. but in course of time they got out, faced the battery of cameras and cinematograph machines, and got into their car. jack effaced himself in a corner, but dodo bowed and smiled with wonderful assiduity to the crowds. "they have come to see us," she explained. "so it is essential that we should look pleased to see them. i should so like to be the queen, say on saturdays only, like the train you always want to go by on other days in the week. darling, can't you smile at them? or put out your tongue, and make a face. they would enjoy it hugely." eventually, as they got further away from the abbey, it became clear to dodo that the people in the street were concerned with their own businesses, and not hers, and she leaned back in the carriage. "oh, jack," she said, "it is you and i at last. but i can't help talking nonsense, dear. i only do it because i'm so happy. i am indeed. and you?" "it is morning with me," he said. they left town that afternoon, though dodo rather regretted that they would not see themselves in the cinematograph to make sure that she had smiled and that jack's hair was tidy, and went down to winston, jack's country place, where so many years ago dodo had arrived before as the bride of his cousin. he had wondered whether, for her sake, another place would not be more suitable as a honeymoon resort, but she thought the plan quite ideal. "it will be like the renewal of one's youth," she said, "and i am going to be so happy there now. jack, we were neither of us happy when you used to come to stay there before, and to go back like this will wipe out all that is painful in those old memories, and keep all that isn't. is it much changed? i should so like my old sitting-room again if you haven't made it something else." "it is exactly as you left it," said he. "i couldn't alter anything." dodo slipped her hand into his. "did you try to, jack?" she asked. "yes. i meant to alter it entirely: i meant to put away all that could remind me of you. in fact, i went down there on purpose to do it. but when i saw it, i couldn't. i sat down there, and--" "cried?" said dodo softly, sympathetically. "no, i didn't cry. i smoked a cigarette and looked round in a stupid manner. then i took out of its frame a big photograph of myself that i had given you, in order to tear it up. but i put it back in its frame again, and put the frame exactly where it was before." dodo gave a little moan. "oh, jack, how you must have hated me!" she said. "i hated what you had done: i hated that you could do it. but the other, never. and, dodo, let us never talk about all those things again, don't let us even think of them. it is finished, and what is real is just beginning." "it was real all along," she said, "and i knew it was real all along--you and me, that is to say--but i chose to tell myself that it wasn't. i have been like the people who when they hear the scream of somebody being murdered say it is only the cat. i have been a little brute all my life, and in all probability it is past half-time for me already; in fact it certainly is unless i am going to live to be ninety. i'm not sure that i want to, and yet i don't want to die one bit." "i should be very much annoyed if you ventured to do anything of the sort," remarked jack. "yes, and that is so wonderful of you. you ought to have wished me dead a hundred times. what's the phrase? 'yes, she would be better dead.' just now i want to be better without being dead. i often think we all have a sort of half-time in our lives, like people in foot-ball matches, when they stop playing and eat lemons. the lemons, you understand, are rather sour reflections that we are no better than we might be, but a great deal worse. and somehow that gives one a sort of a fresh start, and we begin playing again." * * * * * they arrived at winston late in the afternoon; the village had turned out to greet them, flags and arches made rainbow of the gray street with its thatched houses and air of protected stability, and from the church-tower the bells pealed welcome. dodo, always impressionable and impulsive, was tremendously moved, and with eyes brimming over, leaned out of one side of the carriage and then the other to acknowledge these salutations. "oh, jack, isn't it dear of them?" she said. "of course i know it's all for you really, but you've endowed me with everything, and so this is mine too. look at that little duck whom that nice-faced woman is holding up, waving a flag! hark to the bells! do you remember the poem by browning, 'the air broke into a mist with bells'? this is a positive london fog of bells; can't you taste it? is it the foghorns, in that case, that make the fogs? and here we are at the lodge and there's the lake, and the house! ah, what a gracious thing a summer evening is. but how fragile, jack, and how soon over." that wistful, underlying tenderness in her nature, almost melancholy but wholly womanly, rose for the moment to the surface. it was not the less sincere because it was seldom in evidence. it was as truly part of her (and a growing part of her) as her brilliant enjoyment and _insouciance_. and the expression of it gleamed darkly in her soft brown eyes, as she leaned back in the carriage and took his hand. "i will try to make you happy," she said. he bent over her. "don't try to do anything, dodo," he said. "just--just be." for a moment a queer little qualm came over her. had she followed her immediate impulse, she would have said, "i don't know how to love like that. i have to try: i want to learn." but that would have done no good, and in her most introspective moments dodo was always practical. the qualm lasted but a moment, as the door was opened, when they drew up. but it lasted long enough to cause her to wonder whether it would be the past that would be entered again instead of the future, entered, too, not by another door, but by the same. on the doorstep she paused. "lift me over the threshold, jack," she said; "it is such bad luck for a bride to stumble when she enters her home." "my dear, what nonsense." "very likely, but let's be nonsensical. let us propitiate all the gods and demons. lift me, jack." he yielded to her whim. "that is dear of you," she said. "that was a perfect entry. aren't i silly? but no austrian would ever dream of letting his wife walk over the threshold for the first time. and--and that's all about austria," she added rather hastily. dodo looked swiftly round the old, remembered hall. opposite was the big open fireplace round which they so often had sat, preferring its wide-flaring homely comfort to the more formal drawing-rooms. to-day, no fire burned there, for it was midsummer weather; but as in old times a big yellow collie sprawled in front of it, grandson perhaps, so short are the generations of dogs, to the yellow collies of the time when she was here last. he, too, gave good omen, for he rose and stretched and waved a banner of a tail, and came stately towards them with a thrusting nose of welcome. the same pictures hung on the walls; high up there ran round the palisade of stags' heads and dodo (with a conscious sense of most creditable memory) recognized the butler as having been her first husband's valet. she also remembered his name. "why, vincent," she said, holding out her hand, "it is nice to see another old face. and you don't look one day older, any more than his lordship does. tea? yes, let us have tea at once, jack. i am so hungry: happiness is frightfully exhausting, and i don't mind how exhausted i am." suddenly dodo caught sight of the portrait of herself which had been painted when this house was for the first time her home. "oh, jack, look at that little brute smiling there!" she said. "i was rather pretty, though, but i don't think i like myself at all. dear me, i hope i'm not just the same now, with all the prettiness and youth removed. i don't think i am quite, and oh, jack, there's poor dear old chesterford. ah, that hurts me; it gives me a bitter little heart-ache. would you mind, jack, if--" jack felt horribly annoyed with himself in not having seen to this. "my dear," he said, "it was awfully thoughtless of me. of course, it shall go. it was stupid, but, dodo, i was so happy all this last month, that i have thought of nothing except myself." dodo turned away from the picture to him. "and all the time i thought you were thinking about me!" she said. "jack, what a deceiver!" he shook his head. "no: it is that you don't understand. you _are_ me. "am i? i should be a much nicer fellow if i was. jack, don't have that picture moved. it only hurt for a moment: it was a ghost that startled me merely because i did not expect it. it is a dear ghost: it is not jealous, it will not spoil things or come between us. it--it wants us to be happy, for he told me, you know, it was the last thing he said--that i was to marry you. it is a long time ago, oh, how long ago, though i say it to my shame. besides, if you are to pull down or put away all that reminds me of that dreadful young woman"--dodo put out her tongue and made a face at her own picture--"you will have to pull down the house and drink up the lake and cut down the trees. ah, how lovely the garden looks! i was never here in the summer before: we only came for the shooting and hunting and the garden invariably consisted of rows of blackened salvias and decaying dahlias. but it is summer now, jack." there was no mistaking the figurative sense in which she meant him to understand the word "summer." it had been winter, winter of discontent--so the glance she gave him inevitably implied--when she was here before, and she rejoiced in and admired this excellent glory of summer-time. and yet but a moment before the picture in the hall had "hurt" her, until she remembered that even on his death-bed her first husband had bidden her marry the man who had brought her back here to-day. she had neglected to do as she was told for about a quarter of a century, and had married somebody else instead, and yet this amazing variety of topics that concerned her heart, any one of which, you would have expected, was of sufficient import to fill her mind to the exclusion of all else, but bowled across it, as the shadows of clouds bowl across the fields on a day of spring winds, leaving the untarnished sunshine after their passage. it was not because she was heartless that she touched on this series of somewhat tremendous topics: it was rather that her vitality instantly reasserted itself: it was undeterred, impervious to discouraging or disturbing reflections. dodo ate what may be termed a good tea, and smoked several cigarettes. then noticing that a small golf links had been laid out in the fields below the garden, she rushed indoors to change her dress, and play a game with her husband. "it won't be much fun for you, darling," she said, "because my golf is a species of landscape gardening, and i dig immense hollows with my club and alter the lie of the country generally. also i sometimes cheat, if nobody is looking, so admire the beauties of nature if you hear me say that i have a bad lie, because if you looked you would see me pushing the ball into a pleasanter place, and that would give you a low opinion of me. but a little exercise would be so good for us both after being married: the abbey was terribly stuffy." the fifth hole brought them near the memorial chapel in the park, where her first husband was buried. "darling, that puts you five up," she said, "and would you mind waiting here a minute, while i go in alone? i don't want even you with me: i want to go alone and kneel for a minute by his grave, and say my prayers, and tell him i have come back again with you. will you wait for a minute, jack? i shan't be long." dodo wasn't long: she said her prayers with remarkable celerity, and came out again wiping her eyes. "oh, jack," she said, "what a beautiful monument: it wasn't finished, you know, when i went away and i hadn't seen it. and it's so touching to have just those three words, 'lead, kindly light': the dear old boy was so fond of that hymn. it's all so lovely and peaceful, and if ever there was a saint in the nineteenth century, it was he. somehow i felt as if he knew about us and approved, and i remember we had 'lead, kindly light' on the very last sunday evening of all. i am so glad i went in." dodo gave a little sigh. "where are we?" she said. "am i one hole up or two? two, isn't it? do let it be two. and what a lovely piece of marble. it looks like the most wonderful cold cream turned to stone. it must be carrara. oh, jack, what a beautiful drive! it went much faster than the legal limit." * * * * * the flames of the summer-sunset were beginning to fade in the sky when they got back to the house, and it was near dinner-time. dodo's spirits and appetite were both of the most excellent order, and all the memories that this house brought back to her, so far from causing any aching resuscitation of past years, were, owing to the incomparable alchemy of her mind, but transformed into a soft and suitable background for the present. afterwards, they sat on the terrace in the warm dusk. "i must telegraph to nadine to-morrow," she said, "and tell her how happy i am. jack, sometimes nadine seems to me exactly what i should expect a very attractive aunt to be. do you know what i mean? i feel she could have warned me of all the mistakes i have made in my life, before they happened, if she had been born. and she approves of you and me; isn't it lucky? i wonder why i feel so young on the very day on which i should most naturally be thinking what a lot of life has passed. jack, i don't want any more events. some people reckon life by events, and that is so unreasonable. events are thrust upon you; what counts is what you feel." he moved his chair a little nearer to hers. "i am satisfied with what i feel," he said. "and though i have felt it for very many years, it has never lost its freshness. i have always wanted, and now i have got." suddenly dodo's mood changed. "oh, you take a great risk," she said. "who is to assure you that i shan't disappoint you, disappoint you horribly? i can't assure you of that, jack. it is easy to understand other people, but the silly proverb that tells you to know yourself, makes a far more difficult demand. if i disappoint you, what are we to do?" "you can't disappoint me if you are yourself," he said. "you say that! to me, too, who have outraged every sort of decency with regard to you?" he was silent a moment. "yes, i say that to you," he said. dodo gave a little bubbling laugh. "you are not very polite," she said. "i say that i have outraged every sort of decency and you don't even contradict me." "no. what you say is--is perfectly true. but the comment of you and me sitting here on our bridal night is sufficient, is it not? dodo, there is no use in your calling yourself names. leave it all alone: we are here, you and i. and it is getting late, my darling." * * * * * the same night lady ayr was giving one of her awful dinner-parties. her family, john, esther and seymour were always bidden to them, and went in to dinner in exactly their proper places as sons and daughters of a marquis. before now it had happened that seymour had to take esther in to dinner, and it was so to-night. but in the general way they saw so little of each other, that they did not very much object. they usually quarreled before long, but made their differences up again by their unanimity of opinion about their mother. that had already happened this evening. "mother is bursting with curiosity about aunt dodo's wedding," said esther. "she wasn't asked. i told her it was a very pretty wedding." "i went," said seymour, "and i am going to write an account of it for _the lady_. if you will tell me how you were dressed, i will put it in, that is supposing you were decently dressed. mother asked me about it, too, and i think i said the bridesmaids looked lovely." "but there weren't any," said esther. "of course there weren't, but it enraged her. by the way, there is some awful stained glass put up in the staircase since i was here last. a ruby crown has apparently had twins, one of which is a sapphire crown and the other a diamond crown. i shouldn't mind that sort of thing happening, if it wasn't so badly done. i shall try to break it by accident after dinner. did you design it? my dear, i forgot: we had finished quarreling. let us talk about something else. nadine came to see me the other day, and if you will not tell anybody, i think it quite likely that i shall marry her. she likes jade. and she looks quite pretty to-night, doesn't she?" esther had already alluded to nadine, who was sitting opposite, as the dream of dreams, and further appreciation was unnecessary. "you don't happen to have asked her yet?" she said, with marked neutrality. "no, one doesn't ask that sort of thing until one knows the answer," said he. "that is, unless you are one of the ridiculous people who ask for information. i hate the information i get by asking, unless i know it already." "and then you don't get it." "no. esther, that is a charming emerald you are wearing but it is atrociously set. if you will send it round to-morrow, i will draw a decent setting for it. do look at mother. she has got the family lace on, which is made of string. i think it is saxon. oh, of course the coronets are about her. how foolish of me not to have guessed." "it is more foolish of you to think that nadine would look at you," said esther. "i didn't ask her to look at me, and i shan't ask her to look at me. i shall recommend her not to look at me. but i shall marry her or antoinette. i don't see why you are so stuffy about it. or perhaps you would prefer antoinette for a sister-in-law." "if she is to be your wife, dear, i think i should," said esther. seymour laid his hand on hers. his smelt vaguely of wall-flowers. "how disagreeable you are," he said. "i don't think i shall say anything about your dress in _the lady_. i shall simply say that lady esther sturgis was there looking very plain and tired. i shall describe my own dress instead. i had an emerald pin, properly set, instead of its being set like that sort of cheese cake you are wearing. no, it's not exactly a cheese cake: it is as if you had spilt some _crème-de-menthe_ and put a little palisade of broken glass round it to prevent it spreading. what a disgusting dinner we are having, aren't we? i never know what to do before i dine with mama, whether to eat so much lunch that i don't want any dinner, or to eat none at all so that i can manage to swallow this sort of garbage. to-night i am rather hungry: won't you come away early with me and have some supper at home? perhaps nadine will come too." "if nadine will come, i will," said esther. "i suppose we can chaperone each other." "certainly, if it amuses you. shall we ask anybody else? i see hardly anybody here whom i know by sight. i think they must all be earls and countesses. it's funny how few of one's own class are worth speaking to. look at mama! i know i keep telling you to look at mama, but she is so remarkable. she said 'sir' just now to the man next her. he must be a saxon king. i wish she was responsible for the wine instead of father: teetotalers usually give one excellent wine, because they don't imagine they know anything about it, and tell the wine merchants just to send round some champagne and hock. so of course they send the most expensive." "i think we ought to talk to our neighbors," said esther. "mama is making faces." "that is because she has eaten some of this _entrée_, i expect. i make no face because i haven't. but i can't talk to my neighbor. i tried, but she is unspeakable-to. i wish my nose would bleed, because then i should go away." one of the frequent pauses that occurred at lady ayr's dinners was taking place at the moment, and seymour's rather shrill voice was widely audible. a buzz of vacant conversation succeeded, and he continued. "that was heard," he said, "and really i didn't mean it to be heard. i am sorry. i shall make myself agreeable. but tell nadine we shall go away soon after dinner. if you will be ready, i shall not go up into the drawing-room at all." seymour turned brightly to the woman seated on his right. "have you been to 'the follies'?" he asked. "i hope you haven't, because then we can't talk about them, since i haven't either. there are enough follies going about, without going to them." "how amusin' you are," said his neighbor. seymour felt exasperated. "i know i am," he said. "do be amusing too; then we shall be delighted with each other." "but i don't know who you are," said his neighbor. "well, that is the case with me," said he. "but my mother--" his neighbor's face instantly changed from a chilly neutrality to a welcoming warmth. "oh, are you lord seymour?" she asked. "i should find it very uncomfortable to be anybody else," said he. "i should not know what to do." "then _do_ tell me, because of course you know all about these things: are we all going to wear slabs of jade next year? and did you see me at princess waldenech's wedding this morning? and who manicures you? i hear you have got a marvelous person." seymour really wished to atone for the unfortunate remark that had broken the silence and exerted himself. "but of course," he said. "it is antoinette. she cooks for me and calls me: she dusts my rooms, and brushes my boots. she stirs the soup with one hand and manicures me with the other. fancy not knowing antoinette! she is fifty-two: by the time you are fifty-two you ought to be known anywhere. if she marries i shall die: if i marry, she will still live i hope. now do tell me: do you recommend me to marry?" "doesn't it depend upon whom you marry?" "not much, do you think? but perhaps you are married, and so know. are you married? and would you mind telling me who you are, as i have told you?" "you never told me: i guessed. guess who i am." seymour looked at her attentively. she was a woman of about fifty, with a shrewd face, like a handsome monkey, and his millinerish eyes saw that she was dressed without the slightest regard to expense. "i haven't the slightest idea," he said. "but please don't tell me, if you have any private reason for not wishing it to be known. i can readily understand you would not like people to be able to say that you were seen dining with mama. of course you are not english." "why do you think that?" "because you talk it so well. english people always talk it abominably. but--" he looked at her again, and a vague resemblance both in speech and in the shape of her head struck him. "i will guess," he said, "you are a relation of nadine's." "quite right: go on." seymour was suddenly agitated and upset a glass of champagne that had just been filled. he took not the slightest notice of this. "is it too much to hope that you are the aunt who--who had so many snuff-boxes?" he asked. "i mean the one to whom the emperor gave all those lovely snuff-boxes? or is it too good to be true?" "just good enough," she said. "how wildly exciting! will you come back to my flat as soon as we can escape from this purgatory and antoinette shall manicure you. do tell me about the snuff-boxes; i am sure they were beauties, or you would not--i mean the emperor would not have given you them." "of course not. but i am afraid i can't come to your flat to-night, as i am going to a dance. ask me another day. i hear you have got some lovely jade and are going to make it the fashion. then i suppose you will sell it." seymour determined to insure his jade before countess eleanor entered his rooms, for fear of its subsequently appearing that the austrian emperor had followed up his present of snuff-boxes with a present of jade. but he let no suspicion mar the cordiality of his tone. "yes, that's the idea," he said. "you see no younger son can possibly live in the way he has been brought up unless he has done something honest and commercial like that, or cheats at bridge. but that is so difficult i am told. you have to learn bridge first, and then go to a conjurer, during which time you probably forget bridge again. but otherwise you can't live at all unless you marry and the only thing left to do is to take to drink and die." "my brother took to it and lives," said she. "i know, but you are a very remarkable family." a footman had wiped up the greater part of the champagne seymour had spilt and now stood waiting till he could speak to him. "her ladyship told me to tell you that you seemed to have had enough champagne, my lord," he said. seymour paused for a moment, and his face turned white with indignation. "tell her ladyship she is quite right," he said, "and that the first sip i took of it was more than enough." "very good, my lord." "and tell her that the fish was stale," said seymour shrilly. "yes, my lord." "and tell her--" began seymour again. countess eleanor interrupted him. "you have sent enough pleasant messages for one time," she said. "you can talk to your mother afterwards: at present talk to me. did you go to the wedding this morning?" "yes." seymour rather frequently allowed himself to be ruffled, but he always calmed down again quickly. "it is so like mama to send a servant in the middle of dinner to say i am drunk," he said, "but she will be sorry now. look, she is receiving my message, and is turning purple. that is satisfactory. she looks unusually plain when she is purple. yes: i am describing the wedding for a lady's paper. i shall get four guineas for it." "you do not look as if that would do you much good." "if you take four guineas often enough they--they purify the blood," said he, "though certainly the dose is homeopathic. it is called the gold cure. about the wedding. i thought it was very vulgar. and it was frightfully _bourgeois_ in spirit. it is very early victorian to marry a man who has waited for you since about ." "but they will be very happy." "so are the _bourgeoisie_ who change hats. at least i should have to be frightfully happy to think of putting on anybody else's hat. i recommend you not to eat that savory unless you have a bad cold that prevents your tasting anything. shall i send another message to mama about it?" "ah, my dear young man," said countess eleanor, "we are all common when we fall in love. you will find yourself being common too, some day. and the people who are least _bourgeois_ become the most common of all. nadine, for instance: there is no one less _bourgeoise_ than nadine, but if she ever falls in love she will be so common that she will be perfectly sublime. she will be the embodiment of humanity. but she is not in love with that great boy next her, who is so clearly in love with her. dear me, what beautiful sèvres dessert plates. i once collected sèvres as well as snuff-boxes." "did you--did you get together a fine collection?" asked seymour. "pretty well. it is easier to get snuff-boxes. my brother has some that used to be mine.--ah, they are all getting up. let me come to see your jade some other day." * * * * * nadine and esther escaped very soon after dinner from this dreadful party, and went to seymour's flat where he had preceded them and was busy cooking with antoinette in the kitchen when they arrived. he opened the door for them himself with his shirt sleeves rolled up above his elbows, showing an extremely white and delicate skin. round one wrist he wore a gold bangle. "i've left the kitchen door open," he said, "so that the whole flat shall smell as strong as possible of cooking. there is nothing so delicious when you are hungry. we will open the windows afterwards. you and esther must amuse yourselves for ten minutes, and then supper will be ready." "oh, may i come and cook too, seymour?" asked nadine. "certainly not. antoinette is the only woman in the world who knows how to cook. you would make everything messy. go and rock the cradle or rule the world, or whatever you consider to be a woman's sphere, until we are ready." seymour disappeared again into the kitchen from which came rich cracklings and odors of frying, and nadine turned to esther with a sigh. "my dear, i have got remorse and world yearnings to-night," she said. "i attribute it to your mother's awful party. but i daresay we shall all be better soon. you know, if i had asked hugh to let me come and cook, he would have given me a golden spoon to stir with, and eaten till he burst because i cooked it. and i don't care! he was so dear and so utterly impossible this evening. i told him i wasn't going to the dance at the embassy, and he said he should go in case i changed my mind. and if it had been hugh cooking in there, i should have gone and cooked too, even if he hadn't wanted me to. it's no use, esther: i can't marry hugh. there's the end of it. up till to-night i have always wondered if i could. now i know i can't. i think i shan't see so much of him. i shall miss him, don't think i shan't miss him, but i want to be fair to him. as it is now, whenever i am nice to him, which i always am, he thinks it means that i am beginning to love him. whereas it doesn't mean anything whatever. i wish people hadn't got into the habit of marrying each other, but bought their babies at a shop instead. and kissing is so disgusting. the only person i ever like kissing is mama, because her skin is so delicious and smells very faintly of raspberries. hugh smells of cigarettes and soap--" "darling nadine, you haven't been kissing hugh, have you?" asked esther. "yes, i kissed him this evening, when he was putting my cloak on, but there were ninety-five footmen there so it wasn't compromising: we were heavily chaperoned. and i would just as soon have kissed any of the other ninety-five. but he wanted me to, and so i did, and then suddenly i saw how unfair it was for me. it didn't mean anything: i kissed him just as i kiss my dog, because he is such a duck. also because he wanted me to, which tobias never does: he always cleans his face on the rug after i have kissed him, and sneezes." "did he ask you to?" said esther,--"not toby, hugh!" "no, but i can see by a man's face when he wants. i saw one of the footmen wanted, too, and perhaps i ought to have kissed him as well, to show hugh it did not mean anything." nadine sat down and spread her hands wide with a surprisingly dramatic gesture of innocence and despair. "it isn't my fault," she said; "it's me. _c'est moi: son' io!_ i would translate it into all the languages of the world, like the bible, if that would make hugh understand. people can't be different from what they are. it's a grand mistake to suppose otherwise. they can act and talk in accordance with what they are, or they can act and talk otherwise, but they, the personalities, are unchangeable except by miracles. i could act contrary to my own self and marry hugh, but it would be no particle of good. i want him to understand that i can't love him, and i am too fond of him to marry him without. i wish to heaven he would marry somebody else." "he won't do that," said esther. "i am afraid not. i think it is rather selfish. it is putting it all on me. i shall have to marry somebody else, i suppose, and that will be very unselfish of me, because i don't want to marry. of course one has to: i don't want to grow old, but i shall have to grow old. they are both laws of nature, and perhaps neither the one nor the other is so disagreeable really." esther gave her long, appreciative sigh. "it would be too wonderful of you to marry somebody else, in order to make it clear to hugh that you couldn't marry him," she said. "it would be the most illustrious thing to do and it shows that really you are devoted to hugh. but you really think that people don't change, nadine?" "not unless a moral earthquake happens and earthquakes are not to be expected. only an upheaval of that kind makes any difference in the essential things. their tastes change, as their noses and hair change, but the thing that sits behind like some beastly idol in a temple never moves and looks on at all that changes round it with the same wooden eyes. oh, dear, i am so tired of myself, and i can't get out of sight of myself." nadine looked at herself in a louis seize mirror that hung above the fireplace and pointed a contemplative finger at the reflection of her pale loveliness. "i wish i was anything in the world except that thing," she said. "i am genuine when i say that, but having said that there is nothing else about me but what is intolerable. but i am aware that i don't really care about anybody in the world. the only thing that can be said for me is that i detest myself. i wish i was like you, esther, because you care for me: i wish i was like aunt eleanor because she cares for stealing. i wish i was like daddy because he cares for old brandy. you are all better off than i. i envy anybody and everybody who cares for anybody with her heart. no doubt having a heart is often a very great nuisance, and often leads you to make a dreadful fool of yourself, but it gets tedious to be wise and cool all the time like me." seymour entered at this moment carrying a little silver censer with incense in it. "the smell of food is sufficiently strong," he said. "and supper is ready. also the smell of incense reminds one of stepping out of the blazing sunlight into st. mark's at venice. nadine, you look too exquisite, but depressed. has not the effect of mama worn off yet?" "oh, it's not your mother, it's me," said she. "you think about yourself too much," observed seymour. "i know the temptation so well, and generally yield to it. it is a great mistake: one occasionally has doubts whether one is the nicest person in the world and whether it is worth while doing anything, even collecting jade. but such doubts never last long with me." "don't you ever wish you had a heart, seymour?" she asked. "you and i have neither of us got hearts." "i know, and i am so exceedingly comfortable without one, that i should be sorry to get one. if you have a heart, sooner or later you get into a state of drivel about somebody, who probably doesn't drivel about you. that must be so mortifying. even if two people drivel mutually they are deplorable objects, but a solitary driveler is like a lonely cat on the tiles, and is a positive nuisance. poor hugh! nadine, you suit my wall-paper quite exquisitely. also it suits you. don't let any of us go to bed to-night, but see the morning come. the early morning is the color of a wood-pigeon's breast, and looks frightfully tired, as if it had sat up all night too. most people look perfectly hideous at that moment, but i really don't believe you would. do sit up and let me see. "i look the color of an oyster at dawn," said esther, "it is just as if i had gone bad." her brother looked at her thoughtfully. "yes, my dear, i can imagine your looking quite ghastly," he said. "you had better go away before dawn. it might make me seriously unwell." "i shall. i shall go to the dance at the embassy, i think. madame tavita is so hideous that she makes me feel good-looking for a week." "you always behave as if you were pretty, which matters far more than being pretty," said seymour. "it matters very little what people look like, if they only behave as if they were venuses, just as it does not matter how tall you are if you consistently look at a point rather above the head of the person you are talking to." nadine was recovering a little under the influence of food. "that is quite true," she said. "and if you want to look really rich, you must be shabby, or not wash your face. seymour, let us try and write a little book together, 'fifty ways of appearing enviable.' you should eat a great deal in order to make it appear you have a good digestion, although you may be quite sick afterwards, and refuse a great many invitations to show what a wild social success you are, even though you dine all by yourself at home. my dear, what delicious food; did you cook it, or antoinette?" "both. we each threw in what we thought would be good, and stirred it together. i am sorry for people who are not greedy. i am told that when you are old, food and saving money are the only pursuits that don't pall. at present food and spending money are particularly attractive, and a piquancy is added if you haven't got any money. and now we all feel better." * * * * * seymour had a piece of needlework which he often produced when he was staying with friends, in order to irritate them. he seldom worked at it when at home, but to-night he got it out, in order to irritate his sister into going to the ball without delay, for esther was always exasperated to a point almost beyond her control by the sight of her brother with his thimble and needle. so before long she took her departure, leaving nadine to follow (which was seymour's design), and he put the needlework back into its embroidered bag again. "i am afraid my methods are a little obvious," he said, "but poor esther sees nothing but the most obvious hints. you have to say things very loud and clear to her, like the man in 'alice in wonderland.'" "who was that?" asked nadine absently. "and what did you want esther to do?" "to go away, of course. i wanted to talk to you, nadine. i have never known you look so beautiful as to-night. you look troubled too. troubles make people feel plain but look beautiful." nadine shifted her position, so that she faced him. "yes, do talk to me," she said. "see if you can distract me a little from myself. my mind hurts me, seymour. i wish i had a hard bright mind as some people have. their minds are like ... i don't know what they are like: i can't trouble to think to-night. how stupid are all the jinkings and monkey-tricks we go through! i have worn an inane smile all day, and when i tried to read my plato, it merely bored me. nothing seems worth while. and don't be commonplace, and say that it is liver. it is nothing of the sort. would you be surprised if i burst into tears?" "you have been thinking of the old 'un," remarked seymour. "whom do you mean?" "hugh, of course. do you know you are rather like a boy watching the struggle of a butterfly he has impaled? you are sorry for it, but you don't let it go. "he impaled himself," said nadine. "well, you gave him the pin. but as you don't mean to marry him, make that quite clear to him." "but how?" "marry me," said seymour. chapter vi edith arbuthnot had conceived the idea, an unhappy one as regards her family and neighbors, that every one who aspired to the name of musician (it is not too much to assert that she did) should be able to play every instrument in the band. just now she was learning the french horn and double-bass simultaneously. she kept her mind undistracted by the hideous noises she produced, and expected others to do so. thus unless she was practising some instrument that required the exclusive use of the mouth, she would talk (and did so) while she learned. just now she was seated on the terrace wall at winston, which was of a convenient height for playing the double-bass, which rested on the terrace below, and conversing at the top of her voice to dodo who sat a yard or two away. these stentorian tones of course were necessary in order that she should be heard above the vibrating roar of the ill-played strings. she could not at present get much tone out of them; but for volume, it was as if all the bumblebees in the world were swarming in all the threshing-machines in the world, which were threshing everything else in the world. "i used to think you were heartless, dodo," she shouted; "but compared to nadine you are a sickly sentimentalist." when dodo did not feel equal to shouting back, she spoke in dumb show. now she concisely indicated "rot" on her fingers. "it isn't rot," shouted edith; "ah, what a wonderful thing a double-bass is: i shall write a suite for the double-bass unaccompanied--i really mean it. if you seemed to me without a heart, nadine would seem to have an organ which is all that a heart is not, very highly developed. probably she inherited a tendency from you, and has developed and cultivated it. what do you say?" "i said, do stop that appalling noise, darling," screamed dodo. "i shall burst a blood-vessel if i try to talk against it." "very well: i must just play two or three scales," said edith. the hoarse clamor grew more and more vibrant and dodo stopped her ears. eventually the bow, as edith brought it down upon the first note of a new scale, flew from her hands, and describing a parabola in the air fell into a clump of sweet-peas in the flower-bed below the terrace. "i must learn not to do that," she said. "it happened yesterday and i shan't consider myself proficient until i am safe not to hit the conductor in the face. about nadine: she is going to perpetrate the most horrible cruelty, marrying that dreadful young man, while hugh is just dying for her. hugh reminds me of what jack was like, dodo." "oh, do you think so?" said dodo. "except that jack was once twenty-five, which is what hugh is now, i don't see the smallest resemblance. jack was so good-looking, and hugh only looks good, and though hugh is a darling, he is just a little slow and heavy, which jack never was. you will be able to compare them, by the way, because hugh is coming here this afternoon. i asked him not to, but he is coming just the same. i told him nadine and seymour were both here." "perhaps he means to kill seymour," said edith thoughtfully. "it certainly would be the obvious thing to do--" "hughie would always do the obvious thing," said dodo. "i will finish my sentence," said edith. "it certainly would be the obvious thing to do, provided that the public executioner would not hang him, and that nadine would marry him. but things would probably go the other way about, which would not be so satisfactory for hugh. really the young generation is very bloodless: it talks more than we did, but it does absolutely nothing." "we used to talk a good deal," remarked dodo, "and we are not silent yet. at least you and i are not. edith, has it ever struck you that you and i are middle-aged? or is middle-age, do you think, not a matter of years, but of inclination? i think it must be, for it is simply foolish to say that i am forty-five, though it would be simply untrue to say that i was anything else. that is by the way; we will talk of ourselves soon. where had i got to? oh, yes, hugh is coming down this afternoon though i implored him not to. nadine says i was wrong. she wants me to be very nice to him, as she has been so horrid. they have not seen each other for a whole week, ever since her engagement was announced. i am sure nadine misses him; she will be miserable if hugh deserts her." edith plucked impatiently at the strings of the double-bass, and aroused the bumblebees again. "that's what i mean by bloodless," she said. "they are all suffering from anemia together. their blood has turned to a not very high quality of gray matter in the brain. nadine wants you to be kind to hugh, because she has been so horrid! dodo, don't you see how fishlike that is? and he, since he can't marry her, takes the post of _valet-de-chambre_, and looks on while seymour gives her little butterfly kisses and small fragments of jade. i saw him kiss her yesterday, dodo. it made me feel quite faint and weak, and i had to hurry into the dining-room and take half a glass of port. it was the most debilitated thing i ever saw. berts is nearly as bad, and though he is nine feet high and plays cricket for his county, he is somehow ladylike. i can't think where he got it from: certainly not from me. and as for hugh, i suppose he calls it faithfulness to hang about after nadine, but i call it anemia. i am surprised at hugh; i should have thought he was sufficiently stupid to have more blood in him. he ought to box nadine's ears, kick seymour and instantly marry somebody else, and have dozens of great red-faced, white-toothed children. bah!" dodo had subsided into hopeless giggles over this remarkable tirade against the anemic generation and edith plucked at her double-bass again as she concluded with this exclamation of scorn. "and i can't think how you allow nadine to marry that--that jade," said edith. dodo became momentarily serious. "if you were nadine's mother," she said, "you would be delighted at her marrying anybody. she is the sort of girl who doesn't want to marry, and afterwards wishes she had. i am not like that: i was continually marrying somebody and then wishing i hadn't. but nadine doesn't make mistakes. she may do things that appear very odd, but they are not mistakes, she has thought it out very carefully first. you see, quite a quantity of eligible youths and several remarkably ineligible ones have wanted to marry her, and she has never felt any--dear me, what is it a man with a small income always feels when a post with a large income is offered him--oh, yes, a call: nadine has never felt any call to marry any of them. there are many girls like that in whom the physical makes very little appeal. but what does appeal to nadine very strongly is the mental, and seymour however many times you call him a jade, is as clever as he can be. in him, also, i should say, the physical side is extremely undeveloped, and so i think that he and nadine may be very happy. now hugh is not clever at all; he has practically no intellect and that to nadine is an insuperable defect. now don't call her prig or blue stocking. she is neither the one nor the other. but she has a mind. so have you. so for that matter have i, and it has led me to do weird things." edith thrummed her double-bass again. "dodo, i can't tell you how i disapprove of you," she said, "and how i love you. you are almost entirely selfish, and yet you have charm. most utterly selfish people lose their charm when they are about thirty. i made sure you would. but i was quite wrong. now i am utterly unselfish: i live entirely for my husband and my art. i live for him by seldom going near him, since he is much happier alone. but then i never had any charm at all. now you have always lived, and do still, completely for your own pleasure--" dodo clapped her hands violently in edith's face for it required drastic measures to succeed in interrupting her. "ah, that is an astonishingly foolish thing for you to say," she said. "if i lived for my pleasure, do you know what i should do? i should have a hot bath, go to bed and have dinner there. i should then go to sleep and when i woke up i should go for a ride, have another hot bath and another dinner and go to sleep again. there is nothing so pleasant as riding and hot baths and food and sleep. but i never have sought my pleasure. what i always have sought is my happiness. and that on the whole is our highest duty. don't swear. there is nothing selfish about it, if you are made like i am. because the thing that above all others makes me happy is to contrive that other people should have their own way. that is why i never dream of interfering in what other people want. if they really want it, i do all i can to get it for them. i was not ever thus, as the hymn says, but i am so now. the longer i live the more clearly i see that it is impossible to understand why other people want what they want, but it seems to me that all that concerns me is that they do want. i can see how they want, but never why. i can't think, darling, for instance, why you want to make those excruciating noises, but i see how. here's jack. jack, come and tell us about utopia." edith had laid her double-bass down on the ground of the terrace. "yes, but i want to sit down," he said. "may i sit on it, edith?" edith screamed. he took this as a sign that he might not, and sat on the terrace wall. "utopia?" he asked. "you've got to be a man to begin with and then you have to marry dodo. it does the rest." "what is it?" "that which does it, your consciousness. dodo, it would send up rents in utopia if seymour went to a nice girls' school. he is rather silly, and wants the nonsense knocked out of him." "but there you make a mistake," said she. "almost every one who is nice is nice because the nonsense has not been knocked out of him. people without heaps of nonsense are merely prigs. indeed that is the best definition of a prig, one who has lost his capability for nonsense. look at edith! she doesn't know she's nonsensical, but she is. and she thinks she is serious all the time with her great boots and her great double-bass and her french horns. oh me, oh me! the reasonable people in the world are the ruin of it; they spoil the sunshine. look at the abominable liberal party with terrible, reasonable schemes for scullery-maids. they are all quite excellent, and it is for that reason they are so hopeless. "it is moreover a great liberty to take with people to go about ameliorating them. i should be furious if anybody wanted to ameliorate me. darling, bishop algie the other day said he always prayed for my highest good. i begged him not to, because if his prayers were answered, providence might think i should be better for a touch of typhoid. you can't tell what strange roundabout ways providence may have. so he promised to stop praying for me, because he is so understanding and knew what i meant. but when lloyd george wants to give scullery-maids a happy old age with a canary in the window it is even worse. it is so sensible: i can see them sitting dismally in the room listening to their canary, when they would be much more comfortable in a nice work-house, with edith and me bringing them packets of tea and flannel. don't let us talk politics: there is nothing that saps the intellect so much." "edith and i have not talked much yet," observed jack. "no, you are listening to utopia, which as i said, consists largely of nonsense. if you are to be happy, you must play, you must be ridiculous, you must want everybody else to be ridiculous. but everybody must take his own absurdities quite seriously." dodo sat up, pulled jack's cigarette case from his pocket and helped herself. "the greeks and romans were so right," she said, "they had a slave class, though with them it was an involuntary slave class. we ought to have a voluntary slave class, consisting of all the people who like working for a cause. there are heaps of politicians who naturally belong to it, and clergymen and lawyers and nationalists, all the people in fact who die when they retire, and are disappointed when they have not got offices and churches to go to. you can recognize a slave the moment you see him. he always, socially, wants to open the door or shut the window, or pick up your gloves. the moment you see that look in a man's eye, that sort of itch to be useful, you should be able to give secret information and make him a slave at £ a year, instead of making him a cabinet minister or a bishop or a director of a company. he wants work: let him have it. edith, darling, you would be a slave instantly, and the state would provide you with double-basses and cornets. i haven't thought it all completely out, since it only occurred to me this minute, but it seems to me an almost painfully sound scheme now that i mention it. think of the financiers you would get! there would be poor mr. carnegie and rockefeller and--and the whole of the rothschild house, and barings and speyers all quite happy, because they are happy when they work. and all the millions they make--how they make it, i don't know, unless they buy gold cheap and sell it dear, which i believe is really what they do--all the money they make would be at the disposal of those who know how to spend it. i suppose i am a socialist." edith put her forehead in her hands. "i don't know what you are talking about," she said. "i have my doubts myself," said dodo ingenuously. "it began about nadine's marriage and then drifted. you get to all sorts of strange places if you drift, both morally and physically. it really seems very unfair, that if you don't ever resist anything, you go to the bad. it looks as if evil was stronger than good, but algie shall explain it to me. he can explain almost anything, including wasps. jack, dear, do make me stop talking; you and the sunshine and edith have gone to my head, and given me the babbles." "i insist on your going on talking," said edith. "i want to know how you can let nadine marry without love." "because a great many of our unfortunate sex, dear, never fall in love, as i mean it, at all. but i would not have them not marry. they often make excellent wives and mothers. and i think nadine is one of those. she is as nearly in love with hugh as she has ever been with anybody, but she quite certainly will not marry him. here she is; i daresay she will explain it all herself. my darling, come and talk matrimony shop to edith, jack and i are going for a short ride before lunch. will you be in when hugh comes?" nadine sat down in the chair from which dodo had risen. she was dressed in a very simple linen dress of cornflower blue, that made the whites and pinks of her face look absolutely dazzling. "yes, i will wait for him," she said. "seymour thought it would be kinder if he went to meet him at the station, so that hughie could get rid of some of the hate on the way up. he has perception--_des aperçus très-fins_. and i will explain anything to anybody in the interval. i want to be married, and so does seymour, and we think it will answer admirably if we marry each other. there is very little else to say. we are not foolish about each other--" "i find you are extremely modern," interrupted edith. "you speak as if you did not like that," said nadine; "but surely somebody has got to be modern if we are going to get on at all. otherwise the world remains stock-still, or goes back. i do not think it would be amusing to be victorian again; indeed there would be no use in us trying. we should be such obvious forgeries, seymour particularly. i consider it lucky that he was not born earlier; if he had grown up as he is in victorian days, they would certainly have done away with him somehow. or his mother would have exposed him in battersea park like oedipus." edith leaned over the terrace wall, and took the double-bass bow out of the tall clump of sweet peas. "there are exactly two things in the world worth doing," she said, "to love and to work. certainly you don't work, nadine, and i don't believe you love." nadine looked at her a moment in silent hostility. "that is a very comfortable reflection," she observed, "for you who like working better than anything else in the world except perhaps golf. i wonder you did not say there were three things in the world worth doing, making that damned game the third." edith had spoken with her usual cock-sure breezy enthusiasm, and looked up surprised at a certain venom and bitterness that underlay the girl's reply. "my dear nadine!" she said. "what is the matter?" nadine glared at her a moment, and then broke into rapid speech. "do you think i would not give the world to be able to love?" she said. "do you think i send hugh marching through hell for fun? you say i am heartless, as if it was my fault! would you go to a blind man in the street and say, 'you beast, you brute, why don't you see?' is he blind for fun? am i like this for fun?" she got up from her seat and came and stood in front of edith, flushed with an unusual color, and continued more rapidly yet, emphasizing her points by admirable gesticulations of her hands. indeed they seemed to have speech on their own account: they were extraordinarily eloquent. "do you know you make me lose my temper?" she said. "that is a rare thing with me; i seldom lose it; but when i do it is quite gone, and i don't care what i say, so long as it is what i mean. for the minute my temper is absolutely vanished, and i shall make the most of its absence. who are you to judge and condemn me? and give me rules for conduct, how work and love are the only things worth doing? what do you know about me? either you are absolutely ignorant about me, or so stupid that the very cabbages seem clever by you. and you go telling me what to do! and what do you know about love? to look at you, as little as you know about me. yes; no wonder you sit there with your mouth open staring at me, you and your foolish, great fat-bellied bloated violin. you are not accustomed to be spoken to like this. it never occurred to you that i would give the world to be able to love as jill and polly and mary and minnie love. i do not go about saying that any more than a cripple calls attention to his defect: he tries to be brave and conceal it. but that is me, a dwarf, a hunchback, a _crétin_ of the soul. that is the matter with me, and you are so foolish that it never occurred to you that i wanted to be like other people. you thought it was a pose of which i was proud, i think. there! now do not do that again." nadine paused, and then sighed. "i feel better," she said, "but quite red in the face. however, i have got my temper back again. if you like i will apologize for losing it." edith jumped up and kissed nadine. when she intended to kiss anybody she did it, whether the victim liked it or not. "my dear, you are quite delightful," she said. "i thoroughly deserve every word. i was utterly ignorant of you. but i am not stupid: if you will go on, you will find i shall understand." suddenly nadine felt utterly lonely. all she had said of herself in her sudden exasperation was perfectly genuine, and now when her equanimity returned, she felt as if she must tell somebody about this isolation, which for the moment, in any case, was sincerely and deeply hers. that she was a girl of a hundred moods was quite true, but it was equally true that each mood was authentically inspired from within. many of them, no doubt, were far from edifying, but none could be found guilty of the threadbare tawdriness of pose. she nodded at edith. "it is as i say," she said. "i hate myself, but here i am, and here soon will hugh be. it is a disease, this heartlessness: i suffer from it. it is rather common too, but commoner among girls than boys." then queerly and unexpectedly, but still honestly, her intellectual interest in herself, that cold egoism that was characteristic of another side of her, awoke. "yet it is interesting," she said, "because it is out of this sort of derangement that types and species come. for a million years the fish we call the sole had a headache because one of its eyes was slowly traveling through its head. for a million years man was uncomfortable where the tail once came, because it was drying up. for a million years there will be girls like me, poor wretches, and at the end there will be another type of woman, a third sex, perhaps, who from not caring about these things which nature evidently meant them to care about have become different. and all the boys like seymour will be approximating to the same type from the other side, so that eventually we shall be like the angels--" "my dear, why angels?" asked edith. "neither marrying nor giving in marriage. la, la! and i was saying only the other day to him that i wished to marry half-a-dozen men! what a good thing that one does not feel the same every day. it would be atrociously dull. but in the interval, it is lonely now and then for those of us who are not exactly and precisely of the normal type of girl. but if you have no heart, you have to follow your intelligence, to go where your intelligence leads you, and then wave a flag. perhaps nobody sees it, or only the wrong sort of person, who says, 'what is that idiot-girl waving that rag for?' but she only waves it because she is lost, and hopes that somebody will see it." nadine laughed with her habitual gurgle. "we are all lost," she said. "but we want to be found. it is only the stupidest who do not know they are lost. well, i have--what is hugh's word? ah, yes,--i have gassed enough for one morning. ah, and there is the motor coming back from the station. i am glad that hugh has not thrown seymour out, and driven forwards and backwards over him." the motor at this moment was passing not more than a couple of hundred yards off through the park which lay at the foot of the steep garden terraces below them. from there the road wound round in a long loop towards the house. "i shall go to meet hugh at once, and get it over," said nadine; and thereupon she whistled so shrilly and surprisingly on her fingers, that hugh, who was driving, looked up and saw her over the terrace. she made staccato wavings to him, and he got out. "you whistled the octave of b. in alt," remarked edith appreciatively. "and my courage is somewhere about the octave of b. in profundis," said nadine. "i dread what hugh may say to me." "i will go and talk to him," said edith. "i understand you now, nadine. i will tell him." nadine smiled very faintly. "that is sweet of you," she said, "but i am afraid it wouldn't be quite the same thing." * * * * * nadine walked down the steep flight of steps in the middle of the terrace, and out through the venetian gate into the park. hugh had just arrived at it from the other side, and they met there. no word of greeting passed between them; they but stood looking at each other. he saw the girl he loved, neither more nor less than that, and did not know if she looked well or ill, or if her gown was blue or pink or rainbowed. to him it was nadine who stood there. but she saw details, not being blinded: he was big and square, he looked a picture of health, brown-eyed, clear of skin, large-mouthed, with a habit of smiling written strongly there. he had taken off his hat, as was usual with him, and as usual his hair looked a little disordered, as if he had been out on a windy morning. there was that slight thrusting outwards of his chin which suggested that he would meet argument with obstinacy, but that kind and level look from his eyes that suggested an honesty and kindliness hardly met with outside the charming group of living beings known as dogs. he was like a big, kind dog, polite to strangers, kind to friends, hopelessly devoted to the owner of his soul. but to-day his mouth did not indulge its habit: he was quite grave. "why did you kiss me the other night?" he said. nadine had already repented of that rash act. being conscious of her own repentance, it seemed to her rather nagging of him to allude to it. "i meant nothing," she said. "hughie, are we going to stand like posts here? shan't we stroll--" "i don't see why: let us stand like posts. you did kiss me. or do you kiss everybody?" nadine considered this for a moment. "no, i don't kiss everybody," she said. "i never kissed a man before. it was stupid of me. the moment after i had done it i wanted to kiss _anybody_ to show you it didn't mean anything. you are like the inquisition. my next answer is that i have kissed seymour since. i--i don't particularly like kissing him. but it is usual." "and you are going to marry him?" nadine's courage which she had confessed was a b. in profundis, sank into profundissima. "yes, i am going to marry him," she said. "why? you don't love him. and he doesn't love you." "i don't love anybody," said nadine quickly. "i have said that so often that i am tired of saying it. girls often marry without being in love. it just happens. what do you want? would you like me to go on spinstering just because i won't marry you? that i will not do. you know why. you love me. i can't marry you unless i love you. ah, _mon dieu_, it sounds like ollendorf. but i should be cheating you if i married you, and i will not cheat you. you would expect from me what you bring to me, and it would be right that i should bring it you, and i cannot. if you didn't love me like that, i would marry you to-morrow, and the trousseau might go and hang itself. mama would give me some blouses and stockings, and you would buy me a tooth-brush. yes, this is very flippant, but when serious people are goaded they become flippant. oh, hughie, i wish i was different. but i am not different. and what is it you came down here about? is it to ask me again to marry you, and to ask me not to marry my dear little seymour?" "little?" he asked. "it was a term of endearment. besides, it is not his fault that he does not weigh fourteen stones--" "stone," said he with the tremor of a smile. "no, stones," said nadine. "i choose that it should be stones: fourteen great square lumps. hughie, don't catch my words up and correct me. i am serious and all you can answer is 'stone' instead of 'stones.'" "i did it without thinking," he said. "i only fell back into the sort of speech there used to be between us. it was like that, serious one moment and silly the next. i spoke without thinking, as we used to speak. i won't do it again." "and why not?" demanded nadine. "because now that you tell me you really are going to marry seymour, everything is changed between us. this is what i came to tell you. i am not going to hang about, a mixture between a valet and an _ami de la maison_. you have chosen now. when you refused me before, there was always in my mind the hope that some day you would give me a different answer. i waited long and patiently and willingly for that chance. now the chance no longer exists. you have scratched me--" nadine drew her eyebrows together. "scratched you?" she said. "oh, i see, a race: not nails." "and i am definitely and finally out of it." "you mean you are no longer among my friends?" asked nadine. "i shall not be with you so much or so intimately. we must talk over it just this once. we will stroll if you like. it is too hot for you standing in the sun without a hat." "no, we will settle it here and now," said she quickly. "you don't understand. my marriage with seymour will make no difference in the quality of affection i have always had for you. why should i give up my best friend? why should you?" "because you are much more than my best friend, and i am obliged to give up, at last, that idea of you. you have forced me to see that it is not to be realized. and i won't sit about your house, to have people pointing at me, and saying to each other, 'that's the one who is so frightfully in love with her.' it may sound priggish, but i don't choose to be quite so unmanly as that. nor would you much respect me if i did so choose." "but i never did respect you," said nadine quickly. "i never thought of you as respectable or otherwise. it doesn't come in. you may steal and cheat at cards, and i shall not care. i like whom i like: i like you tremendously. what do you mean you are going to do? go to burmah or bengal? i don't want to lose you, hughie. it is unkind of you. besides, we shall not marry for a long time yet, and even then-- ah, it is the old tale, the old horror called me all over again--i don't love anybody. many are delightful and i am so fond of them. but the other, the absorption, the gorgeous foolishness of it all, it is away outside of me, a fairy-tale and i am grown up now and say, 'for me it is not true.'" hugh came a step nearer her. "you poor devil," he said gently. tears, as yet unshed, gathered in nadine's eyes. they were fairly creditable tears: they were not at any rate like the weepings of the great prig-prince and compounded merely of "languor and self-pity," but sorrow for hugh was one ingredient in them. yet in the main they were for herself, since the only solvent for egoism is love. "yes, i am that," she said. "i'm a poor devil. i'm lost, as i said to that foolish arbuthnot woman with her feet and great violin. hark, she is playing it again: she is a big 'c major'! she has been scolding me, though if it comes to that i gave it her back with far more _gamin_ in my tongue. and now you say you will not be friends any longer, and mama does not like my marrying seymour, though she does not argue, and there is no one left but myself, and i hate myself. oh, i am lost, and i wave my flags and there is no one who sees or understands. i shall go back to daddy, i think, and he and i will drink ourselves drunk, and i shall have the red nose. but you are the worst of them all, hugh! it is a very strange sort of love you have for me, if all it can do is to desert me. and yet the other day i felt as you feel; i felt it would only be fair to you to see you less. i am a damned weathercock. i go this way and that, but the wind is always cold. i am sorry for you, i want you to be happy, i would make you happy myself, if i could." nadine's eyes had quite overflowed, and as she poured out this remarkable series of lamentations, she dabbed at her moistened cheeks. yet hugh, though he was so largely to blame, as it seemed, for this emotion, and though all the most natural instincts in him longed to yield, knew that deep in him his determination was absolutely unsoftened. it, and his love for nadine were of the quality of nether mill-stones. but all the rest of him longed to comfort her. "oh, nadine, don't cry," he said. "i'm not worth crying about, to begin with." "it is not you alone i cry about," said nadine with justice. "i cry a little for you, every third drop is for you. the rest is quite for myself." "it is never worth while to cry for oneself," he said. "who wants it to be worth while? i feel like crying, therefore i cry. hardly anything i do is worth while, yet i go on doing, and i get tired of it before it is done. already i am tired of crying, and besides it gives me the red nose without going to daddy. not you and i together are worth making myself ugly for. but you are so disagreeable, hughie: first i wanted to stroll, and you said 'no,' and then when i didn't want to stroll you said 'yes,' and you aren't going to be friends with me, and i feel exactly as i used to feel when i was six years old, and it rained. come, let us sit down a little, and you shall tell me what you mean to do, and how it will be between us. i will be very good: i will bless any plan you make, like a bishop. it shall all be as you will. i owe you so much and there is no way by which i can ever repay you. i don't want to be a curse to you, hughie; i don't indeed." she sat down, leaning against a great beech trunk, and he lay on the coarse meadow-grass beside her. "i know you don't," he said. he looked at her steadily, as she finished mopping her cheeks. her little burst of tears had not made her nose at all red; it had but given a softness to her eyes. never before had he so strongly felt her wayward, irresistible charm, which it was so impossible to analyse or explain. indeed, if it came to analysis there were strange ingredients there; there was egoism as complete, and yet as disarming, as that of a persian kitten; there was the unreasonableness of a spoilt child; there was the inconsiderateness and unreliability of an april day, which alternates its gleams of the saffron sun of spring with cold rain and plumping showers. yet he felt that there was something utterly adorable, wholly womanly that lay sheathed in these more superficial imperfections, something that stirred within them conscious of the coming summer, just as the life embalmed within the chrysalis stirs, giving token of the time when the husk shall burst, and that which was but a gray crawling thing shall be wafted on wings of silver emblazoned with scarlet and gold. then there was her beauty too, which drew his eyes after the wonder of its perfection, and was worthy of the soul that he divined in her. and finally (and this perhaps to him was the supreme magnet) there was the amazing and superb quality of her vitality, that sparkled and effervesced in all she did and said, so that for him her speech was like song or light, and to be with her was to be bathed in the effulgence of her spirit. and hugh, looking at her now, felt, as always, that his self slipped from him, so that he was conscious of her only; she possessed him, and he lay like the sea with the dazzle of sunlight on it that both reflects the radiance and absorbs it. then he sat up: and half turned from her, for there were things to be said yet that he could scarcely say while he looked at her. "i know you don't mean to be a curse to me," he said, "and you couldn't be if you tried. whatever you did, and you are going to do a pretty bad thing now in marrying that chap, must be almost insignificant compared to the love which you have made exist in me." he paused a moment. "i have thought it all out," he said, "but it is difficult, and you must give me time. i'm not quick like you as you know very well, but sometimes i get there. it is like this." she was watching him and listening to him, with a curious intentness and nervousness, as a prisoner about to receive sentence may watch the judge. her hands clasped and unclasped themselves, her breath came short and irregular. it seemed as if she, for once, had failed to understand him whom she had said she knew too fatally well. just now, at any rate, and on this topic, it was clear she did not know what he was going to propose. yet it was scarcely a proposal she waited for; she waited for his word, his ultimatum. till now she had dominated him completely with her quick wit, her far more subtle intelligence, her beauty, her vitality. but for once now, he was her master: she felt she had to bow to his simplicity and his uncomplicated strength, his brute virility. it was but faintly that she recognized it; the recognition came to her consciousness but as an echo. but the voice that made the echo came from within. "i have received my dismissal from you," he said, "as head of your house, as your possible husband. as i said, i won't take the place of the tame cat instead. god knows i don't want to cut adrift from you, and i can't cut adrift from you. but my aspiration is rendered impossible, and therefore both my mental attitude to you and my conduct must be altered. i daresay berts and tommy and esther and all the rest of them will go lying about on your bed, and smoking in your bedroom just as before. well, i can't be intimate in that sort of way any longer. you said you never reckoned whether you respected me or not, and that may be so. but without wanting to be heavy about it, i have got to respect myself. i can't help being your lover, but i can help tickling my love, so to speak, making it squirm and wriggle. whether i am respectable or not, it is, and i shan't--as i said--i shan't tickle it. also though i would be hurt in any other way for your sake, i won't be hurt like that. don't misunderstand me. it is because my love for you is not one atom abated, that i won't play tricks with it. but when it says to me, 'i can't bear it,' i shall not ask to bear it. you always found me too easy to understand: i think this is another instance of it." he paused a moment and nadine gave a little sobbing sigh. "oh, hughie," she began. "no, don't interrupt," he said. "i want to go through with it, without discussion. there is no discussion possible. i wouldn't argue with god about it. i should say: 'you made me an ordinary human man, and you've got to take the consequences. in the same way, you have chosen seymour, and i am telling you what is the effect. now--you are tired of hearing it--i love you. and therefore i want your happiness without reservation. you have decided it will conduce to your happiness to marry seymour. therefore, nadine--this is quite simple and true--i want you to do so. i may rage and storm on the surface, but essentially i don't. somewhere behind all i may say and do, there is, as you once said to me, the essential me. well, that says to you, 'god bless you.' that's all." he unclasped his hands from round his knees, and stood up. "i'm going away now," he said. "i thought when i came down it might take a long time to tell you this. but it has taken ten minutes only. i thought perhaps you would have a lot to say about it, and i daresay you have, but i find that it doesn't concern me. don't think me brutal, any more than i think you brutal. i am made like this, and you are made otherwise. by all means, let us see each other, often i hope, but not just yet. i've got to adjust myself, you see, and you haven't. you never loved me, and so what you have done makes no difference in your feelings towards me. but i've got to get used to it." she looked up at him, as he stood there in front of her with the green lights through the beech-leaves playing on him. "you make me utterly miserable, hugh," she said. "no, i don't. there is no such thing as misery without love. you don't care for me in the way that you could--could give you the privilege of being miserable." for one half-second she did not follow him. but immediately the quickness of her mind grasped what came so easily and simply to him. "ah, i see," she said, her intelligence leading her away from him by the lure of the pleasure of perception. "when you are like that, it is even a joy to be miserable. is that so?" "yes, i suppose that is it. your misery is a--a wireless message from your love. bad news, perhaps, but still a communication." she got up. "ah, my dear," she said, "that must be so. i never thought of it. but i can infer that you are right. somehow you are quickened, hughie. you are giving me a series of little shocks. you were never quite like that before." "i was always exactly like that," he said. "i have told you nothing that i have not always known." again her brilliant egoism asserted itself. "then it is i who am quickened," she said. "there is nothing that quickens me so much as being hurt. it makes all your nerves awake and active. yes; you have hurt me, and you are not sorry. i do not mind being hurt, if it makes me more alive. ah, the only point of life is to be alive. if life was a crown of thorns, how closely i would press it round my head, so that the points wounded and wounded me. it is so shallow just to desire to be happy. i do not care whether i am happy or not, so long as i feel. give me all the cancers and consumptions and decayed teeth, and gout and indigestion and necrosis of the spine and liver if there is such a thing, so that i may feel. i _don't_ feel: it is that which ails me. i have a sane body and a sane mind, and i am tired of sanity. kick me, hughie, strike me, spit at me, make me angry and disgusted, anything, oh, anything! i want to feel, and i want to feel about you most particularly, and i can't, and there is edith playing on her damned double-bass again. i hear it, i am conscious of it, and it is only the things that don't matter which i am conscious of. i am conscious of your brown eyes, my dear, and your big mouth and your trousers and boots, and the cow that is wagging its tail and looking at us as if it was going to be sick. its dinner, i remember, goes into its stomach, and then comes up again, and then it becomes milk or a calf or something. it has nine stomachs, or is it a cat that has nine lives, or nine tails? i am sure about nine. oh, hughie, i see the outside aspect of things, and i can't get below. i am a flat stone that you send to make--chickens is it?--no, ducks and drakes over a pond: flop, flop, the foolish thing. and somehow you with your stupidity and your simplicity, you go down below, and drown, and stick in the mud, and are so uncomfortable and miserable. and i am sorry for you: i hate you to be uncomfortable and miserable, and oh, i envy you. you suffer and are kind, and don't envy, and are not puffed up, and i envy your misery, and am puffed up because i am so desirable, and i don't really suffer--you are quite right--and i am not kind. hugh, i can't bear that cow, drive it away, it will eat me and make milk of me. and there, look, are mama and papa jack, coming back from their ride. papa jack loves her; his face is like a face in a spoon when he looks at her, and i know she is learning to love him. she no longer thinks when she is talking to him, as to whether he will be pleased. that is a sure sign. she is beginning to be herself, at her age too! she doesn't think about thinking about him any more: it comes naturally. and i am not myself: i am something else: rather, i am nothing else: i am nothing at all, just some intelligence, and some flesh and blood and bones. i am not a real person. it is that which is the matter. i long to be a real person, and i can't. i crawl sideways over other things like a crab: i wave my pincers and pinch. i am lost: i am nothing! and yet i know--how horribly i know it--there is something behind, more than the beastly idol with the wooden eye, which is all i know of my real self. if only i could find it! if only i could crack myself up like a nut and get to a kernel. for god's sake, hughie, take the nut-crackers, and crack me. it is idle to ask you to do it. you have tried often enough. you will have to get a stronger nut-cracker. meantime i am a nut, just a nut, with its hard bright shell. seymour is another nut. there we shall be." hugh caught her by the wrists. "i can't stand it, nadine," he said. "you feel nothing for him. he is nothing to you. how can you marry him? it's profane: it's blasphemous. you say you can give nothing to anybody. well, make the best of yourself. i can give all i am to you. isn't that better than absolute _nil_? you can't give, but let me give. it's worship, it's all there is--" she stood there with her wrists in his hands, his strong fingers bruising and crushing them. she could have screamed for the pain of it. "no, and a thousand times no," she said. "i won't cheat." "i ask you to cheat." "and i won't. hughie dear, press harder, hurt me more, so that you may see i am serious. you may bite the flesh off me, you may strangle me, and i will stand quite still and let you do it. but i won't marry you. i won't cheat you. my will is stronger than your body, and i would die sooner." "then your marriage is a pure farce," said he. "come and laugh at it," she said. chapter vii hugh's intention had been to stay several days, at the least, with the chesterfords, and he had brought down luggage that would last any reasonable person a fortnight. unluckily he had not foreseen the very natural effect that the sight of seymour would have on him, and as soon as lunch was over he took his hostess into a corner and presented the situation with his usual simplicity. "it is like this, aunt dodo," he said. "i didn't realize exactly what it meant to me till i saw seymour again. he drove me up from the station, and it got worse all the time. i thought perhaps since nadine had chosen him, i might see him differently. i think perhaps i do, but it is worse. it is quite hopeless: the best thing i can do is to go away again at once." dodo had lit two cigarettes by mistake, and since, during their ride jack had (wantonly, so she thought) accused her of wastefulness, she was smoking them both, holding one in each hand, in alternate whiffs. but she threw one of them away at this, and laid her hand on hugh's knee. "i know, my dear, and i am so dreadfully sorry," she said. "i was sure it would be so, and that's why i didn't want you to come here. i knew it was no good. i can see you feel really unwell whenever you catch sight of seymour or hear anything he says. and about nadine? did you have a nice talk with her?" hugh considered. "i don't think i should quite call it nice," he said. "i think i should call it necessary. anyhow, we have had it and--and i quite understand her now. as that is so, i shall go away again this afternoon. it was a mistake to come at all." "yes, but probably it was a necessary mistake. in certain situations mistakes are necessary: i mean whatever one does seems to be wrong. if you had stopped away, you would have felt it wrong too." "and will you answer two questions, aunt dodo?" he asked. "yes, i will certainly answer them. if they are very awkward ones i may not answer them quite truthfully." "well, i'll try. do you approve of nadine's marriage? has it your blessing?" "yes, my dear: truthfully, it has. but it is right to tell you that i give my blessings rather easily, and when it is clearly no use attempting to interfere in a matter, it is better to bless it than curse it. but if you ask me whether i would have chosen seymour as nadine's husband, out of all the possible ones, why, i would not. i thought at one time that perhaps it was going to be jack. but then jack chose me, and, as we all know, a girl may not marry her stepfather, particularly if her mother is alive and well. but i should not have chosen you either, hughie, if your question implies that. i used to think i would, but when nadine explained to me the other day, i rather agreed with her. of course she has explained to you." hugh looked at her with his honest, trustworthy, brown eyes. "several times," he said. "but if i agreed, i shouldn't be worrying. now another question: do you think she will be happy?" "yes, up to her present capacity. if i did not think she would be happy, i would not bless it. dear edith, for example, thinks it is a shocking and terrible marriage. for her i daresay it would be, but then it isn't she whom seymour proposed to marry. they would be a most remarkable couple, would they not? i think edith would kill him, with the intention of committing suicide after, and then determine that there had been enough killing for one day. and the next day suicide would appear quite out of the question. so she would write a funeral march." dodo held the admirable sensible view that if discussion on a particular topic is hopeless, it is much better to abandon it, and talk as cheerfully as may be about something different. but this entertaining diversion altogether failed to divert hugh. "you said she would be happy up to her present capacity?" he reminded her. "yes: that is simple, is it not? we develop our capacity for happiness; and misery, also, develops as well. whether nadine's capacity will develop much, i cannot tell. if it does, she may not be happy up to it. but who knows? we cannot spend our lives in arranging for contingencies that may never take place, and changes in ourselves that may never occur." dodo looked in silence for a moment at his grave reliable face, and felt a sudden wonder at nadine for having chosen as she had done. and yet her reason for rejecting this extremely satisfactory youth was sound enough, their intellectual levels were such miles apart. but dodo, though she did not express her further thought, had it very distinct in her mind. "if she does develop emotionally like a woman," she said to herself, "there will not be a superfluity of happiness about. and she will look at you and wonder how she could have refused you." but necessarily she did not say this, and hugh got up. "well, then, at the risk of appearing a worse prig than john sturgis," he said, "i may tell you that as long as nadine is happy, the main object is accomplished. my own happiness consists so largely in the fact of hers. dear me, i wonder you are not sick at my sententiousness. i am quite too noble to live, but i don't really want to die. would it make nadine happier if i told seymour i should be a brother to him?" dodo laughed. "no, hughie; it would make her afraid that your brain had gone, or that you were going to be ill. it would only make her anxious. is the motor around? i am sorry you are going, but i think you are quite right to do so. always propose yourself, whenever you feel like it." "i don't feel like it at present," said he. "but thanks awfully, aunt dodo." dodo felt extremely warmly towards this young man, who was behaving so very well and simply. "god bless you, dear hugh," she said, "and give you your heart's desire." "at present my heart's desire appears to be making other plans for itself," said hugh. * * * * * esther had said once in a more than usually enlightened moment, that nadine's friends did her feeling for her, and she observed them, and put what they felt into vivacious and convincing language and applied it to herself. certainly hugh, when he drove away again this afternoon, was keenly conscious of what nadine had talked about to edith: he felt lost, and the flag he had industriously waved so long for her seemed to be entirely disregarded. he hardly knew what he had hoped would have come of this ill-conceived visit, which had just ended so abruptly, but a vague sense of nadine's engagement being too nightmare-like to be true had prompted him to go in person and find out. also, it had seemed to him that when he was face to face with nadine, asking her at point-blank range, whether she was going to marry seymour, it was impossible that she should say "yes." something different must assuredly happen: either she would say it was a mistake, or something inside him must snap. but there was no mistake about it, and nothing had snapped. the world proposed to proceed just as usual. and he could not decline to proceed with it; unless you died you were obliged to proceed, however intolerable the journey, however unthinkable the succession of days through which you were compelled to pass. life was like a journey in an express train with no communication-cord. you were locked in, and could not stop the train by any means. some people, of course, threw themselves out of the window, so to speak, and made violent ends to themselves; but suicide is only possible to people of a certain temperament, and hugh was incapable of even contemplating such a step. he felt irretrievably lost, profoundly wretched, and yet quite apart from the fact that he was temperamentally incapable of even wishing to commit suicide, the fact that nadine was in the world (whatever nadine was going to do) made it impossible to think of quitting it. that was the manner and characteristic of his love: his own unhappiness meant less to him than the fact of her. until she had suggested it, the thought of traveling had not occurred to him; now, as he waited for his train at the station, he felt that at all costs he wanted to be on the move, to be employed in getting away from "the intolerable anywhere" that he might happen to be in. wherever he was, it seemed that any other place would be preferable, and this he supposed was the essence of the distraction that travel is supposed to give. his own rooms in town he felt would be soaked with associations of nadine, so too would be the houses where he would naturally spend those coming months of august and september. not till october, when his duties as a clerk in the foreign office called him back to town, had he anything with which he felt he could occupy himself. an exceptional capacity for finding days too short and few, even though they had no duties to make the hours pass, had hitherto been his only brilliance; now all gift of the kind seemed to have been snatched from him: he could not conceive what to do with to-morrow or the next day or any of the days that should follow. an allowance of seven days to the week seemed an inordinate superfluity; he was filled with irritation at the thought of the leisurely march of interminable time. he spent the evening alone, feeling that he was a shade less intolerable to himself than anybody else would have been; also, he felt incapable of the attention which social intercourse demands. his mind seemed utterly out of his control, as unable to remain in one place as his body. even if he thought of nadine, it wandered, and he would notice that a picture hung crooked, and jump up to straighten it. one such was a charming water-color sketch by esther of the beach at meering, with a splash of sunlight low in the west that, shining through a chimney in the clouds, struck the sea very far out, and made there a little island of reflected gold. esther had put in this golden islet with some reluctance: she had said that even in nature it looked unreal, and would look even more unreal in art, especially when the artist happened to be herself. but nadine had voted with hugh on behalf of the golden island, just because it would appear unreal and incredible. "it is only the unreal things that are vivid to us," she had said, "and the incredible things are just those which we believe in. isn't that so, hughie?" how well he remembered her saying that; her voice rang in his ears like a haunting tune! and while esther made this artistic sacrifice to the god of things as they are not, he and nadine strolled along the firm sandy beach, shining with the moisture of the receding tide. she had taken his arm, and just as her voice now sounded in his ears, so he could feel the pressure of her hand on his coat. "you live among unrealities," she said, "although you are so simple and practical. you are thinking now that some day you and i will go to live on that golden island. but there is no island really, it is just like the rest of the sea, only the sun shines on it." the bitter truth of that struck him now as applied to her and himself. though she had refused him before, the sun shone on those days, and not until she had engaged herself to seymour did the gold fade. not until to-day when he had definite confirmation of that from her own lips, had he really believed in her rejection of him. he well knew her affection for him; he believed, and rightly, that if she had been asked to name her best friend, she would have named none other than himself. it had been impossible for him not to be sanguine over the eventual outcome, and he had never really doubted that some day her affection would be kindled into flame. he had often told himself that it was through him that she would discover her heart. as she had suggested, he would some day crack the nut for her, and show her her own kernel, and she would find it was his. and now all those optimisms were snuffed out. he had completely to alter and adjust his focus, but that could not be done at once. to-night he peered out, as it were upon familiar scenes, and found that his sight of them was misty and blurred. the whole world had vanished in cold gray mists. he was lost, quite lost, and ... and there was a letter for him on the table which he had not noticed. the envelope was obviously of cheap quality, and was of those proportions which suggest a bill. a bill it was from a bookseller, of four shillings and sixpence, incurred over a book nadine had said she wanted to read. he had passed the bookseller's on his way home immediately afterwards and of course he had ordered it for her. she had not cared for it; she had found it unreal. "the man is meant to arouse my sympathy," she had said, "and only arouses my intense indifference. i am acutely uninterested in what happens to him." hugh felt as if she had been speaking of himself, but the moment after knew that he did her an injustice. even now he could not doubt the sincerity of her affection for him. but there was something frozen about it. it was like sleet, and he, like a parched land, longed for the pity of the soft rain. hugh had a wholesome contempt for people who pity themselves, and it struck him at this point that he was in considerable danger of becoming despicable in his own eyes. he had been capable of sufficient manliness to remove himself from nadine that afternoon, but his solitary evening was not up to that standard; he might as well have remained at winston, if he was to endorse his refusal to dangle after her with nothing more virile than those drawling sentimentalities. she was not for him: he had made this expedition to-day in order to convince himself on that point, and already his determination was showing itself unstable, if it suffered him to dangle in mind though not in body. and yet how was it possible not to? nadine, physically and tangibly, was certainly going to pass out of his life, but to eradicate her from his soul would be an act of spiritual suicide. physically there was no doubt that he would continue to exist without her, spiritually he did not see how existence was possible on the same terms. but he need not drivel about her. there were always two ways of behaving after receiving a blow which knocked you down, and the one that commended itself most to hugh was to get up again. * * * * * lady ayr at the end of the london season had for years been accustomed to carry out some innocent plan for the improvement and discomfort of her family. one year she dragged them along the castles by the loire, another she forced them, as if by pumping, through the picture galleries of holland, and this summer she proposed to show them a quantity of the english cathedrals. these abominable pilgrimages were made pompously and economically: they stayed at odious inns, where she haggled and bargained with the proprietors, but on the other hand she informed the petrified vergers and custodians whom she conducted (rather than was conducted by) round the cathedrals or castles in their charge, that she was the marchioness of ayr, was directly descended from the occupants of the finest and most antique tombs, that the castle in question had once belonged to her family, or that the gem of the holbeins represented some aunt of hers in bygone generations. here pomp held sway, but economy came into its own again over the small silver coin with which she rewarded her conductor. on english lines she had a third class carriage reserved for her and beguiled the tedium of journeys by reading aloud out of guide-books an account of what they had seen or what they were going to visit. generally they put up at "temperance" hotels, and she made a point of afternoon tea being included in the exiguous terms at which she insisted on being entertained. john aided and abetted her in those tours, exhibiting an ogreish appetite for all things gothic and mental improvement; and her husband followed her with a white umbrella and sat down as much as possible. esther's part in them was that of a resigned and inattentive martyr, and she fired off picture postcards of the places they visited to nadine and others with "this is a foul hole," or "the beastliest inn we have struck yet" written on them, while seymour revenged himself on the discomforts inflicted on him, by examining his mother as to where they had seen a particular rose-window or portrait by rembrandt, and then by the aid of a guide-book proving she was wrong. why none of them revolted and refused to go on these annual journeys, now that they had arrived at adult years, they none of them exactly knew, any more than they knew why they went, when summoned, to their mother's dreadful dinner-parties, and it must be supposed that there was a touch of the inevitable about such diversions: you might grumble and complain, but you went. this year the tour was to start with the interesting city of lincoln and the party assembled on the platform at king's cross at an early hour. the plan was to lunch in the train, so as to start sight-seeing immediately on arrival, and continue (with a short excursion to the hotel in order to have the tea which had been included in the terms) until the fading light made it impossible to distinguish ancestral tombs or norman arches. lady ayr had not seen seymour since his engagement, and, as she ate rather grisly beef sandwiches, she gave him her views on the step. though they were all together in one compartment the conversation might be considered a private one, for lord ayr was sleeping gently in one corner, john was absorbed in the account of the roman remains at lincoln (lindum colonia, as he had already announced), and esther with a slightly leaky stylograph was writing a description of their depressing journey to nadine. "what you are marrying on, seymour, i don't know," she said. "neither your father nor i will be able to increase your allowance, and nadine waldenech has the appearance of being an expensive young woman. i hope she realizes she is marrying the son of a poor man, and that we go third class." "she is aware of all that," said seymour, wiping his long white finger-tips on an exceedingly fine cambric handkerchief, after swallowing a sandwich or two, "and we are marrying really on her money." "i am not sure that i approve of that," said his mother. "the remedy is obvious," remarked seymour. "you can increase my allowance. i have no objection. mother, would you kindly let me throw the rest of that sandwich out of the window? it makes me ill to look at it." "we are not talking about sandwiches. why do you not earn some money like other younger sons?" "i do. i earned four pounds last week, with describing your party and other things, and there is my embroidery as well, which i shall work at more industriously. i shall do embroidery in the evening after dinner while nadine smokes." lady ayr looked out of the window and pointed magisterially to the towers of some great church in the town through which the train was passing. "peterborough," she said. "we shall see peterborough on our way back. peterborough, john. ayr and esther, we are passing through peterborough." esther looked out upon the mean backs of houses. "the sooner we pass through peterborough the better," she observed. john turned rapidly over the leaves of his guide-book. "peterborough is seventy-eight miles from london, and contains many buildings of interest," he informed them. lady ayr returned to seymour. "i hope you will insist on her leaving off smoking when you are married to her," she said. "i cannot say she is the wife i should have chosen for you." "i chose her myself," observed seymour. "tell me more about her. certainly the waldenechs are a very old family, there is that to be said. is she serious? does she feel her responsibilities? or is she like her mother?" seymour brushed a few remaining sandwich-crumbs off his trousers. "i think aunt dodo is one of the most serious people i know," he said. "she is serious about everything. she does everything with all her might. nadine is not quite so serious as that. she is rather flippant about things like food and dress. however, no doubt my influence will make her more serious. but as a matter of fact i can't tell you about nadine. a fortnight ago, when i proposed to her, i could have. i could have given you a very complete account of her. but i can't any longer: i am getting blind about her. i only know that it is she. not so long ago i told her a quantity of her faults with ruthless accuracy, but i couldn't now. i can't see them any more: there's a glamor." esther looked up. "oh, seymour," she said, "are you talking about nadine? are you falling in love with her? how very awkward! does she know?" seymour pointed a withering finger at his sister. "little girls should mind their own business," he said. "oh, but it is my business. nadine matters far more than any one else. she might easily think it not right to marry you if you were in love with her." lady ayr turned a petrifying gaze from one to the other. "she seems a very extraordinary young person," she said. "and in any case esther has no business to know anything about it." "whether she thinks it right or not, she is going to marry me," said seymour. esther shook her head. "you are indeed blind about nadine," she said, "if you think she would ever do anything she thought wrong." "you might be describing john," said seymour rather hotly. "anyhow, nadine is not like john." "i see no resemblance," said lady ayr. "but it is something to know she would not do anything she thought wrong." "when you say it in that voice, mother," said esther, "you make nonsense of it." "the same words in any voice mean the same thing," said lady ayr. seymour sighed. "i am on esther's side for once," he said. esther turned to her brother. "seymour, you ought to tell nadine you are falling in love with her," she said. "i really don't think she would approve. why, you might become as bad as hugh. of course you are not so stupid as hugh--ah, stupid is the wrong word--you haven't got such a plain kind of intellect as hugh--which was nadine's main objection--" seymour patted esther's hand with odious superiority. "you are rather above yourself, my little girl," he said, "because just now i agreed with you. it has gone to your head, and makes you think yourself clever. shut your eyes till we get to lincoln. you will feel less giddy by degrees. and when you open them again, you can mind your own business, and mother will tell you about the goths and vandals who built the cathedral. you are a vandal yourself: you will have a fellow-feeling. mother, dear, put down that window. i am going to see cathedrals to please you, but i will not be stifled to please anybody. the carriage reeks of your beef sandwiches. but i think i have some scent in my bag." "i am quite sure you have," said esther scornfully. "i am writing to nadine, by the way. i shall tell her you are falling in love with her." "you can tell her exactly what you please," said seymour suavely. "ah, here is some wall-flower scent. it is like a may morning. yes, tell nadine what you please, but don't bother me. what is the odious town we are coming to? i think it must be lincoln. john, here is lincoln, and all the people are ancient romans." seymour obligingly sprayed the expensive scent about the carriage, even though they were so shortly to disembark. "the river witham," said john, pointing to a small and fetid ditch. "remains of roman villas--" "the inhabitants of which died of typhoid," said seymour. "tell nadine we are enjoying lincoln, esther. had father better be allowed to sleep on, or shall i wake him? there is a porter: call him, mother--i won't carry my bag even to save you sixpence. but don't tell him we are marchionesses and lords and ladies, because then he will expect a shilling. i perceive a seedy-looking 'bus outside. that is probably ours. it looks as if it came from some low kind of inn. i wish i had brought antoinette. and yet i don't know. she would probably have given notice after seeing the degradation of our summer holiday." "seymour, you are making yourself exceedingly disagreeable," said his mother. "it is intentional. you made yourself disagreeable to me: you began. as for you, esther, you must expect to see a good deal less of nadine after she and i are married. i will not have you mooning about the house, reminding her of all the damned--yes, i said damned--nonsense you and she and berts and hugh talked about the inequality of marriages where one person is clever and the other stupid, or where one loves and the other doesn't. you have roused me, you and mother between you, and i am here to tell you that i will manage my own affairs, which are nadine's also, without the smallest assistance from you. put that in--in your ginger-beer, or whatever we have for dinner, and drink it. you thought i was only a sort of thing that waved its hands and collected jade, and talked in rather a squeaky voice, and walked on its toes. well, you have found out your mistake, and don't let me have to teach it you again. you can tell nadine in your letter exactly what i have said. and don't rouse me again: it makes me hot. but mind your own business instead, and remember that when i want either your advice or mother's i will ask for it. till then you can keep it completely to yourselves. you needn't answer me: i don't want to hear anything you have got to say. let us go to the cathedral. i suppose it is that great cockshy on the top of the hill. i know it will prove to have been built by our forefathers. the verger will like to know about it. but bear in mind i don't want to be told anything about nadine." * * * * * seymour had become quite red in the face with the violence of the feelings that prompted these straightforward remarks, and before putting the spray of wall-flower scent back into his bag, he shut his eyes and squirted himself in the face in order to cool himself, while esther stared at him open-mouthed. she hardly knew him, for he had become exactly like a man, a transformation more unexpected than anything that ever happened at a pantomime, and she instantly and correctly connected this change in him with what he had been saying. for the reason of the change was perfectly simple and sufficient: during those last days at winston, after the departure of hugh, he had fallen in love with nadine, and his nature, which had really been neither that of man or woman, had suddenly sexed itself. he had not in the least cast off his tastes and habits; to spray himself and a stuffy railway-carriage with wall-flower scent was still perfectly natural to him, and no doubt, unless nadine objected very much, he would continue to take antoinette about with him as his maid, but he had declared himself a man, and found, even as his sister found, that the change in him was as immense as it was unexpected. he thought with more than usual scorn of nadine's friends, such as esther and berts, who all played about together like healthy, but mentally anemic, children, for he, the most anemic of them all, had suddenly had live blood, as it were, squirted into him. indeed the only member of the clan whom he thought of with toleration was hugh, with whom he felt a bond of brotherhood, for hugh, like himself, loved nadine like a man. already also he felt sorry for him, recognizing in him a member of his own sex. hitherto he had disliked his own sex, because they were men, now he found himself detesting people like berts, because they were not. for men, so he had begun to perceive, are essentially those who are aware of the fact of women; the rest of them, to which he had himself till so lately belonged, he now classified as more or less intellectual amoebæ. and the corresponding members of the other sex were just as bad: esther had no sense of sex, nor perhaps, and here he paused, had nadine. that, it is true, gave him long pause. he knew quite well that nadine had been no more in love with him, when they had got engaged, than he had been with her. they had both been, and she so he must suppose was still, quite undeveloped as regards those instincts. hugh with all his devotion and developed manliness awoke no corresponding flame in her, and seymour was quite clear-sighted enough to see that there was no sign of his having succeeded where hugh had failed. she belonged, as dodo had remarked, to that essentially modern type of girl, which, unless she marries while quite young, will probably be spinster still at thirty. they had brains, they had a hundred intellectual and artistic interests, and studied mummies, or logic, or greek gems, or themselves, and lived in flats, eagerly and happily, and smoked and substituted tea for dinner. they knew of nothing in their natures that gave them any imperious call; on the other hand they called imperiously though unintentionally to others. nadine had called like that to hugh, and was dismayed at the tumult she had roused, regretting it, but not comprehending it. and now she had called like that to seymour. she was like the sleeping beauty in the wood, calling in her sleep. hugh had answered her first and had fought his way through thicket and briar, but his coming had not awakened her. then she had called again, and this time seymour stood by her. she had given him her hand, but her sleep had been undisturbed. she smiled at him, but she smiled in her sleep. * * * * * the seedy 'bus, of the type not yet quite extinct, with straw on the bottom of it, proved to be sent for them and they proceeded over cobbled streets, half deafened by the clatter of ill-fitting windows. after a minute or two of this seymour firmly declined to continue, for he said the straw got up his trousers and tickled his legs, and the drums of his ears were bursting. so he got delicately out, in order to take a proper conveyance, and promised to meet the rest of them at the west door of the cathedral. here he sat very comfortably for ten minutes till they arrived, and entering in the manner of a storming party, they literally stumbled over an astonished archdeacon who was superintending some measurement of paving stone immediately inside, and proved to be a cousin of lady ayr's. this fact was not elicited without pomp, for the cathedral was not open to visitors at this hour, as he informed them, on which lady ayr said, "i suppose there will be no difficulty in the way of the marquis of ayr--ayr, this is an archdeacon--and his wife and family seeing it." upon which "an" archdeacon said, "oh, are you susie ayr?" explanations of cousinship--luckily satisfactory--followed, and they were conducted round the cathedral by him free of all expense, and dined with him in the evening, at a quarter to eight, returning home at ten in order to get a grip of all they were going to see next day, by a diligent perusal of the guide-books. they were staying at an ancient hostelry called the "goat and compasses," a designation the origin of which john very obligingly explained to them, but seymour, still perhaps suffering from the straw at the bottom of the 'bus, thought that the "flea and compasses" would be a more descriptive title. no room was on the level with any other room or with the passage outside it, and short obscure flights of steps designed to upset the unwary communicated between them. a further trap was laid down for unsuspicious guests in the matter of doors and windows, for the doors were not quite high enough to enable the person of average height to pass through them without hitting his forehead against the jamb, and the windows, when induced to open, descended violently again in the manner of a guillotine. the floors were as wavy as the pavement of st. mark's at venice, the looking-glasses seemed like dusky wells, at the bottom of which the gazer darkly beheld his face, and the beds had feather mattresses on them. altogether, it was quite in the right style, except that it was not a "temperance hotel," for the accommodation of lady ayr on a tour of family culture, and she and john, after a short and decisive economical interview with the proprietor, took possession of the largest table in the public drawing-room, ejecting therefrom two nervous spinsters who had been looking forward to playing _patience_ on it, and spreading their maps of the town over it, read to each other out of guide-books, while lord ayr propped himself up dejectedly in a corner, where he hoped to drop asleep unperceived. the troublesome interview with the proprietor had been on the subject of making a deduction from the agreed terms, since they had all dined out. he was finally routed by a short plain statement of the case by lady ayr. "if you can afford to take us in for so much, dinner included," she said, "you can afford to take us in for less without dinner. i think there is no more to be said on the subject. breakfast, please, at a quarter past eight punctually and i shall require a second candle in my bedroom. i think your terms, which i do not say are excessive, included lights? _thank_ you!" * * * * * seymour had declined to take part in this guide-book conference, saying with truth that he felt sure it would all be very completely explained to him next day, and let himself out into the streets of the town which were already growing empty of passengers. above the sky was lucent with many stars, and the moon which had risen an hour before, cleared the house-roofs and shone down into the street with a very white light, making the gas-lamps look red. last night it had been full, and from the terrace at winston they had all watched it rise, full-flaring, over the woods below the house. then he and nadine had strolled away together, and in that luminous solitude with her, he had felt himself constrained and tongue-tied. he had no longer at command the talk that usually rose so glibly to his lips, that gay, witty, inconsequent gabble that had truthfully represented what went on in his quick discerning brain. his brain now was taken up with one topic only, and it was as hard for him to speak to her of that, as it was for him to speak of anything else. he knew that she had entered into her engagement with him, in the same spirit in which he had proposed to her. they liked each other; each found the other a stimulating companion; by each no doubt the attraction of the other's good looks was felt. she, he was certain, regarded him now as she had regarded him then, while for him the whole situation had undergone so complete a change, that he felt that the very fortress of his identity had been stormed and garrisoned by the besieging host. and what was the host? that tall girl with the white slim hands, who, without intention, had picked up a key and, cursorily, so it seemed, had unlocked his heart, so that it stood open to her. honestly, he did not know that it was made to unlock: he had thought of it always as some toy swiss _châlet_, not meant to be opened. but she had opened it, and gone inside. the streets grew emptier: lights appeared behind blinds in upper windows, and only an occasional step sounded on the pavements. he had come to an open market place, and from where he paused and stood the western towers of the cathedral rose above the intervening roofs, and aspired whitely into the dark velvet of the night. hitherto, seymour would have found nothing particular to say about moonlight, in which he took but the very faintest interest, except that it tended to provoke an untimely loquaciousness in cats. but to-night he found his mind flooded with the most hackneyed and commonplace reflections. it reminded him of nadine; it was white and chaste and aloof like her ... he wanted her, and he was going to get her, and yet would she really be his in the sense that he was hers? then for a moment habit asserted itself, and he told himself he was being common, that he was dropping to the level of plain and barbarous hugh. it was very mortifying, yet he could not keep off that level. he kept on dropping there, as he stared at the moonlit towers of the cathedral, unsatisfied and longing. but it may be doubted whether he would have felt better satisfied, if he had known how earnestly nadine had tried to drop, or rise, to the moonlit plane, or how sincerely, even with tears, she had deplored her inability to do so. for it was not he whom she had sought to join there. chapter viii dodo was seated in her room in jack's house in town, intermittently arguing with him and miss grantham and edith and berts, and in intervals looking up as many of her friends as she could remember the names of and asking them to her dance. the month was november, and the dance was for to-day week, which was the first of december, and as far as she had got at present, it appeared that all her friends were in town and that they would all come. nadine was similarly employed next door, and as they both asked anybody who occurred to them, the same people frequently got asked twice over. "which," said dodo, "is an advantage, as it looks as if we really wanted them very much. oh, is that esther? esther, we are having a dance on december the first, and will you all come? yes: wasn't it a good idea? that is nice. of course, delighted if your mother cares to come, too--" "then i shan't," said berts. "berts, shut up," said dodo in a penetrating whisper. "yes, darling esther, berts said something, but i don't know what it was as they are all talking together. yes, a cotillion. good-by. look out hendrick's stores, grantie. but i really won't lead the cotillion with berts. it is too ridiculous: a man may not lead the cotillion with his grandmother: it comes in the prayer-book." "three thousand and seven," said miss grantham. "p'd'n't'n." "three double-o seven, padd," said dodo briskly, "please, miss. i always say, 'please, miss,' and then they are much pleasanter. i used to say 'i'm princess waldenech, please, miss,' but they never believed it, and said 'garn!' but i was: darling jack, i was! no, my days of leading the cotillion came to an end under william the fourth. there is nothing so ridiculous as seeing an old thing-- no, i'm not the warwick hotel? do i sound like the warwick hotel?" dodo's face suddenly assumed an expression of seraphic interest. "it's too entrancing," she whispered. "i'm sure it's a nice man, because he wants to marry me. he says i didn't meet him in the warwick hotel this morning. that was forgetful. yes? oh, he's rung off: he has jilted me. i wish i had said i was the warwick hotel: it was stupid of me. i wonder if you can be married by telephone with a clergyman taking the place of 'please, miss.' where had we got to? oh, yes, hendrick's: three double-o seven, you idiot. i mean, please, miss. what? thank you, miss. no, nadine and berts shall lead it." "i would sooner lead with lady ayr," said berts. "nadine always forgets everything--" "oh, hendrick's, is it?" said dodo. "yes, lady chesterford. i am really, and i want a band for the evening of december the first. no, not a waistband. music. yes, send somebody round." dodo put down the ear-piece. "let us strive not to do several things together," she said. "for the moment we will concentrate on the cotillion. jack dear, why did you suggest i should lead? it has led to so much talking, of which i have had to do the largest part." "i want you to," he said. "i'll take you to egypt in the spring, if you will. i won't otherwise." "darling, you are too unfair for words. you want to make an ass of me. you want everybody to say 'look at that silly old grandmama.' i probably shall be a grandmama quite soon, if nadine is going to marry seymour in january--'silly old grandmama,' they will say, 'capering about like a two-year-old.' because i shall caper: if i lead, i shan't be able to resist kicking up." jack came across the room and sat on the table by her. "don't you want to, dodo?" he asked quietly. "yes, darling, i should love to. i only wanted pressing. oh, my beloved berts, what larks! we'll have hoops, and snowballs, and looking-glass, and wooly-bear--don't you know wooly-bear?--and paper-bags and obstacles, and balance. and then the very next day i shall settle down, and behave as befits my years and riches and honor. i am old and jack is rich, and has endowed me with all his worldly goods, and we are both strictly honorable. but i feel it's a hazardous experiment. if i hear somebody saying, as no doubt i shall, 'surely, lady chesterford is a little old?' i shall collapse in the middle of the floor, and burst into several tears. and then i shall wipe my eyes, both of them if both have cried, and if not, one, and say, 'beloved berts, come on!' and on we shall go." "you haven't asked hugh yet," said miss grantham, looking at the list. "nadine did," said dodo. "he said he wasn't certain. they argued." "they do," said berts. "aunt dodo, may i come to dine this evening, and have a practice afterwards?" "yes, my dear. are you going? till this evening then." dodo turned to jack, and spoke low. "oh, jack," she said, "waldenech's in town. nadine saw him yesterday." "glad i didn't," said jack. "i'm sure you are, darling. but here we all are, you know. you can't put him out like a candle. about the dance, i mean. i think i had better ask him. he won't come, if i ask him." "he won't come anyhow, my dear," said jack. "you can't tell. i know him better than you. he's nasty, you know, poor dear. if i didn't ask him, he might come. he might think he ought to have been asked, and so come instead. whereas if he was asked, he would probably think it merely insulting of me, and so stop at home." "don't whisper to each other," said edith loudly. "i can't bear a husband and wife whispering to each other. it looks as if they hadn't got over the honeymoon. dodo, i haven't had a single word with you yet--" "darling edith, you haven't. if you only would go to the other end of the telephone, i would talk to you for hours, simply to thwart the 'please, miss' who asks if we haven't done yet. the only comfortable conversation is conducted on the telephone. then you say 'hush' to everybody else in the room. indeed, it isn't usually necessary to say 'hush.' anybody with a proper interest in the affairs of other people always listens to what you say, trying to reconstruct what the inaudible voice says. jack was babbling down the telephone the other day, when i particularly wanted to talk, but when he said 'never let him shave her again,' how could i interrupt?" "did he shave her again?" asked miss grantham. "who was she?" "you shouldn't have said that," said dodo, "because now i have to explain. it was the poodle, who had been shaved wrong, and she had puppies next day, and they probably all had hair in the unfashionable places. please talk to each other, and not about poodles. jack and i have a little serious conversation to get through." "i will speak," said edith, "because it matters to me. we've let our house, dodo, at least bertie let it, and has gone to bath, because he is rheumatic; berts can stay at the bath club, because he isn't, but i want to stay with you." "the house is becoming like basle railway-station," remarked jack. "yes, dear. every proper house in town is," said dodo. "a house in london isn't a house, it is a junction. people dine and lunch and sleep if they have time. i haven't. yes, edith, do come. jack wants you, too, only he doesn't say so, because he is naturally reticent." edith instantly got up. "then may i have some lunch at once?" she said. "cold beef will do. but i have a rehearsal at half-past one." the telephone bell rang, and dodo took up the ear-piece. "no, lady chesterford is out," she said. "but who is it? it's waldenech, jack," she said in a low voice. "no, she hasn't come in yet. what? no: she isn't expected at all. she is quite unexpected." she replaced the instrument. "i recognized his voice," she said, "and i oughtn't to have said i was unexpected, because perhaps he will guess. but he sounded a bit thick, don't they say? yes, dear edith, have some cold beef, because it is much nicer than anything else. i shall come and have lunch in one minute, too, as i didn't have any breakfast. take grantie away with you, and i will join you." "i won't have cold beef, whatever happens," said grantie. dodo turned round, facing jack, as soon as the others had left the room, and laid her hand on his knee. "jack, i feel sure i am right," she said. "i don't want waldenech here any more than you do. but after all, he is nadine's father. i wish madge or belle or somebody who writes about society would lay down for us the proper behavior for re-married wives towards their divorced husbands." "i can tell you the proper behavior of divorced husbands towards re-married wives," said jack. "yes, darling, but you must remember that waldenech has nothing to do with proper behavior. he always behaved most improperly. if he hadn't, i shouldn't be your wife now. i think that must be an instance of all things working together for good, as st. peter says." "paul," remarked jack. "very likely, though peter might be supposed to know most about wives. jack, dear, let us settle this at once, because i am infernally hungry, and the thought of edith's eating cold beef makes me feel homesick. i think i had much better ask waldenech to our dance. there he is: i've known him pretty well, and it's just because he is nothing more than an acquaintance now, that i wish to ask him. to ask him will show the--the gulf between us." jack shook his head. "i prefer to show the gulf by not asking him," he said. dodo frowned, and tapped the skirt of her riding-habit with her whip. she was rather tired and very hungry, for she had been playing bridge till two o'clock the night before, and had got up at eight to go out riding, and, meaning to have breakfast afterwards, had found herself plunged in the arrangements for her ball, which had lasted without intermission till this moment. but she felt unwilling to give this point up, unless jack absolutely put his foot down with regard to it. "i think i am right," she said. "he is rather a devil." "all the more reason for not asking him." "do you mean that you forbid me?" she asked. he thought for a moment. "yes, i forbid you," he said. dodo got up at once, flicked him in the face with the end of her riding-whip, and before he had really time to blink, kissed him on exactly the same spot, which happened to be the end of his nose. "that is finished, then," she said in the most good-humored voice. "and now i have both the whip and the whip-hand. if anything goes wrong, darling, i shall say 'i told you so,' till you wish you had never been born." he caught her whip and her hands in his. "you couldn't make me wish that," he said. her whole face melted into a sunlight of adorable smiles. "oh, jack, do you really mean that?" she asked. "and because of me?" he pulled her close to him. "i suppose i should mean in spite of you," he said. "go and eat with that ogre edith. and then, darling, will you rest a little? you look rather tired." she raised her eyes to his. "but i am tired," she said. "it would be a disgrace not to be tired every day. it would show you hadn't made the most of it." "i don't like you to be tired," he said, "especially since it isn't lunch-time yet. you haven't got much more to do, to-day, i hope." "but lots, and all so jolly. oh, my dear, the world is as full as the sea at high-tide. it would be wretched not to fling oneself into it. but it is only high-tide till after my dance. then we go down to meering, and snore, and sleep like pigs and eat like kittens, and sprout like mushrooms." "you've asked a houseful there," objected jack. "yes, darling, but it's only people like you and esther and hugh. i shan't bother about you." "is hugh coming there?" he asked. "yes. he goes abroad directly afterwards, as he has exchanged from the foreign office into the embassy at rome for six months. he is wise, i think. he doesn't want to be here when nadine is married, nor for some time afterwards. but he wants to see her again first." "the rest is wise," said jack, "but that is abominably foolish." "perhaps it is, but how one hates a young man to be altogether wise. a wise young man is quite intolerable. in fact wisdom generally is intolerable. it would be intolerable of me to lie down after lunch, and not eat and drink what i chose. you would be intolerable if you didn't make yourself so utterly foolish about me. oh, jack, let us die if necessary, but don't let us be wise before that." jack had nothing to say to this remarkable aspiration, and dodo went out to join edith. but he sat still on the edge of the table after she had gone, not altogether at ease. during the last month or so, he had several times experienced impulses not to be accounted for rationally, which had made him ask her if she felt quite well, and now that he collected these occasions in his mind, he could not recollect any very reassuring response on her part. she had told him not to fuss, she had stood before him, radiant, brilliant and said, "do i look particularly unwell? why do you want to spoil the loveliest time of all my life?" but she did not seem to have given him any direct answer at all, and the cumulative effect of those possible evasions troubled him a little. but he soon told himself that such a cloud was born of his imagination only, for it was impossible to conceive, when he let himself contemplate the memory of those days since last july, that there could be anything wrong behind them, in so serene a beneficence of happiness were they wrapped. he had never dreamed that the world held such store, and he had not ever so faintly realized how jejune and barren his life had been before. he, for all his fifty years, had not yet lived one-half of them, for less than half himself had passed through the months that made them up. it was as if all his life he had dreamed, dreamed with god knew what shocks and catastrophes that dodo was his, and last july only he awoke to find that his arms were indeed about her, and that she herself was pressed close to him. and she, too, had told him that she was happy, not pleased merely, or excited or thrilled, but happy. incredible as it seemed to his modest soul, her happiness was one with his. it seemed there was nothing left to ask god for; the only possible attitude was to stand up and praise and thank him. jack did that every day and night that passed. dodo, when she left her husband, had not gone straight to the dining-room to join edith and the cold beef. for half an hour before, she had been conscious of a queer and rather sickening pain, that had made it an effort to continue enthusiastically telephoning and arguing. she had had no real doubt in her own mind that it was the result of a rather strenuous morning without any food except the slice of bread and butter that had accompanied her early bedroom tea, but she thought that she would go upstairs and have her hot bath, which was sure to make her quite comfortable, before she ate. her bathroom which opened out of her bedroom was prepared for her, the water steaming and smelling of the delicious verbena-salts which her maid had put into it, and convinced that she would feel perfectly fit again after it, she quickly undressed, and went in with bare feet to enjoy herself. but even as she took off her dressing-gown, she had a start of pain that for the moment frightened her, and caused her to stand naked by her bath, holding on to the edge of it. then the pain gradually drew away, as if pulled out of her by a string, and in a minute more she was quite herself again. but there was the memory of it left, like a black patch, so it seemed, even when it had quite ceased. however, it had gone now, and instinctively obeying the habit of years, she swiftly turned her mind to contemplate the thoroughly delightful things that lay in front of her, rather than the disturbing moment that had passed now, leaving only a black patch in memory. but before she slipped into the hot aromatic water, she wiped the sweat from her forehead. she splashed the steaming water over her back, wriggling a little at the touch of it. "o lord, how nice!" she said to herself. "and it's hardly possible to bear it. and that reminds me that i utterly forgot to say my prayers this morning, because i was in such a hurry. any one would have been on such a lovely morning, with such a lovely horse waiting at the door. but i am having the nicest time that anybody ever had, and i'll try not to be quite such a disgrace as i used to be." dodo gave a loud sigh of reverent content and splashed again. it must be understood that she was saying her forgotten prayers. "and jack's a perfect darling," she went on, "and i am so pleased to love somebody. i never loved anybody before really, if you know what i mean by love, except perhaps nadine. it makes the most tremendous difference, and one doesn't think about oneself absolutely all the time, though i daresay very nearly. of course i was always fond of people, but i think that was chiefly because they were mostly so nice to me. i must go to church next sunday, which is to-morrow, and do all this properly, but it would have been much more convenient if it had been the day after to-morrow, as i think i promised jack to play golf with him to-morrow. but i'll see what can be done. now i've dropped the soap, and isn't everything extraordinarily mixed up! oh, please don't let me have any more pain like what i had just now, if it's all the same; but of course if i must have it, well, there it is. but i hope it doesn't mean anything nasty--" dodo dropped the soap which she had just rescued from the bottom of the cloudy water, and looked up with bright eyes. "oh, my dear, can it be that?" she said aloud. "is it possible?" she recollected that she had said "my dear" when she was by way of saying her forgotten prayers, and so added "amen" very loudly and piously. then, quite revivified, she got out, dried herself with great speed and went downstairs half-dressed, with an immense fur-coat to cover deficiencies, since it was impossible to wait any longer for food. she felt no fatigue any more, but a sudden intense eagerness at the thought of what possibly that pain might mean. it seemed almost incredible, but she found herself almost longing for a return of that which had frightened her before. it was impossible for her to cram any more engagements into that day, since they already fitted into each other like the petals of a rose not yet fully blown, but she made an appointment with her doctor for next morning. the interview was not a long one, but dodo came out from it, wreathed in smiles, immensely excited, and hurried home, where she went straight up to jack's room. she seized him with both hands, and kissed him indiscriminately. "oh, my dear, you can't possibly guess," she said, "because it is quite too ridiculous, and only a person like me could possibly have done anything of the kind, and you're zacharias, but you needn't be dumb. oh, jack, don't you see? yes: it's that. i'm going to have a baby, instead of cancer. i was prepared--at least not quite--for its being cancer, which i shouldn't have enjoyed at all, but dr. ingram says it's the other thing. did you ever hear anything so nice, and i am a very wonderful woman, aren't i, and pray god it will be a boy! oh, jack, think how bored i was with the bearing of my first child. i didn't deserve it, and you used to come and cheer me up. and then, poor little innocent, it was taken from me. poor little chap: he would have been lord chesterford now instead of you if he had lived. won't it seem funny giving birth to the same baby, so to speak, twice? ah, my dear, but it's not the same! it's your child this time, jack, and i shan't be bored this time. you see i didn't really become a woman at all till lately. i was merely a sprightly little devil, and so i suppose god is giving me another chance. jack, it simply must be a boy: i shall love to hear lord harchester cry this time." jack, though informed that he needn't be like zacharias, had been dumb because there was no vacant moment to speak in. the news had amazed and astounded him. "oh, dodo!" he said. "next to yourself, that is the best gift of all. but i'm not sure i forgive you, for suspecting you were ill, and not telling me." "then i shall get along quite nicely without your forgiveness," said she. "forgiveness, indeed! or will it be twins? wouldn't that be exciting? but a boy anyhow: i've ordered him, and he shall have one blue eye because he's yours and one brown eye because he's mine, and so he'll be like a welsh collie, and every one will say: 'what a pretty little dog; does he bite?' jack, i hope he'll be rather a rip when he grows up and make his love to other people's wives. i suppose i oughtn't to wish that, but i can't help it. i like a boy with a little dash in him. he shall be about as tall as you, but much better looking, and oh, to think that i once had a boy before, and didn't care! my conscience! i care now, and only yesterday i said i should probably soon be a grandmother, and now i've got to leave out the grand, and be just a humble mother first. i'm not humble: i'm just as proud as i can stick together." suddenly this amazing flood of speech stopped, and dodo grew dim-eyed, and laid her head on her husband's shoulder. "my soul doth magnify the lord!" she whispered. the night of dodo's ball had arrived, and she was going to lead the cotillion, but not dance more than she felt to be absolutely necessary. she had told everybody what was going to happen to her, in strict privacy, which was clearly the best way of keeping it secret for the present. since she was not going to dance more than a step or two she had put on all the jewels she could manage to attach to herself, including the girdle of great emeralds that waldenech had given her. this was a magnificent adornment, far too nice to give back to him when she divorced him, and she meant to let nadine have it, as soon as she could bear to part with it herself, which did not seem likely to happen in the immediate future. it consisted of large square stones set in brilliants, and long pear-shaped emeralds depended from it. jack had once asked her how she could bear to wear it, and she had said: "darling, when emeralds are as big as that, they help you to bear a good deal. they make a perfect spartan of me." in other respects she wore what she called the "nursery fender," which was a diamond crown so high that children would have been safe from falling over it into the fire, the famous chesterford pearls, and a sort of breast-plate of rubies, like the high-priest. "i suppose it's dreadfully vulgar to wear so many jewels," she said to jack, as they took their stand at the top of the stairs, where dodo intended to remain and receive her guests, as long as she could bear not being in the ball-room, "but most people who have got very nice stones like me i notice are vulgar. the truly refined people are those who have got three garnets and one zircon. they also say that big pearls, great eggs like these, are vulgar and seed-pearls tasteful. what a word, 'tasteful'! and they talk of people's being very simply and exquisitely dressed. thank god, no one can say i'm simply dressed to-night. i'm not: i'm the most elaborate object for miles round. jack, when my baby-- dear lady ayr, how nice to see you, and esther and john. seymour dined here, and he has been taking notes of our clothes for the new paper called _gowns_!" as in the old days, when dodo piped, the world danced, and she was as vital, as charged with that magnetism that spreads enjoyment round itself more infectiously than influenza, to-night as ever. her beauty, too, was like a rose, full-blown, but without one petal yet fallen: and she stood there, in the glory of her incomparable form, jeweled and superb, a juno decked for a feast among the high gods. all the world of her friends streamed up the stairs to be welcomed by that wonderful smiling face, and many instead of going in to the ball-room waited round the balustrade at the stair-head watching her. by degrees the tide of arriving guests slackened, and she turned to jack. "jack dear, the band is turning all my blood into champagne," she said. "come and have one turn with me round the ball-room. why are they all standing about, instead of going to dance? do they want to be shown how? just once round, or perhaps twice, and then i will stop quiet until the cotillion." dodo suddenly knit her eyebrows, and looked sharply down into the hall below. "i was right, and you were wrong," she said. "there's waldenech just come in. he is not going to come upstairs. wait here for me." jack stepped forward. "no, that's for me to do," he said dodo laid her hand on his arm. "do as i tell you, my dear," she said. "wait here: it won't take me a minute." she went straight down into the hall: all smiles and gaiety had left her face, but its vitality was quite unimpaired. the color that was in her cheeks had left them, but it was not fear that had driven it away, but anger. he was just receiving a ticket for his hat and coat, and she went straight up to him. "waldenech, take your hat and coat, and go away," she said. "you must have come to the wrong house, you were not asked here." he turned at the sound of her voice, and looked up at her. "you incomparable creature," he said rather thickly. "you pearl!" "give the prince his hat and coat," said dodo. "now go, waldenech, before i disgrace you. i mean it: if you do not go quietly and at once, you shall be turned out." his eyes wandered unsteadily from her face to her bosom, and down to her waist where the great girdle gleamed and shone. "you still wear the jewels i gave you," he said. dodo instantly undid the clasp, and the girdle fell on to the carpet. "i do not wear them any more," she said. "take them, and go." he stood there for a moment without moving. then he bent down and picked them up. "i ask your pardon most humbly," he said. "i am a gentleman, really. please let me see you put the girdle on again, before i go; and say you forgive me. if your husband knows i am here, ask his pardon for me also." some great wave of pity came over dodo, utterly quenching her anger. "oh, waldenech, you have all my forgiveness, my dear," she said. "but take the jewels." "i ask you to give me that sign of your forgiveness," he said. dodo smiled at him. "fasten it yourself, then," she said. his fingers halted over this, but in a moment he had found and secured the clasp. "good-night," he said. * * * * * the whole scene had lasted not more than a minute, and scarcely half-a-dozen people had seen her speaking to him, or knew who it was. berts, who had just arrived, was one of these. dodo turned to him. "ah, there you are, berts," she said. "we are going to begin the cotillion exactly at twelve. yes, poor dear waldenech looked in, but he couldn't stop. you might remember not to tell nadine. and why wasn't edith here for dinner? or isn't she staying here now? now i come to think of it i haven't seen her all day." "she left you yesterday," said berts, "and i've just left her at home eating a chop and correcting proofs of a part-song. she was also singing. she's coming though, and says she will lead the cotillion with me, and she's sure you oughtn't to. she didn't say why." dodo went up to jack. "he went like a lamb, poor dear," she said, "though i thought for a moment he was going to stop like a lion. it gave me a little heart-ache, jack, for, after all, you know-- now we are going twice round the ball-room. it isn't much of a heart-ache, it's only a little one, and i expect it will soon stop." this, it may be expected, was the case, for certainly dodo did not behave as if she had any kind of ache, however little, anywhere, and, whether she danced or sat still, was the sun and center of the brilliant scene. wall-flowers raised their heads on her approach, and were galvanized into vitality. she ordained that there should be a waltz in which nobody should take part who was not over forty, led off herself with lord ayr, who had not had a wink of sleep all evening, and was far too much surprised to be capable of resistance, and convinced him that his dancing days were not nearly over yet. all manner of women who had hoped that nobody dreamed that they were more than thirty-five at the most followed her, reckless of the antiquity which they had publicly and irrevocably acknowledged, while edith arbuthnot, arriving in the middle of this and being quite unable to find a disengaged gentleman of suitable years, pirouetted up and down the room all by herself, until she clawed hold of jack, who was taking the breathless lady ayr to get some strictly unalcoholic refreshment. "i don't know how i came to do it," said this lady to esther, as she drank her lemonade. "i haven't danced for years. somehow i feel as if it was lady chesterford's fault. she has got into everybody's head, it seems to me. we're all behaving like boys and girls. fancy ayr dancing, too! ayr, i saw you dancing." lord ayr had come in with dodo, at the end of this, unutterably briskened up. "and i saw you dancing, my dear," he said. "and i hope you feel all the better for it, because i do." "we all do," said dodo, "and we'll all do it again. i want everything at once, a cigarette and an ice and a glass of champagne and berts. esther, be angelic and fetch me berts. don't tell him only i want him, but fetch him. oh, jack, isn't it fun: yes, darling, we're going to begin the cotillion immediately, and i'm going to be ever so quiet. edith, it was dear of you to offer to take my place, but i wouldn't give it up to terpsichore herself or even salome. jack dear, go and make every one go and sit down in two rows round the ball-room, and if anybody finds a rather large diamond about, it's probably mine, though i never wrote my name on it.... wasn't it careless? it resembles the _koh-i-noor_. oh, berts, there you are. now don't lose your head, but give all the plainest women the most favors. then the pretty ones will easily see the plan, and the plain ones won't. it's the greatest happiness for the plainest number." * * * * * certainly it was the most successful cotillion. as dodo had arranged, all the more unattractive people got selected first, and all the more attractive, as dodo had foreseen, saw exactly what was happening. the style was distinctly anti-leap-year and in the mirror-figure men, instead of women, rejected the faces in the glass, and lord ayr had nothing whatever to say to his wife, who was instantly accepted by jack. and at the end, the band preceding, they danced through the entire house, from cellar to garret. they waltzed through drawing-rooms and dining-room, and up the stairs, and through dodo's bedroom, and through jack's dressing-room, where his pajamas were lying on his bed (berts put them on _en passant_), and into _cul-de-sacs_, and impenetrable servants' rooms. and somehow it was dodo all the time who inspired these childish orgies: those near her saw her, those behind danced wildly after her. there was no accounting for it, except in the fact that while she was enjoying herself so enormously, it was impossible not to enjoy too. sometimes it was she shrieking, "yes, straight on," sometimes it was her laugh-choked voice, saying "no, don't go in there," but the fact that she was leading them, with her nursery fender, and her vitality, and her ropes of pearls, and her complete _abandon_ to the spirit of dancing, with berts for partner in jack's pajamas, made a magnet that it was impossible not to follow. they passed through bedroom and attic, they went twice round the huge kitchen, where the _chef_, at dodo's imperious command, laid down his culinary implements (which at the moment meant an ice-pail) and joined the dance with the first kitchen-maid. then dodo saw a footman standing idle, and called to him, "take my maid, william," and william with a broad grin embraced a perfectly willing frenchwoman of great attractions, and joined in the dance. like the fairies in a midsummer-night's dream, they danced the whole hour through, dodo with berts, the chef with the kitchen-maid, william with dodo's maid, lord ayr with nadine, lady ayr with somebody whom nobody knew by sight, who had probably come there by mistake, and the first twenty couples or so finished up in the cellar. this, though it seemed improvised, had been provided for, and there were cane-chairs to rest in, and bottles instantly opened. the rest, following the band, danced their way back to the supper-room, where they were almost immediately joined by the cellar party, who were hungry as well as thirsty, and had nothing to eat down below. * * * * * it was between three and four o'clock that the last guests took their ways. as the dance had been announced to take place from ten till two, the cordial spirit of the invitation had been made good. and at length dodo found herself alone with jack. "lovely, just lovely," she said, as he unclasped her diamond collar. "oh, jack, what a darling world it is!" "not tired?" dodo faced round, and her brilliance and freshness was a thing to marvel at "look at me!" she said. "tell me if i look tired!" he laid the collar down on her table: her neck seemed to him so infinitely more beautiful than the gorgeous bauble with which it had been covered, a beauty released from beauteous bonds. "not very. ah, dodo, and this is the best of all, when they have all gone, and you are left." she put her face up to his. "why, of course," she said. "do you suppose i wasn't looking forward to this one minute alone with you all the evening? i was, my dear, though if i said i thought of it all the time, i should be telling a silly lie. but it was anchored firmly in my mind all the time. oh, what pretty speeches for a middle-aged old couple to make to each other! but the fact is that we get on very nicely together. good-night, old boy. it's all too lovely. oh, daddy! fancy becoming daddy! oh, by the way, did hugh come? i didn't see him." "yes, he sat out a couple of dances with nadine, and then went away." "poor old chap!" said dodo. as has been mentioned, dodo proposed to take her family and a great many other people as well to spend christmas down at meering, which at this inclement time of the year often had spells of warm and genial weather. scattered through the same weeks there were to be several shooting-parties at winston, but motor-cars, driven at a sufficiently high speed, made light of the difficulty of being in two places at the same time, and on the day after the dance she talked these arrangements over with nadine. "in any case," she said, "you can be hostess in one house and i, in the other, so that we can be in two places at once quite easily, so jack is wrong as usual. jack dear, i said 'as usual.'" jack got up: it was he who had made the ill-considered remark that you can't be in two places at once. "i heard," he said, "and you may hear, too, that i will not have you going up to north wales every other day, and flying down again the next. otherwise you may settle what you like. personally, i shall be at winston almost all the time, as there's a heap of business to be done, and as nadine hates shooting-parties--" "oh, a story!" said nadine. "well, my dear, you always do your best to spoil them by making a large quantity of young gentlemen, who have been asked to shoot, sit round you and talk to you instead." "papa jack, if you want to call me a flirt, pray do so. i will forgive you instantly. and to save you trouble, i will tell you what you are driving to--" "at," said jack. "driving to," repeated nadine with considerable asperity, for she was aware she was wrong. "you want me to be at meering, and mama to be at winston. so why not say so without calling me a flirt?" "this daughter of eve--" began jack. "my name is dorothea," interrupted dodo, "but they call me dodo for short. i was never called eve either before, during, or after baptism." "all i mean," said jack, "is that dorothea is not going to divide the week into week-ends, and be twenty-four hours at meering and then twenty-four at winston. the master of the house has spoken." "what a bully!" said nadine. "then i shan't give you a wedding-present," said jack. "darling papa jack, you are not a bully. let's all go down to meering in a few days, and stop there over christmas. then you and dorothea shall go to winston, and i shall be left all alone at meering, and you shall have your horrid shooting-parties and she shall do the flirting instead of me." "strictly speaking, will you be all alone at meering?" "not absolutely. i have asked a few friends." "who is going to chaperone you all, darling?" said dodo. "we shall chaperone each other, as usual." "that you and dodo can settle," said jack. "good-by: don't quarrel." "indeed, that will be all right, mama," said nadine, "or i daresay edith would come. anyhow, we were often all together before like that in the summer." "yes, my dear, but it's a little different now," said dodo. "you are engaged to seymour, and hugh is going to be there, too." "yes, but that makes it all the simpler." dodo got up. "i wonder if you realize that seymour is in love with you," she said. "in love with you like hugh is, i mean." "perfectly, and he is charming about it," said nadine. "and i practise every morning being in love with him like that. i think i am getting on very well. i dreamed about him last night. i thought he gave me a great box of jade and when i opened it, there was a rabbit inside--" "that shows great progress," said dodo. "mama, i think you are laughing at me. but what would you have? i am very fond of him, he is handsome and clever and charming. i expected to find it tiresome when he told me he was in love like that, but it is not the least so." memories of the man she had married when she was even younger than nadine, came unbidden into dodo's mind: she remembered her first husband's blind, dog-like devotion and her own _ennui_ when he strove to express it, to communicate it to her. "nadine," she said, "treat it reverently, my dear. there is nothing in the world that a man can give a woman that is to be compared to that. it is better than a rabbit in a jade-box. when i was even younger than you, papa jack's cousin gave it me, and--and i didn't reverence it. don't repeat my irreparable error." "weren't you nice to him?" asked nadine. "i was a brute beast to him, my darling." "oh, i shan't be a brute beast to seymour," said nadine. "besides, i don't suppose you were. you didn't know: wasn't that all?" dodo wiped the mist from her eyes. "no, that wasn't nearly all. but be tender with it, and pray, oh, my dear, pray, that you may catch that--that 'noble fever.' who calls it that? it is so true. and hughie? i never saw him last night." nadine made a little gesture of despair. "ah, dear hughie," she said. "that is not very happy. that is so largely why i wanted to marry seymour quickly, in january instead of later, so that it may be done, and hughie will not fret any more. i hate seeing him suffer, and i can't marry him. it would not be fair: it would be cheating him, as i told him before." "but you are not cheating seymour?" asked dodo. "not in the same way. he is not simple, like hugh. hugh has only one thought: seymour has plenty of others. he has such a mind: it is subtle and swift like a woman's. hughie has the mind of a great retriever dog, and the eyes of one. there is all the difference in the world between them. seymour knows what he is in for, and still wants it. hugh thinks he knows, but he doesn't. i understand hugh so well: i know i am right. and i would have given anything to be able to be in love with him. it was a pity!" there was something here that dodo had not known and there was a dangerous sound about it. "do you mean you wish you were in love with him?" she asked. "oh, yes, mama, but i'm not. i used to practice trying to be for months and months, just as i am practising for seymour now. la, la, what a world!" nadine paused a moment. "of course i've quite stopped practising being in love with hugh since i was engaged to seymour," she said with an air of the most candid virtue. "that _would_ be cheating." nadine got up looking like a tall white lily. "seymour is so good for me," she said. "he doesn't think much of my brain, you know, and i used to think a good deal of it. he doesn't say i'm stupid, but he hasn't got the smallest respect for my mind. i am not sure whether he is right, but i expect seeing so much of hugh made me think i was clever. i wonder if being in love makes people stupid. he himself seems to me to be not quite so subtle as he was, and perhaps it's my fault. what do you think, mama?" chapter ix it was the morning after christmas day, and dodo and jack had just driven off from meering on their way to winston, where a shooting-party was to assemble that day, leaving behind them a party that regretted their departure, but did not mean to repine. edith arbuthnot had promised to arrive two days before, to take over from dodo the duty of chaperone, but she had not yet come, nor had anything whatever been heard of her. "which shows," said berts lucidly, "that nothing unpleasant can have happened to mother, or we should have heard." until she came nadine had very kindly consented to act as regent, and in that capacity she appeared in the hall a little while after dodo had gone, with a large red contadina umbrella, a book or two, and an expressed determination to sit out on the hillside till lunch-time. "it is boxing-day, i know," she said, "but it is too warm to box, even if i knew how. the english climate has gone quite mad, and i have told my maid to put my fur coat in a box with those little white balls until may. now i suppose you are all going to play the foolish game with those other little white balls till lunch." seymour was seated in the window-sill, stitching busily at a piece of embroidery which antoinette had started for him. "i am going to do nothing of the sort," he said. "it is much too fine a day to do anything so limited as to play golf. besides there is no one here fit to play with. nadine, will you be very kind and ring for my maid? i am getting in a muddle." berts, who was sitting near him, got up, looking rather ill. also he resented being told he was not fit to play with. "may i have my perambulator, please, nadine?" he asked. seymour grinned. "berts, you are easier to get a rise out of than any one i ever saw," he remarked. "it is hardly worth while fishing for you, for you are always on the feed. and if you attempt to rag, i shall prick you with my needle." nadine lingered a little after the others had gone, and as soon as they were alone seymour put down his embroidery. "may i come and sit on the hillside with you?" he asked. "or is the--the box-seat already engaged?" "hugh suggested it," she said. "i was going out with him." seymour picked up his work again. "it seems to me i am behaving rather nicely," he said. "at the same time i'm not sure that i am not behaving rather anemically. i haven't seen you much since i came down here. and after all i didn't come down here to see esther." nadine frowned, and laid her hand on his arm. but she did not do it quite instinctively. it was clear she thought it would be appropriate. certainly that was quite clear to seymour. "take that hand away," he said. "you only put it there because it was suitable. you didn't want to touch me." nadine removed her hand, as if his coat-sleeve was red-hot. "you are rather a brute," she said. "no, i am not, unless it is brutal to tell you what you know already. i repeat that i am behaving rather nicely." it was owing to him to do him justice. "i know you are," she said, "you are behaving very nicely indeed. but it is only for a short time, seymour. i don't mean that you won't always behave nicely, but that there are only a limited number of days on which this particular mode of niceness will be required of you, or be even possible. hugh is going away next week; after that you and i will be darby and joan before he sees me again. you are all behaving nicely: he is too. he just wanted one week more of the old days, when we didn't think, but only babbled and chattered. i can't say that he is reviving them with very conspicuous success: he doesn't babble much, and i am sure he thinks furiously all the time. but he wanted the opportunity: it wasn't much to give him." "especially since i pay," said seymour quickly. he saw the blood leap to nadine's face. "i'm sorry," he said. "i oughtn't to have said that, though it is quite true. but i pay gladly: you must believe that also. and i'm glad hugh is behaving nicely, that he doesn't indulge in--in embarrassing reflections. also, when does he go away?" "tuesday, i think." "morning?" asked seymour hopefully. nadine laughed: he had done that cleverly, making a parody and a farce out of that which a moment before had been quite serious. "you deserve it should be," she said. "then it is sure to be in the afternoon. now i've finished being spit-fire--i want to ask you something. you haven't been up to your usual form of futile and clannish conversation. you have been rather plaintive and windy--" "windy?" asked nadine. "yes, full of sighs, and i should say it was shakespeare. are you worrying about anything?" she looked up at him with complete candor. "why, of course, about hughie," she said. "how should i not?" "i don't care two straws about that," said seymour, "as long as your worrying is not connected with me. i mean i am sorry you worry, but i don't care. of course you worry about hugh. i understand that, because i understand what hugh feels, and one doesn't like one's friends feeling like that. but it's not about--about you and me?" nadine shook her head and seymour got up. "well, let us all be less plaintive," he said. "i have been rather plaintive too. i think i shall go and take on that great foolish berts at golf. he will be plaintive afterwards, but nobody minds what berts is." * * * * * whatever plaintiveness there was about, was certainly not shared by the weather, which, if it was mad, as nadine had suggested, was possessed by a very genial kind of mania. an octave of spring-like days, with serene suns, and calm seas, and light breezes from the southwest had decreed an oasis in midwinter, warm halcyon days made even in december the snowdrops and aconites to blossom humbly and bravely, and set the birds to busy themselves with sticks and straws as if nesting-time was already here. new grass already sprouted green among the grayness of the older growths, and it seemed almost cynical to doubt that spring was not verily here. indeed where hugh and nadine sat this morning, it was may not march that seemed to have invaded and conquered december; there lay upon the hillside a vernal fragrance that set a stray bee or two buzzing round the honied sweetness of the gorse with which the time of blossoming is never quite over, and to-day all the winds were still, and no breeze stirred in the bare slender birches, or set the spring-like stalks of the heather quivering. only, very high up in the unplumbed blue of the zenith thin fleecy clouds lay stretched in streamers and combed feathers of white, showing that far above them rivers of air swept headlong and swift. nadine had a favorite nook on this steep hillside below the house, reached by a path that stretched out to the south of the bay. it was a little hollow, russet-colored now with the bracken, of the autumn, and carpeted elsewhere by the short-napped velvet of the turf. just in front, the cliff plunged sheer down to the beach, where they had so often bathed in the summer, and where the reef of tumbled sandstone rocks stretched out into the waveless sea, like brown amphibious monsters that were fish at high tide and grazing beasts at the ebb. down there below, a school of gulls hovered and fished with wheelings of white wings, but not a ripple lapped the edges of the rocks. only the sea breathed softly as in sleep, stirring the fringes of brown weed that had gathered there, but no thinnest line of white showed breaking water. along the sandy foreshore of the bay there was the same stillness: heaven and earth and ocean lay as if under an enchantment. the sand dunes opposite, and the hills beyond, lay reflected in the sea, as if in the tranquillity of some land-locked lake. there was a spell, a hush over the world, to be broken by god-knew-what gentle awakening of activity, or catastrophic disturbance. * * * * * the two had walked to this withdrawn hollow of the hill almost in silence. he had offered to carry her books for her, but she had said that they were of no weight, and after pause he had announced a fragment of current news to which she had no comment to add, but had noticed the windless, unnatural calm of the day. something in this unusual stillness of weather had set her nerves a-quiver, and perhaps the position she was in, bound as she was to seymour, not struggling against it, but quite accepting it, made ordinary intercourse difficult. for she had it all her own way, hugh was behaving with exemplary discretion, seymour was behaving with admirable tolerance, and just because they both made her own part so easy for her, she, womanlike, found the smoothed-out performance of it to be difficult. had she instructed each of them how to behave, her instructions were carried out to the letter's foot: they were impeccable as lover and rejected lover, and therefore she wanted something different. the situation was completely of her own making: her actors played their parts exactly as she would have them play, and yet there was something wanting. they were too well-drilled, too word-perfect, too certain to say all she had designed for them from the right spot, and in the right voice. true, for a moment just now seymour had shown signs of individualism when he called attention to the fact that he was behaving very nicely, and that he would be glad when the scene was over, but hugh had shown none whatever, except for the fact that he had been asked to be allowed a few days like the old days agone before he left england. he had assured her in the summer that he would never seek to get back into the atmosphere of unthinking intimacy again, but, poor fellow, when there were to be so few days left him, before the situation was sealed and made irrevocable, his heart had cried out against the edict of his will and, foolish though it might be, he had asked for this week of meering days. but from his point of view, no less than from hers, they had been but a parody of what he had hoped for, they had been frozen and congealed by the reserve and restraint that he dared not break. below that surface-ice, he knew how swiftly ran the torrent in his soul, but the ice quite stretched from shore to shore. it was this which disappointed nadine: for she equally with hugh had expected that he could realize the impossible, and that he, loving her as he did and knowing that she was so soon to give herself to another man, could cast off the knowledge of that, and resume for a space the unshackled intimacy of old. the ethiopian and the leopard would have found their appropriate feats far easier, for it was hugh's bones and blood he had to change, not mere skin and hair, and the very strength of the bond that bound him to her made the insuperableness of the barrier. he felt every moment the utter failure of his attempt, while she, who thought she understood him so well, had no notion how radical the failure was. not loving, she could not understand. he knew that now, and thought bitterly of the little fireworks of words she had once lit for him on that same text, believing that by the light of those quick little squibs, she could read his heart. so, when they were settled in their nook, once again she tried to recapture the old ease. she pointed downwards over the edge of the cliff. "oh, hughie, what a morning," she said. "quiet sea and gulls, and bees and gorse. what a summer in december, a truce with winter, isn't it? i've brought a handful of nice books. shall i read?" "oh, soon," said he. "but your summer in december isn't going to last long. there is a wind coming, and a big one. look at the mare's-tails of clouds up above. can't you smell the wind coming? i always can. and the barometer has dropped nearly an inch since last night." he put back his head and sniffed, moving his nostrils rather like a horse. "oh, how fascinating," said nadine. "if i do that shall i smell the wind?" it made her sneeze instead. "i don't think much of that," she said. "i expect you looked at the barometer before you smelt the wind. besides, how is it possible to smell the wind before there is any wind to smell? and when it comes you feel it instead." "it will be a big storm," said hugh. even as he spoke some current of air stirred the surface of the sea below them, shattering the reflections. it was as if some great angel of the air had breathed on the polished mirror of the water, dimming it. next moment the breath cleared away again, and the surface was as bright and unwavering as before. but some half-dozen of the gulls that had been hovering and chiding there, rose into the higher air, leaving their feeding-ground, and after circling round once or twice, glided away over the sand dunes inland. almost immediately afterwards, another relay followed, and another, till the bay that had been so populous with birds was quite deserted. they did not pause in their flight, but went straight inland, in decreasing specks of white till they vanished altogether. "the gulls seem to think so, too," said hugh. "then they are perfectly wrong," said nadine. "the instincts nature implants in animals are almost invariably incorrect. for instance, the siberian tigers at the zoo. for several years they never grew winter coats, and all the naturalists went down on their knees and said: 'o wonderful mother nature! their instincts tell them this is a milder climate than siberia.' but this winter, the mildest ever known, the poor things have grown the thickest winter coats ever seen. so all the naturalists had to get up again, and dust their trousers where they had knelt down." "put your money on the gulls and me," said hugh. "look there again, far away along the sands." to nadine, the most attractive feature about hugh was his eyes. they had a far-away look in them that had nothing whatever spiritual or sentimental in it, but was simply due to the fact that he had extraordinarily long sight. she obediently screwed up her eyes and followed his direction, but saw nothing whatever of import. "it's getting nearer: you'll see it soon," said hugh. soon she saw. a whirlwind of sand was advancing towards them along the beach below, revolving giddily. as it came nearer they could see the loose pieces of seaweed and jetsam being caught up into it. it came forward in a straight line, perhaps as fast as a man might run, getting taller as it approached and gyrating more violently. then in its advance it came into collision with the wall of cliff on which they sat, and was shattered. they could hear, like the sound of rain, the sand and rubbish of which it was composed falling upon the rocks. "oh, but did you invent that, hughie?" she said. "it was quite a pretty trick. was it a sign to this faithless generation, which is me, that you could smell the wind? or did the gulls do it? prophesy to me again!" he lay back on the dry grass. "trouble coming, trouble coming," he said. "just the storm?" she asked. "or is this more prophecy?" "oh, just the storm," he said. "i always feel depressed and irritated before a storm." "are you depressed and irritated?" she asked. "sorry. i thought it was such a nice, calm morning." hugh took up a book at random, which proved to be swinburne's "poems and ballads." at random he opened it, and saw the words: "and though she saw all heaven in flower above, she would not love." "oh, do read," said nadine. "anything: just where you opened it." hugh sat up, a bitterness welling in his throat. he read: "and though she saw all heaven in flower above, she would not love." nadine flushed slightly, and was annoyed with herself for flushing. she could not help knowing what must be in his mind, and tried to make a diversion. "i don't think she was to be blamed," she said. "a quantity of flowers stuck all over the sky would look very odd, and i don't think would kindle anybody's emotions. that sounds rather a foolish poem. read something else." hugh shut the book. "'though all we fell on sleep, she would not weep,' is the end of another stanza," he said. nadine looked at him for a long moment, her lips parted as if to speak, but they only quivered; no words came. there was no doubt whatever as to what hugh meant, but still, with love unawakened, and with her tremendous egotism rampant, she saw no further than he was behaving very badly to her. he had come down here to renew the freedom and intimacy of old days: till to-day he had been silent, stupid, but when he spoke like this, silence and stupidity were better. she was sorry for him, very sorry, but the quiver of her lips half at least consisted of self-pity that he made her suffer too. "you mean me," she said, speaking at length, and speaking very rapidly. "it is odious of you. you know quite well i am sorry: i have told you so. i cried: i remember i cried when you made that visit to winston, and the cow looked at me. i daresay you are suffering damned torments, but you are being unfair. though i don't love you--like that, i wish i did. do you think i make you suffer for my own amusement? is it fun to see my best friend like that? is it my fault? you have chosen to love this heartless person, me. if i had no liver, or no lungs, instead of no heart, you would be sorry for me. instead you reproach me. oh, not in words, but you meant me, when you said that. where is the book out of which you read? there, i do that to it: i send it into the sea, and when the gulls come back they will peck it, or the sea will drown it first, and the wind which you smell will blow it to america. you don't understand: you are more stupid than the gulls." she made one swift motion with her arm, and "poems and ballads" flopped in the sea as the book dived clear of the cliff into the high-water sea below. more imminent than the storm which hugh had prophesied was the storm in their souls. he, with his love baffled, raged at the indifference with which she had given herself to another, she, distrusting for the first time, the sense and wisdom of her gift, raged at him for his rebellion against her choice. "don't speak," she said, "for i will tell you more things first. you are jealous of seymour--" hugh threw back his head and laughed. "jealous of seymour?" he cried. "do you really think i would marry you if you consented in the spirit in which you are taking him? once, it is true, i wanted to. you refused to cheat me--those were your words--and i begged you to cheat me, i implored you to cheat me, so long as you gave me yourself. "i didn't care how you took me, so long as you took me. but now i wouldn't take you like that. now, for this last week, i have seen you and him together, and i know what it is like." "you haven't seen us together much," said nadine. "i have seen you enough: i told you before that your marriage was a farce. i was wrong. it's much worse than a farce. you needn't laugh at a farce. but you can't help laughing, at least i can't, at a tragedy so ludicrous." nadine got up. the situation was as violent and sudden as some electric storm. what had been pent-up in him all this week, had exploded: something in her exploded also. "i think i hate you," she said. "i am sure i despise you," said he. he got up also, facing her. it was like the bursting of a reservoir: the great sheet of quiet water was suddenly turned into torrents and foam. "i despise you," he said again. "you intended me to love you; you encouraged me to let myself go. all the time you held yourself in, though there was nothing to hold in; you observed, you dissected. you cut down with your damned scalpels and lancets to my heart, and said, 'how interesting to see it beating!' then you looked coolly over your shoulder and saw seymour, and said, 'he will do: he doesn't love me and i don't love him!' but now he does love you, and you probably guess that. so, very soon, your lancet will come out again, and you will see his heart beating. and again you will say, 'how interesting!' but there will be blood on your lancet. you are safe, of course, from reprisals. no one can cut into you, and see your blood flow, because you haven't any blood. you are something cold and hellish. you often said you understood me too well. now you understand me even better. toast my heart, fry it, eat it up! i am utterly at your mercy, and you haven't got any mercy. but i can manage to despise you: i can't do much else." nadine stood quite still, breathing rather quickly, and that movement of the nostrils, which she had tried to copy from him, did not make her sneeze now. "it is well we should know each other," she said with an awful cold bitterness, "even though we shall know each other for so little time more. it is always interesting to see the real person--" "if you mean me," he said hotly, "i always showed you the real person. i have never acted to you, nor pretended. and i have not changed. i am not responsible if you cannot see!" nadine passed her tongue over her lips. they seemed hard and dry, not flexible enough for speech. "it was my blindness then," she said. "but we know where we are now. i hate you, and you despise me. we know now." then suddenly an impulse, wholy uncontrollable, and coming from she knew not where, seized and compelled her. she held out both her hands to him. "hughie, shake hands with me," she said. "this has been nightmare talk, a bad thing that one dreams. shake hands with me, and that will wake us both up. what we have been saying to each other is impossible: it isn't real or true. it is utter nonsense we have been talking." how he longed to take her hands and clasp them and kiss them! how he longed to wipe off all he had said, all she had said. but somehow it was beyond him to do it. it was by honest impulse that the words of hate and contempt had risen to their lips; the words might be canceled, but what could not be quenched, until some mistake was shown in the workings of their souls, was the thought-fire that had made them boil up. she stood there, lovely and welcoming, the girl whom his whole soul loved, whose conduct his whole soul despised, eager for reconciliation, yearning for a mutual forgiveness. but her request was impossible. god could not cancel the bitterness that had made him speak. he threw his hands wide. "it's no good," he said. "i am sorry i said certain things, for there was no use in saying them. but i can't help feeling that which made me say them. cancel the speeches by all means. let the words be unsaid with all my heart." "but let us be prepared to say them again?" said nadine quietly. "it comes to that." "yes, it comes to that. i am not jealous of seymour. i laughed when you suggested it; and i am not jealous, because you don't love him. if you loved him, i should be jealous, and i should say, 'god bless you!' as it is--" "as it is, you say 'damn you,'" said nadine. hugh shook his head. "you don't understand anything about love," he said. "how can you until you know a little bit what it means? i could no more think or say 'damn you,' than i could say 'god bless you.'" nadine had withdrawn from her welcome and desire for reconciliation. "neither would make any difference to me," she said. "i don't suppose they would, since i make no difference to you," said he. "but there is no sense in adding hypocrisy to our quarrel." nadine sat down again on the sweet turf. "i cancel my words, then, even if you do not," she said. "i don't hate you. i can't hate you, any more than you can despise me. we must have been talking in nightmare." "i am used to nightmare," said hugh. "i have had six months of nightmare. i thought that i could wake; i thought i could--could pinch myself awake by seeing you and seymour together. but it's still nightmare." nadine looked up at him. "oh, hughie, if i loved you!" she said. hugh looked at her a moment, and then turned away from her. outside of his control certain muscles worked in his throat; he felt strangled. "i can say 'god bless you' for that, nadine," he said huskily. "i do say it. god bless you, my darling." nadine had leaned her face on her hands when he turned away. she divined why he turned from her, she heard the huskiness of his voice, and the thought of hughie wanting to cry gave her a pang that she had never yet known the like of. there was a long silence, she sitting with hand-buried face, he seeing the sunlight swim and dance through his tears. then he touched her on the shoulder. "so we are friends again in spite of ourselves," he said. "just one thing more then, since we can talk without--without hatred and contempt. why did you refuse to marry me, because you did not love me, and yet consent to marry seymour like that?" she looked up at him. "oh, hughie, you fool," she said. "because you matter so much more." he smiled back at her. "i don't want to wish i mattered less," he said. "you couldn't matter less." he had no reply to this, and sat down again beside her. after a little nadine turned to him. "and i said i thought it was such a calm morning," she said. "and i said that storm was coming," said he. she laid her hand on his knee. "and will there be some pleasant weather now?" she said. "oh, hughie, what wouldn't i give to get two or three of the old days back again, when we babbled and chattered and were so content?" "speak for yourself, miss," said hugh. "and for god's sake don't let us begin again. i shall quarrel with you again, and--and it gives me a pain. look here, it's a bad job for me all this, but i came here to get an oasis: also to pinch myself awake: metaphors are confusing things. bring on your palms and springs. they haven't put in an appearance yet. let's try anyhow." nadine sat up. "talking of the weather--" she began. "i wasn't." "yes, you were, before we began to exchange compliments." she broke off suddenly. "oh, hughie, what has happened to the sun?" she said. "i know it is the moon," said hugh. "you needn't quote that. the shrew is tamed for a time. it's a shrew-mouse, a lady mouse with a foul temper; do you think? about the sun--look." it was worth looking at. right round it, two or three diameters away, ran a complete halo, a pale white line in the abyss of the blue sky. the little feathers of wind-blown clouds had altogether vanished, and the heavens were untarnished from horizon to zenith. but the heat of the rays had sensibly diminished, and though the sunshine appeared as whole-hearted as ever, it was warm no longer. "this is my second conjuring-trick," said hugh. "i make you a whirlwind, and now i make you a ring round the sun, and cut off the heating apparatus. things are going to happen. look at the sea, too. my orders." the sea was also worth looking at. an hour ago it had been turquoise blue, reflecting the sky. now it seemed to reflect a moonstone. it was gray-white, a corpse of itself, as it had been. then even as they looked, it seemed to vanish altogether. the horizon line was blotted out, for the sky was turning gray also, and both above and below, over the cliff-edge, there was nothing but an invisible gray of emptiness. the sun halo spread both inwards and outwards, so that the sun itself peered like a white plate through some layer of vapor that had suddenly formed across the whole field of the heavens. and still not a whistle or sigh of wind sounded. hugh got up. "as i have forgotten what my third conjuring trick is," he said, "i think we had better go home. it looks as if it was going to be a violent one." he paused a moment, peering out into the invisible sea. then there came a shrill faint scream from somewhere out in the dim immensity. "hold on to me, nadine," he cried. "or lie down." he felt her arm in his, and they stood there together. the scream increased in volume, becoming a maniac bellow. then, like a solid wall, the wind hit them. it did not begin, out of the dead calm, as a breeze; it did not grow from breeze to wind; it came from seawards, like the waters of the red sea on the hosts of pharaoh, an overwhelming wall of riot and motion. nadine's books, all but the one she had cast over the cliff's edge, turned over, and lay with flapping pages; then like wounded birds they were blown along the hillside. the hat she had brought out with her, but had not put on, rose straight in the air, and vanished. hugh, with nadine on his arm, had leaned forward against this maniac blast, and the two were not thrown down by it. the path to the house lay straight up the steep hillside behind them, and turning they were so blown up it, that they stumbled in trying to keep pace to that irresistible torrent of wind that hurried them along. it took them but five minutes to get up the steep brae, while it had taken them ten minutes to walk down, and already there flew past them seaweed and sand and wrack, blown up from the beach below. above, the sun was completely veiled, a riot of cloud had already obscured the higher air, but below, all was clear, and it looked as if a stone could be tossed upon the hills on the farther side of the bay. they had to cross the garden before they came to the house. already two trees had fallen before this hurricane-blast, and even as they hurried over the lawn, an elm, screaming in all its full-foliaged boughs, leaned towards them, and cracked and fell. then a chimney in the house itself wavered in outline, and next moment it crashed down upon the roof, and a covey of flying tiles fell round them. it required hugh's full strength to close the door again, after they had entered, and nadine turned to him, flushed and ecstatic. "hughie, how divine!" she said. "it can't be measured, that lovely force. it's infinite. i never knew there was strength like that. why have we come in? let's go out again. it's god: it's just god." his eyes, too, were alight with it and his soul surged to his lips. "yes, god," he said. "and that's what love is. rather--rather big, isn't it?" and then for the first time, nadine understood. she did not feel, but she was able to understand. "oh, hughie," she said, "how splendid it must be to feel like that!" * * * * * the section of the party which had gone to play golf on this changeable morning, were blown home a few minutes later, and they all met at lunch. edith arbuthnot had arrived before any of them got back, and asked if the world had been blown away. as it had not, she expressed herself ready to chaperone anybody. "and berts is happy too," said seymour, when he came in very late for lunch, since he wished to change all his clothes first, as they 'smelled of wind,' "because berts has at last driven a ball two hundred yards. don't let us mention the subject of golf. it would be tactless. there was no wind when he accomplished that remarkable feat, at least not more wind than there is now. what there was was behind him, and he topped his ball heavily. i said 'good shot.' but i have tact. since i have tact, i don't say to nadine that it was a good day to sit out on the hillside and read. i would scorn the suggestion." a sudden sound as of drums on the window interrupted this tactful speech, and the panes streamed. "anyhow i shall play golf," said edith. "what does a little rain matter? i'm not made of paper." "that's a good thing, mother," said berts. "if you want to win a match, play with berts," said seymour pensively. "but if you only want to be blown away and killed, anybody will do. i shall get on with my embroidery this afternoon, and my maid will sit by me and hold my hand. dear me, i hope the house is well built." for the moment it certainly seemed as if this was not the case, for the whole room shook under a sudden gust more appalling than anything they had felt yet. then it died away again, and once more the windows were deluged with sheets of rain flung, it seemed, almost horizontally against them. for a few minutes only that lasted, and then the wind settled down, so it seemed, to blow with a steady uniform violence. nadine had finished lunch and gone across to the window. the air was perfectly clear, and the hills across the bay seemed again but a stone's-throw away. overhead, straight across the sky, stretched a roof of cloud, but away to the west, just above the horizon line, there was an arch of perfectly clear sky, of pale duck's-egg green, and out of this it seemed as out of a funnel the fury of the gale was poured. the garden was strewn with branches and battered foliage and the long gravel path flooded by the tempest of rain was discharging itself upon the lawn, where pools of bright yellow water were spreading. across it too lay the wreck of the fallen trees, the splintered corpses of what an hour ago had been secure and living things, waiting, warm and drowsy, for the tingle of springtime and rising sap. like the bodies of young men on a battlefield, with their potentialities of love and life unfulfilled, there, by the blast of the insensate fury of the wind they lay stricken and dead, and the birds would no more build in their branches, nor make their shadowed nooks melodious with love-songs. no more would summer clothe them in green, nor autumn in their liveries of gold: they were dead things and at the most would make a little warmth on the hearth, before the feathery ash, all that was left of them, was dispersed on the homeless winds. but the pity of this blind wantonness of destruction was more than compensated for in the girl's mind by the savagery and force of the unlooked-for hurricane, and she easily persuaded hugh to come out with her and be beaten and stormed upon. always sensitive to the weather, this portentous storm had aroused in her a sort of rapture of restlessness: she rejoiced in it, and somehow feared it for its ruthlessness and indifference. they took the path that led downward to the beach, for it was the tumult and madness of the sea that nadine especially wished to observe. though as yet the gale had been blowing only an hour or two, it had raised a monstrous sea, and long before they came down within sight of it, they heard the hoarse thunder and crash of broken waters penetrating the screaming bellow of the gale, and the air was salt with spray and flying foam. to the west there was still clear that arch of open sky through which the gale poured; somewhere behind the clouds to the left of it, the sun was near to its setting, and a pale livid light shone out of it, catching the tops of the breakers as they streamed landwards. between these foam-capped tops lay gray hollows and darknesses, out of which would suddenly boil another crest of mountainous water. the tide was only at half flood, but the sea, packed by the astounding wind, was already breaking at the foot of the cliffs themselves, while in the troughs of the waves as they rode in, there appeared and disappeared again the scattered rocks from some remote cliff-fall, that were strewn about the beach. sometimes a wave would strike one of these full, and be shattered against it, spouting heavenwards in a column of solid water; oftener the breakers swept over them unbroken, until with menace of their toppling crests they flung themselves with huge tongues of hissing water on the rocks at the foot of the cliffs. then with the scream of the withdrawn shingle the spent water was furiously dragged back to the base of the next incoming wave, and was caught up again to hurl itself against the land. sometimes a sudden blast of wind would cut off the crest of the billow even as it curled over, and fling it, a monstrous riband of foam, through the air, sometimes two waves converging rose up in a fountain of water, and fell back without having reached the shore. this way and that, rushing and rolling, in hills and valleys of water, the maddened sea crashed and thundered, and every moment the spray rose more densely from the infernal cauldron. then as the tide rose higher, the waves came in unbroken, and hurled their tons of water against the face of the cliff itself. above, continuous as a water-fall, rose the roar and scream of the gale, ominous, insensate, bewildering: it was as if the elements were being transferred back into the chaos out of which they came. nadine and hugh, clinging together for support, stood there for some minutes, half-way down the side of the cliff, watching the terror and majesty of the spectacle, she utterly absorbed in it and cruelly unconscious of him. then, since they could no longer get down to the base of the cliff, they skirted along it till they came to the sandy foreshore of the bay. there from water-level they could better see the hugeness of the tumult, the strange hardness and steepness of the wave-slopes. it was as if a line of towers and great buildings were throwing themselves down upon the sands, and breaking up into walls and eddies of foam-sheeted water, while behind them there rose again another street of toppling buildings, which again shattered itself on the beach. great balls of foam torn from the spent water trundled by them on the sands, and bunches of brown seaweed torn from the rocks were flung in handfuls at their feet. once from the arch in the sky westwards, a dusky crimson light suddenly burned, turning the wave crests to blood, and then as the darkness of the early winter sunset gathered, they turned, and were blown up the steep cliff-path again, wet and buffeted. conversation had been altogether impossible, and they could but communicate with pointing finger, and nodding head. yet, somehow, to be together thus, cut off by the rise of winds and waves, from all sense of the existence of others, in that pandemonium of tempest, gave to hugh at least a closer feeling of intimacy with nadine, than he had ever yet known. she clung to him, she sheltered under his shoulder, unconsciously, instinctively, as an animal trusts his master, without knowing it is trusting. and that to his aching hunger for her was something.... but the gale was to bring them closer together yet. chapter x all the evening and all night long the gale continued. now and then the constant scream of it would leap upwards a couple of octaves as a shriller blast struck the houses and again for a moment the mad chant would drop into silence. from time to time like a tattoo of drums the rain battered at the window-panes, but through it all, whether in hushes of the wind or when its fiercest squall descended, the beat of the surf sounded ever louder. and all through the night, the result perhaps of his agitated talk with nadine in the morning, or of his intimate gale-encompassed isolation with her in the afternoon, hugh turned and tossed midway between sleeping and waking. sometimes he seemed to himself to be yelling round the house among the spirits of the air seeking admittance, sometimes it seemed to him that he was being beaten on by the hammer of the surf, and whether he was homelessly wandering outside among the spirits of the wind, or was being done to death by those incessant blows of the beating waves, it was nadine that he sought. and as the night went on the anguish of his desire grew ever more acute, and the beating of the waves a more poignant torture, until while yet no faintest lightening of winter's dawn had touched the gross blackness of the night, he roused himself completely, and sat up in bed and turned on his light. to him awake the riot outside was vastly magnified compared with the dimmer trouble of his dream; so was his yearning for nadine. his windows looked eastwards away from the quarter of the gale, and getting out of bed, he lifted a sash, and peered out. nothing whatever could be seen; it was as if he gazed into the darkness of the nethermost pit, out of which blown by the blast of the anger of god came the shrieks of souls that might not rest, driven forever along, drenched by the river of their unavailing tears. even though he was awake the strange remote horror of nightmare was on him, and it was in vain that he tried to comfort himself, by saying, like some child repeating a senseless lesson, "a deep depression has reached us traveling eastwards from the atlantic." he tried to read, but still the nightmare-sense possessed him, and he fancied he had to read a whole line, neither more nor less, between the poundings of the waves. then as usually happens towards the end of these walpurgis nights, he got back to bed again, and slept calmly and dreamlessly. he and seymour alone out of the party put in an appearance at breakfast time: it seemed probable that the others were compensating themselves for a disturbed night by breakfasting upstairs, and afterwards the two went out together to look at the doings of the night. by this time the wind had considerably moderated, the rain had ceased altogether, and the thick pall of cloud that had last night overlain the sky was split up into fragments and islands, and flying vapors, so that here and there pale shafts of sunlight shone upon land and sea. but the thunder of the surf had immeasurably increased, and when they went to the cliff-edge which he and nadine had passed down yesterday afternoon, they looked upon an indescribable confusion of tremendous waters. the tide was low, but the bay was still packed with the sea heaped-up by the wind, and the end of the reef with its big scattered rocks was out beyond the walls of breaking water. the sea appeared to have been driven distraught by the stress of the night; cross currents carried the waves in all directions: it almost seemed that some, shrinking from the wall of cliff in front, were trying to beat out to sea again. quite out, away from land, they jousted and sparred with each other, not jestingly, but, it seemed, with some grim purpose, as if they were practising their strength for deeds of earnest violence, as for some fierce civil war among themselves. it was round the furthest rocks of the reef that this sport of billowy giants most centered: right across the bay ran some current that set on to the end of the reef, and there it met with the waves coming straight in-shore from the direction of the blowing of the gale. then they spouted and foamed together, yet not in play: some purpose, so regular were these rounds of combat, seemed to underlie their wrestlings. hugh threw away a charred peninsula of paper, once a cigarette, which the wind had smoked for him. he never had felt much sense of comradeship in the presence of seymour, and their after-breakfast stroll had no more virtue than was the reward of necessary politeness. "there is something rather senseless in this display of wasted energy," said seymour. "each of those waves would probably cook a dinner, if its force was reasonably employed." hugh, in spite of his restless night, had something of nadine's thrilled admiration for the turmoil, and felt slightly irritated. "they would certainly cook your goose or mine," he remarked. seymour wondered whether it would be well to say, "do you allude to nadine as our goose?" but, perhaps wisely, refrained. "that would be to the good," he said. "goose is a poor bird at any time, but uneatable unless properly roasted." hugh did not attend to this polite rejoinder, for he had caught sight of something incredible not so far out at sea, and he focused his eyes instantly on it. for the moment, what he thought he had seen completely vanished; directly afterwards he caught sight of it again, a fishing-boat with mast broken, reeling drunkenly on the top of a huge wave. his quick, long-sighted eye told him in that one moment of slewing deck that it presented to them, before it was swallowed from sight in the trough of the next wave, that there were two figures on it, clinging to the stump of the broken mast. "look," he said, "there is a boat out there." it rose again to the crest of a wave and again plunged giddily out of sight. the incoming tide was bearing it swiftly shorewards, swiftly also the cross-current that set towards the end of the reef was bearing it there. hugh did not pause. he laid hold of seymour by the shoulder. "run up to the house," he said, "and fetch a couple of men. bring down with you as much rope as you can find. don't say anything to nadine and the women. but be quick." he ran down to the beach himself, as seymour went on his errand, seeing at once that there were two things that might happen to this stricken wanderer of a ship. in one case, the incoming tide with its following waves might bear it straight on to the sandy beach; in the other the cross-current, in which now it was laboring, might carry it across to the reef where the waves were wrestling and roaring together. it was in case of this first contingency that he ran down upon the sands to be ready. the beach was steep there: it would ride it until it was flung down by that fringe of toppling, hard-edged breakers. in that tumble and scurry of surf it might easily be that strong arms could drag out of the fury of the backwash whatever was cast there. the boat, a decked fishing-boat, would be dumped down on the sand: there would be a half-minute, or a quarter-minute, when something might be done. on the other hand this greedy sucking current might carry it on to the reef. then, by the mercy of god, a rope might be of some avail, if a man could reach them. as he ran down the cliff, a sudden splash of sunlight broke through the clouds, making a bright patch of illumination round the boat as it swung over another breaker. there was only one figure there now, lying full length on the deck, and clinging with both hands to the stump of the mast. then once again the water broke over it, lucidly green in the sunlight, and all hugh's heart went out to that solitary prone body, lying there helpless in the hands of god and the gale. his heart stood still to see whether when next the drifting boat reappeared it would be tenantless, and with a sob in his throat, "oh, thank god," he said, when he saw it again. it was still doubtful whether the current or the tide would win, and hugh pulled off his coat and waistcoat, and threw them on the beach, in order to be able to rush in unimpeded of hand and muscle. then with a strange sickness of heart, he saw that the boat was getting in nearer, but moving sideways across to the left, where the reef lay. and he waited, in the suspense of powerlessness. the wind now had quite abated; it was as if it had done its work, in making ready this theater of plunging water; now waited to observe what drama should be moving across the stage of billows. soon from behind, he heard across the shingle at the top of the beach the approach of the others. seymour had brought berts and two men with him, and they brought with them half-a-dozen long coils of rope, part of the fire-rescue apparatus of the house. while watching and waiting for them, his plan was quite made. it was no longer possible to hope that the boat would come to land on the sandy beach, where without doubt two or three able-bodied men could rescue any one cast up, but was driving straight on to the rocks. once there, rescue was all but impossible; the only chance lay in reaching it before it was smashed to atoms on the immense boulders and sharp-toothed fangs. quickly he tied three of the ropes together, and fastened the end round his body just below the shoulders, and took off his boots. "i'm going in," he said; "you all hold the rope and pay it out. if i come near the end of it, tie a fresh piece on--" suddenly across the shingle came footsteps, and a cry. nadine ran down the beach towards them. she was clad only in a dressing-gown, that rainbow-hued one in which one night last june she had entertained a company in her bedroom, and slippers so that her ankles showed white and bare. she saw what hugh intended, and something within her, some denizen of her soul, who till that moment had been unknown to her, took possession of her. "no, hughie, not you, not you," she screamed. "seymour, anybody, but not you!" the cry had come from her very heart; she could no more have stifled it than she could have stopped the beating of it. then, suddenly, she realized what she had said, and sank down on the beach, burying her face in her hands. "take care of her, seymour," said hugh, and there was more heroism required for these few little words, than for the desperate feat he was about to attempt. he did not look round again, nor wish to say anything more, and there was no time to lose. "now, you chaps!" he called out, and ran forward to the edge of the water. at the moment an immense billow poised and curled just in front of him. the wash of it covered him waist-deep and he floundered and staggered as the rush of water went by him. then as it drew out to sea again he ran with it, to where another breaker was toppling in front of him. with a low outward spring he dived into the hollowed water head foremost and passed through it. the beach was very steep here, and coming up again through and beyond the line of surf, he found himself in deep water. behind him lay the breaking line of billows, but in front the huge mountains of water rose and fell unbroken. as he was lifted up on the first of these, swimming strongly against it, he saw not a hundred yards from him his helpless and drifting goal. he could see, too, who it was who lay there, desperately clinging to the stump of the mast with white slender wrists; it was quite a young boy. and at that sight, hugh's pity and determination were strung higher than ever. here was a young creature, in desperate plight among these desperate waterways, one who should not yet have known what peril meant. and at the risk of spending a little strength, when strength was so valuable, hugh gave a great shout of notice and encouragement. then he was swallowed up in the trough of a wave again. but when he rose next, he saw that the boy had raised his head, and that he saw him. the current that swept towards the rocks, swept also a little shorewards, and hugh measuring the distance between the boat and the fatal breakers with his eye, and measuring again the distance between the boat and himself, knew that he must exert himself to the point of exhaustion to get to the boat before it was drifted to its final destruction. but as he swam he knew he had made a mistake in not taking off his shirt and trousers also and giving himself an unimpeded use of his limbs. his trousers particularly dragged and hampered him; then suddenly he remembered a water-game at which he used to be expert at school, namely taking a header into the bathing-place in flannels and undressing in the water. it seemed worth while to sacrifice a few seconds to accomplish that, and, as cool and collected as when he was doing it for mere sport at school, he trod water, slipped his legs out of his trousers, and saw them float away from him. then twice as vigorous, he struck out again. his shirt did not bother him: besides, the rope was tied round his chest, and there was not time for more disencumbrances. for the next five minutes, for he was fighting the tide, he just swam and swam. occasionally rising to a wave it seemed to him that he was making no headway at all, but somehow that did not discourage him. the only necessity that concerned him was that he must go till he could go no longer. and all the time, like a dream and yet like a draught of wine to him was nadine's involuntary cry, "no, hughie, not you!" he did not trouble to guess what that meant. he was only conscious that it invigorated and inspired him. the minutes passed; once the rope seemed to jerk him back, and he found himself swearing underneath his breath. then, though it was terribly heavy, he realized that it was free again, and that he was not being hampered. then he suddenly found himself much closer to the boat than he had any idea of, and this, though he was getting very tired, gave him a new supply of nervous force. he swam into three valleys more, he surmounted three ridges of water, and lo, the boat was on the peaks directly opposite to him, and from opposite sides they plunged into the same valley together. not fifty yards off to the left, incredible fountains of foam spouted and aspired. then, oh, blessed moment! he caught hold of the side of the lurching fishing-smack, and a pale little boyish frightened face was close to his. he clung for a second to the side, and they went up and down two big billows together. then he got breath enough to speak. "now, little chap," he said, "don't be frightened, for we're all right. catch hold of the rope here, close to my body, and just jump in. yes, that's right. plucky boy! take hold with both hands of the rope. not so cold, is it?" once again, before he let go of the boat, they rose to an immense wall of water, and hugh saw the figures on the beach, four of them standing in the wash of the sea, paying out the rope, and one standing there also a little apart waving seawards, clapping her hands. and what she said came to him clear and distinct across the hills and valleys of destruction. "oh, hughie, well done, well done!" she cried. "now pull, all of you, pull him in!" he was glad she added that, for in the hurry of the moment he had given no instructions as to what they were to do when he reached the boat; and what seemed so obvious out here might not have seemed so obvious to those on the beach, and he was not sure that there was enough power left in him to shout to them. but nadine understood: once she had said she understood him too well. it was enough now that she understood him enough. he let go of the boat. for a moment it seemed inclined to follow them, and he thought the bowsprit was going to hit him. then he felt a little pull on the rope under his shoulders, and the boat made a sort of bow of farewell, and slid away towards the spouting towers of foam. hugh was utterly exhausted: he could just paddle with a hand or kick downwards to keep his head above water, but he gave away one breath yet. "nothing to be frightened at," he said. "we're all right now." the buoyant water, for all the wickedness of its foam and savage hunger, sustained him sufficiently. he turned round seawards in the water so that the great surges did not overwhelm him from behind, and put an arm on the rope underneath the boy's neck, so as to support them both. he forced himself even in his utter weariness to be collected and to remember that for several minutes yet there was nothing whatever to be done, except with the minimum possible of exertion to keep afloat, while the rope towed them back towards that line of steep towers and curling precipices beyond which lay the shore, and those who stood on the shore. sometimes the crest of a wave broke over them, almost smothering him, but then again they found themselves on a downward hillside of water, where the panting lungs could be satisfied, and the laboring heart supplied. somewhere inside of him he knew he wanted to know where this poor foundered fishing-smack had come from and how this young boy had managed to cling to it, but he had not sufficient strength to give voice to his desire, for all that he had must be husbanded to meet that final assault of the row of breakers through which they had to pass. and as they got nearer, he began to form his plan. this young unknown life, precious to him now as an unborn baby to a woman, was given into his charge. it seemed to him that, as a woman has to bring the life within her to birth whatever it costs her, so he had to save the life of this unknown little fisher-boy, and take all risks himself. whatever lay beyond that line of breakers, his business was here, and he did not for one second argue the values. he did not forget nadine nor her last cry to him as he set forth on his peril, but for the moment there was something that concerned him even more than nadine, and he had to make the best plans he could for saving this young life that had been put in his hands, even if he fought god over it. the only question was how to get the best chance of saving it. they were close in now, and this three-minute pause of floating had restored him. he was just conscious of bitter cold, even as he was conscious of the group on the edge of the sand, and of the hissing waters. but none of these things seemed to have anything to do with him; they were but external phenomena. between him and the shore were still three towering lines of breakers, sharp-edged and steep as rocks: the third of these suddenly fumbled and disappeared with a thick thud, and an uprising of shattered spray. and suddenly his plan proved itself, fully-finished to his mind. he had been swimming for not more than a quarter of an hour, and the minutes of that fierce outward struggle which had seemed so long to him had to nadine passed in a flash. for once she had got completely outside herself, and, concentrated and absorbed in another, the time had gone by in one flare of triumphant expectation. for one moment after that heart's cry had been flung out of her she had sat dazed and bewildered by the consciousness that it seemed to have revealed to her, for until she had cried out that seymour, that anybody but hugh, must make the desperate attempt, she had not known her own heart, nor could she have, for it was not till then that it was unlocked to herself. when she looked up again hugh had already plunged through the breakers, and was swimming, and instantly her soul was with him there in the inhuman sea, glorying in his strength, proud of the splendid and desperate adventure, and not for one moment doubtful of its success. none but he, she felt, could do it, and it was impossible that he should fail. she would not have had him back by her side saying that the attempt was mere suicide, for all the happiness that the world contained, and had she been able to change places with the boy who clung to the helpless boat, she would have sprung ecstatic to the noble risk, for the sake of having hugh battle the seas on his way to rescue her. failing that, it had been gloriously ordained that he should do this, and that she should stand with heart uplifted and be privileged to see the triumphant venture. she saw him reach the boat, knowing that he would, and clapped her hands and called to him, and with bright eyes and laughing mouth she eagerly watched him getting nearer. then, just at the moment when hugh made his plan, she realized that between him and her there lay that precipice of water that kept flinging itself down in thunder on the shore, and ever re-forming again. and the light died out of her face, and she grew ashen gray to the lips and watched. hugh had been floating with his face seawards. now he turned round to the shore again. she saw him smile at the boy, as they rose on the crest of a wave, and she saw him speak. "now we're all right," was what he said. "get on my back, and hold on to my shoulders." the rope had ceased to pull. the men in control of it just held it taut, waiting to pull when the exact moment came. the boy did as he was told, and next moment the two rose up on the crest of the line of breakers. twenty feet below him as they topped it, hugh looked over upon the backwash of the preceding wave which was being dragged into the billow which bore them and was growing higher as it rose to its ruin. but the boy's fall would be broken: at least this plan seemed to give the best chance. then the wave curled, and he was flung forwards, twisting as he fell. he saw the slim little figure he had been carrying shot over his shoulder, and flung clear of the direct impact of the wave on the beach, and he heard his mind say, "that won't hurt him." then he felt something stupendous, as heavy as the world, strike him on the back. after that he felt nothing more at all. * * * * * as dusk was closing in, nadine sat in the window of her big black-painted bedroom, where so many well-attended sessions had been held. hugh had been in the surgeon's hands since they carried him in, and all that could be done had been done. afterwards nadine had seen the surgeon, and learned from him all there was to fear and the little there was to hope for. it was possible that hugh might not live till the morning, but simply pass away from the shock of his injuries. on the other hand his splendid constitution might pull him through that. but given that he lived through the immediate danger, it was doubtful if he could ever lead an active life again. the boy he had saved was practically unhurt, and was fast asleep. nadine sat there very quiet both in mind and body. she did not want to rave or rebel, she merely let her mind sit, as it were, in front of these things, and contemplate them, like a picture, until they became familiar. she felt they were not familiar yet; though she knew them to be true, they were somehow unreal and incredible. she did not yet grasp them: it seemed to her that her mind was stunned and was incapable of apprehending them. so she had to keep her attention fixed on them, until they became real. yet she found it difficult to control her mind: it kept wandering off into concentric circles round the center of the only significant thing in the world. out on the sea the sun had set, and there were cloud-bars of fading crimson on the horizon level across a field of saffron yellow. this yellow toned off into pale watery green, and high up in the middle of that was one little cloud like an island that still blazed in the sunlight of the upper air. somehow that aroused a train of half-forgotten reminiscences. there had been a patch of sunlight once like an island, on the gray of the sea ... it was connected with a picture ... yes, it was a sketch which esther had made for hugh, and she had put in the island reluctantly, saying it looked unreal in nature and would be worse in art. but hugh had wanted it there, and, as esther worked, she herself had walked with him along the beach from which he had been carried up to-day, and she had told him that he lived in unrealities, and pictured to himself that some day he and she would live on some golden sunlit island together. she remembered it all now. her mind came back to the center again, and started off anew on that splendid deed of the morning. she had quite lost her head when she called out, "no, hughie, not you!" it must have been hugh to do it, no one else could have done it. the idea of berts or seymour wrestling with and overcoming that mountainous and maddened sea was unthinkable. only hugh could have done it, and the deed was as much part of him as his brown eyes or his white strong teeth. and if at the end the sea had flung him down and broken him, that was after he had laughed at the peril and snatched its prey out of its very jaws! even as things were now with him, nadine could not regret what he had done, and if time had run back, and she saw him again plunging into that riot and turmoil, she felt that she would not now cry out to him like that. she would have called godspeed to him instead. once again her mind rippled away from its center. she had called out to seymour or berts to go. at the time it had been quite instinctive, but she saw now what had prompted her instinct. she meant--though then she did not know she meant it--that she could spare any one but hugh. that was what it came to, and she wondered if hugh had understood that. seymour without doubt must have done so: he was so clever. probably he would tell her he understood, and ask her if it was not that which was implied. but all such consideration seemed to her to matter very little. there was only one thing that mattered, and that was not whether hugh lived or died even, but simply the fact of hugh. her mother had telegraphed that she was coming at once; and nadine remembering that she had not told the servants got up and rang the bell. but before it was answered there came an interruption for which she had been waiting. one of the two nurses whom the surgeon from chester had brought with him knocked at the door. she had been tidying up, and removing all traces of what had been done. "the room is neat again now," she said, "and you may come and just look at him." "is he conscious or in pain?" asked nadine. "no; but he may regain consciousness at any time, but i don't think he will have any pain." they went together up the long silent passages in which there hung that curious hush which settles down on a house when death is hovering by it, and came to his door which stood ajar. then from some sudden qualm and weakness of flesh, nadine halted, shrinking from entering. "do not come unless you feel up to it," said nurse bryerley. "but there is nothing that will shock you." nadine hesitated no more, but entered. they had carried him not to his own room, but to another with a dressing-room adjoining. his bed stood along the wall to the left of the door, and he lay on his back with his head a little sideways towards it. there was nothing in the room that suggested illness, and when nadine looked at his face there was nothing there that suggested it either. his eyes were closed, but his face was as untroubled as that of some quiet sleeper. in the wall opposite were the western-looking windows and the room was lit only by that fast-fading splendor. the cloud-island still hung in the sky, but it had turned gray as the light left it. then even as nadine looked at him, his eyes opened and he saw her. "nadine," he said. the nurse stepped to the bedside. "ah, you are awake again," she said. "how do you feel?" "rather tired. but i want to speak to nadine." "yes, you can speak to her," she said and signed to the girl to come. nadine came across the room to him, and knelt down. "oh, hughie," she said, "well done!" he looked at her, puzzled for the moment, with troubled eyes. "you said that before," he said. "it was the last thing you said. why did you--oh, i remember now. yes, what a bang i came! how's the little fellow, the one on my back?" "quite unhurt, hughie. he is asleep." "i thought he wouldn't be hurt. it was the best plan i could think of. i say, why did you call to me not to go at first? i had to." "i know now you had to," said she. "i want to ask you something else. how badly am i hurt?" nadine looked up at the nurse a moment, who nodded to her. she understood exactly what that meant. "you are very badly hurt, dear hughie," she said; "but--but it is worth it fifty times over." hugh was silent a moment. "am i going to die?" he asked. nadine did not need instruction about this. "no, a thousand times, no!" she said. "you're going to get quite well. but you must be patient and rest and sleep." nadine's throat grew suddenly small and aching, and she could not find her voice for a moment. "you are quite certainly going to live," she said. "to begin with, i can't spare you!" hugh's eyelids fluttered and quivered. "by jove!" he said, and next moment they had quite closed. the nurse signed to nadine to get up and she rose very softly and tiptoed away. at the door she looked round once at hugh, but already he was asleep. then still softly she came back and kissed him on the forehead and was gone again. she had been with him but a couple of minutes, but as she went back to her room, she heard the stir of arrivals in the hall, and went down. dodo had that moment arrived. "nadine, my dear," she said, "i started the moment i got your telegram. tell me all you can. how is he? how did it happen? you only said he had had a bad accident, and wanted me." nadine kissed her. "oh! mama," she said. "thank god it wasn't an accident. it was done on purpose. he meant it just like that. but you don't know anything; i forgot. will you come to my room?" "yes, let us go. now tell me at once." "we have had a frightful gale," she said, "and this morning hughie saw a fishing-boat close in land, driving on to the reef. there was just one shrimp of a boy on it, and hughie went straight in, like a duck to water, and got him off and swam back with him. there was a rope and seymour and berts pulled him in. and when they got close in, hughie put the boy on his back--oh, mama, thank god for men like that!--and the breakers banged him down on the beach, and the boy was unhurt. and hughie may die very soon, or he may live--" nadine's voice choked for a moment. all day she had not felt a sob rise in her throat. "and if he lives," she said, "he may never be able to walk again, and i love him." then came the tempest of tears, tears of joy and sorrow, a storm of them, fruitful as autumn rain, fruitful as the sudden deluges of april, with god-knows-what warmth of sun behind. the drought of summer in her, the ice of winter in her had been broken up in the rain that makes the growth and the life of the world. the frozen ground melted under it, the soil, cracked with drought, drank it in: the parody of life that she had lived became but the farce that preceded sweet serious drama, tragedy it might be, but something human.... and dodo, woman also, understood that: she too had lived years that parodied herself, and knew what the awakening to womanhood was, and the immensity of that unsuspected kingdom. it had come late to her, to nadine early: some were almost born in consciousness of their birthright, others died without realizing it. so, mother and daughter, they sat there in silence, while nadine wept her fill. "it was the splendidest adventure," she said at length, lifting her head. "it was all so gay. he shouted to that little boy in the boat to encourage him to cling on, and oh, those damned reefs were so close. and when they rode in, hughie like a horse with a child on his back over that--that precipice, he said something again to encourage him." nadine broke down again for a moment. "hughie never thought about himself at all," she said. "he used always to think about me. but when he went on his adventure he didn't think about me. he thought only of that little stupid boy, god bless him. and, oh, mummie, i gave myself away--i got down to the beach just before hughie went in, and i lost my head and i screamed out, 'not you, hughie: seymour, berts, anybody, but not you!' it wasn't i who screamed; something inside me screamed, and the one who screamed was--was my love for hughie, and i never knew of it. but inside me something swelled, and it burst. yes: hughie heard, i am sure, and seymour heard, and i don't care at all." nadine sat up, with a sort of unconscious pride in her erectness. "i saw him just now," she said, "and he quite knew me, and asked if he was going to die. i told him 'he certainly was not; i couldn't spare him.'" nadine gave a little croaking laugh. "and he instantly went to sleep," she said. the veracious historian is bound to state that this was an adventure absolutely after dodo's heart. all her life she had loved impulse, and disregarded its possibly appalling consequences. never had she reasoned before she acted, and she could almost have laughed for joy at these blind strokes of fate. hugh's splendid venture thrilled her, even as it thrilled nadine, and for the moment the result seemed negligible. a great thing had 'got done' in the world: now by all means let them hope for the best in its sequel, and do their utmost to bring about the best, not with a fainting or regretful heart, but with a heart that rejoiced and sang over the glory of the impetuous deed that brought about these dealings of love and life. dodo's eyes danced as she spoke, danced and were dim at the same time. "oh, nadine, and you saw it!" she said. "how glorious for you to see that, and to know at the same moment that you loved him. and, my dear, if hughie is to die, you must thank god for him without any regret. there is nothing to regret. and if he lives--" "oh, mama, one thing at a time," said nadine. "if he only lives, if only i am going to be allowed to take care of him, and to do what can be done." she paused a moment. "i am so glad you have come," she said; "it was dear of you to start at once like that. did papa jack want you not to go?" "my dear, he hurried me off to that extent that i left the only bag that mattered behind." "that was nice of him. they have been so hopeless, all of them here, because they didn't understand. berts has been looking like a funeral all day, the sort with plumes. and edith has been running in and out with soup for me, soup and mince and glasses of port i think--i think seymour understood though, because he was quite cheerful and normal. oh, mama, if hughie only lives, i will marry seymour as a thank-offering." dodo looked at her daughter in amazement. "not if seymour understands," she said. nadine frowned. "it's the devil's own mess," she observed. "but the devil never cleans up his messes," said dodo. "that's what we learn by degrees. he makes them, and we clean them up. more or less, that is to say." she paused a moment, and flung the spirit of her speech from her. "i don't mean that," she said. "it is truer to say that god makes beautiful things, and we spoil them. and then he makes them beautiful again. it is only people who can't see at all, that see the other aspect of it. i think they call them realists--i know it ends in 'ist.' but it doesn't matter what you call them. they are wrong. we have got to hold our hearts high, and let them beat, and let ourselves enjoy and be happy and taste things to the full. it is easier to be miserable, my dear, for most people. we are the lucky ones. oh, if i had been a charwoman, like that thing in the play, with a husband who stole and was sent to prison, i should have found something to be happy about. probably a large diamond in the grate, which i should have sold without being traced." these remarkable statements were not made without purpose. dodo knew quite well that courage and patience and cheerfulness would be needed by nadine, and she was willing to talk the most outrageous nonsense to give the sense of vitality to her, to make her see that no great happening like this, whatever the end, was a thing to moan and brood over. it must be taken with much more than resignation--a quality which she despised--and with hardly less than gaiety. such at any rate was her private human gospel, which she found had not served her so badly. "i have quite missed my vocation," she said. "i ought to have been born in poverty-stricken and criminal classes to show the world that being hungry does not make you unhappy any more than having three diamond tiaras makes you happy. you've got that birthright, nadine, live up to it. never anticipate trouble, and if it comes embrace and welcome it: it is part of life, and thus it becomes your friend. oh, i wish i had been here this morning! i would have shouted for glee to see that darling hughie go churning out to sea. i am jealous of you. just think: if papa jack had come a-wooing of you, as i really thought he might be doing in the summer, you would have married him and i should be looking after hughie. isn't that like me? i want everybody's good times myself." these amazing statements were marvelously successful. "i won't give my good time away even to you," said nadine. "no, you are sharper than a serpent's tooth. now, darling, we will go very quietly along the passage, and just see if hughie is asleep. i should so like to wake him up--i know he is asleep--in order to tell him how splendid it all is. don't be frightened: i'm not going to. we will just go to the door, and that enormous nurse whom i saw peering over the banisters, will tell us to go away. and then i shall go to dress for dinner, and you will too--" "oh, mama, i can't come down to dinner," said nadine. "yes, dear, you can and you will. there's going to be no sadness in my house. if you don't, i shall send edith up to you with mince and her 'cello and soup. oh, nadine, and it was all just for a little stupid boy, who very likely would have been better dead. he will now probably grow up, and be an anxiety to his parents, if he's got any--they usually haven't--and come to a bad and early end. what a great world!" chapter xi nadine enquired at hugh's door again that night before she went to bed, and found that he was still asleep. she had promised her mother not to sit up, but as she undressed she almost smiled at the uselessness of going to bed, so impossible did it seem that sleep should come near her. after her one outburst of crying, she had felt no further agitation, for something so big and so quiet had entered her heart that all poignancy of anxiety and suspense were powerless to disturb it. as has been said, it was scarcely even whether hugh lived or died that mattered: the only thing that mattered was hugh. had she been compelled to say whether she believed he would live or not, she would have given the negative. and yet there was a quality of peace in her that could not be shaken. it was a peace that humbled and exalted her. it wrapped her round very close, and yet she looked up to it, as to a mountain-peak on which dawn has broken. despite her conviction that sleep was impossible, she had hardly closed her eyes, when it embraced and swallowed up all her consciousness. this cyclone of emotion, in the center of which dwelt the windless calm, had utterly tired her out, though she was unaware of fatigue, and her rest was dreamless. then suddenly she was aware that there was light in the room, and that she was being spoken to, and she passed from unconsciousness back to the full possession of her faculties, as swiftly as they had been surrendered. she found dodo bending over her. "come, my darling," she said. nadine had no need to ask any question, but as she put on her slippers and dressing-gown dodo spoke again. "he has been awake for an hour and asking for you," she said. "the nurse and the doctor are with him: they think you had better come. it is possible that if he sees you there, he may go off to sleep again. but it is possible--you are not afraid, darling?" nadine's mouth quivered into something very like a smile. "afraid of hughie?" she asked. they went up the stairs, and along the passage together. the moon that last night had been hidden by the tempest of storm-clouds, or perhaps blown away from the sky by the wind, now rode high and cloudlessly amid a multitude of stars. no wind moved across those ample floors: only from the beach they heard the plunge and thunder of the sea that could not so easily resume its tranquillity. the moonlight came through the window of hugh's room also, making on the floor a shadow-map of the bars. he was lying again with his face towards the door, but now his eyes were vacantly open, and his whole face had changed. there was an agony of weariness over it, and from his eyes there looked out a dumb, unavailing rebellion. before they had got to the door they had heard a voice inside speaking, a voice that nadine did not recognize. it kept saying over and over again, "nadine, nadine." as she came across the room to the bed, he looked straight at her, but it was clear he did not see her, and the monotonous, unrecognizable voice went on saying, "nadine, nadine." the doctor was standing by the head of the bed, looking intently at hugh, but doing nothing: the nurse was at the foot. he signed to nadine to come, and took a step towards her. "you've got to make him feel you are here," he said. then with his hand he beckoned to the nurse and to dodo, to stand out of sight of hugh, so that by chance he might think himself alone with the girl. nadine knelt down on the floor, so that her face was close to those unseeing eyes, and the mouth that babbled her name. and the great peace was with her still. she spoke in her ordinary natural voice without tremor. "yes, hughie, yes," she said. "don't go on calling me. here i am. what's the use of calling now? i came as soon as i knew you wanted me." "nadine, nadine," said hughie, in the same unmeaning monotone. "hughie, you are quite idiotic!" she said. "as if you didn't know in your own heart that i would always come when you wanted me. i always would, my dear. you need never be afraid that i shall leave you. i am yours, don't you see?" "nadine, nadine," said hugh. nadine's whole soul went into her words. "hughie, you are not with me yet," she said. "i want you, too, and i mean to have you. i didn't know till to-day that i wanted you, and now i can't do without you. hughie, do you hear?" she said. "oh, answer me, hughie dear!" there was dead silence. then hugh gave a great sigh. "nadine!" he said. but it was hugh's voice that spoke then. she bent forward. "oh, hughie, you have come then," she said. "welcome; you don't know how i wanted you!" "yes, i'm here all right," said hugh in a voice scarcely audible. "but i'm so tired. it's horrible; it's like death!" nadine gave her little croaking laugh. "it isn't like anything of the kind," she said. "but of course you are tired. wouldn't it be a good thing to go to sleep?" "i don't know," said hugh. "but i do. i'm tired too, hughie, awfully tired. if i leaned my head back against your bed i should go to sleep too." "nadine, it is you?" said hugh. "oh, my dear! what other girl could be with you?" "no, that's true. nadine, would it bore you to stop with me a bit? we might talk afterwards, when--when you've had a nap." "that will be ripping," said nadine, assuming a sleepy voice. there was silence for a little. then once again, but in his own voice, hugh spoke her name. this time she did not answer, and she felt his hand move till it rested against her plaited hair. then in the silence nadine became conscious of another noise regular and slow as the faint hoarse thunder of the sea, the sound of quiet breathing. after a while the doctor came round the head of the bed. "we can manage to wrap you up, and make you fairly comfortable," he whispered. "i think he has a better chance of sleeping if you stop there." the light and radiance in nadine's eyes were a miracle of beauty, like some enchanted dawn rising over a virgin and unknown land. she smiled her unmistakable answer, but did not speak, and presently dodo returned with pillows and blankets, which she spread over her and folded round her. "the nurse will be in the next room," said the doctor; "call her if anything is wanted." dodo and the doctor went back to their rooms, and nadine was left alone with hugh. that night was the birthnight and the bridal-night of her soul: there was it born, and through the long hours of the winter night it watched beside its lover and its beloved, in that stillness of surrender to and absorption in another, that lies beyond and above the unrest of passion amid the snows and sunshine of the uttermost regions to which the human spirit can aspire. she knew nothing of the passing of the hours, nor for a long time did any thought or desire of sleep come near her eyelids, but the dim room became to her the golden island of which once in uncomprehending mockery she had spoken to hugh. she knew it to be golden now, and so far from being unreal, there was nothing in her experience so real as it. she could just turn her head without disturbing hugh's hand that lay on her plaited hair, and from time to time she looked round at him. his face still wore the sunken pallor of exhaustion, but as his sleep, so still and even-breathing, began to restore the low-ebb of his vital force, it seemed to nadine that the darkness of the valley of the shadow, to the entrance of which he had been so near, cleared off his face as eclipse passes from the moon. how near he had been, she guessed, but it seemed to her that for the present his face was set the other way. she knew, too, that it was she who had had the power to make him look life-wards again, and the knowledge filled her with a sort of abasing pride. he had answered to her voice when he was past all other voices, and had come back in obedience to it. she did not and she could not yet be troubled with the thought of anything else besides the fact that hugh lived. as far as was known yet, he might never recover his activity of movement again, and years of crippled life were all that lay in front of him; but in the passing away of the immediate imminent fear, she could not weigh or even consider what that would mean. similarly the thought of seymour lay for the present outside the focus of her mind: everything but the fact that hugh lived was blurred and had wavering outlines. as the hours went on the oblongs of moonshine on the floor moved across the room, narrowing as they went. then the moon sank and the velvet of the cloudless sky grew darker, and the stars more luminous. one great planet, tremulous and twinkling, made a glory beside which all the lesser lights paled into insignificance. no wind stirred in the great halls of the night, the moans and yells of its unquiet soul were still, and the boom of the surf grew ever less sonorous, like the thunder of a retreating storm. occasionally the night-nurse appeared at the doorway of the room adjoining, where she sat, and as often nadine looked up at her smiling. once, very softly, she came round the head of the bed, and looked at hugh, then bent down towards the girl. "won't you get some sleep?" she said, and nadine made a little gesture of raised eyebrows and parted hands that was characteristic of her. "i don't know," she whispered. "perhaps not. i don't want to." then her solitary night vigil began again, and it seemed to her that she would not have bartered a minute of it for the best hour that her life had known before. the utter peace and happiness of it grew as the night went on, for still close to her head there came the regular uninterrupted breathing, and the weight, just the weight of a hand absolutely relaxed, lay on her hair. not the faintest stir of movement other than those regular respirations came from the bed, and all the laughter and joy of which her days had been full was as the light of the remotest of stars compared to the glorious planet that sang in the windless sky, when weighed against the joy that that quiet breathing gave her. she did not color her consciousness with hope, she did not illuminate it by prayer; there was no room in her mind for anything except the knowledge that hugh slept and lived. it was now near the dawning of the winter day; the stars were paling in the sky, and the sky grew ensaffroned with the indescribable hue that heralds day. footfalls, muffled and remote, began to stir in the house, and far away there came the sound of crowing cocks, faint but exultant, hailing the dawn. about that time, nadine looked round once more at hugh, and saw in the pallid light of morning that the change she had noticed before was more distinct. there had come back to his face something of the firm softness of youth, there had been withdrawn from it the droop and hardness of exhaustion. and turning again, she gave one sigh and fell fast asleep. lover and beloved they lay there sleeping, while the dawn brightened in the sky, she leaning against the bed where he was stretched, he with his hand on her hair. and strangely, the moment that she slept, their positions seemed to be reversed, and hugh in his sleep appeared unconsciously to keep watch over and guard her, though all night she had been awake for him. once her head slipped an inch or two, so that his hand no longer lay on her hair, but it seemed as if that movement reached down to him fathom-deep in his slumber and immediately afterwards his hand, which had lain so motionless and inert all night, moved, as if to a magnet, after that bright hair, seeking and finding it again. and dawn brightened into day, and the sun leaped up from his lair in the east, and still nadine slept, and hugh slept. it was as if until then the balance of vitality had kept the girl awake to pour into him of her superabundance: now she was drained, and sleep with the level stroke of his soft hand across the furrows of trouble and the jagged edges of injury and exhaustion comforted both alike. it had been arranged after these events of storm that the party should disperse, and dodo went to early breakfast downstairs with her departing guests, who were leaving soon after. but first she went into the nurse's room, next door to where hugh lay, to make enquiries, and was taken by her to look into the sick-room. with daylight their sleep seemed only to have deepened: it was like the slumber of lovers who have been long awake in passion of mutual surrender, and at the end have fallen asleep like children, with mere effacement of consciousness. nadine's head was a little bowed forward, and her breath came not more evenly than his. it was the sleep of childlike content that bound them both, and bound them together. dodo looked long, and then with redoubled precaution moved softly into the nurse's room again, with mouth quivering between smiles and tears. "my dear, i never saw anything so perfectly sweet," she said. "do let them have their sleep out, nurse. and nadine has slept in hugh's room all night. what ducks! please god it shall so often happen again!" nurse bryerley was not unsympathetic, but she felt that explanations were needed. "i understood the young lady was engaged to some one else," she said. dodo smiled. "but until now no one has quite understood the young lady herself," she said. "least of all, has she understood herself. i think she will find that she is less mysterious now." "mr. graves will have to take some nourishment soon," said nurse bryerley. dodo considered. "then could you not give him his nourishment very cautiously, so that he will go to sleep again afterwards?" she asked. "i should like them to sleep all day like that. but then, you see, nurse, i am a very odd woman. but don't disturb them till you must. i think their souls are getting to know each other. that may not be scientific nursing, but i think it is sound nursing. it's too bad we can't eternalize such moments of perfect equilibrium." "certainly the young lady was awake till nearly dawn," said nurse bryerley. "it wouldn't hurt her to have a good rest." dodo beamed. "oh, leave them as long as possible," she said. "you have no idea how it warms my heart. there will be trouble enough when they awake." seymour was among those who were going by the early train, and when dodo came down he had finished breakfast. he got up just as she entered. "how is he?" he asked. dodo's warm approbation went out to him. "it was nice of you to ask that first, dear seymour," she said. "he is asleep: he has slept all night." seymour lit a cigarette. "i asked that first," he said, "because it was a mixture of politeness and duty to do so. i suppose you understand." dodo took the young man by the arm. "come out and talk to me in the hall," she said. "bring me a cup of tea." the morning sunshine flooded the window-seat by the door, and dodo sat down there for one moment's thought before he joined her. but she found that no thought was necessary. she had absolutely made up her mind as to her own view of the situation, and with all the regrets in the world for him, she was prepared to support it. in a minute seymour joined her. "nadine came down to the beach just before hugh went in yesterday morning," he said, "and she called out--called?--shouted out, 'not you, hughie: seymour, berts, anybody, but not you!' there was no need for me to think what that meant." dodo looked at him straight. "no, my dear, there was no need," she said. "then i have been a--a farcical interlude," said he, not very kindly. "you managed that farcical interlude, you know. you licensed it, so to speak, like the censor of plays." "yes, i licensed it, you are quite right. but, my dear, i didn't license it as a farce; there you wrong me. i licensed it as what i hoped would be a very pleasant play. you must be just, seymour: you didn't love her then, nor she you. you were good friends, and there was no shadow of a reason to suppose that you would not pass very happy times together. the great love, the real thing, is not given to everybody. but when it comes, we must bow to it.... it is royal." all his flippancy and quickness of wit had gone from him. next conversation remained only because it was a habit. "and i am royal," he said. "i love nadine like that." "then you know that when that regality comes," she said quickly, "it comes without control. it is the same with nadine; it is by no wish of hers that it came." "i must know that from nadine," he said. "i can't take your word for it, or anybody's except hers. she made a promise to me." "she cannot keep it," said dodo. "it is an impossibility for her. she made it under different conditions, and you put your hand to it under the same. and nadine said you understood, and behaved so delightfully yesterday. all honor to you, since behind your behavior there was that knowledge, that royalty." "i had to. but don't think i abdicated. but she was in terrible distress, and really, aunt dodo, the rest of your guests were quite idiotic. berts looked like a frog; he had the meaningless pathos of a frog on his silly face--" "nadine said he looked like a funeral with plumes," dodo permitted herself to interpolate. "more like a frog. edith kept pouring out glasses of port to take to nadine, but i think she usually forgot and drank them herself. it was a lunatic asylum. but nadine felt." "ah, my dear," said dodo, with a movement of her hand on to his. seymour quietly disengaged his own. "very gratifying," he said, "but as i said, i take nobody's word for it, except nadine's. she has got to tell me herself. where is she? i have to go in five minutes, but to see her will still leave me four to spare." dodo got up. "you shall see her," she said. "but come quietly, because she is asleep." "if she is only to talk to me in her sleep--" began he. "come quietly," said dodo. but all her pity was stirred, and as they went along the passage to hugh's room, she slipped her arm into his. she knew that her _coup_ was slightly theatrical, but there seemed no better way of showing him. it might fail: he might still desire explanations, but it was worth trying. "and remember i am sorry," she said, "and be sure that nadine will be sorry." "riddles," said seymour. "yes, my dear, riddles if you will," said she. "but you may guess the answer." dodo quietly turned the handle of the door into the nurse's room, and entered with her arm still in his. she made a sign of silence, and took seymour straight through into the sick-room. all was as she had left it a quarter-of-an-hour ago; nadine still slept and hugh, in that same attitude of security and love. her head was drooped; she slept as only children and lovers sleep. but dodo with all her intuition did not see as much as seymour, who loved her, saw. the truth of it was branded into his brain, whereas it only shone in hers. she saw the situation: he felt it. then with a signal of pressure on his arm, she led him out again. "she has been there all night," she said. "she only fell asleep at dawn." they were in the passage again before seymour spoke. "there is no need for me to awake her or talk to her," he said. "you were quite right. and i congratulate you on your _ensemble_. i should have guessed that it required most careful rehearsal. and i should have been wrong. and now, for god's sake, don't be kind and tender--" he took his arm away from hers, feeling for her then more resentment than he might feel against the footman who conveyed cold soup to him. he did not want the footman's sympathy, nor did he want dodo's. "and spare me your optimism," he said. "if you tell me it is all for the best, i shall scream. it isn't for the best, as far as i am concerned. it is damned bad. i was a thing, and nadine made a man of me. now she is tired of her handiwork, and says that i shall be a thing again. and don't tell me i shall get over it. the fact that i know i shall, makes your information, which was on the tip of your tongue, wanton and superfluous. but if you think i shall love hugh, because he loves nadine, you are utterly astray. i am not a child in a sunday school, letting the teacher smack both sides of my face. i hate hugh, and i am not the least touched by the disgusting spectacle you have taken me on tiptoe to see. they looked like two amorous monkeys in the monkey-house." seymour suddenly paused and gasped. "they didn't," he said. "at any rate nadine looked as i have often pictured her looking. the difference is that it was myself, not hugh, beside whom i imagined her falling asleep. that makes a lot of difference if you happen to be the person concerned. and now i hope the motor is ready to take me away, and many thanks for an absolutely damnable visit. don't look pained. it doesn't hurt you as much as it hurts me. there is a real _cliché_ to finish with." dodo's _coup_ had been sufficiently theatrical to satisfy her, but she had not reckoned with the possible savageness that it might arouse. seymour's temper, as well as his love, was awake, and she had not thought of the two as being at home simultaneously, but had imagined they played box-and-cox with each other in the minds of men. here box and cox met, and they were hand-in-hand. he was convinced and angry: she had imagined he would be convinced and pathetic. with that combination she had felt herself perfectly competent to deal. but his temper roused hers. "you are at least interesting," she said briskly, "and i have enjoyed what you call your damnable visit as much as you. you seem to have behaved decently yesterday, but no doubt that was nadine's mistake." "not at all: it was mine," he said. "which you now recognize," said she. "i am afraid you must be off, if you want to catch your train. good-by." "good-by," said he. he turned from her at the top of the stairs, and went down a half-dozen of them. then suddenly he turned back again. "don't you see i'm in hell?" he said. dodo entirely melted at that, and ran down the stairs to him. "oh, seymour, my dear," she said. "a woman's pity can't hurt you. do accept it." she drew that handsome tragical face towards her, and kissed him. "do you mind my kissing you?" she said. "there's my heart behind it. there is, indeed." "thanks, aunt dodo," he said. "and--and you might tell nadine i saw her like that. i am not so very stupid. i understand: good-by." "and hugh?" she asked, quite unwisely, but in that optimistic spirit that he had deprecated. "don't strain magnanimity," he said. "it's quality is _not_ strained. say good-by to nadine for me. say i saw her asleep, and didn't disturb her. i never thought much of her intelligence, but she may understand that. she will have to tell me what she means to do. that i require. at present our wedding-day is fixed." seymour broke off suddenly and ran downstairs without looking back. dodo was quite sincerely very sorry for him, but almost the moment he had gone she ceased to think about him altogether, for there were so many soul-absorbing topics to occupy her, and forgetting she had had no breakfast, she went to edith's room (edith alone had not the slightest intention of going away) to discuss them. her optimism was luckily quite incurable: she could not look on the darker aspect of affairs for more than a minute or two. she found edith breakfasting in bed, with a large fur cape flung over her shoulders. her breakfast had been placed on a table beside her, but for greater convenience she had disposed the plates round her, on her counterpane. there were also disposed there sheets of music-paper, a pen and ink-bottle, and a box of cigarettes. the window was wide open, and as dodo entered the draught caused the music paper to flutter, and edith laid hasty restraining hands on it, and screamed with her mouth full. "shut the door quickly!" she cried. "and then come and have some breakfast, dodo. i don't think i shall get up to-day. i have been composing since six this morning, and if i get up the thread may be entirely broken. beethoven worked at the c minor symphony for three days and nights without eating, sleeping, or washing." "i see you are eating," remarked dodo. "i hope that won't prevent your giving us another c minor." "the c minor is much over-rated work," said edith; "it is commonplace melodically, and clumsily handled. if i had composed it, i should not be very proud of it." "which is a blessing you didn't, because then you would have composed something of which you were not proud," said dodo, ringing the bell. "yes, i shall have some breakfast with you. oh, edith, everything is so interesting, and hughie has slept all night, and nadine with him. they are sleeping now, nadine on the floor half-sitting up with her head against the bed, looking too sweet for anything. and poor dear seymour has just gone away. i took him in to see them by way of breaking it to him. whoever guessed that he would fall in love with her? it is very awkward, for i thought it would be such a nice sensible marriage. and now of course there will be no marriage at all." at this moment the bell was answered, and edith in trying to prevent her music-paper from practising aviation, upset the ink-bottle. several minutes were spent in quenching the thirst of sheets of blotting paper at it, as you water horses when their day's work is over. "one of the faults of your mind, dodo," said edith, as this process was going on, "is that you don't concentrate enough. you have too many objects in focus simultaneously. now my success is due to the fact that i have only one in focus at a time. for instance this stygian pool of ink does not distress me in the slightest--" "no, darling, it's not your counterpane," said dodo. "it wouldn't distress me if it was. but if i opened your mind i should find hugh's recovery, nadine's future, and your baby in about equally vivid colors, and all in sharp outline. also you make too many plans for other people. do leave something to providence sometimes." "oh, i leave lots," said dodo. "i only try to touch up the designs now and then. providence is often rather sketchy and unfinished. but yesterday's design was absolutely wonderful. i can hardly even be sorry for hugh." edith shook her head. "you are quite incorrigible," she said. "providence sent what was clearly intended to be a terrible event, but you see all sorts of glories in it. i don't thing it is very polite. it is like laughing at a ghost story instead of being terrified." dodo's breakfast had been brought in, and she fell to it with an excellent appetite. "there is nothing like scenes before breakfast to make one hungry," she said. "think how hungry a murderer would be if he was taken out to be hanged before breakfast, and then given his breakfast afterwards. i had a scene with seymour, you know. i am very sorry for him, but somehow he doesn't seem to matter. he lost his temper, which i rather respected, and showed me he had an ideal. that i respect too. i remember the struggles i used to go through in order to get one." "were they successful?" asked edith. "only by a process of elimination. i did everything that i wanted, and found it was a mistake. so, last of all, i married jack. what a delightful life i have led, and how good this bacon is. don't you think david is a very nice name? i am going to call my baby david." "it may be a girl," said edith. "then i shall call it bathsheba," said dodo without pause. "or do i mean beersheba? bath, i think. edith, why is it that when i am most anxious and full of cares, i feel it imperative to talk tommy-rot? i'm sure there is enough to worry me into a grave if not a vault, between seymour and nadine and hugh. but after all, one needn't worry about nadine. it is quite certain that she will do as she chooses, and if she wants to marry hugh with both arms in slings, and two crutches, and a truss and one of those sort of scrapers under one foot she certainly will. i brought her up on those lines, to know her own mind, and then do what she wanted. it has been a failure hitherto, because she has never really wanted anything. but now i think my system of education is going to be justified. i am also suffering from reaction. last night i thought our dear hughie was dying, and i am perfectly convinced this morning that he isn't. so, too, i am sure, is nadine: otherwise she couldn't have fallen asleep like that. and what hughie did was so splendid. i am glad god made men like that, but it doesn't prevent my eating a huge breakfast and talking rot. i hope you don't mean to go away. it is so dull to be alone in the house with two young lovers, even when one adores them both." "aren't you getting on rather quick, dodo?" asked edith. "probably: but seymour is _congédié_--how do you say it--spun, dismissed, and quite certainly nadine has fallen in love with hugh. there isn't time to be slow, nowadays. if you are slow you are left gasping on the beach like a fish. i still swim in the great waters, thank god." dodo got up, and her mood changed utterly. she was never other than genuine, but it had pleased nature to give her many facets, all brilliant, but all reflecting different-colored lights. "oh, my dear, life is so short," she said, "and every moment should be so precious to everybody. i hate going to sleep, for fear i may miss something. fancy waking in the morning and finding you had missed something, like an earthquake or suffragette riot! my days are reasonably full, but i want them to be unreasonably full. and just now jack keeps saying, 'do rest: do lie down: do have some beef-tea.' just as if i didn't know what was good for david! edith, he is going to be such a gay dog! all the girls and all the women are going to fall desperately in love with him. he is going to marry when he is thirty, and not a day before, and he will be absolutely simple and unspoiled and a wicked little devil on his marriage morning. and then all his energies will be concentrated on one point, and that will be his wife. he will utterly adore her, and think of nobody else except me. i shall be seventy-four, you perceive, at that time, and so i shall be easy to please. the older one gets the easier one is to please. already little things please me quite enormously, and big ones, as you also perceive, make me go off my head. oh, i am sure heaven will be extremely nice, if i ever die, which god forbid; but however nice it is, it won't be the same as this. you agree there i know; you want to make all the music you can first--" "as a protest against what seems to be the music of heaven," said edith firmly, "if we may judge by hymn tunes and chants, and the first act of parsifal, and i suppose the last of faust, and handel's oratorios. it is very degrading stuff; all the changes of key are childishly simple, and the proportion of full closes is nearly indecent. and i want another ink-bottle." edith whistled a short phrase on her teeth, as a gentle hint to her hostess. "it's for the flutes," she said, "and the 'cellos take it up two octaves lower." she grabbed at her music-paper. "then the horns start it again in the subdominant," she said, "and all the silly audience will think they are merely out of tune. that's because they got what they didn't expect. to be any good, you must surprise the ear. i'll surprise them. but i want another ink-bottle. and may i have lunch in my room, dodo, if necessary? i don't know when i shall be able to get up." dodo was not attending in any marked manner. "we will all do what we choose," she said genially. "we will be a sort of harmless medmenham abbey. you shall spill all the ink you please, and nadine shall marry hugh, who will get quite well, and i shall go and order dinner and see if nadine is awake. i am afraid i am rather fatuously optimistic this morning, like mr. chesterton, and that is always so depressing, both to other people at the time, and to oneself subsequently. dear me, what a charming world if there was no such thing as reaction. as a matter of fact i do not experience much of it." edith gave a great sigh of relief as dodo left the room, and concentrated herself with singular completeness on the horn-tune in the subdominant. she was quite devoted to dodo, but the horn-tune was in focus just now, and she knew if dodo had stopped any longer, she would have become barely tolerant of her presence. shortly afterwards the fresh supply of ink came also, and edith proceeded straight up into the seventh heaven of her own compositions, which, good or bad, were perfection itself to their author. dodo found a packet of letters waiting for her and among them a telegram from miss grantham saying, "deeply grieved. can i do anything?" this she swiftly answered, replying, "darling grantie. nothing whatever," and went to nadine's room, where she found nadine, half-dressed, rosy from her bath, and radiant of spirit. "oh, mama, i never had such a lovely night," she said. "how delicious it must be to be married! i didn't wake till half-an-hour ago, and simultaneously hughie woke, which looks as if we suited each other, doesn't it? and then the doctor came in, and looked at him, and said he was much stronger, much fuller of vitality for his long sleep, and he congratulated me on having made him sleep. and the nurse told me the first great danger, that he would not rally after the shock of the operation, was over. as far as that goes he will be all right." nadine kissed her mother, and clung round her neck, dewy-eyed. "i'm not going to think about the future," she said. "sufficient to the day is the good thereof. it is enough this morning that hughie has got through the night and is stronger. if i had been given any wish to be fulfilled i should have chosen that. and if on the top of that i had been given another, it would have been that i should have helped towards it, which i suppose is the old eve coming in. i think i had better finish dressing, mama, instead of babbling. have you had breakfast?" "yes, dear, i had it with edith. she is in bed making tunes and pouring ink over the counterpane, and not minding." nadine's face clouded for a moment, in spite of the accomplishment of her wishes. "and then i must see seymour," she said. "it is no use putting that off. but, oh, mama, to think that till yesterday i was willing to marry him, with hugh in the world all the time. whatever happens to hugh, i can't marry him, seymour, i mean, if the ridiculous english pronouns admit of any meaning; and i must tell him." "seymour left half an hour ago," said dodo. "but there's no need for you to tell him. i took him into hugh's room and he saw you asleep. he understands. he couldn't very well help understanding, darling. he told me he understood before, when you called out to hugh not to attempt the rescue. but he only understood it pretty well, as the ordinary person says he understands french. but when he saw you asleep, not exactly in hugh's arms, but sufficiently close, he understood it like a real native, poor boy!" "what did he do?" asked nadine. "he behaved very rightly and properly, and lost his temper with me, just as i lose my temper with the porter at the station if i miss my train. i had been just porter to him. he thanked me for a horrid visit, only he called it damnable, and so i lost my temper, too, and we had a few flowers of speech on the staircase, not big ones, but just promising buds. and then, poor chap, he came back to me, and told me he was in hell, and i kissed him, and he didn't seem to mind much, and i suppose he caught his train. otherwise he would have been back by now. i'm exceedingly sorry for him, nadine, and you must write him a sweet little letter, which won't do any good at all, but it's one of the things you have to do. darling, i wonder if jilting runs in families like consumption and red faces. you see i jilted my darling jack, to marry into your family. but you must write the sweet little letter i spoke of, because you are sorry, only you couldn't help it." "did you write a sweet little letter under--under the same circumstances to papa jack?" asked nadine. "no, dear, because i hadn't got anybody exceedingly wise to give me that good advice," said dodo. "also, because i was a little brute there is no reason why you should be." "perhaps it runs in the family, too," suggested nadine. "then the quicker it runs out of the family the better. besides you are sorry for seymour." nadine opened her hands wide. "am i? i hope so," she said. "but if you are quite full of gladness for one thing, mama, it is a little difficult to find a corner for anything else." dodo turned to leave the room. "anywhere will do. just under the stairs," she said. "i don't want to put it in the middle of the drawing-room. after all, darling, you propose to jilt him." "there's something in that," said nadine. "oh, mama, i used not to have any heart at all, and now that i've got one it doesn't belong to me." "no woman's heart belongs to her," said dodo. "if it belongs to her, it isn't a heart." "i should have thought that nonsense yesterday," said nadine. "oh, wait while i finish dressing; i shan't be ten minutes. what meetings we have had in my lovely back room! one, i remember so particularly. you and esther and berts all lay on my bed like sardines in evening dresses, and i had just refused to marry hugh, who was playing billiards with uncle algie. somehow the things like love and devotion seemed to me quite old-fashioned, or anyhow they seemed to me signs of age. they did, indeed. i thought a clear brain was infinitely preferable to a confused heart, especially if it belonged to somebody else. i'm not used to it, mama: it still seems to me very odd like a hat that doesn't fit. but it's a fact, and i suppose i shall grow into it, not that any one ever grew into a hat. but when hugh swam out yesterday morning, something came tumbling down inside me. or was it that only something cracked, like the shell of a nut? it does not much matter, so long as it is not mended again. but how queer that it should happen in a second, like that. i suppose time has nothing to do with what concerns one's soul. i believe plato says something about it. i don't think i shall look it up. he wrote wonderfully, but when a thing happens to oneself, that seems to matter more than plato's reflections on the subject." there was a short pause as nadine brushed her teeth, but dodo sitting on the unslept-in bed did not feel inclined to break it. she wondered whether a particular point in the situation would occur to nadine, whether her illumination as regards a woman's heart threw any light on that very different affair, a man's heart. she was not left long in doubt. the question of a man's heart was altogether unilluminated, and to dodo there was something poignantly pathetic about nadine's blissful ignorance. she came and sat down on the bed close to her mother. "hughie will see i love him," she said, "because he won't be able to help it. i shall just wait, oh, so happily, for him to say again what he has so often said before. he will know my answer, before i give it him. i hope he will say it soon. then we shall be engaged, and people who are engaged are a little freer, aren't they, mama?" dodo felt incapable of clouding that radiant face, for she knew in the days that were coming, all its radiance would be needed: not a single sparkle of light must be wasted. but it did not seem to her very likely that hugh, whose joyous strength and splendid activity had been so often rejected by nadine, would be likely to offer to her again what would be, in all probability, but a crippled parody of himself. but her sense of justice told her that nadine owed him all the strength and encouragement her eager vitality could give him. it was only fair that she should devote herself to him, and let him feel all the inspiration to live that her care of him could give him. but it seemed to her very doubtful if hugh would consent, even if he perceived that it was love not warm friendship that she gave him, to let himself and his crippled body appeal to her. in days gone by, she would not marry him for love, and it seemed to dodo that a real man, as hugh was, would not allow her to marry him for pity. he had offered her his best, and she had refused it; it would not be surprising if he refused to offer her his worst. the joy that had inspired dodo so that she had softly melted over the sight of nadine asleep by hugh, and had exultantly mopped up the spilt ink with edith, suddenly evaporated, leaving her dry and cold. "you must wait, nadine," she said. "you must make no plans. give hughie your vitality, and don't ask more." she got up. "now, my darling, i shall go downstairs," she said, "and order your breakfast. you must be hungry. and then you can say your prayers, and breakfast will be ready." nadine, absorbed in her own thoughts, felt nothing of this. "prayers?" she said. "why i was praying all night till dawn. at least, i was wanting, just wanting, and not for myself. isn't that prayers?" dodo loved that: it was exactly what she meant in her inmost heart by prayers. she drew nadine to her and kissed her. "darling, you have said enough for a week," she said, "if not more. and you said them because you must, which is the only proper plan. if you don't feel you must say your prayers, it is just as well not to say them at all. but you shall have breakfast, whether you feel you must or not. i say you must." chapter xii one morning a fortnight later, jack, dodo, and edith were sitting together on the cliff above the bay, looking down to the sandy foreshore. jack, finding that dodo was obliged to stop at meering with nadine, had personally abandoned his third shooting-party, leaving berts, whom he implicitly trusted to make himself and everybody else quite comfortable, in charge. among the guests was berts' father, whom berts apparently kept in his place. jack had just told dodo and edith the contents of berts' letter, received that morning. all was going very well, but berts had arranged that his father should escort two ladies of the party to see the interesting town of lichfield one afternoon, instead of shooting the warren beat, where birds came high and berts' father was worse than useless. but it was certain that he would enjoy lichfield very much, and the shoot would be more satisfactory without him. if his mother was still at meering, berts sent his love, and knew she would agree with him. edith just now, working her way through the entire orchestra, was engaged on the _cor anglais_ which, while hugh was still so ill, dodo insisted should not be played in the house. it gave rather melancholy notes, and was productive of moisture. but she finished a passage which seemed to have no end, before she acknowledged these compliments. then she emptied the _cor anglais_ into the heather. "poor bertie is a drone," she said; "he never thinks it worth while to do anything well. berts is better: he thinks it worth while to sit on his father really properly. i thought my energy might wake bertie up, and that was chiefly why i married him. but it only made him go to sleep. lichfield is about his level. i don't know anything about lichfield, and i don't know much about bertie. but they seem to me rather suitable. and much more can be done with the _cor anglais_ than wagner ever imagined. the solo in _tristan_ is absolute child's play. i could perform it myself with a week's practice." dodo had been engaged in a small incendiary operation among the heather, with the match with which she had lit her cigarette. for the moment it seemed that her incendiarism was going to fulfil itself on larger lines than she had intended. "jack, i have set fire to wales, like lloyd george," she cried. "stamp on it with your great feet. what great large strong feet! how beautiful are the feet of them that put out incendiary attempts in wales! about bertie, edith, if you will stop playing that lamentable flute for a moment--" "flute?" asked edith. "trombone, if you like. the point is that your vitality hasn't inspired bertie; it has only drained him of his. you set out to give him life, and you have become his vampire. i don't say it was your fault: it was his misfortune. but berts is calm enough to keep your family going. the real question is about mine. yes, jack, that was where hughie went into the sea, when the sea was like switzerland. and those are the reefs, before which, though it's not grammatical, he had to reach the boat. he swam straight out from where your left foot is pointing. a humane society medal came for him yesterday, and nadine pinned it upon his bed-clothes. he says it is rot, but i think he rather likes it. she pinned it on while he was asleep, and he didn't know what it meant. he thought it was the sort of thing that they give to guards of railway trains. the dear boy was rather confused, and asked if he had joined the station-masters." jack shaded his eyes from the sun. "and a big sea was running?" he asked. "but huge. it broke right up to the cliffs at the ebb. and into it he went like a duck to water." edith got up. "i have heard enough of hugh's trumpet blown," she said. "and i have heard enough of the _cor anglais_," said dodo. "dear edith, will you go away and play it there? you see, darling, jack came out this morning to talk to me, and i came out to talk to him. or we will go away if you like: the point is that somebody must." "i shall go and play golf," said edith with dignity. "i may not be back for lunch. don't wait for me." dodo was roused to reply to this monstrous recommendation. "if i had been in the habit of waiting for you," she said, "i should still be where i was twenty years ago. you are always in a hurry, darling, and never in time." "i was in time for dinner last night," said edith. "yes, because i told you it was at eight, when it was really at half past." edith blew a melancholy minor phrase. "_leit-motif_," she said, "describing the treachery of a friend." "tooty, tooty, tooty," said dodo cheerfully, "describing the gay impenitence of the same friend." edith exploded with laughter, and put the _cor anglais_ into its green-baize bag. "good-by," she said, "i forgive you." "thanks, darling. mind you play better than anybody ever played before, as usual." "but i do," said edith passionately. dodo leaned back on the springy couch of the heather as edith strode down the hillside. "it's not conceit," she observed, "but conviction, and it makes her so comfortable. i have got a certain amount of it myself, and so i know what it feels like. it was dear of you to come down, jack, and it will be still dearer of you if you can persuade nadine to go back with you to winston." "but i don't want to go back to winston. anyhow, tell me about nadine. i don't really know anything more than that she has thrown seymour over, and devotes herself to hugh." "my dear, she has fallen head over ears in love with him." "you are a remarkably unexpected family," jack allowed himself to say. "yes; that is part of our charm. i think somewhere deep down she was always in love with him, but, so to speak, she couldn't get at it. it was like a seam of gold: you aren't rich until you have got down through the rock. and hugh's adventure was a charge of dynamite to her; it sent the rock splintering in all directions. the gold lies in lumps before his eyes, but i am not sure whether he knows it is for him or not. he can't talk much, poor dear; he is just lying still, and slowly mending, and very likely he thinks no more than that she is only sorry for him, and wants to do what she can. but in a fortnight from now comes the date when she was to have married seymour. he can't have forgotten that." "forgotten?" asked jack. "yes; he doesn't remember much at present. he had severe concussion as well as that awful breakage of the hip." "do they think he will recover completely?" asked jack. "they can't tell yet. his little injuries have healed so wonderfully that they hope he may. they are more anxious about the effects of the concussion than the other. he seems in a sort of stupor still; he recognizes nadine of course, but she hasn't, except on that first night, seemed to mean much to him." "what was that?" "he so nearly died then. he kept calling for her in a dreadful strange voice, and when she came he didn't know her for a time. then she put her whole soul into it, the darling, and made him know her, and he went to sleep. she slept, or rather lay awake, all night by his bed. she saved his life, jack; they all said so." "it seems rather perverse to refuse to marry him when he is sound, and the moment he is terribly injured to want to," said jack. "my darling, it is no use criticizing people," said dodo, "unless by your criticism you can change them. even then it is a great responsibility. but you could no more change nadine by criticizing her, than you could change the nature of the wildcat at the zoo by sitting down in front of its cage, and telling it you didn't like its disposition, and that it had not a good temper. you may take it that nadine is utterly in love with him." "and as he has always been utterly in love with her, i don't know why you want me to take nadine away. bells and wedding-cake as soon as hugh can hobble to church." "oh, jack, you don't see," she said. "if i know hughie at all, he wouldn't dream of offering himself to nadine until it is certain that he will be an able-bodied man again. and she is expecting him to, and is worrying and wondering about it. also, she is doing him no good now. it can't be good for an invalid to have continually before him the girl to whom he has given his soul, who has persistently refused to accept it. it is true that they have exchanged souls now--as far as that goes my darling nadine has so much the best of the bargain--but hugh has to begin the--the negotiations, and he won't, even if he sees that nadine is a willing barkis, until he knows he has something more than a shattered unmendable thing to offer her. consequently he is silent, and nadine is perplexed. i will go on saying it over and over again if it makes it any clearer, but if you understand, you may signify your assent in the usual manner. clap your great hands and stamp your great feet: oh, jack, what a baby you are!" "do you suppose she would come away?" said jack, coughing a little at the dust his great feet had raised from the loose soil. "yes, if you can persuade her that her presence isn't good for hugh. so you will try; that's all right. nadine has a great respect for papa jack's wisdom, and i can't think why. i always thought a lot of your heart, dear, but very little of your head. you mustn't retort that you never thought much of either of mine, because it wouldn't be manly, and i should tell you you were a coward as the suffragettes do when they hit policemen in the face." "and why should it be i to do all this?" asked jack. "because you are papa jack," said dodo, "and a girl listens to a man when she would not heed a woman. oh, you might tell her, which is probably true, that edith is going away to-morrow, and you want somebody to take care of you at winston. i think even nadine would see that it would not quite do if she was left here alone with hughie. at least it is possible she might see that: you could use it to help to preach down a stepdaugher's heart. you must think of these things for yourself, though, because in my heart i am really altogether on nadine's side. i think it is wonderful that she should now be waiting so eagerly and humbly for hugh, poor crippled hugh, as he at present is, to speak. she has chosen the good part like mary, and i want you for the present to take it away from her. it's wiser for her to go, but am i," asked dodo grammatically, "to supply the ruthless foe, which is you, with guns and ammunition against my daughter?" "you can't take both sides," remarked jack. "jack, i wish you were a woman for one minute, just to feel how ludicrous such an observation is. our lives--not perhaps edith's--are passed in taking both sides. my whole heart goes out to hugh, who has been so punished for his gallant recklessness, and then the moment i say 'punished' i think of nadine's awakened love and shout, 'no, i meant rewarded.' then i think of nadine, and wonder if i could bear being married to a cripple, and simultaneously, now that she has shown she can love, i cannot bear the thought of her being married to anybody else. after all nelson had only one eye and one arm, and though he wasn't exactly married to lady hamilton, i'm sure she was divinely happy. but then, best of all, i think of hugh making a complete recovery, and once more coming to nadine with his great brown doggy eyes, and telling her.... then for once i don't take both sides, but only one, which is theirs, and if it would advance their happiness, i would even take away from poor little seymour his jade and his antoinette, which is all that nadine left him with, without a single qualm of regret." jack considered this a moment. "after all, she has left him where she found him," said jack, who had rather taken edith's view about their marriage. "he had only his antoinette and his jade when she accepted him, and until you make a further raid, he will have them still." dodo shook her head. "jack, it is rather tiresome of you," she said. "you are making me begin to have qualms for seymour. she had found his heart for him, you see, and now having taken everything out of it, she has gone away again, leaving him a cupboard as empty as mother hubbard's." "he will put the jade back--and antoinette," said jack hopefully. dodo got up. "that is what i doubt," she said. "until we have known a thing, we can't miss it. we only miss it when we have known it, and it is taken away, leaving the room empty. then old things won't always go back into their places again; they look shabby and uninteresting, and the room is spoiled. it is very unfortunate. but what is to happen when a girl's heart is suddenly awakened? is she to give it an opiate? what is the opiate for heart-ache? surely not marriage with somebody different. yet jilt is an ugly word." dodo looked at jack with a sort of self-deprecation. "don't blame nadine, darling," she said. "she inherited it; it runs in the family." jack jumped up, and took dodo's hands in his. "you shall not talk horrible scandal about the woman i love," he said. "but it's true," said dodo. "therefore it is the more abominable of you to repeat it," said he. but there was a certain obstinacy about dodo that morning. "i think it's good for me to keep that scandal alive in my heart," she said. "usen't the monks to keep peas in their boots to prevent them from getting too comfortable?" "monks were idiots," said jack loudly, "and any one less like a monk than you, i never saw. monk indeed! besides, i believe they used to boil the peas first." dodo's face, which had been a little troubled, cleared considerably. "that showed great commonsense," she said. "i don't think they can have been such idiots. jack, if i boil that pea, would you mind my still keeping it in my boot?" "rather messy," said he. "better take it out. after all, you did really take it out when you married me." dodo raised her eyes to his. "david shall take it out," she said. jack had not at present heard of this nomenclature. in fact, it does him credit that he instantly guessed to whom allusion was being made. "oh, that's settled, is it?" he said. "and now, david's mother, give me a little news of yourself. is all well?" dodo's mouth grew extraordinarily tender. "oh, so well, jesse," she said, "so well!" she was standing a foot or so above him, on the steep hillside, and bending down to him, kissed him, and was silent a moment. then she decided swiftly and characteristically that a few words like those that had just passed between them were as eloquent as longer speeches, and became her more usual self again. "you are such a dear, jack," she said, "and i will forgive your dreadful ignorance of the name of david's mother. oh, look at the sea-gulls fishing for their lunch. oh, for the wings of a sea-gull, not to fly away and be at rest at all, but to take me straight to the dining-room. and i feel certain nadine will listen to you, and it would be a good thing to take her away for a little. she is living on her nerves, which is as expensive as eating pearls like cleopatra." "drinking," said jack. "she dissolved them--" "darling, vinegar doesn't dissolve pearls: it is a complete mistake to suppose it does. she took the pearls like a pill, and drank some vinegar afterwards. jack, pull me up the hill, not because i am tired, but because it is pleasanter so. i am sorry you are going to-morrow, and i shall make love to hughie after you've gone and pretend it's you. i do pray hughie may get quite well, and he and nadine, and you and i all have our heart's desire. edith too: i hope she will write a symphony so beautiful that by common consent we shall throw away all the works of beethoven and bach and brahms just as we throw away antiquated bradshaws." she was rather out of breath after delivering herself of this series of remarkable statements, and jack got in a word. "and who was david's mother?" he asked, with a rather tiresome reversion to an abandoned topic. "i don't know or care," said dodo with dignity. "but i'm going to be." * * * * * it required all jack's wisdom to persuade nadine to go away with him, more particularly because at the first opening of the subject, edith, who was present, and whom jack had unfortunately forgotten to take into his confidence, gave a passionate denial to the fact that she was departing also. but in the end she yielded, for during this last fortnight she had felt (as by the illumination of her love she could not help doing) that at present she 'meant' very little to hugh. her presence, which on that first critical night had not done less than set his face towards life instead of death, had, she felt, since then, dimly troubled and perplexed him. every day she had thought that he would need her, but each day passed, and he still lay there, with a barrier between him and her. yet any day he might want her, and she was loth to go. but she knew how tired and overstrained she felt herself, and the ingenious papa jack made use of this. "you have given him all you can, my dear, for the present," he said. "come away and rest, and--what is dodo's phrase?--fill your pond again. you mustn't become exhausted; you will be so much wanted." "and i may come back if hughie wants me?" she asked. that was easy to answer. if hugh really wanted her, the difficult situation solved itself. but there was one thing more. "i don't suppose i need ask it," said nadine, "but if hughie gets worse, much worse, then i may come? i--i couldn't be there, then." jack kissed her. "my dear girl," he said, "what do you take me for? an ogre? but we won't think about that at all. please god, you will not come back for that reason." nadine very rudely dried her eyes on his rough homespun sleeve. "you are such a comfort, papa," she said. "you're quite firm and strong, like--like a big wisdom-tooth. and when we are at winston, will you let seymour come down and see me if he wants to? and--and if he comes will you come and interrupt us in half-an-hour? i've behaved horribly to him, but i can't help it, and it--that we weren't to be married, i mean--was in the _morning post_ to-day, and it looked so horrible and cold. but whatever he wants to say to me, i think half-an-hour is sufficient. i wonder--i wonder if you know why i behaved like such a pig." "i think i might guess," said jack. "then you needn't, because there's only one possible guess. so we'll assume that you know. what a nuisance women are to your poor, long-suffering sex. especially girls." jack laughed. "they are just as much a nuisance afterwards," said he. "look at your mother, how she is making life one perpetual martyrdom to me." "but she used to be a nuisance to you, papa jack," said nadine. "there again you are wrong," he said. "i always loved her." "and does that prevent one's being a nuisance?" asked nadine. "are you sure? because if you are, you needn't interrupt seymour quite so soon. i said half-an-hour, because i thought that would be time enough for him to tell me what a nuisance i was--" "you're a heartless little baggage," observed jack. "not quite," said nadine. "well, you're an april day," said he, seeing the smile break through. "and that is a doubtful compliment," said she. "but you are wrong if you think i am not sorry for seymour. yet what was i to do, papa jack, when i made the discovery?" "well, you're not a heartless little baggage," conceded jack, "but you have taken your heart out of one piece of the baggage, and packed it in another." "oh, la, la," said nadine. "we mix our metaphors." * * * * * nadine left with jack in the motor soon after breakfast next morning. it had been settled that she should not tell hugh she was going, until she said good-by to him, and when she went to his room next morning to do so, she found him still asleep, and the tall nurse entirely refused to have him awakened. "much better for him to sleep than to say good-by," said this adamantine woman. "when he wakes, he shall be told you have gone, if he asks." "of course he'll ask," said nadine. she paused a moment. "will you let me know if he doesn't?" she added. nurse bryerley's grim capable face relaxed into a smile. she did not quite understand the situation, but she was quite content to do her best for her patient according to her lights. "and shall i say that you'll be back soon?" she asked. nadine had no direct reply to this. "ah, do make him get well," she said. "that's what i'm here for. and i will say that you'll be back soon, shall i, if he wants you?" "soon?" said nadine. "that minute." * * * * * hugh slept long that morning, and dodo was not told he was awake and ready to receive a morning call till the travelers had been gone a couple of hours. she had spent them in a pleasant atmosphere of conscious virtue, engendered by the feeling that she had sent jack away when she would much have preferred his stopping here. but as dodo explained to edith it took quite a little thing to make her feel good, whereas it took a lot to make her feel wicked. "a nice morning, for instance," she said, "or sending my darling jack away because it's good for nadine, or getting a postal-order. quite little things like that make me feel a perfect saint. whereas the powers of hell have to do their worst, as the hymn says, to make me feel wicked." edith gave a rather elaborate sigh. she had to sigh carefully because she had a cigarette and a pen in her mouth, while she was scratching out a blot she had made on the score she was revising. so care was needed; otherwise cigarette and pen might have been shot from her mouth. when she spoke her utterance was indistinct and mumbling. "i suppose you infer that you are more at home in heaven than hell," she said, "since just a touch makes you feel a saint. i should say it was the other way about. you are so at home in the other place that the most abysmal depths of infamy have to be presented to you before you know they are wicked at all, whereas you hail as divine the most infinitesimal distraction that breaks the monotonous round of vice. perhaps i am expressing myself too strongly, but i feel strongly. the world is more high-colored to me than to other people." "darling, i never heard such a moderate and well-balanced statement," said dodo. "do go on." "i don't want to. but i thought your optimism about yourself was sickly, and wanted a--a dash of discouragement. but you and nadine are both the same: if you behave charmingly, you tell us to give the praise to you; if you behave abominably you say, 'i can't help it: it was nature's fault for making me like that.' now i am not like that: whatever i do, i take the responsibility, and say, 'i am i. take me or leave me.' but i have no doubt that nadine believes it has been _too_ wonderful of her to fall in love with hugh. and when she jilts seymour, she says 'enquire at nature's workshop; this firm is entirely independent.' bah!" dodo laughed, but her laugh died rather quickly. "ah, don't be hard, edith," she said. "we most of us want encouragement at times, and we have to encourage ourselves by making ourselves out as nice as we can. otherwise we should look on the mess we make of things as a hopeless job. perhaps it is hopeless but that is the one thing we mustn't allow. we are like"--dodo paused for a simile--"we are like children to whom is given a quantity of lovely little squares of mosaic, and we know, our souls know, that they can be put together into the most beautiful patterns. and we begin fairly well, but then the devil comes along, and jogs our elbow, and smashes it all up. probably it is our own stupidity, but it is more encouraging to say it is the devil or nature, something not ourselves. good heavens, my elbow has jogged often enough! and when the pattern gets on well, we encourage ourselves by saying, 'this is clever and good and wise me doing it now!' and then perhaps something very big and solemn comes our way, and we bow our heads, and know it isn't ourselves at all." edith had finished erasing her blot, and was gathering her sheets together. she tapped them dramatically with an inky forefinger. "this is big and solemn," she said. "but it's me. the artist's inspiration never comes from outside: it is always from within. i'm going to send it to have the band parts copied to-day." at the moment the message came that hugh received, and dodo got up. he had received edith one morning, but the effect was that he had eaten no lunch and had dozed uneasily all afternoon. edith had been content with the explanation that her vitality was too strong for him, and, while ready to give him another dose of it, did not press the matter; anyhow, she had other business on hand. he lay propped up in bed, with a wad of pillows at his back. he looked far more alert and present than he had yet done. hitherto, he had been slow to grasp the meaning of what was said to him, and he hardly ever volunteered a statement or question, but this morning he smiled and spoke with quite unusual quickness. "morning, aunt dodo," he said. "i'm awfully brisk to-day." nurse bryerley put in a warning word. "don't be too brisk," she said. "please don't let him be too brisk," she added, looking at dodo. "hughie, dear, you do look better," she said; "but we'll all be quite calm, and self-contained like flats." hugh frowned for a moment; then his face cleared again. "i see," he said. "bright, aren't i? aunt dodo, i have certainly woke up this morning. you look real, do you know; before i was never quite certain about you. you looked as if you might be a good forgery, but spurious. have a cigarette, and why shouldn't i?" "wiser not," said nurse bryerley laconically. hugh's briskness did not seem to be entirely good-natured. "how on earth could a cigarette hurt me?" he said. "perhaps it would be wiser for lady chesterford not to smoke either. aunt dodo, you mustn't smoke. wiser not." nurse bryerley smiled with secret content. "that's right, mr. graves," she said. "i like to see my patients irritable. it always shows they are getting better." "i should have thought you might have seen that without annoying me," said hugh. "well, well, i don't mind your having one cigarette to keep lady chesterford company," said the nurse. "but you'll be disappointed." dodo took out her case as nurse bryerley left the room. "here you are, hughie," she said. hugh lit one, and blew a cloud of smoke through his nostrils. "are they quite fresh, aunt dodo?" he said. "yes, dear, quite. doesn't it taste right?" "yes, delicious," said hugh, absolutely determined not to find it disappointing. "i say, what a sunny morning!" "is it too much in your eyes?" "it is rather. will you ask nurse bryerley to pull the blind down? why should you?" "chiefly, dear, because it isn't any trouble." dodo pulled down the blind too far on the first attempt to be pleasing, not far enough on the second. hugh felt she was very clumsy. "isn't nadine coming to see me this morning?" he asked. "but i daresay she is tired of sitting with me every day." dodo came back to her chair by the bed again. "she went off with jack to winston this morning," she said. "just for a change. she was very much tired and overdone. you've been a fearful anxiety to her, you dear bad boy." hugh put his cigarette down and shut his mouth, as if firmly determined never to speak again. "she came in to say good-by to you," she said, "but you were asleep and they didn't want to wake you." there was still dead silence on hugh's part. "it was only settled she should go yesterday," she continued, "and she had to be persuaded. but jack wanted one of us, and, as i say, she was very much overdone. now i'm not the least overdone. so i stopped. but i wish she could have seen how much more yourself you were when you woke to-day." at length hugh spoke. "what is the use of telling me that sort of tale?" he said. "she is going to be married to seymour in a few days. she has gone away for that. i suppose in some cold-blooded way she thought it better to sneak off without telling me. no doubt it was very tactful of her." dodo turned round towards him. "no, hughie, you are quite wrong," she said. "nadine is not going to marry seymour at all." hugh lifted his right hand, and examined it cursorily. a long cut, now quite healed, ran up the length of his forefinger. "i see," he said. "she said she would marry seymour in order to get rid of me, and now that i have been got rid of in other ways, she has no further use for him. isn't that it?" his face had become quite white, and the hand with the healed wound trembled so violently that the bed shook. "no, that is not it," said dodo quietly. "and don't be so nervous and fidgety, my dear." suddenly the trembling ceased. "aunt dodo, if it is not that, what is it?" he asked, in a voice that would have melted rhadamanthus. she turned a shining face on him, and laid her hand on his. "oh, hughie, lie still and get well," she said. "and then ask nadine herself. she will come back when you want her. she told nurse bryerley to tell you so, if you asked." hugh moved across his other hand, so that dodo's lay between his. "i must ask you one more thing," he said. "is it because of me in any way that she chucked seymour? i entreat you to say 'no' if it is 'no.'" "i can't say 'no,'" said dodo. hugh drew one long sobbing breath. "it's mere pity then," he said. "nadine always liked me, and she was always impulsive like that. i daresay she won't marry him till i'm better, if i am ever better. she will wait till i am strong enough to enjoy it thoroughly." dodo interrupted him. "hughie, don't say bitter and untrue things like that," she said. "and don't feel them. she is not going to marry seymour, either now or afterwards." once again hugh was silent, and after an interval dodo spoke, divining exactly what was in his irritable convalescent mind. "i have never deceived you before, hughie," she said, "and you have no right to distrust me now. i am telling you the truth. i also tell you the truth when i say you must get bitter thoughts out of your mind. ah, my dear, it is not always easy. there's a beast within each of us." "there's a beast within me," said hugh. "and there's a dear brave fellow whom i am so proud of," said dodo. hugh's lip quivered, but there was a quality in his silence as different from that which had gone before, as there was between his callings for nadine on the night when she fought death for him. "and now that's enough," said dodo. "shall i read to you, hughie, or shall i leave you for the present?" he held her hand a moment longer. "i think i will lie still and--and think," he said. "good luck to your fishing, dear," said she, rising. "good luck to your fishing?" he said. "it's on a picture. small boy fishing, kneeling in the waves." dodo beat a strategic retreat. "is it?" she said. but it seemed to hugh that her voice lacked the blank enquiry tone of ignorance. hugh settled himself a little lower down on his backing of pillows, after dodo had left him, and tried to arrange his mind, so that the topics that concerned it stood consecutively. but dodo's last remark, which certainly should have stood last also in his reflections, kept on shouldering itself forward. she had wished him "good luck to his fishing," and he could not bring himself to believe that, consciously or unconsciously, there was not in her mind a certain picture, of a little winged boy, kneeling in the waves, who dropped a red line into the unquiet sea. he could not, and did not try to remember the painter, but certainly the picture had been at some exhibition which he and nadine had attended together. a little winged boy.... the title was printed after the number in the catalogue. nadine was not to marry seymour now or afterwards.... there came a black speck again over his thoughts. he himself had been got rid of by this crippling accident, and now she had expunged seymour also. 'and though she saw all heaven in flower above, she would not love.' the lines came into his mind without any searching for them; for the moment he could not remember where he had heard them. and then memory began to awake. hitherto, he had not been able to recall anything of the day or two that preceded his catastrophe. a few of the immediate events before it he had never forgotten. he remembered nadine calling out, "no hugh, not you," he remembered her cry of "well done"; he remembered that he had toppled in on that line of toppling waters with a small boy on his back. but now a fresh line of memory had been awakened: some connection in his brain had been restored, and he remembered their quarrel and reconciliation on the day the gale began; how she had said, "oh, hughie, if only i loved you!" soon after came the portentous advent of the wind, with the blotting out of the sun, and the transformation of the summer sea. he heard with unspeakable irritation the entry of nurse bryerley. that seemed an unwarrantable intrusion, for he felt as if he had been alone with nadine, and now this assiduous grenadier broke in upon them with a hundred fidgety offices to perform. she restored to him a fallen pillow, she closed a window through which a breeze was blowing rather freely, she brought him a cup of chicken-broth. it seemed an eternity before she asked him if he was comfortable, and made her long-delayed exit. even then she reminded him that the doctor was due in half-an-hour. but for half-an-hour he would be alone now, and for the first time since his accident he found that he wanted to think. hitherto his mind had sat vacant, like an idle passenger who sees without observation or interest the transit of the country. but dodo's visit this morning and her communications to him had made life appear a thing that once more concerned him; till now it was but a manoeuver taking place round him, but outside him. now the warmth of it reached him again, and began to circulate through him. and what she had told him was being blown out, as it were, in his brain, even as a lather of soapsuds is blown out into an iridescent bubble, on which gleam all the hues of sunset and moonrise and rainbow. the rainbow was not one of the vague dreams in which, lately, his mind had moved; it was a real thing, not receding but coming nearer to him, blown towards him by some steady breeze, not idly vagrant in the effortless air. should it break on his heart, not into nothingness, but into the one white light out of which the sum of all lights and colors is made? he could not doubt that it was this which dodo meant. nadine had thrown over seymour and that concerned him. and then swift as the coming of the storm which they had seen together, came the thought, clear and precise as the rows of thunder-clouds, that for all he knew a barrier forever impenetrable lay between them. for he could never offer to her a cripple; the same pride that had refused to let him take an intimate place beside her after she, by her acceptance of seymour, had definitely rejected him, forbade him, without possibility of discussion, to let her tie herself to him, unless he could stand sound and whole beside her. he must be competent in brain and bone and body to be nadine's husband. and for that as yet he had no guarantee. since his accident he had not up till now cared to know precisely what his injuries were, nor whether he could ever completely recover from them. the concussion of the brain had quenched all curiosity, and interest not only in things external to him, but in himself, and he had received the assurance that he was going on very well with the unconcern that we feel for remote events. but now his thoughts flew back from nadine and clustered round himself. he felt that he must know his chances, the best or the worst ... and yet he dreaded to know, for he could live for a little in a paradise by imagining that he would get completely well, instead of in a shattered ruin which the knowledge of the worst would strew round him. but this morning the energy of life which for those two weeks had lain dormant in him, began to stir again. he wanted. it seemed to him but a few moments since his nurse left him that dr. cardew came in. he saw the flushed face and brightened eyes of his patient, and after an enquiry or two took out the thermometer which he had not used for days, and tested hugh's temperature. he put it back again in its nickel case with a smile. "well, it's not any return of fever, anyhow," he said. "do you feel different in any way this morning?" "yes. i want to get well." "highly commendable," said dr. cardew. hugh fingered the bed-clothes in sudden agitation. "i want to know if i shall get well," he said. "i don't mean half well, in a bath-chair, but quite well. and i want to know what my injuries were." dr. cardew looked at him a moment without speaking. but it was perfectly clear that this fresh color and eagerness in hugh's face was but the lamp of life burning brighter. there was no reason that he should not know what he asked, now that he cared to know. "you broke your hip-bone," he said. "you also had very severe concussion of the brain. there were a quantity of little injuries." "oh, tell me the best and the worst of it quickly," said hugh with impatience. "i can tell you nothing for certain for a few days yet about the fracture. there is no reason why it should not mend perfectly. and to-day for the first time i am not anxious about the other." quite suddenly hugh put his hands before his face and broke into a passion of weeping. chapter xiii a week later, dodo was interviewing dr. cardew in her sitting-room at meering. he had just spoken at some little length to her, and she had time to notice that he looked like a third-rate actor, and recorded the fact also that edith seemed to have gone back to scales and the double-bass. this impression was conveyed from next door. he spoke like an actor, too, and said things several times over, as if it was a play. he talked about fractures and conjunctions, and x-ray photographs, and satisfaction, and the recuperative powers of youth and satisfaction and x-rays. eventually dodo could stand this harangue no longer. "it is all too wonderful," she said, "and i quite see that if science hadn't made so many discoveries, we couldn't tell if hughie would have a bath-chair till doomsday or not. but now, dr. cardew, he is longing to hear, and dreading to hear, poor lamb, and won't you let me be the butcher, or i suppose i should say, 'mary'? you've been such a clever butcher, if you understand, and i do want to be mary, who had a little lamb"--she added in desperation, lest he should never understand her allusive conversation. "of course he's not my little lamb, but my daughter's, and he wants to know so frightfully. yes: i understand about his intellect, too. it seems to me as bright as it ever was, and i notice no change whatever. he always spoke as if he was excited. may i go?" dodo intended to go, whether she might or not, but just at the door, she seemed to herself to have treated this distinguished physician with some abruptness. she unwillingly paused. "do stop to lunch," she said, "it will be lunch in ten minutes, and you will find me not so completely distracted. i shall be quite sensible, and would you ring the bell and tell them you are stopping? don't mind the scales and the double-bass, dear dr. cardew; it is only mrs. arbuthnot, of whom you have heard. she will not play at lunch. i know you think you have come to a mad-house, but we are all quite sane. and i may go and tell hughie what you have told me? if you hear loud screams of joy, it will only be me, and you needn't take any notice." dodo slid along the passage, upset a chair in nurse bryerley's room, and knelt down on the floor by hugh's bed. she clawed at something with her eager hands, and it was chiefly bed-clothes. "oh, praise god, hughie," she said. "amen. there! now you know, and there won't be any crutches, my dear, or the shadow of a bath-chair, whatever that is like. you won't have chicken-broth, and a foolish nurse; not you, dear nurse bryerley, i didn't mean you, and you will walk again and run again, and play the fool, just like me, for a hundred years more. i told dr. cardew you weren't ever very calm or unexcited, and your poor broken hip has mended itself, and your kidneys aren't mixed up with your liver and lights, and you've--you've got your strong young body back again, and your silly young brain. oh, hughie!" dodo leaned forward and clutched a more satisfactory handful of hugh's shoulders. "i couldn't let anybody but myself tell you," she said. "i had to tell you. but nobody else knows. you can tell anybody else you want to tell." hugh was paying but the very slightest attention to dodo. "telegraph-form," he said rather rudely to nurse bryerley. dodo loved this inattention to herself. there was nothing _banal_ about it. he had no more thought of her than he would have had for a newspaper that contained ecstatic tidings. he did not stroke or kiss or shake hands with a mere newspaper that told him such great things. "it's so funny not to have telegraph-forms handy," he said. "i know, dear. they ought always to be in every room. but servants are so forgetful. talk to me until nurse bryerley gets one." hugh looked at her with shining eyes. "how can i talk?" he said. "there's nothing to say. i want that telegraph-form." dodo, human and practical and explosive, yearned for the statement of what she knew. "whom are you going to telegraph to?" she asked. hugh had time for one contemptuous glance at her. "oh, aunt dodo, you ass!" he said. "oh, by jove, how awfully rude of me, and i haven't thanked you for coming to tell me. thanks so much: i am so grateful to you for all your goodness to me--ah!" he took a telegraph-form and scribbled a few words. "may it go now?" he said. dodo was almost embarrassingly communicative at lunch, at which meal edith did not appear, and the continued booming of the double-bass indicated that art was being particularly long that morning. consequently dodo found herself alone with an astonished physician. "if only a man could be a clergyman and a doctor," she said, "you could tell him everything, because clergy know all about the soul and doctors all about the body, and when you completely understand anything, you can't be shocked at it. i think i should have poisoned you, dr. cardew, if you had said that hughie would never be the same man again: anyhow i shouldn't have asked you to lunch. ah, in that case i couldn't have poisoned you! how difficult it must be to plan a crime really satisfactorily. i always have had a great deal of sympathy with criminals, because my great-grandfather was hanged for smuggling. do have some more mutton, which calls itself lamb. i certainly shall. i'm going to have a baby, you know, or perhaps you didn't. isn't it ridiculous at my age, and he's going to be called david." "in case--" began dr. cardew. "no, in any case," said dodo. "i mean it certainly is going to be a boy. you shall see. what a day for january, is it not? the year has turned, though i hope that doesn't mean it will go bad. i wish you had seen hughie's face when i told him he wasn't going to have a bath-chair. he looked like one of sir joshua reynolds' angels with a three weeks' beard, which i shouldn't wonder if he was shaving now, since, as i said, there aren't going to be any bath-chairs." "i don't quite follow," said dr. cardew politely but desperately. "i'm sure i don't wonder," said dodo cordially, "although it's so clear to me. but you see, he's going to propose to my daughter now that it's certain he will be the same man again and not a different one, and no eligible young man ever has a beard. what a good title for a sordid and tragic romance 'beards and bath-chairs' would be. of course hughie instantly called for a telegraph-form, and when i asked him who he was telegraphing to, he called me an ass, in so many words, or rather so few. after all i had done for him, too! oh, here's edith; dr. cardew and i have not been listening to your playing, but we're sure it has been lovely. do you know dr. cardew? and it's mrs. arbuthnot, or ought i to say 'she's mrs. arbuthnot'? edith, if you don't mind our smoking, dr. cardew and i will wait and talk to you for a little, but if you do, we won't." edith shook hands so warmly with the doctor, that he felt he must have been an old friend of hers, and that the fact had eluded his memory. but it was only the general zeal which a long musical morning gave her. "i'm sure you came to see our poor hugh," she said. "do tell me, is there the slightest chance of his ever walking again?" "not the smallest," said dodo; "i've just been to break the news to him, and he has telegraphed to nadine to come at once--i can't keep it up. edith, he is going to be perfectly well again, and he has telegraphed to nadine just the same." edith looked a little disappointed. "then i suppose we must resign ourselves to a perfectly conventional and philistine ending," she said. "there was all the makings of a twentieth century tragedy about the situation, and now i am afraid it is going to tail off and be domestic and happy and utterly inartistic. i had better hopes for nadine, she always looked as if there might be some wild destiny in store for her, and when she engaged herself to seymour without caring two straws for him, i thought i heard a great fate knocking at the door--" this was too gross an inconsistency for even dodo to pass over. "and you said at the time you thought the engagement was horrible and unnatural and me a wicked mother for permitting it," she cried. "very possibly. no doubt then i was being a woman, now i am talking as an artist. you always confuse the two, dodo, for all your general acumen. when i have been playing all morning--" "scales," said dodo. "a great deal of the finest music in the world is based on scale passages, and the second movement of my symphony is based on them too. when i have been playing all morning, i see things as an artist. i know dr. cardew will agree with me: sometimes he sees things as a surgeon, sometimes as a man. as a surgeon if a hazardous operation is in front of him, he says to himself, 'this is a wonderful and dangerous thing, and it thrills me.' as a man he says, 'poor devil, i am afraid he may die under the knife.' as for you, dodo, artistically speaking, you spoiled a situation as--lurid as a play by webster. 'princess waldenech' might have been as classical in real life as the 'duchess of malfi.' artistically an atmosphere as stormy as the first act of the valkyries surrounded you. and now instead of the '_götterdämmerung_' you are going to give us '_hänsel und gretel_' with flights of angels." dodo exploded with laughter. "and while i was still giving you 'princess waldenech'," she said, "you cut me for a year." "as a woman," cried edith; "as an artist i adored you. you were as ominous as faust's black poodle. of course your first marriage to a man who adored you, for whom you did not care one bar of the 'hallelujah chorus,' was a thing that might have happened to anybody; but when, as soon as he was mercifully delivered, you got engaged to jack, and at the last moment jilted him for that melodramatic drunkard, i thought great things were going to happen. then you divorced him, and i waited with a beating heart. and now, would you believe it, dr. cardew!" cried edith, pointing a carving fork with a slice of ham on the end of it at him. "she has married lord chesterford, as you know, and is going to have a baby. and all that wealth of potential tragedy is going to end in a silver christening-mug. the silly suffragette with her hammer and a plate-glass window has more sense of drama than you, dodo. and now nadine is going to take after you, and marry the man she loves. hugh is just as bad: instead of dying for the sake of that blear-eyed child who comes up to enquire after him every day, he is going to live for the sake of nadine. drama is dead. of course it has long been dead in literature, but i hoped it survived in life." dodo turned anxiously to dr. cardew. "she isn't mad," she said reassuringly. "you needn't be the least frightened. she will play golf immediately after lunch." edith had been brought her large german pewter beer-mug, and for the moment she had put her face into it, like old-fashioned gentlemen praying into their hats on sunday morning before service. there was a little froth on the end of her rather long nose when she took it out. "why not?" she said. "all artistic activity is a sort of celestial disease, and its antidote is bodily activity which is a material disease. a perfectly healthy body, like mine, does not need exercise, except in order to bring down the temperature of the celestial fever. when i am playing golf, my artistic soul goes to sleep and rests. and when i am composing, i should not know a golf-ball from an egg. that is me. you might think i am being egoistic, but i only take myself as an instance of a type. i speak for the whole corporate body of artists." "militant here on earth," remarked dodo. "militant? of course all artists are militant, and they fight against blind eyes and deaf ears. they scream and lighten, and hope to shake this dull world into perception. but it is fighting against prodigious odds. the drama that seems to interest the world now is a presentation of the hopeless lives of suburban people. any note of romance or distinction is sufficient to secure a failure. it's the same in music: debussy when he tells us of rain in the garden makes the rain fall into a small backyard with sooty blighted plants growing in it, out of a foggy sky. when he gives us '_reflets dans l'eau_' the water is a little cement basin in the same backyard, with anemic goldfish swimming about in it. as for strauss, he began and finished with that terrible 'domestic symphony.' it went from the kitchen into the scullery, and back again. fiction is the same. any book that deals with entirely dull people, provided that they, none of them, ever show a spark of real fire or are touched by romance or joy or beauty, makes success. they must have the smell of oilcloth and irish stew around them, and then the world says, 'this is art' or 'this is reality.' there's the mistake! art is never real: it is fantasy, a fairy-story, a soap-bubble sailing into the sunset. it is art because it takes you out of reality. of course artists are militant; they fight against dullness, and they will fight forever, and they will never win. as for their being militant here on earth, you must be militant somewhere. i shall be militant in heaven by and by. i wonder if you understand. as i said, i was disappointed in nadine artistically, but i am enraptured with her humanly. on that same plane i am enraptured with you, dodo. humanly speaking, i have watched you with sobs in my throat, battling perilously on the great seas. and now you are like a battered ship, having weathered all storms, and putting into port, with all the piers and quays shouting congratulation. artistically speaking, you are a derelict, and i should like to have you blown up. hullo, what has happened to dr. cardew?" dodo looked quickly round. the thought just crossed her mind that he might be asleep or having a fit. but there was no dr. cardew there, nor anywhere about, to be seen. "he has gone away while we weren't attending, just as a conjurer changes a rabbit to an omelette while you aren't attending," she said, "and i'm sure i don't wonder. oh, edith, at last the 'hunting of the snark' has come true. i see now that we are _boojums_. people softly and silently vanish away when you and i are talking, poor dears. they can't stand it, and i've noticed it before. dear old chesterford used to vanish sometimes like that, and i never knew until i saw he wasn't there. i'm sure bertie vanishes too sometimes. i suppose we ought to vanish also, as the table must be laid again for dinner to-night." edith finished her beer. "i had breakfast, lunch and dinner on the same cloth once," she said. "i was composing all day, and at intervals things were stuck in front of me while i ate or drank. i didn't move from nine in the morning till half-past eight in the evening, and i wrote forty pages of full score, and the inspiration never flagged for a moment. i wonder why artists are so fond of writing what they call 'my memories'; they ought to be content, as i am, to stand or fall by what they have done. thank god, i have never had any doubts about my standing. oh, i see a telegraph-boy coming up the drive. it is sure to be for me. i am expecting a quantity." this particular one happened to be for dodo. edith was disposed to take it as a personal insult. * * * * * nadine during the days she had spent at winston had not done much looking after papa jack, which had been the face-reason of her going there; and it is doubtful whether the real reason had found itself fulfilled, since there was substituted for the strain of seeing hugh daily, the strain of wanting to see him. dodo, with her own swift recuperative powers, and the genius she had for being absorbed in her immediate surroundings, had not reckoned with nadine's inferior facility in this respect, nor had she realized how completely the love which had at last touched nadine drained and dominated her whole nature. all her zest for living, all her sensitiveness and intelligence seemed to have been, as by some alchemical touch, transformed into the gold which, all her life, had been missing from her. she explained this to esther, who, with an open-mindedness that might have appeared rather unsisterly, ranged her sympathies in opposition to seymour. "how long i shall be able to stop here," she said, "i don't know. i promised mama i would go away for at least a week, unless hughie wanted me, but after that i think i shall go back whether he wants me or not. i can't attend to anything else, and last night when i was playing billiards i carefully put the chalk into my coffee, which is not at all the sort of thing i usually do. it is very odd: all my life i have been quite unaware of this one thing, now i am not really aware of anything else. you are rather dream-like yourself to me: i am not quite sure if you have really happened, or are part of a general background." "i am not part of any background," said esther firmly. "no, so you say; but perhaps it is only the background that tells me so. and i suppose i ought to think a great deal about seymour. i try to do that, but when i've thought about him for about a minute and a quarter, i find my thoughts wander, and i wonder if hughie has had his beef-tea or not. i do hope that he is not unhappy, but having hoped it, i have finished with that, and remember that just at this moment hughie is being made comfortable for the night. but do pin me down to seymour. did you see him in town, and does he mean to tell me what he thinks?" "yes, i saw him. he was exceedingly cross, but i don't think his crossness came from temper; it came from his mind's hurting him. he told me he had meant to come down here and have it out with you, but presently he said you weren't worth it. so i took your side." "that was darling of you," said nadine; "but i am not sure that seymour is not right." "how can he be right? you haven't changed towards him." "oh, doesn't jilting him make a change?" asked nadine hopefully. "no, that is an accident, as i told him. you didn't do it on purpose. you might as well say that to be knocked down by a motor-car is done on purpose. you get knocked down by hughie. you hadn't ever loved seymour at all, and really you said you would marry him largely because you wanted hughie to stop thinking about you. it was chiefly for hughie's sake you said you would marry seymour, and it was so wonderful of you. then came another accident and seymour fell in love with you. i warned him when we were on the family improvement tour in the summer that he was doing rather a risky thing--" nadine got up. "risky?" she said. "oh, how risky it is. it is that which makes it so splendid! you risk everything: you go for it blind. do you think seymour went for it blind? i don't believe he did. i think he had one eye open all the time. he couldn't be quite blind i think: his intelligence would prevent it. and i don't think he would be cross now, if he had been quite blind. so i am not properly sorry for him." "i went to lunch with him," said esther. "he ate an enormous lunch, which i suppose is a consoling sign. but then seymour would eat an enormous breakfast on the morning he was going to be hung. he would feel that he would never have any more breakfasts, so he would eat one that would last forever. i think we have given enough time to seymour. it is much more important that you shouldn't think of me as a background." nadine apparently thought differently. "but i want to be nice to seymour," she said, "and i don't see how to begin. and--and he's part of the background, too. he doesn't seem really to matter. but if he was really fond of me, like that, it's hateful of me not to care. but how can i care? i've tried to care every day, and often twice a day, but--oh, a huge 'but.'" the two were talking in dodo's sitting-room, which nadine had very wisely appropriated. at this moment the door opened, and seymour stood there. "i made up my mind not to come and see you," he said to nadine, "and then i changed it." esther sprang up. "oh, seymour, how mean of you," she said, "not to ask nadine if you might come." "not at all. she was bound to see me. but i didn't come to see you. you had better go away." "if nadine wishes--" she began. "it does not matter what nadine wishes. nadine, please tell her to go." seymour spoke quite quietly, and having spoken he turned aside and lit a cigarette he held in his hand. by the time he had finished doing that the door had closed behind esther. he looked round. "what a charming room!" he said. "but if you are going to sit in a room like this, you ought to dress for it." nadine felt that all the sorrow she had been conscious of for him was being squeezed out of her. he tiptoed about, now looking at a picture, and now fingering an embroidery. he stopped for a moment opposite a louis seize tapestry chair, and gently flicked off it the cigarette ash that he had let drop there. he looked at the faded crimson of the spanish silk on the walls, and examined with extreme care a dutch picture of a frozen canal with peasants skating, that hung above the mantelpiece. there was an aubonne carpet on the floor, and after one glance at it he went softly off it, and stood on the hearth-rug. "i should put three-quarters of this room into a museum," he said, "and the rest into a dust-bin. you are going to ask me what i should put into the dust-bin. i should put that sham watteau picture there, and that bureau that thinks it is jacobean." "and me?" asked nadine. "i am not sure. no: i am sure. i don't put you anywhere. i want to know where you put yourself. perhaps you think you don't owe me an explanation. but i disagree with you. i think you owe it me. of course i know you haven't got an explanation. but i should like to hear your idea of one." standing on the hearth-rug he pointed his toe as he spoke, looking at the well-polished shoe that shod it. nadine was just on the point of telling him that he was thinking not about her, but about his shoe, but he was too quick for her. "of course i'm thinking about my shoe," he said. "i was wondering how it is that antoinette polishes shoes better than any one in the world." "is that what you have come to talk about?" asked nadine. "that is a very foolish question, nadine. you have quibbled and chattered so incessantly that sometimes i think you can do nothing else. you might retort with a _tu quoque_, but it would not be true. i was capable anyhow of falling in love with you, i regret to say." seymour paused a moment, and then raised his eyes, which had been steadily regarding the masterpieces of antoinette, to nadine. "i am wrong: i don't regret it," he said. suddenly his sincerity and his reality reached and touched nadine. he stepped out of the background, so to speak, and stood firmly and authentically beside her. "i regret it very much," she said, "and i am as powerless to help you, as i am to help myself." "you seem to have been helping yourself pretty freely," said he in a sudden exasperation. but she, usually so quick to flare into flame, felt no particle of resentment. "there is no good in saying that," she said. "i did not mean there to be. good? i did not come down here to do you good." "why did you come? just to reproach me?" "partly." again seymour paused. "i came chiefly in order to look at you," he said at length. "you are quite as beautiful as ever, you may like to know." it was as if a further light had been turned on him, making him clearer and more real. she had confessed to esther her inability to be "properly sorry" for him, but now found herself not so incapable. "i can't help either you or myself," she said again. "we have both been taken in control by something outside ourselves, which never happened to either of us before. you feel that i have behaved atrociously to you, and any one you ask would agree with you. but the atrocity was necessary. i couldn't help it. only you must not think that i am not sorry for the effect that such necessity has had on you. i regret it very much. but if you ask me whether i am ashamed of myself, i answer that i am not." she went on with growing rapidity and animation. "if you have been in love with me, seymour," she said, "you will understand that, for you will know that compulsion has been put upon me. how was it any longer possible for me to marry you, when i fell in love with hughie? i jilted you: it is a word quite hideous, like flirt, but just as never in my life did i flirt, so i have not jilted you in the hideous sense. it was not because i was tired of you, or had a fancy for some one else. there was no getting away from what happened. hughie enveloped me. my walls fell down, and went to jericho. it wasn't my fault. the trumpets blew, just that." "and in walked hugh," said seymour. "i am not sure about that," said nadine. "i think he was there all the time, walled up." seymour was silent a moment. "how is he?" he asked. "he is going on well. they do not know more than that yet. he is getting over the concussion, but they cannot tell yet whether he will be able to walk again." "and are you going to marry him in any case, if he is a cripple, i mean?" he asked. "if hughie will have me. i daresay i shall propose to him, and be refused, just as used to happen the other way round in the old days. oh, i know what his soul is like so well! he will say that he will not let me spend all my life looking after a cripple. but i shall have my way in the end. i am much stronger than he." seymour saw and understood the change in her face when she spoke of hugh. admirable as her beauty always was, he had not dreamed that such tender transformation could come to it, or that it was capable of assuming so inward-burning and devoted a quality and yet shining with its habitual brilliance uneclipsed. the love which he had dreamed would some day awake there for him, he saw now in the first splendor of its dawning, and from it he could guess what would be the glory of its full noonday, and with how celestial a ray she would shine on her lover. for the moment it seemed to him not to matter that it was another, not he, on whom that dawn should break, for whom it should grow to noonday, and sink at last in the golden west of a life truly and lovingly lived without fear of the lengthening shadows and the night that must inevitably close as it had preceded it; for by the power of his own love, he could detach himself from himself, and though only momently reach that summit of devotion far below which, remote and insignificant, lies the mere husk and shell of the world that spins through the illimitable azure. so dante saw the face of beatrice, when he passed into the sweetness of the earthly paradise, and there came to him she whom the chariot with its harnessed griffins drew. and not otherwise, in his degree and hers, seymour looked now at nadine's face, glorified and made tender by her love, and in the perception that his own love gave him, he hailed and adored it.... "i came to scold and reproach," he said, "but i also came just to see you, to look at you. there is no harm in that. and if there is i can't help it. nadine, i used to wonder what you would look like when you loved. you have shown me that. i--i didn't guess. there's a poem by browning which ends 'those who win heaven, blest are they.' the man who speaks was just in my case. but he managed to say that. i say it too, very quickly, because i know this unnatural magnanimity won't last. i agree with all you have said: it wasn't your fault. i hope you won't be tied to a cripple all your life, or, if he has to be a cripple, i hope you will be tied to him. there! i've said it, and it is true, but it rather reminds me of holding my breath. give me a kiss, please, and then i'll climb swiftly down out of this rarefied atmosphere." he kissed her on the mouth, as his right had been, and for a moment held her to him in an embrace more intimate than he had ever yet claimed from her. edith, it may be remembered, had once seen him kiss her, and had pronounced it an anemic salutation. but it was not anemic now: his blood was alert and virile; its quality was not inferior to that which, one day in the summer, made hugh seize her wrists, demanding the annulment of the profanation of her marriage with seymour. in both, too, was the same fierceness of farewell. for a few seconds seymour held her close to him, and felt her neither shrink from him nor respond. her willing surrender to his right was the utmost she could give, and he knew there was nothing else for him. and then he proceeded to descend from what he had called the rarefied atmosphere with the speed of a yet-unopened parachute. "damn hugh," he said. "yes, damn him. for god's sake, don't tell him i asked after him, or hoped he was getting better. i don't want him to die, since i don't suppose that would do me any good, nor do i want him to be crippled for life, since that also would be quite useless after what you have told me. but if you said to him that i had asked after him, i should sink into the earth for shame. he would think it noble and nice of me, and i'm not noble or nice. i should hate to be thought either. his good opinion of me would make me choke and retch. i should not be able to sleep if i thought hugh was thinking well of me. so hold your tongue." nadine had never been able quite to keep pace with seymour: she always lagged a little behind, just as hugh lagged so much more behind her. she was still gasping from the violence of his seizure of her, when he had descended, so to speak, a thousand feet or so. tenderness still clung about her like soaked raiment. "oh, seymour," she said. "i didn't realize you felt like that: i didn't, really. what are you going to do?" his clever handsome face wore an uncompromising look, but there was humor in his eyes. "i may take to drink," he said, "like your angelic father. very likely i shan't, because i notice that it spoils your breakfast if you are intoxicated the evening before. i shall certainly try to get some more jade, and i shan't marry antoinette, because she is buxom. if i marry, i shall marry some girl who reminds me of asparagus, like you. not the stout french asparagus, of course, but the lean english variety. i should not wonder if i came to your wedding, and wrote an account of it to a ladies' newspaper. i shall say you were looking hideous. i haven't got any other plans, except to go away from this place. you are a sort of chucker-out, nadine, at winston. you chucked out hugh in the summer, and now in the winter you chuck me out. you are a vampire, i think. you suck people dry, and then you throw them away like orange skins. don't argue with me: if you argued i should become rude. i was rude to aunt dodo the other day, when she showed me you sleeping on the floor by hugh's bed. it was a sickening spectacle: i told her so at the time, and i tell you so now." poor complicated nadine! her complications had been canceled like vulgar fractions, and she was left in a state of the most deplorable simplicity. there was a numerator, and that was hugh; there was a nought below and that was she. the simplest arithmetician could see that the nought "went into" the numerator an infinite number of times. the result was that there was hugh and nothing else at all. her surrendered reply indicated this: it indicated also her knowledge of it. "but it was hughie there," she said. and then suddenly seymour's unexpanded parachute opened, and he floated in liquid air, with the azure encompassing him. "your hughie," he said. "mine," said nadine. there came an interruption. a footman entered with a telegram which he gave to nadine. and once again the ineffable light came into her face, coming from below, transfiguring it. "that's from the cripple," said seymour unerringly. she passed him the words hugh had written that morning. they could not have been simpler, nor could he, by any expenditure of separate half-pennies have said more. "come back," he had written, "important. good news." seymour got up. "so you are going," he said. nadine did not seem to hear this. she addressed the footman. "tell them to send round the napier car at once," she said. "yes, miss. but his lordship ordered the napier to meet the shooters--" "has it gone?" "no, miss: it was to pick up lady esther--" "then i want it at once, instead. i am going to start instantly. tell them to send the car round at once. and tell my maid to pack a bag for me, and follow with the rest of my luggage." "yes, miss. where to, shall i say?" "meering, of course. she will go by train." she turned her unclouded radiance to seymour again, and held out both her hands. "oh, seymour," she said. "i feel such a brute, such a brute. but it's my nature to." "clearly. go and put on your hat." "will you let me hear of you sometimes?" she asked. "i don't see why i should write to you, if you mean that," he said. "nor do i, now i come to think of it. i made a conventional observation. will you let them know if you want lunch, or want to be taken to the station?" "yes. thanks. good-by. and good luck." she lingered one moment more. "thank you," she said. "and don't think of me without remembering i am sorry." * * * * * it was still an hour short of sunset when the car emerged from the mountainous inland on to the coast. the plain and the line of sand-dunes that bordered the sea slept under a haze of golden winter sun; a few wisps of light cloud hung round the slopes of snowdon, but otherwise the sky was of pale unflecked blue, from rim to rim, and the sea was as untroubled as the turquoise vault which it reflected. though january had still a half-dozen of days to run, a hint and promise of spring was in the air, and nadine sat in the open car unchilled by its headlong passage. they had taken but five hours to come from the midlands, and they seemed to have passed for her in one throb of eager consciousness, so that she looked bewildered to find that the familiar landmarks of home were close about her, and that they were already close to their journey's end. soon they began to climb out of the plain again up the outlying flank of hill that formed the south end of the bay, and culminated in the steep bluff of rock at the top of which she and hugh had sat and quarreled and been reconciled on the morning of the gale. to-day no tumult of maddened water beat at the base of it, nor did thunder of surges break into spray and flying foam, and the line of reef that ran out from it lay, with its huge scattered rocks, as quiet as a herd of sea-beasts grazing. as they got higher she could see over the sand-dunes the beach itself; no ramparts and towers of surf or ruins of shattered billows fringed it now; a child could have played on that zone of shattering and resistless forces. of its dangers and menaces nothing was left; the great gift that it had brought to nadine's heart alone remained, and flowered there like the rose-pink almond blossom in spring. nature had healed where she had hurt, and what had seemed but a blind and wanton stroke, had proved to be the smiting of the rock, so that the spring burst forth, and rivers ran in the dry places. the house, gray and welcoming, stood dozing in the afternoon sun, and nadine, suddenly conscious that they had arrived without a halt, said a contrite word to the chauffeur on the subject of lunch. she recollected also that she had sent no reply to hugh's telegram, and that her arrival would be unexpected. unexpected it certainly was, and dodo, who had just seen edith off to play golf better than anybody else had ever done, jumped up with a scream as she entered. "but, my darling, is it you?" she cried. "we have been expecting to hear from you, but seeing is better than hearing. oh, nadine, such news! of course you guess it, so i shall not tell you, as it is unnecessary, and besides hughie must do that. he has been shaved, and looks quite clean and young again. will you go up to see him at once? perhaps it is equally unnecessary to ask that. shall i come up with you? my darling, there's a third unnecessary question. of course i shall do nothing of the kind. ask the great grenadier if you may go in to him without his being told you are coming. it might be rather a shock, but personally i believe shocks of joy are always good for one. at least they have never hurt me. go upstairs, dear, and after an unreasonable time you might ring for me." the nurse's room was a dressing-room attached to the bedroom where hugh lay. nadine went in through this, and the door into the room beyond being open, she saw that nurse bryerley was in there. at this moment she looked up and saw nadine. she turned towards hugh's bed. "here's a visitor for you," she said, and beckoned to nadine to enter. she heard hugh ask "who?" in a voice that sounded somehow expectant, and she went in. in the doorway she passed nurse bryerley coming out, and the door closed behind her. hugh had raised himself on his elbow in bed, and the light in his eyes showed that, though he had asked who his visitor was, his heart knew. he neither spoke nor moved while nadine came across the room to his bedside. then in a whisper: "it is nadine," he said. she knelt down by the bed. "yes, hughie. you wanted me," she said. "i always want you," he answered. for a moment nadine hid her face in her hands without replying. then she raised it again to him. "hughie, you have always got me," she said. she drew that beloved head down to hers. * * * * * "and the news?" she said presently. "oh, that!" said hugh. "it's only that i am going to get quite well and strong again. that's all." chapter xiv dodo was sitting in her room in jack's house in eaton square, one morning towards the end of may, being moderately busy. she was trying to engage in a very intimate conversation with her husband, and simultaneously to conduct communication through the telephone, to smoke a cigarette, and to write letters. considering the complicated nature of the proceeding viewed as a whole, she was getting on fairly well, but occasionally became a little mixed up in her mind, and spoke of intimate things to jack in the determined telephone voice habitually used, or puffed cigarette smoke violently into the receiver. she had just done this and apologized to the central exchange. "i never knew you could send smoke down a telephone," remarked jack. "double one two four gerrard," said dodo. "in these days of modern science you can't tell what is going to happen, and it's well to anticipate anything. no, you fool, i mean miss, i said double one two four, eleven hundred and twenty four, if that makes it simpler. as i was saying, jack, i don't see why i shouldn't stop in town, and have my baby here. you can put lots of straw down, like margery daw, and that always looks so interesting. i should like to have straw down permanently, why don't we? darling, how are you, and as jack's going out to lunch, and i shall be quite alone, do come round--" dodo's face suddenly became seraphically blank. "oh, are you?" she said. "then will you tell mrs. arbuthnot that i hope she will come round to lunch with lady chesterford. jack, i said all that to edith's footman, who always smiles at me. i wonder if he will come to lunch instead, and say i asked him, which after all is quite true. but edith talks so much like a man, that of course i thought it was she, whereas it was he. yes, i don't see why i should go down to winston for it. babies born in london are just as healthy as babies born in staffordshire, and people will drop in more easily afterwards. besides i must go to nadine's wedding if i possibly can. it would be like reading a story that you know quite well is going to end happily, and finding that the last chapter of all, which you have been saving up for, so to speak, is torn out. i shall have the most enormous lump in my throat when i see her and hughie go up to the altar-rails together, and i love lumps in the throat. don't you? i don't mean quinzy." "i'll tell you all about the last chapter," said jack. "that would be very dear of you, but it wouldn't be the same thing at all. i want to see it, to see hugh walking as if he had never been smashed into ten thousand smithereens, and nadine, as if she had never thought about anybody else since her cradle. oh, by the way, they have settled at last that they would like to go on the yacht for their honeymoon. they are both bad sailors, but i suppose there are lots of harbors or breakwaters about, and they think it is the only plan by which they can be certain of being undisturbed. if it is rough, they will find a sort of pleasure in being sick into one basin: i really think they will. they are in that sort of foolishness, that whatever they do together will be in the garden of eden. and they are just forty-five years old between them which is exactly what i am all by myself. it seems quite a coincidence, though i have no idea what it coincides with. so let them have the yacht, jack, as you suggested, and the moon will be lovely, honey, and they will be exceedingly unwell!" dodo finished her letter, and having telephoned enough for the present, came and sat in a chair by her husband, in order to continue the intimate conversation. "jack, dear," she said, "i never do behave quite like anybody else, as you have known, poor wretch, for i don't know how many years. so you must be prepared for surprises when i give you that darling david. something ridiculous will happen. there'll be two or three of them, and the papers will say i have had a litter, or i shall die, or david will arrive quite unexpectedly like a flash of lightning, and i shall say, 'good heavens, david, is it you?' i should be exceedingly annoyed if i died--" "so should i," said jack. "i really believe you would. but it would be more annoying for me, because however nice the next world is going to be, i haven't had enough of this. i want years and years more, because eternity is there just the same, and if i live to be a hundred there won't be anything the less of that. eternity is safe, so to speak: it is invested in the bank, but time is just pocket-money, of which you always say i want such a lot. eternity will always be on tap, or else it wouldn't be eternal. but this particular brew will come to an end, and i shall be so sorry when the last gurgle sounds, and one knows there is no more. it couldn't come more nicely, if when it sounded, i had given you a son. i can't imagine any nicer way to die. on the other hand, there's no reason anywhere near as nice for living." jack put a great hand on her arm. "dodo, if you talk about dying, i shall be--shall be as sick as hughie and nadine together," he said. "oh, don't. but you see since we are us--is that right?--there is nothing i can't say to you, because i am only talking to myself. i wonder if i had better write a quantity of letters to my son, as some woman, i believe a spinster, did. david shall read them when he has learned how to read. oh, i could tell him so well how to make love, i know exactly what women like a man to be. luckily, so few men really know it, otherwise the world would go round much quicker, and we should all be blown off it. oh, jack, fancy a woman who had never known what child-bearing meant attempting to describe it! you might as well sit down at your bureau and write letters to david." "i could write jolly good ones," said jack serenely. "i am sure they would be excellent, but they would be nonsense from the other's point of view. it is so holy--so holy! once it wasn't holy to me; it was merely a bore. then, when nadine was born, it was not holy, but very exciting, and hugely delightful. but now it is holy." dodo put up her foot, and kicked jack's knee. "it's yours, as well as mine," she said. "poor dear holy jack. but i love you; that makes such a difference." jack caught dodo's foot in his hand. "oh, jack, let go," she said. "it's bad for me." instantly his fingers relaxed; and a look of agonized apology came over his face. dodo laughed. "oh, jack, you silly old woman," she said. "it is so easy to take you in." but her laughter quickly ceased, and she became quite grave again. "i don't want you to be as sick as nadine and hughie combined," she cried, "but i should like to make a few cheerful remarks about dying. we've all got to do it, and it doesn't make it any closer to talk about it. it's a pity we can't practise it, so as to be able to do it nicely, but it's one performance only, without rehearsals, unless you die daily like st. paul. i don't think i shall do it at all solemnly or tragically, jack, for it would not be the least in keeping with my life to have one tragic scene at the end. nor would it suit the rest of my life to be frightened at it. you see if we all held hands and stood in a row and said, 'one, two, three, now we'll die,' it wouldn't be at all alarming. and then you see from a religious point of view, god has been such a brick--is that profane? i don't think it is--such a brick to me all my life, that it seems most unlikely that he won't see me through. jack, dear, you look depressed. i won't talk about it any more. i shall very likely out-live you, and i shall be such a comfort to you when you are dying. i shall be exceedingly annoyed, just as you said you would be if i did it, but, oh, my dear, i shall say _au revoir_ to you with such a stout heart, and when i pass through the valley of the shadow myself how i shall look for your dear gray eyes to welcome me. it will be interesting! and now, as they say at the end of sermons, i must get ready to go out with nadine. i promised to go out with her for an hour before lunch. pull me up, and give me a chaste salute on my marble brow. what a good invention you are! it would be worse than going back to the days of hansoms and four-wheelers to be without you. without undue flattery, it would!" dodo's slight attack of seriousness evaporated completely, and having tried the effect of her hat, which comprised, so she said, the entire flora and fauna of brazil, on jack's head, put it on her own, and sent a message to nadine that she had been waiting an hour and a half. "but hughie shall not come out with us," she said, "since he and nadine don't pay the smallest attention to me, when they are together, and i feel alone in london. besides, nadine has to buy things that young gentlemen don't know anything about--and here you are at last, my darling nadine, but i'm not going to take your darling with us, any more than he takes you to his haberdasher, or whoever it is sells that sort of thing. don't look cross, hughie, because jack's going to let you have the yacht, and you and nadine can be unwell to your heart's content. go and sulk at your club, dear, for an hour, and then you come back to lunch, and stop for tea and dinner if you like. but the obduracy of your esteemed mother-in-law elect on the subject of the drive is quite invincible. dear me, what beautiful language!" nadine and her mother did their errands, and as only edith was going to lunch with them, who was almost invariably half-an-hour late, but who, if she arrived in time, would be quite certain to begin lunch without them, they prolonged their outing by a turn in the park. the morning was of that exquisite tempered heat that lies midway between the uncertain warmth of spring and the fierceness of true midsummer weather, and following, as it did, on a week of rainy days had brought out both crowds and flowers. the little green seats and shady alleys were full of kaleidoscopic color from hats and parasols and summer dresses, and more stable than these, but hardly less brilliant, were the clumps of full-flowered rhododendrons and beds of blossomings. the dust had been laid on the roads, and washed from the angled planes, and summer sat in the lap of spring. summer and spring too, as it were, sat side by side in dodo's motor, and who could say which was the more glorious, the mother in the splendor of her full-blown life, or nadine, that exquisite opening bud, still dewy in the morning of her days, no wild-flower, but more like an orchid, fragrant and subtle and complex. all that still remained to her: she would never be wild-rose or honeysuckle, in spite of the big simple human love which had come to her, and daily sprang higher, flame-like. to-day neither paid much attention to the crowd that contained so many friends. occasionally dodo blew a sudden gale of kissed finger-tips at some especially beloved face, but the smile that never left her face, though it did duty for general salutation, was really inspired from within. her daughter's awakening was a deep joy to dodo. "you and hughie and jack and i ought to be stuffed and put in the south kensington museum, darling," she said, "as curious survivals of absolutely happy people, who are getting exceedingly rare. i should utter a few words of passionate protest when the executioner and the taxidermist arrived, but i think i should consent for the good of the nation in general." nadine disagreed altogether. "we are much more useful alive," she said, "because we're infectious. or would our broad fatuous grins be infectious when we were stuffed? oh, there's seymour, mama. do kiss your hand violently, because it wouldn't be suitable for me to. i can only smile regretfully." "but you don't regret," said dodo, after giving him a perfect volley of kissed finger-tips. "no, but only because i can't. my will regrets. he has sent me a lovely necklace of jade, with a little label, 'jade for the jade,' on it. so i think he must feel better, as it's a sort of joke. i wrote him quite a nice little note, and said how dear it would be of him to come to my wedding, if he felt up to it." dodo giggled. "my dear, that is exactly what i should have done at your age," she said. "but i think i should have kissed my hand to him just now, and people would certainly have thought you heartless, if you had, just because they have got great wooden hearts themselves, accurately regulated, that pump exactly sixty times in a minute, neither more nor less. you do feel kindly and warmly to poor seymour, and you trust he is getting over it. about stuffing us, now. i'm not quite sure i should stuff papa jack. he's anxious about me, poor old darling, as if at my age i didn't know how to have a baby properly. i talked about dying a little, which upset him, i'm afraid, though it wasn't in the least meant to. my dear, to think that in ten days from now you'll be married! nadine, i do look forward to being a grandmama: i want to be lots of grandmamas, if you see what i mean. then there'll be papa hughie, and papa jack, and look, there's papa waldenech. i never knew he was in town. we must stop a moment: i have not seen him since he came uninvited to my ball in the autumn, a little bit on. ah, what a fool i am: he meant me not to tell you, so bear in mind that i haven't. waldenech, my dear, what a surprise!" they drew up at the curb, and he came to the carriage-door, hat in hand, courteous, distinguished and evil. "i have just come from paris," he said. "it is charming of you to welcome me. nadine, too. nadine, is your father to be allowed to come to your wedding? may i--" dodo had half-risen to greet him, and he saw the lines of her figure. he broke off short. "you are going to be a mother again?" he said. "yes, my dear, but you needn't tell the albert memorial about it," said she. "and of course you may come to nadine's wedding. i had no notion you would be in england." he appeared to pay not the slightest attention to this--but looked at her eagerly, hungrily, at those wonderful brown eyes, at the still youthful oval of her face, at the mouth he had so often kissed. "my god, you are a beautiful woman!" he said. "and you used to be mine!" then he turned abruptly, and walked straight away from them without another glance. dodo looked after him in silence a moment, frowning and smiling together. "poor old chap: it was a shock to him somehow," she said. "but he'll go back to the ritz and steady himself. how old he has got to look, nadine." but nadine had the frown without the smile. "i didn't like the way he went off," she said. "he didn't give another thought to my wedding, mama, after he saw. he looked hungry for you, and he looked horrible. he admired you so enormously. he was thinking of what he had lost and what papa jack had gained. and i felt frightened of him, just as i felt frightened one night when i was very little, and he came stumbling into the nursery, and wanted to say good-night to me. i remember my nurse tried to turn him out, and he looked as if he would have murdered her. poor daddy isn't a nice man, you know." but nadine looked more puzzled than vexed. dodo's frown had quite cleared away. she was far too essentially happy to mind little surface disturbances. "poor old daddy," she said. "he was startled, darling, and when people are startled they look like themselves, that is all, and daddy isn't quite nice, any more than the rest of us are. but it was rather sweet of him to want to go to your wedding. i hope he will be sober. he will probably want to kiss us all in the vestry, all of us except jack. i shall certainly kiss him, if he shows the slightest wish that i should do so. but he might be nasty to jack. perhaps we had better not tell jack he is here. it might make him anxious again, like when i talked about death this morning. oh, nadine, look at those delicious horses, cantering along, and praising god because they feel so strong and young! what a rotten seat that man has: oh, of course he has, because he's berts. how he fidgets his horse--berts, dear--" and dodo blew a shower of kisses on the end of her fingers. nadine's enjoyment in this liquid air had been suddenly extinguished. she herself hardly knew why, but her lowered pleasure she felt to be connected with her father. she tried, very sensibly, to get rid of it by speech, for the unreal thing when spoken, became so fantastically absurd. "was daddy ever very jealous about you?" she asked. dodo recalled her mind from the tragedy of berts riding so badly. "but violently pea-green with it," she said, "so that sometimes i didn't know if i could say good-morning to the butler in safety. that was in the early days, and i am bound to confess that he got over it. after that came my turn to be jealous, but i never took my turn, for between the particular old brandy and mademoiselle chose, if you understand, poor daddy became entirely impossible. but for auld lang syne i shall certainly kiss him in the vestry after your wedding, and he shall sign his name if he feels up to it." dodo's face recovered all its radiance. "and he was the father who begot you," she said. "how can i ever forget that, you joy of mine? i should be a beast if i wanted to. but he did look rather wicked just now. i think we had better turn, or edith will have finished lunch and gone away." * * * * * waldenech's appearance did not belie him: he both looked and felt very wicked indeed. the sight of dodo so soon to become the mother of another man's child had caused to break out into hideous activity a volcano that had long smoldered under the slag and ashes of his drunken and debauched days, and he flamed with a jealousy the more passionate because it had so long slumbered. he felt confused and bewildered by the violence of this unexpected passion, and, as dodo had said, he felt he must steady himself. he wanted to think clearly and constructively, to determine exactly what he must do, and how he must do it. at present he knew only of one necessity, that, even as he had taken dodo away from jack years ago, so now he must take jack away from dodo. the particular old brandy, taken in sufficient quantities, would clear his head, and enable him to think out ways and means. he shut himself into his sitting-room at the ritz, and by degrees the monstrous nightmare-like lucidity that alcohol brings to heavy drinkers brightened in his brain, and he sat there emancipated from all moral laws, and thought clearly and connectedly, seeing himself and his desires as the legitimate center of all existence; nothing else and nobody else could be reckoned with. his jealousy that had shot flaming up, no longer flared and flickered: it shone with a steady and tremendous light, a beacon to guide him, and show him the way he must follow. what should happen to himself he did not care, nor did it enter into his calculations: most likely it would be better when he had accounted for jack to account for himself also. that would arrange itself: he would see, when the time came, how he felt about it. and the time had better be soon, for there was no reason for delay. but he pushed away from him a glass which he had just refilled: he had drunk himself steady, and knew that if he went on he would drink himself maudlin and confused again. it would have been strange if by this time he did not know the stages, even as a man knows the stairs in his own house. he sat still a moment longer, rehearsing in his mind what he had taken so long to construct. he would go to the house in eaton square, so that dodo would be there, and he would see her look on what he had done. to make the picture complete that touch was necessary, though he did not want to hurt her. then he would have finished with them, and would finish with himself, instead of waiting for the farce of a trial, and the ignominy of what must follow. the afternoon had already waned, and looking at his watch he saw that it was after seven. that was a suitable hour to go on his errand, for it was probable that jack would be at home now, soon to dress for dinner. as he got up to get from his despatch-box the revolver that he knew was there, he saw the glass of brandy which a little while ago he had pushed away from him, still standing there, and from habit merely he drank it off. then he put the weapon, completely loaded, into his pocket, and took one more look round before leaving the room. somehow deep down in him, and smothered and shadowed, was some vague repugnance towards what he was going to do, and once more, forgetful of his resolution not to trespass on the steadiness of nerves the spirit brought him, he refilled and emptied his glass. that, he felt sure, would soon stifle any conflicting voices within him. his plan was actively seated in his brain; inertia, almost, would achieve it. he had been indoors all the afternoon, and an instinct for fresh air and the evening breeze caused him to go on foot across the green park. the air was fresh but coldish, and it or the extra brandy he had just taken seemed quickly to harmonize and quiet that vague jangle of repugnance that twanged discordantly in his mind, and he became reconciled to himself again. but the wish not to hurt dodo became rather more pronounced in his poor fuddled brain. he had to kill jack, but he hoped she would not mind very much: he could make her understand surely that he was obliged to do it. he had always been devoted to her, even when he most outraged the merest decencies of their married life, and this morning the sight of her glorious beauty had wakened not jealousy only. she was superb in her wonderful womanhood: she was more beautiful now than she had ever been, and nadine was not fit to sit beside her. it was with surprise that he saw he had come to the house. a motor was at the door, which stood open. on the pavement there was a footman bearing a coat and hat, holding a rug in his hand: another, bareheaded, stood by the door. waldenech told himself that he had come very opportunely, for it was clear that they would soon come out. he hesitated a moment, swaying a little where he stood, not certain whether he should just wait for them, or go into the house. soon he decided to take this latter course, for it was possible that dodo or nadine might be going without jack, and seeing him standing there would ask him what he wanted. that risked his whole plan: they might suspect something, and with one hand in his coat pocket, where his fingers grasped the thing he had brought with him, he went up the three steps that led to the front door. "is lord chesterford in?" he asked. "yes, sir. but his lordship is just going out," said the man. "please tell him that prince waldenech would like to speak to him. i shall not detain his lordship more than a moment!" * * * * * dodo and her husband had dined early, for they were going to the opera which began at eight, and at this moment the dining-room door, which opened on to the back of the hall opposite the staircase, was thrown open, and waldenech heard dodo's voice. "come on, jack," she said, "or we shall miss the overture which is the best part, and you will say it is my fault." she came quickly round the corner, resplendent and jeweled, and saw his figure with its back to the light that came in through the open door, so that for half-a-second she did not recognize him. simultaneously, jack came out of the dining-room just behind her. as he came out he turned up the electric light in the hall which had not been lit, and she saw waldenech's face. and at the moment he took out of his pocket what his right hand was fingering. "stand aside, dodo," he said rather thickly. "it is not for you." not more than half-a-dozen paces separated them, and for answer dodo walked straight up to him, with arms outstretched so that he could not pass her, screening jack. she was menacing as a greek fury, beautiful as the dawn, dominant as the sun. "you coward and murderer," she said. "give me that." for one half-second he stood nerveless and irresolute, his poor sodden wits startled into sobriety by the power and glory of her, and without a moment's hesitation she seized the revolver that was pointed straight at her, and tore it from his hand. by a miracle of good luck it did not go off. "out of the house," she cried, "for i swear to you that in another second i will shoot you like a dog. did you think you would frighten me? frighten me! you drunken brute." she stood there like some splendid wild animal at bay, absolutely fearless and irresistible. without a single word, he turned, and shuffled out into the street again. "shut the door," said dodo to the footman. then suddenly and unmistakably she felt the life within her stir, and a start of blinding pain shot through her. so short had been the whole scene that jack hurrying after her had only just reached her side, when she dropped the revolver, and laid her arms on his shoulders, leaning on him with all her weight. "jack, my time has come," she said. "oh, glory to god, my dear!" * * * * * just as dawn began to brighten in the sky, dodo's baby was born, and soon made a lusty announcement that he lived. presently jack was admitted for a moment just to see his son, and then went out again to wait. it was but a couple of hours afterwards that he was again sent for by a well-pleased nurse. "i never saw such vitality," said this excellent woman. "it's like what they tell about the gipsies." dodo was lying propped up in bed, and her baby was at her breast. she gave jack a brilliant smile of welcome. "oh, jack, you and david and i!" she said. "was there ever such a family? i may talk to you for five minutes, and then david and i are going to sleep. but about last night. i don't know how much the servants saw, or what they know, but waldenech came here to shoot you. he was drunk, poor wretch, he couldn't face me for a moment. it was such a deplorable failure that i feel sure he won't try it again, but i should be happier if he left england. see your solicitor about it, have him threatened if he doesn't go. do that this morning, dear, and when i wake be able to tell me he has gone. and now, oh, you and david and i! i told you i should behave in some unusual manner, but i didn't think waldenech would be concerned in it. jack, kiss the top of david's adorable head, but don't disturb him. and then, my dearest, kiss me, and i shall instantly go to sleep. and neither waldenech nor i will be able to go to nadine's wedding, but my reason for not going is much the nicest. isn't it, oh my david?" * * * * * about ten o'clock jack went out to do as dodo had bidden him, and preferring to walk, crossed the green park, and went through the arcade fronting the ritz hotel. he had forgotten to ask dodo where waldenech was staying, but fancied that when he was in england last winter, he had stopped here. so he went through the revolving-door, and into the bureau. "is prince waldenech stopping here?" he asked. the clerk looked down to consult the register of guests before he answered: "his serene highness left for paris this morning." the end (images generously made available by the hathi trust.) the relentless city by e. f. benson author of 'mammon & co.,' etc. london william heinemann chapter i the big pink and white dining-room at the carlton was full to suffocation of people, mixed odours of dinner, the blare of the band just outside, and a babel of voices. in the hall theatre-goers were having their coffee and cigarettes after dinner, while others were still waiting, their patience fortified by bitters, for their parties to assemble. the day had been very hot, and, as is the manner of days in london when june is coming to an end, the hours for most people here assembled had been pretty fully occupied, but with a courage worthy of the cause they seemed to behave as if nothing of a fatiguing nature had occurred since breakfast. the band played loud because it would otherwise have been inaudible above the din of conversation, and people talked loud because otherwise nobody could have heard what anybody else said. to-night everybody had a good deal to say, for a case of the kind that always attracts a good deal of attention had just been given that lengthy and head-lined publicity which is always considered in england to be inseparable from the true and indifferent administration of justice, and the vultures of london life found the banquet extremely to their taste. so they ate their dinner with a sense of special gaiety, pecked ravenously at the aforesaid affair, and all talked loudly together. but nobody talked so loud as mrs. lewis s. palmer. it was said of her, indeed, that, staying for a week-end not long ago with some friend in the country, rain had been expected because one day after lunch a peacock was heard screaming so loud, but investigation showed that it was only mrs. palmer, at a considerable distance away on the terrace, laughing. like the peacock, it is true, she had been making _la pluie et le beau temps_ in london this year, so the mistake was accountable. at present, she was entertaining two young men at an ante-opera dinner. a casual observer might have had the impression that she was clothed lightly but exclusively in diamonds. she talked, not fast, but without pause. she was in fact what may be called a long-distance talker: in an hour she would get through much more than most people. 'yes, london is just too lovely,' she was saying; 'and how i shall tear myself away on monday is more than i can imagine. i shall cry my eyes out all the way to liverpool. mr. brancepeth, you naughty man, you were thinking to yourself that you would pick them up and carry them home with you to remind you of me. i should advise you not to say so, or i shall get lord keynes to call you out. i always tell everyone that he takes as much care of me as if he were my father. yes, lord keynes, you are what i call faithful. i say to everyone, lord keynes is _the_ most faithful friend i ever had. don't you think you are faithful, now? well, as i was saying when mr. brancepeth interrupted me with his wicked inquiries, i shall cry my eyes out. indeed, if it wasn't that lord keynes had faithfully promised to come over in the fall, i think i should get a divorce from lewis s. and remain here right along.' 'on what grounds?' asked bertie keynes. 'why, on the grounds of his incompatibility of residence. just now i feel as if the sight of fifth avenue would make me feel so homesick for london that i guess i should rupture something. when i am homesick i feel just like that, and lewis s. he notices it at once, and sends to tiffany's for the most expensive diamond they've got. that helps some, because a new diamond is one of the solemnest things i know. it just sits there and winks at me, and i just sit there and wink at it. we know a thing or two, a big diamond and i. but i conjecture it will have to be a big one to make me feel better this time, for just now london seems to me the only compatible residence. i guess i'll make lewis buy it.' mrs. palmer's tact had been one of the standing dishes of the season, and it appeared that there was plenty of it still in stock. it was distributed by her with strict impartiality to anyone present, and had a firm flavour. bertie keynes laughed, and drew from his pocket a small printed card. 'i don't know if you have seen this,' he said. '"admit bearer to see the world. signed, lewis s. palmer."' and he handed it to her. mrs. palmer opened her mouth very wide, and screamed so loud that for a radius of three tables round all conversation ceased for a moment. the scream began on about the note selected by express trains when they dash at full speed through a station, rose an octave or two with an upward swoop like a steam siren, came slowly down in a chromatic scale, broken off for a moment as she made a hissing intake of her breath, and repeated itself. this year it had been one of the recognised cries of london.' 'why, if that isn't the cutest thing in the world,' she screamed. 'i never saw anything so cunning. why, i never! admit bearer to see the world! how can i get one for lewis? it would just tickle him to death.' 'pray take this,' said bertie. 'i brought it on purpose for you.' 'well, if that isn't too nice of you! i shall just hand that to lewis without a word the moment i set eyes on him. i guess that'll make him want to buy the world in earnest. why, he'll go crazy about buying it now that it has been suggested. well, i'm sure, lord keynes, it's just too nice of you to give me that. i shall laugh myself sick over it. i always tell everyone that you are the kindest man i ever saw. gracious, it's half after nine! we must go at once. i'll be down with you in a moment, but i must give this to my maid to be packed in my jewel-case.' mrs. palmer looked at it again as she rose, gave another shrill scream, and vanished, leaving her two guests alone. charlie brancepeth moved his chair a little sideways to the table as he sat down again, crossed his legs, and took a cigarette from his case. 'if you had asked her a hundred pounds for it, she would have given it you, bertie,' he remarked. bertie keynes raised his eyebrows a shade. 'a hundred pounds is always welcome, charlie,' he said, without a shadow or hint of comment in his voice. in fact, the neutrality of his tone was too marked to be in the least degree natural. charlie did not reply for a moment, but blew thoughtfully on the lighted end of his cigarette. 'why this sudden--this sudden suppression of the mercantile spirit?' he asked. bertie laughed. 'don't trouble to be more offensive than is necessary to your reasonable comfort,' he remarked with some finish. 'i am not; i should have been in considerable pain if i hadn't said that. but why this suppression?' bertie delayed answering long enough to upset the salt with his elbow, and look reproachfully at the waiter for having done so. 'there isn't any suppression,' he said at length. 'the mercantile spirit is going strong. stronger than ever. damn!' 'is it the salt you asked a blessing on?' said charlie. 'no; the non-suppression.' 'then you really are going to america in the autumn?' asked he. 'i beg its pardon, the fall.' 'yes. fall is just as good a word as autumn, by the way.' 'oh, quite. over there they think it better, and they have quite as good a right to judge as we. if they called it the pump-handle it wouldn't make any difference.' 'not the slightest. yes, i am going.' charlie smiled. 'oh, i suddenly understand about the mercantile spirit,' he said. 'it was stupid of me not to have guessed at once.' 'it was rather. charlie, i should like to talk to you about it. the governor has been making some uncommonly sensible remarks to me on the subject.' 'he would. your father has an immense quantity of dry common-sense. yes, come round after the opera, and we'll talk it out lengthways. here's mrs. palmer. i hope pagani will sing extremely loud to-night, otherwise we shan't hear a note.' two electric broughams were waiting at the pall mall entrance as mrs. palmer rustled out between rows of liveried men, whose sole office appeared to be to look reverential as she passed, as if to have just seen her was the mecca of their aspirations. then, after a momentary hesitation between the two young men, bertie followed her dazzling opera-cloak into the first brougham, and, amid loud and voluble regrets on her part that there was not room for three, and the exaction of a solemn promise that charlie would not quarrel with his friend for having monopolized her, they started. charlie gave a little sigh, whether of disappointment or not is debatable, and followed them alone in the second brougham. the motor went swiftly and noiselessly up haymarket, and into the roaring whirlpool of the circus. it was a fine warm evening, and over pavement and roadway the season of the streets, which lasts not for a few months only, after the manner of the enfeebled upper class, but all the year round, was in full swing. hansom cabs, newsboys shouting the latest details of all the dirty linen which had been washed that week, omnibuses nodding ten feet high above the road, and life-guardsmen nodding six, women plain and coloured, men in dress-clothes hurrying late to the theatres, shabby skulkers in shadow, obscure persons of prey, glittering glass signs about the music-halls, flower-sellers round the fountain, swinging-doors of restaurants swallowing in and vomiting out all sorts and conditions of men, winking sky--signs, policemen controlling the traffic--all contributed their essential but infinitesimal quota to the huge hodge-podge of life, bent as the great majority of life always is on the seizure of the present vivid moment, the only thing which is certainly existent. for the past is already to everyone but of the texture of a dream; the future is a dream also, but lying in impenetrable shadow. but the moment is real. to charlie it appeared to-night that the festival of the pavements was certainly gayer than the festival of the carlton. his own world schemed more, it might be, and substituted innuendo for a bolder and more direct manner of talk, but it really had less capacity for enjoyment. ten weeks of london broke its wind somewhat, and it retired into the country to graze, to digest, to recoup. but here on the pavements a lustier spirit reigned, the spirit of the people, pressing upwards and upwards like buried bulbs striving towards the light through the good, moist earth, whereas, to continue the metaphor that was in his mind, the folk among whom he moved, whose doings he continually observed with an absorbed but kindly cynicism, were like plants tended in a greenhouse, and potted out when the weather became assured. and what if the whole of england was becoming every year more like a tended greenhouse plant, compared to the blind thrust of forces from the earth in other countries? for all the old landmarks, as the great wheel of human life whirled down the road of the centuries, seemed to be passing out of sight; the world was racing westwards, where america sat high on the seas, grown like some portentous mushroom in a single night. there, at the present moment, the inexorable, relentless logic of nature was working out its everlasting proposition that the one force in the material world was wealth. england had had her turn, even as rome had had her turn, and even as the hordes of barbarians had swept over the countries that had been hers till they reached and took the capital itself, even so--well, had he not himself dined with mrs. palmer that evening? it was not in his nature to hate anything, so it cannot be said that he hated her screaming, her insensate conversation, her lack of all that is summed up in the words breeding and culture, but he saw these loud defects, and knew of their existence. on the other hand, he saw and knew also of her intense good-nature, her true kindliness of heart, and believed in the integrity of her life; so, if it was fair to consider her presence in london typically as of the nature of a barbarian invasion, it must be confessed that england had fallen into the hands of very kindly foes. they did not even actively resent culture, they were simply not aware of it, and cut it when they met. in any case they were irresistible, for the power that moved them was wealth more gigantic than any which heretofore had furthered the arts of war and peace, and that wealth was grasped by men who only yesterday had toiled with their hands in factories and workshops. like stars reeling upwards from below the horizon, they swarmed into the sky, and looked down, not cruelly, but merely calmly, into the world which they owned. of such was mrs. palmer's husband; he had been a railway porter, now he was railways and steamships and anything else of which he chose to say 'this is mine.' occasionally men like these watered the english greenhouse plants, and an heiress propped up the unstable fortunes of some five-hundred-years-old english name. but such gift of refreshment was but a spoonful out of the great wells; also, in a manner of speaking, having thus watered the plants, they picked them. his motor got caught in a block at the entrance to leicester square, and he arrived at the opera house some few minutes after the others had got there. a commanding white label with mrs. lewis s. palmer's name printed on it was on the door of the omnibus box on the grand tier, and he found her, with her resplendent back firmly turned towards the stage, discoursing in shrill whispers to bertie keynes, and sighing more than audibly for the end of the act. it was the last representation for the year of 'tristan und isolde,' and the house was crowded. royalty was there: a galaxy of tiaras sparkled in the boxes, and a galaxy of stars sang together on the stage. for london had suddenly conceived the almost incredible delusion that it was musical, and flocked to the opera with all the fervour of a newly-born passion. it was not, it never had been, and it never would be musical, but this particular form of the game 'let's pretend' was in fashion, and the syndicate rejoiced. soon london would get tired of the game, and the syndicate would be sad again. but the longest act comes to an end at last, and even as the curtain fell, mrs. palmer began screaming again. she screamed when she was amused because she was amused, and she screamed when she was bored in order that it might appear that she was not. just now she was amusing herself very tolerably, for as soon as the lights were up, the world in general flocked into her box, supplementing the very desirable company already assembled there. 'why, of course i am coming back next year,' she was explaining. 'and if lewis doesn't come with me, and take seaton house for me, so as to be able to have more than one person to dinner at a time, i guess i'll have a word or two to say to him which he won't forget; and if you, mrs. massington, don't come over to us in the fall with lord keynes, i shall cry my eyes out; and if that monster, mr. brancepeth, is as impudent again as he was at dinner, saying that he would pick them up and take them home to remind him of me, i'll ask him to leave my box, and call him back the moment afterwards, because i can't help forgiving him.' there was a laugh at this brilliant effort of imagination, and mrs. massington leaned back in her chair towards charlie, while mrs. palmer continued her voluble remarks. 'you are getting quite polished, charlie,' she said. 'i should not have suspected you of so much gallantry.' 'i hope you never suspect me of anything,' he said. 'oh, i do--of lots of things. chiefly of a disapproving attitude. you are always disapproving. now, you probably disapprove of my going to america.' 'you have not gone yet,' he said. 'no, but i shall. mrs. palmer has asked me to stay with them, and i am going. and bertie is really going too.' 'so he told me to-night.' 'who suggested it? his father?' 'yes. as usual, he has shown his immensely good sense.' mrs. massington laughed. 'you are extremely old-fashioned,' she said. 'i wonder at your dining with mrs. palmer at all, and coming to her box.' 'i often wonder at it myself,' said he. 'never mind that. i haven't seen you for an age. what have you been doing with yourself?' 'i haven't been doing anything with myself. it is other people who have been doing all sorts of things with me. i have been taken by the scruff of the neck and dragged--literally dragged--from place to place. all this week there's been the serington case, you see. i was in the court for three mornings, getting up at unheard-of hours to be there. really it was very amusing. topsie in the witness-box was the funniest thing you can possibly imagine. he jumped every time anybody asked him a question. they seem to have had the most extraordinary manage, and the servants appear to have spent their entire time in looking through keyholes. i wonder how the house-work got done at all. charlie, you don't appear in the least amused.' he looked at her a moment gravely. 'am i really so awfully old-fashioned?' he asked. 'yes, you old darling, i think you are. are you shocked at my calling you an old darling? it's quite true, you know.' 'delighted to hear it. but am i old-fashioned, then?' 'certainly. antique, out of date, obsolete. of course, that sort of thing, all the serington affair, is extremely shocking, and they are done for, quite done for; nobody will ever speak to them again--at least, except abroad. but because it is shocking, i don't see why i should pretend not to be amused at the really ridiculous figure topsie cut in the witness-box. it would argue a very imperfect sense of humour if i was not amused, and great hypocrisy if i pretended not to be. i was amused, i roared; i was afraid they would turn me out.' he laughed. 'somehow, whatever you do, i can't disapprove,' he said; 'though the notion of all topsie's friends sitting there and looking at him, and talking it over afterwards, makes me feel ill. but you----' 'dear charlie, it is too nice of you. but break those rose-coloured spectacles through which you so kindly observe me. it is no use. i have told you before it was no use, and i don't like telling you again.' 'why?' he asked. 'oh, that is so like a man, and especially an englishman. you know why. because it hurts you.' 'you dislike hurting me? that is something,' said he. 'but that is all,' she said. the orchestra had taken their places, and a silence began to spread over the theatre as the lights were lowered. then suddenly he leaned towards her so that he could smell the faint, warm fragrance of her presence. 'you mean that?' he asked. she nodded her head in reply, and the curtain rose. chapter ii mrs. palmer, when the opera was over, had many voluble good-byes to say to her friends, for she was leaving london next day, and sailing for her native shores in the middle of the week. consequently, it was some time before the two young men could get off from covent garden, but eventually they strolled away together to pick up a hansom rather than wait for one. charlie brancepeth's rooms were in half moon street, and it was thus nearer one than twelve when they got home. he threw himself into a long easy-chair with an air of fatigue, while the other strolled about somewhat aimlessly and nervously, smoking a cigarette, sipping whisky-and-soda, with the indolent carriage of a man who is at home with himself and his surroundings. in person he was of the fair, blue-eyed type of his family, small-featured, and thin, and looking taller, in consequence, than he really was. his eyebrows, darker than his hair, had the line of determination and self-reliance; but one felt somehow that his appearance had less to do with the essential man beneath than with the ancestors from whom he had inherited it. but his aimless, undetermined strolling one felt was more truly his own. at last he went to the window and threw it open, letting in the great _bourdon_ hum of london, coming somewhat muffled through the heavy air. only the gentlest draught drew into the room from outside, barely stirring the flowers in the window-boxes, but spreading slowly over the room the warm, drowsy scent of them. then, taking himself by the shoulders, as it were, he sat down. 'charlie, i am going to america,' he said, 'in order, if possible, to find an extremely wealthy girl who is willing to marry me.' 'so i understood when you said the mercantile spirit was not suppressed. well, you are frank, anyhow. will you tell her that? will you ask how much she expects to have as a dowry?' 'no, it will be unnecessary to tell her anything; she will know. you don't suppose the americans really think that lots of us go there to find wives because we prefer them to english girls? they know the true state of the case perfectly well. they only don't choose to recognise it, just as one doesn't choose to recognise a man one doesn't want to meet. they look it in the face, and cut it--cut it dead.' 'i dare say you are perfectly right,' said charlie with marked neutrality. 'i suppose you disapprove; you have a habit of disapproving, as i heard sybil massington say to you to-night. by the way, she is going to america, too, she told me.' charlie's face remained perfectly expressionless. 'yes,' he said slowly. 'you might arrange to travel together. never mind that now, though. you told me your father had some very sensible things to say about mercenary marriages. do tell me what they were; he is always worth listening to.' bertie keynes hailed this with obvious relief. it was easier to him to put up his father's ideas for his friend, if he chose, to box with, than receive the attack on his own person. he did not care in the least how much charlie attacked his father's opinions on matrimony; nor, on the other hand, would the marquis of bolton care either, because the fact of his never caring for anything was so widely known as to have been abbreviated like a sort of hall-mark into his nick-name of gallio. 'yes, the governor talked to me about it yesterday,' he said to the other. 'he was very convincing, i thought. he put it like this: it is impossible for royalty to marry commoners; therefore, when royalty goes a-wooing, it goes a-wooing in its own class. it is equally impossible for me to marry a poor woman, because i can't afford it. everything is mortgaged up to the hilt, as you probably know, and, indeed, if i don't marry a rich woman, we go smash. therefore, i must go a-wooing, like royalty, among the class into which alone it is possible for me to marry. i see the force of that reasoning, so i am going to america. see?' 'gallio might have gone on to say that it appeared that the english aristocracy is the only possible class for extremely rich american girls to marry into,' remarked charlie. 'yes, i'll tell him that,' said the other; 'he would be pleased with that. then he went on to say that every country necessarily sends abroad for barter or exchange what it doesn't want or has too great a supply of. america has more money than it knows what to do with, so it is willing to let some of it come here, while we have just found out that titles are no longer of the slightest value to us. nobody cares about them now, so we send them for distribution abroad too.' 'labelled,' said charlie. 'ducal coronet so much, countess's coronet much cheaper, baroness's coronet for an annuity merely. you will be a marquis, won't you? marquises come rather high. brush up the coronet, bertie, and put a fancy price on it.' charlie rose with some impatience as he spoke, and squirted some soda-water into a glass. 'doesn't the governor's view seem to you very sensible?' asked the other. 'yes, very sensible; that is why i find it so damnable. sense is overrunning us like some horrid weed. nobody thinks of anything except what will pay. that is what sense means. a sensible, well-balanced view--a sensible, bank-balanced view! that is what it comes to.' bertie keynes whistled gently to himself a minute. 'i don't think i'll tell gallio that,' he said; 'i don't think he would like that so much.' charlie laughed. 'oh yes, he would; but you needn't tell him, since he knows it already. well, in soda-water, i drink success to your wooing. don't make yourself cheap.' bertie lit another cigarette from the stump of the one he had been smoking previously. 'if anybody else had said that, i should have been rather annoyed,' he remarked. 'you are annoyed as it is; at least, i meant you to be. it's no use arguing about it, because we really differ, and you cannot argue unless you fundamentally agree, which we do not. i'm in the minority, i know; almost everybody agrees with you. but i am old-fashioned; i have been told so this evening.' 'by----' 'yes, by sybil massington. she, too, agrees with you.' there was silence for a minute or two. 'it's two years since her husband died, is it not?' asked bertie. 'yes, two years and one month. i know what you are thinking about. i asked her--at least, she saw what i meant--again this evening, but i have asked her for the last time. i suppose it is that--my feeling for her--that to-night makes me think what a horrible cold-blooded proceeding you are going to embark on. i can't help it; i do feel like that. so there's an end of it.' bertie did not reply, and a clock on the chimney-piece chimed two. 'there's one more thing,' he said at length. 'you advised me to brush up the coronet. did you mean anything?' charlie took out his watch, and began winding it up. mechanically, bertie took his coat on his arm. 'yes, i meant exactly what you think i meant.' 'it's rather awkward,' said bertie. 'she's going out to america in the autumn to act. i am certain to meet her in new york; at any rate, she is certain to know i am there.' 'will that really be awkward?' asked charlie. 'is she--is she?' 'i haven't seen her for nearly two years,' said the other. 'i don't know whether she hates me or the other thing. in either case, i am rather afraid.' mrs. massington also had spent the hour after she had got home in midnight conference. since her husband's death, two years ago, she had lived with an unmarried sister of her own, a woman some ten years older than herself, yet still on the intelligent side of forty, and if she herself had rightly earned the title of the prettiest widow in london, to judy, even more unquestionably, belonged the reputation of the wisest spinster in the same village. she was charmingly ugly, and relished the great distinction that real ugliness, as opposed to plainness, confers on its possessor. she was, moreover, far too wise ever to care about saying clever things, and thus there were numbers of people who could never imagine why she was so widely considered a gifted woman. to sybil massington she was a sort of reference in all questions that troubled her--a referee always to be listened to with respect, generally to be agreed with, but in all cases to be treated with entire frankness, for the very simple reason that judy invariably found you out, if you concealed any part of the truth, or had been in any degree, when consulting her, what mrs. massington preferred to call diplomatic. sybil massington herself, though now a two-years-old widow, with weeds which, as we have seen, others considered quite outworn, was still barely twenty-five. she was one of those fortunate beings who invariably through life see more smiles than frowns, more laughter than tears, for the two excellent reasons that she was always, even when herself tired or bored past the general freezing-point of politeness, alert to amuse and to be interested in other people; the second because she studiously avoided all people and places where frowns and tears were likely to be of the party. k she deliberately took the view that life is a very charming 'business at the best, but full in its very woof--inseparably from existence--of many sombre-tinted threads. it was therefore futile to darken the web of existence by serious or solemn thoughts on the sadness of life and the responsibilities which she did not really think were binding on her. she preferred dancing in the sun to reading tracts in the shade; she wished primarily to be happy herself, and, in a scarcely secondary degree, she wished all her friends to be happy too. in this way her essential selfishness yet had the great merit of giving much pleasure as it went on its pleasant course; and though she had not, to state the fact quite baldly, the slightest desire that anybody should be good, it gave her the greatest pleasure to see that they were happy, and she really spent an enormous amount of trouble and force in advancing this object. such a nature, whatever may be its final reward or punishment, certainly reaps a rich harvest here; for strenuous and continued efforts to be agreeable, especially when made by a young and pretty woman, yield their sixtyfold and a hundredfold in immediate returns. it must be confessed that she had immense natural advantages for the rôle she so studiously played. she was rather above the ordinary height of women, and had that smooth, lithe gracefulness which one associates with boyhood rather than womanhood. her head, small for her height, was set on to her neck with that exquisite pose one sees in the greek _figurines_ from tanagra; and her face, with its long, almond-shaped eyes, straight features, and small mouth, expressed admirably the pagan attitude towards life that was hers. it was a face to be loved for its fresh dewy loveliness, a face as of a spring morning, to be enjoyed with a sense of unreasoning delight that such beauty exists. it gave the beholder the same quality of pleasure that is given by the sight of some young animal, simply because it is so graceful, so vital, so made for and capable of enjoyment. and behind her beauty lay a brain of the same order, subtle because she was a woman, but in other respects even as her face, a minister and pastor of the religion of innocent mirth and pleasure. in pursuance of this creed, however, she was capable of subtle and intricate thought, and just now, in her talk with her sister, it was getting abundant exercise. 'ah, that is no use, dear judy,' she was saying. 'i do not say to you, "make me different, then tell me what to do," but "take me as i am, and tell me what to do."' judy's shrewd face broadened into a smile, and a pleasant soul looked out of her intelligent eyes--eyes that were bright and quick like a bird's. 'i don't in the least want to make you different,' she said, 'because i think you are a unique survival.' sybil's eyes expressed surprise. 'survival!' she said. 'yes, dear; you came straight out of pagan mythology; you were a nymph in the woods by the ilyssus, and apollo saw you and ran after you.' 'did he catch me?' asked sybil, with an air of dewy innocence. 'don't be risky; it doesn't suit you. really, sybil, considering what--what great natural advantages you have, you should study yourself more closely. just as a fault of manner committed by a woman who wears a beautiful dress is worse than a fault of manner committed by a char-woman, so you, with your appearance, should be doubly careful not to say anything out of character.' 'dear judy, you are charming, but do keep to the point.' 'i thought you were the point; i am sure i have talked about nothing else.' 'i know: it is charming of you; and you have yawned so frightfully doing it that it is cruel to bring you back to it. but i really want your advice now at once.' judy poured out some hot water from a blanketed jug, and sipped it. having an admirable digestion, she was determined to keep it. 'take care of your health, if it is good,' was a maxim of hers. 'if it is inferior, try to think about something better.' 'state your case, then, in a very few words,' she said, looking at the clock. 'it is fast,' said sybil, laughing, 'though not so fast as i should wish. well, it is this: i am twenty-five years old, and i don't believe i have the faculty of what is known as falling in love. it always seems to me i haven't time, to begin with. i was married, as you know, at eighteen, but i can't imagine i was ever in love with john. otherwise that horror couldn't have happened.' judy looked up, forgetting the time and the hot water. 'what horror?' she asked. the light died out of sybil's face; she looked like a troubled child. 'i have never told anyone,' she said, 'because i was ashamed, but i will tell you to make you understand me. he was ill, as you know, for months before he died; every day i used to grow sick at the thought of having to sit by him, to talk to him. he got more and more emaciated and awful to look at. one night i did not kiss him as usual. he asked me to, and i refused; i could not--simply i could not. i loathed the thought of the days that were coming; i longed for the end, and when the end came i was glad. i tried to persuade myself that i was glad his sufferings were over. it was not so; i was glad that mine were over. so i think i never loved him, though i liked him very much. then he got ill and awful, and i was very sorry for him. but that was all. ah----' she got up, and walked up and down the room once or twice, as if to waken herself from the clutch of some horrid dream. then she stopped behind judy's chair, and leaned over her sister, stroking her hair. 'yes, that was the horror, judy,' she said; 'and i am that horror. now, to-night again charlie would have asked me to marry him, if i had not; "smiling put the question by." i like him very much; i think i should like to have him always in the house. i like everything about him.' 'don't marry him,' said judy quickly. 'judy, when you speak like that, you are saying to yourself, "if only she was different." well, i am not; i am as i am. i couldn't make my eyes blue by wanting, or make myself an inch taller. well, it must surely be far more difficult to change one's nature in so radical a way.' 'i think you did not run very fast when apollo began judy. 'that does not suit you, either, dear,' remarked sybil. 'well, then, i am not to marry charlie. am i to marry anybody? that is the point. or am i to consider that marriage is not for me?' 'how can i tell you, sybil?' asked judy, rather perplexed. 'i dare say there are men who regard marriage like you. you can calmly contemplate marrying a man whom you just like. i don't see why, if you can find a man like you, you shouldn't be far happier together than you would be single. i don't see what law, human or divine, prevents your marrying. you promise to love, honour, and obey--well, fifty people mean exactly fifty different things by love. because a doesn't attach the same meaning to it as b, b has no right to say that a doesn't love. and perhaps your "liking very much" will do. but don't marry a man who loves you very much. john did.' 'yes, john did,' said sybil, and paused a moment. 'then i think i shall go to america,' she said. 'america?' said judy. 'yes; mrs. palmer has asked me to go, and i think i shall accept.' 'do you mean the steam-siren?' asked judy. 'yes, the steam-siren. you see, i like steam, go, energy, so much that i don't really mind about the siren.' 'she has the manners,' said judy, 'of a barmaid, and the mind of a--a barmaid.' 'i know. but i don't mind. in fact--don't howl--i like her; she is extremely good-natured.' judy yawned. 'dear sybil, she is extremely rich.' 'certainly. if she lived in a back fourth-floor flat in new york, i shouldn't go to stay with her. you see, i like rich people; i like the quality of riches just as you like the quality of generosity. by the way, you must be rather rich to be generous to any extent, so the two are really synonymous; i'm glad i thought of that. anyhow, i am going to stay with her.' judy got up. 'you are going to stay with her in order to meet other people who are rich,' she said. 'why not?' asked sybil. 'other things being equal, i should prefer to marry a rich man than a poor one. or shall i cultivate acquaintances in seven dials?' judy laughed. 'i think they would appreciate you in seven dials,' said she, 'and i am sure they will in america. you can make yourself very pleasant, sybil.' 'yes, dear, and you can make yourself most unpleasant, and i adore you for it. judy dear, it's after two. how you keep one up talking!' chapter iii mrs. massington was lying on an extremely comfortable and elaborately padded wicker couch under a conveniently shady tree. the time was after lunch, the day an excessively hot sunday in july, and the place the lawn of lord bolton's present residence on the hills above winchester. his big country place at molesworth was let, and had been for some years, since he could not afford to live in it; but in the interval he made himself fairly at home in the houses of other people in equally impecunious circumstances. as he truly said, one must live somewhere, and he very much preferred not to live at molesworth. the plan partook of the nature of that of those ingenious islanders who lived entirely by taking in each other's washing, but, though theoretically unsound, it seemed to succeed well enough in practice. for himself he really preferred haworth, the place he had taken for the last four years; for molesworth was unmanageably immense, remote from london, and really lonely, except when there was a regiment of guests in the house. haworth, on the other hand, was small, exquisite in its way, and within an hour or so of london. from the lawn the ground sloped sharply down to the water-meadows of the itchen, where in the driest summer the grass was green, and streams of a translucent excellence wove their ropes of living crystal from bank to bank of their courses. a few admirable trees grew on the lawn, and all down the south front of the tudor house a deep riband of flower-bed, all colour, gleamed and glowed in the summer sun. sweet-peas were there in huge fragrant groups, stately hollyhocks, with flowers looking as if they had been cut out of thin paper by a master hand, played chaperon from the back; carnations were in a swoon of languid fragrance, love-lies-bleeding drooped its velvety spires, and a border of pansies wagged their silly faces as the wind passed over them. behind, round the windows of the lower story, great clusters of clematis, like large purple sponges, blossomed, miraculously fed through their thin, dry stalks. at some distance off, in winmester probably, which pricked the blue haze of heat with dim spires, a church bell came muffled and languid, and at the sound mrs. massington smiled. 'that is what i like,' she said. 'i like hearing a railway-whistle when i am not going in the train; i like hearing a church bell when i am not going to church; i like seeing somebody looking very hot when i am quite cool; i like hearing somebody sneeze when i haven't got a cold; i like--oh, i like almost everything,' she concluded broadly. 'i wonder if you, i, we shall like america,' said a voice, which apparently came from two shins and a knee in a basket-chair. 'america?' said sybil. 'of course you, i, we will. it is absurd to go there unless one means to like it, and it is simply weak not to like it, if one means to. bertie, sit up!' 'i don't see why,' said bertie. 'because i want to talk to you, and i can't talk to a tennis-shoe.' the tennis-shoe descended, and the chair creaked. 'well,' said he. 'you and i are going on business,' she said. 'that makes one feel so like a commercial traveller. the worst of it is neither you nor i have got any wares to offer except ourselves. dear me! i'm glad judy can't hear me. oh, there's ginger! ginger, come here!' ginger came (probably because he had red hair). he wore a panama hat, and looked tired. he might have been eighteen or thirty, and was twenty-four, and bertie's younger brother, his less-used name being lord henry scarton. he sat down suddenly on the grass, took off the panama hat, and prepared himself to be agreeable. 'there is a sabbath peace about,' said he; 'that always makes me feel energetic. the feeling of energy passes completely away on monday morning, and it and i are strangers till the ensuing sunday. then we meet. but now it is here, i think i shall go to church. there is a church, isn't there? come to church, bertie.' 'no,' said bertie. 'that is always the way,' remarked ginger; 'and it is the same with me. i never want to do what anybody else proposes; so don't propose to me, sybil.' 'ginger, why don't you do something?' asked sybil. 'i will go to church,' said ginger. 'no, you won't. i want you to tell bertie and me about america. you haven't been there, have you?' 'no. the capital is new york,' said ginger; 'and you are sick before you get there. when you get there, you are sick again. then you come back. that is why i haven't been. next question, please.' 'why is bertie going, then?' she asked. 'because--because he is bertie instead of me.' 'and why am i going, then?' 'because you are not judy. and you are both going there because you are both progressive english people.' ginger got up, and stood in front of them. 'all people who on earth do dwell,' said he, 'go to america if they want to dwell--really dwell--on earth. if you want to have all material things at your command, you will, if you are going to get them at all, get them quicker there than anywhere else. but if you attain your ambition, you will come back like cast iron. everything that was a pleasure to you will be a business; you will play bridge with a cast-iron face, and ask for your winnings; you will study the nature of your soil before you plant a daisy in it; you will always get your money's worth out of everybody. you will be cast iron.' 'no, i won't,' said sybil. 'you are quite wrong. i will come back in nature as i went.' 'you can't. if you were strong enough for that, you wouldn't go; your going is a sign of weakness.' sybil laughed, and stretched herself more at ease on her couch. 'i am not weak,' she said. ginger sat down again. 'i am not sure that to do anything is not a sign of weakness,' he said. 'it isn't so easy to loaf as you imagine. lots of people try to loaf, and take to sheer hard work as a rest from it. i don't suppose anybody in america loafs, and that i expect you will find is the vital and essential difference between them and us. it implies a lot.' 'go on, ginger,' said sybil, as he paused. 'yes, i think i will. now, take mrs. palmer. she works at pleasure in a way few people in this island work at business. it is her life's work to be gay. she doesn't like gaiety really; it isn't natural to her. but she, by the laws of her nature, which prevent her loafing, works at gaiety just as her husband works at amassing millions. they can neither of them stop. they don't enjoy it any more than a person with st. vitus's dance enjoys twitching; simply they have lost control of their power to sit still. now, in england we have lost a good deal; we are falling behind, i am told, in most things, but we still have that power--the power of tranquillity. i am inclined to think it is worth something. but you will go to america, and come back and tell me.' ginger lay back on the grass and tilted his straw hat over his eyes after this address. 'ginger, i've never heard you say so much on end,' remarked sybil; 'have you been getting it up?' 'i never get things up, but i scent danger,' replied ginger. 'i am afraid you and bertie will come back quite different. you will always be wanting to do something; that is a weakness.' 'i don't agree with you,' said sybil. 'that's all right. if people say they agree with me, i always think i must have said something stupid. what don't you agree with me about?' 'about our power of sitting still. look at the season in london. all the time we are doing exactly what you say americans, as opposed to us, do. we make a business of pleasure; we rush about after gaiety, when we are not naturally gay; we----' 'sybil, you are talking about three or four thousand people among whom you live. i hope you don't think that a few hundred people like that mean england.' 'they include almost all well-known english people.' 'well known to whom? to themselves. no, that sleepy little misty town down there is just as important a part of england as the parish of st. james's. the parish of st. james's is the office of the company. the people there do the talking, and see after the affairs of the shareholders, and play a very foolish game called politics. they are mere clerks and officials.' 'well, but as regards the pursuit of gaiety,' said sybil, 'nobody can be more senseless than you or i, ginger.' 'oh, i know we are absurd; you are more absurd than i, though, because you are going to america.' 'you seem to resent it.' 'not in the least. it is ridiculous to resent what anybody else chooses to do, so long as it is not a personal attack on one's self. that is the first maxim in my philosophy of life.' 'published? i shall get it.' 'no; it will be some day. it begins with a short history of the world from the days of adam, and then the bulk of the book draws lessons from the survey. but that is the first lesson. let everybody go to the devil in his own way. your way is by the white star line.' 'i don't think you know what you are talking about, ginger,' said his brother. 'i'm sure i don't,' said ginger cheerfully. 'why desecrate the sabbath stillness, then?' ginger was silent a moment. 'that is a personal assault,' he said at length, 'and i resent it. it is unjust, too, because meaningless conversation is utterly in harmony with sabbath stillness. it completes the sense of repose. it is no tax on the brain. besides, i do really know what i was talking about; i said i didn't because i don't like arguing.' 'you have been doing nothing else.' 'no. i have been reeling out strings of assertions, which sybil has languidly contradicted from time to time. you can't call that argument. look! there's charlie. why didn't you marry him, sybil, and stop in england? who is that with him? oh, judy, isn't it? are they coming here? what a bore!' charlie and judy strolled across the lawn towards them with extreme slowness. to walk across a lawn for tea and walk back again afterwards was the utmost exercise that judy ever took. 'i am taking my walk,' she observed as she got near them. 'i am now exactly half way, so i shall rest. sybil, you look as if you were resting too.' 'we are all resting, and we are making the most of it, because ginger tells us we shall never rest again.' 'do you want a chair, judy?' asked ginger. bertie got up. 'sit there,' he said. 'i am rather tired,' said judy; 'but pray don't let me turn you out.' and she sat down. 'i'm so glad your father's party broke down,' she went on to bertie. 'it is so very much nicer to have nobody here, except just ourselves, who needn't make any efforts.' ginger gently applauded, his face still hidden by his straw hat. 'the voice of my country,' he remarked. 'ah, somebody agrees with you,' said sybil; 'so you are wrong. i am glad; i was beginning to be afraid you were right.' 'has ginger been sparkling?' asked judy. 'yes, sparkling ginger-beer. very tasty,' remarked ginger fatuously. 'they swallowed it all. if you only talk enough, some of it is sure to be swallowed--not to stick. but it's finished now.' charlie had sat down on the bank beside sybil's couch. 'this is the last sunday, then,' he said; 'you go to scotland next week, don't you?' 'yes,' said she--' just for a fortnight. then aix with judy, and i sail on september st.' 'that is earlier than you planned originally.' 'i know; but we get a big boat instead of a small one. i thought it worth while.' 'do you feel inclined to stroll a bit till tea?' 'by all means.' 'they are going to desecrate the sabbath stillness by strolling,' remarked ginger. 'it ought not to be allowed, like public-houses.' 'ah, we are genuine travellers,' said sybil. 'come, too, ginger.' 'do i look like it?' 'no; but one never knows with you. judy dear, would not a good brisk walk do you good?' 'i shouldn't wonder,' said judy; 'but i shall never know.' sybil put up her parasol. 'come, charlie,' she said. they walked off together in the shadow of the big elm avenue that led down to the village. the huge boskage of the trees allowed no inter-penetrating ray of sun to reach them, and in the silence and sleep of the hot summer afternoon they seemed to charlie to be very specially alone. this feeling was emphasized, no doubt, to his mind by the refusal of the others to accompany them. 'really, gallio always succeeds in making himself comfortable,' said she. 'what more can anyone want than a charming house like this? it is so absurd to desire more than you can use. it is a mistake the whole world makes, except, perhaps, judy.' 'i don't think ginger does,' said charlie. 'oh yes; he desires, at least, to say more than he means. consequently people attach no importance to what he says.' charlie laughed. 'which, being interpreted, means that ginger has been saying something which you are afraid is correct.' sybil massington stopped. 'charlie, for a man you have a good deal of intuition. that is partly what makes me never think of you as a man. you are so like a woman in many ways.' 'i am wanting to have a last word.' 'last word! what last word?' 'a last word with you, sybil,' he said; 'i shall never bother you again.' 'dear charlie, it is no use. please don't!' she said. 'i am sorry to disobey you,' said he; 'but i mean to. it is quite short--just this: if ever you change your mind, you will find me waiting for you. that is all.' sybil frowned. 'i can't accept that,' she said. 'you have no business to put the responsibility on me like that.' 'there is no responsibility.' 'yes, there is; you practically threaten me. it is like writing a letter to say you will commit suicide unless i do something. you threaten, anyhow, to commit celibacy unless i marry you.' 'no, i don't threaten,' said he; 'so far from threatening, i only leave the door open in case of hope wanting to come in. that is badly expressed; a woman would have said it better.' sybil was suddenly touched by his gentleness. 'no one could have said it better,' she said. 'charlie, believe me, i am sorry, but--here is the truth of it: i don't believe i can love anybody. this also: if i did not like you so much, i think i would marry you.' 'ah, spare me that,' he said. 'i do spare it you. i will not willingly make you very unhappy. do you believe that?' he stopped, and came close to her. 'sybil, if you pointed to the sky and said it was night, i should believe you,' he said. she made no reply to that, and they walked on in silence. everywhere over the broad expanse of swelling downs, looking huge behind the heat-haze, and over the green restfulness of the water-meadows beneath them, even over the blue immensity of the sky, there was spread a sense of quiet and leisure. to sybil, thinking of the after-lunch conversation, it seemed of value; to her at the moment this contented security was a big factor in life. economically, no doubt, she was wrong; a score of dynamos utilizing the waste power of the streams below that so hurryingly sought the sea would have contributed much to the utility of the scene, and the noble timber which surrounded them could certainly have been far better employed in some factory than to have merely formed a most wasteful handle, as it were, for the great parasol of leaves which screened them and the idle, cud-chewing cattle. here, as always, there was that silent deadly war going on between utility and beauty; soon, without a doubt, in a score of years, or a score of days, or a score of centuries, principles of economy would prevail, and the world of men would live in cast-iron mood in extremely sanitary cast-iron dwellings. already, it seemed to her, the death-knell of beauty was vibrating in the air. the rural heart of the country was bleeding into the towns; instead of beating the swords into sickles, the way of the world now was to beat the elm-trees into faggots and the rivers into electric light. for the faggots would give warmth and the electricity would give light; these things were useful. and in the distance, like a cuttle-fish with tentacles waving and growing every moment nearer, new york, and all that new york stood for, was sucking in whatever came within its reach. she was already sucked in. all this passed very quickly through her mind, for it seemed to her that there had been no appreciable pause when charlie spoke again. 'yes, the world is going westwards,' he said. 'i heard a few days ago that mrs. emsworth was going to act in new york this autumn. is it true?' 'i believe so. why?' 'mere curiosity. is she going on her own?' sybil laughed. 'her own! there isn't any. i don't suppose she could pay for a steerage passage for her company. bilton is taking her,' she paused a moment. 'do you know bilton?' she asked. 'the impresario? no,' 'he is a splendid type,' she said, 'of what we are coming to.' 'cad, i should think,' said charlie. 'cad--oh yes. why not? but a cad with a head. so many cads haven't one. i met him the other night.' 'where?' asked charlie, with the vague jealousy of everybody characteristic of a man in love. 'i forget. at the house of some other cad. it is rather odd, charlie; he is the image of you to look at. when i first saw him, i thought it was you. he is just about the same height, he has the same--don't blush--the same extremely handsome face. also he moves like you, rather slowly; but he gets there.' 'you mean i don't,' said charlie. 'i didn't mean it that moment. your remark again was exactly like an englishman. but i liked him; he has force. i respect that enormously.' on the top of charlie's tongue was 'you mean i have none,' but he was not english enough for that. 'is he going with her?' he asked. 'no; he has gone. he has three theatres in new york, and he is going to instal dorothy emsworth in one of them. is it true, by the way----' she stopped in the middle of her sentence. 'probably not,' said charlie, rather too quickly. 'you mean it is,' she said--'about bertie.' charlie made the noise usually written 'pshaw!' 'oh, my dear sybil,' he said, 'queen anne is dead, the prophets are dead. there are heaps of old histories.' sybil massington stopped. 'now, i am going to ask you a question,' she said. 'you inquired a few minutes ago whether dorothy emsworth was going to act in new york. why did you ask? you said it was from mere curiosity; is that true? you can say yes again, if you wish.' 'i don't wish,' said he. 'it wasn't true then, and i don't suppose it will be by now. you mean that bertie saw a good deal of her at one time, but how much neither you nor i know.' sybil turned, and began walking home again rather quickly. 'how disgusting!' she said. 'your fault,' he said--' entirely your fault.' 'but won't it be rather awkward for him?' she asked, walking rather more slowly. 'i asked him that the other night,' said charlie; 'he said he didn't know.' again for a time they walked in silence. but the alertness of mrs. massington's face went bail for the fact that she was not silent because she had nothing to say. then it is to be supposed that she followed out the train of her thought to her own satisfaction. 'how lovely the shadows are!' she remarked; 'shadows are so much more attractive than lights.' 'searchlights?' asked he. 'no; shadows and searchlights belong to the same plane. i hope it is tea-time; i am so hungry.' this was irrelevant enough; irrelevance, therefore, was no longer a social crime. 'and i should like to see my double,' said charlie. the only drawback to the charming situation of the house was that a curve of a branch railway-line to winchester passed not far from the garden. trains were infrequent on it on weekdays, even more infrequent on sundays. but at this moment the thump of an approaching train was heard, climbing up the incline of the line. 'brut-al-it-é, brut-al-it-é, brut-al-it-é,' said the labouring engine. she turned to him. 'even here,' she said--'even here is an elbow, a sharp elbow. "utility, utility!" did you not hear the engine say that?' 'something of this sort,' said he. chapter iv a day of appalling heat and airlessness was drawing to its close, and the unloveliest city in the world was beginning to find it just possible to breathe again. for fourteen hours new york had been grilling beneath a september sun in an anticyclone; and though anticyclone is a word that does not seem to matter much when it occurs in an obscure corner of the _herald_, under the heading of 'weather report,' yet, when it is translated from this fairy-land of print into actual life, it matters a good deal if the place is new york and the month is september. other papers talked airily of a 'heat wave,' and up in newport everyone reflected with some gusto how unbearable it must be in town, and went to their balls and dinner-parties and picnics and bridge with the added zest that the sauce of these reflections gave. even in newport the heat was almost oppressive, but to think of new york made it seem cooler. from the corner where sixth avenue slices across broadway and thirty-fourth street crosses both, one can see the huge mass of the waldorf hotel rising gigantic against the evening sky, and wonder, if one is that way inclined, how many million dollars it has taken to blot out the evening sun. but during the afternoon to-day most people were probably grateful for the shadow which those millions had undesignedly procured them; it was something as one went from fifth avenue to broadway to be shielded a little by that hideous immensity, for the dazzle and glare of the sun had been beyond all telling. and though now the sun was close to its setting, the airlessness and acrid heat of the evening was scarcely more tolerable than the furnace heat of the day, for boiling was not appreciably more pleasant than baking. yet in the relentless city, where no one may pause for a moment unless he wishes to be left behind in the great universal race for gold, which begins as soon as a child can walk, and ceases not until he is long past walking, the climbings of the thermometer into the nineties is an acrobatic feat which concerns the thermometer only, and at the junction of sixth avenue and broadway there was no slackening in the tides of the affairs of men. the electric street cars which ran up and down both these streets, and the cars that crossed them, running east and west up thirty-fourth street, were all full to overflowing, and passengers hung on to straps and steps as swarming bees cluster around their queen. those in the centre of the car were unable to get out where they wanted, while those at the ends who could get out did not want to. a mass of damp human heat, patient, tired, nasal-voiced, and busy, made ingress and egress impossible, and that on which serene philosophers would gaze, saying, 'how beautiful is democracy!' appeared to those who took part in it to be merely mis-management. incessant ringings of the conductor's bell, the sudden jerks of stoppages and startings, joltings over points where the lights were suddenly extinguished, punctuated the passage of the cars up and down the street, and still the swarming crowds clustered and hung on to straps and backs of seats wherever they could find foot-hold and standing room. but all alike, in payment for this demoniacal means of locomotion, put their five cents into the hot and grimy hands of the conductor, from which, by occult and subtle processes, they were gradually transformed into the decorations of the yachts and palaces of the owners of the line. democracy and discomfort, too, held equal sway in the crowded trams of the elevated railway which roared by overhead down sixth avenue, in the carriages of which tired millionaires and tired milliners sat stewing side by side, with screeching whistles, grinding brakes, and the vomiting forth of the foul smoke from soft coal; for a strike of some kind was in progress in pennsylvania, and the men who had stored coal and also engineered the strike were reaping a million dollars a day in increased prices and slight inconvenience to a hundred million people, for the thick pungent smoke poured in wreaths into the first-floor windows of the dingy, dirty habitations of the street. but the train passed by on the trembling and jarring trestles, and the inconvenience passed also, till the next train came. thunder of the passing trains above; rumbling of the electric cars; roar of heavy, iron-shod wheels of drays on the uneven, ill-paved cobbles of the street; jostling of the foot passengers on the side-walks, as they streamed in and out from the rickety wooden staircases of the elevated railway, from the crammed, perspiring cars, from dingy, sour-smelling restaurants; shouts of the newsboys with sheaves of ill-printed newspapers under their arms, giving horrible details of the latest murder, and abominable prints of the victim's false teeth, shoes, and the dress she had last been seen in; the thump-thump of the engines in the _herald_ office; the sickening stew of the streets; the sickening heat of the skies--democracy, or 'everyone for himself.' as an antidote or warning--though it did not seem to have the least effect on the dogged, unending bustle--the note of 'impermanence' was everywhere sounded loudly. a block or two further up, for instance, the street was torn up for some new underground enterprise (lewis s. palmer, as a matter of fact, had floated a company to run a new subterranean line across new york, and had been paid a million and a half dollars for the loan of his credit); and while the cars, which will certainly not cease running till the last trump has been sounded several times, passed over spindle-shanked iron girders and supports, shaken every now and again by the blasting of the rock below, thousands of workmen were toiling day and night deep down in the earth, loading the baskets of the cranes with the splinters of the riven rocks, or giving the larger pieces into the embrace of huge iron pincers that tackled them as a spider tackles a fat fly, and, rising aloft with them above street level, took them along the ropes of their iron web, over the heads of passengers and vehicles, for the carts which waited for them. elsewhere, half a block of building had vanished almost as the night to make way for something taller, and where yesterday a five-storied building had stood, the site to-day was vacant but for a dozen pistons half buried in the ground, which puffed and shook in a sort of hellish ecstasy of glee at the work, while a gang of men with axe and pick dug out the foundations for the steel house-frames. yet though to-morrow almost would see the newly completed building again filling up the gap in the street, the exposed walls of the adjacent houses were just for to-day only covered with advertisements, and a notice informed the bewildered shopper that business was going on as usual. that in new york might be taken for granted, but the notice omitted to say where it was going on. but for the crowd in general it was sufficient that work was to be done, and money to be made. that was the whole business and duty of each unit there, and as far as each unit was concerned, the devil might take the rest. everyone looked tired, worn out, but indefatigable, and extraordinarily patient. one man pushed roughly by another, and where in england the one would look aggrieved, and the other probably, however insincerely, mutter an apology, here neither grievance nor apology was felt, desired, or expressed, for it is a waste of time to feel aggrieved and a waste of energy to express or feel regret. to-morrow the crowd would, on the average, be a little richer than to-day; that was all they wanted. to-morrow the world in general would be a day richer. sybil massington and bertie keynes had arrived that morning by the _celtic_, after a voyage of complete uneventfulness. the sea had been rough, but the _celtic_ had not been aware of it. bertie had seen a whale blow, or so he said, and sybil had seen three fisher boats off the banks. there had been six hours' fog, and they had got in that morning in this day of frightful heat. they had been on deck like honest tourists to see the immense green, mean statue of liberty, or whatever that female represents, and had found the huge sky-scrapers by the docks, the bustling paddle-steamers of the ferries, the hooting sirens, the general hideousness, exactly what they had expected. they were, in fact, neither disappointed nor pleased, and when a small, tired young man with a note-book had met them on the moment of their landing, and asked bertie his first impressions of america, they had felt that they were indeed in the authentic place. nor had the impression been in any way dimmed all day, and now, as they sat together in the darkened sitting-room at the waldorf, just before going to dress for dinner, they felt like old inhabitants. bertie had bought a paper containing the account of his interview, headed, 'marquis bolton's eldest son lands: lord keynes' first impressions,' and had just finished reading to sybil, half a column of verbose illiteracy of which, to do him justice, he had not been in any way guilty. 'you're getting on, bertie,' said she; 'that interview shows you have struck the right note. and where have you been this afternoon?' 'like satan, walking up and down the earth,' said he. 'i went by an overhead railway and an underground railway. there are swing gates into the stations of the overhead railway. as i passed in, i naturally held the gate for the next man, so as not to let it bang in his face. he did not take it from me, but passed through, leaving me still holding it. i might have stood there all day, and they would have all passed through. then i learned better, and let it slam in other people's faces. it saves time. somehow i thought the incident was characteristic of the country.' sybil lit a cigarette. 'i like it,' she said. 'the air, or the people, or something, makes me feel alert. now, when i feel alert in england it is mere waste of energy. there is nothing to expend one's alertness on; besides, one is out of tone. but here, somehow, it is suitable. i like the utter hideousness of it, too. look from that window at the line of houses. they are like a row of jagged, broken teeth. well, it is no worse than park lane, and, somehow, there is an efficiency about them here. one is ninety-five stories high for a definite reason--because land is valuable; the next is three stories high because it belongs to a millionaire who doesn't want to walk upstairs. by the way, mrs. palmer came in while you were out. we are going to dine with her this evening, and go to mrs. emsworth's first night.' she looked at him rather closely as she said this. 'that will be charming,' he said quite naturally. 'and to-morrow we go down to mrs. palmer's on long island, don't we?' 'yes. really, bertie, their idea of hospitality is very amazing. she came up here to-day to this blazing gridiron of a place simply in order not to let us be dull on our first evening here. it seemed to her quite natural. and she has put a motor-car at my disposal. i like that sort of thing.' bertie thought a moment. 'i know,' he said. 'but though it sounds horrid to say it, a motor-car doesn't mean anything to mrs. palmer.' 'it means the kindliness of thinking of it,' said sybil. 'it was the same kindliness which brought her up from long island. would you and i, if we were in the country, come up to town to entertain someone who was going to stay with us next day? you know we shouldn't.' 'that is true,' said he. 'is mrs. palmer alone here?' 'yes. her husband and daughter are both down in long island. she is making a sort of rival newport, you know. you and i plunge into it all to-morrow. i think i am rather frightened, but i am not sure. no, i don't think i am frightened. i am merely trembling with determination to enjoy it all immensely.' 'trembling?' he asked. 'yes; just as when you hold something as tight as you can your hand trembles. you must go and dress--at least, i must. bertie, i am going to be very english. i think they will like it best.' 'oh, don't pose! you are never so nice when you pose.' 'i'm not going to pose. i am going to be absolutely natural.' 'that is the most difficult pose of all,' said he. about half-way up fifth avenue the two rival restaurants, sherry's and delmonico's, glare at each other from opposite sides of the street, each with its row of attendant hansoms and motor-cars. though new york was technically empty--that is to say, of its millions a few hundred were still at newport--both restaurants were full, for mrs. emsworth's opening night was an occasion not to be missed, and many of those who would naturally have been out of town were there in order to lend their distinguished support to the actress. furthermore, mr. lewis s. palmer, from his retreat in long island, had been operating yesterday on the stock exchange in a manner which compelled the attendance of many of the lesser magnates who at this season usually left the money-market to attend to itself. this was very inconsiderate of him, so it was generally thought, but he was not a man who consulted the convenience of others when he saw his own opportunity. but it was extremely characteristic of him that, while nervous brokers, bankers, and financiers rushed back to the furnace of the streets, he remained himself in the coolness of long island, and spoke laconically through the telephone. mrs. palmer was waiting in the anteroom at sherry's when her two english guests arrived, and greeted them with shrill enthusiasm. a rather stout young american, good-looking in a coarse, uncultivated kind of manner, and dressed in a subtly ill-dressed, expensive mode, was with her. 'and here you are!' she cried. 'how are you, lord keynes? i'm delighted to see you again. mrs. massington, you must let me present to you mr. armstrong, who has been so long dying to make your acquaintance that i thought he would be dead before you got here. mrs. massington, mr. reginald armstrong. lord keynes, mr. armstrong.' the american murmured his national formula about being very pleased, and mrs. palmer continued without intermission. 'and i've got no party to meet you,' she said, 'because i thought you would be tired with your journey, and want to have a quiet evening, and we'll go in to dinner at once. lord keynes, you look as if america agreed with you, and i see they have been interviewing you already. well, that's our way here. why, when reginald armstrong gave his equestrian party down at port washington last week, i assure you there was a string of our newspaper men a quarter of a mile long waiting to see him.' the curious shrillness of talk peculiar to america sounded loud in the restaurant as they made their sidling way by crowded tables toward one of the windows looking on the street. 'equestrian party?' asked mrs. massington. 'what is that?' 'tell them, reginald,' said mrs. palmer. 'why, it tickled me to death, your equestrian party. mrs. massington, those are blue points. you must eat them. tell them, reginald.' 'well, my stable was burned down last fall,' said he, 'and i've been building a new one. so i determined to open it in some kind of characteristic way.' 'his own idea,' said mrs. palmer in a loud aside to bertie. 'he's one of our brightest young men; you'll see a lot of him.' 'so i thought,' continued mr. armstrong, 'that i'd give a stable party--make everyone dress as grooms. but then the ladies objected to dressing as grooms. i'm sure i don't know why. i should have thought they'd have liked to show their figures. but some objected. mrs. palmer objected. i don't know why she objected--looking at her--but she did object.' mrs. palmer smiled. 'isn't he lovely?' she said loudly across the table to mrs. massington. 'well, she objected,' again continued mr. armstrong; 'and when mrs. palmer objects, she objects. she said she wouldn't come. so i had to think of something else. and it occurred to me that the best thing we could do was to have dinner on horseback in the stables.' he paused a moment. 'well, that dinner was a success,' he said. 'i say it was a success, and i'm modest too. i had fifty tables made, fitting on to the horses' shoulders, and we all sat on horseback, and ate our dinners in the new stables. fifty of us in a big circle with the horses' heads pointing inwards, and simultaneously the horses ate their dinner out of a big circular manger. and that dinner has been talked about for a week, and it 'll be talked about till next week. next week mrs. palmer gives a party, and my dinner will be as forgotten as what adam and eve had for tea when they were turned out of paradise.' 'no, don't tell them,' screamed mrs. palmer. 'reginald, if you tell them, i shall never forgive you.' 'please don't, then, mr. armstrong,' said sybil. 'i should hate it if you were never forgiven. besides, i like surprises. i should have loved your dinner; i think it was too unkind of you to have given it before i came. or else it is unkind of you to have told me about it now that it is over.' she laughed with genuine amusement. 'bertie, is it not heavenly?' she said. 'we think of that sort of thing sometimes in england. do you remember the paper ball? but we so seldom do it. and did it all go beautifully? did not half fall off their horses?' 'well, mrs. palmer's husband, lewis s., he wouldn't get on a real horse,' he said. 'he said that he was endangering too many shareholders. so i got a wooden horse for him, and had it covered with gold-leaf.' 'lewis on a rocking-horse!' screamed his wife. 'i died--i just died!' 'luckily, she had a resurrection,' said mr. armstrong; 'otherwise i should never have forgiven myself. but you did laugh, you did laugh,' he said. mrs. palmer probably did. certainly she did now. the dinner went on its way. everything was admirable: what was designed to be cold was iced; what was designed to be hot was molten. round them the shrill-toned diners grew a little shriller; outside the crisp noise of horses' hoofs on asphalt grew more frequent. mrs. emsworth's first night was the feature of the evening; and even the harassed financiers, to whom to-morrow, as dictated by the voice of the telephone from long island, might mean ruin or redoubled fortunes, had with closing hours laid all ideas of dollars aside, and, like sensible men, proposed to distract themselves till the opening of business next morning distracted them. for mrs. emsworth was something of a personality; her friends, who were many, said she could act; her enemies, who were legion, allowed she was beautiful, and new york, which sets the time in so many things, takes its time very obediently in matters of artistic import from unbusiness-like england and france. in this conviction, it was flocking there to-night. besides the great impresario, bilton, had let her the dominion theatre, and was known to have given her _carte blanche_ in the matter of mounting and dresses. this meant, since he was a shrewd man, a belief in her success, for into the value of business he never allowed any other consideration to enter. furthermore, there had been from time to time a good deal of interest in england over mrs. emsworth's career, the sort of interest which does more for a time in filling a theatre than would acting of a finer quality than hers have done. the piece she was to appear in was a _petit saleté_ of no importance whatever. that always suited her best; she liked her audience to be quite undistracted by any interest in the plot, so that they might devote themselves to the contemplation of her dresses and herself. of her dresses the quality was admirable, the quantity small; of herself there was abundance, both of quality and quantity, for she was a tall woman, and, as we have said, even her enemies conceded her good looks. the piece had already begun when the little _partie carrée_ from sherry's entered, and rustled to the large stage-box which bilton had reserved for them. mrs. emsworth, in fact, was at the moment making her first entrance, and, as they took their places, was acknowledging the applause with which she was greeted. naturally enough, her eye, as she bowed to the house, travelled over its occupants, and she saw the party arriving. this was made easy for her by mrs. palmer's voluble enthusiasm, which really for the moment divided the attention of the house between the stage and her box. 'i adore her, i just adore her!' she cried; 'and she promised to come down from saturday till monday to long island. you know her, of course, lord keynes? there's something magnetic to me about her. i told her so this afternoon. i think it's her neck. look at her bending her head, mrs. massington. i really think that mrs. emsworth's neck is the most magnetic thing i ever saw. reginald, isn't it magnetic?' the magnetic lady proceeded. she acted with immense and frolicsome enjoyment, like some great good-humoured child bursting with animal spirits. to the rather tired and heated occupants of the stalls she came like a sudden breeze on a hot day, so infectious was her enjoyment, so natural and unaffected her pleasure in exhibiting her beauty and buoyant vitality. the critical element in the audience--in any case there was not much--she simply took by the scruff of the neck and turned out of the theatre. 'we are here to enjoy ourselves,' she seemed to say. 'laugh, then; look at me, and you will.' and they looked and laughed. whether she was an actress or not was really beside the point; there was in her, anyhow, something of the irrepressible _gamin_ of the streets, and the _gamin_ that there is in everybody hailed its glorious cousin. long before the act was over her success was assured, and when mr. bilton came in to see them in the interval, it was no wonder that his mercantile delight was apparent in his face. once more, for the fiftieth or the hundredth time, he had staked heavily and won heavily. 'i knew she would take,' he said. 'we americans, mrs. massington, are the most serious people on the face of the earth, and there is nothing we adore so much as the entire absence of seriousness. mrs. emsworth is like puck in the "midsummer night's dream." they'll be calling her mrs. puck before the week's out. and she's playing up well. there is a crowd of a hundred reporters behind the scenes now, and she's interviewing them ten at a time, and making her dog give audience to those she hasn't time for. do you know her dog? i thought it would knock the scenery down when it wagged its tail.' armstrong in the meantime was regaling bertie with more details of the equestrian party, and the justice of bilton's remarks about seriousness was evident from his conversation. 'it was all most carefully thought out,' he was saying, 'for one mustn't have any weak point in an idea of that sort. i don't think you go in for that sort of social entertainments in london, do you?' 'no; we are much more haphazard, i think,' said bertie. 'well, it's not so here--anyhow, in our set. if you want to keep in the swim you must entertain people now and then in some novel and highly original manner. mrs. lewis s. palmer there is the centre, the very centre, of our american social life. you'll see things at her home done just properly. last year she gave a farm-party that we talked about, i assure you, for a month. you probably heard of it.' 'i don't remember it, i'm afraid.' 'well, you surprise me. all the men wore real smock-frocks and carried shepherd's crooks or cart-whips or flails, and all the women were dressed as milkmaids. it was the drollest thing you ever saw. and not a detail was wrong. all the grounds down at mon repos--that's her house, you know--were covered with cattle-sheds and poultry-houses and pig-sties, and the cows and sheep were driven around and milked and shorn just as they do on real farms. and inside the walls of her ballroom were even boarded up, and it was turned into a dairy. she's one of our very brightest women.' 'and next week there is to be a new surprise, is there not?' asked bertie. 'yes, indeed, and i think it will top everything she has done yet. what she has spent on it i couldn't tell you. why, even lewis s. palmer got a bit restive about it, and when lewis s. gets restive about what mrs. palmer is spending, you may bet that anyone else would have been broke over it. why, she spent nearly thirty thousand dollars the other day over the funeral of her dog.' 'did mr. palmer get restive over that?' asked bertie. 'well, i guess it would have been pretty mean of him if he had, and lewis, he isn't mean. he's a strenuous man, you know, and he likes to see his wife strenuous as a leader of society. he'd be terribly mortified if she didn't give the time to american society. and he knows perfectly well that she has to keep firing away if she's to keep her place, just as he's got to in his. why, what would happen to american finance if lewis realized all his fortune, and put it in a box and sat on the top twiddling his thumbs? why, it would just crumble--go to pieces. same with american society, if mrs. palmer didn't keep on. she's just got to.' 'then what happened to you all when she came to london?' asked bertie, rather pertinently. 'why, that was in the nature of extending her business. that was all right,' said armstrong. 'and here's some of the returns coming in right along,' he added felicitously--' mrs. massington and you have come to america.' at this point bilton interrupted. 'mrs. emsworth saw you to-night, lord keynes,' he said, and hopes you will go to see her to-morrow morning. no. , west twenty-sixth street. easier than your park squares and park places and park streets? isn't it?' 'much easier,' said bertie. 'pray give my compliments to mrs. emsworth, and say i regret so much i am leaving new york to-morrow with mrs. palmer.' 'ah, you couldn't have a better excuse,' said bilton; 'but no excuse does for mrs. emsworth. you'd better find half an hour, lord keynes.' chapter v mrs. emsworth's little flat in twenty-sixth street certainly reflected great credit on its furnisher, who was her impresario. she had explained her requirements to him briefly but completely before she signed her contract. 'i want a room to eat my chop in,' she said; 'i want a room to digest my chop in; i want a room to sleep in; and i want somebody to cook my chop, and somebody to make my bed. all that i leave to you; you know my taste. if the room doesn't suit me, i shall fly into a violent rage, and probably refuse to act at all. you will take all the trouble of furnishing and engaging servants off my hands, won't you? how dear of you! now, please go away; i'm busy. _au revoir_, till new york.' now, bilton, as has been mentioned, was an excellent man of business, and, knowing perfectly well that mrs. emsworth was not only capable of carrying her threat into action, but was extremely likely to do so--a course which would have seriously embarrassed his plans--he really had taken considerable pains with her flat. consequently, on her arrival, after she had thrown a sham empire clock out of the window, which in its fall narrowly missed braining a passing millionaire, she expressed herself much pleased with what he had done, and gave a standing order to a very expensive florist to supply her with large quantities of fresh flowers every day, and send the account to bilton. the room in which she digested her chop especially pleased her. carpet, curtains, and upholstery were rose-coloured, the walls were green satin, with half a dozen excellent prints on them, and by the window was an immense louis xv. couch covered in brocade, with a mass of pillows on it. here, the morning after her opening night in new york, she was lying and basking like a cat in the heat, smoking tiny rose-scented russian cigarettes, and expecting with some anticipation of amusement the arrival of bertie keynes. round her lay piles of press notices, which stripped the american variety of the english language bare of epithets. she was deeply absorbed in these, and immense smiles of amusement from time to time crossed her face. on the floor lay her huge mastiff, which, with the true time-serving spirit, rightly calculated to be thoroughly popular, she had rechristened teddy roosevelt. her great coils of auburn hair were loosely done up, and her face, a full, sensuous oval, was of that brilliant warm-blooded colouring which testified to the authenticity of the smouldering gold of her hair. lying there in the hot room, brilliant with colour and fragrant with the scent of innumerable flowers (the account for which was sent in to mr. bilton), she seemed the embodiment of vitality and serene paganism. not even her friends--and they were many--ever accused her of morality, but, on the other hand, all children adored her. that is an item not to be disregarded when the moralist adds up the balance-sheet. in spite of his excuse of the night before, bertie keynes had taken bilton's advice, and before long he was announced. 'bertie, bertie!' she cried as he came in, 'i wake up to find myself famous. i am magnetic, it appears, beyond all powers of comprehension. i am vimmy--am i really vimmy, do you think, and what does it mean? i am a soulful incarnation of adorable----oh no; it's teddy roosevelt who is the adorable incarnation. yes, that dear angel lying there is teddy roosevelt and an adorable incarnation, which would never have happened if we hadn't come to america, would it, darling? not you, bertie. i christened him on the way over, and you shall be godfather, because he wants a new collar. let me see, where was i? bertie, i was a success last night. enormous. i knew i should be. now sit down, and try to get a word in edge-ways, if you can.' 'i congratulate you, dorothy,' he said--'i congratulate you most heartily.' 'thanks. i say, teddy roosevelt, the kind young gentleman congratulates us. now, what are you doing on these opulent shores? looking out for opulence, i guess. going to be married, are we? well, teddy is too, if we can find a suitable young lady; and so am i. oh, such fun! and we'll tear up all our past histories, and put them in the fire.' she sat half up on her couch, and looked at him. 'it's two years since we met last, bertie,' she said; 'and you--why, you've become a man. you always were a pretty boy, and you don't make a bad-looking man. and i'm vimmy. i used not to be vimmy, did i? but we are all changing as time goes on. really, i'm very glad to see you again.' bertie felt unaccountably relieved at her manner. his relief was of short duration. dorothy emsworth arranged her pillows more comfortably, and lit another cigarette. 'i wanted to see you before you left new york,' she said, 'because i am coming down to stay with mrs. palmer next saturday, and we had better know how we stand. so, what are you over here for? did you come here to get married? and if so, why not?' she lay back as she spoke, stretching her arms out with a gesture that somehow reminded him of a cat stretching its forelegs and unsheathing the claws of its silent, padded feet. his feeling of relief was ebbing a little. 'why not, indeed?' he said. 'dear bertie, echo-conversation is so tedious,' she said. 'you always used to be rather given to it. so you have come out to get married. that is settled, then. do ask me to the wedding. the "voice that breathed"; wedding march from "lohengrin"; ring dropping and running down the aisle like a hoop; orange-flowers; tears; sudden unexplained hysterics of the notorious mrs. emsworth; deportment of the bride; wedding-cake; puff-puff. and the curtain drops with extreme rapidity. o lor', teddy r.! what devils we all are, to be sure!' bertie's feeling of relief had quite gone, but his nervousness had gone also. he felt he knew the facts now. 'i see,' he said: 'you propose to make trouble. i'm glad you told me.' 'i told you?' she asked, laughing lazily. 'little vimmy me? i say, i'm brainy too.' 'what do you propose to do?' he asked. 'well, wait first of all till you are engaged. i say, bertie, i like teasing you. when you wrinkle your forehead as you are doing now, you look adorable. i don't mean a word i say, you know, any more than you meant a word of that very, very funny letter you once wrote me, which is now,' she said with histrionic utterance, 'one of my most cherished possessions.' 'you told me you had burned it,' said he. 'i know; i meant to burn it, but i couldn't. when i told you i had burnt it, i really meant to have burnt it, and so i didn't tell you a lie, because for all practical purposes it was burned. but then i found i couldn't; it was too funny for words. really, there are so few humorous things in the world that it would be murder to destroy it. of course, you didn't mean it. but i can't burn it. it is here somewhere.' bertie did not smile. he sat up straight in his chair, and put the tips of his fingers together. 'and don't look like gallio,' remarked mrs. emsworth. 'look here, dorothy,' he said, 'you can make things rather unpleasant for me, if you choose. now, why do you choose? you know perfectly well that at one time the world said things about you and me; you also know perfectly well that--well, that there was no truth in them. you encouraged me to fall madly in love with you because--i don't know why. i thought you liked me, anyhow. then there appeared somebody else. i wrote you a letter expressing my illimitable adoration. that was all--all. you have got that letter. is not what i have said true?' 'yes--slightly edited. you see, i am a _very_ improper person.' 'what do you mean?' 'well, if you choose to write a very fervent letter to a very improper person, people will say--it is no use denying it--they will say what a fine day it is, but hot.' bertie got up. 'that is all i have to say,' he said. 'people are so ill-natured,' said mrs. emsworth. the catlike laziness had left her, though her attitude was the same; instead of looking sensuously lazy, she looked very alert. 'good-bye, then,' said bertie; 'we meet next week at long island.' 'yes; it will be very pleasant,' said she. he left the room without more words, and for five minutes she remained where she was. but slowly, as she lay there, the enjoyment and the purring content faded completely out of her face. then it grew hard and sad; eventually, with a long-drawn sigh, half sob, she got up and called to her dog. he rose limb by massive limb, and laid his head on her lap. 'teddy r.,' she said, 'we are devils. but there are two worse devils than you and i. one has just gone away; one is just coming. worse-devil one is worse because he thinks--he thinks that of me. worse-devil two is worse because he--he did that to me. so--so you and i will think nothing more about it at all, but keep our spirits up.' she fondled the great dog's head a moment, then got up suddenly, and drew the blind down to shut out the glare of the sun, which was beginning to lay a hot yellow patch on the floor. 'he thought that,' she said to herself--'he really thought that.' she walked up and down the room for a moment or two, then went to a table on which stood her despatch-box, opened it, and looked through a pile of letters that lay inside. one of these she took out and read through. at moments it seemed to amuse her, at moments her smile was struck from her face. when she had finished reading it, she paused a few seconds with it in her hands, as if weighing it. then, with a sudden gesture of impatience, she tore it in half, and threw the pieces into the grate. then, with the quick relief of a decision made and acted upon, she whistled to her dog, and went into her bedroom to make her toilet. resplendency was part of her programme, and with the consciousness of a busy hour before her, she told her butler--bilton's liberal interpretation of her requirements had included a manservant--that if mr. harold bilton called, he was to be asked to wait. the 'room to sleep in' was, if anything, more satisfactory than the 'room to digest her chop in.' like all proper bedrooms, there was a bed in it, a large table, winking with silver, in the window, and very little else. by the bedside there was a bearskin; in front of the dressing-table in the window there was a rug; otherwise the room was carpetless and parquetted, and devoid of furniture and dust. dark-green curtains hung by the window, dark-green blinds could be drawn across the window. the bathroom beyond held the hopeless but necessary accessories of dressing. her maid was waiting for her--parkinson by name--and it was not dorothy who came to be dressed, but puck. 'parkinson,' she said, 'once upon a time there was a very fascinating woman called x.' 'lor'm!' said parkinson. 'quite so. and there was a very fascinating young man called y. he wanted to marry her, and wrote to say so. but meantime another man called z also wanted to--to marry her. so she said "yes," because he gave her a great deal of money. but she kept y's proposal--i don't know why, except because it was so funny. and so now i suppose she is mrs. z. that's all.' 'lor'm!' said parkinson. 'will you wear your shiffong and lace dress?' 'yes, shiffong. parkinson, supposing i suddenly burst into tears, what would you think?' 'i should think you wasn't quite well'm.' 'quite right; also there isn't time.' mrs. emsworth had not been gone more than ten minutes or so before bilton was shown up. he appeared to be in a particularly well-satisfied humour this morning, and as he moved about the room, noting with his quick eye the stamp of femininity which mrs. emsworth had already impressed into the garnishing of the place, he whistled softly to himself. in his hand he carried a small jewel-case with her initials in gold upon the top. as always, in the relaxed mood the true man came to the surface; for a man is most truly himself, not at great moments of emergency or when a sudden call is made on him, but when his ambitions for the time being are gratified, when he is pleased with himself and his circumstances--above all, when he is alone. thus, though just now the hard eagerness of his face was a little softened, yet its alertness hardly dozed; and though he had made, he felt sure, a great success in bringing dorothy emsworth to america, he hardly allowed himself even this momentary pause of achievement, but had called this morning to talk over with her the details of a protracted tour through the principal cities of the states. true son of his country, he realized that to pause spelled to be left behind. as his manner was, bilton did not sit down, but kept walking about, as if not to be caught idle either in mind or body. as in many of his countrymen, the habit of perpetually being ready and eager to snap up an opportunity had become a second nature to him, so that it was far more an effort to him to rest than to work. working was as natural to him as breathing; to cease to work required the same sort of effort as to hold the breath. to him in his profession as impresario any movement, any glimpse at a room or a picture, could perhaps suggest what in the fertile alchemy of his mind might be transformed into a 'tip,' and he looked with special attention at two watteau prints which hung on the walls; for in the second piece which mrs. emsworth was to produce under his direction a certain scene was laid in the gardens at versailles, and the note of artificial naturalness had to be struck in the scenery as watteau and no one else had struck it. big trees cut formally and square in their lower branches, but with the topmost boughs left unpollarded; fountain in the centre, quite so, and a glimpse, just a glimpse, of the terrace of the palace with the two bronze fountains beneath the trees. he stood a moment before the fireplace with eyes half closed, conjuring up the scene, and in particular seeing it with his mind's eye as a setting to that incomparable woman in whom, professionally, at this juncture, he was so deeply interested, to whom he was so managerially devoted, but of whom in other respects he was so profoundly weary. for a year he had been wildly in love with her, for another year he had slowly cooled towards her, and now it required all his steadiness of head and incessantly watchful will not to betray his tedium. also in years he was now, though still only half way through the thirties, old enough in mind to wish to settle down. his capabilities for passionate attachments were a little cooling, and, with a cynical amusement at himself, he was beginning to realize that married domesticity, even as morals taught, was, though for other reasons, the placid river-bed into which the babbling mountain-streams of youth must eventually empty themselves. rather bathos, perhaps, but he realized fully that everyone gets in life what they themselves bring to it. the only limitations imposed on a man are those which his own nature makes. but these unedifying moralities did not occupy him long. they were the background to his thoughts, just as the terrace of versailles was the background for the picture he was forming. in the foreground of the picture stood mrs. emsworth; on the terrace stood another figure, sybil massington. he had let his cigar go out as he revolved these things in front of the two watteau pictures, and then rose to drop it in the fireplace. a letter in an envelope torn once in half lay there, and he stooped and picked it up, laid the two pieces side by side on the table, and read it through. then he put the pieces in his pocket, and, with that praiseworthy attention to detail which throughout his life had contributed so largely to his success, he took from the table a sheet of paper, folded it inside an envelope, tore it in half, and replaced the pieces in the grate where he had found the others. the whole thing was quickly and naturally done; it was merely one among a thousand million other cases in which his mind was ready to take advantage of any possible opportunity that fate might cast in his way. the torn letter might conceivably at some future date be useful to him. therefore he kept it. it is no use to guard against certainties--such was his gospel--for certainties in this life are so few as to be practically negligible. but he who guarded against contingencies and provided for possibilities was the winner in the long-run. this done, he dismissed the matter from his mind, and, in order not to let the moments pass without seed, sketched out in some detail the plan of the stage as suggested by the two watteau prints. he was deep in this when mrs. emsworth entered. the 'shiffong' suited her admirably. 'you have been waiting,' she said; 'i am sorry for keeping you. oh, harold, they love me over here; they just love me!' his part was at his finger-tips. 'that doesn't seem to me in the least remarkable,' he said. 'you are a success; no one can be more. i want to be allowed to commemorate it.' and he handed her the jewel-case. he was no niggard when business was involved; his business now was to keep her in a good temper, and the opal and diamond brooch he had chosen at tiffany's was really admirable. even mrs. palmer might have found it brought consolation to a wounded spirit. 'that is dear of you, harold,' she said; 'i adore opals. is it really for me? thank you ever so much. it goes on now. is it rather big for the morning? i think it is. a reason the more for wearing it.' she pinned it into her dress, and sat down. 'well?' she said. 'i came really to congratulate you,' said he; 'but as i am here, i suppose we may as well talk over some business that must be talked over. about your tour: are you willing to stop over here till april at least?' 'yes; i don't see why not. i want to appear in london early in may.' 'very well. i will draft an agreement, and send it you. now, you may consider that with your extraordinary success of last night the theatre will be full for some weeks ahead. i propose your giving an evening performance on saturdays as well as the matinee.' 'terms?' 'royalty. twenty per cent, on total takings. it is worth your while.' 'is it not more worth my while to be seen from saturday till monday at mrs. palmer's?' 'it would be if the theatre was not full. but you could fill it--for the present, anyhow--if you had a matinee every day. besides, you can get down to long island with the utmost ease on sunday morning.' 'i go to mass on sunday morning; you forget that!' he smiled. 'i suggest, then, that you should omit that ceremony, if you want to go to mrs. palmer's. however, there is no hurry. weigh the three things in your mind--eighty or ninety pounds by acting on saturday evening, or mass on sunday morning, or mrs. palmer's on sunday morning. there is another thing: i want to talk over the scenes in "paris" with you. i am going to mrs. palmer's the sunday after next. i will bring the models down with me, if you will promise to give me an hour. 'they will not be ready till then.' 'yes. i am going there next sunday and the sunday after. they have a theatre there; she wants me to do something in the evening.' bilton thought a moment. 'what do i get?' he asked. 'the pleasure of seeing me act, silly.' he shook his head. 'i'm afraid i must forget that pleasure,' he said. 'your contract binds you to give no theatrical representations of any sort except under my direction.' the _gamin_ element rose to the surface in her. 'what a beast you are!' she said. 'it is for a charity!' 'and a cheque,' he observed. 'the cheque is purely informal. besides, we shall be there together.' he took a cigar out of his case, bit the end off with his long teeth, that gleamed extremely white between the very remarkable red of his lips. 'look here, dolly,' he said; 'there are two sides to the relations in which we are placed. one is purely businesslike; the other is purely sentimental. it is a pity to let them overlap. it spoils my devotion to you to feel that it is in a way mixed up with business, and it offends my instincts as a business man to let sentiment have a word to say in our bargains. briefly, then, i forbid your acting for mrs. palmer unless you make it worth my while. after all, i didn't bring you out here for sentimental reasons; i brought you out because, from a financial point of view, i thought it would be good for both of us.' 'what do you want?' she asked. 'half your cheque.' 'for something you haven't arranged, and which won't cost you a penny?' 'yes. i am talking business. you can close with that offer any time to-day; to-morrow it will be two-thirds. i'm quite square with you.' 'americans are jews,' observed mrs. emsworth. 'possibly; it would be an advantage if everyone was; it would simplify bargaining immensely. the gentile mind is often highly unreasonable, and, instead of allowing both sides to make profits, it simply refuses to part with its goods. and a fine opportunity goes to--well, to damnation. you won't score if you don't act for her, nor will i. if you do, we both shall. don't be a gentile, dolly.' she did not answer for a moment. her eyes saw the torn fragments of the letter in the grate, and she remembered that she had definitely and for ever torn up what bertie had written to her. then she got up, crossed the room to where he was standing by the fireplace, and put her hands on his shoulders. 'are you tired of me?' she asked. his brown eyes grew black at the fragrance and seductiveness of her close presence; for the blood is stirred long after the imagination has ceased to be fired. 'you witch! you witch!' he said. but in the background on the terrace there still stood the other figure. chapter vi long island is separated from new york by a narrow sound, across which ferry-boats ply in both directions with extreme punctuality. from any part of new york city a couple of electric cars or an electric railway will take you to the threshold of the ferry-boat, and trains await you at the back-door, so to speak, of the ferry-boats, to convey you down the length of long island. on board the ferry-boat you can buy a variety of badly-printed and sensational daily papers for the sum of one cent; you can get your boots blacked for very little more; and no doubt, if there was sufficient demand, the directors would enable you to have your teeth brushed or your hair combed. no part of the equipment, however, is at all lovely. it answers the purpose of conveying you cheaply and expeditiously from one point to another, and enables you to finish your toilet in transit, which is an invaluable boon to those who want to save time. as a matter of fact, everyone wants to save time, but it has been reserved for americans to invent such methods of doing it. the rest of the world, therefore, is in their debt. the debt is acknowledged, but the rest of the world, quite inscrutably, does not choose to follow their example. all may raise the flower now all have got the seed, but they do not raise the flower. there is no 'class' on these boats; there is no 'class' on the elevated railway; there is no 'class' on the electric cars. millionaires in long island, in consequence, have the privilege of enjoying the same discomforts as other people, and even lewis s., who could have bought up the whole system of electric cars, overhead railway, and ferry-boats (after a little judicious distribution of emoluments to the officials of new york city), habitually went by these unlovely conveyances, because there were no other. during his transit he once sent a cablegram buying, at any price, the whole dinner-service which had been used on the last occasion on which marie antoinette dined at petit trianon. it was extremely expensive, and, as he wrote, the drippings from the rain fell on to his cablegram form, for the boat was full. subsequently he argued with the boot-boy who had blacked his boots, but gave in when the boy produced his tariff-card. and democracy, the spirit of his fellow-passengers, sympathized in the main with him. once arrived on long island, a walk of a hundred yards or so leads to the ticket-office. those hundred yards are uncovered, however; but since people who live on long island _must_ pass them in order to get into the delectable city, there is no reason why the railroad or the ferry-boat company should offer conveniences in the way of shelter to their passengers. given competition, any line would vie with the others in mirrors and gilded furniture; but if there is none, why on earth spend a penny? not a passenger the less will travel because the mode of transit is bestial. thus, common-sense, as usual, emerges triumphant. for the purpose of this narrative, the low-lying swamp and companies of jerry-built houses that cluster round the various stations on the line may be disregarded, and after half an hour's travelling the train emerges into a very pleasant land. there are no high uplands to dwarf the immediate landscape, but there are trees of tolerable growth and slim presence to add distinction to it. underneath these trees, as the train nears port washington, grow high clumps of purple michaelmas daisies, now, in september, full of bursting bud, and the temperate sea-winds give a vividness of colour to the prevailing green, which reminds foreigners of the devon sea-coast. mrs. palmer's new-built house stood on a charming hill-top some mile or so beyond the station. the site had been occupied till a few years before by a delightful bungalow structure, built of wood, with shingled walls, and surrounded on all sides by deep, shady verandas. the wood in those days came right up to the house on two sides, and was just lopped of its topmost branches on a third, so that where the ground fell away rapidly from the house a charming glimpse of the dim blue sound could be seen framed in sky and tree-tops, while the fourth side was open, the house-front giving on to a broad lawn of velvety turf which changed into rougher meadow-land in the middle distance, while over distant tree-tops and a wash of green country the gray smoke of new york sat on the horizon. the house, in fact, had been like a hundred other houses on long island, not perhaps very pretty, still less beautiful, but not without a certain haphazard picturesqueness about it, restful and unpretending, and most eminently adapted for the purpose of affording to the brain-heated business man a draught of coolness and greenness. moreover, it had expressed somehow the genius of the place; its woods, not huge nor of magnificent trees, but of pleasant growth, always sounded in whispers through the rooms; and even as the greatest heats of summer came tempered by the passage of the winds through the filter of the woodlands, so, one would have thought, the fever of new york was abated here, even as the smoke of the city was but a gray _tache_ on the horizon. it had, as all houses should, been in tune with the pleasant, mediocre charm of the island, even as the chateaux on the loire express the broad grandeur and classical formality of the landscape, as the big houses of england are in the scale of their huge timbered parks, and, for that matter, as the county gaol expresses the security which his majesty kindly affords to the criminal classes. but within the last few years the whole place had been completely changed, and it was no longer the genius of long island, but the genius of mushroom wealth, that crowned the hill-top. for a quarter of a mile on every side round the house the trees had been felled and their roots dynamited, and huge lawns spread their green carpets in the most ample expanses. four-square in the centre stood the immense house of gray stone, copied largely from one of the valois chateaux in the south of france, but with various protuberances, in the shape of a theatre, a swimming-bath, and a tennis-court, grafted on to it. a carriage-drive lay in long curves like a flicked whip-lash, surmounting terrace after terrace set with nugatory nudities, till it reached the lead-roofed portico at the front, where two great græco-roman candelabra of parian marble stood one on each side of the door, pierced for gas, and crowned by large glass globes. to the north lay the italian garden, all laurels and tessellated pavement, cypresses and statuary, fountains and flower-beds. to the west were the tennis and croquet lawns, and to the south, where the ground in old days had fallen tumbling towards the sea, it had been built up with thousands of tons of earth and faced with masonry, so that from the edge of the terrace one looked down on to the topmost fans of the waving trees. heavy gilded vanes crowned the lead roofs, and high over the central dome of the building a flag-staff displayed mrs. palmer's very original device--love caught in a rose-bush--to the airs of heaven. round the extreme edge of the terrace ran the bicycle track, on which lewis s. palmer did his ten miles a day, with black hatred in his heart of this extraordinary waste of time. the estate, which was of great extent, and produced nothing whatever, since, to mrs. palmer's way of thinking, to live on an estate which produced anything was of the nature of keeping a shop, was all pressed into the amiable service of providing entertainment for the guests, and of showing the wondering world a specimen of the delectable life. for several miles the road through the woods had been run in artfully contrived gradients, carried on struts over too precipitous ravines, and quarried through cuttings to avoid undesirable steepnesses. the sides of the cuttings were admirably planted, and creepers and ivy covered the balustrades of the bridges. a golf-course, smooth as a billiard-table, and not too heavily bunkered, lay near the house, and mrs. palmer had tried a most original experiment last year of stocking the woods with all sorts of game, to provide mixed shooting for a couple of parties in the autumn. this had not been wholly a success, for the deer she had turned out were so tame that they gazed in timid welcome at the shooters, probably expecting to be fed, till they fell riddled with bullets, while the pheasants were so wild that nobody could touch a tail-feather. but the costume of the _chasseurs_--green velvet, very robin-hoody--had been most tasteful, and she herself, armed with a tiny pea-rifle and dressed in decent imitation of atalanta, had shot a roebuck and a beater, the latter happily not fatally. from the centre of the terrace on the east, which had been brought over entire from a needy italian palace, a broad flight of steps of rose-coloured marble led down to the sea. a small breakwater was sufficient to provide station and anchorage for the two steam-yachts and smaller pleasure-boats, but otherwise the shore had not been meddled with. there was a charming beach of sand, and a little further on a fringe of seaweed-covered rock-pools. behind this was a small natural lagoon in a depression in the sandy foreshore, some half-acre in extent, fed by a stream that came down through the woods, but brackish through the infiltration of the salt water. this that highly original woman had chosen to be the scene of the fête which was to astonish society next week; but the secret had been well kept, and no one except reggie armstrong knew the precise details of the new surprise. for a fortnight or so, however, it was common knowledge that a great many large pans wrapped in tarpaulin had been arriving, and the shore had been populous with men who plied some sort of bare-legged avocation, which implied wading in the lagoon. but the foreman of the company who was executing mrs. palmer's orders had received notice that if any word of what was being done leaked out or reached the papers, at that moment all work would be suspended, and the firm would never have another order from her. she herself, sometimes alone, sometimes with reggie, inspected the work; otherwise no one was allowed near the place. the yachts of her dearest friends, it is true, constantly passed and repassed up the sound, and many were the opera-glasses levelled at the shore; but what the bare-legged men were doing baffled conjecture and the best glasses. the house inside was, with the exception of one small suite, of the most sumptuous description. a huge hall, paved with marble, and covered as to its walls with superb wood-work of grinling gibbons, occupied the centre of the ground-floor, and _en suite_ round it were the rooms for entertaining. ping-pong being at this moment fashionable, it was to be expected that almost every room had its table, and it was curious to see the hideous little black board on its cheap trestle legs occupying the centre of the great french drawing-room. old rose-coloured satin was stretched on the walls, an immense aubusson carpet covered the floor. all the furniture was gems of the early empire style; the big ormolu clock was by vernier; great dresden parrots in gilt mounts held the shaded electric lights, and a statuette by clodion stood on the queen's escritoire from the tuileries. one side of the square block of house was entirely occupied by the picture-gallery, which contained some extremely fine specimens of the great english portrait-school, a few dubious old masters, some good lancrets, and several very valuable pictures by that very bright young american artist, sam wallace. these, as all the world knows, represent scenes from the ballet and such subjects, and he is supposed to have a prodigious eye for colour. here, too, of course, was an unrivalled place for ping-pong, and mrs. palmer had caused to be made a very large court, so that four people could play together. great grave english footmen, when the game was in progress, were stationed at each end to pick up the balls, and hand them on silver salvers to the server; and they had rather a busy time of it, for the majority of mrs. palmer's guests found a difficulty in inducing the ball to go anywhere near the table. but they found it very amusing, and it produced shrieks of senseless laughter. an observant man might have noticed in a dark corner of the hall a small green baize door. it was in shadow of the staircase, and might easily have escaped him altogether; but if he noticed it, it would have struck him as odd that this plain baize door, with three brass initials on it--l. s. p.--should find a place in this magnificence. if it had only been l. s. d., it would have been quite in place, and might have been taken to be the shrine of the tutelary god of the place. shrine indeed it was, and the tutelary god sat within; for the initials were those of mrs. palmer's husband. it was a perfectly plain, bare room, with drugget on the floor, an almanac hung near the fireplace, a large table stood in the centre of the room, on which were piles of papers, apparatus for writing, and usually a glass of milk. from the door to the right there came the subdued tickings of telegraph apparatus; near that door sat a young man on a plain wooden chair, and at the table sat a small, gray-haired man, very thin and spare, with bushy eyebrows which frowned over his work. from time to time he would throw on to the floor a scrap of paper. then the young man would get up noiselessly, pick it up, and go through with it into the room from which came the tickings of the telegraph. then he would return and sit down again. occasionally a muffled knock would come at the same door, upon which he would rise and take a paper which was handed him, and lay it quite close to the right hand of the man who sat at the table, who either crumpled it up after reading it or wrote something in reply. these answers and messages were all written on small scraps of paper measuring about three inches by one; there was a pile of them always ready by his left hand. a telephone also stood on this table which rang very constantly. then the man at the table would, as if automatically, place the receiver at his ear and listen, sometimes not even looking up from his writing, and often replacing the instrument without a word. more rarely he looked up, and he would say a few words--'yes, yes,' 'no, certainly not,' 'very well, buy,' or 'sell at once.' 'yes, all!' sometimes, again, it would be he who first used the instrument, and he would ring up his head clerk in new york or a partner, never in a hurry, never apparently impatient. on the other hand, he would not wait idle till the answering bell rang, but go steadily on with his work. at such moments he would raise his eyes sometimes when he was speaking, and if you happened to catch his glance, it is probable you would never forget it, but would understand, though momentarily only and dimly maybe, that at the table in the bare room there sat a force, a great natural phenomenon, before which all the splendour and magnificence of the house, all the illimitable outpouring of wealth which it implied, became insignificant--a mere shirt-button or a tie-pin to the man from whose brain it had all sprung. in face, but for those extraordinary eyes, dark gray in colour, but of a vitality so great that it seemed as if each was a separate living entity, his features were somewhat insignificant. he had gray, rather thin whiskers, and iron-gray hair, still thick, and not yet deserting his forehead. his nose was slightly hooked, suggesting that a spoonful, perhaps, of jewish blood ran in his veins; his mouth was very thin-lipped and compressed. in body, he was short and thin almost to meagreness, and, owing to a nearly total absence of digestive power, he lived practically exclusively on milk, of which he drank some five or six pints a day. and in nothing was his power of control so amazingly shown; for ten years ago he had been both _gourmet_ and _gourmand_, and had habitually eaten enormous masses of food with a relish and palate for the curiously delicate and uncultivated sense of taste that savarin might have envied. even now, when he sat at the head of the table at his wife's parties, he knew, partly by keenness of nostril, partly by look, whether any dish was not perfectly cooked, and next morning the first of the slips which he dropped on to the floor to be picked up by the young man at the door might run: 'to the _chef_: not enough asparagus-heads in the sauce milanaise, some three weeks ago i told you the same thing.--l. s. p.' this extraordinary sense of, and attention to, detail, characteristic of the great napoleon, was also most characteristic of mr. palmer. only the night before his daughter had come down to dinner in a new dress, and found herself the instant target for the piercing gray eye of her father. 'there ought to be two straps on the shoulder, not one,' he said; 'it is copied from the figure of madame matignon, in the picture of the last fête of the empress eugenie. pray have it altered.' 'dear old papa,' remarked amelie, 'i dare say you know everything, but it wouldn't be so pretty.' 'that is a matter of taste, but it would be right.' this characteristic, which appeared so strongly even in such branches of human interest as the position of a strap or a bow on a woman's dress, appeared most piercingly of all on questions concerning finance. figures, indeed, once seen by him, seemed to be indelibly imprinted on his mind, and, without reference, he would embark on enterprises where an accurate knowledge of previous balance-sheets and present prices was essential. it was essential to him; only, instead of referring to books which would give him the required information, he carried it about in his head. to his partners and those who were associated with him in business he was a source of constant wonder. partners they might be to him in name, and, since they were all well-tried and trusted men, they no doubt were of assistance to him; but as far as executive power was concerned, they might as well have been junior clerks in some other firm, for palmer went on his way automatically, self-balanced on the topmost crest of the huge wave of prosperity that was flooding america, quicker than the whole of the rest of the new york market to scent coming trouble or prosperity in the world of money, prompter than any to take advantage of it. then, when his day's work was done, at whatever hour that might be, it was as if the word 'business' was unknown to him, and there sat at table, dressed in loose and somewhat ill-fitting clothes, a man of very simple and kindly nature, a connoisseur in cookery, art, and millinery, a gentleman at heart, and to the backbone an american--one who, in spite of his gentleness, was without breeding; one who, in spite of his deep and varied knowledge, was without culture. he and amelie were seated at lunch alone together on the day following mrs. emsworth's triumphant debut. amelie had only just come in from her ride--the horse she preferred to ride was one which few men could have sat--and she still wore her riding-habit. she was quite obviously the authentic daughter of her father and mother, and, like a clever girl, which she undoubtedly was, she had selected, so it seemed, all the good points possessed by both her parents, rejected all their weaknesses, and embodied the result in the adorable compound known as amelie palmer. she had been right, for instance, in possessing herself of her mother's extraordinary vitality and physical health, rejecting her father's digestive apparatus; on the other hand, she had chosen her father's eyes, impressing upon them, however, a certain femininity, and had set them in a complexion of dazzling fairness, which she owed to her mother. and out of the careful selection there had sprung, crowning it all, the quality that more than anything else was _she_--namely, her unrivalled exuberance of enjoyment. whether it was some new social effort of her mother's to which she brought her glorious presence, whether she rode alone through the flowering woods, or accompanied her father on his hygienic bicycle ride--'papa's treadmill,' as she called it--she brought to all her occupations the great glowing lantern of her joy, the same brilliant smile of welcome for anything that might turn up, the same divine content-she took nothing seriously, but had enthusiasm for everything. of refinement or intellectual qualities she had none whatever, but he would be a bloodless man who could really deplore their absence when he looked on that brilliant vitality. surely it would be time enough to think of such gray gifts when the sparkling tide of her life ran less riotously; at present it would be like teaching some clean-limbed young colt of the meadows to sit up and beg or shake a paw. in a certain way (and it is part of the purpose of this story to draw out the eventual pedigree of the resemblance) her _joie de vivre_ was very much akin to that quality which had so captivated the americans in new york on the occasion of mrs. emsworth's first night. in the older woman, since her nature had been longer in the crucible of life, it had necessarily undergone a certain change; but the critical observer, had he hazarded the conjecture that at amelie's age mrs. emsworth had been very like amelie, would, though he was quite wrong about it, have had the satisfaction of making a really clever mistake. for mrs. emsworth at that age had been possessed of a somewhat serious and joyless nature; her present _joie de vivre_ was the result of her experience of life, the conviction, thoughtfully arrived at, that joy is the thing worth living for. but amelie's exuberance was the result, not of philosophy, but of instinct; she laughed like a child merely because she laughed. and the critical observer, if, after making one clever mistake, he had been willing to hazard another, and had guessed that at mrs. emsworth's age amelie would be like mrs. emsworth, would have risked a mistake that was not clever. for it is very seldom that experience confirms one's childish instincts; in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it either eradicates them altogether, or, at any rate, modifies them almost beyond recognition. mrs. emsworth had won back to what had not been in her an instinct when she was a child; and it was more unlikely that amelie, when a woman, would retain the instincts that were now hers. at the present moment amelie's enthusiasm was largely taken up with food. 'papa, you have an angelic nature,' she said; 'and how you can sit there chewing crackers and sipping milk without throwing the table things at me i can't conjecture.' 'habit of self-control, amelie,' said he, his eyes smiling at her; 'perhaps you will learn it some day. when does your mother come down?' 'this afternoon, with the two english folk. she's been telephoning all the morning. when mamma gets hold, real tight hold, of the telephone, she doesn't let go under an hour or two. now, i'm not like that. the moment i ring anyone up, i forget what i was going to say, and have to ask them to dinner instead. i guess you and mamma took all the brains of the family. papa, i had the heavenliest ride this morning, all through the fir-woods, and tamburlaine wanted to jump the sound. the daisies are all coming out, and it smelt so good. oh, it smelt so good, like--like a drug store. there's the telephone again!' mr. palmer considered this a moment. 'when your mother gave her hunting-party last year,' he said, 'she commenced ringing the telephone at half-past ten in the morning, and she was late for lunch because she hadn't finished. top speed all the time, too. she takes things seriously; that's why she comes out on top every time.' 'yes, some more,' said amelie to the footman. mr. palmer looked quickly at the dish as it was handed her. 'what mess is that?' he asked. 'pigeons once,' said she; 'it won't be anything in a minute or two.' 'there ought to be mushrooms in the stew. it's meant to be _à la toulon_. i've forgotten more about cookery than our present _chef_ ever knew.' amelie laughed. 'poor papá! what a lot you must forget! i guess you're failing. well, i've regretfully finished my lunch. are you going treadmilling?' 'yes. who comes down with your mother?' 'mrs. massington and lord keynes. the others come on saturday--mrs. emsworth, bilton, and that lot. papa, i've thought of the right name for reggie armstrong at last. it's ping-pong. he's just that.' mr. palmer considered this. 'yes, ping-pong is about the size. small set, though. come and treadmill, amelie.' she got up and stretched herself, then let one arm fall round her father's neck. 'there are schemes in the air,' she said to him, as they walked out. 'but on the day you see me marry ping-pong you may tie me up by the heels to tamburlaine's tail.' from which it may be seen that either amelie was charmingly lacking in the wisdom of the world, or that her mother had more of it than one would have guessed. chapter vii mrs. palmer's house-party, which was to be with her during the week of the 'revels,' as they were called, had arrived at mon repos the same afternoon. mon repos had been taking its rest in its usual relentless manner, and bertie keynes and mrs. massington were beginning to get into training. it had dawned on them both very soon that they were engaged in the exercise of the most strenuous mental and physical activity that their dawdling english lives had ever known. the whole party breakfasted together in a marquee on the lawn, and from that moment till after the ensuing midnight were engaged _ohne rast_ with a prodigious quantity of _hast_ in a continuous social effort. bathing, boating, bridge (the two latter simultaneously) lasted till lunch; these and similar pursuits, all executed in the dazzling light, in the dazzling crowd, and largely to the dazzling sound of a band, went on without pause till dinner, after which was a short one-act play in the theatre, followed by a 'quiet dance.' after one day of it mrs. massington's quick perceptions made discoveries which she communicated to bertie. 'you are here to play up,' she said, 'and not to amuse yourself. don't drink any wine at lunch, and very little at dinner.' 'then i shall die,' said bertie. 'no, you will not; you will feel much less tired. the whole day is a stimulant, so why take more? besides, alcohol produces a reaction. that doesn't matter in england, because we sit down and react; here you can't. also don't attempt to sparkle in conversation. here they sparkle naturally--at least, they open their mouths and let it come--whereas in england we tend rather to shut our mouths unless we want to say something. but you are being a great success. go away now; i am going to rest for three minutes before i dress for dinner.' bertie lingered a moment at the door of her room. 'they are awfully kind,' he said. 'if only i was stronger, i should enjoy it enormously.' 'i am enjoying it,' said she; 'it suits me. you will, too, if you take my advice.' 'i feel more inclined to take to drink,' said he. but the fact once grasped that life at mon repos was not a holiday, but hard, relentless work of a most exacting kind, they began forthwith to settle down to it and grapple with it. at once the difficulty and charm of it absorbed them. it was a continual piece of acting; whatever your mood, you had to assume a species of reckless gaiety, and all day long feverishly and seriously engage in things that were originally designed to be relaxations, but which the ingenuity of social life had turned into instruments of the profession. none of those present particularly cared for bridge, boating, or bathing in themselves; they would not have boated or bathed alone, or played bridge even with a dummy, but they used these relaxations as a means of accomplishing social efforts. such a life cannot be undertaken frivolously, though it is purely frivolous; twenty years of it ages its devotees more than thirty years of hard and reasonable brain-work, and though they find it intensely fascinating, yet they know they have to pay for their pleasure, and grow quickly old in its service. indeed, it might almost be classed as a dangerous trade; and if the pursuit of wealth is a relentless task, not less so is its expenditure as a means of social success. certainly mrs. palmer worked quite as hard as her husband. three days passed thus, and it was now the afternoon of the first day of the revels. in consequence, the telegraph and telephone lines down to port washington were congested with messages, for the greater part of the evening papers in new york had kept their first page open for them, and nothing could be sent to press until it was known in what manner the first afternoon would be spent. a good deal, of course, was ready to be set up, for the list of the guests was public property, and their dresses could be, even if imagined only, described; but as long as the lagoon on the shore held its secret, the page could not be made up. it was known also that there would be a ball at mon repos in the evening, and that the walls of the ball-room were to be covered--literally covered, as a paper covers a wall--with roses. but for the secret of the lagoon the papers had to wait, since it had been inviolably kept. another event, too, hardly less momentous, hung in the balance, for only two days before the reigning prince of saxe-hochlaben, a dissolute young man of twenty-five, with a limp, a past, and no future, had arrived like a thunderbolt in new york. now, to the frivolous and lightminded this does not seem a world-curdling event, but that very enlightened paper, the new york _gutter snipe_, was not frivolous, and with extreme rapidity it set the red flame of war ablaze when it announced in huge headlines: 'arrival of his royal transparency the prince of saxe-hochlaben. mrs. lewis s. palmer's revels doomed to dire failure. fritz (that was his name) promises to favour mrs. john z. adelboden at newport.' the editor of the _gutter snipe_, it may be remarked, had once been a man of enormous wealth, and had honoured mr. palmer by singling him out as an adversary in a certain financial campaign. mr. palmer had dropped quite a number of little notes on to the floor over him, and he was now poor but spiteful. the effect of his announcement was magical, for there was already war to the knife between mrs. john z. adelboden and mrs. palmer, the latter of whom had planted her standard at long island in direct defiance of newport; and those headlines brought things to a crisis. the news of his arrival was of course telegraphed to newport by the _gutter snipe_, which did not telegraph it to mon repos. consequently mrs. john z. adelboden knew it by mid-day (the _germanic_ having come in at . ), whereas it went down to long island in the ordinary issue of the paper. thus, mrs. john z. adelboden had seven hours' start. that remarkable woman grasped the event in every aspect in about three minutes and a quarter. she knew--everyone in america knows everything--that timothy vandercrup, the editor of the _gutter snipe_, was her ally against mrs. palmer; she guessed also that the news would not reach mrs. palmer for some hours. so, within five minutes of the arrival of the telegram, she had called on newport to rally round her, and sent out six hundred and fifty invitations for a ball two nights later--that is to say, on the evening of the first day of mrs. palmer's revels. to each invitation she added on the bottom left-hand corner, 'arrival of prince of saxe-hochlaben.' that was rather clever; she did not actually commit herself to anything. the notes were sent out by a perfect army of special messengers, and the same evening all the answers arrived. there were no refusals. simultaneously she wrote a rather familiar little note to h. r. t., whom she had met and flirted with in england the year before, saying: 'pray come up to our little cottage here. we have a ball on monday night. all newport will be there.' at mon repos the same evening the papers arrived as usual, and mrs. palmer (as usual) picked up the _gutter snipe_, since it always contained the manoeuvres of the enemy. and, though at that moment her guests were in the middle of arriving, she left amelie to do the honours, instantly left the room, went to her boudoir, and read the paragraph through twice. she also, it may be remarked, had met the prince before; he had tried to flirt with amelie, who had given him no encouragement whatever. but he had tried to flirt with so many people who had given him a great deal that she thought he might easily have forgotten that. she sat with the paper in her hands for some five minutes, after she had read it through for the second time, her nimble brain leaping like a squirrel from bough to bough of possible policies, and she paused on each for a moment. the new york _evening startler_, for instance, would put in whatever she chose to send it, and she went so far as to seize a pen and write in capital letters: 'mrs. lewis s. palmer refuses to receive prince fritz.' then she sat still again and thought. that would not do; newport would only laugh at her--the one thing she dreaded; for to be laughed at drives the nails into the coffin of social failure. then suddenly all the tension and activity of her leaping brain relaxed, and she smiled to herself at the extreme simplicity of the plan. she took one of her ordinary revel invitation-cards out of her desk, on which the word 'revels' was printed at the bottom left-hand corner. before this she inserted one word, so that it read 'indiscriminate revels.' that was all; she directed it to the prince's address at the waldorf, and went back to her guests. now, a matter so momentous is best described in the simplest possible manner, and the emotions that for the next day or two swayed two factions--that of newport and that of long island--more bitterly and poignantly than the war of independence swayed the north and the south cannot be too simply treated. the plain upshot, then, was as follows: mrs. john z. adelboden's familiar little note to the prince arrived the same evening as mrs. palmer wrote hers. h. r. t. accepted it in his own hand with some effusion. mrs. palmer's card arrived next morning. h. r. t. read it in bed, thought to himself--the 'indiscriminate' did it-' that will be more amusing.' he had forgotten altogether about his acceptance of the newport invitation, and if he had remembered it he would not have done differently. so, after a light and wholesome breakfast of a peach, washed down with some hock and soda, he accepted mrs. palmer's invitation. the news was all over newport (that he was coming there) before evening, and the _gutter snipe_ gave his portrait and biography (both unrecognisable). the news was all over long island (that he was coming there) by evening, and the _startler_ gave the portrait and biography of mrs. lewis s. palmer. then followed two days of suspense and anxiety which can only be called sickening. eventually the two announcements were laid before prince fritz by his trembling secretary, who asked him what he meant to do. he flew into a violent passion, and exclaimed with a strong german accent: 'olso, i shall go where i choose, and when i choose, and how i choose.' and suspense continued to reign. so the momentous afternoon arrived that was to bring the prince in mrs. adelboden's private railway-carriage to newport or in mrs. palmer's motor to mon repos, and still no word of enlightenment had come which should pierce the thick clouds of doubt which hid the face of the future. newport and long island were both _en fête_, and at the rail-way-station of the one, and on the lawns of mon repos at the other, the rival factions were awaiting the supreme moment in a tense, unnatural calm. mrs. palmer alone was absent from her guests, sitting at the telephone. at length it sounded, and with a quivering lip she unhooked the receiver. then she gave one long sob of relief, and rejoined her guests. the motor-car had started, and the prince was in it. and the revels began. at the supreme moment of his arrival, when all attention was breathlessly concentrated on him, a large signboard, bearing the mystic inscription '_to the pearl fishery_,' had been erected at the head of the staircase leading down to the lagoon, and with charming directness the prince pointed to it, and said: 'what does that mean, mrs. adelboden--i should say, mrs. palmer?' and mrs. palmer replied: 'i guess, sir, we'll go and see.' the expectant crowd followed them; it was felt that the secret on which so much fruitless curiosity had been wasted was about to be revealed, but, like a good secret, it baffled conjecture up till the very last moment. the crowd screamed and chattered through the woods, following their illustrious leader, and at last emerged on to the beach. there an immense sort of bathing establishment had been erected, containing hundreds of little cabinets; there were two wings--one for men, one for women--and in each cabinet for women was a blue serge skirt and sandals, a leather pouch, and a small fishing-net; in each cabinet for men was the same apparatus minus the skirt. the lagoon itself smelt strongly of rose-water, for thousands of gallons had just been emptied into it, and the surface was covered with floating tables laden with refreshments, and large artificial water-lilies. and scattered over the bottom of the lagoon--scattered, too, with a liberal hand--were hundreds of pearl oysters. there was no time wasted; as soon as prince fritz grasped the situation, and it had been made clear to him that he might keep any pearls he found, he rushed madly to the nearest cabin, rolled his trousers up to the knee, put the sandals on his rather large, ungainly feet, and plunged into the rose-watered lagoon. nor were the rest slow to follow his example, and in five minutes it was a perfect mob of serge-skirted women and bare-legged men. mr. palmer himself did not join in the wading, for, in addition to a slight cold, wading was bad for his chronic indigestion; but he seized a net, and puddled about with it from the shore. shrieks of ecstasy greeted the finding of the pearls; cries of dismay arose if the shell was found to contain nothing. faster and more furious grew the efforts of all to secure them; for a time the floating refreshment-tables attracted not the smallest attention. in particular, the prince was entranced, and, not waiting to open the shells where the oyster was still alive (most, however, had been killed by the rose-water or the journey, and gaped open), he stowed them away in his pockets, in order to examine them afterwards--not waste the precious moments when so many were in competition with him; and his raucous cries of 'ach, himmel! there is a peauty!' resounded like a bass through the shrill din. he paid no attention whatever to the throng round him; for the present he was intent on the entertainment, and paused once only to empty a bottle of munich beer which had been especially provided for him on a table with a scarlet tablecloth; for the day was hot, and the exertions of grubbing in the sand quite severe. bertie keynes had not entered the water with the first wild scramble, but had stood on the bank a few minutes, divided between amazement and helpless giggling as he observed mrs. cyrus f. bimm, a stout, middle-aged woman, lately widowed, plunge in without even pausing to take her stockings off, and fall flat on her face. but, though soaked, she was utterly undismayed, and, grasping her net, wasted no time in idle laments or in changing her clothes. her hat was naturally black, and streams of dye poured down her face and neck. her dress was black, too, and as wet as her hat. but then the indescribable frolic of the thing--there is no other word for it--seized him, and just as amelie, looking like a nymph of grecian waterways, hurried past him, radiant, slim-limbed, an embodiment of joy, and beckoned to him, he delayed no longer, but joined the rest. but, 'oh, if judy could see me now!' he said to himself, as he took off his socks. for an hour or more the pearl-hunting went on, and every oyster had been fished up and the whole lagoon churned into mud long before the prince could be persuaded to leave it. twice he made a false start, and came out of the water, only to seize his net again and hurry back on the chance of finding another, his pockets bulging with the shells he had not yet opened. all the time the telegraph was whirring and clicking the news of the huge success of mrs. palmer's first afternoon of revels and the ecstasies of the prince all over the country; and mrs. john z. adelboden, like marius, sat and wept among the ruins of newport. bilton and mrs. emsworth had driven down together in a motor from new york, but the latter had to get back in time to act that evening, to return late on saturday night, stop over sunday, and act at mon repos on sunday evening. bilton, on the other hand, had taken a rare holiday, and was not returning to town till the next week. constitutionally, he disliked a holiday; this one, however, he had less objection to, since there was a definite aim he wished to accomplish during it. he was a man to be described as a person of appetites rather than of emotions, and his appetites partook of the nature of the rest of him. they were keen, definite, and orderly--not clamorous or brutal in the least degree, but hard and clear-cut. he was supposed not many years ago to have proposed by telegram to the lady who subsequently became mrs. john z. adelboden, who had replied by the same medium, 'much regret; am otherwise engaged.' this had tickled bilton tremendously, and he had the telegram framed and put up in his flat. during the past summer mrs. massington had seen a good deal of him in london, and though she had frankly conceded that, according, anyhow, to charlie brancepeth's notions, he was a cad, there was a great deal about him she liked immensely. just as she liked the clearness of line, absence of 'fluff,' in a room, so she liked--more than liked --precision of mind in a person. he was quick, definite, and reasonable in the sense that he acted, and could always be counted on to act, strictly in accordance with conclusions at which he had arrived, and which would be found to be based on sound reasoning. she liked also his spare, business-like habit of body, his scrupulous tidiness of attire, his quick, firm movements, his extreme efficiency of person. underlying this, and but dimly present to her consciousness, was the fact that he so much resembled in face and frame charlie brancepeth, towards whom she had always felt a good deal of affection--whose devotion to her touched, though at times it irritated, her. had things been different, she would have married him, but since matrimonially he was impossible, she did not in the least propose to practise celibacy. as she had told judy, she believed she was incapable of what many other people would call love; but she was a great believer in happiness, and knew that she had a fine appetite for it. many things might contribute to it, but love was by no means an essential constituent. and more and more, especially since her arrival in america, she liked the quality of mind which may be broadly called sensibleness. americans--except when they were revelling--seemed to her to have a great deal of it. the pearl-fishing had been succeeded by bridge, bridge by dinner, and dinner by a ball in the room entirely papered with roses. sensationally--from the point of view, that is, of cost--it was a great success, but practically the scent was so overpowering that it was impossible to dance there for more than a few minutes at a time without, so to speak, coming up to breathe. consequently, there was a good deal of sitting-out done, and bilton firmly and collectedly managed to spend a large part of the evening with sybil massington. 'i should so like to know what you really think of us all,' he said on one of these occasions in his quiet, english-sounding voice. 'i adore you,' said she--' collectively, i mean.' 'ah, that spoils it all,' said he; 'we all want to be adored individually.' 'there are too many of you for me to do that,' she said; 'i should have to cut my heart up into so many little bits. wherever i go--there's a song about it--i leave my heart behind me. i always do that. people seem to me very nice.' 'you are taking the rest of the stuffing out,' remarked he in a slightly injured voice. she laughed. 'well, i find you all charming,' she said again. 'will that do?' 'i suppose it will have to. and your friend, lord keynes?' 'ah, he finds one person so charming that i don't think he thinks much about the rest,' she said. look, there they are.' bilton did not look; he had already seen them; he usually saw things first. 'do you think he will marry her?' he asked. 'yes; certainly, i hope so. if he marries at all, he must marry money.' 'and nature clearly designed miss palmer to be a peeress. in fact, the match was made in heaven.' 'i hope it will be ratified on earth,' she said. 'why are you cynical about it?' 'i am never cynical; what makes you think that?' 'well, simple, direct; it comes to the same thing. to tell the truth is often the most cynical thing you can do.' 'not if it is a pleasant truth. and it will be very pleasant to miss palmer to be an english peeress. and, as you said yourself, it is only possible for lord keynes to marry money. and he is fortunate in his money-bag,' he added. she frowned a little; there was something in this speech which, with all her admiration for his countrymen, struck her as both characteristic and disagreeable. he saw it. 'ah, that offends you,' he said quickly. 'i apologize. i wish you would teach me better. you know there is a something, an inherent coarseness, about us, which i have seen get, ever so slightly, on to your nerves fifty times a day.' she laughed. 'teach you!' she said; 'i am learning far too much myself.' 'you learning? what, for instance?' 'not to be finicking, not to be slack and dawdling. to go ahead and do something. if a person of my nature was in mr. palmer's place, do you suppose i should go on working as he does? i would never touch a business question again.' he shook his head. 'believe me, you would; you would not be able to help it. lewis palmer can't stop; his wife can't stop; i can't stop, in my small way. but you at present have the power of stopping. it is the most exquisite thing in the world. to us, to me, i assure you, it is like a cool breeze on a hot day to see you leisurely english people. in england you have a leisured class; we have none. our wealthy class is the least leisured of all. if you adore us, as you say, grant us the privilege of seeing you like that.' there was something in this speech that rather touched her--something also that certainly pleased her, and that was the tone of honest deference in which he spoke. 'in fact, you want to be english,' she said, laughing it off, 'and i want to be american.' and she looked at him, smiling. but he did not smile at all, only again his brown eyes grew hot and black. that, too, pleased her. then suddenly she felt vaguely frightened; she had not definitely intended to give him his chance now, and she did not wish him to take it. so she rose. 'take me back,' she said. 'take me into a crowd of your people. i want to learn a little more.' chapter viii the revels ended on saturday, on which day the wonder-stricken guests for the most part dispersed, their faces probably shining like moses' at this social revelation, and went back to their humble homes. the success of them had been gigantic. nobody (except newport) talked about anything else for days, and to find news of international importance in the papers was almost impossible, for everything else except the revels was tucked away into odd corners. newport alone maintained an icy silence, but disaffection was already at work there, and those who were only struggling on the fringe of newport society said openly that they would go to long island next year, since there really seemed to be some gaiety there, whereas newport was like a wet sunday afternoon. mrs. palmer's two english guests, however, stopped on. so also did bilton; and mrs. emsworth, having decided not to go to mass on sunday morning, was coming down with the larger part of her company on saturday night after her performance in new york. sunday, however, was going to be a quiet day, with the exception that there was a large dinner-party in the evening and a play in the theatre afterwards. ping-pong armstrong also remained, for he was the recognised tame cat without claws about the house. mrs. palmer sometimes secretly wished, in her full consciousness of innocence, that people would 'talk' just a little about him and her, but nobody ever did. even the _gutter snipe_ never alluded to his constant presence in the house, but this was probably due to the fact that the editor--who knew a good deal about the meaner side of human nature--guessed that it would have pleased mrs. palmer. for it is a most extraordinary, though common, phenomenon to find that perfectly virtuous and upright people often like to be thought just a little wicked, whereas bad people are totally indifferent for the most part as to whether anyone thinks them good or not. during the two or three days that had elapsed since bilton and mrs. massington had their talk together, his conduct had been immensely pleasing to her. he had taken the hint she had given him like a gentleman, and had not allowed himself to drift into intimate conversation with her until she gave him the signal. he had been diplomatic and delicate--above all, he had been intelligent, not blundering, and she could not help contrasting him, much to his advantage, with the average englishman, who either insists on 'talking the thing out,' or else looks sulky and wears a woebegone aspect. but bilton had done neither; he had remained brisk, not brusque, and had resisted, apparently without effort, any attempt to bring her to the point, while remaining himself absolutely normal. in the meantime, during the self-imposed pause in her own affairs, mrs. massington watched with extreme satisfaction the development of that mission which had brought bertie keynes to america. affairs for him certainly appeared to be running very smooth; she almost wished for some slight _contretemps_ to take place in order to put things on the proper proverbial footing. in other words, amelie and bertie had made great friends, and owing to the extraordinary freedom which eligible young folk are given in america, with a view to letting them improve their acquaintance, they had got under way with much rapidity. the house being full, they had many opportunities for finding the isolation which exists in crowds, and took advantage of it. mr. palmer, however, with a strong sense of paternal duty, thought it well not to let the matter go too far without satisfying himself that he was justified in letting it go to all lengths. with this in his mind he went to his wife's rooms on sunday morning to have a quiet talk, as was his custom. 'pleased with your party?' he asked amiably. 'lewis, i'm just sick with satisfaction,' she said. 'long island, i tell you, is made, and newport will crumble into the sea. but what am i to do next year? why, i believe that if at this moment i built a house on sandy hook, i could make it fashionable.' 'that would be very convenient,' said he. 'we could flag the liners and save half a day. i'm glad you are satisfied. now, what do you get by it all?' 'same as what you get when you've made a million dollars,' said mrs. palmer with some perspicacity. 'you don't want them. you don't know you've got them. but you like getting them.' his bright gray eyes gleamed suddenly, and he looked at her approvingly. 'i guess that's true,' he said. 'i guess you've hit the nail on the head, as you do every time. we've got to get, you and i; and when we've got, we've got to get again. it's the getting we go for.' his eyes wandered round the room a moment, and he went to a cabinet of _bric-à-brac_ that stood between the windows. 'where did you get that tanagra figure from?' he asked. 'it's a forgery.' and he took it up and threw it into the grate, where it smashed to atoms. 'well, i suppose you know,' said mrs. palmer calmly. 'bilton sold it me.' lewis laughed. 'spoiled his market,' he remarked. 'that man's very clever, but he lacks--he lacks length of vision.' 'perhaps he didn't know it was a forgery,' said mrs. palmer charitably. 'that's worse. give him the credit of knowing.' mrs. palmer put down the paper she was reading. 'lewis, you didn't come here just to break my things,' she said. 'what is it?' 'lord keynes. what do you know of him?' he asked, with his usual directness. had mrs. palmer been in the company of other people, she would have executed her famous scream, because she was amused. but she never wasted it, and it would have been quite wasted on her husband. 'he's charming,' she said. 'he's in excellent style; he's in _the_ set in london. and he wants a wife with a competency. that's why i brought him here.' 'but what does he do?' asked her husband. 'does he just exist?' 'yes, i guess he exists. men do exist in england; here they don't. they get.' 'some exist here. ping-pong does.' 'and who's ping-pong?' she asked. 'why, armstrong. amelie thought of it. he is a ping-pong, you know.' this time mrs. palmer gave the scream, for she was so much amused as to forget the absence of an audience. 'well, i'm sure, if amelie isn't bright,' she said. 'but you're pretty far out, lewis, if you think that lord keynes is a ping-pong. if he was an american, and did nothing, he would be. but men do nothing in england without being.' 'england's a ping-pong, i think sometimes,' remarked lewis. 'she just plays about. however, we're not discussing that. now i see you mean business with lord keynes. you'll run it through on your own lines, i suppose. but remember '--he paused a moment--' i guess it's rather difficult for one to say it,' he said, 'but it's just this: when a girl marries a man, if she doesn't hit it off, the best thing she can do is to make believe she does. but i doubt if amelie can make believe worth a cent.' 'well, she just adores him,' said mrs. palmer. 'that's good as far as it goes.' 'it goes just about to the end of the world,' said she. mr. palmer considered this. 'the end of the world occurs sooner than you think sometimes,' he said. 'i'll get you a genuine tanagra, if you like,' he added, 'and i'll guy bilton about the other. i'll pretend he thought it was genuine. that'll make him tender.' though mrs. palmer had no objection to exaggeration in a good cause, she had not in the least been guilty of it when she said that amelie adored bertie keynes. most girls have daydreams of some kind, and amelie, with the vividness that characterized her, had conjured up before now with some completeness her own complement. unless a woman is celibate by nature (a thing happily rare), she is frequently conscious of the empty place in herself which it is her duty and her constant, though often unconscious, quest to find the tenant for. and amelie was not in the least of a celibate nature; her warm blood beat generously, and the love of her nature that should one day pour itself on one at present overflowed in runnels of tenderness for all living things. the sprouts of the springing daisies were dear to her--dogs, horses, even the wild riot of the revels, was worthy of her affectionate interest. but the rather unreasonable attention she bestowed on these numberless objects of affection was only the overflow from the cistern. one day it would be all given in full flood, its waters would bathe one who had chosen her, and whom her heart chose. this morning she was riding through the woods with bertie keynes, the charmingly sensible laws of american etiquette making it possible for her to ride with anyone she wished, alone and unattended. they had just pulled up from a gallop through the flowering wood paths, and the two horses, muscle-stretched and quiet, were willing to walk unfrettingly side by side. 'oh, it all smells good, it smells very good,' she said. 'and this morning somehow--i suppose it's after mamma's fête--i like the fresh, green out-of-doors more than ever. i think we live altogether too much indoors in america.' 'but the fêtes were entirely out of doors,' said bertie. 'yes; but the pearl-party was just the most indoor thing i ever saw,' said she. 'certainly it was out of doors, but all the time i wanted somebody to open the windows, let in a breath--a breath of----'and she paused for a word. 'i know what you mean,' he said. 'did you feel it too? i want to know?' 'in that case, i did.' he looked at her a moment. 'but all the time you were my breath of out-of-doors,' he said. amelie was not fool enough to take this as a compliment, or to simper acknowledgments. as he spoke he wondered how she would take it, hoped she would look at him, anyhow, then hoped she would not. 'ping-pong is indoors enough,' she said. 'do tell me what you think of him.' 'i don't think of him,' said bertie. 'if i sat down to think of him i should instantly begin, without meaning to, to think about something else.' 'do you loathe him?' she asked. 'good heavens, no! but--but there are people like husks. just husks.' she considered this. 'husky ping-pong,' she said, half to herself. 'poor husky ping-pong. do you grow them in england?' 'yes, heaps. they grow in london. they are always at every party, and they know everybody, and make themselves immensely agreeable. it is all they do. and you see them in the back seats of motor-cars.' she looked at him with some mischief in her eyes. 'and what do you do?' she asked. 'no more than they. anyone is at liberty to call one a ping-pong. only i'm not.' 'i know. i was wondering what the difference was according to your description.' 'there is none, i suppose. but don't confuse me with ping-pongs.' she laughed. 'lord keynes, you are just adorable,' she said. 'i'll race you to the end of the avenue.' 'adoring me all the time?' 'unless you win,' she said. 'then i will lose on purpose.' 'that will be mean. i never adore meanness. are you ready?' and her beautiful horse gathered his legs up under him and whirled her down the grassy ride. bertie got not so good a start, and rode the gauntlet of the flying turf scattered by his heels, till, a bend of the path favouring him, he drew nearly abreast, pursuing her through sunshine and the flecked shadows on the grass. he had seen her day after day in the revels, night after night at ball or concert, yet never had her beauty seemed to him so compelling as it did now, as, swaying the rein with dainty finger-tip, her body moving utterly in harmony with the grand swing of her horse's stride, she turned her smiling face to him, all ecstasy at the exhilaration of the gallop, all wide-eyed smile of consternation at the decreasing lead which she had got at the start. and all at once, for the first time, his blood was kindled; he had admired her form as one may admire a perfect piece of sculptured grace, he had admired her splendid vitality, her charming companionship, her intense _joie de vivre_. but now all the separate, isolated admirations were fused and glowed flamelike. suddenly she laughed aloud, as he had nearly caught her up. 'ride, ride!' she cried, in a sudden burst of intimate, upwelling joy that came from she knew not where. 'you will win.' apollo pursued daphne in the vale of tempe, and in the vales of long island bertie keynes rode hard after amelie. and she encouraged him to win, she even drew rein a shade--just a shade--though she had wanted to win so much. all the afternoon motor-cars, bicycles, carts, tandems, brakes, were arriving, for though it was a quiet sunday, mrs. palmer, it was well-known, liked to see a few friends about teatime, who usually stopped for dinner, and before evening it was as if the revels were extended a day longer. the weather was extremely hot, and in consequence dinner was served in the great marquee on the terrace. among others, mrs. emsworth had come with those of her company who were to act that night in the theatre. the _petit saleté_ to be produced had never been presented on any stage before, the lord-chamberlain of england, with a fatherly regard for the morals of the nation entrusted to him, having deemed that it was too _sale_; and, as a matter of fact, mrs. emsworth rather embraced this opportunity of playing it before a private audience, with a view to seeing whether her public in new york, with their strange mixture of cynical indifference to anything but money, and the even stranger survival of the puritan spirit, which crops up every now and then as some rare border plant will crop up among the weeds and grasses of a long overgrown garden, would be likely to swallow it. she herself was a little nervous of presenting it there. bilton, on the other hand, who might be supposed to know the taste of the patrons for whom he catered so successfully, thought it would be an immense success. 'after all, paris loved it,' he said, as he had a few words with her when they went up to dress for dinner. 'and what is bad enough for paris is good enough for new york. you may take my word for it that what paris swallows america will gobble.' 'you mean they are more--more emancipated here?' 'not at all, but that they are eager to accept anything that has been a success in london or paris. why, i produced "dram-drinking" here. dead failure. i took it to london, where it ran well, and brought it back here. tremendous success. we americans, i mean, are entirely devoid of artistic taste. but we give our decided approbation to what other people say is artistic, which, for your purpose and mine, is the same thing. left to ourselves, we like david harum. i produce "hamlet" here next week. the house is full for the next month. but alter the name and say it is by a new author, and it won't run a week. the papers, to begin with, would all damn it.' 'but the critics. do you mean they don't _know_ "hamlet"?' 'there are no critics, and they don't know anything. they are violent ignoramuses who write for unreadable papers.' 'then why do you ever consider them?' 'because they are not critics, and because in new york everyone reads the unreadable. this is my room--you are next door, i think.' 'i shan't come to dinner,' she said. 'i am rather tired. by the way, is that large, beautiful girl mrs. palmer's daughter?' 'probably. why?' 'will she be at the play to-night?' 'probably. why?' mrs. emsworth frowned. 'it is not fit,' she said. bilton raised his eyebrows. this was indeed a woman of 'infinite variety.' 'you cannot alter your play for fear she will be there,' he said. 'no; i suppose not. i say, what devils we are!' the play was an enormous success, and mrs. emsworth's personality seemed to lift it out of the regions of the equivocal. the part, that of a woman who represented the triumph of mind over morals, fitted her like a glove, and it was as impossible to be shocked as it is when a child uses a coarse or profane expression. her impropriety was no more improper than is the natural instinct of a bird or animal improper; by a supreme effort of nature rather than art she seemed to roll up like an undecipherable manuscript the whole moral code, and say, 'now, let's begin again.' her gaiety covered her sins; more than that it transformed them into something so sunlit that the shadows vanished. even as we laugh at fricka when she inveighs against siegmund and sieglinde, feeling that condemnation is impossible, because praise or blame is uncalled for and irrelevant, so the ethical question (indeed, there was no question) of whether the person whom mrs. emsworth represented behaved quite 'like a lady 'never occurred to anyone. her vitality dominated the situation. of all her audience, there was none so utterly surprised at the performance as bilton. he knew her fairly well, but he had never seen in her half so clearly the triumph of temperament. knowing her as he did, he knew it was not art; it was only an effort, unique and unsurpassable, to be herself. again and again he longed to be a play-wright; he could write her, he felt, could he write at all, a part that would be she. for never before had she so revealed herself a sunlit pagan. and as the play went on, his wonder increased. she was admirable. then mrs. massington, who sat next him, laughed at something he had not seen, and for the moment he was vexed to have been called down from the stage to a woman less vivid, for his sensualism was of a rather high order. late that night, after the supper that followed the entertainment, he went upstairs. in mon repos there was no barbaric quenching of electric light at puritanical hours, no stranding of belated guests in strange passages, and he walked up from the smoking-room with his hands in his pockets, unimpeded by any guttering bedroom candle. the evening had been a triumph for dorothy--in the mercantile way it had been as great a triumph for him, for the _cachet_ of success at mrs. palmer's would certainly float the play in new york. the _gutter snipe_, he reflected, would have at least a column of virulent abuse, since it had been performed at mon repos. so much the better; he would have a whole procession of sandwich men, london fashion, parading fifth avenue, every alternate one bearing the most infamous extracts from that paper. to use abuse as a means of advertisement was a new idea ... it interested him. certainly, dorothy had been marvellous. she was a witch ... no one knew all her incantations ... and he paused at his bedroom door. she had gone upstairs only five minutes before him. since the performance she had been queen bee to the whole party; he himself had not had a word with her. surely even puritanical long island would not be shocked if he just went to her even now for a minute, and congratulated her. besides, puritanical long island would never know. so he tapped softly and entered, after the manner of a man whose tap merely means 'i am coming.' the room was brilliantly lit. mrs. emsworth was standing by the bed. by her, having looked in for a go-to-bed chat, was sybil massington. chapter ix mrs. emsworth had a rehearsal early next morning at new york, and in consequence she had to leave by the stock exchange train at nine, while most of the inhabitants of mon repos were still reposing. she herself was down and out before anyone had appeared, for she had slept but badly, and had awoke, definitely and irrevocably, soon after six. sleeping, as her custom was, with blinds up and curtains undrawn, the glory of the morning quickly weaned her from her bed, and by soon after seven she was strolling about outside in the perfection of an early september hour. there had been a little thunder during the night, and betwixt waking and sleeping she had heard somewhat heavy rain sluicing on to the shrubberies and thirsty grass, and now, when she went out, the moisture was lying like unthreaded diamonds in the sun, and like a carpet of pearls in the shade. many gardeners were already at work, some on the grass and flower-beds, others bringing up fruit from the greenhouses, and all looked with wide-eyed yokel amazement at the famous actress as she walked up and down. one of them had brought his small child, a boy of about six years old, with him, and the little lad, with a bunch of michaelmas daisies in his cap, very gravely pushed at one handle of his father's wheelbarrow. now, children and mrs. emsworth were mutually irresistible, and the barrow was stopped, and the father stood by in a sort of proud, admiring sheepishness, while mrs. emsworth made herself fascinating. she had a story to tell about those particular flowers the child had in his hat. the fairies had made them during the night. one had brought the white silk out of which they were cut, another had brought oil-paints to colour them, a third had brought a watering-pot with a rose to sprinkle them. but the bad fairy had seen them, and had come on her broomstick, surrounded by an army of flying toads and spiders and slugs, to destroy the flowers. and a toad had just begun to eat the top of one of the flowers when the sun said, 'pop, i'm coming,' and before the bad fairy could get under shelter it had shone on her, so that she instantly curled up like a burnt feather, and died with a pain so awful that stomach-ache was nothing to it. this was so absorbing both to the narrator and the audience that neither had observed that someone else was listening, and as the boy broke out into childish laughter, crying, 'that was nice!' at the awful fate of the wicked fairy, mrs. emsworth looked behind her, half hearing a sudden rustle, and saw amelie standing there, also absorbed. she instantly sat down on the other handle of the barrow. 'yes, tommy, that was nice,' she echoed. 'and do you think the lady will tell us another story? ask her.' the lady was so kind as to oblige them again. this time it was about a real live person, who was always very good in the morning, and sat down and did her work as she should, with the good fairy sitting beside her. but later on the good fairy would sometimes go to sleep, and as soon as she was asleep all the bad fairies who had not curled up like burnt feathers came in. and one of them made her eat peas with her knife, and another made her spill her bread-and-milk down her new dress, and another made her lose her temper, and another made her make mud pies in the middle of her nice room, so that it had to be swept again. and she was very unhappy about this, and used to put pins in the good fairy's seat to prevent her going to sleep, and give her strong coffee to drink for the same purpose. but it was all no good, until one day she noticed that as long as a child was with her the good fairy kept awake. so the poor lady set to work again, and tried to see a child every day, because even if she talked to a child for a little in the morning, and especially if it gave her a kiss, the good fairy was much less sleepy. tommy's eyes grew wide. 'oh, i do love you!' he said, and hoisted himself with his dirty boots into her lap. then, smitten with a child's sudden shyness, he clambered down again, and the wheelbarrow went on its way. the two others strolled on in silence for a moment over the grass, amelie with a strange lump in her throat. then she put her arm round mrs. emsworth's waist. 'good-morning,' she said quietly, and they kissed. 'i think i love you too,' she said. 'i came out to tell you that.' mrs. emsworth kissed her again. 'that is nice too,' she said. 'but what makes you?' 'i don't know. i think it was seeing you in that horrid play last night. you were like a sunbeam in--in a cesspool. but why do that sort of thing?' mrs. emsworth shrugged her shoulders. 'because people are beasts, my dear,' she said--'because they like that sort of thing. and one has to live.' amelie thought a moment, with her face growing grave. 'oh, i am sorry, i am sorry,' she said. a sudden impatience and ungovernable irritation filled dorothy. she felt as if she was being hauled back to her ordinary life, when she was so happy in the sweetness of the early morning hour. why did this stupid, gawky girl come and speak to her like this? but with an effort at self-control stronger than she usually bothered herself to make, she mastered it. 'oh, never mind, never mind,' she said. 'walk with me a little further, and let me look at you because you are beautiful, and the trees because they are beautiful, and the grass and the sky. what a heavenly moment! do not let us waste it. look, the lawns are empty, where yesterday they were full with all sorts of silly and wicked people. is that an insult to your mother's guests? i think it is. anyhow, i was one of the silly, wicked people. but now i am not silly or wicked; i am very good, and very innocent, and i want to take everything into my arms and stroke it. my god! what a beautiful world! i am so glad i did not die in the night.' amelie laughed. this mood found in her a ready response. 'yes, yes,' she cried; 'go on. i know what you mean. you want to be rid of all else, to be just a consciousness in the world. i have felt that. what does it say?' dorothy shook her head. 'it never says the same thing for five minutes,' she said. 'just now you and i feel that. if we sat here for a quarter of an hour we should begin to talk _chiffon._ if we sat here longer we might talk scandal. only i think these moments are given us as a sort of refreshment. god washes our faces every now and then, and we proceed to soil them instantly.' she turned to her companion eagerly. 'don't soil yours,' she said. 'don't let others soil it. it grows on you; it is like using rouge,' and she broke off suddenly. there was silence a moment, then amelie said: 'look, here is tommy coming back from the house.' mrs. emsworth rose. 'let us go in,' she said. 'it is time for me to have breakfast, as i am going by the early train. but remember that i was good for ten minutes--if '--and her voice quavered--' if people, as they are sure to do, tell you things.' they passed tommy, who paused as they got near. mrs. emsworth seemed not to notice him. then she looked back. 'dear little chap,' she said, and, retracing her steps, kissed him again. it must be allowed that by the time they got to the station there was nothing of the early-morning mrs. emsworth left about her. on the platform bilton approached her with rather an anxious face. 'i particularly want to speak to you, dorothy,' he said in a low voice. 'you can help me.' she looked at him with extremely vivid virulence. 'oh, go away, you beast!' she said. 'i can help you, you say. no doubt i can. but i won't. go away!' bilton had the sense to see that he needed help, for there had been a very awkward moment when he went into mrs. emsworth's room the night before. he himself was very good at acting quickly in any emergency he had foreseen, but this one was utterly unforeseen, and had found him helplessly unprepared. had he had even a moment's preparation, he felt sure that he could have said something which would anyhow have been palliative; but since the thing was done, he did not trouble his head about what the palliative would have been. for he had come in--his knock unheard--and found the two ladies together. upon which dorothy laughed, mrs. massington turned pink, and he retreated. there was the situation. and the most unpromising feature of it was that dorothy had laughed. with all his quickness he could see no way out. it was clearly impossible for him to open the subject again to mrs. massington; it was equally obvious that she would put a construction on his presence. the only person who could conceivably help him was dorothy, and now she had called him a beast. but, apparently, during the journey to new york she relented, for as they boarded the mangy-looking ferry-boat that conveyed them across the river, she threw a word to him over her shoulder. 'i shall be in at lunch,' she said. 'you can come if you like.' he did not like that either, though it was better than nothing, for he felt that she had in a sense the whip-hand of him, and knew it. and bilton was not accustomed to let anybody have the whip-hand of him. mrs. emsworth always took her rehearsals herself; she had a stage-manager, it is true, who sat meekly in the wings, and whom she contradicted from time to time, his office being to be contradicted, and to write down stage directions which she gave him. occasionally bilton looked in for an hour or two; him she contradicted also at the time, but usually incorporated his suggestions afterwards. her author, if it was a new play, was also in attendance in the stalls; his office was to cut lines out or put lines in. though, perhaps, she could not act, she certainly had a strong sense of drama; that was why she had laughed at bilton's entrance the night before, for the situation struck her as admirably constructed. she had seen, with a woman's sixth sense, as correctly and minutely as in a photograph on what footing he and mrs. massington were, and though she was not in the slightest degree in love with the man--or, indeed, ever had been--yet she looked on him as her possession, and while she did not want him, she distinctly did not wish him to change hands. jealousy of the ordinary green variety had something to do with it. a shrewd eye to business, the knowledge of how much better her career went if the great impresario was her devoted admirer, had about as much. only, if her devoted admirer was to become the confirmed, settled, and sealed-up admirer of someone else, she did not propose to be the candle at which the sealing was done. to be cat's-paw to an act of treason against herself was a feat of altruism of which she was hopelessly incapable. then, finally, in this jumble of feelings which had resulted in her calling bilton a beast, there was something neither sordid nor selfish--namely, the determination, distinct and honest, that mrs. massington, a woman whom she both liked and respected, should not, at any rate by any auxiliary help of hers, be deceived as to what bilton really was. she herself, no doubt, with the aid of liquid eyes and a mouth so beautiful that it looked as if it must be made for the utterance of perfect verity, could persuade mrs. massington that she and bilton had never been in intimate relations, and assure her, even to conviction, that his slightly informal visit last night was only--as was indeed true--a visit for the utterance of a few words of congratulation on her success. but she did not intend--from motives good, bad, and indifferent, all mixed--to do this for him. only, into the composition of this intention the good and honest and fine motive entered. it was not wonderful that this _pot-au-feu_ of feeling, amounting to positive agitation, did not tend towards the comfort of her company at the rehearsal, nor indeed, on the part of the manageress, toward the calm attitude of the thoughtful critic. in consequence, before the rehearsal was an hour old--it was the first 'without books' rehearsal --the second leading lady was next door to tears, the leading gentleman in sulks, the author in despair, and mrs. emsworth in a mood of dangerous suavity that made the aspiring actors heart-sick. 'miss dayrell,' she was saying, 'would you mind not turning your back completely on the audience when you speak those lines. mr. yates'--this was the leading gentleman--' i am _so_ sorry to interrupt your conversation, but my throat is rather sore this morning, and i cannot hear myself speak if you talk so loud to your friends. yes; i think, as you are not on the stage just now, it would be better if you left it. yes, miss dayrell, you see these are perhaps the most important lines in the play which you have to speak, and the audience will have a better chance of understanding it if you let them hear what mr. farquar has given you to say. mr. farquar, i am afraid the second act is about twice as long as it ought to be. i have cut some of it--at least, with your approval, i propose to cut some of it.' mr. farquar sighed heavily in the stalls. he had spent the greater part of the last three nights in writing more of the second act, because it was not long enough. 'thank you,' continued mrs. emsworth, interpreting the sigh as silence. 'you will see my alterations when we get to them. would you kindly begin, miss dayrell, at "if i had a pitch-fork."' suddenly her voice changed to a wheedling tenderness. 'and if my own teddy roosevelt hasn't come down of his own delicious accord to see his aunt in her pretty theatre! teddy, the world is very evil, and my mother bids me bind my hair. i beg your pardon, ladies and gentlemen, but i had to say a word to popsie tootsicums. now, dear miss dayrell, let's begin again. you enter. excellent. you turn. yes, that's exactly what i want. now.' a murmur of relief went round, and the faded actors and actresses raised their drooped heads as when a shower has passed over a drought-dried garden. and teddy r., the angel in disguise, sat sparsely down in the middle of the stage, and smiled on the spectacle of his beneficent work. but because the happy appearance of teddy roosevelt had made _le beau temps_ for the members of mrs. emsworth's company, it did not at all follow that bilton, when he came to lunch, would find the same sunshine awaiting him, even as there is no guarantee that, because at twelve o'clock on an april day pellucid tranquillity flooded the earth, there will not be a smart hail-storm an hour afterwards. on the contrary, it was safe to bet that, whatever mood mrs. emsworth was in, she would be in a different one before long. the spring-day temperament of hers was, in fact, the only thing to be reckoned on. consequently, since bilton had not witnessed the varied phases exhibited at the theatre, he hoped, somehow sanguinely, that she would not be in a temper that so roundly labelled him 'beast' at port washington station. she seemed to have forgotten he was coming to lunch--as a matter of fact, she had, and welcomed him charmingly. 'dear man,' she said, 'how nice of you to look in. i'm nearly dead with fatigue; let's have lunch at once. harold, i've acted every part in 'telegrams' through from beginning to end this morning. those people are so hard-working, but they are so stupid. in fact, i know every part but my own. that i have promised them to be word perfect in by five o'clock this afternoon.' 'you don't rehearse again this afternoon?' asked he. 'oh yes, i do. three hours more this afternoon, then just time for dinner, then theatre again till half-past eleven, then supper at the waldorf. to-morrow, rehearsal all morning, matinee, evening performance, every interval filled up with reporters and milliners and lime-light people. oh, well, thank god, we shall all soon be dead. time to rest then, and time to lunch now.' 'don't overdo it, dolly,' said he, as they sat down. 'overdo it?' my dear boy, it is rather late in the day to recommend me not to overdo it. besides, we women, and in special this woman, are so much stronger than men. my company follow me through hours of rehearsal, faint yet pursuing. they drop asleep, and i wake them with a gentle touch on their shoulders, and they say, "is it morning yet?" and i say, "kindly wake up for ten minutes, and go through this scene, dear, and then you shall go to sleep again." then, at the end, when i say, "that is all for to-night, ladies and gentlemen," they all hurry away in desperate fear lest i should ask them to supper. "_il faut lutter pour l'art_," as daudet says. i'm so glad i'm not a prig, harold, who thinks about the exigencies of the artistic temperament. i'm not an artist at all. people come to see me act because i'm (_a_) rather good-looking, (_b_) in rollicking good spirits. what delicious cantaloupe! i like my food.' 'all the same, i wish you would take more care of yourself,' said he, fostering her present temper with a light and, he hoped, skilful hand. 'i'm sure you do too much, and some day you will break down. you are spending more than your income of nervous energy, you are living on the capital.' 'just what i mean to do. like mr. carnegie, i think it would be a disgrace to die with an ounce of nervous force left in one. what use is it when one is dead? i am living on the capital; i intend to spend it all. i shall die sooner, no doubt--but, oh, harold, what an awful old person i should be at sixty if i proposed, which i do not, to live as long. look at the old women who have spent their youth as i have done. rouge on their raddled cheeks, clinging to life, mortally afraid of dying, trying to get a few more successes, with one bleary eye anxiously fixed on some back door into heaven, the other roaming round to see if they can't have another little flirtation before they die. no; let me die at the height of my success. i don't want to stumble down-hill into my grave. i want to find it on the mountain-top. and i shall lie down in it quite content, for i have had a good time, and ask no further questions. and, harold, plant a great crimson rambler, and a vine like omar, and a few daffodils, and some michaelmas daisies, on my grave, so that i shall flower all the year round. and come, if you like, once a year to it, and think over any occasion when i have pleased or amused you, and say to yourself if you can, "she was rather a good sort." then go away to the woman who happens at the time to--oh, i forgot. we've got to have a talk. and i've been doing all the talking. have you finished lunch? come into the next room.' the april day was behaving quite characteristically. it had got cold and cloudy, and a bitter wind blew suddenly. mentally he shivered, and followed her. she had thrown herself down on the big louis xv. couch. teddy roosevelt was having his dinner. there was no mitigation within the horizon. 'about sybil massington,' she said, and shut her mouth again as if it worked on a steel spring. bilton lit his cigar, and took his time, wishing to appear not nervous. 'ah, yes,' he said. 'i remember.' 'that line is no good,' remarked dorothy critically. 'you must get more sincerity into it, or drop it.' he dropped it, and sat down. 'i've been wanting to tell you for some time, dorothy,' he said, 'that i hope to marry mrs. massington. i should have done so before, only it's an awkward thing to say.' 'there is always a slight crudeness in that situation,' said she. 'men always try to explain away what can't be explained at all. so cut it short. i know you must say a few words, but let them be few.' 'well, it's just this,', said he: 'we've been great friends, we've got along excellently; you have always been charming to me, and i hope i haven't treated you badly.' 'oh no, first-class time,' said she, the _gamin_ coming to the surface. 'well, now i want to marry,' he said, 'and i come to you for your help. if you had been in my position, i would have helped you.' 'thanks. well?' 'you know it was a devilish awkward moment last night. and you made it worse. you laughed. you shouldn't have done that.' dorothy's face relaxed. 'i couldn't help it,' she said. 'dramatically, it was perfect, and so funny. harold, if you could have seen your own face of blank amazement, i really believe you would have laughed too.' he frowned. 'a pal ought to help a man out,' he said. 'i'm sure you went out pretty quick,' she interpolated. 'oh, don't peashoot me,' he said. 'now, a word from you will help me. i can't offer any explanation to mrs. massington, simply because, if i tried, she would be convinced there is something to explain. you can. a half word from you will do it. represent me as your business manager--very business--with an urgent question to ask, and in my stupid, unconventional american way, it not occurring to me that there was any impropriety----' 'and my laugh? how shall i explain that?' 'because it did occur to you what construction mrs. massington would put on it. because my face of horror when i saw what i had done was so funny. you said so yourself.' dorothy paused. 'in other words,' said she slowly, 'i am to tell mrs. massington, either directly or by implication, that you and i are you and i, not we--that--just that.' 'quite so,' he said, 'and very neatly put.' she sat up. 'i refuse,' she said. 'why? for what possible reason?' 'for a reason you couldn't appreciate.' 'let me try.' 'i can't explain it even. but the outline is this: i respect and like sybil massington, therefore i will not assist you to marry her. it is not my business to open her eyes--you may marry her if you can--but neither is it my business to close them. even if you wished it, i would not marry you myself, because i don't think you would be a--well, a satisfactory husband. so i will not help you.' 'bilton's face was clearly given him to conceal his thoughts. on this occasion it expressed nothing whatever, though he thought a good deal. 'you want to stand in my light, then,' he said. 'not at all, only i won't hold the candle for you.' 'you refuse to tell the truth to mrs. massington; you refuse to tell her what you know--namely, that i came to your room last night merely to congratulate you on your success?' 'i refuse to tell her a fag-end of the truth like that--a truth that is designed to deceive.' his eye wandered round the room before he replied, and in its course fell on the grate. to-day also there was a torn letter lying in it. a slight tinge of colour came into his face. 'i can't understand you,' he said. 'as far as i know, you on the whole wish me well; you have assured me that you would not marry me yourself. what do you want, then? do you want to be paid for doing it? if you are not unreasonable in your demands, i will meet them.' she got up, her eyes blazing. 'that is enough,' she said. 'not another word, harold, or i assure you i will throw the heaviest and hardest thing i can lift at you. i mean it.' a rather ugly light came into his eyes--a stale, unwholesome sort of glow. 'pray don't,' he said; 'we will leave the subject. i think you are behaving most ungenerously--that is all. i should like a few words with you about your dresses in "telegrams." i will wait till you are ready to discuss them with me. take a cigarette.' she looked at him a moment in silence. in spite of herself, she could not help feeling the infernal mastery he had over her. as always, the more violent she became the more he seemed steeped in a calm compound of indifference and almost boredom. and since it is obviously more exhausting to continue violent than to continue calm, it followed that she had to compose herself, thus changing first, while he merely remained unmoved. it had happened often before, and it happened now. 'what is it you want me to say to mrs. massington?' she asked at length. 'pray do not let us discuss it. you might throw something at me,' said he, smiling inwardly. 'don't you see my point?' she asked. 'besides, a word from me would do no good. she saw the terms we were on. it was obvious, blatant.' 'then no harm would be done by your saying a word. she would not be deceived.' 'no; but she would think i tried to deceive her.' 'would you mind that?' he asked. 'very much. i like her.' bilton knew well the value of the waiting game in an argument, the futility of trying to persuade a woman to do something, especially if she shows the least sign of persuading herself. so he said nothing whatever, since her re-opening the subject pointed to an already existing indecision. but her final answer, when it came, was not in the least what he expected. 'and i refuse finally to help you,' she said. 'if you wish, i will discuss the dresses.' bilton would never have made himself so successful a career as he had had he not possessed to a very high degree the power of concentrating his mind on one thing, to the complete exclusion of other preoccupations, and for the next half-hour no cloud of what had happened crossed in his mind the very clear sky of the new play's prospects. he was able to give his whole and complete attention to it, until between them they had settled what he desired to settle. then, since, like all other days, it was a busy day with him, he rose. 'good-bye, dorothy,' he said, 'and don't overdo it.' once again she wavered. 'and do you forgive me?' she asked. 'not in the least. but i don't imagine you care.' 'but i do care.' he drew on his gloves with great precision. 'i beg your pardon; if you really cared you would do as i ask,' he said. 'good-bye. i shall be at the theatre this evening.' she let him go without further words, and, in spite of the heat, he walked briskly down fifth avenue. he was not a forgiving man, and though he would not put himself out to revenge himself on anyone, since he had more lucrative ways of employing his time and energies, he was perfectly ready, even anxious, to do her an ill-turn if he had the opportunity. and certainly it seemed to him that there was a handle ready to his grasping when he remembered the torn note from bertie keynes which he had picked up in the grate. how exactly to use it he did not at present see, but it seemed to him an asset. chapter x one afternoon late in october ginger was sitting cross-legged on the hearthrug of judy's drawing-room. outside a remarkably fine london fog had sat down on the town during the morning, and, like the frog footman in 'alice in wonderland,' proposed to sit there till to-morrow, if not for days and days. but a large fire was burning in the grate, for judy detested unfired rooms, and the electric light was burning. the windows were not shuttered nor the blinds drawn, because ginger, a sybarite in sensations, said it made him so much more comfortable to see how disgusting it was outside. so the jaundiced gloom peered in through the windows, and by contrast gave an added animation to ginger's conversation. he had usually a good deal to say, whether events of interest had occurred lately or not. but just now events of some importance to him and judy had been occurring with bewildering rapidity, and in consequence conversation showed even less signs than usual of flagging. 'in fact, the world is like a morning paper, so crammed with news that one can't read any one paragraph without another catching one's eye. and your new paragraph, judy, is most exciting. what has happened, do you suppose?' 'nothing--probably nothing; sybil is just tired of it all. she is like that. she goes on enjoying things enormously till a moment comes; at that moment she finds them instantly and immediately intolerable. i am only surprised that it didn't occur sooner.' 'well, she had enough of new york pretty soon,' said ginger. 'she only stopped down at long island for ten days. then she had a month's travelling; she returns to new york on a monday, and leaves for england forty-eight hours afterwards. you know, she enjoyed it enormously at first. i think something did happen.' judy shook her head. 'no; on her return she found she couldn't endure it for a single moment longer. and i'm sure i don't wonder. the description of the pearl-fishing party made me sick. besides, what could have happened?' ginger handed his cup for some more tea. 'if you want me to guess, i will,' he said; 'but i don't think you'll like it.' 'pray guess,' said she. 'well, i guess that bilton--her own bilton--suddenly behaved like--like bilton.' 'why?' said judy. 'because she wrote me a letter full of bilton one week, since when his name has not occurred.' judy nodded. 'the same applies to mrs. emsworth,' she said. 'do you think----?' 'yes,' said ginger. 'for a fool, you are rather sharp,' said judy. 'i wonder if it is so.' 'i don't; i know it,' said ginger. 'by the way, i saw poor charlie yesterday.' 'were you down at sheringham?' 'no; he has left sheringham. apparently you have to get up when a bell rings, and eat all that is given you, and live out of doors till another bell rings. charlie said he would sooner die like a gentleman than live like a strasburg goose. so he left. he is down at brighton in his mother's house, living out of doors.' judy stirred her tea thoughtfully. 'has he told sybil yet?' she asked. 'you remember he would not let us tell her; he said he wished to tell her himself.' 'i don't know; i know he meant to.' 'humanly speaking, what chance has he got?' she asked. 'a good one, if he will be sensible; he probably won't. but one person could make him sensible.' judy never asked unnecessary questions, and let this pass in silence. 'and have you heard from the millionaire?' she asked. 'bertie? yes. bertie seems uncommonly happy. so should i be if i was going to marry the richest girl in the five continents. also i think he's in love with her.' 'isn't gallio delighted?' 'yes; for the first time in his life, he really takes an interest in bertie. he says a man's efficiency is measured by his success. success means income, you know. gallio speaks of himself as the most inefficient man of his own acquaintance. but the pictures have to be sold, all the same. bertie's news came a little too late.' 'pictures?' asked judy. 'hadn't you heard. you see, gallio, about a month ago, suddenly became aware that he had a genius for speculating on the stock exchange. he chose american rails to exercise his genius on. but the american rails went flat, and knocked him flat. so all the dutch pictures are up at christie's next week. he doesn't care. as soon as he gets the money for them, he is going to speculate again. he has written to bertie in case he can get any sort of special information from palmer. he has stockbrokers to dinner, and lunches with bulls and bears.' judy was silent a moment. 'what about mrs. emsworth?' she asked suddenly. ginger had got hold of a large persian cat, and was stroking it. the animal was in the full ecstasy of sensuous pleasure, with eyes shut and neck strained to his hand. but, as judy asked this, he paused a moment, and stroked it the wrong way. it hit at him with its paw, and fled in violent indignation. 'well, what about mrs. emsworth?' he repeated. 'ginger, don't be ridiculous. it is loyal of you to pretend not to know what i mean, but still ridiculous. how has bertie managed to do this under her very guns?' 'i suppose he silenced them first,' said ginger cautiously. 'or perhaps she has no guns.' 'why, then, two years ago, did we all talk about nothing else but her and bertie?' 'because we are gossips,' said he. 'do you mean that?' ginger examined his injured hand. 'yes, i mean that,' he said. 'bertie told me all that happened. he fell desperately in love with her; he wrote her a very foolish letter, which proposed, oh, all sorts of things--marriage among them. immediately afterwards she--well, we all began talking about her and bilton.' 'what happened to the letter?' asked judy. 'don't know,' said he. judy was silent a little. 'anyhow, it all hangs together with your idea about sybil and bilton,' she said at length. 'i wondered if you were going to see that,' said ginger rather loftily. judy went to the window and looked out. 'i like that fog,' she said, 'because it renders all traffic and business of all sorts out of the question. i like the feeling that london, anyhow, has to pause, and just twiddle its thumbs until god makes the wind blow.' 'after all, a fog comes from smoke, and it was man who lit the fires,' remarked ginger parenthetically. 'you needn't remind one of that,' said she. 'now, sybil told me there were no fogs in new york. that is awful. her letters were awful. the whole of life was a ceaseless grind; if you stopped for a moment, you were left behind. how hopelessly materialistic! why, the only people who do any good in the world--apart from making pullman cars and telephones, that is to say--are exactly those who do stop--who sit down and think. all the same, it is possible to stop too much. you are always stopping. ginger, why don't you ever do something?' 'because it is so vastly more amusing to observe other people doing things,' said he. 'as a rule, they do them so badly. besides, sybil seems to me an awful warning. she deliberately went to seek the strenuous life. well, something has happened; the strenuous life has been one too many for her. oh, by the way, i have more news for you -the most important of all, nearly. you have been talking so much that i couldn't get a word in.' 'slander,' said judy. 'get it in now.' 'gallio, as you know, has been trying to sell molesworth. well, advances have been made to him through an agent about it. he wants to know the name of the purchaser, but he can't find out.' 'what does gallio care as long as the price is a good one?' 'you can't tell about gallio; he has some charming prejudices. besides--i don't understand the ins and outs of it--bertie's consent has to be obtained. but he is offered two hundred thousand for a barrack he never lives in, and some acres of land which nobody will farm. he has telegraphed to bertie about it to-day.' 'well, i suppose it's no use being old-fashioned,' said judy; 'but i think it's horrible to sell what has been yours so long. probably the buyer is some awful south african jew.' 'very likely. but it's nothing new. money has always possessed its own buying power--it always will. only there's such a devil of a lot of it now in certain hands that a poor man can't keep anything of his own. and the hands that own it are not english. but they want england. anyhow, as you say, it is no use being old-fashioned; but it is an immense luxury. you are luxurious, judy.' 'what do you mean?' 'well, the greatest luxury of your life was refusing to ask mrs. palmer to your house. how you could afford it i don't know.' 'it was delicious,' said judy with great appreciation. 'sybil was so sensible about it. she took just your view; she said she couldn't afford it herself, but that i was my own mistress. i wonder--i really wonder--why i find that class of person so intolerable.' 'because you are old-fashioned; because you do not believe what is undoubtedly true--that wealth will get you anything----' 'anything material it certainly will get you.' 'quite so. and this is a materialistic age. i must go, as i'm dining out. mind you let me know anything fresh in all these events that concern us.' ginger went out into the thick, dim-coloured evening with a sense of quickened interest in things. his only passion in life was the observation of other people, but for the last month or two he had found very little to observe. apart from his work as a clerk in the foreign office, which could have been done quite as well in half the time by an ordinary bank clerk at a quarter of his salary, his life was valueless from an economical point of view, while as far as his work went (from the same point of view) he was positively fraudulent. thus, judged by the relentless standards of america, where work is paid for strictly by the demand which exists for it, and that demand is tested simply and solely by the criterion of whether it adds directly or indirectly to the wealth of the country, ginger's services would have been dispensed with. for he was--though the wedge was being pulled out, not pushed in--the thin end of that wedge which in the days of george iii. had provided so amply for the younger sons, nephews, and connections of the nobility. but the leisured ease in which those fortunate people could live in those days was rapidly passing away, and ginger, from an economical point of view, was a very small specimen of an interesting survival. for, provided that a thing is done equally well in a cheap way as in an expensive way, it is inexcusable in the public service not to have it done as cheaply as possible. whether the complete application of this principle will be found wholly successful in its working will be for succeeding generations to determine. but even to-day we have, so to speak, a working model of it in america. the money, once earned, of course becomes the entire property of the individual, and it is perfectly right that beggars should starve for a crust, while on the foreshore of mon repos the glutted vulgarocracy gabble and search for pearls. so the interesting survival made his groping way westwards, in order to dress for dinner. the fog was extremely dense, and the light from the street-lamps was not sufficient to pierce the thickness that lay between them, so that a man following the curb of the pavement had passed out of range of one before he came within range of the next. dim shadows of people suddenly loomed large and close, and as suddenly vanished into the fog. in the roadway omnibuses and cabs proceeded at a foot-pace, some drivers even leading their horses; here a hansom had gone utterly astray, and was at a standstill on the pavement, being backed slowly off into the road. through the dense air sound also came muffled and subaqueously; it was like a city in a dream. at the corner of bond street a man, walking faster than is usual in a fog, ran into ginger just below a gas-lamp, and apologized in a voice that struck him as familiar. the next moment he saw who it was. 'pray don't mention it,' he said. 'i thought you were in america, mr. bilton.' bilton peered at him a moment, and recognised him also. 'really, lord henry, if it was necessary for me to run into someone, i should have chosen you. at the present moment i may be in australia for all i know. is this london, and if so, what part?' 'corner of bond street,' said ginger. 'which way are you going?' 'south audley street,' said the other; 'i'm going to see your father, in fact, about the sale of molesworth.' 'are you going to buy it?' asked ginger. 'no; but i have been asked to communicate direct with him about it. the intending purchaser wants me to see about doing it up.' 'i am going that way too,' said ginger; 'let us go together. walking is the only way. you know, we don't know who the intending purchaser is.' 'that so?' asked bilton. 'well, there's no reason any longer for secrecy; it's lewis s. palmer.' 'lewis palmer?' asked ginger. 'yes; pity your father didn't ask an extra ten thousand.' 'he would have, if he had known who the purchaser was,' said ginger candidly. 'do you know if mr. palmer means to live there?' he asked. 'no more than he means to live on the new liverpool and southampton line.' 'ah! he hasn't got that through yet,' said ginger, with a sudden feeling of satisfaction that there had been considerable difficulties in getting the bill through the house last session. there had really been no reason why it should not have been passed, except that the commons objected to it merely because the line was practically to belong to a man who was not english. bilton laughed a short, rather shoulder-shrugging laugh. 'london is the last place to know what happens in london,' he said. 'the bill was passed this afternoon. lewis s. palmer owns that line as much as i own my walking-stick. he could sit down on the up-track and mrs. palmer on the down-track, and stop all traffic if he chose. you don't seem to like it.' ginger rather resented this, chiefly because it was true. 'why should i not like it?' he said. 'can't say, i'm sure,' said bilton. 'i guess your country ought to be very grateful. palmer will show you how to run a line properly. he won't give you engines which are so pretty that they ought to be hung on the wall, and he won't give you cars covered with gilt and mirrors. but he'll run you trains quicker than you ever had them run yet; he'll give you express freight rates that will be as cheap as transport by sea, and he'll pull the two ports together like stringing beads, instead of letting them roll about unconnected. of course, he'll get his bit out of it, but all the benefit of rapid transport and cheap fares will be yours. i guess your house of commons was annoyed they didn't think of it themselves.' they had got to hyde park corner, and the fog had suddenly grown less dense and the darkness was clarified. across the open square they could see the dark mass of the arch at the top of constitution hill, and farther on the dim shapes of the houses in grosvenor place. hansoms no longer passed as if going to a funeral, but jingled merrily by to the cheerful beat of the horses' hoofs on the road. all the traffic was resuscitated; buses swayed and nodded; silent-footed electric broughams made known their advent by their clear metallic bells, and the two turned more briskly up hamilton place. 'and what has brought you to england so suddenly?' asked ginger. 'i thought you intended to stop in america throughout mrs. emsworth's tour.' 'circumstances altered my plan,' said bilton. 'i had several pieces of business here; for instance, lewis s. palmer wished me to conduct the negotiations of molesworth, as his agent seemed to be a sort of fool-man, and tell him what must be done to make it liveable in.' 'it is going to be lived in?' said ginger, quite unable to stifle the curiosity he felt. 'oh, certainly it is going to be lived in. then i wanted to secure--i have secured--the lease of the coronation theatre for next summer.' 'i thought mrs. emsworth had taken it,' said ginger. 'no; she meant to, but she did not complete her contract before leaving for america. in fact, she let an excellent chance slip.' 'you have cut her out?' 'certainly. then there was another thing. now, do you know, lord henry, whether mrs. massington has arrived in london yet? she sailed the day before i did, but we made a very fast voyage. she was in the _oceanic_.' 'she arrives this evening,' said ginger. 'and goes to her sister's, to miss farady's?' asked bilton. 'yes. here we are. won't you come in with me? i will see if my father is at home.' gallio was in, and very much at bilton's service. personally, he detested the man, but he liked his way of doing business, and he particularly liked the business he had come to do. bertie's consent had been received by cable that afternoon, and a short half-hour was sufficient to draw up the extremely simple deed by virtue of which molesworth, the house and park, and all that was within, house and park passed into the possession of lewis s. palmer on payment of the sum of two hundred thousand pounds. 'and i'll cable to lewis right along,' said bilton at the conclusion, 'and you'll find the sum standing to your credit to-morrow morning. by the way, lewis expressly told me to ask you whether you had any wishes of any sort with regard to molesworth--any small thing you wanted out of it, or anything you wanted kept exactly as it is.' gallio considered a moment. 'ah, there's the visitors' book,' he said; 'i should rather like to have that. i don't think it could be of any value to mrs. palmer, as it only contains the names of friends of mine who have stayed there.' 'distinguished names?' asked bilton. 'i suppose you might call some of them distinguished.' 'i guess mrs. palmer might like to keep it on,' said bilton. 'but i'll ask. anything else?' 'i should rather like the oak avenue left as it is,' said gallio. 'it was planted in the reign of henry viii., and several what you would call distinguished people--james i. and george i. among them--planted trees there.' 'mrs. palmer will have a gold fence put round it,' said bilton, with a touch of sarcasm. 'that will add very greatly to the beauty of the sylvan scene,' gallio permitted himself to remark. 'in fact, if i ever have the pleasure of seeing molesworth again, i shall expect to find it improved out of all recognition.' 'i expect mrs. palmer will smarten it up a bit,' said bilton, quite unmoved. that excellent man of business went down to molesworth next day in order to inspect it generally, with a view to estimating what would have to be spent on it to make it habitable. he had sufficient taste to see the extraordinary dignity of the plain elizabethan house; and though he felt that mrs. palmer would probably have called it a mouldy old ruin, he did not propose, even though he got a percentage on the sale and the costs of renovation, to recommend any scheme of gilding and mirrors. the tapestries were admirable, the sheraton and chippendale furniture was excellently suited to the thoroughly english character of the place, and the gardens wanted nothing but gardeners. bilton's extremely quiet and businesslike mind had its perceptive side, and though he did not care for, yet he appreciated, the leisurely solidity, the leisurely beauty of the place, so characteristic of england, so innate with the genius of the anglo-saxon. the red, lichen-toned house had grown there as surely as its stately oaks and lithe beeches had grown there out of the english soil--indigenous, not bought and planted. cedar-trees with broad fans of leaves, and starred by the ripe cones, made a spacious shade on the lawn, and whispered gently to the stirring of the warm autumn wind, as they bathed themselves in the mellow floods of october sunshine. below the lawn ran a dimpling trout-stream, and within the precincts of the park stood the small gothic church, grown gray in its patient, unremitting service, gathering slowly round it the sons of the soil. attached to one aisle was the chapel of the family, and marble effigies of scartons knelt side by side, or, reclining on their tombs, raised dumb hands of prayer. one had hung up his armour by him; by the feet of another his hunting dogs lay stretched in sleep. one, but a beardless lad, the second of the race, had been killed in the hunting-field; his wife, so ran the inscription, was delivered of a child the same day, and died within twenty-four hours of her lord. and over all was the air of distinction, of race, of culture that could not be bought, though lewis s. palmer, by right of purchase, was entitled to it all. bilton felt this, but dismissed it as an unprofitable emotion, and made a note on his shirt-cuff to inquire whether the right of presentation to the living belonged to the family. sybil massington, in the meantime, had arrived in london, and while bilton was engaged in appraising the molesworth estate, was herself in the confessional of the wisest spinster in london. all her life she had been accustomed to knowing what she wanted, and, knowing, to getting it. but now, for the first time in matters of importance, she did not know what she wanted, and was afraid of not getting anything at all. things in america, in fact, had gone quite stupendously awry; she was upset, angry at herself and others, and, what to her was perhaps most aggravating of all, uncertain of herself. to one usually so lucid, so intensely reasonable as she was, this was of the nature of an idiocy; it was as if she--the essential sybil--stood by, while a sort of wraith of herself sat feeble and indifferent in a chair, unable to make up its mind about anything. she longed to take this phantom by the shoulders and shake it into briskness and activity again, open its head and dust its brain for it. but perhaps judy could do it for her; anyhow, the need, not so much of consultation, but of confession, was urgent. she did not in the least want absolution, because she had done nothing wrong; indeed, she wanted to confess because she was incapable of doing anything at all. she had to make up her mind, and she could not; perhaps stating the problem of her indecision very clearly might, even if it did not elicit a suggestion from judy, help her, at any rate, to see what her difficulties were more clearly. and, though indecisive, she still retained her candour, and told judy all that had happened, exactly as it had happened. 'oh, i know it,' she said in answer to some question of judy's. 'a woman feels in her bones when a man is going to propose to her; only i wasn't quite ready for it, and for two days i kept him from actually asking me. then, on the night that mrs. emsworth was acting there, i went upstairs with her to her room. two minutes afterwards bilton came in--strolled in.' 'you mean he didn't knock?' asked judy. 'oh, my dear, what does it matter whether he knocked or not? as a matter of fact, i think he did, but he came in on the top of his knock. anyhow, there was no doubt in my mind as to what their relations were; but, to make sure, i asked mrs. emsworth. it was a horrible thing to do, but i did it. i like that woman; she is what she is, but she is extremely _bon enfant_, a nice, straightforward boy. and she told me. i was perfectly right: he had been living with her for the last two years.' sybil got up, and began walking up and down the room. 'it hurt me,' she went on; 'it hurt me intolerably. it hurt my self-respect that he should come to me like that. no, he had not broken with her--at any rate, not definitely. she was perfectly straightforward with me, and in a curious sort of way she was sorry for me, as one is sorry for a pain one does not understand. she could not see, i think, that it made any difference.' judy's rather short nose went in the air. 'luckily, it does not matter much what that sort of woman thinks,' she said. sybil did not reply for a moment. 'you don't see my difficulty, then,' she said; 'my difficulty, my indecision, is that i am not certain whether she is right or not. look at it this way: i was attracted by mr. bilton; i felt for him that which i believe in me does duty for love. i liked him and i admired him; i liked the fact that he admired me. now, all the time that i liked and admired him this thing had happened. i liked the man who had done that. what difference, then, can my knowing it make?' judy looked at her in surprise. 'if he had happened to be a murderer?' she said. 'i should not ever have liked him.' 'i don't know what to say to you,' said judy, really perplexed. 'what you tell me is so unlike you.' 'i know it is. i have changed, i suppose. i think america changed me. what has happened? is it that i have become hard or that i have learned common-sense? what i cannot make out is whether i would sooner have learned this or not. if i had not learned it, i should be now engaged to him; but, knowing it, shall i marry him?' 'have you seen him since?' 'no. he has behaved very typically, very cleverly. he neither tried to see me again nor wrote to me. he has very quick perceptions, i am sure. i am sure he reasoned it out with himself, and came to the conclusion that it was better not to approach me in any way for a time. he was quite right; if he had tried to explain things away, or had even assured me that there was nothing to explain, i should have had nothing more to say to him. i should have told him that he and all that concerned him was a matter of absolute indifference to me. he has been wise: he simply effaced himself, and he has therefore made me think about him.' sybil paused in front of the looking-glass, and smoothed her hair with an absent hand. then she turned round again. 'you will see,' she said. 'he will follow me to england. i don't think you like him, judy,' she added. 'my approbation is not necessary to you.' 'not in the least; but why don't you?' 'because i am old-fashioned--because we belong to totally different generations, you and i. i don't like motor-cars, either, you see; and a person's feeling for motor-cars is a very good criterion as to the generation to which he belongs.' sybil laughed. 'how odd you are!' she said; 'they are fast and convenient. but about mr. bilton: he is a very remarkable man. he can do anything he chooses to do, and whatever he chooses to do turns into gold. he owns half the theatres in new york; he has a big publishing business there; he furnishes houses for people; he has made a fortune on the stock exchange. some of those americans are like spiders sitting in the middle of their webs, which extend in all directions, and whatever wind blows, it blows some fly into their meshes. just as a great artist like michael angelo can write a sonnet, or hew a statue out of the marble, or paint a picture, fitting the artistic sense like a handle to any knife, so with a man like him. he sees money everywhere. he is very efficient.' 'is he quite unscrupulous?' asked judy. 'not unscrupulous exactly, but relentless; that is the spirit of america: it fascinates me, and it repels me. some of them remind me of destiny--mr. palmer does. by the way, he asked me, when i was over there, if molesworth was for sale. have you heard anything about it?' 'yes; ginger told me that negotiations were going on. he didn't know, nor did gallio, who the possible purchaser was. no doubt it was mr. palmer.' sybil put her head on one side, considering. 'what was the price?' she asked. 'two hundred thousand.' 'of course, money does not mean anything particular to the palmers,' she said; 'but i rather wonder why they bought it. mr. palmer has been looking out for an english house, i know, but i should have thought molesworth was too remote.' 'i expect they paid for the spirit of ancestry which clings to the place,' said judy. 'molesworth seemed to me, the only time i saw it, to be the most typically english house i had ever seen. mrs. palmer can't procure ancestors, but she can procure the frame for them.' 'that is not charitably said, dear judy,' said her sister; 'besides, i am sure that is not it. ah, i know! they have bought it to give to bertie on his marriage; that must be it.' 'if so, there is a large-leaved, coarse sort of delicacy about it,' said judy. 'there again you are not charitable. besides, you have not seen amelie. she is charming, simply charming--a girl, too, a real flesh and blood girl. and she adores him; she adores him with all her splendid vitality.' 'and bertie?' asked judy. 'oh, they will be very happy,' said sybil. 'it will be a great success. he admires her immensely; he likes her immensely. dear judy, there are many ways of love; one way of love is bertie's and mine. that is all.' 'did he adore mrs. emsworth like that?' asked judy. 'well, no, i imagine not; that was the other way of love.' she took up the morning paper. then a sudden thought seemed to strike her, and she laid it down again. 'by the way, is charlie in town?' she asked. 'i heard from him just before i left america; he said he had not been well. his letter made me feel rather anxious. there was an undercurrent of--of keeping something back.' 'did he tell you no more than that?' asked judy. sybil glanced up, and, seeing judy's face, knitted her brows into a frown. 'judy, what is it?' she asked quickly; 'tell me at once.' 'i can't, dear; he wished to tell you himself. i promised him i wouldn't.' 'but is there something wrong--something really wrong?' judy nodded. 'where is he?' 'down at brighton with his mother.' 'judy, you must tell me,' said her sister; 'it is merely saving me a couple of hours of horrid anxiety. i shall go down to see him this afternoon. now, what is it? is it lungs? i will tell charlie i forced you to tell me.' 'there is no use in my not answering you,' said judy. 'yes, it is that.' 'serious?' 'consumption is always serious.' sybil said nothing for a moment. 'i shall go down this afternoon,' she said. 'why is he at brighton? why is he not at some proper place?' 'he went to sheringham for a time, but he left it.' 'but he has got to get better,' said sybil quickly. 'he must do what is sensible.' judy glanced up at her a moment. 'as things at present stand, he does not much want to get better,' she said. sybil turned, and looked at her long and steadily. 'you mean me?' she asked. there was silence. sybil went to the writing-table and wrote a telegram, while her sister took up the paper she had dropped and looked at it mechanically. almost immediately a short paragraph struck her eye, but her mind, dwelling on other things, did not at once take in its significance. 'yet you advised me yourself not to marry him,' said sybil, as she rang the bell. 'i know i did; nor have i really changed my mind. but it is in your power to make him want to live.' sybil turned on her rather fiercely. 'you have no right to load me with such responsibilities,' she said. 'it is not my fault that he loves me; it is not my fault that i am as i am.' 'i know it is not,' said judy; 'but, sybil, be wise--be very wise. i don't know what you can do, but certainly nobody else can do anything. i am very sorry for you.' sybil gave the telegram, asking charlie if she could come, to the servant, and stood in silence again by the fire. after a pause judy took up the paper again. 'there is something here that concerns you,' she said; 'it is that mr. bilton arrived in london yesterday.' sybil turned, then suddenly threw her arms wide. 'oh, judy, judy,' she cried, 'i am unutterably unhappy! i am perplexed, puzzled; i don't know what i feel.' and she flung herself down on the sofa by judy's side, and burst into uncontrollable sobs. chapter xi charlie brancepeth was sitting in a wooden summer-house on the lawn of his mother's house at brighton. it was set upon a pivot in the centre of its floor, so that it could be turned with little effort to any point of the compass, so as to face the sun and avoid the wind. in it--so much, at any rate, he practised of the treatment which he had compared to the fattening of a strasburg goose--he passed the whole day, only sleeping indoors. but this he did because it seemed to him a very rational and sensible mode of life, soothing to the nerves, and producing in him a certain outdoor stagnation of the brain. he did not want to think; he wanted merely to be as quiet and drowsed as he could, and not to live very long; for, since sybil's final rejection of him, the taste had gone out of life--temporarily it might be only--but while that was still very new and bitter within him had come this fresh blow, the discovery that he was suffering from tubercular disease of the lungs. for some months before he had suspected this; then, soon after the departure of sybil and bertie for america, he had had an attack of influenza from which he did not rally well; he had a daily rise of temperature, a daily intolerable lassitude, and his doctor, seeking for the cause of this, had found it. then, following his advice, he tried a cure on the east coast of england, in which he had to get up at the sound of a bell and proceed out of doors, there to remain all day till a bell summoned him and the other patients in again. at frequent intervals he had to eat large quantities of fattening food; at other hours he had to walk quietly along a road. work of all sorts, even more than an hour or two's reading, was discouraged, and the days had been to him a succession of nightmares, all presenting the same dull hopelessness. so, after a fortnight of it, he decided to persevere with it no more, and, if he had to die, to die. he had talked the thing out once with his mother, and had promised to go to davos for the winter, if it was recommended to him, and in the interval to lead a mode of life that was rational for his case without being unbearable. they both agreed finally to dwell on the subject as little as possible in their thoughts, and dismiss it altogether from their conversation. just now she was away for a day or two, and he was alone as he waited for sybil's arrival. that he was alone he had felt himself bound to tell her, but he felt certain that she would come all the same. and though he waited for her in a sort of anguish of expectation, he felt that life, for the first time since the sunday at haworth at the end of july, was interesting. what she would say to him, how he would take it, even the vaguest predication of their intercourse, was beyond him to guess. indeed, it was scarcely worth while, he thought, trying to conjecture what it would be. for love and death were near to him, august guests. the shelter was lit by an electric light, and he had just turned this on when he heard the wheels of her cab drive up. he went in through the garden-door to meet her, his heart beating wildly, found her in the moment of arrival, and advanced to her with outstretched hands. 'ah, this is charming of you,' he said; 'i am delighted to see you!' but she had involuntarily paused a moment as she saw him, for, though his disease had made no violent inroads on him, yet the whole manner of his face, his walk, his appearance, was changed. his eyes were always large, they now perhaps looked ever so little larger; his face was always thin, it was perhaps a shade thinner; he always stooped, he stooped perhaps a little more. but, even as one can look at a portrait and say 'i see no point on which it is not like, yet it really has no resemblance to the man,' so, though charlie was changed so little, yet he was not like him with whom she had walked on the hot sunday afternoon of july last. then it was summer, now it was autumn; and, instead of the broad brightness of sun, a little bitter wind stirred among the trees. for the flame of life there was substituted the shadow of death, intangible, indescribable, untranslatable into definite thought, but unmistakable. but her pause was only momentary; the quick, practical part of her nature leaped instinctively to the surface to do its duty. she was here, if possible, to help, and she came quickly forward to meet him. 'my dear charlie,' she said, 'it is good to see you again.' she took both his hands in hers. 'you bad boy,' she said, 'to get ill. judy told me. it was not her fault; i made her.' 'i meant to tell you myself,' said he; 'but it does not matter. now, that is enough of that subject; my mother and i never talk of it--we hardly ever think of it. now, will you take off your things?' sybil drew her cloak round her. 'no, certainly not,' said she. 'judy told me you lived in a summer-house. well, i did not come down here to see you through the window; lead on to the summer-house.' 'it will be too cold for you,' said he. 'it will be nothing of the kind.' they talked till dinner on indifferent subjects; she sketched new york for him with a brilliant, if not a very flattering, touch; she did her best for the revels, but suddenly in the middle broke down. 'it really is awful what a beast one is!' she said. 'but there, somehow, where what i am describing to you is natural, where everyone is so extraordinarily kind and so entirely uncultured, the vulgarity did not strike me. i like the people, and, as you know, i like the sense of wealth. who is it who talks about moral geography? burke, i think. well, that is a very suggestive expression. you can do in new york what you cannot possibly conceive doing in england, just as you can grow plants in the south which will not stand our climate.' charlie shook his head. 'i don't think i could stand that anywhere,' he said. 'oh yes, you could. _milieu_, environment is everything; but now, as i sit here and look at the big trees in the garden, covered with that wash of moonlight, it is different. you too--you are so very un-american. i always told you you were old-fashioned.' charlie looked at her in silence a moment. 'and you,' he said at length--' you yourself? have you changed, as ginger prophesied? do i seem to you more old-fashioned than ever? i am a very good test question, i imagine.' 'why?' 'because you have seen, have you not? a good deal of my double, bilton. the contrast of our natures ought to be all the more apparent for the similarity of our appearance.' she got up. 'i have a great deal to talk to you about, charlie,' she said; 'but it is after-dinner talk. a good deal is about you; the rest is about myself. i have also made another discovery: i am a more profound egotist than i knew. did i always strike you as egotistic?' 'dominant people are always egotistic,' said he. 'dominant? am i dominant? you will not think so when you have heard.' 'have things gone wrong?' he asked. 'yes--or right; i do not know which. anyhow, they have gone differently to what i--well, planned. now, the plans of dominant people go as they expect them to go.' 'until they meet a more dominant person,' she shook her head. 'no, if my plans have been upset, anyhow, i have upset others,' she said. they dined rather silently, for both of them were thinking of the talk which was coming, and sybil again was conscious of her own indecision. then, after dinner, since delay only made her more heavily conscious of it, she went straight to the subject. 'judy told me you had left sheringham,' she said--'that you had practically taken yourself out of the hands of doctors who, humanly speaking, could probably have cured you. do you think you have any right to do that?' 'my life is my own,' said he. 'ah, i dispute that. one does not belong to one's self--at any rate, not wholly. one belongs to one's friends--to those who care for one.' 'who cares for me? bertie keynes, i suppose, cares for me, but i entirely deny his right to any disposal of what i do.' 'your mother, then.' 'in the main she agrees with me. supposing i had cancer, she would not urge me for a moment to have an operation which was uncertain of success; and my case is similar.' sybil was silent a moment. 'i, then,' she said. 'i entirely disapprove of your action. i care for you; you should consider me as well. it is in that sense your life is not your own; you have made yourself a niche, so to speak, in other people's lives; you have put an image of yourself there--given it them--and you have no right to take it away.' he took a cigarette from a box near him. 'and you are not allowed to smoke,' she added. he laughed and lit it. 'we have got to talk,' he said. 'if you convince me i have no right to--well, to commit what will probably be a very lengthy suicide, i will smoke no more. if you don't, i shall continue to smoke, and in the interval i can talk more easily. now you have spoken so frankly to me, i shall use the same frankness.' she nodded. 'a man's life,' he said, 'belongs to himself until he has given it to a woman, and she has accepted it. then it is no longer his, but hers, and she may dispose of it. no woman has accepted mine.' she made a little movement in her chair, as if wincing, and he saw it. 'shall i not go on?' he said. 'no, go on; it is this for which i came here.' 'so everybody,' said he, 'has about the same weight with me, and that combined weight is less than my right to do as i choose. bertie keynes, you, judy, ginger--you all want me to be what you call sensible, and live as long as possible. but my indifference to life is stronger than your desire that i should live. my mother alone wishes me to do as i choose, because she understands.' he paused, and saw that sybil was looking, not at him, but into the fire, and that unshed tears stood in her eyes, fighting with some emotion that would not let them fall. 'i understand too,' she said in a whisper; and it looked as if the tears would have their way. then they were checked again as she continued: 'but you are grossly unfair to me--both you and judy. you saddle me with this responsibility. you say it is my fault that you are indifferent to life. indeed it is not fair. i am what i am. you may hate me or love me, but it is me. i am hard, i dare say, without the power to love; that is me too. and you say to me, "alter that, please, and become exceedingly tender and devoted." and because i don't--ah, there is your mistake; it is because i can't. i could pray and think and agonize, and yet not add an inch to my stature; and do you think, then, it is likely that i could alter what is so vastly more _me_ than my height?' 'ah, i don't blame you,' said he, 'and i don't saddle you with any responsibility.' 'but if i loved you, you would care to live.' 'yes; but i don't say that it is your fault that you don't. that would be interfering in your life--a thing which i am deprecating in regard to my own.' she made a hopeless gesture with her hands. 'we are talking in a circle,' she said. 'leave it for a moment; i have something else to tell you.' he sat very upright in his chair, grasping the arms in his hands, feeling that he knew for certain what this was. 'you mean you are going to marry harold bilton?' 'no, i mean exactly the opposite; i mean that i am not.' he dropped the cigarette he had just lit into the fireplace. with her woman's quickness, she instantly saw the symbolical application of this, and, with her passion for analysis, could not resist casting a fly, as it were, over it. she pointed to the grate. 'you have dropped your cigarette,' she said. he looked at her for one half-second, and then, with rather slower-moving mind, recalled what he had said about not smoking any more. 'yes, the doctors told me not to,' he said, feeling again the thrill of even this infinitesimal piece of fencing with her. 'they said it was a bad habit for me.' she got up. 'charlie, i don't know if i was right to tell you that,' she said. 'you mean it may lead me to hope that--i assure you it shall not. but it leaves things less utterly hopeless.' she shook her head. 'you mustn't even think that,' she said. 'i can't help thinking that. while there is life, you know----i was lying'--and his eye brightened with a sudden excitement--' with throat ready for the guillotine. i could see it; they had not bandaged my eyes--but they have taken the knife away. no, i don't ask "what next?" the knife is gone: that is sufficient for the moment.' she stood close to him by the fire, with eyes that strayed from him to a picture, down to the fire again, and again back to him. 'it is late,' she said at length; 'i must go to bed, and so must you. i have got to go back to-morrow. i shall see you in the morning. good-night.' he lit a candle for her, and she went to the foot of the stairs, then paused a moment, with her back to him. 'you will stop to smoke another cigarette before you come up,' she said. she heard him take a couple of steps inside the room she had just left, and then a vague sort of rustle. 'i have thrown them all into the fire,' said he. 'oh, charlie, how wasteful!' she cried, beginning to ascend the stairs; 'and how----' and she paused at the corner. he appeared in the doorway on the instant. 'how?' he asked. 'nothing.' 'what were you going to say, sybil?' said he. 'on oath, mind.' she leaned over the banisters. 'premature,' she whispered, and rustled up the remaining steps. charlie did not smoke another cigarette after she had gone, for the simplest of all reasons, but he broke another rule of health by sitting up much later than he should. he listened, in the way a man does, for the sound of the closing of her door, hoping, for some hopeless, groundless reason, that she would come back. then, because the room was hot, and to him, in his open-air sojournings, airless with the closed windows, he opened one and sat by it, looking out into the still, starry night. and even as the coolness and breeze of air refreshed his body, so the thought of the talk he had had with her refreshed and was wine to his soul. at present he hoped for nothing; it was not necessary for him to tell himself not to be sanguine, for she had done nothing for him that she would not have done for a hundred other friends. she had, in fact, told him no more than others when she had said that his life did not belong entirely to himself; and she had told him no more than a penny newspaper might have told him when she had said she was not going to marry bilton. yet the imminent knife had gone; whether her mere presence again was tonic to him, or whether it was that there was again for him a loophole for hope--something possibly his to win--he did not stop to inquire. the upshot was that life (his life, that is to say, which is all that the most altruistic philosophers really mean when they talk of life) was again interesting, worthy of smiles or tears, as the case might be. whether it was to be smiles or tears he did not at this moment care; the fact that it merited emotion was enough. 'the chequer-board of nights and days' was still in movement; he was not yet a taken piece. for the last three months he had thought of himself as exactly that, and simultaneously with that conviction had come the conviction that the chequer-board and the game played thereon was utterly without interest. his part in it was over; he no longer cared. and, as has been said, even the most altruistic and the most philosophical cannot do much better. 'quelle perte irréparable!' was comte's exclamation when he was told that he had to die. 'how premature!' was not that, too, an indication, however veiled, that it was not premature? she would not have said that his holocaust of the cigarettes was premature if it was so; she would merely have thought to herself, 'poor fellow!' but the hopelessness of the thought was neutralized by its announcement. not the most matter-of-fact physicians broke news of fatal illness like that.... and again he reminded himself that he must not be sanguine. anyhow, she had reminded him (like everybody else, no doubt) that his life was not entirely his own. she had told him also (there was nothing secret about it) that she was not going to marry harold bilton. but it was she who had told him. bilton, meantime, with the speed of his race, had completed his contract for the lease of the coronation theatre for the next season, and had finished, on behalf of lewis s. palmer, the purchase of the molesworth property. it was quite characteristic of him that he should postpone for these affairs which were really imminent the piece of private business which had, more than either of them, perhaps more than both, brought him to england. consequently, it was not till the afternoon of the next day that he called at judy's and asked to see mrs. massington. sybil had spent the morning at brighton, and had arrived only some half-hour before he called. but, with the instinct of the autumn perhaps strong in her, she had said she would see him, rejecting judy's offer to put herself in the way of a _tête-à-tête_. he was shown into the room where judy usually sat, a sitting-room off the drawing-room. it had been furnished with her unerring bizarre taste, and looked like nothing whatever except judy's room. there was a bearskin on the floor because somebody had given it her.' two execrable water-colours were on the wall for the same reason, and on the same walls were three wonderful prints of reynolds' engraved by smith. there was a grand piano there, making locomotion difficult, because judy played much and badly, and steinway, so she always said, knew what she meant better than anybody. there was some good french furniture there because it was hers, and some hopeless english armchairs because they were comfortable. finally, there was sybil there because she was her sister, and at this moment there had entered harold bilton because she had said she would see him. she got up, and advanced to him. 'this is quite unexpected,' she said. 'i thought you were in america. pray sit down. what has happened? has mrs. emsworth also come back?' bilton sat down. he brought his hat and stick with him, according to the custom of his countrymen, and sybil, who had never noticed it there, noticed it in london. she noticed it more particularly since the stick fell down from the angle where he had propped it with a loud clatter. 'no; mrs. emsworth is still in america,' he said. 'she has left new york, and gone on tour. i think her tour will be very successful.' 'so glad,' said sybil. 'tea?' 'i guess i won't, thank you,' said bilton; 'i don't want anything. i want just to talk to you.' sybil pulled herself together. in other words, she tried to remember that a man in new york, if he crosses an insignificant ocean, is the same man who lands at liverpool. she succeeded moderately well. 'and how is everybody?' she asked. 'how is mrs. palmer, and amelie, and all the long island party?' 'they're all right,' said bilton. 'mrs. palmer's giving a woodland fête this week; it will be very complete, and i guess the sea will come and swallow up newport. but i didn't come here to talk about mrs. palmer.' he finished taking off his gloves, threw them into his hat, and took a chair exactly opposite her, so that they faced each other as in a waggonette, which to sybil was an odious vehicle for locomotion. his likeness to charlie was somehow strangely obliterated to-day; she thought of the latter as of something suffering, in need of protection, whereas the same-featured man who sat opposite her looked particularly capable of self-defence, and, if necessary, of aggression. for the first time she rather feared him, and dislike looked hazily out through the tremor of fear. 'you ran away from america in a great hurry,' he said. 'you left us very desolate.' something in this quite harmless speech displeased sybil immensely. 'ran away?' she asked. 'yes, ran away; but only incidentally from america. you ran away from me; i came after you.' sybil got up. 'really, mr. bilton,' she said, 'you have left your manners the other side of the atlantic.' she went half-way across the room with the intention of ringing the bell, but she stopped before she got there; curiosity about the development of this situation conquered, and she sat down again. he took no notice of her remark about his manners. 'i have come to ask you to marry me,' he said. 'you are the woman i have been looking for all my life. i will try to make you very happy.' she answered him without pause. 'i am very grateful to you,' she said; 'but i cannot.' 'you led me to suppose you would,' said he. 'i am very sorry for it.' there was a moment's silence. 'you changed your mind when you saw me come into dorothy emsworth's room,' he said. 'now, i always meant to tell you about that. it is perfectly true that for nearly two years----' she held up her hand. 'you need not trouble,' she said. 'i know.' bilton paused a half-second to arrange his reply in the way he wished. 'i always supposed she would tell you,' he said. her silence admitted it, and he had scored a side-point. he wished to know whether dorothy had told her. 'i think you are hard on me,' he said; 'or perhaps i do not understand. you were, before you knew that, prepared to accept my devotion. do you reject it now because i have led that sort of life?' sybil frowned. 'i can't discuss the question with you,' she said. 'i will just suggest to you this, that you went to see your mistress while i, to whom you had expressed devotion, was staying in the house. if you can't understand my feeling about that, i can't explain it to you.' 'i will promise never to see her again,' said bilton. suddenly and almost with the vividness of actual hallucination the figure of the man who was so like him rose up before sybil, and she all but saw charlie taking bilton's place there, and imagined that it was he who was saying what bilton said. for a moment she invested him with the grossness of his double, and loathed and shuddered at the picture she had conjured up. charlie behaving like bilton was an image so degrading and humiliating that she could not contemplate it. the very thought was to do him dishonour. but bilton, so she recognised, was acting now up to his very best; it was the best of his nature which promised not to see mrs. emsworth again. but charlie in a corresponding position was unthinkable. against this grossness all sybil's fineness, all her taste, ran up like a wave against a stone sea-jetty, and was broken against it, and the jetty did not know what it had done. she rose, conscious that she was trembling. 'it is a matter of entire indifference to me,' she said, 'when or where or how soon you see her again. i want you to understand that.' bilton sat quite unmoved. 'if you were quite certain of yourself, you would not be so violent,' he said. 'you are overstating your feelings; that is because you are rather perplexed as to what they are.' sybil turned quickly round to him. she could not help showing her appreciation of this. 'ah, you are frightfully clever,' she said; 'i do you that justice.' he rose. 'i shall not give up hope,' he said. 'that is as you please,' she said. 'i have stated as clearly as i can that i can give you none.' 'it is not your fault that you don't convince me,' said he; 'it is the fault of my own determination. good-bye.' sybil shook hands with him. 'what are your movements?' she asked. 'i return to america almost immediately to collect my company for the coronation theatre.' 'ah, you are going to have an american company, then?' she asked. 'certainly--two companies, rather. i shall have two pieces running simultaneously, with two performances a day. no one has yet thought of producing entertainments to last from about five till eight in the evening.' when he had gone, she sat down without book, paper, or work, simply to think. despite herself, and despite the disgust for him which, sown by that moment in mrs. emsworth's room, had grown up fungus-like in her mind, this unhurrying, relentless activity, so typical of him and of the nation to which he belonged, which had so stirred her in america, stirred her again. the practical side of her nature responded to it, as an exhausted man responds to alcohol. it woke in her the need to do something definite with her life; it reminded her that the mere observation of other people was not to her, as it was to ginger, a sufficient excuse for her existence. she felt that her quick brain, her sure analytic grasp, could not find its permanent fruition in mere quickness or in mere analysis. something of the passion for deeds, for accomplishment, that instinct which blindly spurs on bees to labour and men to work, had got hold of her. but what was she to do? she refused to marry bilton, for, apart from the fungus of disgust, this very need for activity rejected him. that niche for herself, in front of which should burn in her honour the thick incense of wealth, no longer attracted her. she wanted to accomplish, to make; to be, in however small a degree, an active, creating force. so strong at the present moment was the impulse that she wondered, probably correctly, whether her refusal of bilton did not dip some root-fibre into this soil. the thought stirred within her till sitting still became impossible, and she rose and walked up and down the room. soon her eye fell on the great nosegay of michaelmas daisies which she had gathered in charlie's garden that morning before leaving, and, with her keen dislike of waste, her unwillingness that anything should perish without having got the best out of itself, she busied herself for a few moments in filling a tall venetian vase with water to place them in. the stalks were a little dry and sapless at the ends, and she made another journey to her room in order to get some scissors to cut off the dry pieces. even a flower should be made to do its best, to look its best, and last as long as possible. even flowers should be strenuous, and here was she and nine-tenths of her nation drifting like thistledown on a moor wherever the wind happened to carry it. to work--that was the impulse she had brought back with her from america--not to scheme merely with her busy brain, to intrigue, to find, as she always had found, endless amusement and entertainment in watching others, even though she exerted her intellect to its fullest in intelligently watching them; but to make some plan, and carry it out--to find some work to do, and do it. suddenly, in the middle of her neat, decisive clipping of the flower-stalks, she stopped and laid the scissors down. surely there was a piece of work that lay very ready to her hand, though twice in the last day or two she had resented the responsibility being laid on her. but if she took it on herself--if she led charlie back to interest in life, if she coaxed from him his apathy--was not that worth doing? there were difficulties in the way sufficient to rouse enthusiasm in one who was much less on fire with the desire for production than she. she would be quite honest with him; she would not hold out any hope of which the fulfilment was not sure; she would not let him think for a moment that she would ever marry him. if the thing was to be done at all, she would do it by inciting him to live for the sake of life, by making him feel the unworthiness of giving in--the unworthiness, too, of the only condition on which he at present cared to live. she was not in love with him, but even if she had been, that would have made but a poor motive. the vitality that was hers was so abundant that surely she could impart some of it to him--make something of it bubble in his veins. his nature, his perception, were of a fine order, and though disappointment first and then disease might have dulled their sensibilities for the time, yet surely their numbness was only temporary--a passing anaesthesia. anyhow, here lay a work worth doing. chapter xii mr. lewis s. palmer was sitting at his table in the sitting-room of the quiet, modest little suite he had taken at the carlton hotel, and was studying with some minuteness a large ordnance map of worcestershire. he had some dozen of the sheets arranged in front of him, and the molesworth estate, which he had been down to see only the day before, occupied a considerable portion of the central one of them. by him was seated bilton, who answered, usually monosyllabically, the questions which mr. palmer asked him from time to time. 'yes' or 'no' was generally sufficient; occasionally he thought a moment and then said, 'i don't remember.' of the answers he received, lewis palmer sometimes made a short note. finally, he studied the map for a considerable time in silence, and then folded up each sheet separately, and replaced them in the bookstand that stood on the table. then he read his notes through twice and tore them up. 'complete the purchase of the wyfold estate as soon as possible, literally as soon as possible,' he said. 'if you can do it by half-past four this afternoon, let it be done by then, not by five.' 'it's a huge price,' remarked bilton, 'for half a dozen unproductive farms.' 'it is a necessity,' said the other, 'and a necessity is cheap at any price. but the fact that they ask so much leads me to think they have some kind of inkling as to what i am going to do. that's why i want you to do it at once.' he rose, and sipped the glass of milk that stood on the side-table. 'there is one more thing,' he said. 'i want someone who will give a general supervision to my affairs here, which are growing important to me. i offer you the place because i like your way of doing business.' 'how much time do you want me to give to it?' he asked. 'roughly, two days a week, anything of emergency to be dealt with separately.' bilton smiled. 'you chiefly deal in emergencies,' he said. mr. palmer tapped the table rather impatiently. 'what do you make a year?' he asked. 'round about two hundred thousand dollars.' 'i guarantee you a hundred thousand,' he said, 'on the two days a week basis. if it takes you longer than that, let me know. only my affairs come first.' bilton considered this a moment without the slightest trace of exultation or pleasure. 'that's right, then,' he said. 'i guess i'll go off over the wyfold business.' 'yes, do. i'm going to look at seaton house. i shall be in by two. will you lunch with me?' 'can't say,' said bilton. 'i'm rather busy to-day.' lewis palmer continued sipping his milk in a regular, methodical manner till he had finished it, and then put on some rather shabby dogskin gloves, an extremely shiny and obviously perfectly new tall hat, and rang his hand-bell. almost before it sounded his bedroom door opened noiselessly, and his valet stood there. 'lunch at two,' he said. 'if lord keynes gets here before me, ask him to wait.' 'lunch for how many, sir?' asked his servant. 'i don't know.' mr. palmer's progress out of the carlton was made easy for him. doors flew open as he neared them, and by the time he had reached the pavement his motor had drawn up exactly opposite the entrance, and the door was being held open for him. mrs. palmer had had her eye--or part of an eye--on seaton house for some time. quite a year ago her husband had given her to understand that london might very possibly be the headquarters of his business for a considerable time, and when she spent her season there last summer she had considered london as a residence. on general principles, it was highly attractive--americans, as she knew from experience, could command all that was worth having there, with, on the whole, a less expenditure than was necessary to keep up the same position in new york. prince fritz, for instance, in the autumn, had been a very heavy item, and though prince fritz had yielded high social dividends in america, yet it was easily possible to 'run' a royalty of the same class in england at a far lower figure. on the other hand, prince fritz in london would not be worth exploiting at all--that she recognised--but her conclusions had been that social success of a first-rate order in london could be done on less than the same article in new york. in both towns it was necessary to stand up among the ruck of ordinary hostesses like a mountain-peak; you had in any case to spend much more than most other people. since, therefore, most other people spent less in london than in new york, the mountain-peak need not be so high. she saw also, with her very clear-sighted eye, that england, the professedly aristocratic, was far more democratic than the professedly democratic america. lady a----, duchess b----, countess c----, she saw, as regards their titles alone, were quite valueless socially in england except among suburban and provincial people. that was natural--the prophet has no honour in his own country. again, england, or rather that small section of english society which, in her mind, was equivalent to england, was rapidly conforming to the american ideal. it no longer cared for birth or breeding; it wanted to be greatly and continuously amused; a hostess was worth her power of entertainment. nobody cared here in the least whether her grandfather was a butcher or a boot-black; all they cared was whether they were sufficiently lavishly entertained. so far she had seen clearly and correctly enough; dimly, she had seen a little farther, and knew that for a reason she could not grasp there were in england some few families who had a _cachet_ altogether independent of wealth. she could have named some half-dozen who floated on the very tip-top of everything, to whose houses kings and queens drove up, so to speak, in hansoms, and played about in the garden. they might be poor, they might apparently have no particular power or accomplishment which could account for it, but it was into that circle that mrs. palmer now desired to get. to one of these families bertie keynes belonged. anyhow, she had secured him as a son-in-law, she had cut a step on the steep ice-wall. furthermore, it could not be a disadvantage to have one of the few really fine houses in london for one's own. that was why mr. palmer had bought seaton house. he drove there now in his noiseless motor-brougham, looking out with his piercing gray eyes on to the grimy splendour of pall mall. it was a brilliant winter day, and primrose-coloured sunshine flooded the town, giving an almost southern gaiety to the streets. as usual, a large extent of the pavement was up for repairs, and it vexed his sense of speed and efficiency to see the leisurely manner in which the work was done. frankly, england seemed to him in a very bad way; her railways, her trade, her shipping, all the apparatus of her commerce, was haphazard, unconcentrated, uneconomical, just like her mode of making repairs to her streets. personally, except that at this moment his motor was stopped, he did not at all object to it, since it gave him the opportunity which he had been preparing for of stepping in in the matter of her railways, and introducing american methods. he had, now three months ago, got through his bill for a direct railway between liverpool and southampton, and the work of construction was going on with a speed that fairly took away the breath of contractors who were accustomed to think that slowness was essential to solidity. that boast of solidity, so characteristic of the english, had long amused lewis palmer. 'what they call solid,' he had once said to bilton, 'i call stodgy. they make a brick wall three feet thick, that would bear the weight of the world, when all they want is a two-inch steel girder riveted to an upright. and when they have spent a couple of months in building it, they think they have done better than the man who puts up the steel girder. it is false economy to put up what is not necessary, just as it is false economy not to put up what is. and they think that to paper their railroad cars with looking-glasses in gold frames will console the shareholders for an absence of dividends. no, before we financed the liverpool and southampton we made certain of getting the line built the proper way.' but this line was by no means all the control he meant to get in english railways. its success, his financial knowledge told him, was certain; it was as sure that the traffic between the ports would come by a directer and faster route than that which already existed as that the sun would rise to-morrow; it was equally sure that facility of communication would lead to increased traffic. what followed? cardiff would be forced to get direct communication with his line instead of letting her trade 'walk about in country lanes,' as he expressed it. to do that, a new line from there must join the liverpool and southampton at the nearest possible point. that point lay, allowing ample margin, somewhere within the borders of the molesworth estate, which he had purchased in the autumn, and the wyfold estate, which he had given orders to bilton to purchase that day. there was another thing as well. geologically, it seemed most probable that there was coal on the molesworth estate. it had been suspected half a dozen years ago, but gallio, out of a mixture of reasons, partly indifference, partly want of cash, partly repugnance to turn the park into a colliery, had never made so much as a boring for it. but lewis palmer was neither indifferent nor bankrupt. he also had no particular feeling about parks. and his gray eyes brightened, and the momentary stoppage of his motor, owing to the slovenly and dilatory way in which the street was being repaired, irritated him no longer. one could not say he was lost in reverie. he was rather picking his way through his reverie with very firm and decisive steps, directing his course to a well-defined goal. an assemblage of upholsterers, paperers, carpenters, plumbers, furniture dealers, and painters, were awaiting his arrival, for he had promised his wife to get the house into habitable shape before easter, and, to save time to himself, he took them all round in his inspection and gave orders to each as they went along. 'i shall want a large brocade screen to stand straight in front of the door of the inner hall,' he said. 'let it be at least seven feet high. send me the patterns first. don't put much furniture into the hall; a big plain mahogany table there for cards and small things. a long line of hat-racks there with an umbrella rack below it. don't think you can make a hat-rack pretty, so make it plain. half a dozen chippendale chairs, and an old english steel fender with dogs. i will choose the rugs and stair carpet myself, but polish the whole of the staircase. put a big _vitrine_ for china in that corner. cut a circular _louvre_ window above the front--door, and copy the mouldings round it from the north door of the erechtheum. you will find the drawings in schultz's book. big candelabra will stand at the bottom of the stairs. i will send them here. fit them with electric light, but do not pierce them. there will be six lamps in each of eight candle-power.' it was extremely characteristic of mr. palmer that he went thus into everything himself. nothing escaped him; he grasped at once the difficulty of bringing the dining-room into directer communication with the kitchen, a problem that had puzzled his architect, and solved it in five minutes by a lift and shutter arrangement so simple that it seemed mere idiocy not to have thought of it. he went into every servant's bedroom, every bathroom, into the sculleries, the coal-hole, the wine-cellar, and knew immediately what was wanted. and the more he saw of the house the better it pleased him; the big oak staircase to the reception-rooms was admirable, and more than admirable was the circular dining-room, with its walls panelled in excellent italian _boiseries_, and its cupola-shaped roof, with carved converging wreaths of fruit and flowers. with his amazing knowledge of furniture and decoration, he had in an hour's time chosen the scheme for every room in the house, and provided the dealers, the paperers, the painters, with a week's work in looking out and bringing for his inspection the kind of thing he wanted. but it was not his way to allow a week for a week's work, and these gentleman were appointed to meet him there again in three days' time to submit for his approval carpets, papers, rugs, tables, chairs, kitchen ranges, refrigerators, wardrobes, and specimens of carving. then, at exactly three minutes to two, he again stepped into his motor to go back to the carlton, where bertie keynes was to lunch with him. there were other people there as well, he found, waiting for him when he got back, and it was not possible for him to talk privately, as he intended to do, to his future son-in-law. he had observed him once or twice during lunch, not eating much, and apparently rather silent and abstracted, and wondered vaguely if anything was the matter. he guessed indeed that some money difficulty or accumulation of debts might be bothering him, but as his talk with him was to be partly on that subject, he considered that if that was the cause, bertie's evident pre-occupation would not last very long. he had seen a good deal of him in america, and was very well-disposed towards him, partly because bertie was such an eminently likeable young man, but mainly because amelie was so fond of him. for lewis palmer--a thing which most people would have been inclined to doubt--had a heart. his business, which occupied him, it is true, more than anything else in the world, was to him a thing quite apart from his human life and human affections. in it he was as relentless and as hard as it is possible for a man to be; as far as an affair was business, he was without pity or compassion, for business is as inhuman a science as algebra, and as unemotional, if properly conducted, as quadratic equations. a heart in such spheres would be anomalous--almost an impropriety. had bertie--a thing which he had no thought of doing--crossed lewis palmer's path in such a connection, he would have had not the slightest compunction in obliterating him, if he was of the nature of an obstacle, however minute. but as the affianced of amelie, he was something of an object even of tenderness. he had a few words with him after lunch. 'arrived last night, bertie?' he asked. 'glad to see you. how are they all?' bertie pulled himself together, and smiled. 'all sorts of messages to you,' he said. 'they miss you awfully.' 'i guess i'm not missed most,' remarked mr. palmer. 'can you wait here half an hour or so? i want to talk to you, but i've got other things that won't wait.' bertie looked at his watch. 'i can be back in an hour,' he said, 'if that will do.' 'yes, an hour from now. quarter to four, then,' and he nodded to him, shut up his heart again, and dismissed him from his thoughts as completely as he had left the room. bertie, as mr. palmer had supposed, had arrived in london only the evening before, and since gallio was out of town, spending, in point of fact, a most unremunerative fortnight at monte carlo, on a system which lost infallibly, though slowly, had at his invitation taken possession of his chambers in jermyn street. he had come down to breakfast in as happy and contented a frame of mind as any young man, gifted with good digestion and a charming girl to whom he was engaged, need hope ever to find himself, and had seen with some satisfaction that there was only one letter waiting for him. he had expected rather to find creditors clamouring round him, for he had a respectable number of them waiting for his leisure cash, and had supposed that they would very politely have notified him of their existence as soon as he arrived. but there was only one letter for him. he opened it; its purport was as simple as a statement of accounts, and type-written. it began: 'dear sir, 'i have the honour to remind you of a document, from which i have extracted the following.' then in neat marks of quotation were appended certain sentences. 'why did you bewitch me if it was not for this?' 'when i am with you i am tongue-tied. even now my hand halts as i think of you.' 'you are the only woman in the world for me. i offer you all i am and have, and shall be and shall have.' there was a decent space left after these and other quotations--a silence of good manners. then the letter continued: 'mrs. emsworth has reason to believe that you are about to marry miss amelie palmer. she therefore offers you the chance of regaining possession of the letter, from which we have given you extracts, for the sum of ten thousand pounds (£ , ). should you decide to accept her offer, you are requested to draw a cheque for the above-mentioned sum to the account of her present manager, mr. harold bilton, who, on receipt of it, will forward to you a sealed envelope containing the complete letter from which the above are extracts. should this not reach you within twenty-four hours, you are at liberty to stop the cheque. if, however, such cheque does not reach mr. harold bilton by the evening of january , he will post the sealed packet in his possession (of the contents of which he has no idea), containing the original letter from which the above are extracts, to mr. lewis s. palmer, carlton hotel, london. he has been instructed to do this on behalf of mrs. emsworth without admitting any discussion or temporizing on your part. 'we are, sir, 'your respectful, obedient servants, 'a. b. c.' the postmark on the envelope was london, w., and the envelope was type-written in purple ink. bertie's mouth, when he read this, got suddenly dry, and with a hand that he observed was quite steady, he poured himself out a cup of tea and sipped it, reading the letter through again. also he had a horrible feeling of emptiness inside him, resembling great hunger, but of some sickly kind, for, so far from being hungry, he could not touch the eggs and bacon to which he had just helped himself. he could not yet even begin to think; but again he filled his cup with tea, again drank it, and again read the letter. then he suddenly felt hot, stifled, and though the morning was of a brisk chilliness, he went to the window and leaned out. he was aware that a cold sweat had gathered on his forehead, and he wiped it away. then all at once his feeling of physical faintness and thirst left him altogether, and he was back in his room, lighted a cigarette, and sat down squarely on his sofa to think the matter out. his first impulse--namely, to go straight to mr. palmer with the letter--did not last long. he had told him, after amelie had accepted him, in answer to questions which were very delicately put, that there were no pages in his past life which he feared. mr. palmer, with the tact and finesse which is inseparable from great ability, had indicated his meaning with absolute precision and clearness. he had not hinted that he wished bertie to confess any liaisons he might ever have had, he only asked him with considerable solemnity to assure him that he had done nothing which, coming to light at a future time, could, humanly speaking, bring unhappiness to, and possibly rupture between, him and amelie. he had not pressed him for an answer immediately. 'think it all over,' he had said, 'and tell me to-morrow. young men will be young men as long as women are women. i don't mean that. what i do mean is whether anyone can rake things up afterwards. if anyone can, i should like to know about it. i needn't ask you to be straight with me. i guess you are straight without being asked.' now, it had not occurred to bertie to tell him about mrs. emsworth, for the very simple reason that he was quite innocent. that he had been foolish--mad, if you will--was perfectly true, but morally he was clean. and now, at this moment, she was on tour in america--where, he had no notion. bilton, no doubt, knew, but bilton had been instructed to admit no discussion of any kind. and to-morrow would be january . his second impulse was also short-lived--namely, to go straight with the letter to scotland yard. but what did that mean? an action for blackmail against mrs. emsworth, a dragging into the public view all that had happened, a feast for the carrion-crows of london, and for him--well, celibacy. for mrs. emsworth, clever woman as she was, knew well what justice is done by the world to those who invoke the justice of the law. the verdict of the world is always the same: 'there must have been something in it;' and though every judge and jury in the land might testify to his innocence, the world would simply shrug its shoulders: 'there must have been something in it.' for it is not in the least necessary to touch pitch to be defiled; it is quite sufficient if somebody points a casual finger at you and merely says 'pitch.' yes, it was on this that she, the blackmailer, counted; here lay her security--namely, that his bringing her to justice meant that he must lay himself open to the justice of the world. and what justice in that case would mr. palmer give him? if he was to know at all, it must be bertie who told him. and bertie knew he could not, after the assurance he had given him. for a moment his brain deserted the question of what to do, and put in as a parenthesis that the blackmail scheme had been brilliantly planned. it was excellently timed; it gave him quite long enough to think the matter over, and not rush, as he might possibly have done, in desperation to mr. palmer or scotland yard, if he had only been given an hour or so to decide, and, at the same time, it did not give him an opportunity of communicating with mrs. emsworth. the extracts, too, were cleverly chosen, their genuineness he could not doubt, and they gave him a very fair idea of the impression that the whole letter would make on an unbiassed mind. then suddenly he sprang to his feet. 'but i am not guilty!' he cried. 'my god, i am not guilty!' his fit of passion subsided as suddenly as it had sprung up, and his thoughts turned to dorothy. he remembered with great distinctness his interview with her on the morning after her debut in new york, and the uneasiness with which what his sober self thought was mere chaff had inspired him. but afterwards, at their various meetings in new york and down at long island, he had been quite at his ease again, and ashamed of his momentary suspicions. she was a better actress than he knew, it appeared, for never did anything seem to him more genuine than her kindliness towards him. she had made friends with amelie, too; for amelie had told him of their meeting in the dewy gardens, of her entrancing way with children, which had quite won her heart. then--this. then a third alternative struck him. what if he did nothing, just waited to see if anything would happen, if by to-morrow evening he had not paid this hideous sum to his blackmailer? but again he turned back daunted. the whole plot had been too elaborately, too neatly laid to allow him to think that the threat would not be carried out. if in a sudden passion dorothy had threatened to send the letter to mr. palmer, he might, so he thought, have reasoned with her, appealed to her pity, appealed, above all, to her knowledge of his innocence. he might even have threatened, have coolly and seriously told her that he would lay information against her unless she gave up his letter to him. but he was not dealing, he felt, with a woman in a passion; he was dealing with a cold, well-planned plot, conceived perhaps in anger, but thought out by a very calm and calculating brain. there was not, he felt, even an outside chance that, having worked it out so carefully, she would hold her hand at the last moment. true, he held now in his own hand evidence against her for blackmail sufficient to secure her, if he chose, a severe sentence. only he could not do it; he had not nerve enough to take that step. she had calculated on that, no doubt. she had calculated correctly. then this money must be raised somehow; there was no way out. in order to silence a false accusation against himself he had to pay £ , . it was this question of how to get it that he carried about with him all the morning, and this that had sat beside him at lunch. gallio might possibly lend it him, but it would entail telling gallio the whole story, which he did not in the least wish to do. however, if no better means offered itself he determined to telegraph to him that evening. and so at a quarter to four, his brain still going its dreary rounds from point to point of his difficulties, he again presented himself at the carlton. he was shown by the noiseless valet through the noiseless door of mr. palmer's sitting-room. the latter had not heard him enter, and bertie, in the strangeness of the sight that met his eye, forgot for a moment his own entanglements. for lewis palmer was seated in an easy-chair by the window, doing nothing. his arms hung limply by his side, his head was half sunk into his chest, and his whole attitude expressed a lassitude that was indescribable. but next minute he half turned his head languidly towards the door, and saw bertie standing there. 'ah, come in, come in,' he said. 'i was waiting for you. no, you are not late.' he rose. 'bertie, never be a very rich man,' he said. 'it is a damnable slavery. you can't stop; you have to go on. you can't rest; you are in the mill, and the mill keeps on turning.' he stood silent a moment, then pulled himself together. 'i hope nobody overheard,' he said. 'they would think i was mad. now and then, just now and then, i get like that, and then i would give all i have to get somebody to press out the wrinkles in my brain, and let it rest. i should be quite content to be poor, if i could forget all this fever in which my life has been spent. i might even do something as an art critic. there, it's all over. sit down. there are the cigars by you. 'now you talked to me straight enough once before,' he went on, 'and told me, i believe, the exact truth. i wanted you to start with amelie with a clean sheet in that direction, and i want you to have a clean sheet in another. i want you to pay off all your debts. all, mind; don't come to me with more afterwards. i know it's difficult to state the whole. please try to do so. take time.' bertie sat quite still a moment, with a huge up-leap of relief in his mind. 'i can't tell you accurately,' he said. 'but i am afraid they are rather large.' 'well, a million pounds,' suggested mr. palmer dryly. bertie laughed; already he could laugh. 'no, not quite,' he said. 'but between ten thousand and twenty. about twelve i should say.' 'confiding people, english tradesmen,' remarked mr. palmer. 'been going to the jews?' 'no.' 'well, don't. my house doesn't charge so high. now, i'm not going to give you the money. i shall deduct it from the settlement i am going to make, the amount of which i have already determined on. only i shall give you that at once, and ask you to pay them at once.' 'you are most generous,' said bertie. 'i can't thank you.' 'don't, then. are you sure thirteen thousand will cover them? mind, it doesn't matter to me; it is all deducted.' 'i am sure it will.' mr. palmer did not answer, but drew a chair to the table and wrote the cheque. 'pay them at once, then,' he said. 'now, you looked worried at lunch. anything wrong?' 'it was,' said bertie. 'it isn't now.' mr. palmer looked at him a moment with strong approval. 'i like you,' he said. 'now go away. the mill has to commence again.' the relief was as profound as the oppression had been, and now that the strain was over bertie was conscious of a luxurious relaxation; the tension and strain on his nerves had passed, and a feeling of happy weariness, as when a dreaded operation is well over, set in. he could scarcely yet find it in his mind to be bitter or angry even with mrs. emsworth; she had done a vile thing, but he would not any longer be in her power, and being free from it, he scarcely resented it, so strong was his relief. mr. palmer, he knew, had designed to make some settlement of money on him; what it was to be he did not yet know, but the fact that this had been deducted from it prevented his feeling that he had come by the money in any crooked fashion. as it was, a certain payment to be made to him had been partly anticipated, and he looked forward to paying his blackmail almost with eagerness. he made an appointment by telegraph with bilton for the next morning, and at the hour waited on him at his office in pall mall. he had always rather liked the man; his practical shrewdness, the entire absence of what might be called 'nonsense' about him, a certain hard, definite clearness about him and his ways, was somehow satisfactory to the mind. and this morning these characteristics were peculiarly developed. he gave bertie a blunt and genuine welcome. 'delighted to see you,' he said. 'just come over, haven't you? smoke?' bertie took a cigarette. 'i've called about some business connected with mrs. emsworth,' he said. 'i am here to settle it.' bilton looked puzzled a moment. 'mrs. emsworth?' he said. 'business with mrs. emsworth? ah, i remember. she sent me certain instructions some time ago. let's see; where did i put them?' he took down an alphabetical letter-case from a shelf, and after a short search drew out a packet. 'that's it,' he said. 'ah, i see there is no discussion to pass between us. curious love of mystery a woman has, especially when there is nothing to make a mystery about, as i dare say is the case here.' 'you don't know what the business is?' asked bertie. 'i only know these instructions, and one of them, if you will pardon me reminding you, is that no discussion is to pass between us. you are to deliver to me a cheque, which i am to place to her account, and i am to deliver to you a sealed packet. this is it, is it not? yes. you are also to deliver to me a certain letter which i am to verify, and then destroy in your presence.' 'i heard nothing of that,' said bertie. 'it is in my instructions,' said bilton. 'i can't give up that letter,' said bertie. 'it----' he stopped. bilton got up. 'i am afraid i can do nothing, then,' he said, 'except fulfil the rest of mrs. emsworth's directions, and, if this is not done by the evening of january , to-day, give the packet to mr. palmer.' he referred again to one of the papers he had taken out. 'yes, give the packet to mr. palmer,' he repeated. 'which you intend to do?' bertie asked. 'certainly. at the same time, i may tell you that i have written a very strong letter to mrs. emsworth, protesting against her making use of me in--in private matters of this kind. i am a busy man'--and he looked at his watch--'i have no taste for other people's intrigues.' bertie thought intently for a moment. if he gave up the letter, he would be powerless in the future to prove anything with regard to the blackmail. the fact that he had drawn a cheque for £ , to bilton was in itself nothing to show that he had done so under threats, especially if, as it suddenly occurred to him, bilton was, if not in league with mrs. emsworth, at any rate cognizant of her action. on the other hand, if he refused, he had to risk that letter of his being sent to mr. palmer. he had been unable to face that risk before, and it was as unfaceable now. but the idea that bilton was concerned in this was interesting. it had been suggested by the slight over-emphasizing of the fact that he was busy, by the looking at his watch. that was, however vaguely, threatening; it implied time was short, or that he himself was concerned in bertie's acceptation of the ultimatum. bilton sat down again and tapped with his fingers on the table. 'excuse me, lord keynes,' he said, 'but no purpose is served by our sitting here like this. you will, of course, please yourself in this matter. here is the packet for you if you decide one way; there is the letter-box if you decide the other.' the speech was well-chosen, and left no room for doubt in bertie's mind that the letter-box would be used. he took the desired document from his pocket. 'here is the cheque,' he said, 'and here is the letter. the latter, you say, you are going to verify. i, on my side, i suppose, may verify what you give me.' bilton appeared to consider this for a moment. 'there was nothing said about that,' he remarked, 'but i feel certain that the lady would be willing to let you receive proof of her honourable dealing with you.' 'did you say honourable dealing?' asked bertie in a tone which required no answer. bilton opened the letter bertie gave him, referred to a paper out of the alphabetical case, looked at the cheque, and handed him the packet. bertie glanced at it, saw enough, and put it in his pocket. 'that's correct, then,' said bilton. bertie rose. 'next time you see mrs. emsworth, pray congratulate her for me,' he said. 'she has missed her vocation by going on the stage.' 'i am inclined to disagree with you,' said bilton. 'it has developed her sense of plot. must you be going? good-bye. i suppose you are off to america again in a month. you may meet her there.' 'that is not possible,' said bertie. bilton's smile which sped the parting guest did not at once fade when the guest had gone. it remained, a smile of amusement, on his face for a considerable time. 'god, what a fool!' he permitted himself to remark as he settled down to his work again. chapter xiii some three weeks after this ginger was occupying the whole of the most comfortable sofa in the rooms of his father occupied by bertie, and was conversing to him in his usual amiable manner. the rooms wore the look of those belonging to a man shortly to take a journey; there were packets and parcels lying about, a bag gaped open-mouthed on a chair, and bertie himself was sorting and tearing up papers at a desk, listening with half an ear to the equable flow of ginger's conversation. he had a good deal to say, and a good deal to ask about, but, with the instinct of the skilled conversationalist, he did not bring out his news in spate, nor ask a succession of questions, but ambled easily, so to speak, up and down the lanes and byways of intercourse, only occasionally emerging on to the highroads. 'it may appear odd,' he was just saying, 'but i never was in these rooms before. gallio has never asked me here. i am glad to see that he appears to make himself fairly comfortable. i suppose he is at monte carlo still. heard from him, bertie?' 'yes, a letter of extreme approbation at my marriage, and a regret that he will be unable to visit america for it. also a cheque for £ as a wedding-present. out of his hardly lost losings, he says.' 'gallio's in funds now, or was till he went to monte carlo,' remarked ginger. 'he got two hundred thousand for the sale of molesworth. but he has to settle half of it on you, doesn't he? and where do i come in?' 'you don't, i'm afraid.' 'i think gallio made a very good bargain,' said ginger; 'but i think it remains to be seen whether mr. palmer didn't make a better.' 'how's that?' 'whether, with his american spirit of enterprise, he won't begin digging for the fabulous coal which was supposed to exist.' bertie looked up. 'turn molesworth into a colliery? he won't find it very easy. you see, he has settled it on amelie, or, rather, is going to on our marriage.' 'by gad! he does things in style,' said ginger. 'and you think amelie would not allow it?' 'i think she would attach some weight to my wishes.' 'do you feel strongly about it? i thought you were rather in favour of its being done when it was spoken of before.' 'i know; there was an awful need of money. it is a necessity before which sentiment must give way. but now there is not. and my sentiment is rather strong. after all, it has been ours a good long time; and now we can afford to keep the coal underfoot, if it is there at all. besides, do you know for certain that he has any thought of it?' 'no; bilton put it into my head,' said ginger. 'he hinted that mr. palmer had made a good bargain. he seemed rather elated at something, so i did not question him further. i don't like elated people. i suppose he had made some good bargain, or done somebody in the eye; that is the american idea of humour. he went off to davos the other day.' bertie again looked up. 'hasn't he realized the fruitlessness of that yet?' he asked. 'sybil refused him point-blank, i know; and really, when she follows that up by going out to davos to coax charlie back to life, you would have thought that a third party was not--well, exactly of the party.' 'sybil is an enigma,' said ginger. 'she went to america in the autumn with the avowed intention of getting married, with bilton indicated. she comes back in a scurry, refuses him, and instantly constitutes herself life-preserver to charlie, whom she had also refused. what is she playing at? that's what i want to know.' bertie took up a quantity of waste-papers, and thrust them down into the basket. 'she's not playing at anything just now,' he said. 'she's just being a human woman, trying to save the life of a friend. judy talked to me about it. the only interest in life to charlie was she, and she is trying to get him to take an interest in life that isn't her!' 'that will require some delicacy of touch,' remarked ginger. 'it will. she has it--whether enough remains to be seen. charlie had one foot in the grave when she came back, i'm told; she has taken that out, anyhow.' 'but does she mean to marry him?' asked ginger. 'i can't believe she will succeed in getting him back to life without, anyhow, holding that out as a prospect.' 'it's really a delicate position,' said bertie; 'and it is made more interesting by the fact that physically charlie is so like bilton. in other respects,' he added, 'they are remarkably dissimilar.' 'do you like him?' 'no; i have got an awful distaste for him. why i don't quite know. that rather accentuates it.' ginger sat up from his reclining attitude. 'bertie, i'm awfully interested in one thing, and i haven't seen you since you came back,' he said. 'was there any--well, any difficulty with dorothy emsworth?' bertie paused in his labours, divided in his mind as to whether he should tell ginger or not. he had a great opinion of his shrewdness, but, having himself managed his crisis, paid up, and got back the letter, he did not consider that there was any need for advice or counsel from anybody. so he decided not to tell him. 'she was quite friendly in america,' he said; 'i saw her several times; she even stayed down at port washington.' ginger, as has been seen, was immensely interested in other people's affairs, having none, as he said, of his own which could possibly interest anybody. on this occasion he could not quite stifle his curiosity. 'i remember you telling me that you once wrote her a very--very friendly letter,' he said. 'certainly. it is in my possession now. i keep it as an interesting memento.' ginger shuddered slightly. 'i should as soon think of keeping a corpse,' he said. 'burn it. she's rather a brick to have given it you back, though. sort of wedding-present?' 'yes, a valuable one.' 'does she still carry on with bilton?' asked ginger. 'i don't know.' 'well, i hope she didn't show it him before she returned it,' said the other. january in london, with few exceptions, had been a month of raw and foggy days--days that were bitter cold, with the coldness of a damp cloth, and stuffy with the airlessness of that which a damp cloth covers. far otherwise was it at davos, where morning after morning, after nights of still, intense cold, the sun rose over the snow-covered hills, and flamed like a golden giant, rejoicing in his strength, through the arc of crystalline blue. much snow had fallen in december, but when the fall was past, the triumphant serenity of the brilliant climate reasserted itself. the pines above the long, one-streeted village had long ago shaken themselves clear of their covering, and stood out like large black holes burned in the hillside of white. day after day the divine windlessness of the high alpine valley had communicated something of its briskness to those fortunate enough to be there, and the exhilaration of the atmosphere seemed to percolate into minds of not more than ordinary vivacity. the village itself lies on a gentle down gradient of road, some mile in length, where alpine chalets jostle with huge modern hotels. below lies the puffy little railway which climbs through the pinewoods above the town, and communicates in many loops and detours with the larger routes; and straight underneath the centre of the village is the skating-rink, where happy folk all day slide with set purpose on the elusive material, and with great content perform mystic evolutions of the most complicated order. others, by the aid of the puffy railway, mount to the top of the hills above the town, and spend enraptured days in sliding down again on toboggans to the village of klosters. motion, in fact, of any other sort than that of walking is the aim and object of davos life--an instinct dictated and rendered necessary by the keen exhilaration of the air. at no other place in the world, perhaps, is the sluggard so goaded to physical activity; at no other, perhaps, is the active brain so lulled or intoxicated into quiescence. it lies, in fact, basking and smiling, while the rejuvenated body, free from the low and cramping effects of thought, goes rejoicing on its way. charlie, by reason of his malady, had been debarred from taking either much or violent exercise; he had been told to be out always and to be idle usually. this he found extremely easy, for his mother was there to be idle with him, and sybil was there to furnish entertainment for both. with her usual decision and eye for fitness, she had seen at once that for the present there was only one thing in the world worth doing--namely, skating. she skated extremely badly, but with an enjoyment that was almost pathetic, in consideration of the persistence of 'frequent fall.' thus, morning after morning, she, setting out at earlier hours, would be followed down to the rink by charlie and his mother, where they would lunch together, returning to the hotel before dark fell for the cosy brightness of the long winter evenings. mrs. brancepeth was a widow, cultivated, intelligent, and gifted with a discernment that was at times really rather awkward to herself, though never to those to whom she applied it, since she never used what her intuition had enabled her to see, to their discomfort. this gift put her into very accurate possession of the state of affairs between charlie and sybil; it was clear to her, that is to say, that sybil was wiling him back into the desire to live, waking his dormant interests, as if by oft-repeated little electric shocks of her own vitality, charming him back into life. she knew, of course, the state of her son's feelings towards sybil, and did her the justice of allowing that, not byword or look, direct or indirect, did she ever hold herself out as the prize for which life was worth living. indeed, mrs. brancepeth admired with all the highly-developed power of appreciation that was in her the constant effacement of herself which sybil practised--effacement, that is, of the personal element, while by all healthy and impersonal channels she tried to rekindle his love for life. whatever was--so sybil's gospel appeared to run--was worth attention. her own falls on the ice were matters for amused comment; the outside edge was _per se_ a thing of beauty; the stately march of the sun was enough to turn one parsee. enthusiastic, vitally active as sybil always had been, it required less penetration than mrs. brancepeth possessed to see that her amazing flood of vitality was deliberately outpoured for the sake of charlie. this was the more evident to her by the fact that sybil, when alone with her, subsided, sank into herself, and rested from an effort. at times, indeed, when charlie was not there, she was almost peevish, which, in a woman of equable temper, is a sure sign of some overtaxed function. such an instance occurred, so mrs. brancepeth thought, on an evening shortly before bilton arrived at davos. in the six weeks that they had now spent there, the elder woman had got to know the younger very well, to like her immensely, and to respect, with almost a sense of awe, the extreme cleverness with which she managed her affair. the 'affair' was briefly, to her mind, to make charlie take a normal interest in life again, without exciting an abnormal interest in herself--to transfer his affection, in fact, from herself to life. they had dined together that evening at their small table at the beau site, and sybil had traced loops on the tablecloth with a wineglass, and sketched threes and brackets to a centre with the prong of a fork. 'yes, it sounds silly,' she said, 'but it is the most fascinating thing in the world to try to do anything which you at present believe yourself incapable of doing. i have no eye for colour at all, therefore two years ago i took violently, as charlie remembers, to painting. i have no eye for balance, therefore now i spend my day in trying to execute complicated movements which depend entirely on it.' charlie's eye lit up. 'the quest of the impossible,' he said. 'how i sympathize!' this 'was direct enough; with returning health he had got far greater directness. mrs. brancepeth waited for sybil's reply; it came as direct as his. 'oh, charlie, you always confuse things,' she said. 'you do not mean the quest of the impossible, but the quest of the improbable. the quest of the improbable is the secret of our striving. anyone can grasp the impossible; it is merely an affair of the imagination. i can amuse myself by planning out what my life would be if i were a man. what i cannot do is to plan out for myself a successful career as a woman.' 'surely you have plans enough,' said mrs. brancepeth. 'no, no plans,' said sybil--' desires merely. i have lots of desires. one is control of the outside edge; that is unrealized. dear charlie, you look so well this evening; that is another of my plans. it is getting on.' 'he gained two pounds last week,' said his mother. 'how nice! i lost a hundred, because i speculated on the stock exchange. it sounds rather grand to speculate, but it wasn't at all grand. what happened was that a pleasant young gentleman here, whose name i don't know, said two days ago to me, "buy east rands." i bought a hundred. they went down a point. i sold. but i bought many emotions with my hundred pounds. one was that one could get interested in anything, whether one knew what it was or not, as long as one put money into it. and if money interests you, surely anything else will.' this, too--so mrs. brancepeth interpreted it--was a successful red herring drawn across the path. charlie appeared equally interested. 'ah, you are wrong there, sybil,' he said. 'money _in excelsis_ must be the most interesting thing in the world; there is nothing it cannot do.' 'oh, it can do everything that is not worth doing,' interrupted sybil; 'i grant that.' 'and most things that are,' he continued. 'for, except content, which it will not bring you, there is nothing which is not in its sphere.' 'toothache,' said sybil promptly. 'i had three minutes' toothache yesterday, and was miserable.' 'painless extraction.' 'but not the courage for extraction,' said she. 'i always think that extraction is at the root of it. one can get along all right with what one has not got; what one cannot do is to part with something that one has which gives pain.' mrs. brancepeth tapped with the handle of her fork on the table. 'this is irrelevant,' she said; 'the question before the house is the power of money.' 'dear mrs. brancepeth,' said sybil, 'please don't let us discuss; let us babble. "in a little while our lips are dumb," as some depressing poet says. poets are so often depressing.' 'sybil is the most prosaic poet i know,' said charlie. 'she casts her thought really in the mould of poetry, and before it is cold she hammers it to prose. she is the only person i know who has the romantic temperament and is ashamed of it.' 'not ashamed of it,' cried she; 'but it is not current coin. i hammer the metal into currency. and he calls me prosaic.' the ice was thin here, so thought mrs. brancepeth. 'everyone has the same difficulty,' she said. 'one has either to hammer one's poetry into prose before it is current or trick out one's prose into poetry. the raw product of any of us--that is what it comes to--does not pass.' 'ah, but what is the raw product?' said charlie. 'if one knew, one would use it. but no one knows about himself. "know thyself"--the first of mottoes, and, like all mottoes, impossible to act upon.' 'if you know other people, it is a good working basis about one's self,' said sybil; 'one is very average--that is the important thing to remember.' 'but if everybody is average, why does a single out b?' asked charlie. 'why not c or d, up to z?' sybil finished her pudding. 'i don't know,' she said. 'probably because b comes first--is next to a. about money--of course it will not give you content. content is a matter of temperament. but it will give you the power to gratify any taste; and, considering how many beautiful things there are in the world, it is a confession of idiocy or of want of taste, which is the same thing, not to be able to be absorbed in some one of them.' 'that is quite true,' said mrs. brancepeth; 'and it matters hardly at all what one is absorbed in so long as one is absorbed. charlie responded to this. 'and one's power of absorption depends almost entirely on health,' said he. the evening post came in on this, and not long after charlie went upstairs to answer certain letters which had come for him, leaving the other two together. since the arrival of the post, sybil had become very silent and preoccupied; one letter, in fact, she read three times over, with silent frownings between each perusal. at length she rose, took a turn or two up the room, and spoke. 'i have had disquieting news,' she said; 'and i want advice.' 'do tell me, dear,' said mrs. brancepeth. 'i will do my best.' 'i don't know if you know mr. bilton,' she said. 'i have just heard from him; he is starting to-morrow for davos.' 'charlie has mentioned him,' said the other. 'you know who he is, then,' said sybil. 'shortly before i left england he proposed to me. i refused him. i don't want him to come here; but how is it possible for me to stop him?' she faced about, and stood opposite the elder woman. 'what am i to do?' she asked. 'he is strong, masterful; i am afraid of him, and it will take a great deal of nervous force out of me. now, i can't spare that.' she paused a moment. 'perhaps i had better say straight out what i mean,' she said. 'i am having rather a hard time as it is; that i take on myself very willingly. but every day leaves me more and more tired when the need for playing up is over. but it is worth it: i should be a very feeble creature if i did not feel that. because he is getting better, is he not?' mrs. brancepeth laid her hand on sybil. 'every day i thank god for what you are doing,' she said, 'and i thank you; but--but i suppose i have been more sanguine than i should. is there no chance for charlie?' sybil threw her arms out with a hopeless gesture. 'i don't know--literally i don't know. i like him so much that i can't offer him only liking; and i don't know that i have anything more to offer him. it is all very difficult. i don't suppose there is a woman in the world who knows herself so badly as i do. and i used to think i was so decisive, so clear cut. what is happening to me?' mrs. brancepeth looked at her with a wonderful tenderness and pity. she had often noticed how completely she was in the clutch of her temperament, how the mood of the moment completely blotted out all other landmarks and guiding-posts which experience from without and her own character from within might have been supposed to be of some directing value in perplexities. but it was not so with her; in such things she was a child, ruled by the impulse--not led by the reason, nor steered by any formed character. with her the present moment so blotted out the past that all precedents, all warnings, all points which ninety-nine grown-up people out of a hundred have to help their decisions, were with her simply non-existent. if the present moment was pleasant, she abandoned herself to childish delight; if perplexing, she was the prey of in-soluble doubts. she had a passion for analysis, but her analysis, brilliant as it often was, was as fruitless as the japanese cherry. it was the process of thought which she loved to dissect, and having dissected it, she threw it away. all this mrs. brancepeth saw--saw, too, that sybil's was a nature to which it was no use to preach principles; the practical dealing with the concrete instance was all that could help her. 'tell me more about mr. bilton,' she said. 'he is dominating,' said sybil. 'i was greatly attracted by him. then he did something disgusting, or so i thought it, and i was disillusioned. i even began to dislike him. but he has force, and it will need force on my part to fight him. what will the result be? i shall have less force to fight charlie's microbes for him.' 'yes, that is what you are doing,' said mrs. brancepeth softly. 'and even here, even when i see most clearly how much better he is getting, i ask myself whether i am doing wisely or not,' continued sybil. 'what will the end be? is he filled with certain hopes which i cannot say will ever be realized? and what if he is disappointed of them?' there was no reply, and after a minute she went on. 'mr. bilton will arrive in two days,' she said; 'he will come to this hotel. it is impossible for me to cut him, not to recognise him. he is quite extraordinarily like charlie, by the way. i must speak to him when he speaks to me. i must behave decently. and i know--oh, how well i know it!--he will interest me again. i shall be forced to be interested. there is that about him--some force, some relentless sort of machinery that goes grinding on, pulverizing what gets in its way.' mrs. brancepeth rose. 'now, dear, be quiet,' she said. 'you are working yourself up about it. don't do that. don't whip up your imagination on the subject. you take things too vividly.' sybil smiled rather hopelessly. 'that does not help matters,' she said; 'some people take them not vividly enough. i am myself, you are yourself; the broad lines of each of us are inexorably laid down for us. all we can do is not to make a very shocking mess of them. we are all unsatisfactory. no, i don't think you are; you are very nice and restful. now, what am i to do--not about bilton, i mean, but now this minute. that is always so important.' mrs. brancepeth laughed. 'and that is so like you,' she said. 'go to bed, dear, and dream as vividly as you can of the outside edge.' bilton arrived two days afterwards, and, as was quite natural, paid a call on his friends before dinner in their sitting-room. as chance would have it, neither charlie nor his mother were in, and he found sybil alone. she rose and shook hands with him as he entered, but gave him no smile. 'i was surprised to get your letter,' she said; 'i thought you were too busy to come out to this very idle place.' 'i chose it for its idleness,' he said. 'i was very tired, and i have a busy time ahead of me again. it is economical to spend a fortnight in complete idleness rather than let your work suffer for a year.' he paused a moment. 'that was my excuse,' he said; 'i had also a reason.' sybil felt a sudden anger with him, which flared up and died down again as he went on. 'i am glad to find you alone,' he said, 'because i wanted to see you. i had to see you; i was thirsty for the sight of you. but do not be afraid; i shall not make myself importunate; i shall say nothing to offend you; i shall not entreat you by word or look. i just wanted--wanted to see you: that is all.' he spoke rather low, and rather more slowly than his wont; but next moment he resumed the ordinary tone of his speech. 'i came here a couple of years ago,' said he; 'and i carried away with me an extraordinary sense of coolness and rest. i think one's brain goes to sleep here. we americans need that; we have awful insomnia of the brain. i want to go sliding on a silly sledge down a steep place; i want to fall about on skates, and not read the paper.' sybil laughed; there had been a certain modesty and good taste in his first speech that had rather touched her, and from that he had gone straight to ordinary converse. the assurance of the harmlessness of his intentions seemed to her very genuine. as a matter of fact, it was profoundly calculated, and produced just the effect he wanted; for he particularly desired to be admitted without embarrassment or delay into the others' party. to charlie's mind, this addition--for though bilton never seemed to intrude himself, yet he usually was there--was nothing more at first than a slight nuisance. more than that, it could not be called, since he knew of sybil's complete and final rejection of bilton as a lover, and it was not consonant with the sweetness of his own nature to be rendered jealous and exacting about her friends. but by degrees--so gradual that he could not notice the growth of the feeling, but only register the fact that it had grown--he became aware of uneasiness of mind, which, as it increased, diminished from the great content in which he had passed the earlier weeks of their stay at davos. also he began to realize that in the shade of his mind there had grown up unconsciously a hope--or, if not a hope, the possibility of the hope--that he himself might find in her some day more than a friend. he had often asked himself before whether he still cherished and watered the tender seedling, and as often he had honestly told himself that he did not. but bilton's coming, and the terms he was on with sybil, cast a light into his own dark places, and he knew that that hops was still not rooted up from his mind. and, realizing this, he realized how vital such a hope was to him. sybil, too, during the ten days following bilton's arrival, had insensibly changed in her attitude towards him. having definitely decided that he should not be her lover, she speedily began to find in him excellences as a friend which she had scarcely realized before. as a lover, she had found him wanting; a certain coarseness of nature in him prevented her from receiving him on that footing. but once off that ground, this coarseness almost ceased to offend her; at any rate, transferred on to the less intimate plane, it ranked a 'minus' of the same calibre as one of his numerous 'pluses.' among these, his practical qualities greatly appealed to her--his quickness at grasping the salient points of any question; his very firm hold on concrete affairs, from the quickest and securest way of tying a bootlace to his lucid exposition of american finance, as typified in that napoleon, lewis palmer, or his knowledge in his own business of what constituted a play that would draw. on a hundred occasions every day she had some exhibition of this brought to her notice; in whatever he did or said he showed efficiency. that quality, as she had settled, was not one to be loved, but socially she delighted in it. moreover, the force she had feared seemed to be in abeyance. he made no demands on her nervous energies that she recognised as demands. now, love, though proverbially blind, is often very prone to see something which has no existence whatever, and before long charlie began to conjure up a very complete phantom, which would have done credit to a much finer imagination than he really possessed, had not he viewed the situation through the eyes of a lover, to whose vision all is intensified. he saw, what was true, that sybil listened with very genuine interest to what bilton had to say; he saw her an eager pupil of that excellent skater; he saw, if some expedition was projected, that she left all the arrangements of sleighs and food in his hands. to the unbiassed observer nothing could have been more natural, for he talked well on subjects that interested her, he gave her valuable aid towards accomplishing the elusive outside back edge, and his arrangements in expeditions were admirable; for sleighs were punctual, and nothing was forgotten out of the luncheon-basket. but charlie was not unbiassed, and the conclusions that slowly and silently formed themselves in his mind were both untrue in the abstract and in the concrete unjust to her. he was still sufficiently young to have an attack of childishness, and he was quite sufficiently in love with her to be a prey to jealousy. the second week of bilton's stay had passed, and still he dropped no hint about his imminent return, and on this particular morning, after a rather worried week, rendered not more easy because he kept his worries strictly to himself, charlie had just returned rather gloomily from a visit to his doctor. during the last ten days he had gone down a little in weight, and, though the doctor would have preferred it otherwise, he reminded him that he must have ups and downs; no cure was uninterrupted progress. but this, piled on the top of his other cares, which were rendered harder to bear by a couple of days of south wind, instead of the cold purity of windlessness, unduly depressed him, and sybil, coming out of the hotel to the sheltered corner of the veranda which he usually occupied in the morning, found him somewhat listless and dejected. but, with tact which had often succeeded before, she affected not to notice it, and discoursed on indifferent subjects. 'such a bore!' she said. 'the road down the valley is too soft for sleighing, and the rink is too sloppy for skating.' charlie brightened up a little; he seemed to have seen much less of her lately. 'so you're going to have an idle day,' he said. 'sit and talk to me.' 'well, we are going out almost immediately,' she said, 'just to go down the schwester toboggan-run, which they say is still possible. i wish you could come, charlie, but there's no way of getting up except walking.' charlie instantly froze into himself. 'i'm afraid that's quite impossible,' he said. 'you're going with bilton, i suppose.' 'yes; i rather think he's waiting for me.' charlie registered to himself the fact that she had not asked for the doctor's report of him, though monday was his regular day for being overhauled. 'never keep people waiting,' he said, and opened a book. then his better disposition came to his aid. 'i hope it will be possible for you to get a good run,' he said cordially. 'it is horrid, this weather, is it not?' 'horrid--quite horrid!' she said. 'well, good-bye; your mother will be out directly.' he sat there after she had left him, with book open, but not reading. a pale, watery sun, instead of the golden monarch enthroned in cloudless blue, peered like a white plate through the clouds blown up by the south wind, and, instead of a dry and vivifying air, the atmosphere was loaded with moisture, the eaves dripped with the melting snow, and every now and then, with a whisper and a thud, some sheet would detach itself form a house-roof and plunge into the roadway below. instead of presenting an expanse of crystalline whiteness, the snow-fields were stained and yellowish to the eye; hideous corners of corrugated roofs showed where the coverlet of white had slipped; all the raw discomfort of a thaw was in the air. to charlie, both owing to his physical condition and his unspoken trouble, the heavy chilliness of the day was peculiarly oppressive; his mother also was detained indoors, and for an hour he was prey to the gloomiest reflections. it was all no use, so lie told himself; since october he had heartily tried with all his power both to get better and to recapture the normal joy of living. but now, as so often happened, he had begun to slip back again; next week no doubt would tell a further tale of hardly-earned ground lost, and week would follow week, and he would slip back and back. even if he pulled through, even if he became strong again, what was there in life for him worth recovering for? he had thought--deluded himself into thinking--that perhaps sybil might come to care for him, but with sudden bitter intuition he guessed that he was really no nearer winning her love than he had been before he had been taken ill. great compassion, the divine womanly instinct to help a man, had brought her out here; the improvement in his health, the successful combating of his disease, was due to that. but it was but a bitter gift she had brought him; it was as if she had brought him through some illness only to give him over to the hangman at the last. and she had not asked about the doctor's report. that seemed to him in his dis-ordered frame of mind to clinch the matter. instead she had gone off tobogganing with bilton. true, she had refused him in the autumn, but how many marriages have been prefaced by that? charlie shivered slightly, and looked about him for a rug, for the damp of the day made a man chilly, where the dryness of far greater cold would have been but warming and invigorating. but he had not brought one out, and, saying to himself that he would go in to fetch one in a minute, he still sat on, looking for a break in the clouds that encompassed him. but he could not find one; the taste had gone out of the world again. the schwester run had been in unexpectedly good order, and sybil did not get back to the hotel till late in the afternoon. the weather had cleared since noon, and about twilight the curtain of clouds had been dispersed, the south wind had ceased, and the splendid frosty stars again hung embroidered on the velvet of the night. instead of plunging through the snow, before they reached the hotel their footsteps went crisply on the crackly crust, and the steel runners of their trailing toboggans sang like tea-kettles as they slid over the re-frozen surface. already her spirits had been high, and, with the increased exhilaration of the air, they rose to nonsense point. 'climate, climate,' she was saying--'how is it that people worship money and brains and beauty, and never worship climate, which is the one thing in the world that matters? of course, you don't think that, because you live in new york, which is unbearable three-quarters of the year and intolerable the rest--isn't that it?--and get accustomed to doing without climate, just as you train oysters to live out of water until you are ready to eat them. but to me nothing but climate is really of any importance. i am so much better than when i came here; and i was quite well when i came,' she added. 'it seems to have suited charlie brancepeth very well,' said bilton. 'yes, he's much better; soon he'll be quite well. he gets more like you, mr. bilton, as he regains his health, every day. it really is very odd, because i don't suppose two people were ever so unlike in character. but the climate here has been good for your character as well as charlie's lungs.' 'have i improved? i'm delighted to hear it. i thought i was a hopeless case.' 'not at all--no more hopeless than charlie. you have developed a side your character which i hardly suspected you of having, and are beginning to take perfectly frivolous pursuits with great seriousness. you were much more annoyed at losing ten seconds to-day in that spill than you were at losing your cigarette-case.' 'i have been a pupil, that's all,' he said; 'i have been well taught since i have been here.' '_tanti complimenti_,' said she. 'really, when you came i was afraid you would be absorbed in telegrams and bargains and bulls and bears. but you have not; you have played very nicely. how much longer do you stop?' they had come to the hotel, and were passing the big squares of light cast by the hall windows. he dropped the rope of his toboggan as she asked this, and stopped to pick it up, looking her full in the face. 'i shall go when i am told,' he said--' not a day before.' she looked at him, and understood. it was the first personal word he had said to her since the little interview on her arrival, but it was so modest again, so self-obliterating, that it did not offend her with a sense that he had broken his word when he promised not to speak to her again on intimate subjects. it was sufficient to remind him of it very gently, just to cool him off, so to speak. 'we should all miss you, i am sure,' she said. charlie did not appear at dinner that evening. he had caught a little chill, it appeared, in the morning, and had gone to bed in a good deal of discomfort, with a somewhat high temperature. mrs. brancepeth, though she would not confess to any anxiety, yet felt anxious, and as soon as dinner was over went off to see how he was. she came back before many minutes were over, and signalled to sybil across the salon, who got up at once and followed her. 'is there anything wrong?' she asked. 'yes; i have asked dr. thaxter to come and see him. his temperature has risen again. but he asked me if he could see you for a moment; i wish you would go. he is very restless, and i think you might quiet him; for you know,' she said, looking at her, 'i think you can do more for him than any doctor.' sybil stood there a minute, biting her lip. she had a physical repulsion to illness, which, though it shocked her that she should feel it, yet dominated her. since she had taken charlie in hand, she had had daily to wrestle with it, and though, owing to his very satisfactory progress, it had become easier to overcome, yet it was always there. but she decided almost immediately. 'yes, i will go,' she said, then paused. 'does he look terrible? will it shock me?' she asked. mrs. brancepeth's eyes lit up with a momentary indignation. 'ah, what does that matter?' she exclaimed involuntarily. 'no, dear, i did not mean to say that. i know your horror of illness. but go to him; it will not shock you. he is looking rather flushed; his eyes are very bright.' she took sybil's hands in hers. 'oh, make him better, make him better!' she said; 'make him want to live!' entreaty vibrated in her voice, and her hands trembled. sybil felt immensely sorry for her, and her sorrow overcame her repugnance at what lay before her. her horror for illness was of the same character as a child's fear of the dark--unreasonable, but overmastering. but in the presence of this mother's anxiety it was conquered for the moment. 'i will do what i can,' she said--' i will do what i honestly can. are you coming with me?' 'no; he wants to see you alone.' and, as she spoke, a sudden pang of jealousy and rebellion struck her. why should she who would give her life for him with thankful willingness be powerless to help him, while half that love from another woman might prove so efficacious, could she but exert its strength? but next moment that was gone; no other thought but the mother's yearning for her son was there. sybil went from her up the passage to charlie's room, and entered softly. at that moment, hearing perhaps the rustle of her dress, he turned his head on his pillow, and looked towards the door, and in dead silence for a moment their eyes met. his face was very much flushed; his eyes, as his mother had said, were very bright, but bright with the burning of fever; and the indescribable sharpness and hardness of feature that comes with illness was there. but as sybil looked, no horror was hers, and no shrinking. all she knew was that a man, suffering and ill, lay there--a man to whom she was the reason of living and the sun of life; a man whom she had known long, liked always, loved never. in his eyes there burned not only fever, but, as he saw her, the unquenchable light of love in all its dumb faithfulness. she had seen it often before, and had rejected it, but now it smote upon her heart. something within her melted; and as a butterfly cracks its chrysalis, and emerges weak, hardly yet conscious of the new life, of the iridescence of its own wings, of the sunlight which till now has been hidden from it by that sheath of its shell, so something new trembled on the threshold of her heart--pity--which knew not yet that with which it was entwined. and with the waking of herself within her came the knowledge of what to do and say intuitively, because she was at last a woman. she came quickly across the room, smiling at him. 'charlie, charlie, this will never do,' she said. 'i leave you alone for one day, and you instantly behave naughtily like this. i am ashamed of you.' 'sybil, it is good of you to come and see me,' he said; 'i wanted to see you so much.' then the inevitable querulousness of illness mastered him. 'oh, i am so uncomfortable,' he said--' so hot and feverish.' and he flung-his arm outside the bedclothes. 'poor old charlie!' she said; 'poor old fellow! it is a bore. now, put that arm back at once. there. now, you are not going to talk to me now, but i am going to make you ever so much more comfortable, put the pillow for you so, and you are going to see the doctor, and then you are going to sleep. headache? poor old boy! and i shall sit here and talk to you till the doctor comes.' she drew a chair to the bedside, and he turned more over in bed so that he looked directly at her. 'oh, i'm ill, i'm ill,' he said; 'and it was quite my own fault. i sat outside this morning without a rug, and i knew i was catching a chill. and i didn't care. you see, you didn't care. you never asked me what the doctor's report was this morning, and i--i determined not to care either. i am sorry; i shouldn't have said that.' sybil's hand trembled as she arranged the bedclothes, which he had thrown off. 'i was a brute,' said she, 'and----' she paused. 'charlie, you must get well,' she cried suddenly. he lay quite still a moment, with breath coming quickly. 'you said that as if you cared,' he said. chapter xiv the marriage of bertie keynes and amelie was to be celebrated at new york towards the end of february, and bade fair to be the _comble_ up to date (not even excepting the famous pearl fishery) of mrs. palmer's social successes. it was to take place in st. luke's church, fifth avenue, and for days beforehand the ordinary services had been altogether suspended, because the church had to be made fit to be the theatre of the ceremony, and a perfect army of furniture-men, upholsterers, carpenters, and plumbers occupied it. the ordinary square-backed wooden pews were removed from the body of the church, which was carpeted from wall to wall with purple felt, and rows of _fauteuils_ in scarlet morocco, like the stalls of an opera-house, occupied their places. to complete the resemblance, each chair was marked with its particular number in its own row, and the occupants, who gave up their tickets at the church door, retaining only the tallies, were shown to their places, where they found in each chair a copy of the service printed on vellum and bound by riviere, by scarlet-coated footmen. similarly, the free seats in the gallery were cleared out in order to make room for the very magnificent orchestra, which beguiled the hours of waiting for the guests with inspiriting and purely secular pieces, and during the choral part of the service accompanied the choir. in front of the altar, where the actual ceremony would take place, there had been constructed, hanging from the roof, an immense bell-shaped frame made of wood and canvas, which was completely covered inside and out with white flowers, and reached from side to side of what the reporters called the sacred edifice. it had been quite impossible, even for mrs. palmer, to procure at this time of year sufficient real flowers, and, as a matter of fact, they were largely artificial, like everything else. round the edge of this large bell, suspended by invisible wires, but appearing to float in the air, were life-size baby figures of _amorini_, made of wood and beautifully tinted, winged, and almost completely nude, who discharged gilded arrows from their gilded bows towards the pair who were to stand in the centre of the bell. numbers of others peeped from the banks of flowers that lined the walls, all aiming in the same direction, so that the bridegroom, one would have thought, might reasonably compare himself to a modern st. sebastian. framed in these banks of flowers also were several pictures belonging to lewis palmer, all bearing on what might be called classical matrimony: a titian of europa and the bull, a veronese of bacchus and ariadne, and a more than doubtful rubens of leda and the swan. gilded harps twined with flowers leaned about in odd corners, and the general impression was that one had come, not into a church, but, by some deplorable mistake, into the venusberg as depicted in the first act of 'tannhauser.' the ceremony, of course, had been many times rehearsed, and for days beforehand the dummy bridegroom's procession had crossed fifth avenue (the house exactly opposite was to be bertie's domicile for the night preceding the marriage), and taken up its position, chalked out, at the church door. that event was signalled to the _chef d'orchestre_ in the gallery, who was thereupon to begin the mendelssohn wedding-march, and to the bride's procession, which was to start at the same moment from mr. lewis palmer's house four blocks off. this, proceeding at walking speed, should reach the church door exactly at the conclusion of the wedding-march, whereupon the two processions, dummy-bertie attended by his usher, dummy-amelie by her bridesmaids, moved up the church to right and left of the bell, at such a pace that the voice which breathed o'er eden ceased breathing as they reached their places. then--this was a startling innovation--mr. and mrs. palmer, arm in arm, were to have an unattended progress up the aisle to two very suitable golden chairs, which at this moment would be the only unoccupied places in the church, while the choir in their honour were to sing a short hymn specially written for the occasion, and addressed to them, beginning: 'blessed parents here who see this bright hour arriving.' then the bride and bridegroom took their places under the bell, and the service proceeded in the usual manner. one rehearsal was rudely interrupted by the fall of one of the wooden _amorini_ at this point, which narrowly missed the dummy-bridegroom's head, and fell with a loud crash, splintering itself into match-wood on, the floor of the chancel. so another one was procured, and they were all more securely wired. immense baskets of white flowers were to be carried by the bridesmaids, which they were to strew in the path of the bride both as she entered and left the church with her husband; and from the belfry outside, as they emerged, a shower of sham satin slippers with little parachute wings, so that they should float in the air and sink very gradually on to the heads of the amazed crowd, was to be discharged. these had been tested privately, and were not used in the rehearsals. bertie had arrived in new york some fortnight before the marriage, leaving mr. palmer, who was very much occupied, in england, to follow a week later. wedding-presents for both of them had begun arriving, and were still doing so in shoals, and every day he was occupied for several hours in writing letters of gratitude. he soon got a certain facility at this, but one morning there arrived for him a present which astonished him. the present itself was a charming dressing-bag (there was nothing surprising in this, for it was the eleventh he had received), and the donor was mrs. emsworth. she wrote with it a characteristic little note, saying that she was unable to come to the ceremony, as she was at chicago, and begging him to forget her and not acknowledge the gift. she was making a great success with her tour, and was getting quite rich. considering what had happened, this seemed to him one of the most superb pieces of impertinence ever perpetrated. 'she was getting quite rich!' quite so; she had made a considerable sum lately apart from her theatrical business; she could well afford to give him a dressing-bag. but the impertinence of it, the irresistible impertinence! how like the _gamin_ who puts his tongue in his cheek and says 'yah!' he almost laughed when he thought of it. but the laughter died at the memory of those sickening hours in london on the day he had received the blackmailing letter, and in a sudden spasm of anger against her, not pausing to consider whether it was wise or not, he gave orders that the bag should be packed up again and sent back to her at chicago, without word of any kind. she would understand quite well. this incident, small though it was in itself, served to increase a certain depression and uneasiness that beset him during this fortnight. the appalling apparatus and dis-play which was to be made over the wedding was intolerable to him; never before, as he read and re-read the instructions which had been sent him as to the timing of his own movements in what he mentally termed 'the show,' had the huge, preposterous vulgarity of the american mind fully struck him. the thought of what his wedding-day would be like was unfaceable, and the unextinguishable mirth of ginger, who had come over as his best man, was not consoling. 'here the bridegroom, crowned with garlands and ribands, shall be led underneath the largest _amorino_, which at a given signal shall descend upon his head, while the orchestra plays the dead march from "saul,"' had been his comment when the accident in rehearsal happened, and bertie, though he laughed, groaned inwardly. all this, however, was, as he recognised, but a temporary worry, and did not seriously affect him. more intimately disquieting was the perpetual sense of his nerves being jarred by the voices, manners, aims, mode of looking at life of the society into which he was to marry. not for a moment did he even hint to himself that his manner of living and conducting himself, traditional to him, english, was in the smallest degree better or wiser than the manner of living and conducting themselves practised by these people, traditional (though less so) to them, american. only there was an enormous difference, which had been seen by him in the autumn and dismissed as unessential, since it concerned only their manners, and had nothing to do with their immense kindliness of heart, which he never doubted or questioned for a moment. what he questioned now was whether manners did not spring, after all, from something which might be essential, something, the lack of which in one case, the presence of it in another, might make you find a man or a woman tolerable or intolerable if brought into continuous contact. he was going to marry this charming american girl, whose friends, interests, companions, pursuits, were american. it was reasonable and natural for her--indeed, it would have shown a certain heartlessness had it not been so--that she should wish to continue to be in touch with her friends and interests. for no human being can be plucked up, like a plant, and have its roots buried in an alien soil; transplant it without a lump of its own earth, and it will infallibly wither. nor had bertie the least intention of making the attempt to transplant her like that. all along he had known that the american invasion would come to his house; he no more expected amelie to give up her american _milieu_ than she would have expected him to give up his english _milieu._ indeed, when mr. palmer had presented him with a charming little _bijou_ flat in new york, he had accepted the implication that he would pay from time to time a visit there with the same unquestioning acquiescence. but now in his second visit he found to his dismay that, so far from ceasing to mind or notice the difference between the two peoples, the difference was accentuated as far as notice went, and doubled as far as minding went. his nerves, no doubt, were a little out of order, and what would have scarcely affected him in a serener frame of mind was in his present mood like the squeak of a slate pencil. yet behind all this, even as the sky extends for millions of miles behind a stormy and cloudy foreground, lay his feeling for amelie herself. true, once in his life the passion for a woman had burned in him with so absorbing and fierce a flame that for more than two years afterwards he had soberly believed that he never again could feel any touch of passion for another. his adoration for dorothy emsworth had been his first _grande passion_; it was therefore probably his last, for such a thing does not come twice. men whose lives are morally unedifying might doubt it, so he said to himself, but merely because they have never experienced it at all. to them has come a succession of strong desires, but this never. and though he did not give, nor did he make pretence of giving, to amelie that which mrs. emsworth could find no use for, yet he gave her very honestly another way of love: he gave her very strong and honest affection; he gave her immense admiration; lie gave her as much, for he was of ardent nature, as many men have ever felt. all the chords of his lyre sounded for her. but once there had been another chord; that he could not give her, for it was gone. consequently, when he wondered whether continuous contact with american _milieu_ might not prove absolutely intolerable, he did not include in his misgivings his continuous contact with amelie. he had deliberately set out in the quest of a wealthy wife, and he had found one in all ways so charming, so lovable, that the mercenary side of his quest was out of sight. that quest, he admitted to himself, was not a very exalted one; but as his father had pointed out, he could not, practically speaking, marry a poor girl--at least, without marrying a great deal of discomfort--and it was therefore more sensible to look for his wife among wealth. he had been quite prepared, in fact, for marrying a girl who 'would do,' provided she saw the matter in the same light. amelie did much more than 'do.' two nights before his marriage he had been to a very ingenious party, the author and inventor of which had been reggie armstrong. it was called a 'noah's ark' party, for he had caused his stable-yard to be flooded, and erected in the centre of it a huge wooden building in shape and form exactly like the noah's arks which children play with. it had false painted windows on it, the whole was in crude and glaring colours, and it was approached up a gang-plank across the stable-yard. at the door stood reggie armstrong on a little wooden stand, dressed like noah in a brown ulster, with a stiff wide-awake hat and a false black beard, and by him the four other people who were the joint hosts. mrs. palmer was one, representing mrs. noah, and three young new york bachelors were shem, ham, and japheth. a confused noise came from within the ark, and as the astonished guests entered they saw that all round the walls were cages containing real live animals. a pair of elephants occupied the top end, a snarling tiger was in the next cage; there were giraffes, lions, pumas, antelopes, all sorts of birds in diminishing order of size, and at the tail a small glass-covered box containing fleas. shrill cries of excited admiration greeted this striking piece of genius, and in the rather pungent menagerie atmosphere, to the snarling of the tiger, the growling of lions, the mewing of cats, the barking of dogs, and the neighing of the equine species, the banquet, at which each guest sat on a wooden stool, and ate off wooden plates, in order to accentuate the primitive nature of the surroundings, ran its appointed course, and took rank among the brilliant entertainments of the world. after dinner, bridge and normality followed, and it was natural that bertie should find a corner as quiet as possible to have a talk with amelie. they had wandered together round the cages, had tried to make themselves heard at the lion's end, but that monarch of the forest roared so continuously that it was impossible to catch a word anyone else was saying unless he shouted. and as their conversation was not naturally adapted to shouting, they sought the comparative quiet of the end which harboured the meaner insects. amelie had looked at the last case of all, and turned to bertie. 'it's very complete,' she said. 'very,' said he, and their eyes met, and both laughed. 'now, tell me exactly what you think of it,' she went on, turning her back on the fleas and sitting down. 'i really want to know what you think of it, bertie.' bertie looked round to see that they were alone. 'it appears to me absolutely idiotic,' he said. she did not reply at once. 'mamma--ah, you like me to say mother--mother was one of the hosts,' she observed. 'i know. but you asked me what i thought.' 'reggie's very rich,' she said. 'it doesn't make any difference to him. i suppose a beggar would think me idiotic to wear jewels, which might be converted into cash. at least, i suppose it is that you mean--the senseless expenditure.' 'no; one can't say any expenditure is senseless,' said he, 'since it is a matter of degree, a matter of how much you have to spend. if a man spent all his capital on such an entertainment, or indeed on any, it would be senseless, but, as you say, armstrong is very rich.' 'what do you mean, then?' 'i mean that it is idiotic, because it doesn't give one any real pleasure. it gives one real pleasure to see those pearls lying on your neck.' 'oh, but it does give pleasure, though perhaps not to you,' she said. 'lots of people here think it's just exquisite. i suppose that means they are idiots.' she paused a moment. 'you've been very frank,' she said; 'i will be, too. when i see you here, when i see that darling ginger here, i think it is idiotic. but i don't otherwise. you see, i've been brought up in it all. you have been brought up differently. all my life i have been in the middle of this -this senseless expenditure. you have been in gray old houses, and big green parks, and quiet places, among people with low voices.' he made a gesture to stop her. it was no use saying these things. 'no, i want to say this,' she said; 'i have meant to say it often, and i haven't been able. i have chosen, you see--i have chosen you. and i have seen often that we have grated on you; i have seen you thinking how senseless this all is. but, bertie, i can't give up my friends, and i don't suppose i can change my nature. i can't promise to become english. i can't promise even to try. but i love you.' she looked up at him with those great gray eyes, and for a moment something rose in his breast, till he almost thought that the intolerable joy of a passion he had once felt was about to burn again within him. but it rose, stayed short of the point, and sank again. 'i don't ask you to, amelie,' he said. 'i am not so unreasonable or unfair as to ask you to change. and you left to say last what was best of all.' suddenly he felt an impulse almost overwhelming to tell her all, to tell her that, tender and strong as was his affection for her, he had known once a love that was different in kind from this, a love which he thought a man can only feel once, and when he felt it, it was not for her. yet how could he do it? how define a moonbeam? and what good would it be when done? it might perhaps vaguely distress and disquiet her, but it could serve no other purpose, except that it would satisfy a certain demand for honesty felt by himself. the impulse, he dimly felt, was of a momentous nature; it involved principle which lies behind expediency, but though for a space it was very strong, it soon passed, and the want of practical purpose in telling her took its place. to minimize pain and to multiply pleasure was one of bertie's maxims; suffering of any sort was repugnant to him, whether he or another was the sufferer. such a desire is part always of a kindly nature, but when, as in his case, it is a dominant factor, one of the dominant lords of conduct, it is the sign of a nature not only kindly, but emphatically lazy--one which will always drift as long as possible, one which in a moral sense will never go to the dentist before its teeth ache, and will then not try to have them saved, but take gas and part with them. his last words to amelie made the girl's cheek glow and her eye brighten. she loved her lover's lack of effusiveness, for to her it indicated the depth of still waters. in everything she found him as she would have him, and when he said 'you left till last the best of all,' she felt that no torrent of words, no battery of impassioned looks, could have been so convincingly genuine as the dry simplicity of his words. like every other woman or man who has ever loved, she had imagined for herself the ideal lover, and enshrined it in some human tabernacle. to her bertie was the one and only tabernacle wherein her love could dwell. he had told her with a limpid directness in the early days of their engagement that when he came a-wooing he had come, of set purpose, to a wealthy house, and this declaration, which would in a nature less sweet and generous than hers have prompted, in case of a lover's quarrel, the stifled whisper 'you wished to marry me for my money,' had not the most shadowy existence in her. she knew otherwise; the fortunate accident of her wealth had been no more, so she believed, than the mere master of the ceremonies who had introduced them. the completeness of his reply so satisfied her that, after a short pause, she spoke at once of other things. 'father has settled molesworth on me,' she said. 'he has made it my own.' 'will you ask me there sometimes?' said bertie. 'yes, perhaps. are you very fond of it?' 'yes, somehow right inside me i am. i think one gets a very strong, though not at all a violent, feeling for a place where one has been brought up. one's father was brought up there, too, you see, and one's grandfather. the feeling isn't worth much; we have tried to sell it for years, and whistled for a buyer in vain.' she sighed. 'we americans have no sense of home at all,' she said. 'really, we all live in hotels for preference. i don't suppose i shall ever get it, or even understand it. is it--is it worth having, that sense of home?' 'i don't know that it is. it is a comfortable feeling, that is all. "my own fireside"; it is a domestic sort of joy, which rather reminds one of cowper's poems.' 'i shall read them,' remarked amelie with decision. bertie laughed. 'you will certainly go to sleep over them,' he said. 'that will be domestic too. come, bertie, i'm going to jabber like the others.' 'jabber to me.' 'i can't jabber to you. you are not jabberable. look at me once; that must be our good-night.' mr. palmer had arrived in new york some week or so before, and had occupied himself for a whole day over the matter of settlements. molesworth he had given to amelie, had settled a million pounds sterling on her, and on bertie two hundred and thirty-seven thousand, the curious exactitude of this sum being due to the fact that he had intended to settle a quarter of a million on him, of which he had already received thirteen thousand. he also recommended him a few suitable investments for it, while mrs. palmer, after getting rid of the first high pressure of satisfaction by sending to amelie a perfect packing-case of diamonds, directed a torrent of different objects, chiefly mounted in gold, at both of them. bertie went home that night in a more settled and buoyant frame of mind than had been his since his arrival in america. never before had he felt so certain of a happy and harmonious future. what amelie's feeling for him was he dimly guessed from his knowledge of what once had been his for another, while for his part he gave her all he had to give--admiration, affection, desire. only--and this, as far as he knew, was no longer among the capabilities of his nature--he did not give her their fusion into one white flame; he only offered, as it were, packets of the separate ingredients. but, as sybil massington had said, there are many ways of love; he took the best he knew. the knowledge of this, and the straight and honest acceptation of it by himself, was tranquillizing, and possibly a sedative to his conscience, for his thoughts as he strolled down fifth avenue on that night, strangely warm for the earliness of the month, strayed slowly, like his footsteps, to past years, and it would have surprised anyone who looked on his extraordinarily youthful and untroubled face to know how very old he was feeling as his mind drifted with the quiet strength of some ocean-tide back, _via_ wedding-presents, to dorothy. how absolutely she had dominated his every thought and feeling, how completely for those months he had ceased to have any independent will of his own, being absorbed and melted into her. he remembered one june in particular; they had both been in london, and day after day he had gone to see her in her house in curzon street. the weather was very hot, and she had a craze for living in nearly empty rooms; all her carpets had been taken up, and all her floors polished--everything not essential to comfort had been stacked in garrets, and the rooms were empty except for flowers. lilacs had been magnificent that year--they were her favourite flowers--and the smell of lilac to him now meant that he lived once again, in the flash of a moment, that month of beautiful days when he had been so exquisitely unhappy with the unsatisfied yearning of his first passion. all that month she had kept him in a sort of rapturous agony of suspense, which kept ever growing nearer to certainty. then, at the end, to bring matters to a crisis, he had written her that letter, and not gone near her for two days. then, having no answer, he went, and she laughed at him and sent him away. well, he had paid dearly for that letter, both in the desolating inability to care for anything in the months that followed, and also in other ways. what it cost him in hard cash did not trouble him. after all, he was infinitely her debtor; it was she who had let him see (though she had plucked the vision away again) to what height of ecstasy his own average human nature could rise. what must a woman of that kind be made of? he wondered to himself. was she so grossly stupid that she never had a glimpse of what she meant to him, or was she so utterly hard that, having seen that, she had not the decency anyhow to go into mourning, as it were, for him just for a little? stupidity he could not accuse her of; there was no one of such lightning-like power of intuition to divine the mood of a man. no; she must have seen it and known it, and brushed it from her, as one brushes a fly off one's coat. for not a month after that she had left london with bilton, whom she never professed to care for. but he was rich, and certainly he had done a great deal for her, for he had taken her from her position of 'pretty woman' actress, seen her capability of dramatic impersonation, and got her play after play where she had to behave like herself, till now, in a certain sort of rôle, there was no woman who touched her. also, he had somehow made her the fashion; he had gauged his age correctly, and given it what it wanted. he had seen the trend of society both in england and america--seen its hardness, its heartlessness, its imperative need of being amused, its passion for money, and for its stage he had given it mrs. emsworth, an incarnation of itself. yes; she was hard, hard, hard as her own diamonds, and as brilliant, as many-faceted. sometimes out of her, as out of them, a divinely soft light would shine, but if you tried to warm yourself in that mellow blaze there was no heat there; if in the excellent splendour and softness of the light you would think for a moment that there was a heart there, you would find only the cold, clear-cut edges. had she not proved it--she who, not satisfied with leading him on, with letting him fall passionately in love with her, only to divert herself a little in watching that storm of passion which she observed from behind her shut window, only to draw the blind down when she had looked enough, had even used the letter he wrote her to make money out of it? how well she knew him, his weakness, his ineradicable instinct to save trouble, avoid disturbances, so that, when she wrote, or caused to be written, the letter of blackmail, she did it probably without the least fear that she was putting herself in a dangerous position. nor was she--secure in the knowledge of bertie's engagement, she was certain to get her money. and, as no doubt she also knew well, against her he could not have taken legal steps, for the memory of the love he once bore her. no; she was safe, quite safe. he let himself into his flat with his latch-key, and saw several letters lying on the table. the english mail had come in, and ginger, who had got home before him, was busy with his own correspondence, and only looked up and nodded at bertie as he entered. for bertie himself there were several english letters, chiefly congratulatory, a parcel from tiffany's, 'by order of mrs. palmer,' containing a gold sapphire-starred cigarette-case, and two or three letters from america, one of which was type-written. for some reason, which he hardly formulated to himself, he took it up, and examined on front and back before opening it. then he laid it down again, mixed a whisky and soda, and, returning to it, tore it open. it contained one square sheet, and ran as follows: 'dear sir, 'hearing that you are about to be married to miss amelie palmer, it may interest you to learn that we are in possession of an autograph letter of yours to mrs. emsworth. the following phrases may recall it to your mind: '"i loved you more than ever last night, though i thought i could not have loved you more than i really did." '"lilac, lilac; it reminds me of you more than any picture of you could." '"you know my devotion to you. for me there is no other in the world."' (then, as before, followed a space.) 'should you care to possess yourself of this, we will let you have it for £ , . the money should be sent to mr. harold bilton at his business office, , a, broadway, for mrs. emsworth's account, by to-morrow (tuesday) evening. in the event of its not being to hand, we shall presume that you do not wish to have the letter, which we shall thereupon forward by special messenger that evening to mr. lewis s. palmer. 'mr. bilton, who has lately arrived in new york, is authorized to receive the above-mentioned sum from you, should you settle to adopt this course, but to permit no discussion of any kind referring to the matter in hand. 'we are, dear sir, 'your faithful, obedient servants, 'a. b. c.' bertie read it through, folded it neatly up, replaced it in its envelope, and walked across to where ginger was sitting absorbed in a letter. 'any news?' he asked. 'yes, a good deal.' ginger finished the sheet he was reading, got up briskly, and helped himself to whisky. 'noah's ark,' he observed. 'great and merciful god!' 'you seemed to be enjoying yourself,' said his brother. 'i was, enormously. but it's great and merciful, all the same. that's all. oh no, one thing more. bertie, i think your girl is worth the rest of this continent. news? yes, news from davos. charlie is better, ever so much better, and his nurse throughout has been sybil. in fact, there is going to be love in a cottage, i think. charlie writes. he seems to like the idea of a cottage.' 'she's going to marry him?' asked bertie. ginger smiled. 'now i come to think of it, he doesn't mention the word,' he observed. 'you're rather coarse,' remarked bertie. 'i am. i thought it might cheer you up. you look rather down. anything wrong?' 'nothing whatever.' ginger strolled back to his chair, put his whisky on one arm, a little heap of cigarettes on the other, and curled himself up between them. 'the young folk are all growing up and being married,' he said. 'it makes me feel extremely old, and it is a little uncomfortable. i've done nothing--but that might happen to anybody--and i've felt nothing. what is it like to feel things, bertie?' 'depends what they are.' 'no, i mean independently of what they are. i don't know what strong emotion is. i don't know what it is to be carried off one's feet. i am much interested in many things, but impersonally. now, you--you have adored, and you have been adored. i have sat and looked on. does it leave you duller, do you think, to feel a thing, and then cease to feel it, than you would have been if you never felt it at all?' bertie considered this a moment. 'you never cease to feel things,' he said. 'a thing that has been exquisitely sweet becomes bitter, and continues bitter. you taste the jam first, and the powder afterwards.' he turned to the mantelpiece, took up a cigarette, and then, with a sudden trembling hand, threw it into the grate. 'and you pay for it all,' he said--' you pay over and over again. good-night, ginger.' chapter xv it was a glorious blue and golden morning in early june, and the soft brilliant sunshine of english summer weather flooded the glades of the park at molesworth, where amelie, intent on the finishing of a water-colour sketch, sat on a fallen tree-trunk, and bertie lay on the grass by her side reading at intervals to her from a volume of tennyson he had brought out with him. she was almost too busy with her painting to follow very clearly what he read, but the sound of his voice thrilled her with a big, quiet happiness, and when he was silent, the consciousness of his presence by her was hardly less vivid. all the same, she was attending very closely to what she was doing, and her brush industriously recorded what the upward sweep of her gray eyes had noted before she bent them again with bowed head on her sketch. indeed, that which lay before her was very well worth her attention. in front of them lay a sward of fine-woven turf, and from under the shade of the huge oak which spread its living canopies of green above them they looked through aisles of noble trees into the open, heathery ground of the far distance. the cool greenness, dim and subaqueous in tone, stretched to right and left of them in all shades of colour; here underneath the oak it was dark and almost sombre; there, where a clean-limbed, slender beech foamed up in the freshness of its pale foliage into the blue cup of heaven, the colour was enchantingly vivid and delicate, as if to match, even as the rose-colour of youthful cheeks matches the slender litheness of the frame, the girlish grace of the tree itself. flecks of sunlight lay like spangles on the grass below the trees, and in spaces between them the blue blaze of the june day poured down on to the flower-decked grass. the last of the bluebells still lingered in shady places, as if pieces of sky had fallen there; tall fox-gloves rose in spires of blossoms through thickets of bramble; buttercups made a sunlight of their own, and in the shelter of scattered coppices the pale wind-flowers still dreamed in whiteness. not far in front of them, the centre point of amelie's sketch, rose a huge thorn, covered with clusters of crimson blossom, standing in full sunlight, so throbbing and bursting with colour that she almost fancied she could see on the pale green of the slender-fingered birches that grew near some red reflection of that glorious blaze. to the right of it one could see through the tree-trunks the gray palings of an enclosed cover, where the ground tumbled upwards under pines, and the velvet of the turf was riddled and sandy with rabbit-holes. a fringe of elders, with the white umbrella of their flowers, grew there, and tawny honeysuckle added one more note to the great symphony of delicate woodland smell. and even more entrancing than the woodland smell, more subtly mingled than that bouquet of coolness and greenness, of the aroma of pines, the drowsiness of the honeysuckle, the languor of the elders, was the symphony of woodland sound, the forest murmur that filled the ear even as the greenness filled and refreshed the eye. the hum of insects, of bees at their fragrant labour, was the bourdon note that pervaded everything; a light breeze stirred in the trees, calling out of each its own distinctive note--from the pines the sound of waves very far off, from the birches a thin, sibilant murmur, from the beech something a little lower in the scale, and from the tall grasses a whisper and a sigh. a late cuckoo chimed, still mellow-throated, doves moaned softly, thrushes fluted their repeated notes from bush to bush, calling to one another in the joy of the great vigorous life that filled these enchanted glades, and out in the open larks, black specks against the blue, hung over the nests of their mates, and towered in the triumph of their song. but best of all, pervasive even as the hum of bees, was the ripple and gurgle and chuckle and pouring of water, that one note more liquid than the nightingale's. right down the centre of the glade came the stream, brimmed with the rains of spring, and filling its bed from edge to edge. here its course lay over gravel-beds, and the pebbles glanced and glimmered with the living light that the sun poured down through the pellucid transparency of the water. then came a sharp elbow in its course, and it fretted its way, with sound of melodious outpouring, through the tangled roots of some tree that stood bare in the angle of the turning. then for a space the ground was more clayey, and a carpet of green water-weeds were combed and waved by the woven ropes of water. deeper pools lay here, and under the protection of the banks, where some promontory of rocky stuff made a breakwater, the broad fans of water-lilies and the golden crown of their blossoms found anchorage for their sappy stems. dragon-flies, as if revisiting the scenes of their childhood, where they had nosed in the mud, or lain, blind, pupre, till the spring of their awakening, hovered iridescent and flashed like jewels flying through the air over the sunlit shallows; white-throated swallows skimmed up-stream, and companies of swifts chided together. rushes waded knee-deep into the water, loose-strife stepped gingerly to the brink, and to all the stream prattled and sang and went on its sweet way. amelie laid down her brushes, and held out her sketch to bertie. 'criticise,' she said. he looked at it a moment in silence. 'it's very good,' he said; 'but you still want the--the big softness of it all. it is still a little hard.' she sighed. 'i knew you would say that,' she said, 'and it's perfectly true. perhaps i shall get to be able to do it in time. it's all very well to say that a sketch is merely a matter of line and colour, but it isn't; there is a "feeling" which is beyond either.' she took it back from him. 'anyone could see it was painted by an american,' she observed. bertie laughed. 'that's where you are wrong,' he said; 'most americans would say it was done by an englishwoman.' she smiled to herself with a secret pleasure, laid her sketch by her to dry, slid off the trunk where she had been sitting, and sat down on the grass by her husband. 'read to me again,' she said. 'read that song that ends: '"the moan of doves in immemorial elms, and murmur of innumerable bees."' she leaned her head on his shoulder, and sat with eyes half-closed, as in his low, gentle voice he read through the exquisite passage. 'it is english,' she said, when he had finished; 'and, oh, bertie, that means a lot to me. bertie, are you happy?' he closed the book, and sat thinking a moment before he answered her. it was true that he had never supposed that he was capable of being so happy as he had been in these last three months. it was true also that his affection for his wife had grown with every day they had passed together, yet the question was a difficult one to answer. a few months ago, had she asked him in his present mood the same question, he would instantly have said 'yes'; but with the growth of his capacity for happiness and for loving her had grown the demand for happiness and love which his nature made. instead of acquiescing in the conclusion that he never again could possibly love as he had once loved, he had begun to want that again; he was no longer content with this limitation. 'ah, my dearest,' he said, 'happiness is not in your power or mine. no, i am not quite happy; i want something more.' he sat up as her eyes questioned him. 'i want the impossible, i suppose,' he said; 'i want to be fire. you have made me want that.' for a moment some shadow of vague trouble crossed her eyes. 'i don't think i understand,' she said. bertie plucked a long feather of grass, and chewed the juicy end of it. he had not meant to say quite so much. 'i'm not sure that i understand either,' he said. 'it is quite easy to understand complicated things, but when one gets to the plain, simple things like love and death, then one realizes how little one understands. is it not so?' the trouble grew. 'i never ask for confidences,' she said, 'so you mustn't think i am doing so; but, bertie, sometimes i feel that there is a piece of you which i do not know--some locked room, or--or it is like that haunted house we went to the other day, where there is a space unaccounted for. one goes into all the rooms, but by the measurements there is yet another room which one cannot find.' the intuition of this rather startled and shocked him. 'so you credit me with a bluebeard's chamber?' he asked. 'it is far more likely to be a cupboard for lumber.' 'have you some lumber, then?' she asked quickly. the bitter taste of that which had been exquisitely sweet was at this moment very present to him--more bitter, perhaps, than it had ever been. for he regretted now, not that which was past, but its absence from the present; and the curious persistence of amelie rather vexed him. 'ah, we all must have a little lumber,' he said, with an unconscious touch of impatience in his voice. 'in this rough and tumble of a world we all get some bits of things broken--ideas, ideals, desires, what you will. they are our lumber; and it is wiser to turn the key on them--not bring them out and try to mend them.' amelie noticed the impatience of which he was unconscious. 'cannot i help you to mend them, bertie?' she asked, with a wonderful wistfulness in her voice. 'and have i vexed you?' he threw the grass spearwise down the wind. 'i think you could not really vex me,' he said. 'but you can't help me to mend them; nobody can--not even you.' she picked up her sketching things in silence, washed out her brushes, and closed her sketch-book. 'let us forget it all, then,' she said briskly. 'let us put the hands of the clock back ten minutes, and go on from then. "the murmur of innumerable bees." all june is in that line, is it not? bertie, what a beautiful june we have had!' 'and it is not over yet,' said he. 'no; but people come to us this evening, you know, and on monday we go up to town. come, we must go back to the house; it is lunch-time, and the post will be in.' but for both of them the huge blue of the day was flecked with a little cloud. after lunch amelie had a few calls to make, and some little business to transact in the village, and bertie, who sturdily refused to accompany her, ordered his horse, and went for a rambling ride through the park. somehow the vague conversation of that ten minutes in the morning had dimly but rather deeply upset him. in any case, it had the effect, so to speak, of smashing open his lumber-room door, on which he had so carefully turned the key. twice before had it been rudely opened--on those occasions by mrs. emsworth herself, when she had got from him first ten thousand pounds for what was only a copy of his letter, and, secondly, five thousand more, two evenings before his marriage. it was with a sense of shame that even now made his cheeks burn when he thought of it, that he recalled his own utter weakness, his dread of possible exposure. even at the time he knew that the wise thing to do would have been to have gone straight to mr. palmer with the letter for which he had paid ten thousand pounds and the second blackmailing letter, and have, with these proofs in his hand of the vileness of the scheme, told him the whole truth. but his nerves could no more face it than they could have allowed him to pull out a tooth or a nail of his own, and next day he had gone, cursing his own flabbiness, to bilton's office, and obediently paid the second levy. bilton himself was not there, but a young and rather insolently-mannered clerk, who addressed him as 'earl keynes,' had been authorized to receive his cheque and the type-written letter in exchange for a small packet which contained, as he satisfied himself, a couple of sheets in his own handwriting, torn half across. he had, of course, kept the first letter which he had bought back, and, comparing the two, he came to the conclusion that the first was a very careful forgery, the second the genuine letter. but this afternoon it was not so much his own weakness in having been so easy a prey to the blackmailer, and in having been incapable of forcing himself to tell the whole thing to mr. palmer, that lay like a shadow on him, as his present inability to feel as he once felt. he had unlocked the despatch-box where he kept the letters on his return this morning with amelie, and read one through again. passion vibrated there--a passion which had once been his; he could recall it perfectly; he could remember with the most vivid distinctness the rapture of desire in which he had written those sheets of adoration. it had seemed to him then that life was _this_: that the whole world, and whatever it contained that was lovely and worth the worship of man, found in her its completion. the best and the worst of him--for it was all of him that wrote thus--was hers, in the passionate self-abandonment of love. for that gift she had in return called him a pretty boy, and told him not to talk nonsense; but for the faculty of feeling that nonsense again for his wife he would have given everything he had. he saw and fully recognised the exquisite quality of amelie's beauty, and the beautiful and generous soul that dwelt therein. day by day he saw the sweet unfolding of her nature--an unfolding as silent and as perfect as the blossoming of a rose. he admired her, he felt passion for her, but a passion that never was lost and blinded by itself, as his passion for dorothy had been. often in that june of lilacs he had come home from seeing her, and sat for hours, as if intoxicated or stupefied, unable to speak or think even, only lie with mind open under the eye of his sun. it was that power he would have given the world to recapture. his ramblings had led him into an outlying piece of the park which he seldom visited--a somewhat bleak, heathery upland, not more than a mile or so from the house, but away from the beauty of the wooded glades where he and amelie had spent the morning. he was about to turn, when, at some little distance off, he saw a couple of men standing by a tall red rod planted in the ground, one of whom apparently was taking observations through some sort of telescopic instrument. about a couple of hundred yards further on was another rod, and, following the line with his eye, he saw that between them and the park paling was yet another. he rode up to them, and, with a certain resentment, inquired what they were doing, and got for answer that they were under orders to survey this piece of country for the projected railway. they further explained that the line, when it reached the ridge over which he had ridden, would probably enter a tunnel, and emerge again only outside the park. her ladyship, one of the men remarked in a rather insolent tone, had given permission for the survey. bertie turned his horse round, and rode back homewards, doing his honest best not to think what he thought. in his heart he was very much hurt that amelie had not told him, and somehow the idea that the park was apparently to be invaded and cut up by a railway-line was extraordinarily repugnant to him. a couple of years ago, it is true, both he and his father would have welcomed any scheme which should turn that white elephant, the molesworth property, into cash, at whatever violation of its forest glades; yet now, when only the bare, outlying portions were to be given to the invader, he intensely disliked the thought of it. money was no longer needful; the railroad might go hang. he found amelie in the garden when he got back, and, instead of giving her the little caress which was still usual between them after only an hour or two's separation, he began abruptly. 'i found some men surveying on the far warrens,' he said. 'they told me they had your permission.' amelie frowned slightly, as if puzzled. 'yes, i believe the agent did say something about it two days ago,' she said. 'it is only a survey they are making; there is nothing settled.' 'i think you might have told me,' said he. 'but of course the place is yours; you will please yourself.' this hurt her; he had rather intended it should. but she answered with admirable gentleness. 'i am sorry,' she said; 'i quite forgot to tell you. the thing seemed to me immaterial. of course, i should have consulted you before settling anything.' bertie felt rather ashamed of his ill-temper, and, remembering the omission of their usual little ceremony, he picked up her hand as it lay on the arm of her chair, and pressed it. 'yes, dear, i am stupid to have made anything of it,' he said. 'but tell me, amelie, what is the proposed line?' 'a branch line from cardiff, joining the liverpool and southampton. it is only a preliminary survey, i believe. of course, i meant to talk to you about it as soon as they opened negotiations with us; i may as well now. it will cross the far warren for about a mile, i believe, and then tunnel under the ridge. it will not interfere with us in any way. it is completely cut off from the house and the woods. and i suppose they would pay something substantial. i had meant to give you that.' bertie's feeling of shame grew a little hotter. 'i am a cross-grained brute,' he said. 'am i forgiven?' she smiled at him. 'do you ask that?' she said. 'but oh, bertie, don't hurt me even ever so little. a little hurt from you hurts so much.' so another cloud flecked the blue of june. that afternoon their guests began to arrive for the week-end party. it was the first they had given, and amelie somehow felt a little nervous, for it was her debut as hostess. lord bolton was coming, and, in a way, it seemed to her hardly decent that she should be receiving him in this house. she had met him once or twice before, and was vaguely terrified at him. sybil massington was coming too, with charlie, to whom she was to be married in july. ginger was accompanying his father; other friends of bertie's raised their numbers to a dozen, and both her own parents, with reggie armstrong as gentleman-in-waiting to mrs. palmer, were to make a sort of family party. this consciousness that she was on trial made her the least bit in the world self-conscious, and deep down in her mind, tucked away in its darkest corner, but still there, was a sort of haunting anxiety about her mother. again and again she tried to picture to herself mrs. palmer and gallio engaged in friendly desultory conversation, but as often she abandoned this projected situation as unthinkable. she even hoped--hoped in a whisper, that is to say--that for some reason her mother would be prevented from coming. that whisper she stifled as often as it sounded, thoroughly ashamed of it; but it was there. but providence declined to have any special dealings on this point, and mrs. palmer's entry into the house was clearly audible to her as she sat in the garden with those of her guests who had arrived. gallio was already there, his thin but fresh-coloured face and flossy white hair, his general air of great distinction and complete imperturtability, seeming admirably suited to the dignified stability of the gray house and the spaciousness of the ancestral lawns. he had been most affectionate and gentle to her, had called her 'his dear daughter,' had kissed her hand with a courtly grace, and made her feel intensely ill at ease. then came the sound of screamings from the house, and if the simile of a substantial butterfly with a shrill voice discharged from a catapult conveys anything to the reader, it was in such manner that mrs. palmer came through the open french windows of the drawing-room, and with outstretched arms swooped swiftly across the lawn to amelie. 'my dearest, sweetest angel child,' she cried--screams of emotion mingled with kissing--' why, if i haven't been just dreaming day and night of seeing you again!'--more screams--' why, you look so well; you look just too lovely for words. i've been just crazy to see you!' lord bolton had in the previous year firmly declined the honour of mrs. palmer's acquaintance, saying he did not wish to be deaf for the remainder of a misspent life; and amelie introduced her to him. 'very pleased to make your acquaintance, lord bolton,' she said; 'and to have the pleasure of meeting you here makes it just too complete.' gallio shook hands. 'i have looked forward to this,' he said with his best paternal air. 'bertie, dear amelie, you, and my unworthy self--the family group in the family frame.' and his eye wandered over the great gray façade of the house. 'well, i think that's too beautifully put,' said mrs. palmer; 'that's a real poetical thought. lewis,' she called to her husband, 'lord bolton's been too poetical for words. well, i'm sure!' gallio's thin lips tightened a little. 'how are you, mr. palmer?' he said. 'i am most fortunate to have been able to come down to-day. i was afraid i should not be able to, but when my dear daughter said you were both coming, i could not let anything stand in the way.' 'why, that was just lovely of you,' said mrs. palmer, as she moved to amelie's side at the tea-table, and went on in a loud aside, as gallio engaged mr. palmer in conversation. 'dearest child,' she said, 'you look simply too sweet. and i've lost my heart to lord bolton. i think he's just lovely, with his white hair and all--just the old nobleman i used to dream about before i married lewis. now, give me some tea, poured out with your own hands at your own house, you darling countess of keynes. well, i'm sure, i'm just crazy with pleasure!' mrs. palmer flowed on in a shrill and equable torrent of conversation. her particular timbre of voice made talking in her vicinity as difficult as talking in a rail way-tunnel, for it echoed and reverberated in a manner which rendered all else inaudible. 'i read all about your presentation in the _new york herald_,' she went on--'"the new american beauty, the young and charming countess of keynes"; and you'll laugh, amelie, but i ordered a special edition with all about you printed in gilt letters, and just flooded newport with the copies. i guess newport will find it as hard to beat you as it did to beat the pearl-party. newport will just curl up and die; i guess you've done for newport. and there's one thing i want to ask: do i, lord bolton, take any rank as mother of a countess? i could find nothing about it in your debrett.' gallio turned to her with his most courtly air. 'ah, mrs. palmer,' he said, 'we have no rank in england to equal that which a charming and beautiful woman enjoys in her own right.' the famous cry resounded over the lawns, and beat in echo against the house. 'why, if that isn't just too sweet of you!' she cried. 'lewis, here's lord bolton saying such things to me as you never thought of saying. and where's reggie armstrong? reggie, did you hear what lord bolton said? you did, though you pretend you didn't. you're just green with jealousy. i can see the greenness reflected on your strawberries. well, i never!' sybil massington and others had arrived already, and the assembled party, some fifteen or sixteen, were now all gathered on the lawn, drinking tea and eating strawberries with a slight air of constraint, as if social thunder of some kind was in the air. bertie, who had been receiving his guests indoors and bringing them out, was in a low chair just opposite mrs. palmer, listening with rather less than half an ear to what sybil was saying to him. quite involuntarily, at this speech he raised a deprecating eyebrow, looked up, and caught amelie's eye. she flushed slightly, and looked away again. some rather heavy rejoinder on the part of reggie armstrong followed, and gallio sat down opposite bertie and sybil. 'charming woman,' he said in his very low, gentle voice; 'she has all the brightness of the western civilization.' bertie could not help smiling, and, looking up again, caught amelie's glance, and felt guilty. the resounding voice went on: 'it's just my idea of the english country house,' she said; 'it's just ancestral. why, lewis might go and establish his office right here under these trees, and give vanderbilt fits, as he did last year, and the trees wouldn't care. that's what i've just lain awake and coveted till three in the morning. why, i was at windsor last week, and i assure you windsor looks like a mushroom beside this. it's just english. lord bolton, however you could let lewis have it i can't think. come and sit by me, and pay me some more compliments. why, it tickles me to death to sit here and talk to you. i think you're just lovely.' gallio rose obediently. 'tact, too,' he observed to mrs. massington, as he turned to comply with mrs. palmer's frank and direct request. in fact, for the time things could not have been worse, and mrs. palmer's voluble shrillness, bawling all sorts of things which were neither wicked nor stupid nor anything objectionable, except that they were simply impossible, at gallio, who sat beside her, and encouraged her by his exquisite courtliness of manner into imagining that she was being the most brilliant success, was too much for the nerves of some of the english section, who strolled away about the lawn with fine deliberation, and carefully abstained from any comment. but in process of time amelie took her mother away to see her room, and gallio, suave to the last, made her his best bow, as she declared for the twentieth time that she considered him the loveliest man she had ever met. bertie had strolled away with charlie and sybil massington, feeling that in its small way the situation was unbearable. it was one of the hideous, bitter little comedies of life, where everyone is ridiculous, yet it is impossible to laugh for fear of crying. he knew so well how mrs. palmer felt, how gallio felt, how he himself felt, and he was afraid he knew how amelie felt. sybil had much to say. 'it is quite like a fairy-story, bertie. here are charlie and i--the poor young man who proposed to drop into an early grave, and who proposed to me instead, who has now no more idea of dropping into a grave than i have--and here are you and amelie, with molesworth once more your home. bertie, if you hadn't fallen in love with amelie, you would have argued yourself the most obtuse young man in the world. why she fell in love with you is harder to say. she has got extraordinary charm; i felt it as soon as i saw her. you were in luck when you went a-wooing. so were you, charlie--why didn't you say that?' 'you really didn't give me much time,' said charlie in self-justification. 'no, that's true. bertie, what fun we had in long island! really, that time was most amusing. and we all meet again here--all but mrs. emsworth, that is to say. by the way, she has come back; she is staying somewhere in the neighbourhood. did her tour end as successfully as it began?' 'she wrote to me just before my marriage saying she was getting quite rich,' said bertie, wincing a little. 'how nice! i wish i was. charlie, they are all rich except you and me. never mind; we will stay with them all a great deal, which will be charming for them. and the palmers' house in london--have you seen it? really, it is magnificent. who did it? mrs. palmer or her husband? it can't have been done by a firm; the taste is too individual, too certain.' 'mr. palmer did it,' said bertie. 'i fancy he ordered every individual thing, down to the smallest details.' 'i fancied it must be he; mrs. palmer is a little more _voulu_--more bird of paradise.' she laughed. 'i can't help laughing,' she said. 'to anyone with any eye for human comedy the scene at tea was delicious. she is a great dear, and i am very fond of her; but, frankly, she and gallio together were extraordinarily funny. i love contrasts--notes of jarring colour.' bertie did not laugh. 'i was furious with gallio,' he said; 'he tried to make a fool of her.' 'assuredly he did not succeed,' said sybil. 'mrs. palmer was delighted with him. anyhow, he had to be polite or rude; he chose to be extremely polite.' 'amelie saw,' said bertie briefly, and the subject dropped. they strolled back in the enveloping light of the sunset, which flooded and pervaded the air with level rays. the glades where he had sat with his wife that morning were full of the soft luminousness of the sun, which entered below the leafy boughs of the thick trees and lit them from end to end with a wonderful glory. birds were busy with their evensong in the bushes, and, as at noonday, the countless hum of insects was still in the air. bertie, still rather disturbed for amelie's sake at the little tea-time comedy, felt soothed by the leisurely tranquillity of the hour, and the two others, a little apart, passed from time to time some whispered confidence. but the mellow call of the bell from the elizabethan turret warned them that the minutes to dinner-time were numbered, and they briskened their steps back to the house. the other two went upstairs, but bertie turned for a moment to his sitting-room in quest of evening news, and found amelie there waiting for him. her face was a little flushed, and some shadow of trouble clouded it. 'i wanted to see you a moment before dinner,' she said. 'i----' and she stopped. 'what is it, dear?' said he gently. 'you know. he, your father, was laughing at her; he made other people laugh at her; he made you laugh. i don't think it was a good joke. there are many sorts of bad breeding; i think he showed one of the worst.' 'i am sorry you take it like that, amelie,' said he. 'it is true i laughed, but i did not laugh at your mother; i laughed at the comedy of the situation.' 'he made a fool of her,' continued amelie; 'but i think he made a cad of himself.' 'that is rather strong language,' said bertie. 'i think it is suitable language. i think you ought to ask him to behave with courtesy to my guests--not with exaggerated courtesy.' bertie thought for a moment. 'i will tell him that he hurt your feelings, if you wish,' said he at length. 'that is not the point,' said she. 'for me it is.' she turned on him a long, luminous look. 'then you don't understand,' she said. 'my meaning is that i will not have my mother insulted in my house.' he frowned. 'you make too much of it,' he said. 'you won't do as i ask, then?' she said. 'if you think it over, you will see that it would serve no good purpose.' she left the window where she was standing, and began to move towards the door. 'i never ask twice,' she said. 'by the way, mrs. emsworth has telegraphed to know whether she may come over to lunch to-morrow. she is staying at midhurst.' 'please make some excuse,' said bertie quickly; 'i do not wish her to come here.' 'why not?' 'i desire you to make her some excuse,' he repeated. she looked up, started at the quiet peremptoriness of his tone, and again there flashed into her mind the thought that had been there this morning, when she told him that there was a piece of him she did not know. at this moment she felt she localized it. 'what reason do you give me?' she asked. 'you used to be quite friendly with her last autumn.' 'quite true; but i am not now.' 'have you seen her since?' asked amelie, not quite recognising from what that question really sprang. 'no, i have not.' he paused. 'why did you ask that?' he said quietly. 'it was a reasonable question,' she said. 'mrs. emsworth is a friend of mine too; i have every right to ask her to the house, unless you give me good reason.' 'i ask you not to exercise that right,' said bertie. suddenly, and almost audibly in its distinctness, amelie's mind said to her, 'we are quarrelling.' her love for him, frightened, ran, as it were, towards him, but stumbled over her pride. she did not answer him, but left the room, feeling sick at heart. chapter xvi the construction of the intermediate pieces of line which were to connect liverpool with southampton by a direct route were finished by july, and, running powers over the lines of other existing companies having been acquired, the new service was open for traffic by the beginning of august. as mr. palmer had foreseen, the immense saving of time and convenience of transport effected by this direct linking together of the two ports had been, as soon as the bill for the projected line had passed the houses of parliament, instantly recognised by the various fleets that used these ports, and its success was assured long before its completion. added to this, the economical and businesslike methods of running trains which were adopted by him, based on american systems, enabled the line to cut down rates, while it secured for its customers far more rapid transport, so that it obtained from the first practically a monopoly of the goods traffic between the ports. a quantity of gentlemen, who in some vague sort of manner considered that they were acting in the sacred name of patriotism, wrote hundreds of violent letters to the papers, protesting against this fresh american invasion; while others, equally vaguely, in the sacred name of art, ranted themselves hoarse over the steel-girder budges that desecrated the most lovely spots in the rural fortresses of england, and the black, squat, but eminently efficient, engines that drew the trains of unlovely merchandise. but this _vox_, _et præterea nihil_, soon died away, and the only influence it had on traffic was perhaps to call added attention to the eminent advantages enjoyed by the customers of mr. palmer's line. consequently, neither he nor they had any quarrel with it. 'all this he had foreseen, and more. it became practically necessary, as he had known all along, for swansea and cardiff to put themselves into communication with this system, and as early as june, as we have seen, surveyors were busy on the molesworth estate over the route. the winter before mr. palmer had purchased both it and the adjoining wyfold estate, knowing that the line of direct communication must pass through one or the other; and when towards the end of july the experts pronounced very strongly in favour of the molesworth route, he forwarded their recommendation to amelie, with the request that she would come and talk matters over with him before she left town. the last month had not passed very happily for her; it lacked, at least, that wonderful edge of happiness which may and june had given her. the little rift which had opened between her and bertie had not closed again, and, if anything, it had become rather wider. she had obeyed his request, and not asked mrs. emsworth to lunch, but she had done so unwillingly, rebelling in her mind against this arbitrariness which expected to be obeyed and yet would give no reason for what it wished done. in consequence--for her protest, though mute, was very obvious--the spirit of her compliance was almost as irritating to him as her disobedience would have been. furthermore, at that interview she had had with him suspicion, vague and darkling, she knew lurked in the shadow of her mind; the piece of him she did not know irresistibly connected itself with mrs. emsworth. there it had grown like some mushroom, and, though she did not officially, so to speak, recognise its existence, it was there. other things, too, had tended to separate them, and in particular the treatment (or so she called it) of her mother by the world of london. she had expected to see and saw that london in general flocked to mrs. palmer's new house, where the entertainments, if not quite so wildly improbable as those which awoke the echoes in the glades of long island, were on the most lavish and exuberant scale. consequently london, with its keen eye for the buttered side of the bread, went there in its crowds, drank mrs. palmer's champagne, danced to her fiddles, won her money at bridge, and enjoyed the performances of all the most notable singers and pianists in the world with the greatest contentment. but what amelie saw also was the half-shrugged shoulders, the instantaneous glance of the eye, the raised eyebrow, the just-not-genuine smile of those who were the most constant _habitués_ there. mrs. palmer, in fact, was in london, not of london. this amelie resented, and, by way of retaliation, she had, as was perfectly natural, her mother constantly in her own house, and filled it with americans perhaps rather more than was perfectly natural. for the rest, there had been nothing the least resembling an open breach between her and bertie; he accepted the continual presence of her countrymen without the slightest protest, and never, even by the smallest inflection of voice or manner, was other than absolutely civil to everyone she asked. indeed, the perfect evenness of his manner added its quota to the constraint that lay between them; in her heart of hearts she knew that he often found neither interest nor entertainment in her guests, and the chilled perfection of his mode of conducting himself towards them but served as a barrier the more. but what most stood between them was her undefinable suspicion about mrs. emsworth. on that day the cankerworm had entered, and since then she had again and again asked herself whether bertie's affection for her had ever been of the same quality as the love she had felt for him. she remembered with horrible distinctness his words, 'i want to be fire,' and they, which at the moment had seemed to her but an expression of the ever unsatisfied yearning of love, which always, however perfect, still desires to go yet deeper, now wore a more sinister interpretation, and were to her the kindling of a secret heart-burning. what if this natural and simplest interpretation was true? what if he had never really felt fire for her? such was the abbreviated reading of her spiritual diary down to the day when she drove to see her father. though he had been in london all this last month, she had scarcely set eyes on him, so immersed had he been in the railroad business, and it was with a childish eagerness that she looked forward to having a long talk with him. in the trouble of her mind she felt great longing for that kind, unwearied affection which he ever had for her--an affection not very demonstrative, but extraordinarily real and solid. the effusiveness of her mother's love just now was less satisfying to her, for mrs. palmer had been for the last six weeks a mere whirling atom in the mill of social success; and while one hand, so to speak, was entwined round amelie's neck in a maternal embrace, the other would be scribbling notes of invitation and regret to the flower of england's nobility. she got to the house rather late for lunch, and was struck by the resemblance which the moral atmosphere of the dining-room bore to that of basle railway-station. there was the same sense that everybody was just going to catch a train; that they were exchanging last words as they took their hurried meal. her father, next whom she sat, was an exception, for he ate his thin slices of toasted hovis bread and drank his milk with the deliberateness which his digestion demanded; but everyone else seemed to be unable to attend to what was going on at this moment, because they all were thinking of what they would be doing the next. even her father, too, seemed rather preoccupied, and from time to time she saw that his eyes were fixed on herself with a certain anxious look, which was removed as soon as he saw she observed it. with regard to the railroad scheme, his explanation after lunch was very short. a big ordnance map showed her where the line would enter the park, where it would enter the tunnel, not to appear again till it had passed outside the precinct. its whole course would be quite remote from the house--remote also from the wooded side of the park; they would be as unconscious of its presence there as if it was in the next county. the wyfold route, on the other hand, which perhaps might be adopted if amelie put serious obstacles in the company's way, would actually be very much closer to the house and the forested piece of the park than the other. mr. palmer made these explanations as if he anticipated some opposition on amelie's part, and he was pleased to find none. 'it seems to me much the most sensible plan,' she said; 'and, as you say, the railway will really interfere with us less if it is in molesworth than if it was in wyfold. i must just tell bertie about it, and i will send you my formal consent this evening. i will leave everything connected with the sale in your hands.' she pushed the maps away from her with rather a weary air. 'and how are you, papá,' she said, falling into her old habit of addressing him. 'i haven't set eyes on you for weeks.' mr. palmer gave a moment's consideration to how he was before he answered. 'well, i guess i'm a bit out of condition in the brain,' he said. 'from the business point of view, england is the most enervating place i ever came to. these directors and business men here are about as much use as nursery-maids. they go down to their offices round about eleven, and sit there till one. then they eat a heavy lunch, and stroll back about two to see if anything has happened. of course it hasn't; things don't happen unless you make them happen. so they light a big cigar, and go down to woking for an evening round of golf after the fatigues of the day. saturdays they don't put in an appearance at all. that's their idea of business. and it tells on me rather; it's difficult to keep up ordinary high pressure when you're surrounded by so many flabby bits of chewed string. i guess i'll go back to america in the fall, and get braced up.' 'it don't affect mamma,' said amelie, falling more and more into her native vernacular. 'she just flies around same as ever. she's having a real daisy of a time, she says.' mr. palmer did not listen to this; he was pursuing his own melancholy reflections on english business methods. 'it reminds me of a poultry-yard,' he said. 'an englishman, on the rare occasions when he lays an egg, has to flap his wings and crow over it, instead of sitting down to hatch it. why, i suppose they've given fifty lunches to boards of the directors over this twopenny-halfpenny line of mine already. there was a luncheon on the formation of the board; there was a luncheon to celebrate their determination to set to work at once; there was a luncheon to celebrate their doing so. there was a dinner on the occasion of the cutting of the first sod of earth; they brought down some fool-sort of highness to do it. they had a week at the seaside when the bill passed through the house, and when the first train runs next month, they'll all go and have a rest-cure on the completion of their labours. what they want is something to cure them of their habit of always resting.' he got up from his chair in some impatience, folded up the maps, and stood looking at his daughter in silence for a moment. 'say, amelie,' he said, 'and what kind of time have you been having? all going serene and domestically? bertie been behaving himself? do either of you want anything? you look a bit down, somehow--kind of tired about the eyes.' amelie looked up at him; the 'tired about the eyes' seemed to be a wonderfully true interpretation of how she felt. 'oh, we trot along,' she said. 'i suppose everyone has their bits of worries. mamma has when she accepts three dinner invitations for the same evening. you have when your directors give luncheon-parties instead of doing business. we all have.' 'can't see why you should,' he said. 'i don't like you to worry, amelie. what's it all about?' he paused a moment. 'have you heard anything about bertie which bothers you?' he asked; 'or hasn't he been good to you?' she did not answer at once, for, in her rather super-sensitized frame of mind, it seemed to her that her father's first question was not vague or general, but that he had some special, definite reason for asking. from that it was but the shortest of links necessary to couple the question with that which grew mushroom-like in the shadow of her mind. 'no; he has been perfectly good to me, and i have heard nothing that bothers me,' she said. she looked up at her father as she spoke. he was standing close to her--a short, gray-whiskered man, insignificant in face and features except for those wonderful eyes. in his hand, the hand which by a stroke of the pen, a signing of the name, could set in motion the force of millions, was a little silver paper-knife which she had once given him. even now, as she knew--for he had said he could only give her five minutes after lunch--there were waiting for him a hundred schemes to be considered, a hundred more levers to move the world 'as he chose. but he stood there, waiting with a woman's infinite patience for any impulse towards confidence she-might feel--just a tender, solicitous father, grasping in his hand a daughter's insignificant gift. 'we have always been chums, amelie,' he said, with a sort of appealing wistfulness. 'when you were quite little, you always used to bring me your little worries for us to smooth out together. i used to be pretty smart at it; i used to be devilish proud of the way i could take the frown out of your little forehead.' she held out her hand to him. 'you are an old darling,' she said, with unshed tears springing to her eyes. 'but i tell you this truth: it is only i who have been worrying. i have been imagining all sorts of things, so that i have got to believe them. that is the matter with me.' 'you have heard nothing specific?' he asked. again that question arrested her, awoke her imaginings, and she made up her mind on what had long been a pondered idea. she got up at once. 'nothing whatever,' she said, with a resumption of her usual manner. 'now i am going. take care of yourself, papa darling, and wake this sleepy old county up. i adore its sleepiness myself, and i know you can never rouse it, otherwise i should not suggest it.' the carriage was waiting for her, and she got briskly in. 'mrs. emsworth's,' she said to the footman. as she drove there, she tried to stifle thought, for she knew that her design was to confirm or dispel a suspicion that should never have been hers. she was doing a thing which was based on a wrong done to her husband in thought. that she knew, but she combated it by saying to herself. 'what if it is true?' she found mrs. emsworth at home and delighted to see her, and for a little they just interchanged the generalities which, between two people who have not seen each other for some time, are the necessary ushers to real talk. the day was very hot, and dorothy, catlike, basked and purred in it. there was something rather _décolleté_ about her appearance, and something in her general atmosphere was equally so. she was, in fact, very different, so she struck amelie, from the woman who told the gardener's son the fairy-story on the dewy lawn at long island. 'i am charmed to see you,' she said for the second time, when amelie was seated; 'and i was furious the other day when you put me off coming to see you at molesworth. had you a prim party? if so, it was kind of you. priggish, prim, and prudish--those are the qualities i dislike--probably,' she added with admirable candour, 'because i do not happen to be fortunate enough to possess them.' she paused a moment; then an idea seemed to strike her. 'and where and how is bertie?' she asked. 'i haven't set eyes on him for months--not since the party in long island, in fact.' 'he said he hadn't seen you since then the other day,' said amelie. 'no; i'm rather hurt, because at one time, you know, we were the greatest friends. i used to see him every day nearly. then---' she got up with her slow, catlike movements, and stretched herself luxuriously, and laughed a lazy laugh of somewhat animal enjoyment. something about amelie's attitude--her reserve, her stiffness, which was altogether unlike what she remembered of her in long island--rather irritated her, and woke in her that _gamin_ spirit of mischief which was a very sensible ingredient in her nature. amelie was putting her nose in the air, giving herself airs, and if there was one thing in the world dorothy could not stand, it was that. then, to fortify the mischievous spirit, she remembered the unexplained return of her present to bertie. he, too, was giving himself airs; his nose was in the air. and when dorothy saw a nose in the air, it was her habit to very rudely lay hold of it, so to speak, and rub it in the mud. then, as a coping-stone to her nose-in-air theory, had come amelie's refusal to let her come over to molesworth. decidedly this was a case for treatment. also her love of making mischief--an occupation, we are led to infer, specially designed by satan--was rather strong in her. so she laughed her laugh, and continued. 'then he dropped me,' she said--' just opened his fingers and let me drop. i suppose i ought to have been broken, but i wasn't.' she had sat down again in a very long, low chair opposite amelie, and noticed, with great inward amusement, the tense interest with which amelie listened to her. 'i suppose bertie's been playing about again,' she thought to herself. 'an amorous young man, but it isn't playing the game now he's married.' and, with only three-quarters of her mind bent on mischief, she went on: 'yes, i suppose i ought to have been broken, but one gets tough, you know. but when i sent him a really charming wedding-present, and had it sent back without a word, i thought it was rather strong. that was being dropped with a vengeance.' 'did bertie do that?' asked amelie. 'yes, dear, unless you did. back it came, anyhow. now, if i had not been the sweetest-tempered, meekest little moses that ever lived, i should have--well, made it unpleasant.' amelie flushed; her manner was still far from pleasing dorothy, for she sat as upright in her chair as if the plague lurked in the back or arms of it. 'i don't understand you,' she said; 'how could you make it unpleasant for bertie?' mrs. emsworth laughed; amelie really was too stately for words. 'my dear, you are new to london, of course, but i wonder that no candid friend has ever told you. bertie was once just madly in love with me. it was a great bore though i liked him well enough. but such classical ardour was beyond me. his letter--has he never confessed to you about the letter he wrote me? it was quite a lyrical letter, and it made me scream. i was just _the_ only thing on god's earth.' 'can you show it me?' asked amelie very quietly. 'i should think it must be amusing.' she made a rather pitiful attempt to laugh. 'i wish i could,' said the other, still maliciously; 'i am sure you would shriek over it. but i tore it up ages ago--last autumn, to be accurate, the first time i saw bertie in america. it was rather kind of me--rather excessively kind, i have sometimes thought; i might have had some fun over it.' she glanced carelessly across to amelie. the girl had grown quite pale, even to the lips, and her hands were trembling. instantly a compunction as quick as all her emotions seized the other. 'ah! you mustn't mind my nonsense, dear amelie,' she cried, jumping up. 'i have been talking very foolishly; i did not think it would make you mind like that.' she took the girl's hand, but amelie withdrew it. 'but there was this letter,' she said. 'and bertie did make love to you?' 'yes; why not? show me the man, the most respectable married man, who says he has never kissed another girl in his life, and i will show you a liar. what does it matter?' 'a lyrical letter?' said amelie. 'yes, i wish i had kept it; i would show it you.' suddenly a wave almost of physical nausea swept over amelie. she had all the stainless purity of thought of a girl who has been married young to the first man she has ever loved, and in the first moment of her knowing definitely that bertie at one time had made love to this woman she felt sick--simply sick. she rose from her chair, and put on her gloves, while dorothy watched her, conscious that some emotion which she herself had so long forgotten, had she ever experienced it, that she no longer comprehended it, mastered her. and, with the best intentions in the world, not recognising that any further allusion to her own friend-ship with bertie would only further disgust and sicken his wife, she said: 'that was all. there was never anything more--anything wrong.' amelie turned on her a marble face. 'how am i to know?' she asked. 'what prevented it? his morals, the lyrical letter-writer, or yours?' dorothy felt a strong though momentary impulse to box her ears. it would probably have been a good thing if she had yielded to it. she herself had felt for amelie a sort of wondering pity that a matter so long dead could possibly be bitter still, and, acting under that, she had done her best to reassure her. but amelie had slapped that generous impulse in the face; she had also chosen to express doubt as to the truth of what she had been told; and a rather more pronounced felinity awoke in dorothy's face. 'you had better go and talk it out with bertie,' she said. 'ask him to repeat what he remembers of that letter. he is sure to have some recollection of it even now that he is so happily married. you can then draw your own conclusions, and, as far as i am concerned, you are perfectly free to do so. oh yes, and tell him that i constantly use the dressing-bag he so kindly returned, and think of him.' amelie went out, feeling as if her world had fallen in ruins about her head. possibilities which she had been ashamed of harbouring in her mind suddenly leapt out into flaring certainties, and they enveloped her. she could not think as yet coherently or connectedly; wherever she turned her thoughts, a flame flashed in her eyes. all her secret doubts were justified: bertie had loved this woman; it was she who had called out the notes of his lyre, while she herself was given the shillings and pence--all the small change of the dower of love which he had once showered on mrs. emsworth. she could get no further than this; in this circle her thoughts ran round and round, like a squirrel in a revolving cage. wherever she tried to go, she was still pawing round that one circle; she could get no further; the range of her mental processes was limited to that. and she now knew at once that she had to go on her way, whatever it was, unattended, uncomforted; and even in the exaggerated desolation of these first moments she could make the one resolve that no one, not even her father, should ever know. this her pride imperatively demanded: whatever she had to bear, she would bear in silence. and she could bear anything except pity. 'i want to be fire'--that was explained now, and that he should want that seemed to her an added insult. 'my dear amelie,' he seemed to say, 'you are a charming girl, but you don't interest me--like that. i wish you did; i really wish you did.' she bit her under-lip till it was white with the pressure of her teeth, and clasped her hands so tightly in her lap that the sharp facets of the stones in her rings dinted her fingers. the future spelt impossibility. there were hours daily to be gone through with bertie; what of them? what of the little lover-like caresses that were still constant between them? what, indeed, of the whole tissue of his simulated love--of his wish to be fire? for the moment, whether it was true or not that the acme of his relationship with mrs. emsworth culminated actually in that 'lyrical letter' or not, she hardly cared; it was there, in any case, that his fire had burned--had burned itself out. for a moment the spinning cage of her thoughts paused, and she moved forward in a straight and horrible line. since her engagement to bertie those two had not met. bertie had returned her wedding-present; he had refused to have her at the house. why? because he was afraid of seeing her, lest the fire had burned for her; what if it had _not_ yet burned itself out? chapter xvii the london season was over, and with most admirable industry, now that that garden was empty of flowers, the bees of the world flew in all directions to other gardens, where the autumn flowers bloomed. cowes was crammed, carlsbad--this was a medicinal flower--was crammed also. scotland was beginning to echo with the buzzing, and in a hundred country houses all over the kingdom other bees were resting a moment, cleaning the pollen from their legs, as it were, before they went forth again. one hot august afternoon a small company of bees were pollen-cleaning at haworth, talking over, that is to say, the events of the last few months--london's little adventures and ironies. with the exception of bertie, who was in scotland with his wife, the party was much the same as that which had sat there just a year ago, before the departure of him and sybil massington to america. in fact, the only other change was that the latter was mrs. massington no longer. but, just as before, she sat in an extremely comfortable chair on the lawn, with charlie by her side, and ginger, his hat over his face, lying on the grass in front of them. as before, also, he was employed in editing the history of the world, and making parenthetical prophecies for the future. 'oh, we are certainly getting on,' he was saying, 'and the last year, i am happy to inform you, shows great progress. the palmerization of england is perhaps the most significant sign of the times. england, in fact, consists of men, women and palmers, chiefly the latter. if you want to go by trains anywhere, the money you pay for your ticket goes into the pockets of palmers. if you want----' 'you shouldn't complain, then,' interrupted sybil. 'i don't; i like it. at least, i like most of it. but not all. i went down to molesworth the other day. there were gangs of navvies busy on the construction of the line. that i don't mind; it was remote from the house.' 'but until mr. palmer bought it, you were all remote from the house, too,' said sybil. 'you none of you ever went near it.' 'quite true. reverberating throbs shook the air where they were blasting the tunnel. that also i don't mind, but on the lawn, in the glades, in the garden, they were sinking bore-holes to find the extent and direction of the new coalfield.' 'have they found coal?' asked charlie. 'yes; they found it in the tunnel. they found it also on the wyfold estate, between which and the tunnel lie the house and gardens. therefore, i suppose, in a year's time the whole place will be a colliery. i don't like that.' 'i didn't think amelie would do that,' said sybil. 'nor did bertie. i remember talking to him about it. he said he thought that his wish would have influence with her. one can't blame her, any more than one blames a truffle-hound for finding truffles. it is in the blood, that scent and search for wealth. of course, the borings are only exploratory, but what is the point of exploring if you do not mean to utilize what you find?' 'i thought she was so fond of molesworth,' said sybil. 'she was at first, but she has taken an extraordinary dislike to it. she----' and he stopped. there was silence a moment. 'but they haven't quarrelled?' asked sybil at length. 'oh dear no. they are staying about together in scotland now. but something has happened. what has happened, i suppose she knows. bertie doesn't.' 'since when was this?' asked charlie. 'about six weeks ago, towards the middle of july--and quite suddenly. bertie says she had been lunching with her father one day, to talk over the railway matters, and when she came back she was quite a different person. quite polite, you understand, quite courteous and considerate, but as far away as the antipodes.' sybil got out of her chair with a sudden quick movement. 'mrs. emsworth,' she said. 'but there was nothing to know,' said ginger. 'there were no revelations possible, because there was nothing to reveal.' 'mrs. emsworth,' said sybil again emphatically. 'i remember seeing her about that time, and she told me that amelie had been to call on her. she said she had been rather prim, rather priggish, and in that connection made remarks about the refining influence of married life. i asked what she meant, and she said that bertie had cut her, dropped her. she was rather incisive over it, and tried to laugh about it. but she didn't like it, all the same. i can recommend her remarks about puritans to the attention of--of puritans.' ginger sat up. 'amelie's an awfully good sort,' he said--'and so is bertie. but to dine with them as i did just before they went north was like dining with a piece of ice at one end of the table, and a lump of snow at the other. now, what has happened? i reconstruct this: that mrs. emsworth, being annoyed with bertie, told amelie what friends they had been. there's a working hypothesis, anyhow.' 'but platonically,' said charlie. 'bertie's platonism was--was aristotelian in its intensity,' said ginger. 'he once wrote a letter to her, i believe, which might have been open to misconstruction.' 'and she told amelie about it, do you think?' asked sybil. 'that occurs to one. there's judy taking her sunday walk. it's just like last year. she is coming here, and she shall give us advice.' they called to her, but to hurry judy when she was taking her exercise was an impossible task. however, she arrived at last, and the case was laid before her. she heard in silence, and turned to ginger. 'do you mind interfering?' she asked. 'no, i like it. what, then?' 'write to bertie. tell him that amelie called on mrs. emsworth that day.' 'dear oracle,' observed sybil. judy put down her sunshade, for here under the trees the shade was deep and the air cool. 'i hate seeing two excellent people making such a mess of their lives,' she said. 'they are both proud, they are both reticent, and neither will speak unless the other speaks first. i have a great belief in having things out. if only amelie would pull bertie's hair or scratch his face, and say "what are you behaving like sour milk for?" or if only he would do that to her, something must happen. but they go freezing and freezing--every day the ice gets thicker. soon it will be frozen into a solid block. that is why i advise ginger to throw a stone at it; so to speak, without delay.' 'i don't know that bertie will thank me,' said ginger. 'i don't think he takes the same pleasure in being interfered with as i take in interfering.' 'probably not. but no situation can be worse than that which at present exists. i remember i was there when she told bertie that she had given orders to make half a dozen boring-holes for coal in the park. she announced it in the same tone as she might have announced that she had given orders for the carriage to be round at half-past two. and bertie hardly looked up from his book, and merely said: "the diamond drill is generally used, i believe, in making bore-holes."' 'that is bertie at his worst,' said ginger. 'it seemed to me tolerably bad. i looked at amelie to see how she took it. her face was like frozen marble. but as she turned away her lip quivered a moment. it made me feel ill. then soon afterwards i looked at bertie. he was not reading, but staring straight in front of him. he looked as if his face was made of wood. so i say: "stir them up at any price."' ginger sighed heavily. 'vanity of vanities,' he said. 'a year ago bertie thought that nothing would be intolerable if he had money. we most of us think the same until we have got it. then we find that nothing, on the whole, matters less. that one sees in america. we are supposed to take our pleasures sadly. but in america they take them seriously as well. all the gold of the indies cannot make a man gay. and all the palmerization that is going on does not add one jot to anybody's happiness.' 'i hate it,' said judy suddenly. 'i look on america as some awful cuttlefish. its tentacles are reaching over the world. it grips hold of some place, and no power on earth can detach those suckers. you cannot see it coming, because it clouds the whole of the atmosphere with the thick opacity of its juice, wealth. thus, before you know, it is there, and you are powerless. it has come to england. it laid hold first on the newline from liverpool to southampton. that is spreading in all directions. it is in london in every sense of the word. what woman was the central figure there this year? the queen? not at all. mrs. palmer at seaton house. it laid hold of worcestershire. the huge new coalfield on the wyfold estate is theirs. molesworth is to be a coalfield. then there is your admirer, sybil. half the theatres in london belong to mr. bilton. and the worst of it is that, from all practical points of view, america is our benefactor. theatres are better ventilated and better lighted. coal will be cheaper; one will get about the country more expeditiously. only very soon it will not be our country. that is the only drawback, and it is a purely sentimental one.' sybil shivered slightly. 'charlie,' she said, 'i look upon you as my life-preserver. a tentacle touched--just touched me. the juice of wealth, as judy says, had prevented my seeing what was coming. but one night you were ill, do you remember?' she smiled at him, the complete smile of happiness. 'life-preserver?' said he. 'and what were you?' judy turned to ginger. 'these slight connubialities are rather embarrassing,' she said. 'will you walk with me while i finish my exercise for the day?' sybil laughed. 'don't go just yet, judy,' she said. 'charlie and i will send you away when we want to be alone.' judy rose with some dignity. 'my self-respect cannot _quite_ stand that,' she said. 'come, ginger. you shall walk back with me to the house, and i will hold the pen when you write to bertie.' 'i shall put that in the postscript,' he said. 'the vials of wrath shall descend on both of us.' the two strolled away out of the shadow of the trees into the yellow flood of sunshine that hung over the lawn. the air was very windless, and the flower-beds below the house basked in full summer luxuriance of colour. far away in a misty hollow the town of winchester sunned itself under a blue haze of heat, and languid, dim-sounding church bells clanged distantly. sybil turned towards her husband. 'a year ago--just a year ago,' she said, 'we sat here like this. i always remember that day as a day of pause before i started on adventures. oh, charlie, on what tiny things life and happiness depend! just as a bullet may pass within an inch of your head, and not touch you, when another inch would have killed you, so the smallest incident may turn the whole course of things. for, do you know, if i had not been in mrs. emsworth's room when mr. bilton came in, i believe i should have married him.' 'well, then you see that had just got to happen,' said charlie, smiling at her. 'i suppose so. do you know i am very happy to-day.' 'why particularly?' 'ah, one never knows the reason for happiness. if one knows the reason, one is only pleased. ah! there is the train coming out of the cutting. what was it we settled it said?' 'you thought "utility"; i thought "brutalité." they sound very much alike.' there was a pause; the train rumbled itself away into the distance, and its diminuendo grew overscored again with the sounds of summer. 'i met mr. bilton again the other night,' said sybil. 'he wished me every happiness. i felt rather inclined to send the wish back, like bertie with mrs. emsworth's wedding-present. he didn't please me, somehow. i don't trust him. charlie, he is extraordinarily like you.' 'many thanks.' 'you old darling! do you know, i believe it was that which made me first--first cast a favourable eye on him.' 'and what made you firmly remove that favourable eye?' 'i have told you. then i came back to england and found you ill, and i embarked on a career of most futile diplomacy. i wanted to win you back to life, you see, without permitting or harbouring any sentiment. you proposed to die because you were bored. that seemed to me feeble, futile.' charlie laughed. 'it was rather. but under the same circumstances i should do the same again.' 'ah, the same circumstances can't occur.' he turned to her with the love-light shining brightly in his eyes. 'let us "lean and love it over again,"' he said. 'how did it happen? what change came to you? tell me.' 'and to you?' 'there never came a change to me. i have always loved you.' 'it was your illness first of all,' she said, 'and that made me want to help. i am very practical; the futility of your dying seemed to me so stupid. and as my handiwork, the attachment of you to life, grew, i got rather proud of it. it was like taking a plant that was lying all draggled in the mud and training it upright.' she paused a moment. 'that grew,' she went on, 'till one night you were taken suddenly ill at davos. i came up to see you, do you remember? and at that moment--this is the only way i can explain it--i began to become a woman. so that, if you or i could owe each other anything, dear, the debt i owe you is infinitely greater than what you owe me. i gave you perhaps a few years of life, you gave me life itself and love.' she bent her head, took up his hand where it lay on the arm of her chair, and kissed it. 'ah, not that, sybil,' said he. 'yes, just that,' she answered. the letter which the joint wits of judy and ginger concocted that afternoon went northwards, and reached its destination next morning. it told bertie merely the fact that on the day on which amelie had lunched with her father she had been to see mrs. emsworth afterwards, and suggested that it would be worth while finding out, if possible, what took place there. of late the estrangement between him and amelie, though it had in no ways healed, had been, since they were staying in other houses, where there was less opportunity for intimacy and thus less sense of its absence, less intolerably and constantly present to his consciousness. every now and then, as on the occasion when she told him that they were going to bore for coal, there had been bitter and stinging moments, but such were rare, and their intercourse, which was rare also, was distinguished by cool if not frigid courtesy. on this particular morning they were leaving the house they had been staying in near inverness, and were coming south again to visit other friends in the north of england. it was perfectly natural, therefore, that bertie should travel some part of the way, at any rate, in a smoking-carriage, but, the train being an express, he never omitted to visit her carriage when it stopped, and inquired whether she wanted anything. once she was thirsty, and he got her some lemonade from the refreshment-room, bought her papers, and opened for her a window which was stiff to move. these little attentions were accepted by her with the same courtesy as that with which they were offered, and he would stand on the platform chatting to her through the window, or seating himself for a few minutes in her carriage, till it was time for him to go back to his own. they lunched together in her carriage, and it was at her suggestion that at the next stopping-place he went back to the other to smoke after lunch. it was then that he opened the letters which had reached him that morning, having in the hurry of departure forgotten to do so, and found ginger's communication. at first his impulse was to do nothing whatever, and treat the letter as if it had never been received, and, following the dictation of his _laisser aller_ nature, make no further effort to investigate any possible source of his domestic estrangement. in a way (the freezing process had already gone far) he had got used to his aloofness from his wife; the acuteness of it had got dulled with time, the intolerable had become bearable. he was tired with conjecturing what had happened, and the pride which at first had prevented him straightforwardly going to her and saying 'what have i done?' had become habit. not having done so before, he could not now, and until she voluntarily told him the matter must remain in silence. disgust, fastidiousness, and a bitter sense of having been cheated, had at first stood in her way, where pride stood in his, and she, like him, having lost her first opportunity, waited for him to be the first to speak. but as he watched through the window the giddy scudding by of the brown wind-scoured moors, his indifference began to fade, and curiosity (at first it was no more than that) took its place. having successfully blackmailed him, had dorothy, in order to emphasize his own weakness, told his wife that which he had already paid so much to keep secret? to have blackmailed him at all was so utterly unlike what he knew of her that he told himself he knew nothing at all, and if this conjecture was right, she became something monstrous, something portentous. he would really very much like to know if she was stupendous enough to do that. a rather bitter smile crossed his face, and he took out of his despatch-box a small packet containing the two letters for which he had paid so highly, and a copy of the second blackmailing letter, which he had made before he delivered his cheque and the original at bilton's office in new york. his own letter he read through again, wondering at himself. those words of wild adoration--even now he felt a faint internal thrill at the recollection of the mood they conjured up again--were written to a woman who had done this. it seemed to him incredible that no inkling of her real nature had ever crossed his mind. it seemed impossible that he could have loved one to whom this was possible. for mere interest in a phenomenon like this he must find out what had passed between her and amelie. it was impossible to ask amelie, therefore he would ask her. he wrote to her that night asking whether he might come and see her as soon as he got to town. their northern visits were nearly at an end, and he would be passing through in about a week's time. the matter, he added, was one which might be of great importance to him and his future happiness, and no one in the world could help him but her. the answer he got was thoroughly characteristic--characteristic, that is, of the dorothy emsworth whom he knew, thoroughly uncharacteristic of the dorothy who had blackmailed and then mocked at him by telling his wife what he had paid so heavily for her not to know. 'charmed to see you' (it ran), 'though you have behaved so very badly. yes, perhaps i can help you. i don't know. i am rather afraid i made mischief with your wife; but she annoyed me, and i have, as you well know, the temper of beelzebub. really, i am very fond of amelie, but she is not very fond of me. deeply pathetic, but i shall get over it. 'yours ever, 'd. e.' 'p.s.--thank you so much for the charming dressing-bag you sent me. i use it constantly. it has your crest and initials on it, so that i am constantly reminded of you. by the way, i shall give it you hot when we meet, so it is only fair you should be warned.' bertie read this and re-read it, and for the first time a doubt stood by him, dim and shadowy, but apparent, visible to the senses. this last letter was so like her; it threw into brighter light the unlikeness to her of the affair of the blackmail. yet there was no other explanation the least plausible. a week later they were both in london. the palmers were there also, on the eve of their departure to america--mrs. palmer having spent august very pleasantly in about thirty different houses, her husband having spent it very profitably in one. in other words, he had remained the whole month in london, and devoted himself to the consolidation and extension of his english interests. he had been able to go ahead more completely on his own lines, and with his own rapidity, owing to the absence of other directors on their holidays, and, octopus-like, had spread his tentacles far and wide. but now affairs in america demanded his presence, and he was leaving his english business in the hands of bilton, who appeared to him, the better he knew him, to be extraordinarily efficient. he was almost as rapid, and quite as indefatigable, as mr. palmer himself, and had the faculty of being able to absorb himself in one branch of his work from ten to eleven, and to pass without pause into a similar state of absorption over another. since, then, seaton house was open, and to open their own house just for a couple of days was unnecessary, bertie and amelie took up their quarters there. mrs. emsworth, under bilton's direction, was to make another american tour this autumn, and was, in fact, in london only for a day or two before she left by the same boat by which the palmers were also going. she had made an appointment with bertie for the afternoon of the day after his arrival in london, and since she had warned him that he might expect a hot time, he took with him, in order to equalize the temperature on both sides, the contents of the packet that lived under lock and key in his despatch-box. he had himself no wish to indulge in recrimination; as he had told her, he wanted and entreated her help, but if she was proposing to hurl, so to speak, the returned dressing-bag at his head, the letter seemed to him of the nature of a gun that wanted a great deal of silencing. she was at home when he arrived, and he was at once shown up into the room he knew so well. the outside blinds were down to keep out the stress of the august heat, and the air was thick with the scent of flowers. then there came the rustle of a dress on the landing outside, and she entered. 'are you there, bertie?' she asked. 'it is so dark one can see nothing.' she drew up one of the blinds. 'that is better,' she said. 'now, what do you want?' she gave him no other greeting of hand-shake, but sat down on the sofa opposite the chair where he had been sitting. at the sight of her all his pent-up anger and indignation rushed to the surface; he had not known before how vile what she had done seemed to him. 'what have i done to you that you should treat me like this?' he broke out. 'once i gave you my heart, myself, all i was, and you laughed at me. then--oh my god! it is too much.' she looked at him in blank surprise. 'you got over it,' she said. 'you married somebody else. i think i behaved rather well. if i had chosen i might have made things unpleasant for you. but i am not that sort of woman.' bertie heard himself laugh, though he was unconscious of any amusement. 'i paid you a high price, and you cheated me,' he said. 'i paid you again. that was not enough, but you must needs tell her. that is the sort of woman you are.' dorothy sat up. 'either you are mad or i,' she said. 'i think it is you. as i told you, your wife annoyed me. she was prim, priggish, puritan. i thought it would do her good to know that once you were foolish enough to write me a letter. i wished i had kept it, i remember. i should have liked to have seen her face when i showed it her. i can't bear prigs. but you paying me, and i cheating you? if you will excuse the expression, i wish the devil you would tell me what you mean.' bertie leant forward. 'you are inimitable,' he said. 'i never much respected your power as an actress till to-day. but i see i was wrong. you told me you were getting rich. so rich, perhaps, that ten thousand pounds for a forgery, and then five thousand more, escape your memory.' he got up; the mere statement of what she had done, now that he was face to face with her, infuriated him to a sort of madness of rage. 'if you will excuse the expression, you' devil,' he said. he came a step nearer, and saw her shrink from him, and look round as if to see where the bell was. 'no, no; i am not going to touch you,' he said. 'you needn't be frightened.' he took from his pocket the letters, and unfolded them. 'do you remember this, and this?' he said. 'and this, a copy of the instructions you gave? all that i think i could have forgiven you. but on the top of it, you tell amelie. by your own confession you tell her that, and anything more, i suppose, that occurred to you. no doubt you told her that you had gratified my passion for you. that is the only thing that can account for the change that came over her from the time she saw you.' dorothy's frightened look had passed completely off. 'give me those, bertie,' she said quietly. 'before god, i swear to give you them back. you can trust me. i don't use that name unless i mean it.' his anger had so transported him that his errand to her had been forgotten. he had come to ask for her help, to learn anyhow, if she would tell him, exactly what she had said to amelie. but the sight of her had somehow driven him to frenzy, to a pitch of passionate anger which he had not known he was capable of. but her words, the quietness of them, the sobriety with which she spoke, sobered him. there was something, too, in her tone that convinced him. so in silence he handed them all to her. she read through them all without once raising her eyes. then she gave them back to him, and sat still with eyes downcast. when she raised them, he saw that they were full of tears. 'i know nothing whatever of the whole affair,' she said. 'the torn letter, i think, is yours. i remember tearing it up myself on the day on which you came to see me in new york. the other two i know nothing of. and you thought--you, bertie, who knew me--thought i had done that.' 'i thought you had done that!' he repeated mockingly. then his doubt stood beside him again, a little clearer, a little more precise in outline, and his tone changed. 'you didn't do it?' he said. she looked at him, half in scorn, half in pity. 'i!' she said in a tone indescribable, and no more. she was far too deeply hurt to reproach him; no words could meet the situation. but, looking at him, she saw the anger die out of his face, and knew that he believed her. 'i am sorry, i am sorry,' he stammered. she made a gesture of impatience. 'tell me all about it from the beginning,' she said; and she heard him in silence. 'and you thought i had done that,' she said. 'certainly it looked like it, but you ought to have known it was impossible. you did not. now listen.' she paused a moment. 'bertie, for many months you saw me almost daily, and guessed nothing. of all the men i have known--i have known several--i loved one. you. that was why i always refused you. it was my one decent impulse. it was not easy for me. nor was it easy for me to see you marry amelie. but i loved you, and liked her. and in a very dim and vague sort of way i realized that there was such a thing as keeping good, as being clean. even i realized that. so i kept you by me as long as i could, because your passion for me made you lead a proper life. you did not know that other women even existed while you could see me. then you wrote that letter, and i knew that i could resist no longer if i continued to see you. so i sent you away. i have done a good many horrible things in my life, but i have done just that one decent one. one thing more. you have never known me do a mean thing. i wonder you dared think it was i who blackmailed you. now, that is absolutely all. i have no other word to say about myself.' 'i have one,' he said. 'can you forgive me?' 'i have no idea,' she answered. she got up and walked once or twice up and down the room, he sitting where he was, not looking at her, but hearing only the _frou-frou_ of her dress. then he heard the sprit of a lighted match, and a moment afterwards she blew a great cloud of smoke into his face. 'you disgusting, horrible pig!' she said. 'my fingers simply tingle to box your ears. now, what is to be done? it is perfectly clear who blackmailed you, and if you like you can have him in the hollow of your hand.' 'bilton,' said bertie. 'of course. he really is rather a charming character. he had a grudge against me, because i told sybil brancepeth of--of past events. he has made a good attempt to pay it off. now, what will you do? personally, i should like you to prosecute him, and i will come to the trial. you could get him years and years for that. but you must not do it except with your wife's permission. england is the home of linen-washing in public; it is the one industry that remains to us. but you must ask her first. tell me, what terms are you on?' 'polite speaking terms.' dorothy laughed. 'what fools husbands and wives are!' she remarked. 'why don't you have it out with her? why don't you explode, boil over, beat her, or something? it is partly my fault, too. i saw she thought there was more to be told, and i did not trouble to convince her, for she did behave so primly. nose in the air, as if i was a bad smell.' she paused a moment. 'go to her now at once,' she said, 'before you have time to think it over. show her the letter; tell her the whole story. off with you. ah! wait a minute.' she left the room quickly, and came back again with the dressing-bag in her hand. 'will you take it now?' she said, with her enchanting smile. he could not speak; there was a pathos about her gaiety that gripped his throat. 'all happiness to you and her, dear bertie,' she said. 'now go away.' it was between eleven and twelve that night when bertie left the smoking-room and went upstairs. his wife had gone some quarter of an hour before, but mr. palmer had detained him talking. he tapped at her bedroom door; her maid opened it, and after a moment he was admitted. she was sitting before her glass in a blue silk and lace dressing-gown, and her hair, a rippling sheet of molten gold, was streaming down her back. 'you want to speak to me?' she asked. 'if i may.' 'you can go,' she said to the maid. 'i will send for you if i want you.' amelie got up, smoothing her hair back behind her ears. if she had been the most finished coquette, she would have done exactly that; art would have imitated the complete naturalness of the movement. her face was very pale, and looked infinitely weary, but its beauty, the beauty of that falling river of gold, the beauty of her bare arm, and the gentle swell of her bosom, half seen through the low opening of the neck of her dressing-gown, had never been more dazzling. but her eyes were lustreless; they looked on him as on a stranger. 'what is it?' she asked. he tried to school his tongue to begin, but for the moment it would not. 'would to-morrow do as well?' asked amelie. 'i am rather tired.' 'no; i want to tell you to-night,' said he. 'it is about mrs. emsworth.' she flushed, and turned her head a little away. 'i do not care to hear,' she said. 'i must tell you, all the same,' he said. she shrugged her shoulders ever so slightly. 'i cannot prevent you,' she said. she sat down by her toilet-table, turning only a shoulder to him, and with her cool white hands idly arranged the things that stood there, and he began his tale. he told her everything from the beginning: of his wild infatuation for mrs. emsworth, of the absolute innocence of that attachment, and of the letter he had written. she interrupted him here. 'i do not see why you tell me this,' she said. 'i knew all you have told me.' 'you did not know it from me,' he said. 'that makes a difference.' for the first time her face softened a little. 'yes,' she said, 'i see that.' 'do you believe what i tell you?' she turned now and faced him. 'no, bertie, i am afraid not,' she said. 'it is not reasonable. we all know what sort of a woman mrs. emsworth is. you say you were madly in love with her. we know also what a man's code of morality usually is. is it reasonable?' 'there is a reason,' he said. 'tell it me, then.' 'it is hard to tell you,' he said. 'but it is this: she loved me. for that reason she wished me not--not to act unworthily. so she laughed at me. she sent me away.' amelie got up and stood in front of him, with head downcast. instinctively and completely she knew this to be the truth, and was humbled. she touched his arm gently with her finger-tips. 'yes, that is a very good reason,' she said. 'bertie, i am sorry. all these awful weeks i have believed the other. it has made everything black and bitter to me.' 'have you minded so much?' he asked. 'i have minded more than i can possibly tell you,' she said. 'but i believe you now. and i am sorry.' bertie took her hand and kissed it. there was more to tell yet. 'i want to tell you first about the letter,' he said, 'and then there is just one word more. mrs. emsworth destroyed it, or believed she did, but it fell into the hands of a man, whom i will name if you wish. at least, she regards it as certain it was he. he blackmailed me twice over it, sending me once a copy of the letter, the second time the letter itself. i paid him both times.' 'who was it?' asked she. 'harold bilton. now, what do you wish me to do?' 'it will mean publicity if you prosecute him?' she asked. 'all those horrors of a court?' 'yes.' 'i don't think i could bear it about you,' she said. 'threaten him if you like. get back your money if you can. but not that, bertie.' 'it shall be as you wish.' 'do you want to very much?' 'i see red when i think of him,' said he. 'ah, don't, don't!' she said. she was silent a moment. 'one thing more, then,' he said. 'i want to show you the letter. i want you to know all. i have brought it here. will you read it?' 'yes, if you wish,' she said. she took it from him, and went over to the brighter light of the dressing-table to read it by. it was long, and it took her some minutes, and in those minutes she learned for the first time what a man's love could be, and she envied with a sense of passionate longing the woman to whom it was written. that was the fire he had spoken of. when she had finished she gave it back to him. 'i have read it all,' she said. 'poor bertie! you suffered.' she paused, and suddenly her jealousy and her desire flamed high. 'you never spoke to me like that,' she said. his white face looked down on her. 'no, dear. since then, until weeks after we were married, i thought all power of feeling like that was dead in me. i had forgotten what it meant. i could not imagine ever wanting to care like that again. then by degrees you and your sweetness and your love and your beauty awoke the desire again. that desire grew, and my power to feel it grew with it, till it trembled on the verge of passion. it was growing every day when things began to come between us, till in these last weeks we have been worse than strangers.' something woke in her eyes that he had not seen there for months. 'and will it grow again now?' she asked. 'or have i spoiled it all?' he drew her to him. 'amelie, forgive me,' he said. 'whether you can or not, i don't know, but if you still care for me at all, try, try to help me.' the light in her eyes grew more wonderful. 'if i care for you?' she asked. 'if i care for you?' he kissed her on her beautiful eyes and on her mouth. 'so it is all told, dear,' said he, 'and you will help me. you look very tired. i have been keeping you up.' 'i am not tired now,' she said. 'and, bertie, bertie, there is one thing yet. before very many months i shall be the mother of your child.' and the long pent-up tempest of her love for him broke, overwhelming and flooding her. her arms were pressed round his neck, and from his shoulder she raised her face to his. 'your child,' she whispered again. chapter xviii on the second morning after this bilton was seated at breakfast, with his confidential secretary by him, who was engaged in opening and reading his letters to him, and taking shorthand notes of his replies. bilton himself glanced at the envelopes and directions first, and reserved for his own opening anything that carried a superscription of privacy, or was in the hand of anyone with whom he was on terms of intimacy. there were never many of these; the bulk of his daily correspondence was of a purely business character, which was, on the whole, infinitely more to his mind than the effusions of friends. of late his mail-bag had put on weight enormously, the english affairs of mr. palmer and the swelling trade of his own personal enterprises having almost doubled it in the last few months; but this increase was wholly welcome to him, since every letter received and answered meant business. on this particular morning there was nothing, as far as he could see, designed for his private eye, and the quiet, smooth-voiced young american who sat by him had the field to himself. some letters required but a monosyllabic reply from his master, which he jotted down in a corner of the page; others were longer, and demanded some half-page of cabalistic notes; others, again, were set aside to be dealt with by bilton himself. there were to-day several of them dealing with the subject of a threatened strike at the railway works which were in process of establishment at the junction where the cardiff line, now in process of construction, would join the existing liverpool and southampton. the business was an annoying one; bricklayers employed on repairs on a tunnel there were already out, and now a demand came from platelayers on the same section. another letter was from the engineer in charge of that section of the line. the entrance to the tunnel, on the work of which the bricklayers had been employed, was, of course, perfectly safe with its wooden casing and strutting, but in case of heavy or continuous rain the ground might get soft, and the struts sink in the ground, thus rendering the passage unsafe for trains. he suggested that labour should be brought from elsewhere at once, unless the men could be induced to go back to work. the letters dealing with this bilton had caused to be put on one side; towards the end of his breakfast he asked for a second reading of them. some of the matters appeared to him to be rather urgent; in addition to that, mr. palmer was leaving for liverpool and america the next morning, and would thus be out of touch for the next eight days. so, after a little consideration, he dictated a telegram to say that he would go down there himself that afternoon. there were but few letters remaining, and, during bilton's pause for consideration, the secretary had opened the rest, and had them ready to read. the next was from amelie. 'dear sir, 'kindly order all work of coal-boring on the molesworth property to be stopped until further instructions from me. 'faithfully yours, 'amelie keynes.' bilton frowned, and held out his hand for this. 'i'll answer that,' he said. 'go on.' the smooth-voiced secretary proceeded: 'we are instructed by our client the earl keynes to apply to you for the prompt payment of the sum of fifteen thousand pounds. should your cheque for this not reach us by the evening of tuesday, september , his lordship will place the matter in other hands. he desires me to admit no discussion either from you or your representatives. 'we are, dear sir, 'faithfully yours, 'hobarts & howard.' bilton did not ask for this; he plucked it out of the young man's hand. 'anything more?' he asked. 'no, sir; that is all.' 'very good. i shall leave by the two o'clock train for molesworth. i shall spend the night there, and get back to-morrow. if by the evening's post to-day or by to-morrow morning's post there is anything further from messrs. hobarts and howard, telegraph it to me.' bilton did not at once move from the breakfast-table after his secretary had left him, but remained seated there, his elbow on the table, his lips caressing an unlit cigar. adept as he was at seeing combinations, and supplying from his imagination factors which alone would account for certain combinations presented to him as problems, he could not at once see his way through this. more than that, he could not determine with any internal satisfaction on his next move. that move might, of course, be merely a negative move--mere inaction on his part; but, turn the matter over in what way he might, he could not see how to say 'check' in answer to this 'check.' he was threatened--threatened, too, by a firm of eminently reputable solicitors who presumably would not undertake business of any but the securest nature. fifteen thousand pounds, it is true, did not mean anything very particular to him, but he saw further than that. should he pay it, the very fact of his payment was equivalent, to his shrewd american brain, to a confession of his guilt. what if he paid only to find that he had clinched the proof against himself? and if he did not pay, if he shrugged his shoulders at the whole matter, what if the 'other hands' were entrusted with it?' he rose from the table, biting his cigar through. 'the blackmailer blackmailed,' he muttered. 'new sensational novel. guess i'll think it over.' he glanced again at the letter, and saw that he had till the evening of the next day in which to commit himself definitely to one or the other course of action. he would be back in london in the course of the next afternoon; there would be time then, and to-day he was really too busy to give the matter the attention which he was afraid it deserved. but by mid-day to-morrow the affair of the strike in any case would be off his mind; he would devote the whole of the hours occupied by his journey back to london, if necessary, to the consideration of this matter. then there was the note from amelie stopping the coal-boring.... in a moment a possible reconstruction of what had happened suggested itself to him. she knew. he went down to the scene of the strike that afternoon, and found things rather more serious than he had anticipated. the bricklayers had already gone out, the platelayers had sent in demands which he did not feel himself justified in accepting without consultation with mr. palmer, and, what was much more serious, in spite of their indentures, there was a hint of trouble with the signalmen. it took him, indeed, some two or three hours to find out the full extent of that with which the line was threatened, and in the back of his mind all the time was the consciousness of that with which he himself was threatened. he had, in fact, to leave the inspection of the tunnel till the next morning. he left also till the next morning, in case the result of his negotiations with the strikers might prove to be nugatory, the despatch of a telegram to mr. palmer, asking him to have the express in which he would travel to liverpool stopped at the wyfold junction, so that he himself might get in there, and during the journey to liverpool talk over the situation. in that case it would be necessary also perhaps to get an extra day for himself in his own private matter; and after dinner he telegraphed to messrs. hobarts and howard saying that he would reply to them by the evening of september . extremely urgent business, he said, engaged his attention, and, being at a loss to understand their communication, he asked for this extension. he went up to bed in the rather dingy hotel in which he was forced to stay, conscious of extreme weariness, but unhappily conscious of an inability to obtain the refreshment of sleep. often before now he had suffered from insomnia, and he was aware when he got into bed that the worst form of insomnia--namely, the utter absence of the slightest drowsiness, which to some extent compensates for the absence of sleep--was likely to be his. he knew that there lay before him a seemingly infinite period of intensely active thought, inharmoniously linked with an intensely active desire for sleep. a mill-race of coherent images foamed through his brain, all tinged with failure. he cursed himself for all he had done: he had made a mess of his courtship of sybil; he had made a mess over the wretched fifteen thousand pounds. knowing bertie, he thought he had known how safe this small transaction was. true, it was scarcely worth while, but the man who makes his million makes it by consideration of very much smaller sums, and it was not in his nature to have neglected any chance. the chance seemed certain: his money was paid; his letters were returned; never had blackmail gone on smoother wheels. but in his wakefulness, and in his agitation about the strike, which involved larger issues to him than the mere payment of this sum, the latter assumed nightmare proportions; it swelled and encompassed him. if he paid, there was his confession; if he did not pay, there were the 'other hands' ready to undertake the business. 'i did not think the young man had so much blood in him,' he thought, as he tossed in his abominable feather-bed. during the last forty-eight hours the plans of the palmer family had somewhat altered. mrs. palmer, for instance, had discovered that it was necessary to start at ten in the morning in order to join the liverpool and southampton line, by which her husband wished to travel. that was clearly out of the question, and the matter resolved itself into a decision whether they should go by euston or spend the night at molesworth, stopping the liverpool express there. the latter counsel prevailed, and a couple of hours after bilton had left london they also left, four of them; for bertie was of the party. his plans, too, had changed. he was going to america now instead of following a fortnight later. the inn at which bilton passed the night was close to the railway-station at frampton, near which on the south lay the tunnel where there was trouble with the strikers. frampton itself was originally a small village, but was now extending huge suckers of jerry-built houses into the country; for it lay on the junction between the liverpool and southampton line, and the new communication with south wales. it was on the junction, too, of the molesworth and wyfold estates, molesworth lying on the north, wyfold to the south. consequently, the palmer party had passed through it the afternoon before, and had got out at the station of molesworth, some five miles further on. this, of course, was unknown to bilton, who imagined they were still in london. he rose from his bed the next morning feeling tired and unrefreshed, dressed, and sent a telegram to mr. palmer at seaton house, asking him to have the train stopped at wyfold, where he himself would get in, as he wanted to consult with him over the situation. it should reach him in london in plenty of time before he started, and he himself would have the greater part of the morning at frampton, and would get over to wyfold in time to take the train there. he wished also to see for himself the condition of the unfinished and abandoned work in the tunnel, and get an estimate, if possible, from the engineer of the shortest time in which it would be possible to finish the work without interrupting traffic, in case he decided to import labour at once. his work in connection with other matters, however, took him rather longer than he had anticipated, and he set off down the mile of line which lay between frampton and the tunnel to meet the engineer who was appointed to be waiting for him there rather short of time. he had expected to be obliged to go over to wyfold in the course of the morning, and he had therefore telegraphed to have the train stopped there. this had proved, however, to be unnecessary, but it was too late now to alter the rendezvous to frampton. the tunnel in question was a very deep burrow under some mile of hill that rose steeply above it, and its completion--or so close an approach to completion that it could be used--had been the great triumph of speed in the construction of the line. he found that the work remaining to be done was easily compassable within a week or two, if sufficient numbers of men could be brought to the spot, while there was also at the wyfold end of the tunnel another unfinished piece of less extent, if anything, than this. the report of the engineer also put matters in rather a less serious light: the great beams and timber which supported the wooden arch over which the bricks had to be laid were at present absolutely secure; it would take weeks of rain before danger was even threatened, but would it not be well, if possible, to finish so small a job at once, and have it off their minds? bilton was decidedly of this opinion, and gave orders that steps should be taken to get outside labour without delay. this concluded his morning's work. he looked at his watch; it was later than he had known, and to walk back a mile to frampton, where he could get a trap, and then drive over the huge ridge of the tunnel down into wyfold, might mean missing the train, which would stop for him there, but would assuredly not wait if he was not on the platform. but the engineer had an easy solution. why not walk through the tunnel, which would take very little longer than going back to frampton? he would thus find himself within a mile of the wyfold station? he could get there in very little over half an hour, going briskly, and would easily be in time to step into the stopped express. no train was due on either line for the next half-hour; in fact, the next train that would pass would be the southampton to liverpool express, in which at the moment he would himself be travelling. the engineer would provide him with a lantern, which he could leave at the signal-box at the other end of the tunnel. this seemed an admirable arrangement, and in a couple of minutes he had set off. the light cast by the lantern was excellent; it shone brightly to guide his path, and gleamed on the rails of the four tracks as they pointed in narrowing perspective up the black cavern that lay before him until they were lost in the darkness. he walked on the right-hand side of the tunnel; immediately on his left, was the main line from southampton to liverpool, along which he would soon return at a brisker pace than that which was his now. for some hundreds of yards the gray glimmer from the end of the tunnel where he had entered also cast a diffused light into the darkness, but as he proceeded the light faded and grew dim, and when he was now some third of the way through, the slight continuous bend in the tunnel, which had been necessary in order to avoid a belt of unstable and shifty strata, obscured it altogether, and he walked, but for the light from his lantern, in absolute darkness. his own footsteps echoed queerly from the curved vault, but there was otherwise dead silence save for some occasional drip of water; all outside noises of the world were entirely cut off from him. he was stepping along thus when he saw, with a sudden start of horror, that there was something dark lying between the second and third pair of rails a little way ahead of him. from the fact that he started, he was conscious that his nerves were not working with their accustomed smoothness and coolness, and he heard his heart hammering in his throat. then he pulled himself together, crossed the two rails which lay between him and it, turned the lantern on it, and saw next moment, with a spasm of relief, that it was only a coat, left there and forgotten, no doubt, by some workman. with a cheap impulse of kindness, he picked it up, meaning to leave it with his lantern at the signal-box at the far end. but as he picked it up and stepped on again to regain the side path where he had been walking, his foot tripped in it, or on the corner of some sleeper, and he fell forward, the lantern flying from his hand, and smashing itself to atoms on the hard metal of the road, and his head struck full on the temple against the steel of the track. the blow completely stunned him. about the same time the party left molesworth to drive to the station, where the liverpool express would be stopped for them. it was a distance of not more than three miles, but they stopped in the village close to the station in case there was anything at the post-office which had come by the second post, and would thus miss them. there was only one thing--a telegram from bilton, re-directed from seaton house, asking that the train might be stopped at wyfold. so they drove on to the station, and there learned that the express had already passed through wyfold without stopping, and would reach molesworth in six or seven minutes. so mr. palmer, who never wasted regrets on the inevitable, shrugged his shoulders and inspected the book-stall, while mrs. palmer inundated the telegraph-office with despatches, and bertie and amelie strolled up and down the platform. bilton came to himself with a blank unconsciousness of where he was. it was quite dark, and he first realized that he was not in bed by the feel of his clothes. then he put his hand to his head, and drew it away with a start of horror, for it was warm and wet. then he felt with his hand the metal of the roadway, and, following that, encountered one of the rails. at that the broken ends of memory joined themselves, and he knew where he was. simultaneously he heard the dead silence broken by a distant roar and rumble. at this he started to his feet, wavered, and nearly fell again. all his senses were suddenly electrified, vivified, by that noise, and he remembered all--how he had started to walk through the tunnel, how he had picked up the coat, how he had fallen, how the engineer had told him that the next train through would be that to liverpool. but where was he? on which line had he fallen? there were four tracks; he thought he ought to move to the right across the rails--no, to the left. hell! was it to the right or to the left that that train would pass? the roar got louder; it echoed with an infernal clangour from the curved sides of the tunnel; it prevented him thinking, and he felt sure that if it would only stop for one second his head would be clear, and he could take two steps to safety. but that noise must stop a moment, and in a frenzy, no longer master of himself, he shouted hoarsely, and impotently waved his hand in the darkness. from which way did it come? from in front of him or behind him? if he could only settle that, he would know what to do. the roaring grew unbearable: it drove him mad; and, with his fingers in his ears, he began to run he did not know where, and he again tripped on some rail and fell. on the sides of the tunnel there shone a red, gloomy light, but he did not see it; above the roar and rattle of the racing wheels there sounded the hot, quick panting of some monster, but he did not hear it. he knew one moment of awful shock, of the sense of being torn and battered in pieces; then the roar sank down, as the train passed on, and diminished into silence as it emerged from the darkness of the tunnel into the pure and glorious sunlight of that september morning. and to him who had been pitiless and relentless in life had come death as swift and relentless as himself. amelie and bertie were at the fore-end of the platform when the express drew up, and they turned back. just as they got opposite the engine, bertie gave one short gasp of horror, and grasped his wife's arm. 'bertie, what is it?' she said. 'go on, amelie,' he said quickly. 'don't look to right or left, but walk straight on.' she obeyed him, and he went to the engine-driver. 'there is something on your engine,' he said. epilogue it was a march day of glorious windy brightness, and all down the glades of molesworth, where bertie and amelie had sat one hot morning in june last year, innumerable companies of daffodils danced and flickered in the sun. the great trees were yet for the most part bare of leaves, but round the birches a green mist hovered, and the red buds on the limes were ready to burst. boisterous, but warm and fruitful, and teeming with the promise of the opening year, the wind shouted through the branches, and bowled, as a child bowls a hoop, great fleecy clouds across the blue of the sky. movement, light, fruitfulness of the warm earth, were all triumphant; the strength of all that lived was renewed; spring was there. to-day amelie was pacing alone up and down the glade near the fallen tree-trunk where she had sketched before. she walked briskly, for it was not yet a day to loiter in; and as she came to the end of her beat within sight of the house, she looked eagerly towards it as if expecting someone. but the brilliance of her face and of the smile that every now and then hovered round her lips was in no way diminished when she turned again without seeing him whom she waited for. it seemed she was content to wait, and, though eager, did not fear disappointment. the grass where she walked was all bright with the springing shoots of young growth, and the daffodils nodded and tossed their heads all round her. not yet was the full note of woodland summer sounding, but the great orchestra of nature, as it were, was tuning up for the concert. somehow the fragmentary broken sounds and scraps of summer melody strangely pleased her; often she stopped in her walk, and looked with her brilliant smile to right and left. once she threw her arms wide, so that her red cloak stood away from her bosom, as if to take the world to it. at last he came, and her heart embraced him ere yet he reached her. he was hatless, and the yellow gold of his hair was tossed by the wind. at the sight of him her whole being leaped towards him with stronger ecstasy than she had known yet, for the love between them seemed perfect; and she, woman-like, and loving her task, knew that a little word of comfort and sympathy was demanded of her. 'dear one,' she said, and 'dear one' again. 'poor bertie! you look tired. you should have waited the night in london, and come down this evening.' 'should i, when you were waiting?' he asked. 'oh, what a morning from god! and you, amelie, among the daffodils.' she put her arm into his. 'tell me,' she said, 'did you get there in time? did your father know you?' bertie shook his head. 'no; he knew no one from the time of his seizure. but i am glad i went. he will be buried here on friday.' she pressed his arm; that sympathy of touch was more eloquent to him than words. 'and the baby?' he asked. 'oh, bertie, so wonderful! nurse says he will speak in no time at all if he goes on like this. she says she never saw such a clever baby.' bertie laughed. 'that is a remark i never heard before,' he said. 'then you will hear it lots of times in future,' said amelie with some dignity; 'nurse says it nearly every day.' they had passed out of the shade of the trees on to the lawn near the house. just in front of them was an ugly patch of black-looking earth, on which, however, the new growth of grass was beginning to show. amelie stopped when they came to it. 'ah, bertie, those weeks!' she said--'those weeks when we were strangers! this black patch, where the bore-hole was begun, makes them more vivid to me than my memory of them. it is like them--a black patch.' 'yet the grass springs again,' said he. she took both his hands in hers. 'yes, bertie,' she said, 'the grass springs again, for the winter is past; i read it this morning only. it says beautiful things. "the flowers appear on the earth, and the time of the singing of birds is come." that is now, is it not? then, further on, "my beloved is mine, and i am his."' 'and that is the best of all,' said he. the end http://www.archive.org/details/californians athearch the californians by gertrude atherton john lane: the bodley head london and new york third edition university press, cambridge, u. s. a. to n. l. book i i "i won't study another word to-day!" helena tipped the table, spilling the books to the floor. "i want to go out in the sun. go home, miss phelps, that's a dear. anyhow, it won't do you a bit of good to stay." miss phelps, young herself, glanced angrily at her briery charge, longingly at the brilliant blue of sky and bay beyond the long window. "i leave it to miss yorba." her voice, fashioned to cut, vibrated a little with the vigour of its roots. "you seem to forget, miss belmont, that this is not your house." "but you are just as much my teacher as hers. besides, i always know what magdaléna wants, and i know that she has had enough united states history for one afternoon. when i go to england i'll get their version of it. we're brought up to love their literature and hate them! such nonsense--" "my dear miss belmont, i beg you to remember that you have but recently passed your sixteenth birthday--" "oh, of course! if i'd been brought up in boston, i'd be giving points to socrates and wondering why there were so many old maids in the world. however, that's not the question at present. 'léna, do tell _dear_ miss phelps that she needs an afternoon off, and that if she doesn't take it--i'll walk downstairs on my head." helena, even at indeterminate sixteen, showed promise of great beauty, and her eyes sparkled with the insolence of the spoiled child who already knew the power of wealth. the girl she addressed had only a pair of dark intelligent eyes to reclaim an uncomely face. her skin was swarthy, her nose crude, her mouth wide. the outline of her head was fine, and she wore her black hair parted and banded closely below her ears. her forehead was large, her expression sad and thoughtful. don roberto yorba was many times more a millionaire than "jack" belmont, but magdaléna was not a spoiled child. "i don't know," she said, with a marked hesitation of speech; "i'd like to go out, but it doesn't seem right to take advantage of the fact that papa and mamma are away--" "what they don't know won't hurt them. i'd like to have don roberto under my thumb for just one week. he'd get some of the tyranny knocked out of him. jack is a model parent--" magdaléna flushed a dark ugly red. "i wish you would not speak in that way of papa," she said. "i--i--well--i'm afraid he wouldn't let you come here to study with me if he knew it." "well, i won't." helena flung her arms round her friend and kissed her warmly. "i wouldn't hurt his spanish dignity for the world; only i do wish you happened to be my real own cousin, or--that would be much nicer--my sister." magdaléna's troubled inner self echoed the wish; but few wishes, few words, indeed, passed her lips. "well?" demanded miss phelps, coldly. "what is it to be? do you girls intend to study any more to-day, or not? because--" "we don't," said helena, emphatically. and magdaléna, who invariably gave way to her friend's imperious will, nodded deprecatingly. miss phelps immediately left the room. "she's glad to get out," said helena, wisely. "she hates me, and i know she's got a beau. come! come!" she pulled magdaléna from her chair, and the two girls ran to the balcony beyond the windows and leaned over the railing. "there's nothing in all the world," announced helena, "so beautiful as california--san francisco included--in spite of whirlwinds of dust, and wooden houses, and cobblestone streets, and wooden sidewalks. one can always live on a hill, and then you don't see the ugly things below. for instance, from here you see nothing but that dark blue bay with the dark blue sky above it, and opposite the pink mountains with the patches of light blue, and on that side the hills of sausalito covered with willows, and the breakers down below. and the ferry-boats are like great white swans, with long soft throats bending backwards. i don't express myself very well; but i shall some day. just you wait; i'm going to be a scholar and a lot of other things too." "what, helena?" magdaléna drew closer. she thought helena already the most eloquent person alive, and she envied her deeply, although without bitterness, loving her devotedly. the great gifts of expression and of personal magnetism had been denied her. she had no hope, and at that time little wish, that the last paucity could ever be made good by the power of will; but that articulate inner self had registered a vow that hard study and close attention to the methods of helena and others as--or nearly as--brilliant should one day invest her brain and tongue with suppleness. "what other things are you going to be, helena?" she asked. "i know that you can be anything you like." "well, in the first place, i am going to new york to school,--now, don't look so sad: i've told you twenty times that _i know_ don roberto will let you go. then i'm going to europe. i'm going to study hard--but not hard enough to spoil my eyes. i'm going to finish off in paris, and then i'm going to travel. incidentally, i'm going to learn how to dress, so that when i come back here i'll astonish the natives and be the best-dressed woman in san francisco; which won't be saying much, to be sure. then, when i do come back, i'm going to just rule things, and, what is more, make all the old fogies let me. and--_and_--i am going to be the greatest belle this state has ever seen; and that _is_ saying something." "of course you will do all that, helena. it will be so interesting to watch you. ila and tiny will never compare with you. some people are made like that,--some one way and some another, i mean. shall--shall--you ever marry, helena?" "yes. after i have been engaged a dozen times or so i shall marry a great man." "a great man?" "yes; i don't know any, but they are charming in history and memoirs. i'd have a simply gorgeous time in washington, and ever after i'd have my picture in 'famous women' books." "shall you marry a president?" asked magdaléna, deferentially. she was convinced that helena could marry a reigning sovereign if she wished. "i haven't made up my mind about that yet. presidents' wives are usually such dreary-looking frumps i'd hate to be in the same book with them. besides, most of the presidents don't amount to much. truthful george must have been a deadly bore. i prefer benjamin franklin--although i never could stand that nose--or clay or calhoun or patrick henry or webster. they're dead, but there must be lots more. i'll find one for you, too." again the dark flush mounted to magdaléna's hair, as with an alertness of motion unusual to her, she shook her head. "aha!" cried the astute helena, "you've been thinking the matter over, too, have you? who is he? tell me." magdaléna shook her head again, but slowly this time. helena embraced and coaxed, but to no effect. even with her chosen friend, magdaléna was reticent, not from choice, but necessity. but helena, whose love was great and whose intuitions were diabolical, leaped to the secret. "i know!" she exclaimed triumphantly. "it's a caballero!" this time magdaléna's face turned almost purple; but she had neither her sex's quick instinct of self-protection nor its proneness to dissemble, secretive as she was. she lifted her head haughtily and turned away. for a moment she looked very spanish, not the unfortunate result of coupled races that she was. helena, who was in her naughtiest humour, threw back her head and laughed scornfully. "a caballero!" she cried: "who will serenade you at two o'clock in the morning when you are dying with sleep, and lie in a hammock smoking cigaritos all day; who will roll out rhetoric by the yard, and look like an idiot when you talk common-sense to him; who is too lazy to walk across the plaza, and too proud to work, and too silly to keep the americans from grabbing all he's got. i met a few dilapidated specimens when i was in los angeles last year. one beauty with long hair, a sombrero, and a head about as big as my fist, used to serenade me in intervals of gambling until i appealed to jack, and he threatened to have him put in the calaboose if he didn't let me alone--" magdaléna turned upon her. her face was livid. her eyes stared as if she had seen the dead walking. "hush!" she said. "you--you cruel--you have everything--" helena, whose intuitions never failed her, when she chose to exercise them, knew what she had done, caught a flashing glimpse of the shattered dreams of the girl who said so little, whose only happiness was in the ideal world she had built in the jealously guarded depths of her soul. "oh, magdaléna, i'm so sorry," she stammered. "i was only joking. and my statesmen will probably be horrid old boors. i _know_ i'll never find one that comes up to my ideal." she burst into tears and flung her arms about magdaléna's neck: she was always miserable when those she loved were angry with her, much as she delighted to shock the misprized. "say you forgive me," she sobbed, "or i sha'n't eat or sleep for a week." and magdaléna, who always took her mercurial friend literally, forgave her immediately and dried her tears. ii don roberto yorba had escaped the pecuniary extinction that had overtaken his race. of all the old grandees who, not forty years before, had called the californias their own: living a life of arcadian magnificence, troubled by few cares, a life of riding over vast estates clad in silk and lace, botas and sombrero, mounted upon steeds as gorgeously caparisoned as themselves, eating, drinking, serenading at the gratings of beautiful women, gambling, horse-racing, taking part in splendid religious festivals, with only the languid excitement of an occasional war between rival governors to disturb the placid surface of their lives,--of them all don roberto was a man of wealth and consequence to-day. but through no original virtue of his. he had been as princely in his hospitality, as reckless with his gold, as meagrely equipped to cope with the enterprising united statesian who first conquered the californian, then, nefariously, or righteously, appropriated his acres. when commodore sloat ran up the american flag on the custom house of monterey on july seventh, , one of the midshipmen who went on shore to seal the victory with the strength of his lungs was a clever and restless youth named polk. as his sharpness and fund of dry new england anecdote had made him a distinctive position on board ship, he was permitted to go to the ball given on the following night by thomas o. larkin, united states consul, in honour of the commodore and officers of the three warships then in the bay. having little liking for girls, he quickly fraternised with don roberto yorba, a young hidalgo who had recently lost his wife and had no heart for festivities, although curiosity had brought him to this ball which celebrated the downfall of his country. the two men left the ball-room,--where the handsome and resentful señoritas were preparing to avenge california with a battery of glance, a melody of tongue, and a witchery of grace that was to wreak havoc among these gallant officers,--and after exchanging amenities over a bowl of punch, went out into the high-walled garden to smoke the cigarito. the perfume of the sweet castilian roses was about them, the old walls were a riot of pink and green; but the youths had no mind for either. the don was fascinated by the quick terse common-sense and the harsh nasal voice of the american, and the american's mind was full of a scheme which he was not long confiding to his friend. a shrewd yankee, gifted with insight, and of no small experience, young as he was, polk felt that the idle pleasure-loving young don was a man to be trusted and magnetic with potentialities of usefulness. he therefore confided his consuming desire to be a rich man, his hatred of the navy, and, finally, his determination to resign and make his way in the world. "i haven't a red cent to bless myself with," he concluded. "but i've got what's more important as a starter,--brains. what's more, i feel the power in me to make money. it's the only thing on earth i care for; and when you put all your brains and energies to one thing you get it, unless you get paralysis or an ounce of cold lead first." the californian, who had a true grandee's contempt for gold, was nevertheless charmed with the engaging frankness and the unmistakable sincerity of the american. "my house is yours," he exclaimed ardently. "you will living with me, no? until you find the moneys? i am--how you say it?--delighted. always i like the americanos--we having a few. all i have is yours, señor." "look here," exclaimed polk. "i won't eat any man's bread for nothing, but i'll strike a bargain with you. if you'll stand by me, i'll stand by you. i mean to make money, and i don't much care how i do make it; this is a new place, anyhow. but there's one thing i never do, and that is to go back on a friend. you'll need me, and my yankee sharpness may be the greatest godsend that ever came your way. i've seen more or less of this country. it's simply magnificent. americans will be swarming over the place in less than no time. they've begun already. then you'll be just nowhere. is it a bargain?" "it is!" exclaimed don roberto, with enthusiasm; and when polk had explained his ominations more fully, he wrung the american's hand again. polk, after much difficulty, but through personal influence which he was fortunate enough to possess, obtained his discharge. he immediately became the guest of don roberto, who lived with his younger sister on a ranch covering three hundred thousand acres, and, his first intention being to take up land, was initiated into the mysteries of horse-raising, tanning hides, and making tallow; the two last-named industries being pursued for purposes of barter with the boston skippers. but farming was not to polk's taste; he hated waiting on the slow processes of nature. he married magdaléna yorba, and borrowed from don roberto enough money to open a store in monterey stocked with such necessities and luxuries as could be imported from boston. when the facile californians had no ready money to pay for their wholesale purchases, he took a mortgage on the next hide yield, or on a small ranch. his rate of interest was twelve per cent; and as the californians were never prepared to pay when the day of reckoning came, he foreclosed with a promptitude which both horrified don roberto and made imperious demands upon his admiration. "my dear don," polk would say, "if it isn't i, it will be some one else. i'm not the only one--and look at the squatters. i'm becoming a rich man, and if i were not, i'd be a fool. you had your day, but you were never made to last. your boots are a comfortable fit, and i propose to wear them. i don't mean yours, by the way. i'm going to look after you. better think it over and come into partnership." to this don roberto would not hearken; but when the rush to the gold mines began he was persuaded by polk to take a trip into the san joaquin valley to "see the circus," as the yankee phrased it. there, in community with his brother-in-law, he staked off a claim, and there the lust for gold entered his veins and never left it. he returned to monterey a rich man in something besides land. after that there was little conversation between himself and polk on any subject but money and the manner of its multiplication; and, as the years passed, and polk's prophecy was fulfilled, he gave the devotion of a fanatic to the retention of his vast inheritance and to the development of his grafted financial faculty. between the mines, his store, and his various enterprises in san francisco, polk rapidly became a wealthy man. even in those days he was accounted an unscrupulous one, but he was powerful enough to hold the opinion of men in contempt and too shrewd to elbow such law as there was. and his gratitude and friendship for don roberto never flickered. he advised him to invest his gold in city lots, and as himself bought adjoining ones, don roberto invested without hesitation. polk had acquired a taste for spanish cooking, cigaritos, and life on horseback; his influences on the californian were far more subtle and revolutionising. don roberto was still hospitable, because it became a grandee so to be; but he had a yankee major-domo who kept an account of every cent that was expended. he had no miserly love of gold in the concrete, but he had an abiding sense of its illimitable power, all of his brother-in-law's determination to become one of the wealthiest and most influential men in the country, and a ferocious hatred of poverty. he saw his old friends fall about him: advice did them no good, and any permanent alliance with their interests would have meant his own ruin; so he shrugged his shoulders and forgot them. the american flag always floated above his rooms. in time he and polk opened a bank, and he sat in its parlour for five hours of the day; it was the passion of his maturity and decline. when polk's sister, some eleven years after the occupation of california by the united states, came out to visit the brother who had left her teaching a small school in boston, he married her promptly, feeling himself blessed in another new england relative. she was thirty-two at the time, and her complexion was dark and sallow: but she carried her tall angular figure with impressive dignity, and her chill manners gave her a certain distinction. don roberto was delighted with her, and as she was by nature as economical as his familiar could desire, he dismissed the major-domo and gave her _carte blanche_ at the largest shops in the city; even if he had wished it, she could not have been induced to buy more than four gowns a year. but she was a very ambitious woman. as the wife of a great californian grandee, she had seen herself the future leader of san francisco society. her ambitions were realised in a degree only. don roberto built her a huge wooden palace on nob hill,--on which was the highest flagstaff and the biggest flag in san francisco,--placed a suitable number of servants at her command, and gave her a carriage. but he only permitted her to give two large dinners and one ball during the season, and would go to other people's entertainments but seldom. as their ideas of duty were equally rigid, she would not go without him; but they had a circle of intimate and aristocratic friends with whom they lunched and dined informally,--the polks, the belmonts, the montgomerys, the tarltons, the brannans, the gearys, and the folsoms. they had been married ten years when magdaléna, their only child, was born. iii mrs. yorba was so ill when her daughter came that the child struggled miserably into existence, and, failing to cry, was put away as dead, and forgotten for a time. it was discovered to be breathing by mrs. polk, who coaxed it through several months of puny existence with all a native californian woman's resource. during this time it never cried, only whimpered miserably at rare intervals. it was finally discovered to be tongue-tied, and as soon as it was old enough an operation was performed. after that the child's health mended, although she seemed in no hurry to use her tongue. as she progressed in years she still spoke but seldom, only mildly remonstrating when helena belmont pulled her hair or vented her exuberant vitality upon magdaléna's inferior person. once only did she lose her temper,--when helena hung up all her dolls in a row and slit them that she might have the pleasure of seeing the sawdust pour out,--and then she leaped upon her tormentor with a hoarse growl of rage, and the two pommelled each other black and blue. but as a rule she was gentle and much-enduring, and helena was very kind and clamoured constantly for her society. as the girls grew older they studied together, and the friendship, born of propinquity, was strengthened by mutual tastes and sympathy. helena was probably the only person who ever understood the reticent, proud, apparently cold and impassive temperament of the girl who was an unhappy and incongruous mixture of spanish and new england traits; and magdaléna was helena's most enthusiastic admirer and attentive audience. magdaléna had one other friend, her aunt, mrs. polk, for whom she was named. that lady was enormously stout and something of an invalid, but carried the tokens of early beauty in a skin of brilliant fairness and a pair of magnificent dark eyes fringed with lashes so long and thick that magdaléna, when a child, found it her greatest pleasure to count them. mrs. polk knew little of her husband and liked him less. she had obeyed her brother's orders and married him, loving a dazzling caballero--who had since gambled away his acres--the while. but polk ministered to the luxury that she loved; and though his high-pitched voice never ceased to shake her nerves, and his hard cold face to inspire active dislike, as the years went on and she saw how it was with her people, she accepted her lot with philosophy, and finally--as youth fled--with gratitude. mrs. yorba she detested, but she loved the child she had saved to a life of doubtful happiness, and--she had no children of her own--would gladly have adopted her. she lived a life of retirement, and had a scanty though kindly brain: therefore she never understood magdaléna as well as helena did at the age of six; but she could love warmly, and that meant much to her niece. the three large and aristocratically ugly mansions of don roberto yorba, hiram polk, and colonel "jack" belmont stood side by side on nob hill. belmont was not as wealthy as the others, but a "palatial residence" does not mean illimitable riches even yet in san francisco. belmont had married a boston girl of far greater family pretensions than mrs. yorba's, but of no more stately appearance nor correct demeanour. the two women were intimate friends until her husband's notorious infidelities and erraticisms when under the periodical influence of alcohol killed mrs. belmont. neither don roberto nor polk drank to excess, and they kept their mistresses in more decent seclusion than is the habit of the average san franciscan. it would never occur to mrs. yorba to suspect her husband or any other man of infidelity, did she live in california an hundred years, and mrs. polk was too indifferent to give the matter a thought. although she lived in retirement, rarely venturing out into the winds and fogs of san francisco, mrs. polk surrounded herself with all the luxuries of a pampered woman of wealth and fashion. her house was magnificent, her private apartments almost stifling in their sumptuousness. polk squeezed every dollar before he parted with it, but his wife had long since accomplished the judicious exercise of a violent spanish temper, and her bills were seldom disputed. magdaléna and helena loved these scented gorgeous apartments, and ran through the connecting gardens daily to see her. their delight was to sit at her feet and listen to the tales of california when the grandee owned the land, when the caballero, in gorgeous attire, sang at the gratings of the beauties of monterey. mrs. polk would sing these old love-songs of spain to the accompaniment of the guitar which had entranced her caballeros in the _sala_ of her girlhood; and helena, who had a charming voice, learned them all--to the undoing of her own admirers later on. it was she who asked a thousand questions of that arcadian time, and mrs. polk responded with enthusiasm. doubtless she exaggerated the splendours, the brilliancy, the unleavened pleasure; but it was a time far behind her, and she was happy again in the rememoration. as for magdaléna, she seldom spoke. she listened with fixed eyes and bated breath to those descriptions of the beautiful women of her race, seeing for the time her soul's face as beautiful, gazing at her reflected image aghast when she turned suddenly upon one of the long mirrors. her soul sang in accompaniment to her aunt's rich voice, and her hands moved unconsciously as those listless spanish fingers swept the guitar. when helena imperiously demanded to be taught, and quickly became as proficient as her teacher, magdaléna kept her eyes on the floor lest the others should see the dismay in them. had it occurred to mrs. polk to ask her niece if she would like to learn these old songs of her race, magdaléna would have shaken her head shyly, realising even sooner than she did that there was no medium for the music in her soul, as there was none for the thoughts in her mind. although her aunt loved her, she did not scruple to tell her that she was not to be either a beautiful or a brilliant woman; but although magdaléna made no reply, she had a profound belief that the virgin would in time grant her passionate nightly prayers for a beautiful face and an agile tongue. beauty was her right; no woman of her father's house had ever been plain, and she had convinced herself that if she were a good girl the virgin would acknowledge her rights by her eighteenth birthday. as her intellect developed, she was haunted by an uneasy scepticism of miracles, particularly after she learned to draw, but she still prayed; it was a dream she could not relinquish. nor was this all she prayed for. she had all the californian's indolence, which was ever at war with the intellect she had inherited from her new england ancestors. her most delectable instinct was to lie in the sun or on the rug by the fire all day and dream; and she was thoroughly convinced that the virgin aided her in the fight for mental energy, and was the prime factor in the long periods of victory of mind over temperament. and only her deathless ambition enabled her to keep pace with helena. she sat up late into the night poring over lessons that her brilliant friend danced through while dressing in the morning. her memory was bad, and she never mastered spelling; even after her schooldays were over, she always carried a little dictionary in her pocket. she laboured for years at the piano, not only under her father's orders, but because she passionately loved music, but she had neither ear nor facility, and to her importunities for both the virgin gave no heed. and the bitterness of it all lay in the fact that she was not stupid; she was fully aware that her intellect was something more than commonplace; but the machinery was heavy, and, so far as she could see, there was not a drop of cleverness with which to oil the wheels. she had read extensively even before she was sixteen,--letters, essays, biographies, histories, and a number of novels by classic authors; and although she was obliged to read each book three times in order to write it on her memory, she slowly assimilated it and developed her brain cells. up to this age she was seldom actively unhappy, for she had the hopes of youth and religion, her aunt, helena, and, above all, her sweet inner life, which was an almost constant dwelling upon the poetical past, linked to a future of exalted ideals: not only should she be more beautiful than helena or tiny montgomery or ila brannan, but she should hold rooms spell-bound with her eloquence, or the music in her finger-tips; and when in solitude her soul would rise to such heights as her fettered mind hinted at vaguely but insistently. wild imaginings for a plain tongue-tied little hybrid, but what man's inner life is like unto the husk to whose making he gave no hand? iv helena remained an hour longer, then ran home to don a white frock and roman sash. her father, with all his vagaries, seldom failed to dine at home; and he expected to find his little daughter, smartly dressed, presiding at his table. his sister, mrs. cartright, who had managed his house since his wife's death, made no attempt to manage helena, and never thought of taking the head of the table. magdaléna stood for some time looking out over the darkening bay, at the white mist riding in to hang before the mountains beyond. she had seen california wet under blinding rain-storms, but never ugly. even the fogs were beautiful, the great waves of sand whirling through the streets of san francisco picturesque. california was associated in her mind, however, with perpetual blue skies and floods of yellow light. she had wondered occasionally if all people were not happy in such a country,--where the sun shone for eight months in the year, where flowers grew more thickly than weeds, and fruit was abundant and luscious. she had read of the portion to which man was born, and had decided that if thackeray and dickens had lived in california they would have been more cheerful; but to-day, assailed by a presentiment general rather than specific, she accepted, for the first time, life in something like its true proportions. "there are no more caballeros," she thought, putting into form such sense of the change as she could grasp. "and helena is going away, for years; and papa will not let me go, i know, although i mean to ask him; and aunt is way down in santa barbara, and writes that she may not return for months. and i don't know my music lesson for to-morrow, and papa will be so angry, because he pays five dollars a lesson; and mrs. price is so cross." she paused and shivered as the white fog crept up to the verandah. it was very quiet. she could hear the ocean roaring through the golden gate. again the presentiment assailed her. "none of those things was it," she thought in terror. "uncle jack belmont says, according to balzac, our presentiments always mean something." she noticed anew how beautiful the night was: the white wreaths floating on the water, the dark blue sky that was bursting into stars, the mysterious outline of the hills, the ravishing perfumes rising from the garden below. "it is like a poem," she thought. "why does no one write about it? oh!" with a hard gasp, "if i could--if i could only write!" a meteor shot down the heavens. for the moment it seemed that the fallen star flashed through her brow and lodged, effulgent, in her brain. "i--i--think i could," she thought. "i--i--am sure that i could." and so, the cruel desires of art, and the tree of her crucifix were born. she went inside hastily, afraid of her thoughts. she changed her frock for a white one, smoothed her sleek hair, and walked downstairs. she never ran, like helena--unless, to be sure, helena dragged her; she had all the dignity of her father's race, all its iron sense of convention. she went into the big parlours to await her parents' return; they had been spending a day or two at their country house in menlo park, and would return in time for dinner. the gas had been lighted and turned low; magdaléna had never seen any rooms but her own in this house sufficiently lighted by day or by night, except when guests were present. mrs. yorba would waste neither gas nor carpets; in consequence, the house had a somewhat sepulchral air; even its silence was never broken, save when helena gave a sudden furious war-whoop and slid down the banisters. the walls of the parlour were tinted a pale buff, the ceilings frescoed with cherubs and flowers. on the great plate-glass windows were curtains of dark red velvet trimmed with gold fringe. the large square pieces of furniture were upholstered with red velvet. the floor was covered with a red brussels carpet with a design of squirming devil-fish. three or four small chairs were covered with indian embroidery, and there were two chinese tables of teak-wood and mottled marble. gas having been an afterthought, the pipes were visible, although painted to match the walls. magdaléna had seen few rooms and had not awakened to the hideousness of these; her aunt had mingled little taste with her splendour, and the belmont mansion was furnished throughout its lower part in satin damask with no attempt at art's variousness. magdaléna opened the piano and felt vaguely for the music in the keys. she forgot the star, remembered only her passionate love of exultant sound, her longing to find the soul of this most mysterious of all instruments. but her stiff fingers only sprawled helplessly over the keys, and after a few moments she desisted and sat staring with dilating eyes, the presentiment again assailing her. her shattered caballeros rose before her, but she shook her head; they, under what influence she knew not, had faded out into ghost-land. a carriage drove up to the door. she went forward and stood in the hall, awaiting her parents. they entered almost immediately. both kissed her lightly, her mother inquiring absently if she had been a good girl, and remarking that she had neuralgia and should go to bed at once. her father grunted and asked her if she and helena belmont had behaved themselves, and, more particularly, if she had been outside the house without an attendant; he never failed to ask this when he had been away from the house for twenty-four hours. magdaléna replied in the negative, and did not feel called upon to confess her minor sins. she had a conscience, but she had also a strong distaste for her father's temper. don roberto had been a handsome caballero in his youth, but his face, like that of most californians, had coarsened as it receded from its prime. the nose was thick, the outlines of the jaw lost in rolls of flesh. but the full curves of his mouth had been compressed into a straight line, and the consequent elevation of the lower lip had almost obliterated an originally weak chin. he was bald and wore a skull-cap, but his black eyes were fiery and restless, his skin fair with the fairness of castile. he went to his room, and magdaléna did not see him again until dinner was announced. she saw little of her parents. there is not much fireside life in california. there was none in the yorba household. mrs. yorba was a martyr to neuralgia, and such time as was not passed in the seclusion of her chamber was devoted to the manifold cares of her household and to her small circle of friends. don roberto would not permit her to belong to charitable associations, nor to organisations of any kind, and although she regretted the prestige she might have enjoyed as president of such concerns, she had long since found herself indemnified: don roberto's social restrictions had unwittingly given her the position of the most exclusive woman in san francisco. as time went on, it gave people a certain distinction to be on her visiting list. when mrs. yorba realised this, she looked it over carefully and cut it down to ninety names. after that, hostesses whose position was as secure as her own begged her personally to go to their balls. her own yearly contribution to the season's socialities was looked forward to with deep anxiety. it was the stiffest and dullest affair of the year, but not to be there was to be written down as second of the first. so was greatness thrust upon mrs. yorba, who never returned to her native boston, lest she might once more feel the pangs of nothingness. she loved her daughter from a sense of duty rather than from any animal instinct, but never petted nor made a companion of her. nevertheless she watched over her studies, literary excursions, and associates with a vigilant eye. magdaléna's companions were the objects of her severe maternal care. once a year in town and once during the summer in menlo park, magdaléna had a luncheon party, the guests chosen from the very inner circle of mrs. yorba's acquaintance. the youngsters loathed this function, but were forced to attend by their distinguished parents. magdaléna sat at one end of the table and never uttered a word. the only relief was helena, who talked bravely, but far less than was her wont; the big dark dining-room, panelled to the ceiling with redwood, and hung with the progenitors of the haughty house of yorba, the gliding chinese servants, the eight stiff miserable little girls, with their starched white frocks, crimped hair, and vacant glances, oppressed even that indomitable spirit. on one awful occasion when even helena's courage had failed her, and she was eating rapidly and nervously, the children with one accord burst into wild hysterical laughter. they stopped as abruptly as they had begun, staring at one another with expanded, horrified eyes, then simultaneously burst into tears. helena went off into shrieks of laughter, and magdaléna hurriedly left the room, and in the privacy of her own wept bitterly. when she went downstairs again, she found helena making a brave attempt to entertain the others in the large garden behind the house. they were swinging and playing games, and looked much ashamed of themselves. when they went home each kissed magdaléna warmly, and she forgave them and wished that she could see them oftener. she was never allowed to go to lunch-parties herself. occasionally she met them at helena's, where they romped delightedly, appropriating the entire house and yelling like demons, but taking little notice of the quiet child who sat by mrs. cartright, listening to that voluble dame's tales of the south before the war, too shy and too spanish to romp. even at that early age, they respected and rather feared her. as she grew older, it became known that she was "booky,"--a social crime in san francisco. as for helena, she was one of those favoured mortals who are permitted to be anything they please. she, too, devoured books, but she did so many other things besides that people forgot the idiosyncrasy, or were willing to overlook it. don roberto spent his leisure hours with his friends hiram polk and jack belmont. there was no resource of the town unknown to these elderly rakes; and the older they grew the more they enjoyed themselves. on fine evenings they always rode out to the presidio or to the cliff house; and it was one of the sights of the town,--these three leading citizens and founders of the city's prosperity: don roberto, fat, but riding his big chestnut with all the unalterable grace of the californian; polk, stiff and spare, his narrow grey face unchanged from year to year, ambling along on a piebald; dashing jack belmont, a cavalry officer to his death, his long black moustachios flying in the wind, a flapping hat pulled low over his abundant curls, bestriding a mighty black. all three men were somewhat old-fashioned in their attire; they went little into society, preferring the more various life beyond its pale. v half of the dinner passed in unbroken silence. magdaléna sat at one end of the table, her father at the other, their wants attended to by three chinese servants. magdaléna was not eating: she was summoning up courage to speak on a subject that was fast conquering her reticence. her thoughts were not interrupted. don roberto was a man of few words. he had been an eloquent caballero in his youth, but had grown to be as careful of words as of investments. he liked to be amused by women; but, as he rightly judged, no amount of development could make his wife and daughter amusing, so he encouraged them to hold their tongues. he deeply resented magdaléna's lack of beauty; all the women of his house had been famous throughout the californias for their beauty. it was the duty of a yorba to be beautiful--while young; after thirty it mattered nothing. magdaléna had completed the structure of her courage. she did nothing by halves, and she knew that she should not break down. "papa," she said. "well?" "helena is going to new york and to paris to school. she is going to live with relatives, but she will attend school." "she need." "i thought you liked helena." "i like; but she need the discipline more than all the girls in california." "i shall be very lonely without her." "suppose so; but now is the time to learn plenty, and no think so much by the play." "i should like to go with her." "suppose so." "may i?" "no." "but you would not miss me, nor mamma either." "i choose you shall be educate at home. i no approve of the schools. si helena belmont was my daughter, i take the green hide reata to her every morning; but belmont so soffit, the school is better for her. you stay here. no say any more about it." "could i not travel with her after? i want to travel." "si i find time one day go abroad, i take you; but you no go with helena belmont. i no am surprise si she make herself the talk of europe." "could not mamma go with me?" "your mother no leave the husband! never she propose such a thing!" "do you think you will be able to go soon?" "very doubt. the californian who leave the business for a year working like the dog for five after. si he find one red cent when he come back, he is lucky. the man no knowing just where he is even when he stand over the spot." "then when helena goes, can i go to santa barbara for awhile and visit aunt?" "you no can! i no wish you ask the reason. you never go to the south! never before you talk so much, by scott!" vi magdaléna had failed at every point. she had expected to fail, but she felt miserable and discouraged, nevertheless. after dinner she went up to her room and prayed to the virgin. in time she felt comforted, her tears ceased, and she sat thinking for some time at the foot of her little altar. with the sad philosophy of her nature she put the impossible from her, and considered the future. it had been arranged long ago that she and helena, ila and tiny, were to come out at the same time; the great function which should introduce to san francisco three of its most beautiful girls, and its most favoured by lineage and fortune, was to be given by mrs. yorba. the other girls would come out a year earlier or later. ila and tiny were already in europe. she had three uninterrupted years before her. in those years she could do much. when she was not studying, she would read the best authors and learn their secret. her father had no library, but colonel belmont had, and she was a life member of the mercantile library; the membership had been presented to her two birthdays ago by her luncheon guests, who respected what they would not emulate. she pressed her face into her hands, striving to arrange the nebulous thoughts and ambitions which burned in her brain. there was a wild ringing of bells. she raised her head and saw a red glare, then rose and walked over to the window. she thought a fire very beautiful; and as there were many in that city of wood and wind, she had had full opportunity to observe their manifold phases. her bedroom adjoined the schoolroom, but was on the corner of the house at the back, and overlooked not only the business part of the city between the foot of the hill and the bay, but the region known as "south of market street." this large valley had its aristocratic quarter, but it was now largely given over to warehouses, dépôts, and streets of the poor. a month seldom passed without a big blaze in this closely built combustible section. to-night there was a long narrow ribbon of flame twisting in the wind, which in a few moments would leap from block to block, licking up the flimsy dwellings as a cat licks up milk. above the ribbon flew a million sparks, turning the stars from gold to white. every moment the wind twisted the ribbon into wonderful fantastic shapes, which beset magdaléna's brain for words as beautiful. she listened intently. some one was climbing a pillar of the balcony. it was helena, of course: she often chose that laborious method of entering a house whose doors were always open to her. magdaléna opened the back window and stepped out onto the balcony. "is that you, helena?" she whispered. "is it? just you wait till you see me!" a moment later she had clambered over the railing and stood before the astonished magdaléna. "what--what--" "boys' clothes. can't you see for yourself? i'm going to the fire, and you're going with me." "of course i shall not. what possessed you--" but the astute helena detected a lack of decision in her friend's voice. "you're just dying to go," she said coaxingly. "you adore fires, and you'd love to see one close to. put a waterproof on and a black shawl over your head. then if anybody notices you, they'll think you're a _muchacha_ from spanish town. as i am a boy, i can protect you beautifully. we'll go to the livery stable and i'll make old duff give me a hack. i've a pocket full of boodle; papa gave me my allowance to-day. here, come in." she dragged the unresisting magdaléna into the room, arrayed her in a waterproof, and pinned a black shawl tightly about the small brown face. "there!" she said triumphantly, "you look like a poor little greaser, for all the world. don roberto would have a fit. do you think you can slide down the pillar?" "i don't know--yes, i am sure i can if you can." her spanish dignity was aghast, but her newborn creative instinct stung her spirit into a sudden overpowering desire for dramatic incident. "yes, i'll go," she whispered, closer to excitement than helena had ever, save once, seen her. "i'll go." "of course! i knew you would. i always knew you were a brick; come! quick! i'll go first." she slid down the pillar, which she could easily clasp with her long arms and legs; and magdaléna, after a gasp, followed, shivering with terror, but too proud to utter a sound. before she had reached the bottom she had lost all interest in the fire; she no longer wanted to write poetry; she wished frantically to be back in the security of her room. but she reached the ground safely; and although she fell in a heap, she quickly pulled herself together and stood up, holding her head higher than ever. and when she was on the sidewalk, in disguise, unattended for the first time in her life, her very nerves sang with exultation, and she was filled with a wild longing for a night replete with adventure. "'léna!" whispered helena, ecstatically. "isn't this gorgeous?" magdaléna nodded. her brain and heart were throbbing too loud for speech. "i'm going to fires for the rest of my life," announced helena, as they turned the corner and walked swiftly down the hill. she was not of the order which is content with one experience, even while that initial experience is yet a matter of delightful anticipation. when they reached the livery stable, helena marched in, holding magdaléna firmly by the hand. "i want a hack," she said peremptorily to the man in charge. "and double quick, too." the man stared, but helena rattled the gold in her pocket, and he called to two men to hitch up. "upon my soul," he whispered to his associates, "it's those kids of jack belmont's and old yorba's, or i'm a dead man. but it ain't none of my business, and i ain't one to peach. i like spirit." "we're going to the fire, and i wish the hack to wait for us," said helena, as he signified that all was ready. "i'll pay you now. how much is it?" "ten dollars," he replied unblushingly. helena paid the money like a blood, magdaléna horrified at the extravagance. her own allowance was five dollars a month. "can you really afford this, helena?" she asked remonstrantly, as the hack slid down the steep hill. "i got fifty dollars out of jack to-night. he's feeling awfully soft over my going away. poor old jack, he'll feel so lonesome without me. but we'll have a gay old time travelling together in europe when i'm through." magdaléna did not speak of her conversation with her own parent. she did not want to think of it. this night was to be one of uniform joy. they were a quarter of an hour reaching the fire. as they turned into the great central artery of the city, market street, they leaned forward and gazed eagerly at the dense highly coloured mass of men and women, mostly young, who promenaded the north sidewalk under a blaze of gas. "what queer-looking girls!" said magdaléna. "why do they wear so many frizzes, and sailor hats on one side?" "they're chippies," said helena, wisely. "what's chippies?" "girls that live south of market street. they work all day and promenade with their beaux all evening. as i live, 'léna, we're going down fourth street. we'll go right through chippytown." they had been south of market street before, for ila and tiny lived on the aristocratic rincon hill; but their way had always lain down second street, which was old, but stately and respectable. fourth street, like market street by night, would be a new country; but after a few moments' eager attention helena sniffed with disappointment. the narrow street and those branching from it were ill-lighted and deserted; there was nothing to be seen but low-browed shops. but there was always the red glare beyond; and in a few moments the holocaust burst upon them in all its terrible magnificence. they sprang out of the hack and walked rapidly to the edge of the crowd, which filled the street in spite of the warning cries of the firemen and the angry shouts of the policemen. the fire was devouring four large squares and sending leaping branches to isolated dwellings beyond. a great furniture factory and innumerable tenements were vanishing like icicles under a hot sun. the girls, careless of the severe jostling they received, stared in fascinated amazement at the red tongues darting among the blackened shells, the crashing roofs, the black masses of smoke above, cut with narrow swords of flame, the solid pillar of fire above the factory, the futile streams of water, the gallant efforts of the firemen. magdaléna, hardly knowing why, reflected with deep satisfaction that a fire was even more wonderful at close quarters than when viewed from a distance. every detail delighted her; but when a clumsy boy stepped on her toes, she drew helena into a sand lot opposite, where it was less crowded. it was then that she noticed for the first time the weeping women gathered about their household goods. she stared at them for a moment, then shook the rapt helena by the arm. "look!" she whispered. "what is the matter with those people?" "what?" asked helena, absently. "oh, don't i wish i were on that house with a hose in my hand! what a lovely exciting life a fireman's must be!" then, yielding to magdaléna's insistence, she turned and directed her gaze to the people in the lot behind her. "oh, the poor things!" she said, forgetting the fire. "they've been burnt out. let's talk to them." the two girls approached the unfortunate creatures, who were wailing loudly, as if at a wake. "poor devils!" exclaimed helena. "i am so glad i have some silver with me." "and i have nothing to give them," thought magdaléna, bitterly; but she was too proud to speak. she stared at them, her brain a medley of new sensations, as helena went about, questioning, fascinating, sympathising, giving. it was the first time she had seen poverty; she had barely heard of its existence; it had never occurred to her that great romanticists condescended to borrow from life. it was not abject poverty that she witnessed, by any means. there were no hollow cheeks here, no pallid faces, no shrunken limbs. it was, save for the passing distress, to which they were not unaccustomed, a very jolly, hearty, contented poverty. their belongings were certainly mean, but solid and sufficient. nevertheless, to magdaléna, who had been surrounded by luxury from her birth, and had rarely been in a street of less importance than her own, these commonly clad creatures, weeping over their cheap household goods, seemed the very dregs of the earth. her keen enjoyment fled. she was sure she could never be happy again with so much misery in the world. if her father would only--she recalled his contempt for charities, the prohibition he had laid on her mother. she determined to pray all night to the virgin to soften his heart. when the virgin had been allowed a reasonable time, she would beg him to give her a monthly allowance to devote to the poor. the virgin had failed her many times, but must surely hearken to so worthy a petition as this. she stood apart. no one noticed her. she had nothing to give. they were showering blessings upon helena, who was walking about with a cocky little stride, well pleased with herself. suddenly helena wheeled and ran over to magdaléna. "i've given away my last red," she said. "it's lucky i paid for that hack in advance. let's get out. those i haven't given any to will be down on me in a minute. besides, it's getting late. a-ou-u!" a policeman had tapped her roughly on the shoulder. she gazed at him in speechless terror for a half-moment, then gasped, "w-h-a-t do you want?" "i want you two young uns for the lock-up," he said curtly. the struggling crowd had lashed his pugnacity and ensanguined his temper. as an additional indignity, the saloon had been burned, and he had not had a drink for an hour. "i'll run you in for wearing boys' clothes; have you ever heard the penalty for that, miss? and i'll run in this little greaser as a vagrant." helena burst into shrieks of terror, clinging to magdaléna, who comforted her mechanically, too terrified, herself, to speak. even in that awful moment it was her father she feared, not the law. "shut up!" exclaimed the officer. "none of that." he paused abruptly and regarded helena closely. she was searching wildly in her pockets. "oh, if you've got a fiver," he said easily, "i'll call it square." "i haven't so much as a five-cent piece," sobbed helena, with a fresh burst of tears. "oh, 'léna, what shall we do?" "you'll come with me! that's what you'll do." he took them firmly by the hand and dragged them through the crowd, a section of which had transferred its attentions to the victims of the officer's wrath. but the three were soon hurrying up a dark cross-street toward a car; and as they went helena recovered herself, and began to cast about among her plentiful resource. she dared not risk telling this man their names, and bid him take them home in hope of reward, for he would certainly demand that reward of their scandalised parents. no, she decided, she would confide in the dignitary in charge at the station; and as soon as he knew who she was, he would be sure to let them go at once. they went up town on a street-car. helena had never been in one before, and the experience interested her; but magdaléna sat dumb and wretched. she had been a docile child, and her father's anger had never been visited upon her; but she had seen his frightful outbursts at the servants, and once he had horsewhipped a mexican in his employ until the lad's shrieks had made magdaléna put her fingers in her ears. he would not whip her, of course; but what would he do? and this horrid man, who was of the class of her father's coachman, had called her a "greaser." she had all the pride of her race. the insult stifled her. she felt smirched and degraded. nor was this all: she had had her first signal experience of the pall that lines the golden cloud. the officer motioned to the conductor to stop in front of a squat building in front of the old plaza. the man, whose gall had been slowly rising for want of drink, hurried them roughly off the car and across the sidewalk into a dark passage. their feet lagged, and he shoved them before him, flourishing his bludgeon. "git on! git on!" he said. "there's no gittin' out of this until you've served your time." the words and the dark passage made helena shiver. what if they would not give her a chance to speak, but should lock her up at once? she knew nothing of these dark doings of night. perhaps the policeman would take them directly to a cell. in that case, she must confide in him. they entered a room, and her confidence returned. a man sat at a desk, an open ledger before him. he was talking to several tramps who stood in various uneasy attitudes in front of the desk. his face was tired, but his eyes had a humourous twinkle. he did not glance at the new-comers. "sit down," commanded the policeman, "and wait your turn." the girls sat down uncomfortably on the edge of a bench. in a moment they noticed a young man sitting near the desk and writing on a small pad of paper. he looked up, looked again, regarding them intently, then rose and approached the policeman. "hello, tim," he said. "what have you got here? a girl in boys' clothes?" "that's about the size of it." helena pulled her cap over her eyes and reddened to her hair. for the first time she fully realised her position. she was colonel jack belmont's daughter, and she was waiting in the city prison as a common vagrant. magdaléna bent her head, pulling the shawl more closely about her face. the young man looked them over sharply. "they are the kids of somebodies," he said audibly. "look at their hands. there's a 'story' here." helena turned cold and set her teeth. she had no idea who the young man might be, but instinct told her that he threatened exposure. a few moments later the tramps had gone, and the man at the desk asked the policeman what charge he preferred against his arrests. "this one's a girl in boys' clothes, sir, and both, i take it, are vagrants. the house of correction is the place for 'em, i'm thinkin'." magdaléna's head sank still lower, and she dug her nails into her palms to keep from gasping. but helena, in this crucial moment, was game. she walked boldly forward and said authoritatively,-- "i wish to speak alone with you." the sergeant recognised the great i am of the american maiden; he also recognised her social altitude. but he said, with what severity he could muster,-- "if you have anything private to say, you can whisper it." helena stepped behind the desk and put her lips close to his ear. "i am colonel jack belmont's daughter," she whispered. "send me home, quick, and he'll make it all right with you to-morrow." "a chip of the old block," muttered the sergeant, with a smile. "i see. and who is your companion?" helena hesitated. "do--do i need to tell you?" she asked. "you must," firmly. "she's--you'll never breathe it?" "you must leave that to my discretion. i shall do what is best." "she is the daughter of don roberto yorba." "o lord! _o_ lord!" he threw back his head and gave a prolonged chuckle. the young man edged up to the desk. "who is that man?" demanded helena, haughtily. she felt quite mistress of the situation. "he's a reporter." "what's that?" "why, a reporter for the newspapers." "i know nothing of the newspapers," said helena, with an annihilating glance at the reporter. "my father does not permit me to read them." the sergeant sprang to his feet. "this _is_ no place for you," he muttered. "that's the best thing i've heard of jack belmont for some time. here, come along, both of you." he motioned to the girls to enter the passage, and turned to the officer. "don't let anybody leave the room till i come back," he said; and the reporter, who had started eagerly forward, fell back with a scowl. "there's no 'story' in this, young man," said the sergeant, severely; "and you'll oblige _me_," with significant emphasis, "by making no reference to it." "i think you're just splendid!" exclaimed helena, as they went down the passage. "oh, well, we all like your father. although it would be a great joke on him,--scott, but it would! however, it wouldn't be any joke on you a few years from now, so i'm going to send you home with a little good advice,--don't do it again." "but it's such fun to run to fires!" replied helena, who now feared nothing under heaven. "we _did_ have a time!" "well, if you're set on running to fires, go in your own good clothes, with money enough in your pocket to grease the palm of people like our friend tim. here we are." he called a hack and handed the girls in. "please tell him to stop a few doors from the house," said helena; "and," with her most engaging smile, "i'm afraid i'll have to ask you to pay him. if you'll give me your address, i'll send you the amount first thing to-morrow." "oh, don't mention it. just ask your father to vote for tom shannon when he runs for sheriff. it's no use asking anything of old yorba," he added, with some viciousness. "and i'd advise you, young lady, to keep this night's lark pretty dark." the remark was addressed to magdaléna, but she only lifted her head haughtily and turned it away. helena replied hastily,-- "my father shall vote for you and make all his friends vote, too. i won't tell him about this until next wednesday, the day before i leave for new york; then he'll be feeling so badly he won't say a word, and he'll be so grateful to you that he'll do anything. good-night." "good-night, miss, and i guess you'll get along in this world." as the carriage drove off, helena threw her arms about magdaléna, who was sitting stiffly in the corner. "oh, darling, dearest!" she exclaimed. "_what_ have i made you go through? and you're so generous, you'll never tell me what a villain i am. but you will forgive me, won't you?" "i am just as much to blame as you are. i was not obliged to go." "but it was dreadful, wasn't it? that horrid low policeman! the idea of his daring to put his hand on my shoulder. but we'll just forget it, and next week, to-morrow, it will be as if it never had happened." magdaléna made no reply. "'léna!" exclaimed helena, sharply. "you're never going to own up?" "i must," said magdaléna, firmly. "i've done a wicked thing. i've disobeyed my father, who thinks it's horrible for girls to be on the street even in the daytime alone, and i've nearly disgraced him. i've no right not to tell him. i must!" "that's your crazy old new england conscience! if you were all spanish, you'd look as innocent as a madonna for a week, and if you were my kind of californian you'd cheek it and make your elders feel that they were impertinent for taking you to task." "you are half new england." "so i am, but i'm half southerner, too, and all californian. i'm just beautifully mixed. you're not mixed at all; you're just hooked together. come now, say you won't tell him. he's a terror when he gets angry." "i must tell him. i'd never respect myself again if i didn't. i've done lots of other things and didn't tell, but they didn't matter,--that is, not so much. he's got a _right_ to know." "it's a pity you're not more like him, then you wouldn't tell." "what do you mean, helena? i am sure my father never told a lie." helena was too generous to tell what she knew. she asked instead, "i wonder would your conscience hurt you so hard if everything had turned out all right, and we were coming home in our own hack?" magdaléna thought a moment. "it might not to-night, but it would to-morrow. i am sure of that," she said. helena groaned. "you are hopeless. thank heaven, i was born without a conscience,--that kind, anyhow. i intend to be a law all to myself. i'm californian clear through into my backbone." the hack stopped. the girls alighted and walked slowly forward. mr. belmont's house was the first of the three. "well," said helena, "here we are. i'm going to climb up the pillar and walk along the ledge. how are you going in?" "through the front door." "well, if you will, you will, i suppose. kiss me good-night." magdaléna kissed her and walked on. a half-moment later helena called after her in a loud whisper,-- "take off that shawl!" magdaléna lifted her hand to her chin, then dropped it. when she reached her own home, she rang the bell firmly. the chinaman who opened the door stared at her, the dawn of an expression on his face. "where is don roberto?" she asked. "in loffice, missee." magdaléna crossed the hall and tapped at the door of the small room her father called his office. don roberto grunted, and she opened the door and went in. he was writing, and wheeled about sharply. "what?" he exclaimed. "what the devil! take that shawl off the head." magdaléna removed the shawl and sat down. "i went to a fire," she said. "i got taken up by a policeman and went to the station. a man named tom shannon said he wouldn't lock me up, and sent me home. he paid for the carriage." she paused, looking at her father with white lips. his face had turned livid, then purple. "_dios!_" he gasped. "_dios!_" and then she knew how furious her father was. when his life was in even tenor he never used his native tongue. "_dios!_" he repeated. "tell that again. you go with that little devil, helena belmont, i suppose. _madre de dios!_ again! again!" "i went to a fire--south of market street. a policeman arrested me for a vagrant. he called me a greaser--" her father sprang to his feet with a yell of rage. he caught his riding-whip from the mantel. she stumbled to her feet. "papa!" she said. "papa! you will not do that!" a few moments later she was in her own room. the stars shone full on her pretty altar. she turned her back on it and sat down on the floor. she had not uttered a word as her father beat her. even now she barely felt the welts on her back. but her self-respect had been cut through at every blow, and it quivered and writhed within her. she hated her father and she hated life with an intensity which added to her misery, and she decided that she had made her last confession to any one but the priest, who always forgave her. if she did wrong in the future and her father found it out, well and good; but she would not be the one to tell him. vii it was a part of her punishment that she was to be locked in her room until helena left for new york; but helena visited her every night in her time-honoured fashion. magdaléna never told of the blows, but confinement was a sufficient excuse to her restless friend for any amount of depression; and helena coaxed twenty dollars out of her father and bought books and bonbons for the prisoner, which she carefully disposed about her person before making the ascent. magdaléna hid her presents in a bureau drawer; and it is idle to deny that they comforted her. one of the books was "jane eyre," and another mrs. gaskell's life of charlotte brontë. they fired her with enthusiasm, and although she cried all night after the equally tearful helena had said good-bye to her, she returned to them next day with undiminished enthusiasm. the sunday after helena's departure she was permitted to go to church. she was attended by her mother's maid, a french girl and a fervid catholic. st. mary's cathedral, in which don roberto owned a pew that he never occupied, was at that time on the corner of california and dupont streets. magdaléna prayed devoutly, but only for the reestablishment of her self-respect, and the grace of oblivion for the degradation to which her father had subjected her. later, she intended to pray that he might be forgiven, both by herself and god, and that his heart should be softened to the poor; but not yet. she must be herself again first. her head had been aching for two days, the result of long confinement and too many bonbons. it throbbed so during service that she slipped out, whispering to the maid that she only wanted a breath of fresh air and would be back shortly. she stood for a few moments on the steps. her head felt better, and she noticed how peaceful the city looked; yet, as ever, with its suggestion of latent feverishness. she had heard colonel belmont say that there was no other city in the world like it, and as she stood there and regarded the precipitous heights with their odd assortment of flimsy "palaces" and dilapidated structures dating back to the fifties, she felt the vague restlessness that brooded over everything, and understood what he had meant; and she also knew that she understood as he had not. above was the dazzling sky, not a fleck in its blue fire. there was not a breath of wind in the city. she had never known a more peaceful day. and yet, if at any moment the earth had rocked beneath her feet, she would have felt no surprise. she felt the necessity for exercise. it was now over a week since she had been out of her room, and during that time she had not only studied as usual, but read and read and read. she did not remember to have ever felt so nervous before. she could not go back into the cathedral; it was musty in itself and crowded with the great unwashed. but it would not be right to disturb julie. there could be no harm in the least bit of a walk alone, particularly as her father was in menlo park. she glanced about her dubiously. chinatown, which began a block to her right, was out of the question, although she would have liked to see the women and the funny little chinese babies that she had heard of: the fortunate helena had been escorted through chinatown by her adoring parent and a policeman. she did not care to climb twice the almost perpendicular hill which led to her home, and at the foot of the hill was the business portion of the city. there was only one other way, and it looked quiet and deserted and generally inviting. she crossed california street and walked along dupont street. she saw to her surprise that the houses were small and mean; those the fire had eaten had hardly been worse. they had green outside blinds and appeared to date from the discovery of gold at least. "there are poor people so near us," she thought. "even helena never guessed it. i am glad the plate had not been handed round; i will give some one my quarter." the houses were very quiet. the shutters were closed, but the slats were open. she glanced in, but saw no one. "probably they are all in the cathedral," she thought. "i am glad it is so close to them." she walked on, forgetting the houses for the minute, absorbed in her new appreciation of the strange suggestiveness of san francisco. again, something was shaping itself in her mind, demanding expression. she felt that it would have the power to make her forget all that she did not wish to remember, and thought that perhaps this was the sponge for the slate the virgin was sending in answer to her prayers. suddenly, almost in her ear, she heard a low chuckle. she started violently; in all her life she had never heard anything so evil, so appalling, as that chuckle. it had come from the window at her left. she turned mechanically, her spirits sinking with nameless terror. her expanded eyes fastened upon the open shutters. a woman sat behind them; at least, she was cast in woman's mould. her sticky black hair was piled high in puffs,--an exaggeration of the mode of the day. her thick lips were painted a violent red. rouge and whitewash covered the rest of her face. there was black paint beneath her eyes. she wore a dirty pink silk dress cut shamefully low. the blood burned into magdaléna's cheeks. of sin she had never heard. she had no name for the creature before her, but her woman's instinct whispered that she was vile. the woman, who was regarding her malevolently, spoke. magdaléna did not understand the purport of her words, but she turned and fled whence she had come. as she did so, the chuckle, multiplied a dozen-fold, surrounded her. she stopped for a second and cast a swift glance about her, fascinated, with all her protesting horror. behind every shutter which met her gaze was the duplicate of the creature who had startled her first. as they saw her dismay, their chuckle broke into a roar, then split into vocabulary. magdaléna ran faster than she had ever run in her life before. suddenly she saw colonel belmont sauntering down california street, debonair as ever. his long moustaches swept his shoulders. his soft hat was on the back of his head, framing his bold handsome dissipated face. his frock-coat, but for the lower button, was open, and stood out about the dazzling shirt, well revealed by a low vest. "uncle jack!" screamed magdaléna. "uncle jack!" colonel belmont jumped as if a battery had ripped up the ground in front of him. then he dashed across the street. "good god!" he shouted. "good god!" he caught magdaléna in his arms and carried her back to the shadow of the cross. "you two have been possessed by the devil of late," he began wrathfully, but magdaléna interrupted him. "no! no!" she exclaimed. "i didn't know there was anything different there from any other street. i didn't mean to." "well, i don't suppose you did. you never know where you are in this infernal town, anyhow. where's your maid?" but magdaléna had fainted. viii after that, magdaléna had brain fever. it was a sharp but brief attack, and when she was convalescent the doctor ordered her to go to the country at once and let her school-books alone. as mrs. yorba never left her husband for any consideration, magdaléna was sent to menlo park with miss phelps. the time came when magdaléna hated the monotony of menlo, with its ceaseless calling and driving, its sameness of days and conversation; but at that age she loved the country in any form. menlo park, originally a large spanish grant, had long since been cut up into country places for what may be termed the "old families of san francisco." the eight or ten families who owned this haughty precinct were as exclusive, as conservative, as any group of ancient county families in europe. many of them had been established here for twenty years, none for less than fifteen. that fact set the seal of gentle blood upon them for all time in the annals of california,--a fact in which there is nothing humourous if you look at it logically; there is really no reason why a new country should not take itself seriously. don roberto owned a square mile known as fair oaks, in honour of the ancient and magnificent woods upon it. these woods were in three sections, separated by meadows, and there was a broad road through each, but not a twig of the riotous underbrush had been sacrificed to a foot-path. a hundred acres about the house--which was a mile from the entrance to the estate--had been cleared for extensive lawns, ornamental trees, and a deer park. directly in front of the house, across the driveway and starting from a narrow walk between two great lawns, was a solitary eucalyptus-tree, one of the few in the state at the time of its planting. it was some two hundred feet high and creaked alarmingly in heavy winds; but don roberto, despite mrs. yorba's protestations, would not have it uprooted: he had a particular fondness for it because it was so little like the palms and magnolias of his youth. to the left of the house at the end of an avenue of cherry-trees was an immense orchard surrounded by an avenue of fig-trees, and english walnut-trees. the house was as unlike the adobe mansions of the old grandees as was the eucalyptus the palms. it was large, square, two-storied, and although of wood, of massive appearance. it was, indeed, the most solid-looking structure in california at that time. a deep verandah traversed three sides of the house, its roof making another beneath the bedroom windows. its pillars were hidden under rose vines and wistaria. the thirty rooms were somewhat superfluous, as don roberto would have none of house-parties, but he could not have breathed in a small house. the rooms were very large and lofty, the floors covered with matting, the furniture light and plain. above, as from the town house, floated the american flag. colonel belmont's estate adjoined fair oaks on one side, the montgomerys' on the other; and the brannans, kearneys, gearys, washingtons, and folsoms all spent their summers in that sleepy valley between the waters of the san francisco and the redwood-covered mountains; these and others who have nothing to do with this tale. hiram polk had no home in menlo, excepting in his brother-in-law's house. some of his wife's happiest memories were of the rancho de los pulgas, and she refused to witness its possession by the hated american. so polk had bought her one of the old adobe houses in santa barbara, and each year she extended the limit of her sojourn in a town where memories were still sacred. ix magdaléna was languid and content. she put the terrible experiences which had preceded her illness behind her without effort. her mind dwelt upon the joy of living in the sunshine, and upon the hopes of the future. she admitted frankly that she was glad to be rid of her parents, and only longed for helena. that faithful youngster wrote, twice a week, letters which were a succession of fireworks embellished by caricatures of such of her teachers and acquaintance as had incurred her disapproval. her aunt, mrs. edward forbes, who was one of the leaders of new york society and a beauty, was giving her much petting and would take her abroad later. magdaléna read these letters with delight stabbed with doubt. more than once she had wondered if helena had been born to realise all her own ambitions. even her letters were clever and original. in a week magdaléna was strong enough to walk in the woods, and miss phelps placed no restraint upon her. she re-read what books she had, then made out a list and sent it to her father to purchase, believing that he would refuse her nothing after her illness. don roberto read the note, grunted, and threw it into the waste-paper basket. he abominated erudite women, and had the scorn of the financial mind for the superfluous attributes of the intellectual. magdaléna waited a reasonable time, then after a day's hard fight with the reticence of her nature, wrote and asked colonel belmont for the books. he sent them at once, with a penitent note and an order on the principal bookseller of the city for all that she might want in the future. "i will say a prayer to the virgin for him," thought magdaléna, with a glow at her heart, oblivious that the virgin had refused to intercede with her father. the packet contained the lives of a number of men and women who had distinguished themselves in letters; but although magdaléna read them twice they told her little, save that she must read the works of the masters and puzzle out their methods if she could. meanwhile, in spite of her studies, she was growing strong, for she spent the day out of doors; and when her parents came down on the first of june, they found her as shy and cold as ever, but with sparkling eyes and a faint glow in her cheeks. "but never she is beauty," said don roberto, that evening to polk, as the two men sat on the verandah, smoking. "before, i resent very much, and say damnation, damnation, damnation. but now i think i no mind. si she is beauty i think more often by that time--no can help. i wonder si there are the beautiful women in the south now, like before; but, by jimminy! i like forget the place exeest. i am an american. yes, great scott!" he stretched out his little fat legs and rested his third chin on his inflexible shirt-front. he felt an american, every inch of him, and hated anything that reminded him of what he might become did he yield to the natural indolence and extravagance of his nature. he would gladly have drained his veins and packed them with galloping american blood. it grieved him that he could not eliminate his native accent, and he was persuaded that he spoke the american tongue in all its purity, being especially proud of a large assortment of expletives peculiar to the land of his adoption. polk gave a short dry laugh and stretched out his long hard yankee legs. even in the dusk his lantern jaws stood out. there was no doubt about his nationality. those legs and jaws were the objects of don roberto's abiding envy. "pretty women in the family are a nuisance," said polk. "they want the earth, and don't see why they shouldn't get it. i wouldn't have that helena for another million. by the way, jack told me a good story on you yesterday." don roberto grunted. his spanish pride had not abated an inch. he resented being discussed. polk continued: "there were seven or eight men talking over old times in the union club the other night; that is to say, they were reminiscing over the various enterprises they had been engaged in, and the piles they had made and lost. our names naturally came up, and brannan said, slowly, as if he were thinking it over hard, 'i--don't--think--i--had--any--dealings--with--yorba--ever.' whereupon washington replied, quick as a shot, 'you'd remember it if you had.'" don roberto scowled heavily. it was one of his fictions that he hoodwinked the world. he never snapped his fingers in its face as polk did: exteriorly a yorba must always be a yorba. "some day when the bank have lend meester washington one hundred thousand dollars, i turn on the screw when he no is prepare to pay," he said. and he did. x during the following week all menlo, which had moved down before mrs. yorba, called on that august leader. she received every afternoon on the verandah, clad in black or grey lawn, stiff, silent, but sufficiently gracious. on the day after her arrival, as the first visitor's carriage appeared at the bend of the avenue, its advent heralded by the furious barking of two mastiffs, a bloodhound, and an english carriage dog, magdaléna gathered up her books and prepared to retreat, but her mother turned to her peremptorily. "i wish you to stay," she said. "you must begin now to see something of society. otherwise you will have no ease when you come out. and try to talk. young people must talk." "but i can't talk," faltered magdaléna. "you must learn. say anything, and in time it will be easy." magdaléna realised that her mother was right. if she was to overcome her natural lack of facile speech, she could not begin too soon. although she was terrified at the prospect of talking to these people who had alighted and were exchanging platitudes with her mother, she resolved anew that the time should come when she should be as ready of tongue and as graceful of speech as her position and her pride demanded. she sat down by one of the guests and stammered out something about the violets. the young woman she addressed was of delicate and excessive beauty: her brunette face, under a hat covered with corn-coloured plumes, was almost faultless in its outline. she wore an elaborate and dainty french gown the shade of her feathers, and her small hands and feet were dressed to perfection. magdaléna had heard of the beautiful mrs. washington, and felt it a privilege to sun herself in such loveliness. the three elderly ladies she had brought with her--mrs. cartright, mrs. geary, and mrs. brannan--were dressed with extreme simplicity. "yes," replied mrs. washington, "they are lovely,--they are, for a fact. mine have chilblains or something this year, and won't bloom for a cent. hang the luck! i'm as cross as a bear with a sore head about it." "would you like me to pick some of ours for you?" asked magdaléna, wondering if she had better model her verbal accomplishments on mrs. washington's. she thought them even more picturesque than helena's. "do; that's a jolly good fellow." when magdaléna returned with the violets, they were received with a bewitching but absent smile; another carriage-load had arrived, and all were discussing the advent of a "bonanza" family, whose huge fortune, made out of the nevada mines, had recently lifted it from obscurity to social fame. "it's just too hateful that i've got to call," said mrs. washington, in her refined melodious voice. "teddy says that i must, because sooner or later we've all got to know them,--old dillon's a red indian chief in the financial world; and there's no use kicking against money, anyhow. but i can't cotton to that sort of people, and i just cried last night when teddy--the old darling! i'd do anything to please him--told me i must call." "it's a great pity we old families can't keep together," said mrs. brannan, a stout high-nosed dame. "there are plenty of others for them to know. why can't they let us alone?" "that's just what they won't do," cried mrs. washington. "we're what they're after. what's the reason they've come to menlo park? they'll be 'landed aristocracy' in less than no time. hang the luck!" "shall you call, hannah?" asked mrs. cartright. "dear jack never imposes any restrictions on me,--he's so handsome about everything; so i shall be guided by you." "in time," replied mrs. yorba, who also had had a meaning conference with her husband. "but i shall not rush. toward the end of the summer, perhaps. it would be unwise to take them up too quickly." "i've got to give them a dinner," said mrs. washington, with gloom. "but i'll put it off till the last gun fires. and you've all got to come. otherwise you'll see me on the war-path." "of course we shall all go, nelly," said mrs. yorba. "we will always stand in together." the conversation flowed on. other personalities were discussed, the difficulty of getting servants to stay in the country, where there was such a dearth of "me gentleman frien'," the appearance of the various gardens, and the atrocious amount of water they consumed. "i wish to goodness the water-works on top wouldn't shut off for eight months in the year," exclaimed mrs. washington. "whenever i want something in summer that costs a pile, teddy groans and tells me that his water bill is four hundred dollars a month." and mrs. washington, whose elderly and doting husband had never refused to grant her most exorbitant whim, sighed profoundly. magdaléna did not find the conversation very interesting, nor was she called upon to contribute to it. nevertheless, she received every day with her mother and went with her to return the calls. at the end of the summer she loathed the small talk and its art, but felt that she was improving. her manner was certainly easier. she had decided not to emulate mrs. washington's vernacular, but she attempted to copy her ease and graciousness of manner. in time she learned to unbend a little, to acquire a certain gentle dignity in place of her natural haughty stiffness, and to utter the phrases that are necessary to keep conversation going; but her reticence never left her for a moment, her eyes looked beyond the people in whom she strove to be interested, and few noticed or cared whether or not she was present. but at the end of the summer she was full of hope; society might not interest her, but the pride which was her chief characteristic commanded that she should hold a triumphant place among her peers. she had told neither of her parents of the books colonel belmont had given her, knowing that the result would be a violent scene and an interdiction. at this stage of her development she had no defined ideas of right and wrong. upon such occasions as she had followed the dictates of her conscience, the consequences had been extremely unpleasant, and in one instance hideous. she was indolent and secretive by nature, and she slipped along comfortably and did not bother her head with problems. xi the yorbas returned to town on the first of november. it was decided that magdaléna should continue her studies, but the rainy days and winter evenings gave her long hours for her books. she found, to her delight, that her brain was losing something of its inflexibility; that, by reading slowly, one perusal of an ordinary book was sufficient. her memory was still incomplete, but it was improving. her mother had ceased to overlook her choice of books, being satisfied that magdaléna would never care for trash. magdaléna always found the big dark house oppressive after the months in menlo park, and went out as often as she could. on fine days, attended by julie, she usually walked down to the mercantile library, and prowled among the dusty shelves. the old mercantile library in bush street, almost in the heart of the business portion of the city, had the most venerable air of any building in california. there was, indeed, danger of coming out covered with blue mould. and it was very dark and very gloomy. it has always been suspected that it was a favourite resort for suicides, but this, happily, has never been proved. but magdaléna loved it, for it held many thousand volumes, and they were all at her disposal. her membership was worth more to her than all her father's riches. julie, who hated the library, always carried a chair at once to the register and closed her eyes, that she might not be depressed to tears by the gloom and the walls of books, which were bound as became all that was left of the dead. it was during one of these visits that magdaléna approached another crisis of her inner life. she was wandering about aimlessly, hardly knowing what she wanted, when her eye was caught by the title of a book on an upper shelf: "conflict between religion and science." she knew nothing about science, but she wondered in what manner religion could conflict with anything. she took the book down and read the first few lines, then the page, then the chapter, still standing. when she had finished she made as if to replace the book, then put it resolutely under her arm, called julie, and went home. she read during the remainder of the afternoon, and as far into the night as she dared. before she went to bed she said her prayers more fervently than ever, and the next morning considered deeply whether or not she should return the book half read. she finally concluded to finish it. her intellect was voracious, and she had no other companion but her religion. moreover, if she was to aspire to a position in the world of letters, she must equip her mind with the best that had gone before. she had every faith in the power of the catholic religion to hold its own; her hesitation had been induced, not by fear of disturbing her faith, but because she doubted, pricked by the bigotry in her veins, if it was loyal to recognise the existence of the enemy. however, she finished the book. on the following saturday morning she went down to the library and asked the librarian, who took some interest in her, what he would advise her to read in the way of science; she had lost all taste for anything else. "well, darwin is about the best to begin on, i should say," he replied. "he's easy reading on account of his style. and then i should advise you to read fiske's 'outlines of cosmic philosophy' before you tackle herbert spencer or huxley or tyndall." magdaléna took home darwin's "origin of species" and "descent of man." they so fascinated her that not until their contents had become a permanent part of her mental furnishing did she realise their warfare on revealed religion. but by this time science had her in its mighty grip. she read all that the librarian had recommended, and much more. it was some six months later that she fully realised that her faith was gone. there came a time when her simple appeals to the virgin stuck in her throat; when she realised that her beloved masters, if they could have seen her telling a rosary at the foot of her altar, would have thought her a fool. there was no struggle, for the work was done, and finally. but her grief was deep and bitter. religion had been a strong inherited instinct, and it had been three fourths of her existence for nearly eighteen years. she felt as if the very roots of her spirit had been torn up and lay wilting and shrivelling in the cold light of her reason. she was terrified at her new position. how was she, a mere girl, to think for herself, to make her way through life, which every great writer told her was a complex and crucifying ordeal, with no guide but her own poor reason? for the first time she felt her isolation. she had no one to go to for sympathy, no one to advise her. of all she knew, her parents were the last she could have approached on any subject involving the surrender of her reticence. she lost interest in her books, and brooded, her mind struggling toward will-o'-the-wisps in a fog-bank, until she could endure her solitary position no longer; she felt that she must speak to some one or her brain would fall to ashes. her aunt was still in santa barbara, and showed no disposition to return. a priest was out of the question. there was no one but colonel belmont. magdaléna knew nothing of his private life: not a whisper had reached her secluded ears; but she doubted if religion were his strong point. but he had always been kind, and she knew him to be clever. it took her a week to make up her mind to speak to him and to decide what to say; but when her decision was finally reached, she walked through the connecting gardens one evening with firm tread and set lips. she entered the house by a side door and went to the library, where she knew colonel belmont smoked his after-dinner cigar when at home. a cordial voice answered her knock. when she entered he rose and came forward with the graceful hospitality which never failed him in the moments of his liveliest possession, and with the acute interest which anything feminine and young never failed to inspire. "well, honey!" he exclaimed, kissing her warmly and handing her to a chair; "you might have done this before. i'm such a lonely childless old widower." "oh!" said magdaléna, with contrition; "i never thought you'd care to see me." she could not know that he seldom permitted himself to be alone. "well, now you know it, you'll come oftener, won't you? have you heard from my baby lately? i had a letter a yard long this morning. she can write!" "i had one too." she hesitated a moment, then determined to speak at once. she could not hold this nor any man's attention in ordinary conversation, and she wanted to finish before she wearied him. "uncle jack," she said, "i've come to see you about something in particular. i know so few people, or i wouldn't bore you--" "don't you talk about boring me, honey,--you! why, your old uncle jack would do anything for you." a light sprang into magdaléna's eyes. colonel belmont forgot for the moment that she was not beautiful, and warmed to interest at once. few people had ever withstood jack belmont's magnetism, and magdaléna found it easy to speak. "it is this," she said. "i have been reading books lately that have taken my religion from me; it has gone utterly. i want to ask you what i shall do,--if there is anything to take its place. i--i--feel as if i could not get along without something." colonel belmont made a faint exclamation and wheeled about, staring at the fire. his first impulse was to laugh, so ludicrous was the idea that anyone should come to him for spiritual advice; his second to get out of the room. he did neither, however, and ordered his intelligence to work. he did not speak for some time; and magdaléna, for the first moment, watched him intently, scarcely breathing. then her attention wandered from herself, and she studied his profile. she noted for the first time how worn it was, the bags under the injected eyes, the heavy lines about the mouth. she had no name for what she saw written in that face, but she suddenly felt herself in the presence of one of life's mysteries. of man's life she knew nothing--nothing. what did this man do when he was not at home? who were his friends besides her morose father, her cold dry uncle? she felt belmont's difference from both, and could not know that they had much in common. what circumstances had imprinted that face so differently from the few faces familiar to her? for the first time man in the concrete interested her. she suddenly realised how profound was her ignorance, despite the lore she had gathered from books,--realised dimly but surely that there was a vast region called life for her yet to explore, and that what bloomed for a little on its surface was called human nature. she gave an involuntary shiver and sank back in her chair. at the same moment colonel belmont looked round. "someone walking over your grave?" he asked, smiling. "what you asked came on me right suddenly, 'léna. i couldn't answer it all in a minute. you didn't say much--you never do; so i understand how you've been taking this thing to heart. i'm sorry you've lost your religion, for it stands a woman in mighty well. they have the worst of it in this life." perhaps he was thinking of his wife. his face was very sober. "but if you have lost it, that is the end of the chapter as far as you are concerned. all i can think of is this--" the words nearly choked him, but he went on heroically: "do what you think is right in little matters as well as in great. you've been properly brought up; you know the difference between right and wrong; and all your instincts are naturally good, if i know anything about women. as you grow older, you will see your way more clearly. you won't have the temptations that many women have, so that it will be easier for you than for some of the poor little devils. and you'll never be poor. you'll find it easier than most--and i'm glad of it!" he added with a burst of warm sympathy. emotional by nature, the unaccustomed experience had brought him to the verge of tears; and magdaléna, forlorn and lonely, but thanking him mutely with her eloquent eyes, appealed to the great measure of chivalry in him. "i am glad i spoke to you, uncle jack," she said after a moment. "you have given me much to think about, and i am sure i shall get along much better. thanks, ever so much." she did not rise to go, but was silent for several moments. then she asked abruptly,-- "what do you mean by women having temptations? i know by the way you said it that you don't mean just ordinary every-day temptations." colonel belmont glanced about helplessly. his eloquence had carried him away; he had not paused to take feminine curiosity into account. he encountered magdaléna's eyes. they were fixed on him with solemn inquiry, and they were very intelligent eyes. did he take refuge in verbiage, she would not be deceived. did he refuse to continue the conversation, she would be hurt. in either case her imagination would have been set at work, and she might go far, and in the wrong direction, to satisfy her curiosity. once more he stared at the fire. to his daughter he could have said nothing on such a subject: he was too old-fashioned, too imbued with the chivalrous idea of the south of his generation that women were of two kinds only, and that those who had been segregated for men to love and worship and marry must never brush the skirts of their thought against the sin of the world. they were ideal creatures who would produce others like themselves, and men--like himself. but as he considered he realised that he had a duty toward magdaléna, which grew as he thought: she needed help and advice and had come to him, having literally no one else to go to. after all, might she not have temptations which would pass his beautiful, quick-witted, triumphant daughter by? helena, with the world at her feet, would have little time for brooding, little time for anything but the lighter pleasures of life under his watchful eye, until she loved and passed to the keeping of a man who, he hoped, would be far stronger and finer than himself. but magdaléna? repressed, unloved, intellectual, disappointed at every turn, passionate undoubtedly,--there was no knowing to what sudden extremes desperation might drive her. and the woman, no matter how plain, had yet to be born who could not be utterly bad if she put her mind to it. it was not only his duty to warn magdaléna, but to give her such advice as no mortal had ever heard from his lips before, nor ever would hear again. he drew a long breath and wheeled about. magdaléna was leaning forward, staring at him intently. there was no self-consciousness in her face, and he realised in a flash that he would merely talk into a brain. her woman's nature would not be awakened by the homily of an elderly man. the task became suddenly light. "well, it's just this: there's no moral law governing the animal kingdom; but men and women were allowed to develop into speaking, reasoning, generally intelligent beings for one purpose only: to make the world better, not worse. their reasoning faculty may or may not be a spark of the divine force behind the universe; but there's no doubt about the fact, not the least, that every intelligent being knows that he ought to be at least two thirds good, and in his better moments--which come to the worst--he has a desire to be wholly good, or at least better than he has ever been. in other words, the best of men strive more or less constantly toward an ideal (and the second-best strive sometimes) which, if realised, would make this world a very different place. i believe myself that it is this instinct alone which is responsible for religions,--a desire for a concrete form of goodness to which man can cling when his own little atom is overwhelmed by the great measure of weakness in him. do you follow me?" magdaléna nodded, but she did not look satisfied. "well, this is the point: the world might be prosaic without sin, but it is right positive that women would suffer less. and if it could be pounded into every woman's head that she was a fool to think twice about any man she could not marry, and that she threatened the whole social structure every time she brought a fatherless child into the world; that she made possible such creatures as you saw in dupont street, and a long and still more hideous sequelæ, every time she deliberately violated her own instinct for good,--we'd all begin to develop into what the almighty intended us to be when he started us off on our long march. don't misunderstand me! even if i were not such a sinner myself, i'd be deuced charitable where love was concerned, marriage or no marriage--o lord! i didn't mean to say that. forget it until you're thirty; then remember it if you like, for your brain is a good one. look, promise me something, 'léna;" he leaned forward eagerly and took her hand. "promise me, swear it, that until you are thirty you'll never do anything your instincts and your intelligence don't assure you is right,--really right without any sophistry. of course i mean in regard to men. i don't want you to make yourself into a prig--but i am sure you understand." "i think i do," said magdaléna. "i promise." "thank goodness, for you'll never break your word. you may be tempted more than once to kick the whole stupid game of life to the deuce and go out on a bat like a man, but console yourself with this: you'd be a long sight worse off when you got through than when you started, and you'd either go to smash altogether or spend the rest of your life trying to get back where you were before; and sackcloth hurts. there isn't one bit of joy to be got out of it. if you can't get the very best in this world, take nothing. that's the only religion for a woman to cling to, and if she does cling to it she can do without any other." magdaléna rose. "good-night," she said. "i'll never forget a word of it, and i'm very much obliged." she kissed him and had half crossed the room before he sprang to his feet and went hastily forward to open the door. he went to her father's house with her, then returned to his library fire. to the surprise of his servants, he spent the evening quietly at home. xii a year from the following june, and two days after her arrival in menlo, magdaléna went into the middle woods. the great oaks were dusty already, their brilliant greens were dimming: but the depths of the woods were full of the warm shimmer of summer, of the mysterious noises produced by creatures never seen, by the very heat itself, perchance by the riotous sap in the young trees which had sprung to life from the roots of their mighty parents. magdaléna left the driveway and pushed in among the brush. poison oak did not affect her; and she separated the beautiful creeper fearlessly until she reached a spot where she was as sure of being alone and unseen as if she had entered the bowels of the earth. she sat down on the warm dry ground and looked about her for a moment, glad in the sense of absolute freedom. above the fragrant brush of many greens rose the old twisted oaks, a light breeze rustling their brittle leaves, their arms lifted eagerly to the warm yellow bath from above. near her was a high pile of branches and leaves, the home of a wood-rat. no sound came from it, and mortal had nothing to fear from him. a few birds moved among the leaves, but the heat made them lazy, and they did not sing. after a few moments, magdaléna's glance swept the wall of leaves that surrounded her; then she took a pencil and a roll of foolscap from her pocket. she had made up her mind that the time had come for her first essay in fiction. for two years and a half she had studied and thought to this end; too reverent to criticise, but taking the creators' structures to pieces as best she could and giving all attention to parts and details. she had had a nebulous idea in her mind for some time. it had troubled her that it did not assume definite form, but she trusted to that inspiration of the pen of which she had read much. her hand trembled so that she could not write for a few moments. she put the pencil down, not covering her face with her hands as a more demonstrative girl would have done, but biting her lips. her heart beat suffocatingly. for the first time she fully realised what the power to write would mean to her. her religion had gone, that dear companion of many years; she had practised faithfully until six months ago, when she had asked her teacher to tell her father that she could never become even a third-rate musician; and don roberto had, after a caustic hour, concluded that he would "throw no more good money after bad;" she had had long and meaning conferences with her mirror, conjuring up phantasms of the beautiful dead women of her race, and decided sadly that the worship of man was not for her. she had never talked for ten consecutive minutes with a young man; but she had a woman's instincts, she had read, she had listened to the tales of her aunt, and she knew that what man most valued in woman she did not possess. her great position and the graces she hoped to cultivate might gratify her ambitions in a measure, but they would not companion her soul. books were left; but books are too heterogeneous an interest to furnish a vital one in life, a reason for being alive. she had read of the jealous absorption of art, of the intense exclusive love with which it inspired its votaries. she had read of the joys of creation, and her whole being had responded; she felt that did her brain obey her will and shape itself to achievement, she too would know ecstasy and ask nothing more of life. her nerves settled, and she began to write. her reading had been confined to the classics of the old world: not only had she not read a modern novel, but of the regnant lights of her own country, mr. howells and mr. james, she had never heard. she may have seen their names in the "literary bulletin" her bookseller sent her, but had probably gathered that they were biologists. there was no one to tell her that the actors and happenings within her horizon were the proper substance for her creative faculty. california had whispered to her, but she had not understood. her intention was to write a story of england in the reigns of oliver cromwell and charles the second. the romance of england appealed to her irresistibly. the mass of virgin ore which lay at her hand did not provoke a flash of magnetism from her brain. she wrote very slowly. an hour passed, and she had only covered a page. her head ached a little from the intense concentration of mind. her fingers were stiff. finally, she laid her pencil aside and read what she had written. it was a laboured introduction to the story, an attempt to give a picture of the times. she was only nineteen and a novice, but she knew that what she had written was rubbish. it was a trite synopsis of what she had read, of what everybody knew; and the english, although correct, was commonplace, the vocabulary cheap. she set her lips, tore it up, and began again. at the end of another hour she destroyed the second result. then she determined to skip the prologue for the present and begin the story. for many long moments she sat staring into the brush, her brain plodding toward an opening scene, an opening sentence. at last she began to write. she described the hero. he was walking down the great staircase of a baronial hall,--in which he had lain concealed,--and the company below were struck dumb with terror and amazement at the apparition. she got him to the middle of the stair; she described his costume with fidelity; she wrote of the temper of the people in the great hall. then she dropped the pencil. what was to happen thereafter was a blank. she read what she had written. it was lifeless. it was not fiction. the least of helena's letters was more virile and objective than this. again that mysterious indefinable presentiment assailed her. it was the first time that it had come since that night she had stood on the balcony and opened her brain to literary desire. had that presentiment meant anything since compassed? her father's cruel treatment? her terrible experience in the street of painted women? her illness? the loss of her religion? it was none of these things. so far, it had not been fulfilled; and it had struck its warning note again. she shivered, then discovered that the yellow light was no longer about her, and that her head ached. she rose stiffly and put the torn scraps of paper in her pocket. as she left, she cast a curious glance about her retreat, not knowing what prompted it. the scent of newly upturned earth came to her nostrils; a bird flew down on the rat's nest, starting along the sides a shower of loose earth; the frogs were chanting hoarsely. xiii the next morning the natural buoyancy of youth asserted itself; she reasoned that a long hard apprenticeship had been the lot of many authors, and determined that she would write a page a day for years, if need be, until her tardy faculty had been coaxed from its hard soil and trained to use. she could not go to the woods that day: her mother expected callers. "your birthday is a week from wednesday," mrs. yorba said as they sat on the verandah. "your father and i have decided to give a dinner. you will not come out formally, of course, until winter; but a little society during the summer will take off the stiffness." magdaléna turned cold. "but, mamma! i cannot talk to young men." "you expect to begin sometime, do you not? i shall also take you to any little entertainment that is given in menlo this summer; and as the brannans and montgomerys are back from europe,--they arrived last thursday,--there may be several. the older girls gave little parties before they married; but there have not been any grown girls in menlo for some years now. rose geary and caro folsom, who spent last summer in the east, will spend this in menlo, so that there will be five of you, besides nelly washington." magdaléna knew that the matter was settled. she had given a good deal of imagination to the time when she should be a young lady, but the immediate prospect filled her with dismay. then, out of the knowledge that her lines had been chosen for her, she adapted herself, as mortals do, and experienced some of the pleasures of anticipation. "i believe i did not tell you," her mother resumed, "that i wrote to helena some time ago asking her to bring back four dresses for you,--a ball dress for your début, an english walking suit, a calling dress, and a dinner dress." magdaléna had never given a thought to dress; but this sudden announcement that she was to have four gowns from paris and london pricked her with an intimation that the interests of life were more varied than she had suspected. she wondered vividly what they would be like, and recalled several of nelly washington's notable gowns. "you are to have forty dollars a month after your birthday, and your father will permit me to get you three dresses a year; everything else must come out of your allowance. you will keep an account-book and show it to your father every month, as i do. oh--and there is another thing: a mr. trennahan of new york has brought letters to your father. he is a man of some importance,--is wealthy and has been secretary of legation twice, and comes of a distinguished family; we must do something for him, and have decided to ask him down to your dinner. that will kill two birds with one stone. he can also stay a day or two, and we will show him the different places." "a strange man in the house for two days," gasped magdaléna, forgetting that she was to have forty dollars a month. "he can take care of himself most of the time. here come nelly." mrs. washington's ponies were rounding the deer park. magdaléna craned her neck. "she has some one with her," she said. and in another half-moment: "tiny montgomery and ila brannan." magdaléna clasped her hands tightly to keep them from trembling. what would they think of her? she saw that they were smartly dressed. doubtless they were very grand and clever indeed, and would think her more trying than ever. but although all her shyness threatened for a moment, it was summarily routed by her spanish pride. she rose as the phaeton drew up, and went to the head of the steps, smiling. they might find her uninteresting, but not _gauche_. the girls came gracefully forward and kissed her warmly. "_dear_ 'léna," said miss montgomery. "we wouldn't wait: we wanted so much to see you again. and besides, you know," with a mischievous smile, "we owe you a great many luncheon calls." miss brannan exclaimed almost simultaneously, "how you have improved, 'léna! i should never have known you." and if her tone was conventional, it fell upon ears untuned to conventions. it was magdaléna's first compliment, and she thrilled with pleasure. "my face looks very much the same in the glass," she said. "but i am glad to see you back. let us sit on this side." she led the girls a little distance down the verandah; she was trembling inwardly, but felt that she should get along better if relieved of her mother's ear. tiny began at once to talk of her delight in being home again, and magdaléna had time to recover herself. tiny montgomery was an exquisitely pretty little creature, very small but admirably proportioned, although thin. her brown eyes were very sweet under well-pencilled brows, her nose aquiline and fine. the mouth was barely rubbed in, but the teeth were beautiful, the smile as sweet as the eyes. she had the smallest feet and hands in california, and to-day they were clad in white _suède_ with no detriment to their fame. she wore a frock of white embroidered nainsook and a leghorn covered with white feathers. she talked rather slowly, in language carefully chosen, although plentifully laden with superlatives. her voice was very sweet, and highly cultivated. ila brannan was taller, with a slender full figure, and very smart. she wore a closely fitting frock of tan-coloured cloth, a small toque, and a veil covered with large velvet dots. she was very olive, and her cheeks were deeply coloured. her black eyes had a slanting expression. young as she was, there was a vague suggestion of maturity about her. she smiled pleasantly and echoed tiny's little enthusiasms, which had an air of elaborate rehearsal, but she seemed to have brought something of paris with her, and to adapt herself but ill to her old surroundings. magdaléna did not feel at ease with either of them, but concluded that she liked tiny best. "tell me something of helena," she said finally. "of course you saw her in paris." "oh, constantly," replied tiny. "she's perfectly beautiful, 'léna, _perfectly_. mamma took her with us one night to the opera, and so many people asked her who the beautiful american was. she has grown _quite_ tall, and is wonderfully stylish. colonel belmont has simply showered money on her since he went over, and she will have beautiful clothes, and cut us _all_ out when she comes back." but tiny did not look in the least disturbed, and peeped surreptitiously into the polished glass of the window. "she'll have all the men wild about her," announced ila; she spoke with a slight french accent, which was not affected, as she had spent the greater part of the last five years in paris. "and she is going to be a very dashing belle. she informed me that she shall run to fires and do whatever she chooses, and make people like it whether they want to or not. but i doubt if she will ever be fast." "fast!" echoed magdaléna, a street of painted women flashing into memory; she knew of no degrees. "helena! how can you think of such a thing in connection with her!" ila laughed softly. "you baby!" she said. tiny frowned. "you know, ila," she said coldly, "that i do not like to talk of such things." "well, you need not," said ila, coolly. tiny lifted her brows. "i think you know you cannot talk to me of what i do not wish to hear," she said with great dignity. magdaléna turned to her, the warm light of approval in her eyes; and ila, unabashed, rose and said, "i think i'll go over and talk scandal for awhile," and joined the older women, whose numbers had been reinforced. magdaléna longed to ask tiny if she really had improved, but was too shy. tiny said almost directly,-- "you look _so_ intellectual, 'léna. are you? i feel quite afraid." "oh, no, no!" replied magdaléna, hastily, "i really know very little; i wish i knew more." she hesitated a moment; it was difficult for her to expand even to the playmate of her childhood, but an alluring prospect had suddenly opened. "of course you will have a great deal of leisure this summer," she added. "shall we read together?" tiny rose with a sweet but rather forced smile. "i am not going to let you see how ignorant i am," she said. "but i feel very rude: i should go over and talk to mrs. yorba." when they had gone, magdaléna sat for a time staring straight before her, unheeding her mother's comments. the snub had been prettily administered, but it had cut deep into her sensitiveness. she realised that she was quite unlike these other girls of her own age, had never been like them; it was not europe that had made the difference. "i would not care," she thought, "if they would keep away from me altogether. i have what i care much more for. but i must see them nearly every day and try to interest them. and i know they will find me as dull as when i gave those dreadful luncheons." she was recalled by a direct observation of her mother's. "your washed cross-barred muslin looked very plain beside their french things, but i do not think it worth while to get you any new clothes at present. but do not let it worry you. remember that what _we_ do seems right to every one. we can afford to dress exactly as we choose." "it does not worry me," replied magdaléna. xiv whether or not to tell her parents of her determination to write had been a matter of momentous consideration to magdaléna. after the resignation of her faith and her conversation with colonel belmont, she had determined to adhere rigidly to the truth and to the right way of living, to conquer the indolence of her moral nature and jealously train her conscience. the result, she felt, would be a religion of her own, from which she could derive strength as well as consolation for what she had lost. she knew, by reading and instinct, that life was full of pitfalls, but her intelligence would dictate what was right, and to its mandates she would conform, if it cost her her life. and she knew that the religion she had formulated for herself in rough outline was far more exacting than the one she had surrendered. she had finally decided that it was not her duty to tell her parents that she was trying to write. when she was ready to publish she would ask their consent. that would be their right; but so long as they could in no way be affected, the secret might remain her own. and this secret was her most precious possession; it would have been firing her soul at the stake to reveal it to anyone less sympathetic than helena; she was not sure that she could even speak of it to her. her time was her own in the country. her father and uncle came down three times a week, but rarely before evening; her mother's mornings were taken up with household matters, her afternoons with siesta, calling, and driving; frequently she lunched informally with her friends. how magdaléna spent her time did not concern her parents, so long as she did not leave the grounds and was within call when visitors came. don roberto would not keep a horse in town for magdaléna, but in the country she rode through the woods unattended every morning. the exhilaration of these early rides filled magdaléna's soul with content. the freshness of the golden morning, the drowsy summer sounds, the deep vistas of the woods,--not an outline changed since unhistoried races had possessed them,--the glimpses of mountain and redwood forests beyond, the embracing solitude, laid somnolent fingers on the scars of her inner life, letting free the sweet troubled thoughts of a girl, carried her back to the days when she had dreamed of caballeros serenading beneath her casement. for two years she had dreamed that dream, and then it had curled up and fallen to dust under helena's ridicule. magdaléna was fatally clear of vision, and her reason had accepted the facts at once. sometimes during those rides she dreamed of a lover in the vague fashion of a girl whose acquaintance of man is confined to a few elderly men and to the creations of masters; but only then. she rarely deluded herself. she was plain; she could not even interest women. she felt that she was wholly without that magnetism which, she had read, made many plain women irresistible to man. xv don roberto was to bring his guest with him on the train which arrived a few minutes after five. magdaléna was told to dress early and be in the parlour when mr. trennahan came downstairs. she was cold at the thought of talking alone with a man and a stranger; but mrs. yorba had neuralgia, and announced her intention to lie down until the last minute. magdaléna had received a number of pretty presents from her aunt and friends, a cablegram from colonel belmont and helena, and from her father a small gold watch and fob. her father's gift was very magnificent to her, and her pleasure was as great in the thought of his generosity as in the beauty of the gift itself. his usual gift was ten dollars; and as it had been decided that she was not to be a young lady until she was nineteen, her eighteenth birthday had been passed over. her mother's present was the dress she was to wear to-night, a white organdie of the pearly tint high in favour with blondes of matchless complexion, a white sash, and a white ribbon to be knotted about the throat. the neck of the gown was cut in a small v. magdaléna had no natural taste in dress, nor did she know the first principle of the law of colour; but when she had finished her toilette she stood for many moments before the mirror, regarding herself with disapproval. the radiant whiteness of the frock and of the ribbon about her neck made her look as dark as an indian. she saw no beauty in the noble head with its parted, closely banded hair, in the fine dark eyes. she saw only the wide mouth and indefinite nose, the complexionless skin, the long thin figure and ugly neck. the only thing about her that possessed any claim to beauty, according to her own standards, was her foot. she thrust it out and strove to find encouragement in its pulchritude. it was thin and small and arched, and altogether perfect. she wore her first pair of slippers and silk stockings,--a present from her aunt. her mother thought silk stockings a sinful waste of money. magdaléna sighed and turned to the door. "feet don't talk," she thought. "what am i to say to mr. trennahan?" she walked slowly down the stair. he was before her, standing on the verandah directly in front of the doors. his back was to her. she saw that he was very tall and thin, not unlike her uncle in build, but with a distinction that gentleman did not possess. her father was strutting up and down the drive, taking his ante-dinner constitutional. she went along the hall as slowly as she could, her hands clenched, her mind in travail for a few words of appropriate greeting. when she had nearly reached the door, trennahan turned suddenly and saw her. he came forward at once, his hand extended. "this is miss yorba, of course," he said. "how good of you to come down so soon!" he had a large warm hand. it closed firmly over magdaléna's, and gave her confidence. she could hardly see his face in the gloom of the hall, but she felt his cordial grace, his magnetism. "i am glad you have come down to my birthday dinner," she said, thankful to be able to say anything. "i am highly honoured, i am sure. shall we go outside? i hope you prefer it out there. i never stay in the house if i can help it." "oh, i much prefer to be out." they sat facing each other in two of the wicker chairs. he was a man skilled in woman, and he divined her shyness and apprehension. he talked lightly for some time, making her feel that politeness compelled her to be silent and listen. she raised her eyes after a time and looked at him. he was, perhaps, thirty-five, possibly more. he looked older and at the same time younger. his shaven chin and lips were sternly cut. his face was thin, his nose arched and fine, his skin and hair neutral in tint. the only colouring about him was in his eyes. they were very blue and deeply set under rather scraggy brows. magdaléna noted that they had a peculiarly penetrating regard, and that they did not smile with the lips. the latter, when not smiling, looked grim and forbidding, and there was a deep line on either side of the mouth. her memory turned to colonel belmont, and the night she had studied his profile. there was an indefinable resemblance between the two men. then she realised how old-fashioned and worn belmont was beside this trim elegant man, who, with no exaggeration of manner, treated her with a deference and attention which had no doubt been his habitual manner with the greatest ladies in europe. "shall you be in california long?" she asked suddenly. "that is what i am trying to decide. i had heard so much of your california that i came out with a half-formed idea of buying a little place and settling down for the rest of my days." "the mark smith place is for sale," she answered quickly. "it has only two acres, but they are cultivated, and the house is very pretty." "your father told me about it; but although menlo is very beautiful, it seems to have one drawback. i am very fond of rowing, sailing, and fishing, and there is no water." "there is if you go far enough. the bay is not so very far away, and i have heard that there is salmon-fishing back in the mountains. and mr. washington and uncle jack belmont often go duck and snipe shooting down on the marsh." she stopped with a shortening of the breath. she had not made such a long speech since helena left. he sat forward eagerly. "you interest me deeply," he said. "i am very much inclined to buy the place. i shall certainly think of it." "but you--surely--you would rather be--live--in europe. we are very old-fashioned out here." the expression about his mouth deepened. "i should like to think that i might spend the rest of my days with a fishing-rod or a gun." "but you have been at courts!" he laughed. "i have, and i hope i may never see another." "and--and you are young." her interest and curiosity overcame her reserve. she wanted to know all of this man that he would tell her. she had once seen a picture of a death-mask. his face reminded her of it. _what_ lay behind? "i am forty and some months." she rose suddenly, her hand seeking her heart. "they are coming," she faltered. "i hear wheels. and mamma is not here to introduce you." "well," he said, smiling down on her. "cannot you introduce me?" "i--i cannot. i have never introduced anyone. i must seem very ignorant and _gauche_ to you." "you are delightful. and i am sure you are quite equal to anything. am i to be introduced out here, or in the drawing-room after they have come downstairs?" "oh, i am not sure." "then perhaps you will let me advise you. when they are all here, i will appear in the drawing-room; and if your mother is not down by that time, we will help each other out. they will all be talking and will hardly notice me. but i must run." the geary phaeton drove up. it held rose and her brother. after they had gone upstairs magdaléna went into the parlour to wait for them. the large room was very dim--the gasoline was misbehaving--and silent; she shivered with apprehension. there was no sign of her mother. but trennahan's words and sympathy had given her courage, and she burned with ambition to acquit herself creditably in his eyes. the guests arrived rapidly. in ten minutes they were all in the parlour, sixteen in number, the men in full dress, the women in organdies or foulards showing little of arm and neck. mrs. washington was in pink; tiny in white and a seraphic expression; rose wore black net and red slippers, a bunch of red geraniums at her belt, her eyes slanting at the men about her. with the exception of ned geary and charley rollins, a friend of helena's, with both of whom she had perhaps exchanged three sentences in the course of her life, magdaléna knew none of the young men: they had been brought, at mrs. yorba's suggestion, by the other guests. she could find nothing to say to them; she was watching the door. would her mother never come? her father was on the front verandah talking to mr. washington and her uncle. trennahan entered the room. magdaléna drew herself up and went forward. she looked very dignified and very spanish. no one guessed, with the exception of trennahan, that it was the ordeal of her life. "mr. trennahan," she said in a harsh even voice: "mrs. washington, miss brannan, miss montgomery." he flashed her a glance of admiration which sent the chill from her veins, and began talking at once to the three women that she might feel excused from further duty. a few moments later mrs. yorba entered. she received trennahan without a smile or a superfluous word. mrs. yorba was never deliberately rude; but were she the wife of an ambassador for forty years, her chill nipped new england nature would never even artificially expand; the cast-iron traditions of her youth, when neither she nor any of her acquaintance knew aught of socialities beyond church festivals, could never be torn from the sterile but tenacious soil which had received them. dinner was announced almost immediately. mrs. yorba signified to trennahan that he was to have the honour of taking her in; and as she had not intimated how the rest were to be coupled, the women arranged the matter to suit themselves. mrs. cartright went in with don roberto, mrs. washington with polk; there were no other married women present. as charley rollins was standing by magdaléna, she took the arm he offered her. the function was not as melancholy as the yorba dinners were wont to be. young people in or approaching their first season are not easily affected by atmosphere; and those present to-night, with the exception of magdaléna and tiny montgomery, chattered incessantly. tiny had a faculty for making her temporary partner do the talking while she enjoyed her dinner; but she listened sweetly and her superlatives were happily chosen. mrs. cartright always talked incessantly whether anyone listened or not. mrs. washington, who sat on don roberto's left, amused him with the audacity of her slang. where she learned the greater number of her discords was an abiding mystery; the rest of menlo park relegated slang to the unknown millions who said "mommer" and "popper," got divorces, and used cosmetics. when remonstrated with, she airily responded that her tongue was "made that way," and rattled off her latest acquisition. as she was an especial pet of mrs. yorba's--if that august dame could be said to pet anyone--and of distinguished southern connections, the remonstrances were not serious. magdaléna, although she ordered her brain to action, could think of nothing to say to rollins; but he was a budding lawyer and asked no more of providence than a listener. he talked volubly about helena's childish pranks, the last bohemian club midsummer jinks, the epigrams of his rivals at the bar. he appeared very raw and uninteresting to magdaléna, and she found herself trying to overhear the remarks of trennahan, who was doing his laborious duty by his hostess. after a time trennahan allowed his attention to be diverted by ila, who sat on his right. that he was grateful for the change there could be no doubt. his expression up to this point had been one of grim amusement, which at any moment might become careworn. the lines of his face relaxed under ila's curved smiles and slanting glances. they laughed gaily, but pitched their voices very low. magdaléna wondered if all dinners were as wearisome as this. rollins finally followed trennahan's example and devoted himself to caro folsom, a yellow-haired girl with babyish green eyes, a lisp, and an astute brain. on magdaléna's left was a blond and babbling youth named ellis, who made no secret of the fact that he was afraid of his intellectual neighbour; he stammered and blushed every time she spoke to him. he had gone in with rose geary, a blonde fairy-like little creature, as light of foot as of wit, and an accomplished flirt; who regarded men with the eye of the philosopher. they occupied each other admirably. opposite, another young lawyer, eugene fort, was saying preternaturally bright things to tiny, who lifted her sweet orbs at intervals and remarked: "how _dreadfully_ clever you are, mr. fort; i am _so_ afraid of you!" or "how _sweet_ of you to think i am worth all those _real_ epigrams! you ought to keep them for a great law-book." once she stifled a yawn, but mr. fort did not see it. little notice was taken of magdaléna, and she felt superfluous and miserable. even trennahan, who had seemed so sympathetic, had barely glanced at her. she wondered, with a little inner laugh, if she were growing conceited. why should he, with one of the prettiest girls in california beside him? ila was very young, but she belonged by instinct to his own world. the dinner came to an end. the older men went to the billiard-room, the younger men followed the girls to the parlour. trennahan talked to tiny for a time, then again to ila, who lay back in a chair with her little red slippers on a footstool. she had carefully disposed herself in an alcove beyond the range of mrs. yorba's vision. tiny, whose train added to the remarkable dignity of her diminutive person, crossed the room to magdaléna, who was sitting alone on the window-seat. "you have done so _well_, 'léna dear," she said, as she sat down beside her discouraged hostess. "i feel i must tell you that _immediately_. you are not a _bit_ shy and nervous, as i should be if i were giving my first dinner." magdaléna smiled gratefully. tiny had always been the kindest of the girls. "i am glad you think i am not so bad," she said. "but i fear that i have bored everybody." "_indeed_, you have not. you are so calm and full of natural repose. the rest of us seem _dreadfully_ american by contrast." "you are never fussy." "i know, but it is _quite_ different. i've been very carefully brought up. you would be exactly as you are if you had brought yourself up. the spanish are the most dignified--what are they going to do, i wonder?" mr. fort approached. "we are going to walk about the grounds and step on the frogs," he said. "i don't know a line of poetry, but i can count stars, and i'll tell you of my aspirations in life. will you come?" "i _so_ want to hear your aspirations, mr. fort," said tiny. "i did not know that california men had aspirations." the girls went with him to the verandah, and all started down the driveway together, then paired. to her surprise, magdaléna found trennahan beside her. "i am so glad to be with you again," he said petulantly. "i am tired of types." "types?" "yes; women that a man has been used to for many long weary years,--to put it in another way." "but surely you find ila very fascinating?" "oh, yes; but one understands the fascination so well; and it gives so much pleasure to--twenty-two, that it is almost immoral for an old fogy like myself to monopolise it. i don't understand you in the least, so i am here." magdaléna trembled a little. the nineteen years of her life suddenly assumed a glad complexion, lifting her spirit to the level of her mates. she tried to recall the sad and bitter experiences of her brief past, but they scampered down into the roots of memory. he did not speak again for a time, beyond asking if he might smoke. he was quite sincere for the moment; but he understood the much of her that was salient to his trained eye. her parents, her timid reserve, so unlike that of other american girls favoured by fortune, her ignorance of certain conventionalities, the very fashion of her hair, the very incompatibility of her costume and colouring, told him two thirds of her short history. of the history of her inner life he guessed little, but believed that she had both depth of mind and intensity of feeling. to get her confidence would be next to impossible; it was therefore well worth the effort. if she proved as interesting as he suspected, he believed that he should feel disposed to marry her did she only have a complexion. he was weary straight down into the depths of his weary soul of the women and the girls of the world; but he also abhorred a sallow skin. he had worshipped beauty in his day, and was by no means impervious to it yet; but he felt that he could overlook magdaléna's nose and mouth and elementary figure for the sake of her eyes and originality, did she only possess the primary essential of beauty. a man regards a woman's lack of complexion as a personal grievance. if the american habit of monologue had been a part of trennahan's inheritance, his foreign training had long since lifted it up by the roots; but he saw that if he was to make progress with this silent girl, he must do the talking. he could be both brilliant and amusing when he chose, and he exerted himself as he had not done for some time. he was rewarded by a rapt attention, a humble and profound admiration that would have flattered a demi-god. and in truth he was a demi-god to this girl, with her experience of elderly old-fashioned men and an occasional callow youth encountered on a verandah in summer. they followed the driveway that curved between one of the two larger lawns and the deer park. the lawn was set thickly along its edge and sparsely on its sweep with fragrant trees and shrubs. beyond the deer park was the black mass of the woods. the air was sweet with the mingled breath of june roses, orange blossoms, and the pepper-tree. after a time their way lay through a dark avenue of immense oaks, and the perfumes came from the mariposa lilies in the fields beyond. if trennahan had been with ila, he would have conducted himself as his surroundings and his companion demanded: he would have made love. but he was a man who rarely made a mistake; he talked to magdaléna of the difference between california and the many other countries he had visited, and answered her eager questions about life in the great capitals. as they were returning, he said to her,-- "you say you ride before breakfast. do you think i might join you to-morrow? your father has been kind enough to place his stable at my disposal." "oh--i--i don't know. my father is very--spanish, although he doesn't like you to call it that." "may i ask him?" "oh, yes, you could ask him." when they reached the house he sought his host in the billiard-room. the game was over, and don roberto, mr. polk, and mr. washington were seated in front of the mantel-piece with their feet on the shelf. it was don roberto's favourite attitude; he felt that it completed the structure of his americanism. he could only reach the tip of the shelf with the points of his little elegant feet, but he was just as comfortable as mr. polk, whose feet, large and booted, were planted against the wall. mr. washington, who was a most correct gentleman, with the illustrious forbears his name suggested, had never lifted his feet to one of his own mantels in his life; but don roberto's guests always humoured this little hobby, among many others. "ay, the mr. trennahan," said don roberto, graciously. "we make room for you." the others moved along, and trennahan, seeing what was expected of him, brought a chair and elevated his feet among the chinese bric-à-brac. he accepted a choice cigar--there were certain luxuries in which don roberto never economised--and added his quota to the anecdotes of the hearthstone. as his were fresh and the others as worn as an old wedding-ring, it was not long before he had an audience which would brook no interruption but applause. a chinaman brought a peremptory message from mrs. washington, and the feet on the mantel were reduced to six. when these came down, two hours later, trennahan said to don roberto,-- "may i ride with miss yorba to-morrow before breakfast?" "yes; i no mind," said the don, beaming with approval of his new friend. "but the boy, he go too. my daughter, no must ride alone with the gentleman. and you no leave the grounds, remember." xvi when magdaléna went up to her room, she spread all her pretty gifts on the table and asked herself if they were the secret of this novel feeling of content with herself and her world. she studied the mirror and fancied that she was not so plain as usual. her eyes returned to her presents, and she shook her head. her mind worked slowly, but it worked logically; nor was that imagination hers which keeps woman in a fool's paradise long after all but the husk of her adam has gone. "it is mr. trennahan," she admitted reluctantly but ruthlessly. "he is so clever and so agreeable--no, fascinating--that for the first time i forgot myself, and when i remembered was not unhappy because i am not beautiful nor clever. the world must be much nicer than i thought if there are many people like that in it." to love she did not give a thought, but she smiled to herself after the light was out, and, still smiling, fell asleep. the next morning she was downstairs by six o'clock, but found trennahan before her. as he approached her,--he had been sauntering up and down the drive,--she wondered what he thought of her costume. as she was not allowed to leave the grounds, a habit had never been thought necessary for the heiress of the house of yorba. she had worn for the past two years one of her mother's discarded black skirts and a cotton blouse. but it is doubtful if an inspired mind-reader could have made anything of such thoughts as trennahan wished to conceal. "you look as fresh as the morning," he said, with a gallantry which was mechanical, but true and delightful to a girl in her first experience of compliments. "did you sleep well?" she asked. "i hope the mosquitoes did not keep you awake. they are very bad." "i believe they are, but i received a friendly warning from mr. polk and rubbed the leather which protects my skull with vinegar. i think it was superfluous, but at all events i slept undisturbed." magdaléna regarded his skin attentively, much to his amusement. "it is thick," she said, feeling that she could not honestly reassure him, but quite positive that he expected her to answer. he laughed heartily. "oh!" he said. "what a pity you must 'come out'! i am a convert to the old-californian system. but here are the horses." the improvised groom, a sulky and intensely self-conscious stable-boy, led up the horses, and magdaléna put her foot in trennahan's hand. "oh!" he exclaimed, with a note of real admiration in his voice; and magdaléna nearly fell over the other side of her horse. they cantered off sharply, the boy following a good thirty yards behind, feeling uncommonly sheepish when he was not thinking angrily of his neglected chores. it was not thought good form in menlo park to put on the trappings of circumstance. mrs. washington drove a phaeton and took a boy in the rumble to open the gates; but the coachmen when driving the usual char-à-banc or wagonette performed this office while their mistresses steered the horses through the gates. no one ever thought of wearing a jewel or a décolleté gown to a dinner or a dance. mrs. dillon, the bonanza queen, having heard much of the simplicity of the worshipful menlo park folk, had paid her first calls in a blue silk wrapper, but, conceiving that she had done the wrong thing, sheltered her perplexities in black silk thereafter. her daughter upon the same occasion had worn a voluminous frock of pale blue camel's hair trimmed with flounces of valenciennes lace, that being the simplest frock in her wardrobe; but she privately thought even mrs. washington's apotheosised lawns and organdies very "scrubby," and could never bring herself to anything less expensive than summer silks, made at the greatest house in paris. "i am going to see the mark smith place this afternoon," said trennahan. "your mother has very kindly offered to drive me over. i suppose it has no woods on it. these are beautiful." "they are the only ones in the san mateo valley," replied magdaléna, experiencing the full pride of possession. "are there such beautiful ones in europe?" "those at fontainbleau are not unlike. but in england you stand in the middle of a wood and admire the landscape on either side." "helena wrote me something like that. she said that she always put on a veil when she went into an english wood for fear she would get freckled." "who is helena?" "she is my great friend. she is colonel jack belmont's daughter, and the most beautiful girl in california. at least i think she is, for of course i have not seen them all." "are you always as conscientious as that? why have i not seen this peerless creature?" "she is in europe. you will see her in december. of course i do not know if she is a 'type,' but i don't see how anybody else could be like helena. mr. rollins said last night that she was the concentrated essence of california." "describe her to me." he was delighted at the prospect of drawing her out on any subject. magdaléna hesitated, wondering if she should have the courage to continue, did she begin a monologue. she recalled the sustained animation of the girls at her dinner, and moved as if to shake her head, then recollected her ambition to shine in conversation. to no one had she ever found it so easy to express herself as to this man. why not take advantage of that fact? and that represented but the half of her present ambition. if she could only interest him! he watched her closely, divining some cause of her hesitation, but not all. her complexion was even less desirable by day than by gas, but her hair was tumbled, her eyes were sparkling softly; and the deep green arbours of the wood were an enchanting aid to youth. "she has curly shining hair about the colour of mahogany, and big--long--dark blue eyes that look as if they were not afraid of anything, and make you afraid sometimes, and regular features, and a whiter skin than tiny's, with a beautiful pink colour--" she stopped short, feeling that her attempt at description was as ineffective as the hours wasted upon her much modelled hero. "that sounds very charming, but still--never mind her appearance. tell me what you so much admire in her." "she talks so much, and she isn't afraid of anybody. she says she wouldn't lie because she wouldn't pay anyone that compliment. she loves to 'cheek' and shock people. she walks all round the outside of the house--upstairs--on a narrow ledge, and she runs to fires--at least she ran to one--and she won't study when she doesn't feel like it. and--and--she even snatched off papa's skull-cap once." trennahan threw back his head and laughed loud and long. "and you would have me believe that all that is what moves you to admiration. don't you know, my dear child, that you love your friend in spite of her tomboy eccentricities, not because of them? you wouldn't be or do one of those things if you could." again magdaléna hesitated. the implied approval was delightful; but she would not hold it on false pretences. she answered firmly,-- "i went to the fire with her." "you? delightful! tell me about it. every detail." she told him everything except the terrible sequel. it was lamely presented, but he cared nothing for the episode. his sympathies were immediate if temporary, and experience had eaten off the very cover of the book of seals. he followed her through every mental phase she unconsciously rehearsed; and when she brought the story to an abrupt close, lacking the art to run it off into generalities, he inferred something of the last development and did not press her to continue. he pitied her grimly. but he was an intensely practical man. "you must never think of doing that sort of thing again," he said. "unless a person is naturally eccentric, the attempt to be so demoralises him, because there is nothing so demoralising as failure--except on one's own particular lines. did you, for instance, jump on a horse and career barebacked through menlo park like a wild indian,--a performance which your friend would probably carry off with any amount of dash and _chic_--you would feel a hopeless fool; whereas," he gave her a keen side glance, "if you felt that you possessed a talent--for music, say--and failed forty times before achieving success, you would feel that your failures partook of the dignity of their cause, and of your own character." she turned to him with quickening pulse. "do you think," she faltered, hunting for phrases that would not commit her, "that if a person loved an art very much, even if he could not be sure that he had genius, that he would be right to go on and on, no matter how often he became discouraged?" her eyes were staring at her horse's neck; she did not see him smile. he had felt quite sure that she sought relief for the silences of her life in literary composition. when an unattractive woman has not talent she finds a double revenge in the torture of words, he thought. what shall i say to her? that she is whittling thorns for her own soul? bah! did i not find enjoyment once in the very imaginings of all that has scourged me since? would i have thanked anyone for opening my eyes? and the positive is the one thing that grips the memory. it is as well to have what high lights one can. she had raised her head and was looking at him expectantly. "certainly," he said. "he should go on, by all means. love of an art presupposes a certain degree of talent."--may heaven forgive me for that lie, he thought. she detected his lack of spontaneity, but attributed it to the fact that he had not guessed her personal interest in the question. "have you met many literary people?" she asked. "but of course you must. did you like them very much?" "i have inquired carefully, and ascertained that there are none in menlo. if there were, i should not think twice about the mark smith place." magdaléna felt herself burning to her hair. she glanced at him quickly, but he averted his eyes and called her attention to a magnificent oak whose limbs trailed on the ground. should i tell him? she thought, every nerve quaking. _should_ i? then she set her lips in scorn. he spoke of "literary" people, she continued. it will be many a day before i am that. meanwhile, as helena would say, what he doesn't know won't hurt him. he had no intention of letting her make any such confidences. "tell me," he said. "i have heard something of the old spanish families of california. you, of course, belong to them. that is what gives you your delightful individuality. i should like to hear something of that old life. of course it interests you?" "oh, i love it,--at least, i loved it once. my aunt, my father's sister, used to talk constantly of that time, but i have no one to talk to of it now; she has lived in santa barbara for the last three years. she told me many stories of that time. it must have been wonderful." he drew one leg across the horse's neck and brought him to a stand. they had entered the backwoods and were walking their horses. the groom was nowhere to be seen. he was, in fact, awaiting them at the edge of the woods, his beast tethered, himself prone, the ring-master of a tarantula fight. "tell me those stories," commanded trennahan. he knew they would bore him, but the girl was very interesting. magdaléna began the story of ysabel herrara. at first she stumbled, and was obliged to begin no less than three times, but when fairly started she told it very well. many of her aunt's vivid picturesque phrases sprang from their dusty shelves; her own early enthusiasm revived. when she had finished she passed on to the pathetic little histories of Éléna duncan and benicia ortega. she had told over those stories many times to herself; to-day they were little more than the recital of a well-studied lesson. the intense earnestness of trennahan's gaze magnetised her out of self-consciousness. when she was concluding the third, his horse shied suddenly at a snake, and while he quieted it she tumbled back to the present. she sat with parted lips and thumping heart. had she talked as well as that? she, magdaléna yorba, the dull, the silent, the terrified? she felt a glad pride in herself, and a profound gratitude to the wizard who had worked the spell. "i have never been more interested," he said in a moment. "how delightfully you talk! what a pity you don't write!" magdaléna's heart shook her very throat, but she managed to answer, "and then you wouldn't buy the mark smith place?" "well, no, perhaps i wouldn't," he answered hurriedly, lest she might be moved to confidence. he had a lively vision of magdaléna reading her manuscripts to him, or sending them to him for criticism. "but you must tell me a story every time we--i am so fortunate as to have you all to myself like this. i suppose we should be going back now." magdaléna took out her watch. the little air of pride in her new possession amused trennahan, although he saw the pathos of it. "yes," she said; "it is nearly eight. we must go. papa does not like us to be late for breakfast." as they reached the edge of the woods, magdaléna gave an exclamation of disgust; but trennahan leaned forward with much interest. the two tarantulas, after tearing each other's fur and legs off, were locked in the death embrace, leaping and rolling. "get on your horse at once," said magdaléna, sternly. "you are a cruel boy." "but that is very interesting," said trennahan; "i never saw it before." "they are always doing it here. they pour water--" she turned to the boy, who was mounted, and close behind them, now that they were likely to come within the range of the old don's vision at any moment. "dick," she said sternly, "how did you get those tarantulas up? have you a whiskey flask about you?" she spoke with all her father's harsh pride when addressing an inferior: don roberto regarded servants, in spite of the heavy wage they commanded, as he had the indians of his early manhood. trennahan watched her closely, remarking upon the variety a man might find in a woman if he chose to look for it. the boy assured magdaléna that the tarantulas had been above ground. she shrugged her shoulders and turned her back expressively upon him. "you see those little round holes covered with white film?" she said to trennahan. "they lead down to the tarantulas' houses,--real little houses, with doors on hinges. people pour water down, and the old tarantula comes up--back first, dragging his legs after him--to see what is the matter. then they set two of them at each other with sticks, and they--the tarantulas--never stop fighting until they have torn each other to death: they have two curved sharp teeth." good sport for variety's sake, thought trennahan. i see myself engaged on warm afternoons. xvii after breakfast trennahan lay in a long chair on the verandah and smoked undisturbed. mrs. yorba was busy, and magdaléna sat up in her room, longing to go down, but fearing to weary him. she recalled the early hours with vivid pleasure. for the first time in her life she was almost pleased with herself. she took out her writing materials; but her beloved art would not hold her. she went to the window and unfastened the shutter softly. trennahan was not talking to himself nor even walking up and down the hard boards below, but the aroma of his cigar gave evidence that he was there. it mingled with the perfume of the pink and white roses swarming over the roof of the verandah almost to her window. she experienced her first impulse to decorate herself, to gather a handful of those roses and place them in her hair. her aunt had never been without that national adornment, worn with the grace of her slender girlhood. she stepped over the sill, catching her breath as the tin roof cracked beneath her feet, but gathered the roses and returned to her mirror. with the nimble fingers of her race she arranged the roses at one side of her head, above and behind the ear. certainly they were becoming. she also discovered that she had her aunt's turn of the head, her graceful way of raising her hand to her ear. but it is so little, she thought with a sigh; if i could only have the rest! her mind wandered back to the heroines of her aunt's tales. if she but had the beauty of those wondrous girls, trennahan would have taken fire in the hour that he met her, as their caballeros had done. the thought made her sigh again, not with a woman's bitterness,--she had lived too little for that,--but with a girl's romantic sadness. why had she been defrauded of her birthright? she recalled something colonel belmont had once said about "cross-breeding being death on beauty in nine cases out of ten." why could not her father have married another woman of his race? she dismissed these reflections as unfilial and wicked, and returned to her work; but it was only to bite the end of her pen-holder and dream. meanwhile trennahan fell asleep and dreamed that his menlo house caught fire one night and that all the maidens of his new acquaintance came in a body to extinguish the flames. miss montgomery played a hose considerably larger round than her neck, with indomitable energy and persistence. miss brannan, in a dashing red cap and jacket, danced like a bacchante on the roof, albeit manipulating large buckets of water. mrs. washington was also there, and, swinging in a hammock, encouraged the workers with her characteristic optimism expressed in picturesque american. magdaléna, in a suit of her father's old clothes, was handing his books through the library window to miss folsom. miss geary was scrambling up the ladder, a hose coiled about her like a python. the leader of the company stood on the roof directly above the front door, giving orders with imperious voice and gesture. but although the flames leaped high about her, starting the leaves of a neighbouring tree into sharp relief, he could not see her face. xviii trennahan did not see magdaléna until luncheon. she came in late, and her manner was a shade colder and more reserved than usual. after much excogitation, she had decided to leave the roses in her hair, but it had taken her ten minutes to summon up courage to go downstairs. he understood perfectly, and his soul grinned. then he sighed. youth had been very sweet to him, all manifestations of femininity in a woman very dear. there were four long windows in the dining-room, but the roof of the verandah, the thick vines springing from pillar to pillar, the lilac-trees and willows just beyond, chastened the light in the room. magdaléna looked almost pretty, with her air of proud reserve, the roses nestling in her dark hair. ten years ago he might have loved her, perhaps, in spite of her complexion. mrs. yorba did not notice the roses. her mind was blind with wrath: the cream sauce of the chicken was curdled. during at least half the meal she did not utter a word; and trennahan, wondering if fate were forcing him into the permanent role of the garrulous american, a breed for which he had all the finely bred american's contempt, talked of the weather, the woods, the climate, the beauty of the californian women, with little or no assistance from magdaléna. the moment he paused, and he was hungry, the catlike tread of the chinese butlers was the only sound in the large house; the silence was so oppressive that he reflected with gratitude that his visit would be done with the morrow's morn. finally, mrs. yorba left the table and stepping through one of the open casements walked up and down the verandah. she was very fond of this little promenade between the last solid course of luncheon and the griddle-cakes and fruit. "i am glad you wear flowers in your hair," said trennahan. "your head was made for them. i am certain your ysabel what's-her-name must have worn them just so the night her ardent lover conceived the idea of robbing the mission of its pearls for her fair sake." magdaléna's face glowed with its rare smile. "but ysabel was so beautiful," she said wistfully,--"the most beautiful woman in california." "all women are beautiful, my dear miss yorba--when they are young. if girls could only be made to understand that youth is always beautiful, they would be even prettier than they are." magdaléna's eyes were large and radiant for a moment. she was disposed to believe in him implicitly. she determined that she would think no more on the beautiful women of her race, but learn to make herself attractive in other ways. helena would return soon and would teach her. "i have read in books that plain women are sometimes more fascinating than beautiful ones," she said. "how can that be? of course you must know." "a fascinating ugly woman is one who in the same moment sets the teeth on edge and makes a beauty look like a daub or a statue. her pitfall is that she is apt to be lacking in pride: she makes too great an effort to please. your pride is magnificent. i say that in strict truth and without any desire to pay you a compliment. had fate been so unkind as to make you an ugly woman, you would not have had a jot less; it is the finest part of you, to my way of thinking. you are worrying now because you have less to say than these girls who have travelled and been educated abroad, and who, moreover, are of lighter make. don't try to imitate them. the knack of making conversation will come with time; and you will always be appreciated by the men who are weary past your power to understand of the women that chatter. if i buy this place, i shall read over some of my favourite old books with you,--that is, if you will let me; and i believe that you will." magdaléna's hands were clasped on the edge of the table; she was leaning forward, her soul in her eyes. for the moment she was beautiful, and trennahan looked his admiration and forgot her lack of complexion. to magdaléna there had been a sudden blaze of golden light, then a rift, through which she caught a brief flash of heaven. her vague longings suddenly cohered. she was to be solitary no longer. she was to have a companion, a friend,--perhaps a confidante, a person to whom she might speak out her inmost soul. she had never thought that she should wish to open her reserve to anyone, but in this prospect there was enchantment. mrs. yorba returned to her seat and helped herself to hot cakes. "when miss montgomery and miss brannan were leaving last night," she said, "they asked me to stop for them this afternoon, as they wished to persuade you that the mark smith place was exactly what you wanted, or something to that effect. so we shall stop for them. the char-à-banc will be at the door at a quarter to four." that was her last remark, as it had been her first, and some twenty minutes later the repast came to an end. xix trennahan was again left to his own devices. he amused himself inspecting the stable, a most unpretentious structure, containing all that was absolutely indispensable and no more. attached to the farmhouse in an adjoining field was a barn for the work-horses. the stable-boy did duty as guide, and conducted trennahan through the dairy, granary, carpenter shop, and various other outbuildings. it was all very plain, but very substantial, the symbol of a fortune that would last; altogether unlike the accepted idea of california, that state of rockets and sticks. but, for the matter of that, thought trennahan, all things should be stable in this land of dreaming nature. he had been told since his arrival that everything had been in a rut since the great bonanza plague; but assuredly this archaic repose must be its natural atmosphere; its fevers must always be sporadic and artificial. yes, he thought, it is a good place to die in. it would have been intolerable ten years ago, but it seems little short of paradise when a man has dry rot in him. and that girl looked remarkably well with those roses in her hair. poor thing! magdaléna came down to the verandah a few moments before the char-à-banc drove up. she wore a buff lawn, simply made by the family seamstress, and a large straw hat trimmed with daisies. she had taken the flowers out of her hair, but had pinned a large cluster of red roses at her waist. altogether she looked her best, and felt that she might be able to hold her own against the other girls. one secret of trennahan's charm for women was that he never overlooked their little efforts to please him. he said immediately,-- "yellow and red were made for you. you should leave white for those who cannot stand the fury of colour." she was keenly alive to the pleasures of appreciation, but merely asked if he had managed to amuse himself. "fairly well, considering that you deserted me." "but they almost always leave the men alone down here in the daytime, tiny says. she says that all they come for is to get away from san francisco, and that they prefer to go to sleep on the verandah or the lawns." "i should not have guessed that miss montgomery was cynical. i fancy she finds entertaining in the open air rather sleepy work herself. or perhaps she thinks they are sufficiently honoured in being asked within the sacred precincts of menlo park," he added mischievously. "i have been given to understand that it _is_ an honour." "we keep very much to ourselves," said magdaléna, gravely. "we never care to know new people unless we are sure that we shall like them." to flirt with her a little, or rather to flirt at her, was irresistible. he bent over her, smiling and compelling her gaze. "and how can i be sure that you will not find me wanting?" he asked; "not like me at all a month hence? i think i should wait at least that time before buying this place." she shook her head seriously. "i am sure we are all going to like you. while you were with papa last night, tiny and ila and mrs. washington and rose and caro all said they hoped you would buy the mark smith place. ila said she had not come back to california to talk to children; and tiny--who is not really enthusiastic--said you were one of the few men she ever wanted to see a second time. mrs. washington said, 'a man-of-the-world at this last end of creation, stepping off landing--'" "i am more flattered than i can possibly express, but i want to know what _you_ think about it. shall you tire of me?" "oh, i think not. i am sure i shall not." "do you want me to buy this place?" she looked at him helplessly. instinct whispered that he was unfair, but she had no anger for him. "i--i--think i do," she said. "i--i think you know i do." and then she did feel a little angry with him. he drew back at once. "you are my first friend, you know," he said in his ordinary manner. "i should not think of settling near you unless i were sure of not boring you. but i believe we have tastes in common, and i hope you will let me come over often." "you will be always welcome," she said formally. her anger had gone, leaving a chill in its wake. the char-à-banc drove up. mrs. yorba descended simultaneously. her virtues were many, and one of them was punctuality. xx the montgomerys' house was next in age to the yorbas', but neither so large nor so solid. even its verandah, however, had a more homelike air; its carpets and rugs were old but handsome; and it was full of pretty trifles, and much carved furniture, gathered in europe. the lawns were small, the grounds carelessly kept, but there were many fine old trees and a wilderness of flowers. coralie brannan and lee tarlton, mrs. montgomery's little ward, were romping on the lawn as the yorbas drove up. tiny and ila were sitting on the verandah. the former was in her favourite white, and a hat and sash of azure. ila wore a superlatively smart frock of yellow silk muslin, and a yellow sun-hat covered with red poppies. trennahan saw the flash of dismay from magdaléna's eyes before her face settled into its most stolid expression. he felt genuinely sorry for her, but his only part was to get out and hand these radiant visions into the char-à-banc. "it is _so_ nice to think that you may be a neighbour of ours," said tiny, sweetly, as ila was kissing mrs. yorba, and asking if she were not a good girl to meet her halfway. "we shall really be glad to have you." "we shall make him forget that he has not lived here always," said ila, with her most brilliant smile. she was much elated at the unexpected foil. "he will become quite one of us." "i am sure he would not think of settling elsewhere in california," said mrs. yorba. and then she added with what for her was extreme graciousness, "my husband and i shall be very glad to have him for neighbour." trennahan murmured his thanks. he was deeply amused. that he was the representative of one of the proudest families in a state some three hundred years old mattered nothing to these californians of menlo park. is it catching, i wonder? he thought. if some of my english friends should come out here five years hence, should i patronise them? doubtless, for it is like living on another planet. exclusiveness is the very scheme of its nature. it is encouraging to think that i have yet another phase to live through. ila claimed his attention and kept it as they rolled down the dusty road toward the mark smith place. tiny, after a futile attempt to engage magdaléna in conversation, devoted herself prettily to mrs. yorba and talked of the plans for the summer. magdaléna was acutely miserable. her exaltation of spirits was a bare memory. she hated her dowdy frock, her glaring contrast to the vivid ila, accentuated by that grotesque similarity of attire. she listened to ila's brilliant chatter and recalled her own halting phrases, her narrow vocabulary, and wondered angrily at the conceit which had prompted her to hope that she was overcoming her natural deficiencies. then she remembered that she was a yorba, and drew herself up in lonely pride. it was a privilege for these girls to be intimate with her, to call her 'léna, great as might be their social superiority over the many in san francisco whose names she had never heard. in her inordinate pride of birth, in her intimate knowledge of the fact that she was the daughter of a californian grandee who still possessed the three hundred thousand acres granted his fathers by the spanish crown, she in all honesty believed no one of these friends of her youth to be her equal, although she never betrayed herself by so much as a lifting of the eyebrow. she had questioned, after her loss of religion, if it were not her duty to train down her pride, but had concluded that it was not; it injured no one, and it was a tribute she owed her race. she liked trennahan the better that he had discovered and approved this pride. xxi magdaléna did not see trennahan alone again; he did not ask her to ride with him on the following morning, and left for town immediately after breakfast. but before taking his seat in the char-à-banc he held her hand a moment and assured her with such emphasis that he owed the great pleasure of his visit entirely to her, that her spirits, which had been in weeds, flaunted into colour and song; and she went at once to her nook in the woods, feeling that the fire in her mind was nothing less than creative. but she did not write for some time. the sun was already intensely hot; even in those depths the air was heavy, the heat waves shimmered among the young green of the undergrowth. magdaléna stretched herself out lazily and looked up into the green recesses of the trees. the leaves were rustling in a light hot wind. she fancied that they sang, and strained her ears to catch the tune. it looked so cool and green and dark up there; surely the birds, the squirrels, the very tree-toads,--those polished bits of malachite,--must be happy and fond in their storeyed palace. what a poem might be written about them! but they would not raise their voices above that indefinite murmur, and the straining ears of her soul heard not either. she sat up and began to write, endeavouring to shake some life into her heroine, but only succeeding in making her express herself in very affected old english, with the air of a marionette. then mechanically, almost unconsciously, she began the story again. at the end of an hour she discovered that she had dressed up trennahan in velvet and gold, doublet and hose. she laughed with grim merriment. ignorant as she was, she was quick to see the incongruity between modern man in his quintessence and the romantic garments of a buried century. also, her hero had addressed his startled friends in this wise: "i can't stand that rat-hole any longer. i'm going to stay down here with the rest of you, whether i'm hanged for it or not." this was undoubtedly what trennahan would have said; but not the cavalier, lord hastings of fairfax. she had a vague prompting that on the whole it was preferable to,-- "gadsooks, my bold knights, and prithee should a man rot in a rat-ridden cupboard while his friends make merry? rather let him be drawn and quartered, then fed to ravens, but live while he may." but she dismissed the thought as treason to letters, and proceeded on her mistaken way with the lady eleanora templemere. shakspere and scott were her favourite writers; she felt that she must fumble into the sacred lines of literature by such feeble rays as they cast her. she liked and admired the great realists whose bones were hardly dust; but they did not inspire her, taught her nothing. xxii the next morning, as she was starting for the woods, rather later than usual, dick, the stable-boy, who had just returned from the post-office, detached a letter from a packet he was handing the butler and ran after her. as helena was her only correspondent, she marvelled at the strange handwriting, but opened the letter more promptly than most women do in the circumstances. it was from trennahan and read: dear miss yorba,--i have virtually bought the place. that is to say, i shall buy it as soon as the deeds are made out. meanwhile, i am looking for servants and hope to move down on monday next at latest. mr. smith has also consented to sell me his stud, which, your father tells me, is exceptionally fine. so, you see, i am really to be your neighbour, and am hoping you are friendly enough not to be displeased. at all events, i shall give myself the pleasure of riding over on monday evening, and hope that you will join me in another ride on the following morning. meanwhile, can i do anything for you in town? is there anything that you would care to read? pray command me. faithfully, j. s. trennahan. never was there a more commonplace or business-like note, but it seemed a miracle of easy grace to magdaléna: it was the first note of any sort that she had received from a man not old enough to be her father. she invested it with all the man's magnetism, and heard it enunciated in his cultivated voice. she imagined it delivered in the nasal tones of her uncle, or in the thick voice of the youth that had sat on her left at the birthday dinner,--she had forgotten his name,--and shuddered. she recalled that her mother had received an envelope directed by the same hand the night before; but that, doubtless, had been a mere note of politeness. he had written this because he wished to do so! she spent the entire morning answering the note, and discovered that it was as easy to write a book. after tearing up some twenty epistles, she concluded that the following, when copied on her best note-paper, and compared with the dictionary, would do,-- dear mr. trennahan,--i am glad that you have bought the mark smith place. there is nothing that i want. many thanks. yours truly, magdalÉna yorba. xxiii on the following monday don roberto had a cold and did not go to town, but sunned himself on the verandah, alternately sipping whiskey and eating quinine pills. magdaléna dutifully kept him company, and the whiskey having made him unusually amiable, he talked more than was his wont with the women of his family. in his way he was fond of his daughter, deeply as she had disappointed him; and, had she known how to manage him, doubtless her girlish wants would have met with few rebuffs. but that would have meant another magdaléna. "i like this trennahan," he announced. "he prefer talk with me than with the young mens, and he know plenty good stories, by jimminy! he have call on me at the bank three times, and i have lunch with him one day. damn good lunch. he is what jack call thoroughbred, and have the manners very fine. i like have him much for the neighbour. he ask myself and eeram and washeengton to have the dinner with him on thursday and warm the house. he understand the good wine and the tabac, by scott! i feel please si he ask me plenty time, and i have him here often." magdaléna was delighted with these unexpected sentiments. she pressed her lips together twice, then said,-- "he asked me if i could ride again with him to-morrow morning." "i have not the objection to you ride all you want it with mr. trennahan, si you not go outside the place. need not take that boy, for he have the work; and i have trust in mr. trennahan." he would, indeed, have welcomed trennahan as a son-in-law. magdaléna must inherit his wealth as well as the immense fortune of her uncle; neither of these worthy gentlemen had the least ambition to be caricatured in bronze and accumulate green mould as public benefactors. nor did don roberto regret that he had no son, having the most profound contempt for the sons of rich men, as they circled within his horizon. it would be one of the terms of his will that magdaléna's first son should be named yorba, and that the name should be perpetuated in this manner until california should shake herself into the sea. he had long since determined that magdaléna should marry no one of the sons of his moneyed friends, nor yet any of the sprouting lawyers or unfledged business youths who made up the masculine half of the younger fashionable set. nor would he leave his money in trust for trustees to fatten on. ever since magdaléna's sixteenth birthday he had been on the look-out for a son-in-law to his pattern. the new yorker suited him. a wealthy man himself, trennahan's motives could not be misconstrued. his birth and breeding were all that could be desired, even of a yorba. he understood the value of money and its management. and he was well past the spendthrift age. don roberto and mr. polk had discussed the matter between them; and these two wily old judges of human nature had agreed that trennahan must become the guardian of their joint millions. magdaléna was her father's only misgiving. would a man with an exhaustive experience of beautiful women be attracted into marriage by this ugly duckling? but trennahan had passed his youth. perhaps, like himself, he would have come to the conclusion that it was better to have a plain wife and leave beauty to one's mistresses. he had not the slightest objection to trennahan having a separate establishment; in fact, he thought a man a fool who had not. little escaped his sharp eyes. he had noted trennahan's interest in magdaléna, the length of the morning ride, his daughter's sparkling eyes at breakfast. propinquity would do much; and the bait was dazzling, even to a man of fortune. he became aware that magdaléna was speaking. "i have no habit; and ila says that they intend to have riding parties." "you can get one habit. go up to-morrow and order one." magdaléna felt a little dazed, and wondered if everything in her life were changing. "i hear wheels," she said after a moment. they were on the verandah on the right of the house. she stood up and watched the bend of the drive. "it is the montgomery char-à-banc," she said, "and there are mrs. cartright and tiny and ila and rose. shall you stay?" "i stay. bring them here to me. tiny and ila beautiful girls. great scott! they know what they are about. rose very pretty, too." the char-à-banc drew up; and as its occupants did not alight, magdaléna went down and stood beside it, shading her eyes with her hand. "we have come to take you for a drive to the hills, 'léna dear," said tiny. "do come." "papa has a bad cold. i cannot leave--" "poor dear don roberto!" exclaimed mrs. cartright. "i will get out this minute and speak to him. i know so many remedies for a cold,--blackberry brandy, or currant wine, or inhaling burnt linen and drinking hot water--" but she was halfway down the verandah by this time. "do you remember the last time we went to the hills?" asked ila. "helena and rose shrieked with such hilarity that the horses bolted." "i can answer for myself," said rose. "i may say that the memory was burnt in with a slipper." "i never was spanked," murmured tiny. "that is one of the many things i am grateful for. it must be so humiliating to have been spanked." "who can tell what futures may lie in a slipper?" replied rose, who had a reputation for being clever. "i am sure that my slipperings, for instance, generated a tendency for epigram; something swift and sharp. it destroyed the tendency to bawl continuously,--the equivalent of the great national habit of monologue." "rose, you are quite too frightfully clever," said tiny, with an assumption of languor. "you will be writing a book next." "i will make 'léna the heroine," retorted rose, with a keen glance, "and call it 'the sphinx of menlo park.'" "fancy 'léna being called a sphinx," said ila, who was looking very bored. "are you coming, 'léna, or not? i suppose you don't want to be kept standing in the sun." "oh, we're all used to that," said rose. "i have three new freckles that i owe to mrs. washington and caro folsom. they called yesterday and kept me standing in the sun exactly three quarters of an hour before they made up their minds to come in and stay ten minutes." "i'd like to go--" mrs. cartright returned, shaking her head. "don roberto does not want to be left alone," she said. "i fortunately thought of a most wonderful remedy for colds, and i have also been telling him about a terrible cold general lee had once when he was staying with us. he did look so funny, dear great man, with his head tied up in one of old aunt sally's bandannas--" "please excuse me for interrupting you, dear mrs. cartright," said tiny, firmly; "but i think we had better get out and talk to don roberto, and go to the hills another day when 'léna can go with us. don't you think that would be best?" she murmured to the other girls. "we might help to amuse him a little." "it will be vastly to our credit," said rose, "for he certainly won't amuse us." "has anyone ever been amused here?" asked ila, looking at magdaléna, who was politely listening to mrs. cartright's anecdote. "fancy having the biggest house in the smartest county in california and making no more of it than if it were a cottage. the rest of the houses are so cut up; but fancy what dances we could have here." "i have been thinking over a plan," said tiny, "and that is to try to manage don roberto. 'léna can't, but i think the rest of us could, and mrs. yorba likes to give parties." "i am told that in early days there was an extra burst of lawlessness after each of her balls,--reaction," said rose. "i don't think that it is nice for us to be discussing people at their very doorstep," said tiny. "i just thought i'd mention my plan. and if it succeeded, and all took charge, as it were, there need be no stiffness in an informal party in the country. shall we get out?" "by all means, general tom thumb," said rose, with some ire; "it is very plain who is to be boss in this community, as mrs. washington would say." "wait till helena comes," whispered ila. xxiv don roberto rose as they approached. he did not take off his skull-cap, but he received them with the courtly grace of the caballero, one of his inheritances which he had not permanently discarded, although he practised what he was pleased to call his american manners in the sanctity of his home. he bowed low, kissed their finger-tips, and handed them in turn to the chairs which he first arranged in a semi-circle about his own. when he resumed his former half-reclining attitude he had the air of an invalid sultan holding audience. "we are _so_ sorry that you have _such_ a dreadful cold," said tiny, with her sweetest smile and emphasis; "and _so_ glad that we happened to drive up. you couldn't come for a drive with us, could you? we should _love_ to have you." don roberto rose to the bait at once. he was as susceptible to the blandishments of pretty women as jack belmont, although their influence over his purse was an independent matter. "very glad i am that i have the cold," he answered gallantly; "for it give me the company of three so beautiful ladies. i no can go for drive, for it blow, perhaps; but i no care, so long as you here with me sit." "well, we are going to stay a _long_ time; and we are _so_ glad we are back in menlo again,--so many of us together. we used to love so to come here; it seems _ages_ ago. and now that we have got 'léna again, you must expect us to fairly overrun the house." "it is yours," said don roberto, in the old vernacular. "burn it if you will." tiny, who had never heard even an anecdote of the early californians, gave a quick glance at the whiskey flask, but replied undauntedly,-- "how gallant you are, don roberto! the young men say such stupid things. but you _always_ were so original!" "poor old dear, i feel like wiping it off," whispered rose to ila. but it was evident that don roberto's vision was powdered with the golden dust of flattery. he smiled approvingly into tiny's pretty face. "but i say true, and the young mens do not sometimes. it make me young again to see you here." "one would think you were _old_," said tiny. "but do you _really_ like to see us here? should you mind if we came sometimes in the evening? it would be such _fun_ to meet at each other's houses and talk on the verandahs." "come all the evenings," said don roberto, promptly, "si you talk to me sometimes." "_i_ want to do that. ila plays, and rose sings _beau_tifully. some evening we will get up charades--to amuse you." "on saturday, sunday, tuesday, and thursday nights i am here." "those will be our evenings to come here." she gave a peremptory glance to rose, who responded hurriedly, "are you fond of music, don roberto? it will give me great pleasure to sing for you; and ila has been learning some of my accompaniments." don roberto did not answer for a moment. his memory had played him a trick: it had leaped back to the days of guitars and gratings. he rarely sought the society of gentlewomen, not, at least, of those whose names were on visiting lists. there was something unexpectedly sweet and fragrant in the company of these three beautiful girls. don roberto's memories were hanging in a dusty cupboard, and his heart had shrunken like the meat of a nut too long neglected; but there was life at the core, and the memories came forth, wanting only a breath to dust them. yes, he should like to have these girls about him. and magdaléna had lived the life of a hermit. it was time for her to enjoy her girlhood. "yes," he said, "alway i like the music. si the piano need tune, i send one man down. you can dance, too, si you like it. always i like see the young peoples dance." tiny clapped her hands. ila leaned forward and patted his hand. "what an inspiration!" she exclaimed. "this will be a simply gorgeous house to dance in. don roberto, you certainly are an angel!" don roberto had never been called an angel before, but he smiled approvingly. "some night this week we have the dance," he said. "my wife write you to-night." "i am on the verge of nervous prostration," whispered rose, as his attention was claimed by mrs. cartright. "the effort of keeping my countenance--but the way you handle a trowel, tiny, is a new chapter in diplomacy. butter and molasses for fifty and after; a vaporiser and _peau d'espagne_ for the sharp young things. i was just saying," she added hastily, as don roberto reclined suddenly and turned to her, "that young men are a nuisance. i am thinking of writing a book of advice--" "a book!" cried don roberto, his brows rushing together. "you no write the books?" "of course she would never publish," interposed tiny. "she would just write it for our amusement. i think it would be so horrid to publish the _cleverest_ book," she said, turning to magdaléna, unmistakable sincerity in her voice. "it has always seemed to me so--so--_horrid_ for women to write things to print--for _anybody_ to read." magdaléna did not answer her. she was staring at her father, breathless for his next words. "the ladies never write," announced that grandson of old spain. "nor the gentlemens. always the common peoples write the books." "oh, it's better now, really," said rose. "some people that write are said to be quite nice. of course, one doesn't meet them in society,--in san francisco society, at least,--but that may be the fault of society." "of course," said tiny. "i do not mean that people who write must be horrid. but i think i couldn't know a woman who made her name so public,--i mean if i hadn't been fond of her before; but i should really _hate_ to see a friend's name in print. you are not really thinking of writing a book, are you, rose, dear?" "i have not the slightest idea of writing a book--for the very good reason that i haven't brains enough. you needn't worry about any of us adding to the glory of california--unless, to be sure, 'léna should be clever enough." she spoke at random, and magdaléna's face did not betray her; but she almost hated the girl who was forcing her to another of her mental crises. "my daughter write!" shouted don roberto. "a yorba! she make a fool de my name like the play-actor that do the monkey tricks on the stage? si she do that--" "here comes mr. trennahan," said magdaléna, standing up. "mamma is not here. i must go to meet him." trennahan threw the reins to his groom and sprang out of the cart. "i could not wait till evening, you see," he said, as he came up the steps. "what is the matter? something has gone wrong with you." she shivered. "yes. something. i cannot tell you." "can we have our ride to-morrow?" "yes, i can ride with you. don't, d-don't--" "yes?" "don't talk to me when you get round there." "i won't; and i won't let them talk to you." something _has_ gone wrong, he thought. she looks like a condemned criminal. xxv the next morning when trennahan rode up, magdaléna was already on her horse, and they cantered off at once. "i must teach you to trot," he said. "this is very old-fashioned. you must not be behind your friends, who would scorn to canter." "very well. you can teach me." the next half-hour was given up to the lesson. magdaléna did not like the new method, but persevered heroically. a half-hour was all she could endure, and they cantered across the meadows to the back woods. magdaléna was as pale as a swarthy person can be. her eyes were heavy and shadowed. "you did not sleep last night," said trennahan, abruptly. "and something had happened yesterday before i came. what was it?" "i don't think i can tell you. i don't like to talk about things--about myself." "then let me tell you that no human being can go through life without help. with all your brain and your natural reticence, you are no exception to the rule. i am much older than you are. i know a great deal of the world. you know nothing of it. i can help you if you will let me." he was interested, and thought it probable that her trouble came from the depths of her nature. nevertheless, she was very young, and he prayed that her grief were not the sequence of a rejected manuscript. magdaléna flushed, then paled again. she remembered that she had wanted to speak out to him; but face to face with the prospect, the levelling of lifelong barriers appalled her. if she could only tell part and conceal the rest! but she was no artist in words. she drew a deep sigh and opened her lips, but closed them again. "it will be easier here in the woods," he said, as they rode into the deep shade. "the world always seems quite different to me in a wood." it did not in the least, but he knew that it did to her. "i should have to go back," she said finally. "i cannot begin with yesterday. and i talk so badly." "the longer the story, the more interested i shall be. and i like your direct simplicity. let us walk the horses." "when i was a child i was very religious,--a catholic. it was a very great deal to me. when i prayed to the virgin about my wants and troubles, i felt quite happy and hopeful. i lost it a year or two ago. i had read a great many scientific books; and my religion fell to pieces like--like--there was a beautiful old tree on the edge of the woods once. it looked as if it would stand a century longer. one day there was a terrible wind, and it fell down. its sap and roots were almost gone. i felt dreadfully--about the religion, i mean. i felt, somehow, as if my backbone had been taken out. i knew that one must have some sort of moral ideal. i thought a great deal, and finally i determined to make my conscience my religion. i made a resolution that i would never do, and try not even to think, what i believed to be wrong. when i was little, i followed helena into a great many of her naughty escapades,--though nothing so bad as the fire,--and i did not tell my parents, as a rule, because i could not see that it did any good. when my new england conscience, as helena calls it, got the best of me and i confessed about the fire, the consequences were so terrible that i made up my mind that i would do as i chose and say nothing about it. i kept to that until i lost my religion. then i was careful about every little thing. it was easy enough for a year. then--i don't think i can go on." "then you wrote a book and your conscience hurts you because you have not told your parents." magdaléna dropped her reins and stared at him. had a voice leapt down from heaven, she could not have been more dumfounded. "i never told you," she said helplessly. "can all the others know too?" "i am positive that no one suspects but myself. do go on." "you have guessed something, but not all. i have only begun a book; and i am so ignorant, and my mind is so slow, that i know it will be years before i shall be able to write a book that anybody would read. at first this dismayed me. now i do not care, so long as i succeed in the end; and it will be a pleasure to see myself improve. i have not thought it wrong not to tell my parents, so long as what i did could not affect them in any way. do you not think i was right in that?" "assuredly." "i believed that when i had done something excellent, if that time ever came, they would be proud of it. my mother was a school-teacher, you know; and i did not see why my father should care. he hates to hear women talk, but writing is different. at least i thought so. yesterday, just before you came, the subject came up. rose said she believed i could write a book, and papa was furious at the mere thought. i knew nothing about old-world prejudices, but it seems that a lady would be thought to have disgraced herself in spain if she wrote a book: and papa is as spanish as if he had never learned a word of english, although he would be ready to beat anyone that told him so. he did not have a chance to say much yesterday; but i saw what his ideas were and that nothing could change them. "i did not go to sleep at all last night. i sat up trying to think what i should do. of course i need not tell him what i had done; but should i give it up? that was the question. if i continued, i must tell him of my intention to be a writer. he would forbid it. if i refused to obey, which i do not think i have any right to do, he is quite capable of locking me up. but i cannot go on writing in secret. that would be a great wrong; it would be living a lie. i could not make myself believe that i only wrote for the pleasure of writing: i should know that i longed for the time when i should see my book on somebody's shelf. it seems to me that i cannot give it up. i have much less in my life than most girls. in spite of the hard work, i have felt almost happy while writing. and i am afraid that i have as much ambition as pride. but he is my father. my first duty is to him--i cannot make up my mind. i suppose there should be no struggle; but there is, and i feel as if it were killing me." trennahan had been the confidant of many women, had listened to many tragic confessions, had seen women in agonies of remorse; but nothing had ever touched him as did this bald statement, abrupt with repressed feeling, of a girl's solitary tragedy. had her hero been a lover instead of an art, he would have met her confidence with platitudes and a suppressed yawn; but her lonely attitude in the midst of millions and friends, her terrible slavery to an ideal, to a scourging conscience which was at war with all the secretiveness, self-indulgence, and haughty intolerance of restraint which she had inherited with her father's blood, interested him even more profoundly than it appealed to his sympathies. he determined not only to help her, but to watch her development. "you have honoured me with your confidence," he said. "don't doubt for a moment that i do not appreciate the magnitude of that honour. i know just how proud and reticent you are, how much it cost you to speak. i believe that i have enough wisdom to help you a little. go on with your work. if you have a talent, you get it, one way or another, from your parents, and it is as much entitled to your consideration as your health or your riches. the birthright of every mortal is happiness. some philosopher has said that happiness is the free exercise of the higher faculties of a man's nature. if that is your instinct, pursue it. of course we have no right to claim our happiness at the expense of others. but your father is safe for the present. no matter what your talent, you will not know enough, nor have had sufficient bare practice with your pen, to write even a short story of first-rate merit for ten years to come. you may count it a blessing that various causes are preventing you from rushing into print. at the end of that period your father will be ten years older. he will probably be much softened and will look at things differently; or he may be dead. or you may be--and most likely will be--married. you need only concern yourself with the present. it is possible that you have discovered your only chance of happiness. do not commit the incredible folly of strangling that chance before it is born. this is not my day for lecturing, but i am going to take your conscience in hand. it needs training. before you know it, you will be morbid. that means brain rot, and no chance of the commonest sort of enjoyment." "you are very good; no one has ever been so good. you ought to know far better than i what is right and what is wrong." "i am afraid i do. promise me this: that you will do nothing decisive until the end of the summer. take that time to think it over. there will be little time to write in any case. i shall monopolise a good deal of your time, and i fancy they intend to be rather gay here. six months from now we will talk it over again. will you agree to that?" "i must think it over. my mind is a slow one. but i think you are right." and several days later, when he was dining at the house, she told him briefly that she should take his advice and write no more until the summer was over. xxvi mrs. yorba, who did not like to have her plans made for her, decided to give the party on the evening of saturday week. the floor was to be canvased, and three musicians were engaged. she promised the girls that after this initial party they should dance informally at fair oaks as often as they wished. it was some time before magdaléna rode alone with trennahan again. the other girls rode every morning and claimed him. magdaléna joined these parties as soon as her habit was finished, and met him every afternoon at one or other of the new tennis courts, which consisted merely of chalked lines and a net,--ila had introduced tennis to menlo,--but either ila or caro possessed him with the tentacles of their kind. mrs. yorba had made it understood that her party was to be the first of the season, so the evenings alone were unoccupied. trennahan dined twice at fair oaks, but don roberto and mr. polk claimed him. magdaléna wondered if he had forgotten his original programme. but with four handsome girls demanding his attentions, a literary friendship was doubtless a dream of the future. she felt an unaccountable depression, and wondered if she were going to be ill. by the time the evening of the party arrived, the nervousness which had assailed her when the subject was broached had been tempered by time and constant association with many who would be present. tiny and the other girls had promised to make "things go." there were to be no ball gowns, and the whole affair was to be as informal as possible. she even harboured pleasurable anticipation. parties, she had read and heard, were brilliant exhilarating affairs, and she loved dancing as only a spanish woman can. in this, at least, she should excel her fellows. she had taken lessons once a week for the last two years from a solemn and automatic person who had rarely opened his lips except to complain of the heavy carpets in the cavernous yorba parlours. magdaléna dressed immediately after dinner; the guests were expected by nine. she wore her white organdie, but fastened crimson roses in her hair and belt. she was by no means satisfied with her appearance,--she was too ardent an admirer of beauty for that,--but she knew that she looked far better than she had on the night of her dinner. she shuddered at the memory of that white ribbon about her swarthy throat. she went downstairs, and thought the big rooms looked very inviting with their white floors; the folding-doors had been rolled back, and the parlour and dining-room made an immense sweep. the vases on the mantels were full of flowers. in the distance she heard the tuning of a fiddle. the night was hot, and all the windows were open. the dark grounds beyond looked full of mystery, and of infinite depth. she thought at the moment that there was nothing she loved more than the mystery of night in the country. as she stood in the middle of the brilliantly lighted room, the heavy darkness without outlined with trees and great shrubs, the broken spaces above, set with stars, allured her. almost unconsciously she stepped through one of the windows, crossed the verandah and drive, and entered the long narrow path between the lawns. here there was more sense of space, for the lawns were very large; but the trees were close along their edge and massed heavily at the end of the perspective. above was a long banner of night sky. the monotonous chanting of frogs was the only sound. certainly, california is a land of beauty and peace, she thought. mr. trennahan says he has never known anything like it, and he has been everywhere. everybody should be happy in it, and i suppose everyone is, mostly. poets like tennyson always make weather to suit moods and circumstances. if they are right, one should laugh and be happy for eight months in the year in california, and only sad when it rains. there does not seem much chance for tragedy, although i have heard that there are many murders and suicides; but perhaps that is because the towns are new and excitable. there is nothing in the country itself to make one unhappy, as there must be in other countries where nature has done so little, and they have so many centuries of tragic past behind them.... oh, dear, i am struggling toward something, as usual. what is it? she touched her fingers to her forehead, then drew them lightly back and forth, as if to clear the mist from her brain, the rust from the wheels.... i seem to have seeds in my mind. why don't they sprout? why are they for ever knocking at the hard earth over their heads? one would think they were in their graves instead of never having been born. she sighed and shook her head, but her thoughts ran on. am i happy? i think so. and all the girls seem happy. mr. trennahan says he watched the rest of the world rise into an inverted abyss of smoke when the train slid down the sierras, and that his memory has been asleep ever since. i have been unhappy here! she continued abruptly. and one night i suffered--suffered horribly--and this last week----she stopped short, looking at the beauty and peace about her with a feeling of sharp and swift resentment. she had a sense of being betrayed by the country of which she was, far more than her mates, a part. she was of its first blood, the daughter of its arcadia, the last living representative of all that it had been in the fulness of its power. and she knew california and felt it as no one else did. that sense of betrayal, of personal treachery, passed as swiftly as it had come, but seemed to murmur back that it would come again, and again; and that with each visit she would understand it better. i have read somewhere that artists must suffer before they can accomplish anything, she thought. well, i should not mind, i should not--at least, i think i should not. some time since she had come to the end of the path and turned to the right and into a long lane running between fields. she sat down on a stump; she had quite forgotten the party. her brain was full of struggling ideas. but in a few moments she surrendered herself to the spell of the night. there were no trees quite near her, nothing but level fields thick with grain. far to the left and curving a mile behind her was the black outline of the woods. far behind them were the towering mountains with their forests of redwoods; those on the crest sharp against the stars. california was a new country. it might have been newer, so vast was its silence, so primeval its peace. oh, i am sure i am happy, thought magdaléna, suddenly. yes, i am sure. but i wish i might never see anyone again. california is faultless; it is civilisation that has spoilt her. she was stumbling close upon great truths; but it was part of her inheritance that she had no perception of what she was groping for, and passed almost unheeding the little that came to her. "miss yorba, are you cultivating a reputation for eccentricity?" she sprang to her feet. trennahan was approaching her. he was in evening dress, without a hat. his expression was one of extreme amusement, and magdaléna felt the blood in her face. "have they come?" she asked in dismay. "they are dancing, or were about to begin as your mother sent me to look for you." "i had forgotten--" "i was sure you had. miss brannan insisted that you were hiding, but i had no doubt that you had wandered off in a reverie." he laughed. "happy you!" he said. "happy you!" "you think i am an idiot." "indeed i do not. i feel sorry to think that in a year from now such a thing will no longer be possible. but we must go back, or they will be sending someone to look for us." "is papa angry?" "i don't think he noticed. miss montgomery and miss brannan were using all their blandishments to make him think the party as interesting as themselves; and i am positive they were succeeding." when they reached the house, the quadrille which had opened the party was finishing. don roberto was making a sweeping bow to tiny, whose face wore an inscrutable expression. magdaléna was about to step through the window, but trennahan guided her to the door, and they entered the room without attracting attention. there were some forty people present. with the exception of the yorbas, everybody had house guests. mrs. yorba sat in a corner with a small group of elderly ladies. mr. polk stood before the fireplace in the parlour, his legs well apart, staring absently at the young people, who looked gay and content. "what am i to do?" asked magdaléna, helplessly. "nothing, just now, as there are no wall-flowers. in a moment one of these youths will ask you to dance, and of course you will consent. it is my misfortune that i no longer dance. i think your fate approaches." a young man with a rather bright face came toward her. his name was payne. she had met him at the montgomerys. "may i have the pleasure of the first waltz, miss yorba?" he asked. "i am told that it will be a unique pleasure,--that you can talk science and waltz in the same breath, as it were." he did not speak in sarcasm, merely in facetiousness. he was a type of the fresh young san franciscan whose ways are not as all ways. magdaléna looked at him in sombre anger and made no reply. he saw that he had made a mistake, and reddened, wondering why on earth she were in society at all, if she could not be like other girls. magdaléna did not appreciate his natural indignation; but she saw that he was miserable, and relented. "i will waltz with you if you wish," she said. mr. payne bowed stiffly and offered his arm. they walked the length of the two rooms in utter silence; then the musicians played the opening bars of a waltz. magdaléna remembered that this would be her first waltz with any man, barring the teacher who had solemnly piloted her up and down the parlours in town. she had hoped much from her first dance; and she was to have it with this silly overgrown boy. it was a minor disappointment, but sharp while it lasted. "shall we begin?" he asked formally. he was sulky, and eager to have it over. two or three of his friends had flashed him glances of ironical sympathy, and he was too young to bear ridicule with fortitude. ila was floating down the room with alan rush, a young south american, as graceful of foot and bearing as herself. magdaléna forgot her partner and gazed at them with genuine delight. she had read of the poetry of motion, and this illustration appealed to the passion for beauty which was strong in her nature. she turned to her partner. "do they not dance beautifully?" she exclaimed. that much-enduring youth replied that they did, and asked her again if she were ready. she laid her hand on his shoulder and they started. magdaléna realised at once that her partner was an excellent dancer, and that she was not. she felt that she was heavy, and marvelled at the lightness of ila and rose. they seemed barely to touch the floor, and were laughing and chatting as naturally as if they had no feet to guide. "could you take a little longer step?" asked mr. payne, politely. "i--i--beg pardon for suggesting it, but it's the fashion just now. that's right--a little longer. oh, i--i--am afraid that your feet are too small. shall we sit down a moment?" they sat down in the recess, and payne wiped his brow. "it is so warm," he muttered apologetically. "mr. rush does not look warm," she said cruelly. he repressed the obvious reply, but made no other. in a moment he asked her if she cared to finish the waltz. "no," she said. "i do not. you may go and finish it with someone else, if you like." he moved off with alacrity, and magdaléna sat alone for some moments feeling very miserable. what was the matter with her? could she do nothing well? and she should be a wall-flower for the rest of the evening, of course. that wretched man would tell everybody how badly she danced. but she had forgotten that she was hostess. a moment after the waltz ended, three young men came over to her and begged for the honour of her hand. they were rollins, the sharp-faced fort, and alan rush. she gave the dance to follow to rush, and the others, having inscribed her name on their cuffs, moved off. rush sat down beside her. he had a frank kind face, and the beauty of his figure and the grace of his carriage had given him a reputation for good looks which had reached even magdaléna's ears. he was at that time the most popular young man in san francisco society. magdaléna decided that she liked him better than anyone she had met except trennahan. his voice was rich and southern, although he had no spanish blood in him. "i watched you dance," said magdaléna, abruptly. "i don't dance well enough for you." "dancing is all a matter of habit," he said kindly. "this is my third year. you have no idea how awkward i was when i began. i am sure you will be the best dancer in society next winter--with all those spanish grandmothers." "do you think so?" she liked him almost as well as trennahan for the moment. he did not, for he had noted that she was lacking in natural grace; but he was chivalrous, and he saw that she was discouraged. "there's the music," he said. "suppose we go out in the hall by ourselves, and i will give you a little lesson. no?" magdaléna was delighted, but she merely stood up in her unbending dignity and said that she was glad to take advantage of his kindness. he was a man who danced so well that he compelled some measure of facility in his partner. magdaléna felt inspired at once, and carefully obeyed every instruction. "we will have a great many other lessons, no?" he said as the music finished. "by the time that famous coming-out party of yours comes off, you will be in great form." "will you open it with me?" "i shall be delighted, and to help you all i can." they were walking down the hall, and he was bending over her with an air of devotion which she thought very pleasant. his accomplished eyes appealed to the instinct of coquetry, buried deep in the seriousness of her nature, and she smiled upon him and found herself talking with some ease. she danced with all the young men, but they bored her as much as she felt that she bored them. all the girls danced with her father, and he seemed amiable and pleased, especially when tiny was smiling upon him. ila, despite her elegance and refinement, suggested the ladies of his leisure, rose had too sharp a tongue, and caro had an exaggerated innocence of manner and eye which experience had led him to distrust. but tiny, beautiful, cool, and remote, reminded him of the women of his youth, when he was a man of enthusiasms, ideals, and dreams. mr. polk spent the evening wandering about alone or staring from the hearth-rug. one or two of the girls asked him to dance, but he refused brusquely. it was the first dance he had attended since the one given by thomas larkin to celebrate the occupation of california by the united states. the party broke up a little after twelve, and all assured magdaléna that the party had been a success with such emphasis that she was convinced that it had been; but when she was in bed and the light out, she cried bitterly. xxvii there were no engagements for the following morning, and magdaléna was sitting idly on the verandah when she saw trennahan sauntering up the drive. the blood flew through her veins, lifting the weight from her brain. but she repressed the quick smile, and sat still and erect until he reached the carriage block, when she went to the head of the steps to meet him. "put on your hat," he said, "and let us hide in the woods before somebody comes to take us for a drive or to invite us to luncheon. i haven't forgotten our private plans, if you have." "i had not forgotten, but tiny and ila manage everything. i don't like to refuse when they are so kind." "you must develop a faculty--or no, leave it to me. i shall gradually but firmly insist upon having a day or two a week to myself; and miss geary informs me that such unprecedented energy can never last in this vale of sleep; that before a month is over we shall all have settled down to a chronic state of somnolence from which we shall awaken from saturday till monday only. then, indeed, will menlo be the ideal spot of which i dreamed while you left me to myself on that long day of my visit." her hat was in the hall. she put it on hastily back foremost, and they walked toward the woods. suddenly she turned into a side path. "let us walk through the orchard," she said. "then we shall not meet anyone." the cherries were gone; but the yellow apricots, the golden pears, the red peaches and nectarines, the purple plums, hung heavy among the abundant green, or rotted on the ground. several poor children were stealing frankly, filling sacks almost as large as themselves. don roberto had never so far unbent as to give the village people permission to remove the superfluity of his orchard, but he winked at their depredations, as they saved him the expense of having it carted away; his economical graft had never been able to overcome his haughty aversion to selling the produce of his private estate. magdaléna often came to the orchard to talk to these children: the poor fascinated her, and she liked to feel that she was helping them with words and dimes; but they were not as the poor of whom she had read, nor yet of the fire. they were tow-headed and soiled of face, but they wore stout boots and well-made calico frocks, and they were not without dimes of their own. "does california seem a little unreal to you?" she asked. "i mean, there are no great contrasts. the poverty of london must be frightful." "you ungrateful person, for heaven's sake reap the advantage of your birthright and forget the countries that are not california." they passed out of the back gate and entered the middle woods. magdaléna without hesitation led the way to the retreat hitherto sacred to art. trennahan need not have apprehended that she would inflict him with her manuscript, nor with hopes and fears: she was much too shy to mention the subject unless he drew her deliberately; but she liked the idea of associating him with this leafy and sacred temple. he threw himself on his back at once, clasping his hands under his head and gazing up into the rustling storeys above. about his head was a low persistent hum, a vibration of a sound of many parts. above were only the intense silences of a hot california morning. trennahan forgot magdaléna for the moment. he felt young again and very content. his restless temperament, fed with the infinite varieties of europe, had seldom given way to the pleasures of indolence. even satiety had not meant rest. but california--as distinct from san francisco--with her traditions of luxurious idleness, the low languid murmur of her woods, her soft voluptuous air, her remoteness from the shrieking nerve centres of the united states, the sublime indifference of her people to the racing hours, drew so many quiet fingers across his tired brain, half obliterating deep and ugly impressions, giving him back something of the sense of youth and future. perhaps he dimly appreciated that california is a hell for the ambitious; he knew that it was the antechamber of a possible heaven to the man who had lived his life. he turned suddenly and regarded magdaléna, wondering how much she had to do with his regeneration, if regeneration it were, and concluded that she was merely a part of california the whole. but she was a part as was no other woman he had met. she had clasped her hands about her knees and was staring straight before her. trennahan, in a rare flash of insight, saw the soul of the girl, its potentialities, its beauty, struggling through the deep mists of reserve. "i could love her," he thought; "and more, and differently, than i have loved any other woman." he determined in that moment to marry her. as soon as he had made his decision, he had a sense of buoyancy, almost of happiness, but no rejuvenation could destroy his epicureanism; he determined that the slow awakening of her nature, of revealing her to herself, should be a part of the happiness he promised himself. he was proud that he could love the soul of a woman, that he had found his way to that soul through an unbeautiful envelope, that so far there was not a flutter of sense. he was to love in a new way, which should, by exquisite stages, blend with the old. there could be no surprises, no enigmatic delights, but vicariously he could be young again. then he wondered if he were a vampire feeding on the youth of another. for a moment he faced his soul in horrified wonder, then reasoned that he was little past his meridian in years; that a man's will, if favoured by circumstance, can do much of razing and rebuilding with the inner life. no, he concluded with healthy disgust, he was not that most sickening tribute to lechery, an old vein yawning for transfusion. he was merely a man ready to begin life again before it was too late. this girl had not the beauty he had demanded as his prerogative in woman, but she had individuality, brains, and all womanliness. her shyness and pride were her greatest charms to him: he would be the first and the last to get behind the barriers. such women loved only once. she turned her head suddenly and met his eyes. "what are you thinking about?" she asked. "i have been wondering what that huge pile is behind you." "that is a wood-rat's nest." "and you are not afraid of him? extraordinary woman!" "he is much more afraid of me. i am very afraid of house-rats." "and you sit here often? you are not afraid of snakes?" "there are none in these woods. they always retreat before people--civilisation. everyone drives through here, but scarcely anyone goes through the back woods; the roads are so bad--" "hush!" the sound of wheels, faint for a moment, grew more distinct; with it mingled the sound of voices. a heavy char-à-banc rolled by, and the words of tiny and ila came distinctly to the two in hiding. "they will have a long and fruitless search," said trennahan, contentedly. "we are going to stay here and become acquainted." and they did not move for two hours. for a time trennahan made her talk, learning almost all there was to know. he even drew forth the tattered shreds of the caballero, who had been little more than a matter of garments, and a confession of her long and passionate desire to be beautiful. the story ended with the lonely and terrible surrender of her religion. he was profoundly interested. once or twice he was appalled. did he take this woman, he must assume responsibility for every part of her. she was so wholly without egoism that she would give herself up without reservation and expect him to guide her. that would be all very well with the ordinary woman; but with a nature of high ideals, and possibly of transcendent passions,--was he equal to the task? but in his present mood the prospect fascinated him. one of her slim hands, dark but pretty, lay near his own. he wanted to take it in his, but did not: he wished to keep her unself-conscious as long as possible. he tried to talk to her about himself, but found it hard to avoid the claptrap with which a man of the world attempts to awaken interest in woman. he had always done it artistically: the weariness, the satiety, the mental grasp of nothingness,--these had been ever revealed in flashing glimpses, in unwilling allusiveness; the hope that he had finally stumbled upon the one woman sketched with a brush dipped in mist. but feeling himself sincere for the first time in incalculable years, he dismissed the tempered weapons of his victories with contempt, and, not knowing what others to substitute, talked of his boyhood and college days. as a result, he felt younger than ever, and closer to the girl who was part of the mystery that had taken him to her heart. xxviii a woman's heart may be said to resemble a subterranean cavern to which communication is had by means of a trap-door. how the lover enters this guarded precinct depends upon the lover and the woman. sometimes the trap-door is jerked open, and he is hurled down with no by your leave, gobbled up, willing or unwilling. sometimes there is a desperate fight just over the trap-door, in which he does sometimes, but not always, come off victor. at other times he suddenly finds himself rambling through those labyrinthine passages, to his surprise and that of the woman, who, however, perceives him instantly. there is no such fallacy as that a girl turns in terror or in any other sentiment from the knowledge of this dweller below the trap-door. a woman of experience may, after that first glimpse: she may, in fact, bolt the trap-door yet more tightly and sit herself upon it. but a girl uses it as a frame for her face and watches every movement of the occupant with neither fear nor foreboding until occasion comes,--hanging the halls with the tapestry of dreams, fitting the end of each rose-hued scented gallery with the magic mirror of the future. magdaléna, at the end of that morning in the woods, was quite aware that she was in love. she wondered why she had not thought of it before, and concluded that in the prelude she had been merely fascinated by the first enthralling man she had known. the trap-door of her heart was not jealously guarded; nevertheless, it was not yawning for an occupant. just how and when trennahan slipped in, she could not have told, but there he certainly was, and there he would stay so long as life was in her. he went home with her to luncheon, and she longed to have him go, that she might be alone with the thought of him. he left early in the afternoon, and she locked herself in her room and sat for hours staring into the tree-tops swimming in their blue haze. she was not in the least terrified at the beginnings of tumult within her; she rather welcomed them as the birthright of her sex. in this first stage, she hardly cared whether trennahan were in love with her or not, having none of the instinct of the huntress and her imagination being a slow one. it was enough that she should see him for many hours alone during this dreamy exquisite summer, that she should look constantly into the cold eyes that had their own power to thrill. that he was not the orthodox lover in appearance, manner, nor age pleased her the better. she was not like other girls, therefore it was fitting that she should find her mate among the odd ones of earth. that there might be others like him in the great world whence he came, that he might have loved and been loved by women of the world, never occurred to her. she was content, having found her other part, and wove no histories of the past nor future. but as the weeks went on and their intimacy grew, she accepted the fact that he loved her before the disposition to speculate had arrived in the wake of love. during the hours that they spent rambling through the woods, or in whatever fashion pleased their mood, although he did not startle her by definite word or act, he managed to convey that their future was assured, that she was his, and that in his own time he should claim her. by the time this dawn broke, her imagination was beating at its flood-gates, and shortly broke loose. thereafter when she was not with trennahan in the present, she was his in a future built on the foundations of all she had read and all that instinct taught her. she had no wish that the present should change; it was enough that it suggested the inevitable future. she was happy, and she knew that trennahan was happy. meanwhile they escaped the others and rode together before breakfast, read together after, explored every corner of the woods, and talked of many of the things under heaven. magdaléna, except for an occasional flutter of eyelid or leap of colour, confessed nothing: her pride was a supple armour that she laced tightly above her heart; but trennahan's very self lifted the trap-door and looked to him through her eyes, and he had no misgivings. sometimes he awakened suddenly in the night and gave a quick, short laugh: he was so new to himself. but he knew that he had found something very like true happiness, and he was loving her very deeply. at first he had been pricked by the apprehension that it could not last; that nature had constructed him to move upon the lower planes; that a prolonged tour on the heights would result in disastrous and possibly hideous reaction: his time-worn habits of loving had been of woof and make so different. but as time passed and the light in his spirit spread until it dazzled his eyes and consumed his memories, as the sense of regeneration grew stronger, as the future beckoned alluringly, as he forgot to remember whether magdaléna were plain or beautiful, as peace and content and happiness possessed him,--he ceased to question his immutability. he had lived in the world for forty years, and it was like an old bottle of scent long uncorked. the ideals of his youth had not changed; they had gone. beautiful women had turned to gall on his tongue, shrunken to their skeletons in his weary eyes. fate had steered his bark in the open sea of bachelorhood until he was old enough and wise enough to choose his mate with his soul and his brain, and fate had steered him to magdaléna. he was profoundly thankful. their intimacy attracted little attention in menlo park, for the reason that it was confined within the wooded limits of fair oaks. when they rode and drove with the others and attended dinners and dances, they kept apart. as rose had predicted, gaieties were sporadic, although the young people met somewhere, usually at the yorbas', every saturday evening; what others did during the long hot days when there was no company to entertain, concerned no one. occasionally one of don roberto's huge farm waggons, as deep as a tall man's height, was filled with hay, and young menlo park jolted slowly to the hills. they ate their luncheon by cool streams dark with meeting willows, and poked at the tadpoles, gathered wild roses, killed, perhaps, a snake or two. then, toward evening, they jolted home again, hot, dusty, and weary, but supremely content in having lived up to the traditions of menlo park. tiny alone came out triumphant on these trying occasions. dressed in cool white, she seated her diminutive self in the very middle of the haystack and talked little. the others, undaunted by the sun, started in high spirits, flirted with energy, and changed their positions many times. upon the return journey, tiny, again, sat serene and white; the rest dangled over the sides as a last relief for aching limbs and backs, and forgot the very alphabet of flirtation. it is true that magdaléna did not flirt; but she worked hard to keep her guests pleased and comfortable, and usually went to bed with a headache. xxix it was tiny who discovered that it was leap year, and invited menlo to dance at her house one saturday night and take all advantage of its privileges. mrs. yorba consented that magdaléna should have a new frock, the organdie being in a condition for a maid to sniff at. magdaléna asserted herself, and ordered a scarlet tarlatan. the frock was smartly made at a good house, and magdaléna, on the night of the party, was almost pleased with herself. the vivid colour slanted under her swarthy skin. she wore red slippers and red roses in her hair. by this time she knew something of dress,--it was october,--and she had also discovered that red was trennahan's favourite colour. she was happy, but a little nervous. there had been more than one sign of late that the pretty comedy of friendship had run its course. the very words they uttered had lost their clear-cut black and white, seemed to grow more full-blooded. his eyes had made her lose her breath more than once, had even sharpened her wits to hasty subterfuge. the montgomery parlour was a narrow room at right angles with the dining-room. the two rooms had been thrown into one and canvased. tiny invited don roberto to open the dance with her, and that platonically enamoured gentleman consented with a grand flourish. ila exercised her blandishments upon mr. polk, but to no purpose. no one could understand his constant attendance at these dances, for he merely stood about with unrelaxing visage, scarcely exchanging a word with even the older men. he wore the suit of evening clothes which had done duty at men's dinners these fifteen years, and had bought a pair of evening shoes and a white necktie. eugene fort remarked that he looked like a man whose vital organs had turned to gold and were giving him trouble. mr. washington replied that the tight skin which had done such good service was certainly beginning to bag, and that if he didn't knock off and take a vacation in europe he'd find himself breaking. "to my knowledge," he added, "he hasn't taken a vacation in thirty years; hasn't even been to yosemite or the big trees. he has always said that work was his tonic; but the truth was that he feared to come home and find a dollar unaccounted for,--neither more nor less. and there comes a time, my dear young man, there comes a time--" "it comes early in this state." "it does," mr. washington replied, with a sigh and a glance at his young wife. "but the fevers have raged themselves out here, or i am much mistaken. we're in for quiet times. the next generation will live longer, perhaps." "how old is polk?" "nearly sixty. he's worn better than many, because he's let whiskey alone; never took a drop more than was good for him when con. virginia was tumbling from seven hundred to nothing. neither did yorba, who is several years older; but he's got the longevity of his race. jack belmont is under fifty, and looks older than either,--when you get him in a good light. california is all right, and whiskey is all right, but the two together play the devil and no mistake." "it is the last place where i should want whiskey," said trennahan, who had joined them. "you weren't here half a dozen years ago. while the virginia city mines were booming, your backbone felt like a streak of lightning; you hadn't a comma in your very thoughts; you woke up every morning in a cold sweat, and your teeth chattered as you opened your newspaper. you believed every man a liar and dreamt that your veins ran liquid gold. the stock exchange was hell let loose. men went insane. men committed suicide. no one stopped to remark. do you wonder that men watered the roots of their nerves with alcohol? i did not, but the fever of that time burnt me out, all the same. i've never been the same man since. nor has any other san franciscan. even polk and yorba, although they sold out at the right moment in nine cases out of ten, felt the strain. as for jack belmont, he was on one glorious drunk all the time,--and never more of a gentleman. how he pulled through and doubled his pile to boot, the lord only knows; but he did." "miss belmont will be a great prize," observed fort, thoughtfully. "the greatest beauty in the state, if she has fulfilled her promise; any amount of go, and one or two cold millions,--the californian heiress sublimated." "and mistress of herself and her millions in a few years. i hear that belmont has not drunk a drop since he has been in europe with her; he's been gone a year now. that is fatal at his age,--after having been in pickle some thirty years. poor jack,--the best fellow that ever lived! i suppose his love for the girl brought him up with a round turn. doubtless he suddenly realised that she was old enough to understand, and that he must pull himself up if he would keep her respect. there's a good deal of tragedy in california, mr. trennahan, and it's not of the sentimental young folks' sort, neither." "i won't admit it," said trennahan, who was looking at magdaléna. "its very air breathes content--now, at any rate. i am glad i did not come earlier." "california is the princess royal of her country," said fort; "and at her birth all the good fairies came and gave her of every gift in the stores of the immortals. then a wicked fairy came and turned the skeleton in her beautiful body to gold; and, lo! the princess who had been fashioned to bless mankind carried, hidden from sight by her innocent and beneficent charms, a terrible curse. men came to kiss, and stayed to tear away her flesh with their teeth. when her skeleton has been torn forth, even to the uttermost rib, then the spell of the wicked fairy will be broken, and california be the most gracious mother mankind has ever known." "eugene, you like to hear yourself talk, but it must be admitted that you talk well. will you come out and have a cigar? and you, mr. trennahan?" there was no doubt that the party was a success. between dances the girls stood together in groups and superciliously regarded the ranks of humble wall-flowers. suddenly a half-dozen would dash down upon a young man, beg him simultaneously for an eighth of a waltz, and scribble hieroglyphics on their fans. alan rush was the belle, and no girl was allowed to have more than a fourth of him at a time. once the girls left the room in a body, returning, with mumbled excuses, after the music for the next dance had been playing some three minutes. sometimes a girl would approach a segregated youth, ask him patronisingly if he was enjoying himself, talk to him until the music began, then sidle off with an inaudible remark. altogether if the young men had sinned during the summer,--and they searched their consciences in vain,--they were punished. the new woman had not arrived in the eighties, but the instinct was there, inherited from remotest mother. the party was a third over when trennahan approached magdaléna for the first time. she had taken her partner to his chaperon, mrs. geary, and was regarding a group of expectant youths. the spirit of the thing had possessed her and she was enjoying herself. her shyness had worn off to some extent; she danced rather well, and had learned to make small talk. being happy, all things seemed easy of accomplishment. she became aware that trennahan was standing beside her, but did not turn her eyes. "will you sit out a dance with me--or rather walk it out in the garden? you must be a little tired, and it is delightful out there." "i'd rather--i think papa would not like it." "i am positive that he would not mind." "i am engaged." "let me see your fan." she delivered it reluctantly. "you have no one down for the next--nor the next." "i--i--think i'd rather not go." "do you mean that? for if you do, i shall go home. i came for nothing else. i have not seen you alone for three days." "i am sorry." "come." her jumping fingers closed about her fan, and the sticks creaked; but she followed him. as they descended the steps he drew her hand through his arm. the garden looked very wild and dark. the stars were burning overhead. slanting into the heavy perfume of flowers were the pungent odours of a forest fire. "you look like a pomegranate flower." "do you like my frock?" "you know that i do." "should you like to smoke?" "i should not." "it is a beautiful night." "very." "i had a letter from helena to-day." "did you?" "she described a wonderful experience she had climbing the alps. shall i tell you about it?" "good god, no! i beg pardon, but the american girl in europe is interesting to no one but herself." "she is interesting to me." "because you love her. her letters really bore you, only you won't admit it even to yourself." "but helena is really more brilliant than most people." "possibly; but i did not come out here to talk about helena." magdaléna's fan was hanging at the end of a chain. she clutched at it, missed it, and pressed her hand against her heart, which was hammering. he saw the motion, and took her hand in his. she glanced about wildly. she was in a whirl of terror of everything under heaven. too dignified to wrest herself away and run, she gave him a swift glance of appeal, then bent her head. he dropped her hand. "i would not frighten nor bother you for the world, but you know what i have wanted to say for days past. that, at least, can be no shock: you have known for a long while." "i'd rather you didn't say it," she gasped. "i intend to say it, nevertheless, and you will soon get used to it. will you marry me?" "oh--i--suppose so--that is, if you want me to. let us go back to the house." "i have no intention of going back to the house for fully half an hour. do you love me?" she hated him at the moment. "answer me." "i--i--thought i did--i don't know." "well, we will drop the subject for a moment. there are some other things i want to talk to you about. shall we walk on?" she drew a long breath at the respite. he resumed in a moment. "of course i am double your age, but i do not think we shall be any less happy on that account. my life, i am going to tell you, has not been an ideal one. after the wildness of youth came the deliberate transgressions of maturity, then the more flagrant, because purposeless sins which followed satiety. i know nothing of the middle classes of the united states,--i have lived little in this country,--but the young men of the upper class are not educated to add to the glory of the american race: they are educated to spend their fathers' millions. it is true that in spite of a rather wild career at college i left it with a half-defined idea of being a scientific explorer, and had taken a special course to that end. but my ambitions crumbled somewhere between the campus and new york. i am not seeking to exculpate myself, to throw the responsibility on my adolescent country: i had something more than the average intelligence, and i pursued my subsequent life deliberately. not pursuing an ideal, i had no care to reserve the best that was in me for the woman who should one day be my wife. i entered diplomacy because i liked the life, and because i believed that the day would come when women would mean little more than paper dolls to me, and power would mean everything. i did not reckon on wearying to desperation of the world in general. that time came; with it a desire to live an outdoor existence for the rest of my life. that at least never palled. i determined to come to california. it was an impulse; i hardly speculated upon whether i should remain or not. as the train slid down the sierras, i knew that i should. memories jumbled, and i made no effort to pull them apart. for the first time in my life i wanted a home and a wife. the night we met i felt more attracted to you than to the other charming californians i had met because you seemed more a part of the country. it is singular that a man should love the country first, and the woman as a logical result, but i did. i think that you know i love you; but not how much, nor what it means to me. i am not good enough for you. my soul is old. i see life exactly as it is. i have not an illusion. i am as prosaic as are all men who have made a business of the pleasures of life. i could not make you a perfervid or romantic speech to save my life, and as the selfishness of a lifetime has made me moody and fitful, there will be intervals when i shall be the reverse of lover-like; but on the whole i think you will find me a rather ardent lover. it seems very little to offer a girl who has everything to give. but i love you; never doubt that. what little good was left in me you have coaxed up and trained to something like its original proportions. i want you to understand what my past has been; but i also want you to understand that i am not the same man i was six months ago, and that you have worked the change. when i crossed the continent, it is no exaggeration to say that i had hell in me,--that ferment of spirit which means mental nausea and the desperate dodging of one's accusing soul. i suppose such a time comes to most men who have persistently violated the original instinct for good. with the lower orders it means crime; with the higher civilisation a legion of imps shrieking in a man's soul. i will not say that my particular band have been silent since i came here, for that would mean moral obtuseness; but they are placated, and have consented to fix a generous eye on the future. i believe, firmly believe, that my future will atone for my past,--morally, i mean; i want you to understand that i have wronged no man but myself, that i have been guilty of no act unbecoming a gentleman. now look at me and tell me that you do not hate me." magdaléna lifted her face. her lips were dry and parted, her eyes expanded, but not with horror. "i love you," she said; "i am glad that i can help you." they were near a huge oak whose limbs shut out the stars. trennahan drew her into its shadows and took her in his arms and kissed her many times. he lifted her arms about him, and she clasped her hands tightly. he might be business-like, without illusions, but he knew how to make love with energy and grace. magdaléna from brain to sole was on fire with adoration of him. the words of it surged toward speech, but reserve held her even then. she only clung to him and breathed the passion which his touch had startled. his own pulses were full, and he held her close, glad that the spiritual desires had caught and embraced the human, and that their chances for happiness were all that he could wish and a good deal more than he deserved. xxx "look!" whispered magdaléna. they had reached the steps of the verandah, and were about to mount when she laid her hand on his arm. mr. polk stood by one of the windows. his head was thrust forward. he was staring into the room with hungry eyes and twitching jaw. the light was full on his white face. in the room tiny was standing on a chair fanning alan rush. fort was commanding ila to pick up his handkerchief. the others were laughing and applauding. lee and coralie in their obscure corner were wide-eyed with excitement, and happy. mr. polk's chest heaved spasmodically. he screwed up his eyes. his face grinned. he looked like a man on the rack. he opened his eyes and glared about; but he saw nothing, for they were blind with tears. he turned and fled. magdaléna clung to trennahan, shaking. "take me home," she said. "i cannot stand any more to-night." book ii i helena was back. magdaléna sat amidst iridescent billows of ballgowns, dinner-gowns, tea-gowns, négligés, demi-toilettes, calling-frocks, street-frocks, yachting-frocks, summer-frocks. she had never seen so many clothes outside of a dry-goods shop, and marvelled that any one woman should want so many. they were on the bed, the chairs, the tables, the divan. two mammoth trunks were but half unpacked. others, empty, made the hall impassable. "i love dress," said helena, superfluously. "and women forgive your beauty and brains so much more willingly if you divert their attention by the one thing their soul can admire without bitterness." "you have not grown cynical, helena?" asked magdaléna, anxiously. "a little. it's a phase of extreme youth which must run its course with the down on the peach. i fought against it because i want to be original, but you might as well fight against a desire to sing at the top of your voice when you are happy. but, you darling! i'm so glad to see you again." she flung herself on her knees beside magdaléna and demanded to be kissed. magdaléna, who could hardly realise that she was back, and whose loves were as fixed as the roots of the redwoods, gave her a great hug. "tell me, 'léna, am i improved? am i beautiful? am i a great beauty?" "you are the most beautiful person i have ever seen. of course i have not seen the great beauties of europe--" "they are not a patch to ours. when i was presented, there were eight professionals standing round, and i walked away from the lot of them. am i more beautiful than tiny, or ila, or caro, or mrs. washington?" "oh, yes! yes!" "how? they are really very beautiful." "i know; but you are--you know i never could express myself." "i am helena belmont," replied that young woman, serenely. "besides, i've got the will to be beautiful as well as the outside. tiny hasn't. i have real audacity, and ila only a make-believe. caro shows her cards every time she rolls her eyes, and mrs. washington never had a particle of dash. i'm going to be the belle. i'm going to turn the head of every man in san francisco." "i'm afraid you will, helena." "afraid? you know you want me to. it wouldn't be half such fun if you weren't approving and applauding." "i don't want you to hurt anybody." "hurt?" helena opened her dark-blue pellucid eyes. "the idea of bothering about a trifle like that. men expect to get a scratch or two for the privilege of knowing us. it will be something for a man to remember for the rest of his life that i've 'hurt' him." "i am afraid you're a spoilt beauty already, helena." "i've got the world at my feet. that's a lovely sensation. you can't think--it's a wonderful sensation." "i can imagine it." magdaléna spoke without bitterness. helena realised all her old ambitions but one, but she was too happy for envy. "describe mr. trennahan all over again." "i am such a bad hand at describing." "well, never mind. fancy your being engaged! tell me everything. how did you feel the first moment you met him? when did you find yourself going? it must be such a jolly sensation to be in love--for a week or so. now! tell me all." "i'd rather not, helena. i love you better than anyone besides, but i am not the kind that can talk--" "well, perhaps i couldn't talk about it, myself, but i think i could. i can't imagine not talking about anything. but of course you are the same old 'léna. will you let me read his letters?" "oh, no! no!" "i'll show you every letter i get. i never could be so stingy." "i could not do that. i should feel as if i had lost something." "you were always so romantic. there never was any romance about me. poor mr. trennahan will have something to do to live up to you. an altitude of eleven thousand feet is trying to most masculine constitutions. but i suppose he likes the variety of it, after twenty years of society girls. well, let him rest." a door shut heavily in the hall below. helena sprang to her feet. "there's papa. i must go down. i never leave him a minute alone if i can help it. that's my only crumpled rose-leaf,--he is so pale and seems so depressed at times. you know how jolly and dashing he used to be. he hasn't a thing to worry him, and i can't think what is the matter. i beg him to tell me, but he says a man at his age can't expect to be well all the time. i can always amuse him, and i like to be with him all i can. he's such a darling! he'd build me a house of gold if i asked for it." ii when magdaléna returned home she spread her new garments on the bed and regarded them with much satisfaction. helena had expended no less thought on these than on her own, and none whatever on the meagreness of don roberto's check. there was a brown tweed with a dash of scarlet, a calling-frock of fawn-coloured camel's hair and silk, a dinner-gown of pale blue with bunches of scarlet poppies, and a miraculous coming-out gown of ivory gauze, the deepest shade that could be called white. and besides two charming hats there was a large box of presents: fans, silk stockings, gloves, handkerchiefs, and soft indescribable things for the house toilette. and her trousseau was also to come from paris! don roberto, in his delight at having secured trennahan, had informed his daughter that she should have a trousseau fit for a princess; or, on second thoughts, for a yorba. magdaléna opened a drawer and took out another of helena's presents,--a jewelled dagger. while colonel belmont and his daughter were in madrid there was a sale of a spendthrift noble's treasures. they had gone to see the famous collection, and among other things the dagger was shown them. "it belonged to a lady of the great house of yorba," they were told. "she always wore it in her hair, and all men worshipped her. the old women said it was the dagger that made men love her, that it was bewitched; there were other women as beautiful. but men died for this one and no other. one day she lost the dagger, and after that men loved her no longer. they ran and threw themselves at the feet of the women that had hated her. she laughed in scorn and said that she wanted no such love, and that when one returned--he had gone as ambassador to the court of france--he would show the world that his love did not skulk in the hilt of a dagger. people marvelled at this because she had flouted her very skirts in his face, had not thrown him so much as the humblest flower of hope. when they heard he was coming, they held their breath to see if the magnet had been in the dagger for him too. he arrived in the night, and in the morning she was found in her bed with the dagger to the hilt in her heart. they accused him, and he would not say yes or no, but they could prove nothing and let him go. and when he died the dagger was found among his possessions. no one could ever say how he got it. but it has remained in his family until to-day--and now it goes where?" "to a yorba!" announced helena to magdaléna, as she repeated this yarn. "i made up my mind to that, double quick! it may or may not be true, and she may or may not have been your ancestress; but it would make a jolly present all the same, so i ordered papa to buy it if all madrid bid against him. of course he did what i told him, and i want you to wear it the night of the party." magdaléna regarded it with great awe. she was by no means without superstition. would it bring men to her feet? not that she wanted them now, but she would like one evening of intoxicating success, just for the sake of her old ambitions: they had been little less than entities at one time; for old friendship's sake she would like to give them their due. she did wish that she felt a thrill as she touched it,--a vibration of the attenuated thread which connected one of her soul's particles with that other soul which, perhaps, had contributed its quota to her making. but she felt nothing, and replaced the dagger with some chagrin. she put away the clothes and sat down before the fire to think of trennahan. he had gone east at the summons of his mother, who had invested a large sum of money unwisely,--a habit she had. he might be detained some weeks. magdaléna, on the whole, was glad to have him gone for a while. she wanted to think about him undisturbed, and she wanted to get used to helena and her exactions while his demands were abstract: she loved so hard that she must rub the edge off her delight in having helena again, or the two would tear her in twain. she found the sadness of missing him very pleasurable,--feeling sure of his return; also the painful thrill every morning when the postman knocked. and to sit in retrospect of the summer was delicious. there may have been flaws in its present; there were none in its past. her ambition to write was dormant. a woman's brain in love is like a garden planted with one flower. there may be room for a weed or two, but for none other of the floral kingdom. trennahan had given her more than one glimpse of his past, and it had appalled without horrifying or repulsing her. her sympathy had been swift and unerring. she realised that trennahan had come to california at a critical point in his moral life, and that his complete regeneration depended on his future happiness. he had pointed this out as a weakness, but the fact was all that concerned her. whatever mists there might be between her perceptions and the great abstractions of life, love had sharpened all that love demanded and pointed them straight at all in trennahan that he wished her to know. she was awed by the tremendous responsibility, but confident that she was equal to it; for did she not love him wholly, and had he not chosen her, by the light of his great experience, out of all women? she would walk barefooted on arctic snows or accept any other ordeal that came her way, but she would make him happy. suddenly she remembered that she had received a brief dictated note from her aunt that morning, asking her to pack and send to santa barbara a painting of the virgin which hung in her old apartments: she wished to present it to the mission. mr. polk had closed his house a year before and taken up his permanent abode with the yorbas, but his chinese major-domo was in charge. magdaléna reflected that it was not necessary to bother her uncle, who had seemed ill and restless of late; the chinaman could attend to the matter. she went downstairs and through the gardens to the adjoining house. the weeds grew high behind it; the windows were dusty; the side door at which she rang needed painting. the chinaman answered in his own good time. he looked a little sodden; doubtless he employed much of his large leisure with the opium pipe. magdaléna bade him follow her to her aunt's apartments. as she ascended the imposing staircase she withdrew her hand hastily from the banister. "why do you not keep things clean?" she asked disgustedly. "whattee difflence? nobody come," he replied with the philosophy of his kind. the very air was musty and dusty. the black walnut doors, closed and locked, looked like the sealed entrances to so many vaults. the sound of a rat gnawing echoed through the hollow house. it seemed what it was, this house,--the sarcophagus of a beautiful woman's youth and hopes. for a year or two after the house was built mrs. polk had given magnificent entertainments, scattering her husband's dollars in a manner that made his thin nostrils twitch, and without the formality of his consent. magdaléna paused at a bend of the stair and tried to conjure up a brilliant throng in the dark hall below, the great doors of the parlours rolled back, the rooms flooded with the soft light of many candles; her aunt, long, willowy, of matchless grace, her marvellous eyes shooting scorn at the americans crowding about her, standing against the gold-coloured walls in the blood-red satin she had shown once to her small admirers. but the vision would not rise. there was only a black well below, a rat crunching above. she reached the door of her aunt's private apartments on the second floor and entered. she stepped back amazed. there was no dust here, no musty air, no dimness of window. a fire burned on the hearth. the gas was lit and softly shaded. the vases on the mantel were full of flowers. on one table was a basket of fruit; on another were the illustrated periodicals. "mrs. polk is here?" she said to ah sin. "no, missee." "she is expected, then? how odd--" "donno, missee. evey day, plenty days, one, two, thlee weeks, me fixee rooms all same this." "but why?" "kin sabbee, missee. mr. polk tellee me, and me do allee same whattee he say." magdaléna's lips parted, and her breath came short. she gave the necessary instructions about the picture. the chinaman followed her down the stairs and opened the door. as she was passing out, she turned suddenly and said to him,-- "it is not necessary to tell mr. polk about this, nor that i have been here. he does not like to be bothered about little things." "allight, missee." iii the night of mrs. yorba's long-heralded ball had arrived at last. for weeks society had been keenly expectant, for its greatest heiress and its three most beautiful girls were to come forth from the seclusion in which they were supposed to have been cultivating their minds, into the great world of balls, musicales, and teas, where their success would be in inverse ratio to their erudition. rose and caro had arrived the winter before, and were no longer "buds;" but magdaléna, helena, tiny, and ila were hardly known by sight outside the menlo park set. magdaléna had never hung over the banisters at her mother's parties. the others had been abroad so long that the most exaggerated stories of their charms prevailed. the old beaux knotted their white ties with trembling fingers and thought of the city's wild young days when nina randolph, guadalupe hathaway, mrs. hunt maclean, two of the "three macs," and the sinuous wife of don pedro earle had set their pulses humming. they were lonely old bachelors, many of them, living at the union or the pacific club, and they sighed as the memories rose. that was a day when every other woman in society was a great beauty, and as full of fascination as a fig of seeds. to-day beautiful women in san francisco's aristocracy were rare. in kearney street, on a saturday afternoon, one could hardly walk for the pretty painted shop-girls; and in that second stratum which was led by the wife of a bonanza king who had been pronounced quite impossible by mrs. yorba and other dames of the ancient aristocracy, there were many stunningly handsome girls. they could be met at the fashionable summer resorts; they were effulgent on first nights; they were familiar in kearney street on other afternoons than saturday, and their little world was gay in its way; but society, that exclusive body which owned its inchoation and later its vitality and coherence to that brilliant and elegant little band of women who came, capable and experienced, to the fevered ragged city of the early fifties, still struggled in the eighties to preserve its traditions, and did not admit the existence of these people; feminine curiosity was not even roused to the point of discussion. one day mrs. washington met one of the old beaux, ben sansome by name, on the summit of california street hill, which commands one of the finest views of a city swarming over an hundred hills. mrs. washington waved her hand at the large region known as south san francisco. "i suppose," she said thoughtfully, "that there are a lot of people in san francisco whose names we have never heard." "i suppose so!" he exclaimed. "i wonder what they are like? how many people are there in san francisco, anyhow?" "about three hundred thousand." "really? really?" and mrs. washington shrugged her pretty shoulders and dismissed the subject from her mind. would these new beauties compare with that galaxy of long ago? was the thought that danced between ben sansome's faded eyes and his mirror. three to burst forth in a night! that was unwonted measure. of late years one in three seasons had inspired fervent gratitude. nelly washington had been unchallenged for ten years; caro folsom was second-rate beside her; and rose geary, the favourite of last winter, although piquant and pretty, had not a pretension to beauty. like the other old beaux, he went only to the balls and dinners of the old-timers, never to the dances and musicales of the youngsters, but he kept a sharp look-out, nevertheless. to-night assumed the proportions of an event in his life. several of the young men had met two of these beauties during the summer, but helena was still to be experienced. the young hands did not tremble, but their eyes were very bright as they wondered if they were "in for it," if they would "get it in the neck," if she were really "a little tin goddess on wheels." even rollins, who was madly enamoured of tiny, and fort, who had carefully calculated his chances with rose, were big with curiosity. the former, who had known helena from childhood, had been refused admittance to the belmont mansion: helena had a very distinct intention of making a sensation upon her first appearance in san francisco; and as all were fish that came to her net, even rollins must be dazzled with the rest. magdaléna's engagement was a closely guarded secret, and more than one hardy youth had made up his mind to storm straight through her intellect to her millions; but even these thought only of helena as they dressed for the ball. meanwhile the girls were thinking more of their toilettes than of the men who would admire them. all were to wear white, but each gown had been made at a different paris house, that there should be no monotony of touch and cut, and each was of different shade and material: magdaléna's of ivory gauze, tiny's of pearl-white silk, ila's of cream-white embroidered _mousseline de soie_, helena's of pure white tulle. what little of magdaléna's neck the gown exposed, she concealed with a broad band of cherry-coloured velvet, and a deep necklace of turkish coins, a gift from ila. she revolved before the mirror several times in succession after the maid had left the room. she was laced so tightly that she could scarcely breathe, but she rejoiced in her likeness to a french fashion-plate, and vowed never to wear a home-made gown again. in her hair was a string of pearls that trennahan had given her; and the dagger. would it work the spell? she gave a final shake to her skirts and went downstairs. there was no lack of gas to-night; the lower part of the house was one merciless glare. no flowers graced the square ugly rooms, no decorations of any sort; but the parlours were canvased, the best band in town was tuning up, and the supper would be irreproachable. the dark-brown paper of the hall looked very old and dingy, the carpet was threadbare in places, the big teak-wood tables were in everybody's way and looked as if they were meant for the dead to rest on; but when gay gowns were billowing one would not notice these things. mrs. yorba was in the green reception-room at the end of the hall. she wore black velvet and a few diamonds, and looked impressively null. tiny and ila arrived almost immediately. they looked, the one an angel with a sense of humour, the other circean with an eye to the conventions, both as smart as paris could make them. it was nearly ten o'clock, and there was a rush just after. magdaléna waited a half-hour for helena, then opened the ball in a brief waltz with alan rush instead of the quadrille in which the four débutantes were to dance. she sent a message to helena, and mrs. cartright scribbled back that the poor dear child had altered the trimming on her bodice at the last moment, and would not be ready for an hour yet. caro took her place in the quadrille, as she also wore white. the ball promised to be a success. there were more young people than was usual at mrs. yorba's parties, and more men than girls. they danced and chatted with untiring energy, and between the dances they flirted on the stairs and in every possible nook and corner. magdaléna frolicked little, having her guests to look after; but whenever she rested for a moment there was an obsequious backbone before her. tiny and ila were besieged for dances, and divided each. the older women sat against the wall, a dado of fat and diamonds, and indulged in much caustic criticism. the old beaux stood in a group and exchanged opinions on the relative pretensions of the old and the new. "take it all in all, not to compare," said ben sansome. "miss montgomery is excessively pretty, but no figure and no style. miss brannan looks like a parisian cocotte. miss folsom has eyes, but nothing else--and when you think of 'lupie hathaway's eyes! and not one has the beginnings of the polished charm of manner, the fire of glance, the _je ne sais quoi_ of mrs. hunt maclean. just look at her in her silver brocade, her white hair _à la marquise_. she's handsomer than the whole lot of them--" at that moment helena entered the room. the white tulle gown, made with a half-dozen skirts, floated about her so lightly that she seemed rising from, suspended above it. even beside her father she looked tall; and her neck and arms, the rise of her girlish bust, were more dazzlingly white than the diaphanous substance about her. her haughty little head was set well back on a full firm throat, not too long. her cheeks were touched with pink; her lips were full of it. her long lashes and low straight brows were many shades darker than the unruly mane of glittering coppery hair. and she carried herself with a swing, with an imperious pride, with a nonchalant command of immediate and unmeasured admiration which sent every maiden's heart down with a drop and every man's pulses jumping. "i give in!" gasped ben sansome. "we never had anything like that--never! gad! the girl's got everything. it's almost unfair." alan rush turned white, but he did not lose his presence of mind. he asked don roberto to present him at once, and secured the next dance. it was a waltz; and as the admirably mated couple floated down the room, many others paused to watch them. helena's limpid eyes, raised to the eager ones above her, did all the execution of which they were capable. during the next entre-dance she was mobbed. twenty men pressed about her, introduced by don roberto and rollins, until she finally commanded them to "go away and give her air," then walked off with eugene fort, finishing his first epigram and mocking at his second. he had only a fourth of the next dance; but as helena had refused to permit her admirers to write their names on her card, and as she was at no pains to remember which fourth was whose, giving her scraps to the first comer, rush and fort, who had had the forethought not to pre-engage themselves, and were constantly in her wake, secured more than their share. but the other men had time and energy to fight for their own: helena was constantly stopped in the middle of the room with a firm demand that she should keep her word. between the dances the men crowded about her, eager for a glance, and at supper the small table before her looked like an offering at a chinese funeral. "well," exclaimed mrs. washington, "i always said that no girl could be a belle in this town nowadays, that the men didn't have gumption enough; but i reckon it's because the rest of us haven't come up to the mark. this looks like the stories they tell of old times." "it makes me think of old times," said mr. sansome. "makes me feel young again; or older than ever. i can't decide which." tiny took her eclipse with unruffled philosophy, and divided her smiles between two or three faithful suppliants. ila had a very high colour, and her primal fascination was less reserved than usual. rose admired helena too extravagantly for jealousy, and what caro felt no man ever knew. colonel belmont renewed his acquaintance with many of the women of his youth, long neglected, although he had loved more than one of them in his day. they filled his ears with praises of his beautiful daughter. helena's beauty was of that rare order which compels the willing admiration of her own sex: it was not only indisputable, but it warmed and irradiated. when colonel belmont was not talking, he stood against the wall and followed her with adoring eyes. if she had been a failure--admitting the possibility--his disappointment would have been far keener than hers. "you've cause to be proud, as proud as lucifer," said mr. polk to him. "but you ain't looking well, jack. what's the matter?" "i'm well enough. i shall live long enough to give her to someone who's good enough for her, and that's all i care about--although i'm in no hurry for that, either. but i'm _not_ feeling right smart, hi; i don't just know what's the matter." "we're both getting old. i feel like a worked-out old cart-horse. but you've got ten years the best of me, and i'll tell you what's the matter with you: you can't switch off drink at your age after being two thirds full for twenty-five years. we all need whiskey as we grow older, and the more we've had, the more we need. i'd advise you to take it up again in moderation." "not if it's the death of me! it's nothing or everything with me. the first cocktail, and i'd be off on a jamboree. then she'd know, and i'd blow out my brains with the shame of it. she thinks i'm the finest fellow in the world now, and so she shall if i suffer the tortures of the damned." "well, i guess you're right. the young fellows talk about dying for the girls, but i guess we're the ones that would do that for our own if it came to the scratch." "it's too bad you have none," said colonel belmont, with the sympathy of his own full measure. and then, although mr. polk's iron features did not move, he looked away hastily. "i guess i didn't deserve any," mr. polk answered harshly. "i don't know that you did, for that matter, but i certainly didn't. look at don cavorting round with those girls," he added viciously. "it's positively sickening." "not a bit of it. he's making up for what he's missed. and a little of it would do you good, old fellow. you've never had half enough fun, and you ought to take a little before it's too late. you haven't a pound of flesh on you, and are as spry as any of them. go and make yourself agreeable to the girls. even a smile from them goes a long way, i assure you." mr. polk shook his head. "i couldn't think of a thing to say to them. i didn't learn when i was young." iv when magdaléna drew the dagger out of her hair that night, she laughed a little and tossed it into her handkerchief box. she had seen men carried off their feet for the first time, not caring whether the world laughed or not. she had also noted the exact order of homage that she was to expect from men. helena infatuated. the other girls inspired admiration in varying measure. respect for her father's millions was her portion. she had watched and compared all the evening. it would have distressed and appalled her had she made her début last winter. as it was, it mattered little. occasionally there is a lively winter in san francisco. this promised to be almost brilliant. there were six balls in the next two weeks. at each helena's triumphs were reiterated. the men waited in a solid body between the front door and the staircase, and she had promised, divided, and subdivided every dance before she had set foot on the lowest step. it was almost impossible to begin a party until her arrival. kettledrums had been inaugurated the previous winter, and hardly a man been got to them. now the men would have begged for invitations. they even began to attend church; and helena's "evening" was so crowded that she was obliged to ask five or six of her girl friends to help her. alan rush, eugene fort, carter howard, a southerner of charming manners, infinite tact, and little conversation, and "dolly" webster, a fledgeling of enormous length and well-proportioned brain, were her shadows, her serfs, her determined, trembling adorers. they barely hated one another, so devoured were they by the sovereign passion; and as they were treated with exasperating similitude, there was nothing to set them at one another's throats. helena had all the gifts and arts of the supreme coquette. she allured and mocked, appealed and commanded; adapted herself with the suppleness of bronze to mould, with enchanting flashes of egotism; discarded all perception of man's existence in the abstract, when she had surrendered her attention to one, to jerk him out of his heaven by ordering him to go and send her his rival; possessed a quickness of intuition which finished a man's sentences with her eyes, an exquisite sympathy which made a man feel that here at last he was understood (as he would wish himself understood, rather than as he understood himself); an audacity which never failed to surprise, and never shocked; a fund of talk which never wore itself into platitudes, and a willing ear; and an absolute confidence in herself and her destiny. in addition she had great beauty, the high light spirits of her mercurial temperament, a charming and equable manner (when not engaged in judiciously tormenting her slaves), and a shrewd brain. what wonder that her sovereignty was something for the men who worshipped her to remember when they too were old beaux, and that their present condition was abject? the wonder was that the women did not hate her; but so impulsive and unaffected a creature disarms her own sex, particularly when her gowns are faultless, and she is not lifeless in their company, to scintillate the moment a man enters the room. and they forbore to criticise the dictates of her royal fancy. it is true that she deferred to no one's opinion, but she escaped criticism nevertheless. if she capriciously refused to dance at a party, but sat the night through with one man, not recognising the existence of her lowering train, people merely smiled and shrugged their shoulders, saving their scowls for those who were not the fashion. sometimes these flirtations took place in the open ball-room, sometimes in the conservatory; it was all one to helena, whose powers of concentration amounted to genius. at one of the presidio hops she spent the evening--it was moonlight--in a boat on the bay with an officer who was as accomplished a flirt as herself. the appearance of rush, fort, howard, and webster upon this occasion was pitiable. on her evening, if she tired of her admirers before they could reasonably be expected to leave, she walked out of the room without excuse and went to bed. she not only ran to fires when the humour seized her, but she commanded her quartette to rush every time the alarm sounded, that they might be at her beck in the event of officious policemen. as fires are frequent in san francisco, these enamoured young men were profoundly thankful when they occurred at such times as they happened to be in their tyrant's presence: they were willing to bundle into their clothes at two in the morning, or to leave their duties at midday, were they sure of meeting her; but as she was as capricious about fires as about everything else, their chances were as one in ten. they hinted once that she might advise them of her pleasure by telephone, but were peremptorily snubbed. helena never made concessions. it was at the end of the second month that her father imported a coach from new york. she had driven since her baby days, and could handle four horses as scientifically as one. thereafter, one of the sights of golden gate park on fine afternoons was helena on the box of the huge black and yellow structure, tooling a party of her delighted friends, her father beside her, one of her admirers crouched at her indifferent shoulder. it was the only gentleman's coach in california, for in the eighties the youth of the city had not turned their wits and prowess to sport. few of them could drive with either grace or assurance, and helena's accomplishment was the more renowned. occasionally colonel belmont was allowed to drive, a favour which he enjoyed with all the keenness of his dashing youth. "i told you how it would be," said ila to rose. "she is not only belle, but leader. that's the real reason caro's gone to new york. we are nowhere. i'd turn eccentric, regularly shock people, if i had the good luck to be the fashion. but i've got to marry well. when i have--you'll see." "we can't all be raving belles," said rose. "if helena were so much as doubled, the men would be gibbering idiots. i don't care, so long as i have a good time; and i hold my own. so do you. as for tiny, she may not be mobbed, but she has one man in love with her after another. as soon as poor charley rollins got his congé, bob payne took the vacant seat, and i see a third climbing over the horizon with business in his eye. there can be only one sun, but we're all stars of the first magnitude." "but we'd each like to be the sun, all the same." v magdaléna, although much interested in helena's performances, felt at times as if dream-walking, half expecting to awaken at the foot of her little altar. in the days when she had prayed, full of faith, for beauty and its triumphs, although ignorance had handled the brush of her imagination, yet the vigorous outline sketch had closely resembled all that was now the portion of her friend. she pondered on the fancy she had had as a child that helena realised all her own little ambitions. she certainly had realised all her larger, but one. she dreaded to ask helena if she had ever cared to write, fearing to surprise a confession to the authorship of the novel of the day. this, she concluded, after due reflection, was exaggeration; for if helena had written, even without publication, she certainly would have talked about it, reticence being no vice of hers. but the suggestion might prick a latent talent into action. this was just the one thing magdaléna could not endure, and she decided to let the talent sleep. the rest mattered little, aside from the sense of failure which the vicarious accomplishment of ambition must always induce; for she had her advantage of helena, the greatest one woman can have of another. she was happy, but helena was only satisfied for the moment; so restless and passionate a heart would not long remain content with the husks. it was true that trennahan had not gone mad over herself as other men over helena; but what of that? it was a question of years alone. it was now three months since he had left california. he had found his mother's affairs in a serious condition, but had managed to gather up the threads, and the knot would be tied before long. there was no doubt about his desire to return. in fact, as the time waned, his ardour waxed. sometimes magdaléna was driven to wonder if his yearning for california or herself were the greater; but on the whole she was satisfied, for she liked to accept his fancy that the two were indissoluble. he wrote delightful letters, witty and graceful, full of interesting gossip, and with many personal and tender pages. but the novelty of his absence had worn off some time since, and she longed impatiently for his return. she was caught in the whirl of social activity, and was the restless helena's constant companion; nevertheless, there were lonely hours, when the future with its imperious demands routed the past. the engagement was still a profound secret; magdaléna had told helena at once, but it was unguessed by anyone else. mrs. yorba had insisted that her daughter should have one brilliant girl season. the truth was that she was delighted at don roberto's sudden interest in the world of fashion, and was determined to make the most of it. he developed, indeed, into an untiring seeker after the innocent amusements of his wife's exclusive kingdom, and had given a fashionable tailor permission to bring his wardrobe down to date; he had hitherto worn clothes of the same cut for twenty years. the girls always gave him a square dance; during the round dances he stood against the wall with mr. polk and colonel belmont, and fairly beamed with good-will. the yorbas seldom spent an evening at home unless their own doors were open, and don roberto consented to two parties and several large dinners. mrs. yorba shuddered sometimes at the weakening of her inborn and long-nurtured economical faculty, but thoroughly enjoyed herself--forming an important item of the dado--and hoped that her husband's enthusiasm would endure. vi "i'm not a bit blasé," remarked helena, "but i'd like to be engaged for a change--not to last, of course. only i can't make up my mind which of the four; and whichever i choose the other three will be so disagreeable. if i could only let them know i didn't mean it,--at least wouldn't later,--but that would never do, because i shouldn't enjoy myself unless i really thought i was in earnest. besides, i haven't been able to fall in love with any of them yet." "you don't really mean what you say when you talk that way, do you, helena?" asked magdaléna, with much concern. "it would be so--so unprincipled; and i can't bear to think that of you." "but, 'léna dearest, i should be in earnest for the time being; i'm just talking from the outside, as it were. at the time i should think i really meant it. otherwise i'd be bored to death, and the engagement wouldn't last five minutes after i was. i'm simply wild to fall in love, if only to see what it's like. you won't tell me; anyhow, i don't think that would satisfy all my curiosity if you did. i wish some new man would come along." "alan rush is charming." "he's too much in love with me." "mr. fort keeps your wits on the jump." "my wits are in my brain, not my heart." "mr. howard?" "he has so much tact that he has no sincerity." "there is still mr. webster." "poor dolly!" "what _do_ you want?" helena was moving restlessly about her boudoir,--a bower of pearl-grey embroidered with wild roses, in which she reclined luxuriously when free from social duties, and improved her mind. a volume of motley lay on the floor. walter pater's "imaginary portraits" was slipping off the divan, and there was a pile of reviews on the table. she was biting the corner of a volume of herrick. "i haven't any ideal, if that's what you mean. i think it would have to be a man of the world, for conversation so soon gives out with the men of this village. mr. fort takes refuge in epigrams. if i married--became engaged to him--i should feel as if i were living on pickles. i think that one reason why alan rush and mr. howard are so determined to make love to me is because they have nothing left to talk about." "you've told me twice what you don't want, but you don't seem to know what you do. 'a man of the world' is not very definite." "no; he must be capable of falling violently in love with me, and at the same time not make himself ridiculous; to keep his head except when i particularly want him to lose it. of course i want to inspire a grand passion as well as to feel one, but i don't want to be surrounded by it; and the first time he looked ridiculous would be the last of him as far as i was concerned. i might be in the highest stages of the divine passion, and that would cure me." "well! is that all? some men could not be ridiculous if they tried." "you are thinking of mr. trennahan, of course. if he did, i do believe you wouldn't see it. but i should; i have a hideous sense of the ridiculous. well, lemme see. he must have read and travelled and thought a lot, so that he would know more than i, and i could look up to him; also that subjects of conversation would not give out. the platitudes of love! that would be fatal." "i don't believe they ever sound like platitudes." "hm! i won't undertake to discuss that point, knowing my limitations. what next? he must have suffered. that gives a man weight, as the sculptors say. my quartette will be much more interesting to the next divinity than they are to me. then of course he must have charming manners and an agreeable voice: i could not stand the brain of a bismark in the skull of an apollo if he had a nasal american voice. i believe that's all. i'm not so particular about looks, so long as he's neither small nor fat." "and if you found all that wouldn't you marry it?" "n-o-o--i don't know--but i'd be engaged a good long time. you see i want to be a belle for years and years." "and what is to become of the poor men when you are through with them?" "oh, they'll get over it. i shall. why shouldn't they?" "i thought you said once you wanted to marry a statesman." "sometimes i do, and sometimes i don't. i'll consider that question ten years hence. i want to be a perfectly famous belle first." "you are that already." "oh, i must have a season in new york, and another in washington, and another in london. the gods have given me all the gifts, and i intend to make the most of them. now let's read a chapter of motley out loud, and if i jump off to other things you jerk me back. let's finish pater, though. it's like lying under a cascade of bubbles on a hot summer's day. my brains are addled between trying to be well read and trying to keep four men from proposing. you read aloud, and i'll brush my hair. no, i'll embroider on papa's mouchoir case; i've been at it for thirteen months. oh, by the bye, i didn't tell you that i had a brilliant idea. it darted into my head just as i was dropping off last night. i forgot to speak about it to papa this morning, but i will to-night. it's this: i'm going to give a ball at del monte. take everybody down on a special train. don't you think it will be a change? the spring has come so early that we can have the grounds lit up with chinese lanterns; and there may be some eastern men there. there often are. so much the better for my ball--and me. now read." vii trennahan arrived late in the evening, and went directly to the yorbas' to dinner. he saw magdaléna alone for a moment before the others came downstairs, and his delight at meeting her again was so boyish that she could hardly have recalled his eventful forty years had she tried. he was one of those men, who, having a great deal of nervous energy, are possessed briefly by the high animal spirits of youth when in unusual mental and physical tenor,--with coincident obliteration of the bills of time. trennahan was in the highest spirits this evening. he was delighted to get back to california, delighted to see magdaléna, whom he thought improved and almost pretty in her smart frock. moreover, no woman had ever seemed to him half so sincere, half so well worth the loving, as this girl who said so little and breathed so much. don roberto and mr. polk detained him some time after dinner, and magdaléna, who thought them most inconsiderate, awaited him in the green-and-brown reception-room. she knew the ugliness of these rooms now, and wondered, as trennahan finally entered, if it clashed with his sentiment. but he gave no sign. he pushed a small sofa before the fire, drew her beside him, and demanded the history of the past four months. he held her hand and looked at her with boyish delight. even the lines had left his face for the moment, the grimness his mouth. he looked twenty-six. "your trip has done you more good than california did. you never looked so well here." "i have been funereal since the day i left. this is pure reaction. i never felt so happy in my life. couldn't we have a walk or ride somewhere to-morrow early--out to the presidio? i want to be in the open air with you." "i am afraid we couldn't. nobody does such things, you know--except helena. someone would be sure to see us, and it would be all over town before night. then we should have to announce--i'd rather not do that until just before--i should hate being discussed." "well, but i must have you to myself in my own way. i wonder if your mother would bring you down to my house for a few days. don roberto and mr. polk could come down every evening." "i think they would like it." "and you?" "oh, i should like it. the woods must be lovely in winter." "who has been teaching you coquetry? who has fallen in love with you since i left?" "with me? no one. no one would ever think of such a thing but you--" "i love you with an unerring instinct." "they are all in love with helena. i suppose you heard of her in new york." "it certainly was not your fault if i did not." "but surely you must have heard otherwise. she is a great, great belle." "my dearest girl, you do not hear california mentioned in new york once a month. it might be on mars. the east remembers california's existence about as often as europe remembers america's. they don't know what they miss. when am i to see your helena?" "a week from to-night; she gives a ball then at del monte. she and her father have already gone, because each thought the other needed rest." "monterey,--that is the scene of your ysabel's tragedy. we will explore the old part of the town together." she moved closer to him, her eyes glistening. "that has been one of my dreams,--to be there with you--for the first time. we can guess where they all lived--and go to the cemetery on the hill where so many are buried--and there is the custom house on the rocks, where the ball was and where ysabel jumped off--it will be heaven!" he laughed and caught her in his arms, kissing her fondly. "you dear little spanish maid," he said. "you don't belong to the present at all. no wonder you bewitched me. i am beginning to feel quite out of place in the present, myself. it is a novel and delightful sensation." viii mrs. yorba decided that it would be wiser for them all to go to fair oaks; no one would know whether trennahan were their guest or not. this was her first really gay winter, and could she have thought of a plausible excuse she would have delayed the marriage for a year or two. but both don roberto and trennahan were determined that the wedding should not take place later than june. they were to spend five days at fair oaks. then don roberto, mrs. yorba, and magdaléna would go to monterey, trennahan to follow on the evening of the ball. the winter woods were wet and glistening. thick in the brush were the vivid red berries and the firm little snowballs. the air was of a wonderful freshness and fragrance, cool on the cheek, but striking no chill to the blood. the grass tips in the meadows were close and green. there was no haze on the distant mountains: the redwoods stood out sharply; one could almost see the sun baldes crossing in their gloomy aisles. close to the ground was a low, restless, continuous mutter,--the voluntary of spring. trennahan and magdaléna rode or strolled in the woods during most of the hours of light. they could not sit on the damp ground, but they swung hammocks by the path-side to sit in when tired. trennahan would have slept on the verandah had not his enthusiasm for outdoor delights been controlled by his matter-of-fact brain, but he grudged the hours at table, and persuaded magdaléna to go early to bed that she might rise and go forth at five in the evening of night. after four months of snow and nipping winds and furnace heat, small wonder that he was as happy as a boy out of school, and that he made magdaléna the most wonderingly happy of women. he did little love-making; he treated her more as a comrade upon whose constant companionship he was dependent for happiness,--his other part, with which he was far better satisfied than with the original measure. "we will camp out up there during all of july and august," he said to her one morning, as they stood on the edge of the woods and watched the rising sun pick out the redwoods one by one from the black mass on the mountain. "i can't imagine a more enchanting place for a honeymoon than a redwood forest. we'll take a servant, and a lot of books; but i doubt if we shall read much,--we'll shoot and fish all day. if we like it as much as i am sure we shall, we'll build a house there. do you think you should like it?" "oh, i should! i should!" "you are so sympathetic in your own particular way; not temperamentally so, which is pleasant but means little, but with a slow, sure understanding which goes forth to few people, but is unerring and permanent." "i love no one but you and helena. i have never cared to understand anyone else." "we all have great weaknesses in us. i wonder if mine were ever revealed to you--which god forbid!--if you have sympathy enough to cover those, too." "i am sure that i have. i am neither quick nor generally affectionate, but i do nothing by halves." "i believe you. you are the one person on whose mercy i would throw myself. however,--it is a long time since we have spoken of another subject. do you think no further of writing?" "i haven't lately. there has been no time. some day--oh, yes, i think i should never wholly give it up. should--should you object?" "not in the least. but i am afraid i sha'n't give you much time, either. what were you writing,--your old-california tales?" "no,--an--an historical novel--english." "of course! and with fresh and fascinating material begging for its turn. i arrived in the nick of time. when you have transcribed those stories into correct and distinguished english, you will have taken your place among the immortals. but style alone will give you a place in letters worth having. always remember that. the theme determines popular success, the manner rank. don't misunderstand me; there is no greater fraud or bore than the writer who has acquired the art of saying nothing brilliantly. you must have both. and you are too ambitious, too intellectual, as distinguished from clever, too serious and logical, to be contented with anything short of perfection. i shall be your severest critic; but you yourself will work for years before you produce a line with which you are wholly satisfied. is not this true?" "yes; i should always be my severest critic." he drew a long breath of relief. he had no desire for a literary wife; nor to be known as the husband of one. magdaléna should be as happy as he could make her, but the sooner she realised that genius was not her portion, the better. ix "never i think i come to monterey again," said don roberto, as the 'bus which contained his party only drove from the little toy station to the big toy hotel. "once i hate all the spanish towns, because so extravagant i am before that i feel 'fraid, si i return, i am all the same like then; but now i am old and the habits fixit; and now i know my moneys go to be safe with trennahan, i feel more easy in the mind and can enjoy. but i no go to the town, for all is change, i suppose: all the womens grown old and poor, and all the mens dead--by the drink, generalmente. very fortunate i am i no stay there; meeting eeram in time. ay, yi! what kind de house is this? look like paper, and the grounds so artifeecial. no like much." magdaléna hardly knew her father these last months. from the day that he found a reminiscent pleasure in the mild diversions of menlo he had visibly softened. from the day he was assured of trennahan he had become almost expansive, and at times was moved to generosity. upon one occasion he had doubled magdaléna's allowance, and at christmas he had given her a hundred dollars; and he had paid the bills of the season without a murmur. the fear which had haunted him during the last thirty years,--that he should suddenly relapse into his native extravagance and squander his patrimony and his accumulated millions, dying as the companions of his youth had died,--he dismissed after he met trennahan. polk had been the iron mine to the voracious magnet in his character. in the natural course of things polk would outlive him; but the possibility of polk's extermination by railroad accident or small-pox had been a second devil of torment, and during the past year he had visibly failed. now, however, there was trennahan to take his place. don roberto would enjoy life once more, a second youth. he was almost happy. if he felt his will rotting, he would transfer all his vast interests to trennahan in trust for his wife and daughter, retaining a large income. he did not believe, at this optimistic period, that there was any real danger, after an inflexible resistance of thirty years; but he also realised for the first time what the strain of those thirty years had been. helena, dazzlingly fair in a frock of forest green, and surrounded by five new admirers, three eastern and two english tourists, awaited magdaléna on the verandah. the strangers gave magdaléna a faint shock: being the only well-dressed men she had ever seen except trennahan, they assumed a family likeness to him, and seemed to steal something of his preeminence among men. she commented distantly on this fact as she went up the stair with helena. "oh, your little tin god on wheels is not the only one," replied helena, the astute. "there are five here with possibilities besides dress, and more coming to-morrow. they _are_ such a relief! if i feel real wicked to-morrow night--well, never mind!" "helena! you will not make those four young men any more miserable than they are now?" helena shook her head. she was looking very naughty. "four months, my dear! i didn't realise what i had endured until i had this sudden vacation. two days of blissful rest, and then the variations for which i was born." they were in helena's room, and magdaléna sat down by the open window, where she could smell the cypresses, and regarded her beloved friend more critically than was her habit. "i wonder if you will ever mature,--get any heart?" she said. "'léna! what do you mean! heart? don't i love you and my father; and the other girls--some?" "i don't mean that kind. nor falling in love, either. i never expressed myself very well, but you know what i mean." "oh, bother. what were men and women made for but to amuse each other?" "life isn't all play." "it is for a time--when you're young. i am sure that that is what nature intended, and that the people who don't see it are those who make the mistakes with their lives. otherwise life would be simply outrageous,--no balance, no compensation. after a certain age even fools become serious: they can't help it, for life begins to take its revenge for permitting them to be young at all, and to hope, and all that sort of thing. therefore those that don't make the most of youth and all that goes with it are something more than fools." magdaléna looked at her in dismay. "how do you realise that, at your age? i have lived alone, thought more--had more time to think and to read--but i never should--" "i have intuitions. and i've seen more of the world than you have. i see everything that goes on--you can bet your life on that. talk about my powers of concentration! they're nothing to my antennae." "but have you no principles of right and wrong? no morality? you would not deliberately sacrifice others to your own pleasure, would you?" "wouldn't i? i don't take the least pleasure in cruelty, like some women. if i could give people oblivion draughts, i'd do it in a minute--for my vanity has nothing to do with it, either. but the world is at my feet, and there it shall stay, no matter who pays the piper. i love life. i love everything about it. i've never seen anything in the world i thought ugly. i don't think anything is ugly. if it was, i should hate it. i've never been through a slum,--a horrid slum, that is,--and i don't want to. the beauty of the earth intoxicates me. when i even think about it, much less look at it, i feel perfectly wild with delight to think that i am alive. and my senses are so keen. i see so far. i can hear miles. i believe i can hear the grass grow. i eat and drink little, but that little gives me delight. a glass of cold spring water intoxicates me. and, above all, i enjoy being loved. i never forget how much you and papa love me. i couldn't exist without either of you. papa is looking much better since he came down. don't you think so? and i like to see love in the eyes of men i don't care a rap about. their eyes are like impersonal mirrors for me to read the secrets of the future in. and i don't really hurt them. most men have a lot of superfluous love in them. i may as well have it as another. it won't interfere with the destination of the reserve in the least." "helena!" exclaimed magdaléna, with a sinking heart. "i believe you are a genius." "i have the genius of personality, but i couldn't do a thing to save my life." magdaléna breathed freely again. x trennahan, who was to have arrived in time to dine with the belmonts and yorbas, missed his train and took his dinner alone. afterward, he saw magdaléna for a few moments in the yorbas' private parlour, but she had to dress, and he went off to smoke in the grounds with don roberto, mr. polk, mr. washington, and colonel belmont. they subsequently had a game of bowls, and--excepting colonel belmont--several cocktails. when they suddenly remembered that a ball was in progress to which they were expected, it was eleven o'clock, and trennahan was not dressed. it was helena's ball, but she had made every man promise to look after the wall-flowers, that she might be at liberty to enjoy herself. her aunt, mrs. yorba, and magdaléna received with her; and as all the guests had arrived by the same train, and had dressed at about the same time, the arduous duty of receiving was soon over. helena left the stragglers to her chaperons and prepared to amuse herself. as usual, she had refused to engage herself for any dances, but she gave the first two to her devoted four, then announced her intention to dance no more for the present. the truth was that one of her minute high-heeled slippers pinched, but this she had no intention of acknowledging; if men wished to think her an angel, so they should. she was a sensible person, far too practical to reduce the sum of her happiness by physical discomfort; but the slippers, which she had never tried on, matched her gown, and she had no others with her that did. but the one rift in her lute induced a sympathetic rift in her temper. the party was very gay and pretty. the rooms had been fantastically decorated with red berries and snowballs, pine, and cedar. the leader of the band was in that stage of intoxication which promised music to make the soles of the dado tingle. all the girls had brought their prettiest frocks, and all the matrons their diamonds. there were no tiaras in the eighties, but there were a few necklaces, stars, and ear-rings--of the vulgar variety known as "solitaires." it is true that certain of the fungi looked like crystal chandeliers upon occasion; but helena would have none of them. herself had rarely been more lovely,--in floating clouds of pale pink tulle, which looked like a shower of almond blossoms. her hair was roped up with pearls, hinting the head-dress of juliet, but stopping short of eccentric effect. she wore nothing to break the lines of her throat and neck, but on her arms were quantities of odd and beautiful "bangles," many made from her own suggestions, others picked up in different parts of the world. she was standing opposite the door in the middle of the room as trennahan entered, leaning lightly upon a little table to rest her mischievous foot. only one man was beside her at the moment, and trennahan's view of her was uninterrupted. he knew at once who she was. his second impression was that he had seen few girls so beautiful. his third, that she possessed something more potent than beauty, and that he was responding to it with a certain wild flurry of the senses, and a certain glad exultation in youth and danger which had not been his portion for many a long year. the instinct of the hunter leaped from its tomb, shocked into the eager quivering life of its youth. trennahan was appalled to hear the fine web he had spun between his senses and his spirit rent in a second, then gratified at the youthful singing in his blood. the old joy in recklessness, in surrender to the delirium of the senses, came back to him. he pushed them roughly aside, and looked about for magdaléna. she was listening to the rapid delivery of mr. rollins. he thought she looked ill, and was about to go to her when colonel belmont took him by the arm. "you must meet my daughter," he said. "oh, bother! there go half a dozen." when trennahan reached helena, he was presented in the same breath with two other new arrivals, and her slipper was fairly biting. she did not even hear his name. she was in a mood to make her swains unhappy; and she liked trennahan's face, and what she saw there. there was eager admiration in his eyes and nostrils, and on his face the record of a man who might possibly be her match. of man's deeper and more personal life she never thought. she had heard that men sometimes loved married women, and others whose like she had never seen; but she hated the mere fact of vice as she did all forms of ugliness, and dismissed it from her mind. she read in trennahan's face that he had had many flirtations, nothing more. "i am not going to dance any more to-night," she announced. she placed her hand in trennahan's arm. "take me to the conservatory," she said. there was really nothing for him to do but take her. but it was three hours before either was seen again. xi "you are not looking well this morning," said trennahan, solicitously, about twelve hours after he had appeared in the ball-room. he had just entered the yorbas' private parlour. "neither do you," replied magdaléna. "i sat up late with some of the men, and slept ill after." magdaléna raised her eyes and looked at him steadily. "you have fallen in love with helena," she said. "what nonsense! my dear child, what are you talking about? miss belmont asked me to take her to the conservatory; and as i do not dance, and as you do, and as she announced her intention of not dancing again, and is a very entertaining young woman, i decided to remain there. if our engagement had been made known, of course i should have done nothing of the sort. but as it was--" "you turned white when you first saw her. alan rush looked just like that. now he is mad about her." "i am not alan rush, nor any other boy of twenty-five. the man you have elected to marry, and who is not half good enough for you, as i have told you many times, is a seasoned person past middle age, my dearest. i could not go off my head over a pretty face if i tried. my day for that is long past." he spoke vehemently. "you never looked at me like that." "doubtless my pallor was due to some such unromantic cause as an extremely bad dinner." "i have seen that look several times. alan rush is not the only one. and helena is no doll. she has every fascination." "possibly. shall we go for our walk? i am most anxious to see those old houses and graves." he did not offer to kiss her. she was too proud to take up woman's usual refrain. she put on her hat, and they left the hotel, and walked toward the town. "i believe the cemetery comes first," she said. "i have made inquiries. we can see the town from there, and go on afterward--if you like." "of course i like. how good of you to wait for me! i know you have been longing for the town which i am convinced is a part of your very personality." "yes, i have been longing. i don't care much about it this morning." "which of your heroines is buried in the cemetery?" "benicia ortega, la tulita, and some of aunt's old friends." "you must certainly write those old stories. i often think of them." "nothing that you say this morning sounds like the truth." "my dear girl! i am dull and stupid after a sleepless night. and the night after you left i sat up until two in the morning writing important letters." "i think it was disloyal of helena." "i must rush to her defence. she did not know until the end of the evening who i was. she took me for one of the several easterners who arrived to-day. two of them brought letters to her father from mr. forbes. one was the son of an old friend. as her father presented me--" magdaléna faced about. "and you did not tell her? you did not speak of me?" "i am going to be perfectly frank, knowing how sensible you are. i had a desperate flirtation with your friend, as desperate and meaningless as those things always are; for it is merely an invention to pass the idler hours of society. there was nothing else to do, so we flirted. it added to the zest to keep her in ignorance of my identity. it was a silly pastime, but better than nothing. i should far rather have been in bed. if i could have talked to you, it would have been quite another matter." magdaléna hurried on ahead. he had the tact not to accelerate his own steps. after a time she fell back. she said,-- "what is this 'flirtation,' anyhow? i have heard nothing but 'flirtation' all winter, and i heard a good deal of it last summer. but i have not the slightest idea what it means. what do you do?" "do? oh--i--it is impossible to define flirtation. you must have the instinct to understand. then you wouldn't ask. thank heaven you never will understand. flirtation is to love-making what soda-water is to champagne. i can think of no better definition than that." "did you kiss helena?" "good god, no! that's not flirtation. she is not the sort that would let me if i wished." "did you hold her hand?" "i have held no woman's hand but yours for an incalculable time." "did you tell her that you loved her?" "certainly not!" "i must say i can't see how a flirtation differs from an ordinary conversation." "it only does in that subtle something which cannot be explained." magdaléna had an inspiration. "perhaps you talk with your eyes some." "well, you are not altogether wrong. did you ever see a fencing match? imagine two invisible personalities dodging and doubling, springing and darting. that will give you some idea. and all without a flutter of passion or real interest. it is good exercise for the lighter wits, but stupid at best." he did not add that the very essence of flirtation is its promise of more to come. it was some time before magdaléna spoke again. then she asked,-- "what did helena say when you told her your name?" "i believe she said, 'great heaven!'" "i think this must be the cemetery." they ascended the rough hill, and pushed their way through weeds and thistles and wild oats to the dilapidated stones under the oaks. magdaléna had imagined her conflicting emotions when she visited the graves of her youthful heroines; among other things the delightful sense of unreality. but the unreality was of another sort to-day. they were a part of an insignificant past. trennahan elevated one foot to a massive stone and plucked the "stickers" from his trousers. "this is all very romantic," he said, "but these confounded things are uncomfortable. have you found your graves?" "i think this is benicia's. we can go if you like." "by no means." he went and leaned over the sunken grey stone which recorded the legend of benicia ortega's brief life and tragic death, then insisted upon finding the others. "you don't take any interest," said magdaléna. "why do you pretend?" he caught her in his arms and seated her on the highest and driest of the tombs, then sat beside her. he kept his arm about her, but he did not kiss her. "come now," he said, "let us have it out. we must not quarrel. i humble myself to the dust. i vow to be a saint. i will not exchange two consecutive sentences with your friend in the future. make me promise all sorts of things." "if you love her, you can't help yourself." "i have no intention of loving her. perhaps you will be as sweet and sensible as you always are, and not say anything so absurd again. i am deeply sorry that i have offended you. will you believe that? and will you forgive me?" "do you mean that you still wish to marry me?" "great heaven, 'léna! even if my head were turned, do you think that i have not brains enough to remember that that sort of thing is a matter of the hour only, and that i am a man of honour? i have no less intention of marrying you to-day than i had yesterday. does that satisfy you? and--since you take it so hardly--i wish i might never see miss belmont again." magdaléna raised her eyes; they were full of tears. her hat was pushed back, her soft hair ruffled. in the deep shade of the oaks and with the passion in her face she looked prettier than he had ever seen her. a kiss sprang to her lips. he bent his head swiftly and caught it; and then he was delighted at the depth of his penitence. * * * * * "'léna, you ought to hate me, but i didn't know! i swear i didn't!" "i know you did not. he told me that it was entirely his fault, and i have forgiven him; so don't let us say any more about it." "well, i am glad he admitted that. i'm pretty selfish, as i've never denied, but i'd never be disloyal. not to you, anyhow," she added on second thoughts. "i shouldn't mind ila so much, nor caro." "you don't mean to say you would take any girl's lover away from her, helena?" "yes, i would if i wanted him badly. but i'd do it right out before her face. i'd never be underhand about it. i loathe deceit. i was furious for a time with mr. trennahan last night, but i really believe i was more furious because he was the most interesting man i had ever met and i couldn't have him, than because he hadn't behaved quite properly." magdaléna reached her right hand to a bow on her left shoulder, that helena should not see the sudden leap of her heart. "do you mean to say that you had--had intended to--to--add him to the quartette?" "i had had a very definite idea of turning the entire quartette out in his favour. i don't mind telling you that, because wild horses couldn't make me so much as flirt an eyelash at him again; and of course it was only one of my passing fancies. nothing goes very deep with me. i'm made on a magnificent plan. so is he. we'll both have forgotten last evening before the end of the week. i hate the morning after a ball, don't you? one always feels so devitalised. wasn't ila's gown disgracefully low? and the way some girls roll their eyes is positively sickening. let's go out and get a breath of air." xii two nights later tiny had a large dinner. a place had been kept for trennahan. he had expected to be sent in with magdaléna,--somewhat illogically, as no one suspected his engagement. he was sent in with helena. the long low dining-room of the old house on rincon hill had never been double-dated with gas fixtures. there was a large candelabra against the dark wainscot at each end of the room, and little clusters of flame on the table. the girls never looked so pretty, so guileless, never planted their arrows so surely, as in this room, in the soft radiance of its wax candles. on helena's other side sat rollins, whom she honoured by regarding as a brother. on trennahan's left ila was intent upon the subjugation of a younger brother of mr. washington, who had recently returned to san francisco after six years in europe, and had knelt at her shrine at once. he was wealthy, and she had made up her mind to marry him. trennahan she had given up during the summer. had she not, she would have known better than to pit her charms against helena's. magdaléna was on the same side of the table. helena wore white, in which she looked her best; the silk softened with much lace on the bust. she raised her eyes defiantly to trennahan's. their coquetry had been ordered to the rear. "we've got to talk, or look like idiots," she said. "i had made up my mind never to speak to you again. i think you were quite too horrid the other night." "i certainly was." "was it your fault or mine?" "wholly mine--despite your fascinations." "i wouldn't have been fascinating if i had known. i am glad you admit that it was all your fault. it makes me believe that it was. what made you keep it up for three hours?" "the weakness of man." "is that what you told 'léna?" "no; it is not." "what did you tell her--oh, how horrid of me to ask! let's talk about something else. do you like california better than new york?" "it will take exactly eight minutes to exhaust that subject; i am an old hand at it. so while i assure you that i do, and am giving my reasons, please cast about for a subject to follow." "my thinker is not good to-night. i expect you to take care of me." "what greater delight! you are paler than you were. are you not well?" trennahan's voice became tender from long habit. the softness and fire sprang to helena's eyes. the pink tide poured into her cheeks. a sudden intense light sprang into trennahan's eyes. it held hers for the fraction of a moment, then both looked away; and ate their oysters. it was helena who spoke first. "another moment, and we should have been launched into the second chapter. but we are not to flirt; we understand that thoroughly. i don't think, on second thoughts, that i should like you at all. you have yourself too well in hand; you look as if you had been through it all too many times; there isn't a bit of freshness about you--oh, bother, i hate lying! i'll tell you plainly and have done with it,--i should be in love with you by this time if it were not for 'léna. that's not the way of older climes, but it's mine: i've got to talk out or die. i've always said everything that occurred to me. let's talk this out, and then we'll never talk for two minutes alone again. if you had not been in love with 'léna, should you be in love with me by this time?" he put his fork down abruptly and turned to her. she shrank a little. "i think we had better let that subject alone. as a product of older climes, i am competent to judge." "i must know. i will know. tell me." "well, then, i should." "as much as you are with 'léna?" "i should have been madder about you than i have been about any woman for fifteen years." "if you know that, how can you help it now?" "there is such a thing as honour in men." "that means that there is none in women? well, i don't believe there is. but honour does not keep a man from loving a woman." he made no reply. "does it?" "are you mad about fire? or is it your vanity that is insatiable?" again he met her eyes. and this time her face was as white as her gown. her bosom was heaving. her skin was translucent. to trennahan's suffused vision she seemed bathed in white fire. "i love you," he said hoarsely; "and i would give all the soul i've got to have met you a year ago." xiii talk about the complex heart of a woman. it is nothing to that of a man. trennahan had loved a good many women in a good many ways. perhaps he understood women as well as any man of his day: he had been bred by women of the world, and his errant fancy had occasionally sent him into other strata. he also thought that he knew himself. his mind, his heart, his senses, the best and the worst in him, had been engaged so often and so actively that he could have drawn diagrams of each, alone or in combination, with accommodating types of woman. he also, without generalising too freely, knew men, and he had spent ten years of his life in diplomacy. but he now stood before himself as puzzled as he was aghast. if his grip upon himself had suddenly relaxed, and he had spent a wild night with the wild young men of san francisco, he should not have been particularly surprised: he had been living on an exalted plane for the last ten months. but that he loved magdaléna with the love of his life, that he realised in her some vague youthful ideal, that she was the woman created for the better part of him, that his highest happiness was to be found in her, he had never doubted from the minute he had finished his long communion with himself and determined to marry her. and every moment he had spent with her had strengthened the tie. nothing about her but had pleased him: her intellect, her pride, her reticence, her difference from other women; even, after the first shock to his taste was over, her lack of beauty. it was true that she had no great power over his pulses, but he was tired of his pulses. she appealed to his tenderness and deeper affections as no woman had done. above all, she had given him peace of mind; and she held his future in her hands. and now? helena belmont was that most dangerous rival of other women,--a girl whom men loved desperately with no attendant loss of self-respect. whatever their passion, they felt a keen personal delight in the purity of her mind; and they admired themselves the more that they appreciated her cleverness. she was not only a woman to love but to idolise; she gave even these prosaic san francisco youths vague promptings to distinguish themselves by some great and noble action, sending her shafts straight through the american brain to those dumb inherited instincts which had straggled down through the centuries from mediæval ancestors. her very selfishness--which she was pleased to call paganism--charmed them: it was one of the divine rights of the woman born to rule men and to create a happiness for one unimagined by lesser women. no man but idealised her, unfanciful as he might be, not so much for her beauty or gifts, or for all combined, as because when she gave herself it would be for the last as it was for the first time. as the reader knows, there was nothing ideal about helena. even her fastidiousness was natural in view of her upbringing. she was a most practical young flirt, with a very distinct intention of having her own way as long as she lived. the wealth and petting and adulation which had surrounded her from birth had made a thorough-going egoist of her, albeit a most charming one; for she was warm-hearted, impulsive, generous, and kind--in her own way. naturally the men for whom her lovely eyes beamed welcome, for whom her tantalising mouth pouted into smiles, thought her nothing short of a goddess, and were moved to inarticulate rhyme. * * * * * trennahan had met many more women who were beautiful, seductive, dashing, and withal fastidious, than had these young men of a cosmopolitan and still chaotic state; nevertheless, he might have been adam ranging the dreary solitudes of paradise, facing about for the first time upon the first woman. helena was the type of woman for whom such men as meet her have the strongest passion of their lives, if for no other reason than because she induces an exaggeration of their best faculties and a consequent exaltation of self-appreciation, as distinguished from mere masculine self-sufficiency. never is the briefly favoured one so much of a man apart from a type, looking down upon that type with pitying scorn. this is a mere matter of fascination, too subtle, and composed of too many parts for man's analysis, but it is the most telling force in the clashing of the sexes. trennahan was an extremely practical man. he called things by their right names, and scorned to turn his head aside when life or himself was to be looked squarely in the eye. it is true that he cursed himself for a fool. he was neither in his youth nor in his dotage; he was in that long intermediate period where a man may hope that his will and sound common-sense are in their prime,--the interval of the minimum of mistakes. nevertheless, he was as madly in love with helena belmont as was the first man with the first woman, as a boy with his first mistress, an old man with his last. he admitted the fact and ordered his brain to make the best of the situation. he was not conscious of any change in his feelings for magdaléna except that he no longer desired to marry her. the sense of rest, of comradeship, the tenderness and affection, had not abated. he was just as sure that she was the woman for him to marry as he had been two weeks ago; and he knew that he could not make a greater mistake than to marry helena belmont. he believed that it would be years before she would be capable of loving any man for any length of time. such women not only develop slowly, but they have too much to give, men too little. the clever woman is abnormal in any case, being a divergence from the original destiny of her sex. the woman who is beautiful, fascinating, passionate, and clever is a development with which man has not kept pace. he spent the greater part of the three days following the dinner, on the cliffs beyond the golden gate. there was no great moral battle going on in his mind; he intended to marry magdaléna. one of his pet theories was that one secret of the rottenness underlying the social, and in natural sequence, the political structure of the united states was the absence of a convention. men were on their knees to women so long as their pleasure was materially abetted by the attitude; but the moment the motive ceased to exist, any display of chivalry toward her would be as useless and wasted as toward the ordinary run of women. it is always the woman of the moment, never woman in general. the so-called chivalry of american men does not exist; the misconception has arisen out of the multitudinous examples of american subserviency to the individual woman,--which is part of a habit of exaggeration natural to a youthful nation. there is an utter absence of all responsibility that is not the concomitant of personal desire. the new country is full of good impulses with little to bind them together. children respect their parents if they feel like it, just as they are polite when in a responsive mood, not through any sense of convention. the american press is an exemplification of this absence of _noblesse oblige_, and more particularly in its treatment of women. even when not moved by personal jealousy or spite, the total lack of respect with which the american press treats women who have not in any way challenged public opinion--society women with whom the public has no concern, women upon whom either the misfortune of circumstances or of a powerful individuality has fallen--is the most significant foreboding of the degeneration of a national character while yet half grown. it is individualism, which is a polite term for rampant selfishness, run mad, a fussy contempt and hatred for the traditions of older nations. fifty years ago, when the united states was still so old-fashioned as to be hardly "american," it was more or less bound together by the conventions it had inherited from the great civilisations that begat it. these conventions exist to-day only in men of the highest breeding, those with six or eight generations behind them of refinement, consequence, and fastidiousness in association. in these men, the representatives of an aristocracy that is in danger of being crippled and perhaps swamped by plutocracy, exists the convention which forces the most deplorable degenerate of old-world aristocracy to manifest himself a gentleman in every crucial test. so thoroughly did trennahan comprehend these facts, so profound was his contempt for the second-rate men of his country, that he was almost self-conscious about his honour. he would no more have asked magdaléna to release him, nor have adopted the still more contemptible method of forcing her to break the engagement, than he would have been the ruin of an ignorant girl. but he would have sacrificed every green blade in his soul to have met helena belmont a year ago, and would have taken the chances with defiance and the consequences without a murmur. to marry magdaléna in june was impossible. that he should ever cease to desire helena belmont, to regret the very complete happiness which might have been his for a few years, was a matter of doubt,--with even possibilities. but there must be a long intermission before he could marry another woman. his determination to leave california for a year was fixed, but what excuse to offer don roberto and magdaléna was the question which beset him in all his waking hours and amid all his torments. during these three days he avoided seeing magdaléna alone. on the afternoon of the fourth day he came face to face with helena belmont in the mercantile library. she was leaving as he entered. they looked at each other for a moment, then without a word both walked toward a room at the right of the door. this was a long narrow apartment leading off the great room, and was darker, dustier, gloomier, grimmer. as the building stood almost against another of equal height, its side windows looked upon blank walls; but some measure of grey light was coaxed down from the narrow strip above by means of reflectors. the walls were lined with old books bound in calf black with age, and in the centre was a long narrow table which looked as if it should have a coffin on it. this room had depressed many cheerful lovers in its time; it was enough to drive tormented souls to suicide. trennahan and helena sat down in an angle where they were least likely to be seen. "what are you going to do?" asked helena. "i am going away for a year as soon as i can invent a decent excuse." "then shall you come back and marry 'léna?" "yes." "suppose you still love me?" "it will make no difference. and time works wonders. you will have quite forgotten me." "i sincerely hope i shall." her voice shook. there was agitation in every curve of her figure. but had anyone entered, their faces could not have been distinguished two feet away. the sky was grey. there was no light to reflect. "it is the first time i haven't got what i wanted," she said ingenuously. "it will make your next triumph the keener. i shall be glad to serve as a shadow for the high lights." "i have suffered horribly in the last week." "so have i, if that consoles you. but i have had a good deal of suffering in my life, one way and another, and i shall weather it. i wish i could take your share." "shouldn't you like to marry me?" "of course i should. why do you ask such foolish questions?" "i want to talk it all out. i love 'léna, but i don't love her better than i do myself, and i don't see why i should suffer instead of she. don't you think that if we told her she would release you?" "undoubtedly; but i shall not ask her. nor must you think of such a thing. why two young and exceptionally fortunate girls should want what is left of me god only knows; but if they do the prior rights must win the day. if i don't marry 'léna, i shall marry no woman,--not even you." she gave him a swift glance. his face was not as stern as his words. "you know that you would," she said with decision. "you are too honourable to break the engagement, but you would marry me if it were broken for you." he drew his brows together and bent his face to hers. "listen to me," he said. "i mean what i say. i love you,--how much you have not the vaguest idea; but i will not have her happiness ruined. if you ask her to break the engagement, i shall never see you again. will you remember that?" "i suppose you are right. i had not really thought of asking her. but i've got to tell her that i love you. i feel like a hideous hypocrite. i can hardly look her in the face. i'll promise not to betray you, but i must tell her that. she has been so sweet to me this last week, ever since that night at monterey. she's the very best creature that ever lived. then i'll ask papa to take me away. you need not go." "i shall go. can't you go away without saying anything to her about it? i don't see why her peace of mind should be disturbed." "i should feel just as guilty when i came back." "you would have forgotten it by that time." "oh, no; i shouldn't! i shouldn't!" there was no mistaking the passion in her voice. trennahan half rose, but sat down again. "i would rather you wrote it to her after you left," he said. "then there would be no danger of saying too much. if you want to go to europe, i will go to the south sea islands." "well, i will arrange it that way, if you like." her head was lowered. she spoke dejectedly. there was little of the old helena manifest. in truth, she had been making a mighty effort to control herself for the first time in her life. she hardly knew whether she wished to do what was right or not; for the moment she was dominated by a stronger will than her own. she drew a deep sigh. "i wish i could take it as coolly as you do," she said. "i take it less coolly. but i am older and used to self-control." "i hate self-control." "so do i." "i feel as if life were quite over. i would a great deal rather die than not. i wish i were older. i don't know what to do. i feel that it cannot be right to throw away the happiness of one's life, but i don't know how to hold you, and, above all, i don't want to hurt 'léna. i thought that i knew so much; but i know nothing at all--nothing." "if you do what is right, you will be very glad a year hence." "a year is such a long time." her head dropped lower. she looked utterly dejected. in a moment she put her handkerchief to her face and cried silently. the undemonstrativeness of the act, so unlike her usual volcanic energy, touched him out of prudence. he put his arm about her and pressed her head against his shoulder. in a moment he laid his face against hers and closed his eyes to crowd back the tears that sprang from the depths of his soul. when he opened his eyes, it was to meet those of magdaléna. xiv she had left them without a word, and trennahan did not see her until the following evening, when she sent for him. she received him in the room at the end of the hall, where they were sure not to be interrupted. as he entered he averted his face hastily, and cursed himself for a scoundrel. but he went straight to the point. "i have made you suffer," he said, "and as only you can suffer. i have no excuse to offer except my own weakness. do you remember that i asked you once if you thought you could love me did you come to understand all the weakness of my nature, and that you replied you could? will you forgive me this display of it? i have no desire--no intention of marrying any other woman." "i have not doubted your honour. but i shall not marry you. i do not want you without your love. i see now that i never had it." "you did, and you have it still. it is impossible for a man to explain himself to a woman. will you let me decide for both? i am going away for a time. when i return i want you to marry me." she shook her head. "there would be three people miserable instead of one. if i had not gone there yesterday, perhaps i should never have known: i simply made up my mind after that night at monterey that i would think no more about it. by and by you might have got over it and we might have been happy in a way--i don't know. it is not your fault that i found out. and i went to the library by the merest chance yesterday. it seems like fate, and i shall recognise it. if helena did not love you, it would be different; but i had a terrible scene with her last night. i never thought even she could feel so. for the time i felt much sorrier for her than for myself--i felt rather dull, for that matter. after she went i thought all night. it was a terrible night." she stopped and shivered. he took her hand, but she withdrew it. "i thought of everything. you know i once told you that my only religion was to do what i believed to be right. if love means anything, it means that one should make the other person happy, not oneself. i thought and thought. you two were more to me than any people living. i have not ever really loved anyone else, except my aunt, and her not half so much as helena. therefore my love would not be worth much if i did not consider you two before myself. if helena did not love you, it would be different. i would try to forget that she had fascinated you, and i should see no reason why i should not marry you if you still wished me to. but she loves you. i never expected to see such tragedy. but even if i did not believe she would make you happy, i would not give you to her, for i vowed to live for that--long before the night at tiny's--in the garden. but helena could make any man happy. she has everything." she paused again. he made no reply for a moment. he was staring at the carpet, at a hideous green-and-yellow dragon. the comedy which cuts every black cloud in thin staccato blades was suggesting that he had something to be grateful for, inasmuch as the scene with helena had been spared himself. "you are far more suited to me than she is," he said finally. "i am too old for her. i am not for you. if we have souls, yours and mine were made for each other. years have nothing to do with us. they would mean everything between helena and myself." she leaned forward and fixed her eyes on his, compelling his gaze. "if you had never met me, would you not be engaged to helena by this time?" "doubtless, but that proves nothing." "will you give me your word of honour that you do not wish you were free, that you would not gladly marry her now?" he drew a long breath. he felt like a prisoner on the witness stand driven to save himself by incrimination of another. but he was in that state of mind when only the truth is possible. "i will put it in another way. do you want anything in the world as much as helena?" "no," he said; "i do not." she got up and walked to the window, and drew aside the curtains. the sky was brilliant with moon and stars; the bay and hills lovely with the mystery of night. california had never been more unsympathetically beautiful. she jerked the curtains together and went back to him. as she did not sit down, he rose. "that is all," she said, "except that you must let me explain to my father." "and let you bear the whole brunt of it. not if i know myself." "you must. i understand him, and you do not. besides, if he knew that you and helena had anything to do with the breaking of the engagement he would never let me speak to either of you again, and i have no other friends. i shall tell him that i no longer wish to marry you, and he cannot compel me to give reasons. if he speaks to you about it, you must tell him that you will marry no woman against her will, and let him see that you mean it." "magdaléna, you are a grand woman." "i am a very dull and stupid person who has made up her mind that the only chance of making life bearable is to do what is right. i am terribly commonplace. i wonder you stood me as long as you did." "you are the reverse of stupid and commonplace; and i am by no means sure that you are doing right. i, too, have thought over this matter, for nearly as many days as you have hours. i have tried to get outside myself, to view the case quite dispassionately; and i honestly believe that--as you insist upon putting me before yourself--it would be better for me to marry you than helena." "i do not believe it. nor could i marry you after what you just acknowledged. i have never had much pride with you, but i have that much. marry you when you said that you wanted nothing so much in the world as to marry helena belmont? that was the end of everything." he left the room and the house. magdaléna went up the stair slowly, assisting herself with the banister. her limbs felt as if their muscles had fallen to dust. her heart seemed to have taken it outside of herself altogether; there was no sensation where sensation was supposed to sit, unless it were that of vacancy. her brain was not confused; she did not feel in the least as if she were going to be ill. she knew what she had done, what she had to do in the future; and she wished that her heavy limbs were as dead as that something within her for which she had no name. xv the next morning she received a note from trennahan. i am sailing for honolulu. do nothing until my return. i shall be gone six weeks. until your final decision i shall consider myself bound to you. and, i repeat, i think it best that we should marry. you have acted on impulse, and your mind and judgment were constructed to work slowly. and god knows this is not a matter to be decided in haste. i shall have sailed before even a telegram from you could reach me. don roberto knows that i have thought more than once of a trip to the islands. tell him when he returns that i suddenly decided to go. j. t. but magdaléna wanted no respite. it was her temper to die once rather than a thousand times. her father was in sacramento on business. he would return the following day. she was too dull and listless to feel fear of him, but she wanted it over. she wrote at once to helena, enclosing trennahan's letter: "i have made up my mind, and that is the end of it. as far as i am concerned, he now belongs to you. i shall speak to papa to-morrow night. immediately after i shall write to mr. trennahan, and that will put an end to my part in the matter." helena ordered her devoted parent to take her to southern california at once. to pick up the old routine, to show herself daily and nightly in the studied simulacrum of her former self, was no part of her code. she felt she should tell every man that came near her that she hated him, and the reason why. nor was hers the temperament for suspense without diversion. she could live through the next six weeks with change of scene, but not otherwise. she made a full confession to her father and received the severest reprimand of her life; but colonel belmont took her to southern california. magdaléna went to a lunch-party on the day following trennahan's departure and paid calls during the afternoon. the small details diverted her, and she found herself able to make conversation, despite the sluggish current of misery beneath. she had told her mother of her determination not to marry trennahan; and although mrs. yorba had paced the room in apprehension of her husband's wrath, she was secretly pleased. a daughter, particularly one that gave no trouble, was companionable and useful, and she saw no reason why she should be asked to give her to any man for years to come. although meagre, she was not heartless, and was much relieved that magdaléna appeared indifferent to the sudden break. she was dimly conscious that she did not understand her daughter, but she had no desire to plumb the depths; she had a substantial distaste for the spanish nature when roused. her husband was expected to return in time for dinner. she went to bed with an attack of neuralgia a little after six. magdaléna did not see her father until he entered the dining-room with her uncle. he inquired immediately for trennahan, who usually dined with him when there were no engagements elsewhere. "he decided suddenly to go to the sandwich islands and sailed yesterday." "very sorry he no wait until i come back. i think i gone with him. always i want to see the islands. i work long enough now: go to travel some and see the world. so queer to think is so much world outside california. when you go to europe, i go too. and you, too, eeram. you no can go with us, for both cannot leave the bank, but when we coming back you take the vacation, too." "i never expect to see the outside of california again," said mr. polk, shortly. magdaléna's nerves shook for the first time in seventy-two hours. she appreciated the ordeal she had to face within the next. the dull ache in every nerve of her gave place to a certain keenness of apprehension. what would that terrible little man do? she had absorbed something of her father's personality as a child. during the last year she had talked much with him and had discovered the strange weaknesses and fears which lurked in that manufactured character. she fully realised what a son-in-law like trennahan meant to him. he was quite capable of killing her. and during the last three or four weeks he had flown into more than one violent passion, prompted by a liver disordered by too much dining out. while the two men were drinking their coffee, she left the room and went to the office. the riding-whip was in its old place; on a shelf in the cupboard was a brace of pistols. magdaléna threw the whip into the cupboard, locked the door, and slipped the key behind a book on the mantel. her father came in a moment later. she handed him a cigar and a match. he drew his heavy brows together and puckered his eyelids. "what the matter?" he demanded drily. "so white you are, and the hand tremble." magdaléna sat down and took control of herself. "i am not going to marry mr. trennahan," she said. she held her breath for the expected outburst; but don roberto only stared at her, his eyes slowly expanding. the cigar dropped from his fingers. "he no want marry you?" he ejaculated finally. "i told him that i did not wish to marry him,--i never wish to marry any man,--and he is too proud to insist upon marrying a woman who does not want him. we had a long conversation. we quite understand each other. he will never ask me again." "_dios!_" gasped don roberto. "_dios!_" but there was no anger in his voice. his eyes rolled from magdaléna to the window and back again. finally he said,-- "he no come back, then?" "he is coming back in six weeks." don roberto drew a long breath and seemed to recover himself. "then si he no break the engagement, he feel glad si it is make again. you marry him the day after he come back. i fixit that." "no power on earth can make me marry him." her father searched her countenance. he knew her character. did it not have that iron of new england in it for which he would have sold his birthright? he might turn her into the street, and it would avail him nothing. again his features relaxed, this time not with surprise and consternation, but with abject fear. he shuddered from head to foot; then his hands shot up to receive his face. he groaned and rocked from side to side. magdaléna was aghast. what feeling was alive in her united in filial tenderness. she went to him and put her hands uncertainly about his head, then stroked his hair awkwardly: she was little used to endearments. "i never thought--" she stammered. "i never thought--" "thirty years i work like the slave, and now all going! eeram, he have the death-tick in him: i hear! and now i no go to have the son, and i go to die in the streets like the others; with no one cents! _ay! yi! ay! yi!_" magdaléna was pricked with a new fear: was her father insane? she had heard of the "fixed idea." this weevil had been burrowing in his brain for more than a quarter of a century. she went back to her chair and said assertively,-- "you are one of the ablest financiers in california: everybody says so. nothing can change that, whether uncle dies or not. this is all a fancy of yours. you don't half appreciate yourself. and you are tired out to-night, and have not been well lately--" "all going! all going! _ay de mi! ay de mi!_ why i no dying with the wife and the little boy? make myself over, and now the screws go to drop out my character, and i am like before." magdaléna had an inspiration. "take me into the bank," she said eagerly. "teach me everything. i am sure i can learn. then i will look after everything when uncle dies. i want to work--" don roberto dropped his hands and gave a low roar. "the women all fools, and you the more big fool i never see. you throw way the clever man like he is old hat, and think you can manage the bank! _madre de dios!_ si i no feel like old clothes, no more, i beating you. to-morrow i do it." his eyes kindled at the prospect. "to-morrow si you no say you marry trennahan, i beating you till you are black like my hat." what remained of magdaléna's apathy left her then. she stood up and faced him, drawing her heavy brows together after his own fashion. "you will never beat me again," she said. "let us have an understanding on that subject before we go to bed to-night. i am your daughter, and i shall always obey you except where the question of my marrying is concerned. but if you ill-treat me i shall leave your house and not return. i am of age, and i have my aunt to go to. now, unless _you_ promise _me_ that you will never raise your hand to me again, i will leave for santa barbara to-night." again don roberto stared at her. but his surprise passed quickly. he was too shrewd a judge of human nature to doubt her. if she had inherited the iron of her mother's ancestors, she had also inherited the pride of the yorbas: she would not permit her womanhood to be outraged. but he could have his revenge in other ways; and he would take it. he gave the promise and ordered her sullenly to send the butler to help him up to bed. xvi during the following week don roberto was very ill. the doctor came three times a day. mrs. yorba and magdaléna sat up on alternate nights. mr. polk was constantly at the bedside. when he retired to snatch an hour's sleep, don roberto's temperature became alarming; of the presence of his wife and daughter he took no notice whatever. as the ego must enter into all things, magdaléna, despite her alarm and pity, was grateful for the diversion. the interview with her father had roused her abruptly and finally; and during that night her misery had raged in every part of her. it is true that in the long watches thought fairly stamped in her brain, but it was rudely brushed aside every little while by the imperious wants of the sick man, or the whispered remarks of the professional nurse. at other times she slept heavily or received the numerous friends who came to inquire for the eminent citizen who had dined out too often during the gayest season in many years. don roberto recovered, and his convalescence was as memorable as his previous social activity. no nurse would remain more than thirty-six hours at any price; and even his wife, whose ideas of marital duty were as rigid as her social code, lost her patience upon one occasion and rated him soundly. mr. polk was the only person he treated with common decency. as for magdaléna, he might have been a sultan and she his meanest slave. but magdaléna was rather pleased than otherwise. her conscience had flagellated her as the immediate cause of his illness, and she strove by every act of devotion to make amends. as soon as he was sufficiently recovered, he was taken, in a special car, to fair oaks, to absorb the sun on his spacious verandahs. magdaléna had asked the doctor to order southern california, but the order had been received with such a roar of fury that the subject was not resumed. magdaléna was forced to return to menlo park. she spent the night walking the floor of her room, struggling for endurance to face the places eloquent of trennahan. there were so many of them! helena simply would not have returned; no power short of physical force could have compelled her. more than once magdaléna wished that she was cast in her friend's anarchic mould. she felt that did her grip upon herself relax she should scream aloud and grovel on the very boards that had had their share in her brief love-life. but she was magdaléna yorba, the proudest woman in california; in the very hour of her discovery, when she had been possessed of a blind terror rather than grief, she had remembered to be thankful that the world could not pity her. even the genuine sympathy of tiny would have been gall in a raw wound. she was looking thinner and plainer than ever, but her father's illness would account for that. she must set her features in steel and lock them, keep her emotions for the night. the next day she visited every spot associated with trennahan,--not once, but many times. she had made up her mind with the right instinct that the thing to do was to blunt her sensibilities. by the third day she had ordered the earlier associations on duty, and managed to confuse them somewhat with those which had held possession for so brief a time. she was determined to succeed. she had no right to love the husband of another woman, and suffering was something so much more terrible than anything her imagination had ever hinted that she was frantic to get rid of the load as quickly as possible. by and by she would go back to her writing; and that, and her duties, should be every bit of her life henceforth. at the end of a week she discovered that she was still receptive to the æsthetic delights. it was early spring. the soft air caressed the senses, perfumed with violet and lilac, castilian roses, new clover, and the breath of mountain forests, brought on the long sighs of the wind. never was there such a _bouquet_ since time began. over a high bush on the lawn opposite her window the long "bridal wreaths" tumbled. the meadows were full of mustard, the bright green leaves hardly visible, so thick were the yellow blossoms. once she rode to the foot-hills, escorted by dick. they were covered with yellow and purple lupins, miniature jungles which harboured nothing more sanguinary than the gopher and the cotton-tail. the tawny poppies had hills all to themselves, a blaze of colour as fiery as the sun to which they lifted their curved drowsy lips. the mariposa lilies grew by the creeks, in the dark shade of meeting willows. the gold-green moss was like plush on the trees. from the hills the great valley looked like a dense forest out of which lifted the tower of an enchanted castle. not another signal of man was to be seen, nothing but the excrescence on the big wedding-cake house of a bonanza king. beyond the hills rose the slopes of the mountains, with their mighty redwoods, their dark untrodden aisles, their vast primeval silences. magdaléna was thankful that nature had not ceased to be beautiful, and pressed her hands against her heart to stifle its demand; nature commands union, and has no sympathy for aching solitude. meanwhile don roberto was recovering rapidly. from the hour that he could walk briskly about the garden his voluble irascibility left him, and he reverted to something more than his old taciturnity; he rarely opened his mouth except to put the plainest of food into it, even to speak to mr. polk. his brows were lowered constantly over heavy brooding eyes; his lips seemed set with a spring. when he finally addressed his wife, it was to tell her that she must manage with one butler and one housemaid. coincidently he dismissed two of the gardeners and commanded the one retained, and dick, to plant in a part of the lawns that there might be less water used. himself came from town every evening and worked in the garden for two hours, besides arising at five in the morning and working until breakfast. he sold his finest carriage horses to mr. geary; and when one of the two remaining was temporarily disabled, he rode to and from the station in the spring wagon. the monthly allowance of his wife and daughter was suspended for the summer. mrs. yorba, tall, garbed in black, stalked about the house with the expression of an outraged empress; magdaléna, being the cause of the outrage, was rarely addressed. she ostentatiously made over several of her old frocks and coldly requested her daughter to make her own bed. she kept all the windows in the house, with the exception of one in each room, closed and shuttered, as she was deprived of both service and water. the house seemed perpetually expectant of funeral guests, its silence only broken by mrs. yorba's heavy sighs. magdaléna had certainly succeeded in making three people miserable; she could only hope that she had been more fortunate with the other two. she spent most of her time out of doors, riding or walking until her strength was exhausted. she was profoundly grateful that she was to take little part in the socialities of the summer. to dance and picnic and tennis and ride to the hills, exactly as she had done when quite another person! she infinitely preferred the disapproval of her parents and the freedom they gave her. xvii trennahan had written to magdaléna from the islands, acknowledging the letter she had written him after her interview with her father, and accepting his dismissal. he returned to san francisco the last of may. almost immediately she received a letter from helena announcing her engagement to him. helena, while in southern california, had written to magdaléna with her accustomed regularity. the letters were bitter with self-reproach alternated with the very joy of being alive in that opulent southern land. when she wrote of the engagement she assured the dearest friend she had on earth that if things had turned out differently she should have gone away and got over it somehow, but as magdaléna's decision was irrevocable she intended to be the happiest girl in the world; it wouldn't do anybody a bit of good if she wasn't. magdaléna felt no bitterness toward her. she had lost trennahan; the woman mattered nothing. she would rather it were helena than another; for who else could make him so happy? but she knew that she should see less of helena in the future, and she hardly knew whether she were glad or sorry. she wished that she had the courage to ask her to keep him away from menlo park this summer. the other girls moved down, bringing many guests, and she saw them daily; habit is not broken in a moment. they passed through fair oaks as usual on their afternoon drives, stopping for a chat; in their char-à-bancs or on the verandah. it was some time before they discovered the changes in the yorba household, and when they did they merely shrugged their shoulders at the old don's eccentricities. the big parlours were certainly to be regretted; but there were other parlours that were not half bad, and it was terribly up-hill work entertaining don roberto. they were profoundly sorry for magdaléna, and were so insistent in their demands that she should spend much of her time with them that she found her solitude far less complete than she had hoped. but helena and trennahan were not to come down until the first of july; they had gone with colonel belmont to the yosemite, geysers and big trees. xviii trennahan in that first month thought little of magdaléna. he hardly knew whether he were happy or not; he certainly was intoxicated. helena was both impassioned and shy, a companion to whom words were hardly a necessary medium for thought, and magnificently uncertain of mood. moreover, whether riding a donkey up the steep dusty grades of the yosemite, or half veiled in a mist of steam, reeking of hell, or standing with wondering eyes and parted lips among the colossal trees of calaveras, she was always beautiful. and trennahan worshipped her beauty with the strength of a passion which had sprung from a long and recuperative sleep. that he was twice her age mattered nothing to him now. nothing mattered but that she was to be wholly his. the morning after his return to menlo he awoke with a confused sense that he should be late for his morning ride with magdaléna. he laughed as his senses rattled into place, but he sighed just after; and both the laugh and the sigh were magdaléna's, grim as the former may have been. that had been a time of peace and perfect content, and he could never forget it, not though he lived long years of unimaginable bliss with helena--which he probably would not. a part of his life, limited and stunted a part as it was, belonged irrevocably to magdaléna. he concluded, after some hard thinking, that it was his best part. he had given her something of his soul, and he had no wish to take it back. he had given her the reviving aspirations of an originally noble nature; the sun of her had shone upon the barren soil, and the harvest was hers. he was an unimaginative man, but he was inclined to believe that if there was a future existence, magdaléna would belong to him then and for ever, that something even less definable than the soul of each belonged to the other. for there was nothing to be ashamed of in his love for helena. she appealed as powerfully to his mind and heart as to his passion. but there was something beyond all, and he had no name for it,--unless it were that principle of absolute good as distinguished from its grades and variations; and it belonged to the girl whom he certainly no longer wanted in this life. he wished that he had suggested to helena to spend the summer in san rafael or monterey. menlo park belonged to magdaléna; he found himself hating the thought of having a series of very perfect memories disturbed, even by the most passionately loved of women. and so magdaléna had her first revenge. he went reluctantly enough to fair oaks in the afternoon. the very leaves whispered as they drove through the woods. he had protested, but helena must see 'léna at once; she could never be entirely happy until she had looked into 'léna's eyes and convinced herself that they were quite unchanged. and trennahan must go, too, and have it over. trennahan, who only crossed her whims for the pleasure of making up with her later, admitted that she was right, and went. mrs. yorba was on the verandah receiving mrs. geary and mrs. brannan. magdaléna was upstairs in her room. the monotony of those afternoon receptions had taken its place among the distasteful things of life, and she was determined not to go down until she was sent for. each time she heard wheels she went to the window and looked out. the third time she saw trennahan and helena. the very bones of her skeleton seemed to fall upon each other; she sank to the ground with less vigour than a shattered soldier. but in a moment she gave a hard gasp and pressed her hands to her face. then she heard helena's voice,--that sweet husky voice which was not the least potent of her charms. "'léna! 'léna! well, i'll go look for her." magdaléna scrambled to her feet and fled down the hall to her mother's dressing-room. there, in a cupboard, was always a decanter of sherry; for mrs. yorba, after her neuralgic attacks, was often faint. magdaléna filled a glass, drank it, and blessed the swift fire which shook her will free and made a disciplined regiment of her nerves. she was so delighted at her sudden mastery over herself that she ran out into the hall, caught helena in her arms, and kissed her demonstratively. helena burst into tears. "you are the best girl on earth," she sobbed. "and i feel so wicked; but i am so happy." magdaléna dried her tears, a part she had filled many times. "you are the dearest and most honest girl in the world," she said. "oh, i try to be honest, but i get so mixed up. i wish i could have a new set of commandments handed down all for myself, and that i could have made the rough draft of them. then i'd be quite happy. but come down and see jack,--i couldn't stand john. he's awfully brown and looks splendid." trennahan gave magdaléna's hand a friendly shake and asked her what the plans for the summer were. "papa has a frightfully economical fit and says we are not to entertain any more. he doesn't even allow us enough water to wash the windows; and if this supply of gasoline gives out before the end of the summer, we've got to burn oil." "magdaléna!" gasped mrs. yorba. she wondered if her contribution to the yorbas had suddenly gone mad. but the sherry was in magdaléna's head. she was quite conscious of it, but recklessly decided to let it have its way so long as it helped her to convey to trennahan the information that he was no more to her than the browning tuberoses on the lawn. "it's only what everybody knows," she replied. "i am sure everybody in menlo has discussed him threadbare. mr. trennahan, you happened upon him in the oasis of his life; you never could stand it to dine here now. we can scarcely see to eat, and he never opens his mouth except to swear at the servants." mrs. yorba was speeding her guests. when she returned, she gave her daughter an annihilating glance and went into the house. trennahan stared at magdaléna. he saw her object, but could not guess the motive-power behind. a sudden, sickening fear assailed him: was magdaléna deteriorating? and he the cause? but magdaléna was rattling on. the sherry seemed to have a marvellous power over one's wits and tongue. why had she not known of it in the days when she had longed to shine? but her mother did not approve of girls drinking wine, and she had rarely tasted it, although until recently it had always been on the table. "you both look so well," she said. "you don't look so tired as most engaged people do. i suppose you don't sit up every night until twelve talking about yourselves, as they generally do, i am told. that must be so fatiguing. mr. trennahan, you are actually stouter. you don't look as if you had been climbing perpendicular mountains. is it true that a man stepped over the bridal veil backward? do tell me all about it!" helena was staring at magdaléna with her mouth half open. she was the least obtuse of mortals, but although she knew that pride was at the root of magdaléna's extraordinary behaviour, she concluded that love had fled, and marvelled, for she had believed magdaléna to be the deepest and most tenacious of women. but she was very glad. "well!" she exclaimed. "something has improved you! you will be fairly brilliant by next winter. and do for goodness' sake, 'léna, give don roberto to understand that he's not to have his own way. he's like all bullies: he'd soon give in if you bullied him. i adore papa, and would do anything on earth for him; but if he had been born a different sort, and gave me trouble, i'd find more than one way of bringing him to terms. just flash your eyes at don roberto as you're flashing them at us, and you'll see the difference it will make." has she ceased to love me? thought trennahan. thank god!--at least i ought to. when they had gone, the sherry had run its course, and magdaléna felt very much ashamed of herself. i overdid it, she thought in terror, as she recalled her scintillating remarks and elaborate manner. he must have suspected! i'll drink no more, and next time i'll be just what i would have been if i had never laid eyes on him--if i die in the attempt. and how i talked! what things i said! great heaven, i made a complete fool of myself! and the knowledge that for once in her life she had thrown her dignity and pride to the winds put her other pain to flight, and she had at least one night unracked by the record within her. xix two days later she met trennahan on the montgomerys' verandah. she was her old sedate self, to his unspeakable relief. that magdaléna should change, be less than the admirable creature he had loved when he was something more than himself, would have seemed no less a calamity than had the stars turned black. she sat up very straight in her prim little way and talked of helena's new project; which was to build bath-houses down by the lagoon at ravenswood and bathe when the tide was in. he told her that he too had a project: to persuade the men of menlo to build a club house, and thus have some sort of informal social centre. she told him that she thought that would be nice, and added that she wished she had a project too, but she was hopelessly unoriginal. trennahan assured her that she did herself injustice; and in these admirable platitudes they pushed along a half-hour like a wheel-barrow, while both thought of the great oak staring at them from the foot of the garden. it will come easier with time, she thought that night, as she pulled her clothes off with heavy fingers. i can almost look him in the eyes without wanting to fling myself at him. his voice does not matter so much, for i always hear it anyway. they say that when you no longer hear a person's voice in your memory the love has gone too. they will be away for a year after they marry. perhaps i shall forget then. my memory is not very good. she opened the upper drawer of her bureau and lifted out her large handkerchief box. in its lower part, carefully hidden away, were trennahan's letters, several of his faded boutonnières, and one of his gloves. she had made up her mind the day she heard of his engagement to helena that these things must be burnt, but had dreaded their sight and touch. now, however, they must go. she was always conscious of their presence; something of her weakness might pass with their destruction. as she lifted out the handkerchiefs she came upon the dagger. it was a beautiful toy, but she pushed it aside resentfully. its magic was not for her. she gathered up her tokens with trembling fingers, resisted the impulse to sit down and weep over them, laid them in the grate, and flung a bunch of lighted matches into the pyre. * * * * * helena immediately gave a party. the belmont house, like most of the others of menlo, had been designed for comfort rather than for entertaining; but the dining-room was large, and when stripped of the many massive pieces of furniture which colonel belmont had brought from his southern home, would have accommodated more dancing folk than the neighbours and their guests. the famous four were not present; nor were they seen in menlo that summer. immediately after the announcement of helena's engagement some cruel wag had sent each a miniature tub with "for tears" inscribed with black paint upon the bottom. it was generally supposed that the afflicted quartette were spending their leisure over these tubs, for they had retired into as complete an obscurity as their various callings would permit. helena told magdaléna that she lived in terror of their poisoned or perforated bodies being found in the dark byways of golden gate park; but the youth of the modern civilisation, while amenable to suffering, thinks highly of himself as a factor in current history. trennahan was not allowed to spend the evening in the smoking-room with the older men; he must keep himself in sight even while his helena was dancing with another. he wandered about with a grim smile on his mouth, talking occasionally to the older ladies who sat in a corner; wall-flowers there were none. he wished that magdaléna would take pity on him, for he was unmercifully bored; but she danced with exasperating regularity. occasionally helena slipped her hand through his arm and took him out in the garden, purring upon his shoulder and begging him not to be bored; but she must look at him! if he insisted upon it, she would not dance. he refused to countenance such a sacrifice, and protested that he was just beginning to understand the pleasure of evening parties. once he did slip away, and was lying, with his coat off, a cigar between his lips, crosswise on a bed upstairs with colonel belmont and mr. washington, when he received a peremptory message to go downstairs at once. he threw his cigar away, jerked himself into his coat, and left the room with jeering condolences in his wake. he felt cross for the moment; but when he reached the hall below he smiled humorously as he met the protesting eyes of his lady. "i can't bear to have you out of my sight!" she exclaimed. "it's horribly selfish, but i feel as if everything were a blank when you are out of the room." what could a man do in the face of so much beauty and so much affection, but to vow to hold up the wall for the rest of the evening? as he was taking magdaléna to her carriage a little after midnight, she said to him shyly,-- "i hope you are quite happy." and he answered with unmistakable fervour, "i am indeed." mrs. yorba was detained by mrs. cartright, who was delivering herself of many words. "do you believe that love is everything in life?" magdaléna asked him. "by no means. not even to woman, in spite of the poets. it induces intense concentration for the time, consequently looms larger in the affairs of life than the million other scraps that go to make up the vast patchwork. but it is as well to remember that it is but an occasional patch in the quilt, even if it be of the most vivid hue. and there is a lot to be got out of the other patches!" "if you lost helena, could you feel like that?" "in time; beyond a doubt. memory simply cannot hold water beyond a certain strain; there comes a rift at last, and the flood pours through." "then if you lost helena, should you feel as--as--you did when you came here first? you were--tired of everything--you remember. you told me--you don't mind my speaking of it?" she was aghast at her inconsistency, but the magnet in the man was as irresistible as ever. "mind? from you? i have never talked to a human being about myself as i have talked to you. i don't know what would happen to me in such an event. i am neither a fool nor a drunkard, remember. i think i should seek entirely new, barely comprehended, lands,--the south sea islands, for instance. i have wasted my life. i have neither the energies nor the ambitions to pull up now. i should simply seek new oranges and squeeze them dry. there are always the intellectual pleasures, you know. i should not be proud of myself, but i should get through the remaining years somehow." "there was something else--i should not speak of it--" they were standing in the shadow of the char-à-banc. trennahan raised her hand to his lips. "i was in a state of moral chaos when i met you,--that is what you mean. i do not think i ever shall be again. even helena could never do for me what you did. you and i made a great mistake, but we generated one of those singular friendships which no circumstances nor time can annihilate. some day we shall take up the threads where they broke off. i always look forward to that. a man may be contented with one woman's love, but not with one woman's friendship. i am glad that you are as dear to helena as you are to me. in time, perhaps we may all three live more or less together." he was a man of humour, but he said that. she was a woman of little humour, but she laughed. xx the breathless state of helena's affections did not interfere with her desire to lead in all things those favoured of her acquaintance. although, in deference to trennahan's emphatic wish, she forswore eccentricities, she taxed her fertile brain to keep menlo park in a whirl of excitement. "it can't be done," said rose. "the climate has poppy dust in it instead of oxygen, but she may wake us up for a while." she did. the bath-houses were built, and the big char-à-bancs rolled down the dusty road to ravenswood every morning. the salt water and the sun brought out the red in the girls' hair, so the pastime promised to weather one season, at least. she gave dances and picnics on alternate weeks, and her hospitality in the matter of luncheons and dinners was unbounded. the colonel built a bowling-alley and a proper tennis-court; in short, there was no doubt about "the belmonts'" being the nucleus of menlo park. several times helena persuaded the owner of the stage line between redwood city and la honda to let her drive; and she took a select few of her friends on the top of the lumbering coach, relegating the uneasy passengers to the stuffy interior. the road is one of the most picturesque in california, but the grades are steep, the turnings abrupt, dangerous in many places. nevertheless, helena, balancing on her narrow perch high above the wheelers' heels, managed her rapid mustangs so admirably that trennahan, balancing beside her, wondered if he should be able to manage her one half so well. "what helena belmont needs," said mrs. montgomery, with some asperity, "is six babies; and i hope for mr. trennahan's sake she'll have them. otherwise, i should like to know where the poor man is to get any rest; she's a human cyclone." "i never thought she'd marry so soon," replied mrs. brannan. "it looked as if she were going to be a regular old-time belle; and it took them years to get through." "she's not married yet," remarked mrs. montgomery. but these enormous energies, as rose had predicted, reached their meridian in something under two months, after which, much to trennahan's relief, helena succumbed to menlo park, and manifested an increasing desire for long hours alone with him under the trees on the lawn, although she by no means allowed her neighbours to rest for more than seventy-two hours at a time. xxi don roberto and mr. polk took no part in these festivities; mrs. yorba and magdaléna took less and less; the picture made by don roberto in his shirt-sleeves, manipulating a hose as the char-à-banc drove off, finally forbade his wife to riot while her husband toiled. she was angry and resentful; but she was a woman of stern principles, and she had a certain measure of that sort of love for her husband which duty prompts in those who are without passion. "i don't pretend to understand your father," she said to magdaléna. "the bees he gets in his bonnet are quite beyond me, but if he feels that way, he does, and that's the end of it; and he makes me feel uncomfortable all the time i am anywhere. i sha'n't go out again until he gets over this. you can go with somebody else." "i would a great deal rather stay home. i don't enjoy myself. people work so hard to be amused. i'd much rather just sit still and do nothing." "you're lazy, like all the spanish. well, you'll have to do a good deal of sitting still, i expect; and in a sick room, i'm afraid. poor hiram looks thinner and greyer every day. almost all our relations died of consumption." "i wrote to aunt how badly he was looking, but she has not answered." "she won't, the heartless thing. she never loved him. but if he takes to his bed with slow consumption, she'll have to come up and do her share of the nursing. she ought to like it. fat women always make good nurses." magdaléna was more than glad to fall out of the gaieties. she was beginning to feel that most demoralising of all sensations,--the disintegration of will. pride, a certain excitement, and novelty had kept her armour locked for a time; but each time she met trennahan, the ordeal of facing him with platitudes, or, what was worse still, in occasional friendly talks, and of witnessing helena's little airs of possession, suggested a future and signal failure. she came to have a morbid terror that she should betray herself, and when in company with him kept out of the very reach of his voice. she never went to the woods, lest she meet him, with or without helena. in those rustling arbours of many memories, she knew that she should let fly the passion within her. she was appalled that neither time nor will nor principle had authority over her love. she had made up her mind that she would, if not tear it up by the roots, at least level it to the soil from which it had sprung, and she was quite ready to believe that love was not all; that with her youth, intellect, and wealth there was much in life for her. but the plant flourished and was heavy with bloom. even while she avoided him, she longed for the moment when he must of necessity speak to her. she welcomed the excuse to secede from the ranks of pleasurers, but even then she started up at every sound of wheels that might herald his approach. she longed for the wedding to be over; but helena would not marry before december, that being her birth month and eminently suitable, in her logical fancy, for her second launching. colonel belmont, having satisfied himself that everyone in the little drama had acted with honour, was well pleased with his son-in-law; but he was much distressed at the attitude of the old friend who had hoped to fill a similar relation to trennahan. don roberto, taciturn with everybody, refused to speak to colonel belmont, to return his courtly salutation. "i suppose it is natural," said colonel belmont to helena. "don is not only eccentric, but he would almost rather lose a hundred thousand dollars than his own way. but i hope he'll come round in time, for it makes me feel right lonesome in my old age. he and hi were the only real intimates i have had in california, and now hi is going, poor old fellow! and of course i can do little to cheer him up until don thaws out." "do you feel quite well yourself?" asked helena, anxiously. "you often look so terribly pale." "i never was better, honey, i assure you. but remember that you must expect to lose your old father some day. but i've been pretty good to you, haven't i? you'll have nothing but pleasant things to remember?" "you're the very best angel on earth. i don't even love jack so much. i thought i did, but i don't." "don't you love him?" asked her father, anxiously. he was eager for her to marry; he knew that his blood was white. "of course! what a question!" xxii it was an intensely hot september night. magdaléna, knowing that sleep was impossible, had not gone to bed. she wandered restlessly about her large room, striving to force a current of air. not a vibration came through the open windows, nor a sound. the very trees seemed to lean forward with limp hanging arms. across the stars was a dark veil, riven at long intervals with the copper of sheet lightning. her room, too, was dark. a light would bring a pest of mosquitoes. the high remote falsetto of several, as it was, proclaimed an impatient waiting for their ally, sleep. last night, tiny had given a party, and wrung from magdaléna a promise that she would go to it. rose had called for her. at the last moment magdaléna's courage had shrunk to a final shuddering heap, and as she heard the wheels of the geary waggonette, she had run upstairs, and flung herself between the bedclothes, sending down word that she had a raging toothache. it was her first lie in many years, but it was better than to dance with despair and agony written on her relaxed face behind the windows of the garden in which trennahan had asked her to marry him. to-night she was seriously considering the proposition of going to her aunt in santa barbara, with or without her father's consent. her sense of duty had not tumbled into the ruins of her will, but she argued that in this most crucial period of her life, her duty was to herself. helena had not even asked her to be bridesmaid; she took her acquiescence for granted. magdaléna laughed aloud at the thought; but she could not leave helena in the lurch at the last moment. when she got to santa barbara, she could plead her aunt's ill health as excuse for not returning in time for the ceremony. she was in a mood to tell twenty lies if necessary, but she would not stand at the altar with trennahan and helena. her passionate desire for change of associations was rising rapidly to the dignity of a fixed idea. to-morrow there must be a change of some sort, or her brain would be babbling its secrets. already her memory would not connect at times. she felt sure that the prolonged strain had produced a certain congestion in her brain. and she was beginning to wonder if she hated helena. the fires in magdaléna burned slowly, but they burned exceeding hot. she paused and thrust her head forward. for some seconds past her sub-consciousness had grasped the sound of galloping hoofs. they were on the estate, by the deer park; a horse was galloping furiously toward the house. she ran to the window and looked out. she could see nothing. could it be a runaway horse? was somebody ill? the flying feet turned abruptly and made for the rear of the house, then paused suddenly. there was a furious knocking. magdaléna's knees shook with a swift presentiment. something had happened--was going to happen--to her. she stood holding her breath. someone ran softly but swiftly up the stair, and down the hall, to her room. she knew then who it was, and ran forward and opened the door. "helena!" she exclaimed. "what is the matter? something has--mr. trennahan--" helena flung herself upon magdaléna and burst into a passion of weeping. magdaléna stood rigid, ice in her veins. "is he dead?" she managed to ask. "no! he isn't. i wish he were--no, i don't mean that--i'll tell you in a minute--let me get through first!" magdaléna dragged her shaking limbs across the room and felt for a chair. helena began pacing rapidly up and down, pushing the chairs out of her way. "would you like a light?" asked magdaléna. "no, thanks; i don't want to be eaten alive with mosquitoes. oh, how shall i begin? i suppose you think we've had a commonplace quarrel. i wish we had. i swear to you, 'léna, that up to to-night i loved him--yes, i know that i did! i was rather sorry i'd promised to marry so soon, for i like being a girl, not really belonging to anyone but myself, and i love being a great belle, and i think that i should have begged for another year--but i loved him better than anyone, and i really intended to marry him--" "aren't you going to marry him?" "don't be so stern, 'léna! you don't know all yet. lately i've been alone with him a great deal, and you know how you talk about yourselves in those circumstances. i had told him everything i had ever done and thought--most; had turned myself inside out. then i made him talk. up to a certain point he was fluent enough; then he shut up like a clam. i never was very curious about men; but because he was all mine, or perhaps because i didn't have anything else to think about, i made up my mind he should come to confession. he fought me off, but you know i have a way of getting what i want--if i don't there's trouble; and to-night i pulled his past life out of him bit by bit. 'léna! he's had _liaisons_ with married women; he's kept house with women; he's seen the worst life of every city! for a few years--he confessed it in so many words--he was one of the maddest men in europe. the actual things he told me only in part; but you know i have the instincts of the devil. 'léna, _he's a human slum_, and i hate him! i hate him! i hate him!" "but that all belongs to his past. he loves you, and you can make him better--make him forget--" "i don't want to make any man better. i love everything to be clean and new and bright,--not mildewed with a thousand vices that i would never even discuss. oh, he's a brute to ask me to marry him. i hate myself that i've been engaged to him! i feel as if i'd tumbled off a pedestal!" "are you so much better and purer than i? i knew much of this; but it did not horrify me. i knew too, what you may not know, that he came here in a critical time in his--his--inner life, and i was glad to think that--california had helped him to become quite another man." her voice was hoarse, almost inarticulate. helena flung herself at magdaléna's feet. she was trembling with excitement; but her feverish appeal for sympathy met with no response. "that is another thing that nearly drove me wild,--that i had taken him away from you for nothing. i know you don't care now; but you did--perhaps you do now--sometimes i've suspected, only i wouldn't face it--and to think that in my wretched selfishness i've separated you for ever! for your pride wouldn't let you take him back now, and he's as wild about me as ever: i never thought he could lose control over himself as he did when i told him what i thought of him and beat him on the shoulders with both my fists. he turned as white as a corpse and shook like a leaf. then he braced up and told me i was a little wild cat, and that he should leave me and come back when i had come to my senses, that he had no intention of giving me up. but he need not come back. i'll never lay eyes on him again. while he was letting me get at those things, i felt as if my love for him burst into a thousand pieces, and that when they flew together again they made hate. he told me he was used to girls of the world, who understood things; and that the girls of california were so crude they either knew all there was to know by experience, or else they were prudes--" helena paused abruptly and caught her breath. she had felt magdaléna extend her arm and stealthily open a drawer in the bureau beside her chair. there was nothing remarkable in the fact, for in that drawer magdaléna kept her handkerchiefs. nevertheless, helena shook with the palsy of terror; the cold sweat burst from her body. in the intense darkness she could see nothing, only a vague patch where the face of magdaléna was. the silence was so strained that surely a shriek must come tearing across it. the shriek came from her own throat. she leaped to her feet like a panther, reached the door in a bound, fled down the hall and the stair, her eyes glancing wildly over her shoulder, and so out to her horse. it is many years since that night, but there are silent moments when that ride through the woods flashes down her memory and chills her skin,--that mad flight from an unimaginable horror, through the black woods on a terrified horse, the shadow of her fear racing just behind with outstretched arms and clutching fingers. helena's sudden flight left magdaléna staring through the dark at the spanish dagger in her hand. her arm was raised, her wrist curved; the dagger pointed toward the space which helena had filled a moment ago. "i intended to kill her," she said aloud. "i intended to kill her." the mental admission of the design and its frustration were almost simultaneous. her brain was still in a hideous tumult. weakened by suffering, the shock of helena's fickleness and injustice, the sudden perception that her sacrifice had been useless, if not absurd, had disturbed her mental balance for a few seconds, and left her at the mercy of passions hitherto in-existent to her consciousness. her love for her old friend, long trembling in the balance, had flashed into hate. upon hate had followed the murderous impulse for vengeance; not for her own sake, but for that of the man whose weakness had ruined her life and his own. in the very height of her sudden madness she was still capable of a curious misdirected feminine unselfishness. when she came to herself, chagrin that she had failed to accomplish her purpose possessed her mind for the moment, although she had made no attempt to follow helena, beyond springing to her feet. then her conscience asserted itself, and reminded her that she should be appalled, overcome with horror, at the awful possibilities of her nature. the picture of helena in the death struggle, bleeding and gasping, rose before her. her knees gave way with horror and fright, and she fell upon her chair, dropping the dagger from her wet fingers, staring at the grim spectre of her friend. then once more the sound of galloping hoofs came to her ears. both helena and herself were safe. in a few moments her thoughts grouped themselves into a regret deeper and bitterer still. she was capable of the highest passion, and circumstance had diverted it from its natural climax and impelled it toward murder. she sat there and thought until morning on the part to which she had been born; the ego dully attempting to understand, to realise that its imperious demands receive little consideration from the great law of circumstance, and are usually ignored. xxiii the next morning magdaléna did as wise a thing as if inspired by reason instead of blind instinct: she got on her horse and rode for six hours. when she returned home she was exhausted of body and inert of brain. she found a note from helena awaiting her. dearest 'lÉna,--what a tornado and an idiot you must think me! i cannot explain my extraordinary departure. i suppose i was in such a nervous state that i was obsessed in some mysterious manner and went off like a rocket. i can assure you i feel like a stick this morning. you will forgive me, won't you? for you know that although my affections do fluctuate for some people, they never do for you. well! this morning i had a scene with papa. he was very angry, talked about honour and all that sort of thing, said that i was an unprincipled flirt, and that i expected too much of a man. but when i said i could not understand how so perfect a man as himself could wish his daughter to marry a rake, he never said another word, but went off and wound up with mr. trennahan. i don't know what they said to each other; i don't care. it's all too dreadful to think about, and i never want to hear the subject mentioned again. we're going to monterey this afternoon to remain till the end of the season, and then we'll go to the blue lakes for a little before settling down for the winter. i'm tired of menlo. can't you come to monterey for a week or two? do think about it. i haven't a minute to go over to fair oaks to say good-bye, but perhaps you'll come to the train. helena. magdaléna got some luncheon from the pantry, then went to bed and slept until six o'clock. at dinner mr. polk said to her,-- "i saw trennahan this afternoon in a hack with a lot of luggage on behind, and i stopped the driver and got in, and went to the ferry with him. his engagement with helena belmont is broken, it seems, and he is off for samoa. looked like the devil, but was as polite as ever, and asked me to say good-bye to all of you." don roberto looked up. "when he coming back?" he asked. "you know as much about that as i do; or as he does, i guess. he told me that he was going to explore the south seas thoroughly, and that ought to take as many years as he's got left, and more too." it was two or three days before magdaléna realised what a relief it was to have trennahan out of the country. it moved him back among the memories, and struck from her imagination agitating possibilities. and he belonged to no woman! he could never be hers, but at least she could love him. already she had begun to do so with a measure of calm. she could hide him in her soul and count him wholly hers; and the prospect seemed far sweeter and more satisfactory than she should have imagined of such immaterial union. and some day, she believed, he would write to her. he had spoken authoritatively of the permanence of their friendship, and of its necessity to him. he had not loved her, as men count love, but for a little she had been to him something more than other women had been. the spiritual sympathy which had been rudely interrupted, but had surely existed, taught her this. in time he would become conscious again of the bond, and his letters alone would be something to live for. and she had much else. in the evenings when her father was weeding on the lawn, she devoted herself to her uncle; and he seemed grateful for her attentions, slight as was his response. he was visibly shrinking to his skeleton, although he neither coughed nor complained, and went to town every morning with the regularity of his youth. but his gaunt face was less savagely determined, his eyes had lost the hard surface of metal; and one evening when magdaléna slipped her hand into his, he clasped and held it until don roberto, gloomy and perspiring, came panting across the drive. and almost immediately magdaléna began to write. she did not go to her nook in the woods, but after her morning ride she wrote in her room until luncheon. she told her mother of her literary plans and asked her advice about making a similar announcement to her father. between astonishment and consternation mrs. yorba gasped audibly, and her impassive countenance looked as if the hinges had fallen out of its muscles. "for god's sake don't tell your father!" she exclaimed; and she was not given to strong language. "i don't believe you can write, anyhow, and we should only have a terrible scene for nothing." magdaléna accepted the advice. her father showed so little sense of his duty as a parent that her own was growing adaptable to circumstances, although she was still determined not to publish without his knowledge. she had not returned to her english romance: that had been consigned to the flames, and was now meditating in that limbo which receives the wraiths of the lame, the halt, and the blind of abortive talent. she was at work upon the simplest of the old-californian tales. on the saturday afternoon after helena's departure for monterey rose called and invited magdaléna to drive with her to the train to meet mr. geary. tiny and ila, who were with her, added their insistence, and magdaléna, having no reasonable excuse, joined them. as they drove through the woods ila confided her engagement to young washington, and was kissed and congratulated in due form. "i'm going to live in paris," she announced. "no more california for me. you might as well be on mars, in the first place, and everybody cackles over your private affairs, in the second. for the matter of that, you haven't any." "i think it's disloyal of you to desert california," said tiny. "i have a feeling that we should all keep together, and to the country." "that's a very fine sentiment, but though i love you none the less, i want to live. i intend to be the best-dressed american in paris. that's a reputation worth having." "i'm going east to find a husband," said rose, shamelessly. "there's no one to marry here. alan rush would not have been half bad, but he might as well be in an urn on helena's mantel-piece. i like eastern men best, anyhow." "why not go to southern california?" asked tiny. "it's not so far as new york; and there are always plenty of them there." "i should feel like a ghoul,--man-hunting in one-lungdom, as mr. bierce calls it. besides, i'd rather die an old maid than have a sick man on my hands for five minutes. i'm not heartless, but--well, we've all had our experiences with fathers and brothers. a sick man's an anomaly, somehow: he doesn't fit into a woman's imagination." "i'm not going to marry at all," said tiny. "fancy what a lot of bother. it's so comfortable just to drift along like this." "tiny," said rose, "you're a menlo park poppy." they had arrived at the station, the pretty station under its great oak, and flanked by its beds of bloom. eight or ten other equipages were there, waiting for the "daisy train,"--the fast train from town which on saturday afternoons carried many san franciscans to monterey. the women were in their bright summer attire and full of chatter; as the train was not due for some moments, several got out of their carriages and went to other carriages to gossip. it was a very lively and agreeable scene: there being no outsiders, they were like one large family. in the middle of the large open space beside the platform stood several of the phaetons and waggonettes, whose horses stepped high at sight of the engine. on the far side was a row of chinese wash-houses, in whose doors stood the mongolians, no less picturesque than the civilisation across the way. behind them was the tiny village of menlo park. on the opposite side of the track was a row of high closely knit trees which shut the folsom place from the passing eye. caro, under a big pink sunshade, had walked over to chat with her friends and escort her visitors home. the train rolled in and discharged its favoured few. the wait was short, and mr. geary was still mounting the steps of his char-à-banc when magdaléna sat forward with a faint exclamation. the smoking-car was slowly passing. four hats at four consecutive windows were raised as they drifted past. they were the hats of alan rush, eugene fort, carter howard, and "dolly" webster. xxiv the yorba house on nob hill was the gloomiest house in san francisco in any circumstances; upon the return of the family to town this year it suggested a convent of perpetual silence. mrs. yorba, bereft of her full corps of servants, herself shook the curtains free of their loops and pinned them together. "ah kee can play the hose on the windows from the outside once a month," she remarked to her daughter; "but heaven only knows when they will be washed inside again, or how often poor ah kee will have time to sweep the rooms. i shall make an attempt to keep the reception-room in some sort of order; and as it is comparatively small and i can dust it myself, i may succeed, but i don't suppose anyone will ever enter the parlours again. there seems no hope of your father coming to his senses." magdaléna flung her own curtains wide, determined to have light if she had to wash the windows herself. but the rest of the house chilled and oppressed her. even her mother's bedroom was half-lighted, and the halls and rooms downstairs were echoing vaults. one was almost afraid to break the silence; even the soft-footed chinaman walked on his toes. magdaléna conceived the whimsical idea that her father's house had been closed to receive all the family skeletons of san francisco, of which many whispers had come to her. sometimes she fancied that she heard their bones rattling at night, as they crowded together, muttering their terrible secrets. but the idea only amused her; it did not make her morbid, although there was little but her own will to keep her spirits on a plane where there was more light than bog. it was a very grey and rainy winter. she was forced to spend the afternoons after four o'clock in idleness: don roberto himself turned off the gas every morning before he went down town, and on again at seven in the evening. the meals in the dining-room, naturally the darkest room in the house, were eaten in absolute silence. in fact, it was seldom that anyone spoke except on mrs. yorba's reception day. herself wore the air of a stoic. don roberto's keen eyes searched his wife and daughter now and again for any sign of extravagance in attire, but he rarely addressed them except on the first of the month, when he demanded their accounts. he peremptorily forbade them to go out after dusk, as the night air was bad for the horses. the evenings he spent in his study with his brother-in-law. mrs. yorba and magdaléna sat in their respective rooms until nearly half-past ten; when don roberto went the rounds to see that the lights were out. were it not for his fear of earthquakes, he would have turned off the gas at that hour, but he permitted a tiny spark to burn in the halls all night. occasionally mr. polk came home early and went to magdaléna's little sitting-room, the old schoolroom, and sat with her for an hour or two. he said little and never talked of himself. she longed to bring her aunt back to this lonely old man, but did not know in the least how to go about it, and the subject never was mentioned between them; he might have been a bachelor or a widower. but as he sat staring into the fire, magdaléna was convinced that he was thinking of his wife. she had never entered his house since the day of her strange discovery; delicacy kept her away, but her feminine curiosity often tempted her to go in and see if the fires were burning, the flowers and magazines on the table. sometimes at night she heard footsteps in the connecting gardens behind the houses, and fancied they were those of her uncle, gone on what pilgrimage she dared not imagine. she and helena met again early in november. they greeted each other with all their old cordiality, but there was a barrier, and both felt it. still, they exchanged frequent visits, and magdaléna was always interested in helena's new conquests and dazzling regalities. helena was enjoying herself mightily. she had all her old admirers exhausting and coining adjectives at her feet, and a number of distinguished foreigners, who were spending the winter in san francisco. she could not drive, nor yacht, nor run to fires on account of the weather, but she unloosed her energies upon indoor society, and started a cotillion club, and an amateur opera company. she gave a fancy dress ball, to which all her guests were obliged to come in the costumes of old california, and laughed for a week at the ridiculous figure which most of them cut. she also gave many dinners and breakfasts, kettle-drums and theatre parties, and, altogether, managed to amuse herself and others. she never mentioned trennahan to magdaléna. nor did he write. the pacific might have been climbing over him, for any sign he gave. xxv it was midnight, and magdaléna was still awake; a storm raged, prohibitive of sleep. the wind screamed over the hills, tearing the long ribbons of rain to bits and flinging them in great handfuls against the windows; from which they rebounded to the porch to skurry down the pipes and gurgle into the pools of the soaked ground below. the roar of the ocean bore aloft another sound, a long heavy groan,--the fog-horn of the farallones. magdaléna imagined the wild scene beyond the golden gate: the ships driven out of their course, bewildered by the fog, the loud unceasing rattle of the rigging, the hungry boom of the breakers, the mountains and caverns of the raging pacific. her mind, open to impressions once more, stirred as it had not during its period of subservience to the heart, and toward expression. suffering had not worked those wonders with her literary faculty of which she had read; but she certainly wrote with something more of fluency, something less of attenuated commonplace. she had finished her first story; and although it by no means satisfied her, she had passed on to the next, determined to write them all; then, with the education accruing from long practice, to go back to the beginnings and make them literature. to-night she forgot her stories and lay wondering at the ghostly images rolling through her brain, breaking upon the wall which stood between themselves and speech,--hurled back to rise and form again. what did it mean? was some dumb dead poet trying to speak through her brain, inextricably caught in the folds of her ravening intelligence before recognising its fatal limitations? or was that intelligence but the half of another, divided out there in eternity before being sucked earthwards? it was seldom that such fancies came to her nowadays, but to-night the storm shrieked with a thousand voices, no one of which was unfamiliar to these ghosts in her mind. she had heard the expression "hell let loose" variously applied. were those the souls of old and wicked mates tossed into the wild playground of the storm, helpless and furious shuttle-cocks, yelling their protests with furious energy? the idea that she too might have been wicked once thrilled magdaléna unexpectedly: she had had a few sudden brief lapses into primal impulse, accompanied by a certain exaltation of mind. as she recalled them the rest of her life seemed flat by comparison, and unburdened with meaning; something buried, unsuspected, left over from another existence, shook itself and made as if to leap to those doomed wretches, heavy with memories, buffeting each other on the tides of the storm. a crash brought her upright. it had been preceded by a curious bumping along the front of the house. she realised in a moment what it meant: the flag-pole had snapped and been hurled to the ground. she thought of her father's dismay, and shuddered slightly; she was in a mood to greet omens hospitably. suddenly her eyes fixed themselves expandingly upon the door. she was cast in a heroic mould; but the storm and the vagaries of her imagination had unnerved her, and she shook violently as the knob was softly turned and the door moved forward with significant care. had her father gone suddenly mad? the possibility had crossed her mind more than once. she would lock her door hereafter. "what is it?" she faltered. the door was pushed open abruptly. her uncle stood there. for a moment she thought it was his ghost. the dim light of the hall shone on a ghastly face, and he wore a long gown of grey flannel. he held one hand pressed against his chest. in another second she heard the rattling of his breath. she sprang out of bed and ran to him. "i am going to die," mr. polk said. "telegraph and ask her to come." she led him to his room, roused her father and mother, telephoned for the doctor and a messenger boy, then went to her room, dressed, and wrote the telegram. she had little time to think, but the approach of death made her hands shake a little, and lent an added significance to the horrid sounds without. death had been a mere name before these last few moments; he suddenly became an actual presence stalking the storm. the bell rang. she went down to the door herself. it was the messenger boy. she gave him the telegram to despatch, and told him to return and to remain on duty all night. then she went to her uncle's room. her mother and a dishevelled maid were compounding mustard plasters and heating water. her father was huddled in an armchair, staring at the gasping form on the bed. magdaléna shuddered. his face was more terrible to look on than the sick man's. "it's pneumonia, of course," said mrs. yorba, in the hushed whisper of the sick room, although her hard voice was little more sympathetic in its lower register. "he was wet through when he came home this afternoon. i should think it had rained enough for one year." the doctor came and eased the sufferer with morphine; but he gave the watchers no hope. "he has no lungs, anyhow," he said. "this abrupt climax is rather a mercy than otherwise." magdaléna remained by the bedside during all of the next day. early in the morning a telegram came from mrs. polk, saying that she was about to start on a special train. the message was read to her husband, and he whispered to magdaléna, "i should live until she came,--if she took a week." that was the only remark he made until late in the day, when he motioned to magdaléna to bend her ear to his lips. "don't waste your youth," he whispered; and then he coloured slightly, as if ashamed of having broken the reticence of a lifetime. don roberto barely moved from the chair which commanded a view of the dying man's face. his own shrank visibly. he neither ate nor drank. his sunken terror-struck eyes seemed staring through the passing face on the high pillows into an inferno beyond. "i declare, he gives me the horrors, and i'm not a nervous woman," said mrs. yorba to her daughter. "i never could understand your father's queer ways. who would ever have thought that he could care for anyone like that? poor hiram! no one can feel worse than i do; but he has to go, and as the doctor says, this is a mercy; there's no use acting as if you had lost your last friend on earth." "perhaps that's the way papa feels; and as you say, he's not like other people." the only other person in the sick-room was colonel belmont. he came over as soon as he heard of the attack, and sat on the other side of the bed all day, when he was not attempting to make himself useful. his old comrade smiled when he entered; but mr. polk took little notice of anyone. occasionally his eyes rested with an expression of profound pity on the face of his brother-in-law: once or twice he pressed magdaléna's hand; but his attention chiefly centred on the door, although he knew that his wife could not arrive until after midnight. magdaléna went to the train to meet her aunt. it was still raining, but calmly. there was no gay and chattering crowd in market street, not even the light of a cable car flashing through the grey drizzle. magdaléna recalled the night of the fire. her inner life had undergone many upheavals since that night; even her feeling for helena was changed. and her aunt was a mere memory. at the station she left the carriage and walked along the platform as the train drew in. mrs. polk, assisted by a mexican maid, descended from the car. she was very stout, but as she approached magdaléna, it was evident that her carriage had lost nothing of majesty or grace. she kissed her niece warmly. "so good you are to come for me, _mijita_. and when rain, too--so horriblee san francisco. never i want to see again. and the uncle? how he is?" "he says he will live until you come; but he won't live long after." "poor man! i am sorry he go so soon. but all the mens die early in california now: work so hard. live very old before the americanos coming." they could talk without restraint in the carriage, for the maid did not speak english; but mrs. polk merely asked how her husband had caught cold. her fair placid face and sleepy eyes showed no print of the years. she seemed glad to see magdaléna again. "often i wish have you with me in santa barbara," she said. "but roberto is what the americanos call 'crank.' no is use asking him. santa barbara no is like in the old time, but is nice sleep place, where no have the neuralgia, and nothing to bother. then always i have the few old families that are left, and we are so friends,--see each other every day, and eat the spanish dishes. i no know any americanos; always i hating them. so thin you are, _mijita_; i wish i can take you back." but magdaléna felt no desire to go with her; her aunt seemed to belong to another life. when they reached home, mrs. polk went to mrs. yorba's room to remove her wraps and drink a cup of chocolate. she smoothed her beautiful dusky hair and arranged the old-fashioned lace about her throat, then sailed in all her languid majesty across the hall. "aunt," said magdaléna, with her hand on the door of the sick room, "will--will--you kiss uncle?" mrs. polk raised her eyebrows. "why, yes, is he wanting; but i never kiss him in my life. why now?" "he is dying, and he has wanted you more than anything." "so queer fancies the seeck people have. but i kiss him, of course." as she entered the room, mr. polk raised himself slightly and stared at her with an expression she had never seen in his young eyes. it thrilled her nerves within their mausoleum of flesh. she bent over and kissed him. "poor eeram!" she said. "so sorry i am. but you no suffer, no?" he made no reply. he sank back to his pillows; and after greeting her brother, she took a chair beside the bed and sat there until her husband died, in the ebb of the night. he held her hand, his eyes never leaving her beautiful face, never losing their hunger until the film covered them. what thoughts, what bitter regrets, what futile desires for another beginning may have moved sluggishly in that disintegrating brain, he carried with him into the magnificent vault which his widow erected on lone mountain. his will was read on the day following the funeral, in the parlour where his coffin had rested, and by the light of a solitary gas-jet. magdaléna had never heard a will read before: she hoped she might never hear another. the three women in their black gowns, the four executors and trustees in their crow-black funeral clothes,--her father, colonel belmont, mr. washington, and mr. geary,--the big rustling document with its wearisome formalities,--made a more lugubrious picture than the lonely coffin of the day before. the terms of the will were simple enough: the interest of the vast fortune was left to mrs. polk; upon her death it was to be divided between his sister and niece, the principal to go to magdaléna upon mrs. yorba's death. when mr. washington finished reading the document, don roberto spoke for the first time in four days. "i go to resign. i no will be executor or trustee. no need me, anyhow." and he would listen to no argument. the next day he called a meeting of the bank's board of directors and resigned the presidency, requesting that mr. geary, a cautious and solid man, should succeed him. his wish was gratified, and he walked out of the bank, never to enter it again. his many other interests were in the hands of trustworthy agents: neither he nor his brother-in-law had ever made a mistake in their choice of servants. when he reached home, he wrote to each of these agents demanding monthly instead of quarterly accounts. he had a bed brought down to a small room adjoining the "office," and in these two rooms he announced his intention to live henceforth. at the same time he informed his wife and daughter that their allowance hereafter would be one hundred dollars a year each, and that he would pay no bills. ah kee, who had lived with him for twenty years, would attend to the domestic supplies. then he ordered his meals brought to the office, and shut himself up. on the third day mrs. polk said to magdaléna,-- "si i stay in this house one day more, i go mad, no less. is like the dungeons in the mission. _madre de dios!_ and you living like this for years, perhaps; for roberto grow more crank all the time. come with me. i no think he know." "you may be sure that he knows everything. and i cannot leave them. shall you go back to santa barbara? don't you want to travel?" "_dios de mi alma_; no! i think i go to die on that treep from santa barbara--so jolt. i am too old to travel. once i think i like see spain; but now i only want be comfortable. well, si you change the mind and come sometime, i am delight. but i go now: feel like i am old flower wither up, without the sun." xxvi mrs. polk's large white face and throat had seemed to shed a measure of light in the dark house; when she left, the gloom seemed to get down and sit on one. helena refused to enter by the front door, and lamenting that she was too big to climb the pillar, paid her visits by way of the kitchen and back stairs. after the calls of condolence visitors came more and more rarely to the yorba house. they said it depressed them for days after, and that while there they sat in mortal terror of hearing don roberto burst out of his den with the yell of a maniac. and as for dear mrs. yorba and magdaléna, they never had had much to say, but now they had nothing. they would not drop off altogether, for the old don was bound to follow his brother-in-law in course of time, and then his widow would once more be a useful member of society. mrs. montgomery, mrs. geary, and mrs. cartright were more faithful than the others, but the affections mrs. yorba had inspired during her long and distinguished sojourn in san francisco were not very deep and warm. the girls were sorry for magdaléna, and called frequently, conquering their horror of the gloomy echoing house; but they had less to endure than their elders, for they were received in magdaléna's own sitting-room, which, although sparsely and tastelessly furnished, was always as cheerful as the weather would permit. they brought her all the gossip of the outside world, discussed the new novels with her, and occasionally induced her to spend a day with them. at the end of the winter ila was married; very grandly, in grace church. all her friends but magdaléna were bridesmaids. the omission was a serious one, and all felt that it robbed the function of a last fine finish: each of the girls had counted upon having the last of the yorbas for chief bridesmaid. magdaléna went and sat in a corner of the church and saw the first of her friends break the circle of their girlhood. her present had been very meagre: it had come out of her monthly allowance. mrs. polk was much too indolent to consider whether her niece was allowed an income suitable for her position or not, and magdaléna was much too proud to ask favours. she slipped out of the church just before the end of the ceremony, feeling like a poor relation. she rarely saw her father. occasionally she met him in the hall; he drifted past her like a ghost. mr. polk died in february. on the first of june don roberto had not been out of the house for three months, nor had he exchanged a word with his wife or daughter. "he'll blink like an owl when he does go out," said mrs. yorba. "i wonder if he remembers that it is time to go to the country?" "he never forgets anything. i'll pack his things if you like." but the day passed and the next, and don roberto gave no sign of remembering that it was time to move. then mrs. yorba drew several long breaths, went downstairs, and knocked at his door. there was no response, but she turned the knob and went in. don roberto's face was between the large pages of a ledger. he looked round with a scowl. "everything is ready to move down. are you not coming?" "no; and you no going either. letting the place." if the president of the united states had let the white house, mrs. yorba could not have been more astounded. "let fair oaks! fair oaks?" "yes." "and where are we to go this summer?" "we stay here." "robert! you cannot mean that. no one stays here in summer. the city is impossible--those trade-winds--those fogs--" "need not go out. can stay in the house." and don roberto returned to his ledger. mrs. yorba went straight to magdaléna's room, and for the first time in her daughter's experience of her, wept. "to think of spending a summer in san francisco! how i have looked forward to the summer! things are always bright and cheerful in menlo even with the house shut up, for one can sit on the verandah. but here! and not a soul in town! and the house like a prison! what in heaven's name ails your father? he's not crazy. he's reading his ledgers, and what he says is to the point, goodness knows! but i shall follow hiram if this keeps up. you're a real comfort to me, 'léna. i don't know what i should do without you." magdaléna said what she could to console her mother. the two had drawn together during these trying months. she was bitterly disappointed that she could not go to menlo park. she was tired of its efforts to amuse itself, but she could live in its woods, its soft gracious air, find companionship in the distant redwoods swimming in their dark-blue mists. the girls all invited her to visit them, but she would not leave her mother, even could her father's consent be obtained. mrs. yorba was genuinely unhappy. without mental resources, and deprived of even an occasional hour with her friends, she was further harassed by the fear that her husband would die and leave her with a pittance: he certainly appeared to hate the sight of his family. it consoled her somewhat to reflect that wills were easily broken in california. why had her brother left her nothing? with a full purse she could at least have the distractions of philanthropy. she took to novel-reading with a voracious appetite, and her taste grew so exacting that she would have nothing that was not magnificently sensational. she thought on boston with a shudder, but concluded that it was enough to have been intellectual when young. magdaléna plodded on with her work. she described the customs and manners of the old times with much accuracy, and felt that her beloved creations were rather more than puppets; and it was as much for their sake as for her own that she wanted these little histories to be triumphs of art, that they might arrest the attention of the world. alvarado and castro were great heroes to her: it was unjust and cruel that the big world outside of california should know nothing of them; to the present californian, for that matter, they were not even names. and forty years before the californias had bent to their nod! they had lived with the state of princes, and the wisdom with which the one had ruled and the other had managed his armies would have given them lasting fame had not their country then been as remote from earth's greater civilisations as had it been on jupiter. if she could only immortalise them! that would be a sufficient reason for living, compensate her for the wreck of her personal life. it might take a lifetime, but what of that if she succeeded in the end? she took long walks daily; alone, for the french maid had been dismissed long since. the walks were not pleasant, for when the sand from the outlying dunes was not swept through the city by the bitter trades, the fog was crawling into one's very marrow. and the hills were steep. sometimes she took the cable car to the end of the line, then walked to the presidio; but that brought the sand-hills nearer, and she went home with smarting eyes. protected by her window, she found beauty even in the summer mood of san francisco; and sometimes she went up into the tower of the belmont house and watched the long clouds of dust roll symmetrically down the streets of the city's valleys; or the delicate white mist ride through the golden gate to wreathe itself about the cross on calvary, then creep down the bare brown cone to press close about the tombs on lone mountain; then onward until all the city was gone under a white swinging ocean; except the points of the hills disfigured with the excrescences of the rich. into the cañons and rifts of the hills beyond the blue bay the fog crept daintily at first, hanging in festoons so light that the very trades held aloof, then advancing with a rush,--a phantom of the booming ocean whence it came. and trennahan? he made no sign. whether he were dead or alive, the victim or the captor of his old familiars, careless, or nursing an open wound, magdaléna was miserably ignorant. the time had come when she waited tensely as mails were due, feeling that an empty envelope covered with his handwriting would give her solace. she cherished no hope that he would ever return to her, but he had promised her his lasting friendship. sometimes she wondered at the cruelty of men. why should he not help her? even if he really believed in the extinction of her love, he might guess that she needed his friendship. she had yet to learn that the one thing that man never gives to woman is spiritual help. helena wrote that her father was so anxious for her to marry alan rush that she was officially engaged to that much-enduring youth and really liked him. menlo park was the same as ever; not so gay as last year, but the same in quality. no one had called on the lessees of fair oaks. they were new people whom nobody knew, and it would be horrid to go there, anyhow. caro was engaged to marry an englishman who had bought a grape-ranch some twenty miles from menlo. tiny was prettier and more bored than usual. rose wrote that she certainly could not stand another summer of menlo and should go east in the autumn. ila wrote from paris, london, and homburg that life was quite perfect. it was so interesting to be named washington,--everybody stared so; as the english had never read a line of united states history, they thought her george was a lineal descendant of the immortal head of his house; and she had thirty-two trunks of paris clothes and ever so many men in love with her. and magdaléna lived this life for three years. its monotony was broken by one event only. xxvii during the winter following mr. polk's death, colonel belmont was driving his coach along the beach beyond the park one afternoon when helena, who sat beside him, saw him give a long shudder, then huddle. she grasped the reins of the four swiftly trotting horses and spoke over her shoulder to alan rush. "pull my father up to the top," she said. rush did as he was bid, and the body of colonel belmont was laid out between the two rows of young people, whose gaiety had frozen to horror. "now take the reins," said helena. rush took the reins. helena followed her father swiftly and stooped to take his head in her arms. but she dropped her ear to his lips instead, then to his heart. for a moment longer she stared at him, while the others waited for the outburst. but she returned to the front seat, and caught the reins from rush's hands. "i must do something," she said; and he knew better than to answer her, or even to look at her. it was some time before she could turn the horses, and then she was several miles from home. she drove with steady hands; but when they had reached the house and rush lifted her down, she was trembling violently. she pushed him aside. "go and get magdaléna," she said. magdaléna remained with her a week. this was helena's first real grief, and there was nothing cyclonic about it. "i'll never get over it," she said. "never! and i'll never be quite the same again. of course i don't mean that i'll have this awful sense of bereavement and keep on crying all my life: i know better than that; but i could never forget him, nor forget to wish i still had him, if i lived to be a hundred. if i had anything to reproach myself for--anything serious--i believe i'd go off my head; but i _was_ good to him; and i am sure mamma never could have taken better care of him than i did. when he was under doctor's orders i gave him every drop of the medicine myself, and i never would let him eat a thing i thought wouldn't agree with him. he used to say his life was a burden, poor darling, but i know he liked it. and who knows?--if i hadn't watched him so, he might not have lived as long as he did. that is my one consolation.... this terrible grief makes everything else seem so paltry; i could not even think of being engaged to alan rush any longer. poor fellow! i feel sorry for him, but i can't play for a long time to come. as for papa's wishes in the matter, mr. geary and mr. washington will take care of my money, and i am quite able to take care of myself. if papa is near me now, he will understand how i feel, and agree with me. i wish i had some heroic destiny. why has the united states ceased to make history? i'd like to play some great part. papa used to say there was bound to be another upheaval some day, but i'm afraid it won't be in my time." "it may," replied magdaléna. "there's a good deal of history-making, quiet and noisy, going on all the time. i've been reading the newspapers this last year. they're horrid sensational things, but i manage to get a few ideas from them. no one can tell what may happen ten years hence. you may have a chance to be the heroine of a revolution yet." "i'm afraid i'll never be anything but a belle, and i'm tired of that already, although i never could stand being shelved. but if there is a revolution during my life i'll be a factor in it. just you remember that." "i really do believe that you were intended for something extraordinary." "i believe i was. that's the reason i'm so restless and dramatic. i don't feel as if i ever could be so again, though,--not for ages, anyhow." the old close and affectionate intimacy between the two girls was restored during that week. at its end helena went east to visit her aunt, mrs. forbes. she was the untrammelled mistress of something under a million dollars; and as her private car, filled with flowers, bonbons, and books, pulled away from a sorrowing crowd of friends on the oakland side of the ferry, it must be confessed she reflected that the future would appear several shades darker if she were arranging her belongings in a half-section, a small quarterly allowance in her pocket. nevertheless colonel belmont had his reward. his daughter's grief was deep and lasting; and perhaps he knew. xxviii caro married her englishman, and on a thriving grape-farm entertained other englishmen. rose went east and triumphantly captured a baltimorean of distinguished lineage and depleted exchequer. tiny went to europe again. magdaléna was practically alone. her father still lived in his two rooms downstairs and never spoke to anyone but ah kee. once he forgot to close his study door, and magdaléna, who happened to be passing, paused and looked at him. his face had shrunken and was crossed with a thousand fine and eccentric lines; like the palm of a man singled out for a career of trouble. he had let his hair and beard grow, and he looked uncouth and dirty. mrs. yorba still read novels. she no longer paid calls, for her allowance, now reduced to fifty dollars a year, was quite inadequate to meet the requirements of a dignified member of society. she received her few intimate and faithful friends in her bedroom; the first floor was never dusted nor aired. the house smelt musty and deserted; the lower rooms were as cold and damp as underground caverns; the spiders spun unheeded; when the front door was opened, the festoons in the hall swung like hammocks. even the gloom of the house seemed to accentuate with the years. magdaléna wondered if the inside of the old polk house looked any more haunted than this; and even the belmont house was acquiring an expression of pathos, peculiar to desertion in old age. magdaléna fancied that the three houses must be pointed out to visitors as the sarcophagi of the futile ambitions of three californian millionaires. in her own rooms she toiled on, absorbed in her work, loving it with the beggared passion of her nature, experiencing two or three moments of creative ecstasy and many hours of dull discouragement. she wrote her stories and rewrote them; then again, and again. her critical faculty took long strides ahead of her creative power, and she rarely ceased to be uneasy at the disparity between her work and her ideals. but trennahan had said that it would be ten years before she could attain excellence, and she was willing to serve a harder apprenticeship than this. had it not been for her work and the books of those who had climbed the heights and slept beneath the stars, she might have become morbid and melancholy in her unnatural surroundings. but although the monotony of her life was never broken by a day in the country, she had always the beauty of bay and hill and sky beyond her window; and there are certain months in the spring and autumn when san francisco is as lovely and brilliant as the southern shores of california. the trades are hibernating in the caves of the pacific, and the fogs exist only in the spray of the ponderous waves. on such days and evenings magdaléna sat for hours on her little balcony, forgetting her work, dreaming idly. it was inevitable, in her purely mental and imaginative life, that she should apprehend in trennahan the lover again. she wove her own romance as ardently and consecutively as that of any of her heroines. in time he would forget helena; his love for her had been one of those sudden insane passions of which she had read,--which she tried to depict in her southland tales,--and in time it would fall from him, and he would hear the tinkle of the chain forged in long hours of perfect sympathy. they would both be older and wiser and more sad: the better, perhaps. loneliness and the peculiar circumstances of her life inclined her to borderland sympathies; she believed that if he died suddenly she should become immediately aware of the fact. her love for trennahan by no means interfered with her literary ambitions. all others had failed her; she knew now that with the best of opportunities she should never have cut a brilliant figure in society. but she did not care; letters were a far more glorious goal. helena adored great military heroes, great imperialists like clive and hastings, even great tyrants like napoleon. herself reverenced the great names in literature, and could think of no destiny so exalted as to be enrolled among them. and if she succeeded, what would have mattered these long years of dull loneliness, of denial of all that is dear to the heart of a girl? sometimes she even thought the tarrying of trennahan mattered little; for there is no tyrant so jealous as art. once she read her stories aloud to her mother; and mrs. yorba was pleased to observe that they were much better than she could have expected, but that on the whole she preferred "the duchess." she had grown quite fond of her daughter, and often sat in her room while she wrote. the intimacy and isolation of the two women had made it easy and natural for magdaléna to confide in her mother, but she was forced to confess that she had not inherited her critical faculty from her maternal parent. nevertheless, she was glad of the meagre encouragement and plodded on. xxix it was early in the fourth year that henry james swooped down upon san francisco. he arrived in the train of helena's triumphant return, under her especial patronage. not that a few choice spirits in california had not discovered james for themselves long since; but james as a definite entity, known and approved by society, awaited the second advent of helena. he immediately became the fad; rather, society split into two factions and was threatened with disruption. one young woman of the disapproving camp even went so far as to call an ardent advocate a "henry james fool." all of which was doubtless due to the fact that the traditions of action still lingered in california. strangely enough, tiny, who returned almost immediately after helena, was one of the first to take mr. james under her small but determined wing. she regarded well-read people as an unnecessary bore, and ambition of any sort as unsuited to the land of the poppy, but she had a feminine faith in exceptions, and joined the cult with something like enthusiasm. it was she who introduced him to magdaléna. magdaléna cared nothing for american latter-day authors, and gave no heed to helena's emphatic approval of mr. james. in fact, she and helena had so much else to talk about that they found little leisure for books. helena had been abroad again, and the belle of a winter in washington. she was more beautiful than ever, and, although somewhat subdued, was full of plans for the future. her first ball--she arrived at the end of the winter season--determined that her supremacy, socially and sentimentally, was unshaken. immediately after, she bought an old spanish house in the northern redwoods and provided new surprises for her little world. but there is no more room for helena in this chronicle. perhaps, if history shapes itself around her, she may one day have a chronicle to herself. tiny called on magdaléna one afternoon with two volumes of henry james under her arm. she took to her toes as the front door closed, and ran down the long hall and up the stair to magdaléna's room. "i feel like a book agent," she said, trying not to pant, and hoping magdaléna would go down to the door with her when she left. "but you really must read him, 'léna. he's so fascinating: i think it's because nothing ever happens, and that's so like life. i think i must always have felt henry jamesish, and it seems to me that he is singularly like menlo,--when helena is not there,--just jogging along in aristocratic seclusion punctuated by the epigrams of rose and eugene fort. i'm sure mr. james could, write a novel of menlo park; he just revels in irradiating nothing with genius. there! i feel so guilty, for i really do love menlo,--with intervals of europe,--but i've been visiting rose, and i'm afraid i'm plagiarising a little; you know i'm not one bit clever. only i really feel so when i read mr. james. and he'll be such company in menlo this summer. just think, i shall be all alone there, when i'm not visiting helena or caro. is--is--" she glanced about fearfully--"is there no hope of dear don roberto relenting?" "i am afraid not. but it is such a comfort to have you back. i heard you were engaged--to an englishman, or something?" tiny blushed. she was on her way to a tea, and looked exquisitely pretty in a fawn-coloured _crêpe de chine_ embroidered with wild roses, and a bonnet of pink tulle crushed about her face. magdaléna wondered why some man had not married her out of hand, then reflected that tiny was likely to dispose of her own future. "i'm not quite sure," said miss montgomery, looking innocently at a lithograph of the virgin which still decorated the wall. "you see, he has a title, and it's so commonplace to marry a title. but if i decide to, i'll let you know the very first." shortly after she went away--and left magdaléna alone with henry james. she took up one of the volumes. as she did so, something stirred in the cellars of her mind--beat its stiff wings against the narrow walls--struggled forward and upward. she stood on the porch in the late evening: alone in a fog. her young mind opened to literary desire--preceding it was a swift disturbing presentiment; it had recurred once, and again--but not for several years. what did it mean, here again? and what had henry james to do with it? she dropped into a chair. her hands trembled as they opened the book. xxx it was a week before she squarely faced the relation of henry james to her own ambitions. then she admitted it in so many words: she could not write, she never could write. the writers who were dust had inspired her to emulation; it took a great contemporary to bring her despair. it is only the living enemies we fear; the dead and their past are beautiful unrealities to the smarting ego. magdaléna realised for the first time the exact value she had placed upon the art of expression,--a value that was in inverse ratio to her limitations. literature to her was, above all else, the art of words. stories were to be picked up anywhere: had she not found a number ready to her hand? the creative faculty might, in its unique development, be something supremer still, although crippled without the perfected medium of this writer, who seemed above all writers to be the master and not the servant of words. she re-read her own efforts. they represented the hard thought and work of six years; not a great span, perhaps, but long enough to determine the promise of a faculty. the stories were wooden. her work would always be wooden. there was not a phrase to delight the cultivated reader, not a line that any moderately clever person, given the same material, might not have written. after as many more years of labour she might become a praiseworthy writer of the third rank. she put her manuscripts in the fire. after that, life turned grey indeed. her imagination might have gone into the flames with the stories, for her illusions about trennahan fell to ashes coincidently. she no longer believed that he would return, that he would even write demanding her friendship. she could hardly recall his face; the sound of his voice was gone from her. indubitably he had forgotten her long since. why not? she had ascended above the rosy stratum of youth, where delusions were possible. then began a long struggle against despair and its terrible consequences. it was a summer of raging trades which seemed to lift the sand dunes from their foundations and hurl them through the choking city. she could take little exercise. the library was her only resource, but one can read only so many hours a day. if she could but travel, as helena did, when anything went wrong! or if her uncle had only left her an income that she could expend in charity! her sympathy for the poor had never ebbed, and she would have gladly spent her life in their service, although she doubted if they were more miserable than herself. it was true that she had enough to eat, a roof to her head, and clothes to wear,--extremely plain clothes; but that was all. a nun or a prisoner had as much. there were times when she was threatened with a consuming hatred of life, and then she fled out into the dust and battled with the storms within and without; for her ideals were all that were left her. she knew the ugly potentialities in the depths of her ill-compounded nature: the day she ceased to be true to herself there would be a tragedy in that dark house on the hill. sometimes she wondered toward what end she was persevering, striving to perfect the better part of her. a quarter of a century or more of meaningless earthly existence? a controvertible hereafter? but she ceased to analyse, knowing that it could lead nowhere until the human mind ceased to be human. and one day, in the end of the summer, she lost her grip on herself. for three days the trade-winds had raged; she had not been able to leave the house. twice she had set forth, desperate with the nervous monotony of her hours, and been driven back by the blinding dust. it was on the third day that she happened to catch sight of herself in the glass. she saw her face plainer than ever, but her attention passed suddenly to her shoulders and rested there. they were bent. her carriage was dejected, apathetic. the sluggish tide mounted slowly to her face as she realised that this physical manner must have fallen upon her gradually, and been worn for some time; and its significance. she made an effort to reassume her old erect haughty poise, which had been partly the manifest of inherent pride, partly of half-acknowledged defiance of the beauty-worship of the world. her shoulders sank before the spine had risen to its perpendicular. what did it matter? again she experienced that disintegration of will which once had left her at the mercy of that instinct for destruction which is one of the essential particles of the ego. her brain was almost torpid. the want of exhilarating exercise, the long dearth of companionship, the terrible monotony of her life, the restless nights, the dank gloomy atmosphere in which she had her perpetual being, were, she told herself dully, doing their work. and she did not care. but if her brain was sodden, her nerves felt as if on the verge of explosion. she noticed that her hands were not steady, and sat for hours, wondering what was coming upon her. she cared less and less. ah kee tapped at her door. she replied that she did not want any dinner, loathing the unvarying bill-of-fare. the hours dragged on, and darkness came; but she did not light the gas, whose jet was but a feeble point in these times, hardly worth the waste of a match. she strained her ears, fancied she heard whisperings in the hall below. if san francisco's skeletons really were down there, she wished they would go in and throttle her father. he was the author of all her misery; and was any woman on earth so miserable as she? why should he live, exist down there like a beast in his cave, when his death would give her liberty?--a poignant happiness in itself. she wondered did she kill him should she be hanged? they rarely hanged anybody in california, never when there was gold to rattle contemptuously in the face of the law; why should she not deliver her mother and herself? they would both be in an asylum for the mad, or dead before their time, unless he went soon; and their lives were of several times more value than his. they, at least, had ruined the lives of no one, and with his hoarded unsavoury millions they would gladly do good to hundreds. she tiptoed out into the hall, and leaned over the circular railing, and peered down into the space below. only an old-fashioned waxen taper burned in a cup of oil; it emitted a feeble and ghostly light. the large webs of the spiders quivered in a draught. they assumed strange distorted shapes and seemed to point long fingers at her father's door. they are the ghosts that once animated the skeletons, she thought; and they think it time he joined them. she stood there for a long while, her eyes narrowed in a hard searching regard; the trembling gloom with the tiny sallow flame in its middle suggested the purgatory of imaginative artists. should she go down and thrust the dagger into his neck? her thoughts were torn apart by the abrupt loud shouts of the wind. she wondered if there were such winds anywhere else on earth, or if this were the voice of some fiend prisoned in the pacific,--the spouse whom california had taken to her arms when the fires in her body were hewing and shattering and rehewing her, and divorced in an after-desire for beauty and peace. magdaléna went back to her room and turned the key in the drawer which contained the dagger. "i must get out of this house," she said aloud, with the sensation of dragging her will from the depths of her brain and shaking it back to life. "if i don't, i'll be in an asylum to-morrow. something is certainly wrong in my head." she put on her jacket and hat with trembling fingers. her nerves seemed fighting their way through her skin. her ears were humming. something had begun to pound in her brain. she ran downstairs and let herself out, averting her eyes from her father's door. her fingers were rigid, and curved. as she reached the sidewalk, a squall caught and nearly carried her off her feet. it bellied her skirts and loosened her hair. she lost her breath and regained it with difficulty; she could hardly steer herself. but the wind filled her with a sudden wild exaltation, not of the soul, but of the worst of her passions,--those tangled, fighting, sternly governed passions of the cross-breed. she cursed aloud. she let fly all the maledictions, english and spanish, of which she had knowledge. the street was deserted. she raised her voice and pierced the gale, the furious energy of her words hissing like escaping steam. she raised her voice still higher and shrieked her profane arraignment of all things mundane in a final ecstasy of nervous abandonment. when the passion and its voice were exhausted, her obsession had passed. her head felt lighter, the danger of congestion was over; but her protest was the keener and bitterer. her father's life was safe in her hands, but she had no desire to return to his house. she determined to walk until morning, and to drift, rudderless, in the great sea of the night. she caught her skirts close to her body and walked rapidly to the brow of the hill. the twinkling lights were all below. the wrack of cloud torn by the wind into a thousand flapping sails skurried across a sky which the hidden moon patched with a hard angry silver. far away and high in the storm the great cross on calvary seemed dancing an inebriated jig above the ghostly tombs of lone mountain. magdaléna walked rapidly down the hill. once or twice she paused before a house and stared at it. what secrets did it hold? what skeletons? were any within so desperate as she? why did they not come out and shriek with the storm? she pictured a sudden obsession of san francisco: every door simultaneously flung open, every wretched inmate rushing forth to scream his protest against the injustice of life into the ecstatic fury of the elements. high on a terrace, or rather an unlevelled angle of the hill, and reached by a long rickety flight of steps, was an old ugly wooden house. it was unpainted; the shutters were shaking on their rusty hinges; the chimneys had been blown off long since; but it had cost much gold in its time. it had been the home of a "forty-niner," and he was dead and forgotten, his dust as easily accounted for as his winged gold. doubtless every room had its patient skeleton, grinning eternally at the yellow lust of man. as she passed dupont street, she paused again and regarded it steadily. sheltered in the steep hillside, it took no note of the storm; its sidewalks were not empty, and its windows were broken bars of light. magdaléna wondered if the painted creatures talking volubly behind the shutters were not happier and more normal than she. they were the rejected of their native boulevards, beyond a doubt, but they were free in their way, and they certainly were alive. i am nothing, she thought; neither to myself, nor to any one else. i wonder will the wind blow me in there some night? what if it does? but when a man started toward her with manifest intent to speak, she fled down the hill. when she reached kearney street she turned without hesitation to the left, and walked toward those regions which are associated in the minds of every san franciscan with lawlessness and crime. she had given a swift glance to the right before turning; the region of respectable shops and fashionable promenade was as black as a tunnel; the eccentric economy of the city forbade the light of street lamps when the moon was out, whether clouds accompanied her or not. ahead was a line of lights twisting and leaping in the wind,--the vagrant gas-jets before the row of cheap shops on the east side of the plaza. magdaléna hardly glanced at the medley of curious wares and faces as she hurried past; the wind was roaring about the open square, interfering with sight and hearing and headway. and beyond--her blood leaped to that mysterious disreputable region. she left the plaza and passing under the shelter of the heights upon which stood her home slackened her steps. there was a discordant crash of music in the crowded streets. light was streaming from music-halls, above and below stairs, and from restaurants and saloons. but everybody seemed to be on the sidewalks. it was a strange crowd, and magdaléna forgot herself for the moment: she had entered a new world, and her tortured soul lagged behind. the riff-raff of the world was moving there, and when not apathetic they took their pleasures with drawn brows and eyes alert for a fight; but the only types magdaléna recognised were the drunken sailors and the occasional blank-faced chinaman who had strayed down from his quarter on the hill. there were dark-faced men who were doubtless french and italian; what their calling was, no outsider could guess, but that it was evil no man could doubt; and there were many whose nationality had long since become as inarticulate as such soul they may have been born with. many looked anæmic and consumptive, but the majority were highly coloured and frankly drunk. and if the men were forbidding, the women were appalling. there was no attempt at smartness in their attire; they were dowdy and frowsy, and even the young faces were old. the din of voices, the medley of tongues and faces, the crash of music, the poisoned atmosphere, confused magdaléna, and she turned precipitately into a restaurant. it was almost empty; she sat down before a dirty table and ordered a cup of coffee. the only waiter in attendance--the rest were probably in the street--was old and bleared of eye, but he stared hard at the new customer. "you'd better git out of this," he said, as magdaléna finished her unpleasant draught. "you ain't pretty, but you're a lady, and they don't understand that sort here. have you got much money with you?" "about a dollar, and i certainly do not give the impression of wealth. most nursery maids are better dressed." "you'd better git out, all the same." but the strong coffee had gone to magdaléna's head, and she cared little what became of her. nevertheless, a moment later she was shrieking and struggling in the arms of a big golden-bearded russian. she barely grasped the sense of what followed. there was a volley of screams and laughter; the man was cursing and gripping her with the arms of a grizzly. then there was a flash of knives, and she was stumbling headlong through the crowd, hooted at and buffeted. but no one attempted to stop her, for a fight with bowie-knives was more interesting than a sallow-faced girl who had happened upon foreign territory. she ran up a dark side-street, and then, as her breath gave out and forced her to moderate her pace, she glanced repeatedly over her shoulder. no one was in pursuit, but it was some moments before she realised that it was not relief she experienced, but something akin to disappointment. she was in the ugliest mood of which her nature was capable, and that was saying much. with one exception, better forgotten, this blond ruffian who had insulted her was the only man who had ever desired her; doubtless, she reflected bitterly, even trennahan might be excepted. and when an unprepossessing woman of starved affections and implacably controlled passions sees desire in the eyes of a man for the first time, her vanity of sex responds, if her passions do not. she half turned back and stood looking down the hill to the brilliant noisy street. why should i not go back and live with him, and disappear from a world which takes no interest in me, and in which i am no earthly use? she thought. and no life could be worse than mine, nor more immoral, for that matter. i have never fulfilled a single one of the conditions for which woman was born, and i'd be more normal as that man's mistress, and less unhappy even if he beat me, which he probably would, than living the life of a blind mole underground. then she wondered who her deliverer was, and wondered if he too had wanted her. some portion of the blackness in her soul receded suddenly, and she smiled and trembled slightly. involuntarily her back straightened, and she lifted her head. but with the sudden rush of sexual pride the magnetism of its creators receded, and she turned her back on the flare below and continued to mount the hill. in a moment she turned into a badly lighted alley thinly peopled. here there was but a tinkle of music, and it came from the guitar. fat old women with black shawls pinned about their heads sat on the doorsteps of ramshackle houses talking to men whose flannel shirts revealed hairy chests. the women looked stupid, the men weather-beaten, but the prevailing expression was good-natured. in the middle of the street was a tamale stand surrounded by patrons. the aroma of highly seasoned cooking came from a restaurant at the foot of a rickety flight of steps. every dilapidated window had its flower-box. this, then, was spanish town. magdaléna had dreamed of it often, picturing it a blaze of colour, a moving picture-book, crowded with beautiful girls and handsome gaily attired men. there was not a young person to be seen. nothing could be less picturesque, more sordid. an old crone with a face like a withered apple followed her, whining for a nickel. the others stared at her with the stolid dignity of their race. she gave the woman the nickel and interrupted the invocation. "are there no girls here?" "girl come from other place sometimes, then have the baby and is old queeck. si the señorita stay here, she have the baby and grow old too." magdaléna hastened on. she neither knew nor cared where she went, but after a time struck down the slope again, judging that she was beyond the centre of social activity. once, at the corner of two sharply converging streets, she passed a house whose lighted windows were open, for the wind had gone and the night was hot. but she only stood for a moment. fat mexican women half dressed were lolling about, and the front door was open to many men. the women were not as evil appearing as the french dregs of dupont street, possibly because they wore flowers in their hair and looked more frankly sensual and less commercial. again magdaléna felt an almost irresistible attraction, but hastened on. once, in a dark street, she was flung against a wall and her pockets turned inside out, but she made no protest and was allowed to go without further indignity. it was a woman who had robbed her, and magdaléna, having come off with the mere loss of seventy cents, indulged in a pleasurable thrill of adventure. after a time she found herself climbing a steep hill and felt a sudden desire to reach the top, and that the climb should be a long one. here and there she passed a tumble-down house, but the rest of the hill under the brilliant moon showed bare and brown. from the other side came the sound of lapping waves, and she knew herself to be on telegraph hill. she reached the top and sat down on the ground. the clouds had flown with the wind, and the moon revealed the quiet bay and the black masses of cliff and hill and mountain beyond. an occasional gust made a loud clatter in the rigging of the many crafts below, or an angry shout arose from the water-front; but otherwise the night from the summit of telegraph hill was peaceful and most beautiful. magdaléna, who loved nature and had yielded to its influence many times in her life, made a deliberate attempt to absorb the peace and beauty of the night into her own scarred and troubled soul. but she gave up the attempt in a few moments. the fierceness of her mood had passed, and some of its blackness, but she was still bitter and hopeless. there was nothing to do but to face the problem of her life, and thinking was easier on these altitudes, where the air was fresh and salt, and the stars seemed close, than in the ill-ventilated prison which she called her home. she determined to remain until morning and to restore her brain to its normal condition, if possible. she looked back upon the mental and moral inertia into which she had sunken during the past month, and its sequence of morbid and criminal instinct, with terror and horror. before an hour had passed, she had herself in hand once more, for she had deliberately forced herself to face her own soul, and she believed that she could put her character together again and accept the future without further luxation or debility of will. but she made no attempt to close her eyes to the ugly fact that in that future of interminable years there were only two small stars of hope; and it required an effort of imagination to drag them above the horizon,--her father's death and the return of trennahan. her father belonged to a long-lived race, and trennahan during an absence of three years and some months had given no indication that he remembered her existence; moreover, he had gone into exile for love of another woman. but without the faint white twinkle of those stars the future would be not a blank, but an infernal abyss, which magdaléna, without the society of her kind, without talent, without occupation, without religion, refused to contemplate. and she had all a woman's capacity for fooling herself with the will-o'-the-wisps of the imagination. her eyes had been clear and her logic relentless so long as the man had been within sight and touch, but his absence, combined with his abrupt and final eviction from the toils of the other woman, had lifted him from practical life into the realms of the imagination; in other words, he was no longer so much a man as an ideal,--a soul whom her own soul was free to await or pursue in that inner world where realities are bodiless and forgotten. she longed for the old comfortable irresponsible sensuous embrace of the church of rome. its lightest touch was hypnotic, its very breath a balm. why, she wondered bitterly, could she not have been given less brains, or more? if her talents had been genuine, she would have had that magnificent independence of religion and worldly conditions which only art--and love--can create in the human mind. and if her logic had been a trifle less relentless, she would have had hours of ecstatic forgetfulness these last long years. of course there was always the almighty power to whom one could pray, and who certainly could grant prayer if he chose. but it seemed to her an impertinence for ordinary insignificant beings to importune this remote and absolute god, so forbidding in his monotonous mystery. she had all the arrogance of intellect despite her remorseless limitations. had she been granted the gift of creation,--in other words, a spark from the great creative force commanding the universe,--she felt that she should have no hesitation in begging for further favours; a certain sense of kinship, of being in higher favour than the great congested mass, would have given her assurance and faith. she sighed for a new religion, for that prophet who must one day arise and rid the world of the abomination of dogma and sect, giving to the groping millions a simple belief, in which the fussiness, sentimentality, and cruelty of present religions would have no place. she sat there until the dawn came, grey and appalling at first, then touching the bay and the dark heights with delicate colour, as the sun struggled out of the embrace of the ocean. she was obliged to walk home, as she had no money, and the long toilsome tramp in the wake of the eventful night gave her appetite and many hours of rest. when she awoke she felt that, whatever came, the most formidable crisis of her life had been safely passed. xxxi in the autumn she found an occupation which gave her a temporary place in the scheme of things. mrs. yorba fell ill. the sudden and complete change from a personage to a nobody, the long confinement,--she rarely put her foot outside the house lest her shabby clothes be remarked upon,--and a four years' course of sensational novels induced a nervous distemper. magdaléna, hearing the sound of pacing footsteps in the hall one night, arose and opened her door. mrs. yorba, arrayed in a red flannel nightgown and a frilled nightcap, was walking rapidly up and down, talking to herself. magdaléna persuaded her to go to bed, and the next morning sent for the doctor. he prescribed an immediate change of scene,--travel, if possible; if not, the country. magdaléna undertook to carry the message to her father. knowing that a knock would evoke no response, she opened the door of the study and went in. don roberto, dirty, unshaven, looked like a wild man in a mountain cave; but his eyes were steady enough. his table and the floor about his chair were piled high with ledgers. on everything else the dust was inches thick, and the spiders had spun a shimmering web across one side of the room. it hung from the gas-rod like a piece of fairy tapestry, woven with red and gold here and there, where the sun's rays, scattering through the slats of the inside blinds, caressed it. on the mantel-piece, supported on its broken staff, was the big american flag which had floated above the house of don roberto yorba for thirty years. it had been carefully washed, and although broken bits of spiders' weavings hung to its edges, there were none on its surface. magdaléna felt no desire to kiss her parent, although it was the first time for several years that she had stood in his presence. she disliked and despised him, and thought no less of herself for her repudiation. if she, a young, inexperienced, and lonely woman, could fight and conquer morbid fancies, why not he, who had been counted one of the keenest financial brains of the country? she felt thoroughly ashamed of her progenitor as she stood looking down upon the little dirty shrunken shambling figure. "well?" growled don roberto, "what you want?" "my mother is very ill. this life is killing her. the doctor says she must have a change." "all go to die sometime. what difference now or bimeby?" "will you let us go to santa barbara to visit aunt?" "si she send you the moneys, i no care what you do with it. i no give you one cents." "very well; i shall ask my aunt." but mrs. yorba declared that she would not go to santa barbara: she detested her sister-in-law, and would accept no favours from her, nor be forced into her society. there was nothing for magdaléna to do but to nurse her, and a most exasperating invalid she proved. nevertheless, magdaléna, although a part of her duties was to read her mother's favourite literature aloud by the hour, was almost grateful for the change. she seldom found time for her daily walk, but at least she had little time to think. when mrs. montgomery, mrs. geary, and mrs. brannan returned to town, they came frequently to sit with the invalid, and cheered her somewhat with talk of the coming summer, when they should take her down to their own houses in menlo. "and i shall go," said mrs. yorba to her daughter, "if i _haven't_ a decent rag to my back. they think nothing of that; i was a fool not to go before. and i'm going to get well--against the time when that old fiend dies. there! i never thought i'd say that, for i was brought up in the fear of the lord, but saying it is little different from thinking it, after all. i've been thinking it for two solid years. california's not new england, anyhow. when i do get the money, won't i scatter it! i've been economical all my life, for i had it in my blood, and it was my duty, as your father wished it; as long as he did his duty by me, i was more than willing to do mine by him: he can't deny it. but we all know what reaction means, and it has set in in me. when i am my own mistress, i'll give three balls and two dinners a week. i'll have the finest carriages and horses ever seen in california. i'll have four trousseaux a year from paris, and i'll go to new york myself and buy the most magnificent diamonds tiffany's got. i'll refurnish this house and fair oaks. the walls shall be frescoed, and every stick in them will come from new york--" she paused abruptly, springing to her elbow. the door was ajar. through the aperture came a long low chuckle. magdaléna jumped to her feet, flung the door to, and locked it. "do you think he's gone mad at last?" gasped mrs. yorba. "it sounded like it." "for heaven's sake, don't leave me for a minute. you must sleep here at night. there's a cot somewhere,--in the attic, i think, if the rats haven't eaten it. what a life to live!" she fell to weeping, as she frequently did in these days. suddenly her face brightened. "if he should make a will disinheriting us, we could easily enough prove him insane after the way he's been acting these four years. thank heaven, this is california! general william could break any will that ever was made." mrs. yorba took an opiate and fell asleep. magdaléna went out, locking the door behind her. she determined to ascertain at once if her father was insane. if he was, he should be confined in two of the upper rooms with a keeper. the world should know nothing of his misfortune; but it would be absurd for herself and her mother to live in a constant state of physical terror. as she descended the stair, the door of her father's study opened abruptly and a man shot out as if violently propelled from behind. the door was slammed to immediately. magdaléna ran downstairs and toward the stranger. he was a tall man greatly bowed, and as she approached him she saw that he was old and wore a long white beard. his head was large and suggested nobility and intellect; but the eyes were bleared, the flesh of the face loose and discoloured, and he was shabby and dirty. he looked like a fallen king. "was--was--my father rude?" asked magdaléna. "he is not very well. perhaps i can do something." the man appealed to her strangely, and she had a dollar in her purse. "we were great friends in our boyhood and youth," replied the stranger. he spoke with an accent, but his english was unbroken. "and he has been my guest many times. there was a time when he thought it an honour to know me. when the americans came, everything changed. my career closed, for i would have nothing to do with them. i had held the highest offices under the mexican government. i could not stoop to hold office under the usurpers--many of whom i would not have employed as servants. then they took my lands,--everything. but i am detaining you, señorita." "oh, no, no, indeed! how could they take your lands? who are you? tell me everything." "they 'squatted,' many of them, almost up to my door. the only law we could appeal to was american law, and california was a hell of sharpers at that time. it is bad enough now, but it was worse then. and then came the great drought of ' , in which we lost all our cattle. we never recovered from that, for we mortgaged our lands to the americans to get money to live on with,--everything was three prices then; and when the time came they foreclosed, for we never had the money to pay. and we were great gamblers, señorita, and so were the americans--and far better ones than we were. we were only made for pleasure and plenty, to live the life of grandees who had little use for money, and scorned it. when the time came for us to pit ourselves against sordid people, we crumbled like old bones. your father has been very fortunate: he had a clever man to teach him to circumvent other clever men. years ago, when i was prouder than i am now, i put my pride in my pocket and wrote, asking him for help. i wanted a small sum to pay off the mortgage on a ranchita, upon which i might have ended my days in peace, for it was very productive. he never answered. to-day i came to ask him for money to buy bread. he roared at me like a bull, and vowed he'd blow my brains out if i ever entered his house again. he looks like--" he paused abruptly. there was much of the old-time courtliness in his manner. "i--i--am so sorry. and i have little money to spend. if you will leave me your name and address, i will send you something on the first of each month; and if--if ever i have more i will take care of you--of all of you. i suppose there are many others." "there are indeed, señorita." "some day i will ask you for all of their names. and yours?" he gave it. it was a name famous in the brief history of old california,--a name which had stood for splendid hospitality, for state and magnificence, for power and glory. it was the name of one of her beloved heroes. she had written his youthful romance; she had described the picturesque fervour of his wooing, the pomp of his wedding; of all those heroes he had been the best beloved, the most splendid. and she met him,--a broken-down old drunkard, in the dusty gloom of an old maniac's wooden "palace," in the fashionable quarter of a city which had never heard his name. "o god!" she said. "o god!" and she was glad that she had burned her manuscripts. she took the dollar from her pocket and gave it to him. he accepted it eagerly. "god bless you, señorita!" he said. "and you can always hear of me at the yosemite saloon, castroville." he passed out, neglecting to shut the door behind him, but magdaléna did not notice the unaccustomed rift of light. she sank into a chair against the wall and wept heavily. they were the last tears she shed over her fallen idols. when the wave had broken, she reflected that she was glad to know of the distress of her people; it should be her lifework to help them. when she came to her own she would buy them each a little ranch and see that they passed the rest of their lives in comfort. she leaned forward and listened intently. loud mutterings proceeded from her father's room. she wondered if there was a policeman in the street. she and her mother were very unprotected. the only man in the house besides her father was the chinaman, and chinamen are as indifferent to the lives of others as to their own. don roberto had ordered the telephone and messenger call removed years ago. the sounds rose to a higher register. magdaléna, straining her ears, heard, delivered in rapid defiant tones, the familiar national cry, "hip-hip-hooray!" she went over softly, and put her ear to the thick door. the tones of the old man's voice were broken, as if by muscular exertion, and accompanied by a curious bumping. magdaléna understood in a moment. he was striding up and down the room, waving the american flag, and shouting, "hip-hip-hooray! hip-hip-_hooray_! hoo_ray_! hoo_ray_! hoo_ray_!" she ran down the hall to summon ah kee and send him for a doctor, but before she reached the bell she heard the front door close, and turned swiftly. a man had entered. she went forward in some indignation. so deep was the gloom of the hall that she could distinguish nothing beyond the facts that the intruder was tall and slight, and that he wore a light suit of clothes. when she had approached within a few feet of him, she saw that he was trennahan. for the moment she thought it was the soul of the man, so ghostly he looked in that dim light, in that large silence. his first remark was reassuring: "i rang twice; but as no one came, and the door was open, i walked in,--as you see." "we have so few servants now. won't you come and sit down?" he followed her down to the reception-room. she jerked aside the curtains, careless of the bad house-keeping the light would reveal. it streamed in upon him. he was deeply tanned and indescribably improved. they sat down opposite each other. magdaléna, recalling her tears, placed her chair against the light. "when did you get back?" she asked. "the ship docked an hour ago." "you look very well. have you been enjoying yourself?" "i have been occupied, and useful--i hope. at least, i have collected some data and made some observations which may be new to the world of science. i found the old love very absorbing. and, you will hardly credit it, i have lived quite an impersonal life." "have you come back to california again because you think it a good place to die in?" "i came back to california, because it is a good place to write my book in, and because you are here." "ah!" "don't misunderstand me. i am not so conceited as to imagine that i can have you for the asking. but--listen to me: i had a brief but very genuine madness. when i recovered i knew what i had th--lost. i argued--even during my convalescence--that i had been wholly right in believing that you were the one woman for me to marry, and, that fact established, you must believe it no less than i. but for a long time i was ashamed to come back, or to write. later, i went where it was impossible. moreover, in solitude a man comes into very close knowledge of himself. after a few months of it i knew that i should never be contented with mere existence again. i determined to take advantage of what might be the last chance granted me to make anything of my life; i had thrown away a good many chances. i also argued that if you loved me, you would wait for me; that you were not the sort to marry for any reason but one. at least, perhaps you will give me another trial." "i shall marry you, i suppose; i have wanted to so long, and i never had any pride where you were concerned. a few months ago i should have flown into your arms; and i had felt sure that you would return. but lately i have not been able to care about anything. i am not the least bit excited that you are here. it merely seems quite natural and rather pleasant." "is anything the matter?" he asked anxiously. "you look very thin and worn, and the house--it was like entering the receiving vault on lone mountain. i thought when i came in that you were having a funeral, at least." "it has been like that for four years. uncle died, and papa was afraid to trust himself in the world for fear he would relapse into his natural instincts. so he shut himself up, makes us live on next to nothing, and of course we go nowhere, for we have no clothes. mamma has been ill with nervous prostration for months, and now i feel sure that papa has gone insane. i have only spoken to him once in four years; but i have been certain that he would lose his mind finally, and i have just discovered that he is quite mad." "good god! we'll be married to-morrow. i never imagined your father would hit upon any new eccentricities. you poor little hermit! i fancied you going to parties and plodding at your stories. i never dreamed that you were shut up in a dungeon. i shall see that you are happy hereafter." "i feel sad and worn out. i don't think i can ever feel much of anything again." "oh, you'll get over that," he replied cheerfully; he was as practical as ever. "what you want is plenty of sun and fresh air and a rest from your family. if your father is insane, he'll go into an asylum; and a rest cure is the place for your mother. that will dispose of her while we are taking our honeymoon in the redwoods. do you think you could stand camping out?" "i could stand anything so long as it was the country once more," she said, with her first flash of enthusiasm. "but there is something i should tell you. perhaps after you hear it you won't want to marry me. i tried to kill helena once." "you did what?" he said, staring at her. "she came to me just after leaving you, on the night of your last interview. i was very much worked up before she came, had been for a long while; and when she told me that she had treated you badly and had thrown you over, after taking you away from me, i suddenly wanted to kill her, and i took my dagger out of the drawer beside me. it was very dark, but she had an instinct, and she jumped up and ran away. i never knew i could feel so; but every bit of blood in my body seemed shrieking in my head, and if she had not gone i should have jumped on her and hacked her to bits. i must go up to my mother now. you can think it over and come back again." "i don't need to think it over," he said, smiling. "that was all you needed to make you quite perfect. you are a wonderful example of misdirected energies. where is your father? i will go and look after him at once." he took her suddenly in his arms and compelled her to kiss him; and then magdaléna knew how glad she was that he had come. she went with him to the door of the study. "he is quiet," she whispered. "perhaps he is asleep." she left him and went down the hall, turning to wave her hand to him. trennahan knocked. there was no answer. he opened the door softly, then gave a swift glance over his shoulder, entered hurriedly, and closed the door behind him. suspended from the gas pipe, which was bent and leaking, was don roberto. the light was dim. the purple face on the languidly revolving body was barely visible; but as it turned slowly to the door, it occupied a definite place among the shadows. trennahan flung back the curtains and opened the window, closing the lower inside blinds. a cloud hurried across the face of the sun, as if light had no place in that ghastly room. about the limp body and sprawling hands clung the delicate prismatic tapestry of the spiders. it was rent in twain, and it quivered, and threatened to drop and trail upon the floor. the little weavers were racing about, full of anger and consternation, bent on repair. a number had already gathered up the broken strands and were fastening them across the body. had don roberto remained undiscovered for twenty-four hours, he might have been wrought into the tissue of that beautiful delicate web, a grotesque intruder over whom the spiders would doubtless have held long and puzzled counsel. the cloud passed. the sun caught a brilliant line of colour. trennahan went forward hastily, and examined the long knotted strip between the body and the ceiling. don roberto had hanged himself with the american flag. the end * * * * * _by the same author._ patience sparhawk and her times. his fortunate grace. the doomswoman. (companion volumes to "the californians.") a whirl asunder. american wives and english husbands. a daughter of the vine (ready shortly). some novels published by john lane an african millionaire by grant allen patience sparhawk and her times by gertrude atherton the californians by gertrude atherton a man from the north by e. a. bennett ordeal by compassion by vincent brown grey weather by john buchan carpet courtship by thomas cobb a king with two faces by m. e. coleridge a bishop's dilemma by ella d'arcy middle greyness by a. j. dawson mere sentiment by a. j. dawson symphonies by george egerton fantasias by george egerton the martyr's bible by george fifth a celibate's wife by herbert flowerdew when all men starve by charles gleig the edge of honesty by charles gleig comedies and errors by henry harland the child who will never grow old by k. douglas king weighed in the balance by harry lander the quest of the golden girl by richard le gallienne the romance of zion chapel by richard le gallienne derelicts by w. j. locke idols by w. j. locke mutineers by a. e. j. legge the spanish wine by frank mathew a child in the temple by frank mathew regina by herman sudermann the tree of life by netta syrett galloping dick by h. b. marriott watson the heart of miranda by h. b. marriott watson lady hester; or, ursula's narrative. by charlotte m. yonge contents. chapter i. sault st. pierre chapter ii. trevorsham chapter iii. the peerage case chapter iv. skimping's farm chapter v. spinney lawn chapter vi. the white doe's warning chapter vii. hunting chapter viii. duck shooting chapter ix. trevor's legacy chapter i. sault st. pierre. i write this by desire of my brothers and sisters, that if any reports of our strange family history should come down to after generations the thing may be properly understood. the old times at trevorsham seem to me so remote, that i can hardly believe that we are the same who were so happy then. nay, jaquetta laughs, and declares that it is not possible to be happier than we have been since, and fulk would have me remember that all was not always smooth even in those days. perhaps not--for him, at least, dear fellow, in those latter times; but when i think of the old home, the worst troubles that rise before me are those of the back-board and the stocks, french in the school-room, and miss simmonds' "lady ursula, think of your position!" and as to jaquetta, she was born under a more benignant star. nobody could have put a back-board on her any more than on a kitten. our mother had died (oh! how happily for herself!) when jaquetta was a baby, and miss simmonds most carefully ruled not only over us, but over adela brainerd, my father's ward, who was brought up with us because she had no other relation in the world. besides, my father wished her to marry one of my brothers. it would have done very well for either torwood or bertram, but unluckily, as it seemed, neither of them could take to the notion. she was a dear little thing, to be sure, and we were all very fond of her; but, as bertram said, it would have been like marrying jaquetta, and torwood had other views, to which my father would not then listen. then bertram's regiment was ordered to canada, and that was the real cause of it all, though we did not know it till long after. bertram was starting out on a sporting expedition with a canadian gentleman, when about ten miles from montreal they halted at a farm with a good well-built house, named sault st. pierre, all looking prosperous and comfortable, and a young farmer, american in his ways--free-spoken, familiar, and blunt--but very kindly and friendly, was at work there with some french-canadian labourers. bertram's friend knew him and often halted there on hunting expeditions, so they went into the house--very nicely furnished, a pretty parlour with muslin curtains, a piano, and everything pleasant; and joel lea called his wife, a handsome, fair young woman. bertram says from the first she put him in mind of some one, and he was trying to make out who it could be. then came the wife's mother, a neat little delicate, bent woman, with dark eyes, that looked, bertram said, as if they had had some great fright and never recovered it. they called her mrs. dayman. she was silent at first, and only helped her daughter and the maid to get the dinner, and an excellent dinner it was; but she kept on looking at bertram, and she quite started when she heard him called mr. trevor. when they were just rising up, and going to take leave, she came up to him in a frightened agitated manner, as if she could not help it, and said-- "sir, you are so like a gentleman i once knew. was any relation of yours ever in canada?" "my father was in canada," answered bertram. "oh no," she said then, very much affected, "the captain trevor i knew was killed in the lake campaign in . it must be a mistake, yet you put me in mind of him so strangely." then bertram protested that she must mean my father, for that he had been a captain in the --th, and had been stationed at york (as toronto was then called), but was badly wounded in repulsing the american attack on the lakes in . "not dead?" she asked, with her cheeks getting pale, and a sort of excitement about her, that made bertram wonder, at the moment, if there could have been any old attachment between them, and he explained how my father was shipped off from england between life and death; and how, when he recovered, he found his uncle dying, and the title and property coming to him. "and he married!" she said, with a bewildered look; and bertram told her that he had married lady mary lupton--as his uncle and father had wished--and how we four were their children. i can fancy how kindly and tenderly bertram would speak when he saw that she was anxious and pained; and she took hold of his hand and held him, and when he said something of mentioning that he had seen her, she cried out with a sort of terror, "oh no, no, mr. trevor, i beg you will not. let him think me dead, as i thought him." and then she drew down bertram's tall head to her, and fairly kissed his forehead, adding, "i could not help it, sir; an old woman's kiss will do you no harm!" then he went away. he never did tell us of the meeting till long after. he was not a great letter writer, and, besides, he thought my father might not wish to have the flirtations of his youth brought up against him. so we little knew! but it seems that the daughter and son-in-law were just as much amazed as bertram, and when he was gone, and the poor old lady sank into her chair and burst out crying, and as they came and asked who or what this was, she sobbed out, "your brother hester! oh! so like him--my husband!" or something to that effect, as unawares. she wanted to take it back again, but of course hester would not let her, and made her tell the whole. it seems that her name was faith le blanc; she was half english, half french-canadian, and lived in a village in a very unsettled part, where captain trevor used to come to hunt, and where he made love to her, and ended by marrying her--with the knowledge of her family and his brother officers, but not of his family--just before he was ordered to the lake frontier. the war had stirred up the indians to acts of violence they had not committed for many years, and a tribe of them came down on the village, plundering, burning, killing, and torturing those whom they had known in friendly intercourse. faith le blanc had once given some milk to a papoose upon its mother's back, and perhaps for this reason she was spared, but everyone belonging to her was, she believed, destroyed, and she was carried away by the tribe, who wanted to make her one of themselves; and she knew that if she offended them, such horrors as she had seen practised on others would come on her. however, they had gone to another resort of theirs, where there was a young hunter who often visited them, and was on friendly terms. when he found that there was a white woman living as a captive among them, he spared no effort to rescue her. both he and she were often in exceeding danger; but he contrived her escape at last, and brought her through the woods to a place of safety, and there her child was born. it was over the american frontier, and it was long before she could write to her husband. she never knew what became of her letter, but the hunter friend, piers dayman, showed her an american paper which mentioned captain trevor among the officers killed in their attack. dayman was devoted to her, and insisted on marrying her, and bringing up her daughter as his own. i fancy she was a woman of gentle passive temper, and had been crushed and terrified by all she had gone through, so as to have little instinct left but that of clinging to the protector who had taken her up when she had lost everything else; and she married him. nor did hester guess till that very day that piers dayman was not her father! there were other children, sons who have given themselves to hunting and trapping in the hudson's bay company's territory; but hester remained the only daughter, and they educated her well, sending her to a convent at montreal, where she learnt a good many accomplishments. they were not roman catholics; but it was the only way of getting an education. dayman must have been a warm-hearted, tenderly affectionate person. hester loved him very much. but he had lived a wild sportsman's life, and never was happy at rest. they changed home often; and at last he was snowed up and frozen to death, with one of his boys, on a bear hunting expedition. not very long after, hester married this sturdy american, joel lea, who had bought some land on the canadian side of the border, and her mother came home to live with them. they had been married four or five years, but none of their children had lived. so it was when the discovery came upon poor old mrs. dayman (i do not know what else to call her), that fulk torwood trevor, the husband of her youth, was not dead, but was earl of trevorsham; married, and the father of four children in england. poor old thing! she would have buried her secret to the last, as much in pity and love to him as in shame and grief for herself; and consideration, too, for the sons, for whom the discovery was only less bad than for us, as they had less to lose. hester herself hardly fully understood what it all involved, and it only gradually grew on her. that winter her mother fell ill, and mr. lea felt it right that the small property she had had for her life should be properly secured to her sons, according to the division their father had intended. so a lawyer was brought from montreal and her will was made. thus another person knew about it, and he was much struck, and explained to hester that she was really a lady of rank, and probably the only child of her father who had any legal claim to his estates. lea, with a good deal of the old american republican temper, would not be stirred up. he despised lords and ladies, and would none of it; but the lawyer held that it would be doing wrong not to preserve the record. hester had grown excited, and seconded him; and one day, when lea was out, the lawyer brought a magistrate to take mrs. dayman's affidavit as to all her past history--marriage witnesses and all. she was a good deal overcome and agitated, and quite implored hester never to use the knowledge against her father; but she must have been always a passive, docile being, and they made her tell all that was wanted, and sign her deposition, as she had signed her will, as faith trevor, commonly known as faith dayman. she did not live many days after. it was on the rd of february, , that she died; and in the course of the summer hester had a son, who throve as none of her babies had done. then she lay and brooded over him and the rights she fancied he was deprived of, till she worked herself up to a strong and fixed purpose, and insisted upon making all known to her father. now that her mother was gone she persuaded herself that he had been a cruel, faithless tyrant, who had wilfully deserted his young wife. joel lea would not listen to her. why should she wish to make his son a good-for-nothing english lord? that was his view. nothing but misery, distress, and temptation could come of not letting things alone. he held to that, and there were no means forthcoming either of coming to england to present herself. the family were well to do, but had no ready money to lay out on a passage across the atlantic. nor would hester wait. she had persuaded herself that a letter would be suppressed, even if she had known how to address it; but to claim her son's rights, and make an earl of him, had become her fixed idea, and she began laying aside every farthing in her power. in this she was encouraged, not by the lawyer who had made the will--and who, considering that poor faith's witnesses had been destroyed, and her certificate and her wedding ring taken from her by the indians, thought that the marriage could not be substantiated--but by a clever young clerk, who had managed to find out the state of things; a man named perrault, who used to come to the farm, always when lea was out, and talk her into a further state of excitement about her child's expectations, and the injuries she was suffering. it was her one idea. she says she really believes she should have gone mad if the saving had not occupied her; and a very dreary life poor joel must have had whilst she was scraping together the passage-money. he still steadily and sternly disapproved the whole, and when at two years' end she had put together enough to bring her and her boy home, and maintain them there for a few weeks, he still refused to go with her. the last thing he said was, "remember, hester, what was the price of all the kingdoms of the world! thou wilt have it, then! would that i could say, my blessing go with thee." and he took his child, and held him long in his arms, and never spoke one word over him but, "my poor boy!" chapter ii. trevorsham i suppose i had better tell what we had been doing all this time. adela and i had come out, and had a season or two in london, and my father had enjoyed our pleasure in it, and paid a good deal of court to our pretty adela, because there was no driving torwood into anything warmer than easy brotherly companionship. in fact, torwood had never cared for anyone but little emily deerhurst. once he had come to her rescue, when she was only nine or ten years old, and her schoolboy cousins were teasing her, and at every twelfth-day party since she and he had come together as by right. there was something irresistible in her great soft plaintive brown eyes, though she was scarcely pretty otherwise, and we used to call her the white doe of rylstone. torwood was six or seven years older, and no one supposed that he seriously cared for her, till she was sixteen. then, when my father spoke point blank to him about adela, he was driven into owning what he wished. my father thought it utter absurdity. the connection was not pleasant to him; mrs. deerhurst was always looked on as a designing widow, who managed to marry off her daughters cleverly, and he could believe no good of emily. now adela always had more power with papa than any of us. she had a coaxing way, which his stately old-school courtesy never could resist. she used when we were children to beg for holidays, and get treats for us; and even now, many a request which we should never have dared to utter, she could, with her droll arch way, make him think the most sensible thing in the world. what odd things people can do who have lived together like brothers and sisters! i can hardly help laughing when i think of torwood coming disconsolately up from the library, and replying, in answer to our vigorous demands, that his lordship had some besotted notion past all reason. then we pressed him harder--adela with indignation, and i with sympathy--till we forced out of him that he had been forbidden ever to think or speak again of emily, and all his faith in her laughed to scorn, as delusions induced by mrs. deerhurst. "i'm sure i hope you'll take ormerod, adela," i remember he ended; "then at least you would be out of the way." for sir john ormerod's courtship was an evident fact to all the family, as, indeed, adela was heiress enough to be a good deal troubled with suitors, though she had hitherto managed to make them all keep their distance. adela laughed at him for his kind wishes, but i could see she meant to plead for him. she had her chance, for sir john ormerod brought matters to a crisis at the next ball; and though she thought, as she said, "she had settled him," he followed it up with her guardian, and adela was invited to a conference in the library. it happened that as she ran upstairs, all in a glow, she came on torwood at the landing. she couldn't help saying in her odd half-laughing, half-crying voice-- "it will come right, torwood; i've made terms, i'm out of your way." "not ormerod!" he exclaimed. "oh! no, no!" i can hear her dash of scorn now, for i was just behind my brother, but she went on out of breath-- "you may go on seeing her, provided you don't say a word--till--till she's been out two years." "adela! you queen of girls, how have you done it?" he began, but she thrust him aside and flew up into my arms; and when i had her in her own room it came out, i hardly know how, that she had so shown that she cared for no one she had ever seen except my father, that they found they _did_ love each other; and--and--in short they were going to be married. really it seemed much less wonderful then than it does in thinking of it afterwards. my father was much handsomer than any young man i ever saw, with a hawk nose, a clear rosy skin, pure pink and white like a boy's, curly little rings of white hair, blue eyes clear and bright as the sky, a tall upright soldierly figure, and a magnificent stately bearing, courteous and grand to all, but sweetly tender to a very few, and to her above all. it always had been so ever since he had brought her home an orphan of six years old from her mother's death-bed at nice. and he was youthful, could ride or hunt all day without so much fatigue as either of his sons, and was as fresh and eager in all his ways as a lad. and she, our pretty darling! i don't think torwood and i in the least felt the incongruity of her becoming our step-mother, only that papa was making her more entirely his own. i am glad we did not mar the sunshine. it did not last long. she came home thoroughly unwell from their journey to switzerland, and never got better. by the time the spring had come round again, she was lying in the vault at trevorsham, and we were trying to keep poor little alured alive and help my poor father to bear it. he was stricken to the very heart, and never was the same man again. his age seemed to come upon him all at once; and whereas at sixty-five he had been like a man ten years younger, he suddenly became like one ten years older; and though he never was actually ill, he failed from month to month. he could not bear the sight or sound of the poor baby. poor adela had scarcely lived to hear it was a boy, and all she had said about it was, "ursula, you'll be his mother." and, oh! i have tried. if love would do it, i think he could not be more even to dear adela! what a frail little life it was! what nights and days we had with him; doctors saying that skill could not do it, but care might; and nurses knowing how to be more effective than i could be; yet while i durst not touch him i could not bear not to see him. and i do think i was the first person he began to know. meantime, there was a great difference in torwood. he had been very much of a big boy hitherto. no one but myself could have guessed that he cared for much besides a lazy kind of enjoyment of all the best and nicest things in this world. he did what he was told, but in an uninterested sort of way, just as if politics and county business, and work at the estate, were just as much tasks thrust on him as virgil and homer had been; and put his spirit into sporting, &c. but when he was allowed to think hopefully of emily, it seemed to make a man of him, and he took up all that he had to do, as if it really concerned him, and was not only a burden laid on him by his father. and, as my father became less able to exert himself, torwood came forward more, and was something substantial to lean upon. dear fellow! i am sure he did well earn the consent he gained at last, though not with much satisfaction, from papa. emily had grown into great sweetness and grace, and mrs. deerhurst had gone on very well. of course, people were unkind enough to say, it was only because she had such prey in view as lord torwood; but, whatever withheld her, it is certain that emily only had the most suitable and reasonable pleasures for a young lady, and was altogether as nice, and gentle, and sensible, as could be desired. there never was a bit of acting in her, she was only allowed to grow in what seemed natural to her. she was just one of the nice simple girls of that day, doing her quiet bit of solid reading, and her practice, and her neat little smooth pencil drawing from a print, as a kind of duty to her accomplishments every day; and filling books with neat up-and-down ms. copies of all the poetry that pleased her. dainty in all her ways, timid, submissive, and as it seemed to me, colourless. but fulk taught her wordsworth, who was his great passion then, and found her a perfect listener to all his tory hopes, fears, and usages. papa could not help liking her when she came to stay with us, after they were engaged, at the end of two years. he allowed that, away from her mother and all her belongings, she would do very well; and she was so pretty and sweet in her respectful fear of him--i might almost say awe--that his graceful, chivalrous courtesy woke up again; and he was beginning absolutely to enjoy her, as she became a little more confident and understood him better. how well i remember that last evening! i was happier than i had been for weeks about little alured: the convulsions had quite gone off, the teeth that had caused them were through, and he had been laughing and playing on my lap quite brightly--cooing to his mother's miniature in my locket. he was such an intelligent little fellow for eighteen months! i came down so glad, and it was so pleasant to see emily, in her white dress, leaning over my father while he had gone so happily into his old delight of showing his prints and engravings; and torwood, standing by the fire, watching them with the look of a conqueror, and jaquetta--like the absurd child she loved to be--teasing them with ridiculous questions about their housekeeping. they were to have spinney lawn bought for them, just a mile away, and the business was in hand. jacquey was enquiring whether there was a parlour for the cid, torwood's hunter, whom she declared was as dear to him as emily herself. indeed, emily did go out every morning after breakfast to feed him with bread. i can see her now on torwood's arm, with big rollo and little malta rolling over one another after them. then came an afternoon when we had all walked to spinney lawn, laid out the gardens together, and wandered about the empty rooms, planning for them. the birds were singing in the march sunshine, and the tomtits were calling "peter" in the trees, and jaquetta went racing about after the dogs, like a thing of seven years old, instead of seventeen. and torwood was cutting out a root of primroses, leaves and all, for emily, when we saw a fly go along the lane, and wondered, with a sort of idle wonder. we supposed it must be visitors for the parsonage, and so we strolled home, looking for violets by the way, and jaquetta getting shiny studs of celandine. ah! i remember those glistening stars were all closed before we came back. well, it must come, so it is silly to linger! there stood the fly at the hall-door, and the butler met us, saying-- "there's a person with his lordship, my lord. she would not wait till you came in, though i told her he saw no one on business without you--" torwood hastened on before this, expecting to see some importunate person bothering my father with a petition. what he did see was my father leaning back in his chair, with a white, confounded, bewildered look, and a woman, with a child on her lap, opposite. her back was to the door, and torwood's first impression was that she was a well-dressed impostor threatening him; so he came quickly to my father's side, and said-- "what is it father? i'm here." my poor father put out his hand feebly to him, and said-- "it is all true, torwood. god forgive me; i did not know it!" "know what?" he asked anxiously. "what is it that distresses you, father? let me speak to this person--" then she broke out--not loud, not coarsely, but very determinately--"no, sir; you would be very glad to suppress me, and my child, and my evidence, no doubt; but the earl of trevorsham has acknowledged the truth of my claim, and i will not leave this spot till he has acknowledged my mother as his only lawful wife, and my child, trevor lea, as his only lawful heir!" torwood thought her insane and only said quietly, as he offered my father his arm, "i will talk it over with you presently; lord trevorsham is not equal to discuss it now." "i see what you mean!" she said quickly. "you would like to make me out crazy, but lord trevorsham knows better. do not you, my father?" she said, with a strong emphasis, the more marked, because it was concentrated, not loud. my poor father was shuddering all over with involuntary trembling; but he put torwood's hand away from him, and looked up piteously, as if his heart was breaking (as it was); but he spoke steadily. "it is true. it is true, torwood. i was married to poor faith, when i was a young man, in canada. they sent me proofs that all had perished when the indians attacked the village; but--" and then he put his hands over his face. it must have been dreadful to see; but hester lea was too much bent on her rights to feel a moment's pity; and she spoke on in a hard tone, with her eyes fixed on my brother's face. "but you failed to discover that she was rescued from the indians; gave birth to me, your daughter, hester; and only died two years ago." "you hear! my boy, my poor boy, forgive me; don't leave me to her," was what my poor father had said--he who had been so strong. my brother saw what it all meant now. "never fear that, sir," he said; "i am your son still, any way, you know." "you will do justice to me," she began, in her fierce tone; but my brother met it calmly with, "certainly, we will do our best that justice should be done. you have brought proof?" his quietness overawed her, and she pointed to the papers on the table. they were her mother's attested narrative, and the certificate of her burial. my brother read aloud, "the rd of february, ," then he turned to my father and said, "you observe, father, the difference this may make, if true, is that of putting little alured into the place i have held. my father's last marriage was on the th of april, ," he added to her. he says she quite glared at him with mortification, as if he had invented poor little alured on purpose to baffle her; but my father breathed more freely. "and is nothing--nothing to be done for my child, your own grandson?" exclaimed she, "after these years." torwood silenced her by one of his looks. "we only wish to do justice," he said. "if it be as you say, you will have a right to a great deal, and it will not be disputed; but you must be aware that a claim made in this manner requires investigation, and you can see that my father is not in a state for an exciting discussion." "_your_ father!" she said, with a bitter tone of scorn; but he took it firmly, though the blood seemed to come boiling to his temples. "yes," he said, "my father! and if you are indeed his daughter, you should show some pity and filial duty, by not forcing the discussion on him while he can so little bear it." that staggered her a little, but she said, "i do not wish to do him any harm, but i have my child's interests to think of. how do i know what advantage may be taken against him?" torwood saw my father lying back in the chair, trembling, and he dreaded a fit every moment. "i give you my word," he said, "that no injustice shall be done you;" and as she looked keenly at him, as if she distrusted him, he said, "yes, you may trust me. i was bred an english gentleman, whatever i was born, and i promise you never to come between you and your rights, when your identity as lord trevorsham's daughter is fully established. meantime, do you not see that your presence is killing him? tell me where you may be heard of?" "i shall stay at the shinglebay hotel till i am secure of the justice i claim," she said. "come, my boy, since your own grandfather will not so much as look at you." torwood walked her across the hall. he was a little touched by those last words, and felt that she might have looked for a daughter's reception, so he said in the hall-- "you must remember this is a very sudden shock to us all. when my father has grown accustomed to the idea, no doubt he will wish to see you again; but in his present state of health, he must be our first consideration. and unprepared as my sisters are, it would be impossible to ask you to stay in the house." she was always a little subdued by my brother's manner; i think its courtesy and polish almost frightened her, high-spirited, resolute woman as she was. "i understand," she said, with a stiff, cold tone. jaquetta heard the echo of it, and wondered. "but," he added, "when they understand all, and when my father is equal to it, you shall be sent for." when he went back to the library he found my poor father unconscious. it was really only fainting then, and he came round without anyone being called, and he shrank from seeing anyone but torwood, explaining to him most earnestly how, though he was too ill himself to go to the place, his brother-officer, general poyntz, had done so for him, and had been persuaded that the whole settlement and all the inhabitants had been swept off. it was such a shock to him that it nearly killed him. poor father! it was grievous to hear him wish it had quite done so! we only knew that the woman had upset my father very much, and that torwood could not leave him. word was sent us to sit down to dinner without them, and torwood sent for some gravy soup and some wine for him. he went on talking--sometimes about us, but more often about poor faith, who seemed to have come back on him in all the beauty and charm of his first love. he seemed to be talking himself feverish, and after a time torwood thought that silence would be better for him; so he got him to go to bed, and sent good old blake, the butler, who had been his servant in the army, to sit in the dressing-room. blake, it turned out, had known all about the old story, so he was a safe person. not that safety mattered much. "lady hester lea"--she called herself so now, as, indeed, she had every right--was making it known at shinglebay. so torwood came out. i was very anxious, of course, and had been hovering about on the nursery stairs, where i had gone to see whether baby was quietly asleep, and i overtook him as he was going down-stairs. "how is papa?" i asked. i shall never forget the white look of the face he raised up to mine as he said, "poor father! ursula, i can only call the news terrible. will you try to stand up against it bravely?" and then he held out his arms and gathered me into them, and i believe i said, "i can bear anything when you do that!" i thought it could only be something about bertram, who had rather a way of getting into scrapes, and i said his name; but just as fulk was setting me at ease on that score, jaquetta, who was on the watch, too, opened the door of the green drawing-room, and we were obliged to go in. then, hardly answering her and emily, as they asked after papa, he stood straight up in the middle of the rug and told us, beginning with--"ursula, did you know that our father had been married as a young man in canada?" no. we had never guessed it. "he was," my brother went on, "this is his daughter." "our sister!" jaquetta asked. "where has she been all this time?" but i saw there must be more to trouble him, and then it came. "i cannot tell. my father had every reason to believe that--she--his first wife--had been killed in a massacre by the red indians; but if what this person says is true, she only died two years ago. but it was in all good faith that he married our mother. he had taken all means to discover--" even then we did not perceive what this involved. i felt stunned and numbed chiefly from seeing the great shock it had been to my father and to him; but poor little jaquetta and emily were altogether puzzled; and jaquetta said, "but is this sister of ours such a very disagreeable person, torwood? why didn't you bring her in and show her to us?" then he exclaimed, almost angrily at her simplicity, "good heavens! girls, don't you see what it all means? if this is true, i am not torwood. we are nothing--nobody--nameless." he turned to the fire, put both elbows on the mantelshelf, and hid his face in his hands. emily sprang up, and tried to draw down his arm; and she did, but he only used it to put her from him, hold her off at arm's length, and look at her--oh! with such a tender face of firm sorrow! "ah! emily," he said; "you too! it has been all on false pretences! that will have to be all over now." then emily's great brown eyes grew bigger with wonder and dismay. "false pretences!" she cried, "what false pretences? not that you cared for me, torwood." "not that i cared for you," he said, with a suppressed tone that made his voice _so_ deep! "not that _i_ cared, but that lord torwood did--torwood is the baby upstairs." "but it is you--you--you--fulk!" said emily, trying to creep and sidle up to him, white doe fashion. i believe nobody had ever called him by his christian name before, and it made it sweeter to him, but still he did not give in. "ah! that's all very well," he said, and his voice was softer then, "but what would your mother say?" "the same as i do," said emily, undauntedly. "how should it change one's feelings one bit," and she almost cried at being held back. he did let her nestle up to him then, but with a sad sort of smile. "my child, my darling," he said, "i ought not to allow this! it will only be the worse after!" but just then a servant's step made them start back, and a message came and brought word that mr. blake would be glad if lord torwood would step up. yes, my poor father was wandering in his speech, and very feverish, mixing up adela and faith le blanc strangely together sometimes, and at others fancying he was lying ill with his wound, and sending messages to faith. we sent for the doctor, but he could not do anything really. it had been a death-blow, though the illness lasted a full week. he knew us generally, and liked to see us, but he always had the sense that something dreadful had happened to us; and he would stroke my hand or jaquetta's, and pity us. he was haunted, too, by the sense that he ought to do something for us which he could not do. we thought he meant to make a will, securing us something, but he was never in a condition in which my brother would have felt justified in getting him to sign it. indeed there was so little disease about him, and we thought he would get better, if only we could keep him free from distress and excitement; so we made his room as quiet as possible, and discouraged his talking or thinking. lady hester came every day. my brother had sent for mr. eagles, our solicitor, to meet her the first time, and look at her papers. he said he could not deny that it looked very bad for us. of the original marriage there was no doubt; indeed, my father had told torwood where to find the certificate of it, folded up in the secret drawer of his desk, with his commission in the army; and the register of faith's burial was only too plain. the only chance there was for us was, that her identity could not be established; but mr. eagles did not think it would go off on this. the whole of her life seemed to be traceable; besides, there was something about hester that forbade all suspicion of her being a conscious impostor. whether she would be able to prove herself my father's daughter was another more doubtful point. that, however, made no difference, except as to her own rank and fortune. if the first wife were proved to have been alive till , then little alured was the only true heir to the title and estate, and, next after him, stood hester lea and her son. people said she was like the family; i never could see it, and always thought the likeness due to their imagination. she took one by surprise. she was a tall, well-made woman, with a narrow waist, and a proud, peculiarly upright bearing, though quick, almost sharp in all her movements, and especially with her eyes. those eyes, i confess, always startled me. they were clear, bright blue, well opened eyes--honest eyes one would have called them--only they appeared to be always searching about, and darting at one when one least expected it. the red and white of the face too always had a clear hard look, like the eyes; the teeth projected a little, and were so very, very white, that they always seemed to me to flash like the eyes; and if ever she smiled, it was as much as to say, "i don't believe you." her nose had an amount of hook, too, that always gave me the feeling of having a wild hawk in the room with me. jaquetta used to call her a panther of the wilderness, but to my mind there was none of the purring cattish tenderness of the panther. however, that might be only because she viewed us as her natural enemies, and was always on her guard against us, though i do not well know why; i am sure we only wanted to know the truth and do justice, and fulk was so convinced that she would prove her case, and that there was no help for it, that at the end of hearing mr. eagles question her, he said, "well, the matter must be tried in due time, but since we are brothers and sisters, let us be friendly," and he held out his hand to her. mr. eagles, who told me, said he could have beaten him for the imprudent admission, only he did look so generous and sweet and sad; and lady hester drew herself up doubtfully and proudly, as if she could hardly bear to own such a brother, but she did take his hand, coldly though, and saying, "let me see my father." he was obliged to tell her that this was impossible. i doubt whether she ever believed him--at least she used to gaze at him with her determined eyes, as if she meant to abash him out of falsehood, and she sharply questioned every one about lord trevorsham's state. the determination to be friendly made my brother offer to take her to us. she consented, but not very readily, and i am afraid we were needlessly cold and dry; but we were taken by surprise when my brother brought her into the sitting-room. it was not very easy to welcome the woman who was going to turn us all out, and under such a stigma; and she--she could hardly be expected to look complacently at the interlopers who had her place, and the title she had a right to. she put us through her hard catechism about my dear father's state, and said at last that she should like to see lord torwood. taken by surprise, we looked and signed towards him whom that name had always meant. he smiled a little and said, "little alured! but, remember, i am bound to concede nothing till judicial minds are convinced. the parties concerned cannot judge. can you venture to have baby down, ursula?" no, i did not venture. i thought it might have been averted; but i was only obliged to take her up to the nurseries. on the way up she asked which way my father's room lay. i answered, "oh! across there;" i did not know if she might not make a dash at it. i think she must have heard at shinglebay how delicate poor little alured was, and thence gathered hopes of the succession for her boy, for she asked her sharp questions about his health all the way up, and knew that he had had fits. i could not put her down as one generally can inquisitive people. i suppose it was because she was more sensible of the difference in our real positions than i have as yet felt. baby was asleep; and i think she was touched by the actual sight of him. she said he was very like her boy; and though i supposed that a mere assertion at the time, it was quite true. alured and trevor lea have always been remarkably alike. however, she cross-examined nurse about his health even more minutely, and then took her leave; but she came again every day, walking after the first, as long as my dear father lived. and she must have talked, for there came a kind of feeling over everyone, as well as ourselves, that something was hanging over us, of which the issue would be known when my father's illness took some turn. mr. decies came every day to inquire, but i could not bear a strange eye, and hester might have been looking on. i was steeling myself against him. was i right?--oh! was i right? i have wondered and grieved! for i knew well enough what he had been thinking of for months before; only i did not want it to come to a point. how was i to leave little alured to jaquetta? or disturb my father by breaking up his home? i liked him on the whole, and had come the length of thinking that if i ever married at all, it would be-- but that's all nonsense; and mine could not have been what other people's love was, or i should not have shrunk from the sight and look of him. if it had been only poverty that was coming, it would have been a different thing; but to be nameless impostors! mrs. deerhurst had gone out on a round of visits, when emily came to us, taking her younger daughter. they were not a very letter-writing family. it is odd how some people's pen is a real outlet of expression; while others seem to lack the nerve that might convey their thoughts to it, even when they live in more sympathy than emily could well have had with her mother. at least, so i understand, what afterwards we wondered at, that emily never mentioned hester; only saying, when, after some days she did write, that lord trevorsham was ill. so fulk had the one comfort of being with her when he was out of the sick room. i used to see them from the window walking up and down the terrace in the blue east wind haze of those march days, never that i could see speaking. i don't think my brother would have felt it honourable to tie one additional link between himself and her. he had not a doubt as to how her mother would act, but to be in her dear little affectionate presence was a better help than we could give him, even though nothing passed between them. jaquetta used to wonder at them, and then try to go on the same as usual; and would wander about the garden and park with her dogs, and bring us in little anecdotes, and do all the laughing over them herself. poor child! she felt as if she were in a bad dream, and these were efforts to shake it off, and wake herself. after all, nothing was ever so bad as those ten days! but, my brother always said he was thankful for the respite and time for thought which they gave him. chapter iii. the peerage case. the end came suddenly at last, when we were thinking my dear father more tranquil. he passed away in sleep late one evening, just ten days after hester's arrival. she had gone back to her lodgings, and we did not send to tell her till the morning; but by nine o'clock she was in the house. we had crept down to breakfast, jaquetta and i, feeling very dreary in the half-light, and as if desolation had suddenly come on us; and when we heard her fly drive up to the door, jaquetta cried out almost angrily, "torwood, how could you!" and we would have run away, but he said, "stay, dear girls; it is better to have it over." as she came in he rang the bell as if for family prayers, and she had only asked one or two questions, which he answered shortly, when all the servants came in, some crying sadly. fulk read a very few prayers--as much as he had voice for, and then, as all stood up, he had to clear his voice, but he spoke firmly enough. "it is right that you all should know that a grave doubt has arisen as to my position here. lord trevorsham had every reason to believe his first wife had perished by the hands of the red indians long before he married my mother. what he did was done in entire ignorance--no breath of blame must light on him. this lady alleges that she can produce proofs that she is his daughter, and that her mother only died in february, ' . if these proofs be considered satisfactory by a committee of the house of lords, then she and alured torwood trevor will be shown to be his only legitimate children. i shall place the matter in the right hands as soon as possible--that is" (for she was glaring at him), "as soon as the funeral is over. until that decision is made i request that no one will call me by the title of him who is gone; but i shall remain here to take care of my little brother, whose guardian my father wished me to be; and for the present, at least, i shall make no change in the establishment." i think everyone held their breath: there was a great stillness over all--a sort of hush of awe--and then some of the maids began sobbing, and the butler tried to say something, but he quite broke down; and just then a troubled voice cried out-- "torwood, torwood, what is this?" and there we saw bertram in the midst of us, with the haggard look of a man who had travelled all night, and a dismayed air that i can never forget. he had been quartered at belfast, and we had written to him the day after my father's illness, to summon him home, but there were no telegraphs nor railways; and there had been some hindrance about his leave, so that it had taken all that length of time to bring him. fulk had left all to be told on his arrival. he had come by the mail-coach, and walked up from the trevorsham arms, where he had been told of our father's death; and so had let himself in noiselessly, and was standing in the dining-room door, hearing all that fulk said! poor fellow! jaquetta flung herself on him, hiding her face against him, while the servants went, and before any one else could speak, hester stood forth, and said, to our amazement-- "captain trevor! you know me. you can and must bear me witness, and do me justice--" "you! i have seen you before--but--where? i beg your pardon," he said, bewildered. "you remember sault st. pierre farm?" she said. "sault st. pierre! what? you are mrs. lea! good heavens! where is your mother?" "my mother is dead, sir. you were the first person who made known to her that her husband, my father, was not dead, but had taken--or pretended to take--an english woman for his wife." "wait!" thundered fulk, "whatever my father did was ignorantly and honourably done!" bertram was as pale as death, and looked from one of us to the other, and at last, he gasped out-- "and that--was what she meant?" "there, sir," said hester, turning to torwood, "you see your brother cannot deny it! you will not refuse justice to me, and my son." i fancy she expected that the house was to be given up to her, and that we were only to remain there on her sufferance, perhaps till after the funeral. my brother spoke, "justice will no doubt be done; but the question does not lie between you and me, but between me and alured. it is, as i said, a peerage question--and will be decided by the peers. incidentally, that enquiry will prove what is your position and rank, as well as what may or may not be ours. any further points depend upon my father's will, and that will be in the hands of mr. eagles. i think you can see that it would be impossible, as well as unfeeling, to take any steps until after the funeral." whatever hester lea was, she was a high-spirited being, standing there, a solitary woman, a stranger, with all of us four, and one whole household, as it must have seemed, against her. i was outraged and shocked at her defiance at the time, but when, some time after, i re-read king john, i saw that there was something of constance in her. "that may be," she answered, "but when my child's interests are at stake, i cannot haggle over conventionalities and proprieties. i am the earl of trevorsham's only legitimate daughter, and i claim my right to remain in his house, and to take charge of my infant brother." a sign from fulk stopped me, as i was going to scream at this. "remember," he said, "your identity has yet to be proved." "your brother there must needs witness. he has done so." "what do you witness to, bertram?" asked fulk. "i do not know; i cannot understand," said bertram. "i saw this person in a farm in lower canada, and there was an old lady who seemed to have known my father, and was very much amazed to find he was not killed in . i did not hear her name, nor know whose mother she was, nor anything about her, nor what this dreadful business means." "at any rate," said fulk to her, "your claim to remain in the house must depend on the legal proof of the fact. my father's first marriage is undoubted, but absolute legal certainty that you are the child of that marriage alone can entitle you to take rank as his daughter; and, therefore, i am not compelled to admit your claim to remain here, though if you will refrain from renewing this discussion till after the funeral, i will not ask you to leave the house." "i do not recognize your right to ask or not to ask," she said, undauntedly. "i am either lord trevorsham's rightful heir--and it is not yet shown that i am not--or else i am the guardian he appointed for his son. i know this to be so, and mr. eagles, who will soon be here, will show it to you in the will if you wish it. therefore, until the decision is made, when, if it goes against me, the child will no doubt be made a ward in chancery, i am the person responsible for him and his property." "i have no doubt you will take advantage of me and of every quibble against me;" and there at last she began to break down; "but if there is justice in heaven or earth my child shall have it, though you and all were leagued against him." and there she began to sob. and those brothers of mine, they actually grew compassionate; they ran after wine; they called us to bring salts, and help her. emily shuddered, and put her hands behind her; but jaquetta actually ran up to the woman, and coaxed her and comforted her, when i had rather have coaxed a tigress. but i had to go to the table and pour out tea and give it to her with all the rest. i don't know how we got through that breakfast. but we did, and then i made the housekeeper put her into the very best rooms. anything if she would only stay there out of the way. when i came back, i found fulk explaining why he had spoken at once, and he said he felt that she would have no scruples about taking the initiative, and that everyone would be having surmises. poor bertram was even more cut up than we were. it came more suddenly, and he felt as if it was all his doing. he had no hope, and he took all ours away. there had been something in the old woman that impressed him as genuine, and he had no doubt that she had known and loved our father. nay, no one could suspect hester of not believing in her own story; the only question was whether the links of evidence could be substantiated. the next thing that happened--i can't tell which day it was--was mrs. deerhurst's coming, professing to be dreadfully shocked and overcome by my father's death, to take away emily. she must be so much in our way. i, who saw her first, answered only by begging to keep her--our great comfort and the one thing that cheered and upheld my brother. mrs. deerhurst looked keenly at me; and i began to wonder what she knew, but just then came fulk into the room, with his calm, set, determined face. i knew he would rather speak without me, so i went away, and only knew what he could bear to tell me afterwards. mrs. deerhurst had been a great deal kinder than he expected. no doubt she would not break the thing off while there was a shred of hope that he was an earl; but he could not drive her to allow, in so many words, that it must depend upon that. he had quite made up his mind that it was not right to enjoy emily's presence and the comfort it gave him, unless he was secure of mrs. deerhurst's permitting the engagement under his possible circumstances. i believe he nattered himself she would, and let her deceive him with thinking so, instead of, as we all did, seeing that what she wanted was to secure the credit of being constant and disinterested in case he retained his position. so, although she took emily home, she left him cheered and hopeful, admiring her, and believing that she so regarded her daughter's happiness that, if he had enough to support her, she would overlook the loss of rank and title. he went on half the evening talking about what a remarkable woman mrs. deerhurst was; and, at any rate, it cheered him up through those worst days. our lupton uncles came, and were frightfully shocked and incredulous; at least, uncle george was. uncle lupton himself remembered something of my father having told him of a former affair in america. they would not let jaquetta and me go to the funeral; and they were wise, for hester thrust herself in--but it is of no use to think about that. indeed, there is not much to tell about that time, and i need not go into the investigation. it was all taken out of our hands, as my brother had said. perrault came over from canada, and brought his witnesses, but not joel lea. he had nothing to prove, had conscientious scruples about appearing in an english court of justice, and still hoped it would all come to nothing. we stayed on at the london house--the lawyers said we ought, and that possession was "nine-tenths," &c. besides, we wanted advice for baby, who had been worse of late. the end of it was that it went against us. faith's marriage, her identity, and hester's, were proved beyond all doubt, and little alured was served earl of trevorsham. poor child, how ill he was just then! it was declared water on the brain! i could hardly think about anything else; but they all said it seemed like a mockery, and that he would not bear the title a week. and then lady hester would have been, not countess of trevorsham, but viscountess torwood, and at any rate she halved the personal property: all that had been meant for us. for we already knew that there was nothing in the will that could do us any good. all depended on my mother's marriage settlements, and as the marriage was invalid they were so much waste paper. my uncles, to whom my poor mother's fortune reverted, would not touch it, and gave every bit back to us; but it was only , pounds, and what was that among the four of us? i was in a sort of maze all the time, thinking of very little beyond dear little alured's struggle for life, and living upon his little faint smiles when he was a shade better. jaquetta has told me more of what passed than i heeded at the time. our brothers decided not to retain the trevor name, to which we had no right; but they had both been christened torwood; after an old family custom, and they thought it best to use this still as a surname. bertram felt the shame, as he would call it, the most; but fulk held up his head more. he said where there was no sin there was no shame; and that to treat ourselves as under a blot of disgrace was insulting our parents, who had been mistaken, but not guilty. bertram was determined against returning to his regiment, and it would have been really too expensive. his plan was to keep together, and lay out our capital upon a piece of ground in new zealand, which was beginning to be settled. jaquetta was always ready to be delighted. dear child, her head was full of log huts and robinson crusoe life, and cows to milk herself; and i really think she would have liked to go ashore in the swiss family's eight tubs! the thorough change, after all the sorrow, seemed delicious to her! i heard her and bertram laughing down below, and wondered if they got the length of settling what dogs they would take out! and fulk! he really had almost persuaded himself that emily would go with us; or at the very worst, would wait till he had achieved prosperity and could come home and fetch her. mrs. deerhurst had declared that waiting for the decision was so bad for her nerves, that she must take her to paris; and actually our dear old stupid fellow had not perceived what that meant, for the woman had let him part tenderly with emily in london, with promises of writing, &c., the instant the case was decided. it passed his powers to suppose she could expose her daughter's heart to such a wreck. so he held up, cheerful and hopeful, thinking what a treasure of constancy he had! and when they had built their castle in new zealand, they sent up jaquey to call me to share it with them. baby was asleep, and i went down; but when i heard the plan--it was cross to be so unsympathizing, but i did feel hurt and angry at their forgetting him; and i said, "i shall never leave alured." "ursula! you could not stay by yourself," said jaquey. and bertram, who had hardly ever seen him, and could not care for him said it was nonsense, and even if there were a chance of the child living, i could not be left behind. i was wrought up, and broke out that he would and should live, and that i would come as a stranger, a nursery governess, and watch over him, and never abandon him to hester. "never fear, ursula," said fulk, "if he lives, he will be in safe hands." "safe hands! what are safe hands for a child like that! hester's, who only wishes him out of her way?" "for shame!" the others said, and i answered that, of course, i did not think hester meant ill by him, but that, where the doctors had said only love and care could save him--no care was safe where he was not loved; and i cried very, very bitterly, more than i had done even for my father, or for anything else before; and i fell into a storm of passion, at the cruelty of leaving the poor little thing, whom his dying mother had trusted to me, and declared i would never, never do it. i was right in the main, it seems to me, but unjust and naughty in the way i did it; and when fulk, with some hesitation, began to talk of my not being asked to go just yet--not while the child lived--i turned round in a really violent, naughty fit, with--"you too, fulk, i thought you loved your little brother better than that? you only want to be rid of him, and leave him to hester, and he will die in her hands." fulk began to say that the court of chancery never gave the custody to the next heir. but i rushed away again to the nursery, and sat there, devising plans of disguising myself in a close cap and blue spectacles, and coming to offer myself as lord trevorsham's governess. the child had no relations whatever on his mother's side, and though, if he had been healthy, nurses and tutors might have taken care of this baby lordship, even that would have been sad enough; and for the feeble little creature, whose life hung on a thread, how was it to be thought of? i fully made up my mind to stay, even if they all went. i told jaquetta, so--in my vehemence dashed all her bright anticipation, and sent her again in tears to bed. i wish unhappiness would not make one so naughty! the next day poor fulk was struck down. a letter came from mrs. deerhurst to break off the engagement, and a great parcel containing all the things he had given emily. she must have packed them up before leaving england, while she was still flattering him. not a word nor a line was there from emily herself!--only a supplication from the mother that he would not rend her child's heart by persisting--just as if she had not encouraged him to go on all this time! nothing would serve him but that he must dash over to paris, to see her and emily. railroads were not, and it was a ten days' affair at the shortest; and, with all our prospects doubtful and alured still so ill, it was very trying. how bertram did rave at the folly and futility of the expedition! but one comfort was, that alured was a ward of chancery, and, in the vast kindness and commiseration everyone bestowed upon us, no one tried to hurry us or turn us out. hester used to come continually to inquire after her brother, and there was something in her way that always made me shudder when she asked after him. i knew she could not wish for his life, and gloated over all the reports she could collect of his weakness. i felt more and more horror of her; god forgive me for not having tried not to hate her. i sometimes doubt whether my dread and distrust were not visible, and may not have put it into her head. and then came mr. decies, again and again. he was faithful--i see it now. he cared not if i had neither name nor fortune; he held fast to his proposals. and i? oh, i was absorbed--i was universally defiant--i did not do him justice in the bitterness i did not realise. i thought he was constant only out of honour and pity, and i did not choose to open my heart to understand his pleadings or accept them as earnest--i was harsh. oh, how little one knows what one is doing! too proud to be grateful--that was actually my case. i was enamoured of the blue-spectacle plan; i had romances of watching alured day and night, and pouring away dangerous draughts. the very fancy, i see now, was playing with edged tools; i feel as if my imagination had put the possibility into the very air. once indeed--when jaquetta had been telling me she did not understand my unkindness; and observed that, even for alured's sake, she could not see why i did not accept--i did begin to regard him as a possible protector for the boy. but no; the blue spectacles would be the more assiduous guardian, said my foolish fancy. before i had thought it over into sense or reason, fulk came back from paris. he had not been really crushed till now. he was white, and silent, and resolute, and very gentle; all excitement of manner gone. he did not say one word, but we knew it was all over with him, and that he could not have had one scrap of comfort or hope. nor had he, though even to me he told nothing, till we were together in the dark one evening, much later. he did insist upon seeing emily; but her mother would not leave her, or take her eyes off her, and the timid thing did nothing but sob and cry, in utter helplessness and shame, and never even gave him a look. it was not the being neglected and cast off that he felt as such a wrong, to both himself and emily, but the being drawn on with false hopes and promises to expect that she was to belong to him, after all; and he was cruelly disappointed that emily had not energy to cling to him--he had made so sure of her. bertram and jaquetta had expected all along that he would be the more eager to be off to the antipodes when everything was swept away from him here, and he did sit after dinner talking it over in a business-like way, while bertram gave him all the information he had been collecting in his absence. i would not listen. i was determined against going away from my charge; i had rather have been his housemaid than have left him to hester, and i must have looked like a stone as i got up, and left them to their talk while i went back to the boy. i heard bertram say while i was lighting my candle, "poor ursula! she will not see it. hart told me to-day that the child is dying--would hardly get through the night." now i had been thinking all the afternoon that he was better, and i had gone down to dinner cheered. i turned into the doorway, and told fulk to come and see. he did come. there was alured, lying, as he had lain all day, upon his nurse's knees, with her arm under his head. he had not moaned for a long time, and i had left him in a more comfortable sleep. he opened his eyes as we came in, held out his hands more strongly than we thought he could have done, quite smiled--such an intelligent smile--and said, "tor--tor--," which was what he had always called his brother, making his gesture to go to him. the tears came into fulk's eyes, though he smiled back and spoke in his sweet, strong voice, and held out his arms, while we told him he had better sit down. poor nurse! she must have been glad enough--she had held him all that live-long day! and he was quite eager to go to his brother, and smiled up and cooed out, "tor--tor," again, as he felt himself on the strong arm. fulk bade nurse go and lie down, and he would hold him. and so he did. i fed the child, as i had done at intervals all day; and he sometimes slept, sometimes woke and murmured or cooed a little, and fulk scarcely spoke or stirred, hour after hour. he had been travelling day and night, but, strange to say, that enforced calm--that tender stillness and watching, was better for him than rest. he would only have tossed about awake, if he had gone to bed after a discussion with bertram. but in the morning dr. hart came, quite surprised to find the child alive; and when he looked at him and felt his pulse, he said, "you have saved him for this time, at least." (everybody was lavish of pronouns, and chary of proper names. nobody knew what to call anybody.) his little lordship was able to be laid in his cot, and fulk, almost blind now with sheer sleep, stumbled off to his room, threw himself on his bed, and slept for seven hours in his clothes without so much as moving. he confessed that he had never had such unbroken, dreamless sleep since he had first seen hester lea's face. that little murmur of "tor--tor" had settled all our fates. i don't think he had realised before how love was the one thing that the child's life hung upon, and that the boy himself must have that love and trust. then, too, when he had waked and dressed and come down, the first person he met was hester, with her hard, glittering eyes, trying to condole, and not able to hide how the exulting look went out of her face on hearing that the earl (as she chose to term him) was better. she supposed some arrangement would soon be made, and fulk said he should see the lawyers at once about it, and arrange for the personal guardianship of lord trevorsham. "of course i am the only proper person while he lives, poor child," she said. i broke in with, "the next heir is never allowed the custody." i wish i had not. she hastily and proudly said "what do you mean?" and fulk quickly added that "the lord chancellor would decide." the next day he went out, and on returning came up to me in the nursery, and called me into the study. "ursula," he said, "i find that, considering the circumstances, there will be no objection made to our retaining the personal charge of our little brother. everyone is very kind. ours is not a common case of illegitimacy, and my father's well-known express wishes will be allowed to prevail." "and your character," i could not help saying; and he owned that it did go for something, that he was known to everybody, and had some standing of his own, apart from the rank he had lost. then he went on to say that this would of course put an end to the emigration plan, so far as he was concerned. no doubt in the restless desire of change coming after such a fall and disappointment it was a great sacrifice; but as he said, "there did not seem anything left for him in life but just to try to do what seemed most like one's duty." and then he said it did not seem a worthy thing to do nothing, but just exist on a confined income, and the only thing he did know anything about, and was not too old to learn, was farming, and managing an estate. trevorsham would want an agent, for old hall was so old, that my brother had really done all his work for a year or two past; and he had felt his way enough to know he could get appointed to the agency, if he chose. the house was to be let, but there was a farm to be had about two miles off, with a good house, and he thought of taking it, and stocking it, and turning regular farmer on his own account; while looking after the property, and bringing alured up among his own people and interests. bertram did not like this at all. "among all our old friends and acquaintance? impossible! unbearable!" he said. but fulk's answer, was--"better so! if we went to a strange place, and tried to conceal it, it would always be oozing out, and be supposed disgraceful. if my sisters can bear it, i had rather confront it straightforwardly--" "and be _pitied_"--said bertram, with _such_ a contemptuous tone. nobody, however, thought it would be advisable for him to give up the new zealand plan, nor did he ever mean it for a moment; indeed, he declared that he should go and prepare for us; for that we should very soon get tired of skimping's farm, and come out to him; meaning, of course, that our dear charge would be over. he even wanted jaquetta to come with him at once, and the log huts and fern trees danced before her eyes as the blue spectacles had done before mine; but she did not like to leave me, and fulk would not encourage it, for we both thought her much too young and too tenderly brought up to be sent out to a wild settler's life alone with bertram, and without a friend near. to be farmers' sisters where we had been the earl's daughters--well, i had much rather then that it had been somewhere else; but i saw it was best for baby and still more so for fulk, and clear little jaquey held fast to me and to him, and so it was settled! our friends and relatives had much rather we had all emigrated. they did not know what to do with us, and would have been glad to have had us all out of sight for ever, "damaged goods shipped off to the colonies." we felt this and it heartened us up to stay out of the spirit of opposition. old aunt amelia, who fussed and cried over us, and our two uncles, who gave us good advice by the yard! alas! i fear we were equally ungrateful to them, both cold and impatient. no, we did not bear it really well, though they said we did. we had plenty of pride and self-respect, and that carried us on; but there was no submission, no notion of taking it religiously. i don't mean that we did not go to church, and in the main try to do right. any one more upright than my brother it would have been hard to find; but as to any notion that religious feeling could help us, and that our reverse might be blessed to us, that would have seemed a very strange language indeed! and so we were hard, we would bear no sympathy but from one another, and even among ourselves we never gave way. people admired us, i fancy, but were alienated and disappointed, and we were quite willing _then_ to have it so. chapter iv. skimping's farm. skimping's farm was the unlucky name of the place, and fulk would allow of no modification--his resolution was to accept it all entirely. now i love no spot on earth so well. it was very different then. the farm-house lay on the slope of the hill, in the parish of trevorsham, but with the park lying between it and the main village. the ground sloped sharply down to the little river, which, about two miles lower down, blends with the avon, being, in fact, a creek out of shinglebay. beneath the house the stream is clear and rocky, but then comes a flat of salt marsh, excellent for cattle; and then, again, the river becomes tidal, and reaches at high water to the steep banks, sometimes covered with wood, sometimes with pasture or corn. then under the little promontory comes the hamlet of fisherfolk at quay trevor; and then the coast sweeps away to shinglebay town, as anyone may see by the map. ours is an old farm, and had an orchard of old apple-trees sloping down to the river--as also did the home field, only divided by a low stone wall from the little strip of flower-garden before the house, which in those days had nothing in it but two tamarisks, a tea-tree, and a rose with lovely buds and flowers that always had green hearts. there was a good-sized kitchen-garden behind, and the farm-yard was at the side by the back door. the house is old and therefore was handsome outside, even then, but the chief of the lower story was comprised in one big room, a "keeping-room," as it was called, with an open chimney, screened by a settle, and with a long polished table, with a bench on either side. into this room the front porch--a deep one, with seats--opened. at one end was a charming little sitting-room, parted off; at the other, the real kitchen for cooking, and the dairy and all the rest of the farm offices. up-stairs--the stairs are dark oak, and come down at one end of the big kitchen--there is one beautiful large room, made the larger by a grand oriel window under the gable, one opening out of it, and four more over the offices; then a step-ladder and a great cheese-room, and a perfect wilderness of odd nooks up in the roof. as to furniture, fulk had bought that with the stock and everything else belonging to the farm for a round sum; and the chancery people told us that we might take anything for ourselves from home that had been bought by ourselves, had belonged to our mother, or been given to us individually. so the furniture of fulk's rooms in london--most of which he had had at oxford--my own piano, our books, and various little worktables, chairs, pictures, and knicknacks appertained to us; also, we brought what belonged to the little one's nursery, and put him in the large room. his grand nurse--earl though he was--could not stand the change; but old blake, who was retiring into a public house, as he could do nothing else for us, suggested his youngest sister, who became the comfort of my life, for she was the widow of a small farmer, and could give me plenty of sound counsel as to how much pork to provide for the labourers, and how much small beer would keep them in good heart, and not make them too merry. and she had too much good sense to get into rivalry with susan sisson, the hind's wife, who lived in a kind of lean-to cottage opening into the farm-yard, and was the chief (real) manager of the dairy and poultry--though such was not jaquetta's view of the case by any manner of means. what a help it was to have one creature who did enjoy it all from the very first! the parting with bertram was sore, and one's heart will ache after him still at times, though he is prosperous and happy with his wife and fine family at the new trevorsham. fulk went through it all in a grave set way, as if he knew he never should be happy again, and accepted everything in silence, as a matter of course, not wanting to sadden us, but often grieving me more by his steady silence than if he had complained. one thing he was resolved on, that he would be a farmer out and out--not a gentleman farmer, as he said; but though he only wore broadcloth in the evening and on sundays, i can't say he ever succeeded in not looking more of the gentleman. we fitted up the little parlour with our prettiest things, and it was our morning room, and we put a screen across the big keeping-room, which made it snug for a family gathering place. but those were the days when everyone was abusing the farmers for not living with their labourers in the house, and fulk was determined to try it, at least the first year, either for the sake of consistency, or because he was resolved to keep our expenses as low as possible. "failure would be ruin," he impressed on us, and he thought we ought to live on the profits of the farm, except what was directly spent on the boy, and to save the income of the agency. (taking one year with another, we did so.) so he gave up his own dear old cid, and only used the same horses that had sufficed for our predecessor--a most real loss and deprivation--and he chose to take meals at the long table in the keeping-room with the farm servants. he said we girls might dine in our little parlour apart, but there was no bearing that, and the whole household dined and supped together. breakfast was at such uncertain times that we left that for the back kitchen, and had our own little round table by the fire, or in the parlour, at half-past seven; and so we took care to have a good cup of coffee for fulk when he came in about five or six; but the half-past twelve dinner and eight o'clock supper were at the long table, our three selves and baby at the top--baby between me and mrs. rowe ("ally's rowe," as he called her), then george and susan sisson opposite each other, the under nurse, the two maids, the hind, and the three lads. i believe it was a very awful penance to them at first. we used to hear them splashing away at the pump and puffing like porpoises; and they came in with shining faces and lank hair in wet rats' tails, the foremost of which they pulled on all occasions of sitting down, getting up, or being offered food. but they always behaved very well, and the habit of the animal at feeding-time is so silent that i believe the restraint was compensated by the honour; and it did civilise them, thanks, perhaps, to susan's lectures on manners, which we sometimes overheard. fulk made spasmodic attempts to talk to sisson; but the chief conversation was jaquetta's. she went on merrily all dinner-time, asking about ten thousand things, and hazarding opinions that elicited amusement in spite of ourselves: as when she asked, what sheep did with their other two legs, or suggested growing canary seed, as sure to be a profitable crop. indeed, i think she had a little speculation in it on her own account in the kitchen garden--only the sparrows were too many for her--and what they left would not ripen. but the child was always full of some new and rare device, rattling on anyhow, not for want of sense, but just to force a smile out of fulk and keep us all alive, as she called it. she knew every bird and beast on the farm, fed the chickens, collected the eggs, nursed tender chicks or orphan lambs and weaning calves, and was in and out with the dogs all day, really as happy as ten queens, with the freedom and homely usefulness of the life--tripping daintily about in the tall pattens of farm life in those days, and making fresh enjoyment and fun of everything. i used to be half vexed to see her grieve so little over all we had lost; but fulk said, "i suppose it is very hard to break down a creature at that age." and even i was cheered by the wonderful start of health alured took from the time mrs. rowe had him. he grew fat and rosy, and learnt to walk; and dr. hart was quite astonished at his progress, and said he was nearly safe from any more attacks of that fearful water on the brain till he was six or seven years old, and that, till that time, we must let him be as much as possible in the open air, and with the animals, and not stimulate his brain--neither teach, nor excite, nor contradict him, nor let him cry. the farm life was evidently the very thing he wanted. what a reprieve it was, even though it should be only a reprieve! he was already three years old, and was very clever and observant. we were glad that he was too young to take heed of the change, or to see what was implied by his change from "baby," to "my lord," and we always called him by his christian name. mrs. rowe felt far too much for us to gossip to him, and he was always with her or with me, though i do believe he liked ben--the great, rough, hind--better than anyone else; would lead mrs. rowe long dances after him, to see him milk the cows, and would hold forth to him at dinner, in a way as diverting to us as it was embarrassing to poor ben, who used to blurt out at intervals, "yoi, my lord," and "noa, my lord," while the two maids tried to swallow their tittering. the farmers at market used to call fulk, "my lord," by mistake, and then colour up to their eyes through their red faces. i believe, indeed, it was their name for him among themselves, and that they watched him with a certain contemptuous compassion, in the full belief that he would ruin himself. and he declares he should if he had lived a bit more luxuriously, or if he had not had the agency salary to help him through the years of buying experience and the bad season with which he began. nor was it till he had for some years introduced that capital breed which thrives so well in the salt marshes, and twice following showed up the prize ox at the county show, that they began to believe in "farmer torwood," or think his "advanced opinions" in agriculture anything but a gentleman's whimsies. as to friends and acquaintance, i am afraid we showed a great deal of pride and stiffness. they were kinder than we deserved, but we thought it prying and patronage, and would not accept what we could not return. it is not fair to say we. it was only myself--jaquetta never saw anything but kindness, and took it pleasantly, and fulk was too busy and too unhappy to be concerned about our visiting matters. if i saw anyone coming to call i hid myself in the orchard, or if i was taken by surprise i was stiffness itself; and then i wrote a set of cards (miss torwood and miss jaquetta torwood), and drove round in the queer old-fashioned gig to leave them, and there was an end of it; for i would accept no invitations, though jaquetta looked at me wistfully. and thus i daunted all but old miss prior. poor old thing! all her pleasures had oozed down from our house in old times to her; and her gratitude was indomitable, and stood all imaginable rebuffs that courtesy permitted me. i believe she only pitied and loved me the more, and persevered in the dreadful kindness that has no tact. it did not strike me that pleasure might be good for jaquetta, or that fulk's stern silent sorrow might have been lightened by variety. used as he had been to political life and london society, it was no small change to have merely the market for interest, the farm for occupation, and no society but ourselves; no newspaper but the county chronicle once a week; no new books, for mudie did not exist then, even if we could have afforded it. we had dropped out of the guinea country book club, and knight's "penny magazine" was our only fresh literature. however, jaquetta never was much of a reader, and was full of business--queen of the poultry, and running after the weakly ones half the day, supplementing george sisson's very inadequate gardening--aye, and his wife's equally rough cooking. she found a receipt book, and turned out excellent dishes. she could not bear, she said, to see fulk try to eat grease, and with an effort at concealment, assisted by the dogs, fall back upon bread and cheese. luckily plain work in the school-room had not gone out in our day, and i could make and mend respectably, but i had to keep a volume of shakespeare, scott, or wordsworth open before me, and learn it by heart, to keep away thoughts, which might have been good for me; but no--they were working on their own bitterness. sunday was the hardest day of all to fulk, for this was the only one on which he could not be busy enough to tire himself out. we were a mile from church, and when we got to the worm-eaten farm pew there was a smell, as jaquey said, as if generations of farmers had been eating cheese there, and generations of mice eating after them; and she always longed to shut up a cat there. the old curate was very old, and nothing seemed alive but the fiddles in the gallery--indeed, after the "penny magazine" had made us acquainted with the nibelung, jaquey took to calling sisson, folker the mighty fiddler, so determined were his strains. after the great house was shut up, one service was dropped, and so the latter part of the day was spent in a visit to all the livestock, fulk laden with alured, and jaquetta with tit bits for each and all. she and alured really enjoyed it, and we tried to think we did! and then fulk used to stride off on a long solitary walk, or else sit in the porch with his arms across, in a dumb heavy silence, till he saw us looking at him; and then he would shake himself, and go and find sisson, and discuss every field and beast with him. at least we thought we should have been at peace here; but one afternoon, when jaquetta had gone across to the village to see some purchase at the shop, she came back flushed and breathless, and said as she sat down by me, "oh! ursie, ursie, i met miss prior; and _she_ has bought spinney lawn." _she_ was hester; it had never meant anyone else amongst us when it was said in that voice. fulk, when we told him, had, it appeared, known it for some days past. all he said was, "well! she has every right." and when i exclaimed, "just like a harpy, come to watch our poor child!" he said, "nonsense." but i knew i was right, and sat brooding--till presently he said, "put that out of your head, ursula, or you will not be able to behave properly to her." "i don't see any good in behaving properly to her," said jaquetta. "what business has she to come here?" "i do not choose to regale the neighbourhood with our family jars"--said fulk, quietly. and then--such a ridiculous child as jaquetta was--she burst out laughing, and cried, "what a feast they would be! preserved crabs, i suppose;" and she brought a tiny curl into the corner of his mouth. my pride was up, and i remember i answered, "you are right, fulk. no one shall say we are jealous, or shrink from the sight of her!" "when smith told me that he had no idea who was the bidder, or he would not have suffered it," said fulk, "i told him i could have no possible objection!" and so we endured it in our pride and our dignity. lady hester lea was the heroine of the neighbourhood. the romance of the disowned daughter was charming; and i was far too disagreeable to excite any counterbalancing pity. she was handsome, and everybody raved about her likeness to poor papa and the family portraits; and her montreal convent had given her manners quite distinct from english vulgarity; or, maybe, her blood told on her bearing, for she was immensely admired for her demeanour, quite as much as for her beauty. old miss prior--whom no coldness on my part could check in her assiduous kindness, and nothing would hinder from affectionately telling us whatever we did not want to hear--kept us constantly informed of the new comer's triumphs. especially she would dwell upon the sensation that lady hester produced, and all that the gentlemen said of her. her name stood as lady patroness to all the balls and fancy fairs, and archery, that shinglebay produced; and there was no going to shop there without her barouche coming clattering down the street with the two prancing greys, and poor little trevor inside, with a looped-up hat and ostrich feather exactly like alured's; for by some intention she always dressed him in the exact likeness of his little uncle's. i used to think miss prior told her, and sedulously prevented her ever seeing his lordship out of his brown holland pinafores, but the same rule still held good. what tender enquiries poor miss prior used to make after "the dear little lord," as she called him. my asseverations of his health and intelligence generally eliciting that it was current among lady hester's friends that he could neither stand nor speak, and was so imbecile that it was a mercy that he could not live to be eight years old. of course that was what hester was waiting for. and no small pleasure was it when alured would come pattering in with a shout of "ursa, ursa," and as soon as he saw a lady, would stop, and pull off his hat from his chestnut curls like the little gentleman he always was. spinney lawn was bought before joel lea came to england. if he had seen where it was i doubt whether he would have consented to the purchase; but perrault managed it all, and then, with what he had made out of the case, bought himself a share in meakin's office at shinglebay, and constituted himself lady hester's legal adviser. mr. lea, after vainly trying to get his wife to return to sault st. pierre, thought it wrong to be apart from her and his son, and came to england. fulk went at once to call on him, expecting to be disgusted with yankeeisms; but came home, saying he had found a more unlucky man than himself! fancy a great, big, plain, hard-working back-woodsman, bred only to the axe and rifle, with illimitable forests to range in, happy in toil and homely plenty, and a little king to himself, set down in an english villa, with a trim garden and paddock, and servants everywhere to deprive him of the very semblance to occupation! poor man! he had not even the alleviation of being proud of it, and trying to live up to it. puritan to the bone of his broad back, he thought everything as wicked as it was wearisome and foolish; and lived like faithful in "vanity fair," solely enduring it for the sake of his wife and son. i suppose he could not have carried her off, or altered her course without the strong hand; for she was a determined woman, all the more resolute because she acted for her child. he was a staunch dissenter, and would not go to church with lady hester, who did so as a needful part of the belonging of her station, or, perhaps, to watch over us, but trudged two miles every sunday to the meeting-house at shinglebay, where he was a great light, and spent all that she allowed him on the minister and the sunday school. as to society, he abhorred it on principle, and kept out of the way when his wife gave her parties. if she had an old affection for him in the depths of her heart, it was swallowed up in vexation and provocation; and no wonder, for the verdict of society, as miss prior reported it, was--"how sad that such a woman as lady hester should have been thrown away on a mere common man--not a bit better than a labourer." i detested him like all the rest; but fulk declared he was sublime in passive endurance, and used to make opportunities of consulting him about cattle or farming, just to interest him. fulk and the dissenting minister were the only friends the poor man had, and the latter hester would not let into her house. as to perrault, he loathed and shrank from him as the real destroyer of all his peace, and still the most dangerous influence about his wife. he never said so, but we felt it. i think the poor man's happiest hours were spent here; and, now and then in a press of work, or to show how a thing ought to be done, he put his own hand to axe, lever, or hay-fork, and toiled with that cruelly-wasted alert strength. fulk always says there never was anyone who taught him so much as joel lea, and he means deeper things than farming. sometimes mr. lea brought his little boy. i was vexed at first; but alured, who had hardly spoken to a child before, was in ecstasies, as if a new existence had come upon him; and trevor lea was really a very nice little boy. he was only half a year the elder; and they were so much alike that strangers did not know them apart, dressed alike, as they were; or they were taken for twins, and it made people laugh to find they were uncle and nephew. and i must allow the nephew was the best behaved, though it made me savage to hear fulk say so. but our ally's was not real naughtiness--only the consequence of our not being able to keep up discipline, while we lived in dread of that seventh year that might rob us of our darling--always sweet and loving. chapter v. spinney lawn. a change or two began to creep into our life. one afternoon, as jaquetta, in her pretty pink gingham and white apron, with her black hair in the grecian coil we used to wear when our heads were allowed to be of their own proper size, was gathering crimson apples from the quarrendon tree close to the river, a voice came over the water-- "oh, my good girl, if you would but stand so a minute, and allow me to sketch you!" jaquetta started round and laughed. no doubt she was looking like an arcadian; but i--as from under the trees i saw two gentlemen on the other side of the little stream, and jumped up to come to her defence--i must have looked more like a displeased if not draggle-tailed duchess, for there was an immediate disconcerted begging of our pardons, and a hasty departure. jaquetta made a very funny account of my spring forward in awful dignity, so horribly affronted at her being called a good girl! and she made fulk laugh heartily. the gloom did seem to be lightening on him now. walking tourists, we supposed, though one we thought was a clergyman; and on sunday we saw him in the desk and the draughtsman in the parsonage pew; and we discovered that these were the proposed new curate, mr. cradock, and his younger brother. our rector was a canon who had bad health and never came near us, and the poor old curate was past work, and, indeed, died a week or two after he had given up. i saw that younger brother colour up to the roots of his bright hair as jaquetta walked up the aisle, in her drawn black silk bonnet with the pink lining (made by herself); and i think she coloured too, for she was rosier than usual when we faced round in the corners of our pew. we saw no more of them for a month, and a dainty, bridal-looking little lady appeared in the parsonage seat, with white ribbons in her straw bonnet, and modest little orange flowers in the frill round her pleasant face. mrs. cradock she was, we heard; and not only miss prior, but fulk, wanted us to call on her. "what's the use?" said i. "farmers' families are not on visiting terms with the ladies of the parsonage." poor jaquey uttered an "oh dear!" but she and fulk knew i was past moving in that mood. however, one morning in the next week, in walked fulk into the keeping-room, and the clergyman with him, and found jaquey and me standing at the long table under the window, peeling and cutting up apples for apple-cheese. "mr. cradock, my sister," he said, just in the old tone when he brought a friend into our st. james's-street drawing-room; and he hardly gave time for the shaking of hands before he had returned to the discussion about the change of ministry, just with the voice and animation i had not seen for two whole years. we went on with our apples. for one thing, we were not wanted; for another, there was no fire in the little parlour, and the gentlemen both seemed to be enjoying the bright one that was burning on the hearth. the only difficulty was that dinner time began to approach. the men could not be kept waiting; and i heard alured awake from his sleep, pattering about and shouting; and as we began to gather up our apples one of the maids peeped in with a table-cloth over her arm. mr. cradock saw, though fulk did not, and said his wife would expect him; and then he looked most pleasantly to me, and said he was not at all wanted at home, while his wife was luxuriating in a settlement of furniture; but this was, he was assured, the last day of confusion, and to-morrow she would be quite ready for all who would be so good as to call on her. i could only say i would do myself the pleasure; and then he still waited a moment to say that his brother arthur could not recover from his dismay at his greeting to miss torwood. "but," he said, "the boy's head was quite turned by the beauty of the country. he had been raving all day about the new poet, alfred tennyson, and i believe he thought he had walked into lotus-land." "nearer the dragon of the hesperides, perhaps," said fulk, laughing. "is he with you now?" "no; he has gone back to oxford. he is in his second year; and whether he takes to medicine or to art is to be settled by common-sense or genius." "oh, but if he has genius?" began jaquetta eagerly. "that's the question," said mr. cradock, laughing. "but i am hindering you shamefully," and with that he took his leave, having quite demolished our barriers. and his wife was of the same nature--simple, blithe, and bonny--ready to make friends in a moment; and though she must have known all about us, never seeming to remember anything but that we were her nearest lady neighbours. jaquetta, whose young friendships had been broken short off, because the poor girls really did not know how to correspond with her under present circumstances, took to mrs. cradock with eager enthusiasm, and tripped across the park to her two or three times a week, and became delightedly interested in all her doings, parochial or otherwise. dear jaquey's happy nature had always been content; but when i saw how exceedingly she enjoyed the variety, liveliness, and occupations brought by the cradocks, i felt that it had been scarcely kind to seclude her to gratify my own sole pride; but then there had been nobody like the cradocks--to drop or be dropped. the refreshment to fulk was even greater. the having a man to converse with, and break his mind against, one who would argue, and who really cared for the true principles of politics, made an immense difference to him. when after tea he said he would walk to the parsonage to see how the debate had gone, and we knew we should not see him till half-past ten, we could not but be glad; it must have been so much pleasanter than playing at chess, listening to our old music, or reading even the new books they lent us. he brightened greatly that winter, and i ceased to fear that he was getting a farmer's slouch. he looked as stately and beautiful as ever lord torwood had done, and the dejection had gone out of his face and bearing, when suddenly it returned again; and as miss prior was away from home, i never found out the cause till one day, as i was shopping at shinglebay, and was telling the linen draper that mr. torwood would call for the parcel, i saw the lady at the other counter start and turn round, as if at a sudden shock. then i saw the white doe eyes, full of the old pleading expression, and the lips quivering wistfully, but i only said to myself, "the old arts! that is what has overthrown fulk again;" and away i went with a rigid bow, and said nothing. there was no exchange of calls. that was not my fault, for we could not have begun; and we heard that mrs. deerhurst said, "the torwoods had shown very good taste in retiring from all society, poor things. only it was a great mistake to remain in the neighbourhood--so awkward for everybody!" mrs. cradock was much struck with emily's sweet looks; but i believe that jaquetta told her all about it, and we never met the deerhursts there. in fact they were not intimate, for there must have been a repulsion between mrs. deerhurst and such a woman as mary cradock. the deerhursts owned a villa on the outskirts of shinglebay; indeed, i believe it was the difficulty in letting it that had unwillingly forced mrs. deerhurst home, after having married her second daughter, but not emily. she was only a mile and a half from spinney lawn, and speedily became familiar there, being as entirely hester's counsellor in etiquette as was perrault on business. people saw a marked improvement in elegance from the time she became adviser. that next winter poor joel lea died. i suppose it was merely the dulness and want of exercise that killed him, for he had lost flesh and grown languid in manner for months before a low fever set in, and he had no power to struggle with it. he had been ill a long time, when he sent a message to beg mr. torwood to come and see him. jaquetta and i persuaded ourselves that he had discovered that perrault had suborned witnesses, or done something that would falsify the whole trial. jaquetta said she should be very glad for fulk, and if it happened now little alured would never feel it; but for her own part, she should hate to go back to be my lady again. she had never known before what happiness was. i could not help laughing. nobody had ever detected anything amiss with lady jaquetta trevor's spirits, but that they were too high at times. "of course i don't mean that i was miserable!" she said; "but there's something now that does make everything so delicious." "could you not take that something to the park?" i asked, laughing. "i don't know! it would not be so bad if i could run in and out at the parsonage as i do now." and as i smiled, it smote me as i recollected that arthur cradock was always at the parsonage in the vacations. jaquetta had been sketched many a time as nymph of the orchard, and many a nymph besides. and if he was yielding to his brother's wisdom in making medicine his study and art his pleasure, was not our unconscious maiden the sugar that sweetened the cup of prudence? might not elevation be as sore a trial to her as depression had been to us? however, our troubling ourselves was all nonsense. good joel lea would never have connived at any evil doings. all he had wanted of fulk was to be certain of his forgiveness for the injury he had suffered through his wife, and to entreat him to keep a watch over her and the boy. "you are her brother, when all is come and gone," he said; "and i do not trust that perrault. if ever he fails her, or turns against her, you'll stand her friend, and look to the boy?" fulk heartily promised, and joel further begged him to write to her eldest brother, francis dayman (who was prospering immensely in the timber trade), and let him know the state of things--though he had been so angered at hester's sacrifice of his mother's good name and his own birth, that he had broken with her entirely. "but if anyone can get her out of perrault's hands, it is francis," poor joel said; and he went on to talk of his poor boy, about whom he was very anxious, having no trust in any of hester's intimates, and begging fulk to throw a good word to him now and then. "he thinks much of you," he said. "i heard him tell miss deerhurst that it was no use for anyone to try to be such an out-and-out gentleman as his uncle, for they couldn't do it, and he had rather be like you than anyone else. i don't care for gentlemen, and all that foolery, as you know. i wish i could leave him to my old mate, eli potter; but you are true and honest, fulk torwood, and i think not so far from the kingdom--" then he asked fulk to read a chapter to him. no one else would do so, except little trevor, when now and then left alone with him; but hester would not believe him seriously ill, and thought the bible wearied him and made him low spirited; and as to his friend the dissenter, she would never admit him. fulk was so indignant that he wanted to drive to shinglebay and fetch mr. ball, but lea thanked him and half smiled at his superstition of thinking that a minister was needed to speed his soul; but he was pleased that fulk came to him on each of the four or five remaining days of his life, and read to him whatever he wished. he sank suddenly at last, while hester was at church on sunday morning, and died when alone with fulk. somehow the intense reality of that man and the true comfort his faith was to him made an immense impression on my brother, and seemed, as it were, to give the communication between his religious belief and his feelings, which had somehow not been in force before. he thought and borrowed books from mr. cradock, and there came a deepening and softening over him, which one saw in many ways, that made him dearer than ever. he looked more at peace, even though one felt that each passing sight of emily was a sting. hester was dreadfully stricken down at first, and her anguish of lamentation and self-reproach was terrible to witness; but she would not hear of fulk's fetching either of us--indeed, i fancy that was the fault of my dry, cold looks--nor would she allow him to do anything for her. mrs. deerhurst came to be with her, and perrault managed everything. they had a magnificent funeral--much grander than my father's--and laid him in the family vault. perrault took the opportunity of insulting fulk by pairing him with old hall, the ex-agent; but hall found it out in time, and refused to go, and when the moment came everybody fell back, and fulk found himself close to poor little trevor, who tried to get his hand out of perrault's and cling to him; but perrault held him tight till, at the moment when they moved to the mouth of the vault and were to go down the steps, terror completely seized the poor child, and he began to shriek so fearfully that fulk had to snatch him up and carry him out of the church, trembling from head to foot. it was very cruel to send a sensitive child of six years old in that way; but hester was too much exhausted with her violent grief to go herself, and, devoted mother as she was in all else, she never perceived that poor child's instinctive shrinking from perrault. we tried to be kind to her, and hoped she would soften towards us; but she did not. i could see her eyes glitter with their keen, searching glance under her crape veil, as if she were measuring alured all over when the child walked into church with me; and, indeed, when he went to the zoological gardens some time later, and saw the cobra di capello, he said-- "ursa, why does that snake look at me just like lady hester?" there must have been fascination in the eager mystery of the gaze, for, strangely enough, he was not afraid of her. she always made much of him if he came in her way, and he was so fond of trevor lea that nothing made him so eager or happy as the thought of seeing him. the one idea that her boy was ousted by alured, and the longing to see him the heir, seemed to drive out everything else from hester--almost feeling for her husband. fulk had written to francis dayman, and he intended to come and see after his sister as soon as he could leave his business; but this rather precipitated matters. hester was persuaded that alured could not live through that eighth year of his life at the utmost, and perrault somehow persuaded her, that only as her husband could he protect her interests and trevor's, though what machinations she could have expected from us, i cannot guess; or how, in the case of a minor, we could have interfered with her rights. but the man had gained such an ascendancy over her, that she did not even perceive that the connection was not good for that great object of hers, her son's position in society. in fact, he persuaded her that he was of a noble old french family, and ought to be a count. how we laughed when we heard of it! she did preserve wisdom enough to insist upon having her fortune conveyed to trustees for her son, so that perrault could only touch the income, and not the principal; and as she told everyone that he had been determined upon this being done, i suppose he saw that any demur would excite her suspicion. they went to london, and were married there, while we were still scouting poor miss prior's rumours. we were very sorry when we thought of poor joel's charge; and, besides, "the count" had an uncomfortable slippery look about him. i can't describe it otherwise. he was a slim, trim, well-dressed man, only given to elaborate jewellery and waistcoats, with polished black hair and boots, and keen french-looking eyes, well-mannered, and so versatile and polite, that he soon overcame people's prejudices; and he was thought to make a much better master of the house than poor joel had ever done. chapter vi. the white doe's warning. here was alured's eighth birthday, and he had never been ill at all, but was as fine-looking healthy a boy as could be seen. we took him to london, and showed him to dr. hart, and he said that the old tendency was entirely outgrown, and that lord trevorsham was as likely to live and thrive as any child of his age in england. it really seemed the beginning of a new life, not to have that dreadful fear hanging over us any longer! we felt settled, that was one thing; not as if we should do as bertram expected, have to come off to new zealand. the farm had just began to pay. fulk's sales of cattle had been, for the first time, more than enough to clear his rent. he had a great ox in the smithfield cattle show, and met our lupton uncles there not as an unsuccessful man. and i? i had a dim feeling that alured would soon cease to need me, and jaquetta would not be claimed for a long time; and if-- but in the midst of that i saw a haggard face driving in the park by the side of a little, over-dressed, faded woman. and aunt amelia told me how (in the rebound from my harshness, no doubt) mr. decies had, as it were, dropped into the hands of a weak, extravagant girl, who had long been using all the intellect she had to attract him, and now led him a dreary life of perpetual dissipation. i don't know how much i had been to blame. i am sure he was meant for better things. mine could never have been real love for him, and the refusal could not have been wrong. it must have been the pride and harshness that stung him! i was very sorry for him, though i could not think about it, of course, still less speak; but that was the beginning of my hating myself, and i have hated myself more and more ever since i have taken to write all this down, and seen how hard and foolish i was, how very much the worst of the three. even my care for alured sprang out of exclusive passion, and so, though i do think that by heaven's mercy i had a great share in cherishing him into strength and health, i had managed him badly, i had indulged him over much, and was improperly resentful of any attempt of jaquetta, or even of fulk, to interfere with him or restrain him. thus, when the anxiety was over, and he was a strong boy, full of health and activity, his will was entirely unrestrained, he had no notion of minding any of us, still less of learning. trevor lea could read, write, talk french, say a few latin declensions, when alured could not read a word of three letters, and would not try to learn. oh! the antics he played when i tried to teach him! then fulk tried, and he was tame for three days, but then came idleness, wilfulness, anger, punishment, but he laughed to scorn all that we could find in our hearts to do to him. as to getting other help we were ashamed till he should be a little less shamefully backward. the cradocks offered to teach him, but then, unless he was elaborately put on honour, he played truant. he had plenty of honour, plenty of affection, but not the smallest conscience as to obedience; and fulk would not have the other two motives worked too hard, saying the one might break, the other give way. we had not taught obedience, so we had to take the consequences, and we were the less able to enforce it that he had come to a knowledge of our mutual relations much sooner than we intended, and in the worst manner possible. of course he knew himself to be lord trevorsham, and owner of the property; but one day, when fulk found him galloping his pony in the field laid up for hay, and ordered him out, he retorted that "you ain't my proper brother, and you haven't any rights over me! it is my field; and i shall do as i like." fulk got hold of the pony's bridle, and took alured by the shoulder without one word, then took him into the little study, and had it out with him. it was hester who had told him. he had been at spinney lawn with trevor all one afternoon, when we had thought him out with old sisson. he had told no falsehood indeed, but hester and her husband had made him understand, so far as such a child could do, that there was some disgrace connected with us; that fulk had once been in his place, and only wanted to get it back, and now had it all his own way with his young lordship's property, and that he owed us neither duty nor affection, only to his true relative, lady hester perrault. the dear boy had maintained stoutly that he did love ursula and jacquey, and that hester wasn't half so nice, and that he had rather they bullied him than that she coaxed him! but there was the poison sown--to rankle and grow and burst out when he was opposed. he had full faith and trust in fulk, and accepted his history, owning, indeed, from a boy, that he had been a horrid little wretch for saying what he did, and asking whether it had not been a great bore; indeed, he behaved all the better instead of the worse for some little time, dear fellow. but he was too big and strong to tie to one's apron-string, and his greatest pleasure was in being with trevor. i think trevor's own influence never did any harm. poor joel lea had trained him well, and he was a conscientious, good boy, who often hindered alured from insubordination; but the attraction to spinney lawn was a mischievous thing--for there was no doubt that the heads of the family would set him against us if they could. so fulk thought it wiser to send him to school, since he was learning nothing properly at home, and only getting more disobedient and unruly. immediately trevor lea was sent to the same school, to the boys' great delight. they cared little that trevor was placed nearly at the top and trevorsham at the bottom of the little preparatory school. they held together just as much, and alured came home wonderfully improved and delightfully good, but more than ever inseparable from trevor. in the meantime francis dayman had come to pay his sister a visit. he had made some fortunate speculations, and had come on to be a merchant of considerable wealth and weight in the hudson's bay company. a handsome man of a good deal of strength and force he seemed to be, and perrault had certainly been wise in securing his prize before hester had such a guardian. he was an open, straight-forward man, with a fresh breath of the forest about him; successful beyond all his hopes, and full of activity. he took to fulk, and seemed to have a strong fellow-feeling for us. but little had fulk expected to be made the confidant of his vehement admiration for emily deerhurst. the gentle lady-like girl impressed the backwoodsman in a wondrous manner. it seemed to him, as if his wealth would have real value, if he could pour it all out on her. and her mother encouraged him. emily was six years older than when she had cast off fulk, and there was a pale changed look about her; and the rich canadian, who could buy a baronetcy, and do anything she asked, tempted mrs. deerhurst. though, as fulk said bitterly, if the stain on his birth was all the cause of the utter withdrawal, was it not the same with francis dayman? only in his case it was gilded! dayman knew nothing of this former affair. the world was forgetting it, and if hester knew it, she kept it from his knowledge, so he used to consult fulk as to what was to be done to please an english lady, and whether he was too rough for her; and fulk stood it all. he even knew when the young lady herself was brought forward--and refused, gently, sadly, courteously, but unmistakably; and then, when driven hard by the eager wooing, owned to an old attachment, that never would permit her to marry! what a light there was in fulk's eyes when he whispered that into my ears! and yet he had kept his counsel, even though mr. dayman told him that the mother declared it to be a foolish romantic affair of very early girlhood, that no doubt his perseverance would overthrow. "and her persecution!" muttered poor fulk. but he did enjoy the confidences in a bitter-sweet fashion. it was justifiable to be a dog in the manger under the circumstances. mr. dayman went to london, and hester was negotiating about a house where mrs. deerhurst and her daughters were to stay with her for a few weeks. i fancy mrs. deerhurst thought that the chance of seeing farmer torwood ride by to market had a bad effect. it was the easter holidays, and both boys were at home; always trying to be together, and we not finding it easy to keep alured from spinney lawn, without such flat refusals as would have given his sister legitimate cause of complaint and offence. one beautiful spring afternoon, when alured, to my vexation and vague uneasiness, had gone over there, i was sowing annuals in the garden and watching for him at the same time, when, to my surprise, i saw, coming over the fields from the park, a lady with a quick, timid, yet wearied step. had she lost her way, i thought? there was something of the tame fawn in her movement; and then i remembered the white doe. yes! it was emily! the one haunting anxiety of my life broke out--"you haven't come to say there's anything amiss with my boy?" i cried out. "no; oh no! i think he is safe now; but i wanted to tell you, i think you ought to be warned." she was trembling so much that i wanted to bring her in and make her rest; but she would only sit down on the step of the stile, and there she whispered it, in this way. "you know there's a dreadful scarlet fever at old brown's." "the old man that sells curiosities? no, i did not know it; i'll keep trevorsham away," i said, wondering she had come all this way; and then asking in a fright, "surely he has not been there?" "no; i met him on the road with lady hester perrault, and i told them. i walked back to spinney lawn with them. but," as i began to thank her, and her voice went lower still, "but--oh, ursula, lady hester knew it!" "knew it!" "yes, knew it quite well." "she was doing it on purpose!" "oh," emily hid her face in her hands, "i pray god to forgive me if i am doing a very cruel wicked wrong; but i can't help thinking it. i had told her only yesterday how bad the fever was in that street. she said she had forgotten it, and thanked me; but she had not her own boy, trevor, with her." i was too much frozen with the horror of the thing to speak at first, and perhaps emily thought i did not quite believe her, for she said, under her breath, "and i've heard her talk--talk to mamma--about her being so certain that lord trevorsham could not live, even when he was past seven years old. they always have said that the first illness would go to his head and carry him off. and when people do wish things very much--" and then she grew frightened at herself, and began blaming herself for the horrible fancy, but saying it haunted her every time she saw lord trevorsham in lady hester's sight. that old ballad, "the wee grovelling doo," would come into her head, and she had felt as if any harm happened to the child it would be her fault for not having spoken a word of warning, and this had determined her. by this time i had taken it in, and then the first thing i did was to spring up and ask how she could leave the boy still in the woman's power, to which she answered that she had walked them back to spinney lawn--a whole mile--and that lady hester could not set forth again, now that alured had heard the conversation. he had been bent on going to buy a tame sea-gull there, as a birthday present for trevor; and emily had lured him off from that, by a promise of getting one from an old fisherman whom she knew. so there was not much fear of his running back into the danger, though i should not have a happy moment till he was in my sight again. then emily sprang up, saying, she must go. she had walked four miles, and she must get back as fast as she could. most likely mamma would think her at spinney lawn. but what must not it have cost that timid thing to venture here with her warning! it gave me a double sense of the reality of my boy's, peril, that she had been excited to it, and she would not hear of coming in to rest; and when i entreated her to wait till i could get the gig to drive her part of the way, she held me fast, and insisted, with all the terror of womanly shamefacedness, that, "he--that tor--that mr. torwood--should not know." and she sprang up to go home instantly, before he could guess. "oh, emily, that is too bad, when nothing would make him so glad." "oh! no, no! he has been used too ill; he can't care for me now, and as if i should--" i don't think poor emily uttered anything half so coherent as this, at any rate i understood that she disclaimed the least possibility of his affection continuing, and felt it an outrage on herself to be where she could even suppose herself to have voluntarily put herself in his way. i thought there was nothing for it but to let her start, hurry after her with some vehicle, and then call and bring home my boy; but in the midst of my perplexity and her struggle with her tears, who should appear on the scene but fulk himself, driving home the spring cart wherein, everybody being busy, he had conveyed a pig to a new home. i don't know how it was all done or said. my first notion was that he should be warned of our dear boy's danger, and rescue him before anything else. i could not get into my head that there was no present reason for dread, and yet when i had gasped out "oh, fulk--alured--fetch him home! emily came to warn us!" the accusation began to seem so monstrous and horrible that i could not go on with it before emily. she too, perhaps, found it harder to utter to a man than to a woman, and between the strangeness of speaking to one another again, and her shyness and his wonder and delight, it seemed to me unreasonable that poor little alured's danger was counting for nothing between them, and i turned from the former reticence to the bereaved tigress style, and burst out, "and are we to stand talking here while our boy is in these people's power?" then fulk did listen to what it was all about; but even then it seemed to me he would not think half so much of the peril as of what emily had done. in truth, i believe all they both wanted was to get out of my way; but they pacified me by fulk's undertaking, if emily did not object to the cart, to drive her across the park where no one would meet her, and she could get out only a mile from home, and to call at spinney lawn in returning by the road and take up alured. what a drive that must have been! fulk had the advantage over emily in knowing what poor mr. dayman had told him, whereas she, poor child, only knew that he had been so vilely served that she thought his affection and esteem had been entirely killed. they had it all out in that tax cart, a vehicle fulk now regards as a heavenly chariot, and i heard it all afterwards. poor emily! she had grown a great deal older in those six years. at eighteen she had implicitly believed in her mother. mrs. deerhurst had been so good all those years of striving not to frighten my father, that she had been perfection in her daughter's eyes. emily had believed with all her heart in her apparent disinterestedness, and her hopes and sympathy for us were real; and so, when the crash really came, and she told the poor girl with floods of tears that it was impossible, and a thing not to be thought of, for a right-minded woman to unite herself to a man of such birth. and poor emily, with the conscious ignorance of eighteen, believed, and was the sort of gentle creature who could easily be daunted by the terror that her generous impulses to share the shame and namelessness were unfeminine and wrong. the utter silence had been the consequence of her mother assuring her, with authority, that the true kindness was to betray no token of feeling that could cherish hope where all was hopeless, and that he would regret her less if she commanded herself and gave him no look. it had been terrible, calm self-command, and obedience to abused filial confidence in her mother's infallibility. and then mrs. deerhurst had been sinking ever since in her daughter's esteem, as emily could not but rise higher from the conscientious struggle and self-denying submission, and besides grew older and had more experience; while mrs. deerhurst, no doubt, deteriorated in the foreign wandering life, and all her motives made themselves evident when she married the younger daughter. emily had thought for herself, and seen that advantage had been taken of her innocence, and that her betrothed had rights, which, if she had been older, she would not have been persuaded to ignore. but coming home, two years later, and meeting my cold eyes and fulk's ceremonious bow, and hearing on all parts that he had accepted his position and had a hard struggle to maintain his two sisters; she, knowing herself to be portionless, could but suffer, and be still. of course every attempt of her mother's to get her to marry advantageously, and, even more, mrs. deerhurst's devotion to lady hester, tore away more and more of the veil she had tried to keep over her eyes; and as her youngest sister grew up into bloom, and into the wish for society, emily had been allowed more and more to go her own quiet way in the religious and charitable life of shinglebay, where she had peace, if not joy. and then came the dayman affair, when all the old persecution revived again, and emily's foremost defence against him, her blushing objection to his birth, was set aside as a mere prudish fancy of a young girl. the gentle emily had been irate then, and all the more when her mother tried to cover her inconsistency by alleging that everybody knew of lord torwood's fall, whereas no one knew or cared who francis dayman was, or where he came from. henceforth emily's shame at the usage of fulk had been double--or rather it turned into indignation. reports that he was to marry a rich grazier's daughter had no effect in turning her in pique to dayman. she had firmly told her mother that if it were wrong for her to take the one, it must be equally so to take the other. this mrs. deerhurst had concealed from poor mr. dayman; nor would emily's modesty allow her to utter the objection to the man's own face. so mrs. deerhurst encouraged him, and trusted to london reports of the grazier's daughter, and persevering appeals to that filial sense of duty which had been strained so much too far. and now, how did it stand? when i, secure in knowing that alured was safe at home, thinking it abominable nonsense in miss deerhurst to have bothered about scarlet fever, hester herself had said so. when i could hear fulk's happiness, and try to analyse it, what did it amount to? why, that they knew they loved one another still, and never meant to cease. and with what hopes? alas! the hopes were all for some time or other. emily would do nothing in flat disobedience, and there was little or no hope of her mother's consent to her marrying farmer torwood. she meant to tell her mother thus much, that she had seen him, and that they loved each other as much as ever; and as mrs. deerhurst had waived the objection to dayman, it could not hold in the other case. it would be, in fact, a tacit compact--scarcely an engagement--with what amount of meeting or correspondence must be left for duty and principle to decide, but the love that had existed without aliment for six years might trust now. and "hap what hap," there never was a happier man than my fulk that evening. he was too joyous not to be universally charitable. nay, he called it a blessed fancy of emily's that brought her here, as it was emily's, and had brought him such bliss he could not quite scorn it, but he did not, _could_ not believe in it as we did. it was culpable carelessness in hester, but colonial people had been used to such health that they did not care about infection. but it was a glorious act of emily's! in fact the manly mind could believe nothing so horrible of any woman. chapter vii. hunting. emily told mr. dayman the whole truth. poor fellow! he could not face fulk again, and went back to canada. no doubt emily went through a great deal, but we never exactly knew what. fulk wrote to mrs. deerhurst, stating that he hoped in four years' time to be able to purchase the farm, of which he had the lease, and without going into the past, asking her sanction to the engagement. she sent a cold letter in answer, to desire that the impertinence should not be repeated. and emily wrote that her mother would not hear of the engagement, and she knew fulk would not wish her to deceive or disobey, "and so we must trust one another still; but how sweet to do that!" and when any of us met her there were precious little words and looks, and fulk meant to try again after the four years. in the meantime he was much respected, and had made himself a place of his own. it chafed hester to perceive that though she had pulled us down she could not depress us after the first. she had lowered her position, too, by her marriage. at first perrault was on his good behaviour, and made a favourable impression among the second-rate shinglebay society hester got round her; but as the hopes of the title coming to her diminished, he kept less within bounds, did not treat her well at home, and took to racing and gambling. i never could get fulk to share my alarms about alured, but he did not think perrault's society fit for the boy, told alured so, and forbade him to go to spinney lawn. but though alured was much improved as to obedience, it was almost impossible to enforce this command. hester had some strange fascination for him. she would fiercely caress him at times, and he knew she was his sister, and could not see why, when she was often alone, he should not be with her. the passion for trevor was in full force, too, and the boys could not be content only to meet at the farm. we tried sending alured to make visits from home in the holidays, but he did not like it, and he was not happy; his heart was with his home, and with trevor. we tried having a tutor for the spring holidays before he went to eton, but it did not answer. he was not a sensible man, did not like dining in the keeping-room with the household, and though he did it, he showed that he thought it a condescension. moreover, instead of attending to alured, he was always trying to flirt with jaquetta, infinitely disturbing arthur cradock's peace; and the end of it was, that alured was a great deal more left to his own devices than ever he had been before, and exasperated besides. he was in that mood, when one day, as he was riding along the lanes, he met perrault and trevor coming in from hunting. alured had a very pretty pony, but he was growing rather large for it, and fulk had promised that, if he worked well at eton, he should have a lovely little arab, that was being trained by a dealer he knew; and that another year, fulk himself would go out hunting with him. perrault began to pity him for having missed the run. why did not his brother take him out? fulk's old mare was a sort of elephant, and it was not convenient to get another horse just then. that alured knew and explained, but he was pitied the more for being kept back, and perrault ended by saying that if on the next hunting day he could meet them at the corner of the park, a capital mount should be there for him. the hour was attainable if alured made haste with his studies, and he accepted gladly, and without compunction. fulk had never in so many words forbidden him, and besides, fulk had delegated his authority to the hateful tutor. but the next morning, before alured was up trevor was in his bedroom. "you won't go, trevorsham?" "yes, i shall; i'm not such a muff as to stay for that fellow." but i need not try to tell what passed, as of course i did not hear it; i never so much as knew of it till long after, only trevorsham was determined, and trevor tried all round the due arguments of principle, honour, and duty; but alured had worked up a schoolboy self-justification on all points, and besides had the stronghold of "i will," and "i don't care." then trevor told him, under his breath, he was sure it was not a safe horse. but my high-spirited boy laughed this to scorn. "and perhaps he'll play you some trick," added trevor. but trevorsham was still undaunted in his self-will, till trevor resolutely announced his determination, if nothing else would stop it, of going at once to fulk, and informing him. the boy endured all the rage and scorn that a threat so contrary to all schoolboy codes of honour and friendship might deserve. i believe alured struck him, but at any rate trevor lea gained his point, though at the cost of a desperate quarrel. alured held aloof and sulked at him for the remaining fortnight at home, and only vouchsafed the explanation to us that "lea was a horrid little sneak, and he had done with him." they did not make it up till they met in the same house at eton, and then, though trevor was placed far above alured, they became as friendly as ever. in fact, i believe, alured, having imprudently denominated himself by his full title, was having it kicked out of him, when the fortunate possessor of the monosyllabic name came and stood by him and made common cause, to the entire renewing of love. poor trevor! his was a dreary home. his mother loved him passionately, but she was an anxious, worn, disappointed woman, always craving, restless and expectant of something, and perrault was always tormenting her for money. he was deeply in debt, and though he could not touch the bulk of her fortune--neither, indeed, could she, as it was conveyed to trustees--he was always demanding money of her, and bullying her; while matters grew worse and worse, and they were in danger of having to let spinney lawn and go to live abroad. as to keeping trevor at eton that was becoming impossible. at christmas the tutor consulted fulk about how he should get lea's bills paid, and intimated that he must not return unless this were done. and poor trevor himself had little comfort except with us. we encouraged him to come to us, for we had all come to have a very real love for the dear lad himself, and we saw he was unhappy at home; besides that, it was the only way of keeping alured contented. trevor had entirely left off inviting alured to spinney lawn. partly, he was too gentlemanly and good a boy not to be ashamed of the men who hung about the stables; and besides, we now perceive that the same awful impression that was on emily deerhurst was upon him, and that he had a sense that trevorsham was regarded in a manner that made his presence there a peril. he was but a boy, and it was an undefined horror, and he never breathed a word of it; but oh, there was a weight on that young brow, an anxious look about the face, and though now and then he would be all joy and fun, still there was the older, more sorrowful look about him. we thought he was grieving at not going back to eton, and fulk was living in hopes of an answer to the letter he had written to francis dayman about it, but that was not all. one day--christmas eve it was--mr. cradock, on coming into the church to look at the holly wreaths, found trevor kneeling on his father's gravestone in the pavement, sobbing as if his heart was breaking, and heard between the sobs a broken prayer about "forgive"--"don't let them do it"--"turn mother's heart." then mr. cradock went out of hearing, but he waited for the boy outside, and asked if he could do anything for him. "no." trevor shook his head, thanked him, and grew reserved. chapter viii. duck shooting. alured's thirteenth birthday was on the th of january, and he had extracted a promise from fulk, to take him duck-shooting to the mouth of our little river. nothing can be prettier than our tide river by day, with the retreating banks overhung with trees, the long-legged herons standing in the firs, looking like toys in a german box; while the breadth of blue water reflects the trees that bend down to it. but, on a winter's night, to creep in perfect silence and lie still under an overhanging bank, not daring to make a sound, till you could get a shot at the ducks disporting themselves in the moonlight, on the frozen mud on the banks! such an occupation could only be endurable under the name of sport. however, fulk and bertram had had their time, and now alured was having the infection in his turn; but trevor was driven over to spend the day, much mortified that he had a bad broken chilblain, which made his boots unwearable, and it was the more disappointing, that it was a very hard frost, and there was a report that some wild swans had been seen on the river. but in the course of the day jaquetta routed out a pair of india rubber boots which, with worsted stockings beneath, did not press the chilblains at all, and after having spent all the day in snow-balling and building forts, trevor declared himself far from lame, and resolved not to lose the fun. he had not come equipped, so alured put him into an old grey coat and cap of his own, and merrily they started in the frosty moonlight, with dashes of snow lying under the hedges, and everything intensely light. fulk grumbling in fun at being dragged away from his warm fire, and pretending to be grown old, the boys shouting to one another full of glee, all the dogs in the yard clamouring because only the wise old retriever, captain, was allowed to be of the party; arthur cradock making ridiculous mistakes on purpose between the uncle and nephew, trevorsham and sham trevor, as he called them. alas! nay, shall i say alas, or only be thankful? they had been gone some time when we heard a rapid tread coming towards the porch. something in the very sound thrilled jaquetta and me at once with dismay. we darted out, and saw brand, the head gamekeeper in the park. "never fear, my lady; thank god," he said, "my lord is quite safe. it is poor master lea who is hurt; and mr. torwood sent me up for some brandy, and a mattress, and a lantern, and some cloths." that assured us that he was alive, and we ran to fulfil the request in the utmost haste, without asking further questions, and sending off sisson to ride for the poor mother, and to go on to shinglebay for the doctor, though, to our comfort, we knew that arthur had almost finished his surgical education, and was sure to know what was to be done. "a stray shot," we said again and again to each other; and we called nurse rowe, and made up a bed in alured's old nursery, and lighted a fire, and were all ready, with hearts beating heavy with suspense before the steps came back--my poor alured first, as we held the door open. how pale his face looked! and his brows were drawn with horror, and his steps dragging, saying not a word, but trembling, as he came and held by me, with one hand on my waist, while fulk and sisson carried in the mattress, arthur cradock at the side, and perrault, who had joined them, walking behind with the flask. dear trevor lay white with sobbing breath and closed eyes, the cloths and mattress soaked through and through with blood. they put him down on the keeping-room table, and arthur poured more brandy into his mouth. i said something of the room being ready but arthur said very low "he is dying--internal bleeding;" and when jaquetta asked "can nothing be done?" he answered, "nothing but to leave him still." "trevorsham," murmured the feeble voice, and alured was close to him; "ally! you are all right!" and then again, as alured assured him he would be better-- "no, i shan't; i'm so glad it wasn't you. i always thought he'd do it some day, and now you're quite safe, i want to thank god." we did not understand those words then; we did soon. the weak voice rambled on, "to thank god; but oh, it hurts so--i can't--i will when i get there." then presently "mother!" "she'll come very soon," said alured. "mother! oh, mother! trevorsham, don't let them know. o trev, promise, promise!" "promise what? i promise, whatever it is! only tell me," entreated alured. "take care of her--of mother. don't let--" and then his eyes met perrault's, and a shudder came all over him, which brought the end nearer; and all another spoonful of brandy could do was to enable him to say something in alured's ear, and then a broken word or two--"forgive--glad--pray;" and when we all knelt and fulk did say the lord's prayer, and a verse or two more, there was a peaceful loving look at fulk and jaquetta and me, and then the whisper of the name that is above every name, as a glad brightness came over the face, and the eyes looked upwards, and so grew set in their gaze, and there was the sound one never can forget. nurse rowe laid her hand on alured's neck, as he knelt with his head close to trevor's. fulk and i looked at each other, and we knew that all was over. they had tried in vain to check the bleeding. no one could have done more than arthur had done, but a main artery had been injured, and nothing could have saved him. he had said nothing after the first cry, except when he saw alured's grief. "never mind; i'm glad it was not you." and once or twice, as they carried him home, he had begged to be put down, though they durst not attend to the entreaty, and arthur did not think he had suffered much pain. it jarred that just as we would have knelt for one silent prayer, perrault's voice broke on us. "ah! poor boy, it is better than if it lasted longer! i saw that half-witted fellow, billy blake about. so i don't wonder at anything; but of course it was a mere accident, and i shall not press it." scarcely hearing him, i had joined mrs. rowe in the endeavour to detach alured from his dear companion, when there was poor hester among us, with open horror-stricken eyes, and a wild, frightful shriek as she leapt forward; and no words can describe the misery of her voice as she called on her boy to look at her, and speak to her--gathering him into her bosom with a passionate, desperate clasp, that seemed almost an outrage on the calm awful stillness of the innocent child; and alured involuntarily cried, "oh, don't," while fulk spoke to her kindly; but just then she saw her husband, and sprang on her feet, her eyes flashing, her hands stretched out, while she screamed out, "you here? you dare to come here? you, who killed him!" fulk caught her arm, saying, "hush! hester; come away. it was a lamentable accident, but--" "oh!" the laugh she gave was the most horrible thing i ever heard. "accident! i tell you it has been his one thought to make accidents for trevorsham! and he hated my child--my dear, noble, beautiful, only one! he made him miserable, and murdered him at last!" she gave another passionate kiss to the cheeks, and then just as i hoped she was going to let us lead her away, she darted from us, rushed past mr. cradock who was entering the porch, and in another moment, he hurrying after her, saw her rush down the steep grassy slope, and fling herself into the swollen rapid stream. his shout brought them all out, and fulk found him too in the river, holding her, and struggling with the stream, which winter had made full and violent, and the black darkness of the shadows made it hard to find any landing place, and he was nearly swept away before it was possible to get them out of the river; and fulk was as completely drenched as he was when they brought poor hester, quite unconscious, up to the house, and brought her to the room that had been prepared for her son; and there dr. brown and arthur gave us plenty to do in filling hot-water baths and warming flannels, or rubbing the icy hands and feet. only that constant need of exertion could have borne us through the horror of it all. but it was not over yet. there was a call of "ursula," and as i ran down, i found fulk standing at the bottom of the stairs with alured in his arms looking like death! "i found him on the parlour sofa, the little window and the escritoire open!" fulk said breathlessly, "the villain!" "i'm not hurt," said dear alured's voice, faintly, but reassuringly, "oh! put me down, fulk." we did put him down on the floor--there was no other place--with his head on my lap, and i found strange voices asking him what perrault had done to him. "oh! nothing! 'twasn't that. yes, he's gone, out by the window." he swallowed some wine and then sat up, leaning against me as i sat at the bottom of the stairs, quite himself again, and assuring us that he was not hurt; perrault never touched him--"threatened you, then," said fulk. "no," said alured, as if he hadn't spirit to be indignant; "i meant him to get off." "lord trevorsham!" cried a voice in great displeasure, and i saw that mr. halsted, the nearest magistrate, was standing over us. "he told me--trevor did"--said alured. "told you to assist the murderer to escape!" exclaimed mr. halsted. alured let his head fall back, and would not answer, and fulk said, "there is no need for him to speak at present, is there? the constable and the rest are gone after perrault, but i do not yet know what has directed the suspicion against him." and then at the stair foot, for there was no other place to go to, we came to an understanding, the two gentlemen and brand the keeper standing, and i seated on the step with my boy lying against me. i could not trust him out of my sight, nor, indeed, was he fit to be left. it seems that brand had been uneasy about the number of shooters whom the report of the swans had attracted; and though the bank of the river was not trevorsham ground, he had kept along on the border of the covers higher up the hill, to guard his hares and pheasants. thus he had seen everything distinctly in the moonlight against the snowy bank below; and he had observed one figure in particular, moving stealthily along, in a parallel line with that which he knew our party would take, though they were in shadow, and he could not see them. suddenly, a chance shot fired somewhere made all the ducks fly up. a head and shoulders that brand took for his young lord's, appeared beyond the shadow, beside fulk's; and, at the same moment, he saw the man whom he had been watching level his gun from behind, and fire. then came the cry, and brand running down in horror himself, was amazed to see this person doing the same, and when they came up with the group, he recognised perrault; and found, at the same time, that trevor was the sufferer, and that lord trevorsham was safe. he then would have thought it an accident, but for perrault's own needless wonder, whence the shot came, and that same remark, that billy blake, the half-witted son of a farmer, was about that night. brand, a shrewd fellow, restrained his reply, that mr. perrault knew most about it himself. he saw that the most pressing need was to obey fulk in fetching necessaries from our house, and that perrault meant to disarm suspicion by treating it as an accident, so he thought it best to go off to a magistrate with his story, before giving any alarm; feeling certain, as he said, that the shot had been meant for the earl; as indeed, perrault's first exclamation on coming up showed that he too had expected to find trevorsham the wounded one. mr. halsted had sent for the constable and came at once, though even then inclined to doubt whether brand had not imputed accident to malice. but perrault's flight had settled that question. during the confusion, while hester was being carried upstairs, the miscreant had the opportunity of speaking to the child. "drowned! no, she is not drowned; but she may be the other thing if you don't get me off! what, don't you understand? let the law lay a finger on me, and what is to hinder me from telling how your sweet sister has been plotting to get you--yes, you, out of the way of her darling. no, you needn't fear, there's nothing to get by it now. lucky for you you brought the poor boy out, when i thought him safe by the fire nursing his chilblain. but mind this, if i am arrested, all the story shall come out. i'll not swing alone. if i fired, she pointed the gun! and you may judge if that was what poor trevor meant by his mutterings to you about 'mother.'" "but what do you want?" alured asked. he had backed up against the wall; he was past being frightened, but he felt numb and sick with horror, and ready to do anything to get the wretch out of his sight. "i want a clear way out of the house and all the cash you can get together. what! no more than that? i'd not be a lord to be kept so short. find me some more." alured knew i should forgive him, and he took my key from my basket, unlocked the escritoire, and gave him my purse of household money, undid the shutters, and helped perrault to squeeze himself through the little parlour window; and then, as he said, something came over him, and he just reached the sofa, and knew no more. he did not tell all this about hester before mr. halsted; only when fulk, finding how shaken he was, had carried him upstairs, and we had taken him to his room, he asked anxiously whether anyone had heard hester say that dreadful thing, and added, "then if mr. perrault gets away no one will know--about her." "was that why you helped him?" we asked. "trevor told me to take care of her," he said; and then he told us of perrault's arguments, but we ought not to have let him talk of them that night, for it brought back the shuddering and sobbing, and the horror seemed to come upon him, so that there was no soothing him or getting him calm till the doctor mixed an anodyne draught; and let it go as it would with hester, i never left my boy till i had crooned him to sleep, as in the old times. chapter ix. trevor's legacy. jaquetta bore the brunt of that night, and showed the stuff she was made of, for poor hester had only revived to fall into a most frightful state of delirium, raving and struggling so that the doctor and arthur could hardly hold her. so it went on for hours, alured the only creature asleep in the house, and we not daring to send for any help from without, poor hester's exclamations were so dreadful. poor alured! his waking was sad enough! he had loved trevor with all his heart, and the wonder that anyone could be so wicked oppressed him almost as much as the grief. the remnants of the opiate hung upon him, too, and he lay about all day, hardly rousing himself to speak or look, but giddily and drowsy. not till the inquest was it perceived how cleverly perrault had taken his measures, so that had he not made the mistake between the two boys, he would scarcely have been suspected: certainly not but for brand's having watched him. the report of the wild swans was traced to him. no doubt it was as an excuse for a heavier charge, for poor trevor was wounded with shot that would not have been used merely for ducks, and besides, the other shooters it attracted would be likely to make detection less easy. indeed, fulk had seen that there were enough men about to spoil their sport, and but for the boys' eagerness, would have turned back. moreover it was proved that perrault had in the course of the morning met billy blake, and asked him if he meant to bag the swan--if he followed the young lord's party and fired when they did, he would be sure to bring something down. he did not know that the blakes never let the poor fellow load his old gun with anything but powder. then his joining the horrified group, as if he had been merely after the ducks, and had been attracted by the cry, had entirely deceived us; and but for hester's accusation, brand's evidence, and his own flight, together with all the past, might have continued to do so. he had gone to his own house, as it afterwards turned out, entered so quietly that the listening, watching servants never heard him, collected all the valuables he could easily carry away, changed his dress, and gone off before the search had followed him thither. a verdict of wilful murder was returned against him at the inquest, but it is very doubtful whether he could have been convicted of anything but manslaughter; for even if the intention could have been proved, without his wife, whose evidence was inadmissible, the malice was not directed against his victim, but against trevorsham. we could not but feel it a relief day by day, that nothing was heard of him; for who could tell what disclosures there might be about the poor thing who lay, delirious, needing perpetual watchfulness. arthur devoted himself to the care of her, and never left us, or i do not see how we could have gone through it all. alured was well again, but inert and crushed, and heartless about doing anything, except that he walked over to spinney lawn, and brought home trevor's dog, to which he gave himself up all day, and insisted on having it in his room at night. the burial was in the vault--nobody attended but fulk and alured, not even arthur, for though the poor mother was not aware of what was going on, it was such a dreadful day with her, that he durst not leave us alone to the watch. it was enough to break one's heart to stand by the window and hear her wandering on about her trevor coming to his place, and not being kept from his position; while we watched the little coffin carried across the field by the labouring men, with those two walking after it. our boy's first funeral was that of the friend who had died in his stead. we were glad to send him back to eton, out of the sound of his poor sister's voice; though he went off very mournfully, declaring that he should be even more wretched there without trevor than he was at home; and that he never should do any good without him. but there he was wrong, i am thankful to say. dear trevor was more a guide to him dead than living. trevor's chief eton friend, young maitland, a good, high-principled, clever boy, a little older, who had valued him for what he was, while passing alured by as a foolish, idle little swell, took pity upon him in the grief and dejection of his loss--did for him all and more than trevor could do, and has been the friend and blessing of his life, aiding the depth and earnestness that seemed to pass into our dear child as he hung over the dying lad. yes, trevor lea and john maitland did for our trevorsham what all our love and care had never been able to do. meantime hester's illness took its course. the chill of that icy water had done great harm, and there was much inflammation at first, leaving such oppression of breath that permanent injury to the lungs was expected, and therefore it was all the sadder to see the dumb despair with which she returned to understanding, i can hardly say to memory, for i believe she had never lost it for a moment. hopeless, heedless, reckless, speechless, she was a passive weight, lying or sitting, eating or drinking as she was bidden, but not making any manifestation of preference or dislike, save that she turned rigidly and sullenly away from any attempt to read prayers to her. she asked no questions, attempted no employment, but seemed to care for nothing, and for weeks uttering nothing but a "yes," "no," or a mechanical "thank you." jaquetta tried to caress her, by force of nursing and pity. jaquetta really had come to a warm tender love for her, but she sullenly pushed away the sweet face, and turned aside. we never ventured to leave her alone, and this, after a time, began to vex her. she bade us go down once or twice, and tried to send away mrs. rowe; and at last, when she found it was never permitted, she broke out angrily one day, "you are very absurd to take so much trouble to hinder what cannot make any difference." it made one's blood run cold, and yet it was a relief that the silence was broken. i can't tell what i said, only i implored her not to think so, and told her that her having been rescued was a sign that heaven would have her repent and come back, but she laughed that horrible laugh. "do you think i repent?" she said; "no, only that i left it to that fool! i should have made no mistakes." i was too much horrified to do anything but hide my eyes and pray. i thought i did not do so obviously, but hester saw or guessed, stamped at me, and said, "don't; i will not have it done. it is mockery!" "happily you cannot prevent our doing that, my poor lady hester," i said. "all i wish you to do is, what you would do if you had a spark of natural feeling." "what?" i asked, bewildered at this apparent accusation of unkindness. "leave me to myself. send me from your door. not oppress me with this ridiculous burthensome care and attention, all out of the family pride you still keep up in the trevors!" she sneered. "no, hester. sister hester, will you not believe it is love?" i said, thinking that if she would believe that we loved her and forgave her, it might help her to believe that her father above did. i had never called her by her name alone before; but i thought it might draw her nearer; but it made her only fiercer. "nonsense," she said, "i know better." and then she fell into the same deadly gloom; but i think she had almost a wild animal's longing for solitude; for she made a solemn promise not to attempt her life if we would only leave her alone! and we did, though we took care someone was within hearing; for she was still very weak, and we had not a bell in the house, except a little hand one on the table. so the easter holidays drew on, and she was still far too weak and unwell for any thought of moving her; so that we were in trouble about alured's holidays, not liking him to come home to a house of illness that would renew his sorrow, and advising him to accept some invitations from his schoolfellows; but he wrote that he particularly wished to come home--he could not bear to be away, and maitland wanted to see the place and know all about dear lea, so might he bring him home? we were only too glad to consent, and i had gone to sleep with jaquetta, so as to make room--feeling very happy over the best school report of our boy we had ever had, though not the best we were to have. he spent two or three days at mr. maitland's in london, and then he and his friend, john, came on here. the railway did not come within twenty miles then, and they had to post from it in flies. how delightful it was to see the tall hat and wide white collar, as he stood up in the open fly, signalling to us, and pointing us out to his friend. only, what must it have been to the poor sufferer in the room above? oh! did not one's heart go out in prayer for her! out jumped alured among all of us, and all the dogs at the garden gate; and the first thing, after his kiss to us all, was to turn to the fly and take out a flower-pot with a beautiful delicate forced rose in it. "where's hester?" he said. "my dear child, she has not left her room yet." "she is well enough for me to take this to her, i suppose?" he said. "he always did get some flower like this to bring home to her, you know, she liked them so much." it was just his one idea that trevor had told him to take his place to her. we looked doubtfully at each other, but fulk quietly said, "yes, you may go." and added, as the boy went off, "it can do no harm to her in the end, poor thing!" "to her, no; that was not my fear." there was alured, almost exactly what trevor had been when last she saw him, with his bright sweet honest face over the rose, running up the stairs, knocking, and coming in with his boyish, "good morning, hester, i do hope you are better;" and bending down with his fresh brotherly kiss on her poor hot forehead, "i've got this rose for you, the bud will be out in a day or two." if ever there was a modern version of st. dorothy's roses it was there. that boy's kiss and his gift touched the place in her heart. she caught him passionately in her arms, and held him till he almost lost breath, and then she held him off from her as vehemently. "boy--trevorsham--what do you come to me for?" "he told me," said alured, half dismayed. "besides, you are my sister." "sister, indeed! don't you know we would have killed you?" "never mind that," said alured, with an odd sort of readiness. "you are my sister all the same, and oh--if you would let me try to be a little bit of trevor to you, though i know i can't--" "you--who must hate me?" "no," said he, "i always did like you, hester; and i've been thinking about you all the half--whenever i thought of him." and as the tears came into the boy's eyes, the blessed weeping came at last to hester. he thought he had done her harm, for she cried till she was absolutely spent, sick, faint and weak as a child. but she was like a child, and when her head was on the pillow she begged for trevorsham to wish her good-night. i think she tried to fancy his kiss was trevor's. any way the bitter black despair was gone from that time. she believed in and accepted his kindness like a sort of after glow from trevor's love. perhaps it did her the more good that after all he was only a boy, sometimes forgot her, and sometimes hurried after his own concerns, so that there was more excitement in it than if it had been the steady certain tenderness of an older person on which she could reckon. she certainly cared for no one like trevorsham. she even came downstairs that she might see him more constantly, and while he was at home, she seemed to think of no one else. but she had softened to us all, and accepted us as her belongings, in a matter-of-course kind of way. only when he was gone did she one day say in a heavy dreary tone, that she must soon be leaving us. but i told her, as we had agreed, that she was very far from well enough to go away alone; for indeed, it was true that disease of the lungs had set in, and to send her away to languish and die alone was not to be thought of. my answer made her look up to me, and say, "i don't see why you should all be so good to me! do you know how i have hated you?" i could not help smiling a little at that, it had so little to do with the matter; but i bent down and kissed her, the first time i had ever done so. "i don't understand it," she said, and then pushing me away suddenly. "no! you cannot know, that i--i--i was the first to devise mischief against that boy. perrault would never have thought of it, but for me! now, you see whom you are harbouring! perhaps, you thought it all perrault's doing." "no, we did not," i said. "and you still cherish me! i--who drove you from your home and rank, and came from wishing the death of your darling, to contriving it!" i told her we knew it. and at last, after a long, long silence, she looked up from her joined hands, and said, "if i may only see my child again, even from the other side of the great gulf, i would be ready for any torment! it would be no torment to me, so i saw him! do you think i shall be allowed, ursula?" how i longed for more power, more words to tell her how infinitely more mercy there was than she thought of! i don't think she took it in then, but the beginning was made, and she turned away no more from what she looked on at first as a means of bringing her to her boy, but by-and-by became even more to her. gradually she told how the whole history had come about. she had thought nothing of the discovery of her birth till her boy was born, but from that time the one thought of seeing him in the rank she thought his due had eaten into her heart. she had loved her husband before, but his resistance had chafed her, and gradually she felt it an injustice and cruelty, and her love and respect withered away, till she regarded him as an obstacle. and when she had spent her labour on the voyage, and obtained recognition from her father--behold! alured's existence deprived her of the prize almost within her grasp. a settled desire for the poor baby's death was the consequence, kept up by the continued reports of his danger. till that time she had prayed. then a sense that heaven was unjust to her and her boy filled her with grim rebellion, and she prayed no more; and perrault, by his constant return to the subject and speculations on it, kept her mind on it far more. but alured lived, and every time she saw him she half hated him, half loved him; hated him as standing in her son's light, loved him because she could not help loving trevor's shadow. that day, when emily met them--it had been a sudden impulse--alured had been talking to her about his plans for trevor's birthday; and, as he spoke of that street, the wild thought came over her how easily a fever might yet sweep him away. and yet she says, all down the street, she was trying to persuade herself to forget emily's warning, and to disbelieve in the infection. after all, she thought, even if she had not met emily, she should have made some excuse for turning back, such a pitiful thought came of the fair, fresh face flushing and dying. but it was prevented, only it left fruits; for perrault had heard what passed between her and trevorsham. "did you take him to the shop?" he asked. and when she mentioned miss deerhurst's reminder, he said, "ah! that game wants skill and coolness to carry it out." she says that was almost all that passed in so many words; but from that time she never doubted that perrault would take any opportunity of occasioning danger to trevorsham; and, strange to say, she lived in a continued agony, half of hope, half of terror and grief and pity, her longing for trevor's promotion, balanced by the thought of the grief he would suffer for his friend. any time those five years she told me she thought that had she seen perrault hurting him, she should have rushed between to save him; and yet in other moods, when she planned for her son, she would herself have done anything to sweep alured from his path. and the frequent discussion with perrault of plans depending on the possession of the trevorsham property, kept the consciousness of his purpose before her, and as debt and desperation grew, she was more and more sure of it. that last day, when trevor had been driven away, lamenting his inability to go out duck shooting, perrault had quietly said in the late evening, "i shall take a turn in the salt marshes to-night--opportunities may offer." the wretch! fulk thinks he said so to implicate her. at any rate it left her shuddering with dread and remorse, yet half triumphant at the notion of putting an end to fulk's power over the estate, and of installing her son as heir of trevorsham. she had no fears for him, she trusted to his lame foot to detain him, and said to herself that if it was to be, he would be spared the sight. she was growing jealous of his love for alured and of us, and had a fierce glad hope of getting him more to herself. and then! oh! poor hester! no wonder her desire was to be anywhere, anywhere, out of the world. but out of all the anguish, the remorse, the despair, repentance grew at last. love seemed to open the heart to it. the sense of infinite redeeming love penetrated at last, and trust in pardon, and with pardon came peace. peace grew on her, through increasing self-condemnation, and bearing her up as the bodily powers failed more and more. there is little more to say. she was a dear and precious charge to us, and as she grew weaker, she also became more cheerful! and even that terrible, broken-hearted sense of bereavement calmed. she found out about jaquetta and arthur, and took great interest in his arrangements for getting a partnership at shinglebay. "and hester," said jaquetta, "it is so lucky for me that i came down from being a fine lady. i might never have known arthur; and if i had, what an absurd creature i should have been as a poor man's wife!" as to the deerhursts, the mother sent a servant once or twice to inquire, but never came herself to see her dear friend; and miss prior took care to tell us that there were horrid whispers about, that hester had known, and if not, mrs. deerhurst could not have on her visiting list the wife of a man with a warrant out against him! she thought it very unfeeling in us to harbour her. but emily came. hester had a great longing to thank her for checking her on that walk to the scarlet-fever place, and asked jaquetta one day to write to her and beg her to come to see a dying woman. emily showed the note to her mother, and did not ask leave. the white doe had become a much more valiant animal. hester had liked emily even while emily shrank from her, and she now realized what she had inflicted upon her and fulk. she asked emily's pardon for it, as she had asked fulk's, and said that when she was gone she hoped all would come right. of course the old position could not be restored, but she knew now why joel lea had such an instinct against it. "i feel," she once said, "as if satan had offered me all this for my soul, and i had taken the bargain. aye, and if god's providence had allowed our wicked purpose, he would have had it too. my husband! he prayed for me! and my boy did too." she always called joel lea "my husband" now, and thought and talked much of their early love and his warnings. i think the way she had saddened his later years grieved her as much as anything, and all her affection seemed revived. she lingered on, never leaving the house indeed, but not much worse, till the year had come round again, and we loved her more each day we nursed her. and when the end came suddenly at last, we mourned as for a dear sister. perrault wrote once--a threatening, swaggering letter from america, demanding hush-money. it did not come till she was too ill to open it--only in the last week before her death, and it was left till we settled her affairs. then fulk wrote and told him of the verdict against him, and recommended him to let himself be heard of no more. and he took the advice. we found that dear hester had left all the fortune, , pounds, which had been settled on herself and trevor, to be divided equally between us three. nor had we any scruple in profiting by it. trevorsham had enough, and it was what my father would have given us if he could. it was enough to make jaquetta and her young dr. cradock settle down happily and prosperously on the practice they bought. and enough too, together with emily's strong quiet determination, to make mrs. deerhurst withdraw her opposition. daughters of twenty-nine years old may get their own way. moreover a drawing-room and dining-room were built on to skimping's lawn, though alured declares they have spoilt the place, and nothing ever was so jolly as the keeping-room. we had a beautiful double wedding in the summer, in our old church, and since that i have come to make the old hall homelike to my boy in the holidays. we are very happy together when he comes home, and fills the house with his young friends; and if it feels too large and empty for me in his absence, i can always walk down for a happy afternoon with emily, or go and make a longer visit to jaquetta. and i don't think, as a leader of the fashion, she would have been half so happy as the motherly, active, ready-handed doctor's wife. but best of all to me, are those quiet moments when alured's earnest spirit shows itself, and he talks out what is in his heart; that it is a great responsibility to stand in the place such a man as fulk would have had--yes--and to have been saved at the cost of trevor's life. i believe the pure, calm remembrance of trevor lea's life will be his guiding star, and that he will be worthy of it. proofreaders aunt jane's nieces in society by edith van dyne list of chapters chapter i uncle john's duty ii a question of "pull" iii diana iv the three nieces v preparing for the plunge vi the fly in the broth vii the hero enters and trouble begins viii opening the campaign ix the von taer pearls x misled xi limousine xii fogerty xiii diana revolts xiv a cool encounter xv a bewildering experience xvi madame cerise, custodian xvii the mystery deepens xviii a rift in the clouds xix politic repentance xx a telephone call xxi the unexpected happens xxii gone xxiii the crisis xxiv a matter of course chapter i uncle john's duty "you're not doing your duty by those girls, john merrick!" the gentleman at whom this assertion was flung in a rather angry tone did not answer his sister-in-law. he sat gazing reflectively at the pattern in the rug and seemed neither startled nor annoyed. mrs. merrick, a pink-cheeked middle-aged lady attired in an elaborate morning gown, knitted her brows severely as she regarded the chubby little man opposite; then, suddenly remembering that the wrinkles might leave their dreadful mark on her carefully rolled and massaged features, she banished them with a pass of her ringed hand and sighed dismally. "it would not have mattered especially had the poor children been left in their original condition of friendless poverty," she said. "they were then like a million other girls, content to struggle for a respectable livelihood and a doubtful position in the lower stratas of social communion. but you interfered. you came into their lives abruptly, appearing from those horrid western wilds with an amazing accumulation of money and a demand that your three nieces become your special _protégées_. and what is the result?" the little man looked up with a charming smile of good humored raillery. his keen gray eyes sparkled as mischievously as a schoolboy's. softly he rubbed the palms of his hands together, as if enjoying the situation. "what is it, martha, my dear? what is the result?" he asked. "you've raised them from their lowly condition to a sphere in which they reign as queens, the envy of all who know them. you've lavished your millions upon them unsparingly; they are not only presumptive heiresses but already possessed of independent fortunes. ah, you think you've been generous to these girls; don't you, john merrick?" "go on, martha; go on." "you've taken them abroad--you took my own daughter, john merrick, and left _me_ at home!--you've lugged your three nieces to the mountains and carried them to the seashore. you even encouraged them to enlist in an unseemly campaign to elect that young imbecile, kenneth forbes, and--" "oh, martha, martha! get to the point, if you can. i'm going, presently." "not until you've heard me out. you've given your nieces every advantage in your power save one, and the neglect of that one thing renders futile all else you have accomplished." now, indeed, her listener seemed perplexed. he passed a hand over his shiny bald head as if to stimulate thought and exorcise bewilderment. "what is it, then? what have i neglected?" was his mild enquiry. "to give those girls their proper standing in society." he started; smiled; then looked grave. "you're talking foolishly," he said. "why, confound it, martha, they're as good girls as ever lived! they're highly respected, and--" "sir, i refer to fashionable society." the capitals indicate the impressive manner in which mrs. merrick pronounced those words. "i guess money makes folks fashionable; don't it, martha?" "no, indeed. how ignorant you are, john. can you not understand that there is a cultured, aristocratic and exclusive society in new york that millions will not enable one to gain _entrée_ to?" "oh, is there? then i'm helpless." "you are not, sir." "eh? i thought you said--" "listen, john; and for heaven's sake try for once to be receptive. i am speaking not only for the welfare of my daughter louise but for beth and patricia. your nieces are charming girls, all three. with the advantages you have given them they may well become social celebrities." "h-m-m. would they be happier so?" "of course. every true woman longs for social distinction, especially if it seems difficult to acquire. nothing is dearer to a girl's heart than to win acceptance by the right social set. and new york society is the most exclusive in america." "i'm afraid it will continue to exclude our girls, martha." "not if you do your duty, john." "that reminds me. what is your idea of my duty, martha? you've been talking in riddles, so far," he protested, shifting uneasily in his chair. "let me explain more concisely, then. your millions, john merrick, have made you really famous, even in this wealthy metropolis. in the city and at your club you must meet with men who have the _entrée_ to the most desirable social circles: men who might be induced to introduce your nieces to their families, whose endorsement would effect their proper presentation." "nonsense." "it isn't nonsense at all." "then blamed if i know what you're driving at." "you're very obtuse." "i won't agree to that till i know what 'obtuse' means. see here, martha; you say this social position, that the girls are so crazy for--but they've never said anything to _me_ about it--can't be bought. in the next breath you urge me to buy it. phoo! you're a thoughtless, silly woman, martha, and let your wild ambitions run away with your common sense." mrs. merrick sighed, but stubbornly maintained her position. "i don't suggest 'buying' such people; not at all, john. it's what is called--ah--ah--'influence'; or, or--" "or 'pull.' 'pull' is a better word, martha. do you imagine there's any value in social position that can be acquired by 'pull'?" "of course. it has to be acquired some way--if one is not born to it. as a matter of fact, louise is entitled, through her connection with _my_ family--" "pshaw, i knew _your_ family, martha," he interrupted. "an arrant lot of humbugs." "john merrick!" "don't get riled. it's the truth. i _knew_ 'em. on her father's side louise has just as much to brag about--an' no more. we merricks never amounted to much, an' didn't hanker to trip the light fantastic in swell society. once, though, when i was a boy, i had a cousin who spelled down the whole crowd at a spellin'-bee. we were quite proud of him then; but he went wrong after his triumph, poor fellow! and became a book agent. now, martha, i imagine this talk of yours is all hot air, and worked off on me not because the girls want society, but because you want it for 'em. it's all _your_ ambition, i'll bet a peanut." "you misjudge me, as usual, john. i am urging a matter of simple justice. your nieces are lovely girls, fitted to shine in any sphere of life," she continued, knowing his weak point and diplomatically fostering it. "our girls have youth, accomplishments, money--everything to fit them for social triumphs. the winter season is now approaching; the people are flocking back to town from their country homes; fashionable gaieties and notable events will soon hold full sway. the dear girls are surely entitled to enjoy these things, don't you think? aren't they _worthy_ the best that life has to offer? and why shouldn't they enter society, if you do your full duty? once get them properly introduced and they will be able to hold their own with perfect ease. give me the credit for knowing these things, john, and try to help your nieces to attain their ambition." "but _is_ it their ambition?" he asked, doubtfully. "they have not said so in words; but i can assure you it _is_ their ambition, because all three are sensible, spirited, young women, who live in this age and not the one you yourself knew a half century or so ago." mr. merrick sighed and rubbed his head again. then he slowly rose. "mornin', martha," he said, with a somewhat abstracted nod at his sister-in-law. "this is a new idea to me. i'll think it over." chapter ii a question of "pull" john merrick's face was not so cheery as usual as he made his way into the city. this suggestion of martha merrick's regarding his inattention to duty to his beloved nieces was no easy nut to crack. he knew his sister-in-law to be a wordly-minded, frivolous woman, with many trivial ambitions; but in this instance he had misgivings that she might be right. what did he, john merrick, know of select society? a poor man, of humble origin, he had wandered into the infantile, embryo west years ago and there amassed a fortune. when he retired and returned to "civilization" he found his greatest reward in the discovery of three charming nieces, all "as poor as job's turkey" but struggling along bravely, each in her individual characteristic way, and well worthy their doting uncle's affectionate admiration. mrs. merrick had recited some of the advantages they had derived from the advent of this rich relative; but even she could not guess how devoted the man was to the welfare of these three fortunate girls, nor how his kindly, simple heart resented the insinuation that he was neglecting anything that might contribute to their happiness. possession of money had never altered john merrick's native simplicity. he had no extravagant tastes, dressed quietly and lived the life of the people. on this eventful morning the man of millions took a cross-town car to the elevated station and climbed the stairs to his train. once seated and headed cityward he took out his memorandum book to see what engagements he had for the day. there were three for the afternoon. at twelve o'clock he had promised to meet von taer. "h-m-m. von taer." gazing reflectively from the window he remembered a conversation with a prominent banker some month or so before. "von taer," the banker had said, "is an aristocrat with an independent fortune, who clings to the brokerage business because he inherited it from his father and grandfather. i hold that such a man has no moral right to continue in business. he should retire and give the other fellow a chance." "why do you call him an aristocrat?" mr. merrick had enquired. "because his family is so ancient that it shames the ark itself. i imagine his ancestors might have furnished noah the lumber to build his ship. in new york the ' ' all kowtow to von taer." "seems to me he has the right to be a broker if he wants to," asserted mr. merrick. "the right; yes. but, between us, mr. merrick, this society swell has no mental capacity to handle such an uncertain business. he's noted for doing unwarranted things. to me it's a marvel that von taer hasn't shipwrecked the family fortunes long ago. luck has saved him, not foresight." that speech of a few weeks ago now seemed prophetic to john merrick. within a few days the aristocratic broker had encountered financial difficulties and been forced to appeal to mr. merrick, to whom he obtained an introduction through a mutual friend. von taer was doubtless solvent, for he controlled large means; but unless a saving hand was extended at this juncture his losses were sure to be severe, and might even cripple him seriously. all this mr. merrick shrewdly considered in the space of a few moments. as he left the train he looked at his watch and found it was barely eleven. he decided not to await the hour of appointment. with his usual brisk stride he walked to von taer's offices and was promptly admitted to the broker's sanctum. hedrik von taer was a fine looking man, tall, grave, of dignified demeanor and courteous manners. he stood until his visitor was seated and with a gesture of deference invited him to open the conversation. "i've decided to make you the loan, von taer," began mr. merrick, in his practical, matter-of-fact way. "three hundred thousand, wasn't it? call on major doyle at my office this afternoon and he'll arrange it for you." an expression of relief crossed the broker's face. "you are very kind, sir," he answered. "i assure you i fully appreciate the accommodation." "glad to help you," responded the millionaire, briskly. then he paused with marked abruptness. it occurred to him he had a difficult proposition to make to this man. to avoid the cold, enquiring eyes now fixed upon him he pulled out a cigar and deliberately cut the end. von taer furnished him a match. he smoked a while in silence. "this loan, sir," he finally began, "is freely made. there are no strings tied to it. i don't want you to feel i'm demanding any sort of return. but the truth is, you have it in your power to grant me a favor." von taer bowed. "mr. merrick has generously placed me under an obligation it will afford me pleasure to repay," said he. but his eyes held an uneasy look, nevertheless. "it's this way," explained the other: "i've three nieces--fine girls, von taer--who will some day inherit my money. they are already independent, financially, and they're educated, well-bred and amiable young women. take my word for it." "i am sure your statements are justified, mr. merrick." yet hedrik von taer's face, usually unexpressive, denoted blank mystification. what connection could these girls have with the favor to be demanded? "got any girls yourself, von taer?" "a daughter, sir. my only child. "grown up?" "a young lady now, sir." "then you'll understand. i'm a plain uneducated man myself. never been any nearer swell society than a fifth avenue stage. my money has given me commercial position, but no social one worth mentioning. your ' 's' a bunch i can't break into, nohow." a slight smile hovered over the other's lips, but he quickly controlled it. "they tell me, though," continued the speaker, "that _your_ family has long ago climbed into the top notch of society. you're one o' the big guns in the battery, an' hold the fort against all comers." von taer merely bowed. it was scarcely necessary to either admit or contradict the statement. uncle john was a little indignant that his companion showed no disposition to assist him in his explanation, which a clear head might now easily comprehend. so, with his usual frankness, he went directly to the point. "i'd like my girls to get into the best--the most select--circles," he announced. "they're good and pretty and well-mannered, so it strikes me they're entitled to the best there is a-going. i don't want to mix with your swell crowd myself, because i ain't fit; likewise the outfit ain't much to my taste, askin' your pardon; but with women it's different. they need to stand high an' shine bright to make 'em really happy, and if any special lot is particularly ex-clusive an' high-falutin', that's the crowd they long to swarm with. it's human nature--female human nature, anyhow. you catch my idea, von taer, don't you?" "i think so, mr. merrick. yet i fail to see how i can be of service to you in gratifying the ambition of your charming nieces." "then i'll go, and you may forget what i've said." the visitor arose and took his hat from the table. "it was only a fool notion, anyway; just a thought, badly expressed, to help my girls to a toy that money can't buy." hedrik von taer gazed steadily into the man's face. there was something in the simple, honest self-abnegation of this wealthy and important person that won the respect of all he met. the broker's stern eyes softened a bit as he gazed and he allowed a fugitive smile, due to his own change of attitude, to wreathe his thin lips again--just for an instant. "sit down, please, mr. merrick," he requested, and rather reluctantly uncle john resumed his seat. "you may not have an especially clear idea of new york society, and i want to explain my recent remark so that you will understand it. what is called 'the ' may or may not exist; but certainly it is no distinct league or association. it may perhaps be regarded as a figure of speech, to indicate how few are really admitted to the most exclusive circles. moreover, there can be no dominant 'leader of society' here, for the reason that not all grades of society would recognize the supremacy of any one set, or clique. these cliques exist for various reasons. they fraternize generally, but keep well within their own circles. kindred tastes attract some; ancient lineage others. there is an ultra-fashionable set, a sporting set, a literary set, an aristocratic set, a rather 'fast' set, a theatrical set--and so on. these may all lay claim with certain justice to membership in good society. their circles are to an extent exclusive, because some distinction must mark the eligibility of members. and outside each luminous sphere hovers a multitude eager to pass the charmed circle and so acquire recognition. often it is hard to separate the initiate from the uninitiate, even by those most expert. is it difficult to comprehend such a condition as i have described, mr. merrick?" "somewhat, mr. von taer. the wonder to me is why people waste time in such foolishness." "it is the legitimate occupation of many; the folly of unwise ambition impels others. there is a fascination about social life that appeals to the majority of natures. let us compare society to a mountain whose sides are a steep incline, difficult to mount. to stand upon the summit, to become the cynosure of all eyes, is a desire inherent, seemingly, in all humanity; for humanity loves distinction. in the scramble toward the peak many fall by the wayside; others deceive themselves by imagining they have attained the apex when they are far from it. it is a game, mr. merrick, just as business is a game, politics a game, and war a game. you know how few really win." "here," said uncle john, musingly, "is a philosophy i did not expect from you, von taer. they tell me you're one who stands on top the peak. and you were born that way, and didn't have to climb. seems to me you rather scorn the crowd that's trying to climb to an eminence you never had to win. that wouldn't be my way. and i suspect that if the crowd wasn't trying to climb to you, your own position wouldn't be worth a cotton hat." von taer had no answer to this criticism. perhaps he scarcely heard it, for he appeared lost in a brown study. finally he said: "will you permit my daughter to call upon your nieces, mr. merrick?" "of course, sir." "then kindly give me their addresses." uncle john wrote them on a slip of paper. "you may now dismiss the subject from your mind, sir, as you lately advised me to do. whatever may be accomplished in the direction you have suggested i will gladly undertake. if i succeed it will be exceedingly gratifying to us all, i am sure." mr. merrick left the office in a rather humbled and testy mood. he disliked to ask favors at any time and now felt that he had confided himself to the mercy of this callous aristocrat and met with a distinct rebuff. but he had done it for the sake of his beloved nieces--and they would never know what humiliation this unsatisfactory interview had cost him. chapter iii diana diana von taer can not be called a type. she was individual. aristocratic to her finger tips, she was unlike all other aristocrats. an admitted queen of society, her subjects were few and indifferent. she possessed ancient lineage, was highly accomplished, had been born to the purple, as the saying is; but none of these things conspired to make her the curious creature she was. as we make her acquaintance she is twenty-three years of age--and looks eighteen. she is tall and slender and carries her handsome form with exquisite grace. diana is never abrupt; her voice is ever modulated to soft, even tones; she rises from a chair or couch with the lithe, sinuous motion of a serpent uncoiling. her face, critically regarded, is not so admirable as her form. the features are a trifle too elongated, and their delicacy is marred by a nose a bit broad and unshapely and a mouth with thin lips primly set. her dark eyes might be magnificent if wide open: but through the narrow slits of their lids, half hidden by long curling lashes, the eyes peer at you with a cold, watchful, intent gaze that carries a certain uncanny and disconcerting fascination. yet the girl is essentially feminine. if you refrain from meeting that discomfiting gaze--and her familiars have learned to avoid it--diana impresses you as being graceful, dainty and possessed of charming manners. her taste in dress is perfect. she converses fluently on many topics. it is her custom to rise at ten o'clock, whatever time she may have retired the night before; to read until luncheon; to devote the remainder of her day to the requirements of society. eligible young men of admitted social standing call upon diana at such intervals as the proprieties require. they chatter "small talk" and are careful to address her with deference. with an exception to be referred to later these young men have no more thought of "flirting" with miss von taer than they would with the statue of the goddess, her namesake. her dinner parties and entertainments are very successful. she is greatly admired, _per se_, but has no intimate friends. when her mother died, some years before, an aunt had come to live with diana, and now posed as her chaperon. mrs. cameron was a stolid, corpulent lady, with a countenance perpetually placid and an habitual aversion to displaying intellect. her presence in the establishment, although necessary, was frankly ignored. fortunately she never obtruded herself. hedrik von taer was passionately devoted to his daughter. he alone, perhaps, of all the world, thoroughly understood her and appreciated her talents. she may have frightened him at times, but that only added to his admiration. in return diana displayed a calm, but affectionate regard for her father. often after dinner these two would pass an hour together in a corner of the drawing-room, where the cold gray eyes of the man met the intent, half-veiled glance of the girl with perfect understanding. they talked of many things, including business. hedrik had no secrets from his daughter. the desperate condition of his finances, when he had been caught in a "corner" on wheat and nearly crushed, had not dismayed her in the least. it was she who had counseled him to appeal to john merrick, since the name and fame of the eccentric millionaire were familiar to her as to him. he related to diana his interview with mr. merrick on his return home. he was saved. the three hundred thousand were now in the bank to his credit and he could weather the coming storm easily--perhaps with profit. in a tone half amused, half serious, he told her of the little millionaire's desire to secure _entrée_ into good society for his three nieces. diana laughed with her lips; her eyes never laughed. then she took in her hand the paper containing the addresses of the three girls and regarded it thoughtfully. "it is a curious request, _mon pere_," she said, in her soft, even tones; "but one we cannot diplomatically disregard. provided, however--" "yes, diana;" as she paused. "provided these prospective _debutantes_ are not wholly impossible." "i realize that," returned her father. "john merrick is a great power in the city. he has been useful to me, and may be again. i have this chance to win him. but the man is very common clay, despite his wealth, and his three nieces are likely to be made of the same material. should they prove impossible you cannot well descend to introducing them to our set." "i am not certain of that, sir," said the girl, with a pretty shrug. "my position is too secure to be jeopardized by any error of this sort. i believe i may introduce these girls without risk. i shall not vouch for them too strongly, and after their debut they must stand or fall on their own merits." "it is something a von taer has never yet done," remarked the man, gravely. "to commercialize his social position? but, father dear, the age is fast commercializing everything. i think our especial set is as yet comparatively free from contamination by the 'lately rich'; but even among us money has glossed many offenses that a generation ago would have meant social ostracism." he nodded. "that is true, diana." "life with me is a bit dull, as well. everlasting routine, however admirable, is tiresome. i scent amusement in this adventure, which i have decided to undertake. with your permission i will see these girls and quickly decide their fate. should they prove not too dreadfully _outré_ you may look to see them my especial _protégés_." "i leave all to your discretion, diana," returned von taer, with a sigh. "if, in the end, some of the more particular venture to reproach them." "it will not matter," interrupted the daughter, lightly, as her dark eyes narrowed to a hair's breadth. "any who dares reproach diana von taer will afford her interesting occupation. and to offset that remote contingency we shall permanently enslave the powerful john merrick. i understand he is hard as nails in financial matters; but to us the man has disclosed his one weakness--ambition to promote his three nieces. since we have discovered this vulnerable point, let us take advantage of it. i am satisfied the loan of three hundred thousand was but a lure--and how cleverly the man gauged us!" von taer scowled. "get your wraps, diana. the carriage is waiting, and we are due at mrs. doldringham's crush." chapter iv the three nieces the von taers did not affect motor cars. in some circles the carriage and pair is still considered the more aristocratic mode of conveyance. established customs do not readily give way to fads and freaks. consulting her memoranda as she rode along; in her handsome, tastefully appointed equipage, diana found that louise merrick, one of the three girls she had set out to discover, was the nearest on her route. presently she rang the bell at the merrick residence, an eminently respectable dwelling; in a desirable neighborhood. diana could not resist a sigh of relief as her observant glance noted this detail. a dignified butler ushered her into a reception room and departed with her card. it was now that the visitor's nose took an upward tendency as she critically examined her surroundings. the furnishings were abominable, a mixture of distressingly new articles with those evidently procured from dealers in "antiquities." money had been lavished here, but good taste was absent. to understand this--for miss von taer gauged the condition truly--it is necessary to know something of mrs. martha merrick. this lady, the relict of john merrick's only brother, was endowed with a mediocre mind and a towering ambition. when left a widow with an only daughter she had schemed and contrived in endless ways to maintain an appearance of competency on a meager income. finally she divided her capital, derived from her husband's life insurance, into three equal parts, which she determined to squander in three years in an attempt to hoodwink the world with the belief that she was wealthy. before the three years were ended her daughter louise would be twenty, and by that time she must have secured a rich _parti_ and been safely married. in return for this "sacrifice" the girl was to see that her mother was made comfortable thereafter. this worldly and foolish design was confided to louise when she was only seventeen, and her unformed mind easily absorbed her mother's silly ambition. it was a pity, for louise merrick possessed a nature sweet and lovable, as well as instinctively refined--a nature derived from her dead father and with little true sympathy with mrs. merrick's unscrupulous schemes. but at that age a girl is easily influenced, so it is little wonder that under such tuition louise became calculating, sly and deceitful, to a most deplorable degree. such acquired traits bade fair in the end to defeat mrs. merrick's carefully planned _coup_, for the daughter had a premature love affair with a youth outside the pale of eligibility. louise ignored the fact that he had been disinherited by his father, and in her reckless infatuation would have sacrificed her mother without thought or remorse. the dreadful finale had only been averted by the advent of uncle john merrick, who had changed the life plans of the widow and her heedless daughter and promptly saved the situation. john merrick did not like his sister-in-law, but he was charmed by his lovely niece and took her at once to his affectionate old heart. he saw the faults of louise clearly, but also appreciated her sweeter qualities. under his skillful guidance she soon redeemed herself and regained control of her better nature. the girl was not yet perfect, by any means; she was to an extent artificial and secretive, and her thoughtless flirtations were far from wise; but her two cousins and her uncle had come to know and understand her good points. they not only bore patiently with her volatile nature but strove to influence her to demonstrate her inherent good qualities. in one way her mother's calculating training had been most effective. louise was not only a dainty, lovely maid to the eye, but her manners were gracious and winning and she had that admirable self-possession which quickly endears one even to casual acquaintances. she did not impress more intimate friends as being wholly sincere, yet there was nothing in her acts, since that one escapade referred to, that merited severe disapproval. of course the brilliant idea of foisting her precious daughter upon the "select" society of the metropolis was original with mrs. merrick. louise was well content with things as they were; but not so the mother. the rise from poverty to affluence, the removal of all cares and burdens from her mind, had merely fostered still greater ambitions. uncle john's generosity had endowed each of his three nieces with an ample fortune. "i want 'em to enjoy the good things of life while they're at an age to enjoy 'em," he said; "for the older one gets the fewer things are found to be enjoyable. that's my experience, anyhow." he also told the girls frankly that they were to inherit jointly--although not equally--his entire fortune. yet even this glowing prospect did not satisfy mrs. merrick. since all her plans for louise, from the very beginning, had been founded on personal selfishness, she now proposed to have her daughter gain admission to recognized fashionable society in order that she might herself bask in the reflection of the glory so obtained and take her place with the proud matrons who formed the keystone of such society. after carefully considering ways and means to gain her object she had finally conceived the idea of utilizing mr. merrick. she well knew uncle john would not consider one niece to the exclusion of the others, and had therefore used his influence to get all three girls properly "introduced." therefore her delight and excitement were intense when the butler brought up diana's card and she realized that "the perfectly swell miss von taer" was seated in her reception room. she rushed to louise, who, wholly innocent of any knowledge of the intrigue which had led to this climax, opened her blue eyes in astonishment and said with a gasp: "oh, mother! what shall i do?" "do? why, go down and make yourself agreeable, of course. it's your chance, my dear, your great chance in life! go--go! don't, for heaven's sake, keep her waiting." louise went down. in her most affable and gracious way she approached the visitor and said: "it is very nice of you to call upon me. i am _so_ glad to meet miss von taer." diana, passing conversational nothings with the young girl, was pleased by her appearance and self-possession. this aspirant for social honors was fresh, fair and attractive, with a flow of small talk at her tongue's end. "really," thought the fastidious visitor, "this one, at least, will do me no discredit. if she is a fair sample of the others we shall get along very nicely in this enterprise." to louise she said, before going: "i'm to have an evening, the nineteenth. will you assist me to receive? now that we are acquainted i wish to see more of you, my dear, and i predict we shall get along famously together." the girl's head swam. help miss von taer to receive! such an honor had been undreamed of an hour ago. but she held her natural agitation under good control and only a round red spot upon each cheek betrayed her inward excitement as she prettily accepted the invitation. beneath their drooping lashes diana's sagacious eyes read the thoughts of the girl quite accurately. miss von taer enjoyed disconcerting anyone in any way, and louise was so simple and unsophisticated that she promised to afford considerable amusement in the future. by the time diana had finished her brief call this singular creature had taken the measure of louise merrick in every detail, including her assumption of lightness and her various frivolities. she understood that in the girl were capabilities for good or for evil, as she might be led by a stronger will. and, musingly, diana wondered who would lead her. as for louise, she was enraptured by her distinguished visitor's condescension and patronage, and her heart bounded at the thought of being admitted to the envied social coterie in which diana von taer shone a bright, particular star. the second name in the list of john merrick's nieces was that of elizabeth de graf. she lived at a good private hotel located in an exclusive residence district. it was true that elizabeth--or "beth," as she was more familiarly called--was not a permanent guest at this hotel. when in new york she was accustomed to live with one or the other of her cousins, who welcomed her eagerly. but just now her mother had journeyed from the old ohio home to visit beth, and the girl had no intention of inflicting her parent upon the other girls. therefore she had taken rooms at the hotel temporarily, and the plan suited her mother excellently. for one thing, mrs. de graf could go home and tell her cloverton gossips that she had stopped at the most "fashionable" hotel in new york; a second point was that she loved to feast with epicurean avidity upon the products of a clever _chef_, being one of those women who live to eat, rather than eat to live. mrs. de graf was john merrick's only surviving sister, but she differed as widely from the simple, kindly man in disposition as did her ingenious daughter from her in mental attainments. the father, professor de graf, was supposed to be a "musical genius." before beth came into her money, through uncle john, the professor taught the piano and singing; now, however, the daughter allowed her parents a liberal income, and the self-engrossed musician devoted himself to composing oratorios and concertas which no one but himself would ever play. to be quite frank, the girl cared little for her gross and selfish parents, and they in turn cared little for her beyond the value she afforded them in the way of dollars and cents. so she had not lived at home, where constant quarrels and bickerings nearly drove her frantic, since uncle john had adopted her. in catering to this present whim of her mother, who longed to spend a few luxurious weeks in new york, beth sacrificed more than might be imagined by one unacquainted with her sad family history. whimsical major doyle often called uncle john's nieces "the three graces"; but beth was by odds the beauty of them all. splendid brown eyes, added to an exquisite complexion, almost faultless features and a superb carriage, rendered this fair young girl distinguished in any throng. fortunately she was as yet quite unspoiled, being saved from vanity by a morbid consciousness of her inborn failings and a sincere loathing for the moral weakness that prevented her from correcting those faults. judging beth by the common standard of girls of her age, both failings and faults were more imaginary than real; yet it was her characteristic to suspect and despise in herself such weaknesses as others would condone, or at least regard leniently. for here was a girl true and staunch, incapable of intrigue or deceit, frank and outspoken, all these qualities having been proven more than once. everyone loved beth de graf save herself, and at this stage of her development the influence of her cousins and of uncle john had conspired to make the supersensitive girl more tolerant of herself and less morbid than formerly. i think beth knew of diana von taer, for the latter's portrait frequently graced the society columns of the new york press and at times the three nieces, in confidential mood, would canvass diana and her social exploits as they did the acts of other famous semi-public personages. but the girl had never dreamed of meeting such a celebrity, and miss von taer's card filled her with curious wonder as to the errand that had brought her. the de grafs lived _en suite_ at the hotel, for beth had determined to surround her sybaritic mother with all attainable luxury, since the child frequently reproached herself with feeling a distinct repulsion for the poor woman. so to-day diana was ushered into a pretty parlor where beth stood calmly awaiting her. the two regarded one another in silence a moment, miss de graf's frank eyes covering the other with a comprehensive sweep while miss von taer's narrowed gaze, profoundly observant, studied the beautiful girl before her with that impenetrable, half-hidden gleam that precluded any solution. "miss von taer, i believe," said beth, quietly glancing at the card she held. "will you be seated?" diana sank gracefully into a chair. the sinuous motion attracted beth's attention and gave her a slight shiver. "i am so glad to meet you, my dear," began the visitor, in soft, purring accents. "i have long promised myself the pleasure of a call, and in spite of many procrastinations at last have accomplished my ambition." beth resented the affectation of this prelude, and slightly frowned. diana was watching; she always watched. "why should you wish to call upon me?" was the frank demand. "do not think me rude, please; but i am scarcely in a position to become a desirable acquaintance of miss von taer." the tone was a trifle bitter, and diana noted it. a subtile antagonism seemed springing up between them and the more experienced girl scented in this danger to her plans. she must handle this young lady more cautiously than she had louise merrick. "your position is unimpeachable, my dear," was the sweet-toned response. "you are john merrick's niece." beth was really angry now. she scowled, and it spoiled her beauty. diana took warning and began to think quickly. "i referred to my social position, miss von taer. our family is honest enough, thank god; but it has never been accepted in what is termed select society." diana laughed; a quiet, rippling laugh as icy as a brook in november, but as near gaiety as she could at the moment accomplish. when she laughed this way her eyes nearly closed and became inscrutable. beth had a feeling of repulsion for her caller, but strove to shake it off. miss von taer was nothing to her; could be nothing to her. "your uncle is a very wealthy man," said diana, with easy composure. "he has made you an heiress, placing you in a class much sought after in these mercenary days. but aside from that, my dear, your personal accomplishments have not escaped notice, and gossip declares you to be a very fascinating young woman, as well as beautiful and good. i do not imagine society claims to be of divine origin, but were it so no one is more qualified to grace it." the blandishments of this speech had less effect upon beth than the evident desire to please. she began to feel she had been ungracious, and straightway adopted a more cordial tone. "i am sure you mean well, miss von taer," she hastened to say, "and i assure you i am not ungrateful. but it occurred to me we could have nothing in common." "oh, my dear! you wrong us both." "do you know my uncle?" enquired beth. "he is the friend of my father, mr. hedrik von taer. our family owes mr. john merrick much consideration. therefore i decided to seek pleasure in the acquaintance of his nieces." the words and tone seemed alike candid. beth began to relent. she sat down for the first time, taking a chair opposite diana. "you see," she said, artlessly, "i have no personal inclination for society, which is doubtless so large a part of your own amusement. it seems to me artificial and insipid." "those who view from a distance the husk of a cocoanut, have little idea of the milk within," declared diana, softly. "true," answered beth. "but i've cracked cocoanuts, and sometimes found the milk sour and tainted." "the difference you observe in cocoanuts is to be found in the various grades of society. these are not all insipid and artificial, i assure you." "they may be worse," remarked beth. "i've heard strange tales of your orgies." diana was really amused. this girl was proving more interesting than the first niece she had interviewed. unaccustomed to seeking acquaintances outside her own exclusive circle, and under such circumstances, these meetings were to her in the nature of an adventure. a creature of powerful likes and dislikes, she already hated beth most heartily; but for that very reason she insisted on cultivating her further acquaintance. "you must not judge society by the mad pranks of a few of its members," she responded, in her most agreeable manner. "if we are not to set an example in decorum to the rest of the world we are surely unfitted to occupy the high place accorded us. but you must see and decide for yourself." "i? no, indeed!" "ah, do not decide hastily, my dear. let me become your sponsor for a short time, until you really discover what society is like. then you may act upon more mature judgment." "i do not understand you, miss von taer." "then i will be more explicit. i am to receive a few friends at my home on the evening of the nineteenth; will you be my guest?" beth was puzzled how to answer. the thought crossed her mind that perhaps uncle john would like her to be courteous to his friend's daughter, and that argument decided her. she accepted the invitation. "i want you to receive with me," continued diana, rising. "in that way i shall be able to introduce you to my friends." beth wondered at this condescension, but consented to receive. she was annoyed to think how completely she had surrendered to the will of miss von taer, for whom she had conceived the same aversion she had for a snake. she estimated diana, society belle though she was, to be sly, calculating and deceitful. worse than all, she was decidedly clever, and therefore dangerous. nothing good could come of an acquaintance with her, beth was sure; yet she had pledged herself to meet her and her friends the nineteenth, lit a formal society function. how much beth de graf misjudged diana von taer the future will determine. the interview had tired diana. as she reentered her carriage she was undecided whether to go home or hunt up the third niece. but willing square was not five minutes' drive from here, so she ordered the coachman to proceed there. "i am positively out of my element in this affair," she told herself, "for it is more difficult to cultivate these inexperienced girls than i had thought. they are not exactly impossible, as i at first feared, but they are so wholly unconventional as to be somewhat embarrassing as _protégées_. analyzing the two i have met--the majority--one strikes me as being transparently affected and the other a stubborn, attractive fool. they are equally untrained in diplomacy and unable to cover their real feelings. here am i, practically dragging them into the limelight, when it would be far better for themselves--perhaps for me--that they remained in oblivion. ah, well: i called it an adventure: let me hope some tangible plot will develop to compensate me for my trouble. life seems deadly dull; i need excitement. is it to be furnished by john merrick's nieces, i wonder?" willing square is a new district, crowded with fashionable apartment houses. that is, they are called fashionable by their builders and owners and accepted as such by their would-be fashionable occupants. diana knew at least two good families resident in willing square, and though she smiled grimly at the rows of "oppressively new and vulgar" buildings, she still was not ashamed to have her equipage seen waiting there. number willing square is a very substantial and cozy appearing apartment building owned in fee by miss patricia doyle. diana was unaware of this fact, but rang the doyle bell and ascended to the second floor. a maid received her with the announcement that miss doyle had "just stepped out," but was somewhere in the building. would the visitor care to wait a few minutes? yes; diana decided she would wait. she took a seat in the snug front parlor and from her position noted the series of rooms that opened one into another throughout the suite, all richly but tastefully furnished in homely, unassuming manner. "this is better," she mused. "there is no attempt at foolish display in this establishment, at any rate. i hope to find miss doyle a sensible, refined person. the name is irish." a door slammed somewhere down the line of rooms and a high-pitched voice cried in excited tones: "i've found a baby! hi, there, nunkie, dear--i've found a baby!" thereupon came the sound of a chair being pushed back as a man's voice answered in equal glee: "why, patsy, patsy! it's the little rogue from upstairs. here, bobby; come to your own old uncle!" "he won't. he belongs to me; don't you, bobby darlin'?" a babyish voice babbled merrily, but the sounds were all "goos" and "ahs" without any resemblance to words. bobby may have imagined he was talking, but he was not very intelligible. "see here, patsy doyle; you gimme that baby." cried the man, pleadingly. "i found him myself, and he's mine. i've dragged him here all the way from his home upstairs, an' don't you dare lay a finger on him. uncle john!" "fair play, patsy! bobby's my chum, and--" "well, i'll let you have half of him, nunkie. down on your hands and knees, sir, and be a horse. that's it--now, bobby, straddle uncle john and drive him by his necktie--here it is. s-t-e-a-d-y, uncle; and neigh--neigh like a horse!" "how does a horse neigh, patsy?" asked a muffled voice, choking and chuckling at the same time. "'nee, hee-hee--hee; hee!'" uncle john tried to neigh, and made a sorry mess of it, although bobby shrieked with delight. then came a sudden hush. diana caught the maid's voice, perhaps announcing the presence of a visitor, for patsy cried in subdued accents: "goodness me, mary! why didn't you say so? listen, uncle john--" "leggo that ear, bobby--leggo!" "--you watch the baby, uncle john, and don't let anything happen to him. i've got a caller." diana smiled, a bit scornfully, and then composed her features as a young girl bustled into the room and came toward her with frank cordiality indicated in the wide smile and out-stretched hand. "pardon my keeping you waiting," said patsy, dropping into a chair opposite her visitor, "uncle john and i were romping with the baby from upstarts--bobby's such a dear! i didn't quite catch the name mary gave me and forgot to look at your card." "i am miss von taer." "not diana von taer, the swell society girl?" cried patsy eagerly. diana couldn't remember when she had been so completely nonplused before. after an involuntary gasp she answered quietly: "i am diana von taer." "well, i'm glad to meet you, just the same," said patsy, cheerfully. "we outsiders are liable to look on society folk as we would on a cage of monkeys--because we're so very ignorant, you know, and the bars are really between us." this frank disdain verged on rudeness, although the girl had no intention of being rude. diana was annoyed in spite of her desire to be tolerant. "perhaps the bars are imaginary," she rejoined, carelessly, "and it may be you've been looking at the side-show and not at the entertainment in the main tent. will you admit that possibility, miss doyle?" patsy laughed gleefully. "i think you have me there, miss von taer. and what do _i_ know about society? just nothing at all. it's out of my line entirely." "perhaps it is," was the slow response. "society appeals to only those whose tastes seem to require it." "and aren't we drawing distinctions?" enquired miss doyle. "society at large is the main evidence of civilization, and all decent folk are members of it." "isn't that communism?" asked diana. "perhaps so. it's society at large. but certain classes have leagued together and excluded themselves from their fellows, admitting only those of their own ilk. the people didn't put them on their pedestals--they put themselves there. yet the people bow down and worship these social gods and seem glad to have them. the newspapers print their pictures and the color of their gowns and how they do their hair and what they eat and what they do, and the poor washwomen and shop-girls and their like read these accounts more religiously than they do their bibles. my maid mary's a good girl, but she grabs the society sheet of the sunday paper and reads it from top to bottom. i never look at it myself." diana's cheeks were burning. she naturally resented such ridicule, having been born to regard social distinction with awe and reverence. inwardly resolving to make miss patricia doyle regret the speech she hid all annoyance under her admirable self-control and answered with smooth complacency: "your estimate of society, my dear miss doyle, is superficial." "don't i know it, then?" exclaimed patsy. "culture and breeding, similarity of taste and intellectual pursuits will always attract certain people and band them together in those cliques which are called 'social sets,' they are not secret societies; they have no rules of exclusion; congenial minds are ever welcome to their ranks. this is a natural coalition, in no way artificial. can you not appreciate that, miss doyle?" "yes, indeed," admitted patsy, promptly. "you're quite right, and i'm just one of those stupid creatures who criticise the sun because there's a cloud before it. probably there are all grades of society, because there are all grades of people." "i thought you would agree with me when you understood," murmured diana, and her expression was so smug and satisfied that patsy was seized with an irresistible spirit of mischief. "and haven't i seen your own pictures in the sunday papers?" she asked. "perhaps; if you robbed your maid of her pleasure." "and very pretty pictures they were, too. they showed culture and breeding all right, and the latest style in gowns. of course those intellectual high-brows in your set didn't need an introduction to you; you were advertised as an example of ultra-fashionable perfection, to spur the ambition of those lower down in the social scale. perhaps it's a good thing." "are you trying to annoy me?" demanded diana, her eyes glaring under their curling lashes. "dear me--dear me!" cried patsy, distressed, "see how saucy and impudent i've been--and i didn't mean a bit of it! won't you forgive me, please, miss von taer? there! we'll begin all over again, and i'll be on my good behavior. i'm so very ignorant, you know!" diana smiled at this; it would be folly to show resentment to such a childish creature. "unfortunately," she said, "i have been unable to escape the vulgar publicity thrust upon me by the newspapers. the reporters are preying vultures, rapacious for sensation, and have small respect for anyone. i am sure we discourage them as much as we can. i used to weep with mortification when i found myself 'written up'; now, however, i have learned to bear such trials with fortitude--if not with resignation." "forgive me!" said patsy, contritely. "somehow i've had a false idea of these things. if i knew you better, miss von taer, you'd soon convert me to be an admirer of society." "i'd like to do that, miss doyle, for you interest me. will you return my call?" "indeed i will," promised the girl, readily. "i'm flattered that you called on me at all, miss von taer, for you might easily have amused yourself better. you must be very busy, with all the demands society makes on one. when shall i come? make it some off time, when we won't be disturbed." diana smiled at her eagerness. how nescient the poor little thing was! "your cousins, miss merrick and miss de graf, have consented to receive with me on the evening of the nineteenth. will you not join us?" "louise and beth!" cried patsy, astounded. "isn't it nice of them? and may i count upon you, also?" patsy smiled dubiously into the other's face. "let me out of it!" she said. "can't you see i'm no butterfly?" diana saw many things, having taken a shrewd account of the girl long before this. miss patricia doyle was short and plump, with a round, merry face covered with freckles, hair indisputably red and a _retroussé_ nose. also she possessed a pair of wonderful blue eyes--eyes that danced and scintillated with joyous good humor--eyes so captivating that few ever looked beyond them or noted the plain face they glorified. but the critic admitted that the face was charmingly expressive, the sweet and sensitive mouth always in sympathy with the twinkling, candid eyes. life and energy radiated from her small person, which miss von taer grudgingly conceded to possess unusual fascination. here was a creature quite imperfect in detail, yet destined to allure and enchant whomsoever she might meet. all this was quite the reverse of diana's own frigid personality. patsy would make an excellent foil for her. "as you please, my dear," she said graciously; "but do you not think it would amuse you to make your debut in society--unimpeachable society--and be properly introduced to the occupants of the 'pedestals,' as your cousins will be?" patsy reflected. if beth and louise had determined to undertake this venture why should she hold back? moreover, she experienced a girlish and wholly natural curiosity to witness a fashionable gathering and "size up" the lions for herself. so she said: "i'll come, if you really want me; and i'll try my best to behave nicely. but i can't imagine why you have chosen to take us three girls under your wing; unless--" with sudden intuition, "it's for uncle john's sake." "that was it, at first," replied diana, rising to go; "but now that i've seen you i'm delighted to have you on your own account. come early, dear; we must be ready to receive our guests by nine." "nine o'clock!" reflected patsy, when her visitor had gone; "why, i'm often in bed by that time." chapter v preparing for the plunge john merrick lived with the doyles at their willing square apartments. there were but two of the doyles--patricia and her father, major doyle, a tall, handsome, soldierly man with white moustache and hair. the major was noted as a "character," a keen wit and a most agreeable type of the "old irish gentleman." he fairly worshipped his daughter, and no one blamed him for it. his business, as special agent and manager for his brother-in-law's millions, kept the major closely occupied and afforded john merrick opportunity to spend his days as be pleased. the rich man was supposed to be "retired," yet the care of his investments and income was no light task, as the major found. we are accustomed to regard extreme wealth as the result of hard-headed shrewdness, not wholly divorced from unscrupulous methods, yet no one could accuse john merrick or his representative with being other than kindly, simple-hearted and honest. uncle john says that he never intended to "get rich"; it was all the result of carelessness. he had been so immersed in business that he failed to notice how fast his fortune was growing. when he awoke to a realization of his immense accumulation he promptly retired, appointing major doyle to look after his investments and seeking personal leisure after many years of hard work. he instructed his agent to keep his income from growing into more capital by rendering wise assistance to all worthy charities and individuals, and this, as you may suppose, the major found a herculean task. often he denounced uncle john for refusing to advise him, claiming that the millionaire had selfishly thrust the burden of his wealth on the major's broad shoulders. while there was an element of truth in this the burden it was not so heavy as to make the old soldier unhappy, and the two men loved and respected one another with manly cordiality. patricia was recognized as uncle john's favorite niece and it was understood she was to inherit the bulk of his property, although some millions might be divided between beth and louise "if they married wisely." neither uncle john nor the major ever seemed to consider patsy's marrying; she was such a child that wedlock for her seemed a remote possibility. the sunday afternoon following diana von taer's visit to the three nieces found the girls all congregated in patsy's own room, where an earnest discussion was being conducted. that left uncle john to take his after-dinner nap in the big morris chair in the living room, where major doyle sat smoking-sulkily while he gazed from the window and begrudged the moments patsy was being kept from him. finally the door opened and the three girls trooped out. "huh! is the conspiracy all cut-an'-dried?" growled the major. uncle john woke up with a final snort, removed the newspaper from his face and sat up. he smiled benignantly upon his nieces. "it's all your fault, sor!" declared major doyle, selecting the little millionaire as the safest recipient of his displeasure. "your foolishness has involved us all in this dreadful complication. why on earth couldn't you leave well-enough alone?" uncle john received the broadside with tolerant equanimity. "what's wrong; my dears?" he enquired, directing his mild glance toward the bevy of young girls. "i am unaware that anything is wrong, uncle," replied louise gravely. "but since we are about to make our debut in society it is natural we should have many things to discuss that would prove quite uninteresting to men. really, uncle john, this is a great event--perhaps the most important event of our lives." "shucks an' shoestrings!" grunted the major. "what's in this paper-shelled, painted, hollow thing ye call 'society' to interest three healthy, wide-awake girls? tell me that!" "you don't understand, dear," said patsy, soothing him with a kiss. "i think he does," remarked beth, with meditative brows. "modern society is a man-made--or woman-made--condition, to a large extent artificial, selfish and unwholesome." "oh, beth!" protested louise. "you're talking like a rank socialist. i can understand common people sneering at society, which is so far out of their reach; but a girl about to be accepted in the best circles has no right to rail at her own caste." "there can be no caste in america," declared beth, stubbornly. "but there _is_ caste in america, and will be so long as the exclusiveness of society is recognized by the people at large," continued louise. "if it is a 'man-made condition' isn't it the most respected, most refined, most desirable condition that one may attain to?" "there are plenty of honest and happy people in the world who ignore society altogether," answered beth. "it strikes me that your social stars are mighty few in the broad firmament of humanity." "but they're stars, for all that, dear," said uncle john, smiling at her with a hint of approval in his glance, yet picking up the argument; "and they look mighty big and bright to the crowd below. it's quite natural. you can't keep individuals from gaining distinction, even in america. there are few generals in an army, for instance; and they're 'man-made'; but that's no reason the generals ain't entitled to our admiration." "let's admire 'em, then--from a distance," retorted the major, realizing the military simile was employed to win his sympathy. "certain things, my dear major, are naturally dear to a girl's heart," continued uncle john, musingly; "and we who are not girls have no right to condemn their natural longings. girls love dancing, pink teas and fudge-parties, and where can they find 'em in all their perfection but in high society? girls love admiration and flirtations--you do, my dears; you can't deny it--and the male society swells have the most time to devote to such things. girls love pretty dresses--" "oh, uncle! you've hit the nail on the head now," exclaimed patsy, laughing. "we must all have new gowns for this reception, and as we're to assist miss von taer the dresses must harmonize, so to speak, and--and--" "and be quite suited to the occasion," broke in louise; "and--" "and wear our lives out with innumerable fittings," concluded beth, gloomily. "but why new dresses?" demanded the major. "you've plenty of old ones that are clean and pretty, i'm sure; and our patsy had one from the dressmaker only last week that's fit for a queen." "oh, daddy! you don't understand," laughed patsy. "this time, major, i fear you don't," agreed beth. "your convictions regarding society may be admirable, but you're weak on the gown question." "if the women would only listen to me," began the major, dictatorially; but uncle john cut him short. "they won't, sir; they'll listen to no man when it comes to dressmaking." "don't they dress to captivate the men, then?" asked the major, with fine sarcasm. "not at all," answered louise, loftily. "men seldom know what a woman has on, if she looks nice; but women take in every detail of dress and criticise it severely if anything happens to be out of date, ill fitting or in bad taste." "then they're in bad taste themselves!" retorted the major, hotly. "tut-tut, sir; who are you to criticise woman's ways?" asked uncle john, much amused. the major was silenced, but he glared as if unconvinced. "dressmaking is a nuisance," remarked beth, placidly; "but it's the penalty we pay for being women." "you're nothing but slips o' girls, not out of your teens," grumbled the major. and no one paid any attention to him. "we want to do you credit, uncle john," said patsy, brightly. "perhaps our names will be in the papers." "they're there already," announced mr. merrick, picking up the sunday paper that lay beside him. a chorus of exclamations was followed by a dive for the paper, and even the major smiled grimly as he observed the three girlish heads close together and three pair of eager eyes scanning swiftly the society columns. "here it is!" cried patsy, dancing up and down like a school-girl; and louise read in a dignified voice--which trembled slightly with excitement and pleasure--the following item: "miss von taer will receive next thursday evening at the family mansion in honor of miss merrick, miss doyle and miss de graf. these three charming _debutantes_ are nieces of john merrick, the famous tin-plate magnate." "phoo!" growled the major, during the impressive hush that followed; "that's it, exactly. your names are printed because you're john merrick's nieces. if it hadn't been for tin-plate, my dears, society never would 'a' known ye at all, at all!" chapter vi the fly in the broth diana was an experienced entertainer and under her skillful supervision the reception proved eminently successful. nor had she cause to be ashamed of the three _protégées_ she presented to society, since capable _modistes_ had supplemented their girlish charms and freshness with costumes pertinent to the occasion. perhaps patsy's chubby form looked a little "dumpish" in her party gown, for some of diana's female guests regarded her with quiet amusement and bored tolerance, while the same critical posse was amazed and envious at beth's superb beauty and stately bearing. after all, it was louise who captured the woman contingency and scored the greatest success; for her appearance was not only dainty and attractive but she was so perfectly self-possessed and responsive and bore herself so admirably under the somewhat trying; circumstances of a debut that she won the cordial goodwill of all whom she encountered. the hostess was elaborately gowned in white pompadour satin, trimmed with white chiffon and embroidered in pink roses and pearls. the von taer home was handsomely decorated for the occasion, since diana never did anything by halves and for her own credit insisted on attention to those details of display that society recognizes and loves. hundreds of long-stemmed american beauties and kentia palms were combined in beautifying the spacious hall, while orchids in marvelous variety nodded their blossoms in the great drawing-room, where the young-ladies received. these rare and precious flowers were arranged in bronze baskets with sprays of maidenhair. in the music room adjoining, great clusters of madam chantenay roses embellished the charming scene. branches of cherry-blossoms, supplied by hot-houses, were banked in the lofty dining-room, where a japanese pergola made of bamboo and lighted with red lanterns was erected at the upper end. the attendants here were japanese girls in native costume, and the long table was laid with a lace cloth over pink satin, with butterfly bows of pink tulle. the table itself was decorated with cut-glass baskets of cecil brunner roses mingled with lilies of the valley and refreshments were distributed to the standing guests as they entered. the affair was in the nature of a typical "crush," for diana's list of eligibles included most of the prominent society folk then in town, and she was too important a personage to have her invitations disregarded. beth and patsy were fairly bewildered by the numerous introductions, until names became meaningless in their ears; but louise, perfectly composed and in no wise distracted by her surroundings or the music of the orchestra and the perpetual buzz of conversation in the crowded rooms, impressed each individual upon her memory clearly, and was not likely to blunder in regard to names or individuality in the future. this is a rare talent, indeed, and scores, largely in one's favor; for no one likes to think himself so unimportant as to be forgotten, under any circumstances. it was during the thick of the reception that one of miss von taer's intimates, a graceful blond girl, suddenly seized her arm and whispered: "oh, diana! guess who's here--guess, my dear!" diana knew. her eyes, always narrowed until the lashes shielded their sharp watchfulness, seldom missed observing anything of importance. she pressed her friend's hand and turned again to the line of guests, while louise, who had overheard the excited whisper, wondered casually what it might mean. soon after she knew. a tall, handsome young fellow was bowing before diana, who--wonder of wonders!--for an instant unclosed her great eyes and shot an electric glance into his smiling face. the glance was brief as unexpected, yet it must have told the young man something, for he flushed and bowed again as if to hide his embarrassment. it also told louise something, and her heart, which had given a quick bound at sight of the man's face, began to cry out against diana von taer's artifices. "mr. arthur weldon," said the hostess, in her soft voice; and now, as the young man turned an eager gaze on louise and half extended his hand, the girl's face grew pale and she imitated diana to the extent of dropping her eyes and bowing with frigid indifference. standing close he whispered "louise!" in a pleading tone that made diana frown wickedly. but the girl was unresponsive and another instant forced him to turn to beth. "why, arthur! are you here, then?" said the girl, in a surprised but cordial tone. "that is not astonishing, miss beth," he replied. "the puzzling fact is that _you_ are here--and under such auspices," he added, in a lower tone. patsy now claimed him, with a frank greeting, and arthur weldon could do little more than press her hand when the line forced him to move on and give place to others. but this especial young fellow occupied the minds of all four girls long after the crowd had swallowed him up. diana was uneasy and obviously disturbed by the discovery that he was known to the three cousins, as well as by the memory of his tone as he addressed louise merrick. louise, who had read diana's quick glance with the accuracy of an intuitionist, felt a sudden suspicion and dislike for diana now dominating her. behind all this was a mystery, which shall be explained here because the reader deserves to be more enlightened than the characters themselves. arthur weldon's nature was a queer combination of weakness and strength. he was physically brave but a moral coward. the motherless son of a man wholly immersed in business, he had been much neglected in his youth and his unstable character was largely the result of this neglect. on leaving college he refused a business career planned for him by his father, who cast him off with scornful indifference, and save for a slim temporary allowance promised to disinherit him. it was during this period that arthur met louise and fell desperately in love with her. the girl appeared to return the young fellow's devotion, but shrewd, worldly mrs. merrick, discovering that the boy was practically disinherited and had no prospects whatever, forbade him the house. louise, until now but mildly interested in the young-man, resented her mother's interference and refused to give him up. she found ways to meet arthur weldon outside her home, so that the situation had become complicated and dangerous when uncle john seized his three nieces and whisked them off to europe. young weldon, under an assumed name, followed and attached himself to the party; but john merrick's suspicions were presently aroused and on discovering the identity of the youth he forbade him or louise to "make love" or even speak of such a thing during the remainder of the trip. the young fellow, by manly acts on some occasions and grave weaknesses on others, won uncle john's kindly interest. the old gentleman knew human nature, and saw much to admire as well as condemn in louise's friend. beth and patsy found him a pleasant comrade, and after all love-making was tabooed they were quite a harmonious party. finally the sudden death of weldon's father left him the possessor of a fortune. he returned to america to look after his newly-acquired business and became so immersed in it that louise felt herself neglected when she came home expecting him to dance attendance upon her as before. she treated him coldly and he ceased calling, his volatile and sensitive nature resenting such treatment. it is curious what little things influence the trend of human lives. many estrangements are caused by trifles so intangible that we can scarcely locate them at all. at first the girl was very unhappy at the alienation, but soon schooled herself to forget her former admirer. arthur weldon, for his part, consoled himself by plunging into social distractions and devoting himself to diana von taer, whose strange personality for a time fascinated him. the business could not hold young weldon's vacillant temperament for long; neither could diana. as a matter of fact his heart, more staunch than he himself suspected, had never wavered much from louise. yet pride forbade his attempting to renew their former relations. it was now some months since he had seen the girl, and his eager exclamation was wrested from him by surprise and a sudden awakening to the fact that his love for her had merely slumbered. diana, worldly, cold and calculating as was her nature, had been profoundly touched by arthur's devotion to her. usually young men were soon repulsed by her unfortunate personality, which was not easily understood. therefore her intense nature responded freely to this admirer's attentions, and if diana could really love she loved arthur weldon. he had never proposed to her or even intimated it was his intention to do so, but she conceived a powerful desire to win him and had never abandoned this motive when he grew cold and appeared to desert her. just now he was recently back from italy, where he had passed several months, and diana's reception was his first reappearance in society. the girl had planned to bring him to her side this evening and intended to exert her strongest fascinations to lure him back to his former allegiance; so her annoyance may be guessed when she found her three _protégées_ seemingly more familiar with the young man than was she herself. at last the line ended and the introductions were complete. the _debutantes_ were at once the center of interested groups composed of those who felt it a duty or pleasure to show them attention. diana wandered to the music room and waylaid arthur weldon, who was just about to make his escape from the house, having decided it was impossible to find an opportunity to converse with louise that evening. "i'm so glad you came, arthur," she said, a quick glance assuring her they were not overheard. "you landed from the steamer but yesterday, i hear." "and came straightway to pay my respects to my old friend," he answered lightly. "isn't it unusual for you to present _debutantes_, diana?" "you know these girls, don't you, arthur?" "yes; i met them in europe." "and flirted with miss merrick? be honest, arthur, i know your secret." "do you? then you know we were merely good friends," said he, annoyed at her accusation. "of course. you called her 'louise,' didn't you?" "to be sure. and patsy called me 'arthur. you may have heard her." "patsy?" "that's miss patricia doyle--our dear little patsy." "oh. i'm sure you didn't fall in love with _her_, at any rate." "i'm not so sure. everybody loves patsy. but i had no time for love-making. i was doing europe." "wasn't that a year or so ago?" she asked, realizing he was trying to evade further reference to louise. "yes." "and since then?" "i've been away the last six or seven months, as you know, on my second trip abroad." "but before that--when you first returned?" "if i remember rightly i was then much in the society of miss von taer. is the catechism ended at last?" "yes," she replied, laughing. "don't think me inquisitive, arthur; i was surprised to find you knew these girls, with whom i am myself but lightly acquainted." "yet you introduce them to your very select set?" "to please my father, who wishes to please mr. merrick." "i understand," said he, nodding. "but they're nice girls, diana. you're not running chances, i assure you." "that relieves me," she replied rather scornfully. "if arthur weldon will vouch for them--" "but i don't. i'll vouch for no one--not even myself," he declared hastily. she was calmly reading his face, and did not seem to approve the text. "are you as fickle as ever, then, _mon cher_?" she asked, softly. "i'm not fickle, diana. my fault is that i'm never serious." "never?" "i cannot remember ever being serious; at least, where a girl was concerned." diana bit her lips to restrain a frown, but her eyes, which he was avoiding, flashed wickedly. "that is surely a fault, my arthur," was her tender reply. "were you never serious during our quiet evenings together; our dances, theatre parties and romps?" "that was merely fun. and you, diana?" "oh, i enjoyed the fun, too. it meant so much to me. i began to live, then, and found life very sweet. but when you suddenly left me and went abroad--ah, _that_ was indeed serious." her tone was full of passionate yearning. he laughed, trying to appear at ease. some sort of an understanding must be had with diana sooner or later, and she might as well realize at this present interview that the old relations could not be restored. his nature was not brutal and he disliked to hurt her; moreover, the boy had an uneasy feeling that he had been a far more ardent admirer of this peculiar girl than any fellow should be who had had no serious intentions; yet it would be folly to allow diana to think she could win him back to his former allegiance. no compromising word had ever left his lips; he had never spoken of love to her. yet the girl's attitude seemed to infer a certain possession of him which was far from agreeable. having gone so far, he should have said more; but here again his lack of moral courage proved his stumbling-block, and he weakly evaded a frank expression of his true feelings. "life," he began somewhat haltingly, to break the embarrassing pause, "is only serious when we make it so; and as soon as we make it serious it makes us unhappy. so i've adopted one invariable rule: to laugh and be gay." "then i too will be gay, and together we'll enjoy life," responded diana, with an effort to speak lightly. "i shall let your moods be my moods, arthur, as a good friend should. are we not affinities?" again he knew not what to say. her persistence in clinging to her intangible hold upon him was extremely irritating, and he realized the girl was far too clever for him to cope with and was liable to cause him future trouble. instead of seizing the opportunity to frankly undeceive her he foolishly evaded the subject. "you've been tempting fate to-night," he remarked with assumed carelessness. "don't you remember that to stand four girls in a row is a bad omen?" "only for the one who first winks. isn't that the way the saying goes? i seldom wink, myself," she continued, smilingly. "but i have no faith in ill omens. their power is entirely due to mental fear." "i think not," said arthur, glad the conversation had taken this turn. "once i knew a fellow with thirteen letters in his name. he had no mental fear. but he proposed to a girl--and was accepted." she gave him one of those sudden, swift glances that were so disconcerting. "if you had a middle initial, there would be thirteen letters in your own name, arthur weldon." "but i haven't, diana; i haven't," he protested, eagerly. "and if ever i propose to a girl i'm sure she'll refuse me. but i've no intention of doing such a crazy thing, so i'm perfectly safe." "you cannot be sure until you try, arthur," she replied pointedly, and with a start he became conscious that he was again treading upon dangerous ground. "come; let us rejoin your guests," said he, offering her his arm. "they would all hate me if they knew i was keeping the fair diana from them so long." "arthur, i must have a good long; talk with you--one of our old, delightful confabs," she said, earnestly. "will you call sunday afternoon? then we shall be quite undisturbed." he hesitated. "sunday afternoon?" he answered. "yes." "all right; i'll come, diana." she gave him a grateful look and taking his arm allowed him to lead her back to the drawing-room. the crush was over, many having already departed. some of the young people were dancing in the open spaces to the music of a string orchestra hidden behind a bank of ferns in the hall. louise and beth were the centers of attentive circles; patsy conversed with merry freedom with a group of ancient dowagers, who delighted in her freshness and healthy vigor and were flattered by her consideration. mrs. merrick--for she had been invited--sat in a corner gorgeously robed and stiff as a poker, her eyes devouring the scene. noting the triumph of louise she failed to realize she was herself neglected. a single glance sufficed to acquaint diana with all this, and after a gracious word to her guests here and there she asked arthur to dance with her. he could not well refuse, but felt irritated and annoyed when he observed louise's eyes fastened upon him in amused disdain. after a few turns he discovered some departing ones waiting to bid their hostess _adieu_, and escaped from his unpleasant predicament by halting his partner before them. then he slipped away and quietly left the house before diana had time to miss him. chapter vii the hero enters and trouble begins the von taer reception fully launched the three nieces in society. endorsed by diana and backed by john merrick's millions and their own winsome charms, they were sure to become favorites in that admirable set to which they had fortunately gained admittance. cards poured in upon them during; the succeeding days and they found themselves busy returning calls and attending dinners, fetes, bridge parties and similar diversions. the great mrs. sandringham took a decided fancy to louise, and when the committee was appointed to arrange for the social kermess to be held in december, this dictatorial leader had the girl's name included in the list. naturally the favor led to all three cousins taking active part in the most famous social event of the season, and as an especial mark of favoritism they were appointed to conduct the "flower booth," one of the important features of the kermess. mrs. merrick was in the seventh heaven of ecstatic delight; uncle john declared his three girls were sure to become shining lights, if not actual constellations, wherever they might be placed; major doyle growled and protested; but was secretly pleased to have "our patsy the captain of the dress parade," where he fondly imagined she outclassed all others. all former denunciations of society at large were now ignored, even by unimpressive beth, and the girls soon became deeply interested in their novel experiences. arthur weldon sulked at home, unhappy and undecided, for a day or two after the reception. sunday noon he dispatched a messenger to diana with a note saying he would be unable to keep his appointment with her that afternoon. then he went straight to the merrick home and sent his card to louise. the girl flushed, smiled, frowned, and decided to go down. no one had ever interested her so much as arthur weldon. there had been a spice of romance about their former relations that made her still regard him as exceptional among mankind. she had been asking herself, since the night of the reception, if she still loved him, but could not come to a positive conclusion. the boy was no longer "ineligible," as he had been at first; even uncle john could now have no serious objection to him. he was handsome, agreeable, occupied a good social position and was fairly well off in the way of worldly goods--the last point removing mrs. merrick's former rejection of arthur as a desirable son-in-law. but girls are wayward and peculiar in such an _affaire du coeur_, and none of these things might have weighed with louise had she not discovered that diana von taer was in love with arthur and intended to win him. that aroused the girl's fighting instincts, rendered the young man doubly important, and easily caused louise to forget her resentment at his temporary desertion of her. perhaps, she reflected, it had partially been her own fault. now that arthur showed a disposition to renew their friendship, and she might promise herself the satisfaction of defeating diana's ambitions, it would be diplomatic, at least, to receive the youth with cordial frankness. therefore she greeted him smilingly and with outstretched hand, saying: "this is quite a surprise, mr. weldon. i'd a notion you had forgotten me." "no, indeed, louise! how could you imagine such a thing?" he answered, reproachfully. "there was some evidence of the fact," she asserted archly. "at one time you gave me no peace; then you became retiring. at last you disappeared wholly. what could i think, sir, under such circumstances?" he stood looking down at her thoughtfully. how pretty she had grown; and how mature and womanly. "louise," said he, gently, "don't let us indulge in mutual reproaches. some one must have been at fault and i'll willingly take all the blame if you will forgive me. once we were--were good friends. we--we intended to be still more to one another, louise, but something occurred, i don't know what, to--to separate us." "why, you went away," said the girl, laughing; "and that of course separated us." "you treated me like a beggar; don't forget that part of it, dear. of course i went away." "and consoled yourself with a certain miss diana von taer. it has lately been rumored you are engaged to her." "me? what nonsense?" but he hushed guiltily, and louise noted everything and determined he should not escape punishment. "diana, at least, is in earnest," she remarked, with assumed indifference. "you may not care to deny that you have been very attentive to her." "not especially so," he declared, stoutly. "people gossip, you know. and diana is charming." "she's an iceberg!" "oh, you have discovered that? was she wholly unresponsive, then?" "no," he said, with a touch of anger. "i have never cared for diana, except in a friendly way. she amused me for a while when--when i was wretched. but i never made love to her; not for a moment. afterward, why--then----" "well; what then?" as he hesitated, growing red again. "i found she had taken my careless attentions in earnest, and the play was getting dangerous. so i went abroad." louise considered this explanation seriously. she believed he was speaking the truth, so far as he knew. but at the same time she realized from her own experience that arthur might as easily deceive himself as diana in his estimate as to the warmth of the devotion he displayed. his nature was impetuous and ardent. that diana should have taken his attentions seriously and become infatuated with the handsome young fellow was not a matter to cause surprise. gradually louise felt her resentment disappearing. in arthur's presence the charm of his personality influenced her to be lenient with his shortcomings. and his evident desire for a reconciliation found an echo in her own heart. mutual explanations are excellent to clear a murky atmosphere, and an hour's earnest conversation did much to restore these two congenial spirits to their former affectionate relations. of course louise did not succumb too fully to his pleadings, for her feminine instinct warned her to keep the boy on "the anxious seat" long enough to enable him to appreciate her value and the honor of winning her good graces. moreover, she made some severe conditions and put him on his good behavior. if he proved worthy, and was steadfast and true, why then the future might reward him freely. diana had been making careful plans for her interview with arthur that sunday afternoon. with no futile attempt to deceive herself as to existent conditions she coldly weighed the chances in her mental scale and concluded she had sufficient power to win this unstable youth to her side and induce him to forget that such a person as louise merrick ever existed. diana was little experienced in such affairs, it is true. arthur weldon had been her first and only declared admirer, and no one living had studied his peculiar nature more critically than this observant girl. also she knew well her own physical failings. she realized that her personality was to many repulsive, rather than attractive, and this in spite of her exquisite form, her perfect breeding and many undeniable accomplishments. men, as a rule, seldom remained at her side save through politeness, and even seemed to fear her; but never until now had she cared for any man sufficiently to wish to retain or interest him. there were unsuspected fascinations lying dormant in her nature, and miss von taer calmly reflected that the exercise of these qualities, backed by her native wit and capacity for intrigue, could easily accomplish the object she desired. thus she had planned her campaign and carefully dressed herself in anticipation of arthur's call when his note came canceling the engagement. after rereading his lame excuse she sat down in a quiet corner and began to think. the first gun had been fired, the battle was on, and like a wise general she carefully marshaled her forces for combat. an hour or two later she turned to her telephone book and called up the merrick establishment. a voice, that of a maid, evidently, answered her. "i wish to speak with miss merrick," said diana. louise, annoyed at being disturbed, left arthur's side to respond to the call. "who is it, please?" she asked. "is mr. weldon still there, or has he gone?" enquired diana, disguising her voice and speaking imperatively.. "why, he's still here," answered bewildered louise; "but who is talking, please?" no answer. "do you wish to speak with mr. weldon?" continued the girl, mystified at such an odd procedure. diana hung up her receiver, severing the connection. the click of the instrument assured louise there was no use in waiting longer, so she returned to arthur. she could not even guess who had called her. arthur could, though, when he had heard her story, and diana's impudent meddling made him distinctly uneasy. he took care not to enlighten louise, and the incident was soon forgotten by her. "it proved just as i expected," mused diana, huddled in her reclining' chair. "the fool has thrown me over to go to her. but this is not important. with the situation so clearly defined i shall know exactly what i must do to protect my own interests." mr. von taer was away from home that sunday afternoon, and would not return until a late hour. diana went to the telephone again and after several unsuccessful attempts located her cousin, mr. charles connoldy mershone, at a club. "it's diana," she said, when at last communication was established. "i want you to come over and see me; at once." "you'll have to excuse me, di," was the answer. "i was unceremoniously kicked out the last time, you know." "father's away. it's all right, charlie. come along." "can't see it, my fair cousin. you've all treated me like a bull-pup, and i'm not anxious to mix up with that sort of a relationship. anything more? i'm going to play pool to win my dinner." "funds running low, charlie?" "worse than that; they're invisible." "then pay attention. call a taxi at once, and get here as soon as you can. i'll foot the bill--and any others that happen to be bothering you." a low, surprised whistle came over the wire. "what's up, di?" he asked, with new interest. "come and find out." "can i be useful?" "assuredly; to yourself." "all right; i'm on the way." he hung up, and diana gave a sigh of content as she slowly returned to her den and the easy chair, where mr. mershone found her "coiled" some half hour later. "this is a queer go," said the young man, taking a seat and glancing around with knitted brows. "it isn't so long since dear uncle hedrik tumbled me out of here neck and crop; and now cousin diana invites me to return." at first glance young mershone seemed an attractive young fellow, tall, finely formed and well groomed. but his eyes were too close together and his handsome features bore unmistakable marks of dissipation. "you disgraced us a year or so ago, charlie," said diana, in her soft, quiet accents, "and under such circumstances we could not tolerate you. you can scarcely blame us for cutting your acquaintance. but now--" "well, now?" he enquired coolly, trying to read her impassive face. "i need the services of just such an unscrupulous and clever individual as you have proven yourself to be. i'm willing to pay liberally for those services, and you doubtless need the money. are we allies, then?" mershone laughed, with little genuine mirth. "of course, my dear cousin," he responded; "provided you propose any legal villainy. i'm not partial to the police; but i really need the money, as you suggest." "and you will be faithful?" she asked, regarding him doubtfully. "to the cause, you may be sure. but understand me: i balk at murder and burglary. somehow, the police seem to know me. i'll not do anything that might lead to a jail sentence, because there are easier ways to get money. however, i don't imagine your proposed plan is very desperate, diana; it's more liable to be dirty work. never mind; you may command me, my dear cousin--if the pay is ample." "the pay will be ample if you succeed," she began. "i don't like that. i may not succeed." "listen to me, charlie. do you know arthur weldon?" "slightly; not very well." "i intend to marry him. he has paid me marked attentions in the past; but now--he--" "wants to slip the leash. quite natural, my dear." "he has become infatuated with another girl; a light-headed, inexperienced little thing who is likely to marry the first man who asks her. she is very rich--in her own right, too--and her husband will be a fortunate man." mershone stared at her. then he whistled, took a few turns up and down the room, and reseated himself. "evidently!" he ejaculated, lighting a cigarette without permission and then leaning back thoughtfully in his chair. "charlie," continued diana, "you may as well marry louise merrick and settle down to a life of respectability. you've a dashing, masterful way which no girl of her sort can long resist. i propose that you make desperate love to louise merrick and so cut arthur weldon out of the deal entirely. my part of the comedy will be to attract him to my side again. now you have the entire proposition in a nutshell." he smoked for a time in reflective silence. "what's the girl like?" he enquired, presently. "is she attractive?" "sufficiently so to fascinate arthur weldon. moreover, she has just been introduced in our set, and knows nothing of your shady past history. even if rumors came to her ears, young creatures of her sort often find a subtle charm in a man accused of being 'naughty.'" "humph!" "if you win her, you get a wife easily managed and a splendid fortune to squander as you please." "sounds interesting, di, doesn't it? but--" "in regard to preliminary expenses," she interrupted, calmly, "i have said that your reward will be ample when you have won the game. but meantime i am willing to invest the necessary funds in the enterprise. i will allow you a thousand a month." "bah! that's nothing at all!" said he, contemptuously, as he flicked the ashes from his cigarette. "what do you demand, then?" "five hundred a week, in advance. it's an expensive job, di." "very well; i will give you five hundred a week; but only as long as you work earnestly to carry out the plot. i shall watch you, charlie. and you must not lose sight of the ultimate reward." "i won't, my sweet cousin. it's a bargain," he said, readily enough. "when do i begin, and what's the program?" "draw your chair nearer," said diana, restraining her triumphant joy. "i'll explain everything to you in detail. it will be my part to plan, and yours to execute." "good!" he exclaimed, with a cheerful grin. "i feel like an executioner already!" chapter viii opening the campaign louise's little romance, which now began to thrive vigorously, was regarded with calmness by her cousins and her mother, who knew of the former episode between her and arthur and attached little importance to the renewed flirtation in which they indulged. that they were deceived in their estimate was due to the girl's reputation for frivolity where young men were concerned. she had been dubbed a "flirt" ever since she first began to wear long dresses, and her nature was not considered deep enough for her heart to be ever seriously affected. therefore the young girl was gravely misjudged. louise was not one to bare her heart, even to her most intimate friends, and no one now suspected that at last her deepest, truest womanly affections were seriously involved. the love for arthur that had lain dormant in her heart was aroused at a time when she was more mature and capable of recognizing truly her feelings, so that it was not long before she surrendered her reserve and admitted to him that life would mean little for her unless they might pass the years together. for his part, young weldon sincerely loved louise, and had never wavered from his firm devotion during all the past months of misunderstanding. the general impression that they were "merely flirting" afforded the lovers ample opportunity to have their walks and drives together undisturbed, and during these soulful communions they arrived at such a perfect understanding that both were confident nothing could ever disturb their trust and confidence. it was at a theatre party that the three _debutantes_ first met charlie mershone, but they saw little of him that first evening and scarcely noticed his presence. louise, indeed, noted that his eyes were fixed upon her more than once with thinly veiled admiration, and without a thought of disloyalty to arthur, but acting upon the impulse of her coquettish nature, she responded with a demure smile of encouragement. charlie mershone was an adept at playing parts. he at first regarded louise much as a hunter does the game he is stalking. patsy doyle was more jolly and beth de graf more beautiful than miss merrick; but the young man would in any event have preferred the latter's dainty personality. when he found her responsive to his admiring glances he was astounded to note his heart beating rapidly--a thing quite foreign to his usual temperament. yes, this girl would do very nicely, both as a wife and as a banker. assuredly the game was well worth playing, as diana had asserted. he must make it his business to discover what difficulties must be overcome in winning her. of course arthur weldon was the main stumbling-block; but weldon was a ninny; he must be thrust aside; diana had promised to attend to that. never in his life had charles connoldy mershone been in earnest before. after his first interview with louise merrick he became in deadly earnest. his second meeting with her was at marie delmar's bridge whist party, where they had opportunity for an extended conversation. arthur was present this evening, but by some chance mershone drew louise for his partner at cards, and being a skillful player he carried her in progression from table to table, leaving poor arthur far behind and indulging in merry repartee and mild flirtation until they felt they were quite well acquainted. louise found the young man a charming conversationalist. he had a dashing, confidential way of addressing the girl which impressed her as flattering and agreeable, while his spirits were so exuberant and sparkling with humor that she was thoroughly amused every moment while in his society. indeed, mr. mershone was really talented, and had he possessed any manly attributes, or even the ordinary honorable instincts of mankind, there is little doubt he would have been a popular favorite. but he had made his mark, and it was a rather grimy one. from earliest youth he had been guilty of discreditable acts that had won for him the contempt of all right-minded people. that he was still accepted with lax tolerance by some of the more thoughtless matrons of the fashionable set was due to his family name. they could not forget that in spite of his numerous lapses from respectability he was still a mershone. not one of the careless mothers who admitted him to her house would have allowed her daughter to wed him, and the degree of tolerance extended to him was fully appreciated by mershone himself. he knew he was practically barred from the most desirable circles and seldom imposed himself upon his former acquaintances; but now, with a distinct object in view, he callously disregarded the doubtful looks he encountered and showed himself in every drawing-room where he could secure an invitation or impudently intrude himself. he made frank avowals that he had "reformed" and abandoned his evil ways forever. some there were who accepted this statement seriously, and diana furthered his cause by treating him graciously whenever they met, whereas she had formerly refused to recognize her cousin. louise knew nothing at all of charlie mershone's history and permitted him to call when he eagerly requested the favor; but on the way home from the delmars arthur, who had glowered at the usurper all the evening, took pains to hint to louise that mershone was an undesirable acquaintance and had a bad record. of course she laughed at him and teased him, thinking he was jealous and rejoicing that in mershone she had a tool to "keep arthur toeing the mark." as a matter of truth she had really missed her lover's companionship that evening, but forbore to apprise him of the fact. and now the great kermess began to occupy the minds of the three cousins, who were to share the important "flower booth" between them. the kermess was to be the holiday sensation of the season and bade fair to eclipse the horse show in popularity. it was primarily a charitable entertainment, as the net receipts were to be divided among several deserving hospitals; nevertheless it was classed as a high society function and only the elect were to take active part in the affair. the ball room at the waldorf had been secured and many splendid booths were to be erected for the sale of novelties, notions and refreshments. there were to be lotteries and auctions, national dances given by groups of society belles, and other novel entertainments calculated to empty the pockets of the unwary. beth was somewhat indignant to find that she and her cousins, having been assigned to the flower booth, were expected to erect a pavilion and decorate it at their own expense, as well as to provide the stock of flowers to be sold. "there is no fund for preliminary expenses, you know," remarked mrs. sandringham, "and of course all the receipts are to go to charity; so there is nothing to do but stand these little bills ourselves. we all do it willingly. the papers make a good deal of the kermess, and the advertisement we get is worth all it costs us." beth did not see the force of this argument. she thought it was dreadful for society--really good society--to wish to advertise itself; but gradually she was learning that this was merely a part of the game. to be talked about, to have her goings and comings heralded in the society columns and her gowns described on every possible occasion, seemed the desire of every society woman, and she who could show the biggest scrap-book of clippings was considered of highest importance.. uncle john laughed joyously when told that the expenses of the flower booth would fall on the shoulders of his girls and there was no later recompense. "why not?" he cried. "mustn't we pay the fiddler if we dance?" "it's a hold-up game," declared beth, angrily. "i'll have nothing to do with it." "yes, you will, my dear," replied her uncle; "and to avoid separating you chicks from your pin-money i'm going to stand every cent of the expense myself. why, it's for charity, isn't it? charity covers a multitude of sins, and i'm just a miserable sinner that needs a bath-robe to snuggle in. how can the poor be better served than by robbing the rich? go ahead, girls, and rig up the swellest booth that money will build. i'll furnish as many flowers as you can sell, and charity ought to get a neat little nest-egg out of the deal." "that's nice of you," said patsy, kissing him; "but it's an imposition, all the same." "it's a blessing, my dear. it will help a bit to ease off that dreadful income that threatens to crush me," he rejoined, smiling at them. and the nieces made no further protest, well knowing the kindly old gentleman would derive untold pleasure in carrying out his generous plans. the flower booth, designed by a famous architect, proved a splendid and most imposing structure. it was capped by a monster bouquet of artificial orchids in _papier-maché,_ which reached twenty feet into the air. the three cousins had their gowns especially designed for the occasion. beth represented a lily, louise a gold-of-ophir rose, and patricia a pansy. the big ball room had been turned over to the society people several days in advance, that the elaborate preparations might be completed in time, and during this period groups of busy, energetic young folks gathered by day and in the evenings, decorating, flirting, rehearsing the fancy dances, and amusing themselves generally. arthur weldon was there to assist uncle john's nieces; but his pleasure was somewhat marred by the persistent presence of charlie mershone, who, having called once or twice upon louise, felt at liberty to attach himself to her party. the ferocious looks of his rival were ignored by this designing young man and he had no hesitation in interrupting a _tête-à-tête_ to monopolize the girl for himself. louise was amused, thinking it fun to worry arthur by flirting mildly with mr. mershone, for whom she cared not a jot. both patsy and beth took occasion to remonstrate with her for this folly, for having known weldon for a long time and journeyed with him through a part of europe, they naturally espoused his cause, liking him as much as they intuitively disliked mershone. one evening arthur, his patience well-nigh exhausted, talked seriously with louise. "this fellow mershone," said he, "is a bad egg, a despicable son of a decadent family. his mother was hedrik von taer's sister, but the poor thing has been dead many years. not long ago charlie was tabooed by even the rather fast set he belonged to, and the von taers, especially, refused to recognize their relative. now he seems to go everywhere again. i don't know what has caused the change, i'm sure." "why, he has reformed," declared louise; "diana told me so. she said he had been a bit wild, as all young men are; but now his behavior is irreproachable." "i don't believe a word of it," insisted arthur. "mershone is a natural cad; he's been guilty of all sorts of dirty tricks, and is capable of many more. if you'll watch out, louise, you'll see that all the girls are shy of being found in his society, and all the chaperons cluck to their fledglings the moment the hawk appears. you're a novice in society just yet, my dear, and it won't do you any good to encourage charlie mershone, whom everyone else avoids." "he's very nice," returned louise, lightly. "yes; he must be nicer than i am," admitted the young man, glumly, and thereupon he became silent and morose and louise found her evening spoiled. the warning did not fall on barren ground, however. in the seclusion of her own room the girl thought it all over and decided she had teased her true lover enough. arthur had not scolded or reproached her, despite his annoyance, and she had a feeling that his judgment of charlie mershone was quite right. although the latter was evidently madly in love with her the girl had the discretion to see how selfish and unrestrained was his nature, and once or twice he had already frightened her by his impetuosity. she decided to retreat cautiously but positively from further association with him, and at once began to show the young man coolness. mershone must have been chagrined, but he did not allow louise to see there was any change in their relations as far as he was concerned. he merely redoubled his attentions, sending her flowers and bonbons daily, accompanied by ardently worded but respectful notes. really, louise was in a quandary, and she frankly admitted to arthur that she had brought this embarrassment upon herself. yet arthur could do or say little to comfort her. he longed secretly to "punch mershone's head," but could find no occasion for such decided action. diana, during this time, treated both arthur and louise with marked cordiality. believing her time would come to take part in the comedy she refrained from interfering prematurely with the progress of events. she managed to meet her accomplice at frequent intervals and was pleased that there was no necessity to urge charlie to do his utmost in separating the lovers. "i'm bound to win, di," he said grimly, "for i love the girl even better than i do her fortune. and of one thing you may rest assured; weldon shall never marry her." "what will you do?" asked diana, curiously. "anything! everything that is necessary to accomplish my purpose." "be careful," said she warningly. "keep a cool head, charlie, and don't do anything foolish. still--" "well?" "if it is necessary to take a few chances, do it. arthur weldon must not marry louise merrick!" chapter ix the von taer pearls uncle john really had more fun out of the famous kermess than anyone else. the preparations gave him something to do, and he enjoyed doing--openly, as well as in secret ways. having declared that he would stock the flower booth at his own expense, he confided to no one his plans. the girls may have thought he would merely leave orders with a florist; but that was not the merrick way of doing things. instead, he visited the most famous greenhouses within a radius of many miles, contracting for all the floral blooms that art and skill could produce. the kermess was to be a three days' affair, and each day the floral treasures of the cast were delivered in reckless profusion at the flower booth, which thus became the center of attraction and the marvel of the public. the girls were delighted to be able to dispense such blooms, and their success as saleswomen was assured at once. of course the fair vendors were ignorant of the value of their wares, for uncle john refused to tell them how extravagant he had been; so they were obliged to guess at the sums to be demanded and in consequence sold priceless orchids and rare hothouse flora at such ridiculous rates that mr. merrick chuckled with amusement until he nearly choked. the public being "cordially invited" uncle john was present on that first important evening, and--wonder of wonders--was arrayed in an immaculate full-dress suit that fitted his chubby form like the skin of a banana. mayor doyle, likewise disguised, locked arms with his brother-in-law and stalked gravely among the throng; but neither ever got to a point in the big room where the flower booth was not in plain sight. the major's pride in "our patsy" was something superb; uncle john was proud of all three of his nieces. as the sale of wares was for the benefit of charity these old fellows purchased liberally--mostly flowers and had enough parcels sent home to fill a delivery wagon. one disagreeable incident, only, marred this otherwise successful evening--successful especially for the three cousins, whose beauty and grace won the hearts of all. diana von taer was stationed in the "hindoo booth," and the oriental costume she wore exactly fitted her sensuous style of beauty. to enhance its effect she had worn around her neck the famous string of von taer pearls, a collection said to be unmatched in beauty and unequaled in value in all new york. the "hindoo booth" was near enough to the "flower booth" for diana to watch the cousins, and the triumph of her late _protégées_ was very bitter for her to endure. especially annoying was it to find arthur weldon devoting himself assiduously to louise, who looked charming in her rose gown and favored arthur in a marked way, although charlie mershone, refusing to be ignored, also leaned over the counter of the booth and chatted continually, striving to draw miss merrick's attention to himself. forced to observe all this, diana soon lost her accustomed coolness. the sight of the happy faces of arthur and louise aroused all the rancor and subtile wit that she possessed, and she resolved upon an act that she would not before have believed herself capable of. leaning down, she released the catch of the famous pearls and unobserved concealed them in a handkerchief. then, leaving her booth, she sauntered slowly over to the floral display, which was surrounded for the moment by a crowd of eager customers. many of the vases and pottery jars which had contained flowers now stood empty, and just before the station of louise merrick the stock was sadly depleted. this was, of course, offset by the store of money in the little drawer beside the fair sales-lady, and louise, having greeted diana with a smile and nod, turned to renew her conversation with the young men besieging her. diana leaned gracefully over the counter, resting the hand containing the handkerchief over the mouth of an empty doulton vase--empty save for the water which had nourished the flowers. at the same time she caught louise's eye and with a gesture brought the girl to her side. "those young men are wealthy," she said, carelessly, her head close to that of louise. "make them pay well for their purchases, my dear." "i can't rob them, diana," was the laughing rejoinder. "but it is your duty to rob, at a kermess, and in the interests of charity," persisted diana, maintaining her voice at a whisper. louise was annoyed. "thank you," she said, and went back to the group awaiting her. the floral booth was triangular, beth officiated at one of the three sides, patsy at another, and louise at the third. diana now passed softly around the booth, interchanging a word with the other two girls, after which she returned to her own station. presently, while chatting with a group of acquaintances, she suddenly clasped her throat and assuming an expression of horror exclaimed: "my pearls!" "what, the von taer pearls?" cried one. "the von taer pearls," said diana, as if dazed by her misfortune. "and you've lost them, dear?" "they're lost!" she echoed. well, there was excitement then, you may be sure. one man hurried to notify the door-keeper and the private detective employed oh all such occasions, while others hastily searched the booth--of course in vain. diana seemed distracted and the news spread quickly through the assemblage. "have you left this booth at all?" asked a quiet voice, that of the official whose business it was to investigate. "i--i merely walked over to the floral booth opposite, and exchanged a word with miss merrick, and the others there," she explained. the search was resumed, and charlie mershone sauntered over. "what's this, di? lost the big pearls, i hear," he said. she took him aside and whispered something to him. he nodded and returned at once to the flower booth, around which a crowd of searchers now gathered, much to the annoyance of louise and her cousins. "it's all foolishness, you know," said uncle john, to the major, confidentially. "if the girl really dropped her pearls some one has picked them up, long ago." young mershone seemed searching the floral booth as earnestly as the others, and awkwardly knocked the doulton vase from the shelf with his elbow. it smashed to fragments and in the pool of water on the floor appeared the missing pearls. there was an awkward silence for a moment, while all eyes turned curiously upon louise, who served this side of the triangle. the girl appeared turned to stone as she gazed down at the gems. mershone laughed disagreeably and picked up the recovered treasure, which diana ran forward and seized. "h-m-m!" said the detective, with a shrug; "this is a strange occurrence--a very strange occurrence, indeed. miss von taer, do you wish--" "no!" exclaimed diana, haughtily. "i accuse no one. it is enough that an accident has restored to me the heirloom." stiffly she marched back to her own booth, and the crowd quietly dispersed, leaving only arthur, uncle john and the major standing to support louise and her astonished cousins. "why, confound it!" cried the little millionaire, with a red face, "does the jade mean to insinuate--" "not at all, sor," interrupted the major, sternly; "her early education has been neglected, that's all." "come dear," pleaded arthur to louise; "let us go home." "by no means!" announced beth, positively; "let us stay where we belong. why, we're not half sold out yet!" chapter x misled arthur weldon met mershone at a club next afternoon. "you low scoundrel!" he exclaimed. "it was _your_ trick to accuse miss merrick of a theft last night." "was she accused?" enquired the other, blandly. "i hadn't heard, really." "you did it yourself!" "dear me!" said mershone, deliberately lighting a cigarette. "you or your precious cousin--you're both alike," declared arthur, bitterly. "but you have given us wisdom, mershone. we'll see you don't trick us again." the young man stared at him, between puffs of smoke. "it occurs to me, weldon, that you're becoming insolent. it won't do, my boy. unless you guard your tongue--" "bah! resent it, if you dare; you coward." "coward?" "yes. a man who attacks an innocent girl is a coward. and you've been a coward all your life, mershone, for one reason or another. no one believes in your pretended reform. but i want to warn you to keep away from miss merrick, hereafter, or i'll take a hand in your punishment myself." for a moment the two eyed one another savagely. they were equally matched in physique; but arthur was right, there was no fight in mershone; that is, of the knock-down order. he would fight in his own way, doubtless, and this made him more dangerous than his antagonist supposed. "what right have you, sir, to speak for miss merrick?" he demanded. "the best right in the world," replied arthur. "she is my promised wife." "indeed! since when?" "that is none of your affair, mershone. as a matter of fact, however, that little excitement you created last night resulted in a perfect understanding between us." "_i_ created!" "you, of course. miss merrick does not care to meet you again. you will do well to avoid her in the future." "i don't believe you, weldon. you're bluffing." "am i? then dare to annoy miss merrick again and i'll soon convince you of my sincerity." with this parting shot he walked away, leaving mershone really at a loss to know whether he was in earnest or not. to solve the question he called a taxicab and in a few minutes gave his card to the merrick butler with a request to see miss louise. the man returned with a message that miss merrick was engaged. "please tell her it is important," insisted mershone. again the butler departed, and soon returned. "any message for miss merrick must be conveyed in writing, sir," he said, "she declines to see you." mershone went away white with anger. we may credit him with loving louise as intensely as a man of his caliber can love anyone. his sudden dismissal astounded him and made him frantic with disappointment. louise's treatment of the past few days might have warned him, but he had no intuition of the immediate catastrophe that had overtaken him. it wasn't his self-pride that was injured; that had become so battered there was little of it left; but he had set his whole heart on winning this girl and felt that he could not give her up. anger toward weldon was prominent amongst his emotion. he declared between his set teeth that if louise was lost to him she should never marry weldon. not on diana's account, but for his own vengeful satisfaction was this resolve made. he rode straight to his cousin and told her the news. the statement that arthur was engaged to marry louise merrick drove her to a wild anger no less powerful because she restrained any appearance of it. surveying her cousin steadily through her veiled lashes she asked: "is there no way we can prevent this thing?" mershone stalked up and down before her like a caged beast. his eyes were red and wicked; his lips were pressed tightly together. "diana," said he, "i've never wanted anything in this world as i want that girl. i can't let that mollycoddle marry her!" she flushed, and then frowned. it was not pleasant to hear the man of her choice spoken of with such contempt, but after all their disappointment and desires were alike mutual and she could not break with charlie at this juncture. suddenly he paused and asked: "do you still own that country home near east orange?" "yes; but we never occupy it now. father does not care for the place." "is it deserted?" "practically so. madame cerise is there in charge." "old cerise? i was going to ask you what had become of that clever female." "she was too clever, charlie. she knew too much of our affairs, and was always prying into things that did not concern her. so father took an antipathy to the poor creature, and because she has served our family for so long sent her to care for the house at east orange." "pensioned her, eh? well, this is good news, di; perhaps the best news in the world. i believe it will help clear up the situation. old cerise and i always understood each other." "will you explain?" asked diana, coldly. "i think not, my fair cousin. i prefer to keep my own counsel. you made a bad mess of that little deal last night, and are responsible for the climax that faces us. besides, a woman is never a good conspirator. i know what you want; and i know what i want. so i'll work this plan alone, if you please. and i'll win, di; i'll win as sure as fate--if you'll help me." "you ask me to help you and remain in the dark?" "yes; it's better so. write me a note to cerise and tell her to place the house and herself unreservedly at my disposal." she stared at him fixedly, and he returned the look with an evil smile. so they sat in silence a moment. then slowly she arose and moved to her escritoire, drawing a sheet of paper toward her and beginning to write. "is there a telephone at the place?" enquired mershone abruptly. "yes." "then telephone cerise after i'm gone. that will make it doubly sure. and give me the number, too, so i can jot it down. i may need it." diana quietly tore up the note. "the telephone is better," she said. "being in the dark, sir, i prefer not to commit myself in writing." "you're quite right, di," he exclaimed, admiringly. "but for heaven's sake don't forget to telephone madame cerise." "i won't charlie. and, see here, keep your precious plans to yourself, now and always. i intend to know nothing of what you do." "i'm merely the cats-paw, eh? well, never mind. is old cerise to be depended upon, do you think?" "why not?" replied the girl. "cerise belongs to the von taers--body and soul!" chapter xi the brown limousine the second evening of the society kermess passed without unusual event and proved very successful in attracting throngs of fashionable people to participate in its pleasures. louise and her cousins were at their stations early, and the second installment of uncle john's flowers was even more splendid and profuse than the first. it was not at all difficult to make sales, and the little money drawer began to bulge with its generous receipts. many a gracious smile or nod or word was bestowed upon miss merrick by the society folk; for these people had had time to consider the accusation against her implied by diana von taer's manner when the pearls were discovered in the empty flower vase. being rather impartial judges--for diana was not a popular favorite with her set--they decided it was absurd to suppose a niece of wealthy old john merrick would descend to stealing any one's jewelry. miss merrick might have anything her heart desired with-out pausing to count the cost, and moreover she was credited with sufficient common sense to realize that the von taer heirlooms might easily be recognized anywhere. so a little gossip concerning the queer incident had turned the tide of opinion in louise's favor, and as she was a recent _debutante_ with a charming personality all vied to assure her she was held blameless. a vast coterie of the select hovered about the flower booth all the evening, and the cousins joyously realized they had scored one of the distinct successes of the kermess. arthur could not get very close to louise this evening; but he enjoyed her popularity and from his modest retirement was able to exchange glances with her at intervals, and these glances assured him he was seldom absent from her thoughts. aside from this, he had the pleasure of glowering ferociously upon charlie mershone, who, failing to obtain recognition from miss merrick, devoted himself to his cousin diana, or at least lounged nonchalantly in the neighborhood of the hindoo booth. mershone was very quiet. there was a speculative look upon his features that denoted an undercurrent of thought. diana's face was as expressionless as ever. she well knew her action of the previous evening had severed the cordial relations formerly existing between her and mr. merrick's nieces, and determined to avoid the possibility of a snub by keeping aloof from them. she greeted whoever approached her station in her usual gracious and cultured manner, and refrained from even glancing toward louise. hedrik von taer appeared for an hour this evening. he quietly expressed his satisfaction at the complete arrangements of the kermess, chatted a moment with his daughter, and then innocently marched over to the flower booth and made a liberal purchase from each of the three girls. evidently the old gentleman had no inkling of the incident of the previous evening, or that diana was not still on good terms with the young ladies she had personally introduced to society. his action amused many who noted it, and louise blushing but thoroughly self-possessed, exchanged her greetings with diana's father and thanked him heartily for his purchase. mr. von taer stared stonily at charlie mershone, but did not speak to him. going out he met john merrick, and the two men engaged in conversation most cordially. "you did the trick all right, von taer," said the little millionaire, "and i'm much obliged, as you may suppose. you're not ashamed of my three nieces, i take it?" "your nieces, mr. merrick, are very charming young women," was the dignified reply. "they will grace any station in life to which they may be called." when the evening's entertainment came to an end arthur weldon took louise home in his new brown limousine, leaving patsy and her father, uncle john and beth to comfortably fill the doyle motor car. now that the engagement of the young people had been announced and accepted by their friends, it seemed very natural for them to prefer their own society. "what do you think of it, uncle john, anyhow?" asked patsy, as they rode home. "it's all right, dear," he announced, with a sigh. "i hate to see my girls take the matrimonial dive, but i guess they've got to come to it, sooner or later." "later, for me," laughed patsy. "as for young weldon," continued mr. merrick, reflectively, "he has some mighty good points, as i found out long ago. also he has some points that need filing down. but i guess he'll average up with most young men, and louise seems to like him. so let's try to encourage 'em to be happy; eh, my dears?" "louise," said beth, slowly, "is no more perfect than arthur. they both have faults which time may eradicate, and as at present they are not disposed to be hypercritical they ought to get along nicely together." "if 't was me," said the major, oracularly, "i'd never marry weldon." "he won't propose to you, daddy dear," returned patsy, mischievously; "he prefers louise." "i decided long ago," said uncle john, "that i'd never be allowed to pick out the husbands for my three girls. husbands are a matter of taste, i guess, and a girl ought to know what sort she wants. if she don't, and makes a mistake, that's _her_ look-out. so you can all choose for yourselves, when the time comes, and i'll stand by you, my dears, through thick and thin. if the husband won't play fair, you can always bet your uncle john will." "oh, we know, that," said patsy, simply; and beth added: "of course, uncle, dear." thursday evening, the third and last of the series, was after all the banner night of the great kermess. all the world of society was present and such wares as remained unsold in the booths were quickly auctioned off by several fashionable gentlemen with a talent for such brigandage. then, the national dances and songs having been given and received enthusiastically, a grand ball wound up the occasion in the merriest possible way. charlie mershone was much in evidence this evening, as he had been before; but he took no active part in the proceedings and refrained from dancing, his pet amusement. diana observed that he made frequent trips downstairs, perhaps to the hotel offices. no one paid any attention to his movements, except his cousin, and miss von taer, watching him intently, decided that underneath his calm exterior lurked a great deal of suppressed excitement. at last the crowd began to disperse. uncle john and the major took beth and patsy away early, as soon as their booth was closed; but louise stayed for a final waltz or two with arthur. she soon found, however, that the evening's work and excitement had tired her, and asked to be taken home. "i'll go and get the limousine around," said arthur. "that new chauffeur is a stupid fellow. by the time you've managed in this jam to get your wraps i shall be ready. come down in the elevator and i'll meet you at the thirty-second street entrance." as he reached the street a man--an ordinary servant, to judge from his appearance--ran into him full tilt, and when they recoiled from the impact the fellow with a muttered curse raised his fist and struck young weldon a powerful blow. reeling backward, a natural anger seized arthur, who was inclined to be hot-headed, and he also struck out with his fists, never pausing to consider that the more dignified act would be to call the police. the little spurt of fistcuffs was brief, but it gave mershone, who stood in the shadow of the door-way near by, time to whisper to a police officer, who promptly seized the disputants and held them both in a firm grip. "what's all this?" he demanded, sternly. "that drunken loafer assaulted me without cause" gasped arthur, panting. "it's a lie!" retorted the man, calmly; "he struck me first." "well, i arrest you both," said the officer. "arrest!" cried arthur, indignantly; "why, confound it, man, i'm--" "no talk!" was the stern command. "come along and keep quiet." as if the whole affair had been premeditated and prearranged a patrol wagon at that instant backed to the curb and in spite of arthur weldon's loud protests he was thrust inside with his assailant and at once driven away at a rapid gait. at the same moment a brown limousine drew up quietly before the entrance. louise, appearing in the doorway in her opera cloak, stood hesitating on the steps, peering into the street for arthur. a man in livery approached her. "this way, please, miss merrick," he said. "mr. weldon begs you to be seated in the limousine. he will join you in a moment." with this he led the way to the car and held the door open, while the girl, having no suspicion, entered and sank back wearily upon the seat. then the door abruptly slammed, and the man in livery leaped to the seat beside the chauffeur and with a jerk the car darted away. so sudden and astounding was this _denouement_ that louise did not even scream. indeed, for the moment her wits were dazed. and now charlie mershone stepped from his hiding place and with a satirical smile entered the vestibule and looked at his watch. he found he had time to show himself again at the kermess, for a few moments, before driving to the ferry to catch the train for east orange. some one touched him on the arm. "very pretty, sir, and quite cleverly done," remarked a quiet voice. mershone started and glared at the speaker, a slender, unassuming man in dark clothes. "what do you mean, fellow?" "i've been watching the comedy, sir, and i saw you were the star actor, although you took care to keep hidden in the wings. that bruiser who raised the row took his arrest very easily; i suppose you've arranged to pay his fine, and he isn't worried. but the gentleman surely was in hard luck pounded one minute and pinched the next. you arranged it very cleverly, indeed." charlie was relieved that no mention was made of the abduction of louise. had that incident escaped notice? he gave the man another sharp look and turned away; but the gentle touch again restrained him. "not yet, please, mr. mershone." "who are you?" asked the other, scowling. "the house detective. it's my business to watch things. so i noticed you talking to the police officer; i also noticed the patrol wagon standing on the opposite side of the street for nearly an hour--my report on that will amuse them at headquarters, won't it? and i noticed you nod to the bruiser, just as your victim came out." "let go of my arm, sir!" "do you prefer handcuffs? i arrest you. we'll run over to the station and explain things." "do you know who i am?" "perfectly, mr. mershone. i believe i ran you in for less than this, some two years ago. you gave the name of ryder, then. better take another, to-night." "if you're the house detective, why do you mix up in this affair?" enquired mershone, his anxiety showing in his tone. "your victim was a guest of the house." "not at all. he was merely attending the kermess." "that makes him our guest, sir. are you ready?" mershone glanced around and then lowered his voice. "it's all a little joke, my dear fellow," said he, "and you are liable to spoil everything with your bungling. here," drawing; a roll of bills from his pocket, "don't let us waste any more time. i'm busy." the man chuckled and waved aside the bribe. "you certainly are, sir; you're _very_ busy, just now! but i think the sergeant over at the station will give you some leisure. and listen, mr. mershone: i've got it in for that policeman you fixed; he's a cheeky individual and a new man. i'm inclined to think this night's work will cost him his position. and the patrol, which i never can get when i want it, seems under your direct management. these things have got to be explained, and i need your help. ready, sir?" mershone looked grave, but he was not wholly checkmated. thank heaven the bungling detective had missed the departure of louise altogether. charlie's arrest at this critical juncture was most unfortunate, but need not prove disastrous to his cleverly-laid plot. he decided it would be best to go quietly with the "plain-clothes man." weldon had become nearly frantic in his demands to be released when mershone was ushered into the station. he started at seeing his enemy and began to fear a thousand terrible, indefinite things, knowing how unscrupulous mershone was. but the waldorf detective, who seemed friendly with the police sergeant, made a clear, brief statement of the facts he had observed. mershone denied the accusation; the bruiser denied it; the policeman and the driver of the patrol wagon likewise stolidly denied it. indeed, they had quite another story to tell. but the sergeant acted on his own judgment. he locked up mershone, refusing bail. he suspended the policeman and the driver, pending investigation. then he released arthur weldon on his own recognisance, the young man promising to call and testify when required. the house detective and arthur started back to the waldorf together. "did you notice a young lady come to the entrance, soon after i was driven away?" he asked, anxiously. "a lady in a rose-colored opera cloak, sir?" "yes! yes!" "why, she got into a brown limousine and rode away." arthur gave a sigh of relief. "thank goodness that chauffeur had a grain of sense," said he. "i wouldn't have given him credit for it. anyway, i'm glad miss merrick is safe." "huh!" grunted the detective, stopping short. "i begin to see this thing in its true light. how stupid we've been!" "in what way?" enquired arthur, uneasily. "why did mershone get you arrested, just at that moment?" "because he hated me, i suppose." "tell me, could he have any object in spiriting away that young lady--in abducting her?" asked the detective. "could he?" cried arthur, terrified and trembling. "he had every object known to villainy. come to the hotel! let's hurry, man--let's fly!" chapter xii fogerty at the waldorf arthur's own limousine was standing by the curb. the street was nearly deserted. the last of the kermess people had gone home. weldon ran to his chauffeur. "did you take miss merrick home?" he eagerly enquired. "miss merrick? why, i haven't seen her, sir, i thought you'd all forgotten me." the young man's heart sank. despair seized him. the detective was carefully examining the car. "they're pretty nearly mates, mr. weldon. as far as the brown color and general appearances go," he said. "but i'm almost positive the car that carried the young lady away was of another make." "what make was it?" the man shook his head. "can't say, sir. i was mighty stupid, and that's a fact. but my mind was so full of that assault and battery case, and the trickery of that fellow mershone, that i wasn't looking for anything else." "can you get away?" asked arthur. "can you help me on this case?" "no, sir; i must remain on duty at the hotel. but perhaps the young lady is now safe at home, and we've been borrowing trouble. in case she's been stolen, however, you'd better see fogerty." "who's fogerty?" "here's his card, sir. he's a private detective, and may be busy just now, for all i know. but if you can get fogerty you've got the best man in all new york." arthur sprang into the seat beside his driver and hurried post-haste to the merrick residence. in a few minutes mrs. merrick was in violent hysterics at the disappearance of her daughter. arthur stopped long enough to telephone for a doctor and then drove to the doyles. he routed up uncle john and the major, who appeared in pajamas and bath-robes, and told them the startling news. a council of war was straightway held. uncle john trembled with nervousness; arthur was mentally stupefied; the major alone was calm. "in the first place," said he, "what object could the man have in carrying off louise?" arthur hesitated. "to prevent our marriage, i suppose," he answered. "mershone has an idea he loves louise. he made wild love to her until she cut his acquaintance." "but it won't help him any to separate her from her friends, or her promised husband," declared the major. "don't worry. we're sure to find her, sooner or later." "how? how shall we find her?" cried uncle john. "will he murder her, or what?" "why, as for that, john, he's safe locked up in jail for the present, and unable to murder anyone," retorted the major. "it's probable he meant to follow louise, and induce her by fair means or foul to marry him. but he's harmless enough for the time being." "it's not for long, though," said arthur, fearfully. "they're liable to let him out in the morning, for he has powerful friends, scoundrel though he is. and when he is free--" "then he must be shadowed, of course," returned the major, nodding wisely. "if it's true the fellow loves louise, then he's no intention of hurting her. so make your minds easy. wherever the poor lass has been taken to, she's probably safe enough." "but think of her terror--her suffering!" cried uncle john, wringing his chubby hands. "poor child! it may be his idea to compromise her, and break her heart!" "we'll stop all that, john, never fear," promised the major. "the first thing to do is to find a good detective." "fogerty!" exclaimed arthur, searching for the card. "who's fogerty?" "i don't know." "get the best man possible!" commanded mr. merrick. "spare no expense; hire a regiment of detectives, if necessary; i'll--" "of course you will," interrupted the major, smiling. "but we won't need a regiment. i'm pretty sure the game is in our hands, from the very start." "fogerty is highly recommended," explained arthur, and related what the house detective of the waldorf had said. "better go at once and hunt him up," suggested uncle john. "what time is it?" "after two o'clock. but i'll go at once." "do; and let us hear from you whenever you've anything to tell us," said the major. "where's patsy?" asked arthur. "sound asleep. mind ye, not a word of this to patsy till she _has_ to be told. remember that, john." "well, i'll go," said the young man, and hurried away. q. fogerty lived on eleventh street, according to his card. arthur drove down town, making good time. the chauffeur asked surlily if this was to be "an all-night job," and arthur savagely replied that it might take a week. "can't you see, jones, that i'm in great trouble?" he added. "but you shall be well paid for your extra time." "all right, sir. that's no more than just," said the man. "it's none of my affair, you know, if a young lady gets stolen." arthur was wise enough to restrain his temper and the temptation to kick jones out of the limousine. five minutes later they paused before a block of ancient brick dwellings and found fogerty's number. a card over the bell bore his name, and arthur lit a match and read it. then he rang impatiently. only silence. arthur rang a second time; waited, and rang again. a panic of fear took possession of him. at this hour of night it would be well-nigh impossible to hunt up another detective if fogerty failed him. he determined to persist as long as there was hope. again he rang. "look above, sir," called jones from his station in the car. arthur stepped back on the stone landing and looked up. a round spark, as from a cigarette, was visible at the open window. while he gazed the spark glowered brighter and illumined a pale, haggard boy's face, surmounted by tousled locks of brick colored hair. "hi, there!" said arthur. "does mr. fogerty live here?" "he pays the rent," answered a boyish voice, with a tinge of irony. "what's wanted?" "mr. fogerty is wanted. is he at home?" "he is," responded the boy. "i must see him at once--on important business. wake him up, my lad; will you?" "wait a minute," said the youth, and left the window. presently he opened the front door, slipped gently out and closed the door behind him. "let's sit in your car," he said, in soft, quiet tones. "we can talk more freely there." "but i must see fogerty at once!" protested arthur. "i'm fogerty." "q. fogerty?" "quintus fogerty--the first and last and only individual of that name." arthur hesitated; he was terribly disappointed. "are you a detective?" he enquired. "by profession." "but you can't be very old." the boy laughed. "i'm no antiquity, sir," said he, "but i've shed the knickerbockers long ago. who sent you to me?" "why do you ask?" "i'm tired. i've been busy twenty-three weeks. just finished my case yesterday and need a rest--a good long rest. but if you want a man i'll refer you to a friend." "gorman, of the waldorf, sent me to you--and said you'd help me." "oh; that's different. case urgent, sir?" "very. the young lady i'm engaged to marry was abducted less than three hours ago." fogerty lighted another cigarette and the match showed arthur that the young face was deeply lined, while two cold gray eyes stared blankly into his own. "let's sit in your limousine, sir," he repeated. when they had taken their places behind the closed doors the boy asked arthur to tell him "all about it, and don't forget any details, please." so weldon hastily told the events of the evening and gave a history of mershone and his relations with miss merrick. the story was not half told when fogerty said: "tell your man to drive to the police station." on the way arthur resumed his rapid recital and strove to post the young detective as well as he was able. fogerty made no remarks, nor did he ask a single question until weldon had told him everything he could think of. then he made a few pointed enquiries and presently they had arrived at the station. the desk sergeant bowed with great respect to the youthful detective. by the dim light arthur was now able to examine fogerty for the first time. he was small, slim and lean. his face attested to but eighteen or nineteen years, in spite of its deep lines and serious expression. although his hair was tangled and unkempt fogerty's clothing and linen were neat and of good quality. he wore a scotch cap and a horseshoe pin in his cravat. one might have imagined him to be an errand boy, a clerk, a chauffeur, a salesman or a house man. you might have placed him in almost any middle-class walk in life. perhaps, thought arthur, he might even be a good detective! yet his personality scarcely indicated it. "mershone in, billy?" the detective asked the desk sergeant. "room . want him?" "not now. when is he likely to go?" "when parker relieves me. there's been a reg'lar mob here to get mershone off. i couldn't prevent his using the telephone; but i'm a stubborn duck; eh, quintus? and now the gentleman has gone to bed, vowing vengeance." "you're all right, billy. we both know mershone. gentleman scoundrel." "exactly. swell society blackleg." "what name's he docked under?" "smith." "will parker let him off with a fine?" "yes, or without it. parker comes on at six." "good. i'll take a nap on that bench. got to keep the fellow in sight, billy." "go into my room. there's a cot there." "thanks, old man; i will. i'm dead tired." then fogerty took arthur aside. "go home and try to sleep," he advised. "don't worry. the young lady's safe enough till mershone goes to her hiding place. when he does, i'll be there, too, and i'll try to have you with me." "do you think you can arrange it alone, mr. fogerty?" asked arthur, doubtfully. the boy seemed so very young. "better than if i had a hundred to assist me. why, this is an easy job, mr. weldon. it 'll give me a fine chance to rest up." "and you won't lose mershone?" "never. he's mine." "this is very important to me, sir," continued arthur, nervously. "yes; and to others. most of all it's important to fogerty. don't worry, sir." the young man was forced to go away with this assurance. he returned home, but not to sleep. he wondered vaguely if he had been wise to lean upon so frail a reed as fogerty seemed to be; and above all he wondered where poor louise was, and if terror and alarm were breaking her heart. chapter xiii diana revolts charlie mershone had no difficulty in securing his release when parker came on duty at six o'clock. he called up a cab and went at once to his rooms at the bruxtelle; and fogerty followed him. while he discarded his dress-coat, took a bath and donned his walking suit mershone was in a brown study. hours ago louise had been safely landed at the east orange house and placed in the care of old madame cerise, who would guard her like an ogre. there was no immediate need of his hastening after her, and his arrest and the discovery of half his plot had seriously disturbed him. this young man was no novice in intrigue, nor even in crime. arguing from his own stand-point he realized that the friends of louise were by this time using every endeavor to locate her. they would not succeed in this, he was positive. his plot had been so audacious and all clews so cleverly destroyed or covered up that the most skillful detective, knowing he had abducted the girl; would be completely baffled in an attempt to find her. the thought of detectives, in this connection, led him to decide that he was likely to be shadowed. that was the most natural thing for his opponents to do. they could not prove mershone's complicity in the disappearance of louise merrick, but they might easily suspect him, after that little affair of weldon's arrest. therefore if he went to the girl now he was likely to lead others to her. better be cautious and wait until he had thrown the sleuths off his track. having considered this matter thoroughly, mershone decided to remain quiet. by eight o'clock he was breakfasting in the grill room, and fogerty occupied a table just behind him. during the meal it occurred to charlie to telephone to madame cerise for assurance that louise had arrived safely and without a scene to attract the attention of strangers. having finished breakfast he walked into the telephone booth and was about to call his number when a thought struck him. he glanced out of the glass door. in the hotel lobby were many loungers. he saw a dozen pairs of eyes fixed upon him idly or curiously; one pair might belong to the suspected detective. if he used the telephone there would be a way of discovering the number he had asked for. that would not do--not at all! he concluded not to telephone, at present, and left the booth. his next act was to purchase a morning paper, and seating himself carelessly in a chair he controlled the impulse to search for a "scare head" on the abduction of miss merrick. if he came across the item, very well; he would satisfy no critical eye that might be scanning him by hunting for it with a show of eagerness. the game was in his hands, he believed, and he intended to keep it there. fogerty was annoyed by the man's evident caution. it would not be easy to surprise mershone in any self-incriminating action. but, after all, reflected the boy, resting comfortably in the soft-padded cushions of a big leather chair, all this really made the case the more interesting. he was rather glad mershone was in no hurry to precipitate a climax. a long stern chase was never a bad chase. by and bye another idea occurred to charlie. he would call upon his cousin diana, and get her to telephone madame cerise for information about louise. it would do no harm to enlighten diana as to what he had done. she must suspect it already; and was she not a co-conspirator? but he could not wisely make this call until the afternoon. so meantime he took a stroll into broadway and walked leisurely up and down that thoroughfare, pausing occasionally to make a trifling purchase and turning abruptly again and again in the attempt to discover who might be following him. no one liable to be a detective of any sort could he discern; yet he was too shrewd to be lulled into a false belief that his each and every act was unobserved. mershone returned to his hotel, went to his room, and slept until after one o'clock, as he had secured but little rest the night before in his primitive quarters at the police station. it was nearly two when he reappeared in the hotel restaurant for luncheon, and he took his seat and ate with excellent appetite. during this meal mr. fogerty also took occasion to refresh himself, eating modestly at a retired table in a corner. mershone's sharp eyes noted him. he remembered seeing this youth at breakfast, and thoughtfully reflected that the boy's appearance was not such as might be expected from the guest of a fashionable and high-priced hotel. silently he marked this individual as the possible detective. he had two or three others in his mind, by this time; the boy was merely added to the list of possibilities. mershone was a capital actor. after luncheon he sauntered about the hotel, stared from the window for a time, looked at his watch once or twice with an undecided air, and finally stepped to the porter and asked him to call a cab. he started for central park; then changed his mind and ordered the man to drive him to the von taer residence, where on arrival diana at once ordered him shown into her private parlor. the young man found his cousin stalking up and down in an extremely nervous manner. she wrung her delicate fingers with a swift, spasmodic motion. her eyes, nearly closed, shot red rays through their slits. "what's wrong, di?" demanded mershone, considerably surprised by this intense display of emotion on the part of his usually self-suppressed and collected cousin. "wrong!" she echoed; "everything is wrong. you've ruined yourself, charlie; and you're going to draw me into this dreadful crime, also, in spite of all i can do!" "bah! don't be a fool," he observed, calmly taking a chair. "am _i_ the fool?" she exclaimed, turning upon him fiercely. "did _i_ calmly perpetrate a deed that was sure to result in disgrace and defeat?" "what on earth has happened to upset you?" he asked, wonderingly. "it strikes me everything is progressing beautifully." "does it, indeed?" was her sarcastic rejoinder. "then your information is better than mine. they called me up at three o'clock this morning to enquire after louise merrick--as if _i_ should know her whereabouts. why did they come to _me_ for such information? why?" she stamped her foot for emphasis. "i suppose," said charlie mershone, "they called up everyone who knows the girl. it would be natural in case of her disappearance." "come here!" cried diana, seizing his arm and dragging him to a window. "be careful; try to look out without showing yourself. do you see that man on the corner?" "well?" "he has been patrolling this house since day-break. he's a detective!" charlie whistled. "what makes you think so, di? why on earth should they suspect you?" "why? because my disreputable cousin planned the abduction, without consulting me, and--" "oh, come, di; that's a little too--" "because the girl has been carried to the von taer house--_my_ house--in east orange; because my own servant is at this moment her jailor, and--" "how should they know all this?" interrupted mershone, impatiently. "and how do you happen to know it yourself, diana?" "madame cerise called me up at five o'clock, just after louise's uncle had been here for the second time, with a crew of officers. cerise is in an ugly mood. she said a young girl had been brought to her a prisoner, and mr. mershone's orders were to keep her safely until he came. she is greatly provoked at our using her in this way, but promised to follow instructions if i accepted all responsibility." "what did you tell her?" "that i knew nothing of the affair, but had put the house and her services at your disposal. i said i would accept no responsibility whatever for anything you might do." mershone looked grave, and scowled. "the old hag won't betray us, will she?" he asked, uneasily. "she cannot betray me, for i have done nothing. charlie," she said, suddenly facing him, "i won't be mixed in this horrid affair. you must carry out your infamous plan in your own way. i know nothing, sir, of what you have done; i know nothing of what you intend to do. do you understand me?" he smiled rather grimly. "i hardly expected, my fair cousin, that you would be frightened into retreat at this stage of the game, when the cards are all in our hands. do you suppose i decided to carry away louise without fully considering what i was doing, and the immediate consequences of my act? and wherein have i failed? all has gone beautifully up to this minute. diana, your fears are absolutely foolish, and against your personal interests. all that i am doing for myself benefits you doubly. just consider, if you will, what has been accomplished for our mutual benefit: the girl has disappeared under suspicious circumstances; before she again rejoins her family and friends she will either be my wife or arthur weldon will prefer not to marry her. that leaves him open to appreciate the charms of diana von taer, does it not? already, my dear cousin, your wishes are accomplished. my own task, i admit, is a harder one, because it is more delicate." the cold-blooded brutality of this argument caused even diana to shudder. she looked at the young man half fearfully as she asked: "what is your task?" "why, first to quiet louise's fears; then to turn her by specious arguments--lies, if you will--against weldon; next to induce her to give me her hand in honest wedlock. i shall tell her of my love, which is sincere; i shall argue--threaten, if necessary; use every reasonable means to gain her consent." "you'll never succeed!" cried diana, with conviction. "then i'll try other tactics," said he blandly. "if you do, you monster, i'll expose you," warned the girl. "having dissolved partnership, you won't be taken into my confidence, my fair cousin. you have promised to know nothing of my acts, and i'll see you don't." then he sprang from his chair and came to her with a hard, determined look upon his face. "look here, di; i've gone too far in this game to back out now, i'm going to carry it through if it costs me my life and liberty--and yours into the bargain! i love louise merrick! i love her so well that without her the world and its mockeries can go to the devil! there's nothing worth living for but louise--louise. she's going to be my wife, diana--by fair means or foul i swear to make her my wife." he had worked himself up to a pitch of excitement surpassing that of diana. now he passed his hand over his forehead, collected himself with a slight shudder, and resumed his seat. diana was astonished. his fierce mood served to subdue her own. regarding him curiously for a time she finally asked: "you speak as if you were to be allowed to have your own way--as if all society was not arrayed against you. have you counted the cost of your action? have you considered the consequences of this crime?" "i have committed no crime," he said stubbornly. "all's fair in love and war." "the courts will refuse to consider that argument, i imagine," she retorted. "moreover, the friends of this kidnaped girl are powerful and active. they will show you no mercy if you are discovered." "if i fail," answered mershone, slowly, "i do not care a continental what they do to me, for my life will be a blank without louise. but i really see no reason to despair, despite your womanish croakings. all seems to be going nicely and just as i had anticipated." "i am glad that you are satisfied," diana returned, with scornful emphasis. "but understand me, sir; this is none of my affair in any way--except that i shall surely expose you if a hair of the girl's head is injured. you must not come here again. i shall refuse to see you. you ought not to have come to-day." "is there anything suspicious in my calling upon my cousin--as usual?" "under such circumstances, yes. you have not been received at this house of late years, and my father still despises you. there is another danger you have brought upon me. my father seemed suspicious this morning, and asked me quite pointedly what i knew of this strange affair." "but of course you lied to him. all right, diana; perhaps there is nothing to be gained from your alliance, and i'll let you out of the deal from this moment. the battle's mine, after all, and i'll fight it alone. but--i need more money. you ought to be willing to pay, for so far the developments are all in your favor." she brought a handful of notes from her desk. "this ends our partnership, charlie," she said. "very well. a woman makes a poor conspirator, but is invaluable as a banker." "there will be no more money. this ends everything between us." "i thought you were game, di. but you're as weak as the ordinary feminine creation." she did not answer, but stood motionless, a defiant expression upon her face. he laughed a little, bowed mockingly, and went away. chapter xiv a cool encounter on leaving the house mershone buttoned his overcoat tightly up to his chin, for the weather was cold and raw, and then shot a quick glance around him. diana's suspect was still lounging on the corner. charlie had little doubt he was watching the house and the movements of its in-mates--a bad sign, he reflected, with a frown. otherwise the street seemed deserted. he had dismissed the cab on his arrival, so now he stepped out and walked briskly around the corner, swinging his cane jauntily and looking very unlike a fugitive. in the next block he passed a youth who stood earnestly examining the conventional display in a druggist's window. mershone, observing this individual, gave a start, but did not alter his pace. it was the same pale, red-haired boy he had noticed twice before at the hotel. in his alert, calculating mind there was no coincidence in this meeting. before he had taken six more steps mershone realized the exact situation. at the next crossing he stopped and waited patiently for a car. up the street he still saw the youth profoundly interested in drugs--a class of merchandise that seldom calls for such close inspection. the car arrived and carried mershone away. it also left the red-haired youth at his post before the window. yet on arriving at the bruxtelle some twenty minutes later charlie found this same queer personage occupying a hotel chair in the lobby and apparently reading a newspaper with serious attention. he hesitated a moment, then quietly walked over to a vacant chair beside the red-haired one and sat down. the youth turned the paper, glanced casually at his neighbor, and continued reading. "a detective, i believe," said mershone, in a low, matter of fact tone. "who? me?" asked fogerty, lowering the paper. "yes. your age deceived me for a time. i imagined you were a newsboy or a sporting kid from the country; but now i observe you are older than you appear. all sorts of people seem to drift into the detective business. i suppose your present occupation is shadowing me." fogerty smiled. the smile was genuine. "i might even be a lawyer, sir," he replied, "and in that case i should undertake to cross-examine you, and ask your reasons for so queer a charge." "or you might be a transient guest at this hotel," the other returned, in the same bantering tone, "for i saw you at breakfast and luncheon. pretty fair _chef_ here, isn't he? but you didn't stick to that part, you know. you followed me up-town, where i made a call on a relative, and you studied the colored globes in a druggist's window when i went away. i wonder why people employ inexperienced boys in such important matters. in your case, my lad, it was easy enough to detect the detective. you even took the foolish chance of heading me off, and returned to this hotel before i did. now, then, is my charge unfounded?" "why should you be under the surveillance of a detective?" asked fogerty, slowly. "really, my boy, i cannot say. there was an unpleasant little affair last night at the waldorf, in which i was not personally concerned, but suffered, nevertheless. an officious deputy caused my arrest and i spent an unpleasant night in jail. there being nothing in the way of evidence against me i was released this morning, and now i find a detective shadowing me. what can it all mean, i wonder? these stupid blunders are very annoying to the plain citizen, who, however innocent, feels himself the victim of a conspiracy." "i understand you, sir," said fogerty, drily. for some moments mershone now remained silent. then he asked; "what are your instructions concerning me?" to his surprise the boy made a simple, frank admission. "i'm to see you don't get into more mischief, sir." "and how long is this nonsense to continue?" demanded mershone, showing a touch of anger for the first time. "depends on yourself, mr. mershone; i'm no judge, myself. i'm so young--and inexperienced." "who is your employer?" "oh, i'm just sent out by an agency." "is it a big paying proposition?" asked charlie, eyeing the diffident youth beside him critically, as if to judge his true caliber. "not very big. you see, if i'd been a better detective you'd never have spotted me so quickly." "i suppose money counts with you, though, as it does with everyone else in the world?" "of course, sir. every business is undertaken to make money." mershone drew his chair a little nearer. "i need a clever detective myself," he announced, confidentially. "i'm anxious to discover what enemy is persecuting me in this way. would it--er--be impossible for me to employ _you_ to--er--look after my interests?" fogerty was very serious. "you see, sir," he responded, "if i quit this job they may not give me another. in order to be a successful detective one must keep in the good graces of the agencies." "that's easy enough," asserted mershone. "you may pretend to keep this job, but go home and take life easy. i'll send you a daily statement of what i've been doing, and you can fix up a report to your superior from that. in addition to this you can put in a few hours each day trying to find out who is annoying me in this rascally manner, and for this service i'll pay you five times the agency price. how does that proposition strike you, mr.--" "riordan. me name's riordan," said fogerty, with a smile. "no, mr. mershone," shaking his head gravely, "i can't see my way to favor you. it's an easy job now, and i'm afraid to take chances with a harder one." something in the tone nettled mershone. "but the pay," he suggested. "oh, the pay. if i'm a detective fifty years, i'll make an easy two thousand a year. that's a round hundred thousand. can you pay me that much to risk my future career as a detective?" mershone bit his lip. this fellow was not so simple, after all, boyish as he seemed. and, worse than all, he had a suspicion the youngster was baiting him, and secretly laughing at his offers of bribery. "they will take you off the job, now that i have discovered your identity," he asserted, with malicious satisfaction. "oh, no," answered fogerty; "they won't do that. this little interview merely simplifies matters. you see, sir, i'm an expert at disguises. that's my one great talent, as many will testify. but you will notice that in undertaking this job i resorted to no disguise at all. you see me as nature made me--and 't was a poor job, i'm thinking." "why were you so careless?" "it wasn't carelessness; it was premeditated. there's not the slightest objection to your knowing me. my only business is to keep you in sight, and i can do that exactly as well as riordan as i could by disguising myself." mershone had it on his tongue's end to ask what they expected to discover by shadowing him, but decided it was as well not to open an avenue for the discussion of miss merrick's disappearance. so, finding he could not bribe the youthful detective or use him in any way to his advantage, he closed the interview by rising. "i'm going to my room to write some letters," said he, with a yawn. "would you like to read them before they are mailed?" again fogerty laughed in his cheerful, boyish way. "you'd make a fine detective yourself, mr. mershone," he declared, "and i advise you to consider the occupation. i've a notion it's safer, and better pay, than your present line." charlie scowled at the insinuation, but walked away without reply. fogerty eyed his retreating figure a moment, gave a slight shrug and resumed his newspaper. day followed day without further event, and gradually mershone came to feel himself trapped. wherever he might go he found fogerty on duty, unobtrusive, silent and watchful. it was very evident that he was waiting for the young man to lead him to the secret hiding place of louise merrick. in one way this constant surveillance was a distinct comfort to charlie mershone, for it assured him that the retreat of louise was still undiscovered. but he must find some way to get rid of his "shadow," in order that he might proceed to carry out his plans concerning the girl. during his enforced leisure he invented a dozen apparently clever schemes, only to abandon them again as unpractical. one afternoon, while on a stroll, he chanced to meet the bruiser who had attacked arthur weldon at the waldorf, and been liberally paid by mershone for his excellent work. he stopped the man, and glancing hastily around found that fogerty was a block in the rear. "listen," he said; "i want your assistance, and if you're quick and sure there is a pot of money, waiting for you." "i need it, mr. mershone," replied the man, grinning. "there's a detective following me; he's down the street there--a mere boy--just in front of that tobacco store. see him?" "sure i see him. it's fogerty." "his name is riordan." "no; it's fogerty. he's no boy, sir, but the slickest 'tec' in the city, an' that's goin' some, i can tell you." "well, you must get him, whoever he is. drag him away and hold him for three hours--two--one. give me a chance to slip him; that's all. can you do it? i'll pay you a hundred for the job." "it's worth two hundred, mr. mershone. it isn't safe to fool with fogerty." "i'll make it two hundred." "then rest easy," said the man. "i know the guy, and how to handle him. you just watch him like he's watching you, mr. mershone, and if anything happens you skip as lively as a flea. i can use that two hundred in my business." then the fellow passed on, and fogerty was still so far distant up the street that neither of them could see the amused smile upon his thin face. chapter xv a bewildering experience when louise merrick entered the brown limousine, which she naturally supposed to belong to arthur weldon, she had not the faintest suspicion of any evil in her mind. indeed, the girl was very happy this especial evening, although tired with her duties at the kermess. a climax in her young life had arrived, and she greeted it joyously, believing she loved arthur well enough to become his wife. now that the engagement had been announced to their immediate circle of friends she felt as proud and elated as any young girl has a right to be under the circumstances. added to this pleasant event was the social triumph she and her cousins had enjoyed at the kermess, where louise especially had met with rare favor. the fashionable world had united in being most kind and considerate to the dainty, attractive young _debutante_, and only diana had seemed to slight her. this was not surprising in view of the fact that diana evidently wanted arthur for herself, and there was some satisfaction in winning a lover who was elsewhere in prime demand. in addition to all this the little dance that concluded the evening's entertainment had been quite delightful, and all things conspired to put louise in a very contented frame of mind. still fluttering with the innocent excitements of the hour the girl went to join arthur without a fear of impending misfortune. she did not think of charlie mershone at all. he had been annoying and impertinent, and she had rebuked him and sent him away, cutting him out of her life altogether. perhaps she ought to have remembered that she had mildly flirted with diana's cousin and given him opportunity for the impassioned speeches she resented; but louise had a girlish idea that there was no harm in flirting, considering it a feminine license. she saw young mershone at the kermess that evening paying indifferent attentions to other women and ignoring her, and was sincerely glad to have done with him for good and all. she obeyed readily the man who asked her to be seated in the limousine. arthur would be with her in a minute, he said. when the door closed and the car started she had an impulse to cry out but next moment controlled it and imagined they were to pick up mr. weldon on some corner. on and on they rolled, and still no evidence of the owner of the limousine. what could it mean, louise began to wonder. had something happened to arthur, so that he had been forced to send her home alone? as the disquieting thought came she tried to speak with the chauffeur, but could not find the tube. the car was whirling along rapidly; the night seemed very dark, only a few lights twinkled here and there outside. suddenly the speed slackened. there was a momentary pause, and then the machine slowly rolled upon a wooden platform. a bell clanged, there was a whistle and the sound of revolving water-wheels. louise decided they must be upon a ferry-boat, and became alarmed for the first time. the man in livery now opened the door, as if to reassure her. "where are we? where is mr. weldon?" enquired the girl, almost hysterically. "he is on the boat, miss, and will be with you shortly now," replied the man, very respectfully. "mr. weldon is very sorry to have annoyed you, miss merrick, but says he will soon explain everything, so that you will understand why he left you." with this he quietly closed the door again, although louise was eager to ask a dozen more questions. prominent was the query why they should be on a ferry-boat instead of going directly home. she knew the hour must be late. but while these questions were revolving in her mind she still suspected no plot against her liberty. she must perforce wait for arthur to explain his queer conduct; so she sat quietly enough in her place awaiting his coming, while the ferry puffed steadily across the river to the jersey shore. the stopping of the boat aroused louise from her reflections. arthur not here yet? voices were calling outside; vehicles were noisily leaving their positions on the boat to clatter across the platforms. but there was no sign of arthur. again louise tried to find the speaking tube. then she made an endeavor to open the door, although just then the car started with a jerk that flung her back against the cushions. the knowledge that she had been grossly deceived by her conductor at last had the effect of arousing the girl to a sense of her danger. something must be wrong. something _was_ decidedly wrong, and fear crept into her heart. she pounded on the glass windows with all her strength, and shouted as loudly as she could, but all to no avail. swiftly the limousine whirled over the dusky road and either her voice could not be heard through the glass cage in which she was confined or there was no one near who was willing to hear or to rescue her. she now realized how wrong she had been to sit idly during the trip across the ferry, where a score of passengers would gladly have assisted her. how cunning her captors had been to lull her fears during that critical period! now, alas, it was too late to cry out, and she had no idea where she was being taken or the reason of her going. presently it occurred to her that this was not arthur's limousine at all. there was no speaking tube for one thing. she leaned forward and felt for the leathern pocket in which she kept a veil and her street gloves. no pocket of any sort was to be found. an unreasoning terror now possessed her. she knew not what to fear, yet feared everything. she made another attempt to cry aloud for help and then fell back unconscious on the cushions. how long she lay in the faint she did not know. when she recovered the limousine was still rattling forward at a brisk gait but bumping over ruts in a manner that indicated a country road. through the curtains she could see little but the black night, although there was a glow ahead cast by the searchlights of the car. louise was weak and unnerved. she had no energy to find a way to combat her fate, if such a way were possible. a dim thought of smashing a window and hurling herself through it gave her only a shudder of repulsion. she lacked strength for such a desperate attempt. on, on, on. would the dreary journey never end? how long must she sit and suffer before she could know her fate, or at least find some explanation of the dreadful mystery of this wild midnight ride? at last, when she had settled down to dull despair, the car came to a paved road and began to move more slowly. it even stopped once or twice, as if the driver was not sure of his way. but they kept moving, nevertheless, and before long entered a driveway. there was another stop now, and a long wait. louise lay dismally back upon the cushions, sobbing hysterically into her dripping handkerchief. the door of her prison at last opened and a light shone in upon her. "here we are, miss," said the man in uniform, still in quiet, respectful tones. "shall i assist you to alight?" she started up eagerly, her courage returning with a bound. stepping unassisted to the ground she looked around her in bewilderment. the car stood before the entrance to a modest country house. there was a light in the hall and another upon the broad porch. around the house a mass of trees and shrubbery loomed dark and forbidding. "where am i?" demanded louise, drawing back haughtily as the man extended a hand toward her. "at your destination, miss," was the answer. "will you please enter?" "no! not until i have an explanation of this--this--singular, high-handed proceeding," she replied, firmly. then she glanced at the house. the hall door had opened and a woman stood peering anxiously at the scene outside. with sudden resolve louise sprang up the steps and approached her. any woman, she felt, in this emergency, was a welcome refuge. "who are you?" she asked eagerly, "and why have i been brought here?" "_mademoiselle_ will come inside, please," said the woman, with a foreign accent. "it is cold in the night air, _n'est-ce-pas_?" she turned to lead the way inside. while louise hesitated to follow the limousine started with a roar from its cylinders and disappeared down the driveway, the two men going with it. the absence of the lamps rendered the darkness around the solitary house rather uncanny. an intense stillness prevailed except for the diminishing rattle of the receding motor car. in the hall was a light and a woman. louise went in. chapter xvi madame cerise, custodian the woman closed the hall door and locked it. then she led the way to a long, dim drawing-room in which a grate fire was smouldering. a stand lamp of antique pattern but dimly illuminated the place, which seemed well furnished in an old fashioned way. "will not you remove your wraps, mees--mees--i do not know ma'm'selle's name." "what is your own name?" asked louise, coming closer to gaze earnestly into the other's face. "i am called madame cerise, if it please you." her voice, while softened to an extent by the french accent, was nevertheless harsh and emotionless. she spoke as an automaton, slowly, and pausing to choose her words. the woman was of medium size, slim and straight in spite of many years. her skin resembled brown parchment; her eyes were small, black and beady; her nose somewhat fleshy and her lips red and full as those of a young girl. the age of madame cerise might be anywhere between fifty and seventy; assuredly she had long been a stranger to youth, although her dark hair was but slightly streaked with gray. she wore a somber-hued gown and a maid's jaunty apron and cap. louise inspected her closely, longing to find a friend and protector in this curious and strange woman. her eyes were moist and pleading--an appeal hard to resist. but madame cerise returned her scrutiny with a wholly impassive expression. "you are a french maid?" asked louise, softly. "a housekeeper, ma'm'selle. for a time, a caretaker." "ah, i understand. are your employers asleep?" "i cannot say, ma'm'seile. they are not here." "you are alone in this house?" "alone with you, ma'm'seile." louise had a sudden access of alarm. "and why am i here?" she cried, wringing her hands pitifully. "ah, who can tell that?" returned the woman, composedly. "not cerise, indeed. cerise is told nothing--except what is required of her. i but obey my orders." louise turned quickly, at this. "what are your orders, then?" she asked. "to attend ma'm'selle with my best skill, to give her every comfort and care, to--" "yes--yes!" "to keep her safely until she is called for. that is all." the girl drew a long breath. "who will call for me, then?" "i am not inform, ma'm'selle." "and i am a prisoner in this house?" "ma'm'selle may call it so, if it please her. but reflect; there is no place else to go. it is bleak weather, the winter soon comes. and here i can make you the comforts you need." louise pondered this speech, which did not deceive her. while still perplexed as to her abduction, with no comprehension why she should have been seized in such a summary manner and spirited to this lonely, out-of-the-way place, she realized she was in no immediate danger. her weariness returned tenfold, and she staggered and caught the back of a chair for support. the old woman observed this. "ma'm'selle is tired," said she. "see; it is past four by the clock, and you must be much fatigue by the ride and the nervous strain." "i--i'm completely exhausted," murmured louise, drooping her head wearily. the next moment she ran and placed her hands on madame cerise's shoulders, peering into the round, beady eyes with tender pleading as she continued: "i don't know why i have been stolen away from my home and friends; i don't know why this dreadful thing has happened to me; i only know that i am worn out and need rest. will you take care of me, madame cerise? will you watch over me while i sleep and guard me from all harm? i--i haven't any mother to lean on now, you know; i haven't any friend at all--but _you!_" the grim features never relaxed a muscle; but a softer look came into the dark eyes and the woman's voice took on a faint tinge of compassion as she answered: "nothing can harm ma'm'selle. have no fear, _ma chere_. i will take care of you; i will watch. _allons_! it is my duty; it is also my pleasure." "are there no--no men in the house--none at all?" enquired the girl, peering into the surrounding gloom nervously. "there is no person at all in the house, but you and i." "and you will admit no one?" the woman hesitated. "not to your apartment," she said firmly. "i promise it." louise gave a long, fluttering sigh. somehow, she felt that she could rely upon this promise. "then, if you please, madame cerise, i'd like to go to bed," she said. the woman took the lamp and led the way upstairs, entering a large, airy chamber in which a fire burned brightly in the grate. the furniture here was dainty and feminine. in an alcove stood a snowy bed, the covers invitingly turned down. madame cerise set the lamp upon a table and without a word turned to assist louise. the beautiful kermess costume, elaborately embroidered with roses, which the girl still wore, evidently won the frenchwoman's approval. she unhooked and removed it carefully and hung it in a closet. very dextrous were her motions as she took down the girl's pretty hair and braided it for the night. a dainty _robe de nuit_ was provided. "it is my own," she said simply. "ma'm'selle is not prepared." "but there must be young ladies in your family," remarked louise, thoughtfully, for in spite of the stupor she felt from want of sleep the novelty of her position kept her alert in a way. it is true she was too tired and bewildered to think clearly, but slight details were impressing themselves upon her dimly. "this room, for instance--" "of course, _ma chere_, a young lady has lived here. she has left some odd pieces of wardrobe behind her, at times, in going away. when you waken we will try to find a house-dress to replace your evening-gown. will ma'm'selle indulge in the bath before retiring?" "not to-night, madame cerise. i'm too tired for anything but--sleep!" indeed, she had no sooner crawled into the enticing bed than she sank into unconscious forgetfulness. this was to an extent fortunate. louise possessed one of those dispositions cheery and equable under ordinary circumstances, but easily crushed into apathy by any sudden adversity. she would not suffer so much as a more excitable and nervous girl might do under similar circumstances. her sleep, following the severe strain of the night's adventure, did little to refresh her. she awoke in broad daylight to hear a cold wind whistling shrilly outside and raindrops beating against the panes. madame cerise had not slept much during the night. for an hour after louise retired she sat in her room in deep thought. then she went to the telephone and notwithstanding the late hour called up diana, who had a branch telephone on a table at her bedside. miss von taer was not asleep. she had had an exciting night herself. she answered the old caretaker readily and it did not surprise her to learn that the missing girl had been taken to the east orange house by the orders of charlie mershone. she enquired how louise had accepted the situation forced upon her, and was shocked and rendered uncomfortable by the too plainly worded protest of the old frenchwoman. madame cerise did not hesitate to denounce the abduction as a heartless crime, and in her communication with diana swore she would protect the innocent girl from harm at the hands of mershone or anyone else. "i have ever to your family been loyal and true, ma'm'selle diana," said she, "but i will not become the instrument of an abominable crime at your command or that of your wicked cousin. i will keep the girl here in safety, if it is your wish; but she will be safe, indeed, as long as cerise guards her." "that's right, madame," stammered diana, hardly knowing at the moment what to say. "be discreet and silent until you hear from me again; guard the girl carefully and see that she is not too unhappy; but for heaven's sake keep charlie's secret until he sees fit to restore miss merrick to her friends. no crime is contemplated; i would not allow such a thing, as you know. yet it is none of my affair whatever. my cousin has compromised me by taking the girl to my house, and no knowledge of the abduction must get abroad if we can help it. do you understand me?" "no," was the reply. "the safest way for us all is to send miss merrick away." "that will be done as soon as possible." with this the old frenchwoman was forced to be content, and she did not suspect that her report had made miss von taer nearly frantic with fear--not for louise but for her own precious reputation. accustomed to obey the family she had served for so many years, madame cerise hesitated to follow her natural impulse to set the poor young lady free and assist her to return to her friends. so she compromised with her conscience--a thing she was not credited with possessing--by resolving to make the imprisonment of the "_pauvre fille_" as happy as possible. scarcely had louise opened her eyes the following morning when the old woman entered her chamber, unlocking the door from the outside to secure admission. she first rebuilt the fire, and when it was crackling cheerfully she prepared a bath and brought an armful of clothing which she laid out for inspection over the back of a sofa. she produced lingerie, too, and louise lay cuddled up in the bedclothes and watched her keeper thoughtfully until the atmosphere of the room was sufficiently warmed. "i'll get up, now," she said, quietly. madame cerise was assuredly a skilled lady's maid. she bathed the girl, wrapped her in an ample kimono and then seated her before the dresser and arranged her _coiffure_ with dextrous skill. during this time louise talked. she had decided her only chance of escape lay in conciliating this stern-faced woman, and she began by relating her entire history, including her love affair with arthur weldon, diana von taer's attempt to rob her of her lover, and the part that charlie mershone had taken in the affair. madame cerise listened, but said nothing. "and now," continued the girl, "tell me who you think could be so wicked and cruel as to carry me away from my home and friends? i cannot decide myself. you have more experience and more shrewdness, can't you tell me, madame cerise?" the woman muttered inaudibly. "mr. mershone might be an enemy, because i laughed at his love-making," continued louise, musingly. "would a man who loved a girl try to injure her? but perhaps his love has turned to hate. anyhow, i can think of no one else who would do such a thing, or of any reason why charlie mershone should do it." madame cerise merely grunted. she was brushing the soft hair with gentle care. "what could a man gain by stealing a girl? if it was mr. mershone, does he imagine i could ever forget arthur? or cease to love him? or that arthur would forget me while i am away? perhaps it's diana, and she wants to get rid of me so she can coax arthur back to her side. but that's nonsense; isn't it, madame cerise? no girl--not even diana von taer--would dare to act in such a high-handed manner toward her rival. did you ever hear of miss von taer? she's quite a society belle. have you ever seen her, madame cerise?" the woman vouchsafed no reply to this direct enquiry, but busied herself dressing the girl's hair. louise casually turned over the silver-mounted hand mirror she was holding and gave a sudden start. a monogram was engraved upon the metal: "d.v.t." she gazed at the mark fixedly and then picked up a brush that the frenchwoman laid down. yes, the same monogram appeared upon the brush. the sharp eyes of cerise had noted these movements. she was a little dismayed but not startled when louise said, slowly: "'d.v.t.' stands for diana von taer. and it isn't likely to stand for anything else. i think the mystery is explained, now, and my worst fears are realized. tell me, madame, is this diana von taer's house?" her eyes shone with anger and round red patches suddenly appeared upon her pallid cheeks. madame cerise drew a long breath. "it used to be," was her quiet answer. "it was left her by her grandmother; but mr. von taer did not like the place and they have not been here lately--not for years. miss von taer informed me, some time ago, that she had transferred the property to another." "to her cousin--mr. mershone?" asked louise quickly. "that may be the name; i cannot remember," was the evasive reply. "but you must know him, as he is diana's cousin," retorted louise. "why will you try to deceive me? am i not helpless enough already, and do you wish to make me still more miserable?" "i have seen mr. mershone when he was a boy, many times. he was not the favorite with ma'm'selle diana, nor with monsieur von taer. for myself, i hated him." there was decided emphasis to the last sentence. louise believed her and felt a little relieved. from the _mélange_ of apparel a modest outfit was obtained to clothe the girl with decency and comfort, if not in the prevailing style. the fit left much to be desired, yet louise did not complain, as weightier matters were now occupying her mind. the toilet completed, madame cerise disappeared to get a tray containing a good breakfast. she seemed exceedingly attentive. "if you will give me the proper directions i will start for home at once," announced louise, with firm resolve, while eating her egg and toast. "i am unable to give you directions, and i cannot let you go, ma'm'selle," was the equally firm reply. "the day is much too disagreeable to venture out in, unless one has proper conveyance. here, alas, no conveyance may be had." louise tried other tactics. "i have no money, but several valuable jewels," she said, meaningly. "i am quite sure they will obtain for me a conveyance." "you are wrong, ma'm'selle; there is no conveyance to be had!" persisted the old woman, more sternly. "then i shall walk." "it is impossible." "where is this place situated? how far is it from new york? how near am i to a street-car, or to a train?" "i cannot tell you." "but this is absurd!" cried louise. "you cannot deceive me for long. i know this is diana von taer's house, and i shall hold diana von taer responsible for this enforced imprisonment." "that," said madame cerise, coldly, "is a matter of indifference to me. but ma'm'selle must understand one thing, she must not leave this house." "oh, indeed!" "at least, until the weather moderates," added the woman, more mildly. she picked up the tray, went to the door and passed out. louise heard the key click in the lock. chapter xvii the mystery deepens uncle john was both astounded and indignant that so bold and unlawful an act as the abduction of his own niece could have been perpetrated in the heart of new york and directly under the eyes of the police. urged by the major, mr. merrick was at first inclined to allow arthur weldon to prosecute the affair and undertake the recovery of the girl, being assured this would easily be accomplished and conceding the fact that no one had a stronger interest in solving the mystery of louise's disappearance than young weldon. but when midday arrived and no trace of the young girl had yet been obtained the little millionaire assumed an important and decisive air and hurried down town to "take a hand in the game" himself. after a long interview with the chief of detectives, mr. merrick said impressively: "now, understand, sir; not a hint of this to the newspaper folks. i won't have any scandal attached to the poor child if i can help it. set your whole force to work--at once!--but impress them with the need of secrecy. my offer is fair and square. i'll give a reward of ten thousand dollars if miss merrick is discovered within twenty-four hours; nine thousand if she's found during the next twenty-four hours; and so on, deducting a thousand for each day of delay. that's for the officer who finds her. for yourself, sir, i intend to express my gratitude as liberally as the service will allow me to. is this all clear and above-board?" "it is perfectly clear, mr. merrick." "the child must be found--and found blamed quick, too! great caesar! can a simple affair like this baffle your splendid metropolitan force?" "not for long, mr. merrick, believe me." but this assurance proved optimistic. day by day crept by without a clew to the missing girl being discovered; without development of any sort. the inspector informed mr. merrick that "it began to look like a mystery." arthur, even after several sleepless nights, still retained his courage. "i'm on the right track, sir," he told uncle john. "the delay is annoying, but not at all dangerous. so long as fogerty holds fast to mershone louise is safe, wherever she may be." "mershone may have nothing to do with the case." "i'm positive he has." "and louise can't be safe while she's a prisoner, and in the hands of strangers. i want the girl home! then i'll know she's safe." "i want her home, too, sir. but all your men are unable to find her, it seems. they can't even discover in what direction she was taken, or how. the brown limousine seems to be no due at all." "of course not. there are a thousand brown limousines in new york." "do you imagine she's still somewhere in the city, sir?" enquired arthur. "that's my theory," replied uncle john. "she must be somewhere in the city. you see it would be almost impossible to get her out of town without discovery. but i'll admit this detective force is the finest aggregation of incompetents i've ever known--and i don't believe your precious fogerty is any better, either." of course beth and patsy had to be told of their cousin's disappearance as soon as the first endeavor to trace her proved a failure. patsy went at once to mrs. merrick and devoted herself to comforting the poor woman as well as she could. beth frowned at the news and then sat down to carefully think out the problem. in an hour she had logically concluded that diana von taer was the proper person to appeal to. if anyone knew where louise was, it was diana. that same afternoon she drove to the von taer residence and demanded an interview. diana was at that moment in a highly nervous state. she had at times during her career been calculating and unscrupulous, but never before had she deserved the accusation of being malicious and wicked. she had come to reproach herself bitterly for having weakly connived at the desperate act of charlie mershone, and her good sense assured her the result would be disastrous to all concerned in it. contempt for herself and contempt for her cousin mingled with well-defined fears for her cherished reputation, and so it was that miss von taer had almost decided to telephone madame cerise and order her to escort louise merrick to her own home when beth's card came up with a curt demand for a personal interview. the natures of these two girls had never harmonized in the slightest degree. beth's presence nerved diana to a spirit of antagonism that quickly destroyed her repentant mood. as she confronted her visitor her demeanor was cold and suspicious. there was a challenge and an accusation in beth's eyes that conveyed a distinct warning, which miss von taer quickly noted and angrily resented--perhaps because she knew it was deserved. it would have been easy to tell beth de graf where her cousin louise was, and at the same time to assure her that diana was blameless in the affair; but she could not endure to give her antagonist this satisfaction. beth began the interview by saying: "what have you done with louise merrick?" that was, of course, equal to a declaration of war. diana was sneering and scornful. thoroughly on guard, she permitted no compromising word or admission to escape her. really, she knew nothing of louise merrick, having unfortunately neglected to examine her antecedents and personal characteristics before undertaking her acquaintance. one is so likely to blunder through excess of good nature. she had supposed a niece of mr. john merrick would be of the right sort; but the age is peculiar, and one cannot be too cautious in choosing associates. if miss merrick had run away from her home and friends, miss von taer was in no way responsible for the escapade. and now, if miss de graf had nothing further to say, more important matters demanded diana's time. beth was furious with anger at this baiting. without abandoning a jot her suspicions she realized she was powerless to prove her case at this time. with a few bitter and cutting remarks--made, she afterward said, in "self-defense"--she retreated as gracefully as possible and drove home. an hour later she suggested to uncle john that he have a detective placed where diana's movements could be watched; but that had already been attended to by both mr. merrick and mr. fogerty. uncle john could hardly credit diana's complicity in this affair. the young lady's social position was so high, her family so eminently respectable, her motive in harming louise so inconceivable, that he hesitated to believe her guilty, even indirectly. as for her cousin, he did not know what to think, as arthur accused him unreservedly. it did not seem possible that any man of birth, breeding and social position could be so contemptible as to perpetrate an act of this character. yet some one had done it, and who had a greater incentive than charlie mershone? poor mrs. merrick was inconsolable as the days dragged by. she clung to patsy with pitiful entreaties not to be left alone; so miss doyle brought her to her own apartments, where the bereft woman was shown every consideration. vain and selfish though mrs. merrick might be, she was passionately devoted to her only child, and her fears for the life and safety of louise were naturally greatly exaggerated. the group of anxious relatives and friends canvassed the subject morning, noon and night, and the longer the mystery remained unsolved the more uneasy they all became. "this, ma'am," said uncle john, sternly, as he sat one evening facing mrs. merrick, "is the final result of your foolish ambition to get our girls into society." "i can't see it that way, john," wailed the poor woman. "i've never heard of such a thing happening in society before, have you?" "i don't keep posted," he growled. "but everything was moving smoothly with us before this confounded social stunt began, as you must admit." "i can't understand why the papers are not full of it," sighed mrs. merrick, musingly. "louise is so prominent now in the best circles." "of course," said the major, drily; "she's so prominent, ma'am, that no one can discover her at all! and it's lucky for us the newspapers know nothing of the calamity. they'd twist the thing into so many shapes that not one of us would ever again dare to look a friend in the eye." "i'm sure my darling has been murdered!" declared mrs. merrick, weeping miserably. she made the statement on an average of once to every five minutes. "or, if she hasn't been killed yet, she's sure to be soon. can't _something_ be done?" that last appeal was hard to answer. they had done everything that could be thought of. and here it was tuesday. louise had been missing for five days. chapter xviii a rift in the clouds the tuesday morning just referred to dawned cold and wintry. a chill wind blew and for a time carried isolated snowflakes whirling here and there. gradually, as the morning advanced, the flakes became more numerous, until by nine o'clock an old fashioned snowstorm had set in that threatened to last for some time. the frozen ground was soon covered with a thin white mantle and the landscape in city and country seemed especially forbidding. in spite of these adverse conditions charlie mershone decided to go out for a walk. he felt much like a prisoner, and his only recreation was in getting out of the hotel for a daily stroll. moreover, he had an object in going abroad to-day. so he buttoned his overcoat up to his chin and fearlessly braved the storm. he had come to wholly disregard the presence of the detective who shadowed him, and if the youthful fogerty by chance addressed him he was rewarded with a direct snub. this did not seem to disconcert the boy in the least, and to-day, as usual, when mershone walked out fogerty followed at a respectful distance. he never appeared to be watching his man closely, yet never for an instant did mershone feel that he had shaken the fellow off. on this especial morning the detective was nearly a block in the rear, with the snow driving furiously into his face, when an automobile suddenly rolled up to the curb beside him and two men leaped out and pinioned fogerty in their arms. there was no struggle, because there was no resistance. the captors quickly tossed the detective into the car, an open one, which again started and turned into a side street. fogerty, seated securely between the two burly fellows, managed to straighten up and rearrange his clothing. "will you kindly explain this unlawful act, gentlemen?" he enquired. the man on the left laughed aloud. he was the same individual who had attacked arthur weldon, the one who had encountered mershone in the street the day before. "cold day, ain't it, fogerty?" he remarked. "but that makes it all the better for a little auto ride. we like you, kid, we're fond of you--awful fond--ain't we, pete?" "we surely are," admitted the other. "so we thought we'd invite you out for a whirl--see? we'll give you a nice ride, so you can enjoy the scenery. it's fine out harlem way, an' the cold'll make you feel good. eh, pete?" "that's the idea," responded pete, cheerfully. "very kind of you," said the detective, leaning back comfortably against the cushions and pulling up his coat collar to shield him from the wind. "but are you aware that i'm on duty, and that this will allow my man to slip away from me?" "can't help that; but we're awful sorry," was the reply. "we just wanted company, an' you're a good fellow, fogerty, considerin' your age an' size." "thank you," said fogerty, "you know me, and i know you. you are bill leesome, alias will dutton--usually called big bill. you did time a couple of years ago for knocking out a policeman." "i'm safe enough now, though," responded big bill. "you're not working on the reg'lar force, fogerty, you're only a private burr." "i am protected, just the same," asserted fogerty. "when you knabbed me i was shadowing mershone, who has made away with a prominent society young lady." "oh, he has, has he?" chuckled big bill, and his companion laughed so gleefully that he attracted fogerty's attention to himself. "ah, i suppose you are one of the two men who lugged the girl off," he remarked; "and i must congratulate you on having made a good job of it. isn't it curious, by the way, that the fellow who stole and hid this girl should be the innocent means of revealing her biding place?" the two men stared at him blankly. the car, during this conversation, had moved steadily on, turning this and that corner in a way that might have confused anyone not perfectly acquainted with this section of the city. "what d'ye mean by that talk, fogerty?" demanded big bill. "of course it was mershone who stole the girl," explained the detective, calmly; "we know that. but mershone is a clever chap. he knew he was watched, and so he has never made a movement to go to his prisoner. but he grew restless in time, and when he met you, yesterday, fixed up a deal with you to carry me away, so he could escape." big bill looked uncomfortable. "you know a lot, fogerty," he said, doggedly. "yes; i've found that human nature is much the same the world over," replied the detective. "of course i suspected you would undertake to give mershone his chance by grabbing me, and that is exactly what you have done. but, my lads, what do you suppose i have done in the meantime?" they both looked their curiosity but said nothing. "i've simply used your clever plot to my own advantage, in order to bring things to a climax," continued fogerty. "while we are joy-riding here, a half dozen of my men are watching every move that mershone makes. i believe he will lead them straight to the girl; don't you?" big bill growled some words that were not very choice and then yelled to the chauffeur to stop. the other man was pale and evidently frightened. "see here, fogerty; you make tracks!" was the sharp command, as the automobile came to a halt. "you've worked a pretty trick on us, 'cordin' to your own showin', and we must find mr. mershone before it's too late--if we can." "good morning," said fogerty, alighting. "thank you for a pleasant ride--and other things." they dashed away and left him standing on the curb; and after watching them disappear the detective walked over to a drug store and entered the telephone booth. "that you, hyde?--this is fogerty." "yes, sir. mr. mershone has just crossed the ferry to jersey. adams is with him. i'll hear from him again in a minute: hold the wire." fogerty waited. soon he learned that mershone had purchased a ticket for east orange. the train would leave in fifteen minutes. fogerty decided quickly. after looking at his watch he rushed out and arrested a passing taxicab. "ready for a quick run--perhaps a long one?" he asked. "ready for anything," declared the man. the detective jumped in and gave hurried directions. "never mind the speed limit," he said. "no one will interfere with us. i'm fogerty." chapter xix politic repentance perhaps no one--not even mrs. merrick--was so unhappy in consequence of the lamentable crime that had been committed as diana von taer. immediately after her interview with beth her mood changed, and she would have given worlds to be free from complicity in the abduction. bitterly, indeed, she reproached herself for her enmity toward the unsuspecting girl, an innocent victim of diana's own vain desires and charles mershone's heartless wiles. repenting her folly and reasoning out the thing when it was too late, diana saw clearly that she had gained no possible advantage, but had thoughtlessly conspired to ruin the reputation of an honest, ingenuous girl. not long ago she had said that her life was dull, a stupid round of social functions that bored her dreadfully. she had hoped by adopting john merrick's nieces as her _protégées_ and introducing them to society to find a novel and pleasurable excitement that would serve to take her out of her unfortunate _ennui_--a condition to which she had practically been born. but diana had never bargained for such excitement as this; she had never thought to win self abhorrence by acts of petty malice and callous cruelties. yet so intrenched was she in the conservatism of her class that she could not at once bring herself to the point of exposing her own guilt that she might make amends for what had been done. she told herself she would rather die than permit louise to suffer through her connivance with her reckless, unprincipled cousin. she realized perfectly that she ought to fly, without a moment's delay, to the poor girl's assistance. yet fear of exposure, of ridicule, of loss of caste, held her a helpless prisoner in her own home, where she paced the floor and moaned and wrung her hands until she was on the verge of nervous prostration. if at any time she seemed to acquire sufficient courage to go to louise, a glance at the detective watching the house unnerved her and prevented her from carrying out her good intentions. you must not believe that diana was really bad; her lifelong training along set lines and practical seclusion from the everyday world were largely responsible for her evil impulses. mischief is sure to crop up, in one form or another, among the idle and ambitionless. more daring wickedness is said to be accomplished by the wealthy and aimless creatures of our false society than by the poorer and uneducated classes, wherein criminals are supposed to thrive. these sins are often unpublished, although not always undiscovered, but they are no more venial because they are suppressed by wealth and power. diana von taer was a girl who, rightly led, might have been capable of developing a noble womanhood; yet the conditions of her limited environment had induced her to countenance a most dastardly and despicable act. it speaks well for the innate goodness of this girl that she at last actually rebelled and resolved to undo, insofar as she was able, the wrong that had been accomplished. for four days she suffered tortures of remorse. on the morning of the fifth day she firmly decided to act. regardless of who might be watching, or of any unpleasant consequences to herself, she quietly left the house, unattended, and started directly for the east orange mansion. chapter xx a telephone call still another laggard awoke to action on this eventful tuesday morning. madame cerise had been growing more and more morose and dissatisfied day by day. her grievance was very tangible. a young girl had been brought forcibly to the house and placed in her care to be treated as a prisoner. from that time the perpetrators of the deed had left the woman to her own resources, never communicating with her in any way. during a long life of servitude madame cerise had acquiesced in many things that her own conscience did not approve of, for she considered herself a mere instrument to be used at will by the people who employed and paid her. but her enforced solitude as caretaker of the lonely house at east orange had given her ample time to think, and her views had lately undergone a decided change. to become the jailer of a young, pretty and innocent girl was the most severe trial her faithfulness to her employers had ever compelled her to undergo, and the woman deeply resented the doubtful position in which she had been placed. however, the chances were that madame cerise might have obeyed her orders to the letter had not so long a period of waiting ensued. during these days she was constantly thrown in the society of louise, which had a tendency to make her still more rebellious. the girl clung to cerise in her helplessness and despair, and constantly implored her to set her free. this, indeed, the frenchwoman might have done long ago had she not suspected such an act might cause great embarrassment to diana von taer, whom she had held on her knee as an infant and sought to protect with loyal affection. it was hard, though, to hear the pitiful appeals of the imprisoned girl, and to realize how great was the wrong that was being done her. the old woman was forced to set her jaws firmly and turn deaf ears to the pleadings in order not to succumb to them straightway. meantime she did her duty conscientiously. she never left louise's room without turning the key in the lock, and she steadfastly refused the girl permission to wander in the other rooms of the house. the prison was a real prison, indeed, but the turnkey sought to alleviate the prisoner's misery by every means in her power. she was indefatigable in her service, keeping the room warm and neat, attending to the girl's every want and cooking her delicious meals. while this all tended to louise's comfort it had little affect in soothing her misery. between periods of weeping she sought to cajole the old woman to release her, and at times she succumbed to blank despair. arthur was always in her mind, and she wondered why he did not come to rescue her. every night she stole softly from her bed to try the door, hoping cerise had forgotten to lock it. she examined her prison by stealth to discover any possible way of escape. there were two small windows and one large one. the latter opened upon the roof of a small porch, but, there were no way to descend from it unless one used a frail lattice at one end, which in summer probably supported a rose or other vine. louise shrank intuitively from such a desperate undertaking. unless some dreadful crisis occurred she would never dare trust herself to that frail support. yet it seemed the only possible way of escape. time finally wore out the patience of madame cerise, who was unable longer to withstand louise's pleadings. she did not indicate by word or look that her attitude had changed, but she made a secret resolve to have done with the affair altogether. often in their conversations the girl had mentioned arthur weldon. she had given cerise his address and telephone number, and implored her at least to communicate with him and tell him his sweetheart was safe, although unhappy. this had given the old woman the clever idea on which she finally acted. by telephoning mr. weldon she could give him the information that would lead to his coming for louise, without anyone knowing who it was that had betrayed the secret. this method commended itself strongly to her, as it would save her from any trouble or reproach. leaving louise at breakfast on this tuesday morning madame cerise went down to the telephone and was soon in communication with arthur. she told him, in a quiet tone, that miss louise merrick was being secluded in a suburban house near east orange, and described the place so he could easily find it. the young man questioned her eagerly, but aside from the information that the girl was well and uninjured she vouchsafed no further comment. it was enough, however. arthur, in wild excitement, rushed to the rescue. chapter xxi the unexpected happens madame cerise, well knowing she had accelerated the march of events to a two-step, calmly sat herself down in the little housekeeper's room off the lower hall and, leaving louise to her moody solitude upstairs, awaited the inevitable developments. outside the weather was cold and blustering. the wind whirled its burden of snowflakes in every direction with blinding, bewildering impartiality. it was a bad day to be out, thought the old frenchwoman; but a snowstorm was not likely to deter an anxious lover. she calculated the time it would take monsieur weldon to arrive at the mansion: if he was prompt and energetic he could cover the distance in an hour and a half by train or three hours by motor car. but he must prepare for the journey, and that would consume some time; perhaps she need not expect him within two hours at the earliest. she read, to pass away the time, selecting a book from a shelf of well-worn french novels. somehow she did not care to face her tearful prisoner again until she could restore the unhappy girl to the arms of her true lover. there was still romance in the soul of madame cerise, however withered her cheeks might be. she was very glad that at last she had summoned courage to act according to the dictates of her heart. eh? what is this? a rumble of wheels over the frozen snow caused her to glance at the clock above the mantel. not by any possibility could monsieur weldon arrive so soon. who, then, could it be? she sat motionless while the doorbell rang, and rang again. nothing must interfere with the pretty _denouement_ she had so fondly anticipated when louise's faithful knight came to her. but the one who had just now alighted was persistent. the vehicle had been sent away--she heard the sound of receding wheels--and the new arrival wanted to get in. the bell jerked and jangled unceasingly for a time and then came a crash against the door, as if a stalwart shoulder was endeavoring to break it down. madame cerise laid down her book, placed her _pince-nez_ in the case, and slowly proceeded down the hall. the door shook with another powerful impact, a voice cried out demanding admittance. "who is it, then?" she called shrilly. "open the door, confound you!" was the irritated reply. the woman reflected. this was surely young mershone's voice. and she had no excuse to deny him admittance. quietly she unbolted the door and allowed it to open an inch while she peered at the man outside. "oh! it is monsieur mershone." "of course it is," he roared, forcing the door open and stalking in. "who in thunder did you think it was?" "a thousand pardons, m'sieur," said cerise. "i must be cautious; it is your own command. that you may be protected i deny admittance to all." "that's all right," said mershone gruffly, while he stamped his feet upon the rug and shook the snow from his clothing. "haven't you any fire in this beastly old refrigerator? i'm nearly frozen. where's miss merrick?" "she is occupying ma'm'selle diana's room, in the west wing. will monsieur please to come this way?" she led him to her own little room, and so engrossed were they that neither remembered he had failed to rebolt the front door. a good fire burned in the grate of cerise's cosy den and mershone threw off his overcoat and warmed his hands as he showered questions upon the old caretaker. "how is the girl behaving? tears and hysterics?" "at times, m'sieur." "takes it hard, eh?" "she is very unhappy." "ever mention a man named weldon?" "often." "humph!" he did not like this report. "has anyone been here to disturb you, or to make enquiries?" "no one, m'sieur." "we're safe enough, i guess. it was a mighty neat job, cerise, taken altogether, although the fools have been watching me night and day. that's the reason i did not come sooner." she made no comment. mershone threw himself into a chair and stared thoughtfully at the fire. "has louise--miss merrick, you know--mentioned my name at all?" "at times." "in what way?" "with loathing and contempt." he scowled at her savagely. "do you think she suspects that i carried her away?" "she seems to know it absolutely." he stared at the fire again. "i've got a queer job on my hands, cerise, and i rely on you to help me," said he presently, assuming a more conciliating manner. "perhaps i'm in a box, or a hole, or whatever else you like to call it, but it's too late too back down now--i must push ahead and win. you see the case is this: i love the girl and had her brought here to keep her from another man. by hook or crook i'm going to make her my wife. she won't take kindly to that at first, perhaps, but i'll make her happy in the end. in one way this delay has been a good thing. it must have worn her out and broken her spirits quite a bit; eh?" "she seems very miserable," conceded the woman. "do you find her hard to manage? does she show much temper? in other words, do you suppose she'll put up a fight?" madame cerise regarded him wonderingly. "she is a good girl," was her reply. "she loves with much devotion the man from whom you have stolen her. i am quite positive she will never consent to become your wife." "oh, you are? well, i intend she shall marry me, and that settles it. she's unnerved and miserable now, and i mean to grind her down till she hasn't strength to resist me. that sounds hard. i know; but it's the only way to accomplish my purpose. after she's my wife i'll be very kind to her, poor thing, and teach her to love me. a man can do anything with a woman if he sets about it the right way. i'm not taking this stand because i'm cruel, cerise, but because i'm desperate. all's fair in love and war, you know, and this is a bit of both." he was pacing the floor by this time, his hands thrust deep in his pockets, an anxious look upon his face that belied his bombastic words. the frenchwoman's expression was impassive. her scorn for the wretch before her was tempered with the knowledge that his cowardly plan was doomed to defeat. it was she who had checkmated him, and she was glad. now and again her eyes sought the clock, while she silently calculated the time to elapse before arthur weldon arrived. there would be a pretty scene then, cerise would have much enjoyment in witnessing the encounter. "now, then, take me to louise," commanded mershone, suddenly. she shrank back in dismay. "oh, not yet, m'sieur!" "why not?" "the young lady is asleep. she will not waken for an hour--perhaps two." "i can't wait. we'll waken her now, and give her an idea of the change of program." "but no, m'sieur! it is outrageous. the poor thing has but now sobbed herself to sleep, after many bitter hours. can you not wait a brief hour, having waited five days?" "no. take me to her at once." as he came toward her the woman drew away. "i cannot," she said firmly. "see here, cerise, i intend to be obeyed. i won't endure any nonsense at this stage of the game, believe me," he announced fiercely. "in order to win, there's just one way to manage this affair, and i insist upon your following my instructions. take me to louise!" "i will not!" she returned, the bead-like eyes glittering as they met his angry gaze. "then i'll go alone. give me the key." she did not move, nor did she answer him. at her waist hung a small bunch of household keys and this he seized with a sudden movement and jerked loose from its cord. "you miserable hag!" he muttered, inflamed with anger at her opposition. "if you propose to defend this girl and defy me, you'll find i'm able to crush you as i will her. while i'm gone i expect you to come to your senses, and decide to obey me." with these words he advanced to the door of the little room and opened it. just outside stood fogerty, smiling genially. "glad to meet you again, mr. mershone," he said. "may i come in? thank you." while mershone stood bewildered by this unexpected apparition the detective entered the room, closed the door carefully, and putting his back to it bowed politely to madame cerise. "pardon this seeming intrusion, ma'am," said he. "i'm here on a little matter of business, having a warrant for the arrest of mr. charles connoldy mershone." chapter xxii gone the grim face of madame cerise relaxed to allow a quaint smile to flit across it. she returned fogerty's bow with a deep curtsy. mershone, after one brief exclamation of dismay, wrested from him by surprise, threw himself into the chair again and stared at the fire. for a few moments there was intense stillness in the little room. "how easy it is," said fogerty, in soft, musing tones, "to read one's thoughts--under certain circumstances. you are thinking, mr. mershone, that i'm a boy, and not very strong, while you are an athlete and can easily overpower me. i have come at a disagreeable time, and all your plans depend on your ability to get rid of me. but i've four good men within call, who are just now guarding the approaches to this house. they'd like to come in, i know, because it's very cold and disagreeable outside; but suppose we allow them to freeze for a time? ah, i thought you'd agree with me, sir--i overheard you say you were about to visit miss merrick, who is confined in a room upstairs, but i'd like you to postpone that while we indulge in a little confidential chat together. you see--" the door-bell rang violently. fogerty glanced at madame cerise. "will you see who it is?" he asked. she arose at once and left the room. mershone turned quickly. "what's your price, fogerty?" he asked, meaningly. "for what?" "for getting out of here--making tracks and leaving me alone. every man has his price, and i'm trapped--i'm willing to pay anything--i'll--" "cut it out, sir. you've tried this once before. i'm not to be bribed." "have you really a warrant for my arrest?" "i've carried it since friday. it's no use, mershone, the game's up and you may as well grin and bear it." mershone was about to reply when the door opened and diana von taer came in with a swift, catlike tread and confronted him with flaming eyes. "you coward! you low, miserable scoundrel! how dare you come here to annoy and browbeat that poor girl?" she cried in clear, cutting accents, without noticing the presence of fogerty. "oh, shut up, di, you're in it as deep as i am," he retorted, turning away with a flushed face. "i'm not, sir! never have i countenanced this wicked, criminal act," she declared. "i have come here to-day to save louise from your wiles and carry her back to her friends. i dare you, or your confederates," with a scornful look at the detective, "to interfere with me in any way." then she turned to cerise and continued: "where is miss merrick now?" "in your own room, ma'm'seile." "come with me, then." with a defiant glance at mershone she turned haughtily and left the room. cerise followed obediently, somewhat astonished at the queer turn of events. left alone with mershone, fogerty chuckled gleefully. "why, it seems i wasn't needed, after all," said he, "and we've both of us taken a lot of trouble for nothing, mershone. the chances are miss von taer would have turned the trick in any event, don't you think so?" "no, you don't understand her. she wouldn't have interfered if she hadn't been scared out," growled the other. "she's sacrificed me to save herself, that's all." "you may be right about that," admitted fogerty; and then he got up to answer the door-bell, which once more rang violently. an automobile stood outside, and from it an excited party trooped into the hallway, disregarding the cutting wind and blinding snowflakes that assailed them as they passed in. there was arthur weldon and uncle john, patricia and beth; and all, as they saw the detective, cried with one voice: "where's louise?" fogerty had just managed to close the door against the wintry blast when the answer came from the stairway just above: "she is gone!" the voice was shrill and despairing, and looking up they saw diana standing dramatically posed upon the landing, her hands clasped over her heart and a look of fear upon her face. over her shoulder the startled black eyes of old cerise peered down upon the group below. the newcomers were evidently bewildered by this reception. they had come to rescue louise, whom they imagined confined in a lonely deserted villa with no companion other than the woman who guarded her. arthur's own detective opened the door to them and diana von taer, whom they certainly did not expect to meet here, confronted them with the thrilling statement that louise had gone. arthur was the first to recover his wits. "gone!" he repeated; "gone where?" "she had escaped--run away!" explained diana, in real distress. "when?" asked uncle john. "just now. within an hour, wasn't it, cerise?" "at ten o'clock i left her, now she is gone," said the old woman, who appeared as greatly agitated as her mistress. "good gracious! you don't mean to say she's left the house in this storm?" exclaimed patsy, aghast at the very thought. "what shall we do? what _can_ we do?" demanded beth, eagerly. fogerty started up the stairs. cerise turned to show him the way, and the others followed in an awed group. the key was in the lock of the door to the missing girl's room, but the door itself now stood ajar. fogerty entered, cast a sharp look around and walked straight to the window. as the others came in, glancing curiously about them and noting the still smouldering fire and the evidences of recent occupation, the detective unlatched the french window and stepped out into the snow that covered the roof of the little porch below. arthur sprang out beside him, leaving the rest to shiver in the cold blast that rushed in upon them from the open window. fogerty, on his knees, scanned the snow carefully, and although weldon could discover no sign of a footprint the young detective nodded his head sagaciously and slowly made his way to the trellis at the end. here it was plain that the accumulation of snow had recently been brushed away from the frail framework. "it was strong enough to hold her, though," declared fogerty, looking over the edge of the roof. "i'll descend the same way, sir. go back by the stairs and meet me below." he grasped the lattice and began cautiously to lower himself to the ground, and arthur turned to rejoin his friends in the room. "that is the way she escaped, without doubt," he said to them. "poor child, she had no idea we were about to rescue her, and her long confinement had made her desperate." "did she have a cloak, or any warm clothes?" asked beth. madame cerise hurriedly examined the wardrobe in the closets. "yes, ma'm'selle; she has taken a thick coat and a knit scarf," she answered. but i am sure she had no gloves, and her shoes were very thin." "how long do you think she has been gone?" patsy enquired. "not more than an hour. i was talking with mr. mershone, and--" "mershone! is he here?" demanded arthur. "he is in my room downstairs--or was when you came," said the woman. "that accounts for her sudden flight," declared the young man, bitterly. "she doubtless heard his voice and in a sudden panic decided to fly. did mershone see her?" he asked. "no, m'sieur," replied cerise. with one accord they descended to the lower hall and the caretaker led the way to her room. to their surprise they found mershone still seated in the chair by the fire, his hands clasped behind his head, a cigarette between his lips. "here is another crime for you to account for!" cried arthur, advancing upon him angrily. "you have driven louise to her death!" mershone raised one hand in mild protest. "don't waste time cursing me," he said. "try to find louise before it is too late." the reproach seemed justified. arthur paused and turning to mr. merrick said: "he is right. i'll go help fogerty, and you must stay here and look after the girls until we return." as he went out he passed diana without a look. she sat in a corner of the room sobbing miserably. beth was thoughtful and quiet, patsy nervous and indignant. uncle john was apparently crushed by the disaster that had overtaken them. mershone's suggestion that louise might perish in the storm was no idle one; the girl was not only frail and delicate but worn out with her long imprisonment and its anxieties. they all realized this. "i believe," said mershone, rising abruptly, "i'll go and join the search. fogerty has arrested me, but you needn't worry about my trying to escape. i don't care what becomes of me, now, and i'm going straight to join the detective." they allowed him to go without protest, and he buttoned his coat and set out in the storm to find the others. fogerty and arthur were by this time in the lane back of the grounds, where the detective was advancing slowly with his eyes fixed on the ground. "the tracks are faint, but easily followed," he was saying, "the high heels of her shoes leave a distinct mark." when mershone joined them arthur scowled at the fellow but said nothing. fogerty merely smiled. from the lane the tracks, already nearly obliterated by the fast falling snow, wandered along nearly a quarter of a mile to a crossroads, where they became wholly lost. fogerty looked up and down the roads and shook his head with a puzzled expression. "we've surely traced her so far," said he, "but now we must guess at her further direction. you'll notice this track of a wagon. it may have passed fifteen minutes or an hour ago. the hoof tracks of the horses are covered, so i'm not positive which way they headed; i only know there are indications of hoof tracks, which proves it a farmer's wagon. the question is, whether the young lady met it, and caught a ride, or whether she proceeded along some of the other trails. i can't find any indication of those high-heeled shoes from this point, in any direction. better get your car, mr. weldon, and run east a few miles, keeping sharp watch of the wagon tracks on the way. it was a heavy wagon, for the wheels cut deep. mershone and i will go west. when you've driven far enough to satisfy yourself you're going the wrong direction, you may easily overtake us on your return. then, if we've discovered nothing on this road, we'll try the other." arthur ran back at once to the house and in a few minutes had started on his quest. the motor car was powerful enough to plow through the deep snow with comparative ease. those left together in madam cerise's little room were more to be pitied than the ones engaged in active search, for there was nothing to relieve their fears and anxieties. diana, unable to bear the accusing looks of patsy and beth, resolved to make a clean breast of her complicity in the affair and related to them every detail of her connection with her cousin's despicable plot. she ended by begging their forgiveness, and wept so miserably that uncle john found himself stroking her hair while patsy came close and pressed the penitent girl's hand as if to comfort and reassure her. beth said nothing. she could not find it in her heart as yet to forgive diana's selfish conspiracy against her cousin's happiness. if louise perished in this dreadful storm the proud diana von taer could not escape the taint of murder. the end was not yet. chapter xxiii the crisis mershone and fogerty plodded through the snow together, side by side. they were facing the wind, which cut their faces cruelly, yet neither seemed to mind the bitterness of the weather. "keep watch along the roadside," suggested mershone; "she may have fallen anywhere, you know. she couldn't endure this thing long. poor louise!" "you were fond of her, mr. mershone?" asked fogerty, not unsympathetically. "yes. that was why i made such a struggle to get her." "it was a mistake, sir. provided a woman is won by force or trickery she's never worth getting. if she doesn't care for you it's better to give her up." "i know--now." "you're a bright fellow, mershone, a clever fellow. it's a pity you couldn't direct your talents the right way. they'll jug you for this." "never mind. the game of life isn't worth playing. i've done with it, and the sooner i go to the devil the better. if only i could be sure louise was safe i'd toss every care--and every honest thought--to the winds, from this moment." during the silence that followed fogerty was thoughtful. indeed, his mind dwelt more upon the defeated and desperate man beside him than upon the waif he was searching for. "what's been done, mr. mershone," he said, after a time, "can't be helped now. the future of every man is always a bigger proposition than his past--whoever he may be. with your talents and genius you could yet make of yourself a successful and prosperous man, respected by the community--if you could get out of this miserable rut that has helped to drag you down." "but i can't," said the other, despondently. "you can if you try. but you'll have to strike for a place a good way from new york. go west, forget your past, and carve out an honest future under a new name and among new associates. you're equal to it." mershone shook his head. "you forget," he said. "they'll give me a jail sentence for this folly, as sure as fate, and that will be the end of me." "not necessarily. see here, mershone, it won't help any of those people to prosecute you. if the girl escapes with her life no real harm has been done, although you've caused a deal of unhappiness, in one way or another. for my part, i'd like to see you escape, because i'm sure this affair will be a warning to you that will induce you to give up all trickery in the future. money wouldn't bribe me, as you know, but sympathy and good fellowship will. if you'll promise to skip right now, and turn over a new leaf, you are free." "where could i go?" "there's a town a mile ahead of us; i can see the buildings now and then. you've money, for you offered it to me. i haven't any assistants here, i'm all alone on the job. that talk about four men was only a bluff. push me over in the snow and make tracks. i'll tell weldon you've escaped, and advise him not to bother you. it's very easy." mershone stopped short, seized the detective's hand and wrung it gratefully. "you're a good fellow, fogerty. i--i thank you. but i can't do it. in the first place, i can't rest in peace until louise is found, or i know her fate. secondly, i'm game to give an account for all my deeds, now that i've played the farce out, and lost. i--i really haven't the ambition, fogerty, to make a new start in life, and try to reform. what's the use?" fogerty did not reply. perhaps he realized the case was entirely hopeless. but he had done what he could to save the misguided fellow and give him a chance, and he was sorry he had not succeeded. meantime arthur weldon, almost dazed by the calamity that had overtaken his sweetheart, found an able assistant in his chauffeur, who, when the case was explained to him, developed an eager and intelligent interest in the chase. fortunately they moved with the storm and the snow presently moderated in volume although the wind was still blowing a fierce gale. this gave them a better opportunity than the others to observe the road they followed. jones had good eyes, and although the trail of the heavy wagon was lost at times he soon picked it up again and they were enabled to make fairly good speed. "i believe," said arthur, presently, "that the marks are getting clearer." "i know they are, sir," agreed jones. "then we've come in the right direction, for it is proof that the wagon was headed this way." "quite right, sir." this back section was thinly settled and the occasional farm-houses they passed were set well back from the road. it was evident from the closed gates and drifted snowbanks that no teams had either left these places or arrived during a recent period. arthur was encouraged, moreover, by the wagon ruts growing still more clear as they proceeded, and his excitement was great when jones abruptly halted and pointed to a place where the wheels had made a turn and entered a farm yard. "here's the place, sir," announced the chauffeur. "can you get in?" "it's pretty deep, sir, but i'll try." the snow was crisp and light, owing to the excessive cold, and the machine plowed through it bravely, drawing up at last to the door of an humble cottage. as arthur leaped out of the car a man appeared upon the steps, closing the door softly behind him. "looking for the young lady, sir?" he asked. "is she here?" cried arthur. the man placed his finger on his lips, although the wind prevented any sound of voices being heard within. "gently, sir, don't make a noise--but come in." they entered what seemed to be a kitchen. the farmer, a man of advanced years, led him to a front room, and again cautioning him to be silent, motioned him to enter. a sheet-iron stove made the place fairly comfortable. by a window sat a meek-faced woman, bent over some sewing. on a couch opposite lay louise, covered by a heavy shawl. she was fast asleep, her hair disheveled and straying over her crimson cheeks, flushed from exposure to the weather. her slumber seemed the result of physical exhaustion, for her lips were parted and she breathed deeply. arthur, after gazing at her for a moment with a beating-heart, for the mysterious actions of the old farmer had made him fear the worst, softly approached the couch and knelt beside the girl he loved, thanking; god in his inmost heart for her escape. then he leaned over and pressed a kiss upon her cheek. louise slowly opened her eyes, smiled divinely, and threw her arms impulsively around his neck. "i knew you would come for me, dear," she whispered. chapter xxiv a matter of course all explanations were barred until the girl had been tenderly taken to her own home and under the loving care of her mother and cousins had recovered to an extent from the terrible experiences she had undergone. then by degrees she told them her story, and how, hearing the voice of her persecutor mershone in the hall below she had become frantic with fear and resolved to trust herself to the mercies of the storm rather than submit to an interview with him. before this she had decided that she could climb down the trellis, and that part of her flight she accomplished easily. then she ran toward the rear of the premises to avoid being seen and managed to find the lane, and later the cross-roads. it was very cold, but her excitement and the fear of pursuit kept her warm until suddenly her strength failed her and she sank down in the snow without power to move. at this juncture the farmer and his wife drove by, having been on a trip to the town. the man sprang out and lifted her in, and the woman tenderly wrapped her in the robes and blankets and pillowed her head upon her motherly bosom. by the time they reached the farm-house she was quite warm again, but so exhausted that with a brief explanation that she was lost, but somebody would be sure to find her before long, she fell upon the couch and almost immediately lost consciousness. so arthur found her, and one look into his eyes assured her that all her troubles were over. they did not prosecute charlie mershone, after all. fogerty pleaded for him earnestly, and uncle john pointed out that to arrest the young man would mean to give the whole affair to the newspapers, which until now had not gleaned the slightest inkling of what had happened. publicity was to be avoided if possible, as it would set loose a thousand malicious tongues and benefit nobody. the only thing to be gained by prosecuting mershone was revenge, and all were willing to forego that doubtful satisfaction. however, uncle john had an interview with the young man in the office of the prosecuting attorney, at which mershone was given permission to leave town quietly and pursue his fortunes in other fields. if ever he returned, or in any way molested any of the merricks or his cousin diana, he was assured that he would be immediately arrested and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. mershone accepted the conditions and became an exile, passing at once out of the lives of those he had so deeply wronged. the joyful reunion of the lovers led to an early date being set for the wedding. they met all protests by pleading their fears of another heartrending separation, and no one ventured to oppose their desire. mrs. merrick quickly recovered her accustomed spirits during the excitement of those anxious weeks preceding the wedding. cards were issued to "the very best people in town;" the _trousseau_ involved anxiety by day and restless dreams by night--all eminently enjoyable; there were entertainments to be attended and congratulations to be received from every side. society, suspecting nothing of the tragedy so lately enacted in these young lives, was especially gracious to the betrothed. louise was the recipient of innumerable merry "showers" from her girl associates, and her cousins, patsy and beth, followed in line with "glass showers" and "china showers" until the prospective bride was stocked with enough wares to establish a "house-furnishing emporium," as uncle john proudly declared. mr. merrick, by this time quite reconciled and palpably pleased at the approaching marriage of his eldest niece, was not to be outdone in "social stunts" that might add to her happiness. he gave theatre parties and banquets without number, and gave them with the marked success that invariably attended his efforts. the evening before the wedding uncle john and the major claimed arthur for their own, and after an hour's conference between the three that left the young fellow more happy and grateful than ever before, he was entertained at his last "bachelor dinner," where he made a remarkable speech and was lustily cheered. of course beth and patsy were the bridesmaids, and their cousin kenneth forbes came all the way from elmhurst to be arthur's best man. no one ever knew what it cost uncle john for the wonderful decorations at the church and home, for the music, the banquet and all the other details which he himself eagerly arranged on a magnificent scale and claimed was a part of his "wedding present." when it was all over, and the young people had driven away to begin the journey of life together, the little man put a loving arm around beth and patsy and said, between smiles and tears: "well, my dears, i've lost one niece, and that's a fact; but i've still two left. how long will they remain with me, i wonder?" "dear me, uncle john," said practical patsy; "your necktie's untied and dangling; like a shoestring! i hope it wasn't that way at the wedding." "it was, though," declared the major, chuckling. "if all three of ye get married, my dears, poor uncle john will come to look like a scarecrow --and all that in the face of swell society!" "aren't we about through with swell society now?" asked mr. merrick, anxiously. "aren't we about done with it? it caused all our troubles, you know." "society," announced beth, complacently, "is an excellent thing in the abstract. it has its black sheep, of course; but i think no more than any other established class of humanity." "dear me!" cried uncle john; "you once denounced society." "that," said she, "was before i knew anything at all about it." richard little. "what do you make of it, jeeves?" i said. "i confess i am a little doubtful, sir. i think mr. little would have done better to follow my advice and confine himself to good works about the village." "you think the things will be a frost?" "i could not hazard a conjecture, sir. but my experience has been that what pleases the london public is not always so acceptable to the rural mind. the metropolitan touch sometimes proves a trifle too exotic for the provinces." "i suppose i ought to go down and see the dashed thing?" "i think mr. little would be wounded were you not present, sir." * * * * * the village hall at twing is a smallish building, smelling of apples. it was full when i turned up on the evening of the twenty-third, for i had purposely timed myself to arrive not long before the kick-off. i had had experience of one or two of these binges, and didn't want to run any risk of coming early and finding myself shoved into a seat in one of the front rows where i wouldn't be able to execute a quiet sneak into the open air half-way through the proceedings, if the occasion seemed to demand it. i secured a nice strategic position near the door at the back of the hall. from where i stood i had a good view of the audience. as always on these occasions, the first few rows were occupied by the nibs--consisting of the squire, a fairly mauve old sportsman with white whiskers, his family, a platoon of local parsons and perhaps a couple of dozen of prominent pew-holders. then came a dense squash of what you might call the lower middle classes. and at the back, where i was, we came down with a jerk in the social scale, this end of the hall being given up almost entirely to a collection of frankly tough eggs, who had rolled up not so much for any love of the drama as because there was a free tea after the show. take it for all in all, a representative gathering of twing life and thought. the nibs were whispering in a pleased manner to each other, the lower middles were sitting up very straight, as if they'd been bleached, and the tough eggs whiled away the time by cracking nuts and exchanging low rustic wheezes. the girl, mary burgess, was at the piano playing a waltz. beside her stood the curate, wingham, apparently recovered. the temperature, i should think, was about a hundred and twenty-seven. somebody jabbed me heartily in the lower ribs, and i perceived the man steggles. "hallo!" he said. "i didn't know you were coming down." i didn't like the chap, but we woosters can wear the mask. i beamed a bit. "oh, yes," i said. "bingo wanted me to roll up and see his show." "i hear he's giving us something pretty ambitious," said the man steggles. "big effects and all that sort of thing." "i believe so." "of course, it means a lot to him, doesn't it? he's told you about the girl, of course?" "yes. and i hear you're laying seven to one against him," i said, eyeing the blighter a trifle austerely. he didn't even quiver. "just a little flutter to relieve the monotony of country life," he said. "but you've got the facts a bit wrong. it's down in the village that they're laying seven to one. i can do you better than that, if you feel in a speculative mood. how about a tenner at a hundred to eight?" "good lord! are you giving that?" "yes. somehow," said steggles meditatively, "i have a sort of feeling, a kind of premonition that something's going to go wrong to-night. you know what little is. a bungler, if ever there was one. something tells me that this show of his is going to be a frost. and if it is, of course, i should think it would prejudice the girl against him pretty badly. his standing always was rather shaky." "are you going to try and smash up the show?" i said sternly. "me!" said steggles. "why, what could i do? half a minute, i want to go and speak to a man." he buzzed off, leaving me distinctly disturbed. i could see from the fellow's eye that he was meditating some of his customary rough stuff, and i thought bingo ought to be warned. but there wasn't time and i couldn't get at him. almost immediately after steggles had left me the curtain went up. except as a prompter, bingo wasn't much in evidence in the early part of the performance. the thing at the outset was merely one of those weird dramas which you dig out of books published around christmas time and entitled "twelve little plays for the tots," or something like that. the kids drooled on in the usual manner, the booming voice of bingo ringing out from time to time behind the scenes when the fatheads forgot their lines; and the audience was settling down into the sort of torpor usual on these occasions, when the first of bingo's interpolated bits occurred. it was that number which what's-her-name sings in that revue at the palace--you would recognise the tune if i hummed it, but i can never get hold of the dashed thing. it always got three encores at the palace, and it went well now, even with a squeaky-voiced child jumping on and off the key like a chamois of the alps leaping from crag to crag. even the tough eggs liked it. at the end of the second refrain the entire house was shouting for an encore, and the kid with the voice like a slate-pencil took a deep breath and started to let it go once more. at this point all the lights went out. * * * * * i don't know when i've had anything so sudden and devastating happen to me before. they didn't flicker. they just went out. the hall was in complete darkness. well, of course, that sort of broke the spell, as you might put it. people started to shout directions, and the tough eggs stamped their feet and settled down for a pleasant time. and, of course, young bingo had to make an ass of himself. his voice suddenly shot at us out of the darkness. "ladies and gentlemen, something has gone wrong with the lights----" the tough eggs were tickled by this bit of information straight from the stable. they took it up as a sort of battle-cry. then, after about five minutes, the lights went up again, and the show was resumed. it took ten minutes after that to get the audience back into its state of coma, but eventually they began to settle down, and everything was going nicely when a small boy with a face like a turbot edged out in front of the curtain, which had been lowered after a pretty painful scene about a wishing-ring or a fairy's curse or something of that sort, and started to sing that song of george thingummy's out of "cuddle up." you know the one i mean. "always listen to mother, girls!" it's called, and he gets the audience to join in and sing the refrain. quite a ripeish ballad, and one which i myself have frequently sung in my bath with not a little vim; but by no means--as anyone but a perfect sapheaded prune like young bingo would have known--by no means the sort of thing for a children's christmas entertainment in the old village hall. right from the start of the first refrain the bulk of the audience had begun to stiffen in their seats and fan themselves, and the burgess girl at the piano was accompanying in a stunned, mechanical sort of way, while the curate at her side averted his gaze in a pained manner. the tough eggs, however, were all for it. at the end of the second refrain the kid stopped and began to sidle towards the wings. upon which the following brief duologue took place: young bingo (_voice heard off, ringing against the rafters_): "go on!" the kid (_coyly_): "i don't like to." young bingo (_still louder_): "go on, you little blighter, or i'll slay you!" i suppose the kid thought it over swiftly and realised that bingo, being in a position to get at him, had better be conciliated, whatever the harvest might be; for he shuffled down to the front and, having shut his eyes and giggled hysterically, said: "ladies and gentlemen, i will now call upon squire tressidder to oblige by singing the refrain!" you know, with the most charitable feelings towards him, there are moments when you can't help thinking that young bingo ought to be in some sort of a home. i suppose, poor fish, he had pictured this as the big punch of the evening. he had imagined, i take it, that the squire would spring jovially to his feet, rip the song off his chest, and all would be gaiety and mirth. well, what happened was simply that old tressidder--and, mark you, i'm not blaming him--just sat where he was, swelling and turning a brighter purple every second. the lower middle classes remained in frozen silence, waiting for the roof to fall. the only section of the audience that really seemed to enjoy the idea was the tough eggs, who yelled with enthusiasm. it was jam for the tough eggs. and then the lights went out again. * * * * * when they went up, some minutes later, they disclosed the squire marching stiffly out at the head of his family, fed up to the eyebrows; the burgess girl at the piano with a pale, set look; and the curate gazing at her with something in his expression that seemed to suggest that, although all this was no doubt deplorable, he had spotted the silver fining. the show went on once more. there were great chunks of plays-for-the-tots dialogue, and then the girl at the piano struck up the prelude to that orange-girl number that's the big hit of the palace revue. i took it that this was to be bingo's smashing act one finale. the entire company was on the stage, and a clutching hand had appeared round the edge of the curtain, ready to pull at the right moment. it looked like the finale all right. it wasn't long before i realised that it was something more. it was the finish. i take it you know that orange number at the palace? it goes: oh, won't you something something oranges, my something oranges, my something oranges; oh, won't you something something something i forget, something something something tumty tumty yet: oh---- or words to that effect. it's a dashed clever lyric, and the tune's good, too; but the thing that made the number was the business where the girls take oranges out of their baskets, you know, and toss them lightly to the audience. i don't know if you've ever noticed it, but it always seems to tickle an audience to bits when they get things thrown at them from the stage. every time i've been to the palace the customers have simply gone wild over this number. but at the palace, of course, the oranges are made of yellow wool, and the girls don't so much chuck them as drop them limply into the first and second rows. i began to gather that the business was going to be treated rather differently to-night when a dashed great chunk of pips and mildew sailed past my ear and burst on the wall behind me. another landed with a squelch on the neck of one of the nibs in the third row. and then a third took me right on the tip of the nose, and i kind of lost interest in the proceedings for awhile. when i had scrubbed my face and got my eye to stop watering for a moment, i saw that the evening's entertainment had begun to resemble one of belfast's livelier nights. the air was thick with shrieks and fruit. the kids on the stage, with bingo buzzing distractedly to and fro in their midst, were having the time of their lives. i suppose they realised that this couldn't go on for ever, and were making the most of their chances. the tough eggs had begun to pick up all the oranges that hadn't burst and were shooting them back, so that the audience got it both coming and going. in fact, take it all round, there was a certain amount of confusion; and, just as things had begun really to hot up, out went the lights again. it seemed to me about my time for leaving, so i slid for the door. i was hardly outside when the audience began to stream out. they surged about me in twos and threes, and i've never seen a public body so dashed unanimous on any point. to a man--and to a woman--they were cursing poor old bingo; and there was a large and rapidly growing school of thought which held that the best thing to do would be to waylay him as he emerged and splash him about in the village pond a bit. there were such a dickens of a lot of these enthusiasts and they looked so jolly determined that it seemed to me that the only matey thing to do was to go behind and warn young bingo to turn his coat-collar up and breeze off snakily by some side exit. i went behind, and found him sitting on a box in the wings, perspiring pretty freely and looking more or less like the spot marked with a cross where the accident happened. his hair was standing up and his ears were hanging down, and one harsh word would undoubtedly have made him burst into tears. "bertie," he said hollowly, as he saw me, "it was that blighter steggles! i caught one of the kids before he could get away and got it all out of him. steggles substituted real oranges for the balls of wool which with infinite sweat and at a cost of nearly a quid i had specially prepared. well, i will now proceed to tear him limb from limb. it'll be something to do." i hated to spoil his day-dreams, but it had to be. "good heavens, man," i said, "you haven't time for frivolous amusements now. you've got to get out. and quick!" "bertie," said bingo in a dull voice, "she was here just now. she said it was all my fault and that she would never speak to me again. she said she had always suspected me of being a heartless practical joker, and now she knew. she said---- oh, well, she ticked me off properly." "that's the least of your troubles," i said. it seemed impossible to rouse the poor zib to a sense of his position. "do you realise that about two hundred of twing's heftiest are waiting for you outside to chuck you into the pond?" "no!" "absolutely!" for a moment the poor chap seemed crushed. but only for a moment. there has always been something of the good old english bulldog breed about bingo. a strange, sweet smile flickered for an instant over his face. "it's all right," he said. "i can sneak out through the cellar and climb over the wall at the back. they can't intimidate _me_!" * * * * * it couldn't have been more than a week later when jeeves, after he had brought me my tea, gently steered me away from the sporting page of the _morning post_ and directed my attention to an announcement in the engagements and marriages column. it was a brief statement that a marriage had been arranged and would shortly take place between the hon. and rev. hubert wingham, third son of the right hon. the earl of sturridge, and mary, only daughter of the late matthew burgess, of weatherly court, hants. "of course," i said, after i had given it the east-to-west, "i expected this, jeeves." "yes, sir." "she would never forgive him what happened that night." "no, sir." "well," i said, as i took a sip of the fragrant and steaming, "i don't suppose it will take old bingo long to get over it. it's about the hundred and eleventh time this sort of thing has happened to him. you're the man i'm sorry for." "me, sir?" "well, dash it all, you can't have forgotten what a deuce of a lot of trouble you took to bring the thing off for bingo. it's too bad that all your work should have been wasted." "not entirely wasted, sir." "eh?" "it is true that my efforts to bring about the match between mr. little and the young lady were not successful, but still i look back upon the matter with a certain satisfaction." "because you did your best, you mean?" "not entirely, sir, though of course that thought also gives me pleasure. i was alluding more particularly to the fact that i found the affair financially remunerative." "financially remunerative? what do you mean?" "when i learned that mr. steggles had interested himself in the contest, sir, i went shares with my friend brookfield and bought the book which had been made on the issue by the 'cow and horses.' it has proved a highly profitable investment. your breakfast will be ready almost immediately, sir. kidneys on toast and mushrooms. i will bring it when you ring." chapter xvi the delayed exit of claude and eustace the feeling i had when aunt agatha trapped me in my lair that morning and spilled the bad news was that my luck had broken at last. as a rule, you see, i'm not lugged into family rows. on the occasions when aunt is calling to aunt like mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps and uncle james's letter about cousin mabel's peculiar behaviour is being shot round the family circle ("please read this carefully and send it on to jane"), the clan has a tendency to ignore me. it's one of the advantages i get from being a bachelor--and, according to my nearest and dearest, practically a half-witted bachelor at that. "it's no good trying to get bertie to take the slightest interest" is more or less the slogan, and i'm bound to say i'm all for it. a quiet life is what i like. and that's why i felt that the curse had come upon me, so to speak, when aunt agatha sailed into my sitting-room while i was having a placid cigarette and started to tell me about claude and eustace. "thank goodness," said aunt agatha, "arrangements have at last been made about eustace and claude." "arrangements?" i said, not having the foggiest. "they sail on friday for south africa. mr. van alstyne, a friend of poor emily's, has given them berths in his firm at johannesburg, and we are hoping that they will settle down there and do well." i didn't get the thing at all. "friday? the day after to-morrow, do you mean?" "yes." "for south africa?" "yes. they leave on the _edinburgh castle_." "but what's the idea? i mean, aren't they in the middle of their term at oxford?" aunt agatha looked at me coldly. "do you positively mean to tell me, bertie, that you take so little interest in the affairs of your nearest relatives that you are not aware that claude and eustace were expelled from oxford over a fortnight ago?" "no, really?" "you are hopeless, bertie. i should have thought that even you----" "why were they sent down?" "they poured lemonade on the junior dean of their college.... i see nothing amusing in the outrage, bertie." "no, no, rather not," i said hurriedly. "i wasn't laughing. choking. got something stuck in my throat, you know." "poor emily," went on aunt agatha, "being one of those doting mothers who are the ruin of their children, wished to keep the boys in london. she suggested that they might cram for the army. but i was firm. the colonies are the only place for wild youths like eustace and claude. so they sail on friday. they have been staying for the last two weeks with your uncle clive in worcestershire. they will spend to-morrow night in london and catch the boat-train on friday morning." "bit risky, isn't it? i mean, aren't they apt to cut loose a bit to-morrow night if they're left all alone in london?" "they will not be alone. they will be in your charge." "mine!" "yes. i wish you to put them up in your flat for the night, and see that they do not miss the train in the morning." "oh, i say, no!" "bertie!" "well, i mean, quite jolly coves both of them, but i don't know. they're rather nuts, you know---- always glad to see them, of course, but when it comes to putting them up for the night----" "bertie, if you are so sunk in callous self-indulgence that you cannot even put yourself to this trifling inconvenience for the sake of----" "oh, all right," i said. "all right." it was no good arguing, of course. aunt agatha always makes me feel as if i had gelatine where my spine ought to be. she's one of those forceful females. i should think queen elizabeth must have been something like her. when she holds me with her glittering eye and says, "jump to it, my lad," or words to that effect, i make it so without further discussion. when she had gone, i rang for jeeves to break the news to him. "oh, jeeves," i said, "mr. claude and mr. eustace will be staying here to-morrow night." "very good, sir." "i'm glad you think so. to me the outlook seems black and scaly. you know what those two lads are!" "very high-spirited young gentlemen, sir." "blisters, jeeves. undeniable blisters. it's a bit thick!" "would there be anything further, sir?" at that, i'm bound to say, i drew myself up a trifle haughtily. we woosters freeze like the dickens when we seek sympathy and meet with cold reserve. i knew what was up, of course. for the last day or so there had been a certain amount of coolness in the home over a pair of jazz spats which i had dug up while exploring in the burlington arcade. some dashed brainy cove, probably the chap who invented those coloured cigarette-cases, had recently had the rather topping idea of putting out a line of spats on the same system. i mean to say, instead of the ordinary grey and white, you can now get them in your regimental or school colours. and, believe me, it would have taken a chappie of stronger fibre than i am to resist the pair of old etonian spats which had smiled up at me from inside the window. i was inside the shop, opening negotiations, before it had even occurred to me that jeeves might not approve. and i must say he had taken the thing a bit hardly. the fact of the matter is, jeeves, though in many ways the best valet in london, is too conservative. hide-bound, if you know what i mean, and an enemy to progress. "nothing further, jeeves," i said, with quiet dignity. "very good, sir." he gave one frosty look at the spats and biffed off. dash him! * * * * * anything merrier and brighter than the twins, when they curveted into the old flat while i was dressing for dinner the next night, i have never struck in my whole puff. i'm only about half a dozen years older than claude and eustace, but in some rummy manner they always make me feel as if i were well on in the grandfather class and just waiting for the end. almost before i realised they were in the place, they had collared the best chairs, pinched a couple of my special cigarettes, poured themselves out a whisky-and-soda apiece, and started to prattle with the gaiety and abandon of two birds who had achieved their life's ambition instead of having come a most frightful purler and being under sentence of exile. "hallo, bertie, old thing," said claude. "jolly decent of you to put us up." "oh, no," i said. "only wish you were staying a good long time." "hear that, eustace? he wishes we were staying a good long time." "i expect it will seem a good long time," said eustace, philosophically. "you heard about the binge, bertie? our little bit of trouble, i mean?" "oh, yes. aunt agatha was telling me." "we leave our country for our country's good," said eustace. "and let there be no moaning at the bar," said claude, "when i put out to sea. what did aunt agatha tell you?" "she said you poured lemonade on the junior dean." "i wish the deuce," said claude, annoyed, "that people would get these things right. it wasn't the junior dean. it was the senior tutor." "and it wasn't lemonade," said eustace. "it was soda-water. the dear old thing happened to be standing just under our window while i was leaning out with a siphon in my hand. he looked up, and--well, it would have been chucking away the opportunity of a lifetime if i hadn't let him have it in the eyeball." "simply chucking it away," agreed claude. "might never have occurred again," said eustace. "hundred to one against it," said claude. "now what," said eustace, "do you propose to do, bertie, in the way of entertaining the handsome guests to-night?" "my idea was to have a bite of dinner in the flat," i said. "jeeves is getting it ready now." "and afterwards?" "well, i thought we might chat of this and that, and then it struck me that you would probably like to turn in early, as your train goes about ten or something, doesn't it?" the twins looked at each other in a pitying sort of way. "bertie," said eustace, "you've got the programme nearly right, but not quite. i envisage the evening's events thus: we will toddle along to ciro's after dinner. it's an extension night, isn't it? well, that will see us through till about two-thirty or three." "after which, no doubt," said claude, "the lord will provide." "but i thought you would want to get a good night's rest." "good night's rest!" said eustace. "my dear old chap, you don't for a moment imagine that we are dreaming of going to _bed_ to-night, do you?" i suppose the fact of the matter is, i'm not the man i was. i mean, these all-night vigils don't seem to fascinate me as they used to a few years ago. i can remember the time, when i was up at oxford, when a covent garden ball till six in the morning, with breakfast at the hammams and probably a free fight with a few selected costermongers to follow, seemed to me what the doctor ordered. but nowadays two o'clock is about my limit; and by two o'clock the twins were just settling down and beginning to go nicely. as far as i can remember, we went on from ciro's to play chemmy with some fellows i don't recall having met before, and it must have been about nine in the morning when we fetched up again at the flat. by which time, i'm bound to admit, as far as i was concerned the first careless freshness was beginning to wear off a bit. in fact, i'd got just enough strength to say good-bye to the twins, wish them a pleasant voyage and a happy and successful career in south africa, and stagger into bed. the last i remember was hearing the blighters chanting like larks under the cold shower, breaking off from time to time to shout to jeeves to rush along the eggs and bacon. it must have been about one in the afternoon when i woke. i was feeling more or less like something the pure food committee had rejected, but there was one bright thought which cheered me up, and that was that about now the twins would be leaning on the rail of the liner, taking their last glimpse of the dear old homeland. which made it all the more of a shock when the door opened and claude walked in. "hallo, bertie!" said claude. "had a nice refreshing sleep? now, what about a good old bite of lunch?" i'd been having so many distorted nightmares since i had dropped off to sleep that for half a minute i thought this was simply one more of them, and the worst of the lot. it was only when claude sat down on my feet that i got on to the fact that this was stern reality. "great scott! what on earth are you doing here?" i gurgled. claude looked at me reproachfully. "hardly the tone i like to hear in a host, bertie," he said reprovingly. "why, it was only last night that you were saying you wished i was stopping a good long time. your dream has come true. i am!" "but why aren't you on your way to south africa?" "now that," said claude, "is a point i rather thought you would want to have explained. it's like this, old man. you remember that girl you introduced me to at ciro's last night?" "which girl?" "there was only one," said claude coldly. "only one that counted, that is to say. her name was marion wardour. i danced with her a good deal, if you remember." i began to recollect in a hazy sort of way. marion wardour has been a pal of mine for some time. a very good sort. she's playing in that show at the apollo at the moment. i remembered now that she had been at ciro's with a party the night before, and the twins had insisted on being introduced. "we are soul-mates, bertie," said claude. "i found it out quite early in the p.m., and the more thought i've given to the matter the more convinced i've become. it happens like that now and then, you know. two hearts that beat as one, i mean, and all that sort of thing. so the long and the short of it is that i gave old eustace the slip at waterloo and slid back here. the idea of going to south africa and leaving a girl like that in england doesn't appeal to me a bit. i'm all for thinking imperially and giving the colonies a leg-up and all that sort of thing; but it can't be done. after all," said claude reasonably, "south africa has got along all right without me up till now, so why shouldn't it stick it?" "but what about van alstyne, or whatever his name is? he'll be expecting you to turn up." "oh, he'll have eustace. that'll satisfy him. very sound fellow, eustace. probably end up by being a magnate of some kind. i shall watch his future progress with considerable interest. and now you must excuse me for a moment, bertie. i want to go and hunt up jeeves and get him to mix me one of those pick-me-ups of his. for some reason which i can't explain, i've got a slight headache this morning." and, believe me or believe me not, the door had hardly closed behind him when in blew eustace with a shining morning face that made me ill to look at. "oh, my aunt!" i said. eustace started to giggle pretty freely. "smooth work, bertie, smooth work!" he said. "i'm sorry for poor old claude, but there was no alternative. i eluded his vigilance at waterloo and snaked off in a taxi. i suppose the poor old ass is wondering where the deuce i've got to. but it couldn't be helped. if you really seriously expected me to go slogging off to south africa, you shouldn't have introduced me to miss wardour last night. i want to tell you all about that, bertie. i'm not a man," said eustace, sitting down on the bed, "who falls in love with every girl he sees. i suppose 'strong, silent,' would be the best description you could find for me. but when i do meet my affinity i don't waste time. i----" "oh, heaven! are you in love with marion wardour, too?" "too? what do you mean, 'too'?" i was going to tell him about claude, when the blighter came in in person, looking like a giant refreshed. there's no doubt that jeeves's pick-me-ups will produce immediate results in anything short of an egyptian mummy. it's something he puts in them--the worcester sauce or something. claude had revived like a watered flower, but he nearly had a relapse when he saw his bally brother goggling at him over the bed-rail. "what on earth are you doing here?" he said. "what on earth are _you_ doing here?" said eustace. "have you come back to inflict your beastly society upon miss wardour?" "is that why you've come back?" they thrashed the subject out a bit further. "well," said claude at last. "i suppose it can't be helped. if you're here, you're here. may the best man win!" "yes, but dash it all!" i managed to put in at this point. "what's the idea? where do you think you're going to stay if you stick on in london?" "why, here," said eustace, surprised. "where else?" said claude, raising his eyebrows. "you won't object to putting us up, bertie?" said eustace. "not a sportsman like you," said claude. "but, you silly asses, suppose aunt agatha finds out that i'm hiding you when you ought to be in south africa? where do i get off?" "where _does_ he get off?" claude asked eustace. "oh, i expect he'll manage somehow," said eustace to claude. "of course," said claude, quite cheered up. "_he_'ll manage." "rather!" said eustace. "a resourceful chap like bertie! of course he will." "and now," said claude, shelving the subject, "what about that bite of lunch we were discussing a moment ago, bertie? that stuff good old jeeves slipped into me just now has given me what you might call an appetite. something in the nature of six chops and a batter pudding would about meet the case, i think." i suppose every chappie in the world has black periods in his life to which he can't look back without the smouldering eye and the silent shudder. some coves, if you can judge by the novels you read nowadays, have them practically all the time; but, what with enjoying a sizable private income and a topping digestion, i'm bound to say it isn't very often i find my own existence getting a flat tyre. that's why this particular epoch is one that i don't think about more often than i can help. for the days that followed the unexpected resurrection of the blighted twins were so absolutely foul that the old nerves began to stick out of my body a foot long and curling at the ends. all of a twitter, believe me. i imagine the fact of the matter is that we woosters are so frightfully honest and open and all that, that it gives us the pip to have to deceive. all was quiet along the potomac for about twenty-four hours, and then aunt agatha trickled in to have a chat. twenty minutes earlier and she would have found the twins gaily shoving themselves outside a couple of rashers and an egg. she sank into a chair, and i could see that she was not in her usual sunny spirits. "bertie," she said, "i am uneasy." so was i. i didn't know how long she intended to stop, or when the twins were coming back. "i wonder," she said, "if i took too harsh a view towards claude and eustace." "you couldn't." "what do you mean?" "i--er--mean it would be so unlike you to be harsh to anybody, aunt agatha." and not bad, either. i mean, quick--like that--without thinking. it pleased the old relative, and she looked at me with slightly less loathing than she usually does. "it is nice of you to say that, bertie, but what i was thinking was, are they _safe_?" "are they _what_?" it seemed such a rummy adjective to apply to the twins, they being about as innocuous as a couple of sprightly young tarantulas. "do you think all is well with them?" "how do you mean?" aunt agatha eyed me almost wistfully. "has it ever occurred to you, bertie," she said, "that your uncle george may be psychic?" she seemed to me to be changing the subject. "psychic?" "do you think it is possible that he could _see_ things not visible to the normal eye?" i thought it dashed possible, if not probable. i don't know if you've ever met my uncle george. he's a festive old egg who wanders from club to club continually having a couple with other festive old eggs. when he heaves in sight, waiters brace themselves up and the wine-steward toys with his corkscrew. it was my uncle george who discovered that alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought. "your uncle george was dining with me last night, and he was quite shaken. he declares that, while on his way from the devonshire club to boodle's he suddenly saw the phantasm of eustace." "the what of eustace?" "the phantasm. the wraith. it was so clear that he thought for an instant that it was eustace himself. the figure vanished round a corner, and when uncle george got there nothing was to be seen. it is all very queer and disturbing. it had a marked effect on poor george. all through dinner he touched nothing but barley-water, and his manner was quite disturbed. you do think those poor, dear boys are safe, bertie? they have not met with some horrible accident?" it made my mouth water to think of it, but i said no, i didn't think they had met with any horrible accident. i thought eustace _was_ a horrible accident, and claude about the same, but i didn't say so. and presently she biffed off, still worried. when the twins came in, i put it squarely to the blighters. jolly as it was to give uncle george shocks, they must not wander at large about the metrop. "but, my dear old soul," said claude. "be reasonable. we can't have our movements hampered." "out of the question," said eustace. "the whole essence of the thing, if you understand me," said claude, "is that we should be at liberty to flit hither and thither." "exactly," said eustace. "now hither, now thither." "but, damn it----" "bertie!" said eustace reprovingly. "not before the boy!" "of course, in a way i see his point," said claude. "i suppose the solution of the problem would be to buy a couple of disguises." "my dear old chap!" said eustace, looking at him with admiration. "the brightest idea on record. not your own, surely?" "well, as a matter of fact, it was bertie who put it into my head." "me!" "you were telling me the other day about old bingo little and the beard he bought when he didn't want his uncle to recognise him." "if you think i'm going to have you two excrescences popping in and out of my flat in beards----" "something in that," agreed eustace. "we'll make it whiskers, then." "and false noses," said claude. "and, as you say, false noses. right-o, then, bertie, old chap, that's a load off your mind. we don't want to be any trouble to you while we're paying you this little visit." and, when i went buzzing round to jeeves for consolation, all he would say was something about young blood. no sympathy. "very good, jeeves," i said. "i shall go for a walk in the park. kindly put me out the old etonian spats." "very good, sir." * * * * * it must have been a couple of days after that that marion wardour rolled in at about the hour of tea. she looked warily round the room before sitting down. "your cousins not at home, bertie?" she said. "no, thank goodness!" "then i'll tell you where they are. they're in my sitting-room, glaring at each other from opposite corners, waiting for me to come in. bertie, this has got to stop." "you're seeing a good deal of them, are you?" jeeves came in with the tea, but the poor girl was so worked up that she didn't wait for him to pop off before going on with her complaint. she had an absolutely hunted air, poor thing. "i can't move a step without tripping over one or both of them," she said. "generally both. they've taken to calling together, and they just settle down grimly and try to sit each other out. it's wearing me to a shadow." "i know," i said sympathetically. "i know." "well, what's to be done?" "it beats me. couldn't you tell your maid to say you are not at home?" she shuddered slightly. "i tried that once. they camped on the stairs, and i couldn't get out all the afternoon. and i had a lot of particularly important engagements. i wish you would persuade them to go to south africa, where they seem to be wanted." "you must have made the dickens of an impression on them." "i should say i have. they've started giving me presents now. at least, claude has. he insisted on my accepting this cigarette-case last night. came round to the theatre and wouldn't go away till i took it. it's not a bad one, i must say." it wasn't. it was a distinctly fruity concern in gold with a diamond stuck in the middle. and the rummy thing was that i had a notion i'd seen something very like it before somewhere. how the deuce claude had been able to dig up the cash to buy a thing like that was more than i could imagine. next day was a wednesday, and as the object of their devotion had a _matinée_, the twins were, so to speak, off duty. claude had gone with his whiskers on to hurst park, and eustace and i were in the flat, talking. at least, he was talking and i was wishing he would go. "the love of a good woman, bertie," he was saying, "must be a wonderful thing. sometimes---- good lord! what's that?" the front door had opened, and from out in the hall there came the sound of aunt agatha's voice asking if i was in. aunt agatha has one of those high, penetrating voices, but this was the first time i'd ever been thankful for it. there was just about two seconds to clear the way for her, but it was long enough for eustace to dive under the sofa. his last shoe had just disappeared when she came in. she had a worried look. it seemed to me about this time that everybody had. "bertie," she said, "what are your immediate plans?" "how do you mean? i'm dining to-night with----" "no, no, i don't mean to-night. are you busy for the next few days? but, of course you are not," she went on, not waiting for me to answer. "you never have anything to do. your whole life is spent in idle--but we can go into that later. what i came for this afternoon was to tell you that i wish you to go with your poor uncle george to harrogate for a few weeks. the sooner you can start, the better." this appeared to me to approximate so closely to the frozen limit that i uttered a yelp of protest. uncle george is all right, but he won't do. i was trying to say as much when she waved me down. "if you are not entirely heartless, bertie, you will do as i ask you. your poor uncle george has had a severe shock." "what, another!" "he feels that only complete rest and careful medical attendance can restore his nervous system to its normal poise. it seems that in the past he has derived benefit from taking the waters at harrogate, and he wishes to go there now. we do not think he ought to be alone, so i wish you to accompany him." "but, i say!" "bertie!" there was a lull in the conversation. "what shock has he had?" i asked. "between ourselves," said aunt agatha, lowering her voice in an impressive manner, "i incline to think that the whole affair was the outcome of an over-excited imagination. you are one of the family, bertie, and i can speak freely to you. you know as well as i do that your poor uncle george has for many years _not_ been a--he has--er--developed a habit of--how shall i put it?" "shifting it a bit?" "i beg your pardon?" "mopping up the stuff to some extent?" "i dislike your way of putting it exceedingly, but i must confess that he has not been, perhaps, as temperate as he should. he is highly-strung, and---- well, the fact is, that he has had a shock." "yes, but what?" "that is what it is so hard to induce him to explain with any precision. with all his good points, your poor uncle george is apt to become incoherent when strongly moved. as far as i could gather, he appears to have been the victim of a burglary." "burglary!" "he says that a strange man with whiskers and a peculiar nose entered his rooms in jermyn street during his absence and stole some of his property. he says that he came back and found the man in his sitting-room. he immediately rushed out of the room and disappeared." "uncle george?" "no, the man. and, according to your uncle george, he had stolen a valuable cigarette-case. but, as i say, i am inclined to think that the whole thing was imagination. he has not been himself since the day when he fancied that he saw eustace in the street. so i should like you, bertie, to be prepared to start for harrogate with him not later than saturday." she popped off, and eustace crawled out from under the sofa. the blighter was strongly moved. so was i, for the matter of that. the idea of several weeks with uncle george at harrogate seemed to make everything go black. "so that's where he got that cigarette-case, dash him!" said eustace bitterly. "of all the dirty tricks! robbing his own flesh and blood! the fellow ought to be in chokey." "he ought to be in south africa," i said. "and so ought you." and with an eloquence which rather surprised me, i hauled up my slacks for perhaps ten minutes on the subject of his duty to his family and what not. i appealed to his sense of decency. i boosted south africa with vim. i said everything i could think of, much of it twice over. but all the blighter did was to babble about his dashed brother's baseness in putting one over on him in the matter of the cigarette-case. he seemed to think that claude, by slinging in the handsome gift, had got right ahead of him; and there was a painful scene when the latter came back from hurst park. i could hear them talking half the night, long after i had tottered off to bed. i don't know when i've met fellows who could do with less sleep than those two. * * * * * after this, things became a bit strained at the flat owing to claude and eustace not being on speaking terms. i'm all for a certain chumminess in the home, and it was wearing to have to live with two fellows who wouldn't admit that the other one was on the map at all. one felt the thing couldn't go on like that for long, and, by jove, it didn't. but, if anyone had come to me the day before and told me what was going to happen, i should simply have smiled wanly. i mean, i'd got so accustomed to thinking that nothing short of a dynamite explosion could ever dislodge those two nestlers from my midst that, when claude sidled up to me on the friday morning and told me his bit of news, i could hardly believe i was hearing right. "bertie," he said, "i've been thinking it over." "what over?" i said. "the whole thing. this business of staying in london when i ought to be in south africa. it isn't fair," said claude warmly. "it isn't right. and the long and the short of it is, bertie, old man, i'm leaving to-morrow." i reeled in my tracks. "you are?" i gasped. "yes. if," said claude, "you won't mind sending old jeeves out to buy a ticket for me. i'm afraid i'll have to stick you for the passage money, old man. you don't mind?" "mind!" i said, clutching his hand fervently. "that's all right, then. oh, i say, you won't say a word to eustace about this, will you?" "but isn't he going, too?" claude shuddered. "no, thank heaven! the idea of being cooped up on board a ship with that blighter gives me the pip just to think of it. no, not a word to eustace. i say, i suppose you can get me a berth all right at such short notice?" "rather!" i said. sooner than let this opportunity slip, i would have bought the bally boat. "jeeves," i said, breezing into the kitchen. "go out on first speed to the union-castle offices and book a berth on to-morrow's boat for mr. claude. he is leaving us, jeeves." "yes, sir." "mr. claude does not wish any mention of this to be made to mr. eustace." "no, sir. mr. eustace made the same proviso when he desired me to obtain a berth on to-morrow's boat for himself." i gaped at the man. "is he going, too?" "yes, sir." "this is rummy." "yes, sir." had circumstances been other than they were, i would at this juncture have unbent considerably towards jeeves. frisked round him a bit and whooped to a certain extent, and what not. but those spats still formed a barrier, and i regret to say that i took the opportunity of rather rubbing it in a bit on the man. i mean, he'd been so dashed aloof and unsympathetic, though perfectly aware that the young master was in the soup and that it was up to him to rally round, that i couldn't help pointing out how the happy ending had been snaffled without any help from him. "so that's that, jeeves," i said. "the episode is concluded. i knew things would sort themselves out if one gave them time and didn't get rattled. many chaps in my place would have got rattled, jeeves." "yes, sir." "gone rushing about, i mean, asking people for help and advice and so forth." "very possibly, sir." "but not me, jeeves." "no, sir." i left him to brood on it. * * * * * even the thought that i'd got to go to harrogate with uncle george couldn't depress me that saturday when i gazed about the old flat and realised that claude and eustace weren't in it. they had slunk off stealthily and separately immediately after breakfast, eustace to catch the boat-train at waterloo, claude to go round to the garage where i kept my car. i didn't want any chance of the two meeting at waterloo and changing their minds, so i had suggested to claude that he might find it pleasanter to drive down to southampton. i was lying back on the old settee, gazing peacefully up at the flies on the ceiling and feeling what a wonderful world this was, when jeeves came in with a letter. "a messenger-boy has brought this, sir." i opened the envelope, and the first thing that fell out was a five-pound note. "great scott!" i said. "what's all this?" the letter was scribbled in pencil, and was quite brief: _dear bertie,--will you give enclosed to your man, and tell him i wish i could make it more. he has saved my life. this is the first happy day i've had for a week._ _yours_, m. w. jeeves was standing holding out the fiver, which had fluttered to the floor. "you'd better stick to it," i said. "it seems to be for you." "sir?" "i say that fiver is for you, apparently. miss wardour sent it." "that was extremely kind of her, sir." "what the dickens is she sending you fivers for? she says you saved her life." jeeves smiled gently. "she over-estimates my services, sir." "but what _were_ your services, dash it?" "it was in the matter of mr. claude and mr. eustace, sir. i was hoping that she would not refer to the matter, as i did not wish you to think that i had been taking a liberty." "what do you mean?" "i chanced to be in the room while miss wardour was complaining with some warmth of the manner in which mr. claude and mr. eustace were thrusting their society upon her. i felt that in the circumstances it might be excusable if i suggested a slight ruse to enable her to dispense with their attentions." "good lord! you don't mean to say you were at the bottom of their popping off, after all!" silly ass it made me feel. i mean, after rubbing it in to him like that about having clicked without his assistance. "it occurred to me that, were miss wardour to inform mr. claude and mr. eustace independently that she proposed sailing for south africa to take up a theatrical engagement, the desired effect might be produced. it appears that my anticipations were correct, sir. the young gentlemen ate it, if i may use the expression." "jeeves," i said--we woosters may make bloomers, but we are never too proud to admit it--"you stand alone!" "thank you very much, sir." "oh, but i say!" a ghastly thought had struck me. "when they get on the boat and find she isn't there, won't they come buzzing back?" "i anticipated that possibility, sir. at my suggestion, miss wardour informed the young gentlemen that she proposed to travel overland to madeira and join the vessel there." "and where do they touch after madeira?" "nowhere, sir." for a moment i just lay back, letting the idea of the thing soak in. there seemed to me to be only one flaw. "the only pity is," i said, "that on a large boat like that they will be able to avoid each other. i mean, i should have liked to feel that claude was having a good deal of eustace's society and _vice versa_." "i fancy that that will be so, sir. i secured a two-berth stateroom. mr. claude will occupy one berth, mr. eustace the other." i sighed with pure ecstasy. it seemed a dashed shame that on this joyful occasion i should have to go off to harrogate with my uncle george. "have you started packing yet, jeeves?" i asked. "packing, sir?" "for harrogate. i've got to go there to-day with sir george." "of course, yes, sir. i forgot to mention it. sir george rang up on the telephone this morning while you were still asleep, and said that he had changed his plans. he does not intend to go to harrogate." "oh, i say, how absolutely topping!" "i thought you might be pleased, sir." "what made him change his plans? did he say?" "no, sir. but i gather from his man, stevens, that he is feeling much better and does not now require a rest-cure. i took the liberty of giving stevens the recipe for that pick-me-up of mine, of which you have always approved so much. stevens tells me that sir george informed him this morning that he is feeling a new man." well, there was only one thing to do, and i did it. i'm not saying it didn't hurt, but there was no alternative. "jeeves," i said, "those spats." "yes, sir?" "you really dislike them?" "intensely, sir." "you don't think time might induce you to change your views?" "no, sir." "all right, then. very well. say no more. you may burn them." "thank you very much, sir. i have already done so. before breakfast this morning. a quiet grey is far more suitable, sir. thank you, sir." chapter xvii bingo and the little woman it must have been a week or so after the departure of claude and eustace that i ran into young bingo little in the smoking-room of the senior liberal club. he was lying back in an arm-chair with his mouth open and a sort of goofy expression in his eyes, while a grey-bearded cove in the middle distance watched him with so much dislike that i concluded that bingo had pinched his favourite seat. that's the worst of being in a strange club--absolutely without intending it, you find yourself constantly trampling upon the vested interests of the oldest inhabitants. "hallo, face," i said. "cheerio, ugly," said young bingo, and we settled down to have a small one before lunch. once a year the committee of the drones decides that the old club could do with a wash and brush-up, so they shoo us out and dump us down for a few weeks at some other institution. this time we were roosting at the senior liberal, and personally i had found the strain pretty fearful. i mean, when you've got used to a club where everything's nice and cheery, and where, if you want to attract a chappie's attention, you heave a bit of bread at him, it kind of damps you to come to a place where the youngest member is about eighty-seven and it isn't considered good form to talk to anyone unless you and he were through the peninsular war together. it was a relief to come across bingo. we started to talk in hushed voices. "this club," i said, "is the limit." "it is the eel's eyebrows," agreed young bingo. "i believe that old boy over by the window has been dead three days, but i don't like to mention it to anyone." "have you lunched here yet?" "no. why?" "they have waitresses instead of waiters." "good lord! i thought that went out with the armistice." bingo mused a moment, straightening his tie absently. "er--pretty girls?" he said. "no." he seemed disappointed, but pulled round. "well, i've heard that the cooking's the best in london." "so they say. shall we be going in?" "all right. i expect," said young bingo, "that at the end of the meal--or possibly at the beginning--the waitress will say, 'both together, sir?' reply in the affirmative. i haven't a bean." "hasn't your uncle forgiven you yet?" "not yet, confound him!" i was sorry to hear the row was still on. i resolved to do the poor old thing well at the festive board, and i scanned the menu with some intentness when the girl rolled up with it. "how would this do you, bingo?" i said at length. "a few plovers' eggs to weigh in with, a cup of soup, a touch of cold salmon, some cold curry, and a splash of gooseberry tart and cream with a bite of cheese to finish?" i don't know that i had expected the man actually to scream with delight, though i had picked the items from my knowledge of his pet dishes, but i had expected him to say something. i looked up, and found that his attention was elsewhere. he was gazing at the waitress with the look of a dog that's just remembered where its bone was buried. she was a tallish girl with sort of soft, soulful brown eyes. nice figure and all that. rather decent hands, too. i didn't remember having seen her about before, and i must say she raised the standard of the place quite a bit. "how about it, laddie?" i said, being all for getting the order booked and going on to the serious knife-and-fork work. "eh?" said young bingo absently. i recited the programme once more. "oh, yes, fine!" said bingo. "anything, anything." the girl pushed off, and he turned to me with protruding eyes. "i thought you said they weren't pretty, bertie!" he said reproachfully. "oh, my heavens!" i said. "you surely haven't fallen in love again--and with a girl you've only just seen?" "there are times, bertie," said young bingo, "when a look is enough--when, passing through a crowd, we meet somebody's eye and something seems to whisper...." at this point the plovers' eggs arrived, and he suspended his remarks in order to swoop on them with some vigour. "jeeves," i said that night when i got home, "stand by." "sir?" "burnish the old brain and be alert and vigilant. i suspect that mr. little will be calling round shortly for sympathy and assistance." "is mr. little in trouble, sir?" "well, you might call it that. he's in love. for about the fifty-third time. i ask you, jeeves, as man to man, did you ever see such a chap?" "mr. little is certainly warm-hearted, sir." "warm-hearted! i should think he has to wear asbestos vests. well, stand by, jeeves." "very good, sir." and sure enough, it wasn't ten days before in rolled the old ass, bleating for volunteers to step one pace forward and come to the aid of the party. "bertie," he said, "if you are a pal of mine, now is the time to show it." "proceed, old gargoyle," i replied. "you have our ear." "you remember giving me lunch at the senior liberal some days ago. we were waited on by a----" "i remember. tall, lissom female." he shuddered somewhat. "i wish you wouldn't talk of her like that, dash it all. she's an angel." "all right. carry on." "i love her." "right-o! push along." "for goodness sake don't bustle me. let me tell the story in my own way. i love her, as i was saying, and i want you, bertie, old boy, to pop round to my uncle and do a bit of diplomatic work. that allowance of mine must be restored, and dashed quick, too. what's more, it must be increased." "but look here," i said, being far from keen on the bally business, "why not wait awhile?" "wait? what's the good of waiting?" "well, you know what generally happens when you fall in love. something goes wrong with the works and you get left. much better tackle your uncle after the whole thing's fixed and settled." "it _is_ fixed and settled. she accepted me this morning." "good lord! that's quick work. you haven't known her two weeks." "not in this life, no," said young bingo. "but she has a sort of idea that we must have met in some previous existence. she thinks i must have been a king in babylon when she was a christian slave. i can't say i remember it myself, but there may be something in it." "great scott!" i said. "do waitresses really talk like that?" "how should _i_ know how waitresses talk?" "well, you ought to by now. the first time i ever met your uncle was when you hounded me on to ask him if he would rally round to help you marry that girl mabel in the piccadilly bun-shop." bingo started violently. a wild gleam came into his eyes. and before i knew what he was up to he had brought down his hand with a most frightful whack on my summer trousering, causing me to leap like a young ram. "here!" i said. "sorry," said bingo. "excited. carried away. you've given me an idea, bertie." he waited till i had finished massaging the limb, and resumed his remarks. "can you throw your mind back to that occasion, bertie? do you remember the frightfully subtle scheme i worked? telling him you were what's-her-name, the woman who wrote those books, i mean?" it wasn't likely i'd forget. the ghastly thing was absolutely seared into my memory. "that is the line of attack," said bingo. "that is the scheme. rosie m. banks forward once more." "it can't be done, old thing. sorry, but it's out of the question. i couldn't go through all that again." "not for me?" "not for a dozen more like you." "i never thought," said bingo sorrowfully, "to hear those words from bertie wooster!" "well, you've heard them now," i said. "paste them in your hat." "bertie, we were at school together." "it wasn't my fault." "we've been pals for fifteen years." "i know. it's going to take me the rest of my life to live it down." "bertie, old man," said bingo, drawing up his chair closer and starting to knead my shoulder-blade, "listen! be reasonable!" and of course, dash it, at the end of ten minutes i'd allowed the blighter to talk me round. it's always the way. anyone can talk me round. if i were in a trappist monastery, the first thing that would happen would be that some smooth performer would lure me into some frightful idiocy against my better judgment by means of the deaf-and-dumb language. "well, what do you want me to do?" i said, realising that it was hopeless to struggle. "start off by sending the old boy an autographed copy of your latest effort with a flattering inscription. that will tickle him to death. then you pop round and put it across." "what _is_ my latest?" "'the woman who braved all,'" said young bingo. "i've seen it all over the place. the shop windows and bookstalls are full of nothing but it. it looks to me from the picture on the jacket the sort of book any chappie would be proud to have written. of course, he will want to discuss it with you." "ah!" i said, cheering up. "that dishes the scheme, doesn't it? i don't know what the bally thing is about." "you will have to read it, naturally." "read it! no, i say...." "bertie, we were at school together." "oh, right-o! right-o!" i said. "i knew i could rely on you. you have a heart of gold. jeeves," said young bingo, as the faithful servitor rolled in, "mr. wooster has a heart of gold." "very good, sir," said jeeves. bar a weekly wrestle with the pink 'un and an occasional dip into the form book i'm not much of a lad for reading, and my sufferings as i tackled "the woman" (curse her!) "who braved all" were pretty fearful. but i managed to get through it, and only just in time, as it happened, for i'd hardly reached the bit where their lips met in one long, slow kiss and everything was still but for the gentle sighing of the breeze in the laburnum, when a messenger boy brought a note from old bittlesham asking me to trickle round to lunch. i found the old boy in a mood you could only describe as melting. he had a copy of the book on the table beside him and kept turning the pages in the intervals of dealing with things in aspic and what not. "mr. wooster," he said, swallowing a chunk of trout, "i wish to congratulate you. i wish to thank you. you go from strength to strength. i have read 'all for love'; i have read 'only a factory girl'; i know 'madcap myrtle' by heart. but this--this is your bravest and best. it tears the heartstrings." "yes?" "indeed yes! i have read it three times since you most kindly sent me the volume--i wish to thank you once more for the charming inscription--and i think i may say that i am a better, sweeter, deeper man. i am full of human charity and kindliness toward my species." "no, really?" "indeed, indeed i am." "towards the whole species?" "towards the whole species." "even young bingo?" i said, trying him pretty high. "my nephew? richard?" he looked a bit thoughtful, but stuck it like a man and refused to hedge. "yes, even towards richard. well ... that is to say ... perhaps ... yes, even towards richard." "that's good, because i wanted to talk about him. he's pretty hard up, you know." "in straitened circumstances?" "stoney. and he could use a bit of the right stuff paid every quarter, if you felt like unbelting." he mused awhile and got through a slab of cold guinea hen before replying. he toyed with the book, and it fell open at page two hundred and fifteen. i couldn't remember what was on page two hundred and fifteen, but it must have been something tolerably zippy, for his expression changed and he gazed up at me with misty eyes, as if he'd taken a shade too much mustard with his last bite of ham. "very well, mr. wooster," he said. "fresh from a perusal of this noble work of yours, i cannot harden my heart. richard shall have his allowance." "stout fellow!" i said. then it occurred to me that the expression might strike a chappie who weighed seventeen stone as a bit personal. "good egg, i mean. that'll take a weight off his mind. he wants to get married, you know." "i did not know. and i am not sure that i altogether approve. who is the lady?" "well, as a matter of fact, she's a waitress." he leaped in his seat. "you don't say so, mr. wooster! this is remarkable. this is most cheering. i had not given the boy credit for such tenacity of purpose. an excellent trait in him which i had not hitherto suspected. i recollect clearly that, on the occasion when i first had the pleasure of making your acquaintance, nearly eighteen months ago, richard was desirous of marrying this same waitress." i had to break it to him. "well, not absolutely this same waitress. in fact, quite a different waitress. still, a waitress, you know." the light of avuncular affection died out of the old boy's eyes. "h'm!" he said a bit dubiously. "i had supposed that richard was displaying the quality of constancy which is so rare in the modern young man. i--i must think it over." so we left it at that, and i came away and told bingo the position of affairs. "allowance o.k.," i said. "uncle blessing a trifle wobbly." "doesn't he seem to want the wedding bells to ring out?" "i left him thinking it over. if i were a bookie, i should feel justified in offering a hundred to eight against." "you can't have approached him properly. i might have known you would muck it up," said young bingo. which, considering what i had been through for his sake, struck me as a good bit sharper than a serpent's tooth. "it's awkward," said young bingo. "it's infernally awkward. i can't tell you all the details at the moment, but ... yes, it's awkward." he helped himself absently to a handful of my cigars and pushed off. i didn't see him again for three days. early in the afternoon of the third day he blew in with a flower in his buttonhole and a look on his face as if someone had hit him behind the ear with a stuffed eel skin. "hallo, bertie." "hallo, old turnip. where have you been all this while?" "oh, here and there! ripping weather we're having, bertie." "not bad." "i see the bank rate is down again." "no, really?" "disturbing news from lower silesia, what?" "oh, dashed!" he pottered about the room for a bit, babbling at intervals. the boy seemed cuckoo. "oh, i say, bertie!" he said suddenly, dropping a vase which he had picked off the mantelpiece and was fiddling with. "i know what it was i wanted to tell you. i'm married." chapter xviii all's well i stared at him. that flower in his buttonhole.... that dazed look.... yes, he had all the symptoms; and yet the thing seemed incredible. the fact is, i suppose, i'd seen so many of young bingo's love affairs start off with a whoop and a rattle and poof themselves out half-way down the straight that i couldn't believe he had actually brought it off at last. "married!" "yes. this morning at a registrar's in holburn. i've just come from the wedding breakfast." i sat up in my chair. alert. the man of affairs. it seemed to me that this thing wanted threshing out in all its aspects. "let's get this straight," i said. "you're really married?" "yes." "the same girl you were in love with the day before yesterday?" "what do you mean?" "well, you know what you're like. tell me, what made you commit this rash act?" "i wish the deuce you wouldn't talk like that. i married her because i love her, dash it. the best little woman," said young bingo, "in the world." "that's all right, and deuced creditable, i'm sure. but have you reflected what your uncle's going to say? the last i saw of him, he was by no means in a confetti-scattering mood." "bertie," said bingo, "i'll be frank with you. the little woman rather put it up to me, if you know what i mean. i told her how my uncle felt about it, and she said that we must part unless i loved her enough to brave the old boy's wrath and marry her right away. so i had no alternative. i bought a buttonhole and went to it." "and what do you propose to do now?" "oh, i've got it all planned out! after you've seen my uncle and broken the news...." "what!" "after you've...." "you don't mean to say you think you're going to lug _me_ into it?" he looked at me like lilian gish coming out of a swoon. "is this bertie wooster talking?" he said, pained. "yes, it jolly well is." "bertie, old man," said bingo, patting me gently here and there, "reflect! we were at school----" "oh, all right!" "good man! i knew i could rely on you. she's waiting down below in the hall. we'll pick her up and dash round to pounceby gardens right away." i had only seen the bride before in her waitress kit, and i was rather expecting that on her wedding day she would have launched out into something fairly zippy in the way of upholstery. the first gleam of hope i had felt since the start of this black business came to me when i saw that, instead of being all velvet and scent and flowery hat, she was dressed in dashed good taste. quiet. nothing loud. so far as looks went, she might have stepped straight out of berkeley square. "this is my old pal, bertie wooster, darling," said bingo. "we were at school together, weren't we, bertie?" "we were!" i said. "how do you do? i think we--er--met at lunch the other day, didn't we?" "oh, yes! how do you do?" "my uncle eats out of bertie's hand," explained bingo. "so he's coming round with us to start things off and kind of pave the way. hi, taxi!" we didn't talk much on the journey. kind of tense feeling. i was glad when the cab stopped at old bittlesham's wigwam and we all hopped out. i left bingo and wife in the hall while i went upstairs to the drawing-room, and the butler toddled off to dig out the big chief. while i was prowling about the room waiting for him to show up, i suddenly caught sight of that bally "woman who braved all" lying on one of the tables. it was open at page two hundred and fifteen, and a passage heavily marked in pencil caught my eye. and directly i read it i saw that it was all to the mustard and was going to help me in my business. this was the passage: _"what can prevail"--millicent's eyes flashed as she faced the stern old man--"what can prevail against a pure and all-consuming love? neither principalities nor powers, my lord, nor all the puny prohibitions of guardians and parents. i love your son, lord mindermere, and nothing can keep us apart. since time first began this love of ours was fated, and who are you to pit yourself against the decrees of fate?"_ _the earl looked at her keenly from beneath his bushy eyebrows._ _"humph!" he said._ before i had time to refresh my memory as to what millicent's come-back had been to that remark, the door opened and old bittlesham rolled in. all over me, as usual. "my dear mr. wooster, this is an unexpected pleasure. pray take a seat. what can i do for you?" "well, the fact is, i'm more or less in the capacity of a jolly old ambassador at the moment. representing young bingo, you know." his geniality sagged a trifle, i thought, but he didn't heave me out, so i pushed on. "the way i always look at it," i said, "is that it's dashed difficult for anything to prevail against what you might call a pure and all-consuming love. i mean, can it be done? i doubt it." my eyes didn't exactly flash as i faced the stern old man, but i sort of waggled my eyebrows. he puffed a bit and looked doubtful. "we discussed this matter at our last meeting, mr. wooster. and on that occasion...." "yes. but there have been developments, as it were, since then. the fact of the matter is," i said, coming to the point, "this morning young bingo went and jumped off the dock." "good heavens!" he jerked himself to his feet with his mouth open. "why? where? which dock?" i saw that he wasn't quite on. "i was speaking metaphorically," i explained, "if that's the word i want. i mean he got married." "married!" "absolutely hitched up. i hope you aren't ratty about it, what? young blood, you know. two loving hearts, and all that." he panted in a rather overwrought way. "i am greatly disturbed by your news. i--i consider that i have been--er--defied. yes, defied." "but who are you to pit yourself against the decrees of fate?" i said, taking a look at the prompt book out of the corner of my eye. "eh?" "you see, this love of theirs was fated. since time began, you know." i'm bound to admit that if he'd said "humph!" at this juncture, he would have had me stymied. luckily it didn't occur to him. there was a silence, during which he appeared to brood a bit. then his eye fell on the book and he gave a sort of start. "why, bless my soul, mr. wooster, you have been quoting!" "more or less." "i thought your words sounded familiar." his whole appearance changed and he gave a sort of gurgling chuckle. "dear me, dear me, you know my weak spot!" he picked up the book and buried himself in it for quite a while. i began to think he had forgotten i was there. after a bit, however, he put it down again, and wiped his eyes. "ah, well!" he said. i shuffled my feet and hoped for the best. "ah, well," he said again. "i must not be like lord windermere, must i, mr. wooster? tell me, did you draw that haughty old man from a living model?" "oh, no! just thought of him and bunged him down, you know." "genius!" murmured old bittlesham. "genius! well, mr. wooster, you have won me over. who, as you say, am i to pit myself against the decrees of fate? i will write to richard to-night and inform him of my consent to his marriage." "you can slip him the glad news in person," i said. "he's waiting downstairs, with wife complete. i'll pop down and send them up. cheerio, and thanks very much. bingo will be most awfully bucked." i shot out and went downstairs. bingo and mrs. were sitting on a couple of chairs like patients in a dentist's waiting-room. "well?" said bingo eagerly. "all over except the hand-clasping," i replied, slapping the old crumpet on the back. "charge up and get matey. toodle-oo, old things. you know where to find me, if wanted. a thousand congratulations, and all that sort of rot." and i pipped, not wishing to be fawned upon. * * * * * you never can tell in this world. if ever i felt that something attempted, something done had earned a night's repose, it was when i got back to the flat and shoved my feet up on the mantelpiece and started to absorb the cup of tea which jeeves had brought in. used as i am to seeing life's sitters blow up in the home stretch and finish nowhere, i couldn't see any cause for alarm in this affair of young bingo's. all he had to do when i left him in pounceby gardens was to walk upstairs with the little missus and collect the blessing. i was so convinced of this that when, about half an hour later, he came galloping into my sitting-room, all i thought was that he wanted to thank me in broken accents and tell me what a good chap i had been. i merely beamed benevolently on the old creature as he entered, and was just going to offer him a cigarette when i observed that he seemed to have something on his mind. in fact, he looked as if something solid had hit him in the solar plexus. "my dear old soul," i said, "what's up?" bingo plunged about the room. "i _will_ be calm!" he said, knocking over an occasional table. "calm, dammit!" he upset a chair. "surely nothing has gone wrong?" bingo uttered one of those hollow, mirthless yelps. "only every bally thing that could go wrong. what do you think happened after you left us? you know that beastly book you insisted on sending my uncle?" it wasn't the way i should have put it myself, but i saw the poor old bean was upset for some reason or other, so i didn't correct him. "'the woman who braved all'?" i said. "it came in dashed useful. it was by quoting bits out of it that i managed to talk him round." "well, it didn't come in useful when we got into the room. it was lying on the table, and after we had started to chat a bit and everything was going along nicely the little woman spotted it. 'oh, have you read this, lord bittlesham?' she said. 'three times already,' said my uncle. 'i'm so glad,' said the little woman. 'why, are you also an admirer of rosie m. banks?' asked the old boy, beaming. 'i _am_ rosie m. banks!' said the little woman." "oh, my aunt! not really?" "yes." "but how could she be? i mean, dash it, she was slinging the foodstuffs at the senior liberal club." bingo gave the settee a moody kick. "she took the job to collect material for a book she's writing called 'mervyn keene, clubman.'" "she might have told you." "it made such a hit with her when she found that i loved her for herself alone, despite her humble station, that she kept it under her hat. she meant to spring it on me later on, she said." "well, what happened then?" "there was the dickens of a painful scene. the old boy nearly got apoplexy. called her an impostor. they both started talking at once at the top of their voices, and the thing ended with the little woman buzzing off to her publishers to collect proofs as a preliminary to getting a written apology from the old boy. what's going to happen now, i don't know. apart from the fact that my uncle will be as mad as a wet hen when he finds out that he has been fooled, there's going to be a lot of trouble when the little woman discovers that we worked the rosie m. banks wheeze with a view to trying to get me married to somebody else. you see, one of the things that first attracted her to me was the fact that i had never been in love before." "did you tell her that?" "yes." "great scott!" "well, i hadn't been ... not really in love. there's all the difference in the world between.... well, never mind that. what am i going to do? that's the point." "i don't know." "thanks," said young bingo. "that's a lot of help." * * * * * next morning he rang me up on the phone just after i'd got the bacon and eggs into my system--the one moment of the day, in short, when a chappie wishes to muse on life absolutely undisturbed. "bertie!" "hallo?" "things are hotting up." "what's happened now?" "my uncle has given the little woman's proofs the once-over and admits her claim. i've just been having five snappy minutes with him on the telephone. he says that you and i made a fool of him, and he could hardly speak, he was so shirty. still, he made it clear all right that my allowance has gone phut again." "i'm sorry." "don't waste time being sorry for me," said young bingo grimly. "he's coming to call on you to-day to demand a personal explanation." "great scott!" "and the little woman is coming to call on you to demand a personal explanation." "good lord!" "i shall watch your future career with some considerable interest," said young bingo. i bellowed for jeeves. "jeeves!" "sir?" "i'm in the soup." "indeed, sir?" i sketched out the scenario for him. "what would you advise?" "i think if i were you, sir, i would accept mr. pitt-waley's invitation immediately. if you remember, sir, he invited you to shoot with him in norfolk this week." "so he did! by jove, jeeves, you're always right. meet me at the station with my things the first train after lunch. i'll go and lie low at the club for the rest of the morning." "would you require my company on this visit, sir?" "do you want to come?" "if i might suggest it, sir, i think it would be better if i remained here and kept in touch with mr. little. i might possibly hit upon some method of pacifying the various parties, sir." "right-o! but, if you do, you're a marvel." * * * * * i didn't enjoy myself much in norfolk. it rained most of the time, and when it wasn't raining i was so dashed jumpy i couldn't hit a thing. by the end of the week i couldn't stand it any longer. too bally absurd, i mean, being marooned miles away in the country just because young bingo's uncle and wife wanted to have a few words with me. i made up my mind that i would pop back and do the strong, manly thing by lying low in my flat and telling jeeves to inform everybody who called that i wasn't at home. i sent jeeves a telegram saying i was coming, and drove straight to bingo's place when i reached town. i wanted to find out the general posish of affairs. but apparently the man was out. i rang a couple of times but nothing happened, and i was just going to leg it when i heard the sound of footsteps inside and the door opened. it wasn't one of the cheeriest moments of my career when i found myself peering into the globular face of lord bittlesham. "oh, er, hallo!" i said. and there was a bit of a pause. i don't quite know what i had been expecting the old boy to do if, by bad luck, we should ever meet again, but i had a sort of general idea that he would turn fairly purple and start almost immediately to let me have it in the gizzard. it struck me as somewhat rummy, therefore, when he simply smiled weakly. a sort of frozen smile it was. his eyes kind of bulged and he swallowed once or twice. "er...." he said. i waited for him to continue, but apparently that was all there was. "bingo in?" i said, after a rather embarrassing pause. he shook his head and smiled again. and then, suddenly, just as the flow of conversation had begun to slacken once more, i'm dashed if he didn't make a sort of lumbering leap back into the flat and bang the door. i couldn't understand it. but, as it seemed that the interview, such as it was, was over, i thought i might as well be shifting. i had just started down the stairs when i met young bingo, charging up three steps at a time. "hallo, bertie!" he said. "where did you spring from? i thought you were out of town." "i've just got back. i looked in on you to see how the land lay." "how do you mean?" "why, all that business, you know." "oh, that!" said young bingo airily. "that was all settled days ago. the dove of peace is flapping its wings all over the place. everything's as right as it can be. jeeves fixed it all up. he's a marvel, that man, bertie, i've always said so. put the whole thing straight in half a minute with one of those brilliant ideas of his." "this is topping!" "i knew you'd be pleased." "congratulate you." "thanks." "what did jeeves do? i couldn't think of any solution of the bally thing myself." "oh, he took the matter in hand and smoothed it all out in a second! my uncle and the little woman are tremendous pals now. they gas away by the hour together about literature and all that. he's always dropping in for a chat." this reminded me. "he's in there now," i said. "i say, bingo, how _is_ your uncle these days?" "much as usual. how do you mean?" "i mean he hasn't been feeling the strain of things a bit, has he? he seemed rather strange in his manner just now." "why, have you met him?" "he opened the door when i rang. and then, after he had stood goggling at me for a bit, he suddenly banged the door in my face. puzzled me, you know. i mean, i could have understood it if he'd ticked me off and all that, but dash it, the man seemed absolutely scared." young bingo laughed a care-free laugh. "oh, that's all right!" he said. "i forgot to tell you about that. meant to write, but kept putting it off. he thinks you're a looney." "he--what!" "yes. that was jeeves's idea, you know. it's solved the whole problem splendidly. he suggested that i should tell my uncle that i had acted in perfectly good faith in introducing you to him as rosie m. banks; that i had repeatedly had it from your own lips that you were, and that i didn't see any reason why you shouldn't be. the idea being that you were subject to hallucinations and generally potty. and then we got hold of sir roderick glossop--you remember, the old boy whose kid you pushed into the lake that day down at ditteredge hall--and he rallied round with his story of how he had come to lunch with you and found your bedroom full up with cats and fish, and how you had pinched his hat while you were driving past his car in a taxi, and all that, you know. it just rounded the whole thing off nicely. i always say, and i always shall say, that you've only got to stand on jeeves, and fate can't touch you." i can stand a good deal, but there are limits. "well, of all the dashed bits of nerve i ever...." bingo looked at me astonished. "you aren't _annoyed_?" he said. "annoyed! at having half london going about under the impression that i'm off my chump? dash it all...." "bertie," said bingo, "you amaze and wound me. if i had dreamed that you would object to doing a trifling good turn to a fellow who's been a pal of yours for fifteen years...." "yes, but, look here...." "have you forgotten," said young bingo, "that we were at school together?" * * * * * i pushed on to the old flat, seething like the dickens. one thing i was jolly certain of, and that was that this was where jeeves and i parted company. a topping valet, of course, none better in london, but i wasn't going to allow that to weaken me. i buzzed into the flat like an east wind ... and there was the box of cigarettes on the small table and the illustrated weekly papers on the big table and my slippers on the floor, and every dashed thing so bally _right_, if you know what i mean, that i started to calm down in the first two seconds. it was like one of those moments in a play where the chappie, about to steep himself in crime, suddenly hears the soft, appealing strains of the old melody he learned at his mother's knee. softened, i mean to say. that's the word i want. i was softened. and then through the doorway there shimmered good old jeeves in the wake of a tray full of the necessary ingredients, and there was something about the mere look of the man.... however, i steeled the old heart and had a stab at it. "i have just met mr. little, jeeves," i said. "indeed, sir?" "he--er--he told me you had been helping him." "i did my best, sir. and i am happy to say that matters now appear to be proceeding smoothly. whisky, sir?" "thanks. er--jeeves." "sir?" "another time...." "sir?" "oh, nothing.... not all the soda, jeeves." "very good, sir." he started to drift out. "oh, jeeves!" "sir?" "i wish ... that is ... i think ... i mean.... oh, nothing!" "very good, sir. the cigarettes are at your elbow, sir. dinner will be ready at a quarter to eight precisely, unless you desire to dine out?" "no. i'll dine in." "yes, sir." "jeeves!" "sir?" "oh, nothing!" i said. "very good, sir," said jeeves. +-------------------------------------------------+ |transcriber's note: | | | |obvious typographic errors have been corrected. | | | +-------------------------------------------------+ dynevor terrace: or the clue of life. by charlotte m. yonge. the author of 'the heir of redclyffe' contents i. charlotte. ii. an old schoolmistress. iii. louis le debonnaire. iv. thistle-down. v. the two ministers. vi. farewells. vii. gossamer. viii. a truant disposition. ix. the family compact. x. the better part of valour. xi. a halting proposal. xii. childe roland. xiii. frosty, but kindly. xiv. new inhabitants. xv. motley the only wear. xvi. the fruit of the christmas-tree xvii. the rivals. xviii. rest for the weary. xix. moonshine. xx. the fantastic viscount. xxi. the hero of the barricades. xxii. burgomasters and great one-eyers. volume i who wisdom's sacred prize would win, must with the fear of god begin; immortal praise and heavenly skill have they who know and do his will. new version. chapter i. charlotte. farewell rewards and fairies, good housewives now may say, for now foul sluts in dairies may fare as well as they. bp. corbet. an ancient leafless stump of a horse-chesnut stood in the middle of a dusty field, bordered on the south side by a row of houses of some pretension. against this stump, a pretty delicate fair girl of seventeen, whose short lilac sleeves revealed slender white arms, and her tight, plain cap tresses of flaxen hair that many a beauty might have envied, was banging a cocoa-nut mat, chanting by way of accompaniment in a sort of cadence-- 'i have found out a gift for my fur, i have found where the wood-pigeons breed; but let me the plunder forbear, she will say--' 'hollo, i'll give you a shilling for 'em!' was the unlooked-for conclusion, causing her to start aside with a slight scream, as there stood beside her a stout, black-eyed, round-faced lad, his ruddy cheeks and loutish air showing more rusticity than agreed with his keen, saucy expression, and mechanic's dress. 'so that's what you call beating a mat,' said he, catching it from her hands, and mimicking the tender clasp of her little fingers. 'd'ye think it's alive, that you use it so gingerly? look here! give it him well!' as he made it resound against the tree, and emit a whirlwind of dust. 'lay it into him with some jolly good song fit to fetch a stroke home with! why, i heard my young lord say, when shakspeare was a butcher, he used to make speeches at the calves, as if they was for a sacrifice, or ever he could lift a knife to 'em.' 'shakspeare! he as wrote romeo and juliet, and all that! he a butcher! why, he was a poet!' cried the girl, indignantly. 'if you know better than lord fitzjocelyn, you may!' said the boy. 'i couldn't have thought it!' sighed the maiden. 'it's the best of it!' cried the lad, eagerly. 'why, charlotte, don't ye see, he rose hisself. anybody may rise hisself as has a mind to it!' 'yes, i've read that in books said charlotte. 'you can, men can, tom, if you would but educate yourself like edmund! in the _old english baron_. but then, you know whose son you are. there can't be no catastrophe--' 'i don't want none,' said tom. 'we are all equal by birth, so the orator proves without a doubt, and we'll show it one of these days. a rare lady i'll make of you yet, charlotte arnold.' 'o hush, tom, i can never be a lady--and i can't stand dawdling here--nor you neither. 'tisn't right to want to be out of our station, though i do wish i lived in an old castle, where the maidens worked tapestry, and heard minstrels, never had no stairs to scour. come, give me my mats, and thank you kindly!' 'i'll take 'em in,' said tom, shouldering them. ''tis breakfast-hour, so i thought i'd just run up and ax you when my young lord goes up to oxford. 'he is gone,' said charlotte; 'he was here yesterday to take leave of missus. mr. james goes later--' 'gone!' cried tom. 'if he didn't say he'd come and see me at mr. smith's!' 'did you want to speak to him?' 'i wanted to see him particular. there's a thing lays heavy on my mind. you see that place down in ferny dell--there's a steep bank down to the water. well, my young lord was very keen about building a kind of steps there in the summer, and he and i settled the stones, and i was to cement 'em. by comes mr. frost, and finds faults, what i thought he'd no call to; so i flings down my trowel, and wouldn't go on for he! i was so mortal angry, i would not go back to the work; and i believe my lord forgot it--and then he went back to college; and frampton and gervas, they put on me, and you know how 'twas i come away from ormersfield. i was not going to say a word to one of that lot! but if i could see lord fitzjocelyn, i'd tell him they stones arn't fixed; and if the frost gets into 'em, there'll be a pretty go next time there's a tolerablish weight! but there--it is his own look-out! if he never thought it worth his while to keep his promise, and come and see me--' 'o tom! that isn't right! he only forgot--i hear mrs. beckett telling him he'd forget his own head if it wasn't fixed on, and mr. james is always at him.' 'forget! aye, there's nothing gentlefolks forget like poor folks. but i've done with he! let him look out--i kept my promises to him long enough, but if he don't keep his'n--' 'for shame, for shame, tom! you don't mean it!' cried charlotte. 'but, oh!' with a different tone, 'give me the mat! there's the old lord and mr. poynings riding down the terrace!' 'i ain't ashamed of nothing!' said the lad, proudly; and as charlotte snatched away the mats, and vanished like a frightened hare, he stalked along like a village hampden, muttering, 'the old tyrant shall see whether i'm to be trampled on!' and with both hands in his pockets, he gazed straight up into the face of the grave elderly gentleman, who never even perceived him. he could merely bandy glances with poynings, the groom, and he was so far from indifferent that he significantly lifted up the end of his whip. nothing could more have gratified tom, who retorted with a grimace and murmur, 'don't you wish you may catch me? you jealous syc--what is the word, sick of uncles or aunts, was it, that the orator called 'em? he'd say i'd a good miss of being one of that sort, and that my young lord there opened my eyes in time. no better than the rest of 'em--' and the clock striking eight, he quickened his pace to return to his work. he had for the two or three previous years been nominally under the gardener at ormersfield, but really a sort of follower and favourite to the young heir, lord fitzjocelyn--a position which had brought on him dislike from the superior servants, who were not propitiated by his independent and insubordinate temper. faults on every side had led to his dismissal; but lord fitzjocelyn had placed him at an ironmonger's shop in the town of northwold, where he had been just long enough to become accessible to the various temptations of a lad in such a situation. charlotte sped hastily round the end of the block of buildings, hurried down the little back garden, and flew breathlessly into her own kitchen, as a haven of refuge, but she found a tall, stiff starched, elderly woman standing just within the door, and heard her last words. 'well! as i said, 'tis no concern of mine; only i thought it the part of a friend to give you a warning, when i seen it with my own eyes!-- ah! here she is!' as charlotte dropped into a chair. 'yes, yes, miss, you need not think to deceive me; i saw you from miss mercy's window--' 'saw what?' faintly exclaimed charlotte. 'you know well enough,' was the return. 'you may think to blind mrs. beckett here, but i know what over good-nature to young girls comes to. pretty use to make of your fine scholarship, to be encouraging followers and sweethearts, at that time in the morning too!' 'speak up, charlotte,' said the other occupant of the room, a pleasant little brisk woman, with soft brown, eyes, a clear pale skin, and a face smooth, in spite of nearly sixty years; 'speak up, and tell mrs. martha the truth, that you never encouraged no one.' the girl's face was all one flame, but she rose up, and clasping her hands together, exclaimed--'me encourage! i never thought of what mrs. martha says! i don't know what it is all about!' 'here, jane beckett,' cried mrs. martha; 'd'ye see what 'tis to vindicate her! will you take her word against mine, that she's been gossiping this half hour with that young rogue as was turned off at ormersfield?' 'tom madison! cried the girl, in utter amaze. 'oh! mrs. martha!' 'well! i can't stop!' said martha. 'i must get miss faithfull's breakfast! but if you was under me, miss charlotte, i can tell you it would be better for you! you'll sup sorrow yet, and you'll both recollect my advice, both of you.' wherewith the cassandra departed, and charlotte, throwing her apron over her face, began to cry and sob piteously. 'my dear! what is it now? exclaimed her kind companion, pulling down her apron, and trying to draw down first one, then the other of the arms which persisted in veiling the crimson face. 'surely you don't think missus or i would mistrust you, or think you'd take up with the likes of him!' 'how could she be so cruel--so spiteful,' sobbed charlotte, 'when he only came to ask one question, and did a good turn for me with the mats. i never thought of such a thing. sweetheart, indeed! so cruel of her!' 'bless me!' said jane, 'girls used to think it only civility to say they had a sweetheart!' 'don't, mrs. beckett! i hate the word! i don't want no such thing! i won't never speak to tom madison again, if such constructions is to be put on it!' 'well, after all, charlotte dear, that will be the safest way. you are young yet, and best not to think of settling, special if you aren't sure of one that is steady and religious, and you'd better keep yourself up, and not get a name for gossiping--though there's no harm done yet, so don't make such a work. bless me, if i don't hear his lordship's voice! he ain't never come so early!' 'yes, he is,' said charlotte, recovering from her sobs; 'he rode up as i came in.' 'well, to be sure, he is come to breakfast! i hope nothin's amiss with my young lord! i must run up with a cup and plate, and you, make the place tidy, in case mr. poynings comes in. you'd better run into the scullery and wash your face; 'tis all tears! you're a terrible one to cry, charlotte!' with a kind, cheering smile and caress. mrs. beckett bustled off, leaving charlotte to restore herself to the little handy piece of household mechanism which kind, patient, motherly training had rendered her. charlotte arnold had been fairly educated at a village school, and tenderly brought up at home till left an orphan, when she had been taken into her present place. she had much native refinement and imagination, which, half cultivated, produced a curious mixture of romance and simplicity. her insatiable taste for reading was meritorious in the eyes of mrs. beckett, who, unlearned herself, thought any book better than 'gadding about,' and, after hearing her daily portion of the bible, listened to the most adventurous romances, with a sense of pleasure and duty in keeping the girl to her book. she loved the little fragile orphan, taught her, and had patience with her, and trusted the true high sound principle which she recognised in charlotte, amid much that she could not fathom, and set down alternately to the score of scholarship and youth. taste, modesty, and timidity were guards to charlotte. a broad stare was terror to her, and she had many a fictitious horror, as well as better-founded ones. truly she said, she hated the broad words martha had used. one who craved a true knight to be twitted with a sweetheart! martha and tom madison were almost equally distasteful, as connected with such a reproach; and the little maiden drew into herself, promenaded her fancy in castles and tournaments, kept under jane's wing, and was upheld by her as a sensible, prudent girl. chapter ii. an old schoolmistress. i praise thee, matron, and thy due is praise, heroic praise and true; with admiration i behold thy gladness unsubdued and bold. thy looks and gestures all present the picture of a life well spent; our human nature throws away its second twilight and looks gay. wordsworth. unconscious of charlotte's flight and tom's affront, the earl of ormersfield rode along dynevor terrace--a row of houses with handsome cemented fronts, tragic and comic masks alternating over the downstairs windows, and the centre of the block adorned with a pediment and colonnade; but there was an air as if something ailed the place: the gardens were weedy, the glass doors hazy, the cement stained and scarred, and many of the windows closed and dark, like eyes wanting speculation, or with merely the dreary words 'to be let' enlivening their blank gloom. at the house where charlotte had vanished, he drew his rein, and opened the gate--not one of the rusty ones--he entered the garden, where all was trim and fresh, the shadow of the house lying across the sward, and preserving the hoar-frost, which, in the sunshine, was melting into diamond drops on the lingering china roses. without ring or knock, he passed into a narrow, carpetless vestibule, unadorned except by a beautiful blue wedgewood vase, and laying down hat and whip, mounted the bare staircase, long since divested of all paint or polish. avoiding the door of the principal room, he opened another at the side, and stood in a flood of sunshine, pouring in from the window, which looked over all the roofs of the town, to the coppices and moorlands of ormersfield. on the bright fire sung a kettle, a white cat purred on the hearth, a canary twittered merrily in the window, and the light smiled on a languishing dresden shepherdess and her lover on the mantelpiece, and danced on the ceiling, reflected from a beautifully chased silver cream-jug--an inconsistent companion for the homely black teapot and willow-patterned plates, though the two cups of rare indian porcelain were not unworthy of it. the furniture was the same mixture of the ordinary and the choice, either worn and shabby, or such as would suit a virtuoso, but the whole arranged with taste and care that made the effect bright, pleasant, and comfortable. lord ormersfield stood on the hearth-rug waiting. his face was that of one who had learnt to wait, more considerate than acute, and bearing the stamp both of toil and suffering, as if grief had taken away all mobility of expression, and left a stern, thoughtful steadfastness. presently a lady entered the room. her hair was white as snow, and she could not have seen less than seventy-seven years; but beauty was not gone from her features--smiles were still on her lips, brightness in her clear hazel eyes, buoyancy in her tread, and alertness and dignity in her tall, slender, unbent figure. there was nothing so remarkable about her as the elasticity as well as sweetness of her whole look and bearing, as if, while she had something to love, nothing could be capable of crushing her. 'you here!' she exclaimed, holding out her hand to her guest. 'you are come to breakfast.' 'thank you; i wished to see you without interrupting your day's work. have you many scholars at present?' 'only seven, and three go into school at easter. jem and clara, wish me to undertake no more, but i should sorely miss the little fellows. i wish they may do me as much credit as sydney calcott. he wrote himself to tell me of his success.' 'i am glad to hear it. he is a very promising young man.' 'i tell him i shall come to honour, as the old dame who taught him to spell. my scholars may make a dr. busby of me in history.' 'i am afraid your preferment will depend chiefly on james and young calcott.' 'nay, louis tells me that he is going to read wonderfully hard; and if he chooses, he can do more than even sydney calcott.' 'if!' said the earl. jane here entered with another cup and plate, and lord ormersfield sat down to the breakfast-table. after some minutes' pause he said, 'have you heard from peru?' 'not by this mail. have you?' 'yes, i have. mary is coming home.' 'mary!' she cried, almost springing up--'mary ponsonby? this is good news--unless,' as she watched his grave face, 'it is her health that brings her.' 'it is. she has consulted the surgeon of the libra, a very able man, who tells her that there is absolute need of good advice and a colder climate; and ponsonby has consented to let her and her daughter come home in the libra. i expect them in february.' 'my poor mary! but she will get better away from him. i trust he is not coming!' 'not he,' said lord ormersfield. 'dear, dear mary! i had scarcely dared to hope to see her again,' cried the old lady, with tears in her eyes. 'i hope she will be allowed to be with us, not kept in london with his sister. london does her no good.' 'the very purport of my visit,' said lord ormersfield, 'was to ask whether you could do me the favour to set aside your scholars, and enable me to receive mrs. ponsonby at home.' 'thank you--oh, thank you. there is nothing i should like better, but i must consider--' 'clara would find a companion in the younger mary in the holidays, and if james would make fitzjocelyn his charge, it would complete the obligation. it would be by far the best arrangement for mary's comfort, and it would be the greatest satisfaction to me to see her with you at ormersfield.' 'i believe it would indeed,' said the old lady, more touched than the outward manner of the earl seemed to warrant. 'i would--you know i would do my very best that you and mary should be comfortable together'--and her voice trembled--'but you see i cannot promise all at once. i must see about these little boys. i must talk to jem. in short, you must not be disappointed'--and she put her hands before her face, trying to laugh, but almost overcome. 'nay, i did not mean to press you,' said lord ormersfield, gently; 'but i thought, since james has had the fellowship and clara has been at school, that you wished to give up your pupils.' 'so i do,' said the lady, but still not yielding absolutely. 'for the rest, i am very anxious that james should accept fitzjocelyn as his pupil. i have always considered their friendship as the best hope, and other plans have had so little success, that--' 'i'm not going to hear louis abused!' she exclaimed, gaily. 'yes,' said lord ormersfield, with a look nearly approaching a smile, 'you are the last person i ought to invite, if i wish to keep your nephew unspoiled.' 'i wish there were any one else to spoil him!' 'for his sake, then, come and make ormersfield cheerful. it will be far better for him.' 'and for you, to see more of jem,' she added. 'if he were yours, what would you say to such hours?' the last words were aimed at a young man who came briskly into the room, and as he kissed her, and shook hands with the earl, answered in a quick, bright tone, 'shocking, aye. all owing to sitting up till one!' 'reading?' said the earl. 'reading,' he answered, with a sort of laughing satisfaction in dashing aside the approval expressed in the query, 'but not quite as you suppose. see here,' as he held up maliciously a railway novel. 'i am afraid i know where it came from,' said lord ormersfield. 'exactly so,' said james. 'it was fitzjocelyn's desertion of it that excited my curiosity.' 'indeed. i should have thought his desertions far too common to excite any curiosity.' 'by no means. he always has a reason.' 'a plausible one.' 'more than plausible,' cried james, excitement sparkling in his vivid black eyes. 'it happens that this is the very book that you would most rejoice to see distasteful to him--low morality, false principles, morbid excitement, not a line that ought to please a healthy mind.'-- 'yet it has interest enough for you.' 'i am not fitzjocelyn.' 'you know how to plead for him.' 'i speak simple truth,' bluntly answered james, running his hand through his black hair, to the ruin of the morning smoothness, so that it, as well as the whole of his quick, dark countenance seemed to have undergone a change from sunny south to stormy north in the few moments since his first appearance. after a short silence, lord ormersfield turned to him, saying 'i have been begging a favour of my aunt, and i have another to ask of you,' and repeating his explanation, begged him to undertake the tutorship of his son. 'i shall not be at liberty at easter,' said james, 'i have all but undertaken some men at oxford.' 'oh, my dear jem!' exclaimed the old lady, 'is that settled beyond alteration?' 'i'm not going to throw them over.' 'then i shall hope for you at midsummer,' said the earl. 'we shall see how things stand,' he returned, ungraciously. 'i shall write to you,' said lord ormersfield, still undaunted, and soon after taking his leave. 'cool!' cried james, as soon as he was gone. 'to expect you to give up your school at his beck, to come and keep house for him as long as it may suit him!' 'nay, jem, he knew how few boys i have, and that i intended to give them up. you don't mean to refuse louis?' she said, imploringly. 'i shall certainly not take him at easter. it would be a mere farce intended to compensate to us for giving up the school, and i'll not lend myself to it while i can have real work.' 'at midsummer, then. you know he will never let louis spend a long vacation without a tutor.' 'i hate to be at ormersfield,' proceeded james, vehemently, 'to see fitzjocelyn browbeaten and contradicted every moment, and myself set up for a model. i may steal a horse, while he may not look over the wall! did you observe the inconsistency?--angry with the poor fellow first for having the book, and then for not reading the whole, while it became amiable and praiseworthy in me to burn out a candle over it!' 'ah! that was my concern. i tell him he would sing another note if you were his son.' 'i'd soon make him! i would not stand what louis does. the more he is set down and sneered at, the more debonnaire he looks, till i could rave at him for taking it so easily.' 'i hoped you might have hindered them from fretting each other, as they do so often.' 'i should only be a fresh element of discord, while his lordship will persist in making me his pattern young man. it makes me hate myself, especially as louis is such an unaccountable fellow that he won't.' 'i am sorry you dislike the plan so much.' 'do you mean that you wish for it, grandmamma? cried he, turning full round on her with an air of extreme amazement. 'if you do, there's an end of it; but i thought you valued nothing more than an independent home.' 'nor would i give it up on any account,' said she. 'i do not imagine this could possibly last for more than a few months, or a year at the utmost. but you know, dear jem, i would do nothing you did not like.' 'that's nothing to the purpose,' replied james. 'though it is to be considered whether ormersfield is likely to be the best preparation for clara's future life. however, i see you wish it--' 'i confess that i do, for a few months at least, which need interfere neither with clara nor with you. i have not seen lord ormersfield so eager for many years, and i should be very sorry to prevent those two from being comfortably together in the old home--' 'and can't that be without a chaperon?' exclaimed james, laughing. 'why, his lordship is fifty-five, and she can't be much less. that is a good joke.' 'it is not punctilio,' said his grandmother, looking distressed. 'it is needful to be on the safe side with such a man as mr. ponsonby. my fear is that he may send her home with orders not to come near us.' 'she used to be always at ormersfield in the old times.' 'yes, when my sister was alive. ah! you were too young to know about those matters then. the fact was, that things had come to such a pass from mr. ponsonby's neglect and unkindness, that lord ormersfield, standing in the place of her brother, thought it right to interfere. his mother went to london with him, to bring poor mary and her little girl back to ormersfield, and there they were till my sister's death, when of course they could not remain. mr. ponsonby had just got his appointment as british envoy in peru, and wished her to go with him. it was much against lord ormersfield's advice, but she thought it her duty, poor dear. i believe he positively hates lord ormersfield; and as if for a parting unkindness, he left his little girl at school with orders to spend her holidays with his sister, and never to be with us.' 'that accounts for it!' said james. 'i never knew all this! nor why we were so entirely cut off from mary ponsonby. i wonder what she is now! she was a droll sturdy child in those days! we used to call her downright dunstable! she was almost of the same age as louis, and a great deal stouter, and used to fight for him and herself too. has not she been out in peru?' 'yes, she went out at seventeen. i believe she is an infinite comfort to her mother.' 'poor mary! well, we children lived in the middle of a tragedy, and little suspected it! by the bye, what relation are the ponsonbys to us?' 'mrs. ponsonby is my niece. my dear sister, mary--' 'married mr. raymond--yes, i know! i'll make the whole lucid; i'll draw up a pedigree, and louis shall learn it.' and with elaborate neatness he wrote as follows, filling in the dates from the first leaf of an old bible, after his grandmother had left the room. the task, lightly undertaken, became a mournful one, and as he read over his performance, his countenance varied from the gentleness of regret to a look of sarcastic pride, as though he felt that the world had dealt hardly by him, and yet disdained to complain. king arthur - pendragons and dynevors innumerable - roland dynevor, d. - . . . --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - - - catharine, m. james frost dynevor, esq. elizabeth, m. jocelyn, rd earl of ormersfield mary, m. ch. raymond, esq. b. b. b. b. b. d. d. d. d. d. . . -------------------------------------------------- jocelyn, m. louisa villars, mary, m. robert ponsonby esq., henry roland m. frances preston oliver j. frost th earl of b. b. british envoy frost dynevor b. dynevor ormersfield d. in peru. b. d. b. b. d. . . . . . ------------------------------------------------------------ james roland frances catharine oliver clara louis fitzjocelyn mary ponsonby frost dynevor b. b. b. b. viscount fitzjocelyn b. b. d. d. d. b. . fellow of st. f. college, oxford. 'since ,' muttered james, as he finished. 'thirty years of drudgery! when shall i be able to relieve her? ha! o. j. f. dynevor, esquire, if it were you who were coming from peru, you would find a score to settle!' he ran down stairs to assist his grandmother in the latin lessons of her little school, the usual employment of his vacations. catharine dynevor had begun life with little prospect of spending nearly half of it as mistress of a school. her father was the last male of the dynevors of cheveleigh--a family mounting up to the days of the pendragons--and she had been made to take the place of an eldest son, inheriting the extensive landed property on condition that her name and arms should be assumed in case of her marriage. her choice was one of the instances in which her affections had the mastery over her next strongest characteristic, family pride. she married a highly-educated and wealthy gentleman, of good family, but of mercantile connexions, such as her father, if living, would have disdained. her married life was, however, perfectly unclouded, her ample means gave her the power of dispensing joy, and her temperament was so blithe and unselfish that no pleasure ever palled upon her. cheveleigh was a proverb for hospitality, affording unfailing fetes for all ages, full of a graceful ease and freedom that inspired enjoyment. mr. frost dynevor was a man of refined taste, open-handed even to extravagance, liberal in all his appointments, and gratifying to the utmost his love of art and decoration, while his charities and generous actions were hearty and lavish enough to satisfy even his warm-hearted wife. joined with all this was a strong turn for speculations. when the mind has once become absorbed in earthly visions of wealth and prosperity, the excitement exercises such a fascination over the senses that the judgment loses balance. bold assumptions are taken as certainties, and made the foundation of fresh fabrics--the very power of discerning between fact and possibility departs, and, in mere good-will, men, honest and honourable at heart, risk their own and their neighbours' property, and ruin their character and good name, by the very actions most foreign to to their nature, ere it had fallen under the strong delusion. mr. frost dynevor had the misfortune to live in a country rich in mineral wealth, and to have a brother-in-law easily guided, and with more love of figures than power of investigating estimates on a large scale. mines were set on foot, companies established, and buildings commenced, and the results were only to be paralleled by those of the chalybeate springs discovered by mr. dynevor at the little town of northwold, which were pronounced by his favourite hanger-on to be destined 'literally to cut the throat of bath and cheltenham.' some towns are said to have required the life of a child ere their foundations could be laid. many a speculation has swallowed a life and fortune before its time for thriving has come. mr. frost dynevor and lord ormersfield were the foremost victims to the cheveleigh iron foundries and the northwold baths. the close of the war brought a commercial crisis that their companies could not stand; and mr. dynevor's death spared him from the sight of the crash, which his talent and sagacity might possibly have averted. he had shown no misgivings, but, no sooner was he removed from the helm, than the vessel was found on the brink of destruction. enormous sums had been sunk without tangible return, and the liabilities of the companies far surpassed anything that they had realized. lord ormersfield was stunned and helpless. mrs. dynevor had but one idea--namely, to sacrifice everything to clear her husband's name. her sons were mere boys, and the only person who proved himself able to act or judge was the heir of ormersfield, then about four-and-twenty, who came forward with sound judgment and upright dispassionate sense of justice to cope with the difficulties and clear away the involvements. he joined his father in mortgaging land, sacrificing timber, and reducing the establishment, so as to set the estate in the way of finally becoming free, though at the expense of rigid economy and self-denial. cheveleigh could not have been saved, even had the heiress not been willing to yield everything to satisfy the just claims of the creditors. she was happy when she heard that it would suffice, and that no one would be able to accuse her husband of having wronged him. but for this, she would hardly have submitted to retain what her nephew succeeded in securing for her--namely, an income of about pounds per annum, and the row of houses called dynevor terrace, one of the building ventures at northwold. this was the sole dependence with which she and her sons quitted the home of their forefathers. 'never mind, mother,' said henry, kissing her, to prevent the tears from springing, 'home is wherever we are together!' 'never fear, mother,' echoed oliver, with knitted brow and clenched hands, 'i will win it back.' oliver was a quiet lad, of diligent, methodical habits, and willingly accepted a clerkship in a mercantile house, which owed some obligations to his father. at the end of a couple of years he was sent to reside in south america; and his parting words to his mother were--'when you see me again, cheveleigh shall be yours.' 'oh, my boy, take care. remember, 'they that haste to be rich shall not be innocent.'' that was the last time she had seen oliver. her great object was to maintain herself independently and to complete henry's education as a gentleman. with this view she took up her abode in the least eligible of her houses at northwold, and, dropping the aristocratic name which alone remained of her heiress-ship, opened a school for little boys, declaring that she was rejoiced to recall the days when henry and oliver wore frocks and learnt to spell. if any human being could sweeten the latin grammar, it was mrs. frost, with the motherliness of a dame, and the refinement of a lady, unfailing sympathy and buoyant spirits, she loved each urchin, and each urchin loved her, till she had become a sort of adopted grandmamma to all northwold and the neighbourhood. henry went to oxford. he gained no scholarship, took no honours, but he fell neither into debt nor disgrace; he led a goodnatured easy life, and made a vast number of friends; and when he was not staying with them, he and his mother were supremely happy together. he walked with her, read to her, sang to her, and played with her pupils. he had always been brought up as the heir--petted, humoured, and waited on--a post which he filled with goodhumoured easy grace, and which he continued to fill in the same manner, though he had no one to wait on him but his mother, and her faithful servant jane beckett. years passed on, and they seemed perfectly satisfied with their division of labour,--mrs. frost kept school, and henry played the flute, or shot over the ormersfield property. if any one remonstrated, henry was always said to be waiting for a government appointment, which was to be procured by the ormersfield interest. more for the sake of his mother than of himself, the ormersfield interest was at length exerted, and the appointment was conferred on him. the immediate consequence was his marriage with the first pretty girl he met, poorer than himself, and all the ormersfield interest failed to make his mother angry with him. the cholera of put an end to poor henry's desultory life. his house, in a crowded part of london, was especially doomed by the deadly sickness; and out of the whole family the sole survivors were a little girl of ten months old, and a boy of seven years, the latter of whom was with his grandmother at northwold. mrs. frost was one of the women of whom affection makes unconscious heroines. she could never sink, as long as there was aught to need her love and care; and though henry had been her darling, the very knowledge that his orphans had no one but herself to depend on, seemed to brace her energies with fresh life. they were left entirely on her hands, her son oliver made no offers of assistance. he had risen, so as to be a prosperous merchant at lima, and he wrote with regularity and dutifulness, but he had never proposed coming to england, and did not proffer any aid in the charge of his brother's children. if she had expected anything from him, she did not say so; she seldom spoke of him, but never without tenderness, and usually as her 'poor oliver,' and she abstained from teaching her grandchildren either to look to their rich uncle or to mourn over their lost inheritance. cheveleigh was a winter evening's romance with no one but jane beckett; and the grandmother always answered the children's inquiries by bidding them prove their ancient blood by resolute independence, and by that true dignity which wealth could neither give nor take away. of that dignity, mrs. frost was a perfect model. a singular compound of the gentle and the lofty, of tenderness and independence, she had never ceased to be the northwold standard of the 'real lady,' too mild and gracious to be regarded as proud and poor, and yet too dignified for any liberty to be attempted, her only fault, that touch of pride, so ladylike and refined that it was kept out of sight, and never offended, and everything else so sweet and winning that there was scarcely a being who did not love, as well as honour her, for the cheerfulness and resignation that had borne her through her many trials. her trustful spirit and warm heart had been an elixir of youth, and had preserved her freshness and elasticity long after her sister and brother-in-law at ormersfield had grown aged and sunk into the grave, and even her nephew was fast verging upon more than middle age. chapter iii. louis le debonnaire. i walked by his garden and saw the wild brier, the thorn and the thistle grow broader and higher. isc watts. ormersfield park was extensive, ranging into fine broken ground, rocky and overgrown with brushwood; but it bore the marks of retrenchment; there was hardly a large timber tree on the estate, enclosures had been begun and deserted, and the deer had been sold off to make room for farmers' cattle, which grazed up to the very front door. the house was of the stately era of anne, with a heavy portico and clumsy pediment on the garden side, all the windows of the suite of rooms opening on a broad stone terrace, whence steps descended to the lawn, neatly kept, but sombre, for want of openings in the surrounding evergreens. it was early march, and a lady wrapped in a shawl was seated on the terrace, enjoying the mild gleam of spring, and the freshness of the sun-warmed air, which awoke a smile of welcome as it breathed on her faded cheek, and her eyes gazed on the scene, in fond recognition. it had been the home of mrs. ponsonby's childhood; and the slopes of turf and belts of dark ilex were fraught with many a recollection of girlish musings, youthful visions, and later, intervals of tranquillity and repose. after fourteen years spent in south america, how many threads she had to take up again! she had been as a sister to her cousin, lord ormersfield, and had shared more of his confidence than any other person during their earlier years, but afterwards their intercourse had necessarily been confined to brief and guarded letters. she had found him unchanged in his kindness to herself, and she was the more led to ponder on the grave, stern impassiveness of his manner to others, and to try to understand the tone of mind that it indicated. she recalled him as he had been in his first youth--reserved, sensible, thoughtful, but with the fire of ambition burning strongly within, and ever and anon flashing forth vividly, repressed at once as too demonstrative, but filling her with enthusiastic admiration. she remembered him calmly and manfully meeting the shock of the failure, that would, he knew, fetter and encumber him through life--how resolutely he had faced the difficulties, how unselfishly he had put himself out of the question, how uprightly he had dealt by the creditors, how considerately by his father and aunt, how wise and moderate his proceedings had been throughout. she recollected how she had shared his aspirations, and gloried in his consistent and prudent course, without perceiving what sorrow had since taught her-that ambition was to him what pleasure was to other young men. what had it not been to her when that ambition began to be gratified! when he had become a leading man in parliament, and by-and-by held office. there, a change came over the spirit of her dream; and though she sighed, she could not but smile at the fair picture that rose before her, of a young girl of radiant loveliness, her golden curls drooping over her neck, and her eyes blue as the starry veronica by the hedge side, smiling in the sunshine. she thought of the glances of proud delight that her cousin had stolen at her, to read in her face, that his louisa was more than all he had told her. little was needed to make her love the sweet, caressing young creature who had thrown her arms round her, and told her that she saw it was all nonsense to tell her she was such a good, grave, dreadful cousin mary! yet there had been some few misgivings! so short an acquaintance! her cousin too busy for more than being bewitched by the lovely face! the villiers family, so gay and fashionable! might not all have been foreseen? and yet, of what use would foresight have been? the gentleman was deeply attached, and the lady's family courted the match, the distinction he had won, atoning for his encumbered fortune. other scenes arose on her memory--louisa, a triumphant beauty, living on the homage she received, all brilliance, grace, and enjoyment. but there was a darkening background which grew more prominent. poor louisa had little wisdom by nature, and her education had been solely directed to enable her to shine in the world, not to render her fit for the companionship of a man of domestic tastes, accustomed to the society of superior women. there was nothing to fall back upon, nothing to make a home, she was listless and weary whenever gaiety failed her--and he, disappointed and baffled, too unbending to draw her out, too much occupied to watch over her, yielded to her tastes, and let her pursue her favourite enjoyments unchecked. a time had come when childish vanity and frivolity were verging on levity and imprudence. expostulations fell powerless on her shallowness. painful was the remembrance of the deprecating roguish glance of the beautiful eyes, and the coaxing caresses with which she kissed away the lecture, and made promises, only to forget them. she was like the soulless undine, with her reckless gaiety and sweetness, so loving and childish that there was no being displeased with her, so innocent and devoid of all art or guile in her wilfulness, that her faults could hardly bear a harsher name than follies. again, mrs. ponsonby thought of the days when she herself had been left to stay with her old uncle and aunt. in this very house while her husband was absent abroad, when she had assisted them to receive the poor young wife, sent home in failing health. she thought of the sad weeks, so melancholy in the impossibility of making an impression, or of leading poor louisa from her frivolities, she recalled the sorrow of hearing her build on future schemes of pleasure, the dead blank when her prattle on them failed, the tedium of deeper subjects, and yet the bewitching sweetness overpowering all vexation at her exceeding silliness. though full one-and-twenty years had passed, still the tears thrilled warm into mrs. ponsonby's eyes at the thought of louisa's fond clinging to her, in spite of many an admonition and even exertion of authority, for she alone dared to control the spoilt child's self-will; and had far more power than the husband, who seemed to act as a check and restraint, and whose presence rendered her no longer easy and natural. one confidence had explained the whole. 'you know, mary dear, i always was so much afraid of him! if i had had my own way, i know who it would have been; but there were mamma and anna maria always saying how fortunate i was, and that he would be prime minister, and all the rest. oh! i was far too young and foolish for him. he should have married a sober body, such as you, mary! why did he not? she wished she had never teased him by going out so much, and letting people talk nonsense; he had been very kind, and she was not half good enough for him. that confession, made to him, would have been balm for ever; but she had not resolution for the effort, and the days slid away till the worst fears were fulfilled. nay, were they the worst fears? was there not an unavowed sense that it was safer that she should die, while innocent of all but wayward folly, than be left to perils which she was so little able to resist? the iron expression of grief on her husband's face had forbidden all sympathy, all attempt at consolation. he had returned at once to his business in london, there to find that poor louisa's extravagance had equalled her folly, and that he, whose pride it had been to redeem his paternal property, was thrown back by heavy debts on his own account. this had been known to mrs. ponsonby, but by no word from him; he had never permitted the most distant reference to his wife, and yet, with inconsistency betraying his passionate love, he had ordered one of the most beautiful and costly monuments that art could execute, for her grave at ormersfield, and had sent brief but explicit orders that, contrary to all family precedent, his infant should bear no name but louis. on this boy mrs. ponsonby had founded all her hopes of a renewal of happiness for her cousin; but when she had left england there had been little amalgamation between the volatile animated boy, and his grave unbending father. she could not conjure up any more comfortable picture of them than the child uneasily perched on his papa's knee, looking wistfully for a way of escape, and his father with an air of having lifted him up as a duty, without knowing what to do with him or to say to him. at her earnest advice, the little fellow had been placed as a boarder with his great aunt, mrs. frost, when his grandmother's death had deprived him of all that was homelike at ormersfield, he had been with her till he was old enough for a public school, and she spoke of him as if he were no less dear to her than her own grandchildren; but she was one who saw no fault in those whom she loved, and mrs. ponsonby had been rendered a little anxious by a certain tone of dissatisfaction in lord ormersfield's curt mention of his son, and above all by his cold manner of announcing that this was the day when he would return from oxford for the easter vacation. could it be that the son was unworthy, or had the father's feelings been too much chilled ever to warm again, and all home affections lost in the strife of politics? these had ever since engaged him, whether in or out of office, leaving little time for society or for any domestic pursuit. her reflections were interrupted by a call of 'mamma!' and her daughter came running up the steps. mary ponsonby had too wide a face for beauty, and not slightness enough for symmetry, but nothing could be more pleasing and trustworthy than the open countenance, the steady, clear, greenish-brown eyes, the kind, sensible mouth, the firm chin, broad though rather short forehead, and healthy though not highly-coloured cheek; and the voice--full, soft, and cheerful--well agreed with the expression, and always brought gladness and promise of sympathy. 'see, mamma, what we have found for you.' 'violets! the very purple ones that used to grow on the orchard bank!' 'so they did. mary knew exactly where to look for them,' said mrs. frost, who had followed her up the steps. 'and there is gervas,' continued mary; 'so charmed to hear of you, that we had almost brought him to see you.' mrs. ponsonby declared herself so much invigorated by ormersfield air, that she would go to see her old friend the gardener. mary hurried to fetch her bonnet, and returned while a panegyric was going on upon her abilities as maid-of-all-work, in her mother's difficulties with male housemaids--black and brown--and washerwomen who rode on horseback in white satin shoes. she looked as if it were hardly natural that any one but herself should support her mother, when mrs. frost tenderly drew mrs. ponsonby's arm into her own; and it was indeed strange to see the younger lady so frail and broken, and the elder so strong, vigorous, and active; as they moved along in the sunshine, pausing to note each spring blossom that bordered the gravel, and entered the walled kitchen-garden, where espaliers ran parallel with the walks, dividing the vegetables from the narrow flower-beds, illuminated by crocuses opening the depths of their golden hearts to the sunbeams and the revelling bees. old gervas, in a patriarchal red waistcoat, welcomed mrs. ponsonby with more warmth than flattery. bless me, ma'am, i'm right glad to see you; but how old you be!' 'i must come home to learn how to grow young, gervas,' said she, smiling; 'i hear betty is as youthful as my aunt here.' 'ay, ma'am, betty do fight it out tolerablish,' was the reply to this compliment. 'why, gervas, what's all that wilderness? surely those used to be strawberry beds.' 'yes, ma'am, the earliest hautboys; don't ye mind? my young lord came and begged it of me, and, bless the lad, i can't refuse him nothing.' 'he seems to be no gardener!' 'he said he wanted to make a botany bay sort of garden,' said the old man; 'and sure enough 'tis a garden of weeds he's made of it, and mine into the bargain! he has a great big thistle here, and the down blows right over my beds, thick as snow, so that it is three women's work to be a match for the weeds; but speak to him of pulling it up, ye'd think 'twas the heart out of him.' 'does he ever work here?' 'at first it was nought else; he and that young chap, madison, always bringing docks and darnel out of the hedges, and plants from the nursery gardens, and bringing rockwork, and letting water in to make a swamp. there's no saying what's in the lad's head! but, of late, he's not done much but by times lying on the bank, reading or speaking verses out loud to himself, or getting young madison off his work to listen to him. once he got me to hear; but, ma'am, 'twas all about fairies and such like, putting an ass's head on an honest body as had lost his way. i told him 'twas no good for him or the boy to read such stuff, and i'd ha' none of it; but, if he chose to read me some good book, he'd be welcome--for the candles baint so good as they used, and i can't get no spectacles to suit me.' 'and did he read to you?' 'a bit or two, ma'am, if the humour took him. but he's young, you see, ma'am. i'm right glad he'll find you here. my old woman says he do want a lady about the place to make him comfortable like.' 'and who is this young madison?' asked mrs. ponsonby, when they had turned from the old gardener. 'to hear jem, you would believe that he is the most promising plant rearing for botany bay!' said mrs. frost. 'he is a boy from that wild place marksedge, whom louis took interest in, and made more familiar than jem liked, or than, perhaps, was good for him. it did not answer; the servants did not like it, and it ended in his being sent to work with smith, the ironmonger. poor louis! he took it sadly to heart, for he had taken great pains with the boy.' 'i like to hear the old name, louis!' 'i can't help it,' said mrs. frost. 'he must be his old aunt kitty's louis le debonnaire! don't you, remember your calling him so when he was a baby?' 'oh yes, it has exactly recalled to me the sort of gracious look that he used to have--half sly, half sweet-and so very pretty!' 'it suits him as well now. he is the kind of being who must have a pet name;' and mrs. frost, hoping he might be already arrived, could hardly slacken her eager step so as to keep pace with her niece's feeble movements. she was disappointed; the carriage had returned without lord fitzjocelyn. his hat and luggage were come, but he himself was missing. mrs. frost was very uneasy, but his father silenced conjectures by saying, that it was his usual way, and he would make his appearance before the evening. he would not send to meet another train, saying, that the penalty of irregularity must be borne, and the horses should not suffer for such freaks; and he would fain have been utterly indifferent, but he was evidently listening to every sound, and betrayed his anxiety by the decision with which he checked all expression of his aunt's fears. there was no arrival all that evening, no explanation in the morning; and betty gervas, whom mary went to visit in the course of the day, began to wonder whether the young lord could be gone for a soldier--the usual fate of all missing village lads. mary was on her way home, through the park, along a path skirting the top of a wooded ravine, a dashing rivulet making a pleasant murmur among the rocks below, and glancing here and there through the brushwood that clothed the precipitous banks, when, with a sudden rustling and crackling, a man leaped upon the path with a stone in each hand. mary started, but she did not lose her presence of mind, and her next glance showed her that the apparition was not alarming, and was nearly as much amazed as herself. it was a tall slight young man, in a suit of shepherd's plaid, with a fair face and graceful agile form, recalling the word debonnaire as she had yesterday heard it applied. in instant conviction that this was the truant, she put out her hand by the same impulse that lighted his features with a smile of welcome, and the years of separation seemed annihilated as he exclaimed, 'my cousin mary!' and grasped her hand, adding, 'i hope i did not frighten you--' 'oh no; but where did you come from?' 'up a hill perpendicular, like hotspur,' he replied, in soft low quiet tones, which were a strange contrast to the words. 'no, see here,' and parting the bushes he showed some rude steps, half nature, half art, leading between the ferns and mountain-ash, and looking very inviting. 'how delightful!' cried mary. 'i am glad you appreciate it,' he exclaimed; 'i will finish it off now, and put a rail. i did not care to go on when i had lost the poor fellow who helped me, but it saves a world of distance.' 'it must be very pretty amongst those beautiful ferns!' 'you can't conceive anything more charming,' he continued, with the same low distinct utterance, but an earnestness that almost took away her breath. 'there are nine ferns on this bank--that is, if we have the scolopendrium loevigatum, as i am persuaded. do you know anything of ferns? ah! you come from the land of tree ferns.' 'oh! i am so glad to exchange them for our home flowers. primroses look so friendly and natural.' 'these rocks are perfect nests for them, and they even overhang the river. this is the best bit of the stream, so rapid and foaming that i must throw a bridge across for aunt catharine. which would be most appropriate? i was weighing it as i came up--a simple stone, or a rustic performance in wood?' 'i should like stone,' said mary, amused by his eagerness. 'a rough druidical stone! that's it! the idea of rude negligent strength accords with such places, and this is a stone country. i know the very stone! do come down and see!' 'to-morrow, if you please,' said mary. 'mamma must want me, and--but i suppose they know of your return at home.' 'no, they don't. they have learnt by experience that the right time is the one never to expect me.' mary's eyes were all astonishment, as she said, between wonder and reproof, 'is that on purpose?' 'adventures are thrust on some people,' was the nonchalant reply, with shoulders depressed, and a twinkle of the eye, as if he purposed amazing his auditor.' 'i hope you have had an adventure, for nothing else could justify you,' said mary, with some humour, but more gravity. 'only a stray infant-errant, cast on my mercy at the junction station. nurse, between eating and gossiping left behind--bell rings--engine squeaks--train starts--fitzjocelyn and infant vis-a-vis.' 'you don't mean a baby?' 'a child of five years old, who soon ceased howling, and confided his history to me. he had been visiting grandmamma in london, and was going home to illershall; so i found the best plan would be to leave the train at the next station, and take him home.' 'oh, that was quite another thing!' exclaimed mary, gratified at being able to like him. 'could you find his home?' 'yes; he knew his name and address too well to be lost or mislaid. i would have come home as soon as i had seen him in at the door; but the whole family rushed out on me, and conjured me first to dine and then to sleep. they are capital people. dobbs is superintendent of the copper and tin works--a thoroughly right-minded man, with a nice, ladylike wife, the right sort of sound stuff that old england's heart is made of. it was worth anything to have seen it! they do incalculable good with their work-people. i saw the whole concern.' he launched into an explanation of the process, producing from his pocket, papers of the ore, in every stage of manufacture, and twisting them up so carelessly, that they would have become a mass of confusion, had not mary undertaken the repacking. as they approached the house, the library window was thrown up, and mrs. frost came hurrying down with outstretched arms. she was met by her young nephew with an overflow of fond affection, before he looked up and beheld his father standing upright and motionless on the highest step. his excuses were made more lightly and easily than seemed to suit such rigid looks; but lord ormersfield bent his head as if resigning himself perforce to the explanation, and, with the softened voice in which he always spoke to mrs. ponsonby, said, 'here he is--louis, you remember your cousin.' she was positively startled; for it was as if his mother's deep blue eyes were raised to hers, and there were the same regular delicate features, fair, transparent complexion, and glossy light-brown hair tinted with gold--the same careless yet deprecating glance, the same engaging smile that warmed her heart to him at once, in spite of an air which was not that of wisdom. 'how little altered you are!' she exclaimed. 'if you were not taller than your father, i should say you were the same louis that i left fourteen years ago.' 'i fear that is the chief change,' said lord ormersfield. 'a boy that would be a boy all his life, like sir thomas more's son!' said louis, coolly and simply, but with a twinkle in the corner of his eye, as if he said it on purpose to be provoking; and mrs. frost interposed by asking where the cousins had met, and whether they had known each other. 'i knew him by what you said yesterday,' said mary. 'louis le debonnaire? asked mrs. frost, smiling. 'no, mary; not that name!' he exclaimed. 'it is what jem calls me, when he has nothing more cutting to say--' 'aye, because it is exactly what you look when you know you deserve a scolding--with your shoulders pulled down, and your face made up!' said his aunt, patting him. when mrs. ponsonby and mary had left the room to dress, louis exclaimed, 'and that is mrs. ponsonby! how ill she does look! her very voice has broken down, though it still has the sweet sound that i could never forget! has she had advice?' 'dr. hastings saw her in london,' said his father. 'he sent her into the country at once, and thinks that there is fair hope that complete rest of spirits may check the disease.' 'will she stay here?' said louis, eagerly. 'that would be like old times, and we could make her very comfortable. i would train those two ponies for her drives--' 'i wish she would remain here,' said his father; 'but she is bent on becoming my aunt's tenant.' 'ha! that is next best! they could do nothing more commendable. will they be a windfall for the house beautiful?' 'no,' said mrs. frost. 'they wish to have a house of their own, in case mr. ponsonby should come home, or miss ponsonby to stay with them.' 'the respected aunt who brought mary up! how long has she been at lima?' 'four years.' 'four years! she has not made use of her opportunities! alas for the illusion dispelled! the spanish walk and mantilla melt away; and behold! the primitive wide-mouthed body of fourteen years since!' mrs. frost laughed, but it seemed to be a serious matter with lord ormersfield. 'if you could appreciate sterling worth,' he said, 'you would be ashamed to speak of your cousin with such conceited disrespect.' all the effect was to make louis walk quietly out of the room; but his shoulder and eyebrow made a secret telegraph of amazement to mrs. frost. the new arrival seemed to have put the earl into a state of constant restless anxiety, subdued and concealed with a high hand, but still visible to one who knew him so intimately as did mrs. ponsonby. she saw that he watched each word and gesture, and studied her looks to judge of the opinion they might create in her. now the process was much like weighing and balancing the down of fitzjocelyn's own favourite thistle; the profusion, the unsubstantiality, and the volatility being far too similar; and there was something positively sad in the solicitous heed taken of such utter heedlessness. the reigning idea was the expedition to illershall, and the excellent condition of the work-people under his new friend the superintendent. forgetful that mines were a tender subject, the eager speaker became certain that copper must exist in the neighbourhood, and what an employment it would afford to all the country round. 'marksedge must be the very place, the soil promises metallic veins, the discovery would be the utmost boon to the people. it would lead to industry and civilization, and counteract all the evils we have brought on them. mary, do you remember marksedge, the place of exile?' 'not that i know of.' 'no; we were too young to understand the iniquity. in the last generation, it was not the plan to stone naboth, but to remove him. great people could not endure little people; so, by way of kindness, our whole population of ormersfield, except a few necessary retainers, were transported bodily from betwixt the wind and our nobility, located on a moor beyond our confines, a generous gift to the poor-rates of bletchynden, away from church, away from work, away from superintendence, away from all amenities of the poor man's life!' this was one of the improvements to which mr. dynevor had prompted the last earl; but louis did not know whom he was cutting, as he uttered this tirade, with a glow on his cheek and eye, but with his usual soft, modulated intonation and polished language, the distinctness and deliberation taking off all air of rattle, and rendering his words more impressive. 'indeed! is there much distress at marksedge?' said mrs. ponsonby. 'they have gifts with our own poor at christmas,' said lord ormersfield, 'but they are a defiant, ungrateful set, always in distress by their own fault.' 'what cause have they for gratitude?' exclaimed his son. 'for being turned out of house and home? for the three miles' walk to their daily work! yes, it is the fact. the dozen families left here, with edicts against lodgers, cannot suffice for the farmer's work; and all norris's and beecher's men have to walk six miles every day of their lives, besides the hard day's work. they are still farther from their parish, they are no one's charge, they have neither church nor school, and whom should we blame for their being lawless?' 'it used to be thought a very good thing for the parish,' said mrs. frost, looking at her niece. 'i remember being sorry for the poor people, but we did not see things in the light in which louis puts it.' 'young men like to find fault with the doings of their elders,' said lord ormersfield. 'nothing can make me regard it otherwise than as a wicked sin!' said louis. 'nay, my dear,' mildly said aunt catharine, 'if it were mistaken, i am sure it was not intentionally cruel.' 'what i call wicked is to sacrifice the welfare of dependents to our own selfish convenience! and you would call it cruel too, aunt catharine, if you could hear the poor creatures beg as a favour of mr. holdsworth to be buried among their kin, and know how it has preyed on the minds of the dying that they might not lie here among their own people.' 'change the subject, fitzjocelyn,' said his father: 'the thing is done, and cannot be undone.' 'the undoing is my daily thought,' said louis. 'if i could have tried my plan of weaving cordage out of cotton-grass and thistle-down, i think i could have contrived for them.' mary looked up, and met his merry blue eye. was he saying it so gravely to try whether he could take her in? 'if you could--' she said, and he went off into a hearty laugh, and finished by saying, so that no one could guess whether it was sport or earnest, 'even taking into account the depredations of the goldfinches, it would be an admirable speculation, and would confer immeasurable benefits on the owners of waste lands. i mean to take out a patent when i have succeeded in the spinning.' 'a patent for a donkey,' whispered aunt catharine. he responded with a deferential bow, and the conversation was changed by the earl; but copper was still the subject uppermost with louis, and no sooner was dinner over than he followed the ladies to the library, and began searching every book on metals and minerals, till he had heaped up a pile of volumes, whence be rang the changes on oxide, pyrites, and carbonate, and octohedron crystals--names which poor mrs. frost had heard but too often. at last it came to certainty that he had seen the very masses containing ore; he would send one to-morrow to illershall to be analysed, and bring his friend dobbs down to view the spot. 'not in my time,' interposed lord ormersfield. 'i would not wish for a greater misfortune than the discovery of a mine on my property.' 'no wonder,' thought mrs. ponsonby, as she recollected wheal salamanca and wheal catharine, and wheal dynevor, and all the other wheals that had wheeled away all cheveleigh and half ormersfield, till the last unfortunate wheal failed when the rope broke, and there were no funds to buy a new one. no wonder lord ormersfield trembled when he heard his son launch out into those easily-ascending conjectural calculations, freely working sums in his head, so exactly like the old earl, his grandfather, that she could have laughed, but for sympathy with the father, and anxiety to see how the son would take the damp so vexatiously cast on his projects. he made the gesture that mrs. frost called debonnaire--read on for five minutes in silence, insisted on teaching his aunt the cause of the colours in peacock ores, compared them to a pigeon's neck, and talked of old betty gervas's tame pigeons; whence he proceeded to memories of the days that he and mary had spent together, and asked which of their old haunts she had revisited. had she been into the nursery? 'oh yes! but i wondered you had sent the old walnut press into that lumber-room.' 'is that satire?' said louis, starting and looking in her face. 'i don't know what you mean.' 'i have a better right to ask what you mean by stigmatizing my apartment as a lumber-room?' 'it was only what i saw from the door,' said mary, a little confused, but rallying and answering with spirit; 'and i must maintain that, if you mean the room over the garden entrance, it is very like a lumber-room.' 'ah, mary! you have not outgrown the delusions of your sex. is an englishman's house his castle while housemaids maraud over it, ransacking his possessions, irritating poor peaceful dust that only wants to be let alone, sweeping away cherished cobwebs?' 'oh, if you cherish cobwebs!' said mary. 'did not the fortunes of scotland hang on a spider's thread? did not a cobweb save the life of mahomet, or ali, or a mediaeval saint--no matter which? was not a spider the solace of the bastille? have not i lain for hours on a summer morning watching the tremulous lines of the beautiful geometrical composition?' 'more shame for you!' said mary, with a sort of dry humorous bluntness. 'the very answer you would have made in old times,' cried louis, delighted. 'o mary, you bring me back the days of my youth! you never would see the giant who used to live in that press!' 'i remember our great fall from the top of it.' 'oh yes!' cried louis; 'jem frost had set us up there bolt upright for sentries, and i saw the enemies too soon, when you would not allow that they were there. i was going to fire my musket at them; but you used violence to keep me steady to my duty--pulled my hair, did not you?' 'i know you scratched me, and we both rolled off together! i wonder we were not both killed!' 'that did not trouble jem! he picked us up, and ordered us into arrest under the bed for breach of discipline.' 'i fear jem was a martinet,' said mrs. frost. 'that he was! a general formed on the model of him who, not contented with assaulting a demi-lune, had taken une lune toute entiere. we had a siege of the fort bombadero, inaccessible, and with mortars firing double-hand grenades. they were dandelion clocks, and there were nettles to act the part of poisoned spikes on the breach.' 'i remember the nettles,' said mary, 'and jem's driving you to gather them; you standing with your bare legs in the nettle-bed, when he would make me dig, and i could not come to help you!' 'on duty in the trenches. your sense of duty was exemplary. i remember your digging on, like a very casablanca, all alone, in the midst of a thunder-storm, because jem had forgotten to call you in, crying all the time with fear of the lightning!' 'you came to help me,' said mary. 'you came rushing out from the nursery to my rescue!' 'i could not make you stir. we were taken prisoners by a sally from the nursery. for once in your life, you were in disgrace!' 'i quite thought i ought to mind jem,' said mary, 'and never knew whether it was play or earnest.' 'only so could you transgress,' said louis,--'you who never cried, except as my amateur mungo malagrowther. poor mary! what an amazement it was to me to find you breaking your heart over the utmost penalties of the nursery law, when to me they only afforded agreeable occasions of showing that i did not care! i must have been intolerable till you and mrs. ponsonby took me in hand!' 'i am glad you own your obligations,' said lord ormersfield. 'i own myself as much obliged to mary for making me wise, as to jem for making me foolish.' 'it is not the cause of gratitude i should have expected,' said his father. 'alas! if he and clara were but here!' sighed louis. 'i entreated him in terms that might have moved a pyramid from its base, but the frost was arctic. an iceberg will move, but he is past all melting!' 'i respect his steadiness of purpose,' said the earl; 'i know no young man whom i honour more than james.' his aunt and his son were looking towards each other with glistening eyes of triumph and congratulation, and mrs. frost cleared her voice to say that he was making far too much of her jemmy; a very good boy, to be sure, but if he said so much of him, the marys would be disappointed to see nothing but a little fiery welshman. chapter iv. thistle-down. lightly soars the thistle-down, lightly does it float--, lightly seeds of care are sown, little do we note. watch life's thistles bud and blow, oh, 'tis pleasant folly; but when all life's paths they strew, then comes melancholy. poetry past and present. mary ponsonby had led a life of change and wandering that had given her few strong local attachments. the period she had spent at ormersfield, when she was from five to seven years old, had been the most joyous part of her life, and had given her a strong feeling for the place where she had lived with her mother, and in an atmosphere of affection, free from the shadow of that skeleton in the house, which had darkened her childhood more than she understood. the great weakness of mrs. ponsonby's life had been her over-hasty acceptance of a man, whom she did not thoroughly know, because her delicacy had taken alarm at foolish gossip about herself and her cousin. it was a folly that had been severely visited. irreligious himself, mr. ponsonby disliked his wife's strictness; he resented her affection for her own family, gave way to dissipated habits, and made her miserable both by violence and neglect. born late of this unhappy marriage, little mary was his only substantial link to his wife, and he had never been wanting in tenderness to her: but many a storm had raged over the poor child's head; and, though she did not know why the kind old countess had come to remove her and her mother, and 'papa' was still a loved and honoured title, she was fully sensible of the calm security at ormersfield. when mr. ponsonby had recalled his wife on his appointment at lima, mary had been left in england for education, under the charge of his sister in london. miss ponsonby was good and kind, but of narrow views, thinking all titled people fashionable, and all fashionable people reprobate, jealous of her sister-in-law's love for her own family, and, though unable to believe her brother blameless, holding it as an axiom that married people could not fall out without faults on both sides, and charging a large share of their unhappiness on the house of fitzjocelyn. principle had prevented her from endeavouring to weaken the little girl's affection to her mother; but it had been her great object to train her up in habits of sober judgment, and freedom from all the romance, poetry, and enthusiasm which she fancied had been injurious to mrs. ponsonby. the soil was of the very kind that she would have chosen. mary was intelligent, but with more sense than fancy, more practical than intellectual, and preferring the homely to the tasteful. at school, study and accomplishments were mere tasks, her recreation was found in acts of kindness to her companions, and her hopes were all fixed on the going out to peru, to be useful to her father and mother. at seventeen she went; full of active, housewifely habits, with a clear head, sound heart, and cramped mind, her spirits even and cheerful, but not high nor mirthful, after ten years of evenings spent in needlework beside a dry maiden aunt. nor was the home she found at lima likely to foster the joyousness of early girlhood. mr. ponsonby was excessively fond of her; but his affection to her only marked, by contrast, the gulf between him and her mother. there was no longer any open misconduct on his part, and mrs. ponsonby was almost tremblingly attentive to his wishes; but he was chill and sarcastic in his manner towards her, and her nervous attacks often betrayed that she had been made to suffer in private for differences of opinion. health and spirits were breaking down; and, though she never uttered a word of complaint, the sight of her sufferings was trying for a warm-hearted young girl. mary's refuge was hearty affection to both parents. she would not reason nor notice where filial tact taught her that it was best to be ignorant; she charged all tracasseries on the peruvian republic, and set herself simply to ameliorate each vexation as it arose, and divert attention from it without generalizing, even to herself, on the state of the family. the english comfort which she brought into the limenian household was one element of peace; and her brisk, energetic habits produced an air of ease and pleasantness that did much to make home agreeable to her father, and removed many cares which oppressed her mother. to her, mary was all the world-daughter, comforter, friend, and nurse, unfailing in deeds of love or words of cheer, and removing all sense of dreariness and solitude. and mary had found her mother all, and more than all she remembered, and admired and loved her with a deep, quiet glow of intense affection. there was so much call for mary's actual exertion of various kinds, that there was little opportunity for cultivating or enlarging her mind by books, though the scenes and circumstances around her could not but take some effect. still, at twenty-one she was so much what she had been at seventeen--so staid, sensible, and practical, that miss ponsonby gladly pronounced her not in the least spoilt. fain would her aunt have kept both her and her mother as her guests; but mrs. ponsonby had permission to choose whatever residence best suited her, and felt that bryanston-square and miss ponsonby would be fatal to her harassed spirits. she yearned after the home and companions of her youth, and miss ponsonby could only look severe, talk of london doctors, and take mary aside to warn her against temptations from fashionable people. mary had been looking for the fashionable people ever since, and the first sign of them she had seen, was the air and figure of her cousin fitzjocelyn. probably good aunt melicent would distrust him; and yet his odd startling talk, and the arch look of mischief in the corners of his mouth and eyes, had so much likeness to the little louis of old times, that she could not look on him as a stranger nor as a formidable being; but was always recurring to the almost monitorial sense of protection, with which she formerly used to regard him, when she shared his nursery. her mother had cultivated her love for ormersfield, and she was charmed by her visits to old haunts, well remembering everything. she gladly recognised the little low-browed church, the dumpy tower, and grave-yard rising so high that it seemed to intend to bury the church itself, and permitted many a view, through the lattices, of the seats, and the fitzjocelyn hatchments and monuments. she lingered after church on sunday afternoon with mrs. frost to look at lady fitzjocelyn's monument. it was in the chancel, a recumbent figure in white marble, as if newly fallen asleep, and with the lovely features chiselled from a cast taken after death had fixed and ennobled their beauty. 'it is just like louis's profile!' said mrs. frost, as they came out. 'well,' said louis, who was nearer than she was aware, 'i hope at least no one will make me the occasion of a lion when i am dead.' 'it is very beautiful,' said mary. 'may be so; but the sentiment is destroyed by its having been six months in the royal academy, number , , and by seeing it down among the excursions in the northwold guide.' 'louis, my dear, you should not be satirical on this,' said mrs. frost. 'i never meant it,' said louis, 'but i never could love that monument. it used to oppress me with a sense of having a white marble mother! and, seriously, it fills up the chancel as if it were its show-room, according to our family tradition that the church is dedicated to the fitzjocelyns. living or dead, we have taken it all to ourselves.' 'it was a very fair, respectable congregation,' said his aunt. 'exactly so. that is my complaint. everything belonging to his lordship is respectable--except his son.' 'take care, louis; here is mary looking as if she would take you at your word.' 'pray, mary, do they let no one who is not respectable go to church in peru?' 'i do not think you would change your congregation for the wretched crowds of brown beggars,' said mary. 'would i not?' cried louis. 'oh! if the analogous class here in england could but feel that the church was for them!--not driven out and thrust aside, by our respectability.' 'marksedge to wit!' said a good-humoured voice, as mr. holdsworth, the young vicar, appeared at his own wicket, with a hearty greeting. 'i never hear those words without knowing where you are, fitzjocelyn.' 'i hope to be there literally some day this week,' said louis. 'will you walk with me? i want to ask old madison how his grandson goes on. i missed going to see after the boy last time i was at home.' 'i fear he has not been going on well, and have been sorry for it ever since,' said the vicar. 'his master told me that he found him very idle and saucy.' 'people of that sort never know how to speak to a lad,' said louis. 'it is their own rating that they ought to blame.' 'not tom madison, i know,' said mr. holdsworth, laughing. 'but i did not come out to combat that point, but to inquire after the commissions you kindly undertook.' 'i have brought you such a set of prizes! red rubrics, red margins; and for the apparatus, i have brought a globe with all the mountains in high relief;--yes, and an admirable physical atlas, and a box of instruments and models for applying mathematics to mechanics. we might give evening lectures, and interest the young farmers.' 'pray,' said the vicar, with a sound of dismay, 'where may the bill be? i thought the limits were two pounds eighteen.' 'oh! i take all that on myself.' 'we shall see,' said mr. holdsworth, not gratefully. 'was origen sent home in time for you to bring?' 'there!' cried louis, starting, 'origen is lying on the very chair where i put him last january. i will write to jem frost to-morrow to send him to the binder.' 'is it of any use to ask for the music?' 'i assure you, mr. holdsworth, i am very sorry. i'll write at once to frost.' 'then i am afraid the parish will not be reformed as you promised last christmas,' said the vicar, turning, with a smile, to mrs. frost. 'we were to be civilized by weekly concerts in the school.' 'what were you to play, louis?' said mrs. frost, laughing. 'i was to imitate all the birds in the air at once,' said louis, beginning to chirp like a melee of sparrows, turning it into the croak of a raven, and breaking off suddenly with, 'i beg your pardon--i forgot it was sunday! indeed, mr. holdsworth, i can say no more than that i was a wretch not to remember. next time i'll write it all down in the top of my hat, with a pathetic entreaty that if my hat be stolen, the thief shall fulfil the commissions, and punctually send in the bill to the rev. w. b. holdsworth!' 'i shall hardly run the risk,' said mr. holdsworth, smiling, as he parted with them, and disappeared within his clipped yew hedges. 'poor, ill-used mr. holdsworth!' cried aunt catharine. 'yes, it was base to forget the binding of that book,' said louis, gravely. 'i wish i knew what amends to make.' 'you owe amends far more for making a present of a commission. i used to do the like, to save myself trouble, till i came down in the world, and then i found it had been a mere air de grand seigneur.' 'i should not dare to serve you or jem so; but i thought the school was impersonal, and could receive a favour.' 'it is no favour, unless you clearly define where the commission ended and the gift began. careless benefits oblige no one.' fitzjocelyn received his aunt's scoldings very prettily. his manner to her was a becoming mixture of the chivalrous, the filial, and the playful. mary watched it as a new and pretty picture. all his confidence, too, seemed to be hers; but who could help pouring out his heart to the ever-indulgent, sympathizing aunt catharine? it was evidently the greatest treat to him to have her for his guest, and his attention to her extended even to the reading a sermon to her in the evening, to spare her eyes; a measure so entirely after aunt melicent's heart, that mary decided that even she would not think her cousin so hopelessly fashionable. goodnatured he was, without doubt; for as the three ladies were sitting down to a sociable morning of work and reading aloud, he came in to say he was going to see after tom madison, and to ask if there were any commands for northwold, with his checked shooting-jacket pockets so puffed out that his aunt began patting and inquiring. 'provisions for the house beautiful,' he said, as forth came on the one side a long rough brown yam. 'i saw it at a shop in london,' he said, 'and thought the faithfull sisters would like to be reminded of their west indian feasts.' and, 'to make the balance true,' he had in the other pocket a lambswool shawl of gorgeous dyes, with wools to make the like, and the receipt, in what he called 'female algebra,' the long knitting-pins under his arm like a riding-whip. he explained that he thought it would be a winter's work for miss salome to imitate it, and that she would succour half-a-dozen families with the proceeds; and mrs. ponsonby was pleased to hear him speak so affectionately of the two old maiden sisters. they were the nieces of an old gentleman to whom the central and handsomest house of dynevor terrace had been let. he had an annuity which had died with him, and they inherited very little but the furniture with which they had lived on in the same house, in hopes of lodgers, and paying rent to mrs. frost when they had any. there was a close friendship and perfect understanding between her and them, and, as she truly assured them, full and constant rent could hardly have done her as much good as their neighbourhood. miss mercy was the sister of charity of all northwold; miss salome, who was confined to her chair by a complaint in her knee, knitted and made fancy-works, the sale of which furnished funds for her charities. she was highly educated, and had a great knowledge of natural history. fitzjocelyn had given their abode the name of the house beautiful, as being redolent of the essence of the pilgrim's progress; and the title was so fully accepted by their friends, that the very postman would soon know it. he lingered, discoursing on this topic, while mary repacked his parcels, and his aunt gave him a message to jane beckett, to send the carpenter to no. before mary's visit of inspection; but she prophesied that he would forget; and, in fact, it was no good augury that he left the knitting-pins behind him on the table, and mary was only just in time to catch him with them at the front door. 'thank you, mary--you are the universal memory,' he said. 'what rest you must give my father's methodical spirit! i saw you pile up all those blackwoods of mine this morning, just as he was going to fall upon them.' 'if you saw it, i should have expected you to do it yourself,' said mary, in her quaint downright manner. 'never expect me to do what is expected,' answered he. 'do you do that because it is not expected?' said mary, feeling almost as if he were beyond the pale of reason, as she saw him adjusting a plant of groundsel in his cap. 'it is for the dicky-bird at my aunt's. there's no lack of it at the terrace; but it is an old habit, and there always was an illusion that ormersfield groundsel is a superior article.' 'i suppose that is why you grow go much.' 'are you a gardener? some day we will go to work, clear the place, and separate the botanical from the intrusive!' 'i should like it, of all things!' 'i'll send the horse round to the stable, and begin at once!' exclaimed louis, all eagerness; but mary demurred, as she had promised to read to her mother and aunt some of their old favourites, madame de sevigne's letters, and his attention flew off to his restless steed, which he wanted her to admire. 'my yeomanry charger,' he said. 'we turn out five troopers. i hope you will be here when we go out, for going round to northwold brought me into a direful scrape when i went to exhibit myself to the dear old terrace world. my father said it was an unworthy ambition. what would he have thought, if he had seen jane stroking me down with the brush on the plea of dust, but really on the principle of stroking a dog! good old jane! have you seen her yet? has she talked to you about master oliver?' the horse became so impatient, that mary had no time for more than a monosyllable, before louis was obliged to mount and ride off; and he was seen no more till just before dinner, when, with a shade of french malice, mrs. frost inquired about jane and the carpenter: she had seen the cap, still decorated with groundsel, lying in the hall, and had a shrewd suspicion, but the answer went beyond her expectations--'ah!' he said, 'it is all the effect of the norman mania!' 'what have you been doing? what is the matter?' she cried, alarmed. 'the matter is not with me, but with the magistrates.' 'my dear louis, don't look so very wise and capable, or i shall think it a very bad scrape indeed! pray tell me what you have been about.' 'you know sir gilbert brewster and mr. shoreland are rabid about the little brook between their estates, of which each wishes to arrogate to himself the exclusive fishing. their keepers watch like the austrian guard on the danube, in a life of perpetual assault and battery. last saturday, march rd, , one benjamin hodgekin, aged fifteen, had the misfortune to wash his feet in the debateable water; the belligerent powers made common cause, and haled the wretch before the petty sessions. his mother met me. she lived in service here till she married a man at marksedge, now dead. this poor boy is an admirable son, the main stay of the family, who must starve if he were imprisoned, and she declared, with tears in her eyes, that she could not bear for a child of hers to be sent to gaol, and begged me to speak to the gentlemen.' he started up with kindling eyes and vehement manner. 'i went to the justice-room!' 'my dear! with the groundsel?' 'and the knitting-needles!' on rushed the narration, unheeding trifles. 'there was the array: mr. calcott in the chair, and old freeman, and captain shaw, and fat sir gilbert, and all the rest, met to condemn this wretched widow's son for washing his feet in a gutter!' 'pray what said the indictment?' asked mrs. ponsonby. 'oh, that he had killed an infant trout of the value of three farthings! three giant keepers made oath to it, but i had his own mother's word that he was washing his feet!' no one could help laughing, but fitzjocelyn was far past perceiving any such thing. 'urge what i would, they fined him. i talked to old brewster! i appealed to his generosity, if there be room for generosity about a trout no bigger than a gudgeon! i talked to mr. calcott, who, i thought, had more sense, but justice shallow would have been more practicable! no one took a rational view but ramsbotham of the factory, a very sensible man, with excellent feeling. when it is recorded in history, who will believe that seven moral, well-meaning men agreed in condemning a poor lad of fifteen to a fine of five shillings, costs three-and-sixpence--a sum he could no more pay than i the national debt, and with the alternative of three months' imprisonment, branding and contaminating for life, and destroying all self-respect? i paid the fine, so there is one act of destruction the less on the heads of the english squirearchy.' 'act of destruction!' 'the worst destruction is to blast a man's character because the love of adventure is strong within him--!' he was at this point when lord ormersfield entered, and after his daily civil ceremonious inquiries of the ladies whether they had walked or driven out, he turned to his son, saying, 'i met mr. calcott just now, and heard from him that he had been sorry to convict a person in whom you took interest, a lad from marksedge. what did you know of him?' 'i was prompted by common justice and humanity,' said louis. 'my protection was claimed for the poor boy, as the son of an old servant of ours.' 'indeed! i think you must have been imposed on. mr. calcott spoke of the family as notorious poachers.' 'find a poor fellow on the wrong side of a hedge, and not a squire but will swear that he is a hardened ruffian!' 'usually with reason,' said the earl. 'pray when did this person's parents allege that they had been in my service?' 'it was his mother. her name was blackett, and she left us on her marriage with one of the hodgekins.' lord ormersfield rang the bell, and frampton, the butler and confidential servant, formed on his own model, made his appearance. 'do you know whether a woman of the name of blackett ever lived in service here?' 'not that i am aware of, my lord. i will ascertain the fact.' in a few moments frampton returned. 'yes, my lord, a girl named blackett was once engaged to help in the scullery, but was discharged for dishonesty at the end of a month.' 'did not frampton know that that related to me?' said louis, sotto voce, to his aunt. 'did he not trust that he was reducing me from a sea anemone to a lump of quaking jelly?' so far from this consummation, lord fitzjocelyn looked as triumphant as don quixote liberating gines de pasamonte. he and his father might have sat for illustrations of 'youth is full of pleasance, age is full of care,' as they occupied the two ends of the dinner-table; the earl concealing anxiety and vexation, under more than ordinary punctilious politeness; the viscount doing his share of the honours with easy, winning grace and attention, and rattling on in an under-tone of lively conversation with aunt catharine. mary was silently amazed at her encouraging him; but perhaps she could not help spoiling him the more, because there was a storm impending. at least, as soon as she was in the drawing-room, she became restless and nervous, and said that she wished his father could see that speaking sternly to him never did any good; besides, it was mere inconsiderateness, the excess of chivalrous compassion. mrs. ponsonby said she thought young men's ardour more apt to be against than for the poacher. 'i must confess,' said aunt catherine, with all the reluctance of a high-spirited dynevor,--'i must confess that louis is no sportsman! he was eager about it once, till he had become a good shot; and then it lost all zest for him, and he prefers his own vagaries. he never takes a gun unless james drives him out; and, oddly enough, his father is quite vexed at his indifference, as if it were not manly. if his father would only understand him!' the specimen of that day had almost made mrs. ponsonby fear that there was nothing to understand, and that only dear aunt kitty's affection could perceive anything but amiable folly, and it was not much better when the young gentleman reappeared, looking very debonnaire, and, sitting down beside mrs. frost, said, in a voice meant for her alone--'henry iv; part ii., the insult to chief justice gascoigne. my father will presently enter and address you: 'o that it could be proved that some night-tripping fairy had exchanged in cradle-cloths our children as they lay,-- call'd yours fitzjocelyn--mine, frost dynevor!' 'for shame, louis! i shall have to call you fitzjocelyn! you are behaving very ill.' 'insulting the english constitution in the person of seven squires.' 'don't, my dear! it was the very thing to vex your father that you should have put yourself in such a position.' 'bearding the northwold bench with a groundsel plume and a knitting-needle: 'with a needle for a sword, and a thimble for a hat, wilt thou fight a traverse with the castle cat?' the proper champion in such a cause, since 'what cat's averse to fish?'' 'no, louis dear,' said his aunt, struggling like a girl to keep her countenance; 'this is no time for nonsense. one would think you had no feeling for your father.' 'my dear aunt, i can't go to gaol like prince hal. i do assure you, i did not assault the bench with the knitting-pins. what am i to do?' 'not set at nought your father's displeasure.' 'i can't help it,' said he, almost sadly, though half smiling. 'what would become of me if i tried to support the full weight? interfering with institutions, ruining reputation, blasting bulwarks, patronizing poachers, vituperating venerated--' 'quite true,' cried aunt catherine, with spirit. 'you know you had no business there, lecturing a set of men old enough to be your grandfathers, and talking them all to death, no doubt.' 'well, aunt kitty, if oppression maddens the wise, what must it do to the foolish?' 'if you only allow that it was foolish--' 'no; i had rather know whether it was wrong. i believe i was too eager, and not respectful enough to the old squire: and, on reflection, it might have been a matter of obedience to my father, not to interfere with the prejudices of true-born english magistrates. yes, i was wrong: i would have owned it sooner, but for the shell he fired over my head. and for the rest, i don't know how to repent of having protested against tyranny.' there was something redeeming in the conclusion, and it was a comfort, for it was impossible to retain anger with one so gently, good-humouredly polite and attentive. a practical answer to the champion was not long in coming. he volunteered the next day to walk to northwold with mrs. frost and mary, who wanted to spend the morning in selecting a house in dynevor terrace, and to be fetched home by-and-by, when mrs. ponsonby took her airing. two miles seemed nothing to aunt catharine, who accepted her nephew's arm for love, and not for need, as he discoursed of all the animals that might be naturalized in england, obtained from mary an account of the llamas of the andes, and rode off upon a scheme of an importation to make the fortune of marksedge by a manufacture of alpaca umbrellas. meantime, he must show the beautiful american ducks which he hoped to naturalize on the pond near the keeper's lodge: but, whistle and call as he would, nothing showed itself but screaming canada geese. he ran round, pulled out a boat half full of water, and, with a foot on each side, paddled across to a bushy island in the centre,--but in vain. the keeper's wife, who had the charge over them, came out: 'oh, my lord, i am so sorry! they pretty ducks!' 'ha! the foxes?' 'i wish it was, my lord; but it is they poachers out at marksedge that are so daring, they would come anywheres--and you see the ducks would roost up in the trees, and you said i was not to shut 'em up at night. my master was out up by beech hollow; i heerd a gun, and looked out; i seen a man and a boy--i'd take my oath it was young hodgekin. they do say nanny hodgekin, she as was one of the blacketts, whose husband was transported, took in two ducks next morning to northwold. warren couldn't make nothing of it; but if ever he meets that hodgekin again, he says he _shall_ catch it!' 'well, mrs. warren, it can't be helped--thank you for the good care you took of the poor ducks,' said louis, kindly; and as he walked on through the gate, he gave a long sigh, and said, 'my dainty ducks! so there's an end of them, and all their tameness!' but the smile could not but return. 'it is lucky the case does not come before the bench! but really that woman deserves a medal for coolness!' 'i suppose,' said mary, 'she could have paid the fine with the price of the ducks.' 'ah! the beauties! i wish mr. hodgekin had fallen on the pheasants instead! however, i am thankful he and warren did not come to a collision about them. i am always expecting that, having made those marksedge people thieves, murder will be the next consequence.' a few seconds sufficed to bring the ludicrous back. 'how pat it comes! mary, did you prime mrs. warren, or did frampton?' 'i believe you had rather laugh at yourself than at any one else,' exclaimed his aunt, who felt baffled at having thrown away her compassion. 'of course. one knows how much can be borne. why, mary, has that set you studying,--do you dissent?' 'i was thinking whether it is the best thing to be always ready to laugh at oneself,' said mary. 'does it always help in mending?' ''don't care' came to a bad end,' said louis; 'but on the other hand, care killed a cat--so there are two sides to the question.' while mary was feeling disappointed at his light tone, he changed it to one that was almost mournful. 'the worst of it is, that 'don't care' is my refuge. whatever i do care about is always thwarted by frampton or somebody, and being for ever thrown over, i have only to fall as softly as i can.' 'you know, my dear,' said mrs. frost, 'that your father has no command of means to gratify you.' 'there are means enough for ourselves,' said louis; 'that is the needful duty. what merely personal indulgence did i ever ask for that was refused me?' 'if that is all you have to complain of, i can't pity you,' said mary. 'listen, mary. let me wish for a horse, there it is! let me wish for a painted window, we can't afford it, though, after all, it would not eat; but horses are an adjunct of state and propriety. so again, the parish feasted last th of january, because i came of age, and it was _proper_; while if i ask that our people may be released from work on good friday or ascension day, it is thought outrageous.' 'if i remember right, my dear,' interposed his aunt, 'you wanted no work to be done on any saint's-day. was there not a scheme that mr. holdsworth called the cricket cure!' 'that may yet be. no one knows the good a few free days would do the poor. but i developed my plan too rapidly! i'll try again for their church-going on good friday.' 'i think you ought to succeed there.' 'i know how it will be. my father will ring, propound the matter to frampton; the answer will be, 'quite impracticable, my lord,' and there will be an end of it.' 'perhaps not. at least it will have been considered,' said mary. 'true,' said louis; 'but you little know what it is to have a frampton! if he be a fair sample of prime ministers, no wonder princes of wales go into the opposition!' 'i thought frampton was a very valuable superior servant.' 'exactly so. that is the worst of it. he is supreme authority, and well deserves it. when la grande mademoiselle stood before the gates of orleans calling to the sentinel to open them, he never stirred a step, but replied merely with profound bows. that is my case. i make a request, am answered, 'yes, my lord;' find no results, repeat the process, and at the fourth time am silenced with, 'quite impracticable my lord.'' 'surely frampton is respectful?' 'it is his very essence. he is a thorough aristocrat, respecting himself, and therefore respecting all others as they deserve. he respects a viscount fitzjocelyn as an appendage nearly as needful as the wyverns on each side of the shield; but as to the individual holding that office, he regards him much as he would one of the wyverns with a fool's-cap on.' and with those words, fitzjocelyn had sprung into the hedge to gather the earliest willow-catkins, and came down dilating on their silvery, downy buds and golden blossoms, and on the pleasure they would give miss faithfull, till mary, who had been beginning to compassionate him, was almost vexed to think her pity wasted on grievances of mere random talk. warm and kindly was his greeting of his aunt's good old servant, jane beckett, whom mary was well pleased to meet as one of the kind friends of her childhood. the refinement that was like an atmosphere around mrs. frost, seemed to have extended even to her servants; for jane, though she could hardly read, and carried her accounts in her head, had manners of a gentle warmth and propriety that had a grace of their own, even in her racy, bad grammar; and there was no withstanding the merry smile that twitched up one side of her mouth, while her eyes twinkled in the varied moods prompted by an inexhaustible fund of good temper, sympathy, and affection, but the fulness of her love was for the distant 'master oliver,' whose young nursery-maid she had been. her eyes winked between tears and smiles when she heard that miss mary had seen him but five months ago, and she inquired after him, gloried in his prosperity, and talked of his coming home, with far less reserve than his mother had done. mary was struck, also, with the pretty, modest looks of the little underling, and remarked on them as they proceeded to the inspection of the next house. 'yes,' said louis, 'charlotte is something between a wood sorrel and a five-plume moth. tom madison, as usual, shows exquisite taste. she is a perfect lady of eschalott.' 'now, louis!' said his aunt, standing still, and really looking annoyed, 'you know i cannot encourage any such thing. poor little charlotte is an orphan, and i am all the more responsible for her.' 'there's a chivalry in poor tom--' 'nonsense!' said his aunt, as if resolved not to hear him out, because afraid of herself. 'don't say any more about it. i wish i had never allowed of his bringing your messages.' 'who set him down in the kitchen to drink a cup of beer?' said louis, mischievously. 'ah! well! one comfort is, that girls never care for boys of the same age,' replied aunt catharine, as she turned the key, and admitted them into no. ; when fitzjocelyn confused mary's judgment with his recommendations, till aunt catharine pointing out the broken shutter, and asking if he would not have been better employed in fetching the carpenter, than in hectoring the magistrates, he promised to make up for it, fetched a piece of wood and james's tools, and was quickly at work, his aunt only warning him, that if he lost jem's tools she would not say it was her fault. by the time mary's imagination had portrayed what paper, paint, furniture, and habitation might make the house, and had discerned how to arrange a pretty little study in case of her father's return; he had completed the repair in a workmanlike manner, and putting two fingers to his cap, asked, 'any other little job for me, ma'am?' of course, he forgot the tools, till shamed by mary's turning back for them, and after a merry luncheon, served up in haste by jane, they betook themselves to number , where the miss faithfulls were seated at a dessert of hard biscuits and water, of neither of which they ever partook: they only adhered to the hereditary institution of sitting for twenty minutes after dinner with their red and purple doileys before them. mary seemed to herself carried back fourteen years, and to understand why her childish fancy had always believed christiana's mercy a living character, when she found herself in the calm, happy little household. the chief change was that she must now bend down, instead of reaching up, to receive the kind embraces. even the garments seemed unchanged, the dark merino gowns, black silk aprons, white cap-ribbons, the soft little indian shawl worn by the elder sister, the ribbon bow by the younger, distinctions that used to puzzle her infant speculation, not aware that the coloured bow was miss mercy's ensign of youth, and that its absence would have made miss salome feel aged indeed. the two sisters were much alike--but the younger was the more spare, shrivelled up into a cheery nonpareil, her bloom changed into something quite as fresh and healthful, and her blithe tripping step always active, except when her fingers were nimbly taking their turn. miss salome had become more plump, her cheek was smoother and paler, her eye more placid, her air that of a patient invalid, and her countenance more intellectual than her sister's. she said less about their extreme enjoyment of the yam, and while mrs. frost and mary held counsel with miss mercy on servants and furniture, there was a talk on entomology going on between her and fitzjocelyn. it was very pretty to see him with the old ladies, so gently attentive, without patronizing, and they, though evidently doting on him, laughing at him, and treating him like a spoilt child. he insisted on mary's seeing their ordinary sitting room, which nature had intended for a housekeeper's room, but which ladylike inhabitants had rendered what he called the very 'kernel of the house beautiful.' there were the stands of flowers in the window; the bullfinch scolding in his cage, the rare old shells and china on the old-fashioned cabinets that mary so well remembered; and the silk patchwork sofa-cover, the old piano, and miss faithfull's arm chair by the fire, her little table with her beautiful knitting, and often a flower or insect that she was copying; for she still drew nicely; and she smiled and consented, as louis pulled out her portfolios, life-long collections of portraits of birds, flowers, or insects. her knitting found a sale at the workshop, where the object was well known, and the proceeds were diffused by her sister, and whether she deserved her name might be guessed by the basket of poor people's stores beside her chair. miss mercy was well known in every dusky northwold lane or alley, where she always found or made a welcome for herself. the kindly counsel and ready hand were more potent than far larger means without them. such neighbours were in themselves a host, and mary and her mother both felt as if they had attained a region of unwonted tranquillity and repose, when they had agreed to rent no. , dynevor terrace, from the ensuing lady-day, and to take possession when carpenters and upholsterers should have worked their will. louis was half-way home when he exclaimed, 'there! i have missed tom madison a second time. when shall i ever remember him at the right time?' little did louis guess the effect his neglect was taking! charlotte arnold might have told, for mrs. martha had brought in stories of his unsteadiness and idle habits that confirmed her in her obedience to jane. she never went out alone in his leisure hours; never looked for him in returning from church--alas! that was not the place to look for him now. and yet she could not believe him such a very bad boy as she was told he had become. chapter v. the two ministers. 'the creature's neither one nor t'other. i caught the animal last night, and viewed him o'er by candle-light; i marked him well, 'twas black as jet. you stare, but sirs, i've got him yet, and can produce him.' 'pray, sir, do; i'll lay my life the thing is blue.' 'and i'll be sworn, that when you've seen the reptile, you'll pronounce him green.' 'well, then, at once to end the doubt,' replies the man, 'i'll turn him out; and when before your eyes i've set him, if you don't find him black, i'll eat him.' he said--then, full before their sight produced the beast, and lo! 'twas white! merrick. mrs. ponsonby had seen in the tropics birds of brilliant hues, that even, whilst the gazer pronounced them all one beaming tint of gorgeous purple, would give one flutter, and in another light would flash with golden green or fiery scarlet. no less startling and unexpected were the aspects of lord fitzjocelyn, 'every thing by starts, and nothing long;' sometimes absorbed in study, sometimes equally ardent over a childish game; wild about philanthropic plans, and apparently forgetting them the instant a cold word had fallen on them; attempting everything, finishing nothing; dipping into every kind of book, and forsaking it after a cursory glance; ever busy, yet ever idle; full of desultory knowledge, ranging through all kinds of reading and natural history, and still more full of talk. this last was perhaps his most decided gift. to any one, of whatever degree, he would talk, he could hardly have been silent ten minutes with any human being, except frampton or his father, and whether deep reflections or arrant nonsense came out of his mouth, seemed an even chance, though both alike were in the same soft low voice, and with the same air of quaint pensive simplicity. he was exceedingly provoking, and yet there was no being provoked with him! he was so sincere, affectionate, and obliging, that not to love him was impossible, yet that love only made his faults more annoying, and mrs. ponsonby could well understand his father's perpetual restless anxiety, for his foibles were exactly of the sort most likely to tease such a man as the earl, and the most positively unsatisfactory part of his character was the insouciance that he displayed when his trifling or his wild projects had given umbrage. yet, even here, she could not but feel a hope, such as it was, that the carelessness might be the effect of want of sympathy and visible affection from his father, whose very anxiety made him the more unbending; and that, what a worse temper might have resented, rendered a good one gaily reckless and unheeding. she often wondered whether she should try to give a hint--but lord ormersfield seemed to dread leading to the subject, although on all else that interested him he came to her as in old times, and seemed greatly refreshed and softened by her companionship. an old friend and former fellow-minister had proposed spending a night at ormersfield. he was the person whom the earl most highly esteemed, and, in his own dignified way, he was solicitous that the household should be in more than usually perfect order, holding a long conference with the man of whom he was sure, frampton. would that he could have been equally sure of his son! he looked at him almost wistfully several times during breakfast, and at last, as they rose, gave an exhortation 'that he would be punctual to dinner at half-past seven, which would give him ample time, and he hoped he would be--' he paused for a word, and his son supplied it. 'on my good behaviour, i understand.' with that he walked off, leaving lord ormersfield telling mrs. ponsonby that it was the first introduction, as he had 'for various reasons' thought it undesirable to bring fitzjocelyn early to london, and betraying his own anxiety as to the impression he might produce on sir miles oakstead. his own perplexity and despondency showed themselves in his desire to view his son with the eyes of others, and he also thought the tenor of fitzjocelyn's future life might be coloured by his friend's opinion. evening brought the guest. mrs. ponsonby was not well enough to appear at dinner, but mary and mrs. frost, pleased to see an historical character, were in the drawing-room, enjoying sir miles's agreeable conversation, until they caught certain misgivings reflected in each other's looks, as time wore on and nothing had been seen or heard of louis. the half-hour struck; the earl waited five minutes, then rang the bell. 'is lord fitzjocelyn come in?' 'no, my lord.' 'bring in the dinner.' mary longed to fly in search of him, and spare further vexation. she had assumed all an elder sister's feelings, and suffered for him as she used to do, when he was in disgrace and would not heed it. she heard no more of the conversation, and was insensible to the honour of going in to dinner with the late secretary of state, as she saw the empty place at the table. the soup was over, when she was aware of a step in the hall, and beside her stood a grey figure, bespattered with mud, shading his eyes with his hand, as if dazzled by the lights. 'i beg your pardon,' were the words, 'but i was obliged to go to northwold. i have shot a rose-coloured pastor!' 'shot him!' cried mary. 'was he much hurt?' 'killed! i took him to miss faithfull, to be sketched before he is stuffed--' a clearer view of the company, a wave of the hand from the earl, and the young gentleman was gone. next he opened the library door, saying, 'here's my pretty behaviour!' 'louis! what is the matter?' cried mrs. ponsonby. 'i entirely forgot the right honourable, and marched into the dining-room to tell aunt catharine that i have killed a rose-coloured pastor.' 'killed what?' 'a bird, hardly ever seen in england. i spied him in the fir-wood, went to warren for a gun, brought him down, and walked on to the house beautiful, where miss faithfull was enchanted. she will copy him, and send him to the bird-stuffer. i looked in to give directions, and old jenyns was amazed; he never knew one shot here before, so early in the year too. he says we must send the account to the ornithological--' 'do you know how wet you are? exclaimed mrs. ponsonby, seeing rivulets dropping from his coat. 'i see. it rained all the way home, and was so dark, i could not see the footpath; and when i came in, my eyes were blinded by the light, and my head so full of the pastor, that the other minister never occurred to me, and remains under the impression that i have confessed a sacrilegious murder.' 'you really are incorrigible!' cried mrs. ponsonby. 'why are you not dressing for dinner?' 'because you are going to give me a cup of your tea.' 'certainly not. i shall begin to think you purposely mortified your father, when you know he wanted you to be reasonable.' 'the lower species never show off well to strangers,' said fitzjocelyn, coolly; but, as he lighted his candle, he added, with more candour, 'i beg your pardon--indeed i did not do this on purpose, but don't say anything about appearances--there's something in me that is sure to revolt.' so noiselessly that the moment was unknown, the vacant chair was filled by a gentleman irreproachably attired, his face glowing with exercise, or with what made him very debonnaire and really silent, dining rapidly and unobtrusively, and never raising his eyes even to his aunt, probably intending thus to remain all the evening; but presently sir miles turned to him and said, 'pray satisfy my curiosity. who is the rose-coloured pastor?' louis raised his eyes, and meeting a pleasing, sensible face, out beamed his arch look of suppressed fun as he answered, 'he is not at all clerical. he is otherwise called the rose-coloured ouzel or starling.' 'whence is that other startling name?' 'from his attending flocks of sheep, on the same mission as jackdaws fulfil here--which likewise have an ecclesiastical reputation-- 'a great frequenter of the church.'' fearing alike nonsense and ornithology, lord ormersfield changed the subject, and louis subsided, but when the gentlemen came into the drawing-room, mrs. ponsonby was surprised to see him taking a fair share, and no more, of the conversation. some information had been wanted about the terms of labour in the mining districts, and louis's visit to illershall enabled him to throw light on the subject, with much clearness and accuracy. sir miles had more literature than lord ormersfield, and was more used to young men; and he began to draw fitzjocelyn out, with complete success. louis fully responded to the touch, and without a notion that he was showing himself to the best advantage, he yielded to the pleasure, and for once proved of what he was capable--revealing unawares an unusual amount of intelligence and observation, and great power of expression. not even his aunt had ever seen him appear so much like a superior man, and the only alloy was his father's, ill-repressed dread lest he should fall on dangerous ground, and commit himself either to his wildly philanthropical or extravagantly monarchical views, whichever might happen to be in the ascendant. however, such shoals were not approached, nor did louis ever plunge out of his depth. the whole of his manner and demeanour were proofs that, in his case, much talk sprang from exuberance of ideas, not from self-conceit. he was equally good in the morning: he had risen early to hunt up some information which sir miles wanted, and the clearness and readiness with which he had found it were wonderful. the guest was delighted with him; gave him a warm invitation to oakstead, and on being left alone with mrs. ponsonby, whom he had formerly known, expressed his admiration of his friend's son--as a fine, promising young man, of great ability and originality, and, what was still more remarkable, of most simple, natural manners, perfectly free from conceit. he seemed the more amazed, when he found, what he would hardly believe, that fitzjocelyn was twenty-one, and had nearly finished his university education. the liking was mutual. no sooner had sir miles departed, than louis came to the library in a rapture, declaring that here was the refreshing sight of a man unspoilt by political life, which usually ate out the hearts of people. mary smiled at this, and told him that he was talking 'like an old statesman weary of the world.' 'one may be weary of the world beforehand as well as after,' said he. 'that does not seem worth while,' said mary. 'no,' he said, 'but one's own immediate look-out may not be flattering, whatever the next turn may bring;' and he took up the newspaper, and began to turn it over. ''as butler--as single-handed man--as clerk and accountant.' there, those are the lucky men, with downright work, and some one to work for. or, just listen to this!' and he plunged into a story of some heroic conduct during a shipwreck. while he was reading it aloud, with kindling eyes and enthusiastic interest, his father opened the door. 'louis,' he said, 'if you are doing nothing, i should be obliged if you would make two copies of this letter.' louis glanced at the end of what he was reading, laid the paper down, and opened a blotting-book. 'you had better come into the study, or you will not write correctly.' 'i can write, whatever goes on.' 'i particularly wish this to be legible and accurate. you have begun too low down.' louis took another sheet. 'that pen is not fit to write with.' 'the pens are delusions,' said louis, trying them round, in an easy, idle way: 'i never could mend a quill! how is this steel one? refuses to recognise the purpose of his existence. aunt catherine, do you still forbid steel pens in your school? if so, it must be the solitary instance. how geese must cackle blessings on the inventor! he should have a testimonial--a silver inkstand representing the goose that laid the golden eggs,--and all writing-masters should subscribe. ha! where did this pen come from? mary, were you the bounteous mender! a thousand thanks.' if louis fretted his father by loitering and nonsense, his father was no less trying by standing over him with advice and criticisms which would have driven most youths beyond patience, but which he bore with constant good-humour, till his father returned to the study, when he exclaimed, 'now, mary, if you like to finish the wreck, it will not interrupt me. this is mere machine-work.' 'thank you,' said mary; 'i should like it better afterwards. do you think i might do one copy for you? or would it not suit lord ormersfield?' louis made polite demurs, but she overruled them and began. he stretched himself, took up his times, and skimmed the remaining incidents of the shipwreck, till he was shamed by seeing mary half-way down the first page, when he resumed his pen, overtook her, and then relapsed into talk, till mrs. frost fairly left the room, to silence him. as the two copies were completed, lord ormersfield returned; and mary, with many apologies, presented her copy, and received most gracious thanks and compliments on her firm, clear writing, a vexation to her rather than otherwise, since 'fitzjocelyn' was called to account for dubious scrawls, errors, and erasures. he meekly took another sheet, consoling himself, however, by saying, 'i warn you that pains will only make it miss fanny.' 'what do you mean?' as if glad to be instigated, he replied, 'did you never hear of my signature being mistaken by an ingenious person, who addressed his answer to 'miss fanny jocelyn? why, fanny has been one of jem's regular names for me ever since! i have the envelope somewhere as a curiosity. i'll show it to you, mary.' 'you seem to be proud of it!' exclaimed his father, nearly out of patience. 'pray tell me whether you intend to copy this creditably or not.' 'i will endeavour, but the fates must decide. i can scrawl, or, with pains, i can imitate miss fanny; but the other alternative only comes in happy moments.' 'do you mean that you cannot write well if you choose?' 'it is like other arts--an inspiration. dogberry was deep when he said it came by nature.' 'then make no more attempts. no. that schoolgirl's niggle is worse than the first.' 'fanny, as i told you,' said louis, looking vacantly up in resigned despair, yet not without the lurking expression of amusement, 'i will try again.' 'no, i thank you. i will have no more time wasted.' louis passively moved to the window, where he exclaimed that he saw aunt catharine sunning herself in the garden, and must go and help her. 'did you ever see anything like that?' cried lord ormersfield, thoroughly moved to displeasure. 'there was at least good-humour,' said mrs. ponsonby. 'pardon me, there was almost as much to try his temper as yours.' 'he is insensible!' 'i think not. a word from aunt catharine rules him.' 'though you counselled it, mary, i doubt whether her training has answered. henry frost should have been a warning.' mary found herself blundering in her new copy, and retreated with it to the study, while her mother made answer: 'i do not repent of my advice. the affection between him and aunt catherine is the greatest blessing to him.' 'poor boy!' said his father, forgetting his letters as he stood pondering. mrs. ponsonby seized the moment for reporting sir miles's opinion, but the earl did not betray his gratification. 'first sight!' he said. 'last night and this afternoon he is as unlike as these are,' and he placed before her louis's unlucky copies, together with a letter written in a bold, manly hand. 'three different men might have written these! and he pretends he cannot write like this, if he please!' 'i have no doubt it is to a certain extent true. yes, absolutely true. you do not conceive the influence that mood has on some characters before they have learnt to master themselves. i do not mean temper, but the mere frame of spirits. even sense of restraint will often take away the actual power from a child, or where there is not a strong will.' 'you are right!' said he, becoming rigid as if with pain. 'he is a child! you have not yet told me what you think of him. you need not hesitate. no one sees the likeness more plainly than i do.' 'it is strong externally,' she said; 'but i think it is more external than real, more temperament than character.' 'you are too metaphysical for me, mary;' and he would fain have smiled. 'i want you to be hopeful. half the object would be attained if you were, and he really deserves that you should.' 'he will not let me. if i hope at one moment, i am disappointed the next.' 'and how? by nothing worse than boyishness. you confirm what my aunt tells me, that there has never been a serious complaint of him.' 'never. his conduct has always been blameless; but every tutor has said the same--that he has no application, and allows himself to be surpassed by any one of moderate energy!' 'blameless conduct! how many fathers would give worlds to be able to give such a character of a son!' 'there are faults that are the very indications of a manly spirit,' began the earl, impatiently. 'not that i mean that i wish--he has never given me any trouble--but just look at james frost, and you would see what i mean! there's energy in him--fire--independence; you feel there is substance in him, and like him the better for having a will and way of his own.' 'so, i think, has louis; but it is so often thwarted, that it sinks away under the sense of duty and submission.' 'if there were any consistency or reason in his fancies, they would not give way so easily; but it is all talk, all extravagant notions--here one day, gone the next. not a spark of ambition!' 'ambition is not so safe a spark that we should wish to see it lighted.' 'a man must wish to see his son hold his proper station, and aim high! no one can be satisfied to see him a trifler.' 'i have been trying to find out why he trifles. as far as i can see, he has no ambition, and i do not think his turn will be for a life like yours. his bent is towards what is to do good to others. he would make an admirable country gentleman.' 'a mere farmer, idling away his time in his fields.' 'no; doing infinite good by example and influence, and coming forward whenever duty required it. depend upon it, the benefit to others is the impulse which can work on louis, not personal ambition. birth has already given him more than he values.' 'you may be right,' said lord ormersfield, 'but it is hard to see so many advantages thrown away, and what sometimes seems like so much ability wasted. but who can tell? he is never the same for an hour together.' 'may it not be for want of a sphere of wholesome action?' 'he is not fit for it, mary. you know i resolved that the whole burthen of our losses should fall on me; i made it my object that he should not suffer, and should freely have whatever i had at the same age. everything is cleared at last. i could give him the same income as i started in life with; but he is so reckless of money, that i cannot feel justified in putting it into his hands. say what i will, not a vacation occurs but he comes to tell me of some paltry debt of ten or fifteen pounds.' 'he comes to tell you! nay, never say he has no resolution! such debts as those, what are they compared with other young men's, of which they do not tell their fathers?' 'if he were like other youths, i should know how to deal with him. but you agree with me, he is not fit to have a larger sum in his hands.' 'perhaps not; he is too impulsive and inexperienced. if you were to ask me how to make it conduce to his happiness, i should say, lay out more on the estate, so as to employ more men, and make improvements in which he would take interest.' 'i cannot make him care for the estate. last winter, when he came of age, i tried to explain the state of affairs; but he was utterly indifferent--would not trouble himself to understand the papers he was to sign, and made me quite ashamed of such an exhibition before richardson.' 'i wish i could defend him! and yet--you will think me unreasonable, but i do believe that if he had thought the welfare of others was concerned, he would have attended more.' 'umph!' 'i am not sure that it is not his good qualities that make him so hard to deal with. the want of selfishness and vanity seem to take away two common springs of action, but i do believe that patience will bring out something much higher when you have found the way to reach it.' 'that i certainly have not, if it be there!' 'to cultivate his sympathies with you,' said mrs. ponsonby, hesitating, and not venturing to look into his face. 'enough, mary,' he said, hastily. you said the like to me once before.' 'but,' said mrs. ponsonby, firmly, '_here_ there is a foundation to work on. there are affections that only need to be drawn out to make you happy, and him--not, perhaps, what you now wish, but better than you wish.' his face had become hard as he answered, 'thank you, mary; you have always meant the best. you have always been kind to me, and to all belonging to me.' her heart ached for the father and son, understanding each other so little, and paining each other so much, and she feared that the earl's mind had been too much cramped, and his feelings too much chilled, for such softening on his part as could alone, as it seemed, prevent louis from being estranged, and left to his naturally fickle and indolent disposition. mary had in the mean time completed her copies, and left them on the earl's table; and wishing neither to be thanked nor contrasted with louis, she put on her bonnet, to go in search of aunt catharine. not finding her in the garden, she decided on visiting old gervas and his wife, who had gladly caught at her offer of reading to them. the visit over, she returned by the favourite path above ferny dell, gathering primroses, and meditating how to stir up louis to finish off his rocky steps, and make one piece of work complete. she paused at the summit of them, and was much inclined to descend and examine what was wanting, when she started at hearing a rustling beneath, then a low moan and an attempt at a call. the bushes and a projecting rock cut off her view; but, in some trepidation, she called out, 'is any one there?' little did she expect the answer-- 'it is i--fitzjocelyn. come!--i have had a fall.' 'i'm coming--are you hurt?' she cried, as with shaking limbs she prepared to begin the descent. 'not that way,' he called; 'it gave way--go to the left.' she was almost disobeying; but, recalling herself to thought, she hurried along the top till the bank became practicable, and tore her way through brake and brier, till she could return along the side of the stream. horror-struck, she perceived that a heavy stone had given way and rolled down, bearing louis with it, to the bottom, where he lay, ghastly and helpless. she called to him; and he tried to raise himself, but sank back. 'mary! is it you? i thought i should have died here,' he said; as she knelt by him, exclaiming, 'oh, louis! louis! what a dreadful fall!' 'it is my fault,' he eagerly interrupted. 'i am glad it has happened to no one else.' 'and you are terribly hurt! i must go for help! but what can i do for you? would you like some water? 'water! oh! i have heard it all this time gurgling there!' she filled his cap, and bathed his face, apparently to his great relief, and she ventured to ask if he had been long there. 'very long!' he said. 'i must have fainted after i got the stone off my foot, so i missed gervas going by. i thought no one else would come near. thank god!' mary almost grew sick as she saw how dreadfully his left ankle had been crushed by a heavy stone; and her very turning towards it made him shudder, and say, 'don't touch me! i am shattered all over.' 'i am afraid i should only hurt you,' she said, with difficulty controlling herself. 'i had better fetch some one.' he did not know how to be left again; but the damp chilliness of his hands made her the more anxious to procure assistance, and, after spreading her shawl over him, she made the utmost speed out of the thicket. as she emerged, she saw lord ormersfield riding with his groom, and her scream and sign arrested him; but, by the time they met, she could utter nothing but 'louis!' 'another accident!' was the almost impatient answer. 'he is dreadfully hurt!' she said, sobbing and breathless. 'his foot is crushed! he has been there this hour!' the alarm was indeed given. the earl seemed about to rush away without knowing whither; and she had absolutely to withhold him, while, summoning her faculties, she gave directions to poynings. then she let him draw her on, too fast for speaking, until they reached the spot where louis lay, so spent with pain and cold, that he barely opened his eyes at their voices, made no distinct answers as to his hurts, and shrank and moaned when his father would have raised him. mary contrived to place his head on her lap, bathed his forehead and chafed his hands, while lord ormersfield stood watching him with looks of misery, or paced about, anxiously looking for the servants. they came at last, all too soon for poor louis, who suffered terribly in the transport, and gave few tokens of consciousness, except a cry now and then extorted by a rougher movement. none of the household, scarcely even mrs. frost, seemed at first to be able to believe that lord fitzjocelyn could really have hurt himself seriously. 'again!' was the first word of every one, for his many slight accidents were treated like crying 'wolf;' but frampton himself looked perfectly pale and shocked when he perceived how the matter really stood; and neither he nor lord ormersfield was half so helpful as mrs. frost. the shock only called out her energy in behalf of her darling, and, tender as her nature was, she shrank from nothing that could soothe and alleviate his suffering; and it did infinitely comfort him, as he held her hand and looked with affection into her face, even in the extremity of pain. fain would others have been the same support; but his father, though not leaving him, was completely unnerved, and unable to do anything; and mrs. ponsonby was suffering under one of the attacks that were brought on by any sudden agitation. mary, though giddy and throbbing in every pulse, was forced to put a resolute check on herself--brace her limbs, steady her voice, and keep her face composed, while every faculty was absorbed in listening for sounds from her cousin's room, and her heart was quivering with an anguish of prayer and suspense. could she but hide her burning cheeks for one moment, let out one of the sobs that seemed to be rending her breast, throw herself on her knees and burst into tears, what an infinite relief it would be! but mary had learnt to spend her life in having no self. chapter vi. farewells. what yet is there that i should do, lingering in this darksome vale? proud and mighty, fair to view, are our schemes, and yet they fail, like the sand before the wind, that no power of man can bind. arndt, lyra germanica. dynevor terrace was said to have dark, damp kitchens, but by none who had ever been in no. , when the little compact fire was compressed to one glowing red crater of cinders, their smile laughing ruddily back from the bright array on the dresser, the drugget laid down, the round oaken table brought forward, and jane beckett, in afternoon trim, tending her geraniums, the offspring of the parting cheveleigh nosegay, or gauffreing her mistress's caps. no wonder that on raw evenings, master james, miss clara, or my young lord, had often been found gossiping with jane, toasting their own cheeks as well as the bread, or pinching their fingers in her gauffreing machine. yet, poor little charlotte arnold learnt that the kitchen could be dreary, when mrs. beckett had been summoned to nurse lord fitzjocelyn, and she remained in sole charge, under mrs. martha's occasional supervision. she found herself, her household cares over all too soon, on a cold light march afternoon, with the clock ticking loud enough for midnight, the smoke-jack indulging in supernatural groans, and the whole lonely house full of undefined terrors, with an unlimited space of the like solitude before her. she would even have been glad to be sure of an evening of mrs. martha's good advice, and of darning stockings! she sat down by the round table to mr. james's wristbands; but every creak or crack of the furniture made her start, and think of death-watches. she might have learnt to contemn superstition, but that did not prevent it from affecting her nerves. she spread her favourite study, the old english baron, on the table before her; but the hero had some connexion in her mind with tom madison, for whom she had always coveted a battle-field in france. what would he feel when he heard how he had filled up his course of evil, being well-nigh the death of his benefactor! if any one ought to be haunted, it would assuredly be no other than tom! chills running over her at the thought, she turned to the fire as the thing nearest life, but at the moment started at a hollow call of her own name. a face was looking in at her through the geraniums! she shrieked aloud, and clasped her hands over her eyes. 'don't make a row. open the door!' it was such a relief to hear something unghostly, that she sprang to the door; but as she undid it, all her scruples seized her, and she tried to hold it, saying, 'don't come in! you unfortunate boy, do you know what you have done?' but tom madison was in a mood to which her female nature cowered. he pushed the door open, saying authoritatively, 'tell me how he is!' 'he is as ill as he can be to be alive,' said charlotte, actuated at once by the importance of being the repository of such tidings, and by the excitement of communicating them to one so deeply concerned. 'mr. poynings came in to fetch mrs. beckett--he would have no one else to nurse him--and he says the old lord and missus have never had their clothes off these two nights.' 'then, was it along of them stones?' asked the lad, hoarsely. 'yourself should know best!' returned charlotte. 'mr. poynings says 'twas a piece of rock as big as that warming-pan as crushed his ankle! and you know--' 'i know nothing,' said tom. 'master kept me in all day yesterday, and i only heard just now at little northwold, where i've been to take home some knives of squire calcott's. master may blow me up if he likes, but i couldn't come till i'd heard the rights of it. is he so very bad?' 'they've sent up to london for a doctor,' pursued charlotte. 'mr. walby don't give but little hope of him. poor young gentleman, i'm sure he had a good word from high and low!' 'well! i'm gone!' cried tom, vehemently. 'goodbye to you, charlotte arnold! you'll never see me in these parts more!' 'gone! oh, tom! what do you mean!' 'd'ye think i'll stay here to have this here cast in my face? such a one as won't never walk the earth again!' and he burst out into passionate tears. 'i wish i was dead!' 'oh, hush, tom!--that is wicked!' 'may be so! i am all that's wicked, and you all turn against me!' 'i don't turn against you,' sobbed charlotte, moved to the bottom of her gentle heart. 'you! you turned against me long ago. you've been too proud to cast one look at me these three months; and he forgot me; and that's what drew me on, when who cared what became of me--nor i neither now.' 'don't speak that way! don't say 'twas pride. oh no! but i had to behave proper, and how should i keep up acquaintance when they said you went on--unsteady--' 'aye, aye! i know how it is,' said poor tom, with broken-down humility: 'i was not fit for you then, and i'm next thing to a murderer now; and you're like a white dove that the very fingers of me would grime. i'll take myself out of your way; but, let what will come of me, i'll never forget you, charlotte.' 'oh, wait, tom! if i could but say it right!--oh! i know there's something about biding patiently, and getting a blessing--if you'd only stop while i recollect it.' 'i thought i heard voices!' exclaimed mrs. martha, suddenly descending on them. 'i wonder you aren't ashamed of yourselves, and the family in such trouble! downright owdacious!' 'be this your house?' said tom, stepping before charlotte, his dejection giving way instantly to rude independence. 'oh, very well,' said martha, with dignity. 'i know what to expect from such sort of people. the house and young woman is in my charge, sir; and if you don't be off, i'll call the police.' 'never trouble your old bones!' retorted tom. 'good-bye to you, charlotte;' and, as in defiance of martha, he took her passive hand. 'you'll remember one as loved you true and faithful, but was drove desperate! good-bye! i'll not trouble no one no more!' the three concluding negatives with which he dashed out of the house utterly overwhelmed charlotte, and made her perfectly insensible to mrs. martha's objurgations. she believed in the most horrible and desperate intentions, and sobbed herself into such violent hysterics that miss mercy came in to assist--imagined that the rude boy had terrified her, misunderstood her shamefaced attempts at explanation, and left her lying on her bed, crying quietly over her secret terrors, and over that first, strangely-made declaration of love. the white dove! she did not deserve it, but it was so poetical! and poor tom was so unhappy! she had not time even to think what was become of her own character for wisdom and prudence. the next morning, between monition and triumph, martha announced that the good-for-nothing chap was off with a valuable parcel of mr. calcott's, and the police were after him; with much more about his former idle habits,--frequenting of democratic oratory, public-houses, and fondness for bad company and strolling actors. meek and easily cowed, charlotte only opened her lips to say she knew that he had taken home mr. calcott's parcel. but this brought down a storm on her for being impertinent enough to defend him, and she sat trembling till it had subsided; and martha retreating, left her to weep unrestrainedly over her wild fancies, and the world's cruelty and injustice towards one whom, as she was now ready to declare, she loved with her whole heart. the bell rang sharply, knocks rattled at the front door! she was sure that tom had been just taken out of the river! but instinct to answer the bell awoke at the second furious clattering and double pealing, which allowed no time for her to compose her tear-streaked, swollen face, especially as the hasty sounds suggested 'mr. james.' mr. james it was, but the expected rebuke for keeping him waiting was not spoken. as he saw her sorrowful looks, he only said, low and softly, 'is it so, charlotte?' in his eyes, there could be but one cause for grief, and charlotte's heart smote her for hypocrisy, when she could barely command her voice to reply, 'no, sir; my lord has had a little better night.' he spoke with unusual gentleness, as he made more inquiries than she could answer; and when, after a few minutes, he turned to walk on to ormersfield, he said, kindly, 'good-bye, charlotte; i'll send you word if i find him better:' and the tears rose in his eyes at the thought how every one loved the patient. he was not wrong. there was everywhere great affection and sympathy for the bright, fantastic being whom all laughed at and liked, and northwold and the neighbourhood felt that they could have better spared something more valuable. the danger was hardly exaggerated even by charlotte. the chill of the long exposure had brought on high fever; and besides the crushed ankle, there had been severe contusions, which had resulted in an acute pain in the side, hitherto untouched by remedies, and beyond the comprehension of the old northwold surgeon, mr. walby. as yet, however, the idea of peril had not presented itself to louis, though he was perfectly sensible. severe pain and illness were new to him; and though not fretful nor impatient, he had not the stoicism either of pride or of physical indifference, put little restraint on the expression of suffering, and was to an almost childish degree absorbed in the present. he was always considerate and grateful; and his fond affection for his aunt catharine, and for good old jane, never failed to show itself whenever they did anything for his relief; and they were the best of nurses. poor lord ormersfield longed to be equally effective; but he was neither handy nor ready, and could only sit hour after hour beside his son, never moving except to help the nurses, or to try to catch the slightest accent of the sufferer. look up when louis would, he always saw the same bowed head, and earnest eyes, which, as mrs. ponsonby told her daughter, looked as they did when louisa was dying. the coming of the london surgeon was an era to which louis evidently looked anxiously, with the iteration of sickness, often reckoning the hours till he could arrive; and when at last he came, there was an evident effort to command attention. when the visit was over, and the surgeon was taking leave after the consultation, fitzjocelyn calmly desired to know his opinion, and kept his eyes steadily fixed on his face, weighing the import of each word. all depended on the subduing the inflammatory action, in the side; and there was every reason to hope that he would have strength for the severe treatment necessary. there was no reason to despond. 'i understand--thank you,' said louis. he shut his eyes, and lay so still that mrs. frost trusted that he slept; but when his father came in, they were open, and lord ormersfield, bending over him, hoped he was in less pain. 'thank you, there is not much difference.' but the plaintive sound was gone, the suffering was not the sole thought. 'walby is coming with the leeches at two o'clock,' said lord ormersfield: 'i reckon much on them.' 'thank you.' silence again, but his face spoke a wish, and his aunt catharine said, 'what, my dear?' 'i should like to see mr. holdsworth,' said louis, with eyes appealing to his father. 'he has been here to inquire every day,' said the earl, choosing neither to refuse nor understand. 'whenever it is not too much for you--' 'it must be quickly, before i am weaker,' said louis. 'let it be before walby returns, father.' 'whatever you wish, my dear--' and lord ormersfield, turning towards the table, wrote a note, which mrs. frost offered to despatch, thinking that her presence oppressed her elder nephew, who looked bowed down by the intensity of grief, which, unexpressed, seemed to pervade the whole man and weigh him to the earth: and perhaps this also struck louis for the first time, for, after having lain silent for some minutes, he softly said, 'father!' the earl was instantly beside him, but, instead of speaking, louis gazed in his face, and sighed, as he murmured, 'i was meant to have been a comfort to you.' 'my dear boy--' began lord ormersfield, but he could not trust his voice, as he saw louis's eyes moist with tears. 'i wish i had!' he continued; 'but i have never been anything but a care and vexation, and i see it all too late.' 'nay, louis,' said his father, trying to assume his usual tone of authority, as if to prove his security, 'you must not give way to feelings of illness. it is weak to despond.' 'it is best to face it,' said the young man, with slow and feeble utterance, but with no quailing of eye or voice. 'but oh, father! i did not think you would feel it so much. i am not worth it.' for the earl could neither speak nor breathe, as if smothered by one mighty unuttered sob, and holding his son's hand between both his own, pressed it convulsively. 'i am glad mrs. ponsonby is here,' said louis; 'and you will soon find what a nice fellow edward fitzjocelyn is, whom you may make just what--' 'louis, my own boy, hush! i cannot bear this,' cried his father, in an accent wrung from him by excess of grief. 'i may recover,' said louis, finding it his turn to comfort, 'and i should like to be longer with you, to try to make up--' 'you will. the leeches must relieve you. only keep up your spirits: you have many years before you of happiness and success.' the words brought a look of oppression over louis's face, but it cleared as he said, 'i am more willing to be spared those years!' his father positively started. 'louis, my poor boy,' he said, 'is it really so? i know i have seemed a cold, severe father.' 'oh, do not say so!' exclaimed louis; 'i have deserved far less-idle, ungrateful, careless of your wishes. i did not know i could pain you so much, or i would not have done it. you have forgiven often, say you forgive now.' 'you have far more to forgive than i,' said the earl. 'if i could tell you the half-waywardness, discontent, neglect, levity, wasted time--my treatment of you only three days back. everything purposed--nothing done! oh! what a life to bring before the judge!' and he covered his face, but his father heard long-drawn sobs. 'compose yourself, my dear boy,' he exclaimed, exceedingly grieved and perplexed. 'you know there is no cause to despond; and even--even if there were, you have no reason to distress yourself. i can say, from the bottom of my heart, that you have never given me cause for real anxiety, your conduct has been exemplary, and i never saw such attention to religion in any young man. these are mere trifles--' 'oh, hush, father!' exclaimed louis. 'you are only making it worse; you little know what i am! if mr. holdsworth would come!' 'he could only tell you the same,' said his father. 'you may take every comfort in thinking how blameless you have been, keeping so clear of all the faults of your age. i may not have esteemed you as you deserved, my poor louis; but, be assured that very few can have so little to reproach themselves with as you have.' louis almost smiled. 'poor comfort that,' he said, 'even if it were true; but oh, father!' and there was a light in his eye, 'i had thought of 'he hath blotted out like a cloud thy transgressions.'' 'that is right. one like you must find comfort in thinking.' 'there is comfort ineffable,' said louis; 'but if i knew what i may dare to take home to myself! it is all so dim and confused. this pain will not let anything come connectedly. would you give me that little manuscript book!' it was given; and as the many loose leaves fell under louis's weak hand, his father was amazed at the mass of copies of prayers, texts, and meditations that he had brought together; the earlier pages containing childish prayers written in aunt catharine's hand. louis's cheeks coloured at the revelation of his hidden life, as his father put them together for him. 'it is of no use,' he said, sadly; 'i cannot read. perhaps my aunt would come and read this to me.' 'let me,' said his father; and louis looked pleased. lord ormersfield read what was pointed out. to him it was a glimpse of a very new world of contrition, faith, hope, and prayer; but he saw the uneasy expression on louis's face give place to serenity, as one already at home in that sphere. 'thank you,' he said. 'that was what i wanted. mr. holdsworth will soon come, and then i don't want to say much more. only don't take this too much to heart--i am not worth it; and but for you and the dear terrace home, i can be very glad. if i may hope, the hope is so bright! here there are so many ways of going wrong, and all i do always fails; and yet i always tried to do him service. oh, to have all perfect!--no failure--no inconsistency--no self! can it be?' 'i always tried to do him service!' sadly and dejectedly as the words were spoken--mournful as was the contrast between the will and the result, this was the true cause that there was peace with louis. unstable, negligent, impetuous, and weak as he had been, the one earnest purpose had been his, guarding the heart, though not yet controlling the judgment. his soul was awake to the unseen, and thus the sense of the reality of bliss ineffable, and power to take comfort in the one great sacrifice, came with no novelty nor strangeness. it was a more solemn, more painful preparation, but such as he had habitually made, only now it was for a more perfect festival. his father, as much awestruck by his hopes as distressed by his penitence, still gave himself credit for having soothed him, and went to meet and forewarn the vicar that poor fitzjocelyn was inclined to despond, and was attaching such importance to the merest, foibles in a most innocent life, that he required the most tender and careful encouragement. he spoke in his usual tone of authoritative courtesy; and then, finding that his son wished to be left alone with mr. holdsworth, he went to the library to seek the only person to whom he could bear to talk. 'mary,' he said, 'you were right. i have done so little to make that poor boy of mine happy, that he does not wish for life.' mrs. ponsonby looked up surprised. 'are you sure of what he meant?' she said. 'was it not that this life has nothing to compare with that which is to come?' 'but what can be more unnatural?' said the earl. 'at his age, with everything before him, nothing but what he felt as my harshness could so have checked hope and enjoyment. my poor louis!' and, though eye and voice were steady and tearless, no words could express the anguish of his under-tone. mrs. ponsonby adduced instances showing that, to early youth, with heart still untainted by the world, the joys of the life everlasting have often so beamed out as to efface all that earth could promise, but he could not be argued out of self-reproach for his own want of sympathy, and spoke mournfully of his cold manner, sternness to small faults, and denial of gratifications. mary the younger could not help rising from her corner to say, 'indeed, louis said the other day that you never had denied him any personal indulgence.' 'my dear, he never asked for personal indulgences,' said the earl. his further speech was interrupted by a quick step, a slow opening of the door, and the entrance of james frost, who grasped his outstretched hand with a breathless inquiry. 'he is very ill--' lord ormersfield paused, too much oppressed to say more. 'no better? what did the london surgeon say? what?' 'he says there is no time to be lost in attacking the inflammation. if we can subdue that, he may recover; but the state of the ankle weakens him severely. i believe myself that he is going fast,' said the earl, with the same despairing calmness; and james, after gazing at him to collect his meaning, dropped into a chair, covered his face with his hands, and sobbed aloud. lord ormersfield looked on as if he almost envied the relief of the outburst, but james's first movement was to turn on him, as if he were neglecting his son, sharply demanding, 'who is with him?' 'he wished to be left with mr. holdsworth.' 'is it come to this!' cried james. 'oh, why did i not come down with him? i might have prevented all this!' 'you could not have acted otherwise,' said the earl, kindly. 'your engagement was already formed.' 'i could!' said james. 'i would not. i thought it one of your excuses for helping us.' 'it is vain to lament these things now,' said lord ormersfield. 'it is very kind in you to have come down, and it will give him great pleasure if he be able to see you.' 'if!' james stammered between consternation and anger at the doubt, and treated the earl with a kind of implied resentment as if for injustice suffered by louis, but it was affecting to see his petulance received with patience, almost with gratitude, as a proof of his affection for louis. the earl stood upright and motionless before the fire, answering steadily, but in an almost inward voice, all the detailed questions put by james, who, seated on one chair, with his hands locked on the back of the other, looked keenly up to him with his sharp black eyes, often overflowing with tears, and his voice broken by grief. when he had elicited that louis had been much excited and distressed by the thought of his failings, he burst out, 'whatever you may think, lord ormersfield, no one ever had less on his conscience!' 'i am sure of it.' 'i know of no one who would have given up his own way again and again without a murmur, only to be called fickle.' 'yes, it has often been so,' meekly said lord ormersfield. 'fickle!' repeated james, warming with the topic, and pouring out what had been boiling within for years. 'he was only fickle because his standard was too high to be reached! you thought him weak!' 'there may be weakness by nature strengthened by principle,' said mrs. ponsonby. 'true,' cried jem, who, having taken no previous notice of her, had at first on her speaking bent his brows on her as if to extend to her the storm he was inflicting on poor, defenceless lord ormersfield, 'he is thought soft because of his easy way; but come to the point where harm displays itself, you can't move him a step farther--though he hangs back in such a quiet, careless fashion, that it seems as if he was only tired of the whole concern, and so it goes down again as changeableness.' 'you always did him justice,' said lord ormersfield, laying his hand on his cousin's shoulder, but james retreated ungraciously. 'i suppose, where he saw evil, he actually took a dislike,' said mrs. ponsonby. 'it is an absolute repugnance to anything bad. you,' turning again on the earl, 'had an idea of his being too ready to run into all sorts of company; but i told you there was no danger.' 'you told me i might trust to his disgust to anything unrefined or dissipated. you knew him best.' 'there is that about him which men, not otherwise particular, respect as they might a woman or a child. they never show themselves in their true colours, and i have known him uphold them because he has never seen their worst side!' 'i have always thought he learnt that peculiar refinement from your grandmother.' 'i think,' said mrs. ponsonby, softly, 'that it is purity of heart which makes him see heaven so bright.' 'sydney calcott walked part of the way with me,' continued jem, 'and showed more feeling than i thought was in him. he said just what i do, that he never saw any one to whom evil seemed so unable to cling. he spoke of him at school--said he was the friend of all the juniors, but too dreamy and uncertain for fellows of his own standing. he said, at first they did not know what to make of him, with his soft looks and cool ways--they could not make him understand bullying, for he could not be frightened nor put in a passion. only once, one great lout tried forcing bad language on him, and then fitzjocelyn struck him, fought him, and was thoroughly licked, to be sure: but calcott said it was a moral victory--no one tried the like again--' james was interrupted by mr. holdsworth's entrance. he said a few words apart to the earl, who answered, with alarm, 'not now; he has gone through enough.' 'i told him so, but he is very anxious, and begged me to return in the evening.' 'thank you. you had better join us at dinner.' the vicar understood lord ormersfield better than did james, and said, pressing his hand, 'my lord, it is heart-breaking, but the blessedness is more than we can feel.' mrs. ponsonby and mary were left to try to pacify james, who was half mad at his exclusion from the sickroom, and very angry with every hint of resignation--abusing the treatment of the doctors, calling mr. walby an old woman, and vehemently bent on prophesying the well-doing of the patient. keenly sensitive, grief and suspense made him unusually irritable; and he seemed to have no power of waiting patiently, and trusting the event to wiser hands. mrs. ponsonby dared not entertain any such ardent wishes. life had not afforded her so much joy that she should deem it the greatest good, and all that she had heard gave her the impression that louis was too soft and gentle for the world's hard encounter,--most pure and innocent, sincere and loving at present, but rather with the qualities of childhood than of manhood, with little strength or perseverance, so that the very dread of taint or wear made it almost a relief to think of his freshness and sweetness being secured for ever. even when she thought of his father, and shrank from such grief for him, she could not but see a hope that this affliction might soften the heart closed up by the first and far worse sorrow, and detach it from the interests that had absorbed it too exclusively. all this was her food for silent meditation. mary sat reading or working beside her, paler perhaps than her wont, and betraying that her ear caught every sound on the stairs, but venturing no word except the most matter-of-fact remark, quietly giving force to the more favourable symptoms. not till after mr. walby's second visit, when there was a little respite in the hard life-and-death contest between the remedies and the inflammation, could mrs. frost spare a few moments for her grandson. she met him on the stairs--threw her arms round his neck, called him her poor jemmy, and hastily told him that he must not make her cry. he looked anxiously in her face, and told her that he must take her place, for she was worn out.' 'no, thank you, my dear, i can rest by-and-by.' it sounded very hopeless. 'come, granny, you always take the bright side.' 'who knows which is the bright side?' she said. 'such as he are always the first. but there, dear jem, i told you not to make too much of granny--' and hastily withdrawing her hand, she gave a parting caress to his hair as he stood on the step below her, and returned to her charge. it would have been an inexpressible comfort to james to have had some one to reproach. his own wretchedness was like a personal injury, and an offence that he could resent would have been a positive relief. he was forced to get out of the way of frampton coming up with a tray of lemonade, and glared at him, as if even a station on the stairs were denied, then dashed out of doors, and paced the garden, goaded by every association the scene recalled. it seemed a mere barbarity to deprive him of what he now esteemed as the charm of his life--the cousin who had been as a brother, ever seeking his sympathy, never offended by his sharp, imperious temper, and though often slighted or tyrannized over, meeting all in his own debonnaire fashion, and never forsaking the poor, hard-working student, so that he might well feel that the world could not offer him aught like louis fitzjocelyn. he stood in the midst of the botanical garden, and, with almost triumphant satisfaction, prognosticated that now there would be regret that louis's schemes had been neglected or sneered at, and when too late, his father might feel as much sorrow as he had time for. it was the bitterness, not the softness of grief, in which he looked forth into the dull blue east-windy haze deepening in the twilight, and presently beheld something dark moving along under the orchard bank beneath. 'hollo! who's there?' he exclaimed, and the form, rearing itself, disclosed young madison, never a favourite with him, and though, as a persecuted protege of louis, having claims which at another time might have softened him, coming forward at an unlucky moment, when his irritation only wanted an object on which to discharge itself. it was plain that one who came skulking in the private grounds could intend no good, and james greeted him, harshly, with 'you've no business here!' 'i'm doing no harm,' said the boy, doggedly, for his temper was as stubborn as james's was excitable. 'no harm! lurking here in that fashion in the dark! you'll not make me believe that! let me hear what brings you here! the truth, mind!' 'i came to hear how lord fitzjocelyn is,' said tom, with brief bluntness and defiance. 'a likely story! what, you came to ask the apple-trees?' and james scornfully laughed. 'there was no back-door, i suppose! i could forgive you anything but such a barefaced falsehood, when you know it was your own intolerable carelessness that was the only cause of the accident!' 'better say 'twas yourself!' cried tom, hoarse with passion and shaking all over. the provocation was intense enough to bring back james's real principle and self-restraint, and he spoke with more dignity. 'you seem to be beside yourself, madison,' he said, 'you had better go at once, before any one finds you here. lord fitzjocelyn cared for you so much, that i should not wish for you to meet your deserts under present circumstances. go! i wish to have no more of your tongue!' the boy was bounding off, while james walked slowly after to see him beyond the grounds, and finding warren the keeper, desired him to be on the look-out. warren replied with the tidings that madison had run away from his place, and that the police were looking out for him on the suspicion of having stolen mr. calcott's parcel, moralizing further on the depravity of such doings when my young lord was so ill, but accounting for the whole by pronouncing poaching to be bred in the bone of the marksedge people. this little scene had done jem a great deal of good, both by the exhalation of bitterness and by the final exertion of forbearance. he had, indeed, been under two great fallacies on this day,--soothing charlotte for the grief that was not caused by fitzjocelyn's illness, and driving to extremity the lad brimming over with sorrow not inferior to his own. little did he know what a gentle word might have done for that poor, wild, tempestuous spirit! yet, james's heart smote him that evening, when, according to louis's earnest wish, mr. holdsworth came again, and they all were admitted to the room, and he saw the feeble sign and summons to the vicar to bend down and listen. 'tell poor madison, it was wrong in me not to go to see him. give him one of my books, and tell him to go on well!' that day had been one of rapid change, and the remedies and suffering had so exhausted louis that he could scarcely speak, and seemed hardly conscious who was present. all his faculties were absorbed in the one wish, which late in the evening was granted. the scene was like an epitome of his life--the large irregular room, cumbered with the disorderly apparatus of all his multifarious pursuits, while there he lay on his little narrow iron bed, his features so fair and colourless as to be strangely like his mother's marble effigy--his eyes closed, and his brows often contracted with pain, so that there was a doubt how far his attention was free, but still with a calm, pure sweetness, that settled down more and more, as if he were being lulled into a sleep. 'he is asleep,' mrs. frost said, as they all rose up. they felt what that sleep might become. 'we might as well wish to detain a snow-wreath,' thought mr. holdsworth. chapter vii. gossamer. chaos is come again.--othello. that sleep was not unto death. when james and mary came simultaneously creeping to the door in the grey twilight of the morning, they heard that there had been less pain and more rest, and gradually throughout the day, there was a diminution of the dangerous symptoms, till the trembling hope revived that the patient might be given back again to life. james was still sadly aggrieved at being forbidden the sick-room, and exceedingly envied lord ormersfield's seat there. he declared, so that mary doubted whether it were jest or earnest, that the earl only remained there because society expected it from their relative positions, and that it must retard poor fitzjocelyn's recovery to be perpetually basilisked by those cold grey eyes. mary stood up gallantly for the earl, who had always been so kind to her, and, on her mother's authority, vouched for his strong though hidden, feelings; to which jem replied, 'aye! he was hiding a strong fear of being too late for the beginning of the session.' 'i do not think it right to impute motives,' said mary. 'i would not, mary, if i could help it,' said james, 'but through the whole course of my life i have never seen a token that his lordship is worthy of his son. if he were an ordinary, practical, common-place block, apt to support his dignity, he might value him, but all the grace, peculiarity, and conventionality is a mere burthen and vexation, utterly wasted.' mary knew that she was a common-place block, and did not wonder at herself for not agreeing with james, but cherishing a strong conviction that the father and son would now leave off rubbing against each other; since no unprejudiced person could doubt of the strong affection of the father, nor of the warm gratitude of the son. in spite of the asperity with which james spoke of the earl, she was beginning to like him almost as much as she esteemed him. this had not been the case in their childhood, when he used to be praised by the elders for his obedience to his grandmother and his progress in the northwold grammar school; but was terribly overbearing with his juniors, and whether he cuffed louis or led him into mischief, equally distressed her. grown up, he was peculiarly vif, quick and ready, unselfish in all his ways, and warmly affectionate--very agreeable companion where his sensitiveness was not wounded, and meriting high honour by his deeper qualities. young as he was, he had already relieved his grandmother from his own maintenance: he had turned to the utmost account his education at the endowed school at northwold; by sheer diligence, had obtained, first a scholarship and then a fellowship at oxford; and now, by practising rigid economy, and spending his vacations in tuition, he was enabled to send his sister to a boarding-school. he had stolen a few days from his pupils on hearing of fitzjocelyn's danger, but was forced to return as soon as the improvement became confirmed. on the previous day, he asked mary to walk with him to the scene of the accident, and they discussed the cause with more coolness than they really felt, as they shuddered at the depth of the fall, and the size of the stones. james declared it all the fault of that runaway scamp, young madison, in whom louis had always been deceived, and who had never been seen since the night of his apparition in the garden. 'poor boy! i suppose that was the reason he ran away,' said mary. 'a very good thing, too. he would never have been anything but a torment to louis. i remember telling him he was setting the stones so as to break the neck of some one!' 'i think it would be of more use to build them up than to settle how they broke down,' said mary. 'do you think we could manage it safely?' 'a capital thought!' cried james, eagerly, and no sooner said than done. the two cousins set to work--procured some cement from the bricklayer in the village, and toiled at their masonry with right good-will as long as light and time served them, then made an appointment to meet at half-past six next morning, and finish their work. when the rendezvous took place, they were rejoicing over mrs. frost's report of an excellent night, and over her own happy looks, from which james prognosticated that all her fatigue and watching had done no harm to her vigorous frame, for which gladness was always the best cordial. it was a joyous beginning on that spring morning, and seemed to add fresh sparkles to the dazzling dewdrops, and double merriment to the blackbirds and thrushes answering each other far and wide, around, as the sun drew up the grey veil of morning mist. 'they all seem holding a feast for his recovery!' exclaimed mary, warming for once into poetry, as she trudged along, leaving green footmarks in the silver dew. 'well they may,' said james; 'for who loves them better than he? i grudge myself this lovely morning, when he is lying there, and my poor clara is caged up at that place--the two who would the most enjoy it.' 'your going to see her will be as good as the spring morning.' 'poor child! i dread it!' sighed jem. it was his first voluntary mention of his sister. he had always turned the conversation when mrs. ponsonby or mary had tried to inquire for her, and mary was glad to lead him on to say more. 'i remember her last when you were teaching her to run alone, and letting none of us touch her, because you said she was your child, and belonged to no one else.' 'i should not be so ungrateful, now that i am come to the sense of my responsibility in teaching her to go alone.' 'but she has aunt catherine,' said mary, thinking that he was putting the natural guardian out of the question as much now as in the days referred to. 'my grandmother never had to do with any girl before, and does not profess to understand them. she let clara be regularly a boy in school, at first learning the same lessons, and then teaching; and whatever i tried to impress in the feminine line, naturally, all went for nothing. she is as wild as a hare, and has not a particle of a girl about her!' 'but she is very young.' 'there it is again! she grows so outrageously. she is not sixteen, and there she is taller than granny already. it is getting quite absurd.' 'what advice do you want on that head?' 'seriously, it is a disadvantage, especially to that sort of girl, who can't afford to look like a woman before her time. well, as she must probably depend on herself, i looked out for as good a school as could be had for the means, and thought i had succeeded, and that she would be brought into some sort of shape. granny was ready to break her heart, but thought it quite right.' 'then, does it not answer?' 'that is just what i can't tell. you have been used to schools: i wish you could tell me whether it is a necessary evil, or clara's own idiosyncrasy, or peculiar to the place.' 'whether what is?' 'her misery!' 'misery! why, there is nothing of that in her letters to my aunt. there is not a complaint.' 'she is a brave girl, who spares granny, when she knows it would be of no use to distress her. judge now, there's the sort of letter that i get from her.' mary read. 'dearest jemmy,--write to me as quick as ever you can, and tell me how louis is; and let me come home, or i shall run mad. it is no good telling me to command my feelings; i am sure i would if i could, for the girls are more detestable than ever; but what can one do when one cannot sleep nor eat? all the screaming and crying has got into one bump in my throat, because i can't get it out in peace. if i could only shy the inkstand at the english teacher's head! or get one moment alone and out of sight! let me come home. i could at least run messages; and it is of no use for me to stay here, for i can't learn, and all the girls are looking at me. if they were but boys, they would have sense! or if i could but kick them! this will make you angry, but do forgive me; i can't help it, for i am so very unhappy. louis is as much to me as you are, and no one ever was so kind; but i know he will get well--i know he will; only if i knew the pain was better, and could but hear every minute. you need not come to fetch me; only send me a telegraph, and one to miss brigham. i have money enough for a second-class ticket, and would come that instant. if you saw the eyes and heard the whispers of these girls, i am sure you would. i should laugh at such nonsense any other time, but now i only ask to be wretched quietly in a corner. 'your affectionate, nearly crazy, sister, 'clara frost dynevor.' mary might well say that there was nothing more expedient than going to see clara, and 'much,' said poor james, 'he should gain by that,' especially on the head that made him most uneasy, and on which he could only hint lightly--namely, whether the girls were 'putting nonsense in her head.' 'if they had done her any harm, she would never have written such a letter,' said mary. 'true,' said jem. 'she is a mere child, and never got that notion into her head for a moment; but if they put it in, we are done for! or if the place were ever so bad, i can't remove her now, when granny is thus occupied. one reason why i made a point of her going to school was, that i thought doing everything that fitzjocelyn did was no preparation for being a governess.' 'oh! i hope it will not come to that! mr. oliver dynevor talks of coming home in a very few years.' 'so few, that we shall be grey before he comes. no; clara and i are not going to be bound to him for the wealth heaped up while my grandmother was left in poverty. we mean to be independent.' mary was glad to revert to clara. 'i must do the best i can for her for the present,' said jem,--'try to harden her against the girls, and leave her to bear it. poor dear! it makes one's heart ache! and to have done it oneself, too! then, in the holidays, perhaps, you will help me to judge. you will be her friend, mary; there's nothing she needs so much. i thought she would have found one at school but they are not the right stamp of animal. she has been too much thrown on louis; and though he has made a noble thing of her, that must come to an end, and the sooner the better.' certainly, it was a perplexity for a young elder brother; but there could not but remain some simple wonder in mary's mind whether the obvious person, mrs. frost, had not better have been left to decide for her granddaughter. the building operations gave full occupation to the powers of the two cousins, and in good time before breakfast, all was successfully completed,--a hand-rail affixed, and the passage cleared out, till it looked so creditable, as well as solid, that there was no more to wish for but that louis should be able to see their handiwork. james went away in the better spirits for having been allowed to shake louis by the hand and exchange a few words with him. mary augured that it would be the better for clara and for the pupils. all that further transpired from him was a cheerful letter to mrs. frost, speaking of clara as perfectly well, and beginning to accommodate herself to her situation, and from this mary gathered that he was better satisfied. the days brought gradual improvement to the patient, under mrs. frost's tender nursing, and his father's constant assiduity; both of which, as he revived, seemed to afford him the greatest pleasure, and were requited with the utmost warmth and caressing sweetness towards his aunt, and towards his father with ever-fresh gratitude and delight. lord ormersfield was like another man, in the sick-room, whence he never willingly absented himself for an hour. one day, however, when he was forced to go to northwold on business, louis put on a fit of coaxing importunity. nothing would serve him but some of jane beckett's choice dried pears, in the corner of the oaken cupboard, the key of which was in aunt kitty's pocket, and no one must fetch them for him but aunt kitty herself, he was so absurdly earnest and grave about them, that jane scolded him, and mrs. frost saw recovery in his arch eyes; understanding all the time that it was all an excuse for complimenting jane, and sending her to air herself, visit the faithfull sisters, and inspect the lady of eschalott. so she consented to accompany lord ormersfield, and leave their charge to mrs. ponsonby, who found louis quite elated at the success of his manoeuvre--so much disposed to talk, and so solicitous for the good of his nurses, that she ventured on a bold stroke. his chamber was nearly as much like a lumber-room as ever; for any attempt to clear away or disturb his possessions had seemed, in his half-conscious condition, to excite and tease him so much, that it had been at once relinquished. although the room was large, it was always too much crowded with his goods; and the tables and chairs that had been brought in during his illness, had added to the accumulation which was the despair of mrs. beckett and mr. frampton. mrs. ponsonby thought it was time for louis to make a sacrifice in his turn, and ventured to suggest that he was well enough to say where some of his things might be bestowed; and though he winced, she persevered in representing how unpleasant it must be to his father to live in the midst of so much confusion. the debonnaire expression passed over his face, as he glanced around, saying, 'you are right. i never reflected on the stretch of kindness it must have been. it shall be done. if i lose everything, it will not be soon that i find it out.' it evidently cost him a good deal, and mrs. ponsonby proposed that mary should come and deal with his treasures; a plan at which he caught so eagerly, that it was decided that no time was like the present, and mary was called. he could move nothing but his hands; but they were eagerly held out in welcome: and his eyes glittered with the bright smile that once she had feared never to see again. she felt a moisture in her own which made her glad to turn aside to her task even while he complimented her with an allusion to the labours of hercules. it did not seem uncalled-for, when she began by raising a huge sheet of paper that had been thrown in desperation to veil the confusion upon the table, and which proved to be the ordnance map of the county, embellished with numerous streaks of paint. 'the outlines of the old saxon wappentakes,' said louis: 'i was trying to make them out in blue, and the roman roads in red. that mark is spontaneous; it has been against some paint.' which paint was found in dried swamps in saucers, while cakes of lake and prussian blue adhered to the drawing-board. 'the colour-box is probably in the walnut-press; but i advise you not to irritate that yet. let me see that drawing, the design for the cottages that frampton nipped in the bud--' 'how pretty and comfortable they do look!' exclaimed mary, pleased to come to something that was within her sphere of comprehension. 'if they were but finished!' 'ah! i thought of them when i was lying there in the dell! had they been allowed to stand where i wanted them, there would have been no lack of people going home from work; but, 'quite impracticable' came in my way, and i had no heart to finish the drawing.' 'what a pity!' exclaimed mary. 'this was richardson's veto, two degrees worse than frampton's; and i shall never be able to abuse frampton again. i have seen him in his true light now, and never was any one more kind and considerate. ha, mary, what's that?' 'it looks like a rainbow in convulsions.' 'now, mary, did not i tell you that i could not laugh? it is a diagram to illustrate the theory of light for clara.' 'does she understand _that_?' cried mary. 'clara? she understands anything but going to school--poor child! yes, burn that map of the strata,--not that--it is to be a painted window whenever i can afford one, but i never could make money stay with me. i never could think why--' the _why_ was evident enough in the heterogeneous mass--crumpled prints, blank drawing-paper, and maps heaped ruinously over and under books, stuffed birds, geological specimens, dislocated microscopes, pieces of roman pavement, curiosities innumerable and indescribable; among which roamed blotting-books, memorandum-books, four pieces of indian rubber, three pair of compasses, seven paper-knives, ten knives, thirteen odd gloves, fifteen pencils, pens beyond reckoning, a purse, a key, half a poem on the siege of granada, three parts of an essay upon spade husbandry, the dramatis personae of a tragedy on queen brunehault, scores of old letters, and the dust of three years and a half. louis owned that the arrangements conduced to finding rather than losing, and rejoiced at the disinterment of his long-lost treasures; but either he grew weary, or the many fragments, the ghosts of departed fancies, made him thoughtful; for he became silent, and only watched and smiled as mary quietly and noiselessly completed her reforms, and arranged table and chairs for the comfort of his father and aunt. he thanked her warmly, and hoped that she would pursue her kind task another day,--a permission which she justly esteemed a great testimony to her having avoided annoying him. it was a great amusement to him to watch the surprised and pleased looks of his various nurses as each came in, and a real gratification to see his father settle himself with an air of comfort, observing that 'they were under great obligations to mary.' still, the sight of the arrangements had left a dreary, dissatisfied feeling with louis: it might have been caught from mary's involuntary look of disappointment at each incomplete commencement that she encountered,--the multitude of undertakings hastily begun, laid aside and neglected--nothing properly carried out. it seemed a mere waste of life, and dwelt on his spirits, with a weariness of himself and his own want of steadfastness--a sense of having disappointed her and disappointed himself, and he sighed so heavily several times, that his aunt anxiously asked whether he were in pain. he was, however, so much better, that no one was to sit up with him at night--only his father would sleep on a bed on the floor. as he bade him good night, louis, for the first time, made the request that he might have his bible given to him, as well as his little book; and on his father advising him not to attempt the effort of reading, he said, 'thank you; i think i can read my two verses: i want to take up my old habits.' 'have you really kept up this habit constantly?' asked his father, with wonder that louis did not understand. 'aunt catharine taught it to us, he said. 'i neglected it one half-year at school; but i grew so uncomfortable, that i began again.' the earl gave the little worn volume, saying, 'yes, louis, there has been a thread running through your life.' 'has there been one thread?' sadly mused louis, as he found the weight of the thick book too much for his weak hands, and his eyes and head too dizzy and confused for more than one verse:-- 'i am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.'' the bible sank in his hands, and he fell into a slumber so sound and refreshing, that when he opened his eyes in early morning, he did not at first realize that he was not awakening to health and activity, nor why he had an instinctive dread of moving. he turned his eyes towards the window, uncurtained, so that he could see the breaking dawn. the sky, deep blue above, faded and glowed towards the horizon into gold, redder and more radiant below; and in the midst, fast becoming merged in the increasing light, shone the planet venus, in her pale, calm brilliance. there was repose and delight in dwelling on that fair morning sky, and louis lay dreamily gazing, while thoughts passed over his mind, more defined and connected than pain and weakness had as yet permitted. since those hours in which he had roused his faculties to meet with approaching death, he had been seldom awake to aught but the sensations of the moment, and had only just become either strong enough, or sufficiently at leisure for anything like reflection. as he watched the eastern reddening, he could not but revert to the feelings with which he had believed himself at the gate of the city that needs neither sun nor moon to lighten it, and, for the first time, he consciously realized that he was restored to this world of life. the sensation was not unmixed. his youthful spirit bounded at the prospect of returning vigour, his warm heart clung round those whom he loved, and the perception of his numerous faults made him grateful for a longer probation; but still he had a sense of having been at the borders of the glorious land, and thence turned back to a tedious, doubtful pilgrimage. there was much to occasion this state of mind. his life had been without great troubles, but with many mortifications; he had never been long satisfied with himself or his pursuits, his ardour had only been the prelude to vexation and self-abasement, and in his station in the world there was little incentive to exertion. he had a strong sense of responsibility, with a temperament made up of tenderness, refinement, and inertness, such as shrank from the career set before him. he had seen just enough of political life to destroy any romance of patriotism, and to make him regard it as little more than party spirit, and dread the hardening and deadening process on the mind. he had a dismal experience of his own philanthropy; and he had a conscience that would not sit down satisfied with selfish ease, pleasure, or intellectual pursuits. his smooth, bright, loving temper had made him happy; but the past was all melancholy, neglect, and futile enterprise; he had no attaching home--no future visions; and, on the outskirts of manhood, he shrank back from the turmoil, the temptations, and the roughness that awaited him--nay, from the mere effort of perseverance, and could almost have sighed to think how nearly the death-pang had been over, and the home of love, life, and light had been won for ever:-- 'i am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.' the words returned on him, and with them what his father had said, 'you have had a thread running through your life.' he was in a state between sleeping and waking, when the confines of reflection and dreaming came very near together, and when vague impressions, hardly noticed at the time they were made, began to tell on him without his own conscious volition. it was to him as if from that brightening eastern heaven, multitudes of threads of light were floating hither and thither, as he had often watched the gossamer undulating in the sunshine. some were firm, purely white, and glistening here and there with rainbow tints as they tended straight upwards, shining more and more into the perfect day; but for the most part they were tangled together in inextricable confusion, intermingled with many a broken end, like fleeces of cobweb driven together by the autumn wind,--some sailing aimlessly, or with shattered tangled strands-some white, some dark, some anchored to mere leaves or sprays, some tending down to the abyss, but all in such a perplexed maze that the eye could seldom trace which were directed up, which downwards, which were of pure texture, which defiled and stained. in the abortive, unsatisfactory attempt to follow out one fluctuating clue, not without whiteness, and heaving often upwards, but frail, wavering, ravelled, and tangled, so that scarcely could he find one line that held together, louis awoke to find his father wondering that he could sleep with the sun shining full on his face. 'it was hardly quite a dream,' said louis, as he related it to mrs. frost. 'it would make a very pretty allegory.' 'it is too real for that just now,' he said. 'it was the moral of all my broken strands that mary held up to me yesterday.' 'i hope you are going to do more than point your moral, my dear. you always were good at that.' 'i mean it,' said louis, earnestly. 'i do not believe such an illness--ay, or such a dream--can come for nothing.' so back went his thoughts to the flaws in his own course; and chiefly he bewailed his want of sympathy for his father. material obedience and submission had been yielded, but, having little cause to believe himself beloved, his heart had never been called into action so as to soften the clashings of two essentially dissimilar characters. instead of rebelling, or even of murmuring, he had hid disappointment in indifference, taken refuge in levity and versatility, and even consoled himself by sporting with what he regarded as prejudice or unjust displeasure. all this cost him much regret and self-reproach at each proof of the affection so long veiled by reserve. never would he have given pain, had he guessed that his father could feel; but he had grown up to imagine the whole man made up of politics and conventionalities, and his new discoveries gave him at least as much contrition as pleasure. after long study of the debates, that morning, his father prepared to write. louis asked for the paper, saying his senses would just serve for the advertisements, but presently he made an exclamation of surprise at beholding, in full progress, the measure which had brought sir miles oakstead to ormersfield, one of peculiar interest to the earl. his blank look of wonder amused mrs. ponsonby, but seemed somewhat to hurt his father. 'you did not suppose i could attend to such matters now?' he said. 'but i am so much better!' fearing that the habit of reserve would check any exchange of feeling, mrs. ponsonby said, 'did you fancy your father could not think of you except upon compulsion?' 'i beg your pardon, father,' said louis, smiling, while a tear rose to his eyes, 'i little thought i was obstructing the business of the nation. what will sir miles do to me?' 'sir miles has written a most kind and gratifying letter,' said lord ormersfield, 'expressing great anxiety for you, and a high opinion of your powers.' louis had never heard of his own powers, except for mischief, and the colour returned to his cheeks, as he listened to the kind and cordial letter, written in the first shock of the tidings of the accident. he enjoyed the pleasure it gave his father far more than the commendation to himself; for he well knew, as he said, that 'there is something embellishing in a catastrophe,' and he supposed 'that had driven out the rose-coloured pastor.' 'there is always indulgence at your age,' said the earl. 'you have created an impression which may be of great importance to you by-and-by.' louis recurred to politics. the measure was one which approved itself to his mind, and he showed all the interest which was usually stifled, by such subjects being forced on him. he was distressed at detaining his father when his presence might be essential to the success of his party, and the earl could not bear to leave him while still confined to his bed. the little scene, so calm, and apparently so cold, seemed to cement the attachment of father and son, by convincing louis of the full extent of his father's love; and his enthusiasm began to invest the earl's grey head with a perfect halo of wisdom slighted and affection injured; and the tenor of his thread of life shone out bright and silvery before him, spun out of projects of devoting heart and soul to his father's happiness, and meriting his fondness. the grave earl was looking through a magnifying-glass no less powerful. he had not been so happy since his marriage; the consciousness of his own cold manner made him grateful for any demonstration from his son, and the many little graces of look and manner which louis had inherited from his mother added to the charm. the sense of previous injustice enhanced all his good qualities, and it was easy to believe him perfect, while nothing was required of him but to lie still. day and night did lord ormersfield wait upon him, grudging every moment spent away from him, and trying to forestall each wish, till he became almost afraid to express a desire, on account of the trouble it would cause. mary found the earl one day wandering among the vines in the old hothouse, in search of a flower, when, to her amusement, he selected a stiff pert double hyacinth, the special aversion of his son, who nevertheless received it most graciously, and would fain have concealed the headache caused by the scent, until mrs. frost privately abstracted it. another day, he went, unasked, to hasten the birdstuffer in finishing the rose-coloured pastor; and when it came, himself brought it up-stairs, unpacked it, and set it up where louis could best admire its black nodding crest and pink wings; unaware that to his son it seemed a memento of his own misdeeds--a perpetual lesson against wayward carelessness. 'it is like a new love,' said mrs. ponsonby; 'but oh! how much depends upon louis after his recovery!' 'you don't mistrust his goodness now, mamma!' 'i could not bear to do so. i believe i was thinking of his father more than of himself. after having been so much struck by his religious feeling, i dread nothing so much as his father finding him deficient in manliness or strength of character.' chapter viii. a truant disposition. gathering up each broken thread. whytehead. 'tom madison is come back,' said the vicar, as he sat beside fitzjocelyn's couch, a day or two after lord ormersfield had gone to london. 'come back--where has he been?' exclaimed louis. 'there!' said the vicar, with a gesture of dismay; 'i forgot that you were to hear nothing of it! however, i should think you were well enough to support the communication.' 'what is it?' cried louis, the blood rushing into his cheeks so suddenly, that mr. holdsworth felt guilty of having disregarded the precautions that he had fancied exaggerated by the fond aunt. 'poor fellow--he has not--' but, checking himself, he added, 'i am particularly anxious to hear of him.' 'i wish there were anything more gratifying to tell you; but he took the opportunity of the height of your illness to run away from his place, and has just been passed home to his parish. after all your pains, it is very mortifying, but--' 'pains! don't you know how i neglected him latterly!' said louis. 'poor fellow--then--' but he stopped himself again, and added, 'you heard nothing of the grounds?' 'they were not difficult to find,' said mr. holdsworth. 'it is the old story. he was, as mrs. smith told me, 'a great trial'--more and more disposed to be saucy and disobedient, taking up with the most good-for-nothing boys in the town, haunting those chartist lectures, and never coming home in proper time at night. the very last evening, he had come in at eleven o'clock, and when his master rebuked him, came out with something about the rights of man. he was sent to little northwold, about the middle of the day, to carry home some silver-handled knives of mr. calcott's, and returned no more. smith fancied, at first, that he had made off with the plate, and set the police after him, but that proved to be an overhasty measure, for the parcel had been safely left. however, miss faithfull's servant found him frightening mrs. frost's poor little kitchen-maid into fits, and the next day james frost detected him lurking suspiciously about the garden here, and set warren to warn him off--' louis gave a kind of groan, and struck his hand against the couch in despair, then said, anxiously, 'what then?' 'no more was heard of him, till yesterday the police passed him home to the union as a vagabond. he looks very ill and ragged; but he is in one of those sullen moods, when no one can get a word out of him. smith declines prosecuting for running away, being only too glad of the riddance on any terms; so there he is at his grandfather's, ready for any sort of mischief.' 'mr. holdsworth,' said louis, raising himself on his elbow, 'you are judging, like every one else, from appearances. if i were at liberty to tell the whole, you would see what a noble nature it was that i trifled with; and they have been hounding--poor tom! would it have been better for him that i had never seen him? it is a fearful thing, this blind treading about among souls, not knowing whether one does good or harm!' 'if you feel so,' said mr. holdsworth, hoping to lead him from the unfortunate subject, 'what must _we_ do?' 'my position, if i live, seems to have as much power for evil, without the supernatural power for good. doing hastily, or leaving undone, are equally fatal!' 'nay, what hope can there be but in fear, and sense of responsibility?' 'i think not. i do more mischief than those who do not go out of their way to think of the matter at all!' 'do you!' said the vicar, smiling. 'at least, i know, for my own part, i prefer all the trouble and perplexity you give me, to a squire who would let me and my parish jog on our own way.' 'i dare say young brewster never spoilt a tom madison.' 'the sight of self indulgence spoils more than injudicious care does. besides, i look on these experiments as giving experience.' 'nice experience of my best efforts!' 'pardon me, fitzjocelyn, have we seen your best?' 'i hope you will!' said louis, vigorously. 'and to begin, will you tell this poor boy to come to me?' mr. holdsworth had an unmitigated sense of his own indiscretion, and not such a high one of fitzjocelyn's discretion as to make him think the interview sufficiently desirable for the culprit, to justify the possible mischief to the adviser, whose wisdom and folly were equally perplexing, and who would surely be either disappointed or deceived. dissuasions and arguments, however, failed; and mrs. frost, who was appealed to as a last resource, no sooner found that her patient's heart was set on the meeting, than she consented, and persuaded mr. holdsworth that no harm would ensue equal to the evil of her boy lying there distressing himself. accordingly, in due time, mr. holdsworth admitted the lad, and, on a sign from louis, shut himself out, leaving the runaway standing within the door, a monument of surly embarrassment. raising himself, louis said, affectionately, 'never mind, tom, don't you see how fast i am getting over it?' the lad looked up, but apparently saw little such assurance in the thin pale cheeks, and feeble, recumbent form; for his face twitched all over, resumed the same sullen stolidity, and was bent down again. 'come near, tom,' continued louis, with unabated kindness--'come and sit down here. i am afraid you have suffered a great deal,' as the boy shambled with an awkward footsore gait. 'it was a great pity you ran away.' 'i couldn't stay!' burst out tom, half crying. 'why not?' 'not to have that there cast in my teeth!' he exclaimed, with blunt incivility. 'did any one reproach you?' said louis, anxiously. 'i thought no one knew it but ourselves.' 'you knew it, then, my lord?' asked tom, staring. 'i found out directly that there was no cement,' said louis. 'i had suspected it before, and intended to examine whenever i had time.' 'well! i thought, when i came back, no one did seem to guess as 'twas all along of me!' cried tom. 'so sure i thought you hadn't known it, my lord. and you never said nothing, my lord!' 'i trust not. i would not consciously have accused you of what was quite as much my fault as yours. that would not have been fair play.' 'if i won't give it to bill bettesworth!' cried tom. 'what has he done?' 'always telling me that gentlefolks hadn't got no notion of fair play with the like of us, but held us like the dirt to be trampled on! but there--i'll let him know--' 'who is he?' 'a young man what works with mr. smith,' returned tom, his sullenness having given place to a frank, open manner, such as any one but louis would have deemed too free and ready. 'was he your great friend at northwold?' 'a chap must speak to some one,' was tom's answer. 'and what kind of a some one was he?' 'why, he comes down illershall way. he knows a thing or two, and can go on like an orator or a play-book--or like yourself, my lord.' 'thank you. i hope the thing or two were of the right sort.' tom looked sheepish. 'i heard something about bad companions. i hope he was not one. i ought to have come and visited you, tom; i have been very sorry i did not. you'd better let me hear all about it, for i fear there must have been worse scrapes than this of the stones.' 'worse!' cried tom--'sure nothing could be worserer!' 'i wish there were no evils worse than careless forgetfulness,' said louis. 'i didn't forget!' said tom. 'i meant to have told you whenever you came to see me, but'--his eyes filled and his voice began to alter--'you never came, and she at the terrace wouldn't look at me! and bill and the rest of them was always at me, asking when i expected my aristocrat, and jeering me 'cause i'd said you wasn't like the rest of 'em. so then i thought i'd have my liberty too, and show i didn't care no more than they, and spite you all.' 'how little one thinks of the grievous harm a little selfish heedlessness may do!' sighed louis, half aloud. 'if you had only looked to something better than me, tom! and so you ran into mischief?' half confession, half vindication ensued, and the poor fellow's story was manifest enough. his faults had been unsteadiness and misplaced independence rather than any of the more degrading stamp of evils. the public-house had not been sought for liquor's sake, but for that of the orator who inflamed the crude imaginations and aspirations that effervesced in the youth's mind; and the rudely-exercised authority of master and foreman had only driven his fierce temper further astray. with sense of right sufficient to be dissatisfied with himself, and taste and principle just enough developed to loathe the evils round him, hardened and soured by louis's neglect, and rendered discontented by chartist preachers, he had come to long for any sort of change or break; and the tidings of the accident, coupled with the hard words which he knew himself to deserve but too well, had put the finishing stroke. hearing that the police were in pursuit of him, he had fancied it was on account of the harm done by his negligence. 'i hid about for a day,' he said: 'somehow i felt as if i could not go far off, till i heard how you were, my lord, and i'd made up my mind that as soon as ever i heard the first stroke of the bell, i'd go and find the police, and his lordship might hang me, and glad!' louis was nearer a tear than a smile. 'then mr. frost finds me, and was mad at me. nothing wasn't bad enough for me, and he sets mr. warren to see me off, so i had nothing for it but to cut.' 'what did you think of doing?' sighed louis. 'i made for the sea. if i could have got to them places in the indies, such as that philip went to, as you reads about in the verse-book--he as killed his wife and lost his son, and made friends with that there big rascal, and had the chest of gold--' 'philip mortham! were you going in search of buccaneers?' 'i don't know, my lord. once you told me of some english sir, as kills the pirates, and is some sort of a king. i thought, may be, now you'd tell me where they goes to dig for gold.' 'oh, tom, tom, what a mess i have made of your notions!' 'isn't there no such place?' 'it's a bad business, and what can you want of it?' 'i want to get shut of them as orders one about here and there, with never a civil word. besides,' looking down, 'there's one i'd like to see live like a lady.' 'would that make her happier?' 'i'll never see her put about, and slave and drudge, as poor mother did!' exclaimed tom. 'that's a better spirit than the mere dislike to a master,' said louis. 'what is life but obedience?' 'i'd obey fast enough, if folk would only speak like you do--not drive one about like a dog, when one knows one is every bit as good as they.' 'i'm sure i never knew that!' tom stared broadly. 'i never saw the person who was not my superior,' repeated louis, quietly, and in full earnest. 'not that this would make rough words pleasanter, i suppose. the only cure i could ever see for the ills of the world is, that each should heartily respect his neighbour.' paradoxes musingly uttered, and flying over his head, wore to tom a natural and comfortable atmosphere; and the conversation proceeded. louis found that geography had been as much at fault as chronology, and that the runaway had found himself not at the sea, but at illershall, where he had applied for work, and had taken a great fancy to mr. dobbs, but had been rejected for want of a character, since the good superintendent made it his rule to keep up a high standard among his men. wandering had succeeded, in which, moneyless, forlorn, and unable to find employment, he had been obliged to part with portions of his clothing to procure food; his strength began to give way, and he had been found by the police sleeping under a hedge; he was questioned, and sent home, crestfallen, sullen, and miserable, unwilling to stay at marksedge, yet not knowing where to go. his hankering was for illershall, and louis, thinking of the judicious care, the evening school, and the openings for promotion, decided at once that the experiment should be tried without loss of time. he desired tom to bring him ink and paper, and hastily wrote: 'dear mr. dobbs,--you would do me a great kindness by employing this poor fellow, and bearing with him. i have managed him very ill, but he would reward any care. have an eye to him, and put him in communication with the chaplain. if you can take him, i will write more at length. if you have heard of my accident, you will excuse more at present. 'yours very truly, 'fitzjocelyn.' then arose the question, how tom was to get to illershall. he did not know; and louis directed his search into the places where the loose money in his pocket might have been put. when it was found, tom scrupled at the proposed half-sovereign. three-and-fourpence would pay for his ticket. 'you will want a supper and a bed. go respectably, tom, and keep so. it will be some consolation for the mischief i have done you!' 'you done me harm!' cried tom. 'why, 'tis all along of you that i ain't a regularly-built scamp!' 'very irregularly built, whatever you are!' said louis. but i'll tell you what you shall do for me,' continued he, with anxious earnestness. 'do you know the hollow ash-tree that shades over inglewood stile? it has a stout sucker, with a honeysuckle grown into it--coming up among the moss, where the great white vase-shaped funguses grew up in the autumn.' 'i know him, my lord,' said tom, brightening at the detail, given with all a sick man's vivid remembrance of the out-of-doors world. 'i have fixed my mind on that stick! i think it has a bend at the root. will you cut it for me, and trim it up for a walking-stick?' 'that i will, my lord!' 'thank you. bring it up to me between seven and eight in the morning, if you please; and so i shall see you again--' mr. holdsworth was already entering to close the conversation, which had been already over-long and exciting, for louis, sinking back, mournfully exclaimed, 'the medley of that poor boy's mind is the worst of my pieces of work. i have made him too refined for one class, and left him too rough for another--discontented with his station, and too desultory and insubordinate to rise, nobleness of nature turning to arrogance, fact and fiction all mixed up together. it would be a study, if one was not so sorry!' nevertheless, mr. holdsworth could not understand how even fitzjocelyn could have given the lad a recommendation, and he would have remonstrated, but that the long interview had already been sufficiently trying; so he did his best to have faith in his eccentric friend's good intentions. in the early morning, tom madison made his appearance, in his best clothes, erect and open-faced, a strong contrast to the jaded, downcast being who had yesterday presented himself. the stick was prepared to perfection, and louis acknowledged it with gratitude proportioned to the fancies that he had spent on it, poising it, feeling the cool grey bark, and raising himself in bed to try how he should lean on it. 'hang it up there, tom, within my reach. it seems like a beginning of independence.' 'i wish, my lord,' blurted out tom, in agitation, 'you'd tell me if you're to go lame for life, and then i should know the worst of it.' 'i suspect no one knows either the worst or the best,' said louis, kindly. 'since the pain has gone off, i have been content, and asked no questions. mr. walby says my ankle is going on so well, that it is a real picture, and a pleasure to touch it; and though i can't say the pleasure is mutual, i ought to be satisfied.' 'you'll only laugh at me!' half sobbed tom, 'and if there was but anything i could do! i've wished my own legs was cut off--and serve me right--ever since i seen you lying there.' 'thank you; i'm afraid they would have been no use to me! but, seriously, if i had been moderately prudent, it would not have happened. and as it is, i hope i shall be glad of that roll in ferny dell to the end of my life.' 'i did go to see after mending them stones!' cried tom, as if injured by losing this one compensation; 'but they are all done up, and there ain't nothing to do to them.' 'look here, tom: if you want to do anything for me, it is easily told, what would be the greatest boon to me. they tell me i've spoilt you, and i partly believe it, for i put more of my own fancies into you than of real good, and the way i treated you made you impatient of control: and then, because i could not keep you on as i should have wished,--as, unluckily, you and i were not made to live together on a desert island,--i left you without the little help i might have given. now, tom, if you go to the bad, i shall know it is all my fault--' 'that it ain't,' the boy tried to say, eagerly, but louis went on. 'don't let my bad management be the ruin of you. take a turn from this moment. you know who can help you, and who, if you had thought of him, would have kept you straight when i forgot. put all the stuff out of your head about one man being equal to another. equal they are; but some have the trial of ruling, others of obeying, and the last are the lucky ones. if we could only see their souls, we should know it. you'll find evening schools and lectures at illershall; you'd better take to them, for you've more real liking for that sort of thing than for mischief; and if you finished up your education, you'd get into a line that would make you happier, and where you might do much good. there--promise me that you'll think of these things, and take heed to your sundays.' 'i promise,' said tom. 'and mind you write to me, tom, and tell how you get on. i'll write, and let you know about your grandfather, and marksedge news and all--' the 'thank you, my lord,' came with great pleasure and alacrity. 'some day, when you are a foreman, perhaps i may bring miss clara to see copper-smelting. only mind, that you'll never go on soundly, nor even be fit to make your pretty tidy nest for any gentle bird, unless you mind one thing most of all; and that is, that we have had a new life given us, and we have to begin now, and live it for ever and ever.' as he raised himself, holding out his pale, slender hand from his white sleeve, his clear blue eyes earnestly fixed on the sky, his face all one onward look, something of that sense of the unseen passed into the confused, turbulent spirit of the boy, very susceptible of poetical impressions, and his young lord's countenance connected itself with all the floating notions left in his mind by parable or allegory. he did not speak, as louis heartily shook his hardy red hand, and bade him good speed, but his bow and pulled forelock at the door had in them more of real reverence than of conventional courtesy. of tastes and perceptions above his breeding, the very sense of his own deficiencies had made him still more rugged and clownish, and removed him from the sympathies of his own class, while he almost idolized the two most refined beings whom he knew, lord fitzjocelyn and charlotte arnold. on an interview with her, his heart was set. he had taken leave of his half-childish grandfather, made up his bundle, and marched into northwold, with three hours still to spare ere the starting of the parliamentary train. sympathy, hope, resolution, and the sense of respectability had made another man of him; and, above all, he dwelt on the prospect held out of repairing the deficiencies of his learning. the consciousness of ignorance and awkwardness was very painful, and he longed to rub it off, and take the place for which he felt his powers. 'i will work!' thought he; 'i have a will to it, and, please god, when i come back next, it won't be as a rough, ignorant lout that i'll stand before charlotte!' 'louis,' said mary ponsonby, as she sat at work beside him that afternoon, after an expedition to the new house at dynevor terrace, 'i want to know, if you please, how you have been acting like a gentleman.' 'i did not know that i had been acting at all of late.' 'i could not help hearing something in aunt catharine's garden that has made me very curious.' 'ha!' cried louis, eagerly. 'i was sowing some annuals in our back garden, and heard voices through the trellis. presently i heard, quite loud, 'my young lord has behaved like a real gentleman, as he is, and no mistake, or i'd never have been here now.' and, presently, 'i've promised him, and i promise you, charlotte, to keep my church, and have no more to do with them things. i'll keep it as sacred as they keeps the temperance pledge; for sure i'm bound to him, as he forgave me, and kept my secret as if i'd been his own brother: and when i've proved it, won't that satisfy you, charlotte?' 'and what did charlotte say?' 'i think she was crying; but i thought listening any more would be unfair, so i ran upstairs and threw up the drawing-room window to warn them.' 'oh, mary, how unfeeling!' 'i thought it could be doing no good!' 'that is so like prudent people, who can allow no true love under five hundred pounds a year! did you see them? how did they look?' 'charlotte was standing in an attitude, her hands clasped over her broom. the gentleman was a country-looking boy--' 'bearing himself like a sensible, pugnacious cock-robin? poor fellow, so you marred their parting.' 'charlotte flew into the house, and the boy walked off up the garden. was he your madison, louis? for i thought my aunt did not think it right to encourage him about her house.' 'and so he is to be thwarted in what would best raise and refine him. that great, bright leading star of a well-placed affection is not to be allowed to help him through all the storms and quicksands in his way.' good mary might well open her eyes, but, pondering a little, she said, 'he need not leave off liking charlotte, if that is to do him good; but i suppose the question is, what is safest for her?' 'well, he is safe enough. he is gone to illershall to earn her.' 'oh! then i don't care! but you have not answered me, and i think i can guess the boy's secret that you have been keeping. did you not once tell me that you trusted those stones in ferny dell to him?' 'now, mary, you must keep his secret!' 'but why was it made one? did you think it unkind to say that it was his fault?' 'of course i did. when i thought it was all over with me, i could not go and charge the poor fellow with it, so as to make him a marked man. i was only afraid that thinking so often of stopping myself, i should bring it out by mistake.' mary looked down, and thought; then raised her eyes suddenly, and said, as if surprised, 'that was really very noble in you, louis!' then, thinking on, she said, 'but how few people would think it worth while!' 'yes,' said louis; 'but i had a real regard for this poor fellow, and an instinct, perhaps perverse, of shielding him; so i could not accuse him on my own account. besides, i believe i am far more guilty towards him. his neglect only hurt my ankle--my neglect left him to fall into temptation.' 'yet, by the way he talks of you--' 'yes, he has the sort of generous disposition on which a little delicacy makes a thousand times more impression than a whole pile of benefits i hope and trust that he is going to repair all that is past. i wish i could make out whether good intentions overrule errors in detail, or only make them more fatal.' mary was glad to reason out the question. abstract practical views interested her, and she had much depth and observation, more original than if she had read more and thought less. of course, no conclusion was arrived at; but the two cousins had an argument of much enjoyment and some advantage to both. affairs glided on quietly till the saturday, when lord ormersfield returned. never had he so truly known what it was to come home as when he mounted the stairs, with steps unlike his usual measured tread, and beheld his son's look of animated welcome, and eager, outstretched hands. 'i was afraid,' said the earl, presently, 'that you had not felt so well,' and he touched his own upper lip to indicate that the same feature in his son was covered with down like a young bird. louis blushed a little, but spoke indifferently. 'i thought it a pity not to leave it for the regulation moustache for the yeomanry.' 'i wish i could think you likely to be fit to go out with the yeomanry.' 'every effort must be made!' cried louis. 'what do they say in london about the invasion?' it was the year , when a french invasion was in every one's mouth, and sydney calcott had been retailing all sorts of facts about war-steamers and artillery, in a visit to fitzjocelyn, whose patriotism had forthwith run mad, so that he looked quite baffled when his father coolly set the whole down as 'the regular ten years' panic.' there was a fervid glow within him of awe, courage, and enterprise, the outward symbol of which was that infant yellow moustache. he was obliged, however, to allow the subject to be dismissed, while his father told him of sir miles oakstead's kind inquiries, and gave a message of greeting from his aunt lady conway, delivering himself of it as an unpleasant duty, and adding, as he turned to mrs. ponsonby, 'she desired to be remembered to you, mary.' 'i have not seen her for many years. is sir walter alive?' 'no; he died about three years ago.' 'i suppose her daughters are not come out yet?' 'her own are in the school-room; but there is a step-daughter who is much admired.' 'those cousins of mine,' exclaimed louis, 'it is strange that i have never seen them. i think i had better employ some of my spare time this summer in making their acquaintance.' mrs. ponsonby perceived that the earl had become inspired with a deadly terror of the handsome stepdaughter; for he turned aside and began to unpack a parcel. it was m'culloch's natural theology, into which louis had once dipped at mr. calcott's, and had expressed a wish to read it. his father had taken some pains to procure this too-scarce book for him, and he seized on it with delighted and surprised gratitude, plunging at once into the middle, and reading aloud a most eloquent passage upon electricity. no beauty, however, could atone to lord ormersfield for the outrage upon method. 'if you would oblige me, louis,' he said, 'you would read that book consecutively.' 'to oblige you, certainly,' said louis, smiling, and turning to the first page, but his vivacious eagerness was extinguished. m'culloch is not an author to be thoroughly read without a strong effort. his gems are of the purest ray, but they lie embedded in a hard crust of reasoning and disquisition; and on the first morning, louis, barely strong enough yet for a battle with his own volatility, looked, and owned himself, dead beat by the first chapter. mary took pity on him. she had been much interested by his account of the work, and would be delighted if he would read it with her. he brightened at once, and the regular habit began, greatly to their mutual enjoyment. mary liked the argument, louis liked explaining it; and the flood of allusions was delightful to both, with his richness of illustration, and mary's actual experience of ocean and mountains. she brought him whatever books he wanted, and from the benevolent view of entertaining him while a prisoner, came to be more interested than her mother had ever expected to see her in anything literary. it was amusing to see the two cousins unconsciously educating each other--the one learning expansion, the other concentration, of mind. mary could now thoroughly trust louis's goodness, and therefore began by bearing with his vagaries, and gradually tracing the grain of wisdom that was usually at their root; and her eyes were opened to new worlds, where all was not evil or uninteresting that aunt melicent distrusted. louis made her teach him spanish; and his insight into grammar and keen delight in the majestic language and rich literature infected her, while he was amused by her positive distaste to anything incomplete, and playfully, though half murmuringly, submitted to his 'good governess,' and let her keep him in excellent order. she knew where all his property was, and, in her quaint, straightforward way, would refuse to give him whatever 'was not good for him.' it was all to oblige mary that, when he could sit up and use pen and pencil, he set to work to finish his cottage plans, and soon drew and talked himself into a vehement condition about marksedge. mary's patronage drew on the work, even to hasty learning of perspective enough for a pretty elevation intelligible to the unlearned, and a hopeless calculation of the expense. the plans lay on the table when next his father came home, and their interest was explained. 'did you draw all these yourself?' exclaimed the earl. 'where did you learn architectural drawing? i should have thought them done by a professional hand.' 'it is easy enough to get it up from books,' said louis; 'and mary kept me to the point, in case you should be willing to consider the matter. i would have written out the estimate; but this book allows for bricks, and we could use the stone at inglewood more cheaply, to say nothing of beauty.' 'well,' said lord ormersfield, considering, 'you have every right to have a voice in the management of the property. i should like to hear your views with regard to these cottages.' colouring deeply, and with earnest thanks, fitzjocelyn stated the injury both to labourers and employers, caused by their distance from their work; he explained where he thought the buildings ought to stand, and was even guarded enough to show that the rents would justify the outlay. he had considered the matter so much, that he could even have encountered richardson; and his father was only afraid that what was so plausible _must_ be insecure. caution contended with a real desire to gratify his son, and to find him in the right. he must know the wishes of the farmer, be sure of the cost, and be certain of the spot intended. his crippled means had estranged him from duties that he could not fulfil according to his wishes, and, though not a hard landlord, he had no intercourse with his tenants, took little interest in his estate, and was such a stranger to the localities, that louis could not make him understand the nook selected for the buildings. he had seen the arable field called 'great courtiers,' and the farm called 'small profits,' on the map, but did not know their ups and downs much better than the coast of china. 'mary knows them!' said louis. 'she made all my measurements there, before i planned the gardens.' 'mary seems to be a good friend to your designs,' said the earl, looking kindly at her. 'the best!' said louis. 'i begin to have some hope of my doings when i see her take them in hand.' lord ormersfield thanked mary, and asked whether it would be trespassing too much on her kindness to ask her to show him the place in question. she was delighted, and they set out at once, the earl almost overpowering her by his exceeding graciousness, so that she was nearly ready to laugh when he complimented her on knowing her way through the bye-paths of his own park so much better than he did. 'it is a great pleasure to me that you can feel it something like home,' he said. 'i was so happy here as a child,' said mary, heartily, 'that it must seem to me more of a home than any other place.' 'i hope it may always be so, my dear.' he checked himself, as if he had been about to speak even more warmly; and mary did the honours of the proposed site for the cottages, a waste strip fronting a parish lane, open to the south, and looking full of capabilities, all of which she pointed out after louis's well-learned lesson, as eagerly as if it had been her own affair. lord ormersfield gave due force to all, but still was prudent. 'i must find out,' he said, 'whether this place be in my hands, or included in morris's lease. you see, mary, this is an encumbered property, with every disadvantage, so that i cannot always act as you and louis would wish; but we so far see our way out of our difficulties, that, if guided by good sense, he will be able to effect far more than i have ever done.' 'i believe,' was mary's answer, 'this green is in the farmer's hands, but that he has no use for it.' 'i should like to be certain of his wishes. farmers are so unwilling to increase the rates, that i should not like to consent till i know that it would be really a convenience to him.' mary suggested that there stood the farmhouse; and the earl apologetically asked if she would dislike their proceeding thither, as he would not detain her long. she eagerly declared that louis would be 'so glad,' and lord ormersfield turned his steps to the door, where he had only been once in his life, when he was a very young man, trying to like shooting. the round-eyed little maid would say nothing but 'walk in, sir,' in answer to inquiries if mr. norris were at home; and they walked into a parlour, chill with closed windows, and as stiff and fine as the lilac streamers of the cap that mrs. norris had just put on for their reception. nevertheless, she was a sensible, well-mannered woman, and after explaining that her husband was close at hand, showed genuine warmth and interest in inquiring for lord fitzjocelyn. as the conversation began to flag, mary had recourse to admiring a handsome silver tankard on a side table. it was the prize of a ploughing-match eight years ago, and brought out a story that evidently always went with it, how mrs. norris had been unwell and stayed at home, and had first heard of her husband's triumph by seeing the young lord galloping headlong up the homefield, hurraing, and waving his cap. he had taken his pony the instant he heard the decision, and rushed off to be the first to bring the news to mrs. norris, wild with the honour of small profits. 'and,' said the farmer's wife, 'i always say norris was as pleased with what i told him, as i was with the tankard!' norris here came in, an unpretending, quiet man, of the modern, intelligent race of farmers. there was anxiety at first in his eye, but it cleared off as he heard the cause of his landlord's visit, and he was as propitious as any cautious farmer could be. he was strong on the present inconveniences, and agreed that it would be a great boon to have a _few_ families brought back, such as were steady, and would not burden the rates; but the _few_ recurred so often as to show that he was afraid of a general migration of marksedge. lord ormersfield thereupon promised that he should be consulted as to the individuals. 'thank you, my lord. there are some families at marksedge that one would not wish to see nearer here; and i'll not say but i should like to have a voice in the matter, for they are apt to take advantage of lord fitzjocelyn's kindness.' 'i quite understand you. nothing can be more reasonable. i only acted because my son was persuaded it was your wish.' 'it is so, my lord. i am greatly obliged. he has often talked of it with me, and i had mentioned the matter to mr. richardson, but he thought your lordship would be averse to doing anything.' 'i have not been able to do all i could have wished,' said the earl. 'my son will have it in his power to turn more attention to the property.' and he _is_ a thorough farmer's friend, as they all say,' earnestly exclaimed norris, with warmth breaking through the civil formal manner. 'true,' said lord ormersfield, gratified; 'he is very much attached to the place, and all connected with it.' 'i'm sure they're the same to him,' replied the farmer. 'as an instance, my lord, you'll excuse it--do you see that boy driving in the cows? you would not look for much from him. well, the morning the doctor from london came down, that boy came to his work, crying so that i thought he was ill. 'no, master,' said he, 'but what'll ever become of us when we've lost my young lord?' and he burst out again, fit to break his heart. i told him i was sorry enough myself, but to go to his work, for crying would do no good. 'i can't help it, master,' says he, 'when i looks at the pigs. didn't he find 'em all in the park, and me nutting--and helped me his own self to drive 'em out before mr. warren see 'em, and lifted the little pigs over the gap as tender as if they were christians?' 'yes, that's the way with them all,' interposed mrs. norris: 'he has the good word of high and low.' lord ormersfield smiled: he smiled better than he used to do, and took leave. 'fitzjocelyn will be a popular man,' he said. mary could not help being diverted at this moral deduced from the pig-story. 'every one is fond of him,' was all she said. 'talent and popularity,' continued the earl. 'he will have great influence. the free, prepossessing manner is a great advantage, where it is so natural and devoid of effort.' 'it comes of his loving every one,' said mary, almost indignantly. 'it is a decided advantage,' continued the earl, complacently. 'i have no doubt but that he has every endowment requisite for success. you and your mother have done much in developing his character, my dear; and i see every reason to hope that the same influence continued will produce the most beneficial results.' mary thought this a magnificent compliment, even considering that no one but her mamma had succeeded in teaching louis to read when a little boy, or in making him persevere in anything now: but then, when lord ormersfield did pay a compliment, it was always in the style of louis xiv. chapter ix. the family compact. who, nurst with tender care, and to domestic bounds confined, was still a wild jack-hare cowper. 'mary,' said mrs. frost. mrs. ponsonby was sitting by the open window of the library, inhaling the pleasant scents of july. raising her eyes, she saw her aunt gazing at her with a look somewhat perplexed, but brim full of mischievous frolic. however, the question was only--'where is that boy?' 'he is gone down with mary to his cottage-building.' 'oh! if mary is with him, i don't care,' said aunt catharine, sitting down to her knitting; but her ball seemed restless, and while she pursued it, she broke out into a little laugh, and exclaimed, 'i beg your pardon, my dear, but i cannot help it. i never heard anything so funny!' 'as this scheme,' said mrs. ponsonby, with a little hesitation. 'then you have the other side of it in your letter,' cried mrs. frost, giving way to her merriment. 'the arabian nights themselves, the two viziers laying their heads together, and sending home orders to us to make up the match!' 'my letter does not go so far,' said mrs. ponsonby, amused, but anxious. 'yours is the lady's side. my orders are precise. oliver has talked it over with mr. ponsonby, and finds the connexion would be agreeable; so he issues a decree that his nephew, roland dynevor--(poor jem--he would not know himself!)--should enter on no profession, but forthwith pay his addresses to miss ponsonby, since he will shortly be in a position befitting the heir of our family!' 'you leave prince roland in happy ignorance,' said mrs. ponsonby, blushing a little. 'certainly--or he would fly off like a sky-rocket at the first symptom of the princess.' 'then i think we need not alter our plans. all that mary's father tells me is, that he does not intend to return home as yet, though his successor is appointed, since he is much occupied by this new partnership with oliver, and expects that the investment will be successful. he quite approves of our living at the terrace, especially as he thinks i ought to be informed that oliver has declared his intentions with regard to his nephew, and so if anything should arise between the young people, i am not to discourage it.' 'mary is in request,' said mrs. frost, slyly, and as she met mrs. ponsonby's eyes full of uneasy inquiry. 'you don't mean that you have not observed at least his elder lordship's most decided courtship? don't be too innocent, my dear.' 'pray don't say so, aunt kitty, or you will make me uncomfortable in staying here. if the like ever crossed his mind, he must perceive that the two are just what we were together ourselves.' 'that might make him wish it the more,' aunt catharine had almost said, but she restrained it halfway, and said, 'louis is hardly come to the time of life for a grande passion.' 'true. he is wonderfully young, and mary not only seems much older, but is by no means the girl to attract a mere youth. i rather suspect she will have no courtship but from the elders.' 'in spite of her opportunities. what would some mammas--lord ormersfield's bugbear, for instance, lady conway--give for such a chance! three months of a lame young lord, and such a lame young lord as my louis!' 'i might have feared,' said mrs. ponsonby, 'if mary were not so perfectly simple. aunt melicent managed to abstract all romance, and i never regretted it so little. she has looked after him merely because it came in her way as a form of kindness, and is too much his governess for anything of the other sort.' 'so you really do not wish for the other sort?' said mrs. frost, half mortified, as if it were a slight to her boy. 'i don't know how her father might take it,' said mrs. ponsonby, eager to disarm, her. 'with his grand expectations, and his view of the state of this property, he might make difficulties. he is fond of expressing his contempt for needy nobility, and i am afraid, after all that has passed, that this would be the last case in which he would make an exception.' 'yet you say he is fond of mary.' 'very fond. if anything would triumph over his dislike, it would be his affection for her, but i had rather my poor mary had not to put it to the proof. and, after all, i don't think it the safest way for a marriage, that the man should be the most attractive, and the woman the most--' 'sensible! say it, mary--that is the charm in my nephew's eyes.' 'your great-nephew is the point! no, no, aunt kitty; you are under a delusion. the kindness to mary is no more than 'auld lang-syne,' and because he thinks her too impossible. he cannot afford for his son to marry anything but a grand unquestionable heiress. mary's fortune, besides, depending on speculations, would be nothing to what lady fitzjocelyn ought to have.' 'for shame! i think better of him. i believe he would be unworldly when louis's happiness was concerned.' 'to return to james,' said mrs. ponsonby, decidedly: 'i am glad that his uncle should have declared his intentions.' 'oh, my dear, we are quite used to that. i am only glad that jem takes no heed. we have had enough of that!--for my own part,' and the tears arose, 'i never expect that poor oliver will think he has done enough in my lifetime. these things do so grow on a man! if i had but kept him at home!' 'it might have been the same.' 'there would have been something to divide his attention. his brother used to be a sort of idol; he seemed to love him the more for his quiet, easy ways, and to delight in waiting on him. i do believe he delays, because he cannot bear to come home without henry!' mrs. ponsonby preferred most topics to that of mrs. frost's sons, and was relieved by the sight of the young people returning across the lawn--fitzjocelyn with his ash stick, but owing a good deal of support to mary's firm, well-knit arm. they showed well together: even lameness could not disfigure the grace of his leisurely movements; and the bright changefulness and delicacy of his face contrasted well with the placid nobleness of her composed expression, while her complexion was heightened and her eyes lighted by exercise, so that she was almost handsome. she certainly had been looking uncommonly well lately. was this the way they were to walk together through life? but mrs. ponsonby had known little of married life save the troubles, and she was doubly anxious for her daughter's sake. she exceedingly feared unformed characters, and natures that had no root in themselves. mary's husband must not lean on her for strength. she was glad, as with new meaning, she watched their proceedings, to see how easily, and as a matter of course, louis let mary bring his footstool and his slipper, fetch his books, each at the proper time, read spanish with him, and make him look out the words in the dictionary when he knew them by intuition, remind him of orders to be written for his buildings, and manage him as her pupil. if she ruled, it was with perfect calmness and simplicity, and the playfulness was that of brother and sister, not even with the coquettish intimacy of cousinhood. the field was decidedly open to roland dynevor, alias james frost. mrs. ponsonby was loth to contemplate that contingency, though in all obedience, she exposed her daughter to the infection. he was expected on that afternoon, bringing his sister with him, for he had not withstood the united voices that entreated him to become fitzjocelyn's tutor during the vacation, and the whole party had promised to remain for the present as guests at ormersfield. louis, in high spirits, offered to drive mrs. ponsonby to meet the travellers at the station; and much did he inflict on her poor shattered nerves by the way. he took no servant, that there might be the more room, and perched aloft on the driving seat, he could only use his indefatigable tongue by leaning back with his head turned round to her. she kept a sharp lookout ahead; but all her warnings of coming perils only caused him to give a moment's attention to the horses and the reins, before he again turned backwards to resume his discourse. in the town, his head was more in the right direction, for he was nodding and returning greetings every moment; he seemed to have a bowing acquaintance with all the world, and when he drew up at the station, reached down several times to shake hands with figures whom his father would barely have acknowledged; exchanging good-humoured inquiries or congratulations with almost every third person. scarcely had the train dashed up before mrs. ponsonby was startled by a shout of 'he's there himself! louis! louis!' and felt, as well as saw, the springing ascent to the box of a tall apparition, in a scanty lilac cotton dress, an outgrown black mantle, and a brown straw bonnet, scarcely confining an overprofusion of fair hair. louis let go the reins to catch hold of both hands, and cry, 'well, old giraffe! what have you done with jem?' 'seeing to the luggage! you won't let him turn me out! i must sit here!' 'you must have manners,' said louis; 'look round, and speak rationally to mrs. ponsonby.' 'i never saw she was there!' and slightly colouring, the 'giraffe' erected her length, turned round a small insignificant face slightly freckled, with hazel eyes, as light as if they had been grey; and stretched down a hand to be shaken by her new relation, but she was chiefly bent on retaining her elevation. 'there, jem!' she cried exultingly, as he came forth, followed by the trunks and portmanteaus. 'madcap!' he said; 'but i suppose the first day of the holidays must be privileged. ha! fitzjocelyn, you're the right man in the right place, whatever clara is.' so they drove off, james sitting by mrs. ponsonby, and taking care to inform her that, in spite of her preposterous height, clara was only sixteen, he began to ask anxious questions as to fitzjocelyn's recovery, while she looked up at the pair in front, and thought, from the appearance of things, that even louis's tongue was more than rivalled, for the newcomer seemed to say a sentence in the time he took in saying a word. poor mrs. ponsonby! she would not have been happier had she known in which pair of hands the reins were! 'and louis! how are you?' cried clara, as soon as this point had been gained; 'are you able to walk?' 'after a fashion.' 'and does your ankle hurt you?' 'only if i work it too hard. one would think that lounging had become a virtue instead of a vice, to hear the way i am treated.' 'you look--' began clara. 'but oh, louis!' cried she, in a sort of hesitating wonder, 'what! a moustache?' 'don't say a word:' he lowered his voice. 'riding is against orders, but i cannot miss the yeomanry, under the present aspect of affairs.' 'the invasion! a man in the train was talking of the war steamers, but jem laughed. do you believe in it?' 'it is a time when a display of loyalty and national spirit may turn the scale. i am resolved to let no trifle prevent me from doing my part,' he said, colouring with enthusiasm. 'you are quite right,' cried clara. 'you ought to take your vassals, like a feudal chief! i am sure the defence of one's country ought to outweigh everything.' 'exactly so. our volunteer forces are our strength and glory, and are a happy meeting of all classes in the common cause. but say nothing, clara, or granny will take alarm, and get an edict from walby against me.' 'dear granny! but i wish we were going home to the terrace.' 'thank you. how flattering!' 'you would be always in and out, and it would be so much more comfortable. is lord ormersfield at home?' 'no, he will not come till legislation can bear london no longer.' 'oh!'--with a sound of great relief. 'you don't know how kind he has been,' said louis, eagerly. 'you will find it out when you are in the house with him.' clara laughed, but sighed. 'i think we should have had more fun at home.' 'what! than with me for your host? try what i can do. besides, you overlook mary.' 'but she has been at school!' 'well!' 'i didn't bargain for school-girls at home!' 'i should not have classed mary in that category.' 'don't ask me to endure any one who has been at school! oh, louis! if you could only guess--if you would only speak to jem not to send me back to that place--' 'aunt kitty will not consent, i am sure, if you are really unhappy there, my poor clara.' 'no! no! i am ordered not to tell granny. it would only vex her, and jem says it must be. i don't want her to be vexed, and if i tell you, i may be able to keep it in!' out poured the whole flood of troubles, unequal in magnitude, but most trying to the high-spirited girl. formal walks, silent meals, set manners, perpetual french, were a severe trial, but far worse was the companionship. petty vanities, small disputes, fretful jealousies, insincere tricks, and sentimental secrets, seemed to clara a great deal more contemptible than the ignorance, indolence, abrupt manners and boyish tastes which brought her into constant disgrace--and there seemed to be one perpetual chafing and contradiction, which made her miserable. and a further confidence could not help following, though with a warning that jem must not hear it, for she did not mind, and he spent every farthing on her that he could afford. she had been teased about her dress, told that her friends were mean and shabby, and rejected as a walking companion, because she had no parasol, and that was vulgar. 'i am sure i wanted to walk with none of them,' said clara, 'and when our english governess advised me to get one, i told her i would give in to no such nonsense, for only vulgar people cared about them. such a scrape i got into! well, then miss salter, whose father is a knight, and who thinks herself the great lady of the school, always bridled whenever she saw me, and, at last, lucy raynor came whispering up, to beg that i would contradict that my grandmamma kept a school, for miss salter was so very particular.' 'i should like to have heard your contradiction.' 'i never would whisper, least of all to lucy raynor, so i stood up in the midst, and said, as clear as i could, that my grandmother had always earned an honest livelihood by teaching little boys, and that i meant to do the same, for nothing would ever make me have anything to do with girls.' 'that spoilt it,' said louis--'the first half was dignified.' 'what was the second?' 'human nature,' said louis. 'i see,' said clara. 'well, they were famously scandalized, and that was all very nice, for they let me alone. but you brought far worse on me, louis.' 'i!' 'ay! 'twas my own fault, though, but i couldn't help it. you must know, they all are ready to bow down to the ninety-ninth part of a lord's little finger; and miss brown--that's the teacher--always reads all the fashionable intelligence as if it were the arabian nights, and imparts little bits to miss salter and her pets; and so it was that i heard, whispered across the table, the dreadful accident to viscount fitzjocelyn!' 'did nobody write to you?' 'yes--i had a letter from granny, and another from jem by the next morning's post, or i don't know what i should have done. granny was too busy to write at first; i didn't three parts believe it before, but there was no keeping in at that first moment.' 'what did you do?' 'i gave one great scream, and flew at the newspaper. the worst was, that i had to explain, and then--oh! it was enough to make one sick. why had i not said i was lord ormersfield's cousin? i turned into a fine aristocratic-looking girl on the spot! miss salter came and fondled, and wanted me to walk with her!' 'of course; she had compassion on your distress--amiable feeling!' 'she only wanted to ask ridiculous questions, whether you were handsome.' 'what did you reply?' 'i told them not a word, except that my brother was going to be your tutor. when i saw miss salter setting off by this line, i made jem take second-class tickets, that she might be ashamed of me.' 'my dear giraffe, bend down your neck, and don't take such a commonplace, conventional view of your schoolfellows.' 'conventional! ay, all agree because they know it by experience,' said clara--'i'm sure i do!' 'then take the other side--see the best.' 'jem says you go too far, and are unreasonable with your theory of making the best of every one.' 'by no means. i always made the worst of frampton, and now i know what injustice i did him. i never saw greater kindness and unselfishness than he has shown me.' 'i should like to know what best you would make of these girls!' 'you have to try that!' 'can i get any possible good by staying?' 'a vast deal.' 'i'm sure italian, and music, and drawing, are not a good compared with truth, and honour, and kindness.' 'all those things only grow by staying wherever we may happen to be, unless it is by our own fault.' 'tell me what good you mean!' 'learning not to hate, learning to mend your gloves. don't jerk the reins, clara, or you'll get me into a scrape.' clara could extract no more, nor did she wish it, for having relieved her mind by the overflow, she only wanted to forget her misfortunes. her cousin louis was her chief companion, they had always felt themselves on the same level of nonsense, and had unreservedly shared each other's confidences and projects; and ten thousand bits of intelligence were discussed with mutual ardour, while clara's ecstasy became uncontrollable as she felt herself coming nearer to her grandmother. she finally descended with a bound almost as distressing to her brother as her ascent had been, and leapt at once to the embrace of mrs. frost, who stood there, petting, kissing her, and playfully threatening all sorts of means to stop her growth. clara reared up her giraffe figure, boasting of having overtopped all the world present, except louis! she made but a cold, abrupt response to her cousin mary's greeting, and presently rushed upstairs in search of dear old jane, with an impetus that made mrs. frost sigh, and say, 'poor child! how happy she is;' and follow her, smiling, while james looked annoyed. 'never mind, jem,' said louis, who had thrown himself at full length on the sofa, 'she deserves compensation. let it fizz.' 'and undo everything! what do you say to that, mary?' 'mary is to say nothing,' said louis, 'i mean that poor child to have her swing.' 'i shall leave you and james to settle that,' said mary, quitting them. 'i am very anxious that clara should form a friendship with mary,' said james, gravely. 'friendships can't be crammed down people's throats,' said louis, in a weary indifferent tone. 'you who have been three months with mary--!' 'mary and i did not meet with labels round our necks that here were a pair of friends. pray do you mean to send that victim of yours back to school?' 'don't set her against it. i have been telling her of the necessity all the way home.' 'is it not to be taken into consideration that a bad--not to say a base-style of girl seems to prevail there?' 'i can't help it, fitzjocelyn,' cried jem, ruffling up his hair, as he always did when vexed. 'girls fit to be her companions don't go to school--or to no school within my means. this place has sound superiors, and she _must_ be provided with a marketable stock of accomplishments, so there's no choice. i can trust her not to forget that she is a dynevor.' 'query as to the benefit of that recollection.' 'what do you mean?' 'that i never saw evils lessened by private self-exaltation.' 'very philosophical! but as a matter of fact, what was it but the sense of my birth that kept me out of all the mischief i was exposed to at the grammar school!' 'i always thought it had been something more respectable,' said louis, his voice growing more sleepy. 'pshaw! primary motives being understood, secondary stand common wear the best.' 'as long as they don't eat into the primary.' 'the long and short of it is,' exclaimed james, impatiently, 'that we must have no nonsense about clara. it is pain enough to me to inflict all this on her, but i would not do it, if i thought it were more than mere discomfort. her principles are fixed, she is above these trumperies. but you have the sense to see that her whole welfare may depend on whether she gets fitted to be a valuable accomplished governess or a mere bonne, tossed about among nursery-maids. there's where poverty galls! don't go and set my grandmother on! if she grew wretched and took clara away, it would be mere condemning of her to rudeness and struggling!' 'very well,' said louis, as james concluded the brief sentences, uttered in the bitterness of his heart, 'one bargain i make. if i am to hold my tongue about school, i will have my own way with her in the holidays.' 'i tell you, louis, that it is time to have done with childishness. clara is growing up--i _won't_ have you encourage her in all that wild flightiness--i didn't want to have had her here at all! if she is ever to be a reasonable, conformable woman, it is high time to begin. i can't have you undoing the work of six months! when mary might make some hand of her, too--' james stopped. louis's eyes were shut, and he appeared to be completely asleep. if silence were acquiescence, it was at least gained; and so he went away, and on returning, intended to impress his lessons of reserve on clara and her grandmother, but was prevented by finding mrs. ponsonby and her daughter already in the library, consulting over some letters, while clara sat at her grandmother's knee in the full felicity of hearing all the northwold news. the tea was brought in, and there was an inquiry for louis. he came slowly forward from the sofa at the dark end of the room, but disclaimed, of course, the accusation of fatigue. 'a very bad sign,' said james, 'that you have been there all this time without our finding it out. decidedly, you have taken me in. you don't look half as well as you promised. you are not the same colour ten minutes together, just now white, and now--how you redden!' 'don't, jem!' cried louis, as each observation renewed the tide of burning crimson in his cheek. 'it is like whistling to a turkey-cock. if i had but the blue variety, it might be more comfortable, as well as more interesting.' clara went into a choking paroxysm of laughter, which her brother tried to moderate by a look, and louis rendered more convulsive by quoting 'marked you his cheek of heavenly blue,' and looked with a mischievous amusement at james's ill-suppressed displeasure at the merriment that knew no bounds, till even mrs. frost, who had laughed at first as much at james's distress as at louis's travestie or clara's fun, thought it time to check it by saying, 'you are right, jem, he is not half so strong as he thinks himself. you must keep him in good order.' 'take care, aunt kitty,' said louis; 'you'll make me restive. a tutor and governess both! i appeal! shall we endure it, clara?' 'britons never shall be slaves!' was the eager response. 'worthy of the daughter of the pendragons,' said louis; 'but it lost half its effect from being stifled with laughing. you should command yourself, clara, when you utter a sentiment. i beg to repeat miss frost dynevor's novel and striking speech, and declare my adhesion, 'britons never shall be slaves!' liberty, fraternity, and equality! tyrants, beware!' 'you ungrateful boy!' said mrs. frost; 'that's the way you use your good governess!' 'only the way the nineteenth century treats all its good governesses,' said louis. 'when it gets past them,' said mary, smiling. 'i hope you did not think i was not ready to give you up to your tutor?' mary found the renunciation more complete than perhaps she had expected. the return of his cousins had made fitzjocelyn a different creature. he did indeed read with james for two hours every morning, but this was his whole concession to discipline; otherwise he was more wayward and desultory than ever, and seemed bent on teazing james, and amusing himself by making clara extravagantly wild and idle. tired of his long confinement, he threw off all prudence with regard to health, as well as all struggle with his volatile habits; and the more he was scolded, the more he seemed to delight in making meekly ridiculous answers and going his own way. sometimes he and clara would make an appointment, at some unearthly hour, to see mrs. morris make cheese, or to find the sun-dew blossom open, or to sketch some effect of morning sun. louis would afterwards be tired and unhinged the whole day, but never convinced, only capable of promoting clara's chatter; and ready the next day to stand about with her in the sun at the cottages, to the increase of her freckles, and the detriment of his ankle. their frolics would have been more comprehensible had she been more attractive; but her boisterous spirits were not engaging to any one but louis, who seemed to enjoy them in proportion to her brother's annoyance, and to let himself down into nearly equal folly. he gave some slight explanation to mary, one day when he had been reminded of one of their former occupations--'ah! i have no time for that now. you see there's nobody else to protect that poor giraffe from being too rational.' 'is that her great danger?' said mary. 'take my advice, mary, let her alone. follow your own judgment, and not poor jem's fidgets. he wants to be 'father, mother both, and uncle, all in one,' and so he misses his natural vocation of elder brother. he wants to make a woman of her before her time; and now he has his way with her at school, he shall let her have a little compensation at home.' 'is this good for her? is it the only way she can be happy?' 'it is her way, at least; and if you knew the penance she undergoes at school, you would not grudge it to her. she is under his orders not to disclose the secrets of her prison-house, lest they should disquiet aunt catharine; and she will not turn to you, because--i beg your pardon, mary--she has imbibed a distrust of all school-girls; and besides, jem has gone and insisted on your being her friend more than human nature can stand.' 'it is a great pity,' said mary, smiling, but grieved; 'i should not have been able to do her much good--but if i could only try!' 'i'll tell you,' said louis, coming near, with a look between confidence and embarrassment; 'is it in the power of woman to make her dress look rather more like other people's without inflaming the blood of the dynevors--cautiously, you know? even my father does not dare to give her half-a-sovereign for pocket-money; but do ask your mother if she could not be made such that those girls should not make her their laughingstock.' 'you don't mean it!' 'aye, i do; and she has not even told james, lest he should wish to spend more upon her. she glories in it, but that is hardly wholesome.' 'then she told you?' 'oh, yes! we always were brothers! it is great fun to have her here! i always wished it, and i'm glad it has come before they have made her get out of the boy. he will be father to the woman some day; and that will be soon enough, without teasing her.' mary wished to ask whether all this were for clara's good, but she could not very well put such a question to him; and, after all, it was noticeable that, noisy and unguarded as clara's chatter was, there never was anything that in itself should not have been said: though her manner with louis was unceremonious, it was never flirting; and refinement of mind was as evident in her rough-and-ready manner as in his high-bred quietness. this seemed to account for mrs. frost's non-interference, which at first amazed her niece; but aunt catharine's element was chiefly with boys, and her love for clara, though very great, showed itself chiefly in still regarding her as a mere child, petting her to atone for the privations of school, and while she might assent to the propriety of james's restrictions, always laughing or looking aside when they were eluded. james argued and remonstrated. he said a great deal, always had the advantage in vehemence, and appeared to reduce louis to a condition of quaint debonnaire indifference; and warfare seemed the normal state of the cousins, the one fiery and sensitive, the other cool and impassive, and yet as appropriate to each other as the pepper and the cucumber, to borrow a bon mot from their neighbour, sydney calcott. if jem came to mary brimful of annoyance with louis's folly, a mild word of assent was sufficient to make him turn round and do battle with the imaginary enemy who was always depreciating fitzjocelyn. to make up for clara's avoidance of mary, he rendered her his prime counsellor, and many an hour was spent in pacing up and down the garden in the summer twilight; while she did her best to pacify him by suggesting that thorough relaxation would give spirits and patience for clara's next half year, and that it might be wiser not to overstrain his own undefined authority, while the lawful power, aunt catharine, did not interfere. surely she might safely be trusted to watch over her own granddaughter; and while clara was so perfectly simple, and louis such as he was, more evil than good might result from inculcating reserve. at any rate, it was hard to meddle with the poor child's few weeks of happiness, and to this james always agreed; and then he came the next day to relieve himself by fighting the battle over again. so constantly did this occur, that aunt kitty, in her love of mischief, whispered to mrs. ponsonby that she only hoped the two viziers would not quarrel about the three thousand sequins, three landed estates, and three slaves. still, louis's desertion had left unoccupied so many of the hours of mary's time that he had previously absorbed, that her mother watched anxiously to see whether she would feel the blank. but she treated it as a matter of course. she had attended to her cousin when he needed her, and now that he had regained his former companion, clara, she resigned him without effort or mortification, as far as could be seen. she was forced to fall back on other duties, furnishing the house, working for every one, and reading some books that louis had brought before her. the impulse of self-improvement had not expired with his attention, and without any shadow of pique she was always ready to play the friend and elder sister whenever he needed her, and to be grateful when he shared her interests or pursuits. so the world went till lord ormersfield's return caused clara's noise to subside so entirely, that her brother was sufficiently at ease to be exceedingly vivacious and entertaining, and mrs. ponsonby hoped for a great improvement in the state of affairs. chapter x. the better part of valour. for who is he, whose chin is but enriched with one appearing hair, that will not follow these culled and choice-drawn cavaliers 'gainst france? work, work your thoughts, and therein see a siege. king henry v. the next forenoon, mary met james in the park, wandering in search of his pupil, whom he had not seen since they had finished their morning's work in the study. some wild freak with clara was apprehended, but while they were conferring, mary exclaimed, 'what's that?' as a clatter and clank met her ear. 'only the men going out to join old brewster's ridiculous yeomanry,' said jem. 'oh, i should like to see them,' cried mary, running to the top of a bank, whence she could see into the hollow road leading from the stables to the lodge. four horsemen, the sun glancing on their helmets, were descending the road, and a fifth, at some distance ahead, was nearly out of sight. 'ah,' she said, 'louis must have been seeing them off. how disappointed he must be not to go!' 'i wish i was sure--' said james, with a start. 'i declare his folly is capable of anything! why did i not think of it sooner?' clara here rushed upon them with her cameleopard gallop, sending her voice before her, 'can you see them?' 'scarcely,' said mary, making room for her. 'where's louis'!' hastily demanded her brother. 'gone to the yeomanry meeting,' said clara, looking in their faces in the exultation of producing a sensation. james was setting off with a run to intercept him, but it was too late; and clara loudly laughed as she said, 'you can't catch him.' 'i've done with him!' cried james. 'can madness go further?' 'james! i am ashamed of you,' cried the giraffe, with great stateliness. 'here are the enemy threatening our coasts, and our towns full of disaffection and sedition; and when our yeomanry are lukewarm enough to go off grouse-shooting instead of attending to their duty, what is to become of the whole country if somebody does not make an exertion? the tranquillity of all england may depend on the face our yeomanry show.' 'on lieutenant fitzjocelyn's yellow moustache! pray how long have you been in the secret of these heroic intentions?' 'ever since i came home.' 'we all knew that he meant to go out if he could,' said mary, in a tone calculated to soothe jem, and diminish clara's glory in being sole confidante, 'but we did not think him well enough. i hope it will do him no harm.' 'exertions in a good cause can do no harm!' boldly declared clara; then, with sudden loss of confidence, 'do you really think it will?' 'just cripple him for life,' said james. 'mr. walby wished him not to attempt riding,' said mary. 'he thinks any strain on the ankle just now might hurt him very much; but it may be over caution.' 'mr. walby is an old woman,' said clara. 'now, jem, you said so yourself. besides, it is all for his duty! of course, he would risk anything for the good of his country.' 'don't say another word, clara,' exclaimed james, 'or you will drive me distracted with your folly. one grain of sense, and even you would have stopped it; but neither you nor he could miss a chance of his figuring in that masquerade dress! look at the sun, exactly like a red-hot oven! we shall have him come home as ill as ever!' clara had another milder and more sorrowful version of the scolding from her grandmother, but lord ormersfield escaped the day's anxiety by being so busy with richardson, that he never emerged from the study, and did not miss his son. it was an exceedingly sultry day, and the hopeful trusted that louis would be forced to give in, before much harm could be done; but it was not till five o'clock that the hoofs were heard on the gravel; and jem went out to revenge himself with irony for his uneasiness. 'i hope you are satisfied,' he said, 'dulce est pro patria mori.' louis was slowly dismounting, and as he touched the ground gave a slight cry of pain, and caught at the servant's arm for support. 'no more than i expected,' said james, coming to help him; and at the same moment lord ormersfield was heard exclaiming-- 'fitzjocelyn--! what imprudence!' 'take care,' hastily interrupted james, finding louis leaning helplessly against him, unable to speak or stand, and his flushed cheek rapidly changing to deadly white. they lifted him up the steps into the hall, where he signed to be laid down on the seat of the cool north window, and trying to smile, said 'it was only the hot sun, and his foot aching _rather_; it would soon go off.' and when, with much pain and difficulty, frampton had released his swollen foot from the regulation-boot, into which he had foolishly thrust it, he went on more fluently. 'he had thought it his duty, especially when mr. shaw, the captain of his troop, had chosen to go away--he had believed it could do no harm--he was sure it was only a little present discomfort, and in the present crisis--' he addressed his aunt, but his eyes were on his father; and when he heard not a single word from him, he suddenly ceased, and presently, laying his head down on the window-sill, he begged that no one would stand and watch him, he should come into the library in a few minutes. the few minutes lasted, however, till near dinnertime, when he called to mary, as she was coming downstairs, and asked her to help him into the library; he could remain no longer exposed to frampton's pity, as dinner went in. he dragged himself along with more difficulty than he had found for weeks, and sank down on the sofa with a sigh of exhaustion; while clara, who was alone in the room, reared herself up from an easy-chair, where she had been sitting in an attitude that would have been despair to her mistress. 'ha, clara!' said louis, presently; 'you look as if you had been the object of invective?' 'i don't care,' exclaimed clara, 'i know you were in the good old cause.' 'conde at jarnac, charles xii. at pultowa--which?' said louis. 'i thought of both myself--only, unluckily, i made such frightful blunders. i was thankful to my men for bringing me off, like other great commanders.' 'oh, louis! but at least you were in your place--you set the example.' 'unluckily, these things descend from the sublime to the other thing, when one is done up, and beginning to doubt whether self-will cannot sometimes wear a mask.' 'i'm sure they are all quite cross enough to you already, without your being cross to yourself.' 'an ingenious and elegant impersonal,' said louis. clara rushed out into the garden to tell the stiff old rose-trees that if lord ormersfield were savage now, he would be more horrid than ever. meanwhile, louis drew a long sigh, murmuring, 'have i gone and vexed him again? mary, have i been very silly?' the half-piteous doubt and compunction had something childish, which made her smile as she answered: 'you had better have done as you were told.' 'the surest road to silliness,' said louis, whose tendency was to moralize the more, the more tired he was, 'is to think one is going to do something fine! it is dismal work to come out at the other end of an illusion.' 'with a foot aching as, i am afraid, yours does.' 'i should not mind that, but that i made such horrid mistakes!' these weighed upon his mind so much, that he went on, half aloud, rehearsing the manoeuvres and orders in which he had failed, from the difficulty of taking the command of his troop for the first time, when bewildered with pain and discomfort. the others came in, and james looked rabid; louis stole a glance now and then at his father, who preserved a grave silence, while clara stood aloof, comparing the prostrate figure in blue and silver to all the wounded knights in history or fiction. he was past going in to dinner, and the party were 'civil and melancholy,' mrs. frost casting beseeching looks at her grandson, who sat visibly chafing at the gloom that rested on the earl's brow, and which increased at each message of refusal of everything but iced water. at last mrs. frost carried off some grapes from the dessert to tempt him, and as she passed through the open window--her readiest way to the library--the earl's thanks concluded with a disconsolate murmur 'quite ill,' and 'abominable folly;' a mere soliloquy and nearly inaudible, but sufficient spark to produce the explosion. 'fitzjocelyn's motives deserve no such name as folly,' james cried, with stammering eagerness. 'i know you did not encourage him,' said lord ormersfield. 'i did,' said a young, clear voice, raised in alarm at her own boldness; 'jem knew nothing of it, but i thought it right.' lord ormersfield made a little courteous inclination with his head, which annihilated clara upon the spot. 'i doubt whether i should have done right in striving to prevent him,' said james. 'who can appreciate the moral effect of heroism?' 'heroism in the cause of a silver jacket!' 'now, that is the most unfair thing in the world!' cried james, always most violent when he launched out with his majestic cousin. 'there is not a man living more careless of his appearance. you do him justice, mrs. ponsonby?' 'yes, i do not believe that vanity had anything to do with it. a man who would bear what he has done to-day would do far more.' 'if it had been for any reasonable cause,' said the earl. 'you may not understand it, lord ormersfield,' exclaimed james, 'but i do. in these times of disaffection, a sound heart, and whole spirit, in our volunteer corps may be the saving of the country; and who can tell what may be the benefit of such an exhibition of self-sacrificing zeal. the time demands every man's utmost, and neither risk nor suffering can make him flinch from his duty.' 'my dear jem,' said a voice behind him at the window, 'i never see my follies so plainly as when you are defending them. come and help me up stairs; granny is ordering me up; a night's rest will set all smooth.' it was not a night's rest, neither did it set things smooth. in vain did louis assume a sprightly countenance, and hold his head and shoulders erect and stately; there was no concealing that he was very pale, and winced at every step. his ankle had been much hurt by the pressure of the stirrup, and he was not strong enough to bear with impunity severe pain, exertion, and fatigue on a burning summer day. it was evident that his recovery had been thrown back for weeks. his father made no reproaches, but was grievously disappointed. his exaggerated estimate of his son's discretion had given place to a no less misplaced despondency, quite inaccessible to mrs. ponsonby's consolations as to the spirit that had prompted the performance. he could have better understood a youth being unable to forego the exhibition of a handsome person and dress, than imagine that any one of moderate sense could either expect the invasion, or use these means of averting it. if imagination was to be allowed for, so much the worse. a certain resemblance to the childish wilfulness with which his wife had trifled with her health, occurred to him, increasing his vexation by gloomy shadows of the past. his silent mortification and kind anxiety went to his son's heart. louis was no less disappointed in himself, in finding his own judgment as untrustworthy as ever, since the exploit that had been a perpetual feast to his chivalrous fancy had turned out a mere piece of self-willed imprudence, destroying all the newly-bestowed and highly-valued good opinion of his father; and even in itself, incompetently executed. 'he had made a fool of himself every way.' that had been james's first dictum, and he adopted it from conviction. in the course of the day, goodnatured, fat sir gilbert brewster, the colonel of the yeomanry, who had been seriously uneasy at his looks, and had tried to send him home, rode over to inquire for him, complimenting him on being 'thorough game to the last.' louis relieved his mind by apologies for his blunders, whereupon he learnt that his good colonel had never discovered them, and now only laughed at them, and declared that they were mere trifles to what the whole corps, officers and men, committed whenever they met, and no one cared except one old sergeant who had been in the light dragoons. louis's very repentance for them was another piece of absurdity. he smiled, indeed, but seemed to give himself up as a hopeless subject. his spirits flagged as they had not done throughout his illness, and, unwell, languid, and depressed, he spent his days without an attempt to rally. he was only too conscious of his own inconsistency, but he had not energy enough to resume any of the habits that mary had so diligently nursed, neglected even his cottage-building, would not trouble himself to consider the carpenter's questions, forgot messages, put off engagements, and seemed to have only just vigour enough to be desultory, tease james, and spoil clara. lord ormersfield became alarmed, and called in doctors, who recommended sea air, and james suggested a secluded village on the yorkshire coast, where some friends had been reading in the last long vacation. this was to be the break-up of the party; mrs. frost and the two marys would resort to dynevor terrace, clara would return to school, and james undertook the charge of louis, who took such exceedingly little heed to the arrangements, that jem indignantly told him that he cared neither for himself nor anybody else. chapter xi. a halting proposal. shallow. will you upon good dowry, marry her? slender. i will do a greater thing than that, upon your request. merry wives of windsor. the first thing that louis did appear to care for was a letter that arrived about three days previous to their departure, addressed to 'lord fitsgosling, hawmsfield park, northwold.' rather too personal, as he observed, he must tell his correspondent that it hurt his feelings. the correspondent was tom madison, whose orthography lagged behind his other attainments, if his account might be trusted of 'they lectures on kemistry.' his penmanship was much improved, and he was prospering, with hopes of promotion and higher wages, when he should have learnt to keep accounts. he liked mr. dobbs and the chaplain, and wished to know how to send a crown per post to 'old granfer up at marksedge; because he is too ignorant to get a border sinned. please, my lord, give my duty to him and all enquiring friends, and to schirlt, up at the teras.' highly amused, louis lay on the uppermost step from the library window, in the cool summer evening, laughing over the letter. 'there, aunt kitty, he said, 'i commit that tender greeting to your charge,' and as she looked doubtful, 'yes, do, there's a good aunt and mistress.' 'i am afraid i should not be a good mistress; i ought not to sanction it.' 'better sanction it above board than let it go on by stealth,' said louis. 'you are her natural protector.' 'so much the more reason against it! i ought to wish her to forget this poor boy of yours.' 'ay, and light hymen's torch with some thriving tallow chandler, who would marry a domestic slave as a good speculation, without one spark of the respectful chivalrous love that--' 'hush! you absurd boy.' 'well, then, if you won't, i shall go to jane. the young ladies are all too cold and too prudent, but jane has a soft spot in her heart, and will not think true love is confined within the rank that keeps a gig. i did think aunt kitty had been above vulgar prejudices.' 'not above being coaxed by you, you gosling, you,' said aunt kitty; 'only you must come out of the dew, the sun is quite gone.' 'presently,' said louis, as she retreated by the window. 'i would not have been too cold or too prudent!' said clara. 'i well believe it!' 'you will be one if you are not the other,' said mary, gathering her work up, with the dread of one used to tropical dews. 'are not you coming in?' 'when i can persuade myself to write a letter of good advice, a thing i hate.' 'which,' asked mary; 'giving or receiving it?' 'receiving, of course.'--'giving, of course,' said clara and louis at the same instant. 'take mine, then,' said mary, 'and come out of the damp.' 'mary is so tiresome about these things!' cried clara, as their cousin retreated. 'such fidgetting nonsense.' 'i once argued it with her,' said louis, without stirring; 'and she had the right side, that it is often more self-denying to take care of one's health, than to risk it for mere pleasure or heedlessness.' 'there's no dew!' said clara; 'and if there was, it would not hurt, and if it did, i should be too glad to catch a cold, or something to keep me at home. oh, if i could only get into a nice precarious state of health!' 'you would soon wish yourself at school, or anywhere else, so that you could feel some life in your limbs,' half sighed louis. 'i've more than enough! oh! how my feet ache to run! and my throat feels stifled for want of making a noise, and the hatefulness of always sitting upright, with my shoulders even! come, you might pity me a little this one night, louis: i know you do, for jem is always telling me not to let you set me against it.' 'no, i don't pity you. pity is next akin to contempt.' 'nonsense, louis. do be in earnest.' 'i have seldom seen the human being whom i could presume to pity: certainly not you, bravely resisting folly and temptation, and with so dear and noble a cause for working.' 'you mean, the hope of helping to maintain grandmamma.' 'which you will never be able to do, unless you pass through this ordeal, and qualify yourself for skilled labour.' 'i know that,' said clara; 'but the atmosphere there seems to poison, and take the vigour out of all they teach. oh, so different from granny teaching me my notes, or jem teaching me french--' 'growling at you--' 'he never growled half as much as, i deserved. i cared to learn of him; but i don't care for anything now,--no, not for drawing, which you taught me! there's no heart in it! the whole purpose is to get amazing numbers of marks and pass each other. all dates and words, and gabble gabble!' 'ay! there's an epitome of the whole world: all ambition, and vanity, and gabble gabble,' said louis, sadly. 'and what is a gosling, that he should complain?' 'you don't mean that in reality. you are always merry. 'some mirth is because one does not always think, clara; and when one does think deeply enough, there is better cheerfulness.' 'deeply enough,' said clara. 'ah! i see. knowing that the world of gabble is not what we belong to, only a preparation? is that it!' 'it is what i meant.' 'ah i but how to make that knowledge help us.' 'there's the point. now and then, i think i see; but then i go off on a wrong tack: i get a silly fit, and a hopeless one, and lose my clue. and yet, after all, there is a highway; and wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein,' murmured louis, as he gazed on the first star of evening. 'oh! tell me how to see my highway at school!' 'if i only kept my own at home, i might. but you have the advantage--you have a fixed duty, and you always have kept hold of your purposes much better than i.' 'my purpose!' said clara. 'i suppose that is to learn as fast as i can, that i may get away from that place, and not be a burthen to granny and jem. perhaps jem will marry and be poor, and then i shall send his sons to school and college.' 'and pray what are your social duties till that time comes?' 'that's plain enough,' said clara: 'to keep my tone from being deteriorated by these girls. why, louis, what's that for?' as, with a bow and air of alarm, he hastily moved aside from her. 'if you are so much afraid of being deteriorated--' 'nonsense! if you only once saw their trumpery cabals, and vanities, and mean equivocations, you would understand that the only thing to be done is to keep clear of them; take the learning i am sent for, but avoid them!' 'and where is the golden rule all this time?' said louis, very low. 'but ought not one to keep out of what is wrong?' 'yes, but not to stand aloof from what is not wrong. look out, not for what is inferior to yourself, but what is superior. ah! you despair; but, my giraffe, will you promise me this? tell me, next christmas, a good quality for every bad one you have found in them. you shake your head. nay, you must, for the credit of your sex. i never found the man in whom there was not something to admire, and i had rather not suppose that women are not better than men. will you promise?' 'i'll try, but--' 'but, mind, it takes kind offices to bring the blossoms out. there--that's pretty well, considering our mutual sentiments as to good advice.' 'have you been giving me good advice?' 'not bad, i hope.' 'i thought only people like--like mary--could give advice.' 'ah! your blindness about mary invalidates your opinion of your schoolfellows. it shows that you do not deserve a good friend.' 'i've got you; i want no other.' 'quite wrong. not only is she full of clear, kind, solid sense, like a pillar to lean on, but she could go into detail with you in your troubles. you have thrown away a great opportunity, and i am afraid i helped you. i shall hold you in some esteem when you are--to conclude sententiously--worthy of her friendship.' clara's laugh was loud enough to bring out the earl, to summon them authoritatively out of the dew. louis sat apart, writing his letter; clara, now and then, hovering near, curious to hear how he had corrected tom's spelling. he had not finished, when the ladies bade him good-night; and, as he proceeded with it, his father said, 'what is that engrossing correspondence, louis?' 'such a sensible letter, that i am quite ashamed of it,' said louis. 'i wonder at the time you chose for writing, when you are so soon to part with our guests.' 'i have no excuse, if you think it uncivil. i never have spirit to set about anything till the sun is down.' his father began at once to speak softly: 'no, i intended no blame; i only cannot but wonder to see you so much engrossed with clara dynevor.' 'poor child! she wants some compensation.' 'i have no doubt of your kind intentions; but it would be safer to consider what construction may be placed on attentions so exclusive.' louis looked up in blank, incredulous amazement, and then almost laughingly exclaimed, 'is that what you mean? why, she is an infant, a baby--' 'not in appearance--' 'you don't know her, father,' said louis. 'i love her with all my heart, and could not do more. why, she is, and always has been, my she-younger-brother!' 'i am aware,' said the earl, without acknowledging this peculiar relationship, 'that this may appear very ridiculous, but experience has shown the need of caution. i should be concerned that your heedless good-nature should be misconstrued, so as to cause pain and disappointment to her, or to lead you to neglect one who has every claim to your esteem and gratitude.' louis was bewildered. 'i have been a wretch lately,' he said, 'but i did not know i had been a bear.' 'i did not mean that you could be deficient in ordinary courtesy; but i had hoped for more than mere indifferent civility towards one eminently calculated--' lord ormersfield for once failed in his period. 'are we talking at cross purposes?' exclaimed fitzjocelyn. 'what have i been doing, or not doing?' 'if my meaning require explanation, it is needless to attempt any.-- is your ankle painful to-night?' not a word more, except about his health, could louis extract, and he went to his room in extreme perplexity. again and again did he revolve those words. quick as were his perceptions on most points, they were slow where self-consciousness or personal vanity might have sharpened them; and it was new light to him that he had come to a time of life that could attach meaning to his attentions. whom had he been neglecting? what had his father been hoping? who was eminently calculated, and for what? it flashed upon him all at once. 'i see! i see!' he cried, and burst into a laugh. then came consternation, or something very like it. he did not want to feel embarked in manhood. and then his far-away dream of a lady-love had been so transcendently fair, so unequalled in grace, so perfect in accomplishments, so enthusiastic in self-devoted charity, all undefined, floating on his imagination in misty tints of glory! that all this should be suddenly brought down from cloudland, to sink into mary ponsonby, with the honest face and downright manner for whom romance and rapture would be positively ridiculous! yet the notion would not be at once dismissed. his declaration that he would do anything to gratify his father had been too sincere for him lightly to turn from his suggestion, especially at a moment when he was full of shame at his own folly, and eagerness to retain the ground he had lost in his father's opinion, and, above all, to make him happy. his heart thrilled and glowed as he thought of giving his father real joy, and permanently brightening and enlivening that lonely, solitary life. besides, who could so well keep the peace between him and his father, and save him by hints and by helpfulness from giving annoyance? he had already learnt to depend on her; she entered into all his interests, and was a most pleasant companion--so wise and good, that the most satisfactory days of his life had been passed under her management, and he had only broken from it to 'play the fool.' he was sick of his own volatile quixotism, and could believe it a relief to be kept in order without trusting to his own judgment. she had every right to his esteem and affection, and the warm feeling he had for her could only be strengthened by closer ties. the unworldliness of the project likewise weighed with him. had she been a millionaire or a duke's daughter, he would not have spent one thought on the matter; but he was touched by seeing how his father's better feelings had conquered all desire for fortune or connexion. and then mary could always find everything he wanted! 'i will do it!' he determined. 'never was son more bound to consider his father. of course, she will make a much better wife than i deserve. most likely, my fancies would never have been fulfilled. she will save me from my own foolishness. what ought a man to wish for more than a person sure to make him good? and--well, after all, it cannot be for a long time. they must write to lima. perhaps they will wait till her father's return, or at least till i have taken my degree.' this last encouraging reflection always wound up the series that perpetually recurred throughout that night of broken sleep; and when he rose in the morning, he felt as if each waking had added a year to his life, and looked at the glass to see whether he had not grown quite elderly. 'no, indeed! i am ridiculously youthful, especially since i shaved off my moustache in my rage at the yeomanry mania! i must systematically burn my cheeks, to look anything near her age!' and he laughed at himself, but ended with a long-drawn sigh. he was in no state of mind to pause: he was tired of self-debate, and was in haste to render the step irrevocable, and then fit himself to it; and he betook himself at once to the study, where he astonished his father by his commencement, with crimson cheeks--'i wished to speak to you. last night i did not catch your meaning at once.' 'we will say no more about it,' was the kind answer. 'if you cannot turn your thoughts in that direction, there is an end of the matter.' 'i think,' said louis, 'that i could.' 'my dear boy,' said the earl, with more eagerness than he could quite control, 'you must not imagine that i wish to influence your inclinations unduly; but i must confess that what i have seen for the last few months, has convinced me that nothing could better secure your happiness.' 'i believe so,' said louis, gazing from the window. 'right,' cried the earl, with more gladness and warmth than his son had ever seen in him; 'i am delighted that you appreciate such sterling excellence! yes, louis,' and his voice grew thick, 'there is nothing else to trust to.' 'i know it,' said louis. 'she is very good. she made me very happy when i was ill.' 'you have seen her under the most favourable circumstances. it is the only sort of acquaintance to be relied on. you have consulted your own happiness far more than if you had allowed yourself to be attracted by mere showy gifts.' 'i am sure she will do me a great deal of good,' said louis, still keeping his eyes fixed on the evergreens. 'you could have done nothing to give me more pleasure!' said the earl, with heartfelt earnestness. 'i know what she is, and what her mother has been to me. that aunt of hers is a stiff, wrongheaded person, but she has brought her up well--very well, and her mother has done the rest. as to her father, that is a disadvantage; but, from what i hear, he is never likely to come home; and that is not to be weighed against what she is herself. poor mary! how rejoiced she will be, that her daughter at least should no longer be under that man's power! it is well you have not been extravagant, like some young men, louis. if you had been running into debt, i should not have been able to gratify your wishes now; but the property is so nearly disencumbered, that you can perfectly afford to marry her, with the very fair fortune she must have, unless her father should gamble it away in peru.' this was for lord ormersfield the incoherency of joy, and louis was quite carried along by his delight. the breakfast-bell rang, and the earl rising and drawing his son's arm within his own, pressed it, saying, 'bless you, louis!' it was extreme surprise and pleasure to fitzjocelyn, and yet the next moment he recollected that he stood committed. how silent he was--how unusually gentle and gracious his father to the whole party! quite affectionate to mary, and not awful even to clara. there was far too much meaning in it, and louis feared mrs. ponsonby was seeing through all. 'a morning of greek would be insupportable,' thought he; and yet he felt as if the fetters of fate were being fast bound around him, when he heard his father inviting james to ride with him. he wandered and he watched, he spoke absently to clara, but felt as if robbed of a protector, when she was summoned up-stairs to attend to her packing, and mary remained alone, writing one of her long letters to lima. 'now or never,' thought he, 'before my courage cools. i never saw my father in such spirits!' he sat down on an ottoman opposite to her, and turned over some newspapers with a restless rustling. 'can i fetch anything for you?' asked mary, looking up. 'no, thank you. you are a great deal too good to me, mary.' 'i am glad,' said mary, absently, anxious to go on with her letter; but, looking up again at him--'i am sure you want something.' 'no--nothing--but that you should be still more good to me.' 'what is the matter?' said mary, suspecting that he was beginning to repent of his lazy fit, and wanted her to hear his confession. 'i mean, mary,' said he, rising, and speaking faster, 'if you--if you would take charge of me altogether. if you would have me, i would do all i could to make you happy, and it would be such joy to my father, and--'(rather like an after-thought)'to me.' her clear, sensible eyes were raised, and her colour deepened, but the confusion was on the gentleman's side--she was too much amazed to feel embarrassment, and there was a pause, till he added, 'i know better than to think myself worthy of you; but you will take me in hand--and, indeed, mary, there is no one whom i like half so well.' poor louis! was this his romantic and poetical wooing! 'stop, if you please, louis!' exclaimed mary. 'this is so very strange!' and she seemed ready to laugh. 'and--what do you say, mary?' 'i do not know. i cannot tell what i ought to say,' she returned, rising. 'will you let me go to mamma?' she went; and louis roamed about restlessly, till, on the stairs, he encountered mrs. frost, who instantly exclaimed, 'why, my dear, what is the matter with you?' 'i have been proposing to mary,' said he, in a very low murmur, his eyes downcast, but raised the next moment, to see the effect, as if it had been a piece of mischief. 'well--proposing what?' 'myself;' most innocently whispered. 'you!--you!--mary!--and--' aunt catharine was scarcely able to speak, in the extremity of her astonishment. 'you are not in earnest!' 'she is gone to her mother,' said louis, hanging over the baluster, so as to look straight down into the hall; and both were silent, till mrs. frost exclaimed, 'my dear, dear child, it is an excellent choice! you must be very happy with her!' 'yes, i found my father was bent on it.' 'that was clear enough,' said his aunt, laughing, but resuming a tone of some perplexity. 'yet it takes me by surprise: i had not guessed that you were so much attracted.' 'i do like her better than any one. no one is so thoroughly good, no one is likely to make me so good, nor my father so happy.' there was some misgiving in mrs. frost's tone, as she said, 'dear louis, you are acting on the best of motives, but--' 'don't, pray don't, aunt kitty,' cried louis, rearing himself for an instant to look her in the face, but again throwing half his body over the rail, and speaking low. 'i could not meet any one half so good, or whom i know as well. i look up to her, and--yes--i do love her heartily--i would not have done it otherwise. i don't care for beauty and trash, and my father has set his heart on it.' 'yes, but--' she hesitated. 'my dear, i don't think it safe to marry, because one's father has set his heart on it.' 'indeed,' said louis, straightening himself, 'i do think i am giving myself the best chance of being made rational and consistent. i never did so well as when i was under her.' 'n--n--no--but--' 'and think how my father will unbend in a homelike home, where all should be made up to him,' he continued, deep emotion swelling his voice. 'my dear boy! and you are sure of your own feeling?' 'quite sure. why, i never saw any one,' said he, smiling--'i never cared for any one half so much, except you, aunt kitty, no, i didn't. won't that do?' 'i know i should not have liked your grandpapa--your uncle, i mean-to make such comparisons.' 'perhaps he had not got an aunt kitty,' said louis. 'no, no! i can't have you so like a novel. no, don't be anxious. it can't be for ever so long, and, of course, the more i am with her, the better i must like her. it will be all right.' 'i don't think you know anything about it,' said mrs. frost, 'but there, that's the last i shall say. you'll forgive your old aunt.' he smiled, and playfully pressed her hand, adding, 'but we don't know whether she will have me.' mary had meantime entered her mother's room, with a look that revealed the whole to mrs. ponsonby, who had already been somewhat startled by the demeanour of the father and son at breakfast. 'oh, mamma, what is to be done?' 'what do you wish, my child?' asked her mother, putting her arm round her waist. 'i don't know yet,' said mary. 'it is so odd!' and the disposition to laugh returned for a moment. 'you were not at all prepared.' 'oh no! he seems so young. and,' she added, blushing, 'i cannot tell, but i should not have thought his ways were like the kind of thing.' 'nor i, and the less since clara has been here.' 'oh,' said mary, without a shade on her calm, sincere brow, 'he has clara so much with him because he is her only friend.' the total absence of jealousy convinced mrs. ponsonby that the heart could hardly have been deeply touched, but mary continued, in a slightly trembling voice, 'i do not see why he should have done this, unless--' 'unless that his father wished it.' 'oh,' said mary, somewhat disappointed, 'but how could lord ormersfield possibly--' 'he has an exceeding dread of louis's making as great a mistake as he did,' said mrs. ponsonby; 'and perhaps he thinks you the best security.' 'and you think louis only meant to please him?' 'my dear, i am afraid it may be so. louis is very fond of him, and easily led by a strong character.' she pressed her daughter closer, and felt rather than heard a little sigh; but all that mary said was, 'then i had better not think about it.' 'nay, my dear, tell me first what you think of his manner.' 'it was strange, and a little debonnaire, i think,' said mary, smiling, but tears gathering in her eyes. 'he said i was too good for him. he said he would make me happy, and that he and his father would be very happy.' a great tear fell. 'something about not being worthy.' mary shed a few more tears, while her mother silently caressed her; and, recovering her composure, she firmly said, 'yes, mamma, i see it is not the real thing. it will be kinder to him to tell him to put it out of his head.' 'and you, my dear?' 'oh, mamma, you know you could not spare me.' 'if this were the real thing, dearest--' 'no,' whispered mary, 'i could not leave you alone with papa.' mrs. ponsonby went on as if she had not heard: 'as it is, i own i am relieved that you should not wish to accept him. i cannot be sure it would be for your happiness.' 'i do not think it would be right,' said mary, as if that were her strength. 'he is a dear, noble fellow, and has the highest, purest principles and feelings. i can't but love him almost as if he were my own child: i never saw so much sweetness and prettiness about any one, except his mother; and, oh! how far superior he is to her! but then, he is boyish, he is weak--i am afraid he is changeable.' 'not in his affections,' said mary, reproachfully. 'no, but in purposes. an impulse leads him he does not know where, and now, i think, he is acting on excellent motives, without knowing what he is doing. there's no security that he might not meet the person who--' 'oh, mamma!' 'he would strive against temptation, but we have no right to expose him to it. to accept him now, it seems to me, would be taking too much advantage of his having been left so long to our mercy, and it might be, that he would become restless and discontented, find out that he had not chosen for himself--regret--and have his tone of mind lowered--' 'oh, stop, mamma, i would not let it be, on any account.' 'no, my dear, i could not part with you where we were not sure the 'real thing' was felt for you. if he had been strongly bent on it, he would have conducted matters differently; but he knows no better.' 'you and i don't part,' said mary. neither spoke till she renewed her first question, 'what is to be done?' 'shall i go and speak to him, my dear?' 'perhaps i had better, if you will come with me.' then, hesitating--'i will go to my room for a moment, and then i shall be able to do it more steadily.' mrs. ponsonby's thoughts were anxious during the five minutes of mary's absence; but she returned composed, according to her promise, whatever might be the throbbings beneath. as mrs. ponsonby opened the door, she saw louis and his aunt together, and was almost amused at their conscious start, the youthful speed with which the one darted into the further end of the corridor, and the undignified haste with which the other hopped down stairs. by the time they reached the drawing-room, he had recovered himself so as to come forward in a very suitable, simple manner, and mary said, at once, 'louis, thank you; but we think it would be better not--' 'not!' exclaimed fitzjocelyn. 'not,' repeated mary; 'i do not think there is that between us which would make it right.' 'there would be!' cried louis, gaining ardour by the difficulty, 'if you would only try. mrs. ponsonby, tell her we would make her happy.' 'you would try,' said mrs. ponsonby, kindly; 'but i think she is right. indeed, louis, you must forgive me for saying that you are hardly old enough to make up your mind--' 'madison is younger,' said louis, boyishly enough to make her smile, but earnestly proceeding, 'won't you try me? will you not say that if i can be steady and persevering--' 'no,' said mrs. ponsonby; 'it would not be fair towards either of you to make any conditions.' 'but if without them, i should do better--mary, will you say nothing?' 'we had better not think of it,' said mary, her eyes on the ground. 'why? is it that i am too foolish, too unworthy?' she made a great effort. 'not that, louis. do not ask any more; it is better not; you have done as your father wished--now let us be as we were before.' 'my father will be very much disappointed,' said louis, with chagrin. 'i will take care of your father,' said mrs. ponsonby, and as mary took the moment for escaping, she proceeded to say some affectionate words of her own tender feeling towards louis; to which he only replied by saying, sadly, and with some mortification, 'never mind; i know it is quite right. i am not worthy of her.' 'that is not the point; but i do not think you understand your own feelings, or how far you were actuated by the wish to gratify your father.' 'i assure you,' cried louis, 'you do not guess how i look up to mary; her unfailing kindness, her entering into all my nonsense--her firm, sound judgment, that would keep me right--and all she did for me when i was laid up. oh! why cannot you believe how dear she is to me?' '_how dear_ is just what i do believe; but still this is not enough.' 'just what aunt kitty says,' said louis, perplexed, yet amused at his own perplexity. 'you will know better by-and-by,' she answered, smiling: 'in the meantime, believe that you are our very dear cousin, as ever.' and she shook hands with him, detecting in his answering smile a little relief, although a great deal of disappointment. mary had taken refuge in her room, where a great shower of tears would have their course, though she scolded herself all the time. 'have done! have done! it is best as it is. he does not really wish it, and i could not leave mamma. we will never think of it again, and we will be as happy as we were before.' her mother, meanwhile, was waiting below-stairs, thinking that she should spare louis something, by taking the initiative in speaking to his father; and she was sorry to see the alacrity with which the earl came up to her, with a congratulatory 'well, mary!' she could hardly make him comprehend the real state of the case; and then his resignation was far more trying than that of the party chiefly concerned. her praise of fitzjocelyn had little power to comfort. 'i see how it is,' he said, calmly: 'do not try to explain it away; i acquiesce--i have no doubt you acted wisely for your daughter.' 'nothing would have delighted me more, if he were but a few years older.' 'you need not tell me the poor boy's failings,' said his father, sadly. 'it is on account of no failing; but would it not be a great mistake to risk their happiness to fulfil our own scheme?' 'i hoped to secure their happiness.' 'ay, but is there not something too capricious to find happiness without its own free will and choice? did you never hear of the heart?' 'oh! if she be attached elsewhere'--and he seemed so much relieved, that mrs. ponsonby was sorry to be obliged to contradict him in haste, and explain that she did not believe fitzjocelyn's heart to be yet developed; whereupon he was again greatly vexed. 'so he has offered himself without attachment. i beg your pardon, mary; i am sorry your daughter should have been so treated.' 'do not misunderstand me. he is strangely youthful and simple, bent on pleasing you, and fancying his warm, brotherly feeling to be what you desire.' 'it would be the safest foundation.' 'yes, if he were ten years older, and had seen the world; but in these things he is like a child, and it would be dangerous to influence him. do not take it to heart; you ought to be contented, for i saw nothing so plainly as that he loves nobody half so well as you. only be patient with him.' 'you are the same mary as ever,' he said, softened; and she left him, hoping that she had secured a favourable audience for his son, who soon appeared at the window, somewhat like a culprit. 'i could not help it!' he said. 'no; but you may set a noble aim before you--you may render yourself worthy of her esteem and confidence, and in so doing you will fulfil my fondest hopes.' 'i asked her to try me, but they would make no conditions. i am sorry this could not be, since you wished it.' 'if you are not sorry on your own account, there are no regrets to be wasted on mine.' 'candidly, father,' said louis, 'much as i like her, i cannot be sorry to keep my youth and liberty a little longer.' 'then you should never have entered on the subject at all,' said lord ormersfield, beginning to write a letter; and poor louis, in his praiseworthy effort not to be reserved with him, found he had been confessing that he had not only been again making a fool of himself, but, what was less frequent and less pardonable, of his father likewise. he limped out at the window, and was presently found by his great-aunt, reading what he called a raving novel, to see how he ought to have done it. she shook her head at him, and told him that he was not even decently concerned. 'indeed i am,' he replied. 'i wished my father to have had some peace of mind about me, and it does not flatter one's vanity.' dear, soft-hearted aunt kitty, with all her stores of comfort ready prepared, and unable to forgive, or even credit, the rejection of her louis, without a prior attachment, gave a hint that this might be his consolation. he caught eagerly at the idea. 'i had never once thought of that! it can't be any spaniard out in peru--she has too much sense. what are you looking so funny about? what! is it nearer home? that's it, then! famous! it would be a capital arrangement, if that terrible old father is conformable. what an escape i have had of him! i am sure it is a most natural and proper preference--' 'stop! stop, louis, you are going too fast. i know nothing. don't say a word to jem, on any account: indeed, you must not. it is all going on very well now; but the least notion that he was observed, or that it was his uncle oliver's particular wish, and there would be an end of it.' she was just wise enough to keep back the wishes of the other vizier, but she had said enough to set louis quite at his ease, and put him in the highest spirits. he seemed to have taken out a new lease of boyishness, and, though constrained before mary, laughed, talked, and played pranks, so as unconsciously to fret his father exceedingly. clara's alert wits perceived that so many private interviews had some signification; and mrs. frost found her talking it over with her brother, and conjecturing so much, that granny thought it best to supply the key, thinking, perhaps, that a little jealousy would do jem no harm. but the effect on him was to produce a fit of hearty laughter, as he remembered poor lord ormersfield's unaccountable urbanity and suppressed exultation in the morning's ride. 'i honour the ponsonbys,' he said, 'for not choosing to second his lordship's endeavours to tyrannize over that poor fellow, body and soul. poor louis! he is fabulously dutiful.' but clara, recovering from her first stupor of wonder, began scolding him for presuming to laugh at anything so cruel to louis. it was not the part of a friend! and with tears of indignation and sympathy starting from her eyes, she was pathetically certain that, though granny and jem were so unfeeling as to laugh, his high spirits were only assumed to hide his suffering. 'poor louis! what had he not said to her about mary last night! now she knew what he meant! and as to mary, she was glad she had never liked her, she had no patience with her: of course, she was far too prosy and stupid to care for anything like louis, it was a great escape for him. it would serve her right to marry a horrid little crooked clerk in her father's office; and poor dear, dear louis must get over it, and have the most beautiful wife in the world. don't you remember, jem, the lady with the splendid dark eyes on the platform at euston square, when you so nearly made us miss the train, with the brow that you said--' 'hush, clara, don't talk nonsense.' chapter xii. childe roland. a house there is, and that's enough, from whence one fatal morning issues a brace of warriors, not in buff, but rustling in their silks and tissues. the heroines undertook the task; thro' lanes unknown, o'er stiles they ventured,-- rapped at the door, nor stayed to ask, but bounce into the parlour entered. gray's long story. 'no carmine? nor scarlet lake in powder?' 'could procure some, my lord.' 'thank you, the actinia would not live. i must take what i can find. a lump of gamboge--' 'if you stay much longer, he will not retain his senses,' muttered james frost, who was leaning backwards against the counter, where the bewildered bookseller of the little coast-town of bickleypool was bustling, in the vain endeavour to understand and fulfil the demands of that perplexing customer, lord fitzjocelyn. 'some drawing-paper. this is hardly absorbent enough. if you have any block sketch-books?--' 'could procure some, my lord.' james looked at his watch, while the man dived into his innermost recesses. 'the tide!' he said. 'never mind, we shall only stick in the mud.' 'how could you expect to find anything here? a half-crown paint-box is their wildest dream.' 'keep quiet, jem, go and look out some of those library books, like a wise man.' 'a wise man would be at a loss here,' said james, casting his eye along the battered purple backs of the circulating-library books. 'wisdom won't condescend! ah! thank you, this will do nicely. those colours--yes; and the seaside book. i'll choose one or two. what is most popular here?' james began to whistle; but louis, taking up a volume, became engrossed beyond the power of hints, and hardly stepped aside to make way for some ladies who entered the shop. a peremptory touch of the arm at length roused him, and holding up the book to the shopman, he put it into his pocket, seized his ash-stick, put his arm into his cousin's, and hastened into the street. 'did you ever see--' began jem. 'most striking. i did not know you had met with her. what an idea--the false self conjuring up phantoms--' 'what are you talking of? did you not see her?' 'elizabeth barrett. was she there?' 'is that her name? do you know her?' 'i had heard of her, but never--' 'how?--where? who is she?' 'i only saw her name in the title-page.' 'what's all this? you did not see her?' 'who? did not some ladies come into the shop?' 'some ladies! is it possible? why, i touched you to make you look.' 'i thought it was your frenzy about the tide. what now?--' james made a gesture of despair. 'the loveliest creature i ever saw. you may see her yet, as she comes out. come back!' 'don't be so absurd,' said fitzjocelyn, laughing, and, with instinctive dislike of staring, resisting his cousin's effort to wheel him round. 'what, you will?' withdrawing his arm. 'i shall put off without you, if you don't take care.' and, laughing, he watched jem hurry up the sloping street and turn the corner, then turned to pursue his own way, his steps much less lame and his looks far more healthful than they had been a month before. he reached the quay--narrow, slippery, and fishy, but not without beauty, as the green water lapped against the hewn stones, and rocked the little boats moored in the wide bay, sheltered by a richly-wooded promontory. 'jem in a fit of romance! well, whose fault will it be if we miss the tide? i'll sit in the boat, and read that poem again.-- oh! here he comes, out of breath. well, jem, did the heroine drop glove or handkerchief? or, on a second view, was she minus an eye?' 'you were,' said james, hurrying breathlessly to unmoor the boat. 'let me row,' said louis; 'your breath and senses are both lost in the fair vision.' 'it is of no use to talk to you--' 'i shall ask no questions till we are out of the harbour, or you will be running foul of one of those colliers--a tribute with which the fair unknown may dispense.' the numerous black colliers and lighters showed that precautions were needful till they had pushed out far enough to make the little fishy town look graceful and romantic; and the tide was ebbing so fast, that louis deemed it prudent to spend his strength on rowing rather than on talking. james first broke silence by exclaiming--'do you know where beauchastel is?' 'on the other side of the promontory. don't you remember the spire rising among the trees, as we see it from the water?' 'that church must be worth seeing. i declare i'll go there next sunday.' another silence, and louis said--'i am curious to know whether you saw her.' 'she was getting into the carriage as i turned the corner; so i went back and asked bull who they were.' 'i hope she was the greengrocer's third cousin.' 'pshaw! i tell you it was mrs. mansell and her visitors.' 'oho! no wonder beauchastel architecture is so grand. what an impudent fellow you are, jem!' 'the odd thing is,' said james, a little ashamed of louis having put mansell and beauchastel together, as he had not intended, 'that it seems they asked bull who we were. i thought one old lady was staring hard at you, as if she meant to claim acquaintance, but you shot out of the shop like a sky-rocket.' 'luckily there's no danger of that. no one will come to molest us here.' 'depend on it, they are meditating a descent on his lordship.' 'you shall appear in my name, then.' 'too like a bad novel: besides, you don't look respectable enough for my tutor. and, now i think of it, no doubt she was asking bull how he came to let such a disreputable old shooting-jacket into his shop.' the young men worked up an absurd romance between them, as merrily they crossed the estuary, and rowed up a narrow creek, with a whitewashed village on one side, and on the other a solitary house, the garden sloping to the water, and very nautical--the vane, a union-jack waved by a brilliant little sailor on the top of a mast, and the arbour, half a boat set on end; whence, as james steered up to the stone steps that were one by one appearing, there emerged an old, grizzly, weather-beaten sailor, who took his pipe from his mouth, and caught hold of the boat. 'thank you, captain!' cried fitzjocelyn. 'i've brought home the boat safe, you see, by my own superhuman exertions--no thanks to mr. frost, there!' 'that's his way, captain,' retorted jem, leaping out, and helping his cousin: 'you may thank me for getting him home at all! but for me, he would have his back against the counter, and his head in a book, this very moment.' 'ask him what he was after,' returned louis. 'which of us d'ye think most likely to lag, captain hannaford?' cried jem, preventing the question. 'which would you choose to have on board?' 'ye'd both of ye make more mischief than work,' said the old seaman, who had been looking from one to the other of the young men, as if they were performing a comedy for his special diversion. 'so you would not enter us on board the eliza priscilla?' cried louis. 'no, no,' said the old man, shrewdly, and with an air of holding something back; whereupon they both pressed him, and obtained for answer, 'no, no, i wouldn't sail with you'--signing towards fitzjocelyn--'in my crew: ye'd be more trouble than ye're worth. and as to you, sir, if i wouldn't sail with ye, i'd like still less to sail under you.' he finished with a droll, deprecating glance, and louis laughed heartily; but james was silent, and as soon as they had entered the little parlour, declared that it would not do to encourage that old skipper--he was waylaying them like the ancient mariner, and was actually growing impudent. 'an old man's opinion of two youngsters is not what i call impudence,' began louis, with an emphasis that made jem divert his attack. those two cousins had never spent a happier month than in these small lodgings, built by the old retired merchant-seaman evidently on the model of that pride of his heart, the eliza priscilla, his little coasting trader, now the charge of his only surviving son; for this was a family where drowning was like a natural death, and old captain hannaford looked on the probability of sleeping in ebbscreek churchyard, much as bayard did at the prospect of dying in his bed. his old deaf wife kept the little cabin-like rooms most exquisitely neat; and the twelve-years-old priscilla, the orphan of one of the lost sons, waited on the gentlemen with an old-fashioned, womanly deportment and staid countenance that, in the absence of all other grounds of distress, louis declared was quite a pain to him. the novelty of the place, the absence of restraint, the easy life, and, above all, the freshness of returning health, rendered his spirits exceedingly high, and he had never been more light-hearted and full of mirth. james, elated at his rapid improvement, was scarcely less full of liveliness and frolic, enjoying to the utmost the holiday, which perhaps both secretly felt might be the farewell to the perfect carelessness of boyish relaxation. bathing, boating, fishing, dabbling, were the order of the day, and withal just enough quarrelling and teasing to add a little spice to their pleasures. louis was over head and ears in maritime natural history; but jem, backed by mrs. hannaford, prohibited his 'messes' from making a permanent settlement in the parlour; though festoons of seaweed trellised the porch, ammonites heaped the grass-plat, tubs of sea-water flanked the approach to the front door; and more than one bowl, with inmates of a suspicious nature, was often deposited even on the parlour table. on the afternoon following the expedition to bickleypool, louis was seated, with an earthenware pan before him, coaxing an actinia with raw beef to expand her blossom, to be copied for miss faithfull. another bowl stood near, containing some feathery serpulas; and the weeds were heaped on the locker of the window behind him, and on the back of the chair which supported his lame foot. the third and only remaining chair accommodated james, with a book placed on the table; and a semicircle swept round it, within which nothing marine might extend. louis was by turns drawing, enticing his refractory sitter, exhorting her to bloom, and complimenting her delicate beauty, until james, with a groan, exclaimed, 'is silence impossible to you, fitzjocelyn? i would go into the garden, but that i should be beset by the intolerable old skipper!' 'i beg your pardon--i thought you never heard nor heeded me.' 'i don't in general, but this requires attention; and it is past all bearing to hear how you go on to that jelly!' 'read aloud, then: it will answer two purposes. 'this is divinity--hooker,' said james, sighing wearily. 'so much the better. i read some once; i wish i had been obliged to go on.' 'you are the oddest fellow!--after all, i believe you have a craving after my profession.' 'is that a discovery?' said louis, washing the colour out of his brush. 'the only person i envy is a country curate--except a town one.' 'don't talk like affectation!' growled james. 'do you know, jem,' said louis, leaning back, and drawing the brush between his lips, 'i am persuaded that something will turn up to prevent it from being your profession.' 'your persuasions are wrong, then!' 'that fabulous uncle in the indies--' 'you know i am determined to accept nothing from my uncle, were he to lay it at my feet--which he never will.' 'literally or metaphorically?' asked louis, softly. 'pshaw!' 'you dynevors don't resemble my sea-pink. see how she stretches her elegant fringes for this very unpleasant bit of meat! there! i won't torment you any more; read, and stop my mouth!' 'you are in earnest?' 'you seem to think that if a man cannot be a clergyman, he is not to be a christian.' 'then don't break in with your actinias and stuff!' 'certainly not,' said louis, gravely. the first interruption came from james himself. leaping to his feet with a sudden bound, he exclaimed, 'there they are!' and stood transfixed in a gaze of ecstasy. 'you have made me smudge my lake,' said louis, in the mild tone of 'diamond, diamond!' 'i tell you, there they are!' cried james, rushing into wild activity. 'one would think it the fair unknown,' said louis, not troubling himself to look round, nor desisting from washing out his smudge. 'it is! it is!--it is all of them! here they come, i tell you, and the place is a very merman's cave!' 'take care--the serpula--don't!' as james hurriedly opened the door leading to the stairs--disposed of the raw meat on one step and the serpulas on another, and hurled after them the heap of seaweed, all but one trailing festoon of 'luckie minnie's lines,' which, while his back was turned, louis by one dexterous motion wreathed round the crown of his straw hat; otherwise never stirring, but washing quietly on, until he rose as little priscilla opened the door, and stood aside, mutely overawed at the stream of flounced ladies that flowed past, and seemed to fill up the entire room. it was almost a surprise to find that, after all, there were only three of them! 'i knew i was not mistaken,' said a very engaging, affectionate voice. 'it is quite shocking to have to introduce myself to you--lady conway--' 'my aunt!' cried louis, with eager delight--'and my cousin!' he added, turning with a slight blush towards the maiden, whom he felt, rather than saw, to be the worthy object of yesterday's rapture. 'not quite,' she answered, not avoiding the grasp of his hand, but returning it with calm, distant politeness. 'not quite,' repeated lady conway. 'your real cousins are no farther off than beauchastel--' 'where you must come and see them,' added the third lady--a portly, cordial, goodnatured dame, whom lady conway introduced as mrs. mansell, who had known his mother well; and louis making a kind of presentation of his cousin james, the two elder ladies were located on two of the chairs: the younger one, as if trying to be out of the way, placed herself on the locker. jem stood leaning on the back of the other chair; and louis stood over his aunt, in an ecstasy at the meeting--at the kind, warm manner and pleasant face of his aunt--and above all, at the indescribable pleasure imparted by the mere presence of the beautiful girl, though he hardly dared even to look at her; and she was the only person whose voice was silent in the chorus of congratulation, on the wonderful chance that had brought the aunt and nephew together. the one had been a fortnight at beauchastel, the other a month at ebbscreek, without guessing at each other's neighbourhood, until lady conway's attention had been attracted at the library by louis's remarkable resemblance to her sister, and making inquiries, she had learnt that he was no other than lord fitzjocelyn. she was enchanted with the likeness, declaring that all she wished was to see him look less delicate, and adding her entreaties to those of mrs. mansell, that the two young men would come at once to beauchastel. louis looked with wistful doubt at james, who, he knew, could not brook going to fine places in the character of tutor; but, to his surprise and pleasure, james was willing and eager, and made no demur, except that fitzjocelyn could not walk so far, and the boat was gone out. mrs. mansell then proposed the ensuing monday, when, she said, she and mr. mansell should be delighted to have them to meet a party of shooting gentlemen--of course they were sportsmen. louis answered at once for james; but for himself, he could not walk, nor even ride the offered shooting-pony; and thereupon ensued more minute questions whether his ankle were still painful. 'not more than so as to be a useful barometer. i have been testing it by the sea-weeds. if i am good for nothing else, i shall be a walking weather-glass, as well as a standing warning against man-traps.' 'you don't mean that you fell into a man-trap!' exclaimed mrs. mansell, in horror. 'that will be a warning for mr. mansell! i have such a dread of the frightful things!' 'a trap ingeniously set by myself,' said louis. 'i was only too glad no poor poacher fell into it.' 'your father told me that it was a fall down a steep bank,' exclaimed lady conway. 'exactly so; but i suppose he thought it for my credit to conceal that my trap consisted of a flight of stone stops, very solid and permanent, with the trifling exception of cement.' 'if the truth were known,' said james, 'i believe that a certain scamp of a boy was at the bottom of those steps.' 'i'm the last person to deny it,' said louis, quietly, though not without rising colour, 'there was a scamp of a boy at the bottom of the steps, and very unpleasant he found it--though not without the best consequences, and among them the present--' and he turned to lady conway with a pretty mixture of gracefulness and affection, enough to win the heart of any aunt. mrs. mansell presently fell into raptures at the sight of the drawing materials, which must, she was sure, delight isabel, but she was rather discomfited by the sight of the 'subject,'--called it an odious creature, then good-humouredly laughed at herself, but would not sit down again, evidently wishing to escape from close quarters with such monsters. lady conway likewise rose, and looked into the basin, exclaiming, in her turn, 'ah! i see you understand these things! yes, they are very interesting! virginia will be delighted; she has been begging me for an aquarium wherever we go. you must tell her how to manage it. look, isabel, would not she be in ecstasies?' miss conway looked, but did not seem to partake in the admiration. 'i am perverse enough never to like what is the fashion,' she said. 'i tried to disgust fitzjocelyn with his pets on that very ground,' said james; 'but their charms were too strong for him.' 'fashion is the very testimony to them,' said louis. 'i think i could convince you.' he would perhaps have produced his lovely serpula blossoms, but he was forced to pass on to his aunt and mrs. mansell, who had found something safer for their admiration, in the shape of a great cornu ammonis in the garden. 'he can throw himself into any pursuit,' said james, as he paused at the door with miss conway; but suddenly becoming aware of the slimy entanglement round his hat, he exclaimed, 'absurd fellow!' and pulled it off rather petulantly, adding, with a little constraint, 'recovery does put people into mad spirits! i fancy the honest folks here look on in amaze.' miss conway gave a very pretty smile of sympathy and consolation, that shone like a sunbeam on her beautiful pensive features and dark, soft eyes. then she began to admire the view, as they stood on the turf, beside captain hannaford's two small cannon, overlooking the water towards bickleypool, with a purple hill rising behind it. a yacht was sailing into the harbour, and james ran indoors to fetch a spy-glass, while lady conway seized the occasion of asking her nephew his tutor's name. louis, who had fancied she must necessarily understand all his kindred, was glad to guard against shocks to jem's sensitive pride, and eagerly explained the disproportion between his birth and fortune, and his gallant efforts to relieve his grandmother from her burthens. he was pleased to find that he had touched all his auditors, and to hear kind-hearted mrs. mansell repeat her special invitation to mr. frost dynevor with double cordiality. 'if you must play practical jokes,' said james, as they watched the carriage drive off, 'i wish you would choose better moments for them.' 'i thought you would be more in character as a merman brave,' said louis. 'i wonder what character you thought you appeared in?' 'i never meant you to discover it while they were here, nor would you, if you were not so careful of your complexion. come, throw it at my head now, as you would have done naturally, and we shall have fair weather again!' 'i am only concerned at the impression you have made.' 'too late now, is it? you don't mean to be bad company for the rest of the day. it is too bad, after such a presence as has been here. she is a poem in herself. it is like a vision to see her move in that calm, gliding way. such eyes, so deep, so tranquil, revealing the sphere apart where she dwells! an ideal! how can you be savage after sitting in the same room, and hearing that sweet, low voice?' meantime the young lady sat back in the carriage, dreamily hearing, and sometimes answering, the conversation of her two elders, as they returned through pretty forest-drives into the park of beauchastel, and up to the handsome, well-kept house; where, after a few words from mrs. mansell, she ascended the stairs. 'isabel!' cried a bright voice, and a girl of fourteen came skating along the polished oak corridor. 'come and have some tea in the school-room, and tell us your adventures!' and so saying, she dragged the dignified isabel into an old-fashioned sitting-room, where a little pale child, two years younger, sprang up, and, with a cry of joy, clung round the elder sister. 'my white bind-weed,' said isabel, fondly caressing her, 'have you been out on the pony?' 'oh i yes, we wanted only you. sit down there.' and as isabel obeyed, the little louisa placed herself on her lap, with one arm round her neck, and looked with proud glee at the kind, sensible-faced governess who was pouring out the tea. 'the reconnoitring party!' eagerly cried virginia. 'did you find the cousin?' 'yes, we did.' 'oh! then what is he like?' 'you will see when he comes on monday.' 'coming--oh! and is he so very handsome?' 'i can see how pretty a woman your aunt louisa must have been.' 'news!' laughed virginia; 'when mamma is always preaching to me to be like her!' 'is he goodnatured?' asked louisa. 'i had not full means of judging,' said isabel, more thoughtfully than seemed justified by the childish question. 'his cousin is coming too,' she added; 'mr. frost dynevor.' 'another cousin!' exclaimed virginia. 'no; a relation of lord ormersfield--a person to be much respected. he is heir to a lost estate, and of a very grand old family. lord fitzjocelyn says that he is exerting himself to the very utmost for his grandmother and orphan sister; denying himself everything. he is to be a clergyman. there was a book of divinity open on the table.' 'he must be very good!' said louisa, in a low, impressed voice, and fondling her sister's hand. 'will he be as good as sir roland?' 'oh! i am glad he is coming!' cried virginia. 'we have so wished to see somebody very good!' a bell rang--a signal that lady conway would be in her room, where she liked her two girls to come to her while she was dressing. louisa reluctantly detached herself from her sister, and virginia lingered to say, 'dress quickly, please, please, isabel. i know there is a new bit of sir roland done! oh! i hope mr. dynevor is like him!' 'not quite,' said isabel, smiling as they ran away. 'poor children, i am afraid they will be disappointed; but long may their craving be to see 'somebody very good!' 'i am very glad they should meet any one answering the description,' said the governess. 'i don't gather that you are much delighted with the object of the expedition.' 'a pretty boy--very pretty. it quite explains all i have ever heard of his mother.' 'as you told the children.' 'more than i told the children. their aunt never by description seemed to me my ideal, as you know. i would rather have seen a likeness to lord ormersfield, who--though i don't like him--has something striking in the curt, dry, melancholy dignity of his manner.' 'and how has lord fitzjocelyn displeased you?' 'perhaps there is no harm in him--he may not have character enough for that; but talk, attitudes, everything betrays that he is used to be worshipped--takes it as a matter of course, and believes nothing so interesting as himself.' 'don't you think you may have gone with your mind made up?' 'if you mean that i thought myself uncalled for, and heartily detested the expedition, you are right; but i saw what i did not expect.' 'was it very bad?' 'a very idle practical joke, such as i dislike particularly. a quantity of wet sea-weed wound round mr. dynevor's hat.' miss king laughed. 'really, my dear, i don't think you know what young men like from each other.' 'mr. dynevor did not like it,' said isabel, 'though he tried to pass it off lightly as the spirits of recovery. those spirits--i am afraid he has too much to suffer from them. there is something so ungenerous in practical wit, especially from a prosperous man to one unprosperous!' 'well, isabel, i won't contradict, but i should imagine that such things often showed people to be on the best of terms.' isabel shook her head, and left the room, to have her dark hair braided, with little heed from herself, as she sat dreamily over a book. before the last bracelet was clasped, she was claimed by her two little sisters, who gave her no peace till her desk was opened, and a manuscript drawn forth, that they might hear the two new pages of her morning's work. it was a fouque-like tale, relieving and giving expression to the yearnings for holiness and loftiness that had grown up within isabel conway in the cramped round of her existence. the story went back to the troubadour days of provence, where a knight, the heir of a line of shattered fortunes, was betrothed to the heiress of the oppressors, that thus all wrongs might be redressed. they had learnt to love, when sir roland discovered that the lands in dispute had been won by sacrilege. he met adeline at a chapel in a little valley, to tell the whole. they agreed to sacrifice themselves, that restitution should be made; the knight to go as a crusader to the holy land; the lady, after waiting awhile to tend her aged father, to enter a convent, and restore her dower to the church. twice had isabel written that parting, pouring out her heart in the high-souled tender devotion of roland and his adeline; and both feeling and description were beautiful and poetical, though unequal. louisa used to cry whenever she heard it, yet only wished to hear it again and again, and when virginia insisted on reading it to miss king, tears had actually been surprised in the governess's eyes. yet she liked still better adeline's meek and patient temper, where breathed the feeling isabel herself would fain cherish--the deep, earnest, spiritual life and high consecrated purpose that were with the provencal maiden through all her enforced round of gay festivals, light minstrelsy, tourneys, and courts of love. thus far had the story gone. isabel had been writing a wild, mysterious ballad, reverting to that higher love and the true spirit of self-sacrifice, which was to thrill strangely on the ears of the thoughtless at a contention for the golden violet, and which she had adapted to a favourite air, to the extreme delight of the two girls. to them the chapel in the valley, roland and his adeline, were very nearly real, and were the hidden joy of their hearts,--all the more because their existence was a precious secret between the three sisters and miss king, who viewed it as such an influence on the young ones, that, with more meaning than she could have explained, she called it their telemaque. the following-up of the teaching of isabel and miss king might lead to results as little suspected by lady conway as fenelon's philosophy was by louis xiv. lady conway was several years older than her beautiful sister, and had married much later. perhaps she had aimed too high, and had met with disappointments unavowed; for she had finally contented herself with becoming the second wife of sir walter conway, and was now his serene, goodnatured, prosperous widow. disliking his estate and neighbourhood, and thinking the daughters wanted london society and london masters, she shut up the house until her son should be of age, and spent the season in lowndes-square, the autumn either abroad, in visits, or at watering-places. beauchastel was an annual resort of the family. isabel was more slenderly portioned than her half-sisters; and she was one of the nearest surviving relations of her mother's cousin, mr. mansell, whose large comfortable house was always hospitable; and whose wife, a great dealer in goodnatured confidential gossip, used to throw out hints to her great friend lady conway, that much depended on isabel's marriage--that mr. mansell had been annoyed at connexions formed by others of his relations--but though he had decided on nothing, the dear girl's choice might make a great difference. nothing could be more passive than miss conway. she could not remember her mother, but her childhood had been passed under an admirable governess; and though her own miss longman had left her, miss king, the successor, was a person worthy of her chief confidence. at two-and-twenty, the school-room was still the home of her affections, and her ardent love was lavished on her little sisters and her brother walter. going out with lady conway was mere matter of duty and submission. she had not such high animal spirits as to find enjoyment in her gaieties, and her grave, pensive character only attained to walking through her part; she had seen little but the more frivolous samples of society, scorned and disliked all that was worldly and manoeuvring, and hung back from levity and coquetry with utter distaste. removed from her natural home, where she would have found duties and seen various aspects of life, she had little to interest or occupy her in her unsettled wanderings; and to her the sap of life was in books, in dreams, in the love of her brother and sisters, and in discussions with miss king; her favourite vision for the future, the going to live with walter at thornton conway when he should be of age. but walter was younger than louisa, and it was a very distant prospect. her characteristic was a calm, serene indifference, in which her stepmother acquiesced, as lovers of peace do in what they cannot help; and the more willingly, that her tranquil dignity and pensive grace exactly suited the style of her tall queenly figure, delicate features, dark soft languid eyes, and clear olive complexion, just tinged with rosebud pink. what louis said of her to his tutor on the monday night of their arrival was beyond the bounds of all reason; and it was even more memorable that jem was neither satirical nor disputatious, assented to all, and if he sighed, it was after his door was shut. a felicitous day ensued, spent by james in shooting, by fitzjocelyn, in the drawing-room; whither mrs. mansell had requested isabel's presence, as a favour to herself. the young lady sat at work, seldom raising her eyes, but this was enough for him; his intense admiration and pleasure in her presence so exhilarated him, that he rattled away to the utmost. louisa was at first the excuse. in no further doubt of his good-nature, she spent an hour in the morning in giving him anagrams to guess; and after she had repaired to the schoolroom, he went on inventing fresh ones, and transposing the ivory letters, rambling on in his usual style of pensive drollery. happiness never set him off to advantage, and either there was more froth than ordinary, or it appeared unusually ridiculous to an audience who did not detect the under-current of reflection. his father would have been in despair, mrs. ponsonby or mary would have interposed; but the ladies of beauchastel laughed and encouraged him,--all but isabel, who sat in the window, and thought of adeline, 'spighted and angered both,' by a navarrese coxcomb, with sleeves down to his heels, and shoes turned up to his knees. she gave herself great credit for having already created him a viscount. in the afternoon, louis drove out lionizing with his aunt; but though the ponies stopped of themselves at all the notable views; sea, hill, and river were lost on him. lady conway could have drawn out a far less accessible person, and her outpouring of his own sentiments made him regard her as perfect. she consulted him about her winter's resort. louisa required peculiar care, and she had thought of trying mineral baths--what was thought of northwold? what kind of houses were there? the northwold faculty themselves might have taken a lesson from fitzjocelyn's eloquent analysis of the chemical properties of the waters, and all old mr. frost's spirit would seem to have descended on him when he dilated on the house beautiful. lodgers for miss faithfull! what jubilee they would cause! and such lodgers! no wonder he was in ecstasy. all the evening the sound of his low, deliberate voice was unceasing, and his calm announcements to his two little cousins were each one more startling than the last; while james, to whom it was likewise all sunshine, was full of vivacity, and a shrewd piquancy of manner that gave zest to all he said, and wonderfully enlivened the often rather dull circle at beauchastel. morning came; and when the ladies descended to breakfast, it was found that lord fitzjocelyn had gone out with the sportsmen. the children lamented, and their elders pronounced a young gentleman's passion for shooting to be quite incalculable. when, late in the day, the party returned, it was reported that he did not appear to care much for the sport; but had walked beside mr. mansell's shooting-pony, and had finally gone with him to see his model farm. this was a sure road to the old squire's heart, and no one was more delighted with the guest. for aunt catharine's sake, louis was always attracted by old age, and his attentive manners had won mr. mansell's heart, even before his inquiries about his hobby had completed the charm. to expound and to listen to histories of agricultural experiments that really answered, was highly satisfactory to both, and all the evening they were eager over the great account-book which was the pride of the squire's heart; while virginia and louisa grumbled or looked imploring, and isabel marvelled at there being any interest for any one in old mr. mansell's conversation. 'what is the meaning of this?' asked james, as they went up stairs. louis shrugged like a frenchman, looked debonnaire, and said 'good-night.' again he came down; prepared for shooting, though both pale and lame; but he quietly put aside all expostulations, walking on until, about fifty yards from the house, a pebble, turning under the injured foot, caused such severe pain that he could but just stagger to a tree and sit down. there was much battling before mr. mansell would consent to leave him, or he to allow james to help him back to the house, before going on to overtake the party. very irate was jem, at folly that seemed to have undone the benefits of the last month, and at changeableness that was a desertion of the queen to whom all homage was due. he was astonished that louis turned into the study, a room little inhabited in general, and said, 'make haste--you will catch the others; don't fall in with the ladies.' 'i mean to send your aunt to you.' 'pray don't. can't you suppose that peace is grateful after having counted every mortal hour last night?' 'was that the reason you were going to walk ten miles without a leg to stand upon? fitzjocelyn! is this systematic?' 'what is?' said louis, wearily. 'your treatment of--your aunt.' 'on what system should aunts be treated?' 'of all moments to choose for caprice! exactly when i thought even you were fixed!' 'pur troppo,' sighed louis. 'ha!' cried jem, 'you have not gone and precipitated matters! i thought you could never amaze me again; but even you might have felt she was a being to merit rather more time and respect!' 'even i am not devoid of the organ of veneration.' his meek tone was a further provocation; and with uplifted chin, hair ruffled like the crest of a shetland pony, flashing eyes, and distinct enunciation, james exclaimed, 'you will excuse me for not understanding you. you come here; you devote yourself to your aunt and cousins--you seem strongly attracted; then, all on a sudden, you rush out shooting--an exercise for which you don't care, and when you can't walk: you show the most pointed neglect. and after being done-up yesterday, you repeat the experiment to-day, as if for the mere object of laming yourself for life. i could understand pique or temper, but you have not the--' 'the sense,' said louis; 'no, nor anything to be piqued at.' 'if there be a motive,' said james, 'i have a right to demand not to be trifled with any longer.' 'i wish you could be content to shoot your birds, and leave me in peace: you will only have your fun spoilt, like mine, and go into a fury. the fact is, that my father writes in a state of perturbation. he says, i might have understood, from the tenor of his conduct, that he did not wish me to be intimate with my aunt's family! he cannot know anything about them, for it is all one warning against fashion and frivolity. he does not blame us--especially not you.' 'i wish he did.' 'but he desires that our intercourse should be no more than propriety demands, and plunges into a discourse against first impressions, beauty, and the like.' 'so that's the counterblast!' 'you ought to help me, jem,' said louis, dejectedly. 'i'll help you with all my heart to combat your father's prejudices.' 'an hour's unrestrained intercourse with these people would best destroy them,' said louis; 'but, in the mean time--i wonder what he means.' 'he means that he is in terror for his darling scheme.' 'mrs. ponsonby was very right,' sighed louis. 'ay! a pretty condition you would be in, if she had not had too much principle to let you be a victim to submission. that's what you'll come to, though! you will never know the meaning of passion; you will escape something by it, though you will be twisted round his lordship's finger, and marry his choice. i hope she will have red hair!' 'negative and positive obedience stand on different grounds,' said louis, with such calmness as often fretted james, but saved their friendship. 'besides, till i had this letter, i had no notion of any such thing.' james's indignation resulted in fierce stammering; while louis deliberately continued a viva voce self-examination, with his own quaint naivete, betraying emotion only by the burning colour of cheek and brow. 'no; i had no such notion. i only felt that her presence had the gladdening, inspiriting, calming effect of moonlight or starlight. i reverenced her as a dream of poetry walking the earth. ha! now one hears the sound of it--that is like it! i did not think it was such a confirmed case. i should have gone on in peace but for this letter, and never thought about it at all.' 'so much the better for you!' 'my father is too just and candid not to own his error, and be thankful.' 'and you expect her to bear with your alternations in the mean time?' 'towards her i have not alternated. when i have made giggle with clara under the influence of the starry sky, did you suppose me giggling with lyra or the pleiades! i should dread to see the statue descend; it seemed irreverence even to gaze. the lofty serenity keeps me aloof. i like to believe in a creature too bright and good for human nature's daily food. our profane squinting through telescopes at the lady moon reveals nothing but worn-out volcanoes and dry oceans, black gulfs and scorched desolation; but verily that may not be lady moon's fault--only that of our base inventions. so i would be content to mark her--isabel, i mean--queenly, moonlike name!--walk in beauty and tranquillity unruffled, without distorting my vision by personal aims at bringing her down to my level. there--don't laugh at me, jem.' 'no, i am too sorry for you.' 'why!' he exclaimed, impatient of compassion; 'do you think it desperate?' 'i see your affection given to a most worthy object, and i know what your notions of submission will end in.' 'once for all, jem,' said fitzjocelyn, 'do you know how you are using my father? no; isabel conway may be the happiness or the disappointment of my life--i cannot tell. i am sure my father is mistaken, and i believe he may be convinced; but i am bound not to fly in the face of his direct commands, and, till we can come to an understanding, i must do the best i can, and trust to--' the last word was lost, as he turned to nurse his ankle, and presently to entreat james to join the sportsmen; but jem was in a mood to do nothing pleasing to himself nor to any one else. a sacrifice is usually irritating to the spectators, who remonstrate rather than listen to self-reproach; and louis had been guilty of three great offences--being in the right, making himself ridiculous, and submitting tamely--besides the high-treason to isabel's beauty. it was well that the earl was safe out of the way of the son of the pendragons! fitzjocelyn was in pain and discomfort enough to make james unwilling to leave him; though his good-will did not prevent him from keeping up such a stream of earplugs and sinister auguries, that it was almost the climax of good-temper that enabled louis to lie still, trying to read a great quarto park's travels, and abstaining from any reply that could aggravate matters. as the one would not go to luncheon, the other would not; and after watching the sound of the ladies' setting out for their drive, louis said that he would go and lie on the turf; but at that moment the door was thrown open, and in ran virginia. explanations were quickly exchanged--how she had come to find vertot's malta for isabel, and how he had been sent in by hurting his foot. 'were you going to stay in all day?' said virginia. 'oh, come with us! we have the pony-carriage; and we are going to a dear old ruin, walking and driving by turns. do, pray, come; there's plenty of room.' there could be no objection to the school-room party, and it was no small relief to escape from james and hope he was amused; so fitzjocelyn allowed himself to be dragged off in triumph, and james was acceding to his entreaty that he would go in search of the shooting-party, when, as they reached the hall-door, they beheld miss conway waiting on the steps. there was no receding for her any more than for louis, so she could only make a private resolution against the pony-carriage, and dedicate herself to the unexceptionable company of little sister, governess and tutor; for james had resigned the shooting, and attached himself to the expedition. it was an excellent opportunity of smoothing his cousin's way, and showing that all was not caprice that might so appear: so he began to tell of his most advantageous traits of character, and to explain away his whimsical conduct, with great ardour and ingenuity. he thought he should be perfectly satisfied if he could win but one smile of approbation from that gravely beautiful mouth; and it came at last, when he told of fitzjocelyn's devoted affection to mrs. frost and his unceasing kindness to the old ladies of dynevor terrace. thus gratified, he let himself be led into abstract questions of principle,--a style of discussion frequent between miss king and isabel, but on which the latter had never seen the light of a man's mind thrown except through books. the gentlemen whom she had met were seldom either deep or earnest, except those too much beyond her reach; and she had avoided anything like confidence or intimacy: but mr. dynevor could enlighten and vivify her perplexed reflections, answer her inquiries, confirm her opinion of books, and enter into all that she ventured with diffidence to express. he was enchanted to find that no closer approach could dim the lustre of louis's moon, and honoured her doubly for what she had made herself in frivolous society. he felt sure that his testimony would gain credit where fitzjocelyn's would be regarded as love-blinded, and already beheld himself forcing full proof of her merits on the reluctant earl, beholding louis happy, and isabel emancipated from constraint. a five miles' walk gave full time for such blissful discoveries; for miss conway was resolute against entering the pony-carriage, and walked on, protesting against ever being fatigued; while louis was obliged to occupy his seat in the carriage, with a constant change of companions. 'i think, my dear,' said miss king, when the younger girls had gone to their mother's toilette, 'that you will have to forgive me.' 'meaning,' said isabel, 'that you are bitten too! ah! miss king, you could not withstand the smile with which he handed you in!' 'could you withstand such an affectionate account of your cruel, tyrannical practical joker?' 'facts are stubborn things. do you know what mr. dynevor is doing at this moment? i met him in the gallery, hurrying off to ebbscreek for some lotion for lord fitzjocelyn's ankle. i begged him to let mrs. mansell send; but no-no one but himself could find it, and his cousin could not bear strangers to disarrange his room. if anything were wanting, it would be enough to see how simply and earnestly such a man has been brought to pamper--nay, to justify, almost to adore, the whims and follies of this youth.' 'if anything were wanting to what? to your dislike.' 'it would not be so active as dislike, unless--' isabel spoke with drooping head, and miss king did not ask her to finish, but said, 'he has not given you much cause for alarm.' 'so; he is at least a thorough gentleman. it may be conceit, or wrong self-consciousness, but from the moment the poor boy was spied in the shop, i had a perception that mamma and mrs. mansell marked him down. personally he would be innocent, but, through all his chatter, i cannot shake off the fancy that i am watched, or that decided indifference is not needed to keep him at a distance.' 'i wish you could have seen him without knowing him!' 'in vain, dear miss king! i can't bear handsome men. i see his frivolity and shallowness; and for amiability, what do you think of keeping his cousin all the morning from shooting for such a mere nothing, and then sending him off for a ten miles' walk? 'for my part, i confess that i was struck with the good sense and kindness he showed in our tete-a-tete--i thought it justified mr. dynevor's description.' 'yes, i have no doubt that there is some good in him. he might have done very well, if he had not always been an idol.' isabel was the more provoked with lord fitzjocelyn, when, by-and-by, he appeared in the drawing-room, and related the result of his cousin's mission. jem, who would know better than himself where to find his property, had not chosen to believe his description of the spot where he had left the lotion, and, in the twilight, louis had found his foot coiled about by the feelers and claws of a formidable monster--no other than a bottled scorpion, a recent present from captain hannaford. he did not say how emblematic the scorpion lotion was of that which jem had been administering to his wounded spirit all the morning, but he put the story in so ludicrous a light that isabel decided that mr. dynevor was ungenerously and ungratefully treated as a butt; and she turned away in displeasure from the group whom the recital was amusing, to offer her sympathy to the tutor, and renew the morning's conversation. chapter xiii. frosty, but kindly. go not eastward, go not westward, for a stranger whom we know not. like a fire upon the hearthstone, is a neighbour's homely daughter; like the moonlight or the starlight, is the handsomest of strangers. legend of hiawatha. 'what a laboured production had the letter been! how many copies had the statesman written! how late had he sat over it at night! how much more consideration had he spent on it than on papers involving the success of his life! a word too much or too little might precipitate the catastrophe, and the bare notion of his son's marriage with a pupil of lady conway renewed and gave fresh poignancy to the past. at first his anxieties were past mention; but he grew restless under them, and the instinct of going to mrs. ponsonby prevailed. at least, she would know what had transpired from james, or from fitzjocelyn to mrs. frost. she had heard of ecstatic letters from both the cousins, and mary had been delighted to identify miss conway with the isabel of whom one of her school friends spoke rapturously, but the last letter had beenfrom james to his grandmother, declaring that lord ormersfield was destroying the happiness of the most dutiful of sons, who was obedient even to tameness, and so absurd that there was no bearing him. his lordship must hear reason, and learn that he was rejecting the most admirable creature in existence, her superiority of mind exceeding even her loveliness of person. he had better beware of tyranny; it was possible to abuse submission, and who could answer for the consequences of thwarting strong affections? all the ground fitzjocelyn had gained in the last six weeks had been lost; and for the future, james would not predict. 'an uncomfortable matter,' said mrs. ponsonby, chiefly for the sake of reading her daughter's feelings. 'if it were not in poor louis's mind already, his father and james would plant it there by their contrary efforts.' 'oh! i hope it will come right,' said mary. 'louis is too good, and his father too kind, for it not to end well. and then, mamma, he will be able to prove, what nobody will believe--that he is constant.' 'you think so, do you?' said her mother, smiling. mary blushed, but answered, 'where he really cared, he would be constant. his fancy might be taken, and he might rave, but he would never really like what was not good.--if he does think about miss conway, we may trust she is worthy of him. oh! i should like to see her!' mary's eyes lighted up with an enthusiasm that used to be a stranger to them. it was not the over-acted indifference nor the tender generosity of disappointment: it seemed more to partake of the fond, unselfish, elder-sisterly affection that she had always shown towards louis, and it set her mother quite at ease. seeing lord ormersfield riding into the terrace, mary set out for a walk, that he might have his tete-a-tete freely with her mother. on coming home, she met him on the stairs; and he spoke with a sad softness and tone of pardon that alarmed her so much, that she hastened to ask her mother whether louis had really avowed an attachment. 'oh no,' said mrs. ponsonby; 'he has written a very right-minded letter, on the whole, poor boy! though he is sure the conways have only to be known to be appreciated. rather too true! it is in his miss fanny hand, stiff and dispirited; and his father has worked himself into such a state of uneasiness, that i think it will end in his going to ebbscreek at once.' 'o mamma, you won't let him go and torment louis?' 'why, mary, have you been learning of james? perhaps he would torment him more from a distance; and besides, i doubt what sort of counsellor james is likely to make in his present mood.' 'i never could see that james made any difference to louis,' said mary. 'i know people think he does, because louis gives up wishes and plans to him; but he is not led in opinions or principles, as far as i can see.' 'not unless his own wishes went the same way.' 'at least, lord ormersfield will see miss conway!' 'i am afraid that will do no good. it will not be for the first time. lady conway has been his dread from the time of his own marriage; and if she should come to northwold, he will be in despair. i do think he must be right; she must be making a dead set at louis.' 'not miss conway,' said mary. 'i know she must be good, or he would not endure her for a moment.' 'mary, you do not know the power of beauty.' 'i have heard of it,' said mary; 'i have seen how dona guadalupe was followed. but those people were not like louis. no, mamma; i think james might be taken in, i don't think louis could be--unless he had a very grand dream of his own before his eyes; and then it would be his own dream, not the lady that he saw; and by-and-by he would find it out, and be so vexed!' 'and, i trust, before he had committed himself!' 'mamma, i won't have you think miss conway anything but up to his dreams! i know she is. only think what jane drummond says of her!' when the idea of going to see how matters stood had once occurred to the earl, he could not stay at home: the ankle and the affections preyed on him by turns, and he wrote to sir miles oakstead to fix an earlier day for the promised visit, as well as to his son, to announce his speedy arrival. then he forgot the tardiness of cross-country posts, and outran his letter, so that he found no one to meet him at bickleypool; and on driving up to the gate at ebbscreek, found all looking deserted. after much knocking, priscilla appeared, round-eyed and gasping, and verified his worst fears with 'gone to bochattle.' however, she explained that only one gentleman was gone to dine there; the other was rowing him round the point, with grandfather;--they would soon be back--indeed they ought, for the tide was so low, they would have to land down by the shingle bar. she pointed out where the boat must come in; and thither the earl directed his steps, feeling as if he were going to place himself under a nutmeg-grater, as he thought how james frost would receive the implied distrust of his guardianship. the sunset gleam was fading on the sleepy waves that made but a feint of breaking, along the shining expanse of moist uncovered sand, when two figures were seen progressing from the projecting rocks, casting long shadows before them. lord ormersfield began to prepare a mollifying address--but, behold! was it the effect of light so much to lengthen jem's form? nay, was it making him walk with a stick? a sudden, unlooked-for hope seized the earl. the next minute he had been recognised; and in the grasping hands and meeting eyes, all was forgotten, save the true, fond affection of father and son. 'i did not expect this pleasure. they told me you were dining out.' 'only rowing jem to the landing-place. i told him to make my excuses. it is a dinner to half the neighbourhood, and my foot is always troublesome if i do not lay it up in the evening.' 'i am glad you are prudent,' said his father, dismissing his fears in his gratification, and proceeding to lay his coming to the score of his foot. fitzjocelyn did not wish to see through the plea--he was much too happy in his father's unusual warmth and tenderness, and in the delights of hospitality. mrs. hannaford was gone out, and eatables were scarce; but a tea-dinner was prepared merrily between priscilla, the captain, and louis, who gloried in displaying his school-fagging accomplishments with toast, eggs, and rashers--hobbled between parlour and kitchen, helping priscilla, joking with the captain, and waiting on his father so eagerly and joyously as to awaken a sense of adventure and enjoyment in the earl himself. no meal, with frampton behind his chair, had ever equalled fitzjocelyn's cookery or attendance; and louis's reminiscences of the penalties he had suffered from his seniors for burnt toast, awoke like recollections of schoolboy days, hitherto in utter oblivion, and instead of the intended delicate conversation, father and son found themselves laughing over a 'tirocinium or review of schools.' still, the subject must be entered on; and when lord ormersfield had mentioned the engagement to go to oakstead, he added, 'all is well, since i have found you here. let me tell you that i never felt more grateful nor more relieved than by this instance of regard for my wishes.' though knowing the fitful nature of louis's colour, he would have been better satisfied not to have called up such an intensity of red, and to have had some other answer than, 'i wish you saw more of them.' 'i see them every year in london.' 'london gives so little scope for real acquaintance,' ventured louis again, with downcast eyes. 'you forget that lady conway is my sister-in-law.' louis would have spoken, but his father added, 'before you were born, i had full experience of her. you must take it on trust that her soft, prepossessing manners belong to her as a woman of the world who cannot see you without designs on you.' 'of course,' said louis, 'i yield to your expressed wishes; but my aunt has been very kind to me: and,' he added, after trying to mould the words to their gentlest form, 'you could not see my cousins without being convinced that it is the utmost injustice--' 'i do not censure them,' said his father, as he hesitated between indignation and respect, 'i only tell you, louis, that nothing could grieve me more than to see your happiness in the keeping of a pupil of lady conway.' he met a look full of consternation, and of struggles between filial deference and the sense of injustice. all louis allowed himself to say was, however, 'surely, when i am her own nephew! when our poverty is a flagrant fact--she may be acquitted of anything but caring for me for--for my mother's sake.' there was a silence that alarmed louis, who had never before named his mother to the earl. at last, lord ormersfield spoke clearly and sternly, in characteristic succinct sentences, but taking breath between each. 'you shall have no reason to think me prejudiced. i will tell you facts. there was a match which she desired for such causes as lead her to seek you. the poverty was greater, and she knew it. on one side there was strong affection; on that which she influenced there was--none whatever. if there were scruples, she smothered them. she worked on a young innocent mind to act out her deceit, and without a misgiving on--on his part that his feelings wore not returned, the marriage took place.' 'it could not have been all her own fault,' cried louis. 'it must have been a willing instrument--much to blame--' his father cut him short with sudden severity, such as startled him. 'never say so, louis. she was a mere child, educated for that sole purpose, her most sweet and docile nature wasted and perverted.' 'and you know this of your own knowledge?' said fitzjocelyn, still striving to find some loophole to escape from such testimony. the earl paused, as if to collect himself, then repeated the words, slowly and decidedly, 'of my own knowledge. i could not have spoken thus otherwise.' 'may i ask how it ended?' 'as those who marry for beauty alone have a right to expect. there was neither confidence nor sympathy. she died early. i--we--those who loved her as their own life--were thankful.' louis perceived the strong effort and great distress with which these words were uttered, and ventured no answer, glancing hastily through all his connexions to guess whose history could thus deeply affect his father; but he was entirely at a loss; and lord ormersfield, recovering himself, added, 'say no more of this; but, believe me, it was to spare you from her manoeuvres that i kept you apart from that family.' 'the northwold baths have been recommended for louisa,' said fitzjocelyn. 'before we knew of your objections, we mentioned miss faithfull's lodgings.' what the earl was about to utter, he suppressed. 'you cannot look at those girls and name manoeuvring!' cried louis. 'poor things.' after a silence, lord ormersfield added, with more anxiety than prudence, 'set my mind at rest, louis. there can have been no harm done yet, in so short a time.' 'i--don't--know--' said louis, slowly. 'i have seldom spoken to her, to be sure. she actually makes me shy! i never saw anything half so lovely. i cannot help her reigning over my thoughts. i shall never believe a word against her, though i cannot dispute what you say of my aunt. she is of another mould, i wish you could let me hope that--' a gesture of despair from his father cut him short. 'i will do whatever you please,' he concluded. 'you will find that time conquers the fancy,' said the earl, quickly. 'i am relieved to find that you have at least not committed yourself: it would be no compliment to mary ponsonby.' louis's lip curled somewhat; but he said no more, and made no objections to the arrangements which his father proceeded to detail. doubtful of the accommodations of ebbscreek, lord ormersfield had prudently retained his fly, and though louis, intending to sleep on the floor, protested that there was plenty of room, he chose to return to the inn at bickleypool. he would call for louis to-morrow, to take him for a formal call at beauchastel; and the day after they would go together to oakstead, leaving james to return home, about ten days sooner than had been previously concerted. lord ormersfield had not been gone ten minutes, before james's quick bounding tread was heard far along the dry woodland paths. he vaulted over the gate, and entered by the open window, exclaiming, as he did so, 'hurrah! the deed is done; the letter is off to engage the house beautiful.' 'doom is doom!' were the first words that occurred to louis. 'the lion and the prince.' 'what's that?' 'there was once a king,' began louis, as if the tale were the newest in the world, 'whose son was predestined to be killed by a lion. after much consideration, his majesty enclosed his royal highness in a tower, warranted wild-beast proof, and forbade the chase to be mentioned in his hearing. the result was, that the locked-up prince died of look-jaw in consequence of tearing his hand with a nail in the picture of the lion.' 'i shall send that apologue straight to ormersfield.' 'you may spare that trouble. my father has been with me all the evening.' 'oh! his double-ganger visits you. that accounts for your freaks.' 'double-gangers seldom come in yellow-bodied flys.' 'his lordship in propria persona. you don't mean it.' 'he is sleeping at the 'george' at bickleypool. there is a letter coming to-morrow by the post, to say he is coming to-day, with every imaginable civility to you; but i am to go to the rose-coloured pastor's with him on wednesday.' 'so there's an end of our peace and comfort!' 'i am afraid we have sadly discomposed his peace.' 'did you discover whether his warnings have the slightest foundation?' 'he told me a history that somewhat accounts for his distrust of my aunt. i think there must be another side to it, and nothing can be more unjust than to condemn all the family, but it affected him so exceedingly that i do not wonder at his doing so. he gave no names, but i am sure it touched him very nearly. can you tell who it could have been?' and he narrated enough to make james exclaim, 'it ought to touch him nearly. he was talking of himself.' 'impossible!--my mother!' cried louis, leaping up. 'yes--his own version of his married life.' 'how do you know? you cannot remember it,' said louis, though too well convinced, as he recollected the suppressed anguish, and the horror with which all blame of the young wife had been silenced. 'i have heard of it again and again. it was an unhappy, ill-assorted marriage: she was gay, he was cold.' 'my aunt catharine says so?' 'as far as she can blame anything. your mother was a sweet blossom in a cold wind. she loved and pitied her with all her heart. your aunt was talking, this very evening, of your father having carried her sister to ormersfield, away from all her family, and one reason of her desire to go to northwold is to see those who were with her at last.' louis was confounded. 'yes! i see,' he said. 'how obtuse not to read it in his own manner! how much it explains!' and he silently rested his brow on his hands. 'depend upon it, there are two sides to the story. i would not be a pretty, petted, admired girl in his keeping.' 'do you think it mends matters with me to fasten blame on either?' said louis, sadly. 'no; i was realizing the perception of such a thread of misery woven into his life, and thinking how little i have felt for him.' 'endowing him with your own feelings, and then feeling for him!' 'no. i cannot estimate his feeling. he is of harder, firmer stuff than i; and for that very reason, i suspect, suffering is a more terrific thing. i heard the doctors saying, when i bore pain badly, that it would probably do the less future harm: a bad moral, but i believe it is true of the mental as of the physical constitution.' answering something between a look and a shrug of james, he mused on, aloud--'i understand better what the wreck of affection must have been.' 'for my part,' said james, 'i do not believe in the affection that can tyrannize over and blight a woman.' 'nay, james! i cannot doubt. my very name--my having been called by it, are the more striking in one so fond of usage and precedent. things that passed between him and mrs. ponsonby while i was ill--much that i little regarded and ill requited--show what force of love and grief there must have been. the cold, grave manner, is the broken, inaccessible edge of the cliff rent asunder.' 'if romance softens the rough edge, you are welcome to it! i may as well go to bed!' 'not romance--the sad reality of my poor father's history. i trust i shall never treat his wishes so lightly--' impatient of one-sided sympathy, james exclaimed, 'as if you did not give way to him like a slave!' 'yes, like a slave,' said louis, gravely. 'i wish to give way like a son who would try to comfort him for what he has undergone.' 'now, i should have thought your feeling would have been for your mother!' 'if my mother could speak to me,' said louis, with trembling lips, 'she would surely bid me to try my utmost, as far as in me lies, to bring peace and happiness to my father. i cannot tell where the errors may have been, and i will never ask. if she was as like to me as they say, i could understand some of them! at least, i know that i am doubly bound to give as little vexation to him as possible, and i trust that you will not make it harder to me. you lost your father so early, that you can hardly estimate--' 'the trial?' said james, willing to give what had passed the air of a joke. 'exactly so--good night.' chapter xiv. new inhabitants. sometimes a troop of damsels glad-- sometimes a curly shepherd lad, or long-haired page in crimson clad, goes by to towered camelot; and sometimes, through the mirror blue, the knights come riding two and two. she hath no loyal knight and true-- the lady of shalott. tennyson. 'oakstead, oct. th, . 'my dear aunt,--i find that fitzjocelyn is writing to you, but i think you will wish for a fuller account of him than can be obtained from his own letters. indeed, i should be much obliged if you would kindly exercise your influence to persuade him that he is not in a condition to be imprudent with impunity. sir miles oakstead was absolutely shocked to see the alteration in his appearance, as well as in his spirits; and although both our kind host and hostess are most solicitous on his account, it happens unfortunately that they are at this juncture quite alone, so that he is without companions of his own age. i must not, however, alarm you. the fact is, that circumstances have occurred which, though he has acted in the most exemplary manner, have harassed and distressed him a good deal, and his health suffers from the difficulty of taking sufficient exercise. james will triumph when he hears that i regret having shortened his stay by the sea-side; for neither the place nor the weather seems to agree with him: he has had a recurrence of wakeful nights, and is very languid. poor boy! yesterday he wandered out alone in the rain, lost his way, and came home so fatigued that he slept for three hours on the sofa, but to-day he seems better--has more colour, and has been less silent. we go to leffingham castle from monday till thursday, when i shall take him to london for hastings to decide whether it be fit for him to return to christchurch after the vacation, according to his own most anxious wish. with my love to mary ponsonby and her daughter, and best remembrances to james, 'your affectionate nephew, 'ormersfield.' the same envelope contained another letter of many sheets, beginning in a scrawl:-- 'scene--rose-coloured pastor's nest. tables, chairs, books, papers, despatch-boxes. the two ex-ministers writing and consulting. viscount f. looking on like a colt running beside its parent at plough, thinking that harness leaves deep marks, and that he does not like the furrow. 'october th, .--that correct date must be a sign that he is getting into harness. 'well, dear aunt kitty, to make a transition from the third to the first person, like mrs. norris, you have in this short scene an epitome of the last fortnight. lady oakstead is an honourable matron, whom i pity for having me in her way; a man unable to be got rid of by the lawful exercises of shooting and riding, and with a father always consulting her about him, and watching every look and movement, till the blood comes throbbing to my temples by the mere attraction of his eyes. to be watched into a sense of impatience and ingratitude, is a trial of life for which one is not prepared. my father and sir miles are very busy; i hang here an anomaly, sitting with them as being less in their way than in lady oakstead's, and wondering what i shall be twenty years hence. i am sick of the only course of life that will content my father, and i can see no sunshine likely to brighten it. but, at least, no one's happiness is at stake but my own. here is a kind, cordial letter from lady conway, pressing me to join her at scarborough, make expeditions, &c. my father is in such a state about me, that i believe i could get his consent to anything, but i suppose it would not be fair, and i have said nothing to him as yet. on monday we go to leffingham, which, i hear, is formality itself. after that, more state visits, unless i can escape to oxford. my father fancies me not well enough; but pray unite all the forces of the terrace to impress that nothing else will do me any good. dragging about in this dreary, heartless way is all that ails me, and reading for my degree would be the best cure. i mean to work hard for honours, and, if possible, delude myself with hopes of success. work is the need. here, there is this one comfort. there is no one to talk to, no birds in last year's nest, sons absent, daughters disposed of, but, unluckily, the pastoress, under a mistaken sense of kindness, has asked the vicar's son to walk with me, and he is always lying in wait,--an ensign in a transition state between the sheepish schoolboy and the fast man, with an experience of three months of depot. having roused him from the pristine form, i regret the alternative. 'did i ever write so savage a letter? don't let it vex you, or i won't send it. what a bull! there is such a delectable scotch mist, that no one will suspect me of going out; and i shall actually cheat the ensign, and get a walk in solitude to hearten me for the dismal state dinner party of the evening. 'october th.--is it in the book of fate that i should always treat this rose-coloured pastor like a carrion crow? i have done it again! and it has but brought out more of my father's marvellous kindness and patience. 'i plunged into the scotch mist unsuspected and unpursued. the visible ebullition of discontent had so much disgusted me that i must needs see whether anything could be done with it, and fairly face the matter, as i can only do in a walk. pillow counsel is feverish and tumultuous; one is hardly master of oneself. the soft, cool, mist-laden air, heavy but incense-breathing, was a far more friendly adjunct in the quiet decay of nature--mournful, but not foul nor corrupt, because man had not spoilt it. it suited me better than a sunny, glaring day, such as i used to revel in, and the brightness of which, last spring, made me pine to be in the free air. such days are past with me; i had better know that they are, and not strive after them. personal happiness is the lure, not the object, in this world. i have my northwold home, and i am beginning to see that my father's comfort depends on me as i little imagined, and sufficiently to sweeten any sacrifice. so i have written to refuse scarborough, for there is no use in trying to combine two things, pleasing my father and myself. i wish the determination may last; but mine have never been good for much, and you must help me. 'neither thinking nor fog conduced to seeing where i was going; and when my ankle began to give out, and i was going to turn, i ran into a hedge, which, looming through the mist, i had been taking for a fine range of distant mountains--rather my way of dealing with other objects. being without a horse on whose neck to lay the reins, i could only coast the hedge, hoping it might lead me back to oakstead park, which i had abandoned in my craving for space and dread of being dogged by the ensign. but the treacherous hedge led me nowhere but to a horsepond; and when i had struggled out of the adjacent mire, and attained a rising ground, i could only see about four yards square of bare down, all the rest being grey fog. altogether, the scene was worth something. i heard what i thought the tinkling of a sheep bell through the cloud, which dulled the sound like cotton wool; i pursued the call, when anon, the veil began to grow thin, and revealed, looking just like a transparency, a glimpse of a little village in a valley almost under my feet, trees, river, church-spire and all, and the bell became clearer, and showed me what kind of flock it was meant for. i turned that way, and had just found a path leading down the steep, when down closed the cloud--a natural dissolving view--leaving me wondering whether it had been mirage or imagination, till presently, the curtain drew up in earnest. out came, not merely form, but colour, as i have seen a camera clear itself--blue sky, purple hills, russet and orange woods, a great elm green picked out with yellow, a mass of brown oaks, a scarlet maple, a beech grove, skirting a brilliant water meadow, with a most reflective stream running through it, and giving occasion for a single arched bridge, and a water mill, with a wheel draperied with white foam; two swans disporting on the water (i would not declare they were not geese), a few cottony flakes of mist hanging over damp corners, the hill rising green, with the bright whitewashed cottages of this district, on the side a rich, red, sandstone-coloured church, late architecture, tower rather mouldering--all the more picturesque; churchyard, all white headstones and ochreous sheep, surmounted by a mushroom-shaped dark yew tree, railed in with intensely white rails, the whole glowing in the parting coup-de-soleil of a wet day, every tear of every leaf glistening, and everything indescribably lustrous. it is a picture that one's mental photograph ought to stamp for life, and the cheering and interest it gave, no one but you can understand. i wished for you, i know. it looks so poor in words. 'after the service, i laid hold of the urchin whose hearty stare had most reminded me of tom madison, and gave him a shilling to guide me back to oakstead, a wise measure, for down came the cloud, blotting all out like the castle of st. john, and by the time i came home, it was pitch dark and raining hard, and my poor father was imagining me at the foot of another precipice. i was hoping to creep up in secret, but they all came out, fell upon me, lady oakstead sent me tea, and ordered me to rest; and so handsomely did i obey, that when next i opened my eyes, and saw my father waiting, as i thought, for me to go down to dinner with him, i found he had just come up after the ladies had quitted the dining-room. so kind and so little annoyed did he seem, that i shook myself, to be certified that i had broken no more bones, but it was all sheer forbearance and consideration--enough to go to one's heart--when it was the very thing to vex him most. with great penitence, i went down, and the first person i encountered was the very curate i had seen in my _mist_erious village, much as if he had walked out of a story book. on fraternizing, i found him to be a friend of holdsworth. lady oakstead is going to take me, this afternoon, to see his church, &c., thoroughly; and behold, i learn from him that she is a notable woman for doing good in her parish, never so happy as in trotting to cottages, though her good deeds are always in the background. thereupon, i ventured to attack her this morning on cottage garniture, and obtained the very counsel i wanted about ovens and piggeries, we began to get on together, and she is to put me up to all manner of information that i want particularly. i must go now, not to keep her waiting, never mind the first half of my letter--i have no time to cancel it now. i find my father wants to put in a note: don't believe a word that he says, for i am much better to-day, body and mind. goosey, goosey gander, where shall we wander, anywhere, everywhere, to remain still 'your most affectionate, 'fits gosling.' dear aunt kitty! one of her failings was never to be able to keep a letter to herself. she fairly cried over her boy's troubles; and mrs. ponsonby would not have known whether to laugh or cry but for james's doleful predictions, which were so sentimental as to turn even his grandmother to the laughing party, and left him no sympathizer but mary, who thought it very hard and cruel to deride louis when he was trying so earnestly to be good and suffering so much. why should they all--aunt catharine herself--be merry over his thinking the spring-days of his life past away, and trying so nobly and patiently to resign himself? 'it is the way of the world, mary,' said james. 'people think they are laughing at the mistaking a flock of sheep for the army of pentapolin of the naked arm, when they are really sneering at the lofty spirit taking the weaker side. they involve the sublime temper in the ridiculous accident, and laugh both alike to scorn.' 'not mamma and aunt catharine,' said mary. 'besides, is not half the harm in the world done by not seeing where the sublime is invaded by the ridiculous?' 'i see nothing ridiculous in the matter,' said james. 'his father has demanded an unjustifiable sacrifice. fitzjocelyn yields and suffers.' 'i do believe lord ormersfield must relent; you see how pleased he is, saying that louis's conduct is exemplary.' 'he would sacrifice a dozen sons to one prejudice!' 'perhaps miss conway will overcome the prejudice. i am sure, if he thinks louis's conduct exemplary, louis must have the sort of happiness he used to wish for most, and his father would do his very best to gratify him.' that sentence was mary's cheval de bataille in her discussions with james, who could never be alone with her without broaching the subject. the two cousins often walked together during james's month at northwold. the town church was not very efficiently served, and was only opened in the morning and late evening on sundays, without any afternoon prayers, and james was often in the habit of walking to ormersfield church for the three o'clock service, and asking mary to join him. their return was almost always occupied in descriptions of miss conway's perfections, and mary learnt to believe that two beings, evidently compounded of every creature's best, must be destined for each other. 'how well it is,' she thought, 'that i did not stand in the way. oh! how unhappy and puzzled i should be now. how thankful i am that dear mamma understood all for us so well! how glad i am that louis is waiting patiently, not doing anything self-willed. as long as his father says he is exemplary, it must make one happy, and mamma will convince lord ormersfield. it will all turn out well; and how delightful it will be to see him quite happy and settled!' mary and her mother had by this time taken root at dynevor terrace, and formed an integral part of the inhabitants. their newspaper went the round of the houses, their name was sent to the northwold book-club and enrolled among the subscribers to local charities, and miss mercy faithfull found that their purse and kitchen would bear deeper hauls than she could in general venture upon. mary was very happy, working under her, and was a welcome and cheerful visitor to the many sick, aged, and sorrowful to whom she introduced her. if mary could only have induced aunt melicent to come and see with her own eyes, to know mrs. frost and the faithfull sisters, and, above all, to see mamma in her own house, she thought one of her most eager wishes would have been fulfilled. but invite as she and her mother might, they could not move miss ponsonby from bryanstone square. railroads and country were both her dread; and she was not inclined, to overcome her fears on behalf of a sister-in-law whom she forgave, but could not love. 'you must give it up, my dear,' said mrs. ponsonby. 'i let the time for our amalgamation pass. melicent and i were not tolerant of each other. since she has given you back to me, i can love and respect her as i never did before; but a little breach in youth becomes too wide in age for either repentance or your affection, my dear, to be able to span it.' mary saw what a relief it was that the invitations were not accepted, and though she was disappointed, she blamed herself for having wished otherwise. tranquillity was such a boon to that wearied spirit, each day was so much gain that went by without the painful, fluttered look of distress, and never had mrs. ponsonby had so much quiet enjoyment with her daughter and her aunt. mary was perfectly contented in seeing her better, and had no aims beyond the present trivial, commonplace life, with so many to help by little ordinary services, and her mother serene and comfortable. placid, and yet active, she went busily through the day, and did not forget the new pleasures to which louis had opened her mind. she took up his books without a pang, and would say, briskly and unblushingly, to her mother, how strange it was that before she had been with him, she had never liked at all, what she now cared for so much. the winter portended no lack of excitement. miss faithfull's rooms were engaged. when miss mercy ran in breathless to mrs. frost with the tidings, she little knew what feelings were excited; the hope and fear, the doubt and curiosity; the sense of guilt towards the elder nephew, in not preventing what she could not prevent, the rejoicing on behalf of the younger nephew; the ladylike scorn of the motives that brought the lodgers; yet the warm feeling towards what was dear to louis and admired by jem. what a flapping and battering of carpets on the much-enduring stump! what furious activity of martha! what eager help of little charlotte, who was in a perfect trepidation of delight at the rumour that a real beauty, fit for a heroine, was coming! what trotting hither and thither of miss mercy! what netting of blinds and stitching of chintz by miss salome! what envy and contempt on the part of other landladies on hearing that miss faithfull's apartments were engaged for the whole winter! what an anxious progress was miss mercy's, when she conducted mrs. frost and mary to a final inspection! and what was her triumph when mary, sitting down on the well-stuffed arm-chair, pronounced that people who would not come there did not understand what comfort was. every living creature gazed--mrs. frost through her blind, mary behind her hydrangea in the balcony, charlotte from her attic window,--when the lodgers disembarked in full force--two ladies, two children, one governess, three maids, two men, two horses, one king charles's spaniel! let it be what it might, it was a grand windfall for the miss faithfulls. mary's heart throbbed as the first carriage thundered upon the gravel, and a sudden swelling checked her voice as she was about to exclaim 'there she is!' when the second lady emerged, and moved up the garden path. she was veiled and mantled; but accustomed as was mary's eye to the spanish figure and walk, the wonderful grace of movement and deportment struck her as the very thing her eye had missed ever since she left peru. what the rest of the strangers were like, she knew not; she had only eyes for the creature who had won louis's affection, and doubtless deserved it, as all else that was precious. 'so they are come, charlotte,' said mrs. frost, as the maiden demurely brought in the kettle. 'yes, ma'am;' and stooping to put the kettle on, and growing carnation-coloured over the fire. 'oh, ma'am, i never saw such a young lady. she is all one as the king's sister in the lord of the isles!' while the object of all this enthusiasm was arriving at the terrace, she was chiefly conscious that sir roland was sinking down on the ramparts of acre, desperately wounded in the last terrible siege; and she was considering whether palmer or minstrel should carry the tidings of his death to adeline. it was her refuge from the unpleasant feelings, with which she viewed the experiment of the northwold baths upon louisa's health. as the carriage stopped, she cast one glance at the row of houses, they struck her as dreary and dilapidated; she drew her mantle closer, shivered, and walked into the house. 'small rooms, dingy furniture-that is mamma's affair,' passed through her mind, as she made a courteous acknowledgment of miss mercy's greeting, and stood by the drawing-room fire. 'roland slowly awoke from his swoon; a white-robed old man, with a red eight-pointed cross on his breast, was bending over him. he knew himself to be in--i can't remember which tower the hospitallers defended. i wonder whether marianne can find the volume of vertot.' 'isabel, isabel!' shrieked virginia, who, with louisa, had been roaming everywhere, 'here is a discovery in the school-room! come!' it was an old framed print of a large house, as much of a sham castle as the nature of things would permit; and beneath were the words 'cheveleigh, the seat of roland dynevor, esquire.' 'there!' cried virginia; 'you see it is a castle, a dear old feudal castle! think of that, isabel! why, it is as good as seeing sir roland himself, to have seen mr. dynevor frost disinherited. oh! if his name were only roland, instead of that horrid james!' 'his initials are j. r.,' said isabel. 'it is a curious coincidence.' 'it only wants an adeline to have the castle now,' said louisa. 'oh! there shall be an heiress, and she shall be beautiful, and he shan't go crusading--he shall marry her.' the sisters had not been aware that the school-room maid, who had been sent on to prepare, was busy unpacking in a corner of the room. 'they say, miss louisa,' she interposed, 'that mr. frost is going to be married to a great heiress--his cousin, miss ponsonby, at no. .' isabel requited the forwardness by silently leaving the room with the sisters, and virginia apologized for not having been more cautious than to lead to such subjects. 'it is all gossip,' she said, angrily; 'mr. dynevor would never marry for money.' 'nay, let us find in her an adeline,' said isabel. the next day, miss mercy had hurried into no. , to declare that the ladies were all that was charming, but that their servants gave themselves airs beyond credence, especially the butler, who played the guitar, and insisted on a second table; when there was a peal of the bell, and mary from her post of observation 'really believed it was lady conway herself;' whereupon miss mercy, without listening to persuasions, popped into the back drawing room to effect her retreat. lady conway was all eagerness and cordiality, enchanted to renew her acquaintance, venturing so early a call in hopes of prevailing on mrs. ponsonby to come out with her to take a drive. she conjured up recollections of mary's childhood, declared that she looked to her for drawing isabel out, and was extremely kind and agreeable. mary thought her delightful, with something of louis's charm of manner; and mrs. ponsonby believed it no acting, for lady conway was sincerely affable and affectionate, with great warmth and kindness, and might have been all that was excellent, had she started into life with a different code of duty. so there was to be an intimacy. for fitzjocelyn's sake, as well as for the real good-nature of the advances, mrs. ponsonby would not shrink back more than befitted her self-respect. of that quality she had less than mrs. frost, who, with her innate punctilious spirit, avoided all favours or patronage. it was curious to see the gentle old lady fire up with all the dignity of the pendragons, at the least peril of incurring an obligation, and, though perfectly courteous, easy, and obliging, she contrived to keep at a greater distance than if she had been mistress of cheveleigh. there, she would have remembered that both she and lady conway were aunts to louis; at northwold, her care was to become beholden for nothing that she could not repay. lady conway did her best, when driving out with mrs. ponsonby, to draw her into confidence. there were tender reminiscences from her heart of poor sweet louisa, tearful inquiries respecting her last weeks, certainties that mrs. ponsonby had been of great use to her; for, poor darling, she had been thoughtless--so much to turn her head. there was cause for regret in their own education--there was then so much less attention to essentials. lady conway could not have borne to bring up her own girls as she herself and her sisters had grown up; she had chosen a governess who made religion the first object, and she was delighted to see them all so attached to her; she had never had any fears of their being too serious--people had learnt to be reasonable now, did not insist on the impracticable, did not denounce moderate gaieties, as had once been done to the alarm of poor louisa. sweetest louisa's son! she could not speak too warmly of him, and she declared herself highly gratified by mr. mansell's opinion of his modesty, attention, and good sense. mr. mansell was an excellent judge, he had such as opinion of lord ormersfield's public character. and, at a safe interval, she mentioned the probability that beauchastel might be settled on isabel, if she should marry so as to please mr. mansell: he cared for connexion more than for wealth; if he had a weakness, it was for rank. mrs. ponsonby thought it fair that the earl should be aware of these facts. he smiled ironically. he left his card with his sister-in-law, and, to have it over while louis was safe at oxford, invited the party to spend a day at ormersfield, with mrs. frost to entertain them. he was far too considerate of the feelings that he attributed to the ponsonbys to ask them to come; and as three out of the six in company were more or less in a state of haughtiness and coolness, lady conway's graces failed entirely; and poor innocent virginia and louisa protested that they had never spent so dull a day, and that they could not believe their cousin fitzjocelyn could belong to such a tiresome place. isabel, who had undergone more dull days than they had, contrived to get through it by torturing adeline with utter silence of all tidings from the east, and by a swarm of suitors, with the fantastic viscount foremost. she never was awake from her dream until mr. holdsworth came to dinner, and was so straightforward and easy that he thawed every one. afterwards, he never failed to return an enthusiastic reply to the question that all the neighbourhood were asking each other--namely, whether they had seen miss conway. no one was a more devoted admirer than the lady of eschalott, whose webs had a bad chance when there was one glimpse of miss conway to be obtained from the window, and the vision of whose heart was that mrs. martha might some day let her stand in the housemaid's closet, to behold her idol issue forth in the full glory of an evening dress--a thing charlotte had read of, but never seen anything nearer to it than miss walby coming to tea, and her own miss clara in the scantiest of all white muslins. but mrs. martha was in an unexampled state of vixenish crossness, and snapped venomously at mild mrs. beckett for the kindest offers of sparing charlotte to assist her in her multiplied labours. she seemed to be running after time all day long, with five dinners and teas upon her hands, poor woman, and allowing herself not the slightest relaxation, except to rush in for a few seconds to no. , to indulge herself by inveighing against the whole of the fine servants; and yet she was so proud of having lodgers at all, that she hated them for nothing so much as for threatening to go away. the object of her bitterest invectives was the fastidious butler, mr. delaford, who by her account could do nothing for himself, grudged her mistresses their very sitting-room, drank wine with the ladies' maids like a gentleman, and ordered fish for the second table; talked of having quitted a duke, and submitting to live with lady conway because he compassionated unprotected females, and my lady was dependent on him for the care of sir walter in the holidays. to crown his offences, he never cleaned his own plate, but drew sketches and played the guitar! moreover, mrs. martha had her notions that he was making that sickly frenchified maid of miss conway's much too fond of him; and as to his calling himself mr. delaford--why, mrs. martha had a shrewd suspicion that he was some kin to her first cousin's brother-in-law's shopman's wife in tottenham-court-road, whose name she knew was ford, and who had been picked out of a gutter! the establishment of such a fact appeared as if it would be the triumph of mrs. martha's life. in the meantime, she more than hinted that she would wear herself to the bone rather than let charlotte arnold into the house; and jane, generally assenting, though seldom going all lengths, used to divert the conversation by comparisons with mr. frampton's politeness and consideration. he never came to no. to give trouble, only to help. the invectives produced on charlotte's mind an effect the reverse of what was intended. mr. delaford, a finer gentleman than mr. frampton and mr. poynings, must be a wonder of nature. the guitar--redolent of serenades and spanish cloaks--oh! but once to see and hear it! the very rudeness of mrs. martha's words, so often repeated, gave her a feeling in favour of their object. she had known mrs. martha unjust before. poor tom! if he had only been a spaniard, he would have sung about the white dove--his pretty thought--in a serenade, but then he might have poignarded mr. james in his passion, which would have been less agreeable--she supposed he had forgotten her long ago--and so much the better! it was a sunday evening. every one was gone to church except charlotte, who was left to keep house. though november, it was not cold, the day had been warm and showery, and the full moon had risen in the most glorious brightness, riding in a sky the blue of which looked almost black by contrast with her brilliancy. charlotte stood at the back door, gazing at the moon walking in brightness, and wandered into the garden, to enjoy what to her was beyond all other delights, reading gessner's death of abel by moonlight. there was quite sufficient light, even if she had not known the idyll almost by heart; and in a trance of dreamy, undefined delight, she stood beside the dark ivy-covered wall, each leaf glistening in the moonbeams, which shed a subdued pearliness over her white apron and collar, paled but gave a shadowy refinement to her features, and imparted a peculiar soft golden gloss to the fair braids of hair on her modest brow. a sound of opening the back gate made her give one of her violent starts; but before she could spring into the shelter of the house, she was checked by the civil words, 'i beg your pardon, i was mistaken--i took this for no. .' 'three doors off--' began charlotte, discovering, with a shy thrill of surprise and pleasure, that she had been actually accosted by the great mr. delaford; and the moonlight, quite as becoming to him as to her, made him an absolute italian count, tall, dark, pale, and whiskered. he did not go away at once, he lingered, and said softly, 'i perceive that you partake my own predilection for the moonlight hour.' charlotte would have been delighted, had it not been a great deal harder to find an answer than if the old lord had asked her a question; but she simpered and blushed, which probably did just as well. mr. delaford supposed she knew the poet's lines-- 'how sweet the moonlight sleeps on yonder bank--' 'oh yes, sir--so sweet!' exclaimed the lady of eschalott, under her breath, though yonder bank was only represented by the chequer-work of mrs. ponsonby's latticed trellis; and mr. delaford proceeded to quote the whole passage, in a deep mellow voice, but with a great deal of affectation; and charlotte gasped, 'so beautiful!' 'i perceive that you have a fine taste for poetry,' said mr. delaford, so graciously, that charlotte presumed to say, 'oh, sir! is it true that you can play the guitar?' he smiled upon her tone of veneration, and replied, 'a trifle--a little instrumental melody was a great resource. if his poor performance would afford her any gratification, he would fetch his guitar.' 'oh, sir--thank you--a psalm-tune, perhaps. it is sunday--if you would be so kind.' he smiled superciliously as he regretted that his music was not of that description, and charlotte felt ready to sink into the earth at the indignity she had done the guitar in forgetting that it could accompany anything but such songs as valancourt sang to emily. she begged his pardon humbly; and he declared that he had a great respect for a lady's scruples, and should be happy to meet her another evening. 'if mrs. beckett would allow her,' said charlotte, overpowered with gratitude: 'there would be the moon full to-morrow--how delightful!' he could spare a short interval between the dinner and the tea; and with this promise he took leave. honest little charlotte told mrs. beckett the whole story, and all her eager wishes for to-morrow evening; and jane sighed and puzzled herself, and knew it would make martha very angry, but could not help being goodnatured. jane had a great deference for martha's strong, rough character; but then martha had never lived in a great house, and did not know 'what was what,' nor the difference between 'low people' and upper servants. so jane acted chaperon as far as her easy discretion went, and had it to say to her own conscience, and to the angry martha, that he never said one word that need offend any young woman. there was a terrible storm below-stairs in the house beautiful at the idea of delaford taking up with mrs. frost's little kitchen-maid--delaford, the lady's-maid killer par excellence, wherever lady conway went, and whose coquetries whitened the cheeks of miss conway's poor marianne, the object of his attentions whenever he had no one else in view. he had not known charlotte to be a kitchen-maid when he first beheld her, and her fair beauty and retiring grace had had full scope, assisted by her veneration for himself; and now the scorn of the grand mrs. fanshawe, and the amusement of teasing marianne, only made him the more bent on patronizing 'the little rustic,' as he called her. he was deferential to mrs. beckett, who felt herself in her element in discussing plate, china, and large establishments with him; and he lent books, talked poetry, and played the guitar to charlotte, and even began to take her portrait, with her mouth all on one side. delaford was an admirable servant, said the whole conway family; he was trusted as entirely as he represented, and lady conway often gave him charge over her son in sports and expeditions beyond ladies' management: he was, in effect, nearly the ruler of the household, and never allowed his lady to go anywhere if he did not approve. if it had not been for the 'little rustic's' attractions, perhaps he might have made strong demonstrations against the house beautiful. little did miss faithfull know the real cause of her receiving or retaining her lodgers. chapter xv. motley the only wear. for better far than passion's glow, or aught of worldly choice, to listen his own will to know, and, listening, hear his voice. the angel of marriage--rev. i. williams. the friendships that grew up out of sight were far more effective than anything that lady conway could accomplish on the stage. miss king and the miss faithfulls found each other out at once, and the governess was entreated to knock at the door at the bottom of the stairs whenever her pupils could spare her. then came eager wishes from her pupils to be admitted to the snuggery, and they were invited to see the curiosities. isabel believed the 'very good' was found, and came with her sisters. she begged to be allowed to help in their parish work, under miss mercy faithfull's guidance; and sir roland stood still, while she fancied she was learning to make little frocks, but really listening to their revelations of so new a world. she went out with miss mercy--she undertook a class and a district, and began to be happier than ever before; though how much of the absolute harder toil devolved on miss king, neither she nor the governess understood. this led to intercourse with mary ponsonby; and isabel was a very different person in that homely, friendly parlour, from the lofty, frigid miss conway of the drawing-room. cold hauteur melted before mary's frank simplicity, and they became friends as fast as two ladies could beyond the age of romantic plunges, where on one side there was good-will without enthusiasm, on the other enthusiasm and reserve. they called each other 'miss conway' and 'miss ponsonby,' and exchanged no family secrets; but they were, for all that, faster friends than young ladies under twenty might imagine. one winter's day, the crisp, exhilarating frost had lured them far along the high road beyond mr. calcott's park palings, talking over isabel's favourite theme, what to wish for her little brother, when the sound of a large clock striking three made isabel ask where she was. 'it was the stable clock at ormersfield,' said mary, 'did you not know we were on that road?' 'no, i did not.' and isabel would have turned, but mary begged her to take a few steps up the lane, that they might see how lord fitzjocelyn's new cottages looked. isabel complied, and added, after a pause, 'are you one of lord fitzjocelyn's worshippers?' 'i should not like to worship any one,' said mary, looking straightforward. 'i am very fond of him, because i have known him all my life. and he is so good!' 'then i think i may consider you exempt! it is the only fault i have to find with northwold. you are the only person who does not rave about him--the only person who has not mentioned his name.' 'have i not? i think that was very unkind of me--' 'very kind to me,' said isabel. 'i meant, to him,' said mary, blushing; 'if you thought that i did not think most highly of him--' 'don't go on! i was just going to trust to you for a calm, dispassionate statement of his merits, and i shall soon lose all my faith in you.' 'my mother--' began mary; but just then lord ormersfield came forth from one of the cottages, and encountered the young ladies. he explained that fitzjocelyn was coming home next week, and he had come to see how his last orders had been executed, since frampton and the carpenter had sometimes chosen to think for themselves. he was very anxious that all should be right, and, after a few words, revealed a perplexity about ovens and boilers, in which mary's counsel would be invaluable. so, with apologies and ceremonies to miss conway, they entered, and isabel stood waiting in the dull kitchen, smelling of raw plaster, wondering at the extreme eagerness of the discussion with the mason over the yawning boiler, the earl referring to his son's letter, holding it half-a-yard off, and at last giving it to mary to decipher by the waning light. so far had it waned, that when the fixtures had all been inspected, lord ormersfield declared that the young ladies must not return alone, and insisted on escorting them home. every five minutes some one thought of something to say: there was an answer, and by good luck a rejoinder; then all died away, and mary pondered how her mother would in her place have done something to draw the two together, but she could not. she feared the walk had made isabel more adverse to all connected with ormersfield than even previously; for the ormersfield road was avoided, and the question as to fitzjocelyn's merits was never renewed. mary thought his cause would be safest in the hands of his great champion, who was coming home from oxford with him, and was to occupy his vacation in acting tutor to little sir walter conway. louis came, the day after his return, with his father, to make visits in the terrace, and was as well-behaved and uninteresting as morning calling could make him. he was looking very well--his general health quite restored, and his ankle much better; though he was still forbidden to ride, and could not walk far. 'you must come and see me, aunt kitty,' he said; 'i am not available for coming in to see you. i'm reading, and i've made a resignation of myself,' he added, with a slight blush, and debonnaire shrug, glancing to see that his father was occupied with james. they were to dine with lady conway on the following tuesday. in the interim, no one beheld them except jem, who walked to ormersfield once or twice for some skating for his little pupil walter, and came back reporting that louis had sold himself, body and soul, to his father. clara came home, a degree more civilized, and burning to confide to louis that she had thought of his advice, had been the less miserable for it, and had much more on which to consult him. she could not conceive why even grandmamma would not consent to her accompanying the skaters; though she was giving herself credit for protesting that she was not going on the ice, only to keep poor louis company, while the others were skating. she was obliged to defer her hopes of seeing him until tuesday, when she had been asked to drink tea in the school-room, and appear in the evening. mrs. frost had consented, as a means of exempting herself from the party. and clara's incipient feminine nature began to flutter at her first gaiety. the event was magnified by a present from jem, of a broad rose-coloured sash and white muslin dress, with a caution that she was not to consider the tucks up to the waist as a provision for future growth. she flew to exhibit the finery to the miss faithfulls, and to consult on the making-up, and, to her consternation, was caught by miss conway kneeling on the floor, being measured by miss salome. to isabel, there was a sort of touching novelty in the simplicity that could glory in pink ribbon when embellished by being a brother's gift; she looked on with calm pleasure at such homely excitement, and even fetched some bows of her own, for examples, and offered to send marianne down with patterns. clara was enchanted to recognise in miss conway the vision of the euston-square platform. the grand, quiet style of beauty was exactly fitted to impress a mind like hers, so strongly imbued with sentiments like those of louis, and regarding isabel as necessarily louis's destiny, she began to adore her accordingly, with a girl-reverence, quite as profound, far more unselfish, and little less ardent than that of man for woman. that a female vision of perfection should engross clara's imagination, was a step towards softening her; but, poor child! the dawn of womanhood was to come in a painful burst. surprised at her own aspect, with her light hair dressed by jane and wreathed with ivy leaves by grandmamma, and her skirts so full that she could not refrain from making a gigantic cheese, she was inspected and admired by granny and jane, almost approved by jem himself; and, exalted by the consciousness of being well-dressed, she repaired to the school-room tea at the house beautiful. virginia and louisa were, she thought, very poor imitations of louis's countenance--the one too round, the other too thin and sallow; but both they, their brother, and miss king were so utterly unlike anything at school, that she was at once at ease, and began talking with walter over schoolboy fun, in which he could not be a greater proficient than herself. walter struck up a violent friendship for her on the spot, and took to calling her 'a fellow,' in oblivion of her sex; and virginia and louisa fell into ecstasies of laughter, which encouraged clara and walter to compote with each other which should most astonish their weak minds. in the drawing-room, lady conway spoke so graciously, that clara, was quite distressed at looking over her head. mary looked somewhat oppressed, saying her mother had not been so well that day; and she was disposed to keep in the background, and occupy herself with clara; but it was quite contrary to the giraffe's notions to be engrossed by any one when louis was coming. as if she had divined mary's intentions of keeping her from importuning him, she was continually gazing at the door, ready at once to claim his attention. at first, the gentlemen only appeared in a black herd at the door, where mr. calcott had stopped lord ormersfield short, in his eagerness to impress on him the views of the county on a police-bill in course of preparation for the next session. the other magistrates congregated round; but james frost and sydney calcott had slipped past, to the piano where lady conway had sent miss calcott and isabel. 'why did not fitzjocelyn, come too?' was murmured by the young group in the recess opposite the door; and when at last he became visible, leaning against the wall, listening to the squire, virginia declared he was going to serve them just as he used at beauchastel. 'oh, no! he shan't--i'll rescue him!' exclaimed clara; and leaping up to her cameleopard attitude, she sprang forward, and, with a voice audible in an unlucky lull of the music, she exclaimed, 'louis! louis! don't you see that i am here?' as he turned, with a look of surprise and almost rebuke, her own words came back to her ears as they must have sounded to others; her face became poppy-coloured, nothing light but her flaxen eyebrows; and she scarcely gave her hand to be shaken. 'no, i did not know you were coming,' he said; and almost partaking her confusion, as he felt all eyes upon her, he looked in vain for a refuge for her. how welcome was mary's kind face and quiet gesture, covering poor clara's retreat as she sank into a dark nook, sheltered by the old black cabinet! louis thanked mary by a look, as much as to say, 'just like you,' and was glad to perceive that james had not been present. he had gone to ask miss faithfull to supply the missing stanzas of a jacobite song, and just then returned, saying that she knew them, but could not remember them. fitzjocelyn, however, capped the fragment, and illustrated it with some anecdotes that interested miss conway. james had great hopes that she was going to see him to the best advantage, but still there was a great drawback in the presence of sydney calcott. idolized at home, successful abroad, young calcott had enough of the prig to be a perpetual irritation to jem frost, all the more because he could never make louis resent, nor accept, as other than natural, the goodnatured supercilious patronage of the steady distinguished senior towards the idle junior. jacobite legends and stuart relics would have made miss conway oblivious of everything else; but sydney calcott must needs divert the conversation from that channel by saying, 'ah! there fitzjocelyn is in his element. he is a perfect handbook to the byways of history.' 'for the diffusion of useless knowledge?' said louis. 'illustrated by the examination, when the only fact you could adduce about the argonauts was that charles v. founded the order of the golden fleece.' 'i beg your pardon; it was his great-grandfather. i had read my quentin durward too well for that.' 'i suspect,' said isabel, 'that we had all rather be examined in our quentin durward than our charles v. 'ah!' said young calcott, 'i had all my dates at my fingers' ends when i went up for the modern history prize. now my sister could beat me.' 'a proof of what i always say,' observed louis, 'that it is lost labour to read for an examination.' 'from personal experience?' asked sydney. 'a strasburg goose nailed down and crammed before a fire, becomes a strasburg pie,' said louis. never did isabel look more bewildered, and sydney did not seem at once to catch the meaning. james added, 'a goose destined to fulfil the term of existence is not crammed, but the pie stimulus is not required to prevent it from starving.' 'is your curious and complimentary culinary fable aimed against reading or against examinations?' asked sydney. 'against neither; only against the connecting preposition.' 'then you mean to find a superhuman set of students?' 'no; i'm past that. men and examinations will go on as they are; the goose will run wild, the requirements will be increased, he will nail himself down in his despair; and he who crams hardest, and has the hottest place will gain.' 'then how is the labour lost?' asked isabel. 'you are new to fitzjocelyn's paradoxes,' said sydney; as if glorying in having made louis contradict himself. 'the question is, what is lost labour?' said louis. both sydney calcott and miss conway looked as if they thought he was arguing on after a defeat. 'calcott is teaching her his own obtuseness!' thought james, in a pet; and he exclaimed, 'is the aim to make men or winners of prizes?' 'the aim of prizes is commonly supposed to be to make men,' loftily observed sydney. 'exactly so; and, therefore, i would not make them too analogous to the strasburg system,' said louis. 'i would have them close, searching, but not admitting of immediate cramming.' 'pray how would you bring that about?' 'by having no subject on which superficial knowledge could make a show.' 'oh! i see whither you are working round! that won't do now, my dear fellow; we must enlarge our field, or we shall lay ourselves open to the charge of being narrow-minded.' 'you have not strength of mind to be narrow-minded!' said louis, shaking his head. 'ah! well, i have no more to say; my trust is in the narrow mind, the only expansive one--' he was at that moment called away; lord ormersfield's carriage had been announced, and his son was not in a quarter of the room where he wished to detain him. james could willingly have bitten sydney calcott for the observation, 'poor fitzjocelyn! he came out strong to-night.' 'very clever,' said isabel, wishing to gratify james. 'oh yes, very; if he had ever taken pains,' said sydney. 'there is often something in his paradoxes. after all, i believe he is reading hard for his degree, is he not, jem? his feelings would not be hurt by the question, for he never piqued himself upon his consistency.' luckily for the general peace, the calcott household was on the move, and jem solaced himself on their departure by exclaiming, 'well done, strasburg system! a high-power greek-imbibing machine, he may be, but as to comprehending fitzjocelyn--' 'nay,' said isabel, 'i think lord fitzjocelyn ought to carry about a pocket expositor, if he will be so very startling. he did not stay to tell us what to understand by narrow minds.' 'did you ever hear of any one good for anything, that was not accused of a narrow mind?' exclaimed james. 'if that were what he meant,' said isabel,--'but he said his trust was in the narrow mind--' 'in what is popularly so called,' said james. 'i think,' said mary, leaning forward, and speaking low, 'that he did not mean it to be explained away. i think he was going to say that the heart may be wide, but the mind must be so far narrow, that it will accept only the one right, not the many wrong.' 'i thought narrowness of mind consisted in thinking your own way the only right one,' said isabel. 'every one says so,' said mary, 'and that is why he says it takes strength of mind to be narrow-minded. is not the real evil, the judging people harshly, because their ways are not the same; not the being sure that the one way is the only right! others may be better than ourselves, and may be led right in spite of their error, but surely we are not to think all paths alike-- 'and is that lord fitzjocelyn's definition of a narrow mind?' said isabel. 'it sounds like faith and love. are you sure you did not make it yourself, miss ponsonby?' 'i could not,' said mary, blushing, as she remembered one sunday evening when he had said something to that effect, which had insensibly overthrown the theory in which she had been bred up, namely, that all the sincere were right, and yet that, practically every one was to be censured, who did not act exactly like aunt melicent. she rose to take leave, and clara clung to her, emerging from the shade of her cabinet with colour little mitigated since her disappearance. james would have come with them, but was detained by lady conway for a few moments longer than it took them to put on their shawls; and clara would not wait. she dragged mary down the steps into the darkness, and groaned out, 'o mary, he can never speak to me again!' 'my dear! he will not recollect it. it was very awkward, but new places and new people often do make us forget ourselves.' 'everybody saw, everybody heard! o, i shall never bear to meet one of them again!' 'i think very few saw or heard--' began mary. 'he did! i did! that's enough! the rest is nothing! i have been as bad as any one at school! i shall never hold up my head there again as i have done, and louis! oh!' 'dear child, it will not be remembered. you only forgot how tall you were, and that you were not at home. he knows you too well to care.' james shouted from behind to know why they had not been let into the house; and as clara rushed in at the door and he walked on with mary to leave her at home and fetch his grandmother, who had been spending the evening with mrs. ponsonby, he muttered, 'i don't know which is most intolerable! he neglects her, talks what, if it be not nonsense, might as well be; and as if she were not ready enough to misunderstand, sydney calcott must needs thrust in his wits to embroil her understanding. mary! can't you get her to see the stuff he is made of?' 'if she cannot do that for herself, no persuasion of mine will make her,' said mary. 'no! you do not half appreciate him either! no one does! and yet you could, if you tried, do something with her! i see she does not think you prejudiced. you made an impression to-night.' mary felt some consternation. could it depend on her? she could speak naturally, and from her heart in defence of louis when occasion served; but something within her forbade the thought of doing so on a system. was that something wrong! she could not answer; but contented herself with the womanly intuition that showed her that anything of persuasion in the present state of affairs would be ineffectual and unbecoming. meantime, clara had fled to her little room, to bid her childhood farewell in a flood of bitter tears. exaggerated shame, past disdain of the foibles of others, the fancy that she was publicly disgraced and had forfeited louis's good opinion, each thought renewed her sobs; but the true pang was the perception that old times were passed for ever. he might forgive, he would still be friend and cousin; but womanhood had broken on her, and shown that perfect freedom was at an end. happy for her that she wept but for the parting from a playfellow! happy that her feelings were young and undeveloped, free from all the cruel permanence that earlier vanity or self-consciousness might have given; happy that it could be so freely washed away! when she had spent her sobs, she could resolve to be wise and steady, so as to be a fit governess to his children; and the tears flowed at the notion of being so distant and respectful to his lordship. but what stories she could tell them of his boyhood! and in the midst of--'now, my dears, i will tell you about your papa when he was a little boy,' she fell asleep. that party was a thing to be remembered with tingling cheeks for life, and clara dreaded her next meeting with louis; but the days passed on without his coming to the terrace, and the terror began to wear off, especially as she did not find that any one else remembered her outbreak. mary guarded against any unfavourable impression by a few simple words to isabel and miss king as to the brotherly terms that had hitherto prevailed, and poor clara's subsequent distress. clara came in for some of the bright tints in which her brother was viewed at the house beautiful; walter was very fond of her, and she had been drawn into a friendship for virginia, cemented in the course of long walks, when the schoolroom party always begged for mr. and miss dynevor, because no one else could keep walter from disturbing louisa's nerves by teasing her pony or sliding on dubious ice. as mrs. ponsonby often joined in lady conway's drive, mary and isabel were generally among the walkers; and mary was considered by louisa as an inestimable pony-leader, and an inexhaustible magazine of stories about sharks, earthquakes, llamas, and icebergs. james and miss conway generally had either book or principle to discuss, and were usually to be found somewhat in the rear, either with or without miss king. one day, however, james gave notice that he should not be at their service that afternoon; and as soon as walter's lessons had been despatched, he set out with rapid steps for ormersfield park, clenching his teeth together every now and then with his determinate resolution that he would make louis know his own mind, and would 'stand no nonsense.' 'ah! james, good morning,' said the earl, as he presented himself in the study. 'you will find louis in his room. i wish you would make him come out with you. he is working harder than is good for him.' he spoke of his son far differently from former times; but jem only returned a judiciously intoned 'poor fellow.' lord ormersfield looked at him anxiously, and, hesitating, said, 'you do not think him out of spirits?' 'oh, he carries it off very well. i know no one with so strong a sense of duty,' replied jem, never compassionate to the father. again the earl paused, then said, 'he may probably speak more unreservedly to you than to me.' 'he shuns the topic. he says there is no use in aggravating the feelings by discussion. he would fain submit in heart as well as in will.' lord ormersfield sighed, but did not appear disposed to say more; and, charitably hoping that a dagger had been implanted in him, jem ran up-stairs, and found louis sitting writing at a table, which looked as if mary had never been near it. 'jem! that's right! i've not seen you this age.' 'what are you about?' 'i wanted particularly some one to listen. it is an essay on the police--' 'is this earnest?' 'sober earnest. sir miles and all that set are anxious to bring the matter forward, and my father has been getting it up, as he does whatever he may have to speak upon. his eyes are rather failing for candle-light work, so i have been helping him in the evening, till it struck me that it was a curious subject to trace in history,--the censors, the attempts in germany and spain, to supply the defective law, the spanish and italian dread of justice. i became enamoured of the notion, and when i have thrown all the hints together, i shall try to take in my father by reading them to him as an article in the quarterly.' 'oh, very well. if your soul is there, that is an end of the matter.' 'of what matter?' 'things cannot run on in this way. it is not a thing to lay upon me to go on working in your cause with her when you will not stir a step in your own behalf.' 'i am very much obliged to you, but i never asked you to work in my cause. i beg your pardon, jem, don't fly into a welsh explosion. no one ever meant more kindly and generously--' he checked himself in amaze at the demonstration he had elicited; but, as it was not accompanied with words, he continued, 'no one can be more grateful to you than i; but, as far as i can see, there is nothing for it but to be thankful that no more harm has been done, and to let the matter drop;' and he dropped his hand with just so much despondency as to make jem think him worth storming at, instead of giving him up; and he went over the old ground of louis being incapable of true passion and unworthy of such a being if he could yield her without an effort, merely for the sake of peace. 'i say, jem,' said louis, quietly, 'all this was bad enough on neutral ground; it is mere treason under my father's own roof, and i will have no more of it.' 'then,' cried james, with a strange light in his eyes, 'you henceforth renounce all hopes--all pretensions?' 'i never had either hope or pretension. i do not cease to think her, as i always did, the loveliest creature i ever beheld. i cannot help that; and the state i fell into after being with her on tuesday, convinced me that it is safest to stay here and fill up time and thought as best i may.' 'for once, fitzjocelyn,' said james, with a gravity not natural to him, 'i think better of your father than you do. i would neither treat him as so tyrannical nor so prejudiced as your conduct supposes him.' 'how? he is as kind as possible. we never had so much in common.' 'yes. your submission so far, and the united testimony of the terrace, will soften him. show your true sentiments. a little steadiness and perseverance, and you will prevail.' 'don't make me feverish, jem.' a summons to lord fitzjocelyn to come down to a visitor in the library cut short the discussion, and james took leave at once, neither cousin wishing to resume the conversation. the darts had not been injudiciously aimed. the father and son were both rendered uneasy. they had hitherto been unusually comfortable together, and though the life was unexciting, louis's desire to be useful to his father, and the pressing need of working for his degree, kept his mind fairly occupied. though wistful looks might sometimes be turned along the northwold road, when he sallied forth in the twilight for his constitutional walk, he did not analyse which number of the terrace was the magnet, and he avoided testing to the utmost the powers of his foot. the affection and solicitude shown for him at home claimed a full return; nor had james been greatly mistaken in ascribing something to the facility of nature that yielded to force of character. but jem had stirred up much that louis would have been contented to leave dormant; and the hope that he had striven to excite came almost teazingly to interfere with the passive acquiescence of an indolent will. perturbed and doubtful, he was going to seek counsel as usual of the open air, as soon as the visitor was gone, but his father followed him into the hall, asking whither he was going. 'i do not know. i had been thinking of trying whether i can get as far as marksedge.' marksedge would be fatal to the ankle, solitude to the spirits, thought the earl; and he at once declared his intention of walking with his son as far as he should let him go. louis was half vexed, half flattered, and they proceeded in silence, till conscious of being ruffled, and afraid of being ungracious, he made a remark on the farm that they were approaching, and learnt in return that the lease was nearly out, the tenant did not want a renewal, and that richardson intended to advertise. he breathed a wish that it were in their own hands, and this led to a statement of the condition of affairs, the same to which a year before he had been wilfully deaf, and to which he now attended chiefly for the sake of gratifying his father, though he better understood what depended on it. at least, it was making the earl insensible to the space they were traversing, and the black outlines of marksedge were rising on him before he was aware. then he would have turned, but louis pleaded that having come so far, he should be glad to speak to madison's grandfather, and one or two other old people, and he prevailed. lord ormersfield was not prepared for the real aspect of the hamlet. 'richardson always declared that the cottages were kept in repair,' he said. 'richardson never sees them. he trusts to reeves.' 'the people might do something themselves to keep the place decent.' 'they might; but they lose heart out of sight of respectability. i will just knock at this door--i will not detain you a moment.' the dark smoky room, damp, ill-paved floor, and cracked walls produced their effect; and the name and voice of the inmate did more. lord ormersfield recognised a man who had once worked in the garden, and came forward and spoke, astonished and shocked to find him prematurely old. the story was soon told; there had been a seasoning fever as a welcome to the half-reclaimed moorland; ague and typhus were frequent visitors, and disabling rheumatism a more permanent companion to labourers exhausted by long wet walks in addition to the daily toil. at an age less than that of the earl himself, he beheld a bowed and broken cripple. fitzjocelyn perceived his victory, and forebore to press it too hastily, lest he should hurt his father's feelings; and walked on silently, thinking how glad mary would be to hear of this expedition, and what a pity it was that the unlucky passage of last august should have interfered with their comfortable friendship. at last the earl broke silence by saying, 'it is very unfortunate;' and louis echoed, 'very.' 'my poor uncle dynevor! he was, without exception, the most wrong-headed person i ever came in contact with, yet so excessively plausible and eager that he carried my poor father entirely along with him. louis! nothing is so ruinous as to surrender the judgment.' fully assenting, louis wondered whether marksedge would serve no purpose save the elucidation of this truism, and presently another ensued. 'mischief is sooner done than repaired. as i have been allowing you, there has never been ready money at command.' 'i thought there were no more mortgages to be paid off. the rents of the fitzjocelyn estate and the houses in the lower town must come to something.' he was then told how these, with his mother's fortune, had been set apart to form a fund for his establishment, and for the first time he was shown the object of arrangements against which he had often in heart rebelled. his first impulse was to exclaim that it was a great pity, and that he could not bear that his father should have denied himself on his account. 'do you think these things are sacrifices to me?' said the earl. 'my habits were formed long ago.' 'mine have been formed on yours,' said louis. 'i should be encumbered by such an income as you propose unless you would let me lay it out in making work for the men and improving the estate, and that i had rather you undertook, for i should be certain to do something preposterous, and then be sorry.' 'mrs. ponsonby judged rightly. it was her very advice.' 'then!' cried louis, as if the deed were done. 'you would not find the income too large in the event of your marriage.' 'a most unlikely event!' his father glanced towards him. if there had been a symptom of unhappiness, relenting was near, but it so chanced that marksedge was reigning supreme, and he was chiefly concerned to set aside the supposition as an obstacle to his views. the same notion as james frost's occurred to the earl, that it could not be a tenacious character which could so easily set aside an attachment apparently so fervent, but the resignation was too much in accordance with his desires to render him otherwise than gratified, and he listened with complacency to louis's plans. nothing was fixed, but there was an understanding that all should have due consideration. this settled, louis's mind recurred to the hint which his father had thrown out, and he wondered whether it meant that the present compliance might be further stretched, but he thought it more likely to be merely a reference to ordinary contingencies. things were far too comfortable between him and his father to be disturbed by discussion, and he might ultimately succeed better by submitting, and leaving facts and candour to remove prejudice. to forget perplexity in the amusement of a mystification, he brought down his essay, concealing it ingeniously within a review flanked by blue-books, and, when lord ormersfield was taking out a pair of spectacles with the reluctance of a man not yet accustomed to them, he asked him if he would like to hear an article on the police question. at first the earl showed signs of nodding, and said there was nothing to the purpose in all the historical curiosities at the outset, so that louis, alarmed lest he should absolutely drop asleep, skipped all his favourite passages, and came at once to the results of the recent inquiries. the earl was roused. who could have learnt those facts? that was telling--well put, but how did he get hold of it. the very thing he had said himself--what quarterly was it? surely the christmas number was not out. hitherto louis had kept his countenance and voice, but in an hiatus, where he was trying to extemporize, his father came to look over his shoulder to see what ailed the book, and, glancing upwards with a merry debonnaire face, he made a gesture as if convicted. 'do you mean that this is your own composition?' 'i beg your pardon for the pious fraud!' 'it is very good! excellently done!' said lord ormersfield. 'there are redundancies--much to betray an unpractised hand--but--stay, let me hear the rest--' very differently did he listen now, broad awake, attacking the logic of every third sentence, or else double shotting it with some ponderous word, and shaking his head at utopian views of crime to be dried up at the fountain head. next, he must hear the beginning, and ruthlessly picked it to pieces, demolishing all the vehme gericht and santissima hermandad as irrelevant, and, when he had made louis ashamed and vexed with the whole production, astonishing him by declaring that it would tell, and advising him to copy it out fair with these _little_ alterations. these _little_ alterations would, as he was well aware, evaporate all the spirit, and though glad to have pleased his father, his perseverance quailed before the task; but he said no more than thank you. the next day, before he had settled to anything, lord ormersfield came to his room, saying, 'you will be engaged with your more important studies for the next few hours. can you spare the paper you read to me last night?' 'i can spare it better than you can read it, i fear,' said louis, producing a mass of blotted ms in all his varieties of penmanship, and feeling a sort of despair at the prospect of being brought to book on all his details. his father carried it off, and they did not meet again till late in the day, when the first thing louis heard was, 'i thought it worth while to have another opinion on your manuscript before re-writing it. i tried to read it to mrs. ponsonby, but we were interrupted, and i left it with her.' presently after. 'i have made an engagement for you. lady conway wishes that you should go to luncheon with her to-morrow. i believe she wants to consult you about some birth-day celebration.' louis was much surprised, and somewhat entertained. 'when will you have the carriage?' pursued the earl. 'will not you come?' 'no, i am not wanted. in fact, i do not see how you can be required, but anything will serve as an excuse. in justice, however, i should add that our friends at the terrace are disposed to think well of the younger part of the family.' except for the cold constraint of the tone, louis could have thought much ground gained, but he was sure that his holiday would be damped by knowing that it was conceded at the cost of much distress and uneasiness. going to northwold early enough for a call at no. , he was greeted by mrs. frost with, 'my dear! what have you been about? i never saw your father so much pleased in his life! he came in on purpose to tell me, and i thought it exceedingly kind. so you took him in completely. what an impudent rogue you always were!' 'i never meant it to go beyond the study. i was obliged to write it down in self-defence, that i might know what he was talking of.' 'i believe he expects you to be even with sydney calcott after all. it is really very clever. where did you get all those funny stories?' 'what! you have gone and read it!' 'ah, ha! mrs. ponsonby gave us a pretty little literary soiree. don't be too proud, it was only ourselves, except that mary brought in miss conway. jem tried to read it, but after he had made that spanish society into 'hammer men dead,' mary got it away from him, and read through as if it had been in print.' 'what an infliction!' 'it is very disrespectful to think us so frivolous. we only wished all reviews were as entertaining.' 'it is too bad, when i only wanted to mystify my father.' 'it serves you right for playing tricks. what have you been doing to him, louis? you will turn him into a doting father before long.' 'what have you done with clara?' 'she goes every day to read italian with miss conway, and the governess is so kind as to give her drawing lessons. she is learning far more than at school, and they are so kind! i should hardly know how to accept it, but jem does not object, and he is really very useful there, spends a great deal of time on the boy, and is teaching the young ladies latin.' 'they are leaving you lonely in the holidays! you ought to come to ormersfield, your nephews would take better care of you.' 'ah! i have my marys. if i were only better satisfied about the dear old one. she is far less well than when she came.' 'indeed! is mary uneasy?' 'she says nothing, but you know how her eye is always on her, and she never seems to have her out of her thoughts. i am afraid they are worried about lima. from what oliver says, i fear mr. ponsonby goes on worse than ever without either his family or his appointment to be a restraint.' 'i hope they do not know all! mary would not believe it, that is one comfort!' 'ah, louis! there are things that the heart will not believe, but which cut it deeply! however, if that could be any comfort to them, he wishes them to spare nothing here. he tells them they may live at the rate of five thousand pounds a-year, poor dears. indeed, he and oliver are in such glory over their equatorial steam navigation, that i expect next to hear of a crash.' 'you don't look as if it would be a very dreadful sound.' 'if it would only bring my poor oliver back to me!' 'yes--nothing would make jem so civil to him as his coming floated in on a plank, wet through, with a little bundle in one hand and a parrot in the other.' mrs. frost gave one of her tender laughs, and filled up the picture. 'jane would open the door, jane would know master oliver's black eyes in a moment--'no, no. _i_ must see him first! if he once looked up i could not miss him, whatever colour he may have turned. i wonder whether he would know me!' 'don't you know that you grow handsomer every year, aunt kitty?' 'don't flatter, sir.' 'well, i most go to my aunt.' he tarried to hear the welcome recital of all the kind deeds of the house of conway. he presently found lady conway awaiting him in the drawing-room, and was greeted with great joy. 'that is well! i hoped to work on your father by telling him i did not approve of young men carrying industry too far--' 'that is not my habit.' 'then it is your excuse for avoiding troublesome relations! no, not a word! i know nothing about the secret that occupied isabel at mrs. ponsonby's select party. but i really wanted you. you are more au fait as to the society here than the ponsonbys and dynevors. ah! when does that come off?' 'what is to come off?' 'miss ponsonby and mr. dynevor. what a good creature he is!' 'i cannot see much likelihood of it, but you are more on the scene of action.' 'she could do much better, with such expectations, but on his account i could not be sorry. it is shocking to think of that nice young sister being a governess. i think it a duty to give her every advantage that may tend to form her. with her connexions and education, i can have no objection to her as a companion to your cousins, and with a few advantages, though she will never be handsome, she might marry well. they are a most interesting family. isabel and i are most anxious to do all in our power for them.' 'clara is obliged,' said louis, with undetected irony, but secret wonder at the dexterity with which the patronage must have been administered so as not to have made the interesting family fly off at a tangent. isabel made her appearance in her almost constant morning dress of soft dove-coloured merino entirely unadorned, and looking more like a maiden in a romance than ever. she had just left adeline standing on the steps of a stone cross, exhorting the provencals to arm against a descent of moorish corsairs, and she held out her hand to fitzjocelyn much as adeline did, when the fantastic viscount professed his intention of flying instead of fighting, and wanted her to sit behind him on his courser. lady conway pronounced her council complete, and propounded the fete which she wished to give on the th of january in honour of louisa's birthday. isabel took up a pencil, and was lost in sketching wayside crosses, and vessels with lateen sails, only throwing in a word or two here and there when necessary. dancing was still, lady conway feared, out of the question with fitzjocelyn. 'and always will be, i suspect. so much for my bargain with clara to dance with her at her first ball!' 'you like dancing?' exclaimed isabel, rejoiced to find another resemblance to the fantastic viscount. 'last year's yeomanry ball was the best fun in the world!' 'there, isabel,' said lady conway, 'you ought to be gratified to find a young man candid enough to allow that he likes it! but since that cannot be, i must find some other plan--' 'what cannot be?' exclaimed louis. 'you don't mean to omit the dancing--' 'it could not be enjoyed without you. your cousins and friends could not bear to see you sitting down--' isabel's lips were compressed, and the foam of her waves laughed scornfully under her pencil. 'they must get accustomed to the melancholy spectacle,' said louis. 'i do not mean to intermit the yeomanry ball, if it take place while i am at home. the chaperons are the best company, after all. reconsider it, my dear aunt, or you will keep me from coming at all.' lady conway was only considering of tableaux, and louis took fire at the notion: he already beheld waverley in his beloved yeomanry suit, isabel as flora, clara as davie gellatley--the character she would most appreciate. isabel roused herself to say that tableaux were very dull work to all save the actors, and soon were mere weariness to them. her stepmother told her she had once been of a different mind, when she had been isabel bruce, kneeling in her cell, the ring before her. 'i was young enough then to think myself isabel,' was her answer, and she drew the more diligently because fitzjocelyn could not restrain an interjection, and a look which meant, 'what an isabel she must have been!' she sat passive while lady conway and louis decked up a scene for flora macivor; but presently it appeared that the waverley of the piece was to be, according to louis, not the proper owner of the yeomanry uniform, but james frost. his aunt exclaimed, and the rehearsals were strong temptation; but he made answer, 'no--you must not reckon on me: my father would not like it.' the manful childishness, the childish manfulness of such a reply, were impenetrable. if his two-and-twenty years did not make him ashamed of saying so, nothing else could, and it covered a good deal. he knew that his father's fastidious pride would dislike his making a spectacle of himself, and thought that it would be presuming unkindly on to-day's liberty to involve himself in what would necessitate terms more intimate than were desired. the luncheon silenced the consultation, which was to be a great secret from the children; but afterwards, when it was resumed, with the addition of james frost, fitzjocelyn was vexed to find the tableaux discarded; not avowedly because he excluded himself from a share, but because the style of people might not understand them. the entertainment was to be a christmas-tree--not so hackneyed a spectacle in the year as in --and louis launched into a world of couplets for mottoes. next came the question of guests, when lady conway read out names from the card-basket, and fitzjocelyn was in favour of everybody, till jem, after many counter-statements, assured lady conway that he was trying to fill her rooms with the most intolerable people in the world. 'my aunt said she wanted to give pleasure.' 'ah! there's nothing so inconvenient to one's friends as good nature. who cares for what is shared indiscriminately?' 'i don't think i can trust fitzjocelyn with my visiting-list just yet,' said lady conway. 'you are too far above to be sensible of the grades beneath, with your place made for you.' 'not at all,' said louis. 'northwold tea-parties were my earliest, most natural dissipation; and i spoke for these good people for my own personal gratification.' 'nay, i can't consent to your deluding lady conway into mrs. walby.' 'if there be any one you wish me to ask, my dear fitzjocelyn--' began lady conway. 'oh no, thank you; jem is quite right. i might have been playing on your unguarded innocence; but i am the worst person in the world to consult; for all the county and all the town are so kind to me, that i don't know whom i could leave out. now, the pendragon there will help you to the degree of gentility that may safely be set to consort together.' 'what an unkind fling!' thought isabel. louis took leave, exclaiming to himself on the stairs, 'there! if comporting oneself like a donkey before the object be a token, i've done it effectually. didn't i know the exclusiveness of the woman? yet, how could i help saying a word for the poor little walbys? and, after all, if they were there, no one would speak to them but aunt kitty and i. and isabel, i am sure she scorned the fastidious nonsense; i saw it in her eye and lip.' after a quarter of an hour spent in hearing her praises from miss faithfull, he betook himself to mrs. ponsonby's, not quite without embarrassment, for he had not been alone with the mother and daughter since august. 'i am glad you did not come before,' said mary, heartily; 'i have just done:' and she returned to her writing-table, while her mother was saying, 'we like it very much.' 'you have not been copying that wretched concern!' exclaimed louis. 'why, mary, you must have been at it all night. it is a week's work.' 'copying is not composing,' said mary. 'but you have mended it, made it consecutive! if i had guessed that my father meant to trouble any one with it!' 'if you take pains with it, it may be very valuable,' said mrs. ponsonby. 'we have marked a few things that you had better revise before it goes to oakstead.' 'goes to oakstead!' said louis, faintly. 'your father talks of sending it, to see if sir miles does not think it might tell well in one of the reviews.' 'i hope not. i should lose all my faith in anonymous criticism, if they admitted such a crude undergraduate's omnium gatherum! besides, what an immense task to make it presentable!' 'is that the root of your humility?' 'possibly. but for very shame i must doctor it, if mary has wasted so much time over it. it does not look so bad in your hand!' 'it struck me whether you had rendered this spanish story right.' 'of course not. i never stuck to my dictionary.' a sound dose of criticism ensued, tempered by repetitions of his father's pleasure, and next came some sympathy and discussion about the farm and marksedge, in which the ladies took their usual earnest part, and mary was as happy as ever in hearing of his progress. he said no word of their neighbours; but he could not help colouring when mary said, as he wished her good-bye, 'we like the party in the house beautiful so much! miss conway is such an acquisition to me! and they are doing all you could ever have wished for clara.' mary was glad that she had said it. louis was not so glad. he thought it must have been an effort, then derided his vanity for the supposition. chapter xvi. the fruit of the christmas-tree age, twine thy brows with fresh spring flowers, and call a train of laughing hours; and bid them dance, and bid them sing: and thou, too, mingle in the ring. wordsworth the th of january was the last day before james and louis meant to return to oxford, jem taking clara on from thence to school. it was to be the farewell to christmas--one much enjoyed in dynevor terrace. fitzjocelyn's absence was almost a relief to clara; she could not make up her mind to see him till she could hope their last encounter had been forgotten; and in the mean time, her anticipations were fixed on the great th. she was aware of what the entertainment would consist, but was in honour bound to conceal her knowledge from virginia and louisa, who on their side affected great excitement and curiosity, and made every ostentation of guessing and peeping. gifts were smuggled into the house from every quarter--some to take their chance, some directed with mottoes droll or affectionate. clara prepared a few trifles, in which she showed that school had done something for her fingers, and committed her little parcels to her brother's care; and miss mercy was the happiest of all, continually knocking at the locked door of the back drawing-room with gilded fir cones, painted banners, or moss birds'-nests, from miss salome. miss king and isabel had undertaken the main business. when roused from her pensive stillness, isabel could be very eager, active, and animated; and she worked with the exhilaration that she could freely enjoy when unrestrained by perceiving that she was wanted to produce an effect. what woman's height and hand could not perform fell to the share of james, who, with his step-ladder and dexterous hands, was invaluable. merrily, merrily did the three work, laughing over their suspended bonbons, their droll contrivances, or predicting the adaptations of their gifts; and more and more gay was the laugh, the tutor more piquant, the governess more keen and clever, the young lady more vivacious, as the twilight darkened, and the tree became more laden, and the streamers and glass balls produced a more brilliant effect. proudly, when the task was accomplished, did they contemplate their work, and predict the aspect of their tinsel and frippery when duly lighted up. then, as they dispersed to dress, james ran home, and hastily tapped at his sister's door. 'what is the matter?' she cried. 'have the tassels come off my purse?' 'nothing of the kind, but--' he came quite in, and looked round restlessly, then hastily said, 'you gave me nothing for miss conway.' 'i wished it very much,' said clara, 'but i could not bear to do anything trumpery for her. oh, if one could give her anything worth having!' 'clara, i had thought--but i did not know if you would like to part with it--' 'i had thought of it too,' said clara; 'but i thought you would not like it to be given away.' pulling out a drawer, she opened an odd little box of queer curiosities, whence she took a case containing an exquisite ivory carving, a copy of the 'madonna della sedia,' so fine that a magnifier alone could fully reveal the delicacy and accuracy of the features and expression. it was mounted as a bracelet clasp, and was a remnant of poor mr. dynevor's treasures. it had been given to mrs. henry frost, and had descended to her daughter. 'should you be willing?' wistfully asked james. 'that i should! i have longed to give her what she would really care for. she has been so very kind--and her kindness is so very sweet in its graciousness! i shall always be the happier for the very thinking of it.' 'i am glad--' began jem, warmly; but, breaking off, he added--'this would make us all more comfortable. it would lessen the weight of obligation, and that would be satisfactory to you.' 'i don't know. i like people to be so kind, that i can't feel as if i would pay them off, but as if i could do nothing but love them.' 'you did not imagine that i rate this as repayment!' 'oh! no, no!' 'no! it is rather that nothing can be too precious--' then pausing--'you are sure you are willing, clary?' 'only too glad. i like it to be something valuable to us as well as in itself. if i only had a bit of black velvet, i could set it up.' in ten minutes, jem had speeded to a shop and back again, and stood by as clara stitched the clasp to the ribbon velvet; while there was an amicable dispute, he insisting that the envelope should bear only the initials of the true donor, and she maintaining that 'he gave the black velvet.' she had her way, and wrote, 'from her grateful c. f. d. and j. r. f. d.;' and as james took the little packet, he thanked her with an affectionate kiss--a thing so unprecedented at an irregular hour, that clara's heart leapt up, and she felt rewarded for any semblance of sacrifice. he told his grandmother that he had agreed with his sister that they could do no otherwise than present the ivory clasp; and mrs. frost, who had no specially tender associations with it, was satisfied to find that they had anything worth offering on equal terms. she was to be of the party, and setting forth, they, found the house beautiful upside down--even the faithfull parlour devoted to shawls and bonnets, and the two good old sisters in the drawing-room; miss salome, under the protection of little louisa, in an easy chair, opposite the folding doors. small children were clustered in shy groups round their respective keepers. lady conway was receiving her guests with the smile so engaging at first sight, isabel moving from one to the other with stately grace and courtesy, virginia watching for clara, and both becoming merged in a mass of white skirts and glossy heads, occupying a wide area. mrs. frost was rapturously surrounded by half-a-dozen young men, sydney calcott foremost, former pupils enchanted to see her, and keeping possession of her all the rest of the evening. she was a dangerous person to invite, for the northwold youth had no eyes but for her. the children were presently taken down to tea in the dining-room by miss king and miss mercy; and presently a chorus of little voices and peals of laughter broke out, confirming the fact, whispered by delaford to his lady, that lord fitzjocelyn had arrived, and had joined the downstairs party. while coffee went round in the drawing-room, isabel glided out to perform the lighting process. 'oh, mr. dynevor!' she exclaimed, finding him at her side, 'i did not mean to call you away.' 'mere unreason to think of the performance alone,' said james, setting up his trusty ladder. 'what would become of that black lace?' 'thank you, it may be safer and quicker.' 'so far the evening is most successful,' said jem, lighting above as she lighted below. 'that it is! i like northwold better than any place i have been in since i left thornton conway. there is so much more heartiness and friendliness here than in ordinary society. 'i think fitzjocelyn's open sympathies have conduced--' isabel laughed, and he checked himself, disconcerted. 'i beg your pardon,' she said; 'i was amused at the force of habit. if i were to say the terrace chimneys did not smoke, you would say it was lord fitzjocelyn's doing.' 'do not bid me do otherwise than keep him in mind.' down fell the highest candle: the hot wax dropping on isabel's arm caused her to exclaim, bringing jem down in horror, crying, 'i have hurt you! you are burnt!' 'oh no, only startled. there is no harm done, you see,' as she cracked away the cooled wax--'not even a mark to remind me of this happy christmas.' 'and it has been a happy christmas to you,' he said, remounting. 'most happy. nothing has been so peaceful or satisfactory in my wandering life.' 'shall i find you here at easter?' 'i fear not. mamma likes to be in london early; but perhaps she may leave the school-room party here, as louisa is gaining so much ground, and that would be a pledge of our return.' 'too much joy,' said james, almost inaudibly. 'i hope walter may spend his holidays here,' she pursued. 'it is a great thing for him to be with any one who can put a few right notions into his head.' jem abstained from, as usual, proposing fitzjocelyn for his example, but only said that walter was very susceptible of good impressions. 'and most heartily we thank you for all you have done for him,' said isabel, doubting whether walter's mother appreciated the full extent of it; 'indeed, we have all a great deal to thank you for. i hope my sisters and i may be the better all our lives for the helps and explanations you have given to us. is that the last candle? how beautiful! we must open.' 'miss conway--' 'yes'--she paused with her hand on the key. 'no, no--do not wait,' taking the key himself. 'yet--yes, i must--i must thank you for such words--' 'my words?' said isabel, smiling. 'for thanking you, or being happy here?' 'both! both! those words will be my never-failing charm. you little guess how i shall live on the remembrance. oh, if i could only convey to you what feelings you have excited--' the words broke from him as if beyond his control, and under the pressing need of not wasting the tapers, he instinctively unlocked the door as he spoke, and cut himself short by turning the handle, perhaps without knowing what he was about. instantly lady conway and miss king each pushed a folding leaf, isabel and james drew back on either side, and the spectators beheld the tall glistening evergreen, illuminated with countless little spires of light, glancing out among the dark leaves, and reflected from the gilt fir-cones, glass balls, and brilliant toys. 'sister! sister!' cried miss mercy, standing by miss faithfull's chair, in the rear of the throng, and seizing her hand in ecstasy; 'it is like a dream! like what we have read of! oh, the dear little children! so very kind of lady conway! could you have imagined--?' she quite gasped. 'it is very pretty, but it was a nicer christmas-tree last year at lady runnymede's,' said louisa, with the air of a critic. 'there we had coloured lamps.' 'little fastidious puss!' said louis, 'i thought you keeping in the background out of politeness; but i see you are only blasee with christmas-trees. i pity you! i could no more be critical at such a moment than i could analyse the jewels in aladdin's cave.' 'oh, if you and miss faithfull talk, cousin fitzjocelyn, you will make it seem quite new.' 'you will deride the freshness of our simplicity,' said louis, but presently added, 'miss salome, have we not awakened to the enchanted land? did ever mortal tree bear stars of living flame? here are realized the fabled apples of gold--nay, the fir-cones of nineveh, the jewel-fruits of eastern story, depend from the same bough. yonder lamps shine by fairy spell.' 'now, cousin fitzjocelyn, do you think i suppose you so silly--' 'soft! the dryad of the enchanted bower advances. her floating robes, her holly crown, beseem her queenly charms.' 'as if you did not know that it is only isabel!' 'only! may the word be forgiven to a sister! isabel! the name is all-expressive.' 'she is looking even more lovely than usual,' said miss faithfull. 'i never saw such a countenance.' 'she has a colour to-night,' added miss mercy, 'which does, as you say, make her handsomer than ever. dear! dear! i hope she is not tired. i am so sorry i did not help her to light the tree!' 'i do not think it is fatigue,' said her sister. 'i hope it is animation and enjoyment--all i have ever thought wanting to that sweet face.' 'you are as bad as my prosaic cousin,' said louis, 'disenchanting the magic bower and the wood-nymph into fir, wax, and modern young ladyhood.' 'there, cousin, it is you who have called her a modern young lady.' before louisa had expressed her indignation, there was a call for her. 'the sovereign of the bower beckons,' said louis. 'favoured damsel, know how to deserve her smiles. fairy gifts remain not with the unworthy.' as he put her forward, some one made way for her. it was mary, and he blushed at perceiving that she must have heard all his rhodomontade. as if to make amends, he paused, and asked for mrs. ponsonby. 'much more comfortable to-night, thank you;' and the pleasant, honest look of her friendly eyes relieved him by not reproaching him. 'i wish she were here. it is a prettier, more visionary sight than i could have conceived.' 'i wish she could see it; but she feared the crowd. many people in a room seem to stifle her. is lord ormersfield here?' 'no, it would not be his element. but imagine his having taken to walking with me! i really think he will miss me.' 'really?' said mary, amused. 'it is presumptuous; but he does not see well at night, and is not quite broken in to his spectacles. mary, i hope you will walk over to see after him. nothing would be so good for him as walking you back, and staying to dinner with you. go right into the library; he would be greatly pleased. can't you make some book excuse? and you have the cottages to see. the people inaugurated the boilers with christmas puddings.' 'mr. holdsworth told us how pleased they were. and the norrises?' 'mrs. norris is delighted; she has found a woman to wash, and says it will save her a maid. the people can get milk now: i assure you they look more wholesome already! and beecher has actually asked for two more houses in emulation. and richardson found himself turned over to me!' 'oh, that's right.' 'i've been at the plans all the afternoon. i see how to contrive the fireplace in the back room, that we could not have in the first set, and make them cheaper, too. my father has really made a point of that old decrepit hailes being moved from marksedge; and mary, he, and richardson mean inglewood to be made over to me for good. i am to put in a bailiff, and do as i can with it--have the profits or bear the losses. i think i have an idea--' in spite of her willingness to hear the idea, mary could not help asking, 'have you sent off the police article?' 'hush, mary; it is my prime object to have it well forgotten.' 'oh! did not sir miles like it?' 'he said it wanted liveliness and anecdote. so the santissima hermandad, and all the extraneous history, were sent to him; and then he was well content, and only wanted me to leave out all the christian chivalry--all i cared to say--' 'you don't mean not to finish? your father was so pleased, isabel so much struck! it is a pity--' 'no, no; you may forgive me, mary--it is not pure laziness. it was mere rubbish, without the point, which was too strong for the two politicians; rubbish, any way. don't tell me to go on with it; it was a mere trial, much better let it die away. i really have no time; if i don't mind my own business, i shall be a plucked gosling; and that would go to his, lordship's heart. besides, i must get these plans done. do you remember where we got the fire-bricks for the ovens?' mary was answering, when walter came bursting through the crowd. 'where is he? fitzjocelyn, it is your turn.' 'here is a curious specimen for our great naturalist,' said mrs. frost, a glow in her cheeks, and her voice all stifled mirth and mischief. it was a large nest of moss and horsehair, partly concealed under the lower branches, and containing two huge eggs streaked and spotted with azure and vermilion, and a purple and yellow feather, labelled, 'dropped by the parent animal in her flight, on the discovery of the nest by the crew of h.m.s. flying dutchman. north greenland, april st, . qu.? female of equus pegasus. respectfully dedicated to the right honourable viscount fitzjocelyn.' 'a fine specimen,' said the viscount at once, with the air of a connoisseur, by no means taken by surprise. 'they are not very uncommon; i found one myself about the same date in the justice-room. i dare say mr. calcott recollects the circumstance.' 'oh, my dear fellow,' exclaimed sydney, instead of his father; 'you need not particularize. you always were a discoverer in that line.' 'true,' said louis, 'but this is unique. north greenland--ah! i thought it was from a frosty country. ha, clara?' 'not i; i know nothing of it,' cried clara, in hurry and confusion, not yet able to be suspected of taking liberties with him. 'no?' said louis, turning about his acquisition; 'i thought i knew the female that laid these eggs. the proper name is, i fancy, glacies dynevorensis--var. catharina--perhaps--' walter and louisa had brought their mother to see the nest, the point of which she comprehended as little as they; and not understanding how much amusement was betokened by her nephew's gravity, she protested that none of her party had devised it, nor even been privy to it, and that mr. dynevor must bear the blame, but he was very busy detaching the prizes from the tree, and hastily denied any concern with it. aunt catharine was obliged to console lady conway, and enchant louis by owning herself the sole culprit, with no aid but miss mercy's. together they had disposed the nest in its right locality, as soon as the earl's absence was secure. 'i had not courage for it before him,' she laughed. 'as for this fellow, i knew he would esteem it a compliment.' 'as a tribute to his imagination?' said isabel, who, in her mood of benevolence, could be struck with the happy understanding between aunt and nephew revealed by such a joke, so received. 'it would be a curious research,' said louis, 'whether more of these nidifications result from over-imagination or the want of it.' 'often from want of imagination, and no want of cowardice,' said isabel. 'that sort of nest has not illuminated eggs like these,' said louis. 'they are generally extremely full of gunpowder, and might be painted with a skull and crossbones. i say, clara, has aunt kitty considered the consequences? she has sacrificed her ostrich eggs! i can never part with these original productions of her genius.' he exhibited his mare's nest with his own gay bonhommie to all who were curious, and presently, when every one's attention had been again recalled to the wonders which isabel was distributing, and he had turned aside to dispose of his treasure, he heard a sound of soliloquy half aloud, 'i wonder whether she has it!' from clara, who stood a little apart. 'what?' asked louia. 'my ivory clasp with the madonna,' said clara. 'jem and i thought it the only thing worthy of miss conway.' 'hem!' said louis; 'it is not your fault, clara; but it would be graceful to learn to receive a favour.' 'a favour, but not a grand thing like this,' said clara, showing a beautiful little case of working implements. 'hardly worth, even intrinsically, your mother's bracelet,' said louis. 'but i am not going to talk treason to the family doctrine, though it is very inconvenient to your friends.' 'then you think we ought not to have done it?' 'that depends on what i can't decide.' 'what's that?' 'whether you give it out of love or out of pride.' 'i think we gave it out of one, and excused it by the other.' 'very satisfactory. to reward you, here is something for you to do. i shall never get at aunt kitty to-night. i see the midshipman, young brewster, will not relinquish her; so will you or will she administer this letter to the lady of eachalott?' 'you don't mean that is tom madison!' exclaimed clara. 'why, it is like copper-plate. no more fitsgoslings!' 'no, indeed! is he not a clever fellow? he has just reached the stage of civilization that breaks out in dictionary words. i have been, in return, telling him the story of the irish schoolmaster who puzzled the magistrate's bench by a petition about a small cornuted animal, meaning a kid. but i should think it would be very edifying to charlotte to see herself commemorated as the individual at the terrace, and his grandfather as his aged relative. he sends the old man ten shillings this time, for he is promoted. don't you think i may be proud of him? is mary gone home? she must hear about him.' as he turned away in search of mary, clara felt a soft hand on her shoulder, and isabel beckoned her to follow into the back drawing-room, where the tree was burnt out and deserted. 'i may thank _you_,' said isabel, in a low, sweet voice, pressing her hand. 'and jem,' said clara; 'he thought of it first.' 'it is the most beautiful christmas gift; but i do not like for you to part with it, my dear.' 'we both wished it, and grandmamma gave leave. we longed for you to have something we prized like this, for it belonged to my mamma. it is jem's present too, for he went out and bought the black velvet.' 'clasp it on for me, dear clara. there!' and isabel kissed the fingers which obeyed. 'it shall never leave my arm.' clara's face burnt with surprise and pleasure amounting to embarrassment, as isabel expressed hopes of meeting again, and engaged her to write from school. she looked for her brother to take his share of thanks; but he was determinately doing his duty in cutting chicken and cake for those who desired supper, and he did not come in their way again till all the guests were gone, and good-night and good-bye were to be said at once. lady conway was warm in expressing her hopes that walter would enjoy the same advantages another holidays, and told mr. dynevor she should write to him. but jem made little answer, nothing like a promise. clara thought he had become stiff from some unknown affront, perhaps some oppressive present, for he seemed to intend to include all the young ladies in one farewell bow. but isabel advanced with outstretched hand and flushing cheek, and her murmured 'thank you' and confiding pressure drew from him such a grasp as could not easily be forgotten. clara's heart was all the lighter because she was sure that fitzjocelyn had forgiven, and, what was more, forgotten. she had spoken naturally to him once more, and was ready for anything now--even though they had missed all confidential discussions upon school. she gave charlotte tom madison's letter. the little maiden took it, and twirled it about rather superciliously. 'what business had my young lord,' she thought, 'to fancy she cared for that poor fellow? very likely he was improved, and she was glad of it, but she knew what was genteel now. yes, she would read it at once; there was no fear that it would make her soft and foolish--she had got above that!' chapter xvii. the rivals. 'which king, bezonian?'--henry iv. sir roland of provence remained in suspense whether to be a novice or an irrevocably pledged hospitalier. the latter was most probable; and when adeline's feelings had been minutely analysed, miss conway discovered that she had better not show her morning's work to her sisters. clara and louis pronounced jem to be as savage as a bear all through the journey. clara declared it was revenge for having been civil and amiable all through the vacation; and louis uttered a theatrical aside, that even _that_ could not have been maintained if he had not occasionally come to ormersfield to relieve himself a little upon their two lordships. laugh as he might, fitzjocelyn was much concerned and perplexed by his cousin's ill-humour, when it appeared more permanent than could be puffed off in a few ebullitions. attempts to penetrate the gloom made it heavier, and louis resolved to give it time to subside. he waited some days before going near james, and when he next walked to his college found him engaged with pupils. he was himself very busy, and had missed his cousin several times before he at length found him alone. 'why, jem, old fellow, what are you about? you've not been near my rooms this term. are you renouncing me in anticipation of my plucking?' 'you won't be plucked unless you go out of your senses for the occasion.' 'no thanks to your advice and assistance if i am not. but it would conduce to my equanimity, jem, to know whether we are quarrelling, as in that case i should know how to demean myself.' 'i've no quarrel with you. you have far more reason--but,' added jem, catching himself up, 'don't you know i have no leisure for trifling? the ordination is the second week in march.' 'the ordination!' 'ay--you know it! my fellowship depends on it.' 'i never liked to contemplate it.' he sat down and mused, while james continued his occupation. presently he said, 'look here. sir miles oakstead asked me if i had any clever oxford friend to recommend. if he comes into office, he--' 'i'll be no great man's hanger-on.' 'this matter is not imminent. you are barely four-and-twenty. wait a year or two; even a few months would--' 'you have tried my forbearance often enough,' broke in james; 'my object is--as you very well know--to maintain myself and mine without being liable to obnoxious patronage. if you think i should disgrace the office, speak out!' louis, without raising his eyes, only answered with a smile. 'then, what do you mean? as to your notions of a vocation, ninety-nine out of a hundred are in my case. i have been bred up to this--nothing else is open--i mean to do my duty; and surely that is vocation--no one has a right to object--' 'no one; i beg your pardon,' meekly said louis, taking up his stick to go; but both knew it was only a feint, and james, whose vehemence was exhausting itself, resumed, in an injured tone, 'what disturbs you? what is this scruple of yours!--you, who sometimes fancy you would have been a curate yourself!' 'i have just inclination enough to be able to perceive that you have none.' 'and is every one to follow his bent?' 'this is not a step to be taken against the grain, even for the best earthly motives. jem! i only beg you to ask advice. for the very reason that you are irreproachable, you will never have it offered.' 'the present time, for instance?' said james, laughing as best he might. 'that is nothing. i have no faith in my own judgment, but, thinking as i do of the profession and of you, i cannot help believing that my distaste for seeing you in it must be an instinct.' 'give me your true opinion and its grounds candidly, knowing that i would not ask another man living.' 'nor me, if i did not thrust it on you.' 'now for it! let us hear your objection.' 'simply this. i do not see that anything impels you to take holy orders immediately, except your wish to be independent, and irrevocably fixed before your uncle can come home. this seems to me to have a savour of something inconsistent with what you profess. it might be fine anywhere else, but will it not bear being brought into the light of the sanctuary? no, i cannot like it. i have no doubt many go up for ordination far less fit than you, but--jem, i wish you would not. if you would but wait a year!' 'no, fitzjocelyn, my mind is made up. i own that i might have preferred another course, and heaven knows it is not that i think myself worthy of this; but i have been brought up to this, and i will not waver. it is marked out for me as plainly as your earldom for you, and i will do my duty in it as my appointed calling. there lies my course of honest independence: you call it pride--see what those are who are devoid of it: there lie my means of educating my sister, providing for my grandmother. i can see no scruple that should deter me.' fitzjocelyn having said his say, it was his turn and his nature to be talked down. 'in short,' concluded james, walking about the room, 'there is no alternative. waiting for a college living is bad enough, but nothing else can make happiness even possible.' 'one would think you meant one sort of happiness,' said louis, with a calm considering tone, and look of inquiry which james could not brook. 'what else?' he cried. 'fool and madman that i am to dwell on the hopeless--' 'why should it be hopeless?--' began louis. 'hush! you are the last person with whom i could discuss this subject,' he said, trying to be fierce, but with more sorrow than anger. 'i must bear my burthen alone. believe me, i struggled hard. if you and i be destined to clash, one comfort is, that even i could never quarrel with you.' 'i have not the remotest idea of your meaning.' 'so much the better. no, so much the worse. you are not capable of feeling what i do for her, or you would have hated me long ago. do not stay here! i do not know that i can quite bear the sight of you--but don't let me lose you, louis.' james wrung the hand of his cousin; and no sooner was he alone, than he began to pace the room distractedly. 'poor jem!' soliloquized fitzjocelyn. 'at least, i am glad the trouble is love, not the ordination. but as to his meaning! he gives me to understand that we are rivals--it is the most absurd thing i ever knew--i declare i don't know whether he means mary or isabel. i suppose he would consider mary's fortune a barrier--no, she is too serene for his storms--worthy, most worthy--but she would hate to be worshipped in that wild way. besides, i am done for in that quarter. no clashing there--! nay, the other it can never be--after all his efforts to lash me up at christmas. yet, he was much with her, he made clara sacrifice the clasp to her. hm! she is an embodied romance, deserving to be raved about; while for poor dear mary, it would be simply ridiculous. i wish i could guess--it is too absurd to doubt, and worse to ask; and, what's more, he would not stand it. if i did but know! i'm not so far gone yet, but that i could leave the field to him, if that would do him any good. heigh ho! it would be en regle to begin to hate him, and be as jealous as bluebeard; but there! i don't know which it is to be about, and one can't be jealous for two ladies at once, luckily, for it would be immensely troublesome, unless a good, hearty quarrel would be wholesome to revive his spirits. it is a bad time for it, though! well, i hope he does not mean mary--i could not bear for her to be tormented by him. that other creature might reign over him like the full moon dispersing clouds. well! this is the queerest predicament i ever heard of!' and on he wandered, almost as much diverted by the humour of the doubt, as annoyed by the dilemma. he had no opportunity for farther investigation: james removed himself so entirely from his society, that he was obliged to conclude that the prevailing mood was that of not being quite able to bear the sight of him. his consolation was the hope of an opening for some generous proceeding, though how this should be accomplished was not visible, since it was quite as hard to be generous with other people's hearts as to confer a benefit on a pendragon. at any rate, he was so confident of jem's superiority, as to have no fear of carrying off the affection of any one whom his cousin wished to win. james was ordained, and shortly after went to some pupils for the easter vacation, which was spent by louis at christchurch, in studying hard. the preparation for going up for his degree ended by absorbing him entirely, as did every other pursuit to which he once fairly devoted himself, and for the first time he gave his abilities full scope in the field that ought long ago to have occupied them. when, finally, a third class was awarded to him, he was conscious that it might have been a first, but for his past waste of time. he was sorry to leave oxford: he had been happy there in his own desultory fashion; and the additional time that his illness had kept him an undergraduate, had been welcome as deferring the dreaded moment of considering what was to come next. he had reached man's estate almost against his will. he was to go to join his father in london; and he carried thither humiliation for having, by his own fault, missed the honours that too late he had begun to value as a means of gratifying his father. the earl, however, could hardly have taken anything amiss from louis. after having for so many years withheld all the lassez-aller of paternal affection, when the right chord had once been touched, his fondness for his grown-up son had the fresh exulting pride, and almost blindness that would ordinarily have been lavished on his infancy. lord ormersfield's sentiments were few and slowly adopted, but they had all the permanence and force of his strong character, and his affection for fitzjocelyn partook both of parental glory in a promising only son, and of that tenderness, at once protecting and dependent, that fathers feel for daughters. this was owing partly to louis's gentle and assiduous attentions during the last vacation, and also to his long illness, and remarkable resemblance to his mother, which rendered fondness of him a sort of tribute to her, and restored to the earl some of the transient happiness of his life. it was a second youth of the affections, but it was purchased by a step towards age. the anxiety, fatigue, and various emotions of the past year had told on the earl, and though still strong, vigorous, and healthy, the first touch of autumn had fallen on him--he did not find his solitary life so self-sufficing as formerly, and craved the home feeling of the past christmas. so the welcome was twice as warm as louis had expected; and as he saw the melancholy chased away, the stern grey eyes lighted up, and the thin, compressed lips relaxed into a smile, he forgot his aversion to the well-appointed rooms in jermyn street, and sincerely apologized that he had not brought home more credit to satisfy his father. 'oakstead was talking it over with me,' was the answer; 'and we reckoned up many more third-class men than first who have distinguished themselves.' 'many thanks to sir miles,' said louis, laughing. 'my weak mind would never have devised such consolation.' 'perhaps the exclusive devotion to study which attains higher honours may not be the beat introduction to practical life.' 'it is doing the immediate work with the whole might.' 'you do work with all your might.' 'ay! but too many irons in the fire, and none of them red-hot through, have been my bane.' 'you do not set out in life without experience; i am glad your education is finished, louis!' said his father, turning to contemplate him, as if the sight filled up some void. 'are you?' said louis, wearily. 'i don't think i am. it becomes my duty--or yours, which is a relief--to find out the next stage.' 'have you no wishes?' 'not at the present speaking, thank you. if i went out and talked to any one, i might have too many.' 'no views for your future life?' 'thus far: to do as little harm as may be--to be of some use at home--and to make turnips grow in the upland at inglewood, i have some vague fancy to see foreign parts, especially now they are all in such a row--it would be such fun--but i suppose you would not trust me there now. here i am for you to do as you please with me--a gracious permission, considering that you did not want it. only the first practical question is how to get this money from jem to clara. i should like to call on her, but i suppose that would hardly be according to the proprieties.' 'i would walk to the school with you, if you wish to see her. my aunt will be glad to hear of her, if we go home to-morrow.' 'are you thinking of going home?' exclaimed louis, joyfully coming to life. 'yes; but for a cause that will grieve you. mrs. ponsonby is worse, and has written to ask me to come down.' 'materially worse?' 'i fear so. i showed my aunt's letter to hastings, who said it was the natural course of the disease, but that he thought it would have been less speedy. i fear it has been hastened by reports from peru. she had decided on going out again; but the agitation overthrew her, and she has been sinking ever since,' said lord ormersfield, mournfully. 'poor mary!' 'for her sake i must be on the spot, if for no other cause. if i had but a home to offer her!' louis gave a deep sigh, and presently asked for more details of mrs. ponsonby's state. 'i believe she is still able to sit up and employ herself at times, but she often suffers dreadfully. they are both wonderfully cheerful. she has little to regret.' 'what a loss she will be! oh, father! what will you do without her?' 'i am glad that you have known her. she has been more than a sister to me. things might have been very different, if that miserable marriage had not separated us for so many years.' 'how could it have happened? how was it that she--so good and wise--did not see through the man?' 'she would, if she had been left to herself; but she was not. my mother discovered, when too late, that there had been foolish, impertinent jokes of that unfortunate trifler, poor henry frost, that made her imagine herself suspected of designs on me.' 'mary would never have attended to such folly!' cried louis. 'mary is older. besides, she loved the man, or thought she did. i believe she thinks herself attached to him still. but for mary's birth, there would have been a separation long ago. there ought to have been; but, after my father's death, there was no one to interfere! what would i not have given to have been her brother! well! i never could see why one like her was so visited--!' then rousing himself, as though tender reminiscences were waste of time, he added, 'there you see the cause of the caution i gave you with regard to clara dynevor. it is not fair to expose a young woman to misconstructions and idle comments, which may goad her to vindicate her dignity by acting in a manner fatal to her happiness. now,' he added, having drawn his moral, 'if we are to call on clara, this would be the fittest time. i have engaged for us both to dine at lady conway's this evening: i thought you would not object.' 'thank you; but i am sure you cannot wish to go out after such news.' 'there is not sufficient excuse for refusing. there is to be no party, and it would be a marked thing to avoid it.' louis hazarded a suggestion that the meeting with clara would be to little purpose if they were all to sit in state in the drawing-room; and she was asked for on the plea of going to see the new houses of parliament. the earl of ormersfield's card and compliments went upstairs, and miss frost dynevor appeared, with a demure and astonished countenance, which changed instantly to ecstasy when she saw that the earl was not alone. not at all afraid of love, but only of misconstructions, he goodnaturedly kept aloof, while clara, clinging to louis's arm, was guided through the streets, and in and out among the blocks of carved stone on the banks of the thames, interspersing her notes of admiration and his notes on heraldry with more comfortable confidences than had fallen to their lot through the holidays. his first hope was that clara might reveal some fact to throw light on the object of her brother's affections, but her remarks only added to his perplexity. once, when they had been talking of poor mary, and lamenting her fate in having to return to her father, louis hazarded the conjecture that she might find an english home. 'there is her aunt in bryanston square,' said clara. 'or if she would only live with us! you see i am growing wise, as you call it: i like her now.' 'that may be fortunate,' said louis. 'you know her destination according to northwold gossip.' 'nonsense! jem would scorn an heiress if she were ten times prettier. he will never have an escutcheon of pretence like the one on the old soup tureen that the lady of eschalott broke, and jane was so sorry for because it was the last of the old cheveleigh china.' louis made another experiment. 'have you repented yet of giving away your clasp?' 'no, indeed! miss conway always wears it. she should be richly welcome to anything i have in the world.' 'you and jem saw much more of them than i did.' 'whose fault was that? jem was always raving about your stupidity in staying at home.' he began to question whether his interview with james had been a dream. as they were walking back towards the school, clara went on to tell him that lady conway had called and taken her to a rehearsal of a concert of ancient music, and that isabel had taken her for one or two drives into the country. 'this must conduce to make school endurable,' said louis. 'i think i hate it more because i hate it less.' 'translate, if you please.' 'the first half-year, i scorned them all, and they scorned me; and that was comfortable--' 'and consistent. well?' 'the next, you had disturbed me; i could not go on being savage with the same satisfaction, and their tuft-hunting temper began to discharge itself in such civility to me, that i could not give myself airs with any peace.' 'have you made no friends?' one and a half. the whole one is a good, rough, stupid girl, who comes to school because she can't learn, and is worth all the rest put together. the half is caroline salter, who is openly and honestly purse-proud, has no toad-eating in her nature, and straight-forwardly contemns high-blood and no money. we fought ourselves into respect for one another; and now, i verily believe, we are fighting ourselves into friendship. she is the only one that is proud, not vain; so we understand each other. as to the rest, they adore caroline halter's enamelled watch one day; and the next, i should be their 'dearest' if i would but tell them what we have for dinner at ormersfield, and what colour your eyes are!' 'the encounters have made you so epigrammatic and satirical, that there is no coming near you.' 'oh, louis! if you knew all, you would despise me as i do myself! i do sometimes get drawn into talking grandly about ormersfield; and though i always say what i am to be, i know that i am as vain and proud as any of them: i am proud of being poor, and of the pendragons, and of not being silly! i don't know which is self-respect, and which is pride!' 'i have always had my doubts about that quality of self-respect. i never could make out what one was to respect.' 'oh, dear! les voila!' cried clara, as, entering hanover square, they beheld about twenty damsels coming out of the garden in couples. 'i would not have had it happen for the whole world!' she added, abruptly withdrawing the arm that had clung to him so trustfully across many a perilous crossing. she seemed to intend to slip into the ranks without any farewells, but the earl, with politeness that almost confounded the little elderly governess, returned thanks for having been permitted the pleasure of her company, and louis, between mischief and good-nature, would not submit to anything but a hearty, cousinly squeeze of the hand, nor relinquish it till he had forced her to utter articulately the message to grandmamma that she had been muttering with her head averted. at last it was spoken sharply, and her hand drawn petulantly away, and, without looking back at him, her high, stiff head vanished into the house, towering above the bright rainbow of ribbons, veils, and parasols. the evening would have been very happy, had not lord ormersfield looked imperturbably grave and inaccessible to his sister-in-law's blandishments. she did not use the most likely means of disarming him when she spoke of making a tour in the summer. it had been a long promise that isabel and virginia should go to see their old governess at paris; but if france still were in too disturbed a state, they might enjoy themselves in belgium, and perhaps her dear fitzjocelyn would accompany them as their escort. his eyes had glittered at the proposal before he recollected the sorrow that threatened his father, and began to decline, protesting that he should be the worst escort in the world, since he always attracted accidents and adventures. but his aunt, discovering that he had never been abroad, became doubly urgent, and even appealed to his father. 'as far as i am concerned, fitzjocelyn may freely consult his own inclinations,' said the earl, so gravely, that lady conway could only turn aside the subject by a laugh, and assurance that she did not mean to give him up. she began to talk of james frost, and her wishes to secure him a second time as walter's tutor in the holidays. 'you had better take him with you,' said louis; 'he would really be of use to you, and how he would enjoy the sight of foreign parts!' isabel raised her head with a look of approbation, such as encouraged him to come a little nearer, and apeak of the pleasure that her kindness had given to clara. 'there is a high spirit and originality about clara, which make her a most amusing companion.' isabel replied, 'i am very glad of an hour with her, especially now that i am without my sisters.' 'she must be such a riddle to her respectable school-fellows, that intercourse beyond them must be doubly valuable.' 'poor child! is there no hope for her but going out as a governess?' 'unluckily, we have no church patronage for her brother; the only likely escape--unless, indeed, the uncle in peru, whom i begin to regard as rather mythical, should send an unavoidable shower of gold on them.' 'i hope not,' said isabel, 'i could almost call their noble poverty a sacred thing. i never saw anything so beautiful as the reverent affection shown to mrs. dynevor on walter's birthday, when she was the queen of the night, and looked it, and her old pupils vied with each other in doing her honour. i have remembered the scene so often in looking at our faded dowagers here.' 'i would defy midas to make my aunt catharine a faded dowager,' said louis. 'no; but he could have robbed their homage of half--nay, all its grace.' they talked of northwold, and isabel mentioned various details of mrs. ponsonby, which she had learnt from miss king, and talked of mary with great feeling and affection. never had louis had anything so like a conversation with isabel, and he was more bewitched than ever by the enthusiasm and depth of sensibilities which she no longer concealed by coldness and reserve. in fact, she had come to regard him as an accessory of northwold, and was delighted to enjoy some exchange of sympathy upon terrace subjects--above all, when separated from the school-room party. time had brought her to perceive that the fantastic viscount did not always wear motley, and it was almost as refreshing as meeting with clara, to have some change from the two worlds in which she lived. in her imaginary world, adeline had just been rescued from the corsairs by a knight hospitalier, with his vizor down, and was being conducted home by him, with equal probabilities of his dying at her feet of a concealed mortal wound, or conducting her to her convent gate, and going off to be killed by the moors. the world of gaiety was more hollow and wearisome than ever; and the summons was as unwelcome to her as to fitzjocelyn, when lord ormersfield reminded him that the ladies were going to an evening party, and that it was time to take leave. 'come with us, fitzjocelyn,' said his aunt. 'they would be charmed to have you;' and she mentioned some lions, whose names made louis look at his father. 'i will send the carriage for you,' said the earl; but louis had learnt to detect the tone of melancholy reluctance in that apparently unalterable voice, and at once refused. perhaps it was for that reason that isabel let him put on her opera-cloak and hand her down stairs. 'i don't wonder at you,' she said; 'i wish i could do the same.' 'i wished it at first,' he answered; 'but i could not have gone without a heavy heart.' 'are you young enough to expect to go to any gaieties without a heavy heart?' 'i am sorry for you,' said he, in his peculiar tone: 'i suppose i am your elder.' 'i am almost twenty-_four_,' she said, with emphasis. 'indeed! that must be the age for care, to judge by the change it has worked in jem frost.' the words were prompted by a keen, sudden desire to mark their effect; but he failed to perceive any, for they were in a dark part of the entry, and her face was turned away. 'fitzjocelyn,' said the earl, on the way home, 'do not think it necessary to look at me whenever you receive an invitation. it makes us both appear ridiculous, and you are in every respect your own master.' 'i had rather not, thank you,' said louis, in an almost provokingly indifferent tone. 'it is full time you should assume your own guidance.' 'how little he knows how little that would suit him!' thought louis, sighing despondingly. 'am i called on to sacrifice myself in everything, and never even satisfy him?' chapter xviii. rest for the weary. therefore, arm thee for the strife all throughout this mortal life, soldier now and servant true, earth behind, and heaven in view. rev. i. williams. the first impression on arriving at northwold was, that the danger had been magnified. mrs. frost's buoyant spirits had risen at the first respite; and though there was a weight on mary's brow, she spoke cheerfully, and as if able to attend to other interests, telling louis of her father's wish for some good workmen to superintend the mines, and asking him to consult his friends at illershall on the subject. lord ormersfield came down encouraged by his visit to the invalid, whom he had found dressed and able to converse nearly as usual. she begged him to come to dinner the next day, and spend the evening with her, promising with a smile that if he would bring louis, their aunt should chaperon mary. when the earl went upstairs after dinner, the other three closed round the fire, and talked in a tranquil, subdued strain, on various topics, sometimes grave, sometimes enlivened by the playfulness inherent in two of the party. aunt kitty spoke of her earlier days, and louis and mary ventured questions that they would have ordinarily deemed intrusive. yet it was less the matter than the manner of their dialogue--the deep, unavowed fellow-feeling and mutual reliance--which rendered it so refreshing and full of a kind of repose. louis felt it like the strange bright stillness, when birds sing their clearest, fullest notes, and the horizon reach of sky beams with the softest, brightest radiance, just ere it be closed out by the thunder-cloud, whose first drops are pausing to descend; and to mary it was peace--peace which she was willing gratefully to taste to the utmost, from the instinctive perception that the call had come for her to brace all her powers of self-control and fortitude; while to the dear old aunt, besides her enjoyment of her darling's presence, each hour was a boon that she could believe the patient or the daughter, relieved and happy. louis was admitted for a few minutes' visit to the sick-chamber, and went up believing that he ought to be playful and cheerful; but he was nearly overcome by mrs. ponsonby's own brightness, as she hoped that her daughter and aunt had made themselves agreeable. 'thank you, i never was so comfortable, not even when my foot was bad.' 'i believe you consider that a great compliment.' 'yes, i never was so much off my own mind, nor on other people's:' and the recollection of all he owed to mrs. ponsonby's kindness rushing over him, he looked so much affected, that mary was afraid of his giving way, and spoke of other matters; her mother responded, and he came away quite reassured, and believing mrs. frost's augury that at the next call, the invalid would be in the drawing-room. on the way home, however, his father overthrew such hopes, and made him aware of the true state of the case,--namely, that this was but the lull before another attack, which, whether it came within weeks or days, would probably be the last. 'does mary know?' 'she does. she bears up nobly.' 'and what is to become of her?' the earl sighed deeply. 'lima is her destiny. her mother is bent on it, and says that she wishes it herself; but on one thing i am resolved: she shall not go alone! i have told her mother that i will go with her, and not leave her without seeing what kind of home that man has for her. mary--the mother, i mean--persists in declaring that he has real affection for his child, and that her presence will save him.' 'if anything could--' broke out louis. 'it should! it ought; but i do not trust him. i know robert ponsonby as his wife has never chosen to know him. this was not a time for disguise, and i told her plainly what i thought of risking her daughter out there. but she called it mary's duty--said that he was fully to be trusted where his child was concerned, and that mary was no stranger at lima, but could take care of herself, and had many friends besides oliver dynevor there. but i told her that go with her i would!' 'you to take the voyage! was not she glad?' 'i think she was relieved; but she was over-grateful and distressed, and entreating me to be patient with him. she need not fear. i never was a hasty man; and i shall only remember that she bears his name, and that he is mary's father--provided always that it is fit mary should remain with him. miserable! i can understand that death may well come as a friend--but her daughter!' he exclaimed, giving way more than he might have done anywhere but in the dark; 'how can she endure to leave her to such a father--to such prospects!' 'she knows it is not only to such a father that she leaves her,' murmured louis. 'her words--almost her words,' said the earl, between earnestness and impatience; 'but when these things come to pressing realities, it is past me how such sayings are a consolation.' 'not if they were no more than sayings.' there was silence. louis heard an occasional groaning sigh from his father, and sat still, with feelings strongly moved, and impelled to one of his sudden and impetuous resolutions. the next morning, he ordered his horse, saying he would bring the last report from the terrace. that afternoon, mrs. ponsonby observed a tremulousneas in mary's hand, and a willingness to keep her face turned away; and, on more minute glances, a swelling of the eyelids was detected. 'my dear,' said mrs. ponsonby, 'you should take a walk to-day. pray go out with the conways.' 'oh no, thank you, mamma.' 'if the cousins come in from ormersfield, i shall tell louis to take you to look at his farm. it would be very good for you--my dear, what is it?' for mary's ears and neck, all that she could see, were crimson. 'oh, mamma! he has been doing it again. i did not mean to have told you--' said mary, the strong will to be calm forcing back the tears and even the flush. 'nay, dear child, nothing can hurt me now. you must let me share all with you to the last. what did you say to him?' 'i told him that i could not think of such things now,' said mary, almost indignantly. 'and he?' 'he begged my pardon, and said he only did it because he thought it might be a relief to you.' 'only; did he say 'only?' 'i am not sure. at least,' she added, with a deep sigh, 'i thought he meant only--' 'and you, my dearest, if you had not thought he meant _only_?' 'don't ask me, mamma; i cannot think about it!' 'mary, dearest, i do wish to understand you.' 'is it of any use for me to ask myself?' said mary. 'i think it is. i do not say that there might not be insuperable obstacles; but i believe we ought to know whether you are still indifferent to louis.' 'oh, that i never was! nobody could be!' 'you know what i mean,' said her mother, slightly smiling. 'mamma, i don't know what to say,' replied mary, after a pause. 'i had thought it wrong to let my thoughts take that course; but when he spoke in his own soft, gentle voice, i felt, and i can't help it, that--he--could--comfort--me--better--than--any one.' not hesitating, but slowly, almost inaudibly, she brought out the words; and, as the tears gushed out irrepressibly with the last, she hastened from the room, and was seen no more till she had recovered composure, and seemed to have dismissed the subject. louis kept this second attempt a secret; he was not quite sure how he felt, and did not wish to discuss his rejection. at breakfast, he received a note from mrs. ponsonby, begging him to come to the terrace at three o'clock; and the hope thus revived made him more conversational than he had been all the former day. he found that mary was out walking, and he was at once conducted to mrs. ponsonby's room, where he looked exceedingly rosy and confused, till she began by holding out her hand, and saying, 'i wish to thank you.' 'i am afraid i vexed mary,' said louis, with more than his usual simplicity; 'but do you think there is no hope? i knew it was a bad time, but i thought it might make you more at ease on her account.' 'you meant all that was most kind.' 'i thought i might just try,' pursued he, disconsolately, 'whether she did think me any steadier. i hope she did not think me very troublesome. i tried not to harass her much.' 'my dear louis, it is not a question of what you call steadiness. it is the old story of last summer, when you thought us old ones so much more romantic than yourself.' 'you are thinking of miss conway,' said louis, blushing, but with curious naivete. 'well, i have been thinking of that, and i really do not believe there was anything in it. i did make myself rather a fool at beauchastel, and jem would have made me a greater one; but you know my father put a stop to it. thinking her handsomer than other people can't be love, can it?' 'not alone, certainly.' 'and actually,' he pursued, 'i don't believe i ever think of her when i am out of the way of her! no, indeed! if i had not believed that was all over, do you think i could have said what i did yesterday?' 'not unless you believed so.' 'well, but really you don't consider how little i have seen of her. i was in awe of her at first, and since, i have kept away on purpose. i never got on with her at all till the other evening. i don't believe i care for her one bit. then,' suddenly pausing, and changing his tone, 'you don't trust me after all.' 'i do. i trust your principle and kindness implicitly, but i think the very innocence of your heart prevents you from knowing what you are about.' 'it is very hard,' said louis; 'every one will have it that i must be in love, till i shall have to believe so myself, and when i know it cannot come to good.' 'you are making yourself more simple than you really are,' said mra. ponsonby, half provoked. louis shut his eyes, and seemed to be rousing his faculties; then, taking a new turn, he earnestly said, 'you know that the promises must settle the question, and keep my affections fast.' 'ah, louis! there is the point. others, true and sincere as yourself, have broken their own hearts, and those of others, from having made vows in wilful ignorance of latent feelings. it would be a sin in me to allow you to bind yourself to mary, with so little comprehension as you have of your own sentiments.' 'then i have done wrong in proposing it.' 'what would have been wrong in some cases, was more of blindness--ay, and kindness--in you. louis, i cannot tell you my gratitude for your wish to take care of my dear girl,' she said, with tears in her eyes. 'i hope you fully understand me.' 'i see i have made a fool of myself again, and that you have a right to be very angry with me.' 'not quite,' said mrs. ponsonby, smiling, 'but i am going to give you some advice. settle your mind as to miss conway. your father is beginning to perceive that his distrust was undeserved; he has promised me not to object in case it should be for your true happiness; and i do believe, for my own part, that, in some respects, she is better fitted for his daughter-in-law than my poor mary.' 'no one ever was half as good as mary!' cried louis. 'and this is what you tell me!' 'mind, i don't tell you to propose to her, nor to commit yourself in any way: i only tell you to put yourself in a position to form a reasonable judgment of your own feelings. that is due to her, to yourself, and to your wife, be she who she may.' louis sighed, and presently added, smiling, 'i am not going to rave about preferences for another; but i do want to know whether anything can be done for poor jem frost.' 'ha! has he anything of this kind on his mind?' 'he does it in grand style--disconsolate, frantic, and frosty; but he puzzles me completely by disclosing nothing but that he has no hope, and thinks me his rival. can nothing be done?' 'no, louis,' said mrs. ponsonby, decidedly; 'i have no idea that there is anything in that quarter. what may be on his mind, i cannot tell: i am sure that he is not on mary's.' louis rose. 'i have tired you,' he said, 'and you are very patient with my fooleries.' 'you have been very patient with many a lecture of mine, louis.' 'there are very few who would have thought me worth lecturing.' 'ah, louis! if i did not like you so well for what you are, i should still feel the right to lecture you, when i remember the night i carried you to your father, and tried to make him believe that you would be his comfort and blessing. i think you have taught him the lesson at last!' 'you have done it all,' said louis, with deep feeling. 'and now, may i say what more i want to see in you? if you could acquire more resolution, more manliness--will you pardon my saying so?' 'ah! i have always found myself the identical weak man that all books give up as a hopeless case,' said louis, accepting the imputation more easily than she could have supposed possible. 'no,' she said, vigorously, 'you have not come to your time of life without openings to evil that you could not have resisted if you had been really weak.' 'distaste--and rather a taste for being quizzed,' said louis. 'those are not weakness. your will is indolent, and you take refuge in fancying that you want strength. rouse yourself, not to be drifted about--make a line for yourself.' 'my father will have me walk in no line but his own.' 'you have sense not to make duty to him an excuse for indolence and dislike of responsibility. you have often disappointed yourself by acting precipitately; and now you are throwing yourself prone upon him, in a way that is unwise for you both.' 'i don't know what to do!' said louis. 'when i thought the aim of my life was to be to devote myself to his wishes, you--ay, and he too--tell me to stand alone.' 'it will be a disappointment to him, if you do not act and decide for yourself--yes, and worse than disappointment. he knows what your devotional habits are; and if he sees you wanting in firmness or energy, he will set down all the rest as belonging to the softer parts of your nature.' 'on the contrary,' exclaimed louia, indignantly, 'all the resolution i ever showed came from nothing else!' 'i know it. let him see that these things make a man of you; and, louis--you feel what a difference it might make!' louis bowed his head thoughtfully. 'you, who are both son and daughter to him, may give up schemes and pleasures for his sake, and may undertake work for which you have no natural turn; but, however you may cross your inclinations, never be led contrary to your judgment. then, and with perseverance, i think you will be safe.' 'perseverance--your old lesson.' 'yes; you must learn to work over the moment when novelty is gone and failure begins, even though your father should treat the matter as a crotchet of your own. if you know it is worth doing, go on, and he will esteem you and it.' 'my poor private judgment! you work it hard! when it has generally only run me full-drive into some egregious blunder!' 'not your true deliberate judgment, exercised with a sense of responsibility. humility must not cover your laziness. you have such qualities and such talents as must be intended to do good to others, not to be trifled away in fitful exertions. make it your great effort to see clearly, and then to proceed steadfastly, without slackening either from weariness or the persuasions of others.' 'and you won't let me have the one person who can see clearly, and keep me steady?' 'to be your husband, instead of your wife! no, louis; you must learn to take yourself on your own hands, and lean neither on your father, nor on any one else on earth, before you can be fit for mary, or--' 'and if i did?' began louis. 'you would make a man of yourself,' she said, interrupting him. 'that is the first thing--not a reed shaken with the wind. you can do it; there is nothing that grace cannot do.' 'i know there is not,' said louis, reverently. 'and, oh! the blessing that you would so bring on yourself and on your dear father! you have already learnt to make him happier than i ever looked to see him; and you must be energetic and consistent, that so he may respect, not you, but the power which can give you the strength.' louis's heart was too full to make any answer. mrs. ponsonby lay back in her chair, as though exhausted by the energy with which she had spoken the last words; and there was a long silence. he thought he ought to go, and yet could not resolve to move. at last she spoke--'good-bye, louis. come what may, i know mary will find in you the--all that i have found your father.' 'thank you, at least, for saying that,' said louis. 'if you would only hold out a hope--i wish it more than ever now! i do not believe that i should ever do as well with any one else! will you not give me any prospect?' 'be certain of your own heart, louis! nay,' as she saw his face brighten, 'do not take that as a promise. let me give you a few parting words, as the motto i should like to leave with you--'quit yourselves like men; be strong.' and so, louis, whatever be your fixed and resolute purpose, so it be accordant with the will of heaven, you would surely, i believe, attain it, and well do you know how i should rejoice to see'--she broke off, and said, more feebly, 'i must not go on any longer. let me wish you good-bye, louis: i have loved you only less than my own child!' louis knelt on one knee beside her, held her hand, and bowed down his face to hide the shower of tears that fell, while a mother's kiss and a mother's blessing were on his brow. he went down stairs, and out of the house, and took his horse from the inn stables, without one word to any one. the ostlers said to each other that the young lord was in great trouble about the lady at the terrace. mary came home; and if she knew why that long walk had been urged on her, she gave no sign. she saw her mother worn and tired, and she restrained all perception that she was conscious that there had been agitation. she spoke quietly of the spring flowers that she had seen, and of the people whom she had met; she gave her mother her tea, and moved about with almost an increase of the studied quietness of the sick-room. only, when mrs. frost came in for an hour, mary drew back into a corner with her knitting, and did not speak. 'mary,' said her mother, when she came back from lighting her aunt down stairs, 'come to me, my child.' mary came, and her mother took both her hands. they were chilly; and there was a little pulse on mary's temple that visibly throbbed, and almost seemed to leap, with fearful rapidity. 'dear child, i had no power to talk before, or i would not have kept you in suspense. i am afraid it will not do.' 'i was sure of it,' said mary, almost in a whisper. 'dear mamma, you should not have vexed and tired yourself.' 'i comforted myself,' said mrs. ponsonby; 'i said things to him that i had longed to say, and how beautifully he took them! but i could not feel that he knew what he was about much better than he did the first time.' 'it would not be right,' said mary, in her old tone. 'i think your father might have been persuaded. i would have written, and done my utmost--' 'oh, mamma, anything rather than you should have that worry!' 'and i think things will be different--he is softened, and will be more so. but it is foolish to talk in this way, and it may be well that the trial should not be made; though that was not the reason i answered louis as i did.' 'i suppose it will be miss conway,' said mary, trying to smile. 'at least, it ought to be no one else till he has seen enough of her to form a judgment without the charm of prohibition; and this he may do without committing himself, as they are so nearly connected. i must ask his father to give him distinct permission, and then i shall have done with these things.' mary would not break the silence, nor recall her to earthly interests; but she returned to the subject, saying, wistfully, 'can you tell me that you are content, dear child?' 'quite content, thank you, mamma--i am certain it is right,' said mary. 'it would be taking a wrong advantage of his compassion. i fall too far short of what would be wanted to make him happy.' she spoke firmly, but her eyes were full of tears. her mother felt as if no one could fail of happiness with mary, but, controlling the impulse, said, 'it is best, dearest; for you could not bear to feel yourself unable to make him happy, or to fancy he might have more peace without you. my dear, your prospect is not all i could have wished or planned, but this would be too cruel.' 'it is my duty to go to papa,' said mary. 'what would be selfish could not turn out well.' 'if you could be sure of his feelings--if he were only less strangely youthful--no,' she added, breaking off, as if rebuking herself, 'it is not to be thought of, but i do not wonder at you, my poor mary--i never saw any one so engaging, nor in whom i could place such confidence.' 'i am so glad!' said mary, gratefully. 'you used not to have that confidence.' 'i feared his being led. now i feel as sure as any one can dare of his goodness. but i have been talking to him about self-reliance and consistency. he is so devoid of ambition, and so inert and diffident when not in an impetuous fit, that i dread his doing no good as well as no evil.' mary shook her head. did she repress the expression of the sense that her arm had sometimes given him steadiness and fixed his aim?' 'the resemblance to his mother struck me more than ever,' continued mrs. ponsonby. 'there is far more mind and soul, but almost the same nature--all bright, indolent sweetness, craving for something to lean on, but he shows what she might have been with the same principles. dear boy! may he do well!' 'he will be very happy with miss conway,' said mary. 'she will learn to appreciate all he says and does--her enthusiasm will spur him on. i shall hear of them.' the unbreathed sigh seemed to be added to the weight of oppression on mary's patient breast; but she kept her eye steady, her brow unruffled. all the joys did indeed appear to be passing from her with her mother, and she felt as if she should never know another hour of gladness, nor of rest in full free open-hearted confidence, but she could not dwell either on herself or on the future, and each hour that her mother was spared to her was too precious to be wasted or profaned by aught that was personal. mrs. ponsonby herself realized the weary soon to be at rest, the harassed well nigh beyond the reach of troubling. she treated each earthly care and interest as though there were peace in laying it down for the last time. at intervals, as she was able, she wrote a long letter to her husband, to accompany the tidings of her death; and she held several conversations with mary on her conduct for the future. she hoped much from mary's influence, for mr. ponsonby was fond of his daughter, and would not willingly display himself in his worst colours before her; and mary's steadiness of spirits and nerves might succeed, where her own liability to tears and trembling had always been a provocation. her want of judgment in openly preferring her own relations to his uncongenial sister had sown seeds of estrangement and discord which had given mrs. ponsonby some cause for self-reproach, and she felt great hope that her daughter would prevail where she had failed. there was little danger that he would not show mary affection enough to make her home-duties labours of love; and at her age, and with her disposition, she could both take care of herself, and be an unconscious restraint on her father. the trust and hope that she would be the means of weaning her father from evil, and bringing him home a changed man, was mrs. ponsonby's last bright vision. as to scruples on lord ormersfield becoming mary's escort on the voyage, mrs. ponsonby perceived his determination to be fixed beyond remonstrance. perhaps she could neither regret that her daughter should have such a protector, nor bear to reject his last kindness; and she might have lingering hopes of the consequences of his meeting her husband, at a time when the hearts of both would be softened. these matters arranged, she closed out the world. louis saw her but once again, when other words than their own were spoken, and when the scene brought back to him a like one which had seemed his own farewell to this earth. his thread of life was lengthened--here was the moment to pray that it might be strengthened. firm purpose was wakening within him, and the battle-cry rang again in his ears--'quit yourselves like men; be strong!' his eye sought mary. she looked, indeed, like one who could 'suffer and be strong.' her brow was calm, though as if a load sat on her, borne too patiently to mar her peace. the end shone upon her, though the path might be hid in gloom: one step at a time was enough, and she was blest above all in her mother's good hope. a hush was on them all, as though they were watching while a tired, overtasked child sank to rest. there was a space of suffering, when mary and miss mercy did all that love could do, and kept mrs. frost from the sight of what she could neither cheer nor alleviate, and when all she could do was to talk over the past with lord ormersfield. then came a brief interval of relief and consciousness, precious for ever to mary's recollection. the last words of aught beneath were--'my dearest love to your father. tell him i know now how much he has to forgive.' the tender, impulsive, overhasty spirit had wrought for itself some of the trials that had chastened and perfected it, even while breaking down the earthly tabernacle, so as to set free the weary soul, to enter into rest! chapter xix. moonshine. he talked of daggers and of darts, of passions and of pains, of weeping eyes and wounded hearts, of kisses and of chains: but still the lady shook her head, and swore by yea and nay, my whole was all that he had said, and all that he could say. w. mackworth praed. mary's strength gave way. she was calm and self-possessed as ever, she saw lord ormersfield, wrote to her aunt, made all necessary arrangements, and, after the funeral, moved to mrs. frost's house. but, though not actually ill, she was incapable of exertion, could not walk up stairs without fatigue; and after writing a letter, or looking over papers, aunt catharine would find her leaning back, so wan and exhausted, that she could not resist being laid down to rest on the sofa. she shrank from seeing any fresh face, and the effort of talking to the earl resulted in such weariness and quiet depression, that mrs. frost dared not press her to admit any one else, except louis, who rode to the terrace almost every day; but when the kind aunt, believing there must be solace in the sight of her boy, begged to bring him in, mary answered, with unusual vehemence, 'pray don't: tell him i cannot see any one.' and when mrs. frost returned from a sorrowful talk with louis, she believed that mary had been weeping. louis was sad enough. out of the few friends of his childhood he could ill afford to lose one, and he grieved much for his father, to whom the loss was very great. the earl strove, in his old fashion, to stifle sorrow in letters of business, but could not succeed: the result was, that he would discuss the one, mary's past, and the other, mary's future, till time waxed so short that he gladly accepted his son's assistance. conversations with richardson and orders to frampton devolved on louis, and the desire to do no mischief caused him to employ his intellect in acquiring a new habit of attention and accuracy. his reverence for mary was doubled, and he was much concerned at his exclusion, attributing it to his mistimed proposals, and becoming sensible that he had acted boyishly and without due respect. with a longing desire to do anything for her, he dared not even send her a greeting, a flower, or a book, lest it should appear an intrusion; and but for his mournful looks, his aunt would have been almost vexed at his so often preventing her from going to make another attempt to induce his cousin to see him. mary first roused herself on finding that lord ormersfield was taking it for granted that she would wait to hear from her father before sailing for peru. the correspondence which had passed since her mother had begun to decline, had convinced her that he expected and wished for her without loss of time, and the vessel whose captain he chiefly trusted was to sail at the end of may. she entreated to be allowed to go alone, declaring that she had no fears, and would not endure that the earl should double cape horn on her account; but he stood fast--he would not be deprived of the last service that he could render to her mother, and he had not reliance enough on her father to let her go out without any guardian or friend. recent letters from mr. ponsonby and from oliver dynevor reiterated requests for an intelligent man conversant with mining operations, and oliver had indicated a person whom he remembered at chevleigh; but, as his mother said, he forgot that people grew old in the eastern hemisphere, and the application was a failure. finding that mary regarded it as her charge, fitzjocelyn volunteered to go to illershall to consult his friend mr. dobbs; and his first meeting with mary was spent in receiving business-like instructions as to the person for whom he should inquire. there were some who felt dubious when he was seen walking back from the station with a young man who, in spite of broadcloth and growth, was evidently tom madison. 'i could not help it, mary,' said louis, 'it was not my fault that dobbs would recommend him.' mr. dobbs had looked this way and that, and concluded with, 'well, lord fitzjocelyn, i do not know who would answer your purpose better than the young fellow you sent here a year ago.' it appeared that tom had striven assiduously both to learn his business and to improve himself; and, having considerable abilities, already brightened and sharpened by louis, his progress had been surprising. he had no low tastes, and was perfectly to be relied on for all essential points; but mr. dobbs owned that he should be relieved by parting with him, as he was not liked by his fellows, and was thought by the foremen to give himself airs. quarrels and misunderstandings had arisen so often, that he himself had been obliged to exert an influence on his behalf, which he feared might make him obnoxious to the accusation of partiality. he considered that the lad had worth, substance, and promise far beyond his fellows; but his blunt, haughty manners, impatience of rough jokes, and rude avoidance of the unrefined, made him the object of their dislike, so that it was probable that he would thrive much better abroad and in authority; and at his age, he was more likely to adapt himself to circumstances, and learn a new language, than an older man, more used to routine. the vision of the land for digging gold and silver seemed about to be realized, just as tom had been growing learned enough to despise it. enterprise and hopes of fortune made him wild to go; and mary after reading dobbs's letter, and laying before louis the various temptations of lima, found that he thought england to the full as dangerous for his protege. she, therefore, sent for the young man, and decided as dispassionately as she could, upon taking him. the ormersfield world was extremely indignant; frampton and gervas prophesied that no good would come of such a choice, and marvelled at the vicar, who gave the lad lodging in his house, and spent the evenings in giving him such mathematical instruction and teaching of other kinds, as he thought most likely to be useful to him. to his surprise, however, tom was much more grave and sober-minded under his promotion than could have been expected. louis, who had undertaken his outfit, was almost disappointed to find him so much out of heart, and so little responsive to cheerful auguries; and at last a little hint at bantering about the individual at the terrace explained his despondence. it was all over. charlotte had hardly spoken to him while he was waiting at no. , and miss faithfull's martha had told him there had been nothing but walking and talking with lady conway's fine butler, and that charlotte would never have nothing more to say to him! now! just as he might have spoken! was it not enough to knock the heart out of it all! he never wished to go near no. again. louis strongly advised him at least to know his fate, and declared that for his part, he would never take any mrs. martha's word, rather than that of the lady herself. speak out, and, of course, montrose's famous motto came in, and was highly appreciated by tom, though he still shook his head ruefully, as he recollected what a lout he had been at his last meeting with charlotte, and how little he could compare with such a fine gentleman as had been described, 'and she always had a taste for gentility.' 'well, tom, i would not wish to see a better gentleman any day, than you have stuff enough in you to make; and, if charlotte be a girl worth having, she'll value that more than french polish. you're getting polished, too, tom, and will more as you get better and sounder, and that polish will be true and not french.' meantime charlotte had been in twenty states of mind. had tom striven at once to return to the former terms, the lady of eschalott might have treated it as mere natural homage, compared him with delaford's delicate flatteries, and disclaimed him. she had been chilling and shy at the first meeting, expecting him to presume on his promotion, but when he was gone, came no more, except for necessary interviews with miss ponsonby, and then merely spoke civilly, and went away directly, her heart began to fail her. neglect mortified her; she was first affronted, sure she did not care, and resolved to show that she did not; but then the vexation became stronger, she wondered if he had heard of delaford, was angry at her intercourse with the butler being deemed an offence, and finally arrived at a hearty longing for a return to old times. vanity or affection, one or the other, demanded tom's allegiance. and tom came at last. he did not come by moonlight--he did not come at all romantically; but as she was washing vegetables, he stood by the scullery door, and made no elegant circumlocutions. would she be his wife, some time or other? and he would try to be worthy of her. fitzjocelyn had judged her rightly! sound true love had force enough to dispel every illusion of sentimental flattery. charlotte burst into a flood of tears, and, sobbing behind her apron, confessed that she never liked nobody like tom, but she was afraid he would think she had been false to him, for she did like mr. delaford's talk, all about poetry and serenades; but she never would heed him no more, not if he went down on his knees to her. tom was a great deal more likely to perform that feat. he stood his ground when mrs. beckett came in, and told her all about it, and the good old soul mingled her tears with charlotte's, wished them joy, and finished washing the greens. nevertheless mrs. frost thought the kitchen-clock was very slow. their 'walking together' was recognised. martha was very angry with jane, and predicted that the young vagabone would never be heard of more; and that the only benefit would be, that it would settle the girl's mind, and hinder her from encouraging any more followers. and even mrs. frost had her doubts. her prudent counsel interfered with tom's wish to carry out poor little charlotte as his wife; and they had to content themselves with a betrothal until they should have 'saved something,' exchanging brooches, each with a memorial lock of hair. during the remaining week, the lady of eschalott neither ate nor slept, and though she did her work, her tears never seemed to cease. she defended herself by averring that miss ponsonby's pillow was soaked every morning; but if mary's heavy eyelids corroborated her, her demeanour did not. mary was busy in dismantling the house and in packing up; speaking little, but always considerate and self-possessed, and resolute in avoiding all excitement of feeling. she would not go to ormersfield, as the earl proposed, even for one day, and a few books connected with the happy lessons of last summer, were given into mrs. frost's keeping, with the steady, calm word, 'i had better not take them.' she made no outpouring even to that universal, loving confidante, aunt catharine; and the final parting did not break down her self-restraint, though, as the last bend of her head was given, the last chimney of northwold disappeared, her sensation of heartache almost amounted to sickening. she was going to bryanston square. her aunt had been as kind as possible, and had even offered to come to northwold to fetch her home; but mary had been too considerate to allow her to think of so dreadful a journey, and had in fact, been glad to be left only to her own aunt catharine. the last letters which had passed between mrs. ponsonby and annt melicent had been such as two sincere christian women could not fail to write in such circumstances as must soften down all asperities, alleviate prejudice and variance, and be a prelude to that perfect unity when all misunderstandings shall end for ever; and thus mary had the comfort of knowing that the two whom she loved so fondly, had parted with all mutual affection and cordial honour. she really loved the little prim stiff figure who stood on the stairs to welcome her. the house had been her home for ten of the most home-forming years of her life, and felt familiar and kindly; it was very quiet, and it was an unspeakable comfort to be with one who talked freely of her father with blind partiality and love, and did not oppress her with implied compassion for her return to him. yet mary could not help now and then being sensible that good aunt melicent was not the fountain of wisdom which she used to esteem her. now and then a dictum would sound narrow and questionable, objections to books seemed mistaken, judgments of people hard, and without sufficient foundation; and when mary tried to argue, she found herself decidedly set down, with as much confident superiority as if she had been still sixteen years old. six years spent in going to the other side of the world, and in seeing so many varieties of people, did not seem to aunt melicent to have conferred half so much experience as sleeping every night in bryanston square, daily reading the morning post, and holding intercourse with a london world of a dozen old ladies, three curates, and a doctor. the worst of it was, that a hurt and angry tenderness was always excited in mary's mind by the manner of any reference to northwold or ormersfield. it seemed to be fixed, beyond a doubt, that everything there must have been wrong and fashionable; and even poor dear aunt kitty was only spoken of with a charitable hope that affliction had taught her to see the error of her days of worldly display. it was allowed that there was nothing objectionable in clara frost, who was subdued by the sight of mary's deep mourning, and in silent formal company could be grave and formal too. but there was a severe shock in a call from lady conway and isabel; and on their departure mary was cross-examined, in the hope that they had been outrageously gay at northwold, and for want of any such depositions, was regaled with histories of poor lady fitzjocelyn's vanities, which had not lost by their transmission through twenty-two years and twice as many mouths. still more unpleasant was the result of a visit from the earl and his son to appoint the day of starting for liverpool. louis was in no mood to startle any one; he was very sad at heart, and only anxious to be inoffensive; but his air was quite enough to give umbrage, and cause the instant remark, 'i never saw such a puppy!' nothing but such angry incoherency occurred to mary, that she forcibly held her peace, but could not prevent a burning crimson from spreading over her face. she went and stood at the window, glad that miss ponsonby had just taken up the newspaper, which she daily read from end to end, and then posted for lima. by and by came a little dry cough, as she went through the presentations at the levee, and read out 'viscount fitzjocelyn, by the earl of ormersfield.' mary's mind made an excursion to the dear yeomanry suit, till her aunt, having further hunted them out among the earls and viscounts summed up at the end, severely demanded whether she had known of their intention. 'i knew he was to be presented.' 'quite the young man of fashion. no doubt beginning that course, as if the estate were not sufficiently impoverished already. i am not surprised at the report that lord ormersfield was very anxious to secure your fortune for his son.' this was too much, and mary exclaimed, 'he never believes in any fortune that depends on speculation.' 'oh, so there was nothing in it!' said miss ponsonby, who would have liked the satisfaction of knowing that her niece had refused to be a countess, and, while mary was debating whether her silence were untruthful, her bent head and glowing cheek betrayed her. 'ah! my dear, i will ask no questions; i see you have been annoyed. it always happens when a girl with expectations goes among needy nobility.' 'you would not say that, if you knew the circumstances,' said mary, looking down. 'i won't distress you, my dear; i know you are too wise a girl to be dazzled with worldly splendours, and that is enough for me.' the poor old furniture at ormersfield! mary held her tongue, though reproaching herself for cruel injustice to all that was dearest to her, but how deny her refusal, or explain the motives. not that her aunt wanted any explanation, except her own excellent training, which had saved her niece from partaking her mother's infatuation for great people. she had a grand secret to pour into the bosom of her intimates in some tete-a-tete tea-party by-and-by, and poor mary little guessed at the glorification of her prudence which was flowing from her aunt's well-mended pen, in a long letter to mr. ponsonby. she thought it right that he should be informed, she said, that their dear mary had conducted herself according to their fondest wishes; that the relations, among whom she had unfortunately been thrown, had formed designs on her fortune, such as they had every reason to expect; that every solicitation had been employed, but that mary had withstood all that would have been most alluring to girls brought up to esteem mere worldly advantages. it was extremely gratifying, the more so as the young gentleman in question might be considered as strikingly handsome to the mere outward eye, which did not detect the stamp of frivolity, and the effect of an early introduction to the world of fashion and dissipation. she trusted that their dear young heiress would have a better fate, owing to her own wisdom, than being chosen to support the extravagance of a young titled adventurer. having worked herself up into enthusiastic admiration of her own work, miss ponsonby was kinder than ever to her niece, and pitied her for being harassed with lord fitzjocelyn's company to liverpool. mary was not as much relieved as she had expected, when her hand had been released from his pressure, and she had seen the last glimpse of his returning boat. henceforth her imagination was to picture him only with isabel conway. and so viscount fitzjocelyn was left with more liberty than he knew what to do with. he was disinclined to begin the pursuit of miss conway, as if this would involve a want of delicacy and feeling, and he had no other object. the world was before him, but when he drove to the liverpool station, he was unwilling to exert his mind to decide for what ticket to ask. the bias was given by the recollection of a message from his father to frampton. it would be less trouble to go home than to write, and, besides, aunt catharine was alone. she was his unfailing friend, and it would be a great treat to have her to himself. home then he went, where he spent the long summer days in listless, desultory, busy idleness, often alone, dreaming over last year, often passing his evenings with his aunt, or bringing her to see his designs; dining out whenever he was invited, and returning odd uncertain answers when mr. calcott asked him what he was going to do. mr. holdswolth was going to leave james in charge of his parish, and take a walking tour in cornwall, and perversely enough, louis's fancy fixed on joining him; and was much disappointed when mrs. frost proved, beyond dispute, that an ankle, which a little over haste or fatigue always rendered lame, would be an unfair drag upon a companion, and that if he went at all, it must not be on his own feet. at last, lady conway made a descent upon northwold. paris had become so tranquil that she had no hesitation in taking her two elder daughters to make their promised visit; and such appeals were made to louis to join them, that it became more troublesome to refuse than to comply, and, at the shortest notice, he prepared to set out as the escort of the conway family. 'now for it!' he thought. 'if she be the woman, i cannot fail to find it out, between the inns and the sights!' short as the notice was, the lady of eschalott could have wished it shorter. no sooner had mr. delaford set foot in the house beautiful, than mrs. martha announced to him that he would be happy to hear that charlotte arnold was going to be married to a very respectable young man, whom she had known all his life, and to whom mr. dynevor and miss ponsonby had given an appointment to the gold mines, out of respect for lord fitzjocelyn. mr. delaford gravely declared himself glad to hear it. but delaford's purpose in life was, that no maiden should fail of being smitten with his charms; and he took charlotte's defection seriously to heart. his first free moment was devoted to a call in number , but charlotte was scouring in the upper regions, and mrs. beckett only treated him to another edition of the gold mines, in which, if they became silver, the power and grandeur of mr. oliver were mightily magnified. mr. delaford thrummed his most doleful tunes on the guitar that evening, but though the june sun was sinking beauteously, charlotte never put her head out. however, the third time, he found her, and then she was coy and blushing, reserved and distant, and so much prettier, and more genuine than all his former conquests, that something beyond vanity became interested. he courted the muses, and walked in with a pathetic copy of verses, which, some day or other, might serve to figure in the county newspaper, complaining of desertion and cruelty. charlotte sat at the little round table; jane was upstairs, and without her guardian, she felt that she must guard herself. he laid the verses down before her with a most piteous countenance. 'please don't, mr. delaford,' she said; 'i asked mrs. beckett to tell you--' 'she has transfixed my breast,' was the commencement, and out poured a speech worthy of any hero of charlotte's imagination, but it was not half so pleasant to hear as to dream of, and the utmost she could say was a reiteration of her 'please don't!' at last she mustered courage to say, 'i can't listen, sir. i never ought to have done it. i am promised now, and i can't.' a melodramatic burst of indignation frightened her nearly out of her senses, and happily brought jane down. he was going the next day, but he returned once more to the charge, very dolorous and ill-used; but charlotte had collected herself and taken counsel by that time. 'i never promised you anything, sir,' she said. 'i never knew you meant nothing.' 'ah! miss arnold, you cannot interpret the heart!' and he put his hand upon it. 'nor i don't believe you meant it, neither!' continued charlotte, with spirit. 'they tell me 'tis the way you goes on with all young women as have the ill-luck to believe you, and that 'tis all along of your hard-heartedness that poor miss marianne looks so dwining.' 'when ladies will throw themselves at a gentleman's head, what can a poor man do? courtesy to the sex is my motto; but never, never did i love as i love you!' said delaford--'never have i spoken as i do now! my heart and hand are yours, fairest charlotte!' 'for shame, mr. delaford; don't you know i am promised?' he went on, disregarding--'my family is above my present situation, confidential though it be; but i would at once quit my present post--i would open an extensive establishment for refreshment at some fashionable watering-place. my connexions could not fail to make it succeed. you should merely superintend--have a large establishment under you--and enjoy the society and amusements for which you are eminently fitted. we would have a library of romance and poetry--attend the theatre weekly--and,'--(finishing as if to clench the whole) 'charlotte, do you know what my property consists of? i have four hundred pounds and expectations!' if charlotte had not been guarded, what would have been the effect of the library of poetry and romance? but her own poetry, romance, and honest heart, all went the same way, and she cried out--'i don't care what you have, not i. i've promised, and i'll be true--get along with you!' the village girl, hard pressed, was breaking out. 'you bid me go. cruel girl! your commands shall be obeyed. i go abroad! you know the disturbed state of the continent.--in some conflict for liberty, where the desperate poniard is uplifted--there--' 'oh! don't talk so dreadful. pray--' 'do you bid me pause? at a word from you. you are the arbitress of my destiny.' 'no; i've nothing to do--do go! only promise you'll not do nothing dangerous--' 'reject me, and life is intolerable. where the maddened crowd rise upon their tyrants, there in thickest of the fray--' 'you'll be the first to take to your heels, i'll be bound! ain't you ashamed of yourself, to be ranting and frightening a poor girl that fashion?' cried the friendly dragon martha, descending on them. 'do you apply that language to me, ma'am?' 'that i do! and richly you deserve it, too, sir! see if your missus doesn't hear of your tricks, if i find you at this again.' the 'sex' fairly scolded the courteous delaford off the field; and though she turned her wrath on charlotte for having encouraged him, and wondered what the poor young man over the seas would think of it, her interposition had never been so welcome. charlotte cried herself into tranquillity, and was only farther disturbed by a dismal epistle, conveyed by the shoe-boy on the morning of departure, breathing the language of despair, and yet announcing that she had better think twice of the four hundred pounds and expectations, for that it was her destiny that she and no other should be the bride of delaford. 'if i could only know he would do nothing rash!' sighed charlotte. jane comforted her; martha held that he was the last man in the world who would do anything rash. miss conway's marianne, who was left behind, treated charlotte as something ignominious, but looked so ill, miserable, and pining, that miss mercy was persuaded she was going into a decline, and treated her with greater kindness than she had met since she was a child. in the meantime, fitzjocelyn had begun with a fit of bashfulness. the knowledge that this was the crisis, and that all his friends looked to the result of the expedition, made him feel as if he were committing himself whenever he handed isabel in or out of a carriage, and find no comfort except in virginia's chattering. this wore off quickly; the new scene took effect on his impressible mind, and the actual sights and sounds drove out all the rest. his high spirits came back, he freely hazarded mrs. frost's old boarding-school french, and laughed at the infinite blunders for which virginia took him to task, was excessively amused at delaford's numerous adventures, and enjoyed everything to the utmost. to miss conway he turned naturally as the person best able to enter into the countless associations of every scene; and isabel, becoming aware of his amount of knowledge, and tone of deep thought, perceived that she had done mr. frost dynevor injustice in believing his friendship blind or unmerited. they were on most comfortable terms. they had walked all over versailles together, and talked under their breath of the murdered queen; they had been through the louvre, and isabel, knowing it well of old, found all made vivid and new by his enthusiastic delight; they had marvelled together at the poor withered 'popular trees,' whose name had conferred on them the fatal distinction of trees of liberty; they had viewed, like earnest people, the scenes of republican paris, and discussed them with the same principles, but with sufficient difference in detail for amicable argument. they had thought much of things and people, and not at all of each other. only isabel thought she would make the viscount into a vidame, both as more quaint and less personal, and involving slight erasures, and louis was surprised to find what was the true current of his thoughts. with isabel propitious, without compunction in addressing her, with all the novelty and amusement before him, he found himself always recurring to mary, trying all things by mary's judgment, wondering whether he should need approval of his theories in mary's eyes, craving mary's sympathies, following her on her voyage, and imagining her arrival. was it the perverse spirit of longing after the most unattainable? he demanded of himself whether it were a fatal sign that he regretted the loss of isabel, when she went to spend a few days with her old governess. miss longman had left the conway family in order to take care of the motherless children of a good-for-nothing brother, who had run too deeply into debt to be able to return to england. he was now dead, but she was teaching english, and obtaining advantages of education for her nieces, which detained her at paris; and as she had a bed to offer her former pupil, isabel set her heart on spending her last three days in the unrestrained intercourse afforded by a visit to her. louis found that though their party had lost the most agreeable member, yet it was not the loss of the sun; and that he was quite as ready to tease his aunt and make virginia laugh, as if isabel had been looking on with a smile of wonder and commiseration for their nonsense. chapter xx. the fantastic viscount. search for a jewel that too casually hath left mine arm: it was thy master's. shrew me if i would lose it for a revenue of any king's in europe!--cymbeline. 'my dear fitzjocelyn, what is to be done? have you heard? delaford says these horrid creatures are rising! there was an attack on the hotel de ville last night! a thousand people killed, at least!--the national guard called out!' 'one of the lions of paris, my dear aunt; virginia is seeing it in style.' 'seeing it! we must go at once. they will raise those horrid barricades;--we shall be closed in. and isabel gone to that governess! i wish i had never consented! how could i come here at all? fitzjocelyn, what is to be done?' 'drive round that way, if you are bent on going,' said louia, coolly. 'meantime, virginia, my dear, i will thank you for some coffee.' 'how can you talk of such things?' cried his aunt. 'it is all those savage wretches, mad because the national workshops are closed. delaford declares they will massacre all the english.' 'poor wretches, i believe they are starving. i think you are making yourself ill--the most pressing danger. come, virginia, persuade your mamma to sit down to breakfast, while i go to reconnoitre. where are the passports?' virginia had lost all terror in excitement, but neither she nor her mother could bear to let him go out, to return they knew not when. the carriage had already been ordered, but lady conway was exceedingly frightened at the notion of driving anywhere but direct to the railway station; she was sure that they should encounter something frightful if they went along the boulevards. 'could not delaford go to fetch isabel?' suggested virginia, 'he might take a carriage belonging to the hotel.' delaford was summoned, and desired to go to fetch miss conway, but though he said, 'yes, my lady,' he looked yellow and white, and loitered to suggest whether the young lady would not be alarmed. 'i will go with you,' said louis. 'order the carriage, and i shall be ready.' lady conway, to whom his presence seemed protection, was almost remonstrating, but he said, 'delaford is in no state to be of use. he would take bonjour for a challenge. let me go with him, or he will take care the young lady is alarmed. when we are all together, we can do as may seem best, and i shall be able better to judge whether we are to fight or fly.' outside the door he found delaford, who begged to suggest to his lordship that my lady would be alarmed if she were left without either of them, he could hardly answer it to himself that she should remain without any male protector. 'oh yes, pray remain to defend her,' said louis, much amused, and hastening down-stairs he ordered the carriage to drive to rue ----, off the boulevard st. martin. he thought there were signs boding tempest. shops were closed, and men in blouses were beginning to assemble in knots--here and there the red-cap loomed ominously in the far end of narrow alleys, and in the wider streets the only passengers either seemed in haste like himself, or else were national guards hurrying to their alarm-post. he came safely to miss longman's apartments, where he found all on the alert--the governess and her nieces recounting their experiences of february, which convinced them that there was more danger in returning than in remaining. miss longman was urgent to keep isabel and lord fitzjocelyn for at least a few hours, which she declared would probably be the duration of any emeute, but they knew this would cause dreadful anxiety, and when fitzjocelyn proposed returning alone, isabel insisted on accompanying him, declaring that she had no fears, and that her mother would be miserable if her absence should detain them. perhaps she was somewhat deceived by the cool, almost ludicrous, light in which he placed the revolution, as a sort of periodical spasm, and miss longman's predictions that the railway would be closed, only quickened her preparations. after receiving many entreaties to return in case of alarm, they took leave, louis seating himself beside the driver, as well to keep a look-out, as to free miss conway from fears of a tete-a-tete. except for such a charge of ladies, he would have been delighted at the excitement of an emeute; but he was far from guessing how serious a turn affairs were taking. the dark blue groups were thickening into crowds; muskets and pikes were here and there seen, and once he recognised the sinister red flag. a few distant shots were heard, and the driver would gladly have hastened his speed, but swarms of haggard-looking men began to impede their progress, and strains of 'mourir pour la patrie' now and then reached their ears. close to the porte st. denis they were brought to a full stop by a dense throng, above whose heads were seen a line of carriages, the red flag planted on the top. many hands were seizing the horses' heads, and louis leapt down, but not before the door had been opened, and voices were exclaiming, 'descendez citoyenne; au nom de la nation, descendez.' the mob were not uncivil, they made way for louis, and bade him reassure her that no harm was intended, but the carriage was required for the service of the nation. isabel had retreated as far as she could from their hands, but she showed no signs of quailing; her eyes were bright, her colour high, and the hand was firm which she gave to louis as she stepped out. there was a murmur of admiration, and more than one bow and muttered apology about necessity and the nation, as the crowd beheld the maiden in all her innate nobleness and dignity. 'which way?' asked louis, finding that the crowd were willing to let them choose their course. 'home,' said isabel, decidedly, 'there is no use in turning back.' they pressed on past the barricade for which their carriage had been required, a structure of confiscated vehicles, the interstices filled up with earth and paving stones, which men and boys were busily tearing up from the trottoirs, and others carrying to their destination. they were a gaunt, hungry, wolfish-looking race, and the first words that isabel spoke were words of pity, when they had passed them, and continued their course along the boulevards, here in desolate tranquillity. 'poor creatures, they look as if misery made them furious! and yet how civil they were.' 'were you much alarmed? i wish i could have come to you sooner.' 'thank you; i knew that you were at hand, and their address was not very terrific, poor things. i do not imagine there was any real danger.' 'i wish i knew whether we are within or without the barricades. if within, we shall have to cross another. we are actually becoming historical!' he broke off, amazed by isabel's change of countenance, as she put her hand to the arm he held, hastily withdrew it, and exclaimed, 'my bracelet! oh, my bracelet!' turning round to seek it on the pavement. 'the ivory clasp?' asked louis, perceiving its absence. 'oh yes!' she cried, in much distress, 'i would not have lost it for all the world.' 'you may have left it at miss longman's.' 'no, no, i was never without it!' she turned, and made a few retrograde steps, searching on the ground, as if conscious only of her loss, shaking off his hand when he touched her arm to detain her. a discovery broke on, him. well that he could bear it! 'hark!' he said, 'there is cannon firing! miss conway, you cannot go back. i will do my utmost to recover your clasp, but we must not stay here.' 'i had forgotten. i beg your pardon, i did not think!' said isabel, with a species of rebuked submission, as if impressed by the calmness that gave authority to his manner; and she made no remark as he made her resume his arm, and hurried her on past houses with closed doors and windows. suddenly there was the sound of a volley of musketry far behind. 'heaven help the poor wretches,' said louis; and isabel's grasp tightened on his arm. again, again--the dropping sound of shot became continual. and now it was in front as well as in the rear; and the booming of cannon resounded from the heart of the city. they were again on the outskirts of a crowd. 'it is as i thought,' said louis, 'we are between both. there is nothing for it but to push on, and see whether we can cross the barricades; are you afraid to encounter it!' 'no,' said isabel. 'there is a convent not far off, i think. we might find shelter for you there. yet they might break in. it might not be easy to meet. i believe you are safer with me. will you trust in me?' 'i will not have you endanger yourself for me. dispose of me as you will--in a convent, or anywhere. your life is precious, your safety is the first thing.' 'you are speaking in irony.' 'i did not mean it: i beg your pardon.' but she coloured and faltered. 'you must distinctly understand that this is only as englishman to englishwoman.' 'as englishman to englishwoman,' repeated louis, in her own formula. 'or rather,' he added, lowering his voice, 'trust me, for the sake of those who gave the clasp.' he was answered by her involuntary pressure of his arm, and finally, to set her at ease, he said, hurriedly, 'if it went wrong with me, it would be to lima that i should ask you to send my love.' there was no time for more. they were again on the freshly-torn ground, whence the pavement had been wrenched. the throng had thickened behind them, and seemed to be involving them in the vortex. above their heads louis could see in front between the tall houses, the summit of another barricade complete, surmounted with the red flag, and guarded by a fierce party of ruffians. all at once, tremendous yells broke out on all sides. the rattle of a drum, now and then, might be distinguished, shouts and shrieks resounded, and there was a sharp fire of musketry from the barricade, and from the adjoining windows; there was a general rush to the front, and louis could only guard isabel by pressing her into the recess of the closed doorway of one of the houses, and standing before her, preventing himself from being swept away only by exerting all his english strength against the lean, wild beings who struggled past him, howling and screaming. the defenders sprang upon the barricade, and thrust back and hurled down the national guards, whose heads were now and then seen as they vainly endeavoured to gain the summit. this desperate struggle lasted for a few minutes, then cries of victory broke out, and there was sharp firing on both sides, which, however, soon ceased; the red flag and the blouses remaining still in possession. isabel had stood perfectly silent and motionless through the whole crisis, and though she clung to her protector's arm, it was not with nervous disabling terror, even in the frightful tumult of the multitude. there was some other strength with her! 'you are not hurt?' said louis, as the pressure relaxed. 'oh no! thank god! you are not?' 'are you ready? we must make a rush before the next assault.' a lane opened in the throng to afford passage for the wounded. isabel shrank back, but louis drew her on hastily, till they had attained the very foot of the barricade, where a space was kept clear, and there was a cry 'au large, or we shall fire.' 'let us pass, citizens,' said louis, hastily rehearsing the french he had been composing. 'you make not war on women. let me take this young lady to her mother.' grim looks were levelled at them by the fierce black-bearded men, and their mutterings of belle made her cling the closer to her guardian. 'let her pass, the poor child!' said more than one voice. 'hein!--they are english, who take the bread out of our mouths.' 'if you were a political economist,' said louis, gravely, fixing his eyes on the shrewd-looking, sallow speaker, i would prove to you your mistake; but i have no time, and you are too good fellows to wish to keep this lady here, a mark for the garde nationale.' 'he is right there,' said several of the council of chiefs, and a poissarde, with brawny arms and a tall white cap, thrusting forward, cried out, 'let them go, the poor children. what are they doing here? they look fit to be set up in the church for waxen images!' 'take care you do not break us,' exclaimed louis, whose fair cheek had won this tribute; and his smile, and the readiness of his reply, won his admission to the first of the steps up the barricade. 'halte la!' cried a large-limbed, formidable-looking ruffian on the summit, pointing his musket towards them; 'none passes here who does not bring a stone to raise our barricade for the rights of the red republic, and cry, la liberte, l'egalite, et la, fraternite, let it fit his perfidious tongue as it may.' 'there's my answer,' said louis, raising his right arm, which was dripping; with blood, 'you have made me mount the red flag!' 'ha!' cried the friendly fishwife, 'wounded in the cause of the nation! let him go.' 'he has not uttered the cry!' shouted the rest. louis looked round with his cool, pensive smile. 'liberty!' he said, 'what _we_ mean by liberty is freedom to go where we will, and say what we will. i wish you had it, my poor fellows. fraternity--it is not shooting our brother. egalite--i preach that too, but in my own fashion, not yours. let me pass--si cela vou est egal.' his nonchalant intrepidity--a quality never lost on the french--raised an acclamation of le brave anglais. no one stirred a hand to hinder their mounting to the banquette, and several hands were held out to assist in surmounting the parapet of this extempore fortification. isabel bowed her thanks, and louis spoke them with gestures of courtesy; and shouts of high applause followed them as they sped along the blood-stained street. the troops were re-forming after the repulse, and the point was to pass before the attack could be renewed, as well as not to be mistaken for the insurgents. they were at once challenged, but a short explanation to the officer was sufficient, and they were suffered to turn into the rue richelieu, where they were only pursued by the distant sounds of warfare. 'oh, lord fitzjocelyn!' cried isabel, as he slackened his pace, and gasped for breath. 'you are sure you are not hurt?' he said. 'oh no, no; but you--' 'it is very little,' he said--'a stray shot--only enough to work on their feelings. what good-natured rogues they were. i will only twist my handkerchief round to stop the blood. thank you.' isabel tried to help him, but she was too much afraid of hurting him to draw the bandage tight. they dashed on, finding people on the watch for tidings, and meeting bodies of the national guard, and when at length they reached the place vendome, they found the whole establishment watching for them, and virginia flew to meet them on the stairs, throwing her arms round her sister, while lady conway started forward with the agitated joy, and almost anger, of one who felt injured by the fright they had made her suffer. 'there you are! what has kept you! delaford said they were slaughtering every one on the boulevards!' 'i warned you of the consequences of taking me,' said louis, dropping into a chair. 'mamma! he is all over blood!' screamed virginia. lady conway recoiled, with a slight shriek. 'it is a trifle,' said louis;' isabel is safe. there is all cause for thankfulness. we could never have got through if she had not been every inch a heroine.' 'oh, lord fitzjocelyn, if i could thank you!' 'don't,' said louis, with so exactly his peculiar droll look and smile, that all were reassured. isabel began to recount their adventure. 'in the midst of those horrid wretches! and the firing!' cried lady conway. 'my dear, how could you bear it? i should have died of fright!' 'there was no time for fear,' said isabel, with a sort of scorn; 'i should have been ashamed to be frightened when lord fitzjocelyn took it so quietly. i was only afraid lest you should repeat their horrid war-cry. i honour your refusal.' 'of course one would not in their sense, poor things, and on compulsion,' said louis, his words coming the slower from the exhaustion which made him philosophize, rather than exert himself. 'in a true sense, it is the war-cry of our life.' 'how can you talk so!' cried lady conway. 'delaford says the ruffians are certain to overpower the guard. we must go directly. very likely this delay of yours may prevent us from getting off at all.' 'i will find out whether the way be open,' said louis, 'when i have-' his words failed him, for as he rose, the handkerchief slipped off, a gush of blood came with it, and he was so faint that he could hardly reach the sofa. lady conway screamed, virginia rang the bells, isabel gave orders that a surgeon should be called. 'spirits from the vasty deep,' muttered louis, in the midst of his faintness, 'the surgeons have graver work on hand.' 'for heaven's sake, don't talk so!' cried his aunt, without daring to look at him; 'i know your arm is broken!' 'broken bones are a very different matter, experto crede. this will be all right when i can stop the bleeding,' and steadying himself with difficulty, he reached the door, and slowly repaired to his own room, while the girls sent fanshawe and delaford to his assistance. lady conway, unable to bear the sight of blood, was in a state of nervous sobbing, which virginia's excited restlessness did not tend to compose; and isabel walked up and down the room, wishing that she could do anything, looking reproachfully at her mother, and exalting to the skies the courage, presence of mind, and fortitude of the wounded knight. presently, delaford came down with a message from lord fitzjocelyn that it was of no use to wait for him, for as the butler expressed it, 'the haemorrhage was pertinacious,' and he begged that the ladies would depart without regard to him. 'in fact,' said delaford, 'it was a serious crisis, and there was no time to be lost; an english gentleman, captain lonsdale, who had already offered his services, would take care of his lordship, and my lady had better secure herself and the young ladies.' 'leave fitzjocelyn!' cried virginia. 'is it very dangerous, delaford?' asked lady conway. 'i would not be responsible for the consequences of remaining, my lady,' was the answer. 'shall i order the horses to be brought out?' 'i don't know. is the street full of people? oh! there is firing! what shall i do? isabel, what do you say!' isabel was sitting still and upright; she hardly raised her eyelids, as she tranquilly said, 'nothing shall induce me to go till he is better.' 'isabel! this is most extraordinary! do you know what you are saying?' isabel did not weaken her words by repetition, but signed to delaford to leave them, and he never ventured to disregard miss conway. virginia hung about her, and declared that she was quite right; and lady conway, in restless despair, predicted that they would all be massacred, and that her nephew would bleed to death, and appealed to every one on the iniquity of all the doctors in paris for not coming near him. poor louis himself was finding it very forlorn to be left to fanshawe, whose one idea was essences, and delaford, who suggested nothing but brandy. some aunts and cousins he had, who would not have left him to their tender mercies. he was growing confused and feeble, speculating upon arteries, and then starting from a delusion of mary's voice to realize his condition, and try to waken his benumbed faculties. at last, a decided step was heard, and he saw standing by him a vigorous, practical-looking englishman, and a black-eyed, white-hooded little soeur de charite. captain lonsdale, on hearing the calls for surgical aid, had without a word, hurried out and secured the brisk little sister, who, with much gesticulation, took possession of the arm, and pronounced it a mere trifle, which would have been nothing but for the loss of blood, the ball having simply passed through the fleshy part of the arm, avoiding the bone. louis, pleased with this encounter as a result of the adventure, was soon in condition to rise, though with white cheeks and tottering step, and to present to lady conway her new defender. the sight of a bold, lively english soldier was a grand consolation, even though he entirely destroyed all plans of escape by assuring her that there was a tremendous disturbance in the direction of the northern railway, and that the only safe place for ladies was just where she was. he made various expeditions to procure intelligence, and his tidings were cheerful enough to counteract the horrible stories that delaford was constantly bringing in, throughout that saturday, the dreadful th of june, . it was late before any one ventured to go to bed; and louis, weak and weary, had wakened many times from dreamy perceptions that some wonderful discovery had been made, always fixing it upon mary, and then finding himself infinitely relieved by recollecting that it did not regard her. he was in the full discomfort of the earlier stage of this oft-repeated vision, when his door was pushed open, and delaford's trembling voice exclaimed, 'my lord, i beg your pardon, the massacre is beginning.' 'let me know when it is over,' said louis, nearly in his sleep. delaford reiterated that the city was bombarded, thousands of armed men were marching on the hotel, and my lady ought to be informed. a distant cannonade, the trampling of many feet, and terrified voices on the stairs, finally roused louis, and hastily rising, he quitted his room, and found all the ladies on the alert. lady conway was holding back virginia from the window, and by turns summoning isabel to leave it, and volubly entreating the master of the hotel to secure it with feather-beds to defend them from the shot. 'oh, fitzjocelyn!' she screamed, 'tell him so--tell him to take us to the cellars. why will he not put the mattresses against the windows before they fire?' 'i should prefer a different relative position for ourselves and the beds,' said louis, in his leisurely manner, as he advanced to look out. 'these are the friends of order, my dear aunt; you should welcome your protectors. their beards and their bayonets by gaslight are a grand military spectacle.' 'they will fire! there will be fighting here! they will force their way in. don't, virginia--i desire you will not go near the window.' 'we are all right. you are as safe as if you were in your own drawing-room,' said captain lonsdale, walking in, and with his loud voice drowning the panic, that louis's cool, gentle tones only irritated. isabel looked up and smiled, as louis stood by her, leaving his aunt and virginia to the martial tones of their consoler. 'i could get no one to believe me when i said it was only the soldiers,' she observed, with some secret amusement. 'the feather-bed fortress was the leading idea,' said louis. 'some ladies have a curious pseudo presence of mind.' 'generally, i believe,' said isabel, 'a woman's presence of mind should be to do as she is told, and not to think for herself, unless she be obliged.' 'thinking for themselves has been fatal to a good many,' said louis, relapsing into meditation--'this poor paris among the rest, i fancy. what a dawn for a sunday morning! how cold the lights look, and how yellow the gas burns. we may think of home, and be thankful!' and kneeling with one knee on a chair, he leant against the shutter, gazing out and musing aloud. 'thankful, indeed!' said isabel, thoughtfully. 'yes--first it was thinking not at all, and then thinking not in the right way.' isabel readily fell into the same strain. 'they turned from daylight and followed the glare of their own gas,' said she. so they began a backward tracing of the calamities of france; and, as louis's words came with more than usual slowness and deliberation, they had only come to cardinal de richelieu, when captain lonsdale exclaimed, 'i am sorry to interrupt you, lord fitzjocelyn, but may i ask whether you can afford to lose any more blood?' 'thank you; yes, the bandage is loosened, but i was too comfortable to move,' said louis, sleepily, and he reeled as he made the attempt, so that he could not have reached his room without support. the captain had profited sufficiently by the sister's example to be able to staunch the blood, but not till the effusion had exhausted louis so much that all the next day it mattered little to him that the city was in a state of siege, and no one allowed to go out or come in. even a constant traveller like captain lonsdale, fertile in resource, and undaunted in search of all that was to be seen, was obliged to submit, the more willingly that fitzjocelyn needed his care, and the ladies' terror was only kept at bay by his protection. he sat beside the bed where lay louis in a torpid state, greatly disinclined to be roused to attend when his aunt would hasten into the room, full of some horrible rumour brought in by delaford, and almost petulant because he would not be alarmed. all he asked of the tricolor or of the drapeau rouge for the present was to let him alone, and he would drop into a doze again, while the captain was still arguing away her terror. more was true than he would allow her to credit and when the little soeur de charite found a few minutes for visiting her patient's wound, her bright face was pale with horror and her eyes red with weeping. 'our good archbishop!' she sobbed, when she allowed herself to speak, and to give way to a burst of tears. 'ah, the martyr! ah, the good pastor! the miserable--but no--my poor people, they knew not what they did!' and as louis, completely awakened, questioned her, she told how the good archbishop affre had begun that sunday of strife and bloodshed by offering his intercessions at the altar for the unhappy people, and then offering his own life. 'the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep,' were his words, as he went forth to stand between the hostile parties, and endeavour to check their fury against one another. she herself had seen him, followed by a few priests, and preceded by a brave and faithful ouvrier, who insisted on carrying before him a green branch, as an emblem of his peaceful mission. she described how, at the sight of his violet robes, and the white cross on his breast, the brave boy gardes mobiles came crowding round him, all black with powder, begging for his blessing, some reminding him that he had confirmed them, while others cried, 'your blessing on our muskets, and we shall be invincible,' while some of the women asked him to carry the bandages and lint which they wished to send to the wounded. on he went, comforting the wounded, absolving the dying, and exhorting the living, and at more than one scene of conflict the combatants paused, and yielded to his persuasions; but at the barricade at the faubourg st. antoine, while he was signing to the mob to give him a moment to speak, a ball struck him, and followed by the weeping and horror-struck insurgents, he was borne into the curate's house, severely wounded, while the populace laid down their weapons, to sign a declaration that they knew not who had fired the fatal shot. 'no, no, it was none of our people!' repeated the little nun. 'not one of them, poor lost creatures as too many are, would have committed the act--so sacrilegious, so ungrateful! ah! you must not believe them wicked. it is misery that drove them to rise. hold! i met a young man--alas! i knew him well when he was a child--i said to him, 'ah! my son, you are on the bad train.' 'bread, mother--it is bread we must have,' he answered. 'why, would you speak to one who has not eaten for twenty-four hours?' i told him he knew the way to our kitchen. 'no, mother,' he said, 'i shall not eat; i shall get myself killed.'' many a lamentable detail of this description did she narrate, as she busied herself with the wound; and louis listened, as he had listened to nothing else that day, and nearly emptied his travelling purse for the sufferers. isabel and virginia waylaid her on the stairs to admire and ask questions, but she firmly, though politely, put them aside, unable to waste any time away from her children--her poor wounded! on monday forenoon tranquillity was restored, the rabble had been crushed, and the organized force was triumphant. still the state of siege continued, and no one was allowed free egress or ingress, but the captain pronounced this all nonsense, and resolutely set out for a walk, taking the passports with him, and promising lady conway to arrange for her departure. by-and-by he came in, subdued and affected by the procession which he had encountered--the dying archbishop borne home to his palace on a litter, carried by workmen and soldiers, while the troops, who lined the streets, paid him their military salutes, and the people crowded to their doors and windows--one voice of weeping and mourning running along paris--as the good prelate lay before their eyes, pale, suffering, peaceful, and ever and anon lifting his feeble hand for a last blessing to the flock for whom he had devoted himself. the captain was so much impressed that, as he said, he could not get over it, and stayed for some time talking over the scene with the young ladies, before starting up, as if wondering at his own emotion, he declared that he must go and see what they would do next. presently afterwards, fitzjocelyn came down stairs. his aunt was judiciously lying down in her own apartment to recruit her nerves after her agitation, and had called virginia to read to her, and isabel was writing her journal, alone, in the sitting-room. lady conway would have been gratified at her eager reception of him, but, as he seemed very languid, and indisposed for conversation, she continued her occupation, while he rested in an arm-chair. presently he said, 'is it possible that you could have left that bracelet at miss longman's?' 'pray do not think about it,' exclaimed isabel; 'i am ashamed of my childishness! perhaps, but for that delay, you would not have been hurt,' and her eyes filled with tears, as her fingers encircled the place where the bracelet should have been. 'perhaps, but for that delay, we might both have been shot,' said louis. 'no, indeed; i could not wonder at your prizing it so much.' 'i little thought that would be the end of it,' said isabel. 'i am glad you know its history, so that i may have some excuse;' and she tried to smile, but she blushed deeply as she dried her eyes. 'excuse? more than excuse!' said louis, remembering his fears that it would be thrown away upon her. 'i know--' 'he has told you!' cried isabel, starting with bashful eagerness. 'he has told me what i understand now,' said louis, coming near in a glow of grateful delight. 'oh, i am so glad you appreciate him. thank you.' 'you are inferring too much,' said isabel, turning away in confusion. 'don't you mean it!' exclaimed louis. 'i thought--' 'we must not mistake each other,' said isabel, recovering her self-possession. 'nothing amounting to what you mean ever passed, except a few words the last evening, and i may have dwelt on them more than i ought,' faltered she, with averted head. 'not more than he has done, i feel certain,' said louis; 'i see it all! dear old jem! there's no such fellow in existence.' but here perceiving that he was going too far, he added, almost timidly, 'i beg your pardon.' 'you have no occasion,' she said, smiling in the midst of her blushes. 'i feared i had said what i ought not. i little expected such kind sympathy.' she hastily left him, and lady conway soon after found him so full of bright, half-veiled satisfaction, that she held herself in readiness for a confession from one or both every minute, and, now that the panic was over, gave great credit to the red republicans for having served her so effectually, and forgave the young people for having been so provoking in their coolness in the time of danger, since it proved how well they were suited to each other. she greatly enjoyed the universally-implied conviction with regard to the handsome young pair. nor did they struggle against it; neither of them made any secret of their admiration for the conduct of the other, and the scrupulous appellations of miss conway and lord fitzjocelyn were discarded for more cousinly titles. the young hero fell somewhat in his aunt's favour when he was missing at the traveller's early breakfast, although delaford reported him much better and gone out. 'what if he should be late for the train?--what if he should be taken up by the police?' virginia scolded her sister for not being equally restless, and had almost hunted the captain into going in search of him; when at last, ten minutes before the moment of departure, in he came, white, lame, and breathless, but his eyes dancing with glee, and his lips archly grave, as he dropped something into isabel's lap. 'her bracelet!' exclaimed virginia, as isabel looked up with swimming eyes, unable to speak. 'where did you find it?' 'in the carriage, in the heart of the barricade at the porte st. denis.' 'it is too much!' cried isabel, recovering her utterance, and rising with her hands locked together in her emotion. 'you make me repent my having lamented for it!' 'i had an old respect for clara's clasp.' 'i never saw a prettier attention,' said his aunt. 'it is only a pity that you cannot fasten it on for her.' 'that could only be done by the right hand,' muttered louia, under his breath, enjoying her blush. 'you have not told us how you got it!' said virginia. 'it struck me that there was a chance, and i had promised to lose none. i found the soldiers in the act of pulling down the barricade. what an astonishing construction it is! i spoke to the officer, who was very civil, and caused me to depose that i had hired the carriage, and belonged to the young lady. i believe my sling had a great effect; for they set up a shout of acclamation when the bracelet appeared, lying on the cushion as quietly as if it were in its own drawer.' 'the value will be greater than ever _now_, isabel,' said lady conway. 'you will never lose it again!' isabel did not gainsay her. the captain shrugged his shoulders, and looked sagacious at his patient's preparation for the journey before him. louis gravely looked into his face as he took leave of him, and said, 'you are wrong.' the captain raised his eyebrows incredulously. as they left the city, the bells of all the churches were tolling for the martyred archbishop. and not for him alone was there mourning and lamentation through the city: death and agony were everywhere; in some of the streets, each house was a hospital, and many a groan and cry of mortal pain was uttered through that fair summer-day. louis, in a low voice, reminded isabel that, on this same day, the english primate was consecrating the abbey newly restored for a missionary college; and his eyes glistened as he dwelt with thanksgiving upon the contrast, and thought of the 'peace within our walls, and plenteousness within our palaces.' he lay back in his corner of the carriage, too much tired to talk; though, by-and-by, he began to smile over his own musings, or to make some lazily ludicrous remark to amuse virginia. his aunt caressed her wounded hero, and promoted his intercourse with isabel, to his exquisite amusement, in his passive, debonnaire condition, especially as isabel was perfectly insensible to all these manuoevres. there she sat, gazing out of window, musing first on the meeting with the live sir roland, secondly on the amends to be made in the 'chapel in the valley.' the cloten of the piece must not even be a vidame nothing distantly connected with a v; even though this prototype was comporting himself much more like the nonchalant, fantastic viscount, than like her resolute, high-minded knight at the porte st. denis. chapter xxi. the hero of the barricades. the page slew the boar, the peer had the gloire. quentin durward. great uneasiness was excited at dynevor terrace by the tidings of the insurrection at paris. after extracting all possible alarm from her third-hand newspaper, mrs. frost put on her bonnet to set off on a quest for a sight of the last day's times. james had offered to go, but she was too restless to remain at home; and when he had demonstrated that the rumour must be exaggerated, and that there was no need for alarm, he let her depart, and as soon as she was out of sight, caught up the paper to recur to the terrible reports of the first day's warfare. he paced about the little parlour, reviling himself for not having joined the party, to infuse a little common sense; fitzjocelyn, no more fit to take care of himself than a baby, probably running into the fray from mere rash indifference! isabel exposed to every peril and terror! why had he refused to join them? the answer was maddening. he hated himself, as he found his love for his cousin melting under the influence of jealousy, and of indignation that his own vehement passion must be sacrificed to the tardy, uncertain love which seemed almost an insult to such charms. 'what needs dwelling on it?' he muttered; 'doubtless they are engaged by this time! i shall surely do something desperate if they come here, under my very eye. would that i could go to the antipodes, ere i forfeit louis's love! but my grandmother, clara! was ever man so miserably circumstanced?' a hand was on the door; and he strove to compose his face lest he should shock his grandmother. it was not mrs. frost. 'louis! for heaven's sake, where are they!' 'in the house beautiful.' james breathed--'and you! what makes you so pale? what have you done to your arm? 'a little affair of the barricades. i have been watering the french republic with my blood.' 'rushing into the thickest of the row, of course.' 'only escorting miss conway through an assault of the garde nationale said louis, in a tone as if he had been saying 'walking up the high street.' how could he help teasing, when he could make such amends? james began to pace up and down again, muttering something about madness and frenzy. 'it was not voluntary,' said louis. 'when the carriage was confiscated for the service of the nation, what could we do?--i can tell you, jem,' he added, fervently, 'what a gallant being she is! it was the glorious perfection of gentle, lofty feminine courage, walking through the raging multitude--through shots, through dreadful sights, like una through the forest, in christian maidenly fearlessness.' james had flung himself into a chair, hiding his face, and steadying his whole person, by resting his elbow on his knee and his brow on his hand, as he put a strong force on himself that he might hear louis out without betraying himself. louis paused in ardent contemplation of the image he had called up, and poor james gruffly whispered, 'go on: you were happy.' 'very happy, in knowing what cause i have to rejoice for you.' james gave a great start, and trembled visibly. 'i did not tell you,' pursued louis, 'that the single moment when she lost her firmness, was when she thought she had lost a certain ivory clasp.' james could endure no more: 'louis,' he said, 'you must try me no longer. what do you mean?' louis affectionately put his hand on his shoulder: 'i mean, dear jem, that i understand it now; and it is a noble heart that you have won, and that can value you as you deserve.' james wrung his hand, and looked bewildered, inquiring, and happy; but his quivering lips could form no words. 'it was a time to reveal the depths of the heart,' said louis. 'a few words and the loss of the bracelet betrayed much: and afterwards, as far as a lady could, she confessed that something which passed between you the last evening--' 'louis!' cried james, 'i could not help it! i had been striving against it all along; but if you could imagine how i was tried! you never would come to plead your own cause, and i thought to work for you, but my words are too near the surface. i cut myself short. i have bitterly reproached myself ever since, but i did not know the harm i had done you. can you forgive me? can you--no, it is vain to ask; you never can be happy.' 'my dear jem, you go on at such a pace, there is no answering you. there is no forgiveness in the case. further acquaintance had already convinced me that she was lovely and perfect, but that 'she is na mine ain lassie.' yes, she caught my imagination; and you and my father would have it that i was in love, and i supposed you knew best: but when i was let alone to a rational consideration, i found that to me she is rather the embodied isabel of romance, a beauteous vision, than the--the--in short, that there is another who has all that i am wanting in. no, no, dear jem; it was you who made the generous sacrifice. have no scruples about me; i am content with the part of una's lion, only thankful that sans-loy and sans-foy had not quite demolished him before he had seen her restored to the red cross knight.' it was too much for james; he hid his face in his hands, and burst into tears. such joy dawning on him, without having either offended or injured his cousin, produced a revulsion of feeling which he could not control, and hearing the street-door opened, he ran out of the room, just before his grandmother came hurrying in, on the wings of the intelligence heard below. 'yes! i knew my own boy would come to me!' she cried. 'even miss conway has not begun to keep him from me yet.' 'nor ever will, aunt kitty. there are obstacles in the way. you must be granny, and mother, and sister and wife, and all my womankind, a little longer, if you please.' and he sat down fondly at her feet, on a footstool which had been his childish perch. 'not distressed, you insensible boy?' 'very happy about isabel,' said he, turning to look at her with eyes dancing with merry mystification. 'a foolish girl not to like my louis! i thought better of her; but i suppose my lady has taught her to aim higher!' 'so she does,' said louis, earnestly. 'ungrateful girl! why, charlotte tells me you led her straight over the barricades, with cannon firing on you all the time!' 'but not cupid.' 'then, it is true! and you have really hurt yourself! and so pale! my poor boy--what is it? i must nurse you.' 'i had so little blood left, that a gnat of tolerable appetite could have made an end of me on sunday, without more ado. but, instead of that, i had a good little sister of charity; and wasn't that alone worth getting a bullet through one's arm?' aunt catharine was shuddering thankfully through the narration, when james came down, his brow unclouded, but his manner still agitated, as if a burthen had been taken away, and he hardly knew how to realize his freedom from the weight. mrs. frost could not part with her boy, and jane beckett evidently had a spite against 'they french bandages;' so that louis only talked of going home enough to get himself flattered and coaxed into remaining at no. , as their patient. the two young men went in the afternoon to inquire after the conway party, when they found that her ladyship was lying down, but isabel, who had been summoned from a wholesale conflagration of all the ms. relating to the fantastic viscount, brought down miss king, apparently to converse for her; for she did little except blush, and seemed unable to look at either of the friends. as they took leave, louisa came into the room with a message that mamma hoped to see mr. frost dynevor to-morrow, and trusted that he had made no engagements for the holidays. james murmured something inaudible, and ran down stairs, snarling at louis as he turned to the miss faithfulls' door, and telling him he wanted to obtain a little more petting and commiseration. 'i could not waste such an opportunity of looking interesting!' said louis, laughing, as he tapped at the door. delaford marshalled out the poor tutor with a sense of triumph. 'his hopes, at least, were destroyed!' thought the butler; and he proceeded to regale marianne with the romance of the barricades,--how he had himself offered to be miss conway's escort, but lord fitzjocelyn had declared that not a living soul but himself should be the young lady's champion; and, seeing the young nobleman so bent on it, mr. delaford knew that the force of true affection was not to be stayed, no more than the current of the limpid stream, and had yielded the point; and, though, perhaps, his experience might have spared her the contaminating propinquity of the low rabble, yet, considering the circumstances, he did not regret his absence, since he was required for my lady's protection, and, no doubt, two fond hearts had been made happy. then, in the midnight alarm, when the young nobleman had been disabled, delaford had been the grand champion:--he had roused the establishment; he had calmed every one's fears; he had suggested arming all the waiters, and fortifying the windows; he had been the only undaunted representative of the british lion, when the environs swarmed with deadly foes, with pikes and muskets flashing in the darkness. fanshawe had been much too busy with her ladyship's nerves, and too ignorant of french, to gather enough for his refutation, had she wished for it; and, in fact, she had regarded him as the only safeguard of the party, devoutly believing all his reports, and now she was equally willing to magnify her own adventures. what a hero delaford was all over the terrace and its vicinity! people looked out to see the defender of the british name; and charlotte arnold mended stockings, and wondered whether her cruelty had made him so desperately courageous. she could almost have been sorry that the various arrivals kept the domestic establishments of both houses so fully occupied! poor tom! she had been a long time without hearing of him! and a hero was turning up on her hands! the world was not tranquil above-stairs. the removal of the one great obstacle to james's attachment had only made a thousand others visible; and he relapsed into ill-suppressed irritability, to the disappointment of louis, who did not perceive the cause. at night, however, when mrs. frost had gone up, after receiving a promise, meant sincerely, however it might be kept, that 'poor louis' should not be kept up late, james began with a groan: 'now that you are here to attend to my grandmother, i am going to answer this advertisement for a curate near the land's end.' 'heyday!' 'it is beyond human endurance to see her daily and not to speak! i should run wild! it would be using lady conway shamefully.' 'and some one else. what should hinder you from speaking?' 'you talk as if every one was heir to a peerage.' 'i know what i am saying. i do not see the way to your marriage just yet, but it would be mere trifling with her feelings, after what has passed already, not to give her the option of engaging herself.' 'i'm sure i don't know what i said! i was out of myself. i was ashamed to remember that i had betrayed myself, and dared not guess what construction she put on it.' 'such a construction as could only come from her own heart!' after some raptures, james added, attempting to be cool, 'you candidly think i have gone so far, that i am bound in honour to make explanation.' 'i am sure it would make her very unhappy if you went off in magnanimous silence to the land's end; and remaining as the boy's tutor, without confession, would be a mere delusion and treachery towards my aunt.' 'that woman!' 'she is not her mother.' 'who knows how far she will think herself bound to obedience? with that sort of relationship, nobody knows what to be at.' 'i don't think isabel wishes to make her duty to lady conway more stringent than necessary. they live in utterly different spheres; and, at least, you can be no worse off than you are already.' 'i may be exposing her to annoyance. women have ten million ways of persecuting each other.' 'had you seen isabel's eye when she looked on the wild crowd, you would know how little she would heed worse persecution than my poor aunt could practise. it will soon be my turn to say you don't deserve her.' james was arguing against his own impulse, and his scruples only desired to be talked down; louis's generous and inconsiderate ardour prevailed, and, after interminable discussion, it was agreed that, after some communication with the young lady herself, an interview should be sought with lady conway, for which james was already bristling, prepared to resent scorn with scorn. in the morning, he was savage with shamefacedness, could not endure any spectator, and fairly hunted his cousin home to ormersfield, where louis prowled about in suspense--gave contradictory orders to frampton, talked as if he was asleep, made frampton conclude that he had left his heart behind him, and was ever roaming towards the northwold turnpike. at about four o'clock, a black figure was seen posting along the centre of the road, and, heated, panting, and glowing, james came up--made a decided and vehement nod with his head, but did not speak till they had turned into the park, when he threw himself flat on the grass under an old thorn, and louis followed his example, while farmer morris's respectable cows stared at the invasion of their privacy. 'tout va bien?' asked louis. 'as well as a man in my position can expect! she is the most noble of created beings, louis!' 'and what is her mother?' 'don't call her mother! you shall hear. i could not stay at home! i went to the faithfulls' room: i found miss mercy waiting for her, to join in a walk to some poor person. i went with them. i checked her when she was going into the cottage. we have been walking round brackley's fields--' 'and poor miss mercy?' 'never remembered her till this moment!' 'she will forgive! and her ladyship?' 'that's the worst of it. she was nearly as bad as you could have been!--so intensely civil and amiable, that i began to think her all on my side. i really could be taken in to suppose she felt for us!' 'i have no doubt she did. my good aunt is very sincerely loth to hurt people's feelings.' 'she talked of her duty! she sympathized! it was not till i was out of the house that i saw it was all by way of letting me down easy-trapping me into binding myself on honour not to correspond.' 'not correspond!' cried louis, in consternation. 'are you not engaged?' 'as far as understanding each other goes. but who knows what may be her machinations, or isabel's sense of obedience?' 'does she forbid it?' 'no. she went to speak to isabel. i fancy she found it unwise to test her power too far; so she came down and palavered me,--assured me that i was personally all that heart could wish--she loved her dear child the better for valuing solid merit. faugh! how could i stand such gammon? but i must perceive that she was peculiarly circumstanced with regard to isabel's family, she must not seem to sanction an engagement till i could offer a home suited to her expectations. she said something of my uncle oliver; but i disposed of that. however, i dare say it made her less willing to throw me overboard! anyway, she smoothed me and nattered me, till i ended by agreeing that she has no choice but to remove instanter from the terrace, and forbid me her abode! and, as i said, she wormed a promise from me not to correspond.' 'you have no great loss there. depend upon it that isabel would neither brave her openly by receiving your letters, nor submit to do anything underhand.' 'nor would i ask her!--but it is intolerable to have been tricked into complacent consent.' 'i am glad your belle-mere knows how to manage you.' 'i told you she was only less unbearable than yourself. you have it from the same stock.' 'the better for your future peace. i honour her. if she had let the welsh dragon show his teeth in style, he would only have had to make unpleasant apologies when the good time comes.' 'when!' sighed james. 'if isabel be the woman i take her for, she will be easily content.' 'she is sick of parade; she has tried how little it can do for a mind like hers: she desires nothing but a home like our own--but what prospect have i of any such thing? even if the loss of my fellowship were compensated, how could i marry and let clara be a governess? clara must be my first consideration. but, i say, we ought to be going home.' 'i thought i was at home.' 'my grandmother and jane won't be pacified till they see you. they think you are not fit to be in a house by yourself. they both fell on me for having let you go. you must come back, or my grandmother will think you gone off in despair, as you ought to be, and i shall never dare to speak to her.' 'at your service,' said the duteous fitzjocelyn. 'i'll leave word at the lodge.' 'by-the-bye, are you up to walking?' 'candidly, now i think of it, i doubt whether i am. come, and let us order the carriage.' 'no--no;--i can't stand waiting--i'll go home and get over the first with granny--you come after. yes; that's right.' so the hunted louis waited, contentedly, while james marched back, chary of his precious secret, and unwilling to reveal it even to her, and yet wanting her sympathy. the disclosure was a greater shock than he had expected from her keen and playful interest in matters of love and matrimony. it was a revival of the mournful past, and she shed tears as she besought him not to be imprudent, to remember his poor father, and not rush into a hasty marriage. he and his sister had been used to poverty, but it was different with miss conway. he bitterly replied, that lady conway would take care they were not imprudent; and that instant the granny's heart melted at the thought of his uncertain prospect, and at hearing of the struggles and sufferings that he had undergone. they had not talked half an hour, before she had taken home isabel conway to her heart as a daughter, and flown in the face of all her wisdom, but assuring him that she well knew that riches had little to do with happiness, auguring an excellent living, and, with great sagacity, promising to settle the terrace on his wife, and repeating, in perfect good faith, all the wonderful probabilities which her husband had seen in it forty years ago. when louis arrived, he found her alone, and divided between pride in her grandson's conquest, and some anxiety on his own account, which took the form of asking him what he meant by saying that isabel aimed higher than himself. 'did she not?' said louis; and with a sort of compunction for a playful allusion to the sacred calling, he turned it off with, 'why, what do you think of roland ap dynasvawr ap roland ap gruffydd ap rhys ap morgan ap llywellwyn ap roderic ap caradoc ap arthur ap uther ap pendragon?' running this off with calm, slow, impressive deliberation. 'certify me, louis dear, before i can quite rejoice, that this fun is not put on.' 'did you think me an arrant dissembler? no, indeed: before i guessed how it was with them, i had found out--oh! aunt kitty, shall i ever get mary to believe in me, after the ridiculous way in which i have behaved to her?' 'is this what you really mean?' 'indeed it is. the very presence of isabel could not keep me from recurring to her; and at home, not a room, not a scene, but is replete with recollections of all that she was to me last year! and that i should only understand it when half the world is between us! how mad i was! how shall i ever persuade her to forget my past folly? past! nay, folly and inconsistency are blended in all i do, and now they have lost me the only person who could help me to conquer them! and now she is beyond my reach, and i shall never be worthy of her.' he was much agitated. the sight of james's success, and the return to his solitary home, had stirred up his feelings very strongly; and he needed his aunt's fond soothing and sympathy--but it was not difficult to comfort and cheer him. his disposition was formed more for affection than passion, and his attachment to mary was of a calmer nature than his fiery cousin would have allowed to be love. it took a good deal of working-up to make it outwardly affect his spirits or demeanour, in general, it served only as an ingredient in the pensiveness that pervaded all his moods, even his most arrant nonsense. the building of castles for james, and the narration of the pleasing delusion in which he had brought home his aunt, were sufficient to enliven him. he was to go the next morning to call upon lady conway, and see whether he could persuade her into any concessions: james was very anxious that isabel and his grandmother should meet, and was beginning to propose that louis should arrange an interview for them in miss faithfull's room, before the departure, which was fixed for monday. 'i intend to call upon lady conway,' said mrs. frost, with dignity that made him feel as if he had been proposing something contraband. louis went first, and was highly entertained by the air of apology and condolence with which his aunt received him. she told him how excessively concerned she was, and how guilty she felt towards him--a score on which, he assured her, she had no need to reproach herself. she had heard enough from isabel to lead to so much admiration of his generosity, that he was obliged to put a stop to it, without being skilful enough to render sincerity amiable, but she seemed satisfied, eagerly assured him of her approval, and declared that she fully understood him. had she explained, he would have thought her understanding went too far. she entirely forgave him. after all, he was her own sister's son, and isabel only a step-daughter; and though she had done her duty by putting isabel in the way of the connexion, she secretly commended his prudence in withstanding beauty, and repairing the dilapidated estate with peruvian gold. she sounded him, as a very wise man, on the chances of oliver dynevor doing something for his nephew, but did not receive much encouragement; though he prophesied that james was certain to get on, and uttered a rhapsody that nearly destroyed his new reputation for judgment. lady conway gave him an affectionate invitation to visit her whenever he could, and summoned the young ladies to wish him good-bye. the mute, blushing gratitude of isabel's look was beautiful beyond description; and virginia's countenance was exceedingly arch and keen, though she was supposed to know nothing of the state of affairs. lady conway was alone when mrs. frost was seen approaching the house. the lady at once prepared to be affably gracious to her apologies and deprecations of displeasure; but she was quite disconcerted by the dignified manner of her entrance;--tall, noble-looking, in all the simple majesty of age, and of a high though gentle spirit, lady conway was surprised into absolute respect, and had to rally her ideas before, with a slight laugh, she could say, 'i see you are come to condole with me on the folly of our two young people.' 'i think too highly of them to call it folly,' said the heiress of the dynevors. 'why, in one way, to be sure,' hesitated lady conway, 'we cannot call it folly to be sensible of each other's merits; and if--if mr. dynevor have any expectations--i think your son is unmarried?' 'he is;' but she added, smiling, 'you will not expect me to allow that my youngest child is old enough to warrant any calculations on that score.' 'it is very unfortunate; i pity them from my heart. an engagement of this kind is a wretched beginning for life.' 'oh, do not say so!' cried the old lady, 'it may often be the greatest blessing, the best incentive to both parties.' lady conway was too much surprised to make a direct answer, but she continued, 'if my brother could exert his interest--and i know that he has so high an opinion of dear mr. dynevor--and you have so much influence. that dear, generous fitzjocelyn, too--' as soon as mrs. frost understood whom lady conway designated as her brother, she drew herself up, and said, coldly, that lord ormersfield had no church patronage, and no interest that he could exert on behalf of her grandson. again, 'it was most unlucky;' and lady conway proceeded to say that she was the more bound to act in opposition to her own feelings, because mr. mansell was resolved against bequeathing beauchastel to any of his cousinhood who might marry a clergyman; disliking that the place should fall to a man who ought not to reside. it was a most unfortunate scruple; but in order to avoid offending him, and losing any chance, the engagement must remain a secret. mrs. frost replied, that mr. mansell was perfectly right; and seemed in nowise discomfited or conscious that there was any condescension on her ladyship's part in winking at an attachment between miss conway and a dynevor of cheveleigh. she made neither complaint nor apology; there was nothing for lady conway to be gracious about; and when the request was made to see miss conway, her superiority was so fully established that there was no demur, and the favour seemed to be on her side. the noble old matron had long been a subject of almost timid veneration to the maiden, and she obeyed the summons with more bashful awe than she had ever felt before; and with much fear lest the two elders might have been combining to make an appeal to her to give up her betrothal, for james's sake. as she entered, the old lady came to meet her, held out both arms, and drew her into her bosom, with the fond words, 'my dear child!' isabel rested in her embrace, as if she had found her own mother again. 'my dear child,' again said mrs. frost, 'i am glad you like my jem, for he has always been a good boy to his granny.' the homeliness of the words made them particularly endearing, and isabel ventured to put her arm round the slender waist. 'yes, darling,' continued the grandmother; 'you will make him good and happy, and you must teach him to be patient, for i am afraid you will both want a great deal of patience and submission.' 'he will teach me,' whispered isabel. lady conway was fairly crying. 'i am glad to know that he has you to look to, when his old grandmother is gone.' 'oh, don't say--' 'i shall make way for you some day,' said mrs. frost, caressing her. 'you are leaving us, my dear. it is quite right, and we will not murmur; but would not your mamma spare you to us for one evening? could you not come and drink tea with us, that we may know each other a little better?' the stepmother's affectionate assent, and even emotion, were a great surprise to isabel; and james began to imagine that nothing was beyond mrs. frost's power. louis saved james the trouble of driving him away by going to dine with mr. calcott, and the evening was happy, even beyond anticipation; the grandmother all affection, james all restless bliss, isabel serene amid her blushes; and yet the conversation would not thrive, till mrs. frost took them out walking, and, when in the loneliest lane, conceived a wish to inquire the price of poultry at the nearest farm, and sent the others to walk on. long did she talk of the crops, discourse of the french and bohemian enormities, and smilingly contradict reports that the young lord was to marry the young lady, before the lovers reappeared, without the most distant idea where they had been. after that, they could not leave off talking; they took granny into their counsels, and she heard isabel confess how the day-dream of her life had been to live among the 'very good.' she smiled with humble self-conviction of falling far beneath the standard, as she discovered that the enthusiastic girl had found all her aspirations for 'goodness' realized by dynevor terrace; and regarding it as peace, joy, and honour, to be linked with it. the newly-found happiness, and the effort to be worthy of it, were to bear her through all uncongenial scenes; she had such a secret of joy that she should never repine again. 'ah! isabel, and what am i to do?' said james. 'you ask?' she said, smiling. 'you, who have northwold for your home, and live in the atmosphere i only breathe now and then?' 'your presence is my atmosphere of life.' 'mrs. frost, tell him he must not talk so wrongly, so extravagantly, i mean.' 'it may be wrong; it is not extravagant. it falls only too far short of my feeling! what will the terrace be without you?' 'it will not be without my thoughts. how often i shall think i see the broad road, and the wide field, and the mountain-ash berries, that were reddening when we came; and the canary in the window! how little my first glance at the houses took in what they would be to me!' and then they had to settle the haunts she was to revisit at beauchastel. an invitation thither was the ostensible cause of the rapid break-up from the house beautiful; but the truth was not so veiled but that there were many surmises among the uninitiated. jane had caught something from my young lord's demeanour which certified her, and made her so exceedingly proud and grand, that, though she was too honourable to breathe a word of her discovery, she walked with her kind old head three inches higher; and, as a great favour, showed charlotte a piece of poor dear master henry's bridecake, kept for luck, and a little roll of treasured real brussels lace, that she had saved to adorn her cap whenever mr. james should marry. charlotte was not absolutely as attentive as she might have been to such interesting curiosities. she had one eye towards the window all the time; she wanted to be certified how deeply she had wounded the hero of the barricade, and she had absolutely not seen him since his return! the little damsel missed homage! 'you are not heeding me!' exclaimed jane at last. 'yes; i beg your pardon, ma'am--' 'charlotte, take care. mind me, one thing at a time,' said jane, oracularly. 'not one eye here, the other there!' 'i'm sure i don't know what you mean, mrs. beckett.' 'come, don't colour up, and say you don't know nothing! why did you water your lemon plant three times over, but that you wanted to be looking out of window? why did you never top nor tail the gooseberries for the pudding, but sent them up fit to choke my poor missus? if master jem hadn't--bless me! what was i going to say?--but we should soon have heard of it! no, no, charlotte; i've been a mother to you ever since you came here, a little starveling thing, and i'll speak plain for your good. if you fancy that genteel butler in there, say so downright; but first sit down, and write away a letter to give up the other young man!' charlotte's cheeks were in a flame, and something vehement at the end of her tongue, when, with a gentle knock, and 'by your favour, ladies,' in walked mr. delaford. jane was very civil, but very stiff at first, till he thawed her by great praise of lord fitzjocelyn, the mere prelude to his own magnificent exploits. charlotte listened like a very desdemona. he was very pathetic, and all that was not self-exaltation was aimed at her. nothing could have been more welcome than the bullets to penetrate his heart, and he turned up his eyes in a feeling manner. charlotte's heart was exceedingly touched, and she had tears in her eyes when she moved forward in the attitude of the porcelain shepherdess in the parlour, to return a little volume of selections of tender poetry, bound in crimson silk, that he had lent to her some time since. 'would she not honour him by accepting a trifling gift?' she blushed, she accepted; and with needle-like pen, in characters fine as hair, upon a scroll garlanded with forget-me-nots, and borne in mid air by two portly doves, was charlotte arnold's name inscribed by the hero of the barricades. oh, vanity! vanity! how many garbs dost thou wear! delaford went away, satisfied that he had produced an impression such as he could improve if they should ever be thrown together again. the lady of eschalott remained anything but satisfied. she was touchy and fretful, found everything a grievance, left cobwebs in the corners, and finally went into hysterics because the cat jumped at the canary-bird's cage. chapter xxii. burgomasters and great one-eyers. when full upon his ardent soul the champion feels the influence roll, he swims the lake, he leaps the wall, heeds not the depth, nor plumbs the fall. unshielded, mailless, on he goes, singly against a host of foes! harold the dauntless. 'jem! jem! have you heard?' 'what should i hear?' 'mr. lester is going to retire at christmas!' 'does that account for your irrational excitement?' 'and it has not occurred to you that the grammar-school would be the making of you! endowment, pounds--thirty, forty boys at pounds per annum, pounds at least. that is pounds--say pounds for certain; and it would be doubled under a scholar and a gentleman-- pounds a year! and you might throw it open to boarders; set up the houses in the terrace, and let them at--say pounds? nine houses, nine times forty--' 'well done, fitzjocelyn! at this rate one need not go out to peru.' 'exactly so; you would be doubling the value of your own property as a secondary consideration, and doing incalculable good--' 'as if there were any more chance of my getting the school than of the rest of it!' 'so you really had not thought of standing?' 'i would, most gladly, if there were the least hope of success. i can't afford to miss any chance; but it is mere folly to talk of it. one-half of the trustees detest my principles; the others would think themselves insulted by a young man in deacon's orders offering himself.' 'it is evident that you are the only man on whom they can combine who can save the school, and do any good to all those boys--mind you, the important middle class, whom i would do anything to train in sound principles.' 'so far, it is in my favour that i am one of the few university men educated here.' 'you are your grandmother's grandson--that is everything! and you have more experience of teaching than most men twice your age.' james made a face at his experience; but little stimulus was needed to make him attempt to avail himself of so fair an opening, coming so much sooner than he could have dared to expect. it was now september, and the two months of waiting and separation seemed already like so many years. by the time mrs. frost came in from her walk, she found the two young gentlemen devising a circular, and composing applications for testimonials. after the first start of surprise, and telling james he ought to go to school himself, mrs. frost was easily persuaded to enter heartily into the project; but she insisted on the first measure being to consult mr. calcott. he was the head of the old sound and respectable party--the chairman of everything, both in county and borough--and had the casting vote among the eight trustees of king edward's school, who, by old custom, nominated each other from the landholders within the town. she strongly deprecated attempting anything without first ascertaining his views; and, as the young men had lashed themselves into great ardour, the three walked off at once to lay the proposal before the squire. but mr. calcott was not at home. he had set off yesterday, with miss calcott and miss caroline, for a tour in wales, and would not return for a week or ten days. to the imaginations of lord fitzjocelyn and mr. frost, this was fatal delay. besides, he would be sure to linger!--he would not come home for a month--nay, six weeks at least!--what candidates might not start--what pledges might not be given in the meantime! james, vehement and disappointed, went home to spend the evening on the concoction of what his grandmother approved as 'a very proper letter,' to be despatched to meet the squire at the post-office at caernarvon, and resigned himself to grumble away the period of his absence, secretly relieved at the postponement of the evil day of the canvass, at which all the pendragon blood was in a state of revolt. but louis, in his solitude at ormersfield, had nothing to distract his thoughts, or prevent him from lapsing into one of his most single-eyed fits of impetuosity. he had come to regard james as the sole hope for northwold school, and northwold school as the sole hope for james; and had created an indefinite host of dangerous applicants, only to be forestalled by the most vigorous measures. evening, night, and morning, did but increase the conviction, till he ordered his horse, and galloped to the terrace as though the speed of his charger would decide the contest. eloquently and piteously did he protest against james's promise to take no steps until the squire's opinion should be known. he convinced his cousin, talked over his aunt, and prevailed to have the letter re-written, and sent off to the post with the applications for testimonials. then the rough draft of the circular was revised and corrected, till it appeared so admirable to louis, that he snatched it up, and ran away with it to read it to old mr. walby, who was one of the trustees, and very fond of his last year's patient. his promise, good easy man, was pretty sure to be the prize of the first applicant; but this did not render it less valuable to his young lordship, who came back all glorious with an eighth part of the victory, and highly delighted with the excellent apothecary's most judicious and gratifying sentiments,--namely, all his own eager rhetoric, to which the good man had cordially given his meek puzzle-headed assent. thenceforth mr. walby was to 'think' all fitzjocelyn's strongest recommendations of his cousin. there was no use in holding back now. james was committed, and, besides, there was a vision looming in the distance of a scholar from a foreign university with less than half a creed. thenceforth prompt measures were a mere duty to the rising generation; and louis dragged his coriolanus into the town, to call upon certain substantial tradesmen, who had voices among the eight. civility was great; but the portly grocer and gentlemanly bookseller had both learned prudence in many an election; neither would make any immediate reply--the one because he never did anything but what mr. calcott directed, and the other never pledged himself till all the candidates were in the field, and he had impartially printed all their addresses. richardson, the solicitor, and man-of-business to the ormersfield estate, appeared so sure a card, that james declared that he was ashamed of the farce of calling on him, but they obtained no decided reply. louis was proud that richardson should display an independent conscience, and disdained his cousin's sneering comment, that he had forgotten that there were other clients in the county besides the fitzjocelyns. no power could drag mr. frost a step further. he would not hear of canvassing that 'very intelligent' mr. ramsbotham, of the factory, who had been chosen at unawares by the trustees before his principles had developed themselves; far less on his nominee, the wealthy butcher, always more demonstratively of the same mind. james declared, first, that he would have nothing to do with them; secondly, that he could not answer it to the earl to let louis ask a favour of them; thirdly, that he had rather fail than owe his election to them; fourthly, that it would be most improper usage of mr. calcott to curry favour with men who systematically opposed him; and, fifthly, that they could only vote for him on a misunderstanding of his intentions. the eighth trustee was a dead letter,--an old gentleman long retired from business at his bank to a cottage at the lakes, where he was written to, but without much hope of his taking the trouble even to reply. however, if the choice lay only between james and the representative of the new lights, there could be little reasonable fear. much fretting and fuming was expended on the non-arrival of a letter from mr. calcott; but on the appointed tenth day he came home, and the next morning james was at ormersfield in an agony of disappointment. the squire had sent him a note, kind in expression, regretting his inability to give his interest to one for whom he had always so much regard, and whose family he so highly respected, but that he had already promised his support to a mr. powell, the under-master of a large classical school, whom he thought calculated for the situation, both by experience and acquirements. james had been making sure enough of the school to growl at his intended duties; but he had built so entirely on success, and formed so many projects, that the disappointment was extreme; it appeared a cruel injury in so old a friend to have overlooked him. he had been much vexed with his grandmother for regarding the veto as decisive; and he viewed all his hopes of happiness with isabel as overthrown. louis partook and exaggerated his sentiments. they railed--the one fiercely, the other philosophically--against the squire's domineering; they proved him narrow and prejudiced--afraid of youth, afraid of salutary reform, bent on prolonging the dull old system, and on bringing in a mere usher. they recollected a mauvais sujet from the said classical school; argued that it never turned out good scholars, nor good men; and that they should be conferring the greatest benefit on northwold burghers yet unborn, by recalling the old squire to a better mind, or by bringing in james frost in spite of him. not without hopes of the first, though, as james told him, no one would have nourished them save himself, louis set forth for little northwold, with the same valour which had made him the champion of the marksedge poacher. he found the old gentleman good-natured and sympathizing, for he liked the warm friendship of 'the two boys,' and had not the most remote idea of their disputing his verdict. 'it is very unlucky that i was from home,' he said. 'i am afraid the disappointment will be the greater from its having gone so far.' 'may i ask whether you are absolutely pledged to mr. powell?' 'why, yes. i may say so. considering all things, it is best as it is. i should have been unwilling to vex my good old friend, mrs. frost; and yet,' smiling benignantly on his fretted auditor, 'i have to look out for the school first of all, you know.' 'perhaps i shall not allow that mr. powell is the best look-out for the school, sir.' 'eh? the best under the circumstances. such a place as this wants experience and discipline more than scholarship. powell is the very man, and has been waiting for it long; and young frost could do much better for himself, if he will only have patience.' 'then his age is all that is against him? the only inferiority to mr. powell? 'hm! yes, i may say so. inferior? no, he is superior enough; it is a mere joke to compare them; but this is not a post for one of your young unmarried men.' 'if that be all,' cried louis, 'the objection would be soon removed. it may be an inducement to hear that you would be making two people happy instead of one.' 'now, don't tell me so!' almost angrily exclaimed the squire. 'jem frost marry! he has no business to think of it these ten years! he ought to be minding his grandmother and sister. to marry on that school would be serving poor mrs. frost exactly as his poor absurd father did before him, and she is too old to have all that over again. i thought he was of a different sort of stamp.' 'my aunt gives her full consent.' 'i've no doubt of it! just like her! but he ought to be ashamed to ask her, at her age, when she should have every comfort he could give her. pray, who is the lady? there was some nonsense afloat about miss conway; but i never believed him so foolish!' 'it is perfectly true, but i must beg you not to mention it; i ought not to have been betrayed into mentioning it.' 'you need not caution me. it is not news i should be forward to spread. what does your father say to it?' 'the engagement took place since he left england.' 'i should think so!' then pausing, he added, with condescending good-nature, 'well, fitzjocelyn, i seem to you a terrible old flint-stone, but i can't help that. there are considerations besides true love, you know; and for these young people, they can't have pined out their hearts yet, as, by your own showing, they have not been engaged three months. if it were sydney himself, i should tell him that love is all the better for keeping--if it is good for anything; and where there is such a disparity, it ought, above all, to be tested by waiting. so tell master jem, with my best wishes, to take care of his grandmother. i shall think myself doing him a kindness in keeping him out of the school, if it is to hinder him from marrying at four-and-twenty, and a girl brought up as she has been!' 'and, mr. calcott,' said louis, rising, 'you will excuse my viewing my cousin's engagement as an additional motive for doing my utmost to promote his success in obtaining a situation, for which i consider him as eminently fitted. good morning, sir.' 'good morning, my lord.' lord fitzjocelyn departed so grave, so courteous, so dignified, so resolute, so comically like his father, that the old squire threw himself back in his chair and laughed heartily. the magnificent challenge of war to the knife, was no more to him than the adjuration he had heard last year in the justice-room; and he no more expected these two lads to make any effectual opposition than he did to see them repeal the game-laws. the viscount meanwhile rode off thoroughly roused to indignation. the good sense of sixty naturally fell hard and cold on the ears of twenty-two, and it was one of the moments when counsel inflamed instead of checking him. never angry on his own account, he could be exceedingly wrathful for others; and the unlucky word, disparity, drove him especially wild. in mere charity, he thought it right to withhold this insult to the pendragons from his cousin's ears; but this very reserve seemed to bind him to resent it in james's stead; and he was far more blindly impetuous than if, as usual, he had seen james so vehement that he was obliged to try to curb and restrain him. he would not hear of giving in! when the ramsbotham candidate appeared, and james scrupled to divide the contrary interest, louis laid the whole blame of the split upon mr. calcott; while, as to poor mr. powell, no words were compassionate enough for his dull, slouching, ungentlemanly air; and he was pronounced to be an old writing-master, fit for nothing but to mend pens. but mr. walby's was still their sole promise. the grocer followed the squire; the bookseller was liberal, and had invited the ramsbotham candidate to dinner. on this alarming symptom, fitzjocelyn fell upon richardson, and talked, and talked, and talked, till the solicitor could either bear it no longer, or feared for the ormersfield agency, and his vote was carried off as a captive. this triumph alarmed mrs. frost and james, who knew how scrupulously the earl abstained from seeking anything like a favour at northwold; and they tried to impress this on louis, but he was exalted far above even understanding the remonstrance. it was all their disinterestedness; he had no notion of that guarded pride which would incur no obligation. no, no; if jem would be beholden to no one, he would accept all as personal kindness to himself. expect a return! he returned good-will--of course he would do any one a kindness. claims, involving himself! he would take care of that; and off he went laughing. he came in the next day, announcing a still grander and more formidable encounter. he had met mr. ramsbotham himself, and secured his promise that, in case he failed in carrying his own man, he and the butcher would support mr. frost. the fact was, that lord fitzjocelyn's advocacy of the poacher, his free address, his sympathy for 'the masses,' and his careless words, had inspired expectations of his liberal views; mr. ramsbotham was not sorry to establish a claim, and was likewise gratified by the frank engaging manners, which increased the pleasure of being solicited by a nobleman--a distinction of which he thought more than did all the opposite party. to put james beyond the perils of the casting vote was next the point. without divulging his tactics, louis flew off one morning by the train, made a sudden descent on the recluse banker at ambleside, barbarously used his gift of the ceaseless tongue, till the poor old man was nearly distracted, touched his wife's tender heart with good old mrs. frost and the two lovers, and made her promise to bring him comfortably and quietly down to stay at ormersfield and give his vote. and so, when the election finally came on, mr. calcott found himself left with only his faithful grocer to support his protege. three votes were given at once for the reverend james roland frost dynevor; the bookseller followed as soon as he saw how the land lay; and ramsbotham and co. swelled the majority as soon as they saw that their friend had no chance. poor mr. powell went home to his drudgery with his wrinkles deeper than ever; and his wife sighed as she resigned her last hope of sending her son to the university. mr. calcott had, for the first time in his life, been over-ridden by an unscrupulous use of his neighbour's rank; and of the youthfulness that inspired hopes of fixing a claim on an untried, inexperienced man. the old squire was severely hurt and mortified; but he was very magnanimous--generously wished james joy, and congratulated mrs. frost with all his heart. he was less cordial with louis; but the worst he said of him was, that he was but a lad, his father was out of the way, and he wished he might not find that he had got himself into a scrape. he could not think why a man of old ormersfield's age should go figuring round cape horn, instead of staying to keep his own son in order. sydney was absent; but the rest of the family and their friends were less forbearing than the person chiefly concerned. they talked furiously, and made a strong exertion of forgiveness in order not to cut fitzjocelyn. sir gilbert brewster vowed that it would serve him right to be turned out of the troop, and that he must keep a sharp look out lest he should sow disaffection among the yeomanry. making friends with ramsbotham! never taking out a gun! the country was gone to the dogs when such as he was to be a peer! end of vol. i. _a chance acquaintance._ by w. d. howells. boston: james r. osgood and company late ticknor & fields, and fields, osgood, & co. . university press: welch, bigelow, & co., cambridge. a chance acquaintance. i. up the saguenay. on the forward promenade of the saguenay boat which had been advertised to leave quebec at seven o'clock on tuesday morning, miss kitty ellison sat tranquilly expectant of the joys which its departure should bring, and tolerantly patient of its delay; for if all the saguenay had not been in promise, she would have thought it the greatest happiness just to have that prospect of the st. lawrence and quebec. the sun shone with a warm yellow light on the upper town, with its girdle of gray wall, and on the red flag that drowsed above the citadel, and was a friendly lustre on the tinned roofs of the lower town; while away off to the south and east and west wandered the purple hills and the farmlit plains in such dewy shadow and effulgence as would have been enough to make the heaviest heart glad. near at hand the river was busy with every kind of craft, and in the distance was mysterious with silvery vapors; little breaths of haze, like an ethereal colorless flame, exhaled from its surface, and it all glowed with a lovely inner radiance. in the middle distance a black ship was heaving anchor and setting sail, and the voice of the seamen came soft and sad and yet wildly hopeful to the dreamy ear of the young girl, whose soul at once went round the world before the ship, and then made haste back again to the promenade of the saguenay boat. she sat leaning forward a little with her hands fallen into her lap, letting her unmastered thoughts play as they would in memories and hopes around the consciousness that she was the happiest girl in the world, and blest beyond desire or desert. to have left home as she had done, equipped for a single day at niagara, and then to have come adventurously on, by grace of her cousin's wardrobe, as it were, to montreal and quebec; to be now going up the saguenay, and finally to be destined to return home by way of boston and new york;--this was more than any one human being had a right to; and, as she had written home to the girls, she felt that her privileges ought to be divided up among all the people of eriecreek. she was very grateful to colonel ellison and fanny for affording her these advantages; but they being now out of sight in pursuit of state-rooms, she was not thinking of them in relation to her pleasure in the morning scene, but was rather regretting the absence of a lady with whom they had travelled from niagara, and to whom she imagined she would that moment like to say something in praise of the prospect. this lady was a mrs. basil march of boston; and though it was her wedding journey and her husband's presence ought to have absorbed her, she and miss kitty had sworn a sisterhood, and were pledged to see each other before long at mrs. march's home in boston. in her absence, now, kitty thought what a very charming person she was, and wondered if all boston people were really like her, so easy and friendly and hearty. in her letter she had told the girls to tell her uncle jack that he had not rated boston people a bit too high, if she were to judge from mr. and mrs. march, and that she was sure they would help her as far as they could to carry out his instructions when she got to boston. these instructions were such as might seem preposterous if no more particular statement in regard to her uncle jack were made, but will be imaginable enough, i hope, when he is a little described. the ellisons were a west virginia family who had wandered up into a corner of northwestern new york, because dr. ellison (unceremoniously known to kitty as uncle jack) was too much an abolitionist to live in a slaveholding state with safety to himself or comfort to his neighbors. here his family of three boys and two girls had grown up, and hither in time had come kitty, the only child of his youngest brother, who had gone first to illinois and thence, from the pretty constant adversity of a country editor, to kansas, where he joined the free state party and fell in one of the border feuds. her mother had died soon after, find dr. ellison's heart bowed itself tenderly over the orphan. she was something not only dear, but sacred to him as the child of a martyr to the highest cause on earth; and the love of the whole family encompassed her. one of the boys had brought her from kansas when she was yet very little, and she had grown up among them as their youngest sister; but the doctor, from a tender scruple against seeming to usurp the place of his brother in her childish thought, would not let her call him father, and in obedience to the rule which she soon began to give their love, they all turned and called him uncle jack with her. yet the ellisons, though they loved their little cousin, did not spoil her,--neither the doctor, nor his great grown-up sons whom she knew as the boys, nor his daughters whom she called the girls, though they were wellnigh women when she came to them. she was her uncle's pet and most intimate friend, riding with him on his professional visits till she became as familiar a feature of his equipage as the doctor's horse itself; and he educated her in those extreme ideas, tempered by humor, which formed the character of himself and his family. they loved kitty, and played with her, and laughed at her when she needed ridiculing; they made a jest of their father on the one subject on which he never jested, and even the antislavery cause had its droll points turned to the light. they had seen danger and trouble enough at different times in its service, but no enemy ever got more amusement out of it. their house was a principal _entrepôt_ of the underground railroad, and they were always helping anxious travellers over the line; but the boys seldom came back from an excursion to canada without adventures to keep the family laughing for a week; and they made it a serious business to study the comic points of their beneficiaries, who severally lived in the family records by some grotesque mental or physical trait. they had an irreverent name among themselves for each of the humorless abolition lecturers who unfailingly abode with them on their rounds; and these brethren and sisters, as they called them, paid with whatever was laughable in them for the substantial favors they received. miss kitty, having the same natural bent, began even as a child to share in these harmless reprisals, and to look at life with the same wholesomely fantastic vision. but she remembered one abolition visitor of whom none of them made fun, but treated with a serious distinction and regard,--an old man with a high, narrow forehead, and thereon a thick upright growth of gray hair; who looked at her from under bushy brows with eyes as of blue flame, and took her on his knee one night and sang to her "blow ye the trumpet, blow!" he and her uncle had been talking of some indefinite, far-off place that they called boston, in terms that commended it to her childish apprehension as very little less holy than jerusalem, and as the home of all the good and great people outside of palestine. in fact, boston had always been dr. ellison's foible. in the beginning of the great antislavery agitation, he had exchanged letters (corresponded, he used to say) with john quincy adams on the subject of lovejoy's murder; and he had met several boston men at the free soil convention in buffalo in . "a little formal perhaps, a little reserved," he would say, "but excellent men; polished, and certainly of sterling principle": which would make his boys and girls laugh, as they grew older, and sometimes provoke them to highly colored dramatizations of the formality of these bostonians in meeting their father. the years passed and the boys went west, and when the war came, they took service in iowa and wisconsin regiments. by and by the president's proclamation of freedom to the slaves reached eriecreek while dick and bob happened both to be home on leave. after they had allowed their sire his rapture, "well, this is a great blow for father," said bob; "what are you going to do now, father? fugitive slavery and all its charms blotted out forever, at one fell swoop. pretty rough on you, isn't it? no more men and brothers, no more soulless oligarchy. dull lookout, father." "o no," insinuated one of the girls, "there's boston." "why, yes," cried dick, "to be sure there is. the president hasn't abolished boston. live for boston." and the doctor did live for an ideal boston, thereafter, so far at least as concerned a never-relinquished, never-fulfilled purpose of some day making a journey to boston. but in the mean time there were other things; and at present, since the proclamation had given him a country worth living in, he was ready to honor her by studying her antiquities. in his youth, before his mind had been turned so strenuously to the consideration of slavery, he had a pretty taste for the mystery of the mound builders, and each of his boys now returned to camp with instructions to note any phenomena that would throw light upon this interesting subject. they would have abundant leisure for research, since the proclamation, dr. ellison insisted, practically ended the war. the mound builders were only a starting-point for the doctor. he advanced from them to historical times in due course, and it happened that when colonel ellison and his wife stopped off at eriecreek on their way east, in , they found him deep in the history of the old french war. as yet the colonel had not intended to take the canadian route eastward, and he escaped without the charges which he must otherwise have received to look up the points of interest at montreal and quebec connected with that ancient struggle. he and his wife carried kitty with them to see niagara (which she had never seen because it was so near); but no sooner had dr. ellison got the despatch announcing that they would take kitty on with them down the st. lawrence to quebec, and bring her home by way of boston, than he sat down and wrote her a letter of the most comprehensive character. as far as concerned canada his mind was purely historical; but when it came to boston it was strangely re-abolitionized, and amidst an ardor for the antiquities of the place, his old love for its humanitarian pre-eminence blazed up. he would have her visit faneuil hall because of its revolutionary memories, but not less because wendell phillips had there made his first antislavery speech. she was to see the collections of the massachusetts historical society, and if possible certain points of ancient colonial interest which he named; but at any rate she was somehow to catch sight of the author of the "biglow papers," of senator sumner, of mr. whittier, of dr. howe, of colonel higginson, and of mr. garrison. these people were all bostonians to the idealizing remoteness of dr. ellison, and he could not well conceive of them asunder. he perhaps imagined that kitty was more likely to see them together than separately; and perhaps indeed they were less actual persons, to his admiration, than so many figures of a grand historical composition. finally, "i want you to remember, my dear child," he wrote, "that in boston you are not only in the birthplace of american liberty, but the yet holier scene of its resurrection. there everything that is noble and grand and liberal and enlightened in the national life has originated, and i cannot doubt that you will find the character of its people marked by every attribute of a magnanimous democracy. if i could envy you anything, my dear girl, i should envy you this privilege of seeing a city where man is valued simply and solely for what he is in himself, and where color, wealth, family, occupation, and other vulgar and meretricious distinctions are wholly lost sight of in the consideration of individual excellence." kitty got her uncle's letter the night before starting up the saguenay, and quite too late for compliance with his directions concerning quebec; but she resolved that as to boston his wishes should be fulfilled to the utmost limit of possibility. she knew that nice mr. march must be acquainted with some of those very people. kitty had her uncle's letter in her pocket, and she was just going to take it out and read it again, when something else attracted her notice. the boat had been advertised to leave at seven o'clock, and it was now half past. a party of english people were pacing somewhat impatiently up and down before kitty, for it had been made known among the passengers (by that subtle process through which matters of public interest transpire in such places) that breakfast would not be served till the boat started, and these english people had the appetites which go before the admirable digestions of their nation. but they had also the good temper which does not so certainly accompany the insular good appetite. the man in his dashing glengarry cap and his somewhat shabby gray suit took on one arm the plain, jolly woman who seemed to be his wife, and on the other, the amiable, handsome young girl who looked enough like him to be his sister, and strode rapidly back and forth, saying that they must get up an appetite for breakfast. this made the women laugh, and so he said it again, which made them laugh so much that the elder lost her balance, and in regaining it twisted off her high shoe-heel, which she briskly tossed into the river. but she sat down after that, and the three were presently intent upon the liverpool steamer which was just arrived and was now gliding up to her dock, with her population of passengers thronging her quarter-deck. "she's from england!" said the husband, expressively. "only fancy!" answered the wife. "give me the glass, jenny." then, after a long survey of the steamer, she added, "fancy her being from england!" they all looked and said nothing for two or three minutes, when the wife's mind turned to the delay of their own boat and of breakfast. "this thing," she said, with that air of uttering a novelty which the english cast about their commonplaces,--"this this thing doesn't start at seven, you know." "no," replied the younger woman, "she waits for the montreal boat." "fancy her being from england!" said the other, whose eyes and thoughts had both wandered back to the liverpool steamer. "there's the montreal boat now, comin' round the point," cried the husband. "don't you see the steam?" he pointed with his glass, and then studied the white cloud in the distance. "no, by jove! it's a saw-mill on the shore." "o harry!" sighed both the women, reproachfully. "why, deuce take it, you know," he retorted, "i didn't turn it into a saw-mill. it's been a saw-mill all along, i fancy." half an hour later, when the montreal boat came in sight, the women would have her a saw-mill till she stood in full view in mid-channel. their own vessel paddled out into the stream as she drew near, and the two bumped and rubbed together till a gangway plank could he passed from one to the other. a very well dressed young man stood ready to get upon the saguenay boat, with a porter beside him bearing his substantial valise. no one else apparently was coming aboard. the english people looked upon him for an instant with wrathful eyes, as they hung over the rail of the promenade. "upon my word," said the elder of the women, "have we been waitin' all this time for one man?" "hush, edith," answered the younger, "it's an englishman." and they all three mutely recognized the right of the englishman to stop, not only the boat, but the whole solar system, if his ticket entitled him to a passage on any particular planet, while mr. miles arbuton of boston, massachusetts, passed at his ease from one vessel to the other. he had often been mistaken for an englishman, and the error of those spectators, if he had known it, would not have surprised him. perhaps it might have softened his judgment of them as he sat facing them at breakfast; but he did not know it, and he thought them three very common english people with something professional, as of public singing or acting, about them. the young girl wore, instead of a travelling-suit, a vivid light blue dress; and over her sky-blue eyes and fresh cheeks a glory of corn-colored hair lay in great braids and masses. it was magnificent, but it wanted distance; so near, it was almost harsh. mr. arbuton's eyes fell from the face to the vivid blue dress, which was not quite fresh and not quite new, and a glimmer of cold dismissal came into them, as he gave himself entirely to the slender merits of the steamboat breakfast. he was himself, meantime, an object of interest to a young lady who sat next to the english party, and who glanced at him from time to time, out of tender gray eyes, with a furtive play of feeling upon a sensitive face. to her he was that divine possibility which every young man is to every young maiden; and, besides, he was invested with a halo of romance as the gentleman with the blond mustache, whom she had seen at niagara the week before, on the goat island bridge. to the pretty matron at her side, he was exceedingly handsome, as a young man may frankly be to a young matron, but not otherwise comparable to her husband, the full-personed good-humored looking gentleman who had just added sausage to the ham and eggs on his plate. he was handsome, too, but his full beard was reddish, whereas mr. arbuton's mustache was flaxen; and his dress was not worn with that scrupulosity with which the bostonian bore his clothes; there was a touch of slovenliness in him that scarcely consorted with the alert, ex-military air of some of his movements. "good-looking young john bull," he thought concerning mr. arbuton, and then thought no more about him, being no more self-judged before the supposed englishman than he would have been before so much frenchman or spaniard. mr. arbuton, on the other hand, if he had met an englishman so well dressed as himself, must at once have arraigned himself, and had himself tacitly tried for his personal and national difference. he looked in his turn at these people, and thought he should have nothing to do with them, in spite of the long-lashed gray eyes. it was not that they had made the faintest advance towards acquaintance, or that the choice of knowing them or not was with mr. arbuton; but he had the habit of thus protecting himself from the chances of life, and a conscience against encouraging people whom he might have to drop for reasons of society. this was sometimes a sacrifice, for he was not past the age when people take a lively interest in most other human beings. when breakfast was over, and he had made the tour of the boat, and seen all his fellow-passengers, he perceived that he could have little in common with any of them, and that probably the journey would require the full exercise of that tolerant spirit in which he had undertaken a branch of summer travel in his native land. the rush of air against the steamer was very raw and chill, and the forward promenade was left almost entirely to the english professional people, who walked rapidly up and down, with jokes and laughter of their kind, while the wind blew the girl's hair in loose gold about her fresh face, and twisted her blue drapery tight about her comely shape. when they got out of breath they sat down beside a large american lady, with a great deal of gold filling in her front teeth, and presently rose again and ran races to and from the bow. mr. arbuton turned away in displeasure. at the stern he found a much larger company, most of whom had furnished themselves with novels and magazines from the stock on board and were drowsing over them. one gentleman was reading aloud to three ladies the newspaper account of a dreadful shipwreck; other ladies and gentlemen were coming and going forever from their state-rooms, as the wont of some is; others yet sat with closed eyes, as if having come to see the saguenay they were resolved to see nothing of the st. lawrence on the way thither, but would keep their vision sacred to the wonders of the former river. yet the st. lawrence was worthy to be seen, as even mr. arbuton owned, whose way was to slight american scenery, in distinction from his countrymen who boast it the finest in the world. as you leave quebec, with its mural-crowned and castled rock, and drop down the stately river, presently the snowy fall of montmorenci, far back in its purple hollow, leaps perpetual avalanche into the abyss, and then you are abreast of the beautiful isle of orleans, whose low shores, with their expanses of farmland, and their groves of pine and oak, are still as lovely as when the wild grape festooned the primitive forests and won from the easy rapture of old cartier the name of isle of bacchus. for two hours farther down the river either shore is bright and populous with the continuous villages of the _habitans_, each clustering about its slim-spired church, in its shallow vale by the water's edge, or lifted in more eminent picturesqueness upon some gentle height. the banks, nowhere lofty or abrupt, are such as in a southern land some majestic river might flow between, wide, slumbrous, open to all the heaven and the long day till the very set of sun. but no starry palm glasses its crest in the clear cold green from these low brinks; the pale birch, slender and delicately fair, mirrors here the wintry whiteness of its boughs; and this is the sad great river of the awful north. gradually, as the day wore on, the hills which had shrunk almost out of sight on one hand, and on the other were dark purple in the distance, drew near the shore, and at one point on the northern side rose almost from the water's edge. the river expanded into a lake before them, and in their lap some cottages, and half-way up the hillside, among the stunted pines, a much-galleried hotel, proclaimed a resort of fashion in the heart of what seemed otherwise a wilderness. indian huts sheathed in birch-bark nestled at the foot of the rocks, which were rich in orange and scarlet stains; out of the tops of the huts curled the blue smoke, and at the door of one stood a squaw in a flame-red petticoat; others in bright shawls squatted about on the rocks, each with a circle of dogs and papooses. but all this warmth of color only served, like a winter sunset, to heighten the chilly and desolate sentiment of the scene. the light dresses of the ladies on the veranda struck cold upon the eye; in the faces of the sojourners who lounged idly to the steamer's landing-place, the passenger could fancy a sad resolution to repress their tears when the boat should go away and leave them. she put off two or three old peasant-women who were greeted by other such on the pier, as if returned from a long journey; and then the crew discharged the vessel of a prodigious freight of onions which formed the sole luggage these old women had brought from quebec. bale after bale of the pungent bulbs were borne ashore in the careful arms of the deck-hands, and counted by the owners; at last order was given to draw in the plank, when a passionate cry burst from one of the old women, who extended both hands with an imploring gesture towards the boat. a bale of onions had been left aboard; a deck-hand seized it and ran quickly ashore with it, and then back again, followed by the benedictions of the tranquillized and comforted beldam. the gay sojourners at murray bay controlled their grief, and as mr. arbuton turned from them, the boat, pushing out, left them to their fashionable desolation. she struck across to the southern shore, to land passengers for cacouna, a watering-place greater than murray bay. the tide, which rises fifteen feet at quebec, is the impulse, not the savor of the sea; but at cacouna the water is salt, and the sea-bathing lacks nothing but the surf; and hither resort in great numbers the canadians who fly their cities during the fierce, brief fever of the northern summer. the watering-place village and hotel is not in sight from the landing, but, as at murray bay, the sojourners thronged the pier, as if the arrival of the steamboat were the great event of their day. that afternoon they were in unusual force, having come on foot and by omnibus and calash; and presently there passed down through their ranks a strange procession with a band of music leading the way to the steamer. "it's an indian wedding," mr. arbuton heard one of the boat's officers saying to the gentleman with the ex-military air, who stood next him beside the rail; and now, the band having drawn aside, he saw the bride and groom,--the latter a common, stolid-faced savage, and the former pretty and almost white, with a certain modesty and sweetness of mien. before them went a young american, with a jaunty scotch cap and a visage of supernatural gravity, as the master of ceremonies which he had probably planned; arm in arm with him walked a portly chieftain in black broadcloth, preposterously adorned on the breast with broad flat disks of silver in two rows. behind the bridal couple came the whole village in pairs, men and women, and children of all ages, even to brown babies in arms, gay in dress and indescribably serious in demeanor. they were mated in some sort according to years and size; and the last couple were young fellows paired in an equal tipsiness. these reeled and wavered along the pier; and when the other wedding guests crowned the day's festivity by going aboard the steamer, they followed dizzily down the gangway. midway they lurched heavily; the spectators gave a cry; but they had happily lurched in opposite directions; their grip upon each other's arms held, and a forward stagger launched them victoriously aboard in a heap. they had scarcely disappeared from sight, when, having as it were instantly satisfied their curiosity concerning the boat, the other guests began to go ashore in due order. mr. arbuton waited in a slight anxiety to see whether the tipsy couple could repeat their maneuver successfully on an upward incline; and they had just appeared on the gangway, when he felt a hand passed carelessly and as if unconsciously through his arm, and at the same moment a voice said, "those are a pair of disappointed lovers, i suppose." he looked round and perceived the young lady of the party he had made up his mind to have nothing to do with resting one hand on the rail, and sustaining herself with the other passed through his arm, while she was altogether intent upon the scene below. the ex-military gentleman, the head of the party, and apparently her kinsman, had stepped aside without her knowing, and she had unwittingly taken mr. arbuton's arm. so much was clear to him, but what he was to do was not so plain. it did not seem quite his place to tell her of her mistake, and yet it seemed a piece of unfairness not to do so. to leave the matter alone, however, was the simplest, safest, and pleasantest; for the pressure of the pretty figure lightly thrown upon his arm had something agreeably confiding and appealing in it. so he waited till the young lady, turning to him for some response, discovered her error, and disengaged herself with a face of mingled horror and amusement. even then he had no inspiration. to speak of the mistake in tones of compliment would have been grossly out of place; an explanation was needless; and to her murmured excuses, he could only bow silently. she flitted into the cabin, and he walked away, leaving the indians to stagger ashore as they might. his arm seemed still to sustain that elastic weight, and a voice haunted his ear with the words, "a pair of disappointed lovers, i suppose"; and still more awkward and stupid he felt his own part in the affair to be; though at the same time he was not without some obscure resentment of the young girl's mistake as an intrusion upon him. it was late twilight when the boat reached tadoussac, and ran into a sheltered cove under the shadow of uplands on which a quaint village perched and dispersed itself on a country road in summer cottages; above these in turn rose loftier heights of barren sand or rock, with here and there a rank of sickly pines dying along their sterility. it had been harsh and cold all day when the boat moved, for it was running full in the face of the northeast; the river had widened almost to a sea, growing more and more desolate, with a few lonely islands breaking its expanse, and the shores sinking lower and lower till, near tadoussac, they rose a little in flat-topped bluffs thickly overgrown with stunted evergreens. here, into the vast low-walled breadth of the st. lawrence, a dark stream, narrowly bordered by rounded heights of rock, steals down from the north out of regions of gloomy and ever-during solitude. this is the saguenay; and in the cold evening light under which the traveller approaches its mouth, no landscape could look more forlorn than that of tadoussac, where early in the sixteenth century the french traders fixed their first post, and where still the oldest church north of florida is standing. the steamer lies here five hours, and supper was no sooner over than the passengers went ashore in the gathering dusk. mr. arbuton, guarding his distance as usual, went too, with a feeling of surprise at his own concession to the popular impulse. he was not without a desire to see the old church, wondering in a half-compassionate way what such a bit of american antiquity would look like; and he had perceived since the little embarrassment at cacouna that he was a discomfort to the young lady involved by it. he had caught no glimpse of her till supper, and then she had briefly supped with an air of such studied unconsciousness of his presence that it was plain she was thinking of her mistake every moment. "well, i'll leave her the freedom of the boat while we stay," thought mr. arbuton as he went ashore. he had not the least notion whither the road led, but like the rest he followed it up through the village, and on among the cottages which seemed for the most part empty, and so down a gloomy ravine, in the bottom of which, far beneath the tremulous rustic bridge, he heard the mysterious crash and fall of an unseen torrent. before him towered the shadowy hills up into the starless night; he thrilled with a sense of the loneliness and remoteness, and he had a formless wish that some one qualified by the proper associations and traditions were there to share the satisfaction he felt in the whole effect. at the same instant he was once more aware of that delicate pressure, that weight so lightly, sweetly borne upon his arm. it startled him, and again he followed the road, which with a sudden turn brought him in sight of a hotel and in sound of a bowling-alley, and therein young ladies' cackle and laughter, and he wondered a little scornfully who could be spending the summer there. a bay of the river loftily shut in by rugged hills lay before him, and on the shore, just above high-tide, stood what a wandering shadow told him was the ancient church of tadoussac. the windows were faintly tinged with red as from a single taper burning within, and but that the elements were a little too bare and simple for one so used to the rich effects of the old world, mr. arbuton might have been touched by the vigil which this poor chapel was still keeping after three hundred years in the heart of that gloomy place. while he stood at least tolerating its appeal, he heard voices of people talking in the obscurity near the church door, which they seemed to have been vainly trying for entrance. "pity we can't see the inside, isn't it?" "yes; but i am so glad to see any of it. just think of its having been built in the seventeenth century!" "uncle jack would enjoy it, wouldn't he?" "o yes, poor uncle jack! i feel somehow as if i were cheating him out of it. he ought to be here in my place. but i _do_ like it; and, dick, i don't know what i can ever say or do to you and fanny for bringing me." "well, kitty, postpone the subject till you can think of the right thing. we're in no hurry." mr. arbuton heard a shaking of the door, as of a final attempt upon it, before retreat, and then the voices faded into inarticulate sounds in the darkness. they were the voices, he easily recognized, of the young lady who had taken his arm, and of that kinsman of hers, as she seemed to be. he blamed himself for having not only overheard them, but for desiring to hear more of their talk, and he resolved to follow them back to the boat at a discreet distance. but they loitered so at every point, or he unwittingly made such haste, that he had overtaken them as they entered the lane between the outlying cottages, and he could not help being privy to their talk again. "well, it may be old, kitty, but i don't think it's lively." "it _is_n't exactly a whirl of excitement, i must confess." "it's the deadliest place i ever saw. is that a swing in front of that cottage? no, it's a gibbet. why, they've all got 'em! i suppose they're for the summer tenants at the close of the season. what a rush there would be for them if the boat should happen to go off and leave her passengers!" mr. arbuton thought this rather a coarse kind of drolling, and strengthened himself anew in his resolution to avoid those people. they now came in sight of the steamer, where in the cove she lay illumined with all her lamps, and through every window and door and crevice was bursting with the ruddy light. her brilliancy contrasted vividly with the obscurity and loneliness of the shore where a few lights glimmered in the village houses, and under the porch of the village store some desolate idlers--_habitans_ and half-breeds--had clubbed their miserable leisure. beyond the steamer yawned the wide vacancy of the greater river, and out of this gloomed the course of the saguenay. "o, i hate to go on board!" said the young lady. "do you think he's got back yet? it's perfect misery to meet him." "never mind, kitty. he probably thinks you didn't mean anything by it. _i_ don't believe you would have taken his arm if you hadn't supposed it was mine, _any_ way." she made no answer to this, as if too much overcome by the true state of the case to be troubled by its perversion. mr. arbuton, following them on board, felt himself in the unpleasant character of persecutor, some one to be shunned and escaped by every maneuver possible to self-respect. he was to be the means, it appeared, of spoiling the enjoyment of the voyage for one who, he inferred, had not often the opportunity of such enjoyment. he had a willingness that she should think well and not ill of him; and then at the bottom of all was a sentiment of superiority, which, if he had given it shape, would have been _noblesse oblige_. some action was due to himself as a gentleman. the young lady went to seek the matron of the party, and left her companion at the door of the saloon, wistfully fingering a cigar in one hand, and feeling for a match with the other. presently he gave himself a clap on the waistcoat which he had found empty, and was turning away, when mr. arbuton said, offering his own lighted cigar, "may i be of use to you?" the other took it with a hearty, "o yes, thank you!" and, with many inarticulate murmurs of satisfaction, lighted his cigar, and returned mr. arbuton's with a brisk, half-military bow. mr. arbuton looked at him narrowly a moment. "i'm afraid," he said abruptly, "that i've most unluckily been the cause of annoyance to one of the ladies of your party. it isn't a thing to apologize for, and i hardly know how to say that i hope, if she's not already forgotten the matter, she'll do so." saying this, mr. arbuton, by an impulse which he would have been at a loss to explain, offered his card. his action had the effect of frankness, and the other took it for cordiality. he drew near a lamp, and looked at the name and street address on the card, and then said, "ah, of boston! _my_ name is ellison; i'm of milwaukee, wisconsin." and he laughed a free, trustful laugh of good companionship. "why yes, my cousin's been tormenting herself about her mistake the whole afternoon; but of course it's all right, you know. bless my heart! it was the most natural thing in the world. have you been ashore? there's a good deal of repose about tadoussac, now; but it must be a lively place in winter! such a cheerful lookout from these cottages, or that hotel over yonder! we went over to see if we could get into the little old church; the purser told me there are some lead tablets there, left by jacques cartier's men, you know, and dug up in the neighborhood. i don't think it's likely, and i'm bearing up very well under the disappointment of not getting in. i've done my duty by the antiquities of the place; and now i don't care how soon we are off." colonel ellison was talking in the kindness of his heart to change the subject which the younger gentleman had introduced, in the belief, which would scarcely have pleased the other, that he was much embarrassed. his good-nature went still further; and when his cousin returned presently, with mrs. ellison, he presented mr. arbuton to the ladies, and then thoughtfully made mrs. ellison walk up and down the deck with him for the exercise she would not take ashore, that the others might be left to deal with their vexation alone. "i am very sorry, miss ellison," said mr. arbuton, "to have been the means of a mistake to you to-day." "and i was dreadfully ashamed to make you the victim of my blunder," answered miss ellison penitently; and a little silence ensued. then as if she had suddenly been able to alienate the case, and see it apart from herself in its unmanageable absurdity, she broke into a confiding laugh, very like her cousin's, and said, "why, it's one of the most hopeless things i ever heard of. i don't see what in the world can be done about it." "it _is_ rather a difficult matter, and i'm not prepared to say myself. before i make up my mind i should like it to happen again." mr. arbuton had no sooner made this speech, which he thought neat, than he was vexed with himself for having made it, since nothing was further from his purpose than a flirtation. but the dark, vicinity, the young girl's prettiness, the apparent freshness and reliance on his sympathy from which her frankness came, were too much: he tried to congeal again, and ended in some feebleness about the scenery, which was indeed very lonely and wild, after the boat started up the saguenay, leaving the few lights of tadoussac to blink and fail behind her. he had an absurd sense of being alone in the world there with the young lady; and he suffered himself to enjoy the situation, which was as perfectly safe as anything could be. he and miss ellison had both come on from niagara, it seemed, and they talked of that place, she consciously withholding the fact that she had noticed mr. arbuton there; they had both come down the rapids of the st. lawrence, and they had both stopped a day in montreal. these common experiences gave them a surprising interest for each other, which was enhanced by the discovery that their experiences differed thereafter, and that whereas she had passed three days at quebec, he, as we know, had come on directly from montreal. "did you enjoy quebec very much, miss ellison?" "o yes, indeed! it's a beautiful old town, with everything in it that i had always read about and never expected to see. you know it's a walled city." "yes. but i confess i had forgotten it till this morning. did you find it all that you expected a walled city to be?" "more, if possible. there were some boston people with us there, and they said it was exactly like europe. they fairly sighed over it, and it seemed to remind them of pretty nearly everything they had seen abroad. they were just married." "did that make quebec look like europe?" "no, but i suppose it made them willing to see it in the pleasantest light. mrs. march--that was their name--wouldn't allow me to say that _i_ enjoyed quebec, because if i hadn't seen europe, i _could_n't properly enjoy it. 'you may _think_ you enjoy it,' she was always saying, 'but that's merely fancy.' still i cling to my delusion. but i don't know whether i cared more for quebec, or the beautiful little villages in the country all about it. the whole landscape looks just like a dream of 'evangeline.'" "indeed! i must certainly stop at quebec. i should like to see an american landscape that put one in mind of anything. what can your imagination do for the present scenery?" "i don't think it needs any help from me," replied the young girl, as if the tone of her companion had patronized and piqued her. she turned as she spoke and looked up the sad, lonely river. the moon was making its veiled face seen through the gray heaven, and touching the black stream with hints of melancholy light. on either hand the uninhabitable shore rose in desolate grandeur, friendless heights of rock with a thin covering of pines seen in dim outline along their tops and deepening into the solid dark of hollows and ravines upon their sides. the cry of some wild bird struck through the silence of which the noise of the steamer had grown to be a part, and echoed away to nothing. then from the saloon there came on a sudden the notes of a song; and miss ellison led the way within, where most of the other passengers were grouped about the piano. the english girl with the corn-colored hair sat, in ravishing picture, at the instrument, and the commonish man and his very plain wife were singing with heavenly sweetness together. "isn't it beautiful!" said miss ellison. "how nice it must be to be able to do such things!" "yes? do you think so? it's rather public," answered her companion. when the english people had ended, a grave, elderly canadian gentleman sat down to give what he believed a comic song, and sent everybody disconsolate to bed. "well, kitty?" cried mrs. ellison, shutting herself inside the young lady's state-room a moment. "well, fanny?" "isn't he handsome?" "he is, indeed." "is he nice?" "i don't know." "sweet?" "_ice_-cream," said kitty, and placidly let herself be kissed an enthusiastic good-night. before mrs. ellison slept she wished to ask her husband one question. "what is it?" "should you want kitty to marry a bostonian? they say bostonians are so cold." "what bostonian has been asking kitty to marry him?" "o, how spiteful you are! i didn't say any had. but if there should?" "then it'll be time to think about it. you've married kitty right and left to everybody who's looked at her since we left niagara, and i've worried myself to death investigating the character of her husbands. now i'm not going to do it any longer,--till she has an offer." "very well. _you_ can depreciate your own cousin, if you like. but i know what _i_ shall do. i shall let her wear all my best things. how fortunate it is, richard, that we're exactly of a size! o, i am so glad we brought kitty along! if she should marry and settle down in boston--no, i hope she could get her husband to live in new york--" "go on, go on, my dear!" cried colonel ellison, with a groan of despair. "kitty has talked twenty-five minutes with this young man about the hotels and steamboats, and of course he'll be round to-morrow morning asking my consent to marry her as soon as we can get to a justice of the peace. my hair is gradually turning gray, and i shall be bald before my time; but i don't mind that if you find any pleasure in these little hallucinations of yours. _go_ on!" ii. mrs. ellison's little maneuvre. the next morning our tourists found themselves at rest in ha-ha bay, at the head of navigation for the larger steamers. the long line of sullen hills had fallen away, and the morning sun shone warm on what in a friendlier climate would have been a very lovely landscape. the bay was an irregular oval, with shores that rose in bold but not lofty heights on one side, while on the other lay a narrow plain with two villages clinging about the road that followed the crescent beach, and lifting each the slender tin-clad spire of its church to sparkle in the sun. at the head of the bay was a mountainous top, and along its waters were masses of rocks, gayly painted with lichens and stained with metallic tints of orange and scarlet. the unchanging growth of stunted pines was the only forest in sight, though ha-ha bay is a famous lumbering port, and some schooners now lay there receiving cargoes of odorous pine plank. the steamboat-wharf was all astir with the liveliest toil and leisure. the boat was taking on wood, which was brought in wheelbarrows to the top of the steep, smooth gangway-planking, where the _habitant_ in charge planted his broad feet for the downward slide, and was hurled aboard more or less _en masse_ by the fierce velocity of his heavy-laden wheelbarrow. amidst the confusion and hazard of this feat a procession of other habitans marched aboard, each one bearing under his arm a coffin-shaped wooden box. the rising fear of colonel ellison, that these boxes represented the loss of the whole infant population of ha-ha bay, was checked by the reflection that the region could not have produced so many children, and calmed altogether by the purser, who said that they were full of huckleberries, and that colonel ellison could have as many as he liked for fifteen cents a bushel. this gave him a keen sense of the poverty of the land, and he bought of the boys who came aboard such abundance of wild red raspberries, in all manner of birch-bark canoes and goblets and cornucopias, that he was obliged to make presents of them to the very dealers whose stock he had exhausted, and he was in treaty with the local half-wit--very fine, with a hunchback, and a massive wen on one side of his head--to take charity in the wild fruits of his native province, when the crowd about him was gently opened by a person who advanced with a flourishing bow and a sprightly "good morning, good morning, sir!" "how do you do?" asked colonel ellison; but the other, intent on business, answered, "i am the only person at ha-ha bay who speaks english, and i have come to ask if you would not like to make a promenade in my horse and buggy upon the mountain before breakfast. you shall be gone as long as you will for one shilling and sixpence. i will show you all that there is to be seen about the place, and the beautiful view of the bay from the top of the mountain. but it is elegant, you know, i can assure you." the speaker was so fluent of his english, he had such an audacious, wide-branching mustache, such a twinkle in his left eye,--which wore its lid in a careless, slouching fashion,--that the heart of man naturally clove to him; and colonel ellison agreed on the spot to make the proposed promenade, for himself and both his ladies, of whom he went joyfully in search. he found them at the stern of the boat, admiring the wild scenery, and looking "fresh as the morn and as the season fair." he was not a close observer, and of his wife's wardrobe he had the ignorance of a good husband, who, as soon as the pang of paying for her dresses is past, forgets whatever she has; but he could not help seeing that some gayeties of costume which he had dimly associated with his wife now enhanced the charms of his cousin's nice little face and figure. a scarf of lively hue carelessly tied about the throat to keep off the morning chill, a prettier ribbon, a more stylish jacket than miss ellison owned,--what do i know?--an air of preparation for battle, caught the colonel's eye, and a conscious red stole responsive into kitty's cheek. "kitty," said he, "don't you let yourself be made a goose of." "i hope she won't--by _you_!" retorted his wife, "and i'll thank you, colonel ellison, not to be a betty, whatever you are. i don't think it's manly to be always noticing ladies' clothes." "who said anything about clothes?" demanded the colonel, taking his stand upon the letter. "well, don't _you_, at any rate. yes, i'd like to ride, of all things; and we've time enough, for breakfast isn't ready till half past eight. where's the carriage?" the only english scholar at ha-ha bay had taken the light wraps of the ladies and was moving off with them. "this way, this way," he said, waving his hand towards a larger number of vehicles on the shore than could have been reasonably attributed to ha-ha bay. "i hope you won't object to having another passenger with you? there's plenty of room for all. he seems a very nice, gentlemanly person," said he, with a queer, patronizing graciousness which he had no doubt caught from his english patrons. "the more the merrier," answered colonel ellison, and "not in the least!" said his wife, not meaning the proverb. her eye had swept the whole array of vehicles and had found them all empty, save one, in which she detected the blamelessly coated back of mr. arbuton. but i ought perhaps to explain mrs. ellison's motives better than they can be made to appear in her conduct. she cared nothing for mr. arbuton; and she had no logical wish to see kitty in love with him. but here were two young people thrown somewhat romantically together; mrs. ellison was a born match-maker, and to have refrained from promoting their better acquaintance in the interest of abstract matrimony was what never could have entered into her thought or desire. her whole being closed for the time about this purpose; her heart, always warm towards kitty,--whom she admired with a sort of generous frenzy,--expanded with all kinds of lovely designs; in a word, every dress she had she would instantly have bestowed upon that worshipful creature who was capable of adding another marriage to the world. i hope the reader finds nothing vulgar or unbecoming in this, for i do not; it was an enthusiasm, pure and simple, a beautiful and unselfish abandon; and i am sure men ought to be sorry that they are not worthier to be favored by it. ladies have often to lament in the midst of their finesse that, really, no man is deserving the fate they devote themselves to prepare for him, or, in other words, that women cannot marry women. i am not going to be so rash as try to depict mrs. ellison's arts, for then, indeed, i should make her appear the clumsy conspirator she was not, and should merely convict myself of ignorance of such matters. whether mr. arbuton was ever aware of them, i am not sure: as a man he was, of course, obtuse and blind; but then, on the other hand, he had seen far more of the world than mrs. ellison, and she may have been clear as day to him. probably, though, he did not detect any design; he could not have conceived of such a thing in a person with whom he had been so irregularly made acquainted, and to whom he felt himself so hopelessly superior. a film of ice such as in autumn you find casing the still pools early in the frosty mornings had gathered upon his manner over night; but it thawed under the greetings of the others, and he jumped actively out of the vehicle to offer the ladies their choice of seats. when all was arranged he found himself at mrs. ellison's side, for kitty had somewhat eagerly climbed to the front seat with the colonel. in these circumstances it was pure zeal that sustained mrs. ellison in the flattering constancy with which she babbled on to mr. arbuton and refrained from openly resenting kitty's contumacy. as the wagon began to ascend the hill, the road was so rough that the springs smote together with pitiless jolts, and the ladies uttered some irrepressible moans. "never mind, my dear," said the colonel, turning about to his wife, "we've got all the english there is at ha-ha bay, any way." whereupon the driver gave him a wink of sudden liking and good-fellowship. at the same time his tongue was loosed, and he began to talk of himself. "you see my dog, how he leaps at the horse's nose? he is a moose-dog, and keeps himself in practice of catching the moose by the nose. you ought to come in the hunting season. i could furnish you with indians and everything you need to hunt with. i am a dealer in wild beasts, you know, and i must keep prepared to take them." "wild beasts?" "yes, for barnum and the other showmen. i deal in deer, wolf, bear, beaver, moose, cariboo, wild-cat, link--" "what?" "link--link! you say deer for deers, and link for lynx, don't you?" "certainly," answered the unblushing colonel. "are there many link about here?" "not many, and they are a very expensive animal. i have been shamefully treated in a link that i have sold to a boston showman. it was a difficult beast to take; bit my indian awfully; and mr. doolittle would not give the price he promised." "what an outrage!" "yes, but it was not so bad as it might have been. he wanted the money back afterwards; the link died in about two weeks," said the dealer in wild animals, with a smile that curled his mustache into his ears, and a glance at colonel ellison. "he may have been bruised, i suppose. he may have been homesick. perhaps he was never a very strong link. the link is a curious animal, miss," he said to kitty, in conclusion. they had been slowly climbing the mountain road, from which, on either hand, the pasturelands fell away in long, irregular knolls and hollows. the tops were quite barren, but in the little vales, despite the stones, a short grass grew very thick and tenderly green, and groups of kine tinkled their soft bells in a sweet, desultory assonance as they cropped the herbage. below, the bay filled the oval of the hills with its sunny expanse, and the white steamer, where she lay beside the busy wharf, and the black lumber-ships, gave their variety to the pretty scene, which was completed by the picturesque villages on the shore. it was a very simple sight, but somehow very touching, as if the soft spectacle were but a respite from desolation and solitude; as indeed it was. mr. arbuton must have been talking of travel elsewhere, for now he said to mrs. ellison, "this looks like a bit of norway; the bay yonder might very well be a fjord of the northern sea." mrs. ellison murmured her sense of obligation to the bay, the fjord, and mr. arbuton, for their complaisance, and kitty remembered that he had somewhat snubbed her the night before for attributing any suggestive grace to the native scenery. "then you've really found something in an american landscape. i suppose we ought to congratulate it," she said, in smiling enjoyment of her triumph. the colonel looked at her with eyes of humorous question; mrs. ellison looked blank; and mr. arbuton, having quite forgotten what he had said to provoke this comment now, looked puzzled and answered nothing: for he had this trait also in common with the sort of englishman for whom he was taken, that he never helped out your conversational venture, but if he failed to respond inwardly, left you with your unaccepted remark upon your hands, as it were. in his silence, kitty fell a prey to very evil thoughts of him, for it made her harmless sally look like a blundering attack upon him. but just then the driver came to her rescue; he said, "gentlemen and ladies, this is the end of the mountain promenade," and, turning his horse's head, drove rapidly back to the village. at the foot of the hill they came again to the church, and his passengers wanted to get out and look into it. "o certainly," said he, "it isn't finished yet, but you can say as many prayers as you like in it." the church was decent and clean, like most canadian churches, and at this early hour there was a good number of the villagers at their devotions. the lithographic pictures of the stations to calvary were, of course, on its walls, and there was the ordinary tawdriness of paint and carving about the high altar. "i don't like to see these things," said mrs. ellison. "it really seems to savor of idolatry. don't you think so, mr. arbuton?" "well, i don't know. i doubt if they're the sort of people to be hurt by it." "they need a good stout faith in cold climates, i can tell you," said the colonel. "it helps to keep them warm. the broad church would be too full of draughts up here. they want something snug and tight. just imagine one of these poor devils listening to a liberal sermon about birds and fruits and flowers and beautiful sentiments, and then driving home over the hills with the mercury thirty degrees below zero! he couldn't stand it." "yes, yes, certainly," said mr. arbuton, and looked about him with an eye of cold, uncompassionate inspection, as if he were trying it by a standard of taste, and, on the whole, finding the poor little church vulgar. when they mounted to their places again, the talk fell entirely to the colonel, who, as his wont was, got what information he could out of the driver. it appeared, in spite of his theory, that they were not all good catholics at ha-ha bay. "this chap, for example," said the frenchman, touching himself on the breast and using the slang he must have picked up from american travellers, "is no catholic,--not much! he has made too many studies to care for religion. there's a large french party, sir, in canada, that's opposed to the priests and in favor of annexation." he satisfied the colonel's utmost curiosity, discoursing, as he drove by the log-built cottages which were now and then sheathed in birch-bark, upon the local affairs, and the character and history of such of his fellow-villagers as they met. he knew the pretty girls upon the street and saluted them by name, interrupting himself with these courtesies in the lecture he was giving the colonel on life at ha-ha bay. there was only one brick house (which he had built himself, but had been obliged to sell in a season unfavorable for wild beasts), and the other edifices dropped through the social scale to some picturesque barns thatched with straw. these he excused to his americans, but added that the ungainly thatch was sometimes useful in saving the lives of the cattle toward the end of an unusually long, hard winter. "and the people," asked the colonel, "what do they do in the winter to pass the time?" "draw the wood, smoke the pipe, court the ladies.--but wouldn't you like to see the inside of one of our poor cottages? i shall be very proud to have you look at mine, and to have you drink a glass of milk from my cows. i am sorry that i cannot offer you brandy, but there's none to be bought in the place." "don't speak of it! for an eye-opener there is nothing like a glass of milk," gayly answered the colonel. they entered the best room of the house,--wide, low-ceiled, dimly lit by two small windows, and fortified against the winter by a huge canada stove of cast-iron. it was rude but neat, and had an air of decent comfort. through the window appeared a very little vegetable garden with a border of the hardiest flowers. "the large beans there," explained the host, "are for soup and coffee. my corn," he said, pointing out some rows of dwarfish maize, "has escaped the early august frosts, and so i expect to have some roasting-ears yet this summer." "well, it isn't exactly what you'd call an inviting climate, is it?" asked the colonel. the canadian seemed a hard little man, but he answered now with a kind of pathos, "it's cruel! i came here when it was all bush. twenty years i have lived here, and it has not been worth while. if it was to do over again, i should rather not live anywhere. i was born in quebec," he said, as if to explain that he was used to mild climates, and began to tell of some events of his life at ha-ha bay. "i wish you were going to stay here awhile with me. you wouldn't find it so bad in the summer-time, i can assure you. there are bears in the bush, sir," he said to the colonel, "and you might easily kill one." "but then i should be helping to spoil your trade in wild beasts," replied the colonel, laughing. mr. arbuton looked like one who might be very tired of this. he made no sign of interest either in the early glooms and privations or the summer bears of ha-ha bay. he sat in the quaint parlor, with his hat on his knee, in the decorous and patient attitude of a gentleman making a call. he had no feeling, kitty said to herself; but that is a matter about which we can easily be wrong. it was rather to be said of mr. arbuton that he had always shrunk from knowledge of things outside of a very narrow world, and that he had not a ready imagination. moreover, he had a personal dislike, as i may call it, of poverty; and he did not enjoy this poverty as she did, because it was strange and suggestive, though doubtless he would have done as much to relieve distress. "rather too much of his autobiography," he said to kitty, as he waited outside the door with her, while the canadian quieted his dog, which was again keeping himself in practice of catching the moose by making vicious leaps at the horse's nose. "the egotism of that kind of people is always so aggressive. but i suppose he's in the habit of throwing himself upon the sympathy of summer visitors in this way. you can't offer a man so little as shilling and sixpence who's taken you into his confidence. did you find enough that was novel in his place to justify him in bringing us here, miss ellison?" he asked with an air he had of taking you of course to be of his mind, and which equally offended you whether you were so or not. every face that they had seen in their drive had told its pathetic story to kitty; every cottage that they passed she had entered in thought, and dreamed out its humble drama. what their host had said gave breath and color to her fancies of the struggle of life there, and she was startled and shocked when this cold doubt was cast upon the sympathetic tints of her picture. she did not know what to say at first; she looked at mr. arbuton with a sudden glance of embarrassment and trouble; then she answered, "i was very much interested. i don't agree with you, i believe"; which, when she heard it, seemed a resentful little speech, and made her willing for some occasion to soften its effect. but nothing occurred to her during the brief drive back to the boat, save the fact that the morning air was delicious. "yes, but rather cool," said mr. arbuton, whose feelings apparently had not needed any balm; and the talk fell again to the others. on the pier he helped her down from the wagon, for the colonel was intent on something the driver was saying, and then offered his hand to mrs. ellison. she sprang from her place, but stumbled slightly, and when she touched the ground, "i believe i turned my foot a little," she said with a laugh. "it's nothing, of course," and fainted in his arms. kitty gave a cry of alarm, and the next instant the colonel had relieved mr. arbuton. it was a scene, and nothing could have annoyed him more than this tumult which poor mrs. ellison's misfortune occasioned among the bystanding habitans and deck-hands, and the passengers eagerly craning forward over the bulwarks, and running ashore to see what the matter was. few men know just how to offer those little offices of helpfulness which such emergencies demand, and mr. arbuton could do nothing after he was rid of his burden; he hovered anxiously and uselessly about, while mrs. ellison was carried to an airy position on the bow of the boat, where in a few minutes he had the great satisfaction of seeing her open her eyes. it was not the moment for him to speak, and he walked somewhat guiltily away with the dispersing crowd. mrs. ellison addressed her first words to pale kitty at her side. "you can have all my things, now," she said, as if it were a clause in her will, and perhaps it had been her last thought before unconsciousness. "why, fanny," cried kitty, with an hysterical laugh, "you're not going to die! a sprained ankle isn't fatal!" "no; but i've heard that a person with a sprained ankle can't put their foot to the ground for weeks; and i shall only want a dressing-gown, you know, to lie on the sofa in." with that, mrs. ellison placed her hand tenderly on kitty's head, like a mother wondering what will become of a helpless child during her disability; in fact she was mentally weighing the advantages of her wardrobe, which kitty would now fully enjoy, against the loss of the friendly strategy which she would now lack. helpless to decide the matter, she heaved a sigh. "but, fanny, you won't expect to travel in a dressing-gown." "indeed, i wish i knew whether i _could_ travel in _anything_ or not. but the next twenty-four hours will show. if it swells up, i shall have to rest awhile at quebec; and if it doesn't, there may be something internal. i've read of accidents when the person thought they were perfectly well and comfortable, and the first thing they knew they were in a very dangerous state. that's the worst of these internal injuries: you never can tell. not that i think there's anything of that kind the matter with me. but a few days' rest won't do any harm, whatever happens; the stores in quebec are quite as good and a little cheaper than in montreal; and i could go about in a carriage, you know, and put in the time as well in one place as the other. i'm sure we could get on very pleasantly there; and the colonel needn't be home for a month yet. i suppose that i could hobble into the stores on a crutch." whilst mrs. ellison's monologue ran on with scarcely a break from kitty, her husband was gone to fetch her a cup of tea and such other light refreshment as a lady may take after a swoon. when he returned she bethought herself of mr. arbuton, who, having once come back to see if all was going well, had vanished again. "why, our friend boston is bearing up under his share of the morning's work like a hero--or a lady with a sprained ankle," said the colonel as he arranged the provision. "to see the havoc he's making in the ham and eggs and chiccory is to be convinced that there is no appetizer like regret for the sufferings of others." "why, and here's poor kitty not had a bite yet!" cried mrs. ellison. "kitty, go off at once and get your breakfast. put on my--" "o, _don't_, fanny, or i can't go; and i'm really very hungry." "well, i won't then," said mrs. ellison, seeing the rainy cloud in kitty's eyes. "go just as you are, and don't mind me." and so kitty went, gathering courage at every pace, and sitting down opposite mr. arbuton with a vivid color to be sure, but otherwise lion-bold. he had been upbraiding the stars that had thrust him further and further at every step into the intimacy of these people, as he called them to himself. it was just twenty-four hours, he reflected, since he had met them, and resolved to have nothing to do with them, and in that time the young lady had brought him under the necessity of apologizing for a blunder of her own; he had played the eavesdropper to her talk; he had sentimentalized the midnight hour with her; they had all taken a morning ride together; and he had ended by having mrs. ellison sprain her ankle and faint in his arms. it was outrageous; and what made it worse was that decency obliged him to take henceforth a regretful, deprecatory attitude towards mrs. ellison, whom he liked least among these people. so he sat vindictively eating an enormous breakfast, in a sort of angry abstraction, from which kitty's coming roused him to say that he hoped mrs. ellison was better. "o, very much! it's just a sprain." "a sprain may be a very annoying thing," said mr. arbuton dismally. "miss ellison," he cried, "i've been nothing but an affliction to your party since i came on board this boat!" "do you think evil genius of our party would be too harsh a term?" suggested kitty. "not in the least; it would be a mere euphemism,--base flattery, in fact. call me something worse." "i can't think of anything. i must leave you to your own conscience. it was a pity to end our ride in that way; it would have been such a pleasant ride!" and kitty took heart from his apparent mood to speak of some facts of the morning that had moved her fancy. "what a strange little nest it is up here among these half-thawed hills! and imagine the winter, the fifteen or twenty months of it, they must have every year. i could almost have shed tears over that patch of corn that had escaped the early august frosts. i suppose this is a sort of indian summer that we are enjoying now, and that the cold weather will set in after a week or two. my cousin and i thought that tadoussac was somewhat retired and composed last night, but i'm sure that i shall see it in its true light, as a metropolis, going back. i'm afraid that the turmoil and bustle of eriecreek, when i get home--" "eriecreek?--when you got home?--i thought you lived at milwaukee." "o no! it's my cousins who live at milwaukee. i live at eriecreek, new york state." "oh!" mr. arbuton looked blank and not altogether pleased. milwaukee was bad enough, though he understood that it was largely peopled from new england, and had a great german element, which might account for the fact that these people were not quite barbaric. but this eriecreek, new york state! "i don't think i've heard of it," he said. "it's a small place," observed kitty, "and i believe it isn't noted for anything in particular; it's not even on any railroad. it's in the north-west part of the state." "isn't it in the oil-regions?" groped mr. arbuton. "why, the oil-regions are rather migratory, you know. it used to be in the oil-regions; but the oil was pumped out, and then the oil-regions gracefully withdrew and left the cheese-regions and grape-regions to come back and take possession of the old derricks and the rusty boilers. you might suppose from the appearance of the meadows, that all the boilers that ever blew up had come down in the neighborhood of eriecreek. and every field has its derrick standing just as the last dollar or the last drop of oil left it." mr. arbuton brought his fancy to bear upon eriecreek, and wholly failed to conceive of it. he did not like the notion of its being thrust within the range of his knowledge; and he resented its being the home of miss ellison, whom he was beginning to accept as a not quite comprehensible yet certainly agreeable fact, though he still had a disposition to cast her off as something incredible. he asked no further about eriecreek, and presently she rose and went to join her relatives, and he went to smoke his cigar, and to ponder upon the problem presented to him in this young girl from whose locality and conjecturable experiences he was at loss how to infer her as he found her here. she had a certain self-reliance mingling with an innocent trust of others which mrs. isabel march had described to her husband as a charm potent to make everybody sympathetic and good-natured, but which it would not be easy to account for to mr. arbuton. in part it was a natural gift, and partly it came from mere ignorance of the world; it was the unsnubbed fearlessness of a heart which did not suspect a sense of social difference in others, or imagine itself misprized for anything but a fault. for such a false conception of her relations to polite society, kitty's uncle jack was chiefly to blame. in the fierce democracy of his revolt from his virginian traditions he had taught his family that a belief in any save intellectual and moral distinctions was a mean and cruel superstition; he had contrived to fix this idea so deeply in the education of his children, that it gave a coloring to their lives, and kitty, when her turn came, had the effect of it in the character of those about her. in fact she accepted his extreme theories of equality to a degree that delighted her uncle, who, having held them many years, was growing perhaps a little languid in their tenure and was glad to have his grasp strengthened by her faith. socially as well as politically eriecreek was almost a perfect democracy, and there was little in kitty's circumstances to contradict the doctor's teachings. the brief visits which she had made to buffalo and erie, and, since the colonel's marriage, to milwaukee, had not sufficed to undeceive her; she had never suffered slight save from the ignorant and uncouth; she innocently expected that in people of culture she should always find community of feeling and ideas; and she had met mr. arbuton all the more trustfully because as a bostonian he must be cultivated. in the secluded life which she led perforce at eriecreek there was an abundance of leisure, which she bestowed upon books at an age when most girls are sent to school. the doctor had a good taste of an old-fashioned kind in literature, and he had a library pretty well stocked with the elderly english authors, poets and essayists and novelists, and here and there an historian, and these kitty read childlike, liking them at the time in a certain way, and storing up in her mind things that she did not understand for the present, but whose beauty and value dawned upon her from time to time, as she grew older. but of far more use and pleasure to her than these now somewhat mouldy classics were the more modern books of her cousin charles,--that pride and hope of his father's heart, who had died the year before she came to eriecreek. he was named after her own father, and it was as if her uncle jack found both his son and his brother in her again. when her taste for reading began to show itself in force, the old man one day unlocked a certain bookcase in a little upper room, and gave her the key, saying, with a broken pride and that queer virginian pomp which still clung to him, "this was my son's, who would one day have been a great writer; now it is yours." after that the doctor would pick up the books out of this collection which kitty was reading and had left lying about the rooms, and look into them a little way. sometimes he fell asleep over them; sometimes when he opened on a page pencilled with marginal notes, he would put the volume gently down and go very quickly out of the room. "kitty, i reckon you'd better not leave poor charley's books around where uncle jack can get at them," one of the girls, virginia or rachel, would say; "i don't believe he cares much for those writers, and the sight of the books just tries him." so kitty kept the books, and herself for the most part with them, in the upper chamber which had been charles ellison's room, and where, amongst the witnesses of the dead boy's ambitious dreams, she grew dreamer herself and seemed to inherit with his earthly place his own fine and gentle spirit. the doctor, as his daughter suggested, did not care much for the modern authors in whom his son had delighted. like many another simple and pure-hearted man, he thought that since pope there had been no great poet but byron, and he could make nothing out of tennyson and browning, or the other contemporary english poets. amongst the americans he had a great respect for whittier, but he preferred lowell to the rest because he had written the biglow papers, and he never would allow that the last series was half so good as the first. these and the other principal poets of our nation and language kitty inherited from her cousin, as well as a full stock of the contemporary novelists and romancers, whom she liked better than the poets on the whole. she had also the advantage of the magazines and reviews which used to come to him, and the house over-flowed with newspapers of every kind, from the eriecreek courier to the new york tribune. what with the coming and going of the eccentric visitors, and this continual reading, and her rides about the country with her uncle jack, kitty's education, such as it was, went on very actively and with the effect, at least, to give her a great liveliness of mind and several decided opinions. where it might have warped her out of natural simplicity, and made her conceited, the keen and wholesome airs which breathed continually in the ellison household came in to restore her. there was such kindness in this discipline, that she never could remember when it wounded her; it was part of the gayety of those times when she would sit down with the girls, and they took up some work together, and rattled on in a free, wild, racy talk, with an edge of satire for whoever came near, a fantastic excess in its drollery, and just a touch of native melancholy tingeing it. the last queer guest, some neighborhood gossip, some youthful folly or pretentiousness of kitty's, some trait of their own, some absurdity of the boys if they happened to be at home, and came lounging in, were the themes out of which they contrived such jollity as never was, save when in uncle jack's presence they fell upon some characteristic action or theory of his and turned it into endless ridicule. but of such people, of such life, mr. arbuton could have made nothing if he had known them. in many things he was an excellent person, and greatly to be respected for certain qualities. he was very sincere; his mind had a singular purity and rectitude; he was a scrupulously just person so far as he knew. he had traits that would have fitted him very well for the career he had once contemplated, and he had even made some preliminary studies for the ministry. but the very generosity of his creed perplexed him, his mislikers said; contending that he could never have got on with the mob of the redeemed. "arbuton," said a fat young fellow, the supposed wit of the class, "thinks there _are_ persons of low extraction in heaven; but he doesn't like the idea." and mr. arbuton did not like the speaker very well, either, nor any of his poorer fellow-students, whose gloveless and unfashionable poverty, and meagre board and lodgings, and general hungry dependence upon pious bequests and neighborhood kindnesses, offended his instincts. "so he's given it up, has he?" moralized the same wit, upon his retirement. "if arbuton could have been a divinely commissioned apostle to the best society, and been obliged to save none but well-connected, old-established, and cultivated souls, he might have gone into the ministry." this was a coarse construction of the truth, but it was not altogether a perversion. it was long ago that he had abandoned the thought of the ministry, and he had since travelled, and read law, and become a man of society and of clubs; but he still kept the traits that had seemed to make his vocation clear. on the other hand he kept the prejudices that were imagined to have disqualified him. he was an exclusive by training and by instinct. he gave ordinary humanity credit for a certain measure of sensibility, and it is possible that if he had known more kinds of men, he would have recognized merits and excellences which did not now exist for him; but i do not think he would have liked them. his doubt of these western people was the most natural, if not the most justifiable thing in the world, and for kitty, if he could have known all about her, i do not see how he could have believed in her at all. as it was, he went in search of her party, when he had smoked his cigar, and found them on the forward promenade. she had left him in quite a lenient mood, although, as she perceived with amusement, he had done nothing to merit it, except give her cousin a sprained ankle. at the moment of his reappearance, mrs. ellison had been telling kitty that she thought it was beginning to swell a little, and so it could not be anything internal; and kitty had understood that she meant her ankle as well as if she had said so, and had sorrowed and rejoiced over her, and the colonel had been inculpated for the whole affair. this made mr. arbuton's excuses rather needless, though they were most graciously received. iii. on the way back to quebec. by this time the boat was moving down the river, and every one was alive to the scenery. the procession of the pine-clad, rounded heights on either shore began shortly after ha-ha bay had disappeared behind a curve, and it hardly ceased, save at one point, before the boat re-entered the st. lawrence. the shores of the stream are almost uninhabited. the hills rise from the water's edge, and if ever a narrow vale divides them, it is but to open drearier solitudes to the eye. in such a valley would stand a saw-mill, and huddled about it a few poor huts, while a friendless road, scarce discernible from the boat, wound up from the river through the valley, and led to wildernesses all the forlorner for the devastation of their forests. now and then an island, rugged as the shores, broke the long reaches of the grim river with its massive rock and dark evergreen, and seemed in the distance to forbid escape from those dreary waters, over which no bird flew, and in which it was incredible any fish swam. mrs. ellison, with her foot comfortably and not ungracefully supported on a stool, was in so little pain as to be looking from time to time at one of the guide-books which the colonel had lavished upon his party, and which she was disposed to hold to very strict account for any excesses of description. "it says here that the water of the saguenay is as black as ink. do _you_ think it is, richard?" "it looks so." "well, but if you took some up in your hand?" "perhaps it wouldn't be as black as the best maynard and noyes, but it would be black enough for all practical purposes." "maybe," suggested kitty, "the guide-book means the kind that is light blue at first, but 'becomes a deep black on exposure to the air,' as the label says." "what do you think, mr. arbuton?" asked mrs. ellison with unabated anxiety. "well, really, i don't know," said mr. arbuton, who thought it a very trivial kind of talk, "i can't say, indeed. i haven't taken any of it up in my hand." "that's true," said mrs. ellison gravely, with an accent of reproval for the others who had not thought of so simple a solution of the problem, "very true." the colonel looked into her face with an air of well-feigned alarm. "you don't think the sprain has gone to your head, fanny?" he asked, and walked away, leaving mr. arbuton to the ladies. mrs. ellison did not care for this or any other gibe, if she but served her own purposes; and now, having made everybody laugh and given the conversation a lively turn, she was as perfectly content as if she had not been herself an offering to the cause of cheerfulness. she was, indeed, equal to any sacrifice in the enterprise she had undertaken, and would not only have given kitty all her worldly goods, but would have quite effaced herself to further her own designs upon mr. arbuton. she turned again to her guide-book, and left the young people to continue the talk in unbroken gayety. they at once became serious, as most people do after a hearty laugh, which, if you think, seems always to have something strange and sad in it. but besides, kitty was oppressed by the coldness that seemed perpetually to hover in mr. arbuton's atmosphere, while she was interested by his fastidious good looks and his blameless manners and his air of a world different from any she had hitherto known. he was one of those men whose perfection makes you feel guilty of misdemeanor whenever they meet you, and whose greeting turns your honest good-day coarse and common; even kitty's fearless ignorance and more than western disregard of dignities were not proof against him. she had found it easy to talk with mrs. march as she did with her cousin at home: she liked to be frank and gay in her parley, to jest and to laugh and to make harmless fun, and to sentimentalize in a half-earnest way; she liked to be with mr. arbuton, but now she did not see how she could take her natural tone with him. she wondered at her daring lightness at the breakfast-table; she waited for him to say something, and he said, with a glance at the gray heaven that always overhangs the saguenay, that it was beginning to rain, and unfurled the slender silk umbrella which harmonized so perfectly with the london effect of his dress, and held it over her. mrs. ellison sat within the shelter of the projecting roof, and diligently perused her book with her eyes, and listened to their talk. "the great drawback to this sort of thing in america," continued mr. arbuton, "is that there is no human interest about the scenery, fine as it is." "why, i don't know," said kitty, "there was that little settlement round the saw-mill. can't you imagine any human interest in the lives of the people there? it seems to me that one might make almost anything out of them. suppose, for example, that the owner of that mill was a disappointed man who had come here to bury the wreck of his life in--sawdust?" "o, yes! that sort of thing; certainly. but i didn't mean that, i meant something historical. there is no past, no atmosphere, no traditions, you know." "o, but the saguenay _has_ a tradition," said kitty. "you know that a party of the first explorers left their comrades at tadoussac, and came up the saguenay three hundred years ago, and never were seen or heard of again. i think it's so in keeping with the looks of the river. the saguenay would never tell a secret." "um!" uttered mr. arbuton, as if he were not quite sure that it was the saguenay's place to have a legend of this sort, and disposed to snub the legend because the saguenay had it. after a little silence, he began to speak of famous rivers abroad. "i suppose," kitty said, "the rhine has traditions enough, hasn't it?" "yes," he answered, "but i think the rhine rather overdoes it. you can't help feeling, you know, that it's somewhat melodramatic and--common. have you ever seen the rhine?" "o, no! this is almost the first i've seen of anything. perhaps," she added, demurely, yet with a tremor at finding herself about to make light of mr. arbuton, "if i had had too much of tradition on the rhine i should want more of it on the saguenay." "why, you must allow there's a golden mean in everything, miss ellison," said her companion with a lenient laugh, not feeling it disagreeable to be made light of by her. "yes; and i'm afraid we're going to find cape trinity and cape eternity altogether too big when we come to them. don't you think eighteen hundred feet excessively high for a feature of river scenery?" mr. arbuton really did have an objection to the exaggerations of nature on this continent, and secretly thought them in bad taste, but he had never formulated his feeling. he was not sure but it was ridiculous, now that it was suggested, and yet the possibility was too novel to be entertained without suspicion. however, when after a while the rumor of their approach to the great objects of the saguenay journey had spread among the passengers, and they began to assemble at points favorable for the enjoyment of the spectacle, he was glad to have secured the place he held with miss ellison, and a sympathetic thrill of excitement passed through his loath superiority. the rain ceased as they drew nearer, and the gray clouds that had hung so low upon the hills sullenly lifted from them and let their growing height he seen. the captain bade his sight-seers look at the vast roman profile that showed itself upon the rock, and then he pointed out the wonderful gothic arch, the reputed doorway of an unexplored cavern, under which an upright shaft of stone had stood for ages statue-like, till not many winters ago the frost heaved it from its base, and it plunged headlong down through the ice into the unfathomed depths below. the unvarying gloom of the pines was lit now by the pensive glimmer of birch-trees, and this gray tone gave an indescribable sentiment of pathos and of age to the scenery. suddenly the boat rounded the corner of the three steps, each five hundred feet high, in which cape eternity climbs from the river, and crept in under the naked side of the awful cliff. it is sheer rock, springing from the black water, and stretching upward with a weary, effort-like aspect, in long impulses of stone marked by deep seams from space to space, till, fifteen hundred feet in air, its vast brow beetles forward, and frowns with a scattering fringe of pines. there are stains of weather and of oozing springs upon the front of the cliff, but it is height alone that seems to seize the eye, and one remembers afterwards these details, which are indeed so few as not properly to enter into the effect. the rock fully justifies its attributive height to the eye, which follows the upward rush of the mighty acclivity, steep after steep, till it wins the cloud-capt summit, when the measureless mass seems to swing and sway overhead, and the nerves tremble with the same terror that besets him who looks downward from the verge of a lofty precipice. it is wholly grim and stern; no touch of beauty relieves the austere majesty of that presence. at the foot of cape eternity the water is of unknown depth, and it spreads, a black expanse, in the rounding hollow of shores of unimaginable wildness and desolation, and issues again in its river's course around the base of cape trinity. this is yet loftier than the sister cliff, but it slopes gently backward from the stream, and from foot to crest it is heavily clothed with a forest of pines. the woods that hitherto have shagged the hills with a stunted and meagre growth, showing long stretches scarred by fire, now assume a stately size, and assemble themselves compactly upon the side of the mountain, setting their serried stems one rank above another, till the summit is crowned with the mass of their dark green plumes, dense and soft and beautiful; so that the spirit perturbed by the spectacle of the other cliff is calmed and assuaged by the serene grandeur of this. there have been, to be sure, some human agencies at work even under the shadow of cape eternity to restore the spirit to self-possession, and perhaps none turns from it wholly dismayed. kitty, at any rate, took heart from some works of art which the cliff wall displayed near the water's edge. one of these was a lively fresco portrait of lieutenant-general sherman, with the insignia of his rank, and the other was an even more striking effigy of general o'neil, of the armies of the irish republic, wearing a threatening aspect, and designed in a bold conceit of his presence there as conqueror of canada in the year . mr. arbuton was inclined to resent these intrusions upon the sublimity of nature, and he could not conceive, without disadvantage to them, how miss ellison and the colonel should accept them so cheerfully as part of the pleasure of the whole. as he listened blankly to their exchange of jests he found himself awfully beset by a temptation which one of the boat's crew placed before the passengers. this was a bucket full of pebbles of inviting size; and the man said, "now, see which can hit the cliff. it's farther than any of you can throw, though it looks so near." the passengers cast themselves upon the store of missiles, colonel ellison most actively among them. none struck the cliff, and suddenly mr. arbuton felt a blind, stupid, irresistible longing to try his chance. the spirit of his college days, of his boating and ball-playing youth, came upon him. he picked up a pebble, while kitty opened her eyes in a stare of dumb surprise. then he wheeled and threw it, and as it struck against the cliff with a shock that seemed to have broken all the windows on the back bay, he exulted in a sense of freedom the havoc caused him. it was as if for an instant he had rent away the ties of custom, thrown off the bonds of social allegiance, broken down and trampled upon the conventions which his whole life long he had held so dear and respectable. in that moment of frenzy he feared himself capable of shaking hands with the shabby englishman in the glengarry cap, or of asking the whole admiring company of passengers down to the bar. a cry of applause had broken from them at his achievement, and he had for the first time tasted the sweets of popular favor. of course a revulsion must come, and it must be of a corresponding violence; and the next moment mr. arbuton hated them all, and most of all colonel ellison, who had been loudest in his praise. him he thought for that moment everything that was aggressively and intrusively vulgar. but he could not utter these friendly impressions, nor is it so easy to withdraw from any concession, and he found it impossible to repair his broken defences. destiny had been against him from the beginning, and now why should he not strike hands with it for the brief half-day that he was to continue in these people's society? in the morning he would part from them forever, and in the mean time why should he not try to please and be pleased? there might, to be sure, have been many reasons why he should not do this; but however the balance stood he now yielded himself passively to his fate. he was polite to mrs. ellison, he was attentive to kitty, and as far as he could he entered into the fantastic spirit of her talk with the colonel. he was not a dull man; he had quite an apt wit of his own, and a neat way of saying things; but humor always seemed to him something not perfectly well bred; of course he helped to praise it in some old-established diner-out, or some woman of good fashion, whose _mots_ it was customary to repeat, and he even tolerated it in books; but he was at a loss with these people, who looked at life in so bizarre a temper, yet without airiness or pretension, nay, with a whimsical readiness to acknowledge kindred in every droll or laughable thing. the boat stopped at tadoussac on her return, and among the spectators who came down to the landing was a certain very pretty, conscious-looking, silly, bridal-faced young woman,--imaginably the belle of the season at that forlorn watering-place,--who before coming on board stood awhile attended by a following of those elderly imperial and colonial british who heavily flutter round the fair at such resorts. she had an air of utterly satisfied vanity, in which there was no harm in the world, and when she saw that she had fixed the eyes of the shoreward-gazing passengers, it appeared as if she fell into a happy trepidation too blissful to be passively borne; she moistened her pretty red lips with her tongue, she twitched her mantle, she settled the bow at her lovely throat, she bridled and tossed her graceful head. "what should you do next, kitty?" asked the colonel, who had been sympathetically intent upon all this. "o, i think i should pat my foot," answered kitty; and in fact the charming simpleton on shore, having perfected her attitude, was tapping the ground nervously with the toe of her adorable slipper. after the boat started, a canadian lady of ripe age, yet of a vivacity not to be reconciled with the notion of the married state, capered briskly about among her somewhat stolid and indifferent friends, saying, "they're going to fire it as soon as we round the point"; and presently a dull boom, as of a small piece of ordnance discharged in the neighborhood of the hotel, struck through the gathering fog, and this elderly sylph clapped her hands and exulted: "they've fired it, they've fired it! and now the captain will blow the whistle in answer." but the captain did nothing of the kind, and the lady, after some more girlish effervescence, upbraided him for an old owl and an old muff, and so sank into such a flat and spiritless calm that she was sorrowful to see. "too bad, mr. arbuton, isn't it?" said the colonel; and mr. arbuton listened in vague doubt while kitty built up with her cousin a touching romance for the poor lady, supposed to have spent the one brilliant and successful summer of her life at tadoussac, where her admirers had agreed to bemoan her loss in this explosion of gunpowder. they asked him if he did not wish the captain _had_ whistled; and "oh!" shuddered kitty, "doesn't it all make you feel just as if you had been doing it yourself?"--a question which he hardly knew how to answer, never having, to his knowledge, done a ridiculous thing in his life, much less been guilty of such behavior as that of the disappointed lady. at cacouna, where the boat stopped to take on the horses and carriages of some home-returning sojourners, the pier was a labyrinth of equipages of many sorts and sizes, and a herd of bright-hooded, gayly blanketed horses gave variety to the human crowd that soaked and steamed in the fine, slowly falling rain. a draught-horse was every three minutes driven into their midst with tedious iteration as he slowly drew baskets of coal up from the sloop unloading at the wharf, and each time they closed solidly upon his retreat as if they never expected to see that horse again while the world stood. they were idle ladies and gentlemen under umbrellas, indians and habitans taking the rain stolidly erect or with shrugged shoulders, and two or three clergymen of the curate type, who might have stepped as they were out of any dull english novel. these were talking in low voices and putting their hands to their ears to catch the replies of the lady-passengers who hung upon the rail, and twaddled back as dryly as if there was no moisture in life. all the while the safety-valves hissed with the escaping steam, and the boat's crew silently toiled with the grooms of the different horses to get the equipages on board. with the carriages it was an affair of mere muscle, but the horses required to be managed with brain. no sooner had one of them placed his fore feet on the gangway plank than he protested by backing up over a mass of patient canadians, carrying with him half a dozen grooms and deck-hands. then his hood was drawn over his eyes, and he was blindly walked up and down the pier, and back to the gangway, which he knew as soon as he touched it. he pulled, he pranced, he shied, he did all that a bad and stubborn horse can do, till at last a groom mounted his back, a clump of deck-hands tugged at his bridle, and other grooms, tenderly embracing him at different points, pushed, and he was thus conveyed on board with mingled affection and ignominy. none of the canadians seemed amused by this; they regarded it with serious composure as a fitting decorum, and mr. arbuton had no comment to make upon it. but at the first embrace bestowed upon the horse by the grooms the colonel said absently, "ah! long-lost brother," and kitty laughed; and as the scruples of each brute were successively overcome, she helped to give some grotesque interpretation to the various scenes of the melodrama, while mr. arbuton stood beside her, and sheltered her with his umbrella; and a spice of malice in her heart told her that he viewed this drolling, and especially her part in it, with grave misgiving. that gave the zest of transgression to her excess, mixed with dismay; for the tricksy spirit in her was not a domineering spirit, but was easily abashed by the moods of others. she ought not to have laughed at dick's speeches, she soon told herself, much less helped him on. she dreadfully feared that she had done something indecorous, and she was pensive and silent over it as she moved listlessly about after supper; and she sat at last thinking in a dreary sort of perplexity on what had passed during the day, which seemed a long one. the shabby englishman with his wife and sister were walking up and down the cabin. by and by they stopped, and sat down at the table facing kitty; the elder woman, with a civil freedom, addressed her some commonplace, and the four were presently in lively talk; for kitty had beamed upon the woman in return, having already longed to know something of them. the world was so fresh to her, that she could find delight in those poor singing or acting folk, though she had soon to own to herself that their talk was not very witty nor very wise, and that the best thing about them was their good-nature. the colonel sat at the end of the table with a newspaper; mrs. ellison had gone to bed; and kitty was beginning to tire of her new acquaintance, and to wonder how she could get away from them, when she saw rescue in the eye of mr. arbuton as he came down to the cabin. she knew he was looking for her; she saw him check himself with a start of recognition; then he walked rapidly by the group, without glancing at them. "brrrr!" said the blond girl, drawing her blue knit shawl about her shoulders, "isn't it cold?" and she and her friends laughed. "o dear!" thought kitty, "i didn't suppose they were so rude. i'm afraid i must say good night," she added aloud, after a little, and stole away the most conscience-stricken creature on that boat. she heard those people laugh again after she left them. iv. mr. arbuton's inspiration. the next morning, when mr. arbuton awoke, he found a clear light upon the world that he had left wrapped in fog at midnight. a heavy gale was blowing, and the wide river was running in seas that made the boat stagger in her course, and now and then struck her bows with a force that sent the spray from their seething tops into the faces of the people on the promenade. the sun, out of rifts of the breaking clouds, launched broad splendors across the villages and farms of the level landscape and the crests and hollows of the waves; and a certain joy of the air penetrated to the guarded consciousness of mr. arbuton. involuntarily he looked about for the people he meant to have nothing more to do with, that he might appeal to the sympathies of one of them, at least, in his sense of such an admirable morning. but a great many passengers had come on board, during the night, at murray bay, where the brief season was ending, and their number hid the ellisons from him. when he went to breakfast, he found some one had taken his seat near them, and they did not notice him as he passed by in search of another chair. kitty and the colonel were at table alone, and they both wore preoccupied faces. after breakfast he sought them out and asked for mrs. ellison, who had shared in most of the excitements of the day before, helping herself about with a pretty limp, and who certainly had not, as her husband phrased it, kept any of the meals waiting. "why," said the colonel, "i'm afraid her ankle's worse this morning, and that we'll have to lie by at quebec for a few days, at any rate." mr. arbuton heard this sad news with a cheerful aspect unaccountable in one who was concerned at mrs. ellison's misfortune. he smiled, when he ought to have looked pensive, and he laughed at the colonel's joke when the latter added, "of course, this is a great hardship for my cousin, who hates quebec, and wants to get home to eriecreek as soon as possible." kitty promised to bear her trials with firmness, and mr. arbuton said, not very consequently, as she thought, "i had been planning to spend a few days in quebec, myself, and i shall have the opportunity of inquiring about mrs. ellison's convalescence. in fact," he added, turning to the colonel, "i hope you'll let me be of service to you in getting to a hotel." and when the boat landed, mr. arbuton actually busied himself in finding a carriage and putting the various ellison wraps and bags into it. then he helped to support mrs. ellison ashore, and to lift her to the best place. he raised his hat, and had good-morning on his tongue, when the astonished colonel called out, "why, the deuce! you're going to ride up with us!" mr. arbuton thought he had better get another carriage; he should incommode mrs. ellison; but mrs. ellison protested that he would not at all; and, to cut the matter short, he mounted to the colonel's side. it was another stroke of fate. at the hotel they found a line of people reaching half-way down the outer steps from the inside of the office. "hallo! what's this?" asked the colonel of the last man in the queue. "o, it's a little procession to the hotel register! we've been three quarters of an hour in passing a given point," said the man, who was plainly a fellow-citizen. "and haven't got by yet," said the colonel, taking to the speaker. "then the house is full?" "well, no; they haven't begun to throw them out of the window." "his humor is degenerating, dick," said kitty; and "hadn't you better go inside and inquire?" asked mrs. ellison. it was part of the ellison travelling joke for her thus to prompt the colonel in his duty. "i'm glad you mentioned it, fanny. i was just going to drive off in despair." the colonel vanished within doors, and after long delay came out flushed, but not with triumph. "on the express condition that i have ladies with me, one an invalid, i am promised a room on the fifth floor some time during the day. they tell me the other hotel is crammed and it's no use to go there." mrs. ellison was ready to weep, and for the first time since her accident she harbored some bitterness against mr. arbuton. they all sat silent, and the colonel on the sidewalk silently wiped his brow. mr. arbuton, in the poverty of his invention, wondered if there was not some lodging-house where they could find shelter. "of course there is," cried mrs. ellison, beaming upon her hero, and calling kitty's attention to his ingenuity by a pressure with her well foot. "richard, we must look up a boarding-house." "do you know of any good boarding-houses?" asked the colonel of the driver, mechanically. "plenty," answered the man. "well, drive us to twenty or thirty first-class ones," commanded the colonel; and the search began. the colonel first asked prices and looked at rooms, and if he pronounced any apartment unsuitable, kitty was despatched by mrs. ellison to view it and refute him. as often as she confirmed him, mrs. ellison was sure that they were both too fastidious, and they never turned away from a door but they closed the gates of paradise upon that afflicted lady. she began to believe that they should find no place whatever, when at last they stopped before a portal so unboarding-house-like in all outward signs, that she maintained it was of no use to ring, and imparted so much of her distrust to the colonel that, after ringing, he prefaced his demand for rooms with an apology for supposing that there were rooms to let there. then, after looking at them, he returned to the carriage and reported that the whole affair was perfect, and that he should look no farther. mrs. ellison replied that she never could trust his judgment, he was so careless. kitty inspected the premises, and came back in a transport that alarmed the worst fears of mrs. ellison. she was sure that they had better look farther, she knew there were plenty of nicer places. even if the rooms were nice and the situation pleasant, she was certain that there must be some drawbacks which they did not know of yet. whereupon her husband lifted her from the carriage, and bore her, without reply or comment of any kind, into the house. throughout the search mr. arbuton had been making up his mind that he would part with his friends as soon as they found lodgings, give the day to quebec, and take the evening train for gorham, thus escaping the annoyances of a crowded hotel, and ending at once an acquaintance which he ought never to have let go so far. as long as the ellisons were without shelter, he felt that it was due to himself not to abandon them. but even now that they were happily housed, had he done all that nobility obliged? he stood irresolute beside the carriage. "won't you come up and see where we live?" asked kitty, hospitably. "i shall be very glad," said mr. arbuton. "my dear fellow," said the colonel, in the parlor, "i didn't engage a room for you. i supposed you'd rather take your chances at the hotel." "o, i'm going away to-night." "why, that's a pity!" "yes, i've no fancy for a cot-bed in the hotel parlor. but i don't quite like to leave you here, after bringing this calamity upon you." "o, don't mention that! i was the only one to blame. we shall get on splendidly here." mr. arbuton suffered a vague disappointment. at the bottom of his heart was a formless hope that he might in some way be necessary to the ellisons in their adversity; or if not that, then that something might entangle him further and compel his stay. but they seemed quite equal in themselves to the situation; they were in far more comfortable quarters than they could have hoped for, and plainly should want for nothing; fortune put on a smiling face, and bade him go free of them. he fancied it a mocking smile, though, as he stood an instant silently weighing one thing against another. the colonel was patiently waiting his motion; mrs. ellison sat watching him from the sofa; kitty moved about the room with averted face,--a pretty domestic presence, a household priestess ordering the temporary penates. mr. arbuton opened his lips to say farewell, but a god spoke through them,--inconsequently, as the gods for the most part do, saying, "besides, i suppose you've got all the rooms here." "o, as to that i don't know," answered the colonel, not recognizing the language of inspiration, "let's ask." kitty knocked a photograph-book off the table, and mrs. ellison said, "why, kitty!" but nothing more was spoken till the landlady came. she had another room, but doubted if it would answer. it was in the attic, and was a back room, though it had a pleasant outlook. mr. arbuton had no doubt that it would do very well for the day or two he was going to stay, and took it hastily, without going to look at it. he had his valise carried up at once, and then he went to the post-office to see if he had any letters, offering to ask also for colonel ellison. kitty stole off to explore the chamber given her at the rear of the house; that is to say, she opened the window looking out on what their hostess told her was the garden of the ursuline convent, and stood there in a mute transport. a black cross rose in the midst, and all about this wandered the paths and alleys of the garden, through clumps of lilac-bushes and among the spires of hollyhocks. the grounds were enclosed by high walls in part, and in part by the group of the convent edifices, built of gray stone, high gabled, and topped by dormer-windowed steep roofs of tin, which, under the high morning sun, lay an expanse of keenest splendor, while many a grateful shadow dappled the full-foliaged garden below. two slim, tall poplars stood against the gable of the chapel, and shot their tops above its roof, and under a porch near them two nuns sat motionless in the sun, black-robed, with black veils falling over their shoulders, and their white faces lost in the white linen that draped them from breast to crown. their hands lay quiet in their laps, and they seemed unconscious of the other nuns walking in the garden-paths with little children, their pupils, and answering their laughter from time to time with voices as simple and innocent as their own. kitty looked down upon them all with a swelling heart. they were but figures in a beautiful picture of something old and poetical; but she loved them, and pitied them, and was most happy in them, the same as if they had been real. it could not be that they and she were in the same world: she must be dreaming over a book in charley's room at eriecreek. she shaded her eyes for a better look, when the noonday gun boomed from the citadel; the bell upon the chapel jangled harshly, and those strange maskers, those quaint black birds with white breasts and faces, flocked indoors. at the same time a small dog under her window howled dolorously at the jangling of the bell; and kitty, with an impartial joy, turned from the pensive romance of the convent garden to the mild comedy of the scene to which his woeful note attracted her. when he had uttered his anguish, he relapsed into the quietest small french dog that ever was, and lay down near a large, tranquil cat, whom neither the bell nor he had been able to stir from her slumbers in the sun; a peasant-like old man kept on sawing wood, and a little child stood still amidst the larkspurs and marigolds of a tiny garden, while over the flower-pots on the low window-sill of the neighboring house to which it belonged, a young, motherly face gazed peacefully out. the great extent of the convent grounds had left this poor garden scarce breathing-space for its humble blooms; with the low paling fence that separated it from the adjoining house-yards it looked like a toy-garden or the background of a puppet-show, and in its way it was as quaintly unreal to the young girl as the nunnery itself. when she saw it first, the city's walls and other warlike ostentations had taken her imagination with the historic grandeur of quebec; but the fascination deepened now that she was admitted, as it were, to the religious heart and the domestic privacy of the famous old town. she was romantic, as most good young girls are; and she had the same pleasure in the strangeness of the things about her as she would have felt in the keeping of a charming story. to fanny's "well, kitty, i suppose all this just suits you," when she had returned to the little parlor where the sufferer lay, she answered with a sigh of irrepressible content, "o yes! could anything be more beautiful?" and her enraptured eye dwelt upon the low ceilings, the deep, wide chimneys eloquent of the mighty fires with which they must roar in winter, the french windows with their curious and clumsy fastenings, and every little detail that made the place alien and precious. fanny broke into a laugh at the visionary absence in her face. "do you think the place is good enough for your hero and heroine?" asked she, slyly; for kitty had one of those family reputes, so hard to survive, for childish attempts of her own in the world of fiction where so great part of her life had been passed; and mrs. ellison, who was as unliterary a soul as ever breathed, admired her with the heartiness which unimaginative people often feel for their idealizing friends, and believed that she was always deep in the mysteries of some plot. "o, i don't know," kitty answered with a little color, "about heroes and heroines; but, i'd like to live here, myself. yes," she continued, rather to herself than to her listener, "i do believe this is what i was made for. i've always wanted to live amongst old things, in a stone house with dormer-windows. why, there isn't a single dormer-window in eriecreek, nor even a brick house, let alone a stone one. o yes, indeed! i was meant for an old country." "well, then, kitty, i don't see what you're to do but to marry east and live east; or else find a rich husband, and get him to take you to europe to live." "yes; or get him to come and live in quebec. that's all i'd ask, and he needn't be a very rich man, for that." "why, you poor child, what sort of husband could you get to settle down in _this_ dead old place?" "o, i suppose some kind of artist or literary man." this was not mrs. ellison's notion of the kind of husband who was to realize for kitty her fancy for life in an old country; but she was content to let the matter rest for the present, and, in a serene thankfulness to the power that had brought two marriageable young creatures together beneath the same roof, and under her own observance, she composed herself among the sofa-cushions, from which she meant to conduct the campaign against mr. arbuton with relentless vigor. "well," she said, "it won't be fair if you are not happy in this world, kitty, you ask so little of it"; while kitty turned to the window overlooking the street, and lost herself in the drama of the passing figures below. they were new, and yet oddly familiar, for she had long known them in the realm of romance. the peasant-women who went by, in hats of felt or straw, some on foot with baskets, and some in their light market-carts, were all, in their wrinkled and crooked age or their fresh-faced, strong-limbed youth, her friends since childhood in many a tale of france or germany; and the black-robed priests, who mixed with the passers on the narrow wooden sidewalk, and now and then courteously gave way, or lifted their wide-rimmed hats in a grave, smiling salutation, were more recent acquaintances, but not less intimate. they were out of old romances about italy and spain, in which she was very learned; and this butcher's boy, tilting along through the crowd with a half-staggering run, was from any one of dickens's stories, and she divined that the four-armed wooden trough on his shoulder was the butcher's tray, which figures in every novelist's description of a london street-crowd. there were many other types, as french mothers of families with market-baskets on their arms; very pretty french school-girls with books under their arms; wild-looking country boys with red raspberries in birch-bark measures; and quiet gliding nuns with white hoods and downcast faces: each of whom she unerringly relegated to an appropriate corner of her world of unreality. a young, mild-faced, spectacled anglican curate she did not give a moment's pause, but rushed him instantly through the whole series of anthony trollope's novels, which dull books, i am sorry to say, she had read, and liked, every one; and then she began to find various people astray out of thackeray. the trig corporal, with the little visorless cap worn so jauntily, the light stick carried in one hand, and the broad-sealed official document in the other, had also, in his breast-pocket, one of those brief, infrequent missives which lieutenant osborne used to send to poor amelia; a tall, awkward officer did duty for major dobbin; and when a very pretty lady driving a pony carriage, with a footman in livery on the little perch behind her, drew rein beside the pavement, and a handsome young captain in a splendid uniform saluted her and began talking with her in a languid, affected way, it was osborne recreant to the thought of his betrothed, one of whose tender letters he kept twirling in his fingers while he talked. most of the people whom she saw passing had letters or papers, and, in fact, they were coming from the post-office, where the noonday mails had just been opened. so she went on turning substance into shadow,--unless, indeed, flesh and blood is the illusion,--and, as i am bound to own, catching at very slight pretexts in many cases for the exercise of her sorcery, when her eye fell upon a gentleman at a little distance. at the same moment he raised his eyes from a letter at which he had been glancing, and ran them along the row of houses opposite, till they rested on the window at which she stood. then he smiled and lifted his hat, and, with a start, she recognized mr. arbuton, while a certain chill struck to her heart through the tumult she felt there. till he saw her there had been such a cold reserve and hauteur in his bearing, that the trepidation which she had felt about him at times, the day before, and which had worn quite away under the events of the morning, was renewed again, and the aspect, in which he had been so strange that she did not know him, seemed the only one that he had ever worn. this effect lasted till mr. arbuton could find his way to her, and place in her eager hand a letter from the girls and dr. ellison. she forgot it then, and vanished till she read her letter. v. mr. arbuton makes himself agreeable. the first care of colonel ellison had been to call a doctor, and to know the worst about the sprained ankle, upon which his plans had fallen lame; and the worst was that it was not a bad sprain, but mrs. ellison, having been careless of it the day before, had aggravated the hurt, and she must now have that perfect rest, which physicians prescribe so recklessly of other interests and duties, for a week at least, and possibly two or three. the colonel was still too much a soldier to be impatient at the doctor's order, but he was of far too active a temper to be quiet under it. he therefore proposed to himself nothing less than the capture of quebec in an historical sense, and even before dinner he began to prepare for the campaign. he sallied forth, and descended upon the bookstores wherever he found them lurking, in whatsoever recess of the upper or lower town, and returned home laden with guide-books to quebec, and monographs upon episodes of local history, such as are produced in great quantity by the semi-clerical literary taste of out-of-the-way catholic capitals. the colonel (who had gone actively into business, after leaving the army, at the close of the war) had always a newspaper somewhere about him, but he was not a reader of many books. of the volumes in the doctor's library, he had never in former days willingly opened any but the plays of shakespeare, and don quixote, long passages of which he knew by heart. he had sometimes attempted other books, but for the most of kitty's favorite authors he professed as frank a contempt as for the mound-builders themselves. he had read one book of travel, namely, the innocents abroad, which he held to be so good a book that he need never read anything else about the countries of which it treated. when he brought in this extraordinary collection of pamphlets, both kitty and fanny knew what to expect; for the colonel was as ready to receive literature at second-hand as to avoid its original sources. he had in this way picked up a great deal of useful knowledge, and he was famous for clipping from newspapers scraps of instructive fact, all of which he relentlessly remembered. he had already a fair outline of the local history in his mind, and this had been deepened and freshened by dr. ellison's recent talk of his historical studies. moreover, he had secured in the course of the present journey, from his wife's and cousin's reading of divers guide-books, a new store of names and dates, which he desired to attach to the proper localities with their help. "light reading for leisure hours, fanny," said kitty, looking askance at the colonel's literature as she sat down near her cousin after dinner. "yes; and you start fair, ladies. start with jacques cartier, ancient mariner of dieppe, in the year . no favoritism in this investigation; no bringing forward of champlain or montcalm prematurely; no running off on subsequent conquests or other side-issues. stick to the discovery, and the names of jacques cartier and donnacona. come, do something for an honest living." "who was donnacona?" demanded mrs. ellison, with indifference. "that is just what these fascinating little volumes will tell us. kitty, read something to your suffering cousins about donnacona,--he sounds uncommonly like an irishman," answered the colonel, establishing himself in an easy-chair; and kitty picked up a small sketch of the history of quebec, and, opening it, fell into the trance which came upon her at the touch of a book, and read on for some pages to herself. "well, upon my word," said the colonel, "i might as well be reading about donnacona myself, for any comfort i get." "o dick, i forgot. i was just looking. now i'm really going to commence." "no, not yet," cried mrs. ellison, rising on her elbow. "where is mr. arbuton?" "what has he to do with donnacona, my dear?" "everything. you know he's stayed on our account, and i never heard of anything so impolite, so inhospitable, as offering to read without him. go and call him, richard, do." "o, no," pleaded kitty, "he won't care about it. don't call him, dick." "why, kitty, i'm surprised at you! when you read so beautifully! yon needn't be ashamed, i'm sure." "i'm not ashamed; but, at the same time, i don't want to read to him." "well, call him any way, colonel. he's in his room." "if you do," said kitty, with superfluous dignity, "i must go away." "very well, kitty, just as you please. only i want richard to witness that i'm not to blame if mr. arbuton thinks us unfeeling or neglectful." "o, if he doesn't say what he thinks, it'll make no difference." "it seems to me that this is a good deal of fuss to make about one human being, a mere passing man and brother of a day, isn't it?" said the colonel. "go on with donnacona, do." there came a knock at the door. kitty leaped nervously to her feet, and fled out of the room. but it was only the little french serving-maid upon some errand which she quickly despatched. "well, _now_ what do you think?" asked mrs. ellison. "why, i think you've a surprising knowledge of french for one who studied it at school. do you suppose she understood you?" "o, nonsense! you know i mean kitty and her very queer behavior. richard, if you moon at me in that stupid way," she continued, "i shall certainly end in an insane asylum. can't you see what's under your very nose?" "yes, i can, fanny," answered the colonel, "if anything's there. but i give you my word, i don't know any more than millions yet unborn what you're driving at." the colonel took up the book which kitty had thrown down, and went to his room to try to read up donnacona for himself, while his wife penitently turned to a pamphlet in french, which he had bought with the others. "after all," she thought, "men will be men"; and seemed not to find the fact wholly wanting in consolation. a few minutes after there was a murmur of voices in the entry without, at a window looking upon the convent garden, where it happened to mr. arbuton, descending from his attic chamber, to find kitty standing, a pretty shape against the reflected light of the convent roofs, and amidst a little greenery of house-plants, tall geraniums, an overarching ivy, some delicate roses. she had paused there, on her way from fanny's to her own room, and was looking into the garden, where a pair of silent nuns were pacing up and down the paths, turning now their backs with the heavy sable coiffure sweeping their black robes, and now their still, mask-like faces, set in that stiff framework of white linen. sometimes they came so near that she could distinguish their features, and imagine an expression that she should know if she saw them again; and while she stood self-forgetfully feigning a character for each of them, mr. arbuton spoke to her and took his place at her side. "we're remarkably favored in having this bit of opera under our windows, miss ellison," he said, and smiled as kitty answered, "o, is it really like an opera? i never saw one, but i could imagine it must be beautiful," and they both looked on in silence a moment, while the nuns moved, shadow-like, out of the garden, and left it empty. then mr. arbuton said something to which kitty answered simply, "i'll see if my cousin doesn't want me," and presently stood beside mrs. ellison's sofa, a little conscious in color. "fanny, mr. arbuton has asked me to go and see the cathedral with him. do you think it would be right?" mrs. ellison's triumphant heart rose to her lips. "why, you dear, particular, innocent little goose," she cried, flinging her arms about kitty, and kissing her till the young girl blushed again; "of course it would! go! you mustn't stay mewed up in here. _i_ sha'n't be able to go about with you; and if i can judge by the colonel's _breathing_, as he calls it, from the room in there, _he_ won't, at present. but the idea of _your_ having a question of propriety!" and indeed it was the first time kitty had ever had such a thing, and the remembrance of it put a kind of constraint upon her, as she strolled demurely beside mr. arbuton towards the cathedral. "you must be guide," said he, "for this is my first day in quebec, you know, and you are an old inhabitant in comparison." "i'll show the way," she answered, "if you'll interpret the sights. i think i must be stranger to them than you, in spite of my long residence. sometimes i'm afraid that i _do_ only fancy i enjoy these things, as mrs. march said, for i've no european experiences to contrast them with. i know that it _seems_ very delightful, though, and quite like what i should expect in europe." "you'd expect very little of europe, then, in most things; though there's no disputing that it's a very pretty illusion of the old world." a few steps had brought them into the market-square in front of the cathedral, where a little belated traffic still lingered in the few old peasant-women hovering over baskets of such fruits and vegetables as had long been out of season in the states, and the housekeepers and serving-maids cheapening these wares. a sentry moved mechanically up and down before the high portal of the jesuit barracks, over the arch of which were still the letters i. h. s. carved long ago upon the keystone; and the ancient edifice itself, with its yellow stucco front and its grated windows, had every right to be a monastery turned barracks in france or italy. a row of quaint stone houses--inns and shops--formed the upper side of the square; while the modern buildings of the rue fabrique on the lower side might serve very well for that show of improvement which deepens the sentiment of the neighboring antiquity and decay in latin towns. as for the cathedral, which faced the convent from across the square, it was as cold and torpid a bit of renaissance as could be found in rome itself. a red-coated soldier or two passed through the square; three or four neat little french policemen lounged about in blue uniforms and flaring havelocks; some walnut-faced, blue-eyed old citizens and peasants sat upon the thresholds of the row of old houses, and gazed dreamily through the smoke of their pipes at the slight stir and glitter of shopping about the fine stores of the rue fabrique. an air of serene disoccupation pervaded the place, with which the occasional riot of the drivers of the long row of calashes and carriages in front of the cathedral did not discord. whenever a stray american wandered into the square, there was a wild flight of these drivers towards him, and his person was lost to sight amidst their pantomime. they did not try to underbid each other, and they were perfectly good-humored; as soon as he had made his choice, the rejected multitude returned to their places on the curbstone, pursuing the successful aspirant with inscrutable jokes as he drove off, while the horses went on munching the contents of their leathern head-bags, and tossing them into the air to shake down the lurking grains of corn. "it _is_ like europe; your friends were right," said mr. arbuton as they escaped into the cathedral from one of these friendly onsets. "it's quite the atmosphere of foreign travel, and you ought to be able to realize the feelings of a tourist." a priest was saying mass at one of the side-altars, assisted by acolytes in their every-day clothes; and outside of the railing a market-woman, with a basket of choke-cherries, knelt among a few other poor people. presently a young english couple came in, he with a dashing india scarf about his hat, and she very stylishly dressed, who also made their genuflections with the rest, and then sat down and dropped their heads in prayer. "this is like enough europe, too," murmured mr. arbuton. "it's very good north italy; or south, for the matter of that." "o, is it?" answered kitty, joyously. "i thought it must be!" and she added, in that trustful way of hers: "it's all very familiar; but then it seems to me on this journey that i've seen a great many things that i know i've only read of before"; and so followed mr. arbuton in his tour of the pictures. she was as ignorant of art as any roman or florentine girl whose life has been passed in the midst of it; and she believed these mighty fine pictures, and was puzzled by mr. arbuton's behavior towards them, who was too little imaginative or too conscientious to make merit for them out of the things they suggested. he treated the poor altar-pieces of the quebec cathedral with the same harsh indifference he would have shown to the second-rate paintings of a european gallery; doubted the vandyck, and cared nothing for the conception, "in the style of le brun," over the high-altar, though it had the historical interest of having survived that bombardment of which destroyed the church. kitty innocently singled out the worst picture in the place as her favorite, and then was piqued, and presently frightened, at his cold reluctance about it. he made her feel that it was very bad, and that she shared its inferiority, though he said nothing to that effect. she learned the shame of not being a connoisseur in a connoisseur's company, and she perceived more painfully than ever before that a bostonian, who had been much in europe, might be very uncomfortable to the simple, unravelled american. yet, she reminded herself, the marches had been in europe, and they were bostonians also; and they did not go about putting everything under foot; they seemed to care for everything they saw, and to have a friendly jest, if not praises, for it. she liked that; she would have been well enough pleased to have mr. arbuton laugh outright at her picture, and she could have joined him in it. but the look, however flattered into an air of polite question at last, which he had bent upon her, seemed to outlaw her and condemn her taste in everything. as they passed out of the cathedral, she would rather have gone home than continued the walk as he begged her, if she were not tired, to do; but this would have been flight, and she was not a coward. so they sauntered down the rue fabrique, and turned into palace street. as they went by the door of hôtel musty, her pleasant friends came again into her mind, and she said, "this is where we stayed last week, with mr. and mrs. march." "those boston people?" "yes." "do you know where they live in boston?" "why, we have their address; but i can't think of it. i believe somewhere in the southern part of the city--" "the south end?" "o yes, that's it. have you ever heard of them?" "no." "i thought perhaps you might have known mr. march. he's in the insurance business--" "o no! no, i don't know him," said mr. arbuton, eagerly. kitty wondered if there could be anything wrong with the business repute of mr. march, but dismissed the thought as unworthy; and having perceived that her friends were snubbed, she said bravely, that they were the most delightful people she had ever seen, and she was sorry that they were not still in quebec. he shared her regret tacitly, if at all, and they walked in silence to the gate, whence they strolled down the winding street outside the wall into the lower town. but it was not a pleasant ramble for kitty: she was in a dim dread of hitherto unseen and unimagined trespasses against good taste, not only in pictures and people, but in all life, which, from having been a very smiling prospect when she set out with mr. arbuton, had suddenly become a narrow pathway, in which one must pick one's way with more regard to each step than any general end. all this was as obscure and uncertain as the intimations which had produced it, and which, in words, had really amounted to nothing. but she felt more and more that in her companion there was something wholly alien to the influences which had shaped her; and though she could not know how much, she was sure of enough to make her dreary in his presence. they wandered through the quaintness and noiseless bustle of the lower town thoroughfares, and came by and by to that old church, the oldest in quebec, which was built near two hundred years ago, in fulfilment of a vow made at the repulse of sir william phipps's attack upon the city, and further famed for the prophecy of a nun, that this church should be ruined by the fire in which a successful attempt of the english was yet to involve the lower town. a painting, which represented the vision of the nun, perished in the conflagration which verified it, in ; but the walls of the ancient structure remain to witness this singular piece of history, which kitty now glanced at furtively in one of the colonel's guide-books; since her ill-fortune with the picture in the cathedral, she had not openly cared for anything. at one side of the church there was a booth for the sale of crockery and tin ware; and there was an every-day cheerfulness of small business in the shops and tented stands about the square on which the church faced, and through which there was continual passing of heavy burdens from the port, swift calashes, and slow, country-paced market-carts. mr. arbuton made no motion to enter the church, and kitty would not hint the curiosity she felt to see the interior; and while they lingered a moment, the door opened, and a peasant came out with a little coffin in his arms. his eyes were dim and his face wet with weeping, and he bore the little coffin tenderly, as if his caress might reach the dead child within. behind him she came who must be the mother, her face deeply hidden in her veil. beside the pavement waited a shabby calash, with a driver half asleep on his perch; and the man, still clasping his precious burden, clambered into the vehicle, and laid it upon his knees, while the woman groped, through her tears and veil, for the step. kitty and her companion had moved reverently aside; but now mr. arbuton came forward, and helped the woman to her place. she gave him a hoarse, sad "_merci!_" and spread a fold of her shawl fondly over the end of the little coffin; the drowsy driver whipped up his beast, and the calash jolted away. kitty cast a grateful glance upon mr. arbuton, as they now entered the church, by a common impulse. on their way towards the high-altar they passed the rude black bier, with the tallow candles yet smoking in their black wooden candlesticks. a few worshippers were dropped here and there in the vacant seats, and at a principal side-altar knelt a poor woman praying before a wooden effigy of the dead christ that lay in a glass case under the altar. the image was of life-size, and was painted to represent life, or rather death, with false hair and beard, and with the muslin drapery managed to expose the stigmata: it was stretched upon a bed strewn with artificial flowers; and it was dreadful. but the poor soul at her devotions there prayed to it in an ecstasy of supplication, flinging her arms asunder with imploring gesture, clasping her hands and bowing her head upon them, while her person swayed from side to side in the abandon of her prayer. who could she be, and what was her mighty need of blessing or forgiveness? as her wont was, kitty threw her own soul into the imagined case of the suppliant, the tragedy of her desire or sorrow. yet, like all who suffer sympathetically, she was not without consolations unknown to the principal; and the waning afternoon, as it lit up the conventional ugliness of the old church, and the paraphernalia of its worship, relieved her emotional self-abandon with a remote sense of content, so that it may have been a jealousy for the integrity of her own revery, as well as a feeling for the poor woman, that made her tremble lest mr. arbuton should in some way disparage the spectacle. i suppose that her interest in it was more an aesthetic than a spiritual one; it embodied to her sight many a scene of penitence that had played before her fancy, and i do not know but she would have been willing to have the suppliant guilty of some dreadful misdeed, rather than eating meat last friday, which was probably her sin. however it was, the ancient crone before that ghastly idol was precious to her, and it seemed too great a favor, when at last the suppliant wiped her eyes, rose trembling from her knees, and approaching kitty, stretched towards her a shaking palm for charity. it was a touch that transfigured all, and gave even mr. arbuton's neutrality a light of ideal character. he bestowed the alms craved of him in turn, he did not repulse the beldame's blessing; and kitty, who was already moved by his kindness to that poor mourner at the door, forgot that the earlier part of their walk had been so miserable, and climbed back to the upper town through the prescott gate in greater gayety than she had yet known that day in his company. i think he had not done much to make her cheerful; but it is one of the advantages of a temperament like his, that very little is expected of it, and that it can more easily than any other make the human heart glad; at the least softening in it, the soul frolics with a craven lightsomeness. for this reason kitty was able to enjoy with novel satisfaction the picturesqueness of mountain street, and they both admired the huge shoulder of rock near the gate, with its poplars atop, and the battery at the brink, with the muzzles of the guns thrust forward against the sky. she could not move him to her pleasure in the grotesqueness of the circus-bills plastered half-way up the rock; but he tolerated the levity with which she commented on them, and her light sallies upon passing things, and he said nothing to prevent her reaching home in serene satisfaction. "well, kitty," said the tenant of the sofa, as kitty and the colonel drew up to the table on which the tea was laid at the sofa-side, "you've had a nice walk, haven't you?" "o yes, very nice. that is, the first part of it wasn't very nice; but after a while we reached an old church in the lower town,--which was very interesting,--and then we appeared to cheer up and take a new start." "well," asked the colonel, "what did you find so interesting at that old church?" "why, there was a baby's funeral; and an old woman, perfectly crushed by some trouble or other, praying before an altar, and--" "it seems to take very little to cheer you up," said the colonel. "all you ask of your fellow-beings is a heart-breaking bereavement and a religious agony, and you are lively at once. _some_ people might require human sacrifices, but you don't." kitty looked at her cousin a moment with vague amaze. the grossness of the absurdity flashed upon her, and she felt as if another touch must bring the tears. she said nothing; but mrs. ellison, who saw only that she was cut off from her heart's desire of gossip, came to the rescue. "don't answer a word, kitty, not a single word; i never heard anything more insulting from one cousin to another; and i should say it, if i was brought into a court of justice." a sudden burst of laughter from kitty, who hid her conscious face in her hands, interrupted mrs. ellison's defence. "well," said mrs. ellison, piqued at her desertion, "i hope you understand yourselves. _i_ don't." this was mrs. ellison's attitude towards her husband's whole family, who on their part never had been able to account for the colonel's choice except as a joke, and sometimes questioned if he had not perhaps carried the joke too far; though they loved her too, for a kind of passionate generosity and sublime, inconsequent unselfishness about her. "what i want to know, _now_," said the colonel, as soon as kitty would let him, "and i'll try to put it as politely as i can, is simply this: what made the first part of your walk so disagreeable? you didn't see a wedding-party, or a child rescued from a horrible death, or a man saved from drowning, or anything of that kind, did you?" but the colonel would have done better not to say anything. his wife was made peevish by his persistence, and the loss of the harmless pleasure upon which she had counted in the history of kitty's walk with mr. arbuton. kitty herself would not laugh again; in fact she grew serious and thoughtful, and presently took up a book, and after that went to her own room, where she stood awhile at her window, and looked out on the garden of the ursulines. the moon hung full orb in the stainless heaven, and deepened the mystery of the paths and trees, and lit the silvery roofs and chimneys of the convent with tender effulgence. a wandering odor of leaf and flower stole up from the garden, but she perceived the sweetness, like the splendor, with veiled senses. she was turning over in her thought the incidents of her walk, and trying to make out if anything had really happened, first to provoke her against mr. arbuton, and then to reconcile her to him. had he said or done anything about her favorite painting (which she hated now), or the marches, to offend her? or if it had been his tone and manner, was his after-conduct at the old church sufficient penance? what was it he had done that common humanity did not require? was he so very superior to common humanity, that she should meekly rejoice at his kindness to the afflicted mother? why need she have cared for his forbearance toward the rapt devotee? she became aware that she was ridiculous. "dick was right," she confessed, "and i will _not_ let myself be made a goose of"; and when the bugle at the citadel called the soldiers to rest, and the harsh chapel-bell bade the nuns go dream of heaven, she also fell asleep, a smile on her lips and a light heart in her breast. vi. a letter of kitty's. quebec, august --, . dear girls: since the letter i wrote you a day or two after we got here, we have been going on very much as you might have expected. a whole week has passed, but we still bear our enforced leisure with fortitude; and, though boston and new york are both fading into the improbable (as far as we are concerned), quebec continues inexhaustible, and i don't begrudge a moment of the time we are giving it. fanny still keeps her sofa; the first enthusiasm of her affliction has worn away, and she has nothing to sustain her now but planning our expeditions about the city. she has got the map and the history of quebec by heart, and she holds us to the literal fulfilment of her instructions. on this account, she often has to send dick and me out together when she would like to keep him with her, for she won't trust either of us alone, and when we come back she examines us separately to see whether we have skipped anything. this makes us faithful in the smallest things. she says she is determined that uncle jack shall have a full and circumstantial report from me of all that he wants to know about the celebrated places here, and i really think he will, if i go on, or am goaded on, in this way. it's pure devotion to the cause in fanny, for you know she doesn't care for such things herself, and has no pleasure in it but carrying a point. her chief consolation under her trial of keeping still is to see how i look in her different dresses. she sighs over me as i appear in a new garment, and says, o, if she only had the dressing of me! then she gets up and limps and hops across the room to where i stand before the glass, and puts a pin here and a ribbon there, and gives my hair (which she has dressed herself) a little dab, to make it lie differently, and then scrambles back to her sofa, and knocks her lame ankle against something, and lies there groaning and enjoying herself like a martyr. on days when she thinks she is never going to get well, she says she doesn't know why she doesn't give me her things at once and be done with it; and on days when she thinks she is going to get well right away, she says she will have me one made something like whatever dress i have got on, as soon as she's home. then up she'll jump again for the exact measure, and tell me the history of every stitch, and how she'll have it altered just the least grain, and differently trimmed to suit my complexion better; and ends by having promised to get me something not in the least like it. you have some idea already of what fanny is; and all you have got to do is to multiply it by about fifty thousand. her sprained ankle simply intensifies her whole character. besides helping to compose fanny's expeditionary corps, and really exerting himself in the cause of uncle jack, as he calls it, dick is behaving beautifully. every morning, after breakfast, he goes over to the hotel, and looks at the arrivals and reads the newspapers, and though we never get anything out of him afterwards, we somehow feel informed of all that is going on. he has taken to smoking a clay pipe in honor of the canadian fashion, and he wears a gay, barbaric scarf of indian muslin wound round his hat and flying out behind; because the quebeckers protect themselves in that way against sunstroke when the thermometer gets up among the sixties. he has also bought a pair of snow-shoes to be prepared for the other extreme of weather, in case anything else should happen to fanny, and detain us into the winter. when he has rested from his walk to the hotel, we usually go out together and explore, as we do also in the afternoon; and in the evening we walk on durham terrace,--a promenade overlooking the river, where the whole cramped and crooked city goes for exercise. it's a formal parade in the evening; but one morning i went there before breakfast, for a change, and found it the resort of careless ease; two or three idle boys were sunning themselves on the carriages of the big guns that stand on the terrace, a little dog was barking at the chimneys of the lower town, and an old gentleman was walking up and down in his dressing-gown and slippers, just as if it were his own front porch. he looked something like uncle jack, and i wished it had been he,--to see the smoke curling softly up from the lower town, the bustle about the market-place, and the shipping in the river, and the haze hanging over the water a little way off, and the near hills all silver, and the distant ones blue. but if we are coming to the grand and the beautiful, why, there is no direction in which you can look about quebec without seeing it; and it is always mixed up with something so familiar and homelike, that my heart warms to it. the jesuit barracks are just across the street from us in the foreground of the most magnificent landscape; the building is--think, you eriecreekers of an hour!--two hundred years old, and it looks five hundred. the english took it away from the jesuits in , and have used it as barracks ever since; but it isn't in the least changed, so that a jesuit missionary who visited it the other day said that it was as if his brother priests had been driven out of it the week before. well, you might think so old and so historical a place would be putting on airs, but it takes as kindly to domestic life as a new frame-house, and i am never tired of looking over into the yard at the frowsy soldiers' wives hanging out clothes, and the unkempt children playing among the burdocks, and chickens and cats, and the soldiers themselves carrying about the officers' boots, or sawing wood and picking up chips to boil the teakettle. they are off dignity as well as off duty, then; but when they are on both, and in full dress, they make our volunteers (as i remember them) seem very shabby and slovenly. over the belfry of the barracks, our windows command a view of half quebec, with its roofs and spires dropping down the slope to the lower town, where the masts of the ships in the river come tapering up among them, and then of the plain stretching from the river in the valley to a range of mountains against the horizon, with far-off white villages glimmering out of their purple folds. the whole plain is bright with houses and harvest-fields; and the distinctly divided farms--the owners cut them up every generation, and give each son a strip of the entire length--run back on either hand, from the straight roads bordered by poplars, while the highways near the city pass between lovely villas. but this landscape and the jesuit barracks, with all their merits, are nothing to the ursuline convent, just under our back windows, which i told you something about in my other letter. we have been reading up its history since, and we know about madame de la peltrie, the noble norman lady who founded it in . she was very rich and very beautiful, and a saint from the beginning, so that when her husband died, and her poor old father wanted her to marry again and not go into a nunnery, she didn't mind cheating him by a sham marriage with a devout gentleman; and she came to canada as soon as her father was dead, with another saint, marie de l'incarnation, and founded this convent. the first building is standing yet, as strong as ever, though everything but the stone walls was burnt two centuries ago. only a few years since an old ash-tree, under which the ursulines first taught the indian children, blew down, and now a large black cross marks its place. the modern nuns are in the garden nearly the whole morning long, and by night the ghosts of the former nuns haunt it; and in very bright moonlight i myself do a bit of madame de la peltrie there, and teach little indian boys, who dwindle like those in the song, as the moon goes down. it is an enchanted place, and i wish we had it in the back yard at eriecreek, though i don't think the neighbors would approve of the architecture. i have adopted two nuns for my own: one is tall and slender and pallid, and you can see at a glance that she broke the heart of a mortal lover, and knew it, when she became the bride of heaven; and the other is short and plain and plump, and looks as comfortable and commonplace as life-after-dinner. when the world is bright i revel in the statue-like sadness of the beautiful nun, who never laughs or plays with the little girl pupils; but when the world is dark--as the best of worlds will be at times for a minute or two--i take to the fat nun, and go in for a clumsy romp with the children; and then i fancy that i am wiser if not better than the fair slim ursuline. but whichever i am, for the time being, i am vexed with the other; yet they always are together, as if they were counterparts. i think a nice story might be written about them. in wolfe's siege of quebec this ursuline garden of ours was everywhere torn up by the falling bombs, and the sisters were driven out into the world they had forsaken forever, as fanny has been reading in a little french account of the events, written at the time, by a nun of the general hospital. it was there the ursulines took what refuge there was; going from their cloistered school-rooms and their innocent little ones to the wards of the hospital, filled with the wounded and dying of either side, and echoing with their dreadful groans. what a sad, evil, bewildering world they had a glimpse of! in the garden here, our poor montcalm--i belong to the french side, please, in quebec--was buried in a grave dug for him by a bursting shell. they have his skull now in the chaplain's room of the convent, where we saw it the other day. they have made it comfortable in a glass box, neatly bound with black, and covered with a white lace drapery, just as if it were a saint's. it was broken a little in taking it out of the grave; and a few years ago, some english officers borrowed it to look at, and were horrible enough to pull out some of the teeth. tell uncle jack the head is very broad above the ears, but the forehead is small. the chaplain also showed us a copy of an old painting of the first convent, indian lodges, madame de la peltrie's house, and madame herself, very splendidly dressed, with an indian chief before her, and some french cavaliers riding down an avenue towards her. then he showed us some of the nuns' work in albums, painted and lettered in a way to give me an idea of old missals. by and by he went into the chapel with us, and it gave such a queer notion of his indoors life to have him put on an overcoat and india-rubbers to go a few rods through the open air to the chapel door: he had not been very well, he said. when he got in, he took off his hat, and put on an octagonal priest's cap, and showed us everything in the kindest way--and his manners were exquisite. there were beautiful paintings sent out from france at the time of the revolution; and wood-carvings round the high-altar, done by quebec artists in the beginning of the last century; for he said they had a school of arts then at st. anne's, twenty miles below the city. then there was an ivory crucifix, so life-like that you could scarcely bear to look at it. but what i most cared for was the tiny twinkle of a votive lamp which he pointed out to us in one corner of the nuns' chapel: it was lit a hundred and fifty years ago by two of our french officers when their sister took the veil, and has never been extinguished since, except during the siege of . of course, i think a story might be written about _this_; and the truth is, the possibilities of fiction in quebec are overpowering; i go about in a perfect haze of romances, and meet people at every turn who have nothing to do but invite the passing novelist into their houses, and have their likenesses done at once for heroes and heroines. they needn't change a thing about them, but sit just as they are; and if this is in the present, only think how the whole past of quebec must be crying out to be put into historical romances! i wish you could see the houses, and how substantial they are. i can only think of eriecreek as an assemblage of huts and bark-lodges in contrast. our boarding-house is comparatively slight, and has stone walls only a foot and a half thick, but the average is two feet and two and a half; and the other day dick went through the laval university,--he goes everywhere and gets acquainted with everybody,--and saw the foundation walls of the first building, which have stood all the sieges and conflagrations since the seventeenth century; and no wonder, for they are six feet thick, and form a series of low-vaulted corridors, as heavy, he says, as the casemates of a fortress. there is a beautiful old carved staircase there, of the same date; and he liked the president, a priest, ever so much; and we like the looks of all the priests we see; they are so handsome and polite, and they all speak english, with some funny little defect. the other day, we asked such a nice young priest about the way to hare point, where it is said the recollet friars had their first mission on the marshy meadows: he didn't know of this bit of history, and we showed him our book. "ah! you see, the book say 'pro-_bab_-ly the site.' if it had said _certainly_, i should have known. but pro-_bab_-ly, pro-_bab_-ly, you see!" however, he showed us the way, and down we went through the lower town, and out past the general hospital to this pointe aux lièvres, which is famous also because somewhere near it, on the st. charles, jacques cartier wintered in , and kidnapped the indian king donnacona, whom he carried to france. and it was here montcalm's forces tried to rally after their defeat by wolfe. (please read this several times to uncle jack, so that he can have it impressed upon him how faithful i am in my historical researches.) it makes me dreadfully angry and sad to think the french should have been robbed of quebec, after what they did to build it. but it is still quite a french city in everything, even to sympathy with france in this prussian war, which you would hardly think they would care about. our landlady says the very boys in the street know about the battles, and explain, every time the french are beaten, how they were outnumbered and betrayed,--something the way we used to do in the first of our war. i suppose you will think i am crazy; but i do wish uncle jack would wind up his practice at eriecreek, and sell the house, and come to live at quebec. i have been asking prices of things, and i find that everything is very cheap, even according to the eriecreek standard; we could get a beautiful house on the st. louis road for two hundred a year; beef is ten or twelve cents a pound, and everything else in proportion. then besides that, the washing is sent out into the country to be done by the peasant-women, and there isn't a crumb of bread baked in the house, but it all comes from the bakers; and only think, girls, what a relief that would be! do get uncle jack to consider it _seriously_. since i began this letter the afternoon has worn away--the light from the sunset on the mountains would glorify our supper-table without extra charge, if we lived here--and the twilight has passed, and the moon has come up over the gables and dormer-windows of the convent, and looks into the garden so invitingly that i can't help joining her. so i will put my writing by till to-morrow. the going-to-bed bell has rung, and the red lights have vanished one by one from the windows, and the nuns are asleep, and another set of ghosts is playing in the garden with the copper-colored phantoms of the indian children of long ago. what! not madame de la peltrie? oh! how do they like those little fibs of yours up in heaven? _sunday afternoon._--as we were at the french cathedral last sunday, we went to the english to-day; and i could easily have imagined myself in some church of old england, hearing the royal family prayed for, and listening to the pretty poor sermon delivered with such an english _brogue_. the people, too, had such englishy faces and such queer little eccentricities of dress; the young lady that sang contralto in the choir wore a scarf like a man's on her hat. the cathedral isn't much, architecturally, i suppose, but it affected me very solemnly, and i couldn't help feeling that it was as much a part of british power and grandeur as the citadel itself. over the bishop's seat drooped the flag of a crimean regiment, tattered by time and battles, which was hung up here with great ceremonies, in , when the prince of wales presented them with new colors; and up in the gallery was a kind of glorified pew for royal highnesses and governor-generals and so forth, to sit in when they are here. there are tablets and monumental busts about the walls; and one to the memory of the duke of lenox, the governor-general who died in the middle of the last century from the bite of a fox; which seemed an odd fate for a duke, and somehow made me very sorry for him. fanny, of course, couldn't go to church with me, and dick got out of it by lingering too late over the newspapers at the hotel, and so i trudged off with our bostonian, who is still with us here. i didn't dwell much upon him in my last letter, and i don't believe now i can make him quite clear to you. he has been a good deal abroad, and he is europeanized enough not to think much of america, though i can't find that he quite approves of europe, and his experience seems not to have left him any particular country in either hemisphere. he isn't the bostonian of uncle jack's imagination, and i suspect he wouldn't like to be. he is rather too young, still, to have much of an antislavery record, and even if he had lived soon enough, i think that he would not have been a john brown man. i am afraid that he believes in "vulgar and meretricious distinctions" of all sorts, and that he hasn't an atom of "magnanimous democracy" in him. in fact, i find, to my great astonishment, that some ideas which i thought were held only in england, and which i had never seriously thought of, seem actually a part of mr. arbuton's nature or education. he talks about the lower classes, and tradesmen, and the best people, and good families, as i supposed nobody in _this_ country _ever_ did,--in earnest. to be sure, i have always been reading of characters who had such opinions, but i thought they were just put into novels to eke out somebody's unhappiness,--to keep the high-born daughter from marrying beneath her for love, and so on; or else to be made fun of in the person of some silly old woman or some odious snob; and i could hardly believe at first that our bostonian was serious in talking in that way. such things sound so differently in real life; and i laughed at them till i found that he didn't know what to make of my laughing, and then i took leave to differ with him in some of his notions; but he never disputes anything i say, and so makes it seem rude to differ with him. i always feel, though he begins it, as if i had thrust my opinions upon him. but in spite of his weaknesses and disagreeabilities, there is something really _high_ about him; he is so scrupulously true, so exactly just, that uncle jack himself couldn't be more so; though you can see that he respects his virtues as the peculiar result of some extraordinary system. here at quebec, though he goes round patronizing the landscape and the antiquities, and coldly smiling at my little enthusiasms, there is really a great deal that ought to be at least improving in him. i get to paying him the same respect that he pays himself, and imbues his very clothes with, till everything he has on appears to look like him and respect itself accordingly. i have often wondered what his hat, his honored hat, for instance, would do, if i should throw it out of the front window. it would make an earthquake, i believe. he is politely curious about us; and from time to time, in a shrinking, disgusted way, he asks some leading question about eriecreek, which he doesn't seem able to form any idea of, as much as i explain it. he clings to his original notion, that it is in the heart of the oil regions, of which he has seen pictures in the illustrated papers; and when i assert myself against his opinions, he treats me very gingerly, as if i were an explosive sprite, or an inflammable naiad from a torpedoed well, and it wouldn't be quite safe to oppose me, or i would disappear with a flash and a bang. when dick isn't able to go with me on fanny's account, mr. arbuton takes his place in the expeditionary corps; and we have visited a good many points of interest together, and now and then he talks very entertainingly about his travels. but i don't think they have made him very cosmopolitan. it seems as if he went about with a little imaginary standard, and was chiefly interested in things, to see whether they fitted it or not. trifling matters annoy him; and when he finds sublimity mixed up with absurdity, it almost makes him angry. one of the oddest and oldest-looking buildings in quebec is a little one-story house on st. louis street, to which poor general montgomery was taken after he was shot; and it is a pastry-cook's now, and the tarts and cakes in the window vexed mr. arbuton so much--not that he seemed to care for montgomery--that i didn't dare to laugh. i live very little in the nineteenth century at present, and do not care much for people who do. still i have a few grains of affection left for uncle jack, which i want you to give him. i suppose it will take about six stamps to pay this letter. i forgot to say that dick goes to be barbered every day at the "montcalm shaving and shampooing saloon," so called because they say montcalm held his last council of war there. it is a queer little steep-roofed house, with a flowering bean up the front, and a bit of garden, full of snap-dragons, before it. we shall be here a week or so yet, at any rate, and then, i think, we shall go straight home, dick has lost so much time already. with a great deal of love, your kitty. vii. love's young dream. with the two young people whose days now lapsed away together, it could not be said that monday varied much from tuesday, or ten o'clock from half past three; they were not always certain what day of the week it was, and sometimes they fancied that a thing which happened in the morning had taken place yesterday afternoon. but whatever it was, and however uncertain in time and character their slight adventure was to themselves, mrs. ellison secured all possible knowledge of it from kitty. since it was her misfortune that promoted it, she considered herself a martyr to kitty's acquaintance with mr. arbuton, and believed that she had the best claim to any gossip that could come of it. she lounged upon her sofa, and listened with a patience superior to the maiden caprice with which her inquisition was sometimes met; for if that delayed her satisfaction it also employed her arts, and the final triumph of getting everything out of kitty afforded her a delicate self-flattery. but commonly the young girl was ready enough to speak, for she was glad to have the light of a worldlier mind and a greater experience than her own on mr. arbuton's character: if mrs. ellison was not the wisest head, still talking him over was at least a relief from thinking him over; and then, at the end of the ends, when were ever two women averse to talk of a man? she commonly sought fanny's sofa when she returned from her rambles through the city, and gave a sufficiently strict account of what had happened. this was done light-heartedly and with touches of burlesque and extravagance at first; but the reports grew presently to have a more serious tone, and latterly kitty had been so absent at times that she would fall into a puzzled silence in the midst of her narration; or else she would meet a long procession of skilfully marshalled questions with a flippancy that no one but a martyr could have suffered. but mrs. ellison bore all and would have borne much more in that cause. battled at one point, she turned to another, and the sum of her researches was often a clearer perception of kitty's state of mind than the young girl herself possessed. for her, indeed, the whole affair was full of mystery and misgiving. "our acquaintance has the charm of novelty every time we meet," she said once, when pressed hard by mrs. ellison. "we are growing better strangers, mr. arbuton and i. by and by, some morning, we shall not know each other by sight. i can barely recognize him now, though i thought i knew him pretty well once. i want you to understand that i speak as an unbiassed spectator, fanny." "o kitty! how can you accuse me of trying to pry into your affairs!" cries injured mrs. ellison, and settles herself in a more comfortable posture for listening. "i don't accuse you of anything. i'm sure you've a right to know everything about me. only, i want you really to know." "yes, dear," says the matron, with hypocritical meekness. "well," resumes kitty, "there are things that puzzle me more and more about him,--things that used to amuse me at first, because i didn't actually believe that they could be, and that i felt like defying afterwards. but now i can't bear up against them. they frighten me, and seem to deny me the right to be what i believe i am." "i don't understand you, kitty." "why, you've seen how it is with us at home, and how uncle jack has brought us up. we never had a rule for anything except to do what was right, and to be careful of the rights of others." "well." "well, mr. arbuton seems to have lived in a world where everything is regulated by some rigid law that it would be death to break. then, you know, at home we are always talking about people, and discussing them; but we always talk of each person for what he is in himself, and i always thought a person could refine himself if he tried, and was sincere, and not conceited. but _he_ seems to judge people according to their origin and locality and calling, and to believe that all refinement must come from just such training and circumstances as his own. without exactly saying so, he puts everything else quite out of the question. he doesn't appear to dream that there can be any different opinion. he tramples upon all that i have been taught to believe; and though i cling the closer to my idols, i can't help, now and then, trying myself by his criterions; and then i find myself wanting in every civilized trait, and my whole life coarse and poor, and all my associations hopelessly degraded. i think his ideas are hard and narrow, and i believe that even my little experience would prove them false; but then, they are his, and i can't reconcile them with what i see is good in him." kitty spoke with half-averted face where she sat beside one of the front windows, looking absently out on the distant line of violet hills beyond charlesbourg, and now and then lifting her glove from her lap and letting it drop again. "kitty," said mrs. ellison in reply to her difficulties, "you oughtn't to sit against a light like that. it makes your profile quite black to any one back in the room." "o well, fanny, i'm not black in reality." "yes, but a young lady ought always to think how she is looking. suppose some one was to come in." "dick's the only one likely to come in just now, and he wouldn't mind it. but if you like it better, i'll come and sit by you," said kitty, and took her place beside the sofa. her hat was in her hand, her sack on her arm; the fatigue of a recent walk gave her a soft pallor, and languor of face and attitude. mrs. ellison admired her pretty looks with a generous regret that they should be wasted on herself, and then asked, "where were you this afternoon?" "o, we went to the hôtel dieu, for one thing, and afterwards we looked into the court-yard of the convent; and there another of his pleasant little traits came out,--a way he has of always putting you in the wrong even when it's a matter of no consequence any way, and there needn't be any right or wrong about it. i remembered the place because mrs. march, you know, showed us a rose that one of the nuns in the hospital gave her, and i tried to tell mr. arbuton about it, and he graciously took it as if poor mrs. march had made an advance towards his acquaintance. i do wish you could see what a lovely place that court-yard is, fanny. it's so strange that such a thing should be right there, in the heart of this crowded city; but there it was, with its peasant cottage on one side, and its long, low barns on the other, and those wide-horned canadian cows munching at the racks of hay outside, and pigeons and chickens all about among their feet--" "yes, yes; never mind all that, kitty. you know i hate nature. go on about mr. arbuton," said mrs. ellison, who did not mean a sarcasm. "it looked like a farmyard in a picture, far out in the country somewhere," resumed kitty; "and mr. arbuton did it the honor to say it was just like normandy." "kitty!" "he did, indeed, fanny; and the cows didn't go down on their knees out of gratitude, either. well, off on the right were the hospital buildings climbing up, you know, with their stone walls and steep roofs, and windows dropped about over them, like our convent here; and there was an artist there, sketching it all; he had such a brown, pleasant face, with a little black mustache and imperial, and such gay black eyes that nobody could help falling in love with him; and he was talking in such a free-and-easy way with the lazy workmen and women overlooking him. he jotted down a little image of the virgin in a niche on the wall, and one of the people called out,--mr. arbuton was translating,--'look there! with one touch he's made our blessed lady.' 'o,' says the painter, 'that's nothing; with three touches i can make the entire holy family.' and they all laughed; and that little joke, you know, won my heart,--i don't hear many jokes from mr. arbuton;--and so i said what a blessed life a painter's must be, for it would give you a right to be a vagrant, and you could wander through the world, seeing everything that was lovely and funny, and nobody could blame you; and i wondered everybody who had the chance didn't learn to sketch. mr. arbuton took it seriously, and said people had to have something more than the chance to learn before they could sketch, and that most of them were an affliction with their sketchbooks, and he had seen too much of the sad effects of drawing from casts. and he put me in the wrong, as he always does. don't you see? i didn't want to learn drawing; i wanted to be a painter, and go about sketching beautiful old convents, and sit on camp-stools on pleasant afternoons, and joke with people. of course, he couldn't understand that. but i know the artist could. o fanny, if it had only been the painter whose arm i took that first day on the boat, instead of mr. arbuton! but the worst of it is, he is making a hypocrite of me, and a cowardly, unnatural girl. i wanted to go nearer and look at the painter's sketch; but i was ashamed to say i'd never seen a real artist's sketch before, and i'm getting to be ashamed, or to seem ashamed, of a great many innocent things. he has a way of not seeming to think it possible that any one he associates with can differ from him. and i do differ from him. i differ from him as much as my whole past life differs from his; i know i'm just the kind of production that he disapproves of, and that i'm altogether irregular and unauthorized and unjustifiable; and though it's funny to have him talking to me as if i must have the sympathy of a rich girl with his ideas, it's provoking, too, and it's very bad for me. up to the present moment, fanny, if you want to know, that's the principal effect of mr. arbuton on me. i'm being gradually snubbed and scared into treasons, stratagems, and spoils." mrs. ellison did not find all this so very grievous, for she was one of those women who like a snub from the superior sex, if it does not involve a slight to their beauty or their power of pleasing. but she thought it best not to enter into the question, and merely said, "but surely, kitty, there are a great many things in mr. arbuton that you must respect." "respect? o, yes, indeed! but respect isn't just the thing for one who seems to consider himself sacred. say _revere_, fanny; say revere!" kitty had risen from her chair, but mrs. ellison waved her again to her seat with an imploring gesture. "don't go, kitty; i'm not half done with you yet. you _must_ tell me something more. you've stirred me up so, now. i know you don't always have such disagreeable times. you've often come home quite happy. what do you generally find to talk about? do tell me some particulars for once." "why, little topics come up, you know. but sometimes we don't talk at all, because i don't like to say what i think or feel, for fear i should be thinking or feeling something vulgar. mr. arbuton is rather a blight upon conversation in that way. he makes you doubtful whether there isn't something a little common in breathing and the circulation of the blood, and whether it wouldn't be true refinement to stop them." "stuff, kitty! he's very cultivated, isn't he? don't you talk about books? he's read everything, i suppose." "o yes, he's _read_ enough." "what do you mean?" "nothing. only sometimes it seems to me as if he hadn't read because he loved it, but because he thought it due to himself. but maybe i'm mistaken. i could imagine a delicate poem shutting up half its sweetness from his cold, cold scrutiny,--if you will excuse the floweriness of the idea." "why, kitty! don't you think he's refined? i'm sure, i think he's a _very_ refined person." "he's a very elaborated person. but i don't think it would make much difference to him what our opinion of him was. his own good opinion would be quite enough." "is he--is he--always agreeable?" "i thought we were discussing his mind, fanny. i don't know that i feel like enlarging upon his manners," said kitty, slyly. "but surely, kitty," said the matron, with an air of argument, "there's some connection between his mind and his manners." "yes, i suppose so. i don't think there's much between his heart and his manners. they seem to have been put on him instead of having come out of him. he's very well trained, and nine times out of ten he's so exquisitely polite that it's wonderful; but the tenth time he may say something so rude that you can't believe it." "then you like him nine times out of ten." "i didn't say that. but for the tenth time, it's certain, his training doesn't hold out, and he seems to have nothing natural to fall back upon. but you can believe that, if he knew he'd been disagreeable, he'd be sorry for it." "why, then, kitty, how can you say that there's no connection between his heart and manners? this very thing proves that they come from his heart. don't be illogical, kitty," said mrs. ellison, and her nerves added, _sotto voce_, "if you _are_ so abominably provoking!" "o," responded the young girl, with the kind of laugh that meant it was, after all, not such a laughing matter, "i didn't say he'd be sorry for _you_! perhaps he would; but he'd be certain to be sorry for himself. it's with his politeness as it is with his reading; he seems to consider it something that's due to himself as a gentleman to treat people well; and it isn't in the least as if he cared for _them_. he wouldn't like to fail in such a point." "but, kitty, isn't that to his credit?" "maybe. i don't say. if i knew more about the world, perhaps i should admire it. but now, you see,"--and here kitty's laugh grew more natural, and she gave a subtle caricature of mr. arbuton's air and tone as she spoke,--"i can't help feeling that it's a little--vulgar." mrs. ellison could not quite make out how much kitty really meant of what she had said. she gasped once or twice for argument; then she sat up, and beat the sofa-pillows vengefully in composing herself anew, and finally, "well, kitty, i'm sure i don't know what to make of it all," she said with a sigh. "why, we're not obliged to make anything of it, fanny, there's that comfort," replied kitty; and then there was a silence, while she brooded over the whole affair of her acquaintance with mr. arbuton, which this talk had failed to set in a more pleasant or hopeful light. it had begun like a romance; she had pleased her fancy, if not her heart, with the poetry of it; but at last she felt exiled and strange in his presence. she had no right to a different result, even through any deep feeling in the matter; but while she owned, with her half-sad, half-comical consciousness, that she had been tacitly claiming and expecting too much, she softly pitied herself, with a kind of impersonal compassion, as if it wore some other girl whose pretty dream had been broken. its ruin involved the loss of another ideal; for she was aware that there had been gradually rising in her mind an image of boston, different alike from the holy place of her childhood, the sacred city of the antislavery heroes and martyrs, and from the jesting, easy, sympathetic boston of mr. and mrs. march. this new boston with which mr. arbuton inspired her was a boston of mysterious prejudices and lofty reservations; a boston of high and difficult tastes, that found its social ideal in the old world, and that shrank from contact with the reality of this; a boston as alien as europe to her simple experiences, and that seemed to be proud only of the things that were unlike other american things; a boston that would rather perish by fire and sword than be suspected of vulgarity; a critical, fastidious, and reluctant boston, dissatisfied with the rest of the hemisphere, and gelidly self-satisfied in so far as it was not in the least the boston of her fond preconceptions. it was, doubtless, no more the real boston we know and love, than either of the others: and it perplexed her more than it need, even if it had not been mere phantasm. it made her suspicious of mr. arbuton's behavior towards her, and observant of little things that might very well have otherwise escaped her. the bantering humor, the light-hearted trust and self-reliance with which she had once met him deserted her, and only returned fitfully when some accident called her out of herself, and made her forget the differences that she now too plainly saw in their ways of thinking and feeling. it was a greater and greater effort to place herself in sympathy with him; she relaxed into a languid self-contempt, as if she had been playing a part, when she succeeded. "sometimes, fanny," she said, now, after a long pause, speaking in behalf of that other girl she had been thinking of, "it seems to me as if mr. arbuton were all gloves and slim umbrella,--the mere husk of well dressed culture and good manners. his looks _do_ promise everything; but o dear me! i should be sorry for any one that was in love with him. just imagine some girl meeting with such a man, and taking a fancy to him! i suppose she never would quite believe but that he must somehow be what she first thought him, and she would go down to her grave believing that she had failed to understand him. what a curious story it would make!" "then, why don't you write it, kitty?" asked mrs. ellison. "no one could do it better." kitty flushed quickly; then she smiled: "o, i don't think i could do it at all. it wouldn't be a very easy story to work out. perhaps he might never do anything positively disagreeable enough to make anybody condemn him. the only way you could show his character would be to have her do and say hateful things to him, when she couldn't help it, and then repent of it, while he was impassively perfect through everything. and perhaps, after all, he might be regarded by some stupid people as the injured one. well, mr. arbuton has been very polite to us, i'm sure, fanny," she said after another pause, as she rose from her chair, "and maybe i'm unjust to him. i beg his pardon of you; and i wish," she added with a dull disappointment quite her own, and a pang of surprise at words that seemed to utter themselves, "that he would go away." "why, kitty, i'm shocked," said mrs. ellison, rising from her cushions. "yes; so am i, fanny." "are you really tired of him, then?" kitty did not answer, but turned away her face a little, where she stood beside the chair in which she had been sitting. mrs. ellison put out her hand towards her. "kitty, come here," she said with imperious tenderness. "no, i won't, fanny," answered the young girl, in a trembling voice. she raised the glove that she had been nervously swinging back and forth, and bit hard upon the button of it. "i don't know whether i'm tired of _him_,--though he isn't a person to rest one a great deal,--but i'm tired of _it_. i'm perplexed and troubled the whole time, and i don't see any end to it. yes, i wish he would go away! yes, he _is_ tiresome. what is he staying here for? if he thinks himself so much better than all of us, i wonder he troubles himself with our company. it's quite time for him to go. no, fanny, no," cried kitty with a little broken laugh, still rejecting the outstretched hand, "i'll be flat in private, if you please." and dashing her hand across her eyes, she flitted out of the room. at the door she turned and said, "you needn't think it's what you think it is, fanny." "no indeed, dear; you're just overwrought." "for i really wish he'd go." but it was on this very day that mr. arbuton found it harder than ever to renew his resolution of quitting quebec, and cutting short at once his acquaintance with these people. he had been pledging himself to this in some form every day, and every morrow had melted his resolution away. whatever was his opinion of colonel and mrs. ellison, it is certain that, if he considered kitty merely in relation to the present, he could not have said how, by being different, she could have been better than she was. he perceived a charm, that would be recognized anywhere, in her manner, though it was not of his world; her fresh pleasure in all she saw, though he did not know how to respond to it, was very winning; he respected what he thought the good sense running through her transports; he wondered at the culture she had somewhere, somehow got; and he was so good as to find that her literary enthusiasms had nothing offensive, but were as pretty and naive as a girl's love of flowers. moreover, he approved of some personal attributes of hers: a low, gentle voice, tender long-lashed eyes; a trick of drooping shoulders, and of idle hands fallen into the lap, one in the other's palm; a serene repose of face; a light and eager laugh. there was nothing so novel in those traits, and in different combination he had seen them a thousand times; yet in her they strangely wrought upon his fancy. she had that soft, kittenish way with her which invites a caressing patronage, but, as he learned, she had also the kittenish equipment for resenting over-condescension; and she never took him half so much as when she showed the high spirit that was in her, and defied him most. for here and now, it was all well enough; but he had a future to which he owed much, and a conscience that would not leave him at rest. the fascination of meeting her so familiarly under the same roof, the sorcery of the constant sight of her, were becoming too much; it would not do on any account; for his own sake he must put an end to it. but from hour to hour he lingered upon his unenforced resolve. the passing days, that brought him doubts in which he shuddered at the great difference between himself and her and her people, brought him also moments of blissful forgetfulness in which his misgivings were lost in the sweetness of her looks, or the young grace of her motions. passing, the days rebuked his delay in vain; a week and two weeks slipped from under his feet, and still he had waited for fate to part him and his folly. but now at last he would go and in the evening, after his cigar on durham terrace, he knocked at mrs. ellison's door to say that on the day after to-morrow he should push on to the white mountains. he found the ellisons talking over an expedition for the next morning, in which he was also to take part. mrs. ellison had already borne her full share in the preparation; for, being always at hand there in her room, and having nothing to do, she had been almost a willing victim to the colonel's passion for information at second-hand, and had probably come to know more than any other american woman of arnold's expedition against quebec in . she know why the attack was planned, and with what prodigious hazard and heroical toil and endurance it was carried out; how the dauntless little army of riflemen cut their way through the untrodden forests of maine and canada, and beleaguered the gray old fortress on her rock till the red autumn faded into winter, and, on the last bitter night of the year, flung themselves against her defences, and fell back, leaving half their number captive, montgomery dead, and arnold wounded, but haplessly destined to survive. "yes," said the colonel, "considering the age in which they lived, and their total lack of modern improvements, mental, moral, and physical, we must acknowledge that they did pretty well. it wasn't on a very large scale; but i don't see how they could have been braver, if every man had been multiplied by ten thousand. in fact, as it's going to be all the same thing a hundred years from now, i don't know but i'd as soon be one of the men that tried to take quebec as one of the men that did take atlanta. of course, for the present, and on account of my afflicted family, mr. arbuton, i'm willing to be what and where i am; but just see what those fellows did." and the colonel drew from his glowing memory of mrs. ellison's facts a brave historical picture of arnold's expedition. "and now we're going to-morrow morning to look up the scene of the attack on the st of december. kitty, sing something." at another time kitty might have hesitated; but that evening she was so at rest about mr. arbuton, so sure she cared nothing for his liking or disliking anything she did, that she sat down at the piano, and sang a number of songs, which i suppose were as unworthy the cultivated ear as any he had heard. but though they were given with an untrained voice and a touch as little skilled as might be, they pleased, or else the singer pleased. the simple-hearted courage of the performance would alone have made it charming; and mr. arbuton had no reason to ask himself how he should like it in boston, if he were married, and should hear it from his wife there. yet when a young man looks at a young girl or listens to her, a thousand vagaries possess his mind,--formless imaginations, lawless fancies. the question that presented itself remotely, like pain in a dream, dissolved in the ripple of the singer's voice, and left his revery the more luxuriously untroubled for having been. he remembered, after saying good-night, that he had forgotten something: it was to tell them he was going away. viii. next morning. quebec lay shining in the tender oblique light of the northern sun when they passed next morning through the upper town market-place and took their way towards hope gate, where they were to be met by the colonel a little later. it is easy for the alert tourist to lose his course in quebec, and they, who were neither hurried nor heedful, went easily astray. but the street into which they had wandered, if it did not lead straight to hope gate, had many merits, and was very characteristic of the city. most of the houses on either hand were low structures of one story, built heavily of stone or stuccoed brick, with two dormer-windows, full of house-plants, in each roof; the doors were each painted of a livelier color than the rest of the house, and each glistened with a polished brass knob, a large brass knocker, or an intricate bell-pull of the same resplendent metal, and a plate bearing the owner's name and his professional title, which if not _avocat_ was sure to be _notaire_, so well is quebec supplied with those ministers of the law. at the side of each house was a _porte-cochère_, and in this a smaller door. the thresholds and doorsteps were covered with the neatest and brightest oil-cloth; the wooden sidewalk was very clean, like the steep, roughly paved street itself; and at the foot of the hill down which it sloped was a breadth of the city wall, pierced for musketry, and, past the corner of one of the houses, the half-length of cannon showing. it had the charm of those ancient streets, dear to old-world travel, in which the past and the present, decay and repair, peace and war, have made friends in an effect that not only wins the eye, but, however illogically, touches the heart; and over the top of the wall it had a stretch of such landscape as i know not what old-world street can command: the st. lawrence, blue and wide; a bit of the white village of beauport on its bank; then a vast breadth of pale-green, upward-sloping meadows; then the purple heights; and the hazy heaven over them. half-way down this happy street sat the artist whom they had seen before in the court of the hôtel dieu; he was sketching something, and evoking the curious life of the neighborhood. two schoolboys in the uniform of the seminary paused to look at him as they loitered down the pavement; a group of children encircled him; a little girl with her hair in blue ribbons talked at a window about him to some one within; a young lady opened her casement and gazed furtively at him; a door was set quietly ajar, and an old grandam peeped out, shading her eyes with her hand; a woman in deep mourning gave his sketch a glance as she passed; a calash with a fat quebecker in it ran into a cart driven by a broad-hatted peasant-woman, so eager were both to know what he was drawing; a man lingered even at the head of the street, as if it were any use to stop there. as kitty and mr. arbuton passed him, the artist glanced at her with the smile of a man who believes he knows how the case stands, and she followed his eye in its withdrawal towards the bit he was sketching: an old roof, and on top of this a balcony, shut in with green blinds; yet higher, a weather-worn, wood-colored gallery, pent-roofed and balustered, with a geranium showing through the balusters; a dormer-window with hook and tackle, beside an oriental-shaped pavilion with a shining tin dome,--a picturesque confusion of forms which had been, apparently, added from time to time without design, and yet were full of harmony. the unreasonable succession of roofs had lifted the top far above the level of the surrounding houses, into the heart of the morning light, and some white doves circled about the pavilion, or nestled cooing upon the window-sill, where a young girl sat and sewed. "why, it's hilda in her tower," said kitty, "of course! and this is just the kind of street for such a girl to look down into. it doesn't seem like a street in real life, does it? the people all look as if they had stepped out of stories, and might step back any moment; and these queer little houses: they're the very places for things to happen in!" mr. arbuton smiled forbearingly, as she thought, at this burst, but she did not care, and she turned, at the bottom of the street, and lingered a few moments for another look at the whole charming picture; and then he praised it, and said that the artist was making a very good sketch. "i wonder quebec isn't infested by artists the whole summer long," he added. "they go about hungrily picking up bits of the picturesque, along our shores and country roads, when they might exchange their famine for a feast by coming here." "i suppose there's a pleasure in finding out the small graces and beauties of the poverty-stricken subjects, that they wouldn't have in better ones, isn't there?" asked kitty. "at any rate, if i were to write a story, i should want to take the slightest sort of plot, and lay the scene in the dullest kind of place, and then bring out all their possibilities. i'll tell you a book after my own heart: '_details_,'--just the history of a week in the life of some young people who happen together in an old new england country-house; nothing extraordinary, little, every-day things told so exquisitely, and all fading naturally away without any particular result, only the full meaning of everything brought out." "and don't you think it's rather a sad ending for all to fade away without any particular result?" asked the young man, stricken he hardly knew how or where. "besides, i always thought that the author of that book found too much meaning in everything. he did for men, i'm sure; but i believe women are different, and see much more than we do in a little space." "'why has not man a microscopic eye? for this plain reason, man is not a fly,' nor a woman," mocked kitty. "have you read his other books?" "yes." "aren't they delightful?" "they're very well; and i always wondered he could write them. he doesn't look it." "o, have you ever seen him?" "he lives in boston, you know." "yes, yes; but--" kitty could not go on and say that she had not supposed authors consorted with creatures of common clay; and mr. arbuton, who was the constant guest of people who would have thought most authors sufficiently honored in being received among them to meet such men as he, was very far from guessing what was in her mind. he waited a moment for her, and then said, "he's a very ordinary sort of man,--not what one would exactly call a gentleman, you know, in his belongings,--and yet his books have nothing of the shop, nothing professionally literary, about them. it seems as if almost any of us might have written them." kitty glanced quickly at him to see if he were jesting; but mr. arbuton was not easily given to irony, and he was now very much in earnest about drawing on his light overcoat, which he had hitherto carried on his arm with that scrupulous consideration for it which was not dandyism, but part of his self-respect; apparently, as an overcoat, ho cared nothing for it; as the overcoat of a man of his condition he cared everything; and now, though the sun was so bright on the open spaces, in these narrow streets the garment was comfortable. at another time, kitty would have enjoyed the care with which he smoothed it about his person, but this profanation of her dearest ideals made the moment serious. her pulse quickened, and she said, "i'm afraid i can't enter into your feelings. i wasn't taught to respect the idea of a gentleman very much. i've often heard my uncle say that, at the best, it was a poor excuse for not being just honest and just brave and just kind, and a false pretence of being something more. i believe, if i were a man, i shouldn't want to be a gentleman. at any rate, i'd rather be the author of those books, which any gentleman _might_ have written, than all the gentlemen who didn't, put together." in the career of her indignation she had unconsciously hurried her companion forward so swiftly that they had reached hope gate as she spoke, and interrupted the revery in which colonel ellison, loafing up against the masonry, was contemplating the sentry in his box. "you'd better not overheat yourself so early in the day, kitty," said her cousin, serenely, with a glance at her flushed face; "this expedition is not going to be any joke." now that prescott gate, by which so many thousands of americans have entered quebec since arnold's excursionists failed to do so, is demolished, there is nothing left so picturesque and characteristic as hope gate, and i doubt if anywhere in europe there is a more mediæval-looking bit of military architecture. the heavy stone gateway is black with age, and the gate, which has probably never been closed in our century, is of massive frame set thick with mighty bolts and spikes. the wall here sweeps along the brow of the crag on which the city is built, and a steep street drops down, by stone-parapeted curves and angles, from the upper to the lower town, where, in , nothing but a narrow lane bordered the st. lawrence. a considerable breadth of land has since been won from the river, and several streets and many piers now stretch between this alley and the water; but the old sault au matelot still crouches and creeps along under the shelter of the city wall and the overhanging rock, which is thickly bearded with weeds and grass, and trickles with abundant moisture. it must be an ice-pit in winter, and i should think it the last spot on the continent for the summer to find; but when the summer has at last found it, the old sault au matelot puts on a vagabond air of southern leisure and abandon, not to be matched anywhere out of italy. looking from that jutting rock near hope gate, behind which the defeated americans took refuge from the fire of their enemies, the vista is almost unique for a certain scenic squalor and gypsy luxury of color: sag-roofed barns and stables, and weak-backed, sunken-chested workshops of every sort lounge along in tumble-down succession, and lean up against the cliff in every imaginable posture of worthlessness and decrepitude; light wooden galleries cross to them from the second stories of the houses which back upon the alley; and over these galleries flutters, from a labyrinth of clothes-lines, a variety of bright-colored garments of all ages, sexes, and conditions; while the footway underneath abounds in gossiping women, smoking men, idle poultry, cats, children, and large, indolent newfoundland dogs. "it was through this lane that arnold's party advanced almost to the foot of mountain street, where they were to be joined by montgomery's force in an attempt to surprise prescott gate," said the colonel, with his unerring second-hand history. "'you that will follow me to this attempt,' 'wait till you see the whites of their eyes, and then fire low,' and so forth. by the way, do you suppose anybody did that at bunker hill, mr. arbuton? come, you're a boston man. my experience is that recruits chivalrously fire into the air without waiting to see the enemy at all, let alone the whites of their eyes. why! aren't you coming?" he asked, seeing no movement to follow in kitty or mr. arbuton. "it doesn't look very pleasant under foot, dick," suggested kitty. "well, upon my word! is this your uncle's niece? i shall never dare to report this panic at eriecreek." "i can see the whole length of the alley, and there's nothing in it but chickens and domestic animals." "very well, as fanny says; when uncle jack--he's _your_ uncle--asks you about every inch of the ground that arnold's men were demoralized over, i hope you'll know what to say." kitty laughed and said she should try a little invention, if her uncle jack came down to inches. "all right, kitty; you can go along st. paul street, there, and mr. arbuton and i will explore the sault au matelot, and come out upon you, covered with glory, at the other end." "i hope it'll be glory," said kitty, with a glance at the lane, "but i think it's more likely to be feathers and chopped straw.--good by, mr. arbuton." "not in the least," answered the young man; "i'm going with you." the colonel feigned indignant surprise, and marched briskly down the sault au matelot alone, while the others took their way through st. paul street in the same direction, amidst the bustle and business of the port, past the banks and great commercial houses, with the encounter of throngs of seafaring faces of many nations, and, at the corner of st. peter street, a glimpse of the national flag thrown out from the american consulate, which intensified for untravelled kitty her sense of remoteness from her native land. at length they turned into the street now called sault au matelot, into which opens the lane once bearing that name, and strolled idly along in the cool shadow, silence, and solitude of the street. she was strangely released from the constraint which mr. arbuton usually put upon her. a certain defiant ease filled her heart; she felt and thought whatever she liked, for the first time in many days; while he went puzzling himself with the problem of a young lady who despised gentlemen, and yet remained charming to him. a mighty marine smell of oakum and salt-fish was in the air, and "o," sighed kitty, "doesn't it make you long for distant seas? shouldn't you like to be shipwrecked for half a day or so, mr. arbuton?" "yes; yes, certainly," he replied absently, and wondered what she laughed at. the silence of the place was broken only by the noise of coopering which seemed to be going on in every other house; the solitude relieved only by the newfoundland dogs that stretched themselves upon the thresholds of the cooper-shops. the monotony of these shops and dogs took kitty's humor, and as they went slowly by she made a jest of them, as she used to do with things she saw. "but here's a door without a dog!" she said, presently. "this can't be a genuine cooper-shop, of course, without a dog. o, that accounts for it, perhaps!" she added, pausing before the threshold, and glancing up at a sign--"_académie commerciale et littéraire_"--set under an upper window. "what a curious place for a seat of learning! what do you suppose is the connection between cooper-shops and an academical education, mr. arbuton?" she stood looking up at the sign that moved her mirth, and swinging her shut parasol idly to and fro, while a light of laughter played over her face. suddenly a shadow seemed to dart betwixt her and the open doorway, mr. arbuton was hurled violently against her, and, as she struggled to keep her footing under the shock, she saw him bent over a furious dog, that hung from the breast of his overcoat, while he clutched its throat with both his hands. he met the terror of her face with a quick glance. "i beg your pardon; don't call out please," he said. but from within the shop came loud cries and maledictions, "o nom de dieu c'est le boule-dogue du capitaine anglais!" with appalling screams for help; and a wild, uncouth little figure of a man, bareheaded, horror-eyed came flying out of the open door. he wore a cooper's apron, and he bore in one hand a red-hot iron, which, with continuous clamor, he dashed against the muzzle of the hideous brute. without a sound the dog loosed his grip, and, dropping to the ground, fled into the obscurity of the shop as silently as he had launched himself out of it, while kitty yet stood spell-bound, and before the crowd that the appeal of mr. arbuton's rescuer had summoned could see what had happened. mr. arbuton lifted himself, and looked angrily round upon the gaping spectators, who began, one by one, to take in their heads from their windows and to slink back to their thresholds as if they had been guilty of something much worse than a desire to succor a human being in peril. "good heavens!" said mr. arbuton, "what an abominable scene!" his face was deadly pale, as he turned from these insolent intruders to his deliverer, whom he saluted, with a "merci bien!" spoken in a cold, steady voice. then he drew off his overcoat, which had been torn by the dog's teeth and irreparably dishonored in the encounter. he looked at it shuddering, with a countenance of intense disgust, and made a motion as if to hurl it into the street. but his eye again fell upon the cooper's squalid little figure, as he stood twisting his hands into his apron, and with voluble eagerness protesting that it was not his dog, but that of the english ship-captain, who had left it with him, and whom he had many a time besought to have the beast killed. mr. arbuton, who seemed not to hear what he was saying, or to be so absorbed in something else as not to consider whether he was to blame or not, broke in upon him in french: "you've done me the greatest service. i cannot repay you, but you must take this," he said, as he thrust a bank-note into the little man's grimy hand. "o, but it is too much! but it is like a monsieur so brave, so--" "hush! it was nothing," interrupted mr. arbuton again. then he threw his overcoat upon the man's shoulder. "if you will do me the pleasure to receive this also? perhaps you can make use of it." "monsieur heaps me with benefits;--monsieur--" began the bewildered cooper; but mr. arbuton turned abruptly away from him toward kitty, who trembled at having shared the guilt of the other spectators, and seizing her hand, he placed it on his arm, where he held it close as he strode away, leaving his deliverer planted in the middle of the sidewalk and staring after him. she scarcely dared ask him if he were hurt, as she found herself doing now with a faltering voice. "no, i believe not," he said with a glance at the frock-coat, which was buttoned across his chest and was quite intact; and still he strode on, with a quick glance at every threshold which did not openly declare a newfoundland dog. it had all happened so suddenly, and in so brief a time, that she might well have failed to understand it, even if she had seen it all. it was barely intelligible to mr. arbuton himself, who, as kitty had loitered mocking and laughing before the door of the shop, chanced to see the dog crouched within, and had only time to leap forward and receive the cruel brute on his breast as it flung itself at her. he had not thought of the danger to himself in what he had done. he knew that he was unhurt, but he did not care for that; he cared only that she was safe; and as he pressed her hand tight against his heart, there passed through it a thrill of inexpressible tenderness, a quick, passionate sense of possession, a rapture as of having won her and made her his own forever, by saving her from that horrible risk. the maze in which he had but now dwelt concerning her seemed an obsolete frivolity of an alien past; all the cold doubts and hindering scruples which he had felt from the first were gone; gone all his care for his world. his world? in that supreme moment, there was no world but in the tender eyes at which he looked down with a glance which she knew not how to interpret. she thought that his pride was deeply wounded at the ignominy of his adventure,--for she was sure he would care more for that than for the danger,--and that if she spoke of it she might add to the angry pain he felt. as they hurried along she waited for him to speak, but he did not; though always, as he looked down at her with that strange look, he seemed about to speak. presently she stopped, and, withdrawing her hand from his arm, she cried, "why, we've forgotten my cousin!" "o--yes!" said mr. arbuton with a vacant smile. looking back they saw the colonel standing on the pavement near the end of the old sault au matelot, with his hands in his pockets, and steadfastly staring at them. he did not relax the severity of his gaze when they returned to join him, and appeared to find little consolation in kitty's "o dick, i forgot all about you," given with a sudden, inexplicable laugh, interrupted and renewed as some ludicrous image seemed to come and go in her mind. "well, this may be very flattering, kitty, but it isn't altogether comprehensible," said he, with a keen glance at both their faces. "i don't know what you'll say to uncle jack. it's not forgetting me alone: it's forgetting the whole american expedition against quebec." the colonel waited for some reply; but kitty dared not attempt an explanation, and mr. arbuton was not the man to seem to boast of his share of the adventure by telling what had happened, even if he had cared at that moment to do so. her very ignorance of what he had dared for her only confirmed his new sense of possession; and, if he could, he would not have marred the pleasure he felt by making her grateful yet, sweet as that might be in its time. now he liked to keep his knowledge, to have had her unwitting compassion, to hear her pour out her unwitting relief in this laugh, while he superiorly permitted it. "i don't understand this thing," said the colonel, through whose dense, masculine intelligence some suspicions of love-making were beginning to pierce. but he dismissed them as absurd, and added, "however, i'm willing to forgive, and you've done the forgetting; and all that i ask now is the pleasure of your company on the spot where montgomery fell. fanny'll never believe i've found it unless you go with me," he appealed, finally. "o, we'll go, by all means," said mr. arbuton, unconsciously speaking, as by authority, for both. they came into busier streets of the port again, and then passed through the square of the lower town market, with the market-house in the midst, the shops and warehouses on either side, the long row of tented booths with every kind of peasant-wares to sell, and the wide stairway dropping to the river which brought the abundance of the neighboring country to the mart. the whole place was alive with country-folk in carts and citizens on foot. at one point a gayly painted wagon was drawn up in the midst of a group of people to whom a quackish-faced yankee was hawking, in his own personal french, an american patent-medicine, and making his audience giggle. because kitty was amused at this, mr. arbuton found it the drollest thing imaginable, but saw something yet droller when she made the colonel look at a peasant, standing in one corner beside a basket of fowls, which a woman, coming up to buy, examined as if the provision were some natural curiosity, while a crowd at once gathered round. "it requires a considerable population to make a bargain, up here," remarked the colonel. "i suppose they turn out the garrison when they sell a beef." for both buyer and seller seemed to take advice of the bystanders, who discussed and inspected the different fowls as if nothing so novel as poultry had yet fallen in their way. at last the peasant himself took up the fowls and carefully scrutinized them. "_those_ chickens, it seems, never happened to catch his eye before," interpreted kitty; and mr. arbuton, who was usually very restive during such banter, smiled as if it were the most admirable fooling, or the most precious wisdom, in the world. he made them wait to see the bargain out, and could, apparently, have lingered there forever. but the colonel had a conscience about montgomery, and he hurried them away, on past the queen's wharf, and down the cove road to that point where the scarped and rugged breast of the cliff bears the sign, "here fell montgomery," though he really fell, not half-way up the height, but at the foot of it, where stood the battery that forbade his juncture with arnold at prescott gate. a certain wildness yet possesses the spot: the front of the crag, topped by the high citadel-wall, is so grim, and the few tough evergreens that cling to its clefts are torn and twisted by the winter blasts, and the houses are decrepit with age, showing here and there the scars of the frequent fires that sweep the lower town. it was quite useless: neither the memories of the place nor their setting were sufficient to engage the wayward thoughts of these curiously assorted pilgrims; and the colonel, after some attempts to bring the matter home to himself and the others, was obliged to abandon mr. arbuton to his tender reveries of kitty, and kitty to her puzzling over the change in mr. arbuton. his complaisance made her uncomfortable and shy of him, it was so strange; it gave her a little shiver, as if he were behaving undignifiedly. "well, kitty," said the colonel, "i reckon uncle jack would have made more out of this than we've done. he'd have had their geology out of these rocks, any way." ix. mr. arbuton's infatuation. kitty went as usual to mrs. ellison's room after her walk, but she lapsed into a deep abstraction as she sat down beside the sofa. "what are you smiling at?" asked mrs. ellison, after briefly supporting her abstraction. "was i smiling?" asked kitty, beginning to laugh. "i didn't know it." "what _has_ happened so very funny?" "why, i don't know whether it's so very funny or not. i believe it isn't funny at all." "then what makes you laugh?" "i don't know. was i--" "now _don't_ ask me if you were laughing, kitty. it's a little too much. you can talk or not, as you choose; but i don't like to be turned into ridicule." "o fanny, how can you? i was thinking about something very different. but i don't see how i can tell you, without putting mr. arbuton in a ludicrous light, and it isn't quite fair." "you're very careful of him, all at once," said mrs. ellison. "you didn't seem disposed to spare him yesterday so much. i don't understand this sudden conversion." kitty responded with a fit of outrageous laughter. "now i see i must tell you," she said, and rapidly recounted mr. arbuton's adventure. "why, i never knew anything so cool and brave, fanny, and i admired him more than ever i did; but then i couldn't help seeing the other side of it, you know." "what other side? i _don't_ know." "well, you'd have had to laugh yourself, if you'd seen the lordly way he dismissed the poor people who had come running out of their houses to help him, and his stateliness in rewarding that little cooper, and his heroic parting from his cherished overcoat,--which of course he can't replace in quebec,--and his absent-minded politeness in taking my hand under his arm, and marching off with me so magnificently. but the worst thing, fanny,"--and she bowed herself under a tempest of long-pent mirth,--"the worst thing was, that the iron, you know, was the cooper's branding-iron, and i had a vision of the dog carrying about on his nose, as long as he lived, the monogram that marks the cooper's casks as holding a certain number of gallons--" "kitty, don't be--sacrilegious!" cried mrs. ellison. "no, i'm not," she retorted, gasping and panting. "i never respected mr. arbuton so much, and you say yourself i haven't shown myself so careful of him before. but i never was so glad to see dick in my life, and to have some excuse for laughing. i didn't dare to speak to mr. arbuton about it, for he couldn't, if he had tried, have let me laugh it out and be done with it. i trudged demurely along by his side, and neither of us mentioned the matter to dick," she concluded breathlessly. then, "i don't know why i should tell you now; it seems wicked and cruel," she said penitently, almost pensively. mrs. ellison had not been amused. she said, "well, kitty, in _some_ girls i should say it was quite heartless to do as you've done." "it's heartless in _me_, fanny; and you needn't say such a thing. i'm sure i didn't utter a syllable to wound him, and just before that he'd been _very_ disagreeable, and i forgave him because i thought he was mortified. and you needn't say that i've no feeling"; and thereupon she rose, and, putting her hands into her cousin's, "fanny," she cried, vehemently, "i _have_ been heartless. i'm afraid i haven't shown any sympathy or consideration. i'm afraid i must have seemed dreadfully callous and hard. i oughtn't to have thought of anything but the danger to him; and it seems to me now i scarcely thought of that at all. o, how rude it was of me to see anything funny in it! what _can_ i do?" "don't go crazy, at any rate, kitty. _he_ doesn't know that you've been laughing about him. you needn't do anything." "o yes, i need. he doesn't know that i've been laughing about him to you; but, don't you see, i laughed when we met dick; and what can he think of that?" "he just thinks you were nervous, i suppose." "o, do you suppose he does, fanny? o, i _wish_ i could believe that! o, i'm so horribly ashamed of myself! and here yesterday i was criticising him for being unfeeling, and now i've been a thousand times worse than he has ever been, or ever could be! o dear, dear, dear!" "kitty! hush!" exclaimed mrs. ellison; "you run on like a wild thing, and you're driving me distracted, by not being like yourself." "o, it's very well for _you_ to be so calm; but if you didn't know what to do, you wouldn't." "yes, i would; i don't, and i am." "but what shall i do?" and kitty plucked away the hands which fanny had been holding and wrung them. "i'll tell you what i can do," she suddenly added, while a gleam of relief dawned upon her face: "i can bear all his disagreeable ways after this, as long as he stays, and not say anything back. yes, i'll put up with everything. i'll be as _meek_! he may patronize me and snub me and put me in the wrong as much as he pleases. and then he won't be _approaching_ my behavior. o fanny!" upon this, mrs. ellison said that she was going to give her a good scolding for her nonsense, and pulled her down and kissed her, and said that she had not done anything, and was, nevertheless, consoled at her resolve to expiate her offence by respecting thenceforward mr. arbuton's foibles and prejudices. it is not certain how far kitty would have succeeded in her good purposes: these things, so easily conceived, are not of such facile execution; she passed a sleepless night of good resolutions and schemes of reparation; but, fortunately for her, mr. arbuton's foibles and prejudices seemed to have fallen into a strange abeyance. the change that had come upon him that day remained; he was still mr. arbuton, but with a difference. he could not undo his whole inherited and educated being, and perhaps no chance could deeply affect it without destroying the man. he continued hopelessly superior to colonel and mrs. ellison; but it is not easy to love a woman and not seek, at least before marriage, to please those dear to her. mr. arbuton had contested his passion at every advance; he had firmly set his face against the fancy that, at the beginning, invested this girl with a charm; he had only done the things afterwards that mere civilization required; he had suffered torments of doubt concerning her fitness for himself and his place in society; he was not sure yet that her unknown relations were not horribly vulgar people; even yet, he was almost wholly ignorant of the circumstances and conditions of her life. but how he saw her only in the enrapturing light of his daring for her sake, of a self-devotion that had seemed to make her his own; and he behaved toward her with a lover's self-forgetfulness,--or something like it: say a perfect tolerance, a tender patience, in which it would have been hard to detect the lurking shadow of condescension. he was fairly domesticated with the family. mrs. ellison's hurt, in spite of her many imprudences, was decidedly better, and sometimes she made a ceremony of being helped down from her room to dinner; but she always had tea beside her sofa, and he with the others drank it there. few hours of the day passed in which they did not meet in that easy relation which establishes itself among people sojourning in summer idleness under the same roof. in the morning he saw the young girl fresh and glad as any flower of the garden beneath her window, while the sweet abstraction of her maiden dreams yet hovered in her eyes. at night he sat with her beside the lamp whose light, illuming a little world within, shut out the great world outside, and seemed to be the soft effulgence of her presence, as she sewed, or knit, or read,--a heavenly spirit of home. sometimes he heard her talking with her cousin, or lightly laughing after he had said good night; once, when he woke, she seemed to be looking out of her window across the moonlight in the ursulines' garden while she sang a fragment of song. to meet her on the stairs or in the narrow entries; or to encounter her at the doors, and make way for her to pass with a jest and blush and flutter; to sit down at table with her three times a day,--was a potent witchery. there was a rapture in her shawl flung over the back of a chair; her gloves, lying light as fallen leaves on the table, and keeping the shape of her hands, were full of winning character; and all the more unaccountably they touched his heart because they had a certain careless, sweet shabbiness about the finger-tips. he found himself hanging upon her desultory talk with fanny about the set of things and the agreement of colors. there was always more or less of this talk going on, whatever the main topic was, for continual question arose in the minds of one or other lady concerning those adaptations of mrs. ellison's finery to the exigencies of kitty's daily life. they pleased their innocent hearts with the secrecy of the affair, which, in the concealments it required, the sudden difficulties it presented, and the guiltless equivocations it inspired, had the excitement of intrigue. nothing could have been more to the mind of mrs. ellison than to deck kitty for this perpetual masquerade; and, since the things were very pretty, and kitty was a girl in every motion of her being, i do not see how anything could have delighted her more than to wear them. their talk effervesced with the delicious consciousness that he could not dream of what was going on, and babbled over with mysterious jests and laughter, which sometimes he feared to be at his expense, and so joined in, and made them laugh the more at his misconception. he went and came among them at will; he had but to tap at mrs. ellison's door, and some voice of unaffected cordiality welcomed him in; he had but to ask, and kitty was frankly ready for any of those strolls about quebec in which most of their waking hours were dreamed away. the gray lady of the north cast her spell about them,--the freshness of her mornings, the still heat of her middays, the slant, pensive radiance of her afternoons, and the pale splendor of her auroral nights. never was city so faithfully explored; never did city so abound in objects of interest; for kitty's love of the place was boundless, and his love for her was inevitable friendship with this adoptive patriotism. "i didn't suppose you western people cared for these things," he once said; "i thought your minds were set on things new and square." "but how could you think so?" replied kitty, tolerantly. "it's because we have so many new and square things that we like the old crooked ones. i do believe i should enjoy europe even better than you. there's a forsaken farm-house near eriecreek, dropping to pieces amongst its wild-grown sweetbriers and quince-bushes, that i used to think a wonder of antiquity because it was built in . can't you imagine how i must feel in a city like this, that was founded nearly three centuries ago, and has suffered so many sieges and captures, and looks like pictures of those beautiful old towns i can never see?" "o, perhaps you will see them some day!" he said, touched by her fervor. "i don't ask it at present: quebec's enough. i'm in love with the place. i wish i never had to leave it. there isn't a crook, or a turn, or a tin-roof, or a dormer-window, or a gray stone in it that isn't precious." mr. arbuton laughed. "well, you shall be sovereign lady of quebec for me. shall we have the english garrison turned out?" "no; not unless you can bring back montcalm's men to take their places." this might be as they sauntered out of one of the city gates, and strayed through the lower town till they should chance upon some poor, bare-interiored church, with a few humble worshippers adoring their saint, with his lamps alight before his picture; or as they passed some high convent-wall, and caught the strange, metallic clang of the nuns' voices singing their hymns within. sometimes they whiled away the hours on the esplanade, breathing its pensive sentiment of neglect and incipient decay, and pacing up and down over the turf athwart the slim shadows of the poplars; or, with comfortable indifference to the local observances, sat in talk on the carriage of one of the burly, uncared-for guns, while the spider wove his web across the mortar's mouth, and the grass nodded above the tumbled pyramids of shot, and the children raced up and down, and the nursery-maids were wooed of the dapper sergeants, and the red-coated sentry loitered lazily to and fro before his box. on the days of the music, they listened to the band in the governor's garden, and watched the fine world of the old capital in flirtation with the blond-whiskered officers; and on pleasant nights they mingled with the citizen throng that filled the durham terrace, while the river shaped itself in the lights of its shipping, and the lower town, with its lamps, lay, like a nether firmament, two hundred feet below them, and point levis glittered and sparkled on the thither shore, and in the northern sky the aurora throbbed in swift pulsations of violet and crimson. they liked to climb the break-neck steps at prescott gate, dropping from the upper to the lower town, which reminded mr. arbuton of naples and trieste, and took kitty with the unassociated picturesqueness of their odd shops and taverns, and their lofty windows green with house-plants. they would stop and look up at the geraniums and fuchsias, and fall a thinking of far different things, and the friendly, unbusy people would come to their doors and look up with them. they recognized the handsome, blond young man, and the pretty, gray-eyed girl; for people in quebec have time to note strangers who linger there, and kitty and mr. arbuton had come to be well-known figures, different from the fleeting tourists on their rounds; and, indeed, as sojourners they themselves perceived their poetic distinction from mere birds of passage. indoors they resorted much to the little entry-window looking out on the ursulines' garden. two chairs stood confronted there, and it was hard for either of the young people to pass them without sinking a moment into one of them, and this appeared always to charm another presence into the opposite chair. there they often lingered in the soft forenoons, talking in desultory phrase of things far and near, or watching, in long silences, the nuns pacing up and down in the garden below, and waiting for the pensive, slender nun, and the stout, jolly nun whom kitty had adopted, and whom she had gayly interpreted to him as an allegory of life in their quaint inseparableness; and they played that the influence of one or other nun was in the ascendant, according as their own talk was gay or sad. in their relation, people are not so different from children; they like the same thing over and over again; they like it the better the less it is in itself. at times kitty would come with a book in her hand (one finger shut in to keep the place),--some latest novel, or a pirated edition of longfellow, recreantly purchased at a quebec bookstore; and then mr. arbuton must ask to see it; and he read romance or poetry to her by the hour. he showed to as much advantage as most men do in the serious follies of wooing; and an influence which he could not defy, or would not, shaped him to all the sweet, absurd demands of the affair. from time to time, recollecting himself, and trying to look consequences in the face, he gently turned the talk upon eriecreek, and endeavored to possess himself of some intelligible image of the place, and of kitty's home and friends. even then, the present was so fair and full of content, that his thoughts, when they reverted to the future, no longer met the obstacles that had made him recoil from it before. whatever her past had been, he could find some way to weaken the ties that bound her to it; a year or two of europe would leave no trace of eriecreek; without effort of his, her life would adapt itself to his own, and cease to be a part of the lives of those people there; again and again his amiable imaginations--they were scarcely intents--accomplished themselves in many a swift, fugitive revery, while the days went by, and the shadow of the ivy in the window at which they sat fell, in moonlight and sunlight, upon kitty's cheeks, and the fuchsia kissed her hair with its purple and crimson blossom. x. mr. arbuton speaks. mrs. ellison was almost well; she had already been shopping twice in the rue fabrique, and her recovery was now chiefly retarded by the dress-maker's delays in making up a silk too precious to be risked in the piece with the customs officers, at the frontier. moreover, although the colonel was beginning to chafe, she was not loath to linger yet a few days for the sake of an affair to which her suffering had been a willing sacrifice. in return for her indefatigable self-devotion, kitty had lately done very little. she ungratefully shrunk more and more from those confidences to which her cousin's speeches covertly invited; she openly resisted open attempts upon her knowledge of facts. if she was not prepared to confess everything to fanny, it was perhaps because it was all so very little, or because a young girl has not, or ought not to have, a mind in certain matters, or else knows it not, till it is asked her by the one first authorized to learn it. the dream in which she lived was flattering and fair; and it wholly contented her imagination while it lulled her consciousness. it moved from phase to phase without the harshness of reality, and was apparently allied neither to the future nor to the past. she herself seemed to have no more fixity or responsibility in it than the heroine of a romance. as their last week in quebec drew to its close, only two or three things remained for them to do, as tourists; and chief among the few unvisited shrines of sentiment was the site of the old jesuit mission at sillery. "it won't do not to see that, kitty," said mrs. ellison, who, as usual, had arranged the details of the excursion, and now announced them. "it's one of the principal things here, and your uncle jack would never be satisfied if you missed it. in fact, it's a shame to have left it so long. i can't go with you, for i'm saving up my strength for our picnic at château-bigot to-morrow; and i want you, kitty, to see that the colonel sees everything. i've had trouble enough, goodness knows, getting the facts together for him." this was as kitty and mr. arbuton sat waiting in mrs. ellison's parlor for the delinquent colonel, who had just stepped round to the hôtel st. louis and was to be back presently. but the moment of his return passed; a quarter-hour of grace; a half-hour of grim magnanimity,--and still no colonel. mrs. ellison began by saying that it was perfectly abominable, and left herself, in a greater extremity, with nothing more forcible to add than that it was too provoking. "it's getting so late now," she said at last, "that it's no use waiting any longer, if you mean to go at all, to-day; and to-day's the only day you _can_ go. there, you'd better drive on without him. i can't bear to have you miss it." and, thus adjured, the younger people rose and went. when the high-born noël brulart de sillery, knight of malta and courtier of marie de medicis, turned from the vanities of this world and became a priest, canada was the fashionable mission of the day, and the noble neophyte signalized his self-renunciation by giving of his great wealth for the conversion of the indian heathen. he supplied the jesuits with money to maintain a religious establishment near quebec; and the settlement of red christians took his musical name, which the region still keeps. it became famous at once as the first residence of the jesuits and the nuns of the hôtel dieu, who wrought and suffered for religion there amidst the terrors of pestilence, iroquois, and winter. it was the scene of miracles and martyrdoms, and marvels of many kinds, and the centre of the missionary efforts among the indians. indeed, few events of the picturesque early history of quebec left it untouched; and it is worthy to be seen, no less for the wild beauty of the spot than for its heroical memories. about a league from the city, where the irregular wall of rock on which quebec is built recedes from the river, and a grassy space stretches between the tide and the foot of the woody steep, the old mission and the indian village once stood; and to this day there yet stands the stalwart frame of the first jesuit residence, modernized, of course, and turned to secular uses, but firm as of old, and good for a century to come. all round is a world of lumber, and rafts of vast extent cover the face of the waters in the ample cove,--one of many that indent the shore of the st. lawrence. a careless village straggles along the roadside and the river's margin; huge lumber-ships are loading for europe in the stream; a town shines out of the woods on the opposite shore; nothing but a friendly climate is needed to make this one of the most charming scenes the heart could imagine. kitty and mr. arbuton drove out towards sillery by the st. louis road, and already the jealous foliage that hides the pretty villas and stately places of that aristocratic suburb was tinged in here and there a bough with autumnal crimson or yellow; in the meadows here and there a vine ran red along the grass; the loath choke-cherries were ripening in the fence corners; the air was full of the pensive jargoning of the crickets and grasshoppers, and all the subtle sentiment of the fading summer. their hearts were open to every dreamy influence of the time; their driver understood hardly any english, and their talk might safely be made up of those harmless egotisms which young people exchange,--those strains of psychological autobiography which mark advancing intimacy and in which they appear to each other the most uncommon persons that ever lived, and their experiences and emotions and ideas are the more surprisingly unique because exactly alike. it seemed a very short league to sillery when they left the st. louis road, and the driver turned his horses' heads towards the river, down the winding sylvan way that descended to the shore; and they had not so much desire, after all, to explore the site of the old mission. nevertheless, they got out and visited the little space once occupied by the jesuit chapel, where its foundations may yet be traced in the grass, and they read the inscription on the monument lately raised by the parish to the memory of the first jesuit missionary to canada, who died at sillery. then there seemed nothing more to do but admire the mighty rafts and piles of lumber; but their show of interest in the local celebrity had stirred the pride of sillery, and a little french boy entered the chapel-yard, and gave kitty a pamphlet history of the place, for which he would not suffer himself to be paid; and a sweet-faced young englishwoman came out of the house across the way, and hesitatingly asked if they would not like to see the jesuit residence. she led them indoors, and showed them how the ancient edifice had been encased by the modern house, and bade them note, from the deep shelving window-seats, that the stone walls were three feet thick. the rooms were low-ceiled and quaintly shaped, but they borrowed a certain grandeur from this massiveness; and it was easy to figure the priests in black and the nuns in gray in those dim chambers, which now a life so different inhabited. behind the house was a plot of grass, and thence the wooded hill rose steep. "but come up stairs," said the ardent little hostess to kitty, when her husband came in, and had civilly welcomed the strangers, "and i'll show you my own room, that's as old as any." they left the two men below, and mounted to a large room carpeted and furnished in modern taste. "we had to take down the old staircase," she continued, "to get our bedstead up,"--a magnificent structure which she plainly thought well worth the sacrifice; and then she pointed out divers remnants of the ancient building. "it's a queer place to live in; but we're only here for the summer"; and she went on to explain, with a pretty _naïveté_, how her husband's business brought him to sillery from quebec in that season. they were descending the stairs, kitty foremost, as she added, "this is my first housekeeping, you know, and of course it would be strange anywhere; but you can't think how funny it is here. i suppose," she said, shyly, but as if her confidences merited some return, while kitty stepped from the stairway face to face with mr. arbuton, who was about to follow them, with the lady's husband,--"i suppose this is your wedding-journey." a quick alarm flamed through the young girl, and burned out of her glowing cheeks. this pleasant masquerade of hers must look to others like the most intentional love-making between her and mr. arbuton,--no dreams either of them, nor figures in a play, nor characters in a romance; nay, on one spectator, at least, it had shed the soft lustre of a honeymoon. how could it be otherwise? here on this fatal line of wedding-travel,--so common that she remembered mrs. march half apologized for making it her first tour after marriage,--how could it happen but that two young people together as they were should be taken for bride and bridegroom? moreover, and worst of all, he must have heard that fatal speech! he was pale, if she was flushed, and looked grave, as she fancied; but he passed on up the stairs, and she sat down to wait for his return. "i used to notice so many couples from the states when we lived in the city," continued the hospitable mistress of the house, "but i don't think they often came out to sillery. in fact, you're the only pair that's come this summer; and so, when you seemed interested about the mission, i thought you wouldn't mind if i spoke to you, and asked you in to see the house. most of the americans stay long enough to visit the citadel, and the plains of abraham, and the falls at montmorenci, and then they go away. i should think they'd be tired always doing the same things. to be sure, they're always different people." it was unfair to let her entertainer go on talking for quantity in this way; and kitty said how glad she was to see the old residence, and that she should always be grateful to her for asking them in. she did not disabuse her of her error; it cost less to leave it alone; and when mr. arbuton reappeared, she took leave of those kind people with a sort of remote enjoyment of the wife's mistakenness concerning herself. yet, as the young matron and her husband stood beside the carriage repeating their adieux, she would fain have prolonged the parting forever, so much she dreaded to be left alone with mr. arbuton. but, left alone with him, her spirits violently rose; and as they drove along under the shadow of the cliff, she descanted in her liveliest strain upon the various interests of the way; she dwelt on the beauty of the wide, still river, with the ships at anchor in it; she praised the lovely sunset-light on the other shore; she commented lightly on the village, through which they passed, with the open doors and the suppers frying on the great stoves set into the partition-walls of each cleanly home; she made him look at the two great stairways that climb the cliff from the lumber-yards to the plains of abraham, and the army of laborers, each with his empty dinner-pail in hand, scaling the once difficult heights on their way home to the suburb of st. roch; she did whatever she could to keep the talk to herself and yet away from herself. part of the way the village was french and neat and pleasant, then it grovelled with irish people, and ceased to be a tolerable theme for discourse; and so at last the silence against which she had battled fell upon them and deepened like a spell that she could not break. it would have been better for mr. arbuton's success just then if he had not broken it. but failure was not within his reckoning; for he had so long regarded this young girl _de haut en bas_, to say it brutally, that he could not imagine she should feel any doubt in accepting him. moreover, a magnanimous sense of obligation mingled with his confident love, for she must have known that he had overheard that speech at the residence. perhaps he let this feeling color his manner, however faintly. he lacked the last fine instinct; he could not forbear; and he spoke while all her nerves and fluttering pulses cried him mercy. xi. kitty answers. it was dimmest twilight when kitty entered mrs. ellison's room and sank down on the first chair in silence. "the colonel met a friend at the st. louis, and forgot about the expedition, kitty," said fanny, "and he only came in half an hour ago. but it's just as well; i know you've had a splendid time. where's mr. arbuton?" kitty burst into tears. "why, has anything happened to him?" cried mrs. ellison, springing towards her. "to him? no! what should happen to _him_?" kitty demanded with an indignant accent. "well, then, has anything happened to _you_?" "i don't know if you can call it _happening_. but i suppose you'll be satisfied now, fanny. he's offered himself to me." kitty uttered the last words with a sort of violence, as if since the fact must be stated, she wished it to appear in the sharpest relief. "o dear!" said mrs. ellison, not so well satisfied as the successful match-maker ought to be. so long as it was a marriage in the abstract, she had never ceased to desire it; but as the actual union of kitty and this mr. arbuton, of whom, really, they knew so little, and of whom, if she searched her heart, she had as little liking as knowledge, it was another affair. mrs. ellison trembled at her triumph, and began to think that failure would have been easier to bear. were they in the least suited to each other? would she like to see poor kitty chained for life to that impassive egotist, whose very merits were repellent, and whose modesty even seemed to convict and snub you? mrs. ellison was not able to put the matter to herself with moderation, either way; doubtless she did mr. arbuton injustice now. "did you accept him?" she whispered, feebly. "accept him?" repeated kitty. "no!" "o dear!" again sighed mrs. ellison, feeling that this was scarcely better, and not daring to ask further. "i'm dreadfully perplexed, fanny," said kitty, after waiting for the questions which did not come, "and i wish you'd help me think." "i will, darling. but i don't know that i'll be of much use. i begin to think i'm not very good at thinking." kitty, who longed chiefly to get the situation more distinctly before herself, gave no heed to this confession, but went on to rehearse the whole affair. the twilight lent her its veil; and in the kindly obscurity she gathered courage to face all the facts, and even to find what was droll in them. "it was very solemn, of course, and i was frightened; but i tried to keep my wits about me, and _not_ to say yes, simply because that was the easiest thing. i told him that i didn't know,--and i don't; and that i must have time to think,--and i must. he was very ungenerous, and said he had hoped i had already had time to think; and he couldn't seem to understand, or else i couldn't very well explain, how it had been with me all along." "he might certainly say you had encouraged him," mrs. ellison remarked, thoughtfully. "encouraged him, fanny? how can you accuse me of such indelicacy?" "encouraging isn't indelicacy. the gentlemen _have_ to be encouraged, or of course they'd never have any courage. they're so timid, naturally." "i don't think mr. arbuton is very timid. he seemed to think that he had only to ask as a matter of form, and i had no business to say anything. what has he ever done for me? and hasn't he often been intensely disagreeable? he oughtn't to have spoken just after overhearing what he did. it was horrid to do so. he was very obtuse, too, not to see that girls can't always be so certain of themselves as men, or, if they are, don't know they are as soon as they're asked." "yes," interrupted mrs. ellison, "that's the way with girls. i do believe that most of them--when they're young like you, kitty--never think of marriage as the end of their flirtations. they'd just like the attentions and the romance to go on forever, and never turn into anything more serious; and they're not to blame for that, though they _do_ get blamed for it." "certainly," assented kitty, eagerly, "that's it; that's just what i was saying; that's the very reason why girls must have time to make up their minds. _you_ had, i suppose." "yes, two minutes. poor dick was going back to his regiment, and stood with his watch in his hand. i said no, and called after him to correct myself. but, kitty, if the romance had happened to stop without his saying anything, you wouldn't have liked that either, would you?" "no," faltered kitty, "i suppose not." "well, then, don't you see? that's a great point in his favor. how much time did you want, or did he give you?" "i said i should answer before we left quebec," answered kitty, with a heavy sigh. "don't you know what to say now?" "i can't tell. that's what i want you to help me think out." mrs. ellison was silent for a moment before she said, "well, then, i suppose we shall have to go back to the very beginning." "yes," assented kitty, faintly. "you did have a sort of fancy for him the first time you saw him, didn't you?" asked mrs. ellison, coaxingly, while forcing herself to be systematic and coherent, by a mental strain of which no idea can be given. "yes," said kitty, yet more faintly, adding, "but i can't tell just what sort of a fancy it was. i suppose i admired him for being handsome and stylish, and for having such exquisite manners." "go on," said mrs. ellison. "and after you got acquainted with him?" "why, you know we've talked that over once already, fanny." "yes, but we oughtn't to skip anything now," replied mrs. ellison, in a tone of judicial accuracy which made kitty smile. but she quickly became serious again, and said, "afterwards i couldn't tell whether to like him or not, or whether he wanted me to. i think he acted very strangely for a person in--love. i used to feel so troubled and oppressed when i was with him. he seemed always to be making himself agreeable under protest." "perhaps that was just your imagination, kitty." "perhaps it was; but it troubled me just the same." "well, and then?" "well, and then after that day of the montgomery expedition, he seemed to change altogether, and to try always to be pleasant, and to do everything he could to make me like him. i don't know how to account for it. ever since then he's been extremely careful of me, and behaved--of course without knowing it--as if i belonged to him already. or maybe i've imagined that too. it's very hard to tell what has really happened the last two weeks." kitty was silent, and mrs. ellison did not speak at once. presently she asked, "was his acting as if you belonged to him disagreeable?" "i can't tell. i think it was rather presuming. i don't know why he did it." "do you respect him?" demanded mrs. ellison. "why, fanny, i've always told you that i did respect some things in him." mrs. ellison had the facts before her, and it rested upon her to sum them up, and do something with them. she rose to a sitting posture, and confronted her task. "well, kitty, i'll tell you: i don't really know what to think. but i can say this: if you liked him at first, and then didn't like him, and afterwards he made himself more agreeable, and you didn't mind his behaving as if you belonged to him, and you respected him, but after all didn't think him fascinating--" "he _is_ fascinating--in a kind of way. he was, from the beginning. in a story his cold, snubbing, putting-down ways would have been perfectly fascinating." "then why didn't you take him?" "because," answered kitty, between laughing and crying, "it isn't a story, and i don't know whether i like him." "but do you think you might get to like him?" "i don't know. his asking brings back all the doubts i ever had of him, and that i've been forgetting the past two weeks. i can't tell whether i like him or not. if i did, shouldn't i trust him more?" "well, whether you are in love or not, i'll tell you what you _are_, kitty," cried mrs. ellison, provoked with her indecision, and yet relieved that the worst, whatever it was, was postponed thereby for a day or two. "what!" "you're--" but at this important juncture the colonel came lounging in, and kitty glided out of the room. "richard," said mrs. ellison, seriously, and in a tone implying that it was the colonel's fault, as usual, "you know what has happened, i suppose." "no, my dear, i don't; but no matter: i will presently, i dare say." "o, i wish for once you wouldn't be so flippant. mr. arbuton has offered himself to kitty." colonel ellison gave a quick, sharp whistle of amazement, but trusted himself to nothing more articulate. "yes," said his wife, responding to the whistle, "and it makes me perfectly wretched." "why, i thought you liked him." "i didn't _like_ him; but i thought it would be an excellent thing for kitty." "and won't it?" "she doesn't know." "doesn't know?" "no." the colonel was silent, while mrs. ellison stated the case in full, and its pending uncertainty. then he exclaimed vehemently, as if his amazement had been growing upon him, "this is the most astonishing thing in the world! who would ever have dreamt of that young iceberg being in love?" "haven't i _told_ you all along he was?" "o yes, certainly; but that might be taken either way, you know. you would discover the tender passion in the eye of a potato." "colonel ellison," said fanny with sternness, "why do you suppose he's been hanging about us for the last four weeks? why should he have stayed in quebec? do you think he pitied _me_, or found _you_ so very agreeable?" "well, i thought he found us just tolerable, and was interested in the place." mrs. ellison made no direct reply to this pitiable speech, but looked a scorn which, happily for the colonel, the darkness hid. presently she said that bats did not express the blindness of men, for any bat could have seen what was going on. "why," remarked the colonel, "i did have a momentary suspicion that day of the montgomery business; they both looked very confused, when i saw them at the end of that street, and neither of them had anything to say; but that was accounted for by what you told me afterwards about his adventure. at the time i didn't pay much attention to the matter. the idea of his being in love seemed too ridiculous." "was it ridiculous for you to be in love with me?" "no; and yet i can't praise my condition for its wisdom, fanny." "yes! that's _like_ men. as soon as one of them is safely married, he thinks all the love-making in the world has been done forever, and he can't conceive of two young people taking a fancy to each other." "that's something so, fanny. but granting--for the sake of argument merely--that boston has been asking kitty to marry him, and she doesn't know whether she wants him, what are we to do about it? _i_ don't like him well enough to plead his cause; do you? when does kitty think she'll be able to make up her mind?" "she's to let him know before we leave." the colonel laughed. "and so he's to hang about here on uncertainties for two whole days! that _is_ rather rough on him. fanny, what made you so eager for this business?" "eager? i _wasn't_ eager." "well, then,--reluctantly acquiescent?" "why, she's so literary and that." "and what?" "how insulting!--intellectual, and so on; and i thought she would be just fit to live in a place where everybody is literary and intellectual. that is, i thought that, if i thought anything." "well," said the colonel, "you may have been right on the whole, but i don't think kitty is showing any particular force of mind, just now, that would fit her to live in boston. my opinion is, that it's ridiculous for her to keep him in suspense. she might as well answer him first as last. she's putting herself under a kind of obligation by her delay. i'll talk to her--" "if you do, you'll kill her. you don't know how she's wrought up about it." "o well, i'll be careful of her sensibilities. it's my duty to speak with her. i'm here in the place of a parent. besides, don't i know kitty? i've almost brought her up." "maybe you're right. you're all so queer that perhaps you're right. only, do be careful, richard. you must approach the matter very delicately,--indirectly, you know. girls are different, remember, from young men, and you mustn't be blunt. do maneuver a little, for once in your life." "all right, fanny; you needn't be afraid of my doing anything awkward or sudden. i'll go to her room pretty soon, after she is quieted down, and have a good, calm old fatherly conversation with her." the colonel was spared this errand; for kitty had left some of her things on fanny's table, and now came back for them with a lamp in her hand. her averted face showed the marks of weeping; the corners of her firm-set lips were downward bent, as if some resolution which she had taken were very painful. this the anxious fanny saw; and she made a gesture to the colonel which any woman would have understood to enjoin silence, or, at least, the utmost caution and tenderness of speech. the colonel summoned his _finesse_ and said, cheerily, "well, kitty, what's boston been saying to you?" mrs. ellison fell back upon her sofa as if shot, and placed her hand over her face. kitty seemed not to hear her cousin. having gathered up her things, she bent an unmoved face and an unseeing gaze full upon him, and glided from the room without a word. "well, upon my soul," cried the colonel, "this is a pleasant, nightmarish, sleep-walking, lady-macbethish little transaction. confound it, fanny this comes of your wanting me to maneuver. if you'd let me come straight _at_ the subject,--like a _man_--" "_please_, richard, don't say anything more now," pleaded mrs. ellison in a broken voice. "you can't help it, i know; and i must do the best i can, under the circumstances. do go away for a little while, darling! o dear!" as for kitty, when she had got out of the room in that phantasmal fashion, she dimly recalled, through the mists of her own trouble, the colonel's dismay at her so glooming upon him, and began to think that she had used poor dick more tragically than she need, and so began to laugh softly to herself; but while she stood there at the entry window a moment, laughing in the moonlight, that made her lamp-flame thin, and painted her face with its pale lustre, mr. arbuton came down the attic stairway. he was not a man of quick fancies; but to one of even slower imagination and of calmer mood, she might very well have seemed unreal, the creature of a dream, fantastic, intangible, insensible, arch, not wholly without some touch of the malign. in his heart he groaned over her beauty as if she were lost to him forever in this elfish transfiguration. "miss ellison!" he scarcely more than whispered. "you ought not to speak to me now," she answered, gravely. "i know it; but i could not help it. for heaven's sake, do not let it tell against me. i wished to ask if i should not see you to-morrow; to beg that all might go on as had been planned, and as if nothing had been said to-day." "it'll be very strange," said kitty. "my cousins know everything now. how can we meet before them!" "i'm not going away without an answer, and we can't remain here without meeting. it will be less strange if we let everything take its course." "well." "thanks." he looked strangely humbled, but even more bewildered than humbled. she listened while he descended the steps, unbolted the street door, and closed it behind him. then she passed out of the moonlight into her own room, whose close-curtained space the lamp filled with its ruddy glow, and revealed her again, no malicious sprite, but a very puzzled, conscientious, anxious young girl. of one thing, at least, she was clear. it had all come about through misunderstanding, through his taking her to be something that she was not; for she was certain that mr. arbuton was of too worldly a spirit to choose, if he had known, a girl of such origin and lot as she was only too proud to own. the deception must have begun with dress; and she determined that her first stroke for truth and sincerity should be most sublimely made in the return of fanny's things, and a rigid fidelity to her own dresses. "besides," she could not help reflecting, "my travelling-suit will be just the thing for a picnic." and here, if the cynical reader of another sex is disposed to sneer at the method of her self-devotion, i am sure that women, at least, will allow it was most natural and highly proper that in this great moment she should first think of dress, upon which so great consequences hang in matters of the heart who--to be honest for once, o vain and conceited men!--can deny that the cut, the color, the texture, the stylish set of dresses, has not had everything to do with the rapture of love's young dream? are not certain bits of lace and knots of ribbon as much a part of it as any smile or sidelong glance of them all? and hath not the long experience of the fair taught them that artful dress is half the virtue of their spells? full well they know it; and when kitty resolved to profit no longer by fanny's wardrobe, she had won the hardest part of the battle in behalf of perfect truth towards mr. arbuton. she did not, indeed, stop with this, but lay awake, devising schemes by which she should disabuse him of his errors about her, and persuade him that she was no wife for him. xii. the picnic at chateau-bigot. "well," said mrs. ellison, who had slipped into kitty's room, in the morning, to do her back hair with some advantages of light which her own chamber lacked, "it'll be no crazier than the rest of the performance; and if you and he can stand it, i'm sure that _we_'ve no reason to complain." "why, i don't see how it's to be helped, fanny. he's asked it; and i'm rather glad he has, for i should have hated to have the conventional headache that keeps young ladies from being seen; and at any rate i don't understand how the day could be passed more sensibly than just as we originally planned to spend it. i can make up my mind a great deal better with him than away from him. but i think there never was a more ridiculous situation: now that the high tragedy has faded out of it, and the serious part is coming, it makes me laugh. poor mr. arbuton will feel all day that he is under my mercilessly critical eye, and that he mustn't do this and he mustn't say that, for fear of me; and he can't run away, for he's promised to wait patiently for my decision. it's a most inglorious position for him, but i don't think of anything to do about it. i could say no at once, but he'd rather not." "what have you got that dress on for?" asked mrs. ellison, abruptly. "because i'm not going to wear your things any more, fanny. it's a case of conscience. i feel like a guilty creature, being courted in another's clothes; and i don't know but it's for a kind of punishment of my deceit that i can't realize this affair as i ought, or my part in it. i keep feeling, the whole time, as if it were somebody else, and i have an absurd kind of other person's interest in it." mrs. ellison essayed some reply, but was met by kitty's steadfast resolution, and in the end did not prevail in so much as a ribbon for her hair. it was not till well into the forenoon that the preparations for the picnic were complete and the four set off together in one carriage. in the strong need that was on each of them to make the best of the affair, the colonel's unconsciousness might have been a little overdone, but mrs. ellison's demeanor was sublimely successful. the situation gave full play to her peculiar genius, and you could not have said that any act of hers failed to contribute to the perfection of her design, that any tone or speech was too highly colored. mr. arbuton, of whom she took possession, and who knew that she knew all, felt that he had never done justice to her, and seconded her efforts with something like cordial admiration; while kitty, with certain grateful looks and aversions of the face, paid an ardent homage to her strokes of tact, and after a few miserable moments, in which her nightlong trouble gnawed at her heart, began, in spite of herself, to enjoy the humor of the situation. it is a lovely road out to château-bigot. first you drive through the ancient suburbs of the lower town, and then you mount the smooth, hard highway, between pretty country-houses, toward the village of charlesbourg, while quebec shows, to your casual backward-glance, like a wondrous painted scene, with the spires and lofty roofs of the upper town, and the long, irregular wall wandering on the verge of the cliff; then the thronging gables and chimneys of st. roch, and again many spires and convent walls; lastly the shipping in the st. charles, which, in one direction, runs, a narrowing gleam, up into its valley, and in the other widens into the broad light of the st. lawrence. quiet, elmy spaces of meadow land stretch between the suburban mansions and the village of charlesbourg, where the driver reassured himself as to his route from the group of idlers on the platform before the church. then he struck off on a country road, and presently turned from this again into a lane that grew rougher and rougher, till at last it lapsed to a mere cart-track among the woods, where the rich, strong odors of the pine, and of the wild herbs bruised under the wheels, filled the air. a peasant and his black-eyed, open-mouthed boy were cutting withes to bind hay at the side of the track, and the latter consented to show the strangers to the château from a point beyond which they could not go with the carriage. there the small habitant and the driver took up the picnic-baskets, and led the way through pathless growths of underbrush to a stream, so swift that it is said never to freeze, so deeply sprung that the summer never drinks it dry. a screen of water-growths bordered it; and when this was passed, a wide open space revealed itself, with the ruin of the château in the midst. the pathos of long neglect lay upon the scene; for here were evidences of gardens and bowery aisles in other times, and now, for many a year, desolation and the slow return of the wilderness. the mountain rising behind the château grounds showed the dying flush of the deciduous leaves among the dark green of the pines that clothed it to the crest; a cry of innumerable crickets filled the ear of the dreaming noon. the ruin itself is not of impressive size, and it is a château by grace of the popular fancy rather than through any right of its own; for it was, in truth, never more than the hunting-lodge of the king's intendant, bigot, a man whose sins claim for him a lordly consideration in the history of quebec, he was the last intendant before the british conquest, and in that time of general distress he grew rich by oppression of the citizens, and by peculation from the soldiers. he built this pleasure-house here in the woods, and hither he rode out from quebec to enjoy himself in the chase and the carouses that succeed the chase. here, too, it is said, dwelt in secret the huron girl who loved him, and who survives in the memory of the peasants as the murdered _sauragesse_; and, indeed, there is as much proof that she was murdered as that she ever lived. when the wicked bigot was arrested and sent to france, where he was tried with great result of documentary record, his château fell into other hands; at last a party of arnold's men wintered there in , and it is to our own countrymen that we owe the conflagration and the ruin of château-bigot. it stands, as i said, in the middle of that open place, with the two gable walls and the stone partition-wall still almost entire, and that day showing very effectively against the tender northern sky. on the most weatherward gable the iron in the stone had shed a dark red stain under the lash of many winter storms, and some tough lichens had incrusted patches of the surface; but, for the rest, the walls rose in the univied nakedness of all ruins in our climate, which has no clinging evergreens wherewith to pity and soften the forlornness of decay. out of the rubbish at the foot of the walls there sprang a wilding growth of syringas and lilacs; and the interior was choked with flourishing weeds, and with the briers of the raspberry, on which a few berries hung. the heavy beams, left where they fell a hundred years ago, proclaimed the honest solidity with which the château had been built, and there was proof in the cut stone of the hearths and chimney-places that it had once had at least the ambition of luxury. while its visitors stood amidst the ruin, a harmless garden-snake slipped out of one crevice into another; from her nest in some hidden corner overhead a silent bird flew away. for the moment,--so slight is the capacity of any mood, so deeply is the heart responsive to a little impulse,--the palace of the cæsars could not have imparted a keener sense of loss and desolation. they eagerly sought such particulars of the ruin as agreed with the descriptions they had read of it, and were as well contented with a bit of cellar-way outside as if they had really found the secret passage to the subterranean chamber of the château, or the hoard of silver which the little habitant said was buried under it. then they dispersed about the grounds to trace out the borders of the garden, and mr. arbuton won the common praise by discovering the foundations of the stable of the château. then there was no more to do but to prepare for the picnic. they chose a grassy plot in the shadow of a half-dismantled bark-lodge,--a relic of the indians, who resort to the place every summer. in the ashes of that sylvan hearth they kindled their fire, mr. arbuton gathering the sticks, and the colonel showing a peculiar genius in adapting the savage flames to the limitations of the civilized coffee-pot borrowed of mrs. gray. mrs. ellison laid the cloth, much meditating the arrangement of the viands, and reversing again and again the relative positions of the sliced tongue and the sardines that flanked the cold roast chicken, and doubting dreadfully whether to put down the cake and the canned peaches at once, or reserve them for a second course; the stuffed olives drove her to despair, being in a bottle, and refusing to be balanced by anything less monumental in shape. some wild asters and red leaves and green and yellowing sprays of fern which kitty arranged in a tumbler were hailed with rapture, but presently flung far away with fierce disdain because they had ants on them. kitty witnessed this outburst with her usual complacency, and then went on making the coffee. with such blissful pain as none but lovers know, mr. arbuton saw her break the egg upon the edge of the coffee-pot, and let it drop therein, and then, with a charming frenzy, stir it round and round. it was a picture of domestic suggestion, a subtle insinuation of home, the unconscious appeal of inherent housewifery to inherent husbandhood. at the crash of the eggshell he trembled; the swift agitation of the coffee and the egg within the pot made him dizzy. "sha'n't i stir that for you, miss ellison?" he said, awkwardly. "o dear, no!" she answered in surprise at a man's presuming to stir coffee; "but you may go get me some water at the creek, if you please." she gave him a pitcher, and he went off to the brook, which was but a minute's distance away. this minute, however, left her alone, for the first time that day, with both dick and fanny, and a silence fell upon all three at once. they could not help looking at one another; and then the colonel, to show that he was not thinking of anything, began to whistle, and mrs. ellison rebuked him for whistling. "why not?" he asked. "it isn't a funeral, is it?" "of course it isn't," said mrs. ellison; and kitty, who had been blushing to the verge of tears, laughed instead, and then was consumed with vexation when mr. arbuton came up, feeling that he must suspect himself the motive of her ill-timed mirth. "the champagne ought to be cooled, i suppose," observed mrs. ellison, when the coffee had been finally stirred and set to boil on the coals. "i'm best acquainted with the brook," said mr. arbuton, "and i know just the eddy in it where the champagne will cool soonest." "then you shall take it there," answered the governess of the feast; and mr. arbuton duteously set off with the bottle in his hand. the pitcher of water which he had already brought stood in the grass; by a sudden movement of the skirt, kitty knocked it over. the colonel made a start forward; mrs. ellison arrested him with a touch, while she bent a look of ineffable admiration upon kitty. "now, i'll teach myself," said kitty, "that i can't be so clumsy with impunity. i'll go and fill that pitcher again myself." she hurried after mr. arbuton; they scarcely spoke going or coming; but the constraint that kitty felt was nothing to that she had dreaded in seeking to escape from the tacit raillery of the colonel and the championship of fanny. yet she trembled to realize that already her life had become so far entangled with this stranger's, that she found refuge with him from her own kindred. they could do nothing to help her in this; the trouble was solely hers and his, and they two must get out of it one way or other themselves; the case scarcely admitted even of sympathy, and if it had not been hers, it would have been one to amuse her rather than appeal to her compassion. even as it was, she sometimes caught herself smiling at the predicament of a young girl who had passed a month in every appearance of love-making, and who, being asked her heart, was holding her lover in suspense whilst she searched it, and meantime was picnicking with him upon the terms of casual flirtation. of all the heroines in her books, she knew none in such a strait as this. but her perplexities did not impair the appetite which she brought to the sylvan feast. in her whole simple life she had never tasted champagne before, and she said innocently, as she put the frisking fluid from her lips after the first taste, "why, i thought you had to _learn_ to like champagne." "no," remarked the colonel, "it's like reading and writing: it comes by nature. i suppose that even one of the lower animals would like champagne. the refined instinct of young ladies makes them recognize its merits instantly. some of the confederate cellars," added the colonel, thoughtfully, "had very good champagne in them. green seal was the favorite of our erring brethren. it wasn't one of their errors. i prefer it myself to our own native cider, whether made of apples or grapes. yes, it's better even than the water from the old chain-pump in the back yard at eriecreek, though it hasn't so fine a flavor of lubricating oil in it." the faint chill that touched mr. arbuton at the mention of eriecreek and its petrolic associations was transient. he was very light of heart, since the advance that kitty seemed to have made him; and in his temporary abandon he talked well, and promoted the pleasure of the time without critical reserves. when the colonel, with the reluctance of our soldiers to speak of their warlike experiences before civilians, had suffered himself to tell a story that his wife begged of him about his last battle, mr. arbuton listened with a deference that flattered poor mrs. ellison, and made her marvel at kitty's doubt concerning him; and then he spoke entertainingly of some travel experiences of his own, which he politely excused as quite unworthy to come after the colonel's story. he excused them a little too much, and just gave the modest soldier a faint, uneasy fear of having boasted. but no one else felt this result of his delicacy, and the feast was merry enough. when it was ended, mrs. ellison, being still a little infirm of foot, remained in the shadow of the bark-lodge, and the colonel lit his cigar, and loyally stretched himself upon the grass before her. there was nothing else for kitty and mr. arbuton but to stroll off together, and she preferred to do this. they sauntered up to the château in silence, and peered somewhat languidly about the ruin. on a bit of smooth surface in a sheltered place many names of former visitors were written, and mr. arbuton said he supposed they might as well add those of their own party. "o yes," answered kitty, with a half-sigh, seating herself upon a fallen stone, and letting her hands fall into each other in her lap as her wont was, "you write them." a curious pensiveness passed from one to the other and possessed them both. mr. arbuton began to write. suddenly, "miss ellison," said he, with a smile, "i've blundered in your name; i neglected to put the miss before it; and now there isn't room on the plastering." "o, never mind," replied kitty, "i dare say it won't be missed!" mr. arbuton neither perceived nor heeded the pun. he was looking in a sort of rapture at the name which his own hand had written now for the first time, and he felt an indecorous desire to kiss it. "if i could speak it as i've written it--" "i don't see what harm there would be in that," said the owner of the name, "or what object," she added more discreetly. --"i should feel that i had made a great gain." "i never told you," answered kitty, evasively, "how much i admire _your_ first name, mr. arbuton." "how did you know it?" "it was on the card you gave my cousin," said kitty, frankly, but thinking he now must know she had been keeping his card. "it's an old family name,--a sort of heirloom from the first of us who came to the country; and in every generation since, some arbuton has had to wear it." "it's superb!" cried kitty. "miles! 'miles standish, the puritan captain,' 'miles standish, the captain of plymouth.' i should be very proud of such a name." "you have only to take it," he said, gravely. "o, i didn't mean that," she said with a blush, and then added, "yours is a very old family, then, isn't it?" "yes, it's pretty well," answered mr. arbuton, "but it's not such a rare thing in the east, you know." "i suppose not. the ellisons are _not_ an old family. if we went back of my uncle, we should only come to backwoodsmen and indian fighters. perhaps that's the reason we don't care much for old families. you think a great deal of them in boston, don't you?" "we do, and we don't. it's a long story, and i'm afraid i couldn't make you understand, unless you had seen something of boston society." "mr. arbuton," said kitty, abruptly plunging to the bottom of the subject on which they had been hovering, "i'm dreadfully afraid that what you said to me--what you asked of me, yesterday--was all through a misunderstanding. i'm afraid that you've somehow mistaken me and my circumstances, and that somehow i've innocently helped on your mistake." "there is no mistake," he answered, eagerly, "about my loving you!" kitty did not look up, nor answer this outburst, which flattered while it pained her. she said, "i've been so much mistaken myself, and i've been so long finding it out, that i should feel anxious to have you know just what kind of girl you'd asked to be your wife, before i--" "what?" "nothing. but i should want you to know that in many things my life has been very, very different from yours. the first thing i can remember--you'll think i'm more autobiographical than our driver at ha-ha bay, even, but i must tell you all this--is about kansas, where we had moved from illinois, and of our having hardly enough to eat or wear, and of my mother grieving over our privations. at last, when my father was killed," she said, dropping her voice, "in front of our own door--" mr. arbuton gave a start. "killed?" "yes; didn't you know? or no: how could you? he was shot by the missourians." whether it was not hopelessly out of taste to have a father-in-law who had been shot by the missourians? whether he could persuade kitty to suppress that part of her history? that she looked very pretty, sitting there, with her earnest eyes lifted toward his. these things flashed wilfully through mr. arbuton's mind. "my father was a free-state man," continued kitty, in a tone of pride. "he wasn't when he first went to kansas," she added simply; while mr. arbuton groped among his recollections of that forgotten struggle for some association with these names, keenly feeling the squalor of it all, and thinking still how very pretty she was. "he went out there to publish a proslavery paper. but when he found out what the border ruffians really were, he turned against them. he used to be very bitter about my uncle's having become an abolitionist; they had had a quarrel about it; but father wrote to him from kansas, and they made it up; and before father died he was able to tell mother that we were to go to uncle's. but mother was sick then, and she only lived a month after father; and when my cousin came out to get us, just before she died, there was scarcely a crust of cornbread in our cabin. it seemed like heaven to get to eriecreek; but even at eriecreek we live in a way that i am afraid you wouldn't respect. my uncle has just enough, and we are very plain people indeed. i suppose," continued the young girl meekly, "that i haven't had at all what you'd call an education. uncle told me what to read, at first, and after that i helped myself. it seemed to come naturally; but don't you see that it wasn't an education?" "i beg pardon," said mr. arbuton, with a blush; for he had just then lost the sense of what she said in the music of her voice, as it hesitated over these particulars of her history. "i mean," explained kitty, "that i'm afraid i must be very one-sided. i'm dreadfully ignorant of a great many things. i haven't any accomplishments, only the little bit of singing and playing that you've heard; i couldn't tell a good picture from a bad one; i've never been to the opera; i don't know anything about society. now just imagine," cried kitty, with sublime impartiality, "such a girl as that in boston!" even mr. arbuton could not help smiling at this comic earnestness, while she resumed: "at home my cousins and i do all kinds of things that the ladies whom you know have done for them. we do our own work, for one thing," she continued, with a sudden treacherous misgiving that what she was saying might be silly and not heroic, but bravely stifling her doubt. "my cousin virginia is housekeeper, and rachel does the sewing, and i'm a kind of maid-of-all-work." mr. arbuton listened respectfully, vainly striving for some likeness of miss ellison in the figure of the different second-girls who, during life, had taken his card, or shown him into drawing-rooms, or waited on him at table; failing in this, he tried her in the character of daughter of that kind of farm-house where they take summer boarders and do their own work; but evidently the ellisons were not of that sort either; and he gave it up and was silent, not knowing what to say, while kitty, a little piqued by his silence, went on: "we're not ashamed, you understand, of our ways; there's such a thing as being proud of not being proud; and that's what we are, or what i am; for the rest are not mean enough ever to think about it, and once i wasn't, either. but that's the kind of life i'm used to; and though i've read of other kinds of life a great deal, i've not been brought up to anything different, don't you understand? and maybe--i don't know--i mightn't like or respect your kind of people any more than they did me. my uncle taught us ideas that are quite different from yours; and what if i shouldn't be able to give them up?" "there is only one thing i know or see: i love you!" he said, passionately, and drew nearer by a step; but she put out her hand and repelled him with a gesture. "sometimes you might be ashamed of me before those you knew to be my inferiors,--really common and coarse-minded people, but regularly educated, and used to money and fashion. i should cower before them, and i never could forgive you." "i've one answer to all this: i love you!" kitty flushed in generous admiration of his magnanimity, and said, with more of tenderness than she had yet felt towards him, "i'm sorry that i can't answer you now, as you wish, mr. arbuton." "but you will, to-morrow." she shook her head. "i don't know; o, i don't know! i've been thinking of something. that mrs. march asked me to visit her in boston; but we had given up doing so, because of the long delay here. if i asked my cousins, they'd still go home that way. it's too bad to put you off again; but you must see me in boston, if only for a day or two, and after you've got back into your old associations there, before i answer you. i'm in great trouble. you must wait, or i must say no." "i'll wait," said mr. arbuton. "o, _thank_ you," sighed kitty, grateful for this patience, and not for the chance of still winning him; "you are very forbearing, i'm sure." she again put forth her hand, but not now to repel him. he clasped it, and kept it in his, then impulsively pressed it against his lips. colonel and mrs. ellison had been watching the whole pantomime, forgotten. "well," said the colonel, "i suppose that's the end of the play, isn't it? i don't like it, fanny; i don't like it." "hush!" whispered mrs. ellison. they were both puzzled when kitty and mr. arbuton came towards them with anxious faces. kitty was painfully revolving in her mind what she had just said, and thinking she had said not so much as she meant and yet so much more, and tormenting herself with the fear that she had been at once too bold and too meek in her demand for longer delay. did it not give him further claim upon her? must it not have seemed a very audacious thing? what right had she to make it, and how could she now finally say no? then the matter of her explanation to him: was it in the least what she meant to say? must it not give him an idea of intellectual and spiritual poverty in her life which she knew had not been in it? would he not believe, in spite of her boasts, that she was humiliated before him by a feeling of essential inferiority? o, _had_ she boasted? what she meant to do was just to make him understand clearly what she was; but, had she? could he be made to understand this with what seemed his narrow conception of things outside of his own experience? was it worth while to try? did she care enough for him to make the effort desirable? had she made it for his sake, or in the interest of truth, merely, or in self-defence? these and a thousand other like questions beset her the whole way home to quebec, amid the frequent pauses of the talk, and underneath whatever she was saying. half the time she answered yes or no to them, and not to what dick, or fanny, or mr. arbuton had asked her; she was distraught with their recurrence, as they teased about her like angry bees, and one now and then settled, and stung and stung. through the whole night, too, they pursued her in dreams with pitiless iteration and fantastic change; and at dawn she was awakened by voices calling up to her from the ursulines' garden,--the slim, pale nun crying out, in a lamentable accent, that all men were false and there was no shelter save the convent or the grave, and the comfortable sister bemoaning herself that on meagre days madame de la peltrie ate nothing but choke-cherries from château-bigot. kitty rose and dressed herself, and sat at the window, and watched the morning come into the garden below: first, a tremulous flush of the heavens; then a rosy light on the silvery roofs and gables; then little golden aisles among the lilacs and hollyhocks. the tiny flower-beds just under her window were left, with their snap-dragons and larkspurs, in dew and shadow; the small dog stood on the threshold, and barked uneasily when the bell rang in the ursulines' chapel, where the nuns were at matins. it was sunday, and a soft tranquillity blest the cool air in which the young girl bathed her troubled spirit. a faint anticipative homesickness mingled now with her nightlong anxiety,--a pity for herself that on the morrow she must leave those pretty sights, which had become so dear to her that she could not but feel herself native among them. she must go back to eriecreek, which was not a walled city, and had not a stone building, much less a cathedral or convent, within its borders; and though she dearly loved those under her uncle's roof there, yet she had to own that, beyond that shelter, there was little in eriecreek to touch the heart or take the fancy; that the village was ugly, and the village people mortally dull, narrow, and uncongenial. why was not her lot cast somewhere else? why should she not see more of the world that she had found so fair, and which all her aspirations had fitted her to enjoy? quebec had been to her a rapture of beautiful antiquity; but europe, but london, venice, rome, those infinitely older and more storied cities of which she had lately talked so much with mr. arbuton,--why should she not see them? here, for the guilty space of a heat-lightning flash, kitty wickedly entertained the thought of marrying mr. arbuton for the sake of a bridal trip to europe, and bade love and the fitness of things and the incompatibility of boston and eriecreek traditions take care of themselves. but then she blushed for her meanness, and tried to atone for it as she could by meditating the praise of mr. arbuton. she felt remorse for having, as he had proved yesterday, undervalued and misunderstood him; and she was willing now to think him even more magnanimous than his generous words and conduct showed him. it would be a base return for his patience to accept him from a worldly ambition; a man of his noble spirit merited the best that love could give. but she respected him; at last she respected him fully and entirely, and she could tell him that at any rate. the words in which he had yesterday protested his love for her repeated themselves constantly in her revery. if he should speak them again after he had seen her in boston, in the light by which she was anxious to be tested,--she did not know what she should say. xiii. ordeal. they had not planned to go anywhere that day; but after church they found themselves with the loveliest afternoon of their stay at quebec to be passed somehow, and it was a pity to pass it indoors, the colonel said at their early dinner. they canvassed the attractions of the different drives out of town, and they decided upon that to lorette. the ellisons had already been there, but mr. arbuton had not, and it was from a dim motive of politeness towards him that mrs. ellison chose the excursion; though this did not prevent her from wondering aloud afterward, from time to time, why she had chosen it. he was restless and absent, and answered at random when points of the debate were referred to him, but he eagerly assented to the conclusion, and was in haste to set out. the road to lorette is through st. john's gate, down into the outlying meadows and rye-fields, where, crossing and recrossing the swift st. charles, it finally rises at lorette above the level of the citadel. it is a lonelier road than that to montmorenci, and the scattering cottages upon it have not the well-to-do prettiness, the operatic repair, of stone-built beauport. but they are charming, nevertheless, and the people seem to be remoter from modern influences. peasant-girls, in purple gowns and broad straw hats, and not the fashions of the year before last, now and then appeared to our acquaintance; near one ancient cottage an old man, in the true habitant's red woollen cap with a long fall, leaned over the bars of his gate and smoked a short pipe. by and by they came to jeune-lorette, an almost ideally pretty hamlet, bordering the road on either hand with galleried and balconied little houses, from which the people bowed to them as they passed, and piously enclosing in its midst the village church and churchyard. they soon after reached lorette itself, which they might easily have known for an indian town by its unkempt air, and the irregular attitudes in which the shabby cabins lounged along the lanes that wandered through it, even if the ellisons had not known it already, or if they had not been welcomed by a pomp of indian boys and girls of all shades of darkness. the girls had bead-wrought moccasins and work-bags to sell, and the boys bore bows and arrows and burst into loud cries of "shoot! shoot! grand shoot! put-up-pennies! shoot-the-pennies! grand shoot!" when they recognized the colonel, as they did after the party had dismounted in front of the church, they renewed these cries with greater vehemence. "now, richard," implored his wife, "you're _not_ going to let those little pests go through all that shooting performance again?" "i must. it is expected of me whenever i come to lorette; and i would never be the man to neglect an ancient observance of this kind." the colonel stuck a copper into the hard sand as he spoke, and a small storm of arrows hurtled around it. presently it flew into the air, and a fair-faced, blue-eyed boy picked it up: he won most of the succeeding coins. "there's an aborigine of pure blood," remarked the colonel; "his ancestors came from normandy two hundred years ago. that's the reason he uses the bow so much better than these coffee-colored impostors." they went into the chapel, which stands on the site of the ancient church burnt not long ago. it is small, and it is bare and rude inside, with only the commonest ornamentation about the altar, on one side of which was the painted wooden statue of a nun, on the other that of a priest,--slight enough commemoration of those who had suffered so much for the hopeless race that lingers and wastes at lorette in incurable squalor and wildness. they are christians after their fashion, this poor remnant of the mighty huron nation converted by the jesuits and crushed by the iroquois in the far-western wilderness; but whatever they are at heart, they are still savage in countenance, and these boys had faces of wolves and foxes. they followed their visitors into the church, where there was only an old woman praying to a picture, beneath which hung a votive hand and foot, and a few young huron suppliants with very sleek hair, whose wandering devotions seemed directed now at the strangers, and now at the wooden effigy of the house of st. ann borne by two gilt angels above the high-altar. there was no service, and the visitors soon quitted the chapel amid the clamors of the boys outside. some young girls, in the dress of our period, were promenading up and down the road with their arms about each other and their eyes alert for the effect upon spectators. from one of the village lanes came swaggering towards the visitors a figure of aggressive fashion,--a very buckish young fellow, with a heavy black mustache and black eyes, who wore a jaunty round hat, blue checked trousers, a white vest, and a morning-coat of blue diagonals, buttoned across his breast; in his hand he swung a light cane. "that is the son of the chief, paul picot," whispered the driver. "excuse me," said the colonel, instantly; and the young gentleman nodded. "can you tell me if we could see the chief to-day?" "o yes!" answered the notary in english, "my father is chief. you can see him"; and passed on with a somewhat supercilious air. the colonel, in his first hours at quebec, had bought at a bazaar of indian wares the photograph of an indian warrior in a splendor of factitious savage panoply. it was called "the last of the hurons," and the colonel now avenged himself for the curtness of m. picot by styling him "the next to the last of the hurons." "well," said fanny, who had a wife's willingness to see her husband occasionally snubbed, "i don't know why you asked him. i'm sure nobody wants to see that old chief and his wretched bead trumpery again." "my dear," answered the colonel, "wherever americans go, they like to be presented at court. mr. arbuton, here, i've no doubt has been introduced to the crowned heads of the old world, and longs to pay his respects to the sovereign of lorette. besides, i always call upon the reigning prince when i come to lorette. the coldness of the heir-apparent shall not repel me." the colonel led the way up the principal lane of the village. some of the cabins were ineffectually whitewashed, but none of them were so uncleanly within as the outside prophesied. at the doors and windows sat women and young girls working moccasins; here and there stood a well-fed mother of a family with an infant huron in her arms. they all showed the traces of white blood, as did the little ones who trooped after the strangers and demanded charity as clamorously as so many italians; only a few faces were of a clear dark, as if stained by walnut-juice, and it was plain that the hurons were fading, if not dying out. they responded with a queer mixture of french liveliness and savage stolidity to the colonel's jocose advances. great lean dogs lounged about the thresholds; they and the women and children were alone visible; there were no men. none of the houses were fenced, save the chief's; this stood behind a neat grass plot, across which, at the moment our travellers came up, two youngish women were trailing in long morning-gowns and eye-glasses. the chief's house was a handsome cottage, papered and carpeted, with a huge stove in the parlor, where also stood a table exposing the bead trumpery of mrs. ellison's scorn. a full-bodied elderly man with quick, black eyes and a tranquil, dark face stood near it; he wore a half-military coat with brass buttons, and was the chief picot. at sight of the colonel he smiled slightly and gave his hand in welcome. then he sold such of his wares as the colonel wanted, rather discouraging than inviting purchase. he talked, upon some urgency, of his people, who, he said, numbered three hundred, and were a few of them farmers, but were mostly hunters, and, in the service of the officers of the garrison, spent the winter in the chase. he spoke fair english, but reluctantly, and he seemed glad to have his guests go, who were indeed willing enough to leave him. mr. arbuton especially was willing, for he had been longing to find himself alone with kitty, of which he saw no hope while the idling about the village lasted. the colonel bought an insane watch-pocket for _une dolleur_ from a pretty little girl as they returned through the village; but he forbade the boys any more archery at his expense, with "pas de grand shoot, _now_, mes enfans!--friends," he added to his own party, "we have the falls of lorette and the better part of the afternoon still before us; how shall we employ them?" mrs. ellison and kitty did not know, and mr. arbuton did not know, as they sauntered down past the chapel, to the stone mill that feeds its industry from the beauty of the fall. the cascade, with two or three successive leaps above the road, plunges headlong down a steep crescent-shaped slope, and hides its foamy whiteness in the dark-foliaged ravine below. it is a wonder of graceful motion, of iridescent lights and delicious shadows; a shape of loveliness that seems instinct with a conscious life. its beauty, like that of all natural marvels on our continent, is on a generous scale; and now the spectators, after viewing it from the mill, passed for a different prospect of it to the other shore, and there the colonel and fanny wandered a little farther down the glen, leaving kitty with mr. arbuton. the affair between them was in such a puzzling phase, that there was as much reason for as against this: nobody could do anything, not even openly recognize it. besides, it was somehow very interesting to kitty to be there alone with him, and she thought that if all were well, and he and she were really engaged, the sense of recent betrothal could be nowhere else half so sweet as in that wild and lovely place. she began to imagine a bliss so divine, that it would have been strange if she had not begun to desire it, and it was with a half reluctant, half-acquiescent thrill that she suffered him to touch upon what was first in both their minds. "i thought you had agreed not to talk of that again for the present," she feebly protested. "no; i was not forbidden to tell you i loved you: i only consented to wait for my answer; but now i shall break my promise. i cannot wait. i think the conditions you make dishonor me," said mr. arbuton, with an impetuosity that fascinated her. "o, how can you say such a thing as that?" she asked, liking him for his resentment of conditions that he found humiliating, while her heart leaped remorseful to her lips for having imposed them. "you know very well why i wanted to delay; and you know that--that--if--i had done anything to wound you, i never could forgive myself." "but you doubted me, all the same," he rejoined. "did i? i thought it was myself that i doubted." she was stricken with sudden misgiving as to what had seemed so well; her words tended rapidly she could not tell whither. "but why do you doubt yourself?" "i--i don't know." "no," he said bitterly, "for it's really me that you doubt. i can't understand what you have seen in me that makes you believe anything could change me towards you," he added with a kind of humbleness that touched her. "i could have borne to think that i was not worthy of you." "not worthy of me! i never dreamed of such a thing." "but to have you suspect me of such meanness--" "o mr. arbuton!" --"as you hinted yesterday, is a disgrace that i ought not to bear. i have thought of it all night; and i must have my answer now, whatever it is." she did not speak; for every word that she had uttered had only served to close escape behind her. she did not know what to do; she looked up at him for help. he said with an accent of meekness pathetic from him, "why must you still doubt me?" "i don't," she scarcely more than breathed. "then you are mine, now, without waiting, and forever," he cried; and caught her to him in a swift embrace. she only said, "oh!" in a tone of gentle reproach, yet clung to him a helpless moment as for rescue from himself. she looked at him in blank pallor, striving to realize the tender violence in which his pulses wildly exulted; then a burning flush dyed her face, and tears came into her eyes. "o, i hope you'll never be sorry," she said; and then, "do let us go," for she had no distinct desire save for movement, for escape from that place. her heart had been surprised, she hardly knew how; but at his kiss a novel tenderness had leaped to life in it. she suffered him to put her hand upon his arm, and then she began to feel a strange pride in his being tall and handsome, and hers. but she kept thinking as they walked, "i hope he'll never he sorry," and she said it again, half in jest. he pressed her hand against his heart, and met her look with one of protest and reassurance, that presently melted into something sweeter yet. he said, "what beautiful eyes you have! i noticed the long lashes when i saw you on the saguenay boat, and i couldn't get away from them." "o please, don't speak of that dreadful time!" cried kitty. "no? why not?" "o because! i think it was such a bold kind of accident my taking your arm by mistake; and the whole next day has always been a perfect horror to me." he looked at her in questioning amaze. "i think i was very pert with you all day,--and i don't think i'm pert naturally,--taking you up about the landscape, and twitting you about the saguenay scenery and legends, you know. but i thought you were trying to put me down,--you are rather down-putting at times,--and i admired you, and i couldn't bear it." "oh!" said mr. arbuton. he dimly recollected, as if it had been in some former state of existence, that there were things he had not approved in kitty that day, but now he met her penitence with a smile and another pressure of the hand. "well, then," he said, "if you don't like to recall that time, let's go back of it to the day i met you on goat island bridge at niagara." "o, did you see _me_ there? i thought you didn't; but _i_ saw _you_. you had on a blue cravat," she answered; and he returned with as much the air of coherency as if really continuing the same train of thought, "you won't think it necessary to visit boston, now, i suppose," and he smiled triumphantly upon her. "i fancy that i have now a better right to introduce you there than your south end friends." kitty smiled, too. "i'm willing to wait. but don't you think you ought to see eriecreek before you promise too solemnly? i can't allow that there's anything serious, till you've seen me at home." they had been going, for no reason that they knew, back to the country inn near which you purchase admittance to a certain view of the falls, and now they sat down on the piazza, somewhat apart from other people who were there, as mr. arbuton said, "o, i shall visit eriecreek soon enough. but i shall not come to put myself or you to the proof. i don't ask to see you at home before claiming you forever." kitty murmured, "ah! you are more generous than i was." "i doubt it." "o yes, you are. but i wonder if you'll be able to find eriecreek." "is it on the map?" "it's on the county map; and so is uncle jack's lot on it, and a picture of his house, for that matter. they'll all be standing on the piazza--something like this one--when you come up. you'll know uncle jack by his big gray beard, and his bushy eyebrows, and his boots, which he won't have blacked, and his leghorn hat, which we can't get him to change. the girls will be there with him,--virginia all red and heated with having got supper for you, and rachel with the family mending in her hand,--and they'll both come running down the walk to welcome you. how will you like it?" mr. arbuton suspected the gross caricature of this picture, and smiled securely at it. "i shall like it well enough," he said, "if you run down with them. where shall you be?" "i forgot. i shall be up stairs in my room, peeping through the window-blinds, to see how you take it. then i shall come down, and receive you with dignity in the parlor, but after supper you'll have to excuse me while i help with the dishes. uncle jack will talk to you. he'll talk to you about boston. he's much fonder of boston than you are, even." and here kitty broke off with a laugh, thinking what a very different boston her uncle jack's was from mr. arbuton's, and maliciously diverted with what she conceived of their mutual bewilderment in trying to get some common stand-point. he had risen from his chair, and was now standing a few paces from her, looking toward the fall, as if by looking he might delay the coming of the colonel and fanny. she checked her merriment a moment to take note of two ladies who were coming up the path towards the porch where she was sitting. mr. arbuton did not see them. the ladies mounted the steps, and turned slowly and languidly to survey the company. but at sight of mr. arbuton, one of them advanced directly toward him, with exclamations of surprise and pleasure, and he with a stupefied face and a mechanical movement turned to meet her. she was a lady of more than middle age, dressed with certain personal audacities of color and shape, rather than overdressed, and she thrust forward, in expression of her amazement, a very small hand, wonderfully well gloved; her manner was full of the anxiety of a woman who had fought hard for a high place in society, and yet suggested a latent hatred of people who, in yielding to her, had made success bitter and humiliating. her companion was a young and very handsome girl, exquisitely dressed, and just so far within the fashion as to show her already a mistress of style. but it was not the vivid new york stylishness. a peculiar restraint of line, an effect of lady-like concession to the ruling mode, a temperance of ornament, marked the whole array, and stamped it with the unmistakable character of boston. her clear tints of lip and cheek and eye were incomparable; her blond hair gave weight to the poise of her delicate head by its rich and decent masses. she had a look of independent innocence, an angelic expression of extremely nice young fellow blending with a subtle maidenly charm. she indicated her surprise at seeing mr. arbuton by pressing the point of her sun-umbrella somewhat nervously upon the floor, and blushing a very little. then she gave him her hand with friendly frankness, and smiled dazzlingly upon him, while the elder hailed him with effusive assertion of familiar acquaintance, heaping him with greetings and flatteries and cries of pleasure. "o dear!" sighed kitty, "these are old friends of his; and will i have to know them? perhaps it's best to begin at once, though," she thought. but he made no movement toward her where she sat. the ladies began to walk up and down, and he with them. as they passed her, he did not seem to see her. the ladies said they were waiting for their carriage, which they had left at a certain point when they went to look at the fall, and had ordered to take them up at the inn. they talked about people and things that kitty had never heard of. "have you seen the trailings since you left newport?" asked the elder woman. "no," said mr. arbuton. "perhaps you'll be surprised then--or perhaps you won't--to hear that we parted with them on the top of mount washington, thursday. and the mayflowers are at the glen house. the mountains are horribly full. but what are you to do! now the continent"--she spoke as if the english channel divided it from us--"is so common, you can't run over there any more." whenever they walked towards kitty, this woman, whose quick eye had detected mr. arbuton at her side as she came up to the inn, bent upon the young girl's face a stare of insolent curiosity, yet with a front of such impassive coldness that to another she might not have seemed aware of her presence. kitty shuddered at the thought of being made acquainted with her; then she remembered, "why, how stupid i am! of course a gentleman can't introduce ladies; and the only thing for him to do is to excuse himself to them as soon as he can without rudeness, and come back to me." but none the less she felt helpless and deserted. though ordinarily so brave, she was so beaten down by that look, that for a glance of not unkindly interest that the young lady gave her she was abjectly grateful. she admired her, and fancied that she could easily be friends with such a girl as that, if they met fairly. she wondered that she should be there with that other, not knowing that society cannot really make distinctions between fine and coarse, and could not have given her a reason for their association. still the three walked up and down before kitty, and still she made his peace with herself, thinking, "he is embarrassed; he can't come to me at once; but he will, of course." the elder of his companions talked on in her loud voice of this thing and that, of her summer, and of the people she had met, and of their places and yachts and horses, and all the splendors of their keeping,--talk which kitty's aching sense sometimes caught by fragments, and sometimes in full. the lady used a slang of deprecation and apology for having come to such a queer resort as quebec, and raised her brows when mr. arbuton reluctantly owned how long he had been there. "ah, ah!" she said briskly, bringing the group to a stand-still while she spoke, "one doesn't stay in a slow canadian city a whole month for love of the _place_. come, mr. arbuton, is she english or french?" kitty's heart beat thickly, and she whispered to herself, "o, now!--now surely he _must_ do something." "or perhaps," continued his tormentor, "she's some fair fellow-wanderer in these canadian wilds,--some pretty companion of voyage." mr. arbuton gave a kind of start at this, like one thrilled for an instant with a sublime impulse. he cast a quick, stealthy look at kitty, and then as suddenly withdrew his glance. what had happened to her who was usually dressed so prettily? alas! true to her resolution, kitty had again refused fanny's dresses that morning, and had faithfully put on her own travelling-suit,--the suit which rachel had made her, and which had seemed so very well at eriecreek that they had called uncle jack in to admire it when it was tried on. now she knew that it looked countrified, and its unstylishness struck in upon her, and made her feel countrified in soul. "yes," she owned, as she met mr. arbuton's glance, "i'm nothing but an awkward milkmaid beside that young lady." this was unjust to herself; but truly it was never in her present figure that he had intended to show her to his world, which he had been sincere enough in contemning for her sake while away from it. confronted with good society in these ladies, its delegates, he doubtless felt, as never before, the vastness of his self-sacrifice, the difficulty of his enterprise, and it would not have been so strange if just then she should have appeared to him through the hard cold vision of the best people instead of that which love had illumined. she saw whatever purpose toward herself was in his eyes, flicker and die out as they fell from hers. then she sat alone while they three walked up and down, up and down, and the skirts of the ladies brushed her garments in passing. "o, where can dick and fanny be?" she silently bemoaned herself, "and why don't they come and save me from these dreadful people?" she sat in a stony quiet while they talked on, she thought, forever. their voices sounded in her ears like voices heard in a dream, their laughter had a nightmare cruelty. yet she was resolved to be just to mr. arbuton, she was determined not meanly to condemn him; she confessed to herself, with a glimmer of her wonted humor, that her dress must be an ordeal of peculiar anguish to him, and she half blamed herself for her conscientiousness in wearing it. if she had conceived of any such chance as this, she would perhaps, she thought, have worn fanny's grenadine. she glanced again at the group which was now receding from her. "ah!" the elder of the ladies said, again halting the others midway of the piazza's length, "there's the carriage at last! but what is that stupid animal stopping for? o, i suppose he didn't understand, and expects to take us up at the bridge! provoking! but it's no use; we may as well go to him at once; it's plain he isn't coming to us. mr. arbuton, will you see us on board?" "who--i? yes, certainly," he answered absently, and for the second time he cast a furtive look at kitty, who had half started to her feet in expectation of his coming to her before he went,--a look of appeal, or deprecation, or reassurance, as she chose to interpret it, but after all a look only. she sank back in blank rejection of his look, and so remained motionless as he led the way from the porch with a quick and anxious step. since those people came he had not openly recognized her presence, and now he had left her without a word. she could not believe what she could not but divine, and she was powerless to stir as the three moved down the road towards the carriage. then she felt the tears spring to her eyes: she flung down her veil, and, swept on by a storm of grief and pride and pain, she hurried, ran towards the grounds about the falls. she thrust aside the boy who took money at the gate. "i have no money," she said fiercely; "i'm going to look for my friends: they're in here." but dick and fanny were not to be seen. instead, as she fluttered wildly about in search of them, she beheld mr. arbuton, who had missed her on his return to the inn, coming with a frightened face to look for her. she had hoped, somehow never to see him again in the world; but since it was to be, she stood still and waited his approach in a strange composure; while he drew nearer, thinking how yesterday he had silenced her prophetic doubt of him: "i have one answer to all this; i love you." her faltering words, verified so fatally soon, recalled themselves to him with intolerable accusation. and what should he say now? if possibly,--if by some miracle,--she might not have seen what he feared she must! one glance that he dared give her taught him better; and while she waited for him to speak, he could not lure any of the phrases, of which the air seemed full, to serve him. "i wonder you came back to me," she said after an eternal moment. "came back?" he echoed, vacantly. "you seemed to have forgotten my existence!" of course the whole wrong, if any wrong had been done to her, was tacit, and much might be said to prove that she felt needlessly aggrieved, and that he could not have acted otherwise than as he did; she herself had owned that it must be an embarrassing position to him. "why, what have i done," he began, "what makes you think... for heaven's sake listen to me!" he cried; and then, while she turned a mute attentive face to him, he stood silent as before, like one who has lost his thought, and strives to recall what he was going to say. "what sense,--what use," he resumed at last, as if continuing the course of some previous argument, "would there have been in making a display of our acquaintance before them? i did not suppose at first that they saw us together."... but here he broke off, and, indeed, his explanation had but a mean effect when put into words. "i did not expect them to stay. i thought they would go away every moment; and then at last it was too late to manage the affair without seeming to force it." this was better; and he paused again, for some sign of acquiescence from kitty, and caught her eye fixed on his face in what seemed contemptuous wonder. his own eyes fell, and ran uneasily over her dress before he lifted them and began once more, as if freshly inspired: "i could have wished you to be known to my friends with every advantage on your side," and this had such a magnanimous sound that he took courage; "and you ought to have had faith enough in me to believe that i never could have meant you a slight. if you had known more of the world,--if your social experience had been greater you would have seen.... oh!" he cried, desperately, "is there nothing you have to say to me?" "no," said kitty, simply, but with a languid quiet, and shrinking from speech as from an added pang. "you have been telling me that you were ashamed of me in this dress before those people. but i knew that already. what do you want me to do?" "if you give me time, i can make everything clear to you." "but now you don't deny it." "deny what? i--" but here the whole fabric of mr. arbuton's defence toppled to the ground. he was a man of scrupulous truth, not accustomed to deceive himself or others. he had been ashamed of her, he could not deny it, not to keep the love that was now dearer to him than life. he saw it with paralyzing clearness; and, as an inexorable fact that confounded quite as much as it dismayed him, he perceived that throughout that ignoble scene she had been the gentle person and he the vulgar one. how could it have happened with a man like him! as he looked back upon it, he seemed to have been only the helpless sport of a sinister chance. but now he must act; it could not go so, it was too horrible a thing to let stand confessed. a hundred protests thronged to his lips, but he refused utterance to them all as worse even than silence; and so, still meaning to speak, he could not speak. he could only stand and wait while it wrung his heart to see her trembling, grieving lips. his own aspect was so lamentable, that she half pitied him, half respected him for his truth's sake. "you were right; i think it won't be necessary for me to go to boston," she said with a dim smile. "good by. it's all been a dreadful, dreadful mistake." it was like him, even in that humiliation, not to have thought of losing her, not to have dreamed but that he could somehow repair his error, and she would yet willingly be his. "o no, no, no," he cried, starting forward, "don't say that! it can't be, it mustn't be! you are angry now, but i know you'll see it differently. don't be so quick with me, with yourself. i will do anything, say anything, you like." the tears stood in her eyes; but they were cruel drops. "you can't say anything that wouldn't make it worse. you can't undo what's been done, and that's only a little part of what couldn't be undone. the best way is for us to part; it's the only way." "no, there are all the ways in the world besides! wait--think!--i implore you not to be so--precipitate." the unfortunate word incensed her the more; it intimated that she was ignorantly throwing too much away. "i am not rash now, but i was very rash half an hour ago. i shall not change my mind again. o," she cried, giving way, "it isn't what you've done, but what you _are_ and what _i_ am, that's the great trouble! i could easily forgive what's happened,--if you asked it; but i couldn't alter both our whole lives, or make myself over again, and you couldn't change yourself. perhaps you would try, and i know that i would, but it would be a wretched failure and disappointment as long as we lived. i've learnt a great deal since i first saw those people." and in truth he felt as if the young girl whom he had been meaning to lift to a higher level than her own at his side had somehow suddenly grown beyond him; and his heart sank. "it's foolish to try to argue such a thing, but it's true; and you must let me go." "i _can't_ let you go," he said in such a way, that she longed at least to part kindly with him. "you can make it hard for me," she answered, "but the end will be the same." "i won't make it hard for you, then," he returned, after a pause, in which he grew paler and she stood with a wan face plucking the red leaves from a low bough that stretched itself towards her. he turned and walked away some steps; then he came suddenly back. "i wish to express my regret," he began formally, and with his old air of doing what was required of him as a gentleman, "that i should have unintentionally done anything to wound--" "o, better not speak of _that_," interrupted kitty with bitterness, "it's all over now." and the final tinge of superiority in his manner made her give him a little stab of dismissal. "good by. i see my cousins coming." she stood and watched him walk away, the sunlight playing on his figure through the mantling leaves, till he passed out of the grove. the cataract roared with a seven-fold tumult in her ears, and danced before her eyes. all things swam together, as in her blurred sight her cousins came wavering towards her. "where is mr. arbuton?" asked mrs. ellison. kitty threw her arms about the neck of that foolish woman, whoso loving heart she could not doubt, and clung sobbing to her. "gone," she said; and mrs. ellison, wise for once, asked no more. she had the whole story that evening, without asking; and whilst she raged, she approved of kitty, and covered her with praises and condolences. "why, of course, fanny, i didn't care for _knowing_ those people. what should i want to know them for? but what hurt me was that he should so postpone me to them, and ignore me before them, and leave me without a word, then, when i ought to have been everything in the world to him and first of all. i believe things came to me while i sat there, as they do to drowning people, all at once, and i saw the whole affair more distinctly than ever i did. we were too far apart in what we had been and what we believed in and respected, ever to grow really together. and if he gave me the highest position in the world, i should have only that. he never could like the people who had been good to me, and whom i loved so dearly, and he only could like me as far as he could estrange me from them. if he could coolly put me aside _now_, how would it be afterwards with the rest, and with me too? that's what flashed through me, and i don't believe that getting splendidly married is as good as being true to the love that came long before, and honestly living your own life out, without fear or trembling, whatever it is. so perhaps," said kitty, with a fresh burst of tears, "you needn't condole with me so much, fanny. perhaps if you had seen him, you would have thought he was the one to be pitied. _i_ pitied him, though he _was_ so cruel. when he first turned to meet them, you'd have thought he was a man sentenced to death, or under some dreadful spell or other; and while he was walking up and down listening to that horrible comical old woman,--the young lady didn't talk much,--and trying to make straight answers to her, and to look as if i didn't exist, it was the most ridiculous thing in the world." "how queer you are, kitty!" "yes; but you needn't think i didn't feel it. i seemed to be like two persons sitting there, one in agony, and one just coolly watching it. but o," she broke out again while fanny held her closer in her arms, "how could he have done it, how could he have acted so towards me; and just after i had begun to think him so generous and noble! it seems too dreadful to be true." and with this kitty kissed her cousin and they had a little cry together over the trust so done to death; and kitty dried her eyes, and bade fanny a brave good-night, and went off to weep again, upon her pillow. but before that, she called fanny to her door, and with a smile breaking through the trouble of her face, she asked, "how do you suppose he got back? i never thought of it before." "_oh!_" cried mrs. ellison with profound disgust, "i hope he had to _walk_ back. but i'm afraid there were only too many chances for him to ride. i dare say he could get a calash at the hotel there." kitty had not spoken a word of reproach to fanny for her part in promoting this hapless affair; and when the latter, returning to her own room, found the colonel there, she told him the story and then began to discern that she was not without credit for kitty's fortunate escape, as she called it. "yes," said the colonel, "under exactly similar circumstances she'll know just what to expect another time, if that's any comfort." "it's a _great_ comfort," retorted mrs. ellison; "you can't find out what the world is, too soon, i can tell you; and if i hadn't maneuvered a little to bring them together, kitty might have gone off with some lingering fancy for him; and think what a misfortune that would have been!" "horrible." "and now, she'll not have a single regret for him." "i should think not," said the colonel; and he spoke in a tone of such dejection, that it went to his wife's heart more than any reproach of kitty's could have done. "you're all right, and nobody blames you, fanny; but if _you_ think it's well for such a girl as kitty to find out that a man who has had the best that the world can give, and has really some fine qualities of his own, can be such a poor devil, after all, then _i_ don't. she may be the wiser for it, but you know she won't be the happier." "o _don't_, dick, don't speak seriously! it's so dreadful from _you_. if you feel so about it, why don't you do something." "o yes, there's a fine opening. we know, because we know ever so much more, how the case really is; but the way it seems to stand is, that kitty couldn't bear to have him show civility to his friends, and ran away, and then wouldn't give him a chance to explain. besides, what could i do under any circumstances?" "well, dick, of course you're right, and i wish i could see things as clearly as you do. but i really believe kitty's glad to be out of it." "what?" thundered the colonel. "i think kitty's secretly relieved to have it all over. but you needn't _stun_ me." "you _do_?" the colonel paused as if to gain force enough for a reply. but after waiting, nothing whatever came to him, and he wound up his watch. "to be sure," added mrs. ellison thoughtfully, after a pause, "she's giving up a great deal; and she'll probably never have such another chance as long as she lives." "i hope she won't," said the colonel. "o, you needn't pretend that a high position and the social advantages he could have given her are to be despised." "no, you heartless worldling; and neither are peace of mind, and self-respect, and whole feelings, and your little joke." "o, you--you sickly sentimentalist!" "that's what they used to call us in the good old abolition days," laughed the colonel; and the two being quite alone, they made their peace with a kiss, and were as happy for the moment as if they had thereby assuaged kitty's grief and mortification. "besides, fanny," continued the colonel, "though i'm not much on religion, i believe these things are ordered." "don't be blasphemous, colonel ellison!" cried his wife, who represented the church if not religion in her family. "as if providence had anything to do with love-affairs!" "well, i won't; but i will say that if kitty turned her back on mr. arbuton and the social advantages he could offer her, it's a sign she wasn't fit for them. and, poor thing, if she doesn't know how much she's lost, why she has the less to grieve over. if she thinks she couldn't be happy with a husband who would keep her snubbed and frightened after he lifted her from her lowly sphere, and would tremble whenever she met any of his own sort, of course it may be a sad mistake, but it can't be helped. she must go back to eriecreek, and try to worry along without him. perhaps she'll work out her destiny some other way." xiv. afterwards. mrs. ellison had kitty's whole story, and so has the reader, but for a little thing that happened next day, and which is perhaps scarcely worthy of being set down. mr. arbuton's valise was sent for at night from the hôtel st. louis, and they did not see him again. when kitty woke next morning, a fine cold rain was falling upon the drooping hollyhocks in the ursulines' garden, which seemed stricken through every leaf and flower with sudden autumn. all the forenoon the garden-paths remained empty, but under the porch by the poplars sat the slender nun and the stout nun side by side, and held each other's hands. they did not move, they did not appear to speak. the fine cold rain was still falling as kitty and fanny drove down mountain street toward the railway station, whither dick and the baggage had preceded them, for they were going away from quebec. midway, their carriage was stopped by a mass of ascending vehicles, and their driver drew rein till the press was over. at the same time kitty saw advancing up the sidewalk a figure grotesquely resembling mr. arbuton. it was he, but shorter, and smaller, and meaner. then it was not he, but only a light overcoat like his covering a very common little man about whom it hung loosely,--a burlesque of mr. arbuton's self-respectful overcoat, or the garment itself in a state of miserable yet comical collapse. "what is that ridiculous little wretch staring at you for, kitty?" asked fanny. "i don't know," answered kitty, absently. the man was now smiling and gesturing violently. kitty remembered having seen him before, and then recognized the cooper who had released mr. arbuton from the dog in the sault au matelot, and to whom he had given his lacerated overcoat. the little creature awkwardly unbuttoned the garment, and took from the breast-pocket a few letters, which he handed to kitty, talking eagerly in french all the time. "what _is_ he doing, kitty?" "what is he saying, fanny?" "something about a ferocious dog that was going to spring upon you, and the young gentleman being brave as a lion and rushing forward, and saving your life." mrs. ellison was not a woman to let her translation lack color, even though the original wanted it. "make him tell it again." when the man had done so, "yes," sighed kitty, "it all happened that day of the montgomery expedition; but i never knew, before, of what he had done for me. fanny," she cried, with a great sob, "may be i'm the one who has been cruel? but what happened yesterday makes his having saved my life seem such a very little matter." "nothing at all!" answered fanny, "less than nothing!" but her heart failed her. the little cooper had bowed himself away, and was climbing the hill, mr. arbuton's coat-skirts striking his heels as he walked. "what letters are those?" asked fanny. "o, old letters to mr. arbuton, which he found in the pocket. i suppose he thought i would give them to him." "but how are you going to do it?" "i ought to send them to him," answered kitty. then, after a silence that lasted till they reached the boat, she handed the letters to fanny. "dick may send them," she said. the end. headlong hall by thomas love peacock contents preface i. the mail ii. the squire--the breakfast iii. the arrivals iv. the grounds v. the dinner vi. the evening vii. the walk viii. the tower ix. the sexton x. the skull xi. the anniversary xii. the lecture xiii. the ball xiv. the proposals xv. the conclusion all philosophers, who find some favourite system to their mind, in every point to make it fit, will force all nature to submit. p r e f a c e to "headlong hall" and the three novels published along with it in . -------- all these little publications appeared originally without prefaces. i left them to speak for themselves; and i thought i might very fitly preserve my own impersonality, having never intruded on the personality of others, nor taken any liberties but with public conduct and public opinions. but an old friend assures me, that to publish a book without a preface is like entering a drawing-room without making a bow. in deference to this opinion, though i am not quite clear of its soundness, i make my prefatory bow at this eleventh hour. "headlong hall" was written in ; "nightmare abbey" in ; "maid marian", with the exception of the last three chapters, in ; "crotchet castle" in . i am desirous to note the intervals, because, at each of those periods, things were true, in great matters and in small, which are true no longer. "headlong hall" begins with the holyhead mail, and "crotchet castle" ends with a rotten borough. the holyhead mail no longer keeps the same hours, nor stops at the capel cerig inn, which the progress of improvement has thrown out of the road; and the rotten boroughs of have ceased to exist, though there are some very pretty pocket properties, which are their worthy successors. but the classes of tastes, feelings, and opinions, which were successively brought into play in these little tales, remain substantially the same. perfectibilians, deteriorationists, statu-quo-ites, phrenologists, transcendentalists, political economists, theorists in all sciences, projectors in all arts, morbid visionaries, romantic enthusiasts, lovers of music, lovers of the picturesque, and lovers of good dinners, march, and will march for ever, _pari passu_ with the march of mechanics, which some facetiously call the march of the intellect. the fastidious in old wine are a race that does not decay. literary violators of the confidences of private life still gain a disreputable livelihood and an unenviable notoriety. match-makers from interest, and the disappointed in love and in friendship, are varieties of which specimens are extant. the great principle of the right of might is as flourishing now as in the days of maid marian: the array of false pretensions, moral, political, and literary, is as imposing as ever: the rulers of the world still feel things in their effects, and never foresee them in their causes: and political mountebanks continue, and will continue, to puff nostrums and practise legerdemain under the eyes of the multitude: following, like the "learned friend" of crotchet castle, a course as tortuous as that of a river, but in a reverse process; beginning by being dark and deep, and ending by being transparent. the author of "headlong hall". _march_ , . h e a d l o n g h a l l ---*--- chapter i the mail the ambiguous light of a december morning, peeping through the windows of the holyhead mail, dispelled the soft visions of the four insides, who had slept, or seemed to sleep, through the first seventy miles of the road, with as much comfort as may be supposed consistent with the jolting of the vehicle, and an occasional admonition to _remember the coachman_, thundered through the open door, accompanied by the gentle breath of boreas, into the ears of the drowsy traveller. a lively remark, that _the day was none of the finest_, having elicited a repartee of _quite the contrary_, the various knotty points of meteorology, which usually form the exordium of an english conversation, were successively discussed and exhausted; and, the ice being thus broken, the colloquy rambled to other topics, in the course of which it appeared, to the surprise of every one, that all four, though perfect strangers to each other, were actually bound to the same point, namely, headlong hall, the seat of the ancient and honourable family of the headlongs, of the vale of llanberris, in caernarvonshire. this name may appear at first sight not to be truly cambrian, like those of the rices, and prices, and morgans, and owens, and williamses, and evanses, and parrys, and joneses; but, nevertheless, the headlongs claim to be not less genuine derivatives from the antique branch of cadwallader than any of the last named multiramified families. they claim, indeed, by one account, superior antiquity to all of them, and even to cadwallader himself, a tradition having been handed down in headlong hall for some few thousand years, that the founder of the family was preserved in the deluge on the summit of snowdon, and took the name of rhaiader, which signifies a _waterfall_, in consequence of his having accompanied the water in its descent or diminution, till he found himself comfortably seated on the rocks of llanberris. but, in later days, when commercial bagmen began to scour the country, the ambiguity of the sound induced his descendants to drop the suspicious denomination of _riders_, and translate the word into english; when, not being well pleased with the sound of the _thing_, they substituted that of the _quality_, and accordingly adopted the name _headlong_, the appropriate epithet of waterfall. i cannot tell how the truth may be: i say the tale as 'twas said to me. the present representative of this ancient and dignified house, harry headlong, esquire, was, like all other welsh squires, fond of shooting, hunting, racing, drinking, and other such innocent amusements, _meizonos d' allou tinos_, as menander expresses it. but, unlike other welsh squires, he had actually suffered certain phenomena, called books, to find their way into his house; and, by dint of lounging over them after dinner, on those occasions when he was compelled to take his bottle alone, he became seized with a violent passion to be thought a philosopher and a man of taste; and accordingly set off on an expedition to oxford, to inquire for other varieties of the same genera, namely, men of taste and philosophers; but, being assured by a learned professor that there were no such things in the university, he proceeded to london, where, after beating up in several booksellers' shops, theatres, exhibition-rooms, and other resorts of literature and taste, he formed as extensive an acquaintance with philosophers and dilettanti as his utmost ambition could desire: and it now became his chief wish to have them all together in headlong hall, arguing, over his old port and burgundy, the various knotty points which had puzzled his pericranium. he had, therefore, sent them invitations in due form to pass their christmas at headlong hall; which invitations the extensive fame of his kitchen fire had induced the greater part of them to accept; and four of the chosen guests had, from different parts of the metropolis, ensconced themselves in the four corners of the holyhead mail. these four persons were, mr foster[ . ], the perfectibilian; mr escot[ . ], the deteriorationist; mr jenkison[ . ], the statu-quo-ite; and the reverend doctor gaster[ . ], who, though of course neither a philosopher nor a man of taste, had so won on the squire's fancy, by a learned dissertation on the art of stuffing a turkey, that he concluded no christmas party would be complete without him. the conversation among these illuminati soon became animated; and mr foster, who, we must observe, was a thin gentleman, about thirty years of age, with an aquiline nose, black eyes, white teeth, and black hair--took occasion to panegyrize the vehicle in which they were then travelling, and observed what remarkable improvements had been made in the means of facilitating intercourse between distant parts of the kingdom: he held forth with great energy on the subject of roads and railways, canals and tunnels, manufactures and machinery: "in short," said he, "every thing we look on attests the progress of mankind in all the arts of life, and demonstrates their gradual advancement towards a state of unlimited perfection." mr escot, who was somewhat younger than mr foster, but rather more pale and saturnine in his aspect, here took up the thread of the discourse, observing, that the proposition just advanced seemed to him perfectly contrary to the true state of the case: "for," said he, "these improvements, as you call them, appear to me only so many links in the great chain of corruption, which will soon fetter the whole human race in irreparable slavery and incurable wretchedness: your improvements proceed in a simple ratio, while the factitious wants and unnatural appetites they engender proceed in a compound one; and thus one generation acquires fifty wants, and fifty means of supplying them are invented, which each in its turn engenders two new ones; so that the next generation has a hundred, the next two hundred, the next four hundred, till every human being becomes such a helpless compound of perverted inclinations, that he is altogether at the mercy of external circumstances, loses all independence and singleness of character, and degenerates so rapidly from the primitive dignity of his sylvan origin, that it is scarcely possible to indulge in any other expectation, than that the whole species must at length be exterminated by its own infinite imbecility and vileness." "your opinions," said mr jenkison, a round-faced little gentleman of about forty-five, "seem to differ _toto coelo_. i have often debated the matter in my own mind, _pro_ and _con_, and have at length arrived at this conclusion,--that there is not in the human race a tendency either to moral perfectibility or deterioration; but that the quantities of each are so exactly balanced by their reciprocal results, that the species, with respect to the sum of good and evil, knowledge and ignorance, happiness and misery, remains exactly and perpetually _in statu quo_." "surely," said mr foster, "you cannot maintain such a proposition in the face of evidence so luminous. look at the progress of all the arts and sciences,--see chemistry, botany, astronomy----" "surely," said mr escot, "experience deposes against you. look at the rapid growth of corruption, luxury, selfishness----" "really, gentlemen," said the reverend doctor gaster, after clearing the husk in his throat with two or three hems, "this is a very sceptical, and, i must say, atheistical conversation, and i should have thought, out of respect to my cloth----" here the coach stopped, and the coachman, opening the door, vociferated--"breakfast, gentlemen;" a sound which so gladdened the ears of the divine, that the alacrity with which he sprang from the vehicle superinduced a distortion of his ankle, and he was obliged to limp into the inn between mr escot and mr jenkison; the former observing, that he ought to look for nothing but evil, and, therefore, should not be surprised at this little accident; the latter remarking, that the comfort of a good breakfast, and the pain of a sprained ankle, pretty exactly balanced each other. chapter ii the squire--the breakfast squire headlong, in the meanwhile, was quadripartite in his locality; that is to say, he was superintending the operations in four scenes of action--namely, the cellar, the library, the picture-gallery, and the dining-room,--preparing for the reception of his philosophical and dilettanti visitors. his myrmidon on this occasion was a little red-nosed butler, whom nature seemed to have cast in the genuine mould of an antique silenus, and who waddled about the house after his master, wiping his forehead and panting for breath, while the latter bounced from room to room like a cracker, and was indefatigable in his requisitions for the proximity of his vinous achates, whose advice and co-operation he deemed no less necessary in the library than in the cellar. multitudes of packages had arrived, by land and water, from london, and liverpool, and chester, and manchester, and birmingham, and various parts of the mountains: books, wine, cheese, globes, mathematical instruments, turkeys, telescopes, hams, tongues, microscopes, quadrants, sextants, fiddles, flutes, tea, sugar, electrical machines, figs, spices, air-pumps, soda-water, chemical apparatus, eggs, french-horns, drawing books, palettes, oils and colours, bottled ale and porter, scenery for a private theatre, pickles and fish-sauce, patent lamps and chandeliers, barrels of oysters, sofas, chairs, tables, carpets, beds, looking-glasses, pictures, fruits and confections, nuts, oranges, lemons, packages of salt salmon, and jars of portugal grapes. these, arriving with infinite rapidity, and in inexhaustible succession, had been deposited at random, as the convenience of the moment dictated,--sofas in the cellar, chandeliers in the kitchen, hampers of ale in the drawing-room, and fiddles and fish-sauce in the library. the servants, unpacking all these in furious haste, and flying with them from place to place, according to the tumultuous directions of squire headlong and the little fat butler who fumed at his heels, chafed, and crossed, and clashed, and tumbled over one another up stairs and down. all was bustle, uproar, and confusion; yet nothing seemed to advance: while the rage and impetuosity of the squire continued fermenting to the highest degree of exasperation, which he signified, from time to time, by converting some newly unpacked article, such as a book, a bottle, a ham, or a fiddle, into a missile against the head of some unfortunate servant who did not seem to move in a ratio of velocity corresponding to the intensity of his master's desires. in this state of eager preparation we shall leave the happy inhabitants of headlong hall, and return to the three philosophers and the unfortunate divine, whom we left limping with a sprained ankle, into the breakfast-room of the inn; where his two supporters deposited him safely in a large arm-chair, with his wounded leg comfortably stretched out on another. the morning being extremely cold, he contrived to be seated as near the fire as was consistent with his other object of having a perfect command of the table and its apparatus; which consisted not only of the ordinary comforts of tea and toast, but of a delicious supply of new-laid eggs, and a magnificent round of beef; against which mr escot immediately pointed all the artillery of his eloquence, declaring the use of animal food, conjointly with that of fire, to be one of the principal causes of the present degeneracy of mankind. "the natural and original man," said he, "lived in the woods: the roots and fruits of the earth supplied his simple nutriment: he had few desires, and no diseases. but, when he began to sacrifice victims on the altar of superstition, to pursue the goat and the deer, and, by the pernicious invention of fire, to pervert their flesh into food, luxury, disease, and premature death, were let loose upon the world. such is clearly the correct interpretation of the fable of prometheus, which is the symbolical portraiture of that disastrous epoch, when man first applied fire to culinary purposes, and thereby surrendered his liver to the vulture of disease. from that period the stature of mankind has been in a state of gradual diminution, and i have not the least doubt that it will continue to grow _small by degrees, and lamentably less_, till the whole race will vanish imperceptibly from the face of the earth." "i cannot agree," said mr foster, "in the consequences being so very disastrous. i admit, that in some respects the use of animal food retards, though it cannot materially inhibit, the perfectibility of the species. but the use of fire was indispensably necessary, as aeschylus and virgil expressly assert, to give being to the various arts of life, which, in their rapid and interminable progress, will finally conduct every individual of the race to the philosophic pinnacle of pure and perfect felicity." "in the controversy concerning animal and vegetable food," said mr jenkison, "there is much to be said on both sides; and, the question being in equipoise, i content myself with a mixed diet, and make a point of eating whatever is placed before me, provided it be good in its kind." in this opinion his two brother philosophers practically coincided, though they both ran down the theory as highly detrimental to the best interests of man. "i am really astonished," said the reverend doctor gaster, gracefully picking off the supernal fragments of an egg he had just cracked, and clearing away a space at the top for the reception of a small piece of butter--"i am really astonished, gentlemen, at the very heterodox opinions i have heard you deliver: since nothing can be more obvious than that all animals were created solely and exclusively for the use of man." "even the tiger that devours him?" said mr escot. "certainly," said doctor gaster. "how do you prove it?" said mr escot. "it requires no proof," said doctor gaster: "it is a point of doctrine. it is written, therefore it is so." "nothing can be more logical," said mr jenkison. "it has been said," continued he, "that the ox was expressly made to be eaten by man: it may be said, by a parity of reasoning, that man was expressly made to be eaten by the tiger: but as wild oxen exist where there are no men, and men where there are no tigers, it would seem that in these instances they do not properly answer the ends of their creation." "it is a mystery," said doctor gaster. "not to launch into the question of final causes," said mr escot, helping himself at the same time to a slice of beef, "concerning which i will candidly acknowledge i am as profoundly ignorant as the most dogmatical theologian possibly can be, i just wish to observe, that the pure and peaceful manners which homer ascribes to the lotophagi, and which at this day characterise many nations (the hindoos, for example, who subsist exclusively on the fruits of the earth), depose very strongly in favour of a vegetable regimen." "it may be said, on the contrary," said mr foster, "that animal food acts on the mind as manure does on flowers, forcing them into a degree of expansion they would not otherwise have attained. if we can imagine a philosophical auricula falling into a train of theoretical meditation on its original and natural nutriment, till it should work itself up into a profound abomination of bullock's blood, sugar-baker's scum, and other _unnatural_ ingredients of that rich composition of soil which had brought it to perfection[ . ], and insist on being planted in common earth, it would have all the advantage of natural theory on its side that the most strenuous advocate of the vegetable system could desire; but it would soon discover the practical error of its retrograde experiment by its lamentable inferiority in strength and beauty to all the auriculas around it. i am afraid, in some instances at least, this analogy holds true with respect to mind. no one will make a comparison, in point of mental power, between the hindoos and the ancient greeks." "the anatomy of the human stomach," said mr escot, "and the formation of the teeth, clearly place man in the class of frugivorous animals." "many anatomists," said mr foster, "are of a different opinion, and agree in discerning the characteristics of the carnivorous classes." "i am no anatomist," said mr jenkison, "and cannot decide where doctors disagree; in the meantime, i conclude that man is omnivorous, and on that conclusion i act." "your conclusion is truly orthodox," said the reverend doctor gaster: "indeed, the loaves and fishes are typical of a mixed diet; and the practice of the church in all ages shows----" "that it never loses sight of the loaves and fishes," said mr escot. "it never loses sight of any point of sound doctrine," said the reverend doctor. the coachman now informed them their time was elapsed; nor could all the pathetic remonstrances of the reverend divine, who declared he had not half breakfasted, succeed in gaining one minute from the inexorable jehu. "you will allow," said mr foster, as soon as they were again in motion, "that the wild man of the woods could not transport himself over two hundred miles of forest, with as much facility as one of these vehicles transports you and me through the heart of this cultivated country." "i am certain," said mr escot, "that a wild man can travel an immense distance without fatigue; but what is the advantage of locomotion? the wild man is happy in one spot, and there he remains: the civilised man is wretched in every place he happens to be in, and then congratulates himself on being accommodated with a machine, that will whirl him to another, where he will be just as miserable as ever." we shall now leave the mail-coach to find its way to capel cerig, the nearest point of the holyhead road to the dwelling of squire headlong. chapter iii the arrivals in the midst of that scene of confusion thrice confounded, in which we left the inhabitants of headlong hall, arrived the lovely caprioletta headlong, the squire's sister (whom he had sent for, from the residence of her maiden aunt at caernarvon, to do the honours of his house), beaming like light on chaos, to arrange disorder and harmonise discord. the tempestuous spirit of her brother became instantaneously as smooth as the surface of the lake of llanberris; and the little fat butler "plessed cot, and st tafit, and the peautiful tamsel," for being permitted to move about the house in his natural pace. in less than twenty-four hours after her arrival, everything was disposed in its proper station, and the squire began to be all impatience for the appearance of his promised guests. the first visitor with whom he had the felicity of shaking hands was marmaduke milestone, esquire, who arrived with a portfolio under his arm. mr milestone[ . ] was a picturesque landscape gardener of the first celebrity, who was not without hopes of persuading squire headlong to put his romantic pleasure-grounds under a process of improvement, promising himself a signal triumph for his incomparable art in the difficult and, therefore, glorious achievement of polishing and trimming the rocks of llanberris. next arrived a post-chaise from the inn at capel cerig, containing the reverend doctor gaster. it appeared, that, when the mail-coach deposited its valuable cargo, early on the second morning, at the inn at capel cerig, there was only one post-chaise to be had; it was therefore determined that the reverend doctor and the luggage should proceed in the chaise, and that the three philosophers should walk. when the reverend gentleman first seated himself in the chaise, the windows were down all round; but he allowed it to drive off under the idea that he could easily pull them up. this task, however, he had considerable difficulty in accomplishing, and when he had succeeded, it availed him little; for the frames and glasses had long since discontinued their ancient familiarity. he had, however, no alternative but to proceed, and to comfort himself, as he went, with some choice quotations from the book of job. the road led along the edges of tremendous chasms, with torrents dashing in the bottom; so that, if his teeth had not chattered with cold, they would have done so with fear. the squire shook him heartily by the hand, and congratulated him on his safe arrival at headlong hall. the doctor returned the squeeze, and assured him that the congratulation was by no means misapplied. next came the three philosophers, highly delighted with their walk, and full of rapturous exclamations on the sublime beauties of the scenery. the doctor shrugged up his shoulders, and confessed he preferred the scenery of putney and kew, where a man could go comfortably to sleep in his chaise, without being in momentary terror of being hurled headlong down a precipice. mr milestone observed, that there were great capabilities in the scenery, but it wanted shaving and polishing. if he could but have it under his care for a single twelvemonth, he assured them no one would be able to know it again. mr jenkison thought the scenery was just what it ought to be, and required no alteration. mr foster thought it could be improved, but doubted if that effect would be produced by the system of mr milestone. mr escot did not think that any human being could improve it, but had no doubt of its having changed very considerably for the worse, since the days when the now barren rocks were covered with the immense forest of snowdon, which must have contained a very fine race of wild men, not less than ten feet high. the next arrival was that of mr cranium, and his lovely daughter miss cephalis cranium, who flew to the arms of her dear friend caprioletta, with all that warmth of friendship which young ladies usually assume towards each other in the presence of young gentlemen.[ . ] miss cephalis blushed like a carnation at the sight of mr escot, and mr escot glowed like a corn-poppy at the sight of miss cephalis. it was at least obvious to all observers, that he could imagine the possibility of one change for the better, even in this terrestrial theatre of universal deterioration. mr cranium's eyes wandered from mr escot to his daughter, and from his daughter to mr escot; and his complexion, in the course of the scrutiny, underwent several variations, from the dark red of the peony to the deep blue of the convolvulus. mr escot had formerly been the received lover of miss cephalis, till he incurred the indignation of her father by laughing at a very profound craniological dissertation which the old gentleman delivered; nor had mr escot yet discovered the means of mollifying his wrath. mr cranium carried in his own hands a bag, the contents of which were too precious to be intrusted to any one but himself; and earnestly entreated to be shown to the chamber appropriated for his reception, that he might deposit his treasure in safety. the little butler was accordingly summoned to conduct him to his _cubiculum_. next arrived a post-chaise, carrying four insides, whose extreme thinness enabled them to travel thus economically without experiencing the slightest inconvenience. these four personages were, two very profound critics, mr gall and mr treacle, who followed the trade of reviewers, but occasionally indulged themselves in the composition of bad poetry; and two very multitudinous versifiers, mr nightshade and mr mac laurel, who followed the trade of poetry, but occasionally indulged themselves in the composition of bad criticism. mr nightshade and mr mac laurel were the two senior lieutenants of a very formidable corps of critics, of whom timothy treacle, esquire, was captain, and geoffrey gall, esquire, generalissimo. the last arrivals were mr cornelius chromatic, the most profound and scientific of all amateurs of the fiddle, with his two blooming daughters, miss tenorina and miss graziosa; sir patrick o'prism, a dilettante painter of high renown, and his maiden aunt, miss philomela poppyseed, an indefatigable compounder of novels, written for the express purpose of supporting every species of superstition and prejudice; and mr panscope, the chemical, botanical, geological, astronomical, mathematical, metaphysical, meteorological, anatomical, physiological, galvanistical, musical, pictorial, bibliographical, critical philosopher, who had run through the whole circle of the sciences, and understood them all equally well. mr milestone was impatient to take a walk round the grounds, that he might examine how far the system of clumping and levelling could be carried advantageously into effect. the ladies retired to enjoy each other's society in the first happy moments of meeting: the reverend doctor gaster sat by the library fire, in profound meditation over a volume of the "_almanach des gourmands_:" mr panscope sat in the opposite corner with a volume of rees' cyclopaedia: mr cranium was busy upstairs: mr chromatic retreated to the music-room, where he fiddled through a book of solos before the ringing of the first dinner bell. the remainder of the party supported mr milestone's proposition; and, accordingly, squire headlong and mr milestone leading the van, they commenced their perambulation. chapter iv the grounds "i perceive," said mr milestone, after they had walked a few paces, "these grounds have never been touched by the finger of taste." "the place is quite a wilderness," said squire headlong: "for, during the latter part of my father's life, while i was _finishing_ my _education_, he troubled himself about nothing but the cellar, and suffered everything else to go to rack and ruin. a mere wilderness, as you see, even now in december; but in summer a complete nursery of briers, a forest of thistles, a plantation of nettles, without any live stock but goats, that have eaten up all the bark of the trees. here you see is the pedestal of a statue, with only half a leg and four toes remaining: there were many here once. when i was a boy, i used to sit every day on the shoulders of hercules: what became of _him_ i have never been able to ascertain. neptune has been lying these seven years in the dust-hole; atlas had his head knocked off to fit him for propping a shed; and only the day before yesterday we fished bacchus out of the horse-pond." "my dear sir," said mr milestone, "accord me your permission to wave the wand of enchantment over your grounds. the rocks shall be blown up, the trees shall be cut down, the wilderness and all its goats shall vanish like mist. pagodas and chinese bridges, gravel walks and shrubberies, bowling-greens, canals, and clumps of larch, shall rise upon its ruins. one age, sir, has brought to light the treasures of ancient learning; a second has penetrated into the depths of metaphysics; a third has brought to perfection the science of astronomy; but it was reserved for the exclusive genius of the present times, to invent the noble art of picturesque gardening, which has given, as it were, a new tint to the complexion of nature, and a new outline to the physiognomy of the universe!" "give me leave," said sir patrick o'prism, "to take an exception to that same. your system of levelling, and trimming, and clipping, and docking, and clumping, and polishing, and cropping, and shaving, destroys all the beautiful intricacies of natural luxuriance, and all the graduated harmonies of light and shade, melting into one another, as you see them on that rock over yonder. i never saw one of your improved places, as you call them, and which are nothing but big bowling-greens, like sheets of green paper, with a parcel of round clumps scattered over them, like so many spots of ink, flicked at random out of a pen,[ . ] and a solitary animal here and there looking as if it were lost, that i did not think it was for all the world like hounslow heath, thinly sprinkled over with bushes and highwaymen." "sir," said mr milestone, "you will have the goodness to make a distinction between the picturesque and the beautiful." "will i?" said sir patrick, "och! but i won't. for what is beautiful? that what pleases the eye. and what pleases the eye? tints variously broken and blended. now, tints variously broken and blended constitute the picturesque." "allow me," said mr gall. "i distinguish the picturesque and the beautiful, and i add to them, in the laying out of grounds, a third and distinct character, which i call _unexpectedness_." "pray, sir," said mr milestone, "by what name do you distinguish this character, when a person walks round the grounds for the second time?"[ . ] mr gall bit his lips, and inwardly vowed to revenge himself on milestone, by cutting up his next publication. a long controversy now ensued concerning the picturesque and the beautiful, highly edifying to squire headlong. the three philosophers stopped, as they wound round a projecting point of rock, to contemplate a little boat which was gliding over the tranquil surface of the lake below. "the blessings of civilisation," said mr foster, "extend themselves to the meanest individuals of the community. that boatman, singing as he sails along, is, i have no doubt, a very happy, and, comparatively to the men of his class some centuries back, a very enlightened and intelligent man." "as a partisan of the system of the moral perfectibility of the human race," said mr escot,--who was always for considering things on a large scale, and whose thoughts immediately wandered from the lake to the ocean, from the little boat to a ship of the line,--"you will probably be able to point out to me the degree of improvement that you suppose to have taken place in the character of a sailor, from the days when jason sailed through the cyanean symplegades, or noah moored his ark on the summit of ararat." "if you talk to me," said mr foster, "of mythological personages, of course i cannot meet you on fair grounds." "we will begin, if you please, then," said mr escot, "no further back than the battle of salamis; and i will ask you if you think the mariners of england are, in any one respect, morally or intellectually, superior to those who then preserved the liberties of greece, under the direction of themistocles?" "i will venture to assert," said mr foster, "that considered merely as sailors, which is the only fair mode of judging them, they are as far superior to the athenians, as the structure of our ships is superior to that of theirs. would not one english seventy-four, think you, have been sufficient to have sunk, burned, and put to flight, all the persian and grecian vessels in that memorable bay? contemplate the progress of naval architecture, and the slow, but immense succession of concatenated intelligence, by which it has gradually attained its present stage of perfectibility. in this, as in all other branches of art and science, every generation possesses all the knowledge of the preceding, and adds to it its own discoveries in a progression to which there seems no limit. the skill requisite to direct these immense machines is proportionate to their magnitude and complicated mechanism; and, therefore, the english sailor, considered merely as a sailor, is vastly superior to the ancient greek." "you make a distinction, of course," said mr escot, "between scientific and moral perfectibility?" "i conceive," said mr foster, "that men are virtuous in proportion as they are enlightened; and that, as every generation increases in knowledge, it also increases in virtue." "i wish it were so," said mr escot; "but to me the very reverse appears to be the fact. the progress of knowledge is not general: it is confined to a chosen few of every age. how far these are better than their neighbours, we may examine by and bye. the mass of mankind is composed of beasts of burden, mere clods, and tools of their superiors. by enlarging and complicating your machines, you degrade, not exalt, the human animals you employ to direct them. when the boatswain of a seventy-four pipes all hands to the main tack, and flourishes his rope's end over the shoulders of the poor fellows who are tugging at the ropes, do you perceive so dignified, so gratifying a picture, as ulysses exhorting his dear friends, his eriaeres 'etairoi, to ply their oars with energy? you will say, ulysses was a fabulous character. but the economy of his vessel is drawn from nature. every man on board has a character and a will of his own. he talks to them, argues with them, convinces them; and they obey him, because they love him, and know the reason of his orders. now, as i have said before, all singleness of character is lost. we divide men into herds like cattle: an individual man, if you strip him of all that is extraneous to himself, is the most wretched and contemptible creature on the face of the earth. the sciences advance. true. a few years of study puts a modern mathematician in possession of more than newton knew, and leaves him at leisure to add new discoveries of his own. agreed. but does this make him a newton? does it put him in possession of that range of intellect, that grasp of mind, from which the discoveries of newton sprang? it is mental power that i look for: if you can demonstrate the increase of that, i will give up the field. energy--independence--individuality--disinterested virtue--active benevolence--self-oblivion--universal philanthropy--these are the qualities i desire to find, and of which i contend that every succeeding age produces fewer examples. i repeat it; there is scarcely such a thing to be found as a single individual man; a few classes compose the whole frame of society, and when you know one of a class you know the whole of it. give me the wild man of the woods; the original, unthinking, unscientific, unlogical savage: in him there is at least some good; but, in a civilised, sophisticated, cold-blooded, mechanical, calculating slave of mammon and the world, there is none--absolutely none. sir, if i fall into a river, an unsophisticated man will jump in and bring me out; but a philosopher will look on with the utmost calmness, and consider me in the light of a projectile, and, making a calculation of the degree of force with which i have impinged the surface, the resistance of the fluid, the velocity of the current, and the depth of the water in that particular place, he will ascertain with the greatest nicety in what part of the mud at the bottom i may probably be found, at any given distance of time from the moment of my first immersion." mr foster was preparing to reply, when the first dinner-bell rang, and he immediately commenced a precipitate return towards the house; followed by his two companions, who both admitted that he was now leading the way to at least a temporary period of physical amelioration: "but, alas!" added mr escot, after a moment's reflection, "epulae nocuere repostae![ . ]" chapter v the dinner the sun was now terminating his diurnal course, and the lights were glittering on the festal board. when the ladies had retired, and the burgundy had taken two or three tours of the table, the following conversation took place:-- _squire headlong._ push about the bottle: mr escot, it stands with you. no heeltaps. as to skylight, liberty-hall. _mr mac laurel._ really, squire headlong, this is the vara nectar itsel. ye hae saretainly discovered the tarrestrial paradise, but it flows wi' a better leecor than milk an' honey. _the reverend doctor gaster._ hem! mr mac laurel! there is a degree of profaneness in that observation, which i should not have looked for in so staunch a supporter of church and state. milk and honey was the pure food of the antediluvian patriarchs, who knew not the use of the grape, happily for them.--(_tossing off a bumper of burgundy._) _mr escot._ happy, indeed! the first inhabitants of the world knew not the use either of wine or animal food; it is, therefore, by no means incredible that they lived to the age of several centuries, free from war, and commerce, and arbitrary government, and every other species of desolating wickedness. but man was then a very different animal to what he now is: he had not the faculty of speech; he was not encumbered with clothes; he lived in the open air; his first step out of which, as hamlet truly observes, is _into his grave_[ . ]. his first dwellings, of course, were the hollows of trees and rocks. in process of time he began to build: thence grew villages; thence grew cities. luxury, oppression, poverty, misery, and disease kept pace with the progress of his pretended improvements, till, from a free, strong, healthy, peaceful animal, he has become a weak, distempered, cruel, carnivorous slave. _the reverend doctor gaster._ your doctrine is orthodox, in so far as you assert that the original man was not encumbered with clothes, and that he lived in the open air; but, as to the faculty of speech, that, it is certain, he had, for the authority of moses---- _mr escot._ of course, sir, i do not presume to dissent from the very exalted authority of that most enlightened astronomer and profound cosmogonist, who had, moreover, the advantage of being inspired; but when i indulge myself with a ramble in the fields of speculation, and attempt to deduce what is probable and rational from the sources of analysis, experience, and comparison, i confess i am too often apt to lose sight of the doctrines of that great fountain of theological and geological philosophy. _squire headlong._ push about the bottle. _mr foster._ do you suppose the mere animal life of a wild man, living on acorns, and sleeping on the ground, comparable in felicity to that of a newton, ranging through unlimited space, and penetrating into the arcana of universal motion--to that of a locke, unravelling the labyrinth of mind--to that of a lavoisier, detecting the minutest combinations of matter, and reducing all nature to its elements--to that of a shakespeare, piercing and developing the springs of passion--or of a milton, identifying himself, as it were, with the beings of an invisible world? _mr escot._ you suppose extreme cases: but, on the score of happiness, what comparison can you make between the tranquil being of the wild man of the woods and the wretched and turbulent existence of milton, the victim of persecution, poverty, blindness, and neglect? the records of literature demonstrate that happiness and intelligence are seldom sisters. even if it were otherwise, it would prove nothing. the many are always sacrificed to the few. where one man advances, hundreds retrograde; and the balance is always in favour of universal deterioration. _mr foster._ virtue is independent of external circumstances. the exalted understanding looks into the truth of things, and, in its own peaceful contemplations, rises superior to the world. no philosopher would resign his mental acquisitions for the purchase of any terrestrial good. _mr escot._ in other words, no man whatever would resign his identity, which is nothing more than the consciousness of his perceptions, as the price of any acquisition. but every man, without exception, would willingly effect a very material change in his relative situation to other individuals. unluckily for the rest of your argument, the understanding of literary people is for the most part _exalted_, as you express it, not so much by the love of truth and virtue, as by arrogance and self-sufficiency; and there is, perhaps, less disinterestedness, less liberality, less general benevolence, and more envy, hatred, and uncharitableness among them, than among any other description of men. (_the eye of mr escot, as he pronounced these words, rested very innocently and unintentionally on mr gall._) _mr gall._ you allude, sir, i presume, to my review. _mr escot._ pardon me, sir. you will be convinced it is impossible i can allude to your review, when i assure you that i have never read a single page of it. _mr gall, mr treacle, mr nightshade, and mr mac laurel._ never read our review! ! ! ! _mr escot._ never. i look on periodical criticism in general to be a species of shop, where panegyric and defamation are sold, wholesale, retail, and for exportation. i am not inclined to be a purchaser of these commodities, or to encourage a trade which i consider pregnant with mischief. _mr mac laurel._ i can readily conceive, sir, ye wou'd na wullingly encoorage ony dealer in panegeeric: but, frae the manner in which ye speak o' the first creetics an' scholars o' the age, i shou'd think ye wou'd hae a leetle mair predilaction for deefamation. _mr escot._ i have no predilection, sir, for defamation. i make a point of speaking the truth on all occasions; and it seldom happens that the truth can be spoken without some stricken deer pronouncing it a libel. _mr nightshade._ you are perhaps, sir, an enemy to literature in general? _mr escot._ if i were, sir, i should be a better friend to periodical critics. _squire headlong._ buz! _mr treacle._ may i simply take the liberty to inquire into the basis of your objection? _mr escot._ i conceive that periodical criticism disseminates superficial knowledge, and its perpetual adjunct, vanity; that it checks in the youthful mind the habit of thinking for itself; that it delivers partial opinions, and thereby misleads the judgment; that it is never conducted with a view to the general interests of literature, but to serve the interested ends of individuals, and the miserable purposes of party. _mr mac laurel._ ye ken, sir, a mon mun leeve. _mr escot._ while he can live honourably, naturally, justly, certainly: no longer. _mr mac laurel._ every mon, sir, leeves according to his ain notions of honour an' justice: there is a wee defference amang the learned wi' respact to the defineetion o' the terms. _mr escot._ i believe it is generally admitted that one of the ingredients of justice is disinterestedness. _mr mac laurel._ it is na admetted, sir, amang the pheelosophers of edinbroo', that there is ony sic thing as desenterestedness in the warld, or that a mon can care for onything sae much as his ain sel: for ye mun observe, sir, every mon has his ain parteecular feelings of what is gude, an' beautifu', an' consentaneous to his ain indiveedual nature, an' desires to see every thing aboot him in that parteecular state which is maist conformable to his ain notions o' the moral an' poleetical fetness o' things. twa men, sir, shall purchase a piece o' grund atween 'em, and ae mon shall cover his half wi' a park---- _mr milestone._ beautifully laid out in lawns and clumps, with a belt of trees at the circumference, and an artificial lake in the centre. _mr mac laurel._ exactly, sir: an' shall keep it a' for his ain sel: an' the other mon shall divide his half into leetle farms of twa or three acres---- _mr escot._ like those of the roman republic, and build a cottage on each of them, and cover his land with a simple, innocent, and smiling population, who shall owe, not only their happiness, but their existence, to his benevolence. _mr mac laurel._ exactly, sir: an' ye will ca' the first mon selfish, an' the second desenterested; but the pheelosophical truth is semply this, that the ane is pleased wi' looking at trees, an' the other wi' seeing people happy an' comfortable. it is aunly a matter of indiveedual feeling. a paisant saves a mon's life for the same reason that a hero or a footpad cuts his thrapple: an' a pheelosopher delevers a mon frae a preson, for the same reason that a tailor or a prime meenester puts him into it: because it is conformable to his ain parteecular feelings o' the moral an' poleetical fetness o' things. _squire headlong._ wake the reverend doctor. doctor, the bottle stands with you. _the reverend doctor gaster._ it is an error of which i am seldom guilty. _mr mac laurel._ noo, ye ken, sir, every mon is the centre of his ain system, an' endaivours as much as possible to adapt every thing aroond him to his ain parteecular views. _mr escot._ thus, sir, i presume, it suits the particular views of a poet, at one time to take the part of the people against their oppressors, and at another, to take the part of the oppressors, against the people. _mr mac laurel._ ye mun alloo, sir, that poetry is a sort of ware or commodity, that is brought into the public market wi' a' other descreptions of merchandise, an' that a mon is pairfectly justified in getting the best price he can for his article. noo, there are three reasons for taking the part o' the people; the first is, when general leeberty an' public happiness are conformable to your ain parteecular feelings o' the moral an' poleetical fetness o' things: the second is, when they happen to be, as it were, in a state of exceetabeelity, an' ye think ye can get a gude price for your commodity, by flingin' in a leetle seasoning o' pheelanthropy an' republican speerit; the third is, when ye think ye can bully the menestry into gieing ye a place or a pansion to hau'd your din, an' in that case, ye point an attack against them within the pale o' the law; an' if they tak nae heed o' ye, ye open a stronger fire; an' the less heed they tak, the mair ye bawl; an' the mair factious ye grow, always within the pale o' the law, till they send a plenipotentiary to treat wi' ye for yoursel, an' then the mair popular ye happen to be, the better price ye fetch. _squire headlong._ off with your heeltaps. _mr cranium._ i perfectly agree with mr mac laurel in his definition of self-love and disinterestedness: every man's actions are determined by his peculiar views, and those views are determined by the organisation of his skull. a man in whom the organ of benevolence is not developed, cannot be benevolent: he in whom it is so, cannot be otherwise. the organ of self-love is prodigiously developed in the greater number of subjects that have fallen under my observation. _mr escot._ much less i presume, among savage than civilised men, who, _constant only to the love of self, and consistent only in their aim to deceive, are always actuated by the hope of personal advantage, or by the dread of personal punishment_[ . ]. _mr cranium._ very probably. _mr escot._ you have, of course, found very copious specimens of the organs of hypocrisy, destruction, and avarice. _mr cranium._ secretiveness, destructiveness, and covetiveness. you may add, if you please, that of constructiveness. _mr escot._ meaning, i presume, the organ of building; which i contend to be not a natural organ of the _featherless biped_. _mr cranium._ pardon me: it is here.--(_as he said these words, he produced a skull from his pocket, and placed it on the table to the great surprise of the company._)--this was the skull of sir christopher wren. you observe this protuberance--(_the skull was handed round the table._) _mr escot._ i contend that the original unsophisticated man was by no means constructive. he lived in the open air, under a tree. _the reverend doctor gaster._ the tree of life. unquestionably. till he had tasted the forbidden fruit. _mr jenkison._ at which period, probably, the organ of constructiveness was added to his anatomy, as a punishment for his transgression. _mr escot._ there could not have been a more severe one, since the propensity which has led him to building cities has proved the greatest curse of his existence. _squire headlong._ (_taking the skull._) _memento mori._ come, a bumper of burgundy. _mr nightshade._ a very classical application, squire headlong. the romans were in the practice of adhibiting skulls at their banquets, and sometimes little skeletons of silver, as a silent admonition to the guests to enjoy life while it lasted. _the reverend doctor gaster._ sound doctrine, mr nightshade. _mr escot._ i question its soundness. the use of vinous spirit has a tremendous influence in the deterioration of the human race. _mr foster._ i fear, indeed, it operates as a considerable check to the progress of the species towards moral and intellectual perfection. yet many great men have been of opinion that it exalts the imagination, fires the genius, accelerates the flow of ideas, and imparts to dispositions naturally cold and deliberative that enthusiastic sublimation which is the source of greatness and energy. _mr nightshade._ _laudibus arguitur vini vinosus homerus._[ . ] _mr jenkison._ i conceive the use of wine to be always pernicious in excess, but often useful in moderation: it certainly kills some, but it saves the lives of others: i find that an occasional glass, taken with judgment and caution, has a very salutary effect in maintaining that equilibrium of the system, which it is always my aim to preserve; and this calm and temperate use of wine was, no doubt, what homer meant to inculcate, when he said: _par de depas oinoio, piein hote thumos anogoi._[ . ] _squire headlong._ good. pass the bottle. (_un morne silence_). sir christopher does not seem to have raised our spirits. chromatic, favour us with a specimen of your vocal powers. something in point. mr chromatic, without further preface, immediately struck up the following song in his last binn sir peter lies, who knew not what it was to frown: death took him mellow, by surprise, and in his cellar stopped him down. through all our land we could not boast a knight more gay, more prompt than he, to rise and fill a bumper toast, and pass it round with three times three. none better knew the feast to sway, or keep mirth's boat in better trim; for nature had but little clay like that of which she moulded him. the meanest guest that graced his board was there the freest of the free, his bumper toast when peter poured, and passed it round with three times three. he kept at true good humour's mark the social flow of pleasure's tide: he never made a brow look dark, nor caused a tear, but when he died. no sorrow round his tomb should dwell: more pleased his gay old ghost would be, for funeral song, and passing bell, to hear no sound but three times three. (_hammering of knuckles and glasses and shouts of bravo!_) _mr panscope._ (_suddenly emerging from a deep reverie._) i have heard, with the most profound attention, every thing which the gentleman on the other side of the table has thought proper to advance on the subject of human deterioration; and i must take the liberty to remark, that it augurs a very considerable degree of presumption in any individual, to set himself up against the _authority_ of so many great men, as may be marshalled in metaphysical phalanx under the opposite banners of the controversy; such as aristotle, plato, the scholiast on aristophanes, st chrysostom, st jerome, st athanasius, orpheus, pindar, simonides, gronovius, hemsterhusius, longinus, sir isaac newton, thomas paine, doctor paley, the king of prussia, the king of poland, cicero, monsieur gautier, hippocrates, machiavelli, milton, colley cibber, bojardo, gregory nazianzenus, locke, d'alembert, boccaccio, daniel defoe, erasmus, doctor smollett, zimmermann, solomon, confucius, zoroaster, and thomas-a-kempis. _mr escot._ i presume, sir, you are one of those who value an _authority_ more than a reason. _mr panscope._ the _authority_, sir, of all these great men, whose works, as well as the whole of the encyclopaedia britannica, the entire series of the monthly review, the complete set of the variorum classics, and the memoirs of the academy of inscriptions, i have read through from beginning to end, deposes, with irrefragable refutation, against your ratiocinative speculations, wherein you seem desirous, by the futile process of analytical dialectics, to subvert the pyramidal structure of synthetically deduced opinions, which have withstood the secular revolutions of physiological disquisition, and which i maintain to be transcendentally self-evident, categorically certain, and syllogistically demonstrable. _squire headlong._ bravo! pass the bottle. the very best speech that ever was made. _mr escot._ it has only the slight disadvantage of being unintelligible. _mr panscope._ i am not obliged, sir, as dr johnson observed on a similar occasion, to furnish you with an understanding. _mr escot._ i fear, sir, you would have some difficulty in furnishing me with such an article from your own stock. _mr panscope._ 'sdeath, sir, do you question my understanding? _mr escot._ i only question, sir, where i expect a reply; which, from things that have no existence, i am not visionary enough to anticipate. _mr panscope._ i beg leave to observe, sir, that my language was perfectly perspicuous, and etymologically correct; and, i conceive, i have demonstrated what i shall now take the liberty to say in plain terms, that all your opinions are extremely absurd. _mr escot._ i should be sorry, sir, to advance any opinion that you would not think absurd. _mr panscope._ death and fury, sir---- _mr escot._ say no more, sir. that apology is quite sufficient. _mr panscope._ apology, sir? _mr escot._ even so, sir. you have lost your temper, which i consider equivalent to a confession that you have the worst of the argument. _mr panscope._ lightning and devils! sir---- _squire headlong._ no civil war!--temperance, in the name of bacchus!--a glee! a glee! _music has charms to bend the knotted oak._ sir patrick, you'll join? _sir patrick o'prism._ troth, with all my heart; for, by my soul, i'm bothered completely. _squire headlong._ agreed, then; you, and i, and chromatic. bumpers! come, strike up. squire headlong, mr chromatic, and sir patrick o'prism, each holding a bumper, immediately vociferated the following glee a heeltap! a heeltap! i never could bear it! so fill me a bumper, a bumper of claret! let the bottle pass freely, don't shirk it nor spare it, for a heeltap! a heeltap! i never could bear it! no skylight! no twilight! while bacchus rules o'er us: no thinking! no shrinking! all drinking in chorus: let us moisten our clay, since 'tis thirsty and porous: no thinking! no shrinking! all drinking in chorus! grand chorus _by squire headlong, mr chromatic, sir patrick o'prism, mr panscope, mr jenkison, mr gall, mr treacle, mr nightshade, mr mac laurel, mr cranium, mr milestone, and the reverend dr gaster._ a heeltap! a heeltap! i never could bear it! so fill me a bumper, a bumper of claret! let the bottle pass freely, don't shirk it nor spare it, for a heeltap! a heeltap! i never could bear it! 'omados kai doupos ororei' the little butler now waddled in with a summons from the ladies to tea and coffee. the squire was unwilling to leave his burgundy. mr escot strenuously urged the necessity of immediate adjournment, observing, that the longer they continued drinking the worse they should be. mr foster seconded the motion, declaring the transition from the bottle to female society to be an indisputable amelioration of the state of the sensitive man. mr jenkison allowed the squire and his two brother philosophers to settle the point between them, concluding that he was just as well in one place as another. the question of adjournment was then put, and carried by a large majority. chapter vi the evening mr panscope, highly irritated by the cool contempt with which mr escot had treated him, sate sipping his coffee and meditating revenge. he was not long in discovering the passion of his antagonist for the beautiful cephalis, for whom he had himself a species of predilection; and it was also obvious to him, that there was some lurking anger in the mind of her father, unfavourable to the hopes of his rival. the stimulus of revenge, superadded to that of preconceived inclination, determined him, after due deliberation, to _cut out_ mr escot in the young lady's favour. the practicability of this design he did not trouble himself to investigate; for the havoc he had made in the hearts of some silly girls, who were extremely vulnerable to flattery, and who, not understanding a word he said, considered him a _prodigious clever man_, had impressed him with an unhesitating idea of his own irresistibility. he had not only the requisites already specified for fascinating female vanity, he could likewise fiddle with tolerable dexterity, though by no means so _quick_ as mr chromatic (for our readers are of course aware that rapidity of execution, not delicacy of expression, constitutes the scientific perfection of modern music), and could warble a fashionable love-ditty with considerable affectation of feeling: besides this, he was always extremely well dressed, and was heir-apparent to an estate of ten thousand a-year. the influence which the latter consideration might have on the minds of the majority of his female acquaintance, whose morals had been formed by the novels of such writers as miss philomela poppyseed, did not once enter into his calculation of his own personal attractions. relying, therefore, on past success, he determined _to appeal to his fortune_, and already, in imagination, considered himself sole lord and master of the affections of the beautiful cephalis. mr escot and mr foster were the only two of the party who had entered the library (to which the ladies had retired, and which was interior to the music-room) in a state of perfect sobriety. mr escot had placed himself next to the beautiful cephalis: mr cranium had laid aside much of the terror of his frown; the short craniological conversation, which had passed between him and mr escot, had softened his heart in his favour; and the copious libations of burgundy in which he had indulged had smoothed his brow into unusual serenity. mr foster placed himself near the lovely caprioletta, whose artless and innocent conversation had already made an impression on his susceptible spirit. the reverend doctor gaster seated himself in the corner of a sofa near miss philomela poppyseed. miss philomela detailed to him the plan of a very moral and aristocratical novel she was preparing for the press, and continued holding forth, with her eyes half shut, till a long-drawn nasal tone from the reverend divine compelled her suddenly to open them in all the indignation of surprise. the cessation of the hum of her voice awakened the reverend gentleman, who, lifting up first one eyelid, then the other, articulated, or rather murmured, "admirably planned, indeed!" "i have not quite finished, sir," said miss philomela, bridling. "will you have the goodness to inform me where i left off?" the doctor hummed a while, and at length answered: "i think you had just laid it down as a position, that a thousand a-year is an indispensable ingredient in the passion of love, and that no man, who is not so far gifted by _nature_, can reasonably presume to feel that passion himself, or be correctly the object of it with a well-educated female." "that, sir," said miss philomela, highly incensed, "is the fundamental principle which i lay down in the first chapter, and which the whole four volumes, of which i detailed to you the outline, are intended to set in a strong practical light." "bless me!" said the doctor, "what a nap i must have had!" miss philomela flung away to the side of her dear friends gall and treacle, under whose fostering patronage she had been puffed into an extensive reputation, much to the advantage of the young ladies of the age, whom she taught to consider themselves as a sort of commodity, to be put up at public auction, and knocked down to the highest bidder. mr nightshade and mr mac laurel joined the trio; and it was secretly resolved, that miss philomela should furnish them with a portion of her manuscripts, and that messieurs gall & co. should devote the following morning to cutting and drying a critique on a work calculated to prove so extensively beneficial, that mr gall protested he really _envied_ the writer. while this amiable and enlightened quintetto were busily employed in flattering one another, mr cranium retired to complete the preparations he had begun in the morning for a lecture, with which he intended, on some future evening, to favour the company: sir patrick o'prism walked out into the grounds to study the effect of moonlight on the snow-clad mountains: mr foster and mr escot continued to make love, and mr panscope to digest his plan of attack on the heart of miss cephalis: mr jenkison sate by the fire, reading _much ado about nothing_: the reverend doctor gaster was still enjoying the benefit of miss philomela's opiate, and serenading the company from his solitary corner: mr chromatic was reading music, and occasionally humming a note: and mr milestone had produced his portfolio for the edification and amusement of miss tenorina, miss graziosa, and squire headlong, to whom he was pointing out the various beauties of his plan for lord littlebrain's park. _mr milestone._ this, you perceive, is the natural state of one part of the grounds. here is a wood, never yet touched by the finger of taste; thick, intricate, and gloomy. here is a little stream, dashing from stone to stone, and overshadowed with these untrimmed boughs. _miss tenorina._ the sweet romantic spot! how beautifully the birds must sing there on a summer evening! _miss graziosa._ dear sister! how can you endure the horrid thicket? _mr milestone._ you are right, miss graziosa: your taste is correct--perfectly _en regle_. now, here is the same place corrected--trimmed--polished --decorated--adorned. here sweeps a plantation, in that beautiful regular curve: there winds a gravel walk: here are parts of the old wood, left in these majestic circular clumps, disposed at equal distances with wonderful symmetry: there are some single shrubs scattered in elegant profusion: here a portugal laurel, there a juniper; here a laurustinus, there a spruce fir; here a larch, there a lilac; here a rhododendron, there an arbutus. the stream, you see, is become a canal: the banks are perfectly smooth and green, sloping to the water's edge: and there is lord littlebrain, rowing in an elegant boat. _squire headlong._ magical, faith! _mr milestone._ here is another part of the grounds in its natural state. here is a large rock, with the mountain-ash rooted in its fissures, overgrown, as you see, with ivy and moss; and from this part of it bursts a little fountain, that runs bubbling down its rugged sides. _miss tenorina._ o how beautiful! how i should love the melody of that miniature cascade! _mr milestone._ beautiful, miss tenorina! hideous. base, common, and popular. such a thing as you may see anywhere, in wild and mountainous districts. now, observe the metamorphosis. here is the same rock, cut into the shape of a giant. in one hand he holds a horn, through which that little fountain is thrown to a prodigious elevation. in the other is a ponderous stone, so exactly balanced as to be apparently ready to fall on the head of any person who may happen to be beneath[ . ]: and there is lord littlebrain walking under it. _squire headlong._ miraculous, by mahomet! _mr milestone._ this is the summit of a hill, covered, as you perceive, with wood, and with those mossy stones scattered at random under the trees. _miss tenorina._ what a delightful spot to read in, on a summer's day! the air must be so pure, and the wind must sound so divinely in the tops of those old pines! _mr milestone._ bad taste, miss tenorina. bad taste, i assure you. here is the spot improved. the trees are cut down: the stones are cleared away: this is an octagonal pavilion, exactly on the centre of the summit: and there you see lord littlebrain, on the top of the pavilion, enjoying the prospect with a telescope. _squire headlong._ glorious, egad! _mr milestone._ here is a rugged mountainous road, leading through impervious shades: the ass and the four goats characterise a wild uncultured scene. here, as you perceive, it is totally changed into a beautiful gravel-road, gracefully curving through a belt of limes: and there is lord littlebrain driving four-in-hand. _squire headlong._ egregious, by jupiter! _mr milestone._ here is littlebrain castle, a gothic, moss-grown structure, half bosomed in trees. near the casement of that turret is an owl peeping from the ivy. _squire headlong._ and devilish wise he looks. _mr milestone._ here is the new house, without a tree near it, standing in the midst of an undulating lawn: a white, polished, angular building, reflected to a nicety in this waveless lake: and there you see lord littlebrain looking out of the window. _squire headlong._ and devilish wise he looks too. you shall cut me a giant before you go. _mr milestone._ good. i'll order down my little corps of pioneers. during this conversation, a hot dispute had arisen between messieurs gall and nightshade; the latter pertinaciously insisting on having his new poem reviewed by treacle, who he knew would extol it most loftily, and not by gall, whose sarcastic commendation he held in superlative horror. the remonstrances of squire headlong silenced the disputants, but did not mollify the inflexible gall, nor appease the irritated nightshade, who secretly resolved that, on his return to london, he would beat his drum in grub street, form a mastigophoric corps of his own, and hoist the standard of determined opposition against this critical napoleon. sir patrick o'prism now entered, and, after some rapturous exclamations on the effect of the mountain-moonlight, entreated that one of the young ladies would favour him with a song. miss tenorina and miss graziosa now enchanted the company with some very scientific compositions, which, as usual, excited admiration and astonishment in every one, without a single particle of genuine pleasure. the beautiful cephalis being then summoned to take her station at the harp, sang with feeling and simplicity the following air:-- love and opportunity oh! who art thou, so swiftly flying? my name is love, the child replied: swifter i pass than south-winds sighing, or streams, through summer vales that glide. and who art thou, his flight pursuing? 'tis cold neglect whom now you see: the little god you there are viewing, will die, if once he's touched by me. oh! who art thou so fast proceeding, ne'er glancing back thine eyes of flame? marked but by few, through earth i'm speeding, and opportunity's my name. what form is that, which scowls beside thee? repentance is the form you see: learn then, the fate may yet betide thee: she seizes them who seize not me.[ . ] the little butler now appeared with a summons to supper, shortly after which the party dispersed for the night. chapter vii the walk it was an old custom in headlong hall to have breakfast ready at eight, and continue it till two; that the various guests might rise at their own hour, breakfast when they came down, and employ the morning as they thought proper; the squire only expecting that they should punctually assemble at dinner. during the whole of this period, the little butler stood sentinel at a side-table near the fire, copiously furnished with all the apparatus of tea, coffee, chocolate, milk, cream, eggs, rolls, toast, muffins, bread, butter, potted beef, cold fowl and partridge, ham, tongue, and anchovy. the reverend doctor gaster found himself rather _queasy_ in the morning, therefore preferred breakfasting in bed, on a mug of buttered ale and an anchovy toast. the three philosophers made their appearance at eight, and enjoyed _les premices des depouilles_. mr foster proposed that, as it was a fine frosty morning, and they were all good pedestrians, they should take a walk to tremadoc, to see the improvements carrying on in that vicinity. this being readily acceded to, they began their walk. after their departure, appeared squire headlong and mr milestone, who agreed, over their muffin and partridge, to walk together to a ruined tower, within the precincts of the squire's grounds, which mr milestone thought he could improve. the other guests dropped in by ones and twos, and made their respective arrangements for the morning. mr panscope took a little ramble with mr cranium, in the course of which, the former professed a great enthusiasm for the science of craniology, and a great deal of love for the beautiful cephalis, adding a few words about his expectations; the old gentleman was unable to withstand this triple battery, and it was accordingly determined--after the manner of the heroic age, in which it was deemed superfluous to consult the opinions and feelings of the lady, as to the manner in which she should be disposed of--that the lovely miss cranium should be made the happy bride of the accomplished mr panscope. we shall leave them for the present to settle preliminaries, while we accompany the three philosophers in their walk to tremadoc. the vale contracted as they advanced, and, when they had passed the termination of the lake, their road wound along a narrow and romantic pass, through the middle of which an impetuous torrent dashed over vast fragments of stone. the pass was bordered on both sides by perpendicular rocks, broken into the wildest forms of fantastic magnificence. "these are, indeed," said mr escot, "_confracti mundi rudera_[ . ]: yet they must be feeble images of the valleys of the andes, where the philosophic eye may contemplate, in their utmost extent, the effects of that tremendous convulsion which destroyed the perpendicularity of the poles, and inundated this globe with that torrent of physical evil, from which the greater torrent of moral evil has issued, that will continue to roll on, with an expansive power and an accelerated impetus, till the whole human race shall be swept away in its vortex." "the precession of the equinoxes," said mr foster, "will gradually ameliorate the physical state of our planet, till the ecliptic shall again coincide with the equator, and the equal diffusion of light and heat over the whole surface of the earth typify the equal and happy existence of man, who will then have attained the final step of pure and perfect intelligence." "it is by no means clear," said mr jenkison, "that the axis of the earth was ever perpendicular to the plane of its orbit, or that it ever will be so. explosion and convulsion are necessary to the maintenance of either hypothesis: for la place has demonstrated, that the precession of the equinoxes is only a secular equation of a very long period, which, of course, proves nothing either on one side or the other." they now emerged, by a winding ascent, from the vale of llanberris, and after some little time arrived at bedd gelert. proceeding through the sublimely romantic pass of aberglaslynn, their road led along the edge of traeth mawr, a vast arm of the sea, which they then beheld in all the magnificence of the flowing tide. another five miles brought them to the embankment, which has since been completed, and which, by connecting the two counties of meirionnydd and caernarvon, excludes the sea from an extensive tract. the embankment, which was carried on at the same time from both the opposite coasts, was then very nearly meeting in the centre. they walked to the extremity of that part of it which was thrown out from the caernarvonshire shore. the tide was now ebbing: it had filled the vast basin within, forming a lake about five miles in length and more than one in breadth. as they looked upwards with their backs to the open sea, they beheld a scene which no other in this country can parallel, and which the admirers of the magnificence of nature will ever remember with regret, whatever consolation may be derived from the probable utility of the works which have excluded the waters from their ancient receptacle. vast rocks and precipices, intersected with little torrents, formed the barrier on the left: on the right, the triple summit of moelwyn reared its majestic boundary: in the depth was that sea of mountains, the wild and stormy outline of the snowdonian chain, with the giant wyddfa towering in the midst. the mountain-frame remains unchanged, unchangeable: but the liquid mirror it enclosed is gone. the tide ebbed with rapidity: the waters within, retained by the embankment, poured through its two points an impetuous cataract, curling and boiling in innumerable eddies, and making a tumultuous melody admirably in unison with the surrounding scene. the three philosophers looked on in silence; and at length unwillingly turned away, and proceeded to the little town of tremadoc, which is built on land recovered in a similar manner from the sea. after inspecting the manufactories, and refreshing themselves at the inn on a cold saddle of mutton and a bottle of sherry, they retraced their steps towards headlong hall, commenting as they went on the various objects they had seen. _mr escot._ i regret that time did not allow us to see the caves on the sea-shore. there is one of which the depth is said to be unknown. there is a tradition in the country, that an adventurous fiddler once resolved to explore it; that he entered, and never returned; but that the subterranean sound of a fiddle was heard at a farm-house seven miles inland. it is, therefore, concluded that he lost his way in the labyrinth of caverns, supposed to exist under the rocky soil of this part of the country. _mr jenkison._ a supposition that must always remain in force, unless a second fiddler, equally adventurous and more successful, should return with an accurate report of the true state of the fact. _mr foster._ what think you of the little colony we have just been inspecting; a city, as it were, in its cradle? _mr escot._ with all the weakness of infancy, and all the vices of maturer age. i confess, the sight of those manufactories, which have suddenly sprung up, like fungous excrescences, in the bosom of these wild and desolate scenes, impressed me with as much horror and amazement as the sudden appearance of the stocking manufactory struck into the mind of rousseau, when, in a lonely valley of the alps, he had just congratulated himself on finding a spot where man had never been. _mr foster._ the manufacturing system is not yet purified from some evils which necessarily attend it, but which i conceive are greatly overbalanced by their concomitant advantages. contemplate the vast sum of human industry to which this system so essentially contributes: seas covered with vessels, ports resounding with life, profound researches, scientific inventions, complicated mechanism, canals carried over deep valleys, and through the bosoms of hills: employment and existence thus given to innumerable families, and the multiplied comforts and conveniences of life diffused over the whole community. _mr escot._ you present to me a complicated picture of artificial life, and require me to admire it. seas covered with vessels: every one of which contains two or three tyrants, and from fifty to a thousand slaves, ignorant, gross, perverted, and active only in mischief. ports resounding with life: in other words, with noise and drunkenness, the mingled din of avarice, intemperance, and prostitution. profound researches, scientific inventions: to what end? to contract the sum of human wants? to teach the art of living on a little? to disseminate independence, liberty, and health? no; to multiply factitious desires, to stimulate depraved appetites, to invent unnatural wants, to heap up incense on the shrine of luxury, and accumulate expedients of selfish and ruinous profusion. complicated machinery: behold its blessings. twenty years ago, at the door of every cottage sate the good woman with her spinning-wheel: the children, if not more profitably employed than in gathering heath and sticks, at least laid in a stock of health and strength to sustain the labours of maturer years. where is the spinning-wheel now, and every simple and insulated occupation of the industrious cottager? wherever this boasted machinery is established, the children of the poor are death-doomed from their cradles. look for one moment at midnight into a cotton-mill, amidst the smell of oil, the smoke of lamps, the rattling of wheels, the dizzy and complicated motions of diabolical mechanism: contemplate the little human machines that keep play with the revolutions of the iron work, robbed at that hour of their natural rest, as of air and exercise by day: observe their pale and ghastly features, more ghastly in that baleful and malignant light, and tell me if you do not fancy yourself on the threshold of virgil's hell, where continuo auditae voces, vagitus et ingens, _infantumque animae flentes_, in limine primo, quos _dulcis vitae exsortes_, et ab ubere raptos, _abstulit atra dies_, et funere mersit acerbo! as mr escot said this, a little rosy-cheeked girl, with a basket of heath on her head, came tripping down the side of one of the rocks on the left. the force of contrast struck even on the phlegmatic spirit of mr jenkison, and he almost inclined for a moment to the doctrine of deterioration. mr escot continued: _mr escot._ nor is the lot of the parents more enviable. sedentary victims of unhealthy toil, they have neither the corporeal energy of the savage, nor the mental acquisitions of the civilised man. mind, indeed, they have none, and scarcely animal life. they are mere automata, component parts of the enormous machines which administer to the pampered appetites of the few, who consider themselves the most valuable portion of a state, because they consume in indolence the fruits of the earth, and contribute nothing to the benefit of the community. _mr jenkison._ that these are evils cannot be denied; but they have their counterbalancing advantages. that a man should pass the day in a furnace and the night in a cellar, is bad for the individual, but good for others who enjoy the benefit of his labour. _mr escot._ by what right do they so? _mr jenkison._ by the right of all property and all possession: _le droit du plus fort_. _mr escot._ do you justify that principle? _mr jenkison._ i neither justify nor condemn it. it is practically recognised in all societies; and, though it is certainly the source of enormous evil, i conceive it is also the source of abundant good, or it would not have so many supporters. _mr escot._ that is by no means a consequence. do we not every day see men supporting the most enormous evils, which they know to be so with respect to others, and which in reality are so with respect to themselves, though an erroneous view of their own miserable self-interest induces them to think otherwise? _mr jenkison._ good and evil exist only as they are perceived. i cannot therefore understand, how that which a man perceives to be good can be in reality an evil to him: indeed, the word _reality_ only signifies _strong belief_. _mr escot._ the views of such a man i contend are false. if he could be made to see the truth---- _mr jenkison._ he sees his own truth. truth is that which a man _troweth_. where there is no man there is no truth. thus the truth of one is not the truth of another.[ . ] _mr foster._ i am aware of the etymology; but i contend that there is an universal and immutable truth, deducible from the nature of things. _mr jenkison._ by whom deducible? philosophers have investigated the nature of things for centuries, yet no two of them will agree in _trowing_ the same conclusion. _mr foster._ the progress of philosophical investigation, and the rapidly increasing accuracy of human knowledge, approximate by degrees the diversities of opinion; so that, in process of time, moral science will be susceptible of mathematical demonstration; and, clear and indisputable principles being universally recognised, the coincidence of deduction will necessarily follow. _mr escot._ possibly when the inroads of luxury and disease shall have exterminated nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine of every million of the human race, the remaining fractional units may congregate into one point, and come to something like the same conclusion. _mr jenkison._ i doubt it much. i conceive, if only we three were survivors of the whole system of terrestrial being, we should never agree in our decisions as to the cause of the calamity. _mr escot._ be that as it may, i think you must at least assent to the following positions: that the many are sacrificed to the few; that ninety-nine in a hundred are occupied in a perpetual struggle for the preservation of a perilous and precarious existence, while the remaining one wallows in all the redundancies of luxury that can be wrung from their labours and privations; that luxury and liberty are incompatible; and that every new want you invent for civilised man is a new instrument of torture for him who cannot indulge it. they had now regained the shores of the lake, when the conversation was suddenly interrupted by a tremendous explosion, followed by a violent splashing of water, and various sounds of tumult and confusion, which induced them to quicken their pace towards the spot whence they proceeded. chapter viii the tower in all the thoughts, words, and actions of squire headlong, there was a remarkable alacrity of progression, which almost annihilated the interval between conception and execution. he was utterly regardless of obstacles, and seemed to have expunged their very name from his vocabulary. his designs were never nipped in their infancy by the contemplation of those trivial difficulties which often turn awry the current of enterprise; and, though the rapidity of his movements was sometimes arrested by a more formidable barrier, either naturally existing in the pursuit he had undertaken, or created by his own impetuosity, he seldom failed to succeed either in knocking it down or cutting his way through it. he had little idea of gradation: he saw no interval between the first step and the last, but pounced upon his object with the impetus of a mountain cataract. this rapidity of movement, indeed, subjected him to some disasters which cooler spirits would have escaped. he was an excellent sportsman, and almost always killed his game; but now and then he killed his dog.[ . ] rocks, streams, hedges, gates, and ditches, were objects of no account in his estimation; though a dislocated shoulder, several severe bruises, and two or three narrow escapes for his neck, might have been expected to teach him a certain degree of caution in effecting his transitions. he was so singularly alert in climbing precipices and traversing torrents, that, when he went out on a shooting party, he was very soon left to continue his sport alone, for he was sure to dash up or down some nearly perpendicular path, where no one else had either ability or inclination to follow. he had a pleasure boat on the lake, which he steered with amazing dexterity; but as he always indulged himself in the utmost possible latitude of sail, he was occasionally upset by a sudden gust, and was indebted to his skill in the art of swimming for the opportunity of tempering with a copious libation of wine the unnatural frigidity introduced into his stomach by the extraordinary intrusion of water, an element which he had religiously determined should never pass his lips, but of which, on these occasions, he was sometimes compelled to swallow no inconsiderable quantity. this circumstance alone, of the various disasters that befell him, occasioned him any permanent affliction, and he accordingly noted the day in his pocket-book as a _dies nefastus_, with this simple abstract, and brief chronicle of the calamity: _mem. swallowed two or three pints of water_: without any notice whatever of the concomitant circumstances. these days, of which there were several, were set apart in headlong hall for the purpose of anniversary expiation; and, as often as the day returned on which the squire had swallowed water, he not only made a point of swallowing a treble allowance of wine himself, but imposed a heavy mulct on every one of his servants who should be detected in a state of sobriety after sunset: but their conduct on these occasions was so uniformly exemplary, that no instance of the infliction of the penalty appears on record. the squire and mr milestone, as we have already said, had set out immediately after breakfast to examine the capabilities of the scenery. the object that most attracted mr milestone's admiration was a ruined tower on a projecting point of rock, almost totally overgrown with ivy. this ivy, mr milestone observed, required trimming and clearing in various parts: a little pointing and polishing was also necessary for the dilapidated walls: and the whole effect would be materially increased by a plantation of spruce fir, interspersed with cypress and juniper, the present rugged and broken ascent from the land side being first converted into a beautiful slope, which might be easily effected by blowing up a part of the rock with gunpowder, laying on a quantity of fine mould, and covering the whole with an elegant stratum of turf. squire headlong caught with avidity at this suggestion; and, as he had always a store of gunpowder in the house, for the accommodation of himself and his shooting visitors, and for the supply of a small battery of cannon, which he kept for his private amusement, he insisted on commencing operations immediately. accordingly, he bounded back to the house, and very speedily returned, accompanied by the little butler, and half a dozen servants and labourers, with pickaxes and gunpowder, a hanging stove and a poker, together with a basket of cold meat and two or three bottles of madeira: for the squire thought, with many others, that a copious supply of provision is a very necessary ingredient in all rural amusements. mr milestone superintended the proceedings. the rock was excavated, the powder introduced, the apertures strongly blockaded with fragments of stone: a long train was laid to a spot which mr milestone fixed on as sufficiently remote from the possibility of harm: the squire seized the poker, and, after flourishing it in the air with a degree of dexterity which induced the rest of the party to leave him in solitary possession of an extensive circumference, applied the end of it to the train; and the rapidly communicated ignition ran hissing along the surface of the soil. at this critical moment, mr cranium and mr panscope appeared at the top of the tower, which, unseeing and unseen, they had ascended on the opposite side to that where the squire and mr milestone were conducting their operations. their sudden appearance a little dismayed the squire, who, however, comforted himself with the reflection, that the tower was perfectly safe, or at least was intended to be so, and that his friends were in no probable danger but of a knock on the head from a flying fragment of stone. the succession of these thoughts in the mind of the squire was commensurate in rapidity to the progress of the ignition, which having reached its extremity, the explosion took place, and the shattered rock was hurled into the air in the midst of fire and smoke. mr milestone had properly calculated the force of the explosion; for the tower remained untouched: but the squire, in his consolatory reflections, had omitted the consideration of the influence of sudden fear, which had so violent an effect on mr cranium, who was just commencing a speech concerning the very fine prospect from the top of the tower, that, cutting short the thread of his observations, he bounded, under the elastic influence of terror, several feet into the air. his ascent being unluckily a little out of the perpendicular, he descended with a proportionate curve from the apex of his projection, and alighted not on the wall of the tower, but in an ivy-bush by its side, which, giving way beneath him, transferred him to a tuft of hazel at its base, which, after upholding him an instant, consigned him to the boughs of an ash that had rooted itself in a fissure about half way down the rock, which finally transmitted him to the waters below. squire headlong anxiously watched the tower as the smoke which at first enveloped it rolled away; but when this shadowy curtain was withdrawn, and mr panscope was discovered, _solus_, in a tragical attitude, his apprehensions became boundless, and he concluded that the unlucky collision of a flying fragment of rock had indeed emancipated the spirit of the craniologist from its terrestrial bondage. mr escot had considerably outstripped his companions, and arrived at the scene of the disaster just as mr cranium, being utterly destitute of natatorial skill, was in imminent danger of final submersion. the deteriorationist, who had cultivated this valuable art with great success, immediately plunged in to his assistance, and brought him alive and in safety to a shelving part of the shore. their landing was hailed with a view-holla from the delighted squire, who, shaking them both heartily by the hand, and making ten thousand lame apologies to mr cranium, concluded by asking, in a pathetic tone, _how much water he had swallowed?_ and without waiting for his answer, filled a large tumbler with madeira, and insisted on his tossing it off, which was no sooner said than done. mr jenkison and mr foster now made their appearance. mr panscope descended the tower, which he vowed never again to approach within a quarter of a mile. the tumbler of madeira was replenished, and handed round to recruit the spirits of the party, which now began to move towards headlong hall, the squire capering for joy in the van, and the little fat butler waddling in the rear. the squire took care that mr cranium should be seated next to him at dinner, and plied him so hard with madeira to prevent him, as he said, from taking cold, that long before the ladies sent in their summons to coffee, every organ in his brain was in a complete state of revolution, and the squire was under the necessity of ringing for three or four servants to carry him to bed, observing, with a smile of great satisfaction, that he was in a very excellent way for escaping any ill consequences that might have resulted from his accident. the beautiful cephalis, being thus freed from his _surveillance_, was enabled, during the course of the evening, to develop to his preserver the full extent of her gratitude. chapter ix the sexton mr escot passed a sleepless night, the ordinary effect of love, according to some amatory poets, who seem to have composed their whining ditties for the benevolent purpose of bestowing on others that gentle slumber of which they so pathetically lament the privation. the deteriorationist entered into a profound moral soliloquy, in which he first examined _whether a philosopher ought to be in love?_ having decided this point affirmatively against plato and lucretius, he next examined, _whether that passion ought to have the effect of keeping a philosopher awake?_ having decided this negatively, he resolved to go to sleep immediately: not being able to accomplish this to his satisfaction, he tossed and tumbled, like achilles or orlando, first on one side, then on the other; repeated to himself several hundred lines of poetry; counted a thousand; began again, and counted another thousand: in vain: the beautiful cephalis was the predominant image in all his soliloquies, in all his repetitions: even in the numerical process from which he sought relief, he did but associate the idea of number with that of his dear tormentor, till she appeared to his mind's eye in a thousand similitudes, distinct, not different. these thousand images, indeed, were but one; and yet the one was a thousand, a sort of uni-multiplex phantasma, which will be very intelligible to some understandings. he arose with the first peep of day, and sallied forth to enjoy the balmy breeze of morning, which any but a lover might have thought too cool; for it was an intense frost, the sun had not risen, and the wind was rather fresh from north-east and by north. but a lover, who, like ladurlad in the curse of kehama, always has, or at least is supposed to have, "a fire in his heart and a fire in his brain," feels a wintry breeze from n.e. and by n. steal over his cheek like the south over a bank of violets; therefore, on walked the philosopher, with his coat unbuttoned and his hat in his hand, careless of whither he went, till he found himself near the enclosure of a little mountain chapel. passing through the wicket, and stepping over two or three graves, he stood on a rustic tombstone, and peeped through the chapel window, examining the interior with as much curiosity as if he had "forgotten what the inside of a church was made of," which, it is rather to be feared, was the case. before him and beneath him were the font, the altar, and the grave; which gave rise to a train of moral reflections on the three great epochs in the course of the _featherless biped_,--birth, marriage, and death. the middle stage of the process arrested his attention; and his imagination placed before him several figures, which he thought, with the addition of his own, would make a very picturesque group; the beautiful cephalis, "arrayed in her bridal apparel of white;" her friend caprioletta officiating as bridemaid; mr cranium giving her away; and, last, not least, the reverend doctor gaster, intoning the marriage ceremony with the regular orthodox allowance of nasal recitative. whilst he was feasting his eyes on this imaginary picture, the demon of mistrust insinuated himself into the storehouse of his conceptions, and, removing his figure from the group, substituted that of mr panscope, which gave such a violent shock to his feelings, that he suddenly exclaimed, with an extraordinary elevation of voice, _oimoi kakodaimon, kai tris kakodaimon, kai tetrakis, kai pentakis, kai dodekakis, kai muriakis!_[ . ] to the great terror of the sexton, who was just entering the churchyard, and, not knowing from whence the voice proceeded, _pensa que fut un diableteau_. the sight of the philosopher dispelled his apprehensions, when, growing suddenly valiant, he immediately addressed him:-- "cot pless your honour, i should n't have thought of meeting any pody here at this time of the morning, except, look you, it was the tevil--who, to pe sure, toes not often come upon consecrated cround--put for all that, i think i have seen him now and then, in former tays, when old nanny llwyd of llyn-isa was living--cot teliver us! a terriple old witch to pe sure she was--i tid n't much like tigging her crave--put i prought two cocks with me--the tevil hates cocks--and tied them py the leg on two tombstones--and i tug, and the cocks crowed, and the tevil kept at a tistance. to pe sure now, if i had n't peen very prave py nature--as i ought to pe truly--for my father was owen ap-llwyd ap-gryffydd ap-shenkin ap-williams ap-thomas ap-morgan ap-parry ap-evan ap-rhys, a coot preacher and a lover of _cwrw_[ . ]--i should have thought just now pefore i saw your honour, that the foice i heard was the tevil's calling nanny llwyd--cot pless us! to pe sure she should have been puried in the middle of the river, where the tevil can't come, as your honour fery well knows." "i am perfectly aware of it," said mr escot. "true, true," continued the sexton; "put to pe sure, owen thomas of morfa-bach will have it that one summer evening--when he went over to cwm cynfael in meirionnydd, apout some cattles he wanted to puy--he saw a strange figure--pless us!--with five horns!--cot save us! sitting on hugh llwyd's pulpit, which, your honour fery well knows, is a pig rock in the middle of the river----" "of course he was mistaken," said mr escot. "to pe sure he was," said the sexton. "for there is no toubt put the tevil, when owen thomas saw him, must have peen sitting on a piece of rock in a straight line from him on the other side of the river, where he used to sit, look you, for a whole summer's tay, while hugh llwyd was on his pulpit, and there they used to talk across the water! for hugh llwyd, please your honour, never raised the tevil except when he was safe in the middle of the river, which proves that owen thomas, in his fright, did n't pay proper attention to the exact spot where the tevil was." the sexton concluded his speech with an approving smile at his own sagacity, in so luminously expounding the nature of owen thomas's mistake. "i perceive," said mr escot, "you have a very deep insight into things, and can, therefore, perhaps, facilitate the resolution of a question, concerning which, though i have little doubt on the subject, i am desirous of obtaining the most extensive and accurate information." the sexton scratched his head, the language of mr escot not being to his apprehension quite so luminous as his own. "you have been sexton here," continued mr escot, in the language of hamlet, "man and boy, forty years." the sexton turned pale. the period mr escot named was so nearly the true one, that he began to suspect the personage before him of being rather too familiar with hugh llwyd's sable visitor. recovering himself a little, he said, "why, thereapouts, sure enough." "during this period, you have of course dug up many bones of the people of ancient times." "pones! cot pless you, yes! pones as old as the 'orlt." "perhaps you can show me a few." the sexton grinned horribly a ghastly smile. "will you take your pible oath you ton't want them to raise the tevil with?" "willingly," said mr escot, smiling; "i have an abstruse reason for the inquiry." "why, if you have an _obtuse_ reason," said the sexton, who thought this a good opportunity to show that he could pronounce hard words as well as other people; "if you have an _obtuse_ reason, that alters the case." so saying he led the way to the bone-house, from which he began to throw out various bones and skulls of more than common dimensions, and amongst them a skull of very extraordinary magnitude, which he swore by st david was the skull of cadwallader. "how do you know this to be his skull?" said mr escot. "he was the piggest man that ever lived, and he was puried here; and this is the piggest skull i ever found: you see now----" "nothing can be more logical," said mr escot. "my good friend will you allow me to take this skull away with me?" "st winifred pless us!" exclaimed the sexton, "would you have me haunted py his chost for taking his plessed pones out of consecrated cround? would you have him come in the tead of the night, and fly away with the roof of my house? would you have all the crop of my carden come to nothing? for, look you, his epitaph says, "he that my pones shall ill pestow, leek in his cround shall never crow." "you will ill bestow them," said mr escot, "in confounding them with those of the sons of little men, the degenerate dwarfs of later generations; you will well bestow them in giving them to me: for i will have this illustrious skull bound with a silver rim, and filled with mantling wine, with this inscription, nunc tandem: signifying that that pernicious liquor has at length found its proper receptacle; for, when the wine is in, the brain is out." saying these words, he put a dollar into the hands of the sexton, who instantly stood spellbound by the talismanic influence of the coin, while mr escot walked off in triumph with the skull of cadwallader. chapter x the skull when mr escot entered the breakfast-room he found the majority of the party assembled, and the little butler very active at his station. several of the ladies shrieked at the sight of the skull; and miss tenorina, starting up in great haste and terror, caused the subversion of a cup of chocolate, which a servant was handing to the reverend doctor gaster, into the nape of the neck of sir patrick o'prism. sir patrick, rising impetuously, _to clap an extinguisher_, as he expressed himself, _on the farthing rushlight of the rascal's life_, pushed over the chair of marmaduke milestone, esquire, who, catching for support at the first thing that came in his way, which happened unluckily to be the corner of the table-cloth, drew it instantaneously with him to the floor, involving plates, cups and saucers, in one promiscuous ruin. but, as the principal _materiel_ of the breakfast apparatus was on the little butler's side-table, the confusion occasioned by this accident was happily greater than the damage. miss tenorina was so agitated that she was obliged to retire: miss graziosa accompanied her through pure sisterly affection and sympathy, not without a lingering look at sir patrick, who likewise retired to change his coat, but was very expeditious in returning to resume his attack on the cold partridge. the broken cups were cleared away, the cloth relaid, and the array of the table restored with wonderful celerity. mr escot was a little surprised at the scene of confusion which signalised his entrance; but, perfectly unconscious that it originated with the skull of cadwallader, he advanced to seat himself at the table by the side of the beautiful cephalis, first placing the skull in a corner, out of the reach of mr cranium, who sate eyeing it with lively curiosity, and after several efforts to restrain his impatience, exclaimed, "you seem to have found a rarity." "a rarity indeed," said mr escot, cracking an egg as he spoke; "no less than the genuine and indubitable skull of cadwallader." "the skull of cadwallader!" vociferated mr cranium; "o treasure of treasures!" mr escot then detailed by what means he had become possessed of it, which gave birth to various remarks from the other individuals of the party: after which, rising from table, and taking the skull again in his hand, "this skull," said he, "is the skull of a hero, _palai katatethneiotos_[ . ], and sufficiently demonstrates a point, concerning which i never myself entertained a doubt, that the human race is undergoing a gradual process of diminution, in length, breadth, and thickness. observe this skull. even the skull of our reverend friend, which is the largest and thickest in the company, is not more than half its size. the frame this skull belonged to could scarcely have been less than nine feet high. such is the lamentable progress of degeneracy and decay. in the course of ages, a boot of the present generation would form an ample chateau for a large family of our remote posterity. the mind, too, participates in the contraction of the body. poets and philosophers of all ages and nations have lamented this too visible process of physical and moral deterioration. 'the sons of little men', says ossian. '_oioi nun brotoi eisin_,' says homer: 'such men as live in these degenerate days.' 'all things,' says virgil, 'have a retrocessive tendency, and grow worse and worse by the inevitable doom of fate.'[ . ] 'we live in the ninth age,' says juvenal, 'an age worse than the age of iron; nature has no metal sufficiently pernicious to give a denomination to its wickedness.'[ . ] 'our fathers,' says horace, 'worse than our grandfathers, have given birth to us, their more vicious progeny, who, in our turn, shall become the parents of a still viler generation.'[ . ] you all know the fable of the buried pict, who bit off the end of a pickaxe, with which sacrilegious hands were breaking open his grave, and called out with a voice like subterranean thunder, _i perceive the degeneracy of your race by the smallness of your little finger!_ videlicet, the pickaxe. this, to be sure, is a fiction; but it shows the prevalent opinion, the feeling, the conviction, of absolute, universal, irremediable deterioration." "i should be sorry," said mr foster, "that such an opinion should become universal, independently of my conviction of its fallacy. its general admission would tend, in a great measure, to produce the very evils it appears to lament. what could be its effect, but to check the ardour of investigation, to extinguish the zeal of philanthropy, to freeze the current of enterprising hope, to bury in the torpor of scepticism and in the stagnation of despair, every better faculty of the human mind, which will necessarily become retrograde in ceasing to be progressive?" "i am inclined to think, on the contrary," said mr escot, "that the deterioration of man is accelerated by his blindness--in many respects wilful blindness--to the truth of the fact itself, and to the causes which produce it; that there is no hope whatever of ameliorating his condition but in a total and radical change of the whole scheme of human life, and that the advocates of his indefinite perfectibility are in reality the greatest enemies to the practical possibility of their own system, by so strenuously labouring to impress on his attention that he is going on in a good way, while he is really in a deplorably bad one." "i admit," said mr foster, "there are many things that may, and therefore will, be changed for the better." "not on the present system," said mr escot, "in which every change is for the worse." "in matters of taste i am sure it is," said mr gall: "there is, in fact, no such thing as good taste left in the world." "oh, mr gall!" said miss philomela poppyseed, "i thought my novel----" "my paintings," said sir patrick o'prism---- "my ode," said mr mac laurel---- "my ballad," said mr nightshade---- "my plan for lord littlebrain's park," said marmaduke milestone, esquire---- "my essay," said mr treacle---- "my sonata," said mr chromatic---- "my claret," said squire headlong---- "my lectures," said mr cranium---- "vanity of vanities," said the reverend doctor gaster, turning down an empty egg-shell; "all is vanity and vexation of spirit." chapter xi the anniversary among the _dies alba creta notandos_, which the beau monde of the cambrian mountains was in the habit of remembering with the greatest pleasure, and anticipating with the most lively satisfaction, was the christmas ball which the ancient family of the headlongs had been accustomed to give from time immemorial. tradition attributed the honour of its foundation to headlong ap-headlong ap-breakneck ap-headlong ap-cataract ap-pistyll ap-rhaidr[ . ] ap-headlong, who lived about the time of the trojan war. certain it is, at least, that a grand chorus was always sung after supper in honour of this illustrious ancestor of the squire. this ball was, indeed, an aera in the lives of all the beauty and fashion of caernarvon, meirionnydd, and anglesea, and, like the greek olympiads and the roman consulates, served as the main pillar of memory, round which all the events of the year were suspended and entwined. thus, in recalling to mind any circumstance imperfectly recollected, the principal point to be ascertained was, whether it had occurred in the year of the first, second, third, or fourth ball of headlong ap-breakneck, or headlong ap-torrent, or headlong ap-hurricane; and, this being satisfactorily established, the remainder followed of course in the natural order of its ancient association. this eventful anniversary being arrived, every chariot, coach, barouche and barouchette, landau and landaulet, chaise, curricle, buggy, whiskey, and tilbury, of the three counties, was in motion: not a horse was left idle within five miles of any gentleman's seat, from the high-mettled hunter to the heath-cropping galloway. the ferrymen of the menai were at their stations before daybreak, taking a double allowance of rum and _cwrw_ to strengthen them for the fatigues of the day. the ivied towers of caernarvon, the romantic woods of tan-y-bwlch, the heathy hills of kernioggau, the sandy shores of tremadoc, the mountain recesses of bedd-gelert, and the lonely lakes of capel-cerig, re-echoed to the voices of the delighted ostlers and postillions, who reaped on this happy day their wintry harvest. landlords and landladies, waiters, chambermaids, and toll-gate keepers, roused themselves from the torpidity which the last solitary tourist, flying with the yellow leaves on the wings of the autumnal wind, had left them to enjoy till the returning spring: the bustle of august was renewed on all the mountain roads, and, in the meanwhile, squire headlong and his little fat butler carried most energetically into effect the lessons of the _savant_ in the court of quintessence, _qui par engin mirificque jectoit les maisons par les fenestres_[ . ]. it was the custom for the guests to assemble at dinner on the day of the ball, and depart on the following morning after breakfast. sleep during this interval was out of the question: the ancient harp of cambria suspended the celebration of the noble race of shenkin, and the songs of hoel and cyveilioc, to ring to the profaner but more lively modulation of _voulez vous danser, mademoiselle?_ in conjunction with the symphonious scraping of fiddles, the tinkling of triangles, and the beating of tambourines. comus and momus were the deities of the night; and bacchus of course was not forgotten by the male part of the assembly (with them, indeed, a ball was invariably a scene of "_tipsy dance and jollity_"): the servants flew about with wine and negus, and the little butler was indefatigable with his corkscrew, which is reported on one occasion to have grown so hot under the influence of perpetual friction that it actually set fire to the cork. the company assembled. the dinner, which on this occasion was a secondary object, was despatched with uncommon celerity. when the cloth was removed, and the bottle had taken its first round, mr cranium stood up and addressed the company. "ladies and gentlemen," said he, "the golden key of mental phaenomena, which has lain buried for ages in the deepest vein of the mine of physiological research, is now, by a happy combination of practical and speculative investigations, grasped, if i may so express myself, firmly and inexcusably, in the hands of physiognomical empiricism." the cambrian visitors listened with profound attention, not comprehending a single syllable he said, but concluding he would finish his speech by proposing the health of squire headlong. the gentlemen accordingly tossed off their heeltaps, and mr cranium proceeded: "ardently desirous, to the extent of my feeble capacity, of disseminating as much as possible, the inexhaustible treasures to which this golden key admits the humblest votary of philosophical truth, i invite you, when you have sufficiently restored, replenished, refreshed, and exhilarated that osteosarchaematosplanchnochondroneuromuelous, or to employ a more intelligible term, osseocarnisanguineoviscericartilaginonervomedullary, _compages_, or shell, the body, which at once envelopes and developes that mysterious and inestimable kernel, the desiderative, determinative, ratiocinative, imaginative, inquisitive, appetitive, comparative, reminiscent, congeries of ideas and notions, simple and compound, comprised in the comprehensive denomination of mind, to take a peep with me into the mechanical arcana of the anatomico-metaphysical universe. being not in the least dubitative of your spontaneous compliance, i proceed," added he, suddenly changing his tone, "to get everything ready in the library." saying these words, he vanished. the welsh squires now imagined they had caught a glimpse of his meaning, and set him down in their minds for a sort of gentleman conjuror, who intended to amuse them before the ball with some tricks of legerdemain. under this impression, they became very impatient to follow him, as they had made up their minds not to be drunk before supper. the ladies, too, were extremely curious to witness an exhibition which had been announced in so singular a preamble; and the squire, having previously insisted on every gentleman tossing off a half-pint bumper, adjourned the whole party to the library, where they were not a little surprised to discover mr cranium seated, in a pensive attitude, at a large table, decorated with a copious variety of skulls. some of the ladies were so much shocked at this extraordinary display, that a scene of great confusion ensued. fans were very actively exercised, and water was strenuously called for by some of the most officious of the gentlemen; on which the little butler entered with a large allowance of liquid, which bore, indeed, the name of _water_, but was in reality a very powerful spirit. this was the only species of water which the little butler had ever heard called for in headlong hall. the mistake was not attended with any evil effects: for the fluid was no sooner applied to the lips of the fainting fair ones, than it resuscitated them with an expedition truly miraculous. order was at length restored; the audience took their seats, and the craniological orator held forth in the following terms: chapter xii the lecture "physiologists have been much puzzled to account for the varieties of moral character in men, as well as for the remarkable similarity of habit and disposition in all the individual animals of every other respective species. a few brief sentences, perspicuously worded, and scientifically arranged, will enumerate all the characteristics of a lion, or a tiger, or a wolf, or a bear, or a squirrel, or a goat, or a horse, or an ass, or a rat, or a cat, or a hog, or a dog; and whatever is physiologically predicted of any individual lion, tiger, wolf, bear, squirrel, goat, horse, ass, hog, or dog, will be found to hold true of all lions, tigers, wolves, bears, squirrels, goats, horses, asses, hogs, and dogs, whatsoever. now, in man, the very reverse of this appears to be the case; for he has so few distinct and characteristic marks which hold true of all his species, that philosophers in all ages have found it a task of infinite difficulty to give him a definition. hence one has defined him to be a _featherless biped_, a definition which is equally applicable to an unfledged fowl: another to be _an animal which forms opinions_, than which nothing can be more inaccurate, for a very small number of the species form opinions, and the remainder take them upon trust, without investigation or inquiry. "again, man has been defined to be _an animal that carries a stick_: an attribute which undoubtedly belongs to man only, but not to all men always; though it uniformly characterises some of the graver and more imposing varieties, such as physicians, oran-outangs, and lords in waiting. "we cannot define man to be a reasoning animal, for we do not dispute that idiots are men; to say nothing of that very numerous description of persons who consider themselves reasoning animals, and are so denominated by the ironical courtesy of the world, who labour, nevertheless, under a very gross delusion in that essential particular. "it appears to me that man may be correctly defined an animal, which, without any peculiar or distinguishing faculty of its own, is, as it were, a bundle or compound of faculties of other animals, by a distinct enumeration of which any individual of the species may be satisfactorily described. this is manifest, even in the ordinary language of conversation, when, in summing up, for example, the qualities of an accomplished courtier, we say he has the vanity of a peacock, the cunning of a fox, the treachery of an hyaena, the cold-heartedness of a cat, and the servility of a jackal. that this is perfectly consentaneous to scientific truth, will appear in the further progress of these observations. "every particular faculty of the mind has its corresponding organ in the brain. in proportion as any particular faculty or propensity acquires paramount activity in any individual, these organs develope themselves, and their development becomes externally obvious by corresponding lumps and bumps, exuberances and protuberances, on the osseous compages of the occiput and sinciput. in all animals but man, the same organ is equally developed in every individual of the species: for instance, that of migration in the swallow, that of destruction in the tiger, that of architecture in the beaver, and that of parental affection in the bear. the human brain, however, consists, as i have said, of a bundle or compound of all the faculties of all other animals; and from the greater development of one or more of these, in the infinite varieties of combination, result all the peculiarities of individual character. "here is the skull of a beaver, and that of sir christopher wren. you observe, in both these specimens, the prodigious development of the organ of constructiveness. "here is the skull of a bullfinch, and that of an eminent fiddler. you may compare the organ of music. "here is the skull of a tiger. you observe the organ of carnage. here is the skull of a fox. you observe the organ of plunder. here is the skull of a peacock. you observe the organ of vanity. here is the skull of an illustrious robber, who, after a long and triumphant process of depredation and murder, was suddenly checked in his career by means of a certain quality inherent in preparations of hemp, which, for the sake of perspicuity, i shall call _suspensiveness_. here is the skull of a conqueror, who, after over-running several kingdoms, burning a number of cities, and causing the deaths of two or three millions of men, women, and children, was entombed with all the pageantry of public lamentation, and figured as the hero of several thousand odes and a round dozen of epics; while the poor highwayman was twice executed-- 'at the gallows first, and after in a ballad, sung to a villainous tune.' "you observe, in both these skulls, the combined development of the organs of carnage, plunder, and vanity, which i have separately pointed out in the tiger, the fox, and the peacock. the greater enlargement of the organ of vanity in the hero is the only criterion by which i can distinguish them from each other. born with the same faculties, and the same propensities, these two men were formed by nature to run the same career: the different combinations of external circumstances decided the differences of their destinies. "here is the skull of a newfoundland dog. you observe the organ of benevolence, and that of attachment. here is a human skull, in which you may observe a very striking negation of both these organs; and an equally striking development of those of destruction, cunning, avarice, and self-love. this was one of the most illustrious statesmen that ever flourished in the page of history. "here is the skull of a turnspit, which, after a wretched life of _dirty work_, was turned out of doors to die on a dunghill. i have been induced to preserve it, in consequence of its remarkable similarity to this, which belonged to a courtly poet, who having grown grey in flattering the great, was cast off in the same manner to perish by the same catastrophe." _after these, and several other illustrations, during which the skulls were handed round for the inspection of the company, mr cranium proceeded thus:--_ "it is obvious, from what i have said, that no man can hope for worldly honour or advancement, who is not placed in such a relation to external circumstances as may be consentaneous to his peculiar cerebral organs; and i would advise every parent, who has the welfare of his son at heart, to procure as extensive a collection as possible of the skulls of animals, and, before determining on the choice of a profession, to compare with the utmost nicety their bumps and protuberances with those of the skull of his son. if the development of the organ of destruction point out a similarity between the youth and the tiger, let him be brought to some profession (whether that of a butcher, a soldier, or a physician, may be regulated by circumstances) in which he may be furnished with a licence to kill: as, without such licence, the indulgence of his natural propensity may lead to the untimely rescission of his vital thread, 'with edge of penny cord and vile reproach.' if he show an analogy with the jackal, let all possible influence be used to procure him a place at court, where he will infallibly thrive. if his skull bear a marked resemblance to that of a magpie, it cannot be doubted that he will prove an admirable lawyer; and if with this advantageous conformation be combined any similitude to that of an owl, very confident hopes may be formed of his becoming a judge." a furious flourish of music was now heard from the ball-room, the squire having secretly dispatched the little butler to order it to strike up, by way of a hint to mr cranium to finish his harangue. the company took the hint and adjourned tumultuously, having just understood as much of the lecture as furnished them with amusement for the ensuing twelvemonth, in feeling the skulls of all their acquaintance. chapter xiii the ball the ball-room was adorned with great taste and elegance, under the direction of miss caprioletta and her friend miss cephalis, who were themselves its most beautiful ornaments, even though romantic meirion, the pre-eminent in loveliness, sent many of its loveliest daughters to grace the festive scene. numberless were the solicitations of the dazzled swains of cambria for the honour of the two first dances with the one or the other of these fascinating friends; but little availed, on this occasion, the pedigree lineally traced from caractacus or king arthur; their two philosophical lovers, neither of whom could have given the least account of his great-great-grandfather, had engaged them many days before. mr panscope chafed and fretted like llugwy in his bed of rocks, when the object of his adoration stood up with his rival: but he consoled himself with a lively damsel from the vale of edeirnion, having first compelled miss cephalis to promise him her hand for the fourth set. the ball was accordingly opened by miss caprioletta and mr foster, which gave rise to much speculation among the welsh gentry, as to who this mr foster could be; some of the more learned among them secretly resolving to investigate most profoundly the antiquity of the name of foster, and ascertain what right a person so denominated could have to open the most illustrious of all possible balls with the lovely caprioletta headlong, the only sister of harry headlong, esquire, of headlong hall, in the vale of llanberris, the only surviving male representative of the antediluvian family of headlong ap-rhaiader. when the first two dances were ended, mr escot, who did not choose to dance with any one but his adorable cephalis, looking round for a convenient seat, discovered mr jenkison in a corner by the side of the reverend doctor gaster, who was keeping excellent time with his nose to the lively melody of the harp and fiddle. mr escot seated himself by the side of mr jenkison, and inquired if he took no part in the amusement of the night? _mr jenkison._ no. the universal cheerfulness of the company induces me to rise; the trouble of such violent exercise induces me to sit still. did i see a young lady in want of a partner, gallantry would incite me to offer myself as her devoted knight for half an hour: but, as i perceive there are enough without me, that motive is null. i have been weighing these points _pro_ and _con_, and remain _in statu quo_. _mr escot._ i have danced, contrary to my system, as i have done many other things since i have been here, from a motive that you will easily guess. (_mr jenkison smiled._) i have great objections to dancing. the wild and original man is a calm and contemplative animal. the stings of natural appetite alone rouse him to action. he satisfies his hunger with roots and fruits, unvitiated by the malignant adhibition of fire, and all its diabolical processes of elixion and assation; he slakes his thirst in the mountain-stream, _summisgetai tae epituchousae_, and returns to his peaceful state of meditative repose. _mr jenkison._ like the metaphysical statue of condillac. _mr escot._ with all its senses and purely natural faculties developed, certainly. imagine this tranquil and passionless being, occupied in his first meditation on the simple question of _where am i? whence do i come? and what is the end of my existence?_ then suddenly place before him a chandelier, a fiddler, and a magnificent beau in silk stockings and pumps, bounding, skipping, swinging, capering, and throwing himself into ten thousand attitudes, till his face glows with fever, and distils with perspiration: the first impulse excited in his mind by such an apparition will be that of violent fear, which, by the reiterated perception of its harmlessness, will subside into simple astonishment. then let any genius, sufficiently powerful to impress on his mind all the terms of the communication, impart to him, that after a long process of ages, when his race shall have attained what some people think proper to denominate a very advanced stage of perfectibility, the most favoured and distinguished of the community shall meet by hundreds, to grin, and labour, and gesticulate, like the phantasma before him, from sunset to sunrise, while all nature is at rest, and that they shall consider this a happy and pleasurable mode of existence, and furnishing the most delightful of all possible contrasts to what they will call his vegetative state: would he not groan from his inmost soul for the lamentable condition of his posterity? _mr jenkison._ i know not what your wild and original man might think of the matter in the abstract; but comparatively, i conceive, he would be better pleased with the vision of such a scene as this, than with that of a party of indians (who would have all the advantage of being nearly as wild as himself), dancing their infernal war-dance round a midnight fire in a north american forest. _mr escot._ not if you should impart to him the true nature of both, by laying open to his view the springs of action in both parties. _mr jenkison._ to do this with effect, you must make him a profound metaphysician, and thus transfer him at once from his wild and original state to a very advanced stage of intellectual progression; whether that progression be towards good or evil, i leave you and our friend foster to settle between you. _mr escot._ i wish to make no change in his habits and feelings, but to give him, hypothetically, so much mental illumination, as will enable him to take a clear view of two distinct stages of the deterioration of his posterity, that he may be enabled to compare them with each other, and with his own more happy condition. the indian, dancing round the midnight fire, is very far deteriorated; but the magnificent beau, dancing to the light of chandeliers, is infinitely more so. the indian is a hunter: he makes great use of fire, and subsists almost entirely on animal food. the malevolent passions that spring from these pernicious habits involve him in perpetual war. he is, therefore, necessitated, for his own preservation, to keep all the energies of his nature in constant activity: to this end his midnight war-dance is very powerfully subservient, and, though in itself a frightful spectacle, is at least justifiable on the iron plea of necessity. _mr jenkison._ on the same iron plea, the modern system of dancing is more justifiable. the indian dances to prepare himself for killing his enemy: but while the beaux and belles of our assemblies dance, they are in the very act of killing theirs--time!--a more inveterate and formidable foe than any the indian has to contend with; for, however completely and ingeniously killed, he is sure to rise again, "with twenty mortal murders on his crown," leading his army of blue devils, with ennui in the van, and vapours in the rear. _mr escot._ your observation militates on my side of the question; and it is a strong argument in favour of the indian, that he has no such enemy to kill. _mr jenkison._ there is certainly a great deal to be said against dancing: there is also a great deal to be said in its favour. the first side of the question i leave for the present to you: on the latter, i may venture to allege that no amusement seems more natural and more congenial to youth than this. it has the advantage of bringing young persons of both sexes together, in a manner which its publicity renders perfectly unexceptionable, enabling them to see and know each other better than, perhaps, any other mode of general association. _tete-a-tetes_ are dangerous things. small family parties are too much under mutual observation. a ball-room appears to me almost the only scene uniting that degree of rational and innocent liberty of intercourse, which it is desirable to promote as much as possible between young persons, with that scrupulous attention to the delicacy and propriety of female conduct, which i consider the fundamental basis of all our most valuable social relations. _mr escot._ there would be some plausibility in your argument, if it were not the very essence of this species of intercourse to exhibit them to each other under false colours. here all is show, and varnish, and hypocrisy, and coquetry; they dress up their moral character for the evening at the same toilet where they manufacture their shapes and faces. ill-temper lies buried under a studied accumulation of smiles. envy, hatred, and malice, retreat from the countenance, to entrench themselves more deeply in the heart. treachery lurks under the flowers of courtesy. ignorance and folly take refuge in that unmeaning gabble which it would be profanation to call language, and which even those whom long experience in "the dreary intercourse of daily life" has screwed up to such a pitch of stoical endurance that they can listen to it by the hour, have branded with the ignominious appellation of "_small talk_." small indeed!--the absolute minimum of the infinitely little. _mr jenkison._ go on. i have said all i intended to say on the favourable side. i shall have great pleasure in hearing you balance the argument. _mr escot._ i expect you to confess that i shall have more than balanced it. a ball-room is an epitome of all that is most worthless and unamiable in the great sphere of human life. every petty and malignant passion is called into play. coquetry is perpetually on the alert to captivate, caprice to mortify, and vanity to take offence. one amiable female is rendered miserable for the evening by seeing another, whom she intended to outshine, in a more attractive dress than her own; while the other omits no method of giving stings to her triumph, which she enjoys with all the secret arrogance of an oriental sultana. another is compelled to dance with a _monster_ she abhors. a third has set her heart on dancing with a particular partner, perhaps for the amiable motive of annoying one of her _dear friends_: not only he does not ask her, but she sees him dancing with that identical _dear friend_, whom from that moment she hates more cordially than ever. perhaps, what is worse than all, she has set her heart on refusing some impertinent fop, who does not give her the opportunity.--as to the men, the case is very nearly the same with them. to be sure, they have the privilege of making the first advances, and are, therefore, less liable to have an odious partner forced upon them; though this sometimes happens, as i know by woeful experience: but it is seldom they can procure the very partner they prefer; and when they do, the absurd necessity of changing every two dances forces them away, and leaves them only the miserable alternative of taking up with something disagreeable perhaps in itself, and at all events rendered so by contrast, or of retreating into some solitary corner, to vent their spleen on the first idle coxcomb they can find. _mr jenkison._ i hope that is not the motive which brings you to me. _mr escot._ clearly not. but the most afflicting consideration of all is, that these malignant and miserable feelings are masked under that uniform disguise of pretended benevolence, _that fine and delicate irony, called politeness, which gives so much ease and pliability to the mutual intercourse of civilised man, and enables him to assume the appearance of every virtue without the reality of one_.[ . ] the second set of dances was now terminated, and mr escot flew off to reclaim the hand of the beautiful cephalis, with whom he figured away with surprising alacrity, and probably felt at least as happy among the chandeliers and silk stockings, at which he had just been railing, as he would have been in an american forest, making one in an indian ring, by the light of a blazing fire, even though his hand had been locked in that of the most beautiful _squaw_ that ever listened to the roar of niagara. squire headlong was now beset by his maiden aunt, miss brindle-mew grimalkin phoebe tabitha ap-headlong, on one side, and sir patrick o'prism on the other; the former insisting that he should immediately procure her a partner; the latter earnestly requesting the same interference in behalf of miss philomela poppyseed. the squire thought to emancipate himself from his two petitioners by making them dance with each other; but sir patrick vehemently pleading a prior engagement, the squire threw his eyes around till they alighted on mr jenkison and the reverend doctor gaster; both of whom, after waking the latter, he pressed into the service. the doctor, arising with a strange kind of guttural sound, which was half a yawn and half a groan, was handed by the officious squire to miss philomela, who received him with sullen dignity: she had not yet forgotten his falling asleep during the first chapter of her novel, while she was condescending to detail to him the outlines of four superlative volumes. the doctor, on his part, had most completely forgotten it; and though he thought there was something in her physiognomy rather more forbidding than usual, he gave himself no concern about the cause, and had not the least suspicion that it was at all connected with himself. miss brindle-mew was very well contented with mr jenkison, and gave him two or three ogles, accompanied by a most risible distortion of the countenance which she intended for a captivating smile. as to mr jenkison, it was all one to him with whom he danced, or whether he danced or not: he was therefore just as well pleased as if he had been left alone in his corner; which is probably more than could have been said of any other human being under similar circumstances. at the end of the third set, supper was announced; and the party, pairing off like turtles, adjourned to the supper-room. the squire was now the happiest of mortal men, and the little butler the most laborious. the centre of the largest table was decorated with a model of snowdon, surmounted with an enormous artificial leek, the leaves of angelica, and the bulb of blancmange. a little way from the summit was a tarn, or mountain-pool, supplied through concealed tubes with an inexhaustible flow of milk-punch, which, dashing in cascades down the miniature rocks, fell into the more capacious lake below, washing the mimic foundations of headlong hall. the reverend doctor handed miss philomela to the chair most conveniently situated for enjoying this interesting scene, protesting he had never before been sufficiently impressed with the magnificence of that mountain, which he now perceived to be well worthy of all the fame it had obtained. "now, when they had eaten and were satisfied," squire headlong called on mr chromatic for a song; who, with the assistance of his two accomplished daughters, regaled the ears of the company with the following terzetto[ . ] grey twilight, from her shadowy hill, discolours nature's vernal bloom, and sheds on grove, and field, and rill, one placid tint of deepening gloom. the sailor sighs 'mid shoreless seas, touched by the thought of friends afar, as, fanned by ocean's flowing breeze, he gazes on the western star. the wanderer hears, in pensive dream, the accents of the last farewell, as, pausing by the mountain stream, he listens to the evening bell. this terzetto was of course much applauded; mr milestone observing, that he thought the figure in the last verse would have been more picturesque, if it had been represented with its arms folded and its back against a tree; or leaning on its staff, with a cockle-shell in its hat, like a pilgrim of ancient times. mr chromatic professed himself astonished that a gentleman of genuine modern taste, like mr milestone, should consider the words of a song of any consequence whatever, seeing that they were at the best only a species of pegs, for the more convenient suspension of crotchets and quavers. this remark drew on him a very severe reprimand from mr mac laurel, who said to him, "dinna ye ken, sir, that soond is a thing utterly worthless in itsel, and only effectual in agreeable excitements, as far as it is an aicho to sense? is there ony soond mair meeserable an' peetifu' than the scrape o' a feddle, when it does na touch ony chord i' the human sensorium? is there ony mair divine than the deep note o' a bagpipe, when it breathes the auncient meelodies o' leeberty an' love? it is true, there are peculiar trains o' feeling an' sentiment, which parteecular combinations o' meelody are calculated to excite; an' sae far music can produce its effect without words: but it does na follow, that, when ye put words to it, it becomes a matter of indefference what they are; for a gude strain of impassioned poetry will greatly increase the effect, and a tessue o' nonsensical doggrel will destroy it a' thegither. noo, as gude poetry can produce its effect without music, sae will gude music without poetry; and as gude music will be mair pooerfu' by itsel' than wi' bad poetry, sae will gude poetry than wi' bad music: but, when ye put gude music an' gude poetry thegither, ye produce the divinest compound o' sentimental harmony that can possibly find its way through the lug to the saul." mr chromatic admitted that there was much justice in these observations, but still maintained the subserviency of poetry to music. mr mac laurel as strenuously maintained the contrary; and a furious war of words was proceeding to perilous lengths, when the squire interposed his authority towards the reproduction of peace, which was forthwith concluded, and all animosities drowned in a libation of milk-punch, the reverend doctor gaster officiating as high priest on the occasion. mr chromatic now requested miss caprioletta to favour the company with an air. the young lady immediately complied, and sung the following simple ballad "o mary, my sister, thy sorrow give o'er, i soon shall return, girl, and leave thee no more: but with children so fair, and a husband so kind, i shall feel less regret when i leave thee behind. "i have made thee a bench for the door of thy cot, and more would i give thee, but more i have not: sit and think of me there, in the warm summer day, and give me three kisses, my labour to pay." she gave him three kisses, and forth did he fare. and long did he wander, and no one knew where; and long from her cottage, through sunshine and rain, she watched his return, but he came not again. her children grew up, and her husband grew grey; she sate on the bench through the long summer day: one evening, when twilight was deep on the shore, there came an old soldier, and stood by the door. in english he spoke, and none knew what he said, but her oatcake and milk on the table she spread; then he sate to his supper, and blithely he sung, and she knew the dear sounds of her own native tongue: "o rich are the feasts in the englishman's hall, and the wine sparkles bright in the goblets of gaul: but their mingled attractions i well could withstand, for the milk and the oatcake of meirion's dear land." "and art thou a welchman, old soldier?" she cried. "many years have i wandered," the stranger replied: "'twixt danube and thames many rivers there be, but the bright waves of cynfael are fairest to me. "i felled the grey oak, ere i hastened to roam, and i fashioned a bench for the door of my home; and well my dear sister my labour repaid, who gave me three kisses when first it was made. "in the old english soldier thy brother appears: here is gold in abundance, the saving of years: give me oatcake and milk in return for my store, and a seat by thy side on the bench at the door." various other songs succeeded, which, as we are not composing a song book, we shall lay aside for the present. an old squire, who had not missed one of these anniversaries, during more than half a century, now stood up, and filling a half-pint bumper, pronounced, with a stentorian voice--"to the immortal memory of headlong ap-rhaiader, and to the health of his noble descendant and worthy representative!" this example was followed by all the gentlemen present. the harp struck up a triumphal strain; and, the old squire already mentioned, vociferating the first stave, they sang, or rather roared, the following chorus hail to the headlong! the headlong ap-headlong! all hail to the headlong, the headlong ap-headlong! the headlong ap-headlong ap-breakneck ap-headlong ap-cataract ap-pistyll ap-rhaiader ap-headlong! the bright bowl we steep in the name of the headlong: let the youths pledge it deep to the headlong ap-headlong, and the rosy-lipped lasses touch the brim as it passes, and kiss the red tide for the headlong ap-headlong! the loud harp resounds in the hall of the headlong: the light step rebounds in the hall of the headlong: where shall music invite us, or beauty delight us, if not in the hall of the headlong ap-headlong? huzza! to the health of the headlong ap-headlong! fill the bowl, fill in floods, to the health of the headlong! till the stream ruby-glowing, on all sides o'erflowing, shall fall in cascades to the health of the headlong! the headlong ap-headlong ap-breakneck ap-headlong ap-cataract ap-pistyll ap-rhaiader ap-headlong! squire headlong returned thanks with an appropriate libation, and the company re-adjourned to the ballroom, where they kept it up till sunrise, when the little butler summoned them to breakfast. chapter xiv the proposals the chorus which celebrated the antiquity of her lineage, had been ringing all night in the ears of miss brindle-mew grimalkin phoebe tabitha ap-headlong, when, taking the squire aside, while the visitors were sipping their tea and coffee, "nephew harry," said she, "i have been noting your behaviour, during the several stages of the ball and supper; and, though i cannot tax you with any want of gallantry, for you are a very gallant young man, nephew harry, very gallant--i wish i could say as much for every one" (added she, throwing a spiteful look towards a distant corner, where mr jenkison was sitting with great _nonchalance_, and at the moment dipping a rusk in a cup of chocolate); "but i lament to perceive that you were at least as pleased with your lakes of milk-punch, and your bottles of champagne and burgundy, as with any of your delightful partners. now, though i can readily excuse this degree of incombustibility in the descendant of a family so remarkable in all ages for personal beauty as ours, yet i lament it exceedingly, when i consider that, in conjunction with your present predilection for the easy life of a bachelor, it may possibly prove the means of causing our ancient genealogical tree, which has its roots, if i may so speak, in the foundations of the world, to terminate suddenly in a point: unless you feel yourself moved by my exhortations to follow the example of all your ancestors, by choosing yourself a fitting and suitable helpmate to immortalize the pedigree of headlong ap-rhaiader." "egad!" said squire headlong, "that is very true, i'll marry directly. a good opportunity to fix on some one, now they are all here; and i'll pop the question without further ceremony." "what think you," said the old lady, "of miss nanny glen-du, the lineal descendant of llewelyn ap-yorwerth?" "she won't do," said squire headlong. "what say you, then," said the lady, "to miss williams, of pontyglasrhydyrallt, the descendant of the ancient family of----?" "i don't like her," said squire headlong; "and as to her ancient family, that is a matter of no consequence. i have antiquity enough for two. they are all moderns, people of yesterday, in comparison with us. what signify six or seven centuries, which are the most they can make up?" "why, to be sure," said the aunt, "on that view of the question, it is no consequence. what think you, then, of miss owen, of nidd-y-gygfraen? she will have six thousand a year." "i would not have her," said squire headlong, "if she had fifty. i'll think of somebody presently. i should like to be married on the same day with caprioletta." "caprioletta!" said miss brindle-mew; "without my being consulted." "consulted!" said the squire: "i was commissioned to tell you, but somehow or other i let it slip. however, she is going to be married to my friend mr foster, the philosopher." "oh!" said the maiden aunt, "that a daughter of our ancient family should marry a philosopher! it is enough to make the bones of all the ap-rhaiaders turn in their graves!" "i happen to be more enlightened," said squire headlong, "than any of my ancestors were. besides, it is caprioletta's affair, not mine. i tell you, the matter is settled, fixed, determined; and so am i, to be married on the same day. i don't know, now i think of it, whom i can choose better than one of the daughters of my friend chromatic." "a saxon!" said the aunt, turning up her nose, and was commencing a vehement remonstrance; but the squire, exclaiming "music has charms!" flew over to mr chromatic, and, with a hearty slap on the shoulder, asked him "how he should like him for a son-in-law?" mr chromatic, rubbing his shoulder, and highly delighted with the proposal, answered, "very much indeed:" but, proceeding to ascertain which of his daughters had captivated the squire, the squire demurred, and was unable to satisfy his curiosity. "i hope," said mr chromatic, "it may be tenorina; for i imagine graziosa has conceived a _penchant_ for sir patrick o'prism."--"tenorina, exactly," said squire headlong; and became so impatient to bring the matter to a conclusion, that mr chromatic undertook to communicate with his daughter immediately. the young lady proved to be as ready as the squire, and the preliminaries were arranged in little more than five minutes. mr chromatic's words, that he imagined his daughter graziosa had conceived a _penchant_ for sir patrick o'prism, were not lost on the squire, who at once determined to have as many companions in the scrape as possible, and who, as soon as he could tear himself from mrs headlong elect, took three flying bounds across the room to the baronet, and said, "so, sir patrick, i find you and i are going to be married?" "are we?" said sir patrick: "then sure won't i wish you joy, and myself too? for this is the first i have heard of it." "well," said squire headlong, "i have made up my mind to it, and you must not disappoint me." "to be sure i won't, if i can help it," said sir patrick; "and i am very much obliged to you for taking so much trouble off my hands. and pray, now, who is it that i am to be metamorphosing into lady o'prism?" "miss graziosa chromatic," said the squire. "och violet and vermilion!" said sir patrick; "though i never thought of it before, i dare say she will suit me as well as another: but then you must persuade the ould orpheus to draw out a few _notes_ of rather a more magical description than those he is so fond of scraping on his crazy violin." "to be sure he shall," said the squire; and, immediately returning to mr chromatic, concluded the negotiation for sir patrick as expeditiously as he had done for himself. the squire next addressed himself to mr escot: "here are three couple of us going to throw off together, with the reverend doctor gaster for whipper-in: now, i think you cannot do better than make the fourth with miss cephalis; and then, as my father-in-law that is to be would say, we shall compose a very harmonious octave." "indeed," said mr escot, "nothing would be more agreeable to both of us than such an arrangement: but the old gentleman, since i first knew him, has changed, like the rest of the world, very lamentably for the worse: now, we wish to bring him to reason, if possible, though we mean to dispense with his consent, if he should prove much longer refractory." "i'll settle him," said squire headlong; and immediately posted up to mr cranium, informing him that four marriages were about to take place by way of a merry winding up of the christmas festivities. "indeed!" said mr cranium; "and who are the parties?" "in the first place," said the squire, "my sister and mr foster: in the second, miss graziosa chromatic and sir patrick o'prism: in the third, miss tenorina chromatic and your humble servant: and in the fourth to which, by the by, your consent is wanted----" "oho!" said mr cranium. "your daughter," said squire headlong. "and mr panscope?" said mr cranium. "and mr escot," said squire headlong. "what would you have better? he has ten thousand virtues." "so has mr panscope," said mr cranium; "he has ten thousand a year." "virtues?" said squire headlong. "pounds," said mr cranium. "i have set my mind on mr escot," said the squire. "i am much obliged to you," said mr cranium, "for dethroning me from my paternal authority." "who fished you out of the water?" said squire headlong. "what is that to the purpose?" said mr cranium. "the whole process of the action was mechanical and necessary. the application of the poker necessitated the ignition of the powder: the ignition necessitated the explosion: the explosion necessitated my sudden fright, which necessitated my sudden jump, which, from a necessity equally powerful, was in a curvilinear ascent: the descent, being in a corresponding curve, and commencing at a point perpendicular to the extreme line of the edge of the tower, i was, by the necessity of gravitation, attracted, first, through the ivy, and secondly through the hazel, and thirdly through the ash, into the water beneath. the motive or impulse thus adhibited in the person of a drowning man, was as powerful on his material compages as the force of gravitation on mine; and he could no more help jumping into the water than i could help falling into it." "all perfectly true," said squire headlong; "and, on the same principle, you make no distinction between the man who knocks you down and him who picks you up." "i make this distinction," said mr cranium, "that i avoid the former as a machine containing a peculiar _cataballitive_ quality, which i have found to be not consentaneous to my mode of pleasurable existence; but i attach no moral merit or demerit to either of them, as these terms are usually employed, seeing that they are equally creatures of necessity, and must act as they do from the nature of their organisation. i no more blame or praise a man for what is called vice or virtue, than i tax a tuft of hemlock with malevolence, or discover great philanthropy in a field of potatoes, seeing that the men and the plants are equally incapacitated, by their original internal organisation, and the combinations and modifications of external circumstances, from being any thing but what they are. _quod victus fateare necesse est_." "yet you destroy the hemlock," said squire headlong, "and cultivate the potato; that is my way, at least." "i do," said mr cranium; "because i know that the farinaceous qualities of the potato will tend to preserve the great requisites of unity and coalescence in the various constituent portions of my animal republic; and that the hemlock, if gathered by mistake for parsley, chopped up small with butter, and eaten with a boiled chicken, would necessitate a great derangement, and perhaps a total decomposition, of my corporeal mechanism." "very well," said the squire; "then you are necessitated to like mr escot better than mr panscope?" "that is a _non sequitur_," said mr cranium. "then this is a _sequitur_," said the squire: "your daughter and mr escot are necessitated to love one another; and, unless you feel necessitated to adhibit your consent, they will feel necessitated to dispense with it; since it does appear to moral and political economists to be essentially inherent in the eternal fitness of things." mr cranium fell into a profound reverie: emerging from which, he said, looking squire headlong full in the face, "do you think mr escot would give me that skull?" "skull!" said squire headlong. "yes," said mr cranium, "the skull of cadwallader." "to be sure he will," said the squire. "ascertain the point," said mr cranium. "how can you doubt it?" said the squire. "i simply know," said mr cranium, "that if it were once in my possession, i would not part with it for any acquisition on earth, much less for a wife. i have had one: and, as marriage has been compared to a pill, i can very safely assert that _one is a dose_; and my reason for thinking that he will not part with it is, that its extraordinary magnitude tends to support his system, as much as its very marked protuberances tend to support mine; and you know his own system is of all things the dearest to every man of liberal thinking and a philosophical tendency." the squire flew over to mr escot. "i told you," said he, "i would settle him: but there is a very hard condition attached to his compliance." "i submit to it," said mr escot, "be it what it may." "nothing less," said squire headlong, "than the absolute and unconditional surrender of the skull of cadwallader." "i resign it," said mr escot. "the skull is yours," said the squire, skipping over to mr cranium. "i am perfectly satisfied," said mr cranium. "the lady is yours," said the squire, skipping back to mr escot. "i am the happiest man alive," said mr escot. "come," said the squire, "then there is an amelioration in the state of the sensitive man." "a slight oscillation of good in the instance of a solitary individual," answered mr escot, "by no means affects the solidity of my opinions concerning the general deterioration of the civilised world; which when i can be induced to contemplate with feelings of satisfaction, i doubt not but that i may be persuaded _to be in love with tortures, and to think charitably of the rack_[ . ]." saying these words, he flew off as nimbly as squire headlong himself, to impart the happy intelligence to his beautiful cephalis. mr cranium now walked up to mr panscope, to condole with him on the disappointment of their mutual hopes. mr panscope begged him not to distress himself on the subject, observing, that the monotonous system of female education brought every individual of the sex to so remarkable an approximation of similarity, that no wise man would suffer himself to be annoyed by a loss so easily repaired; and that there was much truth, though not much elegance, in a remark which he had heard made on a similar occasion by a post-captain of his acquaintance, "that there never was a fish taken out of the sea, but left another as good behind." mr cranium replied that no two individuals having all the organs of the skull similarly developed, the universal resemblance of which mr panscope had spoken could not possibly exist. mr panscope rejoined; and a long discussion ensued, concerning the comparative influence of natural organisation and artificial education, in which the beautiful cephalis was totally lost sight of, and which ended, as most controversies do, by each party continuing firm in his own opinion, and professing his profound astonishment at the blindness and prejudices of the other. in the meanwhile, a great confusion had arisen at the outer doors, the departure of the ball-visitors being impeded by a circumstance which the experience of ages had discovered no means to obviate. the grooms, coachmen, and postillions, were all drunk. it was proposed that the gentlemen should officiate in their places: but the gentlemen were almost all in the same condition. this was a fearful dilemma: but a very diligent investigation brought to light a few servants and a few gentlemen not above _half-seas-over_; and by an equitable distribution of these rarities, the greater part of the guests were enabled to set forward, with very nearly an even chance of not having their necks broken before they reached home. chapter xv the conclusion the squire and his select party of philosophers and dilettanti were again left in peaceful possession of headlong hall: and, as the former made a point of never losing a moment in the accomplishment of a favourite object, he did not suffer many days to elapse, before the spiritual metamorphosis of eight into four was effected by the clerical dexterity of the reverend doctor gaster. immediately after the ceremony, the whole party dispersed, the squire having first extracted from every one of his chosen guests a positive promise to re-assemble in august, when they would be better enabled, in its most appropriate season, to form a correct judgment of cambrian hospitality. mr jenkison shook hands at parting with his two brother philosophers. "according to your respective systems," said he, "i ought to congratulate _you_ on a change for the better, which i do most cordially: and to condole with _you_ on a change for the worse, though, when i consider whom you have chosen, i should violate every principle of probability in doing so." "you will do well," said mr foster, "to follow our example. the extensive circle of general philanthropy, which, in the present advanced stage of human nature, comprehends in its circumference the destinies of the whole species, originated, and still proceeds, from that narrower circle of domestic affection, which first set limits to the empire of selfishness, and, by purifying the passions and enlarging the affections of mankind, has given to the views of benevolence an increasing and illimitable expansion, which will finally diffuse happiness and peace over the whole surface of the world." "the affection," said mr escot, "of two congenial spirits, united not by legal bondage and superstitious imposture, but by mutual confidence and reciprocal virtues, is the only counterbalancing consolation in this scene of mischief and misery. but how rarely is this the case according to the present system of marriage! so far from being a central point of expansion to the great circle of universal benevolence, it serves only to concentrate the feelings of natural sympathy in the reflected selfishness of family interest, and to substitute for the _humani nihil alienum puto_ of youthful philanthropy, the _charity begins at home_ of maturer years. and what accession of individual happiness is acquired by this oblivion of the general good? luxury, despotism, and avarice have so seized and entangled nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand of the human race, that the matrimonial compact, which ought to be the most easy, the most free, and the most simple of all engagements, is become the most slavish and complicated,--a mere question of finance,--a system of bargain, and barter, and commerce, and trick, and chicanery, and dissimulation, and fraud. is there one instance in ten thousand, in which the buds of first affection are not most cruelly and hopelessly blasted, by avarice, or ambition, or arbitrary power? females, condemned during the whole flower of their youth to a worse than monastic celibacy, irrevocably debarred from the hope to which their first affections pointed, will, at a certain period of life, as the natural delicacy of taste and feeling is gradually worn away by the attrition of society, become willing to take up with any coxcomb or scoundrel, whom that merciless and mercenary gang of cold-blooded slaves and assassins, called, in the ordinary prostitution of language _friends_, may agree in designating as a _prudent choice_. young men, on the other hand, are driven by the same vile superstitions from the company of the most amiable and modest of the opposite sex, to that of those miserable victims and outcasts of a world which dares to call itself virtuous, whom that very society whose pernicious institutions first caused their aberrations,--consigning them, without one tear of pity or one struggle of remorse, to penury, infamy, and disease,--condemns to bear the burden of its own atrocious absurdities! thus, the youth of one sex is consumed in slavery, disappointment, and spleen; that of the other, in frantic folly and selfish intemperance: till at length, on the necks of a couple so enfeebled, so perverted, so distempered both in body and soul, society throws the yoke of marriage: that yoke which, once rivetted on the necks of its victims, clings to them like the poisoned garments of nessus or medea. what can be expected from these ill-assorted yoke-fellows, but that, like two ill-tempered hounds, coupled by a tyrannical sportsman, they should drag on their indissoluble fetter, snarling and growling, and pulling in different directions? what can be expected for their wretched offspring, but sickness and suffering, premature decrepitude, and untimely death? in this, as in every other institution of civilised society, avarice, luxury, and disease constitute the triangular harmony of the life of man. avarice conducts him to the abyss of toil and crime: luxury seizes on his ill-gotten spoil; and, while he revels in her enchantments, or groans beneath her tyranny, disease bursts upon him, and sweeps him from the earth." "your theory," said mr jenkison, "forms an admirable counterpoise to your example. as far as i am attracted by the one, i am repelled by the other. thus, the scales of my philosophical balance remain eternally equiponderant, and i see no reason to say of either of them, oichetai eis aidao[ . ]." notes chapter [ . ] foster, quasi _phostaer_,--from _phaos_ and _taereo_, lucem servo, conservo, observo, custodio,--one who watches over and guards the light; a sense in which the word is often used amongst us, when we speak of _fostering_ a flame. [ . ] escot, quasi _es skoton_, _in tenebras_, scilicet, intuens; one who is always looking into the dark side of the question. [ . ] jenkison: this name may be derived from _aien ex ison_, _semper ex aequalibus_--scilicet, mensuris omnia metiens: one who from equal measures divides and distributes all things: one who from equal measures can always produce arguments on both sides of a question, with so much nicety and exactness, as to keep the said question eternally pending, and the balance of the controversy perpetually in statu quo. by an aphaeresis of the _a_, an elision of the second _e_, and an easy and natural mutation of _x_ into _k_, the derivation of this name proceeds according to the strictest principles of etymology: _aien ex ison--ien ex ison--ien ek ison--ien 'k ison--ienkison_--ienkison--jenkison. [ . ] gaster: scilicet _gastaer_--venter, et praeterea nihil. chapter [ . ] see emmerton on the auricula. chapter [ . ] mr knight, in a note to the landscape, having taken the liberty of laughing at a notable device of a celebrated _improver_, for giving greatness of character to a place, and showing an undivided extent of property, by placing the family arms on the neighbouring _milestones_, the improver retorted on him with a charge of misquotation, misrepresentation, and malice prepense. mr knight, in the preface to the second edition of his poem, quotes the improver's words:--"the market-house, or other public edifice, or even a _mere stone with distances_, may bear the arms of the family:" and adds:--"by a _mere stone with distances_, the author of the landscape certainly thought he meant a _milestone_; but, if he did not, any other interpretation which he may think more advantageous to himself shall readily be adopted, as it will equally answer the purpose of the quotation." the improver, however, did not condescend to explain what he really meant by a _mere stone with distances_, though he strenuously maintained that he did _not_ mean a _milestone._ his idea, therefore, stands on record, invested with all the sublimity that obscurity can confer. [ . ] "il est constant qu'elles se baisent de meilleur coeur, et se caressent avec plus de grace devant les hommes, fieres d'aiguiser impunement leur convoitise par l'image des faveurs qu'elles savent leur faire envier."--rousseau, _emile_, liv. . chapter [ . ] see price on the picturesque. [ . ] see knight on taste, and the edinburgh review, no. xiv. [ . ] protracted banquets have been copious sources of evil. chapter [ . ] see lord monboddo's ancient metaphysics. [ . ] drummond's academical questions. [ . ] homer is proved to have been a lover of wine by the praises he bestows upon it. [ . ] a cup of wine at hand, to drink as inclination prompts. chapter [ . ] see knight on taste. [ . ] this stanza is imitated from machiavelli's _capitolo dell' occasione_. chapter [ . ] fragments of a demolished world. [ . ] took's diversions of purley. chapter [ . ] some readers will, perhaps, recollect the archbishop of prague, who also was an excellent sportsman, and who, com' era scritto in certi suoi giornali, ucciso avea con le sue proprie mani un numero infinito d'animali: cinquemila con quindici fagiani, seimila lepri, ottantantre cignali, e per disgrazia, ancor _tredici cani_, &c. chapter [ . ] me miserable! and thrice miserable! and four times, and five times, and twelve times, and ten thousand times miserable! [ . ] pronounced cooroo--the welsh word for _ale._ chapter [ . ] long since dead. [ . ] georg. i. . [ . ] sat. xiii. . [ . ] carm. iii. , . chapter [ . ] pistyll, in welch, signifies a cataract, and rhaidr a cascade. [ . ] rabelais. chapter [ . ] rousseau, discours sur les sciences. [ . ] imitated from a passage in the purgatorio of dante. chapter [ . ] jeremy taylor. chapter [ . ] _it descends to the shades_: or, in other words, _it goes to the devil_. transcription notes source form: printed book title: headlong hall author: thomas love peacock publisher: j. m. dent & co. at aldine house, great eastern st., london. date: editor: richard garnett, lld. printer: turnbull and spears, printers, edinburgh. british library shelfmark: .i. / description: tan cloth over board binding, mm x mm x mm, pages plus at front and at back modifications chapter head and foot decorations have been deleted -- to simplify production to purely text. decorative chapter-start drop-caps have been replaced with capitals -- to simplify production to purely text. page numbers and headers have been deleted -- the new document is unpaginated. fullstops have been deleted from chapter titles and song titles -- they are superfluous. all notes have been moved to the end of the document -- to suit the unpaginated format. all notes by the editor richard garnett have been deleted -- to remove (insubstantial) attachments to the original text. chapter paragraph : inserted closing quotes after "perpetually in statu quo." -- they appear to be missing, since the speech is not continued in the next paragraph. chapter paragraph : deleted fullstop after "astronomy----" -- the sentence is truncated, it does not end. chapter paragraph : deleted fullstop after "selfishness----" -- the sentence is truncated, it does not end. chapter paragraph : deleted fullstop after "cloth----" -- the sentence is truncated, it does not end. chapter paragraph : inserted a comma after "sprained ankle" -- there is a small comma-sized gap at the end of the line where a comma appears to have been omitted. chapter paragraph : deleted comma after "oils" in "oils, and colours" -- "and" clusters things in an item, not separates items, in this list. chapter paragraph : inserted closing quotes after "summit of ararat." -- they appear to be missing, since the speech is not continued in the next paragraph. chapter paragraph : replaced emdash before "exactly, sir: an' ye" with fullstop and space -- it appears to be an erroneous inconsistency, there being no other like instances in speech indication. chapter paragraph : deleted closing quotes after "confracti mundi rudera:" -- the phrase is not quoted, and the speech does not end there. chapter paragraph : replaced "procession" with "precession" in "the procession of the equinoxes" -- it appears to be a spelling error, since mr foster is informed on the subject and not tending to make such mistakes. chapter paragraph : inserted "_mr escot._" at start of paragraph before "nor is" -- to follow consistent indication and layout of speech. chapter paragraph : replaced "befel" with "befell" -- it appears to be a spelling error. chapter paragraph : replaced fullstop with questionmark after "the tevil with" -- the sentence is a question. chapter paragraph : replaced fullstop with questionmark after "away with me" -- the sentence is a question. chapter paragraph : replaced "b" with "p" in "by his chost" -- the sexton in all other cases says "py" instead of "by". chapter paragraph : inserted single closing quote after "_oioi nun brotoi eisin_" -- it appears to be missing. chapter paragraph : replaced "y" in "vouley" with "z" -- it appears to be a spelling error. chapter paragraph : replaced "wolves" in "individual lion, tiger, wolves," with "wolf" -- it is a list of singulars. chapter paragraph : inserted paragraph start and opening quotes before "you observe, in both these skulls" -- blockquotes cannot be inside paragraphs in the layout scheme. chapter paragraph : inserted closing quotes after "becoming a judge." -- they appear to be missing, since the speech is not continued in the next paragraph. chapter paragraph : replaced "woful" with "woeful" in "by woful experience" -- it appears to be a spelling error. chapter ballad: replaced "feats" with "feasts" in "o rich are the feats" -- it appears to be a spelling error. chapter paragraph : replaced fullstop with questionmark after "llewelyn ap-yorwerth" -- the sentence is a question. chapter paragraph : inserted comma after "said the lady" -- one would be expected here. chapter paragraph : capitalised "squire" in ""your daughter," said squire headlong." -- all other instances of "squire headlong" are capitalised. the second mrs. tanqueray * * * * * _the plays of arthur w. pinero_ with introductory notes by malcolm c. salaman paper cover, s. d.; cloth, s. d. each _the times_ _the profligate_ _the cabinet minister_ _the hobby-horse_ _lady bountiful_ _the magistrate_ _dandy dick_ _sweet lavender_ _the schoolmistress_ _the weaker sex_ _the amazons_ _the second mrs. tanqueray_ _the notorious mrs. ebbsmith_ _the benefit of the doubt_ _the princess and the butterfly_ _trelawny of the "wells"_ _the pinero birthday book_ selected and arranged by myra hamilton with a portrait. mo, cloth, s. d. _london: william heinemann_ * * * * * the second mrs. tanqueray a play in four acts by arthur w. pinero london: william heinemann mcm first impression, second impression, third impression, copyright, all rights reserved entered at stationers' hall entered at the library of congress washington, u.s.a. all applications respecting amateur performances of this play must be made to mr. pinero's agents, samuel french, limited, strand, london, w.c. this play was produced at the st. james's theatre on saturday, may , . _the persons of the play_ aubrey tanqueray. paula. ellean. cayley drummle. mrs. cortelyon. captain hugh ardale. gordon jayne, m.d. frank misquith, q.c., m.p. sir george orreyed, bart. lady orreyed. morse. _the present day._ _the scene of the first act is laid at_ mr. tanqueray's _rooms, no. x, the albany, in the month of november; the occurrences of the succeeding acts take place at his house, "highercoombe," near willowmere, surrey, during the early part of the following year._ the second mrs. tanqueray the first act aubrey tanqueray's _chambers in the albany--a richly and tastefully decorated room, elegantly and luxuriously furnished: on the right a large pair of doors opening into another room, on the left at the further end of the room a small door leading to a bedchamber. a circular table is laid for a dinner for four persons which has now reached the stage of dessert and coffee. everything in the apartment suggests wealth and refinement. the fire is burning brightly._ aubrey tanqueray, misquith, _and_ jayne _are seated at the dinner-table._ aubrey _is forty-two, handsome, winning in manner, his speech and bearing retaining some of the qualities of young-manhood._ misquith _is about forty-seven, genial and portly._ jayne _is a year or two_ misquith's _senior; soft-speaking and precise--in appearance a type of the prosperous town physician._ morse, aubrey's _servant, places a little cabinet of cigars and the spirit-lamp on the table beside_ aubrey, _and goes out._ misquith. aubrey, it is a pleasant yet dreadful fact to contemplate, but it's nearly fifteen years since i first dined with you. you lodged in piccadilly in those days, over a hat-shop. jayne, i met you at that dinner, and cayley drummle. jayne. yes, yes. what a pity it is that cayley isn't here to-night. aubrey. confound the old gossip! his empty chair has been staring us in the face all through dinner. i ought to have told morse to take it away. misquith. odd, his sending no excuse. aubrey. i'll walk round to his lodgings later on and ask after him. misquith. i'll go with you. jayne. so will i. aubrey. [_opening the cigar-cabinet._] doctor, it's useless to tempt you, i know. frank--[misquith _and_ aubrey _smoke._] i particularly wished cayley drummle to be one of us to-night. you two fellows and cayley are my closest, my best friends---- misquith. my dear aubrey! jayne. i rejoice to hear you say so. aubrey. and i wanted to see the three of you round this table. you can't guess the reason. misquith. you desired to give us a most excellent dinner. jayne. obviously. aubrey. [_hesitatingly._] well--i--[_glancing at the clock_]--cayley won't turn up now. jayne. h'm, hardly. aubrey. then you two shall hear it. doctor, frank, this is the last time we are to meet in these rooms. jayne. the last time? misquith. you're going to leave the albany? aubrey. yes. you've heard me speak of a house i built in the country years ago, haven't you? misquith. in surrey. aubrey. well, when my wife died i cleared out of that house and let it. i think of trying the place again. misquith. but you'll go raving mad if ever you find yourself down there alone. aubrey. ah, but i sha'n't be alone, and that's what i wanted to tell you. i'm going to be married. jayne. going to be married? misquith. married? aubrey. yes--to-morrow. jayne. to-morrow? misquith. you take my breath away! my dear fellow, i--i--of course, i congratulate you. jayne. and--and so do i--heartily. aubrey. thanks--thanks. [_there is a moment or two of embarrassment._ misquith. er--ah--this is an excellent cigar. jayne. ah--um--your coffee is remarkable. aubrey. look here; i daresay you two old friends think this treatment very strange, very unkind. so i want you to understand me. you know a marriage often cools friendships. what's the usual course of things? a man's engagement is given out, he is congratulated, complimented upon his choice; the church is filled with troops of friends, and he goes away happily to a chorus of good wishes. he comes back, sets up house in town or country, and thinks to resume the old associations, the old companionships. my dear frank, my dear good doctor, it's very seldom that it can be done. generally, a worm has begun to eat its way into those hearty, unreserved, pre-nuptial friendships; a damnable constraint sets in and acts like a wasting disease; and so, believe me, in nine cases out of ten a man's marriage severs for him more close ties than it forms. misquith. well, my dear aubrey, i earnestly hope---- aubrey. i know what you're going to say, frank. i hope so, too. in the meantime let's face dangers. i've reminded you of the _usual_ course of things, but my marriage isn't even the conventional sort of marriage likely to satisfy society. now, cayley's a bachelor, but you two men have wives. by-the-bye, my love to mrs. misquith and to mrs. jayne when you get home--don't forget that. well, your wives may not--like--the lady i'm going to marry. jayne. aubrey, forgive me for suggesting that the lady you are going to marry may not like our wives--mine at least; i beg your pardon, frank. aubrey. quite so; then i must go the way my wife goes. misquith. come, come, pray don't let us anticipate that either side will be called upon to make such a sacrifice. aubrey. yes, yes, let us anticipate it. and let us make up our minds to have no slow bleeding-to-death of our friendship. we'll end a pleasant chapter here to-night, and after to-night start afresh. when my wife and i settle down at willowmere it's possible that we shall all come together. but if this isn't to be, for heaven's sake let us recognise that it is simply because it can't be, and not wear hypocritical faces and suffer and be wretched. doctor, frank--[_holding out his hands, one to_ misquith, _the other to_ jayne]--good luck to all of us! misquith. but--but--do i understand we are to ask nothing? not even the lady's name, aubrey? aubrey. the lady, my dear frank, belongs to the next chapter, and in that her name is mrs. aubrey tanqueray. jayne. [_raising his coffee-cup._] then, in an old-fashioned way, i propose a toast. aubrey, frank, i give you "the next chapter!" [_they drink the toast, saying, "the next chapter!"_ aubrey. doctor, find a comfortable chair; frank, you too. as we're going to turn out by-and-by, let me scribble a couple of notes now while i think of them. misquith _and_ jayne. certainly--yes, yes. aubrey. it might slip my memory when i get back. [aubrey _sits at a writing-table at the other end of the room, and writes._ jayne. [_to_ misquith, _in a whisper._] frank---- [misquith _quietly leaves his chair and sits nearer to jayne._] what is all this? simply a morbid crank of aubrey's with regard to ante-nuptial acquaintances? misquith. h'm! did you notice _one_ expression he used? jayne. let me think---- misquith. "my marriage is not even the conventional sort of marriage likely to satisfy society." jayne. bless me, yes! what does that suggest? misquith. that he has a particular rather than a general reason for anticipating estrangement from his friends, i'm afraid. jayne. a horrible _mésalliance_! a dairymaid who has given him a glass of milk during a day's hunting, or a little anæmic shopgirl! frank, i'm utterly wretched! misquith. my dear jayne, speaking in absolute confidence, i have never been more profoundly depressed in my life. morse _enters._ morse. [_announcing_] mr. drummle. [cayley drummle _enters briskly. he is a neat little man of about five-and-forty, in manner bright, airy, debonair, but with an undercurrent of seriousness._ [morse _retires._ drummle. i'm in disgrace; nobody realises that more thoroughly than i do. where's my host? aubrey. [_who has risen._] cayley. drummle. [_shaking hands with him._] don't speak to me till i have tendered my explanation. a harsh word from anybody would unman me. [misquith _and_ jayne _shake hands with_ drummle. aubrey. have you dined? drummle. no--unless you call a bit of fish, a cutlet, and a pancake dining. aubrey. cayley, this is disgraceful. jayne. fish, a cutlet, and a pancake will require a great deal of explanation. misquith. especially the pancake. my dear friend, your case looks miserably weak. drummle. hear me! hear me! jayne. now then! misquith. come! aubrey. well! drummle. it so happens that to-night i was exceptionally early in dressing for dinner. misquith. for which dinner--the fish and cutlet? drummle. for _this_ dinner, of course--really, frank! at a quarter to eight, in fact, i found myself trimming my nails, with ten minutes to spare. just then enter my man with a note--would i hasten, as fast as cab could carry me, to old lady orreyed in bruton street?--"sad trouble." now, recollect, please, i had ten minutes on my hands, old lady orreyed was a very dear friend of my mother's, and was in some distress. aubrey. cayley, come to the fish and cutlet? misquith _and_ jayne. yes, yes, and the pancake! drummle. upon my word! well, the scene in bruton street beggars description; the women servants looked scared, the men drunk; and there was poor old lady orreyed on the floor of her boudoir like queen bess among her pillows. aubrey. what's the matter? drummle. [_to everybody._] you know george orreyed? misquith. yes. jayne. i've met him. drummle. well, he's a thing of the past. aubrey. not dead! drummle. certainly, in the worst sense. he's married mabel hervey. misquith. what! drummle. it's true--this morning. the poor mother showed me his letter--a dozen curt words, and some of those ill-spelt. misquith. [_walking up to the fireplace._] i'm very sorry. jayne. pardon my ignorance--who _was_ mabel hervey? drummle. you don't----? oh, of course not. miss hervey--lady orreyed, as she now is--was a lady who would have been, perhaps has been, described in the reports of the police or the divorce court as an actress. had she belonged to a lower stratum of our advanced civilisation she would, in the event of judicial inquiry, have defined her calling with equal justification as that of a dressmaker. to do her justice, she is a type of a class which is immortal. physically, by the strange caprice of creation, curiously beautiful; mentally, she lacks even the strength of deliberate viciousness. paint her portrait, it would symbolise a creature perfectly patrician; lance a vein of her superbly-modelled arm, you would get the poorest _vin ordinaire_! her affections, emotions, impulses, her very existence--a burlesque! flaxen, five-and-twenty, and feebly frolicsome; anybody's, in less gentle society i should say everybody's, property! that, doctor, was miss hervey who is the new lady orreyed. dost thou like the picture? misquith. very good, cayley! bravo! aubrey. [_laying his hand on_ drummle's _shoulder._] you'd scarcely believe it, jayne, but none of us really know anything about this lady, our gay young friend here, i suspect, least of all. drummle. aubrey, i applaud your chivalry. aubrey. and perhaps you'll let me finish a couple of letters which frank and jayne have given me leave to write. [_returning to the writing-table._] ring for what you want, like a good fellow! [aubrey _resumes his writing._ misquith. [_to_ drummle.] still, the fish and cutlet remain unexplained. drummle. oh, the poor old woman was so weak that i insisted upon her taking some food, and felt there was nothing for it but to sit down opposite her. the fool! the blackguard! misquith. poor orreyed! well, he's gone under for a time. drummle. for a time! my dear frank, i tell you he has absolutely ceased to be. [aubrey, _who has been writing busily, turns his head towards the speakers and listens. his lips are set, and there is a frown upon his face._] for all practical purposes you may regard him as the late george orreyed. to-morrow the very characteristics of his speech, as we remember them, will have become obsolete. jayne. but surely, in the course of years, he and his wife will outlive---- drummle. no, no, doctor, don't try to upset one of my settled beliefs. you may dive into many waters, but there is _one_ social dead sea----! jayne. perhaps you're right. drummle. right! good god! i wish you could prove me otherwise! why, for years i've been sitting, and watching and waiting. misquith. you're in form to-night, cayley. may we ask where you've been in the habit of squandering your useful leisure? drummle. where? on the shore of that same sea. misquith. and, pray, what have you been waiting for? drummle. for some of my best friends _to come up_. [aubrey _utters a half-stifled exclamation of impatience; then he hurriedly gathers up his papers from the writing-table. the three men turn to him._] eh? aubrey. oh, i--i'll finish my letters in the other room if you'll excuse me for five minutes. tell cayley the news. [_he goes out._ drummle. [_hurrying to the door._] my dear fellow, my jabbering has disturbed you! i'll never talk again as long as i live! misquith. close the door, cayley. [drummle _shuts the door._ jayne. cayley---- drummle. [_advancing to the dinner table._] a smoke, a smoke, or i perish! [_selects a cigar from the little cabinet._ jayne. cayley, marriages are in the air. drummle. are they? discover the bacillus, doctor, and destroy it. jayne. i mean, among our friends. drummle. oh, nugent warrinder's engagement to lady alice tring. i've heard of that. they're not to be married till the spring. jayne. another marriage that concerns us a little takes place to-morrow. drummle. whose marriage? jayne. aubrey's. drummle. aub----! [_looking towards_ misquith.] is it a joke? misquith. no. drummle. [_looking from_ misquith _to_ jayne.] to whom? misquith. he doesn't tell us. jayne. we three were asked here to-night to receive the announcement. aubrey has some theory that marriage is likely to alienate a man from his friends, and it seems to me he has taken the precaution to wish us good-bye. misquith. no, no. jayne. practically, surely. drummle. [_thoughtfully._] marriage in general, does he mean, or this marriage? jayne. that's the point. frank says---- misquith. no, no, no; i feared it suggested---- jayne. well, well. [_to_ drummle.] what do you think of it? drummle. [_after a slight pause._] is there a light there? [_lighting his cigar._] he--wraps the lady--in mystery--you say? misquith. most modestly. drummle. aubrey's--not--a very--young man. jayne. forty-three. drummle. ah! _l'age critique!_ misquith. a dangerous age--yes, yes. drummle. when you two fellows go home, do you mind leaving me behind here? misquith. not at all. jayne. by all means. drummle. all right. [_anxiously._] deuce take it, the man's second marriage mustn't be another mistake! [_with his head bent he walks up to the fireplace._ jayne. you knew him in his short married life, cayley. terribly unsatisfactory, wasn't it? drummle. well---- [_looking at the door._] i quite closed that door? misquith. yes. [_settles himself on the sofa_; jayne _is seated in an armchair._ drummle. [_smoking, with his back to the fire._] he married a miss herriott; that was in the year eighteen--confound dates--twenty years ago. she was a lovely creature--by jove, she was; by religion a roman catholic. she was one of your cold sort, you know--all marble arms and black velvet. i remember her with painful distinctness as the only woman who ever made me nervous. misquith. ha, ha! drummle. he loved her--to distraction, as they say. jupiter, how fervently that poor devil courted her! but i don't believe she allowed him even to squeeze her fingers. she _was_ an iceberg! as for kissing, the mere contact would have given him chapped lips. however, he married her and took her away, the latter greatly to my relief. jayne. abroad, you mean? drummle. eh? yes. i imagine he gratified her by renting a villa in lapland, but i don't know. after a while they returned, and then i saw how wofully aubrey had miscalculated results. jayne. miscalculated----? drummle. he had reckoned, poor wretch, that in the early days of marriage she would thaw. but she didn't. i used to picture him closing his doors and making up the fire in the hope of seeing her features relax. bless her, the thaw never set in! i believe she kept a thermometer in her stays and always registered ten degrees below zero. however, in time a child came--a daughter. jayne. didn't that----? drummle. not a bit of it; it made matters worse. frightened at her failure to stir up in him some sympathetic religious belief, she determined upon strong measures with regard to the child. he opposed her for a miserable year or so, but she wore him down, and the insensible little brat was placed in a convent, first in france, then in ireland. not long afterwards the mother died, strangely enough, of fever, the only warmth, i believe, that ever came to that woman's body. misquith. don't, cayley! jayne. the child is living, we know. drummle. yes, if you choose to call it living. miss tanqueray--a young woman of nineteen now--is in the loretto convent at armagh. she professes to have found her true vocation in a religious life, and within a month or two will take final vows. misquith. he ought to have removed his daughter from the convent when the mother died. drummle. yes, yes, but absolutely at the end there was reconciliation between husband and wife, and she won his promise that the child should complete her conventual education. he reaped his reward. when he attempted to gain his girl's confidence and affection he was too late; he found he was dealing with the spirit of the mother. you remember his visit to ireland last month? jayne. yes. drummle. that was to wish his girl good-bye. misquith. poor fellow? drummle. he sent for me when he came back. i think he must have had a lingering hope that the girl would relent--would come to life, as it were--at the last moment, for, for an hour or so, in this room, he was terribly shaken. i'm sure he'd clung to that hope from the persistent way in which he kept breaking off in his talk to repeat one dismal word, as if he couldn't realise his position without dinning this damned word into his head. jayne. what word was that? drummle. alone--alone. aubrey _enters._ aubrey. a thousand apologies! drummle. [_gaily._] we are talking about you, my dear aubrey. [_during the telling of the story,_ misquith _has risen and gone to the fire, and_ drummle _has thrown himself full-length on the sofa._ aubrey _now joins_ misquith _and_ jayne. aubrey. well, cayley, are you surprised? drummle. surp----! i haven't been surprised for twenty years. aubrey. and you're not angry with me? drummle. angry! [_rising._] because you considerately withhold the name of a lady with whom it is now the object of my life to become acquainted? my dear fellow, you pique my curiosity, you give zest to my existence! and as for a wedding, who on earth wants to attend that familiar and probably draughty function? ugh! my cigar's out. aubrey. let's talk about something else. misquith. [_looking at his watch._] not to-night, aubrey. aubrey. my dear frank! misquith. i go up to scotland to-morrow, and there are some little matters---- jayne. i am off too. aubrey. no, no. jayne. i must: i have to give a look to a case in clifford street on my way home. aubrey. [_going to the door._] well! [misquith _and_ jayne _exchange looks with_ drummle. _opening the door and calling._] morse, hats and coats! i shall write to you all next week from genoa or florence. now, doctor, frank, remember, my love to mrs. misquith and to mrs. jayne! morse _enters with hats and coats._ misquith _and_ jayne. yes, yes--yes, yes. aubrey. and your young people! [_as_ misquith _and_ jayne _put on their coats there is the clatter of careless talk._ jayne. cayley, i meet you at dinner on sunday. drummle. at the stratfields'. that's very pleasant. misquith. [_putting on his coat with_ aubrey's _aid._] ah-h! aubrey. what's wrong? misquith. a twinge. why didn't i go to aix in august? jayne. [_shaking hands with_ drummle.] good-night, cayley. drummle. good-night, my dear doctor! misquith. [_shaking hands with_ drummle.] cayley, are you in town for long? drummle. dear friend, i'm nowhere for long. good-night. misquith. good-night. [aubrey, jayne, _and_ misquith _go out, followed by_ morse; _the hum of talk is continued outside._ aubrey. a cigar, frank? misquith. no, thank you. aubrey. going to walk, doctor? jayne. if frank will. misquith. by all means. aubrey. it's a cold night. [_the door is closed._ drummle _remains standing with his coat on his arm and his hat in his hand._ drummle. [_to himself, thoughtfully._] now then! what the devil----! [aubrey _returns._ aubrey. [_eyeing_ drummle _a little awkwardly._] well, cayley? drummle. well, aubrey? [aubrey _walks up to the fire and stands looking into it._ aubrey. you're not going, old chap? drummle. [_sitting._] no. aubrey. [_after a slight pause, with a forced laugh._] hah! cayley, i never thought i should feel--shy--with you. drummle. why do you? aubrey. never mind. drummle. now, i can quite understand a man wishing to be married in the dark, as it were. aubrey. you can? drummle. in your place i should very likely adopt the same course. aubrey. you think so? drummle. and if i intended marrying a lady not prominently in society, as i presume you do--as i presume you do---- aubrey. well? drummle. as i presume you do, i'm not sure that _i_ should tender her for preliminary dissection at afternoon tea-tables. aubrey. no? drummle. in fact, there is probably only one person--were i in your position to-night--with whom i should care to chat the matter over. aubrey. who's that? drummle. yourself, of course. [_going to_ aubrey _and standing beside him._] of course, yourself, old friend. aubrey. [_after a pause._] i must seem a brute to you, cayley. but there are some acts which are hard to explain, hard to defend---- drummle. to defend----? aubrey. some acts which one must trust to time to put right. [drummle _watches him for a moment, then takes up his hat and coat._ drummle. well, i'll be moving. aubrey. cayley! confound you and your old friendship! do you think i forget it? put your coat down! why did you stay behind here? cayley, the lady i am going to marry is the lady--who is known as--mrs. jarman. [_there is a pause._ drummle. [_in a low voice_] mrs. jarman! are you serious? [_he walks up to the fireplace, where he leans upon the mantelpiece uttering something like a groan._ aubrey. as you've got this out of me i give you leave to say all you care to say. come, we'll be plain with each other. you know mrs. jarman? drummle. i first met her at--what does it matter? aubrey. yes, yes, everything! come! drummle. i met her at homburg, two--three seasons ago. aubrey. not as mrs. jarman? drummle. no. aubrey. she was then----? drummle. mrs. dartry. aubrey. yes. she has also seen you in london, she says. drummle. certainly. aubrey. in aldford street. go on. drummle. please! aubrey. i insist. drummle. [_with a slight shrug of the shoulders._] some time last year i was asked by a man to sup at his house, one night after the theatre. aubrey. mr. selwyn ethurst--a bachelor. drummle. yes. aubrey. you were surprised therefore to find mr. ethurst aided in his cursed hospitality by a lady. drummle. i was unprepared. aubrey. the lady you had known as mrs. dartry? [drummle _inclines his head silently._] there is something of a yachting cruise in the mediterranean too, is there not? drummle. i joined peter jarman's yacht at marseilles, in the spring, a month before he died. aubrey. mrs. jarman was on board? drummle. she was a kind hostess. aubrey. and an old acquaintance? drummle. yes. aubrey. you have told your story. drummle. with your assistance. aubrey. i have put you to the pain of telling it to show you that this is not the case of a blind man entrapped by an artful woman. let me add that mrs. jarman has no legal right to that name, that she is simply miss ray--miss paula ray. drummle. [_after a pause._] i should like to express my regret, aubrey, for the way in which i spoke of george orreyed's marriage. aubrey. you mean you compare lady orreyed with miss ray? [drummle _is silent._] oh, of course! to you, cayley, all women who have been roughly treated, and who dare to survive by borrowing a little of our philosophy, are alike. you see in the crowd of the ill-used only one pattern; you can't detect the shades of goodness, intelligence, even nobility there. well, how should you? the crowd is dimly lighted! and, besides, yours is the way of the world. drummle. my dear aubrey, i _live_ in the world. aubrey. the name we give our little parish of st. james's. drummle. [_laying a hand on_ aubrey's _shoulder._] and you are quite prepared, my friend, to forfeit the esteem of your little parish? aubrey. i avoid mortification by shifting from one parish to another. i give up pall mall for the surrey hills; leave off varnishing my boots and double the thickness of the soles. drummle. and your skin--do you double the thickness of that also? aubrey. i know you think me a fool, cayley--you needn't infer that i'm a coward into the bargain. no! i know what i'm doing, and i do it deliberately, defiantly. i'm alone; i injure no living soul by the step i'm going to take; and so you can't urge the one argument which might restrain me. of course, i don't expect you to think compassionately, fairly even, of the woman whom i--whom i am drawn to---- drummle. my dear aubrey, i assure you i consider mrs.--miss jarman--mrs. ray--miss ray--delightful. but i confess there is a form of chivalry which i gravely distrust, especially in a man of--our age. aubrey. thanks. i've heard you say that from forty till fifty a man is at heart either a stoic or a satyr. drummle. [_protestingly._] ah! now---- aubrey. i am neither. i have a temperate, honourable affection for mrs. jarman. she has never met a man who has treated her well--i intend to treat her well. that's all. and in a few years, cayley, if you've not quite forsaken me, i'll prove to you that it's possible to rear a life of happiness, of good repute, on a--miserable foundation. drummle. [_offering his hand._] do prove it! aubrey. [_taking his hand._] we have spoken too freely of--of mrs. jarman. i was excited--angry. please forget it! drummle. my dear aubrey, when we next meet i shall remember nothing but my respect for the lady who bears your name. morse _enters, closing the door behind him carefully._ aubrey. what is it? morse. [_hesitatingly._] may i speak to you, sir? [_in an undertone._] mrs. jarman, sir. aubrey. [_softly to_ morse.] mrs. jarman! do you mean she is at the lodge in her carriage? morse. no, sir--here. [aubrey _looks towards_ drummle, _perplexed._] there's a nice fire in your--in that room, sir. [_glancing in the direction of the door leading to the bedroom._] aubrey. [_between his teeth, angrily._] very well. [morse _retires._ drummle. [_looking at his watch._] a quarter to eleven--horrible! [_taking up his hat and coat._] must get to bed--up late every night this week. [aubrey _assists_ drummle _with his coat._] thank you. well, good-night, aubrey. i feel i've been dooced serious, quite out of keeping with myself; pray overlook it. aubrey. [_kindly._] ah, cayley! drummle. [_putting on a neck-handkerchief._] and remember that, after all, i'm merely a spectator in life; nothing more than a man at a play, in fact; only, like the old-fashioned playgoer, i love to see certain characters happy and comfortable at the finish. you understand? aubrey. i think i do. drummle. then, for as long as you can, old friend, will you--keep a stall for me? aubrey. yes, cayley. drummle. [_gaily._] ah, ha! good-night! [_bustling to the door._] don't bother! i'll let myself out! good-night! god bless yer! [_he goes out_; aubrey _follows him._ morse _enters by the other door, carrying some unopened letters which after a little consideration he places on the mantelpiece against the clock._ aubrey _returns._ aubrey. yes? morse. you hadn't seen your letters that came by the nine o'clock post, sir; i've put 'em where they'll catch your eye by-and-by. aubrey. thank you. morse. [_hesitatingly._] gunter's cook and waiter have gone, sir. would you prefer me to go to bed? aubrey. [_frowning._] certainly not. morse. very well, sir. [_he goes out._ aubrey. [_opening the upper door_] paula! paula! paula _enters and throws her arms round his neck. she is a young woman of about twenty-seven: beautiful, fresh, innocent-looking. she is in superb evening dress._ paula. dearest! aubrey. why have you come here? paula. angry? aubrey. yes--no. but it's eleven o'clock. paula. [_laughing._] i know. aubrey. what on earth will morse think? paula. do you trouble yourself about what servants _think_? aubrey. of course. paula. goose! they're only machines made to wait upon people--and to give evidence in the divorce court. [_looking round._] oh, indeed! a snug little dinner! aubrey. three men. paula. [_suspiciously._] men? aubrey. men. paula. [_penitently._] ah! [_sitting at the table._] i'm so hungry. aubrey. let me get you some game pie, or some---- paula. no, no, hungry for this. what beautiful fruit! i love fruit when it's expensive. [_he clears a space on the table, places a plate before her, and helps her to fruit._] i haven't dined, aubrey dear. aubrey. my poor girl! why? paula. in the first place, i forgot to order any dinner, and my cook, who has always loathed me, thought he'd pay me out before he departed. aubrey. the beast! paula. that's precisely what i---- aubrey. no, paula! paula. what i told my maid to call him. what next will you think of me? aubrey. forgive me. you must be starved. paula. [_eating fruit._] _i_ didn't care. as there was nothing to eat, i sat in my best frock, with my toes on the dining-room fender, and dreamt, oh, such a lovely dinner-party. aubrey. dear lonely little woman! paula. it was perfect. i saw you at the end of a very long table, opposite me, and we exchanged sly glances now and again over the flowers. we were host and hostess, aubrey, and had been married about five years. aubrey. [_kissing her hand._] five years. paula. and on each side of us was the nicest set imaginable--you know, dearest, the sort of men and women that can't be imitated. aubrey. yes, yes. eat some more fruit. paula. but i haven't told you the best part of my dream. aubrey. tell me. paula. well, although we had been married only such a few years, i seemed to know by the look on their faces that none of our guests had ever heard anything--anything--anything peculiar about the fascinating hostess. aubrey. that's just how it will be, paula. the world moves so quickly. that's just how it will be. paula. [_with a little grimace._] i wonder! [_glancing at the fire._] ugh! do throw another log on. aubrey. [_mending the fire._] there. but you mustn't be here long. paula. hospitable wretch! i've something important to tell you. no, stay where you are. [_turning from him, her face averted._] look here, that was my dream, aubrey; but the fire went out while i was dozing, and i woke up with a regular fit of the shivers. and the result of it all was that i ran upstairs and scribbled you a letter. aubrey. dear baby! paula. remain where you are. [_taking a letter from her pocket._] this is it. i've given you an account of myself, furnished you with a list of my adventures since i--you know. [_weighing the letter in her hand._] i wonder if it would go for a penny. most of it you're acquainted with; _i've_ told you a good deal, haven't i? aubrey. oh, paula! paula. what i haven't told you i daresay you've heard from others. but in case they've omitted anything--the dears--it's all here. aubrey. in heaven's name, why must you talk like this to-night? paula. it may save discussion by-and-by, don't you think? [_holding out the letter._] there you are. aubrey. no, dear, no. paula. take it. [_he takes the letter._] read it through after i've gone, and then--read it again, and turn the matter over in your mind finally. and if, even at the very last moment, you feel you--oughtn't to go to church with me, send a messenger to pont street, any time before eleven to-morrow, telling me that you're afraid, and i--i'll take the blow. aubrey. why, what--what do you think i am? paula. that's it. it's because i know you're such a dear good fellow that i want to save you the chance of ever feeling sorry you married me. i really love you so much, aubrey, that to save you that i'd rather you treated me as--as the others have done. aubrey. [_turning from her with a cry._] oh! paula. [_after a slight pause._] i suppose i've shocked you. i can't help it if i have. [_she sits, with assumed languor and indifference. he turns to her, advances, and kneels by her._ aubrey. my dearest, you don't understand me. i--i can't bear to hear you always talking about--what's done with. i tell you i'll never remember it; paula, can't you dismiss it? try. darling, if we promise each other to forget, to forget, we're bound to be happy. after all, it's a mechanical matter; the moment a wretched thought enters your head, you quickly think of something bright--it depends on one's will. shall i burn this, dear? [_referring to the letter he holds in his hand._] let me, let me! paula. [_with a shrug of the shoulders._] i don't suppose there's much that's new to you in it--just as you like. [_he goes to the fire and burns the letter._ aubrey. there's an end of it. [_returning to her._] what's the matter? paula. [_rising, coldly._] oh, nothing! i'll go and put my cloak on. aubrey. [_detaining her._] what _is_ the matter? paula. well, i think you might have said, "you're very generous, paula," or at least, "thank you, dear," when i offered to set you free. aubrey. [_catching her in his arms._] ah! paula. ah! ah! ha, ha! it's all very well, but you don't know what it cost me to make such an offer. i do so want to be married. aubrey. but you never imagined----? paula. perhaps not. and yet i _did_ think of what i'd do at the end of our acquaintance if you had preferred to behave like the rest. [_taking a flower from her bodice._ aubrey. hush! paula. oh, i forgot! aubrey. what would you have done when we parted? paula. why, killed myself. aubrey. paula, dear! paula. it's true. [_putting the flower in his buttonhole._] do you know i feel certain i should make away with myself if anything serious happened to me. aubrey. anything serious! what, has nothing ever been serious to you, paula? paula. not lately; not since a long while ago. i made up my mind then to have done with taking things seriously. if i hadn't, i---- however, we won't talk about that. aubrey. but now, now, life will be different to you, won't it--quite different? eh, dear? paula. oh yes, now. only, aubrey, mind you keep me always happy. aubrey. i will try to. paula. i know i couldn't swallow a second big dose of misery. i know that if ever i felt wretched again--truly wretched--i should take a leaf out of connie tirlemont's book. you remember? they found her---- [_with a look of horror._] aubrey. for god's sake, don't let your thoughts run on such things! paula. [_laughing._] ha, ha, how scared you look! there, think of the time! dearest, what will my coachman say! my cloak! [_she runs off, gaily, by the upper door._ aubrey _looks after her for a moment, then he walks up to the fire and stands warming his feet at the bars. as he does so he raises his head and observes the letters upon the mantelpiece. he takes one down quickly._ aubrey. ah! ellean! [_opening the letter and reading._] "my dear father,--a great change has come over me. i believe my mother in heaven has spoken to me, and counselled me to turn to you in your loneliness. at any rate, your words have reached my heart, and i no longer feel fitted for this solemn life. i am ready to take my place by you. dear father, will you receive me?--ellean." paula _re-enters, dressed in a handsome cloak. he stares at her as if he hardly realised her presence._ paula. what are you staring at? don't you admire my cloak? aubrey. yes. paula. couldn't you wait till i'd gone before reading your letters? aubrey. [_putting the letter away._] i beg your pardon. paula. take me downstairs to the carriage. [_slipping her arm through his._] how i tease you! to-morrow! i'm so happy! [_they go out._ the second act _a morning-room in_ aubrey tanqueray's _house, "highercoombe," near willowmere, surrey--a bright and prettily furnished apartment of irregular shape, with double doors opening into a small hall at the back, another door on the left, and a large recessed window through which is obtained a view of extensive grounds. everything about the room is charming and graceful. the fire is burning in the grate, and a small table is tastefully laid for breakfast. it is a morning in early spring, and the sun is streaming in through the window._ aubrey _and_ paula _are seated at breakfast, and_ aubrey _is silently reading his letters. two servants, a man and a woman, hand dishes and then retire. after a little while_ aubrey _puts his letters aside and looks across to the window._ aubrey. sunshine! spring! paula. [_glancing at the clock._] exactly six minutes. aubrey. six minutes? paula. six minutes, aubrey dear, since you made your last remark. aubrey. i beg your pardon; i was reading my letters. have you seen ellean this morning? paula. [_coldly._] your last observation but one was about ellean. aubrey. dearest, what shall i talk about? paula. ellean breakfasted two hours ago, morgan tells me, and then went out walking with her dog. aubrey. she wraps up warmly, i hope; this sunshine is deceptive. paula. i ran about the lawn last night, after dinner, in satin shoes. were you anxious about me? aubrey. certainly. paula. [_melting._] really? aubrey. you make me wretchedly anxious; you delight in doing incautious things. you are incurable. paula. ah, what a beast i am! [_going to him and kissing him, then glancing at the letters by his side._] a letter from cayley? aubrey. he is staying very near here, with mrs.---- very near here. paula. with the lady whose chimneys we have the honour of contemplating from our windows? aubrey. with mrs. cortelyon--yes. paula. mrs. cortelyon! the woman who might have set the example of calling on me when we first threw out roots in this deadly-lively soil! deuce take mrs. cortelyon! aubrey. hush! my dear girl! paula. [_returning to her seat._] oh, i know she's an old acquaintance of yours--and of the first mrs. tanqueray. and she joins the rest of 'em in slapping the second mrs. tanqueray in the face. however, i have my revenge--she's six-and-forty, and i wish nothing worse to happen to any woman. aubrey. well, she's going to town, cayley says here, and his visit's at an end. he's coming over this morning to call on you. shall we ask him to transfer himself to us? do say yes. paula. yes. aubrey. [_gladly._] ah, ha! old cayley! paula. [_coldly._] he'll amuse _you_. aubrey. and you too. paula. because you find a companion, shall i be boisterously hilarious? aubrey. come, come! he talks london, and you know you like that. paula. london! london or heaven! which is farther from me! aubrey. paula! paula. oh! oh, i am so bored, aubrey! aubrey. [_gathering up his letters and going to her, leaning over her shoulder._] baby, what can i do for you? paula. i suppose, nothing. you have done all you can for me. aubrey. what do you mean? paula. you have married me. [_he walks away from her thoughtfully, to the writing-table. as he places his letters on the table he sees an addressed letter, stamped for the post, lying on the blotting-book; he picks it up._ aubrey. [_in an altered tone._] you've been writing this morning before breakfast? paula. [_looking at him quickly, then away again._] er--that letter. aubrey. [_with the letter in his hand._] to lady orreyed. why? paula. why not? mabel's an old friend of mine. aubrey. are you--corresponding? paula. i heard from her yesterday. they've just returned from the riviera. she seems happy. aubrey. [_sarcastically._] that's good news. paula. why are you always so cutting about mabel? she's a kind-hearted girl. every thing's altered; she even thinks of letting her hair go back to brown. she's lady orreyed. she's married to george. what's the matter with her? aubrey. [_turning away._] oh! paula. you drive me mad sometimes with the tone you take about things! great goodness, if you come to that, george orreyed's wife isn't a bit worse than yours! [_he faces her suddenly._] i suppose i needn't have made that observation. aubrey. no, there was scarcely a necessity. [_he throws the letter on to the table, and takes up the newspaper._ paula. i am very sorry. aubrey. all right, dear. paula. [_trifling with the letter._] i--i'd better tell you what i've written. i meant to do so, of course. i--i've asked the orreyeds to come and stay with us. [_he looks at her and lets the paper fall to the ground in a helpless way._] george was a great friend of cayley's; i'm sure _he_ would be delighted to meet them here. aubrey. [_laughing mirthlessly._] ha, ha, ha! they say orreyed has taken to tippling at dinner. heavens above! paula. oh! i've no patience with you! you'll kill me with this life! [_she selects some flowers from a vase on the table, cuts and arranges them, and fastens them in her bodice._] what is my existence, sunday to saturday? in the morning, a drive down to the village, with the groom, to give my orders to the tradespeople. at lunch, you and ellean. in the afternoon, a novel, the newspapers; if fine, another drive--_if_ fine! tea--you and ellean. then two hours of dusk; then dinner--you and ellean. then a game of bésique, you and i, while ellean reads a religious book in a dull corner. then a yawn from me, another from you, a sigh from ellean; three figures suddenly rise--"good-night, good-night, good-night!" [_imitating a kiss._] "god bless you!" ah! aubrey. yes, yes, paula--yes, dearest--that's what it is _now_. but, by-and-by, if people begin to come round us---- paula. hah! that's where we've made the mistake, my friend aubrey! [_pointing to the window._] do you believe these people will _ever_ come round us? your former crony, mrs. cortelyon? or the grim old vicar, or that wife of his whose huge nose is positively indecent? or the ullathornes, or the gollans, or lady william petres? i know better! and when the young ones gradually take the place of the old, there will still remain the sacred tradition that the dreadful person who lives at the top of the hill is never, under any circumstances, to be called upon! and so we shall go on here, year in and year out, until the sap is run out of our lives, and we're stale and dry and withered from sheer, solitary respectability. upon my word, i wonder we didn't see that we should have been far happier if we'd gone in for the devil-may-care, _café_-living sort of life in town! after all, _i_ have a set and you might have joined it. it's true i did want, dearly, dearly, to be a married woman, but where's the pride in being a married woman among married women who are--married! if---- [_seeing that_ aubrey's _head has sunk into his hands._] aubrey! my dear boy! you're not--crying? [_he looks up, with a flushed face._ ellean _enters, dressed very simply for walking. she is a low voiced, grave girl of about nineteen, with a face somewhat resembling a madonna. towards_ paula _her manner is cold and distant._ aubrey. [_in an undertone._] ellean! ellean. good-morning, papa. good-morning, paula. [paula _puts her arms round_ ellean _and kisses her._ ellean _makes little response._ paula. good-morning. [_brightly._] we've been breakfasting this side of the house, to get the sun. [_she sits at the piano and rattles at a gay melody. seeing that_ paula's _back is turned to them,_ ellean _goes to_ aubrey _and kisses him; he returns the kiss almost furtively. as they separate, the servants re-enter, and proceed to carry out the breakfast-table._ aubrey. [_to_ ellean.] i guess where you've been: there's some gorse clinging to your frock. ellean. [_removing a sprig of gorse from her skirt._] rover and i walked nearly as far as black moor. the poor fellow has a thorn in his pad; i am going upstairs for my tweezers. aubrey. ellean! [_she returns to him._] paula is a little depressed--out of sorts. she complains that she has no companion. ellean. i am with paula nearly all the day, papa. aubrey. ah, but you're such a little mouse. paula likes cheerful people about her. ellean. i'm afraid i am naturally rather silent; and it's so difficult to seem to be what one is not. aubrey. i don't wish that, ellean. ellean. i will offer to go down to the village with paula this morning--shall i? aubrey. [_touching her hand gently._] thank you--do. ellean. when i've looked after rover, i'll come back to her. [_she goes out;_ paula _ceases playing, and turns on the music-stool looking at_ aubrey. paula. well, have you and ellean had your little confidence? aubrey. confidence? paula. do you think i couldn't feel it, like a pain between my shoulders? aubrey. ellean is coming back in a few minutes to be with you. [_bending over her._] paula, paula dear, is this how you keep your promise? paula. oh! [_rising impatiently and crossing swiftly to the settee, where she sits, moving restlessly._] i _can't_ keep my promise; i _am_ jealous; it won't be smothered. i see you looking at her, watching her; your voice drops when you speak to her. i know how fond you are of that girl, aubrey. aubrey. what would you have? i've no other home for her. she is my daughter. paula. she is your saint. saint ellean! aubrey. you have often told me how good and sweet you think her. paula. good!--yes! do you imagine _that_ makes me less jealous? [_going to him and clinging to his arm._] aubrey, there are two sorts of affection--the love for a woman you respect, and the love for a woman you--love. she gets the first from you: i never can. aubrey. hush, hush! you don't realise what you say. paula. if ellean cared for me only a little, it would be different. i shouldn't be jealous then. why doesn't she care for me? aubrey. she--she--she will, in time. paula. you can't say that without stuttering. aubrey. her disposition seems a little unresponsive; she resembles her mother in many ways; i can see it every day. paula. she's marble. it's a shame. there's not the slightest excuse; for all she knows, i'm as much a saint as she--only married. dearest, help me to win her over! aubrey. help you? paula. you can. teach her that it is her duty to love me; she hangs on to every word you speak. i'm sure, aubrey, that the love of a nice woman who believed me to be like herself would do me a world of good. you'd get the benefit of it as well as i. it would soothe me; it would make me less horribly restless; it would take this--this--mischievous feeling from me. [_coaxingly._] aubrey! aubrey. have patience; everything will come right. paula. yes, if you help me. aubrey. in the meantime you will tear up your letter to lady orreyed, won't you? paula. [_kissing his hand._] of course i will--anything! aubrey. ah, thank you, dearest! [_laughing._] why, good gracious!--ha, ha!--just imagine "saint ellean" and that woman side by side! paula. [_going back with a cry._] ah! aubrey. what? paula. [_passionately._] it's ellean you're considering, not me? it's all ellean with you! ellean! ellean! ellean _re-enters._ ellean. did you call me, paula? [_clenching his hands,_ aubrey _turns away and goes out._] is papa angry? paula. i drive him distracted sometimes. there, i confess it! ellean. do you? oh, why do you? paula. because i--because i'm jealous. ellean. jealous? paula. yes--of you. [ellean _is silent._] well, what do you think of that? ellean. i knew it; i've seen it. it hurts me dreadfully. what do you wish me to do? go away? paula. leave us! [_beckoning her with a motion of the head._] look here! [ellean _goes to_ paula _slowly and unresponsively._] you could cure me of my jealousy very easily. why don't you--like me? ellean. what do you mean by--like you? i don't understand. paula. love me. ellean. love is not a feeling that is under one's control. i shall alter as time goes on, perhaps. i didn't begin to love my father deeply till a few months ago, and then i obeyed my mother. paula. ah, yes, you dream things, don't you--see them in your sleep? you fancy your mother speaks to you? ellean. when you have lost your mother it is a comfort to believe that she is dead only to this life, that she still watches over her child. i do believe that of my mother. paula. well, and so you haven't been bidden to love _me_? ellean. [_after a pause, almost inaudibly._] no. paula. dreams are only a hash-up of one's day-thoughts, i suppose you know. think intently of anything, and it's bound to come back to you at night. i don't cultivate dreams myself. ellean. ah, i knew you would only sneer! paula. i'm not sneering; i'm speaking the truth. i say that if you cared for me in the daytime i should soon make friends with those nightmares of yours. ellean, why don't you try to look on me as your second mother? of course there are not many years between us, but i'm ever so much older than you--in experience. i shall have no children of my own, i know that; it would be a real comfort to me if you would make me feel we belonged to each other. won't you? perhaps you think i'm odd--not nice. well, the fact is i've two sides to my nature, and i've let the one almost smother the other. a few years ago i went through some trouble, and since then i haven't shed a tear. i believe if you put your arms round me just once i should run upstairs and have a good cry. there, i've talked to you as i've never talked to a woman in my life. ellean, you seem to fear me. don't! kiss me! [_with a cry, almost of despair,_ ellean _turns from_ paula _and sinks on to the settee, covering her face with her hands._ paula. [_indignantly._] oh! why is it! how dare you treat me like this? what do you mean by it? what do you mean? _a_ servant _enters._ servant. mr. drummle, ma'am. cayley drummle, _in riding dress, enters briskly._ _the_ servant _retires._ paula. [_recovering herself._] well, cayley! drummle. [_shaking hands with her cordially._] how are you? [_shaking hands with_ ellean, _who rises._] i saw you in the distance an hour ago, in the gorse near stapleton's. ellean. i didn't see you, mr. drummle. drummle. my dear ellean, it is my experience that no charming young lady of nineteen ever does see a man of forty-five. [_laughing._] ha, ha! ellean. [_going to the door._] paula, papa wishes me to drive down to the village with you this morning. do you care to take me? paula. [_coldly._] oh, by all means. pray tell watts to balance the cart for three. [ellean _goes out._ drummle. how's aubrey? paula. very well--when ellean's about the house. drummle. and you? i needn't ask. paula. [_walking away to the window._] oh, a dog's life, my dear cayley, mine. drummle. eh? paula. doesn't that define a happy marriage? i'm sleek, well-kept, well-fed, never without a bone to gnaw and fresh straw to lie upon. [_gazing out of the window._] oh, dear me! drummle. h'm! well, i heartily congratulate you on your kennel. the view from the terrace here is superb. paula. yes, i can see london. drummle. london! not quite so far, surely? paula. _i_ can. also the mediterranean, on a fine day. i wonder what algiers looks like this morning from the sea! [_impulsively._] oh, cayley, do you remember those jolly times on board peter jarman's yacht when we lay off----? [_stopping suddenly, seeing_ drummle _staring at her._] good gracious! what are we talking about! aubrey _enters._ aubrey. [_to drummle._] dear old chap! has paula asked you? paula. not yet. aubrey. we want you to come to us, now that you're leaving mrs. cortelyon--at once, to-day. stay a month, as long as you please--eh, paula? paula. as long as you can possibly endure it--do, cayley. drummle. [_looking at aubrey._] delighted. [_to paula._] charming of you to have me. paula. my dear man, you're a blessing. i must telegraph to london for more fish! a strange appetite to cater for! something to do, to do, to do! [_she goes out in a mood of almost childish delight._ drummle. [_eyeing aubrey._] well? aubrey. [_with a wearied, anxious look._] well, cayley? drummle. how are you getting on? aubrey. my position doesn't grow less difficult. i told you, when i met you last week, of this feverish, jealous attachment of paula's for ellean? drummle. yes. i hardly know why, but i came to the conclusion that you don't consider it an altogether fortunate attachment. aubrey. ellean doesn't respond to it. drummle. these are early days. ellean will warm towards your wife by-and-by. aubrey. ah, but there's the question, cayley! drummle. what question? aubrey. the question which positively distracts me. ellean is so different from--most women; i don't believe a purer creature exists out of heaven. and i--i ask myself, am i doing right in exposing her to the influence of poor paula's light, careless nature? drummle. my dear aubrey! aubrey. that shocks you! so it does me. i assure you i long to urge my girl to break down the reserve which keeps her apart from paula, but somehow i can't do it--well, i don't do it. how can i make you understand? but when you come to us you'll understand quickly enough. cayley, there's hardly a subject you can broach on which poor paula hasn't some strange, out-of-the-way thought to give utterance to; some curious, warped notion. they are not mere worldly thoughts--unless, good god! they belong to the little hellish world which our blackguardism has created: no, her ideas have too little calculation in them to be called worldly. but it makes it the more dreadful that such thoughts should be ready, spontaneous; that expressing them has become a perfectly natural process; that her words, acts even, have almost lost their proper significance for her, and seem beyond her control. ah, and the pain of listening to it all from the woman one loves, the woman one hoped to make happy and contented, who is really and truly a good woman, as it were, maimed! well, this is my burden, and i shouldn't speak to you of it but for my anxiety about ellean. ellean! what is to be her future? it is in my hands; what am i to do? cayley, when i remember how ellean comes to me, from another world i always think, when i realise the charge that's laid on me, i find myself wishing, in a sort of terror, that my child were safe under the ground! drummle. my dear aubrey, aren't you making a mistake? aubrey. very likely. what is it? drummle. a mistake, not in regarding your ellean as an angel, but in believing that, under any circumstances, it would be possible for her to go through life without getting her white robe--shall we say, a little dusty at the hem? don't take me for a cynic. i am sure there are many women upon earth who are almost divinely innocent; but being on earth, they must send their robes to the laundry occasionally. ah, and it's right that they should have to do so, for what can they learn from the checking of their little washing-bills but lessons of charity? now i see but two courses open to you for the disposal of your angel. aubrey. yes? drummle. you must either restrict her to a paradise which is, like every earthly paradise, necessarily somewhat imperfect, or treat her as an ordinary flesh-and-blood young woman, and give her the advantages of that society to which she properly belongs. aubrey. advantages? drummle. my dear aubrey, of all forms of innocence mere ignorance is the least admirable. take my advice, let her walk and talk and suffer and be healed with the great crowd. do it, and hope that she'll some day meet a good, honest fellow who'll make her life complete, happy, secure. now you see what i'm driving at. aubrey. a sanguine programme, my dear cayley! oh, i'm not pooh-poohing it. putting sentiment aside, of course i know that a fortunate marriage for ellean would be the best--perhaps the only--solution of my difficulty. but you forget the danger of the course you suggest. drummle. danger? aubrey. if ellean goes among men and women, how can she escape from learning, sooner or later, the history of--poor paula's--old life? drummle. h'm! you remember the episode of the jeweller's son in the arabian nights? of course you don't. well, if your daughter lives, she _can't_ escape--what you're afraid of. [aubrey _gives a half stifled exclamation of pain._] and when she does hear the story, surely it would be better that she should have some knowledge of the world to help her to understand it. aubrey. to understand! drummle. to understand, to--to philosophise. aubrey. to philosophise? drummle. philosophy is toleration, and it is only one step from toleration to forgiveness. aubrey. you're right, cayley; i believe you always are. yes, yes. but, even if i had the courage to attempt to solve the problem of ellean's future in this way, i--i'm helpless. drummle. how? aubrey. what means have i now of placing my daughter in the world i've left? drummle. oh, some friend--some woman friend. aubrey. i have none; they're gone. drummle. you're wrong there; i know one---- aubrey. [_listening._] that's paula's cart. let's discuss this again. drummle. [_going up to the window and looking out._] it isn't the dog-cart. [_turning to_ aubrey.] i hope you'll forgive me, old chap. aubrey. what for? drummle. whose wheels do you think have been cutting ruts in your immaculate drive? _a_ servant _enters._ servant. [_to_ aubrey.] mrs. cortelyon, sir. aubrey. mrs. cortelyon! [_after a short pause._] very well. [_the_ servant _withdraws._] what on earth is the meaning of this? drummle. ahem! while i've been our old friend's guest, aubrey, we have very naturally talked a good deal about you and yours. aubrey. indeed, have you? drummle. yes, and alice cortelyon has arrived at the conclusion that it would have been far kinder had she called on mrs. tanqueray long ago. she's going abroad for easter before settling down in london for the season, and i believe she has come over this morning to ask for ellean's companionship. aubrey. oh, i see! [_frowning._] quite a friendly little conspiracy, my dear cayley! drummle. conspiracy! not at all, i assure you. [_laughing._] ha, ha! ellean _enters from the hall with_ mrs. cortelyon,_a handsome, good humoured, spirited woman of about forty-five._ ellean. papa---- mrs. cortelyon. [_to_ aubrey, _shaking hands with him heartily._] well, aubrey, how are you? i've just been telling this great girl of yours that i knew her when she was a sad-faced, pale baby. how is mrs. tanqueray? i have been a bad neighbour, and i'm here to beg forgiveness. is she indoors? aubrey. she's upstairs putting on a hat, i believe. mrs. cortelyon. [_sitting comfortably._] ah! [_she looks round:_ drummle _and_ ellean _are talking together in the hall._] we used to be very frank with each other, aubrey. i suppose the old footing is no longer possible, eh? aubrey. if so, i'm not entirely to blame, mrs. cortelyon. mrs. cortelyon. mrs. cortelyon? h'm! no, i admit it. but you must make some little allowance for me, _mr. tanqueray_. your first wife and i, as girls, were like two cherries on one stalk, and then i was the confidential friend of your married life. that post, perhaps, wasn't altogether a sinecure. and now--well, when a woman gets to my age i suppose she's a stupid, prejudiced, conventional creature. however, i've got over it and--[_giving him her hand_]--i hope you'll be enormously happy and let me be a friend once more. aubrey. thank you, alice. mrs. cortelyon. that's right. i feel more cheerful than i've done for weeks. but i suppose it would serve me right if the second mrs. tanqueray showed me the door. do you think she will? aubrey. [_listening._] here is my wife. [mrs. cortelyon _rises, and_ paula _enters, dressed for driving; she stops abruptly on seeing_ mrs. cortelyon.] paula dear, mrs. cortelyon has called to see you. [paula _starts, looks at_ mrs. cortelyon _irresolutely, then after a slight pause barely touches_ mrs. cortelyon's _extended hand._ paula. [_whose manner now alternates between deliberate insolence and assumed sweetness._] mrs.----? what name, aubrey? aubrey. mrs. cortelyon. paula. cortelyon? oh, yes. cortelyon. mrs. cortelyon. [_carefully guarding herself throughout against any expression of resentment._] aubrey ought to have told you that alice cortelyon and he are very old friends. paula. oh, very likely he has mentioned the circumstance. i have quite a wretched memory. mrs. cortelyon. you know we are neighbours, mrs. tanqueray. paula. neighbours? are we really? won't you sit down? [_they both sit._] neighbours! that's most interesting! mrs. cortelyon. very near neighbours. you can see my roof from your windows. paula. i fancy i _have_ observed a roof. but you have been away from home; you have only just returned. mrs. cortelyon. i? what makes you think that? paula. why, because it is two months since we came to highercoombe, and i don't remember your having called. mrs. cortelyon. your memory is now terribly accurate. no, i've not been away from home, and it is to explain my neglect that i am here, rather unceremoniously, this morning. paula. oh, to explain--quite so. [_with mock solicitude._] ah, you've been very ill; i ought to have seen that before. mrs. cortelyon. ill! paula. you look dreadfully pulled down. we poor women show illness so plainly in our faces, don't we? aubrey. [_anxiously._] paula dear, mrs. cortelyon is the picture of health. mrs. cortelyon. [_with some asperity._] i have never _felt_ better in my life. paula. [_looking round innocently._] have i said anything awkward? aubrey, tell mrs. cortelyon how stupid and thoughtless i always am! mrs. cortelyon. [_to_ drummle _who is now standing close to her._] really, cayley----! [_he soothes her with a nod and smile and a motion of his finger to his lip._] mrs. tanqueray, i am afraid my explanation will not be quite so satisfactory as either of those you have just helped me to. you may have heard--but, if you have heard, you have doubtless forgotten--that twenty years ago, when your husband first lived here, i was a constant visitor at highercoombe. paula. twenty years ago--fancy. i was a naughty little child then. mrs. cortelyon. possibly. well, at that time, and till the end of her life, my affections were centred upon the lady of this house. paula. were they? that was very sweet of you. [ellean _approaches_ mrs. cortelyon, _listening intently to her._ mrs. cortelyon. i will say no more on that score, but i must add this: when, two months ago, you came here, i realised, perhaps for the first time, that i was a middle-aged woman, and that it had become impossible for me to accept without some effort a breaking-in upon many tender associations. there, mrs. tanqueray, that is my confession. will you try to understand it and pardon me? paula. [_watching_ ellean,--_sneeringly._] ellean dear, you appear to be very interested in mrs. cortelyon's reminiscences; i don't think i can do better than make you my mouthpiece--there is such sympathy between us. what do you say--can we bring ourselves to forgive mrs. cortelyon for neglecting us for two weary months? mrs. cortelyon. [_to_ ellean, _pleasantly._] well, ellean? [_with a little cry of tenderness_ ellean _impulsively sits beside_ mrs. cortelyon _and takes her hand._] my dear child! paula. [_in an undertone to_ aubrey.] ellean isn't so very slow in taking to mrs. cortelyon! mrs. cortelyon. [_to_ paula _and_ aubrey.] come, this encourages me to broach my scheme. mrs. tanqueray, it strikes me that you two good people are just now excellent company for each other, while ellean would perhaps be glad of a little peep into the world you are anxious to avoid. now, i'm going to paris to-morrow for a week or two before settling down in chester square, so--don't gasp, both of you!--if this girl is willing, and you have made no other arrangements for her, will you let her come with me to paris, and afterwards remain with me in town during the season? [ellean _utters an exclamation of surprise._ paula _is silent._] what do you say? aubrey. paula--paula dear. [_hesitatingly._] my dear mrs. cortelyon, this is wonderfully kind of you; i am really at a loss to--eh, cayley? drummle. [_watching_ paula _apprehensively._] kind! now i must say i don't think so! i begged alice to take _me_ to paris, and she declined. i am thrown over for ellean! ha! ha! mrs. cortelyon. [_laughing._] what nonsense you talk, cayley! [_the laughter dies out._ paula _remains quite still._ aubrey. paula dear. paula. [_slowly collecting herself._] one moment. i--i don't quite---- [_to_ mrs. cortelyon.] you propose that ellean leaves highercoombe almost at once and remains with you some months? mrs. cortelyon. it would be a mercy to me. you can afford to be generous to a desolate old widow. come, mrs. tanqueray, won't you spare her? paula. won't _i_ spare her. [_suspiciously._] have you mentioned your plan to aubrey--before i came in? mrs. cortelyon. no, i had no opportunity. paula. nor to ellean? mrs. cortelyon. oh, no. paula. [_looking about her, in suppressed excitement._] this hasn't been discussed at all, behind my back? mrs. cortelyon. my dear mrs. tanqueray! paula. ellean, let us hear your voice in the matter! ellean. i should like to go with mrs. cortelyon-- paula. ah! ellean. that is, if--if---- paula. if--if what? ellean. _[looking towards_ aubrey, _appealingly._] papa! paula. [_in a hard voice._] oh, of course--i forgot. [_to_ aubrey.] my dear aubrey, it rests with you, naturally, whether i am--to lose--ellean. aubrey. lose ellean! [_advancing to_ paula.] there is no question of losing ellean. you would see ellean in town constantly when she returned from paris; isn't that so, mrs. cortelyon? mrs. cortelyon. certainly. paula. [_laughing softly._] oh, i didn't know i should be allowed that privilege. mrs. cortelyon. privilege, my dear mrs. tanqueray! paula. ha, ha! that makes all the difference, doesn't it? aubrey. [_with assumed gaiety._] all the difference? i should think so! [_to_ ellean, _laying his hand upon her head, tenderly._] and you are quite certain you wish to see what the world is like on the other side of black moor? ellean. if you are willing, papa, i am quite certain. aubrey. [_looking at_ paula _irresolutely, then speaking with an effort._] then i--i am willing. paula. [_rising and striking the table lightly with her clenched hand._] that decides it! [_there is a general movement. excitedly to_ mrs. cortelyon, _who advances towards her._] when do you want her? mrs. cortelyon. we go to town this afternoon at five o'clock, and sleep to-night at bayliss's. there is barely time for her to make her preparations. paula. i will undertake that she is ready. mrs. cortelyon. i've a great deal to scramble through at home too, as you may guess. good-bye! paula. [_turning away._] mrs. cortelyon is going. [paula _stands looking out of the window, with her back to those in the room._ mrs. cortelyon. [_to_ drummle.] cayley---- drummle. [_to her._] eh? mrs. cortelyon. i've gone through it, for the sake of aubrey and his child, but i--i feel a hundred. is that a mad-woman? drummle. of course; all jealous women are mad. [_he goes out with_ aubrey. mrs. cortelyon. [_hesitatingly, to_ paula.] good-bye, mrs. tanqueray. [paula _inclines her head with the slightest possible movement, then resumes her former position._ ellean _comes from the hall and takes_ mrs. cortelyon _out of the room. after a brief silence,_ paula _turns with a fierce cry, and hurriedly takes off her coat and hat, and tosses them upon the settee._ paula. oh! oh! oh! [_she drops into the chair as_ aubrey _returns; he stands looking at her._] who's that? aubrey. i. you have altered your mind about going out? paula. yes. please to ring the bell. aubrey. [_touching the bell._] you are angry about mrs. cortelyon and ellean. let me try to explain my reasons---- paula. be careful what you say to me just now! i have never felt like this--except once--in my life. be careful what you say to me! _a_ servant _enters._ paula. [_rising._] is watts at the door with the cart? servant. yes, ma'am. paula. tell him to drive down to the post-office directly, with this. [_picking up the letter which has been lying upon the table._ aubrey. with that? paula. yes. my letter to lady orreyed. [_giving the letter to the_ servant, _who goes out._ aubrey. surely you don't wish me to countermand any order of yours to a servant? call the man back--take the letter from him! paula. i have not the slightest intention of doing so. aubrey. i must, then. [_going to the door. she snatches up her hat and coat and follows him._] what are you going to do? paula. if you stop that letter, walk out of the house. [_he hesitates, then leaves the door._ aubrey. i am right in believing that to be the letter inviting george orreyed and his wife to stay here, am i not? paula. oh yes--quite right. aubrey. let it go; i'll write to him by-and-by. paula. [_facing him._] you dare! aubrey. hush, paula! paula. insult me again and, upon my word, i'll go straight out of the house! aubrey. insult you? paula. insult me! what else is it? my god! what else is it? what do you mean by taking ellean from me? aubrey. listen----! paula. listen to _me_! and how do you take her? you pack her off in the care of a woman who has deliberately held aloof from me, who's thrown mud at me! yet this cortelyon creature has only to put foot here once to be entrusted with the charge of the girl you know i dearly want to keep near me! aubrey. paula dear! hear me----! paula. ah! of course, of course! i can't be so useful to your daughter as such people as this; and so i'm to be given the go-by for any town friend of yours who turns up and chooses to patronise us! hah! very well, at any rate, as you take ellean from me you justify my looking for companions where i can most readily find 'em. aubrey. you wish me to fully appreciate your reason for sending that letter to lady orreyed? paula. precisely--i do. aubrey. and could you, after all, go back to associates of that order? it's not possible! paula. [_mockingly._] what, not after the refining influence of these intensely respectable surroundings? [_going to the door._] we'll see! aubrey. paula! paula. [_violently._] we'll see! [_she goes out. he stands still looking after her._ the third act _the drawing-room at "highercoombe." facing the spectator are two large french windows, sheltered by a verandah, leading into the garden; on the right is a door opening into a small hall. the fireplace, with a large mirror above it, is on the left-hand side of the room, and higher up in the same wall are double doors recessed. the room is richly furnished, and everything betokens taste and luxury. the windows are open, and there is moonlight in the garden._ lady orreyed, _a pretty, affected doll of a woman with a mincing voice and flaxen hair, is sitting on the ottoman, her head resting against the drum, and her eyes closed._ paula, _looking pale, worn, and thoroughly unhappy, is sitting at a table. both are in sumptuous dinner-gowns._ lady orreyed. [_opening her eyes._] well, i never! i dropped off! [_feeling her hair._] just fancy! where are the men? paula. [_icily._] outside, smoking. _a_ servant _enters with coffee, which he hands to_ lady orreyed. sir george orreyed _comes in by the window. he is a man of about thirty-five, with a low forehead, a receding chin, a vacuous expression, and an ominous redness about the nose._ lady orreyed. [_taking coffee._] here's dodo. sir george. i say, the flies under the verandah make you swear. [_the_ servant _hands coffee to_ paula, _who declines it, then to_ sir george, _who takes a cup._] hi! wait a bit! [_he looks at the tray searchingly, then puts back his cup._] never mind. [_quietly to_ lady orreyed.] i say, they're dooced sparin' with their liqueur, ain't they? [_the_ servant _goes out at window._ paula. [_to_ sir george.] won't you take coffee, george? sir george. no, thanks. it's gettin' near time for a whisky and potass. [_approaching_ paula, _regarding_ lady orreyed _admiringly._] i say, birdie looks rippin' to-night, don't she? paula. your wife? sir george. yaas--birdie. paula. rippin'? sir george. yaas. paula. quite--quite rippin'. [_he moves round to the settee._ paula _watches him with distaste, then rises and walks away._ sir george _falls asleep on the settee._ lady orreyed. paula love, i fancied you and aubrey were a little more friendly at dinner. you haven't made it up, have you? paula. we? oh, no. we speak before others, that's all. lady orreyed. and how long do you intend to carry on this game, dear? paula. [_turning away impatiently._] i really can't tell you. lady orreyed. sit down, old girl; don't be so fidgety. [paula _sits on the upper seat of the ottoman with her back to_ lady orreyed.] of course, it's my duty, as an old friend, to give you a good talking-to--[paula _glares at her suddenly and fiercely._]--but really i've found one gets so many smacks in the face through interfering in matrimonial squabbles that i've determined to drop it. paula. i think you're wise. lady orreyed. however, i must say that i do wish you'd look at marriage in a more solemn light--just as i do, in fact. it is such a beautiful thing--marriage, and if people in our position don't respect it, and set a good example by living happily with their husbands, what can you expect from the middle classes? when did this sad state of affairs between you and aubrey actually begin? paula. actually, a fortnight and three days ago; i haven't calculated the minutes. lady orreyed. a day or two before dodo and i turned up--arrived. paula. yes. one always remembers one thing by another; we left off speaking to each other the morning i wrote asking you to visit us. lady orreyed. lucky for you i was able to pop down, wasn't it, dear? paula. [_glaring at her again._] most fortunate. lady orreyed. a serious split with your husband without a pal on the premises--i should say, without a friend in the house--would be most unpleasant. paula. [_turning to her abruptly._] this place must be horribly doleful for you and george just now. at least you ought to consider him before me. why don't you leave me to my difficulties? lady orreyed. oh, we're quite comfortable, dear, thank you--both of us. george and me are so wrapped up in each other, it doesn't matter where we are. i don't want to crow over you, old girl, but i've got a perfect husband. [sir george _is now fast asleep, his head thrown back and his mouth open, looking hideous._ paula. [_glancing at_ sir george.] so you've given me to understand. lady orreyed. not that we don't have our little differences. why, we fell out only this very morning. you remember the diamond and ruby tiara charley prestwick gave poor dear connie tirlemont years ago, don't you? paula. no, i do not. lady orreyed. no? well, it's in the market. benjamin of piccadilly has got it in his shop-window, and i've set my heart on it. paula. you consider it quite necessary? lady orreyed. yes, because what i say to dodo is this--a lady of my station must smother herself with hair ornaments. it's different with you, love--people don't look for so much blaze from you, but i've got rank to keep up; haven't i? paula. yes. lady orreyed. well, that was the cause of the little set-to between i and dodo this morning. he broke two chairs, he was in such a rage. i forgot, they're your chairs; do you mind? paula. no. lady orreyed. you know, poor dodo can't lose his temper without smashing something; if it isn't a chair, it's a mirror; if it isn't that, it's china--a bit of dresden for choice. dear old pet! he loves a bit of dresden when he's furious. he doesn't really throw things _at_ me, dear; he simply lifts them up and drops them, like a gentleman. i expect our room upstairs will look rather wrecky before i get that tiara. paula. excuse the suggestion, perhaps your husband can't afford it. lady orreyed. oh, how dreadfully changed you are, paula! dodo can always mortgage something, or borrow of his ma. what _is_ coming to you! paula. ah! [_she sits at the piano and touches the keys._ lady orreyed. oh, yes, do play! that's the one thing i envy you for. paula. what shall i play? lady orreyed. what was that heavenly piece you gave us last night, dear? paula. a bit of schubert. would you like to hear it again? lady orreyed. you don't know any comic songs, do you? paula. i'm afraid not. lady orreyed. i leave it to you, then. [paula _plays._ aubrey _and_ cayley drummle _appear outside the window; they look into the room._ aubrey. [_to_ drummle. ] you can see her face in that mirror. poor girl, how ill and wretched she looks. drummle. when are the orreyeds going? aubrey. heaven knows! [_entering the room._ drummle. but _you're_ entertaining them; what's it to do with heaven? [_following_ aubrey. aubrey. do you know, cayley, that even the orreyeds serve a useful purpose? my wife actually speaks to me before our guests--think of that! i've come to rejoice at the presence of the orreyeds! drummle. i daresay; we're taught that beetles are sent for a benign end. aubrey. cayley, talk to paula again to-night. drummle. certainly, if i get the chance. aubrey. let's contrive it. george is asleep; perhaps i can get that doll out of the way. [_as they advance into the room,_ paula _abruptly ceases playing and finds interest in a volume of music._ sir george _is now nodding and snoring apoplectically._] lady orreyed, whenever you feel inclined for a game of billiards i'm at your service. lady orreyed. [_jumping up._] charmed, i'm sure! i really thought you'd forgotten poor little me. oh, look at dodo! aubrey. no, no, don't wake him; he's tired. lady orreyed. i must, he looks so plain. [_rousing_ sir george.] dodo! dodo! sir george. [_stupidly._] 'ullo! lady orreyed. dodo, dear, you were snoring. sir george. oh, i say, you could 'a told me that by-and-by. aubrey. you want a cigar, george; come into the billiard-room. [_giving his arm to_ lady orreyed.] cayley, bring paula. [aubrey _and_ lady orreyed _go out._ sir george. [_rising._] hey, what! billiard-room! [_looking at his watch._] how goes the----? phew! 'ullo, 'ullo! whisky and potass! [_he goes rapidly after_ aubrey _and_ lady orreyed. paula _resumes playing._ paula. [_after a pause._] don't moon about after me, cayley; follow the others. drummle. thanks, by-and-by. [_sitting._] that's pretty. paula. [_after another pause, still playing._] i wish you wouldn't stare so. drummle. was i staring? i'm sorry. [_she plays a little longer, then stops suddenly, rises, and goes to the window, where she stands looking out._ drummle _moves from the ottoman to the settee._] a lovely night. paula. [_startled._] oh! [_without turning to him._] why do you hop about like a monkey? drummle. hot rooms play the deuce with the nerves. now, it would have done you good to have walked in the garden with us after dinner and made merry. why didn't you? paula. you know why. drummle. ah, you're thinking of the--difference between you and aubrey? paula. yes, i _am_ thinking of it. drummle. well, so am i. how long----? paula. getting on for three weeks. drummle. bless me, it must be! and this would have been such a night to have healed it! moonlight, the stars, the scent of flowers; and yet enough darkness to enable a kind woman to rest her hand for an instant on the arm of a good fellow who loves her. ah, ha! it's a wonderful power, dear mrs. aubrey, the power of an offended woman! only realise it! just that one touch--the mere tips of her fingers--and, for herself and another, she changes the colour of the whole world! paula. [_turning to him, calmly._] cayley, my dear man, you talk exactly like a very romantic old lady. [_she leaves the window and sits playing with the knick-knacks on the table._ drummle. [_to himself._] h'm, that hasn't done it! well--ha, ha!--i accept the suggestion. an old woman, eh? paula. oh, i didn't intend---- drummle. but why not? i've every qualification--well, almost. and i confess it would have given this withered bosom a throb of grandmotherly satisfaction if i could have seen you and aubrey at peace before i take my leave to-morrow. paula. to-morrow, cayley! drummle. i must. paula. oh, this house is becoming unendurable. drummle. you're very kind. but you've got the orreyeds. paula. [_fiercely._] the orreyeds! i--i hate the orreyeds! i lie awake at night, hating them! drummle. pardon me, i've understood that their visit is, in some degree, owing to--hem!--your suggestion. paula. heavens! that doesn't make me like them better. somehow or another, i--i've outgrown these people. this woman--i used to think her "jolly!"--sickens me. i can't breathe when she's near me: the whiff of her handkerchief turns me faint! and she patronises me by the hour, until i--i feel my nails growing longer with every word she speaks! drummle. my dear lady, why on earth don't you say all this to aubrey? paula. oh, i've been such an utter fool, cayley! drummle. [_soothingly._] well, well, mention it to aubrey! paula. no, no, you don't understand. what do you think i've done? drummle. done! what, _since_ you invited the orreyeds? paula. yes; i must tell you---- drummle. perhaps you'd better not. paula. look here. i've intercepted some letters from mrs. cortelyon and ellean to--him. [_producing three unopened letters from the bodice of her dress._] there are the accursed things! from paris--two from the cortelyon woman, the other from ellean! drummle. but why--why? paula. i don't know. yes, i do! i saw letters coming from ellean to her father; not a line to me--not a line. and one morning it happened i was downstairs before he was, and i spied this one lying with his heap on the breakfast-table, and i slipped it into my pocket--out of malice, cayley, pure devilry! and a day or two afterwards i met elwes the postman at the lodge, and took the letters from him, and found these others amongst 'em. i felt simply fiendish when i saw them--fiendish! [_returning the letters to her bodice._] and now i carry them about with me, and they're scorching me like a mustard plaster! drummle. oh, this accounts for aubrey not hearing from paris lately! paula. that's an ingenious conclusion to arrive at! of course it does! [_with an hysterical laugh._] ha, ha! drummle. well, well! [_laughing._] ha, ha, ha! paula. [_turning upon him._] i suppose it _is_ amusing! drummle. i beg pardon. paula. heaven knows i've little enough to brag about! i'm a bad lot, but not in mean tricks of this sort. in all my life this is the most caddish thing i've done. how am i to get rid of these letters--that's what i want to know? how am i to get rid of them? drummle. if i were you i should take aubrey aside and put them into his hands as soon as possible. paula. what! and tell him to his face that i----! no, thank you. i suppose _you_ wouldn't like to---- drummle. no, no; i won't touch 'em! paula. and you call yourself my friend? drummle. [_good-humouredly._] no, i don't! paula. perhaps i'll tie them together and give them to his man in the morning. drummle. that won't avoid an explanation. paula. [_recklessly._] oh, then he must miss them---- drummle. and trace them. paula. [_throwing herself upon the ottoman._] i don't care! drummle. i know you don't; but let me send him to you now, may i? paula. now! what do you think a woman's made of? i couldn't stand it, cayley. i haven't slept for nights; and last night there was thunder, too! i believe i've got the horrors. drummle. [_taking the little hand-mirror from the table._] you'll sleep well enough when you deliver those letters. come, come, mrs. aubrey--a good night's rest! [_holding the mirror before her face._] it's quite time. [_she looks at herself for a moment, then snatches the mirror from him._ paula. you brute, cayley, to show me that! drummle. then--may i? be guided by a fr--a poor old woman! may i? paula. you'll kill me, amongst you! drummle. what do you say? paula. [_after a pause._] very well. [_he nods his head and goes out rapidly. she looks after him for a moment, and calls "cayley! cayley!" then she again produces the letters, deliberately, one by one, fingering them with aversion. suddenly she starts, turning her head towards the door._] ah! aubrey _enters quickly._ aubrey. paula! paula. [_handing him the letters, her face averted._] there! [_he examines the letters, puzzled, and looks at her inquiringly._] they are many days old. i stole them, i suppose to make you anxious and unhappy. [_he looks at the letters again, then lays them aside on the table._ aubrey. [_gently._] paula, dear, it doesn't matter. paula. [_after a short pause._] why--why do you take it like this? aubrey. what did you expect? paula. oh, but i suppose silent reproaches are really the severest. and then, naturally, you are itching to open your letters. [_she crosses the room as if to go._ aubrey. paula! [_she pauses._] surely, surely it's all over now? paula. all over! [_mockingly._.] has my step-daughter returned then? when did she arrive? i haven't heard of it! aubrey. you can be very cruel. paula. that word's always on a man's lips; he uses it if his soup's cold. [_with another movement as if to go._] need we---- aubrey. i know i've wounded you, paula. but isn't there any way out of this? paula. when does ellean return? to-morrow? next week? aubrey. [_wearily._] oh! why should we grudge ellean the little pleasure she is likely to find in paris and in london. paula. i grudge her nothing, if that's a hit at me. but with that woman----! aubrey. it must be that woman or another. you know that at present we are unable to give ellean the opportunity of--of---- paula. of mixing with respectable people. aubrey. the opportunity of gaining friends, experience, ordinary knowledge of the world. if you are interested in ellean, can't you see how useful mrs. cortelyon's good offices are? paula. may i put one question? at the end of the london season, when mrs. cortelyon has done with ellean, is it quite understood that the girl comes back to us? [aubrey _is silent._] is it? is it? aubrey. let us wait till the end of the season---- paula. oh! i knew it. you're only fooling me; you put me off with any trash. i believe you've sent ellean away, not for the reasons you give, but because you don't consider me a decent companion for her, because you're afraid she might get a little of her innocence rubbed off in my company? come, isn't that the truth? be honest! isn't that it? aubrey. yes. [_there is a moment's silence on both sides._ paula. [_with uplifted hands as if to strike him._] oh! aubrey. [_taking her by the wrists._] sit down. sit down. [_he puts her into a chair; she shakes herself free with a cry._] now listen to me. fond as you are, paula, of harking back to your past, there's one chapter of it you always let alone. i've never asked you to speak of it; you've never offered to speak of it. i mean the chapter that relates to the time when you were--like ellean. [_she attempts to rise; he restrains her._] no, no. paula. i don't choose to talk about that time. i won't satisfy your curiosity. aubrey. my dear paula, i have no curiosity--i know what you were at ellean's age. i'll tell you. you hadn't a thought that wasn't a wholesome one, you hadn't an impulse that didn't tend towards good, you never harboured a notion you couldn't have gossiped about to a parcel of children. [_she makes another effort to rise: he lays his hand lightly on her shoulder._] and this was a very few years back--there are days now when you look like a schoolgirl--but think of the difference between the two paulas. you'll have to think hard, because after a cruel life one's perceptions grow a thick skin. but, for god's sake, do think till you get these two images clearly in your mind, and then ask yourself what sort of a friend such a woman as you are to-day would have been for the girl of seven or eight years ago. paula. [_rising._] how dare you? i could be almost as good a friend to ellean as her own mother would have been had she lived. i know what you mean. how dare you? aubrey. you say that; very likely you believe it. but you're blind, paula; you're blind. you! every belief that a young, pure-minded girl holds sacred--that you once held sacred--you now make a target for a jest, a sneer, a paltry cynicism. i tell you, you're not mistress any longer of your thoughts or your tongue. why, how often, sitting between you and ellean, have i seen her cheeks turn scarlet as you've rattled off some tale that belongs by right to the club or the smoking-room! have you noticed the blush? if you have, has the cause of it ever struck you? and this is the girl you say you love, i admit that you _do_ love, whose love you expect in return! oh, paula, i make the best, the only, excuse for you when i tell you you're blind! paula. ellean--ellean blushes easily. aubrey. you blushed as easily a few years ago. paula. [_after a short pause._] well! have you finished your sermon? aubrey. [_with a gesture of despair._] oh, paula! [_going up to the window and standing with his back to the room._ paula. [_to herself._] a few--years ago! [_she walks slowly towards the door, then suddenly drops upon the ottoman in a paroxysm of weeping._] o god! a few years ago! aubrey. [_going to her._] paula! paula. [_sobbing._] oh, don't touch me! aubrey. paula! paula. oh, go away from me! [_he goes back a few steps, and after a little while she becomes calmer and rises unsteadily; then in an altered tone._] look here----! [_he advances a step; she checks him with a quick gesture._] look here! get rid of these people--mabel and her husband--as soon as possible! i--i've done with them! aubrey. [_in a whisper._] paula! paula. and then--then--when the time comes for ellean to leave mrs. cortelyon, give me--give me another chance! [_he advances again, but she shrinks away._] no, no! [_she goes out by the door on the right. he sinks on to the settee, covering his eyes with his hands. there is a brief silence, then a_ servant _enters._] servant. mrs. cortelyon, sir, with miss ellean. [aubrey _rises to meet_ mrs. cortelyon, _who enters, followed by_ ellean, _both being in travelling dresses. the_ servant _withdraws._ mrs. cortelyon. [_shaking hands with_ aubrey.] oh, my dear aubrey! aubrey. mrs. cortelyon! [_kissing_ ellean.] ellean dear! ellean. papa, is all well at home? mrs. cortelyon. we're shockingly anxious. aubrey. yes, yes, all's well. this is quite unexpected. [_to_ mrs. cortelyon.] you've found paris insufferably hot? mrs. cortelyon. insufferably hot! paris is pleasant enough. we've had no letter from you! aubrey. i wrote to ellean a week ago. mrs. cortelyon. without alluding to the subject i had written to you upon. aubrey. [_thinking._] ah, of course---- mrs. cortelyon. and since then we've both written and you've been absolutely silent. oh, it's too bad! aubrey. [_picking up the letters from the table._] it isn't altogether my fault. here are the letters---- ellean. papa! mrs. cortelyon. they're unopened. aubrey. an accident delayed their reaching me till this evening. i'm afraid this has upset you very much. mrs. cortelyon. upset me! ellean. [_in an undertone to_ mrs. cortelyon.] never mind. not now, dear--not to-night. aubrey. eh? mrs. cortelyon. [_to_ ellean _aloud._] child, run away and take your things off. she doesn't look as if she'd journeyed from paris to-day. aubrey. i've never seen her with such a colour. [_taking_ ellean's _hands._ ellean. [_to_ aubrey, _in a faint voice._] papa, mrs. cortelyon has been so very, very kind to me, but i--i have come home. [_she goes out._ aubrey. come home! [_to_ mrs. cortelyon.] ellean returns to us, then? mrs. cortelyon. that's the very point i put to you in my letters, and you oblige me to travel from paris to willowmere on a warm day to settle it. i think perhaps it's right that ellean should be with you just now, although i---- my dear friend, circumstances are a little altered. aubrey. alice, you're in some trouble. mrs. cortelyon. well--yes, i _am_ in trouble. you remember pretty little mrs. brereton who was once caroline ardale? aubrey. quite well. mrs. cortelyon. she's a widow now, poor thing. she has the _entresol_ of the house where we've been lodging in the avenue de friedland. caroline's a dear chum of mine; she formed a great liking for ellean. aubrey. i'm very glad. mrs. cortelyon. yes, it's nice for her to meet her mother's friends. er--that young hugh ardale the papers were full of some time ago--he's caroline brereton's brother, you know. aubrey. no, i didn't know. what did he do? i forget. mrs. cortelyon. checked one of those horrid mutinies at some far-away station in india, marched down with a handful of his men and a few faithful natives, and held the place until he was relieved. they gave him his company and a v.c. for it. aubrey. and he's mrs. brereton's brother? mrs. cortelyon. yes. he's with his sister--_was_, rather--in paris. he's home--invalided. good gracious, aubrey, why don't you help me out? can't you guess what has occurred? aubrey. alice! mrs. cortelyon. young ardale--ellean! aubrey. an attachment? mrs. cortelyon. yes, aubrey. [_after a little pause._] well, i suppose i've got myself into sad disgrace. but really i didn't foresee anything of this kind. a serious, reserved child like ellean, and a boyish, high-spirited soldier--it never struck me as being likely. [aubrey _paces to and fro thoughtfully._] i did all i could directly captain ardale spoke--wrote to you at once. why on earth don't you receive your letters promptly, and when you do get them why can't you open them? i endured the anxiety till last night, and then made up my mind--home! of course, it has worried me terribly. my head's bursting. are there any salts about? [aubrey _fetches a bottle from the cabinet and hands it to her._] we've had one of those hateful smooth crossings that won't let you be properly indisposed. aubrey. my dear alice, i assure you i've no thought of blaming you. mrs. cortelyon. that statement always precedes a quarrel. aubrey. i don't know whether this is the worst or the best luck. how will my wife regard it? is captain ardale a good fellow? mrs. cortelyon. my dear aubrey, you'd better read up the accounts of his wonderful heroism. face to face with death for a whole week; always with a smile and a cheering word for the poor helpless souls depending on him! of course, it's that that has stirred the depths of your child's nature. i've watched her while we've been dragging the story out of him, and if angels look different from ellean at that moment, i don't desire to meet any, that's all! aubrey. if you were in my position----? but you can't judge. mrs. cortelyon. why, if i had a marriageable daughter of my own and captain ardale proposed for her, naturally i should cry my eyes out all night--but i should thank heaven in the morning. aubrey. you believe so thoroughly in him? mrs. cortelyon. do you think i should have only a headache at this minute if i didn't! look here, you've got to see me down the lane; that's the least you can do, my friend. come into my house for a moment and shake hands with hugh. aubrey. what, is he here? mrs. cortelyon. he came through with us, to present himself formally to-morrow. where are my gloves? [aubrey _fetches them from the ottoman._] make my apologies to mrs. tanqueray, please. she's well, i hope? [_going towards the door._] i can't feel sorry she hasn't seen me in this condition. ellean _enters._ ellean. [_to_ mrs. cortelyon.] i've been waiting to wish you good-night. i was afraid i'd missed you. mrs. cortelyon. good-night, ellean. ellean. [_in a low voice, embracing_ mrs. cortelyon.] i can't thank you. dear mrs. cortelyon! mrs. cortelyon. [_her arms round_ ellean, _in a whisper to_ aubrey.] speak a word to her. [mrs. cortelyon _goes out._ aubrey. [_to_ ellean.] ellean, i'm going to see mrs. cortelyon home. tell paula where i am; explain, dear. [_going to the door_ ellean. [_her head drooping._] yes. [_quickly._] father! you are angry with me--disappointed? aubrey. angry?--no. ellean. disappointed? aubrey. [_smiling and going to her and taking her hand._] if so, it's only because you've shaken my belief in my discernment. i thought you took after your poor mother a little, ellean; but there's a look on your face to-night, dear, that i never saw on hers--never, never. ellean. [_leaning her head on his shoulder._] perhaps i ought not to have gone away? aubrey. hush! you're quite happy? ellean. yes. aubrey. that's right. then, as you are quite happy there is something i particularly want you to do for me ellean. ellean. what is that? aubrey. be very gentle with paula. will you? ellean. you think i have been unkind. aubrey. [_kissing her upon the forehead._] be very gentle with paula. [_he goes out and she stands looking after him, then, as she turns thoughtfully from the door, a rose is thrown through the window and falls at her feet. she picks up the flower wonderingly and goes to the window._ ellean. [_starting back._] hugh! hugh ardale, _a handsome young man of about seven-and-twenty, with a boyish face and manner, appears outside the window._ hugh. nelly! nelly dear! ellean. what's the matter? hugh. hush! nothing. it's only fun. [_laughing._] ha, ha, ha! i've found out that mrs. cortelyon's meadow runs up to your father's plantation; i've come through a gap in the hedge. ellean. why, hugh? hugh. i'm miserable at the warren; it's so different from the avenue de friedland. don't look like that! upon my word i meant just to peep at your home and go back, but i saw figures moving about here, and came nearer, hoping to get a glimpse of you. was that your father? [_entering the room._ ellean. yes. hugh. isn't this fun! a rabbit ran across my foot while i was hiding behind that old yew. ellean. you must go away; it's not right for you to be here like this. hugh. but it's only fun, i tell you. you take everything so seriously. do wish me good-night. ellean. we have said good-night. hugh. in the hall at the warren before mrs. cortelyon and a man-servant. oh, it's so different from the avenue de friedland! ellean. [_giving him her hand hastily._] good-night, hugh. hugh. is that all? we might be the merest acquaintances. [_he momentarily embraces her, but she releases herself._ ellean. it's when you're like this that you make me feel utterly miserable. [_throwing the rose from her angrily._] oh! hugh. i've offended you now, i suppose? ellean. yes. hugh. forgive me, nelly. come into the garden for five minutes; we'll stroll down to the plantation. ellean. no, no. hugh. for two minutes--to tell me you forgive me. ellean. i forgive you. hugh. evidently. i sha'n't sleep a wink to-night after this. what a fool i am! come down to the plantation. make it up with me. ellean. there is somebody coming into this room. do you wish to be seen here? hugh. i shall wait for you behind that yew-tree. you must speak to me. nelly! [_he disappears._ paula _enters._ paula. ellean! ellean. you--you are very surprised to see me, paula, of course. paula. why are you here? why aren't you with--your friend? ellean. i've come home--if you'll have me. we left paris this morning; mrs. cortelyon brought me back. she was here a minute or two ago; papa has just gone with her to the warren. he asked me to tell you. paula. there are some people staying with us that i'd rather you didn't meet. it was hardly worth your while to return for a few hours. ellean. a few hours? paula. well, when do you go to london? ellean. i don't think i go to london, after all. paula. [_eagerly._] you--you've quarrelled with her? ellean. no, no, no, not that; but--paula! [_in an altered tone._] paula. paula. [_startled._] eh? [ellean _goes deliberately to_ paula _and kisses her._] ellean! ellean. kiss me. paula. what--what's come to you? ellean. i want to behave differently to you in the future. is it too late? paula. too--late! [_impulsively kissing_ ellean _and crying._] no--no--no! no--no! ellean. paula, don't cry. paula. [_wiping her eyes_] i'm a little shaky; i haven't been sleeping. it's all right,--talk to me. ellean. there is something i want to tell you---- paula. is there--is there? [_they sit together on the ottoman,_ paula _taking_ ellean's _hand._ ellean. paula, in our house in the avenue de friedland, on the floor below us, there was a mrs. brereton. she used to be a friend of my mother's. mrs. cortelyon and i spent a great deal of our time with her. paula. [_suspiciously._] oh! [_letting_ ellean's _hand fall._] is this lady going to take you up in place of mrs. cortelyon? ellean. no, no. her brother is staying with her--_was_ staying with her. her brother---- [_breaking off in confusion._ paula. well? ellean. [_almost inaudibly._] paula---- [_she rises and walks away,_ paula _following her._ paula. ellean! [_taking hold of her._] you're not in love! [ellean _looks at_ paula _appealingly._ paula. oh! _you_ in love! you! oh, this is why you've come home! of course, you can make friends with me now! you'll leave us for good soon, i suppose; so it doesn't much matter being civil to me for a little while! ellean. oh, paula! paula. why, how you have deceived us--all of us! we've taken you for a cold-blooded little saint. the fools you've made of us! saint ellean! saint ellean! ellean. ah, i might have known you'd only mock me! paula. [_her tone changing._] eh? ellean. i--i can't talk to you. [_sitting on the settee._] you do nothing else but mock and sneer, nothing else. paula. ellean dear! ellean! i didn't mean it. i'm so horribly jealous, it's a sort of curse on me. [_kneeling beside_ ellean _and embracing her._] my tongue runs away with me. i'm going to alter, i swear i am. i've made some good resolutions, and, as god's above me, i'll keep them! if you are in love, if you do ever marry, that's no reason why we shouldn't be fond of each other. come, you've kissed me of your own accord--you can't take it back. now we're friends again, aren't we? ellean dear! i want to know everything, everything. ellean dear, ellean! ellean. paula, hugh has done something that makes me very angry. he came with us from paris to-day, to see papa. he is staying with mrs. cortelyon and--i ought to tell you---- paula. yes, yes. what? ellean. he has found his way by the warren meadow through the plantation up to this house. he is waiting to bid me good-night. [_glancing towards the garden._] he is--out there. paula. oh! ellean. what shall i do? paula. bring him in to see me! will you? ellean. no, no. paula. but i'm dying to know him. oh, yes, you must. i shall meet him before aubrey does. [_excitedly running her hands over her hair._] i'm so glad. [ellean _goes out by the window._] the mirror--mirror. what a fright i must look! [_not finding the hand-glass on the table, she jumps on to the settee, and surveys herself in the mirror over the mantelpiece, then sits quietly down and waits._] ellean! just fancy! ellean! _after a pause_ ellean _enters by the window with_ hugh. ellean. paula, this is captain ardale--mrs. tanqueray. [paula _risen and turns, and she and_ hugh _stand staring blankly at each other for a moment or two; then_ paula _advances and gives him her hand._ paula. [_in a strange voice, but calmly._] how do you do? hugh. how do you do? paula. [_to_ ellean.] mr. ardale and i have met in london, ellean. er--captain ardale, now? hugh. yes. ellean. in london? paula. they say the world's very small, don't they? hugh. yes. paula. ellean, dear, i want to have a little talk about you to mr. ardale--captain ardale--alone. [_putting her arms round_ ellean, _and leading her to the door._] come back in a little while. [ellean _nods to_ paula _with a smile and goes out, while_ paula _stands watching her at the open door._] in a little while--in a little---- [_closing the door and then taking a seat facing_ hugh.] be quick! mr. tanqueray has only gone down to the warren with mrs. cortelyon. what is to be done? hugh. [_blankly._] done? paula. done--done. something must be done. hugh. i understood that mr. tanqueray had married a mrs.--mrs.---- paula. jarman? hugh. yes. paula. i'd been going by that name. you didn't follow my doings after we separated. hugh. no. paula. [_sneeringly._] no. hugh. i went out to india. paula. what's to be done? hugh. damn this chance! paula. oh, my god! hugh. your husband doesn't know, does he? paula. that you and i----? hugh. yes. paula. no. he knows about others. hugh. not about me. how long were we----? paula. i don't remember, exactly. hugh. do you--do you think it matters? paula. his--his daughter. [_with a muttered exclamation he turns away and sits with his head in his hands._] what's to be done? hugh. i wish i could think. paula. oh! oh! what happened to that flat of ours in ethelbert street? hugh. i let it. paula. all that pretty furniture? hugh. sold it. paula. i came across the key of the escritoire the other day in an old purse! [_suddenly realising the horror and hopelessness of her position, and starting to her feet with an hysterical cry of rage._] what am i maundering about? hugh. for god's sake, be quiet! do let me think. paula. this will send me mad! [_suddenly turning and standing over him._] you--you beast, to crop up in my life again like this! hugh. i always treated you fairly. paula. [_weakly._] oh! i beg your pardon--i know you did--i---- [_she sinks on to the settee, crying hysterically._ hugh. hush! paula. she kissed me to-night! i'd won her over! i've had such a fight to make her love me! and now--just as she's beginning to love me, to bring this on her! hugh. hush, hush! don't break down! paula. [_sobbing._] you don't know! i--i haven't been getting on well in my marriage. it's been my fault. the life i used to lead spoilt me completely. but i'd made up my mind to turn over a new life from to-night. from to-night! hugh. paula---- paula. don't you call me that! hugh. mrs. tanqueray, there is no cause for you to despair in this way. it's all right, i tell you--it shall be all right. paula. [_shivering._] what are we to do? hugh. hold our tongues. paula. eh? [_staring vacantly._ hugh. the chances are a hundred to one against any one ever turning up who knew us when we were together. besides, no one would be such a brute as to split on us. if anybody did do such a thing we should have to lie! what are we upsetting ourselves like this for, when we've simply got to hold our tongues? paula. you're as mad as i am! hugh. can you think of a better plan? paula. there's only one plan possible--let's come to our senses!--mr. tanqueray must be told. hugh. your husband! what, and i lose ellean! i lose ellean! paula. you've got to lose her. hugh. i won't lose her! i can't lose her! paula. didn't i read of your doing any number of brave things in india? why, you seem to be an awful coward! hugh. that's another sort of pluck altogether; i haven't this sort of pluck. paula. oh, i don't ask _you_ to tell mr. tanqueray. that's my job. hugh. [_standing over her._] you--you--you'd better! you----! paula. [_rising._] don't bully me! i intend to. hugh. [_taking hold of her; she wrenches herself free._] look here, paula! i never treated you badly--you've owned it. why should you want to pay me out like this? you don't know how i love ellean! paula. yes, that's just what i _do_ know. hugh. i say you don't! she's as good as my own mother. i've been downright honest with her too. i told her, in paris, that i'd been a bit wild at one time, and, after a damned wretched day, she promised to forgive me because of what i'd done since in india. she's behaved like an angel to me! surely i oughtn't to lose her, after all, just because i've been like other fellows! no; i haven't been half as rackety as a hundred men we could think of. paula, don't pay me out for nothing; be fair to me, there's a good girl--be fair to me! paula. oh, i'm not considering you at all! i advise you not to stay here any longer; mr. tanqueray is sure to be back soon. hugh. [_taking up his hat._] what's the understanding between us then? what have we arranged to do? paula. i don't know what you're going to do; i've got to tell mr. tanqueray. hugh. by god, you shall do nothing of the sort! [_approaching her fiercely._ paula. you shocking coward! hugh. if you dare! [_going up to the window._] mind! if you dare! paula. [_following him._] why, what would you do? hugh. [_after a short pause, sullenly._] nothing. i'd shoot myself--that's nothing. good-night. paula. good-night. [_he disappears. she walks unsteadily to the ottoman, and sits; and as she does so her hand falls upon the little silver mirror, which she takes up, staring at her own reflection._ the fourth act _the drawing room at "highercoombe," the same evening._ paula _is still seated on the ottoman, looking vacantly before her, with the little mirror in her hand._ lady orreyed _enters._ lady orreyed. there you are! you never came into the billiard-room. isn't it maddening--cayley drummle gives me sixty out of a hundred and beats me. i must be out of form, because i know i play remarkably well for a lady. only last month---- [paula _rises._] whatever is the matter with you, old girl? paula. why? lady orreyed. [_staring._] it's the light, i suppose. [paula _replaces the mirror on the table._] by aubrey's bolting from the billiard-table in that fashion i thought perhaps---- paula. yes; it's all right. lady orreyed. you've patched it up? [paula _nods._] oh, i am jolly glad----! i mean---- paula. yes, i know what you mean. thanks, mabel. lady orreyed. [_kissing_ paula.] now take my advice; for the future---- paula. mabel, if i've been disagreeable to you while you've been staying here, i--i beg your pardon. [_walking away and sitting down._ lady orreyed. you disagreeable, my dear? i haven't noticed it. dodo and me both consider you make a first-class hostess, but then you've had such practice, haven't you? [_dropping on to the ottoman and gaping._] oh, talk about being sleepy----! paula. why don't you----! lady orreyed. why, dear, i must hang about for dodo. you may as well know it; he's in one of his moods. paula. [_under her breath._] oh----! lady orreyed. now, it's not his fault; it was deadly dull for him while we were playing billiards. cayley drummle did ask him to mark, but i stopped that; it's so easy to make a gentleman look like a billiard-marker. this is just how it always is; if poor old dodo has nothing to do, he loses count, as you may say. paula. hark! sir george orreyed _enters, walking slowly and deliberately; he looks pale and watery-eyed._ sir george. [_with mournful indistinctness._] i'm 'fraid we've lef' you a grea' deal to yourself to-night, mrs. tanqueray. attra'tions of billiards. i apol'gise. i say, where's ol' aubrey? paula. my husband has been obliged to go out to a neighbour's house. sir george. i want his advice on a rather pressing matter connected with my family--my family. [_sitting._] to-morrow will do just as well. lady orreyed. [_to_ paula.] this is the mood i hate so--drivelling about his precious family. sir george. the fact is, mrs. tanqueray, i am not easy in my min' 'bout the way i am treatin' my poor ol' mother. lady orreyed. [_to_ paula.] do you hear that? that's _his_ mother, but _my_ mother he won't so much as look at! sir george. i shall write to bruton street firs' thing in the morning. lady orreyed. [_to_ paula.] mamma has stuck to me through everything--well, you know! sir george. i'll get ol' aubrey to figure out a letter. i'll drop line to uncle fitz too--dooced shame of the ol' feller to chuck me over in this manner. [_wiping his eyes._] all my family have chucked me over. lady orreyed. [_rising._] dodo! sir george. jus' because i've married beneath me, to be chucked over! aunt lydia, the general, hooky whitgrave, lady sugnall--my own dear sister!--all turn their backs on me. it's more than i can stan'! lady orreyed. [_approaching him with dignity._] sir george, wish mrs. tanqueray good-night at once and come upstairs. do you hear me? sir george. [_rising angrily._] wha'---- lady orreyed. be quiet! sir george. you presoom to order me about! lady orreyed. you're making an exhibition of yourself! sir george. look 'ere----! lady orreyed. come along, i tell you! [_he hesitates, utters a few inarticulate sounds, then snatches up a fragile ornament from the table, and is about to dash it on to the ground._ lady orreyed _retreats, and_ paula _goes to him._ paula. george! [_he replaces the ornament._ sir george. [_shaking_ paula's _hand._] good ni', mrs. tanqueray. lady orreyed. [_to_ paula.] good-night, darling. wish aubrey good-night for me. now, dodo? [_she goes out._ sir george. [_to_ paula.] i say, are you goin' to sit up for ol' aubrey? paula. yes. sir george. shall i keep you comp'ny? paula. no, thank you, george. sir george. sure? paula. yes, sure. sir george. [_shaking hands._] good-night again. paula. good-night. [_she turns away. he goes out, steadying himself carefully. drummle appears outside the window, smoking._ drummle. [_looking into the room, and seeing_ paula.] my last cigar. where's aubrey? paula. gone down to the warren, to see mrs. cortelyon home. drummle. [_entering the room._] eh? did you say mrs. cortelyon? paula. yes. she has brought ellean back. drummle. bless my soul! why? paula. i--i'm too tired to tell you, cayley. if you stroll along the lane you'll meet aubrey. get the news from him. drummle. [_going up to the window._] yes, yes. [_returning to_ paula.] i don't want to bother you, only--the anxious old woman, you know. are you and aubrey----? paula. good friends again? drummle. [_nodding._] um. paula. [_giving him her hand._] quite, cayley, quite. drummle. [_retaining her hand._] that's capital. as i'm off so early to-morrow morning, let me say now--thank you for your hospitality. [_he bends over her hand gallantly, then goes out by the window._ paula. [_to herself._] "are you and aubrey----?" "good friends again?" "yes." "quite, cayley, quite." [_there is a brief pause, then_ aubrey _enters hurriedly, wearing a light overcoat and carrying a cap._ aubrey. paula dear! have you seen ellean? paula. i found her here when i came down. aubrey. she--she's told you? paula. yes, aubrey. aubrey. it's extraordinary, isn't it! not that somebody should fall in love with ellean or that ellean herself should fall in love. all that's natural enough and was bound to happen, i suppose, sooner or later. but this young fellow! you know his history? paula. his history? aubrey. you remember the papers were full of his name a few months ago? paula. oh, yes. aubrey. the man's as brave as a lion, there's no doubt about that; and, at the same time, he's like a big good-natured schoolboy, mrs. cortelyon says. have you ever pictured the kind of man ellean would marry some day? paula. i can't say that i have. aubrey. a grave, sedate fellow i've thought about--hah! she has fallen in love with the way in which ardale practically laid down his life to save those poor people shut up in the residency. [_taking off his coat._] well, i suppose if a man can do that sort of thing, one ought to be content. and yet---- [_throwing his coat on the settee._] i should have met him to-night, but he'd gone out. paula dear, tell me how you look upon this business. paula. yes, i will--i must. to begin with, i--i've seen mr. ardale. aubrey. captain ardale? paula. captain ardale. aubrey. seen him? paula. while you were away he came up here, through our grounds, to try to get a word with ellean. i made her fetch him in and present him to me. aubrey. [_frowning._] doesn't captain ardale know there's a lodge and a front door to this place? never mind! what is your impression of him? paula. aubrey, do you recollect my bringing you a letter--a letter giving you an account of myself--to the albany late one night--the night before we got married? aubrey. a letter? paula. you burnt it; don't you know? aubrey. yes; i know. paula. his name was in that letter. aubrey. [_going back from her slowly, and staring at her._] i don't understand. paula. well--ardale and i once kept house together. [_he remains silent, not moving._] why don't you strike me? hit me in the face--i'd rather you did! hurt me! hurt me! aubrey. [_after a pause._] what did you--and this man--say to each other--just now? paula. i--hardly--know. aubrey. think! paula. the end of it all was that i--i told him i must inform you of--what had happened ... he didn't want me to do that ... i declared that i would ... he dared me to. [_breaking down._] let me alone!--oh! aubrey. where was my daughter while this went on? paula. i--i had sent her out of the room ... that is all right. aubrey. yes, yes--yes, yes. [_he turns his head towards the door._ paula. who's that? _a_ servant _enters with a letter._ servant. the coachman has just run up with this from the warren, sir. [aubrey _takes the letter._] it's for mrs. tanqueray, sir; there's no answer. [_the_ servant _withdraws._ aubrey _goes to_ paula _and drops the letter into her lap; she opens it with uncertain hands._ paula. [_reading it to herself._] it's from--him. he's going away--or gone--i think. [_rising in a weak way._] what does it say? i never could make out his writing. [_she gives the letter to_ aubrey _and stands near him, looking at the letter over his shoulder as he reads._ aubrey. [_reading._] "i shall be in paris by to-morrow evening. shall wait there, at meurice's, for a week, ready to receive any communication you or your husband may address to me. please invent some explanation to ellean. mrs. tanqueray, for god's sake, do what you can for me." [paula _and_ aubrey _speak in low voices, both still looking at the letter._ paula. has he left the warren, i wonder, already? aubrey. that doesn't matter. paula. no, but i can picture him going quietly off. very likely he's walking on to bridgeford or cottering to-night, to get the first train in the morning. a pleasant stroll for him. aubrey. we'll reckon he's gone, that's enough. paula. that isn't to be answered in any way? aubrey. silence will answer that. paula. he'll soon recover his spirits, i know. aubrey. you know. [_offering her the letter._] you don't want this, i suppose? paula. no. aubrey. it's done with--done with. [_he tears the letter into small pieces. she has dropped the envelope; she searches for it, finds it, and gives it to him._ paula. here! aubrey. [_looking at the remnants of the letter._] this is no good; i must burn it. paula. burn it in your room. aubrey. yes. paula. put it in your pocket for now. aubrey. yes. [_he does so._ ellean _enters and they both turn, guiltily, and stare at her._ ellean. [_after a short silence, wonderingly._] papa---- aubrey. what do you want, ellean? ellean. i heard from willis that you had come in; i only want to wish you good-night. [paula _steals away, without looking back._] what's the matter? ah! of course, paula has told you about captain ardale? aubrey. well? ellean. have you and he met? aubrey. no. ellean. you are angry with him; so was i. but to-morrow when he calls and expresses his regret--to-morrow---- aubrey. ellean--ellean! ellean. yes, papa? aubrey. i--i can't let you see this man again. [_he walks away from her in a paroxysm of distress, then, after a moment or two, he returns to her and takes her to his arms._] ellean! my child! ellean. [_releasing herself._] what has happened, papa? what is it? aubrey. [_thinking out his words deliberately._] something has occurred, something has come to my knowledge, in relation to captain ardale, which puts any further acquaintanceship between you two out of the question. ellean. any further acquaintanceship ... out of the question? aubrey. yes. [_advancing to her quickly, but she shrinks from him._ ellean. no, no--i am quite well. [_after a short pause._] it's not an hour ago since mrs. cortelyon left you and me together here; you had nothing to urge against captain ardale then. aubrey. no. ellean. you don't know each other; you haven't even seen him this evening. father! aubrey. i have told you he and i have not met. ellean. mrs. cortelyon couldn't have spoken against him to you just now. no, no, no; she's too good a friend to both of us. aren't you going to give me some explanation? you can't take this position towards me--towards captain ardale--without affording me the fullest explanation. aubrey. ellean, there are circumstances connected with captain ardale's career which you had better remain ignorant of. it must be sufficient for you that i consider these circumstances render him unfit to be your husband. ellean. father! aubrey. you must trust me, ellean; you must try to understand the depth of my love for you and the--the agony it gives me to hurt you. you must trust me. ellean. i will, father; but you must trust me a little too. circumstances connected with captain ardale's career? aubrey. yes. ellean. when he presents himself here to-morrow of course you will see him and let him defend himself? aubrey. captain ardale will not be here to-morrow. ellean. not! you have stopped his coming here? aubrey. indirectly--yes. ellean. but just now he was talking to me at that window! nothing had taken place then! and since then nothing can have----! oh! why--you have heard something against him from paula. aubrey. from--paula! ellean. she knows him. aubrey. she has told you so? ellean. when i introduced captain ardale to her she said she had met him in london. of course! it is paula who has done this! aubrey. [_in a hard voice._] i--i hope you--you'll refrain from rushing at conclusions. there's nothing to be gained by trying to avoid the main point, which is that you must drive captain ardale out of your thoughts. understand that! you're able to obtain comfort from your religion, aren't you? i'm glad to think that's so. i talk to you in a harsh way, ellean, but i feel your pain almost as acutely as you do. [_going to the door._] i--i can't say anything more to you to-night. ellean. father! [_he pauses at the door._] father, i'm obliged to ask you this; there's no help for it--i've no mother to go to. does what you have heard about captain ardale concern the time when he led a wild, a dissolute life in london? aubrey. [_returning to her slowly and staring at her._] explain yourself! ellean. he has been quite honest with me. one day--in paris--he confessed to me--what a man's life is--what his life had been. aubrey. [_under his breath._] oh! ellean. he offered to go away, not to approach me again. aubrey. and you--you accepted his view of what a man's life is! ellean. as far as _i_ could forgive him, i forgave him. aubrey. [_with a groan._] why, when was it you left us? it hasn't taken you long to get your robe "just a little dusty at the hem!" ellean. what do you mean? aubrey. hah! a few weeks ago my one great desire was to keep you ignorant of evil. ellean. father, it is impossible to be ignorant of evil. instinct, common instinct, teaches us what is good and bad. surely i am none the worse for knowing what is wicked and detesting it! aubrey. detesting it! why, you love this fellow! ellean. ah, you don't understand! i have simply judged captain ardale as we all pray to be judged. i have lived in imagination through that one week in india when he deliberately offered his life back to god to save those wretched, desperate people. in his whole career i see now nothing but that one week; those few hours bring him nearer the saints, i believe, than fifty uneventful years of mere blamelessness would have done! and so, father, if paula has reported anything to captain ardale's discredit---- aubrey. paula----! ellean. it must be paula; it can't be anybody else. aubrey. you--you'll please keep paula out of the question. finally, ellean, understand me--i have made up my mind. [_again going to the door._ ellean. but wait--listen! i have made up my mind also. aubrey. ah! i recognise your mother in you now! ellean. you need not speak against my mother because you are angry with me! aubrey. i--i hardly know what i'm saying to you. in the morning--in the morning---- [_he goes out. she remains standing, and turns her head to listen. then, after a moment's hesitation she goes softly to the window, and looks out under the verandah._ ellean. [_in a whisper._] paula! paula! [paula _appears outside the window and steps into the room; her face is white and drawn, her hair is a little disordered._ paula. [_huskily._] well? ellean. have you been under the verandah all the while--listening? paula. n--no. ellean. you _have_ overheard us--i see you have. and it _is_ you who have been speaking to my father against captain ardale. isn't it? paula, why don't you own it or deny it? paula. oh, i--i don't mind owning it; why should i? ellean. ah! you seem to have been very very eager to tell your tale. paula. no, i wasn't eager, ellean. i'd have given something not to have had to do it. i wasn't eager. ellean. not! oh, i think you might safely have spared us all for a little while. paula. but, ellean, you forget i--i am your step-mother. it was my--my duty--to tell your father what i--what i knew---- ellean. what you knew! why, after all, what can you know! you can only speak from gossip, report, hearsay! how is it possible that you----! [_she stops abruptly. the two women stand staring at each other for a moment; then_ ellean _backs away from_ paula _slowly._] paula! paula. what--what's the matter? ellean. you--you knew captain ardale in london! paula. why--what do you mean? ellean. oh! [_she makes for the door, but_ paula _catches her by the wrist._ paula. you shall tell me what you mean! ellean. ah! [_suddenly looking fixedly in_ paula's _face._] you know what i mean. paula. you accuse me! ellean. it's in your face! paula. [_hoarsely._] you--you think i'm--that sort of creature, do you? ellean. let me go! paula. answer me! you've always hated me! [_shaking her._] out with it! ellean. you hurt me! paula. you've always hated me! you shall answer me! ellean. well, then, i have always--always---- paula. what? ellean. i have always known what you were! paula. ah! who--who told you? ellean. nobody but yourself. from the first moment i saw you i knew you were altogether unlike the good women i'd left; directly i saw you i knew what my father had done. you've wondered why i've turned from you! there--that's the reason! oh, but this is a horrible way for the truth to come home to every one! oh! paula. it's a lie! it's all a lie! [_forcing_ ellean _down upon her knees._] you shall beg my pardon for it. [_ellean utters a loud shriek of terror._] ellean, i'm a good woman! i swear i am! i've always been a good woman! you dare to say i've ever been anything else! it's a lie! [_throwing her off violently._ aubrey _re-enters._ aubrey. paula! [paula _staggers back as_ aubrey _advances. raising_ ellean.] what's this? what's this? ellean. [_faintly._] nothing. it--it's my fault. father, i--i don't wish to see captain ardale again. [_she goes out,_ aubrey _slowly following her to the door._ paula. aubrey, she--she guesses. aubrey. guesses? paula. about me--and ardale. aubrey. about you--and ardale? paula. she says she suspected my character from the beginning ... that's why she's always kept me at a distance ... and now she sees through---- [_she falters; he helps her to the ottoman, where she sits._ aubrey. [_bending over her._] paula, you must have said something--admitted something---- paula. i don't think so. it--it's in my face. aubrey. what? paula. she tells me so. she's right! i'm tainted through and through; anybody can see it, anybody can find it out. you said much the same to me to-night. aubrey. if she has got this idea into her head we must drive it out, that's all. we must take steps to---- what shall we do? we had better--better----what--what? [_sitting and staring before him._ paula. ellean! so meek, so demure! you've often said she reminded you of her mother. yes, i know now what your first marriage was like. aubrey. we must drive this idea out of her head. we'll do something. what shall we do? paula. she's a regular woman too. she could forgive _him_ easily enough--but _me_! that's just a woman! aubrey. what _can_ we do? paula. why, nothing! she'd have no difficulty in following up her suspicions. suspicions! you should have seen how she looked at me! [_he buries his head in his hands. there is silence for a time, then she rises slowly, and goes and sits beside him._] aubrey! aubrey. yes. paula. i'm very sorry. [_without meeting her eyes, he lays his hand on her arm for a moment._ aubrey. well, we must look things straight in the face. [_glancing round._] at any rate, we've done with this. paula. i suppose so. [_after a brief pause._] of course, she and i can't live under the same roof any more. you know she kissed me to-night, of her own accord. aubrey. i asked her to alter towards you. paula. that was it, then. aubrey. i--i'm sorry i sent her away. paula. it was my fault; i made it necessary. aubrey. perhaps now she'll propose to return to the convent,--well, she must. paula. would you like to keep her with you and--and leave me? aubrey. paula----! paula. you needn't be afraid i'd go back to--what i was. i couldn't. aubrey. sssh, for god's sake! we--you and i--we'll get out of this place ... what a fool i was to come here again! paula. you lived here with your first wife! aubrey. we'll get out of this place and go abroad again, and begin afresh. paula. begin afresh? aubrey. there's no reason why the future shouldn't be happy for us--no reason that i can see---- paula. aubrey! aubrey. yes? paula. you'll never forget this, you know. aubrey. this? paula. to-night, and everything that's led up to it. our coming here, ellean, our quarrels--cat and dog!--mrs. cortelyon, the orreyeds, this man! what an everlasting nightmare for you! aubrey. oh, we can forget it, if we choose. paula. that was always your cry. how _can_ one do it! aubrey. well make our calculations solely for the future, talk about the future, think about the future. paula. i believe the future is only the past again, entered through another gate. aubrey. that's an awful belief. paula. to-night proves it. you must see now that, do what we will, go where we will, you'll be continually reminded of--what i was. i see it. aubrey. you're frightened to-night; meeting this man has frightened you. but that sort of thing isn't likely to recur. the world isn't quite so small as all that. paula. isn't it! the only great distances it contains are those we carry within ourselves--the distances that separate husbands and wives, for instance. and so it'll be with us. you'll do your best--oh, i know that--you're a good fellow. but circumstances will be too strong for you in the end, mark my words. aubrey. paula----! paula. of course i'm pretty now--i'm pretty still--and a pretty woman, whatever else she may be, is always--well, endurable. but even now i notice that the lines of my face are getting deeper; so are the hollows about my eyes. yes, my face is covered with little shadows that usen't to be there. oh, i know i'm "going off." i hate paint and dye and those messes, but, by-and-by, i shall drift the way of the others; i sha'n't he able to help myself. and then, some day--perhaps very suddenly, under a queer, fantastic light at night or in the glare of the morning--that horrid, irresistible truth that physical repulsion forces on men and women will come to you, and you'll sicken at me. aubrey. i----! paula. you'll see me then, at last, with other people's eyes; you'll see me just as your daughter does now, as all wholesome folks see women like me. and i shall have no weapon to fight with--not one serviceable little bit of prettiness left me to defend myself with! a worn-out creature--broken up, very likely, some time before i ought to be--my hair bright, my eyes dull, my body too thin or too stout, my cheeks raddled and ruddled--a ghost, a wreck, a caricature, a candle that gutters, call such an end what you like! oh, aubrey, what shall i be able to say to you then? and this is the future you talk about! i know it--i know it! [_he is still sitting staring forward; she rocks herself to and fro as if in pain._] oh, aubrey! oh! oh! aubrey. paula----! [_trying to comfort her._ paula. oh, and i wanted so much to sleep to-night! [_laying her head upon his shoulder. from the distance, in the garden, there comes the sound of_ drummle's _voice; he is singing as he approaches the house._] that's cayley, coming back from the warren. [_starting up._] he doesn't know, evidently. i--i won't see him! [_she goes out quickly._ drummle's _voice comes nearer._ aubrey _rouses himself and snatches up a book from the table, making a pretence of reading. after a moment or two,_ drummle _appears at the window and looks in._ drummle. aha! my dear chap! aubrey. cayley? drummle. [_coming into the room._] i went down to the warren after you? aubrey. yes? drummle. missed you. well? i've been gossiping with mrs. cortelyon. confound you, i've heard the news! aubrey. what have you heard? drummle. what have i heard! why--ellean and young ardale! [_looking at_ aubrey _keenly._] my dear aubrey! alice is under the impression that you are inclined to look on the affair favourably. aubrey. [_rising and advancing to_ drummle.] you've not--met--captain ardale? drummle. no. why do you ask? by-the-bye, i don't know that i need tell you--but it's rather strange. he's not at the warren to-night. aubrey. no? drummle. he left the house half-an-hour ago, to stroll about the lanes; just now a note came from him, a scribble in pencil, simply telling alice that she would receive a letter from him to-morrow. what's the matter? there's nothing very wrong, is there! my dear chap, pray forgive me if i'm asking too much. aubrey. cayley, you--you urged me to send her away! drummle. ellean! yes, yes. but--but--by all accounts this is quite an eligible young fellow. alice has been giving me the history---- aubrey. curse him! [_hurling his book to the floor._] curse him! yes, i do curse him--him and his class! perhaps i curse myself too in doing it. he has only led "a man's life"--just as i, how many of us, have done! the misery he has brought on me and mine it's likely enough we, in our time, have helped to bring on others by this leading "a man's life"! but i do curse him for all that. my god, _i've_ nothing more to fear--i've paid _my_ fine! and so i can curse him in safety. curse him! curse him! drummle. in heaven's name, tell me what's happened? aubrey. [_gripping_ drummle's _arm._] paula! paula! drummle. what? aubrey. they met to-night here. they--they--they're not strangers to each other. drummle. aubrey! aubrey. curse him! my poor, wretched wife! my poor, wretched wife! [_the door opens and_ ellean _appears. the two men turn to her. there is a moment's silence._ ellean. father ... father...! aubrey. ellean? ellean. i--i want you. [_he goes to her._] father ... go to paula! [_he looks into her face, startled._] quickly--quickly! [_he passes her to go out, she seizes his arm, with a cry._] no, no; don't go! [_he shakes her off and goes._ ellean _staggers back towards_ drummle. drummle. [_to_ ellean.] what do you mean? what do you mean? ellean. i--i went to her room--to tell her i was sorry for something i had said to her. and i _was_ sorry--i _was_ sorry. i heard the fall. i--i've seen her. it's horrible. drummle. she--she has----! ellean. killed--herself? yes--yes. so everybody will say. but i know--i helped to kill her. if i had only been merciful! [_she faints upon the ottoman. he pauses for a moment irresolutely--then he goes to the door, opens it, and stands looking out._ _printed by_ ballantyne, hanson, & co. _london and edinburgh_ * * * * * transcriber's note: spelling has been preserved as in the original, but several cases of missing punctuation have been corrected.